This question is as old as the race. Men cannot let it alone. It exercises a strange fascination. One generation, immersed in pleasure or in business, may think thatthisworld is quite enough and may push the question aside: but the next generation will ask with increased intensity: "If a man die, shall he live again?" At one period of his life a man may care little for a question that carries him beyond the horizon of the present; but by and by no question comes to him with more poignant urgency.
The question will not rest, because death will not let us alone. As long as death breaks into our family circles, the problem will recur. Death came with his legions during the War and compelled a fresh answer to his challenge. No one who can think or feel is able to look unmoved on the face of death: he must ask "Shall he live again?"
It is passing strange that this should remain to any degree an open question. Why have not men reached a decisive answer? As a matter of fact, the history of nations and religions shows that man's tendency is to answer "Yes, he will live again." The natural inclination of man everywhere is to believe, not in his extinction, but in his survival.
The Christian doctrine of immortality implies vastly more than the mere survival of personality after death. It involves aqualityrather than aquantityof life. Let us first, however, gather the manifold rays of light from various quarters that illuminate a future life of any kind. Some of them may be only candle lights; but their combination will reveal a trend towards immortality. It will appear that it is less difficult to believe that a man will live again than to believe he will be extinguished by death.
I. A survey of human history discovers some candle lights on the problem of survival. These lights are certain well-established facts.
1.—All peoples and tribes, in all ages and of all grades of intelligence have conceived a life beyond death. Isolated exceptions are so rare that they may be accounted for by the loss, through degeneration, of an instinctive idea. This belief built the Pyramids of Egypt, reared the great Etruscan tombs, led men to embalm their dead, placed food and utensils within the tomb for use beyond, slaughtered the horses of the dead warrior and burned the widow on the husband's pyre. There is a deep-rooted and universal feeling that the spirit of man is distinct from, and superior to, the body, and survives the body. The universal fact of mortality has suggested the universal belief in immortality. This is all the more remarkable in face of the lack of immortality in nature. Nature presents the aspect of an indefinite series of things succeeding one another. It would seem that the human mind is so constructed that it tends in the direction of belief in the survival of personality. This may be but acandlelight; yet it is alight.
2.—This belief in immortality persists. Various fancies and superstitions have been outgrown and cast aside in the progress of the ages. Many conceptions of the past have proved unworthy to survive. But this belief has a stronger grip on the modern world than it ever had in the past. While advance in knowledge reveals an interdependence of soul and body, it accentuates their distinction. To-day progress is interpreted to mean the triumph of the spirit and is marked by an increasing consciousness of the reality of the self which knows and wills and feels. A belief which thus survives must surely have in it something of the vitality of truth.
3.—This belief develops and waxes strong as life itself develops and climbs higher. The higher a man is in the scale of being, the wider his thoughts, the deeper his affections, the nobler his life; the more likely is he to believe that the soul lives on. The more fleshly, selfish and materialistic is the life, the harder it is to be sure of immortality. Thousands may live in the slime, with the beasts, and may not have a steadfast hope in a life beyond; but the great-minded and great-hearted men of the race are surest of life everlasting. Tennyson once said to Bishop Lightfoot: "The cardinal point of Christianity is the life after death." Tennyson is supremely the poet of immortality. It is his master thought; and herein he is typical of the greatest minds in human history. This belief, universal and persistent, is most vigorous in the hearts of the supreme men of our civilization.
4.—This belief, however vague may be the ideas in its context, exercises a real influence on life. It energises men. It nerves them to struggle and achieve. It enlarges their view. It inspires them for vaster enterprises. It enables them to do hard things and to persevere to the end.
II. Philosophy lights more candles on the problem. Philosophy goes deeper than the statement of facts; it gives a theory of the facts; it seeks to find causes, relations and purposes.
1. Thethoughtsof the normal man are long thoughts. He has an instinctive yearning for immortality. If this instinct is absent, the man is not normal. If this instinct is suppressed, the man's soul is injured. If he does not believe in immortality, he will believe in something far less credible. It may be continued existence in the complex-life of humanity; it may be absorption of individual personality in some Oversoul. The issue is sorrow of heart, bitterness of soul, pessimism of creed, "Pessimism is the column of black smoke proceeding from the heart in which the hope of immortality has been burned to ashes." If a man remains normal, he believes in immortality. What is the inference? Tennyson has drawn it.
"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust,Thou madest man, he knows not why;He thinks he was not made to die;And Thou hast made him, Thou are just."
A just Creator will not place instinctive longings in His Creature's soul, only to betray them.
