Life Here and Hereafter

Front matter

~ ne class, 2.0 x P Book A, | 33, General Theological Seminary Library. ~ : Chelsea Square, New York Beside the main topic, this book also treats of

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S0c'y for Promoting Religion and Learning

Dedication

IN MEMORY OF MANY HAPPY DAYS SPENT TOGETHER ON THE NILE, IN PALESTINE, AND IN CRUISING OVER GREEK AND TURKISH SEAS 3 IN MEMORY, ABOVE ALL, OF MOST TENDER AND SELF-SACRIFICING MINISTRATIONS

DURING AN ALMOST FATAL ILLNESS 3 I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME,

MOST GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY, TO THE MOST ATTRACTIVELY UNSELFISH HUMAN BEING

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. xiii

(1) Prayer was offered im all the early liturgies “ for all the saints, martyrs, confessors, patriarchs, prophets, and even the Virgin Mary herself, and all other holy men and women from the foundation of the world, who were supposed to be in a place of rest and happiness, not in any place of purgation or torment.” He instances the prayers of St. Ambrose for persons “of whom he had not the least doubt but that their souls were in rest and happiness;” and St. Austin, who prayed for his mother that she might be cleansed from any remaining stains of sin—clearly implying a state, though of felicity, still short of heaven. (2) “Upon the same presumption some of those prayers for the dead were always eucharistical.” (3) * Because they justly conceived all men to die with some remainders of frailty and corruption, and therefore desired that God would deal with them according to His mercy, and not in strict justice according to their deserts ; for no one was then thought to have any real merit or title to eternal happiness, but only upon God’s promises and mercy. St. Austin discourses excellently upon this point in the case of his mother Monica.” And Bingham quotes a long passage from the Confessions to prove his point. St. Austin evidently believed that his mother was in a state of happiness, yet of happiness short of heaven. (4) The reason given by Epiphanius, namely, “that it was to put a distinction between the perfection of xiv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Christ and the imperfection ‘of all other men, saints, martyrs, apostles, prophets, confessors, etc, He being the only Person for whom prayer was not then made in the Church.” (5) To show their belief in the continued existence of the departed. (6) “ Whereas the soul is but in an imperfect state of happiness till the resurrection, when the whole man shall obtain a complete victory over death, and by the last judgment be established in an endless state of consummate happiness.”

In addition to these “general reasons,’ Bingham enumerates some particular reasons. (1) “A great many of the ancients believed that the souls of all the righteous, except martyrs, were sequestered out of heaven, in some place which they called Hades, or Paradise, or Abraham’s bosom; a place of refreshment and joy, where they expected a completer happiness at the end of all things. This is the known opinion of Hermas Pastor, Justin Martyr, Pope Pius, Irenzus, Tertullian, Origen, Caius, Romanus, Victorinus Martyr, Novatian, Lactantius, _ Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory Nyssen, Prudentius, Austin, and Chrysostom. Therefore, in praying for the dead, they may be supposed to have some refer- - ence to this, and to desire that the souls of the righteous, thus sequestered for a time, might at last be brought to the perfect fruition of happiness in heaven.” (2) “Many of the ancients held the opinion

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. xv of the Millennium, and so prayed that the faithful departed might obtain a part in this resurrection.” (3) “Many of the ancients believed that there would be a fire of probation through which all must pass at the last day, even the prophets and apostles, and even the Virgin Mary herself not excepted, which is asserted by Origen, Irenzus, and Lactantius, but also by St. Ambrose, who says, after Origen, ‘that all must pass through the flames, though it be John the Evangelist ; though it be Peter? The sons of Levi shall be purged by fire, Ezekiel, Daniel,’” etc. He quotes St. Hilary as follows: “If the Virgin herself, who conceived God in her womb, must undergo the severity of judgment, who is so bold as to desire to be judged by God?” Bingham goes on: “There are many like passages in Gregory Nazianzen, and Nyssen, and St. Jerome, and St. Austin, which the Romish writers commonly produce for the fire of purgatory, whereas they plainly refer to this ‘ purging sacrament, as Origen calls it; or, in St. Austin’s language, ‘the purging pains of the fire of judgment at the last day.’” (4) Some of the Fathers believed . that the prayers of the living might “mitigate the pains of the damned souls;” and he quotes St. Austin, St. Chrysostom, and Prudentius. Of course Bingham holds that the doctrine of the Church of England is identical with the doctrine of the Fathers and the early Church (Axizz., vol. v. pp. I pune

