Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/225

 such a multitude to assemble, and this difficulty is being increased every day; the total number of inhabitants is about 1,283 millions, and one soul passes into the spiritual world every second; this adds every day 87,761 persons for whom space has to be provided, but for which the surface of the habitable world is not sufficient. Those who interpret the narrative in such a way as to create this difficulty, may not have seen it, but there it is, and it is for them to deal with it. Some may try to evade this difficulty by supposing that the judgment will be executed only upon a certain number at once, for whom there may be room, and that this will go on, successively, until that process has been completed upon all: but, surely, they will not contend that this is a scriptural representation of the subject; hence we need not stop to investigate a notion the consequences of which entail indescribable labour upon the Almighty; we therefore pass on.

The Lord in speaking of His second coming said, "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 in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory." This certainly is a symbolical description of the event. It does not announce the personal coming of the Son of man, but the appearance of His sign; and what is that? It cannot mean the exhibition of some natural phenomena in the sky, for the sky is not the heaven about which the Scriptures treat; and every one who will carefully reflect upon the subject must see that what are called the "clouds of heaven" are not the vapours of the earth. If some extraordinary display in the atmosphere had been the sign referred to, surely the word "heaven," which is a term expressing a purely spiritual idea, would not have been employed to indicate the scene of it. The