THE CHRISTIAN LIFE EVERLASTING
Various factors combine to make it hard for men today to believe vividly
in life beyond the grave. Our science has emphasized the closeness of
the connection between our spiritual life and our bodies. If there be an
abnormal pressure upon some part of the brain, we lose our minds; an
operation upon a man's skull may transform him from a criminal into a
reputable member of society. It is not easy for us to conceive how life
can continue after the body dies. Diderot put the difficulty more than a
century ago: "If you can believe in sight without eyes, in hearing
without ears, in thinking without a head, if you could love without a
heart, feel without senses, exist when you are nowhere and be something
without extension, then we might indulge this hope of a future life."
Our modern view of the universe no longer leaves us a localized heaven
and hell, and we have not the lively imaginations of those older
generations to whom the unseen world was as real as the streets they
walked and the houses in which they lived. One goes into such a burying
place as the Campo Santo at Pisa, or reads Dante's _Divina Comedia_, and
the painters who adorned the walls with frescoes depicting the future
abodes of the blessed and the damned, and the poet who actually
travelled in thought through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, were as
keenly aware of these places as of neighboring Italian towns. We lack a
definite neighborhood in which to locate the lives that pass from our
sight.
Religious authority is based, today, upon experience, and obviously
experience can give no certain knowledge of things future. We are
disposed to treat all pictures of the life to come, whether in the Bible
or out of it, as the projections of men's hopes. They are such stuff as
dreams are made on.
And at present we are absorbingly interested in the advance of _our_
world's life; we dream of better cities here, rather than of some
golden city beyond our horizon; we care far more intensely for lasting
earth-wide peace that shall render impossible such awful orgies of death
as this present war, than for the peace of a land that lieth afar. Men
think of the immortality of their influence, rather than of what they
themselves will be doing five hundred years hence, and of the social
order that shall prevail in the earth in the year 2000, rather than of
the social order of the celestial country.
Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of. But death is
always man's contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without
regretted partings. And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us
under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more
than an interval between ourselves and the tomb. To every thoughtful
person the question is forced home, "If a man die, shall he live again?"
What did Jesus Christ contribute towards answering our question?
He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to
the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely
rich it is, He kindled in us the passion for the second life, and
rendered immortality indispensable for Christians.
Christ enhances every man's worth in his own eyes. We find that we mean
so much to Him and to His God and Father, that we come to mean
infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man
feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it
hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is
when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor
trifles he cares for--his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his
newspaper--that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined,
that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or
sublime--immortality among the rest. When a man rises in his aims and
looks at the weal of the universe, and the harmony of the soul with God,
then we feel that extinction would be grievous." And it is just this
uplift into a new outlook that men find in Jesus Christ. A Second
Century Christian, writing to his friend, Diognetus, characterizes
Christianity as "this new interest which has entered into life." We look
upon each day with a fresh expectancy; we view ourselves with a new
reverence. The waste wilderness within, from which we despaired of
producing anything, must under Christ's recreating touch become an Eden,
where we feel
Pison and Euphrates roll
Round the great garden of a kingly soul.
But is this emparadised life to be some day thrown aside? G.J. Romanes,
whose Christian upbringing had instilled in him the distinctively
Christian appreciation of the value of his own life, when his scientific
opinions robbed him of the hope of immortality, wrote: "Although from
henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain
an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words
that 'the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think,
as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed
glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of
existence as I now find it, at such times I shall ever feel it
impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my instinct is
susceptible."
And Jesus increases the significance of people for each other. He
possessed and conveys the genius for appreciation. He came that life
might become more abundant, and every human relation deeper, tenderer,
richer. It is to love that death is intolerable. Professor Palmer of
Harvard, a few years ago, delivered a lecture upon _Intimations of
Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakespere_, in which he showed that, when
a man finds himself truly in love, mortality becomes unthinkable to him.
And for Christians love and friendship contain more than they do for
other men. Christ takes us more completely out of ourselves and wraps us
up in those to whom we feel ourselves bound. He makes life touch life at
more points, life draw from life more copious inspirations, life cling
to life with more affectionate tenacity. He roots and grounds us in
love, and that is to root us in the souls of other men; then to tear
them from us irrevocably--parents, children, husband, wife, lover,
beloved, friend,--is to leave us of all men most pitiable.
Love--the prisoned God in man--
Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free,
Cries like a captain for eternity.
Again, Christ gives men an ideal for themselves which in their
threescore years and ten, more or less, they cannot hope to achieve: "Be
ye perfect as your Father." Jesus Himself, in whom we see the Father, is
for us that which we feel we must be, yet which we never are.
