THE

UTAH GENEALOGICAL

AND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER, 1913.

THE "LARGER HOPE" FOR THE DEAD.

BY NEPHI ANDERSON.

The plan of life ordained for man in the heavens from the beginning provides salvation for every human soul who will accept and abide by its laws. This plan is called the gospel of Jesus Christ. By it provisions have been made to save in some degree of glory the whole human race, excepting only those who persistently refuse to abide by the law of righteousness,-who deny the truth and defy God's power. "All the rest shall be brought forth by the resurrection of the dead, through the triumph and glory of the Lamb.

* * *

"And this is the gospel, the glad tidings which the voice out of the heavens bore record unto us,

"That he came into the world, even Jesus, to be crucified for the world, and to bear the sins of the world, and to sanctify the world, and to cleanse it from all unrighteousness;

"That through him all might be saved whom the Father had put into his power and made by him,

"Who glorifies the Father, and saves all the works of his hands, except the sons of perdition, who deny the Son after the Father has revealed him; wherefore, he saves all except them." (Doc. & Cov. Sec. 67.)

This is the doctrine believed in by the Latter-day Saints, a beautiful, comforting doctrine of mercy for every soul, sinner though he may be, that God's divine compassion reaches out to every repentant soul, and gives him a chance, sometime, here or hereafter to turn and live. And provisions are made for all such who have missed the opportunity to obey the gospel law on earth in the vicarious work which the living are doing and may do for the dead. The Latter-day Saints understand these things, and

glory in the privilege afforded them of being saviors on Mount Zion.

Since this principle of salvation for the dead was revealed to the earth through the Prophet Joseph Smith, and the "spirit of Elijah" has been operating upon men, turning their hearts to their fathers in the great spirit world, this "Larger Hope" for the great mass of the departed dead has found lodgment in the hearts of many honest men and women. Gleams of light have penetrated the gloomy night which has hung as a pall over the nations.

And the past in this respect, has indeed, been the Dark Ages. In the name of the Christian religion, men have taught that the vast majority of the human race would never attain to salvation, and the terrible condition of lost souls which some of these religionists depicted were horrible to contemplate. St. Augustine, one of the early "Fathers" held out no hope for the unconverted dead. Calvin's doctrines were hard and unmerciful. Dante but reflected the belief of his time in his "Inferno." Oliver Wendell Holmes quotes from Calvin: "Although infants have not yet produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, they have the seed planted in themselves; nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed-bed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and adominable to God." He then adds these words of Jesus: "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." The genial Doctor then asks: "Do you mean, John Calvin, that heaven lies about us in our infancy?"

St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552) one of the earliest missionaries to the Indians, writes the following in his "Letters from Japan:"

"One of the things which most of all pains and torments these Japanese is that we teach them that the prison of hell is irrevocably shut, so that there is no egress. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, of their parents and relatives, and they often show their grief by their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope, any way to free them by prayer from that eternal misery, and I am obliged to answer that there is absolutely none. Their grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully: they almost pine away with sorrow. They often ask if God cannot take their parents out of hell, and why their punishment must never have an end; but they do not cease to grieve, and I can sometimes hardly restrain my tears at seeing men so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already done and can never be undone."

But the "Larger Hope" has come into the world, and in proof of this there are presented herewith a number of quotations from various broad-minded men who believe in love and light and justice rather than in their opposites.

"Ask any tolerable instructed Christian person and his instinct will respond what every teacher of the Church everywhere knows to be the truth. Ask him, Will any soul be lost, heathen, idolater, heretic, or if any form of hereditary unbelief or misbelief, if in good faith he was what he was, living up to the light which he had, whencesoever it came, and repenting where he did amiss? All Christendom would answer you, God forbid!"— Dr. Pusey. (1800.)

"The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself; therefore, those who have not yet closed it against themselves, in that the means of salvation, the redemption in Christ, has yet not been offered to them, will indisputably hereafter, when beyond the bounds of this earthly life, be placed in a condition to enter upon this way of return to God if they choose. And this, of course, also refers to those to whom, although belonging to the outer sphere of the Christian Church, the real nature of the Gospel has nevertheless not been presented; indeed, we may venture to hope that between death and the judgment of the world many deep misunderstadings, by which numbers were withheld from the appropriation of the truth, will be cleared away."-Dr. Julius Muller, (Quoted in Clark's For. Theol. Library vol. 2, page 483.)

"My belief is that in the end there will be a vastly larger number saved than we have any conception of. What sort of earthly government would that be where more than half the subjects were in prison? I cannot believe that the government of God will be like that." * * * Rev. Dr. Guthrie in Life, p. 511. (1803-1878.)

The Rev. Arthur Chambers of England printed a book called "Our Life after Death," in 1894. The following quotations are from the 1902 edition of that work:

"The view which has obtained currency in the past, and which is still entertained by a large number of Christians, is, that our Lord's work of saving souls is absolutely restricted to this Earth-life; so that, when once the breath has departed from the body of a person who may have died without a saving knowledge of the truth, his doom is fixed. No matter how unfavorable his lot may have been in this world; however unfortunate his environment: however small his chances compared with those of others, according to some, it makes no difference. What he will be for all eternity is determined by what he is at the moment of death. And the irresistible logic of this merciless conception is to make Death the hurler of ninety-nine out of every hundred persons into a hopeless perdition."

