I UN 22 191 fi 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
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THIS LIFE 
 AND THE NEXT 
 
 The Effect on This Life ._^ 
 
 of Faith in Another:^^'^'*^^^i 
 
 lUN 22 191 
 p. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 Principal of Hackney College, Hampstead, and 
 
 Dean of the Faculty of Theology in 
 
 the University of London 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1918 
 
 A.U rights reaervedt 
 
COPTBIGHT, 1918 
 
 By p. T. FORSYTH 
 
 Set up and electro typed. Published, May, 1918 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Is Life the more Great or Dear as 
 
 IT IS Brief ? i 
 
 George Eliot's " Jubal." The effect of 
 \ life's brevity on its value. Death good for 
 life only as it promises life beyond. The 
 moral action of immortality on life due to 
 the enhanced value of personality. 
 
 II The Egoism of Immortality . . .15 
 
 The egoism of Christ. The fear of pun- 
 ishment and the hope of heaven. Demor- 
 alization possible. But my neighbor's im- 
 mortality. The w^orth of our immortality 
 to God. The egoism of the anti-egoists. 
 Immoral immortality. 
 
 Ill The Egoism of God 27 
 
 The immortals not an elite. The egoism 
 of God is the blessing of the world. The 
 moral paradox and miracle of holy love. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 :H AFTER PAGE 
 
 IV De Mortuis 35 
 
 The egoism of the will to live is qualified 
 by the suicides and the martyrs. Demor- 
 alizing sacrifice. Falso consolations and 
 true. Prayer for the dead. 
 
 V The Practice of Eternity and the 
 
 Experience of Life 47 
 
 The moral psychology of the saints. The 
 change wrought by age on the soul's direc- 
 tion. But also in the soul's interests. The 
 efEect on life of the antepast of Eternity. 
 
 VI Immortality as Present Judgment 54 
 
 It is a vocation rather than a problem. 
 Life is another thing if we confuse these. 
 Immortality is a destiny rather than a rid- 
 dle. Live immortally. Choose; do not 
 argue. To live for Eternity is much, but 
 to live Eternity is more. 
 
 VII Eternity within Time, Time with- 
 in Eternity 61 
 
 The other life then is the other life now. 
 The timeless in Time. Time's Sacrament. 
 We are Eternal each moment. Eternity 
 and progress. 
 
 vi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 VIII Life a Sacrament ...... 74 
 
 Time sacramental of Eternity. How part 
 and lot in the Eternal raises the common 
 tasks and tragedies of life beyond the 
 sordid. 
 
 IX Immortality and the Kingdom of 
 
 God 80 
 
 \ Absence from able publicists of either idea. 
 But the only perfection is in a common 
 realm and a common King. 
 
 \ 
 
 \ 
 
 X Immortality and Redemption . . 92 
 
 The theology of it and the psychology. 
 The ethic of it. The holy the guarantee 
 of the eternal. The difference of faith 
 and experience. 
 
 XI Eternity and New Birth ... 99 
 
 Does the great change refurbish or regen- 
 erate? Do we need more a fuller life or 
 an altered? Immortality is the continu- 
 ance less of the soul than of its change. 
 Meaning of the new creation. Not an 
 annexe, nor a surrogate, but a reconcilia- 
 tion of the soul. The idea of Resurrec- 
 tion as the nexus of that life and this, 
 vii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XII The Fructification OF Failure . 112 
 
 <. The future is the fruition of failure here. 
 Eternity holds the key of history, the 
 meaning of progress, the interest of tears. 
 All opens out in that light. The pathos of 
 the past. 
 
 XIII L'Envoi 117 
 
 ^ To live is Christ, to die is more Christ. 
 We pass into a genial native land. 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IS LIFE THE MORE GREAT OR DEAR AS IT 
 IS BRIEF? 
 
 George Eliot's "Jubal." The effect of life's brevity on 
 its value. Death good for life only as it promises life 
 beyond. The moral action of immortality on life 
 due to the enhanced value of personality. 
 
 I AM not proposing to speak about the 
 grounds in this life of a belief in another, but 
 about the reaction of that belief upon this 
 life. It is not a question about the basis of 
 a belief in immortality, but about its moral 
 rebound. We often hear from pulpits of 
 the effect of this life on the next; but this is 
 not a pulpit, and what we are now to dwell 
 on is rather the reaction of the next life on 
 this. Sometimes we are bidden to turn from 
 considering what we do for posterity to real- 
 ize what posterity does for us — which is 
 much. Mr. Benjamin Kidd lectured in 1906 
 at the Royal Institution on this subject, '' The 
 significance of the Future in the theory of 
 organic evolution." Well, it is great. But 
 the future has a greater significance still for 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 our spiritual evolution. Posterity does much 
 for our souls. We are to think, then, of 
 the reflex action on us of the idea of immor- 
 tality, or, in a more Christian way, the power 
 over us of an endless life in Christ, where the 
 gain in dying is but more of our career in 
 Christ. If to live is Christ, to die is more 
 Christ. 
 
 May I be personal and reminiscent? The 
 formative part of my life was spent in a 
 world ruled by the giants of the Victorian 
 days, of whom one of the most potent was 
 George Eliot. And I can well remember 
 when her poem, " The Legend of Jubal," 
 came out in Macmillan^s Magazine. I was 
 a student in an ancient university in a far 
 northern city. A few of us seized the maga- 
 zine as soon as it could be bought, and took 
 it out for consumption one morning by the 
 banks of the highland river that there ends 
 in the North Sea its passionate yet pensive 
 life. George Eliot was not at her best as a 
 poet, and I do not think that " Jubal " is as 
 much read now as her lyric with the same mo- 
 tive, which probably will live in the antholo- 
 gies, 
 
 " O may I join the Choir Invisible, 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In souls made better by their presence, etc." 
 
 2 
 
I LIFE'S BREVITY: ITS VALUE 
 
 But " Jubal " was more dramatic, more pic- 
 turesque, and at the same time more philo- 
 sophic, which appealed to us as we then were. 
 It had a story, and it had reflection. And 
 one passage that impressed myself deeply 
 that morning was the lines describing the ten- 
 der value given to life by the new sense of its 
 mortality. i\ccording to this legend, death 
 had never entered the world till an accident 
 brought it. As the finality of the sleep came 
 home to the race, its effect was revolutionary. 
 And the nature of the effect was more fever- 
 ish energy, and an affection tender because 
 brief. 
 
 *' And a new spirit from that time came o'er 
 The race of Cain; soft idlesse was no more, 
 But even the sunshine had a heart of care, 
 Smiling with hidden dread — a mother fair 
 Who, folding to her heart a dying child. 
 Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness 
 
 mild. 
 Death now was lord of life, and at his word 
 Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred, 
 With measured wing now audibly arose. 
 Thrilling through all things to some unknown 
 
 close. 
 Now glad content by clutching haste was torn, 
 And work grew eager, and device was born. 
 
 It seemed the light was never loved before. 
 Now each man said, ' I will go and come no 
 more.' 
 
 3 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 No budding branch, no pebble from the brook, 
 No form, no shadow, but new dearness took 
 From the one thought that life must have an end. 
 And the last parting now began to send 
 Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss, 
 Thrilling them into finer tenderness. 
 
 Thus to Cain's race death was tear-watered seed 
 Of various life, and action-shaping need." 
 
 Now, who does not feel the touching truth 
 in this ? Who has not clung with new tender- 
 ness to the dear one whose days are num- 
 bered? How many have recognized their 
 angels only as they were leaving them? Even 
 in health who has not stayed the impatient 
 word, at the remembrance that the time to- 
 gether is at most so short, and might be short- 
 ened to an hour? Who has not felt a new 
 fascination in the world's beauty as our lease 
 of it runs out, even if we have had many fits 
 of disillusion about it? 
 
 But what if this became our general atti- 
 tude to the world! If the ruling feeling of 
 society were that of brief life, sure sorrow, 
 and eternal loss! If this feeling became a 
 social principle ! If we all lived in the con- 
 viction that death ended all, and was no new 
 departure! What would the effect of that 
 be ? Would it not be like that of alcohol — 
 first bustle then blight, excitement and then 
 stupidity. If we only looked forward to 
 Jubal's goal, to immersion in the All — 
 4 
 
I LIFE'S BREVITY: ITS VALUE 
 
 " Quitting mortality, a quenched sun wave, 
 The all creating presence was his grave." 
 
 would there be much creative vigor left in 
 life under that doom ? 
 
 A far greater poem on immortality came 
 from the Victorians than George Eliot's. 
 There was " In Memoriam." And we can 
 call it great whatever critical reserves we may 
 have about certain aspects of that spiritual 
 achievement to-day. It is a poem that ought 
 to be read and studied to-day more than ever 
 before. Our preachers of comfort and hope 
 should make much of it, and, even if they 
 quote little, draw much from it, while they 
 add something. It is better and holier than 
 ghosts for the comfort and making of the 
 soul. Well, there is a line in it which is very 
 true to the psychology of sorrow. Unless 
 we can be sure of love's immortality, Tenny- 
 son says, a bhght would come on love, it 
 would be 
 
 " Half dead to know that It could die." 
 
 So it would be. It would take the energy 
 out of us, and the zest, if we came, habitually 
 and collectively, to believe that death ended 
 all, and that we only survived in our life's 
 resultant among men, and not In Its person- 
 ality with God. 
 
 5 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 We might grant that death teaches us much 
 as to the value of life, and that life without 
 death would become a very hard and coarse 
 thing. With the abolition of death would 
 vanish the uncertainty which educates faith, 
 the mystery, the tragedy, which makes life 
 so great, the sense of another world which 
 gives such dignity and meaning to this, the 
 range of sympathy that flows from believing 
 that our affections are not for this world 
 alone. Erase death, and TIthonus tells us 
 life sinks at last into drab weariness. Its 
 noblest, dearest interest ebbs and fades. Its 
 tragedy and its chivalry both go. We should 
 end by having no concern but feeding, 
 drowsing, prancing and feeding again. 
 Love, valor, pity, sacrifice; charm, music and 
 all the nameless spell of nature and of per- 
 sonality; courtesy and reverence, all the sweet 
 fine things of life that are tributes to soul, 
 and that death seems to cut short most pain- 
 fully — those are the things which would 
 really die out if we succeeded in indefinitely 
 averting death. 
 
 But, of course, it is not death that preserves 
 these after all. It Is the conviction that death 
 is a crisis which opens a new phase of life. 
 It Is the conviction, latent or patent, of im- 
 mortality and spiritual growth In it. How 
 much more true Is St. Paul: *' Wherefore my 
 beloved brethren be ye steadfast, immovable, 
 6 
 
I LIFE'S BREVITY: ITS VALUE 
 
 eveo* abounding In the work of the Lord, for 
 as much as ye know that your labor is not In 
 vain in the Lord." The work is the Lord's. 
 It is there not simply to meet man's need, 
 but God's purpose. That purpose is a 
 greater action-shaping power than our need 
 is. It is not true to suggest, as this poem 
 does, that death, understood as final, could 
 have set afoot the new feature of energy or 
 desire, the eagerness of work, the strength of 
 society, or the tenderness of affection. For 
 men were already living in a city, " The City 
 of Cain," before the accident took place or 
 the stimulus of death came In. The enter- 
 prise of civilization had started well on its 
 way. Did It need an accidental death to stir 
 in the children of the first murderer the ter- 
 rors that made life tragic, intense, and pa- 
 thetic? It Is not the poverty and brevity of 
 life that draws out its resources; it is its sense 
 of fullness and power. It is strength that is 
 the root of action, not need. " Action-shap- 
 ing need," yes, but not action-creating. Ac- 
 tion shaping! Yes, but what inspires action 
 — moral action as distinct from mere energy, 
 mere movement ? What makes the good will 
 which attends at all to the needs of others and 
 does not just feed our own? A stream Is not 
 effective which just spreads out and flows into 
 each hole It finds. It dies of diversion. 
 That phrase was a piece of eggshell which 
 7 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 clung to George Eliot from the hatching of 
 her mind by George Henry Lewes, as any one 
 may see who reads his now forgotten books. 
 Need may shape action, but it does not create 
 action; which is the child of wealth not pov- 
 erty, of the soul's fullness and not of its 
 death. We were created by God not out of 
 his poverty and his need of company, but out 
 of his overflowing wealth of love and his 
 passion to multiply joy. 
 
 The passage is fine poetry; It is true to cer- 
 tain phases of experience, but it is a pathetic 
 fallacy all the same. It partakes of that very 
 sentimentalism in religion which the author's 
 school unduly despised, — and succumbed to. 
 Sentiment has Its dear place, but it is demoral- 
 izing to construe life by the sentiment of its 
 phases Instead of the revelation in Its con- 
 science. Love Is not fondness. Sentiment is 
 not life. Sentimentalism Is not cherishing 
 sentiment but living by It, at the cost of moral 
 realities. Like art, it Is life's friend, but not 
 Its guide. And It is the peculiar peril of a 
 religion of love which Is not understood as 
 holy love. 
 
 Of course It would be unfair to say that 
 with the decay of a belief In Immortality 
 morality would straightway cease. At least 
 that would be putting It too bluntly. All 
 morality would not cease. The nobler souls 
 8 
 
I LIFE'S BREVITY: ITS VALUE 
 
 would still for a time find goodness good. 
 And the rest would find incumbent on them 
 a utilitarian ethic in the interest of the society 
 of which they were a part. For a long time 
 at least this would be so. But all the time 
 there would be question whether a utilitarian 
 ethic is really moral, whether you find your 
 moral soul in it or not. 
 
 This finding of the soul raises an issue more 
 direct and just. Would moral vigor, cour- 
 age, enterprise, civilization continue to rise 
 and progress under the condition supposed? 
 Would the disbelief in immortality lead in the 
 end to the finding of the soul or the losing of 
 it? Would it lead to the gain of the public 
 morale or its loss? For I mean the phrase 
 less in the theological sense than the socio- 
 logical. Even if the disbelief in our souFs 
 future did not arrest morality, would It not 
 lead to a lowered sense of that which is be- 
 hind morality and is the condition of it — 
 the value of personality? And would that 
 not in the end produce the same effect as the 
 relaxation of moral sanctions — especially on 
 society? Public morality would sink to class 
 egoism or national patriotism, and finally It 
 would be abjured. The moral value of the 
 Individual would sink — as it has done In Ger- 
 many, for Instance, where there Is no general 
 belief in Immortality, and where the individ- 
 ual withers and the State Is more and more. 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 And this means the corruption of the State 
 itself, which ceases to be a moral entity, and 
 becomes the prey of the militarist gamblers 
 in power. The people would be brutalized. 
 The citizen would really cease to be a citizen. 
 The free elector would disappear and become 
 Kanonen-f utter fed up to the guns. Under 
 such a creed the vital natural man would cease 
 to concern himself with posterity; therefore 
 he would slacken in public concern. His in- 
 terests would be but egoist, and his activity 
 but for the order of the day. He would say 
 of everything, " it will last my time." His 
 policy would be from hand to mouth, with a 
 growing tendency to the mouth and its egoism. 
 The shortening of the soul's career would 
 lead to the impoverishment of its interests. 
 It would be emptied and not merely curtailed. 
 Pantheism or Positivism, of course, does 
 not think so. It says that each moment left 
 would receive an increase of value, like the 
 Sibylline books. If you reduce the supply 
 you increase the price of life. Well, that 
 looks plausible if you treat moral realities and 
 moral issues commercially, if you regulate the 
 soul by economics, or politics by mere pru- 
 dence. But that course has been a failure. 
 We are now on the other tack. We try to 
 regulate economics by the soul, wages by the 
 standard of living, profits with a prime regard 
 to wage. The soul does not work by the law 
 
 lO 
 
I LIFE'S BREVITY: ITS VALUE 
 
 of supply and demand. You do not increase 
 the value of mankind by decimation. To re- 
 duce population is not the way to a vigorous 
 and lasting community. Nor is it so if we 
 reduce the content of each life by stopping 
 it at a point. On the contrary each person 
 would then drop to pursue the line of least 
 resistance. If I am to die in six months I 
 won't get new clothes. If I must get them, 
 shoddy will do. A jerry built house will 
 serve me; and the children can move to a 
 new one when this begins to crack. Burdens 
 would be thrown on the aftercomers. Those 
 upon- whom the end of the world should 
 come would be crushed under the silt of the 
 obligations left to them before it arrived. 
 Neglect would not be felt to be crirninal. 
 Whereas the sense that each moment is of 
 value for an eternal life is like the soul's 
 sense that it is not its own but is the subject 
 and property of Christ — it raises the.soul's 
 sense of dignity, and therefore raises also 
 its inner wealth and energy. The things it 
 does are worth while. And it will matter 
 to us a hundred years hence what we do to- 
 day or omit. If there were no other consid- 
 eration, there would be this. If I am to be 
 extinguished at seventy I need not be too 
 much concerned about my soul's perfection, 
 to say nothing of becoming perfect as God is. 
 And that is the end of moral effort in due 
 II 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 course. The pursuit of perfection is a 
 greater moral influence than the passion for 
 power. 
 
 The finality of death in the vital sense 
 leads to all the low temperatures in life 
 which I have been describing. Its finality in 
 the moral sense leads to all the enormities 
 which we associate with the doctrine of 
 double predestination. 
 
 Clearly in this life some are better off than 
 others, and some are morally better. That 
 means, if there be a ruling power in human 
 affairs, a doctrine of election in one sense or 
 another. Now, to a doctrine of election we 
 do not need to object. Aimer c^est choisir. 
 Love is preferential. But two things we 
 must insist on. First, it is not an election to 
 prerogative, privilege, and exemption, but 
 to God's own responsibility, service, and sac- 
 rifice. The Captain of the elect came to 
 serve. For it is an election of love. On 
 that the Gospel is clear. And second, it is 
 the action of a moral process that goes on 
 after death. The fate of the soul is not 
 finally determined then. Those lives and 
 those generations which were elect here were 
 chosen for the service and good of those 
 whose turn was not to come in this life. Ed- 
 ucation, or experience, which begins in this 
 life does not fructify in certain cases till an- 
 
 12 
 
I LIFE'S BREVITY: ITS VALUE 
 
 other. An election to a certain place in this 
 life does not mean that we are condemned 
 to that place for ever. Death does not fix 
 the moral position of the soul irretrievably. 
 Other methods of moral discipline lie be- 
 yond. We cannot be occupied there with the 
 sordid trivialities which engage so much of 
 our time here. That is to say, we are not 
 predestined for ever to the place or state 
 in which we die. Does that not take^ the 
 sting out of a doctrine of predestination? 
 We are all predestined in love to life sooner 
 or later, /'/ we will. An election is to certain 
 stages and methods of endless growth. It 
 Is selection for cycles and crises of moral 
 evolution. It is not that some are chosen for 
 eternal life and some are doomed to eternal 
 death. That was a nightmare which grew 
 from the association of the truth of election 
 with the falsehood of death's finality. And 
 Its tendency is to reduce the value of the soul, 
 like the notion that death is final in the sense 
 of extinction. It is a doctrine which for the 
 popular mind has blighted the great name of 
 Calvin, and prevented us from realizing him 
 as one of the very greatest makers of his- 
 tory, and the creator through Puritanism of 
 modern democracy. Calvin only applied 
 consistently that idea of death's finality which 
 all Protestants held. Take his doctrine of 
 election, relieve it of the notion of death's 
 13 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 absolute arrest, and you have a great pan- 
 orama of development which makes this life 
 organic, with all the possibilities of an endless 
 growth beyond. It is the abuse of Calvin- 
 ism, as it is the abuse of purgatory, that has 
 done the mischief. So we discard the ex- 
 treme of orthodoxy as we do the extreme of 
 negation about the finality of death. And 
 we realize the immense effect on this life and 
 the use of it from the faith of another life, 
 which is the continued action of the Kingdom 
 of God and the discipline of the moral soul. 
 But why did predestination, as a matter of 
 fact, not lower personality? Why was it the 
 religion of the strongest men of the day and 
 for long after — the makers of history? 
 Why did It not act like Fatalism In Islam? 
 Because it was the action not of a Fate but 
 of a living God and a free God of Grace, 
 however distorted the conception of His 
 mode of action. The greatness of God's 
 free and holy sovereignty overbore the weak- 
 ness of the rest of the creed. He was a liv- 
 ing God and a free, and not a force, a pro- 
 cess, or a fate. And the history of Calvin- 
 ism shows that a supreme concern for God's 
 freedom Is the best motive and guarantee 
 for man's. 
 
 14 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE EGOISM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 The egoism of Christ. The fear of punishment and the 
 hope of heaven. Demoralization possible. But my 
 neighbor's immortality. The worth of our mortal- 
 ity to God. The egoism of the anti-egoists. Im- 
 moral immortality. 
 
 The belief in immortality has been charged 
 with egoism. But there Is egoism and 
 egoism. And In Christ Himself there Is a 
 unique combination of self-sacrifice and self- 
 assertion. 
 
 In what sense can we say there was an 
 egoism In Jesus? " Eternal life Is to believe 
 in Me," " Because I live ye shall live also," 
 " I shall judge the world," ^' Inasmuch as ye 
 did it to these ye did It to me." These, with 
 many similar claims, Indicate what. In a mere 
 man, would be egoism carried even to im- 
 perial megalomania. Yet It does not offend 
 us. It offends us no more than the egoism 
 of God — who Is a sole and jealous God — 
 or love's egoism with its monogamy (the so- 
 cial counterpart of monotheism) and its ex- 
 clusive right. As a matter of fact, the ego- 
 ism of Christ is in the same category as the 
 15 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 absoluteness of God; and such egoism In God 
 is the blessing of the world. It is its moral 
 stability. It is its holiness. To worship it 
 is not to be infected with egoism, but to lose 
 it. To glorify God is to find our soul, which 
 is lost in its own pursuit. It is not egoism to 
 court an immortality which is the communion 
 and obedience of His absolute life. 
 
 It might, of course, be said that we should 
 not speak of an egoism in God, and that we 
 had better betake ourselves to a less familiar 
 but more fitting word, and speak of His 
 Egoity. But that hardly meets the case if by 
 the new term we think to avoid the idea that 
 God seeks His own. He does seek His 
 own, since He can seek no higher. Like us, 
 He must seek the highest. Could He devote 
 Himself only to an inferior? His grace to 
 us is a debt to himself. And our faith is a 
 faith that nothing is well with us until we are 
 at His service in that quest, that seeking of 
 His own. For He is a holy God, with a life 
 self-determined and turned In on Himself 
 with an infinite self-sufficiency, just as surely 
 as He is a God of love with a life outgoing. 
 He is at once self-contained and communi- 
 cative. Without a centripetal force the heav- 
 ens cannot stand. It were a slack piety, and 
 one drawn from our sentiment more than 
 from His revelation, to treat Him as one 
 whose whole concern is to give, with nothing 
 i6 
 
n THE EGOISM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 In His energy of that self-regard which makes 
 a character worth much to receive. An 
 effusive God cannot be a holy God, and such 
 love Is not divine. It Is not self-seeking, 
 therefore, to cherish an Immortality of divine 
 service. Man's true self Is the worship of 
 God's. But to this point I shall return. 
 
 I do not mean to say much on the common 
 theme (however valuable) of the effect on 
 this life of a doctrine of retribution, of re- 
 wards and punishments, In another. For 
 this Is not the only action of a belief in im- 
 mortality. And some might say It was not 
 the chief. They might say Its chief effect 
 was on the soul's belief in Itself and its dig- 
 nity. They would question the worth of 
 goodness done for a reward. Many would 
 ask how reward consists with grace, a wage 
 with a free gift — deep points these that I 
 do not stop to discuss here. As to punish- 
 ment, they might also go on to say that the 
 fear of it has been more debasing than the 
 hope of reward; because people as they grow 
 worse tend to think more about punishment, 
 while as they grow better they think less of 
 reward. The reward is not a motive with 
 the people who deserve best, but the punish- 
 ment is a motive with the people who deserve 
 least. And In a religion of moral redemp- 
 tion a doctrine cannot be of chief value if it 
 17 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 weigh more with the bad than with the good. 
 
 Also, I will do little more than mention the 
 effect of the waning belief in eternal torment, 
 both upon life and upon some public matters 
 like capital punishment, or war. If the hang- 
 man fixes a soul in a certain state for ever, 
 I do not see how any crime could justify any 
 State in the capital sentence; nor do I see how 
 It could morally go to war. But there does 
 follow on the decay of this belief a certain 
 levity about death, judgment, and the soul. 
 The soul is taken more lightly if its sin is no 
 more than this life or a brief purgatory can 
 deal with. The whole meaning of life is 
 lowered. And with life's reduced value 
 there comes a reduced sense of life's sanctity 
 and public order. This levity of doctrine 
 has gone beyond a protest against the eternity 
 of punishment, and has led to dropping the 
 Idea of any hell or judgment at all, as if we 
 could cheat judgment by dying. And so it 
 leads to the loss of such life-wisdom as be- 
 gins in fear, and rises to reverence and awe. 
 It is all part of the loss of moral tone in re- 
 ligion through the general abeyance of the 
 sense of the holy and of sin. 
 
 In the matter of reward. It Is charged by 
 some that an immortal life, as it involves the 
 infinite expansion of the self, magnifies our 
 
n THE EGOISM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 egoism, makes us take ourselves too seriously, 
 and thereby tends to develop an anti-social 
 frame of mind which cannot bear to be out 
 of anything and always wants the front. 
 The criticism itself reflects the old anti-so- 
 cial individualism. But there is no doubt 
 that some forms of the belief do have the 
 effect named. It is so in Islam, which is 
 a religion of conquest rather than of civil- 
 ization. It was so even with the Moors 
 in Spain. But it is so also nearer home. 
 Germany means civilization, but by racial do- 
 minion. If the doctrine of immortality is 
 held only on subjective grounds, it is quite 
 likely to end in religious egoism. It is a fun- 
 damental principle of all I say on the subject 
 that a sure belief in immortality does not 
 rest where philosophy puts it, but where re- 
 ligion puts it. It is not founded on the nature 
 of the psychic organism, but on its relation 
 to Another. I mean that if it is based on the 
 indestructible nature of the soul substance, or 
 upon an untamed passion for adventure, or 
 upon endless curiosity, or upon our instinct 
 and thirst for personal perfection, or upon 
 our native moral greatness, or upon any such 
 stoic forms of self-esteem, or even self-re- 
 spect, it is quite likely (if you go on far 
 enough to give scope for its gravitation) to 
 end downward in a supreme care for my im- 
 mortality, whatever becomes of yours. And 
 19 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 that ends In people elbowing each other out 
 of the way to get at the elixir of life, or to 
 dip in this Bethesda pool for eternity. But 
 these are philosophic considerations, or aes- 
 thetic or egoistic concerns, which are not 
 really religious. They detach man from 
 God, the Lord and Giver of Life. At least 
 they do not found on man's union with God. 
 They set him, with his claims and presump- 
 tions, over against God, as the deadly way of 
 Pharisaism was. Man may come thus to be- 
 have like a spoilt beauty, unschooled in duty, 
 and craving for attentions without end. The 
 Creator may even be reminded that He has 
 made the soul immortal, that He cannot re- 
 call the initial gift of life, and that the soul 
 has stamped on It a signed concession of eter- 
 nal rights. All that is egoist enough, or can 
 become so. And I do not remember where 
 we have Christian warrant for believing that 
 man was created immortal. 
 
 But the case Is quite altered If I am not 
 thinking chiefly about my living for ever. I 
 rnay be thinking of some dearer to me than 
 life, for whose salvation beyond the grave I 
 would risk my own. Or I may be thinking 
 of the immortality of the race; which is a 
 more potent Influence on the present than a 
 multitude of individual immortalities, be- 
 cause the efl^clency of an organic group is 
 20 
 
n THE EGOISM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 greater than the sum total of the efficiencies 
 of its units. A nation is great, a crowd is 
 not. But still more is the case altered if 
 I am thinking about our glorifying God for 
 ever whether as a soul or as a race. All is 
 different if I am thinking about what my soul 
 means for others. Most of all when I am 
 thinking of what it means for God and not 
 of what it means for me, if I am not making 
 Him to serve my egoism, if I am not think- 
 ing of the paradise of Heaven but of the pur- 
 pose of God and His righteousness. If my 
 immortality is due to God's gift, it Is due to 
 His incessant gift and creation, and not to an 
 infinite lease of life which He signed at the 
 beginning. That is to say, It can go on only 
 by communion with Him. But that Is not 
 the communion of love between equals, but of 
 grace between unequals. And whatever we 
 owe to God's grace glorifies Him far more 
 than it glorifies us. What man tends to say, 
 whether he do It naively or philosophically, 
 is, " Because I live I shall live." But what 
 Christ says, and what faith hears is, " Be- 
 cause I live ye shall live also." He alone has 
 life in Himself, and we have It by His gift 
 and by union with Him either here or here- 
 after. It makes a vast difference between 
 the philosophic and the religious treatment 
 of Immortality when we remember this — 
 that in the Bible the supreme interest and the 
 
 21 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 final ground of Immortality was not the con- 
 tinuity of an organism, physical or psychical, 
 but of a relation. The ground of the belief 
 was not that such an organism must go on, 
 but that a life In God, and especially in the 
 risen Christ, could not die. The philosophic 
 way Is egoist, however large and fine; it does 
 justice to that excellent creature man. It is 
 anthropocentrlc. The other way (of faith) 
 is concerned with God, His stake in us. His 
 purpose with us, and our service of His King- 
 dom and honor. It is theocentric. 
 
 If this were a mere matter of debate and 
 we wanted to make a point, we might, of 
 course, remind an objector that if there is 
 egoism in some of the hopes of immortality, 
 there Is egoism In many of the results of its 
 denial. If death be dissolution, self knows 
 that it has but a short time, and must make 
 the most of it. And there is no power to 
 forbid or limit. So it piles gain on gain, 
 power on power, pleasure on pleasure, 
 with an energy that nothing abates or de- 
 flects, and with a deep sense of the resources 
 of money to neutralize consequences, still 
 pain, and avert death. So duty easily comes 
 to be a negligible quantity. And the man is 
 ruled by the will to live with all his might 
 the little span on which he may count. But 
 
 22 
 
n THE EGOISM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the events round us would show, if nothing 
 else did, that such brief egoism in due course 
 reduces the value and power of each ego 
 even to enjoy. It reduces the value of moral 
 personality, and society sinks to worse than 
 death. 
 
 But It is not here a mere matter of debate 
 and of making points. Let it be owned that 
 in cases it has happened, and does happen, 
 that the passion for poring on a future life 
 has starved the passion due to this life, and 
 bleached it of reality. (Though, to tell the 
 truth, I wish more people pored on these 
 things now.) It has taken the monk out of 
 his helping place In the world Into a hiding 
 place; and It has put him Into a cellular self, 
 regardless of either the goods or the duties 
 of this life. By his celibacy it robbed the 
 world of the propagation of the best lives 
 to an extent only equal to that in which by 
 this war we have lost them. But the hope 
 that produces such a result does not get Its 
 substance from positive faith, which is occu- 
 pied with Christ and not with our future, and 
 with a Christ who had much sense of life's 
 joy and zest. The dream of a life to come 
 can be used only to pamper the self; and that 
 means to empty of reality the life that now 
 is. It Is a non-moral faith; for if social duty 
 be unreal, all Is unreal. Our real and great 
 
 23 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 hope Is not that one day we shall die to the 
 world, but that this day we live to others and 
 to God. 
 
 To such misled people as I have named the 
 future was a hope that starved the present. 
 But there are those to whom it is a fear, 
 which also crushes it. The dread of hell is 
 an obsession that has distorted many lives. 
 But that again has been because their future 
 was more to them than Christ was, and they 
 were more tied in self than freed in a Savior. 
 With a keen conscience and a vivid imagina- 
 tion, a future that is merely life prolonged 
 and not reborn may well become filled with 
 fears and loaded with care. But in Christ 
 the future is given us filled with a regenerate 
 power and glory, where fear is sanctified into 
 penitence and vigilance, sorrow glorifies God 
 and becomes service, and love is realized in 
 ready obedience. Our total ignorance of a 
 future which faith does not fill with Christ 
 can be a more debasing source of fear than 
 a hell which we know serves the purposes of 
 God. Without Christ and the love of Him, 
 the past and the future may equally loom 
 upon us, and beetle over our present. 
 
 And not upon us only. We are unsure and 
 anxious not only about ourselves, but about 
 the loved and lost. If our personal outlook 
 be a blank we can perhaps be Stoics, but what 
 of them? Is it any comfort to our love, 
 24 
 
11 THE EGOISM OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 does it not add a sting to death and put a slur 
 on love, that they may have ceased to be? 
 It is one thing to commit them to Christ, who 
 fills (and is) our future and theirs; but it is 
 another thing to trust to Christ neither our- 
 selves nor them. And yet to-day there are 
 thousands who have far more passion to see 
 their dead than to know Christ; one word 
 from a revenant were worth all that Christ 
 has said or could say; a frame of mind which 
 not only disappoints moral hope, but leaves 
 them too easy victims to the occult and all 
 its train. It is neither religion nor ethic, but 
 magic. It does not produce religious belief. 
 " If they believe not Moses and the prophets, 
 neither would they believe to Christian pur- 
 pose if one rose from the dead." One does 
 not like to seem untender to the bereaved, 
 but surely it is a poor ending to high-minded 
 people when they find in West End mediums 
 a certainty about their dear ones which they 
 had renounced in Christ, and more comfort 
 in the ghosts' banalities than in the power or 
 silence of Him. It is always an unstable 
 frame of mind and a low form of faith to be, 
 even in the name of love, more anxious about 
 immortality than about being in Christ or in 
 God's Kingdom. And it is dangerous, be- 
 cause it exposes affection to the advances of 
 magic, the variation of temperament, and the 
 spell of the occult — as if the chief secret 
 25 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 of life were in the preternatural or the sub* 
 liminal and not in a moral revelation. But, 
 on the other hand, we can so view the other 
 life in Christ, and so care for the righteous- 
 ness of His endless Kingdom that we give up 
 the dearest souls to its historic service with 
 tears of such noble sorrow as the mother 
 weeps in sad joy when she sends off her 
 daughter as a bride. 
 
 26 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE EGOISM OF GOD 
 
 The immortals not an elite. The egoism of God is the 
 blessing of the world. The moral paradox and 
 miracle of holy love. 
 
 I KEEP saying that our immortality is not so 
 much a matter of our psychical structure, but 
 of our relation to God. i\nd not to God 
 only, but also to our fellows. Let us think 
 of the future not only religiously, as God's 
 gift to us, but ethically, as the destiny of 
 others rather than of ourselves, or as the 
 destiny of our whole kind. Its issues go to 
 the horizon of the whole race. If the future 
 do not belong to them all as it does to us we 
 become an elite. The immortals become a 
 caste. They exist, not in grades of glory 
 (which we may well think), but in a monop- 
 oly of prerogative. Without are dogs. If 
 we are more concerned about our own future 
 than about that of our kind we destroy the 
 Kingdom of God. We turn moral consid- 
 erations out of the large action of history, 
 and we cut the tap root of the unity of man- 
 kind, which at the last lies in the conscience 
 27 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 and its salvation. The Christian believes in 
 the unity of man only because he believes in 
 the righteousness of the universal Kingdom 
 and the new Humanity in Christ. Also, if 
 we are more concerned about a future com- 
 pensation for the ills and losses of life to 
 ourselves than to others, we soon come to 
 treat them as our tools. If there be no com- 
 pensation, such as only another world can 
 give, to these millions of sufferers, all silent 
 but for a Pleader in heaven, and unknown 
 except to the mercy that forgets nothing — 
 if there be no compensation to these dim and 
 common populations of age after age, that 
 fact reduces their whole value, and therewith 
 the value of the soul everywhere. And with 
 that goes the concern at last for human life 
 or suffering. Men come to seem not worth 
 compensating. God has not cast His mantle 
 over their mangled corpses. But we cannot 
 so leave them. If they do not ask, we must 
 ask for them. We must press God to take 
 order for them. Otherwise we lose respect, 
 to say nothing of love, for them. We belong 
 then to a caste and not to mankind. And if 
 the caste so formed be a coarsely egoist, if 
 it be militarist, caste, with a dynastic caste 
 within it; and if, moreover, the belief in the 
 soul and Its destiny die out in that land, then 
 the lives of the millions are but food for the 
 guns, and even the caste Itself becomes the 
 28 
 
ra THE EGOISM OF GOD 
 
 vassal of the dynasty. And the whole of 
 Humanity becomes but the manure in which 
 this monopoly grows. 
 
