"Life's Stages: Their Duties and Opportunities." By James Stark; Minister of Belmont Congregational Church. Aberdeen: 1889.
(1.) THE END WHICH IS THE BEGINNING
(1a.) It is related of a traveler that, on visiting the catacombs of Rome, he was by some mischance separated from his guide, and was lost among the intricate passages and lonesome scenes of that ancient underground cemetery. As he was groping his way, with considerable fluttering of feeling, caused by the associations of the place, and the thought of possible entombment while he was yet alive, he dimly descried what his terrified imagination took to be a skeleton advancing towards him. The horror of the situation was too much for him; he fainted. But the lapse of consciousness being but for a moment, he woke in the light of the searchers who had come for his rescue.
(1b.) Is not that incident a suggestive picture of what death is in prospect, and also in actual experience, to the man who is prepared for it? It is but a mediator between the lower and loftier life. Death is an end which there is the inevitable pang of dissolution and separation from the visible and familiar environment, which, however, is much more dreadful in the distance than at hand, and is also but the momentary prelude to a glorious beginning in another state of existence. It is fainting and awakening in the light of the searchers who come for our rescue.
(1c.) Why should there be this instinctive recoil from death, which even faith does not always completely overcome? If mortality be a purely natural necessity, “a payment of the debt of nature,” as was generally affirmed by heathen writers of ancient times, and is taught by non-Christian thinkers of our own day, it is one to which man at least has a difficulty in reconciling himself. Does not the Scriptural conception of death, as having something to do with human sin and divine displeasure, go deeper down, and account more reasonably for that aversion to death as it comes to us, which unquestionably does exist in the human breast? It is moral element in death which imparts to it its tragic solemnity. Had there been no “fall,” there would have been doubtless some kind of dissolution, but not death as we know it. “The sting of death is sin.”
(1d.) But is a man has gained the “victory” over sin, “through our Lord Jesus Christ,” two things happen in his experience; he at the expiry of his earthly lease is willing if not eager to go, and at the same time he has a confident expectation that in going his life is simply passing into an unknown but higher sphere.
(1e.) In the first place, he can give a good reason when old age has been reached for going out of this world. Both he and it are to each other as spent forces. They have nothing more to get from one another. Human life here as a whole is a stage which is outgrown, just as were the minor and successive stages of which it was composed. A man cannot ever be a child – life must go on. So he cannot ever be a denizen of the earth – life must go on.
(1f.) Why not go on in this present scene? Because eternal life is not mere monotonous everlastingness. It is progressive change, augmented interest, higher development, under fitting circumstances. The cradle, and the nursery with it toys, serve their purpose as incidents, not as permanent interests in life; and just as man becomes a stranger to them, so he last becomes a “stranger upon the earth.”
(1g.) What a tender pathos there is in the strangeness that comes from exhausted use! What paradox there is in life, -familiar, yet strange! Yet is it not so? I take up the books of famous authors which I read and mastered at college. I turn over the leaves languidly. I cannot now read them with the same avidity. I wonder why the spell does not work, why the charm is gone. I ask myself the question: Are they changed? No, don’t you see the old marks and pencillings of favourite passages? Am I changed then? Yes, the explanation lies there! Those works in their thought and essence have gone into me. Their genius and spirit are part of the structure and capital of my intellectual life. The printed page has lost its power because it has served its purpose. Those paper leaves in worn and soiled bindings are to me what the moulted feathers are to the bird, which it leaves behind as it soars.
(1h.) The world drops us and we drop it when we are done with each other. If a man has been living to profit, he becomes independent of the world as he advances in years. It is less to him because it has been so much to him. Its scenes, its treasures, its pursuits, are not the same that they once were, as they have to a great extent yielded up their contents to him and are wrapt up in himself. The world becomes more or less husk, the kernel is parted from it and transmuted into the vital force of his own being. We have a certain regard for an outworn garment, as it was so closely associated with us, yet we put it aside. The student passes by certain books in his library with a feeling which may be described as fondly indifferent. He seldom reads them-they are in him. He has a kind of sentimental reluctance to dispose of them, however, and probably they will stand upon the shelves till he is taken from them, rather that they from him. In like manner the earth, and all its contents, fulfils its ministry in and for a man in the course of years, and while his own reason as well as the teaching of Scripture tell him that it is fitting he should go, yet there is a vague yearning for the old earth, and a pensive pleasure in its scenes, which brings a tear to the eye even as the heart smiles and is exultant at the prospect of heaven’s promotion, of which death is a signal.
