It is well worth noting that the New Testament very seldom condescends
to use that name for the mere physical fact of dissolution. It reserves
it for the most part for something a great deal more dreadful than the
separation of body and soul, and uses all manner of periphrases, or what
rhetoricians call euphemising, that is, gentle expressions which put the
best face upon a thing instead of the ugly word itself. It speaks, for
instance, as you may remember, in the context here about the 'putting
off' of a tent or 'a tabernacle,' blending the notions of stripping off
a garment and pulling down a transitory abode. It speaks about death as
a sleep, and in that and other ways sets it forth in gracious and gentle
aspects, and veils the deformity, and loves and hopes away the
dreadfulness of it.
Now other languages and other religions besides Christianity have done
the same things, and Roman and Greek poets and monuments have in like
manner avoided the grim, plain word--death, but they have done it for
exactly the opposite reason from that for which the Christian does it.
They did it because the thing was so dark and dismal, and because they
knew so little and feared so much about it. And Christianity does it for
exactly the opposite reason, because it fears it not at all, and knows
it quite enough. So it toys with leviathan, and 'lays its hand on the
cockatrice den,' and my text is an instance of this.
'My decease ... an entrance.' So the terribleness and mystery dwindled
down into this--a change of position; or if locality is scarcely the
right class of ideas to apply to spirits detached from the body--a
change of condition. That is all.
We do not need to insist upon the notion of change of place. For, as I
say, we get into a fog when we try to associate place with pure
spiritual existence. But the root of the conviction which is expressed
in both these phrases, and most vividly by their juxtaposition, is this,
that what happens at death is not the extinction, but the withdrawal, of
a person, and that the man _is_, as fully, as truly as he was, though
all the relations in which he stands may be altered.
Now no materialistic teaching has any right to come in and bar that
clear faith and firm conclusion. For by its very saying that it knows
nothing about life except in connection with organisation, it
acknowledges that there is a difference between them. And until science
can tell me how it is that the throb of a brain or the quiver of a
nerve, becomes transformed into morality, into emotion, I maintain that
it knows far too little of personality and of life to be a valid
authority when it asserts that the destruction of the organisation is
the end of the man. I feel myself perfectly free--in the darkness in
which, after all investigation, that mysterious transformation of the
physical into the moral and the spiritual lies--I feel perfectly free to
listen to another voice, the voice which tells me that life can subsist,
and that personal being can be as full--ay, fuller--apart altogether
from the material frame which here, and by our present experience, is
its necessary instrument. And though accepting all that physical
investigation can teach us, we can still maintain that its light does
not illumine the central obscurity; and that, after all, it still
remains true that round about the being of each man, as round about the
being of God, clouds and darkness roll,
'Life and thought have gone away,
Side by side,
Leaving door and window wide.'