Part 6 (1/2)

SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME

+The inwardness of Salvation and Judgment.+--We come now to the consideration of a group of subjects which are usually treated in quite separate categories. I mean the punishment of sin, the nature and scope of Salvation, Resurrection and Ascension, Death, Judgment, Heaven and h.e.l.l. The reason why I feel that these subjects ought not to be treated in separate categories is because they are all descriptions of states of the soul and imply each other; they are inward, not outward, experiences. This statement will, I trust, become clearer as we proceed.

So far we have examined pretty thoroughly the nature of sin and its effects in the world, but have said very little as to its penal consequences, and yet the consideration of these consequences has been the determining factor in most of the theories of Atonement, ancient or modern, which have occupied the field of human thought. It is true, as I have said, that the idea of Atonement is not necessarily a.s.sociated with that of sin, and actually precedes it both historically and psychologically, but it cannot be gainsaid that in Christian thought the desirability of finding some means of escaping or minimising the punishment of sin has tended to overshadow everything else in popular presentations of the Atonement. But what is the punishment of sin, and who administers it? What is the Judgment and when does it take effect?

How does Salvation stand related to punishment and judgment? What has Death to do with the matter? What are we to understand by Heaven and h.e.l.l, and what is the bearing of either upon Salvation and Judgment?

Everyone knows how popular evangelical theology would answer these questions. Sin, we are told, will be punished in a future life by the committal of the impenitent soul to everlasting torment. Salvation is primarily a means of escaping this, and secondarily being conformed gradually to the moral likeness of the Saviour. Judgment is a grand a.s.size, which will take place when the material world comes to an end; Jesus Christ will be the Judge, and will apportion everlasting weal or woe, according as the soul has or has not claimed the benefit of His redeeming work in time to profit by it. Death is the dividing line beyond which the destiny is fixed eternally whether we die old or young. Heaven is the place into which the redeemed enter--whether after death or after judgment has never been clearly settled--there to praise G.o.d eternally in perfect happiness; h.e.l.l is the place of never ending torment to which unbelievers are to be consigned.

Now it does not require a very profound intelligence to see that popular theology is a ma.s.s of contradictions in regard to these things.

By eternal the ordinary Christian usually means everlasting; why should punishment be everlasting? The worst sin that was ever sinned does not deserve everlasting punishment, and I have never yet met the Christian who would really and truly be willing to see a fellow-creature undergo it. There is no understandable sense in which justice could demand such a terrible sentence, even if it involved no more than everlasting unhappiness; how much more unthinkable it becomes if the punishment is to be everlasting, fiendish torment! If Salvation is first and foremost deliverance from this punishment, how is it that it does not take effect immediately? Justice would suggest that it ought to do so, for some sinners live a merry life until the eleventh hour, and then give G.o.d ”the last snuff of the candle” as Father Taylor put it, whereas others repent early but never manage, all through a long life, to escape the suffering caused by their own deeds in youth. In some cases, at any rate, on this side of the grave, Salvation does not involve the least remission of penalty, while in others apparently no penalty will ever be endured either on this side of death or on the other. The poor drunkard who repents does not find that repentance gives him back his wrecked const.i.tution, but the selfish, grasping, cruel-hearted wrecker of homes and lives may just be in time with his trust in the ”finished work,” and go right home to glory while his victims struggle and suffer on amid the conditions he has made for them on earth. Curious justice this!

+Christian thought never quite consistent about Death and after.+--There is no need to labour the point; popular evangelical views of the punishment of sin are incredible when looked at in a common-sense way. But they are even more chaotic on the subject of death and whatever follows death. It does not seem to be generally recognised that Christian thought has never been really clear concerning the Resurrection, especially in relation to future judgment.

One view has been that the deceased saint lies sleeping in the grave until the archangel's trump shall sound and bid all mankind awake for the great a.s.size. Anyone who reads the New Testament without prejudice will see that this was Paul's earlier view, although later on he changed it for another. There is a good deal of our current, everyday religious phraseology which presumes it still--

”Father, in thy gracious keeping Leave we now thy servant sleeping.”

But alongside this view another which is a flagrant contradiction of it has come down to us, namely, that immediately after death the soul goes straight to heaven or h.e.l.l, as the case may be, without waiting for the archangel's trump and the grand a.s.size. On the whole this is the dominant theory of the situation in Protestant circles, and is much less reasonable than the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, however much the latter may have been abused. But under this view what is the exact significance of the Judgment Day and the physical Resurrection? One would think they might be accounted superfluous. What is the good of tormenting a soul in h.e.l.l for ages and then whirling it back to the body in order to rise again and receive a solemn public condemnation?

