"Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress; 'Midst flaming worlds in these arrayed, With joy shall I lift up my head. Bold shall I stand in that great day, For who aught to my charge shall lay? Fully absolved through these I am, From sin and fear, from guilt and shame." * * * * * CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE "My knowledge of that life is small, The eye of faith is dim; But 'tis enough that Christ knows all, And I shall be with Him." RICHARD BAXTER. * * * * * XVI CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE "_Where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal._"--MATT. vi. 20. "_Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched._"--MARK ix. 48. These are both sayings of Christ, and each has reference to the life beyond death; together they illustrate the two-fold thought of the future which finds a place in all the records of our Lord's teaching. Popular theology, it is sometimes said, seriously misunderstands and misinterprets Jesus. And so far as the theology of the future life is concerned there need be no hesitation in admitting that, not unfrequently, it has been disfigured by an almost grotesque literalism. The pulpit has often forgotten that over-statement is always a blunder, and that any attempt to imagine the wholly unimaginable is most likely to end in defeating our own intentions and in dissipating, rather than reinforcing, our sense of the tremendous realities of which Christ spoke. Nevertheless, much as theology may have erred in the form of its teaching concerning the future, its great central ideas have always been derived direct from Christ. It has not, we know, always made its appeal to what is highest in man; it has sometimes spoken of "heaven" and "hell" in a fashion that has left heart and conscience wholly untouched; nevertheless, the time has not yet come--until men cease to believe in Christ, the time never will have come--for banishing these words from our vocabulary. Unless Christ were both a deceiver and deceived, they represent realities as abiding as God and the soul, realities towards which it behoves every man of us to discover how he stands. In the teaching of Jesus, no less than in the teaching of popular theology, the future has a bright side and it has a dark side; there is a heaven and there is a hell. I