race, each one
reading with perfect clearness in every particular the complete
history of humanity from the beginning to the end, understanding
all its causes, courses and consequences, and beholding with
unspeakable delight the justification of the ways of God, the
whole universe opening into free intercommunication, as if time
and space were either no more or else their measures were of
boundless subjective elasticity, every creature found in peace and
rapture at the goal of his destiny. That, indeed, would be a
realization of the day of judgment and the resurrection of the
dead, but without a shock or a jar in the course of things which
science reveals. The process of development now going on, if
carried far enough, will naturally result in this or in something
equivalent to it; while the notion of the vomiting forth of the
accumulated dead from land and sea, at the blast of a trumpet, is
a wild piece of imagery, borrowed from startling political
phenomena, and applied with absurd incongruity to the chronic
providence of God. The former view contains all the moral
significance of the latter, but without its violation of
probability. Nor is it all necessary that the climax shall be
brought about of a simultaneous universal judgment, or of the
appearance of our whole race on the earth at one time. The giving
of the vision to souls subjectively, one after another, in the
order of their attainment of the conditions, would meet every
requirement of the case. To each one in turn, wherever he was, as
the result broke on him in the ecstatic glory of all it means, the
essence of the so long cherished faith of Christendom would be
justified, and the providential theater and scenery of human
experience would appear under its illumination as a dazzling
vision of poetic justice perfect at every point.

Marvelous and almost incredible as this scheme of thought may
seem, it is not more mysterious in itself, or more staggering in
its demand on our faith, than many things successively were which
are now established beyond a doubt such as the telegraphic
conversation of men through the ocean and around the globe; the
seven hundred and thirty three thousand millions of ethereal
vibrations in a second, which cause the report of the violet ray
in consciousness; the transcendent disclosures of the spectrum
analysis; the conception of gravitation as a force which holds all
matter in unbroken union, and acts throughout the stellar univer