struggle between Christianity and heathenism. Rome has become _drunk
with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus_
(xvii. 6). The contest centres about the worship of the beast,--that
is, Caesar. The book possibly includes older apocalypses which reflect
earlier conflicts, but in its present form it apparently comes from
the closing years of Domitian's reign. The obvious aim of its Jewish
Christian writer was to encourage his readers by glowing pictures of
the coming victory of the Lamb, and thus to steel them for unfaltering
resistance to the assaults of heathenism. The purpose which actuated the
writer was therefore in certain respects the same as that which led Paul
to write his letter to the persecuted church of Thessalonica, although
the form in which that purpose was realized was fundamentally different.

[Sidenote: _The literary activity of the first four centuries_]

Many other apocalypses were written by the early Christians. The one
recently discovered and associated with the name of Peter is perhaps the
most important. Thus, the second half of the first century after the
death of Jesus witnessed the birth of a large Christian literature,
consisting of epistles, gospels, and apocalypses. The work of the next
three centuries was the appreciation and the selection of the books
which, to-day constitute our New Testament. The influences which led
to this consummation may be followed almost as clearly as those which
produced the individual books.

[Sidenote: _Influences that led to the canonization of the Gospels_]

Early in the second century the motives which had originally led certain
Christians to write the four Gospels induced the Church to regard those
books as the most authentic, and therefore authoritative, records of the