I am perfectly well aware that the most of us who are here have given
up this idea, though there may remain fragments and suggestions of it
in our minds still haunting the chambers of the brain, not yet
outgrown, not yet cleared away. But with most people in the modern
world, if they are sincere, if they are consistent, the one great
question with them is whether they are to be saved or lost in another
life. And, if this be the true theory of things, then not only ought
men to bend all their thought, their energies, devote their
enthusiasms, consecrate their time and money to it as much as they do,
but a thousand times more.
We look, perhaps, with a sort of amused curiosity, some of us, from
what we regard as our superior point of view, at a man like Mr. Moody;
and yet Mr. Moody is one man out of a million for his consistency and
consecration to the thought which underlies all the Protestant churches
of the modern world, with the exception of a few here and there. Mr.
Moody believes that this life is a probation ended by death. There are
thousands on thousand on thousands of men who say they believe it, who
still cast in all their influence with churches that are based on it,
and who yet devote their energies mainly to making money, to attaining
social success, to pleasures of one kind or another, to political
ambitions, who live as though this great fate were not overhanging the
world, who meet their neighbors for pleasure or business, believing, if
they are sincere, that this neighbor is heedlessly walking on to the
brink of a gulf, and yet never speaking to him about it, never saying a
word to imply that they really believe it; and yet this fear hangs over
them, haunts their consciousness waking or sleeping; and, if you ask
them if they believe it, they will say they suppose they do.
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