day?-these thousand fibres, more delicate than the gossamer's thread-these thousand vessels, more fine than the discernment of the finest instrument of vision-these bones, balanced and knit and compacted so strongly-these muscles, with their thousand combinations of movement-this secret organization of brain, the seat of thought-the eye, the ear, the every sense, all constructed out of earth, and in one day? This stately form of manhood, which requires generation and slow conception, and the milky juices of the mother, and ten thousand meals of food, and the exercise of infinite thought and actions, long years of days and nights, the one to practise and train, the other to rest and refresh the frame, before it can come to any maturity-this is to be created in one day out of primitive dust of the ground? Impossible! unintelligible! And if we go farther into the thing, and meditate that, seeing there was no second act of God, this creation out of dust was not of one man and one woman, but of all men and all women that have been and are to be for ever; that it was virtually the peopling of all nations and kingdoms of the earth in one day out of inanimate dust-who can fathom the work? It is inconceivable, idle, and not worthy a thought. Thus the mind becomes the dupe of its own inquisitiveness, and loseth all the benefit of this revelation.

Not less out of the comforts of Providence have I seen the wisest men beguiled by the nicety and importunateness of their research. They have reasoned of the multitude of God's avocations throughout the peopled universe, in every star imagining the centre of some revolving system, in every system the dwelling-place of various tribes of beings, until they had the Almighty so occupied as neither to have time nor care for our paltry earth. And if you can fix their attention upon the earth, they do straightway so overwhelm themselves with the myriads who dwell thereon, and their own insignificant place amongst so many, that they cannot see the small part of his providence which can be afforded unto them; and thus, from prayer, from trust and hope of future bliss, they escape into a heartless indifference and a wreckless independence towards their Creator;-all which ariseth from their subdividing, by active calculation, the great work which God hath to do, without, at the same time, multiplying the power of the Almighty to discharge it all, untroubled and undisturbed. I could show equally fatal results wrought by the same unrestrained appetite for speculation in the great work of redemption, but it would lead me away too far from the scope of the argument.

Now, as in creation I pretend not to unfold the methods of bringing all things into being and harmonious action, neither in providence to disclose the means for dealing out to them, day by day, those supplies of nourishment and power by which their being and their action are sustained; no more do I undertake to unfold the forms of process by which, in the last dread day, the Almighty Judge will deal out to each mortal the measure of his deserving or delinquency; being convinced that from any such attempt there would come up over my mind a mist thicker than that which covered the land of Egypt, in the midst of which I should wander like the sinful men of Sodom. But will I therefore abide from sceptical men any derision or scorn to be cast upon this solemn affair? Never. The mole, who worketh his little gallery under ground, may as well pretend to understand the minings and counterminings of a mighty army; the New Holland savage may as well pretend to understand the noble forms of a British Assize by his own club-law administration, as may vain man, though educated in these enlightened times, pretend to understand the forms of the Almighty procedure of judgment. Nor are these perplexities to be resolved by any supply of intelligence, for we shall never be able to understand any of the works of God; but they are rather to be carried off by meditating upon the magnitude of the Almighty's power and wisdom to do all the pleasure of his will. As to founding scepticism or disbelief upon this incompetency of our conception, it is the height of weakness and ignorance; seeing there is not one single case in which conception does not suffer the same eclipse, and calculation the same confusion of their powers, when they would essay to contend with any other of the doings of the Lord. Let them endeavour to reckon up the number of mouths which he sustains in the various animal tribes; or the number of organs which go by their healthy operation to continue the well-being of each, the fibrous sinews, the cellular folds, the pipes and channels through which life's fluids are diffused. Let them reckon up the number of seeds which he generates every year for their sustenance, or the many-webbed structure of one single plant. Let them tell the number of imaginations which the indwelling soul can conceive, the rate at which they speed through the provinces of time and space, the number of past impressions which lie treasured in the mind, and the number of hopes and wishes which it sendeth scouting into the portentous future. Let them fathom the depths of space, and circumnavigate the outward

bound of creation, and bring home the number of the stars through all the glorious galaxies and the milky way of heaven, and sum the number of living things, vegetable, animal, and rational, which are found under the dominion of God; and they shall find how utterly unequal is the task, when the powers and faculties of man would cope with any one of the works of Almighty God.

Now, if by one word of his mouth he could create the subtle and pervading light, and by another carpet the chaotic earth with green and fragrant beauty, and by a third replenish all its chambers with living creatures, and by a fourth beget the winged fancy and creative thought of man; since which day of wondrous birth-giving creation hath stood strong and stedfast, and procreation gone on successive, and will continue so to do, the astronomers demonstrate and the naturalists declare, until the same powerful word interfere to shake and overthrow it all-who, who can misgive of the ability of God in one day of judgment to review all the effects which one day of creation did originate, and to organize a new constitution of things which shall be stable and everlasting as this in which we have our present abode. It seemeth to me, that what we call the day of judgment, we shall thereafter call the day of second creation, on which God launched our being anew, and furnished our voyage of existence the second time; and it may be recounted by us in one short chapter, at the beginning of the sacred annals, even as our creation is recounted in the Bible; and prove to us, when it is past, as incomprehensible a work as it now doth seem to us, looking forward, or as creation seemeth to us, looking backward; and, though incomprehensible, be as present to our feeling and our observation as the objects of creation are, and as demonstrative of God's justice as creation is demonstrative of his power.

