"WOULD WE LIVE OUR LIVES AGAIN?"

Press, Volume LX, Issue 11751, 27 November 1903, Page 6

"WOULD WE LIVE OUR LIVES AGAIN?"

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PMS3. Sir, —In your issue of last Saturday you had a leader on the above wubject, which waa exceedingly interesting and suggestive. You aro doubtless right when you say in your concluding sentence, "there are few who would not consent to take on this mortal coil a second time." The fact is a very sad one, and as true as it is sad. There must be a reason, or reasons, for this prevailing state of mind. The churches for centuries have been preaching a "gospel" which has done little or nothing to turn the tide of this almost universal feeling, which, one would think, they ought to have done. No doubt heaven has been represented as a place of golden crown and golden streets, where harps are played by angels, and where tears never dim the eyes, but the Gcd of heaven has been set forth in thousands of instances in a way that does not make Him attractive, but the apposite. Ido not wonder that so many people would rather live their lives over again, in view of the teaching even of the modern pulpit. If, according to the creed of some of the churches, God sends some to heaven and some to hell, not for anything in the creature, but for His own glory, and if, as a preacher said the other week, in the writer's hearing, that infants are born damned, then it would be strange, indeed, if the people preferred the future world to the present. Preachers for the most part, as it would appear, have settled down to the thought that theology is a fixed science, and that, unlike all others, it does not admit of expansion, or radical reconstruct ion, and hence the painful uniformity of sermons, and the doleful repetition of theological phraseology, like so many voices from tho long dead past, and the preachers believe, or profos* to believe, that this condition of things, and thi» mode of teaching, is calculated to make the people lit for heaven and long to be there. From your leader it would appear to have the opposite effect, and that the most of them would rather be here. To my mind this should not be, and ought not to be, but so long as we have such a grotesque representation of God, of the Gospel, of the Founder of the Gospel movement, from so many pulpits, just so long shall the voice of the people in favour of earthly habitations, and that, when they are forced to give them up, it will be under a subdued or outspoken protest.— Yours, etc., JOSEPH PRESTON.