1873–1874. This has run through several editions. The long
_Introduction_ to this book was written immediately after the
publication of Mr. Mill’s _Essay on Religion_; a most important work of
which Miss Taylor had kindly put the proof sheets in my hands, and to
which I was eagerly anxious to offer such rejoinder from the side of
faith as might be in my power. Whether I succeeded in making an adequate
reply in the fifty pages I devoted to the subject, I cannot presume to
say. The Pessimist side, taken by Mr. Mill has been gaining ground ever
since, but there are symptoms that a reaction is taking place, beginning
(of all countries!) in France. I conclude this Preface thus—p. 53.
“But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of
offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us by a man
so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs
must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes
and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty
should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of
the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his
noble heart and animated his entire career.”
The book contains two long Essays on the _Life after Death_ contributed
originally to the _Theological Review_. In the first of these, after
stating at length the reasons for supposing that human existence ends at
death, I ask: “What have we to place against them in the scale of Hope?”
and I begin by observing that all the usual arguments for immortality
involve at the crucial point the assumption that we possess some
guarantee that mankind will _not_ be deceived, that Justice will
eventually triumph and that human affairs are the concern of a Power
whose purposes cannot fail. Were the faith which supplies such warrant
to fail, the whole structure raised upon it must fall to the ground.
Belief in Immortality is pre-eminently a matter of Faith; a corollary
from faith in God. To imagine that we can reach it by any other road is
vain. Heaven will always be (as Dr. Martineau has said) “a part of our
Religion, not a Branch of our Geography.” But in addressing men and
women who believe in God’s Justice and Love, I hope to show that, not by
one only but by many _convergent_ lines, Faith uniformly points to a
Life after Death; and that if we follow her guidance in any one
direction implicitly, we are invariably conducted to the same
conclusion. Nay more; we cannot stop short of this conclusion and retain
entire faith in any thing beyond the experience of the senses. Every
idea of Justice, of Love and of Duty is truncated if we deny to it the
extension of eternity; and as for our conception of God himself, I see
not how any one who has realised the dread darkness of “the riddle of
the painful earth,” can call him “Good” unless he can look forward to
the solution of that problem hereafter. The following are channels
through which Faith inevitably flows towards Immortality:
1st. The human race longs for Justice. Even “if the Heavens fall,” we
feel Justice ought to be done. All literature, from Æschylus and Job to
our own time, has for its highest theme the triumph of Justice, or the
tragedy of the disappointment of human hope thereof. But where did we
obtain this idea? The world has never seen a Reign of Astræa. Injustice
and Cruelty prevail largely, even now in the world; and as we go back up
the stream of time to ruder ages where Might was more completely
dominant over Right, the case was worse and worse. Where then, did Man
derive his idea that the Power ruling the world,—Zeus, or Jehovah, or
Ormusd,—was Just? Not only could no ancestral experience have caused the
“set of our brains” towards the expectation of Justice, but experience,
under many conditions of society, pointed quite the other way. It is
assuredly (if anything can be so reckoned) the Divine spirit in man
which causes him to love Justice, and to believe that his Maker is just,
for it is inconceivable how he could have arrived at such faith
otherwise. But if death be the end of human existence this expectation
of justice has been only a miserable delusion. God has created us, poor
children of the dust, to love and hope for Justice, but He Himself has
disregarded it, on the scale of a disappointed world. After referring to
the thousands of cases where the bad have died successful and
peacefully, and the good,—like Christ,—have perished in misery and
agony, I say “boldly and so much the more reverently: _Either Man is
Immortal or God is not Just_.”
2nd. The second line of thought leading us to belief in Immortality
is,—that if there be no future life, there are millions of human beings
whose existence has answered no purpose which we can rationally
attribute to a wise and merciful God. He is a _baffled_ God, if His
creature be extinguished before reaching _some_ end which He may
possibly have designed.