Mh

Xvi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Iam writing away from my books, but I believe I am correct in saying that St. Austin is the first and only Father of the Primitive Church who deprecated prayers for the martyrs as incongruous, on the ground that their baptism of blood had washed out every stain of sin. But even immaculateness does not necessarily qualify for unclouded fruition of the Beatific Vision ; and Perrone labours in vain to prove that the current doctrine of the Church of Rome on the Intermediate State is in harmony with the teaching of St. Austin. The Roman doctrine, as contrasted with that of the Churches of the East and the Primitive Church, is thus tersely stated by Mr. William Palmer, in a work written while he was an

Anglican, and not disowned after he joined the Church .

of Rome :—

“The doctrine of the Fathers and of the early Church, of the present Greek or Orthodox Church, and of all the other separated Eastern Churches, is this, that, generally speaking and upon the whole, the state of the faithful departed is a state of light, and rest, and peace, and refreshment, of happiness far greater than any belonging to this life, yet inferior to that which shall be enjoyed after the resurrection and the final judgment. The doctrine of the Latins, on the other hand, is this, that, generally speakin and upon the whole, the state of the faithful departe is a state of penal torment, differing from that of hel atl

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. vii only in the certainty of future deliverance ” (Dissertations on the Orthodox Communion, p. 124).

This is a fair summary of the case, and Palmer is undoubtedly right in identifying “the doctrine of the Fathers and of the early Church” with that of Oriental Christendom at the present day ; whereas the doctrine of the Roman Church, since the Council of Florence especially, is simply unknown to the early Church, East and West.

Probably no Englishman of our time had such complete mastery of the doctrine of the Eastern Church on all subjects as Mr. William Palmer, and he was also profoundly learned in the theology of Latin Christianity. But, indeed, it is not necessary to labour that point. The standard authorities of the Eastern and Western Churches confirm the accuracy of my quotation from Mr. Palmer. The question was referred to at the Bonn Conferences in 1874-75 as one of the differences between the Churches of the East and West. The Archpriest Janyscheff, one of the acutest and most learned divines in Russia, insisted on the importance of the difference on this point between the Church of Rome and Eastern Christendom; and he was supported by M. Ossinin, Professor of Theology in the Ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg ; by Professor Damalas of Athens ; by Archbishop Lycurgos, and by all the Easterns present. .

= xviii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Janyscheff appealed to “The Longer Catechism of the Russian Church,” to show that, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, the faithful departed did not enter heaven till after the general resurrection. The following is the passage to which he referred :-—

“Q, In what state are the souls of the dead till the general resurrection ?”

“A. The souls of the righteous are in light and rest ; but the souls of the wicked are in a state the reverse of this.”

“@Q. Why may we not ascribe to the souls of the righteous perfect happiness immediately after death ?” .

“A. Because it is ordained that the perfect retribution according to works shall be received by the perfect man after the resurrection of the body and God’s last judgment.”

“Q. Why do weascribe to the souls of the righteous a foretaste of bliss before the last judgment?”

“A, On the testimony of Jesus Christ Himself, who says in the parable that the righteous Lazarus was immediately after death carried into Abraham’s bosom. St. Luke xvi. 22.”

“Q. Is this foretaste of bliss joined with a sight of Christ’s own countenance ?”

“ A, It is so, more especially with the Saints, as we are given to understand by the Apostle Paul, who

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. xix had a desire to depart and to be with Christ. Philip. i. 23.”

Moreover, in the Encyclical Letter, lately issued by the Eastern Church, in reply to the Pope’s call to reunion, “the belief in a complete recompense of the just before the general resurrection and judgment” is pointed out as one of the innovations on the part of Rome which bar the reunion of Christendom.

