Unlucky to be With
God?
The following is an extract from a patriotic oration
delivered last July in a North Carolina town. The speaker, himself a war
veteran, was addressing his surviving comrades in memory and in honor of the
heroic dead. Which was all very nice and proper. But here is where he spoiled
it.
“Comrades, they are gone. They are dead. They have made the
supreme sacrifice. Their bodies sleep in the tombs of clay and their souls are
at rest with God, and we know not how lucky and how fortunate we are to be here
today.”
Get that? He says those who have managed to stay away from
God are lucky and fortunate, which is the same as saying that those whose souls
are at rest with God are unlucky and unfortunate.
That is a strange kind of talk Why is it such a misfortune
to be in heaven with God? Why are those left behind in this troublesome world
so much more lucky and fortunate than those who have arrived safe in glory?
That orator didn’t mean to slander God, nor to insinuate
that heaven was an undesirable community; but he simply allowed his old
orthodox teaching to run away with his common sense. If he had stopped long
enough to consider how it sounded he never would have said it.
But that’s the kind of nonsense that the “Immortal soul”
teaching always leads to. Why will people be such fools?
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