The God of Judgment

“It is frequently possible for men to screen themselves from the penalty of human laws: but no man can be unjust or ungrateful, without suffering for his crime. Hence I conclude that these laws must have proceeded from a more excellent legislator than man.” — Socrates.

“Thou, attended gloriously from heaven,
Shalt in the sky appear, and from Thee send
Thy summoning archangels, to proclaim
Thy dread tribunal.”

—Paradise Lost, Book iii.

“Four things belong to a Judge: to hear graciously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and decide impartially.,.. Pray to the Gods, that my departure hence may be happy.” — Socrates,

“Oh who shall bear, the blinding glare

Of the Majesty that shall meet us there?
What eye may gaze on the unveiled blaze

Of the light-girdled Throne of the Ancient of Days? t t

Christ us aid! — Himself be our Shade, That in that Dread Day we be not dismayed!”

—Wkytehead.

The great Apostle has now reached the last theme — the peroration of his fourfold discourse, — God, the God of Judgment; and the sisting of the world at His righteous bar.

“Because He hath appointed a day, in the
WHICH He will judge the wokld in righteousness BY THAT MAN WHOM He HATH ORDAINED;
WHEREOF He hath GIVEN ASSURANCE UNTO ALL
MEN IN THAT He HATH RAISED HiM FROM THE
DEAD” (v. 31).

It is almost unnecessary to say that a ‘* tribunal” was not strange to Greek or Athenian. As we now well know, the very spot where St. Paul stood was hoary with recollections of the highest and most ancient of these. We have, in an earUer part of this Volume, spoken of the marble seats, even then venerable with age, on which the circle of the Areopagite judges sat, with a corresponding stone for the accused. So that the

Apostle’s judicial emblem could hardly fail to be suggestive to his hearers.^

Nor were the Athenians conversant alone with an earthly court of criminal jurisdiction, where retribution for crime was meted out to delinquents. They recognised arraignment also at the supreme though invisible bar of conscience — the arbiter of right and wrong. They avowed their sense of individual responsibility, and indeed had clothed the moral accompaniments and results of crime in incarnate shape. For, as already also noted in our topographical description, — the Cave of the Furies was close by: its eastern opening being under the very hill on which the august conclave was now assembled. These * Erinnyes ’ — avengers — were supposed, even in the present world, to inflict punishment on the transgressor. With their knotted thongs they were the living impersonators of the old Hebrew aphorism — “And be sure your sin will find you out.” The poet yschylus represents them as standing on the brow of the Areopagus, and singing together the following doleful ditty: —

1 “‘He is about to judge’ (M-iWei Kplueip). This is appropriately said in the Areopagus, where justice and judgment used to be dispensed.” — Bengel,

THE GOD OF JUDGMENT. 18i

“For fate supreme ordains that we,
This office hold, for evermore:
Mortals, imbued with kindred gore
We scathe till under earth they flee:
And when in death
They yield their breath,
In Hades still our thralls they be.” i

There was of course a similar * recompense of reward’ which they held to be meted out on earth to the deserving. The “righteousness,” or equity, spoken of immediately by the Apostle, had its twofold application. Indeed the statue of Athene enshrined, as previously described, in one of the Temples which confronted him, was the embodiment of this double thought in magnificent sculpture. “In her justice, which is the dominant virtue, she wears two robes, one of light and one of darkness; the robe of light, saffroncolour, or the colour of the day-break, falls to her feet, covering her wholly with favour and love, — the calm of the sky in blessing; it is embroidered along its edge with her victory over the giants.... Then, her robe of indignation is worn on her breast and left arm only, fringed with fatal serpents, and fastened with gorgonian cold, turning men to stone; physically the lightning and the hail of chastisement by storm.” Nor

1 Orestes, quoted by Dr. Porter.

2 Ruskin’s Queen of the Air, p. 14.

can we restrict this thought of penal vengeance or its opposite to the present life. However repudiated by Epicurean or Stoic, a future retributive economy was accepted by many, alike among the illustrious and the common people. If we take Plato as certainly one of the purest and loftiest of her philosophic thinkers, — he holds, first of all, that the soul, emancipated from its mortal material tenement, is incapable of decay or dissolution. In his various writings, but specially in his Pheedo, the unique and remarkable dialogue, purporting to describe the last hours of Socrates — the doctrine of Immortality is clearly unfolded: that at death, the body is resolved into its original dust; but its inextinguishable tenant continues to live in an unembodied state and under new conditions. We may recall the familiar lines of Addison in his /’Cato’s Soliloquy:” —

“It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well-Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after Immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? ‘Tis the Divinity that stirs within us; ‘Tis Heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.”

