THE LIFE ETERNAL.                    

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WE close the summary of our belief in the Lord's work by the confession that He will 'come to judge the quick and the dead:' we close the summary of our belief in the Spirit's work by confessing 'the Resurrection of the body.' That universal Judgment, that personal Resurrection, prepare the consummation of all things. We complete our Creed therefore by declaring that we believe in 'the life eternal,' that man made in the image of God, and made for God, will in due time enter into the life of God.      In touching on the doctrine of the Resurrec- tion of the Body—of the Flesh—we saw that there is need of the greatest care lest we should extend to the idea itself the present limitations under which we are forced to think when we endeavour to give a distinct shape to it. The same caution is required in speaking of 'the life eternal.' For us duration, permanence, is

XI.

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144          Life eternal the life of the world to come:

XI.  Hebr. ii. 8, 9. 1 Cor. xiii. 10.

the sign of that which is. We pass in thought from point to point in endless succession and observe no change, and speak in the language of time of that which is thus unalterably abiding as 'eternal.' But it is evident that we cannot apply this 'phantom of succession' to the existence of God. The 'eternal' does not in essence express the infinite extension of time but the absence of time : not the omni-temporal but the supra- temporal.      When therefore we declare our belief in 'the life eternal' our meaning is best defined by con- trast with the present life. Eternal life is emphatically, as it is described in the correspond- ing clause of the 'Nicene' Creed, 'the life of the- world to come, 'the life of' that age' in opposition to the life of 'this age.' Here conflict and decay are the conditions not only of being but even of happiness. Obstacles and difficulties call out our powers into vigorous activity. But we cannot rest in the prospect of a never-ending conflict. We are forced to regard such broken struggles as transitory. That which is transitory in detail is transitory in the sum. And here our Creed meets us. Though we see not yet all things subject to the Son of man, we do see in His exalta- tion the sure pledge of a realised victory. We know therefore that that which is in part shall be

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apprehended in part.                               145

done away, while we admit that here we can only think and know 'in part:' we know that in the world and in ourselves shall be revealed the ful- ness of Christ's redemption and of God's will: we know that there shall be the life which is truly life, the life eternal, the life which is the vision of God, which is (they are amazing words) God made known in His Son.      In two passages of Holy Scripture we have a description of 'the life eternal.' To hold these firmly is to be saved from many perplexities which accompany all attempts to define further that which we have no power to define. This is the life eternal, that they should know Thee the only true God, and Him Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.      We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.      Eternal life is then that knowledge of God which is communion with Him : it is not something future but absolute: it is in its realisation: it answers to a divine fellowship which issues in perfect unity.      Each of these thoughts may be followed out a little further, though we must keep the most     W. H. F.                                                                  10

XI. John xvii. 3.

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146                             The eternal life

XI.  Gal. iv. 9.

reverent reserve lest we should seem to determine by conclusions due to the limitations of our own minds what Scripture has not determined.      The eternal life is not something future: it is, it is now. It lies in a relation to God through Christ. The manifestation of the life is con- fined and veiled by the circumstances of our present condition, but the life is actual. It does not depend for its essence upon any external change. To know God, or, as St Paul prefers to express the truth, to be known by God, to be the object, in human language, of His thought, is to have entered, to have been taken into the new order. Time has no more connexion with this form of existence in itself than with the being of God.      But, while this is so, the teaching of Scripture under the forms of time guards us from supposing that this eternal life, this life in God, is a monoto- nous stillness, a calm, fixed attainment, an extinc- tion of individual consciousness, a Nirvâna. We may not indeed carry into it directly anything which measures and characterises the present, the temporal life; but all these personal feelings, memories, aspirations, fruitions, are a figure of spiritual realities, of the unseen and the unima- ginable which shall be. As we are now, the knowledge which is eternal life is spoken of as

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perfect divine fellowship.                          147

something continuous, progressive, depending upon effort, springing out of fellowship and issuing in closer fellowship. But the end is fellowship and not absorption. We are said to be 'in Christ;' and we are said also 'to be at home with Christ.' The life is in the growing knowledge. 'To enter into life' suggests the enjoyment of the fulness of powers which are checked and undeveloped here. Yet once again the eternal life which is fellow- ship with God is presented to us also as fellowship with men, fellowship with men in God. The fellowship with God, while it is itself the essence of life leaves the personality of the believer un- impaired: so too the fellowship with men, though it appears to be the supreme manifestation of human life in its completeness, leaves the indivi- dual life in its entirety, or perhaps we may say more truly first confirms to it its entirety. On such a subject our weakness counsels us to speak with the utmost caution ; but may we not say that this idea of a corporate life 'in Christ,' to which each separate life is a conscious contributory, removes many of the gravest difficulties which attend every endeavour to realise the future as an existence of isolated individualities? There can be no doubt that the uniform ten- dency of recent research is to establish in many                                                          10—2

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148                        Fellowship answers to Love.

