are the relations which grow out of material and bodily interests, and bring together souls in their nature repellent. There is also illustrated here the manner in which the lower interests - these bodies and their wants for a time overlay and bury up our spiritual tendencies and affinities, so that the real man is more or less shut in and concealed beneath material forms and pursuits. We see, too, the effort, even now, of the inmost life to come forth and become dominant, and break up all affinities growing out of the mere external man.

But the resurrection is the emergence of the immortal man out of the natural body, and the consequent abnegation of all its arbitrary relations. And the spiritual body in which he emerges is, in the very nature of things, the form and exponent of his inward life. Hence the broad and inevitable disclosures of the other world. Hence, again, the new law according to which the whole mass of humanity at that point breaks up and parts asunder. It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the crisis, or the parting asunder of good and evil.

There are two principles which reign over human nature, and under all forms of religion and of morals are always shaping it to their moulds and affinities. One is self-love, always the same in its quality, though multiform in its pursuits;

essentially corrupt, though concealed sometimes under thin and fair disguises; always having the internal quality of the tares, though sometimes resembling the wheat in the color and contour of its leaves and flowers. The other is the Divine love, or self-devotion to the Divine law; not always ruling even the good man with an unmixed motive, but always shaping his inmost being into a more perfect image of the Divine Original, and under the hardest and roughest exterior unfolding the angel form from within. It is these which death uncovers and releases; it is these which the resurrection brings forth in demon shape or angel form, and so develops out of a redeemed or perverted humanity either heaven or hell.

The resurrection of necessity brings forth the inmost life, and configures it cleared of all deceptive appearances. Hence the aspect of Truth and Goodness rises majestic and unclouded in contrast with that of moral evil, and hence "the great gulf fixed," that yawns and deepens between them; on one side the paths that lead up the terraced mountain of the Lord; on the other, the caverns and the pitfalls and the deeps that exclude the day. These are solemn reflections, and we are on ground where we fear to tread with sandalled feet, while we look up through the resplendent ethers above, or down through the awful abysses below.

It does not follow by any means that this separation will take place instantly at death, or that each one's essential life will be instantly manifest. The Divine laws work no violent and eruptive changes, and for that reason they are sure of their final results. How manifold are the concealments of the real man within us, not only under material interests, but under church sanctities, under the comities of intercourse, under artificial and mock moralities! The resurrection places us in a state of being where these must all disappear, where that which we only seem to have will be taken from us, where what we essentially are will take its correspondent form; and we will now see if stupendous agencies are not revealed, adapted to hasten on the catastrophe.

10

CHAPTER XIII.

CHRIST AS THE JUDGE.

ALL through the New Testament we meet with the prediction that Christ should come a second time, and come in judgment at the consummation of things. The resurrection, the judgment, and the second coming are events which are described as closely consecutive, sometimes under imagery of overwhelming sublimity. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, which is only a portion of one great prophecy, the last utterance from the heights of Olivet, with Jerusalem, the doomed city, lying under his eye, - the Saviour looks down the eternal perspective and describes the last act of the drama,-the grand crisis of humanity. The Son of Man is to come in his glory, and sit upon the throne of his glory; all nations shall gather before him as a mighty multitude, and part to the right and left as if cleft in twain and separated in the brightness of his coming. Substantially the same prediction is re

corded by John, though made under different circumstances, and with feelings of unspeakable tenderness. In those divine discoursings which followed the last supper, when Christ in person was to be separated from his disciples, he promises to come to them again. "I will come and receive you unto myself"; "I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you." This second coming he describes in the context as that of the Spirit of truth which the Father would send through him out of his glorified state, and which should be the Comforter to his disciples, but which at the same time should be the Judge of the world. "If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment." *

In collateral and illustrative passages we have further intimations of the means and the process by which Christ is to judge the world. It is not by an arbitrary or personal judgment. "If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world (in person), but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: THE WORD THAT I HAVE SPOKEN, the same shall judge him in the last day."†

*John xiv. 3, 18; xvi. 7, 8.

† Ibid. xii. 47, 48.