them from the terrible presence of the Lord and from his consuming wrath. Such episodes of melting tenderness there will be at this final parting of men! such eternal farewells! but, ah! the word farewell hath forgotten its meaning, and wishes of welfare now are vain. A new order of things hath commenced, the age of necessity hath begun its reign, all change is for ever sealed.

This mighty crisis in the history of the human race, this catastrophe of evil and consummation of good, fortunately it is not our province to clothe with living imagery, else our faculties should have failed in the attempt. But if our divine Poet hath, by his mighty genius, so rendered to conception the fallen angels beneath the sulphurous canopy of hell, their shapes, their array, their warfare and their high debates, as to charm and captivate our souls by the grandeur of their sentiments and the splendour of their chivalry, and to cheat us into sympathy and pity and even admiration; how might such another spirit, (if it shall please the Lord to yield another such,) draw forth the theme of judgment from its ambiguous light, give it form and circumstance, feeling and expression, so that it should strike home upon the heart with the presentiment of those very feelings which shall then be awakened in our breasts. This task awaits some lofty and pious soul hereafter to arise, and when performed will enrich the world with a " Paradise Regained" worthy to be a sequel to the " Paradise Lost;" and with an "Inferno" that needeth no physical torments to make it infernal; and with a judgment antecedent to both, embracing and embodying the complete justification of God's ways

to man.

Instead of which mighty fruit of genius, this age (Oh, shocking!) hath produced out of this theme two most nauseous and unformed abortions, vile, unprincipled, and unmeaning-the one a brazen-faced piece of political cant, the other an abandoned parody of solemn judgment. Of which visionaries, I know not whether the self-confident tone of the one, or the ill-placed merriment of the other, displeaseth me the more. It is ignoble and impious to rob the sublimest of subjects of all its grandeur and effect, in order to serve wretched interests and vulgar passions. I have no sympathy with such wretched stuff, and I despise the age which hath. The men are limited in their faculties, for they, both of them, want the greatest of all faculties-to know the living God and stand in awe of his mighty power: with the one, blasphemy is virtue when it makes for loyalty; with

the other, blasphemy is the food and spice of jest-making. Barren souls! and is the land of Shakspeare and Spencer and Milton come to this! that it can procreate nothing but such profane spawn, and is content to exalt such blots and blemishes of manhood into ornaments of the age. Puny age! when religion and virtue and manly freedom have ceased from the character of those it accounteth noble. But I thank God who hath given us a refuge in the great spirits of a former age, who will yet wrest the sceptre from these mongrel Englishmen; from whose impieties we can betake ourselves to the "Advent to Judgment" of Taylor; "The Four Last Things" of Bates; the Blessedness of the Righteous" of Howe; and the "Saint's Rest" of Baxter; books which breathe of the reverend spirit of the olden time. God send to the others repentance, or else blast the powers they have abused so terribly; for if they repent not, they shall harp another strain at that scene they have sought to vulgarize. The men have seated themselves in his throne of judgment, to vent from thence doggrel spleen and insipid flattery; the impious men have no more ado with the holy seat than the obscene owl hath, to nestle and bring forth in the Ark of the Covenant, which the wings of the cherubim of glory did overshadow.

But, to return, our office is not to create forms for the presentation of the last judgment to the fancy, but to measure it by reason, and examine how it squares with the noble sentiments of justice which God hath implanted in our breast. Having already taken his constitution of government to task, it now remains that, in like manner, we take to task the judgment and the award which is to pass thereon. As to the manner of the judgment, we have already thrown out our conjecture in the preceding part, and the preliminaries of it we have examined at length. It now remains that we enter into inquiry upon the matter of it, or the principle by which decision is to be given. This is stated at length in Matthew, chapter xxv. verse 31:—

"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. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, and ye

gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink! When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels; For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal."

These six charities, upon which the destinations of the righteous and the wicked are made to turn, seem at first thought but a slight review of human life, and but a loose inquisition into our obedience of the divine law; and we feel as if the tests of judgment to come should have been more consonant to the spiritual character of the divine constitution, turning more upon the perfection of Christian character, than upon six outward moral actions of charity and human-heartedness, which are hardly hid from the natural feelings of the most unfeeling savage. But when thoroughly examined, as we now, in dependence upon divine grace, shall endeavour to do, this will turn out to be the most thorough inquest into our faith and feelings and character, and the severest test of our obedience which the Scripture contains among all its descriptions of this solemn event.

The six necessary consolations and supports of human life are bread, water and clothing-health, human fellowsnip, and freedom to travel over the creation of God. Being abridged of any one of these demands, Nature complains; and being cut off from any one of them, she is miserable if she have no refuge in the hopes of the world to come.

Without bread and water, life cannot endure for many days; without clothing, misery invades us at every pore, every modest, delicate sentiment is murdered, and the noble nature of man brought level with the brutes; without health, the countenance of man is transformed and his nature is disguised-pain possesses the place of enjoyment, and the selfishness of pain doth in the long run eat out the kindlier sympathies of the heart. And what were man without friends or the fellowship of his kind? a miserable outcast, a helpless wanderer and vagabond upon the earth, for whom it is better to die than to live. And the loss of liberty, imprisonment in loathsome dungeons, and restriction from the natural freedom of our estate, for which every creature under heaven was made, is perhaps of all the others the most desperate calamity. For if Providence deny us bread and water and necessary clothing, then we can die in calm resignation to his will, and our misery is at an end; or if his visitations bow us down with sickness, then still it is the Lord which giveth, and the Lord which taketh away, and let his name be blessed. If our friends forsake us, we have still a resource in the friendship of God, and of him whom God hath sent to comfort the afflicted and the fallen. But that our fellow-men, worms like ourselves, should have power yielded them to shut us out from friendship and the face of day, and the sight of Nature's charms, to deal out to us/ our pittance of bread and water and wretched accommodation, protracting at pleasure the vile durance, and at will increasing the measure of our deprivations-this is a condition for humanity to be affected with, worse, it seems to me, than the other five, and, next to a disgraceful and violent death, the worst that can be laid upon enduring man.

Let these six states of existence, a hungered, athirst, naked, sick, a stranger, a prisoner, be regarded then not as six individual afflictions amongst the ten thousand which afflict this weary world, but as being the six aspects of misery— the six evil stars under which the miserable pass their life. Go round the habitations of men, and examine into the several sources of their anxiety, and the several causes of their urgent labours, you shall find that it is to keep at the staff's end these three necessities-hunger, thirst, and nakedness. Also, study the luxuries which are assembled into the shops and market-places of the city; you shall find the most part for the accommodation or entertainment of the three desires, of food and drink and raiment, for which the earth is cultivated and the juices of her fruits expressed,

and her animals stripped of their fleecy and hairy coverings; Again, go round the habitations of men, and mark the sources of their grief and bitter lamentations, you shall find them to arise from loss of friends or balmy health; they are sick, or they are strangers to the beloved of their heart, whom God hath removed from the place where they were wont to dwell. Finally, go to the places appointed for the miserable, and what do you find? prisons where liberty is curtailed; hospitals into which the sick are received; asylums for the friendless and the orphans; tables for the hungry mendicants, and clothing for the naked and the destitute; which induction doth prove the position stated above, that these six conditions, mentioned in the judgment, are, as it were, the six great perils of man.

For this same reason that these six conditions are as it were the six zones in the world of misery, they become six regions into which the power of man consigns those whom it would afflict. They are the points on which human nature is vulnerable, and are fixed upon for that end by those who, from cruelty or for punishment, would trouble her condition-and further they cannot go in their measures against her well-being. For it is not in the power of man to disturb the seat of reason, which God hath kept secret from his reach; neither can he raze out the legends of memory, or deface the visions of hope, or stem the current of thought; he can only remove us from the dwellings of our kindred to a land wherein we shall be a stranger; and he can immure us in disgraceful bondage, and abstract from Nature her wonted supplies; he can dismember our bodies, and bring on sickness and disease by noxious confinements and unwholesome foods. If he were to go a greater length he would defeat his own end, for by death we should flee away and be at rest. Accordingly, if you study the annals of wantonly inflicted suffering, or enter into the criminal code of nations, you will find these six heads, mentioned in the judgment, to be a good classification of all the individual instances of infliction:-deprivation of customary diet, from the plenty and luxury of our ordinary life down to the limit of starvation: abstraction of personal comfort and domestic accommodation, down to the limit of nakedness: infliction of torture, to cause pain and sickness: exile from our native land to a distant inhospitable region; deprivation of our liberty, to the extent of immuring our persons and fettering our limbs. The Lord, therefore, in these six brief instances, has not only grouped the calamities of human na