1 Thessalonians 4:13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not… The dreary and cheerless aspect which the state of the dead presented to Homer's mind, even in the case of Achilles, his prime hero, and Agamemnon, king of men, and Ajax, whose peculiarly unhappy fate and brilliant services on earth would have entitled him to consolation, if there had been any to be found, hardly needs a comment. The first of these bitterly contrasts his shadowy primacy with the lot of the meanest hireling on earth. The dead have no prospect; they only look back to the past, or seek to snatch a glimpse of the present. They dwell on the triumphs, or on the wrongs and sufferings, of this mortal life, and sympathize, after a forlorn and bereaved fashion, with those whom they have left behind. The picture is one of such blank desolation as came spontaneously to the poet's mind, on whom neither faith nor philosophy had yet dawned, but who yet could not so far renounce man's birthright of immortality as to conceive of the utter extinction of personality in what had once been a human soul. The dead of Homer have pride, they cherish grudges and curiosity, affection and resentment, but they have, in a later poet's phrase, "left hope behind." The casual exceptions of the few favoured heroes who were by birth or marriage connected with Zeus himself, only prove more pointedly the dismal universality of the rule by which the rest are bound. (H. Hayman, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. |
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