I THESS.-HEB. — II
i62 LIFE AND IMMORTALITY
on the natural world, of that luminary whose power and splendour symbolized His glory in prophetic song. To those who received Him, whose reason and heart He alike illuminated, the outward became clear and the inward calm ; the shadows departed and fear was subdued ; objective truth had light cast upon it that made it manifest, and "the king of terrors," seen in the sunlight, was discovered to have an aspect that did not terrify.
I.
Life and Immortality before Christ.
1. Among the Gentiles. — It does not need any wide or minute survey of the religions of the ancient world to show that the doctrine of immortality was in sad need of reconstruction, and that the reconstruction could come only through a radical im- provement in the world's ideas concerning God. The primeval belief had assumed grotesque and extravagant forms which distressed the imagination and at the same time involved sinister reflp'^tions upon the supreme power and goodness of God.
^ The form in which we best remember the words of the text is that which is found in the Authorized Version, not " life and incorruption," which is undoubtedly the true rendering of the word, and is consonant with other passages in Holy Scripture, but " life and immortality," life and an endurance of that life onward for ever. In this latter form the thought rests more on the duration of the life ; in the form which we have in the Eevised Version, attention is directed more to the essential nature of the life — life in which there can be no element of death, because it is a life that is indissoluble and incorruptible.^
(1) In ancient Egypt the immortality of the soul and its reunion with the body in a future resurrection were made contingent upon the preservation of the fleshly form from corruption by the art of the embalmer. Personal immortality was not thought of as the immediate gift of an infinite Being, from whose fiat life in all its types and gradations issued, but as conditioned in part by the skill of the physician, whose work preserved skin and bone from dissolution. The
^ 0. J. Ellicott, Sermons at Gloucester, 154.
2 TIMOTHY I. 10 163
primitive races of the Nile valley must have held in some rough, crude way the theory of the modern materialist, that all thought and feeling depend upon physical structures and that mind is disabled, if not annihilated, when sundered from the material form through which it has been accustomed to operate. If the bodily shape is lost, the " Ka," or spirit, with which it has been identified, must pass into final oblivion,
(2) The Assyriologist tells us that amongst the earliest populations of the Mesopotamian plains, the state of the dead was conceived of in pictures which were full of gloom and profound distress. For virtuous and degraded alike the underworld was wrapped about in thick darkness and dominated by universal pain. The possibility of reaching a state of spiritual beatitude there had scarcely entered into the dream of the men who founded those imposing civilizations. Perhaps the ruthless warriors who moulded the strong, primitive empires transferred to this mysterious hereafter the shadow of their own misdoing upon earth. Men of blood, drunk with the fanaticism of the sword, made many and cruel gods after their own likeness, and the most implacable of these truculent, blight-breathing gods swayed sceptres of dominion in the underworld. Neither the Semitic nor any other branch of the human race could have a right con- ception of the life beyond the grave until they had learned to worship a holy, a righteous, a humane God, who swayed His sceptre of dominion over all worlds. Such affrighting ideas received their death-blow when St. John saw in the hands of the gracious and triumphant Son of Man the keys of the grave and the underworld.
(3) In subsequent centuries this weird Babylonian view of immortality projected its gloom into the religions of India and the Far East, as well as into those of Greece and Eome. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls, with many purgatories interposed between each rebirth, spread far and near, filling the popular imagination with endless appalling dramas of changing destiny. In the absence of a benign, personal, supreme God the scheme of retribution became a rigid revolving mechanism of steel, from which all possibilities of pity and forgiveness were excluded. To a solitary hero or moralist once in a century death might mean gain, if the doctrine of reward and punishment should
i64 LIFE AND IMMORTALITY
prove to be true ; but for the many there was no outlook from death towards a land of promise but the descent into inevitable woe.
^ But the Greeks, though they dreaded the vagueness and shadowiness of the under world, which always seemed to them bereft of sunlight and concrete form, both dear to the Hellenic spirit, yet in their happier moments had a vivid conception of heaven as the abode of the departed heroes who had deserved well of God and men. What could be lovelier and simpler than Homer's childlike faith? This is the promise to the hero Menelaus : —
But thee into plains Elysian, which lie at the world's far end, The seat of the judge Ehadamanthus, the immortal gods shall