114 LIFE BEYOND DEATH [CHAP. It was an inevitable consequence of the “dark ages" when intellectual and spiritual culture were alike hard to come by, and could only be preserved under the hot-house conditions of the cloister. Such a one-sided ideal leads to as mistaken a conception of the life to come as of life on earth. The latter we have corrected. We no longer draw the sharp line between the "religious" (i.e., the conventual,) life and that of the world which our fathers drew. The best religious thought of our day recognises that Christianity claims as its own all art, all science, all culture, all philanthropy, that no department of life or of service lies outside religion. But our grasp of the sacredness of activity, the consecration of knowledge, even of affection, is most frequently limited to the sphere of earth. Beyond there seems nothing before us but a life of passive contemplation. We can form no conception of it save that it will bring us rest, freedom from care and sorrow and evil, be a condition of negative beatitude in fact, to the thought of which, at times of sick weariness with the restlessness and turmoil of the world, we turn with joy and relief, but which has no attraction for the v.] IS MORE THAN REST 115 young, the strong, the healthfully busy, the happy. There is a fundamental error here which it is well worth while to track and refute. The spirit of the New Testament teaching on this subject gives us, as chief objects of hope, untrammelled service of the Divine Father, unlimited development of our own capacities both of body and spirit. We are therefore wrong if we if we fix our eyes only on rest; we are injuring those whose greatest need and desire is not to cease from activity but to be granted full scope for it. Some may regard such an ideal as too material to be permissible from the Christian standpoint, and if material is to be taken as a synonym for sensual, then it is true that there is no place for the material in the Christian conception of life, either present or to come. The restriction of human beings to, or their absorption in the life of the senses is inimical to every spiritual religion, to Christianity most because it is most spiritual, because there is in it no lower path for the ordinary man, no esoteric mysteries for the initiated, but the same 116 CONDITIONS NON-EARTHLY [CHAP. demand made on each and all, to live up to the highest they know. dimly hinted But if by "material" be intended man's relationship to the natural universe, nay, that universe itself in all the marvels of its known order, with all the possibilities of what may yet become known, then the Christian conception of immortality embraces that relationship, applies to that universe. One of the "notes" of Christianity is that it neither ignores, condemns, nor supersedes the natural, but raises it to a new dignity and confers upon it a larger scope, by treating it as itself the expression and the pledge of spirit. According to New Testament teaching, the universe of Nature is a spiritual creation,1 which in the Divine ideal of it is throughout "very good," and which in its actual state of (to human perception) non-attainment, groans and travails together with man until the adoption, that is the redemption of the body; 2 until, that is, the material expression is so perfectly moulded to the spiritual meaning that the latter shines forth undimmed in its eternal 2 Romans viii. 19-24. 1 Col. i. 15-17. v.] BUT STILL HUMAN 117 beauty and splendour. Man's intellect, affections, moral consciousness are spiritual attributes, none the less so that not having themselves attained to the Divine Ideal, and being therefore imperfect, they are expressed through the imperfect medium of the "natural body." Christianity does not teach that when this medium fails, human knowledge, love, righteousness are to be without expression, but that a more fitting expression is to be given them. First the natural expression, afterwards that which is spiritual, for if there is a natural body, there is a spiritual body. If, that is, under earthly conditions, man needs an earthly body and an earthly environment by means of which to express what he is and does, so under conditions which are not earthly but which are and must be human, he will need a human though a non-earthly environment for the same reason to express his being and his activity. Thus the true Christian Ideal of the completion of each human individual by means of immortality, is the completion of the whole man, body, mind and spirit. It is the whole man whom Christ loves and 118 REWARD AND PUNISHMENT [CHAP. redeems; it is the whole man for whom an "inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away" is reserved.1 A second aspect of the Christian Ideal of Immortality is equally with the one we have just been considering, bound up with the continuity of individual life before and after death, viz., reward and punishment. This subject has been allowed in past ages to loom too largely, or rather too exclusively, in the teaching of the Christian Church with regard to immortality, and consequently a reaction has set in, and we find one of the reproaches cast upon the Faith is that it should lend itself to such unexalted motives as the fear of hell and the hope of heaven. But it is not possible to say with honesty that our Lord did not appeal to them. His teaching was intended not only for those whose pure unselfishness of aim and motive was akin to His own, but also for those who were on a lower spiritual plane, who had not yet attained the liberty of children, but were under bondage, the bondage of sin and ignorance. Even to His immediate followers to those whose 1 1 Peter i. 4. |