One Hundred Years Ago

The next newsletter, number 61, was not printed until September 1908. to fill hese history pages until then we will have extracts from later newsletters and some of the sermons of Alexander MacLennan.

A book of "Memoirs and Sermons of Rev, Alexander MacLennan" was published in 1906. This book is long since out of print but a pdf version is available, for those who are interested, by sending an email to the address on the contact page.

In writing to the Corinthians St. Paul says a striking thing about death. He classes it among the boons and blessings and advantages which are the heritage of the Christian. All things are yours, he says, the world, life, death, things present and things to come; all are yours. We are not surprised that he should count all the others as blessings, but it does at first seem a new thought that he should as much as say that death is one of the precious belongings of the Christian. Looked at with enlightened eyes death becomes no longer a thing of terror, but something which is all for good to man. Now, that view of death we owe to Christianity. Go back to the Old Testament, and, with the exception of one or two hints of a morning after the night, death is regarded with dread, with shrinking, and as a deplorable necessity in human experience. Turn to Greece and you find that the one form of melancholy which brooded over that people with whom we associate so much sweetness and beauty and light, was the shadow of death. And, wherever Christian light has not come, or where it is not appreciated, death remains a thing dark, mysterious, and hopeless. It is quite true that even without the Christian faith, men and women may brace themselves bravely to meet it, and many have done so. But it is one thing to face stoically the inevitable, and another thing to face it in the faith that it is no foe but a friend; that instead of its being an outrage and a blot on human experience, it is one of the unrecognised blessings and gains.

Now, we have a way of saying that what cannot be cured must be endured. And on the same principle, I can imagine people saying that it is making a virtue of a necessity to try to make out that death is a blessing. We have to go through it, so we may as well make the best of it and say the best of it we can. While that would be a method all for hope, and a way of distilling light out of a dark thing, what I say is, that we are not reduced to that somewhat forced optimism regarding this subject. We cannot learn of Christ without knowing well that part of His work was to take the sting from death, and to liberate those who, from fear of death, were in bondage of soul all their days. And the way in which Christ has done that is, first by His direct teaching about death, and then by passing through it Himself, and showing how it did not really touch Him, but left Him essentially as He was.

Now, to-day, there is room and call for the acceptance of a decently Christian view of death. Notwithstanding all that Christ has said and done, we are still more than half pagan in our attitude to physical death. We are its slaves, instead of its masters, and our attitude to it stands in need of Christianising.

I

Taking the general attitude and teaching of Christ as our guide, I think the first step towards a healthy and true doctrine of death is, to rid ourselves of the thought that physical death is due to sin, that if sin had not entered into the world there would have been no death of the body, and that but for Adam’s transgression all the life that ever was in the world would have continued until this day. This idea has been rooted in our thinking. And there is this much to be said for it. Certainly it is sin that is the sting of death. Sin hastens death, too, in many a case. It is sin that gives death its terror, for the sinner cannot but think of what may lie beyond death for him. In all these ways sin has made death a thing of terror, but, all the same, it did not cause death itself to be. Then again, on the surface at least, it seems as if Scripture gave support to the idea that the death of the body is due to sin. You ask, does not Genesis distinctly say, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die?” And does not St. Paul interpreting that, say – “Death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned?” Now, will you look at these passages which may represent others for a moment. The fact is when you read your Genesis you find that the passage, which declares the penalty for sin, takes physical death for granted as the natural heritage of man. And the real penalty for sin lies in the discordant relation it produces between man and his surroundings, man and his duty, man and his God. These are the results of sin as recorded in Genesis, for it continues - “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Man’s mortality is taken for granted. If you say, What do you make of that warning - “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die?” my reply is that the word die is not used here of the physical at all, but of the spiritual. As a matter of fact they did not die physically on the day that they ate of the forbidden fruit. What happened was inward. Spiritual deterioration and spiritual death began within them. And if I trace the use of the word “death” through the Gospels, and especially note the use of it by Christ, I find that with Him the word death had always this deeper significance. He did not use it of the body, except under protest, and then it was to accommodate Himself to the current coin of language. He will not speak of the parting of body and soul as death, but as sleep. He will not say the maid is dead, He says the maid is not dead. She is “asleep,” and yet according to common speech she was dead. “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth,” He said, and yet we know that Lazarus was dead. And all through you find Christ refusing to use the word “dead” of physical dissolution. He wished to teach us to look on it in a new way, in a kindlier way, not as an enemy but as a friend.

Besides Christ’s reluctance to use the word “death” of the physical, we have His constant use of it to denote a spiritual fact. The man who believes in Christ has passed from death to life. And yet we know that that man has no exemption from mortality, but his soul has had its resurrection. Again, “If a man keep My word, he shall never see death,” and yet we know that all saints reach Heaven through the gateway of what we call death. Evidently, therefore, Christ does not mean the death of the body at all, when He uses the word death, but something deeper and more awful, because it is spiritual. Then, if you consider St. Paul’s use of the word, you will find no support to the idea that physical death is due to sin. He also employs this-word death as a spiritual term. He says that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made him free from the law of sin and death; but it was plain to him that the Christian faith did not exempt a man from passing through the valley of the shadow. Good men die in that sense as well as bad men. And so, without burdening what I am saying with quotation, it is, enough to say that, just as the life which Christ gives, is not mere physical existence, but an inward and soul enrichment, so the death, from which He saves us, is not the death of the body, but of the soul and the spiritual powers. There is a death which is the wages of sin, but it is a death of the highest within, of the soul, of the powers of the soul. Christ sought to produce a right attitude to the death of the body by refusing to regard it as death, and by asking men to look on it as simply as they do on the sleep that rounds a day’s toil. And St. Paul drove home his Master’s teaching.

