sent
possession, has no business to talk about future judgment. I cannot
help thinking that this is a very grave mistake. There is no doubt
that those who believe space and time to be only forms of our thought,
must regard the traditional eschatology as symbolical. We are not
concerned to maintain that there will be, literally, a great assize,
holden at a date and place which could be announced if we knew it. If
that is all that Reuss means, perhaps he is right in saying that
"mystical theology has nothing to do with such a notion." But if he
means that such expressions as those referred to in St. John, about
eternal life as something here and now, imply that judgment is now,
_and therefore not in the future_, he is attributing to the
evangelist, and to the whole array of religious thinkers who have used
similar expressions, a view which is easy enough to understand, but
which is destitute of any value, for it entirely fails to satisfy the
religious consciousness. The feeling of the contrast between what
ought to be and what is, is one of the deepest springs of faith in the
unseen. It can only be ignored by shutting our eyes to half the facts
of life. It is easy to say with Browning, "God's in His heaven: all's
right with the world," or with Emerson, that justice is not deferred,
and that everyone gets exactly his deserts in this life; but it would
require a robust confidence or a hard heart to maintain these
propositions while standing among the ruins of an Armenian village, or
by the deathbed of innocence betrayed. There is no doubt a sense in
which it may be said that the ideal is the actual; but only when we
have risen in thought to a region above the antitheses of past,
present, and future, where "_is_" denotes, not the moment which passes
as we speak, but the everlasting Now in the mind of God. This is not a
region in which human thought can live; and the symbolical eschatology
of religion supplies us with forms in which it is possible to think.
The basis of the belief in future judgment is that deep conviction of
the rationality of the world-order, or, in religious language, of the
wisdom and justice of God, which we cannot and will not surrender. It
is authenticated by an instinctive assurance which is strongest in
the strongest minds, and which has nothing to do with any desire for
spurious "consolations";[67] it is a conviction, not merely a hope,
and we have every reason to believe that it is part of the Divin