And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season. And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the Word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away: and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.—Rev. xx.
The word “Millennium” raises unpleasant recollections in the minds of many cultivated persons. Some think of the Fifth Monarchy men, in our civil wars. Others are reminded of speculations which they have heard in their own days—speculations which seemed to them a curious mixture of history and fiction, supported by arguments at once ingenious and incoherent. These persons will approach this chapter, where the doctrine of a Millennium is announced, with listlessness or impatience. “Surely,” they will be inclined to say, “the few words that have given rise to such dreams may be passed over as the obiter dicta of a book which is, in itself, rather unintelligible. We are practical men; we want the Bible for practical lessons; if there are any people amongst us who have nothing to do, let them busy themselves in such matters.”
By all means, let us remember that we are practical men, and that the Bible is a practical book. But I cannot think that this method of setting aside passages which, for good or evil, have affected and are affecting the most earnest men and women, is practical at all. Contempt is never practical; it is the offspring of laziness; it involves in the end much unnecessary trouble. Questions which have been denounced as beneath our notice prove that they possess a power of which we must take heed. Opinions which we have despised in others, in their rebound strike against ourselves; probably overthrow us, just because we had paid no regard to them. I am satisfied that this belief in a Millennium has been a practical belief in numbers of devout thinkers; that if it is, as is alleged, encompassed with fancies, maintained on insufficient grounds, that is a reason for inquiring whence it derives the strength which it certainly cannot owe to what is essentially feeble. Suppose there had been no such tradition in Christendom, no such thought hovering about the minds of men in one age and another, all of us would have been the sufferers. There would not have been less of fanaticism—that would have taken other forms; there would have been far less of hope, far less of confidence in God’s promises; more of a dreary suspicion that the earth is given up to those who care only to rob and spoil it. All art, all poetry, all politics, would have been lower and more grovelling if this conception had not been haunting those to whom it presented itself in no formal and doctrinal shape, who were often the least disposed to give it entertainment.
But, as I said in reference to the word Babylon in the previous chapter, this word points not to one set of opinions, but to opposite sets of opinion. The objectors to the doctrine are not found only or chiefly among those who treat it with scorn. Numbers shrink from it, because there are positive convictions in their minds, which they suppose they must abandon before they can receive it. “We have been taught to look for a heavenly state; you want us,” they say, “to fix our hopes upon an earthly paradise. We have been looking forward to a reward which is to greet those who have served God faithfully here when they have passed the boundary of death; you point us to a blessed condition which may befall this world generally. Supposing we could care for that general indiscriminate felicity here, does any Christian know that he shall reach the moment which is fixed for it?”
These are grave doubts—so grave in the minds of some, that they ignore or dismiss that part of Scripture which has given rise to them. I cannot hold that to be a safe course. To me it seems that the hope of good for this earth is essentially involved in all the promises of God; that we must suppress the most obvious statements in Scripture, and kill the best wishes in our own hearts, if we refuse to cherish it. I cannot think that any true belief in a Kingdom of Heaven, or in the gifts after death which God will bestow on those who love Him, would interfere in the least with the other anticipation. If they have clashed, it must have been through some confusion in our minds. And a faithful study of the actual language of the Divine book, must be the way to remove the confusion, and to bring the two into harmony.
The traditions of the early Church represent St. John in direct collision with Cerinthus, who was the champion of that notion of a reign of Christ upon earth, which identified it with a Saturnian reign, the reappearance of an Eden of outward felicity. Though there is no historical foundation for the tales which make him and the Apostle personal antagonists, they denote an instinct that their doctrines were incompatible: the one the counteraction of the other. That instinct is supported by every part of the Apocalypse. The deliverance of the earth is assuredly its subject but the deliverance of the earth, from the sensual masters who had degraded it, by its true spiritual Lord. That idea of a kingdom of Heaven, which has been developing itself through every part of the New Testament, now reaches its completion. The Lamb fully vindicates His right to the dominion, against the Dragon, over all God’s voluntary creatures. The involuntary creatures are restored to their right place, when man is restored to his. Remember that this has been the consistent teaching of the Apocalypse hitherto, and consider the words with which this chapter opens.
I. “And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, to shut him up, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: after that he must be loosed a little season.”
