ms^jj^t CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Miss ti\\^o.Bt^< Tilliams and Mrs. J- 1-:. Tanner slty Library The redeemed life after death 3 1924 031 696 184 olin,anx Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031696184 THE REDEEMED LIFE AFTER DEATH The Redeemed Life After Death CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL Ntw York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh ^^ Copyright, 1.905, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY ~~r P\ll^Li.S\ New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street YT!{;>i.-iV|KiU To The Sacred Memory of My Father and My Mother Et audivi vocem de coelo dicentem mihi: Scribe : Beati mortui, qui in Domino moriuntur. Amodo jam dicit Spir- itus, ut requiescant a laboribus suis : opera enim ilhrum, sequuntur illos. THE REDEEMED LIFE AFTER DEATH I am the Eesnrreotion and the Life ; he that he- lieveth in Me, though he were dead yet shall he live ; And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.— /St. John 11 : 25, 26, Blessed be the God and Father of onr Lord Jesus Christ, Which according to Hia abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the Besurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. To an inheritance incor- ruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, re- served in heaven. — 1 Peter 1 : 3, 4. In My Father's house are many mansions : if it were not so I would have told yon. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself ; that where I am, there ye may be also. — St. John 14 : 2, 3. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have en- tered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. — 1 Corinthians 2 : 9. For this corruptible must put on incormption and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible 'shall have put on incormption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pa^ the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. — 1 Corinthians 15 : 53, 54, Having a desire to depart and to be with Christ ; which is far better. — PhUippians 1 : 23. IN the quiet yard of what is called the oldest Church in England, the Church of St. Martin, of Can- terbury — among immemorial yews that may have seen Anselm called from his Norman monastery and forced into the English Archbishop- ric — lies the writer of the hymn, " Ten thousand times ten thousand " — Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. Upon the stone that marks his grave, written in melodi- ous Latin composed by himself, is this inscription : Deversorivm Viatoris Hierosolymam profidscentis, " The Inn of a Traveller on his way to Jeru- salem." It might be written on every grave, where, from the first century [9] The Redeemed onward, believers in the faith of Christ have laid their dead who have fallen asleep in Him. There have been many differences touching other things, but those differences have not invaded the circle of peace that sur- rounds the Christian grave. We may differ about the opinions and acts of the living, but an unvarying belief of twenty centuries unites us, concerning the destiny of the blessed dead. Over the whole course of Christian history, redeeming from despair its lowest de- pressions, tempering its greatest exal- tations with the serious splendour of immortality, rests a confidence that Death is not the end of personal exist- ence ; that, when the shadows of the eventide close in about the pilgrim, he lies down, as in a traveller's rest- Life After Death house, to awake refreshed and to put on the vestments of a new and more beautiful life. One cannot too strongly emphasise the fact that belief in the continuance of life after death is far from being pe- culiar to Christianity. If it were peculiar to Christianity, its authority and its consolation as a belief might be much less than they are. Death is definite, obvious, apparently final in its action upon the individual. The conception of life going on after this ruin of death has taken place is startling and opposed to the law of probability, as set up by what the hand touches and what the eye rests upon, of the dead. The doubting of immortality is a familiar accom- paniment of hours of sorrow and ["] 'The Redeemed hours of pleasure. If belief in the ongoing of life beyond the grave were confined to that part of the human race holding the Christian tradition, it may be that that belief would be submerged, yet more often than it is, by tidal waves of material- istic philosophy. But it is not so. Christians are not the only believers in life after death. Ages before the dawn of Christianity, the river of this belief, brimming with the hopes and fears of human hearts, ran, like the fourfold river of Eden, through four ancient channels of the religious experience of our race, the faiths of Egypt, of Babylonia, of Persia, of India. Two thousand years before the Hebrew Exodus, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was penetrating [12] L'ife After Death that gentle and poetic civilisation with the atmosphere of immortality. A thousand years before the Psalter of Israel, the Accadian hymns of Chaldsea were voicing the same ele- mental belief for the Babylonian pro- genitors of the Hebrew people. Half a millennium before Christ, in the Asiatic Empire between the Caspian and the Persian Gulf, the Zoroastrian Avesta was proclaiming with singular clearness and decision the Parsi faith of life advancing after death to its judgment and its doom. When the Hindu Aryans swept through the passes of