Standing Before God

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life -which we arc- living now is more- aware A than wo know of the- life which is to come. Death, which separates the two, is not, as it has been so often pictured, like a great thick wall. It is rather like a soft and yielding curtain, through which wo cannot see, but which i. —. always waving and troubling with the impulses that conic out of the life which lies upon the other side of it. Ve arc aever wholly unaware that the curtain is not the end of everything. Sounds conn- to us, inntlled and dull, but still indubitably real, through its thick folds. Kv.-r y titne that a new soul passes through that vail from mortality to immortality, it seems as if we heard its light footfalls for a moment after the jealous curtain has concealed it from our sight. As each soul passes, it almost M-cms as if the opening of the curtain to let it through wen- going to giv»- us a sight of the, unseen things beyond; and. though v r disappointed, the shadowy expectation always comes back to us again, when we see the curtain stirred by another friend’s departure. After our friend lias passed, we can almost see the curtain, which ho stirred, moving, tremulously for a while, before it settles once more into stillness.

behind this curtain of death, St. John, in his great vision, passed, and he has written down for us what he saw there. He has not told us many things; and probably we cannot know how great the disappointment must have been if he had tried to translate into our mortal language all the ineffable wonders of eternity. But he has told us much; and most of what we want to know is wrapped up in this simple and sublime declaration, “I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.”

I think that it grows clearer and clearer to us all that what we need are the great truths, the vast and broad assurances within which are included all the special details of life. Let us have them, and we are more and more content to leave the special details unknown. With regard to eternity, for instance, I am sure that we can most easily, nay, most gladly, forego the detailed knowledge of the circumstances and occupations of the other life, if only we can fully know two things — that the dead are, and that they are with God. All beside these two things we can most willingly leave undiscovered. And those two things, if we can believe St. John, are sure.

“I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.” What is meant by “standing before God?” We are apt to picture to ourselves a great dramatic

•Oene. Host l>«-voml host, rank behind rank, the millions who have lived upon the earth, all standing crowded together in the indescribable presence of On<- who looks not merely at the mass but at the individual, and sees through the whole life and character of every single soul. The picture is suMime, and it is what the words of St. John are intended to suggest. But we must get lpehind the pictin its meaning. The picture must describe not 01113 scene only, but the whole nature and condition of tho everlasting life. The souls of men in the eternal world arc always “standing before God.” And what does that mean? AY understand at once, if we consider that that before which a man stands is the standard, or test, or source of judgment for his life. Kvery man stands before something which is his judge. The child stands before the father. Not in a single act, making report of what he has bc.-n doing on a special day, but in the whole posture of his life, almost as if the father was a mirror in whom he saw himself reflected, and from whose reflection of him self he got at once a judgment as to what he was, and suggestions as to what he ought to be. The poet stands before nature. She is his judge. A tain felt harmony or discord between his nature and her ideal is the test and directing power of his life. The philosopher stands before the unseen and majestic presence of the abstract truth. The philanthropist stands before humanity. ‘I he artist stands before beauty. The legislator stands before ju The politician stands before that vague l.ut awful embodiment of average character, the people, the demos. The fop, in miserable servility, stands before fashion, the feeblest and ficklest of tyrants. The scholar stands before knowledge, and gets the satisfactions or disappointments of his life from the approv als or disapprovals of her serene and gracious lips.

You see what the words mean. Every soul that counts itself capable of judgment and responsibility, stands in some presence by which the nature of its judgment is decreed. The higher the presence, the loftier and greater, though often the more oppressed and anxious, is the life. A weak man, who wants to shirk the seriousness and anxiety of life, goes down into some lower chamber and stands before some baser judge whose standard will be least exacting. A strong, ambitious man presses up from judgment room to judgment room, and is not satisfied with meeting any standard perfectly so long as there is any higher standard which he has not faced. Greater than anything else in education, vastly greater than any question about how many facts and sciences a teacher may have taught his pupil, there must always be this other question, into what presence he has introduced him; before what standard he has made his pupil stand: for in the answer to that question are involved all the deepest issues of the pupil’s character and life.

