The Life of the World to Come: Six Addresses Given by the Late Henry Barclay ...

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Preface

These six addresses on the " Life of the World

to Come" were given by Dr. Swete at Hitchin

on the Friday afternoons of last Lent in the Trinity

Chapel of St. Mary's Church. After their delivery

he was asked to print them, but declined on the

ground that they were too slight. Had he been

spared to live longer his intention was to complete

his series of books on the Apostles' Creed by a

volume on " The Life Everlasting/ ' for which he

had made some preliminary studies, and this he

doubtless had in mind when he gave this Lenten

course. It was his custom to prepare for a book

by lecturing or, as in this case, speaking on the

subject until it grew and crystallized into its final

shape. These addresses were written in full with

all his customary care and pains, and, after his

wont, they were completed some time before he

was to deliver the first. To him such ministry of

the Word was a matter of the first moment ; and

vii vffi PREFACE

if he deemed these particular addresses " slight," they were so intentionally, not because he had been hurried or grudged pains in their preparation. Those who heard them greatly appreciated them, and many were comforted in a time of sore trial. As he lay dying he gave me permission to print them for his " Hitchin friends." He had made his home at Hitchin after his resignation of the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Cambridge, and the eighteen months of his residence here were among some of the happiest in his life. He delighted in his garden, his library, his home, but specially did he love the parish church, and it was a great joy that he could minister in it. The churchpeople of Hitchin had in return shewed him no common appreciation and affection. One of them writes of this very course : " I shall always think of Dr. Swete as I saw him during those wonderful Lenten addresses which he gave us. He was so beautiful, sitting there in the sanctuary with the lamp shining on his face. And it seems fitting that his last words should be on the Life Hereafter. We shall miss him very much . ' ' The last address was given within a week of the begin-

PREFACE ix

ning of his illness. He fell asleep on May 10, 191 7 ; and by his own request his body was laid to rest in Hitchin.

If this little book cannot take a place among my uncle's fuller and more finished works, it reflects at least his serene faith in our sure and certain hope, and an eventide radiant with light and peace.

JM. B. K.

Hitchin,

Contents

fAGH

L IMMORTALITY • * -J

II. THE INTERMEDIATE STATE - - 1 7

II

The common sense of humanity declares that the soul survives death, and lives on without the body. But where is this separate life of the soul lived, and under what conditions? I have to some extent indicated the answer given to these questions by the ancient civilizations in Egypt, in Babylonia, in Greece, and at Rome. To-day we will consider the answer given in the sacred books of the Church — the Old Testament and the New. l. The Old Testament is a history of the life and thought of the people of Israel in the centuries before Christ. We can trace in it, among other things, the growth of the religion of Israel from the earliest times. From Ur in South Babylonia, and from Haran, further to the north, Abraham brought with him to Canaan, we may suppose, in the main the religion of his fathers, and it was but gradually that fuller light came as the reward of his faith. In some vague way, we must suppose, the patriarchs looked beyond their earthly inheritance to a heavenly.

*9

Jacob, we are told by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "looked for the city that hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God." 1 And the same, no doubt, is true of Abraham and Isaac and Joseph : they confessed that they were strangers and sojourners upon earth ; they desired a better country than the land of Canaan, and God prepared it for them. Long after their deaths, as our Lord teaches, He was still their God, and they were "living unto Him." 2 But in all this they were better than their creed, the religion which they brought with them from their Mesopotamian home. Like the Babylonians, the Hebrews entertained the most gloomy views of the state of the dead. They thought of the abode of the dead as an underworld, which they called Sheol, a hollow cavern tenanted by the fleshless spirits of all generations. It is sometimes translated in our English Bible by ' ' the grave, ' ' sometimes by ' ' the pit ' ' ; sometimes the name "Sheol" is left by the reviser untranslated. But though the conception of Sheol is doubtless borrowed from the rocktombs which were used in Palestine for burial, or the grave-pits dug by the poorer class, it is not the grave or tomb which holds the body that is intended in any of these passages which speak. * Heb. xi. 10. * Luke xx. 36.