I wish you to observe that in this passage, at all events, there is no allusion whatever to any special temporal felicity which the earth or man is to experience. Nothing is said about exemption from pain and sorrow either to individuals or nations. We have been hearing of a spiritual power, who resisted the Lamb and who was overcome by Him, and cast out of heaven. We have heard how that power was able to wage an unusually terrible, though a short war, with the inhabitants of the earth. We have heard of armies rising from the bottomless pit to second him, not by destroying trees or grass, but by tormenting the minds and hearts of men. We have heard of a beast to whom the Dragon gave his authority, and of a false prophet who wrought wonders in his name. These temporary incarnations of the Evil Spirit have been thrown down. Now it is announced that he himself will be restrained in the exercise of that power which he has been exerting against human beings. A chain shall be put upon him. And when we ask what kind of chain, the answer is given immediately: he shall not be able to deceive the nations as he has done. It is a moral mischief he has been doing. He has persuaded men to believe that the Lamb is not King of kings, and Lord of lords; that the visible is mightier than the invisible; that he himself is stronger than Christ. A confession shall be borne by the nations, by those who have yielded the strongest assent to his lie, that this is not so; that the invisible is mighty over the visible; that Christ is the King, and not Satan. It is not said that his power is at an end. He may again—he will again—be set loose. But there shall be a series of years during which the reign of Christ over this planet of ours shall not only be proclaimed by a few here and there, who stand aloof from the doings of the earth, but shall make itself felt in its order, in its commonest daily transactions.
One objection, then, to this doctrine is removed by presenting the whole of it instead of merely a side of it; in the Apostle’s words rather than in our own. You think that men are far too prone already to imagine a state of things in which there shall be a lazy felicity; in which all the fruits of the earth shall lay themselves at our feet, without needing the toil of heads and hands to cultivate them; in which there shall be no need of justice, government, self-sacrifice, because each thing will come to each man spontaneously. You think this dream, whether it is called a dream of heaven or of earth, has weakened thought, courage, manhood, all the virtues that are most precious to us. The Apostle thinks with you. He declares that the Lamb who sacrificed Himself for human beings shewed forth what is the truest, highest, most celestial state. That spirit who has deceived men with thoughts of some good which is different from this, opposed to this—who has set before us a vision of selfish enjoyment—he regards as the great enemy and destroyer of the race. And the thousand years of which he tells are precisely years in which the earth shall acquire a new life, and strength, and capacity, just because men are not so much a prey to that delusion as they once were; because they have an altogether different standard set before them; because they confess themselves to be under a different law.
But can we adopt this notion of a great moral change if we suppose it to be the effect of a sudden descent of Christ to the earth? I believe, my brethren, that all this book has been telling us how the Apostle connected a moral change in the world with a descent of Christ to the earth. The true Lord of the world shewed Himself to the world in poverty and humiliation; in acts of mercy and power; in dying the death of the cross. That was His descent to the earth. And He that descended, also ascended that He might fill all things. Death could not hold Him. He was proclaimed to Jews and heathens as the Conqueror of death, as the Son of God, and the Giver of the Divine Spirit to men. The question whether He was so or not, was to be brought to the trial of battle. This book records the battle. Jerusalem, the capital of one division of the old world, Rome, the capital of the other division of the old world, were the fields on which it was fought. Other accounts may be given of the result. I accept this account of it: that mortal power was shewn not to be supreme over the earth and man; that the power which is opposed to brute power was vindicated. The descent of Christ to the earth, for which all ages had been preparing, was the beginning of this triumph; if He is the Son of God, all that followed was the necessary consequence of His appearance. The thrones of the earth were shaken to their centre that thus it might be known who had the highest throne—to whom all kings of the world owed homage. This manifestation or appearing of Christ in the glory of His Father and of the angels, the Apostles looked for; this, the last of Apostles was permitted to behold through the clouds and darkness which enveloped the world in his day. But if you ask, not for a manifestation of Christ’s royal glory, but for another descent like that into the manger, I can discover no traces of it anywhere; certainly not in this passage respecting the Millennium where people have most suspected it. For read the next words.
II. “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the Word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.” Surely if one takes these words as they stand, they do not describe a descent of Christ to the earth, but an ascent of them who had been beheaded for the witness of Christ to reign with Him. I do not believe that those who cling with the most real and deep faith to the idea of a millennium those to whom it is a strength in their pilgrimage through the world, and a solace under the weight of its evil—would feel shaken for more than a few moments by observing this difference, startling as it looks. I am satisfied that what they really intend by a reign of Christ on earth is exactly what the Apostle intends; and that if they could give a clear account to themselves of their own thoughts and hopes, they would find that his language was far more satisfactory to them than their own. At first, it might be a far greater distress to them to suggest the thought that they had postponed to a remote future a millennium upon which he believed that the world was about to enter in his own day. And if such an interpretation of his words involved the loss of any real hope which they have entertained respecting the future of the earth or of mankind, I should be very slow to put it forward, because I should suspect its truth. I am sure that the expectations which the Bible holds out to us are brighter, not fainter, than our own; that they include all which any one has conceived; that the business of every teacher is to strengthen and deepen them, not to weaken them. But it seems to me that the passage before us not only becomes more consistent with the rest of this book, and of the New Testament generally, if we understand it of the ages during which the Gospel was establishing itself in the different parts of the Roman Empire, but that by understanding it so, the difficulty which has perplexed so many minds, about the connexion between the future state of each man after death and the future state of the world at large, is removed, and a brilliant light thrown upon both.