3rd. The incompleteness of the noblest part of man offers so strange a
contrast to the perfection of the other work of creation that we are
drawn to conclude that the human soul is only a _bud_ to blossom out
into full flower hereafter. No man has ever in his life reached the
plentitude of moral strength and beauty of which his nature gives
promise. A garden wherein all the buds should perish before blooming,
would be more hideous than a desert, and such a garden is God’s world if
man dies for ever when we see him no more.
4th. Human love urges an appeal to Faith which has been to millions of
hearts the most conclusive of all.
“To think of the one whose innermost self is to us the world’s chief
treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and
believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to be, and
become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the
fond love for ourselves forgotten for ever,—this is such agony, that
having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to
affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the
grave. Love would be the curse of mortality were it to bring always
with it such unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge that every
hour which knitted our heart more closely to our friend also brought
us nearer to an eternal separation. Better never to have ascended to
that high Vita Nuova where self-love is lost in another’s weal, better
to have lived like the cattle which browse and sleep while they wait
the butcher’s knife, than to endure such despair.
“But is there nothing in us which refuses to believe all this
nightmare of the final sundering of loving hearts? Love itself seems
to announce itself as an eternal thing. It has such an element of
infinity in its tenderness, that it never fails to seek for itself an
expression beyond the limits of time, and we talk, even when we know
not what we mean of “undying affection,” “immortal love.” It is the
only passion which in the nature of things we can carry with us into
another world, and it is fit to be prolonged, intensified, glorified
for ever. It is not so much a joy we may take with us, as the only joy
which can make any world a heaven when the affections of earth shall
be perfected in the supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which we
share with God, and by which we live in Him and He in us. All its
beautiful tenderness, its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure and
ineffable delight, are the rays of God’s Sun of Love reflected in our
souls.
“Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent dust decaying slowly
in their coffins side by side in the vault? If so, let us have done
with prating of any Faith in Heaven or Earth. We are mocked by a
fiend.”—(_Hopes_, p. 52.)
5th. A remarkable argument is to be found in Prof. F. W. Newman’s
_Theism_ (p. 75). It insists on the fact that many men have certainly
loved God and that God must love them in return (else Man were better
than God); and we must reasonably infer that those whom God loves are
deathless, else would the Divine Blessedness be imperfect, nay, “a
yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow.”
6th. The extreme variability of the common human belief that the “soul
of man never dies” makes it difficult to discern its proper evidential
value, still it seems to have the _Note_ of a genuine instinct. It
begins early, though (probably) not at the earliest stage of human
development. It attains its maximum among the highest races of mankind
(the Vedic-Aryan, early Persian and Egyptian). It projects such varied
and even contrasted ideals of the other life (_e.g._, Valhalla and
Nirvana) that it cannot well have been borrowed by one race from another
but must have sprung up in each indigenously. Finally the instinct
begins to falter in ages of self-consciousness and criticism.
7th, lastly. The most perfect and direct faith in Immortality belongs to
saintly souls who personally feel that they have entered into relations
with the Divine Spirit which can never end. “_Faith in God and in our
eternal Union with Him_,” said one such devout man to me, “_are not two
dogmas but one_.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades. Thou wilt guide
me by thy counsel and afterwards receive me to Glory.”
“Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the perfect evidence of
things not seen. But can their full faith supply our lack? Can we see
with their eyes and believe on their report? It is only possible in a
very inferior measure. Yet if our own spiritual life have received
even some faint gleams of the ‘light which never came from sun or
star,’ then, once more, will our faith point the way to Immortality;
for we shall know in what manner such truths come to the soul, and be
able to trust that what is dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have
journeyed nearer to the East than we; who have surmounted Duty more
perfectly, or passed through rivers of affliction into which our feet
have never dipped. God cannot have deluded them in their sacred hope
of His eternal Love. If their experience be a dream all prayer and
communion may be dreams likewise.”
In conclusion, while commending to the reader’s consideration what
appears to me the true method of solving the problem of a Life after
Death, I point to the fact that on the answer to that question must hang
the alternative, not only of the hope or despair of the Human Race, but
of the glory or the failure of the whole Kosmos, so far as our uttermost
vision can extend.
