LIFE EVERLASTING

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 980, 24 May 1930, Page 5

LIFE EVERLASTING

THE CASE FOR RELIGION MR. BENTLEY’S VIEWS “The first argument for the life everlasting is drawn from our human consciousness. We all desire to live. . The longing for eternal life is com- \ mon to the human race.” In these words the Rev. Mr. Bent- ; ley spoke on “Unanswerable Argu- l ments for Immortality,” in St. Mat- j thew’s Church on Thursday evening. He j said that if death was the end of life it was the end of all faith in a God j of justice and goodness. If the best | and the worst lay together in a com- j mon grave, and that was the end of ; them, then God did not care whether j the human race did right or wrong. i The facts in the case, Mr. Bentley j said, were that the world to come \ lacked the testimony of our senses, 1 and the demonstration of our reason, j From the religious point of view, the ! future world was merely a test of ! faith, as there was no virtue know- j ledge. There were five senses in a world j that was immeasurably and incon- ; ceivably great, but were people so J ignorant and conceited as to imagine that those senses took everything in? i Could it be said that all we did not know was not knowledge and was not [ worth knowing? If man was that 1 kind of fool he was like the ant which j sat by its ant-hill and believed that !it was contemplating the universe ! While the human mind was very vvon- ; derful, to say that it had the measure j of all there was, and to say that its j senses reported to it everything there i was to report, was ridiculous. The | testimony of our physical senses was l not sufficient to convince us that there ] was not a future life. To take the i other difficulty—that the life to come : was beyond the demonstration of reaj son—the answer was that the future j was always incapable of proof. “The expectation of immortality is ! so universal that it is an elemental ; quality,” Mr. Bentley said. “We are born with it. It is as much a part of us spiritually as our eyes are physically. Self-preservation is the first law of life and it is so deepseated an instinct that it amounts to a consciousness of immortality. Something inside us tells us that “death is j J fOt the end. This something is a ! spiritual fact which is equally to be ; accounted for as any physical fact. It: is a physical fact that all material substances tend to fall to earth in accordance with the law of gravitation, and it is a spiritual fact that the soul of man reaches out in aspiration toward the life everlasting. Behind that tact is the law of life and immortality. “The second argument for a future life is found in the value of man,” Mr. Bentley said. “I mean not only the human race, but every individual being. The Hebrew idea of immortality was that of the nation, the Greek that of the individual in the joy of reunion beyond the grave, but the Christian conception unites both. There is the innumerable multitude and the individual of whom Our Lord said that the very hairs of our heads are numbered. The individual in God’s sight is too precious to be allowed to die forever. “Don’t worry about the size of the universe and the insignificance of man,” Mr. Bentley said. “It is not quantity that counts, but quality, and your soul is more precious to Him than the whole material universe. We are the fruit of the tree of life —the result of the cosmic process which starts with the protoplasm and ends in man. Is this all to end ? Wliy, the very logic of the universe is against it! It demands the immortality of both body and soul. The soul is yourself on the spiritual side, as your body is on the physical side. The body is a combination of chemical elements which at death do not perish, but are redistributed; not one is lost. The soul is the centre of our spiritual forces that we call will, affection and personality. Is nature careful to carry over the forces of the physical series while she drops those of the spiritual? In other words, is chemical affinity more precious than spiritual affection? Must atoms endure while spirit decays? The only rational answer is that man must live on as a necessary inference from his value as the highest in the scale of life.

“The third argument for life everlasting is drawn from the justice of God. So far as G.od is concerned —if we are to take notice of the disbelievers—He does not care whether we eat, drink and carouse, or do whatever is earthly, sensual and brutish, for tomorrow w r e die and it makes no difference “Can you swallow that?” the speaker asked. ‘‘You know you cannot. Your moral sense revolts at it. Thus you see the Christian creed lies at the bottom of the commandments. We can’t even imagine a Nero and a St. Paul coming to a common end and a like fate. Or General Gordon and the Kaiser! Or David Livingstone and Voltaire! It is unthinkable. “If the man who suffers torture and Is burned at the stake for truth dies like a beast, then the Judge of all the earth is an unjust judge. Even the Hebrew sheik Abraham, over 6,000 years ago, knew better than that when he cried, ‘Shall not the juidge of all the earth do right?’ “Personal immortality is needed for the vindication of the justice of God and the satisfaction of the moral sense of man. Summarised, the unanswerable arguments for immortality are drawn from man’s consciousness, from his value in the scale of creation, and from his moral sense. All three are grounded in reason and all are independent of religion, church and Bible. “Supplementing these, the church and Bible, and this Eastertide ‘declare that Christ has risen from the dead and that His authority is supreme. Next to creation itself this is the greatest fact in the history of the world. His rising again was the last step in evolution. Man had gone as far as he could go without being overweighted by his sins, and Christ died to free him from them. Those.who believe this and obey Him will rise into life eternal—those who refuse will live but in outer darkness, where there will be ‘weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

“You see it is the survival of the fittest all over again,” Mr. Bentley concluded. “The difference is that it is not on the physical plane, but on the moral and spiritual. Since He came the latter alone counts. We have been told that God is our Father, but God is no Father if, after making us in His Image He suffers us to die like weeds. It would be unthinkable. as atheism is unthinkable. The world’s supreme authority has told us ‘Because I live ye shall live also.’ So we can lift our hearts and take courage and play manfully the game of life.”