English
Perhaps again in your doctrine of Nirvana is an overstrained and mystical expression for tlie joy of union with God, by making His design our will. But Jesus seems more perfectly to have fulfilled whatever truth may be in your thoughts, in that He rushed not on self-chosen death, yet most willingly gave His life, when the great enemy of the Divine will could only so be vanquished. Nor can we wonder, that out of a death so holy went forth power for life, as when a seed is cast into the ground, and dies, but there springs up four-fold. Thus by the death of Jesus, even more than by His life, men were drawn to His faith, as if their souls were purified in gazing with a tragical awe ; and when they considered how much they partook of that sinfulness in the world which made the death of Jesus necessary to deliver us from evil, they seemed almost to partake of that which slew Him, and were pricked to the heart. You can imagine, what would be the revulsion in men's conscience when thus awakened. A sympathy with the holy sufferer would awaken attention to His doctrine ; and its truth, when listened to, would prevail in proportion as there was good ground to receive it. Even the rude nations of the North (as the savage Clovis and his people) were awakened out of their native ferocity as they felt a better indignation at the griefs of the Man of sorrows on the Cross. Nor should I suppose that you in India would be deaf to the witness which unparalleled suffering gives to the highest Truth. '' He who is so identified with the holiest cause as to lose himself in it, will think its triumph no mean reward. Nor is this entire self-abnegation beyond the reach of that love which seeketh not its own, of which God makes the sovl capable. Yet we have a presentiment stretching into a faith, that the very mind thus devoted will find from the Divine equity an acknow- ledgment of its work, and have a reward in seeing it prosper, and even an overflow of gift beyond recompense in everlasting 368 LOVE SEEKING NOT ITS OWN. life from Him whose breath has come upon it, and dwelt in it*. For certainly it will find in God no less love than its own, and it is easy for Him to give out of that eternal life of which He has the fomitain, and which He causes to flow. Thus he who seeks not his life shall find it, if he seeks first God, who is life, and who gives over and above. Moreover the man will be thus kindred to Gt)d, who is love; and if he is a son, then is he heir of the Father, by whom every fatherhood on earth is both willed and stands. Or again, as one partakes of that thought and love which are beyond time and death, so the bounds of these will not hold that in Him which is above them. " Thus, even if Jesus the Son of Man had not risen from the grave, He would yet have rejoiced in His work of redeeming His own people from the curse of the law, and of binding botli Jews and all nations in tlie fellowship of that truth which is before the law and beyond it. He would still have lived by His own spirit and the spirit of the Father in that temple which is made of living minds, so that it would be to Him a body, and His mind would anunate it. This then would be the kingdom of the Father, whose express image would be seen in it by faith as the very truth, and His holy will would come out in it in act, as through eternity it is conceived in thought without bound. Such an eternal life, I say, would be a reward to Jesus ; and it would fulfil many of His deepest sayings of what life ist, and what death is, and what freedom and bondage are, and many sayings of His Apostles as to what rising from the dead is, and of heaven and earth passing away, and of the Lord God Omni- potent reigning, and of His dwelling in His people for ever. Hence I do not wonder that some ultra-spiritualists, or mystics, among Christians, have thought such was the only meaning of the words of Jesus, and is their frilfilment. They think, as I * I Corinthiaiui ii. lo — 16. t Ev. St John, xvii. 3; xii. 50, 15; vi. 50, 51, 63; v. 15; viii. 34: Ephe- flianfl ii. 5, 6: Romanfl yi. rr, 21. RESURRECTION SPIRITUAL AND BODILY. 369 suppose, (though their thoughts are not always spoken clearly,) that we could not doubt the life of Jesus after bodily death in that realm of thought which He has unveiled as encompassing and coming forth in the visible world, but that His own strong contrast between body and soul, and the spirit of His words and their letter, points to a spiritual rather than a bodily rising again; and as they find His words fulfilled in this spiritual sense, they think the literal may have been but a parable; but yet as the parables of the wise have analytical self-consciousness^ while those of the sensuous Many are less conscious of their own meaning, and come forth in the form of poetry, thus trans- lating truth into figure and thought into story, so our ultra- spiritualists conceive, that the victory of the mind and faith of Jesus over death and extinction took its popular expression in the form of a story of His bodily outstanding before the senses of His disciples, and of His visibly ascending into the heavens, and sitting, as in royalty, at the right hand of the Supreme King upon a throne of brightness. "Possibly such views may not be without use in turning inward our thoughts and deepening our sense of moral good and evil, and so quickening our conceptions of the mental nature of the kingdom of God. But yet the overwhelming majority of Christian men believe, what the Apostles plainly teach, that Jesus rose bodily firom the grave on the third day, and com- muned with His disciples for forty days, and after explaining to them the kingdom of God, was taken up from this earth into that higher realm which we call heaven, in which the Divine glory is more manifestly displayed. Nor yet, in saying this, do they mean to rest merely on visible things. They gladly own that there is something spiritual in the resurrection of Christ. Its evidence to them is not merely the number of witnesses say- ing that they saw, but the great likelihood that He who had lived a life of God, would come out of death with the clear power of God. We cannot crush the air nor quench the great breatli of life by merely changing its form ; still less can we M. p. 24 370 KESURUECTION SPIRITUAL AND BODILY. slay any thought of the mind whicli goes beyond death ; and less still any truth which takes hold of mind after mind, and comes immortal out of every persecution. So the holiest Truth which dwelt in Jesus, and above all the Divinity which upholds it, and of whose very being it is the outshining, must come forth in calm victory out of trial, and be only glorified by the opposi- tion of every enemy. But if it was necessary (because our sensuous conceptions do not easily rise to spiritual things) that this Divine Truth should be embodied in the life and death of Jesus, there would be the same necessity for its embodiment in His resurrection. Our faith is not triumphant until it has seen the victory as well as the suffering. K the Divine thought for this world comes to fulfilment in the flesh, so must it for the world to come. Thus He who shewed, as the Son of Man, our true life on earth, being lifted from the grave as the Son* of Grod, shews our entrance into life eternal. Thus our Revelation becomes complete : and as you hold that the visible world em- bodies the Divine thinking, so Christians believe that the far higher world, or rather the mind of God which upholds it, is unveiled by being embodied to historical experience in the life, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus the Mediator between God and man. Thus Spirit manifests itself in matter, both lying beyond, and upholding, and coming out in it ; sin, or rebellion against the will of the forecasting Spirit, is taken away ; death is triumphed over ; and the kingdom of His thought, which it is the will of God should come, is not only seen afar by pure faith, but is brought nearer in light. Thus our eyes behold the King in His beauty. " That these things were so, not in parables with a meaningf but in outward act, seems taught by the Apostles of Christ in all their writings.