And now St. John declares that when he passed behind the vail, he saw the dead, small and great, stand before God. Do you not see now what that means? Out of all the lower presences with which they have made themselves contented: out of all t ho chambers where tin- little easy judges sit with their COmpromifling codes of conduct, with their ideas worked <»vcr and worked down to suit the conditions nf this earthly life; out of all these partial and imperiudgment chambers, when men die they are all carried up into the presence of the perfect righteousness, and are judged by that. All previous judgments go for nothing unless they find their confirmation there. Men who have been the pets and favorites of society, and of the populace, ami of their own self-esteem, the change that death lias made to them is that they have been compelled to face another standard and to feel its unfamiliar awfulness. Just think of it. A man who, all his life on earth since he was a child, has never once asked himself about any action, about any plan of his. is this right? Suddenly, when he is dead, behold, he iinds himself in a new world, where that is the only question about everything. His old questions as to whether a thing was comfortable, or was popular, or

profitable, are all gone. The very atmosphere of this new world kills them. And upon the amazed soul, from every side tin-re pours this new, strange, searching question: “Is it right?” Out of the ground he walks on. out of the walls which shelter and restrain him, out of the canopy of glory over head, out of strange, unexplored r t’ his own

newly-awakened life, from every side comes pressing in upon him that one question, “Is it right T That is what it is lor that d< ad man to “stand before iod.”

And then there is another soul which, before it passed through death, while it was in this world, had always been struggling after higher presences. Refusing to ask whether acts were popular or profitable, refusing even to care much whether they were comfortable or beautiful, it had insisted upon asking whether each act was right. It had always struggled to keep its moral vision clear. It had climbed to heights of self-sacrifice that it might get above the miasma of low standards which lay upon the earth. In every darkness about what was right, it had been true to the best light it could see. It had grown into a greater and greater incapacity to live in any other presence, as it had struggled longer and longer for this highest company. Think what it must be for that soul, when for it, too, death sweeps every other chamber back and lifts the nature into the pure light of the unclouded righteousness. Now for it, too, the question, “Is it right?” rings from every side; but in that question this soul hears the echo of its own best-loved standard. Not in mockery, but in invitation; not tauntingly, but temptingly; the everlasting goodness seems to look in upon the soul from all that touches it. That is what it is for that soul to “stand before God.” God opens his own heart to that soul and is both Judgment and Love. They are not separate. He is Love because He is Judgment; for to be judged by Him, to meet His judgment is what the soul has been long and ardently desiring. Tell me, when two such souls as these stand together “before God,” are they not judged by their very standing there? Are not the deep content of one, and tin- p 1 distress of the otlnT. already their h’-;ivt-n and then hell? Do yon need a pit of fire, and a city of p»ld. t<> -mpliasize their difference? When the dead, small and great, stand before God, is not the book already opened, and are not the dead already judged?,

“The dead, small and great,” St. .John says that he saw standing before God. In that great judgment-day, another truth is that the difference of si/«-s among human lives, of which we make so much, passes away, and all human beings, in simple virtue of their human quality, are called to face the everlasting righteousness. The child and the greybeard, the scholar and the boor, however their lives may have been separated here, they come together there. See how this falls in with what I said before. It is upon the moral ground that the most separated souls must always meet. Upon the child and the philosopher alike rests the common obligation not to lie, but to tell the truth. The scholar and the plow-boy both are bound to be pure and to be merciful. Differently as they may have to fulfil their duties, the duties are the same for both. Intellectual sympathies are limited. The more men study, the more they separate them selves into groups with special interests. But moral sympathies are universal. The more men try t<> do right, the more they come into communion with all other men who are engaged in the same struggle all through the universe. Therefore it is that before the moral judgment seat of God all souls, the small and great, are met together. All may be good — all may be bad; therefore, before Him, whose nature is the decisive touchstone of goodness and badness in every nature which is laid upon it, all souls of all the generations of mankind may be assembled.

Think what a truth that is. We try to find some meeting ground for all humanity, and what we find is always proving itself too narrow or too weak. The one only place where all can meet, and every soul claim its relationship with every other soul, is before the throne of God. The Father’s presence alone furnishes the meeting-place for all the children, regard less of differences of age or wisdom. The grave and learned of this earth shall come up there before God, and find, standing in His presence, that all which they have truly learned has not taken them out of the sympathy of the youngest and simplest of their Father’s children. On the other hand, the simple child, who has timidly gazed afar off’ upon the great minds of his race, when he comes to stand with them before God, will find that he is not shut out from them. He has a key which will unlock their doors and let him enter into their lives. Because they are obeying the same Godewhom he obeys, therefore He has some part in the eternal life of Abraham, and Moses, and Paul. Not directly, but through the God before whom both of them stand, the small and great come together. The humility of the highest and the self-respect of the lowest are both perfectly attained. The children, who have not been able to understand or hold communion with each other directly, meet perfectly together in the Father’s house, and the dead, small and icreat. .stand in complete sympathy and oneness before <;<«!.

