The part played in theological speculation and popular religious belief by imagery borrowed from the scenery and methods of judicial tribunals, the procedures and enforcement of penal law, has not been less prominent and profound than the influence exerted by natural, political, and military metaphors. The power, the pomp, the elaborate spectacle, the mysterious formalities, the frightful penalties, the intense personal hopes and fears, associated with the trial of culprits in courts or before the head of a nation, must always have sunk so deeply into the minds of men as to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typical stamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and the future world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctly shown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before the sarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake to be deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of the departed, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, together with forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of a particular sin, assembled on the shore and sat in judgment. The deceased was put on his trial before them: and, if justified, awarded an honorable burial; if condemned, disgraced by the withholding of the funeral rites. Now the papyrus rolls found with the mummies give a description of the judgment of the dead, a picture of the fate of the disembodied soul in the Egyptian Hades, minutely agreeing in many particulars with the foregoing ceremony. Ma, the Goddess of Justice, leads the soul into the judgment hall, before the throne of Osiris, where stands a great balance with a symbol of truth in one scale, the symbol of a human heart in the other. The accuser is heard, and the deceased defends himself before forty two divine judges who preside over the forty two sins from which he must be cleared. The gods Horus and Anubis attend to the balance, and Thoth writes down the verdict and the sentence. The soul then passes on through adventures of penance or bliss, the details of which are obviously copied, with fanciful changes and additions, from the connected scenery and experience known on the earth.
Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scene in human society so impressive as the periodical sitting in judgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of those half deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, the Emperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in the gate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversible administration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing in purple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest to his person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next in order; his body guards and various classes of servants, in distinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast masses of troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must have composed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared the accusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captives taken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who had complaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. The monarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executioners carried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, some sent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When the tribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended, there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darkness there, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place.
Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in some degree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary in human governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, the judge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of the social order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties, wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminals gathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, may go on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up of arrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural it would be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery, summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their doom according to his sovereign pleasure?
The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times, that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.
This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.
The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead, Minos, who presided at the trial of souls arriving from Europe; Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold; the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct the tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future in forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom, of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth, while the Judge and his officers take their places in the Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology, should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely, the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one, because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal truths are wholly different from their relations with each other in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity. God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual, results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those judicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken and hitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable, the circumstances are so completely different. The true illustration of the divine government must be adopted from physiology and psychology, where the perfect working of the Creator is exemplified, not from the forum and the court, where the imperfect artifices of men are exhibited.
God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions of their own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kick of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. The thief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, the philosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just and intrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in the fitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discords with the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus is the daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded with thrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream of devouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed of uncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions of universal good; the vices represent private opposition to those conditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting and cooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonistic and repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfect retribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel its working, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of the secrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his own experience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far from refuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truth of that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward." Those who consider themselves saints indulge in an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinners have their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next." The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical with the first law of motion in the material sphere; action and reaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law being instantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be no occasion for a final epoch to redress its accumulated disbalancements. It has no disbalancements, save in our erroneous or defective vision.
The true conception of the relation of the all judging Creator to his creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies all finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices, fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent, constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance, originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a truth.
For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered, not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact, and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares, because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a flaming furnace.
Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "When the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moral meaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializing degradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appears clearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wife of Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his right hand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said, "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give." The imagery meant that the missionary assistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth and love he came to establish, would be represented in common with himself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world. When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, as indicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and that his favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, and glory, he solemnly repudiated it.