cannot bear it. To the former, the evening star is not so fair; to the latter, no portents in the sky are so baleful; and the Son of Man coming out of the heavens in his all-revealing glories would be the judgment and the judgment-day whereby the peoples would cleave asunder and sweep to their opposite poles. And hence Christ is everywhere spoken of in the New Testament as the judge of men, because, in his spiritual coming, he brings on the grand crisis of humanity.

Turn now to the celebrated passage, John v. 28, 29, and its meaning becomes abundantly clear. "Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth: they that have done good to the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil to the resurrection of damnation." The literal sense is, that the men themselves, not their bodies, are in the graves, and that Christ is to come and utter words over the turf that lies upon them, at which the sleepers shall wake up and come forth to judgment. No intelligent reader needs to be shown that this is a false interpretation. cannot be taken in the literal sense. The "voice of the Son of Man" means his forthgoing truth coming in upon the soul. Those who are "in the graves" are those who, like the heathen, are locked in to their natural state of darkness, with

It

out light and without privilege. So the word is used in Ezekiel xxxvii. 12, "Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves." Those who have "done good," means those who have lived well the natural life, the lowest plane of existence and the only one which has been opened to them; and those who have "done evil" are those, on the other hand, who have lived an evil natural life. With this interpretation, listen now to the solemn enunciation which rings with marvellous clearness out of the skies.

"The time is coming, and now is, when the spiritually dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who were listening for it shall live. Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming when the whole world, now entombed in its darkness, shall hear the Gospel, and shall awake to it: those who have done good, to receive and welcome it and live in its renovating beams; those who have done evil, to see the evil adjudged, and themselves condemned beneath its blaze."

We imbibe false and fantastic notions of the after-scene by losing sight of the fact that death does not abolish the principles of human nature, but rather sets them free; and that, therefore, by knowing them here and now, we get the surest preconceptions of the things that shall be hereafter. The nature of the final judgment is often

foreshadowed by the crises of the present life. In a mixed state of society, with all its clanging interests, where the good and the bad have relations which run together and intertwine, we sometimes see the cleaving power of truth to resolve communities, states, and empires into their elements. Purity and corruption, truth and error, may live for a while together. But in that state of things let God's trumpet be blown, and let the truth be applied sharply and cogently to the business of men; let corruption be unroofed, and let the light be let in from above on the ghastly faces of its votaries. The elements are immediately astir, and there are commotions and earthquakes in divers places. Those who love the evil and the false, who live by it and profit by it, band together more closely, gnash their teeth against the coming light, and perhaps strive to put it out in blood. Those who love truth and righteousness for their own sake, and for their beneficent influence, band together beneath them, and put on strength from their inspirations. Self and demonism muster their hosts on one side, God and humanity on the other, and the chasm yawns and deepens. And unless the evil is reformed, or unless the truth is crucified and put down, the final and inevitable catastrophe follows they part asunder, one to the curse that cleaves to it and blasts it, the other to the un

alloyed blessings of a purer and better state. So communities and kingdoms have their crises through which they pass, sometimes to a loftier fruition, sometimes, as Judæa, Rome, and Carthage, to a darker and more dreadful doom.

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side. Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,

And the choice goes by for ever 'twixt that darkness and that light."

We have only to suppose humanity to have passed onward into the spiritual realm, where artificial restraints and relations are left behind, and God's angel-truths fall unclouded upon its opened senses, and we realize the full power of Christ's dramatic description, the elect and non-elect gathered each to its own place, as on the wings of the wind.

CHAPTER XIV.

EVERLASTING YOUTH.

OLD age in some of its aspects is a most interesting and solemn mystery, and to the outward eye merely, is the gradual waning and extinction of existence. All the faculties fold themselves up to a long, last sleep. First, the senses begin to close, and lock in the soul from the outward world. The hearing is generally the first to fail, shutting off the mind from the tones of affection and the notes of melody. The sight fails next, and the imprints of beauty on the canvas hung round us by even and morn become blurred, and the doors and windows are shut towards the street. The invasion keeps on steadily towards the seat of life. The images of the memory lose their outline, and run together, and at length melt away into darkness; now and then you put forth a special effort, and make rents in the cloud, and see away through the green glades of other years; but the edges of the cloud close