(1i.) By why be so confident of a life beyond the grave? Because the soul is not done with itself though the outworn body is about to break down. While the man who is truly and profoundly alive admits the wisdom of departure from this world after a season, he feels that there is that in him which could go on if only, as he believes is really the case, another world and another body were provided for him. The old man who is a Christian is exhausted in relation to this world, but not in relation to life. The sheath is worn, but the sword has not lost temper and edge. As Bushnell says: “Observing how long the soul-force goes on to expand after the body-force has reached its maximum, and when disease and age have began to shatter the frail house it inhabits, how long it braves these bodily decrepitudes, driving on, still on like a strong engine in a poorly-timbered vessel, through seas not too heavy for it, but only for the crazy hulk it impels,-observing this, and making due account of it, we should be the more impressed with a sense of some inherent everlasting power of growth and progress in its endless life.”
(1j.) But some say this sense of unending and expanding life is no more than a disguised belief in the perpetual freshness and energy, not of men, but of man. It is a knowledge of the continuity and progress of the race, to which our personal life has been a contribution, like a rill that empties itself into the river, and is present and yet lost in the larger current. Our work, memory, and influence remain, and as we pass away we are to comfort ourselves with the thought that death is a contrivance by which the world is delivered from the encumbering presence of those whose force is spent, to obtain the services of another generation, young and strong.
“On storms my strong-limbed race, Pause for me is nigh; Long on earth will man have place, Not much longer I; Thousand summers kiss the lea, Only one the sheaf; Thousand springs may deck the tree, Only one the leaf, One, but one, and that one brief.”
(1k.) Does that impersonal and shadowy kind of immortality appease the hunger of your heart for life? Are you content, and is it sublime in you to be content to pass away like a snowflake on the stream? No, magnanimous self-sacrifice is not self-extinction, but self-devotion to noble ends. That is a spurious unselfishness which depreciates personality. It is like the cure of disease by the infliction of death. It is not Judas the suicide, but Paul the brave wrestler, who longs to live that he may love and serve, who is the type of manly heroism. This doctrine of immortality only in the race is the spawn of fantastic and diseased sentiment; it is a fiction coined in the mint of despair; it is a speculative subterfuge known only to philosophers, and is at once repudiated as a counterfeit immortality by the honest robust common sense of men who put less dependence upon the overstrained “conceits of the closet” than upon the unsophisticated instincts of the race. “What is the triumph-the outcomes of the nineteenth century culture? All that we can do upon this scheme is to live our little span, wisely if we will, happily if we may, and then drop down with all our being and belongings, with all the power which we have trained, and all the treasure which we have gathered, into the all-devouring night.” Is not the “wisdom” of this world folly?
(2.) A plea then is put for personal immortality. On what ground is it advanced? Let us proceed cautiously to clear our ground, and be content at first with this negative position: IT WOULD REQUIRE TO BE PROVED THAT BODY AND SOUL, MATTER AND MIND, ARE IDENTICAL BEFORE IT COULD BE AFFIRMED THAT THE END OF MAN’S LIFE HERE IS NOT ITS BEGINNING ELSEWHERE.
(2a.) It is an undeniable fact that mind has not been resolved into matter. The materialist, the man who maintains that everything that is in man and the universe can be accounted for by a reference to the properties of what is called matter, is obliged to call our faith into exercise in order to the acceptance of his propositions. He cannot prove that thought is an attribute of matter, that the one springs out of the other, that consciousness needs nothing more than a physical organism to account for it. He can, indeed, furnish us with evidence of the fact that a certain condition of the particles of the brain is at present necessary to thought, and that there cannot be thought without coinciding action on the part of the material organism. A man who is stunned cannot think till he recover from the physical disarrangement caused by the blow. But that does not prove more than that mind and body dwell together, and have entered into partnership-have made a kind of communistic arrangement. When the materialist goes farther and asserts identify, he brings in an assumption-calls for faith. The gulf between matter which has not the qualities of mind, and thought which has not extension and visibility is admittedly-the highest scientific authorities themselves being witnesses-as wide and impassable in the nineteenth century as it was in the days of Socrates and Plato. Professor Tyndal allows that there is a chasm between brain action and consciousness: “Here is a rock upon which materialism must split when it pretends to be a complete philosophy of the human mind.” It requires more faith to believe that matter is mind than that mind is matter.
