l goodness, that
constitutes the salvation of the disciple. We are to look not for
the resurrection of the flesh from the grave, but for the
resurrection of the soul from all forms of sin, ignorance, and
misery. It is the universal prevalence of truth and virtue,
knowledge, love, and peace, in the hearts of men, not the physical
reign of the returning Messiah, which will make a millennium on
earth. The kingdom of God which Judaism localized exclusively in
Palestine, and the early church exclusively in heaven or on the
millennial earth, should be recognized in every place, whether
above the sky or on the globe, where duty is done, and pure
affection, trust, and joy experienced; for God is not excluded
from all other spaces by any enthronization in one. We ought not
to cling, as to permanent fixtures of revealed truth, to the rigid
outlines of that scheme of faith which was struck out when the
three story house of the Hebrew cosmogony showed the limits of
what men knew, before exact science was born, or criticism
conceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia and
the Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculative
theological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstruct
and read just them, from time to time, in accordance with the
demands of the growing body of human knowledge.

Reflecting, in the light of these general ideas of truth, on the
whole subject of the current doctrine of the end of the world and
the day of judgment, we shall see that that doctrine presents no
valid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out of
the historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianity
arose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by the
unconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figures
came, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginative
collection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literal
truths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historical
and critical information for entering into the book from the point
of view occupied by its author, it is just as evident that its
imagery was meant to describe the immediate conflict of Hebrew
Christianity with pagan Rome, and not the literal blotting out of
the universe, as it is unquestionable that the book of Daniel
depicts, not the impending destruction of the world, but the
relations of the chosen nation with the hostile empires of
Persia, Media, Babylon, and Mac