That a vision of the souls who were beheaded for the witness of Christ must refer to those who have died, not to those who escape death, no one can dispute. What, then, would it appear to tell us? That these witnesses of Christ—who had cared so much for the earth when they dwelt upon it, who had laboured to do it good, and apparently had laboured in vain, who had told it of its true King, and of its revolt to a usurper—should, when they were no more seen, exercise an influence over it which had been denied them before; should work as the efficient servants of Him who had given up His life for the redemption of the world. This is their high reward, exactly that reward which our Lord held out to them in His parable. He that had used the pound well, and had made it five pounds, was to have dominion over five cities. He that used the two well, and made them other two, was to have dominion over two cities. No idleness, no luxurious indulgence was offered them; they would enter into the glory of their Lord; they would have the delight of knowing more and more of His purposes, of working more and more in conformity with them. They should be set free from the miserable vanity and selfishness which had clogged and disappointed their efforts here; they should understand their own spheres of labour, and co-operate with all to whom other spheres were assigned; they should live as He lives, they should work as He works, for the good of His subjects; they should judge, as He judges, between the right and the wrong, between the pure and the impure.
And here is the distinction between these true servants of God, and those who did not serve Him, but His enemy. “The rest of the dead lived not again till the thousand years were finished.” No such reward was prepared for them. They had chosen the wages of sin and selfishness, and those wages were death. That is what we are told. I accept the words and those which follow them as they are written. They may interfere with some of our notions about the future. I cannot help that. It is a subject on which our understandings make all kinds of crude, ignorant guesses. If we want a revelation to scatter our darkness, let us be thankful that it is given.
“This,” we are told, “is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are they that have part in it.” Who then are they that have part in it? We have heard the definition of them. It is surely one which does not exclude the first ages of the Christian Church. Our first and most natural thought might be that it had special reference to the times when men were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus. Suppose then we considered what actually took place upon the earth in the centuries which followed that in which the Apostles lived. We say ordinarily that during those centuries the Gospel made its way in countries where Greek, or Syrian, or Egyptian, or Celtic, or Gothic idolatry had prevailed before. But what do we mean by this phrase? Do we mean that one form of opinion took place of certain other forms of opinion? If we mean only this, infidels ask, and we are forced to ask ourselves, was the world better for the change? Was there not as much evil committed in the name of Christianity as had been committed in the names of the false gods? But when we have exhausted ourselves with this thought, there rises before us the clear certainty of moral good and physical changes effected in the earth, and effected directly by Christian agency. We perceive—no startling facts on the other side, and no false candour, can help us from perceiving—that we are entering on a new stage of the history of our planet. The whole scheme of religion which had been connected with the politics, the habits, the amusements of the different nations of the earth passes away. Principles which had been contradicted in all quarters of the world, which are still at variance with its practice, gradually force themselves upon men’s acceptance as truths. Much as they are set at nought, they more and more approve themselves as laws which must govern somewhere, which ought to govern everywhere. That idea of self-sacrifice which runs counter to every inclination and tendency of every human mind, enthrones itself in human minds as the effective principle, as that which can accomplish what no other accomplishes. The cross does in some marvellous way obtain a recognition from the emperors and kings who appear as if they did think and must think it to be the most contemptible of all signs. How do they come to feel its power? By trying their swords against it; by seeing whether swords and stakes will not extinguish the confession of it. Those ages therefore exactly answer to the first part of the description in this chapter. No decrees of monarchs, no acts of priests, will explain the alteration which is taking effect. It is a change at the very heart of society. The demon is forced to let go his hold over minds and spirits that had recognised him. The new life of the thousand years affects government, education, manners, the cultivation of the soil. But it proceeds silently, mysteriously, in defiance of all appearances. You must study it by the lapse of centuries to know how complete it is. You must see how the overthrow of one established corruption after another attests the permanence of the spiritual rule under which the earth has been brought.
