JESUS CAME PREACHING THAT THE KINGDOM OF GOD WAS AT HAND. THIS WAS THE "GOOD NEWS." HE TAUGHT MEN TO pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth." God's kingdom means the rule of faith and love, of righteousness and peace in the hearts of men and in all the world's life. Today, nineteen centuries later, we see a world of evil. What may we hope for here on earth?

The Kingdom of God on Earth

The conceptions of the kingdom already considered give varying answers to this question. (1) The kingdom of God is the Church, and we may expect its increasing triumph—this the high church, and especially the Roman, view. (2) The kingdom of God is to be found in the saints who are saved and kept, and in the heaven which is our real hope—this the traditional Protestant view. (3) Apocalypticism in its current premillennial form posits two ages for this earth. For the present age there is no hope; it is Satan's age, and the world can only grow worse. The next age, the millennium, will come with Christ's return and will know no evil. This is viewed as imminent—and has been since Christ's death. (4) Christian social idealists, while including the personal-spiritual, see the kingdom of God as involving a gradually achieved higher social order. While not omitting divine action, the stress is on human action and responsibility. (5) Current neo-orthodoxy has no positive word on the hope of a coming kingdom of God on earth. It emphasizes the moral obligation of Christian social interest and action, but it has no word on God's redemptive presence and action in the social order and holds out no hope for a coming rule of love and righteousness on earth. Man is evil, the world is evil, and there is no other prospect for history.

Our first need is to face realistically the fact of evil. Here neo-orthodoxy has rendered a real service as against an easy optimism. It is not a question of the doctrine of original sin and total depravity, but the reality and power of evil must be faced. We see this evil in the individual: selfishness, greed, hate, fear, the divided spirit. It is even plainer in social life and social institutions. We see the selfishness of national life, the systematic and calculated selfishness of labor, industrial, and financial groups. Removed ever further from the individual, the associated life tends to become ever more impersonal and less accessible to ideals. The whole modern movement has been toward larger groupings—political, industrial, national, international. That in turn has meant increasing concentration of power, and power corrupts, tending to become selfish, irresponsible, arbitrary.

The effects of the scientific-technological advance must also be noted. Good results are obvious: the overcoming of ancient evils of disease and poverty, the furnishing of instruments of communication which make it possible for men better to understand each other and better to work together, as well as furthering human knowledge. But we must face accompanying evils also. These instruments which bring the world together at the same time serve to multiply divisions, to promote strife, and to make war incomparably more destructive. Further, the multiplication of material wealth and of means of personal gratification has helped to increase materialism of thought and selfishness of life.

But this does not mean the loss of hope of a redeemed world or the limitation of our hope to a realm in heaven. The ground of our hope is God. He is the transcendent God, the God of holiness and might, infinitely above the human and finite. He is more than the sum of human goodness and finite forces. It is well to stress this against all naturalism and humanism and mere programs of reform. But it is just as necessary to know that this transcendent God is the living God, the God who works, the God who dwells with men in love and saving help. We can pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven," only because we have first prayed, "Our Father who art in heaven." Our hope is not in man, and it is not measured by signs of progress. Our hope is not in a divine force which shall sometime "smash" the evil and place the saints in seats of power. It is in the power of redeeming love: in love that is mightier than selfishness, in truth that will win out over error, in righteousness which abides when oppression and injustice destroy themselves.

All about us are the evidences of the work of this God. Men are being won for Christ and are being transformed into his spirit. The Church of these last generations has been marked by aggressive missionary enterprise, by a new sense of its task of education, by a new appreciation of the meaning of the gospel for the social life, by a deeper desire for unity. Significant is the spread of democracy. Men have been slow in grasping its full meaning and slower still in conforming their practice to its ideals, especially in industry and international relations. But they are seeing more clearly its demand and its needs. The ideals of freedom and responsibility, of social justice and regard for man as man, the realization of human solidarity and of the need of co-operation for a common good, these are marks of the work in our world of a higher Power than man.