In like manner Pindar, among the poets of

THE GOD OF yUDGMENT. 183

Greece, now and then presents bright and unexpected glimpses of the world beyond the grave: not the gloomy and unlovable region depicted by Homer, ^schylus, and Sophocles. Nor do Plato and kindred spirits — (the eKkeKTwv €K€/cTOTepoi) — receive and promulgate only the doctrine of a beatified future. They are equally clear and pronounced on a state of coming equitable punishment — “punishments partly penal, partly purgatorial; some temporary and some without end.” The doom of Sisyphus, the son of ^olus, with his toilsome and monotonous infliction, will occur to most of us as described in Pope’s well-known lines. The block of stone or boulder with which it was alleged he had committed his savage murders in Ephyra, was made the instrument of penal recompense in the infernal regions. In its ceaseless upheaval from the base to the summit of a mountain, we have set forth, in a strange myth, the Greek idea of equity in the after retribution.

“Up fhe high hill lie heaved the huge round stone; The huge round stone, resultant with a bound, Thundered impetuous down, and smoked along the ground.”

While, on the other hand, may be found in other poets of Hellas, as we have already specially noted in the case of Pindar, golden legends of the bliss awaiting as a recompense the lives of the brave and virtuous, the good and the true, in regions where the light of Grecian skies, and the beauty of fields enamelled with Grecian flowers, were perpetuated. Confirming what we have just said, the ’ mysteries ’ of the Greeks, in the words of another, “owed their attractiveness and influence in part at least to this, that the hierophant professed to lead the initiated on to the contemplation of things after death. Popular mythology spoke of Minos and Ehadamanthus, and the Elysian fields, and Tartarus and Acheron, and Phlegethon, the fiery river and the Lethe of forgetfulness. The eleventh book of Odyssey brought before men the thought, that in that other world they would recognise those whom they had known on earth, and ’ see the great Achilles whom they knew.* The elegiac song on Hermodius led them to think of the souls of patriots and heroes as in * the island of the blessed.’ Plato, who saw in these popular legends at least the parables and symbols of eternal truths, was never weary ... of bringing them before men’s minds, as being more than merely mythical.”

But with all this ‘’feeling after it,” St. Paul in his

1 Dean Pluraptre’s Studies on the Life after Death, p. 394.

present address invests the great theme of a future retributive economy vrith entirely new features of solemnity and distinctiveness; indeed equivalent, in the ears of his hearers, to a new revelation. Specially so in these two factors; — that there was to be a Resurrection of the body; and that the place of a Judge was to be filled, and the functions of Judge discharged by a Man: — A Man once crucified, but who had been raised from the dead as the pledge of the resurrection of His redeemed people. These two * counts ’ were specially obnoxious, for reasons stated at length in a previous part of this Volume, to the representatives of both philosophic sects in his present audience: — the Epicureans, who retorted on the assertion with mocking (’ some mocked ‘): and the Stoics, who, less noisy and defiant, relegated the discussion to some indefinite future — “We will hear thee again of this matter” (v. 32).

(1.) The Resurrection of the dead! — the old perplexing mystery and query: “Son of man, can these bones live 1” This was a doctrine with which Paul was himself familiar before his conversion to Christianity from the writings of his own ancestral seers (see specially Dan. xii. 2, and Isaiah: passim); but which was brought to full light in the Gospel, and by the teachings of Death’s great Abolisher: that the vile body resuscitated, and redeemed from the dishonours of the grave, will be fashioned like unto Christ’s glorious and glorified body, — a spiritual yet corporeal being, freed from all the clogs and hamperings of the present.