 But a bold spirit may go further and say 
 that the God of the everlasting Kingdom is 
 but an Egoist. He Is a dynast. The very 
 unity of the race may be but the footstool of 
 His throne. If His object In our eternal life 
 is His own eternal glory, that transfers the 
 egoism to Him. It makes Him the Arch- 
 Egoist, the Caesar of heaven. And how can 
 an Egoist worship the Arch-Egoist, however 
 much he might envy Him? There Is a kind 
 of thinking, more or less popular, which takes 
 to that somewhat crude criticism as the liberal 
 way. That is Its form of protest against 
 the domineering sovereignty of God in the 
 old orthodoxy, for which it has nothing but 
 protest — no Interpretation. The Church 
 in preaching a holy God, a jealous God, a 
 sole God, Is charged with preaching an egoist 
 God; and the Christian course. It is said, must 
 be to discard Him for a God whose holiness 
 Is only purity, and whose being as pure love 
 Is wholly spent In bestowing Himself on His 
 creation without a thought of His own self 
 or dignity. He keeps us Immortal for our 
 good, and He Is not thinking of His own 
 sanctity or glory at all. 
 
 But this Is as one-sided as orthodoxy could 
 29 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 ever be, and for moral man much more fatal. 
 It makes God but the servant of man, the 
 father of a spoilt child. Man picks up all 
 the egoism such a God discards. The 
 Christian revelation is a God of holy love 
 and not of hearty love only; but this ten- 
 dency drops the holy and keeps only to the 
 love. It offers us a God of dear mother- 
 hood and not holy fatherhood. It has taken 
 this swing in the rebound from an orthodoxy 
 that made everything of God's justice and 
 nothing of His love. But if we cannot hold 
 both sides of a paradox we are not fit for 
 the kingdom of heaven. The God of holy 
 love is a paradox. He Is not only a mys- 
 tery; we might even welcome that in an aes- 
 thetic way. But He is an aggressive mys- 
 tery; and that irritates us. He combines two 
 things which, as thoughts, we can adjust in 
 no theology; but we can grasp them by a 
 faith of their reconcilement in a person with 
 whom we have to do — a moral reconcile- 
 ment, and not one worked out by the process 
 of an idea. 
 
 Consider. A God of holy love, a God 
 whose love we do not only enjoy but worship, 
 must be a God that orbs Into a perfect sun as 
 well as sheds His goodly rays. He must be 
 a God concentrated as much as a God com- 
 municative; else what can He communicate? 
 He does owe something to that closed self 
 30 
 
m THE EGOISM OF GOD 
 
 which blesses all to their fill. Except as a 
 real self He cannot bless. He would have 
 nothing to give. His self-revelation would 
 only be effusion. But His transcendence in 
 the Old Testament does not cease in His Con- 
 descendence in the New. It even rises to 
 the place the Holy Spirit takes there as a con- 
 stituent of God-head. His love is homeward 
 bound as well as outward bound. If it go 
 forth always, it also returns incessantly on 
 Himself. Systole is as endless as diastole. 
 And the synthesis of these two movements 
 can only be realized in the energy of His 
 living person; it cannot be set out in any 
 rational harmony. It involves the miracle 
 of personality and will. That the holy 
 should ever touch the sinful Is the great mira- 
 cle of moral reality. A holy God is more 
 than altruist. His holiness Is not egoism. 
 His absolute founds every relative, and does 
 not destroy it. 
 
 In the Bible, things, or places, or people 
 are holy which are set apart for God; God 
 is holy as He Is set apart for Himself. 
 Things are holy as they are for God; He Is 
 holy as He is for Himself. We are holy as 
 belonging to Him; He is holy as belonging 
 to Himself, as absolute possessor of Him- 
 self, by gift of none. He is possessor of 
 Himself, and of all In Him that houses and 
 blesses us. In the Father's heart are many 
 31 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 mansions. For the creature to be holy is 
 to be for God; for God Himself to be holy is 
 to be God. His holiness is the complete ac- 
 cord of His will and His nature. It is not 
 an attribute of God; It is His name, and be- 
 ing, and infinite value. But if the holiness 
 do not go out to cover. Imbue, conquer, and 
 sanctify all things, If it do not give Itself In 
 love, It Is the less holy. It Is but partial and 
 not absolute. As holy he must subdue all 
 and bless all. God's holiness Is the funda- 
 mental principle not of our worship only, 
 but of His whole saving revelation and econ- 
 omy of love. It Is the moral principle of 
 both love and grace. It is love's content, it 
 is what lov^e brings or grace gives. And it 
 IS the warrant of love's eternity. For only 
 the holy can love for ever and for ever sub- 
 due the loveless ; only the holy can thoroughly 
 forgive so as to make His holiness dear. In 
 God's holiness are perfectly balanced the two 
 things which correspond to Egoism and Al- 
 truism with us. They are warp and woof of 
 Him. That heaven moves in the harmony 
 of Its centrifugal and Its centripetal powers. 
 If we fasten on either at the cost of the other 
 we fly from our orbit and come to grief. 
 Luther (but half de-cathollclzed) seized on 
 the love, and we have modern Germany, with 
 Its deadly docility, Its soft piety, and its hard 
 practice. Calvin (with the moral thorough- 
 32 
 
m THE EGOISM OF GOD 
 
 ness of Redemption) seized by preeminence 
 on the holy, with a seeming hardness which 
 has brought the freedom and security of the 
 world. The two had coexisted in Catholi- 
 cism In a naive and dormant way; and they 
 had to dispart in these two reformers on the 
 way to a synthesis which we have not yet 
 reached in practice, but which the great Ca- 
 tholicism of the future must see. 
 
 The egoism of the absolute God is not 
 egoism. It makes the relativity of all. It 
 IS not selfishness but selfhood. It Is the se- 
 curity of blessing for all. The egoism of 
 God is the blessing of the world. It is His 
 possession of His own holy soul. If He did 
 not possess His soul how should He give His 
 spirit to us? It is not the egoism of an indi- 
 vidual that we have to do with, but the uni- 
 versal self-contalnedness, self-constancy, self- 
 identity. It is the eternal totality (If we 
 speak Latin) or the holiness (if we speak 
 Saxon) of all things in righteous love. It is 
 love's power, in every contact with creation, 
 to remain itself, assert itself, establish Itself, 
 and always come home to itself, bringing 
 its sheaves in our souls. It is the absolute- 
 ness and eternity of the moral and spiritual 
 world, the security and certainty of the con- 
 quest, government, and uplifting of the 
 Universe. The worship of the absolute self- 
 hood of the holy Lover by those who live in 
 33 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 Him IS the source In us of permanent power 
 to quell our egoism In the sacrifices of love. 
 Naturally we love love because it Is lovely. 
 Yet It might be helpless. We do not love 
 spiritually till we are perfectly sure of its in- 
 finite power. And that lies In its holiness. 
 Because It Is holy it is almighty, and we trust 
 It for eternal victory. The Idea of a Fate 
 behind Him that might destroy Him and that 
 keeps Him on a long chain would also destroy 
 religion; we could not worship a God who 
 was but our stoutest comrade under a Fate 
 which bound us both. He would not be a 
 holy God. And we can worship no less. 
 
 God's holy love is the egoism not of the 
 fragmentary individual but of the absolute 
 fullness and perfect personality which gives 
 every person or soul its place, wealth, and 
 joy. It is the egoism of the sacrificial God 
 of the Cross, lifted up to draw all men unto 
 Him. And an immortality which shares 
 such egoism as that is our last destiny as the 
 image of God. 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 DE MORTUIS 
 
 The egoism of the will to live is qualified by the suicides 
 and the martyrs. Demoralizing sacrifice. False con- 
 solations and true. Prayer for the dead. 
 
 We have seen that when we speak of another 
 life we mostly mean a second cycle of this life 
 better oiled. The Immortality of the soul 
 means for us mostly a continuance, under bet- 
 ter and smoother conditions, of that self-as- 
 severation, conscious or unconscious, which 
 makes life here. It expresses that revolt 
 from extinction which gives zest and verve 
 to our natural world, and which may be, after 
 all, but a part of our egoism. But we have 
 also seen that a belief so great as Immortality 
 has come to be In Christianity cannot rest at 
 last upon the Instinct of a mere egoism dis- 
 tended. Such a basis would reduce Its moral 
 value, /. e.^ Its ultimate value for life. We 
 should lose life In our anxiety to prolong it. 
 The Christian ground for immortality Is that 
 the Lord hath need of him. 
 
 But when our life-hunger has been dis- 
 cussed it is not all. Is there no such thing as 
 35 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 the passion for death? If we long for Im- 
 mortality, we also have, In cases, both the 
 wish and the power of suicide. If we could 
 only be sure of extinction by it ! Sleep ! 
 Ay, but what dreams may come ! In Hke 
 manner the racial Instinct Is an adumbration 
 of the instinct for immortality, and emerges 
 In us when religion does; but there Is also 
 celibacy, whether as a preference, or a power, 
 or a duty. These are two sets of extremes, 
 life with its refusal in death, or love with Its 
 refusal in celibacy. And each extreme seems 
 to cross the other's drift — life at war with 
 death, love with celibacy. But there is one 
 point in which the two agree. They agree 
 In asserting the soul's power over nature. 
 The one, life, asserts that the soul has power 
 to transcend nature and live down circum- 
 stances; the other, suicide, that it has power 
 to slip out of circumstances, to foil nature, 
 and to stop when nature says go on. The 
 one, love, can rejoice over untoward fate; the 
 other, celibacy, can war down Instincts the 
 most primal and powerful. And If the soul 
 Is so In control of nature, then it need not 
 end with nature. It Is not wholly dependent 
 on It. Thought does not depend on brain. 
 Still, let us not overpress certain points in the 
 argument. I only note that, when we urge 
 the passion for life as an argument for Its 
 duration, the disgust or indifference for life 
 36 
 
IV DE MORTUIS 
 
 must also be taken into account. The atten- 
 uation of life, by loss of interest in it, is 
 closely associated with its brevity. 
 
 There is a farther qualification that we 
 have already marked on the passion to live. 
 The desire for immortality may not be a de- 
 sire for 7ny immortality, but for that of an- 
 other life more dear to me than my own. 
 That would greatly affect the note of my daily 
 life. Indeed such a love might point towards 
 my own suicide were I certain that it would 
 insure the continuance of the other's life be- 
 yond. I am ready to die; he is not. If my 
 death could be thought to give him chances 
 in a future life which he has thrown away in 
 this I would welcome it. I might even cause 
 my own death for his sake, and trust the 
 motive to win me mercy. If my ceasing to 
 live entirely could insure him a life of good- 
 ness and happiness, I should gladly go out 
 that he might have a fuller life. " Blot me 
 out of the Book of Life." " I could wish 
 myself accused of God for my brethren's 
 sake." I would part with my immortality 
 for his if I had the power. Indeed, in some 
 cases, so far as people have the power, it is 
 done. Some lives are thus given for others, 
 not by an act of pistol or poison, but by long 
 days of sacrifice; and sometimes, alas! these 
 very days crush the soul itself and grind it 
 down. You will meet with a long life sacri- 
 37 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 fice In which the soul seems to sink in the 
 moral scale with every year, and the service 
 Itself becomes sordid. This is one of the 
 most pathetic of moral mysteries. The cross 
 that was taken up was more than the moral 
 power could carry. It shows that sacrifice 
 is not in itself a moral or an elevating thing. 
 The habit Is not sustained by any sense of a 
 compensating future or an unfailing God. 
 There is often, Indeed, no regard for a future 
 life at all. That Is a common type of parent- 
 hood among unsplrltual people. All warmth 
 or beauty In the relation dies In the habit or 
 duty of it. But take it at Its best. Would 
 it alter, would It vanish, If immortality came 
 to be generally disbelieved ? 
 
 Again, at a time like the present the Inter- 
 est of countless bereaved hearts is not an im- 
 mortality for themselves, but for those who 
 have been caught away either unfulfilled, or 
 unprepared, or worse than unprepared, by the 
 wickedness of war. What do our ideas of 
 the unseen warrant us to say to the bleeding 
 hearts and fearful minds of those left upon 
 earth? 
 
 At the outset, I venture to think that it is a 
 surrender of Christianity to find from ghosts 
 a comfort and hope about the unseen which 
 we do not draw from Christ. It is amoral. 
 It is another religion and a debased. It is 
 38 
 
IV DE MORTUIS 
 
 the renunciation of the moral element In 
 religion for quite an inferior mysticism 
 (magic). It Is a non-moral mysticism which 
 gets from some Bond Street medium a faith 
 which the soul fails to receive from Christ 
 or His apostles and saints. But that by the 
 way. 
 
 May we say In consolation to the bereaved 
 that every martyr patriot goes straight from 
 the field of death to the side of the Savior? 
 May we say that In the way of comfort; as If 
 a death for a great cause, to whose side the 
 man sprang at a patriotic call, wiped out the 
 vices of a lifetime, or the betrayal of Inno- 
 cent hearts? We could say no such thing. 
 We may not forget our moral gospel so far 
 as to speak like that. If these souls go 
 straight to the presence of the Savior, It Is to 
 the Judgment seat of Christ, where we must 
 all stand. Yes, but It is where nothing Is 
 neglected or forgotten, nothing glozed, and 
 nothing set down In malice, but good and bad 
 are in scales perfectly and kindly just. It is 
 quite as false, on the other hand, to quote the 
 bad old phrase about the tree lying as It had 
 fallen. It does not. It crumbles. Or It Is 
 moved away. It Is turned to some good ac- 
 count. We may be quite sure that, if a cup 
 of cold water to a disciple do not lose Its re- 
 ward, so an act of sacrifice for a righteous 
 cause cannot go without its moral value for 
 39 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 God, and a corresponding effect on the soul. 
 And the finest thing that that soul ever did, 
 though it will not atone for a lifetime of 
 things foul, yet must have its full value for 
 the personality in a sphere where such things 
 tell more than they do here. There shall 
 never be one lost good. The closing sacri- 
 fice does all that is in it to do. It is not 
 wasted. But it does not do what it is beyond 
 heroism itself to do for the soul. It does not 
 save. Yet it may be the moment of his con- 
 version. It may open his moral eyes. It 
 may begin his godly sorrow. It may be the 
 first step in a new life, the beginning of re- 
 pentance in a new life which advances faster 
 there than here. We threw away too much 
 when we threw Purgatory clean out of doors. 
 We threw out the baby with the dirty water 
 of its bath. There are more conversions on 
 the other side than on this, if the crisis of 
 death opens the eyes as I have said. And, 
 while it may be true that some mephistophe- 
 lian spirits are born dead into that world as 
 some are into this, is it not true also that for 
 others we can only say that the manner of 
 their leaving life became them better than 
 anything they did in it, and It is the first step 
 to a new life, and not only another life. If 
 a man do not at once receive the prodigal's 
 robe, at least he has the entree of the father's 
 domain. 
 
 40 
 
IV DE MORTUIS 
 
 How natural in this connection to turn to 
 prayer for the dead. Prayer for the dead is 
 healthier than tampering with them. Prayer 
 is our supreme link with the unseen — with 
 which otherwise we have no practical rela- 
 tions. We should resume prayer for the 
 dead, were it only to realize the unity of the 
 Church and our fellowship with its invisible 
 part. In Christ we cannot be cut off from 
 our dead nor they from us wherever they be. 
 And the contact is in prayer. 
 
 No converse with the dead is so much of a 
 Christian activity as prayer for them. There 
 is no part of the practical Christian life which 
 is so intimate and effectual as prayer. It col- 
 ors and shapes us more than the obvious 
 forms of action do. It is the work which 
 chiefly influences the growth of faith and the 
 quality of character. Life is affected from 
 its foundation by whether we pray or not, 
 and by how we pray. It Is the main practi- 
 cal interest between this life and the life un- 
 seen. And we shall pray or not pray, we 
 shall pray one way or another way, accord- 
 ing as we believe in a future life, and hope 
 for ourselves, or for those dearer than our- 
 selves. Which is the better, to put them in 
 God's hands and pray for them, or to bring 
 strange devices to pass to conjure them 
 up ? If we believe in a continued life through 
 spirits and not through Christ, if a medium 
 41 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 mean more than a Mediator for our contact 
 with the unseen, the manner of our prayer 
 will be accordingly. If we discard Christ's 
 moral revelation, and say we get more if one 
 seem to rise magically from the dead, we pass 
 into another religion, and prayer sinks ac- 
 cordingly. If Christ's voice do not come to 
 us from beyond the grave, if all we hear is 
 but the dull sound and hard effort of a miner's 
 pick trying to meet ours in a tunnel between 
 the two worlds, the note of our prayer and 
 of our life is going to be deeply affected. It 
 will lose the infinite moral value of union 
 with the intercession of Christ, crowning His 
 moral and final victory of a holy Cross. Or 
 if we go on to say that death ends all, it ends 
 all prayer. It not only stops the soul that 
 prays, but the thought of it paralyzes the soul 
 and its prayer in life. 
 
 On the other hand, if death fix and settle 
 all, if the tree lies for ever as it falls, prayer 
 is much affected, and so life. One form of 
 prayer is then excluded — prayer for the 
 dead (though they need our prayer more if 
 they are suffering yonder) . Yet it would be 
 easier to maintain a belief in immortality if 
 we were encouraged so to pray. It would 
 give us a practical relation with the other side, 
 and to other immortality than our own. As 
 it is, we have little direct and practical contact 
 with immortality so far as the day's life 
 42 
 
IV DE MORTUIS 
 
 goes. No act of that life brings us into 
 direct and practical connection with the world 
 of the dead. It is a dream; it Is a world 
 not reahzed. It does not belong to the 
 strong and active side of our life. There is 
 always about a life that works outward on 
 another a certain note of distinction which 
 is not made up for by any enthusiasm of Hu- 
 manity. I knew an agnostic of a very fine 
 kind who shortened his life by his devoted 
 service to the very poor in a low part of Lon- 
 don. There was to me a certain halo about 
 him. And yet it is a different kind of spell 
 that invests a life lived in the power of an 
 endless life, a life that dwells with immortal- 
 ity daily. 
 
