I ways once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking rough the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realize a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in experience, having traveled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs; though be had been charged with excess in telling travelers’ tales. In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburned face and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to me: ‘Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that? I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, ‘Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity! Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goat like beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about like a dawn. ‘Why, of course,’ I said after a moment’s reflection, ‘if it hadn’t been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex! I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont.

That insane image of. the Kentish church standing on the point of its spire, as in some old rustic topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my imagination when I hear these things said about pagan origins; and calls to my aid the laughter of the giants. Then I feel as genially and charitably to a11 other scientific investigators, higher critics, and authorities on ancient and modern religion, as I do to poor Louis de Rougemont. But the memory of that immense absurdity remains as a sort of measure and check by which to keep sane, not only on the subject of Christian churches, but also on the subject of heathen temples. Now a great many people have talked about heathen origins as the distinguished traveler talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great many modern heathens have been very hard on heathenism. A great many modem humanitarians have been very hard on the real religion of humanity. They have represented it as being everywhere and from the first rooted only in these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something utterly shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a moment. I should never dream of thinking about the whole worship of Apollo what

De Rougemont could think about the worship of Christ. I would never admit that there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as that madman was able-to smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it is the whole point, even of this final chapter upon the final decay of paganism, to insist once more that the worst sort of paganism had already been defeated by the best sort. It was the best sort of paganism that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort of paganism that wore the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world bad yet seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best that began to decay.

Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew. Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?

To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage was partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations more normal and more nearly akin to her than Carthage. I am not here concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman statesmen acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am concerned to contradict the notion that there was nothing but a hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike of Greek vices. I am not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry, with a sentiment about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am presenting them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a pretense. The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and mere mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks, due to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man. If Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her conqueror; but these were things he did originally wish to conquer-even in himself. It is true that in one sense there was less inhumanity even in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon. When we consider the war of the demons on the children we cannot compare even Greek decadence to Punic devil worship. But it is not true that the sincere revulsion from either need be merely pharisaical. It is not true to human nature or to common sense. Let any lad who has had the look to grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will be right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion; it is the greatest of all illusions; the illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive the more or less rustic virtues of the ruck of the original Romans as reacting against the very rumor of it with complete spontaneity and sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser degree, exactly as they did .against the cruelty of Carthage. Because it was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed Carthage. But if their attitude and action was rather destructive, in neither case need their indignation have been mere self-righteousness covering mere selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could have operated in either case but reasons of state and commercial conspiracies, we can only tell him that there is something which he does not understand; something which possibly he will never understand; something which, until he does. understand, he will never understand the Latins. That something is called democracy. He has probably heard the word a good many times and even used it himself; but he has no notion of what it means. All through the revolutionary history of Rome there was an incessant drive ‘towards democracy; the state and the statesman could do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the sort of democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely because of the presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about Roman oligarchy. For instance, recent historians have tried to explain the valor and victory of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested usury which was practiced by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had conquered the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or the Consul Nero had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent. But we realize the usury of the Patricians because of the perpetual revolt of the Plebeians. The rule of the Punic merchant princes had the very soul of usury. But there was never a Punic mob that dared to call them usurers.

Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness, the rise of Rome bad really been the rise of normal and especially of popular things; and in nothing more than in the thoroughly normal and profoundly popular hatred of perversion. Now among the Greeks a perversion had become a convention. It is true that it had become so much of a convention, especially a literary convention, that it was sometimes conventionally copied by Roman literary men. But this is one of those complications that always arise out of conventions. It must not obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two societies as a whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a theme of Theocritus; but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was particularly fond of that theme. The themes of Virgil were specially and notably the normal themes and nowhere more than in morals; piety and patriotism and the honor of the countryside. And we may well pause upon the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity, upon his name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn, of its maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits of fulfillment and its prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind.