Dr. Déllinger said at the Bonn Conference that he was familiar with this point of difference between the two Churches, but added that he did not know that the Easterns laid such emphasis upon it. With respect to the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, Dr. Déllinger agreed with the Easterns in rejecting it as an innovation on the doctrine of undivided Christendom : I mean the doctrine which represents Purgatory as a hell, differing only from the Inferno in point of duration. Of the Purgatorial fire Bellarmine says: “Tt is the common mind of theologians that it is true and proper fire, and of the same kind as our element.” And he gives the volcanic fire of A‘tna as an illustration (De Purg., ii. 11).

Of this doctrine Faber says: “It loves to represent Purgatory simply as a hell which is not eternal. Violence, confusion, wailing, horror preside over its descriptions. It dwells, and truly, on the terribleness of the pain of sense which the soul is mysteriously permitted’ to endure. The fire is the same fire as xx PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

that of hell, created for the single and express purpose of giving torture” (A// for Fesus, pp. 335-337).

To plunge innocent children and saintly adults into this indefinitely prolonged hell was too revolting to man’s sense of natural justice ; and as Purgatory was supposed to embrace the whole of the Intermediate State, this doctrine made it necessary that baptized infants and eminent saints should go straight from earth to heaven, being supposed to be “as the angels” in fitness for enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, It follows, of course, that prayers for them are as much out of place as prayers for the angels. Yet, in all the ancient Liturgies, prayers are offered for all the faithful departed without exception. Can there be a clearer proof that the Roman doctrine of Purgatory is inconsistent with the creed of undivided Christendom ?

Nor, indeed, are Roman divines quite consistent with themselves and with each other on this subject. Saint Catherine of Genoa, and Cardinal Newman in his Dream of Gerontius, represent the pain of Purgatory as that of unsatisfied longing ; pain caused by absence from the unclouded splendour of “the King in His beauty,” yet glad acquiescence in that pain, since premature admission to the Beatific Vision would bring still greater pain. Few unprejudiced Christians, I imagine, would find much difficulty in receiving such a doctrine of Purgatory as that, if

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, xxi they would only purge their minds of the popular notions associated with the word.

It is not easy to gather a clear and logical idea of the subject from the discussion of it by St. Thomas Aquinas, for he is hardly consistent with himself. He teaches that saints at death enjoy the Beatific Vision, and that St. Paul enjoyed it in the rapture or trance described in 2 Cor. xii. Yet he compares the Apostle’s vision of God on that occasion with that enjoyed by Moses in Horeb (Exod. xxxiii.): Talis Suit raptus Pauli et etiam Moysis : et satis congruenter, nam sicut Moyses fuit primus doctor Fude@orum, ita Paulus fuit primus doctor gentium. Clearly this was not the Beatific Vision in its strict theological sense. It was the afterglow of the Divine Majesty that Moses saw “in aclift of the rock” and “covered” with the hand of God while the Beatific Vision “passed by,” which Moses could not “see and live.” This incident in the life of the great Jewish lawgiver has always seemed to me a beautiful illustration of the condition of the faithful departed between death and the general resurrection, They are “in a clift of the rock ;” shaded from the overpowering splendour of unveiled Deity while under the imperfection of disembodied existence, but enjoying such glimpses of that splendour as in their “ unclothed ” state they are able to bear.

Aquinas proceeds to describe a number of other differences between the rapture of St. Paul and the xxii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Beatific Vision. So that it is by no means easy to understand what precise idea he meant to convey. His explanation of our Lord’s promise to the penitent robber is still more perplexing. This is partly due to the notion then prevalent, that there are two paradises—a terrestrial paradise (sometimes called zxfernum) in the interior of this earth; anda spiritual Paradise where the saints enjoy the Beatific Vision. It was into “the terrestrial and corporeal paradise,” according to Aquinas, that the robber descended ; and our Lord’s promise on the Cross was thus fulfilled, because the robber in the earthly Paradise “enjoyed Christ’s divinity.” How forced and non-natural this explanation is will appear the moment one remembers that the robber “enjoyed the divinity of Christ” on the Cross; for the divinity is ubiquitous. But our Lord’s promise cannot refer to His presence with the robber on the Cross, for the promise is future. Nor can it refer to heaven, the sphere of the Beatific Vision, for it points to the period immediately after death ; and Christ did not enter heaven in His glorified Humanity for six weeks afterwards. The truth is that St. Thomas found the specifically Roman doctrine of Purgatory in practical possession of the See of Rome, and he did his best to reconcile it with Holy Scripture. The forged Decretals were then honestly believed through-

