the sheep and the goats, to teach us that the former were in states of charity without truth, and that the latter were in the possession of truth without charity. The non-possession of truth on the part of the sheep would, for a time, keep them out of heaven, and the possession of truth on the part of the goats would keep them out of hell, and so both classes would remain in the world of spirits. It was, then, spirits of this description who became the subjects of the last judgment. The wheat and the tares grew together until the harvest.
They had for a long period been accumulating in the spiritual world, owing to the declining influence of a falling Church, until at last the influences in favour of goodness
realization. Their external wants and tastes and interests were similar. They had the same notions about property, about labour, about almost everything that pertains to the outward life, and so they expected to open a terrestrial paradise in the wilderness. For a while everything went on charmingly well. The little community grew into an organization of fair proportions and harmonious workings. It was not long, however, before it began to be manifest that man has an internal life as well as external, and that this in the long run is the more dominant of the two. And they found, when brought into close relations with each other, that this internal life showed itself by little and little, and that no considerations of prudence and expediency could cover it-up. By-and-by there were conflicts of self with self; opinion jarred against opinion, and interest clashed against interest; truth and falsehood met together, and did by no means kiss each other: the secret heart of this person and that began to be opened, and to be mutually repellent, and the divers elements of the little community were in a general fermentation and whirl. It was quite evident that, though this might be a good arrangement of body with body, it was a decided mal-arrangement of spirit with spirit. The pressure of spiritual affinities and repulsions from within became greater and greater, and the result was that the whole society broke in pieces; each went to his own place, and left the prairie wolf to howl over the place of his imagined paradise."—Sears on the Foregleams of Immortality. Art. "The Day of Judgment."
