tremble at the thought of a judgment so unavoidable and so
tremendous as this! The votaries of superstition are mistaken in
supposing that the removal of their false beliefs will destroy or
weaken the sanctions of duty among men. The removal of imaginary
sanctions will but cause the true ones to appear more clearly and
to work more effectively.

The judgment of God then, we conclude, is no vengeful wreaking of
arbitrary royal volitions; but it is the return of the laws of
being on all deeds, actual or ideal. This is, in itself, perpetual
and infallible: but it sometimes forces itself on our recognition
in sudden shocks or crises caused by the gathering obstacles and
opposition made to it by our ignorance, vice, and crime. Every
other doctrine of the Divine judgment is either an error or a
figurative statement of this one. In the latter case, the physical
cover should be dissolved and thrown away, the moral nucleus laid
bare and appropriated. But the popular mind of Christendom has
unfortunately pursued the contrary course, first exaggerating and
consolidating the metaphors, then putting their forms literally in
the place of their meaning.

The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in the
Apocalypse, the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as
blood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the great
white throne, from before the face of whose occupant the
frightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of the
dead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and the
judging of the dead out of the things written therein, this scenic
array has, by its terrible vividness and power of fanciful
plausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken such
a tenacious hold on the feelings of the Christian world, secured
for itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself with
such a mass of associations, that it has actually come to be
regarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act as
such. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think on
the subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books are
provided in heaven with the names of men in them and recording
angels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by single
entry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white dais
raised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. On
what principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayal
rendered as emblem, the rest accep