Another thought which is suggested by St. .John’s verse, is the easy comprehension of the finite by the infinite. All the dead of all the generation! stand before God together. H<.w sneh a picture sends our imagination back. We think how many men have died upon the earth. We think of all the ages and of all the lands. We think of all the uncounted myriads who died before history began. We see the dusk of the world’s earliest memory crowded with graves. We let our minds begin to count the countless dead of Asia, with its teeming kingdoms; of this America of ours, with its suggestions of extinguished races. We remember the earth quakes, the battle fields, the pestilences. We hear the helpless wail of infancy, which, in all the generations, has just crept upon the arth long enough to claim life with one plaintive cry, and die. Where should we stop? We know that “All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumlx -r in its bosom;” and yet how crowded is the globe to day. Not one must be leftut! We heap up millions upon millions until we weary of the men- reiteration, and numbers cease to have a meaning. And yet not one must be left out! All must be there* All the dead, small and great, out of all the ages; out of all the lands! All the dead, small and great, are standing before God. Is there an effort more staggering than this, the effort to gather up in our imagination all the hosts of humanity, and !«•- lieve in the true immortality of every one of them?

Here, I think, is where the faith of many men in their own immortality staggers the most. If only there were not so many of us! A man feels his own soul, and its very existence seems to promise him that he is immortal. And in his brethren, whose life he watches, he sees the same signs that for them too there is another life. But when he looks abroad, the multitude dismays him. There are so many souls. What world can hold them all? What care can recognize, and cover and embrace them all? If there only were not so many of us! The thought of one’s own immortality sinks like a tired soldier on a battle-field, overwhelmed and buried under the multitude of the dead. Have not many of you felt this bewilderment? I think that it is one of the most common forms in which perplexity, not clear and definite, but vague and terribly oppressive, lays itself upon a human soul. What can we say to it? How can we grasp and believe in this countless army of immortals who come swarming up out of all the lands and all the ages? There is only one way. Multiply numbers as enormously as you will, and the result is finite still. Then set the finite, however large, into the presence of the infinite, and it is small. Its limitations show. There is no finite, however vast, that can overcrowd the infinite; none that the infinite cannot most easily grasp and hold.

Now, St. John says, that he saw all the hosts of the dead stand “before God.” We too must see them stand before God, and they will not oppress us.

7<D Standing Before God.

For (iod is infinite, an«l a thousand million draughts come no near>T to exhausting iiilinity than ten would come. Here must be the r.-al solution of our difficulty, in the infinity of God. You say. “I can have live iVit-iuls and understand them, and discriininai tween them, and love them all; Imt gm; me fifty friends and you swamp me in the ocean of their needs. I have not intelligence, nor care, nor sympathy enough to comprehend them all.” But make yourself infinite, and then the difficulty disappears. Unnumbered souls may stand before you then, and you can open a vastness of nature which shall take them all in, and be to each one just as much a friend as if there were no others; yet being all the while the comprehending and including presence which embraces all. Be sure that if you will begin not by counting the multitude of the dead, and asking yourself how any celestial meadow where you can picture them assembled can hold them all, but by lifting yourself up and laying hold on the infinity of God, you will find range enough in Him for all the marvellous conception of the immortality of all men. Every thought of man depends upon what you first think of God. Make your thought of God large enough, and there is no thought of man too large for you to think within it.

Take, then, these three ideas, and I think thai can see something of what it must have been for souls to stand, as John the Evangelist in his pvat vision saw them standing before God. They had gone up above all the small and temporary standards, and laid their lives close upon the one perfect and eternal standard by which men must be judged, No* longer did it matter to them whether they were rich or poor, whether men praised them, or abused them, or pitied them. The one question about themselves, into which all other questions gathered and were lost, was whether they were good, whether they were obedient to God.

And then, along with this, there had come to them a true and cordial meeting with their brethren. No child of their Father was too lofty or too low for them to be truly his brethren, when they stood, small and great, together before God.

