Why does Pascha (Easter) matter?
Yes, the story of Christ’s suffering, His ignoble death, His ministry to the dead, and His Resurrection are all magnificent, awe-inspiring, and incredible.
But why do they matter?
Pascha matters because life is not meaningless and is not limited to this world. Pascha matters because when we understand that neither did our lives begin here, nor do they end here, and that what we do now imbues our Truest Self with eternal character and meaning – when we understand that Heaven is real, Hell is real, and that what we do here really matters – only then do we begin to understand who we really our, who our God really is, and what we really can become. Only then can we begin to appreciate the deep beauty and eternal meaning of Pascha for now and for ever.
That is what this article by Niels Lars (N.L.) Nelson is all about. In it he explores both the limitations and misunderstandings of what the afterlife is like in other faiths, how the Latter-day Saint conception is different, and how our theology and doctrine on the afterlife infuses our lives with deeper, richer, meaning, purpose, and joy. Understanding the insights that Professor Nelson shares here will in turn help the reader understand better why he or she matters, and how the realities of the afterlife invest everything we do now with deep meaning, beauty, and purpose. And understanding the realities of Heaven, the actuality of Hell and damnation, and the importance of this life, one can finally begin to understand why Christ’s sacrifice was so important. You can finally begin to comprehend the magnificent magnitude of what Jesus did in that darkened Garden and upon that rugged Cross and in that blessedly empty Tomb so long ago.
Nelson was a Professor of English at Brigham Young University when he wrote this article below. A year later he also started serving as the principal of Brigham Young Academy/High School from 1900 to 1904. His article is presented below with only minor corrections in typos and modernization of spelling in order to help the reader more easily understand the text. I have also added pictures to help illustrate the ideas that Nelson talks about. Otherwise, everything is presented as it appeared in the original The Improvement Era article of April 1899.
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THE REALITY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF HEAVEN AND HELL
BY PROF. N. L. NELSON, OF THE BRIGHAM YOUNG ACADEMY, PROVO.
By an inadvertence I was announced on the cover of the last Era to write on the “Difference Between Heaven and Hell.” I trust that this theme will incidentally receive some degree of elucidation in this series of papers. My theme, however, is as set forth above, the “Reality and Significance of Heaven and Hell.’ The title is, unfortunately, a somewhat pretentious one, and the reader may well be warned not to expect too much. But some new principles relating thereto have, in the light of modern revelation, become clear, and it is to these that I invite attention.
In order the better to understand what may follow, it will not be amiss to glance briefly at the part these two ideas, Heaven and Hell, have played in the history of mankind. No ideas are more characteristic of the entire race and of all ages. There has been found, so it is claimed, a savage tribe in Africa which has not even a vague idea of a future state, either good or bad. The fact has been disputed, but whether founded or unfounded, the extent to which the alleged exception is paraded by skeptics, is strong negative testimony of the universality of conceptions corresponding to our notions of Heaven and Hell. Among the lowest grades of humanity these states are objects of superstition; among the highest they are held either as creations of the imagination, having no objective reality, or as objects of a faith more or less rational.
But though it may be said that all men have held and do hold the ideas of Heaven and Hell, there has been no consistency as to the meaning of the terms; other perhaps than the general idea of “good” attached to the one, and “bad” attached to the other. As to the working out of these ideas, broad and general likenesses may be recognized in areas covered by each of the respective races of mankind, more specific likenesses among each of the respective peoples of a race, and likenesses of a still greater detail in each of the respective religious sects of a people. But if to the general idea “good” or “bad,” in which all agree, there be added the points of agreement contributed by race, people, and sect respectively, and each individual be required to complete the details of these future states as he conceives them, the differences, man for man the world over, would perhaps vastly exceed the resemblances; giving color to the theosophic conception that each man’s heaven and hell—covering the 1500 years or so supposed to exist between each successive death and reincarnation—is in fact only a dream, but a dream real as life, in which the environments, characters, and events of the one are woven out of his higher nature by the shuttle of hope, and of the other, out of his baser propensities through the desperate activity of fear.
Space would not suffice to consider the curious conceptions of the after life which have held the belief of mankind in remote ages; such, for instance, as the Valhalla of Scandinavian myth, the Hades of Greek legend, and the shadowy domain of Isis and Osiris. Of modern conceptions, perhaps more people, numerically speaking, find solace in the Paradise of Mohammed, and the Nirvana of Buddha, than in all other conceptions combined. And yet these heavens, though held by men and women living side by side, are diametrically opposed in character; the one being the apotheosis of the carnal and sensuous in man—gardens of delight for his appetites and houris of unspeakable beauty for his passions—and the other the utter refinement of the spiritual till, like a cloud melting into heaven’s blue, individuality is lost and man is merged into God (i. e., the universe).
Of conceptions formed from texts in the Bible, one might hope for some degree of traditional order and consistency; but there is in fact less unanimity in framework, less coherency in detail, and wilder play of phantasy among the so-called Christian sects of the day than among the savages of the western forests or the ultra- mystics of the orient. In the first place, they begin with an impossible god—the god of Buddha—whom, by an unimaginable contradiction, they seat in a great white throne located—where? Around him circle, with white wings and golden harps, all who have died in Christ Jesus; singing and thrumming throughout eternity.