(3.) But we can go father, carrying war into the enemy’s camp, can affirm: THAT THERE IS THAT IN MAN WHICH IS NOT IN THE MATERIAL SYSTEM GENERALLY, VIZ., THE ABSENCE OF NECESSITY OR, PUTTING IS POSITIVELY, THE PRESENCE OF MORAL FREEDOM.
(3a.) Nature speaks to us in the imperative mood. She herself has no freedom. All her operations are pre-ordained and unavoidable sequences. She cannot do other than she does. She has no mind or will of her own, but is slavishly obedient to the behests of-well, we will not say an Unseen Presence, for that might be disputed, but-an established order. No one thinks of imputing blame to nature when is sucks us into its whirlpools, lashes us with its tempests, buries us under its avalanches, scorches us with its lava, fevers us with its malaria, or poisons us with its deadly herbs. We sometimes, indeed, speak of “relentless” nature, but when we do so it is with a clear knowledge of the fact that we are using a figure of speech.
(3b.) But there is no poetical license in affirming that Nero the Roman Emperor was an atrociously cruel monster, whose desert it is to be execrated by every reader of history. What is the difference between Nero’s treatment of the Christians and nature’s treatment of us as she sweeps us before a terrific tornado? The only answer is that Nero had that which the physical system has not, freedom, responsibility, a moral nature. The words conscience, reason, will, proclaim the difference. He could have done other than he did. Philosophers, by their metaphysical subtleties, may try to confuse the issue, but however ingenious their fine-spun speculations, they only make themselves laughing-stocks among their fellows when they have the hardihood to push their fatalistic or necessitarian theories into society. Our police, our prisons, our penal settlements, are the most effective reply to those reasonings which tend to undermine human responsibility. Society would be in a state of chaos to-morrow if the assumption were to be generally accepted that the wrong-doer could not be a right-doer. What is remorse but the acknowledgement, extorted from the wrong-doer’s own nature, that he might and ought to have done other than he did. The “ought,” not the “must” of the physical universe, is the distinguishing glory of man, and the irrefragable proof that he has a nature other than that which he sees in the perishable world around him. It is the shame of man that he should break the appointed order of things. It is his glory that he can do it; for it proves that while there is much in him that he shares with nature, and is subject to its conditions, he being obliged to die like the flower and all material existences around him, yet there is something else in him which does not partake in the characteristics of what the senses unfold to the view. There is the consciousness of personality. “The law of physical science can never, therefore, become a moral and spiritual law of mankind.” There is something in men which does not belong to things as we know them in this world. It is for that something which is not the same as that which dies, that we claim immunity from death’s fell stroke.
(4.) Still farther: MAN HAS A SENSE OF IMMORTALITY OR A FUTURE LIFE JUST AS HE HAS A SENSE OF THE PRESENT WORLD.
(4a.) The soul may be said to have its “senses” as well as the body. There are certain instinctive beliefs, fundamental conceptions, permanent convictions of the race, which do for the unseen world what the senses do for the material world. Every one who has but an elementary acquaintance with philosophy is aware of the fact that the veracity of consciousness cannot be scientifically demonstrated. We believe that our bodily organs and the interpreter within do not deceive us, but correctly present facts to us as they are in the outlying world. We trust our senses in dealing with things sensuous. Should we not in the like manner trust the primitive conviction, the universal persuasion and ingrained desire in the human breast with reference to immortality? It is questionable if reasoning can do much to strengthen this inborn sentiment of belief. Greg, the author of the “Creed of Christendom,” said he was always more sure of immortality, when he did not argue about it.
(4b.) Belief, a sentiment or conviction which seems to be a part of man himself, and which cannot give a better account of itself than that it is,-that, and not mathematical certainty, is the basis of human life and action. We believe in the reality of the external world; but, as Berkley’s reasoning shows, we cannot logically prove it. We believe in the permanency of the laws of nature, the stability of the constitution and course of things, but it is not so certain to us that the sun will rise to-morrow as that two and two make four. I saw a man this spring actually throwing away his seed upon the ploughed ground. True, he expected his own back again with usury. What was his security? Faith in the continuity and benevolence of the system into which he threw his seed. When I have to die, I hope to be able to give as much practical effect to my instinctive belief in disposing of my personality as the farmer did in disposing of his seed. My faith will be a venture, but not more than was his. He has his own observation and the experience of mankind on which to ground his assurance. I have the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and its undeniable effects upon the history of the world, along with the evidence of my own spiritual consciousness on which to build my hope.
