^ In Plato's ideal state, while lying on part of the private citizens is condemned, it is allowed to magistrates. As Eendel Harris says,^ it is a reserved art, practised by the guardians of the community upon the rank and file, presumably for their good. The rulers have reserved rights in untruthfulness. " The lying," he continues, "which Plato inculcated was not of the pitiful degraded kind which Liguori patronizes and which Cardinal New-
1 G. Matheson, Sidelights from Patmos, 331.
2 Sidelights oil New Testament Research, 231. REV. — 2 2
338 THE CITIZENS OF THE CITY
man was so hard put to it to defend. But whatever was covered by the Platonic doctrine, the Christian Church generally repudi- ated it, and it is expressly repudiated in the Apocalyptic sketch of the New City."
II.
Those who may Enter.
" Only they which are written in the Lamb's book of life."
1. Their names are written in a hook. — To live in a book is one of the deepest desires of men. There are few who have not wished to have an influence on earth extending beyond the range of their earthly life. To have something that will survive us, something that will speak of us when we are gone, something that will make us a power in the world after we have passed away, is an ambition which, in some form or other, has been felt by all. Various have been the forms it has taken. Some have sought it by winning love, some by leaving a mass of money, some by rear- ing a monument of art, some by bequeathing the creations of music. But even those who would live by art, by sculpture, by music, expect to have their name preserved through the medium of a hook. It is in no case by our own book that we mainly hope to live. Our ambition is to have our names written in some other book, to be quoted as an authority, to be referred to as an illustration. Even to write one's name in a visitors' book has a kind of symbolic pleasure ; it suggests the transmission of fame. Even to appear in the fleeting columns of the newspaper gives a glow of satisfaction ; it conveys the impression of publicity. But to have the name written in a real book, a living book, a book that will live, to appear in pages that are destined to last for centuries, to obtain honourable mention in a record that will endure as long as the language of your country — this is a goal of aspiration which any man might be proud to win.
II Our ambition is to get our names in a living book, a book that will live. But where is such a book to be found ? How many books are there of living writers which one would venture to pronounce immortal? I have often asked myself, if all the authors of the present day were to stop writing from this moment, how many would be remembered, even by name, twenty-five years
REVELATION xxi. 27 339
after this. It would be invidious to say. Meantime, we cannot but observe that there is nothing in which the calculations of men have been so falsified as the fate of books. Works which were confidently promised an immortality by their contemporaries have, in a few years, been buried in oblivion ; and works which, by their contemporaries, were unnoticed and unknown have filled the world with their fame. Sydney Dobell was pronounced a great dramatist; Alexander Smith was called one of the greatest of poets; yet Sydney Dobell is altogether, and Alexander Smith almost, forgotten. Thomas k Kempis issued his book in the dark- ness, and its coming woke no echoes in its time ; but the world found it after many days, and posterity gave it a place next to the Bible. Every book that lasts through a series of centuries is in a sense a " Lamb's book." It has achieved success by sacrifice. It has postponed a temporal to an eternal interest. It has refused to follow the fashions of the hour. It has declined to purchase popularity by pandering to the spirit of a special age. It selects universal types of men, and is content to wait till that which is special has passed away. If Shakespeare had written for his age, he would have been famous in his age. But he preferred to disregard the accidents of humanity, to ignore that which was peculiar to the sixteenth century ; and therefore he has found his atmosphere only in a later day.^
2. It is the hook of life. — The book of life is that great volume in which the eternal and inexorable conditions of life are written. It is not, as some have supposed, an arbitrary catalogue of names, selected without a moral basis from the multitudes of men, to which eternal life is attached by an omnipotent flat Its fundamental character is not more elective than it is moral and spiritual. It is the awful and eternal focus of power out of which the currents of life perennially flow. It is the great God's charter of life based upon God's own nature, upon eternal truth and righteousness. The " book of life " is the record and forecast of victorious moral grandeur, of the vast achievement of God-given power in the hearts of men. It is the roll of heroes, the volume of the mighty, the record of the pure, the list of the strong sons of God.