GROWTH AND PURIFICATION
What is the main purpose of the Intermediate Life? Is there something
to be done there which cannot be fully done at any other time?
Let us still try to keep to the firm ground of Scripture, and to avoid
confusion let us confine ourselves still to the case of those who have
died, in some degree at least, in penitence and faith.
§ 1
We have already seen that Scripture intimates that that life is not one
of sleep or unconsciousness. It is a clear conscious life. It is
therefore natural to ask what happens in it? What is the use of it?
Science and experience teach that growth is the law of all the life
which we know anything about. Even if we had no further light of
revelation we should find it difficult to believe that imperfect beings
dying in the grace of God pass into that life and live in it for years
or for ages without any growth or development.
Scripture also teaches that God's aim for us is not merely that we
should escape hell or just creep into heaven. Our goal is to grow into
the likeness of God, to "rise to the stature of the perfect man, even
to the stature of the fullness of Christ." How many of us are ever
even in sight of that goal when we die?
But Scripture goes further still. It points us forward to the final
stage of being, to the Beatific Vision of God in the far future and
tells us with awe that that God "is of purer eyes than to behold
iniquity," that "even the heavens are not clean in His sight;" that
into that final abode of bliss "nothing that defileth shall enter in."
Which of us, the greatest soul of us all, can look forward to such a
prospect without bowing himself in dread like Isaiah of old, "Woe is me
for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, that mine eyes should
see the King of the Lord of Hosts!" If there be no growth or
purification in the Waiting Life what hope is there ever for any one of
us of fitness for the presence of the all holy God?
Think that the great majority of those who die, even though penitent
and striving after right, have much of evil clinging to them; that many
after a whole life of ingraining their characters with evil have
brought sorrowfully to Christ at last their poor defiled souls; that
even the best is not without many faults and stains. If nothing that
defileth shall enter Heaven, if growth is a law of all life as far as
we know it, are we not practically compelled to believe that much of
the growth and purification needed to fit us for God's presence shall
take place in the great Waiting Life?
And this belief and hope for all these poor faulty souls in whom the
good work of God has begun on earth, St. Paul confirms. "Being
confident of this very thing, that He who hath begun a good work in you
will perfect it UNTIL THE DAY OF JESUS CHRIST"--_i. e._, right through
the earth life, right through the Intermediate Life, until the last
great scene in the drama of our history opens at the Judgment Day.
§ 2
How this shall take place God has not definitely revealed to us. But
God has given us reason and common sense to enable us to draw
conclusions from what He has revealed. Since in that life I am the
same conscious "I," with the same consciously continuous personality,
with the same conscience and memory, I may surely expect that the Holy
Spirit "who hath begun a good work in me and will continue it until the
day of Jesus Christ"--will continue it in much the same natural way as
here, through Conscience and Memory and the Sense of His Presence.
Only that these will be all more keen and effective and free from the
disturbance of the bodily senses and the distractions of this life on
earth.
CONSCIENCE here is the throne of the Holy Ghost, from which He rules
and directs my life. Therefore my body is "the temple of the Holy
Ghost." But Conscience here is greatly weakened by fears and hopes and
ambitions and distractions of various kinds. At times, when I lie
awake at night and think about my life, or when I enter into my closet
to prepare by special concentration of spirit for my Holy Communion, I
get some dim notions of what Conscience might effect in me if it had a
free hand. In THAT life of close spiritual concentration, when the
outer world is shut off and the soul enters into its own deepest
recesses, contemplating itself, contemplating its past and its future,
contemplating the deep tender love of Him who is there present as in
Palestine long ago, and feeling that in spite of all my shameful
ingratitude He is loving me and blessing me and watching tenderly over
me--surely I may expect great things of the operation of Conscience in
me.
MEMORY in this life is a very wonderful thing. It can call up in a
moment, for Conscience to work on, pictures of half a century ago. But
in the fast crowding impressions on the senses Memory is overtaxed and
has to lay away in its storehouse of subconsciousness whole tracts of
the past which never rise up before my conscious thought at all.
Psychological science has much to say in late years about this
storehouse of subconscious memory and the power that, unknown to me, it
is exerting on my life. It is there all the time, "under the
threshold." These buried memories are alive, ready to spring up, but
asleep--in abeyance.
§ 3
Now think what this means for Conscience and for Memory as the handmaid
of Conscience in the great contemplative life after Death. There is no
good or evil thing that I have ever done but Conscience has pronounced
on. Some of these judgments I remember. Some of them I forget. In
the many distractions of life and the desire to escape painful
thoughts, there has dropped down under the threshold of my conscious
thought a vast store of memories of which I am oblivious, but of which
one and another and another springs up at times unexpectedly with a
startling reminder of the great hidden store behind. I meet by chance
an old friend of my boyhood, and as he talks about the old times,
picture after picture springs up into the light, memories which had
long gone from me and which would never have sprung up from "under the
threshold" but for the chance stimulation of his talk.
We have often heard of drowning people on the verge of death having the
forgotten memories of half a lifetime flashed back in a moment. An old
friend once told me a curious experience. "I was crossing a railway
line hurriedly on a wet day. As I rushed over the rails the Express
came in view. I slipped and fell--fortunately into a hollow where men
had been working, and swift as a flash the Express swept over me. The
experience of that half minute I shall never forget. It seemed that my
whole life was blazoned before me in thirty seconds. Things that I had
not remembered for forty years past flashed back in a moment as if they
had happened yesterday."
That is what Memory can do even in this life under strong excitation,
calling up its forgotten stores. Think what its power may be in that
life as a handmaid to Conscience. With all its old lumber rooms of
forgotten deeds thrown open--with all the forgotten feelings of my
life--boyhood, youth, manhood--open for my contemplation. My
impatience and God's patience, my sorrows and why God sent them, my
mercies, all the kindly providences of God working unknown to me all my
days.
And my sins--some sins that I hate to think of, some that I had almost
succeeded in forgetting, all standing out clearly before me in the
unsparing light of that mysterious life.
I sat alone with my Conscience
In the place where time had ceased.
We discoursed of my former living
In the land where the years increased.
And I felt I should have to answer
The questions it put to me,
And to face those questions and answers
In that dim eternity.
And the ghosts of forgotten actions
Came floating before my sight,
And things that I thought were dead things
Were alive with a terrible might.
And the vision of all my past life
Was an awful thing to face
Alone, alone with my Conscience,
In that strange and lonely place.
Aye, my Conscience must do its work some day if I keep it from doing it
now. But all this will be in the presence of my Saviour. They are
"with Christ."
Every memory will be more keen and poignant and yet more peaceful and
touching in the presence of that dear loving Lord who I feel knows all
and yet has loved and received and forgiven me in spite of all, and who
is watching over me with deep tenderness like the refiner of silver
over His furnace as the dross is cleared away and I grow steadily in
fitness for the glorious life of unselfish joy and service in Heaven.
But pain! You do not like any thought of pain in connection with that
life. Yes surely, more or less, according to one's state, and dying
gradually into perfect peace. Growth of holiness does not come to
sinful man here or there but through pain, the tender blessed pain of
God's purification, the pain of self-reproach, the pain that thou hast
sinned,
"The shame of self and pity for thy Lord
That One so sweet should e'er have placed Himself
At disadvantage such, as to be used
So vilely by a being vile as thee."
But what a sweet and wholesome pain, mingled with the sense of safety
and peace and hope--mingled with deep joy and boundless adoring
gratitude and love as we see the stain of the old sins steadily being
effaced and look forward to the sure bliss of Heaven in the future!
Surely by means of such pain and gratitude and adoring love God makes
sinful souls fit for Heaven.