In the first place, this is what has actually taken place. In the growing recognition of his spirit and power, in the spread of his teachings and name, in the revolutionizing advancement of his kingdom among men, Jesus has come again and again. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, as he foretold, amidst unspeakable tribulations, and the disciples of the new faith installed in domination over the world. He said the time was then at hand, even at the doors, that some of those standing by should not taste death until all these things came to pass. If his prophecy bore a moral sense, the sequel justified it; if it bore a physical sense, the sequel refuted and falsified it. For that generation passed away, fifty generations since have passed away, and yet there has been no literal second advent of Jesus in person to judge the dead and the living, and to destroy the world. The event proves that we must either give the words of Jesus a metaphorical interpretation or hold that he was in error.
But, secondly, such an error would be incompatible with soundness of mind. For any man, even for him called by an apostle "the man Christ Jesus," to believe that after his death he should reappear, swooping down from heaven, convoyed by squadrons of angels, to collect all men from their graves, and replace the old creation with a new one, would imply a profound disturbance of reason, a monomaniacal fanaticism if not an actual insanity. It is such a pure piece of theatrics that no one deeply in unison with that spirit of truth which expresses the mind of God through the order of nature and providence could possibly believe it. Such a nature was preeminently that of Jesus. All his most characteristic utterances, such as: "blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God;" "who loves much shall be forgiven much;" reveal unsurpassed saneness and truth of perception. It is by much the most probable supposition, that Jesus employed in the deepest and purest moral sense alone those Messianic images and catastrophic prophecies which were indeed originally used as moral metaphors, but had been afterwards degraded into material dogmas.
Still further, the literal belief commonly attributed to Jesus, in his own physical reappearance and reign, is not only incompatible with his supreme soundness of mind, it is also irreconcilable with his other explicit teachings. "My kingdom is not of this world." "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." He warns his disciples against the many false Christs who will appear, and says that "the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation." "Say not, lo here! or lo there! for the kingdom of heaven is within you." "I am the truth, the way, and the life." "He that rejecteth me, I judge him not; the word that I have spoken, that shall judge him." "Whoever doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother." In view of these and kindred utterances of the profoundest insight, irreconcilable with any gross mythological beliefs, we must hold to the purely spiritual character of the doctrine of Jesus concerning his personal offices, and think that all the speeches, if any such there be, which cannot be fairly explained in accordance with this view, have been refracted in their transmission through incompetent reporters, or even perhaps fictitiously ascribed to him from the faith of a later age. There is a grateful satisfaction in thus discharging, as we feel we are fairly entitled to do, from the authority of Jesus a burden too great even for his peerless name any longer to support. For, say what its advocates may, this gigantic melo drama of the second advent, this world wide mixture and display of martial and forensic elements before an audience of all mankind and amidst a convulsed and closing universe, is inherently incredible by any mind not grossly ignorant and undisciplined or drilled to the most slavish servility of traditional thought. Every one really educated in science and philosophy, and familiar with the physiological conditions and literary history of mythology in the other nations of the world, will plainly perceive the intrinsic fancifulness and falsity of the belief, at the same time that he easily accounts for its rise and prevalence.
The same picture of the siege of Jerusalem by a league of idolatrous armies, and of the mighty coming of the Messiah, found in the New Testament, is drawn in the third book of the Sibylline Oracles, which was composed by a Jew two hundred years before one word of Matthew or Luke was written. Jesus took up this current and fitting imagery wherein to express the conflict of his religion with the world, and to predict its ultimate triumph. He identifies himself with the truths he has brought, with the regenerating energies he has inaugurated to combat and overcome the wickedness and despotism of the nations of men. Every advent of his universal principles to a wider conflict or a higher seat of authority, is a true coming of the Son of Man. The vices and crimes of men, the selfishness and tyranny of governments, accumulate impediments in the way of the free working of the will of God in human society. Therefore from period to period convulsive crises occur, shocks of progressive truth and liberty against the obstacles gathered in their way. Thus, not only the destruction of Jerusalem, but the destruction of Rome, the French Revolution, and all the terrible social crises in the advancing affairs of the world, write on the earth and the sky, in huge characters of blood, smoke and fire, the true meaning of the repeated coming of Christ. This is the only kind of judicial second advent he will ever make, and this will occur over and over in calamitous but helpful revolutions, until all removable evils are done away, all the laws of men made just and all the hearts of men pure. Then the spirit once manifested by Jesus in his lonely mission will be a universal presence on earth, and the genuine millennium prevail without end.