But all this should make clear to us how long and hard the road is for the coming of God's rule. Our hope is in God, but our problem, and God's problem, is man with his ignorance and sin. The kingdom is God's gift, but its coming waits for men who will see it, receive it, and embody its rule in their own life and in all the associations of life. We can only say then: God's rule is here where his will is done; God's rule is coming as men receive Christ and live his life. The rest we must leave with God; it is not ours to know of times and seasons.

One other word must follow from all this: The kingdom of God will never be fully attained in this world. Perfection does not belong to the world of the finite-human. Each individual must deal afresh with impulse and passion and the temptation to self-centeredness and self-indulgence. Always man may say "no" to God. Always he will need to grow to maturity. And so with social groups. The Church must constantly be renewed. Justice must always be reaffirmed; freedom must always be won anew. "Never leave growing till the life to come." Society as well as the individual must

Watch, and fight, and pray;

The battle ne'er give o'er.

The Christian hope is not utopianism

The Life to Come

For many the doctrine of the future life seems to be a kind of addendum to the great Christian doctrines of God and man and salvation, whose chief concern is the proof of man's survival after death. On the contrary it must be said that our belief in the life to come is an integral part of our Christian faith, that it flows directly from our faith in God and from the Christian view of man and salvation, and that it is far more than the mere idea of survival. Here again we must face the need for theology to see things whole and to see all in the light of the knowledge of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

1. The idea of some kind of existence after death has been almost universal, but the conception of that existence has varied greatly. In its beginnings it was the center of all manner of superstitions and fears. Man could not believe that his spirit died. But the existence after death seemed a hapless one, whether the spirit was conceived as descending into a world of darkness or as wandering about the earth. Death meant leaving the world of light and life and warm fellowship. Men could not think of extinction, but what survived, they thought, was only the ghost of a man, a shade, a pale and ineffectual thing. The Achilles of Homer expressed this primitive attitude: "Speak not consolingly of death to me, O great Odysseus; sooner would I be the slave of another in the house of a penniless wight, who had no great livelihood, than king of all the dead." The Hebrew idea of Sheol (wrongly translated hell in our older versions) corresponded to the dark underworld which the Greeks called Hades, In their thought of the future men used such terms as the grave, the pit, the place of darkness, the land of forgetfulness, where men no longer praised Jehovah. ¹

The belief in a meaningful and desirable life after death came slowly; its beginnings, however, go back long before the Christian era. We find it in Egypt and Persia, in Greece with Plato, and in the Orphic teachings. It was part of the movement of human thought away from the visible and external to the rational, ethical, and spiritual as part of the real world. The ethical note appeared in the idea of judgment, of the future life as determined by the kind of life lived here.

Most significant is the movement in Hebrew thought and its preparation for the Christian faith in immortality. The prophetic concern was primarily with God and the nation. The individual and inner aspects of religion, however, followed inevitably from the personal-ethical concept of God and from the deepening of the religious life. Such a God demanded of men not simply ritual performance and the keeping of laws but an inner spirit of humility and mercy and righteousness. Such a God was concerned not merely with nations, but with individuals (Ps. 23). Would he leave in the grave these children of his love? Would men thus joined to God be separated from him by death (Ps. 16:8-10)? The thought of God's righteousness entered in: this God who would vindicate Israel before the nations, would he not vindicate his saints? Would the same Sheol wait equally for the good and the evil? This is the movement of thought, the growing insight of faith which we find suggested by some passages in the later psalms, in Dan. 12:2, 3, and in Isa. 26:19. It issued at last in a definite faith in the future life, whether in a renewed earth or in a heavenly realm.

What is important to note is the fact that we have here a faith, a religious belief. The primitive idea of survival was not religious; it was simply a part of an animistic world view. With the Jews the belief in immortality was not a development of the old animism nor a conclusion from philosophical argument; it rested upon their faith in God and in religion as life with God.

