THE LAST THINGS
"It is appointed unto men once to die, and after death the judgment."
"He shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead,
whose Kingdom shall have no end."
"I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting."
Jesus Christ spoke in symbolical language of His coming in the clouds
of heaven as Son of Man with power and great glory, and declared that
the Divine verdict upon the lives and deeds of men should be
determined by their relationship to Him and to His ideals. Both in the
days of the Apostles, and for the most part among succeeding
generations of Christian people down to the present time, it would
seem that a more literal signification was attached to His words than
they will really bear. The truth of the Divine Judgment upon men's
lives nevertheless stands. "GOD is a great Judge, strong and patient:
and GOD is provoked every day." We must, however, be careful, in
thinking of the reality of Divine Judgment, to interpret the justice
of GOD in the light of the Christian revelation of His Love. The
attitude of GOD towards sinners is never anything but love, though a
love that is holy and righteous, and never merely sentimental. GOD as
Christ reveals Him can never impose or inflict a merely external
penalty upon a sinner, other than the supreme penalty of being simply
what he is, viz. a soul who by his own deliberate actions has
separated himself from goodness and from GOD. It is important in
thinking of the Judgment to remember that the essence of judgment is
neither the sentence nor the penalty: it is simply the verdict,
whereby moral and spiritual realities are revealed, shams and
disguises are stripped off, and evil is separated from good.
[Footnote: The associations of an English law-court, in which the
verdict is the work of the jury, are here misleading.] If our Lord,
speaking in parables, declared, of such as had neglected to do good,
that "these shall go away into eternal punishment," a considerable
body of orthodox opinion in the Christian Church has always held that
the punishment in question consists essentially in the "penalty of
loss"--the loss of goodness and of GOD, the loss of capacity for the
life which is life indeed--rather than in any imagined "penalty of
sense," or purposeless prolongation of pain. The imagery which our
Lord employed to describe the spiritual condition known as "hell" is
taken from the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine just outside the walls of
Jerusalem, in which fires were continually maintained for the
destruction of refuse, and maggots preyed on offal. The imagery is
sufficiently terrible; but it suggests the destruction of waste
products in GOD'S creation, rather than the prolonged torture of
living beings. It may well be that a soul, which by persistent and
deliberate rejection of every appeal of the Divine Love even to the
very end--in this life or beyond--has become so wholly self-identified
with evil as to be finally incapable of life in GOD, passes, of
necessity, out of sentient existence altogether. We do not know. What
we do know is, in the first place, that wickedness is of its very
nature instinct with the eternal quality of "hell"; and, in the second
place, that GOD is Love, and that GOD "desireth not the death of a
sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness, and live."
Just as the term "hell" expresses the condition of a soul which by its
own act and deed and deliberate choice has become wholly self-
identified with evil, so the term "heaven" expresses the spiritual
state of the pure in heart, to whom it is given to see GOD. So
regarded, heaven is simply the ideal consummation of progressive
spiritual advance, the perfect fruition of that "beatific vision"
which the saints of GOD desired. It has ever been the conviction of
the Christian Church that her members are already, even in this
present life, made partakers in the life of heaven, just in proportion
as their affections are set upon things above and not upon things in
the earth. What is begun here is continued more perfectly hereafter;
but it is unreasonable to assume that at the moment of death the
ultimate fulness of "heaven" is immediately attained.
The Church, therefore, has believed in an intermediate state,
sometimes called "Purgatory," a condition of progressive purification
and spiritual growth, characterized at once by a deepening penitence
for the sins and failures of the past, and by a deepening joy in GOD'S
more perfect service.
