THE LAST JUDGMENT. A NEW YEAR'S SERMON "We spend our years as a tale that is told.”—Psalm xc. 9. Y DEAR FRIENDS, How much food there is for MY reflection in these simple words! Since our last meeting a new year has dawned upon us— and the old year has closed on us for ever: it is to us as a narrative we have been listening to "as a tale that is told." Every year, every month, every week, every day, is to each and to all of us "as a tale that is told." The departed year, if passed in review before us, would seem, no doubt, a pleasant tale to many, a comic tale to some, a tragic tale to thousands, and, if rightly viewed, a serious tale-a tale full of eternal interest to all. For Good or Evil, for Weal or Woe, the deeds done, the thoughts uttered, the opportunities neglected, are past recall, they are matters of history, they are, both nationally and individually, "a tale that is told." Our mode of life, our thoughts and actions, have been Wrong or Right, Wise or Foolish-all of them. In their religious and moral relations, none of them have been indifferent. Hence, they reflect honor on us, or lay us open to reproach, they are germs of Happiness, or seeds of Woe,-they cheer or chide We have us,—they yield us Joy, or call for Penitence,--they are Angels with blessings, or, Demons with a lash. We are better than we were a year ago, or we are worse. grown in Spiritual stature-in Righteousness, in Holiness, and in Christian Love, and are thence nearer Heaven nearer God; or we have shrunk in Spiritual stature, and have forged chains for ourselves which fetter us to the Earth. Reflective minds and tender, wakeful, consciences know these things, and, in reviewing the tale of the past year, are pleased or pained; and are, moreover, wiser and better for the retrospect. But, with the majority of us, it is different: we are like unwise traders who never take stock, and do not keep accounts; and, like them, shall not obtain our certificates. if we fail. To those of us who are unaccustomed to reflection, to-day blots out and eclipses yesterday in our memories, as to-morrow will eclipse and blot out to-day. But, if we would build up for ourselves a Heaven on Earth, this must not be. It is true we have, many of us, little time for reflection, little aptitude, and perhaps less desire. Our monotonous occupations are conducive of intellectual and moral apathy, and this the more certainly because of our habit of seeing things with our physical eyes, and not with our mental understandings-which is in reality, viewing things without seeing them, or seeing them to no purpose because seeing them only in part,—a state of mind which is deadening to our faculties, obstructive to our Spiritual progress, and never fails to lull our consciences to sleep: the consequence whereof is- -we fancy that, of our years and our yesterdays no record exists. Hence, we take no heed of the matter; we are rendered neither miserable nor happy by a retrospect which we do not or cannot take, -by the "tale" of our past lives which, because we have forgotten, or do not trouble ourselves to remember, we believe to be nowhere recorded. There cannot, however, be a greater error; and, therefore, in all this we deceive ourselves, for-whether he knows it or not-every man is a living history of himself. The "tale" of his life; the record of his habitual thoughts; the story of his secret, or avowed, desires-all are registered in his character, depicted in his manners, indiced on his countenance, blazoned in his eye. If strongly marked (as they always are when so habitually indulged in as to have become the master-passions of the mind,) all men can read them as though printed in a book; but whether this autobiographical record be thus manifestly legible to others or not, the record itself is there,—a record which (whether bad or good) can only be effaced by writing over it a worthier one, or scribbling over it a worse. familiar example, look at the degraded victim of intemperance. It requires no Daniel to read the writing on his bloated visage-in his "lack-lustre eye." Eloquent and awful is the record written there! "Sensualist, Madman, Idiot! thou hast been weighed in the balance of Free-agency, and found wanting; thy health, thy heritage, and the 'talent' that was entrusted to thee by thy Creator to thy use and keeping, have been taken from thee, and given to another!" As a My dear friends, we all know the victim of Intemperance at sight, and the keen-featured Miser, and the lewd-eyed Voluptuary. We know the falcon-gaze, the compressed and bloodless lip, of Cruelty, and the dogged, downcast, look of the mere human Brute. We know them, and instinctively avoid all contact with them-if we can. We know also, without any other herald than themselves, the trust-inspiring features of genuine HONESTY; and the bland aspect of pure BENEVOLENCE,—radiant and loveable, as the bright sunshine in winter; balmy as the breath of violets; beautiful as summer roses; open and affluent as the summer's day. Yes! we read each other's characters where we find them thus broadly legible, and guess and speculate where we cannot read; but ever, in so doing-be it remembered― we write our own. And in all this we are admonished to be charitable, for it is a Law of our nature that harsh thoughts imprint harsh lines upon the countenance, showing us that Christ's Christianity (which is in harmony with our nature) must ever consist in kindness and sympathy towards our erring brothers, and not in pious wrath and Calvinistic commination. We may admonish and save our falling brother if we can: we have nothing to do with monkish cursings and denunciations. God has so ordered it (as we shall see presently) that Judgment can never fail, and that no man can innocently presume to sit in judgment on his brother. Of course, I speak not here of public magistrates, who, as long as Crime and Social institutions, on their present plan exist, must summon offenders to the tribunals where erring human judgments are dispensed; but I speak now of Priests and private individuals touching social faults which the laws dispensed by Magistrates fail to reach. Here all men—and most of all the Christian Minister (whose divine Master "came, not to condemn the world, but that the world through his all-loving example might be saved.") are admonished that we may in nowise "judge" without "being in danger of the judgment." And what I wish to take this opportunity of showing you is that this principle of Christianity, so well known in theory to us all, is in perfect harmony with the prior Laws of God, as these Laws are stereotyped in our physical and mental constitutions; as well as to show you the modus operandi by which God's judgments are carried out, and the utter impossibility of their failure, or evasion. All We have seen, my friends, how, in extreme cases (whether simple or complex, bad or good,) men write the "tale" of their lives in such legible characters on their physiognomies that all men might read them, and thus possess themselves of these secret histories—at will: it follows as a corollary in reason that there also are indiced (whether decypherable by men or not) the life-long story of the soul, whose workings give the Intellectual and Moral expression to the perishable tenement it dwells in-thus preserving (during life) the self-inscribed mementoes of its own honor, or disgrace. this is certain: and not less certain this other fact, that, in Our IMMATERIAL MEMORIES exist (little as we may suspect or desire it) every fact and circumstance of our lives, preserved as though printed in a book, that there nothing is omitted, nothing is falsified, nothing is lost,—that there, at least, is a point-blank statement of the pure facts as we knew those facts at the time they were recorded. Now, "if, when a man dies he shall live again,"-if the Soul's essence be indeed immortal, then, that this immaterial memory should accompany us into our new existence is a fact as predicable by pure Reason as it has been rendered certain by Revelation. But circumstances are constantly occurring |