SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME
+The inwardness of Salvation and Judgment.+--We come now to the
consideration of a group of subjects which are usually treated in quite
separate categories. I mean the punishment of sin, the nature and
scope of Salvation, Resurrection and Ascension, Death, Judgment, Heaven
and Hell. The reason why I feel that these subjects ought not to be
treated in separate categories is because they are all descriptions of
states of the soul and imply each other; they are inward, not outward,
experiences. This statement will, I trust, become clearer as we
proceed.
So far we have examined pretty thoroughly the nature of sin and its
effects in the world, but have said very little as to its penal
consequences, and yet the consideration of these consequences has been
the determining factor in most of the theories of Atonement, ancient or
modern, which have occupied the field of human thought. It is true, as
I have said, that the idea of Atonement is not necessarily associated
with that of sin, and actually precedes it both historically and
psychologically, but it cannot be gainsaid that in Christian thought
the desirability of finding some means of escaping or minimising the
punishment of sin has tended to overshadow everything else in popular
presentations of the Atonement. But what is the punishment of sin, and
who administers it? What is the Judgment and when does it take effect?
How does Salvation stand related to punishment and judgment? What has
Death to do with the matter? What are we to understand by Heaven and
Hell, and what is the bearing of either upon Salvation and Judgment?
Everyone knows how popular evangelical theology would answer these
questions. Sin, we are told, will be punished in a future life by the
committal of the impenitent soul to everlasting torment. Salvation is
primarily a means of escaping this, and secondarily being conformed
gradually to the moral likeness of the Saviour. Judgment is a grand
assize, which will take place when the material world comes to an end;
Jesus Christ will be the Judge, and will apportion everlasting weal or
woe, according as the soul has or has not claimed the benefit of His
redeeming work in time to profit by it. Death is the dividing line
beyond which the destiny is fixed eternally whether we die old or
young. Heaven is the place into which the redeemed enter--whether
after death or after judgment has never been clearly settled--there to
praise God eternally in perfect happiness; Hell is the place of never
ending torment to which unbelievers are to be consigned.
Now it does not require a very profound intelligence to see that
popular theology is a mass of contradictions in regard to these things.
By eternal the ordinary Christian usually means everlasting; why should
punishment be everlasting? The worst sin that was ever sinned does not
deserve everlasting punishment, and I have never yet met the Christian
who would really and truly be willing to see a fellow-creature undergo
it. There is no understandable sense in which justice could demand
such a terrible sentence, even if it involved no more than everlasting
unhappiness; how much more unthinkable it becomes if the punishment is
to be everlasting, fiendish torment! If Salvation is first and
foremost deliverance from this punishment, how is it that it does not
take effect immediately? Justice would suggest that it ought to do so,
for some sinners live a merry life until the eleventh hour, and then
give God "the last snuff of the candle" as Father Taylor put it,
whereas others repent early but never manage, all through a long life,
to escape the suffering caused by their own deeds in youth. In some
cases, at any rate, on this side of the grave, Salvation does not
involve the least remission of penalty, while in others apparently no
penalty will ever be endured either on this side of death or on the
other. The poor drunkard who repents does not find that repentance
gives him back his wrecked constitution, but the selfish, grasping,
cruel-hearted wrecker of homes and lives may just be in time with his
trust in the "finished work," and go right home to glory while his
victims struggle and suffer on amid the conditions he has made for them
on earth. Curious justice this!
+Christian thought never quite consistent about Death and
after.+--There is no need to labour the point; popular evangelical
views of the punishment of sin are incredible when looked at in a
common-sense way. But they are even more chaotic on the subject of
death and whatever follows death. It does not seem to be generally
recognised that Christian thought has never been really clear
concerning the Resurrection, especially in relation to future judgment.
One view has been that the deceased saint lies sleeping in the grave
until the archangel's trump shall sound and bid all mankind awake for
the great assize. Anyone who reads the New Testament without prejudice
will see that this was Paul's earlier view, although later on he
changed it for another. There is a good deal of our current, everyday
religious phraseology which presumes it still--
"Father, in thy gracious keeping
Leave we now thy servant sleeping."