? Summa, Pars III., Q. lii,, Art. IV.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. xxiii out the West, and St. Thomas dutifully accepted, as of supreme authority, the whole body of doctrine which he found flourishing under Papal sanction. Under all the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that his usual lucidity of reasoning somewhat forsakes him in his discussion of this subject.

Dante, who accepts the medizval eschatology, divides his paradise into the terrestrial paradise, which is on the summit of the Mount of Purgatory, and the celestial paradise, which consists of nine spheres and, above and embracing them all, the Empyrean—the sphere of the Beatific Vision. In the nine spheres of the celestial paradise are the souls of saints in varying degrees of imperfection and development. In the Empyrean alone is the Beatific Vision, which Dante is supernaturally allowed to see in one moment of intuition, in which an eternity is condensed, What he beholds is three circles of equal circumference and threefold colour, but exhibiting only one form—the Divine-human countenance of the Incarnate Son—

In brief, the Biblical and patristic view of redeemed human life in its totality divides it into three cosmical spheres, First, the present sphere, év capxh, whose prevailing bias is submission to the sensible and material ; secondly, the intermediate state, év rvebuars, the sphere of incorporeal soul-life, a sphere of infinitely varied ethical and spiritual condition and progressive development; lastly, the post-resurrection period, when the soul shall be clothed with the compa mvevuaricoy, in place of the cdua WuxiKdy, and there shall be the full fruition of the Beatific Vision.

Preface To The Second Edition. XXV

This is plainly St. Paul’s doctrine, as when he says: “If this earthly house,” ze. the natural body, “be destroyed, we have an eternal, a heavenly habitation, whose maker is God,” ze the resurrection body. And he represents the intervening period between the two bodies as one of nudity, the absence of that spiritual integumant which is as essential to the integrity of man in heaven as the material body was to his integrity on earth, and without which the soul cannot enjoy its predestined heritage.

No doctrine can be built on the mere use of the word “heaven,” either in the Bible or in patristic literature, for it is used in various senses, and in the Bible almost invariably in the plural, indicating different spheres of spiritual life, as I have explained in the sermons on “The Many Mansions.” The word “paradise,” on the other hand, is used in the Bible in a sense invariably exclusive of the highest heaven. Rev. ii. 7 is sometimes quoted as an exception. But, in the first place, the reference is figurative, and evidently not a statement of fact; and, in the second place, the figure excludes heaven in the specific sense of this discussion. The analogy requires that the paradise of Rev. ii. 7 should be—like the paradise of Gen. ii. g—a place of preparation for heaven: therefore not heaven itself.

To sum up. The ancient Church, East and West, divided the. unseen realm into three states. (1) The xxvi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

highest heaven, where God is seen in unclouded majesty. Into this disembodied spirits do not enter ; they must wait to be “clothed upon” with the spiritual body. (2) Hades, which was divided into a place of torment, as in the case of Dives, and into paradise, as in the case of Lazarus. (3) Gehenna. Into paradise passed all souls who died in grace, but in every degree of ethical and spiritual develop- - ment, from the brand snatched from the burning to the mature saint; each going to his own place —to the mansion prepared for his special need. In this intermediate state there was progress for all, and visitation of angels, and such measure of the Divine glory as was suited to the capacity of each.

