Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/282

 which are there because they were the interior vices of the deceased during their life-time here, but which were hypocritically concealed for the sake of gain, or reputation, or some other selfish purpose. As this goes on, the wicked spirits in whom those vices exist come to infest society on earth, each acts and reacts upon the other; and the final result of the accumulation of wicked spirits in the world of spirits is, that they obstruct the descent of heavenly influences to men, and close their minds against the acceptance of genuine truth and goodness. When this takes place it is plain that the end of the Church has come, and, consequently, the time of the last judgment must have arrived. It is spoken of as the last judgment, to intimate that others have preceded it, others both of an individual and more general kind; if it were not so, that which is commonly called the last would really be the first. Those others, to which we are now referring, were not those which occurred at the end of the Adamic and Israelitish periods, but those which have been experienced under the Christian dispensation. The end of a Church has always been attended by the execution of a last judgment upon the souls of those who have gone into the world of spirits infected with the worst corruptions of the Church to which they belonged, and so have stood in the way, hindering the beneficence of heaven from operating upon their survivors in the world.

Thus we learn what must be the condition of the world of spirits, when the necessity arrives for a final judgment upon perverted Christianity. The inhabitants of that world will gradually have usurped a power over the minds of men, and have infested them with all sorts of disorderly persuasions. They will have hindered spiritual light in the process of its descent, beclouded its character, and so