Afghanistan to the plains of the Indus and the Ganges, they brought with them pre- historic hymns breathing the hope of immortality and telling of an The Redeemed " everlasting and imperishable world, where there is eternal light and glory." ^ " The idea of immortality," one has said, " was the common prop- erty of all Indian philosophers. It was so completely taken for granted that we look in vain for any elaborate arguments in support of it." ^ The assurance of life after death is not more evident in this fourfold stream of the world's most ancient religious experience than in those two faiths more nearly associated with Christianity : the religion of Greece and the religion of Israel. The former advances beyond the intuitive sense of immortality to reason with con- fidence concerning the after-life of ' Rig Veda viii : 48. ' Max Mnller : Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, p. 138. [Mj Liife After Death the soul ; the latter, rising to a moral doctrine of God, of man and of death, progressively is filled with promise of the coming faith of Christianity. " By slow degrees," it has been said of the Old Testament doctrine of a future life,^ "it grew from little to more, from surmise to certainty, from obscurity to clearness." Through these reflections we are re- minded that belief in the continuance of life after death is far from being peculiar to Christianity. It is no new thought that breaks in upon a race accustomed by its religious in- heritances to think of life as limited to this world ; of death as the end of all. Nor is the Christian belief a ' Salmond : The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, p. 192, 2ud edition. [IS] The Redeemed spasmodic outburst, flaring up like a failing fire, from the embers of an ex- piring faith. The opposite is true. The belief that we cherish concerning the redeemed life after death has back of it and beneath it the conviction of all the ages since man became a liv- ing and a reasoning soul ; a conviction born of what he found in himself, of what he saw in others. With the same precision and security with which man in all ages has claimed, by a physical sense, a relation between the eye and light, has he, by a spiritual sense, claimed a relation between the soul and immortality. The nature of that relation he could not grasp ; the depths of that mystery of immortality he could not fathom ; but in the fact he believed, in the sense £i6] Life After Death of destiny he lived and died. His rea- sonings concerning it were vague, and dark and full of fear. To the Hindu the discharge of the soul at death may have been as the weariness of the wild bird of the sea, wandering above the pathless billows of transmigration, seeking through millions of years and millions of reincarnations final rest in the ocean of an Impersonal Absolute. To the Hebrew the going forth from the body may have been to enter a pallid and shadowy underworld — a house of gloomy and indiscriminate assemblage appointed for all the liv- ing. But to the one as to the other, the obscuration of the vision made it not less a vision of life and the con- tinuance of being, as against death and the annihilation of being. [17] The Redeemed The Revelation of Jesus Christ is the confirmation of this universal as- sumption of immortality ; the inter- pretation of this universal sense of destiny ; the Key of Death. " God hath saved us," says St. Paul, "and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began ; but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Sa- viour Jesus Christ, Who hath abol- ished Death and hath brought life and immortality to light." In our quiet hours, it is well to reflect upon the confirming and interpreting of our sense of immortality through the Christian Revelation ; to take the Key of Death, as from His Hand, and open [18] J-'ife After Death a door of thought into that blessed Life that lies beyond. " When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers." The moment we open that door we are tempted to draw back and to turn away our eyes ; confused, if not terrified, by the mys- teries that envelope the future. As soon as we assume the certainty of life beyond death we open questions that we cannot answer ; we unveil possi- bilities that we cannot limit. That this is so, ought not in the least to surprise us, much less to deprive us of our peace. How could it be other- wise with a life which we view from afar, and of which we have not yet had experience ! When one remem- bers how little, relatively, we know [19] The Redeemed about our present life, how many of its phenomena baffle investigation, how many of its forces are incalcu- lable, how ignorant we remain in this wonderful world, is it strange if, look- ing forward into another, and catch- ing only dim and evanescent glimpses, we are uncertain about many things ? Is it strange if at times we shrink with fear from the thought of leaving the familiar world for such a terra incognita? We have grown used to the kindly earth and its ways. Is it strange if it frightens us sometimes to think of going away from it all forever — the pine-trees and the hills, the firesides and the faces that smile and speak ? It is, of course, a poetic materialism that runs through Fred- erick Faber's lines on " The Shore of [20] Life After Death Eternity," yet we have all felt, or may some day feel, that of which he speaks : Alone ! to land alone upon that shore ! On which no wavelets lisp, no billows roar, Perhaps no shape of ground, Perhaps no sight or sound, No forms of earth our fancies to arrange, But to begin alone that mighty change ! Alone ! to land alone upon that shore ! Knowing so well we can return no more; No voice or face of friend. None with us to attend Our disembarking on that awful strand, But to arrive alone in such a land ! There are moments when the mys- tery of it all is overwhelming. But this natural and childlike shrinking from that which we do not under- stand, is not the only influence that makes it hard for us sometimes to see the fair, sweet landscape of immortal- ity that lies beyond the tumultuous [21] The Redeemed clouds of mystery. The Church has always been debating matters con- nected with that future life upon which it is beyond the power of man to pronounce a final decision : the doom of those who never repent, the fate of the ignorant, the destiny of religious souls outside of Christianity, the salvation of infants, the purgato- rial discipline, the intermediate state, conditional immortality, probation after death, the Second Coming of Christ, the judgment of mankind, the closing of the aflairs of the world. These awful matters have furnished material for controversies and have been made the subjects of antagonistic dogmas. Around them have gathered masses of rival opinions, in turn claiming and yielding authority as [22] J^ife After Death final interpretations of Scripture. It was inevitable, in view of the inherent interest in immortality, that these problems of the future life should press for solution. It was equally in- evitable that dogmatic attempts to solve them should add to the confu- sion of Christendom. It is blessed to feel that while, as thoughtful students of Scripture and of life, each one of us must hold for himself such opinions touching these deep matters as, for him, the Word and the Spirit shall appear to justify, we may, at times, let all these things go, turn from all these clouds of mystery and look on that peaceful landscape of the redeemed life after death, which, to the eye of Christian faith and hope, some- times stands forth in such sunny out- [23] The Redeemed line, that it seems not like a distant, unsubstantial vision, but like that which really it is, the continuance of an eternity that begins here, in time. I say, the continuance of an eternity that begins in time. This thought is the very gateway through which the mind of Christian faith moves natu- rally towards that peaceful consumma- tion of the redeemed life after death. To apprehend the life that is to be we must learn to think more largely and sacredly of the life that is now. We must enlarge the scope and meas- ure of To-day ; must identify To-day with what we call Eternity. To bring this thought within our reach was one great purpose of the Revela- tion of the Lord Jesus. " I am come that they might have life and that they [24] L,ife After Death might have it more abundantly." " I am the Resurrection and the Life, he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." "Because I live ye shall live also." This is the Gospel of the Res- urrection — the passage of the Lord from His daily life before death through the grave to His joyful Res- urrection and His Life after death. This is the note of power in the preaching of the first days — that the Lord had risen, and that with His Resurrection had come a confirmation and interpretation of that sense of the soul's survival of death which Egypt and Babylonia, and Persia and the Aryans of the Hindu Kush, and Greeks and Jews had been affirming [25 ] The Redeemed in their own grand, vague ways for thousands of years. Some are saying in these latter days that the historical evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus is slight and the witnesses are few. What if it were so? Is the only evidence of the Resurrection of Christ the testimony of the eye-witnesses ? Is it not also the power that burst like an avalanche after the fact? I be- lieve with Harnack : " Whatever may have happened at that grave, one thing is certain, that grave is the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished ; that there is life eter- nal. Wherever there is a strong faith in the infinite value of the soul, wherever the sufferings of the present are measured against a future of glory, this feeling of life is bound up with [26] L,ife After Death the conviction that Jesus Christ has passed through death, that God has awakened Him to life and glory. It is not by any speculative ideas of philosophy, but by the Vision of Jesus' Life and Death and by the feeling of His imperishable union with God that mankind, so far as it believes in these things, has attained to that certainty of eternal life it was meant to know and which it dimly discerns ; eternal life in time and beyond time."^ Eternal life in time. To-day a part of eternity. Here is the beginning of the Christian conception of the re- deemed life. "He that heareth My word and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, is passed from death unto life." The present ' What is Christianity t p. 162, [27] The Redeemed life is the eternal life, seen for the time being through the mode of the phys- ical. Death is the suspension of rela- tions with the physical universe. Life, which was eternal here, goes on, undeterred and undissolved by the suspension of these physical relations. This is the power of an endless, an indissoluble life — a life that cannot be dissolved. The mode of existence may change, relations may be sus- pended ; mourners may go about the streets; the dust may return to the earth as it was ; but the spirit which came out from God, which is akin to God, returns to God, Who gave it: lives with God. There are reasons why, to a well balanced mind, this matter is one of the most intensely interesting things [28] ■Life After Death in the whole field of thought. Its great interest comes largely from its real relation to ourselves and to those we love. There are many questions, important and interesting in them- selves, which have only a possible, or provisional or occasional relation to us. We may become involved in them or we may not. We may take them up for a season, pursue them, drop them, and take up other in- terests in their turn. But in this matter we are certainly involved ; more than this : this matter contains, and is, our future experience ; what we are to pass through, to feel, to know, to do, to be. What is more real to us than our own life to-day ! This is our own life to-morrow. It is a wise ordering, no doubt, that the [29] The Redeemed sense of our real relation to a life after death comes to us gradually. In the days of our childhood and of our youth some do not think at all of that life in the future ; the present world is so new, so full of surprises, so interesting by reason of new sensa- tions. There is something of the same affluent sense of good and beautiful things in store, that are about to be opened up, with which we begin an evening of noble music, and think ahead no farther than the melody has gone. There are others, many, I believe, who, even in child- hood and youth, think long, long thoughts that rise, as with wings, into the infinite spaces ; that proph- esy, as with voices, of that which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. [30] Life After Death But to very few are these prophetic intimations of immortality absolutely real in childhood, in youth, or even in early manhood and womanhood. They are flashing visions that add to the grandeur, the sacredness, the pathos of living ; they are involun- tary and unorganised effects of religious emotion and the awaking of the soul to the knowledge of God. They are genuine, yet academic ; sincere, yet with the sincerity of poetic imagination rather than the prose of the sober fact. The child's eyes may fill with tears at. the vision of im- mortality. In an hour, thank God ! the sweet laughter and the crowding interests of time have swept that vision away. At length there comes gradually, [31 J The Redeemed in the well-balanced mind, a change from the academic to the actual. It dawns upon one that a large part of the life is over, which once, from the standpoint of childhood, seemed a road without an ending; that the sense of indefinite opportunity has changed into the problem how to do in the time remaining some definite things that wait to be done. For some the acuteness of this problem is heightened by the growing limitations that come to them with age and wan- ing vitality. The mysterious words of Christ to Simon Peter they begin, half wonderingly, to apply to them- selves : '- Verily, verily I say unto thee. When thou wast young thou girdedst thyself and walkedst whither thou wouldest, but when thou shalt [32] J-jife After Death be old thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldest not." When one begins to feel these things, it is a sign that he is taking hold of the realism of life after death. As one who has heard, all his life, of India, vaguely visualising it to him- self as a continent of mystery, far away, and who finds himself at last upon a ship standing in to that land, fringed with its palm-bearing atolls, so at length the vagueness of the sense of immortality gives place to dis- tinct impressions of advance toward that which must, within a time rel- atively short, become a part of one's own experience. To such as have had vital energy reduced to a minimum, and courage undermined, by tortur- [33 J The Redeemed ing years of illness ; or who, alienated through adversity, have broken their connection with outward affairs, have lost touch with active life and retired into the seclusion of melancholy thoughts, one can imagine that the prospect of death as leading to a com- plete change of the mode of existence may be accepted with somewhat more than passive willingness, as a release from the monotony of pain and dis- appointment. But for those whose career in the world has been marked by relative progress and achievement, who are living lives of service to which the interests of humanity appeal strongly, who find each year more in- teresting than the last, as the world wakes up to movements of science and civilisation and religion that point to [34] J-jife After Death golden ages of liberty and social re- demption — for such as these it is hard to be reconciled to any change that means separation from forces and friends so dear ; elimination from movements bound up with that which is the very life of one's life. Yet this hardship can be mitigated, this pain of renunciation can be soothed if there be the light of reasonable hope shining upon that future, so that we shall see its connection with the life that we live here ; its advance to something greater and more inter- esting than this which to us is so great and so nobly interesting. What we want is the sense of relation to that future ; relation in some manner that shall conserve the essence of life in us, and not consign us to the [35] The Redeemed miserable silence and unprofitable- ness of Death. Is it not true that this matter comes very near to us ; near with the vital nearness of a personal experience ! Not less near to us is it as involving those whom we love. In the highest affections of this life, love becomes a kind of earthly transmigration of the soul. We live in those most dear to us, sometimes far more than we live within ourselves. Our chief thoughts are immersed in them. What they are, what they do, what they may be- come are the things that engage us most. In them we seem to find an- other and a better self. From them proceed to us silent influences that augment the blessedness of living. Undoubtedly there are some natures [36] Life After Death that know relatively little of this ab- sorption in the lives of others ; not, it may be, because incapable of such knowledge, but because circumstances did not lend themselves to its devel- opment. Apparently the roots of per- sonal affection lie nearer the surface in some hearts than in others, and the uprooting of earthly relationships by death does not carry with it so much of the heart's fibre, for some. There are others to whom life means love ; to whom the thought of the mysterious future that lies before our beloved is more real than our own. When they are with us in the joy of health, some- times we search their dear faces with our eyes and wonder concerning all that lies before them, whether they shall enter early or late into that great [37] The Redeemed experience, and how they shall adapt themselves to it. Here they seem a part of ourselves, they seem to us sometimes like the interpretation and answer of that deepest life that lies buried in our own soul. Our love would protect them from every ad- versity ; but from that last adversity of Death we cannot protect them. Into it and through it they must go, and we, also, thank God, must go and may be with them afterwards, and they with us. But what shall it all mean : to them and to us ? Think ! when our one soul understands The great word that makes all things new ; When earth breaks up and heaven expands How will the change strike me and you In the House not made with hands ? Day by day, as we grow older, we [38 J L,ife After Death have to see the great transition ac- complished by one and another of our friends. To-day they are by our side, working, with us, at the fascinating work of living, answering with flash of eye, and tone of voice, and touch of hand their environment in a phys- ical universe — they are well ; to-mor- row this perfect correspondence of health is invaded ; the eye dims with weakness, the voice sinks to a whis- per, the hand grows passive — they are sick. The third day all is still ; every relation with the material universe is suspended — they are dead. What does it all mean? What shall we believe concerning them that are asleep in Him ? No negative an- swer need be given by him who holds *he essence of the Christian faith ; no [39] The Redeemed cautious, indeterminate balancing of possibilities. From that joyous age when " with great power the Apostles gave witness to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all," an extraordinary unity of belief has pervaded Christian thought concerning the redeemed life after death. It has been a distinctive faith, standing forth in positiveness and beauty of outline against the back- ground of many forms of non-Chris- tian theory. In that confused back- ground of non-Christian theory, touch- ing the state after death, one finds the blank and horrifying denial of im- mortality by an animalistic material- ism ; a denial which, it must be remem- bered, is simply another belief : " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we [40] l-^ife After Death die." It is the attempt to blot out the visions of life that flit across the imagination, by putting man in his death with the beasts that perish. One finds also the efibrt, as in the pathetic volume of Cotter Morison,^ to substitute for our personal life after death the survival of our influence in this world, as a contribution to the common experience of the race ; " rob- bing the individual of his immortality to enrich the abstraction called hu- manity." ^ One finds, in many forms, the reflex action of Orientalism on Western thought, in beliefs touching the absorption of the individual soul in the soul of the universe, as the wave is lost in the sea. Against the shadows of this shifting ' The Service of Man. "Salmond, op. cit. p. 583. [41] The Redeemed background, Christ has brought life and immortality to light. That holy hope, which, tested by twenty cen- turies of Christian experience, is to- day more real, more full, more ade- quate than ever, we owe to Him Who said : " If it were not so, I would have told you." " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," says one of those who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead, " Which, according to His abundant mercy, hath begotten us again to a lively hope, by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incor- ruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven." It is through that living hope that Christ has relieved our life of an intolerable [42] Liife After Death burden ; has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers. Carlyle speaks of his beloved friend John Sterling, dying at thirty-eight, as a brave man " looking steadfastly into the silent continents of Death and Eternity " ; and Sterling, a few days before his death, writing to Carlyle, shows how, to one who has found the solution of his spiritual problem in Christ, it is possible, even in the midst of one's best days, to lay down these beautiful affairs of earth and to feel a human interest in the life to come : " I tread the common road," he says, " into the great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much of hope. It is all very strange, but not one hundredth part so sad as it seems to the standers-by." [43] The Redeemed When one thinks of the largeness of this matter and of the many types of mind interested in it over so great a stretch of time, one sees that inevi- tably there must be variations in the detail of the Christian belief concern- ing the blessed life after death. Such variations we find ; as, for example, in matters touching the Intermediate State and the Second Coming of our Blessed Lord — matters of which it is not possible for me to speak here. These natural variations, however, only make more impressive the glori- ous unities of the belief coming down to us unbroken from Christ ; lending themselves to the progressive think- ing of each successive age and be- coming to-day, when interpreted in the terms of modern knowledge of [44 J Life After Death the problems of life, more inspiring than ever. Essentially these unities of our faith concerning the blessed life after death are three in number : the continuance of personal identity ; the progress of the soul ; the resurrec- tion of the body. The continuance of personal iden- tity after death is one of the splendid elements of this belief " Handle Me and see," says the Risen Christ, " that it is / Myself" As the rainbow glows against the sullen clouds, so does this rich hope of the persistance of per- sonal life stand out in contrast with the dark alternatives of annihilation at death, or absorption after death into the impersonal soul of the uni- verse. The individualising of lives is God's most wonderful miracle of being: [45] The Redeemed each life a unique expression of attri- butes coming forth from Himself, and standing apart from all other lives in the inimitable atmosphere of its own personality. How extraordinarily real is the place of an individual life in the world and in our heart : not to be mistaken for, or confused with, any other, but only, always, everywhere himself, herself ! How mysterious and how absolute is the correspondence of personalities one with another ! Out of the indis- tinguishable throngs of human lives emerge one and another who are to us as the special messengers of God, to have come in contact with whom is to have received influences that must continue to affect us while our being lasts. This is the ministration [46] L.ife After Death of personality, at once the most real and the most spiritual of facts ; the most actual and the most elusive. How wonderful it is to reflect upon the influence of one radiant person- ality, in a home, in a community, in the world 1 Year after year it abides among us, coming to us day after day, or returning to us after long intervals in its own beautiful uniqueness ; a bright fact in our universe, a continu- ous force afiecting our consciousness of being, a living epistle unfolding the beauty of God, We try to inter- pret this miracle of personality ; we cannot. We ask it to give account of its secret of power : its only answer is: " It is 7 myself." It is this of which our Christian faith affirms immortal continuance. It is this that shall [47 3 The Redeemed shine as the stars forever and ever. The catastrophe of death has come between us and this personality for a season, suspending its power to have relations with us through the medium of the physical universe in which we still live and act ; but over the essen- tial self of personality, over that unique blending of attributes through which God expressed His thought in forming this beautiful personal essence, death hath no more dominion. In the persistence of an indissoluble life it lives — itself forever. But liow does that Self live on in the life after death? Is that world but as the pallid Sheol of the Hebrew imagination, where gathered the ghosts of the dead, pursuing an ex- istence the spectral counterpart of this [48] Life After Death — the form without the warmth and colour, the semblance without the life ? Or is the life after death a bald monot- ony of perfected existence ? Does the soul at death plunge into the ocean of immediate perfection, to endure eter- nally without the incentives that come through progress and the widen- ing of knowledge ? Surely this would be the practical extinction of indi- viduality — its practical absorption into the undifferentiated soul of the universe ; this would be to make heaven less interesting than earth, and the vision of God less stimulating There than Here. Such conceptions of life after death do not justly ex- press the Christian faith, in which the continuance of personal identity is inseparable from the growth and [49] The Redeemed progress of the soul. The meaning of Christ's coming into the world was to open to us the vision and experi- ence of life fulfilling itself on ever broadening lines ; life ever growing more abundant; joy ever deepening the strength and volume of its cur- rent. As we come into the experience of that life here, learning through Him to care for and to seek the better things, instinctively and by the moral and intellectual necessities of our na- ture we interpret joy and good in the terms of progress in character, in knowledge, in the service of God. Have we not intimations, in our best hours, of the endless possibility of moral development ; of qualities of the soul that shall never cease to grow more worthy of Him Who implanted [5oj L,ife After Death them ; of character fulfilling itself per- petually in line with a Divine Ideal ? Have we not suggestions, in those superb moments when the mind is at its best, of a larger intellectual devel- opment, a more comprehensive assim- ilation and use of knowledge, post- poned for the present by imperious limitations of time? Have we not visions of service, flung briefly open, like rifts in an encompassing cloud, at times when our spirit is most thor- oughly obedient to God ; service the nature of which we cannot grasp be- cause the vision is so brief, but the import of which we apprehend to be the doing of God's will, as it is done in heaven ! As the vision of such possibilities swept before Paul's mind, to be hidden again by earth's clouds, [SI] The Redeemed sin and overwork and the sorrow of unequal strength, well might he cry : " I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better." What a wonderful characterisation of the possibilities and opportunities of this one life of ours, as it shall develope after death— /ar heti^r ! Very splendid are the possibilities and opportunities that open to us here ; sometimes we feel that no life could be broader or richer than this, and in our faithlessness we think of death as the shattering of a great career ; but they who enter into the faith of the Resurrection dare to an- ticipate something far better — better in its scope and range, better in its freedom from harassing liabilities and limita- tions, better in its opportunity for upbuilding character worthy of those [52] L.ife After Death that are called " the children of God." " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things that God hath pre- pared for them that love Him." To the survival of personal identity and the growth of the soul must be added one other element, that from the beginning has marked the com- mon faith of Christians : the Res- urrection of the Body. By this, its most characteristic belief, Christianity becomes a noble mediator between two extreme views of personality. There is a view of personality, a very normal and human view, to which bodily reality is the only reality. The visible form, the expression of the face, the colour, the voice, the touch of the hand — these are personality ; [53] The Redeemed the warm, sweet actualities of life. And when these are swallowed up in the all-devouring grave there remains nothing but memory and sorrow. He Who wept at the grave of Lazarus His friend, can sympathise with those to whom the bodily side of personality is so real as this. There is another, a philosophical, view of personality, to which the body is nothing but the temporary dwelling in which the soul, the real person, lives for a little while, then abandons forever. This is the view that fills Indian thought; innumerable incarnations of the soul, which briefly tenants one body after another, escaping with joy from each miserable habitation. This is the view that condemns the body as the source of moral evil — the un- [54] Life After Death sanitary prison of the impatient soul. This is the view that conceives of our only real self as an immortal princi- ple, liberated by death to enjoy its birthright of disembodied freedom. When one thinks of the malady, the pain, the possibilities of misuse, the weariness, the enfeebling changes that beset the mortal body, one can sym- pathise with the philosophical im- pulse to solve a difficult problem by consigning the body to oblivion. Between these two extremes stands Christianity : a noble, compassionating mediator. It will not say that the body is all ; neither will it say that the body is nothing. To our passion- ate impulse to cling to the bodily man- ifestations of personality it answers : that this impulse is true and not false ; [55] The Redeemed that the body is a part of personality and that our instinctive protest against the humiliation and wreckage of the body by death is a prophetic intimation of immortality. To our philosophical impulse to consign the body to oblivion because of its weak- ness, and to trust only to the con- tinuance of an impaired, because a dis- embodied, self, Christianity points, in reply, to the Incarnation of the Son of God sanctifying and honouring our whole nature; and to His Uprising from the grave in the fullness of Per- sonality, clothed upon with the glori- ous Body of His Resurrection. " Now is Christ risen from the dead and be- come the First-fruits of them that slept." " It is sown in weakness, it [S6j L,ife After Death is raised in power ; it is sown a natu- ral body, it is raised a spiritual body." Such is our faith concerning them that sleep in Him — a faith full of mystery ; knowing nothing of the mode but simply holding the fact ; a faith that consents to wait reverently until the Day of Explanation dawn, and the shadows of the grave flee away. It is that faith that makes sacred the resting-places of Christ's own. It is that faith that shall make us calm to endure the rending of our own personality in the last hour. " My flesh shall rest in hope." " For this corruptible must put on incorrup- tion and this mortal must put on im- mortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and [57] The Redeemed this mortal shall have put on immor- tality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written : Death is swallowed up in Victory." [58]