I. The first proposition then that I am to endeavor to establish, is, That the General Judgment announc

with its note of admiration, but to hint, that the Divine Judge would find such a mode of judgment too troublesome and difficult? If my dulness of apprehension causes me to do our assailant any injustice, I beg his pardon; but if this be not the meaning of the sentence, it appears to me to have no meaning at all, but to be the merest nonsense; and whether such a meaning will raise it much above nonsense, the reader must determine. The objector insinuates, that to judge of the cases of sixty persons in a minute, is too hard for Omniscience; wherefore, to simplify the matter, he would have all who have died from the beginning of the world to the end of it judged at once. He goes on:" And if that be true also, which a zealous Swedenborgian once told me, that according to their doctrine the world will never be at an end, but will last for ever, then there must be an everlasting propagation of mankind." This is a sad aggravation of the difficulty, indeed. If the human race is thus to continue, and the ratio of its increase goes on as at present, instead of only sixty dying in a minute, there will at length be six hundred, or six thousand; and then how can they be judged? The mind of the objector is overwhelmed at the thought; and he apprehends that the Almighty must sink under the task, as he does under the idea. Can he really mean to suggest that "the everlasting propagation of mankind" is too much for Infinity? Can he in fact suppose, that Infinity can be satisfied with less? Can he behold the countless multitude of suns which the telescope discovers to us, each accompanied, as reason necessarily concludes, with its dependent worlds; can he admit that all these are replenished with inhabitants, and with an endless variety of natural productions, like the world in which we live; can he believe that the minutest and the greatest of all things are alike the workmanship of the Creator; and that his providence, throughout all worlds, is as universal as the Lord teaches when he says, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without our heavenly Father, and that the very hairs of our head are all numbered? Can his mind embrace all this, and then shrink from the congenial idea, that He who has produced and who governs these mighty works, did not create them for the sake of uncreating them again, but, as they are boundless in extent, so are they intended to be in duration, and their Creator will continue to draft off from them inhabitants for his heavenly kingdom, in continually increasing numbers, without end? Alas, this thought seems to distress our poor friend most of all; for he adds, as something transcendantly monstrous, " And then again, according to this New Jerusalem doctrine, all mankind after death become either angels in heaven or devils in hell; wherefore, it clearly follows that this world, their doctrine being admitted, is nothing but a manufactory of angels and devils!" Most truly, it does so follow : and if the inference thus sagaciously brought out is sufficient to condemn the "New Jerusalem doctrine," we have not a syllable to offer in extenuation. If Mr B. will have it so, "this world is nothing but a manufactory of angles and devils." And pray, for what "manufactory," more worthy of its Creator than that of angels, does he think it can be designed? (as for devils, he knows that, according to our doctrines, they are not manufactured such by the

ed in Scripture, as to be performed at the Second Coming of the Lord, was not to take place in the natural world, as commonly supposed, but in the spiritual.

That it was not to take place in the natural world, is evident from this consideration: that the circumstances announced in prophecy as being to attend it, are such as cannot be intended to be literally understood, and, some of them, such as are impossible in the nature of things. For what is the nature of the Last Judgment, according to the common apprehensions of it; and how is it to be performed? We have all been told from our childhood, that angels are to appear with trumpets, the sound of which shall be so loud, as not only to rouse to a sense of the great event at hand the whole race of mankind then living upon the globe, but also to wake the dead: for then

"a mighty trump, one half concealed

In clouds, one half to mortal eye revealed,
Shall pour a dreadful note; the piercing call
Shall rattle in the centre of the ball,
The extended circuit of creation shake;
The living die with fear, the dead awake."

Or, as another poet describes it,

"Celestial guards the topmost height attend,
And crowds of angels down from heaven descend;
With their big cheeks the deafening clarions wind,
Whose dreadful clangors startle all mankind:-
Ten thousand worlds revive to better skies,

And from their tombs the thronging corses rise."

No matter how long since they may have lain mouldering in the dust, nor how widely their particles may have been scattered asunder; no matter into what other substances they may have passed; nor even though, by being devoured by cannibals, or by passing into the substances of vegetables and animals, and being thence again taken into the human system, they may have formed parts

Creator, but by themselves.) Does he mean to deny the fact, and affirm that mankind do not become either angels or devils? It really is not easy to tell what he means; further than this; that he is determined, at any rate, to contradict the doctrines of the New Jerusalem, but cannot find anything plausible to urge against them. The plain English of such objections is this,-that those sublime and heavenly doctrines make God too wise, too good, and too great.

* Young.

† Amhurst's translation of Addison's celebrated Latin poem on the Altar-piece of Magdalen College, Oxford.

of human bodies many times over; no matter for these and a thousand difficulties more, all shall revive:

"And now, from every corner of the earth,
The scattered dust is called to second birth;
Whether in mines it formed the ripening mass,
Or humbly mixed and flourished in the grass,
[Or holds the station that it held before,
In human forms incorporate o'er and o'er.]
The severed body now unites again,
And kindred atoms rally into men -
Here an imperfect form returns to light,
Not half renewed, dishonest to the sight;
Maimed of his nose appears his blotted face,
And scarce the image of a man we trace:
Here, by degrees infused, the vital ray
Gives the first motion to the panting clay :
Slow, to new life the thawing fluids creep,
And the stiff joints wake heavily from sleep."

