{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_25826/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_25826","id":"gutenberg_25826","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25826","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Religion/Spirituality","Eschatology"],"text":"E-text prepared by Al Haines\n\n\n\nTranscriber's Note:\n\n   The Greek words in this e-book have been transliterated according\n   to Project Gutenberg's Greek How-To.  Such words are indicated\n   with surrounding underscores.  There are a couple of instances\n   of author-transliterated Greek words.  Those words are bracketed\n   and not italicized.  Underscores are also used to indicate\n   italicization of words, but in this e-book such words are always\n   English words.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE GOSPEL OF THE HEREAFTER\n\nby\n\nJ. PATERSON-SMYTH, B.D., LL.D., LITT. D., D.C.L,\n\n  _Rector of St. Georges, Montreal, Late Professor\n  of Pastoral Theology, University of Dublin_\n\n  _Author of \"How We Got Our Bible,\" \"The\n  Old Documents and the New Bible,\" etc., etc., etc._\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew York ---- Chicago ---- Toronto\nFleming H. Revell Company\nLondon And Edinburgh\n\nCopyright, 1910, by\nFleming H. Revell Company\n\nNew York: 158 Fifth Avenue\nChicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.\nLondon: 21 Paternoster Square\nEdinburgh: 75 Princes Street\n\n\n\n\n_To My Wife_\n\n\n\n\nContents\n\n\nPART I\n\nTHE NEAR HEREAFTER\n\n    I.  \"I\"\n   II.  THE THREE STAGES OF EXISTENCE\n  III.  WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT THE NEAR HEREAFTER\n   IV.  WHAT THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH SAY ABOUT THE NEAR HEREAFTER\n    V.  THE CRISIS OF DEATH\n   VI.  \"I\" \"MYSELF\" AFTER DEATH\n  VII.  RECOGNITION\n VIII.  THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS\n   IX.  GROWTH AND PURIFICATION\n    X.  PROBATION IN THIS LIFE\n   XI.  MINISTRY IN THE UNSEEN LIFE\n  XII.  CONCLUSION\n\n\nPART II\n\nTHE FAR HEREAFTER\n\n    I.  THE JUDGMENT\n   II.  HELL\n  III.  HEAVEN\n\n\n\n\nPublishers' Note\n\nThis tenth American (and sixteenth British) edition has been carefully\nrevised and where necessary rewritten by the author.  We call special\nattention to an interesting note on page 108.\n\nThis year a Norwegian edition has been published, translated by Judge\nHambro of the Supreme Court of Norway assisted by the Bishops of\nChristiania and Trondheim.  Also request has been received for\npermission to translate the book for readers in Holland.  But more\ninteresting is a letter from a Brahmin gentleman in India asking\npermission to produce at his own cost an edition for his people and\ndedicated on the front page, \"TO MY SON, SEREM ALI, WHO IS NOW IN THE\nNEAR HEREAFTER.\"\n\n\n\n\nForeword\n\nThe Lord is risen, but the people do not know it.  There is no death,\nbut the people do not believe it.  Human life is the most exciting\nromantic adventure in the Universe, going on stage after stage till we\nare older than Methuselah and then on again through the infinite\neternities--and yet men pass into the Unseen as stupidly as the\ncaterpillar on the cabbage-leaf, without curiosity or joy or wonder or\nexcitement at the boundless career ahead.\n\nInstead of the thrill of coming adventure we have the dull grey\nmonotony of aged lives drawing near the close, and the horror of this\nwar is doubled and the torture of wife or mother as the beloved one\ncrosses the barrier.\n\nWhat is the matter with us, Christian people?  Do we not know?  Or have\nwe lost our beliefs? or has imagination grown dulled by too frequent\nrepetition of God's good news?\n\n      *      *      *      *      *\n\nIt was so different in early days when the world was younger, when\nChrist's revelation was fresh.  Look at St. John, four-score years and\nten, like an eager boy looking into the Great Adventure: \"Beloved, now\nare we the sons of God, and IT DOTH NOT YET APPEAR WHAT WE SHALL BE.\"[1]\n\nWhat we shall be!  What we shall be!  Is not that the chief delight of\nbeing young?  Guessing and hoping and wondering what we shall be.\n\nThe dreariest thing in life is dulness--monotony.  The brightest thing\nin life is outlook--vision.  And God has given us that.  Like St. John\nwe too can stand on the rim of the world and look out over the wall.\n\n      *      *      *      *      *\n\nLife is full of latent possibilities--of outlook, of romance, of\nexciting futures.  God has made it so, if we would only see it.  God's\nworld of nature has its continuous progress, its ever new and\nfascinating stages.  God's caterpillars in their next stage are going\nto be soaring butterflies--God's acorns are to become mighty\noaks--God's dry little seeds in the granary to-day will in autumn be\nalive in the waving harvests.  God's world of nature is full of\nromantic possibilities.\n\nAnd God's world of men is infinitely more so, and one of life's\ndelights is to know it and look forward to it guessing what we shall\nbe.  Outlook.  Vision.  That is what gives zest to life.  That is what\nwe need to make life bright and beautiful.\n\n      *      *      *      *      *\n\nI see a group of small boys sitting at their play, and their eyes are\nbright looking into the future.  They are going to be soldiers, and\nsailors, and circus riders, and travelers, and all sorts of things.\nBecause they are boys with the enthusiasms of boyhood, they may be\nanything.  All the possibilities of boyhood belong to them.  It doth\nnot yet appear what they shall be, but it is delightful to look forward\nand speculate about it.\n\n      *      *      *      *      *\n\nI see them again a dozen years later.  They are starting in life, just\nleft college, young soldiers and lawyers and curates and business\nmen--still with their visions and dreams of the future.  It doth not\nyet appear what they shall be, but because they are young men, all that\nbelongs to young manhood lies before them, as they look forward in\ntheir day-dreams.  What countries they shall live in and what girl they\nshall marry, and what positions and what work, and what excitements,\nand what pleasure lie before them.  Ah, it is delightful to be young,\nrealizing the possibilities in front--dreaming of what we shall be.\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nI see a crowd of older people, men and women dull, uninterested.  \"We\nare no longer young,\" they say, \"we are middle-aged or elderly.  And we\nhave ceased looking forward.  We have lost the vision.  We have not\nbecome as great as we expected, or as good as we expected.  We are\nfairly comfortable.  We have not much to complain of.  But life is a\nbit dull.  The path is a bit monotonous now.  We have traversed most of\nit.  We can see to the end.  There are no more romantic possibilities\nto make life exciting, no more visions of 'what we shall be.'\"\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nDon't believe it!  Not a word of it.  The visions are there all right.\nLook out over the wall.  This life of yours is only one of the stages\nin your career, and not the first stage, either.  The first came to\nyou, silent, unconscious, \"where the bones do grow in the womb of her\nthat is with child.\"  There you grew and developed for the next move\nforward.  One day came the crisis of birth and you passed into the\nsecond stage, the training stage for life and for God.  Then through a\nnew crisis you pass on again to new adventures.  For God has revealed\nthat what you call death, the end of this career, is but birth into a\nnew and more wondrous career which again passes you forward into still\nnobler adventures, and that again, perhaps--who knows?  Who shall fix\nthe limit?\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nNay, you are not elderly.  You are not middle-aged.  These are but\ncomparative terms.  A house-fly is elderly in twenty-four hours.  An\noak-tree is young after a hundred years.  And you, children of eternity\nwith ages and millenniums before you--you are not even one year old\nbabies in the light of your great future.\n\nNow do you see why the old apostle of Ephesus did not feel aged or\nelderly--why he looked out like an eager boy into the adventure before\nhim?  \"Beloved, now are we the sons of God but we don't know yet what\nwe shall be.\"  Aye, we don't know yet.  No more than did the small boys\nlaughing in their play and going to be soldiers and sailors and\nwonderful people.  We don't know yet.  But it is all before us.  And it\nis all going to be good because it is in the Father's presence.\n\nSo I bid you do what I sometimes do myself, look out into the void and\nguess like the children what you shall be when you are older than\nMethuselah.\n\nShake off the dulness and monotony from your life.  Don't talk as if\nold or middle-aged any more.  Be children again in the presence of the\nFather, and with happy child hearts keep guessing what you shall be.\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nI see a woman with the deep pain in her eyes, one of the many mothers\nwhom I have met in these terrible four years....  They were afraid to\ntell her when the War Office telegram came....  He had crept out in the\nnight to bring in a wounded chum, and the German sniper got him.  At\nfirst she could not believe it.  It must be some mistake,--some one of\nsimilar name.  But the days passed on.  And the light died in her eyes\nand she became suddenly old.  Her prayers ceased.  God had disappointed\nher.  There was nothing left to pray for now.  Nothing to be ambitious\nfor any more.  Her boy was dead--buried in a shallow grave in France\nwith a little wooden cross at his head.  And he was only twenty-two!\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nThe awful waste of it!  All her loving thought over his childhood--all\nher care, her anxiety, her efforts, her prayers that God would make him\na good and noble man.  All her hope and pride in the high promise of\nhis boyhood.  He was dead.  All that he might have been and done in the\nworld was lost.  Her life was forever desolate.  And God had let it\nhappen!\n\nKindly friends came to comfort and sympathise.  But it was of little\nuse.  They had not lost their boy.  They could not understand.  They\nbade her be proud that he had died in a noble cause--that he had died\nto save another.  They told her that time would bring a blessed easing\nto her pain.  They told her she must bow to God's mysterious will.\n\nAh! what is the use of it?  How can any outsider intermeddle in the\npain of a mother whose boy has just been killed?\n\n  Not all the talking since Adam\n  Can make death to be other than death.\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nGod help us all if there were no better comfort for a tortured world in\nthis hour of its bitterest need--to \"make death to be other than death.\"\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nShe was a brave woman.  She faced the issue clearly.  She talked with\nwise friends.  She came back to her prayers.  She recalled and\nrelearned the teaching of her Bible and her church which had lain\nhazily in memory till her need arose.  And gradually God's blessed\ncomfort came to her \"as to one whom his mother comforteth.\"  Slowly\npeace came to her heart, and in spite of her pain life became worth\nliving again....  He was a good boy.  He loved his God.  He loved his\nmother.  He had his faults, but she could trust Christ with them.  She\nhad had high ambitions for him.  Her ambitions came back.\n\nShe learned to think of him in the wondrous new adventure, living a\nfull conscious life, thinking and remembering, growing and becoming\nfitted for the eternal Heaven that is still in front.  She believed\nthat the high promise of his boyhood might be fulfilled after all, and\nthat she might one day see it.\n\nLife is still very desolate without him; but she believes that he lives\nand knows, that he is growing and going on--that he remembers her and\nloves her as never before, that he is waiting for her, perhaps watching\nover her as in his days on earth, even though he cannot write home.\nAnd trustfully, gratefully she remembers him in her prayers.  She\nthinks that the Heavenly Father is not likely to forget what a mother\nsays to Him about her son.\n\n    *    *    *    *    *\n\nThis book is a poor, imperfect attempt to put together some of the\nteachings of our holy religion, to help a troubled world, in this day\nof its necessity, \"to look out over the wall.\"\n\n\n\n[1] John iii. 2.\n\n\n\n\nPART I\n\nThe Near Hereafter\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\n\"I\"\n\nThe title of this chapter is a very short one.  It consists of but a\nsingle word, and that the shortest word in the whole English language.\nAnd though it is the shortest word, yet it is the most wonderful and\nmysterious word.  Though it is a word that every one of us has on his\nlips every moment of the day, yet no one who reads this book--no one in\nthe whole world--has ever been able to understand what it means.\n\nJust the letter \"I.\"--All day long, from morning till night, we are\nusing it:--I did this.  I mean to do that.  I ought.  I shall.  I will.\nI think.  I wish.  I love.  I hate.  I remember.  I forget.  And so on\nand on--ever ringing the changes on this little word in all its cases\n\"I\" and \"my\" and \"mine\" and \"me.\"  I want to set you thinking.  Who or\nwhat is this \"I,\" this \"me\"?\n\nPerhaps you will say, \"Oh, there is nothing mysterious about it--I know\nvery well what I mean by it.  'I' means myself.\"\n\nBut what do I mean by Myself?  Of course there is a rough work-day\nmeaning in which it means my whole being as I stand--clothes, body,\nbrains, thoughts, feelings, general appearance, everything.  But every\nthinking man knows that this is not the real \"I,\" that when he says I\ncan, I do, I will, I ought, I remember, the \"I\" means to him something\nmuch deeper and more mysterious than that.  Ask yourself, each one,\nwhat do you mean by \"I\"?\n\n\nSection 1\n\nIS IT MY BODY?  Nay, surely not.  I know that my body is only my\noutward garment woven by \"me\" out of certain chemical substances.  In a\nscientific museum I can stand before a glass case and see neatly\nlabelled the exact portions of lime and silica and iron and water and\nother elements which compose my body.  I know that this body is\ncontinually changing its substance like the rainbow in the sky, like\nthe eddy round a stone in the river.  The body I have to-day is no more\nthe body of last year than the fire on my hearth to-night is the fire\nthat was there this morning.  I have had a dozen different bodies since\nI was born, but I am the same still.  Every thinking man knows that the\n\"I,\" the real self, stands behind the body looking out through the\nwindows of the eyes, receiving messages through the portals of the\nears.  It rules the body, it possesses the body.  It says, \"I have a\nbody.\"  \"This body is a thing belonging to me.\"\n\nAs you watch the changing expression in the face of your friend, as you\nsee his eyes flashing in anger, or softening in affectionate sympathy,\ndo you not feel that all you see is but the outward casing, that the\nreal self of your friend is a something dwelling within?\n\nI hope I am not puzzling you.  What I want to do is to introduce you to\nyour own self, to make you really acquainted with that mysterious being\nin his first stage of existence here and then to follow him out into\nthe great adventure of the Hereafter.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nLet us go on.  What is this I, this self?  IS IT MY BRAIN?\nPhysiologists tell us wonderful things of that brain; how its size and\nshape, and the amount of gray matter modify my character; how it\nexcites itself when I am thinking; how it has different departments for\ndifferent functions; how it rules and directs everything I do.  And men\nimpressed by these wonders have sometimes asserted that there is\nnothing more to be found.  It is the brain which originates all,\nthought is only certain activities of the brain--memory is only\nimpressions on the substance of the brain--when the brain decays there\nis no self remaining.  What I call \"I\" is merely a function of my brain.\n\nBut immediately the question arises, Which brain?  The particles of my\nbrain are always changing.  I have had a dozen different brains in my\nlifetime, with not a particle remaining the same.  Which of these\nbrains is it that \"I\" am only a function of?  And how does it happen\nthat I remember what I thought and did and said with the old vanished\nbrains of twenty and thirty years ago?  Memory insists that I am still\nthe same \"I\" in spite of all those changes of brain.  If memory be but\na series of impressions registered on the brain these could no more\nsurvive the dissolution of the brain than impressions on wax could\nsurvive the melting of the wax.  Surely my memory, my irresistible\nconviction of personal identity with my past makes it abundantly clear\nthat \"I\" am a mysterious unchanging spiritual being behind this ever\nchanging brain.\n\nAnd that is what the best modern science asserts--that the brain is but\nmy instrument.  If we compare it to a violin then \"I\" am the unseen\nviolin player behind it.  The musician cannot produce violin music\nwithout a violin, but also the violin cannot produce a musical note,\nmuch less take part in a complex symphony without the musician behind\nit.  If the strings of the violin be injured, or if they be smeared\nwith grease, the result is discords and crazy sounds.  If the brain be\nphysically injured or disordered the result is what we call mental\nderangement.\n\nTo say, then, that the brain is the _seat_ of thought is not at all to\nsay that it is the _source_ of thought.  Everything involved in my\nconscious personality is _related_ to the brain, but it is not\n_originated_ by the brain.  The mysterious spiritual \"I\" is behind the\nbrain, using the brain--nay further--actually educating and fitting the\nbrain for its work.  The brain of a little child with its plastic gray\nmatter is smooth and unformed.  It is the \"I\" behind that is steadily\ncreasing and moulding and training it for its purpose.  I don't know of\nanything more impressive than the study of the human brain in its\nactivities, and how \"I\" am continually changing and modifying and\neducating my brain.  You feel sometimes as if you could almost lay\nhands on that mysterious spiritual being that is behind it, like a\nspider in his web--feeling and interpreting every quiver of it, sending\nmessages out into the world by means of it.  But he always eludes you.\nYou have no instrument that can touch him.  You only know that he is\nthere, enshrouded in mystery, a supernatural being not only using the\nbrain but educating it for use.  The brain itself has no knowledge or\nthought, and no power of itself to originate knowledge or thought.  The\nbrain of a baboon differs very little from the brain of a man.  The\ndifference is in the being who is behind it.  I read lately the\nstatement of a great scientist: \"As far as I can see, if the soul of a\nman could get behind the brain of an ape he could probably use it\nalmost as well as his own.\"\n\nI have never known a really thoughtful student of science satisfied\nwith the foolish notion that the brain is what thinks and remembers and\nwills.  He looks upon a human brain, on the dissecting table, a mere\nmass of cells and nerve centres suffused with blood, and he thinks of\nthe glorious poems and the mighty intellectual efforts and the noble\nthoughts of God and Righteousness, and perforce he laughs at the\nthought that that poor bleeding thing originated them.  Something\nwithin him indignantly replies: \"Nay, 'I' am not the brain.  I possess\nit.  I use it.  It is mine, but it is not me!\"\n\n\nSection 3\n\nWe have not yet gone deep enough to discover this \"I.\"  It is hardly\nnecessary to ask the next question which some foolish people are\nspeculating about to-day.  Am I merely the TRAIN OF THOUGHTS AND\nFEELINGS AND EMOTIONS?  Am \"I\" but like an Eolian harp, played on by\nthe wind of sensations from without?\n\nSurely not.  This mysterious \"I\" is constantly and persistently\nclaiming to be a real conscious person behind all these--greater than\nall these--possessing all these.  Listen to the voice down deep in your\nconsciousness--COGITO, ERGO SUM.  \"I\" think--therefore \"I\" exist.  I am\nnot the thoughts and feelings and emotions--I am greater than them all.\nI am the possessor of them all.  They are mine.  They are not Me.  They\nare only passing phases of my being.  They are always changing.\nEverything around is changing.  I remain the same being always.\nNothing else in the universe remains the same being--except God.  God\nand I.  God and these selves that are in every one of us.\n\nI cannot escape that conviction that \"I\" am the permanent being behind\nall the changes.  No human vision can see me.  No surgeon's knife can\ndetect me.  But I am there, behind everything.\n\nThe particles of my body, of brain and nerves and heart are constantly\nbeing changed--every few years they are completely renewed.  I have had\na dozen new bodies, a dozen new sets of brains and heart since I was\nborn--I am always wearing them out.  I change them when they are worn\nout and throw them aside like old clothes.  My thoughts and feelings\nare ever changing, like the ripples on the sea.\n\nBut I am absolutely certain that \"I\" am still there--that I am the\nsame--just as God is the same.  The same \"I\" that played as a little\nchild--the same \"I\" that lived and desired and thought and felt and\nworked and sinned years and years ago.\n\nNot a particle remains of the brain, or nerves, or tongue, or eyes, or\nhands, or feet, with which I did a good or evil deed twenty years\nsince--but it is impossible for me to doubt that it was \"I\" who did it,\nthat I to-day deserve the praise or blame which is due to it.\n\nEvery man on earth, when he thinks about it, has this conviction of\nhimself as an \"I\"--as a person separate from all other persons, as a\nself separate from all other selves, as remaining always the same\nbeing, whatever changes may take place around him.  That is what\nconstitutes man--a self conscious of itself.  As far as we can\ndiscover, the lower animals have no such idea.  Children, at first,\nhave not.  Did you ever notice how a little child never says \"I\" till\nhe is about three years old?  He always speaks in the third person.  It\nis always \"Baby does this,\" \"Baby likes that,\" until the Divine\nrevelation of his personality gradually grows and he recognizes himself\nas a person.  Then, without any teaching on your part, the child, of\nhis own accord, will begin to say \"I.\"\n\n\nSection 4\n\nOh, who or what is this awful, mysterious \"I\" that dwells somewhere in\nthe centre of my being, and rules and possesses and is responsible for\neverything?  What is this self, in each of you, that is hidden behind\nyour faces as behind a mask--that is looking out through your eyes, and\nreceiving, through your ears, the thoughts that others are trying to\nexpress for you?  Can the surgeon's knife find any trace of it?  Is it\npossible to destroy it?  Is it possible to get away from it?  It has\nsurvived the putting away of every part of the body a dozen times over.\nWill it survive the final putting away of the whole body at death?\nWill it survive everything?  Shall \"I\" be \"I,\" the same identical\nperson through all the ages of eternity?\n\n\nSection 5\n\nLook in again upon this \"I\" within you and answer this question.  Why\ndoes it assert so positively that it is impossible to doubt it; \"I\nought to do certain things, I ought not to do certain other things\"?\nAll over the earth this day--from the St. Lawrence to the Ganges, from\nthe North Pole to the South--there is no man outside of a lunatic\nasylum without that conviction.  No race, not even the lowest, has been\nfound without it.  Where did that conviction come from?  From the\nBible, do you say?  From the teachings of Christ?  Nay, surely not.\nLong before the Bible, long before the incarnation of Christ, the old\npagan had the thought clear and distinct, though not by any means so\nclear and distinct as Christianity has made it.  Did you ever think of\nthe mystery of this authoritative utterance of the self within you: \"_I\nought_\"?  In the very lowest savages it asserts this.  St. Paul calls\nthis sense of \"ought\"--the law of God written in our hearts (Rom. ii.\n15).  St. John calls it the light of Christ in us, \"the light which\nlighteth every man coming into the world\" (St. John i. 9).  Longfellow\nsings of it in \"Hiawatha\":\n\n  That in even savage bosoms\n  There are longings, yearnings, strivings\n  For the good they comprehend not;\n  That the feeble hands and helpless,\n  Groping blindly in the darkness,\n  Touch God's right hand in the darkness.\n\nEven in the heart of the thief or the murderer it insists: I ought to\ndo this, I ought not to do that, and when he disobeys this mysterious\nlaw within him he is compelled to drag himself up for judgment and\nfierce remorse for wrong that no one else knows of, that no one else\ncan punish him for.  What do you think of that mysterious fact about\nthis Conscious Personality within you?  Does it not look as if it\nbelongs to God, that every soul is stamped with God's image and\nsuperscription, as every coin of King George is stamped in the mint\nwith the image and superscription of the King?\n\n\nSection 6\n\nAnd this suggests a further question.  Why is there in us this sense of\nimperfection, of incompleteness--of ideals always away in the front\nthat we can never even approximately reach on earth?  Look at this\nconscience which we have just been thinking about.  It is always\nholding high above us an ideal of perfect goodness and insisting that\nwe must strive after it.  But we can never get even near it on earth.\nThe very best man at the close of life sees his ideal still high above\nhim and feels how much better he might be and ought to be and then he\ndies feeling the incompleteness of this life.  Does not this unfinished\nlife thus broken off, with its aim still far in the future, demand\nsomething further?  The great German philosopher Kant founded on this\nfact his famous argument for Immortality.\n\nOr look at our efforts after knowledge.  It takes nearly all this life\nto fit the student for his search after truth, and when he is just\nready and the great ocean of truth lies before him, Death comes.  Oh,\nhow incomplete and unfinished his life seems!  Just the scaffolding put\nup for his work, just the tools got into good order.  Then he dies.\n\n\"For half a century,\" said Victor Hugo, \"I have been writing my\nthoughts in prose and verse, history, philosophy, drama, romance,\ntradition, satire, ode, song.  But I feel that I have not said a\nthousandth part of what is in me.  When I go down to the grave I shall\nhave finished my day's work.\"  And this thought of incompleteness\ncompels in him the hope, \"another day will begin next morning.\"\n\nWas Victor Hugo right?  Was the old pagan philosopher right?  \"You may\ncatch my body,\" said Socrates, \"but no man can catch me, myself, to\nbury me.\"  Victor Hugo did not believe in the Christian Bible.\nSocrates had no revelation from God, except the revelation of this self\nwithin him.  You have the revelation of Christ as well.  What do you\nthink of the question?  When the dust shall return to the earth as it\nwas, shall the spirit return to God who gave it?  When brain and heart\nand nerves are destroyed, when the sun is old and the stars grow cold,\nand all that you ever saw is swept away into nothingness, will this\nmysterious, lonely self remain, to say \"I\" and \"my\" and \"mine\" and\n\"me,\" through all the ages of Eternity?\n\n\nSection 7\n\nNow, I put a closer question still.  Is not this mysterious \"I\" behind\nthe brain the being that God is especially concerned with?  What He\nsometimes calls your soul.[1]  The ceiling of the Sistine chapel at\nRome has a fine painting by Michael Angelo from the text, \"Man became a\nliving soul.\"  It represents the Supreme Spirit floating in the ether\nand touching with His finger the body of Adam.  As He touches it an\nelectric spark flashes into the body and Adam becomes a living soul.\nIs not this the centre of the awful mystery that I call \"I,\"\nmyself--the same of which our Lord asks His tremendous question: \"What\nshall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own self?\"\n\nIs not this \"self\" the real man, the man in the centre of his life, in\nthe deepest recesses of his being, the man as he lives beneath the eye\nof God and enters into relations with God--the man for whom the Bible\nannounces that exciting adventure in the long ages of the Hereafter?\n\nIs not this \"I\" looking out from behind your eyes this moment--the real\nman, of whom the body that you see is only the outward covering, of\nwhom the brain is only the outward telegraphic instrument?  Should not\nwe adapt our thoughts to that tremendous fact?  Instead of thinking \"I\n_have_ a soul,\" should we not rather think \"I _am_ a soul\"?  Instead of\nthinking, that beautiful girl has an ugly soul, that insignificant\nlooking man has a noble soul, should we not rather think, that ugly\nsoul has a beautiful girl body, that splendid soul is in a mean looking\nbody?  Would not some such manner of thinking help to bring home the\nreality, that \"I\" am the invisible immortal being which clothes itself\nin a material body during this first stage of its life.  Should not we\nbe more likely to become acquainted with our own soul, to become\nimpressed with its existence, to think about its character?  Should we\nnot thus learn more easily that wealth and clothes and outward\nappearance are not so important, that the character, the relation to\nGod is the one supreme thing?\n\nThink out for yourself the answer to that and to all these questions.\nI am not going to answer any of them.  My purpose here is not to answer\nquestions but to set you asking them--not to do your thinking for you,\nbut to set you thinking for yourselves.  Is it the spoiling and ruining\nof that self within you which Christ balances against the whole world?\n\n\nSection 8\n\nNow, have I helped, even in a little way, to introduce you to\nyourself--that \"self\" that is going out into the great adventure of the\nHereafter?  If I have, I have done a very good thing for you.  With so\nmany the soul is but a vague abstraction, belonging to the pulpit and\nthe sick-bed and the life of the hereafter.  But amid the busy daily\nlife, the real work and pleasure, the real streets and houses, it is\nhard to think of it except as something shadowy and unreal.  My effort\nhere is to take it out of the region of the vague and unreal and bring\nit into the region of every-day, practical life.\n\nTry to respond to my thoughts.  Try to get acquainted with your own\nself--your own soul.  Try to watch its wondrous life.  Try to become\nimpressed with its existence--to think about its character.  Think\nwhether, when the Bible says anything about your soul, it means this\nmysterious being that you call \"I.\"  Think whether this \"I\" is an\nemanation from God's nature, and therefore is intended to be in harmony\nwith Him.  Think whether it must live for ever and ever, and therefore\nif its character be not of enormous importance--if its character-making\nbe not the one supremely important thing in your life.\n\nThen realize that whether you exalt or degrade it, it is with you for\never.  You CAN NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GET AWAY FROM YOURSELF.  You will be\nthe very same self after death as before.  I read some time since of\nthe sinking of a ship and how the captain dived through the cabin door,\nand keeping the light above in view, swam up through the hatchway and\nescaped out of the wreck.  There is a deceitful expectation in human\nnature that when we go down in the sea of death and eternity we shall\nin some way escape out of ourselves, swim away from our own\npersonalities, and thus leave the ship at the bottom of the sea.  If\nthe \"I\" meant only the body, that would be true.  But this \"I\" is where\ncharacter exists, where love and desire and will exist.  This \"I\" is\nthe captain himself.  The captain cannot swim away from the captain.\nMyself cannot swim away from \"myself.\"  \"I\" must be \"I\" to all\neternity.  I cannot shake off my character, be it good or bad.\n\nRealize next what you mean to the God who created you and lovingly\nplanned for you your magnificent destiny.\n\nLet the soul within you feel its dignity, its priceless importance in\nthe eyes of its Maker.  Measure the value of it by what God has done\nfor it.\n\nWhy was this world slowly built through thousands of ages?  Just as a\nplatform for this \"I\" to develop character.  Why was the Incarnation\nand Death of the Everlasting Son of God?  Why is the gift and energy of\nthe Holy Spirit?  Why is the perpetual intercession of Christ in\nHeaven?  Why is the grace and power of the Sacraments in life?  Why are\nthe boundless prospects opened beyond the grave?\n\nAll for the sake of this mysterious permanent supernatural being that\nwe call \"I.\"  Measure I say by what God has done for it, the tremendous\nvalue He sets on your immortal soul.\n\n\n\n[1] In a simple, popular statement such as this it would but be\nconfusing to go into nice metaphysical distinctions of soul and\n\"spirit.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nTHE THREE STAGES OF EXISTENCE\n\nSection 1\n\nNow, grip with both hands the fact that this life, as you know it, is\nbut one single stage in God's plan for you--the Kindergarten stage, the\ncaterpillar stage of your existence.  That in five thousand years that\nspiritual being looking out from behind the mask of your face to-day\nwill be living still, and feeling still, and thinking still.  That what\nyou call death, the end of this career, is but birth into a new and\nmore exciting career, stretching away into the far future, age after\nage, aeon after aeon, whose prospect should stir the very blood within\nus.\n\nThere is nothing which so touches some of us as a thing with \"makings\"\nin it, a thing with untold potentialities in it, a thing which may come\nin the future to God only knows what.  Talk of the caterpillar which is\nto develop into the butterfly or the acorn which shall one day be a\nmighty oak.  Why, these miracles are but child's play compared with the\nmiracles potentially wrapped up in this poor little self.  No wildest\nfairy tale can suggest the wonder of its possibilities as it passes out\ninto the new adventure of the life beyond.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nThirteen hundred years ago there was an eager discussion in the court\nof King Edward of Northumbria.  The old wattled hall was blazing with\ntorches and a crowd of eager listeners hung intent on the teaching of\nthe Christian missionaries who had just arrived.  At last a grim\nbearded old earl rose in his place.  \"Can this new religion,\" he asked,\n\"tell us of what happens after death?  The life of man is like a\nswallow flying through this lighted hall.  It enters in at one door\nfrom the darkness outside, and flitting through the light and warmth\npasses through the farther door into the dark unknown beyond.  Can this\nnew religion solve for us the mystery?  What comes to men in the dark,\ndim unknown?\"\n\nPerhaps he was thinking of his dead wife or his brave boy killed in\nbattle.  The old earl's question is the question of humanity in all\nages gazing out into the darkness after its dead.  The full answer can\nonly be had by dying.  But a partial answer can be had now.\n\nThe Bible reveals to us that there are three stages of human existence:\n\n1st.  _The earthly stage_, where \"I,\" the mysterious \"I,\" live with a\nbody woven around me.  The Bible hints that this stage is of untold\nimportance.  In fact, all the future stages depend largely on how it is\nlived.  That is what makes this first stage so awfully important.  It\nis the formative time whose influence spreads out into eternity.  In\nthis stage Acts make habits.  Habits make character.  Character makes\nDestiny.\n\n2nd.  _The intermediate life_ BEFORE THE JUDGMENT, THE \"NEAR HEREAFTER\"\nWHEN \"I\" LAY ASIDE THE BODY AT DEATH.  THIS IS THE STAGE BEFORE THE\nRESURRECTION WHICH IN OUR LORD'S TIME THE JEWS CALLED HADES, AND IN\nWHICH THEY CALLED THE SPECIAL STATE OF THE BLEST PARADISE, ABRAM'S\nBOSOM, UNDER THE THRONE, ETC.\n\n3rd.  And away after this _final stage_ the \"Far Hereafter\" in the \"end\nof the age,\" as our Lord says, where come the General Resurrection, the\nJudgment of Men, the final stages of Heaven and Hell.  _That stage has\nnot yet arrived in the history of humanity_.\n\nIn Part I of this book we are only concerned with the Intermediate\nLife, the life of the near Hereafter which comes after Death and before\nthe Judgment.  We are to study what can be known about it.\n\nWith educated people it should not be necessary to combat the foolish\npopular notion that at death men pass into their final destiny--Heaven\nor Hell--and then perhaps thousands of years afterwards come back to be\njudged as to that final destiny!  To state such a belief should be\nenough to refute it.  Those who hold it \"do err not knowing the\nScriptures.\"  For the Scriptures have no such teaching.\n\nThe Jews in our Lord's time believed in a waiting life of departed\nsouls before the Judgment.  Owing to vagueness and contradictions in\nthe Rabbinical teaching it is impossible to state their notions about\nit with definiteness.  But in the main it may be said that when they\nspeak of that life as a whole without distinguishing between the states\nof the good and the evil they call this whole by the general name of\nHADES, _i. e._, \"the Unseen\" (the Hebrew word was Sheol), but they also\ndistinguished in it the abode or state of the Blest as PARADISE, or the\n\"Garden of Eden,\" or \"ABRAHAM'S BOSOM,\" or \"UNDER THE THRONE,\" _e. g._,\n\"Abraham whom God planted in the Garden of Paradise,\" \"our master Moses\ndeparted into the Garden of Eden.\"  The holy Judah rests this day in\n\"Abraham's Bosom.\"\n\nTheir teaching is of course not authoritative for us.  Doubtless many\nof their notions on the subject needed much correction.  But our Lord\ngives His sanction in the main to their belief and uses their very\nphrases in speaking of the new life, _e. g._, Dives \"in HADES (not\nHell, see R. V.), lift up his eyes being in torment\"--Lazarus \"was\ncarried by the angels into ABRAHAM'S BOSOM.\"  \"To-day thou shalt be\nwith Me in PARADISE\" is His promise to the dying thief.  And it is\nclear that He did not mean the final Heaven for He says, \"No man hath\nascended into Heaven only the Son of Man who is in Heaven.\"  Even He\nHimself did not go to Heaven when He died, for this is His statement\nafter the Resurrection, \"I have not yet ascended unto My Father.\"\nWhere, then, did His Spirit go?  The whole Church throughout the world\nrepeats every Sunday, in the creed, \"He was dead and buried, and\ndescended into HADES\"--the life of the waiting souls.  St. Peter tells\nus in his first Epistle that in those three days Christ's living Spirit\nwent and preached to the spirits in safe keeping who had been\ndisobedient in the old world.  For which cause he says, \"was the Gospel\npreached to them that are dead.\"  The same thought was evidently in his\nmind in his first sermon (Acts ii. 31).  \"David,\" he says, \"prophesied\nof the resurrection of Christ that His soul was not left in Hades.\"\n\n\nSection 4\n\nAnd this is the point of view of all the New Testament Scriptures.\nHeaven and Hell are always spoken of as states _after the Judgment_ and\nthe Judgment is to be in the \"end of the world\" or the \"end of this\nage.\"\n\nThe great crisis of expectation set before men is not death, but \"the\nDay when the Lord shall appear,\" _e. g._, \"That ye may be saved in the\nDay of the Lord,\" \"The Day of the Lord is as a thief in the night,\"\n\"Looking for and hasting to the coming of the Day of God,\" \"Keep the\ncommandment till the appearing of our Lord,\" \"To be found with praise\nat the appearing of Jesus,\" etc., etc.  Warning, reproof, exhortation,\nencouragement are all directed to that great day at the end of the\nWaiting Life--the Judgment at the second coming of the Son of Man.\n\nNaturally this belief passed into the thought of the early church.\n\"The souls of the godly abide in some better place and the souls of the\nunrighteous in a worse place expecting the time of judgment....  These\nwho hold that when men die their souls are at once taken to heaven are\nnot to be accounted Christians or even Jews\" (Justin Martyr, A. D. 150,\n_Dialogue with Trypho_).  \"The souls of Christ's disciples go to the\ninvisible place determined for them by God and there dwell awaiting the\nResurrection\" (Irenaeus, _Against Heretics_, A. D. 180).  \"All souls\nare sequestered in Hades till the Day of the Lord\" (Tertullian, _De\nAnima_, A. D. 200).  \"Let no man think that souls are judged\nimmediately after death; all are detained in one common place of safe\nkeeping till the time when the Supreme Judge makes His scrutiny\"\n(Lactantius, _Div. Institutes_).  \"During the interval between death\nand resurrection men's souls are kept in hidden receptacles according\nas they severally deserve rest or punishment\" (Augustine).\n\nDoes it not all give a fuller meaning for us to the words of our Lord,\n\"In My Father's house are many mansions\" (or abiding places).\n\nThis whole teaching about the Intermediate Life has been obscured in\nour day by the fact that most people read the Authorized Version of the\nBible where the word Hades has been unfortunately translated \"Hell,\"\njust the same as the darker word Gehenna.  At the time of the\ntranslation of the Authorized Version the old English word _hell_--the\nhole--the unseen, had not yet stiffened into the awful meaning that it\nhas attained in our day.  It was not then a word set apart to designate\nthe abode of the lost.  It simply meant the \"unseen place,\" \"the\ncovered place.\"  In the south of England still a thatcher who _covers\nin_ a house is called a \"hellier.\"  Even in games it was used.  In the\nold English games of forfeits, on the village green, the \"hell\" is the\nhidden place where the girls ran away to escape being kissed.  You can\nsee it had no awful meaning necessarily connected with it.  Therefore\nit did not seem repulsive to translate the Greek word \"Hades,\" the\nUnseen, by the English \"Hell.\"  But it has become very misleading in\nlater days, and our own conservative instincts which prevent our\naltering the word in the creed has helped to perpetuate the error.\n\nThe revised version has put all this right, _e. g._, \"His soul was not\nleft in Hades (not hell), nor did His flesh see corruption\" (Acts ii.\n31).  \"I have the keys of death and of Hades\" (Rev. i. 18).  At the end\nof the world \"death and Hades gave up the dead\" (Rev. xx. 13).  In\nHades (not hell) \"the rich man lifts up his eyes, being in torment\"\n(St. Luke xvi. 23).\n\n\nSection 5\n\nThe Bible, then, teaches to every careful student that there is the\nIntermediate Life beyond the grave, a vivid conscious life.  That all\nmen go there when they depart this life.  No man has ever yet gone to\nHeaven.  No man it would seem has ever yet gone to Hell.  No man has\never yet been finally judged.  No man has ever yet been finally damned.\nThank God for that at any rate.  The Bible teaches that all who have\never left this earth are waiting yet--from King Alfred to King Edward;\nfrom St. Paul to Bishop Westcott; from the poor struggler of the\nancient days in the morning of history to the other poor struggler who\ndied last night.\n\nWe are now to study this next stage of our history, beginning at what\nwe call death which is really birth into the next stage of life, just\nas the death of the caterpillar is the birth of the butterfly.  In this\nnext stage are living to-day our dear children and brothers and sisters\nand wives and husbands within the veil.  In a very few years we shall\nall have gone through--each of us just the same \"I.\"\n\nThe Bible does not reveal very much about it as was to be expected.\nThe Bible is intended to guide our conduct and prepare us for a final\nHeaven.  Therefore it busies itself with the responsibilities of this\npresent life and the glories of the final prospect--touching very\nlightly the intermediate stages, just as we press on a boy the\nimportance of his school days and the high prospects for his manhood,\ntouching very little the stages between.[1]  But there is much more to\nbe learned from Scripture about this Intermediate Life than most people\nthink.\n\n\n\n[1] There is a further reason as regards St. Paul's epistles, which\nform one-third of the whole New Testament.  The reason is that St. Paul\nand his people were not greatly interested in the Intermediate Life.\nThey looked for the Lord's coming in glory during their own lifetime.\nEven if some died before, the intermediate waiting time would be so\nshort that it excited no absorbing interest.  They did not dwell on it.\nIt could not concern them as it concerns us.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nWHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT THE NEAR HEREAFTER\n\nWe are now to enquire about that life into which our departed ones have\ngone from us.  \"I\" has gone on his mysterious journey into the strange,\nnew land.  We are standing in the darkened death chamber, where the\ndead body lies, with close shut eyes, like an empty house whence the\ntenant has gone out, closing the windows after him, and the sobbing\nfriends are feeling the inevitable pressure of the questions, \"Where is\nhe?  What is he doing?  What is he seeing?  Can we know anything at all\nabout his condition now?\"\n\nMany of them say, \"No, we cannot know anything; all is vague, shadowy,\nunreal.  It is vain to torment our hearts by thinking.\"  So they lock\naway his photographs and letters, and they gradually, reluctantly let\nhim drop out of their conversation and their prayers, and, as far as\npossible, out of their thoughts, trusting sadly in the healing\ninfluence of time and forgetfulness to quiet the aching questions in\ntheir hearts.  Ah! it is a poor comfort!\n\nSome of them even think that there is something presumptuous in\nintruding into mysteries which they say God has not revealed.  \"Do not\nthe secret things belong unto the Lord our God?\"  What a pity they do\nnot complete that text, \"But the things that are revealed belong to\nus;\" and then go on to find out whether, after all, God has not\nrevealed a great deal more than they think about that mysterious\njourney on which the beloved one has gone.  A reverent curiosity\nconcerning the life of our departed is surely not displeasing to God.\n\"I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren,\" says St. Paul,\n\"concerning them that are asleep.\"\n\nI wish I could comfort those sorrowing questioners, as I have comforted\nmyself, by thus searching for what God has revealed.  I do not want to\noffer mere sentimental guesses.  I want to find for them the \"things\nthat God has revealed,\" and if I draw some conclusions which I cannot\ndefinitely prove from Scripture, they are only such as seem to me\nreasonable and probable from a fair consideration of the evidence, and\nI shall draw a clear distinction between the authoritative teaching of\nScripture, which you are bound to accept, and any conclusions which I\ndraw from Scripture, which you are free to reject.\n\nLet me first put your questionings into clear, definite shape, as you\nlook upon the face of your dead.  Is it a life of sleep and\nunconsciousness into which he has gone, or is he as fully alive and\nconscious as he was an hour ago?  Is there further probation in that\nlife?  Is there growth and progress?  Does he still remember?  Does he\nstill love?  Does he still know or care anything about the old home and\nabout us who are left behind?  Can he help us?  Can we help him?  Are\nwe to think of him as one gone absolutely into the unknown, or may we\nthink of him as we do of our other absent one who went to India last\nyear, only with the difference that one writes home and the other does\nnot?\n\n\n\nII\n\nAs in all our troubles, we had best go first to our Lord.  As He is the\nonly one who really knows all the questions of our hearts, so He is the\nonly one who really knows the secrets of the invisible world.  He is\nthe only one on earth who has ever gone away into that strange land and\nthen came back to tell us anything about it.  In all things He is our\ngreat forerunner.  He, the Son of Man, has gone before us poor sons of\nman in all the experiences of life,--childhood, youth, manhood,\ntemptation, struggle, sorrow, disappointment, victory, joy.  And He has\ngone before us, too, into the Unseen Land, as if to lead us and say to\nus \"Be not afraid.\"\n\nHe does not speak much about it.  As I have already shown you, this was\nto be expected.  In the first place, in our present imperfect, limited\ncondition, with senses fitted only for this poor earthly life, it would\nprobably be impossible to teach us anything definitely about the higher\nlife of the spirit world.  How can you teach a blind, deaf man about\nthis world of beautiful sights and sounds in which you are living?  How\ncould God teach us definite details about a life which no experience of\nours can help us to imagine?  And, besides that, Scripture is intended\nto guide our conduct in this world, not to gratify our speculations\nabout another world.  At any rate, there is a marked reticence and\nreserve all through the Bible in speaking of the Hereafter, which\nreticence and reserve we shall do well to imitate.\n\n\nSection 1\n\nFirst, watch our Lord draw the curtain a little in His story of the\nRich Man and Lazarus.  The \"story\" I say, not the \"parable.\"  It is no\nparable.  A parable is the statement of an analogy between visible\nthings and invisible.  This is a direct statement about the invisible\nthings themselves.  Jesus is telling what happens after death.  Indeed,\nmany in the early Church thought, and many to-day think, that this is a\ndirect historical account by Christ of the life of a certain selfish\nrich man in Jerusalem whom He knew and of a certain beggar that lay at\nhis gate.  They died and were buried, and those who followed them to\nthe grave could see no further.  But the Lord is watching them still as\nthey pass into the land which He knew so well.  Whether this was the\nstory of a certain man, or only a general statement about all such men,\ndoes not matter.  Christ was telling of what happens just after death,\nwhen the \"I,\" the self, has laid aside the body and gone out into the\nUnseen.\n\nI do not mean that this story is intended as a revelation of that life.\nIf it were it would doubtless have been more complete.  It is simply a\npassing reference to it in warning against the danger of a selfish\nlife.  But it lifts the curtain a little bit.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nBe quite clear about this--that our Lord is not speaking of the FAR\nHereafter--of the final stage of human life at the end of the world, in\nwhich after the Final Judgment come Heaven and Hell.  He is speaking of\nthe near Hereafter, the life immediately after death.  We have seen\nthat there are three stages in our history: 1st.  This Earth life,\nwhere the \"I,\" the self, has a body woven around it.  2nd.  The\nIntermediate Life before the Judgment, into which I go at death without\nmy body into my second stage of being.  3rd.  The final stage at the\nend of the age in which come the Final Judgment and Heaven and Hell,\nwhich stage is still in the future for all humanity.\n\nClearly our Lord is speaking of the Intermediate Life, of the unseen\nlife existing to-day, running on side by side with the earthly life.\nFor you see the men He speaks of are not long dead.  Dives' brothers\nare still living here.  Dives is quite conscious that the ordinary life\nof men is still going on on earth side by side with that other life.\nClearly Jesus is telling of the present stage in the life of the\ndeparted--that life in which all our dear departed ones are living at\nthis moment.\n\n\nSection 3\n\nNext I notice that that life in its inmost experiences seems very like\nthis life, and follows from it quite naturally.  He depicts it as a\nclear, conscious life.  They are not dead nor asleep nor unconscious.\nThey are very much alive.  He represents them as thinking and speaking\nand feeling.  Lazarus is feeling \"comforted.\"  Dives is feeling\n\"tormented,\" and thinking keenly of his own misery and of his brothers'\ndanger on earth at that moment.  So actively alive are they all to him\nthat he wants one of them to go back to earth to tell his brothers\nabout it.\n\nBe quite clear about this.  Challenge every statement as I go on.  Is\nthis a mere speculation of mine or have we Christ's authority for\nsaying that in the new environment men are living a life as clear and\nvivid and conscious as on this earth--that death makes no break?\n\n\nSection 4\n\nNext I learn that each feels himself the same continuous \"I\" that he\nwas on earth.  Lazarus feels himself the same Lazarus, Dives feels\nhimself the same Dives, the brother of those five boys.  I shall still\nkeep on saying \"I.\"  I am not somebody else over there.  That is what\nJesus said from the other side of the grave--\"Handle Me and see--it is\nI, Myself.\"\n\n\nSection 5\n\nNext I read on His authority that there is no break in memory.  Of\ncourse there could not be if I am still \"I.\"  But our Lord confirms\nthis.  Lazarus remembers Dives.  Dives remembers Lazarus so well that\nhe wants him to go back to convert his brothers.  Aye, he remembers the\nbrothers in the old Jerusalem home, the five boys that grew up beside\nhim.  He remembers sorrowfully that they have grown to be selfish men\nlike himself, perhaps through his fault.  He is thinking about them and\ntroubling about them.  And Abraham assumes this memory as a matter of\ncourse.  \"My son, remember that thou in thy lifetime, etc.\"\n\nDoes not all this confirm our statement in Chapter I, that memory is\nsomething more than impressions on the gray matter of the brain; that\nmemory is in the man himself who is behind the brain and, therefore,\nmust go on with him.\n\n\nSection 6\n\nI read on, \"Now he is comforted and thou art tormented.\"  That again is\njust what I should expect.  It is all quite natural.  If \"I\" am still\nthe same \"I\" in full vivid conscious life, in full memory of the\npast--if I have passed out of the mists of earth into the full light of\nthe Eternal, where everything is seen at its full value, where money\ncounts for nothing and love counts for everything, it is of course\nnatural that the good man should feel comforted and the bad man should\nfeel tormented.\n\nOnly more so.  Only more so.  That is the difference.  The poor humble\nfollower of Christ, even on earth, is in the main happy--at his best\nmoments.  But he is not always very happy.  He has the inner comfort of\nthe peace of God.  But there is much worry and distraction, about his\nbusiness and his sickness and his troubles of many kinds to spoil his\npeace.  All these earthly troubles are gone now.  He sees Christ.  He\nknows of the boundless joy before him by and by.  He is comforted.\n\nAnd I read that Dives \"is tormented.\"  Here again all is natural and as\nwe should expect.  The godless man is in some degree tormented in this\nlife--at his best moments, when he stops to think, when he lies awake\nin the lonely night and conscience speaks to him.  But there are many\ndistractions to ease his pain--the pleasures and amusements of life,\nthe company of friends, the pursuit of business, the excitements of\nambition.  So he can manage a good deal to forget God, to acquire a\ndistaste for God, and yet to dull the still small voice that hurts him.\nBut these distractions are gone now.  He has gone out into the new\nlife, naked, alone.  All the money and business excitement are gone.\nAll the things of sense and appetite are gone.  That poor soul of his,\ndwarfed and degraded, stands in the dread loneliness before God, full\nof the sense of loss and misery--of shame for the past--of dread of\nwhat is to come--of wretched discord between himself and all that is\ngood.  In Hades, says Christ, not in Hell (the Revised Version puts\nthat right), in that life just after death, he lifted up his eyes,\nbeing in torment.  The Judgment has not come yet.  He is not in Hell.\nHell has not yet come.  Those things are in the final stage of being.\nBut already, just after death, Christ says, he is in torment of soul.\n\n\nSection 7\n\nI do not think we should pass over the expression \"carried by the\nangels into Abraham's bosom.\"  Notice that our Lord makes it simple and\nintelligible for the Jews by using their own phrase, \"Abraham's Bosom,\"\ntheir name for the state of the faithful departed immediately after\ndeath.  And He says, Lazarus \"was carried by the angels.\"  If anybody\nelse but Jesus had said it, we might pass this over as a piece of\npoetic imagery.  But it was Jesus who said it.  He says so much about\nthe angels.  He says that there are guardian angels of the children.\nHe says that the angels rejoice over one sinner that repenteth.  He\nwould not say this about Lazarus carried by the angels unless it meant\nsomething real.  If so I think we have here our Lord's authority for\nthe ministry of angels at death, an indication that the poor soul does\nnot go out solitary into a great lone land--that there are loving\nwatchers around the death-bed \"sent forth to minister to the heirs of\nsalvation.\"\n\nI do not know how much weight we should attach to the suggestion that\nDives seems the better for the discipline of the new life.  His\nselfishness on earth bulks largely in the story.  Now in all his\ntrouble he is thinking of his five brothers \"lest they also come to\nthis place of torment.\"\n\n\nSection 9\n\nThe next words suggest a very serious and awful question.  Is the\ndestiny and the condition of every soul fixed forever at death?  What\nis the meaning of the phrase: \"Between us and you there is a great gulf\nfixed\"?  That is too large a question to deal with here.  I postpone it\nto a later chapter.  I have already reminded you of the tremendous\nimportance of this life in its bearing on our final destiny.\n\n\n\nIII\n\nWe get another hint of the Unseen Life in the story of the\nTransfiguration, when Moses and Elijah, two of the greatest souls of\nthe old world days in the wondrous Waiting Life, come out from that\nlife to meet the Lord and to speak with Him \"of His decease, which He\nshould accomplish at Jerusalem\" (Luke ix. 31).  Does it not suggest at\nonce the deep interest which they and their comrades, the great souls\nwithin the Veil, were taking in the mighty scheme of Redemption that\nwas being worked out on earth?  Does it not suggest that in the spirit\nland they are watching our doings here?  Does it not help us to\nanticipate the joy in that wondrous life when, straight from the Cross,\nChrist the triumphant victor \"descended into Hades\" (Apostles' Creed)\nto proclaim the glad news to the dead (1 Peter iv. 18); to unfurl His\nbanner and set up His Cross in the great world of the departed?\n\n\n\nIV\n\nOur next hint comes when the Lord is dying on the Cross.  The penitent\nthief is hanging beside Him.  Death is drawing near.  The poor sinner\nis about to take the leap off into the dark.  He does not know what is\nbefore him: Darkness--unconsciousness--nothingness--what?  He does not\nknow.  The only one on earth who does know is on a cross beside him.\n\"LORD, REMEMBER ME WHEN THOU COMEST IN THY KINGDOM.\"  And Jesus said:\n\"TO-DAY THOU SHALT BE WITH ME IN PARADISE.\"  Not in Heaven, but in\nParadise--the Jews' word for the resting place of good men after death.\nNow, when one man says to another at such a tune, \"To-day you shall be\nwith me,\" surely it suggests, \"You and I will be living a full,\nconscious life, and you will remember our acquaintance here upon the\nearth; we shall know each other as the two who hung together this\nmorning on calvary.\"  Does it not, at least suggest, recognition in the\nUnseen Land?\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nWHAT THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH SAY ABOUT THE NEAR HEREAFTER\n\nOnly three hours later the Lord passed through into that Unseen Land.\n\"Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit, and having said this He\ngave up the ghost,\" and departed on the mysterious journey.  If we\ncould know anything about what He saw and did on that mysterious\njourney surely it would give some hints about our dear ones departed.\n\n\nSection 1\n\nThat journey of the Lord into the world of the dead has been made a\ngreat article of the Christian faith.  We all repeat it regularly in\nthe Apostles' Creed, \"He descended into Hell.\"  I need not translate\nthat clause.  Every well taught Sunday-school child knows its meaning.\n\"He descended into Hades,\" into the world of the departed in the great\nwaiting life before the Judgment.  But there is a great deal more than\nthis to be said about it.\n\nNow, let us consider this statement.  Clearly it deals with the three\ndays between our Lord's death and resurrection.  Where did His spirit\ngo?  \"To heaven, of course,\" somebody says.  \"No,\" says the Lord\nHimself after the resurrection, \"I have not yet ascended to My Father.\"\nWhere, then, did His spirit go?  \"Nobody can tell,\" you say.  Yes, one\nperson could tell, and only one--the Lord Himself.  He only could have\ntold of His solitary temptation in the wilderness, and He evidently\ntold it.  He only could have told of the solitary scene in Gethsemane,\nit would seem that He told it.  He only could have told of His visit to\nthe world of the dead, and I think that He told it.  You remember that\nafter the resurrection He was with them \"forty days teaching the things\nconcerning the Kingdom.\"  I think He must have told them then of those\nthree days.  Why?  Because the knowledge of it was so wide-spread in\nthe early Church, and there was no one else to tell it.  Some people\nseem to think that there are only some obscure verses of St. Peter and\na few references of St. Paul in favour of such teaching.  Not at all.\nIt was the belief of the whole Church.  St. Peter and St. Paul were\nonly two in a crowd of teachers of early days who proclaimed\ntriumphantly the visit of the Lord into the world of the dead.  St.\nPeter seems to be thinking of it in his first sermon when he quotes:\n\"His soul was not left in Hades\" (Acts ii. 31).  Therefore St. Peter\nknew that it was into that intermediate life--not into that final\nHeaven--that our Lord went at death.  This statement by itself would\nnot prove much, but when I find the same St. Peter long afterwards\ntelling so circumstantially in his first epistle (iii. 18) that when\nhis Master was put to death in the flesh He was made more alive in the\nspirit, in which spirit He went and preached to the spirits in prison\nwho had been disobedient at the flood.  \"For which cause (chap. iv. 6)\nwas the gospel--the glad news--preached to them that are dead,\" I think\nit is a fair inference that St. Peter had some definite information.\nAnd then I find St. Paul, in Eph. iv. 9, when he is writing of the\ngifts bestowed on the Church by her ascended Lord.  The word \"ascended\"\ncauses him to pause abruptly.  Men must not think that His work in the\nunseen was limited to that work for us in Heaven after His ascension.\n\"Now that He ascended, what is it but that He descended first into the\nlower parts of the earth (_i. e._, the world of the departed) that He\nmight fill all things.\"  Hades and Heaven had alike felt the glory of\nHis presence.\n\nAnd then immediately after the Apostles' days I find the knowledge\nwide-spread in the Church.  I read the writings of the ancient bishops\nand teachers of the Church, beginning at the death of St. John, the\nvery men to whom we refer for information as to the Baptism and Holy\nCommunion and the authenticity of the four Gospels, and there I find\nprominently in their preaching the gospel of our Lord's visit to the\nworld of the departed.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nThe earliest is known as Justin Martyr.  He was born about the time of\nSt. John's death, and he feels so strongly about the Descent into Hades\nthat he actually charges the Jews with mutilating a prophecy of\nJeremiah foretelling it.\n\nIrenaeus, the great Bishop of Lyons in France, a little while later\ntells how the Lord descended {59} into the world of the dead, preaching\nto the departed, and all who had hopes in Him, and submitted to His\ndispensations, received remission of sins.\n\nThen away in Egypt comes St. Clement of Alexandria, born about fifty\nyears after St. John's death.  I have been greatly interested in some\nlittle touches in his chapter on the descent into the world of the\ndead.  He asserts as the direct teaching of Scripture that our Lord\npreached the Gospel to the dead, but he thinks that the souls of the\nApostles must have taken up the same task when they died, and that it\nwas not merely to Jews and saints, but to heathen as well--as was only\nfair, he says, since they had no chance of knowing.  Don't you like\nthat honest appeal of his \"as was only fair\"?\n\nSt. Clement's great disciple, Origen, comes next.  His evidence comes\nin curiously.  A famous infidel named Celsus, knowing of this\nwide-spread creed of the Church about the preaching in Hades, laughs at\nthe Christians.  \"I suppose your Master when He failed to persuade the\nliving had to try and persuade the dead?\"  Origen meets the question\n{60} straight out: \"Whether it please Celsus or no, we of the Church\nassert that the soul of our Lord, stript of its body, held converse\nwith other souls that He might convert those capable of instruction.\"\n\nThen away in Western Africa, the Church's belief is represented by\nanother great teacher, Tertullian.  In Jerusalem, Cyril the Bishop,\nteaches the people in his catechetical lectures this faith of the\nChurch with a ring of gladness and triumph.  He sees Christ not only\namid the souls who had once been disobedient, but also in blessed\nintercourse with the strugglers after right who had never seen His face\non earth.  He pictures how the holy prophets ran to our Lord, how\nMoses, and Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and David, and Samuel, and\nJohn the Baptist, ran to Him with the cry, \"Oh, Death, where is thy\nsting?  Oh, Grave, where is thy victory, for the Conqueror has redeemed\nus.\"\n\nI cannot go on to tell of St. Athanasius and the rest.  I have said\nenough to show you that in the early ages of the Church--the pure\nloving ages--nearest to the Lord and to the Apostles, the Church\nrejoiced in the glad belief that Christ went and visited the spirits in\nthe Unseen who had never seen His face on earth.[1]\n\n\nSection 3\n\nThis was one of the gladdest notes in the whole Gospel harmony of the\nearly Church for five hundred years, in the purest and most loving\ndays, the days nearest our Lord and His Apostles.  It was a note of\ntriumph.  It told of the tender, thoughtful love of Christ for the\nfaithful souls who had never seen Hun.  It told of the universality of\nHis Atonement.  It told of victory, far beyond this life.  It told that\nChrist, who came to seek and save men's souls on earth, had continued\nthat work in the world of the dead while His body lay in the grave.\nThat He passed into the unseen world as a saviour and conqueror.  That\nHis banner was unfurled there and His cross set up there in the world\nof the departed.  That the souls of all the ancient world who had never\nknown Him, and WHO WERE CAPABLE OF TURNING TO HIM (_i. e._, who in\ntheir earthly probation, in spite of all their ignorance and sin, had\nnot irrevocably turned away from God and good), might turn to Him and\nlive.  That the spirits of the old-world saints and prophets had\nwelcomed Him with rejoicing.  That even men of much lower place had yet\nfound mercy.  That even such men as those who had perished in the flood\nin God's great judgment, BUT HAD NOT HARDENED THEMSELVES AGAINST HIS\nRIGHTEOUSNESS AND LOVE, were not shut out from hope.  In the \"many\nmansions\" was a place even for such as they.  To the teachers of the\nearly Church, I repeat, it was one of the most triumphant notes in\ntheir gospel--the wideness of Christ's Atonement.\n\n\nSection 4\n\nThat is what we mean, then, by the descent into Hades.  Does it not\ngive a vivid reality to that world that we think of so vaguely?  Think\nof it.  Was there ever before or since such a scene, such a preaching,\nsuch a preacher, such a congregation?  Could the wildest flights of\nimagination go further?  Yet it is all sober fact.  Try to picture it\nfor yourselves for a moment.  The Lord hanging on the cross, with His\nheart full of pain for that humanity that He was redeeming; and yet\nsurely full of triumph, too, and glad anticipation.  He was going to\nshow Himself to the poor souls who in the dark old world days had loved\nGod and Right.  He had finished the work that was given Him to do.  He\nwas leaving His Church with that blessed gospel of salvation to preach\nthrough the centuries to all souls on earth.  But what of the souls who\nhad gone out of earth from the beginning of the world without knowing\nHim?  The Church replies, through her Bible and through her Creed and\nthrough her early teachers, that the Lord was not forgetting them.  He\nwas about to go forth in a few moments, \"quickened in His spirit,\" to\nbring His glad gospel to the waiting souls.  That was the first great\nmissionary work of the Church.  May we not reverently see His own\nanticipation of it in His departing words as He started on His mission,\n\"Father, into Thy hands do I commend My spirit\" (in the journey on\nwhich it is going).  May we not read it in that \"au revoir,\" not\n\"good-bye,\" to the thief beside Him, \"To-day you shall be with Me in\nParadise\"?  May we not dwell on the wonder and joy and gratitude and\nlove which must have shaken that world within the veil, as the loving\nconqueror came in amongst them?  And may we not reverently follow Him\nstill in thought when He returned to earth and, as we conjecture,\nsomewhere in the Forty Days after the Resurrection, told His disciples\nof His marvellous experience?  I am not laying down this as a statement\nof Scripture, but I think it is a fair conjecture, for how else could\nthey have learned it?  And if we are right; think how the knowledge of\nit would swell the glad confidence of St. Paul.  \"For I am persuaded\nthat neither DEATH, nor LIFE, nor angels, nor principalities, nor\npowers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, is able to\nseparate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.\"\n\nI think we must see that this teaching of the Apostles and apostolic\nmen of the whole early Church is true.  People sometimes ask, \"Why,\nthen, is it new in our day?\"  The answer is easy.  At the Reformation\ntime there were terrible abuses connected with the Church's doctrine of\nthe Intermediate life.  The practice of purchased Masses, and Pardons,\nand Indulgences, and all the absurdities connected with the Roman\npurgatory, so exemplified in Tetzel's cry, \"When money clinks at the\nbottom of my box a soul is released from purgatory.\"  With such\nprovocation one does not wonder--though one may greatly regret--that\nthe indignant reformers, in sweeping away the falsehood, sometimes\nswept away also the underlying truth.  The teaching about the\nIntermediate Life, and the old practice of the Church in remembering\nher faithful departed in prayer, were all put in the background as\nleading to dangerous abuse; and so the people, getting no real teaching\nabout it, got the sad habit of trying to forget about the state of\ntheir dear ones departed.  In their ignorance, they could only guess\nblindly what the Creed here means.  So for centuries this has been the\n\"lost article of the Creed.\"  But this teaching of the Creed is none\nthe less true, because it has been neglected in later days.  And if it\nbe true, it is well worth our attention, for it confirms what we have\nalready learned from the previous teaching of the Lord, that the life\nof the departed is a clear, vivid, conscious life, since Christ could\nteach them and they could learn.\n\nAnd it suggests that the departed souls of the old world who had no\nchance of knowing Him have not by death lost all capacity for repenting\nand receiving Christ.  Those men that St. Peter thinks of had perished\nin God's great judgment, but it would seem in their terrible fate they\nhad not hardened themselves irrevocably against God.  Those who do that\non earth seem to close the door for ever.  That is the sin against the\nHoly Ghost--the only sin which our Lord says hath never forgiveness\neither in this world or in the world to come.  These evidently had\nstill their capacity for repentance.  And this gives one stirrings of\nhope in the perplexities of God's awful judgments.  Don't be afraid to\nthink this.  There is not one word in Scripture to forbid our thinking\nit.  It merely means that in the terrible fate which they had brought\non themselves they had not utterly hardened their hearts--and Christ\nhad not forgotten them in their misery.\n\n\nSection 6\n\nEstimate fairly the value of this evidence for our Lord's visit to the\nUnseen Life.  Do not overestimate it.  It is not all Scripture.  But\nall that is not Scripture is the wide-spread belief of the primitive\nChurch which was afterwards crystallized into an article of the Creed.\nSurely it is enough to deepen our sense of the reality of that Unseen\nLife.  It strongly confirms what we have learned already--that that\nlife is a vivid, conscious life into which \"I\" go my \"self,\" with my\nfull memory of the past.  And do not misread it.  It is not offering\nany hope to wicked men who, with full knowledge of Christ, wilfully\nreject Him.  It tells of men who had never known Him, and has hope only\nof those \"who were capable of receiving Him.\"  There is nothing here to\nmake light of the responsibility of this life.\n\nBut this message comes to us to comfort the hearts and strengthen the\nfaith of thinking men and women who are puzzled and perplexed and\nestranged from Christ by the terrible perplexities of life and of God's\njudgments as they understand or misunderstand them.  You have often\nthought of the difficulty of reconciling the righteous justice of God\nwith His Fatherly love.  You have often thought, in wondering doubt,\n\"Why did Christ come so late in the world's history?  What of all the\nold-world souls who could not have known Him here on earth?  For you\nknow that there is no salvation save by Jesus Christ.  You have read in\nthe Old Testament of whole nations, men, women and little children,\nswept away in one dread destruction.  What of them?  You have wondered\nabout the vast heathen world passing in thousands every day into the\nUnseen, with no knowledge of Him.  You have sometimes read the\nRegistrar-General's return of deaths in your city, and thought of all\nthe little dead children, brought up in evil homes; of sullen prisoners\nhardened in the jails; of grown men and women in the city's slums who,\nthrough the hardening influence of circumstances, had little real\nchance of ever being touched by that tenderness of God's love which\nleads men to love Him in return.  You know they have not died in\nChrist.  What of them?\"  If you had to stand at some death-beds at\nwhich some of us have to stand you would feel as we do the insistent\npressure of that question for all in the ancient or modern world--the\nvast countless world of the dead--who had no real chance of knowing\nChrist or being touched by His love here on earth.\n\n  Oh, the generations old\n  Over whom no church bell tolled\n  Christless lifting up blind eyes\n  To the silence of the skies.\n    For the innumerable dead\n    Is my soul disquieted!\n\n\nTrust them with God, says this teaching of the Creed.  Christ will do\nright by them.  Christ does not forget them.\n\n  Trust Him, though thy sight be dim,\n  Doubt for them is doubt of Him.\n      *    *    *    *    *\n  Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen\n  Yearns to reach those souls in prison,\n  Through all depths of sin and loss\n  Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross.\n  Never yet abyss was found\n  Deeper than that Cross could sound.\n\n\nIn these two chapters we have touched on the chief statements in the\nNew Testament and in the beliefs of the primitive Church as to the near\nHereafter.  There are others of less importance to be referred to as we\ngo on.  It seemed well to lay down some basis to proceed on.\n\n\n\n[1] See Plumptre, _The Spirits in Prison_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nTHE CRISIS OF DEATH\n\nIn an earlier chapter I placed you in imagination in the darkened death\nchamber, looking on the face of your dead and feeling the keen pressure\nof the inevitable questions: What has happened to him?  Where is he?\nWhat is he seeing?  What is he knowing in that mysterious world into\nwhich he has gone?\n\nThat death chamber is the best place on earth for solemn thought about\nthe Hereafter.  But when you are thinking only of your own dead and\nyour heart is all quivering in pain and longing you are not in the best\ncondition for cool, clear searching after truth.  Imagination and\nsentiment are apt to run away with reason.  The tender tortured woman\nis apt to believe too easily what the heart longs to believe.  The\nstricken man in his deep numb pain is in danger of yielding to hopeless\ndoubt about it all.\n\nSo I lifted you away into a clearer atmosphere and sent you searching\nfor definite revelations of God about other people's dead thousands of\nyears ago, where your heart and affections were not involved, and where\ncool, clear reason had a chance to be heard.  We tried to study\nimpartially what Scripture reveals about the World of the Departed and\nhow the primitive Church interpreted that revelation.  This gives us a\nsolid basis to proceed on.\n\n\nSection 1\n\nWith that preparation we come back into the darkened room again looking\ninto the face of our dead, trying in perplexity of heart to follow him\non the great journey.  To avoid confusion we assume here that he died a\npenitent man in Christ's faith and fear.\n\nLet me try to enter into your thoughts.  Let me begin at the\nbeginning--Death.\n\nNaturally we all shrink from death--the seeming shock of sundering soul\nand body--the launching out against our will into the regions of the\nUnexplored--the \"land of far distances\" as Isaiah calls it.  We are\nafraid of that unknown death, for our dear ones--like children afraid\nof a bogey on the dark stairs.  We can't help being afraid of it.  But\nought we to be so MUCH afraid of it?  Has not our Lord taught us that\nthere is no bogey on that dark stairs, that he who has just now closed\nhis eyes in death is opening them already into a larger life?\n\n  \"There is no death, what seems so is transition.\"\n\n\nNow think of this \"unknown death.\"  Has not Christ revealed to you that\nthis terrible thing that you so fear for him who is gone really only\nmeans that at the close of this poor limited kindergarten stage of his\nhistory Death has come--God's beneficent angel to lead him into the\nnext stage of being.  Why should you be afraid?  Birth gave him much,\nDeath will give much more.  FOR DEATH MEANS BIRTH INTO A FULLER LIFE.\nWhat a fright he gives us, this good angel of God!  We do not trust his\nMaster much.\n\nDo you say that you do not know what is before your friend--that it is\na \"leap off into the dark\"?  Have we not learned from Scripture already\nthat it is much less of \"dark\" than come of us thought?  And may it not\nbe much less of a \"leap off\" than we think--only a closing of the eyes\nhere and an opening of them there?  May not the birth into that life be\nas simple as the birth into this?  May not our fright be like that of\nDon Quixote when blind-folded he hung by his wrist from the stable\nwindow and they told him that a tremendous abyss yawned beneath him.\nHe is in terror of the awful fall.  Maritornes cuts the thong with\ngladsome laughter and the gallant gentleman falls--just four inches!\nMay we not believe that God reserves just as blithesome a surprise for\nus when our time comes to discover the simplicity, the agreeableness,\nthe absence of any serious change in what we call dying.  I am not\nignoring the pain and sickness of the usual death-bed.  But these are\nnot dying?  The act of dying comes after these.  These are but the\nbirth pangs before the new life begins, the rough, hard bit of road\nthat leads to \"the wicket gate out of the city.\"\n\nPliny, from much clinical observations, declares his opinion that death\nitself is pleasure rather than pain.  Dr. Solander was delighted at the\nsensation of dying in the snow.  The late Archbishop of Canterbury\nremarked as he died: \"It is really nothing much after all.\"  Dying\nitself may be pleasure rather than pain.\n\nWe have all noticed that expression of composed calm which comes on the\nfaces of the newly dead.  Some say it is only due to muscular\nrelaxation.  Perhaps so.  But perhaps not.  One likes to think that it\nmay be something more.  Who knows that it may not be a last message of\ncontent and acquiescence from those departing souls who at the moment\nof departure know perhaps a little more than ourselves--a message of\ngood cheer and pleasant promise by no means to be disregarded.[1]\n\nAt any rate does not Scripture suggest to us in the story of\nLazarus--of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration--of the dying\nthief--of the spirits in the Unseen Life whom Christ visited at His\ndeath--that Death comes not as an executioner to cut off our departed\none from life and love, but rather as God's good angel bringing him\nmore than life has ever brought, and leading him by a path as full of\nmiracles of soft arrangement as was his birth to heights of ever\nadvancing existence.\n\nGod reveals to us too that the closing of the eyes in the darkness of\nDeath is but the opening them to the light of a larger life, to the\nvision of the new mysterious real world which the glare of this world\nobscured.  It is just what happens every day when the glare of the\nsunlight, revealing to us every little flower and leaf and insect,\nshuts out from us the great universe of God which stands forth in the\nmidnight sky.  Do you know Blanco White's famous sonnet?  He is\nimagining what Adam must have felt as the first night fell on the\nearth.  All the beautiful world that he had known for but a day was\nvanishing from him into darkness.  Was the end of all things come\nalready?  But lo, a stupendous unexpected miracle!  Lo, as the darkness\ndeepened a new and more wonderful world was revealed in the sky, a\nworld which the sunlight had kept absolutely concealed:\n\n  Hesperus, with the host of heaven came\n  And lo!  Creation widened on man's view\n  Who could have thought such marvels lay concealed\n  Behind thy beams, O Sun?  Or who could find\n  Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood revealed\n  That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind?\n  Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife\n  If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?\n\n\nYes, life shuts out greater things than light does.  God teaches us\nthat Death is birth, that what the earth life conceals Death will\nreveal; that as the babe's eyes opened from the darkness of the womb to\nsunlight on this earth, so will the eyes that close in the darkness of\ndeath open on \"a light that never was on sea or land.\"\n\n\nSection 2\n\nAnd may not this act of dying be much less lonely than we think?  God\nsent each of us into this first stage of existence with mother and home\nand loved friends about us.  No one comes into this world to\nloneliness.  Should not that stir some hope at least that the Father\nmay take similar care for us in our entry on the second stage at death?\nI hate sentimentalizing about it.  But this is not sentimentalizing.  I\nhave already called attention to our Lord's only account of a good\nman's entrance into the Unseen.  \"He was carried by the angels,\" He\nsaid, and I have shown you some reason to think that He meant literally\nwhat He said--that the angels who are presented in Scripture as so\ninterested in our life here are equally interested in our transition to\na larger life--that loving watchers are around a soul as it passes into\nthe Unseen.\n\nI sometimes wonder, too, how much significance should be attached to\nthe fairly frequent phenomenon of dying people seeming in some rapt\nvision to see or feel as if meeting them the presence of loved ones\ngone before.  Sometimes these phenomena are very striking.  I once\nthought of asking a religious journal to open its columns to testimony\nfrom thoughtful, cool-headed clergy and laity of such experiences at\ndeath-beds.  It might enable us to judge critically if it could be\nexplained away as mere sentimental fancy or if the evidence were strong\nenough to suggest an underlying reality.  It would need to be very\nkeenly criticized.  All allowance should be made, especially in the\ncase of women, for the deceitfulness of pious fancies.  But there are\nsome cases which, if their number were large enough, would point much\ndeeper, where there could be no case of sentimental fancies.  For\ninstance a young student in one of our city hospitals told me a curious\nexperience lately.  A little child under two years old had been rescued\nout of a fire and was dying badly burned.  \"I took the little chap on a\npillow in my arms,\" he said, \"to let him die more easily.  Suddenly he\nstiffened himself and reached out his little hands and his face beamed\nwith the sort of gladness that a child has in reaching to something\nvery pleasant and in a very short time he died.\"  My informant was by\nno manner of means a sentimental youth, and he was much struck with the\nincident.  I don't know if there is much evidence of this kind.  If so\nit would count for a good deal in forming our judgment.  Our Lord\nspeaks of those whom we have made friends on earth receiving us when we\ndie into the everlasting habitations (Luke xvi. 9).  Is it too good to\nbelieve that He might have meant some pleasant welcoming on the other\nside--that perhaps that little child in the hospital that night was\nreally reaching out his little hands to some one invisible to the young\nstudent?  Let us have no weak sentimentalizing, but on the other\nhand--is anything too good to believe as to what God might do for poor\nfrightened souls at such a dread crisis of being?\n\n\n\n[1] I have here freely adapted some thoughts and phrases from Edwin\nArnold's _Death and Afterwards_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\n\"I,\" \"MYSELF\" AFTER DEATH\n\nSection 1\n\nBut we must not delay at Death.  Death is a very small thing in\ncomparison with what comes after it--that wonderful, wonderful,\nwonderful world into which Death ushers us.  Turn away from the face of\nyour dead.  Turn away from the house of clay which held him an hour\nago.  The house is empty, the tenant is gone.  He is away already,\ngasping in the unutterable wonder of the new experience.\n\n  O change! stupendous change!\n  There lies the soulless clod.\n  The light eternal breaks,\n  The new immortal wakes,\n  Wakes with his God!\n\n\nOh! the wonder of it to him at first!  Years ago I met with a story in\na sermon by Canon Liddon.  An old Indian officer was telling of his\nbattles--of the Indian Mutiny, of the most striking events in his\nprofessional career; and as he vividly described the skirmishes, and\nbattles, and sieges, and hair-breadth escapes, his audience hung\nbreathless in sympathy and excitement.  At last he paused; and to their\nexpressions of wonderment he quietly replied, \"I expect to see\nsomething much more wonderful than that.\"  As he was over seventy, and\nretired from the service, his listeners looked up into his face with\nsurprise.  There was a pause; and then he said, in a solemn undertone,\n\"I mean in the first five minutes after death.\"\n\nThat story caught on to me instantly.  That has been for years my\nclosest feeling.  I feel it at every death-bed as the soul passes\nthrough.  I believe it will be my strongest feeling when my own\ndeath-hour comes--eager, intense, glad curiosity about the new, strange\nworld opening before me.\n\nNot long ago in the early morning I stood by a poor old man as he was\ngoing through into the Unseen.  He was, as it were, fumbling with the\nveil of that silent land--wishing to get through; and we were talking\ntogether of the unutterable wonder and mystery that was only an hour or\ntwo ahead.  I always talk to dying people of the wonders of that world\njust ahead of them.  I left him and returned to see him in a couple of\nhours; but I was too late, he had just got through--got through into\nthat wonder and mystery that I had been stupidly guessing about, and\nthe poor old worn body was flung dishevelled on the bed, as one might\nfling an old coat, to be ready for the journey.  He was gone.  Just got\nthrough--and I felt, with almost a gasp, that he had solved the riddle\nof life; that I would give anything, risk anything, for one little\nglimpse through; but I could not get it.  I could only guess the\nstupendous thing that had come to him.  For all the stupendous changes\nthat have ever happened here are surely but trifles when compared with\nthat first few minutes in the marvellous life beyond, when our friends\npass from us within the veil, and our hearts follow them with eager\nquestioning--\"What are they doing?  What are they seeing?  What are\nthey knowing now?\"\n\n\nSection 2\n\nMore and more of late years I keep asking those questions at\ndeath-beds.  I seem to myself constantly as if trying to hold back the\ncurtain and look through.  But the look through is all blurred and\nindistinct.\n\nIt must always be so while we are here, with our limited faculties,\nshut up in this little earth body.  I know certain facts about the \"I,\"\nthe \"self\" in the Unseen Life, but I have no knowledge and no\nexperience that would help me to picture his surroundings.  