Likewise he asserts Christ, under a different figure, sitting crowned upon a white cloud, with a harvesting sickle, the mention of the seven plagues being subjoined, and the victory of the saints being related; and, with the hardness of the Jews remaining, and an incomparable persecution, he records the future damnation of the harlot, whom he describes with the painted adornment of a woman, in whose seven heads and ten horns he says there is both secular power and hidden wickedness. In the fifth book also, by a different account, the same coming of Christ is intimated. Whom, under the name of an angel, he says descends from heaven, and the earth illumined by His power and brightness.
He records that Babylon was destroyed, which, signified by many names, is foretold to fall in ruin; by the debt of the committed iniquity she is shown to be punished with vengeance; where surely the dignity of the saints in the pearls and in the marriage of the Lamb, and in clean fine linen, was to be recorded. Hence he describes One bearing the emblem of a diadem, sitting upon a white horse, as having contended with the beast, and the devil is said to have been bound by his chains for a thousand years, so that he lost his accustomed power of seducing the nations, sitting on a white throne as a figure of the judgment to come. Recording the same Christ, he again designates the second coming, when, by the renewal of the elements, a new heaven and earth are described as to come, and a new Jerusalem the bride.
He says that (Jerusalem), solidified upon the foundation of the patriarchs and apostles of the Lamb, obtains the promised reward, being illumined by the light of the Lamb and given to drink of the fountain of life, and is said to enjoy the vision of Him. Then he frequents with repeated preaching the 'Alpha and Omega,' that he may intimate the Trinity of one divine nature, and that he may seem to have a discourse concordant, both with his own future Gospel and with this book. With the repeated mention of the seven churches he assigns the aim of the book, that is, its intention, and Christ announces Himself as about to come to the Church. But considering the quantity of this work, I judge that some may be able to complain of what they think its prolixity, while others, burning with the fervor of the divine law or of reading, may rather demand yet more from so great a profundity of the book.
But while I long wavered in perplexity between the fastidious and the greedy, I feared lest either by immoderate lavishness I should heap up error upon the idle, or lest, by a scanty handling of necessary matters, I should be judged grudging in withholding. And so I thought that my pen should be tempered, with the Lord governing it, in such a way that I might spend more discourse upon the illustration of the more obscure passages, and but little upon those that are plain, so that I might neither cheat the hungry of what could be found, nor by my presumptuous statements give offense to the learned. Yet I confess that I have rendered these due services not so far as the lofty dignity of the mysteries demanded, but only so far as the poverty of my powers, with divine help, was able.