the fourth century, or Luther in the sixteenth, or Wesley in the eighteenth, read this book, it had nothing to say to them. It spoke of a beast that would not appear until the twentieth century! Even worse, that would mean that John, exiled in Patmos and concerned about the congregations he had left behind in Asia, wrote to them a book that they could not understand, offering no other comfort than that sometime in the future another generation would be able to understand. When you think about it,