2. We need now to consider the grounds for this faith. For Christianity immortality is not a doctrine separately given and independently proved. It is a part of our total faith and stands or falls with this. First is our faith in God. That, indeed, is the final and sufficient ground. The arguments against immortality commonly rest upon a materialistic or naturalistic world view which rules out immortality as it rules out God. The Christian faith holds that the ultimate reality is spiritual. It affirms not only a God, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the creative good will of this God man has his definite place.

The Christian idea of man enters in with that of God as the ground of hope. It is not the nature of man as rational being nor any claim resting upon the worth of man in himself that grounds our hope, however; it is God's undeserved love and his gracious purpose in relation to man. That purpose began with the creation of man in his likeness as a being who could know God and worship him and share his Spirit. Its goal was a redeemed humanity, redeemed not only for this world but for the world above. God in his infinite and undeserved love, man as seen in the light of God and of God's gracious purpose, these are the ground of our belief in immortality. It is faith in this God that gives life meaning here and reveals a meaning which transcends time. In God's salvation we have eternal life here in time and a life that time cannot destroy. And both are given to him who, taught of God, can look up and say, "Our Father." Without this, life has neither meaning for this world nor hope for a world beyond.

Various rational arguments have been advanced for the belief in immortality. Ancient is the idea of the soul as an indivisible and indestructible spiritual atom, or unit, or as imperishable spiritual essence. But while man must have the capacity for this in natural endowment, a rational, ethical, personal life is an achievement, not something given him ready-made. Nor can we use the analogy of the conservation of energy; it is the life of a personal being with which we are here concerned, not an impersonal force.

More significant is the appeal to the evidences of order, rationality, and purpose in the universe, to a continuing creative process which brings forth higher levels of being, with the conclusion that our universe would be totally irrational if the highest product of this age-long movement should be doomed to destruction. That this world is rational, at least in some degree, is the common assumption of human thought and action. The farmer, the engineer, the scientist, all proceed on the conviction of a dependable order in nature, that is, a rational element. But there is a lower rationality and a higher. The lower is causal; the higher is telic, implying thought, purpose, and values. This argument has its strongest form in a definitely theistic view and most clearly in Christian theism.

We would seem to be driven then to the choice between a world that is rational in this higher sense and a world that is basically irrational and unmeaning. The higher rationality of the Christian view presents a God who is not only power and inclusive order but gracious purpose as well. His goal is not merely ordered being, but beauty and truth and goodness. The highest embodiment of these is in rational, ethical, personal beings like men, living together in a fellowship of faith and love and righteousness. There may be other worlds with other conscious beings, but we cannot conceive of God's end as being less than this. To these ends God has worked through ages of cosmic development, through millenniums of human history on this earth. It would surely be an irrational world if these results, achieved at such cost of time and toil and pain, were in the end "cast as rubbish to the void."

The spiritualistic argument need not detain us. It makes the claim to prove man's conscious personal survival of death through sensible and indubitable communications from the departed. Even if the dubious evidence were accepted, the conclusion would be of little more value than the primitive animistic beliefs. Our concern is not with mere persistence but with life, life that has quality and meaning. What is the life of these disembodied spirits who hover about their old haunts and can only furnish trivial communications? Is it a life with God? Does it offer rich and satisfying fellowship? Is it life immortal or simply the temporary persistence of a shadowy spirit which finally fades out? The words of Thomas a Kempis belong here: "Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, there is death and hell."

3. The objections to the idea of immortality for the most part root in a naturalistic world view, though in some cases coming from a misapprehension of the Christian doctrine.

"How can we think of a spirit existing apart from a body?" we are asked. This life of the "spirit" has developed, we are told, in and through the body. Thinking depends upon the brain, perception of the world upon our sense organs. In illness or injury of the body we see the spirit life directly affected. The individual, like the race, is a product of the world of nature and has no life apart from this. The one reality is the unceasing movement of natural forces. Human life is but one of a myriad of products in the ceaseless succession of life and death. Even when a philosophy of naturalism is not avowed, the most common cause of doubt is the unspoken assumption that the visible world is the one certain reality and so the life in the body the only life of which we can be sure.

