The Judgment | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 1, 1877

The Judgment.

WHEN the Bible reveals a day of Judgment, it reveals what the human mind of itself perceives to be a necessity. The idea of a judgment after death is no more biblical than it is classical. Every people under heaven who have reached any considerable mental expansion, who have advanced far enough to study at all the problems of moral responsibility, of justice and equity, have had their theory of a judgment. In Persia, in Hindostan, in India, among the Egyptians, in the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, in the teachings of the Druids, and in the picturesque faith of the poor Saxon-hunted Indian, among every race and tribe, the idea of a judgment, a day of supreme and final allotment of the good and the bad, has been prevalent. The Bible assertion of a Judgment day, instead, therefore, of doing violence to human feelings, as some say, is in exact harmony with them; it is only the divine and authoritative announcement of what the universal consciousness of the race had instinctively conceived must be a fact; and every person at all intelligent and candid yields the free, unforced assent of his intellect to the statement of the Scriptures, that “God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”— Golden Rule.