No doubt “heaven” and “paradise” are sometimes used loosely and rhetorically as convertible terms by some ancient writers. But the essential point is that the faithful departed are represented as being in an intermediate state, suited to the spiritual condition of each, and preparatory to the highest heaven after the resurrection. And the word “paradise” implies this. It isa Persian word, meaning a pleasure park, and especially the park belonging to a royal palace, where the King may be seen occasionally. But his throne is in the palace, and it is there he holds his court. Eden was such a paradise, visited by the Divine Presence in»man’s >

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XXVli state of innocence ; an abode preparatory to his translation in due time to the interior of the palace.

I have ventured to offer this explanation because I have lately learned, with much surprise, that a certain number of our own and of the American clergy have not only adopted the extreme Roman doctrine on the subject of the Intermediate State, but have strangely persuaded themselves, in addition, that this is, as one of them has expressed it, “the faith of Christendom ”—the received doctrine of the Church of England, barring a few ill-instructed High Churchmen—as well as of all the Churches of Eastern Christendom.

I will give here one crucial illustration of the fallacies which pervade the whole reasoning of these writers. I had in a letter to the Church Times appealed to the extract from “ The Longer Catechism of the Russian Church,” which I have quoted on a previous page, by way of proof that the Orthodox Church held the doctrine which I have endeavoured to explain in this Preface. It is said in that extract that the faithful departed have in the Intermediate State “a sight of Christ’s own countenance,” and are “with Christ ” in the sense in which St. Paul “ desired to depart and to be with Christ.” From this one of my critics concluded that to be “with Christ” is of necessity to be in the highest heaven. “Canon MacColl’s quotation from the Russian Catechism,”

xxvii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

he says, “ goes to prove our point, not his—viz. that,

although the saints await their perfect consummation,

they are already ‘with Christ.’ Christ is at the right

hand of God in glory.” This style of reasoning

would prove that St. Stephen was in heaven when

he “saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man

standing on the right hand of God;” and St. Paul,

when he “saw a light from heaven above the bright-

ness of the sun,” and heard the voice of Jesus speaking to him in the Hebrew tongue.

All this kind of reasoning rests on a material basis. It assumes that the laws of the spiritual world and the faculties of its inhabitants are identical with ours, or at least similar to them. The probability is that they are of a totally different kind. And, indeed, some of the recent discoveries of modern science prove that there are, even within the sphere of mundane matter, marvellous possibilities which, if they had been found predicted in the Bible, would have been scoffed at as absurdities. Our Lord’s passing in His glorified body through closed doors, for example, has been for centuries scoffed at as an absurd and impossible myth. But the latest discovery in photography has demonstrated its possibility. For if light, which is a material substance, can penetrate, as if they did not exist, opaque and solid substances, like wood and aluminium and flesh — and muscle, @ fortiori may the much subtler substance

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XXIX of a spiritual body do so. To spiritual beings, moreover, there is probably nothing corresponding to what we mean by distance. They do not travel by locomotion; like thought, they are instantaneously where they wish tobe. Nearness to, or distance from, Christ would therefore, for such beings, have no relation to locality or space, but only to spiritual perception. The fissure which enabled the proto-martyr or the Apostle to see or hear Christ “at the right hand of God” was not in “the heavens,” but in their own material organisms. The latent powers of the human spirit were enabled to pierce material obstacles as if they did not exist, and to perceive the presence of the Son of Man in glory, always near us, although we are unable to apprehend it under the limitations of our present condition.

Holy Scripture and the discoveries of modern science coincide in teaching that the more any substance approaches the realm of spirit the less is it impeded by the ordinary laws of matter. The force of attraction is independent of distance and of any mass of gross matter that may lie between the attracting atoms. Two atoms attract each other on opposite sides of the globe as if nothing lay between. If particles of dead matter are thus cognizant of each without regard to distance or intervening obstacles, does it not follow, @ fortiori, that pure spirit is even more independent of matter?

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A late president of the British Association, a distinguished lawyer as well as man of science, says, in his most interesting Correlation of Physical Forces, that “myriads of organized beings may exist, imperceptibly to our vision, even if we were among them.” And it is a truism of physical science that impressions on the atmosphere as well as on the ocean are indelible ; that as every ripple on the sea is imperishable, so every motion of the atmosphere caused by our idle words remain printed in indelible characters, and probably legible to higher organisms than ourselves. Some readers will remember how vividly Babbage draws this out in his eloquent, but unfortunately unfinished, Bridgwater Treatise.- And what a terrible significance it adds to our Lord’s declaration that “for every idle word that men shall speak ” they will have to render an account !