Better leave it in the Inferno and save trouble, especially as the solemn trial is meaningless, seeing that a part of the sentence has already been undergone, and that there is no hope that any portion of it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender mercies with which theologians have credited the Almighty are cruel indeed! It is difficult to speak with patience of the solemn, non-committal way in which many present-day theological writers discuss everlasting punishment. Many of them have an ”open mind” on the subject, whatever that may be, and warn the rest of us not to dogmatise on the great mystery. It does not seem to occur to them that the Christian fundamental of the love of G.o.d renders the dogma of everlasting punishment impossible, for it implies that G.o.d will do the most for the being that needs the most, and surely that must be the most unhappy sinner. Others speak of a ”larger hope,” a second opportunity for accepting divine grace, and so on. But these theories do not meet the case at all. While sin remains in the universe, G.o.d is defeated; everlasting punishment involves His everlasting failure. How often we bear preachers speaking about the obdurate human will, which to all eternity may go on resisting good. There are not a few who defend the abstract possibility of everlasting punishment by insisting that it is impossible to coerce the will, and therefore that to endless ages a soul may go on choosing evil and rejecting good. But this is an entirely new argument; it implies that a sinner _might_ choose the good on the other side of death, and that if he does not he continues eternally to pa.s.s sentence upon himself, G.o.d being helpless in the matter. This is not the way in which advocates of everlasting punishment used to talk. It is a little more hopeful than the conventional dogma, for it makes the sinner to some extent his own judge and executioner, and places stress on the undoubted truth that if a man keeps on doing wrong things he becomes hardened. I have heard this view defended in private by a bishop, who apparently never saw that in adopting it he had given up entirely the orthodox Protestant view that there is no chance for a man after death, and that the thing which determines our post-mortem destiny is not our conduct, but our belief. Repentance at the eleventh hour, however bad the previous life may have been, is, according to the theology of this particular bishop, enough to secure admission to heaven. If, therefore, a power of eternally choosing evil remains on the further side of the great change, surely there is some hope that that power might not continue to be exercised. But if not, what becomes of the whole fabric of popular Protestant theology concerning the plan of salvation, the Judgment Day, and the atoning merits of the Redeemer?

No, this kind of incoherent theologising will not do. No one really believes it, and the churches will have to give up professing to believe it. In our ordinary everyday concerns we take quite a different view for granted all the time, the view that ”Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.” The harvest may be long in coming, but it comes at last. Neither do we choose our friends on account of their chances of heaven or h.e.l.l. We like or dislike a man because he deserves to be liked or disliked, and not because he believes something that will get him into heaven. Neither, thank G.o.d, do we want to see even the wicked left to the consequences of their wickedness; we want to see them helped to live differently, and it is hardly probable that this impulse of our better humanity will change after death. Love cannot be false to itself; in the presence of need it must of necessity keep on giving itself until the need is satisfied and the victory won.

But if popular theology concerning the last things is untrue, or at least misleading and inadequate, what is the truth? Do we want a different set of terms or not? I think not, but we want a different perspective. These terms ought to be construed as states of the soul, rather than as external conditions. Let me try to explain what I mean.

+The true Salvation.+--In the first place if sin is selfishness, salvation must consist in ceasing to be selfish, that is, it represents the victory of love in the human heart. This may be represented as the uprising of the deeper self, the true man, the Christ man in the experience of the penitent. We may even go so far as to say that this can come about, and does come about, without any strongly marked feelings of contrition or sudden change of att.i.tude. Wherever you see a man trying to do something for the common good, you see the uprising of the spirit of Christ; what he is doing is a part of the Atonement.

In church or out of church, with or without a formal creed, this is the true way in which the redemption of the world is proceeding. Every man who is trying to live so as to make his life a blessing to the world is being saved himself in the process, saved by becoming a saviour.

Ordinary observation ought to tell us that untold thousands of our fellow-beings, even among those who never dream of going to church, are being saved in this way. This is the true way to look at the matter.

