The New Standard Of Criticism
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REVELATION XX. 12
"AND I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened ; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works."
It is in my opinion impossible to understand this passage if we do not consider the state of the seer's mind when he witnessed the vision.
Every word seems to me to be strongly antithetical.
St.
John is suffering from a false judgment; his fellow-Christians are suffering from a false judgment.
He sees the Roman world divided into the great and the small.
He sees men standing before the throne of that tribunal to receive their respective places.
He is not for a moment
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under the idea that the world of Christ is distinguished from the world of Cesar by the possession of a judgment-seat.
He knows that Czsar has a throne, and that men are made great or small by standing before that throne.
What he objects to is not the absence, but the ground, of the judgment.
Men are given their places without reference to character ; they are not judged " according to their works."
Their position is often determined by arbitrary circumstances—family, name, wealth, influence.
To the eye of St. John, gazing on the tribunal of that old world, the balance between the great and the small turns on a physical rather than a moral weight.
There is nothing which involves self-introspection—the looking into the records of the past, or,as St. John calls it, "the open books."
There is nothing, above all, which can send a man back to his zzmermost self—the state of being which lies even behind his works— that other book called the book of life.
Now, in opposition to this view, St. John sees a new order of criticism.
He beholds
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the multitude of the dead come back, in the places which the old world gave them.
He sees them stand before a new throne, before a new tribunal, before a judgment-seat guided by other principles.
Guided by these principles, judging by that new standard, this second throne effects wondrous transformations.
Many of the first become last, and many of the last become first.
Those whom the first throne pronounced great are by the second pronounced small; those whom the first declared small are by the second esteemed great.
Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, were at the top of the list in the old society ; in the new they are very near the end of it—only saved from being quite at the end by the imputation of insanity.
And, in the place of honour which was held by Tiberius and Caligula and Nero, stands many a despised slave, many a deformed outcast—outcast by reason of his deformity, many a poor invalid considered unfit for survival, and whom the old world's chariot had passed, contemptuous, by.
As I have said, the cause of this change
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$239 was a change of standard.
The old standard was the impression of outward force.
The new standard, St. John says, is introspective.
It is the record of inward books, and specially of one book the innermost of all—life.
I do not think that by this innermost book St. John means to indicate that "Lamb's book of life" of which he has elsewhere spoken and which we have elsewhere considered.
That was Christs reading of history; this is the testimony of our own souls, the witness of our spirit with His Spirit.
The idea evidently is that in the completed kingdom of God there are influences which must render man more self-critical—influences which must unlock his powers of introspection, and quicken those mortified members which were dead in trespasses and in sin.
Excluding all reference to the book of history, there are three inward books spoken of in the Bible.
The writer of the fifty-first Psalm says, "Blot me not out from the book of Thy remembrance"; there is, then, a book of memory.
St. Paul says that the Gentiles
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have a "law written in their hearts"; there is, then, a book of conscience.
Finally, St. John here speaks of a book underlying both of these—the book of life.
Let us look at these three.
The thought of the seer evidently is that for each of them death is an expansion.
He regards these three books as at present blotted—prevented from giving their testimony by reason of certain physical ink-stains.
Death erases the ink-stains and reveals the handwriting below.
It confronts a man for the first time with the sight of himself as he is.
It does so, not so much by creating new light as by removing past darkness.
The idea is that we are at present the victims of obstruction ; something is shutting out our legitimate light.
We are in actual possession of books which would tell us marvellous things.
But they are closed books.
There is a physical clasp on them which can only be broken by a_ physical wrench.
Death is that wrench.
It breaks the clasp and the books fly open.
The page of our inner self is revealed ; and in a moment,
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in the twinkling of an eye, we read, hear, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Take the book of memory.
What is the cause of forgetfulness in the present system of things?
I hold it to lie always in matter, never in mind.
The popular notion is that memory declines with years; I believe the fact to be that memory is obstructed with years.
It is the difference between failing to see a thing from short-sightedness and failing to see a thing because another object stands in the way.
I hold that the memory of old age is in the latter position; it fails, not as a power, but because in a certain direction its view is circumscribed.
