I

As to the _fact_ of Christ's coming we are left in no doubt. Our Lord's own declarations are as explicit as language can make them. Thus, in Matthew xvi. 27 we read that "the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then shall He render unto every man according to his deeds." In the great discourse on the Last Things, recorded by all the Synoptists, after speaking of the fall of Jerusalem, Christ goes on, "Then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." And again, in the Upper Room, He said to His disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto Myself; that where I am ye may be also." The hope of that return shines on every page of the New Testament: "This Jesus," said the angels to the watching disciples, "which was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him going into heaven." The early Christians were wont to speak, without further definition, of "that day." St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians how that they had "turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven." _Maran atha_--"our Lord cometh"--was the great watchword of the waiting Church. When, at the table of the Lord, they ate the bread and drank the cup, they proclaimed His death "till He come." "Amen; come, Lord Jesus," is the passionate cry with which our English Scriptures close.

For all those, then, to whom the New Testament speaks with authority, the fact of Christ's return is established beyond all controversy. But what will be the nature of His coming? Will it be visible and personal, or spiritual and unseen? Will it be once and never again, or repeated? Will Christ come at the end of history, or is He continually coming in those great crises which mark the world's progress towards its appointed end? These questions have been answered with such admirable simplicity and scriptural truth by Dr. Denney that I cannot do better than quote his words: "It may be frankly admitted," he says, "that the return of Christ to His disciples is capable of different interpretations. He came again, though it were but intermittently, when He appeared to them after His resurrection. He came again, to abide with them permanently, when His Spirit was given to the Church at Pentecost. He came, they would all feel who lived to see it, signally in the destruction of Jerusalem, when God executed judgment historically on the race which had rejected Him, and when the Christian Church was finally and decisively liberated from the very possibility of dependence on the Jewish. He comes still, as His own words to the High Priest suggest--From this time on ye shall see the Son of Man coming--in the great crises of history, when the old order changes, yielding place to the new; when God brings a whole age, as it were, into judgment, and gives the world a fresh start. But all these admissions, giving them the widest possible application, do not enable us to call in question what stands so plainly in the pages of the New Testament,--what filled so exclusively the minds of the first Christians--the idea of a personal return of Christ at the end of the world. We need lay no stress on the scenery of New Testament prophecy, any more than on the similar element of Old Testament prophecy; the voice of the archangel and the trump of God are like the turning of the sun into darkness and the moon into blood; but if we are to retain any relation to the New Testament at all, we must assert the personal return of Christ as Judge of all."[53]

So far I think is clear. It is when we come to speak of the time of our Lord's return that our difficulties begin. It appears to me impossible to doubt that the first Christians were looking for the immediate return of our Lord to the earth. At one time even St. Paul seems to have expected Him within his own life-time. Nor does this fact in itself cause us any serious perplexity. What does perplex us is to find in the Gospels language attributed to Christ which apparently makes Him a supporter of this mistaken view. _E.g._, we have these three separate sayings, recorded in St. Matthew's Gospel: "But when they persecute you in this city, flee into the next; for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come" (x. 23); "Verily I say unto you, There be some of them that stand here, which shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom" (xvi. 28); "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be accomplished" (xxiv. 34). This seems plain enough; and if we are to take the words as they stand, we seem to be shut up to the conclusion that our Lord was mistaken, that He ventured on a prediction which events have falsified. Let us see if this really be so. I leave, for the moment, the words I have quoted in order to cite other words which point in a quite different direction.

To begin with, we have the emphatic statement: "But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only." We remember also Christ's words to His disciples, on the eve of the Ascension, "It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within His own authority." There is, further, a whole class of sayings, exhortations, and parables, which seem plainly to involve a prolonged Christian era, and, consequently, the postponement to a far distant time, of the day of Christ's return. Thus, there are the passages which speak of the preaching of the gospel to the nations beyond: "Wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, that also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her" (Mark xiv. 9); "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come" (Matt. xxiv. 14). There is the parable which tells of the tarrying of the bridegroom till even the wise virgins slumbered and slept. "After a long time," we read in another parable, "the Lord of those servants cometh and maketh a reckoning with them." What is the significance of the parable of the leaven hid in three measures of meal, and still more, of that group of parables which depict the growth of the kingdom--the parables of the sower, the wheat and tares, the mustard-seed, and the seed growing gradually? Does not all this point not to a great catastrophe nigh at hand, which should bring to an end the existing order of things, but rather to just such a future for the kingdom of God on earth as the actual course of history reveals? And this, and no other, was, I believe, the impression which Christ desired to leave on the minds of His disciples.

