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when it grows white hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality — of real Christianity, for example — is exactly this same thing. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means some- thing flaming like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours, but He never paints so gorgeously — I had almost said so gaudily — as when He paints in white.1
iii. The Judgment to Come.
Every coming of the Lord is associated with judgment; in- evitably and necessarily the coming of Christ to any soul is the judgment of that soul; it was so when He was here on earth; souls were judged by His very coming. "This child," said Simeon to the astonished Mary in the temple, "is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel ; and for a sign which is spoken against." And so it came to pass. By His mere presence He divided men and separated them. There was a " judging " wherever Christ appeared. Men's characters stood revealed. The bias of the soul declared itself. Men classified themselves ; tried by the touchstone of His character, of their own accord, they took their stand, some on the right and others on the left. " God sent not his Son into the world," says John, " to judge the world," and yet the actual result of His coming was a judgment. " This is the judgment," he goes on to say, just a sentence or two further down, " that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil." He judged the world by His presence in it. The essential goodness of Peter and John and James and Zacchaeus, and the essential evil of the chief priests and scribes, stood dis- closed by contact with Jesus. And every coming of the Lord involves judgment still. His coming to us as individuals in the appeals and strivings of His Spirit implies a judging. The good heart and the evil heart stand revealed by the answer given to His pleadings and calls. Suppose that at this moment Jesus presents Himself to us ; and suppose we bow Him out of our heart and life ; suppose we say to Him in effect, " We will not have Thee to reign over us." The judgment has taken place ! We have declared ourselves amongst the goats upon the left hand.
1 G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles.
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And His coming to a nation in the great crises of its history implies and involves a judging. As Lowell says —
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by for ever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
But in the Creed we have the statement that Christ who is seated at the right hand of the Father will come " to judge the quick and the dead."
1. Let us first look at the Certainty of this Judgment.
(1) What does Scripture say ? " And as Paul reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgement to come " — no, that is not precisely what Luke wrote. Eead the verse again in the Eevised Version : " Paul reasoned of . . . the judgement to come." It was no misty idea of a coming judgment that floated dimly through the speaker's mind ; he thought of " that day " when the books would be opened and God should judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ. And to this bear all the Scriptures witness. Let us turn to the Old Testament and read those many anticipations of the " day of the Lord " to be found so often in the writings of the prophets. Then let us open the New Testament, and immediately the truth rises before us in sharpest and most unmistakable distinctness. "When the Son of man shall come in his glory " — they are His own words — " and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory ; and before him shall be gathered all the nations ; and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats ; and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." And if from the words of Jesus we turn to the records of the early Christian Church, to the Acts of the Apostles and the various Epistles that follow, the result is the same. It would be impossible, says Dr. Denney, to overestimate the power of this final judgment as a motive in the primitive Church. When Peter went to expound the Gospel for the first time to a Eoman centurion, this was how he summed up the sacred commission given to him and the other disciples : " He charged us to preach
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unto the people and to testify that this is he which is ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead." When Paul proclaimed the Gospel in Athens an essential part of his message was this : " God hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained ; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead."