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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/puttingonimmorta00maca_0 
 

 
 
 “ 
 Putting on Immortal! 
 
 SUL UBICAL SENN 
 Reflections on the Life Beyond 
 
 By y 
 CLARENCE EDWARD MACARTNEY 
 
 Minister of Arch Street Presbyterian Church 
 Philadelphia 
 
 %) 
 ¥ 
 
 
 
 New Yorxk CHICAGO 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 LONDON AND 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
Copyright, MCMXXVI, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 
 
To 
 FATHER and MOTHER 
 Now Within The Veil 
 
ty ras ala de 
 re # Dery 
 A Rata, 
 
 i fy vy), 
 
 
 
Introduction 
 
 T can hardly be questioned that the tide of 
 interest in the life to come has rapidly ebbed 
 in our generation. Save for a somewhat un- 
 healthy revival of spiritualism, there has been little 
 discussion or teaching about the great change which 
 _ awaits us all. It used to be the fashion of the foes 
 of the Church to rebuke her as being too other- 
 worldly in her thought and teaching, and not 
 enough interested in the life which now is. Cer- 
 tainly no one could lay such a charge against the 
 Church of our day. The whole emphasis, in the 
 pulpit, and out of it, has been put upon the Here, 
 and the Hereafter has faded immeasurably. 
 This subsidence of interest in the life to come 
 has undoubtedly had its influence in the present 
 low spiritual condition of the Church and in the 
 
 sag in public morality. There is a tonic in the ~~ 
 
 wind which blows off the shores of the life to 
 come, and both Church and State sorely need to 
 feel its awakening and life-giving breath. In his | 
 “ History of the People of Israel,’\Renan pays a __ 
 noble tribute to the part which faith in the life to © 
 come plays in the affairs of the life which now is. 
 
 He says, “ Let us not deceive ourselves; man is 
 rf 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 governed by nothing but his conception of the 
 future. Any nation which en masse gives up all 
 faith in what lies beyond the grave will become 
 utterly degraded. An individual may do great 
 things, and yet not believe in immortality ; but those 
 around him must believe it, for him and for them- 
 selves.” \ 
 
 No one has traversed the whole territory of 
 Christian truth till he has climbed those high ranges 
 of revelation, whence he can command a view of 
 the life everlasting. True, it is a far distant view, 
 and much cloud and mist obscure the outlines of 
 the eternal shores. Nevertheless, there are some 
 things about the life to come which the Word of 
 God makes clear to us. If we see as in a glass, 
 darkly, that is no reason why we should refuse to 
 look at all. A Scriptural interest and hope in life 
 hereafter exerts a purifying influence upon our 
 characters in the life of this world. The Apostle 
 speaks of the “ powers of the world to come.” It 
 will give us strength for the battle of to-day and 
 hope for the unknown things of to-morrow if, 
 through the Scriptures, we come in contact with the 
 “ powers of the world to come.” 
 
 C. E. M. 
 Philadelphia. | 
 
Contents 
 
 ie 
 % Wuat Att Men Feex 2 a aR 
 Il. 
 PAGAN IDEAS - = - 3 3 
 ITI. 
 Op TESTAMENT IDEAS “ s S 
 IV. 
 Can WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? - 
 Ve 
 %, THE RESURRECTION OF THE Bopy - 
 VI. 
 %, THe RESURRECTION OF THE Unjust - 
 | VII. 
 BETWEEN DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION 
 VIII. 
 Tue Last JUDGMENT - p i s 
 IX. 
 FUTURE RETRIBUTION - - - ~ 
 X. 
 Bet Last - a = i EL nttne 
 
 II 
 29 
 47 
 69 
 89 
 105 
 Rt? 
 127 
 
 145 
 
 169 
 

 
I 
 WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 
 
“Vital spark of heavenly flame! 
 Quit, oh, quit this mortal frame! 
 Trembling, hoping, ling'ring, flying! 
 Oh, the pain, the bliss of dying! 
 Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife, 
 And let me languish into hfe! 
 
 “ Hark! they whisper—angels say, 
 
 ‘ Sister spirit, come away!’ 
 What is this absorbs me quite; 
 Steals my senses, shuts my sight; 
 Drowns my spirits, draws my breath? 
 Tell me, my soul, can this be—death? 
 
 “The world recedes! It disappears! 
 Heaven opens to my eyes!—my ears 
 With sounds seraphic ring: 
 Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! 
 O Grave! where is thy victory? 
 O Death! where is thy sting?” 
 
 Pore’s Translation of Latin Ode. 
 
I 
 WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 
 
 N a bright July day twelve years ago, I 
 () was resting at a post-house on a journey 
 across the mountains of Norway. ‘The 
 village was but a cluster of cottages, and most of 
 the inhabitants were standing about the door of one 
 of the cottages. Presently, men came out of the ~ 
 house carrying a rude coffin. It was laid on the 
 flat bed of a low wagon, and the procession started 
 for the place of burial. Down the steep hill rum- 
 bled the wagon, followed by the company of 
 mourners and neighbours. At the foot of the hill 
 they took a road to the left which led them through 
 the fields which were sweet with the new-mown 
 hay. After a moment’s pause at the gate of the 
 churchyard, they passed through and came to a 
 stop before the door of the white Lutheran Church. 
 The body was carried into the church, the men 
 and women and children filing in after it. In the 
 space of half an hour they came out again into 
 the clear sunlight and gathered about the open 
 grave, 
 For a little time there was quiet and silence, 
 
 like that which brooded over the Sabbath fields 
 13 
 
14 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 of hay and the deep fiord, across whose placid face 
 lay the shadow of the mountains and silver cas- 
 cades. ‘Then the company broke up and went their 
 several ways, each waiting his time, until for him, 
 too, the little episode of life would be over, and he 
 would take the same journey, down the hill, 
 through the meadow, into the church, and then to 
 the grave, while the bell in the tower tolled a sad, 
 yet sweetly sounding, requiem. 
 
 As I saw them come slowly up the hill again, I 
 thought of the question that was in my own mind, 
 and in the minds of those honest, hard-working, 
 yet life-loving peasants, a question to which their 
 noble mountains and peaceful fields and deep mys- 
 terious fiords could give no answer, “ If a man die, 
 shall he live again? ” | 
 
 One question, more than all others, 
 
 From thoughtful minds implores reply, 
 
 It 1s, as breathed from star and pall, 
 What fate awaits us when we die? 
 
 It would betray a want of true humanity even 
 to pretend to be indifferent to this question of life 
 after death. In spite of all the rhetorical garlands 
 which we strew over the grave, the human mind 
 recognizes death as the great foe to life. Pro- 
 fessor Seeley, in his Ecce Homo, tells the truth 
 when he says, “‘ Death remains the fatal bar to all 
 complete satisfaction, the disturber of all great 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 15 
 
 plans, the Nemesis of all great happiness, the stand- 
 ing dire discouragement of human nature.” The 
 old question raised by Job, “If a man die, shall 
 he live again? ” loses nothing of its fascination for 
 the human mind as the ages roll by. Onthe tomb 
 of Thomas Huxley, the great agnostic, are these 
 lines: 
 
 
 
 “ And if there be no meeting past the grave, 
 Tf all is silence, darkness, yet ’tis rest. 
 Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep, 
 For God still giveth His beloved sleep; 
 And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.” 
 
 But the heart of humanity has never acquiesced 
 in that view of death. If there be no meeting past 
 the grave, and if its sleep is an endless sleep, then 
 a final and overwhelming calamity awaits us all. 
 To speak of God giving His beloved sleep, and 
 that sleep an endless sleep, is a contradiction in 
 terms. Mankind has ever taken the view that if 
 there be a God, and if God be good, then He will 
 *“show wonders to the dead.” Yet this subject 
 of life hereafter, majestic though it be, ever al- 
 luring us, is one that ever baffles us. When we 
 stand by the still form of the beloved dead, or, on 
 a spring day, pause by the grave of our parents, 
 and long to break the silence of death and the 
 grave and hold but a moment’s converse with the 
 dead, we realize how true it is that we see through 
 
16 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 the glass darkly and know in part; and kneeling be- — 
 
 fore the veil that screens the Beyond we weep in 
 silence. 
 
 Yet our grief and our perplexity do not make 
 us despair of the life hereafter. On the contrary, 
 they do but serve to increase our interest in it and 
 awaken in our minds and hearts those reasons and 
 intimations of immortality which from the be- 
 ginning of time and death have brought comfort 
 to mankind. Man lives in a vast cemetery. His 
 world is a world of dead empires, dead civiliza- 
 tions, dead cities, dead vegetation, dead animals, 
 
 dead races, and dead contemporaries. Yet in spite © 
 
 ofthe fact that the world in which he lives seems 
 to mock at his creed of life hereafter, man has 
 steadfastly clung to such a belief and warms his 
 heart with this hope. But with the odds, appar- 
 ently, so overwhelmingly against him, man has cast 
 about him for reasons and intimations with which 
 to fortify himself in this citadel of his faith in 
 life to come. ‘These reasons and intimations are 
 not the source of his hope and belief, but they are 
 the grounds upon which man seeks to rest those 
 hopes. Believing that he will live again after 
 death, man seeks to justify that belief in the court 
 of reason. Of some of these reasons let us now 
 speak. 
 
 From the standpoint of reason one of the strong- 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL Ly 
 
 est proofs of the existence of God is the fact that 
 man has in his mind the idea of God. How, if 
 there is no God, could he have the idea of God? 
 The same argument holds good when we come 
 to the doctrine of immortality. In spite of the 
 trophies of death all about him, and in spite of the 
 certain death which awaits him, man undoubtedly 
 has the conception of life after death. But if man 
 is a creature destined to come to nothingness in 
 the grave, how could he have this idea of life after 
 death? The very fact, then, that man in all ages 
 has had the instinct of life after death is in itself 
 a thing of tremendous importance. Haeckel, the 
 prophet of materialism, writes that no man who 
 keeps a good dog can deny that the dog has just 
 as good a claim for immortality as man himself. 
 As one who has kept several good dogs, I deny 
 that this is so. The death of a dog does not sug- 
 gest the subject of immortality, but the death of a 
 man does. The reason is that a dog in no way 
 expresses any instinct for life after death, whereas 
 man does express such instinct. 
 
 The plan of the Creator in His world is to sup- 
 _ ply a suitable organ wherever He implants the 
 instinct. ‘The bee has the instinct to secrete honey, 
 and honey and wax are provided. The bird has 
 the instinct to fly, and the wing with which to fly. 
 The fish has the instinct to swim, and the fin with 
 
18 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 which to swim. ‘The ear is made for hearing and 
 the eye for seeing. Are we to think that this great 
 plan of God breaks down only when we come to 
 the highest creature and the highest instinct of 
 that creature, which is life after death? How deep 
 and universal and ancient that instinct for im- 
 mortality is, may be seen from all those processes 
 in nature which have been appealed to by man as 
 processes which are similar to a life coming out 
 of death. 
 
 This is often spoken of as the argument from 
 analogy. Man saw the beetle emerge from his 
 filthy bed of corruption, and in his temples he hung 
 up the golden scarabeeus as the symbol of life to 
 come. He saw the butterfly come out in radiant 
 glory from her dark bed, and on his tomb he carved 
 the butterfly as a symbol of the resurrection. 
 When the ice and the snow began to melt, and the 
 south winds began to blow softly, and Spring blew 
 her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, man saw the 
 dead branches bud and put forth new leaves, and 
 in the great change of the springtime he saw the 
 sure token of the revirescence of man after death. 
 In a hundred different forms man has liked to 
 repeat the myth of the phoenix, how that fabled 
 bird after subsisting for five hundred years, loads 
 his wings with spices, and flying to the temple is 
 burned to ashes upon the altar, and out of the ashes 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 19 
 
 there emerges the new bird which salutes the priest 
 and flies away. ‘Therefore, in his temples, man 
 set up the phoenix as the symbol of life everlasting. 
 These analogies, of course, prove nothing; for the 
 beetle, the butterfly, and the tree only sEEM to be 
 _ dead; yet the appeal of man to these processes in 
 “nature show how deep is his instinct for im- 
 mortality. 
 
 Man’s instinct for immortality and his apprecia- 
 tion of his own moral dignity are closely related. 
 It is because he takes such high views of himself 
 that man cannot think of the grave as his final 
 destiny. ‘What a piece of work is man! how 
 noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form 
 and moving how express and admirable! in action 
 how like an angel! in apprehension how like a 
 god!” Able to take such a view of himself as is 
 expressed in those words of Hamlet, or thinking 
 of himself as the Psalmist did, “a little lower than 
 the angels,” how could man acquiesce in death as 
 his end? Ina noble passage Chateaubriand con- 
 trasts man with the beast of the field and pays 
 tribute to man’s instinct for the hereafter: “ Why 
 does not the ox as I do? It can lie down upon 
 the grass, raise its head toward the heaven, and in 
 its lowing call upon that unknown Being who fills 
 the immensity of space. But, no; content with the 
 turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not those 
 
20 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 suns in the firmament above, which are the grand 
 evidences of God. Animals are not troubled with 
 those hopes which fill the heart of man; the spot 
 on which they tread yields them all the happiness 
 of which they are susceptible; a little grass satisfies 
 the sheep; a little blood gluts the tiger. The only 
 creature that looks beyond himself and is not all 
 in all to himself, is man.” 
 
 Thus it is that in any marshalling of the reasons 
 which support man’s faith in immortality the first 
 place must always be given to man’s universal in- 
 stinct for immortality. The Preacher of Ecclesi- 
 astes is thought to have struck this note when he 
 said of man, “ He hath made everything beautiful 
 in its time; also he hath set eternity in their heart.” 
 Man and the thought of immortality are insep- 
 arable. 
 
 “ Here sits he, shaping wings to fly: 
 His heart forebodes a mystery; 
 He names the name Eternity.” 
 
 In the mind of man faith in God and faith in 
 right are linked together. ‘‘ Shall not the judge 
 of all the earth do right?” is the granite platform 
 upon which rests the structure of man’s hope. 
 Man is a moral being. ‘This means that he dis- 
 tinguishes between right and wrong, and that his 
 conscience within him is the oracle of God. In 
 
 ; 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 21 
 
 the government of God, then, virtue must be re- 
 warded and vice must be punished. A splendid 
 example of how firmly this idea that God will 
 punish evil and reward good is implanted in the 
 breast of man, is afforded us in St. Luke’s account 
 of the shipwreck of St. Paul on the coast of Malta. 
 
 When the viper came out of the faggots which 
 
 Paul had gathered for the fire and fastened itself 
 upon his arm, the barbarians said one to another, 
 “No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though 
 he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth 
 not to live.’ The barbarians made a deity of Jus- 
 tice and held firmly to the faith that no wrong-doer 
 could escape punishment. 
 
 This world, however, affords no full vindication 
 of justice and right. We know from our own 
 conscience and from the occasional visible mani- 
 festations of the judgments of God and man that 
 the world is governed in righteousness. But cer- 
 tainly time, this life, cannot be the only field for 
 the working of the laws of righteousness and jus- 
 tice, for there is a great deal of evil that goes un- 
 checked and unpunished. This was the great prob- 
 
 » lem with which the Old Testament saint wrestled. 
 
 . He saw the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer 
 
 oppression. It would not have vexed him so much 
 had he possessed the knowledge of the future that 
 came with Christ; but with his imperfect thought 
 
22 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 of the future it did constitute a very great problem, 
 provided he held to his faith in the power and the 
 goodness of God. If we look at life without our 
 Christian hope of life hereafter, the same problem 
 will vex us to-day. If this world is the only 
 
 theatre for the display of God’s laws, then verily — 
 
 His ways are not equal. We have our laws and 
 maintain the right, and endeavour to punish evil; 
 but there is a vast amount of evil that goes un- 
 punished. Some men are punished here for their 
 sins, in a preparatory degree, at least. But there 
 are many others whose “eyes stand out with fat- 
 ness,” and who experience neither the compunc- 
 tions of conscience nor the judgments of men. 
 There are so many crooked ways that ought to be 
 made straight; so much pushing aside of the weak 
 and trampling down of the meek; so frequent a 
 miscarriage of justice among men, for 
 
 “Tn the corrupted currents of this world 
 Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, 
 And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize tiself 
 Buys out the law.” 
 
 If death is the common end of all men, then such 
 a terminus to life throws into confusion man’s 
 moral ideas, for it shocks him to believe that Elijah 
 and Jezebel, John the Baptist and Herodias, Paul 
 and Nero, share at death exactly the same fate, 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 23 
 
 and that fate annihilation. It is true that many of 
 the prefigurations on the part of man of the re- 
 wards and punishments of the life to come, are 
 gross and revolting in the extreme; yet they bear 
 testimony to the grip that the sense of right and 
 wrong has on man’s mind, and to the conviction 
 in man’s mind that for the full display of righteous- 
 ness and judgment there must be a life after death. 
 
 To the eye of man there is much that is partial 
 and incomplete in life. There is nothing here to 
 indicate that man’s life on earth is one of God’s 
 finished chapters. “The incompleteness of life 
 strikes one when one thinks of the great number 
 who never found their place or niche in this world. 
 
 When one reads the answer of the unemployed 
 in the parable of the vineyard and the labourers, 
 “No man hath hired us,” one hears in it the sad 
 refrain of the unappreciated, the disappointed, the 
 broken, the unnoticed, all that vast throng whom 
 life has never summoned into its vineyard. As the 
 Master called these men at the eleventh hour to go 
 into the vineyard, will not the hereafter provide a 
 vineyard into which men shall be summoned, and 
 where not only those who toiled faithfully and 
 successfully in life shall perform higher labours, 
 but also those who had to stand by and watch 
 others work and succeed shall find employment 
 suited to their talent and desires? ‘There the hands 
 
24 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 that might have “ swayed the rod of empire ” shall 
 hold the rod of opportunity and high service; there 
 the hands that might have “ waked to ecstasy the 
 living lyre”’ shall find lyres which they can strike 
 and harmonies which they can awaken; if knowl- 
 edge in this life never “ unrolled her ample page ” 
 before their eyes, there they shall know the truth 
 and increase in knowledge; and if life’s poverty 
 and “ chill penury ” repressed their noble rage and 
 froze the genial current of the soul in this life, 
 hereafter His servants shall serve Him, and there 
 shall be no discrepancy between opportunity and 
 capacity, the labourer and his vineyard. 
 
 If the thought of a life after death seems to be 
 necessary when we think of the beaten and baffled, 
 those who never found their place or had their 
 chance, it is not less necessary when we go to the 
 other extreme and think of those who have been 
 most richly endowed with talents, to whom life has 
 opened splendid fields of labour and who have made 
 through a long life the most of their gifts and of 
 the opportunity for the display of those gifts. 
 Death never comes with a greater shock than when 
 it comes to put an end to the life of a gifted per- 
 sonality who has laboured long and with distinction 
 in this world. It shocks us to think that such 
 powers are suddenly and forever quenched in the 
 gloom and silence of the grave. Much as the man 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 25 
 
 has accomplished, it is but the faint token and 
 prophecy of what he might have accomplished had 
 his life gone on developing and increasing in wis- 
 dom and grace. In the words of Principal Caird, 
 “ Man’s intellectual and moral endowments are on 
 a scale immeasurably larger than the needs of this 
 
 present life, or than is required for any attainment 
 
 in knowledge or goodness, which even the noblest 
 and best of men reach in their earthly existence; 
 and therefore we can only account for the dispro- 
 portion by the conception of a future life in which 
 these endowments shall find adequate scope and 
 employment.” 
 
 Unless there is a future life, then man is the 
 only creature with desires for the gratification of 
 which he has neither power nor opportunity. On 
 his seventieth birthday Victor Hugo wrote, ‘‘ Win- 
 ter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. 
 The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear 
 around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds 
 which invite me. For half a century I have been 
 writing my thoughts in prose, verse, history, 
 philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, 
 song,—I have tried all. But I feel that I have 
 not said the thousandth part of what is in me.” 
 Life’s incompleteness, then, is an intimation of life 
 tocome. In the striking sentence of Thomas Chal- 
 mers, “Man feels an interminable longing after 
 
26 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 noble and higher things, which nought but im- 
 mortality and the greatness of immortality can 
 satiate.” 
 
 The heart hath reasons of its own, said Pascal, 
 of which the mind knows nothing. No survey of 
 the intimations of immortality would be complete — 
 which did not pay tribute to this reason of the 
 heart. Every heart which has loved and _ lost 
 knows what this reason is. The Gospels tell us 
 that after the disciples had inspected the empty 
 sepulchre they went away again unto their own 
 home, “ But Mary stood without the sepulchre, 
 weeping.”’ And there, at the sepulchre, through 
 all the ages since death first came into the world, 
 Mary, symbol of grief, has stood weeping, and 
 refusing to be comforted. So love weeps for 
 friends separated from it by death and finds no 
 real ray of comfort, save the hope of meeting 
 again on some farther shore. It may be that it is 
 better to have loved and lost than never to have 
 loved at all. But that “better” is far from best. 
 Recollection of the hours spent in sweet counsel © 
 with the dead, and the remembrance of his noble 
 character, have their temporary consolation; but 
 they cannot fill the aching void, indeed, they only 
 serve to emphasize the change which has taken 
 place, and send the mourning heart empty away. 
 There is but one thought that comforts the heart, 
 
WHAT ALL MEN FEEL 27 
 
 and that is the thought of seeing again in the glori- 
 ous morning of another life those faces which we 
 have loved long since and lost a while. The lines 
 of Scott’s son-in-law, Lockhart, express the “ ear- 
 nest expectation of the creature ” when he looks at 
 life through the eyes of love: 
 
 “Tt 1s an old belief 
 That on some solemn shore, 
 Beyond the sphere of grief, 
 Dear friends shall meet once more. 
 
 “ Beyond the sphere of time, 
 And sin, and fate’s control, 
 Serene in changeless prime 
 Of body and of soul. 
 
 “That creed I fain would keep, 
 This hope P'll not forego; 
 Eternal be the sleep, 
 
 If not to waken so.” 
 
 These, then, are four of the chief reasons and 
 arguments with which man has sought to fortify 
 himself in the citadel of his faith in life beyond 
 the grave. They are sufficient to show that the 
 belief in immortality is a reasonable one. ‘There 
 are the best of rational grounds for believing that 
 man lives after death. But helpful as these inti- 
 mations are, they are not evidences or proofs of 
 immortality. They are only intimations and sug- 
 
28 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 gestions. ‘There is a vast difference between these 
 questionings and suggestions of our own hearts 
 and the majestic words of Jesus Christ. Yet these 
 intimations of life after death show how natural 
 
 and reasonable the doctrine is, and how when the | 
 
 revelation camne through Jesus Christ, it was a reve- 
 lation which was in harmony with the deep desires 
 of the heart of man. Deep calleth unto deep. 
 When Columbus was sailing in his frail caravels 
 toward the undiscovered continent of the west, he 
 saw floating in the sea leaves and branches, which 
 told him he must be drawing nigh to another world, 
 
 and cheered by that conviction, he sailed ever on, — 
 
 until at length the sands of the Bahamas shone 
 
 white in the moonlight. Wind and tide carry man — 
 across the ocean of existence. He cannot see the © 
 land whither he is going, nor can he speak any ships — 
 
 returning from that mysterious bourne. But in 
 
 the affections and longings of his heart, in the deep- — 
 est instincts of his being, in the shadow-like brevity — 
 and pitiful incompleteness of life he sees portents — 
 and intimations, floating messengers of the unseen,, 
 
 which help him to believe that beyond the waste of 
 time’s ocean there is the shore of another world,— 
 
 “—a land of pure delight 
 Where saints immortal reign; 
 Infinite day excludes the night, 
 And pleasures banish pain.” 
 
 
 
II 
 PAGAN IDEAS 
 
“It must be so,—FPlato, thou reasonest well! 
 
 Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 
 This longing after immortality? 
 
 Or whence this secret dread and inward horror 
 Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul 
 
 Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 
 ’Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 
 
 ’Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, 
 And intimates Eternity to man. 
 
 Eternity! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought.” 
 
 —-ADDISON. 
 
 I gather up the scattered rays 
 
 Of wisdom in the early days,— 
 
 Faint gleams, and broken, like the light 
 Of meteors in a Northern night, 
 Betraying to the darkling earth 
 
 The unseen sun which gave them birth; 
 I listen to the sibyl’s chant, 
 
 The voice of priest and hierophant; 
 I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, 
 And what of life and what of death 
 The demon taught to Socrates, 
 
 And what, beneath his garden-trees 
 Slow pacing, with a dream-like tread, 
 The solemn-thoughted Plato said ; 
 Nor lack I tokens, great or small, 
 
 Of God’s clear light in each and all, 
 While holding with more dear regard 
 Than scroll of heathen seer and bard 
 The starry pages, promise-lit, 
 
 With Christ's evangel overwrit, 
 
 Thy miracle of life and death, 
 
 O Holy One of Nazareth! 
 
 —WHITTIER, Questions of Life. 
 
IT 
 PAGAN IDEAS 
 
 Pr “HE belief in a future life, though quick- 
 "ened and confirmed by the Christian reve- 
 lation, was not created by it. As com- 
 pared with the great assurance of life hereafter 
 which came with Jesus Christ, all the so-called ar- 
 guments for immortality, such as those drawn 
 from human instinct, from analogy, from the in- 
 completeness of this life and from the vindication 
 of justice, are but broken reeds when the bereaved 
 soul drinks its cup of sorrow and yearns for a 
 great promise upon which to lean. Nevertheless, 
 the revelation through Christ came in the fulness 
 of time. ‘When the fulness of time was come 
 God sent forth His Son, born of a woman.” ‘This 
 means that there was a long process of divine 
 preparation before Christ came as the Resurrection 
 and the Life. Let us now trace that preparation 
 as we discover it in the religions and philosophies 
 of the ancient peoples. 
 Claims have been made concerning certain tribes, 
 such as the Bechuanas in Africa, that they had no 
 conception of immortality. But closer acquaint- 
 
 anceship with primitive peoples would tend to sup- 
 31 
 
32 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 port the natural and common sense conclusion that 
 all men of all ages have had some idea of a life 
 after death. What did man think when first he 
 looked upon the face of death? In his drama of 
 “Cain” Byron tries to describe the sensation and 
 wonder of Cain as he stood over the body of the 
 murdered Abel: 
 
 “Who makes me brotherless? 
 
 His eyes are open! then he is not dead! 
 Death is like sleep; and sleep shuts down our 
 
 lids. 
 His lips, too, are apart; why, then he breathes! 
 And yet I feelit not. His heart!—his heart! 
 Let me see, doth it beat? methinks—No!— 
 This is a vision, else I am become 
 The native of another and a worse world. 
 
 “ But he cannot be dead!—Is silence death? 
 No; he will wake: then let me watch by him. 
 Life cannot be so slight as to be quenched 
 Thus quickly!—He hath spoken to me since— 
 What shall I say to him? My brother!—No: 
 He will not answer to that name for brethren 
 Smite not each other. Yet—yet—speak to me! 
 Oh, for a word more of that gentle voice, 
 That I may bear to hear my own again!” 
 
 The strange thing about death is that in spite 
 of the fact that it has been here as long as man, it 
 
 comes with new wonder and shock to the men of 
 
 each new generation. When death invades the cir- 
 
 : 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 33 
 
 cle of our friends or family, we are forced to look 
 on it with the same awe and surprise and wonder 
 which Byron so splendidly imagines in the mind of 
 Cain. 
 
 One of the stories told of Buddha treats of this 
 shock and amazement with which men first look on 
 death. The only child of the young mother, Kisa- 
 gotami, was dead. The mother clasped the child 
 to her breast and went about from house to house, 
 seeking medicine that would cure him. Finally, 
 a Buddhist convert told her that the Buddha might 
 tell her of a medicine that would restore the child. 
 When she approached the sage he told her he could 
 cure the child, but that she must bring to him 
 mustard seed secured from some house where no 
 parent or husband or son or slave had ever died. 
 Eagerly and hopefully, she set out to get the mus- 
 tard seed. But at each house, after she had been 
 given the mustard seed, and had asked her ques- 
 tion, if any had died there, the reply was always 
 the same: “Lady! what is this that you say? 
 The living are few, but the dead are many.” At 
 length she began to understand that all must die, 
 and leaving her child in the wood, she returned to 
 the sage, and bowing to the impermanence of all 
 things, entered the life of contemplation. 
 
 The legend has a timeless significance, for after 
 all, every bereaved mother must face death as that 
 
34 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY. 
 
 Indian mother did. Death becomes a real fact to 
 us only when it smites one of our own circle, or — 
 when it lays its grim siege to the citadel of our — 
 own life. There is no good reason to think that — 
 death did not awaken wonder and yearning about — 
 a future life just as much in the dawn of the race — 
 as it does to-day. The fact is that as far back as — 
 we can go we find death turning the thought of © 
 man to the hereafter. A thousand customs, rites, — 
 inscriptions, legends, poems and writings, bear — 
 testimony to this universal idea of some kind of — 
 a state of future existence. Immortality is not — 
 an acquired idea, the result of evolution or de- © 
 velopment, but an idea that has belonged to hu- © 
 manity from the very beginning. 
 
 Time would fail to tell of the various forms — 
 which man’s idea of the future has taken. But j 
 through all these different conceptions, the trans- | 
 migration from shape to shape and soul to soul; or | 
 the extinction of individuality in Nirvana; or the | 
 reabsorption of the individual soul in the Universal — 
 Soul; or the Homeric idea of the shades in the — 
 nether world floating down the gloomy river and — 
 toiling at their hopeless labours; or the American © 
 Indian’s thought of the happy hunting grounds; — 
 or the lofty conceptions of Greek philosophy,— — 
 through them all there is heard speaking the con- 
 viction that death is not the end, and that some _ 
 
 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 35 
 
 kind of experience awaits man beyond the shadows 
 of the grave. The interesting thing to note is that 
 to-day, with faith in life hereafter established by 
 the Christian revelation, there is but little theory 
 and little speculation about the manner of life after 
 death; whereas in the ancient world, with life and 
 immortality not yet brought to light, men mapped 
 out the beyond and described its occupations, its 
 woes and its joys, with an amazing wealth of de- 
 tail, The less men knew the more they told. 
 
 In selecting one from among the many ancient 
 peoples for a recital of their customs and beliefs 
 concerning the dead, it is natural that our choice 
 should fall on the Egyptians. Egypt is one vast 
 sarcophagus, Its mighty monuments, the great- 
 est ever reared by the hand of man, are reposi- 
 tories for the dead, man’s comment in eternal stone 
 on death and the life hereafter. In his Ingersoll 
 Lectures on Immortality at Harvard University, 
 Dr. Osler ventured the opinion that in their out- 
 look toward life after death men might be di- 
 vided into three classes: those who dreaded it; 
 those who looked forward to, and those who never 
 thought much about it at all. In his opinion, the 
 vast number of men belong to the third group. 
 Very likely he was wrong. ‘There are some things 
 about which man cannot help thinking, and one 
 of those things is the life hereafter. 
 
36 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 But whatever may be the case with our civiliza- 
 tion to-day, it is certain that in that great Egyptian 
 civilization, long dead and buried, but which played 
 so influential a part in the destinies of the human 
 race, death, and life to come, took a preéminent 
 place. It was the thought of that ancient people 
 concerning death which reared their temples and 
 built the pyramids and “ enshrined whole genera- 
 tions of Egypt’s embalmed population in richly 
 adorned sepulchres of everlasting rock.” Those 
 colossal tombs which have withstood the ravages 
 of thirty centuries of time, and whose gigantic 
 shadows still fall across the vast and solitary 
 ‘ plains, are magnificent and yet pathetic evidences 
 of man’s protest against death and his hunger after 
 the endless life. 
 
 The recent unearthing of the tomb of one of the 
 Pharaohs has brought this fact of Egypt’s thought 
 of death to the attention of the whole world to- 
 day. What before was presented only to the oc- 
 casional traveler, or to the scholar and historian, 
 has now been presented to the consideration of 
 men everywhere throughout the civilized world. 
 Millions of men followed the excavators and 
 scholars as they worked their way from one cham- 
 ber to another toward the resting place of the 
 dead monarch. Men looked with wonder on the 
 beautiful paintings and sculptures created by hands 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 37 
 
 that have been in the dust for more than forty 
 centuries, and beheld with curious awe the rich 
 furnishings with which the chambers of the dead 
 were appointed. Such prodigious labours, such 
 lavishing of wealth and art, such magnificent em- 
 bellishment and furniture, and all for the sake of 
 an eviscerated human carcase, whose brain cavity 
 had been stuffed with cotton and whose flesh and 
 bones had been shrunken in ovens and painted with 
 tar and swathed in uncounted bandages! 
 
 What was the idea that was back of that vast 
 labour and expense? It is easier to ask the ques- 
 tion than it is to answer it. The tombs of the 
 Pharaohs yield up their secrets from age to age, 
 but they throw little light upon the meaning and 
 purpose of all that elaborated mechanism of sep- 
 ulture-and death. Some have thought that the 
 body was thus carefully preserved from corruption 
 because the Egyptians believed that the departed 
 spirit would some day return to reanimate it. 
 But there seems to be little ground for this sup- 
 position, for although the doctrine of metempsy- 
 chosis and transmigration was widely held in the 
 ancient world it does not appear in this form, that 
 of the spirit returning to its former abode. Others 
 have ventured that the idea back of this extraordi- 
 nary process of preserving the body was to keep the 
 soul and body joined together in their journey into 
 
38 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 the unknown. But this, too, is unlikely, for even 
 to the most undeveloped and untutored mind it is 
 evident that at death the body and the spirit part 
 company. 
 
 We are probably nearer to the truth, though we 
 walk here in an unknown territory and see through 
 the glass darkly, if at all, when we say with Alger 
 in his monumental work on the Doctrine of a Fu- 
 ture Life, that “The adornment of the tomb, so 
 lavish and varied with the Egyptians, was a grati- 
 fication of the spontaneous workings of fancy and 
 affection, and needs no far-fetched explanation.” 
 The careful and tender way in which we array our 
 dead for the grave, endeavouring to make them 
 look as lifelike as possible, and finding no little 
 consolation in that lifelike look, is after all but a 
 different expression of that same desire to show 
 affection to the dead, if possible to persuade our- 
 selves that they are not really dead, which animated 
 the Egyptian when he wrapped the body in a thou- 
 sand bandages and deposited it in its magnificent 
 resting place. The only difference is that we pre- 
 serve the body for a shorter period of time, and 
 build for it a less costly tomb. However the cus- 
 tom was worked out and elaborated, and enshrined 
 in priestly rites, we may be sure that back of it all 
 was the great surge of human affection and the 
 deep yearning after life more abundant. 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 39 
 
 Careful as he was in the care and sepulture of 
 the dead body, the Egyptian was not less careful 
 and elaborate in his conception of what happened 
 to the soul. For a description of the rites for the 
 dead and the fate of the departed spirit these words 
 of Alger will suffice: “ What was the significance 
 of the funeral ceremonies. celebrated by the 
 Egyptians over their dead? When the body had 
 been embalmed, it was presented before a tribunal 
 of forty-two judges sitting in state on the eastern 
 borders of the lake of Acherusia. They made 
 strict inquiry into the conduct and character of the 
 deceased. Any one might make complaint against 
 him, or testify in his behalf. If it was found that 
 he had been wicked, had died in debt, or was other- 
 wise unworthy, he was deprived of honourable 
 burial and ignominiously thrown into a ditch. This 
 was called Tartar, from the wailings the sentence 
 produced among the relatives. But if he was 
 found to have led an upright life, and to have been 
 a good man, the honours of a regular interment 
 were decreed him. The cemetery, a large plain 
 environed with trees and lined with canals, lay 
 on the western side of the lake, and was named 
 Elisout, or rest. It was reached by a boat, a 
 funeral barge in which no man could cross with- 
 out an order from the judges and the payment of 
 a small fee. 
 
40 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 “Tn these and other particulars some of the 
 scenes supposed to be awaiting the soul in the other 
 world were dramatically shadowed forth. Each rite 
 was a symbol of a reality existing in solemn cor- 
 respondence in the invisible state. What the priests 
 did over the body on earth the judicial deities did 
 over the soul in Amenthe.”’ Those who are familiar 
 with Greek mythology will recognize in all this 
 much that appears in the Greek thought of the soul 
 after death. But long centuries before these ideas 
 can be traced among the Greeks, we find them 
 among the Egyptians, leaving little doubt that the 
 Greeks borrowed them from the Egyptians. 
 Where did the Egyptians get them? 
 
 In the next life the processes of judgment are 
 continued and finished. In the terrible Hall of 
 the Two Truths, or the Hall of Double Justice, the 
 rewarding and the punishing, the soul is weighed 
 in the balance and the decisive sentence is pro- 
 nounced. If condemned, the soul is scourged back 
 to earth again to live in the form of some vile 
 beast or plunged into the fire of hell. If justified, 
 the soul is permitted to join the company of the 
 sun god in joyful pursuits in the Fields of the Sun 
 on the banks of the heavenly Nile. v 
 
 Such, then, were some of the popular ideas of 
 the life hereafter forty centuries ago. No one can 
 doubt that there was much here which was on the 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 41 
 
 side of virtue and sober living. Although our 
 world is a different world, yet man’s moral world, 
 whether to-day or forty centuries ago, is much the 
 same. Although it all belongs to that forever van- 
 ished civilization and religion, who can read of 
 that ordeal of the departed soul, the searching 
 inquisition into his past and character before the 
 forty-two judges, and the resulting sentence of 
 bliss or woe, without feeling anew the deep solemn- 
 ity of life and destiny, without thinking of his own 
 sins, and without hearing those words spoken by 
 God to the soul, by so many signs and rites, and 
 through so many religions, “ Stand in awe and sin 
 not”? Even Egypt’s tombs reason with us of 
 righteousness, temperance and judgment to come. 
 These ancient views of the future were charac- 
 terized by the great idea of retribution. Indeed, 
 one may say that man everywhere has held to three 
 ideas, that there is a God, that there is a hereafter, 
 and that in that hereafter there will be a judgment. 
 “It is appointed unto all men once to die, but after 
 this the judgment,” is a New Testament saying, 
 but it embodies an idea that is as old and universal 
 as man. Though hand join in hand the wicked 
 shall not go unpunished. To the ancient mind as 
 well as to the modern mind, and sometimes with 
 much more reality and intensity, the order of this 
 world was conceived of as a moral order, and 
 
42 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 righteousness and judgment as the habitation of 
 God’s throne. 
 
 One of the noblest expressions of this idea of 
 retribution in the hereafter is that found in the 
 last part of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates, into 
 whose mouth Plato puts his ideas on immortality, 
 relates the dream of Erus. Erus, the son of 
 Armenius, was desperately wounded in battle in 
 Pamphylia. When men came to bury the decom- . 
 posing bodies of the slain a few days after the 
 battle, they found the body of Erus fresh and un- 
 corrupted. Huis body was carried to his home and 
 prepared for burial. On the twelfth day after 
 the battle, as he lay on his funeral pyre, Erus re- 
 vived and related what he had seen in the other 
 world. After his soul had left the body he went 
 with a great company to a mysterious place on the 
 borders of heaven and earth. In the earth there 
 were two great gaps and opposite to them similar 
 gaps in heaven. A never ceasing stream of souls 
 was passing up out of the earth toward heaven 
 and down from heaven into the earth. At the 
 two gaps the judges had set up their thrones, and 
 there the stream of souls coming.from the earth 
 was divided into two companies, the just being 
 commanded to take the road to the right leading 
 up to heaven, and the unjust the road to the left, 
 Jeading downward into the earth. The just bore 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 43 
 
 placards declaring their virtues, and the unjust 
 placards telling of their sins and misdeeds. When 
 the turn of Erus came to appear before the judges, 
 they told him that he should be a witness of all 
 that took place after the judgment and then tell 
 to his fellow men on the earth all that he had seen. 
 
 In the Phzedo of Plato, where Socrates again is 
 the speaker, there is a remarkable passage which 
 one may well characterize as the high water-mark 
 of Greek thought and hope concerning immortality. 
 After having given all his arguments and reasons 
 for immortality, and as if realizing their inade- 
 quacy, Plato reaches out after some more sure word 
 of a divine revelation, and makes Socrates say, 
 “We must either learn the truth from others or 
 find it out for ourselves. If both ways fail us, 
 amidst all human reasons we must fix upon the 
 strongest and most forcible, and trust to that as 
 to a ship, while we pass through this stormy sea 
 and endeavour to avoid its tempests, until we find 
 out one more firm and sure, such as a promise or 
 revelation, upon which we may happily accom- 
 plish the voyage of this life, as in a vessel that fears 
 no danger.” 
 
 In any sketch of the pre-Christian literature on 
 immortality a high place must be given to the 
 beautiful passage at the close of Cicero’s Essay on 
 Old Age, where he puts into the mouth of Cato 
 
44 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 his highest hope and thought of the life to come. 
 This passage is all the more interesting because the 
 essay was written at a time when Cicero sought in 
 philosophy and meditation relief from the political 
 storms that were then sweeping over the Roman 
 state, and escape from his own poignant grief over 
 the death of his beloved daughter, Tullia. After 
 giving many reasons why death is not to be 
 dreaded by a good man, Cicero concludes with this 
 justly celebrated apostrophe: 
 
 “From this life I depart as from a temporary 
 lodging, not as from a home. For nature has as- 
 signed it to us as an inn to sojourn in, not a place of 
 habitation. Oh, glorious day! when I shall depart 
 to that divine company and assemblage of spirits, 
 and quit this troubled and polluted scene! For I 
 shall go to my friend Cato, than whom never was 
 better man born, nor more distinguished for pious 
 affection; whose body was burned by me, whereas, 
 on the contrary, it was fitting that mine should be 
 burned by him. But his soul, not deserting me, but 
 oft looking back, no doubt departed to those regions 
 whither I saw that I myself was destined to come: 
 Which, though a distress to me, I seemed patiently 
 to endure: not that I bore it with indifference, but 
 I comforted myself with the recollection that the 
 separation and distance between us would not con- 
 tinue long: For these reasons, O Scipio, old age is 
 tolerable to me, and not only not irksome, but even 
 delightful. And if I am wrong in this, that I be- 
 lieve the souls of men to be immortal, I willingly 
 delude myself: nor do I desire that this mistake, in 
 
PAGAN IDEAS 45 
 
 which I take pleasure, should be wrested from me as 
 long as I live: but if I, when dead, shall have no 
 consciousness, as some narrow-minded philosophers 
 imagine, I do not fear lest dead philosophers should 
 ridicule this my delusion.” 
 
 At this long range, it is exceedingly difficult for 
 us to say just what influence the speculations and 
 opinions of the sages and philosophers exerted upon 
 conduct or to what degree they afforded comfort 
 to the bereaved. The impression one receives is 
 that there was a gulf fixed between these literary 
 and philosophical discussions and the practical at- 
 titude taken by the authors of these beautiful sen- 
 timents when they came face to face with the last 
 enemy. When Cicero penned those eloquent lines 
 how much comfort was he finding for himself 
 in his grief over Tullia? Did he really expect 
 to meet her again? Or does he merely sketch a 
 hypothetical existence and reunion after death, 
 when all the time in his heart of hearts he believes 
 that the grave is the end of all? The closing words 
 of Cicero’s great apostrophe have in them a sad in- 
 timation that the gifted orator had no real hope 
 of life to come and felt that reason was against it. 
 These great passages in pre-Christian literature do 
 but serve to emphasize the fact that life and im- 
 mortality were brought to light in the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
bia 
 f 
 
 —= 
 
 
 
iB Ot 
 OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 
 
“ Souls of the righteous in the hand of God, 
 Nor hurt nor torment cometh them a-nigh, 
 O holy hope of mmortality! 
 
 To eyes of men unwise they seem to die. 
 They are at peace—O fairest liberty! 
 Souls of the righteous in the hand of God. 
 On earth as children chastened by Love’s rod, 
 As gold in furnace tried, 
 So now on high they shine lke stars, 
 A golden galaxy.” 
 —Booxk oF WISDOM. 
 
III 
 OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 
 
 4 “HERE is no subject upon which it is more 
 difficult for a Christian man to write than 
 that of the doctrine of immortality as 
 
 taught in the Old Testament. The reason for this 
 
 is that it is almost impossible to recede from the 
 
 New Testament position and divest ourselves of 
 
 those ideas which are distinctively Christian. Try 
 
 as we may, we can hardly keep from reading into 
 the Old Testament passages meanings which are 
 the gift of the New Testament revelation. 
 
 The Apostle said that Christ brought life and 
 immortality to light in the Gospel. The Christian 
 revelation strengthened and confirmed the idea of 
 life hereafter, rather than created it, for the 
 thought and the desire of life after death belong: 
 to man’s nature. In this sense, then, Christ 
 brought to light the great hope that had always 
 burned within the breast of man. But the saying 
 of St. Paul may also apply to the doctrine of im- 
 mortality as taught in the Old Testament. ‘The 
 hope was there, but it burned faintly. Our task 
 
 now is to try to discover to what extent the doc- 
 49 
 
50 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 trine of immortality was held and taught in the 
 old dispensation. 
 
 Before we try to show what is taught in the Old 
 Testament, it will help if we mention some of the 
 things which are not there. ‘The Hebrews were 
 an eastern people, yet in their sacred literature we 
 do not find any trace of some of those ideas which 
 were so popular with ancient and eastern peoples. 
 
 There is no trace of the doctrine of pantheism in 
 
 any of its forms. ‘The idea of the soul of man 
 
 being merged at death in the life of God was alto- — 
 
 gether foreign to Hebrew thought. Some have 
 
 cited the saying in Ecclesiastes 12:7, “And the 
 spirit shall return to God who gave it” as remi- — 
 
 niscent of the doctrine of pantheism. But there 
 
 is slender ground for such interpretation. The 
 fact is that the Hebrew idea of God was so exalted — 
 and majestic that the doctrine of man’s soul merg- — 
 
 ing with the soul of God at death would have been 
 
 repugnant in the extreme. The Hebrew gave man — 
 a high place, “a little lower than the angels,” but — 
 he shrinks from making the soul of man an ema- — 
 
 nation from, or an ultimate portion of, the soul of 
 God. Nor do we find any trace of the idea of the 
 
 preéxistence and the transmigration of souls. The — 
 idea of metempsychosis, or transmigration, has al- 
 ways exerted a certain fascination over the mind — 
 of man. It was elaborated to an extraordinary - 
 
 
 
 
 
 —_—— ass 
 
 ——— 
 
 ——— ee Ee ee 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 51 
 
 degree as the seers of the ancient world sought to 
 trace the destinies of men in the hereafter, and to 
 account for the fate of men in this world. But 
 this thought of the wandering of the soul and the 
 various tabernacles which it inhabits in the cycles 
 of its existence is not to be found in the Old Testa- 
 ment. Nor is there any studied doctrine of ma- 
 terialism, or extinction of being, that the grave is 
 the end of man. | 
 
 There are passages in the Old Testament which 
 strike the notes of deepest despondency, and which, 
 to one not familiar with the Old Testament as a 
 whole, might seem to indicate a belief that man 
 came to an end at death. One of the best known 
 passages of this nature is the noble lament of the 
 Thirty-ninth Psalm, read so frequently at funeral 
 services. The Psalm comes to a close with this 
 prayer: 
 
 “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear ynto 
 my cry; } 
 Hold not thy peace at my tears: 
 For I am a stranger with thee, and 
 A sojourner, as all my fathers were. 
 Oh, spare me, that I may recover strength, 
 Before I go hence, and be no more.” 
 
 “And be no more!” Was that the Psalmist’s 
 thought of the future? Another passage of simi- 
 | lar tone is that of Job 7: 21, 22: 
 
52 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 “And why dost thou not pardon my transgression; 
 and take away mine iniquity? 
 For now shall I sleep in the dust; 
 And Thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I 
 shall not be.” 
 
 Here Job pleads with God to show him His good- 
 ness and forgiveness in this life, for when he is 
 dead, God will not be able to show him His loving 
 kindness. Of the same temper is the celebrated 
 passage in Job 14: 7-10: 
 
 “ For there is hope of a tree, 
 If it be cut down, that it will sprout again, 
 And that the tender branch thereof will not cease. 
 Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, 
 And the stock thereof die in the ground; 
 Yet through the scent of water it will bud, 
 And put forth boughs lke a plant. 
 But man dieth, and wasteth away; 
 Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?” 
 
 In Ecclesiastes 3: 19-22, the Preacher seems to 
 feel that man at death has no advantage over the 
 beast of the field: 
 
 “For that which befalleth the sons of men be-— 
 falleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as one 
 dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one 
 breath; so that man hath no preéminence above a 
 beast: for all 1s vanity. All go unto one place; all 
 are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who 
 knoweth the spirit of man, that goeth upward, and 
 the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the 
 earth?” 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 53 
 
 What shall we think of passages like these just 
 cited? Certainly we are not to think of them as 
 representative of the Old Testament teaching on 
 the subject of the hereafter. They represent the 
 pathos of human grief, the temporary eclipse of 
 what faith the speaker had as to the future. They 
 echo the music of the soul of man when sub- 
 merged in the depths. Even among Christian be- 
 lievers the anguish of bereavement or personal 
 vicissitude will wring cries of despair and unbelief 
 from the soul. Yet we should not take such ut- 
 terances as characteristic of the Christian thought 
 as to the future; and no more should we think that 
 the gloom and pessimism of the passages just 
 quoted indicate the common view of the Old Testa- 
 ment believer. 
 
 There are two great doctrines taught in the Old 
 Testament which are not to be reconciled with 
 materialism, or extinction of being. First, there | 
 is the doctrine of God. ‘The Hebrew exalted God 
 to a throne of awful majesty, but also trusted in 
 Him as a God who deals in fatherly love with men 
 in this present world. He had an intense convic- 
 tion that God was his refuge and his strength, his 
 helper and guide. The Twenty-third Psalm, often 
 quoted as a Psalm dealing with immortality, has 
 this thought of God’s providence for its theme. 
 
