The Gospel of the Hereafter Part 9

CHAPTER IX

GROWTH AND PURIFICATION

What is the main purpose of the Intermediate Life? Is there something to be done there which cannot be fully done at any other time?

Let us still try to keep to the firm ground of Scripture, and to avoid confusion let us confine ourselves still to the case of those who have died, in some degree at least, in penitence and faith.

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We have already seen that Scripture intimates that that life is not one of sleep or unconsciousness. It is a clear conscious life. It is therefore natural to ask what happens in it? What is the use of it?

Science and experience teach that growth is the law of all the life which we know anything about. Even if we had no further light of revelation we should find it difficult to believe that imperfect beings dying in the grace of G.o.d pa.s.s into that life and live in it for years or for ages without any growth or development.

Scripture also teaches that G.o.d's aim for us is not merely that we should escape h.e.l.l or just creep into heaven. Our goal is to grow into the likeness of G.o.d, to "rise to the stature of the perfect man, even to the stature of the fullness of Christ." How many of us are ever even in sight of that goal when we die?

But Scripture goes further still. It points us forward to the final stage of being, to the Beatific Vision of G.o.d in the far future and tells us with awe that that G.o.d "is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," that "even the heavens are not clean in His sight;" that into that final abode of bliss "nothing that defileth shall enter in."

Which of us, the greatest soul of us all, can look forward to such a prospect without bowing himself in dread like Isaiah of old, "Woe is me for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, that mine eyes should see the King of the Lord of Hosts!" If there be no growth or purification in the Waiting Life what hope is there ever for any one of us of fitness for the presence of the all holy G.o.d?

Think that the great majority of those who die, even though penitent and striving after right, have much of evil clinging to them; that many after a whole life of ingraining their characters with evil have brought sorrowfully to Christ at last their poor defiled souls; that even the best is not without many faults and stains. If nothing that defileth shall enter Heaven, if growth is a law of all life as far as we know it, are we not practically compelled to believe that much of the growth and purification needed to fit us for G.o.d's presence shall take place in the great Waiting Life?

And this belief and hope for all these poor faulty souls in whom the good work of G.o.d has begun on earth, St. Paul confirms. "Being confident of this very thing, that He who hath begun a good work in you will perfect it UNTIL THE DAY OF JESUS CHRIST"--_i. e._, right through the earth life, right through the Intermediate Life, until the last great scene in the drama of our history opens at the Judgment Day.

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How this shall take place G.o.d has not definitely revealed to us. But G.o.d has given us reason and common sense to enable us to draw conclusions from what He has revealed. Since in that life I am the same conscious "I," with the same consciously continuous personality, with the same conscience and memory, I may surely expect that the Holy Spirit "who hath begun a good work in me and will continue it until the day of Jesus Christ"--will continue it in much the same natural way as here, through Conscience and Memory and the Sense of His Presence.

Only that these will be all more keen and effective and free from the disturbance of the bodily senses and the distractions of this life on earth.

CONSCIENCE here is the throne of the Holy Ghost, from which He rules and directs my life. Therefore my body is "the temple of the Holy Ghost." But Conscience here is greatly weakened by fears and hopes and ambitions and distractions of various kinds. At times, when I lie awake at night and think about my life, or when I enter into my closet to prepare by special concentration of spirit for my Holy Communion, I get some dim notions of what Conscience might effect in me if it had a free hand. In THAT life of close spiritual concentration, when the outer world is shut off and the soul enters into its own deepest recesses, contemplating itself, contemplating its past and its future, contemplating the deep tender love of Him who is there present as in Palestine long ago, and feeling that in spite of all my shameful ingrat.i.tude He is loving me and blessing me and watching tenderly over me--surely I may expect great things of the operation of Conscience in me.

MEMORY in this life is a very wonderful thing. It can call up in a moment, for Conscience to work on, pictures of half a century ago. But in the fast crowding impressions on the senses Memory is overtaxed and has to lay away in its storehouse of subconsciousness whole tracts of the past which never rise up before my conscious thought at all.

