ite Being who supplies all
finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of
organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of
good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of
thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices,
fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view
worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The
incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent,
constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the
traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance,
originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a
truth.

For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be
drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered,
not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the
transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the
approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible
calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and
rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish
armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined
evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the
future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact,
and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the
image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income
of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer
of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and
stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares,
because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be
riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on
revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the
property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the
bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to
themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in
the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops
of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the
right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a
flaming furnace.

Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the
vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory
minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He
is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostl