1 Bret Harte.
PHILIPPIANS I. 21 287
into which it passes is no longer loss, but gain. When to live is Christ, to die is, so to speak, more Christ.
^ For this man the Alps were tunnelled. There was no interruption in his progress. He would go, he believed, without " break of gauge," and would pass through the darkness, scarcely knowing when it came, and certainly unchecked for even a moment, right on to the other side where he would come out, as travellers to Italy do, to fairer plains and bluer skies, to richer harvests and a warmer sun. No jolt, no pause, no momentary suspension of consciousness, no reversal, nor even interruption in his activity, did Paul expect death to bring him, but only continu- ance and increase of all that was essential to his life.^
^ If we live for Christ, Christ lives for us ; and if Christ lives for us, Christ will see to it that the world into which death ushers us shall be in harmony with our highest needs and capa- bilities. The life which is Christ has in it not only the seed of eternity, but also the seed of perfection ; and it were assuredly a strange thing if He who gives it such capability should not bring it to ripeness and realization when it passes into the world where there is no sin, where He reigns without a rival. He is the guarantee that a life which is His shall close with a death that is gain.2
^ A few years since the Metropolitan Ptailway ended at Moorgate Street ; there came an extension to Aldgate ; and forth- with Moorgate Street was abolished as a terminus, but remained as a station. So the terminal character of death is abolished by Christ, a line is added stretching into infinity and terminating in the many mansions of our Father's House, and death becomes forthwith simply a starting-point for the pilgrims journeying to the glories and joys of the Divine Home. To Paul, death is, therefore, no actual break in the continuity of his life, but merely a station at which there is a momentary halt in his eternal pro- gress.^
4. For those to whom to live is Christ, death is the gate to ampler powers and a wider ministry. Our life, transferred into a region where everything is congenial to its exercise and growth, clothed in due season with a new and perfect body, which will give the amplest expression to all its powers, a body like unto Christ's glorious body will develop freely and without restraint.
^ A Maclaren, in The Sunday Magazine, 1884, p. 429.
= Principal D. W. Simon. ^ J. Clifford, The Dawn of Manhood, 194.
288 ST. PAUL'S RULING PASSION
In short, death will lead to the perfection of our identity with Him, bringing about the end of that which is here begun. Hope will change into fruition. Desire will be satisfied. The painful, humbling disproportion between the will to do and the power to accomplish will pass away, for the stature of the perfect man shall then have been reached. All the faculties and powers we possess will be turned into harmony, and that harmony will be Christ.
^ Professor Wundt, in his System of Philosophy, has formu- lated a law of the universe which he calls the law of increase of spiritual energy, and which he expressly opposes to the law of conservation of energy in physical things. There seems no formal limit to the positive increase of being in spiritual respects ; and since spiritual being, whenever it comes, affirms itself, expands and craves continuance, we may justly and literally say, regard- less of the defects of our own private sympathy, that the supply of individual life in the universe can never possibly, however immeasurable it may become, exceed the demand. The demand for that supply is there the moment the supply itself comes into being, for the beings supphed demand their own continuance. I speak from the point of view of all the other individual beings, realizing and enjoying inwardly their own existence. If we are Pantheists, we can stop there. We need, then, only say that through them, as through so many diversified channels of ex- pression, the eternal Spirit of the Universe affirms and reaUzes its own infinite life. But if we are Theists, we can go farther without altering the result. God, we can then say, has so inex- haustible a capacity for love that His call and need is for a literally endless accumulation of created lives. He can never faint or grow weary, as we should, under the increasing supply. His scale is infinite in all things. His sympathy can never know satiety or glut.^
*\ The sense in which men rest from their labours while their works follow them is surely not the sense in which human beings fall asleep in glad fatigue with a feeling upon their hearts of having earned their rest, for that would imply a cessation rather than an expansion of life — a long night of half-conscious or un- conscious repose, instead of a great increase of Divine power. It seems almost monstrous to regard the initiation into Divine life as implying a cessation of all that we most closely associate with life here, as the happy trance of languid ecstasy instead of the new glow of creative vigour. Clearly, the " beatific vision " must ' William James, Human Immortality, 80.