What follows? This. If I am fully conscious what am I conscious of? Surely, first of all I must be conscious of myself, conscious of the continuity of my personal identity, conscious of the continuity of my personal character. I must feel that I am the same "I," I am still "myself." Death which removes only the outer covering leaves the Ego just where it was. No better. No worse. The Bible lays no emphasis at all on death as making any change in character. Our Lord assumes the characters as remaining the same. The mere act of dying does not alter character. I am the same I. I have entered into a new environment more favourable for the exercise of my faculties, more adaptable to the acquisition of knowledge, more helpful, I trust, to growth in good. But I am the same "I." As I leave off here I begin there. I take into that world just myself as I have made it. If I have made the best of myself what more should I desire to take? Consciousness, Memory, Thought, Love, Character. If I have not made the best of myself, if I have acquired a distaste for God, for holiness, still I take in myself just as I stand. Think how tremendously solemn that makes the life here. It is the place of character making for the life there. I can never, never, never get away from myself. I shall always be myself. You remember what our Lord said from the other side of the grave. "Handle Me and see it is I MYSELF."
It is I myself, the very same self. It is they themselves, the very same selves whom I loved and who loved me so dearly. In that solemn hour after death, believe it, your boy, your wife, your husband, who is experiencing the startling revelations of the new life is feeling that life as an unbroken continuance of the life begun on earth. Only the environment is changed. He feels himself the same boy or man that he was an hour ago, with the same character, aspirations, desires, the same love and courage and hope. But oh, what a different view of all things! How clearly he recognizes God's love and holiness. How clearly he sees himself—his whole past life. If ever he cared for Christ and His will, how longingly, wonderingly, he is reaching out to Him. If ever he loved you tenderly on earth, how deeply and tenderly he is loving you to-day. In all the whirl of awe and wonder and curiosity and hope, love must stand supreme. For "love never faileth." "And now," says St. Paul, "abideth Faith, Hope and Love (these three that abide for ever), but the greatest of these is love."
§ 3
What else have you learned? That HE REMEMBERS CLEARLY the old life and the old home and the old comrades and the old scenes on earth. There is no conjecturing about that. That goes without saying if "I" am the same "I" in that world. Personal identity of course postulates memory which binds into one the old life and the new. And the Bible takes that for granted. We saw that Lazarus remembered Dives and Dives remembered Lazarus and remembered his old home and the five young brothers who grew up with him. He remembers that they have grown to be selfish men like himself and is troubled for them. And Abraham assumes it as a matter of course. "My son, remember that thou in thy lifetime," etc. Our Lord comes back from Death remembering all the past as if Death made no chasm at all in His memory. "Go and meet Me in Galilee," He says; "Lo I have told you" (before I died). And the redeemed in the future life are represented as remembering and praising God who had redeemed them from their sins on earth.
So you may be quite sure that your dear one is remembering you and storing up in his memory all your love in the past. Did your wife ever tell you on earth how happy you had made her? Did the old father and mother now in the Unseen ever thank God for the comfort you had been to them during their declining years? Be sure that in that land of love these will be amongst the most precious pictures in their storehouse of memory.
§ 4
And he has taken with him all the treasures of mind and soul which by God's grace he has won for himself on earth. A man can take nothing of the external things—of gold or lands. Nothing of what he HAS but all of what he is—all that he has gained IN HIMSELF. The treasures of memory, of disciplined powers, of enlarged capacities, of a pure and loving heart. All the enrichment of the mind by study, all the love of man, all the love of God, all the ennobling of character which has come through the struggle after right and duty. These are the true treasures which go on with us into that land where neither rust nor moth doth corrupt.
§ 5
And he is "WITH CHRIST."
The Bible teaches that the faithful who have died in Christ are happy and blest in Paradise even though the Final Heaven and the Beatific Vision is still but a thing to be longed for far off in the future. Lazarus is "comforted" after his hard life on earth. "The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, there shall no torment touch them." "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord … they rest from their labours." But best of all it assures us that they are WITH CHRIST. "Lord Jesus receive my spirit" the dying Stephen prayed as he passed into the Unseen. They are "absent from the body at home with the Lord." They "depart to be with Christ which is far better."