418 THE OWNER'S MARK
done, he said, "Mr. Speer, you have asked me a great many questions, and some of them have been very difficult. Now, I would like to ask you one question. You know what the Chris- tians in your country are like. Are they all men and women of burning hearts ? " It was a quaint Chinese idiom of which he made use, but that was its literal translation. He desired to know if we were all of us of burning hearts. What would you have said to him ? What would you have said to him about the great mass of our so-called Christians. Are we of burning hearts ? *
Tis not for man to trifle, life is brief
And sin is here; Our age is but the falling of a leaf,
A dropping tear. We have no time to sport away the hours, All must be earnest in a world like ours.
Not many lives, but only one have we,
One, only one, How earnest should that one life be,
That narrow span, Day after day spent in blessed toil, Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil.
Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat; Only, we can't command it; fire and life Are all, dead matter's nothing, we agree: And be it a mad dream or God's very breath, The fact's the same, — belief's fire, once in us, Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself.2
1 R. E. Speer. * Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology.
The Resurrection of the Body.
Literature.
Beecher (W. J.), The Teaching of Jesus concerning the Future Life, 145.
Brown (J. Baldwin), The Divine Life in Man, 223.
Ingram (A. F. W.), A Mission of the Spirit, 217.
Jeffrey (G.), The Believer's Privilege, 286.
Mabie (H. C), The Meaning and Message of the Cross, 171.
Christian World Pulpit, xxxviii. 392 (White) ; lxvii. 289 (Scott-Holland).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vi. 39 (Brown).
420
The Resurrection of the Body.
But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you.— Rom. viii. n.
1. " I believe in the resurrection of the body." In spite of that merciless saying of Strauss, " The last enemy which shall be destroyed is the belief of man in his own immortality," there is no hope which nestles deeper in the human heart, and none which in our day has had more wistful expression. Among a thousand people there will not be one who does not wish to cast himself with all his heart and mind into this inspiring belief, and declare his conviction, if he can, that death is not the end of all his labours, his sorrows, his endeavours, his victories, his love, but that he, a complete human being — not soul only, but body and soul — will enter into fulness of life when he passes from this world into that which encompasses us on every side.
2. Now this hope is fulfilled in Christianity. For Christianity is a revelation of energy. That is its heart of hearts. It declares the direction in which God has put out force. It professes to bring into play the full powers of the Divine will. Everything else is subordinate to that. Knowledge, for instance, is not given by it for its own sake. Nothing is told us which does not belong to and issue from the action taken on our behalf. We know God through what He does. We know Him, we see Him, in Jesus Christ whom He has sent. In that sending we learn what God is, and the sending determines and limits all our knowledge. When we go beyond what He has shown us in that mission of His Christ, we find ourselves, as much as any others, lost in an abyss. We slip off into the inane ; our faculties fail us. Only in the face of Jesus Christ, only by the rigid adherence to the actual manifestation of God's will in act through Him, only in what is
422 THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
there expressed through the face of Him who lived and died and rose, only so does our knowledge come.
Even such is Time who takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust; Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days.
But from that earth, that grass, that dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust ! x
Eesurkection.
1. The word most commonly used in the New Testament for rising from the dead is the verb egeiro, " to awaken." The angel awakened Peter, and the disciples awakened Jesus (Acts xii. 7 ; Mark iv. 38). Joseph awakened from his dream, and took Jesus to Egypt, and back to the land of Israel (Matt. ii. 13, 14, 20, 21). Here and often elsewhere the English versions have the verb " arise," but the arising is only a suggested meaning. Probably the word could be uniformly translated " awaked," and in many instances with the effect of rendering the sense more vivid. Ptead through the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, substituting " awaken " for " be raised." Note especially the places where it comes into antithesis with " asleep " (e.g. verses 15, 20). You will perhaps not wish to change the familiar old rendering, but you will find it imbued with new significance. The noun of this stem is used but once in the New Testament (Matt, xxvii. 53).