My reason for thinking so is that the memory of old age does fail only 2 a certain direction; it forgets yesterday, but it remembers youth.
It is the near things which it misses; it trips only upon the threshold of the door.
But far-away things are clear; the voices of all the birds twitter in the dawn.
What does that prove?
Clearly that, whatever be the defect of memory in age, it is not a defect in the power.
If not in the power, it
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must be in the environment.
Death changes the environment.
Even changes of the environment falling short of death have rendered the memory preternatural Men who have been resuscitated from the waves have told how, in the moment of drowning, they have lived their whole past anew, recalled forgotten scenes, performed obliterated deeds, reproduced the buried acts of long ago.
The book of memory has been opened by an influence which to the physical organism is absolutely adverse.
If the loosing of the silver cord can do so much, what might not the dveaking of it do?
But the book of memory is by itself zot a source of judgment; there is, I think, a very common misconception on this point.
It is quite safe to affirm that any man who has been able to do a bad deed without a twinge will, other things being equal, be able to vemember it without a twinge.
Surely perception is at least as vivid as memory; if the actual sight of evil has failed to move, the mere remembrance of evil will move still less.
Why is it, then, that in the dawning of moral con-
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viction men shrink from memory—that even a Newman cries, "Remember not past years"?
It is because a second book has been opened —the book of conscience.
If the book of memory were opened alone, it would be morally powerless, valueless; its power lies in the volume below.
What, then, is the influence which, according to St. John, is to open this underlying volume—this book of conscience?
He tells us what it is in the preceding verse quite explicitly: "I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away ; and there was found no place for them."
That which opens the book of conscience is the vision of the great white throne—the sight of an ideal of superhuman purity.
Man will know his sin by Christ, not Christ by his sin ; nothing but the blaze of the throne can teach him his own night.
What has prevented him from seeing his night is the cave of materialism ; he has thought of himself as a bit of physical nature, or a piece of mechanism bound to act in a certain way.
Judged by such a
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throne, it is easy to say "we are all honourable men."
But when a rent shall be made in the cave, and the morning light shall strike through, the white will reveal the black.
Man will see zz, the first time he sees out.
He will take a measure of himself when he has a standard beyond himself.
He will recognise the presence of his own dust and ashes the moment he has looked upon the face of Jesus.
That is distinctly the interpretation which St.
John means to be put on his vision.
You will observe that in his view the state of judgment is a state of intense individualism.
This is implied in the very idea of reading a book—nay, it is involved in the conception of conscience itself.
Conscience is the solitary region of the soul.
Love demands at least two; conscience is a voice to one.
When that book is opened a man must always be alone.
The point is well worth our consideration.
We have been accustomed to think of this scene as a great assize where the whole world is assembled side by side, where the
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individual soul is lost in the contemplation of a vast multitude.
That is not my reading of the passage.
It is true, the small and great are said to stand before the throne; but it is not said that they stand before each other.
The sight is that of a multitude to the eye of the seer and to the eye of the Judge; but not to the eye of the accused.
He sees nothing but his own soul.
The book which his brother reads is invisible to him; the verdict on his brother is inaudible to him.
Seen by the eye of Omnipotence, it is the gathering together in a single space and at one time; but to the dwellers in the space and time it is represented in fragments.
Each feels himself to be in a space apart; each is conscious of a different time.
Every man is the member of an immense crowd ; yet every man believes himself alone.
I think this is the idea of Browning's "Easter Day."
I used to wonder why he should have represented a human soul as standing before the bar of God in solitude ; where were the small and great who were to
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assemble round the throne?
Browning seems to answer, "They ave round the throne, but they are not round the criminal."
He probably felt, as every reflective man must feel, that the revealed presence of a crowd must spoil the judgment ; that introspection is essential to self-criticism; that the book of each heart must be opened and read by itself alone.
We find a similar view in Cardinal Newman's remarkable poem, "The Dream of Gerontius."
The first experience of Gerontius after death is a vision of Chrzst.
It precedes his sight of heaven, it anticipates his view of the golden streets and pearly gates and crystal fountains.
It is an experience of the individual heart.
The man sees not his brother; he sees Jesus only.