As to the forms with which it is presented in Scripture, viz. the ushering in of the solemn day by the archangel and the trump of God-the white throne of judgment, with the judge that sitteth thereon-the glorious company of angelsthe opening of the books, in which stand recorded every man's account of good and ill-the solemn separation, to the right and the left, of the two great divisions of men-and their separate verdicts of blessing and of cursing, these are no more to be understood by the letter than any other of the works of God, but to be taken as an image or device of the transaction, done with the best similitudes that the earth contains; and seeing there never was and never will be a state

of society to which a day of judgment is strange, God hath chosen this emblem as being the most likely interpretation of it to the understanding and feeling of all men in all ages to whom the tidings of it might come. But it were a vain thing to puzzle imagination and perplex conception with the details thereof, with the array of a human assize or the bustle of a judgment-seat, where all the world was to appear and be taken successively under cognizance of the judge; for instantly immensity overwhelms the thought, and stupifies the feeling, the crowd forms a shelter to the fears, and the company, the innumerable companions of our fate, gives a cheer to the misgiving heart. We throw ourselves loose, therefore, from the details of the ritual, and aim at nothing but to preserve the spirit of the transaction; not but that these details are highly useful and in the very best keeping with the majesty and terror of the scene, serving to convey ideas and imaginations of the great event, and to embody it to the mind; and being used for inspiring reverence and awakening conscience and setting forth impartial retribution and resistless power, they serve good ends of knowledge and feeling-but because when used for straining conception, and deafening conviction and impairing belief, they do but befool us in the maze of God's power, which our faculties cannot unravel.

If I were to venture an opinion it would be this: that the action will take place, not by a successive summons of each individual, and a successive inquisition of his case, but by an instantaneous separation of the two classes the one from the other. Nor do I fancy to myself the bodily presence of any judge, or the utterance by his lips of vocal sounds, although it be so written, any more than I fancy a loud voice to have been uttered by the Eternal for the light to come forth, or any other part of the material universe to arise into being. But I rather think it to be more congenial to the other works of God, when it is imagined that these souls, and the bodies recreated for their use, will be planted without knowing how, each class in the abodes prepared for them; and that they will not be consulted about the equity of the measure. God will leave them to find out the rectitude of the proceeding, as he left us to find out the rectitude of his proceeding at the fall. He told Adam of the loss of paradise. If Adam had speculated thereon, he would have found himself unequal to the speculation. Yet the word of the Lord stood fast, and he found himself stripped and denuded, in the twinkling of an eye, of his pristine glory and innocence. God did not bandy the question with him, nor try conclusions as at a human bar.

The thing came about by moral laws of being older than the creation-yea, old as the eternal existence of God; and, in the same manner, by laws of being equally old and sure, shall come about the opening of paradise again to the righteous, and the barring of hope and happiness to the wicked.

But though, in this summary manner, most like to a divine work, we present the thing to your conception, we do in nothing invalidate the principle upon which the division of righteous from wicked is to come about, but rather make it the more valid, seeing it is, like the threatening in paradise, the only thing to which we have to look. If we were to have a debate for our life, even after having contravened the prescript, then verily hope would suspend itself upon the chance of fortunate or mitigated issue. But now, when we give up this as mere exposition and enforcement of the great separation and awful issues, it becomes more momentous to dwell on that separate description of character which comes in for the whole determination of our fate.

I regard all descriptions of judgment, therefore, to be only a way of stating to us the design of God, as to our recovery from this fallen state and re-admission into paradise, or our expulsion from this purgatorial state of existence and detrusion to the changeless settlements of the reprobate. These descriptions are no more than, "Do this and live;"" in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die;" uttered in a more expanded form to meet the various faculties of human nature, fancy, judgment, fear, hope, pain, or pleasure; but they do no more imply that by the forms of an earthly tribunal we shall be judged, than the creation of animals at first implies the modes of their present creation. When the end of all things hath come, and the renovation of all things hath taken place, I reckon that the bodies of men will start from their unconscious state of dispersion and dissolution, as the materials of Adam's body came at first from their secret and various places, or as the earth teemed out her various tribes; and that the soul will come from its intermediate sojourn, as Adam's soul came, no one knoweth whence, and be united to her ancient comrade. So that the moment the sleep of death is broken by the trump of God, we shall find ourselves, each one ere we wis, with the paradise of heaven overshadowing our heads, or the pavement of hell glowing beneath our feet.

This mode of conceiving the matter, which is the only one congenial to the other operations of the Almighty, doth in no respect do away with the Scripture emblems; for it is