That is what I gather from the instances in the Old and New Testament in which those who had gone on before their time were called back again.
There are six of these instances in all: one in the Old Testament, and five in the New. Of four of them we are expressly told that those restored were young; of the other two nothing is said as to age, but one at least was probably young, while the other was greatly needed.
The child called back by Elisha was still a little boy. The daughter of Jairus was still a little girl. The son of the widow of Nain was a young man, as was also Eutychus raised by St. Paul. Though we are not told the age of Lazarus we judge that he was at most no more than in man"s maturity. Dorcas of Lydda may have been of any age, but, judging by the circ.u.mstances, she had not completed her task.
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My point is this, that if these things happened, they seem to bear out my suggestion that our own inducement of premature death cuts us off from fulfilling our appointed time and getting our appointed experience.
Only on some such ground can we believe that any would be permitted to return.
Should this be so we would be in a position to a.s.sume that all who go over ahead of time would be allowed to come back, if we had sufficient spiritual power to recall them. But that power is of the rarest. Our Lord, apparently, was in control of it only at times, and on at least one occasion, that of the raising of Lazarus, its exercise was not what we should call easy. But that He believed it to be at human command to some extent is clear from the fact that its use became one of His four basic principles. "Raise the dead," was the second of the commands with which He sent out his first seventy disciples.
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I dwell on the subject only because of its bearing on the love of G.o.d.
If it becomes plain to us that by the understanding of G.o.d"s Will we gain a richer experience, with less fear of being cut off before our work is done, that Will makes a stronger appeal for being understood.
That we have not understood it earlier, that we have not particularly cared to understand it, is due, I think, to our a.s.sumption of its capriciousness. It has been so underscored as inscrutable--the word generally applied to it--that the man in the street has felt mystified by it from the start. Being mystified he has settled down to think as little about it as he could.
But a great force striving with man to put common sense into his methods is worth comprehending. It does not compel us to common-sense methods for the reason that we value only that which we work out for ourselves.
We work nothing out but through suffering. We learn nothing, we take no forward step, except as we are whipped to it by anguish. That is why there is so much mourning in the world. G.o.d does not cause it; we bring it on ourselves; but each time we bring it on ourselves we creep one tiny step nearer that race-conclusion which is now coming to us about war, and will one day come to us about death, that "It must never happen again."
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In other words, death will be abolished by race-unanimity not to submit to it. We shall have travelled far in this direction when the average mind begins to perceive that G.o.d did not send death into His creation, but that we ourselves developed it. Having developed it ourselves we must get rid of it ourselves, and already some of that work has been done. "For seeing that death came through man," are the words of St.
Paul, "through man comes also the resurrection of the dead." When he speaks of "Jesus Christ who hath abolished death," his words are stronger still. "He has put an end to death and has brought Life and Immortality to light by the Good News, of which I have been appointed a preacher, apostle, and teacher."
This Life and Immortality are not to be relegated to other ages and worlds; they are for us to work out now.
The degree to which we work them out depends on our own efforts. Death will be our doom for many generations to come, because so few of us have the energy to strive against it. Release can come only when the race at large is willing to cast the evil thing off. One would suppose that we would be willing now; but we are far from being willing. We shall go on forcing our dear ones to die before their time, falling sick ourselves, enduring agonies, and rotting in graves, till we have suffered to the point at which we cry out that we have had enough. There will be a day when in presence of the useless thing we shall say, with something amounting to one accord, "It must stop." That day will be the beginning of the end of the age-long curse to which we still submit ourselves. In the language of St. Paul, "The last enemy to be destroyed is death,"
leaving us with the belief that, when we have progressed to the overthrow of other forces opposed to us, we shall go on to the overthrow of this one--and that it will be overthrown.
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From one kind of fear this reasoning has almost entirely delivered me--that of being taken away in the midst of my responsibilities, and before my work is done. I am not so audacious as to say that it may not happen; but only that, reasoning as I do, I am no longer a prey to apprehensions on the point. They used to come to me, not like the money-fear, an abiding visitant, but in spells of intense dread.
I suppose that most men with families, and much unfinished business, know this dread, and have suffered from it. You think of the home you have built up, and of what it would be without you. You think of your wife, grappling with a kind of difficulty to which she is unaccustomed.
You think of your children who turn to you as their central point, and who would be left without your guidance. You think of other duties you have undertaken, and wonder who will carry them through. You seem to be so essential to everyone and everything; and yet, you have been told, it may be the Will of G.o.d to remove you from them, and either let your plans collapse, or put their execution on the shoulders of someone else.