He realises for the first time the awful purity of Christ ; it acts on him like the great white throne.
St. John says that before this whiteness the earth and the heaven fled away.
Even so, before the spotless purity of Jesus, Gerontius flies within upon himself, beholds in a moment of time what manner of man he
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was.
St. Paul speaks of death as a departing to be with Christ.
Did he mean to suggest some such thought?
Did he intend to indicate that, before entering into that great congregation called the city of God, the soul has a moment of intense individualism, a moment of personal solitude in which for the first time it sees what it szght have been?
I myself have no doubt that this was St. Paul's view.
I believe that he and St. John were speaking of the same thing.
Paul is speaking of the silence to each man; John is contemplating the collective silences.
To the eye of God Almighty the books are opened simultaneously ; the small and the great are seen together in a moment of time.
But to each of the small and the great there appears only one book— the volume in the individual hand.
There is no object seen but the great white throne; the first hour of departure is an hour with Christ.
I believe that, to the sacred writers, it is this separation of the individual from the mass that makes the time after death the appro-
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priate day of judgment.
What prevents selfjudgment here is in their view just the vision of the multitude, the sight of a crowd of fellowbeings who are living precisely the same as ourselves.
Death has a moment of isolation in it; it makes silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.
It breaks for an instant the chain of physical continuity that binds me to my brother.
It throws me back upon myself; it makes me say "It is I."
This reading of yourself in the record is what St. John calls having your name "written in the books."
It is a very difficult thing to take a record to yourself.
We hear a preacher denouncing a special form of sin.
We say, "He is evidently hitting at the man in front."
He is hitting at ourselves.
We have failed to see our own names written in the book.
That is our reproach ; that is our loss.
It proves conscience to be blunted, individualism to be blunted, introspection to be blunted.
Our penalty has been the escape of our pain.
To read our own name in the record of the world's badness is a moral gain,
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For, this leads me to observe that the opening of the book of conscience involves the opening of what St. John calls "another book "—the book of life.
By "another book" he means, as I take it, an opposite kind of book—a book which is not accusing, but commendatory.
He means that no man can read his name in the record of conscience except by the light of God—the light which streams from the great white throne.
It is not by the human that the state of humanity is seen, it is by the superhuman.
The perpetual presence of foul air is not only destructive to life, it is destructive to the perception of itself.
To make a man perceive it you must lift him into other air—pure air.
Why?
Because pure air means more life, and more life means more sensitiveness.
That is the secret of the moral expansion which St. John ascribes to death ; it is the increased sensitiveness which comes from increased vitality.
He would not limit the process to the last earthly hour.
He declares in his First Epistle that he regards all regeneration as a "passing from death into
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life."
But, come when and where it will, the effect of the higher life is ever the same; it reveals for the first time the lower.
"Sin revived, and I died,' says Paul, speaking of the revelation of Christ to his soul.
It is a bold, a striking statement.
It tells us that he only saw the darkness of to-day when it became his yesterday.
It was from the height of his new life that he began to survey the old.
It was by the light of heaven that he read the record of earth.
It was in the vision of the great white throne that he learned the blackness of his past.
The book of life was the preface to the book of conscience.
Before the throne of Moses he had said with sincerity, "Touching the righteousness of the law, I am blameless"; before the throne of the Lamb, he cried, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death ?"
And this is the comfort of all spiritual depression.
I cannot read my name in the book except by the light of God.
"Nathan said unto David, 'Thou art the man""
David
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himself never dreamed that he was the man; he thought another was the man; he evoked upon that other the vengeance of heaven.
The book was patent to him, open to him; but another's name was on the titlepage.
It is not my voice nor my light that says "Thou art the man"; it is a higher voice: and when that voice comes, it is a sore and solemn moment.
Yet it sends peace, not a sword.
It tells me I have passed already from death into life.
God alone could have revealed my distance from God.
Flesh and_ blood could never have told it; only my Father which is in heaven.
It is from the gates of the Divine temple that I behold the storm; it is from the shelter of the ark that I discern the waters of the flood.
Only he who has heard the still, small voice can detect the thunder, the earthquake, and the fire; for moral strengthening is the root of moral pain, and the book of conscience is a volume of the book of life.