But alongside this view another which is a flagrant contradiction of it
has come down to us, namely, that immediately after death the soul goes
straight to heaven or hell, as the case may be, without waiting for the
archangel's trump and the grand assize. On the whole this is the
dominant theory of the situation in Protestant circles, and is much
less reasonable than the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, however much
the latter may have been abused. But under this view what is the exact
significance of the Judgment Day and the physical Resurrection? One
would think they might be accounted superfluous. What is the good of
tormenting a soul in hell for ages and then whirling it back to the
body in order to rise again and receive a solemn public condemnation?
Better leave it in the Inferno and save trouble, especially as the
solemn trial is meaningless, seeing that a part of the sentence has
already been undergone, and that there is no hope that any portion of
it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender mercies with which
theologians have credited the Almighty are cruel indeed! It is
difficult to speak with patience of the solemn, non-committal way in
which many present-day theological writers discuss everlasting
punishment. Many of them have an "open mind" on the subject, whatever
that may be, and warn the rest of us not to dogmatise on the great
mystery. It does not seem to occur to them that the Christian
fundamental of the love of God renders the dogma of everlasting
punishment impossible, for it implies that God will do the most for the
being that needs the most, and surely that must be the most unhappy
sinner. Others speak of a "larger hope," a second opportunity for
accepting divine grace, and so on. But these theories do not meet the
case at all. While sin remains in the universe, God is defeated;
everlasting punishment involves His everlasting failure. How often we
bear preachers speaking about the obdurate human will, which to all
eternity may go on resisting good. There are not a few who defend the
abstract possibility of everlasting punishment by insisting that it is
impossible to coerce the will, and therefore that to endless ages a
soul may go on choosing evil and rejecting good. But this is an
entirely new argument; it implies that a sinner _might_ choose the good
on the other side of death, and that if he does not he continues
eternally to pass sentence upon himself, God being helpless in the
matter. This is not the way in which advocates of everlasting
punishment used to talk. It is a little more hopeful than the
conventional dogma, for it makes the sinner to some extent his own
judge and executioner, and places stress on the undoubted truth that if
a man keeps on doing wrong things he becomes hardened. I have heard
this view defended in private by a bishop, who apparently never saw
that in adopting it he had given up entirely the orthodox Protestant
view that there is no chance for a man after death, and that the thing
which determines our post-mortem destiny is not our conduct, but our
belief. Repentance at the eleventh hour, however bad the previous life
may have been, is, according to the theology of this particular bishop,
enough to secure admission to heaven. If, therefore, a power of
eternally choosing evil remains on the further side of the great
change, surely there is some hope that that power might not continue to
be exercised. But if not, what becomes of the whole fabric of popular
Protestant theology concerning the plan of salvation, the Judgment Day,
and the atoning merits of the Redeemer?
No, this kind of incoherent theologising will not do. No one really
believes it, and the churches will have to give up professing to
believe it. In our ordinary everyday concerns we take quite a
different view for granted all the time, the view that "Whatsoever a
man soweth that shall he also reap." The harvest may be long in
coming, but it comes at last. Neither do we choose our friends on
account of their chances of heaven or hell. We like or dislike a man
because he deserves to be liked or disliked, and not because he
believes something that will get him into heaven. Neither, thank God,
do we want to see even the wicked left to the consequences of their
wickedness; we want to see them helped to live differently, and it is
hardly probable that this impulse of our better humanity will change
after death. Love cannot be false to itself; in the presence of need
it must of necessity keep on giving itself until the need is satisfied
and the victory won.
But if popular theology concerning the last things is untrue, or at
least misleading and inadequate, what is the truth? Do we want a
different set of terms or not? I think not, but we want a different
perspective. These terms ought to be construed as states of the soul,
rather than as external conditions. Let me try to explain what I mean.
+The true Salvation.+--In the first place if sin is selfishness,
salvation must consist in ceasing to be selfish, that is, it represents
the victory of love in the human heart. This may be represented as the
uprising of the deeper self, the true man, the Christ man in the
experience of the penitent. We may even go so far as to say that this
can come about, and does come about, without any strongly marked
feelings of contrition or sudden change of attitude. Wherever you see
a man trying to do something for the common good, you see the uprising
of the spirit of Christ; what he is doing is a part of the Atonement.
In church or out of church, with or without a formal creed, this is the
true way in which the redemption of the world is proceeding. Every man
who is trying to live so as to make his life a blessing to the world is
being saved himself in the process, saved by becoming a saviour.
Ordinary observation ought to tell us that untold thousands of our
fellow-beings, even among those who never dream of going to church, are
being saved in this way. This is the true way to look at the matter.
