But the Past is heavy and hindereth me,
The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells
That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells
About my soul.
The huge waves wash, the high waves roll,
Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole,
And hindereth me from sailing!
"Old Past, let go and drop i' the sea
Till fathomless waters cover thee!
For I am living, but thou art dead;
Thou drawest back, I strive ahead
The day to find.
Thy shells unbind! Night comes behind,
I needs must hurry with the wind
And trim me best for sailing."
There is no question but that the past is heavy and hindereth every one.
Its "cumbrous shells" cling like dead weights around man, and keep him
from the larger, freer life. "Man is not by any means convinced as yet
of his immortality," says Sir Edwin Arnold; "all the great religions
have in concert more or less positively affirmed it to him; but no safe
logic proves it, and no entirely accepted voice from some farther world
proclaims it."
The one proof, of course, so far as absolute evidential demonstration
goes, lies in the communication from those who have passed through
death. There unfolds an increasingly impressive mass of logical
probabilities that point to but one conclusion to every student of
science and of spiritual laws. Biology offers its important testimony.
The law of the conservation of forces,--of motion and matter,--which is
definitely proven by actual demonstration, suggests with a potency which
no one can evade that intellect, emotion, and will--the most intense and
resistless forces of the universe--can hardly be extinguished when the
forces of matter persist. The study of the nature of the ether alone
pours a flood of illumination on the theory of an ethereal world,--a
theory with which all the known facts of science and psychology accord,
and with which they range themselves. Rev. Doctor Newman Smyth says that
the facts disclosed by a study of biology, as well as the theories
advanced by some trained biologists, fairly open the new and
interesting question whether death itself does not fall naturally under
some principle of selection and law of utility for life? "It is of
religious concern as well as of scientific interest," he continues, "for
us to learn, as far as possible, all the facts and suggestions which
microscopic researches may bring to our knowledge concerning the minute
processes or most intimate and hidden laws of life and death. For if we,
children of an age of questioning and change, are to keep a rational
faith in spiritual reality,--strong and genuine as was our fathers'
faith according to their light, ours must be a faith that shall strike
its roots deep down into all knowledge, although light from above alone
may bring it to its perfect Christian trust and sweetness.... The least
facts of nature may be germinal with high spiritual significance and
beauty."
The twentieth century leads faith to the brink of knowledge. The deepest
spiritual feeling must perpetually recognize that faith alone--Christ's
words alone--are enough for every human soul; but faith grows not less,
but more, when informed by knowledge. When man measures and weighs the
star and discovers their composition; when he sends messages without
visible means, then he may believe with Fichte, that "here, in the earth
life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination." Mr.
Weiss objected to any (possible) evidential demonstration of
immortality, because (as he said), "If you owe your belief in
immortality to the assumed facts of a spiritual intercourse, your belief
is at the mercy of your assumption.... It is merely an opinion derived
from phenomena." But this reasoning would not hold good regarding any
other trend of knowledge; the vital necessity of the soul to lay hold on
God and immortality is not lessened, but rather deepened and reinforced
by understanding, when knowledge goes hand in hand with faith. And the
one supreme argument of all is that a truer knowledge of man's spiritual
being--now and here--with a truer conception of his destiny in the part
of life immediately succeeding the change of death, would make so
marvellous a difference in all his relations on earth, in all his
conceptions of achievement, and would, as Sir Edwin Arnold says, "turn
nine-tenths of the sorrows of earth into glorious joys and abolish quite
as large a proportion of the faults and vices of mankind."
The Past is heavy with misconceptions of the simple truths of life and
immortality as Jesus taught them. The Present seeks to throw off these
"cumbrous shells." Death is the liberator, the divinely appointed means
for ushering man into the more real, the more significant life, whose
_degree_ of reality and significance depends wholly on ourselves; which
is simply the achievement--better or poorer--which man creates now and
here, in the same manner in which the quality of manhood and womanhood
depends wholly on the degree of achievement in childhood and youth. We
do not "find," but instead, create our lives. As we are perpetually
creating, we are perpetually making them anew. If we must, this year,
live out the errors that we made last year, there is an encouragement
rather than a penalty in the fact, as this truth argues that if we now
enter on a loftier plane and realize in outward life a nobler
experience, we shall, next year, or in some future time, find ourselves
entirely free from the weight of the errors we have abandoned, the
mistakes we have learned not to make, and the entanglements that our
"negligences and ignorances" created. If we have caused our own sorrow,
we can cause our own joy. For the Golden Age lies onward.
DISCERNING THE FUTURE.
_As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow._
* * * * *
_There exist moments in the life of man
When he is nearer the great Soul of the world
Than is man's custom, and possesses freely
The power of questioning his destiny._
--COLERIDGE.
