Chapter II: The Day of Judgment (2)

Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scene in human society so impressive as the periodical sitting in judgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of those half deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, the Emperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in the gate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversible administration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing in purple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest to his person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next in order; his body guards and various classes of servants, in distinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast masses of troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must have composed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared the accusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captives taken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who had complaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. The monarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executioners carried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, some sent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When the tribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended, there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darkness there, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place.

Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in some degree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary in human governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, the judge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of the social order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties, wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminals gathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, may go on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up of arrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural it would be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery, summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their doom according to his sovereign pleasure?

The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times, that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.

This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.

The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead, Minos, who presided at the trial of souls arriving from Europe; Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold; the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct the tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future in forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom, of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth, while the Judge and his officers take their places in the Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology, should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely, the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one, because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal truths are wholly different from their relations with each other in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity. God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual, results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those judicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken and hitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable, the circumstances are so completely different. The true illustration of the divine government must be adopted from physiology and psychology, where the perfect working of the Creator is exemplified, not from the forum and the court, where the imperfect artifices of men are exhibited.

God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions of their own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kick of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. The thief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, the philosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just and intrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in the fitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discords with the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus is the daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded with thrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream of devouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed of uncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions of universal good; the vices represent private opposition to those conditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting and cooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonistic and repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfect retribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel its working, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of the secrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his own experience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far from refuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truth of that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward." Those who consider themselves saints indulge in an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinners have their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next." The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical with the first law of motion in the material sphere; action and reaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law being instantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be no occasion for a final epoch to redress its accumulated disbalancements. It has no disbalancements, save in our erroneous or defective vision.

The true conception of the relation of the all judging Creator to his creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies all finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices, fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent, constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance, originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a truth.

For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered, not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact, and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares, because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a flaming furnace.

Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "When the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moral meaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializing degradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appears clearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wife of Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his right hand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said, "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give." The imagery meant that the missionary assistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth and love he came to establish, would be represented in common with himself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world. When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, as indicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and that his favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, and glory, he solemnly repudiated it.

There is yet another and a wholly different style of imagery employed by Jesus to convey his instructions as to the judgment which is to separate the justified from the condemned. The consideration of this species of imagery would afford an independent proof, of a cogent character, that they strangely misapprehend the mind of Jesus who interpret the moral meaning of his parable in an outward and dramatic sense. The metaphors to which we now refer are of a domestic and convivial nature, based on some of the most impressive social customs of the Oriental nations. It was the habit of kings, governors, and other rich and powerful men, to give, on certain occasions, great banquets, to which the guests were invited by special favor. These feasts were celebrated with the utmost pomp and splendor, by night, in brilliantly illuminated apartments. The contrast of the blazing lights, the richly costumed guests, the music and talk, the honor and luxury within, set against the darkness, the silence, the envious poverty and misery without, must have deeply struck all who saw it, and would naturally secure rhetorical reflections in speech and literature. The Jews illustrated their idea of the Kingdom of God by the symbol of a table at which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were banqueting, and would be joined by all their faithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing how a king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast and sent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagery still more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Is it not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended it as an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he first announced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, having rejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to the Gentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joy and honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused to accept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias that the parable has been perverted into a description of the Last Judgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to or exclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter of personal experience in the heart of the disciple and in the society of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, without which no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, and loving character. In consequence of his destitution of this, Judas, although seated at the table, with the most honored guests, in the very presence of his Lord, was proved to have no right there, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, his inability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom, constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind of Jesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually in the present, and not something to be shown collectively and materially at the end of the world, appears from the great number of different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had he meant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the last day, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had a distinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one and the same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach that all who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct to assimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby made members of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsic unfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that his fertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey this one truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in which the images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agree must be the essential thought. Now the parables differ in the forms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms are metaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fate to the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is the vital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist in anything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere is something moral.

The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the Creator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympathetic connection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing the verdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need to project the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of a trial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into an overwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt, was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully for good in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be as much better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real and more pervasive.

Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power of justice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, the genuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career of that being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment; because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the end at which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If we could survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view, and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedly we should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of each ephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of its sun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as the final day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then the sum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from all further alteration by him, passing into history as a collective cause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls in space, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal will tell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will not 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 accepted 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 details, it grew ever more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after being bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years," should "be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still continued to expect him.

The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts: the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels, in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of thousands of years.

But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation, when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day. Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross; the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and the repulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders who had escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in black coffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and, finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. The procession tediously winds to the great square in front of the cathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix with extinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his court and the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by their presence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish in long drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a more vivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than the fact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of an Auto da Fe magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth, Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiars standing by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil his bidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, the crucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe; the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helpless before him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at the inexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutly thank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it is cruel?

Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, the millennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if the literature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books, sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pile as big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about a quarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the time for the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic in the United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germany have also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebrated London preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End," and "The Great Tribulation," have been circulated in tens of thousands of copies, is now the most prominent representative of this catastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculous by his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has become more an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematical calculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalyptic poetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerable sect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the most illiterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to the fanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead an eleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiously wait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake, pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoric shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles them as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some of them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope that its end is at hand,

"Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathway for the coming Judge!"

But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception. In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those who still cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment has been put forward as far as the day of creation has been put backward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before the theatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; more and more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic jurisdiction in the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. The time is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit of national separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred, whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, all others with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies," will give way to that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which sees brethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equal salvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the self righteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and so relentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over the idea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chief captains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, saying to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?" then the temper of this faith will be seen to be as wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as a remnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the whole mind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the disciples wished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents, rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." Many a bigoted and complacent dogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to day, fails to read his own heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishly fancying himself better and safer, on account of his blind conservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance of science. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses of the mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The whole ecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No such gigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza, will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, as freshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his will through his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness and justice; and forever may all his creatures come to him unimpeded, and trust in him without limit.

Away, then, monstrous horrors, bred in the night of the past! Dreadful incubi! too cruelly and too long ye have sat on the breast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it is time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels, fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims! Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer. Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into the light. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinions where all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itself shall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made to outgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning the sun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night before him. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now we fling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope to escape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history. For we believe that all history is by its own enactment indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.