Chapter VI · (continued 2)

The whole conception, then, is this: The universe is one vast house, comprising many subordinate mansions. All the moral beings that dwell in it compose one immortal family. God is the universal Father. His will the truth is the law of the household. Whoever obeys it is a worthy son and has the Father's approbation; whoever disobeys it is alienated and degraded into the condition of a servant. We may roam from room to room, but can never get lost outside the walls beyond the reach of the Paternal arms. Death is variety of scenery and progress of life:

"We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another golden chamber of the King's, Larger than this we leave, and lovelier."

Who can comprehend the idea, in its overwhelming magnificence and in its touching beauty, its sweeping amplitude embracing all mysteries, its delicate fitness meeting all wants, without being impressed and stirred by it, even to the regeneration of his soul? If there is any thing calculated to make man feel and live like a child of God, it would surely seem to be this conception. Its unrivalled simplicity and verisimilitude compel the assent of the mind to its reality. It is the most adequate and sublime view of things that ever entered the reason of man. It is worthy the inspiration of God, worthy the preaching of the Son of God. All the artificial and arbitrary schemes of fanciful theologians are as ridiculous and impertinent before it as the offensive flaring of torches in the face of one who sees the steady and solemn splendors of the sun. To live in the harmony of the truth of things, in the conscious love of God and enjoyment of immortality, blessed children, everywhere at home in the hospitable mansions of the everlasting Father, this is the experience to which Christ calls his followers; and any eschatology inconsistent with such a conception is not his.

There are two general methods of interpretation respectively applied to the words of Christ, the literal, or mechanical, and the spiritual, or vital. The former leads to a belief in his second visible advent with an army of angels from heaven, a bodily resurrection of the dead, a universal judgment, the burning up of the world, eternal tortures of the wicked in an abyss of infernal fire, a heaven located on the arch of the Hebrew firmament. The latter gives us a group of the profoundest moral truths clustered about the illuminating and emphasizing mission of Christ, sealed with Divine sanctions, truths of universal obligation and of all redeeming power. The former method is still adopted by the great body of Christendom, who are landed by it in a system of doctrines well nigh identical with those of the Pharisees, against which Christ so emphatically warned his followers, a system of traditional dogmas not having the slightest support in philosophy, nor the least contact with the realities of experience, nor the faintest color of inherent or historical probability. In this age they are absolutely incredible to unhampered and studious minds. On the other hand, the latter method is pursued by the growing body of rational Christians, and it guides them to a consistent array of indestructible moral truths, simple, fundamental, and exhaustive, an array of spiritual principles commanding universal and implicit homage, robed in their own brightness, accredited by their own fitness, armed with the loveliness and terror of their own rewarding and avenging divinity, flashing in mutual lights and sounding in consonant echoes alike from the law of nature and from the soul of man, as the Son of God, with miraculous voice, speaks between.