 We must be careful about reading our faith 
 
54 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 back into the Old Testament, but we find it diffi- 
 cult to believe that men who lived so near to God 
 and trusted Him so implicitly as Abraham and 
 David and Isaiah, could think that their relation- 
 
 ship with God came to an end at death. The other | 
 
 doctrine in the Old Testament which is hostile to 
 the idea of death as the end is the doctrine of man. 
 No book exposes so relentlessly the sin and degra- 
 
 dation of human nature. Yet no book gives man 
 
 so high a place as the Old Testament. The story 
 of the creation of man in the image of God, with 
 dominion over the creatures, with a living soul 
 breathed into him by the Creator, puts man in a 
 
 class by himself. He is “a little lower than the. 
 
 angels,’ and in behalf of man the great revelation 
 of the law and the prophets is given and the great 
 activities of Old Testament worship and redemp- 
 tion are initiated. The comparative silence of the 
 Old Testament as to immortality must not blind 
 our eyes to the magnificent conception of man 
 bearing the image of God which we find there, and 
 such a conception could hardly have been held if 
 it was thought that man came to an end in the dust. 
 In that event there would be nothing magnificent 
 about man’s nature, and he would indeed have no 
 preéminence over the beast of the field. 
 
 However men may regard it to-day, the Old 
 Testament believer did not think of death as a 
 
 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 55 
 
 natural fact in man’s career. Death is introduced 
 as an intruder, an interloper, an enemy, as the 
 penalty upon sin. We speak to-day of death as 
 the “debt we owe to nature.’ But in the Old 
 Testament death is spoken of as the debt we owe 
 to sin, to the transgression of the moral law. The 
 wages of sinis death. We carry this over into the 
 next world, and make it refer to death eternal, 
 banishment from the presence of God. But death, 
 even as physical fact in this life, is looked upon in 
 the Old Testament as a monstrous disorder, due 
 to man’s transgression. But if death were the 
 natural and proper ending of human existence, 
 how then did the Hebrews come to regard it as 
 unnatural, as a curse, as the crowning calamity of 
 their existence? The fact that they did so regard 
 death shows that they believed that man was des- 
 tined to live forever. 
 
 The silence of Moses on the subject of im- 
 mortality has often been remarked. He must have 
 been versed in the lore of Egypt and familiar with 
 the Egyptian view of life to come and the over- 
 emphasis upon death and the after-death which 
 characterized that people and their religion. Yet 
 in the laws and customs which he gave to Israel 
 Moses makes no reference to future reward or 
 future punishment as motives of conduct. God’s 
 dealings and judgments seem to be confined to the 
 
 a 
 
56 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 arena of this world. Because of this lack of refer- 
 ence to life to come men have spoken disparag- 
 ingly of the Mosaic legislation and of the Hebrew 
 religion. Even Kant thought the religion of 
 Israel lacking in one of the essentials of a true 
 religion, though he held that Moses and other Old 
 Testament worthies themselves knew and believed 
 the doctrines of immortality, but hid it from the 
 people. Warburton, in his famous book, the Di- 
 vine Legation of Moses, in treating of this prob- 
 lem turns the tables on the deists and declares that 
 the absence of the doctrine of immortality from 
 the books of Moses is a proof of their divine 
 origin, for no man speaking merely out of human 
 experience and wisdom, could have given laws to 
 a people and made no reference to the future life. 
 
 The name given to the abode of the dead in the 
 Old Testament is Sheol, the hollow place. Sheol 
 is not the grave, for Jacob, who did not know 
 where the body of Joseph was, says that he will 
 go “down to Sheol to my son mourning”; and 
 Abraham was “ gathered to his fathers,” although 
 he was buried in Macpelah, and they in Mesopo- 
 tamia. In the nether world wicked Saul and his 
 sons will be with righteous Samuel. Moral dis- 
 tinctions seem to be lost sight of; the inhabitants 
 of Sheol are dim and meagre shades, living a mis- 
 erable existence, cut off from the joy of life, and — 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 57 
 
 banished from the presence of God. One of the lat- 
 est believers, and most disciplined saints of the Old 
 Testament, Hezekiah, draws back with terror from 
 the realm of the dead, declaring in his song of 
 thanksgiving after his recovery from sickness: 
 
 “The grave cannot praise thee, death cannot cele- 
 brate thee: 
 They that go down into the pit cannot hope for 
 thy truth, 
 The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do 
 this day.” 
 
 It has been well observed that it is not lack of 
 religion in the Old Testament which accounts for 
 the comparative silence on the life to come, but 
 the great amount of religion. Even to-day, when 
 we wish to quote some passage which will speak to 
 our troubled hearts and assure them of God and 
 His providential care over our lives, it is a verse 
 from the Old Testament that we quote, and not 
 a verse from the New Testament. Why is this? 
 Because the Old Testament saint had so intense a 
 conviction and sense of the presence and power of 
 God in his life here on earth. However much it 
 may seem to us that the Old Testament writers 
 ignore the life to come, they certainly do not deny 
 it, nor discount it, but rather keep silent about it 
 because their deep sense of God’s presence in this 
 life overshadowed the life to come. 
 
58 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 In his History of the People of Israel Renan has 
 a chapter in which he deals with the doctrine of the 
 future life in its relationship to the Jews. Accord- 
 ing to his idea the ancient son of Shem believed 
 that virtue must meet with its reward, but that the 
 only time and place for that reward is this world. 
 As the history of the race unfolded, as in the his- 
 tory of any race or any individual, there were great 
 obstacles in the way of this view that sin was 
 perfectly punished and virtue perfectly rewarded 
 in this world. In so many instances the evil pros- 
 pered and the good were afflicted. Yet the theory 
 was warmly adhered to in spite of the questions 
 which the life of the nation and the life of the 
 individual raised concerning it. At the end of his 
 long series of adversities Job is rewarded by get- 
 ting back his possession in twofold measure and by 
 having the same number of sons and daughters 
 which he had before his misfortunes overtook him. 
 
 According to this theory, it was not until a late 
 day in the history of Israel, the captivity, and the 
 persecutions of Antiochus, that the Hebrews began 
 to look for rewards in the life to come. There was 
 little hope for the crushed and scattered nation, so 
 far as this world was concerned, but in another life 
 the Kingdom of God would be realized. “ The 
 martyr was the creator of the belief in another 
 hife.”’ Thus, side by side, there arose at a late 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 59 
 
 hour in Israel’s history the two doctrines of the 
 future which we find in the New Testament, the 
 Kingdom of God and the resurrection of the body. 
 This idea of the victory of righteousness and the 
 sharing in that victory in life to come by all the 
 righteous is familiar to all of us as Christians, 
 Thus the Hebrews developed this idea as a result 
 of the conflict between their belief in the holiness 
 of God, that reward must be punished, and their 
 observation and experience that life is brief and 
 full of injustices, and that Israel was scattered and 
 trampled under foot of the nations. 
 
 As we shall see, there is much in the Old Testa- 
 ment history which does not fit in with the de- 
 velopment theory of the origin of the Hebrew 
 hope of immortality. Yet we are indebted to 
 Renan and this chapter for one of: the finest ap- 
 praisements of the value of the doctrine of im- 
 mortality to men and nations. He says: “ For let 
 us not deceive ourselves: man is governed by noth- 
 ing but his conception of the future. Any nation 
 which en masse gives up all faith in what lies 
 beyond the grave will become utterly degraded. 
 An individual may do great things, and yet not 
 believe in immortality; but those around him must 
 believe in it, for-him and for themselves.” 
 
 The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac 
 awakens great interest in connection ygith the Old 
 
60 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 Testament outlook on the life to come. The 
 promise of God had been fulfilled, and to Sarah and 
 Abraham in their old age a son had been born. 
 Through this son the great promises for the future 
 of the race were to be fulfilled. It was not, there- 
 fore, only a son that God told Abraham to offer up 
 as a sacrifice, but a son in whose life were bound 
 up all the great blessings that God had promised 
 would come to men through his descendants. Yet 
 Abraham, whatever his inward Gethsemane of 
 anguish, proceeded at once to carry out the awful 
 mandate and offer up his son Isaac. 
 
 When on the third day they saw the mount in the 
 distance, Abraham said to the servants, “Abide ye 
 here with the ass and I and the young man will go 
 yonder; and we will worship and come again to 
 you.” Was this just the polite language of dis- 
 missal, or did Abraham really believe that he and 
 Isaac would return together to that spot? The 
 inspired writer of the letter to the Hebrews in his 
 eloquent and extended reference to Abraham. as 
 one of the heroes of faith says of him that “ By 
 faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up 
 Isaac; and, he that had received the promises 
 offered up his only begotten son; even he to whom 
 it was said, In Isaac shall thy seed be called: ac- 
 counting that God was able to raise up, even from 
 the dead, from whence also he received him, in 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 61 
 
 a figure.” The author of the Hebrews here says 
 plainly that in his sore trial of offering up Isaac 
 Abraham was sustained by faith in a resurrection. 
 It may be asked whether it is meant that Abraham 
 believed that God would at once restore Isaac back 
 to this life, after he had been sacrificed? or does 
 the faith of Abraham embrace also a general res- 
 urrection? 
 
 That the faith of Abraham embraced not only a 
 special act of God with regard to the resurrection 
 of Isaac, but also the general resurrection and 
 future existence of God’s people is clearly inti- 
 mated by what the writer of Hebrews says in this 
 same passage about the expectations of Abraham 
 and his descendants: “ By faith Abraham, when he 
 was called, obeyed to go out into a place which he 
 was to receive for an inheritance: and he went out, 
 not knowing whither he went. By faith he became 
 a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not 
 his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, 
 the heirs with him of the same promise: for he 
 looked for the city which hath foundations, whose 
 builder and maker is God. By faith even Sarah 
 herself received power to conceive seed when she 
 was past age, since she counted him faithful who 
 had promised, wherefore also there sprang of one, 
 and him as good as dead, as many as the stars in 
 heaven for multitude, and as the sand which is by 
 
62 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 the seashore innumerable. These all died in 
 faith, not having received the promises, but having 
 seen them and greeted them afar off, and having 
 confessed that they were pilgrims and strangers on 
 the earth. For they that say such things make 
 it manifest that they are seeking after a country 
 of their own. And if they had been mindful of 
 that country from which they went out, they would 
 have had opportunity to return. But now they de- 
 sire a better country, even a heavenly: wherefore 
 God is not ashamed of them to be called their God, 
 for he hath prepared for them a city.” 
 
 Such a passage as this floods the Old Testa- 
 ment with the hope of life to come. In order to 
 make it clear that the country they were desiring 
 was not the country whence they had come, the 
 writer says, that had that been their wish, they 
 could have returned thither at any time. In this 
 great reference, then, we have the soul’s deep and 
 wistful yearning for its true native land, not Ur 
 of the Chaldees, but the kingdom of God. The 
 only portion of the promised land that Abraham 
 ever purchased or possessed in Canaan was the 
 Cave of Macpelah, where he buried his dead. Per- 
 haps it was not until in that plot of ground which 
 he purchased from the children of Heth Abraham 
 buried Sarah, the loved and beautiful companion 
 of all his wanderings, and sharer with him in the 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 63 
 
 great promise, and necessary co-agent with him in 
 the fulfilment of the promise, that Abraham real- 
 ized that the promise involved more than lands and 
 holding in Canaan, and that he was on a journey 
 to a more distant land than Canaan, even to that 
 city which hath foundations, whose builder and 
 maker is God. ‘The blessing is to be as eternal 
 as God Himself. Such, certainly, is the impression 
 one would receive from reading the New Testa- 
 ment reference to Abraham in the epistle to the 
 Hebrews, which, if not written by Paul, was at 
 least written by one who was an expert on Old 
 Testament history and theology. 
 
 In the Psalms there are three great passages 
 which ring with the immortal hope. All inter- 
 pretations which make these passages refer only to 
 man’s life here violate the simple common-sense 
 meaning. The first of these is the Sixteenth 
 Psalm, vs. 10, 11: 
 
 “ For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; 
 Neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see cor- 
 ruption. 
 Thou wilt show me the path of life: 
 In thy presence 1s fulness of joy; 
 At thy right hand there are pleasures forever 
 more.” 
 
 St. Paul uses this Psalm as a prophecy of the 
 resurrection of Jesus Christ, saying that the body 
 
64 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 of David did see corruption. Thus he makes the 
 Psalmist refer, not to himself, but to Christ. 
 Nevertheless, although the prophets, as Peter tells 
 us, frequently referred to Christ when they knew 
 it not, we are justified in hearing in this noble 
 Psalm the hope of the singer himself for life after 
 death. 
 
 The second notable passage in the Psalms is 
 found in Psalm Forty-nine, verses 14, 15. The 
 Psalmist has been wrestling with that problem 
 which so vexed the Old Testament mind, the pros- 
 perity of the wicked and the adversity of the 
 righteous. He solves the problem by assuring 
 himself that the wicked shall go down to Sheol 
 and remain there: 
 
 “ Like sheep they are laid in the grave; 
 Death shall feed on them.” 
 
 But with the righteous it shall not be so: 
 
 “ But God will redeem my soul from the power of 
 the grave; 
 For He shall receive me.” 
 
 A noble climax to the expressions of faith in 
 immortality in the Psalms is found in the Seventy- 
 third Psalm, verses 18-25. Again the Psalmist is 
 grappling with the problem of the prosperity of the 
 wicked in this world, and again his solution is 
 their complete and final overthrow at death: 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 65 
 
 “Thou castedst them down into destruction. 
 How are they brought into desolation as in a mo- 
 ment!” 
 
 But the Psalmist hopes for a different end: 
 
 “ Nevertheless, I am continually with thee: 
 Thou hast holden me by my right hand, 
 Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, 
 And afterward receive me to glory.” 
 
 No survey of the Old Testament teaching would 
 do justice to the subject which did not cite the 
 great declaration of Job, nineteenth chapter, verses 
 21-27. Still holding fast to his integrity and pro- 
 testing against reproaches of his friends, Job pleads 
 for a future vindication before God: 
 
 “ Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my 
 
 friends, 
 For the hand of God hath touched me. 
 2 2 a hy Se * * * 
 
 Oh, that my words were now written! 
 
 Oh, that they were inscribed in a book! 
 
 That with an tron pen and lead 
 
 They were graven in the rock forever! 
 
 But as for me I know that my Redeemer liveth, 
 And at the last He will stand upon the earth: 
 And after my skin, even this body is destroyed, 
 Then without my flesh shall I see God; 
 
 Whom I, even I, shall see on my side, 
 
 And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.” 
 
66 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 Despite all skillful efforts to make this refer to 
 God’s vindication of him in this life only, Job’s 
 words echo and reécho in sermon, hymn, prayer, 
 and oratorio, for when the Christian faces the fact 
 of death, and when his feet are going down into 
 the river, there are no words which voice so 
 triumphantly his sure hope of a resurrection from. 
 the grave and life forever with God. 
 
 If you have gone to the top of a mountain to 
 watch the sunrise, you will remember how first the 
 mass of blackness faded into gray; then, that dull 
 and heavy gray was shot through and through with 
 bars of gold, the heralds of the king of day him- 
 self. The passages quoted from Job and the 
 Psalms are not the radiant hope and the full glory 
 of the New Testament revelation; but they are 
 foregleams of that bright day. Once worshipping ) 
 in the old Scottish Church at Warwick, Bermuda, 
 I heard Dr. Francis L. Patton, in a sermon on 
 this subject, sum up the difference between the Old — 
 Testament and the New Testament faith in im- | 
 mortality. Placing his hand on the stone pillar | 
 of the pulpit, Dr. Patton quoted the verse of the | ) 
 Twenty-third Psalm, “ Yea, though I walk through 
 the valley of the shadow of death, yet will I fear 
 no evil.” “There,” said Dr. Patton, “is the high- 
 water mark of the Old Testament faith: Willing 
 
 Soe eee vanes 
 
 to go, but wanting to stay.” Then, placing his — 
 
 mneseseraeee 
 
 
 
OLD TESTAMENT IDEAS 67 
 
 hand higher up on the pillar, he quoted the words | 
 of St. Paul in Philippians, “For I am in a strait 
 betwixt two, having the desire to depart and to | 
 be with Christ, which is very far better; yet. to | 
 abide in the flesh is needful for your sake.” — 
 “There,” said Dr. Patton, “is the high-water mark 
 of the New Testament faith in the hereafter: 
 Wanting to go, but willing to stay!” 
 

 
IV 
 CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 
 
¢ ae — oo 
 
 “Friend after friend departs; 
 Who hath not lost a friend? 
 There-is no union here of hearts, | 
 That finds not here an end; 
 Were this frail world our only rest, 7 
 Living or dying, none were blest. 
 
 “ Beyond the fight of time, 
 Beyond the vale of death, 
 There surely is some blessed clime, 
 Where life is not a breath, 
 Nor life’s affections transient fire, 
 Whose sparks fly upward and expire. 
 
 “ There is a world above, 4 
 Where parting is unknown; 
 A whole eternity of love, 
 Form’'d for the good alone; 
 And fatih beholds the dying here 
 Translated to that happier sphere.” 
 
 —JaMES MontTcoMERY im “ The Unseen Universe.” 
 
 
 
Yi . 
 } t 
 » 3 ) I 
 j li ¥ ’ 
 ie y 
 
 CAN WE, TALK WITH THE DEAD? 
 
 RAVELING once in Russia, my brother 
 and I arrived late at night at the station 
 in Petrograd. Unable to speak a word 
 
 of the country’s language, nor even to read the 
 barbarous signs which we saw here and there, we 
 had to depend altogether upon the good-will of 
 those with whom we tried to communicate our 
 ideas by falling back upon the universal language 
 of signs. A rather villainous-looking drosky 
 driver got us into his carriage, and we showed him 
 a slip of paper with the name of the hotel written 
 upon it. After a long and circuitous drive through 
 the rambling town, with the light of the northern 
 summer beginning to fade from the huge, tawny 
 buildings, we at length drew up before a hotel. 
 It was not the hotel we had named, but our driver 
 mumbled something that seemed to imply that the 
 other hotel was closed. 
 
 We therefore alighted, and after supper were 
 conducted to two bedrooms, like everything else 
 in Russia, enormous. ‘The feeling of remoteness 
 
 from our own land and language and people, in- 
 71 
 
42 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 deed, from anything with which we had been fa- 
 miliar, the new manners and customs and tongue, 
 and the strange silence of the vast hostelry where 
 we were established, produced in me something 
 akin to uneasiness, and a cloud of depression crept 
 over me. Before I closed my eyes I struck the 
 wall at my side several times with my hand. At 
 once there came back answering knocks from my 
 brother on the other side of the wall. I knew 
 then that all was well with him and he knew that 
 all was well with me. 
 
 Pilgrims together, my friend and I take the long 
 and winding path through life. By and by, the 
 shadows of the night come down and the pilgrims 
 are separated, and one is left to be brave alone. 
 Between us death uplifts its dark wall and heavy 
 barricade. Then what? It is not strange that I 
 should wonder how it fares with him, nor is it 
 strange that I should wonder if he is “ conscious 
 or not of the past.” 
 
 “ Ah! Christ, that it were possible 
 _ For one short hour to see 
 
 The souls we love, that they might tell us | 
 What and where they be.” 
 
 If I knock on this grim wall of death, shall I 
 get an answer from the chamber on-the other side 
 
 of the wall? The question, it goes without say- 
 ing, is one of great interest. From many quarters 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 73 
 
 there comes the reply that we can so communicate 
 with those who have lived and died, that many of 
 those on this side of the wall are carrying on con- 
 versations with those on the other side of the wall. 
 Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle, one a 
 great name in physical science and the other a 
 notable name in popular literature, have not only 
 told to a limited number of friends their experi- 
 ences in this kind of communication with discar- 
 nate spirits, but they have entered upon a public 
 proclamation of their belief, declaring that they 
 feel they have a great and comforting revelation 
 for distressed and sorrowing humanity. 
 
 When I speak of these witnesses, and bear in 
 mind, too, that great numbers of less distinguished 
 persons who, in their more limited circles, tell a 
 similar story, I will try not to forget the fact that 
 death breaks many a heart, darkens many a home, 
 and banishes the sunlight from many a life. ‘“ Oh, 
 death! it is a dreadful thing.” In speaking, there- 
 fore, of any hope or experience, alleged or other- 
 wise, which it is claimed brings comfort to sad 
 and lonely hearts, I must speak with compassion, 
 and not with scorn or denunciation. I have stood 
 by too many open graves and tried to speak a word 
 of comfort to too many wounded hearts, to refer 
 to even a false hope or imaginary experience with 
 anything but a desire to comfort the comfortless, 
 
74 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 and guide them into the path of truth as it is in 
 our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 We believe as Christians that the soul of man 
 lives on after it has been separated from the body, 
 but I have never felt it to be a necessary concomi- 
 tant of such a faith to believe that spirits out of the 
 body can have intercourse with incarnate spirits. 
 The spiritualist, of course, will reply that it makes 
 no difference what I, or any one else, believe, for 
 he has had such communication. . Personally, I 
 have never had nor wished to have such communi- 
 cation. Until I do, my attitude must be one of 
 doubt. When I hear the remarkable testimonies 
 that are being given by those who have spoken 
 with the dead, my conviction is that in many in- 
 stances they are mistaken, and that they are mis- 
 taken through the operation of strange laws and 
 forces of which we know little or nothing. I can 
 no more prove to the spiritualist that he is mis- 
 taken than he can prove to me that he has seen 
 and talked with a spirit. I believe that if we knew 
 more than we do we should understand how good 
 ‘and wise men have been deluded into the belief 
 that they were talking with men who had died. 
 
 If the whole Christian Church has consistently 
 testified against spiritualism and all its practices, 
 there certainly must be some basis in the Bible for 
 this deep repugnance. The Roman Catholic 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 5 
 
 Church by its decrees forbids any Catholic to at- 
 tempt to speak with the dead. The Protestant 
 Church, not by particular articles of confession, 
 but by the whole tone of its teaching, declares the 
 thing to be sinful.k Why? Primarily because the 
 Bible forbids it. It is true that evil results can 
 be noted in the life and faith of those who resort 
 to this twilight practice, but even if there were no 
 such ill results to be noted, the mere fact that the 
 Bible repeatedly and consistently declares against 
 the practice would lead any Church which pre- 
 tended to take the Bible as a guide to lay an in- 
 terdict upon spiritualism. 
 
 Let me quote some of the declarations of the 
 Old Testament Law on this subject: “ Regard not 
 them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after 
 wizards, to be defiled by them. I am the Lord 
 your God ” (Leviticus 19: 81). “And the soul that 
 turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and 
 after wizards to go a whoring after them, I will 
 even set my face against that soul, and will cut 
 him off from among his people. Sanctify your- 
 selves, therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the 
 Lord your God” (Leviticus 20: 6, 7). 
 
 “ There shall not be found among you any one 
 that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through 
 the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of 
 times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, 
 
46 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, 
 or a necromancer. For all that do these things 
 are an abomination unto the Lord” (Deuteronomy 
 18: 10-12). 
 
 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 
 22: 18). 
 
 The terminology changes, but the practice re- 
 mains the same. It is evident that what is meant 
 by a person with a “ Familiar spirit” is just what 
 is meant when we say “medium ’”’ to-day; that is, 
 a person who either could, or claimed that he could, 
 summon the spirit of a dead man and have inter- 
 course with it. As we have seen from the pas- 
 sages just quoted, the pious Hebrew was forbidden 
 to have anything to do with such a person or in 
 any way to seek knowledge or comfort from the 
 dead. It is a crime against the majesty of God 
 — “For I am the Lord thy God.” It defiles the 
 man who engages in it. The sentence of death 
 is declared against it. It is an abomination unto 
 God, so much so that it is mentioned in connection 
 with such sins as human sacrifices, incest and un- 
 natural crimes of which it is a shame even to speak. 
 
 This much, then, is clear: spiritualism, in so 
 far as it means consulting psychic persons, or 
 .\ media, trying in any way to establish communi- 
 
 \ cation with the dead, is forbidden by the Law of 
 God as we have it in the Old Testament. There 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? ‘7%7 
 
 can be no doubt as to that. Was this but a tem- 
 porary injunction, good for the Jews to keep them 
 from being corrupted by heathen practices? Or 
 is it equally binding upon us to-day? Those who 
 look upon the Old Testament as just an interesting 
 collection of ancient Hebrew writings will, of 
 course, pay no more attention to this inhibition 
 against spiritualism than they would to the articles 
 of any ancient code. But a Church and an indi- 
 vidual who believes that the Word of God is con- 
 tained in the Old Testament must give this utter- 
 ance against spiritualism very careful considera- 
 tion. He cannot remove these sayings from the 
 Bible; he cannot tone them down. ‘There they 
 stand in all their naked wrath and severity. Even 
 if a man does not feel in any way bound by the 
 authority of the Bible, common sense would tell 
 him that there must have been reasons why this 
 law took its place among so many other laws of 
 the Old Testament which all grant to be admirable. 
 And if this dealing with the dead, or with those 
 who claimed to have commerce with them, was 
 injurious to the moral life of the individual and 
 destructive of faith in God in Old Testament 
 times, it certainly is not less so to-day. This is a 
 commandment from God that relates to man’s life 
 wherever he lives and in whatever age. What 
 was true of spiritualism then, is true of it to-day. 
 
18 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 In the sunset of Saul’s life we have a dramatic 
 passage (1 Samuel 28), which tells of his resort- 
 ing to a woman with a familiar spirit and seeking 
 to speak with Samuel, who had been dead for four 
 years. That gloomy monarch, leaning upon his 
 spear, saw the vast host of the Philistines as they 
 pitched against him in Shunem. Saul, whatever 
 his faults, was no coward; he was a soldier to the 
 very last. But now he had a premonition that all 
 would not go well with him in the coming battle. 
 Unable to get any answer from the prophets that 
 accompanied his army, Saul, like so many others 
 in the time of distress and uncertainty, yielded to 
 the temptation of the occult world and sought to 
 read his fate before it was administered unto him. 
 He told his servants to seek out a woman with a 
 familiar spirit. So fearlessly had Saul enforced 
 the law against this twilight traffic that it was with 
 difficulty that a medium was located in a lonely 
 glen at En-dor. In disguise, and with two of his 
 companions, Saul went to the woman’s solitary 
 abode. When he had quieted her fears that she 
 was being trapped by royal agents, Saul asked her 
 to call up Samuel. A noble tribute to Samuel, 
 and touching, too, that Saul in his despair should ~ 
 have turned for counsel to that man of God whose — 
 words when he was alive he had scorned and dis- 
 obeyed. The loud cry of fear that the woman. 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 79 
 
 gave when the form of the aged Samuel appeared 
 before her leads one to think that she was the 
 most surprised person in the whole wretched pro- 
 ceedings. I gather that, like so many of her class, 
 she was nothing but an impostor and was terrified 
 when the apparition of Samuel rose before her. 
 - We cannot tell from the narrative whether Saul 
 saw anything or not. But when he “ perceived,” 
 either from the necromancer’s account, or with his 
 own eyes, that he was face to face with Samuel, 
 he fell prostrate on the ground. ‘Then follows the 
 rebuke of Samuel and the prophecy of Saul’s death. 
 Samuel is annoyed and disquieted that he has been 
 called back from the land of the dead; he tells 
 Said that it was wrong to seek advice or knowl- 
 edge from the dead when he could get no answer 
 from God. When he had pronounced the awful 
 words, “ To-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be | 
 with me,” Saul fainted. The scene closes with a_ 
 rather beautiful example of woman’s pity and ten- 
 derness, for the witch forsook the spells and in- 
 cantations of the nether world and nursed Saul 
 baek to life and prepared a meal for him. 
 However one interprets that strange scene, one 
 cannot read into it any other meaning than that 
 the practice of consulting the dead through media 
 and psychic persons was, and is, abhorrent to the 
 Living God. The whole thing is set forth in such 
 
80 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 detail as indicates a purpose of counsel and admoni- 
 tion. ‘Ihe inspired chronicler took this to be the 
 lesson, for in the account of Saul’s death in the 
 Book of Chronicles (1 Chron. 10: 138), it is dis- 
 tinctly stated that Saul perished “ for asking coun- — 
 sel of one that had a familiar spirit, to enquire of | 
 it: and enquired not of the Lord: THEREFORE HE 
 SLEW HIM.” It is given as a warning for Israel, © 
 and ought to be a warning unto the end of time. 
 
 In St. Luke’s Gospel we have the terrific parable 
 of Dives and Lazarus. This was one of the few 
 occasions on which Jesus drew back for a moment 
 the veil that screens the state of man after death. 
 I shall not repeat it now, except to say that in the 
 case of each man there was a complete reversal of 
 condition: the beggar was comforted and the rich 
 man was tormented. Seeing Lazarus afar off, the 
 rich man first requested that Abraham would send 
 him to cool his tongue with cold water. Abraham 
 replies that such a thing was neither proper nor 
 was it possible: it was not proper because the rich 
 man deserved to be tormented and the beggar de- 
 served to be comforted; it was not possible, for ) 
 a gulf was fixed between the two men and from 
 neither side could an essay be made toward the’ 
 other. Then Dives asks that if Lazarus cannot 
 comfort him he be permitted to go and warn his 
 five brothers, who were living just the same kind 
 
 . 
 4 
 hl 
 x 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 81 
 
 of life that he had lived. ‘This also is denied him, 
 on the ground that, even if such a thing could be 
 done, it would have no good result. Not even a 
 messenger from the dead could convert the men 
 who refused to listen to the law and the prophets. 
 This has a direct bearing upon the whole subject 
 of spiritualism, teaching, first, the futility of it, 
 and, secondly, raising the question as to whether 
 such a thing is possible. In the one instance of the 
 Bible where a dead man seeks to get into commu- 
 nication with the living, the thing is forbidden by 
 the authority of Christ Himself. 
 
 I have heard persons refer to the Transfigura-_ 
 tion as sort of a New Testament warrant for spir- 
 itualism. That this should be so shows how far 
 we can wander from the path of Christ and how 
 one of the most uplifting and awe-inspiring inci- 
 dents in His ministry can do very little for those — 
 who approach it in the wrong spirit. While He 
 prayed upon the mountain top Jesus was trans- 
 figured before them, His countenance was altered, 
 and, behold, there talked with Him two men, which 
 were Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory and 
 spake of His decease which He should accomplish 
 at Jerusalem. This certainly teaches that once, at 
 least, men who had died appeared unto. aman on the 
 earth. But remember that it was the Son of God 
 to whom they appeared and with whom they talked, 
 
82 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 that they appeared to Him only when He was 
 transfigured; and if the disciples, too, saw them!) 
 ‘in glory” it was only under the guidance of 
 Christ and when His own glory was upon Him and 
 around them. If Christ leads us into communica- 
 tion with the dead, we need not fear to follow. 
 But what a fearful contrast between that Mount 
 of Transfiguration with the glorified Son of God 
 standing upon it and those weird knockings, those 
 tilting tables, those jangling bones, those peepings 
 and mutterings, those dim chambers which are the 
 platform and the enginery of them that now would 
 hold communion with the dead! ; 
 The Bible leaves us in no doubt as to whether 
 there are evil spirits who seek to deceive man and 
 harm his soul. The prophet Micaiah (1 Kings 
 22: 22), when asked by Ahab to prophesy con- 
 cerning the proposed expedition against Ramoth 
 Gilead, declared that a lying spirit had gone forth 
 to put a lie in the mouth of the prophets of Ahab 
 so as to lure him on to his ruin. Elsewhere in the 
 Old Testament the disastrous agency of evil spirits 
 working upon those who have provoked the Lord 
 their God is acknowledged and described. St. Paul — 
 says in the New Testament (1 Timothy 4:1): 
 “ Now the Spirit speaketh expréssly, that ifi the 
 latter times some shall depart from the faith, giv- | . 
 ing heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of ‘| 
 
 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 83 
 
 devils.” The moment we step across the bound- 
 aries of our own world we-are.face to face with 
 the intelligences, good and evil, of a world where 
 we are at a disadvantage, where we cannot be sure, 
 where we are easily deceived, and where it is quite 
 possible that lying spirits should make us their 
 sport. 
 
 That much of the spiritualistic phenomena is the 
 work of malign spirits is the historic teaching of 
 the Roman Catholic Church. In a letter to the 
 Times for September 16th, 1917, Lord Alfred 
 Douglas says: “As a Catholic I am forbidden to 
 take part in a spiritual séance under pain of mortal 
 sin, nor have I the least temptation to do so. But 
 before I became a Catholic I occasionally dab- 
 bled in spiritualism, and my own experiences were 
 quite enough to convince me that the phenomena 
 are sometimes perfectly genuine, and perfectly un- 
 accountable except on a supernatural basis. The 
 Catholic Church does not deny the phenomena. 
 But it utterly denies that the ‘ spirits’ which give 
 communications. are the souls of departed mor- 
 tals. The phenomena of spiritualism are, the _ 
 Church teaches, produced by devils and evil spirits. _ 
 Their object is to deceive and betray the human | 
 race.” 
 
 The perusal of spiritualistic literature raises 
 against it the great indictment of triviality, inanity, 
 
84 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 banality. Moses and Elias on the Mount spake 
 with Jesus concerning His decease; their great 
 theme of conversation was the redemptive work 
 of Christ, His once offering of Himself up as a 
 sacrifice for the sins of the world. That was their 
 grand topic. I listen to these communications 
 from the dead, and I might expect that they would 
 say something of the mystery and glory of life to 
 come, of the spirits of the just made perfect, of 
 the New Jerusalem, of the Christ Himself. But 
 what is it that I hear instead? The minister who 
 talks with his wife learns where he has mislaid 
 some papers, or where a gold pencil is hidden, or 
 what disposition to make of trinkets in his strong 
 box at the bank. Why did this good man’s wife 
 not tell him something about the Communion of 
 the Saints, about the joys of heaven, or the vision 
 of Jesus Christ at the right hand of the Father? 
 And as for the content of the communications 
 which come through the ordinary spiritualistic 
 media, what greater disrespect and contempt could 
 be cast upon the whole idea of future existence! 
 What nonsense is rapped out, what balderdash is 
 tapped and chirped, what drivel and babble comes 
 from them that now are in the unseen! And yet 
 this is the rubbish to which Sir Conan Doyle re- 
 fers in his introduction to Hills Spiritualism as 
 “a fresh departure in religious thought and ex- 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 85 
 
 perience such as we have not had for two thou- 
 sand years”! 
 
 In England just now there is much ado over 
 spiritualism. Great prominence, of course, is 
 given to the names of men like Lodge and Doyle. 
 But there are still a few Englishmen who have not 
 been carried away by the stampede toward the 
 land of ghosts. Rudyard Kipling is one of them. 
 This is what he has said on the subject: 
 
 “ The road to En-dor is easy to tread 
 For Mother or yearning Wife, 
 There, it 1s sure, we shall meet our Dead 
 As they were even in Ife. 
 Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store 
 For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor. 
 
 “Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark— 
 Hands—ah, God!—that we knew! 
 Visions and voices—look and hark! 
 Shall prove that our tale is true, 
 And that those who have passed to the further 
 shore 
 May be hailed—at a price—on the road to En-dor. 
 
 * ** * * * * K 
 
 “ Oh, the road to En-dor is the oldest road 
 
 And the craziest road of all! 
 Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode, 
 
 As it did in the days of Saul, 
 And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store 
 For such as go down on the road to En-dor!”’ 
 
86 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 In the book which Sir Conan Doyle commends 
 to readers as the chief work on the subject, Hiil’s 
 Spiritualism, there is an account of a spiritualistic 
 church service at Bradford, England. Fora Chris- 
 tian it makes sad reading. One man gets a warn- 
 ing to be careful when he works in a boiler shop 
 on Good Friday. “Mrs. Varley” gets a message 
 from her boy. Spirit after spirit, young, middle- 
 aged and aged, makes its appearance, usually with- 
 out any definite communications at all. Then the 
 benediction is pronounced. And has Christian 
 worship come to this? Where is that great Chris- 
 tian word, sin? And our warfare against it, in 
 ourselves and inthe world? ‘The punishment upon 
 it here and hereafter? And that great remedy for 
 sin, the atonement of Jesus Christ, who loved me 
 and gave Himself for me? It has vanished into 
 thin air. 
 
 Like all the other cults which claim the Bible 
 and Christianity for their distorted-religions, spir- 
 itualism makes its appeal to Christians who have © 
 ceased to believe in their own religion. ‘That there 
 are such in great numbers is, and always will be, 
 sad indeed. But these are they to whom this cult 
 makes its appeal. A Christian who believes in his 
 religion has no need of having his faith so but-— 
 tressed or reinforced. He walks by faith and not 
 by sight. His hope for life to come is based upon 
 
CAN WE TALK WITH THE DEAD? 87 
 
 faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, not upon any evi- 
 dence that a meditm can produce. He believes in 
 God; he believes in Christ. Therefore, he believes 
 in the Life Everlasting... That men should feel the 
 need of seeing a form and hearing a voice before 
 they can accept the great revelation of Christ as 
 to Everlasting Life, is not an evidence of faith at 
 all, but a denial of faith. Such persons walk. by 
 sight, not by faith, A woman said to me at the 
 close of the sermon one Sabbath: “I know that 
 the dead live!”’ A Christian BELIEvEs that the 
 dead live. You must take your choice. Which 
 shall it be? By sight or by faithr 
 
 If this is the way in which we are to take com- 
 fort concerning our beloved dead, why did Jesus 
 not tellus so? Why did He not put that into His 
 incomparable Farewell Address, as we have it in 
 the last portion of St. John’s.Gospel? Why did 
 He not say, ‘Go to the medium. Ye believe in 
 the sorcerer, believe also in life to come,” instead 
 of saying, “In my Father’s house are many man- 
 sions. Ye believe in God, believe also in me. I 
 go to prepare a place for you”? If these spir- 
 itualistic phenomena are to be our ground of hope, 
 why did not St. Paul, seeking to comfort mourning 
 Christians at Thessalonica, commend this practice 
 to them? Why did he not conduct a séance and 
 let them see for themselves that their dead were 
 
88 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 safe in the spirit world? Why did he not tell 
 them to put their hope in psychic investigation, in- 
 stead of in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Why 
 did he not tell them how to invoke the spirits, in- 
 stead of saying to them those noble words, “ For 
 if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even 
 so them also that sleep in Jesus will God bring with 
 him. Wherefore comfort one another with these 
 words’? 
 
V 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE 
 BODY 
 
DOMINUS ILLUMINATIO MEA 
 
 In the hour of death, after this hfe’s whim, 
 When the heart beats low, and the eyes grow 
 dim, 
 And pain has exhausted every limb— 
 The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him. 
 
 When the will has forgotten the lifelong aim, 
 And the mind can only disgrace its fame, 
 
 And a man is uncertain of his own name— 
 The power of the Lord shall fill this frame. 
 
 When the last sigh is heaved and the last tear 
 shed, 
 And the coffin is waiting beside the bed, 
 And the widow and child forsake the dead— 
 Ihe angel of the Lord shall lift this head. 
 
 For even the purest delight may pall, 
 And power must fail and the pride must fall, 
 And the love of the dearest friends grow small— 
 But the glory of the Lord is all in all. 
 
 (These lines were often on the lips of 
 Woodrow Wilson. They were written by 
 RicHarp D, BLAcKmoreE, author of 
 “ Lorna Doone.’’) 
 
V 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 
 
 and Arch Streets, Philadelphia, the passer-by 
 
 can see, through the iron railing, the grave of 
 one of America’s greatest men and one of the 
 world’s most versatile geniuses. If you have made 
 a pilgrimage to that quiet acre of the dead, walled 
 off from the city’s roar and traffic, as if to comment 
 upon the vanity of it all, you will have observed 
 that the flat stone over Franklin’s grave bears no 
 trace of the epitaph which he composed. It is as 
 follows: 
 
 if the old cemetery of Christ Church, at Fifth 
 
 “ Like the cover of an old book, 
 Its contents torn out, 
 And stripped of tts lettering and gilding, 
 Lies here food for worms, 
 But the work shall not be lost, 
 For it will (as he believes) appear once more 
 In a new and more elegant edition, 
 Revised and corrected by the Author.” 
 
 Such was Franklin’s statement of the Christian 
 doctrine of the resurrection of the body. This 
 doctrine has been a part of Christian faith since 
 
 the very beginning. Its most familiar statement 
 91 
 
92 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 is that of the Apostles’ Creed, “ I-believe in the | 
 resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” ‘ ) 
 “—““Fheard a member of the Presbyterian Church say . 
 
 that when he repeated the Creed he always left out 
 the clause, “I believe in the resurrection of the 
 body.” One~would gather the impression that 
 there are not a few who do likewise. They may 
 utter it in mechanical repetition, but it means noth- 
 ing at all to them. Besides these who reject the 
 doctrine altogether, there are, undoubtedly, a great 
 host who are troubled by it. It is to them the 
 greatest stumbling-block in the whole list of the 
 Christian doctrines. But rejected or accepted, un- 
 derstood or misunderstood, disliked or rejoiced in, 
 the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is an 
 integral part.of Christian truth. Christ taught it, 
 the apostles taught it, and the Christian Church of 
 every age has ever confessed together, “I believe 
 in the resurrection of the body and the life ever- 
 lasting.” Few would be troubled if the Creed said 
 only, “I believe in the life everlasting.” But in 
 the Christian faith, these two, the resurrection of 
 the body and the life everlasting, are indissolubly 
 linked together. 
 
 When St. Paul was preaching to the philosophers 
 on Mars Hill, they heard him with all respect until 
 he began to talk of the resurrection of the dead. 
 That was too much for them. “Some mocked.” 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY = 98 
 
 Echoes of that mockery are still heard in the world, 
 and even within the Christian Church. Ina recent 
 issue of a well-known religious weekly there ap- 
 peared an article on quaint epitaphs in the ceme- 
 teries. After quoting one of these epitaphs which 
 referred to the resurrection, the editor added in a 
 parenthetical clause these words: “ Evidently our 
 fathers almost without exception believed in a com- 
 mon resurrection day when together the dead would 
 rise and appear before God.” ‘That explanatory 
 clause in the Christian weekly is very significant, 
 showing how far popular Christian thought has 
 receded from the great affirmation of Christ and 
 His apostles. 
 
 To trace the evidences of the existence and the 
 
 development of the belief in the resurrection of — 
 
 the body in the Old Testament is a difficult task. 
 Some little comment upon it was made in the chap- 
 ter on the Old Testament teaching on immortality. 
 For our present purpose the main thing to re- 
 member is that when we come to the New Testa- 
 ment the doctrine of the resurrection of the body 
 is generally accepted, and is taken for granted in 
 the teaching of Jesus and His apostles. How true 
 this is we may learn from the account in Acts 24 
 of Paul’s answer before Felix to the accusation of 
 sedition brought by Tertullus, the attorney for the 
 high priests at Jerusalem. Here Paul tells Felix 
 
 a 
 
94 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 that he believes the law and the prophets, and that 
 he has hope toward God that there will be a resur- 
 rection of the dead, both of the just and the un- 
 just, “‘ which they themselves,” he adds, referring 
 to his Jewish accusers, “ also allow.” Again, when 
 Paul made his plea before Festus and Agrippa, he 
 declares that he is accused by the Jews because he 
 entertains the hope of the promise of the resurrec- 
 tion made to the fathers: “‘ For which hope’s sake, 
 King Agrippa, I am accused by the Jews. Why 
 should it be thought a thing incredible with you 
 that God should raise the dead?” (Acts 26: 7, 8). 
 Paul was a very skillful pleader, and he attempts 
 to free himself from the charge of heresy and se- 
 dition by claiming that he was teaching only what 
 the religion of the Jews had long taught. In gen- 
 eral terms this was true; but, of course, the Phari- 
 sees and their colleagues were not persecuting Paul 
 because he taught the doctrine of the resurrection 
 of the body, but because he taught the resurrection 
 of Jesus, and grounded the great hope of the resur- 
 rection of the dead upon the resurrection of Jesus. 
 This we must grant, even to the Pharisees. But 
 Paul’s remarks at both hearings are quite sufficient 
 for our present purpose, namely, to show how by 
 the time Christianity was established the doctrine 
 of the resurrection was generally accepted and as- 
 sumed in all discussions as to the future. 
 
 Ne 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY = 95 
 
 In the story of the raising of Lazarus we have 
 another conclusive proof of the generality of the 
 belief in the resurrection of the body. When our 
 Lord said to the distressed Martha, ‘ Thy brother 
 shall rise again,” Martha at once answered, “1 
 know that he shall rise again in the resurrection 
 at the last day.” To this common belief in the 
 resurrection of the body there was one notable 
 ' exception, the Sadducees, “ which say there is no 
 resurrection.” The very fact that the men who 
 held such a belief formed a special class by them- 
 selves shows how generally the belief in the resur- 
 rection prevailed. 
 
 The teaching of Christ as recorded in the Gospels 
 _ assumes,-rather than argues for, the resurrection 
 of the body. But there are occasions when, either 
 upon His own initiative, or through questions pro- 
 pounded to Him, Christ flashed the ray of divine 
 light and truth upon this shadow land of the fu- 
 ture. When He raised the daughter of the ruler 
 of the synagogue, He said to the flute players and 
 _ the noise makers, ‘‘ Give place, for the damsel is 
 not dead, but sleepeth.”’ But this is a miracle of 
 raising the dead. ~The damsel certainly was dead. 
 Yet Christ said she was only sleeping. He did not 
 mean taking her rest in sleep, but something dif- 
 ferent. The implication would seem to be that 
 Christ is introducing them to a new thought of 
 
96 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 death. Who knows but that this may have been 
 the motive back of the three miracles of raising 
 the dead? In like terms Jesus said when He heard 
 of the sickness of Lazarus, “ Our friend Lazarus 
 sleepeth, but I go that I may awaken him out of 
 sleep. Then»said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, 
 he shall do well. Howbeit, Jesus had spoken of 
 his death; but they thought that he had spoken of 
 taking rest in sleep.” St. Paul uses this same 
 term, asleep, “ We shall not all sleep, but we shall 
 all be changed.’’ Hence the beautiful usage of 
 
 Christian faith, when we speak of our dead as) 
 
 those who have “ fallen asleep,” or who “ sleep in | 
 Jesus.”’ If Jesus was thinking only of the future — 
 and continued existence of the spirit, the term 
 would have little meaning; but it has the deepest 
 suggestion when we think of Christ as looking 
 down upon the dead body of the damsel and 
 the buried body of Lazarus and saying, “ This 
 looks to you like the end; but it is not the end; 
 he is only sleeping; and the spirit shall once more 
 animate this now lifeless body.” This, of course, 
 implies a resurrection, of which the restoration of 
 the dead to this life by Christ in the three miracles 
 was a picture. 
 
 It was in answer to the foolish question of the © 
 
 Sadducees that Jesus made His only comment upon i 
 the nature of the resurrection body. The Sad- 
 
 $ 
 
 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 97 
 
 ducees asked Him about a woman who had sur- 
 vived seven husbands, in that respect almost equal- 
 ling some of the celebrities of our own day in the 
 field of divorce. Finally, the woman followed her 
 seven husbands into the unseen. “In the resur- 
 rection, therefore, whose wife shall she be of the 
 seven, for they all had her to wife?”’ This stale 
 jest of the Sadducees was repeated in substance 
 by that high priest of materialism, Haeckel, in his 
 Riddle of the Universe, where he wants to know 
 whether Catharine of Aragon, Catharine Howard, 
 Jane Seymour, Anne Boleyn, or Anne of Cleves 
 would be the wife of Henry VIII. in heaven. 
 However flippantly the Sadducees may have 
 asked the question, Jesus gave it a great answer. 
 In this answer there are two things: first, the 
 affirmation of the doctrine of the resurrection of 
 the body. It was this doctrine that the Sadducees 
 denied and ridiculed. He said to them, “As touch- 
 ing the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read 
 that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, 
 ‘IT am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, 
 and the God of Jacob?’ God is not the God of 
 the living, but of the dead.” Here our Lord 
 plainly declares that in denying the resurrection of 
 the body the Sadducees are mistaken, for God 
 maintains His relationship with the dead patriarchs 
 and they shall live again. The Sadducees denied 
 
98 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 not only the resurrection, but the life to come in 
 any form. Second, Jesus has a word to say about 
 the nature of the resurrection body and the resur- 
 rection life, reminding the Sadducees that their) — 
 question about the much married woman was, after 
 all, an irrelevant one, and that marriage, as a phys- 
 ical relationship, would not exist in heaven, but 
 they shall be as the angels in heaven. 
 
 But some one may ask, What, beside such a © 
 comment as this on the nature of the resurrection 
 body and the resurrection life, has Jesus con- 
 tributed to the doctrine? Before He came, men 
 believed in the immortality of the soul and be- 
 lieved in the resurrection of the body. What 
 then has Christ added? What warrant is there 
 for the high claim of St. Paul that Christ 
 brought immortality to light in the Gospel? T he 
 answer is that Jesus not only taught the doc-, 
 trine of the resurrection, but made Himself itst-4 
 causative agent and in His own resurrection il- 
 lustrated the nature of the resurrection body. 14 
 
 Let us look first at the way in which Jesus made q 
 
 Himself the ground and the cause of the resurrec- a 
 tion. Jesus definitely makes belief in Him the con- 
 dition and the power of the resurrection. “ For \| 
 this is the will of my Father, that every one that | 
 beholdeth. the Son and believeth on him should 
 have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the 
 
 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 99 
 
 last day”’ (John 6: 40). He said the same thing 
 to Martha. He had assured her that her brother 
 would rise again. Martha replied, “1 know that 
 he will rise again in the resurrection at the last 
 day.” Then it was Jesus uttered His great say- 
 ing, “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. Believest thou this?” Martha 
 already believed in the resurrection of the body, 
 but now she can relate that belief to Jesus. It is 
 He who raises the dead who believe in Him. 
 
