SERMON S. SERMON I. WHAT HEAVEN IS.1 HEB. iv. II. "Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest." IN one of our ablest Reviews,2 a discussion has been going on for some time on the soul and future life; and it is a sign of the large toleration of the times that some of the writers not only glory in expressing a belief that, apart from his body, man has no soul, and no life beyond the grave an opinion, the open expression of which would, twenty years ago, have been received with 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Oct. 14, 1877. The Nineteenth Century. B outbursts of indignation; but have even arrived at the point of treating with compassionate disdain those who still cling to the traditional belief. Now I do not think it needful, brethren, in this nineteenth century after Christ, to argue with you that you have souls, and that your life is not as the life of the beasts that perish. To the end of time the human race will believe this, though from the dawn of History there have been a few philosophers who disputed it. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. These speculations have never shaken, will never shake, the fixed convictions of mankind. Those convictions might have been expressed from very early ages in the simple verse of the poet "Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal; Was not spoken of the soul." We may freely concede that, of the separate existence of the immaterial soul, and our survival beyond "the intolerable indignities of dust to dust," we have no mathematical demonstration to offer. But this fact does not in the slightest degree trouble us, because neither is there any such proof of the existence of a God. It is perfectly easy for a man to say, if he will, 'I do not believe in a God.' I do not care to offer up any worship, even of the silent sort, even at the altar of "the unknown and the unknowable." I do not even think it worth while to pray that wild prayer once uttered by a criminal upon the scaffold, "O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." A man may say all this, and plume himself on this melancholy abnegation of man's fairest hopes; on this deliberate suicide of the spiritual faculty; and if he considers such opinions to be a sign of intellectual emancipation, we can offer to him no proof that will necessarily convince him. When Vanini1 lay in prison on a charge of atheism, he touched with his foot 1 The story is also told of Galileo. a straw which lay on his dungeon-floor, and We can pluck the the existence of God." meanest flower of the hedgerow, and, point to the exquisite perfection of its structure, the tender delicacy of its loveliness; we may pick up the tiniest shell out of myriads upon the shore, so delicate that a touch would crush it, and yet a miracle of rose and pearl, of lustrous iridescence and fairy arabesque, and ask the atheist if he feels seriously certain that these things are but the accidental outcome of self-evolving laws. We can take him under the canopy of night, and show him the stars of heaven, and ask him whether he really holds them to be nothing more than "shining illusions of the night, eternal images of deception in an imaginary heaven, golden lies in dark-blue nothingness." Or we may bid him watch with us the flow of the vast stream of history, and see how the great laws of it are as mighty currents 1 Heine, Confessions (Stigand's Life of Heine, i. 50). "that make for righteousness." Or we may appeal to the inner voices of his being, and ask whether they have indeed no message to tell him. But if he deny or reject such arguments as these; if he treat with arrogant scorn that evidence of the things unseen which has been enough in all ages for the millions of humanity-which was enough in past times for Dante and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Newton-which was enough till yesterday for Brewster, and Whewell, and Herschel, and Faraday if he demand a kind of proof which is impossible, and which God has withheld, seeing that it is a law that spiritual things can only be spiritually discerned, and that we walk by faith and not by sight,-if, in short, a man will not see God because clouds and darkness are round about Him, although righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat: then we can do no more. He must believe or not believe-he must bear or must forbear, as seems him best. We cannot argue about colour to the blind. We cannot prove |