that justice is not deferred, and that everyone gets exactly his deserts in this life; but it would require a robust confidence or a hard heart to maintain these propositions while standing among the ruins of an Armenian village, or by the deathbed of innocence betrayed.  There is no doubt a sense in which it may be said that the ideal is the actual; but only when we have risen in thought to a region above the antitheses of past, present, and future, where “is” denotes, not the moment which passes as we speak, but the everlasting Now in the mind of God.  This is not a region in which human thought can live; and the symbolical eschatology of religion supplies us with forms in which it is possible to think.  The basis of the belief in future judgment is that deep conviction of the rationality of the world-order, or, in religious language, of the wisdom and justice of God, which we cannot and will not surrender.  It is authenticated by an instinctive assurance which is strongest in the strongest minds, and which has nothing to do with any desire for spurious “consolations";[67] it is a conviction, not merely a hope, and we have every reason to believe that it is part of the Divine element in our nature.  This conviction, like other mystical intuitions, is formless:  the forms or symbols under which we represent it are the best that we can get.  They are, as Plato says, “a raft” on which we may navigate strange seas of thought far out of our depth.  We may use them freely, as if they were literally true, only remembering their symbolical character when they bring us into conflict with natural science, or when they tempt us to regard the world of experience as something undivine or unreal.

It is important to insist on this point, because the extreme difficulty (or rather impossibility) of determining the true relations of becoming and being, of time and eternity, is constantly tempting us to adopt some facile solution which really destroys one of the two terms.  The danger which besets us if we follow the line of thought natural to speculative Mysticism, is that we may think we have solved the problem in one of two ways, neither of which is a solution at all.  Either we may sublimate our notion of spirit to such an extent that our idealism becomes merely a sentimental way of looking at the actual; or, by paring down the other term in the relation, we may fall into that spurious idealism which reduces this world to a vain shadow having no relation to reality.  We shall come across a good deal of “acosmistic” philosophy in our survey of Christian Platonism; and the sentimental rationalist is with us in the nineteenth century; but neither of the two has any right to appeal to St. John.  Fond as he is of the present tense, he will not allow us to blot from the page either “unborn to-morrow or dead yesterday.”  We have seen that he records the use by our Lord of the traditional language about future judgment.  What is even more important, he asserts in the strongest