 The full meaning of the connection between 
 faith in Christ and the resurrection of believers 
 could not be made clear to Martha, or to any one 
 else, until Christ Himself had risen from the dead. 
 Then with what a thrill Martha must have remem- 
 bered that saying of Jesus, “ I am.the. resurrection 
 and the life”! We know that during the forty 
 days between His resurrection and His ascension 
 our Lord frequently appeared to His disciples and 
 spoke with them about the “ things concerning the 
 kingdom of God.” ‘The definiteness of the mes- 
 sage which the apostles preached after the ascen- 
 sion is no doubt related to the careful instruction 
 of those forty days. We have a few echoes of 
 that teaching recorded in St. Luke’s account. of 
 the resurrection appearance of Jesus to the two on 
 
100 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 the way to Emmaus, and again to the disciples at 
 
 Jerusalem. The thing emphasized is His atone- 
 ment and resurrection, and the Gospel founded 
 upon these facts. Whether He added a word about 
 /His resurrection body and how in the resurrection 
 | they would be like Him, we do not know. What 
 | we do know is that He left them in great peace 
 \and satisfaction of mind. 
 
 If the resurrection of Christ is the ground and 
 pledge of our own resurrection, it is also our only 
 clue, so far as manifestation or illustration is con- 
 cerned, of the nature of the resurrection body. It 
 is very important to remember that in the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus we are contemplating the resurrection 
 
 of one who assumed, and has never relinquished, 
 
 our humanity. It was not God who was raised 
 
 hy 
 HTN SEA ei 
 
 from the dead, but the God-Man. Christ’s identity 
 with man in the days of His humiliation is paral- 
 lelled by a like identity in the resurrection. His 
 resurrection body, therefore, is the norm of our 
 own resurrection. 
 
 This similarity is definitely affirmed by both St. 
 John and St. Paul. St. John is willing to leave the 
 whole future to God’s boundless love, and disclaims 
 any knowledge as to the nature of the life in 
 heaven: “‘ Behold what manner of love the Father 
 hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the 
 sons of God. ... . Beloved, now are we the 
 
 ee ee 
 
 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 101 
 
 sons of God and it doth not yet appear what we 
 shall be.” Then he qualifies this confession of 
 ignorance by his great statement concerning the 
 general principle of that life to come: “ But we | 
 know that when he shall appear, we shall be like 
 him; for we shall see him as he is”? (1 John 
 Beas). 
 
 St. Paul states the same idea, but in a beautiful 
 and suggestive metaphor, when he says: “ But now 
 is Christ risen from the dead and become the first- 
 fruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). The 
 first blade that appears above the earth 1s the proph- 
 ecy and the norm of the whole crop which is to 
 follow. Or, if we apply his figure to the harvest, 
 the first garnered sheaves are a model of all that 
 follows. Out of death comes the harvest of eternal 
 life, of bodies over which death shall have no do- 
 minion. The first to appear was Christ, and His 
 appearing not only convinces us that others shall 
 follow, but that they shall be like Him. St. Paul’s 
 marvellous combination of logic and imagination 
 never shows to better advantage than in this winged 
 metaphor. 
 
 But one might ask, How can Paul call Christ 
 the “firstfruits of them that slept,” when we are 
 told in the Scriptures of the calling back from the 
 dead of several persons in the Old Testament, and 
 at least three during the life of Jesus? ‘The an- 
 
102 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 swer is that those so-called “‘ resurrections ’ were 
 not resurrections at all in the sense that Jesus rose 
 from the dead, or in the sense that His believers 
 shall rise from the dead, for the dead who were 
 raised by the prophets, and the three who were 
 called back to-life by Christ were merely recalled 
 
 to this present life; they were not introduced to \ 
 the life of the resurrection, and in no proper sense | 
 
 were “children of the resurrection.” 
 
 But if the resurrection body of Jesus is the norm 
 of our own resurrection, what do we learn from 
 the risen Jesus? Not much by way of actual 
 knowledge, but a great deal by way of suggestion 
 and intimation. In their earthly minds and bodies 
 the disciples could not comprehend the power and 
 glory of the resurrection body of Jesus. When 
 He did appear unto them it was in the form that 
 they had known Him and seen Him, and He even 
 condescended_ to eat with them, and on one occa- 
 sion displayed His wounds to Thomas, and on an- 
 other, asked the disciples who thought that He was 
 a ghost, to touch Him and feel Him. Yet we feel, 
 as we read these narratives, that these manifesta- 
 tions, although they prove the reality of the resur- 
 rection, and the connection between the body that 
 was laid in the tomb and the body that came out 
 of the tomb, do not reveal in any degree the splen- 
 dour of the body of the resurrection, Although a 
 
 sr 
 
 ee _~*, ane 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 108 
 
 body that could be touched, and which could con- 
 descend to partake of bread and fish, it was also 
 a body that could change its form of manifestation, 
 and that could pass through closed doors, and could 
 quickly transport itself from one place to a place 
 far distant. The same, and yet not the same. 
 However, we must not emphasize too much the 
 fact that the resurrection body of Christ could ap- 
 pear and reappear, for before His death, when oc- 
 casion demanded, He could become. invisible, as at 
 Nazareth, when the mob were about to cast Him 
 down headlong from the brow of the hill, He 
 passed through the midst of them and went His 
 way. Again, when He walked on the sea, His 
 body must have assumed its more than corporeal 
 qualities. Always the body of Christ had the pos- 
 sibilities of omnipotence and infinity. His glory 
 on the mount of transfiguration may also be re- 
 garded as in a sense a prophecy, or foregleam, of 
 His glory in the resurrection. 
 
 However little of the splendours of the resurrec- 
 tion body, and the powers of the world to come, 
 Christ exhibited to His friends in the resurrection, 
 He left behind Him, in the minds of the disciples, 
 and in our minds to-day as we read these noble 
 narratives of His appearances, an impression of 
 majesty and awe. He is moving along the margin 
 between the earthly and the heavenly life, between 
 
104 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 the life which now is and the life which is to come, 
 and not always can we follow Him or clearly dis- 
 cern Him. But always He moves with the majes- 
 tic tread of Him who has the keys of death and 
 hell, and is alive forevermore. And we shall be 
 like Him! In-some way, to some degree, we shall 
 share in the power and splendour of that resurrec- 
 tion body of Christ, for He shall “ change our vile 
 body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glori- 
 ous body, according to the working whereby he is 
 able to subdue all things unto himself.” 
 
 See 
 
ee 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE 
 UNJUST 
 
Lo, He comes with clouds descending, 
 Once for favoured sinners slain! 
 Thousand, thousand saints attending 
 Swell the triumph of His train: 
 Hallelujah! 
 God appears, on earth to reign. 
 
 Every eye shall now behold Him, 
 Robed in dreadful majesty; 
 Those who set at nought and sold Him, 
 Pierced and nailed Him to the tree, 
 Deeply wailing, 
 Shall the true Messiah see. 
 
 Every island, sea, and mountain, 
 Heaven and earth shall flee away; 
 All who hate Him, must, confounded, 
 Hear the trump proclaim the day; 
 
 Come to judgment! 
 Come to judgment, come away! 
 
 —CHARLES WESLEY and JOHN CENNICK. 
 
VI 
 THE RESURRECTION OF THE UNJUST 
 
 the resurrection of the body is a true doctrine 
 
 of the Christian faith. It is not to be re- 
 duced to a mere name for the belief in the continued 
 existence of the spirit after death, nor is it to be 
 confused with the state of existence into which 
 the spirit passes at death. Decisively, the doctrine 
 of the resurrection of the body has to do with the 
 body. Otherwise there would be no sense in 
 speaking of a resurrection, for that only can be 
 raised which has been buried in the grave. Mov- 
 ing out into this territory beyond the confines of 
 this present life, we are at once in a land of fog 
 and mist and uncertainty, not indeed to those who 
 have actually gone thither, but to us who by 
 thought and faith try to follow them and envisage 
 their life. 
 
 But these difficulties which press upon us from 
 every quarter, when we come to speak of the resur- 
 rection, must not tempt us to throw over in despair 
 the whole doctrine, for, as we have seen, it was 
 taught by Jesus, demonstrated by Him, and is an 
 
 integral portion of Christian doctrine. Dr. J. A. 
 107 
 
 N our discussion thus far we have seen how 
 
108 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 Selbie puts the case well when He writes: “The 
 extenuation of the Christian doctrine of the resur- 
 rection of the dead into a natural or conferred 
 immortality of the soul to avoid perplexities arising 
 from the limitation of our knowledge evacuates | 
 the force of St. Paul’s teaching as to the ideal 
 sanctity of the human body (1 Cor. 6:14) and 
 sacrifices the moral value of a sense of its high 
 destiny. Again, it breaks up the Pauline concep- 
 tion of man as body, soul and spirit, all capable of 
 being preserved entire without blame (1 Thess. 
 5:23). Even if we hesitate to accept St. Paul’s 
 psychology we must confess that the only self 
 which we know is a self constituted of body as well 
 as of soul. St. Paul’s expression of Christian 
 hope is not deliverance from the body, but redemp- — 
 tion of the body. The redemption of the body is 
 the last stage in the great process of adoption by 
 which we are made sons of God.” 
 
 This much, then, is certain: the resurrection of 
 the body is taught and there is also something told 
 us about the nature of the resurrection body. But 
 what of the impenitent and the wicked, the non- 
 Christian dead? The New Testament teaching 
 seems to relate only to the resurrection of the 
 Christian dead. It must be perfectly clear to the 
 reader that in the great passage in First Corin- 
 thians St. Paul has in mind the resurrection body of 
 
RESURRECTION OF THE UNJUST 109 
 
 the believer. Obviously it would be out of place 
 to speak-of the wicked as bearing the image of 
 the heavenly, or being raised in glory and in power. 
 The same holds true of the passage in Second 
 Corinthians 5, where Paul speaks of his house from 
 heaven. Whether he refers there to the resurrec- 
 tion body or to the bliss of the departed saint, 
 nothing that he says can apply to the wicked and 
 the impenitent. 
 
 The fact is that this whole subject of the fate 
 of the unbeliever is left in the shadow. Some of 
 the greatest utterances in the New Testament re- 
 late to the resurrection of the believing dead, but 
 almost nothing is said or taught about the unbe- 
 lieving dead. Yet logically, we must ask ourselves 
 about them. Are they to be raised up? And if 
 so, with what body do they come? 
 
 In considering these questions, the first conclu- 
 sion at which we arrive is that the Bible certainly 
 teaches the resurrection of the wicked as well as 
 the resurrection of the believer. The following 
 passages show this: “ Many of them that sleep in 
 the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever- 
 lasting life, and some to shame and everlasting 
 contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as 
 the brightness of the firmament and they that turn 
 many to righteousness as the stars forever and 
 ever” (Dan. 12:2, 3). And they “shall come 
 
110 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 forth, they that have done good, unto the resurrec- | 
 tion of life, and they that have done evil, unto the | 
 resurrection of damnation” (John 5:29). “And 
 
 have hope toward God, which they themselves also 
 allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, 
 both of the just and unjust’ (Acts 24: 15). 
 
 But if there be a resurrection of the wicked, it 
 must be for a different purpose and with a dif- 
 ferent body than the resurrection of the believers. 
 There 1s some hint at that difference in Christ’s 
 lesson for guests and entertainment as recorded 
 in Luke 14: 12-14: “ Then said he also to him that 
 bade him, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, 
 call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy 
 kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also 
 bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. 
 But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the 
 maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be 
 blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou 
 shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the 
 just.” The inference would be that the resurrec- 
 tion of the just is something different from the 
 resurrection of the unjust. 
 
 Again, in Luke 20: 35, 36, where Christ makes 
 
 i 
 
 His extended comment on the foolish query of the | 
 
 Sadducees about the seven times married woman, 
 the resurrection is associated with a certain kind 
 
 of life and character. ‘‘' They which shall be ac- 
 
RESURRECTION OF THE UNJUST 111 
 
 counted worthy to obtain that world, and the resur- 
 rection from the dead, neither marry nor are given 
 in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for 
 they are equal unto the angels; and are the chil- 
 dren of God, being the children of the resurrec- 
 tion.” When Christ speaks about those who have 
 been raised up as the sons of God, and as the chil- 
 dren of the resurrection, it is plain that He is not 
 speaking of the wicked and the unbeliever. This 
 distinction in the two resurrections is confirmed 
 by the saying of Jesus in John 5: 29,° already 
 quoted: And they “shall come forth, they that 
 have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and 
 they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of 
 damnation.” This distinction is further confirmed 
 by St. Paul’s reference in First Thessalonians 
 4; 14, 16, to the “ dead in Christ’: “ For if we 
 believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so 
 them also that sleep in Jesus will God bring with 
 him. . . . For the Lord himself shall descend 
 from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the 
 archangel, and with the trump of God: and the 
 dead in Christ shall rise first.” 
 
 In the Epistle to the Philippians (3:10, 11), 
 Paul expresses the earnest hope that he may share 
 in the resurrection: “ That I may know-him, and 
 the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of 
 his sufferings, being made conformable unto his 
 
112 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 death. If by any means I might attain unto the 
 resurrection of the dead.” If Paul so yearned. 
 for the resurrection of the dead, it must have been| 
 something more than a resurrection in which all 
 men shared alike. The resurrection in which the 
 Christian dead share is declared to be an inherit- 
 ance through faith in Christ: “ This is the Fa- 
 ther’s will which hath sent me, that of all which 
 he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should 
 raise it up again at the last day. And this is the 
 will of him that sent me, that every one that seeth 
 the Son, and believeth on him, may have ever- 
 lasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day. 
 
 No man can come to me except the Fa- 
 ther which hath sent me draw him, and I will raise 
 him up at the last day. . . . Whoso eateth 
 my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life, 
 and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 
 6: 39-54). Here, four times in succession, Christ 
 says that the resurrection will be His gift to those 
 who followed Him and believed in Him in this 
 world. Yet the wicked dead, too, are to be raised; 
 all that are in the graves shall hear His voice and 
 come forth. 
 
 The fact that to the Christian the resurrection 
 is God’s great seal and benediction is affirmed by 
 St. Paul also in Romans 8: 10-21: “If Christ be 
 in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the 
 
RESURRECTION OF THE UNJUST 113 
 
 Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the 
 Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead 
 dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the 
 dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his 
 Spirit that dwelleth in you. . . . For the ear- 
 nest expectation of the creature waiteth for the 
 manifestation of the sons of God. 2. . Be- 
 cause the creature itself also shall be delivered from 
 the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty 
 of the children of God.” 
 
 We have seen, then, that the great body of the 
 New Testament teaching as to the resurrection of 
 the body assumes for the subject of its application 
 the Christian dead, and that such a resurrection is 
 God’s great gift to those who live and believe in 
 
 Jesus Christ. Some go much further than this 
 and teach what is called conditional immortality, 
 that is, that life to come is a gift bestowed only 
 upon those who believe in Christ. This would get 
 rid of the difficulty of the resurrection of the 
 wicked, but it would also get rid of inescapable 
 declarations and inferences of the New Testament 
 which declare that the wicked too are to be raised; 
 for we must all stand before the judgment seat of 
 Christ. In addition to the passages I have cited 
 above as teaching that the wicked too will be raised 
 up, there is the great judgment passage of Christ in 
 Matthew 25. ‘The judgments that He there pro- 
 
114 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 nounces upon the wicked certainly imply their res- 
 urrection from the dead. 
 
 Since there is to be a resurrection of the just 
 and a resurrection of the unjust, some infer that 
 the two resurrections will be separated in time,— 
 first, a resurrection of the believers at the coming 
 of the Lord, and after that, the resurrection of 
 the wicked, or the general resurrection. Some find 
 a hint of this separation in First Corinthians 
 15: 23-26: “ They that are Christ’s at his coming. 
 Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered 
 up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when 
 he shall have put down all rule and all authority 
 and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all 
 enemies under his feet.” The two events sepa- 
 rated here seem to be the resurrection of them that 
 are Christ’s at His coming and the final victory 
 over evil. Between the two events Christ 
 reigns. 
 
 The passage in First Thessalonians 4: 16, “ and 
 the dead in Christ shall rise first,’ does not neces- 
 sarily refer to a subsequent resurrection, as if it 
 meant to say first the Christian dead, and then, 
 long afterward, the unbelieving dead will be 
 raised, for “first” is put in correlation with the 
 “then” which follows: “’Then we which are alive 
 and remain shall be caught up together with them 
 in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so 
 
RESURRECTION OF THE UNJUST 115 
 
 shall we ever be with the Lord.” The meaning 
 of “first” and “then” as so used in the passage 
 would be this: First, the Christian dead are raised, 
 and then, following their resurrection, the believers 
 who are still alive at Christ’s second coming will 
 be caught up. The passage does not necessarily 
 teach a separation in the time of the two resurrec- 
 tions, neither is there anything in it which forbids 
 such a separation. 
 
 Those who are sure that the two events, the two 
 resurrections, are separated by a lapse of time, 
 make their appeal to the celebrated passage in the 
 Apocalypse, Revelation 20:4, 5: “And I saw 
 thrones and théy sat upon them, and judgment was 
 given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that 
 were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for 
 the word of God, and which had not worshipped 
 the beast, neither his image, neither had received 
 his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; 
 and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand 
 years. But the rest of the dead lived not again 
 until the thousand years were finished. ‘This is 
 the first resurrection.” 
 
 Almost any interpretation of this passage comes 
 up against great difficulties. Taken literally, it 
 does not say that all believers are raised at this 
 first resurrection, but the martyrs, the souls of them 
 that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus. But 
 
116 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 it certainly does emphasize the element of judg- 
 ment in the resurrection of the wicked. 
 
 Views on these difficult matters, fortunately, are 
 not necessary to salvation and hope; and what- 
 ever opinion is held, let him who holds it remem- 
 ber that here we see through the glass darkly. 
 “ Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways: And 
 how small a whisper do we hear of him!” But 
 we are taught enough. If the resurrection of the 
 wicked is but rarely mentioned, let that very si- 
 lence concerning it warn us from sharing in such a 
 resurrection, the resurrection of condemnation, to 
 everlasting shame and contempt. Let us rather, 
 as Paul said he did, count all things to be loss, 
 “that I may know him and the power of his resur- 
 rection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being 
 made conformable unto his death; if by any means 
 I may attain unto the resurrection of the dead.” 
 
Vit 
 
 BETWEEN DEATH AND THE 
 RESURRECTION 
 
_ ee 4 
 ee Ee a 
 
 “A shadow fits before me, a 
 Not thou, but hke to thee. 
 Ah, Christ, that it were possible : 
 
 For one short hour to see 
 The souls we loved, that they might tell us 
 What and where they be!” 
 
 —TENNYSON, in “ Maud.” 
 
 “ Spirits departed ye are still, 
 And thoughts of you our lonely hours will fill, 
 As gales wake from the harp a language not their — 
 Own ; 
 Or airs autumnal raise a momentary moan, 
 Till all the soul to thoughts of you is sighing, 
 And every chord that slept in sadness stern replying, 
 Where are ye now in regions blest, 
 On shores of land unknown, in silence and at rest?” 
 
 TT Oe a ee ee 
 
 —ANON. 
 
 
 
Vil 
 
 BETWEEN DEATH AND THE 
 RESURRECTION 
 
 CCORDING to the teaching of the New 
 A Testament, the Christian believer enters 
 into the full glory of eternal life at the 
 resurrection. But ages have elapsed since Chris- 
 tian believers like Paul and Peter and John died, 
 and many more ages may pass away before Christ 
 will come to judge the quick and the dead. What 
 is the condition of these believing dead? Are they 
 in a state of partial glory? Are they in a state of 
 unconscious existence, out of which they will be 
 raised at the last day? Or are they in a state of 
 discipline and purification? Let us consider now 
 the various answers which have been given to these 
 questions. | 
 The Scriptures sometimes speak of death as a 
 sleep. It is said of the patriarchs and the ancient 
 kings that they slept with their fathers. Paul says 
 of David that after he had served his own genera- 
 tion by the will of God, he fell on sleep. The 
 Psalmist prayed, “ Lighten mine eyes lest I sleep 
 the sleep of death.” Christ said of Lazarus, “ Our 
 friend Lazarus sleepeth.” St. Paul frequently re- 
 
 fers to death as a sleep. ‘his frequent reference 
 119 
 
120 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 to death as a sleep has been taken by some fo mean 
 that the whole being of man, body and soul, is in 
 a state of unconsciousness during the time between 
 death and the resurrection. The dead have not 
 been annihilated, but they know nothing; “ there 
 is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom 
 in the grave whither thou goest.” ‘This doctrine, 
 called the Sleep of the Soul, appears from time 
 to time in church history and was controverted 
 and repudiated by some of the Reformers. The 
 Westminster Standards definitely deny it, saying of 
 the departed, they neither die nor sleep. 
 
 It will readily be seen how men would come to 
 speak of death as a sleep. Death looks like sleep; 
 the dead appear to be sleeping. No word so fitly 
 describes the outward appearance of death as sleep. 
 But it is one thing to refer to death under the 
 metaphor of sleep, and quite another thing to say 
 that the soul of man at death passes into a state 
 like that of sleep. Even if we were to take those 
 passages in the Bible which speak of the dead as 
 “asleep” with the utmost literality, it would not 
 mean absolute unconsciousness, for we know how 
 active the mind is even when we have been sleep- 
 ing: 
 
 “To die, to sleep: 
 
 To sleep; perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub: 
 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.” 
 
DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION 121 
 
 The Psalmist expressed his confidence in the fu- 
 ture by saying, “Thou shalt guide me with thy 
 counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.” That 
 would seem to express the hope that after death 
 came not unconscious existence, but a life of glory 
 in the presence of God. ‘The emergence of Moses 
 and Elijah in this life and their conversing with 
 Jesus on the mount of transfiguration can hardly 
 be fitted into the doctrine of the sleep of the soul, 
 for they manifest the keenest intelligence and con- 
 sciousness. However one takes the piercing story 
 of Dives and Lazarus, it certainly teaches anything 
 but that in death we know nothing, for the rich 
 man and Lazarus are both alive and conscious. 
 
 In the Book of Revelation a blessing is pro- 
 nounced upon the dead who die in the Lord: 
 “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from 
 henceforth.” The state thus extolled must be any- 
 thing but a death-like slumber. Finally, we have 
 that great saying of Jesus to the penitent thief, 
 “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” The 
 plain inference is that whether the thief passed at 
 once into heaven or into some intermediate state, 
 he would be at least in a state of conscious happi- 
 ness. : 
 
 Considerably in advance of the doctrine of the 
 sleep of the soul, a doctrine both unseriptural and 
 without comfort, is the belief in what is called the 
 
122 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 Intermediate State. This state is spoken of as 
 Paradise, not as high and blessed as heaven, but 
 still a state of safety and peace preparatory to the 
 bliss of heaven. One argument brought forward 
 for this Intermediate State is the fact that in the 
 Bible the rewards of heaven and the punishments 
 of hell follow the general judgment, intimating that 
 the final state cannot be entered until after the 
 resurrection and the judgment. But Christ’s para- 
 ble of the rich man and Lazarus would not seem 
 to indicate any long period between death and the 
 final state of blessedness or punishment. 
 
 To St. Paul the great themes of life after death 
 were the resurrection, the judgment and heaven. 
 It was the great consummation which captured his 
 enthusiasm, and not the “in between.” He cen- 
 ters his whole thought upon the final glory of the 
 believer in heaven. But the very fact that the be- 
 liever is to be ‘‘ clothed upon ” with his house from 
 heaven, the body of the resurrection, makes it in- 
 evitable that we should ask questions about the 
 present state of the believing dead. If the final 
 and complete glory is not entered into until the 
 resurrection, what is their condition now? 
 
 The question is one that cannot be answered 
 easily. On the one hand, we shrink from think- 
 ing that a soul which has been redeemed-through 
 faith in Jesus Christ must tarry for long-cons 
 
 a 
 
DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION 1238 
 
 before entering into the full inheritance. of the 
 saints. It would seem almost to cast some shadow 
 of insufficiency upon the redeeming work of Christ. 
 On the other hand, the divine consummation for 
 the believer is the body of the resurrection, not 
 inherited until the last great day. For myself, I 
 do not like to think of those whom I have loved 
 and lost as now in a state preparatory to heaven. 
 There is some natural logic in the Roman Catholic 
 idea that even the faithful and believing soul needs 
 a process of discipline and purification before it is 
 fit for the presence of God Himself. It does in- 
 deed need such a process. But that process is the 
 great redeeming and purifying work of Christ on 
 the Cross, and not the cleansing fires of purgatory. 
 
 As to the difference between what is called Para- 
 dise-and. Heaven, there does not appear to be much 
 testimony in the Scriptures. But of this, at least, 
 we can be sure, that Paradise is a state free from — 
 the curse and stain of sin. When Paul said that 
 he was caught up into Paradise and heard un- 
 speakable words, which-it is not lawful for a man 
 to utter, and when our Lord said to the dying thief, 
 “To-day shalt thou be with me in-Paradise,” the 
 Paradise to which they referred must be a state 
 of purity and happiness...Our conclusion then is 
 that while we recognize the New Testament teach- 
 ing that the body of the resurrection is not be- 
 
124 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 stowed upon the believer until the last day, and 
 that to inherit the resurrection body is to enter into 
 the final reward of faith in Christ, still, we shall 
 not think of our beloved and believing dead as now 
 in any condition but one of glory and peace and 
 happiness. 
 
