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sister in all the happy avocations of their being; or that the righteous may be separated to a settlement of their own, to have spiritual enjoyment with each other, of which we cannot have the shadow of a thought-while, on the other hand, the souls of the wicked may be delivered up to the mastery of spirits reprobate, and left in their disembodied state to their mercy, to be by them used and abused in ten thousand ways, to which the material earth is altogether strange. But into these regions, which belong, as hath been said, to the poet and the orator, the conductor of an argument hath not any right to enter.

During the long interval, therefore, from the stroke of death till the trump of God shall ring in death's astonished ear, the soul is, as it were, by the necessity of her existence, forced to engage herself with the work of self-examination and self-trial, according to the best standard which during life she knew. If she was enlightened upon the divine constitution, then, according to the rules thereof, she will examine herself, and soon ascertain whether she held it in reverence and took the appointed measures to obey it, or whether she cast it behind her back and trod it under foot. If, again, she had no revelation of God, but had to depend on the light of Nature alone, then she will try herself according to that light, and discover whether she made virtue or vice her delight, good or evil her god. If she groaned under the bondage of false religion, and was deluded by superstition out of reason's hands, even then, whatever she believed in her conscience to be right, to that rule she will bring herself during this season of abstracted meditation. For in every country and state of mankind there is a line of division between the good and the bad, between the worthy and the worthless, which represents outwardly the inward sense which that people hath of a right and a wrong side of human character. By this, whatever it is, however imperfect, however weak, however erroneous, we judge that each soul of every kindred and nation and tongue upon the earth will be employed during the long intermediate state in examining itself, and suffering or enjoying according to the nature of its reflections.

Now, forasmuch as that man hath never been heard of, who could, in his cool, dispassionate moments, look back and reflect upon his life without a feeling of its unprofitableness, compared with what it might and should have been-foras

much as that man hath never lived, whose trials and besetting ills did form to his reflective mind an apology for his shortcomings and misdemeanours; but all men, since Adam, have condemned themselves before even their embodied soul, when they took themselves to strict inquisition-how much more will they blame, how much less apologize before their disembodied soul, when every temptation of vanity, when every blind of passion and every avocation of thought which the body and the visible world cast in, is removed, and they are left solitary as in a wilderness, serious and sober as in the presence of God, stricken by death out of a thousand misleading visions, and overwhelmed with a sense of forlorn abjectness! Each soul thus immersed in its ruminations, plunged and absorbed in its own conscious being, must accumulate a vast sense of its sinfulness, and a fearful apprehension of the issue. Happy, happy those, who have strongholds of faith into which to turn, and know of a Saviour from that conscious guilt, under which every one, Jew and Gentile, Scythian, bond, and free, must feel himself oppressed. They can deal with their overwhelming feelings, and they alone. I do not say that they alone shall pass the judgment -that is another question from which we studiously refrain. But surely they alone know in this life how that sinfulness is to be wiped away, and therefore, unless after death some perceptions of a Saviour should be revealed to the virtuous of other communions, of which we speculate not, they must lie absorbed in their heavy consciousness of guilt, with a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.

Now then, in these beds, all dissolved in fear, and some' conscious of hope, the spirits of the departed lie; and shrouded in mortality, or absorbed back again into matter's various forms, remain the bodies of the departed, until the archangel and the trump of God shall sound the dread summons through the chambers of nature and the abodes of the separated soul; whence they shall come and meet, and being once more by the power of God conjoined, these two ancient comrades shall form again one conscious frame of being, and take their joyful or heavy way, every living mortal, to the bar and judgment-seat of God.