Nobody can doubt his feelings when the demons were driven in flight before the household gods. But there are two particular points about him and his work which are particularly important to the main thesis here. The first is that the whole of his great in the hands of Providence; and the only thing to the Wooden Cross of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some wild allegory, pious in purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child might have fought the Dragon with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.

The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument is the particular nature of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a special sense be called folk-lore, the faiths and fancies of the populace. Everybody knows that his poetry at its most perfect is less concerned with the pomposity of Olympus than with the numina of natural and agricultural life. Everyone knows where Virgil looked for the causes of things. He speaks of finding them not so much in cosmic allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the sisterhood of the nymphs and Sylvanus the old man of the forest. He is perhaps most himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has perpetuated forever the great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again it is easy enough to miss the point with petty criticism about all the in things that happen to separate his literary convention from ours. There is nothing more artificial than the cry of artificiality as directed against the old pastoral poetry. We have entirely missed all that our fathers meant by looking at the externals of what they wrote. People have been so much amused with the mere fact that the china shepherdess was made of china that they have not even asked why she was made at all. They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a figure in an opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the opera, or how he strayed on to the stage.

In short, we have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a china shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city merchants in elegant attitudes; of iron masters wrought in iron or gold speculators in gold? Why, did the opera exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting upon pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humor of humanity have always told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions of complex cities were less really healthy than the customs of the countryside. So it is with the eternity of the Eclogues. A modern poet did indeed write things called Fleet Street Eclogues, in which poets took the place of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written anything called Wall Street Eclogues, in which millionaires should take the place of the poets. And the reason is that there is a real if only a recurrent yearning for that sort of simplicity; and there is never that sort of yearning for that sort of complexity. The key to the mystery of the Merry Peas is that the peasant often is merry. Those who do not believe it are simply those who do not know anything about him and therefore do not know which are his times for merriment. Those who do not believe in the shepherd’s feast or song are merely ignorant of the shepherd’s calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very different from the ideal shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the root of the ideal. It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a tradition to make a convention. Pastoral poetry is certainly often a convention, especially in a social decline. It was in a social decline that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged about the gardens of Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds and shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded imitations of Virgil. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very nature only the lure of nature-worship, or the love of the natural.

For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of mythology. But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as the whole society grew in age and experience, there began to appear that weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter under that name. This religion was not quite a religion. In other words, this religion was not quite a reality. It was the young world’s riot with images and ideas like a young man’s riot with wine or love-making; it was not so much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time. Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a forest; the claims of the gods and demigods seemed like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than by a poet. But it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons began to fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung-heap. The psychology of it is really human enough, to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances sound fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing the peasant civilization was fading, or had already faded from the whole countryside. The Empire at the end was organized more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organization; indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the organizations of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry came a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, modern return to heathenism has been a return not even the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realized that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars.

They had played the flute; they had played the fool. So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is already something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of understanding; incipe Parve Puer risu cognoscere matrem. But with them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under servile organization and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became enlightened; that is it lost the mental energy that could create myths. All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since Socrates and Pythagoras. They began to betray to the world the fact that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. That unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another, which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher, revealed at once its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue or everything was happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or everything was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be said; so they said it.

Everywhere the sages had degenerated into sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society entertainer, he may as well also be a conjurer. Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world; and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the other continents. But this is an illusion; one of the many illusions of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit the feet of the Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to recognize that the Roman Empire was recognized as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheaters and aqueducts. Man could do no more.

For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good news as the news of invasion conquest. There was nothing left that could conquer Rome but there was

also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilizations had met in one civilization of the Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.

That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been analyzed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. If with the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have called the demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything but destructive. There remains only the fourth element or rather the first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. .What became of this great truth in the background of men’s minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is intensely characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavored to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual Deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world.

The life of the great civilization went on with dreary industry and even with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely give a sort of official flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world realized that there ever bad been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. Ibis might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seemed quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to cat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said, however mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal bad fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.