 The angels in heaven are declared to be “ minis- 
 tering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who 
 shall be heirs of salvation.”” When we try to 
 follow the redeemed children of God in their ex- 
 istence between death and the general resurrection, 
 we wonder if, since they are the elect of God, they 
 have some high task to perform as discarnate souls. 
 If so, what higher ministry than to befriend the 
 ~ souls of men in this present life? We like to think 
 that our loved ones are aware of the events of our 
 life, and in our moments of trial or pain we even 
 comfort ourselves with the thought that we have 
 their help and sympathy. No man who has had 
 the inestimable blessing of the prayers of pious 
 parents cares to think that that ministry comes to 
 an end at death. There is no reason why we 
 should pray for them, save as prayer is an exalted 
 kind of fellowship, but every reason why they 
 should pray for us. ‘The pathetic inscriptions in 
 the Catacombs often give expression to this-simple 
 and yet profound yearning of mourning hearts, for 
 many of the inscriptions come to a close by im- 
 ploring the departed to pray for the living. If the 
 prayers of the righteous avail much in time, there 
 
DEATH AND THE RESURRECTION 125 
 
 is no good reason why the prayers of the righteous ~— 
 
 should not continue to avail when uttered in that 
 world where all is prayer and praise. But, what- 
 ever their estate, we know that they are blessed. 
 
 “We feebly struggle; they in glory shine.” 
 
 Outside of the Scriptures, the rich music of 
 the Shorter Catechism still remains the greatest ut- 
 terance on this subject of the present and the final 
 state of our dead: “ The souls of believers are at 
 
 their death made perfect in holiness and do imme- » 
 diately pass into glory, and their bodies being still | 
 united to Christ, do rest in their graves until the | 
 
 resurrection. At the resurrection, believers being 
 raised up in glory shall be openly acknowledged 
 and acquitted in the day of judgment, and made 
 perfectly blessed to the full enjoying of God to all 
 eternity.” 
 
 At the end of his long roll-call of the heroes of 
 faith, from Abel down to the latest martyr, the 
 author of the Epistle to the Hebrews invites his 
 fellow-disciples to follow in their footsteps, say- 
 ing, ‘Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed 
 about with so great a cloud of witnesses, : 
 let us run with patience the race that is set before 
 us.” 
 nesses” is that they who overcame through faith 
 in past times, watch with an eager sympathy the 
 struggles of those who are still in this world. 
 
 Dives in his distress in the world of the dead 
 
 ee 
 
 The natural interpretation of “ cloud of wit- >. | 
 
- 126 PUTTING ON IMMORALITY 
 
 remembered his five brethren and besought Abra- 
 ham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn them, 
 “lest they also come into this place of torment.” 
 Oh, if the men who have lived in sin and died in 
 unbelief could send back a message to their friends 
 living the same kind of lives in this world, what 
 a message it would be! It would ring with en- 
 treaty and warning, lest the living should share 
 the fate of the dead. 
 
 On the other hand, could the blessed dead send 
 their messages back to us, they would speak of the 
 joy and bliss which now are theirs, and would 
 encourage us ever to seek first the Kingdom of 
 God, ever to be faithful to Christ, to count all 
 things to be loss for the sake of our souls, that we 
 might share with them the inheritance, incor- 
 ruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, re- 
 served in heaven for all those who have overcome 
 through the blood of the Lamb: 
 
 “ Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve, 
 And press with vigor on; 
 A heavenly race demands thy zeal, 
 And an immortal crown. 
 
 “A cloud of witnesses around 
 Hold thee in full survey; 
 Forget the steps already trod, 
 And onward urge thy way.” 
 
VIil 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT 
 
“Tt is the face of the Incarnate God 
 Shall smite thee with that keen and subtle pain; 
 And yet the memory which it leaves will be 
 A sovereign febrifuge to heal the wound; 
 
 When, then (if such thy lot), thou see’st thy Judge, 
 The sight of Him will kindle in thy heart 
 
 All tender, gracious, reverential thoughts, 
 
 Thou wilt be sick with love, and yearn for Him, 
 And feel as though thou couldst but pity Him, 
 That one so sweet should e’er have placed Himself 
 At disadvantage such, as to be used 
 
 So vilely by a being vile as thee. 
 
 There is a piercing in His pensive eyes 
 
 Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee, 
 And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself ; for, though 
 Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinned, 
 As never didst thou feel; and wilt desire 
 
 To slink away, and hide thee from His sight; 
 And yet wilt have a longing, aye to dwell 
 
 Within the beauty of His countenance.” 
 
 —CARDINAL Newman, “ Dream of Gerontius,” 
 
VIII 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT 
 
 f “HERE are three ideas which are common.’ 
 to all men: that there is a God; that man) 
 lives after death; that he will be-judged. 
 
 Man’s expectation of a judgment arises from the 
 
 moral constitution of his nature. A voice of com- 
 
 mandment speaks in his soul—a “Thou Shalt,” 
 and a “ Thou Shalt Not.” The belief in judg- 
 ment to come is but an echo of conscience. Man 
 is the accountable creature. Strip him of this qual- 
 ity and he descends to the brutes of the field. Just 
 as man without moral accountability, and there- 
 fore not subject to a judgment, ceases to be man 
 and becomes brute, so a God who is not a Judge 
 ceases to be God. He is divested of all moral excel- 
 lence. Thus it is that in the Old Testament Scrip- 
 tures God is constantly referred to as the God of 
 judgment. “ Our God shall come and shall not keep 
 silence’ (Psa. 50: 3); “ He shall judge the world 
 with righteousness and the people with his truth” 
 
 (Psa. 96: 13); “ Righteousness and judgment are 
 
 the habitation of his throne” (Psa. 97:2). If 
 
 you take away from God the attribute of judging, 
 
 the throne of His majesty collapses. A belief in 
 129 
 
130 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 God, then, and a belief in judgment are insepara- 
 ble. 
 
 For the sake of clearness, we shall ask ourselves, 
 first, When is the Judgment? and second, What is 
 the Judgment? 
 
 Il. When is the Judgment? 
 
 It is a future judgment. ‘This means that it is 
 distinct from the judgment that men meet in this 
 life. It is often said that men suffer for their 
 sins in this life. ‘The pangs of conscience and re- 
 /morse are, indeed, with some men very terrible. 
 Our punishment is what we are. ‘This has an ele- 
 ment of truth in it and has led men to think that 
 the Biblical references to a judgment in the future 
 are only symbolical descriptions of a process now 
 going on beneath the breast of every man. In the 
 words of Professor Momerie, “ The mind of man 
 is the creator’s Judgment Seat. Everything we do 
 carries with it its own immediate retribution. The 
 judgments of God are continuous, not catastrophic. 
 They are neither more nor less than the reaction 
 of our conduct upon ourselves,” If this be true, 
 of course, there is no need, and therefore no likeli- 
 hood, of a future judgment, unless men are to go 
 on living just as they have been living here. But 
 is it true? Does everything we do carry with it 
 immediate retribution? If men are being pun- 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 131 
 
 ished all the time in this life, do they themselves 
 know that they are being judged and punished? 
 It is impossible to believe such a thing. 
 
 Nothing could be plainer than that some men 
 suffer no immediate consequences of their mis- 
 deeds, either in mind or in body. We speak of 
 conscience, but it is the righteous, the Christian 
 man who suffers most from thé pangs of con- 
 science, whereas the hard-hearted, cruel, dishonest, 
 murderous or lecherous wretch may not suffer at 
 all. The history of men and nations does afford 
 many striking instances of punishment following 
 upon transgression. But nothing could be more 
 evident than that the universal, immediate and 
 visible punishment of evil in time is not a part of 
 God’s plan for the world. But the Judge of all 
 the earth must do right. God must judge, and 
 therefore there must be judgment hereafter. Our 
 hearts long for some greater and more unquestion- 
 able unveiling of the pillars of God’s throne than 
 the history of the world affords. 
 
 Those great masterpieces of literature whose 
 theme is the reaction of judgment and which show 
 to us the evil-doer discovered, found guilty and 
 punished, do not describe the universal condition 
 in this world: they only describe in time what must 
 take place hereafter. Are we to think that Nero 
 and St. Paul, Jezebel and the Virgin Mary, had 
 
182 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 all the rewards and all the punishments which God 
 will appoint in this life, and that in the life to 
 come they will fare alike? Every nobler instinct 
 of man affirms that if there is a process of judg- 
 ment in God’s plan it must work, not only partially 
 and temporally and secretly in this life, but here- 
 after. 
 
 “In the corrupted currents of this world 
 Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, 
 And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself 
 Buys out the law; but ’tis not so above; 
 
 There is no shuffling, there the action hes 
 In its true nature and we ourselves compell’d 
 
 Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults 
 To give in evidence.” 
 
 It is a definite event, a fixed period of time in the / 
 future. It is the Day of the Lord. Paul told the | 
 
 Athenians that God appointed-a@ time in which He 
 will judge the world with righteousness_by the 
 Man whom He_hath chosen. ‘The time of the 
 judgment i 1S related to other events in such a way 
 as makes it impossible to think that the judgment 
 is a long process of the future. The effects of the 
 judgment are indeed going on forever, but not the 
 judgment itself. In the parable of the tares, Jesus 
 said, “ Let both grow together until the harvest. 
 
 The harvest is the end of the world; and 
 the reapers are the angels. . . . So shall it be 
 
 Ms 
 | 
 4 
 
 in the end of this world. The Son of man shall. 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 133 
 
 send forth his angels, and they shall gather out 
 of his kingdom all things that~offend, and them 
 which do iniquity’ (Matt. 138: 30, 39-41). St. 
 Paul said, “ I know whom I have believed and am - 
 persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have | 
 committed unto him against that day” (2 Tim. | 
 1:12). Passages like these indicate not a pro- 
 tracted dispensation but a limited period. More- 
 over, the day of judgment is connected with other 
 events which cannot by their very nature be age- 
 long processes. ‘These are, the appearing of Christ, 
 the resurrection of the dead, and the end of the 
 world. I do not insist that it is a day of twenty- 
 four hours, but a definite period, limited in time, 
 a turning-point in the affairs of the human species, 
 a winding up of man’s history, an end to the age 
 of grace and repentance. Men may object to such 
 a catastrophic happening and sudden intervention. 
 But what is the alternative? The alternative is 
 that human affairs are to ebb and flow forever as 
 they do at the present time. This is inconceivable. 
 The time of the judgment is uncertain, but is 
 connected with the Resurrection and the Second — 
 Coming of Christ. The judgment-is the last of a A 
 trinity of grand events-at the end of the world. — 
 The first of these is the second advent of Christ, | 
 the second the resurrection of the ‘dead, and the 
 third the general judgment and the final ‘separa- 
 
1384 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 tion of the good from the evil. In the Apostles’ 
 Creed we confess, “‘ From thence He shall come 
 again to judge both the quick and the dead.” In 
 the parable of the wheat and the tares the final 
 separation between the good and the evil 1s to take 
 place at the end of the world when the Son of man 
 shall send forth His angels to sever the wicked 
 from among the just. ‘‘ The Son of man shall 
 come in the glory of his Father with his angels; 
 and then he shall reward. every man according to 
 his works” (Matt. 16:27). “ When the Son of 
 man shall come in his glory . . . before him 
 shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate 
 them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his 
 sheep from the goats” (Matt. 25:31, 32). 
 “Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord 
 come, who both will bring to light the hidden things 
 of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels 
 of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise 
 of God” (1 Cor. 4:5). “The Lord Jesus shall 
 be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, 
 in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know 
 not God” (2 Thess. 1:7, 8). ‘ The Lord Jesus 
 Christ who shall judge the quick and the dead at 
 his appearing” (2 Tim. 4:1). ‘ Marvel not at 
 this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that 
 are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall 
 come forth; they that have done good, unto the 
 
 EEE ee eee eee ee ee ee ee eee 
 
 ee 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 135 
 
 resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, 
 unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5: 28, 
 29). “The dead were judged out of those things 
 which were written in the books, according to their 
 works. And the sea gave up the dead which were 
 in it: and death and hell delivered up the dead 
 which were in them” (Rev. 20: 12, 18). 
 
 These three events, the Second Coming of 
 Christ, the Resurrection, and the Judgment, are 
 linked together in the Scriptures. The Resurrec- 
 tion and the Judgment are sequels to the Second 
 Coming of Christ, and since we do not-know when 
 that will be we do not know when the judgment ' 
 
 _will be. But that it will come is as sure as the — 
 coming of Christ. ‘The present age and dispensa- | 
 tion of Divine grace comes to a close at the judg- 
 ment. Then men receive their final destiny of 
 happiness or woe. 
 
 Il. What is the Judgment? 
 
 The subjects of the judgment are to be men and 
 angels. The evil angels are spoken of as delivered 
 “into chains of darkness, to be reserved tinto-judg-— 
 ment” (2 Pet. 2:4). The evil spirits are repre- 
 sented in the Gospels as saying to Jesus, “Art thou 
 come hither to torment us before the time?.”. 
 (Matt. 8: 29). | ! 
 
 But in the Scriptures, those most frequently” 
 
136 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 mentioned as the subjects of judgment are-men. 
 “ He shall judge the quick and the dead,” all who 
 are alive on the earth at the coming of Christ and 
 all the generations that have perished, or that shall 
 yet perish before He comes. “I saw the dead, 
 small and great, stand before God” (Rev. 20: 12). 
 The scene is too tremendous even for the imagina- 
 tion. ‘The small and the great, all ranks, will be 
 there, reduced to the same level before the great 
 white throne. On the field of Gettysburg, a Union’ 
 officer bent over a desperately wounded Confed-! 
 erate and asked him what his rank was. “N ever) 
 mind,’ said the dying officer, “I shall soon be) 
 where there is no rank.’’ King and peasant, phi- 
 losopher and boor, millionaire and beggar, by a 
 common moral interest shall stand together on 
 the same footing. Writing in The Spectator, Num-_ 
 ber 26, on Westminster Abbey, Addison said: 
 “When I see kings lying by those who deposed 
 them, when I consider holy men that divided the 
 world with their contests and disputes placed side 
 by side, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on 
 the little competitions, factions and debates of man- 
 kind. When I read the several dates on the tombs, 
 of some that died yesterday and some six hundred 
 years ago, I consider that great day when we shall 
 all of us be contemporaries and make our appear- 
 ance together.” 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 137 
 
 “You are fond of spectacles!” cried the stern: 
 Tertullian. ‘Expect the greatest of all spectacles, _ 
 the last and eternal judgment of the.universe! ” \ 
 Yes, what a spectacle it will be! The quick and © 
 the dead! All nations shall be gathered before 
 Him, the nations of the living, the multitudinous 
 nations of the dead. The graves shall be opened 
 and send forth their dim host; and the sea shall 
 give up its dead to be judged. All the children of 
 Adam will stand in serried ranks to hear their final 
 sentence. Our dazed and staggered minds ask 
 “How?” How can this inconceivable host be 
 gathered together at one_time and at_one~place? 
 That we leave to God who made them and who 
 shall judge them all. It is not a man who 
 will gather them and judge them, but God their 
 Rreaton, vc Me is 
 
 Christ is to be the Judge. “It is he which was 
 ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and 
 dead” (Acts 10:42). ‘We must all appear be- 
 fore the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10). 
 “He hath appointed a day, in the which he will 
 judge the world in righteousness by that man whom | 
 he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assur- | 
 ance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from | 
 the dead” (Acts 17:31). ‘There is something in- — 
 expressibly solemn and yet tender in the knowledge 
 that Christ is to be our Judge; He who bore our 
 
188 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 nature and was the Son of man as well as the Son 
 of God; He who hung bleeding and dying on the 
 cursed tree, making satisfaction for sin, opening a 
 way of reconciliation to God, will examine and 
 sentence every human soul. His mercy is infinite 
 and infinite is His justice. Condemned and re- 
 jected by the world, Christ shall sit enthroned on 
 the seat of universal judgment. 
 
 The ground of the judgment is to be human 
 conduct. We shall give an account of the deeds 
 done iti the body. We are to be judged according 
 to our works. Human conduct includes the atti- 
 tude men have taken toward Jesus Christ.” The 
 law of God is the standard for all judgment. Yet 
 men have had different revelations of that law. 
 The nations who lived before Christ came and 
 who had no knowledge of the law given to Israel 
 are not to escape judgment, for they are account- 
 able. “These, having not the law, are a law unto 
 themselves, which show the work of the law written 
 in their hearts, their conscience also bearing wit- 
 ness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or 
 else excusing one another,-in-the day when God 
 shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ ac- 
 cording to my gospel” (Rom. 2: 14-16). Men 
 who never heard of Christ will be judged by the~ 
 light that God has. given. them .of.-His-require-~ 
 ments. Jews will be judged by the law given to 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 139 
 
 Moses. Christians by the attitude they have taken 
 toward Jesus Christ. 
 
 In Revelation 20: 12, St. John speaks of the 
 books being opened. No one imagines that these 
 are real books. What this symbol, which appears 
 in Daniel also, tells us is that God has at hand 
 an unerring transcript of the conduct of every 
 soul. One of the favourite sayings of Jesus was 
 this: “ There is nothing covered, that shall not-be 
 ‘revealed; neither hid that shall not be known. 
 Therefore, whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness 
 shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have. 
 spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed 
 upon the housetops”” (Luke 12:2, 3). God is to 
 judge the secrets of the heart. The judgment will 
 create nothing. What it does is to reveal to God 
 the Judge, to every man himself, to his fellow- 
 creatures, each man’s soul. As mountains seen in 
 the distance have soft and beautiful lines~and-re- 
 veal nothing of their sharp angularities and rugged 
 rocks, so our transgressions seen through the glass 
 of our retrospection lose their harshness and ugli-' 
 ness and take on a new appearance. Sin loses its 
 hideousness when the memory of it is dim. We 
 do not see and appreciate the terrible violation of 
 God’s law that lies beneath every sin. But in the 
 judgment, and before the Judge Himself, our _ 
 memory of all our sins will be refreshed and we 
 
140 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 shall behold them—as~God Himself sees them. 
 Whatever sentence is passed by the Judge will be 
 approved fully by conscience. Indeed, the sentence 
 will be that which each man, standing before God, 
 will have passed upon himself. Christ will con- 
 demn none who has not condemned himself. 
 
 The most difficult problem of the Judgment is 
 that of the relation of believers to it. The most 
 definite teaching of the New Testament is that we 
 are saved by our faith in Christ, and not by our 
 works. Christ died for our sins and rose again for 
 our justification. So preéminent is this idea in 
 the Christian’s creed that for a man to claim sal- — 
 vation on the ground of his own works is to deny 
 that he is a Christian. But the question arises in 
 our minds, If a Christian is saved by his faith in 
 Jesus Christ, and if an unbeliever is condemned 
 already, not because of his evil works, but because © 
 of his unbelief, what is the meaning of their ap- 
 pearing before the judgment seat and giving an — 
 account of the deeds done in the body? Why go 
 through the form of examining into their conduct? 
 
 Every thoughtful Christian has, I am sure, felt 
 the difficulty of accepting in the case of the Chris- 
 tian, or of any man who heard the Gospel, both 
 principles of judgment, works and faith. ‘The re- 
 lationship of these two principles is one of those — 
 mysteries which God has not yet revealed. But — 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 141 
 
 this much is shown us: that the Christian is ac- 
 cepted or condemned according to the attitude he 
 has taken toward Jesus Christ. ‘Under the Gos- 
 pel the special ground of condemnation is unbelief 
 in Christ, and the ground of acceptance faith in 
 Christ. St. Paul, looking forward to the judg- 
 ment, based all his hopes upon what Christ had 
 done for him and-his_faith in Christ, not on his 
 long record of conscientious living. “I know 
 whom I have. believed and.am_ persuaded.that he | 
 is able to keep that which I have committed unto 
 him against that day” (2 Tim. 1:12). There \ 
 every Christian casts the anchor of his hope in 
 Christ, not in self: 
 
 “Nothing in my hand I bring, 
 Simply to Thy Cross I cling.” 
 
 The intimation of the New Testament is very 
 clear as to the presence of Christians in the 
 Judgment, as well as unbelievers and those who 
 are judged by the law of conscience or the law of 
 Moses. We shall all appear before the judgment 
 seat of Christ. Since God has so appointed this 
 judgment for Christians, it must serve some great 
 end. It may be that the revelation of the judg- 
 ment, showing the believer the enormity of his sin 
 and his desperate need of a Redeemer, will add 
 to the joy and rapture of the saints in heaven. 
 
142 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 The more a believer realizes that from which 
 Christ has saved him, the deeper will be his joy in 
 heaven with the redeemed, when they sing their 
 hymns of thanksgiving to the Lamb which was 
 slain. It is possible that in the judgment for 
 Christians there may be pain and shame; but if so 
 it will minister to their eternal felicity in heaven. 
 It will give a richer note to their song when they 
 sing, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to re- 
 ceive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, 
 and honour, and glory, and blessing ” (Rev. 5: 12). 
 Of this, at least, we may be sure: The Judgment 
 cannot hurt nor harm the believer. “His faith and 
 love are in Christ, and love casteth out fear. The 
 Lord knoweth them thatare His. 
 
 In one of his letters, Luther tells of a dream in 
 which Satan came to him and said, “ I have looked ; 
 into the Book of Judgment and have seen the black F 
 record of thy sins.” As he named over his of- 
 fences, Luther was overwhelmed with despair. 
 Then he bethought himself and answered, “I, too, | 
 have gazed into the Book of Judgment and as | | 
 thou sayest my sins are all recorded there: but I} 
 saw one entry to my credit which thou hast over- © 
 looked ; namely, ‘ The blood of Jesus Christ cleans- 
 eth this man from all sin.’ That; and that alone, 
 is the believer’s trust. 
 
 What was the Book of Life which John saw 
 
THE LAST JUDGMENT 148 
 
 opened in the day of judgment in addition to the 
 other books? Does it mean the book of believers, 
 the book to which Paul refers when he mentions 
 his friends at Philippi and others ‘“‘ whose names 
 are in the book of life” (Phil. 4:3)? Perhaps 
 so. ‘That there is such a book, that is, that the 
 names of believers are all known to God, and that 
 all true believers, forgiven and saved by the blood 
 of Christ shed for the remission of sin, shall be ~ 
 openly acknowledged and acquitted in the Day of 
 Judgment, is the reliance of the Christian man. 
 In the Dream of Gerontius, Cardinal Newman 
 follows the passage of a soul into the unseen and 
 imagines its sentiments as it approaches the Judg- 
 ment Seat. The soul says to its conducting angel: 
 
 “ Dear Angel, say, . 
 Why have I now no fear at meeting Him? 
 Mtong my earthly life, the thought of death 
 And judgment was to me most terrible. 
 I had it aye before me, and I saw 
 The Judge severe e’en in the Crucifix. 
 Now that the hour is come, my fear 1s fled; 
 And at this balance of my destiny 
 Now close upon me, I can look forward 
 With a serenest joy.” 
 
 The angel then explains to the soul the reason 
 for his joy and peace, and how it is that in the 
 judgment it feels no dread and fears no doom. 
 
144 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 “Tt 1s because 
 
 Then thou didst fear, that now thou dost not 
 fear 
 
 Thou hast forestalled the agony, and so 
 For thee the bitterness of death 1s passed. 
 Also, because already in thy soul 
 The judgment is begun. The day of doom, 
 One and the same for the collected world, 
 That solemn consummation for all flesh, 
 Is, in the case of each, anticipate 
 Upon his death; and, as the last great day 
 In the particular judgment is rehearsed, 
 So now, too, ere thou comest to the throne 
 A presage falls upon thee, as a ray 
 Straight from the Judge, expressive of thy lot. 
 That calm and joy uprising in thy soul 
 Is firstfrwit to thee of thy recompense 
 And heaven begun.” 
 
IX 
 FUTURE RETRIBUTION 
 
“Though the mills of God grind slowly, 
 Yet they grind exceeding small; 
 Though with patience He stands waiting, 
 With exactness grinds He all.” 
 
 —LONGFELLOW, Translations from 
 the German. 
 
 “ Death 1s struck, and nature quaking; 
 All creation is awaking, 
 To its Judge an answer making. 
 
 “Lo, the book, exactly worded, 
 Wherein all hath been recorded: 
 Thence shall judgment be awarded. 
 
 “When the Judge His seat attaineth, 
 And each hidden deed arraigneth, 
 Nothing unavenged remaineth.” 
 
 —THOMAS OF CELANO. 
 
IX 
 FUTURE RETRIBUTION 
 
 € A HE doctrine of future punishment is not 
 
 something upon which we stumble in the 
 
 Bible, but which is out of keeping with 
 all thought and experience. On the contrary, it is 
 consistent with man’s convictions and experience. 
 The great dramas and novels all have running 
 through them the strain of punishment, not dis- 
 ciplinary and reformatory punishment, but burning 
 and consuming penal and vindicatory punishments, 
 punishments to satisfy the law, to avenge the spirit 
 of justice, and not to reform the evil-doer. Would 
 it be possible to have a great book in which this 
 note had not been struck? ‘Take George Eliot’s 
 Romola. ‘The great tale reaches its climax when 
 the wronged and betrayed and disowned old father 
 and guardian, Baldasarre, wanders by the river, 
 waiting, waiting, all the light of reason quenched 
 by his wrongs and sufferings, save the one ele- 
 mental instinct of justice and revenge. The body 
 of Tito, escaping from the mob on the bridge, is 
 cast up on the bank at the old man’s feet. Like 
 a panther he leaps upon the half-conscious man, 
 fiercely clutching his throat. Thus they die to- 
 
 gether. Justice had brought Tito to the bar. The 
 147 
 
148. PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 reader heaves a sigh of satisfaction, for he realizes 
 that what something deep down in his heart de- 
 manded as the proper sequel to the tale has come 
 to pass. The chapter concludes with these words: 
 “Who shall put his finger on the work of justice 
 and say, ‘Itis there’? Justice is like the Kingdom 
 of God—it is not without us as a fact; it is within 
 us as a great yearning.” 
 