 I venture to say, then, that the instinct and 
 custom of praying for our dearest dead, or 
 our noblest (like many of the soldiers by 
 whose pain and death we live), should be 
 encouraged and sanctified as a new bond for 
 practical life between the seen and the unseen, 
 where we have bonds all too few. Nothing 
 in our Christian belief is against it, and there 
 IS a good deal for it. It would never have 
 been lost but for the abuses of purgatory, 
 masses, and the commerce which the Church 
 made of a magical Influence on another 
 world. But we threw away too much when 
 we made a clean sweep. We are bidden to 
 pray for everything that Is not trivial, ''In 
 43 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 everything making your requests known," 
 and to cast every real care on God. There 
 is nothing serious that we may not bring to 
 the Father. A widow praying who does not 
 know where her next shilling is to come from 
 means more to the Father than a full choral 
 service, and more engages His heart. And 
 it is serious enough that half our heart, and 
 all our treasure, should be snatched into the 
 unseen. With that unseen our only sure link 
 is the God to whom we pray. But He is as 
 much the God of our dead as of us; and He 
 is a God from whom they cannot be severed 
 as they are from us. May our prayer to our 
 common Father not put into petition what is 
 always in our thoughts, and put into words 
 what is always in our heart? If we name 
 them before God, what are we doing in our 
 way but what He does in His, and calling 
 things that are not as though they were? 
 
 There are those who can quietly say, as 
 their faith follows their love into the unseen, 
 *| I know that land. Some of my people 
 live there. Some have gone abroad there on 
 secret foreign service, which does not admit 
 of communications. But I meet from time to 
 time the Commanding Officer. And when I 
 mention them to Him He assures me all is 
 well." 
 
 There is another world. It is not a mere 
 44 
 
IV DE MORTUIS 
 
 unseen, unknown. It is not blank being, but 
 full of feature, character, power, reality. 
 We do not fall into it over the edge of a bot- 
 tomless abyss. It is not clean cut off from 
 this life. All kinds of processes run out into 
 it, and they carry current both ways. For 
 Christian people the supreme link, the Grand 
 Commissure (if I might so speak) of both 
 worlds is Christ. The absolute unity of 
 Christ's soul in Its victory over death and 
 dread, in Its exorcism of the occult powers, 
 gives us the spiritual unity of seen and un- 
 seen. His great delivery for a pagan world 
 was not from death, but from Inferior and 
 accusing spirits haunting, distracting, and de- 
 basing life. His living person is as real 
 yonder as here, as real here as there. It is 
 the last effective in both worlds. He is a liv- 
 ing person. He is not inert substance, a 
 mere continuity of essence, a mere prolonga- 
 tion of some great kind of being, or vitality, 
 or principle, or tendency. He is the House 
 of many mansions. He Is more. He is 
 King and Lord. His unity is one of action 
 and reaction. In Him the other world acts 
 on this, and this world on the other. But 
 our chief action from this world on the other 
 is prayer. And our other world Is God. 
 Prayer Is action In the God in whom our 
 dead live. Were they In hell. It Is still God's 
 hell. How can prayer help, either in nature 
 45 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 or in grace, being prayer for our dead? 
 Can we think of them there and not pray? 
 Can we think of them there not praying, and 
 for us, as even Dives prayed for his family 
 at a very early stage of his new moral 
 growth? They, too, in proportion as they 
 feel the atmosphere of the other world, — 
 are they not caught up, and carried on, in the 
 stream of the great intercession? Believers 
 at least are all in Christ, and surely not out- 
 side that intercession in His name and power. 
 In the early Church, says Dr. Swete, it was 
 a well-spread opinion, and apparently unre- 
 buked, that the dead in Christ pray for the 
 living. " No belief which was not actually 
 an article of faith was more general, or more 
 deeply cherished in Christendom." Paul has 
 no protest against Baptism for the dead. 
 There is nothing apostolic or evangelical that 
 forbids prayer for them in a communion of 
 Saints which death does not rend. It is an 
 impulse of nature which is strengthened by 
 all we know of the movement of grace. The 
 arguments against It are apt to be more theo- 
 logically pedantic than spiritually proficient. 
 And they do not seem to have much heart. 
 
 46 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PRACTICE OF ETERNITY AND THE 
 EXPERIENCE OF LIFE 
 
 The moral psychology of the saints. The change wrought 
 by age on the soul's direction. But also in the 
 soul's interests. The effect on life of the antepast 
 of Eternity. 
 
 There Is much to be yet written about the 
 psychology of spiritual change, and especially 
 of conversion and of the new birth which 
 gives us our true eternity. For eternal life 
 means more than Immortality. We may 
 hope for better light on the process when 
 there are more cases, and more thorough, 
 and more Intelligent cases, of the new birth 
 among people with the modern mind and the 
 psychological Insight. The psychology of 
 sainthood has not yet had the attention which 
 has been given to the psychology of the nat- 
 ural man. The reason is partly because spir- 
 itual people are somewhat shy of revealing 
 themselves, partly because they are shy of 
 analyzing the hour of their best spiritual 
 experience. For to dissect may be to kill it; 
 It shrivels at the critical touch; and we can 
 examine but Its memory. But we have some 
 47 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 analogies — and large analogies, not small. 
 The soul's Immortality beyond death may be 
 shown to have a relation to the new birth, 
 similar to that which the new birth has to the 
 origin of the natural egoist man. 
 
 It is not so hard to speak of conversion if 
 we mean by it no more than a change of 
 direction, a turning round and moving the 
 other way. But more than that is meant 
 when it is described as regeneration, as a new 
 birth. It is a change in quality, and not in 
 mere movement or behavior. It means a 
 greater crisis in the growth of the moral per- 
 sonality than the mere reversal of the ma- 
 chinery; a new type of motor is put Into the 
 mill. 
 
 It has been pointed out that we can mark 
 in the long course of the moral life a slow 
 change, which we may well call a slow con- 
 version, because It is a change in the direction 
 of our interest. In youth, says Paulsen, 
 speaking of the course of the natural life, 
 our interest is turned mainly upon the future; 
 in maturity it is turned upon the present; and 
 in age it reverts more and more to the past. 
 Such a change Is gradually wrought by expe- 
 rience upon the direction of the soul. And 
 it Is brought about by our approach to an- 
 other life. For what are youth, maturity, 
 and age? Are they not all relative terms 
 and stages, which we measure by their dls- 
 48 
 
V THE PRACTICE OF ETERNITY 
 
 tance from a fixed point — namely, death. 
 They draw their meaning from some close to 
 which they move. Their particular meaning 
 comes from their various distance from 
 death. But that means from eternity. For 
 death Is the point where all men enter a rela- 
 tion with eternity which gathers past, pres- 
 ent, and future all Into one Infinite simultane- 
 ity. 
 
 Youth, maturity, and age, I say, gradually 
 undergo In us the great conversion of interest 
 that I have described when they are spread 
 out and successive; but they must undergo a 
 greater change still when we enter at death 
 an eternity in which they all coexist in a time- 
 less way, and act simultaneously and col- 
 lectively on us. And the frequent contem- 
 plation here of such contact with eternity 
 must greatly affect life. If the conduct of 
 our life Is much affected by the gradual pas- 
 sage to age as I have put It, without our being 
 very conscious of the change; if the history 
 of our soul must be still more affected when 
 we pass death, and find all the stages of life 
 in a timeless simultaneous action on us, must 
 not life be vastly affected In those who also 
 accustom themselves spiritually to confer 
 with eternity during the whole of life's pas- 
 sage, who make frequent excursions into the 
 unseen, and who deliberately expose their 
 soul at intervals during their whole life to the 
 49 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 spiritual Influence which condenses all suc- 
 cessive stages in a timeless spiritual experi- 
 ence ? To dwell devoutly on such an eternity 
 must much modify the natural development. 
 It must hasten it by anticipation, and ripen us 
 faster than any experience of life can which 
 is merely ethical and reflective. It moralizes 
 in a transcendant way the time process, the 
 successive stages of life. And especially so 
 as we look back on life; it sublimates the 
 retrospect. 
 
 Let me linger on this. Paulsen finely says 
 (speaking of the spiritual and reflective life) 
 that when we come to age and look back on 
 our moral growth, we are much less inter- 
 ested in recalling the good times we had than 
 we were when we anticipated them in youth; 
 and we are more arrested by the memories of 
 our faults than of our pleasures. As to 
 these, we prefer to dwell on the pleasures we 
 have given, or the help we have brought — 
 on the amount of service we have put into 
 life. And we are more concerned than we 
 once were about the loss we have caused, the 
 lives we have stunted, the wrongs we have 
 done; or about the wrongs and losses which 
 our success has cost, even when we meant no 
 ill, just by the course of things. That is to 
 say, our outlook on life Is more moral and 
 less selfish in its retrospect than in Its pros- 
 pect. We become alive to the preoccupa- 
 50 
 
V THE PRACTICE OF ETERNITY 
 
 tlon of our old egoism and the cruelty of our 
 youth — or at least its crassness and insensi- 
 bility. And does this not show what the 
 larger effect of eternity must be ? Is that not 
 the inverted value we shall see in looking 
 back on life when we are converted by enter- 
 ing Eternity? And is it not the value we 
 should see if we entered Eternity in spirit 
 here? If during life we let the influences of 
 eternity, of life in its simultaneity, play on us 
 deliberately and in advance; if we court, by 
 the culture of our spiritual life in Christ, the 
 revelation of eternity in God, with whom is 
 no after nor before; if we let it all act on 
 our soul from there; should we not be doing 
 much to anticipate the verdict of age, and to 
 avert many of the regrets of eternity? The 
 last judgment would then be always at work 
 on us. We should live in it and Its power 
 and glory. We should in a short time fulfill 
 a long time. By the Eternal Spirit, we 
 should so number our days that we turn our 
 hearts to moral wisdom faster than we are 
 changed by the mere lapse of the years. 
 For the knowledge that we court with pains 
 has a value that does not belong to what is 
 forced on us, or what just sinks In subcon- 
 sciously. 
 
 But this means for Christians placing our- 
 selves in ever closer rapport with Christ's 
 holy love, and especially with the holiness in 
 51 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 it and the conquest that means. The real 
 power of immortality is the eternity of the 
 holy. It is, philosophically put, the invinci- 
 bility of the moral absolute. Holiness, with 
 its eternal moral conquest, is the eternal 
 thing in love itself, it is the only guarantee 
 of love's final victory. As we take home 
 eternity from Christ, it is the holy we take 
 home in love. It is the holy as what might 
 be called the ingrain, the tissue, the physiog- 
 nomy of eternal love, the content and quality 
 of it, the gift and power it brings, the warp 
 to its woof. It Is to this supreme moral 
 power that we expose ourselves for our 
 cleansing, or shaping, nay, our new creation 
 — which Is something beyond love's power 
 except as holy. And it is as moral persons 
 that we do so, for the holy Is a moral Idea, 
 it Is a moral power. Therefore it is not the 
 mere duration of the soul that concerns us, 
 not the continuance of a process more or less 
 natural by which we are swept In, but the 
 Immortality of the moral personality which 
 Is reared by our action^ our personal action 
 of response. And the Influence of holiness 
 of God on that active personality Is supreme, 
 because the true eternity is His standing 
 act, It is Himself in that pure holy action 
 which Is the native energy of His being. 
 He Is not a static being into whose kind 
 love we sink, but He Is the eternal Energy 
 52 
 
V THE PRACTICE OF ETERNITY 
 
 we join, which constitutes all being, and 
 binds in holy action the coherent universe — 
 the love which, as holy, moves the earth and 
 all the stars. He is the most influential en- 
 vironment of the moral soul. For His holi- 
 ness does not merely act on man as an ob- 
 ject, as it does on the natural world; but it 
 so acts on him that he returns the act as a 
 subject; it is a case of reciprocal action in a 
 rising scale. It is communion. And we 
 know, not as science knows, but because we 
 are first known by what we know, because 
 His knowing us is the cause of our knowing 
 Him. The object of our knowledge is the 
 eternal Subject that knows. An eternity 
 which begins by knowing us must have a very 
 different effect on our life from an eternity 
 which we but know, and to which we but look 
 forward. 
 
 53 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 IMMORTALITY AS PRESENT JUDGMENT 
 
 It is a vocation rather than a problem. Life is another 
 thing if we confuse these. Immortality is a destiny 
 rather than a riddle. Live immortally. Choose; do 
 not argue. To live for Eternity is much, but to live 
 Eternity is more. 
 
 Like every other Christian doctrine, that of 
 the soul's immortality needs to be mortal- 
 ized and brought home to our daily life 
 without losing its mystic spell. i\nd in this 
 interest we might regard the following con- 
 siderations. 
 
 The trouble about the doctrine of immor- 
 tality has been increased by the fact that so 
 many have turned it from an imperative task 
 to a leisurely theme. It has passed from a 
 practical task to be but a theoretical prob- 
 lem, from a Gospel to our will to be a riddle 
 to our wits. From a ^' concern " it has be- 
 come an enigma. From a vocation it has 
 turned a question. From a matter of con- 
 science and duty it has become a matter of 
 poetry and speculation. It has been made 
 to rest not on the free grace of God but on 
 the dim presumptions of man. The faith of 
 54 
 
IMMORTALITY AS JUDGMENT 
 
 it has turned from a gift of God to a result 
 of ours. 
 
 And this greatly affects its influence on 
 life. We should begin with the fact, if we 
 are Christians at all (for it just means our 
 part and lot in the Christ Who vanquished 
 death), and we should act accordingly. I 
 do not see how a true believer in Christ can 
 doubt the immortality of those who are 
 Christ's (and He claims all), or require 
 occult assurance of it, which means finding 
 Him unsatisfactory. But if you do not so 
 begin and so act; if, instead of beginning 
 with the belief, you expect only to end with 
 it, how long do you think you will take to 
 arrive at a conclusion? It may take a long 
 time, for some all their lives, for others 
 more. Meantime how are you to be living? 
 If so great a thing is true about life, it must 
 have, and must be meant to have, an effect 
 equally great on life's practice. Our behef 
 about such a fact of personality when it finds 
 us must greatly color life. Is it an immor- 
 tal soul that is living life out? If so, and 
 if you begin, and for long go on, speculating 
 pro and con, then all that makes the power 
 of immortality and its action on your soul 
 is lost out of your first stage.^ Your soul 
 must lose irreparably in the end if that plastic 
 stage is not living the immortality out as a 
 power or principle, but it is only working 
 55 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 towards it in a hope rather than a faith. It 
 must make a great difference to life if it is 
 not spent under the power of an eternal life 
 but only under its possibility, not in living 
 out the immortality but only in weighing it, 
 considering whether there is any such thing 
 to live out. If you do not believe in it you 
 cannot live it. And if you are not living 
 an immortal life you are living something 
 different and inferior; and the effect of this 
 for life's tone and value must correspond. 
 It is not something that begins when we die, 
 but something that begins with us and lives 
 forth in our life. Death is not the solution 
 of the riddle, but a crisis of the power. And 
 it may be the coming home of judgment on 
 you for treating as a riddle what is a power. 
 Immortality Is really a destiny pressing 
 on us by Christ in us; it Is not a riddle that 
 just interests us. It is not chess, It Is war. 
 It is a duty bearing on us. It is not a theme 
 that attracts us. When duties turn to mere 
 problems and destinies become but Intellec- 
 tual toys. It Is an evil time. It Is not well 
 when we stop doing in order to discuss. We 
 cannot safely turn the will's duty over to 
 thought. Duty Is a thing we must do. For 
 effect on life we must own It practically, not 
 debate its existence. The gifts of God are 
 not there to be looked In the mouth but to 
 be lived in the heart. There Is no Christian 
 56 
 
VI IMMORTALITY AS JUDGMENT 
 
 question about our duty to obey the immortal 
 call; the only possible question is as to the 
 form of obedience; or it is the question 
 whether we are obeying it or not. Our im- 
 mortality lies on us with that kindling weight, 
 that weight of glory, that weight of wings. 
 Weight but not pressure. The wings that 
 add to our weight yet lift us from the ground. 
 " My soul cleaveth to the dust; quicken Thou 
 me according to Thy winged word." Such 
 a word, gift, and destiny is our immortality. 
 Our Christian business is to crystallize it. 
 It is an obligation; it is not a mere stirring 
 in us. It is a duty on our person and action; 
 it is not a mere process of our natural organ- 
 ism, to whose stream we have just to yield 
 ourselves. Life is not just a stream which 
 we have reason to think flows on beyond 
 a certain point, or continues when it disap- 
 pears 'round a certain bend. It is not an 
 inevitable movement towards the future. It 
 is rather a doom from the past, a work in 
 the present, or a destiny from above. We 
 cannot tarry to argue if there is an immor- 
 tality awaiting us; we must obey the immor- 
 tality urging and lifting us. We do not 
 move to a possible mirage of a city of God; 
 the citizenship is within us. Ask, am I liv- 
 ing as immortal — not as one who will be 
 immortal? Do not waste time asking if 
 there is a coming eternity; ask, what must I | 
 57 ' 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 do to give effect to my present eternity; how 
 shall I be loyal to the eternal responsibility 
 in me and on me? Is my faith a life? It 
 must make a great difference to life whether 
 we treat our eternity as a present or a future, 
 as a power or as a possibility, as a duty or 
 as an ideal — whether our Christ is a By- 
 stander or an occupant of us. Our immor- 
 tality Is really our judgment and Its joy of 
 righteousness; it is not a mere condition of 
 judgment, nor the region of it. It does not 
 become a mere venue, a mere stage for judg- 
 ment, a set scene. Nor does It provide a 
 mere asbestos either for future flames, or for 
 the happier incandescence. It has no ex- 
 istence apart from a content of weal or woe. 
 And that content depends on us (under 
 grace). Our immortality is not just the 
 glory (or gloom) of going on still to be. 
 It is not mere duration. There is no such 
 thing, no such abstraction. Our eternity is 
 something that remains when all its events 
 have passed. It is the state of a soul, the 
 content and quality of Its life, when events 
 in a sequence cease, when they have come 
 and gone with the soul's verdict on them, and 
 the reaction of such verdict on the soul. It 
 is good or evil according to choice. It is a 
 disparting to one of two great seas. It does 
 not call chiefly for contemplation but decis- 
 ion. What Paul did in speaking to Felix 
 58 
 
VI IMMORTALITY AS JUDGMENT 
 
 was not to persuade him of immortality; it 
 was to turn immortality from a curious inter- 
 est to a crushing crisis, from a curious in- 
 terest hovering about life, and discussible at 
 the tables of roues, to a searching judgment 
 on life's interior. It was preaching that 
 Felix did not like with wine and walnuts. 
 The salons shun it, and the Reviews ignore 
 it. Nor was it in the nature of popular 
 preaching. It did not carry the accent either 
 of culture, or of sentiment, or of mere urbane 
 consideration. It did not humor the in- 
 stincts of the heart, nor hallow the graces of 
 the home. It did not agitate the questions 
 that occupy the periodicals on the one hand, 
 nor those that captivate the young on the 
 other. But it was the kind of preaching 
 which brings the other life into this, which 
 shapes our behavior in time by the nature 
 of an immanent eternity (whether we speak 
 of public conduct or private), which trans- 
 mutes time into eternity and does not simply 
 prolong it. It translates a present, it does 
 not discuss a future. It does more than edu- 
 cate, it converts. It does more than enlarge 
 our moral horizon, or manipulate the themes 
 of moral culture. It makes the new heaven 
 and the new earth wherein dwelleth right- 
 eousness. 
 
