throughout Advent in the message of Judgment; we can not rightfully apprehend either until we knit them into the great distinctive theme of the Season. It is the Coming of the Son of Man which shall inaugurate that glorious Day when the righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of the Father; it is the awed expectation of that Coming which detaches the Christian from tenacious clinging to established things, and makes, or should make, an evolutionist of him. The Church, in the great Advent Collect, keeps daily before our minds "the last Day when He shall come again in His glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead"; and through Gospels and Epistles to the very end of the season, the Apocalyptic hope of the Early Church, the definite expectation of the Coming in Judgment of the Son of Man, shines clear.

What does this hope mean to us,-Christians of the Twentieth Century,-anything at all?

Very little, it may be feared. Except for small groups here and there, effective belief in the Second Advent has by tacit consent dropped out from the mind of the Church. Mechanical interpretations have discredited it in any literal form, and in such form it is not likely to recur among educated people. That old vision of the dead, small and great, standing before God, the vision

celebrated in the solemn rhythms of the Dies Iræ, painted by Orcagna and Michelangelo, haunts us no longer. It was replaced for a time by belief in an individual judgment occurring at death, but this conception too has failed; for few people probably now believe in a probation which ends when we leave the body. Judgment, to the modern man, is no longer a solemn climax, placed in the future; it is continuous process going on now; it is part of the ceaseless weaving of the web of life.

"Is there but one Day of Judgment?" writes John Ruskin. "Why, for us every day is a Day of Judgment-every day is a Dies Ira and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses,-it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst of judgment—the insects that we crush are our judges—the moments we fret away are our judges-the elements that feed us, judge, as they minister-and the pleasures that deceive us, judge as they indulge." 1

How spiritual this is, how beautifully put, how true! And yet at the same time it is quite inadequate from the point of view of Scripture. New Testament writers hold relentlessly before us the vision of a Judgment not only continuous but 1Ruskin: The Mystery of Life and its Arts.

catastrophic, not only present but future, not only personal but corporate. The Church, in stressing the same unpopular thought at the opening of her sequence of Christian experience, is merely loyal to the Bible. There can be no lack of precision in her language; it is almost melodramatic:

"Grant that the ministers and stewards of Thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready Thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at Thy second Coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in Thy sight."

The faithful Churchman can hardly be content to let the whole difficult matter slip from his mind, and go on, year after year, singing hymns and praying prayers in which he does not believe. Has the social interpretation any help to offer?

In answering this question, it is well to keep in mind what was suggested at the outset. Every phase of the Christian Year has a double emphasis. It celebrates events, it also reveals principles. So, the Coming of Christ is conceived as a definite event; it is also conceived as an abiding law with recurrent manifestations. And probably the best way to get the right attitude toward the Church teaching concerning Judgment is to begin with the latter aspect.

Few things are more important than to restore

to the Christian mind the recognition that Jesus regarded catastrophe, no less than growth, as a normal and necessary element in human advance. He knew that violent disturbances were the condition and the preliminary of His Coming. We can not keep one factor in His teaching and reject another, dwell on the parable of the seed growing secretly, and forget the lightning flash. The Apocalyptic note is struck too clearly and persistently to be attributed to His reporters, or to later editors of His words.

Modern times have fought shy of accepting the religious necessity of violent change. They have prated much of Progress and Uniformity, of the gradual character of Nature's processes, and have turned away with deep distaste from any forces likely to create a disturbance. The cruder evolutionary ideas of the last century greatly helped this illusion of unbroken progress; for illusion it is, and it can not stand the light of reality. Philosophy is disillusionizing the thinker, and the grim facts of the last decade have been disillusionizing the man in the street. Still we believe in a Reign of Law, but the Law does not work in the fixed and placid way we have assumed; its manifestation in nature and history does not exclude, but includes, cataclysm. Earthquake and revolution are a part of it, as truly as sunrise and or

dered social life. Moreover, the shock and agony, the overthrow of the usual and the normal, when sea and waves are roaring and the powers of Heaven are shaken and men's hearts fail them for fear, are a special revelation of the Eternal, without which His dealings with men were incomplete. This is what Hebrew intuition had long seen; this is what Jesus, heir of that intuition, stressed; and this, of a certainty, is the permanent and sure truth which emerges profitably for us from the clouded Apocalyptic Teaching. Doubtless the Master believed that such fearsome, sudden revelation of the Judgment of God was part of the Divine Purpose and sure to occur within the historic order. The disciples caught His meaning; and they had no difficulty in making the political application to the affairs of their own day. Who shall say that they were wrong when in the phenomena surrounding the fall of their beloved Jerusalem they discerned the fulfilment of prophecy, one episode in the Judgment of God? Are not the same signs to be observed by us in the fall of Germany, and by our children, conceivably, in the fall of this entire Western civilization of ours? What is important is that in each of these crises we should recognize no hideous accident, but the signs of the Advent of the Divine Humanity, of that Son of God Who is also the Son of Man.