CHAPTER XII.

THE JUDGMENT-DAY.

AN old Catechism familiar to our childhood

has this question and answer: "What will be done at the last day? The bodies of all mankind will be raised, the earth will be burned up, and the final judgment will take place."

If the material universe is not self-existent, it follows of necessity that it lives only because God lives in it, forming the inmost principle whence all its phenomenal glories are evolved. The act of creation, then, did not cease at the beginning, but is prolonged and perpetual. Let it be suspended, and the firmaments roll up and vanish away. The idea of the universe as a building which stands of itself, which God put up carpenter-fashion, and which some day he will batter down and destroy, is about as puerile as any of the conceptions of religious naturalism. Nature is not a mechanism, but a creation; on the lowest plane of existence its myriad forms are an efflores

cence out of the life of God. What, then, would it be for God to destroy nature? It would simply be to suspend the creative act. It would not be followed by the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds, but by universal and total silence. It would not be to put forth his power, but to hold it in. There would not be a conflagration, but a blank; as Isaac Taylor puts it, "not a destruction, but a rest; not a crash and a ruin, but a pause."

Our Saviour speaks of the end of the world, and of a judgment-day; and a careful attention to the subject will show that it is not a judgment arbitrarily imposed, but one which results from the essential laws of existence.

One of the most impressive of our Lord's parables is that of the wheat and the tares, found recorded in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew. The tares were a species of darnel whose blade resembled very much that of the wheat, but the fruit of which was totally different in quality. The Divine Teacher thus expounds his own analogy: "The field is the natural world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom, but the tares are the children of wickedness. The enemy that sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of this time, and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be at the end of this time.

The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and those who do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father."

Two Greek words (κόσμος and αἰών) are rendered in the common English version by the same word, namely, "world." Only the former, however, is ever employed to denote this material structure, and the latter is uniformly employed to denote a period or dispensation. In every instance where the phrase "the end of the world" occurs, the word is alwv, or period, and cannot possibly be made to mean the economy of material things. The scene of the judgment, then, is not here in the natural degree of life, and at the end of the natural world; rather it is at the end of this period of natural life, after we have done with time, and our relations to this material scene have come to a close; agreeably to the language of the writer to the Hebrews, "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment."

When we use the word judgment, we ought carefully to distinguish between the accidental concomitants which the word suggests as a judicial term, and the essential meaning of the word

itself. The Greek original is κpiois; and the meaning which lies at the heart of it is very nearly the same as that of the English word which comes immediately from it. It means A CRISIS. It comes from a verb which signifies to distinguish and to separate. It is the crisis made by the separation of the elements of moral good and moral evil. And in the Christian revelation, it is a crisis and separation which take place as a consequence of the resurrection.

This is invariably the Divine order, - first the resurrection, and then the judgment; and if the reader has a clear conception of what the resurrection is, he is in a fair way to see how this must be according to the eternal laws of being. This we will endeavor to illustrate.

We have read somewhere of a number of individuals who broke away from their old ties and hearth-stones, went into a new country, and formed themselves into a new community. They had an ideal of a perfect form of society, and this ideal they expected to reduce to its realizations. Their external wants and tastes and interests were similar. They had the same notions about property, about labor, about almost everything that pertains to the outward life, and so they expected to open a terrestrial paradise in the wilderness. For a while everything went on charmingly well.

The little community grew

into an organization of fair proportions and harmonious workings. It was not long, however, before it began to be manifest that man has an internal life as well as external, and that this, in the long run, is the more dominant of the two. And they found, when brought into close relations with each other, that this internal life showed itself by little and little, and that no considerations of prudence and expediency could cover it up. By and by there were conflicts of self with self; opinion jarred against opinion, and interest clashed against interest; truth and falsehood met together, and did by no means kiss each other; the secret heart of this person and that began to be opened and to be mutually repellent, and the divers elements of the little community were in a general fermentation and whirl. It was quite evident, that, though this might be a good arrangement of body with body, it was a decided mal-arrangement of spirit with spirit. The pressure of spiritual affinities and repulsions from within became greater and greater, and the result was that the whole society broke in pieces, each went to his own place, and left the prairie-wolf to prowl over the place of his imagined Paradise.

So it is. We have illustrated here the twofold relations that bind us, the wheat and the tares growing together until the harvest. There