world's history? What of all the
old-world souls who could not have known Him here on earth? For you
know that there is no salvation save by Jesus Christ. You have read in
the Old Testament of whole nations, men, women and little children,
swept away in one dread destruction. What of them? You have wondered
about the vast heathen world passing in thousands every day into the
Unseen, with no knowledge of Him. You have sometimes read the
Registrar-General's return of deaths in your city, and thought of all
the little dead children, brought up in evil homes; of sullen prisoners
hardened in the jails; of grown men and women in the city's slums who,
through the hardening influence of circumstances, had little real
chance of ever being touched by that tenderness of God's love which
leads men to love Him in return. You know they have not died in
Christ. What of them?" If you had to stand at some death-beds at
which some of us have to stand you would feel as we do the insistent
pressure of that question for all in the ancient or modern world--the
vast countless world of the dead--who had no real chance of knowing
Christ or being touched by His love here on earth.

Oh, the generations old
Over whom no church bell tolled
Christless lifting up blind eyes
To the silence of the skies.
For the innumerable dead
Is my soul disquieted!

Trust them with God, says this teaching of the Creed. Christ will do
right by them. Christ does not forget them.

Trust Him, though thy sight be dim,
Doubt for them is doubt of Him.
* * * * *
Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen
Yearns to reach those souls in prison,
Through all depths of sin and loss
Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross.
Never yet abyss was found
Deeper than that Cross could sound.

In these two chapters we have touched on the chief statements in the
New Testament and in the beliefs of the primitive Church as to the near
Hereafter. There are others of less importance to be referred to as we
go on. It seemed well to lay down some basis to proceed on.

[1] See Plumptre, _The Spirits in Prison_.

CHAPTER V

THE CRISIS OF DEATH

In an earlier chapter I placed you in imagination in the darkened death
chamber, looking on the face of your dead and feeling the keen pressure
of the inevitable questions: What has happened to him? Where is he?
What is he seeing? What is he knowing in that mysterious world into
wh