AFTER DEATH

Evening Star, Issue 21747, 15 June 1934, Page 1

AFTER DEATH

AN ARCHBISHOP'S VIEW Dr Temple, Archbishop of York, in one of his recent Gifford Lectures, made the following statement. He said. “ The possibility, at least, of eternal life is indispensable to every higher interest of man. Yet, in onr time, there is an. unparalleled absence of concern with the whole subject. This is due to the fact that in this- as in our whole outlook we have come to the end of the Modern or Reformation period; all existing presentations of these are satisfactory. There is need to re-think the whole topic. “The hope of eternal life properly springs from faith in God. To invert this order of priority is disastrous. The chief aim of religion is to transfer the centre of interest and concern from self to God. “If assurance of immortality comes before assurance of God, it may hinder that process. Except as implied in the righteousness and love, of God, immortality is not a interest at all, it is, therefore, positively undesirable that there should be experimental proof of man’s survival of death. _ “The relation of immortality to thics is similar. The ' ethical utility of heaven and hell, conceived as reward and punishment, is that of a preparatory discipline from which we must escape if our actions or characters are to be truly moral. ' “And the utility of hell, so conceived, is very rarely exhausted, even if not from the outset overweighed by disadvantages. For fear is the most self-centrecl of all ehiotious. The hope of heaven may have a high value as implied in an independently-established morality, but only in that subordination. . , , , . “ The authentic Christian doc,trine has three special characteristics:— “ (a) It is a doctrine, 'not of Immortality but of Resurrection. “ (b) It regards this as a gift of God, not a property of the soul. “ (c) It is not so much a doctrine of rewards and punishments as the proclamation of the inherent misery of selfishness. “The stress in the New Testament is upon the quality of the life to come and the conditions of inheriting it; and the quality of that life is determined by the doctrine of God. “ The possibility of man’s survival of physical death is grounded in the essential quality of mind os a capacity for ‘ free ideas.’ The mind increasingly organises itself and is its own world apart from the processes which, for the next part, control the body as whose function the mind first came into being. “ As mind increasingly takes control of the organism, so it becomes increasingly independent of the organism as psychologically conceived. Man is not by nature immortal, but capable of immortality. “ Here we confront a dilemma. Man’s freedom seems to involve a final repudiation of God which is for him perdition; but then God’s love has failed, which must not be. But since God is love and love controls men through their freedom, the opposition of these two considerations is not absolute in principle. Yet a ‘ universalism ’ accepted on such grounds must bo true also to the principle of ‘ abiding consequences.’ “ Thus we may avoid the demoralising influence both of the shallow -optimism which says ‘ Never mind, it will all como right in the end,’ and of the terrorism which ’ stereotypes selfcentredness by undue excitation of fear.”