We answer: The real question at issue here is not that of immortality but rather that of our underlying world view. What is ultimate in the universe, matter or spirit? The Christian affirms that it is spirit, a personal Spirit, creative Good Will bringing forth the order and beauty of nature, the ascending forms of life here on earth, and this creature man who can realize in his life God's highest gifts of truth and freedom and moral character. The way which this creator Spirit follows we learn by studying nature and history. It is the way of slow growth in the individual as in cosmic evolution. But the method is one thing; the ultimate cause is another. Naturalism is reductive; it levels down the result (beauty, truth, goodness, the world of moral personality) so that it may keep the ultimate cause down to the level of impersonal nature. Theism sees a cause which is adequate to the result: a Being who is personal-ethical Spirit. The physical in our world is thus the "adjective" of the spiritual; the substance is the spiritual. ²

But if the spiritual is ultimate and not the physical, then the survival of the spiritual ceases to be an insuperable problem, even though we may not find it easy to picture with our experience limited to this body-mind state of existence. Using the physical as its instrument, the finite spiritual becomes increasingly its master and in a measure increasingly independent. This side is commonly overlooked. Physically man begins to go backward, literally to die, with his thirties; the moral and rational life may grow steadily to the last years, reaching often its highest level when the body is weak and broken. Why then should we not say that when at last the structure of life is completed, the physical like a scaffolding should be taken away? When we view it from above, why should not the finite spirits survive for the creator Spirit? Is it not irrational to suppose that what is achieved at such cost should at the end be cast aside? So we come again to the basic question: What is the final reality of this universe, matter and time and ceaseless unmeaning change, or reason and love and righteousness having their being in a personal and purposive God?

Objections have been sometimes raised from the ethical standpoint. Does not this belief make for an otherworldliness which turns man from his real tasks? Why not "one world at a time"? Yes, our first task is to live here and now, doing the work that God has given us to do. But there is a right and needed otherworldliness. If man is to live rightly in this world, he needs a faith in a higher world. That higher world is at once a present reality and a hope for the future. For right Christian thinking the latter enforces the former; the two are one. The invisible and eternal world does not rob this world of value. Rather it gives to it meaning and worth, as it gives men strength for the life in time. It was those who "looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God," who through this faith "conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises,... won strength out of weakness" (Heb. 11:10, 33-34).

In further objection it is asserted that the claim to immortality is egoistic, the interest in individual immortality selfish. Why should these feeble creatures, dwellers on this little planet, think that they out of all creation should merit this gift of everlasting life? Whatever some may think, this is certainly not the Christian attitude or conception. The interest in immortality usually has its rise not in self-concern but first in the thought of loved ones. Again, when we think of others, it seems impossible that the nobler spirits of our race and all they have achieved should disappear in a moment through the incident of physical death. The deeper reason, however, brings us back again to God. It is not the worth of man that is ground for this belief but faith in God's infinite love as revealed in Christ, faith that God cares for us as his children, faith that the divine mercy which gives us life eternal here on earth will keep us in the world to come.

Two substitutes have been offered for individual immortality. The older one is mystical or metaphysical. Individual existence is limited if not evil. Its goal is reabsorption into the divine, the World Soul or the Infinite. ³ The other substitute is social. Accepting death as final for the individual, it holds before men as a higher goal than individual existence the immortality of influence in the generations to come.