And what is the character of that spiritual rule? There is nothing, we sometimes say, more delusive than the dream of posthumous fame. The assertion is well founded, for every selfish anticipation is full of delusion. But is there anything more real, more undoubted, than posthumous influence? How it was felt in those ages we all know. The benefactor of a neighbourhood was regarded as the saint who after his death was blessing that neighbourhood. The tillage of the land is dear to him; he gives healing powers to the springs. But were not those thoughts full of superstition? Do I think that the Bible endorses such superstitions merely because they may have had certain good effects? I believe the thoughts of men about these saints and this government were full of superstition. I believe the Bible endorses no superstition. I believe no superstition has good effects, only evil effects. And for that reason I do not confound the thoughts with that to which they referred and of which they bore witness. This is the mistake of the philosophers, who talk grandly about certain ideas which prevailed in certain periods. If they mean by ideas notions and conceptions of men, they must canonise very mischievous and very dishonourable fancies under that name. If they mean by ideas—laws, principles, truths, which are not of today nor of yesterday, then they will admit with me that the doctrines of men about departed saints may have pointed to an actual rule which they exercised, and which men were conscious of in a number of ways, though they were quite unable to reduce it into order, and though they often made it an excuse for shameful idolatry. For, let me repeat it again and again, this power, if it is of the same nature and quality with that from which it is derived, cannot act upon men as if they were stones, or trees, or even mere animals. It must speak to their understandings, affections, consciences; it must appeal to them as voluntary responsible creatures. May it not then be a very great help to us in studying the facts of the world’s history—and among these facts, the apprehensions of men respecting themselves and the powers that were surrounding them—if we adopt the Apostle’s statement simply; if we suppose that this dominion of the departed over the condition and destiny of the earth is associated by a Divine and providential link with the dominion of Him who was the first-born from the dead, the head of many brethren?
Blessed and holy indeed, if this be so, is the first resurrection, and they who partake of it. One death they have passed through in the dear might of Him whom that death could not hold. The second death, the death which overtakes the self-seeker, has no power over them as it had none over Him. His Spirit bore witness with their spirits that they were sons of God, and therefore, that their lives, in one world or another, were to be spent in the service of men. And have they not been joined by all to whom the same Spirit has taught the same lesson? Do we not know what their occupations must be? Most truly the occupations of heavenly creatures, because devoted to the succour and comforting of those who are walking and often missing their way upon earth. A light falls upon a page of a book—some one seems as if he were showing you the true sense of it. Why not he who wrote it?—he who perhaps understood his own words but imperfectly when he set them down, but who has learnt the signification of them since. A room brings back the memory of faces that were once seen, of voices that were once heard in it—why may not those faces be looking at us; those voices be giving to us reproofs and consolations? If we thought so, we should care little for mock messages from the departed; the real would be infinitely precious and awful. If we thought so, we should indeed feel that the reign of the saints is not ended yet; though perhaps a higher reign than theirs may have been revealed to us.
For we are told of an end to the thousand years.
III. “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
To those who contemplate the Millennium as the great climax of all human history, this prospect of a dark termination to it—of an overthrow of all its rare happiness—must be very appalling. They naturally shrink from the vision of Satan let loose again upon the world, of wild tribes gathered from the ends of the earth to destroy a city in which saints had established their throne. To those on the other hand, who regard this Millennium as the effect of Christ’s Death, Resurrection and Ascension, of the gift of the Spirit, of His victory over Jewish and Heathen enemies, over the rebels of Jerusalem, and the tyrants in Rome—to those who look on the Millennium as a real reign of those who have believed in Christ and fought on His side, and died in His cause, over the earth which He had redeemed,—to those who look upon it as a state in which this government was making itself felt, but felt by those who were continually throwing off its yoke, misunderstanding its nature, making the acknowledgment of it an excuse for superstition and crimes; to those who take it as the true explanation of that Christendom life in death which we read of in the records of the modern world; to those who therefore regard it as something immeasurably better than the condition of the old world, still more than any condition of mere repose and enjoyment could be, but who regard it as immeasurably short of what God’s redemption and His promises would lead them to hope for ultimately; the announcement of a catastrophe which would shake this order so blessed, so little confessed, is a help in the interpretation of the past, and a warrant for confidence in the future. And when we consider the nature of the calamity which is said to befall the camp of the saints and the beloved city, the intention of the prophet again comes forth into light and clearness, by the side of the notorious facts of history. What mean those wild irruptions of hordes of Huns and Avars, and of Tartar hosts under Zenghis Khan and Timour, which found a garden before them, and left a wilderness behind them? They described themselves as scourges of God; they believed they had a Divine commission. How came that thought into their minds? What had they to do? They disturbed the civilisation and order which had been gradually establishing itself in the world; they seemed to say that there was no such thing as legal government, no sacred yoke of customs and traditions. Mere force of numbers, mere strength of arm, apart from all that had converted multitudes and swords into ministers of order, appeared to be again proving itself supreme. Yes! and why? That nations which had sunk into a monotony of customs, laws, traditions; which had forgotten how these had established themselves, and what gave them their stability and authority; which had perverted civilisation into mere indulgence, and the belief of an invisible world into a mere tool for maintaining the corruption and tyranny of the visible; that these nations might be roused to remember what they were and whence they had fallen; that they might know by bitter experience, that selfishness is the author, not of government, but of Anarchy; that the forms and graces and blessings of civil life are not to be sacrificed to the Devil, as if they came from him, but are to be laid on God’s altar, because they are His. Satan is let loose in the strictest sense of the word, that Satan may be overthrown. That dominion of the upper world over the lower is set at naught that men may see how real it is, and what a falsehood society becomes when it ignores the relation between those two worlds, and tries to constitute an earth which shall be self-sufficing.
