mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and
vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation
between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the
Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final
day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery,
summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their
doom according to his sovereign pleasure?

The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth
chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of
an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in
his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit
upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all
nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a
shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the
sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus
himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to
indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and
judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of
morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had
taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so
overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times,
that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.

This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of
the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly
king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity
of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and
undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the
apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in
the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man
whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being
delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a
deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is
generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this
arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate
his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The
essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no
substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor
multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.

The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead,
Minos, who presided at the