The Greek had his Elysian Fields, his daffodil meadows where the Eidola, the shadowy images of the dead, moved in a world of shadows; and his islands of the blest, where Achilles and Tydides unlaced the helmet from their flowing hair. The Scandinavian dreamed of his green sylvan paradise hereafter, amid the barren wastes. The Indian saw God in lightning, heard him in the thunder's roar, and viewed beyond the cloud-capped hills his hunters' paradise. And in the perennial hereafter in the all-life-giving sun there are green fields, daffodil meadows, golden light, rainbows that never fade, glorified cities, white-robed innocence, the crown and the palm branch, the throne of serene majesty, the golden harp and the song of rejoicing, and all-abounding happiness, innocent, thrilling, intense and unending.
The rare and radiant physical beauties of heaven we cannot describe, but it is a place where no guilty step enters the gates of pearl, in the city of God; no polluting presence flings shadows on the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. It is the dwelling place of angels and just men made perfect, and spirits of saints in celestial glory. There is no darkness, envy, hatred or slander, no gold mixed with dross. No bleared and blighted crowds, degraded out of the semblance of humanity, crawl, like singed moths, around the flaring house of multiplied temptations. Where boyhood shall not so live as to make its own manhood miserable; where manhood shall not so live as to make old age dishonorable and death ghastly. The apples of Sodom cannot grow on the same soil with the Tree of Life.
In other stars and countless worlds there may be work for us to do. What radiant ministrations, what infinite activities, what never-ending progress, what immeasurable happiness, what living ecstasies of unknown raptures may surround us in the beauty and loveliness of the land of the leal, in the life supernal?
Heaven is not a reward but a continuity, not a change but a development. It means a place of love and goodness where we are one with God and playfellows with the angels. Present science would change God into a struggle of careless forces or a complexity of impersonal laws. Let us reject the Chinese idea; they believe in God, but worship the devil, because they think the devil's rule predominates.
Let us discard the pagan deification of annihilation, and the modern agnostic's plea for suicide, and the Greek poet's pessimistic postulate: "It were best never to have been born, and next best to depart as soon as possible." Let us grieve at the dark shadows flung by theologians athwart God's light upon those who believe that human reason, conscience, and experience, as well as Scripture, are the books of God. Phrases which belong to metaphor, to imagery, to poetry, to emotion should not be formulated into dogmas, or crystallized into creed.
Discard the tyrannous realism of ambiguous metaphors, the asserted infallibility of isolated words. Canon Farrar says: "Erase from our Bible the erroneous disputed renderings of the three words, 'damnation, hell and everlasting.' Not one of these three expressions ought to stand any longer in our English Bible."
He says further: "There has never been a human being yet since time began, however beautiful, gifted, bright with genius, or radiant with fascination, who has sinned with impunity." Evil and punishment, as Plato said, walk this world with their heads tied together, and the rivet that links their iron link is of adamant. It needs no lightning stroke, or divine interposition, no miraculous message to avenge God's violated laws. They avenge themselves. The hell fire of the Bible was a spiritual fire which does not burn the flesh, but purifies the spirit. Not a material fire, but self-kindled fire, an internal fever—in fact, remorse for remembered sins—a figurative representation of a moral process by which restoration shall be effected.
When earthly life vanishes and we see in the visions of the soul an endless life and being in countless worlds of destiny, death has no terrors. The thought of the pale, cold body enwrapt in its winding sheet, coffined and alone in the narrow grave, its last sad dwelling place, with the grass growing above, where the lonely cricket chirps through the silent night, does not disturb the calm and reasoning soul. A few years hence and we shall all cross the dark river to the shadowy unknown shore and learn the mysteries that lie beyond. But where is that wondrous shore, and where will all of the now living inhabitants of earth be a century hence? Not floating in the marvelous belt of atmosphere which surrounds the earth. Nor on a changeful planet like our earth. Not floating in the frigid ether of space, but, if my hypothesis is correct, they will be celestial residents in the self-luminous, all-life-giving sun.