ame fanciful process of thought, the same
poetic ingredients, here as in the schemes of those heathen
religions whose principal portrayals we all regard as mythology.
To argue that because earthly rulers, in their anger and power,
send retributive armies against their rebellious subjects, to
bring them to judgment, destroy their homes and cities, and lay
waste their lands with fire and sword, therefore God, the supreme
King, will do so by the whole world, is not to reason logically,
but to poetize creatively. There can be no warrant for
transferring the political and military relations between men and
earthly sovereigns to the moral and spiritual relations between
the human race and God, since the two sets of relations are wholly
different. The relation of Creator and creature is immensely
higher and wider than that of king and subject. He whose laws are
everywhere incessantly self executing needs not to select and
group and reserve his friends or foes for any climateric
catastrophe. The common notion of a final judgment day the
fanciful association of all the good together, on one side, to be
saved; of all the bad together, on the other side, to be damned,
applies to the divine government an imperfection belonging only to
human governments. Surely every one must see, the moment the
thought is stated, that this imaginative universalizing of the
indignation of God, and carrying it to a climax, in the
destruction of the world, is a mythological procedure utterly
inapplicable to a Being who can know no anger, no caprice, no
change, a Being whose will is universal truth, whose throne is
immensity, whose robe is omnipresence.

Original Christianity, internally regarded in its divine truth,
was the pure moral law exemplified in the personal traits of Jesus
Christ, and universalized by his ascent out of the flesh into that
kingdom of heaven which knows not nationalities or ceremonies. But
original Christianity, externally and historically regarded, in
the belief of its first disciples, was simply Judaism, with the
addition of the faith that the Messiah had actually come in the
person of Jesus Christ. The first disciples vividly cherished the
prevalent Pharisaic doctrine that the Messiah would glorify his
people, vanquish the heathen, raise and judge the dead, change the
face of the earth, and inaugurate a holy reign of Israel in joy
and splendor. This the Messiah was to do. But they believed Jesus
to be the Messiah. Yet, be