of Sheol, but the abode of the departed soul Of this abode terrible things are said even in some of the Psalms and in other late books of the Old Testament. The dead in Sheol are remembered no more ; they are cut off from God's hand j 1 they lie in dark places, in the deep ; their thoughts perish. " The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence." 2 ' ' In death there is no remembrance of Thee ; in Sheol who shall give Thee thanks ?' ,8 So good and true an Israelite as King Hezekiah spoke of death in this language of despair : ' ' The grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee : they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth." 4 Sometimes the despair suggests the thought of annihilation. " O spare me a little," prays one of the Psalmists, "before I go hence, and be no more seen," 6 the Prayer- Book Psalter has it ; but " seen " is not in the original. "The dead know not anything," exclaims the Preacher, "neither have they any more a reward." 6 "When a few years are gone," Job complains, "I shall go the way whence I shall not return." 7 And again: "There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down,

1 Ps. lxxxviii. 5. a Ps. cxv. 17. a Ps. vi. 5.

4 Is. xxxviii. 18. 5 Ps. xxxix. 13. a Eccl. ix. 5. 7 Job xvi. 22.

that it will sprout again, . . . but man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? M1 "Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake ; . . . if a man die, shall he live again?" 2 The meaning of Job xix* 25 ff. is too doubtful to justify the use of this passage as evidence for ultimate hope of a resurrection. "There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest." 3 So the preacher settles the whole question of man's destiny. Sheol ends all.

This hopelessness of some of the later books of the old Testament (for Job and Ecclesiastes are both relatively late, Ecclesiastes more especially so) is very striking — I may say startling. Contrasted with the bright hopes of the Gospel, contrasted even with some of the nearly contemporary utterances of Greek poets and philosophers, these despairing cries from the land of Israel, the home of God's covenant people, are unexpected and discomposing ; they shew that on the subject of the future life the Hebrew people had on the whole but little light even down to the fourth century before Christ. But there are exceptions ; here and there in the Psalms and the Prophets a bright sunbeam is shot across the darkness, as the Holy Spirit moves some saintly Israelite to anticipate the coming day. Take, for example, one or two passages from the Psalms, when the Psalmists seem to expect for the righteous either deliverance from Sheol or a blessed fellowship with God within the prison of the dead. "My heart is glad . . . my flesh also shall rest in hope, for Thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol . . . Thou wilt shew me the path of life : in Thy presence is fulness of joy; in Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." 1 " As for me, I shall behold Thy face in righteousness : I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness. ,,2 "God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol : for He shall receive me. ,,a "Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel and afterwards receive me to glory. . . . My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart,.-, and my portion for ever." 4 We can use such passages in the Psalter in the Christian sense, but we must not suppose that in writing them the Psalmists had before them the full Christian hope. One cannot be sure of the precise meaning which they attached to their own words . But at least they expressed their conviction that souls which had had happy fellowship with God on earth would

1 Ps. xvi. 9 ff. a Ps. xvii. 15.

a Ps. xlix. 15. 4 Ps. lxxiii. 24, 26.

not lose this fellowship, or the happiness it brought them, in Sheol, but rather, with the awaking of the spirit after death, would realize and enjoy the presence of God far more fully than in the days of the flesh.

The Prophets occasionally go beyond this, foretelling a resurrection from the dead. Some of these prophecies, when they are examined, prove to be concerned with the moral and spiritual resurrection of the nation. Such is clearly Ezekiel's prophecy of the valley of dry bones ; such, too, is Hosea's " After two days will He revive us : on the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him. ,,1 Even Hosea's later words, " I will ransom them from the power of Sheol ; I will redeem them from death : O death, where are thy plagues ? O Sheol, where is thy destruction?" 2 refer, primarily at least, to the deliverance of Israel from national death, from the grave of its lost hopes and ideals.

On the other hand, a remarkable section of Isaiah (chapters xxiv.-xxvii), which is possibly later even than the second Isaiah, and post-exilic, does seem to contemplate the resurrection of the body : " He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering that is cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations. 1 Hosea vi. 2. a Hosea xiii. 14.

