Quiet Talks About Life After Death

The world is still in the back-wash of the war. The big boat’s gone by, but the suction behind at her stern is terrific. And we’re all having a time of it trying to sail across its rough wake.

Whether it’s statescraft, or what passes for statescraft, or economics, or just plain bread and bed and coal, we’ve all got our hands full, clean to the fingertips, trying to keep afloat, and not to be sucked under, either financially or morally. For these seem the two deepest suctions in the wake of the boat.

Religion’s in the tug, too; or rather, religious moorings. The real thing itself is safe enough. But our connections sometimes seem pretty shifty and uncertain.

No statistics can count up the dead. Violence and disease, gaunt want and strain, have formed their old alliance, not to mention what’s going on all the time. And their slain outdo our figuring.

We’re close up to old Egyptian times, — “Not a house where there was not one dead,” almost; ofttimes more than that. And the pull upon one’s emotional nature is tremendous, while brave hearts go bravely on doing faithfully the day’s common tasks.

But to countless numbers the questions, the old questions, old as time almost, keep pushing in night and day: Where is he? Is there life beyond? If so, where and what? Can we get in touch across this stubborn barrier — death? Should we, even if we could?

Imaginative speculation regarding the dead, spun, pretty much, like the spider’s web, out of the bowels of one’s own wishes and longings, spreads like wildfire. The absence of facts, or rather the persistent ignoring of facts, seems to fertilize its rapid over-night mushroom growth. And these mushrooms are of the deadly sort.

The unhallowed “strange fire” has swept over the church and the land, on both sides of the water, like the unchecked dreaded wildfire of the prairie. And, mark you keenly, it’s not merely a matter of belief like an article in one’s printed creed, recited either more or less by rote. It gets to be a matter of morals, or the lack of morals. For belief and character are inseparable twins. One’s real creed is spelled out in the syllables of his daily contacts. And right well the crowd knows it.

The connection between attempted, so-called, communication with the dead and demon activity is as old as sin, and as subtle and certain. The present movement is uncanny in the rapidity of its growth. It is plainly devilish in its origin and growth and influence.

One clear gleam of good sunlight will cut straight through a skyful of graceful, graytinted clouds. One good whifif of sharp, bracing air will send the rose-hued clouds helter-skelter. They’re pretty, those vaporous clouds, brewed up out of sunless dank lowlands and swamps, but how they do vanish into thin air, as though ashamed, before clear sunlight and vigorous wind.

One fact, simple incontestable fact, puts these unwholesome spinnings of imaginative speculation clear out of the running. Happily there are facts, clear, well-established, indisputable facts, fully sufficient to satisfy the keenest brain, and cushion and comfort the torn heart. They give the distinct key-note for joyous singing in the midst of cloud and shade.

An astronomical expert had gone to Egypt to superintend creation of a telescope. He noticed that the military post fired a gun at noon every day. He asked the officer in charge how he got the accurate time for the noon gun. He got it from his watch. And how did he correct his watch? By the watchmaker in Cairo. A few days later he inquired of the Cairo watchmaker how he got his correct time. “By the noon gun!” was the reply. Is this the way some do in the serious things, the moral things? Each keeping tab with the other, and no stabilized recognized standard form to go by?

As one who has felt, into the marrow of the bone, the stinging slash of death brushing rudely by; and who knows, too, and knows certainly, Some One else coming and staying closer by, with his insistent message of settled certainties, I have tried to gather up here, in simple shape, the clear proven facts. There is quite enough, a big enough, to give sure footing and glad singing as we go about the daily task and through the constant tug. We are blest in having a standard to measure by, a Book that stands giant-like above the crowd of theories and opinions.

It will be noted that I have paraphrased a good lO Preface

many passages of Scripture to get dearer the meaning of the original language underneath our English. A paraphrase is a translation of the thought rather than a literal translation of word and sentence.

In their thoughtful effort to avoid any possibility of seeming to lean this way or that, doctrinally, the translators of our English Bible have been compelled to make what, ofttimes, practically amounts to a literal translation. In the New Testament, for instance, the translations, remarkable in their accuracy and spirit, are frequently Grecized English rather than idiomatic English.

And so the paraphrases have been worked out here to give more simply and fully the thought underneath the English. The utmost studious painstaking care has been taken to make these paraphrases strictly accurate to the Hebrew and Greek text being quoted.

Quotations are from the American Revision except where otherwise noted.

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