The gospel of the hereafter

Front matter

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Do. _we live when me se Where do we igh = ie

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PART I THE NEAR HEREAFTER sc”? e se e @ e J THe THree STaGEs OF EXISTENCE

Wat THE Biste Says ABouT THE NEAR HEREAFTER

Wuat THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH Say

Azsour THE Near HereaFTER . ; Tue Crisis oF DEATH . ; ‘ a so]? «© Mysetr’”’? Arrer DeaTH . ‘| RECOGNITION 3 ‘ ; 5 THe CoMMUNION OF SAINTs |. i x GROwTH AND PurRIFICATION . a 4 ProsaTIONn IN THIS LIFE if s ; Ministry 1N THE UnsEEN Lire ‘ f ConcLusion ‘ : ‘ ‘ ‘

PART il THE FAR HEREAFTER Tue JupGMENT ‘ ; : : HE. . ; 4 4 . 4 HEAVEN ; 7 . : ‘ °

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163 164 199

Publishers’ Note

The Gospel of the Hereafter has already been translated into many languages and in English has reached its 125th thousand.

This 1930 edition has been revised and enlarged by the author.

Foreword

HE Lord is risen, but the people do not knowit. There is no death, but the people do not believe it. Human life is the most exciting romantic adventure in the Universe, going on stage after stage till we are older than Methuselah and then on again through the infinite eternities—and yet men pass into the Unseen as stupidly as the caterpillar on the cabbage-leaf, without curiosity or joy or wonder or excitement at the boundless career ahead.

Instead of the thrill of coming adventure we have the dull grey monotony of aged lives drawing near the close, and the horror of this war is doubled and the torture of wife or mother as the beloved one crosses the barrier.

What is the matter with us, Christian people? Do we not know? Or have we lost our beliefs? or has imagination grown dulled by too frequent repetition of God’s good news ?

It was so different in early days when the world was younger, when Christ’s revelation was fresh. Look at St. John, four-score years and ten, like an eager boy looking into the Great Adventure: “ Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and IT DOTH NOT YET APPEAR WHAT WE SHALL BE.” ?

What we shall be! What we shall be! Is not that the chief delight of being young ? Guessing and hoping and wondering what we shall be. |

The dreariest thing in life is dulness—monotony. The brightest thing in life is outlook —vision. And God has given us that. Like St. John we too can stand on the rim of the world and look out over the wall.

Life is full of latent possibilities—of outlook, of romance, of exciting futures. God has made it so, if we would only see it. God’s world of nature has its continuous progress, its ever new and fascinating stages. God’s caterpillars in their next stage are going to be soaring butterflies—God’s acorns are to become mighty oaks —God’s dry little seeds in the granary to-day will in autumn be alive in the waving harvests.

4 John iii. 2,

God’s world of nature is full of romantic possibilities.

And God’s world of men is infinitely more ao, and one of life’s delights is to know it and look forward to it guessing what we shall be. Outlook. Vision. That is what gives zest to life. That is what we need to make life bright and beautiful.

I see a group of small boys sitting at their play, and their eyes are bright looking into the future. They are going to be soldiers, and sailors, and circus riders, and travelers, and all sorts of things. Because they are boys with the enthusiasms of boyhood, they may be anything. All the possibilities of boyhood belong to them. It doth not yet appear what they shall be, but it is delightful to look forward and speculate about it.

I see them again a dozen years later. They are starting in life, just left college, young soldiers and lawyers and curates and business men—still with their visions and dreams of the future. It doth not yet appear what they shall be, but because they are young men, all that belongs to young manhood lies before them, as they look forward in their day-dreams. What countries they shall live in and what girl they shall marry, and what positions and what work, and what excitements, and what pleasure lie before them. Ah, it is delightful to be young, realizing the possibilities in front— dreaming of what we shall be.

I see a crowd of older people, men and women dull, uninterested. ‘“ We are no longer young,” they say, “we are middle-aged or elderly. And we have ceased looking forward. We have lost the vision. We have not become as great as we expected, or as good as we expected. We are fairly comfortable. We have not much to complain of. But life is a bit dull. The path is a bit monotonous now. We have traversed most of it. We can see to the end. There are no more romantic possibilities to make life exciting, no more visions of ‘ what _ we shail be.’ ”

Don’t believe it! Not a word of it. The visions are there all right. Look out over the wall. This life of yours is only one of the stages in your career, and not the first stage, either. The first came to you, silent, unconscious, “ where the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child.” There you grew and developed for the next move forward. One day came the crisis of birth and you passed into the second stage, the training stage for life and for God. Then through a new crisis you pass on again to new adventures. For God has revealed that what you call death, the end of this career, is but birth into a new and more wondrous career which again passes you forward into still nobler adventures, and that again, perhaps—who knows? - Who shall fix the limit ?