The phenomena consequent on the grand eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 have shed a good deal of light on this subject. Some astonishing facts are recorded in a most interesting volume published under the auspices of the Royal Society. -The air-waves varied in rapidity from 13 hrs. 48 min. to 124 hrs. 30 min. in passing between Krakatoa and Kew, according, I suppose, to the difference in the violence of the explosions. But what is, perhaps, the most surprising fact of all to the imagination is that the sound of the explosions was heard “very nearly three thousand

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XRxl

English miles from Krakatoa.” “Several times during the night” (of the eruption), says the account, “reports were heard coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”

“At Diego Garcia, upwards of two thousand five hundred miles from Krakatoa, the sounds were very distinctly heard, and were supposed to be those of guns fired by a vessel in distress. In Ceylon, and also in Australia, the sounds were heard at many different places far removed from each other, while at Dorey, in New Guinea, they were clearly heard, and their occurrence was recorded at the time, long before it was known to what cause they were due” (The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena, Pp. 79, 80).

The light with which the researches of modern science have irradiated the Scripture revelations of a future state is to me as marvellous and instructive as it is fascinating. And it is because I have often found the prevalent notions on that subject so vague and shadowy that I have endeavoured in this volume and elsewhere to show that the spiritual world embraces and interpenetrates this, and that departed souls, and @ fortiori our Lord’s glorified humanity, are not only not separated from us by distance of space—for pure spirit has no relation to distance in space—but that they are infinitely more alive and energetic than they were under the conditions of

c

XXxH PREFACE T0 THE SECOND EDITION.

mortality, and find employment for all their powers in a degree inconceivable here. And is there anything in reason or Scripture to forbid our believing that spirits emancipated from the gross integument of a physical body may be ex rapport, in ways we cannot imagine, with human beings in this world, and especially with those to whom they are united by bonds of sympathy? Were not the souls under the altar conscious of the sufferings of their brethren on earth? And surely Hebrews xii. 1, though embracing the idea of martyrs, suggests primarily the idea of a crowd of encompassing spectators (mcp«e/uevov vépoc), as in the semicircle of an amphitheatre: @earai, but also paptupec, Who had borne witness to God on earth, and were themselves paprupnOévrec dua rie wiorewe ; being now witnesses of their brethren still struggling in the arena.

One of my critics quoted Heb. xii. 22-24 in proof of his assertion that the faithful departed pass into the highest heaven at the moment of death. The truth, however, is that the text is quite irrelevant to this discussion. It is simply a terse statement of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. The inspired writer contemplates the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant proleptically as one body, just as we do ourselves in the Trisagion in the Eucharistic Service. By a parity of reasoning my critic would be obliged to argue that all the baptized are even here in

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XXxill the full enjoyment of the Beatific Vision ; for it is of them that the author of the Epistle says: “But ye are come (mpooeAnAtOare) to Mount Sion,” etc. This shows the danger of drawing general conclusions from isolated expressions. Even the term “ Beatific Vision” may be loosely used to describe the happiness of saints in paradise—ze. in the Intermediate State. For every vision of the divine glory, even that of Moses “in a clift of the rock” on Horeb, as Aquinas admits, may be truly described as “ beatific.” It is a question of degree. Even in heaven angels and glorified saints perceive and enjoy more or less of what is implied by the Beatific Vision in proportion to the greater or less degree of their several capacities. For the purpose of this discussion I have used the term “Beatific Vision” as meaning some supernatural manifestation of the Godhead, through the Incarnate Son, which is only vouchsafed in that heaven into which our Lord will invite His own in the Last Day, in the words: “Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” It is plain that this implies a higher sphere of being and of enjoyment than the disembodied state even of the highest saints. I cannot understand how there can be any doubt about it. The Primitive Church had none.