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dwell in a heavenly house. The simple idea is that the soul, when it leaves its earthly tabernacle, will not be lost in immensity, nor driven away houseless and homeless, but will find a house and home in heaven. This is the consoling doctrine here taught. The soul of the believer does not cease to exist at death. It does not sink into a state of unconsciousness. It does not go into purgatory, but, being made perfect in holiness, it does immediately pass into glory. As soon as it is absent from the body, it is present with the Lord. This is all that is revealed, and this is enough.'*

The words are, we readily allow, clothed in a purposely indistinct form of metaphorical expression. They tell of rest and of home-life in God. They dissuade us from all such dreary conceptions of the disembodied life as that the soul is there an unlocated, unsubstantial vagrant, lost in the wide fields of immensity; a nest-less bird, flying without aim or purpose over the vast wastes of eternity. This, at least, is a true deduction from the words, and of a Divine comfort to our hearts when sick and tired and weary of the restlessness of life and of time. And yet the words reveal without revealing, and, while seeming to draw aside the veil of impenetrable mystery which hangs before the gate of death and of the Blessed Life, the veil is left hanging there still. There is scarcely a more desolate feeling than when we look, with wistful eyes, through the locked gates of a cemetery where our dead sleep, while the chilly mists are beginning to creep over the earth, and to wrap in their white curtain the whiter tombs early in the winter's evening. And yet it is not with such a look, that makes us shiver and weep, that we would compare our gaze into these words written by one who had entered Paradise, although his lips, like those who were recalled from the Silent Land by the

* Dr. Hodge, 'Comment. on 2 Cor. v. 1-4,' p. 112.

Divine Will, were sealed into a silence of mystery that he Idare not violate or break. What had been heard it was unlawful to speak. Yet something of comfort there is in these dear words, for they do not chill, although it is true that they conceal, because the secrets of death may not be disclosed. It may be that the few souls who have returned were not allowed to go far into the garden of the dead, being only detained in the vestibule, or just within the golden gates of life till the iron gates of mortality opened to receive them back again. So they knew but little. Or an act of oblivion may have passed over their souls and erased all the memory and record of their brief sojourn there, that the conditions of the intermediate life might be still inviolate. This, at least, we may know, that all the beautiful qualities and endowments of grace are still the clothing of the life of the Blessed Dead. They are 'clothed upon' with the beauty and Life of God. Often here the rough sackcloth of heartpain, physical sickness, or mental irritation covered the inward sensibilities of the soul, and concealed its real interior character, because the piteous exactions of suffering were so peremptory and tyrannical that they could scarcely be resisted, and thus disguised its true habit and qualities. But in that Life all the softer raiment of the spiritual life will be the dress and ornament of its new transfigured condition.

For the Divine words are even yet more full of consolation than the general interpretation would allow, and especially for those who have passed through that saddest experience of the human heart,—the seeing the lamp of life slowly or suddenly quenched in the eyes of our loved ones till the indefinable change, the going forth of the personal consciousness, like the going out of a wasted lamp, told us, after perhaps one strong flickering that beguiled us into hopes soon darkened, that the oil of life was at last wasted and

spent. While we had them, they were the light of our home, the gladness of our hearts, the consolation of our life. But they are gone, beckoned away by an unseen hand, which they could not choose but obey and follow. We have clasped their hands in the sacred attitude of prayer, we have closed their eyes, as if to shut out from them for evermore all the vexing sights of vanity. Even then our dead made themselves felt in a way infinitely real, lying in the silent room, and filling all the house by the unearthly beauty of their one dear though awful presence. So at last we laid them to rest with many tears, or with that most terrible symptom of the intensest sorrow, a dry and tearless misery, and the soft covering of grass was drawn close above them, and they were left there alone in the solitude and silence of the grave. Sadly we have come back to the old routine of life, though the same life, with its fulness of comfort, can never live for us again; and we know now how hearts can ache, not only with a present pain, but with the dull sense of void and vacancy and elemental loss, all life being left for us a torn and mutilated thing, an inheritance of loss and sorrow. If sometimes we may escape a little sacred while from the hurrying ways of the world's life to visit the quiet churchyard, where stillness and peace seem to reign and to exact from us a tranquil worship of the mystery of death and of Life-the Life beyond death-it is our one consolation. Did not the Life Himself once ask His way to a grave that He might weep there? (John xi. 34, 35).* And yet while we mourn, the soul, now unvested from the raiment of the flesh, is not left naked and unclothed. Weak and feeble as it is, the soul, new-born into eternity, is not like a motherless