How we long, here again, had his auditory granted him the opportunity, to have listened to the full unfolding of the Apostle’s great theme of which Nature and Providence had been the first instalment. No gap in sacred story do we miss more, and with a sanctified curiosity desire more to have filled up. We have it indeed in another sense supplied to us. That noblest of chapters and dissertations — the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians — written subsequently, at the close of his three years’ residence at Ephesus, gives us, in rare and cogent impressiveness, the theme in the very form he would have been likely to present it to the philosophic sceptics of Athens. In writing that chapter, may he not possibly have had our now familiar group of Epicurean and Stoic before his mental eye, — their metaphysical and scientific doubts as to the possibility of a bodily resurrection: — or rather, how utterly in defiance of all natural and physical laws would be the reconstruction of ‘’ the machines of carbon and hydrogen” spoken of by later scientists. The latter half of that chapter, though most sacredly familiar to us all — is so cogent and irresistible an answer to what was burning in the minds of the intellectual throng on the Hill of Judgment, that we must be pardoned inserting it in full: —

‘’But some man will say, How are the dead raised up f and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou soivest is not quickened, except it die. And that which thou soivest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain,^

1 That remarkable episode in Gospel story will here be recalled, where certain G^reeyts — Proselytes of the Gate — on the occasion of their attendance in Jerusalem at the Feast of the Passover, came to Philip of Bethsaida — attracted probably by his Greek name — with the request — “Sir, we would see Jesus.” A portion of Christ’s reply is worthy of note, in which He adopts the same similitude of the “bare grain.” “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John xii. 24). “Observe, in the announcement and enforcement of a great truth. He goes, not to the Volume of Prophecy (this He might have done, and probably would have done, had He been discoursing to Jews alone). But in the presence of these Greeks He turns to pages better understood by them: and allows Nature through her simplest processes, to speak and unfold the impending mystery. He brings before them the familiar parable of the seed-corn dropped into the earth; showing how life comes out of death — a new and more exuberant growth springing from the destruction of the inserted grain.” -See my ‘Communion Memories,’’ p. 3.

it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: hut God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moony and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead; it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. TJiere is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written. The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have home the image of the earthy, xve shall also hear the image of the heavenly. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, hut ive shall all he changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump {for the trumpet shall sound); and the dead shall he raised incorruptihle, and we shall he changed. For this corruptible must put on iyicormption, and this mortal must put on im-Tnortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall he brought to pass the saying that is written. Death is swallowed up in victory. 0 death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory f The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks he to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (vers. 35-57).

(2.) Still more repugnant, however, to all their conceptions of “the world to come “was the idea propounded by the present speaker to his audience of a Day, in which all its nations and individuals were to be judged by an “ordained Man” — a

Man once crucified, but now glorified.^ The pnnciple upon which the adjudications were to be conducted was not strange to many of them or to the best of them. We have just noted it in the illustrative though mythological case of Sisyphus. Indeed the ‘’in righteousness” or “equity” spoken of by St. Paul is the very word (BiKatoavpr)) used by Plato descriptive of one of his “two great virtues.” But the idea of its application: — these equitable awards, whether punitive or the reverse, being dispensed at the hand of a once lowly-born Jew, was something that conflicted with “the pride of life.” Those who had no religion would scorn it as a poor myth, a crude and unworthy hallucination. Those again with instincts of piety, and regard for the nation’s religion, would denounce it as a sacrilegious insult, enough to bring down on their devoted heads and devoted city the wrath of the whole Olympic Pantheon. The worshippers of Jupiter, Minerva, and Apollo, could not be expected to hail with the reverential joy of this converted Israelite these grand and comforting words of his great national Prophet —” A man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest: as rivers of water in a dry

1 See Gospel references, John v. 22, 27, 28, 29.

place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land” (Isa. xxxii. 2).^

There is one speciality about this fourth theme in the Apostle’s address not to be forgotten; for it must have enkindled his whole soul as he sought to unfold it.