What, then, are we to make of those other and apparently contrary words which I have quoted, but meanwhile have left unexplained? They constitute, without doubt, one of the most perplexing problems which the interpreter of the New Testament has to face,[54] and any suggestion for meeting the difficulty must be made with becoming caution. I can but briefly indicate the direction in which the probable solution may be found. Our Lord, as we have already seen, spoke of His coming again, not only at the end of the world, but in the course of it: in the power of His Spirit, at the fall of Jerusalem, in the coming of His kingdom among men. But the minds of the disciples were full of the thought of His _final_ coming, which would establish for ever the glory of His Messianic kingdom; and it would seem that this fact has determined both the form and the setting of some of Christ's sayings which they have preserved for us. Words which He meant to refer to Israel's coming judgment-day they, in the ardour of their expectation, referred to the last great day. In the first Gospel, especially, we may trace some such influence at work. When, _e.g._, Matthew represents our Lord as saying, "There be some of them that stand here which shall in no wise taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom," it is evident, both from the words themselves and from the context, that he understood them to refer to the final return. Luke, however, speaks only of seeing "the kingdom of God," and Mark of seeing "the kingdom of God come in power." And if these words were our only version of the prophecy they would present no difficulty; we should feel that they had received adequate fulfilment in the events of the great day of Pentecost. We conclude, therefore, that of the three reports before us the second and third, which are practically the same, reproduce more correctly the words actually spoken by Christ; and that the account given in the first Gospel was coloured by the eager hope of the early followers of Christ for their Master's speedy return.[55]

To sum up in a sentence the results of this brief inquiry: Christ's teaching concerning His return leaves us both in a state of certainty and uncertainty. "We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge"--that is our certainty; "Of that day and hour knoweth no one"--that is our uncertainty. And each of these carries with it its own lesson.

II

"Of that day and hour knoweth no one;" and we must be content not to know. There are things that are "revealed"; and they belong to us and to our children. And there are "secret things," which belong neither to us, nor to our children, but to God. Just as a visitor to Holyrood Palace finds some rooms open and free, through which he may wander at will, while from others he is strictly excluded, so in God's world there are locked doors through which it is not lawful for any man to enter. And it is our duty to be faithful to our ignorance as well as to our knowledge. There is a Christian as well as an anti-Christian agnosticism. To pry into the secret things of God is no less a sin than wilfully to remain ignorant of what He has been pleased to make known. The idly inquisitive spirit which is never at rest save when it is poking into forbidden corners, Christ always checks and condemns. "Lord," asked one, "are there few that be saved?" But He would give no answer save this: "Strive to enter in by the narrow door." "Lord, and this man what?" said Peter, curious concerning the unrevealed future of his brother apostle. But again idle curiosity must go unsatisfied: "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou Me." "Lord dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" But once more He will give no answer: "It is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father hath set within His own authority." And yet, strangely enough, that which Christ has seen good to leave untold is the one thing concerning His coming on which the minds of multitudes have fastened. It says little, either for our religion or our common-sense, that one of the most widely circulated religious newspapers of our day is one which fills its columns with absurd guesses and forecasts concerning those very "times" and "seasons" of which Christ has told us that it is not for us to know. Christ has given us no detailed map of the future, and when foolish persons pester us with little maps of their own making, let us to see to it that they get no encouragement from us. Let us dare always to be faithful to our ignorance.

