'Abraham said, Son, remember!'--LUKE xvi. 25.
It is a very striking thought that Christ, if He be what we suppose
Him to be, knew all about the unseen present which we call the
future, and yet was all but silent in reference to it. Seldom is it
on His lips at all. Of arguments drawn from another world He has
very few. Sometimes He speaks about it, but rather by allusion than
in anything like an explicit revelation. This parable out of which
my text is taken, is perhaps the most definite and continuous of His
words about the invisible world; and yet all the while it lay there
before Him; and standing on the very verge of it, with it spread out
clear before His gaze, He reads off but a word or two of what He
sees, and then shuts it in in darkness, and says to us, in the spirit
of a part of this parable, 'You have Moses and the prophets--hear
them: if these are not enough, it will not be enough for you if all
the glories of heaven and all the ghastliness of hell are flashed and
flamed before you.' We, too, if we are to 'prophesy according to the
proportion of faith,' must not leave out altogether references to a
future life in its two departments, and such motives as may be based
upon them; only, I think, we ought always to keep them in the same
relative amount to the whole of our teaching in which Christ kept them.
This parable, seeing that it _is_ a parable, of course cannot
be trusted as if it were a piece of simple dogmatic revelation, to
give us information, facts, so as to construct out of it a theory of
the other world. We are always in the double danger in parables, of
taking that for drapery which was meant to be essence, and taking
that for essence which was meant to be drapery. And so I do not
profess to read from this narrative any very definite and clear
knowledge of the future; but I think that in the two words which I
have ventured to take as a text, we get the basis of very impressive
thoughts with regard to the functions of memory in another world.
'Son, remember!' It is the voice, the first voice, the perpetual
voice, which meets every man when he steps across the threshold of
earth into the presence chamber of eternity. All the future is so
built upon and interwoven with the past, that for the saved and for
the lost alike this word might almost be taken as the motto of their
whole situation, as the explanation of their whole condition. Memory
in another world is indispensable to the gladness of the glad, and
strikes the deepest note in the sadness of the lost. There can be no
need to dwell at any length on the simple introductory thought, that
there must be memory in a future state. Unless there were
remembrance, there could be no sense of individuality. A man cannot
have any conviction that he is himself, but by constant, though
often unconscious, operation of this subtle act of remembrance.
There can be no sense of personal identity except in proportion
as there is clearness of recollection. Then again, if that future
state be a state of retribution, there must be memory. Otherwise,
there might be joy, and there might be sorrow, but the why and the
wherefore of either would be entirely struck out of a man's
consciousness, and the one could not be felt as reward, nor the
other as punishment. If, then, we are to rise from the grave the
same men that we are laid in it, and if the future life has this for
its characteristic, that it is a state either of recompense and
reward, or of retribution and suffering, then, for both, the
clearness and constant action, of memory are certainly needed. But
it is not to the simple fact of its existence that I desire to
direct your attention now. I wish, rather, to suggest to you one or
two modifications under which it must apparently work in another
world. When men remember _there_, they will remember very
differently from the way in which they remember _here_. Let us
look at these changes-constituting it, on the one hand, an
instrument of torture; and, on the other, a foundation of all our
gladness.
I. First, in another state, memory will be so widened as to take in
the whole life.
We believe that what a man is in this life, he is more in another,
that tendencies here become results yonder, that his sin, that his
falsehood, that his whole moral nature, be it good or bad, becomes
there what it is only striving to be here. We believe that in this
present life our capacities of all sorts are hedged in, thwarted,
damped down, diluted, by the necessity which there is for their
working through this material body of ours. We believe that death is
the heightening of a man's stature--if he be bad, the intensifying
of his badness; if he be good, the strengthening of his goodness. We
believe that the contents of the intellectual nature, the capacities
of that nature also, are all increased by the fact of having done
with earth and having left the body behind. It is, I think, the
teaching of common-sense, and it is the teaching of the Bible. True,
that for some, that growth will only be a growth into greater power
of feeling greater sorrow. Such an one grows up into a Hercules; but
it is only that the Nessus shirt may wrap round him more tightly,
and may gnaw him with a fiercer agony. But whether saved or lost--he
that dies is greater than when yet living; and all his powers are
intensified and strengthened by that awful experience of death and
by what it brings with it.
