The Gospel of the Hereafter Part 7

Why, even if the Bible were to give you no hint of it, do you not see that the deepest, n.o.blest instincts that G.o.d has implanted in us cry out for recognition of our departed; and where G.o.d is concerned it is not too much to say that the deepest, n.o.blest instincts are, in a sense, prophecies. This pa.s.sionate affection, the n.o.blest thing that G.o.d has implanted in us, makes it impossible to believe that we should be but solitary isolated spirits amongst a crowd of others whom we did not know, that we should live in the society of happy souls hereafter and never know that the spirit next us was that of a mother or husband or friend or child. We know that the Paradise and earth lives come from the same G.o.d who is the same always. Into this life He never sends us alone. There is the mother love waiting and the family affection around us, and as we grow older love and friends.h.i.+p and a.s.sociation with others is one of the great needs and pleasures of life and one of the chief means of training the higher side of us. Unless His method changes we may surely hope that He will do something similar hereafter, for love is the plant that must overtop all others in the whole Kingdom of G.o.d.

Again, love and friends.h.i.+p must be LOVE AND FRIENDs.h.i.+P for SOME ONE.

If we don't know any one, then we cannot love, and human love must die without an object. But the Bible makes it a main essential of the religious life that "He that loveth G.o.d love his brother also."

If we shall not know one another, why then this undying memory of departed ones, this aching void that is never filled on earth? Alas for us! For we are worse off than the lower animals. The calf is taken from the cow, the kittens are taken from their mother and in a few days they are forgotten. But the poor human mother never forgets.

When her head is bowed with age, when she has forgotten nearly all else on earth you can bring the tears into her eyes by speaking of the child that died in her arms forty years ago. Will G.o.d disappoint that tender love, that one supreme thing which is "the most like G.o.d within the soul"?

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There can be no real reason, I repeat, for doubting the fact of recognition unless the Bible should distinctly state the contrary. And so far from doing this the Bible, in its very few references to the Hereafter life, always a.s.sumes the fact and never in any way contradicts it.

Notice first the curiously persistent formula in which Old Testament chroniclers speak of death. "He died in a good old age and WAS GATHERED UNTO HIS PEOPLE and they buried him." "Gathered unto his people" can hardly mean burial with his people, for the burial is mentioned after it. It comes between the dying and the burial. And I note that even at Moses' burial on the lone mountain top this phrase is solemnly used. "The Lord said unto him get thee up into the mount and die in the mount AND BE GATHERED TO THY PEOPLE." Miriam was buried in the distant desert, Aaron's body lay on the slopes of Mount Hor, and the wise little mother who made the ark of bulrushes long ago had found a grave, I suppose, in the brick-fields of Egypt. Did it mean that he came back to them all in the life unseen when he was "gathered to his people"?

David seemed to think that he would know his dead child. "I shall go to him but he shall not return to me."

Our Lord a.s.sumes that Dives and Lazarus knew each other. And in another pa.s.sage He uses a very homely ill.u.s.tration of a friendly gathering when He speaks of those who shall "sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom." And again in His advice about the right use of riches. "Make to yourselves friends by the means of the mammon of unrighteousness that when ye die they may receive you into the everlasting habitations" (Luke xvi. 9). Surely, that at least suggests recognition and a pleasant welcoming on the other side.

I remember well, how in the pain of a great bereavement, His words to the penitent thief came into my life like a message from the Beyond.

"To-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise." I put myself in the place of that poor friendless man taking his lonely leap off into the dark and felt what a joy and comfort it must have been. "To-day we shall be together again at the other side." Not, "I will remember thee," but, "Thou shalt be with Me." Not, by and by when I come in My Kingdom, but "To-day." If anybody knew, surely Jesus knew. If His words meant anything surely they meant we shall be conscious of each other, we shall know each other as the two friendless ones who hung on the cross together.

