be to shroud those woeful reunions with that hour of densest darkness that will precede the dawn of eternity.
Brethren, then, in a burst of light, shall appear the Son of man with great power and majesty. " They shall go," says Isaias, " into the holes of rocks and into the caves of the earth from the face of the fear of the Lord and from the glory of His majesty," and St. John in the Apocalypse adds that the very " earth and heaven shall flee from His face." And if even the angels and the blessed shall tremble as they do who witness from the shore a storm at sea, what shall be the terror of the wicked! They shall look upon Him whom they crucified, and they shall wail and lament as do they who have lost an only-begotten son. They shall realize that for them the day of mercy has passed and the interminable night of justice begun. They shall feel that though the Old Law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been abolished in this world, it has never been abrogated in the next. But their penitential moans shall be all too late, for He shall separate them as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; the just He shall station on His right hand and the wicked on His left. Brethren, think of all the sad partings of friends and relatives by distance and by death that you have ever experienced or heard of, and let the bitterness of them be a salutary warning against that final separation. " And," says St. John (Apoc. xx. 12), " I saw the dead, great and small, standing in the presence of the throne, and the books were spread,