 That is a sample of the way we must res- 
 cue the spiritual for the ethical, moralize 
 59 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 our theology, and make creed practice. 
 However much religion may be life, theol- 
 ogy is deeper life. It rises deeper in God's 
 life, it goes deeper into ours. It moralizes 
 all by its origin in the holy. A theme like 
 Immortality, at least — we do it wrong, be- 
 ing so majestical, to explore it but as a cav- 
 ern with our torches, instead of honoring it 
 as our light and sun and showing it forth 
 accordingly. ^ It is much to live for Eternity, 
 to live Eternity is more. 
 
 60 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 ETERNITY WITHIN TIME, TIME WITHIN 
 ETERNITY 
 
 The other life then is the other life now. The timeless 
 in Time. Time's Sacrament. We are Eternal eadi 
 moment. Eternity and progress. 
 
 " This is eternal life," says Jesus, " to know 
 God, to know Me." It is a thing indwell- 
 ing with us, it is not a thing outside that 
 awaits us. It is ourselves in a phase, in a 
 new relation. Myself am hell; myself am 
 my own heaven. It is not a realm we enter, 
 nor an influx that enters us. Moral though 
 it be, it is a mystic thing now rather than a 
 future then, an inner presence not an outer 
 goal, a power rather than an expectation. 
 It is to know God as holy love. But it is 
 not to know Him as an object, not to know 
 Him as science knows, not to know Him 
 in a cognition, which sees a thing at the 
 other end of our observation or of our 
 thought. It is to know Him by an inner 
 appropriation. It is by an interpenetration. 
 We know what begins by knowing us. We 
 know because we are known. It is the kind 
 of knowledge which does not give power but 
 6i 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 is power, where our self Is not just enhanced 
 but lost, and only in that way found in its 
 fullness. The Christ, who knew God best, 
 had power over all; but it was power to give 
 as to Him it was given, and to give to His 
 own eternal life. Eternal life is much more 
 than contact; It Is living communion with 
 spiritual and eternal reality. And on that 
 reality's initiative. Real love Is not that we 
 loved God but He us. 
 
 Eternal life is not so inward that it Ig- 
 nores the world as phantasmal. Especially 
 It does not ignore history. UnhistorIc spir- 
 ituality Is often a danger to faith. Some say 
 it Is one of the greatest to-day. The true 
 spirituality Is rooted In history. It springs 
 from an incarnation of action. It Is not a 
 matter of Illumination. It does not arise 
 from a mere emanation of light. It is know- 
 ing God In Christ the Redeemer. The resur- 
 rection to immortality crowns the redemption 
 from guilt. It Is not the lone soul with the 
 Alone, Ignoring two millenniums of revela- 
 tion and its saints. It Is not Intuition, mys- 
 tic and gnostic. It Is In a historic Mediator. 
 Is that a piece of theology? Is a Mediator 
 between the eternal spirit and the finite an 
 unreality, an Intrusion? The mystic soul 
 may Impatiently think so, but the moral soul 
 finds such mediation the way to reality; and 
 the mystic experience Is not quite trustworthy 
 62 
 
VII ETERNITY WITHIN TIME 
 
 about reality. The pagan gods had not me- 
 diators, because they were not real or good 
 gods; but the living God has a living Re- 
 vealer. To know the living God is to know 
 Christ, to know Christ is to know the living 
 God. We do not know God by Christ but 
 in Him. We find God when we find Christ; 
 and in Christ alone we know and share His 
 final purpose. Our last knowledge is not the 
 contact of our person with a thing or a 
 thought; it is intercourse of person and 
 person. We meet God in His coming In 
 Christ, meet Him there on His own tryst, 
 and find there that we know only because we 
 were first known. We do not infer from 
 Christ to God. And in Christ we have 
 Eternal life, we do not simply qualify for it, 
 we do not just take the needful steps. 
 
 The true spiritual intuition looks through 
 the historic Christ. Otherwise it is apt to be 
 individual and not social. It haunts a cell 
 and retires from a church. It is more devout 
 than sacramental. It is not historic and it is 
 not moral in its nature. It is more prone 
 to visions than revelations; it is more mys- 
 tic than positive. It develops subjective 
 frames rather than objective powers. It 
 often craves fusion with God rather than 
 communion. From the abeyance of the 
 moral note it tends to think of process more 
 than action, of imagination more than con- 
 63 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 science, of elation more than sympathy, 
 of an evolution instead of a redemption. 
 It Is more Interested In sanctity than in 
 righteousness. It lives on an inner light 
 rather than a redeeming power, a charity 
 rather than a righteousness, a group of saints 
 rather than a Kingdom of God. Its immor- 
 tality is a beatific vision rather than the recip- 
 rocal energy of eternal life. Christian in- 
 tuition turns on our insight into Christ, which 
 to an extent varies with temperament; but 
 Christian faith turns on Christ's action on 
 us and for us, which Is removed from our 
 variations, and can be met and answered well 
 by some whose spiritual penetration Is not 
 yet subtle, vivid, or vocal. 
 
 Another life — what is the other life then 
 but that which is the other life now? What 
 is it but the eternal life which Is our true life 
 here, only viewed as going on, viewed In 
 amount rather than In kind, in extent rather 
 than quality, as prolonged rather than In- 
 tense, as expressed In terms of time, dura- 
 tion or quantity, Instead of worth. We ask, 
 how long. Instead of how rich, how full, we 
 live. ^ Some will remember the Splnozlst 
 description of the two disparate aspects of 
 the great reality. Spinoza spoke of these 
 aspects as thought and extension. And there 
 was only an empirical connection between 
 them. Well, the two aspects of eternal life 
 64 
 
vii ETERNITY WITHIN TIME 
 
 correspond. We may view it quantitatively, 
 extensively, as everlasting, or qualitatively, 
 sub specie eternitatis, as moral. Now are 
 these, like extension and thought, irrelevant 
 to each other and disparate? Are we quite 
 ignorant of what has these features, of that 
 whose physiognomy they are? The life that 
 goes on — is it not the life of moral person- 
 ality? That is soul, that is reality. When 
 we speak of another life we think of our life 
 as enduring; but it is the continuance of the 
 same eternal life which is our good as souls 
 here — intense at each immeasurable mo- 
 ment, infinite in each particle, as it were, and 
 royal in its quality, whatever its extent may 
 be. It does not matter for the moment 
 whether we think of its imperative as that 
 of conscience or that of love. It is the great 
 shaping and guiding power, whose influence 
 is really out of all proportion to our sense of 
 its range. 
 
 Even when by the other life we mean the 
 eternal life in its aspect of duration, we still 
 prize it only for its quality. We want it, not 
 because there is a lot of it, but because it is 
 good. Without that quality it would be a 
 Tithonus burden, and we might well shrink 
 from it. The same thing makes it precious 
 both there and here. It is its intrinsic excel- 
 lence and influence. It is its excellence and 
 influence over what we call nature. It is its 
 65 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 quality, not simply as enhancing us (which is 
 after all but an extension or aggrandizement 
 of our Ego), but as regenerating us, as giv- 
 ing us another center, which is the source of 
 another value, and so makes a new creation. 
 It is as holy that the soul is permanent, it is 
 in virtue of its quality. It is as holy that God 
 Himself is eternal, in incessant moral vic- 
 tory. Thus, as we shall see later, we con- 
 nect immortality very closely with the new 
 birth, which is the foundation of Christian 
 ethic. 
 
 As to natural ethic It might plausibly be 
 said that it could go on in our posterity for 
 Its own sake even were immortality denied. 
 Truth (it is even held) would be a good 
 thing were there none to believe it, and kind- 
 ness were all hearts dust. 
 
 " It comforteth my soul to know 
 That though I perish truth is so." 
 
 That Is In some ways absurd. (Yet read 
 Isaiah II. 6.) It Is a very Individualist 
 view. As was long ago said, pagans have 
 an ethic but paganism has not. Even if a 
 case could be made out from the good pagans 
 — that virtue was good in its own right, their 
 failure was to get people In general to be- 
 lieve and act on It, whose brief life would 
 be a merry one at all costs. But for Chris- 
 66 
 
VII ETERNITY WITHIN TIME 
 
 tian ethic the view that goodness was Indif- 
 ferent to immortality could not be made even 
 plausible. To abolish a future life would 
 be to abolish the eternal life of the present 
 {i.e, the Eternal Spirit, or the Eternal 
 Christ) , which takes the place of the natural 
 man, and makes the Christian soul and its 
 conduct. If you destroy the permanency, 
 you do not leave the quality unaffected. The 
 new power is of God's spirit. It is absolute, 
 timeless. If at a point It could cease. It 
 would be struck at the heart; Its absoluteness, 
 its divinity would cease — " Half dead to 
 know that it could die." 
 
 When we speak of eternal life we are apt 
 to think of it as a second order of things, 
 which might be developed out of time or 
 inserted into It, but which Is less obvious, 
 less real, more ghostly and metaphorical. 
 But, if we come to consider closely, all the 
 deepest life is timeless; and the more life 
 there is the more timeless It feels. The more 
 Intensely we live the less we take note of pass- 
 ing time. Life is full of the present the more 
 vital It Is. But what does that mean? 
 The present? Suppose we look Into that. 
 Should I be metaphysical (and therefore an 
 enemy of the human race) or should I be 
 but psychological (and a favorite of the 
 hour) if I took this line? What Is the pres- 
 ent? Has it any real existence? Is any 
 67 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 fixed point of time conceivable? Can you 
 arrest any moment? Have we not to do 
 with something that is not so much a point 
 in time as timelessly interior to time, and to 
 all its movement through what we call 
 points? Each moment of time is outwardly 
 but a spark at the contact of past and future, 
 a point that is gone before you can say it is. 
 What is the present, outwardly seen, but the 
 briefest flash in the perpetual becoming of 
 things? And we master it only by pressing 
 into its inwardness, by union with that per- 
 fect being which has a becoming only in us 
 and our history. The moment is a " shoot 
 of everlastingness." There Is no present, 
 because there is no time. An abounding life 
 which is all present, even if not all conscious, 
 is timeless. But not as a dreamy entity or 
 velleity might be. It is eternal as a moral 
 act or personality is. It expresses itself 
 chiefly In action; and an act, In its nature, as 
 the act of a spiritual personality Is a timeless 
 thing. As an act of the spirit it partakes 
 of the energy eternal. The great acts of the 
 great personalities at a point of history are 
 superior to time, Interior to It, and beyond it. 
 So also their bodies mock space, and five feet 
 of corporeality may mold the soul of man 
 for ever. The greater we grow the less are 
 we the victims of time or space, and the more 
 we are immortal. And the more we live in 
 68 
 
vn ETERNITY WITHIN TIME 
 
 our true and active immortality the more 
 greatly we live — most of all as when we live 
 in Christ, whose whole person went into one 
 eternal and redeeming act. n 
 
 Eternity Is thus beyond time only in the ^ 
 sense of being deep within it. " He hath set 
 eternity in their hearts." It is within our 
 interior, and beyond it — above it in that 
 way. It is more interior. It inhabits our _^ 
 inner castle.^ '* Religion is not the percep-' 
 tion of the infinite; it is having the infinite 
 within us." That makes the moral value of 
 Immortality for life. We are living now the 
 life beyond. Time and space are rather dis- 
 tilling our eternity than preparing for it. 
 Think of the automatic reaction on our soul 
 of our resolves and deeds, so that what we 
 have been makes us what we are. Think, 
 then, more deeply still, of the power, the 
 eternity, molding these wills and deeds. 
 Our eternal life is not at the end of our 
 days but at the heart of them, the source 
 of them, the control of them. Time is 
 there to reveal or to deposit Eternity, 
 not to qualify for it. Eternity does not lie 
 at the other end of time, it pervades it. We 
 can invert our way of putting it. Time Is, 
 as it were, the precipitate of eternity — 
 should I say the secretion of it? Time is the 
 living garment of the God In us. And It can 
 be not only transparent but permeable. It 
 69 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 has the sacramental, the miraculous power 
 to pass us into eternity at each moment, and 
 not only when we die. Time is divine in the 
 sacramental, and not in the essential, sense. 
 That is, the divine thing is achieved in the 
 souls time makes, whether time be a form of 
 the eternal consciousness or not. Time is 
 divine in function if not in being. *' For re- 
 ligion," says Schleiermacher, " immortality 
 means being one with the Infinite in the midst 
 of finitude. It means to be eternal at every 
 moment." We have begun eternity. We 
 began It at birth. The sacramental value of 
 time I will discuss further in the next chapter. 
 
 But does that not farther mean this, that 
 life and history are there to let God get 
 out rather than to let man get In? We go 
 forward really only as we can take God with 
 us and realize His Kingdom. The grand 
 interest of man is not progress but eternity, 
 not length but wealth of days, and wealth 
 moral and spiritual. Above progress Is the 
 Kingdom of God — a conception that is re- 
 placed In the fourth gospel by the idea of 
 Eternal Life. It is eternity, It Is the King- 
 dom of God, that Is the standard to decide 
 what Is progress and what is not. 
 
 This Is the point where religious liberalism 
 
 comes to grief, especially In Its popular forms. 
 
 It becomes secularized as the march of mind. 
 
 But a life which realizes that its great interest 
 
 70 
 
VII ETERNITY WITHIN TIME 
 
 is not progress but eternity must be con- 
 cerned about much else than the advance of 
 culture. It must be a life very different from 
 one to which progress Is everything. It can 
 rest. It Is not always on the move. It can 
 be guided and steered. It has a worship. 
 It has at least a pole star and a compass. It 
 must be much higher than a life of mere pro- 
 gress, and so much the more real. As we 
 draw nearer death by age, and Immortal 
 things become more real to us. It Is a com- 
 monplace to say that we tend to grow more 
 conservative. But why Is It the case? It 
 Is not that we grow lazy and reactionary, but 
 rather because eternity Is set deeper In our 
 heart. We become more alert In a certain 
 direction. We become more sensitive to 
 what Is deep than to what is lively, to a 
 searchlight than to the flares, to what Is the 
 sure, permanent, and timeless thing In all 
 movement. We realize more the goal eter- 
 nal, which rules within every point of pro- 
 gress as Its true ground, which has a quality 
 and a command of Its own to stamp upon all 
 movement, a norm (and not only a law) to 
 set on all change, and which, therefore. Is 
 the only test we have whether a movement Is 
 progress or not. The great Interest Is not 
 progress; It Is the eternity which all along 
 the line looks forth from what we call pro- 
 gress (or looks In on It), and passes a judg- 
 71 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 ment on it. The eternal element in us meas- 
 ures the events which teach, impress, and even 
 shape the soul. The soul remains when 
 these are gone. It passes judgment on them 
 when they are dead. The eternal soul re- 
 acts on its impressions. It selects some as 
 making for its true progress, and rejects oth- 
 ers which make the other way. Its ever- 
 abiding eternity is the measure of its never- 
 abiding times and phases. Eternity saturates 
 and shapes time, time but clothes and serves 
 eternity. And the soul, as eternal, by an 
 epigenetic ^ power on its environment, selects 
 some directions of change for its own, and 
 discards others. It is thus the real creative 
 power in things. It exercises over them all 
 a creative criticism, appreciative, selective, 
 and expansive. This idea of a creative crit- 
 icism from above is more positive and Chris- 
 tian than that of creative evolution. It does 
 more justice to personality, and pays it more 
 respect. To be judged or chosen is a nobler 
 thing than to be hurried on by a stream. 
 Though evolution itself is a great step to 
 the assertion of that moral eternity within 
 time which the mere thinker is apt to ignore. 
 For it gives room for that election, that 
 
 1 The theory of development known as epigenesis is 
 different from that called preformation in having a selec- 
 tive action on its environment. AH is not in the germ in 
 miniature, which is a simple body without structural 
 sign of its discriminating power. 
 
 72 
 
vn ETERNITY WITHIN TIME 
 
 choice, which must always be associated with 
 the notion of a personal God in relation to 
 His world. The conviction of that eternity 
 which is the true immortahty, of that timeless 
 simultaneity and compatibility of things, is 
 what really sets up the idea of progress; 
 since, as I say, only an eternal and final stan- 
 dard which is at once ground and goal, and 
 which unites in itself both causation and final- 
 ity, enables us to describe any movement in 
 time as progress or the reverse. And it is 
 therefore of first moment for the form and 
 color of life, personal or social. 
 
 73 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 LIFE A SACRAMENT 
 
 Time sacramental of Eternity. How part and lot in the 
 Eternal raises the common tasks and tragedies of life 
 beyond the sordid. 
 
 It is quite true that time is a gift to us as 
 immortality is. But time is given us that we 
 may become free of it, and may reach the un- 
 dying spirit and quintessence of time. Our 
 business in time is to resist it even while we 
 appropriate it. We take the honey from the 
 flower we have to struggle to enter and are 
 soon to leave with a struggle. The soul, 
 shaped as it Is by the events of time, has yet 
 in the end more power to determine them. 
 A soul like Christ's, immersed in a year's 
 events, can yet be creative for history. Our 
 growth in time (if we may change the image) 
 is to resist its petrefaction, to resent our 
 burial in time, and the sealing of the grave. 
 And this we can only do immortally — by 
 rising always into the timeless heaven, and 
 in Christ continually ascending by the experi- 
 ence of a constant new creation. The second 
 death is to miss the second creation. We 
 grow in soul if we feel spiritually younger 
 74 
 
LIFE A SACRAMENT 
 
 to-day than yesterday, and to-morrow than 
 to-day. We are less loaded with years be- 
 cause we are more lifted in the eternal. We 
 taste the rejuvenescence of Immortality, 
 where ends meet and things come full cir- 
 cle. We live where the Father for ever 
 meets the Son, the first the last, the beginning 
 the end, age youth, and all things return for 
 their completion to the perfection in which 
 they began. Time is sacramental of Eter- 
 nity. 
 
