CHAPTER VII. "WHAT SHALL COME AFTER DEATH?" IS A QUESTION AD- DECISIVE OF FUTURE DESTINY; NO PRO- God's Word Alone Enlightens Us.-The Difficulties Environing the Subject Do Not Alter the Declared Fact.-Sin, Responsibility, and Penalty, Inevitable.-They Constitute an Inherent Part of the Almighty's Governmental System.-Calls to Repentance Fill the Old and New Testaments.-Free Pardon, through Christ's Atonement, to Every Penitent.-This is Offered to the Living, but Nowhere to the Dead. -The Issue Presented, Met, and Irreversibly Determined Here.-Cumulative Trend of Scripture Showing God's Treatment of Sin Here and Hereafter.-Disregard of Christ's Emphatic Assertion of the Continued Conscious Existence and Suffering of the Impenitent.-Vain Assumption that God's Character is More Tender than His Word.-Fallacies of "Progressive Orthodoxy" Speculations.-Its Revolutionary Attitude Toward Inspiration and the Fundamental Doctrines of Revealed Christianity. Disastrous Progress of this System of Naturalism. - Imminent Danger to the Church.-A Great Conflict and Defection Impending. By Rev. S. C. BARTLETT, D.D., LL.D., President of Dartmouth College. THE question, "What shall come after death," is natural and almost inevitable to the rational mind. It has spread through all nations and all ages. Only a willful determination can banish it from the thoughts,—a determination confined almost wholly to the artificial conditions of human life, and, singularly enough, to the regions of special religious light. But, as all history shows, it is a subject that will not down. Momentous and urgent as is the question, no human being can answer it decisively. It is a question of fact, on which no man can testify, because no man has been on the other side and returned to tell. Unless there be some superhuman authority, we are shut off from any certain knowledge on the subject; and, whatever their speculations, the philosopher and the savage are equally ignorant of the facts. We claim to be lifted out of this state of absolute ignorance by a Divine revelation. All that we know on the subject comes from that revelation, the Word of God. Our instincts and reasonings, and our observations of God's ways and human action, may indeed confirm these teachings, as it has been often and powerfully shown that they do; but the declarations of that word are and must be the sole authority. Our wishes, hopes, notions, speculations, reasonings, cannot for an instant be put in the place of that authoritative utterance. They cannot supplement it with additional facts. Outside of its express teachings and what they clearly involve, all other utterances are alike valueless; and the ignorant or "intelligent Zulu" knows as much as the learned German. The main teachings of the Scriptures as to future retribution have never been matter of doubt, either to the great body of earnest Christians or to the great body of unbelievers and opponents. The doctrine of a twofold endless retribution, after and dependent on the present life, has been a constant theme of reproach and ground of hostility on the part of open opponents; while the Church in all ages, with only minor and sporadic exceptions, has recognized this doctrine as the transparent teaching of the Sacred Word, and the steady trend and outcome of its whole scheme of Divine government. Earnest believers have, indeed, often felt pressed and oppressed, and their sensibilities have been tried with difficulties and perplexities attendant on the doctrine of future punishment, as was the case notably with John Foster, and many others; but they have been obliged to admit, as did Foster, that the Scripture is formidably strong" on the subject. No thoughtful and tender mind can fail to contemplate this exhibition of the Divine government with the profoundest awe; and undoubtedly there are aspects 66 of it which can be viewed with equanimity only under the fullest sense of the terrible evil of sin, and with the deepest confidence in the wisdom, goodness, and justice of God, the Sovereign Ruler. They are as harassing to the sensibilities as are the details of some plague, famine, earthquake, flood, or cyclone, or the numberless cases of collective or individual agony, which are yet facts under the government of the same great Ruler, and which, however unendurable in the contemplation, we are compelled to accept; which, moreover, are in some respects more mysteriously awful than the punishment of sin, because so often they cannot be traced directly to any ill-desert. But in neither case can the painfulness of the contemplation or the difficulty of explanation affect the evidence of the fact. Penalty is not the only ground of difficulty in this connection. Responsibility itself is equally perplexing in its relation to final justice. For it cannot be shown that, through all the world and through all its history, any two persons have had precisely the same or equal opportunities. In Christian lands, as well as in pagan lands, human privileges have differed by every shade of gradation from the lowest to the highest. How to deal justly with all these