Nay, you are not elderly. You are not middle-aged. These are but comparative terms. A house-fly is elderly in twenty-four hours. An oak-tree is young after a hundred years. And you, children of eternity with ages and millenniums before you—you are not even one year old babies in the light of your great future.

Now do you see why the old apostle of Ephesus did not feel aged or elderly—why he looked out like an eager boy into the adventure before him? “ Beloved, now are we the sons of God but we don’t know yet what we shall be.” Aye, we don’t know yet. No more than did the small boys laughing in their play and going to be soldiers and sailors and wonderful people. We don’t know yet. But it is all before us. And it is all going to be good because it is in the Father’s presence.

So I bid you do what I sometimes do myself, look out into the void and guess like the chil. dren what you shall be when you are older than Methuselah.

Shake off the dulness and monotony from your life. Don’t talk as if old or middle-aged any more. Be children again in the presence of the Father, and with happy child hearts, — keep guessing what you shall be.

I see a woman with the deep pain in her eyes, one of the many mothers whom I have met in the terrible War years. . . . They were afraid to tell her when the War Office telegram came. . . . He had crept out in the night to bring in a wounded chum, and the German sniper got him, At first she could not believe it. It must be some mistake,—some one of similar name. But the days passed on. And the light died in her eyes and she became suddenly old. Her prayers ceased. God had disappointed her. There was nothing left to pray for now. Nothing to be ambitious for any more. Her boy was dead—buried in a shallow grave in France with a little wooden cross at his head. And he was only twentytwo!

The awful waste of it! All her loving thought over his childhood—all her care, her anxiety, her efforts, her prayers that God would make him a good and noble man. All her hope and pride in the high promise of his boyhood. He was dead. All that he might have been and done in the world was lost. Her life was forever desolate. And God had let it happen!

Kindly friends came to comfort and sympathise. But it was of little use. They had not lost their boy. They could not understand. They bade her be proud that he had died in a noble cause—that he had died to save another. They told her that time would bring a blessed easing to her pain. They told her she must bow to God’s mysterious will.

Ah! what is the use of it? How can any outsider intermeddle in the pain of a mother whose boy has just been killed ?

Not all the talking since Adam Can make death to be other than death.

God help us all if there were no better comfort for a tortured world in this hour of its bitterest need—to “make death to be other than death.”

o

She was a brave woman. She faced the issue clearly. She talked with wise friends. She came back to her prayers. She recalled and relearned the teaching of her Bible and her church which had lain hazily in memory till her need arose. And gradually God’s blessed comfort came to her “as to one whom his mother comforteth.” Slowly peace came to her heart, and in spite of her pain life became worth living again. . . . He wasa good boy. He loved his God. He loved his mother. He had his faults, but she could trust Christ with them. She had had high ambitions for him. Her ambitions came back.

She learned to think of him in the wondrous new adventure, living a full conscious life, thinking and remembering, growing and becoming fitted for the eternal Heaven that is still in front. She believed that the high promise of his boyhood might be fulfilled after all, and that she might one day see it.

Life is still very desolate without him; but she believes that he lives and knows, that he is growing and going on—that he remembers her and loves her as never before, that he is waiting for her, perhaps watching over her as in his days on earth, even though he cannot write home. And trustfully, gratefully she remembers him in her prayers. She thinks that the Heavenly Father is not likely to forget what a mother says to Him about her son.

This book is a poor, imperfect attempt to put together some of the teachings of our holy religion, to help a troubled world, in this day of its necessity, “to look out over the wall.”

PART I

CHAPTER I ath Wi:

HE title of this chapter is a very short one. It consists of but a single word, and that the shortest word in the

whole English language. And though it is the shortest word, yet it is the most wonderful and mysterious word. Though it is a word that every one of us has on his lips every moment of the day, yet no one who reads this book— no one in the whole world—has ever been able to understand all that. it means.

