CHAPTER III. Do the Saints at Death pass immediately into Beaven? Tread softly! bow the head, Yet an immortal soul Is passing now. O change! O wondrous change! In mortal prayer—and now O change! stupendous change! The new immortal wakes Walks with his God! IN yonder quiet room, shaded with the mellow twilight of mourning and sorrow, lies a dying saint. Weeping friends crowd around, with hearts that know to feel a parting anguish, waiting for the last breaththe last word has already been heard. Though patience does not permit the utterance of even a sigh or look of complaint, yet the lineaments of exquisite bodily (92) agony are drawn upon the face. But see! the last ebb of life begins to recede from mortal shores. The pulse and breathing are feeble and slow - he dies! The features, before distorted with pain, relax and sink into a sweet pleasantness. The spirit has gone! -WHERE IS IT! Has it plumed its wing for heaven, and is it nowthe moment after death-soaring away on its shining track toward the fountain of uncreated and imperishable light and bliss? Will this child of God, thus set free from its earthly captivity, stop in its way before it reaches its Father's house? Is it in any way, or for any time, detained?—The spirit of my dear friend which has just now waved me his last earthly farewell, whose tenantless body lies motionless before me, must be somewhere-oh where? I look around me and all is silent. The hearth, the room, the accustomed walks of life, all mourn his absence. I feel as though that form must meet me again, which met me before; and, forgetting, I hold my breath, and place my finger upon my lips, to hear that voice once more, or to be joyfully surprised by his coming footsteps. In the dreadful stillness of the twilight hour, I close my eyes, and fancy brings him, but when I open my eyes the sweet delusion flies. I look toward the radiant heaven in the star-lit hour, and still my heart inquires, Where is that spirit now? Who will forbid me these earnest inquiries? Who, that can, will refuse to answer them? It is not in the nature of refined social being, neither does the spirit of Christianity allow it, that our interest in those we learned to love should cease when they die. If the Marys committed no sin in seeking the tomb of their beloved Lord "very early, when it was yet dark," with "sweet spices," to anoint his body, asking, with tears, where they had laid him, it cannot be sinful for us to ask, even with tearful anxiety, where are the spirits of our departed dead? On this subject, as on the question, Where is heaven? there have been many bewildering theories. It is necessary to review these, give their history, the ground on which they rest, and the objections which are seen to stand against them, when viewed from the scriptural ground. After this is done, we shall be better prepared to see what the Spirit has said in answer to this interesting inquiry. The land which lies between these mortal shores and our eternal home is, to the eye of reason, a misty, twilight region, in which the earnest imagination of man has located many strange scenes. It is a land of dubious paths, and of gloomy and cheerless confusion, as long as the day-spring from on high does not shine upon it. If the reader has never travelled much through it, let him stick close to his guide; for he will often, in deep bewilderment, be induced to exclaim, "Watchman, what of the night?" It is, then, a gloomy road; yet gloomy as it is, it will not be in vain to travel in it. We will walk in the radiant highway to Canaan more pleasantly and more gratefully after we have wandered long in the wilderness. After we have tried in vain to make the journey by the unsteady flickerings of human reason and unsanctified imagination, we will try again, taking for our journey "a lamp to our feet and a light to our path." SECTION I. THE ANCIENT UNDER WORLD. A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness. JOB X. 22. Where are those who die and are gathered to their fathers? The first and simplest ideas on this subject are characteristic of the childhood of the world in which they are found. The place of the dead was conceived of by those who lived in the morning of the world as a dark, indistinct, and dreamy UNDER WORLD. On the subject of their eternal homes, as on all other subjects, their ideas were vague and undefined. As childhood is a time of hope and longing, in which realities are not closely scanned, so in the earlier ages, or childhood of the world, men hoped and longed for a future life by a kind of spiritual instinct, but did not much inquire what was the foundation of their hopes, or the nature of that good for which they longed. We cannot now easily conceive how contracted and floating the ideas of men must have been in that early age, when there was no philosophy to require accurate connexion and consistency in their thoughts. They were children not only in simplicity of manners, but in all their reflections. The under world was called, in Hebrew, SHEOL, which means a dark region, where one sees nothing. It was supposed to be a place under the earth, or in some unknown region, away from human reach. Here, amid darkness and silence, the dead existed in the form of mysterious shadows; hence they are called Manes, or shades. This idea rose in their mind in a perfectly natural way. Their friends died, and they put their bodies into caves of the earth, or in vaults constructed by their own hands. Thus the place of the dead was a dark place, and they accordingly called it Sheol-Hades-darkness, where nothing is seen. When they looked into these subterrene caves, they saw not the spirits of the dead, it is true, yet they felt as if the dead were there. The darkness and silence which reigned there were the proper elements for the imagination, and it was easy to people these abodes with spirits. It was natural, then, in those simple ages, when hope, desire, and imagination were strong and uncontrolled, and judgment and reason weak, that the mind should conceive of these caves as the inlet to an under world, which naturally also became peopled with the manes of the dead. Thus the patriarch Jacob, mourning for his son, whom he supposed to be dead, says, "I will go down into the grave (Sheol,) unto my son, mourning." Gen. xxxvii. 35. Job, also, in that early, patriarchal age, speaks of the grave whither his grief should bring him, in a similar way. "I go down to the land of darkness, and the shadow of death; a land of darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness." Job x. 21, 22. Their ideas of heaven, as a place of happiness, and of hell, as a place of misery, not yet having received distinctness in their consciousness, their minds would not go farther into their future history than to these dark and silent regions of the under world. |