All Saints' Day and Other SermonsKingsley, Charles
Religion
All Saints' Day and Other Sermons
Kingsley, Charles
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
And the more loving and affectionate they are, the more they will shrink
from death, unless they believe with their whole hearts the good news of
Easter day. For those whom they have loved on earth have bodies.
Through their bodies--through their voices, their looks, their actions,
they have known them, and thus they have loved them; and if their beloved
ones are to have no bodies in the world to come, how shall they see them?
how shall they know them? how shall they converse with them? It seems to
them in that case neither they, nor those they love, would be the same
persons in the world to come they are here; and that thought is lonely
and dreadful, till they accept the good news of Easter day, the thrice
blessed words of St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, which they
hear at the burial of those whom they love and lose. Oh, blessed news
for us, and for those we love; those without whose company the world to
come would be lonely and cheerless to us. For now we can say, Tell me
not that as the beast dies, so dies the man. Tell me not that as Adam
died because of sin, so must I die, and all I love. Tell me not that it
is the universal law of nature that all things born in time must die in
time; and that every human being, animal, and plant carries in itself
from its beginning to its end a law of death, the seed of its own
destruction. I know all that; but I care little for it, because I know
more than that. I know that the man's body dies as the beast's body
dies; but I know that the body is not the man, but only the husk, the
shell of the man; that the true man, the true woman, lives on after the
loss of his mortal body; and that there is an eternal law of life, which
conquers the law of death; and by that law a fresh body will grow up
round the true man, the immortal spirit, and will be as fit--ay, far
fitter--to do his work, than this poor mortal body which has turned to
death on earth. Tell me not that because I am descended from a mortal
and sinful old Adam, of whom it is written that he was of the earth,
earthly, therefore my soul is a part of my body, and dies when my body
dies. I belong not to the old Adam, but to the new Adam--the new Head of
men, who is the Lord from heaven, the author of eternal life to all who
obey Him. Do not tell me that I have nothing in me but the likeness of
the old Adam, for that seems to me and to St. Paul nothing but the
likeness of the fallen savage and the brute in human form. I know I have
more in me--infinitely more--than that. What may be in store for the
savage, the brutal, the wicked, is God's concern, not mine. But what is
in store for me I know--that as I have borne the image of the earthly, so
shall I bear the image of the heavenly, if only the Spirit of Christ, the
new Adam, be in me. For if Christ be in us, "the body is dead because of
sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness." And if the Spirit
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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