by sacrifice, that He may judge His people.’  Never mind about the drapery, the symbolism, the expression in material forms with which that future judgment is arranged, in order that we may the more easily grasp it.  Remember that these pictures in the New Testament of a future judgment are highly symbolical, and not to be interpreted as if they were plain prose; but also remember that the heart of them is this, that there comes for Christian people as for all others, a time when the light will shine down upon their past, and will flash its rays into the dark chambers of memory, and when men will—­to themselves if not to others—­be revealed ’in the day when the Lord shall judge the secrets of men according to my Gospel.’

We have all experience enough of how but a few years, a change of circumstances, or a growth into another stage of development, give us fresh eyes with which to estimate the moral quality of our past.  Many a thing, which we thought to be all right at the time when we did it, looks to us now very questionable and a plain mistake.  And when we shift our stations to up yonder, and get rid of all this blinding medium of flesh and sense, and have the issues of our acts in our possession, and before our sight—­ah! we shall think very differently of a great many things from what we think of them now.  Judgment will begin at the house of God.

And there is the other thought, that the fire which reveals and tests has also in it a power of destruction.  Gold and silver will lose no atom of their weight, and will be brightened into greater lustre as they flash back the beams.  The timber and the stubble will go up in a flare, and die down into black ashes.  That is highly metaphorical, of course.  What does it mean?  It means that some men’s work will be crumpled up and perish, and be as of none effect, leaving a great, black sorrowful gap in the continuity of the structure, and that other men’s work will stand.  Everything that we do is, in one sense, immortal, because it is represented in our final character and condition, just as a thin stratum of rock will represent forests of ferns that grew for one summer millenniums ago, or clouds of insects that danced for an hour in the sun.  But whilst that is so, and nothing human ever dies, on the other hand, deeds which have been in accordance, as it were, with the great stream that sweeps the universe on its bosom will float on that surface and never sink.  Acts which have gone against the rush of God’s will through creation will be like a child’s go-cart that comes against the engine of an express train—­be reduced, first, to stillness, all the motion knocked out of them, and then will be crushed to atoms.  Deeds which stand the test will abide in blessed issue for the doer, and deeds which do not will pass away in smoke, and leave only ashes.  Some of us, building on the foundation, have built more rubbish than solid work, and that will be

  ’Cast as rubbish to the void
  When God has made the pile complete.’