But this message comes to us to comfort the hearts and strengthen the faith of thinking men and women who are puzzled and perplexed and estranged from Christ by the terrible perplexities of life and of God's judgments as they understand or misunderstand them. You have often thought of the difficulty of reconciling the righteous justice of God with His Fatherly love. You have often thought, in wondering doubt, "Why did Christ come so late in the world's history? What of all the old-world souls who could not have known Him here on earth? For you know that there is no salvation save by Jesus Christ. You have read in the Old Testament of whole nations, men, women and little children, swept away in one dread destruction. What of them? You have wondered about the vast heathen world passing in thousands every day into the Unseen, with no knowledge of Him. You have sometimes read the Registrar-General's return of deaths in your city, and thought of all the little dead children, brought up in evil homes; of sullen prisoners hardened in the jails; of grown men and women in the city's slums who, through the hardening influence of circumstances, had little real chance of ever being touched by that tenderness of God's love which leads men to love Him in return. You know they have not died in Christ. What of them?" If you had to stand at some death-beds at which some of us have to stand you would feel as we do the insistent pressure of that question for all in the ancient or modern world—the vast countless world of the dead—who had no real chance of knowing Christ or being touched by His love here on earth.
Oh, the generations old
Over whom no church bell tolled
Christless lifting up blind eyes
To the silence of the skies.
For the innumerable dead
Is my soul disquieted!
Trust them with God, says this teaching of the Creed. Christ will do right by them. Christ does not forget them.
Trust Him, though thy sight be dim,
Doubt for them is doubt of Him.
* * * * *
Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen
Yearns to reach those souls in prison,
Through all depths of sin and loss
Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross.
Never yet abyss was found
Deeper than that Cross could sound.
In these two chapters we have touched on the chief statements in the
New Testament and in the beliefs of the primitive Church as to the near
Hereafter. There are others of less importance to be referred to as we
go on. It seemed well to lay down some basis to proceed on.
[1] See Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison.
CHAPTER V
THE CRISIS OF DEATH
In an earlier chapter I placed you in imagination in the darkened death chamber, looking on the face of your dead and feeling the keen pressure of the inevitable questions: What has happened to him? Where is he? What is he seeing? What is he knowing in that mysterious world into which he has gone?
That death chamber is the best place on earth for solemn thought about the Hereafter. But when you are thinking only of your own dead and your heart is all quivering in pain and longing you are not in the best condition for cool, clear searching after truth. Imagination and sentiment are apt to run away with reason. The tender tortured woman is apt to believe too easily what the heart longs to believe. The stricken man in his deep numb pain is in danger of yielding to hopeless doubt about it all.