“A great mist over the things of eternity” by J.C. Ryle

“We live in an age of progress,—an age of steam-engines and machinery, of locomotion and invention.

We live in an age when the multitude are increasingly absorbed in earthly things,—in railways, and docks, and mines, and commerce, and trade, and banks, and shops, and cotton, and corn, and iron, and gold.

We live in an age when there is a false glare on the things of time, and a great mist over the things of eternity. In an age like this it is the bounden duty of the ministers of Christ to fall back upon first principles.

Necessity is laid upon us. Woe is unto us, if we do not press home on men our Lord’s question about the soul!

Woe is unto us, if we do not cry aloud:

“The world is not all. The life that we now live in the flesh is not the only life. There is a life to come. We have souls.”

Let us establish it in our minds as a great fact, that we all carry within our bosoms something that will never die.

This body of ours, which takes up so much of our thoughts and time, to warm it, dress it, feed it, and make it comfortable,—this body alone is not all the man.

It is but the lodging of a noble tenant, and that tenant is the immortal soul! The death which each of us has one day to die does not make an end of the man.

All is not over when the last breath is drawn, and the doctor’s last visit has been paid,—when the coffin is screwed down, and the funeral preparations are made,—when “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” has been pronounced over the grave,—when our place in the world is filled up, and the gap made by our absence from society is no longer noticed.

No: all is not over then! The spirit of man still lives on.

Every one has within him an undying soul.”

–J.C. Ryle, Old Paths: Being Plain Statements of Some of the Weightier Matters of Christianity (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1898/1999), 39.