ted as absolute verity? If the
blood red warrior on his white horse followed by the shining
cavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimerical
angels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror struck
fugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incredible
walls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yielding
twelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burning
sulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of the
dead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The reader
smiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in Leaven
amidst boiling pots of walrus meat, while in hell the fish lines
of the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed by
falling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give for
the reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his present
experience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process of
thought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally credit
the following verses:

"There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and in
great books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down The
good ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God.
The other keeps his dreadful day book open Till sunset, that we
may repent, which doing, The record of the action fades away, And
leaves a line of white across the page."

No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in the
New Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in his
treasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled in
it. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents?

When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament were
written, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment was
almost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. At
any instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, the
troops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, and
the sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left.
Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict in
the flame of the west," the believers felt that the supreme Dies
iroe was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation after
generation died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approach
seemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its early
prominence into the background. But as it retreated, and became
more obscure and vague in its date and other