SUNDAY READING

Taranaki Daily News, 5 August 1916, Page 6

SUNDAY READING

THE CLAIM" OF THE AFFECTIONS. fS SEUMON PREACHED BY REV. A. 11. COLVILE, M.A., IX ST. MAKY'S CITI'KCH, XEW PLYMOUTH. "We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love our brethren.''—l. John iii., 1-L We have in these well-known words a very wonderful assurance of immortality, of the yielding of death to a power even greater than its own, the power of love. Men have always imagined a bitter antagonism between love and death. Most of us are familiar with that striking picture of the contest between these two groat powers; the slow, inevitable approach of death, while love strives desperately to repel him. You will remember that on the face of the figure representing death there is no hatred, no rulhlessness. no hostility even, but with infiuite pity and regret he watches the futile Efforts of love to keep him back. Arid the thought comes to us—ls this a real antagonism? Does not death know something that love finds it hard to realise, that beyond the fear and doubt and separation there is life for evermore, and that love yielding inevitably to the stroke of death is himself the victor'? For his very existence and the strength with which he struggles to preserve himself from extinction is the mark of continuance, the sign and' seal of immortality. My friends, now and always man's extremity is God's opportunity; and it is because of this present great "extremity," because death has entered so many homes to-day. because so many loving souls are dreading his approach, because to many thousands this -life seems to hold so little security for the greatest thing of all, that the minds of men and women are more concerned than in the days of ease and security, with the possibility of a fuller lifo to come; and their hearts are clinging aiore closely to the "larger hope" of immortality. We will think of this 'hop.' for a fey; minutes this evening

A CHANGE. ' There lias been a change, I think w« must all feel, in our way of thinking and preaching of life and death, of heaven and hell. The language used on these subjects by preachers in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, even within the memory of some of us, would now be intolerable to any educated congregation. It would be intolerable not so much intellectually as morally. The words once used without protest by a preacher, and accepted placidly by a congregation, would now seem not only incredible, but unworthy, coarse and almost blasphemous. The old gaudilycolored pictures of eternal bliss, when forgetting all else we sing in an everlasting oratorio, no longer grip us. We no longer (thank heaven) believe with the famous Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, that "God is in hell to keep the tortures of the damned freshly piled and to see that no one escapes." "You cannot stand," he goes on, "before an infuriated tiger; what, then, will you do when God rushes on you in His wrath?" All this is gone, and gone I hope, for ever. Have we anything better worth having in its place ? What have we a | right to believe (not only to hope, but to believe) about the life after death? How much has been revealed by God. how much- is certain, how much is probable? "For how mueli must we wait and see"? Questions on the subject come thronging into the mind. "In what sense can we believe in the resurrection of the body? Ought we to believe in future progress towards perfection? Are the lost punished eternally? What is the condition of the disembodied spirit? Ought wo to pray for our friends who have gone from us? Is immortality the prerogative of the human race, or may the "poor Indian" of Pope's lines have been justified in hoping that—"Transported to that equal sky

His faithful dog shall bear him com panv"?

All these are problems on which no preacher can dogmatise, which no theology can solve, questions to which no one can give a full and complete answer. It would require many sermons to deal with them. This evening lam speaking on that one aspect of the Christian hope which appeals most compellingly to the best that is in us. "We know that we have passed—not 'shall pass' only—but have passed from death unto life, because we love." , Our Lord Jesus Christ brought

LIFE AND IMMORTALITY to light not only by assuming the existence of an eternal world in all His teaching, not only by speaking always of heaven as a son saeaks of his father's house and therefore taking all the strangeness and unreality out of it, but above all by revealing to us an ideal of life here on earth to whie'i our eonsciences are hound to assent, and which is a mockery if it is all to be destroyed at death, if it'does not continue and expand in a life beyond the grave. All the finest qualities in man which we have seen in their perfection in Jesus Christ—self-sacrifice, courage, truth, 'patience, purity, unselfishness, which we are only just beginning to grip in our lives here, their grandeur and beauty just beginning to unfold in this life, are they to perish utterly? Could a good God ordain that a partially-evolved creature should sink back into nothingness again? I cannot believe in a wise and good God without at the same time believing that He has a plan for the human race from, whose existence He is wholly responsible; and how can I believe that His plan would end in a gigantic failure, a hopeless cul-de-sac, such as extinction would be? We do not think of an after life as a mere reward. It is not the mere reward of goodness which our instincts refuse to give up (what sort of reward does the best of us deserve after all?). No, it is its reality and continuance that we cannot surrender. AVhen the great ideal has once been shown to us by Jesus Christ we feel that it is altogether too mighty a thing to be completed in 70 or S(i years. Why, God has taken countless ages to make a lump of old red sandstone; shall He perfect a human spirit in three-score years and ten? Our capabilities and our vocation are on a grander scale than the compass of our earthly life. So this argument for immortality is partly intellectual and partly moral. It is intellectual because our minds revolt from anything so irrational as the extinction would be. It is moral because we claim to go on rising on the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things for ever. Our instinct tells us that this is what we are made for, and, as I said, wc cannot believe that a good God would cut our progress short and waste what He has

evolved so patiently and so wisely. And then arising out of this there is the claim to immortality which comes up out of an instinct even stronger and more compelling—the instinct that is bound up with our affections. "We know . . . because we love." If

goodness, truth, courage, purity, selfsacrifice cannot be loss, can love?'' If God will not waste, or destroy these qualities He has evolved within r.s, will He waste