Does not the whole picture remind you of a cloud of gnats in the evening sun? What kind of being must he be who can find joy in the vile singing and harping that the majority of these earth-angels are capable of (judging by their proficiency when they leave this earth)? And what of the celestial gnats themselves? Must they sing forever? Are they never to eat, or drink, or converse, or study—in short, develop other attributes than that of music? If so, where, how, under what government, in pursuit of what objects? Will the cloud of gnats never settle on—alas what? Ten thousand Christian ministers send daily ten thousand recruits for the ”heavenly choir” without stopping to consider one of these or a hundred similar questions concerning the hereafter. How the angels must smile—or weep—at this utter abandonment of common sense by mortals here below!
The fundamental error of such teaching lies in the assumption that the hereafter is totally unlike the present; that by no possibility can conditions in Heaven (or Hell) resemble earth conditions. “Inconceivable—yes; but think what the opposite idea must in- volve; think of working in Heaven—plowing, sowing, reaping, grinding, chewing, digesting! — think of the utter grossness which such a conception involves! No, Heaven is ethereal, and we shall be etherealized” (whatever that may mean), “and forget that there was an earth.” With which delightful vagary the pious blower celestial soap-bubbles, rolling his eyes skyward, consigns the dying soul to the “arms of Jesus in the regions of eternal bliss.”
As a corollary of such teaching, this world comes to be considered a pestilent island between Heaven and Hell; a lazaretto in which a loathsome disease called sin is raging; a bleak moor for the sorting of the sheep and the goats; a floating hulk in a sargasso sea, from which, as the voyagers drop with black parched lips, the souls of a few ascend to bliss, the rest are dragged down to the sulphureous regions of Hell. In short, whatever praise this earth gets from them in other fields of thought, as a working idea in religion it is not only a Bad Land but a No-Man’s-Land, belonging neither to God nor Devil; an order of things much too good for Hell and infinitely too bad for Heaven—a place for souls to linger in while on probation. Out of such conceptions as to man’s estate here grow the hallucinations as to his estate hereafter. Is it any wonder that, rejecting the lamp of experience, such dreamers are given over to will-o-the-wisps and other bog lights in the dark swamps of a man-made theology!
Latter-day Saints escape this fundamental error. To us the earth is a glorious specimen of God’s handiwork. We need not wait for the hereafter to know what Heaven will be like: its prototype is here—here for our eyes to see, our ears to hear, our hearts to drink of and be filled; here in the midst of earth-life, ablaze each morning with the glory of the Infinite, lulled to rest each night by the melody of the spheres. What folly to trample underfoot all this significant majesty and grandeur in a blind search for the key to heaven.
Nor is this conception a mere poetic ornament to hang on the walls of our spiritual emotions; on the contrary it constitutes the solid intellectual masonry on which the whole house of our faith is built. According to Mormon theology man is now in his second estate. His first was pre-existence. How are these two states related? As cause and effect, or, if it will be better understood, as a primary school is related to an intermediate. Death admits us into our third estate, which may be compared to the high school, and the resurrection into God’s university—the universe itself.
Is not this a thoroughly scientific doctrine? Does not every science proclaim the fact that there are no gaps in creation? Nature is a continuous fabric, whose meshes are a series of closely interwoven causes and effects. Latter-day Saints may well believe that the days in Genesis are ages. How long? As long as they need to be. Heaven was potential in this earth even at the time the corner stone was laid, “when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” Since that illustrious morn of creation, the process of cause and effect—which anyone with eyes can see as well now as angels saw then—has gone on by means of infinitesimal links, and will go on until that which was potential, that which was in the womb of creation from the beginning, shall come forth; and when Heaven shall thus stand revealed, it will not differ from the preceding earth-epoch as day from night, but only as daylight from dawn.
As in the material so in the spiritual world: there are no artificial lifts toward Heaven, no jump-offs toward Hell. Our lives are likewise a series of infinitesimal causes and effects, leading sometimes upward sometimes downward. Would you know what principles were the warp and woof out of which our pre-existent lives were woven? Examine the principles at work today. Some may have ceased there, others begun here, but in the main they are the same principles, and will remain the same until we “become perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect.”
How blind, blind, blind, are they who set up for teachers of humanity! Can they not see that we are today in the midst of Heaven’s processes—as much as we shall ever be? That Heaven is potential, right here in our earth-lives? That as this potentiality grows bright within us, we are in fact approaching eternal day, that state wherein our very garments shall shine with the light of Heaven; and as it grows dim we retrograde toward Hell change from transparency through gradual stages of translucency to black opacity? That in fact neither Heaven nor Hell is possible to man on any other principles than those involved in our everyday actions? But no; in the daily operation of God’s laws, they see nothing significant of eternity. Deaf and blind to the teachings of the present, they fill men’s minds with bauble creations as to the future; mere gilded fables that burst when the first breath of common sense is breathed upon them.
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Note: The original Improvement Era article can be found on pg. 48 of the PDF.