2.—Theaffectionsof the soul are as true witnesses as the mind. "The heart has reasons which the reason cannot understand." It is impossible for love at its purest and strongest to believe that death ends all. Love shrinks in pain from such a possibility. It protests against such a violation of the fellowship of heart with heart. The longing for reunion is no vain desire, awakened only to be mocked.
Not so can things be ordained in a world of order. The poets are the prophets of the heart; and all the great poets teach immortality.
The heart, which God made, will not perpetually deceive us. "If it werenotso, I would have told you." The instinct is true. The verdict of the spiritual seers of the race is favorable.
3.—Man is constituted for an ampler and more glorious life than can possibly fall to his lot in this world. Human powers are vast in comparison with human opportunities. Man is too great to be crowded within the narrow limits of seventy years. "So much to do, so little done" were among the last words of Cecil Rhodes. To develop the latent powers we possess, we have no adequate opportunity here. Deep in our souls is the quenchless desire for a fuller expression of our powers. Could God build the human soul with all its capacities for the few years of this fleeting life on earth? Not if there is rationality at the heart of the universe.
4.—This world is an insoluble moral enigma, if there is no other world to explain it. Inequalities, injustices, abominations abound. Circumstances and character are frequently at variance. Right has often been on the scaffold; wrong on the throne. The whole creation is groaning and travailling in pain. This world is intolerable, if there is no other. There must be a world in which wrong will be righted and justice done. Man's conscience whispers that the Judge of all the earth will do right; but how can He do right with all His creatures, unless He has more time? R. L. Stevenson well puts the argument: "We had needs invent Heaven, if it had not been revealed; there are some things that fall so bitterly ill on this side time." Unless this world has been created from sheer extravagance in the infliction of purposeless pain, there must be another to justify the present process of discipline, to heal the wounds of struggle, to comfort sorrow, to develop holiness. Somewhere, sometime, character and condition must correspond.
III. Does Science throw any light on our problem? There may not be any absolute scientific proof of a life beyond; but Science has no demonstrative evidence against it. At least it leaves the question open. Some go so far as to say that the results of modern scientific research, when fairly viewed, are favourable to the reception of the belief in immortality. A great modern physicist says: "The death of the body does not convey any assurance of the soul's death. Every physical analogy is against such a superficial notion in nature. We never see things beginning or coming to an end. Change is what we see, not origin or termination. Death is a change, indeed; a sort of emigration, a wrenching away from the old familiar scenes, a solemn, portentous fact. But it is not annihilation."
Dangers have seemed to threaten the doctrine of personal immortality from the standpoint of the physiologist and the evolutionist; but these dangers have not proved fatal. The physiologist has demonstrated the close connection between the brain and the soul. It was an easy, though improper, conclusion to assert that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." But the psychologist speedily pointed out that the physiologist had gone beyond his province. He had proved only that thought is a function of the brain. Functions may be productive or transmissive. Light as a function of the electric circuit represents aproductivefunction; music as a function of the organ illustrates atransmissivefunction. The music is notinthe organ but in the organist. The organ transmits it. So, the brain is but the organ of the soul.
The evolutionist has made men think in immensities and has given prime importance to the idea of development. But a creature like man who is alleged to be the product of ages of development is surely not going to be extinguished at the tomb. Darwin himself wrote: "It is an intolerable thought that men and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress."
What candles, then, does Science light up for us?
1.—The conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter imply that the natural forces of the world are not annihilated, however much they may be transformed. May we not hope that the peculiar form of force known as personality, the highest force in the world, will not be destroyed by the experience of death?
2.—Unfit organisms perish; fit survive. Many beliefs which once formed part of the spiritual life of man have perished in the lapse of time, but no belief has shown greater vitality and power to resist the disintegrating influences of changing environment than belief in the soul's immortality.
If this belief has survived when quickened by the most awful imaginable strain of the Great War may we not conclude that it is one of those beliefs fit to live, one of those beliefs which the Creator desires to live and grow?
3.—Whenever we find a faculty, we discover in environment something to which this faculty corresponds. Progress is possible only by the constant adaptation of faculty to environment. This is true of the animal world. Is it not also true of man? In man are found faculties peculiar to himself. There is a longing for immortality, an expanding conviction of it. Does this internal condition correspond to reality? Yes, else delusion falls on man alone. For, as a distinguished scientist (Sir J. Burdon Sanderson) has said, "there is no known instance of the development of a capacity without the existence of a corresponding satisfaction."
4.—If there is one increasing purpose through the ages, if there is development from lower to higher, from simple to complex, it is impossible to bound our vision with the grave. If personality has been attained, it is incredible that the gain of painful ages will be thrown away. "Noware we the Sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be." The "forward-looking" habit has not been acquired for naught.
