^ In a certain lake in Munster, it is said, there were two islands; into the first death could never enter, but age and sickness, and the weariness of life and the paroxysms of fear- ful suffering were all known there, and they did their work till the inhabitants, tired of their immortality, learned to look upon the opposite island as upon a haven of repose. They launched their barks upon its gloomy waters; they touched its shore, and they were at rest.^
H Of all hand work whatsoever, necessary for the maintenance ^ W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals^ i. 203.
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of life, those old words, " In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread," indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of calamity ; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle : so that all nations have held their days honourable, or " holy," and constituted them " holydays," or " holidays," by making them days of rest; and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief brightness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the Lord, that "they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them."^
III.
The Works of the Blessed Dead.
1. Some would take *' Their works follow with them," to mean that the reward of past works goes with the Christian into paradise. True indeed it is, in a very practical sense, that the peace and blessedness are rewards. But a work is one thing, and its reward is another ; and without good reason we should not assume that they are identified by the language of Scripture. Others, again, would have it that the memory of past works is meant — an explanation open not only to the same objection, but to the far more formidable one that it would seem to represent the soul of the Christian as dwelling for ever with complacency on the thought of his own merits. But if the memory or the reward of works is not meant, at least chiefly or primarily, we are led on to a view that the works mean the living acts, the deeds which characterize the faithful servant of God as such, the results and proofs of the inner life on earth ; that on his departure hence the man, the conscious man, bears with him those faculties and is permitted and enabled to do those works, in such form and such degree as may be consistent with his new condition. The works themselves, the energies and the results, go with him. He is not therefore, as some would tell us, in a state of dim unconsciousness, nor merely in a state of ecstatic trance, visited by gleams of heavenly splendour, or visions of a more glorious hereafter ; he is in a state of action, doing works which differ from his works in this life mainly in that the element of struggle, of painful effort, 1 Euskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, § 36 ( Works, xviii. 418).
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of an all but perpetual sense of failure and disappointment, is with- drawn, and replaced by a sabbatic rest — a rest not of idleness or vacuity, but of unbroken, untroubled action.
^ It is curious that in the service for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer this verse ends with " they rest from their labours " ; the words "and their works do follow them " are omitted. In the earlier days, in which the Prayer Book was arranged, men thought of death chiefly, if not entirely, as the great rest-giver. But the omission of the last clause, " and their works do follow them," destroys entirely the sense of the Heavenly Voice. Its very purpose was to assure men, not that the departed had passed into a long deep sleep, or that they would sit and sing themselves away to everlasting bliss, but that whilst death would give them rest from labour — from the strain and stress always more or less associated with earthly effort — it would not be the rest of sleep, of unconsciousness, or even of inaction, but the rest of work from which the sense of labour had departed.^
2. Activity is the law of our being. Powers unused gradually wither and at last perish. Use leads to increase and development. Disuse means in the end paralysis and loss. So far as we can judge, the mind is always at work. Even sleep, which seems like inaction, is not so in reality. In sleep the mind is active, only under conditions by which it is recuperated for the work of what we call its waking moments. Save where disease has stopped the wheels of the mind, it is ever active. Incessant activity is the law of life in the Divine Being Himself. " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," said Christ, and within narrower limits that seems to be the law of the creatures made in His image. If, there- fore, life be continued beyond death, our works must follow with us. To say that the soul will exist is only to say that it must be active.