With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the center of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution, Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round then And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilight’s of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightening by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

Every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor. I Cor. iii, 8.

My reward is with Me, to give every man according as his work shall be. Rev. xxii, 12.

If I understand things correctly, whenever you find men or women who are looking to be rewarded here for doing right, they are unqualified to work for God; because if they are looking for the applause of men, looking for reward in this life, it will disqualify them for the service of God, because they are all the while compromising truth.

They are afraid of hurting some one’s feelings. They are afraid that some one is going to say something against them, or there will be some newspaper articles written against them. Now, we must trample the world under our feet if we are going to get our reward hereafter. If we live for God we must suffer persecution. The kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light are at war, and have been, and will be as long as Satan is permitted to reign in this world. As long as the kingdom of darkness is permitted to exist, there will be a conflict, and if you want to be popular in the kingdom of God, if you want to be popular in heaven, and get a reward that shall last forever, you will have to be unpopular here.

If you seek the applause of men, you can’t have the Lord say “Well done” at the end of the journey. You can’t have both. Why? Because this world is at war with God. This idea that the world is getting better all the while is false. The old natural heart is just as much at enmity with God as it was when Cain slew Abel. Sin leaped into the world full grown in Cain. And from the time that Cain was born into the world to the present, man by nature has been at war with God. This world was not established in grace, and we have to fight “the world, the flesh and the devil;” and if we fight the world, the world won’t like us; and if we fight the flesh, the flesh won’t like us. We have to mortify the flesh. We have to crucify the old man and put him under. Then, by and by, we will get our reward, and a glorious reward it will be.

We read in Luke xvi, 15:

“And He said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.”

We must go right against the current of this world. If the world has nothing to say against us, we can be pretty sure that the Lord Jesus Christ has very little to say for us. There are those who do not like to go against the current of the world. They say they know this and that is wrong, but they do not say a word against it lest it might make them unpopular. If we expect to get the reward we must fight the good fight of faith. For all such, as Paul has said, “there is laid up a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give us at that day.”

FEAR OF DEATH

How little do we realize the meaning of the word ETERNITY! The whole time between the creation of the world and the ending of it would not make a day in eternity. In time, it is like the infinity of space, whose center is everywhere and whose boundary is nowhere. We read in the Epistle to the Hebrews:

“Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He, also Himself, likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy Him that had the power of death–that is the devil–and deliver them who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

There are a great many of God’s professed children who live in continual bondage, in the constant fear of death. I believe that it is dishonoring God. I believe that it is not His will to have one of His children live in fear for one moment. If you know the truth as it is in Christ, there need be no fear, there need be no dread, because death will only hasten you on to glory; and your names are already there.

And then the next thought is for those who are dear to us. I believe that it is not only our privilege to have our names written in heaven, but those of the children whom God has given us; and our hearts ought to go right out for them. The promise is not only to us, but to our children. Many a father’s and many a mother’s heart is burdened with anxiety for the salvation of their children. If your own name is there, let your next aim in life be to get the children whom God has given you, there also.

A mother was dying in one of our Eastern cities a few years ago, and she had a large family of children. She died of consumption, and the children were brought in to her one by one as she was sinking. She gave the oldest one her last message and her dying blessing; and as the next one was brought in she put her hand upon its head and gave it her blessing; and then the next one was brought in, and the next, until at last they brought in the little infant. She took it to her bosom and pressed to her loving heart, and her friends saw that it was hastening her end; that she was excited, and as they went to take the little child from her, she said: “My husband, I charge you to bring all these children home with you.” And so God charges us parents to bring our children home with us; not only to have our own names written in heaven, but those of our children also.

An eminent Christian worker in New York told me a story that affected me very much.

A father had a son who had been sick some time, but he did not consider him dangerously ill; until one day he came home to dinner and found his wife weeping, and he asked, “What is the trouble?”

“There has been a great change in our boy since morning,” the mother said, “and I am afraid he is dying; I wish you to go in and see him, and, if you think he is, I wish you to tell him so, for I cannot bear to.”