(4c.) It must be candidly owned that the sense in the human heart of an unending life is a light that is somewhat eclipsed at the present time. There are various causes for the persistent doubt which haunts and depresses the present generation. In every age the young, the healthy, and the prosperous cannot be said, speaking generally, to have a very vivid and influential sense of a future state. The glories of the celestial world are not seen to perfection till the sun sinks in the west, and much of the brightness of the earth passes away. “First that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual.” There are rare and choice spirits whose intimacy with the eternal world, begun in childhood, is maintained through all the stages of life till by death faith is lost in vision. Many men, however, have to go “through their day of pleasure, the school of adversity, through the inexorable developments of long years,” before the unseen world becomes to them the reality of life, and this transitory scene the unsubstantial shadow. What lies in the foreground of life is considered to be quite enough to occupy the mind and satisfy the heart, and the thought of another world comes up like a pale phantom at a feast.
(4d.) In addition to this natural but foolish and culpable disinclination to pay due heed to another world until our interest in the present one is somewhat exhausted or impaired, a belief in that for which the senses supply us with no evidence, is clogged by the dead-weight of an extraordinary development and over-pressure of interest in the material world that has taken place in the present century. Men are dazzled by the wonders natural science has disclosed, and the prodigious feats it has performed. More has been done during the last fifty years by scientific researchers and achievements to press the material side of life upon our view, and so to give a colour to our thought and feeling, than any previous thousand years of the world’s history could unfold.
(4e.) Soul and body being bound up together in man, sense and faith have both to be exercised; but it is exceedingly difficult for him to preserve the balance at any time, more especially when earth is pouring and thrusting its treasures upon him, and making him the object of its spoils and enchantments in a way unheard of in the past. Faith is, therefore, put to a disadvantage in the present day, amidst the excitements and pleasures that abound. A belief in the existence of the unseen has a struggle to maintain such as it never had before against the world, the flesh and the devil. Unless a man is at special pains, by seasons of prayer and reflection, to do justice to both sides of his nature, holding the intrusive and garish world of sense in its place, and encouraging the more ethereal part of himself to come forth and speak out, the finer and spiritual instincts within him will be over-borne. The tendency of scientific men, according to the testimony of one of themselves, is to “concentrate all their minds in their eyes and hands,” and they are setting a fashion which we must resist, if we would not sell our birthright for a mess of pottage. Here is the testimony of a Christian scientist: “I find that if for a few weeks I remit my scientific studies and habits, I am conscious of a certain loss of power, loss of delicacy of scientific perception and appreciation of facts; and if this is so in my scientific life, can I wonder that suspension of care and prayer and watchfulness should have a similar effect on my spiritual life?”
(4f.) Man is weak, and it is easy for him to go wrong, to be partial in his thinking, disproportionate, one-sided in his views. “Think long about a thing and you will end by thinking of nothing but that.” Darwin himself admitted that absorbing research in the physical sphere, unbalanced and unregulated by other studies, had disqualified him for some of the literary and sentimental pleasure he once enjoyed. He was to them as a “withered leaf.” The man whose daily duty it is to analyse the body, handle tissue, and bring all that engages his attention under the microscope, is tempted to say there is no spiritual world, all the more if he makes himself the mere tool and drudge of his profession. While, therefore, we are respectful to scientists on account of the undoubted facts which they furnish, we must not be too much impressed by their general reasoning, when there is room for the bias and colour which predominating and ill-regulated feeling imparts.
(4g.) But a deeper philosophy is beginning to prevail amongst the leaders in natural science. The vastness, the awful grandeur, the infinite exactitude, the profound significance, taken along with the impenetrable background of mystery in creation, are humbling the most daring explorers, and begetting in them the conviction which Newton, their master, so well expressed, when he said he was but a little child who had gathered a few pebbles on the sea-shore, the illimitable ocean beyond being to him untraversed and unknown. There are some approaching the subject on the scientific side who are beginning to think that the sensuous may be but the veil of the spiritual world, and believe, as Blanco White expresses it in him inimitable sonnet, that death may be a revealer like night:
“Mysterious night! when our first parent knew; Thee from divine report, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame; This glorious canopy of light and blue, Yet ‘neath a curtain of translucent dew; Bathed in the rays of the great setting sun, Hesperus with the host of heaven came; And, lo! creation widened in man’s view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed; Within thy beams, O sun? or who could find, Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed; That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind? Why do we then shun death with endless strife? If light could thus deceive, wherefore not life?”
