Expositor's Bible: The Epistles of St. John Part 26

Let us, then, fix our attention upon the unity of all the Resurrection narratives in these two essential principles. (1) The appearances of the Risen Lord to belief and love only. (2) The impression common to all the narrators of glory on His part, of joy on theirs.

We shall be ready to believe that this was part of the great body of proof which was in the Apostle's mind, when pointing to the Gospel with which this Epistle was a.s.sociated, he wrote of this human but most convincing testimony--"if we receive," as a.s.suredly we do, "the witness of men"--of evangelists among the number.

II.

Too often such discussions as these end unpractically enough. Too often

"When the critic has done his best, The pearl of price at reason's test On the Professor's lecture table Lies, dust and ashes levigable."

But, after all, we may well ask: can we afford to dispense with this well-balanced probability? Is it well for us to face life and death without taking it, in some form, into the account?

Now at the present moment, it may safely be said that, for the best and n.o.blest intellects imbued with the modern philosophy, as for the best and n.o.blest of old who were imbued with the ancient philosophy, external to Christian revelation, immortality is still, as before, a fair chance, a beautiful "perhaps," a splendid possibility.

Evolutionism is growing and maturing somewhere another Butler, who will write in another, and possibly more satisfying chapter, than that least convincing of any in the _a.n.a.logy_--"of a Future State."

What has Darwinism to say on the matter?

Much. Natural selection seems to be a pitiless worker; its instrument is _death_. But, when we broaden our survey, the sum-total of the result is everywhere advance--what is mainly worthy of notice, in man the advance of goodness and virtue. For of goodness, as of freedom,

"The battle once begun Though baffled oft, is always won."

Humanity has had to travel thousands of miles, inch by inch, towards the light. We have made such progress that we can see that in time, relatively short, we shall be in noonday. After long ages of strife, of victory for hard hearts and strong sinews, goodness begins to wipe away the sweat of agony from her brow; and will stand, sweet, smiling, triumphant in the world. A gracious life is free for man; generation after generation a softer ideal stands before us, and we can conceive a day when "the meek shall inherit the earth." Do not say that evolution, if proved _a outrance_, brutalises man. Far from it. It lifts him from below out of the brute creation. What theology calls original sin, modern philosophy the brute inheritance--the ape, and the goat, and the tiger--is dying out of man. The perfecting of human nature and of human society stands out as the goal of creation. In a sense, all creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of G.o.d.

Nor need the true Darwinian necessarily fear materialism. "Livers secrete bile--brains secrete thought," is smart and plausible, but it is shallow. Brain and thought are, no doubt, connected--but the connection is of simultaneousness, of two things in concordance indeed, but not related as cause and effect. If cerebral physiology speaks of annihilation when the brain is destroyed, she speaks ignorantly and without a brief.

The greatest thinkers in the Natural Religion department of the new philosophy seem then to be very much in the same position as those in the same department of the old. For immortality there is a sublime probability. With man, and man's advance in goodness and virtue as the goal of creation, who shall say that the thing so long provided for, the goal of creation, is likely to perish? Annihilation is a hypothesis; immortality is a hypothesis. But immortality is the more likely as well as the more beautiful of the two. We may believe in it, not as a thing demonstrated, but as an act of faith that "G.o.d will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion."[327]

But we may well ask whether it is wise and well to refuse to intrench this probability behind another. Is it likely that He who has so much care for us as to make us the goal of a drama a million times more complex than our fathers dreamed of; who lets us see that He has not removed us out of his sight; will leave Himself, and with Himself our hopes, without witness in history? History is especially human; human evidence the branch of moral science of which man is master--for man is the best interpreter of man. The primary axiom of family, of social, of legal, of moral life, is, that there is a kind and degree of human evidence which we ought not to refuse; that if credulity is voracious in belief, incredulity is no less voracious in negation; that if there is a credulity which is simple, there is an incredulity which is unreasonable and perilous. Is it then safe to grope for the keys of death in darkness, and turn from the hand that holds them out; to face the ugly realities of the pit with less consolation than is the portion of our inheritance in the faith of Christ?

"The disciples," John tells us, "went away again unto their own home.

But Mary was standing without at the sepulchre weeping."[328] Weeping!

What else is possible while we are _outside_, while we _stand_--what else until we _stoop_ down from our proud grief to the sepulchre, humble our speculative pride, and condescend to gaze at the death of Jesus face to face? When we do so, we forget the hundred voices that tell us that the Resurrection is partly invented, partly imagined, partly ideally true. We may not see angels in white, nor hear their "why weepest thou?" But a.s.suredly we shall hear a sweeter voice, and a stronger than theirs; and our name will be on it, and His name will rush to our lips in the language most expressive to us--as Mary said unto Him in _Hebrew_,[329] Rabboni. Then we shall find that the grey of morning is pa.s.sing; that the thin thread of scarlet upon the distant hills is deepening into dawn; that in that world where Christ is the dominant law the ruling principle is not natural selection which works through death, but supernatural selection which works through life; that "because He lives, we shall live also."[330]

With the reception of the witness of men then, and among them of such men as the writer of the fourth Gospel, all follows. For Christ,

"Earth breaks up--time drops away;-- In flows Heaven with its new day Of endless life, when He who trod, Very Man and very G.o.d, This earth in weakness, shame, and pain, Dying the death whose signs remain Up yonder on the accursed tree; Shall come again, no more to be Of captivity the thrall-- But the true G.o.d all in all, King of kings, and Lord of lords, As His servant John received the words-- 'I died, and live for evermore.'"

