We are to restore the wandering, sustain the weak and comfort the sorrowing.

We are to go to the house of mourning and give consolation to those who are Christians and who weep above their Christian dead.

As preachers we are to preach the Word. We are to preach in season and out of season, and to exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine.

We are exhorted to this high, this holy, this exalted and practical Christian living, this reincarnation of Christ in daily experience, this translation of His character, this manifestation of His guiding and ruling presence, not by the fact that we must die and appear before G.o.d, but by the fact the Lord Himself is coming, may come at any time, that any moment we may meet Him at His judgment seat.

In all the universe of G.o.d there is nothing so impressive as the thought that you, that I, that we must give a personal account to G.o.d for the manner in which we have used our time, our talent, our opportunity and substance; and when we are told--as we are told in Holy Scripture--that any moment we may be summoned to give an account of our stewardship, and that without dying, just suddenly, without a moment's warning, translated bodily and with all the sense of the daily life we have been living upon us into the presence of Him whose name we have been professing--impressiveness has reached its ultimate and exhortation the fullest leverage of appeal.

And he who says the Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly ignorant of the Word of G.o.d or brutally and perversely guilty of denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative pa.s.sage in the Word of G.o.d.

When thus you are face to face with the indisputable fact that every basic doctrine of the Christian faith, every outshining promise of hope, of comfort, of consolation, of abiding peace, every appeal to the n.o.blest and purest life as a Christian, every demand that the Christian shall unceasingly be the light of heaven in the spiritual darkness of earth is bound up inextricably with the fact of the Second Coming, it carries with it the inevitable corollary that the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as a certified and imminent event is the very sum and substance of all available motives that can lead to a life of practical service to G.o.d and man.

III

Only at the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ Will Redemption be Complete and the Blood of the Cross be Justified

OUR Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world that He might go through the unspeakable horror of the cross; He did not hang on that brutal and torturing instrument of death as the criminal of the universe; He did not receive the down sweep of the essential antagonism of a holy G.o.d against the sin He represented; He did not cry the cry of the lost, "My G.o.d, My G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?"; He was not flung out like a derelict thing into the black, starless night of G.o.d's inexorable law, measureless wrath and indignation where His humanity unanch.o.r.ed and alone was forsaken both by G.o.d and man; He did not hang there in the torment of His body, suffering all the agony the most exquisitely wrought, nerve -centered body of the universe could suffer of physical pain and anguish; G.o.d did not make Him to be sin and treat Him as the blackest and most repulsive thing in existence; He did not lay upon Him the weight and demerit of a world's guilt that He might suffer in His innocence, His purity and innate sinlessness on behalf of the vilest outcast this side of Gehenna, the lake of fire, just that He might keep us from lying, cheating, swearing, getting drunk, giving ourselves up to immorality, licentiousness and sensualism; He did not send Jesus Christ His only begotten and well-beloved Son to die a spectacle to heaven, to earth and h.e.l.l that He might make us merely decent and right and morally correct in our relations to one another. All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of verse and song.

Cleanness and morality are involved quant.i.ties in a Christian. The moment the new life of the risen Christ is wrought in a believer and he is linked up by the Holy Ghost to the glorified body of the Son of G.o.d he has in him all the impulse and power of the highest morality, the most exalted purity, the rarest spirituality and the discernment of spiritual things. All that is self-evident--but the Son of G.o.d came into this world and went through the amazing tragedy and sacrifice of the cross to do something more than to make us merely moral and good. He came into the world, He died the foreordained death of the cross that He might deliver us from death and the grave.

Death is the blackest and most shameful blot on the face of the earth, the grave the most repulsive of scandals, drawing the trench of its corruption and stain round the girdle of the globe.

To bring a human being into the world, give him no choice of father or mother, of place, of time and circ.u.mstance, endow him with a brain to think, a heart to feel and love and then set him face to face with death, hide from him the hour of his going like a criminal who knows not the hour of his execution; to allow the old to live till they are withered, shrivelled and helpless, a burden to others and a still greater burden to themselves, cursing the fact they must live and yet afraid to die; to take a young man in the splendour of his youth, on the threshold of a.s.sured success, s.n.a.t.c.h him away without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of tears, or the choking sob; to allow the living whose hearts are torn and twisted and smashed by the robbery that death brings upon them to stand there and strangle themselves with the unanswered and unanswerable questions: "Whence," "What," and "Whither," and then say all this is the work of a good, a compa.s.sionate, a tender and loving G.o.d, and that death is as natural as birth?

