CHAPTER VIII

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE EVERLASTING

Various factors combine to make it hard for men today to believe vividly in life beyond the grave.  Our science has emphasized the closeness of the connection between our spiritual life and our bodies.  If there be an abnormal pressure upon some part of the brain, we lose our minds; an operation upon a man’s skull may transform him from a criminal into a reputable member of society.  It is not easy for us to conceive how life can continue after the body dies.  Diderot put the difficulty more than a century ago:  “If you can believe in sight without eyes, in hearing without ears, in thinking without a head, if you could love without a heart, feel without senses, exist when you are nowhere and be something without extension, then we might indulge this hope of a future life.”

Our modern view of the universe no longer leaves us a localized heaven and hell, and we have not the lively imaginations of those older generations to whom the unseen world was as real as the streets they walked and the houses in which they lived.  One goes into such a burying place as the Campo Santo at Pisa, or reads Dante’s Divina Comedia, and the painters who adorned the walls with frescoes depicting the future abodes of the blessed and the damned, and the poet who actually travelled in thought through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, were as keenly aware of these places as of neighboring Italian towns.  We lack a definite neighborhood in which to locate the lives that pass from our sight.

Religious authority is based, today, upon experience, and obviously experience can give no certain knowledge of things future.  We are disposed to treat all pictures of the life to come, whether in the Bible or out of it, as the projections of men’s hopes.  They are such stuff as dreams are made on.

And at present we are absorbingly interested in the advance of our world’s life; we dream of better cities here, rather than of some golden city beyond our horizon; we care far more intensely for lasting earth-wide peace that shall render impossible such awful orgies of death as this present war, than for the peace of a land that lieth afar.  Men think of the immortality of their influence, rather than of what they themselves will be doing five hundred years hence, and of the social order that shall prevail in the earth in the year 2000, rather than of the social order of the celestial country.

Immortality is not so much disbelieved, as unthought of.  But death is always man’s contemporary; and no year goes by for any of us without regretted partings.  And if we stop to think of it, we are all of us under sentence, indefinitely reprieved, if you will, but with no more than an interval between ourselves and the tomb.  To every thoughtful person the question is forced home, “If a man die, shall he live again?”