But if there is much we do not know, this we do know: the Lord will come. And, alike on the ground of what we know and of what we do not know, our duty is clear: we must "watch," so that whether He come at even, or at midnight, or at cock-crowing, or in the morning, He shall find us ready. Christ's solemn injunction left an indelible mark on the mind of the Early Church. "Yourselves know perfectly," St. Paul writes in the first of his apostolic letters, "that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night ... so then let us not sleep, as do the rest, but let us watch and be sober." As St. Augustine says, "The last day is hidden that every day maybe regarded." But what, exactly, is the meaning of the command to "watch"? It cannot be that we are to be always "on the watch." That would simply end in the feverish excitement and unrest which troubled the peace of the Church of Thessalonica. The true meaning is given us, I think, in the parable of the Ten Virgins. Five were wise, not because they watched all night for the bridegroom, for it is written "they _all_ slumbered and slept," but because they were prepared; and five were foolish, not because they did not watch, but because they were unprepared. "The fisherman's wife who spends her time on the pier-head watching for the boats, cannot be so well prepared to give her husband a comfortable reception as the woman who is busy about her household work, and only now and again turns a longing look seaward."[56] So Christ's command to "watch" means, not "Be ye always on the watch," but, "Be ye always ready."

Spurgeon once said, with characteristic humour and good sense, that there were friends of his to whom he would like to say, "Ye men of Plymouth, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? Go on with your work." He who in a world like ours can sit and gaze with idly folded hands--let not that man think he shall receive anything of the Lord. A lady once asked John Wesley, "Suppose that you knew you were to die at twelve o'clock to-morrow night, how would you spend the intervening time?" "How, Madam?" he replied; "why just as I intend to spend it now. I should preach this night at Gloucester, and again at five to-morrow morning. After that I should ride to Tewkesbury, preach in the afternoon, and meet the societies in the evening. I should then repair to friend Martin's house, who expects to entertain me, converse and pray with the family as usual, retire to my room at ten o'clock, commend myself to my heavenly Father, lie down to rest, and wake up in glory." This is the right attitude for the Christian. The old cry must not fade from our lips, nor the old hope from our heart: _Maran atha_, "our Lord cometh." But meanwhile He hath given to every man his work; and we may be sure there is no preparation for His coming like the faithful doing of the appointed task. "Blessed is that servant whom His Lord when He cometh shall find so doing."

* * * * *

CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT

"I often have a kind of waking dream; up one road the image of a man decked and adorned as if for a triumph, carried up by rejoicing and exulting friends, who praise his goodness and achievements; and, on the other road, turned back to back to it, there is the very man himself, in sordid and squalid apparel, surrounded not by friends but by ministers of justice, and going on, while his friends are exulting, to his certain and perhaps awful judgment."--R.W. CHURCH.

* * * * *

XV

CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT

"_When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left._"--MATT. XXV. 31-33.

He, the speaker, will do this. It is the most stupendous claim that ever fell from human lips. A young Jewish carpenter whose brief career, as He Himself well knew, was just about to end in a violent and shameful death, tells the little, fearful band which still clung to Him, that a day is coming when before Him all the nations shall be gathered, and by Him be separated as a shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats. In the world's long history there is nothing like it.

That Jesus did really claim to be the Judge of all men, it is, I believe, impossible to doubt. The passage just quoted is by no means our only evidence. In the Sermon on the Mount, which foolish persons who love to depreciate theology sometimes speak of as though it were the pith and marrow of the Christian gospel, Christ says, "Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by Thy name cast out devils, and by Thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity." Again, He says, "Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man also shall be ashamed of Him when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels;" and again, "The Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then shall He render unto every man according to His deeds." The fourth Gospel also represents Him as saying, "Neither doth the Father judge any man, but He hath given all judgment to the Son ... and He gave Him authority to execute judgment because He is the Son of Man." And if still further evidence be necessary it would be easy to show both from the Acts and the Epistles that from the very beginning all the disciples of Jesus believed and taught that He would come again to be their Judge.

Consider what this means. Reference has already been made in an earlier chapter to Christ's witness concerning Himself, to His deep and unwavering consciousness of separateness from all others. But more striking, perhaps, than any illustration mentioned there is that furnished by the fact before us now. What must His thoughts about Himself have been who could speak of Himself in relation to all others as Christ does here? When men write about Jesus as though He were merely a gentle, trustful, religious genius, preaching a sweet gospel of the love of God to the multitudes of Galilee, they are but shutting their eyes to one half of the facts which it is their duty to explain. Speaking generally, we do well to distrust the dilemma as a form of argument; but in this case there need be no hesitation in putting the alternative with all possible bluntness: either Christ was God, or He was not good. That Jesus, if He were merely a good man, with a good man's consciousness of and sensitiveness to His own weakness and limitations, could yet have arrogated to Himself the right to be the supreme judge and final arbiter of the destinies of mankind, is simply not thinkable. And the more we ponder the stupendous claim which Christ makes, the more must we feel that it is either superhuman authority which speaks to us here or superhuman arrogance. Either Christ spoke out of the depths of His own Divine consciousness, knowing that the Father had committed all judgment unto the Son; or He made use of words and put forth claims which were, and which He must have known to have been, empty, false, and blasphemous.