“Lions and eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their kind; but
if the summit and crown of the whole work, the being in whose
consciousness it is all mirrored, be worse than incomplete and
imperfect, an undeveloped embryo, an acorn mouldered in its shell, a
bud blighted by the frost, then must the entire world he deemed a
failure also. Now, Man can only be reckoned on any ground as a
_provisionally_ successful work; successful, that is, provided we
regard him as _in transitu_, on his way to another and far more
perfect stage of development. We are content that the egg, the larva,
the bud, the half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should only
faintly indicate what will be the future bird and butterfly and flower
and picture and temple. And thus to look on man (as by some deep
insight he has almost universally regarded himself) as a ‘sojourner
upon earth,’ upon his way to ‘another country, even a heavenly,’
destined to complete his pilgrimage and make up for all his
shortcomings elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to be
even now a Divine work in its embryonic stage. But if we close out
this view of the future, and assure ourselves that nothing more is
ever to be expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last
days of his mortal life; if we are to believe we have seen the best
development which his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing,
feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing and being blessed, will ever
obtain while the heavens endure,—then, indeed, is the conclusion
inevitable and final. Man is a Failure, the consummate failure of
creation. Everything else,—star, ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast
and insect—has a sort of completeness and perfection. It is fitting in
its own place, and it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it
is. ‘Every Lion,’ as Parker has said, ‘is a type of all lionhood; but
there is no Man who is a type of all Manhood.’ Even the best and
greatest of men have only been imperfect types of a single phase of
manhood—of the saint, the hero, the sage, the philanthropist, the
poet, the friend,—never of the full-orbed man who should be all these
together. If each perish at death, then,—as the seeds of all these
varied forms of good are in each,—every one is cut off prematurely,
blighted, spoiled. Nor is this criterion of success or failure solely
applicable to our small planet; a mere spark thrown off the wheel
whereon a million suns are turned into space. It is easy to believe
that much loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral
powers than our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But Thought
and Love are, after all, the grandest things which any world can show;
and if a whole race endowed with them should prove such a failure as
death-extinguished Mankind would undoubtedly be, there remains no
reason why all the spheres of the universe should not be similar
scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge
blunder and mishap. In vain may the President of the British Congress
of Science dazzle us with the splendid panorama of the material
universe unrolling itself ‘from out of the primal nebula’s fiery
cloud.’ Suns and planets swarming through the abysses of space are but
whirling sepulchres after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken
from off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom they have
been the palaces are all for ever lost. Spreading continents and
flowing seas, soaring Alps and fertile plains are worse than failures,
if we, even we, poor feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures that we are,
shall ever ‘vanish like the streak of morning cloud in the infinite
azure of the past.’”
The second part of this essay discusses the possible _conditions_ of the
Life after Death. I cannot summarize it here.
The rest of the volume consists of a sermon which I read at Clerkenwell
Unitarian Chapel, in 1873, entitled “_Doomed to be Saved_.” I describe
the disastrous moral consequences to a man in old times who believed
himself to have sold his soul to the Evil One, and to have cast himself
off from God’s Goodness for ever; and I contrast this with what we ought
to feel when we recognize that we are _Doomed to be Saved_—destined
irretrievably to be brought back, in this life or in far future lives,
from all our wanderings in remorse and penitence to the feet of God.
The book concludes with an Essay on the _Evolution of the Social
Sentiment_, in which I maintain that the primary human feeling in the
savage which still lingers in the Aryan child, is _not_ Sympathy with
suffering, but quite an opposite, angry and even cruel sentiment, which
I have named _Heteropathy_; which inspires brutes and birds to kill
their wounded or diseased companions. Half-way after this, comes
_Aversion_; and last of all, _Sympathy_,—slowly extending from the
mother’s “pity for the son of her womb,” to the Family, the Tribe, the
Nation, and the Human Race; and, at last to the Brutes. I conclude thus:
“Such is, I believe, the great Hope of the human race. It does not lie
in the progress of the intellect, or in the conquest of fresh powers
over the realms of nature; not in the improvement of laws, or the more
harmonious adjustment of the relations of classes and states; not in
the glories of Art, or the triumphs of Science. All these things may,
and doubtless will, adorn the better and happier ages of the future.