Memory partakes in the common quickening. There are not wanting
analogies and experiences in our present life to let us see that, in
fact, when we talk about forgetting we ought to mean nothing more
than the temporary cessation of conscious remembrance. Everything
which you do leaves its effect with you for ever, just as long-forgotten
meals are in your blood and bones to-day. Every act that a man performs
is there. It has printed itself upon his soul, it has become a part of
himself: and though, like a newly painted picture, after a little while
the colours sink in, why is that? Only because they have entered into
the very fibre of the canvas, and have left the surface because they
are incorporated with the substance, and they want but a touch of
varnish to flash out again! We forget _nothing_, in the sense of not
being able, some time or another, to recall it; we forget much in the
sense of ceasing for a time to have it in our thoughts.
For we know, in our own case, how strangely there come swimming up
before us, out of the depths of the dim waters of oblivion--as one
has seen some bright shell drawn from the sunless sea-caves, and
gleaming white and shapeless far down before we had it on the
surface--past thoughts, we know not whence or how. Some one of the
million of hooks, with which all our life is furnished, has laid
hold of some subtle suggestion which has been enough to bring them
up into consciousness. We said we had forgotten them. What does it
mean? Only that they had sunk into the deep, beneath our
consciousness, and lay there to be brought up when needful. There is
nothing more strange than the way in which some period of my life,
that I supposed to be an entire blank--if I will think about it for
a little while, begins to glimmer into form. As the developing
solution brings out the image on the photographic plate, so the mind
has the strange power, by fixing the attention, as we say (a short
word which means a long, mysterious thing) upon that past that is
half-remembered and half-forgotten, of bringing it into clear
consciousness and perfect recollection. And, there are instances,
too, of a still more striking kind, familiar to some of us how in
what people call morbid states, men remember their childhood, which
they had forgotten for long years. You may remember that old story
of the dying woman beginning to speak in a tongue unknown to all
that stood around her bed. When a child she had learned some
northern language, in a far-off land. Long before she had learned to
shape any definite remembrances of the place, she had been taken
away, and not having used, had forgotten the speech. But at last
there rushed up again all the old memories, and the tongue of the
dumb was loosed, and she spake! People would say, 'the action of
disease.' It may be, but that explains nothing. Perhaps in such
states the spirit is working in a manner less limited by the body
than in health, and so showing some slight prelude of its powers
when it has shuffled off this mortal coil. But be that as it may,
these morbid phenomena, and the other more familiar facts already
referred to, unite to show us that the sphere of recollection is
much wider than that occupied at any given moment by memory.
Recollection is the servant of Memory, as our great poet tells us in
his wise allegory, and
'does on him still attend,
To reach whenever he for ought does send.'
We cannot lay aside anything that we have ever done or been so
utterly but that that servant can find it and bring it to his lord.
We forget nothing so completely but that we shall be able to recall
it. Of that awful power we may say, without irreverence, 'Thou hast
set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy
countenance.'
The fragmentary remembrances which we have now, lift themselves
above the ocean of forgetfulness like islands in some Archipelago,
the summits of sister hills, though separated by the estranging sea
that covers their converging sides and the valleys where their roots
unite. The solid land is there, though hidden. Drain off the sea,
and there will be no more isolated peaks, but continuous land. In
this life we have but the island memories heaving themselves into
sight, but in the next the Lord shall 'cause the sea to go back by
the breath of His mouth,' and the channels of the great deep of a
human heart's experiences and actions shall be laid bare. 'There
shall be no more sea'; but the solid land of a whole life will
appear when God says, 'Son, remember!'
