(2) Taking this to be the keynote of this part of our Lord's discourse, we see in it an assurance of speedy and almost immediate consolation. If we must fix some definite note of time for the fulfilment of the promise, everything points to the out-
* J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, 3.
64 THE HOUSE OF MANY MANSIONS
pouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. For it was from that day forward that the idea of Christ's life and death crept — and crept as a transforming power — into the study of the disciples' imagination, so that the old relationship between them and their Master was replaced by one more distinctly spiritual. Then the merely human tie was dissolved, and the Spirit manifested Christ as a hidden Power to their souls. Then they began to learn that because the Spirit which He sent down upon them was a Spirit proceeding from the Father, therefore in being reunited to Christ spiritually they became the inmates of that Father's home. Night and day is the Divine home open to all who by faith in Christ come to know themselves as children of the Heavenly Father. The household of that Father is wider than our poor thoughts about it We enter it not through the grave and gate of death, but through a willing surrender of ourselves to God as dutiful children.
^ The Apostles evidently understood their Master to promise that, when He had gone out of their bodily sight, He would come to them again in spiritual presence, and they would dwell with Him and the Father in a spiritual home ; and after the Day of Pentecost they were accustomed to assume that the promise had been fulfilled, and that they were living as the Father's children with the other members of the Divine family, looking up to the Divine Son as their head.^
(3) Let us not think of any break at death. The course of life, life of the plant, the animal, the soul, is maintained along lines of uninterrupted continuity. To-day is born from the womb of yesterday, and to-morrow will be the offspring of to-day. There is nothing in Scripture or in nature to sustain the supposi- tion that the highway of our life once begun is gashed with any abyss of meaningless suspension, that threads are broken and have to be knotted together again, and that the little territory we know as our present life is islanded from all that great continent of being that fills to the full the area of the eternal to-morrow. The soul's celestial life is not distinct from its terrestrial life save in the sense in which the blossom is distinct from the bud. We are never to be rooted out from those beginnings of spiritual life in which we are already planted and secured.
' J. LI. Daviea, Sj}irUual Apprehension, 351.
ST. JOHN XIV. 2 65
]| The soul, like the plant, must be uncovered to the au-s that blow across it from the distances, and bared to the baptism of the unfathomed sky by which it is overarched. The great world of spirit is nowhere if it is not here. The world of the blessed is not framed in walls. The beginnings of heaven are in the heavenly mind. This is part of the Father's house and here are some of the mansions. Having referred to some of the lesser blessings by which life is enriched Wordsworth goes on to say : —
Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise ; . . . But for those first affections Those shadowy recollections. Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake,
To perish never : Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
IsTor Man nor Boy Nor all that is at enmity with joy. Can utterly abolish or destroy !
Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither ; Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore. And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.^
(4) Is there no comfort in this ? Is there no consolation in the hour of sorrow ?
^ I once had a conversation with a lady who years before had lost her beloved husband. The relation between her and him had been emphatically a union of souls, one wherein the physical element had been very, very secondary. And yet when the hour of his dissolution arrived, and all that had been the visible expression of his personality, and all through which the tender- ness of his devotion had sweetly disclosed itself, had been laid beneath the sod, the more material side of her nature at first asserted itself and for many days it remained the persistent and ^ Wordsworth, Intimations of ImmortcUity.
ST. JOHN (2) — 5
66 THE HOUSE OF MANY MANSIONS
despairing passion of her heart to tarry by his graveside, and to seek comfort and to find a kind of companionship in clinging as it were to the silent and hidden memorials of a life that was done, of a spirit that was fled.