THE INFINITE LIFE OF MAN

DR. CHANNING'S advice to a young preacher was, Never preach from any but great subjects. My subject upon this occasion would, if I am not mistaken, satisfy his exigent ideal. It is the Infinite Life of Man. By this I do not mean a life of infinite duration. Whether the future life of our desire and faith is to be such a life, or is only to furnish-as one of my most gentle friends believes and loves to believe, having, she fancies, Tennyson's high warrant

"Some landing-place to clasp and say,
Farewell, we lose ourselves in light,'

this is too great a question to be entered upon here and now; or, at any rate, it is not a question to the discussion of which I find myself irresistibly attracted. There is an infinite life of man apart from his unending life beyond those graveyard mounds, which, to the imaginations of our hearts, are higher than the Alps or Himalayas. If we may trust the New Testament in this particular, there is even an eternal life of man which is not coextensive with the perpetuity of his in

dividual life beyond the grave. The words eternal life, as used in the New Testament, especially in the Fourth Gospel, have not unfrequently an extra-temporal significance. They do not express the idea of immortality. They do not express any continuance of the future life, but a quality of the life which now is. Eternal life is life which here and now is centred and stands fast in the Eternal-the Eternal who loveth righteousness. Eternal life is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. This is the New Testament doctrine. But the word infinite is not bound up with the idea of duration any thing like so much as the word eternal; and therefore, if it is legitimate to speak of the eternal life of man apart from any doctrine of his individual persistency, it is still more legitimate to speak of the infinite life of man apart from any such doctrine, not because of any denial of its truth or doubt of its importance, but because something else is just as true, just as important, which, in the average preaching and teaching of the Christian world, comes in for vastly less consideration.

This is the age of science, and we would not have it any thing but this. But is there not a little danger that in our admiration of the chemists and astronomers, the physicists and biologists, we may come to think of these as if they were exhaustive of the possibilities of life; as if what they do not know is not worth knowing; as if what cannot be proved with scientific tests, and expressed in scientific terms, must straightway be counted out? I grant the danger is not

so great as it appears to be; that there are men who talk as if they cared for nothing which is not purely scientific who might be caught a dozen times a day enjoying themselves in some quite unscientific manner, taking a quite unscientific satisfaction in this or that or the other thing, and feeling very sure of some things for which they could not give a single scientific reason. I have heard of a man who found abundant consolation for the wasting sickness of his wife in the opportunity it furnished him for scientific study of her case; and I have known another who seemed to me to miss almost entirely the human, infinite aspects, as I should call them, of his child, through making it, from the first moment of its individual existence, an object of unwearied scientific observation and experiment. But, fortunately, such cases are exceptional. And still the danger of which I have spoken is not imaginary. The loves of a man's heart may triumph over his morbid scientism, and insure him many a genuine thrill of infinite delight, while much besides that properly belongs to him may be forever missed.

To doubt if all the meaning and the joy of life can be reduced to scientific terms is not to doubt that all things go by law. But science, it must be remembered, is not the subjective human counterpart of the complete and perfect law of the Eternal. It is only the subjective human counterpart of a very little of that law, the merest fragment of it here and there. We cannot find out the Almighty to perfection. Doubtless we could not if we had æons instead of years for the

endeavor.

But we have years and not æons, and all that we can reduce to terms of law, with all our patience and persistency, in threescore years and ten, is but a hand's-breadth to the whole. In the mean time, life and the enjoyment of it do not wait exclusively upon our knowledge; do not fail us in direct proportion to our ignorance of the controlling laws of physical and spiritual phenomena. The scientifically comprehended, this is the finite; that is to say, the measured, the bounded. All which has not been thus comprehended, thus measured and bounded, is the infinite; and the life of man in this, his relish and enjoyment of it, is his infinite life. Deprive the average life of men of this infinite element, and it would shrivel to the merest fraction of its present amplitude.

As to assert this infinite element is not to deny that all things go by law, is not to doubt that if we were omniscient we could see the law of those things which are now most baffling to our search, even the most delicately beautiful, the most spiritually significant of them all-" the infinite hearing of a deaf Beethoven, the infinite vision of a blind Milton, a Michael Angelo's cry for liberty from the stones of the quarry in an age when the tongues of men were forced to be dumb"-as to assert an infinite element in life is not to doubt that if we could see as God sees, into the heart of all these things, we should see that every one of them was an expression of invariable law, nor less the rarest beauty that our eyes have seen, the dearest love our hearts have ever known--as