 As we follow up this line of reflection, I 
 say, there is borne in on us something more 
 than the religious significance of life. There 
 comes home to us not only Its solemn but its 
 sacramental value. Life means more than 
 even the poets tell. It has more than an 
 imaginative worth. It has more than a su- 
 pernatural. It has more than an everlasting. 
 It has a holy and eternal worth. I mean 
 that not only is it involved in the process or 
 tragedy of the Universe, but it is partner In 
 the solution of that tragedy in God. History 
 is not only reconciled, it is charged with the 
 message and power of reconciliation. Even 
 art can embalm life in amber. It can cast 
 on it the aesthetic spell, and for a time trans- 
 port us to another world. It can make our 
 noisy lives seem moments in the energy of 
 the eternal silence. But a greater than art 
 75 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 is here. There is a greater secret than even 
 art commands in the relation of the soul and 
 the Holy. The action in time of the Holy 
 and Eternal Spirit of our Redemption is 
 greater than that of genius. We are told 
 indeed by many a seer that *' the momentary 
 life of to-day is a factor in the possession of 
 all time and being." Philosophy can teach 
 us that, whether it get it home or not, whether 
 there be much help in it or not. But we have 
 to do with more than a procession of being, 
 or a dance of ideas; and we have to do with 
 getting that something more home to people. 
 We have to do with an eternal providence, 
 with a heart of love eternal, and with a will 
 absolute over the hearts and in the wills of 
 men; and we have to do with a public faith 
 in it. I mean something more than dogmat- 
 ics — certainly more than dogmatics as a 
 sort of Palladium we carry about in an ark. 
 I have in mind the riddle of the painful earth, 
 for which theology must be some kind of solu- 
 tion. We have to connect up earth's trag- 
 edy with God's. 
 
 The tragedy of the plodding peasant, drag- 
 ging a rheumatic existence from the soil, and 
 dying alone and broken-hearted with his 
 daughter's shame or his son's crime — we 
 have to integrate that with an eternal tragedy, 
 an immortal solution of it, and a final joy. 
 We have to link it with God's disappointment 
 76 
 
Tin LIFE A SACRAMENT 
 
 In His Son man, His grief and His joy and 
 His victory in His Son Christ. Is there any 
 experience possible to the soul, is there any 
 power at work on it, any revelation, any re- 
 demption, whereby the very horrors of 
 world-war and wickedness can be made sac- 
 ramental of the fullness of joy? Can they 
 be underagents for the last righteousness and 
 angels of the last judgment which secures the 
 last peace? Is it a delusion, or is it Time's 
 sacramental secret, that a person, like Christ, 
 of two thousand years ago is as near us all 
 now as He was to men then? Have we with 
 us a power of life by which these two millen- 
 niums do not divide us from Christ, like a 
 world of mists and seas, but unite us — as 
 commerce and invention make the ocean a 
 bond and not a gulf? Is it a dream that the 
 issue in His Cross is greater, and more creat- 
 ive, than all the issues of history? Why do 
 the heathen rage but for the Kingdom of 
 God's Son? And have we a power by which 
 ephemeral lives are not only absorbed in a 
 stream universal but become revelations and 
 energies from a person of absolute love? 
 Can they become channels of the Holy Ghost, 
 in the power of One Who was more than a 
 channel, and more than a revelation — Who 
 was the incarnation of God the Redeemer? 
 That is what the Cross of Christ as the 
 source of his Spirit proposes to do with them. 
 77 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 The victory of an immortal Redeemer be- 
 comes the effective point and principle of 
 life's most sacramental significance. It is 
 the source of any worth life can have not 
 only to God but among us for God, as the 
 vehicle of the Eternal Spirit, as a human 
 priest to human kind. The power which 
 makes life most deeply sacramental is its new 
 creation by Christ. The eternal life that 
 Christ's Cross won for us in the Eternal 
 Spirit acts on us so timelessly that it can give 
 the meanest life the eloquence of the spiritual 
 world. It makes it that it can be not only an 
 object but a channel of supernatural blessing, 
 and not only a channel but a medium. That 
 miraculous power which turns the historic 
 Christ from a memory to be the most real 
 presence, and even constituent, of our life 
 to-day, that power which makes Him Who is 
 so far off the most near, and changes the tem- 
 poral to the eternal — that is what makes the 
 true sacramental power in life, and transfig- 
 ures it with the glow of something that lifts 
 it and lights it for ever. Nothing makes the 
 poor man's toil so full of worth and price as 
 the work* of Christ the Spirit. Nothing so 
 lifts into eternal significance the loves, sor- 
 rows, drudgeries, tragedies of the poor men 
 of the dull fields. It has done it in cases in- 
 numerable. Nothing so makes them know 
 themselves, and seem to others, to be worlds 
 78 
 
VIII LIFE A SACRAMENT 
 
 more than atoms bubbling in a seething cal- 
 dron, or drifting in a desert dust, whirled 
 in a universe of meaningless sound and fury. 
 Such certainty as Christ can give, and does 
 give, of a life beyond life by our partnership 
 of it in Him fills the humblest soul with such 
 power and price that the men of genius can 
 neither fathom it (though they feel it) nor 
 can they give, far less guarantee, that which 
 they may divine of its wealth. The common- 
 est life means worlds both Godward and man- 
 ward. That is the sacramentality of life. 
 The most Christian poets are those who, like 
 Wordsworth, Burns, or Barnes, breathe that 
 note from huts where poor men lie. And 
 the warrant for it is its Creator, its new Cre- 
 ator — the power of the Eternal spirit by 
 which that poor man Christ Himself won 
 the endless victory over time, death, and the 
 world. The simple have known that as they 
 could know nothing else. And it made life 
 for them, and for all who could read them 
 aright, because they shared the same faith, 
 full of staying power, mystic eloquence, and 
 conclusive bliss. 
 
 " Grave in the sight of God is the death of 
 His loyal and loving ones.'* 
 
 79 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 IMMORTALITY AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 Absence from able publicists of either idea. But the 
 only perfection is in a common realm and a common 
 King. 
 
 We have admitted that the belief in another 
 life has been cherished on lines so Individual 
 that its effect on this life has really been to 
 increase the natural egoism instead of con- 
 cealing it. That has happened because it has 
 been dismoralized — first, because the notion 
 of eternal life has dropped to that of endless 
 life, and second, because it has been narrowed 
 down from the idea of the Kingdom of God. 
 It is on this latter that I would now dwell. 
 
 The Kingdom is more than a social idea, 
 but as a social Idea it dominates the synop- 
 tics. In the Epistles it retains its social note 
 as the ideal Church. In the fourth Gospel 
 it appears more mystically, and therefore 
 more individually, as eternal life. To put 
 it technically, the eschatology becomes a tran- 
 scendency, and the last things are not simply 
 the end things but the ground things, the 
 dominants. As the Church went on to grow 
 more external and egoist this idea shared 
 in the fall. Both the Kingdom and its eter- 
 80 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 nal life became debased by contact with the 
 paganism they overcame. But now we are 
 returning to the larger and holler note. The 
 Kingdom of God Is the emergence Into the 
 life of history, both by growth and crisis, of 
 that saving sovereignty which Is the moral 
 power and order of the spiritual world. The 
 coming of the Kingdom Is the growth or the 
 inroad of God's Will on earth to be what it 
 always Is In peace and glory In Heaven. I 
 am thinking of what we have in the very 
 opening of the Lord's Prayer, where the 
 phrase " as In heaven so on earth " belongs 
 to each of the three first petitions, and not 
 only to its next neighbor. *' Hallowed be 
 Thy Name" as In Heaven so on Earth; 
 *' Thy Kingdom come " as In Heaven so on 
 Earth. As If It should say, " There Is a 
 realm at the heart of things where all Is 
 already won and well, all Is Yea and Amen. 
 And access to It Is not barred to faith on 
 earth. And it is the real workshop of his- 
 tory." Our commerce with that country 
 alters much, the whole complexion of our 
 social discussion changes, when we seek to 
 measure and adjust all things by their 
 obedience to this power and their move- 
 ment to this goal. All changes its note and 
 method when we seek first that Kingdom. 
 That Is the new creation in which dwells im- 
 mortality. 
 
 8i 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 Now it is quite true that to-day there is 
 better thinking and writing on social or na- 
 tional subjects than there ever was in the 
 world before. It is writing also much ruled 
 by the ethical note. But even the best of it 
 is, for the most part, less than historic in its 
 range, and it moves only in the middle reg- 
 ister of thought. Its eye is not on the history 
 of the whole soul. And it represents spir- 
 itually neither revolt nor faith, but indiiier- 
 ence (probably more apparent than real). 
 It is not for God's enemies, but neither is it 
 for God as it is for man. To read it you 
 would not guess that we were in a Christian 
 country with a long Christian tradition shap- 
 ing its society. You would receive the im- 
 pression that its rehgion had no more to do 
 with affairs than a harem, that it is kept be- 
 hind the purdah. In all the able and inter- 
 esting speculation of the pubhcists about 
 either the causes or the consequences of the 
 present convulsion, it is one of the most sig- 
 nificant things that hardly any reference is 
 made to the eternal Kingdom of God, rang- 
 ing from earth to heaven; and no express 
 guidance is taken from distinctive principles 
 of the Kingdom's ethic. Insistence on a 
 world-righteousness, and to judgment accord- 
 ingly, is treated as an outburst, more or less 
 amusing, of obsolete Puritanism. If such be 
 the mark of civilization, and if the Kingdom 
 82 
 
IX THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 of God yet be the fundamental nisus in and 
 under all the civilizations, it must be that of- 
 fense comes and war. Our social science is 
 written as our novels are — as if there were 
 no such thing among the powers of life as the 
 Kingdom of God and its religion, as if re- 
 ligion were not the ruling passion of the race 
 (to say nothing of its contents being the key 
 of history), as if a supreme regard to an 
 eternal life made no vital difference to the 
 conduct of life. All is written as if the power 
 which has done the most to make history was 
 an illusion now outgrown, as if the Kingdom 
 of God were a superstition of pietists in holes 
 and corners, or a fragment of theologians 
 who mistook for effective realities certain 
 fantasies of the first century. Any thinker 
 would be more or less discredited with the 
 leading writers on social or political questions, 
 however profound an historian, if he an- 
 nounced that he was to measure everything In 
 the light of the principle of Christ's estab- 
 lished Kingdom of God emerging into human 
 affairs. Even with the far flung monitions 
 and deep old judgments of the war booming 
 in our ears that is so. Reconstruction in its 
 wake Is approached with a mind which seems 
 to have no sense of any but economic or phil- 
 anthropic quantities. The treatment of the 
 war as a function of judgment by that King- 
 dom on a whole civilization which ignores it 
 83 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 would be regarded as a piece of pulpit fustian 
 which the preacher has sunk to be expected 
 to say. And that means that religion, the 
 deepest religion, and especially the religion 
 of the long future, is regarded (if at all) 
 but as a private affair, but there is no idea 
 of eternity as the greatest of public interests 
 and public powers, but that we can best pre- 
 pare citizens for life by teaching civics. 
 There is no sense of a Church as the trustee 
 of man's last social weal, nor of the reign of 
 a holy God as active and decisive in our com- 
 mon life. When you begin discussing the 
 Church with such people they discuss Church- 
 men; just as when I criticize democracy I am 
 often tripped up with the fatuous remark 
 what capital fellows the trades' union leaders 
 are. But no judgment can be really recog- 
 nized as such, it cannot be recognized as a 
 movement of the Kingdom of God, and a sol- 
 emn effect of its righteousness, except by a 
 conscience taught by God. Calamity on a 
 worldly soul but hardens it. And the fool 
 brayed in a mortar is a shrewd fool still. 
 
 Now, since that is so, the chief public work 
 of the Church as the trustee of eternal life, 
 and the way to its recovery of public influ- 
 ence in this life, must be so to acquire the deep 
 historic conscience of the holy as to evange- 
 lize with its righteousness the corporate na- 
 tion and not only the souls in it; to create 
 84 
 
K THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 public repentance and new purpose; to Chris- 
 tianize political conduct; to. press the reality 
 of the Kingdom of God in history and affairs; 
 to make it the dominant it was for the Person 
 who has most molded history; and to do this 
 in such a way that it shall not only become 
 credible but luminous for public life — at 
 least with those for whom the moral interest 
 of society Is supreme. Much of the current 
 talk about the Church's duty after the war 
 where it Is not pietism Is journalism, mostly 
 empiric, the work of people who have no spe- 
 cial preparation, no serious discipline In ethic, 
 history, philosophy, ol* theology for such 
 matters, but are taken from some other job 
 for this. People who have no real part or 
 lot in the Church are very eager to exploit it 
 as an asset for some vague ideal. They 
 know much In a way, but not in a way to 
 teach them that the Church has made modern 
 history. And they vindicate their claim to 
 be realists '' without any nonsense " by call- 
 ing on the Church to change front with every 
 new formation of social phases and public 
 events, just as they would urge the House of 
 Commons. The Church may only change 
 front in so far as It can do so without chang- 
 ing its ground. And when it comes to select- 
 ing the time and type of change, the Church 
 has really no more fools In It than literature 
 or business. But more and more the Church 
 85 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 must feel that Its ground Is the Kingdom of 
 God set up by the moral and creative crisis 
 for history of the Cross of Christ. The real 
 ground of a Christian belief In the soul's 
 future and the future of humanity Is the re- 
 ality of God's Kingdom there put In action 
 as, in a new creation, planting heaven, found- 
 ing earth, and leading history (Isaiah II. i6), 
 there put Into subtle control of human affairs, 
 and made the goal of human history as the 
 new destiny of each soul. It Is true all the 
 same that If the Church realized as It should 
 Its own ground. Its first concern might be the 
 less bustling but more biting task of its own 
 reconstruction. One is amazed at the naive 
 facility with which it devises machinery for 
 the new situation without a misgiving that 
 that situation is largely due to a defect, not 
 to say a falsity. In Its own grasp of the Gos-. 
 pel, which calls for something like a conver- 
 sion In itself as the preacher. 
 
 Our preoccupation with the Interests of 
 another life (I have said) may be of a degree 
 or kind to damage the soul It would save, and 
 the Kingdom It should serve. It may encour- 
 age the same egoism which is the ruling 
 power In civilization, which is bound to quar- 
 rel with the movement of the Kingdom, and 
 which It Is the work of a real revelation to 
 convert or destroy. I mean by egoism prof- 
 iteering in religious things to the loss of pub- 
 86 
 
DC THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 lie soul; and by a real revelation I mean a 
 revelation which redeems even more than it 
 reveals, plants us on a new center, and 
 changes our conscience much more than our 
 conceptions. In an ethical religion which 
 is also social the immortality of a personal 
 being is valuable as an increase of life for 
 others, and especially for God and His King- 
 dom. If we are more they are more. The 
 very Fathers are not perfect till we Sons of 
 the later day come in (a fact which should 
 end the tyrrany of patristics). By a per- 
 verted religion we can overdo the care of our 
 souls, which we have to master and not to 
 fuss, and which is in better hands than ours; 
 but we cannot be too much occupied with the 
 Kingdom of God and our lot there. This is 
 a more vital doctrine for Christianity than 
 the immortality of the soul, because it includes 
 it. The historic righteousness, the holiness 
 of God, which makes His Kingdom, is an in- 
 finitely greater matter than the realization 
 of the superior self. Indeed, is there any 
 hope of our coming to our own, our ownest 
 own, in life except as God does Who is our 
 life, and Whose own we are? We cannot 
 truly or finally realize ourselves except in the 
 service and spread of the Kingdom of God. 
 (Only let us not be too self-conscious in this 
 matter of service. The man who is always 
 fussing about his duty needs our vigilance.) 
 S7 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 It is this Kingdom which is the standard of 
 all progress, and the test by which we tell it 
 from degeneration. It is only to this service 
 that all else is added, and especially moral 
 growth. That is to say only in the active 
 love and service, not simply of God, but of 
 the Kingdom of God and His Christ, are the 
 full powers of the soul released and its re- 
 sources plumbed. The Kingdom of God is 
 only another phrase for the energetic fullness 
 of man's eternal life — here or hereafter. 
 It involves a millennium, the moral organiza- 
 tion of society in considerate sympathy, but 
 it is much more. It is the greatest object in 
 the world; and life's chief end is not even the 
 highest stage or phase of itself, but to glorify 
 and to enjoy for ever in His realm a God 
 of holy love. Without such a goal and its 
 service there is nothing to keep alive in us 
 always a living sensibility of feeling or imag- 
 ination — as there is nothing without it to 
 bind the nations together by their conscience. 
 That is the Kingdom of God, which is more 
 than His Kingdom. 
 
 It has been said, in a slashing way which 
 impresses some, that amid our present cir- 
 cumstances the only choice open to Society is 
 between Utopia and Hell. But what is 
 Utopia, and how reach it? How pass from 
 the mere anomalies of Society to the paradox 
 of moral power and peace? Hell is easy; 
 88 
 
IX THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 and our Utopias are not hard; they kindle us 
 easily. But this is hard. For these cannot 
 bring themselves to pass. We slide down, 
 but we have to struggle up. And where are 
 we to find the power to climb, or the guid- 
 ance? We must be carried, for we cannot 
 go. We faint and fail till we wait on the 
 Lord. The soul in due course subsides on 
 itself, and its prospects starve and shrivel; 
 but, forgetting itself in God's Kingdom after 
 a godly sort, the soul rises to the righteous- 
 ness of it and all its rich entail. Here in our 
 present life we are not what it is in us to be 
 because of the limitations which beset us 
 within and without. Each stunted soul is a 
 drag upon every other. We cannot love each 
 other as we should, nor even as we long to 
 do, because of something that lies on us like 
 frost, and ties us with invisible threads. We 
 cannot move as we would. Or if we do, at 
 the first step to our neighbor's heart our foot 
 is frozen by reserve, or it stumbles on his in- 
 visible fence. And this may be so even with 
 those who are nearest us. But in a life of 
 eternal reconciliation, which is not sympa- 
 thetic only but constructive, which is not a 
 kinder family only but a godller Kingdom, 
 it will be otherwise. We shall not lose our 
 Individuality, but the barriers will fall down 
 in a spiritual telepathy and tact. We shall 
 talk across our fences. For the features of 
 89 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 our Idiosyncrasy, the physiognomy of our 
 soul, limits though they be, are not limita- 
 tions. They are frontiers and not barriers. 
 They make contour and character, not insula- 
 tion. The individual, as he becomes a living 
 person, has powers infinitely expansible and 
 reciprocal. As the soul grows thus perfect it 
 grows at once more capacious and more com- 
 municative. For it is such persons only, and 
 not mere individuals, that can interpenetrate. 
 Each has wealth to give, and room to receive 
 the rest. We grow by such mutual Inter- 
 penetration. Hearts swell into each other. 
 We assimilate each other. We know as we 
 are known. Wci live ourselves Into each 
 other. We rise to each other, or we stoop 
 to rise. None without the rest can be made 
 perfect. And the common perfection Is 
 guaranteed by the Kingship of an indwelling 
 God. Our powers increase there by much 
 more than addition. And that more Is what 
 makes a meeting a Church — it Is the Holy 
 Ghost. The new creation Is a new combina- 
 tion of the old powers, with an eternal life 
 as the secret of the blend. 
 
