Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child: “What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.” Whittier, Snowbound, 200 sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.” Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope: “For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”
The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”
(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).
John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”; 10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people: “We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”
Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence. “In reality,” he said, “it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.” It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.
There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour: “Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.” George Dana Boardman: “Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”
George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures: “Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.” Athanasius: “Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God” (quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial. [pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment. Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
II. The Intermediate State.
The Scriptures affirm the conscious existence of both the righteous and the wicked, after death, and prior to the resurrection. In the intermediate state the soul is without a body, yet this state is for the righteous a state of conscious joy, and for the wicked a state of conscious suffering.