* 'There is a beautiful fragment preserved in Maximus, "On the Soul," from Clement of Alexandria: "Souls, that breathe free of all things, though separated from the body, are borne immortal to the bosom of God, as in the winter the vapours are attracted and rise towards the sun."'-('Ante-Nicene Fathers,' xxii. 163.)

child, a cold and pitiful thing, a poor foundling, uncherished and uncomforted, and so to remain until the day of the great resurrection. A thousand times no! So soon as this earthly tabernacle that sheltered its mortal life has fallen, the cords being severed, and the tent-pole thrown down by the strong fingers of Death, it has a dear home in God awaiting it, and 'a house not made with hands.' Nor do the words mean vaguely and generally that it shall be received into Paradise or into the garden-environs of the highest heaven. They have a more individual, a more near and closely-enfolding meaning than that. 'Wrap my spirit departing, O God, in the pure linen of the first robe,' cries St. Anselm,* meaning by the first robe, as a comparison with St. Bernard † will sufficiently show, the happiness and refreshment enjoyed by the souls of the blessed dead even now in their hidden life; the other, or second robe, being the immortal and beatific splendour to be given to the body when reunited to the soul in the last resurrection. So the Apostolic words tell of the soul as received into the inmost love of Christ, and as resting in the bosom of God; for as the lap of the mother enfolds the nakedness of the child, or as a mantle covers and wraps closely the shoulders of the shivering traveller, so the soul upon which Death had breathed with his icy breath, now in its infancy of new life a nursling of eternity, a pilgrim-thing which has just passed through the snowy ways of death to the heights of the Blessed Life, so soon as it has put off the old, decayed raiment of mortality, shall not remain forlorn or comfortless, but shall receive all that it requires in that new life upon which it has then entered, and all the love that He

* St. Anselm, Op. (Med. ix.), tom. i., p. 220: 'Postremò et mundâ sindone primæ stolæ spiritum meum involve in quâ requiescam ingrediens ad Te in locum tabernaculi admirabilis.'

+ Cf. St. Bernard, i. 1033 F., Serm. iii., 'In Festo Omn. Sanct.'

can lavish upon it, who died in the shame and nakedness of the bitter Cross, that He might bring His children to the home of His Presence, and clothe them with His own everlasting peace. In that warm nest the soul will no longer cry and flutter like a poor fledgling in the cold nights of the spring. Under the wings of God it is warmly nestled, and it lies close to the Heart of Christ in the unclothed life, yet clothed there indeed and sheltered in His love, who, with the beautiful robe of His justifying righteousness, has thrown also around it the soft and thickly-woven mantle of His Divine charity. None other than Himself will be its constant rest and benediction there in its separated life, until the resurrection of the body shall complete its beatitude in the final state of glory, of which St. Cyprian has so finely said,—and the words are like a peal of Easter bells, carried by the morning-wind from the church-tower and over the sleeping-places of our dead, 'When this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal Immortality, the Spirit shall lead us to the Father, and to the festival of the Divine Life.'

For the old Hebrew phrase, 'the bosom of Abraham,' likens the joys of the supernatural life to a banquet * (cf. Irenæus,' Adv. Hær.,' iv. 36), where, according to the eastern custom, they reclined, the head of one guest leaning towards the breast of another (John xiii. 23). Only our sweeter hope, transfiguring the Jewish phrase, that was thus conventionally used by our Lord, into the home - language, which He himself preferred to use (John xiv. 1-3), and into the image given us by His Apostle, may translate 'the bosom of Abraham 't into the feast of the blessed souls

*So think Dr. Gill ('On Luke xvi.'), by whom the Rabbinical parallels are given, and Bishop Pearson ('On the Creed,' p. 442, n.). Archbishop Trench (‘Parables,' p. 463) is of a contrary opinion.

†There is a curious discussion in St. Thomas Aquinas, and conducted

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