It is necessary now, as preliminary to a clear exposition of the true Christian doctrine of judgment, to explain the cause and process of the dark perversion which the teachings of Christ himself have so unfortunately undergone in the Church. For this purpose we must again, for a moment, refer to the original connection of Christianity with Judaism.
Judaism was composed of two parts: one an accidental form; the other, essential truth. The first was the ceremonial peculiarities of the Jewish race and history; the second was the absolute and eternal principles of morality and religion. These two parts the ritual law and moral law were closely joined in all the best representatives of the nation at all the best periods of its history. Yet there was a constant tendency to separate these. One party exalted the ritual element, another party the spiritual element; the priestly class and the vulgar populace the former; the prophets the men of poetic, fiery heart and genius the latter.
Such men as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, always insisted on personal and national righteousness, purity, and devotion, as the one essential thing. But the natural tendency of the common multitude, and of every professional class, to an external routine of mechanised forms, manifested itself more and more in a party which made an overt covenant and ritualistic conformity the all important thing. This party reached its head in the sect of the Pharisees, who, at the time of Jesus, possessed the offices, and represented the dominant spirit and authority of the Jewish nation. The character of this sect of bigoted formalists, as indignantly described and denounced by Jesus, is too well known to need illustration. They subordinated and trivialized the weightier matters of justice, mercy, humility, and peace, but enthroned and glorified the regime of mint, anise, and cummin.
What was the Jewish idea of salvation, or citizenship in the kingdom of God? What was the condition of acceptance in the Pharisaic church? It was heirship in the Jewish race, either by descent or adoption, with ceremonial blamelessness in belief and act. Do you belong to the chosen family of Abraham, and are you undefiled in relation to all the requirements of our code? Then you are one of the elect. Are you a Gentile, an idolatrous member of the uncircumcision, or a scorner of the Levitic and Rabbinical customs? Then you are unfit to enter beyond the outer precincts of the Temple; you are a hopeless alien from the kingdom of heaven. Thus the Jewish test of acceptance with God was national, external, formal, a local and temporal peculiarity.
When Jesus arose and began to teach, his transcendent genius, working under the unparalleled inspiration of God, an unprecedented sensibility to divine truth in its utmost purity and freedom, expanded beyond all these shallow material accidents and bonds; and he propounded a perfectly moral and spiritual test of acceptance before God; namely, the possession of an intrinsically good character. He made nothing of the distinction between Jew and Gentile, declaring, "My father is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." He affirmed the condition of admittance into the kingdom of God to be simply the doing of the will of God. When he saw the young lawyer who had kept the two commandments, loving God with all his soul, and his neighbor as himself, his heart yearned towards him in benediction. And, finally, in his sublime picture of the last judgment, he, in the most explicit and unmistakable manner, makes the one essential condition of rejection to be inhumanity of life, cruel selfishness of character; the one essential condition of acceptance, the spirit of love, the practical doing of good. He utters not a solitary syllable about immaculateness of ceremonial propriety or soundness of dogmatic belief. He only says, Inasmuch as ye have or have not visited the sick and the imprisoned, fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, ye shall be justified or condemned at the divine tribunal. This test of personal goodness or wickedness, benevolent or malignant conduct, proclaimed by Jesus, is the true standard, free from everything local and temporary, fitted for application to all nations and all ages.
But no sooner had Christianity obtained a foothold on earth, multiplied its converts, and gained some outward sway, than its Judaizing disciples and promulgators, fastening on that which was easiest to comprehend and practise, that which was most impressive to the imagination, that which seemed most sharply to distinguish them from the unbelieving and unconforming world around, thrust far into the background this universal and eternal test of judgment set up by Jesus himself, and in place of it installed an exclusive test fashioned after a more developed and aggravated pattern of the very narrowest and worst elements in the Phariasaism which he expressly came to supersede. The Pharisaic condition of salvation was inheritance, by blood or adoption, in the Jewish race and Abrahamic covenant, together with exactitude of ceremonial observance. Everybody else was an unclean alien, an uncircumcised dog, an uncovenanted leper. In place of this test, the orthodox ecclesiastical party made their test dogmatic belief in the supernatural Messiahship of Jesus Christ, formal profession of allegiance to the official person of Jesus Christ. It is summed up in the formula, "Whoso believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is of God; whoso denieth this, is of the Devil."