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OF CHRISTIANITY
TO PAIN
REVELATION
XXI. 4
ALL ages of the world have had some Utopian ideal—some state which they figured to themselves as the condition of ultimate blessedness.
The Greek has his Elysian fields, the Spanish explorer his Eldorado, the Mohammedan his sensuous paradise.
It is quite a subordinate matter where they have placed its locality—on earth, in the sun, in the moon.
That which makes the difference between one heaven and another is not the where, but the what.
Man's paradise is not the place to which he is going, but the s¢aze to which he is going.
The moral value of his heaven lies, not in whether he believes it to be up or down, beyond or here; it lies purely in his answer to the question,
'What do you consider the goal of happiness ? "
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PAIN
In this passage St. John gives us a description of the Utopian condition of human life ; and, in relation to other popular faiths, it presents a feature of paradox.
Everything that is here said about the soul's joy is negative.
The seer throughout this book dwells more on the redress of injuries than on the conferring of benefits.
It is true we have the crystal fountain and the clear river, the pearly gates and the trees with luscious fruit.
Yet, none of these things can be called distinctively joys of the soul They are not sources of employment, occupation, permanent interest; their very joy depends on the existence of a previous joy.
All the statements here made about the ultimate joy of the city of God are negative statements—declarations of the absence of some present encumbrance,
That there is to be no temple with its burdensome rites of worship, no sea with its power of separation, no poverty with its ungratified hunger and thirst, no darkness with its disquieting fears, no death, no sorrow, no pain— these are the main elements which mark the privileges of the city of God.
Perhaps in no
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allegory descriptive of that city has human imagination so restrained itself.
The Republic of Plato has revealed its inner mechanism ; the paradise of the Koran has exposed its pleasures ;
John has contented himself with recording the lifting of the chain.
And yet Iam convinced that, for a purpose of this sort, the seer of Patmos is in the right.
I believe that what is wanted to create perfect happiness in the present world is not a new environment, but the removal of obstructions to the old one.
We hear a great deal about the limits of our environment.
Yet it is not really in our environment that our limit lies.
The powers of our minds are in themselves adequate to more than they ever perform.
It is not because our normal powers are weak that we fall beneath our efforts; it is because our normal powers are impeded.
The absence of full pleasure in this world is not the result of any defect in the world; it is the result of interference with the world.
Ask any man why he is not happy.
He will tell you, not that his discontent arises from the actual objects
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of this universe, but that it comes from some barrier interposed to the reaching of these objects.
Blindness, deafness, lameness, bodily defect ot every kind, the backward stream of heredity, the clashing of competing interests, the quarrels of friends and enemies, the shortness of individual life—these, and a hundred other privations, are the secret of that pessimism which has so large a share in human nature.
The truth is, however different it is from the common view, St. John has on his side the philosophy of the subject.
To be on the line of things in this world is what we call happiness; to be diverted from the line, stopped on the line, or driven back on the line, is what we call unhappiness.
Unhappiness is always the result of obstacle—diversion from the line of march.
Accordingly, St. John takes it for granted that the aim of Christianity is happiness:
"there shall be no more pain."
This is only in other words to say that the natural order will be followed out.
The life of Christ is a sacrificial life— in this world and in all worlds.
But, though
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sacrificial, it must not be painful.
It must move on the &ze of sacrifice, must be unimpeded on that line.
Any absence of will would be an arrest to sacrifice.
Any sense of disagreeableness would be a retardation of the Christian life.
It is a requisite to the progress of that life that a man should enter into joy—the joy of his Lord.
He will change his idea of optimism, but he will be an optimist all the same, nay, he will find himself to be in the actual possession of the best possible world
—a world which meets all his desires, and which he would not exchange for any other.
But now a question arises.
If the goal of Christianity is the elimination of pain, how comes it that, in every branch of the Christian
Church, and still more in the regions outside the Church, Christianity and pain are associated?
How is it that those who have not entered within the pale have uniformly contemplated the entrance as a curtailment?
