CHRISTIAN OPTIMISM.
(IN the first Sunday in this month Dr. Inge, the new Lady ■ -.1 Margaret professor of Divinity, preached before the University of Cambridge a profound and eloquent sermon upon the Christian interpretation of death, taking for his text the words of our Lord : "Except a corn of wheat full into the ground and die, it abideth alone." From the Christian point of view, Dr. Inge declared, death, which appears to be the "seal of failure," is in reality "the condition of success." "Death, says the Book of Genesis, is a Punishment: Death, says science. is no punishment, but a law of Nature. Death, says Jesus Christ, is nothing save the gate throegh which one passes into immortal life." To those who are able to receive His saying, "the passage from death unto life is no unique portent; it iri the open secret of the, universe, which Jesus Christ brought to light. In the world without it is exemplified in every harvest-field." Yet the analogy; as Dr. Inge, admit, is .poetic rather than scientific. "We cannot remain on purely scientific ground when we are dealing with religion, because religion is concerned not only with existence, but with values. When we look at the ceaseless flux of Nature from this point of view, some new considera! tions suggest themselves. If there is no final upward movement for any.living thing, but only a curve ending on the same plane as the starting-point; if all Nature is simply a repetition of the same processes, a series of revolutions of the same machinery, then the time-process has no value and no meaning at all. Nay, it would be worse than meaningless ; it would be foolishness. For endless repetition stales and spoils everything. Such a world would be an , irrational world. And an irrational world, with even one rational creature condemned to inhabit it, would be an evil world. However, so far as we know, there is no such thing as unending repetition in Nature. The planets are cooling. The sun is cooling, though recent discoveries give him a longer life than was formerly believed. The doom of death hangs over the immeasurably great as well as over the immeasurably small. There is only one way in which the values of life can escape the doom of the existences to which they are linked ; and that is by constant transmutation into values of a higher quality. Cling to them as they are, and they fade and perish ; let them go, make a living sacrifice of them, and they will still be yours, transmuted and enhanced." The mysterious law of the spiritual world is, he goes on, "the law of death and rebirth as the condition of all growth and all permanence.", Souris inkling of this truth is to be found, be thinks, in all the higher religions. "Men have felt that everywhere in Nature God has stamped some hint of the, law of rebirth. . The changing seasons, the rising and setting suns, the time-precess itself, with its mysterious register, human memory,—all point to the central law of the higher life, 'That which thou _slowest is not quickened, except it die." This train of thought has, Dr. Inge thinks, "its value as an argument for our survival after death. It is, indeed, the chief foundation of our faith in a future life." The upshot is, in the eyes of the preacher, not that we should fix our attention upon death, but that we should prepare for it, keeping in mind the thought of gain through loss, which is : the essence of Christian self-sacrifice, so that "when the last sacrifice is demanded of us—the sacrifice. of our lives—we shall find it easy to trust death to do for us what the daily dyings of life have always done for us,—to take away much and to give us more, to deprive us of earth that it may give us heaven."
This is a fine sermon, and contains a good argument. Nevertheless, we can imagine that a proportion of Dr. Inge's bearers went away dissatisfied. Sermons upon death are not popular now among the thoughtful. There are many men and women who would rather that the exponent of Christ's teaching dwelt upon the moral more than upon thfs spiritual side of His doctrine, for there is a marked tendency just nowt() make an arbitrary division between the two. All arguments in favour of a future life are, they, say, in the nature of' things inconclusive, and leave the arguer open to a charge of deliberate optimism. The preacher does best, they think, who keeps to Christian morals, in discussing which it is not necessary to postnlate so much hope. But is mot optimism an essential part of Christianity as a whole, of the moral as well as of the spiritual •teaching of Christ P We maintain that it is. The greater part of the characteristic sayings of Christ, particularly those paradoxes which we consider to contain the very essence of His divine teaching, scintillate with hope. His spirit in this respect was diametrically opposed to the spirit of to-day. He refused to see nothing but misery in poverty, nothing but despair in bereavement, nothing but horror even in persecution. God, He said, was not always on the side of the violent. There was a success in store for the meek. There was no fiat of fate gone out against any man's moral improvement. Those who hungered and thirsted after righteousness would be filled, He assured His listeners, and He put in no riders about heredity or environment to discourage those who desired to be good. Again, His strong warnings against undue. anxiety breathe the very spirit of optimism. The double burden of to-day and to-morrow, was a burden one half of. which it was, He said, every man's duty to throw, down .if he could. To the, man who can go. on enduring comes salvation at last, He declared ; and while He never denied that many mysteries 'confront us in life, seeming at first sight like injustice, and trying our courage to the uttermost, He encouraged us to hope that some day all would be explained, for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, or hidden that shall not be known. Even His own death, He said, would turn out to be for the good of those whose hearts would seem for the time to be broken for ever. "It is expedient for you that I go away," He told them, and "your sorrow shall be turned into joy." Again, our Lord's optimism is showed forth in His intense belief in the efficacy of repentance. In Peter's case, for instance, He declared that though the worst should come to the worst, he would tarn again, and be a tower of strength to the men who had not so signally failed.
Even the metaphors of Christ are optimistic. He will not look upon the dark side. How large is the proportion of just persons in the parable of the lost sheep. How eagerly He disclaims the idea that all men are bad alike as He refuses to call the righteous to repentance. Around Him the world lay in religious ignorance, Judaism ossifying into ceremonialism, the religions of Greece and Rome degenerating into pure superstition. Yet Christ declared that many men were still truly religious. "The hour cometb, and now is," He said, when God shall be worshipped in spirit and in truth. With divine sympathy, He ever tried to unburden men of their fears, to inspire them with hope. They must try, He said, not to 'be "troubled" or "afraid," to remember that the hairs of their head Were numbered. They were' to avoid scrupulosity and harsh judgments, not forgetting that in the Kingdom of God men need not all be pushed into one mould. "In my Father's house are many mansions if it were not so, I would have told you." In the language of Scripture, we must be ready against hope to believe in hope if we are indeed to enter into the moral attitude of our Lord. Yet how is that possible if death ends all? The hope of the Christian "entereth into that within the veil," otherwise, as St. Paul said, he is more miserable than other men. The teaching of Christ is a divinely inspired whole, and its parts are interdependent. Christianity without hope is Christianity without Christ, and to cut off hope in the future is to cut it off at its source, for hope is not an affair of the past and cannot exist in the present alone.
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