What is Right with the World

Heavy volumes of commentary and exegesis," we are told of Lord Melbourne in a fascinating book, "he examined with scrupulous diligence; and at any odd moment he might be found turning over the pages of the Bible. To the ladies whom he most liked he would lend some learned work on the Revelation, crammed with marginal notes in his own hand." The Revelation of Saint John, with introduction and notes by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, would not be lacking in interest; it would at least be curious to see what one whom Mr. Strachey describes as a man of perpetual compromises, an autumn rose, a sceptical believer, ambiguous in everything, could make of a book of such intense faith, flaming certitudes, and crashing decisions. The seeming chaos of the Apocalypse has left many a man floundering for his reason. No book in the world has been more commented on than this last of the books of the Bible, and none has had a greater variety of commentators. And we may add the remark-due, I think, to Mr. Chesterton-that, despite all the wild and weird things John saw in his visions, he saw nothing so wild and weird as some of his own commentators. The insanely fantastic interpretations of Abbot Joachim (1202) and of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (1329) furnished the Reformers with arms in their anti-papal campaign. (It is at least in Calvin's favour, as some one has remarked, that he had the sense to leave the book alone

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