In many cases it will be a complete and immediate reversal of all earthly conditions.  Some who in this world wore patched apparel will take on raiment lustrous as a summer noon.  Some who occupied a palace will take a dungeon.  Division regardless of all earthly caste, and some who were down will be up, and some who were up will be down.  Oh, what a shattering of conventionalities!  What an upheaval of all social rigidities, what a turning of the wheel of earthly condition, a thousand revolutions in a second!  Division of all nations, of all ages, not by the figure 9, nor the figure 8, nor the figure 7, nor the figure 6, nor the figure 5, nor the figure 4; but by the figure 2.

Two!  Two characters, two destinies, two estates, two dominions, two eternities, a tremendous, an all-comprehensive, an all-decisive, and everlasting two!

I sometimes think that the figure of the book that shall be opened allows us to forget the thing signified by the symbol.  Where is the book-binder that could make a volume large enough to contain the names of all the people who have ever lived?  Besides that, the calling of such a roll would take more than fifty years, more than a hundred years, and the judgment is to be consummated in less time than passes between sunrise and sunset.  Ah! my friends, the leaves of that book of judgment are not made out of paper, but of memory.  One leaf in every human heart.  You have known persons who were near drowning, but they were afterward resuscitated, and they have told you that in the two or three minutes between the accident and the resuscitation, all their past life flashed before them—­all they had ever thought, all they had ever done, all they had ever seen, in an instant came to them.  The memory never loses anything.  It is only a folded leaf.  It is only a closed book.

Though you be an octogenarian, though you be a nonagenarian, all the thoughts and acts of your life are in your mind, whether you recall them now or not, just as Macaulay’s history is in two volumes, although the volumes may be closed, and you can not see a word of them, and will not until they are opened.  As in the case of the drowning man, the volume of memory was partly open, or the leaf partly unrolled; in the case of the judgment the entire book will be opened, so that everything will be displayed from preface to appendix.

You have seen self-registering instruments which recorded how many revolutions they had made and what work they had done, so the manufacturer could come days after and look at the instrument and find just how many revolutions had been made, or how much work had been accomplished.  So the human mind is a self-registering instrument, and it records all its past movements.  Now that leaf, that all-comprehensive leaf in your mind and mine this moment, the leaf of judgment, brought out under the flash of the judgment throne, you can easily see how all the past of our lives in an instant will be seen.  And so great and so resplendent will be the light of that throne that not only this leaf in my heart and that leaf in your heart will be revealed at a flash, but all the leaves will be opened, and you will read not only your own character and your own history, but the character and history of others.