The Eternal Not Opposed to the Present

“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”—2 Corinthians iv. 18.

The passage: We look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are unseen, for the things seen are temporary and the things unseen are eternal.

We sometimes speak of Time as a river and of Eternity as the ocean it flows into. Some minds may find truth in the comparison, but it is likely to mislead. It gives us a vague impression, not exactly a thought, that we float down the stream of Time in this world and that Death first brings us into contact with Eternity. Many phrases that have passed from popular preaching into the ordinary vocabulary of theology carry this notion. St. Paul’s words suggest a very different one. He says that things seen are temporal (πρόσκαιρα) and things unseen are eternal. He does not call one present and the other future, or say that here he is among passing things and hereafter will be among permanent ones. He feels himself in the midst of both, here on earth. The visible world is around him, and he has senses to take it in and a heart able to enjoy it. An invisible world is around him too. His senses do not take it in, and his heart trembles at it and sometimes would flee from it. Yet he is sure he has faculties for conversing with that world and that his heart will be content with no other. He is truly a man only so far as these faculties are awake, have their proper objects, and are occupied with what satisfies the spirit. His senses may be alive, but he is not alive unless he has something they cannot testify to. Strictly, even the senses are not alive without that. Their reports are confused and inconsistent, and they are overpowered by the world unless he is up and at work to direct and govern them.

But how can he gain this power over them? Who will uphold him, and show him that other world to which he belongs and of which he thinks himself an heir, but which seems full only of vague phantoms? St. Paul teaches that this is the very purpose of God’s revelations. They show men the Kingdom that eye has not seen nor ear heard, and that has not entered the human heart, so that they may make their home in it and own it as their proper dwelling-place. This is the purpose of all the divine disclosures the Bible records, and especially of the last one, when the Son of God took flesh, preached “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” and suffered death to open that Kingdom to all believers.

For He opened to men the nature of God. He showed them the Image after which they were created. There had been righteous kings and subjects; He revealed the Righteousness from which theirs was derived. There had been men who taught Truth and suffered for it; He could say, “I am the Truth,” and show its fulness in both teaching and suffering. There had been stout fighters and messengers of peace; He unveiled the perfect Peace that remains in the midst of tribulation. There had been joyful hearts and sorrowful ones; the Divine Joy was seen in its perfection in the Man of Sorrows.

So the Kingdom of God that Christ preached, said was at hand, and manifested, is called the Kingdom of Righteousness and Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. These are no longer qualities in human minds, subject to the accidents of those minds. They belong to the Substance of God.

I. St. Paul’s first words need no verbal proof. Every year, day, and hour of our life on earth demonstrates them. Spring and autumn both witness to them, and we hear them as much in the songs that welcome a newborn child as in the knell over the dead. But suppose the words were changed to “Things present are temporal.” I believe conscience would then utter a deep groan and a solemn protest instead of agreeing. I can bear the changing seasons, the death of the old and the birth of the new. I can see in that change an infinite beauty it would be a calamity to lose, because I am sure the beauty is not for an hour, belongs to the permanent, and will not pass away. I can bear to see a bright flower fade, because I know its brightness and glory have not ceased and will not cease. If this is so in nature, we have still clearer assurance in our hearts that no sympathy, affection, gentleness, faith, hope, love, or devotion to truth ever seen in a human creature can perish. It may, alas, be only temporary in the man who showed it, a flash of light followed by thicker darkness. But the light has been there, and it has made known something deeper than the foundations of the earth. It came from God and belongs to God. Whatever happens to the outside of things, this unseen thing, which I have felt, experienced, and conversed with, shall not sink into the grave of nature or be counted among its trophies. Christ’s resurrection affirms to all generations that it shall not. The Spirit who works to quicken, preserve, and restore is the pledge that it shall not. They echo and fulfil the oath of the Eternal Father that it shall not.

So the emblems of decay and death, even decay and death to the shrines of all we hold dearest, are not intolerable. Only the things seen are temporal. When we pierce the sensible veil and ask what truly is, we meet what St. Paul declares: “This is not for a season; this is eternal.”

