ought. Now the parables differ in the
forms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms are
metaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fate
to the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is the
vital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist in
anything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere is
something moral.

The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that
we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth
reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and
elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of
some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of
man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the
Creator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympathetic
connection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing the
verdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need to
project the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of a
trial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into an
overwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt,
was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully for
good in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be as
much better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real and
more pervasive.

Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power of
justice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, the
genuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career of
that being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment;
because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the end
at which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If we
could survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view,
and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedly
we should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of each
ephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of its
sun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as the
final day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then the
sum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from all
further alteration by him, passing into history as a collective
cause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls in
space, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal will
tell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will not