"Two very startling things arrest us in John's vision of the future. The first is that the likest thing to Heaven he could think of was a City; the second, that there was no Church in that City. Almost nothing more revolutionary could be said, even to the modern world, in the name of religion. No Church— that is the defiance of religion; a City— that is the antipodes of Heaven. Yet John combines these contradictions in one daring image, and holds up to the world the picture of a City without a Church as his ideal of the heavenly life."