Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/317

 and therefore it must have been from thence that the disciples, with their spiritual eyes, looked towards heaven as He went up. When, therefore, the angels said unto them, "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven," it seems plain that they referred to His personal coming into the world of spirits, that, as we have before explained, being the primary scene of all His judgments. It is to the world of spirits where the Lord comes to "separate the sheep from the goats;" to give to those who have, and to take away from those who only seem to have; and where, consequently, He "giveth to every man according to his works." The Lord's promise, then, to come again, seems very clearly to involve the idea of His personal manifestation in the world of spirits to execute a judgment there, and afterwards to reveal that event to mankind by pouring out a beneficent influence upon them; and especially by causing the true nature of His Divine Word to be more clearly understood.

The Lord, when speaking of His second coming, said that the sign of it should appear in heaven, and that the Son of man should come in the clouds of heaven. Certainly these terms do not express the idea of His personally coming into the natural world. The scene of the subject treated of is clearly laid in a plane above. He distinctly says that the sign of it should appear in heaven, and that He would be seen coming in the clouds of heaven; now "heaven" and "the clouds of heaven" do not mean the sky and the vapours which arise from the earth, but the eternal habitation of the spiritually good, and all those obscurities of thought by which the bright condition of the heavenly life is prevented from appearing. Thus the appearance of the sign of the Son of man in heaven