So far is Science from giving demonstrative evidence against immortality that it actually presents some considerations in its favour. The reasonableness and the beneficence of creation protest against the extinction of men by death.
The candle-lights of history, philosophy and science cast a cumulative radiance upon the problem of life after death. They show that it is harder not to believe than to believe in immortality. But we need the light of the Sun. We need the demonstration of the power of an endless life. This we have in the Risen Christ. Christ brought into perfect light those truths about God and man, of which mankind had dim intuitions. By His Resurrection Christ abolished death (i.e., deprived it of force and power) and brought life and immortality to light (i.e., gives certainty, richness and power to the hope of immortal life).
1.—Christ has givencertaintyto the instinctive longing for immortality. For the shadow, He has given substance; for dimness, light; for hope, assurance. Although this hope has been virtually universal and inextinguishable, yet apart from Christ it has never become a certainty. Though historian, philosopher, poet, lover and saint have their own special arguments for the Hereafter, it is Christ Himself Who is the sure Light both of this world and of that which is to come. He has turned this hope into a full and glorious assurance.
(a)By His teaching.—Two things about mankind Christ took for granted—sinfulness and immortality. He did not argue about this life beyond; He took it for granted. No part of His teaching is explicable on the supposition that all ends at the tomb. His basis for our immortality is not our instinct but the character of God. On the bosom of God's Fatherhood rests man's immortality. If God is our Father and loves us as His children, then we are His and He is oursforever. Death cannot break this tie of life and love which binds us to Him; it cannot rob Him of His child. That God cannot be the God of the dead, but of the living, is axiomatic. His personal relations are real and are eternal.
The Christian faith is sufficient to give us certainty and comfort concerning our departed. We are assured that the blessed dead are in His safe keeping and through Him we are one with them in a union which will one day be consummated in everlasting reunion and communion. Our Christian watchwords are enough—"love in absence, trust in silence, faith in reunion."
(b)By His Life.—To the eye that can see, His life is the supreme argument for immortality. He lived such a life of fellowship with God and so near to the frontier of eternity that the glory of it shone upon and from His face. The longing for a life higher than the life of time is answered in His life. Such a life could not be holden by death. It is eternal. It has the quality now and always of everlastingness.
(c)By His Resurrection.—He confirmed the truth of what He taught, and lived, by what He did. He rose again, transformed, not merely resuscitated. He irradiated the spiritual land. It is no longer "an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns." The empty tomb, the cumulative evidence of independent witnesses, the transformation in the lives of believers, the institutions of the Christian Church, its continued existence, the personal experience of the power of a rising life in individual Christians throughout the ages to the present time—are the attestations of the truth of the Resurrection. The Christian Church is built and still rests on the fact, luminous and sovereign, that Christ rose from the grave in fulness and newness of power. To the life beyond, Christ's resurrection gives reality and humanity and assurance. It confirmed men's subjective aspirations, it changed them into "things most surely believed." It makes every Christian certain of a higher life beyond the grave.
2. Christ hasenrichedthe whole conception of immortality. In the ancient, as in the savage world to-day, immortality or the continued duration of life, was a dreary prospect, a sense of desolation rather than a source of joy, an impoverishment of life, not an enrichment of it; its scene was a shadowy realm of silence, where there is no voice of praise nor human warmth and cheer. In some passages in the Old Testament we find a loftier and clearer utterance. Through his faith in God, Job reached the idea that death may not be the final word. The righteous God would not abandon a righteous man. In revealed religion this faith in a life beyond the grave rested not on any conceptions of man's nature, but on the character of God, the Eternal Righteousness. If he has called men into fellowship with Him, His faith is pledged to them. The Psalmists won their sense of eternal security through their present fellowship with God. Along this line of religious experience of a living, holy and gracious God, the true hope of immortality entered the world. Just as union with God guaranteed to the Psalmist a life that would never end, so union with the Risen Saviour guarantees to the Christian triumph over death. Christ has filled this elementary thought of continued existence with moral content, because He has based it on a true conception of God. The Christian hope is not merely "immortality of the soul" but eternal life; and eternal life is not merely an infinite prolongation of existence in a future state of being; but is life at its highest and best, the life of fellowship, of vision, of growing likeness to God, of ample service. It is life in Christ. It is being with Christ, which is very far better than earthly life at its worthiest. It is not the mere translation, but the transformation of earthly values. This faith in immortality is moral and spiritual; it implies enriched and elevated being, as worthy and glorious as it is endless.
