Without hope or courage, a little girl sits staring out of great innocent eyes because she is under-nourished. This poor fading flower is in striking contrast with the little apple-cheeked girl in bloomers who believeth all things and hopeth all things and (as her brother knows) can do pretty much all things. This startling difference requires no lengthy explanation; nourishment and exercise tell the whole story.
So in our day many languid souls ask, "Where is thy God, and who knows whether there is a life beyond?"
For an instructive contrast, place beside such a life the life of Jesus. Living in the bosom of the Father, doing the Father's will day by day, seeing life in the light of divine love, and witnessing the effect upon those whom he won to a life of love and service, made it impossible for Jesus to lose faith in immortality. While enduring the pain of the cross He could say to the malefactor, "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise."
The abundant, buoyant life nourished in the life of God and exercised in the service of God and man, is the source of hope for the life that is yet to be.
4. Conscious of the existence of God, we become certain of immortality
It is clear as daylight that God Himself will be defeated if He loses His family. Attention has already been called to the fact that, with the loss of His family, God would be reduced to a child-god playing with a toy world; and that without the coöperation of other wills He could not finish His toy. He would be in the position of having a world full of raw material, material capable of infinite, spiritual and social uses, only He would be destitute of any such help as would enable Him to turn the universe to any account whatsoever. If He were left solitary in the world, all God's labors in creation would lead directly to shameful defeat. Without other inhabitants than Himself, the universe would become one colossal piece of junk. Yes, it would be worse than that; even junk has value where there are people. Without intelligent souls to inhabit the universe, an appalling night would settle over all creation. Love, truth, wisdom, righteousness, and the last semblance of a kingdom would be gone; and God Himself would as well die with His children; He would be destitute of character, and incapable of completing that which He began on such a magnificent scale. Having a universe like the present on His hands, with no one to use it, nor to inhabit it, God would be an object worthy of ridicule. The idea that God could murder His children, or carelessly allow them to perish, and then spend an eternity in an unfinished and depopulated world shatters reason itself; such a thought is too appalling and abhorrent to be entertained for a moment. Just as sure as there is a God, we shall continue to live. Anyone who believes in God and does not believe in immortality surely never gave two consecutive logical thoughts to the subject. (1) Ultimately God will have no children at all, (2) or He will have an endless succession of short-lived children, (3) or He will have children that survive all changes.
The first obnoxious idea we regard as impossible and unthinkable. A being that could live in perpetual and absolute solitude, with no more reason and character than such a position would warrant, is not a person that we should call God anyway.
The second thought of God having an endless succession of short-lived children is in some respects worse.
In the autumn of nineteen hundred and fourteen, a friend said to me:
"What is there, I should like to know, in Christianity? Here we've had the Christian religion for more than nineteen hundred years—and now this war. Oh, there is nothing in it!"