degrees of opportunity and responsibility is a question entirely confounding to the human mind. But the fact of universal responsibility remains. Indeed the most formidable and insoluble of all the difficulties connected with the Divine government is the primal fact that sin itself should have made its way into a world governed by a wise, holy, mighty God. But sin is here, and God has told us how he will deal with it. Responsibility is also here. Men know that they are responsible, and God has also declared that he will hold all men responsible. These two great facts of sin and responsibility are known and read of all men. The third great fact of penalty hereafter, as we have said, is definitely known to God alone, and is definitely made known by him alone. It lies on the surface and is embedded in the substance of his written word. It offers itself there to the unhesi tating apprehension of plain people, and abides the careful analysis of the scholar. It is found not alone in separate declarations and single forms of speech, but in every varied mode of utterance, and is part and parcel of the whole coherent system. From beginning to end the gospel presents itself as a message of salvation offered to this lost world. It pronounces all men sinners, responsible, condemned for their sin, and answerable for just the light they have. It sets forth Christ's atonement as the sole ground of forgiveness and hope to the penitent sinner, and on the basis of that redemptive work it offers free pardon to every penitent, trusting soul. Its declarations and implications constantly set forth that work as taking effect, if at all, in this world,-an offer for the living and not for the dead. Its constant burden is that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," and that what he accomplished for them was a transaction in this stage of existence, the results only to be reaped hereafter. The ground on which the great creeds of Christendom have excluded the notion of any decisive probation after this life, has been far broader than the statements of individual passages of Scripture, explicit as these are. It underlies the whole system of revealed truth. All proceeds on this supposition. This world is assumed to be the scene of responsible activity and critical opportunity. The whole pressure of obligation is brought to bear on this life. So heavy is that pressure that some, like Warburton, have wrongly held that the Old Testament recognizes no other world than this. Around this same sphere are accumulated, in that older dispensation, the precepts of duty, the warnings against sin, and, what is especially to the point, the calls to repentance. To men who never in the remotest form had heard of Christ, God was addressing, age after age, his stern rebukes, his perpetual summons to turn from sin, and his denunciations for disobedience. The obligation to repentance now and here in this life was complete and absolute. Wherever sinners were, there were men wholly inexcusable in sin, and wholly inexcusable for not repenting of sin. It would almost seem that this stringent pressure upon sin, this uncompromising demand for duty and repentance in this life, with scarcely a reference to another life, may have been especially designed to rule out beforehand any thoughts of a future probation. The same uniform recognition of this life as the scene of critical moral agency, of opportunity, and of effective achievement for good. or ill, runs through the New Testament. The Saviour even identifies the limitation of his own redemptive labors with the common lot of men (John, 9:4, 5). To the same purport is the great body of representations as to the scene of the Saviour's redemptive activity and its influence. It is this world. As Logos, "There was the true light which lighteth every man, coming into the world. He was in the world and the world knew him not." "The light has come into the world and the world loved darkness." “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might have life." "I am the light of the world." "For judgment am I come into the world that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be made blind." "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth in me should not abide in darkness." "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” "For this purpose came I into this world, that I might bear witness to the truth." "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." "Seen of angels, believed on in the world." "He sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him." 66 "He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." Such is the steady utterance-a work in this world. It is a perpetual and solemn strain on this one string. The same unmistakable impression is made by the extreme urgency of the calls to immediate repentance. If not always formulated in words, the undertone of all the calls and warnings is, "Now is the day of salvation." It is vain to say that this urgency is on the ground of the hardening nature of sin. The New Testament does not ground its appeals on metaphysical principles and |