Such is the significance of Christ's words in their relation to Himself. It is, however, with their relation to ourselves that we are primarily concerned now. Of the wholly unimaginable circumstances of that day when the Son of Man shall come in His glory and all the nations be gathered before Him I shall not attempt to speak. As Dean Church has well said,[57] no vision framed with the materials of our present experience could adequately represent the truth, and, indeed, it is well that our minds should be diverted from matters which lie wholly beyond our reach, that they may dwell upon the solemn certainties which Christ has revealed. Let us think, first of the fact, and secondly of the issues, of Judgment.

I

The persistent definiteness with which the fact of judgment is affirmed by the New Testament we have already seen. Nor is the New Testament our only witness. The belief in a higher tribunal before which the judgments of time are to be revised, and in many cases reversed, may be said to be part of the creed of the race. Plato had his vision of judgment as well as Jesus. And in the Old Testament, and especially in the Book of Psalms, the same faith finds repeated and magnificent utterance: "Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence; a fire shall devour before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about Him. He shall call to the heavens above, and to the earth, that He may judge His people;" and again, "For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth: He shall judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with His truth."

Here, then, is the fact which demands a place in the thoughts of each of us--we are all to be judged. Life is not to be folded up, like a piece of finished work, and then laid aside and forgotten; it is to be gone over again and examined by the hand and eyes of Perfect Wisdom and Perfect Love. Each day we are writing, and often when the leaf is turned that which has been written passes from our mind and is remembered no more; but it is there, and one day the books--the Book of Life, of our life--will be opened, and the true meaning of the record revealed. Life brings to us many gifts of many kinds, and as it lays them in our hands, for our use and for our blessing, it is always, had we but ears to hear, with the warning word, "Know thou, that for all these things, God will bring thee into judgment."

It is, indeed, a tremendous thought. When Daniel Webster was once asked what was the greatest thought that had ever occupied his mind, he answered, "the fact of my personal accountability to God." And no man can give to such a fact its due place without feeling its steadying, sobering influence through all his life. Lament is often made to-day, and not without reason, of our failing sense of the seriousness of life. A plague of frivolity, more deadly than the locusts of Egypt, has fallen upon us, and is smiting all our green places with barrenness. Somehow, and at all costs, we must get back our lost sense of responsibility. If we would remember that God has a right hand and a left hand; if we would put to ourselves Browning's question, "But what will God say?" if sometimes we would pull ourselves up sharp, and ask--this that I am doing, how will it look then, in that day when "Each shall stand full-face with all he did below"? if, I say, we would do this, could life continue to be the thing of shows and make-believe it so often is? It was said of the late Dean Church by one who knew him well: "He seemed to live in the constant recollection of something which is awful, even dreadful to remember--something which bears with searching force on all men's ways and hopes and plans--something before which he knew himself to be as it were continually arraigned--something which it was strange and pathetic to find so little recognized among other men." But, alas! this is how we refuse to live. We thrust the thought of judgment from us; we treat it as an unwelcome intruder, a disturber of our peace; we block up every approach by which it might gain access to our minds. We do not deny that there is a judgment to come; but our habitual disregard of it is verily amazing. "Judge not," said Christ, "that ye be not judged;" yet every day we let fly our random arrows, careless in whose hearts they may lodge. "Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment;" yet with what superb recklessness do we abuse God's great gift of speech! "We shall all stand before the judgment-seat of God;" yes, we know it; but when do we think of it? What difference does it make to us?