I am not so presumptuous as to say that for me this may not happen. I only say that I do not think it will. I do not think so because, according to my judgment, He having helped me to go as far as I have gone, will help me to finish my task before giving me another one.
My task, I think, He must estimate as I do. That is, my duties to others being not wholly of my choosing, but having come to me according to what I may call His weighing and measuring, I take them to be the duties He would have me perform. If so, He would naturally have me perform them till I come to the place where I can reasonably lay them down.
Therefore, I dismiss the fear of untimely separation from my appointed work. Such a separation may come; but if it does, it will probably come by some such means as I have briefly tried to sketch; my own mistakes; the mistakes of others; the effect of race-pressure. In any case, my personal resistance, it seems to me, is made the stouter by feeling that my tasks are His tasks, and so that so long as I am needful to their accomplishment, I remain. If I go, it will be because He has the succession of events so planned as to reduce collapse, failure, or suffering to a minimum.
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B. The thought that the minute after death will only be another little step in Growth, to be followed by another and then another, as we are used to growing here, greatly diminishes one"s shrinking at the change.
It is entirely a modern thought. The past, even of a few centuries ago, never entertained it. It is doubtful if it was mentally prepared to entertain it, or evolve the idea.
This is not to depreciate our fathers" mental powers. Different generations have different gifts. One age works along one line, another along another. The past had a certain revelation of truth; but the revelation of truth did not end with the past. Our ancestors received as much as they could take. What, it seems, they were unable to take was anything which made death less horrible. We may say, in fact, that they didn"t want it. They liked having death made horrible. Many people like it still. The mitigation of that horror they condemn, resent, and often ascribe to the devil.
And yet there is a tendency to see light through this gloom, and to seek views of death more in the line of common sense than those which have come down to us. It is not a strong tendency, but it exists. It exists in the face of opposition on the part of those religious conservatives who think conservatism and orthodoxy the same thing; and it runs the gauntlet of the sneers and jeers of the materially minded who make common cause with the old guard of the churches; but it exists. It exists, and goes forward, becoming a factor in the thought-life of our time.
It is not yet two hundred years since the plea was put forth on behalf of mankind that, in the administration of divine justice, no one suffers less than he deserves, but also that no one suffers more.
The hostility to this seemingly harmless teaching was of the most intense. There is hostility to it still, but mild as compared with that felt by our great-great-grandfathers. That no one should suffer less than he deserves went without saying; but that no one should suffer more was declared a black heresy. As there are those who declare it a black heresy to-day, it may be worth while, in the interests of the conquest of fear, to say a word as to the relation of G.o.d and punishment.
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To my mind it is chiefly verbal.
It is permissible to say that there is no such thing as punishment; there are only wrong results. It depends upon your way of putting it.
The wrong method produces wrong results in proportion as it is wrong.
Wrong results mean wrong conditions; and wrong conditions mean suffering. You may call this the law of G.o.d, but it is the law of anything. It is not positive law, it is negative. As a matter of fact, G.o.d does not need to put forth a law on the point since everything works that way.
What we call sin is simply a wrong method. It may be a wrong method meant to produce wrong; or it may be a wrong method in the hope of producing right. In any case it brings its consequence in pain.
That consequence may be corrected in this phase of our being, or it may be carried over into the next. Carried over into the next the individual, according to our ancestral teaching, comes under the sentence in which our fathers delighted as "d.a.m.nation." Not only did d.a.m.nation involve the most fiendish torture the Almighty could invent, but the torture was inflicted, without an instant of relief, throughout the eons of eternity.
I recall a sermon to which I listened as a boy of nine. It was on a summer"s evening, when the windows of the church were open. A moth fluttered about a light. The church stood at the foot of a mountain. The preacher was trying to explain to us the eternal duration of G.o.d"s punishment. "Think of that moth," he said, "carrying away one grain of sand from that mountain, and going off for a million years, after which it would return and take away another grain. And think of it keeping this up, one grain every million years, till the whole mountain was removed. Well, that would be only a moment as compared with the time you would be in h.e.l.l."
On the generations comforted and fortified by this sort of teaching I have no comment to make; but we of another generation should surely not be reproved for moving away from it. We move away from it in the direction of common sense, since common sense must be an attribute of the Universal Father as it is of the wiser among mankind.
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I revert, then, to my statement that G.o.d"s relation to punishment is chiefly verbal. His "wrath against sin" is a way of "putting it." If you can best express the suffering which springs from wrong methods as "G.o.d"s wrath" you are at liberty so to express yourself; but we should not lose sight of the fact that the wrong methods produce the suffering, and not an outburst of fury on the part of One who is put before us as Love.