(5.) THERE MUST BE IMMORTALITY FOR MAN, ELSE HIS CONDITION IN THIS WORLD GIVES NO EVIDENCE OF THAT SUPREME WISDOM AND GOODNESS WITH WHICH THE SYSTEM OF THINGS IS GENERALLY CREDITED.
(5c.) As a creature whose duration was not to extend over threescore years and ten, man, in nature given to him, is immensely overweighted. There is much in him that is superfluous. He has more motive power than the occasions of time can call out. There is not room in the theatre of this world for all the parts of the human drama. What mean those yearnings after the eternal and unseen which, do what he may, he cannot eradicate from his nature? What mean those aspirations and better moral moods which open up to him glimpses of a higher life? Although you never saw a bird except in a cage, you would still be able to conclude that it was intended by its Maker to roam in a larger amplitude of space than the bars afforded, from the circumstance that it had wings, and sometimes used them in dashing itself against what stood between it and the “larger room.” Man’s yearnings and aspirations that will not be satisfied with the present are to him what wings are to the caged bird. Taking man as we know him to be into connection with the assumption of his non-immortality, he is like an oak planted in a garden flower-pot; he resembles a creature who has the wings of an eagle joined to the body of a sparrow or barn-door fowl, or a spirited steed yoked to a child’s toy cart. There is a want of proportion between the grandeur of his nature and the paltriness of his destiny, if he is only a creature of threescore years and ten.
(5d.) No creature except man, so far as we know, leaves this world with a wealth of capability undisclosed and unexhausted. Latent power means further development, does it not? Beasts and trees spend themselves as a rule before they die. How many human beings leave this world with untold wealth in their natures, which they have had no opportunity of putting upon the counter of time.
(5e.) Man’s better nature is “cribbed, cabined, and confined” here. If there is no future sphere where expansion and rectification will take place, where wrongs shall be redressed, high-handed and unabashed wickedness punished, down-trodden virtue upheld and rewarded, then things in their original structure and design are sadly out of joint.
(5f.) But is it not incredible that our idea of what ought to be in man should transcend what actually is, when exactly the reverse of that holds good over all the rest of creation? Is there not splendor in the realities of nature which cast our imaginings into the shade? Here is my idea of what ought to be in man,-there are the facts of life. They do not correspond. Is there to be no correspondence in the future to resolve the balance between the ideal and the actual in this present life? Things in God’s universe are usually far ahead of our preconceived notions. But it would appear, if man is not immortal, that the system of things in some important respects sinks far below the level of what we can picture and desire for ourselves. Can this be believed? Is the visionary magnificence of the human mind to have no counterpart in the actual framework of things? Is the poetry of life a mere spark from the anvil of my own thought, and is the spark to eclipse all the luminaries of heaven? Is there nothing
“Beyond the verge of that blue sky; Where God’s sublimest secrets lie,”
to equal those glimmerings of grandeur and blessedness in my own bosom? Is it to be assumed that we finite creatures can conceive something better for ourselves than what the Infinite One has actually provided for His children? Are our expectations to beggar the resources of the universe? No, it is flatly inconceivable that the finite can outside the infinite. Therefore, I conclude that the God who made me and dowered me with that wealth of desire and hope, has placed somewhere in my future a real attainable good that answers to what is in my own mind. I cannot believe that the best part of life, its poetry, its glory, its heaven, is a delusion, a light to lure me on to despair, else
“The pillared firmament is but rottenness; And earth’s base built on stubble.”
(5g.) On the other hand is it not an argument of very considerable weight in favour of the Christian revelation that, putting aside the moment the question of its historic reality and objective validity, it, simply as a conception, suits the deepest and noblest parts and extremest needs of man. If it is a vision, an ideal only, it is remarkable in this that it has more to recommend it than most facts and truths. It fits and agrees and hangs together with what is best for man. There is no conceivable good that the Gospel of Christ does not hail and welcome as something to be embraced within its scope and added to its estate. The Gospel is all that could be desired, if only it could be proved to be grounded in reality. Is that general admission not a gain? “Deep calleth unto deep,” our nature and the revelation that professes to be from above meet and are one. The best that is in us and the best that is in the old Book stand or fall together. Its rejection is our confession. Prove it and be unworthy of acceptance and the question of the psalmist may be pressed: “Wherefore hast Thou made all men in vain?”
