Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/10

 "Having thus explained the nature of the judgment to come, and the necessity of believing the same, we have given sufficient light to every Christian to understand what he ought to intend and what it is he professeth when he saith, 'I believe in him who shall come to judge the quick and the dead.' For therein he is conceived to declare thus much: 'I am fully pursuaded of this, as an infallible and necessary truth, that the eternal Son of God, in that human nature in which he died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, shall certainly come from the same heaven into which he ascended, and at his coming shall gather together all those which shall then be alive, and all which ever lived and shall be before that day dead, when causing them all to stand before his judgment seat, he shall judge them all according to their works done in the flesh; and passing the sentence of condemnation upon all the reprobates, shall deliver them to be tormented with the devil and his angels; and pronouncing the sentence of absolution upon all the elect, shall translate them into his glorious kingdom of which there shall be no end. And thus I believe in Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead."

To give force and effect to this doctrine of a literal judgment on this earth, and to impress it more deeply upon the mind, it has been customary to represent that last great day as being ushered in with an awfully sublime display of material imagery. Often has the crowded audience been held in breathless suspense while listening to some thrilling description of that day when the whole material universe will be thrown into the most awful convulsions, the sun and moon will disappear and the stars be hurled from their places in the skies, while earthquakes, lightnings and consuming fires will make this poor earth the victim of their unrestrained fury. In the midst of this awful scene, while planets will be rolling from their orbits, and earthquakes playing the funeral dirge of time, the blast of the archangels trumpet, louder than ten thousand thunders