Then I see St. Paul (though he is referring to the later stage of existence) comforting bereaved mourners with the thought of meeting those whom Christ shall bring with Him. Where would be the comfort of it if they should not know them? He expects to meet his converts and present them to Christ. How could he say this if he thought He would not know them?

I wonder if anybody really doubts it after all. Just think of it!

With Christ in Paradise and not knowing or loving any comrade soul! Is that possible in the land of love? With our dear ones in Paradise and never a thrill of recognition as we touch in spiritual intercourse the mother, or wife, or husband, or child for whose presence we are longing! Cannot you imagine our wondering joy when our questionings are set at rest? Cannot you imagine the Lord in His tender reproach, "Oh, thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?"

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Sometimes one vaguely wonders, How can there be spiritual recognition?

How shall we recognize each other without this accustomed bodily shape?

And in the effort to realize the fact of recognition men have made many guesses. But really we know nothing about the "How." We know that the self in that life can think and remember and love. We know that we can still communicate thoughts to each other. Can we not leave with G.o.d the "how" of recognition?

In several places Scripture seems to suggest that the souls of the departed are clothed in some kind of visible spirit shape. They are spoken of as not only recognized but in some way seen as in the case of Samuel and of Dives and Lazarus and of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration and of our Lord Himself in the spiritual body after the Resurrection. They seem to be visible when they please and as they please.

But when a mother asks, how then should she know her child who died twenty years ago, one feels that recognition must be something spiritual and not depending on visible shape. Even here on earth much of our recognition is spiritual. Soul recognizes soul. We recognize in some degree good and evil character of souls even through the coa.r.s.e covering of the body. We instinctively, as we say, trust or distrust people on first appearance. Or again, a slight young stripling goes away to India and returns in twenty years a big, bearded, broad-shouldered man, with practically no outward resemblance to the boy that went away. But even though he strive to conceal his ident.i.ty he cannot hide it long from his mother. She looks into his eyes and her soul leaps out to him. Call it instinct, insight, intuition, sympathy, what you please, it is the spiritual vision, soul recognizing soul. If that spiritual vision apart from bodily shape plays so great a part in recognition here, may it not be all-sufficient there? In that life where there is consciousness, character, memory, love, longing for our dear ones, and power of communication, is it conceivable that we should have intercourse with our loved and longed for, without any thrill of recognition? Surely not. Instinctively we shall know.

It was not mother that I knew thy face, It was my heart that cried out Mother![1]

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P.S.--I let these words stand as they appear in the earlier editions of this book. For they are true. But to my mind now there is a far more probable answer. It is this: That it is not you who will have to do the recognizing; at any rate that you will not be first with it.

If it be true, as we have reason to believe (see next chapter), that your dear one there is watching your life on earth, of course he would know you at once. While, year by year, you have been changing from youth to old age he has been near you all the time. He knows you as familiarly as if he had been on earth beside you. Probably he has been waiting and watching as you came through.

And whatever change has pa.s.sed on him in his new life, surely he too will be easier to recognize when he has claimed you first.

Whether this suggestion appeals or no, at any rate we need have no doubt that we shall know one another there. Nay, shall we not know each other there far more thoroughly than we do here? "Now," says St.

Paul, "we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then shall I know even as also I have been known." St. Paul's thought is of our fuller knowledge of things hereafter. Does it not include also our fuller knowledge of one another? I met this pa.s.sage lately in a letter of Phillips Brooks: "I wonder what sort of knowledge we shall have of our friends in the Hereafter and what we shall do to keep up our intimacy with one another. There will be one good thing about it. I suppose we shall see through one another to begin with and start off on quite a new basis of mutual understanding. I should think it would be awful at first, but afterwards it must be nice to feel that your friends knew the worst of you and you need not be continually in fear that they will find out what you really are."

I think a simple natural thought such as that seems to bring the idea of spiritual recognition more within our ken. But we must remember that our conjectures about the MODE of recognition have very little basis. The FACT of recognition we may practically a.s.sume. The "how"

we must leave with G.o.d.

