The King of Terrors

I suppose all of us hover between two ways of regarding death, which appear to be in hopeless contradiction with each other. First, there is the familiar and instinctive recoil from it as embodying the supreme and irrevocable disaster. It is the impossible, the incredible thing. Nothing leads up to it, nothing prepares for it. It simply traverses every line on which life runs, cutting across every hope on which life feeds, and every intention which gives life significance. It makes all we do here meaningless and empty. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” Everything goes to one place, good and bad, just and unjust, happy and unhappy, rich and poor, all lie down together in one common ruin. All are cut off by the same blind inexorable fate. So stated it is inexplicable, so ruthless, so blundering — this death that we must die. It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters. Can any end be more untoward, more irrational than this? Its methods are so cruelly accidental, so wickedly fantastic and freakish. We can never tell when or how its blow will fall. It may be, no doubt, that it may come to the very old as the fitting close of an honourable life. But how often it smites, without discrimination, as if it had no law! It makes its horrible breach in our gladness with careless and inhuman disregard of us. We get no consideration from it. Often and often it stumbles in like an evil mischance, like a feckless misfortune. Its shadow falls across our natural sunlight, and we are swept off into some black abyss. There is no light or hope in the grave; there is no reason to be wrung out of it. Life is the only reality, the only truth. Death is mere blindness, mere negation. “Death cannot praise Thee, O God; the grave cannot celebrate Thee. The living, the living, they can only praise Thee, as I do this day.”

So the Scripture cried out long ago. So we cry in our angry protest, in our bitter anguish, as the ancient trouble reasserts its ancient tyranny over us today. It is man’s natural recoil. And the Word of God recognizes this and gives it vigorous expression.

But, then, there is another aspect altogether which death can wear for us. It is that which first comes down to us, perhaps, as we look down upon the quiet face, so cold and white, of one who has been very near and dear to us. There it lies in possession of its own secret. It knows it all. So we seem to feel. And what the face says to us in its sweet silence to us as a last message from the one whom we loved is: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

So the face speaks. Surely while we speak there is a smile flitting over it; a smile as of gentle fun at the trick played us by seeming death. It is not death; nobody is dead. It would be too ludicrous to suppose it. What has death to do with us? How can we die? Everything that we cared for and loved exists. Physical death has no meaning, no relation to it. Reason refuses to bring the two together. There is no common term. Nothing that we see in this dead material now laid out under our eyes represents or involves or includes the thing that was or is alive. That which we loved is not here. That is all. It has dropped out. It has slid away. We are as sure of this as we are of our own identity. We cannot conceive any other possibility. Reason and imagination alike repudiate it.

And, as we stand there, death seems a very little thing. What really matters is the life with its moral quality, its personal characteristics, its intense and vivid charm, its individual experiences, its personal story; the tone of its voice, the pressure of its presence felt as surely now as once through eye and hand; the tenderness, the beauty, the force of the living will — its faults, and its struggles, and its victories, and its maturity, and its quivering affection. What has death to do with these? They are our undying possession.

Still are your pleasant voices,
  Your nightingales awake.

For death he taketh all away.
  But these he cannot take.

There is no severance, no gulf fixed. We can send our hearts over the silent frontier into the secret land. We hold converse with them that are gone from us. Not a tie is cut. They know it, we know it. The spirit bands hold. We can be content to bury this poor body, left behind, out of sight. It has nothing in it that really counts. We can be quiet and calm over it. There is no need for violent distress. All that matters shall go on as if death had never been.

Have we all felt like that now and again standing by the bed? True, we shall not be able to keep that mind. Alas! it will pass from us. The long, horrible silence that follows when we become aware of what we have lost out of our daily intercourse by the withdrawal of the immediate presence will cut its way into our souls. We shall feel it impossible to keep at the high level without a word, without a sign to reassure us of its truth. The blank veil will hang on unlifted, unstirred. Not a glimpse to be had of the world inside and beyond! How black, how relentless, this total lack of tangible evidence for the certainty that we believe in! Once again the old terror will come down upon us. What is it that happens over there? What are the dead about? Where are they? How picture it? How speak of it? It is all blind, dismal, unutterable darkness. We grope in vain. We strain our eyes in vain. “Oh, death is, after all, a fearful thing,” so we say with the old cringing fear that clings to the known, the familiar scene, and abhors the untravelled bourne.

Yes, but for all that our high mood was real, though it passes. It was a true experience; it gave us authentic intelligence. We were better able to win an insight into the real heart of things as we stood there by the bedside of the dead in spiritual exaltation, with every capacity raised to its highest level, than now when we are drawn under the drag of days, submerged, unnerved, wearied, out of spirits, disheartened. Therefore it is our reasonable act of faith to stand by our highest experience, and to assert its validity even when its light has faded out of our lives and we have sunk back under the shadows. Though we have returned to the twilight of the valleys, yet we will ever recall the moment when we stood upon the sunlit heights and saw the far horizons. It was a true value that we then gave to life and death. That act of insight cannot be disproved or discredited; even though there be a counter judgement which will not be gainsaid, and which still presses its conclusion and penetrating insistence.

Our task is to deny neither judgement, but to combine both. The contrasted experiences are equally real, equally valid. How can they be reconciled? That is the question. Only through their reconciliation can the fitness of our human experience be preserved in its entirety. How shall this be done? Is it not through the idea of growth? We are in a condition of process, of growth, of which our state on earth is but the preliminary condition. And this must mean that in one sense we know all that lies before us; and in another sense that we know nothing of it.

“Brethren, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Think that well over. We are now the sons of God. That we can know for certain. That is a direct and absolute experience. And that means that we are already now that which we shall be hereafter. “There is no other world.” So said the crooked spirit of Voltaire. For the “other world” has come here. It is already over here with us, on our side. Its powers are ours. We are in possession of its resources. We have been born into it, born of its spirit, born in its freedom. Within us its secret is germinally lodged. “Our life is hid with Christ in God.” The channels are open; communications pass.  

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