SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 June 1921, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

THE CLEANSING HOPE OF IMMORTALITY.

“Every one that hath this hope, purifieth himself even as He is pure.” —l. Saint .John HL, 3. (By Rev. A. TI. Collins, New Plymouth.)

"And every one that hath this hope.” What hope? To answer that question is to get on the track of the Apostle’s thought. -Speaking quite simply, this hope” is “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life.” Saint John was a mystic, one of the greatest of the long line of elect souls, who lived as “seeing Him that iff- invisible.” He soared, he saw, he sang. But he was a practical mystic. He has just been soaring away into those lofty regions where it is difficult to follow. “We shall be like Him. for we shall see Him as He is,” then, without break or pause, he passes from the un imaginable splendours of the “beatific vision” to the plainest of practical duties. The Christian mystics have sometimes been charged with failing to preach practical righteousness. But here is the greatest mystic of the New Testament insisting on plain morality as earnestly as his friend Saint •lames could have done. Like the eagle, he rises; and like the eagle, with the impetus gained from his height, he drops right down to earth. “Now are we the sons of God”; and eonship is the pledge of future glory; “we shall be like Him, soul and body shall His glorious image wear.” This was the light that burned above life’s dim and tumbling sea, and to it they locked as-to a beacon to guide the mariner home. Beyond the sorrow, and the strain, of these mortal years, they looked for their perfect consummation and bliss in the kingdom of the blessed and the holy. But Saint John says we must be practical. “This hope” is not for idle dreaming and religious rhapsody. Our highest revelations are for service. Just as the sunshine travels ninety million miles to weave the texture of a daisy and paint the petals of “the wee crimnson tipped flower,” sb the loftiest and most profound truths of the Bible are given for use, that knowing we may do. “Hitch your waggon to a star,” says Emerson, and it is only another ,way of saying that heavenly powers are for earthly ends. If we have this immortal hope, we must be mindful of the conditions which attach to its possession. In order to be Jesus Christ’s up yonder, we must be Jesns Christ’s down here. Sonship means samesbip. It is wonderful privilege, but it is .grave responsibility as well. “Every man that hath this hope purifieth himself.” There is a speculative and there is a practical way of diecussing the doctrine of immortality, and the New Testament takes the latter and leaves the former to take care of itself. The evidence that a man is a Christian does not lie in the realm of metaphysics, but in. the sphere of conduct. As some one quaintly says, “We ehall save ourselves endless trouble in discussing whether we belong to the elect, by first discussing whether we are candidate's for election.” Heaven means character. In order to attain jto “glory, honor, and immortality,” in the world to come, means that we “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling,” here and now. THE DREAM OF IMMORTALITY. First let us speak of this dream of immortality. That dream is practically universal. In all lands and races and ages, the hope of a life beyond the bounds of time has burned like the bright candle of the Lord, lighting not only the way that dips downward to the grave, but illuminating the path that slopes upward to the larger and better life of heaven. It existed in pre-Chris-tian times, and in landa unvisited by the Christian Gospel. But I speak of “this hope” as it is revealed in the New Testament. “Immortality is the glorious discovery of Christianity,” said Channing, and he was right. It is not ours to speculate and dream, as Socrates and Plato did. We do not stand beside the open grave and ask, “If a man die, shall he live again?” We believe, on the authority of Jesus Christ, that there is a life beyond the shadows of the grave. We hold that to be a man gifted with the awful dignity of reason, memory, and will, is to be immortal. The risen Lord proclaimed the continuity of life. He passed into Heaven proclaiming victory over death and the grave, and He said:

