And Christianity has no answers that overlook the agony out of which these question spring, or that seem to belittle the faith of the person who dares to ask such questions. Rather than giving quick answers to questions like these, Christianity makes two broad, bold affirmations, and I should like now to make those affirmations, and to expound them, and explore them as far as we can within the limitations of a sermon. The first is that the person that dies is not lost. People in this world are pretty much divided into two big camps. The people in one camp say that this life is all there is, there isn't any more.
Life is what there is by way of existence between the date of birth and the date of death.
We know no other paradise. Those in the other camp are those that say there is something more, that there is a life beyond this life, and that death is a transition from one life to the other. They don't like to be too explicit about it. They can't say too much by way of proof. They resort to images and pictures, and they think of the ranges of mountains that you see in our great Western country, where range after range stretch away until they reach far beyond anything that your eye can see, and yet you know that beyond the furthest one there lies still a further range.