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| Chapter XXX.
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Chapter XXX.
But what a spectacle is that fast-approaching
advent377
of our Lord, now owned by all, now highly
exalted, now a triumphant One! What that exultation of the angelic
hosts! What the glory of the rising saints! What the kingdom of the
just thereafter! What the city New Jerusalem!378
| 378 [This New
Jerusalem gives Bp. Kaye (p. 55) “decisive proof” of
Montanism, especially as compared with the Third Book against Marcion.
I cannot see it, here.] | Yes,
and there are other sights: that last day of judgment, with its
everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of
their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many
products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle
then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? what my
derision? Which sight gives me joy? which rouses me to
exultation?—as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose
reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the
lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore
witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who
persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with
which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of
Christ. What world’s wise men besides, the very philosophers, in
fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in ought that
is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no
souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death
they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as
one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the
judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I
shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians,
louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much
more “dissolute” in the dissolving flame; of looking upon
the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the
wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows;
unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin,
in my eager wish rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury
vented itself against the Lord. “This,” I shall say,
“this is that carpenter’s or hireling’s son, that
Sabbath-breaker, that Samaritan and devil-possessed! This is He whom
you purchased from Judas! This is He whom you struck with reed and
fist, whom you contemptuously spat upon, to whom you gave gall and
vinegar to drink! This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away,
that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted,
that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of
visitants!” What quæstor or priest in his munificence will
bestow on you the favour of seeing and exulting in such things as
these? And yet even now we in a measure have them by faith in the
picturings of imagination. But what are the things which eye has not
seen, ear has not heard, and which have not so much as dimly dawned
upon the human heart? Whatever they are, they are nobler, I believe,
than circus, and both theatres,379
| 379 Viz., the theatre and
amphitheatre. [This concluding chapter, which Gibbon delights to
censure, because its fervid rhetoric so fearfully depicts the
punishments of Christ’s enemies, “appears to Dr. Neander to
contain a beautiful specimen of lively faith and Christian
confidence.” See Kaye, p. xxix.] | and every
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