That, I conceive, has been the great crime of men from the beginning. That it was of which the Tower of Babel gave the precedent; that it was of which all the despotisms of the old world were the development; that it is which has made the Church of Christ, the beloved city of the later ages, fouler and more debased than the Jerusalem of the earlier ages. That the attempt to put a visible hierarchy in place of an invisible, is denounced in the most terrible sentences of this book, I believe as strongly as those do who would merely change Babylon into papal Rome, or who would deny that there has been a Church of Christ—a Communion of Saints, except in some small and scattered communities; which Churches must be invested with an ideal purity, such as belonged to none of those that we read of in the apostolical letters.
Take Babylon to represent an evil principle of society which manifested itself again and again in the old world, and has manifested itself again under more fearful and complicated conditions in the new; take the holy city to be indeed the Christendom of which we and of which all the baptized nations are members; take the millennial state to represent that new kingdom into which we have been brought; and then all the calamities that have befallen mankind from the invasions of the wild Gog and Magog hordes that lie on the outskirts of civilisation, and from the mobs that have been left untended in particular lands, contain the most fearful lesson and warning for us. And yet they contain also the blessed promise, that the borders of the holy city shall be expanded to receive those very races that have threatened its existence; and that Satan, the common deceiver of all times and all lands, shall at length be cast into the lake of fire, to which the beast and the false prophet, the tyrannical and idolatrous systems of the old world, have been already consigned.
And so we are prepared for the vision with which this chapter closes.
IV. “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
A great white throne, and He that sat upon it, before whom heaven and earth fled away, and there was no place for them. Remember, it was heaven as well as earth. If you suppose that these words speak of a destruction of the earth you must suppose that they speak of a destruction of the heavens. If one meaning is impossible, do not contradict all that we have been reading and hearing in this book by imagining the other. Yet the vision is strictly true. In the vision of God Himself all things must disappear; saints who govern, as much as those who are governed. In that perfect light all alike seem lost, no place is found for them. And yet it is that very light which brings all into manifestation. Each one, small and great, stands out clearly and distinctly when He is revealed. Vague thoughts haunt us of great judgments upon the world at large in which we individually are forgotten. Or we are indifferent about the world, thinking of ourselves and what will happen to us. In this Divine light there is no such confusion. God loves the world. How can we separate ourselves from it? God has made each of us a conscious being. How can we lose that being in the vastness of any society? It is a judgment between life and death. Hast thou chosen life? hast thou chosen death? That question reaches every man, whether he has been buried in the sea or in the grave. It reaches, so St. John says, into the very depth of hell. And life, he says, conquers. Death and hell are cast into the lake of fire.
Does that mean, my brethren, that by some change of circumstances, by some arbitrary decree of God, evil ceases to bring its curse and doom; that some time commences when God no longer judges? I can form no conception which is so frightful as that. Evil can never be less accursed, till good becomes less blessed. Asking God not to judge, is asking utter destruction to ourselves. The victories of God are victories over the will of men. You and I can only be saved from curses and punishments by being saved from sin. God sent His Son to deliver us from that. If death and hell are cast into the lake of fire, it is because He has done His work; because He has seen of the travail of His soul, and been satisfied.