onarchies move their appointed course
and pass away. God's plan is working itself out, and the culmination is
yet to come. In vision the prophet beholds it: the "Ancient of days,"
with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne like
fiery flame, with wheels as burning fire. Thousands of thousands
minister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened. One
like the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is given
to him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away. In
his kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High. Many of them
that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lasting
life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish
hope. The national and the individual future blent in one anticipation.
The dead were to "sleep in the dust" until the day when the divine
kingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, and
according to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame.

So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imagination
fashions its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we trace
the elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom and
motherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that can
befall him--drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture--rather than be
false to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from
her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of the
right and to an unseen keeping. And to martyr and mother comes the
voice, "All shall be well with thee and thine."

Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave it
a more central place, and a more appealing force. Of the older religion,
the special characteristic--compared with the Greek and Roman world--was
the impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with a
multitude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principles
of justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of a
personal and righteous God. We see the educational effect upon the
religious Hebrew of this clearly personal God. It constantly lifted him
out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his
imagination the loftiest object. It gave definiteness and impressiveness
to his best ideals. And, further, this anthropomorphis