quences which are past remedy. It may prove there is great reason to think so a spreading cancer in our spiritual nature, whose burning is inextinguishable, everlasting, till the ruin is complete in the extinction of personal existence itself, fulfilling thus the sternest warning our Saviour ever uttered, in actually destroying both soul and body in hell. (Matt. x. 28.)

From the view which has been taken in this and in the foregoing chapter, the conclusion is unavoidable, that the popular doctrine of the day of judgment has been read into the Scripture, and not read out of it. In Scripture we find no warrant for looking forward to a judgment to be delivered to mankind in a mass, and to be displayed after the manner of the Dies Ira,

"When, shriveling like a parched scroll,

The flaming heavens together roll,
And louder yet, and yet more dread,

Swells the high trump that wakes the dead."

There are days of judgment, days of the Lord, in the Old Testament sense (Isaiah xiii. 6), like the day when Babylon was judged. The fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution of 1792, the Ameri

Beside

can Civil War, were such days. these particular days, there is a general day of judgment. In such a day, or period, we now are living. The law delivered by Christ is being manifestly executed in the experience both of society and of individuals. Beyond the grave there is further judgment, when the evil that has escaped full disclosure and condemnation in a world of fleshly forms will no more escape, where we are to see as we are seen and to know as we are known, where everything that has been veiled in the body must be manifested in the spirit. So searching, so complete, may such judgment be anticipated to be, that we may speak of it, in that sense, as the judgment. But to this we go, each of us alone, at death. Not in a mass, but one by one, are we to be confronted with it in the still court of conscience, ablaze at last with the unobstructed light of the Most Holy. For this there is no waiting of long ages. As soon as we enter the unseen world, our judgment is immediate, at least in its beginning.

So far, then, as resurrection be regarded as antecedent to judgment, there is no more delay of the former than of the lat

ter. The immediateness of judgment after death implies the immediateness of what Christ calls "the resurrection of judgment." (John v. 29.)

CHAPTER VIII.

PARTICULARS ELUCIDATED BY PRINCIPLES.

"The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord."—1 Thess. iv. 16, 17.

I. So far as we have studied the subject of the resurrection in the teachings of Christ and of Paul, we have seen reason to think:

(1.) That it is not reserved till the end of time, but is now taking place in the unseen world, through the continuously acting operation of the spiritual power which was manifest in him who said, "I AM the Resurrection and the Life."

(2.) That there is a wide difference between such resurrection as mere nature brings to pass, through neglect of effort for spiritual culture, and such as results from the Christian endeavor which Paul described, when he said that he made all sac

rifices, "if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." (Phil. iii. 10, 11.) This is what Christ calls the "resurrection of life," in the full harvest of spiritual endeavors; the other is what he calls the "resurrection of judgment," in life that is not life, an existence in privation and loss, destitute of all the spiritual fruits for which no seed was sown.1

(3.) The resurrection, whether "of life " or" of judgment," is not a single simultaneous event, affecting all the dead at the same moment, but the continuous process of the rising of spirits, "every man in his own order," into that condition of existence in spiritual bodies which they are fitted to rise into.

(4.) This condition, whatever it be, involves such a conscious experience of the spiritual results of the present life as will perfectly declare the divine judgment upon "the deeds done in the body."

(5.) There is no middle state of waiting to be refurnished, at some great distant day, with a body, all men at once, and in those bodies standing all together before the throne of God to receive judgment in

1 See note B, appended to chapter iv.