PROBATION IN THIS LIFE
Up to this we have been ignoring a
large proportion of the inhabitants of the Unseen
Land. To avoid misunderstanding we have kept
in view those only of whom we had hope that they died
in the fear and love of God. But there is no
evading the thought that between these and the utterly
reprobate, there are multitudes of Christian and heathen
in that Unseen Life today who belong to neither class,
mixed characters in all varying degrees of good or
evil. Of many of them it could be said that
those who knew them best saw much that was good and
lovable in them. But it could not be said that
they had consciously and definitely chosen for Christ.
They must form the majority of those
to-day in the Unseen Land. Therefore one cannot
help wondering about them. One day death overtook
them. The thought of them comes forcibly when
some morning the newspapers startle us with the story
of a terrible battle or railway smash or shipwreck
or conflagration in which hundreds have passed out
of life in a moment and the horror of the catastrophe
is deepened by the thought that they have been called
away suddenly unprepared.
What of their position in the Intermediate
Life? Our Christian charity prompts us to hope
the best for them. But are we justified in hoping?
It is impossible for thoughtful, sympathetic men to
evade that question. It is cowardly to evade
it. At any rate a treatise on the Intermediate
Life can hardly pass over altogether the thought of
the majority of its inhabitants and it cannot be wrong
for us humbly and reverently to think about them.
Section 2
I have already pointed out the solemn
responsibility of this earth life in which acts make
habits and habits make character and character makes
destiny. I am about to point out the grave probability,
to say the least of it, that in a very real sense
this life may be the sole probation time for man.
But this does not shut out the question of the poor
bereaved mother by the side of her dead son.
“If any soul has not in penitence and faith
definitely accepted Jesus Christ in this life is it
forever impossible that he may do so in any other life?”
I answer unhesitatingly, God forbid!
Else what of all the dead children down through the
ages and all the dead idiots and all the millions
of dead heathen and all the poor stragglers in Christian
lands who in their dreary, dingy lives had never any
fair chance of knowing their Lord in a way that would
lead them to love Him, and who have never even thought
about accepting or rejecting Him? “Shall
not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Shall
not the loving Father do His best for all? Our
Lord knew “that if the mighty works done in
Capernaum had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would
have repented.” Does He not there suggest
that He would take thought for those men of Tyre and
Sidon in the Unseen Land? Does He not know the
same of many gone unto that Unseen from heathen lands
and Christian lands, who would have loved Him if they
knew Him as He really is and who have but begun to
know Him truly in the world of the dead of
many who in their ignorance have tried to respond
to the dim light of Conscience within and only learned
within the veil really to know Him the Lord of the
Conscience, “the light which lighteth every man
coming into the world” (St. John .
Here is no question of encouraging
careless, godless men with the hope of a new probation.
Here is no question of men wilfully rejecting Christ.
The merry, thoughtless child the imbecile the
heathen had no thought of rejecting Christ.
The poor struggler in Christian lands, brought up
in evil surroundings, who though he had heard of Christ
yet saw no trace of Christ’s love in his dreary
life he cannot be said to have rejected
Christ. The honest sceptic who in the last generation
had been taught as a prominent truth of Christianity
that God decrees certain men to eternal Heaven and
certain men to eternal Hell not for any good or evil
they had done but to show His power and glory, and
who has therefore in obedience to conscience frankly
rejected Christianity can he be said to
have rejected Christ?
The possibility in this life of putting
oneself outside the pale of salvation is quite awful
enough without our making it worse. It is not
for us to judge who is outside the pale of salvation
nor to limit the love of God by our little shibboleths.
It is on a man’s WILL, not on his knowledge
or ignorance that destiny depends. God only can
judge that. All the subtle influences which
go to make character are known to Him alone.
He alone can weigh the responsibility of the will
in any particular case. And surely we know Him
well enough humbly to trust His love to the uttermost
for every poor soul whom He has created.
II
But this hope must not ignore the
solemn thought that in a very real sense the probation
of this life seems the determining factor in human
destiny even for the unthinking even
for the ignorant nay even for the heathen
who could never have heard of Christ here. Rightly
understood all that we have said does not conflict
with this. It may seem strange at first sight
to think of the heathen as having any real probation
here. Yet, mark it well, it is of this heathen
man who could not consciously have accepted Christ
in this life that St. Paul implies that his attitude
in the Unseen Life towards Him who is the Light of
the World is determined by his attitude in this life
towards the imperfect light of Conscience that he
has. “If the Gentiles who have not the
Law do by nature the things contained in the Law, these
having not the Law are a law unto themselves, which
show the works of the Law written in their hearts,
their Conscience bearing witness” (Rom. i.
We may assume that St. Paul means
that the heathen man who in this life followed the
dim light of his conscience is the man who will rejoice
in the full light when it comes and that the man who
has been wilfully shutting out that dim light of conscience
here is thereby rendering himself less capable of
accepting the fuller light when he meets it hereafter.
In other words this life is his probation, he is forming
on earth the moral bent of his future life.
We may assume the same of men in similar
conditions in Christian lands, men brought up amid
ignorance and crime, men brought up in infidel homes,
men to whom Christ has been so unattractively presented
that they saw no beauty in Him or even instinctively
turned away from Him impelled by their conscience.
They all have the light of God in some degree and
by their attitude towards the right that they know
are determining on earth their attitude towards God
in the Hereafter. They are forming character
and character tends to permanence.