 But the longer we dwell on this new life, 
 and dispose ourselves to it, so much the more 
 we Inhabit another world. And the change, 
 the reaction on our life, is great as we live 
 such another world into this. We acquire 
 both the devout Hfe and the brotherly. The 
 90 
 
IX THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 immortality of the soul can only be realized 
 as our part and lot In an Immortal fellowship 
 deeply active every day. This is what saves 
 it from being an egoist burden or a bore. 
 But It is first a fellowship of Christ. To 
 preach the Kingdom without preaching the 
 knowledge of Christ may be still to serve 
 Him; but to preach It with an ostentatious 
 silence about Him Is of Antichrist. The one 
 is the twilight of the morning, the other of 
 the evening. 
 
 91 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 IMMORTALITY AND REDEMPTION 
 
 The theology of it and the psychology. The ethic of it. 
 The holy the guarantee of the eternal. The diflFer- 
 ence of faith and experience. 
 
 All this goes to hint that it is not quite 
 satisfactory to speak so much of the soul's 
 immortality when we speak of its future. 
 For, as I say, if that mean an immortality 
 native and intrinsic to it, it may be but an ex- 
 pended egoism. Or else we are leaving out 
 those souls in whom the passion to bless oth- 
 ers becomes ready to be shut out from the 
 presence of God and a share in His eternity. 
 Is it not better, then, to have less to say about 
 the soul's immortality and more about God's 
 new creation — less about a life in heaven 
 or hell and more about life in Christ or with- 
 out Him? We can be more sure about the 
 new creation than about the natural immor- 
 tality of the soul. I do not wish to prejudge 
 the question about conditional immortality. 
 But I venture to suggest that for religious 
 purposes it is better to approach the matter 
 theologically than psychologically, in terms 
 of the first creation and the second, of nature 
 92 
 
IMMORTALITY 
 
 and grace. These theological terms are bet- 
 ter, surer, more objective than the terms 
 which do not go beyond aspirations, premo- 
 nitions, tendencies, probabilities, which have 
 no real leverage on life, or at least do not 
 give it footing, and are apt to become but 
 pursuits, or even hobbies, of leisure. Our 
 immortality is the new work of God on us 
 rather than the continuation of a psychical 
 process, the uncoiling of an infinite spring, 
 or the fruition of a spiritual tendency. Im- 
 mortality is a gift, a creation. We do not 
 simply arrive; we are invited and we are 
 fetched. As the second creation it is more 
 of a creation than the first. For it is crea- 
 tion not out of a chaos but a wreck. It is 
 the recreation of a decreation. Our perfec- 
 tion (though it is anything but an annexe) 
 is more created from us, than developed out 
 of us. We are born again into an uncreated 
 world, as the first birth placed us in a world 
 created. And the moral thereof for life is 
 that we grow more perfect when we dwell 
 upon what we may receive rather than on 
 what we may become, and when we conquer 
 our recalcitrance and not merely our inertia. 
 
 When I speak of our immortality as a 
 
 work of God I do not necessarily mean a 
 
 sharply and obviously miraculous act. And 
 
 I certainly do not speak of a wing added on 
 
 93 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 to us, a donum superadditum. That is not 
 how a personality is regenerated. It is not 
 even how it grows. But I would go deeper 
 than any thaumaturgy, and think of the way 
 the new creation is related to the old. We 
 do not pass from the one to the other by 
 a jolt, radical and revolutionary as the change 
 is. The old life and the new are not parted 
 by a bottomless pit. It is a constitutional 
 revolution. I mean God did not create the 
 first world of nature without reference to the 
 second of grace. His grace is not but a new 
 strategy to save us an unforeseen reverse. 
 He did not give us a natural freedom without 
 knowing that He had in reserve freer re- 
 sources still, which were more than able to 
 recover any abuse of it. He had the new 
 creation in view when He issued the first. 
 The second was provided for in the first, and 
 we are to live the first in the interest of the 
 second. Though nature cannot of itself cul- 
 minate in grace, at least it was not put there 
 without regard to grace. Grace is Nature's 
 destiny. We are born to be saved. The 
 soul that in its freedom threw away with its 
 freedom its immortality and its God yet was 
 not thrown out of the compass of redemption 
 and regeneration. Any immortality worth 
 having is always of God's grace; it is not a 
 matter of going on and still to be. It is not 
 a mere realization of a created self but a 
 94 
 
X IMMORTALITY 
 
 resQue of it. The soul's true destiny is not 
 achieved under God's benevolence; it is be- 
 stowed by His grace. If it go on and on 
 it is not because of its own implanted energy, 
 but because of the ever new creative action 
 of Him Who is the source of fresh value 
 more than of continued being, and Who 
 makes life not only long but precious. If 
 we think only of the soul's immortality we 
 shall be bandied to and fro by diverse pre- 
 sumptions. But if we think of an incessant 
 new creation as the source of the new life 
 by a new birth, then our whole soul's habit 
 will settle from the oscillations of self on the 
 fidelity of God, or the constancy of the divine 
 Energy, or the faithfulness of the new Cre- 
 ator. The one is the way of reflection and 
 its presumptions, the other of faith and its 
 certainty. And it makes all the difference 
 to life which of these is our ruling note. 
 Only one of them makes a thing really and 
 finally religious out of the life we would pro- 
 long. The fidelity of God will mean more 
 for our destiny than the simplicity of the 
 soul, its indissoluble simplicity, and certainly 
 more than its constancy. His Holiness, and 
 the constancy which in Him is fidelity, is the 
 warrant of our personality. Nothing can 
 separate us from the holy love of God In 
 Christ. And nothing but the faith of that 
 love enables us to say that. 
 95 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 We do not believe the greatest things on 
 the ground of experience, but only In the 
 medium of experience, by way of an experi- 
 ence, by a miracle of the Spirit which takes 
 place only in experience, and gives us our 
 Authority. It Is In that plane, though not 
 on that ground. The matter of our Immor- 
 tality Is one of the cases where faith must 
 outrun experience. We cannot experience 
 our own Eternity as we can Christ's. Our 
 faith Is in One for whom there is no after nor 
 before, to whom, therefore, the far future Is 
 already an experience, and our destiny al- 
 ready an achievement. I cannot experience 
 the far future (Paul would have said) by any 
 faith; but for me to live Is Christ. My 
 career is Christ, the risen and Immortal. He 
 has subdued everywhere everything fatal to 
 my soul. Apart from Him there are perils 
 to It I cannot conceive. I do not know. In 
 my most religious moments, what may hap- 
 pen to my future In the long, long course of 
 things. How can I be sure of an Eternal 
 God, One from whose hands nothing can 
 pluck me ever? All the religious are not. 
 How can I tell that between now and then 
 there may not be some fatal Incursion upon 
 heaven which even the vast love of God may 
 be powerless to withstand — just as all the 
 love my dearest spend on me can not avert 
 my death and parting? I may be plucked 
 96 
 
X IMMORTALITY 
 
 from His hand, as lives here are snatched 
 away from our love unspeakable. Is God's 
 unspeakable love also invincible? That is 
 the question. Is He able to keep what I 
 trust to Him? I have no means of being 
 sure about this, nor can I live as if I were, 
 unless I know and experience Christ; unless 
 I know Him not simply as the Lover of my 
 soul but as the Victor for it for ever, nay, 
 the very constituent of it; unless His love is 
 the Holy One's love, love absolute. The 
 Christian revelation is not just God is love, 
 but God's love is omnipotent. If I know 
 Him as the final Redeemer, who has beaten 
 down Satan, or all that Satan means, for ever, 
 I trust the saving power of His personahty 
 as I can never trust the indestructibility of 
 my own. To faith it is more certain that He 
 cannot be broken than that I cannot. He 
 cannot be broken short as time might sud- 
 denly cease. The holy nature and quality of 
 His work for me, and for man's whole des- 
 tiny, is a mightier matter than mere duration. 
 It is only His salvation. His redemption, that 
 gives duration any moral value, any value for 
 eternity. But if this is so, then the belief 
 that it Is so gives a distinct complexion to 
 both religion and life. The habit of my soul 
 will be different, first. If I believe in its future, 
 and second, and still more, if I believe In it 
 for these reasons — reasons moral rather 
 97 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 than psychological, more ethical than philo- 
 sophical, more theological than ethical, and 
 therefore more religious in a religion of 
 moral redemption — reasons of faith more 
 even than of hope. The foundation of the 
 moral is the supermoral. 
 
 98 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 Does the great change refurbish or regenerate? Do we 
 need more a fuller life or an altered? Immortality 
 is the continuance less of the soul than of its change. 
 Meaning of the new creation. Not an annexe, nor 
 a surrogate, but a reconciliation of the soul. The 
 idea of Resurrection as the nexus of that life and this. 
 
 The subject I have In hand is practically the 
 relation of Immortality and ethic, of Chris- 
 tian ethic and natural, of Christ and con- 
 science. Is our immortality just a new dis- 
 covery, or is It a new birth? Is the Chris- 
 tian conscience but the natural refined, or Is 
 it the natural reborn? Christ's relation to 
 the conscience — is it to develop its culture 
 or to reconstitute its power? Is it to sub- 
 tilize its acumen, or is it to give it a new qual- 
 ity and a new principle corresponding to the 
 new center on which it is set and the new life 
 which Christ now lives in us — a life new 
 in proportion as He is of God more than of 
 man? Is conscience the voice of God, or 
 (more humbly) the ear which may hear it? 
 The work of Christ — Is it refurbishing or 
 regeneration? Is our key changed, or only 
 the clef? Is conversion but a fresh stimulus, 
 99 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 or is It a real revolution in the quality of the 
 moral life, the source of its power, and the 
 direction of its movement? Is the new birth 
 but a somewhat exaggerated metaphor for 
 a new departure, for turning over a new 
 leaf? Is the passage from the natural to the 
 eternal life but an ascent of the spiritual na- 
 ture, or is it a leap and a venture of faith? 
 These are questions which are of first mo- 
 ment for the effect on life of that new birth 
 into our true immortality. 
 
 We hear of many who are eating their 
 heart out because circumstances do not allow 
 them a fuller life. But it is not more life 
 and fuller that we want. We need a differ- 
 ent life, a life not simply with a new light 
 on it but a new power in it and a new footing 
 • under it. We need a new center, not a trans- 
 y formation but a transposition. We need the 
 completion not of the soul but of its radical 
 1 change. The growing spiritual life, and not 
 :the natural, goes on beyond the greatest of 
 its crises, in death, and goes on reversing its 
 past all the time. That goes on into which 
 we are being changed as personality grows 
 by a constant revolution in our egoism. (I 
 refer to the allusion to Paulsen in Chap. IV.) 
 If life goes on for ever. It goes on coming 
 round full circle, and reflecting an absolute 
 change, an inversion of values which are pres- 
 aged in the moral estimates of age compared 
 
 lOO 
 
XI ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 with youth. If it is an absolute change, that 
 means life going on for ever in an ascending 
 spiral where looking back is looking down. 
 For the eternal, in the qualitative sense of rich 
 life and full, could not continue such if it did 
 not include the quantitative also of long life, 
 and time to work itself out. Grace would 
 then simply be irrelevant to nature, and not 
 related at all. Nothing can ensure to us 
 indestructible being except a power which 
 deHvers us, by a higher way than mere per- 
 sistence, from the mutations of time or 
 space — which delivers us from their de- 
 moralization. Only what is eternal in the 
 moral sense could ensure eternity in the tem- 
 poral sense, for " morality is the nature of 
 things." Eternity is time not simply pro- 
 longed, nor only sublimated, but hallowed, 
 morally regenerated for the holy. That 
 which protects us from time is that which 
 delivers us from evil. So the kingdom of 
 an endless heaven is the Kingdom of a holy 
 God. And it is the fruit not of Chris tus 
 Consummator but of Christus Redemptor, 
 
 I dwell on this to point out that any discus- 
 sion of Christian ethic which does not start 
 with moral regeneration is by so much the 
 less Christian. In the Christian faith " we 
 die but once, but we are born twice." Im- 
 mortality is precious as the continuance of 
 that which has set life in quite another than 
 
 lOI 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 the natural key, moved it into a new rhythm, 
 and made its verdicts more than those of the 
 natural judgment rarefied, or the rational 
 just spiritualized. It is behavior in a new 
 dimension. Have I not said that that is no 
 true, and it is certainly no Christian, belief 
 in immortality which hankers for a life after 
 death just to give the old egoism supernatural 
 opportunities, and to furnish the old desires 
 with superior facilities for getting their head 
 and their bread? Did not even the Phari- 
 sees likewise? They believed in a resurrec- 
 tion, but not in immortality as Christ under- 
 stood it. For him newness of life meant 
 more than a return to life, for however long; 
 it meant a new order of life and love. But 
 for them it only meant a better chance for 
 the old passion; it meant just making good 
 the damage in earth's disappointments; it did 
 not necessarily mean a higher stage of aspira- 
 tion, or a change of quality in the desire. 
 They need not be born again, as even their 
 best, like Nicodemus or Hillel, must from 
 Christ's point of view. Their divine future 
 meant but the happier perpetuating of such 
 national and social ambitions as filled the 
 horizon of many a zealot in his public career. 
 Christ thought of a new heaven and earth; 
 they thought of a smooth running repristina- 
 tion, the restoring of dominion to Israel. 
 He thought of immortality as a worship; 
 1 02 
 
XI ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 they thought of It as a reward, the return to 
 them, repaired, of what death had taken 
 away. For Christ the true resurrection and 
 the true Immortality meant a new ethic born 
 of the spirit; for them It was worldHness re- 
 established and endowed, with security of 
 tenure. 
 
 In these remarks I have had partly in view 
 the admirable book of Dr. Rashdall, Christ 
 and the Conscience. No book on Christian 
 ethic so good has appeared among us. But I 
 cannot agree with Its religious foundation. 
 The prolegomena seems to me to be vitiated 
 by the absence of the idea of regeneration in 
 connection with Christian ethic. I am not 
 going to argue here whether we are to think 
 of regeneration In the baptismal, and sub- 
 liminal, not to say magical, way, or in the 
 evangelical and ethical way. It is enough 
 for my present purpose to recognize that In 
 both cases it represents a change as real and 
 miraculous as grace and the Spirit's life must 
 always be. It is not to be identified with 
 sanctification. Nor is it to be reduced to a 
 development of sympathetic power, nor to a 
 culture of the moral judgment. Christian 
 ethic is not simply the top story of all natural 
 ethic. It is supreme In another sense than 
 merely superlative. There Is a new " crea- 
 tive synthesis" (Wundt). There is an ele- 
 103 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 ment of crisis, and a new life given. We 
 are born into a new world. We are lifted to 
 a new plane. We ascend there in a new at- 
 mosphere. When we die it is into an im- 
 mortality which is only a new departure in the 
 old rebirth and its new life. It is but a new 
 grasp of the grace in which we had died to 
 nature, and yet in losing it found it. 
 
 There is a crude way of criticizing the idea 
 of a new creation and reducing it to a mere 
 metaphor by asking whether the old soul is 
 destroyed and a new identity put down on its 
 site. We all know that that could not be. 
 It is not even a new wing built on. Of course 
 the jiew man must find_hjsj 3oints of attach - 
 ment in the~oI dZI)u^_he. cannot hav e his fo^ - 
 daton t-here. The truth is the newness of 
 the new creature is less in himself than in 
 his tenant. Christy live s_in^ him. And the 
 newness in the man corresponHs to the new 
 and original thing in Christ. If in Christ 
 there was nothing essentially new, if He was 
 but man at his spiritual best, we could not so 
 speak. But all that makes Him the Son of 
 God goes to differentiate the new creature He 
 inhabits. It is a real novelty, it is not a 
 fresh stimulus that we have. And if that be 
 so, it means much for the tone and style of 
 our life. It gives us a creative revelation; 
 and a fresh experience is not a revelation. 
 The new creation is not in me so much as in 
 104 
 
XI ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 Him Whose unique soul and life inhabits me 
 as souls do souls. My knowledge is reborn 
 beyond all science because I am known by 
 Him whom I know; my life is reborn beyond 
 all nature because it is now not lived by me 
 
 ' but lived into me. The new master makes 
 the new man. The relation of son to God, 
 which is intrinsic to Christ by His nature, be- 
 comes ours by His gift; we are sons in Him. 
 He is Son in Himself. He is our immortal- 
 ity. We do not in the new creation get a 
 new Identity, but a new kind and quality of 
 moral power, a new unity of soul by His 
 Reconciliation. The new man is the destruc- 
 
 - tion of the old man as forgiveness destroys 
 — forgiveness, and not sheer oblivion — for- 
 giveness, which is but the negative action 
 of eternal life by a Reconciliation drawing 
 on all the unity of God, rising, that is, from 
 His holiness. The new thing In Christ's rev- 
 elation of God was not a new attribute, but 
 the unity in holy love of all His attributes, 
 conflicting before. It was the revelation and 
 action of God as holy in His love, with all 
 that that entails. And so the new thing in 
 us is not a new quality or faculty, but the 
 unity of our warring selves and our divided 
 heart in Christ's name and power. It is the 
 Reconciliation with God and ourselves. It 
 Is the ^eioV Tt in the life of an organism which 
 marks even a mollusc from a mosaic, which 
 105 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 no analysis can discern, no invention repro- 
 duce, and no mere continuation create. It is 
 like the unity in a work of art, which the best 
 copyist cannot give. It was thus that Shake- 
 speare used Plutarch. Art makes a chord 
 instead of a clang. 
 
 " I knew not If, save in this, such gift be allowed 
 to man 
 That out of three sounds he frame not a fourth 
 sound but a star." 
 
 The new and qualitative element in immor- 
 tality is what connects it with the new birth, 
 and gives it the greatest of all Influences upon 
 our conduct of life, were It only that it forti- 
 fies the will to live, to say nothing of living to 
 divine effect. Our present life is deepened 
 by such an immortality; whereas a mere in- 
 destructibility would become a thin ghostli- 
 ness, with an air of Sheol and a Tithonus 
 burden. Love receives thus a solemnity 
 which guards it from levity, and which fixes 
 its colors in fixing its destiny. We live and 
 love to glorify an immortal God in Christ. 
 We labor to be accepted of Him. He har- 
 monizes the passion for life and the longing 
 for death. The faith of a Christian immor- 
 tality blesses our present life also by taking 
 its concern off itself and its interests. We 
 are not too preoccupied with our own per- 
 io6 
 
XI ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 sonal prospects. We are lost in the desire 
 of God's Kingdom and its fullness. And 
 so our very personal growth is more free and 
 full. For the self-preoccupied do not grow; 
 they do not advance; they only rotate, and 
 wear their axis out. But that is a complaint 
 which every form of immortality will not 
 cure. An immortality that we project from 
 ourselves, as the grand presumption from our 
 being what we are, does not rid us of that 
 egoism. An immortality which does not 
 proceed from God's gift in Christ Is but an 
 Imaginative one, which seems now sure now 
 dim. But, losing our souls in Him, we find 
 in His eternity a life we never found while 
 we called our souls our own. In union with 
 Him we live in His grace, be it here or there. 
 We shall have a very different interpretation 
 of His world and His ways in it, a very dif- 
 ferent theology, according as we are thinking 
 of the release of our powers or the glory of 
 His grace. 
 
 This gives room for the idea of Resur- 
 rection, whatever we may think of Its form 
 or body. The other life reacts on this be- 
 cause it is still, through all crisis or miracle^ 
 organic with it. And what Integrates the 
 other life into this life's history is the Idea 
 of resurrection. The New Testament con- 
 nects the idea of immortality with that of 
 J07 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 resurrection. Its nature is given In Christ's. 
 It is not the resurrection of the flesh but of 
 a body — not of matter but of form. Its 
 idea of resurrection means something very 
 much more than the repristination of the old 
 life under happier circumstances. That, I 
 have said, is but Jewish, and Pharisaist, and 
 Moslem. It thought the old desires were to 
 be refurbished, the old ambitions facilitated, 
 the old life well warmed and oiled for an 
 elect. But that was sheer egoist eudaemon- 
 ism, the cult of selfish happiness and individ- 
 ual well being. It only gave the old hunger 
 better cooking. The idea of Immortality 
 had to be moralized. And that was done 
 first, by the notion of sanctification and per- 
 fection, but, second, by the close association 
 of these with the new life of past duty and 
 relation. The other life was that life going 
 on to perfection and coming to itself in a 
 crisis. It was in an organic moral connec- 
 tion with this. Christ came back to give ef- 
 fect to what He had done. He came back, 
 His body (not His flesh). His person came 
 back to be the Holy Spirit of all He had 
 done. That Is the real value of the doctrine 
 of resurrection. It gives the next life a real- 
 ism drawn from Its moral reality common 
 and continuous with this. Our life beyond 
 is in a moral relation of causality with this. 
 Moral causation is broken as a bondage but 
 io8 
 
XI ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 not as a power. We take with us the char- 
 acter we made. All discussion of what body 
 we come in is beside the point; and we have 
 no data. What happens to this physical 
 body is indifferent to faith, and it is left to 
 reverence. We are reverent to the corpse, 
 and not prudent. It will not be wanted 
 again. We do not mummify our dead; we 
 even burn them. But still the idea of Resur- 
 rection is the integrating factor between the 
 next life and this. Even the new nature does 
 not come per saltum. We return to an old 
 haunt. We put on an old fashion if not the 
 old garment. We grow in the old soil. So 
 the next life has much effect on this by making 
 the new present of infinite worth and mo- 
 ment. Our character here starts our destiny 
 there. This is one of the things that make 
 it such an abuse to rely on another life to 
 make good our neglect here. The deliberate 
 postponement of repentance here in the hope 
 of doing it there only deepens its unlikeli- 
 hood. We fix the impenitent temper. We 
 return yonder to the habit of putting off 
 which we acquired here. 
 
 It may be added that, as we pass into no 
 lone immortality, the social bearings of the 
 next life on the present are great. We so 
 worship here as worshiping with the greater 
 part of the One Church there — the Unseen. 
 109 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 The dead are the majority; and we are in 
 communion with them in Christ. Even for 
 society outside the Church the authority of 
 history means much. For the dead, I say, 
 are the majority; and if they are not extinct 
 they are still in some organic connection with 
 history and with the present. The future is 
 in some sense their resurrection. They re- 
 visit us if only in the resultants of their deeds. 
 And we still meet in the undying Lord. In 
 Christ the past with its souls means much for 
 us and our future. We are debtors both to 
 ancestry and posterity, both unseen. We 
 live as those who are come to a general as- 
 sembly and Church of the first born (for 
 the youngest dead are senior born to us in 
 the unseen). We are come to a city of the 
 living God, and a heavenly Jerusalem, and 
 an innumerable company of heavenly ones. 
 And we cannot live our public life as if we 
 were cut off from either life or society on the 
 other side. We are all in the one historic 
 purpose of God. We are in the lower parts 
 of the same Kingdom of God, and in the ad- 
 vance battles of the soldiery of faith. The 
 dead still have a vote where votes are not 
 counted but weighed. Let us not ignore 
 their weight, their tradition. In public things. 
 They still belong to the constituency of the 
 Christ Whom we have to put In command of 
 no 
 
YA ETERNITY AND NEW BIRTH 
 
 affairs. Ignoble peace always renounces the 
 sacrifices of the noble dead, and still cruci- 
 fies them afresh. 
 
 Ill 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE FRUCTIFICATION OF FAILURE 
 
 The future is the fruition of failure here. Eternity 
 holds the key of history, the meaning of progress, 
 the interest of tears. All opens out in that light. 
 The pathos of the past. 
 
 There are those who are not geniuses, with 
 a ruling passion to realize themselves and get 
 themselves out, but they have more affinity 
 with the meek saints, who have striven for 
 souls without any effect apparent. To such 
 it may come with some cheer to remember 
 that, if death is not a blight but a blessing, the 
 seed they sowed here will be reaped yonder. 
 As the old Testament lives and works in the 
 New so our discipline, long latent here, bears 
 fruit yonder. Death is like the leaf below 
 the Old Testament and New Testament.- 
 Or as the old Bible lives on, and lives larger, 
 in the growing Church so the instruction that 
 came to little here may yonder bud and seed. 
 Christ died like a corn of wheat sinking into 
 the ground to rot, but His harvest grows all 
 over the world. So our fruitless efforts for 
 souls will germinate yonder, as the mummy 
 wheat is said to sprout in soil to-day. His- 
 
 112 
 
FRUCTIFICATION OF FAILURE 
 
 tone Christianity is working Its greatest re- 
 sults in the unseen world, and far more 
 mightily, perhaps, there than here, as the 
 spiritual climate is so much more congenial. 
 When we are disappointed with the historic 
 results of the Gospel, and ask with even de- 
 spair. 
 
 " And is the thing we see Salvation? " 
 
 the answer is that it Is not, except In process. 
 Indeed the thing we see most obviously to- 
 day is the result of neglecting God's salva- 
 tion and kingdom. But there is a realm far 
 within all that goes on here where these 
 things are not neglected, but are ruling, judg- 
 ing, and creative powers. The effects of 
 Christianity are greater, its salvation Is 
 greater, where we do not see than where we 
 do. Which helps us patiently to believe how 
 great they will be in the future and unseen 
 stretch of earth's history. There Is a region 
 where the triumph of the cross is assured 
 and realized as it is not yet here. And our 
 contributions to it here do not come to their 
 fruition till they take effect In a land that is 
 their own. It seems far off, but the same 
 faith that works for It sees It. If we paint 
 for eternity it is eternity painting through us. 
 For after all eternity Is doing far more for 
 time than time is doing for eternity. " Time 
 113 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 Is the mercy of Eternity." Think of that 
 phrase of Blake. Time is there by the initia- 
 tive of Eternity, by the Grace of God, to 
 make Eternity accessible. He forestalls us 
 with every good. We love Him because He 
 first loved us, and became incarnate in crea- 
 tion for us. Time is not the mistake of 
 Eternity. The Eternal did not darkly blun- 
 der on man's suffering soul. The old Provi- 
 dence does not desert us when we go out of 
 life's door. The souls that go into eternity 
 know themselves as they never did before. 
 The spirit is more to them than ever before. 
 Their spiritual acquirement while they were 
 here opens out upon their sight. Think of 
 the grand leisure of Eternity, the leisured 
 receptivity of soul, its feeding in a wise pas- 
 siveness. How things will break open on us, 
 and be reconciled. And not only its poverty 
 but also its wealth will be enriched. Les- 
 sons, facts, thoughts, sacrifices, verses, 
 hymns, that were here overwhelmed with the 
 life mean and coarse, stand out, open out, 
 fructify, take command there. Memories 
 become powers. Old faces become fresh 
 blessings. The once dear becomes the ever 
 solemn. Even if the once despised become 
 terrible It is as the terrible things In righteous- 
 ness answer us from the God of our Salva- 
 tion. And all through Death. All things 
 are In a new light. 
 
 114 
 
xn FRUCTIFICATION OF FAILURE 
 
 Thou takest not away, O Death, 
 Thou strikest; absence perisheth, 
 
 Indifference is no more. 
 The future brightens on our sight, 
 For on the past has fallen a light 
 
 That tempts us to adore. 
 
 Yes, the old companion body, so mangled 
 once, and even so abused, and made the serv- 
 ant of sin, Is clothed with a new tenderness 
 through a new repentance, and the soul shall 
 still feel a respect and affection for Its old 
 home. In a theater once I saw a packed 
 audience brought to a dewy silence like the 
 half hour In heaven, while a young girl on 
 the stage caressed a child to sleep with words 
 they had all known long, and memories they 
 had known longer still, sung to a grave sweet 
 melody. 
 
 O, the auld hoose, the auld hoose. 
 
 What though the rooms were sma*, 
 How many cherished memories 
 
 Do they like flowers reca' ! 
 The auld hoose, the auld hoose, 
 
 Deserted though ye be. 
 There ne'er can be a new hoose 
 
 Will seem sae fair to me. 
 
 So, I thought, the spirit might look back 
 
 from Its Immortal repentance upon the 
 
 mangled body left on Flanders fields, wherein 
 
 had grown up a young soul's pathetic tragedy. 
 
 115 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 And the very repentance, not being hopeless, 
 would not be fierce but tender, and the poor 
 shieling of flesh would receive from across 
 the misty seas of death a reverence we knew 
 not while we lived therein. 
 
 And if you complain that this is sentiment 
 and fancy I will say it is that and more. It 
 is at least a parable of what I said was in 
 the heart of the doctrine of resurrection, of 
 the new meaning, effect, and dearness of all 
 that took place in time, all that came closest 
 to life, all that was the medium of experi- 
 ence. It is a parable of all the blessings we 
 misprised, all the monitions we ignored, all 
 the teaching we resented, all the discipline 
 that chafed us, and all the sacrifices we coolly 
 took as our due. The loving faces we too 
 little loved will not rise up to accuse us, 
 though their very blessings will reproach us. 
 They will not reproach, though reproach will 
 be ours. For it is love's native land this, its 
 song is of mercy and justice, its very judg- 
 ments are full of grace, and its severities 
 make for praise. And their past, through 
 which we who are left here are now toiling, 
 and struggling, and crying, appears already 
 to certain eyes, for whom we once worked 
 and wept, to be 
 
 " Ennobled by a vast regret, 
 And by contrition sealed thrice sure.'* 
 ii6 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 L'ENVOI 
 
 To live is Christ, to die is more Christ. We pass into a 
 genial native land. 
 
 You cannot dwell too much on the death and 
 resurrection of Christ as the revelation of 
 God's immortal love, so long as you do not 
 hide the fact that they are powers and not 
 mere lessons, and that they make together 
 one crucial, final act of divine majesty and 
 mercy. They make up the act which is the 
 central and unflagging energy of the world's 
 last reality as moral reality. They are one 
 act of decisive and final power at the moral 
 center of the Universe; and that is real om- 
 nipotence. Unless we can say that, the cen- 
 ter of our religion does not coincide with the 
 center of the moral cosmos; our faith and 
 our ethic lead a double life; and in a religion 
 of universal and moral redemption that can- 
 not be. Therefore Christ went out in the 
 one grand moral activity of all being, and 
 not in a mere submission, ^ passivity, or 
 martyrdom. He certainly did not simply 
 subside Into an allcreating presence, as one 
 117 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 vortex swirls away to make room for an- 
 other in a vast sea which boils with them. 
 His death and resurrection made the great- 
 est thing His great historic and cosmic per- 
 son did. Nay, it was the greatest thing that 
 God ever did. When God raised Christ 
 from the dead it was the greatest of all His 
 works. It was the new creation of the 
 world. It certainly was the greatest thing 
 ever done for the soul. 
 
 Christ's death meant power and victory 
 over sin's spiritual guilt and moral bondage; 
 His resurrection meant victory over sorrow, 
 nature, and the bondage of the world. To- 
 gether they make a glory greater and surer 
 than nature's joy. More than the morning 
 stars sang together at this new creation — 
 the Father was well pleased. Nothing cre- 
 ated could express the Holy Father's joy as 
 He found Himself In the victory of His 
 equally holy Son. A new value was given 
 to the natural life from its spiritual Lord. 
 It became more active, more precious, and 
 dear. We learned to paint for Eternity. 
 Clutching haste died, and crude feverishness. 
 " I pass but do not cease. I go to those who 
 have gone. I go to Him in whom is no after 
 nor before, and in whom all work Is Yea and 
 Amen. To die is Christ. It is gain — gain 
 In reality. I go nearer to the great reality, 
 the eternal holy love. I do not just sink Into 
 ii8 
 
xm L'ENVOI 
 
 the Unseen, I move deeper into God and the 
 Kingdom of God. I see His face I am 
 rapt into the energies of the Eternal Here 
 I am not where I should be, because others 
 are not. But I go where all souls are filled 
 with Christ; where the public opinion is the 
 Holy Ghost; where all moves in righteous- 
 ness, service and worship." What an ac- 
 cession to our best life here to believe that! 
 What a gain to the value of these things 
 here, when, even if we do lead a buried life, 
 it is among the roots of the fruit eternal 
 where the river of life flows by! The same 
 Christ Who is the reality and power of that 
 life beyond is the reality and value of this. 
 To live here is to live the Christ that rules, 
 eternity. To die is more of that Kingdom. 
 
 Doubt and distraction about our destiny 
 do not stimulate work nor ennoble feeling, 
 though a morbid tenderness they may breed. 
 They kill work. They reduce it to mere 
 restlessness. Mere activity Is not work. 
 We do not then run a race set before us; we 
 dawdle, or we scamper ; we flutter before pur- 
 suing doom like a fowl before a train. And 
 these uncertainties about our future, these 
 blank misgivings, debase feeling rather than 
 elevate it. But how the revelation of 
 Christ's eternity as ours has ennobled love! 
 It has given love a new value for the modern 
 119 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT chap. 
 
 world, and yet made the parting full of hope. 
 The more free we are made from life and 
 the world the more we find in both. But 
 Jubal was not freed, only swallowed up. He 
 was reabsorbed; he was not redeemed. But 
 Christian death is the only close which Is 
 more of a beginning than an end. 
 
 The foundation of our true immortality is 
 in a redemption. Eternal Life is a new gift 
 to us by a new act, a new creation. It is a 
 second birth. It is not a case of evolution 
 but of revolution. It is not the development 
 of a power or an ideal immanent to the world 
 of Humanity. It is a gift of God, through 
 an act of God. And thus it is the only means 
 of passing to our moral perfection. To 
 evade that act of God is to turn religion to a 
 piece of aesthetic. In an ethical religion we 
 are redeemed. We do not glide into heaven; 
 we are taken, not to say plucked, into it. 
 There is no straight line or smooth ascent 
 to our high places — that is shown by the 
 calls to severe self-denial of earthly good.^ 
 
 1 There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, 
 trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life 
 of which the cross is the symbol, a battle which no peace 
 follows this side of the grave; which the grave gapes to 
 finish before the victory is won; and — strange that it 
 should be so — this is the highest life of man. Look 
 back along the great names of history; there is none 
 whose life has been other than this. — J. A. Froude, 
 England's Forgotten Worthies. 
 
 1 20 
 
xni L'ENVOI 
 
 And these calls join with the uncertainty of 
 judgment to make life grave, or even tragic, 
 as Eternal Life makes it great and glorious. 
 For our race the Kingdom of God can only 
 come by the Cross, by crisis, by a breach with 
 the natural life, though not a disruption of 
 it. It Is this new relation to a holy Creator 
 and His eternity that gives the final value 
 to life's chief assets and Its best dreams. 
 Eternal Life Is the enhancement and warrant 
 of human joy and weal. It is the fixing of 
 its finest colors. It is the last Amen. Do 
 not flee the world; overcome it by good. 
 " There is no time so miserable but a man 
 may be true." The force you have to use 
 on yourself is really a function of the power 
 of new life which carries you, an energy of 
 the righteous kingdom. If you break with 
 the world it is in the power of the life which 
 serves and saves it. If Christ live in you all 
 humane affection, all love of man or woman, 
 will be in the service and worship of God. 
 A new power of service comes from that 
 faith. In the vast certainty that Christ has 
 charged Himself with our Immortality our 
 minds and hands are set free to serve others. 
 We escape from ourselves, our introspection, 
 our culture of immortality. We escape our 
 anxious self-concern. So little is Christian 
 immortality a piece of egoism. We do not 
 see the prospect as a field for imaginative en- 
 
 121 
 
THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT 
 
 joyment, nor as a food for our mere com- 
 fort. If Christ is our life our future is not 
 our own. Our ruling passion is not greed 
 of life. We do not do just what we must 
 do to keep death at bay. We begin living 
 the eternal life here, with its endless selfless 
 energy, vaster than we feel, and surer than 
 we know. That life is not a mere spiritual- 
 ity but a sanctity; for we are not mystic be- 
 ings in our destiny, but moral and holy. So 
 to live is the life of faith — which is not an- 
 other piece of work, but the new life which 
 is the source of all work, and which has for 
 its ventures all the capital of Christ's hfe be- 
 hind it. 
 
 The other life Is not the negation and ar- 
 rest of this. Nor is it mere restitution — 
 as if we might then pursue all the old egoist 
 dreams and appetites only with better ma- 
 chinery than here. That were pagan, Mos- 
 lem. It were at best but happiness. And 
 the Christian idea is not happiness and it is 
 not power, but it is perfection — which is the 
 growth of God's image and glory as our des- 
 tiny. 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 122 
 
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