The Christ, the true Christ who was and is Jesus, but who is also the deeper self of every human being, is saving individuals by filling them with the unselfish desire to save the race. It is this unselfish desire to minister to the common good which is the true salvation. I do not mind what name is given to it so long as it is recognised for what it really is; there is no stopping-place between sinner and saviour. This is the way in which men like Robert Blatchford of the _Clarion_ are being saved while trying to save. Conceive how differently such a man _might_ have lived his life. He might have lived it so as to be of no use to anyone, or indeed in such a way as to be a hindrance rather than a help to poor overburdened humanity. It matters comparatively little that this man should think he is destroying supernaturalism and scoffs at the possibility of a future life. His moral earnestness is a mark of his Christhood and his work a part of the Atonement. Not another Christ than Jesus, mind! The very same. Mr. Blatchford may laugh at this and call his moral aspirations by quite a different name. Well, let him; but I know the thing when I see it. This is Salvation.

+Conversion.+--But in the history of mankind the change from selfishness to love, from darkness to light, from death to life, has often meant something much more p.r.o.nounced than this. A man may have been living a bad life, and become suddenly impressed by some appeal to his better nature made in the name of G.o.d. He may have felt humiliated and distressed by his new-found consciousness of sin. He may have prayed earnestly for forgiveness, and felt that forgiveness has come and that the peace of G.o.d has entered into and possessed his soul. He has deliberately and solemnly consecrated his life to Jesus and feels that henceforth he is, as it were, in a new world. This change is rightly termed conversion, a turning round and going right. Such a man may be able to say with St. Paul, ”To me to live is Christ,” and the words would be literally and grandly true. After this he may go on believing all kinds of things about verbal inspiration, the precious blood, the fate of the impenitent, and I know not what else, but the quality of the new life is always the same; it is dominated by the spirit of love instead of the spirit of selfishness; it is harmony with G.o.d. Often this change is very complete and beautiful, but in every case it involves a long and slow ascent to the stature of the perfect man in Christ Jesus. It is no delusion, either, that in the endeavour to live the new life divine help is forthcoming. The Holy Spirit of truth and love is ever present with a child of G.o.d to guide him to higher and ever higher heights of spiritual attainment. Without this blessed religious experience, the experience of those who are ”called to be saints,” this world would be a poor place to live in. I may perhaps be pardoned for adding that in my judgment even the earnest redemptive endeavours of men like the editor of the _Clarion_ have indirectly been made possible by it. Take out of the world what Christian saints have owed to their fellows.h.i.+p with Jesus, and there would be very little of hope and inspiration left. Still, what I want to emphasise here is the fact that, however crude the various theologies may have been in which this experience has clothed itself, it is always the same; it represents the victory of love in the human heart.

+Salvation and penalty.+--But does this kind of salvation do away with the penal consequences of past sin? If not, what is its relation to them? To answer these questions we must look a little more closely into the nature of such penal consequences. Perhaps it would help to clear up the subject if I were to say frankly before going any farther that there is no such thing as punishment, no far-off Judgment Day, no great white throne, and no Judge external to ourselves. I say there is no punishment of sin in the sense in which the word ”punishment” is usually employed. We are accustomed to think of punishment as a sentence imposed by some authority from without and containing within itself some element of vengeance for wrong-doing. But in the divine dealings with men such punishment has never existed and never will.

What has already been said in a previous chapter on the subject of pain should help to make this statement plain. We have seen that pain is life pressing upon death and death resisting life. If there were no life, there would be no pain. We may say therefore that pain is life, or some finite expression of the universal life, seeking to burst through something that fetters and hinders it. Apply this to the region of morals and let us see how it works out. If a man has been living for self, he has been making a mistake and preparing for himself a harvest of pain, for sooner or later the divine life within him, the truer, deeper self, will a.s.sert itself against the decisive efforts of sin. It is just as impossible for a man to go on eternally living apart from the universal life as it is for a sand castle to shut out the ocean; the returning tide would break down the puny barriers and destroy everything that tends to separate between the soul and G.o.d.

For, after all, what is our life but G.o.d's? To try to keep it for ourselves is like trying to catch and imprison a sun ray by drawing the blinds. To save the self we must serve the All. When, therefore, we remember that the spirit of man and the spirit of G.o.d are one, we know of a surety that the infinite life behind the human spirit will a.s.sert itself irresistibly against the endeavours of sin to enclose that spirit within finite conditions. The essence of sin is the declaration, ”Mine is not thine, and I shall live for mine alone.”

This is trying to live for the finite; it is enclosing the soul within barriers; those barriers must be broken if the soul is to be saved, and broken they will be just because the deeper self of every man is already one with G.o.d. In the stable-yard of my house there was at one time a tree, which was cut down and the place where it grew covered with flagstones and a wall built round it. But the roots of the tree were not removed, and so that buried life has rea.s.serted itself, the flagstones have been shattered, and now the wall is coming down. Here is a figure of our moral experience. A man may go on living for self all through a long career; he may bury his better nature deep underneath the hard sh.e.l.l of materialism and self-indulgence, but it is all in vain; sooner or later, on this side of death or on the other, that buried life shall rise in power and all barriers be swept away.

