o the life
beyond death; together they illustrate the two-fold thought of the
future which finds a place in all the records of our Lord's teaching.

Popular theology, it is sometimes said, seriously misunderstands and
misinterprets Jesus. And so far as the theology of the future life is
concerned there need be no hesitation in admitting that, not
unfrequently, it has been disfigured by an almost grotesque literalism.
The pulpit has often forgotten that over-statement is always a blunder,
and that any attempt to imagine the wholly unimaginable is most likely
to end in defeating our own intentions and in dissipating, rather than
reinforcing, our sense of the tremendous realities of which Christ
spoke. Nevertheless, much as theology may have erred in the form of its
teaching concerning the future, its great central ideas have always been
derived direct from Christ. It has not, we know, always made its appeal
to what is highest in man; it has sometimes spoken of "heaven" and
"hell" in a fashion that has left heart and conscience wholly untouched;
nevertheless, the time has not yet come--until men cease to believe in
Christ, the time never will have come--for banishing these words from
our vocabulary. Unless Christ were both a deceiver and deceived, they
represent realities as abiding as God and the soul, realities towards
which it behoves every man of us to discover how he stands. In the
teaching of Jesus, no less than in the teaching of popular theology, the
future has a bright side and it has a dark side; there is a heaven and
there is a hell.

I

That there is a life beyond this life, that death does not end all, is
of course always assumed in the teaching of Jesus. But it is much more
than this that we desire to know. What kind of a life is it? What are
its conditions? How is it related to the present life? What is the
"glory" into which, as we believe, "the souls of believers at their
death do immediately pass"? Perhaps our first impression, as we search
the New Testament for an answer to our questions, is one of
disappointment; there is so much that still remains unrevealed. We do
indeed read of dead men raised to life again by the power of God, but of
the awful and unimaginable experiences through which they passed not a
word is told.

"'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?'
There lives no record of reply.
. . . . .
Behold a man raised up by Christ!