f
persons.' That great hand holds an even balance. And though the
strictness of the judicial process may have its solemn and its awful
aspect, it has also its blessed and its comforting one.

Now, do not run away with the notion that the Apostle is speaking here
of that great White Throne and the future judgment that for many of us
lies, inoperative on our creeds, on the other side of the great cleft of
death. That is a solemn thought, but it is not Peter's thought here. If
any of you can refer to the original, you will see that even more
strongly than in our English version, though quite sufficiently strongly
there, the conception is brought out of a continuous Divine judgment
running along, all through a man's life, side by side with his work. The
judgment here meant is not all clotted together, as it were, in that
final act of judgment, leaving the previous life without it, but it runs
all through the ages, all through each man's days. I beseech you to
ponder that thought, that at each moment of each of our lives an
estimate of the moral character of each of our deeds is present to the
Divine mind.

'Of course we believe that,' you say. 'That is commonplace; not worth
talking about.' Ah! but because we believe it, as of course, we slip out
of thinking about it and letting it affect our lives. And what I desire
to do for you, dear friends, and for myself, is just to put emphasis on
the one half of that little word 'judgeth' and ask you to take its three
last letters and lay them on your minds. Do we feel that, moment by
moment, these little spurs of bad temper, these little gusts of
worldliness, that tiny, evanescent sting of pride and devildom which has
passed across or been fixed in our minds, are all present to God, and
that He has judged them already, in the double sense that He has
appraised their value and estimated their bearing upon our characters,
and that He has set in motion some of the consequences which we shall
have to reap?

Oh! one sometimes wishes that people did not so much believe in a future
judgment, in so far as it obscures to them the solemn thought of a
present and a continuous one. 'Verily, there is a God that _judgeth_ in
the earth,' and, of course, all these provisional decisions, which are
like the documents that in Scotch law are said to 'precognosce the
case,' are all laid away in the archives of heaven, and will be
produced, docketed and in order, at the last for each of us. Christian