The Christ, the true Christ who was and is Jesus, but who is also the
deeper self of every human being, is saving individuals by filling them
with the unselfish desire to save the race. It is this unselfish
desire to minister to the common good which is the true salvation. I
do not mind what name is given to it so long as it is recognised for
what it really is; there is no stopping-place between sinner and
saviour. This is the way in which men like Robert Blatchford of the
_Clarion_ are being saved while trying to save. Conceive how
differently such a man _might_ have lived his life. He might have
lived it so as to be of no use to anyone, or indeed in such a way as to
be a hindrance rather than a help to poor overburdened humanity. It
matters comparatively little that this man should think he is
destroying supernaturalism and scoffs at the possibility of a future
life. His moral earnestness is a mark of his Christhood and his work a
part of the Atonement. Not another Christ than Jesus, mind! The very
same. Mr. Blatchford may laugh at this and call his moral aspirations
by quite a different name. Well, let him; but I know the thing when I
see it. This is Salvation.
+Conversion.+--But in the history of mankind the change from
selfishness to love, from darkness to light, from death to life, has
often meant something much more pronounced than this. A man may have
been living a bad life, and become suddenly impressed by some appeal to
his better nature made in the name of God. He may have felt humiliated
and distressed by his new-found consciousness of sin. He may have
prayed earnestly for forgiveness, and felt that forgiveness has come
and that the peace of God has entered into and possessed his soul. He
has deliberately and solemnly consecrated his life to Jesus and feels
that henceforth he is, as it were, in a new world. This change is
rightly termed conversion, a turning round and going right. Such a man
may be able to say with St. Paul, "To me to live is Christ," and the
words would be literally and grandly true. After this he may go on
believing all kinds of things about verbal inspiration, the precious
blood, the fate of the impenitent, and I know not what else, but the
quality of the new life is always the same; it is dominated by the
spirit of love instead of the spirit of selfishness; it is harmony with
God. Often this change is very complete and beautiful, but in every
case it involves a long and slow ascent to the stature of the perfect
man in Christ Jesus. It is no delusion, either, that in the endeavour
to live the new life divine help is forthcoming. The Holy Spirit of
truth and love is ever present with a child of God to guide him to
higher and ever higher heights of spiritual attainment. Without this
blessed religious experience, the experience of those who are "called
to be saints," this world would be a poor place to live in. I may
perhaps be pardoned for adding that in my judgment even the earnest
redemptive endeavours of men like the editor of the _Clarion_ have
indirectly been made possible by it. Take out of the world what
Christian saints have owed to their fellowship with Jesus, and there
would be very little of hope and inspiration left. Still, what I want
to emphasise here is the fact that, however crude the various
theologies may have been in which this experience has clothed itself,
it is always the same; it represents the victory of love in the human
heart.
+Salvation and penalty.+--But does this kind of salvation do away with
the penal consequences of past sin? If not, what is its relation to
them? To answer these questions we must look a little more closely
into the nature of such penal consequences. Perhaps it would help to
clear up the subject if I were to say frankly before going any farther
that there is no such thing as punishment, no far-off Judgment Day, no
great white throne, and no Judge external to ourselves. I say there is
no punishment of sin in the sense in which the word "punishment" is
usually employed. We are accustomed to think of punishment as a
sentence imposed by some authority from without and containing within
itself some element of vengeance for wrong-doing. But in the divine
dealings with men such punishment has never existed and never will.
What has already been said in a previous chapter on the subject of pain
should help to make this statement plain. We have seen that pain is
life pressing upon death and death resisting life. If there were no
life, there would be no pain. We may say therefore that pain is life,
or some finite expression of the universal life, seeking to burst
through something that fetters and hinders it. Apply this to the
region of morals and let us see how it works out. If a man has been
living for self, he has been making a mistake and preparing for himself
a harvest of pain, for sooner or later the divine life within him, the
truer, deeper self, will assert itself against the decisive efforts of
sin. It is just as impossible for a man to go on eternally living
apart from the universal life as it is for a sand castle to shut out
the ocean; the returning tide would break down the puny barriers and
destroy everything that tends to separate between the soul and God.
For, after all, what is our life but God's? To try to keep it for
ourselves is like trying to catch and imprison a sun ray by drawing the
blinds. To save the self we must serve the All. When, therefore, we
remember that the spirit of man and the spirit of God are one, we know
of a surety that the infinite life behind the human spirit will assert
itself irresistibly against the endeavours of sin to enclose that
spirit within finite conditions. The essence of sin is the
declaration, "Mine is not thine, and I shall live for mine alone."