II. It would be utterly oppressive to think the present belongs only to Time. I think we would be lost in hopeless perplexity if we identified Eternity with an endless past or an endless future. Is eternity behind those ages, perhaps indefinitely long, in which geologists find the earth passing through its changes before it became fit for man? I do not lament the strength of the evidence that such ages were. I thank God we may hear of them, if only because the dreariness of the thought drives us to think of what was: the fixed, unchangeable love that presided over these changes and was to bring forth a divine and satisfying Creation at last. After that long struggle of life with death, what repose to hear: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men!”

If we need this relief from the eternity behind us, how much more the anguish of trying, with dates and myriads of numbers, to meditate on the eternity before us! The process is crushing and it is not honest, so after a while it is dropped. No one perseveres in it, however much he feels the need of bringing Eternity before him. He finds himself among hopeless contradictions. He may try to keep up the sense of endlessness by feeding his fears, but he cannot. He casts it off as a phantom of superstition, though something within him keeps witnessing that phantoms and superstitions belong to Time and Sense, and that Eternity is the great Reality that alone gives reality to what he sees.

Is it not the revelation of the same Word who was before all worlds, the Son who dwelt in the Father’s bosom and delighted to accomplish His purposes of creative love, that makes the thought of ages upon ages to come an ever new unfolding hope instead of a vision of despair? We can think of Him as the eternal ground of all things: they come from Him, hold together by Him, and will be gathered up in Him. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is the same when He said “Let there be light” as when He prayed in the garden “Let this cup pass from Me.” He is the same when He rose and said “Peace be unto you,” the same in His care of the Church and the universe in every period, and the same when He comes again in His Father’s glory to judge the living and the dead. This is possible; this is an eternity we can contemplate. It includes the endurance of every person and thing the Word has created and redeemed. From it come such cheering messages as “Of that which the Father has given Me I will lose nothing,” “Given a ransom for all, to be testified in due time,” and “Those that sleep in Christ shall God bring with Him.”

Such an Eternity is not cast in the mould of time. It is not an endless series of years but a solid possession for each moment, a treasure we are to claim now so that we may hold it in whatever new circumstances life or death brings.

III. St. Paul speaks of looking at, and looking into, the things unseen and eternal. He regards this as the highest privilege and the proper occupation of a man. No one knew better that a man cannot be always busy with the future, and that if he were he would be a useless, restless, bad man. We have work to do here and now. Whoever shrinks from it, or does it half-heartedly because he dreams of good things elsewhere, sins against God. But we do not turn men from any task when we tell them they have a right to look into eternal things and that they live and move and have their being in the midst of them. Steady, habitual converse with these things makes men free and bold to act, makes their acts the result of deliberate purpose rather than sudden impulse, and takes them out of the sway of the visible and changeable so that they can rule it as an instrument of their Creator’s purposes. If we tell a poor toiling brother to think of death and what comes after, we sometimes comfort him, because he links death with rest. But often we seem to mock him, for what chance has he to speculate about what will be when what is presses on him so heavily? The teacher who says to him, “There is a world of invisible treasures about you that you may enter at once, though you will not exhaust them in millions of years; what is close beside you is more precious than what is far off; what is your own is worth all the tangible things you could grasp with a hundred hands,” is no mocker. He tells the poor man a secret by which a serf may become a free human being.

What he says to the man ground down by manual toil and poverty is just what the man with most leisure for intellectual pursuits, and every outward enjoyment within reach, needs to hear as much. His leisure to think about everything that meets his eye and ear may be the very temptation to forget that he himself is more wonderful than they. His power to explore a vast circumference of objects may keep him from seeking a centre. His facilities for getting what he can call his own, and shut others out from, may leave him ignorant of what is truly his own, which makes his life a reality and not a shadow. So the busy professional man may become a slave to his work, and at last to the material advantages it brings. The man with a world of treasures at his command may become their slave and find them escaping him whenever he wants to use them. Both become feverish and restless, unable to do their common tasks heartily or to draw delight from the things they would count it a calamity to lose. This dependence on outward circumstances is what a heathen contemporary of St. Paul, who had probably never heard his name, pronounced the real servitude. He was thankful that his own birth into outward, nominal servitude had been one means of teaching him to rise out of it.

