Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/70

 the apostle did not understand it. Nor was it necessary, at that time, that he should understand it. If he, had understood and explained it, in all that clear light, in which it is now unfolded in the doctrines of the New Dispensation, his explanations would not have been understood by those for whom they were intended. And if not understood, would inevitably have been perverted and abused.

The external and sensual state of the human mind in that age, would have rendered it impossible for any distinct impression to have been received, of the nature of spiritual substances and forms. For we find that even now, in the midst of the boasted light of the nineteenth century, there are many who cannot understand the New Church doctrine of the resurrection, simply because that doctrine substitutes spiritual ideas, for those which are natural, sensual, and material. How much more then would this spiritual and beautiful doctrine have been misunderstood perverted and abused, if it had been announced amidst the darkness and idolatry which overspead the world at the dawn of the christian dispensation.

Such being the general nature of the apostolic writings, designed and fitted to reach the conscience and life, by presenting the prominent facts of religion before the mind, in an external form, it is not necessary to make any very special effort to show, that the apostles were favored with any very interior or spiritual perception of the meaning of those prophecies, which relate to the last judgment and the second coming of the Lord. When Peter reminded his brethren, on the authority of the divine Word, that "the earth and the works that are therein would be burnt up," "that the heavens and the earth would pass away," and that there would be "a new heavens and a new earth," it is not necessary to insist upon the supposition, that either he or the brethren to whom he wrote, had any correct impression of the true spiritual meaning of those prophecies. Their minds may have scarcely risen above the merely na-