Moreover, since the Christian salvation is a social salvation, those
who have departed this life in GOD'S faith and fear shall not without
us be made perfect. None can enter fully into the joy of the Lord
until the whole of GOD'S great World-purpose is accomplished, and all
are gathered in. This brings us to the consideration of the Christian
belief in the Second Advent and the final Kingdom of GOD. It has
already been remarked that the terms in which this belief is expressed
are symbolical and should not be taken literally. Just because we
ourselves, under the conditions of life here upon earth, are immersed
in the stream of time, the idea of an ending of the World-process, a
final passing over of time into eternity, is to us, in the strict and
literal sense of the words, unthinkable. Only under the form of
imagery and symbol is it in the nature of things possible for the idea
of the last great Drama to be expressed, or rather, suggested: it is
impossible for our minds to grasp, in any more exact or effectual
manner, the Reality which the imagery is meant to symbolize. It may be
that the event expressed by the dramatic picture of the Second Advent
of the Christ is simply the revelation of the fact of His Eternal
Presence at once as Saviour and as Judge; however this may be, the
picture stands for the assurance of His final triumph, and the
vindication of His Kingdom in its fulness: and as such it is the
object of Christian hope--"Hallowed be Thy Name; Thy Kingdom come; Thy
will be done; in earth, as it is in Heaven."
If we ask what is the positive nature of the Christian hope and what
the final character of the life of heaven, the answer is that we
cannot fully say, that we know only in part, "we see obscurely, as in
a mirror." In hymn and ecstasy and vision men have sought to find
expression for the substance of things hoped for, and they have
failed. "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into
the heart of man to conceive, the things that GOD hath prepared for
them that love Him." The Book of the Revelation essays to paint a
picture of the heavenly state, and for the most part succeeds in
setting before our minds a noble imagery; but in the end its language
is most convincing when it tells us what heaven is _not_. "They shall
hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light
on them, nor any heat. And GOD shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes." Negatives and contrasts--the picture of a state of things
contrasted with all that in the world as we know it is amiss; we
cannot _positively_ envisage heaven. Only we believe that "there
remaineth a rest for the people of GOD," where nevertheless they rest
not day or night from His perfect service. "Beloved, now are we sons
of GOD, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that
when He shall appear we shall be like Him: for we shall see Him as He
is."
Here this chapter might end: but with regard to the nature of the
Christian conception of the life of the world to come there is
something more to be said: for the Church's creed contains the
assertion of a belief in the Resurrection of the Body, or even, in the
Latin form of the Apostles' Creed, and in the translation which
appears in the Prayer-book Service for Baptism, in the Resurrection of
the Flesh. The plain man may be tempted, brushing aside such a
doctrine in its plain and literal acceptation as a manifest
impossibility, either to hold aloof from a Church which retains such
an affirmation in her creed, or else to conclude hastily that the
words are meant only as a picturesque way of expressing a belief in
the immortality of the soul. Either attitude would be a mistake. It is
true that a literal resuscitation of Christian corpses on some future
Day of Resurrection would be neither possible nor desirable.
Nevertheless the Christian doctrine of the life to come involves more
than a bare assertion of the immortality of the soul.
The body is the embodiment or vehicle of the spirit; the spirit
disembodied would be a mere wraith, a phantasm of the living man. The
life of the world to come is not unreal or shadowy as compared with
the concrete reality of the life of earth: it is a life richer and
fuller, more concrete and more glorious than the life of earth. The
Church by her doctrine of the Resurrection means to affirm that the
full reality of that which made the living man what he was is carried
over into the life beyond. The buried corpse is not "the body that
shall be." "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body."
As to the nature of the future embodiment of the spirit in the life
beyond the grave we are ignorant. "GOD giveth it a body as it hath
pleased Him, and to each seed a body of its own." But we believe that
"the deeds done in the body" here upon earth while we are yet
tabernacling in the flesh necessarily affect and determine the
character of the spiritual embodiment which shall be ours hereafter.
For this reason we hold our bodies sacred, as being temples of the
Holy Ghost. "The body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and
the Lord for the body." Christianity can have nothing to do with the
notion that the defilement of the body is without effect in the
pollution of the soul.
[NOTE.-For a fuller treatment of the subjects of the Second Advent and
the Resurrection of the Body the writer may be allowed to refer to
Chapters III. and IV. in his book, _Dogma, fact and Experience_
(Macmillan & Co., 1915).]