But, try as Mr. Braxton would to set his minister’s closely applied doctrine from Scripture to the account of dyspepsia or neuralgia, he was unable to push from his mind certain convictions wrought therein by the peculiar manner in which some positions had been argued and sustained.  The subject taken by the minister, was that striking picture of the judgment given in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, from the thirty-first verse to the close of the chapter, beginning:  “When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:  and before him shall be gathered all nations:  and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.”  The passage concludes:  “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment:  but the righteous into life eternal.”

Now, although Mr. Braxton had complained of the literal application of this text, that term was hardly admissible, for the preacher waived the idea of a last general judgment, as involved in the letter of Scripture, and declared his belief in a spiritual signification as lying beneath the letter, and applicable to the inner life of every single individual at the period of departure from this world; adding, in this connection, briefly:  “But do not understand me as in any degree waiving the strictness of judgment to which every soul will have to submit.  It will not be limited by his acts, but go down to his ends of life—­to his motives and his quality—­and the sentence will really be a judgment upon what he is, not upon what he has done; although, taking the barest literal sense, only actions are regarded.”

In opening and illustrating his text, he said, farther:  “As the word of God, according to its own declarations, is spirit and life—­treats, in fact, by virtue of divine and Scriptural origin, of divine and spiritual things, must we not go beneath the merely obvious and natural meaning, if we would get to its true significance?  Is there not a hunger of the soul as well as of the body?  May we not be spiritually athirst, and strangers?—­naked, sick, and in prison?  This being so, can we confidently look for the invitation, ’Come, ye blessed of my Father, if our regard for the neighbor have not reached beyond his bodily life?  If we have never considered his spiritual wants and sufferings, and ministered thereto according to our ability?  Just in the degree that the soul is more precious than the body, is the degree of our responsibility under this more interior signification of Scripture.  The mere natural acts of feeding the hungry and giving water to the thirsty, of visiting the sick, and those who lie in prison, of clothing the naked and entertaining strangers, will not save us in our last day, if we have neglected the higher duties involved in the divine admonition.  Nor will even the supply of spiritual nourishment to hungry and thirsty souls be accounted