If you never expect to be judged for any of your own doings, and the tradition of the coming of Christ is to you as an idle tale--still, think what a wonderful tale it would be, were it well told. You are at liberty, disbelieving it, to range the fields--Elysian and Tartarean--of all imagination. You may play with it, since it is false; and what a play would it not be, well written? Do you think the tragedy, or the miracle play, or the infinitely Divina Commedia of the Judgment of the astonished living who were dead;--the undeceiving of the sight of every human soul, understanding in an instant all the shallow, and depth of past life and future,--face to face with both,--and with God:--this apocalypse to all intellect, and completion to all passion, this minute and individual drama of the perfected history of separate spirits, and of their finally accomplished affections!--think you, I say, all this was well told by mere heaps of dark bodies curled and convulsed in space, and fall as of a crowd from a scaffolding, in writhed concretions of muscular pain? But take it the other way. Suppose you believe, be it never so dimly or feebly, in some kind of Judgment that is to be;--that you admit even the faint contingency of retribution, and can imagine, with vivacity enough to fear, that in this life, at all events, if not in another--there may be for you a Visitation of God, and a questioning--What hast thou done? The picture, if it is a good one, should have a deeper interest, surely on _this_ postulate? Thrilling enough, as a mere imagination of what is never to be--now, as a conjecture of what _is_ to be, held the best that in eighteen centuries of Christianity has for men's eyes been made;--Think of it so!