This is trying to live for the finite; it is enclosing the soul within
barriers; those barriers must be broken if the soul is to be saved, and
broken they will be just because the deeper self of every man is
already one with God. In the stable-yard of my house there was at one
time a tree, which was cut down and the place where it grew covered
with flagstones and a wall built round it. But the roots of the tree
were not removed, and so that buried life has reasserted itself, the
flagstones have been shattered, and now the wall is coming down. Here
is a figure of our moral experience. A man may go on living for self
all through a long career; he may bury his better nature deep
underneath the hard shell of materialism and self-indulgence, but it is
all in vain; sooner or later, on this side of death or on the other,
that buried life shall rise in power and all barriers be swept away.
This uprising of the Christ in the individual soul, for such it is,
must inevitably mean pain to the man whose true life has been entombed
in selfishness. The pain may begin here or on the farther side of the
change called death, but it is itself not a mark of death, but of life.
The fact that a soul can suffer proves its salvability beyond dispute.
An everlasting hell is in the nature of things a contradiction, for the
finite cannot eternally bar the way of the infinite reality whose
uprising is the cause of its pain; if it could, it would itself be
infinite, which is absurd. Sin is essentially the endeavour to live
for the finite, the separative, the divisive, as opposed to the
infinite, the whole-ward, the All. Which will win in this encounter?
+The real judge.+--And who, pray, is the Judge? Who but yourself? The
deeper self is the judge, the self who is eternally one with God. The
pain caused by sin arises from the soul, which is potentially infinite
and cannot have its true nature denied. If you go and live over a
sewer, you will be ill. Why? Because you were never meant to live
over a sewer. The evil therein attacks you, and the life within you
fights to overcome it, and in the process you have to suffer. It is
just the same with your spiritual nature. You _cannot_ continue to
live apart from the whole, for the real you _is_ the whole, and, do
what you will, it will overcome everything within you that makes for
separateness, and in the process you will have to suffer. This is what
the punishment of sin means. It is life battling with death, love
striving against selfishness, the deeper soul with the surface soul.
It is our own spiritual nature that compels us to suffer when we sin,
and there is no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, for we
are so constituted that what sin does, love with toil and pain must
undo. No eleventh-hour repentance can evade this issue; in fact, it
may be the beginning of it. If we have been treading a wrong road,
repentance is turning round and taking the way back. If we have been
living a false life, repentance is the beginning of the true, and just
in proportion as the false has been accepted, so will the true find it
difficult to destroy the lie. _You_ are the judge; you _in_ God. If
you have failed to achieve that for which you are here, you will have
to achieve it here or elsewhere, and the correction of your failure
will inevitably mean pain.
"The tissues of the life to be,
We weave with colours all our own;
And in the field of destiny
We reap as we have sown."
There is nothing horrific about this law of the spirit. In a true and
real sense it is our own law; _we_ make it. Being what we are, we
cannot let ourselves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin and
the token of our divine lineage. But there is nothing individualistic
about this sinning and suffering. All the love in the universe comes
to the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even enter the
prison house along with it and accept the cross in the endeavour to
hasten the emancipation of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so,
for as long as there is any sin to be done away, love cannot have its
perfect work. This it was which brought Jesus to earth, and this it is
which turns every follower of Jesus into a saviour. Love must strive
and suffer with sin until God is all in all.
+The spiritual resurrection.+--It follows from this that the true
resurrection is spiritual, not material, and this is the sense in which
the word is most frequently employed in the New Testament. In the
fourth gospel Jesus is represented as saying, "I am the resurrection,
and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall
he live: and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This
is a great saying, and the writer of this particular gospel meant every
word of it in the sense I have just indicated. He makes the eternal
Christ the speaking terms of the earthly Jesus and tells us that the
uprising of this eternal Christ within the soul of the penitent sinner
is the real resurrection.
+The resurrection of Jesus.+--But this subject of the resurrection
demands a further examination. We have already seen how inconsistent
popular Christian doctrine is about the matter, and yet Christianity
started with the belief in a resurrection of our Lord, a belief which
has continued down to the present day. What are we to say about this?