So much, then, for my first consideration--namely, that memory in a
future state will comprehend the whole of life. Another thing is,
that memory in a future state will probably be so rapid as to
embrace all the past life at once. We do not know, we have no
conception of, the extent to which our thinking, and feeling, and
remembrance, are made tardy by the slow vehicle of this bodily
organisation in which the soul rides. But we have in our own lives
instances enough to make us feel that there lie in us dormant,
mysterious powers by which the rapidity of all our operations of
thought and feeling will be enhanced marvellously, like the
difference between a broad-wheeled waggon and an express train! At
some turning point of your life, when some great joy flashed, or
some great shadow darkened upon you all at once; when some crisis
that wanted an instantaneous decision appeared--why, what regions of
thought, purpose, plan, resolution; what wilderness of desolate
sorrow, and what paradises of blooming gladness, your soul has gone
through in a moment. Well, then, take another illustration: A
sleeper, feeling a light finger laid upon his shoulder, does not
know what it is; in an instant he awakes and says, 'Is it you?' but
between that touch and that word there may be a whole life run
through, a whole series of long events dreamt and felt. As on the
little retina of an eye there can be painted on a scale
inconceivably minute, every tree and mountain-top in the whole wide
panorama--so, in an instant, one may run through almost a whole
lifetime of mental acts. Then, again, you remember that
illustration, often used on this subject, about the experience of
those who have been brought face to face with sudden death, and
escaped it. The drowning man, when he comes to himself, tells us,
that in the interval betwixt the instant when he felt he was going
and the passing away of consciousness, all his life stood before
him; as if some flash in a dark midnight had lighted up a whole
mountain country--there it all was! Ah, brethren! we know nothing
yet about the rapidity with which we may gather before us a whole
series of events; so that although we have to pass from one to
another, the succession may be so swift, as to produce in our own
minds the effect of all being co-existent and simultaneous. As the
child flashing about him a bit of burning stick, may seem to make a
circle of flame, because the flame-point moves so quickly--so
memory, though it does go from point to point, and dwells for some
inconceivably minute instant on each part of the remembrance, may
yet be gifted with such lightning speed, with such rapidity and
awful quickness of glance, as that to the man himself the effect
shall be that his whole life is spread out there before him in one
instant, and that he, Godlike, sees the end and the beginning side
by side. Yes; from the mountain of eternity we shall look down, and
behold the whole plain spread before us. Down here we get lost and
confused in the devious valleys that run off from the roots of the
hills everywhere, and we cannot make out which way the streams are
going, and what there is behind that low shoulder of hill yonder:
but when we get to the summit peak, and look down, it will all shape
itself into one consistent whole, and we shall see it all at once.
The memory shall be perfect--perfect in the range of its grasp, and
perfect in the rapidity with which it brings up all its objects
before us at every instant.
Once more: it seems as if, in another world, memory would not only
contain the whole life, and the whole life simultaneously; but would
perpetually attend or haunt us. A constant remembrance! It does not
lie in our power even in this world, to decide very much whether we
shall remember or forget. It does not come within a man's will to
forget or to remember. He cannot say, 'I will remember'; for if he
could, he would have remembered already. He cannot say, 'I will
forget'; for the very effort fixes his attention on the obnoxious
thing. All that we can do, when we seek to remember, is to wander
back to somewhere about that point in our life where the shy thing
lurks, and hope to catch some sight of it in the leafy coverts: and
all we can do, when we want to forget, is to try and fill our mind
with other subjects, and in the distractions of them to lose the
oppressive and burdensome thoughts. But we know that that is but a
partial remedy, that we cannot succeed in doing it. There are
presences that will not be put by. There are memories that
_will_ start up before us, whether we are willing or not. Like
the leprosy in the Israelite's house, the foul spot works its way
out through all the plaster and the paint; and the house is foul
because it is there. Oh, my friend! you are a happy and a singular
man if there is nothing in your life that you have tried to bury,
and the obstinate thing _will_ not be buried, but meets you
again when you come away from its fancied grave. I remember an old
castle where they tell us of a foul murder committed in a vaulted
chamber with a narrow window, by torchlight one night; and there,
they say, there are the streaks and stains of blood on the black
oak floor; and they have planed, and scrubbed, and planed again, and
thought they were gone--but there they always are, and continually
up comes the dull reddish-black stain, as if oozing itself out
through the boards to witness to the bloody crime again! The
superstitious fable is a type of the way in which a foul thing, a
sinful and bitter memory--gets ingrained into a man's heart. He
tries to banish it, and gets rid of it for a while. He goes back
again, and the spots are there, and will be there for ever; and the
only way to get rid of them is to destroy the soul in which they
are.
