those whom the arbitrary predestination of God has elected; all
others are irretrievably damned. Calvin was the first Christian
theologian who succeeded in giving the fearful doctrine of
unconditional election and reprobation a lodgment in the popular
breast. The Roman Catholic Church had earnestly repudiated it.
Gotteschalk was condemned and died in prison for advocating it, in
the ninth century. But Calvin's character enabled him to believe
it, and his talents and position gave great weight to his advocacy
of it, and it has since been widely received. Catholicism,
Lutheranism, Calvinism, all agreed in the general proposition that
by sin physical death came into the world, heaven was shut against
man, and all men utterly lost. They differed only in some
unessential details concerning the condition of that lost state.
They also agreed in the general proposition that Christ came, by
his incarnation, death, descent to hell, resurrection, and
ascension, to redeem men from their lost state. They only differed
in regard to the precise grounds and extent of that redemption.
The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score of
original sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelity
and the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonement
made all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all may
have faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would fall
and incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatched
as brands from the burning, while the mass should be left to
eternal torture; and Christ's atonement purchased the predestined
salvation of the chosen few. Furthermore, Lutherans and
Calvinists, in all their varieties, agree with the Romanist in
asserting that Christ shall come again, the dead be raised bodily,
a universal judgment be held, and that then the condemned shall
sink into the everlasting fire of hell, and the accepted rise into
the endless bliss of heaven.
The Socinian doctrine relative to the future fate of man differed
from the foregoing in the following particulars. First, it limited
the redeeming mission of Christ to the enlightening influences of
the truths which he proclaimed with Divine authority, the moral
power of his perfect example, and the touching motives exhibited
in his death. Secondly, it asserted a natural ability in every man
to live a life conformed to right reason and sound morality, and
promised heaven to all who did this in obedience to the
instructions and after the pattern of Christ. Thirdly, it declared
that the wicked, after suffering excruciating agonies, would be
annihilated. Respecting the second coming of Christ, a physical
resurrection of the dead, and a day of judgment, the Socinians
believed with the other sects.4 Their doctrine scarcely
corresponds with that of the present Unitarians in any thing. The
dissent of the Unitarian from the popular theology is much more
fundamental, detailed, and consistent than that of the Socinian
was, and approaches much closer to the Rationalism of the present
day.
The Universalist formula every soul created by God shall sooner or
later be saved from sin and woe and inherit everlasting happiness
has been publicly defended in every age of the Christian Church.5
It was first publicly condemned as a heresy at the very close of
the fourth century. It ranks among its defenders the names of
Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of
Nyssa, and several other prominent Fathers. Universalism has been
held in four forms, on four grounds. First, it has been supposed
that Christ died for all, and that, by the infinite efficacy of
his redeeming merits, all sins shall be cancelled and every soul
be saved. This was the scheme of those early Universalist
Christians whom Epiphanius condemns as heretics; also of a few in
more modern times. Secondly, it has been thought that each person
would be punished in the future state according to the deeds done
in the body, each sin be expiated by a proportionate amount of
suffering, the retribution of some souls being severe and long,
that of others light and brief; but, every penalty being at
4 Flugge gives a full exposition of these points with references
to the authorities. Lehre vom Zustande, u. s. f., abth. ii. ss.
243-260.
5 Dietelmaier, Commenti Fanatici [non-ASCII characters omitted] Hist.
Antiquar.
length exhausted, the last victim would be restored. This was the
notion of Origen, the basis of the doctrine of purgatory, and the
view of most of the Restorationists. Thirdly, it has been imagined
that, by the good pleasure and fixed laws of God, all men are
destined to an impartial, absolute, and instant salvation beyond
the grave: all sins are justly punished, all moral distinctions
equitably compensated, in this life; in the future an equal glory
awaits all men, by the gracious and eternal election of God, as
revealed to us in the benignant mission of Christ. This is the
peculiar conception distinguishing some members of the
denomination now known as Universalists. Finally, it has been
believed that the freedom and probation granted here extend into
the life to come; that the aim of all future punishment will be
remedial, beneficent, not revengeful; that stronger motives will
be applied for producing repentance, and grander attractions to
holiness be felt; and that thus, at some time or other, even the
most sunken and hardened souls will be regenerated and raised up
to heaven in the image of God. Almost all Universalists, most
Unitarians, and large number of individual Christians outwardly
affiliated with other denominations, now accept and cherish this
theory.