Psychological science has much to say in late years about this storehouse of subconscious memory and the power that, unknown to me, it is exerting on my life. It is there all the time, "under the threshold." These buried memories are alive, ready to spring up, but asleep--in abeyance.

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Now think what this means for Conscience and for Memory as the handmaid of Conscience in the great contemplative life after Death. There is no good or evil thing that I have ever done but Conscience has p.r.o.nounced on. Some of these judgments I remember. Some of them I forget. In the many distractions of life and the desire to escape painful thoughts, there has dropped down under the threshold of my conscious thought a vast store of memories of which I am oblivious, but of which one and another and another springs up at times unexpectedly with a startling reminder of the great hidden store behind. I meet by chance an old friend of my boyhood, and as he talks about the old times, picture after picture springs up into the light, memories which had long gone from me and which would never have sprung up from "under the threshold" but for the chance stimulation of his talk.

We have often heard of drowning people on the verge of death having the forgotten memories of half a lifetime flashed back in a moment. An old friend once told me a curious experience. "I was crossing a railway line hurriedly on a wet day. As I rushed over the rails the Express came in view. I slipped and fell--fortunately into a hollow where men had been working, and swift as a flash the Express swept over me. The experience of that half minute I shall never forget. It seemed that my whole life was blazoned before me in thirty seconds. Things that I had not remembered for forty years past flashed back in a moment as if they had happened yesterday."

That is what Memory can do even in this life under strong excitation, calling up its forgotten stores. Think what its power may be in that life as a handmaid to Conscience. With all its old lumber rooms of forgotten deeds thrown open--with all the forgotten feelings of my life--boyhood, youth, manhood--open for my contemplation. My impatience and G.o.d's patience, my sorrows and why G.o.d sent them, my mercies, all the kindly providences of G.o.d working unknown to me all my days.

And my sins--some sins that I hate to think of, some that I had almost succeeded in forgetting, all standing out clearly before me in the unsparing light of that mysterious life.

I sat alone with my Conscience In the place where time had ceased.

We discoursed of my former living In the land where the years increased.

And I felt I should have to answer The questions it put to me, And to face those questions and answers In that dim eternity.

And the ghosts of forgotten actions Came floating before my sight, And things that I thought were dead things Were alive with a terrible might.

And the vision of all my past life Was an awful thing to face Alone, alone with my Conscience, In that strange and lonely place.

Aye, my Conscience must do its work some day if I keep it from doing it now. But all this will be in the presence of my Saviour. They are "with Christ."

Every memory will be more keen and poignant and yet more peaceful and touching in the presence of that dear loving Lord who I feel knows all and yet has loved and received and forgiven me in spite of all, and who is watching over me with deep tenderness like the refiner of silver over His furnace as the dross is cleared away and I grow steadily in fitness for the glorious life of unselfish joy and service in Heaven.

But pain! You do not like any thought of pain in connection with that life. Yes surely, more or less, according to one's state, and dying gradually into perfect peace. Growth of holiness does not come to sinful man here or there but through pain, the tender blessed pain of G.o.d's purification, the pain of self-reproach, the pain that thou hast sinned,

"The shame of self and pity for thy Lord That One so sweet should e'er have placed Himself At disadvantage such, as to be used So vilely by a being vile as thee."

But what a sweet and wholesome pain, mingled with the sense of safety and peace and hope--mingled with deep joy and boundless adoring grat.i.tude and love as we see the stain of the old sins steadily being effaced and look forward to the sure bliss of Heaven in the future!

Surely by means of such pain and grat.i.tude and adoring love G.o.d makes sinful souls fit for Heaven.

CHAPTER X

PROBATION IN THIS LIFE

Up to this we have been ignoring a large proportion of the inhabitants of the Unseen Land. To avoid misunderstanding we have kept in view those only of whom we had hope that they died in the fear and love of G.o.d. But there is no evading the thought that between these and the utterly reprobate, there are mult.i.tudes of Christian and heathen in that Unseen Life today who belong to neither cla.s.s, mixed characters in all varying degrees of good or evil. Of many of them it could be said that those who knew them best saw much that was good and lovable in them. But it could not be said that they had consciously and definitely chosen for Christ.

