disbelieved the Christian impression may remain. It tightens the nerves of the soul, as a cold bath invigorates the body made languid by too much warmth and ease. Yet, as long as the Pagan form remains, the interior truth is shorn of its full power. Let us pray that the truth, divested of its dark errors, may at last be recognized by the Christian Church. For very often the words of a great writer and thinker (who also was an earnest opponent of the Orthodox form of this doctrine) recur to us in these studies: "Few see the things themselves, but only the forms of things, in the mirror of reflection, as images. But we shall at last see the things themselves face to face, as it is said, and without a veil, if it please God, in part before the close of this present life, more fully in the life to come."

ment.

§ 8. How Judgment by Christ is connected with Punish- To what we have said of judgment by Christ, in the previous chapter, we add here some further thoughts in regard to its connection with punishment. Orthodoxy makes this connection arbitrary and outward. For such sins, it says, God has appointed such a punishment; and the object of judgment is to glorify God, by showing how exact he is in finding out every sinner, and fulfilling his every threat against evil. But, according to a better view, which alone can commend itself to minds of any large range- future judgment is simply the act by which God shows to a man the truth concerning himself, so that he can see it.

A deaf and dumb child being asked, "What is judgment?" replied, Judgment is to see ourselves as we are, and to see

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"Pauci res ipsas, sed rerum imagines, tanquam in speculo, intuentur: at res ipsas, facie ad faciem, ut dicitur, et ablato velo, visuri sumus tandem si Deo placuerit, partim sub occasu hujusce mundi, plenius autem in futuro." - Thomas Burnet, De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium Tractatus. Londini. Typis et impensis J. Hooke, in vico vulgò dicto Fleet Street, 1727.- No one has spoken more powerfully and eloquently than he against everlasting punishment, particularly in the passage beginning "Nobis difficile est omnem exuere humanitatem." p. 309.

God as he is." This is the essential thing in judgment; and in this sense Christ is declared "to be the judge of the quick and the dead;" that is, he judges us in this world, and will judge us in the other world. His judgments are not external, sentencing us to external punishments; but they are internal, causing us to judge ourselves. He shows us what we are. Whenever he comes, he comes to judgment, separating the good from the evil, testing the state of the heart, causing men to go to the right or the left. His coming always makes an issue which cannot be avoided; calls upon us to decide which course we shall take, what thing we shall do, what master we will serve. When Christ first came, he came for judgment, that the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed, revealed to themselves and to others. Wherever he came, men immediately were divided into two classes, -becoming his disciples, or becoming his opponents. No longer was any compromise possible between truth and error, between right and wrong. They were obliged to choose which to serve; and they chose according to the inward tendency of their hearts. They whose hearts were right, chose the right: they whose hearts were wrong, chose the wrong.

Christ is thus the Judge of the living as well as the dead. Often in our lives he comes to us thus to be our Judge. Every time he calls upon us to do anything for him, he judges the state of our heart. Every time he offers an opportunity to the world of improvement or progress, he judges the world.

Caiaphas and before Pilate, When they sentenced him, During the whole of those buffeted, spit upon, crowned

When he was on trial before they were on trial, and not he. they condemned themselves. dark hours, when Christ was with thorns, to the eyes of angels he was seen to be sitting on the throne of his glory. Caiaphas and the Jewish priests, Pontius Pilate and the Roman soldiers, Judas Iscariot, the

Jewish people, each in turn received their sentence, and passed to the left hand. And so ever since, whenever any great opportunity has been given to the world to decide between right and wrong, the world has pronounced judgment on itself; has gone to the right hand with the sheep, or to the left hand with the goats. When Paul offered Christianity to the Jews, and they rejected it, he said "it was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing you put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." So it always is. God does not judge us, nor Christ; but we judge ourselves. For this reason Jesus says, "If any man hear me, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world." And again he says, "The word which I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day." And yet again, "This is the judgment, that light has come into the world, and that men have chosen darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil."