This uprising of the Christ in the individual soul, for such it is, must inevitably mean pain to the man whose true life has been entombed in selfishness. The pain may begin here or on the farther side of the change called death, but it is itself not a mark of death, but of life.

The fact that a soul can suffer proves its salvability beyond dispute.

An everlasting h.e.l.l is in the nature of things a contradiction, for the finite cannot eternally bar the way of the infinite reality whose uprising is the cause of its pain; if it could, it would itself be infinite, which is absurd. Sin is essentially the endeavour to live for the finite, the separative, the divisive, as opposed to the infinite, the whole-ward, the All. Which will win in this encounter?

+The real judge.+--And who, pray, is the Judge? Who but yourself? The deeper self is the judge, the self who is eternally one with G.o.d. The pain caused by sin arises from the soul, which is potentially infinite and cannot have its true nature denied. If you go and live over a sewer, you will be ill. Why? Because you were never meant to live over a sewer. The evil therein attacks you, and the life within you fights to overcome it, and in the process you have to suffer. It is just the same with your spiritual nature. You _cannot_ continue to live apart from the whole, for the real you _is_ the whole, and, do what you will, it will overcome everything within you that makes for separateness, and in the process you will have to suffer. This is what the punishment of sin means. It is life battling with death, love striving against selfishness, the deeper soul with the surface soul.

It is our own spiritual nature that compels us to suffer when we sin, and there is no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, for we are so const.i.tuted that what sin does, love with toil and pain must undo. No eleventh-hour repentance can evade this issue; in fact, it may be the beginning of it. If we have been treading a wrong road, repentance is turning round and taking the way back. If we have been living a false life, repentance is the beginning of the true, and just in proportion as the false has been accepted, so will the true find it difficult to destroy the lie. _You_ are the judge; you _in_ G.o.d. If you have failed to achieve that for which you are here, you will have to achieve it here or elsewhere, and the correction of your failure will inevitably mean pain.

”The tissues of the life to be, We weave with colours all our own; And in the field of destiny We reap as we have sown.”

There is nothing horrific about this law of the spirit. In a true and real sense it is our own law; _we_ make it. Being what we are, we cannot let ourselves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin and the token of our divine lineage. But there is nothing individualistic about this sinning and suffering. All the love in the universe comes to the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even enter the prison house along with it and accept the cross in the endeavour to hasten the emanc.i.p.ation of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so, for as long as there is any sin to be done away, love cannot have its perfect work. This it was which brought Jesus to earth, and this it is which turns every follower of Jesus into a saviour. Love must strive and suffer with sin until G.o.d is all in all.

+The spiritual resurrection.+--It follows from this that the true resurrection is spiritual, not material, and this is the sense in which the word is most frequently employed in the New Testament. In the fourth gospel Jesus is represented as saying, ”I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” This is a great saying, and the writer of this particular gospel meant every word of it in the sense I have just indicated. He makes the eternal Christ the speaking terms of the earthly Jesus and tells us that the uprising of this eternal Christ within the soul of the penitent sinner is the real resurrection.

+The resurrection of Jesus.+--But this subject of the resurrection demands a further examination. We have already seen how inconsistent popular Christian doctrine is about the matter, and yet Christianity started with the belief in a resurrection of our Lord, a belief which has continued down to the present day. What are we to say about this?

We may as well admit at the outset that the gospel accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus are mutually inconsistent and that no amount of ingenuity can reconcile them. Matthew speaks of a Galilean appearance, and says nothing about the ascension. Luke says a great deal about the Jerusalem appearances, nothing about Galilee, and tells us that the ascension took place from Bethany. The end of St. Mark's gospel has been lost, and the last few verses are a summary of the accounts in the other gospels concerning the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord. John's version is, of course, less historical than the synoptists, and puts the last appearance at the sea of Tiberias. A minute discussion of the problem thus raised would be unprofitable for our present purpose, but I hope we can take for granted the broad fact that without a belief in a resurrection of some kind Christianity could not have made a start at all. It is almost indisputable that in some way or other the disciples must have become convinced that they had seen Jesus face to face after the world believed Him to be dead and buried. The earliest apostolic utterance on the subject in the New Testament is the familiar pa.s.sage from 1 Cor.