The father went in and sat down by the bed-side, and he placed his hand upon his forehead, and he could feel the cold, damp sweat of death, and knew its cold, icy hand was feeling for the cords of life, and that his boy was soon to be taken away, and he said to him:

“My son, do you know you are dying?”

The little fellow looked up at him and said:

“No; am I? Is this death that I feel stealing over me, father?”

“Yes, my son, you are dying.”

“Will I live the day out?”

“No; you may die at any moment.”

He looked up to his father, and he said: “Well I shall be with Jesus to-night, won’t I, father?”

And the father answered: “Yes, my boy, you will spend to-night with the Savior,” and the father turned away to conceal the tears, that the little boy might not see him weep; but he saw the tears, and he said:

“Father, don’t you weep for me; when I get to heaven I will go straight to Jesus and tell Him that ever since I can remember you have tried to lead me to Him.”

I have three children, and the greatest desire of my heart is that they may be saved; that I may know that their names are written in the Book of Life. I may be taken from them early; I may leave them in this changing world without a father’s care; but I would rather have my children say that of me after I am dead and gone, or if they die before me I would rather they should take that message to the Master–that ever since they can remember I have tried to lead them to the Master–than to have a monument over me reaching to the skies.

We ought not to look upon death as we do. Bishop Heber has written of a dead friend:

“Thou art gone to the grave! but we will not deplore thee,
Though sorrow and darkness encompass the tomb;
Thy Savior has passed through its portals before thee,
And the lamp of His love is thy guide through the gloom.

“Thou art gone to the grave! We no longer behold thee,
Nor tread the rough paths of the world by thy side;
But the wide arms of Mercy are spread to enfold thee,
And sinners may die, for the Sinless has died.”

The roll is being called, and one after another summoned away, but if the names of our loved ones are there, if we know that they are saved, how sweet it is, after they have left us, to think that we shall meet them by and by; that we shall see them in the morn when the night has worn away.

During the late war a young man lay on a cot, and they heard him say, “Here, here!” and some one went to his cot and wanted to know what he wanted, and he said, “Hark! Hush, don’t you hear them? “Hear whom?” was asked. “They are calling the roll of heaven,” he said, and pretty soon he answered, “Here!”–and he was gone. If our names are in the Book of Life, by and by when the name is called, we can say with Samuel, “Here am I!” and fly away to meet Him. And if our children are called away early, O, it is so sweet to think that they died in Christ; that the great Shepherd gathers them in His arms and carries them in His bosom, and that we shall meet them by and by.

PAUL, THE CHRISTIAN HERO

The way to get to heaven is to be saved through faith in Jesus Christ.

We get salvation as a gift, but we have to work it out, just as if we got a gold mine for a gift.

I do not get a crown by joining the church, or renting a pew.

There was Paul. He won his crown. He had many a hard fight; he met Satan on many a battle-field, and he overcame him and wore the crown. It would take about ten thousand of the average Christians of this day or any other to make one of Paul. When I read the life of that Apostle, I blush for the Christianity of the nineteenth century. It is a weak and sickly thing.

See what he went through. He five times was scourged. The old Roman custom of scourging was to take the prisoner and bind his wrists together and bend him over in a stooping posture, and the Roman soldier would bring the lash, braided with sharp pieces of steel down upon the bare back of the prisoner and cut him through the skin, so that men sometimes died in the act of being scourged. But Paul says he was scourged five different times. Now if we should get one stripe upon our backs what a whining there would be; there would be forty publishers after us before the sun went down, and they would want to publish our lives, that they could make capital out of them. But Paul says, “Five times received I forty stripes, save one.” That was nothing for him. Take your stand by his side.

“Paul, you have been beaten by these Jews four times, and they are going to give you thirty-nine stripes more; what are you going to do after you get out of the difficulty? What are you going to do about it all?

“Do?” says he. “I will do this one thing; I will press toward the mark of the prize of my high calling; I am on my way to get my crown.” He was not going to lose his crown. “Don’t think that a few stripes will turn me away; these light afflictions are nothing.”

And so they put on thirty-nine more stripes.

He had sprung into the race for Christ, as it were, and was leaping toward heaven. If you will allow me the expression, the devil got his match when he met Paul. He never switched off to a side-track. He never sat down to write a letter to defend himself. All the strength that he had he gave to Christ. He never gave a particle to the world nor to himself to defend himself. “This one thing I do,” he said, “I am not going to lose the crown.” See that no man take your crown.

“Thrice beaten with rods.” Take your stand again beside him.

“Now, Paul, they have beaten you twice, and they are going to beat you again. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue preaching? If you are, let me give you a little advice. Now, don’t be quite so radical; be a little more conservative; just use a little finer language, and, so to speak, cover up the cross with beautiful words and flowery sentences, and tell men that they are pretty good after all; that they are not so bad, and try and pacify the Jews; make friends with them, and get in with the world, and the world will think more of you. Don’t be so earnest; don’t be so radical, Paul; now come, take our advice. What are you going to do?”

“Do?” he says, “I do this one thing–I press toward the mark of the prize of my high calling.” So they put on the rods, and every blow lifts him nearer God.

Take your stand with him again. They begin to stone him. That is the way they killed those who did not preach to suit them.

It seems as if he was about to be paid back in his own coin, for when Stephen was stoned to death, Paul, then known as Saul, cheered on the crowd.

“Now, Paul, this is growing serious; hadn’t you better take back some of the things you have said about Jesus? What are you going to do?”

“Do?” he says, “if they take my life I will only get my crown the sooner.”

He would not budge an inch. He had something that the world could not give; he had something it could not take away; he had eternal life, and he had in store a crown of glory.

THESE LIGHT AFFLICTIONS

Three times was he shipwrecked; a day and a night in the deep. Look at that mighty apostle, a whole day and night in the deep. There he was–shipwrecked, and for what? Was it to make money? He was not after money. He was just going from city to city, and town to town, to preach the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, and to lift up the cross wherever he had opportunity. He went down to Corinth and preached eighteen months, and he didn’t have a lot of the leading ministers of Corinth to come on the platform and sit by his side when he preached. There was not a man who stood by him. When he reached Corinth he had none of the leading business men to stand by him and advise him; but the little tent-maker arrives in Corinth a perfect stranger, and the first thing he does is to find a place where he can make a tent; he does not go to a hotel; his means will not allow it; he goes where he can make his bread by the sweat of his brow. Think of that great apostle making a tent, and then getting on the corner of a street and preaching, and perhaps once in a while he would get into a synagogue, but the Jews would turn him out; they did not want to hear him preach anything about Jesus the Crucified.

When I read of the life of such a man, how I blush to think how sickly and dwarfed Christianity is at the present time, and how many hundreds there are who never think of working for the Son of God and honoring Christ.

Yet when he wrote that letter back to Corinth, we find him taking an inventory of some things he had. He is rich, he says, “In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren.” This last must have been the hardest of all. “In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often; in hunger and thirst, in fastings often; in cold, in nakedness; and besides those things that are without, the care of all the churches.” (II Cor. xi, 26-28.) These are only some of the things that he summed up. Do you know what made him so exceedingly happy? It was because he believed the Scripture; he believed the Sermon on the Mount. We profess to believe it; we pretend to believe it; but few of us more than half believe it. Listen to one sentence in that sermon: “Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven,” when you are persecuted. Now persecution was about all that Paul had.

That was his capital, and he had a good deal of it; he had laid by a good many persecutions, and he was to get a great reward Christ says: “Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven.” If Jesus Christ spoke of it as “great” it must be indeed wonderful. We call things great that may look very small to Jesus Christ; and things that look very small to us may look very large to Him. When the great Christ, the Creator of heaven and earth, He who formed the heavens and the earth by His mighty power, when He calls it a great reward, what must it be?

