I turned to another suffering one. He was a banker, who, through the misappropriation of the funds of his bank, had caused many hundreds of people to lose all their earnings. Many of these were aged people. They had trusted him and had put their money into his care, and he had betrayed their trust. He was a pitiful object to behold, so great was his remorse.

I passed on to another. This man was a capitalist, whom the world held very high, both socially and financially, but what a poor specimen of human being he felt he was now in spirit. Gone was all the wealth that had been secured for him through the grinding labor of poorly paid employees. Gone was the prestige of the world. Now he realized how many he could have blessed and made happy, had he lived according to the brotherhood of man. He remembered one of his employees, an old, broken-down widow. She had worked for him for nearly thirty years, he said, and he had paid her hardly enough to keep her body and soul together, and she was dead in poverty and of a broken heart. He realized that she was only one of hundreds whom he had robbed, and he was so rich he could have been a veritable father to all of them. He could have been a real channel through which God’s wealth could have been given freely, in exchange for their faithful work. Now he was bowed down in grief, in regret, in remorse. He could not even pray.

DURING all this time, chaos reigned everywhere. Parents and children became separated. Human beings no longer ruled in the cities, countries, nations, but all men were helpless things, scattered over the earth, pinned under timbers or crawling about in the darkness, feeling their way as if blind. The living and the dead huddled together, not knowing the one from the other—always the mourning and the crying of those who faced the judgment of their own souls, mingled with the noises of crashing walls and splintering trees; for even in the darkness the Book of Life was before them, every page being read in the light of memory, and there was no redress. The records stood as they were. The law of sowing and reaping was being fulfilled. Wherever they turned, the result of their wrong doing was pictured on their souls and they could only cry and mourn and plead for mercy.

Everywhere I looked anguish was stamped upon the features of those who had survived the great day of judgment, and all this