And in the New Testament the chief use made of the fact of death is as a metaphor. Jesus makes a metaphor of what we call death. To Him sin is death ; the maid whom the people thought dead, He said, was asleep. The crisis of a soul's history is not, in the Bible, the death of the body. The fact of physical death and resurrection is used as the symbol of the greater change of a soul from sin to life.
If It is comparatively easy to set our teeth and face the inevitable with " a grin " ; but the " highest bravery n is to hide our anguish with a smile. I do think I make a decently good Stoic, but confess that in times like this Christians have the pull. Nevertheless, I have often thought of the words, " I am not in the least afraid to die," and wondered if, when my time should come, I would be able to say them. But now I know that I can, and this even in the bitterness of feeling that one's work is prematurely cut short.1
If If we Christians believe the smallest fraction of what we pretend to believe, there is but little to mourn over in death. I know not when or how that veiled messenger may come to me, but this I do know, that it can come only at the bidding of my Father. I know its mission can be nothing more than the un- clothing of this poor weak body of my humiliation to clothe me with the body of His glory. . . . Death is not only an exodus, it is also an entrance ; while we stand by the bedside and say, " He is gone," they on the other side are welcoming him with unspeakable
joy.2
3. The only thing to be feared is spiritual death. That is non-adjustment of our hearts to God. The soul out of harmony with love and truth may become as dead as the animalcule left dry upon the edge of the empty glass. To attempt to live as an immortal soul without love, and not as in God's presence, is to dream of living in a vacuum. The true life is to know God. Even now they are most alive who have in pure and loving thoughts the largest relationship to all good. The wages of sin
1 George John Romanes, Life and Letters, 317. ' QuiyUin Hogg, 308.
460 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
is death — death creepiDg into the heart ; death clouding the eye of the intellect ; death, as Jesus said, destroying the soul in Gehenna.
If Dante saw some souls in hell whose bodies were still alive on earth, — their friends in Florence and Lucca had not the faintest idea that these men, seemingly a part of everyday life, were, all the time, " dead souls." There is hardly a more terrible idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own daily life — this atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself as due to his own neglect. Clifford, in A Likely Story, forcibly depicts a soul awaking in the next world to find that through this unconscious starvation, there was no longer anything in him to correspond with God.1
They pass me by like shadows, crowds on crowds, Dim ghosts of men, that hover to and fro, Hugging their bodies round them like thin shrouds Wherein their souls were buried long ago : They trampled on their youth, and faith, and love, They cast their hope of human-kind away. With Heaven's clear messages they madly strove, And conquered, — and their spirits turned to clay: Lo ! how they wander round the world, their grave, Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed, Gibbering at living men, and idly rave, " We, only, truly live, but ye are dead." Alas ! poor fools, the anointed eye may trace A dead soul's epitaph in every face ! 2
4. The resurrection of Jesus was in accordance with the higher, universal law of life. Death is for life, not life for death, in the ultimate constitution of this universe. The resurrection of Jesus is an instance of the general law that life is lord of death. His resurrection, as our text puts it, is the first-fruits of them that sleep. In the opinion of the Apostle the resurrection of Jesus was no more out of the Divine order of things, no more contrary to the ultimate law of nature, than the first-fruits of the summer are exceptions to the general law of life which in the autumn shall show its universal power in every harvest field.
5. This was Jesus' teaching concerning the resurrection. He
1 L. H. M. Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Girls, 160. 2 Lowell, " The Street."
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 461
answered the Sadducees of His generation not merely by asserting His knowledge that the dead shall be raised ; He placed the fact of the resurrection upon the fundamental principle that life, not death, is God's first law. " But that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed, in the place concerning the Bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living : for all live unto him."