O Death! where is thy sting?’
Many specimens might be given if our object were to collect together the Christian Hymns relating to Heaven. Sometimes, too, we have beautiful descriptions not in verse, and Bunyan’s account of the reception of Christian and Hopeful at the Celestial City will at once occur to the reader as not inferior in the claims of true poetry to anything that we have in verse.
255. Now, if we analyse such hymns of joy, we find in them two prominent chords, one or other of which is always struck. The first expresses the Christian’s sense of relief from sorrow and death, and the second his joy in the anticipated presence of Christ—his intense desire to behold the King in his beauty.
These chords are struck together by St. John, when he says (Rev. xxi. 3, 4), ‘And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’ In other respects the descriptions of the Christian heaven are no doubt figurative. They are intended for Christians of all ages of the world, and have hardly any reference to the material conditions of life in a future state. These could not be apprehended by believers 1800 years ago, inasmuch as we can hardly be said to grasp them now. Nevertheless there is one direction in which we do think we are able to obtain a glimpse into the conditions of this future life.
256. One of the most prominent characteristics of even the well-directed human mind is its insatiable curiosity. How intensely anxious we all are to realise the conditions of the life of our forefathers in the ruder and earlier times; how interested in every scrap of intelligence which reaches us from the dead old world! How interested too in any light thrown upon the civilisation which preceded these old times! What would not any man give for half an hour with Socrates or Plato? what would he not give, be he Christian or unbeliever, to have pictured out vividly and truly before him some episode in the life of Christ? In a tedious, toilsome, tantalising, roundabout way we do indeed get some passing glimpses into these ancient historical ages.
The earth is not unlike the human brain, in that it contains in itself certain memories of the past: and, just as we rummage out and hunt up in our brains old memories, so do the historian and the antiquary search about in the earth for that memory which it retains of those distant but glorious ages. But the universe, no less than the individual, has another memory besides the material one, and we have endeavoured ([Art. 196]) to convince our readers that nothing is really lost, the past being always present in the universe. If this be the case, it may readily be conceived that this universal memory may by some process of exaltation and intensification, or as it were by some relay battery of the universe, be occasionally quickened into such a life that the individual in the future and glorified state may be enabled (through the power of the Lord) to realise scenes that happened in the far distant past. For if so much can be accomplished with a thing so little plastic as the material memory of the earth, what may not be done with that infinitely more plastic form of existence which we term the world to come?
257. Again, if in this present world we have great difficulty in realising our own past, we have even greater difficulty in realising what is at this very moment taking place in remote parts of the present visible universe. Astronomers and Physicists agree that life is possible in the planet Mars, and it is quite likely that intelligent beings analogous to ourselves exist at the present moment on the surface of that planet, but we shall never in this life know for certain anything about them. There is an insurmountable barrier to physical inquiry as great as if Mars belonged to the unseen universe, instead of being, what he is in reality, our next-door neighbour in the present.
Now, may not this barrier be removed in the future state? This has been a favourite topic with scientific theologians, and we believe that all who have speculated on the conditions of a future life have unanimously agreed that we shall have much greater freedom of motion in the world to come. There can be no doubt that our relations to time and space will then be greatly altered and enlarged. Men shall run to and fro in the universe, and knowledge shall be increased.
258. But yet the picture is not altogether one of intellectual brightness and beauty. It wears also a moral aspect, and upon this almost exclusively the Christian records dwell. We are told in these records that nothing is forgotten. Christ tells us (St. Luke viii. 17), ‘Nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.’ And again St. John tells us (Rev. xx. 12), ‘I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.’ This thought has been developed by the Rev. Alexander Macleod, D.D., in a work entitled Our own Lives the Books of Judgment. This author points out that in many cases it may not be even necessary to appeal to the universe for the record which is therein written, for this is sufficiently stamped upon the body itself, and he then draws a vivid and lurid picture of the sensual man in whom the mortal body is like a parchment written within and without—a truly mournful and terrible record of the deeds done in the body.
But if all this is possible with an organism possessing so little plasticity as the natural body, and where the wish of the individual is to preserve a respectable exterior, what must be the case in the soul[66] of such a man?—‘If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?’ What a hideous and horrible likeness must not that foul thing have that issues forth from the ‘grave and gate of Death’ into the presence of the Unseen and Eternal?