The “outer darkness” it
would seem comes not from absence of light but from
blindness of sight. The joy of Heaven is impossible
to the unholy just as the joy of beautiful scenery
to the blind or the joy of exquisite music to the
deaf. Probation in this life simply
means that in this first stage of his being a man
either is or is not blinding his eyes and dulling
his ears and hardening his heart so as to make himself
incapable of higher things in the life to come.
If then it be possible even for a
heathen to have in this life sufficient probation
to determine his attitude towards God for ever, how
much more for a man in the full light of Christianity.
In view of this the great law of life that CHARACTER
TENDS TO PERMANENCE may it not be awfully true that
a man who with full knowledge of Christ wilfully and
deliberately turns from Him all through this life,
should thus render himself incapable of turning to
Him in any other life? With full knowledge
of Christ I say, not with knowledge of some repulsive
misrepresentation of Christ.
For think what it means to reject
Christ wilfully with full knowledge of Him.
His voice still comes as we tramp on,
With a sorrowful fall in its pleading
tone:
“Thou wilt tire in the dreary ways
of sin;
I left My home to bring thee in.
In its golden street are no
weary feet,
Its rest is pleasant, its
songs are sweet.”
And we shout back angrily hurrying on
To a terrible home where rest is none:
“We want not your city’s golden
street,
Nor to hear its constant song!”
And still Christ keeps on loving us,
loving all along.
Rejected still He pursues each one:
“My child, what more could thy God
have done?
Thy sin hid the light of heaven from Me,
When alone in the darkness I died for
thee.
Thy sin of to-day in its shadow lay
Between My face and One turned away.”
And we stop and turn for a
moment’s space
To fling back that love in
the Saviour’s face,
To give His heart yet another grief,
And glory in the wrong.
And still Christ keeps on loving us,
loving all along.
Is it hard to believe that a man thus
knowing Christ and wilfully rejecting Him should thereby
risk the ruin of his soul? Can we not recognize
this awful law of life that wilful sin against light
tends to darkening of the light that every
rejection of God and good draws blood as it were on
the spiritual retina, that a life of such rejections
of the light tends to make one incapable of receiving
the light for ever.
If this be so it is not at all fair
to misrepresent it by saying that God cruelly stereotypes
a man’s soul at death and will refuse him permission
to repent after death however much he may want to.
The voice of the Holy Ghost within tells us that
this could never be true of the Father. We must
believe that through all Eternity, if the worst sinner
felt touched by the love of God and wanted to turn
to Him, that man would be saved. What we dread
is that the man may not want to do so, may have rendered
himself incapable of doing so. We dread not
God’s will, but the man’s own will.
Character tends to permanence.
Free will is a glorious but a dangerous prerogative.
All experience leads towards the belief that a human
will may so distort itself as to grow incapable of
good. Even a character not hardened into permanent
evil may grow incapable of the highest good.
A soul even forgiven through the mercy of God may
“enter into life halt and maimed” like
a consumptive patient cured of his disease but going
through life with only one lung.
Though the Bible does not give an
absolutely definite pronouncement on this question,
yet the general trend of its teaching leads to the
belief that this life is our probation time.
It everywhere calls for immediate repentance.
And St. Paul says that the Judgment is for deeds
“done in the body,” and there are
such hints as “the door was shut” and
“there is a sin unto death,” and “it
were better for a man not to have known the way of
righteousness than after he has known it to turn from
it." And this has been the general belief of the
Church in all ages. Even in all the hopeful
words of the ancient Fathers about Christ preaching
to the spirits in prison who in the dark old world
days “had sometime been disobedient,” we
have seen that they add some such significant phrase
as “that He might convert those who were
capable of turning to Him.” (See Chapter
IV, .) And human experience of character tending
to permanence makes this fact of human probation awfully
probable. There is nothing in Scripture nor in
its interpretation by the Church, nor in human experience,
to conflict with the statement that in this life Acts
make habits and Habits make Character and character
makes Destiny.
What new discoveries of God’s
power and mercy may await us in eternity we cannot
know, but from all we do know we are justified in thinking
that (in the sense which I have stated) a man’s
life in this world determines his destiny at
any rate that a man who presumes recklessly on chances
in the future is taking terrible risks. The Bible
gives no encouragement to hope that one who with full
knowledge of Christ keeps on wilfully rejecting Him
all through this life will be able to turn to Him
in any other life.
The only comfort we dare offer to
anxious mourners grieving over sinful friends departed
is that God only is the judge of what constitutes
irrevocable rejection of good, that we cannot tell
who has irrevocably “done despite to the Spirit
of grace,” and that the deep love and pain of
Christ for sinful men remains for ever and ever.
We may tell the poor mother that her deep love and
pain for her dead son is but a faint shadow of the
deep love and pain of God that no one will
be surprised or trapped in his ignorance that
no one will be lost whom it is possible for God to
save that no one will be lost until “the
Heavenly Father has as it were thrown His arms around
him and looked him full in the face with the bright
eyes of His love, and that of his own deliberate will
he would not have Him” (Faber).
We dare not minimize what the love
and pain of God may do, but we dare not presume in
the face of Scripture to lighten the awful responsibility
which this life brings.
Thus we reach larger thoughts of God’s
dealings with man and deeper interest in the infinite
variety that must be in the “many mansions”
of the boundless life hereafter. And this sets
us wondering about another thought as to ministry
in that life.