* * * * *
Think of the power of anticipation everywhere! Think of the
difference it would make to us if events rose above the horizon of
our lives with no twilight that announced their coming. God has
given man the powers which compel him to anticipate the future _for
something_.
--PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The unexpected and the unaccountable play so large a part in human life
that they may well incite study. It is not conceivable that man should
always remain at the mercy of events without conscious and intelligent
choice in selecting and grouping them. Is there no Roentgen ray that
will pierce the horizon of the future and disclose to us what lies
beyond? Of course it is a sort of stock-in-trade, axiomatic assertion,
that if it were intended for man to know the future God would have
revealed it to him; and as it is not thus revealed, it is unwise, or
unlawful, or immoral to seek to read it. On the same principle and with
just as much logic, it might be solemnly declared that we have no right
to endeavor to surprise any of the secrets of the Universe; that if it
had been intended for us to know the weight and composition of the
stars, to understand the laws that hold them in their courses, or to
know what is conquered by the scientist in geology, or chemistry, or
anything else, that the knowledge would have been ready made, and as it
is not so, it is not lawful for man to explore any of these territories
of the unknown. Or this assertion could be carried to a still further
absurdity, and construed that if man had been intended to read he would
have been born with the knowledge, and have had no need of learning the
alphabet; or that if God had intended man to dwell in cities they would
have sprung up spontaneously like forests. As a matter of fact, the
extending of the horizon line of knowledge in every direction is man's
business in this part of life; and why, indeed, if he can weigh and
measure the stars in space, shall he not be able to compel some magic
mirror to reveal to him his future? As it is, we all tread on quicksands
of mystery, that may open and engulf us at any instant. It is simply
appalling when one stops to think of it,--to realize the degree to
which all one's achievements, and possibilities, and success, and
happiness depend on causes apparently outside his own control. One
awakens to begin the day without the remotest idea of what that day
holds for him. All his powers of accomplishment, all his energy, all his
peace of mind,--even the very matter of life or death hangs in the
balance, and the scales are to him invisible and intangible. The chance
of a moment may make or mar. A letter, a telegram, with some revelation
or expression that paralyzes all his powers; the arrival of an
unforeseen friend or guest, a sudden summons to an unexpected
matter,--all these and a thousand other nebulous possibilities that may,
at any instant, fairly revolutionize his life, are in the air, and may
at any moment precipitate themselves.
Is not the next step in scientific progress to be into the invisible and
the unknown?
Doctor Loeb conceived the idea that the forces which rule in the realm
of living things are not different from the forces that we know in the
inanimate world. He has made some very striking and arresting
experiments with protoplasm and chemical stimuli and opened a new field
of problems in biology. If the physical universe can be so increasingly
explored, shall not the spiritual universe be also penetrated by the
spiritual powers of man?
There is no reason why clairvoyance should not be developed into a
science as rational as any form of optical research or experiment. Not
an exact science, like mathematics, for the future is a combination of
the results of the past with the will and power and purposes of the
individual in the present, and of those events that have been in train
and are already on their way. It is a sort of spiritual chemistry. But
it seems reasonably clear that all the experiences on this plane have
already transpired in the life of the spirit on the other plane of that
twofold life that we live, and they occur here because they have already
occurred there. They are precipitated into the denser world after having
taken place in the ethereal world. And so, if the vision can be
cultivated that penetrates into this ethereal world, the future can
thereby be read. It is the law and the prophets.
Now as the present largely determines the future, the things that shall
be are partly of our own creation.
"We shape ourselves the joy or fear
Of which our coming life is made,
And fill our future's atmosphere
With sunshine or with shade."
There are no conditions of being that are not plastic to the potency of
thought. As one learns to control his thought he controls the issues of
life. He becomes increasingly clear in intuition, in perceptions, and in
spiritual vision.
As the planets and the stars and the solar systems are evolved out of
nebulae through attraction and motion and perpetual combination, so the
present and the future is evolved for each individual out of his past,
and he is perpetually creating it. Nothing is absolute, but
relative,--"no truth so sublime but that it may become trivial to-morrow
in the light of new thoughts." There is no relationship, no casual
meeting, no accident or incident of the moment, however trivial it may
seem, but that is a sign, a hint, an illustration of the human drama,
perpetually moving onward, and demanding from each and all insight, as
well as outlook, and a consciousness of the absolute realities involved
in the manifestation of the moment. "The present moment is like an
ambassador which declares the will of God," says the writer of a little
Catholic book of devotions; "the events of each moment are divine
thoughts expressed by created objects," and the one serious hindrance,
it may be, to the acceptance of events in this spirit, lies in the fact
of not being prepared for their acceptance. The problem of life, then,
resolves itself into the question of so ordering one's course of living
as to be prepared to receive the event of the moment; but the entire
rush and ceaseless demands of the life of the present form the obstacle
in the way of this harmonious recognition. One cannot accept the event
of the moment because he is absorbed in the event of yesterday, or last
week, and his life is not, thereby, "up-to-date." To be always
behindhand is to be under a perpetual and ever-increasing burden.