I cannot\nform any image, any, even the vaguest, conception of what that life\nappears like.  That is why my outlook is so blurred and indistinct.\n\nAnd this brings me to point out WHAT SORT OF KNOWLEDGE WE CAN HAVE AND\nWHAT SORT OF KNOWLEDGE WE CANNOT HAVE about that life.  It may help you\nnot to expect the impossible.\n\nYou desire to know two things about the Unseen World.\n\n1st.  You desire to know the real life of the \"I\"\nhimself--consciousness, thought, memory, love, happiness, penitence and\nsuch like.\n\n2nd.  You desire to know his outward surrounding, so that you can\npicture to yourself his life in that world.  That is what gives the\ninteresting touch to your knowledge of your friend's life in a foreign\nland on earth.\n\nNow the first of these is the really important knowledge, and such\nknowledge you can have and you can understand because it is of the same\nkind as the knowledge you already have of him on earth.\n\nThe second would be an interesting knowledge, but this knowledge you\ncannot have, because you have no faculties for it and no similar\nexperience to help you to realize it.  It is a law of all human\nknowledge that you cannot know and cannot depict to yourself anything\nof which you have had no corresponding experience before.\n\n\"I,\" \"myself\" which goes into the Unseen is the really important\nmatter, not my surroundings.  And the essential knowledge, I say, about\nthat self, about his inner real life in the Unseen you can have and you\ncan understand because the inner life there is of the very same kind as\nthe inner life here.  If I am told of full consciousness there, of\nmemory there, of love or hatred there, of happiness or pain there, of\njoy or sorrow there, I can easily understand it.  I have had experience\nof the like here.  There is no difficulty.\n\nBut the knowledge of the outward environment there--what we shall be\nlike, how that world will appear, how we shall live and move and have\nour being in a spiritual existence--all that deeply interesting\nknowledge which imagination could use to picture that life and bring it\nbefore us--THAT we cannot have.  It is not possible with our limited\nfaculties and limited experience.  We could not be taught it.  We have\nno faculties to take it in and no experience to aid us in realizing it.\nA blind man cannot picture colours to himself, a deaf man cannot\nimagine music.  It is not that we are unwilling to teach him, but that\nhis limited faculties prevent him from taking in the idea.\n\nRealize your position then with regard to the spiritual world.  Imagine\na population of blind, deaf men inhabiting this earth.  One of them\nsuddenly gets his sight and hearing, and lo! in a moment an unutterable\nglory, a whole world of beautiful colours and forms and music has\nflowed into his life.  But he cannot convey any notion of it to his\nformer companions.  He cannot convey to them the slightest idea of the\nlovely sunset or the music of the birds.  We, shut up in these human\nbodies, are the blind, deaf men in God's glorious universe.  Some of\nour comrades have moved into the new life beyond, where the eyes of the\nblind are opened and the ears of the deaf are unstopped.  But we have\nno power of even imagining what their wondrous experience is like.\n\nI suppose that is the reason why we have no description of Paradise or\nHeaven except in earthly imagery of golden streets and gates of pearl.\nI suppose that is why St. Paul could not utter what he saw when in some\ntranced condition he was caught up into Paradise and that life was\nshown to him--\"whether in the body or out of the body,\" he could not\ntell (2 Cor. xii. 4).  I suppose that was why Lazarus could tell\nnothing of these marvellous four days in which his disembodied spirit\nmingled with the spirits of the departed.\n\n  \"'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?'\n    There lives no record of reply,\n    Which, telling what it is to die,\n  Had surely added praise to praise.\"\n\n\nI suppose it was all unintelligible to mortal ken when the spirit had\ncome back to the body it had left.  If, in a crowd of blind deaf men,\none got his sight and hearing for a few minutes, and then relapsed,\nwhat could he tell to his comrades or even fully realize to himself?\n\nThus you see the knowledge that you can have and the knowledge you\ncannot have of that spirit life.  Be content.  God has given you a\ngreat deal of knowledge of that real life of the self in the hereafter.\nIf He has so made you that the other knowledge that would help you to\npicture the surroundings is impossible to you it is best that you\nshould know it.  Be content.  Don't cry for the moon.  Follow your\ndeparted in thought into that life and realize what you have learned\nfrom Scripture about him.\n\n\n\nII\n\nWhat have you learned?\n\nFirst that IT IS A VIVID CONSCIOUS life into which he has gone.\n\nThere are several passages in Scripture which speak of Death as sleep\nand which taken alone might suggest a long unconsciousness, a sort of\nRip Van Winkle life, sleeping for thousands of years and waking up in a\nmoment at the Judgment Day, feeling as if there had been no interval\nbetween.  But a little thought will show it is a mere figure of speech\ntaken from the sleeping appearance of the body.  \"The sleep of Death\"\nis a very natural expression to use as one looks on the calm, peaceful\nface after life's fitful fever and the long pain and sickness of the\ndeath-bed.  But no one can study the Bible references to the life\nbeyond without seeing that it cannot be a life of sleep or\nunconsciousness.  \"Shall we sleep between Death and the Judgment?\" asks\nTertullian.  \"Why souls do not sleep even when men are alive.  It is\nthe province of bodies to sleep.\"  This sleep theory has always been\ncondemned whenever the Church has pronounced on it.  Even the Reformers\ndeclare it at variance with Holy Scripture in spite of the strong\nfeeling in its favour in their day.[1]\n\nThe reader who has followed thus far will need no proof as to the\nteaching of Scripture that the Waiting Life before the Judgment into\nwhich our dear ones have gone is no unconscious sleep but a real vivid\nconscious life.  So vivid that our Lord's spirit is said to have been\nquickened, made more alive, as He passed in.  So vivid that the men of\nthe old world could listen to His preaching.  So vivid that Moses and\nElias--those eager, impetuous leaders--in that wondrous life could not\nbe held by its bonds, but broke through to stand on the mountain with\nChrist a thousand years after their death.  So vivid that Lazarus (whom\nour Lord describes as in Abraham's bosom) is depicted as living a full,\nclear, intelligent life; and Dives as thinking anxiously about his five\nbrothers on earth.\n\nThat was surely no unconscious life which St. Paul saw when he was\ncaught up into Paradise and heard unspeakable things, nor was it a\nblank unconsciousness that he looked for in his desire \"to depart and\nbe with Christ which is far better\" (Phil. i. 23).\n\nDo you want further proof?  Look at our Lord and the thief on the\ncross.  The two men had been hanging together dying on the cross, just\nabout to get through the veil to the world beyond.  The poor thief did\nnot know what was beyond that veil--darkness, insensibility, stupor,\noblivion.  The only one on earth who did know hung there beside him.\nAnd when the poor dying one turned with the words, \"Lord, remember me\nwhen Thou comest in Thy kingdom,\" He promptly replied, \"To-day thou\nshalt be with Me.\"  If any one knew, surely He knew.  If it meant\nanything, it meant, \"There shall be no oblivion, no unconscious\nsleeping.  To-night, when our dead bodies lie here upon the cross, you\nand I shall live and know each other as the two men who hung dying\ntogether on Calvary.\"  Ah! the wonder to him as he went in beyond the\nveil, as though the Lord would lead him, lest he should be afraid.\n\nBeyond all question God has revealed to you plainly enough that your\nbeloved has gone into a full, vivid, conscious life.  He is more alive\nto-day than he ever was on earth.\n\nWhat follows?  This.  If I am fully conscious what am I conscious of?\nSurely, first of all I must be conscious of myself, conscious of the\ncontinuity of my personal identity, conscious of the continuity of my\npersonal character.  I must feel that I am the same \"I,\" I am still\n\"myself.\"  Death which removes only the outer covering leaves the Ego\njust where it was.  No better.  No worse.  The Bible lays no emphasis\nat all on death as making any change in character.  Our Lord assumes\nthe characters as remaining the same.  The mere act of dying does not\nalter character.  I am the same I.  I have entered into a new\nenvironment more favourable for the exercise of my faculties, more\nadaptable to the acquisition of knowledge, more helpful, I trust, to\ngrowth in good.  But I am the same \"I.\"  As I leave off here I begin\nthere.  I take into that world just myself as I have made it.  If I\nhave made the best of myself what more should I desire to take?\nConsciousness, Memory, Thought, Love, Character.  If I have not made\nthe best of myself, if I have acquired a distaste for God, for\nholiness, still I take in myself just as I stand.  Think how\ntremendously solemn that makes the life here.  It is the place of\ncharacter making for the life there.  I can never, never, never get\naway from myself.  I shall always be myself.  You remember what our\nLord said from the other side of the grave.  \"Handle Me and see it is I\nMYSELF.\"\n\nIt is I myself, the very same self.  It is they themselves, the very\nsame selves whom I loved and who loved me so dearly.  In that solemn\nhour after death, believe it, your boy, your wife, your husband, who is\nexperiencing the startling revelations of the new life is feeling that\nlife as an unbroken continuance of the life begun on earth.  Only the\nenvironment is changed.  He feels himself the same boy or man that he\nwas an hour ago, with the same character, aspirations, desires, the\nsame love and courage and hope.  But oh, what a different view of all\nthings!  How clearly he recognizes God's love and holiness.  How\nclearly he sees himself--his whole past life.  If ever he cared for\nChrist and His will, how longingly, wonderingly, he is reaching out to\nHim.  If ever he loved you tenderly on earth, how deeply and tenderly\nhe is loving you to-day.  In all the whirl of awe and wonder and\ncuriosity and hope, love must stand supreme.  For \"love never faileth.\"\n\"And now,\" says St. Paul, \"abideth Faith, Hope and Love (these three\nthat abide for ever), but the greatest of these is love.\"\n\n\nSection 3\n\nWhat else have you learned?  That HE REMEMBERS CLEARLY the old life and\nthe old home and the old comrades and the old scenes on earth.  There\nis no conjecturing about that.  That goes without saying if \"I\" am the\nsame \"I\" in that world.  Personal identity of course postulates memory\nwhich binds into one the old life and the new.  And the Bible takes\nthat for granted.  We saw that Lazarus remembered Dives and Dives\nremembered Lazarus and remembered his old home and the five young\nbrothers who grew up with him.  He remembers that they have grown to be\nselfish men like himself and is troubled for them.  And Abraham assumes\nit as a matter of course.  \"My son, remember that thou in thy\nlifetime,\" etc.  Our Lord comes back from Death remembering all the\npast as if Death made no chasm at all in His memory.  \"Go and meet Me\nin Galilee,\" He says; \"Lo I have told you\" (before I died).  And the\nredeemed in the future life are represented as remembering and praising\nGod who had redeemed them from their sins on earth.\n\nSo you may be quite sure that your dear one is remembering you and\nstoring up in his memory all your love in the past.  Did your wife ever\ntell you on earth how happy you had made her?  Did the old father and\nmother now in the Unseen ever thank God for the comfort you had been to\nthem during their declining years?  Be sure that in that land of love\nthese will be amongst the most precious pictures in their storehouse of\nmemory.\n\n\nSection 4\n\nAnd he has taken with him all the treasures of mind and soul which by\nGod's grace he has won for himself on earth.  A man can take nothing of\nthe external things--of gold or lands.  Nothing of what he HAS but all\nof what he is--all that he has gained IN HIMSELF.  The treasures of\nmemory, of disciplined powers, of enlarged capacities, of a pure and\nloving heart.  All the enrichment of the mind by study, all the love of\nman, all the love of God, all the ennobling of character which has come\nthrough the struggle after right and duty.  These are the true\ntreasures which go on with us into that land where neither rust nor\nmoth doth corrupt.\n\n\nSection 5\n\nAnd he is \"WITH CHRIST.\"\n\nThe Bible teaches that the faithful who have died in Christ are happy\nand blest in Paradise even though the Final Heaven and the Beatific\nVision is still but a thing to be longed for far off in the future.\nLazarus is \"comforted\" after his hard life on earth.  \"The souls of the\nrighteous are in the hands of God, there shall no torment touch them.\"\n\"Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord ... they rest from their\nlabours.\"  But best of all it assures us that they are WITH CHRIST.\n\"Lord Jesus receive my spirit\" the dying Stephen prayed as he passed\ninto the Unseen.  They are \"absent from the body at home with the\nLord.\"  They \"depart to be with Christ which is far better.\"\n\n\"With Christ.\"  One has to write carefully here.  The full vision of\nthe Divine Glory and Goodness and Love is reserved for the final stage\nof existence in Heaven where nothing that defileth shall enter in,\nwhereas this Intermediate Life is one with many imperfections and\nfaults, quite unready for that vision of glory.  But for all that St.\nPaul believed that the presence of Christ was vouchsafed in that\nwaiting land, in some such way we may suppose as on earth long ago.\nOnly an imperfect revelation of the Son of God.  And yet--and yet--oh,\nhow one longs for it!  Think of being near Him, even in some such\nrelation as were the disciples long ago.\n\n  \"I think when I read that sweet story of old,\n    When Jesus was here amongst men,\n  How He called little children as lambs to His fold,\n    How I long to have been with Him then.\"\n\nYes, St. Paul seems to say you shall be with Him, you shall have that\nlonging gratified in some measure even before you go to Heaven.  So\nthat Paradise, poor and imperfect as it is compared with the Heaven\nbeyond, is surely a state to be greatly desired.  Some pages back I\nwrote with a certain shrinking \"No man has ever yet gone to Heaven.\"\nIt is quite true, and yet I could feel some poor mourner shrinking back\nfrom it as he thought of that beloved one gone.  Nay, shrink not.\nParadise means the \"Park\" of God, the \"Garden\" of God, the place of\nrest and peace and refreshing shade.  The Park is not the Palace but it\nis the precincts of the Palace.  Paradise is not Heaven, but it is the\nCourtyard of Heaven.  And (the dearest, tenderest assurance of all)\nthey are with Christ.  Is not that sufficient answer to many questions?\nAt any rate the Bible definitely teaches that.\n\n\n\n[1] Our \"39 Articles\" were originally 42, and the 40th says, \"They\nwhich say that the souls of those who depart hence do sleep being\nwithout all sense, feeling or perceiving till the Day of Judgment ...\ndo utterly dissent from the right belief declared to us in Holy\nScripture.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nRECOGNITION\n\nSection 1\n\nSHALL WE KNOW ONE ANOTHER IN THAT LIFE?  Why not?  As George Macdonald\nsomewhere pertinently asks, \"Shall we be greater fools in Paradise than\nwe are here?\"\n\nThis is a perfectly apt retort, and not at all flippant as it may seem\nat first.  It is based on the belief suggested by common sense and\nconfirmed by Scripture that our life there will be the natural\ncontinuous development of our life here and not some utterly\nunconnected existence.  If consciousness, personal identity, character,\nlove, memory, fellowship, intercourse go on in that life why should\nthere be a question raised about recognition?  True, there are morbid\ntimes with most of us when we are inclined to doubt all desirable\nthings, and there are some gloomy Christians who are always suspicious\nof anything especially bright and hopeful in the Gospel of Christ.  But\nto the normal Christian man who knows what is revealed and who believes\nin the love of God, there should never be any serious doubt about\nrecognition in that life.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nBefore saying anything about Scripture evidence let me point out that\nthere are some things that are always assumed by legitimate inference\neven without any definite proofs.  If I knew that the inhabitants of\nMars were alive, and in full consciousness, and with souls like mine,\nand capable of intercourse with each other--whether they have bodies or\nnot, I should assume that they knew one another.  I should not wait for\nthat fact to be definitely stated by a visitor to Mars who should\nreturn to earth.  I should assume it without his stating it.  Nay, I\nshould require very strong evidence to make me believe the contrary.\nNow, the Bible says that our dear ones in Paradise are alive,--that\ntheir life is a full conscious life, with full consciousness of\npersonal identity, that they remember the things of the old earth life,\nthat they love one another, that they can have intercourse together as\nin the story of Dives and Lazarus.\n\nSo far as we can judge, the inner life of the \"I\" THERE seems a very\nnatural continuation of his life HERE.\n\nIf then, \"I\" am the same \"I,\" the same person, still alive, still\nconscious, still thinking, still remembering, still loving, still\nlonging for my dear ones, still capable of intercourse with others, why\nmay I not without definite proof assume the fact of recognition?\nSurely it should require strong evidence to make me believe the\ncontrary.  It is one thing to avoid reckless assertions without any\nfoundation--it is quite another thing to have so little trust in God\nthat we are afraid to make a fair inference such as we would\nunhesitatingly make in like conditions here--just because it seems to\nus \"too good to be true.\"  Nothing is too good to be true where God is\nconcerned.  I do believe that one reason why we have not definite\nanswers to such questions as this is because such answers ought not to\nbe necessary for people who trusted fully in the tenderness of the love\nof God.\n\n\nSection 3\n\nWhy, even if the Bible were to give you no hint of it, do you not see\nthat the deepest, noblest instincts that God has implanted in us cry\nout for recognition of our departed; and where God is concerned it is\nnot too much to say that the deepest, noblest instincts are, in a\nsense, prophecies.  This passionate affection, the noblest thing that\nGod has implanted in us, makes it impossible to believe that we should\nbe but solitary isolated spirits amongst a crowd of others whom we did\nnot know, that we should live in the society of happy souls hereafter\nand never know that the spirit next us was that of a mother or husband\nor friend or child.  We know that the Paradise and earth lives come\nfrom the same God who is the same always.  Into this life He never\nsends us alone.  There is the mother love waiting and the family\naffection around us, and as we grow older love and friendship and\nassociation with others is one of the great needs and pleasures of life\nand one of the chief means of training the higher side of us.  Unless\nHis method changes we may surely hope that He will do something similar\nhereafter, for love is the plant that must overtop all others in the\nwhole Kingdom of God.\n\nAgain, love and friendship must be LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP for SOME ONE.\nIf we don't know any one, then we cannot love, and human love must die\nwithout an object.  But the Bible makes it a main essential of the\nreligious life that \"He that loveth God love his brother also.\"\n\nIf we shall not know one another, why then this undying memory of\ndeparted ones, this aching void that is never filled on earth?  Alas\nfor us!  For we are worse off than the lower animals.  The calf is\ntaken from the cow, the kittens are taken from their mother and in a\nfew days they are forgotten.  But the poor human mother never forgets.\nWhen her head is bowed with age, when she has forgotten nearly all else\non earth you can bring the tears into her eyes by speaking of the child\nthat died in her arms forty years ago.  Will God disappoint that tender\nlove, that one supreme thing which is \"the most like God within the\nsoul\"?\n\n\nSection 4\n\nThere can be no real reason, I repeat, for doubting the fact of\nrecognition unless the Bible should distinctly state the contrary.  And\nso far from doing this the Bible, in its very few references to the\nHereafter life, always assumes the fact and never in any way\ncontradicts it.\n\nNotice first the curiously persistent formula in which Old Testament\nchroniclers speak of death.  \"He died in a good old age and WAS\nGATHERED UNTO HIS PEOPLE and they buried him.\"  \"Gathered unto his\npeople\" can hardly mean burial with his people, for the burial is\nmentioned after it.  It comes between the dying and the burial.  And I\nnote that even at Moses' burial on the lone mountain top this phrase is\nsolemnly used.  \"The Lord said unto him get thee up into the mount and\ndie in the mount AND BE GATHERED TO THY PEOPLE.\"  Miriam was buried in\nthe distant desert, Aaron's body lay on the slopes of Mount Hor, and\nthe wise little mother who made the ark of bulrushes long ago had found\na grave, I suppose, in the brick-fields of Egypt.  Did it mean that he\ncame back to them all in the life unseen when he was \"gathered to his\npeople\"?\n\nDavid seemed to think that he would know his dead child.  \"I shall go\nto him but he shall not return to me.\"\n\nOur Lord assumes that Dives and Lazarus knew each other.  And in\nanother passage He uses a very homely illustration of a friendly\ngathering when He speaks of those who shall \"sit down with Abraham and\nIsaac and Jacob in the Kingdom.\"  And again in His advice about the\nright use of riches.  \"Make to yourselves friends by the means of the\nmammon of unrighteousness that when ye die they may receive you into\nthe everlasting habitations\" (Luke xvi. 9).  Surely, that at least\nsuggests recognition and a pleasant welcoming on the other side.\n\nI remember well, how in the pain of a great bereavement, His words to\nthe penitent thief came into my life like a message from the Beyond.\n\"To-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.\"  I put myself in the place\nof that poor friendless man taking his lonely leap off into the dark\nand felt what a joy and comfort it must have been.  \"To-day we shall be\ntogether again at the other side.\"  Not, \"I will remember thee,\" but,\n\"Thou shalt be with Me.\"  Not, by and by when I come in My Kingdom, but\n\"To-day.\"  If anybody knew, surely Jesus knew.  If His words meant\nanything surely they meant we shall be conscious of each other, we\nshall know each other as the two friendless ones who hung on the cross\ntogether.\n\nThen I see St. Paul (though he is referring to the later stage of\nexistence) comforting bereaved mourners with the thought of meeting\nthose whom Christ shall bring with Him.  Where would be the comfort of\nit if they should not know them?  He expects to meet his converts and\npresent them to Christ.  How could he say this if he thought He would\nnot know them?\n\nI wonder if anybody really doubts it after all.  Just think of it!\nWith Christ in Paradise and not knowing or loving any comrade soul!  Is\nthat possible in the land of love?  With our dear ones in Paradise and\nnever a thrill of recognition as we touch in spiritual intercourse the\nmother, or wife, or husband, or child for whose presence we are\nlonging!  Cannot you imagine our wondering joy when our questionings\nare set at rest?  Cannot you imagine the Lord in His tender reproach,\n\"Oh, thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?\"\n\n\nSection 5\n\nSometimes one vaguely wonders, How can there be spiritual recognition?\nHow shall we recognize each other without this accustomed bodily shape?\nAnd in the effort to realize the fact of recognition men have made many\nguesses.  But really we know nothing about the \"How.\"  We know that the\nself in that life can think and remember and love.  We know that we can\nstill communicate thoughts to each other.  Can we not leave with God\nthe \"how\" of recognition?\n\nIn several places Scripture seems to suggest that the souls of the\ndeparted are clothed in some kind of visible spirit shape.  They are\nspoken of as not only recognized but in some way seen as in the case of\nSamuel and of Dives and Lazarus and of Moses and Elias at the\nTransfiguration and of our Lord Himself in the spiritual body after the\nResurrection.  They seem to be visible when they please and as they\nplease.\n\nBut when a mother asks, how then should she know her child who died\ntwenty years ago, one feels that recognition must be something\nspiritual and not depending on visible shape.  Even here on earth much\nof our recognition is spiritual.  Soul recognizes soul.  We recognize\nin some degree good and evil character of souls even through the coarse\ncovering of the body.  We instinctively, as we say, trust or distrust\npeople on first appearance.  Or again, a slight young stripling goes\naway to India and returns in twenty years a big, bearded,\nbroad-shouldered man, with practically no outward resemblance to the\nboy that went away.  But even though he strive to conceal his identity\nhe cannot hide it long from his mother.  She looks into his eyes and\nher soul leaps out to him.  Call it instinct, insight, intuition,\nsympathy, what you please, it is the spiritual vision, soul recognizing\nsoul.  If that spiritual vision apart from bodily shape plays so great\na part in recognition here, may it not be all-sufficient there?  In\nthat life where there is consciousness, character, memory, love,\nlonging for our dear ones, and power of communication, is it\nconceivable that we should have intercourse with our loved and longed\nfor, without any thrill of recognition?  Surely not.  Instinctively we\nshall know.\n\n  It was not mother that I knew thy face,\n  It was my heart that cried out Mother![1]\n\n\n{108}\n\nSection 6\n\nP.S.--I let these words stand as they appear in the earlier editions of\nthis book.  For they are true.  But to my mind now there is a far more\nprobable answer.  It is this: That it is not you who will have to do\nthe recognizing; at any rate that you will not be first with it.\n\nIf it be true, as we have reason to believe (see next chapter), that\nyour dear one there is watching your life on earth, of course he would\nknow you at once.  While, year by year, you have been changing from\nyouth to old age he has been near you all the time.  He knows you as\nfamiliarly as if he had been on earth beside you.  Probably he has been\nwaiting and watching as you came through.\n\nAnd whatever change has passed on him in his new life, surely he too\nwill be easier to recognize when he has claimed you first.\n\nWhether this suggestion appeals or no, at any rate we need have no\ndoubt that we shall know one another there.  Nay, shall we not know\neach other there far more thoroughly than we do here?  \"Now,\" says St.\nPaul, \"we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face.  Now I know\nin part, then shall I know even as also I have been known.\"  St. Paul's\nthought is of our fuller knowledge of things hereafter.  Does it not\ninclude also our fuller knowledge of one another?  I met this passage\nlately in a letter of Phillips Brooks: \"I wonder what sort of knowledge\nwe shall have of our friends in the Hereafter and what we shall do to\nkeep up our intimacy with one another.  There will be one good thing\nabout it.  I suppose we shall see through one another to begin with and\nstart off on quite a new basis of mutual understanding.  I should think\nit would be awful at first, but afterwards it must be nice to feel that\nyour friends knew the worst of you and you need not be continually in\nfear that they will find out what you really are.\"\n\nI think a simple natural thought such as that seems to bring the idea\nof spiritual recognition more within our ken.  But we must remember\nthat our conjectures about the MODE of recognition have very little\nbasis.  The FACT of recognition we may practically assume.  The \"how\"\nwe must leave with God.\n\n  \"Soul of my soul I shall meet thee again.\n    With God be the rest.\"\n\n\n\n[1] Momerie.  Immortality.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nTHE COMMUNION OF SAINTS\n\nWe have already seen that the evidence of Scriptures leads us to the\nassurance that our dear ones departed are living a vivid, conscious\nlife; that there is continuance of personal identity.  \"I\" am still\n\"I,\" and that there is memory still, clear and distinct, of the old\nfriends and the old scenes on earth.\n\n\nSection 1\n\nWe pass on to consider the relations between ourselves and them.  Do\nthey know now of our life on earth?  Can there be between us\ncomradeship in any sense?  Can there be love and care and sympathy and\nprayer between us on these two sides of the grave, as there is between\nfriends on earth on the two sides of the Atlantic?\n\nThe Church says yes, and calls it in her creed, the Communion of\nSaints.  The Communion of Saints--a very grand name, but it means only\na very simple thing--just loving sympathy between us and these elder\nbrothers and sisters beyond the grave.\n\nThe term \"saint\" in the New Testament only means any poor humble\nservant of Christ \"set apart\" to Him, baptized into His name.\nCommunion means Fellowship, Comradeship.  Therefore the Communion of\nSaints simply means fellowship between Christians, and in church\nlanguage has come chiefly to mean fellowship between Christians at this\nside and at the other side of death.  