Perhaps some people said to the Apostle to the Gentiles: “Now, Paul, you are meeting with too much opposition; you are suffering too much.”

Hear him reply: “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”

“Our light affliction,” he calls it. We would have called it pretty hard, pretty heavy, would we not?

But he says: “These light afflictions are nothing; think of the glory before me, and think of the crowning time; think of the reward that is laid up for me. I am on my way; the Righteous Judge will give it to me when the time comes;” and that is what filled his soul with joy; it was the thought of reward that the Lord had in store for him.

Now, my friends, let us just for a minute think of what Paul accomplished. Think of going out, as it were, among the heathen; the first missionary to preach to these men, who were so full of wickedness, so full of enmity and bitterness, the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, and to tell them that the man who died outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem the death of a common prisoner, a common felon, in the sight of the world, was the promised Christ; to tell them that they had to believe in that crucified Man in order to enter the kingdom of God. Think of the dark mountain that rose up before him; think of the opposition; think of the bitter persecution, and then think of the trifles in our way.

SONGS IN PRISON

But a great many worldly people think Paul’s life was a failure. Probably his enemies, when they put him in prison, thought that would silence him; but do you know that I believe to-day Paul thanks God more for prisons, for stripes, for the persecution and opposition that he suffered, than for anything else that happened to him here?

The very things we do not like are sometimes the very best for us.

Christians probably might not have these glorious Epistles, if Paul had not been thrown into prison. There he took up his pen and wrote letters to the Christians in Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossæ, and to Philemon and Timothy. Look at the two Epistles that he wrote to the Corinthians. How much has been done for the world by these Epistles. What a blessing they have been to the church of God; how great a light they have thrown on many a man’s life. But we might not have had those Epistles if it had not been for persecution.

Perhaps John Bunyan blesses God more to-day for Bedford jail than anything that happened to him. Probably we would not have the Pilgrim’s Progress it he had not been thrown into that prison. Satan thought he accomplished a great deal when he shut up Bunyan for twelve years and six months; but what a blessing it was to the world; and I believe Paul blesses God to-day for the Philippian jail, and for the imprisonment he suffered in Rome, because it gave him time to write those blessed letters. Talk of Alexander making the world tremble with the tread of his armies, and of Cæsar and Napoleon’s power, but here is a little tent-maker, who, without an army, turned the world upside down.

Why?

Because God Almighty was with him.

Paul says in one place: “None of these things move me.” (Acts xx, 24.) They threw him in prison, but it was all the same; it did not move him. When he was at Corinth and Athens preaching, it made no difference. He just “pressed toward the mark of the prize of his high calling.” If God wanted him to go through prisons to win the prize, it was all the same to him. They put him in prison, but they put the Almighty in with him, and Paul was so linked to Jesus that they could not separate them. He would rather be in prison with Christ than out of prison without Him. He would a thousand times rather be cast into prison with the Son of God and suffer a little persecution for a few days here, than to be living at ease without Him.

He heard the cry, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” He went over and preached, and the first thing that happened to him was that he was put into the Philippian jail. Now, if he had been as faint-hearted as most of us, he would have been disappointed and cast down. There would have been a great complaint.

He would have said: “This is a strange Providence; whatever brought me here? I thought the Lord called me here; here I am in prison in a strange city; how did I ever get here? How will I ever get out of this place? I have no money; I have no friends; I have no attorney; I have no one to intercede for me, and here I am.” Paul and Silas were not only in prison, but their feet were made fast in the stocks. There they were, in the inner prison, a dark, cold, damp dungeon. But at midnight the other prisoners heard a strange sound. They had never heard anything like it before. They heard singing. I do not know what song those two imprisoned evangelists sang, but I know one thing, it was not “a doleful sound from the tombs.” You know we have a hymn, “Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound.” They did not sing that, but the Bible tells us they sang praises. That was a queer place to sing praises, was it not?

