Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of. But death is always man's contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without regretted partings. And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more than an interval between ourselves and the tomb. To every thoughtful person the question is forced home, "If a man die, shall he live again?"
What did Jesus Christ contribute towards answering our question?
He made everlasting life much more necessary to His followers than to the rest of men. By bringing life to light and showing us how infinitely rich it is, He kindled in
us the passion for the second life, and rendered immortality indispensable for Christians.
Christ enhances every man's worth in his own eyes. We find that we mean so much to Him and to His God and Father, that we come to mean infinitely more to ourselves. "If," writes a modern essayist, "a man feels that his life is spent in expedients for killing time, he finds it hard to suppose that he can go on forever trying to kill eternity. It is when he thinks on the littleness that makes up his day, on the poor trifles he cares for—his pipe, his dinner, his ease, his gains, his newspaper—that he feels so cramped and cribbed, cabined and confined, that he loses the power of conceiving anything vast or sublime—immortality among the rest. When a man rises in his aims and looks at the weal of the universe, and the harmony of the soul with God, then we feel that extinction would be grievous." And it is just this uplift into a new outlook that men find in Jesus Christ. A Second Century Christian, writing to his friend, Diognetus, characterizes Christianity as "this new interest which has entered into life." We look upon each
day with a fresh expectancy; we view ourselves with a new reverence. The waste wilderness within, from which we despaired of producing anything, must under Christ's recreating touch become an Eden, where we feel
Pison and Euphrates roll
Round the great garden of a kingly soul.
But is this emparadised life to be some day thrown aside? G.J. Romanes, whose Christian upbringing had instilled in him the distinctively Christian appreciation of the value of his own life, when his scientific opinions robbed him of the hope of immortality, wrote: "Although from henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words that 'the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as I now find it, at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the
sharpest pang of which my instinct is susceptible."
And Jesus increases the significance of people for each other. He possessed and conveys the genius for appreciation. He came that life might become more abundant, and every human relation deeper, tenderer, richer. It is to love that death is intolerable. Professor Palmer of Harvard, a few years ago, delivered a lecture upon Intimations of Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakespere, in which he showed that, when a man finds himself truly in love, mortality becomes unthinkable to him. And for Christians love and friendship contain more than they do for other men. Christ takes us more completely out of ourselves and wraps us up in those to whom we feel ourselves bound. He makes life touch life at more points, life draw from life more copious inspirations, life cling to life with more affectionate tenacity. He roots and grounds us in love, and that is to root us in the souls of other men; then to tear them from us irrevocably—parents, children, husband, wife, lover, beloved,