What can indifference such as this say for itself? How can it justify itself before the bar of reason? Do we realize that our neglect has Christ to reckon with? These things of which I have spoken are not the gossamer threads of human speculation; they are the strong cords of Divine truth and they cannot be broken. "You seem, sir," said Mrs. Adams to Dr. Johnson, in one of his despondent hours, when the fear of death and judgment lay heavy on him, "to forget the merits of our Redeemer." "Madam," said the honest old man, "I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but my Redeemer has said that He will set some on His right hand and some on His left." Yes, it is the words of Christ with which we have to do; and if we are wise, if we know the things which belong unto our peace, we shall find for them a place within our hearts.

II

The issues of the Judgment may be summed up in a single word--separation: "He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left." Stated thus broadly, the issue of the Judgment satisfies our sense of justice. If there is to be judgment at all, separation must be the outcome. And in that separation is vindicated one of man's most deep-seated convictions. As right is right and wrong is wrong, and right and wrong are not the same, so neither can their issues be the same. "We have a robust common-sense of morality which refuses to believe that it does not matter whether a man has lived like the Apostle Paul or the Emperor Nero." We can never crush out the conviction that there must be one place for St. John, who was Jesus' friend, and another for Judas Iscariot, who was His betrayer."[58] This must be,

"Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is."

We must be sure that God has a right hand and a left, that good and evil are distinct, and will for ever remain so, that each will go to his own place, the place for which he is prepared, for which he has prepared himself, or our day would be turned into night and our whole life put to confusion.

So far, Christ's words present no difficulty. To many, however, it is a serious perplexity to find that Christ speaks of but two classes into which by the Judgment men are divided. There are the sheep and the goats, the good and the bad, and there are no others. To us it seems impossible to divide men thus. They are not, we think, good _or_ bad, but good _and_ bad. "I can understand," some one has said, "what is to become of the sheep, and I can understand what is to become of the goats, but how are the alpacas to be dealt with?"[59] The alpaca, it should be said, is an animal possessing some of the characteristics both of the sheep and the goat, and the meaning of the question is, of course, what is to become of that vast middle class in whose lives sometimes good and sometimes evil seems to rule?

Now it is a remarkable fact that Scripture knows nothing of any such middle class. Some men it calls good, others it calls evil, but it has no middle term. Note, _e.g._, this typical contrast from the Book of Proverbs: "The path of the righteous is as the light of dawn, that shineth more and more unto the noon-tide of the day. The way of the wicked is as darkness; they know not at what they stumble." Or listen to Peter's question: "If the righteous is scarcely saved, where shall the ungodly and sinner appear?" In both instances the assumption is the same: there, on the one hand, are the righteous; and there, on the other, are the wicked; and beside these there are no others. The same classification is constant throughout the teaching of Jesus. He speaks of two gates, and two ways, and two ends. There are the guests who accept the King's invitation and sit down in His banqueting hall, and there are those who refuse it and remain without. In the parable of the net full of fishes the good are gathered into vessels, but the bad are cast away. The wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest; then the wheat is gathered into the barn, and the tares are cast into the fire. The sheep are set on the right hand, and the goats on the left hand; and there is no hint or suggestion that any other kind of classification is necessary in order that all men may be truly and justly dealt with.

All this may seem very arbitrary and impossible until we remember that the classification is not ours but God's. It is not we who have to divide men, setting one on the right hand and another on the left; that is God's work; and it is well to remind ourselves that He invites none of us to share His judgment-throne with Him, or, by any verdict of ours, to anticipate the findings of the last great day. And because to us such a division is impossible, it does not therefore follow that it should be so to Him before whom all hearts are open and all desires known. _We_ cannot separate men thus because human character is so complex. But complexity is a relative term; it depends on the eyes which behold it; and our naming a thing complex may be but another way of declaring our ignorance concerning it. We all know how a character, a life, a course of events, which, on first view, seemed but a tangled, twisted skein, on closer acquaintance often smooths itself out into perfect simplicity. And there is surely no difficulty in believing that it should be so with human life when it is judged by the perfect knowledge of God. Life is like a great tree which casts forth on every side its far-spreading branches. Yet all that moving, breathing mystery of twig and branch and foliage springs from a single root. To us the mystery is baffling in its complexity: we have looked at the branches. To God it is simple, clear: He sees the hidden root from which it springs. So that, to go back to our former illustration, it is only our ignorance which compels us to speak of "alpacas" in the moral world. To perfect knowledge they will prove to be, as Mr. Selby says, either slightly-disguised sheep or slightly-disguised goats.

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