When Mrs. Booth died, the wife of the famous "General," the "Army"
reported her as "Promoted to Glory from Clacton-on-Sea." It was
extremely funny. Clacton-on-Sea is such a prosaic anti-climax after
Glory. One was reminded of Sir Horace Glendower:
Sprat. But the sense of humor is not acute in religious circles.
Mr. Spurgeon frequently gave expression to his dislike and mistrust of
the antics or the Salvation Army. He was far from prim himself, but he
held that if people were not "won over to Christ" by preaching, it was
idle to bait the hook with mere sensationalism. Yet by a strange irony
his closest friends, in announcing his death to his flock, actually
improved on the extravagance of the Salvationists. Here is a copy of the
telegram that was affixed to the rails of the Metropolitan Tabernacle
the morning after his decease:
Mentone, 11.50.
Spurgeon's Tabernacle, London.
Our beloved pastor entered heaven 11.5 Sunday night.
Harrald.
This Harrald was Mr. Spurgeon's private secretary, but he writes like
the private secretary of God Almighty. A leading statesman once said he
wished he was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay was cocksure of
everything; but what was Macaulay's cocksureness to the cocksureness of
Harrald? The gentleman could not have spoken with more assurance if
he had been Saint Peter himself, and had opened the gate for Pastor
Spurgeon.
We take it that Spurgeon expired at 11.5 on Sunday night. That is the
_fact_. All the rest is conjecture.
How could his soul enter heaven at the very same moment? Is heaven in
the atmosphere? He who asserts it is a very bold speculator. Is it out
in the ether? If so, where? And how is it our telescopes cannot detect
it? If heaven is a place, as it must be if it exists at all, it cannot
very well be within the astronomical universe. Now the farthest stars
are inconceivably remote. Our sun is more than 90,000,000 miles distant,
and Sirius is more than 200,000 times farther off than the sun. There
are stars so distant that their light takes more than a thousand
years to reach us, and light travels at the rate of nearly two hundred
thousands miles per second!
It is difficult to imagine Spurgeon's soul travelling faster than that;
and if heaven is somewhere out in the vast void, beyond the sweep of
telescopes or the register of the camera, Spurgeon's soul has so far
_not_ "entered heaven" that its journey thither is only just begun. In
another thousand years, perhaps, it will be nearing the pearly gates.
_Perhaps_, we say; for heaven may be a million times further off, and
Spurgeon's soul may pull the bell and rouse Saint Peter long after the
earth is a frozen ball, and not only the human race but all life has
disappeared from its surface. Nay, by the time he arrives, the earth may
have gone to pot, and the whole solar system may have vanished from the
map of the universe.
What a terrible journey! Is it worth travelling so far to enter the
Bible heaven, and sing hymns with the menagerie of the Apocalypse?
Besides, a poor soul might lose its way, and dash about the
billion-billion-miled universe like a lunatic meteor.
It appears to us, also, that Mr. Harrald and the rest of Mr. Spurgeon's
friends have forgotten his own teaching. He thoroughly believed in the
bodily resurrection of the dead, and an ultimate day of judgment, when
bodv and soul would join together, and share a common fate for eternity.
How is this reconcileable with the notion that Spurgeon's soul "entered
heaven at 11.5" on Sunday evening, the thirty-first of January, 1892? Is
it credible that the good man went to the New Jerusalem, will stay there
in perfect felicity until the day of judgment, and will then have to
return to this world, rejoin his old bodv, and stand his trial at the
great assize, with the possibility of having to shift his quarters
afterwards? Would not this be extremely unjust, nay dreadfully cruel?
And even if Spurgeon, as one of the "elect," only left heaven for
form's sake at the day of judgment, to go through the farce of a
predetermined trial, would it not be a gratuitous worry to snatch him
away from unspeakable bliss to witness the trial of the human species,
and the damnation of at least nine-tenths of all that ever breathed?
As a matter of fact, the Christian Church has never been able to make
up its mind about the state or position of the soul immediately after
death. Only a few weeks ago we saw that Sir G. G. Stokes, unconsciously
following in the wake of divines like Archbishop Whately, holds the view
that the soul on leaving the body will lie in absolute unconsciousness
until the day when it has to wake up and stand in the dock. The
controversies on this subject are infinite, and all sorts of ideas
have been maintained, but nothing has been authoritatively decided. Mr.
Spurgeon's friends have simply _cut_ the Gordian knot; that is, they are
only dogmatising.
Laying all such subtle disputes aside, we should like Mr. Harrald to
tell us how he knows that Spurgeon has gone, is going, or ever will
go to heaven. What certainty can they have in the matter? Saint Paul
himself alluded to the possibility of his being "a castaway." How can an
inferior apostle be _sure_ of the kingdom of heaven?
Saint Paul taught predestination, and so did Spurgeon. According to
this doctrine, God knew beforehand the exact number of human beings
that would live on this planet, though Omniscience itself must have been
taxed to decide where the anthropoid exactly shaded off into the man. He
also knew the exact number of the elect who would go to heaven, and
the exact number of the reprobate who would go to hell. The tally was
decided before the spirit of God brooded over the realm of Chaos and old
Night. Every child born into the world bears the stamp of his destiny.
But the stamp is secret. No one can detect it. Lists of saved and damned
are not published. If they were, it would save us a lot of anxiety. Some
would say, "I'm all right." Others would say, "I'm in for it; I'll keep
cool while I can." But we must all die before we ascertain our fate.
We may feel confident of being in the right list, with the rest of the
sheep; but confidence is not proof, and impressions are not facts.
When we take the great leap we shall know. Until then no man has any
certitude; not even the most pious Christian that ever rolled his eyes
in prayer to his Maker, or whined out the confession of his contemptible
sins. All are in the same perplexity, and Spurgeon was no exception to
the rule.
When predestination was really believed, the friends of the greatest
saint only _hoped_ he had gone to heaven. When they are _sure_ of it
predestination is dead. Nay, hell itself is extinguished. Spurgeon's
friends think he has gone to heaven because they feel he was too good to
go to hell. They knew him personally, and it is hard to think that a
man whose hand once lay in yours is howling in everlasting fire. Such
exceptions prove a new rule. They show that the human heart has outgrown
the horrible doctrine of future torment, that the human mind has
outgrown foolish creeds, that man is better than his God.