Nay!

Those who say and teach that death is as natural as birth are guilty of pure unintellectualism and are unwarranted deniers of the facts.

The birth of a child is like the coming of the dawn. It is like the note of a new and joyous song. It is the revelation of a new world, a world of life, of hope, of promised and larger activities. No one who is sane and true and wise will deliberately seek to hinder birth; but death! ah! everything is against death and by right against it.

Every fibre in the body repudiates death. Pain is the protest of life against it and the scout that brings in news of its approach.

The brain, the mind, the heart shiver at it, not merely because of the native fear at the unknown, but at the mockery it makes of life, the uselessness of living a time, at the longest, so brief, so full of disappointment and bitterness, a life where plans are never accomplished nor hopes fulfilled, where tears and sorrow outweigh laughter and song.

Every remedy taken from materia medica, every operation of the surgeon's knife that adds even a day to the sufferer's existence, every hospital, every precaution and invention to prevent accident, all the genius exercised by man to conserve health and strength are a protest against death and a proclamation that it is unnatural, a discord and a wrong.

Every human being who has the slightest pulse of sentiment, who is not sunken in the soddenness of moral unconsciousness feels that death is the shadow shutting out the sun of day and hiding the stars of night, the false note that breaks the lilt in any song, the thief who takes the treasure no money can replace, the mocker who bids us readjust our days and live as though those whom we have loved and lost had never been a part of us, so that their going has put more of death in those of us who remain to live than life--even the brute beast feels and knows death is--an enemy.

Nor does G.o.d Himself leave us in any doubt about it.

He says death is an enemy; even as it is written:

"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."

And since in itself it is an enemy, it is, necessarily, the work of an enemy.

It is the work of an enemy who has the power of death.

He who has the power of death is--the Devil; even as it is written:

"Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil."

The Son of G.o.d came into the world that He might destroy the Devil and his work of death.

He came to abolish death and bring life and immortality to light.

He came to make us something more than--just moral.

He came to make us--immortal.

There is only one man in the universe who has immortality; and that man is He who is our Lord Jesus Christ, very G.o.d and yet true and actual man.

There is not an immortal human being on earth to-day.

There is no such thing as an immortal soul.

But here I bid you halt!

Let no one take up this statement and go hence and say I teach the final annihilation of the soul.

He who should go forth and say that would be, after what I shall further tell you, a robber of truth and character.

On this round earth at this hour there is no man who has spoken more, written more and, under G.o.d, done more to rebuke and smite this slavering, s...o...b..ring, unintellectual and Devil-inspired deception known as Russellism, Christadelphianism and Seventh Day Adventism than the man who now speaks to you.

I affirm here that by the will of G.o.d the soul must exist forever whether it be in heaven or in h.e.l.l; but, I say to you the preacher who seeks to deny and overthrow the doctrine of annihilation by defending the immortality of the soul is beaten before he begins. He has his pains for his labour. He can find no such expression as "immortal soul" in the Bible nor any such doctrine taught there.

Above all, he is guilty of excuseless philological blundering. The soul is immaterial. Immortal is applied to that which is material.

The words, "immortal," and "immortality" are never applied in the New Testament to the soul--never! but always and exclusively to the body.

To be immortal means to have a deathless, incorruptible body like unto that of the Son of G.o.d.

This, and this alone--as related to man--is Scriptural immortality.

The Son of G.o.d came into the world to give this boon of immortality to men.

This is the supreme objective of redemption.

Till that objective is obtained redemption is not complete and the blood of the cross is not justified.

Do you call the redemption of Paul complete so long as his body lies mingled with the dust of the highway by the banks of that yellow Tiber where he was slain?

Do you call complete the redemption of those you love and I love so long as the Devil like the strong man armed with the law holds the mortgage on their bodies and keeps them in his dark and worm-filled house--the grave?

It is true, blessedly true, thank G.o.d, the moment a believer dies he is absent from his home in the body and immediately present at his home with the Lord in the third heaven, in the beautiful country of Paradise, in the Holy City, the place prepared.

It is true the dear departed ones are clothed with the white robe of immaculate light woven on the unjarring looms of heaven, a temporary clothing which preserves their form and makes them visible and recognizable to one another; but with it all they are disembodied, and in spite of the comfort and the consolation of it, in spite of the fact that their state is "far better" than this at its best, still they are souls whose vehicle is no longer body, but spirit (wherefore after death they are sometimes spoken of as spirits); nevertheless, the Son of G.o.d did not come to make us eternal, even if happy--ghosts.