"No one abreast with the religious thought of the day will deny that this truth, concerning the saving work of Christ beyond. the grave. is silently, but surely, forcing itself upon the minds of men of all schools of thought in the Church. To many it has

come as a gleam of cheering sunshine to scare away the dark shadows lurking in the theology of the past.* * * The faith of thoughtful men has been assailed and threated by ugly doubts and questionings about God and God's goodness, and the recognition of this truth has answered their doubts and kept them to their Christian moorings, and so saved them from drifting out upon the troubled sea of unbelief. To many it has seemed little short of a fresh revelation from God. And yet it is no new truth; it is as old as the Gospel itself. It is so much a part of the Gospel, that were it shown to be otherwise, for many that Gospel would cease to be a Gospel at all."

"Now if we adopt the idea that the work of salvation is restricted to this side of the grave; if, in other words, the hope of redemption for the unsaved dies when physical dissolution overtakes them, we are driven, perforce, to admit that the Church's mission does not extend beyond this world. Although she herself, in the persons of those who constitute her, is partly in the Earth-life and partly in the Intermediate-life, yet she can do absolutely nothing for the vast majority who have crossed the border-line which divides the seen from the unseen.

"The following illustration will serve to show the unreasonableness of the idea: Suppose that a king of unbounded sympathy and unlimited resources formed in one part of his dominion a great society for the alleviation of distress which existed among his subjects. Imagine him, without either breaking up the society, or indicating that the work is not to be continued, removing the greater number of its members into another district of his empire, where distress is even more widespread than in the locality where they had hitherto been stationed. What should we say if it were told us that the great Society does nothing in the way of relief, except in the smaller of the areas of suffering? Why weaken the good work by taking away so many of the members from a place where they are so badly wanted, and placing them in a spot where, although there is plenty of scope, they must not labor for the cause! And yet that is the light in which the mission of the Church of Christ is regarded by many.

"It is appallingly dreadful to imagine that the greater portion of our fellow creatures have gone unsaved into the Unseenlife, and will be lost, because no one has told them of their Savior, or because preachers and teachers have misrepresented His Gospel.

"We tremble to think about it, and yet, at the same time, we are so constituted that it is difficult to acquire that tone of unthinking religionism which alone can save us from drifting either into infidelity, melancholy, or insanity.

"But everything is changed by the thought that Christ's Church is preaching her Master's Gospel in the Intermediatelife. The sense of unsatisfactoriness vanishes as a vision of possibilities looms into view. Be the earthly environment of men as

black and as unpromising as it may be, behind it is the sunshine of God's love and fairness, and the fact that at the Great Consummation-the "Restitution of all things"-there will be no creature to whom salvation has not been preached.

"We do not deny a future punishment for sin; but we differ very fundamentally from those who regard it in the lurid light of the doctrine of Undying Woe. On this point, they and we are at the opposite poles of thought. They view it as vindictive, hopeless, and everlasting; we, on the contrary, are convinced that it is fatherly, remedial, and terminable. The difference is enormous. Are they, or are we right? If the assumption is correct that the door of Divine love and mercy is forever closed and barred against the sinner when he departs this life, and that the judgment overtaking him in the World Beyond will be irremedial and final, then, the deduction as to post mortem evangelization and recovery cannot stand. In that case a preaching of Christ's Gospel (to the dead) would be useless, or worse.

"On the other hand, if all God's future punishments be Fatherly and remedial, as we in the light of the Scriptures correctly translated believe them to be, then, assuredly, the thought of the preaching of the Gospel after death will commend itself to our reason as being both fitting and propable. Yes, and the thought will be as a glorious ray of Divine sunlight dispersing that black cloud of blank hopelessness that has for centuries made gloomy and depressing the religion of Jesus."

In 1877 the Rev. Frederic W. Farrar, Dean of Canterbury, preached five sermons in Westminster Abbey. These were published later under the title "Eternal Hope." Because of their radical departure from the commonly accepted doctrine of no hope after death, they aroused much discussion. From the many splendid utterances contained in that volume the following are taken:

"How any man with a heart of pity in him-any man who has the faculty of imagination in even the lowest degree developed― can contemplate the present condition of countless multitude of the dead and of the living viewed in the light of such opinions ;— how he can at all reconcile them either with all he learns of God and of Christ in Scripture and by inward experience; how-as he walks the streets and witnesses the life in our great cities-he can enjoy in this world one moment of happiness however deeply he may be convinced of his own individual salvation-is more than I can ever understand."

"It is revealed to us that 'God is love'; and that 'Him to know is life eternal'; and that it is not His will that any should perish; and that 'as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive'; but how long, even after death, man may continue to resist His will:-how long he may continue in that spiritual death which is alienation from God:-that is one of the secret things which God hath not revealed. But this much, at any rate—