And yet, again, in presence of the Infinite, they had comprehended their immortality. They had seen how, within that life to which their lives belonged, there was room for a growth which might go on to all eternity.

No wonder that as St. John looked upon that vision it filled all his soul with joy. No wonder that he hastened back to tell it to the men and women who were yet upon the earthward side of the thick curtain of death. “I have seen the dead,” he cried. *’ Those who have gone from us into the darkness, all our friends who have gone so silently, so sorrowfully, holding fast to this life as long as they could, going into the mystery upon the other side only when they must, sending back no word out of the darkness into which they went — I have seen them all! I actually looked upon them. Among the millions who have gone like them out of all the lands, I saw them. They were standing before God. They are living.

•They are far more living than you arc who are left In-hind them here.” Must not the remembrance of such a sight have filled his soul with joy? Must it not have been present with him afterward, whenever he saw a new soul depart to join the vast company whom he had seen standing before God?

There is the difference between his view of death and ours. He saw what souls go to. We are so apt to see only what souls go from. When our friend dies we think of all the warm delights of life, all the sweet friendships, all the interesting occupations, all the splendor of the sunlight which he leaves behind. If we could only know, somewhat as John must have known after his vision, the presence of God into which our friend enters on the other side, the higher standards, the larger fellowship with all his race, and the new assurance of personal immortality in God; if we could know all this, how our poor comfortless efforts of comfort when our friends depart, our feeble raking-over of the ashes of memory, our desperate struggles to think that the inevitable must be all right; how this would all give way to something almost like a burst of triumph, as the soul which wo loved went forth to such vast enlargement, to such glorious consummation of its life! We should be able to forget our own sorrow, or at least to bear it gladly, in our thankfulness for him, as the generous farmer-boy might see his brother taken from his side to be made a king, and toil on himself all the more cheerfully at his humble and solitary labor, thin Ic ing of the glory to which his brother’s life had

It is well, then, with those to whom John’s vision is fulfilled. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, and stand immortal before Him.

And now one question still remains! Is the fulfilment of the vision of St. John for any man to wait until that man is dead? Can only the dead stand before God? Think for a moment what we found to be the blessings of that standing before God, and then consider that those privileges, however they may be capable of being given more richly to the soul of man in the eternal world, are privileges upon whose enjoyment any man’s soul may enter here. Consider this, and the question at once is answered. Already, now, you and I may live by the standards of the eternal righteousness, and we may claim our brotherhood with the least and the greatest of our fellow-men, and we may so lay hold on God that we shall realize our immortality. The soul that has done all that, is now standing before God. It does not need to push aside the curtain, and to enter into the unknown world which lies behind. While the man is living here, walking these common streets, living in closest intercourse with other men, he is already in the everlasting presence, and his heaven has begun.

But now these are the very things which Jesus Christ promises to give, and which he has given to multitudes of men. All who will come to Him and serve Him are brought thereby to the loftiest standards of righteousness, to the broadest and deepest human fellowship, and to such a true knowledge of God that their own immortality becomes real to them.

Is it not trm, then, ihat Christ docs for the which follows him, that which tin- <-xpcn<’iicf oi eternal world shall take up and (•••rtit’y, and comp Already in Him we begin to live the everlasting life. Already its noble independence, its deep discrimination, its generous charity, its large hopeful its great abounding and inspiring peace gathers around and fills the soul which lives in obedience to Him. Already, as He himself said, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.”

And yet, while we need not wait till we are d- ad for the privilege and power of “standing before God,” yet still the knowledge of that loftier and more manifest standing before Him, which is to come in the unseen land, of which St. John has told us, may make more possible the true experience of the divine presence which we may have here. Because I am to stand before Him in some yet unimagined way, seeing Him with some keener sight, hearing His words with some quicker hearing which shall belong to some new condition of eternity, therefore I will be sure that my true life here consists in such a degree of realization of His presence, such a standing before Him in obedience, and faith, and love, as is possible for one in this lower life.

When the change comes to any of us, my friends, how little it will be, if we have really been, through the power of Jesus Christ, standing before God, in our poor, half-blind way upon the earth. If now, in the bright freshness of your youth, you give your self to Christ, and through him do indeed know God as your dearest friend, years and years hence, when the curtain is drawn back for you, and you are bidden to join the host of the dead who stand before God eternally, how slight the change will be. Only the change from the struggle to the victory, only the opening of the dusk and twilight into the perfect day. “Well done, good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”