"A vital doctrine of our religion": A Hackney Phalanx sermon on the last things

For today's post, another extract from an 1818 sermon by John Lonsdale, associated with the Hackney Phalanx, on the occasion of the death of Queen Caroline. Lonsdale here challenges stereotypes of the late Georgian Church promoted both by Tractarians and evangelicals, with their accounts of a Church and a dominant theology exclusively defined by natural theology and moralising sermons. In stark contrast to such narratives, Lonsdale - in the midst of a sermon for a time of civic and national mourning - appeals to "the far surer guide" of revelation in order to give a vibrant exposition of the final judgement and the life everlasting:

Nor will Reason ever permit us to entertain such unworthy notions of God's attributes, (for I will not suppose the case of direct Atheism) as to believe that he may have impressed our nature with these feelings and faculties merely to deceive us; to buoy us up into a vain imagination that we have another state to look to, after the curtain has been drawn over this narrow and clouded scene; when in fact we were created only that we might pass a few years in the midst of ignorance and inquietude, and then sink for ever into dust and nothingness. 

But why do I appeal to Nature and Reason to aid us in our search after a truth, to which we have a far surer guide? We are, be it remembered, Christians; and Christianity sets the question before us at rest in a moment. If we are at a loss to decide to what further point the contemplation of our certain mortality should immediately lead us, the Apostle in the text will briefly, but very clearly, instruct us. It is appointed unto men once to die; but after this the judgment. What a bright, what an awful light, my brethren, bursts upon us here at once! What a soul-awakening reflection is it, that, when we have gone down to the chambers of death, we shall not sleep there that eternal sleep, which is the wretched, and the only hope of profligacy, but shall hear the voice of Him, who has the keys of hell and of death, summoning us to give an account of the things done in the body, in short, of our whole moral conduct here, as creatures by nature rational and accountable! How vast is the idea, that there is a King of kings, and Lord of lords, before whose tribunal the mightiest monarch, and poorest slave, that ever lived, will stand stripped of their distinctions! 

... How faint, how mean, how contemptible does the most gorgeous description of earthly grandeur ever drawn by human eloquence appear, when compared with the tremendous sublimity of this representation! Well might Felix tremble, surrounded as he was with the insignia of worldly power, when his poor prisoner Paul "reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come". And well may they tremble with him, who having this prospect before them, yet persist in practices strictly forbidden by the laws of Him who will preside in that universal judgment. But the fact is, that they who are determined not to abandon their vices, shut their eyes against this intractable truth; and seem to flatter themselves that wilful blindness will excuse, instead of aggravating disobedience.

This is part of the deceitfulness of sin. And it is painful to consider that any teachers of Christianity should aid the delusion, by bringing this doctrine into view so rarely, that, if any one were to form his notion of the tenor of Scripture from their statement of it, he might be led to suppose that a future judgment of men according to their works was a thing either not named at all, or but slightly and obscurely intimated in the Gospel of Christ. Certain however it is, that in the whole aspect of that Gospel there is no feature more prominent than this; no truth more frequently inculcated, more strongly insisted upon, or more clearly explained either by our Lord or his Apostles. It is indeed a vital doctrine of our religion.