" The passage concludes: "And these shall go away
into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal."
Now, although Mr. Braxton had complained of the literal application
of this text, that term was hardly admissible, for the preacher
waived the idea of a last general judgment, as involved in the
letter of Scripture, and declared his belief in a spiritual
signification as lying beneath the letter, and applicable to the
inner life of every single individual at the period of departure
from this world; adding, in this connection, briefly: "But do not
understand me as in any degree waiving the strictness of judgment to
which every soul will have to submit. It will not be limited by his
acts, but go down to his ends of life--to his motives and his
quality--and the sentence will really be a judgment upon what he
_is_, not upon what he has _done_; although, taking the barest
literal sense, only actions are regarded."
In opening and illustrating his text, he said, farther: "As the word
of God, according to its own declarations, is spirit and
life--treats, in fact, by virtue of divine and Scriptural origin, of
divine and spiritual things, must we not go beneath the merely
obvious and natural meaning, if we would get to its true
significance? Is there not a hunger of the soul as well as of the
body? May we not be spiritually athirst, and strangers?--naked,
sick, and in prison? This being so, can we confidently look for the
invitation, 'Come, ye blessed of my Father, if our regard for the
neighbor have not reached beyond his bodily life? If we have never
considered his spiritual wants and sufferings, and ministered
thereto according to our ability? Just in the degree that the soul
is more precious than the body, is the degree of our responsibility
under this more interior signification of Scripture.
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