Memory in Another World.
"Son, remember." It is the voice, the first voice, the perpetual voice, which meets every man when he steps across the threshold of earth into the presence-chamber of eternity. All the future is so built upon and interwoven with the past, that for the saved and for the lost alike this word might almost be taken as the motto of their whole situation, as the explanation of their whole condition. Memory in another world is indispensable to the gladness of the glad, and strikes the deepest note in the sadness of the lost.
I. Memory will be so widened as to take in the whole life. We believe that what a man is in this life he is more in another, that tendencies here become results yonder, that his sin, that his falsehood, that his whole moral nature, be it good or bad, becomes there what it is only striving to be here. Whether saved or lost, he that dies is greater than when yet living; and all his powers are intensified and strengthened by that awful experience of death, and by what it brings with it. In this life, we have but the island memories heaving themselves into sight, but in the next the Lord shall cause the sea to go back by the breath of His mouth, and the channels of the great deep of a human heart's experience and actions shall be laid bare. "There shall be no more sea," but the solid land of a whole life will appear when God says "Son, remember."
II. Memory in a future state will probably be so rapid as to embrace all the past life at once. We do not know, we have no conception of, the extent to which our thinking and feeling and remembrance, are made tardy by the slow vehicle of this bodily organization in which the soul rides. From the mountain of eternity we shall look down and see the whole plain before us. The memory shall be perfect perfect in the range of its grasp, and perfect in the rapidity with which it brings up all its objects before us at every instant.
III. There will be a constantremembrance in another world.
IV. Memory will be associated in a future life with a perfectly accurate knowledge of the consequences, and a perfectly sensitive conscience as to the criminality of the past.
A. Maclaren, Sermons preached in Manchester,p. 111.
References: Luke 16:25. Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 294; vol. xxviii., p. 123; R. Duckworth, Ibid.,vol. xxii., p. 264; M. Dix, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,p. 257.