it”; when “out of Zion should go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”; when “He should judge the nations, and should rebuke many peoples, and should beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, when nation should not lift up sword against nation, neither should they learn war any more.” That was Isaiah’s assurance, even in the dark days he describes. We have a hundred-fold more ground for the same assurance when it has been proclaimed to us by our Lord Himself, and sealed with His blood, and countersigned with the assurance and the blood of His Apostles and Saints. Even from this general point of view, the message of Advent comes to us with a supremely inspiring force in the crisis of our great national struggle, but it has other aspects of profound grace and comfort as well as of warning. The most gracious, perhaps, of all its aspects is the assurance it gives us that the final judgment of the world, the final establishment of righteousness, the final reward of the good, will be in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ. This, of course, is a matter of faith, based on positive revelation, resting on the personal assurance of our Lord and His Apostles. It is no matter of speculation, no matter of opinion, but a positive statement of fact, which is one of the corner-stones of the Christian religion. There is too much tendency at present to resolve that religion into matters of mere human thought and feeling and hope, and to make its acceptance depend on its conformity to modern ideas; but there is no possibility of treating in that manner such a point of definite, momentous, fundamental fact as that our Lord Jesus Christ has been appointed by God to be the Judge of quick and dead, to sum up the whole world’s destiny, and to assign to each one of us, to every one in this congregation, his place hereafter in the Kingdom of God or outside it. The office of judge, even in this world, is a solemn one. How infinitely awful is the position of the Eternal Judge of all! Now the substance of the revelation of Advent is that this great office is not veiled, as it was to the Jews, and as it must needs be, without revelation, to all the world, in the mysterious, distant, and dread form of the absolute majesty of God Himself; but that it is formally delegated to One Who is not only the Son of God, but the Son of Man, to the Lord Jesus Christ, Who took our flesh and blood upon Him, Who died for us and rose again. “God hath appointed a day,” St. Paul says, “in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by _that man_ Whom He hath ordained ... Whom He raised from the dead.” The grace which is involved in this declaration is so infinite that I hesitate to speak freely of it in my own words, and I am thankful to be able to express it in language of one of the most authoritative of all divines, our own Bishop Pearson, in his grave and deliberate _Exposition of the Creed_. “If,” he says (page 305),