Immortality becomes a necessity to any man who seriously sets himself to
become like Jesus. Our mistakes and follies, the false starts we make,
the tasks we attempt for which we discover ourselves unfit, the waste of
time and energy we cannot repair, the tangled snarls into which we wind
ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life
absurd, if it be final. It cannot be more than a series of tentative
beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a
gigantic blunder. If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal
hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out
on its quest, He is no Saviour but a Tormentor.
The fiend that man harries
Is love of the best.
We are doomed to a few score years of tantalizing failure, and victory
is forever impossible for sheer want of time.
Further, Jesus gives men a vision of a new social order--the Kingdom of
God--a vision so alluring that, once seen, they cannot but live for its
accomplishment. We are fascinated with the prospect of a world where
hideous war is unthinkable; where none waste and none want, for
brotherhood governs industry and commerce; where nations are animated by
a ministering patriotism; and where every contact of life with life is
redemptive. But the more fervently we long for this golden age, the more
heartily and indignantly we protest against present stupidities and
brutalities and injustices, the more passionately we devote ourselves to
realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order
appears. Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest
improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute. Haste means
folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go slowly. Things as they are
have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle. We ache with
curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give
anything to be in at the finish. But there is death. We just begin, and
then--!
Mr. Huxley, a thorough Christian so far as his social hope went, though
without a Christian's faith, wrote to John Morley, as age approached,
"The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigor as long as
one lives, and death as soon as vigor flags." But the allusion to death
set his mind on a painful train of thought, and he continued: "It is a
curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction
increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at
all sorts of times with a horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no
more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a
good deal--at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate
and company are not too trying. I wonder if you are plagued in this
way." He was repeating the experience of the old Greeks as it is
expressed in Pindar's _Fourth Pythian_: "Now this, they say, is of all
griefs the sorest, that one knowing good should of necessity abide
without lot therein." It is glorious to hold up before ourselves the
splendors of the age that is to be, to dream of our cities made over in
ideals, of our land as a world-wide servant of righteousness and peace,
of a whole earth filled with truth and beauty and goodwill; and glorious
to give ourselves unremittingly to bring this consummation nearer. But
can we be content with no personal share in it? Are our lives merely
fertilizer for generations yet unborn?
Oh, dreadful thought, if all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be,--
Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon
A white delight, a Parian Parthenon,
And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid
Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade,
And in processions' pomp together bent
Still interchange their sweet words innocent,--
Not caring that those mighty columns rest
Each on the ruin of a human breast,--
That to the shrine the victor's chariot rolls
Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!
Tennyson once said to Professor Tyndall that, if he believed he were
here simply to usher in something higher than himself in which he could
have no personal part or lot, he should feel that a liberty had been
taken with him. And when that something higher is the Kingdom Jesus
proclaimed, its devotees cannot forego their longing to share in its
perfected life.
And, above all, Jesus opens up for us an intimacy with God which is both
unbearable and incredible without the hope of its continuation beyond
the grave. To enter with Jesus into sonship with the Father, to share
God's interests and sympathies and purposes, to become the partner of
His plans and labors, and then to think of God as living on while we
drop out of existence, is the crowning misery, or rather the supreme
confusion. Jesus would have pointed to some heartbroken man or woman,
like Jairus or the widow of Nain or the sisters at Bethany, and said,
"If ye then, being evil, know how to care so intensely for your kindred,
and would give your all to keep them with you forever, how much more
shall your heavenly Father insist on having His own with Him eternally?"
At Professor Huxley's own request three lines from a poem by his wife
are inscribed upon his tombstone:
Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep;
For still He giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.
But in such a sentence what possible meaning can be put into the
expression "His beloved"? Can we conceive of God as really loving us,
taking us into His secrets, using us in His purposes, letting us spend
and be spent in the fulfilment of His will, and then putting us to an
endless sleep? If Jesus leads us into the life with God which we
Christians know, He renders immortality indispensable if God is to
maintain His own Self-respect.
Others may do without everlasting life; to some an endless sleep may
seem welcome; life has been to them such a mistake and a failure, that
they would gladly be quit of it forever; but to followers of Jesus its
continuance is a passionate and logical longing. Ibsen puts into
Brindel's mouth the words: "I am going homewards. I am homesick for the
mighty Void; the dark night is best." Jesus acclimatizes man's spirit to
a far different home, and sets in his heart an altogether different
eternity. So insistent are the demands of our souls for the persistence
of life with our God in Christ, that "if we have only hoped in Christ in
this life, we are of all men most pitiable."