Just the letter “I.”—All day long, from morning till night, we are using it :—I did this. I mean to do that. JIought. I shall. I will. I think. Iwish. I love. I hate. I remember. I forget. And so on and on—ever ringing the changes on this little word in all its cases “I” and “my” and “mine” and “ me.” - I want to set you thinking. Who or what is this “1,” this “me ” ?

Perhaps you will sas “Oh, there is nothing mysterious about it—I know very well what I mean by it. ‘I’ means myself.”

But what do I mean by Myself? Of course there is a rough work-day meaning in which it means my whole being as I stand—clothes, body, brains, thoughts, feelings, general appearance, everything. But every thinking man knows that this is not the real “I,” that when he says I can, I do, I will, I ought, I remember, the “I” means to him something much deeper and more mysterious than that. Ask yourself, each one, what do you mean by “I”?

$1

Is It My Bopy? Nay, surely not. I know that my body is only my outward garment woven by “me” out of certain chemical substances. In a scientific museum I can stand before a glass case and see neatly labelled the exact portions of lime and silica and iron and water and other elements which compose my body. I know that this body is continually changing its substance like the rainbow in the sky, like the eddy round a stone in the river. The body I have to-day is no more the body of last year than the fire on my hearth to-night, sith aks Ves is the fire that was there this morning. I have had a dozen different bodies since I was born, but I am the same still. Every thinking man knows that the “I,” the real self, stands behind the body looking out through the windows of the eyes, receiving messages through the portals of the ears. It rules the body, it possesses the body. It says, “I havea body.” “This body is a thing belonging to me.”

As you watch the changing expression in the face of your friend, as you see his eyes flashing in anger, or softening in affectionate sympathy, do you not feel that all you see is but the outward casing, that the real self of your friend is a something dwelling within ?

I hope I am not puzzling you. What I want ‘to do is to introduce you to your own self, to make you really acquainted with that mysterious being in his first stage of existence here and then to follow him out into the great adventure of the Hereafter.

§ 2 |

Let us goon. What is this I, this self? I ir My Brain? Physiologists tell us wonderful things of that brain ; how its size and shape.

and the amount of gray matter modify my character; how it excites itself when I am thinking ; how it has different departments for different functions; how it rules and directs everything I do. And men impressed by these wonders have sometimes asserted that there is nothing more to befound. Itis the brain which - originates all, thought is only certain activities of the brain—memory is only impressions on the substance of the brain—when the brain decays there is no self remaining. What I call “JT” is merely a function of my brain.

But immediately the question arises, Which brain? The particles of my brain are always changing. I have had a dozen different brains in my lifetime, with not a particle remaining the same. Which of these brains is it that “1” am only afunction of ? And how does it happen that I remember what I thought and did and said — with the old vanished brains of twenty and thirty years ago? Memory insists that I am still the same “|” in spite of all those changes of brain. If memory be but a series of impressions registered on the brain these could no more survive the dissolution of the brain than impressions on wax could survive the melting of the wax.

Surely my memory, my irresistible conviction of personal identity with my past makes it _ abundantly clear that “I” am a mysterious unchanging spiritual being behind this ever changing brain.

And that is what the best modern science asserts—that the brain is but my instrument. If we compare it to a violin then “I” am the unseen violin player behind it. The musician cannot produce violin music without a violin, but also the violin cannot produce a musical note, much less take part in a complex symphony without the musician behind it. If the strings of the violin be injured, or if they be smeared with grease, the result is discords and crazy sounds. If the brain be physically injured or disordered the result is what we call mental derangement.

To say, then, that the brain is the seat of thought is not at all to say that it is the source of thought. Everything involved in my conscious personality is related to the brain, but it is not originated by the brain. The mysterious spiritual “1” is behind the brain, using the brain —nay further—actually educating and fitting the brain for its work. The brain of a little child with its plastic gray matter is smooth and unformed. Itis the “I” behind that is steadily creasing and moulding and training it for its purpose. I don’t know of anything more impressive than the study of the human brain in its activities, and how “I” am continually changing and modifying and educating my brain. You feel sometimes as if you could almost lay hands on that mysterious spiritual: being that is behind it, like a spider in his web —feeling and interpreting every quiver of it, sending messages out into the world by means of it. But he always eludes you. You have no instrument that can touch him. You only know that he is there, enshrouded in mystery, a supernatural being not only using the brain but educating it for use. The brain itself has no knowledge or thought, and no power of itself to originate knowledge or thought. The brain of a baboon differs very little from the brain of aman. The difference is in the being who is behind it. I read lately the statement of a great scientist: ‘“ As far as I can see, if the soul of a man could get behind the brain of an ape he could probably use it almost as well as his own.”

