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    Immortality
    Immortality
    Immortality
    Ebook84 pages54 minutes

    Immortality

    By R. H. Charles

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    It was with much pleasure that I accepted the invitation to deliver this year the Drew Lecture on Immortality. The invitation came to me overwhelmed with the pressure of tasks in various stages of incompleteness, but the practical character of the subject overcame my reluctance to add to the freight of an already overladen ship. For though I propose to take you speedily over the intellectual changes of outlook on this subject in Israel and a few of its developments in Christianity, you are not to regard this study as one of merely academic interest. Nay, the subject is a living one: it affects the well-being not only of the individual man, but of Churches and religious systems, of nations and races. The loss of such a belief would be tragic in every department of human life, for, as we shall see later, it would be a proof of spiritual declension. I will quote the judgements of two very dissimilar men on this question. Emerson writes: ‘No sooner do we try to get rid of the idea of Immortality—than Pessimism raises its head … human griefs seem little worth assuaging; human happiness too paltry (at the best) to be worth increasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point. Good and evil, right and wrong, become infinitesimal matters. The affections die away—die of their own conscious feebleness and uselessness. A moral paralysis creeps over us.
    CrossReach Publications

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossReach Publications
    Release dateMay 26, 2019
    Immortality

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      Book preview

      Immortality - R. H. Charles

      The question not only of academic but of practical interest.

      It was with much pleasure that I accepted the invitation to deliver this year the Drew Lecture on Immortality. The invitation came to me overwhelmed with the pressure of tasks in various stages of incompleteness, but the practical character of the subject overcame my reluctance to add to the freight of an already overladen ship. For though I propose to take you speedily over the intellectual changes of outlook on this subject in Israel and a few of its developments in Christianity, you are not to regard this study as one of merely academic interest. Nay, the subject is a living one: it affects the well-being not only of the individual man, but of Churches and religious systems, of nations and races. The loss of such a belief would be tragic in every department of human life, for, as we shall see later, it would be a proof of spiritual declension. I will quote the judgements of two very dissimilar men on this question. Emerson writes: ‘No sooner do we try to get rid of the idea of Immortality—than Pessimism raises its head … human griefs seem little worth assuaging; human happiness too paltry (at the best) to be worth increasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point. Good and evil, right and wrong, become infinitesimal matters. The affections die away—die of their own conscious feebleness and uselessness. A moral paralysis creeps over us.’11

      Still more significant perhaps are the words of Ernest Renan: ‘The day’, he writes, ‘in which the belief in an after life shall vanish from the earth will witness a terrific moral and spiritual decadence. Some of us perhaps might do without it, provided only that others held it fast. But there is no lever capable of raising an entire people if once they have lost their faith in the immortality of the soul.’21

      Since, then, the subject is a living and practical one, every circumstance connected with the origin and every phase in the development of this doctrine cannot fail to be of the deepest moment; for since this belief in Israel arose not in the abstract reasonings of the schools, but in the mortal strife of spiritual experience, it cannot be a matter of merely historical interest, but is full of practical importance for all who are seeking to live the life, not of nature’s ephemera, but of the children of God. For in this progress from the complete absence of such a belief in Israel to a positive and spiritual faith in a blessed future life, all alike can read writ large in the page of history from 800 b.c. to a.d. 100 a transcript of their own spiritual struggles as they toil up the steep ascent that leads to the city of God. It is a national Pilgrim’s Progress, which every child of man must repeat in his own spiritual experience, whatever his mental or moral endowments may be, and the goal is as assured to the wayfaring man, though a fool, as it is to the learned and the wise. Having thus recognized the importance of our subject it is advisable, before we enter on the history of the religious development in Israel, to define some of the terms that will recur constantly as we proceed, such as Apocalyptic, Eschatology, and Prophecy.

      Definitions of the terms—Apocalyptic and Eschatology

      First of all we must distinguish Apocalyptic and Eschatology. These two terms are in part synonymous. Eschatology is strictly the doctrine of the last things: and as such can form a division of Apocalyptic or of Prophecy, and so we have an Eschatology of Apocalyptic and an Eschatology of Prophecy. But Apocalyptic takes an infinitely wider sweep. It embraces within its purview things past, present, and to come. But it is no mere history of such things. It seeks to get behind the surface and penetrate to the essence of events: to estimate them as they appear, not from the human but from the divine standpoint.

      Prophecy and Apocalyptic

      To a limited extent Prophecy and Apocalyptic occupy the same field, but the scope of the latter is incommensurably greater. Prophecy devotes itself to the present, and only to the future as rising organically out of the present. It concerns itself mainly with the nation and its hopes and gave birth in due time to the national hope of a Messianic kingdom. Apocalyptic, on the other hand, is interested in the present, but not so much in it as a thing in itself, but as a stage in the development of the divine plan. With this end in

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