Christ abolished death. It is so that the Apostles always speak concerning death. It is so always that they bear them- selves in the presence of death. They will not crouch before it as a tyrant ; neither are they content to stand erect before it, as in the presence of an equal ; rather do they exult and triumph over it, as a conqueror over a crushed and broken foe.
(3) We gain new and vastly grander views of life. — Christ rescued the soul from the neglect and contempt that it received from the current Sadducaic teachers, who regarded it as a perish- able property. He gave the world the faith which was destined to emancipate tlie slave, to overthrow feudalism, and to become an ever-living force in the raising and ennobling of mankind. And that faith was not only faith in God, but faith in man — faith in the dignity of man's own nature, faith in the greatness of his
i82 LIFE AND IMMORTALITY
origin and the sublimity of his destiny. It was this faith that begat a new note of earnestness in human affairs. The old heart of this world asked with wonder and hesitation : " If a man die shall he Kve again ? " There were motives that should have bidden him live well even though he answered that question for himself with " an everlasting No." But this truth remains. Teach a man that he came from God and to God he must return, and he will strive to be worthy of his ancestry and his destiny alike. Teach a man that he comes from dust, that he is but the product of matter, and must return whence he came —
Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills, —
and you must not wonder if his life is as low as its origin, and his thoughts do not rise above his circumstances. For the secret of the world's highest endeavour has been the truth that Christ Jesus brought to light —
Life is real ! life is earnest !
And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
^ There is a beautiful passage in " Marius the Epicurean," in which Walter Pater pictures a Pagan in the early days becoming accustomed to a Christian household, and a little gathering of people who formed one of the Christian Churches, and one thing that impressed itself upon his mind was this : There was the slave sitting beside the others, but the slave had a dignity in the Christian Church that the slave never had out of it, because the slave had laid hold of a great idea. He had received the keys of immortality, he was clothed with a new dignity, he realized the greatness of manhood, and those who were associated with the slave in the same church gave even to the slave the reverence and the respect which such manhood ought to command.*
^ Louis XVI. and his beautiful and unfortunate queen died on the scaffold in the Place de la Eevolution. The boy who ought to have inherited the throne of France, and who in fact, though he never reigned, has been numbered as Louis xvii. in the roll of monarchs, was left a prisoner. Evil had brought forth evil, as ever. An oppressed people had been roused to a spirit of devilish revenge. The child, it is said, was not only to be kept a * C. Silvester Home.
2 TIMOTHY I. lo 183
prisoner and deprived of whatever rights he might be supposed to possess to the throne of his father, but all that was good in his nature was to be, if possible, destroyed. Evil men placed round him were to train his mind to evil thoughts, his heart to evil feelings, his lips to unlovely words. Naturally he suffered. But now and again, it is said, as his tormentors seemed to go beyond the limits of his endurance, or when God's voice prevailed in his young soul against them, the unhappy boy would waken up to higher things, and exclaim in anguish, " 1 can't say it, I can't do it, for I was born to be a king ! " ^
* W. J. Knox Little, Sunlight and Shadow in the Christian Life, 53.
The Practice of Assurance.
as
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