They must form the majority of those to-day in the Unseen Land.

Therefore one cannot help wondering about them. One day death overtook them. The thought of them comes forcibly when some morning the newspapers startle us with the story of a terrible battle or railway smash or s.h.i.+pwreck or conflagration in which hundreds have pa.s.sed out of life in a moment and the horror of the catastrophe is deepened by the thought that they have been called away suddenly unprepared.

What of their position in the Intermediate Life? Our Christian charity prompts us to hope the best for them. But are we justified in hoping?

It is impossible for thoughtful, sympathetic men to evade that question. It is cowardly to evade it. At any rate a treatise on the Intermediate Life can hardly pa.s.s over altogether the thought of the majority of its inhabitants and it cannot be wrong for us humbly and reverently to think about them.

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I have already pointed out the solemn responsibility of this earth life in which acts make habits and habits make character and character makes destiny. I am about to point out the grave probability, to say the least of it, that in a very real sense this life may be the sole probation time for man. But this does not shut out the question of the poor bereaved mother by the side of her dead son. "If any soul has not in penitence and faith definitely accepted Jesus Christ in this life is it forever impossible that he may do so in any other life?"

I answer unhesitatingly, G.o.d forbid! Else what of all the dead children down through the ages and all the dead idiots and all the millions of dead heathen and all the poor stragglers in Christian lands who in their dreary, dingy lives had never any fair chance of knowing their Lord in a way that would lead them to love Him, and who have never even thought about accepting or rejecting Him? "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Shall not the loving Father do His best for all? Our Lord knew "that if the mighty works done in Capernaum had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented."

Does He not there suggest that He would take thought for those men of Tyre and Sidon in the Unseen Land? Does He not know the same of many gone unto that Unseen from heathen lands and Christian lands, who would have loved Him if they knew Him as He really is and who have but begun to know Him truly in the world of the dead--of many who in their ignorance have tried to respond to the dim light of Conscience within and only learned within the veil really to know Him the Lord of the Conscience, "the light which lighteth every man coming into the world"

(St. John i. 9).

Here is no question of encouraging careless, G.o.dless men with the hope of a new probation. Here is no question of men wilfully rejecting Christ. The merry, thoughtless child--the imbecile--the heathen--had no thought of rejecting Christ. The poor struggler in Christian lands, brought up in evil surroundings, who though he had heard of Christ yet saw no trace of Christ's love in his dreary life--he cannot be said to have rejected Christ. The honest sceptic who in the last generation had been taught as a prominent truth of Christianity that G.o.d decrees certain men to eternal Heaven and certain men to eternal h.e.l.l not for any good or evil they had done but to show His power and glory, and who has therefore in obedience to conscience frankly rejected Christianity--can he be said to have rejected Christ?

The possibility in this life of putting oneself outside the pale of salvation is quite awful enough without our making it worse. It is not for us to judge who is outside the pale of salvation nor to limit the love of G.o.d by our little s.h.i.+bboleths. It is on a man's WILL, not on his knowledge or ignorance that destiny depends. G.o.d only can judge that. All the subtle influences which go to make character are known to Him alone. He alone can weigh the responsibility of the will in any particular case. And surely we know Him well enough humbly to trust His love to the uttermost for every poor soul whom He has created.

II

But this hope must not ignore the solemn thought that in a very real sense the probation of this life seems the determining factor in human destiny--even for the unthinking--even for the ignorant--nay even for the heathen who could never have heard of Christ here. Rightly understood all that we have said does not conflict with this. It may seem strange at first sight to think of the heathen as having any real probation here. Yet, mark it well, it is of this heathen man who could not consciously have accepted Christ in this life that St. Paul implies that his att.i.tude in the Unseen Life towards Him who is the Light of the World is determined by his att.i.tude in this life towards the imperfect light of Conscience that he has. "If the Gentiles who have not the Law do by nature the things contained in the Law, these having not the Law are a law unto themselves, which show the works of the Law written in their hearts, their Conscience bearing witness" (Rom. ii.

14).