Knowledge and comradeship and\nsympathy and love and prayer between the church MILITANT on earth and\nthe church EXPECTANT in Paradise, as they both look forward to the\nfinal joy of the church TRIUMPHANT in Heaven, and meantime cooeperate\none with the other to bring the whole world within the Kingdom of\nChrist.\n\nYou see that it is a prominent doctrine of the Church's creed, and\nrightly understood, it is a very beautiful and touching doctrine--not\nonly because of the union of fellowship with our departed--but\nespecially because the bond of that union and fellowship is our dear\nLord Himself, whom we and they alike love and thank and praise and pray\nto and worship, and from whom we and they alike derive the Divine\nsustenance of our souls.\n\nYou know what a bond of union it is between two men even to find that\nthey both deeply honour and admire and love the same friend and\nbenefactor.  They become one in him.  The Bible means that, but a great\ndeal more, when it says we are \"one in Christ Jesus.\"\n\nHere on earth, there in Paradise, is His presence.  Here on earth,\nthere in Paradise, is the love and prayer and praise going forth to\nHim, and the strength and power of God coming back from Him.  You know\nHis own simile, \"I am the Vine, ye are the branches.\"  From the central\nVine the life rises and flows to every farthest branch and twig and\nleaf, connecting them all in the one life.  He the Sacred Vine is on\nearth with us and in Paradise with them.  Some of the branches are in\nthe shadow here, some of them are in the sunlight there, but we are all\nunited through the Lord Himself.  He is the Vine, we are the branches.\nBecause He is with us here, prayer and praise and all the functions of\nthe Church are here.  Because He is with them in Paradise prayer and\npraise and all the functions of the Church go on in Paradise.  Every\nSunday as we in our poor way love Him and worship Him and pray to Him\nand praise Him, our dear ones beyond are doing the very same.  Notice\nhow in the Communion Service we remind ourselves of the fact.\n\"Therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven we\nlaud and magnify Thy holy name,\" etc.  It is not we alone who feed on\nHis divine life, it is not the altar on earth alone that communicates\nthe all-prevailing virtues of the atoning Blood, for the same Victim is\nthe central object of adoration beyond, as saints and angels and all\nredeemed creation are with us taking up together the chorus of that\neverlasting hymn.\n\nIf we on this side were living closer to our Lord and closer to our\ndeparted, how close might that comradeship become!  We should tell our\nLord so much about each other.  We should think of each other and\nremember each other and sympathize with each other and pray for each\nother.  Why, we could do everything for each other that we can do on\nearth when separated by the Atlantic--except just write home.  (Ah, how\none wishes that they could \"write home\"!)  We are very close if we\nwould but realize it.\n\n  \"Death hides but it does not divide\n  Thou art but on Christ's other side,\n  Thou art with Christ and Christ with me\n  In Him I still am close to thee.\"\n\n\n\nII\n\nYes, you say, that is a beautiful thought.  But is that all?  My poor\nheart is craving for more communion than that.  Do they know or care\nabout my love and sorrow to-day?  And are they helping me?  Are they\npraying for me to that dear Lord whom we both love--in whose presence\nwe both stand to-day?  And can I do anything for them on my side in\nthis \"Communion of Saints\"?\n\n\nSection 1\n\nDo they pray for us or help us in any way?  Does any one need to ask\nthat question?\n\nSince they are with Christ of course they pray.  The world to come is\nthe very atmosphere of prayer.  St. John in his vision tells of \"the\noffering of the golden vials full of odours which are the prayers of\nthe saints\" (Rev. v. 8).  And again three chapters later the angel\nstood to offer the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar.\n\nCan you imagine your mother who never went to bed here without earnest\nprayer for her boy going into that life with full consciousness and\nfull memory of the dear old home on earth, and never a prayer for her\nboy rising to the altar of God?\n\nWhy, even the selfish Dives, after death, could not help praying for\nhis brothers.\n\nAye, she is praying for you.  I think amongst the most precious prayers\nbefore the golden altar are the mother's prayers for her boy who is\nleft behind on earth.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nBut, you say, she does not know anything about my life or my needs on\nearth.  Even if she did not know she would surely pray for you.  But I\nam not so sure that she does not know.  There are several hints in\nScripture to suggest that she does know--hints so strong that if you\nare doing anything now that she would like I should advise you to keep\non doing it and if you are doing anything now that you would not wish\nher to know, I should advise you to stop doing it.\n\nOur Lord represents Abraham as knowing all about Moses and the prophets\nwho came one thousand years after his time (St. Luke xvi. 29).\n\nOur Lord distinctly tells the Jews that Abraham in that life knew all\nabout His mission on earth.  \"Your Father Abraham rejoiced to see My\nday and he saw it and was glad\" (St. John viii. 56).\n\nAt the Transfiguration, too, Moses and Elias came out from that waiting\nlife to speak with Christ of His decease which He should accomplish at\nJerusalem.  Does it not suggest at once that they and their great\ncomrades within the veil were watching eagerly and knowing all about\nthe life of Christ and the great crisis of man's redemption towards\nwhich they had been working on earth long years ago.  Can any one\nbelieve that the whole Waiting Church within the veil, living, and\nconscious, and thinking, and remembering were absolutely ignorant and\nunconcerned about the greatest event that ever came in the history of\ntheir race?\n\nThe writer in the Epistle to the Hebrews apparently believed that our\ndeparted ones were watching our course, for after a long list of the\ngreat departed heroes of faith in olden time he writes to encourage us\nin the race on earth.  \"Seeing that we are encompassed about with so\ngreat a cloud of witnesses let us lay aside every weight and run with\npatience the race that is set before us\" (Heb. xii. 1).  The picture\nsuggested is that of the runners in the amphitheatre on earth and the\ngalleries of Creation crowded with sympathetic watchers like the \"old\nboys\" of a great English school coming back at the annual school games\nto cheer on the lads and remember how they had run themselves long ago\nin the very same fields.[1]\n\n\n\nIII\n\nAnd the hope which Scripture thus suggests and never contradicts\ncommends itself to reason and to the deepest instincts in our hearts.\n\nI think of a mother leaving her children and going into a full\nconscious life, where, mark you, she can still think and remember and\nlove.  I see that her love for them was probably the most powerful\ninfluence in ennobling her life here.  And she has gone into a life\nwhere that ennobling is God's chief aim for her.  Since she can\nremember them, I feel quite sure that if she had the choice she would\nwant to watch over them always.\n\nBut, somebody says, she might not be quite happy if she knew all that\nthey had to go through.  Seeing that at any rate she remembers them, do\nyou think she would be more happy if she knew that they might have to\ngo through troubles of which she could not learn anything?  Put\nyourself in the place of any mother on earth that you know and ask if\nit would make her any happier to stop all letters about her children\nwhom she felt might be in danger or trouble.  Are you quite sure that\nin that spirit life a peaceful contentment like that of the cow who\nforgets her calf is the highest thing to be desired?  The higher any\nsoul grows on earth the less can it escape unselfish sorrow for the\nsake of others.  Must it not be so in that land also?  Surely the\nHighest Himself must have more sorrow than any one else for the sins\nand troubles of men.  Have you ever thought of that \"eternal pain\" of\nGod?  If there be joy in His presence over one sinner that repenteth\nmust there not be pain in His presence over one that repenteth not?\n\nThere are surely higher things in God's plans for His saints than mere\nselfish happiness and content.  There is the blessedness that comes of\nsympathy with Him over human sorrow and pain.  We but degrade the\nthought of the blessedness of the redeemed when we desire that they\nshould escape that.\n\nAnd since in that life she is \"with Christ\" and able doubtless to win\nfor her children more than she could ever win on earth, and since she\nknows that Christ is more solicitous for them than she is herself and\nthat she can trust Him utterly to do for them more than she can ask or\nthink, does it not seem far more probable that she should still know\nand care and love and pray and share in the care and sympathy of Christ\nfor them?\n\nYes, I think probably she does know about them.  I know certainly she\nprays about them.  I myself hope and believe that some of the best\nhelps in my life have been won for me by those on the other side who\nlove me and who are so near to their Lord.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nAnd it is a strong confirmation of that belief when I find it the\nbelief of the great bishops and teachers of the early Church in its\npurest and most loving days, the days nearest to those of Christ and\nHis apostles.\n\nSt. Cyprian the martyr bishop of Carthage who was born in the century\nafter St. John's death (A. D. 200) made an agreement with his friend\nCornelius that whichever of them died first should in the Unseen Land\nremember in prayer him who was left behind.  \"Let us mutually be\nmindful of each other....  On both sides let us always pray for each\nother, let us relieve our afflictions and distresses by a reciprocity\nof love and whichever of us goes hence before the other by the speed of\nthe Divine favour, let our affection continue before the Lord, let not\nprayer for our brothers and sisters cease before the mercy of the\nFather\" (Ep. lvii. ad Cornel.).  And in the days of the plague at\nCarthage, A. D. 252, he comforts his fellow citizens reminding them of\n\"the large number of dear ones, parents, brothers, children, a goodly\nand numerous crowd longing for us and while their own immortality is\nassured still longing for our salvation.\"\n\nOrigen, who was a contemporary of Cyprian, says, \"All the souls who\nhave departed this life still retaining their love for those who are in\nthe world concern themselves for their salvation and aid them by their\nprayers and mediation with God.  For it is written in the Book of the\nMaccabees, 'This is Jeremiah the prophet who always prays for the\npeople'\" (in Cant. Hom. iii.).  And in another work he says, \"It is my\nopinion that all those fathers who have fallen asleep before us fight\non our side and aid us by their prayers\" (in Jesu Nave Hom. xvi. ch.\n19).  And again \"They (in that unseen life) understand who are worthy\nof Divine approval and are not only well disposed to these themselves,\nbut cooeperate with them in their endeavours to please God, they seek\nHis favour on their behalf and with their prayers and intercessions\nthey join their own.\"  And again, \"These (in the Unseen Life) pray for\nus and bring help to our perishable race, and if I may so speak, take\nup arms alongside of it\" (Contra Celsum viii. 64).\n\nSt. Gregory Nazianzen is preaching the funeral sermon of St. Basil.\n\"He still prays for the people,\" he says, \"for he did not so leave us\nas to have left us altogether.\"  And in his funeral sermon over his own\nfather, \"I am satisfied that he accomplishes there now by his prayers\nmore than he ever did by his teaching just in proportion as he\napproaches nearer to God after having shaken off the fetters of his\nbody.\"\n\nSt. Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical lectures, and St.\nChrysostom in several of his homilies speak of the help we get through\nthe prayers of departed holy men.\n\nSt. Ambrose in his great grief at his brother's death, says: \"What\nother consolation is left me but this that I hope to come to thee my\nbrother speedily, that thy departure will not entail a long separation\nbetween us, and that power may be granted me by thy intercessions that\nthou mayest summon me who long to join thee more speedily.\"\n\nSt. Jerome, who gave us the Vulgate, the great Revised Bible of the\nWestern Church, is comforting a mother who has lost a daughter.  \"She\nentreats the Lord for thee and begs for me the pardon of my sins.\"\nAgain to another friend, Heliodorus, he speaks of the life after death.\n\"There you will be made a fellow burgher with St. Paul.  There also you\nwill seek for your parents the rights of the same citizenship.  There\ntoo you will pray for me who spurred you on to victory.\"  Again he\nvigorously disputes with Vigilantius who asserts that prayers and\nintercessions must cease after death.  \"If the apostles and martyrs\nwhile still in the body are able to pray for others ... how much more\nmay they do so now....  One man, Moses, obtains from God pardon for\n600,000 men in arms; and Stephen, the imitator of his Lord, begs\nforgiveness for his persecutors; shall their power be less after they\nhave begun to be with Christ?\"[2]\n\n\nSection 3\n\nBut sympathy and prayer must not be on one side only.  It must be\nmutual in the Communion of Saints.  They remembering and loving, and\nthinking about us.  We remembering and loving, and thinking about them.\nThey asking from their Lord blessing for us.  We asking from Him\nblessing for them.  For surely they are not above wanting His blessings\nstill--not even the best of them though safe with Him, though forgiven\ntheir sins, they are still imperfect, still needing to grow in grace,\nin purification, in fitness for the final heaven by and by.  And we can\nhelp their growth as they can help ours.\n\nSome of the most deeply religious people that I know shrink from the\nthought of prayer for the departed.  There has been reason for it.\nThis beautiful old custom, the custom of the Jews, the custom of the\nwhole Christian Church till the Reformation[3] had grown at that time\ninto great corruption.  And one danger of great corruption is that\nindignant reformers are likely to tear away more than the corruption,\n\"hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.\"  So it was here.\nBecause of the abuse men feared even the use.  In their hatred of the\nsordid traffic in masses for the dead they looked with suspicion on any\nprayer for the departed.  And at length men began to think that such\nprayers were even wrong.\n\nAh, it was a pity!  Our departed ones have more quickly passed into\noblivion.  The great Paradise life has almost faded from our view.  We\nare the more lonely in our desolate bereavement.  Perhaps our dear ones\nbeyond are the more lonely, too, if they know about our life and our\nprayers on earth.  A friend said to me lately, \"I was a little child\nwhen the news came of father's death far away.  That night in my\nprayers I prayed for father as usual.  But my aunt stopped me.\n'Darling,' she said, 'you must not pray for father now; it is wrong.'\nAnd I can remember still how I shrank back feeling as if some one had\nslammed the door and shut him outside.\"\n\nI think we should be happier and better, I think the Unseen World would\ncome back more clearly on our horizon if we kept our dear ones in our\nprayers as we used to do before they died.  Do not keep any hidden\nchambers in your hearts shut out from Christ.  Bring your dear departed\nones to Him as you bring all else to Him.  He knows what is best for\nthem.  Pray only for that.  Pray \"Lord help them to grow closer to\nThee.  Help them if it may be to help others and make them happy in Thy\ngreat Kingdom until we meet again.\"  Pray something like that.  Oh, how\ncan you help doing it if you love them and believe in prayer?\n\n  How can I cease to pray for thee?  Somewhere\n  In God's wide universe thou art to-day.\n  Can He not reach thee with His tender care?\n  Can He not hear me when for thee I pray?\n  Somewhere thou livest and hast need of Him,\n  Somewhere thy soul sees higher heights to climb,\n  And somewhere, too, there may be valleys dim\n  Which thou must pass to reach the heights sublime.\n  Then all the more because thou canst not hear\n  Poor human words of blessing will I pray.\n  O, true brave heart, God bless thee wheresoe'er\n  In God's wide universe thou art to-day!\n\n\n\n[1] It is true that the Greek word translated \"witnesses\" is not the\nword meaning \"spectators\" but rather \"witnesses for the faith,\" but as\nmost good commentators (including Bishop Westcott) say--it is\nimpossible to exclude the thought of spectators in an amphitheatre\nwatching a race.  The Revised Version, too, seems to accept this view\nfor it prints the word \"witnesses\" without any marginal remark.\n\n[2] Luckock, _After Death_.\n\n[3] The evidence for this can be seen in full in any standard work on\nthe subject, e. g., Luckock, _After Death_; or Lee, _Christian Doctrine\nof Prayer for the Departed_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nGROWTH AND PURIFICATION\n\nWhat is the main purpose of the Intermediate Life?  Is there something\nto be done there which cannot be fully done at any other time?\n\nLet us still try to keep to the firm ground of Scripture, and to avoid\nconfusion let us confine ourselves still to the case of those who have\ndied, in some degree at least, in penitence and faith.\n\n\nSection 1\n\nWe have already seen that Scripture intimates that that life is not one\nof sleep or unconsciousness.  It is a clear conscious life.  It is\ntherefore natural to ask what happens in it?  What is the use of it?\nScience and experience teach that growth is the law of all the life\nwhich we know anything about.  Even if we had no further light of\nrevelation we should find it difficult to believe that imperfect beings\ndying in the grace of God pass into that life and live in it for years\nor for ages without any growth or development.\n\nScripture also teaches that God's aim for us is not merely that we\nshould escape hell or just creep into heaven.  Our goal is to grow into\nthe likeness of God, to \"rise to the stature of the perfect man, even\nto the stature of the fullness of Christ.\"  How many of us are ever\neven in sight of that goal when we die?\n\nBut Scripture goes further still.  It points us forward to the final\nstage of being, to the Beatific Vision of God in the far future and\ntells us with awe that that God \"is of purer eyes than to behold\niniquity,\" that \"even the heavens are not clean in His sight;\" that\ninto that final abode of bliss \"nothing that defileth shall enter in.\"\nWhich of us, the greatest soul of us all, can look forward to such a\nprospect without bowing himself in dread like Isaiah of old, \"Woe is me\nfor I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, that mine eyes should\nsee the King of the Lord of Hosts!\"  If there be no growth or\npurification in the Waiting Life what hope is there ever for any one of\nus of fitness for the presence of the all holy God?\n\nThink that the great majority of those who die, even though penitent\nand striving after right, have much of evil clinging to them; that many\nafter a whole life of ingraining their characters with evil have\nbrought sorrowfully to Christ at last their poor defiled souls; that\neven the best is not without many faults and stains.  If nothing that\ndefileth shall enter Heaven, if growth is a law of all life as far as\nwe know it, are we not practically compelled to believe that much of\nthe growth and purification needed to fit us for God's presence shall\ntake place in the great Waiting Life?\n\nAnd this belief and hope for all these poor faulty souls in whom the\ngood work of God has begun on earth, St. Paul confirms.  \"Being\nconfident of this very thing, that He who hath begun a good work in you\nwill perfect it UNTIL THE DAY OF JESUS CHRIST\"--_i. e._, right through\nthe earth life, right through the Intermediate Life, until the last\ngreat scene in the drama of our history opens at the Judgment Day.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nHow this shall take place God has not definitely revealed to us.  But\nGod has given us reason and common sense to enable us to draw\nconclusions from what He has revealed.  Since in that life I am the\nsame conscious \"I,\" with the same consciously continuous personality,\nwith the same conscience and memory, I may surely expect that the Holy\nSpirit \"who hath begun a good work in me and will continue it until the\nday of Jesus Christ\"--will continue it in much the same natural way as\nhere, through Conscience and Memory and the Sense of His Presence.\nOnly that these will be all more keen and effective and free from the\ndisturbance of the bodily senses and the distractions of this life on\nearth.\n\nCONSCIENCE here is the throne of the Holy Ghost, from which He rules\nand directs my life.  Therefore my body is \"the temple of the Holy\nGhost.\"  But Conscience here is greatly weakened by fears and hopes and\nambitions and distractions of various kinds.  At times, when I lie\nawake at night and think about my life, or when I enter into my closet\nto prepare by special concentration of spirit for my Holy Communion, I\nget some dim notions of what Conscience might effect in me if it had a\nfree hand.  In THAT life of close spiritual concentration, when the\nouter world is shut off and the soul enters into its own deepest\nrecesses, contemplating itself, contemplating its past and its future,\ncontemplating the deep tender love of Him who is there present as in\nPalestine long ago, and feeling that in spite of all my shameful\ningratitude He is loving me and blessing me and watching tenderly over\nme--surely I may expect great things of the operation of Conscience in\nme.\n\nMEMORY in this life is a very wonderful thing.  It can call up in a\nmoment, for Conscience to work on, pictures of half a century ago.  But\nin the fast crowding impressions on the senses Memory is overtaxed and\nhas to lay away in its storehouse of subconsciousness whole tracts of\nthe past which never rise up before my conscious thought at all.\nPsychological science has much to say in late years about this\nstorehouse of subconscious memory and the power that, unknown to me, it\nis exerting on my life.  It is there all the time, \"under the\nthreshold.\"  These buried memories are alive, ready to spring up, but\nasleep--in abeyance.\n\n\nSection 3\n\nNow think what this means for Conscience and for Memory as the handmaid\nof Conscience in the great contemplative life after Death.  There is no\ngood or evil thing that I have ever done but Conscience has pronounced\non.  Some of these judgments I remember.  Some of them I forget.  In\nthe many distractions of life and the desire to escape painful\nthoughts, there has dropped down under the threshold of my conscious\nthought a vast store of memories of which I am oblivious, but of which\none and another and another springs up at times unexpectedly with a\nstartling reminder of the great hidden store behind.  I meet by chance\nan old friend of my boyhood, and as he talks about the old times,\npicture after picture springs up into the light, memories which had\nlong gone from me and which would never have sprung up from \"under the\nthreshold\" but for the chance stimulation of his talk.\n\nWe have often heard of drowning people on the verge of death having the\nforgotten memories of half a lifetime flashed back in a moment.  An old\nfriend once told me a curious experience.  \"I was crossing a railway\nline hurriedly on a wet day.  As I rushed over the rails the Express\ncame in view.  I slipped and fell--fortunately into a hollow where men\nhad been working, and swift as a flash the Express swept over me.  The\nexperience of that half minute I shall never forget.  It seemed that my\nwhole life was blazoned before me in thirty seconds.  Things that I had\nnot remembered for forty years past flashed back in a moment as if they\nhad happened yesterday.\"\n\nThat is what Memory can do even in this life under strong excitation,\ncalling up its forgotten stores.  Think what its power may be in that\nlife as a handmaid to Conscience.  With all its old lumber rooms of\nforgotten deeds thrown open--with all the forgotten feelings of my\nlife--boyhood, youth, manhood--open for my contemplation.  My\nimpatience and God's patience, my sorrows and why God sent them, my\nmercies, all the kindly providences of God working unknown to me all my\ndays.\n\nAnd my sins--some sins that I hate to think of, some that I had almost\nsucceeded in forgetting, all standing out clearly before me in the\nunsparing light of that mysterious life.\n\n  I sat alone with my Conscience\n    In the place where time had ceased.\n  We discoursed of my former living\n    In the land where the years increased.\n  And I felt I should have to answer\n    The questions it put to me,\n  And to face those questions and answers\n    In that dim eternity.\n\n  And the ghosts of forgotten actions\n    Came floating before my sight,\n  And things that I thought were dead things\n    Were alive with a terrible might.\n  And the vision of all my past life\n    Was an awful thing to face\n  Alone, alone with my Conscience,\n    In that strange and lonely place.\n\n\nAye, my Conscience must do its work some day if I keep it from doing it\nnow.  But all this will be in the presence of my Saviour.  They are\n\"with Christ.\"\n\nEvery memory will be more keen and poignant and yet more peaceful and\ntouching in the presence of that dear loving Lord who I feel knows all\nand yet has loved and received and forgiven me in spite of all, and who\nis watching over me with deep tenderness like the refiner of silver\nover His furnace as the dross is cleared away and I grow steadily in\nfitness for the glorious life of unselfish joy and service in Heaven.\n\nBut pain!  You do not like any thought of pain in connection with that\nlife.  Yes surely, more or less, according to one's state, and dying\ngradually into perfect peace.  Growth of holiness does not come to\nsinful man here or there but through pain, the tender blessed pain of\nGod's purification, the pain of self-reproach, the pain that thou hast\nsinned,\n\n  \"The shame of self and pity for thy Lord\n  That One so sweet should e'er have placed Himself\n  At disadvantage such, as to be used\n  So vilely by a being vile as thee.\"\n\n\nBut what a sweet and wholesome pain, mingled with the sense of safety\nand peace and hope--mingled with deep joy and boundless adoring\ngratitude and love as we see the stain of the old sins steadily being\neffaced and look forward to the sure bliss of Heaven in the future!\nSurely by means of such pain and gratitude and adoring love God makes\nsinful souls fit for Heaven.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nPROBATION IN THIS LIFE\n\nUp to this we have been ignoring a large proportion of the inhabitants\nof the Unseen Land.  To avoid misunderstanding we have kept in view\nthose only of whom we had hope that they died in the fear and love of\nGod.  But there is no evading the thought that between these and the\nutterly reprobate, there are multitudes of Christian and heathen in\nthat Unseen Life today who belong to neither class, mixed characters in\nall varying degrees of good or evil.  Of many of them it could be said\nthat those who knew them best saw much that was good and lovable in\nthem.  But it could not be said that they had consciously and\ndefinitely chosen for Christ.\n\nThey must form the majority of those to-day in the Unseen Land.\nTherefore one cannot help wondering about them.  One day death overtook\nthem.  The thought of them comes forcibly when some morning the\nnewspapers startle us with the story of a terrible battle or railway\nsmash or shipwreck or conflagration in which hundreds have passed out\nof life in a moment and the horror of the catastrophe is deepened by\nthe thought that they have been called away suddenly unprepared.\n\nWhat of their position in the Intermediate Life?  Our Christian charity\nprompts us to hope the best for them.  But are we justified in hoping?\nIt is impossible for thoughtful, sympathetic men to evade that\nquestion.  It is cowardly to evade it.  At any rate a treatise on the\nIntermediate Life can hardly pass over altogether the thought of the\nmajority of its inhabitants and it cannot be wrong for us humbly and\nreverently to think about them.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nI have already pointed out the solemn responsibility of this earth life\nin which acts make habits and habits make character and character makes\ndestiny.  I am about to point out the grave probability, to say the\nleast of it, that in a very real sense this life may be the sole\nprobation time for man.  But this does not shut out the question of the\npoor bereaved mother by the side of her dead son.  \"If any soul has not\nin penitence and faith definitely accepted Jesus Christ in this life is\nit forever impossible that he may do so in any other life?\"\n\nI answer unhesitatingly, God forbid!  Else what of all the dead\nchildren down through the ages and all the dead idiots and all the\nmillions of dead heathen and all the poor stragglers in Christian lands\nwho in their dreary, dingy lives had never any fair chance of knowing\ntheir Lord in a way that would lead them to love Him, and who have\nnever even thought about accepting or rejecting Him?  \"Shall not the\nJudge of all the earth do right?\"  Shall not the loving Father do His\nbest for all?  Our Lord knew \"that if the mighty works done in\nCapernaum had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented.\"\nDoes He not there suggest that He would take thought for those men of\nTyre and Sidon in the Unseen Land?  