His own strong personal belief undoubtedly at this time — though modified in his subsequent letters, was, that the Day of Judgment and the coming of the ordained Man were imminent. We know that the 1st Epistle to the Thessalonians was written at Corinth, if not indeed at Athens itself, almost immediately after his discourse on the heights of Mars’ Hill: — possibly a few days,

1 I may here be permitted, in a note, to give the -vrords of a gifted friend in unfolding the characteristics of Christ as the Judge of mankind. “We may gather the principles on which He will proceed hereafter, from what we read of His character and dealings during His ministry upon earth. A general view of the four gospels convinces us that He has all the essential qualifications of a good and just Judge. He is omniscient, penetrating the secrets of the heart, stripping men of all their disguises and professions, regarding what they are rather than what they say, noting all the hidden workings of their minds and imaginations, — whether of evil or of good. He is imjjartial, regarding not the person of man, equally accessible to the rich and to the poor, taking no account of rank or wealth or respectability, or birth, as prejudicing a case. He is righteous, having a full knowledge of the requirements of God’s law, having a keen sense of God’s honour, and of what is due to Him from the children of men; knowing what human duty is, not theoretically only but practically, having Himself taken our human nature upon Him, and having become obedient even unto death; though He were a Son, yet learning obedience by the things which He suffered. Lastly, He is merciful and loving. Mercy is rightly called by us humanity; for it ia one or, at most, a few weeks intervened. Any one carefully reading that letter, cannot fail to be struck with the constant reiteration of the theme of the Second Advent. The exhortation given, as if inspired by his last permitted words on the Areopagus, is to “wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, who delivered us from the wrath to come” (i. 10). His earnest hope is, that “He may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints” (iii. 13). Then, in that beautiful adjuration to those in the Corinthian Church who were mourning their * loved and lost.’

of the purest and most beautiful parts of human nature, being itself the reflection of the nature of God. Jesus Christ by every deed and word testified that His heart was full of love for His fellow-men, into whose brotherhood He had entered, in order to carry out His Father’s loving work of Redemption.... Even at the time of His greatest suffering, when His life of grief and sorrow was drawing towards its solemn conclusion, He could heal the man whose ear was smitten by Peter, He could cast a look of warning and pity upon that same disciple when denied by him. He could turn to the women who followed Him, and say, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves,’ He could ask His Father to pardon the ignorant men who crucified Him, He could provide for his own desolate and sorrowing Mother before His decease, and He could cheer up the dying moments of the penitent thief by the blessed utterance, * Verily, I say unto thee. To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.’

“Such is the nature, and such the character, of the Judge of all the earth, — a character worthy of the sublime task, and one which the conscience of all men, when brought before the throne, must needs approve of.” — Canon Girdlestone’s Dies Tree.

“But I ^yould not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died, and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, .and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which 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. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.” (iv. 13-18.)

How solemnly, from such considerations, must St. Paul have felt now, as he endeavoured to open up this culminating theme of his prayers and joys! — that “glorious appearing” which would free him from all the manifold toils — heroically endured, of his apostolic earthly calling, and restore him to many in the true * Elysium ’ who regarded him as their spiritual father! Above all, the bliss of seeing Him who had as yet only appeared to him

N in vision, but who was so soon to be revealed in full, glorious, everlasting fruition. With this “blessed hope “thus dominating every other, — we can understand with what sublime indifference he would regard * temples made with hands,’ with their impending doom of destruction: — that he would have the one overmastering reflection as given in the words of his brother St. Peter — “Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” (2 Pet. iii. 11-13.)

August and elevating prospect! the final ^’Parousia,’’ whether near or distant! The “Parousia;” — not the Pantheistic idea of ’ absorption in the soul of the world; ’ — not the Bema of one city or nation, but of every tribe and tongue and people of mankind, occupied by a divine Personality — an adored and glorified Brother-man.’ We can, once more, revert to the Great Epinihion’’ — the accepted Hymn of Triumph of all hymnals and all churches, — the grandest uninspired strain that ever rose from earth to heaven: whose majestic cadences will only cease when blended with the Halleluia- chorus of eternity: —

“Thou sittest at the right hand of God
In the glory of the Father.

We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge.

We therefore pray Thee help Thy servants

Whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood:

Make them to be numbered with Thy saints

In Glory Everlasting.”