University of Virginia Library

The prophecy of the Resurrection of the Real Cross to be borne by Angels in the Judgment, as the Sign of the Son of Man, was a lovely legend of the first fathers, and beautifully “bodied forth.” It would be a noble trophy, and, as they also said, a Memorial Pillar, worthy to stand in Paradise among the trees. They held, too, that every bishop and martyr of the Church would be caught up first to meet the Lord in the air, before the resurrection of the general dead, and so to follow the banner to the judgment, as men who are deemed worthy to “sit on thrones,” and “to judge angels and the world,” and to wait upon the Lord in that day, “as his ancients gloriously.” So aforetime they were laid in the ground—these men of noble name—not in the usual posture of the patient dead, who look towards the Orient to watch for the morning, but with their heads to the east and their faces to the west—for so the path of their Lord will be—in an attitude wherein they will be ready to bound from their biers like soldiers from their sleep, and to gather in immediate array around the Son of Man, to pour forth the buried music of their voices in psalms of thanksgiving, suddenly!

I recommend the slanderers of God's servants, before they again presume to revile the imaged death-bed of the Lord, to read, carefully and thoroughly, the works of Gretser, published in Latin, in seventeen folio volumes, at Ratisbon, 1734-41.