2 Timothy 1:10 But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who has abolished death… It may at first be thought that in the words of the text St. Paul has overstated the originality of his gospel in its doctrine of immortality. For, on the one hand, we find the tokens of firm belief in a life beyond the grave among the very lowest savages: it is shown in their legends, in their accounts of dreams, in their customs of burial. But St. Paul does not, could not, deny that the expectation of an eternal life and the suspicion of immortality were astir among men before Christ rose from the dead, the first-fruits of them that slept: what he does claim is that through the gospel of the Resurrection God has brought the truth to light, and substituted for the shifting glimpses, the twilight hope, the unfinished prophecy of the past, a fact as stable as his prison walls, a fact which brings immortality itself into the broad light of day, and sets it, for those who believe that Christ is risen, among the steadiest axioms of life. He is satisfied that his eyes have seen the form, his ears have heard the voice of One who liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore. The expectation of a future life had indeed long been in the world: but it had been a very different thing from this. In the infantile mind of the savage it had been little mare than the mere inability to imagine how he could cease to be: it cost him less effort to think of the present as continuing than as stopping: he had not fancy or energy enough to conceive an end. It was impossible that a state of mind so purely negative should long take rank as an expectation among civilised men: in their higher and more active souls it must either become positive or pass away. It does become positive to the Greek and to the Jew: but at the same time it loses something of that unfaltering certainty with which it swayed the savage. Even David wonders "What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?" even Hezekiah cries to God, "The grave cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth." Whatever Christianity has done, or failed to do, this at least we need not fear to claim for it: that it has availed to plant the belief of our immortality among the deepest and most general convictions o( our race: that it has borne even into the least imaginative hearts the unfailing hope of a pure and glorious life beyond the death of the body: that it has shot through our language, our literature, our customs, and our moral ideas the searching light of a judgment to come and the quickening glory of a promised Heaven; that it has sustained and intensified this hope through countless changes of thought and feeling in centuries. of quickest intellectual development: and that it is now impossible to conceive the force which could dislodge from so many million hearts the axiom which they have learned from the gospel of the Resurrection. But is there in this achievement any evidence that that gospel is true? Let us seek some answer to this question. And first, may not this be said with truth: that there are some conceptions of our life, of ourselves, and of this present world, which, as moral beings, we have no right to entertain? We have no right, for instance, to entertain, still less to impart, the theory that there is any sin which men cannot avoid, any vice which they had better practise: we have no right to say to ourselves or others that our humanity is naturally vile or brutal. Conscience can condemn a thought as distinctly and authoritatively as it can an act: and there are abstract views of ourselves and our life which can only be accepted by doing ruinous violence to the moral sense. Such, and so criminal, is or would be the belief that this present life is all unreal and meaningless, a thing to be mocked at or despised as silly and abortive: as though all its interests and issues, even when they seem most free and hopeful, were really in the relentless grip of a blind or cruel force, and its government or anarchy, with all that we call law and right and reason, a mere amusement for some scornful spectator of our manifold delusion. We have no right, even in thought, so to jeer at ourselves: no man, being rational and moral, may think so meanly of his manhood. We live then, we go on working, upon the belief that the main and dominant element in life is reasonable and righteous: it is a belief which morality inculcates as a duty; without which effort and progress are words drained of all meaning. But does this world, indeed, display the character which we are thus forced to impute to it, if all the issues of a human life are finished all its drama played, its accounts all balanced, and its story closed, when the frail body dies; if life and immortality indeed have not been brought to light? But there are unnumbered souls for whom only the hope which Christianity has given them can justify the patient continuance of life, or arrest the quick growth of disappointment towards despair and madness. (F. Paget, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel: |
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