This description, to be sure, exposes a little of the inconveniences of the operation; however, all shall be made complete,

Embezzled or mislaid of the whole tale.

Each soul shall have a body ready-furnished;
And each shall have his own."t

The whole terraqueous globe, it seems, like one huge mine, is suddenly to explode, and every spot, both of earth and sea, is to shoot out a human body:

"So when famed Cadmus sowed the fruitful field,
With pregnant throes the quickened furrow swell'd,
From the warm soil sprung up a warlike train,
And human harvests covered all the plain."‡

These, however, though they appear as men complete, are as yet only men's bodies: the souls, therefore, which formerly animated them, and which have been reserved in some unknown region, are to be called from their obscure and not very comfortable retreat, and united with them again:

"The body thus renewed, the conscious soul,
Which has, perhaps, been fluttering near the pole,

* Amhurst's Addison.

+ Blair. Well may the poet add,

"Ask not how this shall be."

And well may both poet and dogmatist seek to silence inquiry with the magic word " Omnipotence.”

tAmhurst's Addison.

Or midst the burning planets wondering strayed,
Or hovered o'er where her pale corpse was laid;
Or rather coasted on her final state,

And feared, or wished, for her appointed fate;
This soul, returning with a constant flame,
Now weds for ever her imınortal frame."*

And notwithstanding the multitude of spirits and bodies thus seeking for each other, they shall all find their own,

"Nor shall the conscious soul

Mistake its partner; but amidst the crowd,

Singling its other half, into its arms

Shall rush, with all the impatience of a man

That's new come home, who having long been absent,
With haste runs over every different room,

In pain to see the whole."

These then are all to join those who may then be living,
and, forming with them an innumerably great army, are
to wait the decision of their lot. To continue our poet-
ical selections:

"Ten thousand trumpets now at once advance;
Now deepest silence lulls the vast expanse:
So deep the silence, and so loud the blast,
As Nature died when she had groaned her last.
Nor man nor angel moves. The Judge on high
Looks round, and with his glory fills the sky:
Then on the fatal book his hand he lays,
Which high to view supporting seraphs raise:
In solemn form the rituals are prepared,
The seal is broken, and a groan is heard.—
Aloft, the seats of bliss their pomp display,
Brighter than brightness, this distinguished day:
Horrors beneath, darkness in darkness, hell
Of hell, where torments behind torments dwell;
A furnace formidable, deep, and wide,
O'erboiling with a mad sulphureous tide,
Expands its jaws, most dreadful to survey,
And roars outrageous for the destined prey.-
Such is the scene: and one short moment's space
Concludes the hopes and fears of human race."‡

While this is proceeding, all the elements sympathize:
the world takes fire; the stars fall to the earth; and at
length all creation perishes in one universal conflagra-
tion:

"Reverse all Nature's web shall run,

And spotless Misrule, all around,

Order, its flying foe, confound,

While backward all the threads shall haste to be unspun."

* Young.

+ Blair.

+ Young.

"The sun, by sympathy concerned,
At these convulsions, pangs, and agonies,
Which on the whole creation seize,
Is to substantial darkness turned.

The neighboring moon, as if a purple flood
O'erflowed her tottering orb, appears
Like a huge mass of black corrupting blood;
For she herself a dissolution fears."

"No more the stars, with paler beams,
Shall tremble o'er the midnight streams,
But travel downward, to behold

What mimics them so twinkling there;
And, like Narcissus, as they gain more near,
For the loved image straight expire,

And agonize in warm desire,

Or slake their heat as in the stream they roll.

Whilst the World burns, and all the orbs below

In their expiring ruins glow,

They sink, and unsupported leave the skies,

Which fall abrupt, and tell their torment in their noise."

"This globe, alone, would but defraud the fire,

Starve its devouring rage: the flakes aspire

And catch the clouds; and make the heavens their prey:
The sun, the moon, the stars, all melt away:

All, all is lost: no monument, no sign,

Where once so proudly blazed the gay machine.
So bubbles on the foaming stream expire;
So sparks that scatter from the kindling fire.
The devastations of one dreadful hour

The great Creator's six-days' work devour."t

本

It is thus that the Last Judgment is usually described. I have taken my delineation of it from the poets, because it is to poetry that such ideas properly appertain: I have been careful, however, not to borrow from them any circumstances of their own invention, but only such as, whether related in poetry or in prose, are generally believed to belong to the subject; and it would be easy to repeat all their statements from almost every prose-writer who has handled the theme. Of the poets, also, whom I have cited, three were clergymen, whose orthodoxy has never been disputed; and the fourth (Addison), is an author, whose authority, on such a subject, few of the clergy would reject. But who can weigh, in the balance of a cool deliberate judgment, such representations as the above, without concluding, that the facts affirmed in them are as purely poetical as the language?-in other ↑ Young.

* Pomfret.