Why is it that, amongst those already within, the greatest saints have generally been regarded as the men who have borne most marks of suffer-
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ing and exhibited most traces of self-denial ?
Yhe symbol of Christ in the world is a cross.
The cross is to the Christian soldier what a medal is to the secular soldier—a mark of honour, an emblem of eminence.
Both individuals and communities have courted privation for the sake of Christ.
Men have gone into deserts, immolated themselves, lacerated themselves.
Women have sacrificed the joys of family and home, have relinquished the leading fashion and the homage paid to beauty, that they might spend their lives in serious thought.
Kings have thrown away their crowns that they might sit in sackcloth and ashes.
A tendency so widely spread, so variedly spread, must have some root in human nature, some root in the facts of the case.
Why is it that Christianity, professedly the ultimate abolisher of pain, should yet throughout the cycles of time have been linked with pain in the thoughts of the human heart?
Now, if we look at the passage before us, I think we shall find at least a suggestion of the answer.
The passage in our Authorised
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Here, the passing away to previous things is made the reason for the passing away of pain. I think this a superior rendering to that of the Revised Version, which treats the latter clause as a mere redundant repetition.
What I understand the seer to say is that pain shall pass away when the eed of it passes away.
At present it is bound up in the constitution of nature, because there are elements in the life of man which make its existence desirable.
Pain exists now because it has a function, and a beneficial function.
Whenever those elements which make it desirable shall be either removed or transformed, it will lose its function, and therefore will cease to be.
If we accept this reading, we shall find an answer to the paradox within the passage itself.
Christ, the ultimate abolisher of pain, has a present use for pain.
He has a function for it in the existing order of things.
It is not a state which could be tolerated in a_ perfect organism, but in the present imperfection of
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the organism it has advantages to the life of the individual.
It cannot pass away until the passing away of that which makes it necessary, that which retards the progress of the human spirit and impedes the development of the race of man.
There is, then, a present good in pain— something which justifies Christianity in being the custodian of pain.
What is it?
I think, in the present system of things, there are two moral benefits of pain.
It serves two ends, which, so far as I know, no other phase of our being can fulfil, Let us glance at each of these.
And, first, pain is, so far as I know, the only protest in the human constitution against something which is wrong.
It is the one protestant movement in the body-politic of man's organism, the only thing which raises its voice against existing abuses.
Pain is a signal—in the moral world the only signal.
It indicates danger on the line.
Without it the danger would be equally great, but not equally remedial.
It is the declaration that our health
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Hunger is the protest of the physical nature against further abstinence; lassitude is the protest of the mental nature against further work.
Always and everywhere pain is the Martin Luther of the organic frame-work ; it placards the walls of the city with the announcement that there is something wrong.
There are two states in which man experiences painlessness—at the top, and at the foot, of the hill.
In perfect health we have no pain ; in perfect disease we have no pain.
In the one case our members are so full of vigour that they are unconscious of their own life; in the other they are so mortified that all sensation has ceased.
Pain is never the lowest thing ; it is always on the middle road between the highest and the lowest.
It is that which leads from the one to the other.
It is the protest of to-day against yesterday on its way to to-morrow.
That is its function; that is its power.
Now, when this function exists in the moral
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nature we call it by a particular name—conscience.
Conscience is simply the hunger of the moral nature.
In itself it indicates convalescence.
It reveals the turpitude of a man's state, but it does not create it.
The revelation implies a higher altitude.
Sin cannot reveal sin any more than night can reveal night.
Pain is a mirror lit from above.
The forms projected on its surface are impure forms, but the light by which we see them is God's light.
Of all present things pain is that which has the most optimistic aspect; just because it is a protest, it is a prophecy.
It is the function of conscience to tell the mind what it is the function of headache to tell the body—that disease is not a normal thing, and therefore not a permanent thing.
As long as disease lasts, physical or mental, it is desirable that pain should last.
Disease without pain is disease without protest—hurrying down a steep place into the sea.
It is destruction unfelt, and therefore unopposed; it is peace where there is no peace.
That is why, in the present state of dilapidation, Christianity has not only
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The first gift of God is the quickening of the Spirit—the wakening into conscious suffering of those members of Christ's body who, from deadness in sin, have been insensible to anguish.