We may as well admit at the outset that the gospel accounts of the
physical resurrection of Jesus are mutually inconsistent and that no
amount of ingenuity can reconcile them. Matthew speaks of a Galilean
appearance, and says nothing about the ascension. Luke says a great
deal about the Jerusalem appearances, nothing about Galilee, and tells
us that the ascension took place from Bethany. The end of St. Mark's
gospel has been lost, and the last few verses are a summary of the
accounts in the other gospels concerning the post-resurrection
appearances of the Lord. John's version is, of course, less historical
than the synoptists, and puts the last appearance at the sea of
Tiberias. A minute discussion of the problem thus raised would be
unprofitable for our present purpose, but I hope we can take for
granted the broad fact that without a belief in a resurrection of some
kind Christianity could not have made a start at all. It is almost
indisputable that in some way or other the disciples must have become
convinced that they had seen Jesus face to face after the world
believed Him to be dead and buried. The earliest apostolic utterance
on the subject in the New Testament is the familiar passage from 1 Cor.
xv: "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received,
how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that
he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the
scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas, then of the twelve: After
that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the
greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of
all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." This
statement is clear enough and almost unquestionably authentic. It
places beyond doubt what the apostolic church thought of the
resurrection of Jesus. The little group of disciples must somehow have
become convinced that their Master was not really dead, but alive and
reigning in the world unseen, interested as much as ever in the work
His followers were doing, and spiritually present with them in the
doing of it. This conviction had immediate and important spiritual
results. It gave these simple men a new and greater confidence in
Jesus and in the power of the life He had lived. They saw that this
life was, after all, the strongest thing in the universe. They
realised that in the end nothing could stand against them; evil could
do it no real harm, for God was behind it. Even before the crucifixion
they had looked upon Jesus as the Son of God in a higher and more
spiritual sense than that title had been used before, but now
henceforth they thought of Him as such in a higher way still.
According to Paul He was "declared to be the Son of God with power by
the resurrection from the dead." If we try to put ourselves in the
place of these first Christians, we shall realise better the effect of
the resurrection upon their feelings and behaviour. Let us suppose
that we had known Jesus in the flesh, that we had learned to understand
a little of the moral and spiritual beauty of the ideal revealed in His
life, and that afterward we had seen Him die in blood and shame; I
think it would have taken a good deal to convince us that evil had not
gained the day. Now suppose after this we had absolute proof--I will
not say how--that our Master was still alive, and that His spirit was
with us and helping us, would it not make a very great difference to
our outlook upon life and our confidence in God? We could not but feel
the littleness of the power that had tried to destroy Jesus, and we
should not be afraid of it any more. This is precisely what appears to
have happened in the experience of these Galileans. Defeat and failure
were somehow turned into victory and success; they had seen Jesus again.
+Theories of resurrection.+--But how are we to account for this
new-found confidence of theirs that they had really once more looked
upon the face of Jesus? The subject has been discussed so exhaustively
that no possible explanation of it has been left altogether untouched.
Such a unique event as the raising of a physical body from death is one
which the average western mind of the present day would reject as
incredible if we had never heard it before, consequently there exists a
widespread tendency among liberal Christians to try to account for
primitive Christian belief in the resurrection of our Lord in some
other way. Thus we have the hallucination theory, the apparition
theory, the swoon theory, and others of a similar character. I should
suppose that most thinkers who take the point of view of the New
Theology would hold one or other of these explanations or some
modification of them, but I confess I have never been able to do so.
It seems to me that no such explanation of the universally held
Christian conviction that the physical body of Jesus actually rose from
the tomb is sufficient to account for it. The passage already quoted
from 1 Cor. xv is alone enough to illustrate this statement. It is
clear that the earliest Christians were absolutely certain that the
body of Jesus after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they had
known it before, although apparently it possessed some new and
mysterious attributes. In my judgment, also, insistence upon the
impossibility of a physical resurrection presumes an essential
distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot admit. The
philosophy underlying the New Theology as I understand it is monistic
idealism, and monistic idealism recognises no fundamental distinction
between matter and spirit. The fundamental reality is consciousness.