What is needed here is a truer conception of the significance of the individual-personal It is in the concrete, the individual, that God's creativity is to be seen, not in any uniformity of process or in undifferentiated being. ⁴ The personal represents the highest level of creation as we know it. The personal life, it is true, is achieved only in the social and handed down in the group heritage, socially and not merely biologically. But there is no group life apart from individuals. There is no vision or faith, no love or righteousness, except as achieved in individual life; and in the end all this achievement will perish except as individuals survive. The creation of values demands the individual and social; their conservation requires the same. Either we have the conservation of individuals who have attained these values or we face the ultimate destruction of all the higher values thus achieved and history ends in a meaningless void.

4. How shall we think of the life beyond? The essential elements of the Christian hope stem directly from that knowledge of God and life which has come to us through Jesus Christ.

It is not a matter of place or external surroundings. A common mistake has been the literalizing of the picture language in which men voiced their hopes, especially in such apocalyptic writing as the book of Revelation. Here again is the misconception of revelation as communication of information, particularly with reference to a program of the future. The restraint of the Gospels and in the main of Paul is in notable contrast, and is expressive of that Christian attitude of faith which, having God, leaves all else with God. Another error has been the tendency to overstress the negative, to see heaven primarily in terms of what is absent: toil, pain, death. The issue of this emphasis tends to be a kind of glorified eudaemonism, the reward of a comfortable, carefree, happy existence in return for the trials of earthly life.

This does not mean that we are to discard all pictures when we speak of the world to come, else we should have to be silent. We have only the language of human experience to speak of the more than human, only pictures and analogies taken from earth when we would speak of heaven. Gates of pearl, streets of gold, a foursquare city, these are simply meant to convey a picture of perfection. Only as taken literally does the imagery of Revelation pervert rather than express the Christian faith. So we shall continue to sing:

Jerusalem the golden,

With milk and honey blest!

The Christian attitude, however, is better expressed by Whittier's lines:

I know not what the future hath

     Of marvel or surprise,

Assured alone that life and death

     His mercy underlies.

But while we have no supernatural revelation of the externals of the world beyond, there is a knowledge of its life through what is given to us here in faith and experience. Our knowledge is partial as our life is partial, but we do have a knowledge of God, and we do have a life from God and with God, eternal life here in time. And this enables us to know some things about the life beyond.

Life with God, life in the presence of God, life fulfilled, that is the meaning of heaven. We know that life here; it will not be less in the world beyond, however much more it may be. (1) It will be a conscious personal life, not some absorption into a divine being. God is love, truth, righteousness. We can share that life only as we are persons, conscious, rational, and free. (2) It will not be merely individual life. The life will be expressed and fulfilled in fellowship, fellowship with God, fellowship with others. Heaven is not an assemblage of individuals; it is the family of God. In that fellowship there will be common worship, mutual love and service, a sharing with others by which we become richer. (3) Heaven means rest and peace, but not inactivity. Eternal life is more than mere continued existence. We have life only as we live it. (4) And that means continuing growth. Man is finite, limited; God's love and truth are infinite. Heaven will mean the confirmation of "all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good," as Browning's Abt Vogler says, when "eternity affirms the conception of an hour." But heaven will mean opportunity as well, richer and fuller, without the hindrances of earth. There will be nothing higher than the love of God or the light of his presence, but we may grow in that love and move on and upward in that light.

In this setting we see the meaning of the idea of "bodily" resurrection. Nowhere is it more necessary than here to realize that our knowledge is limited and that we must think in symbols. The Jewish-Christian conception of the life to come was first of all a protest, not so much against extinction as against the idea of a shadowy, meaningless, "lifeless" existence of disembodied spirits. It envisaged the full life of the whole man. That meant for them, as it does for us, the idea of a "body." Man is a spirit, but it is in and through a body that we know our world, have fellowship with others, and are able to work and learn and grow.

With this basic conviction we agree, but when we say "resurrection of the body," we are using a symbol to express this faith. In its first form the Apostles' Creed spoke of resurrectio carnis. Men thought that the actual physical body would be lifted up to heaven. So some speak today of a miraculous bringing together in the resurrection of the particles of bodies burned or decayed and scattered abroad. Paul gives us better guidance. He speaks like a Hebrew of the body being raised, but he insists that this body is different from that which was buried. "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15:50). What is "sown" is a physical body; what is "raised" is^a spiritual body. As with the planted seed God gives a body as he has chosen. What we affirm is that we shall have in the life to come an instrument which will serve us there as the physical body does on earth, an instrument for seeing and knowing, for self-expression and for fellowship with like beings.