Does He not know the same of many\ngone unto that Unseen from heathen lands and Christian lands, who would\nhave loved Him if they knew Him as He really is and who have but begun\nto know Him truly in the world of the dead--of many who in their\nignorance have tried to respond to the dim light of Conscience within\nand only learned within the veil really to know Him the Lord of the\nConscience, \"the light which lighteth every man coming into the world\"\n(St. John i. 9).\n\nHere is no question of encouraging careless, godless men with the hope\nof a new probation.  Here is no question of men wilfully rejecting\nChrist.  The merry, thoughtless child--the imbecile--the heathen--had\nno thought of rejecting Christ.  The poor struggler in Christian lands,\nbrought up in evil surroundings, who though he had heard of Christ yet\nsaw no trace of Christ's love in his dreary life--he cannot be said to\nhave rejected Christ.  The honest sceptic who in the last generation\nhad been taught as a prominent truth of Christianity that God decrees\ncertain men to eternal Heaven and certain men to eternal Hell not for\nany good or evil they had done but to show His power and glory, and who\nhas therefore in obedience to conscience frankly rejected\nChristianity--can he be said to have rejected Christ?\n\nThe possibility in this life of putting oneself outside the pale of\nsalvation is quite awful enough without our making it worse.  It is not\nfor us to judge who is outside the pale of salvation nor to limit the\nlove of God by our little shibboleths.  It is on a man's WILL, not on\nhis knowledge or ignorance that destiny depends.  God only can judge\nthat.  All the subtle influences which go to make character are known\nto Him alone.  He alone can weigh the responsibility of the will in any\nparticular case.  And surely we know Him well enough humbly to trust\nHis love to the uttermost for every poor soul whom He has created.\n\n\n\nII\n\nBut this hope must not ignore the solemn thought that in a very real\nsense the probation of this life seems the determining factor in human\ndestiny--even for the unthinking--even for the ignorant--nay even for\nthe heathen who could never have heard of Christ here.  Rightly\nunderstood all that we have said does not conflict with this.  It may\nseem strange at first sight to think of the heathen as having any real\nprobation here.  Yet, mark it well, it is of this heathen man who could\nnot consciously have accepted Christ in this life that St. Paul implies\nthat his attitude in the Unseen Life towards Him who is the Light of\nthe World is determined by his attitude in this life towards the\nimperfect light of Conscience that he has.  \"If the Gentiles who have\nnot the Law do by nature the things contained in the Law, these having\nnot the Law are a law unto themselves, which show the works of the Law\nwritten in their hearts, their Conscience bearing witness\" (Rom. ii.\n14).\n\nWe may assume that St. Paul means that the heathen man who in this life\nfollowed the dim light of his conscience is the man who will rejoice in\nthe full light when it comes and that the man who has been wilfully\nshutting out that dim light of conscience here is thereby rendering\nhimself less capable of accepting the fuller light when he meets it\nhereafter.  In other words this life is his probation, he is forming on\nearth the moral bent of his future life.\n\nWe may assume the same of men in similar conditions in Christian lands,\nmen brought up amid ignorance and crime, men brought up in infidel\nhomes, men to whom Christ has been so unattractively presented that\nthey saw no beauty in Him or even instinctively turned away from Him\nimpelled by their conscience.  They all have the light of God in some\ndegree and by their attitude towards the right that they know are\ndetermining on earth their attitude towards God in the Hereafter.  They\nare forming character and _character tends to permanence_.\n\nThe \"outer darkness\" it would seem comes not from absence of light but\nfrom blindness of sight.  The joy of Heaven is impossible to the unholy\njust as the joy of beautiful scenery to the blind or the joy of\nexquisite music to the deaf.  Probation in this life--simply means that\nin this first stage of his being a man either is or is not blinding his\neyes and dulling his ears and hardening his heart so as to make himself\nincapable of higher things in the life to come.\n\nIf then it be possible even for a heathen to have in this life\nsufficient probation to determine his attitude towards God for ever,\nhow much more for a man in the full light of Christianity.  In view of\nthis the great law of life that CHARACTER TENDS TO PERMANENCE may it\nnot be awfully true that a man who with full knowledge of Christ\nwilfully and deliberately turns from Him all through this life, should\nthus render himself incapable of turning to Him in any other life?\nWith _full knowledge of Christ_ I say, not with knowledge of some\nrepulsive misrepresentation of Christ.\n\nFor think what it means to reject Christ wilfully with full knowledge\nof Him.\n\n  His voice still comes as we tramp on,\n  With a sorrowful fall in its pleading tone:\n  \"Thou wilt tire in the dreary ways of sin;\n  I left My home to bring thee in.\n    In its golden street are no weary feet,\n    Its rest is pleasant, its songs are sweet.\"\n  And we shout back angrily hurrying on\n  To a terrible home where rest is none:\n  \"We want not your city's golden street,\n  Nor to hear its constant song!\"\n  _And still Christ keeps on loving us, loving all along_.\n\n  Rejected still He pursues each one:\n  \"My child, what more could thy God have done?\n  Thy sin hid the light of heaven from Me,\n  When alone in the darkness I died for thee.\n  Thy sin of to-day in its shadow lay\n  Between My face and One turned away.\"\n    And we stop and turn for a moment's space\n    To fling back that love in the Saviour's face,\n  To give His heart yet another grief,\n  And glory in the wrong.\n  _And still Christ keeps on loving us, loving all along_.\n\n\nIs it hard to believe that a man thus knowing Christ and wilfully\nrejecting Him should thereby risk the ruin of his soul?  Can we not\nrecognize this awful law of life that wilful sin against light tends to\ndarkening of the light--that every rejection of God and good draws\nblood as it were on the spiritual retina, that a life of such\nrejections of the light tends to make one incapable of receiving the\nlight for ever.\n\nIf this be so it is not at all fair to misrepresent it by saying that\nGod cruelly stereotypes a man's soul at death and will refuse him\npermission to repent after death however much he may want to.  The\nvoice of the Holy Ghost within tells us that this could never be true\nof the Father.  We must believe that through all Eternity, if the worst\nsinner felt touched by the love of God and wanted to turn to Him, that\nman would be saved.  What we dread is that the man may not want to do\nso, may have rendered himself incapable of doing so.  We dread not\nGod's will, but the man's own will.\n\nCharacter tends to permanence.  Free will is a glorious but a dangerous\nprerogative.  All experience leads towards the belief that a human will\nmay so distort itself as to grow incapable of good.  Even a character\nnot hardened into permanent evil may grow incapable of the highest\ngood.  A soul even forgiven through the mercy of God may \"enter into\nlife halt and maimed\" like a consumptive patient cured of his disease\nbut going through life with only one lung.\n\n\nThough the Bible does not give an absolutely definite pronouncement on\nthis question, yet the general trend of its teaching leads to the\nbelief that this life is our probation time.  It everywhere calls for\nimmediate repentance.  And St. Paul says that the Judgment is for deeds\n\"done _in the body_,\" and there are such hints as \"the door was shut\"\nand \"there is a sin unto death,\" and \"it were better for a man not to\nhave known the way of righteousness than after he has known it to turn\nfrom it.\"[1]  And this has been the general belief of the Church in all\nages.  Even in all the hopeful words of the ancient Fathers about\nChrist preaching to the spirits in prison who in the dark old world\ndays \"had sometime been disobedient,\" we have seen that they add some\nsuch significant phrase as \"that He might convert those _who were\ncapable_ of turning to Him.\"  (See Chapter IV, p. 60.)  And human\nexperience of character tending to permanence makes this fact of human\nprobation awfully probable.  There is nothing in Scripture nor in its\ninterpretation by the Church, nor in human experience, to conflict with\nthe statement that in this life Acts make habits and Habits make\nCharacter and character makes Destiny.\n\nWhat new discoveries of God's power and mercy may await us in eternity\nwe cannot know, but from all we do know we are justified in thinking\nthat (in the sense which I have stated) a man's life in this world\ndetermines his destiny--at any rate that a man who presumes recklessly\non chances in the future is taking terrible risks.  The Bible gives no\nencouragement to hope that one who with full knowledge of Christ keeps\non wilfully rejecting Him all through this life will be able to turn to\nHim in any other life.\n\nThe only comfort we dare offer to anxious mourners grieving over sinful\nfriends departed is that God only is the judge of what constitutes\nirrevocable rejection of good, that we cannot tell who has irrevocably\n\"done despite to the Spirit of grace,\" and that the deep love and pain\nof Christ for sinful men remains for ever and ever.  We may tell the\npoor mother that her deep love and pain for her dead son is but a faint\nshadow of the deep love and pain of God--that no one will be surprised\nor trapped in his ignorance--that no one will be lost whom it is\npossible for God to save--that no one will be lost until \"the Heavenly\nFather has as it were thrown His arms around him and looked him full in\nthe face with the bright eyes of His love, and that of his own\ndeliberate will he would not have Him\" (Faber).\n\nWe dare not minimize what the love and pain of God may do, but we dare\nnot presume in the face of Scripture to lighten the awful\nresponsibility which this life brings.\n\nThus we reach larger thoughts of God's dealings with man and deeper\ninterest in the infinite variety that must be in the \"many mansions\" of\nthe boundless life hereafter.  And this sets us wondering about another\nthought as to ministry in that life.\n\n\n\n[1] I have not quoted such texts as \"Where the tree falleth there it\nshall lie,\" which no sensible student now uses in this connection, nor\neven the well-known text, \"Behold now is the acceptable time, behold\nnow is the day of salvation,\" for the \"acceptable time\" and \"the day of\nsalvation\" mean here not the present life of each man but the present\nChristian dispensation.  St. Paul is quoting Isaiah's prophecy of\nChrist of the acceptable time and the day of salvation, and he says\nthis time has come now in this Christian dispensation.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nMINISTRY IN THE UNSEEN LIFE\n\nSection 1\n\nIs it allowable here to make a venture of faith and speculate on a\nmatter of which we cannot give definite proof?  There is a beautiful\nold allegory of KNOWLEDGE, the strong mailed knight, tramping over the\ngreat table-land that he surveyed, and testing and making his ground\nsure at every step, while beside him, just above the ground, moved the\nwhite-winged angel FAITH.\n\nSide by side they moved, till the path broke short off on the verge of\na vast precipice.  Knowledge could go no further.  There was no footing\nfor the ponderous knight; but the white-winged angel rose majestically\nfrom the ground and moved across the chasm, where her companion could\nnot follow.\n\nOur path has broken off--knowledge can go no further.  May we speculate\nwith faith on something we cannot prove?  I am thinking of a\nspeculation very dear to myself, about that progress of our dear ones\nin the presence of Christ.  Will not much of that progress in the life\nbeyond come through unselfish ministry to others?  Let us see what\nreason there is to hope it.\n\nThink of all the true hearts who have lived on earth the Christ life of\nunselfish helpfulness.  Can you imagine them never helping any one\nthere, where growth in love is God's highest aim for them?\n\nThink of our Lord's mysterious preaching in the Life after Death and\nremember that some of the best known teachers of the early Church\nbelieved that the apostles and others had followed His example.  (See\nChapter IV, p. 59.)\n\nThink that there are countless millions in the World of the Departed\nborn in heathen lands, born in Christian lands, who had no chance on\nearth of knowing Christ in a way to win their love for Him.\n\nThink, how shall His command be fulfilled by His Church, \"Go preach the\ngood news to every creature\"--EVERY creature.  What a mockery it seems\nwith the heathen dying half a million every week if no work for Christ\ngoes on in the Unseen!  If millions of those Hindoos who have died\nwithout the Gospel would have accepted it, do you think it is not being\ntaught to any of them now?  If the men of ancient Tyre and Sidon would\nhave repented at the teaching and work of Christ, if the mighty works\nhad been done in them, do you not think He has taken care since that\nthe men of Tyre and Sidon should have their chance?  If the heathen\nSocrates, and Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus would have\nfallen at His feet as their Master and Friend--and you know they\nwould--do you think they have not learned to know Him by now?  If\nhonest hearts in our own land who have died repelled from Him through\ntheir ignorance and through stupid misrepresentations would have loved\nHim if they knew Him as He really is, do you think that no one is\nhelping them to understand Him now?  Can we doubt that somehow within\nthe Veil they will learn more fully of His tender love?  And judging\nfrom what we know of God's methods on earth, is it unreasonable to\nthink that they will learn it from their brethren?  True, God might\nhelp them by means of the angels.  But in God's dealings with men's\nsouls on earth not angels but men were the helpers He gave them.  Even\nin the stupendous miracle of the conversion of St. Paul it was a man\n(Ananias) whom God sent to help him.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nHere comes an interesting question about the doctrine of Election.  To\nthe generation before us it was a horrible doctrine clashing with all\nsense of fairness or right.  Men said it meant that God decreed certain\nmen to eternal Heaven and certain others to eternal Hell by His own\narbitrary will.  The stern revolt of Conscience at length sent us back\nto study our Bibles more carefully.  We found that in the first\nrecorded case of election Abraham was called _for the good of others_\n\"that in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be\nblessed.\"\n\nWe saw reason to believe that Abraham's case was a type of all other\nelect--_elect for the service of others_.  We found that the Bible\nconsistently and throughout affirms that when \"God calls or separates\none man to Himself it is for the good of other men; that when He\nselects one family it is that all families should be blessed; that when\nHe chooses one nation it is for the welfare of all nations; that when\nHe elects and establishes a church it is for the spiritual benefit of\nthe world.  No man, no family, no nation, no church possesses any gift\nor privilege or superior capacity or power for its own use and welfare\nalone but for the general good.\"  So we learned that God's word is true\nin spite of our stupid misunderstanding of it and that this doctrine of\nElection rightly understood is one of the noblest things in the whole\nBible.\n\nNow comes my question.  Are God's elect in the Hereafter life still\n\"_elect for the service of others_\"?  Are those loving souls who are\njoyfully accepting Christ's service here,--destined for a still more\nglorious service in this ministry in the Unseen--the \"first-fruits\" of\na great harvest which through them the Lord will reap in the Hereafter?\nWill some be just saved, saved so as by fire, saved \"by the skin of\ntheir teeth,\" as we say, missing the noble destiny of the \"elect,\" the\njoy of being a blessing to their race?\n\n\nSection 3\n\n\"You have preached your last sermon,\" said one to Frederick Denison\nMaurice as he was dying.  \"Aye,\" he said; \"but only my last sermon in\nTHIS life.\"  He believed he was going through the veil to preach to\nmen.  I believe it too, though I cannot prove it, nay, even though\nthere be difficulties in the way of believing it.  And many men greater\nthan we are believing it, impelled by the stirring of Divine impulses\nwithin.\n\nDo not think of it as merely a work for preachers and teachers.  Every\nbrave boy here who is trying to do right, every poor woman who is\nlearning to love, every one who is blessing the world by kindly\nunselfishness, is helping on the Kingdom of God on earth and will be\nhelping on the Kingdom of God beyond.\n\nSurely there will be scope for them all.  When you think of that great\nmingled crowd that is daily passing through the gates of death, all\nsorts and conditions--from the strong saints of God to the poor\nchildren brought up in homes of sin--you need have little doubt that\nthere is room for service.\n\nIf it be true, ah! think of it, you who are trying to forget\nyourselves, and live for others--think of the blessedness of your life\nin the waiting land.  With the weak and the ignorant needing to be\nhelped; with the little children needing to be mothered and loved; with\nthe great heathen world, who have gone within the veil, never yet\nhaving heard of Christ.\n\n\nSection 4\n\nIf it be true, think how it takes away the reproach of \"glorified\nselfishness,\" which many attribute to the Christians' glad hope.\n\nThink how it helps in the perplexities about God's dealings when young\nand useful lives are taken from the earth.  An angry mourner said to me\nrecently, \"I don't believe God has anything to do with it, else why\nshould He take away a noble life like that and leave all these stupid\nuseless people in the world?\"  I told him of my hope of this ministry\nin the Unseen and suggested that perhaps God did not want ONLY the\nstupid useless people.\n\nAnd think especially how it deepens the importance of our life on earth\nto feel that it has a bearing on our usefulness for ever.  The more we\nincrease our talents here, the more we shall be able to help our\nSaviour there.  He Himself suggests this in the parables of the Talents\nand the Pounds.  \"Thy pound has gained five, I will set thee over five\ncities.  Thy pound has gained ten, I will set thee over ten cities.  I\nwill give thee a larger and nobler work hereafter.\"  Is not that an\nincentive to stir one's blood?  The more I grow in love, in\nunselfishness, in knowledge of God, in righteousness of life, the more\nuse I shall be to my dear Lord and to my brethren for ever.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII\n\nCONCLUSION\n\nSo we close our thoughts about the NEAR HEREAFTER, the life immediately\nafter death.  The FAR Hereafter--the great mystery of Judgment and Hell\nand Heaven belongs to a later section.  Here we have been dealing only\nwith the life going on to-day in the Unseen--side by side with our\npresent life.\n\nAh! that wonderful Paradise land--that wonderful Church of God in the\nUnseen--with its vast numbers, with its enthusiastic love, with all its\ngrand leaders who have been trained on earth.  WE AND THEY together\nform the great continuous Church of God.  We are all ONE LONG\nPROCESSION; they at the head in the Unseen.  What a life it is!  What a\nwork it has!\n\nSaid I not well it was a Gospel of the Hereafter, a good news of God!\nIt will make you solemn as you feel that character passes on unchanged.\nThat is good; but it will do more.  It will take away the sting and the\nhorror of death.  It is not the pain of dying that makes that horror\nwhen I come to die.  After all, men bear far more pain without\nflinching.  It is not merely the parting for the present with those I\nlove.  We have constantly to do that when they go to other lands\nwithout breaking our hearts about it.  It is not even any doubt about a\nfuture Resurrection at the Second Advent.  I may believe that, and yet\nget little comfort from it.  That Advent seems so far away.  It may be\nnext week; but it may be 5,000 years hence, and meantime what of my\nlife?  Sleep, unconsciousness, darkness?  What?  No wonder I should\nshrink from that mysterious unknown.\n\nBut teach me the ancient Scriptural doctrine of the PARADISE life as it\nappears in the Bible.  Teach me that in the hour after death I shall\npass into the Unseen with myself, with my full life, my feelings, my\ncharacter, my individuality, and in that solemn hour death will lose\nits horror.  Is not that a Gospel?\n\nIn the awful days of bereavement it will bring God's peace, and it will\nbring elevation of character.  \"Where your treasure is, there will your\nheart be also.\"\n\n  \"He is not dead, the child of your affection,\n    But gone into that school\n  Where he no longer needs your poor protection,\n    And Christ Himself doth rule.\"\n\n\nYou think of your boy as serving at one side of the veil, and you at\nthe other; each in the presence of Christ.  You think how he is being\nlovingly trained and disciplined.  How all his abilities are being used\nin self-sacrificing deeds for others.  Not in a glorified selfishness\nin thanking God that he is safe, though his brethren be lost.  Ah, no!\nbut in perfect self-sacrifice, even as his Lord.  You think of him as\nlearning to fight for righteousness--to help the weak, aye, mayhap, to\ngo out--God's brave young knight--out into the darkness after some one\nwho has missed of Christ on earth.  Realize that and your whole life\nmust perforce grow nobler.  And realize that you will not have to wait\nfor the Resurrection or the Advent to meet him and learn all.\n\nWhen your death comes, he will be waiting for you.  He has been praying\nand watching over you.  He will tell you of all that has been\nhappening.  And together in Christ's loving presence, side by side, you\nwill work and wait, and help your brethren; and look forward to the\nglory of the heaven that is still in the future.  Is not that a Gospel\nworth the preaching--a Gospel to stir our souls and to comfort our\nhearts for those \"whom we have loved long since and lost a while\"?\n\nThank God for the blessed doctrine of the Paradise life!\n\nThank God for all His poor penitent servants departed this life in His\nfaith and fear!\n\n\n\n\nPART II\n\nThe Far Hereafter\n\n\n\nI\n\nTHE JUDGMENT\n\nWe touch lightly on the subject of the FAR Hereafter which is still\naway in the future for all humanity.  One day the Intermediate Life\nwill close.  The end of this age will come at the Second Advent.  And\nat this crisis our Lord places the great drama of the Judgment and the\nfinal decision of each man's destiny.  Whether it will be a great\nspectacular event such as His picture suggests, with all humanity\nassembled and the Judge on the great White Throne, or whether His\npicture is figurative, we cannot affirm.  We can only gather that it\nwill be a final judgment and that it will be a judgment according to\nfinally developed character, when men shall be clearly seen to belong\nto the right hand or the left, the sheep or the goats, to the wheat or\nthe tares, to the good fish to be gathered up or the bad fish to be\nthrown away.\n\nThen come the final stages in the history of humanity, Hell and Heaven.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nHELL\n\nHere we touch the awful part of our study.  In Christ's great drama of\nthe Judgment those on the left hand are passing out into the darkness,\nand we see them no more.  In that darkness there seems no ray of hope.\nSo far as we can learn, it means irrevocable ruin and loss.  In spite\nof God's love and pain for them on Earth and in Hades, they seem at\nlast to have destroyed in themselves everything of good, and so placed\nthemselves beyond possibility of restoration for ever.  The judgment\nhas clearly the ring of finality.  There seems nothing more to be said.\nAnd so, with pain in our hearts responding to the pain of the Father,\nwe are forced to leave them in the darkness and mystery in which\nScripture enshrouds them.\n\nThis is, I think, all that can justifiably be said.  The reticence and\nreserve of Scripture forbids any definite doctrine of Hell.\n\nAnd this is all that would have needed to be said if men had kept to\nthat reticence and reserve of Scripture, and to all further\nquestionings contented themselves with the answer that the Judge of all\nthe earth will do right.  But they have not so contented themselves.\nIt is hard to blame them.  For beyond the main facts about the doom of\nthe impenitent there are here and there through the Bible many\ntantalizing hints perplexing and difficult to reconcile with each\nother, but very tempting to follow out.  By emphasizing certain of\nthese and ignoring or dwelling more lightly on certain others which\nseem to contradict them, men have formulated definite doctrines about\nHell, differing widely from each other but each with apparently strong\nScriptural support.  This is only what may happen in any department of\nstudy.  The strict rule of evidence in any enquiry is that _all_ the\nfacts must be studied and that no theory shall be accepted as entirely\ntrustworthy while any of the evidence remains unaccounted for.\n\n\nThere are three theories which hold the ground to-day, each of them\nseemingly with much evidence in its favour, but each of them seriously\nunsatisfactory as conflicting with other evidence.\n\n(1) The theory of Everlasting Torment--that every soul which has missed\nof Christ shall be plunged into a Hell of torment and sin for ever and\never, growing worse and worse and lower and lower through all the ages\nof Eternity.\n\n(2) The theory of Universalism--that in the ages of the far future\nthrough the stern loving discipline of God all men shall at length be\nsaved.\n\n(3) The theory of Conditional Immortality--that all souls who fail of\nEternal Life shall be punished not by Everlasting Torment, but by\nannihilation and the loss of God and Heaven for ever.\n\n\nAt first sight it seems almost impossible that such conflicting\ntheories could be formed out of the same Bible.  But a little\nconsideration of the evidence and of the power of prejudice and\npreconceptions in estimating evidence makes it easier to understand.\n\nThe main trend of all Scripture teaching is that it shall be well,\ngloriously well, with the good, and that it shall be evil, unutterably\nevil, with the wicked.  That there is a mysterious and awful malignity\nattaching to sin--that to be in sin means to be in misery and ruin in\nthis life or any other life--and that sin persisted in tends to utter\nand irretrievable ruin.  No arguments about the love and power of God\nto save to the uttermost can cancel the fact of the free-will of man or\nthe plain statements of Scripture confirmed beyond question by the\nloving Lord Himself as to the awful fate of the finally impenitent.\n\nBut running through all this dark background of Scripture is a curious\ngolden thread of prophecy that evil shall not be eternal in God's\nuniverse.  One turns to it perplexed with wondering hope.  For however\nfully Conscience recognizes the righteousness of a terrible retribution\nfor sin, there is in all thoughtful minds a shrinking from the thought\nthat Evil shall be as permanent as Good in the universe of the All-holy\nGod--that any evil power can exist unendingly side by side with Him and\nunendingly resist Him; that Hell and Heaven, Satan and God shall\nco-exist for all eternity.  This is almost unthinkable to thoughtful\nmen.  It is a Dualism repugnant to all our ideals of God.  And this\ngolden thread, running through the Old and New Testaments alike,\nconfirms this thought, in its dim vision of a golden age somewhere away\nin the far future--away it would seem beyond the dark vision of\nHell--when evil shall have vanished out of the Universe for ever and\n\"God shall be all in all\" (1 Cor. xv. 28)--when there shall come \"the\ntimes of the Restoration of all things which God hath promised by the\nmouth of all His holy prophets since the world began\" (Acts iii.  21).\n\n\nNaturally there is danger of people emphasizing strongly either one of\nthese trends of Scripture and gathering certain proof texts according\nto their own prejudices and preconceptions of what ought to be.  \"The\nway in which some people read their Bibles,\" says Mr. Ruskin, \"is like\nthe way in which the old monks thought that hedgehogs ate grapes.  They\nrolled themselves over the grapes as they lay on the ground and\nwhatever first stuck to their spikes they carried off and ate.\"  If the\ngrapes are of various kinds as are the passages of Scripture we cannot\njudge thus of the taste of the vintage.  To get the true taste of the\ngrapes we must press them in cluster.  To get the true meaning of\nScripture we must study the whole trend of Scripture.  Before we can\naccept any doctrine from separate passages of Scripture we must assure\nourselves that it is in harmony, not only with other passages but also\nwith the ruling thoughts which run through all Scripture, God's\nunutterable holiness, God's awful hatred of sin and stern denunciations\nof doom against the impenitent, God's love, God's unchangeableness,\nGod's reasonableness and fairness, and the mysterious golden thread of\nhope which runs through all.\n\nNow we glance as briefly as possible at the three theories referred to.\n\n\n\nI\n\n_The theory of Everlasting Torment and Everlasting Sin_.\n\nThis theory keeps with Scripture in asserting the fatal and irrevocable\nresult of unrepented sin--but it goes beyond the reserve of Scripture\nin defining that result and so defining it as to impugn the character\nof God.  It teaches that all who are condemned in the Judgment are\ndoomed to a life of endless torment, in the company of devils--forsaken\nof God.  Millions of millions of ages shall see this punishment no whit\nnearer to its end.  It must go on for ever and ever and ever.