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THE KING’S BUSINESS
AS TO PURGATORY. To meet this Scriptural teaching some favour one form or another of purgatory. In the Church of Rome purgatory refers to Christians who have not expiated all the judicial re sults of sin in their life-time and who need to be purified by the discipline of pain and thereby made ready ior Heaven. Rut this doctrine falls at once when the Scriptural teaching of justification is seen, and it can, there fore, be set aside. Others, however, indulge the hope that there will be some opportunity of purgation in the form of probation after death, and it is this “larger hope,” as it is often called, that men are encouraged to accept today as an essential part of the Christian Gospel. Here again, however, the one simple and all-em bracing question is, “What saith the Scripture ?” The question is not t really whether men’s destiny is fixed at death but whether there is another chance for those who reject Christ. We have nothing to do at present with those who have never heard of our Lord; they are left confidently and completely with God, knowing that “the Judge of all the earth will do right.” The one inquiry is as to those who have had the opportunity and have deliberately neglected and rejected it. For such, Scripture gives not the. slightest hint of another pro bation, or of purification in the inter mediate state, still less of any penal suffering that will produce results which have proved impossible here. It is often forgotten that the future life will still have the problem of the will, and unless the Divine attitude to man is entirely changed (and of this we have no indication) there cannot be coercion there any more than there is here. God impels but never com pels, anything implying compul sion must be ruled out. Whatever we may say of the rich man and Lazarus the words “a great gulf fixed” are
surely intended to imply and teach a profound truth. And it is or ought to be impossible to attribute to future purgation what Christ and the Holy Spirit could not accomplish here. THE CONSCIOUS SOUL. Another view held at the present day is that of the unconsciousness of the soul between death and judg ment. This is urged because thè New Testament frequently uses the figure of “sleep” , in connection with death. But it may be said without any ques tion that the weight of Scripture is in favour o f . “sleep” being associated with the body, and of consciousness being the condition of the soul from the moment of death. If unconscious ness were true it would be difficult to understand.why the unrighteous are guarded for punishment unto the day of judgment (2 Pet. 2:9). And also why the Apostle should speak of be ing with Christ as “very far better,” since this would not be true in view of the believer’s conscious fellowship with God in the present life. Again, even when all allowance is made for the symbolical and metaphorical teach ing, the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus does not indicate unconscious ness (Luke 16:23). The absence of the body does not prevent the angels from being conscious, while, of course, God as Spirit is necessarily conscious. The theory of the sleep of the soul creates more difficulties than it solves and is faced with passagés of Scrip ture which are entirely opposed to it. This solemn subject of the future of the wicked cannot be dissociated from the Bible teaching concerning Sin and Atonement. The sense of sin is. very rare today* and we are told with complacency that the last thing a healthy-minded man troubles himself about is his sins., .Much tn modern life confirms the truth of this statement, and the result is that the doctrine of the Atonement falls into the background, because men do not
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