5. No problems are more difficult for Christian thought in its doctrine of the future than those connected with final judgment and the fate of the evil. Modern theology has given little attention to these matters. The attitude of the common man is not hard to understand. In part it is due to a sentimentalism which passes over moral issues, in part to a reaction against the older emphasis on future punishment which was part of the traditional evangelistic appeal, and the confident way in which men were assigned to heaven and hell. 5

We have noted that the belief in immortality first came to clear expression in late Judaism and early Christianity, The idea of judgment, penalty, and award was much older. It was a clear implication of the belief in a righteous God and a moral universe. But here, as in regard to salvation, its concern was with the nation, not the individual. Later thought was concerned with the individual as well, alike with sinner and saint. The primary aim of the apocalyptists was to sustain the faith of the harassed saints, to strengthen their loyalty and perseverance by showing them, not only that the tragic conflict would end in victory, but that the faithful who suffered here would live in joy hereafter.

The obverse of this hope was the thought of judgment on the wicked and their punishment in hell. Orthodox theology, Roman Catholic and Protestant, took this over, literalizing the physical aspects of the picture given in these writings. Stress was laid on physical suffering, on torments inflicted by God, the torture of a never-ending fire, with "limbs crackling... and yet unburnt." And some saw the bliss of the saints enhanced because "a perfect view" was "granted them of the tortures of the damned." 6

In the reaction from this there has been danger of losing essential elements of the Christian faith and hope, and first in our thought of God. The righteousness of God is merciful; it seeks the victory of right in a forgiveness which overcomes sinfulness and is morally creative. But the mercy of God is righteous. What hope would there be for our race if we did not believe that the face of God is set against evil, opposing it, bringing it under judgment, looking to an end in which the finally unrepentant evil are shut out from the fellowship of those who love? This is our hope of a coming kingdom of God, on earth and in heaven.

Further, there are certain clear and important truths which we must face as we look at the human side. They are essentials of a world of moral order. (1) Vision and freedom and responsibility belong to man. They set him apart. In them lie alike the glory of life and the possibility of tragedy. Man has the vision of the highest; he determines his destiny as he chooses or refuses. The glory is not possible for him without the fateful possibility. "I have set before you life and death . . . ; therefore choose life" (Deut. 30:19). (2) Man becomes what he chooses and with increasing fixity of character. Nothing in the world is so plastic as human nature; no creature has such a range of potentiality. But, for good or ill, the many possibilities become at last, in character, one specific reality. (3) There is a law of gravitation and separation. In this life it is conditioned and limited by various forces. Good and evil dwell together in a given community. But within the community there are communions, fellowships in which men are drawn together by common spirit and interests. Heaven and hell will bring this movement to its conclusion. There by inevitable moral gravitation each will go to his own place. This is hell, that evil desire shall be fulfilled in evil character and that men of evil shall find themselves with those of like kind.

Turning away from pictures which represent only externals, we can gain some understanding of what hell may be from this view of God and this insight into life. What makes hell? Not physical torture inflicted by a God of vengeance, not the external conditions of a given place. Here, apparently, are some of the elements involved: continued conscious existence with remembrance of the good which one has refused; separation from that God who is light and life and peace; the fact that we must inescapably live with ourselves, that our world is the evil world of self which we have made. In Milton's words, "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell." Sin is selfishness. The consequence of sin is not only that man is shut up with himself but that he is shut out, by his own choice, from others. This, too, is hell, just as high and enriching fellowship makes heaven. Thus hell means death, just as faith and love mean life as they join us to God and our brothers. And this hell has a tragic existence here on earth.

