Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/65

 trations will appear more evident in the revelation than in the vehicle. Revelation proper consists in the disclosure of those spiritual things which lie behind the letter. The letter is but the outer history of some of the activities of the inner lives of men, and consequently of their association with the spiritual world. Man, being essentially spiritual in his nature, cannot be separated from that world; he is intimately connected with some one or other of its departments, by means of that spiritual character which he has formed, and the immortality with which he is endowed.

It is written of the people of Israel, that they became idolatrous in the wilderness; they made a golden calf, and said of it, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." Surely the perpetration of this religious enormity, in the face of the wonderful miracles they had so recently witnessed, and the merciful deliverances they had experienced, must have been induced by some benighting influences operating upon them from the spiritual world, and with which they had become associated during their residence in Egypt. Doubtless they carried with them a leaning towards the idols of the country which they had inhabited so long; and this was the mental plane through which the spirits of deceased idolaters could assail them. The people yielded to those assailants and sinned a great sin, so that there fell that day about three thousand men. This terrible visitation in the natural world reveals the execution of a judgment upon those spirits in the spiritual world, by which the actors in this enormity were impelled. For it is to be observed that soon afterwards a more favourable disposition to fidelity sprung up, and spread itself among the people; thus showing that some obstacles to this blessing had been removed,