Chapter XI: Part 11

Then, when men have lived out their lives, learned their lessons, and stand where the shadow grows thicker, so that we try in vain to see beyond, what then? We preach a gospel of life, of an eternal hope. We believe that death, instead of being the end, is only a transition, the beginning really of the higher and the grander life. We cannot look through the gateway of the shadow; but we catch a gleam of light beyond that means an eternal day, when the sun shall no more go down. This we believe.

And we do not partition that world off into two parts, the immense majority down where the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever, and only a few in a city gold-paved and filled with the light of peace. Rather we believe it is a human life there just as here, that we are under the law of cause and effect, that salvation is not a magical thing, that we are saved only in so far as we come into accord with the divine law and the divine life. And, if anybody says we preach an easy gospel because we eliminate an arbitrary hell, let him remember we preach a harder gospel, a more difficult salvation, not a salvation that can be purchased by a wave of emotion or by the touch of priestly fingers, a salvation that must be wrought out through co-working with God in the building of human character, a salvation that is being right.

This is our gospel; but it is a gospel of eternal and universal hope, because we believe that every single soul is under doom to be saved sometime, somewhere. We preach the inevitable results of law-breaking, are they to last one year, five, a hundred, a thousand, a million, ten millions? There is no possibility of heaven except as people are in perfect accord with the divine law and the divine life; for that is what heaven means. You can no more get heaven out of a disordered character than you can get music out of a disordered piano. This salvation which we preach is the constituent element of life. You cannot have a circle if you break the conditions of a circle. You cannot have a river if you break the conditions the very existence of which constitutes a river. So of anything in God's natural world. There are certain essential things that go to make these what they are. So heaven, righteousness, happiness, the constituent elements of these are right thinking, right feeling, right acting, obedience to the laws of God, which make them possible.

We believe that God, through pain, through suffering, down through the winding ways of darkness and ignorance, one year, a million years, must pursue the soul of any one of his children until that child learns that suffering follows wrong, and must follow it, and that God himself cannot help it, and so, learning the lesson, by and by turns, comes back, and says: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am not worthy to be thy son: make me at least as one of thy hired servants. And then the love that has pursued all the way, that has been in the light and that has been in the dark, shall go out to meet him, and fall on his neck in loving embrace, and rejoice that he who was dead is alive again, and he who was lost is found.

This is the gospel we preach, a gospel of God's eternal, boundless love, the good news that every human being is God's child; that here on earth, co-operating with God and discovering his laws, we may begin the creation of his kingdom now; that we may broaden and enlarge it until it encloses the world; and that it reaches out into the limitless ages of the future. And this, as I said, is the gospel of the Christ, changed in its form, if you please, but one in its essence; for he came, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Change your purpose, accept the message, and come into accord with the divine life. This is the gospel that the Christ preached: this is the gospel we preach to-day.

Do I make, then, an extraordinary claim when I say that we are the Evangelical Church, that the church which preaches the gospel is here?