THE GREATEST THING OF ALL? My friends, if we were lonely, loveless persons we might perhaps be eontent with a sort of second-hand immortality—living on in the results of our labor—in the miii.; 3 of those for whom we live. So we sometimes speak of Shakespeare as immortal because he lives and will live always in the minds o: millions who read his writings. Many noble men and women have tried to be content with this prospect and have decked it out in beautiful language. For instance, George Eliot says:

"0 may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds nude better by their presence. So to live is heaven. To make undying music in the wor'.d." Tt is a noble and a beautiful conception, but is it enough for us—an immortality in memory only? No, it is profoundly unsatisfying, if the humanity in whom we are supposed to live or is not immortal either. If there is no such thing as personal immortality, the noblest of causes for which good men sacrifice themselves will sooner or later perish and lie forgotten, and the martyr who laid down his life for his religion suffered absolute and entire personal extinction for the sake of a cause that was ultimately to perish, whether lie sacrificed himself or not. Better if he hod conformed and saved bis life. But this is an intolerable conclusion. Tt is neif her intellectual nor moral. Our mind and conscience revolt against it. Let us orav by all means that, we may live on in the memnrv of others, but let us hope for and believe ill a greater immortality than tiiis. Tt is. then, in the claim of the affections that we find the great, hope of personal immortality. God has implanted in every heart a yearning to care for something out of itself. This instinct is the very bond and seal of our common humanity, the golden link which knits together and preserves the human race. No other principle is so general and so powerful. It warms the coldest temperament. It softens the hardest heart. However debased a character may be, this single passion is capable of redeeming it from utter defilement and rescuing it from the lowest depth. We have often seen here on earth men and women saved from a living death by the power of an unselfish love and kept straight, kept alive, enabled to live truly and strongly and nobly because of one pure, whole-heart-;ed affection. And we realise that

THERE IS LIFE WITHIN US BECAUSE WE LOVE.

If any clement of our nature can claim to !)•; sacred and divine, this can claim to be so. And is the instinct that tells those who love that death cannot separate for ever, that death cannot destroy what they feel to be divine—is that instinct nothing but a delusion? My friends, if it is a delusion it is one which the affections themselves have created; and are we to believe that the purest and noblest elements of our nature have conspired to deceive us? For it is most certain that what love demands is a "personal" immortality. Nothing else will satisfy. A poor" young woman who had just lost her husband once wrote to a certain German philosopher who had propounded the tlicorv of impersor.al immortality for spiritual hope and lomfort. "Give me, if you can," she iiaid, "the certain assurance that I shall find and know him again." The philosopher could only reply: "Dear friend, what can I say? It is only the images of lancy in her hour of anguish that you wish me to conlirm."

' Now here we have put into words the ' painful doubt which may have, been in the minds of some of us. Is it only ''the images of fancy in her hour of anguish that we wish to confirm"? Are we only striving to believe what we would like to be true? The argument for immortality from the mere desire isn't nearly good enough. Young, the author of the "Night Thoughts," put:, it in a bald form when he says. ''Who wishes life immortal, proves it so." That won't do. We must be honest. Our wishes cannot make or altei facts. We must not try to alter the multiplication table because we are getting into debt. Nevertheless, 1 believe that the philosopher was quite wrong in telling the poor young widow that she must not trust what he called "the images of fancy''—her longing to believe that her husband's personal existence was not lost in the great All. If our love is pure and true we may trust this instinct, deep-rooted in our natures, and the instincts of love, as Christ taught us, are supreme—they are divine. Jesus Christ came to reveal His Father as the God of Love. To repeat these three words in times of doubt and darkness is to have something definite to hold on to That horrible comparison of God to a a savage tiger is (lung back contemptuously before them, and death will surrender its most terrible threat of separation if we cling to them. ''Hod is love," says St. John, repeating what the Master told him, and "he that dwelletli in love dwelieth in Cod and God in him." It is not in scientific ■knowledge, if. is in pure affection that we penetrate furthest into the secrets of the universe and the mysteries of Cod. He hath hid these things from the wise and prudent to reveal them into babes. "Whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be knowledge it, shall vanish away." But love never fajleth,"' neither here or hereafter. In so far as it is pure and true it is the life of heaven itself made manifest here on earth. We know that we have passed from death into life because we love. We know it now, we feel the life within us now. and it is upon this life that love brings with it, and not on the "images of fancy" that we rest our belief "that we shall see and know our friends in heaven." So let us treasure and prize above all else this the greatest thing in life, which is life itself, and when the time of separation comes, you will see no cruelty on the face of death; from your heart love will cast cut fear, and you will be able to look forward and to say:

"No matter if I stand alone, I wait with joy tit coming years; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, And garner up its fluid of tears.

The stars come nightly to the sky, The tidal wave comes to the sea.

Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep mv own away from me,"