The law of conscience.—Rom. 2:15, 16—“they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them; in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ”; Heb. 10:27—“a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.” Goethe said that his writings, taken together, constituted a great confession. Wordsworth, Excursion, III:579—“For, like a plague will memory break out. And, in the blank and solitude of things, Upon his spirit, with a fever's strength, Will conscience prey.” A man who afterwards became a Methodist preacher was converted in Whitefield's time by a vision of the judgment, in which he saw all men gathered before the throne, and each one coming up to the book of God's law, tearing open his heart before it “as one would tear open the bosom of his shirt,” comparing his heart with the things written in the book, and, according as they agreed or disagreed with that standard, either passing triumphant to the company of the blest, or going with howling to the company of the damned. No word was spoken; the Judge sat silent; the judgment was one of self-revelation and self-condemnation. See Autobiography of John Nelson (quoted in the Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan, 207, by Mrs. E. Charles, the author of The Schönberg-Cotta Family).
The law of character.—Heb. 3:8, 15—“Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, Like as in the day of the trial in the wilderness.... Today, if ye shall hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.” Sin leaves its marks upon the soul; men become “past feeling” (Eph. 4:19). In England, churchmen claim to tell a dissenter by his walk—not a bad sign by which to know a man. God needs only to hold up our characters to show what have been our lives. Sin leaves its scars upon the soul, as truly as lust and hatred leave their marks upon the body. So with the manifestation of the good—“the chivalry that does the right, and disregards The yea and nay of the world.... Expect nor question nor reply At what we figure as God's judgment-bar” (Robert Browning, Ring and Book, 178, 202). Mr. Edison says: “In a few years the world will be just like one big ear; it will be unsafe to speak in a house till one has examined the walls and the furniture for concealed phonographs.”But the world even now is “one big ear”, and we ourselves in our characters are writing the books of the judgment. Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 134, 135—“Every part of the material universe contains a permanent record of every change that has taken place therein, and there is also no limit to the power of minds like ours to read and interpret the record.”
Draper, Conflict of Science and Religion: “If on a cold polished metal, as a new razor, any object, such as a wafer, be laid, and the metal breathed upon, and when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discern no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more; if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can injure its surface, and be kept so for many months, on breathing upon it again, the shadowy form emerges. A shadow never falls upon a wall without [pg 1027]leaving thereon a permanent trace, a trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts.”
Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 113-115—“If we had power to follow and detect the minutest effects of any disturbance, each particle of existing matter would furnish a register of all that has happened. The track of every canoe, of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface of the ocean, whether impelled by manual force or elemental power, remains forever registered in the future movement of all succeeding particles which may occupy its place. The furrow which it left is indeed filled up by the closing waters, but they draw after them other and larger portions of the surrounding element, and these again, once moved, communicate motion to others in endless succession. The air itself is one vast library, in whose pages are forever written all that man has said or even whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful will.”
(c) Single acts and words, therefore, are to be brought into the judgment only as indications of the moral condition of the soul. This manifestation of all hearts will vindicate not only God's past dealings, but his determination of future destinies.
Mat. 12:36—“And I say unto you, that every idle word that man shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment”; Luke 12:2, 8, 9—“there is nothing covered up, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.... Every one who shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: but he that denieth me in the presence of men shall be denied in the presence of the angels of God”; John 3:18—“He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been judged already, because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God”; 2 Cor. 5:10—“For we must all be made manifest [not: ‘must all appear,’ as in A. Vers.] before the judgment-seat of Christ.”
Even the human judge, in passing sentence, commonly endeavors so to set forth the guilt of the criminal that he shall see his doom to be just. So God will awaken the consciences of the lost, and lead them to pass judgment on themselves. Each lost soul can say as Byron's Manfred said to the fiend that tortured his closing hour: “I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey, But was my own destroyer.” Thus God's final judgment will be only the culmination of a process of natural selection, by which the unfit are eliminated, and the fit are caused to survive.
O. J. Smith, The Essential Verity of Religion: “Belief in the immortality of the soul and belief in the accountability of the soul are fundamental beliefs in all religion. The origin of the belief in immortality is found in the fact that justice can be established in human affairs only upon the theory that the soul of man is immortal, and the belief that man is accountable for his actions eternally is based upon the conviction that justice should and will be enforced. The central verity in religion therefore is eternal justice. The sense of justice makes us men. Religion has no miraculous origin,—it is born with the awakening of man's moral sense. Friendship and love are based on reciprocity, which is justice. ‘Universal justice,’ says Aristotle, ‘includes all virtues.’ ”If by justice here is meant the divine justice, implied in the awakening of man's moral sense, we can agree with the above. As we have previously intimated, we regard the belief in immortality as an inference from the intuition of God's existence, and every new proof that God is just strengthens our conviction of immortality.