3.—Christ has so increased thepowerof immortality, of the Christian Hope, as almost to make it for the first time effective as a source of courage, hope and consolation. He has turned the hope of immortality into the Power of His Resurrection. All hopes exercise some influence on those who hold them; yet apart from Christ the hope of immortality has been less effective than we might expect. By His Resurrection Christ has raised this yearning hope into a mighty present power brought to bear on humanity. The Christian hope of immortality, certain and rich in the possession of abundant life, gives breadth and outlook to all human efforts. It inspires duty. Brought to bear on our work, it makes effort worth while. If all we have striven to do and yet failed to do is to be perfected in the eternal morning, we can face our tasks with fresh courage. All social reconstructions that deny or neglect the Christian thought of an endless life fail here. Their scope is too limited; their outlook too narrow. The Christian hope brings the power of endurance and victory to sorrowing hearts. Death is not a leap in the dark, but the passing into a larger, brighter room in the House of the One Father. In short, when this hope of immortality is tested by life, it is verified by the loftiness of the character it builds.
The rising life is the present demonstration of the risen life. All low, worldly, unspiritual living tends to doubt in it. If we would escape from doubt about the future, let us through the Living Christ make life larger now. If we would overcome weakening uncertainty, let us daily practice immortality. If we set our affections on things above, our rising life will assure us that we shall live forever. One of Gladstone's great exhortations was: "Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny." This belief is created and can be maintained only by viewing life in relation to God and immortality.
Every man should therefore put the question to himself: "IfIdie, shall I live again?" "What kind of life am I living now? Is it life eternal, or life merely temporal? Is it a friendship with God which death can never extinguish?" Only One Life has ever won open victory over death. Only one kind of life ever can win it—that kind of life which was in Christ, whichisin Christ, which He shares with all whom faith makes one with Him.
"In the midst of life we are in death" such is the cry of bereaved and dying humanity. But in Christ we are able to say: "in the midst of death, we are in life." "God has given us eternal life, and that life is in His Son." Can death touch that life? Never.
T. H. BEST PRINTING CO. LIMITED, TORONTO
Future VolumesVolume II. Lent 1923. God.I. The God Shown us by Jesus Christ. By the Rt. Rev. J.C. Farthing, D.D., D.C.L., Bishop of Montreal.II. God and You. By the Rt. Rev. J. A. Richardson, D.D.,D. C. L., Bishop of Fredericton.III. God and Evolution. By the Very Rev. J. P. D. Llwyd,D.D., D.C.L., Dean of Nova Scotia.IV. God in the Old Testament. By Prof. F. H. Cosgrave, B.D.,Trinity College, Toronto,V. The Holy Trinity. By the Rev. Dr. W. W. Craig,Vancouver.VI. The Holy Spirit. By Rev. Prof. E. A. McIntyre, WycliffeCollege, Toronto.VII. God in Regard to Pain and Affliction. By Rev. E. F.Salmon, Ottawa.Volume III. Advent 1923. Jesus Christ.I. The Messiah. By Rev. H. R. Stevenson, M.A., Montreal.II. Jesus Christ as the World's Moral Miracle. By the Rt.Rev. David Williams, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Huron.III. Jesus Christ compared with other Masters, Buddha, etc.By Rev. Dr. R. C. Johnstone, Winnipeg.IV. Jesus Christ the Son of God. By Rev. Dr. Dyson Hague,Toronto.V. Jesus Christ the Saviour of the World. By Rev. F. H.Brewin, M.A., Toronto.VI. Jesus Christ and You--His practical methods for you tolive by. By the Ven. Archdeacon McElheran, M.A.,Winnipeg.VII. The Virgin Birth. By the Rt. Rev. J. C. Roper, LL.D.,D.D., Ottawa.Volume IV. Lent 1924. The Bible.I. How the Old Testament was written. By the Ven.Archdeacon Paterson-Smyth, D.D., D.Litt., Montreal.II. How the New Testament was written. By the Ven.Archdeacon Paterson-Smyth, D.D., D.Litt., Montreal.III. How the Bible came down to us. By the Ven. ArchdeaconPaterson-Smyth, D.D., D.Litt., Montreal.IV. The Miracles of the New Testament. By the Rt. Rev. E. J.Bidwell, D.D., D.C.L., Bishop of Ontario.V. The Messages of the Four Gospels. By Rev. H. H.Bedford-Jones, M.A.VI. The Messages of the Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse.VII. Two methods of reading the Bible, the daily and theweekly. By the Rt. Rev. J. F. Sweeney, D.D., D.C.L.,Bishop of Toronto.Other volumes will follow on such subjects as Prayer, HolyCommunion, The Prayer Book, Baptism and Confirmation,Missions, etc.