I suppose it was time for the evening prayers, and that they had just had their evening prayer and then sang their evening hymn. And God answered their prayers, and the old prison shook, and the chains dropped, and the prison doors were opened. Yes, yes; I have no doubt that in glory he thanks God that he went to jail and that the Philippian jailer became converted.

SWEPT INTO GLORY

But look at him at Rome. Nero has signed his death warrant. Take your stand and look at the little man. He is small; in the sight of the world he is contemptible (II Cor. xii, 10); the world frowns upon him. Go to the palace of the king and talk about that criminal–about Paul–and you will see a sneer on their countenances.

“Oh, he is a fanatic,” they say; he has gone mad.” I wish the world was filled with such fanatics. I tell you what we want to-day is a few fanatics like him; men who fear nothing but sin and love no one but God.

Rome never had such a conqueror within her walls. Rome never had such a mighty man as Paul within her boundaries. Although the world looked down upon him, and perhaps he looked very small and contemptible, yet in the sight of heaven he was the mightiest man who ever trod the streets of Rome. Probably there will never be another one like him traveling those streets. The Son of God walked with him, and the form of the Fourth was with him. But go into that prison; there he is; officials come to him and tell him that Nero has signed his death-warrant. He does not tremble; he is not afraid.

“Paul, are you not sorry you have been so zealous for Christ? It is going to cost you your life; if you had to live it over again, would you give it to Jesus of Nazareth? “What do you think the old warrior would reply?

See that eye light up as he says: “If I had ten thousand lives I should give every one of those lives to Christ, and the only regret I have is that I did not commence earlier and serve Him better; the only regret I have now is that I ever lifted my voice against Jesus of Nazareth.”

But they are going to behead you.”

Well, they may take my head, but the Lord has my heart. I care nothing about my head; the Lord has my heart and has had it for years. They cannot separate me from the Lord, and when my head is taken off, I shall depart to be with Christ, which is far better.”

And they led him out. I do not know at what hour; perhaps it was early in the morning. There is a tradition tells us that they led him two miles out of the city. Look at the little tent-maker as he goes through the streets of Rome with a firm tread. Look at that giant as he moves through the streets. He is on his way to execution. Take your stand by his side and hear him talk. He is talking of the glory beyond.

He says: “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness. I shall see the King in His beauty to-night. I have longed to be with Him; I have longed to see Him. This is the day of my crowning.”

The world scoffed at him, but he did not heed its scoffing. He had something the world had not; burning within him he had a love and zeal which the world knew nothing about. Ah, the love that Paul had for Jesus Christ! But, oh, the greater love the Lord Jesus had for Paul!

The hour has come. The way they used to behead them in those days was for the prisoner to bend his head, when a Roman soldier took a sword and cut it off. The hour had come, and I seem to see Paul, with a joyful countenance, bending his blessed head, as the soldier’s sword comes down and sets his spirit free.

If our eyes could look as Elisha’s looked, we might have seen him leap into a chariot of light like Elijah; we would have seen him go sweeping through limitless space.

Look at him now as he mounts higher and higher; look at him, see him move up; up–up–up–ever upward.

Look at him yonder!

See! He is entering now the Eternal City of the glorified saints, the blissful abode of the Savior’s redeemed. The prize he so long has sought is at hand. See the gates yonder; how they fly wide open. See the herald angels on the shining battlements of heaven. Hear the glad shout that is passed along, “He is coming! He is coming!” And he goes sweeping through the pearly gates, along the shining way, to the very throne of God, and Christ stands there and says: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

Just think of hearing the Master say it. Will not that be enough for everything?

O friends, your turn and mine will come by-and-by, if we are but faithful. Let us see that we do not lose the crown. Let us awake and put on the whole armor of God; let us press into the conflict; it is a glorious privilege; and then to us too, as to the glorified of old, will come that blessed welcome from our glorified Lord: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”