Empedocles under Mt. Etna was no more imprisoned than is the life of
to-day which is filled with the things of yesterday. Yet where does the
remedy lie? It is the problem of the hour. "In nature every moment is
new," says Emerson, and it is that sense of freshness and exhilaration
that one needs in order successfully to enter into the experiences of
the present hour.
The world of mechanism keeps pace in the most curiously interesting way
with the world of thought. Inventions came as material correspondences
to the immaterial growth and demand. When in the middle of the
nineteenth century the human race had achieved a degree of development
that made swift communication essential to the common life, the
telegraph and the ocean cable were invented; or it might rather be said,
the laws that make them possible were discerned, and were taken
advantage of to utilize for this purpose. The constant developments in
rapid transit, in the instantaneous conveniences of telephonic
communication, and, latest of all, in wireless telegraphy, are all in
the line of absolute correspondence with the advancing needs of
humanity.
More than a decade ago Doctor Edward Everett Hale made the prediction in
an article in "The Forum" that writing (in the mechanical sense) would
become a lost art, and that the people of future centuries would point
to us as "the ancients," who communicated our ideas by means of this
slow and clumsy process. According to Doctor Hale's vision, the writing
of all this present period would come to be regarded in much the same
light as that in which we look at the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the
papyrus. At that time the phonograph, if invented, was not in any way
brought to the practical perfection of the present, and telepathy was
more a theory than an accepted fact; but Doctor Hale has the prophetic
cast of mind, and already his theory is more in the light of probability
than that of mere possibility. The demands of modern life absolutely
require the development of some means of communication that shall
obviate the necessity of the present laborious means of handwriting.
There is needed the mechanism that shall transfer the thought in the
mind to some species of record without the intervention of the hand.
Whether the phonograph can be popularized to meet this need; whether
some still finer means that photograph thought shall be evolved, remains
to be seen. Thought is already photographed in the ether, but whether
this image can be transferred to a material medium is the question.
That telepathy shall yet come to be so well understood; its laws
formulated as to bring it within the range of the definite sciences,
there can be no doubt; but this result can only attend a higher
development of the spiritual power of humanity. In its present status
telepathy is seen as a result of wholly unconscious and unanalyzed
processes that open a new region of life and a new range of
possibilities. It is the discovery of a new keyboard, so to speak, in
the individual, enabling him to still more "live in thought," and to
"act with energies that are immortal." Science is continually revealing
the truth that the world, the solar system, the infinite universes are
all created as the theatre of man's evolutionary development. As Emerson
so truly says, "the world is the perennial miracle which the soul
worketh."
"The Discovery of the Future" was the title of an interesting lecture by
Mr. H. G. Wells, given in London early in 1901, before the Royal
Institute, in which the subject was speculatively discussed, and in the
course of his lecture Mr. Wells said:--
"Along certain lines, with certain limitations, he argued, a
working knowledge of the things of the future was practicable and
possible. As during the past century the amazing searchlights of
inference had been passed into the remoter past, so by seeking for
operating causes instead of for fossils the searchlight of
inference might be thrown into the future. The man of science would
believe at last that events in A. D. 4000 were as fixed, settled,
and unchangeable as those of A. D. 1600, with the exception of the
affairs of man and his children. It is as simple and sure to work
out the changing orbit of the earth in future until the tidal drag
hauls one unchanging face at last toward the sun, as it is to work
back to its blazing, molten past. We are at the beginning of the
greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There will be no
shock, as there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. We are creatures
of twilight, but out of our minds and the lineage of our minds will
spring minds that will reach forward fearlessly. A day will
come--one day in the unending succession of days--when the beings
now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our loins, shall stand on
this earth as one stands on a footstool, and they shall laugh and
reach out their hands among the stars."
Mr. Wells is a disciple of Darwin, and he is applying to the life of
humanity certain laws of evolution. In this lecture he argued that great
men are merely "the images and symbols and instruments taken at
haphazard by the incessant, consistent forces behind them. They were the
pen nibs which fate used in her writing, and the more one was inclined
to trust these forces behind individuals, the more one could believe in
the possibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that would
serve us in politics, morals, social contrivances, and in a thousand
ways."
The lecturer argued that "a deliberate direction of historical,
economic, and social study toward the future, and a deliberate and
courageous reference to the future in moral and religious discussion,
would be enormously stimulating and profitable to the intellectual
life."