For us there comes the hope in Paradise--the connection with the living dead--the pulsation through the isthmus of the Church, from sea to sea, from us to them--the tears not without smiles as we think of the long summer-day when Christ who is our life shall appear--the manifestation of the sons of G.o.d, when "them that sleep in Jesus will G.o.d bring with Him." Our resurrection shall be a fact of history, because His is a fact of history; and we receive it as such--partly from the reasonable motive of reasonable human belief on sufficient evidence for practical conviction.

All the long chain of manifold witness to Christ is consummated and crowned when it pa.s.ses into the inner world of the individual life.

"He that believeth on the Son of G.o.d, hath the witness in him,"

_i.e._, in himself![331] Correlative to this, stands a terrible truth.

He of whom we must conceive that he believes not G.o.d,[332] has made Him a liar--nothing less, because his time for receiving Christ came and went, and with this crisis his unbelief stands a completed present act as the result of his past;[333] unbelief stretching over to the completed witness of G.o.d concerning His Son;[334]--human unbelief co-extensive with divine witness.

But that sweet witness in a man's self is not merely in books or syllogisms. It is the creed of a living soul. It lies folded within a man's heart, and never dies--part of the great principle of victory[335] fought and won over again in each true life[336]--until the man dies, and ceasing then only because he sees that which is the object of its witness.

FOOTNOTES:

[314] The writer is entirely persuaded that St. John in chap. xx. 30, 31, refers to the _Resurrection_ "signs," and not to miracles generally.

[315] Acts x. 41, 42. It is to be regretted that the R. V. has not boldly given us such an arrangement of the words in this important pa.s.sage as would at once connect "made manifest" with "after He rose again from the dead," and avoid making the Apostle state that the chosen witnesses ate and drank with Christ after the Resurrection. St.

Peter mentions that particular characteristic of the Apostles which made them judges not to be gainsayed of the ident.i.ty of the Risen One with Him with whom they used to eat and drink.

[316] John xiv. 19-21.

[317] ??? t??t? e?de?; ???? pa???st???, ?a? e? t?? a???? t?? e? t??

a?t?? ???te?a?. ?te e? ?p?ste?t? e? s?at? pas?? a??d?? (freely, without restraint) e????tte?, ?te de p?st?? a? ?s???a? pa?e??e? e?

?e???? a?asta? ??? ??? ???a?? ?a? t??? ?a?t?? ?eas??ta?? (adepts, initiated) ???d?? pa?efa??et? ... e???? e?pe? ??t?? ?e?a? d??a??

e?f??a? ??e?e? ? ??s??? a?t??? t??? ep??eas? ?a? t? ?atad??asa?t? ?a?

???? pas?? ?f???a?. [Celsus, _ap. Orig._, 2, 55, 59, 70, 63.] The pa.s.sage is given in Rudolph Anger's invaluable _Synopsis Evang. c.u.m locis qui supersunt parallelis litterarum et traditionum Evang.

Irenaeo. antiquiorum._ p. 254.

[318] ???? pa???st???, Celsus. "Moments sacres ou la pa.s.sion d'une hallucinee donne au monde un Dieu ressuscite." Renan, _Vie de Jesus_, 434.

[319] "Post Resurrectionem ... Dominus quum dedisset sindonem servo sacerdotis"--Evang. ad Heb.--Matt. xxvii. 59.--R. Anger, _Synopsis Evang._, 288.

[320] Mark xvi. 8.

[321] Luke xxiv. 37.

[322] Luke xxiv. 41; John xx. 20.

[323] Ps. x.x.xiv. 15.

[324] John xxi. 12, cf. 7.

[325] Matt. xxviii. 13.

[326] 1 Peter i. 3, 4; Apoc. i. 17, 18.

[327] See _The Destiny of Man, viewed in the light of his origin_, by John Fiske, especially the three remarkable chapters pp. 96-119.

[328] John xx. 10, 11.

[329] The word ??a?st? had unfortunately dropped out of the T. R.

John xx. 16.

[330] John xiv. 19.

[331] e? ?a?t?, ver. 10.

[332] ? ? p?ste??? t? Te?, _Ibid._

[333] ?? pep?ste??e?, _Ibid._

[334] e?? t?? a?t???a? ?? ea?t????e? ? Te?? pe?? t?? ???? a?t??.

_Ibid._

[335] pa? t? ?e?e???e??? e? t?? Te?? ???a t?? ??s??. ver. 4.