\n\nIt takes perhaps a child's or a woman's heart to realize the horror of\nthat thought.  I remember as a child reading a Sunday-school book that\nhelped me to realize the meaning of this \"for ever and ever in hell.\"\nI was to imagine a huge forest, and a tiny insect coming from the\nfarthest planet and biting an atom out of one of the leaves, and\ncarrying it away to his home, the journey taking one thousand years.\nThen I was to imagine the ages that must elapse before that whole leaf\nwas carried off.  Then the stupendous time before the whole tree would\nbe gone.  Then, as my brain reeled at the thought, I was to look\nforward to the carrying away of the whole forest, and from that to the\ncarrying away of the whole world.  Then came the awful sentence in\nitalics, _Even then eternity would but have begun_.  I suppose God will\nforgive the people who wrote that book for children if they repent, but\nI don't feel much like forgiving them.  I can remember still lying\nawake in the night and crying as I thought of the lost souls in Hell as\nmy poor little brain reeled at the thought of the journeys of that\nwretched insect and of those whom God kept alive to suffer for ever and\never and ever.\n\nThen as one grew older came the further horror that these \"lost\" are\nkept alive not only to suffer but to sin everlastingly.  They are to go\non increasing in sin for ever and ever and ever in the universe of the\nAll-holy God.  One tests this by the ruling thoughts of Scripture.  One\nthinks of God's holiness.  One thinks of the golden thread of hope.\nOne wonders what it means that Christ came to \"destroy the works of the\ndevil\"[1] and to destroy the devil (bruise the serpent's head[2]) and\nhow one day \"God shall be all in all\" if straight opposite for all\neternity shall be Satan's Kingdom of misery and sin.  Surely Christ has\nnot failed!  And yet--and yet--what shall we say?  And what shall we\nsay of God's fatherhood?  Shall we say as some do that as Judge He must\ndo cruel things which as Father He would shrink from?  God forbid!  The\nJudge and the Father are one.  Men would never use such sophistry about\nthe character of God if it were put into plain words.  \"Ye must ken,\"\nsaid a godly old Scotchman, \"that the Almighty may often have to do in\nHis offeeshial capacity what He would scorn to do as a private\nindividual!\"  I quote this not with flippancy but with stern\nindignation.  That is baldly what such sophistry means.\n\nClearly one who insists on this doctrine ought at least to be\nabsolutely certain that Scripture leaves him no escape from it.  Now\nthe conclusion which a thorough study of the question leads to is\nthis;--that Scripture nowhere definitely affirms that the sufferings of\nthe lost _shall not be_ everlasting, and nowhere definitely affirms\nthat they _shall be_ everlasting.\n\nEven that if it be true is some relief.  We should no longer be forced\nto believe of God what Conscience declares to be unworthy of Him.  But\nis it true?  I can already see the Bible turned over for the dark array\nof texts beginning with \"He that believeth not shall be damned,\" \"How\ncan ye escape the damnation of Hell?\"  \"These shall go away into\neverlasting punishment,\" etc.\n\nLet me explain.\n\nIf we examine the Bible carefully we shall find that, while there are a\ngreat many clear proofs of the certainty and awfulness of Hell, the\nproofs of this theory of Everlasting Torment are not much to be\ndepended on.  Practically they can all be gathered into three groups.\n\nIn the first the chief word is DAMN or DAMNATION.\n\nIn the second the chief word is HELL.\n\nIn the third the chief word is EVERLASTING.\n\nIt is not too much to say that if these three sets of passages were\nremoved from the Bible nobody would think of believing in everlasting\ntorment.  Now let me make the assertion straight out--There is no word\nin the original language of the Bible that at all justifies the use of\neither of these words in the meaning that we have attached to it--and\ntherefore the Revised Version of the Bible has practically swept them\nall away.\n\n\nSection 1\n\nTake first the words Damn, Damnation which convey to us the idea of\ndoom to a Hell of never-ending torment and never-ending sin.  The\noriginal word conveyed no such idea to our Lord or the Apostles.  It\nconveyed no such idea to the translators of the Authorized Version.\nWhen they translated it Damn and Damnation they did not at all mean\nwhat we now mean.\n\nThere are two Greek words, _krino_ which means simply _to judge_, and\n_kata-krino_ which means to _judge adversely_, to _condemn_, and it is\nsometimes the first and sometimes the second of these words which is\ntranslated \"Damn.\"  Why is it so translated?  Surely the translators\ndid not think so evil of God as to believe that He could never judge a\nman without condemning him and that He could never condemn him except\nto everlasting torment.  Not at all.  They had no thought of this.  The\nEnglish word \"damn\" at that time had no such awful meaning as has grown\ninto it in our day through the wide-spread influence of the theory\nwhich I am criticizing.  It simply meant what the Greek word meant.  I\nfind an interesting illustration of this in the Wycliffe Bible in the\npassage about the woman taken in adultery.  Jesus saith, \"Woman, hath\nno man damned thee?\"  \"No man, Lord.\"  \"Neither do I damn thee.\"  That\nis to say the English word Damn at that time only meant \"_condemn_.\"\nBut words are dangerous things if not carefully watched, owing to their\ntendency to change their meaning as a language grows.  A new, darker\nmeaning has grown on to the English word since.  Once an innocent word,\nit has now become dangerous and misleading.  Therefore, the Revisers\nhave swept it away, and _the words damn and damnation have now vanished\nentirely and for ever out of the pages of the English Bible_.\nUnfortunately the public do not read the Revised Version.\n\n\nWith this explanation I ask the reader to turn back to his Bible.  In\nour sense of the word did our Lord say, \"He that believeth not shall be\ndamned\"?  Most certainly not.  He said that he should be _condemned_\nfor wilfully disbelieving, but He did not say to what he should be\ncondemned, nor for how long.  I should condemn you for doing a selfish\nact, but that would hardly mean sending you to endless torment.  Did He\nsay that those who had done evil should rise to the resurrection of\ndamnation?  (1 John v. 29).  No.  He said, \"to the resurrection of\njudgment.\"  (See R. V.)  Did St. Paul say, \"He that doubteth (about\neating certain meats) is damned if he eat\"?  (Rom. xiv. 23).  Did he\nsay that a church widow should have damnation for marrying again?  (1\nTim. v. 12).  Of course not; the word only means judgment or\ncondemnation.  There is no thought at all in it of this endless Hell as\nthe Revised Version has plainly shown.  So we see that at any rate all\nthese texts about \"damnation\" can no longer be used in proof of\neverlasting torment and everlasting sin.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nSomething similar is true about the texts whose chief word is \"Hell.\"\nThe word \"hell\" occurs eighteen times in the Authorized Version.  Once\nit is a translation of a Greek word Tartarus (2 Peter ii. 4) cast down\nto Hell to be reserved \"_unto the Day of Judgment_.\"  That certainly\nwas not everlasting.  Five times it is a translation of the word Hades\nwhose meaning we already know, and which certainly did not mean\neverlasting.  The other twelve times it is a translation of the word\nGehenna used by our Lord, and no scholar with the least regard for his\nreputation would dream of stating that our Lord certainly meant it to\nconvey the idea of endlessness.  It was the name of a horrible valley\noutside Jerusalem where things were cast out to be burnt, to keep the\ncity pure.  The Jewish prophets took the word as a metaphor to express\nthe fate of wicked men.  From it they drew their images used by our\nLord of \"the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched\"\n(Mark x. 46).  To be in danger of Gehenna was to be in danger of a\nhereafter doom suggested by this dread place.\n\nOur Lord simply took up the vague Jewish word and did not define it.\nWhat exactly had He in His mind when He used this word?  This is a\nquestion of terrible importance.  He certainly meant something very\nstern and awful.  He seems to indicate also something final and\nirrevocable.  But there is absolutely no reason to believe that He\nmeant to convey the idea in our minds of a vast prison, in which the\nsouls of the lost are pierced through with agony for ever and ever.\nYou ask, How can I know what He meant?  How could I know what\nShakespeare meant by a certain word?  I should read up all the books\nand letters of Shakespeare's times in which the word occurs, and\nwhatever it commonly meant to the people of Shakespeare's time I should\naccept as being what Shakespeare meant.  That looks sensible, does it\nnot?  Well, a very interesting investigation has been made by various\nscholars.  They have examined all the existing Jewish writings where\nthe word Gehenna was used from 300 B. C. to 300 A. D.  Then they have\nexamined the Jewish Talmuds which run on to the fourth and fifth\ncentury.  A modern English scholar, Dr. Dewes, says (_Plea for a New\nTranslation_, p. 23): \"Every passage has been carefully examined which\nis quoted in the works of Lightfoot, Schoetgen, Buxtorf, Castell,\nSchindler, Glass, Bartoloccius, Ugalino and Nork, and the result of the\nwhole examination is this: _there are only two passages which even a\nsuperficial reader could consider to be corroborative of the assertion\nthat the Jews understood Gehenna to be a place of everlasting torment_.\"\n\nI give a few specimens from the Talmuds.  \"Gehenna is ordained of old\nbecause of sins.\" \"The ungodly will be judged in Gehenna _against the\nday of judgment_.\"  \"The ungodly shall be judged in Gehenna _until the\nrighteous shall say of them, We have seen enough_.\"  \"The judgment of\nthe ungodly is for twelve months.\" \"Gehenna is nothing but a day in\nwhich the impious will be burned.\"  \"The sinners ... shall descend into\nGehenna; at the end of twelve months the body shall be consumed and the\nsoul burned up and the wind shall scatter it under the feet of the\njust.\"\n\nThe reader sees, of course, that the vague Jewish opinions have no\nauthority for us except to help us to get at the meaning of our Lord\nwhen speaking to Jews about Gehenna.  We may assume that He used their\nfamiliar word in the sense in which they would naturally understand it.\nThey certainly would understand Him to proclaim some terrible doom,\nprobably also an irrevocable doom.  But can any one affirm that they\nmust have understood Him to mean endless torment, in the face of this\nevidence--and its powerful confirmation by the greatest of all modern\nJewish students of the Talmud, Emanuel Deutsch.  \"There is no\neverlasting damnation in the Talmud\" (_Remains_, p. 53), and again,\n\"There is not a word in the Talmud which supports the damnable dogma of\nendless torment\" (Conversation with Mr. Cox, _Salvator Mundi_, p. 72).\n\nThe American Revised Version has very wisely removed the word Hell\naltogether on account of the misleading associations connected with it.\nIt substitutes the word Gehenna, leaving the reader to ascertain its\nmeaning.  The English Revisers have retained the word Hell and put the\nword Gehenna beside it in the margin.  I think this was a pity, as it\nwill be hard for the ordinary reader to dissociate the word Hell from\nthe theory which has unwarrantably grown on to it.  But at any rate I\nthink we may safely say that no reader who understands the position\nwill ever again use the texts in which our Lord speaks of Hell to prove\nthe absolute certainty of the theory of Endless Torment and Endless\nSin.  So vanishes another group of the proof texts for this theory.\n\n\nSection 3\n\nNow take the group of texts with the word \"everlasting.\"  It is surely\nsignificant that the Revisers have completely removed this word also in\nevery case and substituted for it the word \"eternal,\" a less definite\nword and which in scholarly usage means rather the opposite of\ntemporal--that which is above the sphere of time and space--that which\nbelongs to the other world.  At any rate the fact that they have\nremoved it in every case shows that the word \"everlasting\" did not seem\nto them a correct translation.\n\nThere is only space for a brief explanation.  The original word is the\nadjective _aionos_ (aionios) (Eng. aeonian), coming from the noun\n_aion_ (aion) (Eng. aeon), an age, an epoch, a long period of time.\nThis noun cannot mean eternity for it is repeatedly used by St. Paul in\nthe plural \"aeons\" and \"aeons of aeons.\"  As we speak of great periods\nof time, \"the Ice Age,\" \"the Stone Age,\" etc., so the Bible speaks of\n\"this age\" (aeon), \"the coming age\" (aeon), and \"the end of the age,\"\netc.  These aeons or ages are thought of in Scripture as vast periods\npast, present and future in which the Divine purpose is working itself\nout, _e. g._, God's purpose is the purpose of the ages (aeons) (Eph.\niii. 11).  Christ's name is above every name not only in this age\n(aeon) but in that which is to come (Eph. i. 21).  \"That in the ages\n(aeons) to come He might shew,\" etc.\n\nFrom this noun, then, conies the adjective _aionios_ (aionios)--aeonian\nwhich may be defined \"age long\" or \"belonging to the ages,\" etc.  Any\nGreek scholar will assert unhesitatingly that of itself it does not\nmean endless or everlasting.  Sometimes, as when applied to God, it may\nbe thus translated but only because the meaning is inherent in the noun\nto which it is applied.  The word _aionios_ of itself would not\npositively prove the endlessness of God.  This adjective when applied\nto any thing or any state of being cannot of itself be used to prove\nits endlessness.\n\nIt is worth notice too that in the Septuagint Greek Bible, the version\nusually quoted in the Gospels and Epistles, this word _aionios_ is\nfrequently applied to things that have ended, _e. g._, the gift of the\nland of Canaan, the priesthood of Aaron, the kingdom of David, the\ntemple at Jerusalem, the daily offerings, etc.  When the noun always\nmeans a finite period and the adjective is applied both to that which\nis ended and to that which is endless it would surely be poor\nscholarship if the Revisers allowed the word \"everlasting\" to remain as\nits translation, or if students of theology should argue from it the\nendlessness of anything.  To which we may add that there are Greek\nadjectives and phrases which _do definitely mean_ \"endless\" and which\nare never used in the Bible of men's fate in the Hereafter.\n\nBe it observed that all this does not prove that the punishment of the\nfuture ages _may not_ be everlasting.  It only proves that Scripture\nnowhere asserts unmistakably that _it must be so_.  It simply asserts\nthat it is aeonian.\n\nThe thoughtful advocates of Everlasting Torment are of course aware of\nall this.  But they honestly feel that in spite of the indefiniteness\nof the adjective, our Lord has fixed His meaning beyond question in the\none passage that has become so famous as the great proof text in this\ncontroversy, \"These shall go away into _aeonian_ punishment, but the\nrighteous into _aeonian_ life\" (Matt. xxv. 46).  Very reasonably they\nsay, \"If the word asserts everlastingness in the one case it must also\nin the other.\"  The answer is that the word _of itself_ cannot assert\neverlastingness in either case.  If this word were our only proof of\neverlasting life then everlasting life would be a doubtful matter.  But\nthe everlastingness of that life like the everlastingness of God is\nevident all over the Bible quite apart from this.  The words here\nsimply tell that the one shall go into the aeonian life and the other\ninto aeonian punishment, _i. e._, that the one shall go into the life\nof the future age and the other into the punishment of the future age\nwithout exactly specifying the duration of either.\n\nI quite feel that the close connection of the words suggests at least\nthe probability that one is as lasting as the other.  Yet even that\nconsideration is weakened by asking if people are willing to apply it\nto St. Paul's statement, \"As in Adam _all_ die even so in Christ shall\n_all_ be made alive\" (the context suggests eternal life).  I would\npoint out, too, that a somewhat similar verse is in the Septuagint\nBible of our Lord's day in Hab. iii. 6, where the (aeonian) everlasting\nmountains were scattered before God, whose ways are (aeonian)\neverlasting.  Yet it does not prove that the one is as endless as the\nother.  And in Rom. xvi. 25-26 the mystery hid in the (aeonian) times\n\"before the world began\" is now manifested according to the command of\nthe (aeonian) eternal God.  But the age \"before the world began\" is\nended.\n\nAt any rate I must leave the matter here.  I have no space for fuller\nstatement.  If any man feels that a world of increasing sin and awful\ntorment growing no nearer to its end after millions and millions of\nages does not disturb his conscience or the thoughts of God which he\nhas learned from the whole trend of Scripture this text will probably\nweigh strongly with him in spite of all that I have said.  But to him\nwho is tortured by such a thought of God and yet feels that Scripture\nbinds him to it, it must surely be some relief to feel that even in\nthis great bulwark text of Everlasting Torment our Lord only asserts\nthat these shall go away into the aeonian punishment or chastisement[3]\nwhatever that may mean.\n\nReluctantly, impelled by a sense of duty, I have dealt with this theory\nmore fully than with the others.  Should any godly people fear that I\nam lightening an awful deterrent to sin let me say what long experience\nhas taught me of the danger of this common theory.\n\nIt is making sad loving hearts whom God has not made sad and making\nearnest Christians, who feel forced to believe it, perplexed about the\nlove and justice of God and the prophecies of the final victory of good.\n\nIt is forcing into the background the true and awfully solemn teaching\nabout Hell which ought to be prominent in all our pulpits.  When men\ncannot see any possible reconciliation between the doctrine of God's\nlove and their doctrine of Hell they are very apt to find an easy way\nout.  \"We cannot reconcile them,\" said a young layman to me one day,\n\"therefore we drop out one of them--Hell.\"  Do not be shocked at it.\nMany besides my young layman are unconsciously doing it.  Nowadays more\nthan ever we, clergy, are teaching much about the love of God.  But\nnowadays more than ever we are holding our tongues about Hell.  We know\nthe horrible idea which Hell commonly conveys.  Therefore we keep it in\nthe background trusting that our hearers will leave it there during the\nsermon on God's love.  But they do not, and so we are very unconvincing\nabout both doctrines.\n\nAgain, this common theory of Hell is so unreasonable that it has lost\nits power as a deterrent.  No teaching from which Conscience revolts\ncan long hold its power over men.  The rough common sense, the rough\nmoral sense of careless men makes them reject it and treat it as a\nsubject of jest.  When men can stupidly laugh together over jests about\nhell-fire, when the devil is presented as a clown in the pantomime it\nindicates something very wrong in the teaching.  No doctrine has any\nreal hold on the crowd when they can lightly jest about it.  And\nbecause of their unbelief in this false notion of Hell they are ceasing\nto believe in any Hell at all--ceasing to believe in that awful real\nHell which is taught in the Bible and of which God is giving some men\nforetastes even in this life.\n\nAnd this false notion of Hell tends to shake men's belief in the\nreality of Heaven.  For if the redeemed could enjoy their bliss in\nHeaven, knowing that myriads are existing for ever and ever in endless\nsuffering and still worse in endless sin, one feels that they have\ngrown so selfish and opposite to Christ that they have no business in\nany heaven.\n\nWe dare not leave out the love of God and we dare not leave out the\ndoctrine of Hell.  Both are certainly true.  Therefore they must be\ncapable of reconciliation.  The reconciliation must not come in\nignoring Hell or believing in a kindly, good-natured God who does not\njudge severely about moral character and who only cares that His child\nshould stop crying and be happy.  We are having too much of this\nsentimentalism nowadays.  It is a miserable misconception of that awful\nholiness which is \"of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.\"  It would\nnever explain the need of Christ dying on the cross to put away sin.\n\nWhatever reconciliation we find here or hereafter it must have at\nbottom God's unutterable hatred of sin but also God's unutterable love\nand pain over every sinful soul which He has made.  This theory of\nEndless Torment and Endless Sin certainly does not appear to satisfy\nthis test, and it has in addition to face the stern revolt of Reason\nand Conscience.\n\n\n\nII\n\n_The theory of Universalism, i. e., that all men shall at length be\nsaved_.\n\nThis opinion is based on the more hopeful side of Scripture that we\nhave referred to, but it ignores or explains away what contradicts it\nin the darker and sterner side.  If one could forget that, it would be\nthe most inspiring of all the guesses that have been made.  As\npresented by its best exponents, such men as Allen and Jukes and Cox,\nit is wonderfully attractive and at first sight seems to satisfy many\nof the conditions of the problem.  It takes account of a just and awful\nretribution for every sin, and takes account also of the mysterious\nhope in the Hereafter which runs through the Bible.  It believes that\nthe power of God has infinite resources and that the love of God has\nunwearying persistence and that no soul can ultimately resist such\nresources and such love.  Even Hell itself it deems God's final effort\nwhen all other means have failed.\n\nThe reader who thinks there can be no possible excuse for such a theory\nshould glance at a few of the passages quoted in its favour:\n\n\"God who wills that _all men_ should be saved\" (1 Tim. ii. 4), and \"who\nwills that _all men_ should come to repentance\" (2 Peter iii. 9).  And\nthis will or determination of God is \"_immutable_\" (Heb. vi. 7).\nAgain, \"Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the Prince of this\nworld be cast out, AND I, if I be lifted up, will draw _all men_ unto\nMyself\" (John xii. 31, 32).  \"_All flesh_ shall see the salvation of\nGod\" (Luke iii. 6).  \"His grace bringing salvation to all men\" (Titus\nii. 11).  \"We trust in the living God who is the Saviour of _all men,\nespecially_ of those who believe\" (1 Tim. iv. 10).  \"He is the\npropitiation _not for our sins only, but also_ for the sins of the\n_whole world_\" (1 John ii. 2).  \"He was manifested that He might\n_destroy_ the works of the devil\" (1 John iii. 8) [and _destroy_ the\ndevil (bruise the serpent's head) Gen. iii. 15].  \"He shall _overcome_\nthe strong man armed (the devil) and take away his armour and divide\nhis spoils\" (Luke xi. 21, 22).  \"He was manifested to _put away_ sin by\nthe sacrifice of Himself\" (Heb. ix. 26).  \"God hath not cast away His\npeople whom He foreknew ... and so _all Israel shall be saved_\" (Rom.\nxii. 25-33).  \"The times of the _Restoration of all things_ which God\nhath promised by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world\nbegan\" (Acts iii. 21).  \"As in Adam _all_ die, even so in Christ shall\n_all_ be made alive.  But every man in his own order: Christ the\nfirst-fruits; afterwards they that are Christ's at His coming.  Then\ncometh the end ... when all things have been _subjected unto Him_[4]\n... then shall the Son also be subjected unto Him that put all things\nunder Him that God may be all in all\" (1 Cor. xv. 22-29).\n\nOne can see how the constant study of such passages should lead men to\nan enthusiastic hope and lead them to study less carefully the stream\nof darker teaching that seemed to conflict with these.  Whatever may be\nsaid against the advocates of Universalism we at least owe to them a\nclearer emphasizing of the mysterious hopefulness of Scripture as to\nthe final triumph of good.\n\nBut with deep reluctance one is bound to assert that the advocates of\nUniversal Salvation to a great degree ignore or explain away\nunsatisfactorily much of the sterner side of the Bible.  For amid all\nits hopefulness there is a steadily persistent note in Scripture,\nstern, awful, sorrowful, which seems impossible to reconcile with\nUniversalism.  There are clear and repeated assertions that some men at\nany rate will not be saved.  It is St. Paul, the author of so many of\nthose hopeful Scriptures quoted, who tells us \"even weeping\" of men\n\"whose end is destruction\" (Phil. iii. 19), and of those whose fate\nshall be \"eternal destruction from the presence of God\" (2 Thess. i.\n9).  It is the loving Christ Himself who said of one of His apostles,\n\"It were good for that man if he had not been born\" (St. Matt. xxvi.\n24).\n\nWe are warned back too by the tendency of character to grow permanent.\nAnd when we are told that God \"willeth all men to be saved,\" and that\nGod can do everything, we are forced to ask, Can God do contradictory\nthings?  Can God make a door to be open and shut at the same time?  Can\nGod make a thing to be and not to be at the same time?  Can God make a\nman's will free to choose good or evil and yet secure that he shall\ncertainly choose good at the last?  One longs to believe that\nUniversalism should be true, but to believe it we must ignore much of\nthe evidence of Scripture.\n\n\n\nIII\n\n_The theory of Conditional Immortality, i. e._, that all souls who fail\nof Eternal Life shall be punished not by Endless Torment, but by\nAnnihilation and the loss of God and Heaven for ever and ever.\n\nThis is another conjecture framed to escape the difficulties of the\nformer two.  It would be consistent both with retribution for evil and\nalso with the final victory of good.  That in the mysterious nature of\nthings when the malignity of sin becomes incurable, a soul rotted\nthrough with sin might ultimately die out of existence; this opinion is\nat least allowable as a conjecture to escape from the theory of Endless\nTorment and Sin.  It would in a real sense be an everlasting\npunishment, being an everlasting loss of Heaven and God.  But it too is\nfounded only on part of the evidence, on such texts as \"The gift of God\nis eternal life,\" \"He that hath the Son hath life,\" implying that\nimmortality is a conditional thing granted only to those who are saved,\nand such texts as \"eternal _destruction_ from the presence of God,\" and\nthe idea of utter annihilation in such passages as \"burn up the chaff\nwith unquenchable fire.\"  There is much in favor of it but there is\nmuch in Scripture which makes it difficult to accept it.  And it\ncontradicts straight out the wide-spread Christian belief in the\nessential immortality of the soul (though that belief also needs to be\nexamined).  At any rate it cannot claim authority as a theory of future\npunishment.\n\n\n\nIV\n\nThese are the only conjectures offered us to solve the difficulties\nconnected with Final Retribution.  We find them all unsatisfactory.  We\nhave reached no definite doctrine of Hell.  With the evidence at our\ndisposal it seems impossible to do so.  The failure of all attempts at\nreconciling the seeming contradictions of Scripture must suggest to us\nthat the solution of this problem is beyond the range of our present\npowers.  At any rate it is beyond the range of our present knowledge.\nSurely it is wise and reverent to think that this points to _some\ndealing of God beyond our human ken_ which will one day reconcile all\nthe difficulties.[5] Our little guesses do not exhaust God's\npossibilities.  Some day we shall find the answer in that land where we\nshall know even as we are known.  And when we find it we know it will\nbe consistent with our highest thoughts of God.  I like to think that\nit is those who have grown closest to Christ in sympathy for sorrow and\npain and who unlike us, know all the facts of the case, who are\nrepresented as joining in that glad shout hereafter, \"Hallelujah!\nsalvation and glory and power belong to our God, FOR TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS\nARE HIS JUDGMENTS.\"  Leave the manifestation of this to God.  A wise\nold man once said, \"God has a good deal of time to do things between\nthis and the other side of eternity.\"\n\nThis then is the conclusion of the whole matter.  A return to the\nreserve and reticence of Scripture.  But with this result of our study,\nthat we feel no longer forced to believe of God that which Conscience\ndeclares to be unworthy of Him.  We are set free to believe that the\nJudge of all the earth will do right--that Hell as well as Heaven is\nwithin the confines of His dominion--that evil shall not last for ever;\nthat in spite of all its conflicting evidence the trend of Scripture\nmoves towards the golden age, the final victory of good.\n\nThus we leave it.\n\nIn our final vision of humanity in Christ's great drama of the\nJudgment, those on the left are passing into the outer darkness and as\nthey pass the curtain falls behind them and we see them no more.  We\nknow not what is passing in that outer darkness where there is \"weeping\nand gnashing of teeth.\"  We have no grounds to believe that any soul\nthere is being born again through sorrow and shame, that any spoiled\nand deformed life is being remoulded in that awful crucible of God.\n\nBut as we watch the awful shadows of that outer darkness, there comes\nbeyond it on the far horizon the quivering of a coming dawn.  For that\nage of God's Gehenna is to have its end, and far away the day will dawn\nfor which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together; when\nevil shall have vanished out of the universe for ever; when death and\nHell, the evil and the Evil One shall be cast into the lake of fire;\nwhen \"at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow of things in Heaven and\nearth, and under the earth\" (in the world of the dead).  \"And every\ntongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the\nFather.\"  \"Then cometh the end,\" says St. Paul, \"when Christ shall\ndeliver up the Kingdom to God, even the Father, when all His enemies\nshall be subjected unto Him.  And when all His enemies have been\nsubjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected unto\nHim that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.\"\n\nThat is what shall be.  One day, somewhere in the far mysterious future\nthe \"purpose of the ages\" shall be accomplished.  Evil shall have\nvanished out of the universe for ever and God shall be all in all.  One\nday again it shall be as at the creation when \"God looked on everything\nthat He had made and behold it was very good.\"  How?  We know not and\nwe need not know.  We need not be able to assert dogmatically how He\nwill accomplish His purpose.  We need not be able to assert that all\nmen shall be saved or that all who are not will be annihilated.  But we\nmust be able with trustful hearts to assert God's love and God's power\nand the final abolishing of evil, even though we can only do it with\nthe poet's vagueness:\n\n  At last I heard a voice upon the slope\n  Cry to the summit, \"Is there any hope?\"\n  To which an answer pealed from that high land,\n  But in a tongue no man could understand,\n  And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn\n  God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.\n\n\n\n[1] 1 John iii. 8.\n\n[2] Gen. iii. 15.\n\n[3] _kolasis_--chastisement, correction, punishment (see Greek Lexicon).\n\n[4] The same Greek words are used of His enemies' subjection to Christ\nas of Christ's subjection to the Father suggesting that it would be of\nthe same kind.\n\n[5] In other antinomies of Scripture, _e. g._, Man's free will and\nGod's foreknowledge, we have to take refuge in a similar belief.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nHEAVEN\n\nAt last \"I\" has reached the goal.  In that far future comes the glad\nfinale of human history, the realization of the eternal thought in the\nmind of God from the beginning.  As the unwritten play of a great\ndramatist lies in his mind before it is uttered or acted, with every\nproblem solved and every contingency provided for--so we believe the\nwhole extended drama lay in the Eternal Mind--the path of struggle and\npain--the cross-currents of human will--the glorious conclusion of it\nall.  Nothing was an after-thought.  Now at last Christ \"shall see of\nthe travail of His soul and shall be satisfied.\"  Aye--satisfied.  It\nwas worth the cost.  Worth the Incarnation of the Eternal Son--worth\nthe sorrow and the pain--worth being misunderstood and shamed and\nmocked and scourged and spitted on and crucified--this final\nsatisfaction of His tender love.  \"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor\nhath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things that God\nhath prepared.  They shall hunger no more nor thirst any more, neither\nshall the sun light on them nor any burning heat, for the Lamb which is\nin the midst of the Throne shall shepherd them and lead them to eternal\nfountains of waters, and God shall wipe away every tear from their\neyes.  There shall be no more death--no mourning nor crying nor pain\nany more, for the former things--the old bad things--have passed away.\"\nThat is the end of God's purpose for men.  Surely it will be the\nwondering cry of the angels for ever, \"Behold how He loved them!\"\n\n\n\nI.  WHAT IS MEANT BY HEAVEN?\n\nTo us with our limited faculties Heaven is practically inconceivable.\nWe have no experience that would help us to realize it.  Even the\ninspired writers can but touch the thought vaguely in allegory and\ngorgeous vision, piling up images of earthly things precious and\nbeautiful--thrones and crowns and gates of pearl and golden streets in\nthe heavenly city \"coming down from God prepared as a bride adorned for\nher husband.\"\n\nThe only clear thought we have about external things in Heaven is that\n\"I\" who lived here in an earthly body and in the Near Hereafter lived a\nspirit life \"absent from the body\"--shall in that Far Hereafter have a\nspiritual body analogous we suppose to the body \"I\" had on earth.  Not\nthe poor body, certainly, which rotted in the grave, \"ashes to ashes,\ndust to dust\" but a \"glorified body,\" and yet it would seem having some\nstrange mysterious connection with the earthly body.  As the oak is the\nresurrection body of the acorn, and the lily of the ugly little bulb\nthat decayed in the ground, \"so also is the resurrection of the dead.\nIt is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in\nweakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is\nraised a spiritual body.\"  That gives very little information but it\ngives some tangible idea to grasp.  Beyond this there is no hold for\nimagination.\n\nBut as we saw in the earlier chapters on the Intermediate Life I am\nstill \"I,\" the same conscious self through the whole life of Earth.\nand Hades and Heaven, and therefore the _real life, the inner life_ can\nstill be understood.  So when we enquire what can be known about the\nmeaning of Heaven--at the very start I strike the key-note of the\nthoughts that follow, in the words of Christ Himself, \"The Kingdom of\nGod is within you.\"  Heaven is a something within you rather than\nwithout you.  Heaven means character rather than possessions.  The\nKingdom of God is not meat and drink, but Righteousness and Peace and\nJoy in the Holy Ghost.\n\nThat is the thought which I am trying to keep prominent all through\nthis book.  Hades life is dependent on character.  Judgment is a\nsorting according to character.  Heaven and Hell are tempers or\nconditions of character within us.  They are not merely places to which\nGod sends us arbitrarily.  They are conditions which we make for\nourselves.  If God could send all men to Heaven, all men would be\nthere.  If God could keep all men from Hell, no one would be there.  It\nis character that makes Heaven.  It is character that makes Hell.  They\nare states of mind that begin here, and are continued and developed\nthere.\n\nI have known men who were in Hell here--they told me so--men of brutal\ncharacter, men in delirium tremens, who saw devils grinning at them\nfrom the bed.  That if continued and developed would mean Hell there.\nI have known sweet, unselfish lives who are in Heaven here.  That\ncontinued and developed would mean Heaven there.  You know how one\ncould be in Heaven here.  Do you remember these wonderful words of our\nLord, \"No man hath ascended into Heaven, only the Son of Man who is in\nHeaven\"?  Not _was_, not _shall be_, but is always in Heaven, because\nalways in unselfish love--always in accord and in communion with God.\nSo, you see, a man carries the beginning of Heaven and Hell within him,\naccording to the state of his own heart.  A selfish, godless man cannot\nhave any Heaven so long as he remains selfish and godless.  For Heaven\nconsists in forgetting self, and loving God and man with heart and soul.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nDo you see, then, the mistake that people have been making in\ndiscussing what is meant by Heaven?  In all ages--in all races--men\nhave speculated about it, and their speculations have been largely\ncoloured by their characters and temperaments.  The Indian placed it in\nthe Happy Hunting Ground.  The Greeks placed it in the Islands of the\nBlest, where warriors rested after the battle.  The Northman and the\nMussulman had his equally sensual Heaven.  And many Christians have as\nfoolish notions as any one else.  Some think that they win Heaven by\nbelieving something with their minds about our Lord's atonement.  Some\nthink they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air.  Some of them,\ntaking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse,\npicture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing\nemerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms\nover and over again through all the ages of eternity.\n\nWhat is the fault in all such?  That they do not understand what Heaven\nreally means.  They think of it as a something outside them which\nanybody could enjoy if he could only get there.  They do not understand\nthat Heaven means the joy of being in union with God--that the outward\nHeaven has no meaning till the inward Heaven has begun in ourselves.  I\nneed not point out to you that our immortal spirits would find little\nhappiness in golden pavements and gates of pearl.  People on this\nearth, who have their fill of gold and pearl, do not always gain much\nhappiness from them.  They are mere external things--they cannot give\neternal joy, because that comes from within, not from without.  It\ndepends not on what we have, but on what we are, not on the riches of\nour possessions, but on the beauty of our lives.\n\nThe gorgeous vision of the Apocalypse has its meaning, but it is not\nthe carnal, literal meaning of foolish men.  It tells of the bright\nriver of the water of life; of glorified cities, where nothing foul, or\nmean, or ignoble shall dwell; of the white robes of our stainless\npurity; of the crowns and palms, the emblems of victory over\ntemptation, of the throne which indicates calm mastery over sin; of the\nsong and music and gladsome feasting to image faintly the abounding\nhappiness and the fervent thanksgiving for the goodness of God.  They\nare all mere symbols--mere earthly pictures with a heavenly meaning,\nand the meaning which lies behind them all is this: _The joy of Heaven\nmeans the inward joy; the joy of character; the joy of goodness; the\njoy of likeness to the Nature of God_.  That is the highest joy of\nall--the only joy worthy of making Heaven for men who are made in the\nimage of God.\n\n\nSection 3\n\nIt is not difficult to show this to any true man or woman who is humbly\ntrying to do beautiful deeds on earth.  Of course, if a man be very\nselfish and worldly; a man who never tries to help another; a man who\nsmiles at these things as unreal sentiment; who tells you that hard\ncash and success in life, and \"to mind number one,\" as they say, are\nthe chief things; a man who never feels his pulses beat faster at the\nstory of noble deeds--you cannot absolutely prove to him that the joy\nof character is the highest happiness.  You cannot prove to a blind man\nthe beauty of the sunset sky; you cannot arouse a deaf man to\nenthusiasm about sweet music; and you cannot prove to an utterly\nselfish, earthly man that self-sacrifice and purity and heroism and\nlove are the loveliest and the most desirable possessions--the sources\nof the highest and most lasting joy.  But I feel sure that most of us,\nwith all our faults, have in our better moments the desire and the\nadmiration--aye, and the effort, too, after nobleness of life, and\ntherefore we can understand this highest joy of Heaven.  We have had\nexperience sometimes, however rarely, of lovely deeds, and the sweet,\npure joy that follows in their train.  Well, whenever you have\nconquered some craving temptation or borne trouble for another's sake;\nwhen you have helped and brightened some poor life, and kept quiet in\nthe shade that no one should know of it; when you have tried to do the\nright at heavy cost to yourself; when the old father or mother at home\nhas thanked God for the comfort you have been in their declining years;\nwhenever in the midst of all your sins you have done anything for the\nlove of God or man, do you not know what a sweet, pure happiness has\nwelled up in your heart, entirely different in kind, infinitely higher\nin degree than any pleasure that ever came to you from riches or\namusement or the applause of men.  Of this kind surely must be the pure\njoy of Heaven.  Call up the recollection of some of those cherished\nmoments of your life, and multiply by infinity the pleasure that you\nfelt, and you will have some faint notion of what is meant by Heaven,\nthe Heaven that God designs for man.\n\n\n\nII.  WHAT IS HEAVEN'S SUPREME JOY?\n\nThus, then, we answer the first of our questions--What is meant by\nHeaven?  Heaven means a state of character rather than a place of\nresidence.  Heaven means to be something rather than to go somewhere.\nBut though Heaven means a state of character rather than a place of\nresidence, yet it means a place of residence, too.  And though Heaven\nmeans to be something rather than to go somewhere, yet it means to go\nsomewhere, too.  And from this the second question easily follows.\nWhat can be known about that life in Heaven?\n\n  \"Oh, for a nearer insight into Heaven,\n    More knowledge of the glory and the joy,\n  Which there unto the happy souls is given,\n    Their intercourse, their worship, their employ.\"\n\n\nWe do not know a great deal about it.\n\nThe Bible is given to help us to live rightly in this world, not to\nsatisfy curiosity about the other world.  But yet some glimpses of the\nblessed life have come to us, for our teaching.\n\nThe first thing to learn is that the chief joy of Heaven shall consist\nin that of which we can only dream in this life, of which we can have\nbut a partial glimpse even in the Hades or Paradise Life--_the Beatific\nVision_, the clear vision and knowledge of God.  All this life and all\nthe Paradise life are fitting and training and preparing us for this\nconsummation.\n\nWise theologians of old divided the happiness of Heaven into\n\"_Essential_\" and \"_Accidental_.\"  By _essential_ they meant the\nhappiness which the soul derives immediately from God's presence, from\nthe Beatific Vision.  By _accidental_ they meant the additional\nhappiness which comes from creatures, from meeting with friends, from\nthe joyous occupations and all the delights of ever-widening knowledge.\n\nBut the Presence of God, the Vision of God, is the essential thing\nwhich gives light and joy to all the others.  Without that Vision of\nGod all would be dark as this beautiful world would be without the sun.\nWithout that joy of God's presence all other joys would be spoiled,\njust as the gifts of this life would be without the central gift of\nhealth.\n\nThat is the central thought about Heaven in the Bible, the central\nthought of God's noblest saints of old, aye, and the central thought of\nsome of the noblest amongst ourselves to-day.\n\nDoes it seem unreal, unnatural, to some of us?  I can well believe it.\nFew of us love God well enough yet to desire Him above all things.\nMost of us, I fear, if we would honestly confess it, think more of the\njoy of meeting our dear ones than of the joy of being with God.  But\nGod is very gentle with us.  \"He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that\nwe are but dust.\"  He will gradually train us here and hereafter, and\none day we, too, shall love Him above all things.  Oh!  I do think that\nto know the tender patience of Christ's love as we shall know it then,\nto know God as He is, with all the false notions about Him swept away,\nwill make it impossible to withhold our love from Him.  And if even our\npoor love for each other on earth is such a happiness think what joy\nmay come from dwelling in that unutterable Love of God.\n\n\n\nIII.  THE LIFE IN HEAVEN\n\nWhat can we know further about the life in Heaven, about what the old\ntheologians called the _secondary_ or _accidental_ joys as compared\nwith the supreme joy of the Beatific Vision?\n\nWe know, first, _There shall be no sin there_.  It shall be a pure and\ninnocent life.  All who on earth have been loving, and pure, and noble,\nand brave, and self-sacrificing, shall be there.  All who have been\ncleansed by the blood of Christ from the defilements of sin, and\nstrengthened by the power of Christ against the enticements of sin,\nshall be there.  There shall be no drunkenness nor impurity there, nor\nhatred, nor emulation, nor ill temper, nor selfishness, nor meanness.\nAh! it is worth hoping for.  We poor strugglers who hate ourselves and\nare so dissatisfied with ourselves, who look from afar at the lovely\nideals rising within us, who think sorrowfully of all which we might\nhave been and have not been--let us keep up heart.  One day the ideal\nshall become the real.  One day we shall have all these things for\nwhich God has put the craving in our hearts to-day.  We shall have no\nsin there.  We shall desire only and do only what is good.  We shall be\nthere what we have only seemed or wished to be here--honest, true,\nnoble, sincere, genuine to the very centre of our being.\n\nNo sin there.\n\n\nSection 2\n\nAnd that will make it easier to understand the second fact revealed to\nus.  _No sorrow there_.  \"They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any\nmore.  There shall be no more curse ... no pain, nor sorrow, nor\ncrying, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.\"  That is\nnot hard to believe.  Sin is the chief cause of our sorrow on earth.\nIf there be no sin there; if all are pure and unselfish and generous\nand true, and if God wipes away all tears that come from causes other\nthan sin, it is easily understood.\n\nBut let us not degrade this thought or make it selfish or unreal.  One\noften hears the sneer or the doubt about the happiness of Heaven while\nany exist who have lost their Heaven.  We do not know the answer now.\nBut we shall know it then.  And we must be absolutely certain that the\nanswer lies not in the direction of selfish indifference.  The higher\nany soul on earth grows in love the less can it escape unselfish sorrow\nfor others.  Must it not be so in that land too?  Surely the Highest\nHimself must have more pain than any one else for the self-caused\nmisery of men.  If there be joy in His presence over one that repenteth\nmust there not be pain over one that repenteth not?  We can only say in\nour deep ignorance that until the day when all evil shall have vanished\nthere are surely higher things in God's plan for His redeemed than\nselfish happiness and content.  There is the blessedness that comes of\nsympathy with Him in the pain which is the underside of the Eternal\nLove.\n\n\nSection 3\n\nNo sin in Heaven.  No sorrow in Heaven.  What else do we certainly\nknow?  _That the essence of the Heaven life will be love_.  The giving\nof oneself for the service of others.  The going out of oneself in\nsympathy with others.  There at last will be realized St. Paul's\nglorious ideal.  There it can be said of every man, He suffereth long\nand is kind; envieth not; vaunteth not himself; is not puffed up;\nseeketh not his own; behaveth not uncourteously.  He is like the\neternal God Himself, who beareth all things, hopeth all things,\nendureth all things (1 Cor. xiii. 4-7).\n\n\nSection 4\n\nWe may well believe _that there will be no dead level of attainment_,\nno dead level of perfection and joy.  That would seem to us very\nuninteresting.  If we may judge from God's dealings here and from the\nmany texts of Scripture, there will be an infinite variety of\nattainment, of positions, of character.  \"In the Father's house there\nare many mansions.\"  Our Lord assumes that we would expect that from\nour experience here.  \"If it were not so, I would have told you.\"  I\nsuppose there will be little ones there needing to be taught and weak\nones needing to be helped; strong leaders sitting at His right hand in\nHis Kingdom, and poor backward ones who never expected to get into it\nat all.\n\nAnd so surely we may believe, too, will there be _varieties of\ncharacter and temperament_.  We shall not lose our identity and our\npeculiar characteristics by going to Heaven, by being lifted to a\nhigher spiritual condition.  Just as a careless man does not lose his\nidentity by conversion, by rising to a higher spiritual state on earth,\nso we may well believe when we die and pass into the life of the\nwaiting souls, and again when at Christ's coming we pass into the\nhigher Heaven we shall remain the same men and women as we were before\nand yet become very different men and women.  Our lives will not be\nbroken in two, but transfigured.  We shall not lose our identity; we\nshall still be ourselves; we shall preserve the traits of character\nthat individualize us; but all these personal traits and\ncharacteristics will be suffused and glorified by the lifting up of our\nmotive and aim.  As far as we can judge, there will be a delightful,\ninfinite variety in the Heaven-life.\n\nWhat else?  There shall be _work in Heaven_.  The gift of God is\neternal _life_ and that life surely means activity.  We are told \"His\nservants shall serve Him.\"  We are told of the man who increased the\ntalents or the pounds to five or ten that he was to be used for\nglorious work according as he had fitted himself--\"Lord, thy talent\nhath gained five talents, ten talents.\" What was the reply?  \"You are\nnow to go and rest for all eternity.\"  Not a bit of it.  \"Be thou ruler\nover five cities, over ten cities; enter thou into the joy of thy\nLord.\"  I know some men who are now retired after a very busy active\nlife of work, and they hate the idleness, they are sick of it.  No\nwonder the conventional Heaven does not appeal to them.  Ah, that is\nnot God's Heaven.  \"They rest from their labours.\"  Yes; but that word\n\"labours\" means painful strain.  In eternal, untiring youth and\nstrength we shall be occupied in doing His blessed will in helping and\nblessing the wide universe that He has made.  Who can tell what\nglorious ministrations, what infinite activities, what endless growth\nand progress, and lifting up of brethren, God has in store for us\nthrough all eternity.  Thank God for the thought of that joyous work of\nnever-tiring youth and vigour; work of men proudly rejoicing in their\nstrength, helping the weak ones, teaching the ignorant aye! perhaps for\nthe very best of us going out with Christ into the outer darkness to\nseek that which is lost until He find it.  For even that is not shut\nout beyond the bounds of possibility in the impenetrable mystery of the\nHereafter.  Do you know Whittier's beautiful poem of the old monk who\nhad spent his whole life in hard and menial work for the rescue and\nhelp of others?  And when he is dying his confessor tells him work is\nover, \"Thou shalt sit down and have endless prayers, and wear a golden\ncrown for ever and ever in Heaven.\"  \"Ah,\" he says, \"I'm a stupid old\nman.  I'm dull at prayers.  I can't keep awake, but I love my fellow\nmen.  I could be good to the worst of them.  I could not bear to sit\namongst the lazy saints and turn a deaf ear to the sore complaints of\nthose that suffer.  I don't want your idle Heaven.  I want still to\nwork for others.\"  The confessor in anger left him, and in the night\ncame the voice of his Lord--\n\n  \"Tender and most compassionate.  Never fear,\n  For Heaven is love, as God Himself is love;\n  Thy work below shall be thy work above.\" [1]\n\nBe sure that the repose of Heaven will be no idling in flowery meadows\nor sitting for ever in a big temple at worship, as the poor, weary\nlittle children are sometimes told after a long sermon in church.  No,\n\"there is no temple in Heaven,\" we are told--no Church.  Because all\nlife is such a glad serving and rejoicing in God that men need no\nspecial times and places for doing it.\n\n\n\nIV.  SHALL WE KNOW ONE ANOTHER IN HEAVEN?\n\nWhat else can we learn?  Shall we know one another?  Does any one\nreally doubt it who believes in God at all?  What sort of Heaven would\nit be otherwise?  What sort of comfort would there be if we did not\nknow one another?  Oh, this beggarly faith, that God has to put up\nwith, that treats the Father above as it would treat a man of doubtful\ncharacter.  \"I must have His definite texts.  I must have His written\npledges, else I will not believe any good thing in His dealing.\"  That\nis our way.  We talk very piously about our belief in God's love, but\nwe are afraid to infer anything, to argue anything from the infinitude\nof that love.  No, we must have God's bond signed and sealed.  I do\nbelieve that one reason why we have not more of direct answers about\nthe mysteries of the future life is because God thought that no such\nanswer should be necessary--that His love, if one would only believe in\nit, is a sufficient answer to them all.\n\nThere is less need of discussing the subject here, since we have\nalready dealt with the question of Recognition in the Intermediate Life\n(Part I, Chapter VII).  If even in that imperfect state \"absent from\nthe body\" we saw reason to hope for recognition, think how that hope\nrises to certainty in the great perfect life of Heaven where \"I\" shall\nbe again \"in the body\" the glorious perfect spiritual body.\n\nAs I have pointed out the Bible gives only passing hints on the\nsubject.  But it comforts the mourners with the thought of meeting\nthose whom Christ will bring with Him.  What would be the good of\nmeeting if they should not know them?  St. Paul expects to meet his\nconverts and present them before Christ.  How could he do so if he did\nnot know them?  Our Lord depicts Dives and Lazarus even in the lower\nHades life as knowing each other.  He says to the dying thief as they\nwent within the veil, \"To-day shalt thou be with Me.\"  What could it\nmean except they should know each other within?\n\nBut surely the Bible does not need to say it.  It is one of those\nthings that we may assume with certainty.  We know that Heaven would\nscarce be Heaven at all if we were to be but solitary isolated spirits\namongst a crowd of others whom we did not know or love.  We know that\nthe next world and this world come from the same God who is the same\nalways.  We know that in this world He has bound us up in groups,\nknowing and loving and sympathizing with each other.  Unless His method\nutterly changes He must do the same hereafter.  And we have seen what a\nprophecy of recognition lies deep in the very fibres of that nature\nwhich God has implanted in us.  If we shall not know one another, why\nis there this undying memory of departed ones, the aching void that is\nnever filled on earth?  The lower animals lose their young and in a few\ndays forget them.  But the poor, human mother never forgets.  When her\nhead is bowed with age, when she has forgotten nearly all else on\nearth, you can bring the tears into her eyes by mentioning the child\nthat died in her arms forty years ago.  Did God implant that divine\nlove in her only to disappoint it?  God forbid!  A thousand times, no.\nIn that world the mother shall meet her child, and the lonely widow\nshall meet her husband, and they shall learn fully the love of God in\nthat rapturous meeting with Christ's benediction resting on them.\n\nI know there are further questions rising in our hearts.  Will our dear\nones remember us?  Will they, in all the years of progress, have grown\ntoo good and great for fellowship with us?  There is no specific answer\nsave what we can infer from the boundless goodness and kindness of God.\nSince He does not forget us we may be sure they will not forget us.\nSince His superior greatness and holiness does not put Him beyond our\nreach, we may be sure that theirs will not--their growth will be mainly\na growth of love which will only bring them closer to us for ever and\never.\n\n\n\nV.  HOW DO MEN ENTER HEAVEN?\n\nWe have asked, What is meant by Heaven?  What can be known of the\ndetails of life in Heaven?  And now I close this book with the solemn\nquestion for us all: How shall we enter Heaven?  If you have followed\nme thus far the answer is easy.  Though there is a special place which\nshall be Heaven, yet, if Heaven means a state of mind rather than a\nplace of residence, if Heaven means to be something rather than to go\nsomewhere, though it means to go somewhere, too, then the answer is\neasy.  We enter Heaven by a spiritual, not by a natural act.  We begin\nHeaven here on earth, not by taking a journey to the sun or the\nplanets, not by taking a journey from this world up through the air,\nbut by taking a journey from a bad state of mind to a good state of\nmind; from that state of mind which is enmity against God, to that of\nhumble, loyal, loving obedience to Christ.  It is not so much that we\nhave to go to Heaven.  We have to do that, too.  But Heaven has to come\nto us first.  Heaven has to begin in ourselves.  \"The beginning of\nHeaven is not at that hour when the eye grows dim and the sound of\nfriendly voices becomes silent in death, but at that hour when God\ndraws near and the eyes of the spiritual understanding are opened, and\nthe soul sees how beautiful Christ is, how hateful sin is; the hour\nwhen self-will is crucified, and the God-will is born in the\nresolutions of a new heart.\"  Then Heaven has begun, the Heaven that\nwill continue after our death.\n\nDo we believe that this is the right way to think of Heaven?  For if so\nit is a serious question for us all.  What about my hopes of entering\nHeaven?  If Heaven consists of character rather than possessions, of a\nstate of mind rather than a place of residence, if, in fine, Heaven has\nto begin on earth, what of our hopes of entering Heaven?  Is it not\npitiful to hear people talk lightly about going to Heaven, whose lives\non earth have not any trace of the love and purity and nobleness and\nself-sacrifice of which Heaven shall entirely consist hereafter?  To\nsee men with the carnal notions about Heaven as a place of external\nglory and beauty and jasper and emerald, where, after they have misused\ntheir time on earth, they shall fly away like swallows to an eternal\nsummer.  Why, what should they do in Heaven?  They would be miserable\nthere even if they could get there.  They would be entirely out of\ntheir element, like a fish sent to live on the grass of a lovely\nmeadow.  Those who shall enjoy the Heaven hereafter are they whose\nHeaven has begun before.  They who may hope to do the work of God\nhereafter are those who are humbly trying to do that will on earth.\nThese shall inherit the everlasting Kingdom.  Unto which blessed\nKingdom may He vouchsafe to bring us all!  Amen.\n\n\n\n[1] Whittier, \"The Brother of Mercy.\"","title":"The Gospel of the Hereafter","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":43055}