Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/15

 and care, and the result, in all cases, has been to strengthen our convictions, with what appeared to us, "Light, more light." The new system of biblical interpretation which the author has adopted, and which regards the Scriptures to be written in conformity with a Divine law, a law recognising the correspondence subsisting between natural and spiritual things; together with considerations touching the wonderful characteristics of the age in which we live, have served to fortify the assurance that we are now actually living within the era in which the predicted judgment and second coming of the Lord have been fulfilled.

This conclusion may startle some to whom it is suggested for the first time; but of course in making this statement, it will be understood that we think of those events in a way very different from that which is commonly accepted. We regard the judgment as a spiritual process on the souls of departed men, and the second coming of the Lord as a spiritual event in reference to the religious teachings of the Word. And although the natural world is not considered to have been the scene of their occurrence, their accomplishment is believed to have been equally real in its results, and to have its foundation in a fair and reasonable interpretation of the Scriptures. We think, also, that the remarkable changes which religious society has experienced during the last century, can only be satisfactorily accounted for by referring their causes to the operations of some extraordinary spiritual phenomena. Men have been so long accustomed to regard these two events as belonging only to some distant futurity, when