SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 September 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY. ‘•Now He is. not the dead, but of the living, for all live unto Him.” —Saint Luke, XX. 38. (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) g The •Sadducees were the Rationalists of their age. though they had their home within the pale of the Jewish Church. They were not atheists, for they believed in the existence of God, but they said: “There is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit.” Life was bounded by sense and time, by the quiver of a nerve and a tick of the clock. The grave, not the sky, is the goal. Death ends all. We live -in a cave and not a universe. It was a dreary and hopeless creed, and. the wonder is that any man should accept it, and greater wonder* still that any man should be .so heartless as to teach it in a world like' ours. But these men were in open revolt against the stiff . nd pedantic orthodoxy of the schoolmen. The dogmatism of the Pharasees repelled them, and they resolved on free enquiry and ended in becoming haughty intellectualists. It is ever so. Dogmatism in the church leads to Rationalism in the world. Wherever you have Pharaseeism in the one, you have Sadduceeism in the other, for Sadduceeism is the recoil of reflective minds from a formal and technical religionism. As a rule the men who denounce belief produce it. For as tyranny on the throne begets rebellion in the people, so unwise dogmatism in the church begets rationalism in thise who cannot make their reason blind. But though Pharasees and Sadducees were poles asunder in many things, they were at one in their hostility to Jesus Christ, and greatly desired His discomfiture. Just as Herpd and Pilate were made friends in open attack on the Son of God. In all the conceit of superior wisdom, they come with thier clever problem. They present as actual history a curious case which put their problem in sharpest form, a case which probably was a hackneyed jest, a reduetio ad absurdum on the marriage question, and entirely without point, save as it supplied the possibility of confounding the Master. a. woman, seven times wife and widow, but never once a mother! Whose would she be in the Resurrection?

A STRANGE CUSTOM. The question was founded on what is known as “the Levirate Law,” which provided that in case a man died childless. his widow had the right to claim her brother-in-law in marirege, and thus have a home, and the dead a chance of his name being rescued from oblivion, for, according to this law, the first child of the second marriage was regarded as the offspring of the dead, and inherited his name and his property. The curious custom is exceedingly ancient and widespread. It obtains in Egypt and Syria and old Italy. It exists in some Indian tribes of Arabia. Captain Burnaby, in his book, “The Ride to Khiva,” says that he found the law existing in certain Kurdish tribes in Central Asia. This strange custom supplied the Sadducees with their imaginary problem, and they stated it with a fine parade of anxiety which only masked their real intention. Instantly Christ saw their real motive and proceeded to spoil their plot. He said their blunder arose out of ignorance, where most error is born. “Ye do err not knowing the Scripture.” Then He proceeded to remind them that they had misconceived the whole subject. MARRIAGES AND DEATHS. In this life we have marriages because we have deaths. The one repairs the ravages of the other, but in heaven there is no death and no marriage. Moreover, where love is perfected there is no jealousy. Men are as the angels, capable of purest affection, without demanding monopoly of possession, such as human infirmity requires. The answer was triumphant. But Christ did not stop there. They accepted the writings of Moses as part of the Divine Revelation, and in the law of Moses it was written: “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” How could He be the God of these great souls if He allowed their hopes to perish and their lives to be blotted out? Whatever we love we seek to keep alive. If God cared for Abraham, would He not guard him against everlasting death? But if the Saducees were right in saying there is “no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit,” then Abraham was at that moment a mere handful of desert dust in which “the God of Abraham” could have no great concern. Everything great and noble in human life ranges itself on the side of immrotality—love of our fellows, self-respect, conscience and reverence for God. The fact that God can engage the thoughts of man, can commune with them ;the fact that man is protected, beloved and redeemed of God, is proof that man is more than mortal. Because God thought it worth while to make man, He thought it worth while to crown Him with the crown of immortal life. God loves His child, God delights in the presence of His child, and God would spend a lonely and desolate Eternity could death rob Him of the presence of the Spirits that trust and cling to Him. It is significant that Jesus Christ, wishing to prove the Resurrection, stopped at immortality, for the one implies the other. The words which follow and complete the argument are rich and full of suggestion. “Now He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto Him.”

