Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/291

 their participation in its advantages. The judgment, indeed, clears away the malevolent spirits from the hold which they have obtained upon people in the world, but before this, they will have impressed their principles upon them, and these principles will not be suddenly abandoned by mankind. The branch, when severed from the tree, does not instantly lose its greenness, or relinquish its sap; it is indeed separated from the stock on which it grew, but some indications of its having possessed vitality will be retained for a time. So those persons living at the epoch of a judgment, although cut off by that event from their previous associates in the world of spirits, do not at once renounce the principles they have imbibed, nor forsake the practices to which those principles lead. Therefore, some of the previous disorders will remain with that generation of men; and, indeed, their reproduction in various forms may be expected in some of their immediate descendants. Hence it was that after the last judgment upon the most ancient Church, great calamities followed in the destruction of the people. After the last judgment upon the Jewish Church, how appalling were the disasters which rolled in upon Jerusalem, Judæa, and the surrounding countries. So after the judgment which broke up the first league of a terrible ambition in the Christian Church, there ensued, both in the eastern and western branches of it, a great variety of evils, ecclesiastical and national; and who has not heard of the revolts, invasions, and consequent sufferings, which occurred in Europe, and of the "Thirty Years' War," just preceding that period, when we believe a judgment to have occured, and to have resulted in the Reformation.

The continuance, then, for some time after the period of a judgment, of disastrous circumstances similar to those