In these simple elements of the Christian faith as to the future we have the background for the preaching of the gospel: the fact of sin, the proclamation of the God of mercy, the summons to repentance and faith, saving help for this world, the hope of the life beyond, the warning as to the consequences of sin, here and hereafter, and the solemn fact of judgment. These are the essentials which have entered into Christian preaching from the beginning.

But there are other questions which inevitably arise. Is man's eternal destiny settled irrevocably at the moment of death? Is that equally true of all? What of the multitudes who have never heard the gospel, who have never been faced with the clear summons to accept or reject? It may be said that each will be judged according to the light which he had, but is it not the will of our God that each man shall have the fullest help in his life decision, the help of the clear word of the gospel and, not less, of a supporting Christian environment? And what of those who die in infancy? Can we accept the Roman position that the baptized are saved, the unbaptized are lost? Or shall we declare with Calvin that with infants as with adults those shall be saved whom God has elected for that end, the rest being predetermined for damnation?

There are questions, too, concerning those whom we think of as saved. We picture heaven as the place of pure love and righteousness. But what is the actual nature of the "saints" whom we know here on earth? How often we see in them immaturity and imperfection, the mingling of good and evil, of love and selfishness. Axe we not all just saints in the making who daily need to pray: "Forgive us our trespasses"?

The Roman Catholic Church has sought to meet this problem by its doctrine of purgatory. Purgatory is not a place for sinners destined for hell but "for those who, departing this life in God's grace, are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions." It serves a double purpose: that of punishment (required even after the sin itself has been pardoned) and of needed purification. ⁷ Against this Roman view we must reject in the former the aspect of legalism, in the latter the idea that evil is some sort of substance which can be eliminated or destroyed by direct action. Some Protestants have held that at death, or at the general resurrection, God fits the soul for heaven by an act of instantaneous and entire sanctification. But here again is the failure to see that moral-spiritual results can never be accomplished by sheer power but only by moral-spiritual means.

What shall we say then in answer to these insistent questions? Our first and greatest need is to recognize the limitations of our knowledge and, whether we be thinking of heaven or of hell, to leave the future of men to the God who is at once wise and merciful and just. There are, of course, central truths of our faith which we need to proclaim: the solemn responsibility of life, the consequences for character and destiny which follow from our life decisions, the increase in fixity of character, an ultimate separation of good and evil. But with these goes our faith in the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

We believe in the God who does not wish that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Pet. 3:9). He will continue to seek to turn men to himself. He will never turn from those who seek him in sincere repentance. It is possible that men with little chance to know the truth, or with unformed character, may in some other world see more clearly and seek for life. And as regards imperfect and immature saints, instead of a preparation through the fires of purgatory, or some magical act of transformation at the moment of death, we may think of the world beyond as one in which life will mean increasing vision and growth in love. This is, clearly, the kind of world to which those will go who die in infancy, a world with the richest opportunity for endless attainment of life.

1) See Isa. 38:10-19; Ps. 88:10-12; and the dramatic picture in Isa. 14 of the descent of the oppressor king of Babylon to this hopeless abode.

2) See W. P. Montague, The Chances of Surviving Death, pp. 13 ff. 234

3) For a modern expression of this view see Ernst Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, p. 382. "The ultimate goal of life after death, however, cannot be eternal, that is, absolute endlessness of existence, a never ceasing being with God. It can only be the final return into the being of God of the purified and sanctified finite creature."

4) See A. N. Whitehead's development of the principle of concretion in Religion in the Making and Science and the Modern World; Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality, p. 157; B. H. Streeter, Reality, ch. X.

5) Jonathan Edwards and Charles H. Spurgeon are examples from among notable leaders of an earlier day. This type of evangelistic appeal still obtains in certain groups.

6) Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Dean Inge in the symposium What Is Hell?) p. 9.

7) The Catholic Encyclopedia, "Purgatory," XII, 575.