This is the book of our life, to be opened after death, and from which we shall each of us be judged. The will, the heart, the love (for to our present purpose, these may be regarded as synonymous) is the essential part of man: the understanding, the thought, is but secondary. The state of the heart will determine the state of the man after death and forever. If the heart be filled with the love of evil rather than of good, then the man after death cannot but go amongst the evil: and the evil or wicked, thus collected together, form to themselves that state and place, which is called, in Scripture, hell. And such a state cannot but be an unhappy one, because it is the nature of evil to pain and torment the spirit—precisely as disease gives pain to the body; for evil is moral disease.
But what, now, it may be asked, is the kind of evil that produces this fearful consequence? Some are apt to think that destructive evil, or sin, is nothing less than the commission of some flagrant crime, or some act of open abominable wickedness: and that, consequently, those who are not guilty of such deeds are sufficiently safe. But the All-wise Saviour has not thus defined condemning sin. In the picture of the Judgment above presented, the condemned are not declared guilty of any heinous crimes, but only of a want of good deeds: it is not said what wickedness they have done, but only what goodness they have not done: "I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not." It was sufficient proof that they were evil, that they had done no good. And their doing no good, that