XI.  2 Pet. i. 4.

unexpected ways the closeness of the connexion by which we are bound one to another. In pro- portion as we know more fully, this connexion is found to be more powerful and more far-reaching. It is the element—one element—in the idea of life which has been specially revealed to us in this age. We may conclude therefore that it is designed by the Providence of God for our special use. And it is distinctly recognised in the New Testament. We can now perceive at length that the phrases which describe the dependence of man upon man, and the mutual relations of man and nature, and the divine purpose of uniting all things 'in Christ,' are to be taken literally. They shew us that the divine revelation of life is. the revelation of that larger life which we can pain- fully and dimly see to be now. We have in them the promise, the prophecy, of a life in which there is the unity of infinite peace and the energy of in- finite love, the peace of God and the love of God, 'we in Him and He in us.'      The eternal life has been spoken of as fellow- ship with God, 'a participation in the divine nature.' This phrase of St Peter throws light upon the idea which I wish to bring out. We are taught that 'God is love,' in His own Being; and the declaration helps us to understand in some way how perfect unity is harmonised with

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The attainment of the end a mystery.                     149

the interaction of different Persons. We are taught also that 'love never faileth.' Here then we have an image of that future consumma- tion to which we reach forward. The life which is the expression of love is a life of the whole ful- filled in the life of the parts; a life in which every part enjoys the life of the whole. We declare our belief in 'the life eternal'— that is faith's proclamation of the fulness of the divine victory—and we go no further. Yet we cannot wholly suppress the questions which arise when we pronounce words full of the largest hope. Does this life exclude death wholly and in all its forms ? Does it include that 'restitution of all things' which is proposed as the aim of human repentance and effort ? Or does it leave room for existences finally alien from God and unsubdued by His love, for evil, as evil, enduring as God is ? To suggest this last alternative seems to be to admit the possibility of a dualism in a form wholly inconceivable. The present existence of evil carries with it difficulties to which nature offers no solution; but to suppose that evil once introduced into the world is for ever, appears to be at variance with the essential conception of God as revealed to us. There may however be some fallacy in our way of conceiving and stating these questions. We

XI. Acts iii. 21.

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150                     An antithesis in Nature

XI.

know too little of the purifying and consuming fire of God's love, too little of the effect of punish- ment when it is seen in the spiritual completeness of perfect justice, too little of our corporate union one with another in virtue of our common hu- inanity, to be able to form theories as to the world to come. And Scripture does not encourage us to enter on such an effort. The reserve of the prophetic and apostolic writings as to the un- seen world is as remarkable as the boldness with which uninspired teachers have presumed to deal with it.      But two thoughts bearing upon the future find clear expression in the New Testament. The one is of the consequences of unrepented sin as answering to the sin; the other of a final unity in which God shall be all in all. We read of an eternal sin, of a sin which has no forgiveness in this world nor in the world to come , of a debt in- curred of which the payment to be rigidly exacted exceeds all imaginable resources of the debtor, of eternal destruction, of the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched . And on the other side we read of the purpose, the good pleasure of God to sum up all things in Christ, and through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, whether things upon the earth or things in the heavens , of the bringing to naught of the

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and in Scripture.                               151

last enemy death, and the final subjection of all things to God.      Moreover, it must be added, these apparently antithetical statements correspond with two modes of regarding the subject from the side of reason. If we approach it from the side of man, we see that in themselves the consequences of actions appear to be for the doer like the deed, indelible; and also that the finite freedom of the individual appears to include the possibility of final resistance to God. And again if we approach it from the Divine side, it seems to be an inadmissible limitation of the infinite love of God that a human will should for ever refuse to yield to it in complete self-surrender when it is known as love.      If we are called upon to decide which of these two lines of reasoning, which of these two thoughts of Scripture must be held to prevail, we can hardly doubt that that "which is the most comprehensive, that which reaches farthest, contains the ruling idea; and that is the idea of a final divine unity. How it will be reached we are wholly unable to say; but we are sure that the manner, which has not been revealed, will be in perfect harmony with the justice of God and the obligations of man's responsibility. More than this we dare not lay down. But that end—'the

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152                         From God to God.

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end'—rises before us as the strongest motive and the most certain encouragement in all the labours of the life of faith.      Thus it is that the cycle of our Creed is com- pleted. 'From God, unto God' is the sum of the history which it discloses, wrought out once for all in the human Life of the Son of God, and through the Spirit being still wrought out by His power in the world. The more we ponder over the facts which we confess in the fullest light of all the phenomena which it has been given to us to observe, the more surely shall we find that these facts of the Christian Creed cover the area of human life, of action and of thought. They confirm to us a view of the future, which reconciles the contrasts of the pre- sent: they reveal to us a view of the present, which, while it intensifies the motives for per- sonal exertion, adds a calming faith in the sove- reignty of the Divine Will. They shew us that there is an eternal significance in our daily struggles, failures, attainments, and that there is a goal for all being: they shew us that we are fashioning day by day not ourselves only but the society to which we belong. They take nothing from the value of the individual soul, and yet they disclose a life immeasurably vaster in which 'the many' shall share.

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the law of life.                              153

To the last we see little, and we see dimly. When the vision seems to grow clearer we are forced by our earthly infirmity to bow the head and veil the face before the exceeding glory. But in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ we can see the Father. That is enough.      OF HIM AND THROUGH HIM AND UNTO HIM ARE ALL THINGS. TO HIM BE GLORY FOR EVER. AMEN.

XI.