SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 April 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

“HE DESCENDED INTO HELL.” “Christ also once for all died for Bin, the innocent One for the guilty many, in order to bring us to God. He wae put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the. Spirit, in which He also went and proclaimed His message to the Spirits that were in prison.” r—l. Saint Peter HI., 18-10. < (Waymouth translation.) (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) Readers 61 Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” that glorious song of hope, will remember the moving passage in which the poet describes the meeting of Mary and .Lazarus, after his return from the gates of the grave: “When Lazarus left the charnel cave, And home to Mary's house returned, Was this demanded—if he yearned To hear her weeping at his grave?” Then follows that wonderful description of Mary—a passage that illustrates and surely proves the supremacy of poetry over painting or sculpture as one of the fine arts: “'Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, No other thought her mind admits, But he was dead, and there he sits, And He that brought him back is there.” Other stanzas follow of equal force and beauty, but I recall the passage for the sake of these four lines: ‘‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days ? There lives no record of reply, Which, telling what it is to die. Had surely added praise to praise.” It is that line, “Where wert thou, brother, those four days?” that links the poem with our subject. Where was Jesus in the interval between Good Friday eve and lEaster Day dawn? His body—marble white and crimson veined —rested in Joseph’s garden grave, amid fragrant blossoms and singing birds. But where was,He? Not in the rocky sepulchre, not in Heaven, for did not Jesus say to Mary: “Touch Me not. for I have not yet ascended unto My Father.” I speak with great humility and great reserve, but with Charles Kingsley we think of the future life with “reverent curiosity.” A DIFFICULT CLAUSE. The answer of “the Apostles' Creed” is this: “He descended into Hell,” and the answer of Saint Peter seems to be the same. “He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which He also went, and proclaimed His message to the Spirits that were in prison.” The clause in the creed is difficult. and the text in Saint Peter's Epistle has been pronounced “the darkest in the New Testament.” Dr. Rendel Harris ingeniously suggests that it was Enoch, and not our Lord, who preached to the' Spirits in prison. But it is difficult to harmonise that reading with the context. Tlie'difficulty of the clause in the creed is heightened by the fact that whilst we have a Revised Version of the New Testament, where the archaic word “Hell” is omitted and the word “Hades” or the “Gehenna” is rightly substituted. In the creed the old word, with its false and frightful ideas, is retained. If instead of saying “He descended into Hell” we read “He passed on to Paradise.” the burden is lifted, and. of course, that is the sense of the passage.

“The Apostles’ Creed” challenges us to believe that what Jesus said to the dying robber: “This day. thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,” did actually happen. The difficulty of the text in Saint Peter is that it seems to lend itself to the Romish doctrine of Purgatory—“pick-pocket Purgatory”—and that grits the teeth of Protestants. The officialising and commercialising of Purgatory is hateful. The system of raising church revenue out of the mourners’' sorrow is hideous. But neither creed nor text teach the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. If they did T should reject/'both. They teach something nobler, and that something nobler is what Pat f terson Smyth calls “a lost chapter in the life of Christ.” In the Puritan revolt against the abuses of Purgatory, in their healthy scorn of error they went too far. As Dr. Forsyth said: “\Ve threw away too much when we threw Purgatory clean out of doors. We threw out the baby with the dirty water of its bath.” There is a truth at the heart of every error. THE GREAT BEYOND. Tlie difference between a portrait and a caricature is just the overdrawing of a feature. It is mistaking a feature for a face. So a truth becomes a lie by ex. aggeration. Alas! it is so much easier to denounce than to discover, so much easier to set up a man of straw and demolish it than to array truth in regal charm. Purgatory is a blasphemous falsehood, but at the risk of gritting Protestant teeth, there is a truth behind that shocking perversion. Before I try to state that truth, I want to remind you of something I said in the first address of this series. “The Apostles’ Creed.'’ as it is called, is a purely hu-< man document, and is in no sense binding on the Christian conscience. The idea that each of the twelve Apostles contributed a clause to the creed is absurd. My boyhood days were spent in association with a church which recited the creed, week by week, but omitted the words: “He descended into Hell.” Large numbers of honest men and women, who prize reality in religion above all else, hold that the creed would be sim- J plified and strengthened if these words were excised, and if you are of the number you are at liberty to omit. But

