trial of souls arriving from Europe;
Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who
judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors
for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions
of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture
of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place
where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find
a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and
walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold;
the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every
man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct
the tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future in
forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar
experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to
the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in
another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom,
of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a
huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of
heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth,
while the Judge and his officers take their places in the
Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology,
should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks
into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of
the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely,
the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary
judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon
our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one,
because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal
truths are wholly different from their relations with each other
in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal
or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a
league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits
and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to
convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity.
God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards
and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual,
results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related
to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those
judicial and police arrangeme