“Being confident of this very thing, that He which began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.”—Phil. i. 6 (R.V.)

The Intermediate Life is not a state of sleep, but a waiting time. But is it a time of mere waiting, and of unemployed quiescence? This would be no better than sleep. There must be a reason for the waiting. And what other reason can there be than that, during it, there is something to be done which can only be done then? S. Paul speaks, in the text, of work which he is confident will be carried on till it is brought to completion on the Day of Judgment. What is this work? We have seen that the Scriptural conception of the happiness of heaven is that it consists in the sight of God, the Beatific Vision. But there can enter the heavenly city nothing that defileth, nothing imperfect. It is the pure in heart who shall see God. Isaiah dare hardly approach the vision of God’s glory on earth, because he felt himself to be a man of unclean lips. The very heavens, the stars themselves, are not clean in God’s sight. And at death, who is pure? Who is free from stain? Who is perfect, that he should be fit to look upon God? Then, if no one that is imperfect can enter heaven, and none are perfect at death, can we not see what the work is that has to be done between death and the Resurrection? It is this work of purification, that the soul may be fitted for the vision of God in heaven. And this is what S. Paul is speaking of in the text. The work begun in life, under the conditions of earth’s life, shall not stop at death, but, under new conditions, shall be carried on to perfection until the day of Jesus Christ.

So far, then, we may say that we are treading on sure ground. But when we go on to ask how shall this work and process of purification be effected, and what is the nature and method of it, we are approaching a stage in our enquiry about which, it may be thought, nothing but conjecture remains, because nothing has been revealed. But let us see what light may be thrown upon this question. And, that we may narrow our enquiry within manageable limits, let us confine our attention for the present to the condition of those of whom it may with truth and reason be said that they died in the favour and grace of God, died in good hope of salvation, surely trusting that their sins had been forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ, and that, however imperfect and blemished with sin their lives had been, there was an assured forgiveness for them and a good hope of eternal mercy. We will not define the exact limits of this reasonable hope, nor attempt to show who are within or beyond those limits. We will only, in general terms, speak of those who have entered upon the Intermediate Life in a condition such as would make them capable of perfect purification. Certainly it is impossible for any of us ever to say of any one absolutely that he is incapable of such progressive purification. It is not possible, in Christian charity, to pronounce sentence upon any. And it may be, and we may indeed hope, that a vast number, a much larger proportion than many now imagine, will prove on their entrance into the Intermediate Life to be capable of such progress of effective purification as may fit them, each according to his measure, for the final salvation for which he may be qualified in that home where “there are many mansions.”

When then does this purification begin? Does it begin with dying? That has been already disproved. But so prevalent is the popular belief that dying has a kind of cleansing power in itself, that it is well to touch upon it once more. What is dying? It is simply the parting of the soul from the body. The soul, up to the moment of death, dwells in the body. At death, in a moment it ceases to dwell in the body. But have not the pain, it may be asked, and the very agony of dying a chastening and purifying force, serving in themselves to crown repentance, and to achieve, in the instant, the complete cleansing of the soul? Why should it be so? The pains which precede death are distinct from dying, from what we may call the act of dying. The act of dying is instantaneous. It is the moment, the crisis at which the soul takes its flight. The pains and agony which accompany the process leading up to death are not the pains and agony of dying at all. They are felt while the sick man is still living. They belong to his life, not to his death. At the moment of dying the sufferings are probably over. The body has just felt its last throb of sensible anguish, and, in the crisis of the soul’s departure, is incapable of feeling pain, and therefore is incapable of the discipline of pain. And it is the discipline of pain alone that has any cleansing power. And the discipline of pain went on in life up to the moment, if it be so, of the dying, and then ceased. But it belonged, as the pain belonged, to the life, and not to the death. During the life, at many times in the life past, the wholesome discipline of pain may or may not have been working a salutary change in the character, up to the very moment, perhaps, of death. But it ceased, as the pain ceased, at death.

This then we conclude, that the act of dying in itself, apart from the pain which may have preceded it, can have no moral effect, or work any moral change. Moral change, that is to say change of character, can only go on in life. Dying is a physical operation, not a moral act. At death the possibility of change of character has stopped, so far as this life can be the sphere of it. Life, not death, may be accompanied by cleansing, life on this side of death, and life on the other side of death, but not death, which is between, the mere transition from life to life, from one mode of life to another.

The soul, therefore, after death begins just where it left off, just as life left it, no better, no worse. It passes into the unseen world, pardoned, it may be, by God’s mercy, but yet no other than it was before it left the body. Even God’s pardon does not change the character, nor yet remove the tendency to sin. That still remains, alas! even in the penitent. The consequences of our acts follow upon our acts, and form our character. As there is uniformity in the law of cause and effect in the realm of nature, so, in morals, is it the case with what we do. Let a man yield to a temptation:—is he as strong against that temptation after he has yielded to it as he would have been if he had not yielded to it? We know that he is not. We know, by our own experience, that it needs a far greater and more strenuous effort to withstand the same temptation after previous yielding, than it did before. A man may repent and be pardoned, but he is what his sin has made him, weak and frail and prone to sin again. God’s pardon has cancelled his guilt, but it has not removed his tendency, nor the moral consequences, which sin has wrought upon his character.

This then is what is meant when it is said that the soul, which has received the gracious pardon of God before it left the body, is still, when it is launched into the Intermediate Life, clouded and disfigured with the stains and imperfections which it had contracted in this life. But God, Who has begun the good work of cleansing in this life, will carry it on in the life unseen, until the soul be made perfect in the day of Jesus Christ.

Who of us, the best of us, does not feel within him the bitterness of the lingering poison, which sin has deposited in his heart? The holier a man is, the more he is conscious of his sinfulness. To the end of life this must be so; for there is no reaching perfection here. Those, chiefly, who have made most progress in the struggle against sin here, know how hateful it is. The higher men rise here in the divine life, the more they discern their imperfections, because they can better measure them by the measure of God’s perfections. Each loftier level is but a new standpoint from which to lift the eyes, and view the peaks which soar upward towards infinite elevations. For God is holiness itself; and holiness is infinite, because God is infinite.