 I cite the above incidents to show that while the 
 doctrine of future punishment has on one side 
 many difficulties, and there is much in our nature 
 that rises in revolt against it, it has also a deep 
 agreement with the noblest instincts of our moral 
 nature. We are mistaken when we attempt to deal 
 with the question of eternal retribution as if it 
 were a matter which could be separated from the 
 whole subject of evil and its punishment. What 
 we are dealing with is the highest and final expres- 
 sion of retribution for sin. In the opening verses 
 of the sixth chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, 
 the author gives a brief summary of Christian 
 truth. This is the order of his enumeration of the 
 doctrines: repentance from dead works, faith to- 
 ward God, baptism, ordination, the resurrection of 
 the dead, “and of eternal judgment.” Eternal 
 judgment is named as the final disclosure in God’s 
 redemptive plan. Whether we like to or not, no 
 honest-minded man can call himself a Christian, or 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 149 
 
 deal in any intelligent way with the Christian 
 revelation as we have it in the Holy Scriptures, 
 without coming face to face with the definite teach- , 
 ing that there comes a day when Almighty God 
 will show the holiness of His being by an irrevo-. 
 cable sentence of punishment upon sinful men. | 
 
 Future retribution is taught by Jesus Christ. — 
 The teaching of eternal life in Christ is a theme | 
 developed by the-apostle of love, St. John, The 
 great foundation fact of the Christian religion, 
 Justification by Faith, is the burden of St. Paul’s 
 teaching. But when it comes to the doctrine of 
 hell, the one to whom we turn for information is _ 
 Jesus Himself. What did Jesus teach? Both by — 
 implication and by direct utterance He taught fu- 
 ture punishment. Jesus had much to say about 
 this present life and its duties; but always His 
 thought is centered upon duty as it is related to 
 destiny, to life hereafter. His words have a sol- 
 emn echo to them, for He speaks as one who stands 
 under the cope of life to come. 
 
 Take His parables: Out of thirty-six parables, .// 
 twelve of them leave men judged, condemned and | | 
 
 sentenced for their sins. From that it is evident 
 that Jesus has in mind something more than the 
 misfortunes and punishments for sin which may 
 fall upon men in this world. In the one terrific 
 parable, where He gives us a brief but piercing 
 
150 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 apocalypse of the conditions of men hereafter, the 
 wicked man is shown in unquestionable torment, 
 a torment that cannot be alleviated and that can- 
 not be terminated. 
 
 The gulf between Lazarus and Dives is unbridge- 
 able. Jesus.teaches that at the resurrection some 
 shall come forth to the resurrection of life and 
 
 some to the resurrection of judgment. What else — 
 
 can He mean by a resurrection of judgment than 
 that the judgment will be followed by punish- 
 ment? He describes men who have turned too 
 late to God, after a long period of indifference and 
 neglect, as vainly knocking at the door where the 
 feast is held and seeking admission. ‘The door is 
 shut against them. He told of men who built a 
 house on the sand. When the wind and the rains 
 and floods beat against the house it fell, and great 
 was the fall thereof. Surely He there teaches the 
 possibility of a great and irrevocable tragedy over- 
 taking a human soul. He represents God as say- 
 ing, “Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity.” 
 He said the world was like a vast harvest field, 
 where the wheat and tares grow together until the 
 judgment, where the tares, which He describes as 
 
 the wicked, shall be separated from the good, and — 
 
 cast into the furnace of fire. He warns certain 
 classes of men that they are in danger of the fire 
 of hell. He pleaded with men to make every kind 
 
 itt, Fe 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 151 
 
 of sacrifice, the eye, the right arm, the right foot, 
 whatever was precious to them, rather than be cast 
 into hell, where the worm dieth not and the fire is 
 not quenched. He told them not to fear the opin- 
 ions and the persecutions of men, but to fear God 
 only, who is able to destroy both body and soul 
 in hell. 
 
 All this He summed up in His last public teach- | 
 ing: when sitting on the Mount of Olives, He 
 drew His picture of the Last Judgment, when God 
 says to one class of men, the company on His 
 left hand, ‘‘ Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire 
 prepared for the devil and his angels. And these — 
 shall go away into eternal punishment.” 
 
 At this point a question may be in your mind: 
 If Jesus thus fully and repeatedly taught future 
 retribution, upon what ground do so many persons 
 calmly set aside the teaching? Upon three 
 grounds: First, an effort is made to evacuate the 
 teaching of serious import by reminding us that 
 Jesus is speaking in parables and in metaphors. 
 When He speaks of fire, of the undying worm, of 
 gnashing of teeth, Jesus is employing metaphors, 
 symbols. Yes, they are figures of speech but fig- 
 ures that shake the soul! Whatever the punish- 
 ment to which Jesus referred, it certainly is no 
 light and dismissible thing if it has to be deseribed 
 
 and illustrated in such fearful metaphors—fire un- 
 
152 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 quenched, the worm undying, the outer darkness, 
 the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. 
 We have in no degree lessened the solemn import 
 of the words of Jesus by saying that they are 
 figures of speech. 
 
 Second, .an effort is made to empty the teachings 
 of Jesus of their solemnity by attempting to prove 
 that the word “ eternal,’ everlasting, is a mistrans- 
 lation. It is claimed that the word “ aionos ” does 
 not mean everlasting, but zonian, connected with, 
 or lasting through an age. It is pointed out that 
 in the Septuagint, or Greek translation of the Old 
 Testament, from which most of the New Testa- 
 ment citations are made, the same word, aionos, 
 is applied to states and orders that we know were 
 not everlasting, the gift of the land of Canaan, the 
 kingdom of David, the priesthood of Aaron, the 
 temple at Jerusalem. In the New Testament it is 
 declared that the word meaning “ endless ” occurs 
 just twice (1 Tim. 1:4; Hebrews 7: 16) and that 
 in these places there is no reference whatever to 
 future punishment. Dean Farrar, whose writings 
 did so much to spread the impression that Chris- 
 tianity was mistaken as to the doctrine of future 
 punishment, in his Eternal Mercy lightly dis-— 
 misses what he calls the “ battered and aged argu- 
 ment” of St. Augustine, about the absurdity of 
 making, in Christ’s picture of the judgment, eonian 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 153 
 
 life for the righteous, mean endless life and bliss, 
 but zonian punishment for the wicked a soon-to- 
 be-terminated punishment. But this “aged and 
 battered argument ”’ still holds water, because it is 
 an argument not taken from etymology, but from 
 common sense. The misery of the one and the 
 bliss of the other must be coextensive. But the 
 most effective way to deal with this effort to evacu- 
 ate the teachings of Jesus of their solemn import 
 is to show that even if the punishment to which 
 Jesus refers is an age-long punishment, and not 
 eternal punishment, still the teaching is unimpaired, 
 and still it tells men of the “terror of the Lord” 
 and ought to persuade them to repentance. Grant 
 for the moment that this punishment upon the 1m- 
 penitent is to last, not forever, but only through 
 “ages of ages”: Have you plucked from such a 
 woe its sting? The ons of Scripture, as referred 
 to by St. Paul, are vast periods of time in which 
 the Divine purpose works its sovereign will. What 
 comfort or consolation do you bring to me as a 
 mortal, finite man by telling me that I am to be 
 punished through zeons, ages of the ages, but not 
 forever? How can I discriminate between a pro- 
 longed purgatory of, say, ten or a hundred thou- 
 sand years, and endless punishment? ‘The great 
 question is not any such breaking up of eternity 
 into sections of time, but, Will God punish here- 
 
154 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 after? Does the Bible, Christ, Christianity, so 
 teach? 
 
 A third escape from the teaching of Jesus on 
 this subject is sought in a frank denial of His in- 
 fallibility. ‘This was the position taken by Theo- 
 dore Parker. He acknowledged, as it seems to 
 me every candid man must acknowledge, that 
 Christ taught endless punishment, but makes this 
 teaching a proof of His imperfection, that Jewish 
 prejudices still lingered about Him. ‘This brings 
 us squarely up with the issue: Christ an infallible 
 teacher, AND the doctrine of future punishment; 
 or, Christ a fallible teacher, a good but mistaken 
 man, AND no future punishment. Before we dis- 
 miss the doctrine of eternal punishment, we must 
 first make up our mind that we are ready to dis- 
 miss Jesus Christ. 
 
 Eternal punishment is an inescapable inference 
 from the plan of salvation. God is the author of 
 eternal salvation. The angel said, “Thou shalt 
 call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people 
 from their sins.” Eternal life and happiness are 
 granted to those who are saved by faith in Christ. 
 He died for sinners. He gave His life a ransom 
 for many. Men who believe and are saved have 
 life eternal. The plain inference from all this is 
 that if there is a heaven, there must be a hell; and 
 if there is eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ, 
 
 . 
 ] 
 if 
 
 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 155 
 
 there must be eternal death without Christ. In 
 short, if men are saved, there must be some real 
 fate from which they are saved. Repentance and 
 faith in Christ and His sacrifice for sin are de- 
 clared to be necessary unto salvation, but they are 
 not necessary if men can do without faith and 
 Christ. What is the meaning of eternal life and 
 all its blessings, the Son of God dying on the Cross 
 to secure it for us, and angels rejoicing in the sal- 
 vation of one soul, unless there is a fate for men 
 which is the very opposite of eternal life and its 
 joys unspeakable? 
 
 Thus, even if the Bible had not a single word in 
 it about hell, about future punishment, the common 
 ‘sense inference from its teaching about eternal 
 salvation would be that there is a contrasting and 
 opposing state, eternal loss and death. Sin is al- 
 ways represented in the Bible as the worst thing, 
 and which will be visited with the worst punish- 
 ments. On the one side, then, a great salvation, 
 won through the agony and death and intercession 
 of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the curse and 
 woe of sin. Thus, if there is no hell, no future 
 and eternal punishment upon sin, then Christianity 
 is a costly and tremendous remedy, but an unneces- 
 sary one, for man did not require it, and will be 
 saved without it. Every Christian sermon and 
 prayer implies, logically, future punishment. If 
 
156 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 not, then let us be honest, and abandon these names 
 of our faith, Saviour, Redeemer, Forgiveness, 
 Propitiation, Justification, Eternal Life. The 
 whole Christian revelation is reduced to a mean- 
 ingless absurdity if its great assumption, the lost 
 and sinful estate of man, his sorrow and misery 
 here, and his misery and woe hereafter, is aban- 
 doned. 
 
 Let us now consider some of the proposed ways 
 of disposing of the wicked other than that of the. 
 plan of Christianity by eternal punishment. One 
 way is by annihilation. Advocates of this plan 
 say that immortality is not natural to mankind, 
 but the gift of Christ to redeemed men. Because 
 of the incarnation and the resurrection of Christ, 
 all men will be raised up in the general resurrec- 
 tion. But only the righteous and the believing 
 shall live forever. The wicked shall be judged, 
 condemned, and destroyed, literally put out of ex- 
 istence. In this way men seek to preserve their 
 respect for the justice of God and their conviction 
 as to the guilt of sin, and, at the same time, re- 
 lieve themselves of the burden of contemplating 
 man forever punished. We wonder if a soul could 
 be destroyed. Would God Himself destroy a soul, 
 any more than He could or would force the will of 
 man? ‘To me the destruction, annihilation, of a 
 soul is unthinkable. 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 157 
 
 But, granted that it were possible, would this sort 
 of punishment be any relief, be any less solemn 
 than the other? As living creatures in this world, 
 there is nothing from which we so much shrink as 
 physical death, for it is the annihilation of our 
 body. Would not the soul shrink from annihila- 
 tion as the most awful of fates? Can we even 
 imagine or picture to ourselves what such a thing 
 would ber Until we can do this, and certainly 
 no finite man can, we dare not say that such a way 
 of disposing of the wicked is preferable to that of 
 eternal punishment. So far as the Scriptures go, 
 all the references to the punishments of the im- 
 penitent are of such a nature as cannot be applied 
 to a state of annihilation. The figures employed 
 by Jesus—fire, worm, darkness, and wailing and 
 gnashing of teeth—have no meaning if punish- 
 ment is annihilation. The parallel of Matthew 
 25: 46, everlasting life and everlasting punishment, 
 cannot hold at all, if the fate of the wicked is 
 cessation of being. 
 
 Another suggested solution is by restoration. 
 The belief in the restoration of all souls to har-— 
 mony with God includes a belief in what is called 
 a Second Probation. Men who have rejected the 
 Gospel and died impenitent in this life will have 
 another chance hereafter. The Scriptural ground 
 for such a hope is certainly very slender. It con- 
 
158 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 sists in the obscure passages in 1 Peter 3: 19 and 
 4:6; “ Being put to death in the flesh, but made — 
 alive in the spirit; in which also he went and 
 preached unto the spirits in prison, that aforetime 
 were disobedient, when the long suffering of God 
 waited in the days of Noah”’; also, ‘‘ For unto this 
 end was the Gospel preached even to the dead.” 
 The interpretation of the passage hinges upon the 
 word “spirit.” If it means that Christ in His 
 spirit, as distinct from His bodily presence, after 
 His crucifixion, went and preached to the ante- 
 diluvians, who had disobeyed the preaching of — 
 Noah, then it does seem to hold out a second hope, 
 at least, for these antediluvians. But may it mean 
 that Christ, put to death in the flesh, was made 
 alive in the Spirit, the Spirit of grace and power, 
 the Holy Spirit, by which, long before His in- 
 carnation, He had preached to the men of Noah’s 
 time, who rejected the preaching? If so, there is 
 no intimation of a second probation in the passage. 
 Certainly it is a slender ground on which to build 
 a hope that is contrary to the whole drift of the 
 Gospel message, with its yearning earnestness and 
 its constant insistence upon the choices and acts 
 of this present life. 
 
 The saying of Jesus about the sin against the 
 Holy Ghost, not to be forgiven in this world nor 
 in the world to come; His comment upon Judas, 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 159 
 
 “Good were it for him that he had not been born,” 
 and the solemn note of finality in Christ’s descrip- 
 tion of the last Judgment are, to say the least, very 
 difficult to fit into a plan of post-mortem evangeli- 
 zation. Christ says, “And the door was shut.” 
 There is no hint that it will be opened again.. 
 
 The Scriptures describe the mediatorial kingdom 
 of Christ as coming to an end. When it does 
 come to an end, all hope and possibility of repent- 
 ance must cease. Those who faintly trust the 
 “larger hope” say that that mediatorial kingdom 
 of Christ will not come to an end until every lost 
 soul has been brought home. Every real Chris- 
 tian would like to see such a consummation. But 
 there is a difference between the desire for a thing 
 and the belief that it will come to pass. God 
 WOULD have ALL men to be saved. But in the reve- 
 lation He has given us, does He teach that all men 
 will be saved? ‘The passages of Scripture usually 
 cited by the advocates of universal restoration of 
 all souls to God are the following: Acts 3: 21: 
 “Whom the heavens must receive until the times 
 of the restitution of all things”; Romans 5: 18: 
 “So then as through one trespass the judgment 
 came upon all men to condemnation, even so 
 through one act of righteousness the free gift came 
 upon all men to justification of life”; Romans 
 8: 20: “ The creation was subjected to vanity, not 
 
160 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected 
 it, in hope that the creation also itself shall be de- 
 livered from the bondage of corruption”; Colos- 
 sians 1: 20: “ Through him to reconcile all things 
 unto himself—whether things upon the earth or 
 things in the heavens”; Philippians 2: 10: “ That 
 at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of 
 things in heaven and things in earth, and things 
 under the earth, and every tongue confess that 
 Jesus Christ is Lord”; 1 Timothy 2:4: “ Who 
 would have all men to be saved and come to the 
 knowledge of the truth.” 
 
 A grand note of universal restitution seems to 
 echo in these passages. But when we compare 
 Scripture with Scripture, when we look with awe 
 upon the dying agony of Christ, when we take into 
 consideration the awful power of the human heart 
 to reject the love of God, we sadly, but decisively, 
 conclude that the restitution of all things does not 
 include universal salvation. If every knee is to 
 bow and every tongue confess, it must mean the 
 honour paid to Christ by all the redeemed; if God 
 would have all men to be saved and come to the 
 knowledge of the truth, we must understand “ not 
 the will of efficient purpose, but of benevolent de- 
 sire, as shown in provision, plan and arrange- 
 ments.’ I know that there are many devout souls 
 who, in spite of the plain drift of the Scriptural 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 161 
 
 teachings and the implications of the whole plan 
 of salvation, indulge a faint hope that in some 
 way all souls will be saved. ‘The darkness into 
 which they pass at death, or at the general resur- 
 rection and judgment, is not a final and unrelieved 
 darkness of unending separation from God, but a 
 limited and penitential night, which shall issue in 
 the morning of restoration and salvation a dark- 
 ness like that of Peter when he went out into the 
 night and wept bitterly, but returned at length to 
 Christ, to love and serve Him forevermore. 
 Impenitent sinners shall, indeed, weep and wail, 
 but it will be the beginning of a process of 
 purification and reclamation, and not of final 
 doom. In our human ignorance of the whole 
 mind of God, each one of us could wish that such 
 a hope were well founded. For myself, I do not 
 believe it to be consistent with the revelation God 
 has granted unto us. It is often said that the 
 keener judgments of life to come, the searching 
 touch of a pain that is both penal and disciplinary, 
 will produce a penitence which earthly experiences 
 and opportunities could not produce. Thus, by a 
 prolonged purgatory, all souls will repent and be 
 saved. But would a penitence educed in that way 
 be a real penitence? Would it have any moral 
 worth? Would man’s will have any part in such a 
 penitence? In the words of Thomas Selby, 
 
162 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 “Devils and angels would join in shouts of de- 
 rision at a penitence with no will in it.” 
 
 But some men will say, even if the Bible does 
 teach it, and even if it is an inescapable inference 
 from a plan of salvation, still such a fate for the 
 . wicked is inconsistent. with the character of God, — 
 His justice and His love. Let us see. Is it in 
 _ consistent with God’s justice? The judge of all 
 : the earth must do right. All agree to this. Can 
 _ God thus punish the impenitent and do right? The 
 _ whole objection is based on the idea that eternal 
 punishment is a penalty disproportionate to the of- 
 - fense, the sin of man. What does sin deserve? 
 What penalty, what degree of punishment, would 
 you suggest as proportionate to it? The only 
 measure that we have of sin, aside from some of 
 the effects that we see in time, is, first, the penalty 
 decreed against it, eternal death, and second, the 
 costly remedy that was devised by God to pay the 
 price of sin and rescue man from its curse and 
 condemnation. We all know what that price was. 
 It is only when we stand apart in Gethsemane and 
 behold the Son of God in His agony, sweating, as 
 it were, great drops of blood, and when we see 
 Him in the darkness of Calvary crying out in the 
 final hour, “My God, why hast thou forsaken 
 me!” that we begin to get an adequate idea of 
 what sin is and what sin deserves. If the penalty 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 163 
 
 upon sin was too great, then the remedy for it was 
 too costly. If you pull down one stone of Chris- 
 tian truth, the whole structure must collapse. Had 
 there been no Gethsemane and no Calvary, I could 
 not accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. But 
 when I behold the Son of God on Calvary for my 
 sins, I am ready to own that though clouds and 
 darkness are round about Him, righteousness and 
 judgment are the habitation of His throne. 
 
 The revelation of the fact of eternal retribution, 
 like everything else in God’s plan, is not without 
 benefit to mankind, though it puts a stop to mercy 
 to the individual. Men are warned and persuaded 
 by the declaration that God will punish. This has 
 been finely put by Selby in his sermon, “ Untem- 
 pered Judgments”: “ Hell is as vicarious as the 
 Cross on which the shadow of hell once fell. Upon 
 the Cross the guiltless willingly suffered for the 
 guilty. In the realms of the lost, unwilling spirits 
 suffer a righteous penalty, that the untold worlds 
 of God’s empires may be admonished and preserved 
 from falling. The very fires of wrath are sac- 
 rificial, although those consumed by them may not 
 be purified. The angels who pour out the vials 
 come forth from the temple clothed in the vest- 
 ments of the altar. There is a priesthood of vi- 
 carious judgment as well as of mercy.” 
 
 Is future punishment consistent with God’s love? 
 
164 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY, 
 
 The best answer to this is the one great revelation 
 that God has given of His love. The one supreme 
 manifestation of God’s love has respect to the 
 production of holiness. Herein is love, that God 
 sent His Son to die for us, to be the propitiation 
 for our sins. The Divine benevolence cannot be 
 impeached if men finally reject the grand and costly 
 provision of God’s love. When a man says that 
 God is love, he cannot ignore the careful definition 
 and explanation of God’s love that God Himself 
 has given us in the death of Christ for our sins. 
 That act as an exhibition of Divine love is abso- 
 lutely meaningless if men are not under the penalty 
 and curse of sin. 
 
 The nature of future punishment is of minor 
 importance compared with the solemn proclama- 
 tion of punishment. From intimations here and 
 there in the teaching of Jesus, and from what we 
 know of our own hearts, it is possible that some- 
 thing akin to remorse will be an element in penal 
 pain. The weeping and wailing and gnashing of 
 teeth sounds like a description of hopeless remorse. 
 Great sinners have testified that when they were 
 first convinced of their sins their chief pain was in 
 the feeling that they had rejected Christ and tram- 
 pled His dying love under their feet. ‘They shall 
 look upon Him Whom they have pierced. When 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 165 
 
 the rich man in hell was inclined to protest against 
 his fate, Abraham said to him, ‘‘ Son, remember! ” 
 . For some men memory will be hell. 
 
 W hat is this power 
 
 That recollects the distant past 
 And makes this hour, 
 
 Unlike the last, 
 
 Pregnant with life? 
 
 Calling across the deep 
 
 To things that slumber, men that sleep. 
 They rise by number, 
 
 And with stealthy creep, 
 
 Like a battalion’s tread, 
 Marshall our dead. 
 
 This is the gtft 
 
 Men cannot bargain with nor shift; 
 Which went with Dives 
 
 Down to hell, 
 
 With Lazarus up to heaven; 
 Which will not let us eer forget 
 The sins of years 
 
 Though washed wiih tears. 
 Whate’er it be, 
 
 Men call 1t Memory. 
 
 Because of the indubitable fact of terrible re- 
 morse, even in this life men have tried to comfort 
 themselves with the thought that this is all that 1s 
 meant by hell. In the dark sunset of his reign, 
 when from his island retreat at Capri Tiberius 
 was issuing his orders for slaughter and torture 
 
166 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 at Rome, he commenced a letter to a friend thus: 
 “How shall I write to you at this time? What 
 shall I write, or what shall I not write? May the 
 
 gods and the goddesses destroy me worse than | 
 
 daily feel myself perishing if I know!” Already 
 Tiberius was in a hell that he had made for him- 
 self. There is no doubt that men frequently by 
 their misdeeds put themselves in such a hell in this 
 present life. But that hell, described by the Per- 
 sian poet as the “ shadow of a soul on fire,” is not 
 to be confused with the future punishment upon 
 sin. All the pains of remorse that men endure in 
 this world, while, in a sense, penal, are not alto- 
 gether penal; they are also disciplinary; they can, 
 they frequently do, teach the soul penitence. But 
 the pains of hell are penal, purely so; they are the 
 final and irrevocable judgments upon sin. 
 
 Men talk about the development of religious 
 thought and the new ideas of the truth. But let it 
 be clearly and courageously stated, that no new 
 way of interpreting the Bible has taken out of it 
 the solemn and searching fact of future retribution. 
 The Bible teaches it, Christ affirmed it, the whole 
 plan of salvation presupposes it, conscience echoes 
 it. Nothing has happened in the intervening cen- 
 turies to render meaningless or out of place the 
 words of St. Paul to men at Corinth: “ For we 
 must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ; 
 
 Trine atime 
 
FUTURE RETRIBUTION 167 
 
 that every man may receive the things done in the 
 body, according to that he hath done, whether it 
 be good or bad. Knowing, therefore, the terror 
 of the Lord, we persuade men.” 
 
 The deep note of judgment to come reverberates 
 in the moral nature of man and divine revelation 
 alike. In his sermon on Future Punishment, 
 Henry Ward Beecher, who, like every other min- 
 ister, says he could wish that some one else would 
 preach the sermon on this solemn theme, neverthe- 
 less concludes with this searching appeal: “ Men 
 and brethren, we are standing on the verge of the 
 unseen world. All the thunderous din of this life 
 ought not to fill our ears so but that we can hear 
 the Spirit and the Bride that say to every man, 
 through this golden air to-day, ‘Come! come!’ 
 And that lonely and solemn sound, like that of the 
 surf beating on the shore from the broad Atlantic, 
 that all day and all night sounds on, and is never 
 still—that sound comes from the other world, and 
 _ says to us, ‘ Beware, beware of that punishment of 
 sin which overhangs the other and the under life 
 forever and forever!’ May God bring us through 
 brightness to gladness, and through gladness to 
 joy, and through joy to immortality of blessedness. 
 Amen.” 
 

 
 its on 
 ; eaty 
 Wael am . 
 