Memory is not all within the power of the will on earth: and
probably, memory in another world is still more involuntary and
still more constant. Why? Because I read in the Bible that there is
work in another world for God's servants to do; but I do not read
that there is work for anybody else but God's servants to do. The
work of an unforgiven sinner is done when he dies, and that not only
because he is going into the state of retribution, but because no
rebel's work is going to be suffered in that world. The time for
that is past. And so, if you will look, all the teachings of the
Bible about the future state of those who are not in blessedness,
give us this idea--a monotonous continuance of idleness, shutting
them up to their own contemplations, the memories of the past and
the agonies of the future. There are no distractions for such a man
in another world. He has thought, he has conscience, he has
remembrance. He has a sense of pain, of sin, of wrong, of loss. He
has one 'passive fixed endurance, all eternal and the same'; but I
do not read that his pain is anodyned and his sorrow soothed by any
activity that his hand finds to do. And, in a most tragic sense, we
may say, 'there is neither work, nor labour, nor device,' in that
dark world where the fruits of sin are reaped in monotonous
suffering and ever-present pain. A memory, brethren, that
i>will_ have its own way--what a field for sorrow and lamentation
that is, when God says at last, 'Now go--go apart; take thy life
with thee; read it over; see what thou hast done with it!' One old
Roman tyrant had a punishment in which he bound the dead body of the
murdered to the living body of the murderer, and left them there
scaffolded. And when that voice comes, 'Son, remember!' to the
living soul of the godless, unbelieving, impenitent man, there is
bound to him the murdered past, the dead past, his own life; and, in
Milton's awful and profound words,
'Which way I fly is hell--myself am hell!'
There is only one other modification of this awful faculty that I
would remind you of; and that is, that in a future life memory will
be associated with a perfectly accurate knowledge of the consequences
and a perfectly sensitive conscience as to the criminality of the
past. You will have cause and consequence put down before you, meeting
each other at last. There will be no room then to say, 'I wonder how
such and such a thing will work out,' 'I wonder how such a thing can
have come upon me'; but every one will have his whole life to look
back upon, and will see the childish sin that was the parent of the
full-grown vice, and the everlasting sorrow that came out of that
little and apparently transitory root. The conscience, which here
becomes hardened by contact with sin, and enfeebled because unheeded,
will then be restored to its early sensitiveness and power, as if the
labourer's horny palm were to be endowed again with the softness of
the infant's little hand. If you will take and think about that,
brother, _there_ is enough--without any more talk, without any
more ghastly, sensual external figures--_there_ is enough to make
the boldest tremble; a memory embracing all the past, a memory rapidly
grasping and constantly bringing its burden, a judgment which admits
of no mistakes, and a conscience which has done with palliations and
excuses!
It is not difficult to see how that is an instrument of torture. It
is more difficult to see how such a memory can be a source of
gladness; and yet it can. The old Greeks were pressed with that
difficulty: they said to themselves, If a man remembers, there can
be no Elysium for him. And so they put the river of forgetfulness,
the waters of Lethe, betwixt life and the happy plains. Ah,
_we_ do not want any river of oblivion betwixt us and everlasting
blessedness. Calvary is on this side, and that is enough! Certainly
it is one of the most blessed things about 'the faith that is in Christ
Jesus,' that it makes a man remember his own sinfulness with penitence,
not with pain--that it makes the memory of past transgressions full
of solemn joy, because the memory of _past_ transgressions but brings
to mind the depth and rushing fullness of that river of love which has
swept them all away as far as the east is from the west. Oh, brother,
brother! you cannot forget your sins; but it lies within your own
decision whether the remembrance shall be thankfulness and blessedness,
or whether it shall be pain and loss for ever. Like some black rock that
heaves itself above the surface of a sunlit sea, and the wave runs
dashing over it, and the spray, as it falls down its sides, is all
rainbowed and lightened, and there comes beauty into the mighty
grimness of the black thing;--so a man's transgressions rear themselves
up, and God's great love, coming sweeping itself against them and over
them, makes out of the sin an occasion for the flashing more brightly
of the beauty of His mercy, and turns the life of the pardoned penitent
into a life of which even the sin is not pain to remember. So, then,
lay your hand upon Christ Jesus. Put your heart into His keeping. Go
to Him with your transgressions, He will forget them, and make it
possible for you to remember them in such a way that the memory will
become to you the very foundation of all your joy, and will make
heaven's anthem deeper and more harmonious when you say, 'Now unto
Him that hath washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath
made us kings and priests unto God, unto Him be glory for ever and
ever!' And, on the other hand, _if not_, then, 'Son, remember!'
will be the word that begins the future retribution, and shuts you
up with a wasted past, with a gnawing conscience, and an upbraiding
heart: to say,
'I backward cast my ee
On prospects drear!
And forward, though I canna see,
I guess and fear!'