But there is a second function of pain in the present system of things; it is the longest line of human sympathy—the line by which the heart can travel farther than by any other route.
There are various lines of sympathy in the present order of the world.
Their defect is not that they are inadequate or wanting in intensity.
What they want is length of rail ; they need to be extended.
Kindred, 2., is a strong bond of sympathy ; and, if the membership in Christ's body were realised, it would be a universal bond.
But by the mass of mankind kindred is limited to special streams of heredity, and sympathy becomes merely the union of a clan.
Again, community of taste is a bond of sympathy ; but, because tastes are varied, it is for that very reason a source also of division.
More than either of these,
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a common joy is to higher natures a bond of sympathy; but it is only to Aigher natures.
To lower natures it is the reverse ; the jealous heart is not drawn to another by seeing him in possession of the same joy.
None of these lines go round the circle of humanity; they all fail to bind man as man.
But there is one thing which can, which does —the element of pain.
What kindred cannot do, what race cannot do, what identity of taste cannot do, what even common joy cannot do, is achieved in a moment from the lowest ground.
The sympathy with pain is the widest sympathy in the world.
There is nothing on earth which so equalises men.
The pains of nature are more potent in their uniting power 'than the pleasures of nature.
The beauty of the landscape is a sealed book to the unrefined soul; but the ills which flesh is heir to make their appeal to all.
In nothing did Christianity more show its wisdom than in attaching itself to the element of pain; in nothing did it so evince its discernment as in stooping to the lawermost.
Had the Son of Man, in the
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descent of His ladder of humiliation, paused at any height short of the ground, He would not have touched humanity as a whole.
The secret of His success, humanly speaking, is His appeal to that experience of pain which lies at the foot of the ladder, and is therefore the ground-floor of humanity.
Even Buddha never stooped so low; he told men that their pain was a delusion.
Christ started from the reality of pain.
He took up the cross of man.
He proclaimed His religion to be the bearing of the cross.
He called to Himself all that were labouring and heavy-laden; and there answered to His summons the representatives of all mankind.
Pain, then, has a second function in the present system of things.
There is something besides disease which prevents it from passing away—the limitation of human sympathy.
It is at present the only chain that constitutes the conscious brotherhood of man; destroy this chain, and there is no conscious brotherhood.
Whenever the time shall come when this, like the previous function, shall be un-
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needed, St. John says pain will disappear.
Science declares that in the world of evolution a thing will cease to live when it ceases to have a use.
So, says the seer, shall it be with pain.
When it has no longer a service to perform, it will die.
When the former things have passed away, when the constitution of human nature has been altered, when the recuperative principle of the organism has ceased to experience decay, when the limitations of the heart have yielded to the universal power of love, then will pain lose its function in the world, and with its function it will itself disappear.
It will have no more place in a system not diseased; it will have no more room in the perfection of a sympathy whose movements are already impelled by love.
When that which is perfect has come, that which is in part shall be done away.
Meantime, I cannot but remark that every step of modern civilisation has been a progress towards the abolition of pain.
Although pain is the natural heritage of culture, the history of modern culture has been a history of the
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We have seen a gradual mitigation of those retarding elements whose extinction the man of Patmos desired.
We have begun to "behold no temple" in the ideal city of God—to relax the bonds of discipline that divide one church from another.
We have begun to realise that there is "no more sea," through the swift modes of travel and the rapid transmission of messages.
We have experienced the illumination of processes which used to be conducted in secret, illustrating the words, " There shall be no night there."
We have restrained many forms of death—by the reduction of war, by the increase of sanitation, by the development of medical skill.
We have reduced the actual sum of sorrow and sighing —proved by the fact that suicide is no longer a glory.
We have minimised bodily suffering by the power of anzsthetics—by chloroform, by morphia, by cocaine; and we are aspiring, not in vain, to do it by mental force.
And the secret of all this strength has been Christianity itself—man's interest in the wants of man.
The treasures of this wisdom existed
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latently from the beginning; the Christian love of man revealed their hiding-place.
The spirit of sacrifice has been the true enricher of the city of God; the Lamb is the light thereof.