"Soul of my soul I shall meet thee again.

With G.o.d be the rest."

[1] Momerie. Immortality.

CHAPTER VIII

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

We have already seen that the evidence of Scriptures leads us to the a.s.surance that our dear ones departed are living a vivid, conscious life; that there is continuance of personal ident.i.ty. "I" am still "I," and that there is memory still, clear and distinct, of the old friends and the old scenes on earth.

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We pa.s.s on to consider the relations between ourselves and them. Do they know now of our life on earth? Can there be between us comrades.h.i.+p in any sense? Can there be love and care and sympathy and prayer between us on these two sides of the grave, as there is between friends on earth on the two sides of the Atlantic?

The Church says yes, and calls it in her creed, the Communion of Saints. The Communion of Saints--a very grand name, but it means only a very simple thing--just loving sympathy between us and these elder brothers and sisters beyond the grave.

The term "saint" in the New Testament only means any poor humble servant of Christ "set apart" to Him, baptized into His name.

Communion means Fellows.h.i.+p, Comrades.h.i.+p. Therefore the Communion of Saints simply means fellows.h.i.+p between Christians, and in church language has come chiefly to mean fellows.h.i.+p between Christians at this side and at the other side of death. Knowledge and comrades.h.i.+p and sympathy and love and prayer between the church MILITANT on earth and the church EXPECTANT in Paradise, as they both look forward to the final joy of the church TRIUMPHANT in Heaven, and meantime cooperate one with the other to bring the whole world within the Kingdom of Christ.

You see that it is a prominent doctrine of the Church's creed, and rightly understood, it is a very beautiful and touching doctrine--not only because of the union of fellows.h.i.+p with our departed--but especially because the bond of that union and fellows.h.i.+p is our dear Lord Himself, whom we and they alike love and thank and praise and pray to and wors.h.i.+p, and from whom we and they alike derive the Divine sustenance of our souls.

You know what a bond of union it is between two men even to find that they both deeply honour and admire and love the same friend and benefactor. They become one in him. The Bible means that, but a great deal more, when it says we are "one in Christ Jesus."

Here on earth, there in Paradise, is His presence. Here on earth, there in Paradise, is the love and prayer and praise going forth to Him, and the strength and power of G.o.d coming back from Him. You know His own simile, "I am the Vine, ye are the branches." From the central Vine the life rises and flows to every farthest branch and twig and leaf, connecting them all in the one life. He the Sacred Vine is on earth with us and in Paradise with them. Some of the branches are in the shadow here, some of them are in the sunlight there, but we are all united through the Lord Himself. He is the Vine, we are the branches.

Because He is with us here, prayer and praise and all the functions of the Church are here. Because He is with them in Paradise prayer and praise and all the functions of the Church go on in Paradise. Every Sunday as we in our poor way love Him and wors.h.i.+p Him and pray to Him and praise Him, our dear ones beyond are doing the very same. Notice how in the Communion Service we remind ourselves of the fact.

"Therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven we laud and magnify Thy holy name," etc. It is not we alone who feed on His divine life, it is not the altar on earth alone that communicates the all-prevailing virtues of the atoning Blood, for the same Victim is the central object of adoration beyond, as saints and angels and all redeemed creation are with us taking up together the chorus of that everlasting hymn.

If we on this side were living closer to our Lord and closer to our departed, how close might that comrades.h.i.+p become! We should tell our Lord so much about each other. We should think of each other and remember each other and sympathize with each other and pray for each other. Why, we could do everything for each other that we can do on earth when separated by the Atlantic--except just write home. (Ah, how one wishes that they could "write home"!) We are very close if we would but realize it.

"Death hides but it does not divide Thou art but on Christ's other side, Thou art with Christ and Christ with me In Him I still am close to thee."

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