it should be remembered that "religions dogma isn’t potted .poetry.” The, statement that Jesus, after He was “crucrfied, dead, and buried,” passed on to y disc, is not a literary freak. If it be true, as Professor Harnajck says, that “the Apostles’ Creed” came into being about the fifth century* then for the last seventeen hundred years it has expressed the beliefs of millions of earnest Christians. Of course that does not prove it is true, but jt does constitute a claim for respectful investigation. And now, .speaking with unreserved frankness, let me try to tell you what I conceive to be the truth at the heart of clause and text. The comparative silence of the New Testament on the Great Beyond is remarkable, and for some it is hard to bear. The silence of Christ is still more arresting. He knew al] that we ache to know. Tlie Yonderland lay open before Him, like the map of a country He had perfectly explored, yet He only rarely lifted the veil, and He tells us’ almost nothing definite andexplicit. The parable of Dives and Lazarus will not bear the strain that has been imposed upon it. The lessons are few and simple. There is another life, and our fate turns on our conduct here. The rich man in the parable is the typical selfish man who reaps the inevitable consequences of his selfishness separation from God, the Spirit of Love. So with Saint Matthew’s picture of the Great Assize. In vivid and compelling words it proclaims the truth that for men, and nations, selfishness has consequences which reach out beyond this life. Christ is not giving information to clairvoyants and spooks, but warning to profiteers! This is practically the sum total of what He said. Tlie dread alternative of the future is summed up in four words: “More life with Christ,” or “More life without Christ.” Yes, but see where all this lands us. WHAT IS DEATH? The New Testament and “the Apostles’ Creed'’ challenges us to recognise that death does not end all. Death is a thoroughfare, and not a terminus. The situation is not simply Life and Death; it is Life and Death and the Beyond. Five minutes after death we shall be conscious, thinking, feeling, knowing, joying or sorrowing. Death is not a drop over the edge of a frowning precipice into nothingness. The same pair of steel rails that carry a train into a tunnel carry it out on the other side. When your friend died the doctor said: “The engine has stopped.” “No,” says the Christian. “Th? engineer has left.” We shall arrive. Personality persists. And “the struggle of the future rests be. tween those who believe that the discar. nate soul passes on to Paradise, and tnose who say there is no soul to pass and no Paradise to pass to.” “A-s I stand by the Cross on the lone mountain crest. Looking over the ultimate sea, In the gloom of the mountain a ship lies at rest, And one sails away from the lea, One spreads its white wings on a farreaching track, With pennant and sheet flowing free: One hides in the shadow with sails laid aback, The ship that is waiting for me.” Mark this, however, the yonder life is not stagnatory. It is a life of purgation and progress. Neither here, nor Beyond, are souls alike in attainment or experience. Some die “like a ehock of corn fully ripe”; others are raw and immature. “One star differs from another in glory.” The robber who repented at tlie eleventh hour, and Saint John, who served Christ from youth to age, were equally debtors to Christ for salvation, but they were not on the same plane pf Spiritual experience. People leave earth at different stages, and death does not revolutionise character. Death is hot a soul-saving sacrament. A bad man does not at death become hopelessly bad. A good man does not become immediately perfect. The future life is a continuation of this. There is no magic in a coffin or a shroud. The character of a man isn’t changed by passing through a gate. We speak of’being “made meet for the inheritance of the Saints in light.” but how many of us who are church members of many years’ standing? and with a tested creed, are spiritually fit for the great adventure into the great Hereafter? Have you beaten down and conquered all your sins? Are al] “the fruits of the Spirit” flourishing in the garden of the soul? Shall wp not even in the Paradise of God need to cry:

“Refining fire go through my heart, Illuminate my soul.” REAL TRUTH MISSED. But isn't that a truth that has slipped us, and in place of it we have a vague notion that, no matter how careless and worldly minded We may have been, the accident of death will make it all right. It isn’t rational. Surely the culris.Jion of the Spiritual life needs and deserves as much care as the passing of an examination or the making of a woman's blouse. Ah! but—- “ Heaven is not reached by a single bound, Beyond each hill-top others rise, Like ladder-rung to loftier skies. Each halt is but a breathing space For fresher pace. Till who dare say, ere night descends, There can be such a thing as end? Finally creed and text declare that the atoning Saviour did something on the Cross that reaches out into the world of Spirits. Christ entered Hades as Conqueror, to announce His finished and perfect sacrifice. Millions of souls passed hence who never heard His Name-, millions of heathens have never so much as heard of the Cross; millions are living in the midst of our unsanctified civilisation, born in recking slums, with bodies tainted and minds debauched. They have never rejected Christ for they have never been brought face to face with His infinite beauty. “Children conceived and born in sin Rotten with syphilis, soaked in gin. Housed like pigs in their filthy styes. Cursed from the day they opened their eyes.” But the line of the Cross sweeps round to the end of the universe, and here or yonder it shall reach these with the message that neither height nor depth, nor length nor breadth, nor life nor death, can separate them from the love of Christ that passeth knowledge. “Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen, Yearns to reach those souls in prison, Through all depths of sin and loss, Drops the plummet of the Cross: Never yet abyss was found Deeper than the Cross could sound.” “He descended into Hades.”