But that which will truly constitute the blessedness of Man will be
the gradual dying out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and his
selfishness, and the growth within him of the god-like faculty of love
and self-sacrifice; the development of that holiest Sympathy wherein
all souls shall blend at last, like the tints of the rainbow which the
Seer beheld around the great White Throne on high.”
Beside these theological works I published more recently two slight
volumes on cognate subjects: _A Faithless World_, and _Health and
Holiness_. I wrote “_A Faithless World_” (first published in the
_Contemporary Review_) in reply to Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s remark in the
_Nineteenth Century_, No. 88, that “We get on very well without
religion” ... “Love, Friendship, Ambition, Science, literature, art,
politics, commerce, and a thousand other matters will go equally well as
far as I can see, whether there is or is not a God and a future state.”
I examine this view in detail and conclude that instead of life
remaining (in the event of the fall of religion) to most people much
what it is at present, there would, on the contrary, be actually
_nothing_ which would be left unchanged by such a catastrophe.
I sent a copy of this article when first published, (as I was bound in
courtesy to do), to Sir James, whom I had often met, and whose brother
and sister were my kind friends. He replied in such a manly and generous
spirit that I am tempted to give his letter.
“December 2nd,
“32, De Vere Gardens, W.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I am much obliged by your note and by the article in the
_Contemporary_, which is perfectly fair in itself and full of kind
things about myself personally.
“The subject is too large to write about, and I am only too glad to
take both the letter and the article in the spirit in which they were
written and ask no further discussion.
“It seems to me very possible that there may be a good deal of truth
in what you suggest as to the nature of the difference between the
points of view from which we look at these things, but it is not
unnatural that _I_ should think you rather exaggerate the amount of
suffering and sorrow which is to be found in the world. I may do the
opposite.
“However that may be, thank you heartily for both your letter and your
article.
“I am sure you will have been grieved to hear of poor Henry Dicey’s
death. His life had been practically despaired of for a considerable
time.
“I am, ever sincerely yours,
J. F. STEPHEN.”
Several of these books of mine, dealing with religious subjects, were
translated into French and published by my French and Swiss
fellow-religionists, and also in Danish by friends at Copenhagen. _Le
Monde Sans Religion_; _Coup d’œil sur le Monde à Venir_; _L’Humanité
destinée au Salut_; _La Maison sur le Rivage_; _Seul avec Dieu_ (Geneva
Cherbuliez, 1881), _En Verden uden Tro_, &c., &c.
But all the time during the intervals of writing these theological
books, I employed myself in studying and writing on various other
subjects of temporary or durable interest. I contributed a large number
of articles to the following periodicals:—
_The Quarterly Review_ (then edited by Sir William Smith).
_The Contemporary Review_ (edited by Mr. Bunting).
_Fraser’s Magazine_ (edited by Mr. Froude).
_Cornhill Magazine_ (edited by Mr. Leslie Stephen).
_The Fortnightly Review_ (edited by Mr. Morley).
_Macmillan’s Magazine_ (edited by Mr. Masson).
_The Theological Review_ (Unitarian Organ, edited by Rev. C. Beard).
_The Modern Review_ (Unitarian, edited by Rev. R. Armstrong).
_The New Quarterly Magazine_ (edited by W. Oswald Crawford).
One collection of these articles was published by Trübner in 1865,
entitled _Studies New and Old on Ethical and Social Subjects_; (1 vol.,
crown 8vo., pp. 466). This volume begins with an elaborate study of
“_Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ_” (_Theological Review_,
September, 1869), which I have often wished to reprint in a separate
form. Also a very long and careful study of the _Sacred Books of the
Zoroastrians_, which brought me the visits and friendships of a very
interesting Parsee gentleman, Nowrosjee Furdoonjee, President of the
Bombay Parsee Society, and of another Parsee gentleman resident in
London. Both expressed their entire approval of my representation of
their religion.
