Dr. Tulloch has the sense to perceive and the candor to acknowledge that
even to those who have not any faith in God or Immortality, death need
not be terrible, and often is not; that they may be resigned or
peaceful, and meet the inevitable with a calm front; that they may be
even glad to be done with the struggle of existence. Of course this is
no news to us who have stood at the bedside of dying Materialists and
Atheists, or are familiar with trustworthy well-authenticated accounts
of the last hours of such persons. Still it is encouraging to find a
distinguished and influential minister openly recognising the facts,
instead of distorting them with the old contemptible pious fictions,
again and again repeated after being again and again refuted. But Dr.
Tulloch considers that only the light of the higher life in Christ can
glorify death. It would have been well had he been more specific as to
this higher life and the glory it casts on death. If they are as
described at length in the only authoritative Christian Scripture on the
subject, the Book of Revelation, it seems to me that the life is
anything but high, and radiates anything but glory. However, tastes
differ, and man is a queer fellow; and there may actually exist many
people who would prefer to annihilation a sort of everlasting Moody and
Sankey meeting, and would even regard this as celestial beatitude.
Concerning such I will only say with Goethe, I hope I shan’t go to
heaven with that lot! Yet these are not quite the lowest of the low in
our civilised Christendom; or are there not many who look forward with
complacency and even enthusiasm to a life beyond death, wherein they
shall be largely employed in rapping tables, jogging arms and scrawling
illiterate nonsense? Dr. Tulloch, in quoting St. Paul, seems to forget
that he was writing of himself and his fellow Christians, to whom his
words were thoroughly applicable; not of mankind in general, to whom
they were not, and by the construction of the sentence could not be. “If
in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most
miserable;” we, the Christians. And why would they be of all men the
most miserable? Clearly because, in obedience to the injunctions of
their Master, they had cut themselves off from this world that they
might secure the next; had renounced wealth, honor, society, enjoyment,
all interest in art, science, literature, all political and national
aspirations, and had courted obloquy and persecution; so that if the
next life should turn out to be a mockery, a delusion and a snare, they
were of all men the most miserable, being the most miserably deluded.
Those poor simple early Christians (on the showing, true or false, of
the books all Christians revere as sacred and divine), having only Jesus
and his apostles to instruct them, had not reached that lofty mercantile
wisdom which made the late Mr. Binney one of the most popular preachers
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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