How this shall take place God has not definitely revealed to us. But God has given us reason and common sense to enable us to draw conclusions from what He has revealed. Since in that life I am the same conscious "I," with the same consciously continuous personality, with the same conscience and memory, I may surely expect that the Holy Spirit "who hath begun a good work in me and will continue it until the day of Jesus Christ"—will continue it in much the same natural way as here, through Conscience and Memory and the Sense of His Presence. Only that these will be all more keen and effective and free from the disturbance of the bodily senses and the distractions of this life on earth.
CONSCIENCE here is the throne of the Holy Ghost, from which He rules and directs my life. Therefore my body is "the temple of the Holy Ghost." But Conscience here is greatly weakened by fears and hopes and ambitions and distractions of various kinds. At times, when I lie awake at night and think about my life, or when I enter into my closet to prepare by special concentration of spirit for my Holy Communion, I get some dim notions of what Conscience might effect in me if it had a free hand. In THAT life of close spiritual concentration, when the outer world is shut off and the soul enters into its own deepest recesses, contemplating itself, contemplating its past and its future, contemplating the deep tender love of Him who is there present as in Palestine long ago, and feeling that in spite of all my shameful ingratitude He is loving me and blessing me and watching tenderly over me—surely I may expect great things of the operation of Conscience in me.
MEMORY in this life is a very wonderful thing. It can call up in a moment, for Conscience to work on, pictures of half a century ago. But in the fast crowding impressions on the senses Memory is overtaxed and has to lay away in its storehouse of subconsciousness whole tracts of the past which never rise up before my conscious thought at all. Psychological science has much to say in late years about this storehouse of subconscious memory and the power that, unknown to me, it is exerting on my life. It is there all the time, "under the threshold." These buried memories are alive, ready to spring up, but asleep—in abeyance.
§ 3
Now think what this means for Conscience and for Memory as the handmaid of Conscience in the great contemplative life after Death. There is no good or evil thing that I have ever done but Conscience has pronounced on. Some of these judgments I remember. Some of them I forget. In the many distractions of life and the desire to escape painful thoughts, there has dropped down under the threshold of my conscious thought a vast store of memories of which I am oblivious, but of which one and another and another springs up at times unexpectedly with a startling reminder of the great hidden store behind. I meet by chance an old friend of my boyhood, and as he talks about the old times, picture after picture springs up into the light, memories which had long gone from me and which would never have sprung up from "under the threshold" but for the chance stimulation of his talk.
We have often heard of drowning people on the verge of death having the forgotten memories of half a lifetime flashed back in a moment. An old friend once told me a curious experience. "I was crossing a railway line hurriedly on a wet day. As I rushed over the rails the Express came in view. I slipped and fell—fortunately into a hollow where men had been working, and swift as a flash the Express swept over me. The experience of that half minute I shall never forget. It seemed that my whole life was blazoned before me in thirty seconds. Things that I had not remembered for forty years past flashed back in a moment as if they had happened yesterday."
That is what Memory can do even in this life under strong excitation, calling up its forgotten stores. Think what its power may be in that life as a handmaid to Conscience. With all its old lumber rooms of forgotten deeds thrown open—with all the forgotten feelings of my life—boyhood, youth, manhood—open for my contemplation. My impatience and God's patience, my sorrows and why God sent them, my mercies, all the kindly providences of God working unknown to me all my days.
And my sins—some sins that I hate to think of, some that I had almost succeeded in forgetting, all standing out clearly before me in the unsparing light of that mysterious life.
I sat alone with my Conscience
In the place where time had ceased.
We discoursed of my former living
In the land where the years increased.
And I felt I should have to answer
The questions it put to me,
And to face those questions and answers
In that dim eternity.
And the ghosts of forgotten actions
Came floating before my sight,
And things that I thought were dead things
Were alive with a terrible might.
And the vision of all my past life
Was an awful thing to face
Alone, alone with my Conscience,
In that strange and lonely place.