 
 
 
 
xX 
 AT LAST 
 
How bright these glorious spirits shine! 
 Whence all their bright array? 
 
 How came they to the blissful seats 
 Of everlasting day? 
 
 Lo! These are they from sufferings great, 
 Who came to realms of light, 
 
 And in the blood of Christ have washed 
 Those robes which shine so bright. 
 
 Now, with triumphal palms, they stand 
 Before the throne on high, 
 
 And serve the God they love, amidst 
 The glories of the sky. 
 
 His presence fills each heart with joy, 
 Tunes every mouth to sing: 
 
 By day, by night, the sacred courts 
 With glad hosannas ring. 
 
 Hunger and thirst are felt no more, 
 Nor suns with scorching ray; 
 
 God is their sun, whose cheering beams 
 Diffuse eternal day. 
 
 The Lamb which dwells amidst the throne 
 Shall o’er them still preside; 
 
 Feed them with nourishment divine 
 And all their footsteps guide. 
 
 "Mong pastures green He'll lead His flock, 
 Where living streams appear; 
 
 And God the Lord from every eye 
 Shall wipe off every tear. 
 
 —PARAPHRASE LX VI. 
 
x 
 AT LAST 
 
 CROSS the river from my boyhood home 
 A was a range of high hills, crowned with 
 a forest. Often I used to watch the great 
 
 disc of the moon come slowly up from behind the 
 hill, and, .sometimes, I saw the sun rise out of 
 that same mysterious country. I was happy in 
 that hillside home. I had kind parents and ample 
 space in which to play and hunt with my three 
 brothers. Yet the fact that I was happy where I 
 was did not keep me from wondering what lay be- 
 yond that high hill and wishing that one day I 
 might stand on its summit and see what was on 
 the other side. So is it with the high barrier which 
 separates this life from the life to come. However 
 happy or useful our life here, there are times when 
 we have a wistful desire to know what lies beyond 
 the horizon, to see on the other side of the hill. 
 The oft reiterated demand that we must get rid 
 of our “ otherworldliness” and confine the re- 
 ligious interests to this present life and this visible 
 world is a demand which is contrary to our highest 
 instinct. Religion can never be limited to the field 
 
 of this world. It will express its highest hopes 
 171 
 
172. PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 and its noblest music when it comes to speak of 
 the life beyond the rampart of the grave. 
 
 “As it is in heaven,” our Lord taught us to say — 
 in the Lord’s Prayer. Perhaps when we think 
 quietly about the life beyond we are apt to over- 
 look what must be its chief glory, that is, its moral 
 perfection. ‘“ Thy will be done on earth as it is in 
 heaven.’ In heaven God’s will is perfectly done. © 
 In a world where God’s will is constantly ignored 
 and defied, it is difficult for us to envisage a world 
 where God’s will is perfectly done. The angels 
 are spoken of as they who do the will of God, and 
 Christ, speaking in the Psalms, says, ‘‘ Lo, I come 
 to do thy will, O God.” The moral glory of the 
 life of Jesus is our best illustration of what the 
 moral order of heaven will be. 
 
 Jesus tells us by that clause in the Lord’s Prayer, 
 “as it is in heaven,” that the true and divine pat- 
 tern is the life in heaven. This same idea was 
 carried out by St. Paul who says that our citizen- 
 ship, our politics, our true order and plan of life 
 is to be found in heaven, and not upon the earth. 
 We see here on earth some noble exhibitions of 
 the possibilities of human life, so exalted that we 
 can hardly conceive of heaven itself producing any- 
 thing finer. Perhaps it will not. But here we 
 see these exhibitions of noble living and complete 
 submission to the will of God against the dark 
 
AT LAST 173 
 
 background of this world’s woe and sin. But 
 what will it be when we can live in a world that 
 knows nothing else than the creature’s devotion to 
 the Creator! What a world this would be to-day 
 if man had never fallen! But the one man who 
 came into this world and did perfectly the will of 
 God in the beauty of His life opens for us a window 
 into heaven. 
 
 Glorious as was the life of Jesus when on earth, 
 it was nevertheless a life of sorrow and pain and 
 death. That was because the world into which 
 He had come was so unlike Him, its life so hostile 
 to His life. Hence the sorrow and the travail of 
 Christ’s earthly life. But in heaven there will be 
 no contrast between the life which does perfectly 
 the will of God and the world in which that life 
 is lived. We often hear read from the Scriptures, 
 or repeated in the prayer, or sung in the hymn 
 or anthem, those words of St. John’s Revelation, 
 how there shall in heaven be no more death, no 
 more crying, no more pain, no more curse. What 
 those assurances tell us, though in a negative way, 
 is that heaven is to be a world of moral beauty 
 and glory. No shadow of the world’s disorder 
 and sin will fall upon the kingdom of the re- 
 deemed. 
 
 In the introduction to a celebrated sermon on 
 immortality Canon Liddon tells of an officer of the 
 
174 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 British army in India who, after long and arduous 
 service in India, had returned to end his days in 
 England. A company of his friends one day per- — 
 suaded him to tell some of his experiences in the © 
 army. After relating a number of amazing ad- 
 ventures, hairbreadth escapes and personal encoun- — 
 ters during the Sepoy Mutiny, the officer said, “I 
 expect to see something much more remarkable — 
 than anything I have been describing.” As he — 
 was seventy years of age, and had retired from 
 active service, his hearers were somewhat per- — 
 plexed at his words. But after a moment’s si- 
 lence he added, “ I mean the first five minutes after 
 death.” : 
 
 The first five minutes after death! What will 
 it be like? And the first five millennia after death, 
 for now time has lost its meaning, what will it be 
 like? The Psalmist asked in a rather troubled and 
 depressed accent, “ Wilt thou show wonders to the 
 dead?” Certainly in Christian faith the answer 
 is a triumphant “‘ Yes!” 
 
 We have already commented on the fact that the 
 alleged communications from those who have 
 passed within the veil cast hardly a ray of light 
 upon the nature of the heavenly existence. But 
 if those who have entered the unseen world have 
 not come back to describe it for us, is it possible 
 that men should have a brief and fleeting vision 
 
AT LAST 175 
 
 of the life to come? St. Paul, as we have seen, 
 speaks at length and with noble eloquence about 
 life after death and the resurrection from the dead. 
 In this connection it must be remembered that Paul 
 says he was once caught up into Paradise, into 
 the third heaven, whether in the body or out of it, 
 he knew not, and heard things such as it is not 
 lawful for man to utter. Many have taken this 
 to mean that Paul’s unhesitating doctrine about the 
 resurrection and the life to come is based upon a 
 special revelation which he had when he was trans- 
 ported into heaven before his death. 
 
 But what of others? The great Christian 
 apostle may have been granted a fleeting experi- 
 ence of the life to come, but has such a thing been 
 granted to any one else? One of the most extra- 
 ordinary and best authenticated claims to such an 
 entrance into life to come is the celebrated trance 
 of the Rev. William Tennent, who for forty years 
 was pastor of the historic Presbyterian Church, at 
 Freehold, N. J., on the battlefield of Monmouth. 
 
 As a young man, Tennent was preparing for his 
 examinations before the Presbytery of New Bruns- 
 wick, and intense application had affected his 
 health. He was conversing with his brother one 
 morning when he suddenly fainted away, and, ap- 
 parently, expired. After every usual test of death 
 had been applied, his body was prepared for burial, 
 
176 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 and the day was set for the funeral. On the ap- 
 
 pointed day the people had assembled for the fu- © 
 
 aici 
 ee ee eS eS 
 
 neral, when the body suddenly opened its eyes and ~ 
 gave a dreadful groan. After vigorous restora- — 
 tives had been applied, his resuscitation was ef- — 
 
 fected. For many weeks he was in an extremely 
 weakened condition, but slowly began to mend. 
 
 He had no recollection for some time of any ~ 
 
 event previous to his resuscitation, and had to be 
 taught his letters again like a little child. But one 
 day his memory came back to him and his knowl- 
 edge of the past was that of any normal mind. 
 Although very reluctant to speak of his experi- 
 ence, he related on several occasions what had 
 transpired. In an instant he found himself in an- 
 other state of existence and under the conduct of 
 a heavenly being who bade him follow. Thus con- 
 ducted, he beheld an ineffable glory and an innu- 
 merable company of happy beings in the midst of 
 this glory. He, too, thrilled to their great joy and 
 besought his heavenly conductor to permit him to 
 join them. But his guide told him that he must 
 return to earth, He heard and obeyed the sen- 
 tence with the sorrow of despair. ‘‘ Lord, must 
 
 I go back?” was his earnest expostulation. ‘The 
 
 shock of his disappointment made him faint, and 
 he saw his brother and the physician standing over 
 his supposedly inanimate body. 
 
AT LAST 177 
 
 What are we to think of such a claim as this? 
 For myself I think it quite credible and a very 
 important bit of evidence as to the joys and glories 
 of those who die in the Lord. It makes one think 
 of the fine old hymn of Isaac Watts: 
 
 “O could we make our doubts remove, 
 
 Those gloomy doubts that rise, 
 
 And see the Canaan that we love 
 With unbeclouded eyes; 
 
 Could we but climb where Moses stood, 
 And view the landscape o’er, 
 
 Not Jordan’s stream, nor death’s cold flood, 
 Should fright us from the shore.” 
 
 Could we see what ‘l'ennent saw, death would be 
 looked upon in a far different way. But for the 
 great number of men no such vision has been 
 vouchsafed. Evidently, it is not the plan of God 
 for usin this world. Weare to walk by faith, and 
 not by sight.. But when we hear the testimony of 
 such a man as Tennent we could wish to share 
 for a moment the rapture of such a vision. 
 
 Most of us, I suppose, make our approach to 
 the life to come, not in thinking of it in connec- 
 tion with our own eventual experience of it, but 
 through our thought for those who are already in 
 that world. Bayard Taylor tells how the British 
 soldiers, just before they were to make the charge 
 at Sebastopol during the Crimean War, were sing- 
 
178 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 ing “Annie Laurie.” They were thinking of dif- 
 ferent persons as they sang, but the song was the 
 same: 
 
 “ Fach heart recalled a different name, 
 But all sang, Annie Laurie.” 
 
 When we think of the life to come, we all think of 
 different persons; some of a father, and some of a 
 mother, some of a husband or wife, and some of a 
 brother, or a little child. But we all have the same > 
 reverent curiosity and the same affectionate long- 
 ing after reunion. Sorrow’s hand may at times 
 rest heavily upon us, but it is sorrow’s hand, never- 
 theless, which opens for us the gate into the other 
 country. 
 
 After the wreck of his fortune and reputation, 
 Aaron Burr still retained his most cherished joy 
 and possession, his beautiful and accomplished 
 daughter, Theodosia. In 1813, this daughter, who 
 was the wife of Governor Alston of South Caro- 
 lina, embarked at Charleston on a pilot ship sailing 
 for New York. ‘The ship never came to port, nor 
 was it ever heard of again. Had we been in the 
 vicinity of the Battery on almost any day in the 
 years which followed the disappearance of the 
 vessel, we might have seen an old and broken man, — 
 but bearing still the unmistakable mark of distinc- 
 tion of mind, walk slowly down upon the Battery 
 
AT LAST 179 
 
 and stand for a long time gazing wistfully down 
 the harbour at the incoming vessels, as if still 
 “ cherishing the faint, fond hope that his Theodosia 
 was coming to him from the other side of the 
 world.” 
 
 As the fond heart of that father daily won- 
 dered about the fate of his lost daughter, so we 
 try to follow our friends into the unseen and we 
 wonder how they fare. 
 
 When Jesus said that in heaven they are as the 
 angels and neither marry nor are given in mar- 
 riage, did He mean to say that husbands and wives 
 in the heavenly life will not be conscious of the 
 relationship which existed between them in this 
 life? I do not so interpret. 1 remember once at 
 the close of a service in the church speaking with 
 the widow of a clergyman of the Episcopal Church 
 on this very subject. She said, “ Shall I be the 
 wife of my deceased husband in heaven?” Their 
 union had been a perfect and blessed one, and un- 
 less it was to be resumed in the life to come, that 
 life had no interest for her. Much as she loved 
 her husband, this woman erred in making the whole 
 future life hinge upon her reunion with him. I 
 believe that we shall see and know our friends 
 again, but to the believer and the Christian dis- 
 ciple heaven’s greatest joy and glory will be life 
 with Christ. We shall be with the Lord. No 
 
180 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 matter how our mourning hearts yearn for reunion © 
 with the departed, the great power and joy of — 
 heaven will be fellowship with Christ. But there 
 is no reason why this supreme joy of fellowship 
 with Christ, “with the Lord,’ as Paul put it, 
 should not be accompanied by the joy of reunion 
 with our friénds. 
 
 The Bible, it is true, has little to say about re- 
 union with friends in the life to come, and rather 
 assumes such a thing than argues for it. Yet, here 
 and there in the Bible, we find intimations of such 
 reunion. When his infant son died, David com- 
 forted himself by saying, “ He cannot return to 
 me, but I shall go to him.” Christ said to the 
 thief on the cross, “ To-day shalt thou be with me 
 in Paradise.” ‘That would imply recognition and 
 consciousness. ‘The same is true of His saying to 
 the disciples on the last night, “I go to prepare a 
 place for you, that where I am, there ye may be 
 also.” The disciples are one day to be with Christ 
 and know that they are with Him. So St. Paul 
 comforts the Christians of Thessalonica who are 
 mourning over their dead with the assurance that 
 they shall be raised up at the coming of Christ. 
 He does not directly affirm that they shall see and 
 know one another, but he does say, “ Comfort one 
 another with these words,” and this must mean 
 the comfort of reunion. 
 
AT LAST 181 
 
 In the winter of ’62, Lincoln’s son William, a 
 lad of twelve, sickened and died. It was the great 
 sorrow of a sad life. For a number of weeks 
 Lincoln observed the Thursday on which the child 
 died as a day of seclusion and mourning, and was 
 with difficulty persuaded to give up the dangerous 
 practice. Some months afterward, he was at 
 Fortress Monroe. In a moment of leisure he was 
 reading his favourite author. Calling his aide into 
 the room, he read to him passages from Hamlet, 
 Macbeth, and then the passage from the third act 
 of King John, where Constance, whose boy has 
 been imprisoned by his uncle, King John, expresses 
 to her confessor the fear that she may not know 
 her boy in heaven. When he had finished read- 
 ing the lines, Lincoln turned to his aide and said, 
 “Colonel, did you ever dream of a lost friend 
 and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a 
 reality? Just so | dream of my boy Willie.” And 
 with that he bowed his head on the table and sobbed 
 aloud. : 
 
 Into how many a mother’s grief do these words 
 of Constance fit themselves? 
 
 “ And Father Cardinal, I have heard you say 
 That we shall see and know our friends in Heaven; 
 If that be true, I shall see my boy again; 
 For since the birth of Cain, the first male child, 
 To him that did but yesterday suspire, 
 
182 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 There was not such a gracious creature born, 
 But now will canker sorrow eat my bud 
 
 And chase the native beauty from his cheek, 
 And he will look as meagre as an ague’s fit; 
 And so he'll die; and rising so again, 
 
 When I shall meet him in the Court of Heaven 
 L shall not know him: and therefore, never, never 
 Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.” 
 
 We wonder what changes time will have wrought 
 in our friends who have passed into the unseen. 
 Will a mother who lost her babe meet it as a child 
 in heaven? Or would recognition be impossible? 
 These questions may puzzle us here, but the heav- 
 enly life will solve and answer them all. During 
 a trip to California last summer, I met a number 
 of old school friends whom I had not seen for 
 twenty-five years. At first there was something 
 odd and strange about our meeting; the mind 
 seemed to be exerting itself to frame out of this 
 changed personality a picture of the friend of long 
 ago. But after I had talked with them for a few 
 minutes, all consciousness of the outward change 
 wrought by the hand of time vanished, and we 
 were our old selves again, schoolmates as we once 
 had been, and totally oblivious of the tracery of 
 the years. That means there is something in per- 
 sonality, in the soul, the inner self, which changes 
 not. So I take comfort about meeting long-lost 
 friends in heaven. 
 
AT LAST 183 
 
 Jonathan Swift, when he heard that Stella, to 
 whom he had written so many love letters in a 
 mysterious cipher, was dying, exclaimed: “T think 
 that there is not a greater folly than that of enter- 
 ing into too strict a partnership or friendship with 
 the loss of which a man must be absolutely miser- 
 able, but especially when the loss occurs at an age 
 at which it is too late to engage in a new friend- 
 ship.” Such loss does leave a man absolutely mis- 
 erable unless he has the hope of reunion with full 
 recognition after death. That hope we have in 
 Christ, for, as St. Paul said, “If we believe that 
 Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which 
 sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” 
 
 The trouble is that the blow and shock of be- 
 reavement sometimes brings on a state of spiritual 
 stupor in which faith is eclipsed. One of the most 
 distressing cases I have come in contact with in my 
 ministry was that of a man, advanced in years, 
 who lost a lovely wife, the companion of nearly 
 half acentury. The man was an intelligent Chris- 
 tian and, in an altogether exceptional and Christ- 
 like way, had given himself to the ministry of 
 the unfortunate among mankind. One would have 
 expected that this man of all men would have 
 quickly recovered from the first shock and parox- 
 ysm of his grief. But he has never lifted his 
 head; all the heart and hope are gone out of him, 
 
184 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 and almost like a ghost I meet him from time to 
 time. He has not been stripped of his Christian 
 faith, but he has so brooded over his loss that he 
 has not found the strength and hope in his Chris- 
 tian life that he might have found. Hence it is 
 that we must give trial-flights, as it were, to our 
 faith, and prepare ourselves for the certain visita- 
 tion of sorrow. 
 
 When we feel sure that our loved ones live again 
 and that one day we shall meet again, our next 
 thought is as to their occupations. They are still 
 rational beings, though now lifted above the limita- 
 tions of time and space. Faithful and able as was 
 their service on earth, they are ready now for 
 greater tasks. What will these be? 
 
 Man was created for activity. We put “At 
 Rest’ upon the graves of our dead. But that is 
 with reference to the cares and trials of this life. 
 In the life beyond there must be activities in keep- 
 ing with the new powers of the redeemed body and 
 soul. What these are to be we can only conjec- 
 ture. Matthew Arnold sang of his noble father, 
 the headmaster of Rugby: 
 
 “ Somewhere surely afar 
 In the sounding labour-house vast 
 Of being, is practised that strength, 
 Zealous, beneficent, firm. 
 
 Still thou performest the Word of the Spirit 
 
 In whom thou dost live.’ 
 
AT LAST 185 
 
 Every man who has had a good Christian parent 
 likes to think of him as engaged in some high work 
 for God. God’s empire is vast. It may be that in 
 other worlds there are rational beings who need 
 the ministry of heaven’s spirits, and that on some 
 such errands the redeemed are sent of God. It 
 is written of heaven that the Lamb is the light 
 thereof. If Christ is to be heaven’s light and law, 
 and if sacrificial love is the constitution and the 
 glory of that world, then the redeemed man’s love 
 and his exhaustless energies must find some outlet 
 in high undertaking for others. In the words of 
 Jeremy Taylor: “There labour shall be without 
 fatigue; ceaseless activity without the necessity of 
 repose; high enterprise without disappointment, 
 and mighty achievements which leave no weariness 
 or decay.” 
 
 In one of the fine old hymns we sing, “ What 
 social joys are there!’’ One of the chiefest joys 
 of this world is its social joy, the intercourse we 
 have with kindred minds. If this is a joy of ra- 
 tional creatures in this life, still more will it be 
 the joy of the life to come. Izaak Walton, when 
 he heard the sweet singing of the birds in the 
 meadows which border the Itchen, used to say, 
 “Lord, if Thou hast provided such music for sin- 
 ners upon earth, what hast Thou in store for Thy 
 saints in heaven!” If a Socrates could look for- 
 
 LOE 
 
186 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 ward with a thrill of expectation to conversing 
 with Homer and the mighty dead of the ancient 
 world, how much more the Christian with the 
 great men of the Old Testament and the New 
 Testament. 
 
 I have sometimes been asked, “ Whom, above 
 all others, would you like to see in heaven?” Of 
 course, we put Christ above all the rest, and after 
 Christ our own beloved friends. After one has 
 seen face to face the Saviour who died for him, 
 and then has greeted his family, which one of the 
 noble dead will one first wish to see? For myself, 
 the answer will be, St. Paul. After Christ, he 
 was the most influential man who has lived on this 
 earth. Whether one takes him in his intellect, or 
 in his affections, or in his achievements, he stands 
 without a peer. I have often wondered what Paul 
 looked like. Then I shall see him face to face. 
 Then, in the Old Testament, there is David, the 
 sweet singer of Israel. Think of looking into the 
 face of him whose music has charmed the ear of so 
 many generations of men, the man who wrote the 
 Twenty-third Psalm! And after David, grand old 
 Elijah. What meetings with the great and illus- 
 trious of all time! What unfolding of the secrets 
 which time could not teach us! What deep under- 
 standing of the events of our trial on earth! 
 “ What knitting severed friendships up ”! 
 
AT LAST 187 
 
 One of the greatest calamities which could be- 
 fall the human race would be a serious decline in 
 faith in the life after death. Such a decline would 
 destroy one of the great motives for moral ieee 
 The editor of one of the leading financial journals 
 thinks that even now one of the reasons for the 
 present moral subsidence in human society is a 
 change in thought about the life hereafter. He 
 says, “ The question of immediate and tremendous 
 importance to Wall Street, quite as much as to any 
 other part of the world, is ‘ Has there been a de- 
 cline of faith in the future life?’ and if so, to 
 what extent is this responsible for the speculative 
 phenomena of our times, the eager pursuit of 
 wealth, the shameless luxury and display, the gross 
 and corrupting extravagance, the misuse of sudden 
 fortune, the indifference to law, the growth of 
 graft, the abuse of corporate power, and the social 
 unrest?” } 
 
 The sinking of faith in the life to come not only 
 endangers the social body, but it robs the individual | 
 of joy and hope. If, at the end, a man and his 
 dog fare alike, it is inevitable that such a creed 
 should result in moral relaxation and the dimming 
 of hope. Gibbon, in his celebrated Fifteenth Chap- ~ 
 ter, gives as one of the five causes for the rapid 
 spread of Christianity its doctrine of reward and 
 punishment hereafter. No matter what the ideas 
 
188 PUTTING ON IMMORTALITY 
 
 held before by the pagan and Jewish worlds, Christ 
 brought immortality to light in the Gospel and 
 made the hereafter a reality to believing men and 
 women. A world made up of men and women 
 whose conduct is in no way regulated by any seri- 
 ous conviction of rewards and punishments here- 
 after is a world that none would care to contem- 
 plate. 
 
 It is, therefore, the duty of every Christian man 
 to express to the world his faith in the life ever- 
 lasting. Just as we testify to patriotism and in- 
 dustry and compassion and courage, so we ought 
 to testify to immortality. Our race cannot do 
 without this hope. Science has done great things 
 for mankind and will do yet greater things. But 
 to science there is a “thus far and no farther.” 
 It can tell us nothing of life beyond. For the 
 broken heart and the hungry soul it has no cure. 
 Only in Jesus Christ is there the answer which 
 man longs to hear; and outside of Christ, silence 
 and darkness! 
 
 Sometimes, when the way gets a little rough and 
 steep, and heavy clouds hang over my road, and 
 I grow weary and wonder just what it all means, 
 I get an increase of faith by travelling back 
 along memory’s path to the old home which stood 
 on the brow of the hill above the winding river 
 and facing the college where my minister-father 
 
AT LAST 189 
 
 was a professor. The most precious recollections 
 of that home are not those that center about the 
 vast attic where I used to lie by the hour and 
 pore over old numbers of the one pictorial maga- 
 zine which came into our home, nor the cavernous 
 cellar where with red-hot poker we used to bore 
 the holes in our sleds, nor the drawing-room, 
 scene of many a happy party, but the dining- 
 room where family worship was held every morn- 
 ing and evening. Once again I see the united 
 family circle as father led us in worship. ‘That 
 family circle is broken now, some in heaven and 
 some onearth. But the benediction of that family 
 altar will, I am sure, follow me through this life 
 and up to the gates of heaven. There was a sen- 
 tence with which father used to conclude his prayer, 
 and with that petition I finish, for it sums up my 
 own wish for myself and for others, “ May we all 
 get home at last.” Yes, heaven is our home, our 
 Father’s House. 
 
 At the conclusion of his great theological treatise, 
 The City of God, St. Augustine thus imagines the 
 life of the redeemed: “ He shall be the end of 
 our desires who shall be seen without end, loved 
 without cloy, praised without weariness.” St. 
 Paul sums it all up for us in his magnificent. 
 climax, “ That God may be all in all.” There faith 
 can rest, for we know that “‘ God is love.” 
 

 
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