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Page 44
Our modern view of the universe no longer leaves us a localized heaven
and hell, and we have not the lively imaginations of those older
generations to whom the unseen world was as real as the streets they
walked and the houses in which they lived. One goes into such a burying
place as the Campo Santo at Pisa, or reads Dante's _Divina Comedia_, and
the painters who adorned the walls with frescoes depicting the future
abodes of the blessed and the damned, and the poet who actually
travelled in thought through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, were as
keenly aware of these places as of neighboring Italian towns. We lack a
definite neighborhood in which to locate the lives that pass from our
sight.
Religious authority is based, today, upon experience, and obviously
experience can give no certain knowledge of things future. We are
disposed to treat all pictures of the life to come, whether in the Bible
or out of it, as the projections of men's hopes. They are such stuff as
dreams are made on.
And at present we are absorbingly interested in the advance of _our_
world's life; we dream of better cities here, rather than of some
golden city beyond our horizon; we care far more intensely for lasting
earth-wide peace that shall render impossible such awful orgies of death
as this present war, than for the peace of a land that lieth afar. Men
think of the immortality of their influence, rather than of what they
themselves will be doing five hundred years hence, and of the social
order that shall prevail in the earth in the year 2000, rather than of
the social order of the celestial country.
Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of. But death is
always man's contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without
regretted partings. And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us
under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more
than an interval between ourselves and the tomb. To every thoughtful
person the question is forced home, "If a man die, shall he live again?"
What did Jesus Christ contribute towards answering our question?
He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to
the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely
rich it is, He kindled in us the passion for the second life, and
rendered immortality indispensable for Christians.
Christ enhances every man's worth in his own eyes. We find that we mean
so much to Him and to His God and Father, that we come to mean
infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man
feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it
hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is
when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor
trifles he cares for--his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his
newspaper--that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined,
that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or
sublime--immortality among the rest. When a man rises in his aims and
looks at the weal of the universe, and the harmony of the soul with God,
then we feel that extinction would be grievous." And it is just this
uplift into a new outlook that men find in Jesus Christ. A Second
Century Christian, writing to his friend, Diognetus, characterizes
Christianity as "this new interest which has entered into life." We look
upon each day with a fresh expectancy; we view ourselves with a new
reverence. The waste wilderness within, from which we despaired of
producing anything, must under Christ's recreating touch become an Eden,
where we feel
Pison and Euphrates roll
Round the great garden of a kingly soul.
But is this emparadised life to be some day thrown aside? G.J. Romanes,
whose Christian upbringing had instilled in him the distinctively
Christian appreciation of the value of his own life, when his scientific
opinions robbed him of the hope of immortality, wrote: "Although from
henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain
an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words
that 'the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think,
as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed
glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of
existence as I now find it, at such times I shall ever feel it
impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my instinct is
susceptible."
And Jesus increases the significance of people for each other. He
possessed and conveys the genius for appreciation. He came that life
might become more abundant, and every human relation deeper, tenderer,
richer. It is to love that death is intolerable. Professor Palmer of
Harvard, a few years ago, delivered a lecture upon _Intimations of
Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakespere_, in which he showed that, when
a man finds himself truly in love, mortality becomes unthinkable to him.
And for Christians love and friendship contain more than they do for
other men. Christ takes us more completely out of ourselves and wraps us
up in those to whom we feel ourselves bound. He makes life touch life at
more points, life draw from life more copious inspirations, life cling
to life with more affectionate tenacity. He roots and grounds us in
love, and that is to root us in the souls of other men; then to tear
them from us irrevocably--parents, children, husband, wife, lover,
beloved, friend,--is to leave us of all men most pitiable.
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