124 THE PAST REMEMBERED [CHAP. I promise not thou shalt forget The past now gone to its account, But leave thee with the old amount, Unvisited as heretofore By God's free Spirit that makes an end.' ” 1 6 Further quotation from a poem familiar to almost all readers is unnecessary, but the italicised lines contain the crux of the whole matter, indicating alike the cause of the extreme anguish of the punishment and the possibility (more clearly developed later,) that it is purgatorial, not penal merely, "I promise not thou shalt forget the past." "It is I myself I who might have judged that the use of flesh was to refine to nerve beneath the spirit's play,' who might have chosen to follow the spirit's fugitive brief gleams,' until they issued in the unveiled light of God. It is I myself who have thrust away my spiritual inheritance, have fixed myself where God's free Spirit, that makes an end,' no longer penetrates. It is I myself who have lost myself." That is the keen edge of the suffering, a very sword of the Spirit before which the man shrinks and quails. 1 "Easter Day." 6 v.] REWARD NO ARBITRARY BLISS 125 But because he can thus suffer, hope has not altogether departed, the pain that an immortal spirit condemned to dwell amongst shadows must experience, so clears his vision that at the end of the poem we find him whose one desire had been the enjoyment of earthly life to the full, exclaiming : "How dreadful to be grudged No ease henceforth, as one that's judged, "But Easter Day breaks! But Christ rises! Mercy every way And, needless to say, the same remarks apply mutatis mutandis to reward. This is no arbitrary bliss bestowed upon all alike who at some time or other of their lives,— it may be upon their death-bed,—have "made their peace with God." It is the inevitable consequence of the aim and endeavour after the highest (according to the light of each individual,) in thought and practice: of the unworldly temper of mind, which, in what 126 CONSUMMATION OF IMMORTALITY [CHAP. ever way shown, however painfully connected with a sense of failure and shortcoming, yet recognises that earth is but in some sense or other a prelude, a forecast, an intimation of something better, nobler, more worthy of attainment than itself, "God's ante-chamber by whose variegated "arras folds "The wise who waited there could tell what royalties in store Lay one step past the entrance door.” But as the sharpest edge of punishment lies in the realisation of what might have been, only possible because what might have been is continuous with what is, so the supreme reward, or one element in the supreme reward, is the knowledge that what is, is essentially connected with what was. 66 It is I myself,-I who strove and fell, and rose to strive again, blinded, maimed, scarcely daring to hope I could attain, yet keeping amid all darkness, amid all defeat even, the unquenchable desire of the highest, I have been found faithful, my feet are set for ever upon the upward path, and to me is given my heart's desire." And if that desire has not known and does not yet know itself to v.] UNION WITH THE DIVINE 127 be none other than the thirst for the Divine, God is not straitened in the means whereby He will in the life beyond draw those who have been true to the light they had under earthly conditions, into full apprehension of and participation in that supreme desire, the response to which is the vision of Himself. And thus we are brought to what is in truth the consummation of the Christian Ideal of immortality, perfect union with (not mergence in) the Divine. "For the last enemy that shall be abolished is death," the only real death, that spiritual death which divides us from God, which causes many now on earth, and many beyond the grave, to drag on a miserable degraded existence, shorn of all the glory that should be theirs, whelmed in darkness, without hope, and, to human understanding, without help. But the things that are impossible with men are possible with God, "for the [Son] must reign till He hath put all His enemies under His feet," and His life on earth showed us clearly the Son of Man's enemies—not men, but the destroyers of men-unbelief, hatred, impurity, all moral evil and all physical evil -all that separates men from one another, 128 NO LOSS OF INDIVIDUALITY [CHAP. and from God. "The last enemy that shall be abolished is death. For He [the Father], put all things in subjection under His [the Son's] feet. But when He saith all things are put in subjection, it is evident that He is excepted who did subject all things unto Him. And when all things have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected to Him that did subject all things unto Him, that God may be all in all.” 1 Not that men will ever be swallowed up in God to the loss of their conscious individuality, "not that Christ will ever put off His humanity, or that we shall ever cease to need Him, for even at the climax of all things, He will still be the Life and the Truth. We shall see the Father face to face, but only because we shall be one Spirit with the Lord. In this sense only the work of redemption and mediation will have an end. We shall see the Father no longer [only] in the Son, but as the Son sees Him, in the day when God shall be all in all." "2 To see "the Father face to face," this 1 1 Cor. xv. 25-29. "Christian Platonists," p. 170, Bigg. |