The Future Life.

Thames Star, Volume XIII, Issue 4254, 19 August 1882, Page 4

The Future Life.

■'■:.:^ *~TmcTvm by S., J.Neill,

"For all live unto Him."—Luke 20,38. " Form Him we" live."—Acts 17, 28. " For we are also His offspring."—Aratus Phsenom 1 (B.C. 270£ ' ■ . , rVI We hare seen from the character of the Sadducees what was the scope of their question, and "also how Christ's answer met them at two points. We proceed; to notice how, in the language of St. Paul, " all live in God," and, therefore,hbw "all must live unto Him." For, as the Cilioian poet had said," we are also His offspring " ~tovgar Teat genos esmen. Another Greek writer, the stoic philosopher Cleantbes, had spoken similar words, and it is in structiye that the Christian apostle recognises truth wherever it may be found, and that the fall revelation of the Divine Fatherhood which Christ unfolds was deep-seated in the breast of man from time immemorial. The reasoning of St. Paul here seems to be that as men are the offspring of God they should not think of God as existing under any form which art Blight imitate. But why not P If man is the child of God as to his bodily form St. Paul's reasoning scems^very weak, and - pointless. But not so, if it be the case that man's is the child of God as to that spiritual, and therefore immortal, nature within, which cannot be pictured by "art and device of man " any more than the Divine Father (God, who is a spirit) can be represented by. painter or sculptor. The second commandment is but the expression of a great truth running through all Scripture, that the Divine Being cannot be represented by human picturin gs; therefore, wej who are his offspring, and cannot be represented any more than God .as t6 our,* real being, should know the truth from within, and worship thus the Divine Spirit, our Father. If we can trust to: this teaching, by the likeness of fatherhood given us by Christ, then surely, as the child in its features is like the parent, we also, as the offspring of God, should grow in our spirital features, in righteousness, in the holiness of truth, in knowledge, after the image of our Divine Parent. On what other principle than this can the words of our Lord have any meaning—" Ye, therefore, shall be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect ?" So also it is written—" Be ye holy, for lam holy." This is at once the glorious hope of man, and the means by which it becomes possible. We are not unlike God in "the make of our spirits," for "we also are his offspring," " in him we live,': and "all live unto him." Immortality then is, in the highest sense, natural to us—as memory, and hearing, and sight are natural to the child because it is the child of one possessing those faculties, and Want of memory, hearing, or sight would be unnatural, or abnormal; so the features of Divine loveliness, because we are the Divine offspring, are natural to us, and sin—which mars the righteousness, the holiness of truth—is alien to us, andshould and will be cast off as a foreign element. It has become in many cases a superinduced nature, but we are to cast off the yoke; it is a disease, but disease is no more natural to the soul than to the body, and the cures of the Great Physician are here most instructive. Immortality is bound up in God, and is impossible only on the ground either that there is no God, or that we are not his offspring, and do not live in him, and therefore may not live to him. Imperfect notions of God here, as elsewhere, lie at the root of wrong views of life. God is separated from .bis works, and religion is separated from life, and this life is separated from the • future. This is the way to bring about chaos* The Bey. Stopford Brooke maintains that that the time has come we should make our conception of Christian truth embrace those ideas which navo had their seed in Christ's teaching, but which, till now, have grown outside rather than within the pale of recognised Church theology. Some of these are to be found in Positivism. The seeds of the teaching about social and international self sacrifice may be found in Christ's words, " Whosoever saveth his life shall lose it," &c. But true Christianity places these teachings on a sounder basis, plants them in a more congenial soil, giving us a Living Person, our Divine Father, giving us endless life for each as well as for the race, and revealing to us the fact ihat we are members, one of another, in Him who is Life Eternal. The whole is alive, and therefore the individuals cannot be dead, else the whole would be dead; but our text says " All live in' Him," and " unto Him," and "are his offspring." As the earthly parent is in certain relation to his children, so God, by his nature as Father to us, stands evermore in certain relations to us, his children. Hence, in the eloquent language of the author we have quoted, " All through our deepest ruin G-od's victorious love is opposed to man's reluctant hatred and despair, till at last, they .being finite,; are dissipated in the Divine Love, and the child comes to himself from the depths, of his misery and darkness, and cries, ' I will arise and go to my Father.'" The moment we have an adequate notion of God as the sole existing being in whom all live, we perceive the utter impossibility of any one " going out like a candle." Truth and Love are the same in us as in our Divine Parent. Truth is absolute wherever the idea is. Truth does not become modified or shaded away into falsehood. It is either truth or not truth. Either there is no God, or annihilation is false. God is, and we are in Him, and Longfellow speaks the truth when he says— " There is no death ! What seems so is transition. .This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the Life Elysian, ■ v Whose portal we call death."