“Because I live ye shall live also.” Hence we cry, with George Macdonald: “I came from God and I am going back to God, and I won’t have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.” But there are times when this hope beats high and strong, times when the present ceases to charm and satisfy, and the future rains down its influence to stir the puke and quicken the blood, as birds of passage feel the pull of spring. This is no sickly sentiment or cowardly fear of dying, <any more than the swallow’s flight to escape winter and swim in the balmy air of summer. Think of some of the reasons for this hope to which the Apostle gives such practical application: THE UNIVERSAL FACT. 1. There is the inherent dread of absolutely ceasing to be, the instinctive recoil of the soul from the thought of being wiped off the slate. Death is the universal fact. The grave lies before us all. Dim and distant it may, and often does, seem to those in bounding health, and yet even those whose hearts are “stout and brave” hear the “muffled drums” and the “funeral marches.” But to men gifted with reason, judgment, and perception, it seems a horrible and irrational thing that death should end all. We have faculties and desires which have no correspondence in 4,his life, and unless we have hope of a Beyond, where these faculties and desires will find fulfilment, life were a curse and not a blessing. Heart and reason are in revolt against, the .idea of annihilation. To suppose that a blade of steel, a pistol shot, a drop of poison, or a spasm of the heart, can blot out this thinking, loving, aspiring me, would make life itself a hideous blot, and human destiny a curse. Rather than be a man under such conditions, I would choose to be a dog baying at the moon, a crow cawing in a cornfield, or a snake wriggling in the dust. “If in this life only we have not hope, we are of all men the most miserable.” THE SENSE THAT HAUNTS US. 2. There is the sense of incompleteness which haunts us, go where we will, and do what we may. Was there ever.a man, much less a good man, who had no higher goal to reach, no dream of goodness unfulfilled? Do we not feel that the highest and fairest significance of life has only visited us as an ideal, and sometimes a tantalising ideal? Stray notes of music fall on our astonished ear, telling us that somewhere all life shall be finely attuned to the eternal harmony! Our aspirations, like fledglings, look over the nest and wish they could I fly! Our loves mingle with passions and infirmities! The soul is “cribbed, cabined and confined.” This is not true

of any other being save man. Other beings are satisfied. Is our dream of future greatness all a lie? 3. Life’s mystery demands a future life for its interpretation. We have been taught to believe in the kindliness of God’s providence; taught to believe in “a divinity that shapes our ends,” and taught to sing that “God is his own interpreter.” Life needs interpretation, no doubt, for have we not felt th? inequalities that call for adjustment, and the wrongs that need to be righted? We have seen might triumph over right Under the very throne of God. We have seen the gentle tormented and - afflicted, whilst the rough and vicious have more than heart could wish! Yet when we asked the reason of this topsy-turvydom, silence has mocked our queify, and not the faintest echo of reply came to soothe our misery. Faith in the moral government of the universe requires a future life to equalise the inequalities and right these wrongs. THE GREAT HOPE. 4. We have friends in the Great Beyond, and the one thing which made their passing bearable was this hope, that with the morn these angel faces will once more beam upon us, and who can measure the effect this hope has had on the life of the world? How it has quickened, and consoled, and sustained! Bui are - men Ind women elevated and refined by a fraud? Let no one tell us so and hope for credence. Such, then, are some of the reasons why we cherish the hope of immortality, only Saint John insists that the doctrine of immortality is not for speculation or comfort alone; it is a spur to effort, and a motive to personal purity. Heaven may be regarded in a dreamy and impractical way that softens and enervates the soul, instead of bracing it. Men speak of going to Heaven as though it w'ere a theatre or a concert room, to enter which you only need to get a ticket! But Heaven is not so much a place into which we are admitted as it is a state into which we must grow. It is a prepared place for a prepared people. Heaven is character. We need to be “made meet for the inheritance of the Saints in light.” We shall have Heaven if we are fit for it, and not else. Character determines destiny! Judas “went to his < n place,” the only place in God’s universe for which he was morally fitted. “Enoch walked with God,” and found rest in the Eternal City. As Shelley sings: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” DEATH NOT A TERMINUS. There is nothing magical in a, coffin or a shroud to change a man’s nature and blot out ii man’s pact. As a maq sleeps, he will .wake. The same pair of parallel rails that lie on the Swiss side of the Saint Gothard continue through the tunnel until the train shoots out into the sunshine of Italy. Death is a thoroughfare, not a terminus. Life on the other side will be the same as this. So, then, the- use St. John makes of the doctrine of immortality is the right use. We are the sons of God? We are the sons of everlasting life? Proof, Sir, proof! Well, this is the proof: “Everyone that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is pure.” The act of physical dissolution cannot change a hard, cold, selfish soul into a tender, warm, loving saint. To be like Christ anywhere, we needs must begin to be like Him here. We must yield ourselves to Him whose mercy blots ‘‘out the evil past, and imparts a new and regenerated life, a life like unto His own. As the Rev. F. B. Meyers says: “When we turn ourselves towards Christ, we enter on a path by which we shall eternally approximate towards Him, quicker or slower, according to the immediacy of our obedience to the light. We may not arrive at the perfect appreciation of Christ for untold milleniums.” But we shall arrive, and we shall be like Him.