THE FUTURE LIFE. It is idle to pretend to ignore the question of the future life. No one has ever succeeded in doing it, and only the frivolous make the attempt. The master minds of all the ages have wrestled with it. Great monuments, rich with the rhyme of antiquity, stand as witness to the’ thinking of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Greece, around this fascinating topic. Missionaries in all lands find the question tormenting the untutored savage, and the nations high up in the ranks of the intellectuals. Modem science cannot ignore the subject. Modern poets, from Wordsworth to Browning, have faced it. Stopford Brooke said of Alfred Tennyson that for sixty years he stood like Horatius on the narrow bridge of immortality, defending it against the host of misbelievers, and that at last he was victorious. One of the most affecting chapters of Livingstone’s journals tells how two travel-stained natives came to his tent, not to gaze on his white skin, but to ask the question: “Do people die jn £our country The natives of Cea-

tral Africa are all their lives in bondage to fear of death.. The hut where they die is forsaken, and the little clearing left to tropical growth, and the people go out in search of soil untouched by death, ana these two pitiful natives came, thinking the white man with his medicine had learned the secret of destroying the waster Death! Nor is this thought of the Beyond morbid and unhealthy. It is just Christian good sense. Canon .Liddon'used to tell of an old Indian officer who recounted -his experience in ilie Indian Mutiny. The story was thrilling. His audience listened spell-bound. Then he paused and quiet-' ly added: “I expect to see something much more wonderful than that.” As he was past seventy, and retired from active service, his listeners looked into his face with surprise. Then in quiet tones he said: “I mean five minutes after death.” There is nothing morbid in that; it is only the eager, reverent curiosity to discover what we can of the i«rw life that opens before the emancipated soul. It i-» the atmosphere in which the New. Testament is written “Ad live, ’ said Christ. That is surely a great and wonderful revelation. The ’weigh*, and worth of it will be seen if you try to reverse it. Suppose it were not true! Would it not be infinitely sad and immeasurably pathetic? To think of all the millions who have lived and loved and suffered, yet not one living now! That God, “The F.vthTii Creator,” cares only for those living now and cares for them only so long as their earth life lasts, whilst the departed great, the heroic and the saintly, have gone like the foam of “ships that pass in the night!” and that having gone they are nothing to God! Such a conclusion would be tragic indeed. Nay, more than tragic, it would drive virtuous men mad.

ALIVE UNTO GOD. But we cannot believe so, and Christ says we ought not to try. Our blessed ones are no more dead than when they passed from one room to another in the house, or took train from one part of the lana to another. “Au live!” Death destroys nothing. The generations which have been are still alive unto God, keenly, 'intensely, for ever alive. In God’s world nothing is wasted, least of all human character and influence. The profound genius of Shakespeare and Milton, the musical gifts of Handel and Mozart, have not perished; Raphael and Di Vinci speak to this age; the force and fervour of Saint Paul and Saint John have not been quenched in unknown graves. The life of Earth is richer for the lives that “breathed be‘neath the Syrian blue.” I wish we cotild drop the word “dead,” with all its painful associations, its nodding plumes, its broken pillars, and. its dirge music. There are no dead. They live! They are not shut up in the cold prison house of the grave. They have passed out of earth into life, and though our eyes cannot see, or our hands hold them, they live a life that is larger, fuller, freer, than ever before. They have cast off all human infirmity and limitations and moral peril. They have exchanged weariness lor rest, conflict for peace, faith for sight, and time for timelessness. They live. “All live! Turn a moment to the second fragment of this sentence, “All live unto Him.” In the Greek the two words, “unto Him,” are one. It is the Greek pronoun in the dative case, and it may be rendered in either of three ways. “All live unto Him;’ “All live before Him,” “All live in Him.” Take the last first. “All live in Him.” The root of all life is in God. From Him we derive our powers. God is Source and Sustainer of all: our First Beginning, our Last Great End. But Dean Alford interprets the pronoun to mean “all live before Him;” that is, all live in His most holy sight. There is not a thought in our miu u but He knows it altogether, and His perfect knowledge is blended with perfect wisdom and perfect love. Finally, “all live unto Him.” Do they? Angels do, for they are “ministering spirits, sent forth to minister.” “The spirits of just men made perfect” do. Did not Moses and Elias appear on the Mount of Vision centuries after they had passed hence? Yes, and we have known men and women of whom it was easy to believe that they lived unto God. But not all. What of wicked men and fallen spirits? I would not be wise abdve what is written, and dark shadows hang about the future, but; I have seen a gang of convicts discharging hateful tasks, and though the task was hated and the taskmaster as well, nevertheless the work was useful and reproductive, though done by prisoners in chains. In some such way it may be that spirits evil are compelled to serve high ends, until cured of rebellion and having suffered the just reward of their deeds, they shall be restored to the ranks of the loyal and the free. “Christ hath abolished death and brought life and immortality to light in the Gospel.” There are no dead. “All live unto Him.” “Death doth hide, But not divide; Thou art but on Christ’s other side, Thou are with Christ, and Christ with me, In Christ united still are we/’