The so-called material world is the product of consciousness exercising
itself along a certain limited plane; the next stage of consciousness
above this is not an absolute break with it, although it is an
expansion of experience or readjustment of focus. Admitting that
individual self-consciousness persists beyond the change called death,
it only means that such consciousness is being exercised along another
plane; from a three-dimensional it has entered a four-dimensional
world. This new world is no less and no more material than the
present; it is all a question of the range of consciousness. It is
this view, the view that matter exists only in and for mind, that leads
me to believe that less than justice has been done by liberal thinkers
to the theory of the physical resurrection of Jesus. What is the
physical but the common denominator between one finite mind and
another? It is a mode of language, an expression of thought as well as
a condition of thought. Imagine a being free of a three-dimensional
world trying to converse with a being still limited to a
two-dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I think may have
happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. The three-dimensional body
would behave in a manner altogether unaccountable to the
two-dimensional watcher. The latter, knowing only length and breadth,
and nothing of up or down, would see his three-dimensional friend as a
line only. The moment the three-dimensional solid rose above or sank
below his line of vision, it would seem to have disappeared like an
apparition, although as really present as before. To the
two-dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid were a ghost.
Does this throw any light upon the mysterious appearances and
disappearances of the body of Jesus? The all-important thing after
Calvary was to make the disciples aware, beyond all dispute, that Jesus
was really alive, more alive than ever, and that His murderers had been
helpless to destroy Him. When we remember that to the ordinary Jewish
mind the thought of personal immortality was anything but clear, and
that to many of them death was synonymous with annihilation, we can see
how enormous was the change that had to be wrought in the mental
attitude of those who had seen Jesus die a violent and bloody death.
To see Him return triumphant was the one thing required to counteract
their feeling that all was lost, and the best means of demonstrating
this victory over death was to enable them to behold Him in the body
with which they were already familiar and which they loved so well.
For, after all, that body was but a thought-form, a kind of language, a
mode of communication between mind and mind; it was no more and no less
a thought-form than an apparition would have been, and, from the point
of view of monistic idealism, it is no more difficult to believe in the
reanimation of a physical body than in the use of any other
thought-form to express a fact of consciousness. Here, then, we have a
being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth-dimensional plane
adjusting Himself to the capacity of those on a three-dimensional plane
for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that--
"Life is ever lord of death,
And love can never love its own."
This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the
post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by
them on the minds of His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends
will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it is consistent
with the philosophic position assumed throughout this book, and seems
to me to present fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New
Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrection of Jesus is
absolutely indispensable or of first-rate importance; the main thing to
be agreed upon is that Christianity started with the belief that its
Founder had risen from the dead in order to demonstrate that death has
no power to destroy anything worthy of God. In consonance with this
idealistic view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it
simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was
dissipated. No doubt primitive Christian thought naïvely regarded
heaven as a place above the sky to which the physical body actually
went, and Hades, or the under-world, as the place from which the spirit
of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending to the abode of the
Father. Plainly enough this is what Paul thought about it, but such a
conception is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist under a
geocentric view of the universe which has long since passed away. But
when Paul speaks even about the resurrection of the saints, this is
what he means. All the good who have died are waiting in the
under-world, the shadowy home of the departed, in a state of existence
which is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with that which they
have left. From this under-world Jesus returned, "the first-fruits of
them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or
later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the
world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been
impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze
Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at
first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the
rest of the primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the
disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need? Paul's theory
as to the resurrection of every physical body is just nonsense in the
light of our larger knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may
as well say so.
+Paul's mystical view of resurrection.+--But we should do Paul an
injustice if we were to limit the value of his utterances by his views
about the resurrection of the human body. I have already pointed out
that Paul employs physical symbols in a mystical way, and in nothing
was this more so than in his use of the idea of a resurrection. With
him, as with the writer of the fourth gospel, the spiritual
resurrection was the uprising, going-forward, issuing-forth, of the
Christ or divine man within the soul. When he speaks in this way he
allows the thought of a physical resurrection to drop out of sight.
Thus he writes: "If we have been planted together in the likeness of
His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection."
"That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the
fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if
by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." "If
then ye be risen with Christ seek the things which are above, where
Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.... For ye died, and your life
is hid with Christ in God." Even if this last sentence is not Paul's
own it has a distinctly Pauline ring. In his maturer thought the great
apostle seems to have escaped the limitations of his early Pharisaism.
He ceases to speak of the sleep or the under-world, and begins to think
of death as the gateway to the immediate presence of his dearly loved
Master. "For I long to depart and to be with Christ which is far
better." Here, surely, we are listening to the voice of Paul the aged.
