The earth was dead, so they tell us, ages ago. But now how this earth lives ! There is hardly a cliff too barren for nature not to hang some blooming thing upon it ; and the old earth teems with life. Furthermore, even here, where death reigns, life has been growing higher, more complex, more capable of larger correspondences with things. Between the lowest living thing and the brain of man there is a difference of life wide as the distance between the earth and the heavens. That first infini- tesimal point of life has no world with which to establish relations larger than the microscopic field in which we have looked and discovered it, but we have already established relations of thought and knowledge with the farthest stars. Plainly then, without any doubt, life is something stronger thus far upon this earth than death. Notwithstanding death, life grows to be more and richer.
What is death, so far as we can see what it is ? Here is a minute living thing in a glass of water. You turn the water out. That living particle is now mere dust upon the glass. Dead, — that is, it is no longer moving in an element corresponding to its capacity of vital movements. What is death then ? A living thing is no longer in harmony with its surroundings. It is thrown out of its own proper correspondence with things ; it is dead. So death is a relative thing. It is simply some wrong or imperfect adjustment of life to external conditions. But death may be partial, then, not entire. A part of the body may be dead. A man may be dead in some relations, and still live in others. There is a sense in which we die daily. Parts of us are thrown out of vital relations. The body may begin to die long before it is dead. Death is but a relative, negative thing. Life is the principle, the force, the law ; death the limitation, the accident, the partial negation of God's great affirmation of life in things.
45$ RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
U The weakest point in the historical acceptation of the Fall certainly is its theory of death ; for if death in the case of man be a penal punishment for breaking the Divine law, how happens it that this penalty should lay low not only the guilty party, which is the proper nature of all penalties, but should travel with an indiscriminate sweep over the whole length and breadth of the creation ? Death is not a horror but a universal phenomenon ; all things die just as certainly as they are born. Flowers die; quadrupeds die; birds die; fishes die — fishes! there they lie enswathed by millions in some mud-beds of the primeval slime, thousands of thousands of years possibly before the appearance of the unfeathered biped on this terrestrial stage, scarcely with any presentiment of Adam's first sin. The ecclesiastical theory of death, therefore, plainly breaks down, by the logical defect of explaining only a small number of the facts. Had it been otherwise, — had man been the only creature that knew death, — the theory might have some plausible ground on which to stand. But a more fundamental objection remains. Death is an evil, but to whom ? — to the creature who dies, and to all who have special cause to lament its loss ; but is it an evil to the universe ? to this earth ? — manifestly not ; for if all the people that have been born on the earth from Adam until now had lived and not known death, where would the room have been for them ? Ee- juvenescence is one of the grandest and most sublime facts in the divine constitution of things: so that young persons may con- stantly appear on what to them is a new and therefore a stimulating scene, old persons must depart and make room.1
If As to death, any one who understands Nature at all thinks nothing of it. Her whole concern is perpetually to produce nourishment for all her offspring. We go that others may come — and better, if we rear them in the right way. In talking of these deep things, men too often make the error of imagining that the world was made for themselves.2
2. Physical death is not made the important thing in our Bibles. Physical death does not hold the first place in the economy of redemption. The Bible assigns a subordinate place to our King of Terrors. The Book of Genesis, it is true, invests natural death with certain punitive fears ; but it does not elevate death to the rank of the supreme and final transaction between man and his Maker. Adam was not commanded by the Lord to live every day as though it were his last, himself a slave bound under the
1 John Stuart Blackie, Notes of a Life, 270. a George Meredith.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 459
fear of death ; he was commanded to go and work in the sweat of his brow, but with a promise of God in his heart. Man is to work out his time here, and to pass through death, as a being born under the higher law of the spirit, and with the possibility of eternal life always before him.