I have never known a really thoughtful stu- _ dent of science satisfied with the foolish notion that the brain is what thinks and remembers and wills. He looks upon a human brain, on the dissecting table, a mere mass of cells and nerve centres suffused with blood, and he thinks of the glorious poems and the mighty intellectual efforts and the noble thoughts of God and Righteousness, and perforce he laughs at the thought that that poor bleeding thing originated them. Something within him indignantly replies: “ Nay, ‘I’ am not the brain. I possess it. Iuseit. It is mine, but it is not me!”

§ 3

_ We have not yet gone deep enough to dis. cover this “I.” It is hardly necessary to ask the next question which some foolish people are speculating about to-day. Am I merely the TRAIN OF THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS AND. EMOTIONS? Am “I” but like an Eolian harp, played on by the wind of sensations from without ?

Surely not. This mysterious “I” is constantly and persistently claiming to be a real conscious person behind all these—greater than i8 The Near Hereafter all these—possessing all these. Listen to the voice down deep in your consciousness—COGITO, ERGO suM. “I” think—therefore “I” exist. I am not the thoughts and feelings and emotions—I am greater than them all. I am the possessor of them all. They are mine. They are not Me. They are only passing phases of my being. They are always changing. Everything around is changing. I remain the same being always. Nothing else in the universe remains the same being—except God. God and I. God and these selves that are in every one of us.

I cannot escape that conviction that “I” am the permanent being behind all the changes. No human vision can see me. No surgeon’s knife can detect me. But I am there, behind. everything. |

The particles of my body, of brain and nerves and heart are constantly being changed—every few years they are completely renewed. Ihave had a dozen new bodies, a dozen new sets of brains and heart since I was born—I am always wearing them out. I change them when they are worn out and throw them aside like old clothes. My thoughts and feelings are ever changing, like the ripples on the sea.

But I am absolutely certain that “1” am still there—that I am the same—just as God is the same. The same “I” that played as a little —child—the same “1” that lived and desired and thought and felt and worked and sinned years and years ago.

Not a particle remains of the brain, or nerves, or tongue, or eyes, or hands, or feet, with which I did a good or evil deed twenty years since— but it is Impossible for me to doubt that it was “1” who did it, that I to-day deserve the praise or blame which is due to it.

Every man on earth, when he thinks about it, has this conviction of himself as an “I ’—as a person separate from all other persons, as a self separate from all other selves, as remaining always the same being, whatever changes may take place around him. That is what constitutes man—a self conscious of itself. As far as we can discover, the lower animals have no such idea. Children, at first, have not. Did you ever notice how a little child never says “I” till he is about two years old? He always speaks in the third person. It is always “ Baby does this,” “Baby likes that,” until the Divine revelation of his personality gradually grows and he recognizes himself as a person. Then, without any teaching on your part, the child, of his own accord, will begin to say “1.”

§4

Oh, who or what: is this awful, mysterious “T” that dwells somewhere in the centre of my being, and rules and possesses and is responsible for everything? What is this self, in each of you, that is hidden behind your faces as behind a mask—that is looking out through your eyes, and receiving, through your ears, the thoughts that others are trying to express for you? Can the surgeon’s knife find any trace of it? Is it possible to destroy it? Is it possible to get away from it? It has survived the putting away of every part of the body a dozen times over. Will it survive the final putting away of the whole body at death? Will it survive everything? Shall “I” be “I,” the same identical person through all the ages of eternity ?

$5 Look in again upon this “I” within you and answer this question. Why does it assert so positively that it is impossible to doubt it: “I wi Ris 23 ought to do certain things, I ought not to do certain other things”? All over the earth this -day—from the St. Lawrence to the Ganges, from the North Pole to the South—there is no man outside of a lunatic asylum without that conviction. No race, not even the lowest, has been found without it. Where did that conviction come from? From the Bible, do you say ? From the teachings of Christ? Nay, surely not. Long before the Bible, long before the incarnation of Christ, the old pagan had the thought clear and distinct, though not by any means so clear and distinct as Christianity has made it. Did you ever think of the mystery of this authoritative utterance of the self within _ you: “ought”? Inthe very lowest savages it asserts this. St. Paul calls this sense of “ ought” —the law of God written in our hearts (Rom. ii. 15). St. John calls it the light of Christ in us, “the light which lighteth every man com: ing into the world” (St. John i. 9). Longfellow sings of it in “ Hiawatha”:

That in even savage bosoms

- There are longings, yearnings, strivings For the good they comprehend not ; That the feeble hands and helpless,

Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God’s right hand in the darkness.