The moment we succeed in disentangling ourselves from all literal and
limiting New Testament statements about the connection between sin and
physical death, the physical resurrection, the distant Judgment Day,
and such-like, we find ourselves in a position to appreciate the
beautiful spiritual experience in which these very terms become symbols
of inner realities of the soul. Till we can do this, New Testament
language is sure to be a hindrance to any true apprehension of the
moral value of the gospel of Christ. The only salvation we need
trouble about is the change from selfishness to love, "We know that we
have passed from death unto life because we love." This change is
equivalent to a resurrection, the uprising of the eternal Christ within
us. It is also an ascension, the uplifting and uniting of the soul to
the eternal Father. But such a resurrection and ascension may be
preceded by a great deal of pain when the soul is shedding the husk of
selfishness. There is no dodging the consequences of sin; that is
absolutely impossible. A saviour may suffer with and for the sinner,
but the sinner must suffer too. The suffering is not a mark of God's
anger, but of his love; so far from salvation being a means of
screening us from it, the pain is a means by which the salvation takes
effect. It is the true self asserting its dominion over the false.
Heaven and hell are states of the soul, and the latter implies the
former. It is life that suffers, not death. When a guilty soul
awakens to the truth, hell begins, but it is because heaven wants to
break through. The aim and object of salvation are not the getting of
a man into heaven, but the getting of heaven into him. There is
nothing horrifying about the law of retribution, although it is
inexorable in its operation. It is an evidence of our divine origin,
our own true being asserting itself against the fetters of evil. But
it is the Christ that saves us, not the retribution; the retribution
only shows that the Christ is there, and that from the Calvary caused
by sin, and from the tomb in which the true self lies buried, He will
rise in glorious majesty in the soul and unite us in the bonds of love
to the eternal divine humanity which is God.
+Physical death of minor importance.+--It follows from what has now
been said that all these familiar terms imply each other, and that
death, judgment, heaven, and hell cannot properly be regarded as the
"Last Things." They are all here now, here within the soul, just as
infinity and eternity are here now. It is not a matter of hither and
yonder, but of higher and lower. Physical death is not the
all-important event which theologians have usually made it out to be;
it is only a bend in the road. My own impression is that when we
individually pass through this crisis, we shall find the change to be
very slight. It will mean the dropping of the scales from the eyes,
and that is about all. The things we have been living for on this side
will only profit us in so far as they have gone to the building up of a
Christlike character. If a man has been living for false and unworthy
ideals, he will quickly find it out; the only possession he can take to
the other side of death is what he is. Belief in the atoning merits
and the finished work of a Saviour will not compensate for wasted
opportunities and selfish deeds; these latter will light the fires of
retribution as the soul awakes to its true condition, and then, and not
till then perhaps, will the indwelling Christ obtain His opportunity.
Nor will the absence of a formal creed shut any good man out of heaven;
it is impossible to shut a man out from what he is. What we sow we
reap, and we do so just because of what we fundamentally are. Every
road to evil ends in a _cul-de-sac_. Sooner or later every soul will
have to learn that it is no use kicking against the pricks; we must
learn by the consequences of our mistakes that, being what we are, the
children of the Highest, we cannot permanently rest in anything less
than the love of God. Salvation and Atonement are just as operative on
the other side of death as on this. The blind soul goes on for a while
in its blundering selfishness, and the Christ spirit, the spirit of
universal love, goes on seeking to win it to the truth. In the end the
truth must prevail if only because we shall have to learn that the lie
is not worth while.
+Evidence for immortality of the soul.+--No doubt there are some
readers of these pages who profess themselves agnostic or indifferent
with regard to the question of immortality, and I am not going to argue
with them. It seems to me probable that before very long it will be
impossible to deny it. The mass of evidence for the persistence of
individual self-consciousness after death is increasing rapidly and is
being subjected to the strictest scientific investigation. Men like
Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge, men whose words are entitled
to respect from the point of view of modern science, have publicly
admitted the importance of such evidence; before long the scientific
world in general will have to take it into consideration. But to me
such evidence does not greatly matter, and I know very little about it
at first hand. I build my belief in immortality on the conviction that
the fundamental reality of the universe is consciousness, and that no
consciousness can ever be extinguished, for it belongs to the whole and
must be fulfilled in the whole. The one unthinkable supposition from
this point of view is that any kind of being which has ever become
aware of itself, that is, has ever contained a ray of the eternal
consciousness, can perish.