One incalculable aid in thus throwing a spiritual searchlight forward
and discussing the future is the realization embodied by Dr. Lyman
Abbott, that there is no death, and no dead; that the entire universe is
life; and that we are encompassed round about by invisible companions
and friends; sustained, guided, helped by forces that we see not.
To see the future as clearly as we see the past, what does it require?
Saint Paul tells us that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned."
The future is visible to the spiritual sight. No one doubts but that the
future is known to God, for it is He who creates and controls it. And
man is the child of God, and his true life is in co-operating with God
in every form of the higher activity. So far as he may co-operate with
God he becomes, himself, a creative force; making, shaping, and
determining this future, and thus, to an increasing degree, he becomes
aware of it, or sees it, before it is realized on the outward plane. The
day is not, indeed, distant, when humanity will live far less blindly
than now. As man develops his psychic self and lives the life of the
spirit,--the life of intellect and thought and purpose and prayer,
rather than the life of the senses, he will perceive his future. To just
the degree that one lives in the energies which are immortal does he
perceive the future. Knowledge penetrates into the unknown and the
unseen. Leverrier postulated Neptune long before his "long-distance"
theory was verified. The intelligent recognition of the unseen forces
and unseen presences, the intelligent conception of the manner in which
these unseen forces are working out the problems of destiny, alone
enables one to consciously combine with them; to enter into the
processes of evolution as an intelligent factor, and thus redeem his
individual life to harmony, beauty, and happiness.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A Determining Question.]
The question confronts one as a very determining problem in life,--can
man control his circumstances? To go deeper still, can he create them?
Or is he the product of his environment? Is every life just that which
it is made? Or does there work, under all our human will and endeavor, a
force resistless as gravitation and as constant as attraction? A writer,
considering this subject, thus expresses his own convictions:--
"I believe that every life is the exact and necessary outcome of
its _environment_, and that there is in reality not one particle of
actual freedom in this respect from the cradle to the grave. I
cannot here go into any extended proof of my position. The
syllogism may be stated as follows:
"Every phenomenon is the necessary result of pre-existing causes:
"Life is but a succession of phenomena.
"Therefore every life is necessarily determined by pre-existing
causes.
"I do not see how the conclusion can be escaped that from the time
we open our eyes upon the world and receive our first impressions,
we are thrust forward between insurmountable walls of fate that
leave no room for freedom. It is true that so far as external or
objective forces are concerned we may be, as a rule, under no
compulsion to follow one more than another; but _subjectively_ we
are in no sense free, because the peculiar way in which the _will_
will act under given conditions must depend upon the preponderating
_subjective_ force. To hold otherwise is to contend that a lesser
force can overcome a greater,--which is absurd."
Certainly the problem as to the degree to which environment determines
life is an interesting one, but may it not be reversed and stand as the
problem to what degree life controls and fashions the environment? Does
not the environment change with the life in a corresponding evolutionary
process? "Every spirit builds its house." Then, too, the thing we call
life is not composed exclusively of character and circumstances. There
enters into it a third element,--that of the unknown.
The environment of Tennyson, for instance, in his early youth, was that
of the limited, even though thoughtful and refined life of the son of a
country clergyman of modest means; as his powers expanded and developed
his environment kept pace with it in extension of breadth. Is it not,
then, true that a life really belongs to the environment it creates for
himself, rather than to that in which it is first nurtured? "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be" applies to the possibilities of life in the
present as well as in that future which lies beyond the change we call
death. The divine electric spark leaps through the atmosphere and
communicates its kindling power. The inner force of the spirit works
outward and begins to shape and fashion its own world. Environment is
simply another name for that series "of the more stately mansions" that
each one may build according to the power that worketh in him. A great
sorrow comes; or an overwhelming joy, on which one rises to heights of
ecstasy, to the very Mount of Transfiguration itself, and thus
transcends all former limits and creates his new environment, whose
walls are transparent to the sunrise flame and through which the glory
enters in. What has he to do with that far-away, opaque, limited
environment into which he was born? No more than has the giant oak,
tossing its branches under the stars, to do with the acorn cup out of
which it sprang. Let one realize, ever so faintly, even, the miracle of
possibilities that may unfold, and his life is uplifted into a richness
and a peace, and a serene confidence that carries with it the essential
essence of all that is best and noblest in its past, and all that is
potential in its infinite future. The problem evolves into a definite
work to be fulfilled, and this work, in turn, leads to another problem
involving its demonstration, in actual performance, as well; and by this
alternation life progresses,--growing ever larger and deeper and more
exalted with its increasing power. In this way man produces his
circumstances--creates his outer conditions. His successive environments
become the expressions of his inner life and energy in their series of
development and growth.