(6.) EVERY ONE FOR HIMSELF THROUGH CHRIST CAN HAVE THE BEGINNING OF WHAT HE KNOWS IS AN UNENDING LIFE BEFORE THE EARTHLY END COMES.
(6a.) It is not necessary that we should accept the theory of conditional immortality to maintain that life in Christ does immeasurably deepen our sense of immortality. A great deal can unquestionably be said in favour of the opinion that the man who neglects his opportunity and persistently refuses to live in the higher regions of his being, may, on the principle that capacity is extirpated by prolonged disuse, gradually “destroy himself.” But let us in the meantime confine our attention to the positive aspect of the doctrine of “Life in Christ,” which is certainly more practical.
(6b.) The teaching of Scripture is that if a man knows God as He is revealed in Christ, gets an experience of His love, enters into His communion, participates in His character, and lives for the fulfillment of His purposes, he has within himself that life which never dies. That is what Christ said to Martha: “Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.” Christ says little about mere duration, continued existence, immortality, as He has nothing to do with empty negations. It is life that is His favourite idea. Immortality is not with Him the conclusion of the logician or the guess of the sage, but the attribute of that life which is the peculiar possession of God, and which He shares with those who are children as well as creatures. It is life that is timeless, everlasting, lifted above the conditions and accidents of earthly existence, but the stress is laid upon its quality or character, not its duration.
(6c.) Now it is possible for us, through Jesus Christ, to enter into such personal relations with God, and to have our natures so enriched and expanded by communications from Him as to have a sense of immortality that is simply unconquerable. Our growing oneness with God makes us feel that God and we must go on together. We cannot think of a separation. Our interest in life is now inexhaustible as God Himself, His truth and love is the treasure of the soul. We have a basis of life that is indestructible. We can no more conceive of our death than of God’s. As Thomas More puts it:
“But souls that of His own good life partake, He loves as His own self; dear as His eye; They are to Him; He’ll never them forsake, When they shall die, then God Himself shall die.”
He and we live for each other. Would He take ephemera into His confidence? Would He shake heaven and earth to bring salvation to creatures who are put out of existence soon after it began to work within them? The intimacy begun between us and God must have a future in which to ripen. The Incarnation and the Cross demand something more proportionate to their momentousness than what the few imperfect years of this life afford. Grace is our title-deed as immortals.
(6d.) It is thus possible for us, by having a vivid sense of God, to have a strong sense of eternal life. We make sure of life’s breadth by making sure of its depth and height. Living and walking with God, the road must stretch beyond the grave. We have thus within ourselves the power of augmenting immeasurably the vital force of our being, as faith is strengthened and spirituality is deepened. He who lives a mere animal life has comparatively little difficulty in believing that his end shall be like that of an animal. A man may easily part with his birthright if he becomes one of earth’s grovellers. If he lose that fine sense of the divine, his intellect will soon furnish him with some plausible pretext for the rejection of the doctrine of immortality, and he will stand naked and not ashamed; but let “the inner life of the spirit awake and the intellect’s verdict will be intolerable, and the length and breadth of his nature will not be said nay.” What wealth and range of responsiveness there is in the human beast! Place a human being into a relationship that comes within the scope of his natural affinities, and there is something in the heart that will some welling up to answer it. The heart is ready for all sorts of providential occasions and opportunities. Filial affection is there ready for use. Parents rouse and exercise it. Love is there which the lovable calls out. Veneration is there; age and other forms of the veneration bring it into play. A yearning for the undying is there, and the Eternal God in Christ liberates, exalts, sustains, that implanted instinct.
(6e.) To one who has a clear vision and vivid sense of God as a Father who communes with His children, death is of no account; “he shall never die.” Death is a mere act or point of transition. It is only a shifting of the scene, not a displacement of the substance of life. It is not a renunciation of life, to be resumed at some future period.
“There is no death. What seems so is transition. This life of mortal breath. Is but a suburb of the life Elysian; Whose portal we call death.”
(6f.) Death to the Christian is thus a moral act. He consents to die. The animal or the worldling expires. The man of faith surrenders his soul to his God,-“Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit.” Oh! the grandeur of Christian faith. The man who has it can glorify God in decay and dissolution, and he is the only creature in the world who can do so. To step into what nature deems a void, a yawning abyss, horrible darkness; and yet by faith to fill it with the gracious and beneficent ministries of heaven is the very highest proof which the human mind is capable of giving of the sublimity of that faith with which Christ inspires mankind.
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(7a.) It does come within the scope of the present volume to consider the various questions connected with a future state of existence. Suffice it to say that Scripture plainly teaches that as we end so we begin. In old maps of the world you see large vacant spaces with “unexplored” upon them. Had any one the hardihood to attempt to construct a map of the unseen world, he would have to write the word “unrevealed,” as well as “unexplored,” over still larger spaces. It is no part of the design, and is indeed inconsistent with the genius of divine revelation as we have it, to afford full and definite information regarding the contents of a period which lies beyond our present economy and need. “Brisk curiosity” and speculative meddlesomeness receive no countenance from the Bible, which is intensely practical and immediately helpful in its aim. We must be content to accept a theology which is not a philosophy of the universe, nor yet a system of doctrine which exhaustively covers the whole area of eternity. Just as the calendar for this year has nothing to do with next year except to lead up to it, so Scripture studiously avoids questions that are more curious than practical, and declines to encumber itself with responsibilities as a divine oracle which do not belong to the present as affected by man’s thought and action. How very little, for example, is said in Scripture in describing heaven as a place or scene. It is the moral and spiritual aspects of the future state, not external details, that are presented to us in the Book of Revelation and other parts of the sacred volume. The canvas is given to the reader, and he can paint thereon scenes of magnificence and beauty such as the gorgeous imagery of Scripture suggests to his mind.
(7b.) But of this Scripture leaves us in no doubt, that we begin as we end, that there is a continuity in the life of man as a moral being which death does not break. We are what we have made ourselves by desire, prayer, and habit. No reconstruction of our external environment can alter the moral basis of life, which is what it is in the virtue of the power that we have as responsible beings of shaping our destiny. There is no magic in death. It is Christ and not death that makes us “new creatures.” Every one holds the key of his future in his own hands, according as he gives effect to self or Christ as the law of his life.
(7c.) When death overtakes us, each of us is like a traveller passing through the Mount Cenis tunnel. On the one side is the cold North, on the other the sunny South,-but the rail goes on without a break. The aspect of things is changed, personal identity and moral character are untouched. There is no error in the present day that is doing more to deaden the higher nature of man and put out the light of heaven than the incipient belief that somehow all will yet come right, whatever we be or do in this present life. Christians who propagate doctrine that has a leaning in that direction might be better employed, as they by their reckless speculations and vain dreams are diverting attention from those immediately practical objects which Christ and the Apostles deemed quite enough to occupy our attention and employ our energies during the few years of this present life. The profoundest thinkers and the men most to be valued as theologians take the position of Law, the English mystic, when he says: “’Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right’ is stronger support to my mind and a better guard against anxiety than the deepest discoveries that the most speculative, inquisitive minds have helped me to.”
(7d.) Things will come right if we, with the help of God, put them right. Ships do not drift into the haven. Why be so anxious to prove that drifting in the higher sphere of life may not be accompanied by the penalties which it brings with it elsewhere? Why be so anxious to convince ourselves that there may be a heaven in store for us thought we do not walk on the road that leads to it? Walking on the way is itself heaven begun on earth. “He that believeth on Me hath everlasting life.”
(7e.) To know and possess the Lord Jesus Christ as the ground and goal of our being is the supreme felicity of life. But He that has imparted this blessedness of experience and has begotten within us a new and profound interest in life, is the unfaltering witness for immortality. Our higher life for the present and our life for the future thus go together, and are bound up in Him who came into this world that we might have life and have it more abundantly.
(8a.) “He that hath found some fledged bird’s nest may know at first sight if the bird be flown; But what fair well or grove he sine in now that is to him unknown.” –Henry Vaughan.
(8b.) “Brethren rise; There is no home for us;
Till earth ne purified; We may not here abide;
We were not born for earth; The city of our birth;
The better paradise; Is far beyond the skies;
Upwards then let us soar; Cleaving to dust no more.”
(8c.) “Let us never hope to make anything more than heaven by our religion, nor ever be content to take anything less.” – Matthew Henry
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