XIX

THE FINAL JUDGMENT

The idea of a judgment to be pronounced authoritatively on man and his life in the world that now is, meets us again and again in the New Testament. Specially do we find it on the lips of our Lord and in the synoptic gospels, though in St. John the idea is taken up and developed as necessarily present because Christ is present. Our Lord must have regarded it as a part of the gospel he had to offer to

men.

And, indeed, the idea of judgment has two aspects, one of approval and one of condemnation. While the idea sometimes repels us, as we think of our own sinfulness and wish it could be hidden away forever, yet at other times it attracts us. When we think of God's judgment on our own personal lives, the feeling of comfort is not uppermost with us. But when the idea of judgment is more general, of men and movements outside ourselves, then it does undoubtedly bring relief and comfort.

There cannot be a doubt that society is full of injustice. Men take advantage of one another. The strong oppress the weak. There are many successful forms of cooperative iniquity. Nations

have again and again been wholesale robbers and murderers. Might has again and again in all generations trampled on right. And not only on this broad area of collective interests, but on all narrower areas the working out of successful injustices cannot be denied. In civil life, in political life, in family life, in the life of individual relationships, again and again injustice has been successful and has triumphed. So much so that one fears that thousands of men and women have lived lives of bitterness and have died in doubt whether, if a Holy God lived, he would allow them to suffer such unavenged moral outrage. However optimistic we may be it is quite beyond our ability, or the ability of any man, to vindicate all the allowances of Divine Providence, or to affirm that they always harmonize in their working with that sense of justice which God has implanted in every one of us.

For, though no man is an unprejudiced judge of himself and his own actions, yet in every one of us there is implanted a sense of justice which, when others are before its bar, is capable of giving a verdict not so very wide of the mark.

In the light of the New Testament teaching, the final judgment is not man's on man. Except in a rough and general way men are not capable of passing final judgments. Even in the administration of the law of the land we have higher courts to revise the findings of lower courts. One would suppose that men trained as lawyers are trained along this very line of judging of evidence, providing they could get all the evidence needful before them,

would seldom arrive at an unjust judgment. And yet experts in judging are not trusted absolutely. Much less is a man trusted to give a verdict on his own case. Our judgment of ourselves can never be final. And certainly our judgment of others can never be final. Clearly finality in judgment is not within human competency.

And yet, implanted within us, there is an ineradicable conviction that there is in all cases, between individuals and between nations, a right and a wrong. And back of that, there is the feeling a feeling which persists in spite of every cold wind which blows upon it that somehow, somewhere, sometime, the right will be shown, will be vindicated, and the wrong exposed and punished.

It is manifest, then, that the truths of the New Testament are only authoritative recognitions of ideas and feelings already sown in the nature of

man.

But, as all our ideas and feelings are elementary, crude, and coarse and need civilizing and more Christianizing, if they are to represent the truth, is it not well for us to think over the suggestions which have come to us from him who seldom argued, but almost invariably positively affirmed that which he taught. His mind was free from doubt. He moved in the midst of certainties. He was positive and affirmative without being dogmatic. "We speak that we do know, and bear witness of that we have seen." Knowledge and perception. In that region he moved. It is not ours. It is his own. No one but himself occupied that position. But he

occupied it for our sakes that we might learn of him.

The ability to learn is the finest ability man has. People who are not capable of continuous learning are stupid. Of course they are to an extent stonified rockified- fossilized. The reading man is generally a reasonable man, because he is always putting himself under influences better and stronger than those which operate on other men. His selfassertiveness is generally mild and modest. I really don't know what judgment will finally have to be passed upon a man who cannot learn, even from the Christ of God. And yet our Lord has invited us to this beautiful form of fellowship, this union with himself of pupil and Teacher, of scholar and Master: "Learn of me!"

There are some subjects on which we can know nothing definite and positive unless we learn of him, and this of the final judgment is one. He has emphasized it in many illustrations, as in this chapter and that magnificent and most dramatic settingforth of the same ideas in the twenty-fifth chapter of this same gospel. It is not necessary to take the records literally in order to get the substance out of them. Nor is it necessary to set the more externalized ideas of judgment in opposition to the representations of St. John, who makes the Saviour say: "For judgment I am come into this world, suggesting that there is an actual revealing and separation of men here and now that Christ, as a present light in the world, discerns between the souls of men, attracting and gladdening those who are of the truth and repelling those who do evil in

evitably, “multiplying for them the pains of darkness, hatred, and sin.

Everything external is also internal. A man beclouded in mind, moves in a darkened external world. Of course there is a judgment going on all the while present and real, though not always discernible in the souls of men. All deeds, good and bad, leave within a spiritual result. We must not forget that, if we would know what the final judgment will be. According to our Lord's teaching it will not be in plunging a man into deeper darkness, but in lifting him into fuller light, so that he sees himself as he is and others see him as he is. This is quite in accord with those words of the great Master himself: "This is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil." You know how beetles and other creatures who hide away under stones are panic-stricken and scurry away in all directions trying to hide themselves when once the stone is removed and the light is let in upon them. We must never forget that the judgment of the latter day is the judgment of light and love. Hence it is, that the truth of a final judgment is part of the gospel. It is an element in it.

When we gather up all these teachings of our Lord on judgment, some of them will surprise us, it may be. The judgments belonging to earth, even of nations and cities, like Sodom and Gomorrah, are provisional, not final. Startling, is it not, to hear our Lord say, speaking of Capernaum and of Sodom