These _Studies_ also contain a long paper on the _Philosophy of the Poor
Laws_, which, as I have narrated in a previous chapter, fell into
fertile soil on the mind of an Australian gentleman and caused the
introduction of some of the reforms I advocated into the Poor Law system
of New South Wales.
There were also in this volume articles on “_Hades_”; on the “_Morals of
Literature_”; and on the “_Hierarchy of Art_,” which perhaps have some
value; but I have not of late years cared to press the book, and have
not included it in Mr. Fisher Unwin’s Re-issue of 1893 on account of the
paper it contains on “_The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes_.”
This article, which appeared first in _Fraser’s Magazine_, Nov., 1863,
was my earliest effort (so far as I know, the first effort of anybody)
to work out the very obscure and difficult ethical problem to which it
refers, in answer to the demands of Vivisectors. I am not satisfied with
the position I took up in this paper. In the thirty years which have
elapsed since I wrote it, my thoughts have been greatly exercised on the
subject, and I think I see the “Claims of Brutes” more clearly, and find
them higher than I did. But, though I believe that I expressed the most
advanced opinion _of that time_ on the duty of Man to the lower animals,
and of the offence of cruelty towards them, I here enter my _caveat_
against the quotation of this article (as was lately done by a zealous
Zoophilist) as if it still represented exactly what I think on the
subject after pondering upon it for thirty years, and taking part in the
Anti-vivisection crusade for two entire decades.
I have mentioned this matter especially, because it is of some
importance to me, and also because I do not find that there is any other
opinion which I have ever published in any book or article, on morals or
religion, which I now desire to withdraw, or even of which I care to
modify the expression. It is a great happiness to me at the end of a
long and busy literary life, to feel that I have never written anything
of which I repent, or which I wish to unsay.
A collection of minor articles, with several fresh papers of a lighter
sort,—an _Allegory_, _The Spectral Rout_, &c.—was also published by
Trübner in 1867, under the name of _Hours of Work and Play_.
In 1872 Messrs. Williams & Norgate published a rather large collection
of my Essays, under the name of _Darwinism in Morals and other Essays_.
The first is a review of the theory of ethics expounded in Darwin’s
_Descent of Man_. I argue that the moral history of mankind (so far as
it is known to us) gives no support whatever to Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis
that Conscience is the result of certain contingencies in our
development, and that it might, at an earlier stage, have been moulded
into quite another form, causing Good to appear to us Evil, and Evil
Good.
“I think we have a right to say that the suggestions offered by the
highest scientific intellects of our time to account for its existence
on principles which shall leave it on the level of other instincts,
have failed to approve themselves as true to the facts of the case.
And I think, therefore, that we are called on to believe still in the
validity of our own moral consciousness, even as we believe in the
validity of our other faculties; and to rest in the faith (well-nigh
universal) of the human race, in a fixed and supreme Law, of which the
will of God is the embodiment and Conscience the Divine
transcript.”—_Darwinism in Morals_, p. 32.
In this same volume (included in the re-issue) are essays on _Hereditary
Piety_ (a review of Mr. Galton’s _Hereditary Genius_); one on _The
Religion of Childhood_, on Robertson’s _Life_; on “A French Theist” (M.
Pécaut); and a series of studies on Eastern Religions; including reviews
of Mr. Ferguson’s _Tree and Serpent Worship_ (with which Mr. F. was so
pleased that he made me a present, of his magnificent book); Bunsen’s
_God in History_, Max Muller’s _Chips from a German Workshop_, and Mrs.
Manning’s _Ancient and Mediæval India_. Each of these is a careful essay
on one or other of the oriental faiths referring to many other books on
each subject. Beside these there are in the same volume two articles on
_Unconscious Cerebration_ and _Dreams_, which excited some interest in
their day; and seem to me (if I be not misled by vanity) to have
forestalled a good deal which has been written of late years about the
“subliminal” or “subjective” consciousness.