IV. So much Epictetus can tell us. We have heard such lessons since childhood, and they have become commonplaces. What more can an Apostle bring? A message that makes us willing to turn from the visible things that hold us captive to the invisible things that will make us free. Let us not hide the truth: we cling to the one because we are afraid of the other. There is a Conscience that makes cowards of us all. I do not like to venture into those dark chambers of my soul’s imagery. “I expect to find nothing there but grisly shapes, recollections of the past and anticipations of the future, that will haunt me in all my works and pleasures. What charm have you for laying these spectres? What poppy or mandragora will dull or destroy this sense of an ever-present, eternal Self, which may make a Hell for me in the midst of Paradise? Do not draw me away from a region where I can hear some soothing melodies and see some visions of loveliness, however soon they pass, only to bring me where there is just light enough to show the shadows cast by my own body! If I am to dwell with those shadows and no others forever, let me have something else to gaze upon while I can.” This, brethren, is why we cannot profit by Epictetus’s noble teaching, and could not profit by St. Paul’s if he had only told us to look at the unseen and eternal. Men tremble at eternity, whether they think of it as present or to come. They must, unless a Gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation comes out of it. It is no sham terror, bred by the arts of priests, that I feel when the thought flashes on me, “I am an eternal being. I cannot shake eternity from me. It goes with me where I go and stays with me where I stay.” Death then has no look of repose. If it is a sleep, it is, as Hamlet guessed, a sleep full of frightful dreams. It stands out, not as poetical allegory but as stern fact, the twin-sister of Sin, and the two seem to be the powers and realities of the universe. I shall think so unless I hear a voice from heaven saying: “No, they are not the powers and realities of the universe. They are the contradictions of its order, the lies against its Author. And He has Himself come down into this earth and this flesh of ours to struggle with them, vanquish them, and trample on them, that you may do the same.”

Unless I believed that the voice bidding me turn from visible things to invisible, eternal ones was saying “Come unto me, and I will give you rest,” I would not dare to invite anyone to give up even the coarsest, most sensual gratifications, however shameful I thought them or sure of where they lead. I would have nothing solid to offer in exchange. I would have to believe that when I turned to look at the eternal things near me I should find not the dark Demon of Self but Christ the deliverer from Self. I would have to believe that His death proclaimed a real conquest of Sin and Death, and His resurrection an actual new birth and new life for our race.

But if I may speak of a Lamb of God who has taken away the sin of the world, and affirm that He is with us and ready to give us the eternal life that was with the Father and that He has manifested to us, then I can boldly ask you all to look at and into the things unseen and eternal. I am sure God Himself urges and helps us to claim this great privilege of our humanity. I am sure His Spirit is always with us to educate us into the inward affection, faith, and trust to which we are naturally disinclined, as we are to every manly effort, however great its later reward. I am sure that if we walk among temporal things as if the eternal treasures were around us, and as if we were resolved not to lose them, they will unveil themselves to us more and more. The Love, Goodness, and Truth at the foundation of the universe will come out to us through all the thick clouds that our selfishness and other men’s have raised to hide them. We shall learn that we have the same property in them as in air and light, and that they have power to make us like their own nature and our acts conformed to them. Then with what opened eyes shall we look at the visible and temporal! What living beauty will clothe them, cast on them from that deeper, permanent world they encircle! The fixed order and orderly alternations of Nature will speak to us of an enduring Majesty and an Unchangeable Truth, which can yet show itself in infinite varieties, catch every passing light, and reflect itself in the ocean or the dewdrop. And the endless flux and reflux of life, or what is called life, in cities will drive us to seek, in our daily walks and ordinary tasks, something to rest in, a home and peace that outward tumults cannot interrupt. If we seek, we shall surely find. Every face, however furrowed with sorrow, distorted by passion, or stupefied by self-indulgence, will witness to us of Eternity. For the sorrow, passion, and self-indulgence it shows are the enemies each of us must wrestle with daily, because he is a spiritual being and a citizen of an eternal kingdom. If we think they have triumphed in this or that man, that may make us tremble for him and for ourselves. But it must not make us forget that Christ has died to redeem that man’s spirit and ours and to vanquish his enemies and ours. To lose that faith is to make the visible things God has given us richly to enjoy our prison-house, and the invisible things we shrink from and yet confess our perpetual torment. To hold it fast is to wait for the full revelation of the Eternal Life that is in the Son of Man, and to look not for a new Heaven only but a new Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness.