Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/227

 speaks of the Lord gathering together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other? It is to be noticed, that they are to be gathered from the ends of heaven, and not from the ends of the earth; thereby clearly placing the scene of the transaction out of the natural world. Besides it is only the elect who are contemplated as recognising the angelic music; if, however, the occurrence is to take place among mankind on earth, how are the non-elect to be prevented from attending to the trumpet's voice? The hearing of sounds does not depend upon the virtues nor the vices of mankind: the bad as well as the good can hear, and both kinds at the Lord's coming are to be subject to the judgment. Conjecture may attempt to answer those inquiries; but it is with the literal interpretation of the terms of the narrative, and not with the glosses for defending it, with which we have now to do. Again, who, knowing anything about the great variety of points from which the wind blows, cannot see that neither the number nor the winds themselves can be naturally meant? Men do not live in the winds; the winds are not literally four; why then speak of gathering men from those sources if some other ideas were not intended to be conveyed by the terms? What those other ideas are we shall speak of in another place. Our purpose now is simply to show that the narrative is not to be understood in a literal sense, and that great embarrassments necessarily result from such an interpretation. Commentators tell us, that the "four winds" mean the four quarters of the globe, east, west, north, and south; and that the sentence, "from one end of heaven to the other," denotes from all parts of the earth. Thus the four winds are turned into so many geographical localities, and the heaven is changed into the earth! This, certainly, concedes the figurative character