hly
symbolical, and not to be interpreted as if they were plain prose;
but also remember that the heart of them is this, that there comes
for Christian people as for all others, a time when the light will
shine down upon their past, and will flash its rays into the dark
chambers of memory, and when men will--to themselves if not to
others--be revealed 'in the day when the Lord shall judge the secrets
of men according to my Gospel.'

We have all experience enough of how but a few years, a change of
circumstances, or a growth into another stage of development, give us
fresh eyes with which to estimate the moral quality of our past. Many
a thing, which we thought to be all right at the time when we did it,
looks to us now very questionable and a plain mistake. And when we
shift our stations to up yonder, and get rid of all this blinding
medium of flesh and sense, and have the issues of our acts in our
possession, and before our sight--ah! we shall think very differently
of a great many things from what we think of them now. Judgment will
begin at the house of God.

And there is the other thought, that the fire which reveals and tests
has also in it a power of destruction. Gold and silver will lose no
atom of their weight, and will be brightened into greater lustre as
they flash back the beams. The timber and the stubble will go up in a
flare, and die down into black ashes. That is highly metaphorical, of
course. What does it mean? It means that some men's work will be
crumpled up and perish, and be as of none effect, leaving a great,
black sorrowful gap in the continuity of the structure, and that
other men's work will stand. Everything that we do is, in one sense,
immortal, because it is represented in our final character and
condition, just as a thin stratum of rock will represent forests of
ferns that grew for one summer millenniums ago, or clouds of insects
that danced for an hour in the sun. But whilst that is so, and
nothing human ever dies, on the other hand, deeds which have been in
accordance, as it were, with the great stream that sweeps the
universe on its bosom will float on that surface and never sink. Acts
which have gone against the rush of God's will through creation will
be like a child's go-cart that comes against the engine of an express
train--be reduced, first, to stillness, all the motion knocked out of
them, and then will be crushed to atoms. Deeds which stand the test
will abide in blessed issue