He hath swallowed up death for ever. . . . Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust : for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead." 1 It is, however, only in Daniel, the latest book of the Old Testament, written probably about 168 B.C., that we find a definite prediction of a resurrection both of the good and the evil. "Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt." a

The Old Testament, then, notwithstanding the pessimism of some even of its later writers, anticipates the Christian hope in two respects : (a) it speaks of increased fellowship with God in Sheol, and (b) it foresees the ultimate deliverance from Sheol by the resurrection of the body.

2. It is the latter of these hopes which is chiefly in view in the New Testament. The Resurrection shines out brightly both in the Gospels and in the Acts and Epistles ; of the state of the departed ^we hear but little either from our Lord or from the Apostles. For some reason or other a veil is drawn over the world of spirits, and it is rarely raised. The attempt which is now being made in some quarters to open up 1 Isa. xxv. 7, 8; xxvi. 19. 2 Dan. xii. 2.

communication with the dead is wholly foreign to the mind of the New Testament. The Old Testament has one instance of such a proceeding — the bringing up of Samuel the prophet by the witch of Endor — but it is evidently disapproved, and necromancy was strictly prohibited by the law. If our Lord had desired to remove this prohibition and encourage the methods of spiritualism, nothing could have been easier. But He was so far from this that even when He recalled the dead to life, He seems to have sealed their lips against any revelations of the other world. Lazarus sat at table after his resurrection with Jesus, but not a word passed, so far as we know, which threw light on the mystery of death. Nor, we may be sure, had the daughter of Jairus or the widow's son at Nain any tale of life in Hades to tell their relations and friends in Galilee. Had they been able to do this, how eagerly would tradition have seized upon their words ; how surely would such disclosures have survived !

Once — twice — our Lord does Himself draw aside the veil for an instant : (i) In the parable of the rich man and Larazus we see the soul of the beggar in Abraham's bosom — i.e., reclining next to Abraham at a banquet — a sharp contrast to his lying at the rich man's gate, asking for the crumbled bread that was thrown to the dogs. The picture represents poverty exchanged for plenty, hardness for ease, neglect for honour. Again, to the penitent highwayman on the cross, who asked to be remembered when Jesus came into His Kingdom, the Lord answered : "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." 1 Instead of the wood of the Cross, the trees of the Garden of God ; instead of the fever-thirst of the crucified, the river of the water of life. And in what company? "With me." And when? "Not when I come into my Kingdom, in days long distant; but this day, the day of thy death." The beggar's rest in Abraham's bosom, the robber's rest in the Garden of God, are not postponed to the Resurrection, but follow death at once.

' ' To-day thou shalt be with me. " Jesus, then, was going that day to Paradise. He and the penitent had been together on Golgotha, and would be together in the Garden of the Lord. Jesus at His death went into the state of the dead. "He descended," as the Creed has it, "into Hell " — into Hades, as the Greeks called it, into Sheol, as the old Hebrews would have said. And lo ! it was no longer Hell or Sheol, no longer a dark cavernous prison, but a Garden, the Garden 1 Luke xxiii. 43.

of happy souls, the Garden of the Lord. It was no longer a prison-house from which there was no escape, but the ante-chamber of Heaven, the waiting-place of souls expecting their resurrection. "He went and preached to the spirits in prison," 1 and converted their prison into a place of liberty and joyful hope.

It was the descent of Jesus Christ into Hades which made it what it has become to the Church. He "descended into Hell M ; and from that hour a new light broke upon the darkness, not enough to answer all our questionings, not enough to satisfy our curiosity, but enough to deliver those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage ; enough to make death to all sincere Christians the gate of life, the entrance into rest, the entrance into a state which is far better than our best here.

The reserve about the state of the departed which we have noticed in the Gospels continues in the Epistles. It was the hope of the Second Coming and the Resurrection that inspired the members of the primitive Church rather than the hope of Paradise. Moreover, the Second Coming seemed to them so near at hand, and they felt at times so confident that they were "being left ,,a on earth for its arrival, that the Lord would 1 i Pet. iii. T9. * 1 Thess. iv. 17 return and raise His saints within their own generation, that little attention was paid to the present state of the dead in Christ, seeing it was so soon to end in the kingdom of glory. Still, the Epistles are not wholly silent on this subject, and what they do say deserves our best consideration.

Let us take first the opening verses of 2 Cor. v. At the end of chapter iv. S. Paul has said that Christians aim not at the visible and transitory, but at the invisible and eternal. Their outward man may decay, but the inward man of the spirit is being renewed from day to day. Then he proceeds — I am paraphrasing his words — "Our earthly house, this mortal body, is a mere tent, which must be taken down and packed up when we move on. But there awaits us another house, a spiritual body, which is now in heaven, in the purpose of God, and which, being invisible, is eternal. In our present mortal body we often groan, and long for the day when the heavenly body, our permanent home, will descend upon us at the coming of the Lord, and our mortality shall be clothed and swallowed up by the resurrection life. In that case we shall not be stripped of our present body, and left naked souls ; the new body will instantly replace our mortal flesh ; we shall not die, but be changed.

We are assured of that by the work of the Spirit upon our hearts, for the Spirit in the heart is the earnest of the complete spiritualizing of the whole man.

' ' But what if we should not live to see the coming of the Lord, or to be clothed, without death, by the spiritual body? What then? Still we are confident, we are content. Death, though we do not choose it — though we would choose to be changed, and not to die — death will be better for us than life in this mortal body. For here we are absent from the Lord ; there we shall be present with Him. Here we are away from home ; there we shall be at home with the Lord. Our only anxiety is that, whether in the body or out of the body, we may be pleasing to Him."

This is an extraordinarily interesting passage, because in it we see S. Paul struggling with the thought that he might have to die,^ and remain in the state of the dead until the Lord's return. He shrinks from the thought, but acquiesces when he reflects that death will bring him into the presence of Christ, which the mortal body hinders him from realizing.

Some years passed by, and the Apostle, now a prisoner at Rome, and conscious that he might not leave Rome alive, again weighs the comparative advantage of life and death. The passage occurs in Philippians i. Again I will use a paraphrase :

"Saints at Philippi, with your bishops and deacons, things are going well here in Rome for the Gospel of Christ. I am a prisoner, but my imprisonment has had the effect of bringing the Name of Jesus Christ to the knowledge of the whole praetorian guard, into whose keeping I have been delivered. I may live or I may die ; what does it matter if the Name of Jesus Christ is magnified? To me life is Christ and death is gain. If I have to choose between the two I scarce know what my choice would be ; for your sakes I should elect to live, but the desire is strong within me to break up my camp and go home to be with Christ; for that is very far better."

If we compare this passage in Philippians with the passage from 2 Corinthians, we shall find that while they differ in one respect, they agree closely in another. They differ in this, that while, in writing to the Corinthians in or about the year 55, S. Paul still on the whole expected to live to the coming of the Lord, he had practically abandoned that hope when he wrote, five or six years after, to the Church at Philippi. He now looks forward to death, if not at once, yet eventually ; and he does not shrink from the prospect. On the other hand, the two Epistles agree completely as to the state of the Christian dead. They are " absent from the body," but "present," "at home," "with the Lord." They are "with Christ," which is "very far better " than being in the body.

Here, then, is the one contribution which S. Paul makes to our knowledge of life after death. The dead in Christ are "with Christ." Let us consider what those two words mean. The Twelve were "with Christ" 1 during the ministry in Galilee. The risen saints will be ' ' with Christ, ' ' the risen and ascended Christ, in the heavenly Kingdom. But how can the dead, the spirits of the departed, be with Him in Paradise? The case of the penitent robber on the cross is not in point, for when our Lord said to him, "Thou shalt be with me," He was Himself about to descend into Hades, and His human spirit was there during the interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection ; but at the Resurrection it left Hades and rejoined His body, and in the risen body ascended to the Father. How, then, can he be still with the spirits of the dead ?

In a sense He is with us here on earth. We have His word for it : "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." 2 We 1 Mark iii. 14. * Matt, xxviii. 20.

believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ with His Church, in the Eucharist, and in the whole life of faith. But this Presence which we have here is absence when compared with His Presence with those who have died in faith. I should not dare to say this if S. Paul had not said it : " whilst we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord." He does not mean, of course, that we are really absent from Him, but that we do not and cannot realize His presence. But we shall realize it when we come to leave the body. It will still be a spiritual presence ; S. Paul does not say that we shall see the Lord ; that is reserved for the risen body, with its new faculty of vision ; but he says that we shall be consciously and constantly with him — as consciously, as constantly as the Twelve were in Galilee, only as spirits with Spirit. There is nothing more than this in Heaven itself, except that there we shall "see Him as He is " : x " so shall we ever be with the Lord " 2 is the utmost that the Apostle can say of life after the resurrection, and (but for the word "ever") he says the same of the faithful departed.

What must be the effect of this realized Presence on those who live in it ? Surely the first

1 1 John Hi. 2. a 1 Thess. iv. 17.

ind the greatest will be purification. ' ' He that is near Me," our Lord is reported to have said, " is near the fire." It is the fire of love; but it will burn up, we may believe, all the imperfections which cling to the saints even to the hour of their departure hence, and which, so far as we can judge (since death cannot change I character), must pass over with them into the unseen world. If there is a purgatory there, it is not what the Middle Ages imagined, a fire of penal suffering ; but it is the all-holy presence of Jesus Christ, in which all that is not holy must melt away and vanish. Another effect, we cannot doubt, will be the perfecting of this spirit in knowledge and love, and in all the moral image of God. If life here in the Church is of the nature of an education for the life to come, it is but the school which prepares for the higher education which is to follow. The higher education of the soul is to be found in the presence of the great Master with those who wait in the unseen world for His coming and their rising again. With this may go our training for the higher service of the great future ; for we cannot suppose that the conscious life of the vast majority of Christ's servants is spent in inactivity; they are surely serving Him while they wait ; and by serving there, they learn to serve in ways far beyond our imagination, when the day of Christ brings these new powers and opportunities.

" Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord." 11 They rest from their labours," 1 for work in Paradise is not labour. Their works follow with them ; not one is forgotten or without the promise of reward. So says the Revelation of S. John, which paints in bright colouring their present life. But it is S. Paul who has seized upon the supreme felicity of the blessed dead. They are 41 with Christ," with Him who Himself was dead and now lives, who has the keys of Hades and of death, who will be with His saints there, and in due time will call them forth, purified and perfected, to share His glorious risen life.

1 Rev. xiv. 13.

Ill

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the keystone of the Christian hope. Take it away, and the arch will collapse, and all that it supports be reduced to a ruin. We have S. Paul's word for this: "If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, and your faith also is vain." 1 The Resurrection of Christ claims to be a historical fact. We have full particulars of time and place. It is not a myth, like the Egyptian story of Osiris. It is not an idea or a doctrine only, but an event which we hold to have actually occurred, as truly as any other well attested fact in history. I ask for special attention to the historical character of the Resurrection of our Lord, because there are in our time many Christian teachers who resolve the event into a mystery, and the risen life into a spiritual survival. In Germany there are not, I suppose, half a dozen theologians known outside their own country who hold the old faith that the body which was born of the Virgin Mary and crucified under Pontius Pilate was raised to life again ; and there are not wanting some amongst ourselves who follow some way along the same road of doubt as to the actual Resurrection of our Lord. Let us, then, begin by asking ourselves what evidence we have that our Lord truly and literally rose from the dead.

And first, who are the witnesses? For ourselves the immediate witnesses are the four Gospels : S. Mark, the earliest, who, according to the oldest Christian tradition, followed the account of S. Peter, whose disciple he was ; S. Luke, who when he was with S. Paul in Judaea had ample opportunities of getting information from members of the Church at Jerusalem who had seen the risen Lord ; " S. Matthew," or the early writer whose book is called by his name, and is probably based in fact on S. Matthew's work ; S. John, who was an eye-witness, although his Gospel was not written till the last years of the first century. There is indeed a fifth Gospel witness, for the last twelve verses of S. Mark are not a part of the original second Gospel, but were added in the second century, probably from another early Gospel, to make up for the loss of the last leaf of S. Mark ; or it may have been because the original S. Mark was left unfinished, breaking off at xvi. 8.