a fearful
catastrophe that man in some sense survived, but in a sense that
separated his two modes of existence by a great gulf. Man survived, but
his interests did not survive, and therefore he looked to the future
with indifference or fear. This life seemed to him much preferable to
the life which was on the other side of the grave. So far as the Old
Testament writings touch on the future world, they touch upon it without
enthusiasm. There is an immense difference between the attitude of the
Old Testament saint toward death and that, for instance, of the early
Christian martyr. And the difference is that the martyr does not feel
that death will put an end to all he knows and loves and set him, alive
it may be, but alive in a strange country. He feels that he is about to
pass into a state of being in which he will find his finer interests not
lost but intensified. At the center of his religious expression is a
personal love of Jesus and a martyr's death would mean immediate
admission to the presence and love of His Master. He would--of this he
had no shadow of doubt--he would see Jesus, not the spirit of Jesus, but
the Jesus Who is God Incarnate, whose earthly life he had gone over so
many times, Whom he felt that he should recognise at once. Death was not
the breaking off of all in which he was interested but was rather the
fulfilment of all that he had dreamed. And this must be true always
where our interests are truly Christian interests. It is no doubt true
that we find in Christian congregations a large number of individuals
whose attitude toward death and the future is purely heathen. They
believe in survival, but they have no vital interest in it. I fancy that
there are a good many people who would experience relief to be persuaded
that death is the end of conscious existence, that they do not have to
look forward to a continuous life under other conditions. And this not
at all, as no doubt it would in some cases be, because it was the
lifting of the weighty burden of responsibility for the sort of life one
leads, because it was relief from the thought of a judgment to be one
day faced, but because the world to come, as they have grasped its
meaning, is a world in which they have no sort of interest. Our Lord in
His Presentation of the future does actually point us to the natural
human interest by which our affection will follow that which we do in
fact value. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be als