Even in the heart of the thief or the murderer it insists: I ought to do this, I ought not to do that, and when he disobeys this mysterious law within him he is compelled to drag himself up for judgment and fierce remorse for wrong that no one else knows of, that no one else can punish him for. What do you think of that mysterious fact about this Conscious Personality within you? Does it not look as if it belongs to God, that every soul is stamped with God’s image and superscription, as every coin of King George is stamped in the mint with the image and superscription of the King ?

§ 6

And this suggests a further question. Why is there in us this sense of imperfection, of incompleteness—of ideals always away in the front that we can never even approximately reach on earth? Look at this conscience which we have just been thinking about. It is always holding high above us an ideal of perfect goodness and insisting that we must strive after it. But we can never, get even near it on earth. The very best man at the close of life sees his ideal still high above him and feels how much better he might be and ought to be and then he dies feeling the incompleteness of this life. Does not this unfinished life thus broken off, with its aim still far in the future, demand something further? The great German philosopher Kant founded on this fact his famous argument for Immortality.

Or look at our efforts after knowledge. It takes nearly all this life to fit the student for his search after truth, and when he is just ready and the great ocean of truth lies before him, Death comes. Oh, how incomplete and unfinished his life seems! Just the scaffolding put ~ up for his work, just the tools got into good order. Then he dies.

“For half a century,” said Victor Hugo, “T have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse, history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, song. But I feel that I have not said a thousandth part of what is in me. When I go down to the grave I shall have finished my day’s work.” And this thought of in. completeness compels in him the hope, “ another -ay will begin next morning.”

Was Victor Hugo right? Was the old pagan philosopher right? “You may catch my body,” said Socrates, “but no man can catch me, myself, to bury me.” Victor Hugo did not believe in the Christian Bible. Socrates had no revelation from God, except the revelation of this self within him. You have the revelation of Christ as well. What do you think of the question? When the dust shall return to the earth as it was, shall the spirit return to God who gave it ? When brain and heart and nerves are destroyed, when the sun is old and the stars grow cold, and all that you ever saw is swept away into nothingness, will this mysterious, lonely self remain, to say “I” and “my” and “mine” and “me,” through all the ages of Eternity ?

§7 Now, I put a closer question still. Is not this mysterious “I” behind the brain the being that God is especially concerned with? What He sometimes calls your soul.’ The ceiling of the Sistine chapel at Rome has a fine painting by Michael Angelo from the text, “Man 1TInasimple, popular statement such as this it would but be confusing to go into nice metaphysical distinctions of soul and ‘‘ spirit,”

became a living soul.” It represents the Supreme Spirit floating in the ether and touching with His finger the body of Adam. As He touches it an electric spark flashes into the body and Adam becomes a living soul. Is not this the centre of the awful mystery that I call “ I,” myself{i—the same of which our Lord asks His tremendous question: “ What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own self?”

Is not this “self” the real man, the man in the centre of his life, in the deepest recesses of his being, the man as he lives beneath the eye of God and enters into relations with God—the man for whom the Bible announces that exciting _ adventure in the long ages of the Hereafter ?

Is not this “1” looking out from behind your eyes this moment—the real man, of whom the body that you see is only the outward covering, of whom the brain is only the outward telegraphic instrument? Should not we adapt our thoughts to that tremendous fact? Instead of thinking “T have a soul,” should we not rather think “I am a soul”? Instead of thinking, that beautiful girl has an ugly soul, that insignificant looking man has a noble soul, should we not rather think, that ugly soul has a beat tiful girl body, that splendid soul is in a mean looking body ? Would not some such manner of thinking help to bring home the reality, that “T” am the invisible immortal being which clothes itself in a materjal body during this first stage of its life. Should not we be more likely to become acquainted. with our own soul, to become impressed with its existence, to think about its character? Should we not thus learn — more easily that wealth and clothes and outward appearance are not so important, that the character, the relation to God is the one supreme thing ?