to shape and guide its destinies, ward off every
fatal crisis, and perfect and immortalize the system as now
sustained. It is an audacious fancy. But like many other
incredible conceptions which have forerun their own still more
incredible fulfillment, the very thought electrifies us with hope
and courage.

And thus the conclusion in which we rest at the close of our
investigation is the belief that the world is to last, and our
race to flourish on it virtually forever. This conclusion is
equally a relief from the frightful burdens of superstition, and a
consolation for our own personal evanescence. The stable harmony
of natural beauty and beneficence, amidst which we individually
play our brief part and vanish, shall stand fast, blooming with
fresh growths, and shining with fadeless light, and the successive
generations of our dear fellow men shall grow ever wiser and
happier, beyond the reach of our farthest vision into the future.
And if we recognize in the great catastrophic myths and previsions
of the poets and scientists the fundamental truth that the things
which are seen are temporal, while the things alone which are
unseen are eternal, the end being a regular and remote sequel in
the creative plan of God, free from anger, retributive
disappointment, or cruelty will not alarm us. For if souls are
substantial entities, and not mere phenomenal processes, they will
survive the universal crisis, and either at the lucid goals of
their perfected destiny rejoice forever in a reflected individual
fruition of the attributes of God, or else start refreshed on a
new career with that redistribution of the cosmic matter and
motion which in its gigantic and eternal rhythm of development and
dissolution the ancient Hindu mind figured as the respiration of
Brahm and which ambitious science now generalizes as the law of
evolution.

CHAPTER II.

THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.

JUDAISM so largely supplied the circumstantial and doctrinal germs
out of which dogmatic Christianity grew, that we cannot thoroughly
understand the Christian belief in a final day of judgment, unless
we first notice the historic and literary derivation of that
belief from Judaism, and then trace its development in the new
conditions through which it passed. The personal character,
teachings, life, and death of Jesus Christ, together with his
subsequent resurrection and career in the consciousness of
ecclesiastical Christendom, constituted the crystalizing ce