Already we have passed into Jesus' second great contribution toward
answering our question of the second life. He assures us of it because
of the character of the Father we come to know through Him. Jesus' faith
in His own resurrection was based on His personal experience of God. The
words from a Psalm, which the early Church applied to Him, sound like an
utterance some disciple may have overheard Him repeating:
Thou wilt not leave My soul in the grave,
Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy devoted One to see corruption.
Thou madest known unto Me the ways of life;
Thou shalt make Me full of gladness in Thy presence.
Love is stronger than death, and for Jesus God is love. It was this
which made Him "the God of the living." Jesus could not imagine Him
linking Himself with men, becoming the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of
Jacob, and allowing them to become mere handfuls of dust in a Hittite
grave. His love would hold them in union with Him forever. Jesus
"abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light _through the
gospel_"--through the good news concerning God. When He succeeds in
convincing us that the universe is our Father's house, it requires no
further argument to assure us of its "many mansions." The unending
fellowship with Jesus' God of all His true children is an inevitable
inference from what we know His and our God to be. We do not base our
confident anticipation of everlasting life merely upon some saying of
Jesus, which we blindly accept because He said it, nor even upon the
report of His own resurrection from the grave; these are too slight
foundations for our assured expectation. We rest it firmly upon what we
know of His and our Father. Immortality is not a mere guess nor a
fervent wish; we have solid and substantial experience of what God is
from all that He has done for His children and for ourselves. And
experience worketh hope. Faith looks both backwards and forwards, to
what God has done and to what He consistently must do; and all the while
faith looks upwards, and in His face reads a love that will not let us
go.
The Easter victory of Jesus is the vindication of His own faith. God, as
Lord of heaven and earth, is involved in our world's history; He has
been responsible for its outcome from the beginning. If He let the
truest Son He ever had end His career in defeat and failure, He is a
faithless and untrustworthy God. Calvary was the supreme venture of
faith; Jesus staked everything on the responsiveness of the universe to
love, in the trust that the God of the universe is love. "If Christ hath
not been raised, your faith is vain." But if the seeming triumph of
wrong over right, of ignorance over truth, of selfishness over
sacrifice, which took place at Golgotha be but the prelude to a vaster
victory, then the Lord of earth has cleared Himself, and proved Himself
worthy of the confidence of His children.
And of the fact of that victory not only the first disciples are
witnesses, but every man and woman since in whose life Christ has been
and is a present force. Explain as we may the details of the
resurrection narratives, conceive as we please of the manner in which
Christ made Himself known to His followers in His post-resurrection
appearances long ago, we know that He is "no dead fact stranded on the
shore of the oblivious years," but a living force in our world today,
and that Easter triumphs are reenacted wherever His Spirit animates the
lives of men. History again and again has demonstrated that His labor
has not been vain in God; that the whole structure and fabric of things
responds to trust and love; that careers such as His cannot be holden of
death, but find an ally in the universe itself, which sends them on
through the years conquering and to conquer. That demonstration in
history confirms Jesus' trust in God, sets a public seal which the whole
world can see to the correctness of His testimony to Him whom He found
in the unseen, and in whose cause He laid down His life.
And Jesus has made still another contribution to the answer of our
question: it is through Him that we form our pictures of the life to
which we look forward so certainly. The New Testament expectations
center about Jesus Himself: "With Me in paradise;" "Where I am, there
also shall my servant be;" "I go to prepare a place for you;" "So shall
we ever be with the Lord." Men who had experienced Christ's hold upon
them, through all the divisive circumstances of life, had no doubt of
His continuing grasp upon them through death; they spoke of the
Christian dead as "the dead in Christ"--the dead under His transforming
control. Not death nor life could separate them from His love.
Since we see God, the Lord of heaven, in Jesus, the only and
all-satisfying knowledge we have of the future life is that it will
accord with the will of the Father of Jesus Christ. Of its details we
can merely say, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that
love Him." But we know God in Christ: we are certain of many things that
cannot be included in a life where His heart has its way; the city of
our hope has walls; but it has also gates on all sides and several gates
on every side, and we are certain of its hospitability to all that
accords with the mind of Christ. That which renders the life within the
veil not all dark to us is the fact that "the Lamb is the light
thereof." There is a connection between it and our life today; the one
Lord rules earth and heaven; and Him we know through Jesus. Humbly
acknowledging that we know but in part, glad that the future has in
store for us glorious surprises, we are convinced that for us there
waits a life in God, in which His children shall attain their Christlike
selves in Christlike fellowship one with another and with Him, their
Christlike Father. More than this who cares to know? More than this, for
what can Christians wish?
_Adhoesi testimoniis tuis, Domine_.
Psalm, cxviii (119): 31, Vulgate.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
End of Project Gutenberg's Some Christian Convictions, by Henry Sloane Coffin