This digression into the separate state of the soul, may seem to many out of place and out of proportion; but, besides being the only way of showing how the spirit comes up to the bar clothed in consciousness of the past, and able to

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acquiesce in the future, it doth also give truth and meaning to a form of speaking concerning judgment most common in the Scriptures, but most unfrequent in these our days. By us the judgment is always regarded as infinitely far off, whereas by the Apostles it is regarded as close at hand, just forthcoming. Paul, in describing the fate of those who were to be alive at the time, includes himself among the number"We who are alive and remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds." And Peter and James and John, no less than Paul, give this second coming of the Lord in judgment a prominency and a frequency in their writings above almost every other consideration, and constantly appeal to it as the great fund of patience, and the great motive to continue in well-doing. Now the Apostles were not ignorant of the space which was to intervene, for they have prophesied of their own death, of the latter times, of the bringing in of the Jews with the fulness of the Gentiles, and of all that has happened since, and of much that is still to happen; and yet, knowing of the ages to run, they nevertheless represented the end of all things as at hand.

We moderns have altogether departed from this manner of speech, and the second coming of Christ is lost from the number of our motives, because the day of judgment is placed afar off. Death must come, and many generations of men fill our room, and our ashes must be scattered on a thousand winds, and millennial ages must run their course, before the trumpet of the archangel sound to judgment. Now, while the day of judgment is thus set infinitely remote, and a state of existence is interposed where joys and sufferings they venture not to set forth, the mind will do with it as it does with death while it considers it at a distance, think nothing of it at all. For it is not the certainty of a thing which gives it power over the mind, otherwise death, which is the most certain of all things, would be the most influential of all things; whereas it is to most men less influential than a journey to a foreign land or the shifting of their residence at home. It is the frequent presence of a thought in the mind which gives it power, and that frequency will seldom happen to a thing that is not looked for till after a time. Present things, or things hard at hand, are what occupy the soul; and until death comes to be so regarded, it gets no purchase over our conduct. But when one is brought to a right view of his frailty and mortality, and every morning sets out as on

a perilous voyage, every evening lays him down as into a grave; then, though death be made no more certain than before, it comes to prevail over the things which are seen, and to draw the solemnity and carefulness of a death-bed hour over every scene of business and of enjoyment. So also of the judgment; while it is considered not only as behind death, but far, far beyond it, it will be as unmoving as death, and will not carry any weight, until, like death, it be brought into the fore-front of things, and have a chance in the fray of contending interests and contending emotions which passes in the mind perpetually. Shall we then preach the end of the world as at hand, and the sound of the trumpet as ready to awake us every morning from our beds, and the regeneration of the heavens and the earth as about to be revealed? The Apostles did so, who uttered those very prophecies which are all our security that the world is to last another hour. They knew the events that were to intervene, and they made them known to us; and yet you see they preached as if nothing were to intervene at all. But we, who do but lamely interpret their prophecies, are so built upon our interpretations, and so assured of the things we guess about, hardly two agreeing; that we pluck up heart, and cast off the daily apprehensions of the Apostles, and preach boldly, as if the world were to last out our day, and the day of our children, and of many generations yet to arise! This is one instance among many of the total inequality of our modern preaching to the Apostolic pattern, and how great scriptural ideas have been completely lost in the heed which the churches have given to their sectarian distinctions.

This discordance between the Apostolical and the modern theology, we confess, was the first thing that drew our attention to the state of the soul immediately consequent on death. And on pursuing it we were led into the speculations given above, which, whatever may be thought of their soundness, have the merit of giving truth and meaning to the Apostolic way of speaking, and of putting into the hands of their successors the same powerful weapon for arresting the attention of a careless world. We have another solution of this difficulty, derived from metaphysical considerations of the nature of Time; which is, however, too abstract and tedious to be embodied in this discourse. Only let it be observed, before passing on to judgment, that the general argument is in nothing prejudiced by the soundness or unsoundness of

this digression, which was introduced solely to explain how the soul might acquire that consciousness of her acts, and that conviction of her deservings, which are essential in a culprit, before condemnation can pass upon him with any effect. Now this is a question of knowledge, not of justice, and therefore doth not prejudice the great argument on which we are engaged, and on which we now venture again with trust, by the help of God, to bring it to a happy issue.

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