The account of judgment (in the 25th chapter of Matthew) at Christ's coming we considered in the last chapter. It will, however, bear a little further examination. There are three different judgments indicated in the three parables of the virgins, the talents, and the sheep and goats. The first is the judgment of opportunity, the second of work, the third of knowledge. In the first and second we judge ourselves, in the last we are judged. These two occur in time, the other in eternity. The first two are the judgments which take place at Christ's coming here; the third is the judgment of "the last day." The first takes place whenever we are “called " by a new opportunity; the second comes in all retribution; the third by the inward revelation of God's truth, showing men what they are, and what God is. The wise and foolish virgins represent those who are invited to receive Christianity; the servants with the talents, believers who have received it

in different degrees; and the nations (heathen, Tά čÔv)* those (in Christendom or outside of it) to whom Christianity has never come.

§ 9. The Doctrine of Annihilation. This view of the final results of moral evil, as destroying personal existence, is hardly an Orthodox doctrine, though quasi-Orthodox. It is the refuge of that class of minds which are unable to accept universal restoration on the one side, or everlasting punishment on the other. To them a large number of human beings seem "too good for banning, and too bad for blessing," and in their opinion will be suffered quietly to drop out of conscious existence. The analogies of nature, in which out of many seeds and many eggs produced, only a few attain to the condition of plants and animals, tend to confirm this view. The state of human character here appears also to favor it, since multitudes pass out of this world in an undeveloped condition, seeming wholly to have failed of the end of their being. The chief scriptural argument in favor of the doctrine is found in the assumption that "life through Christ" is equivalent to continued conscious existence, and

* Is it not remarkable (as showing how little the New Testament has as yet been really studied) that there should be so many discussions as to the future doom of the heathen, when Jesus himself here distinctly tells us what it will be. The word covŋ is the only word in the New Testament which is ever translated heathen wherever the word heathen occurs in our Bible, it is always this. Jesus teaches that the heathen (inside and outside of Christendom) will be judged according to their humanity, their obedience to the law written in their hearts; and he shows that this is coincident with the law of Christianity. So, when the Church of England says (in its 18th article) that "they also are to be had accursed that presume to say that every man shall be saved by the law or sect he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that law and the light of nature;" it denounces this curse on Christ himself, and thus proves conclusively that it is not speaking by the Spirit of God, since "no man, speaking by the Spirit of God, calleth Jesus accursed." (1 Cor.12:3.) This comes of the habit (happily less common now than formerly) of throwing about curses at random, against those who differ from our opinions. Some of them may thus, accidentally, hit the Master himself. It is, perhaps, of less consequence that this anathema also touches the apostle Paul, who declares that the heathen who have not the law are a law to themselves when they do right, and are absolved by their conscience. (Rom. 2:14.)

that "death" as the punishment of sin, is equivalent to annihilation. We have so fully discussed the meaning of these terms in the previous chapter, that it is not desirable to argue this point here. We agree with the Orthodox view, and differ from that of the annihilationists on this point. The God of the gospel is the Father of all his children - of the weakest, feeblest, and most sinful. If he is the God of all, then he is "the God, not of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him." Indian tribes and heathen nations may be willing that the sickly infants, and those worn with age, should perish; they may expose female infants, thinking them not worth bringing up; but Christian nations establish schools and hospitals for the deaf and dumb, the insane, the inebriates, the idiotic. If we, then, being evil, know how to care for the weak, undeveloped, and vegetative natures, how much more shall their Father in heaven care for them! The doctrine of annihilation rests fundamentally on a Pagan view of God.

§ 10. The Doctrine of Universal Restoration. — This opinion has its roots, we think, in the gospel. It has prevailed in the church from the earliest times, having been held, as we have seen, by Origen, and a great number of eminent church fathers and doctors. What more Christian word has come to us from the earliest centuries than the cry out of the heart of the great Alexandrian teacher, "My Saviour, even now, mourns for my sins. My Saviour cannot be happy while I remain in my iniquity. He does not wish to drink the cup of joy alone in the kingdom of God; he is waiting till we shall come and join him there." *

Our object in this chapter is to consider the Orthodox view, and we shall not, therefore, enter into any extensive argument concerning universal salvation. We will only here

* Origen, Homil. in Levit. 7:2. "Salvator meus luget etiam nunc peccata mea; Salvator meus lætari non potest, donec ego in iniquitate permaneo. Non vult solus in regno Dei bibere vinum lætitiæ - nos expectat."