Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/54

 scribed as Churches, and may be respectively called the most ancient, the ancient, the Israelitish, and the Christian. The genius of the first was that which gave pre-eminence to love; the second assigned superiority to faith; the third gave it to obedience. The genius of true Christianity embraces all those virtues, assigns to each its proper place, and looks to their united action as necessary for salvation, salvation being deliverance from evil. It is well known that the three first of these dispensations, after having gradually risen into eminence, successively declined and fell; they had not only their morning and noon, but their evening and night. The decline and fall—the evening and night—of those Churches resulted from the people corrupting the religious truth, and neglecting the spiritual duties, with which they were entrusted. And when, in each, those enormities had attained their height, the Divine is represented to have executed a judgment; He is described to have come; and their end is recorded to have been the result.

To understand this clearly, it may be useful to mention here something concerning those influences from the spiritual world which conduced to those events, but to be treated of more fully in another place. That there is such a world, is shown in the Scriptures and admitted by the learned: its existence is necessary for the reception of the souls of men when their bodies die. As the evils in the above Churches were respectively increasing, men were dying, and consequently they were passing, with all the corruptions they had loved, into the world of spirits. That is the first common receptacle of all who die; and every one takes with him the mind and all the affections by which he may have been distinguished in the world. He then begins to live as consciously in his "spiritual body" as he had previously