Further, Christianity not only urges us to separate mortality and sin, and so to look upon physical death not as due to sin, but as an inevitable incident in our human experience: it goes further. It bids us use the scientific light we have on the subject, and when we do that, we find for one thing that the testimony of the rocks on which God has written part of His revelation, is that long before man appeared, death was the natural lot of living things. And what sin did when it intruded, was to make what was simple and natural, to be shadowed about with gloomy terror.

II

Again, death is ours, in the Christian sense, when we look on it as a divine method of progress in the world. Look at it not as in the individual life, in which strong emotions blur our view, but in the light of God’s broad and universal purposes. Nature is our teacher. And Nature teaches us every autumn and every spring time that death is the condition of further life. The old life dies that there may be new and fuller life. And in human experience it is the same. It is all in the interests of progress that instead of a set number of men, living on and on, there should be a multitude of successive generations, each of a fuller humanity than the one that preceded it. It is in the interests of humanity that man’s life should pass away after the brief threescore years and ten, when he has played his part and made his contribution to the enrichment of humanity. Another generation is knocking at the door, whose fresh dreams and active energies will carry on life’s tasks. When we think along lines like these, lines which Christianity has taught us specially to follow, thinking of the general march of good, rather than of the individual life, we can see as we could not do otherwise, that a Wise Providence has made death His factor in working out His purposes. And if you think that although the race benefit, the single man loses, you are wrong. Because you forget that, although man’s earthly work-time is comparatively brief, when he has done his part and lived his life here, it is God’s intention that he should play a further part, God alone knows how glorious a part, in the Unseen. You will then gladly acquiesce in God’s way of making death a stepping-stone, not only to the higher life of the man, but of the race as well.

III

Then again, Death becomes our friend and not our enemy, when we remember how the thought of its approach affects our attitude to life and duty. Were there no death, no limit to man’s existence here on earth, how could he realise the value and meaning of life? “Man goeth unto his work and to his labour until the evening,” but his work is made strenuous and earnest when he has before him this fact that “the night cometh when no man can work.” You have not an eternity in which to bless the world. You have only a few short days. You must seize the days. The fact that there is a time limit makes life fuller and greater and nobler to the earnest man. You have this idea expressed in match-less English in George Elliot’s Legend of Jubal. In the old sweet days before men knew death save in the solitary deed of Cain, they lived in idleness. They played and sang and danced the live-long day. Life had no seriousness and no greatness. But when the second death came, and men saw that this was to be the lot of their race, a new meaning stole into life. Time took a new value, affection became nobler, men took up life’s tasks in a new spirit. Death bade them live in earnest. Death became as it now is, a spur to activity.

IV

And if the thought of how brief our time is, makes us live the better, is it not also true that the thought that we may lose our dear ones gives an added tenderness to all the relations of life? I may lose my loved ones. They will be all the dearer to me, while I have them, on that account. And if this possibility of loss were always, not exactly in the fore-front, but just in the background of our thoughts, how it would sweeten and hallow all our love! Would it not crush back the angry word? Would it not make us more forgiving? Would it not root out much of the selfishness and meanness that corrupt our lives? Would it not keep our thoughts off our petty disagreements and unite us in loving labour for one another to sweeten the days that are, for the day will too soon near its close?

V

And if you will allow me to come a little closer still, Christianity makes death kindlier even when it robs us. There are facts about it which will mitigate our grief even in our darkest hour. Death is not loss but gain to those who die. Death lulls for ever the storm, and cools the fever, and ends the strife. And in the desolation it leaves, it is the survivor that dies. But even to the desolate this thought comes. No good life, however short, is lived in vain. Twenty years of such a life is an imperishable gift to home and friends. The very incompleteness of such lives urges those who remain to complete them in their own lives. Do you never find yourself referring to the spirit of one who is gone for approval and for inspiration? We neither pray for the dead nor to the dead, and yet we know that in a very true sense they are the “sceptred sovrans that still rule our spirits from their urns.” They are part of the cloud of witnesses - witnesses in this that they have given their testimony, and also in this sense that they seem to be onlookers while we strive and labour. Dr Fairbairn tells how he once had a bosom friend who was more to him than a brother. They were much together. Together they faced the breeze, they climbed the hillside together, they studied together. The one helped to keep alive the flame in the other’s breast. The same week saw them started in their different spheres of labour, the one to die, the other to work to the close of his longer day. “But,” says Principal Fairbairn, “he has gone, and yet he has lived ever since, and I live feeling as if the soul within me belonged to the man who died. A part of him has lived in me to move me on to noble ends. Death robbed, but death gave back more than it took.”

VI

And, last of all, let me say that Death is our friend through Christ, in that it unites more than it divides. We dwell in our sorrow on the separation. In reality death rather unites. The majority, as we commonly say, are on the other side. Death opens the door for us to join them. Tennyson, in a semi-pantheistic way, says:-

"The sun, the moon, and the stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not the symbol and sign of our division from Him?"

He feels that the life that is, only divides from the life universal. We, in a Christian sense, say the same. And the more treasures we have in Heaven the more will death be to us the symbol of union and less the sign of separation.