One important variation from the doctrine of the dominant sects,
in connection with the present subject, is worthy of special
notice. We refer to the celebrated controversy waged in England,
in the first part of the eighteenth century, in regard to the
intermediate state of the dead. The famous Dr. Coward and a few
supporters labored, with much zeal, skill, and show of learning,
to prove the natural mortality of the soul. They asserted this to
be both a philosophical truth proved by scientific facts and a
Christian doctrine declared in Scripture and taught by the
Fathers. They argued that the soul is not an independent entity,
but is merely the life of the body. Proceeding thus far on the
principles of a materialistic science, they professed to complete
their theory from Scripture, without doing violence to any
doctrine of the acknowledged religion.6 The finished scheme was
this. Man was naturally mortal; but, by the pleasure and will of
God, he would have been immortally preserved alive had he not
sinned. Death is the consequence of sin, and man utterly perishes
in the grave. But God will restore the dead, through Christ, at
the day of the general resurrection which he has foretold in the
gospel.7 Some of the writers in this copious controversy
maintained that previous to the advent of Christ death was eternal
annihilation to all except a few who enjoyed an inspired
anticipatory faith in him, but that all who died after his coming
would be restored in the resurrection, the faithful to be advanced
to heaven, the wicked to be the victims of unending torture.8
Clarke and Baxter both wrote with extreme ability in support of
the natural immortality and separate existence of the soul. On the
other hand, the learned Henry Dodwell cited, from the lore of
three thousand years, a plausible body of authorities to show that
the soul is in itself but a mortal breath. He also contended, by a
singular perversion of figurative phrases from the New Testament
and from some of the Fathers, that,
6 Coward, Search after Souls.
7 Hallet, No Resurrection, no Future State.
8 Coward, Defence of the Search after Souls. Dodwell, Epistolary
Discourse. Peckard, Observations. Fleming, Survey of the Search
after Souls. Law, State of Separate Spirits. Layton, Treatise of
Departed Souls.
in counteraction of man's natural mortality, all who undergo
baptism at the hands of the ordained ministers of the Church of
England the only true priesthood in apostolic succession thereby
receive an immortalizing spirit brought into the world by Christ
and committed to his successors. This immortalizing spirit
conveyed by baptism would secure their resurrection at the last
day. Those destitute of this spirit would never awake from the
oblivious sleep of death, unless as he maintained will actually be
the case with a large part of the dead they are arbitrarily
immortalized by the pleasure of God, in order to suffer eternal
misery in hell! Absurd and shocking as this fancy was, it obtained
quite a number of converts, and made no slight impression at the
time. One of the writers in this controversy asserted that Luther
himself had been a believer in the death or sleep of the soul
until the day of judgment.9 Certain it is that such a belief had
at one period a considerable prevalence. Its advocates were called
Psychopannychians. Calvin wrote a vehement assault on them. The
opinion has sunk into general disrepute and neglect, and it would
be hard to find many avowed disciples of it. The nearly universal
sentiment of Christendom would now exclaim, in the quaint words of
Henry More,
"What! has old Adam snorted all this time Under some senselesse
clod, with sleep ydead?" 10
John Asgill printed, in the year 1700, a tract called "An argument
to prove that by the new covenant man may be translated into
eternal life without tasting death." He argues that the law of
death was a consequence of Adam's sin and was annulled by Christ's
sacrifice. Since that time men have died only because of an
obstinate habit of dying formed for many generations. For his
part, he has the independence and resolution to withstand the
universal pusillanimity and to refuse to die. He has discovered
"an engine in Divinity to convey man from earth to heaven." He
will "play a trump on death and show himself a match for the
devil!"
While treating of the various Protestant views of the future life,
it would be a glaring defect to overlook the remarkable doctrine
on that subject published by Emanuel Swedenborg and now held by
the intelligent, growing body of believers called after his name.
It would be impossible to exhibit this system adequately in its
scientific bases and its complicated details without occupying
more space than can be afforded here. Nor is this necessary, now
that his own works have been translated and are easily accessible
everywhere. His "Heaven and Hell," "Heavenly Arcana," "Doctrine of
Influx," and "True Christian
9 Blackburne, View of the Controversy Concerning an Intermediate
State: appendix. It is probable that the great Reformer's opinion
on this point was not always the same. For he says, distinctly,
"The first man who died, when he awakes at the last day, will
think he has been asleep but an hour" Beste, Dr. M. Luther's
Glaubenslehre, cap. iv.: Die Lehre von den Letzen Dingen. Yet. J.
S. Muller seems conclusively to prove the truth of the proposition
which forms the title of his book, "Dass Luther die Lehre vom
Seelenschlafe nie geglaubt habe."
10 The controversy concerning the natural immortality of the soul
has within a few years raged afresh. The principal combatants were
Dobney, Storrs, White, Morris, and Hinton. See Athanasia, by J. H.
Hinton, London, 1849.
Religion," contain manifold statements and abundant illustrations
of every thing important bearing on his views of the theme before
us. We shall merely attempt to present a brief synopsis of the
essential principles, accompanied by two or three suggestions of
criticism.
Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truth
and love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed for
a season of probation in a perishable material body. Every moment
receiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returning
it through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in conscious
obedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal,
and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power of
man's life, and the understanding is its form. When the will is
disinterested love and the understanding is celestial truth, then
man fulfils the end of his being, and his home is heaven; he is a
spirit frame into which the goodness of God perpetually flows, is
humbly acknowledged, gratefully enjoyed, and piously returned. But
when his will is hatred or selfishness and his understanding is
falsehood or evil, then his powers are abused, his destiny
inverted, and his fate hell. While in the body in this world he is
placed in freedom, on probation, between these two alternatives.
The Swedenborgian universe is divided into four orders of abodes.
In the highest or celestial world are the heavens of the angels.
In the lowest or infernal world are the hells of the demons. In
the intermediate or spiritual world are the earths inhabited by
men, and surrounded by the transition state through which souls,
escaping from their bodies, after a while soar to heaven or sink
to hell, according to their fitness and attraction. In this life
man is free, because he is an energy in equilibrium between the
influences of heaven and hell. The middle state surrounding man is
full of spirits, some good and some bad. Every man is accompanied
by swarms of both sorts of spirits, striving to make him like
themselves. Now, there are two kinds of influx into man. Mediate
influx is when the spirits in the middle state flow into man's
thoughts and affections. The good spirits are in communication
with heaven, and they carry what is good and true; the evil
spirits are in communication with hell, and they carry what is
evil and false. Between these opposed and reacting agencies man is
in an equilibrium whose essence is freedom. Deciding for himself,
if he turns with embracing welcome to the good spirits, he is
thereby placed and lives in conjunction with heaven; but if he
turns, on the contrary, with predominant love to the bad spirits,
he is placed in conjunction with hell and draws his life thence.
From heaven, therefore, through the good spirits, all the elements
of saving goodness flow sweetly down and are appropriated by the
freedom of the good man; while from hell, through the bad spirits,
all the elements of damning evil flow foully up and are
appropriated by the freedom of the bad man.
The other kind of influx is called immediate. This is when the
Lord himself, the pure substance of truth and good, flows into
every organ and faculty of man. This influx is perpetual, but is
received as truth and good only by the true and good. It is
rejected, suffocated, or perverted by those who are in love with
falsities and evils. So the light of the sun produces colors
varying with the substances it falls on, and water takes forms
corresponding to the vessels it is poured into.
The whole invisible world heaven, hell, and the middle state is
peopled solely from the different families of the human race
occupying the numerous material globes of the universe. The good,
on leaving the fleshly body, are angels, the bad, demons. There is
no angel nor demon who was created such at first. Satan is not a
personality, but is a figurative term standing for the whole
complex of hell. In the invisible world, time and space in one
sense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. They
virtually cease because all our present measures of them are
annihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondences
to them are left. To spirits, time is no longer measured by the
revolution of planets, but by the succession of inward states;
space is measured not by way marks and the traversing of
distances, but by inward similitudes and dissimilitudes. Those who
are unlike are sundered by gulfs of difference. Those who are
alike are together in their interiors. Thought and love,
forgetfulness and hate, are not hampered by temporal and spatial
boundaries. Spiritual forces and beings spurn material
impediments, and are united or separate, reciprocally visible or
invisible, mutually conscious or unconscious, according to their
own laws of kindred or alien adaptedness.
The soul the true man is its own organized and deathless body, and
when it leaves its earthly house of flesh it knows the only
resurrection, and the cast off frame returns to the dust forever.
Swedenborg repeatedly affirms with emphasis that no one is born
for hell, but that all are born for heaven, and that when any one
comes into hell it is from his own free fault. He asserts that
every infant, wheresoever born, whether within the Church or out
of it, whether of pious parents or of impious, when he dies is
received by the Lord, and educated in heaven, and becomes an
angel. A central principle of which he never loses sight is that
"a life of charity, which consists in acting sincerely and justly
in every function, in every engagement, and in every work, from a
heavenly motive, according to the Divine laws, is possible to
every one, and infallibly leads to heaven." It does not matter
whether the person leading such a life be a Christian or a
Gentile. The only essential is that his ruling motive be divine
and his life be in truth and good.
The Swedenborgian doctrine concerning Christ and his mission is
that he was the infinite God incarnate, not incarnate for the
purpose of expiating human sin and purchasing a ransom for the
lost by vicarious sufferings, but for the sake of suppressing the
rampant power of the hells, weakening the influx of the infernal
spirits, setting an example to men, and revealing many important
truths. The advantage of the Christian over the pagan is that the
former is enlightened by the celestial knowledge contained in the
Bible, and animated by the affecting motives presented in the
drama of the Divine incarnation. There is no probation after this
life. Just as one is on leaving the earth he goes into the
spiritual world. There his
11 Philo the Jew says, (vol. i. p. 277, ed. Mangey,) "God is the
Father of the world: the world is the father of time, begetting it
by its own motion: time, therefore, holds the place of grandchild
to God." But the world is only one measure of time; another, and a
more important one, is the inward succession of the spirit's
states of consciousness. Between Philo and Swedenborg, it may be
remarked here, there are many remarkable correspondences both of
thought and language. For example, Philo says, (vol. i. p. 494,)
"Man is a small kosmos, the kosmos is a grand man."
ruling affection determines his destiny, and that affection can
never be extirpated or changed to all eternity. After death, evil
life cannot in any manner or degree be altered to good life, nor
infernal love be transmuted to angelic love, inasmuch as every
spirit from head to foot is in quality such as his love is, and
thence such as his life is, so that to transmute this life into
the opposite is altogether to destroy the spirit. It were easier,
says Swedenborg, to change a night bird into a dove, an owl into a
bird of paradise, than to change a subject of hell into a subject
of heaven after the line of death has been crossed. But why the
crossing of that line should make such an infinite difference he
does not explain; nor does he prove it as a fact.
The moral reason and charitable heart of Swedenborg vehemently
revolted from the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and
vicarious atonement, and the group of thoughts that cluster around
them. He always protests against these dogmas, refutes them with
varied power and consistency; and the leading principles of his
own system are creditable to human nature, and attribute no
unworthiness to the character of God. A debt of eternal gratitude
is due to Swedenborg that his influence, certainly destined to be
powerful and lasting, is so clearly calculated to advance the
interests at once of philosophic intelligence, social affection,
and true piety. The superiorities of his view of the future life
over those which it seeks to supplant are weighty and numerous.
The following may be reckoned among the most prominent.
First, without predicating of God any aggravated severity or
casting the faintest shadow on his benevolence, it gives us the
most appalling realization of the horribleness of sin and of its
consequences. God is commonly represented in effect, at least as
flaming with anger against sinners, and forcibly flinging them
into the unappeasable fury of Tophet, where his infinite vengeance
may forever satiate itself on them. But, Swedenborg says, God is
incapable of hatred or wrath: he casts no one into hell; but the
wicked go where they belong by their own election, from the
inherent fitness and preference of their ruling love. The evil man
desires to be in hell because there he finds his food, employment,
and home; in heaven he would suffer unutterable agonies from every
circumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary and
benignant love of God, not by his indignation; and their
retributions are in their own characters, not in their prison
house. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shock
the heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to prefer
wallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to the
very evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst of
all the impressions of sin, and beneath the lowest deep of the
popular hell opens to our shuddering conceptions a deep of
loathsomeness immeasurably lower still.
Secondly, the Swedenborgian doctrine of the conditions of
salvation or reprobation, when compared with the popular doctrine,
is marked by striking depth of insight, justice, and liberality.
Every man is free. Every man has power to receive the influx of
truth and good from the Lord and convert it to its blessed and
saving uses, piety towards God, good will towards the neighbor,
and all kinds of right works. Who does this, no matter in what
land or age he lives, becomes an heir of heaven. Who perverts
those Divine gifts to selfishness and unrighteous deeds becomes a
subject of hell. No mere opinion, no mere profession, no mere
ritual services, no mere external obedience, not all these things
together, can save a man, nor their absence condemn him; but the
controlling motive of his life, the central and ruling love which
constitutes the substance of his being, this decides every man's
doom. The view is simple, reasonable, just, necessary. And so is
the doctrine of degrees accompanying it; namely, that there are in
heaven different grades and qualities of exaltation and delight,
and in hell of degradation and woe, for different men according to
their capacities and deserts. A profoundly ethical character
pervades the scheme, and the great stamp of law is over it all.
Thirdly, a manifest advantage of Swedenborg's doctrine over the
popular doctrine is the intimate connection it establishes between
the present and the future, the visible and the invisible, God and
man. Heaven and hell are not distant localities, entrance into
which is to be won or avoided by moral artifices or sacramental
subterfuges, but they are states of being depending on personal
goodness or evil. God is not throned at the heart or on the apex
of the universe, where at some remote epoch we hope to go and see
him, but he is the Life feeding our lives freshly every instant.
The spiritual world, with all its hosts, sustains and arches,
fills and envelops us. Death is the dropping of the outer body,
the lifting of an opaque veil, and we are among the spirits,
unchanged, as we were before. Judgment is not a tribunal dawning
on the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentary
assimilation of a celestial or an infernal love leading to states
and acts, rewards and retributions, corresponding. Before this
view the dead universe becomes a live transparency overwritten
with the will, tremulous with the breath, and irradiate with the
illumination of God.
We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the future
life should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error of
the dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of all
the subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness,
denying that they can ever make the slightest ameliorating
progress. We have never been able to see force enough in any of
the arguments or assertions advanced in support of this tremendous
horror to warrant the least hesitation in rejecting it. For
ourselves, we must regard it as incredible, and think that God
cannot permit it. Instruction, reformation, progress, are the
final aims of punishment. Aspiration is the concomitant of
consciousness, and the authentic voice of God. Surely, sooner or
later, in the boonful eternities of being, every creature capable
of intelligence, allied to the moral law, drawing life from the
Infinite, must begin to travel the ascending path of virtue and
blessedness, and never retrograde again.
Neither can we admit in general the claim made by Swedenborg and
by his disciples that the way in which he arrived at his system of
theology elevates it to the rank of a Divine revelation. It is
asserted that God opened his interior vision, so that he saw what
had hitherto been concealed from the eyes of men in the flesh,
namely, the inhabitants, laws, contents, and experiences of the
spiritual world, and thus that his statements are not speculations
or arguments, but records of unerring knowledge, his descriptions
not fanciful pictures of the imagination, but literal transcripts
of the truth he saw. This, in view of the great range of known
experience, is not intrinsically probable, and we have seen no
proof of it. Judging from what we know of psychological and
religious history, it is far more likely that a man should
confound his intangible reveries with solid fact than that he
should be inspired by God to reveal a world of mysterious truths.
Furthermore, while we are impressed with the reasonableness,
probability, and consistency of most of the general principles of
Swedenborg's exposition of the future life, we cannot but shrink
from many of the details and forms in which he carries them out.
Notwithstanding the earnest avowals of able disciples of his
school that all his details are strictly necessitated by his
premises, and that all his premises are laws of truth, we are
compelled to regard a great many of his assertions as purely
arbitrary and a great many of his descriptions as purely fanciful.
But, denying that his scheme of eschatology is a scientific
representation of the reality, and looking at it as a poetic
structure reared by co working knowledge and imagination on the
ground of reason, nature, and morality, whose foundation walls,
columns, and grand outlines are truth, while many of its details,
ornaments, and images are fancy, it must be acknowledged to be one
of the most wonderful examples of creative power extant in the
literature of the world. No one who has mastered it with
appreciative mind will question this. There are, expressed and
latent, in the totality of Swedenborg's accounts of hell and
heaven, more variety of imagery, power of moral truth and appeal,
exhibition of dramatic justice, transcendent delights of holiness
and love, curdling terrors of evil and woe, strength of
philosophical grasp, and sublimity of emblematic conception, than
are to be found in Dante's earth renowned poem. We say this of the
substance of his ideas, not of the shape and clothing in which
they are represented. Swedenborg was no poet in language and form,
only in conception.
Take this picture. In the topmost height of the celestial world
the Lord appears as a sun, and all the infinite multitudes of
angels, swarming up through the innumerable heavens, wherever they
are, continually turn their faces towards him in love and joy. But
at the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness,
towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through the
successive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God. Or
consider this. Every thing consists of a great number of perfect
leasts like itself: every heart is an aggregation of little
hearts, every lung an aggregation of little lungs, every eye an
aggregation of little eyes. Following out the principle, every
society in the spiritual world is a group of spirits arranged in
the form of a man, every heaven is a gigantic man composed of an
immense number of individuals, and all the heavens together
constitute one Grand Man, a countless number of the most
intelligent angels forming the head, a stupendous organization of
the most affectionate making the heart, the most humble going to
the feet, the most useful attracted to the hands, and so on
through every part.
With exceptions, then, we regard Swedenborg's doctrine of the
future life as a free poetic presentment, not as a severe
scientific statement, of views true in moral principle, not of
facts real in literal detail. His imagination and sentiment are
mathematical and ethical instead of asthetic and passionate. Milk
seems to run in his veins instead of blood, but he is of
truthfulness and charity all compact. We think it most probable
that the secret of his supposed inspiration was the abnormal
frequent or chronic turning of his mind into what is called the
ecstatic or clairvoyant state. This condition being spontaneously
induced, while he yet, in some unexplained manner, retained
conscious possession and control of his usual faculties, he
treated his subjective conceptions as objective realities,
believed his interior contemplations were accurate visions of
facts, and took the strange procession of systematic reveries
through his teeming brain for a scenic revelation of the
exhaustive mysteries of heaven and hell. "Each wondrous guess
beheld the truth it sought, And inspiration flash'd from what was
thought."
This hypothesis, taken in conjunction with the comprehensiveness
of his mind, the vastness of his learning, the integral
correctness of his conscience, and his disciplined habits of
thought, will go far towards explaining the unparalleled
phenomenon of his theological works; and, though it leaves many
things unaccounted for, it seems to us more credible than any
other which has yet been suggested.
The last of the three prominent phenomena which as before said
followed the Protestant Reformation was rationalism, an attempt to
try all religious questions at the tribunal of reason and by the
tests of conscience. The great movement led by Luther was but one
element in a numerous train of influences and events all yielding
their different contributions to that resolute rationalistic
tendency which afterwards broke out so powerfully in England,
France, and Germany, and, spreading thence into every country in
Christendom, has been, in secret and in public, with slow, sure
steps, irresistibly advancing ever since. In the history of
scholasticism there were three distinct epochs. The first period
was characterized by the servile submission and conformity of
philosophy to the theology dictated by the Church. The second
period was marked by the formal alliance and attempted
reconciliation of philosophy and theology. The third period saw an
ever increasing jealousy and separation between the philosophers
and the theologians.12 Many an adventurous thinker pushed his
speculations beyond the limits of the established theology, and
deliberately dissented from the orthodox standards in his
conclusions. Perhaps Abelard, who openly strove to put all the
Church dogmas in forms acceptable to philosophy, and who did not
hesitate to reject in many instances what seemed to him
unreasonable, deserves to be called the father of rationalism. The
works of Des Cartes, Leibnitz, Wolf, Kant's "Religion within the
Bounds of Pure Reason," together with the influence and the
writings of many other eminent philosophers, gradually gave
momentum to the impulse and popularity to the habits of free
thought and criticism even in the realm of theology. The dogmatic
scheme of the dominant Church was firmly seized, many errors
shaken out to the light and exposed, and many long received
opinions questioned and flung into doubt.13 The authenticity of
many of the popular doctrines regarding the future life could not
fail to be denied as soon as it was attempted as was extensively
done about the middle of the eighteenth century to demonstrate
them by mathematical methods, with all the array of axioms,
theorems, lemmas, doubts, and solutions. Flugge has historically
illustrated the employment of this method at considerable
length.14
12 Cousin, Hist. Mod. Phil., lect. ix.
13 Staudlin, Geschichte des Rationalismus. Saintes, Histoire
Critique du Rationalisme en Allemagne, Eng. trans. by Dr. Beard.
14 Geschichte des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit, u. s. f., th. iii.
abth. ii. ss. 281-289.
The essence of rationalism is the affirmation that neither the
Fathers, nor the Church, nor the Scriptures, nor all of them
together, can rightfully establish any proposition opposed to the
logic of sound philosophy, the principles of reason, and the
evident truth of nature. Around this thesis the battle has been
fought and the victory won; and it will stand with spreading favor
as long as there are unenslaved and cultivated minds in the world.
This position is, in logical necessity, and as a general thing in
fact, that of the large though loosely cohering body of believers
known as "Liberal Christians;" and it is tacitly held by still
larger and ever growing numbers nominally connected with sects
that officially eschew it with horror. The result of the studies
and discussions associated with this principle, so far as it
relates to the subject before us, has been the rejection of the
following popular doctrines: the plenary inspiration of the
Scriptures as an ultimate authority in matters of belief;
unconditional predestination; the satisfaction theory of the
vicarious atonement; the visible second coming of Christ, in
person, to burn up the world and to hold a general judgment; the
intermediate state of souls; the resurrection of the body; a local
hell of material fire in the bowels of the earth; the eternal
damnation of the wicked. These old dogmas,15 scarcely changed,
still remain in the stereotyped creeds of all the prominent
denominations; but they slumber there to an astonishing extent
unrealized, unnoticed, unthought of, by the great multitude of
common believers, while every consciously rational investigator
vehemently repudiates them. To every candid mind that has really
studied their nature and proofs their absurdity is now transparent
on all the grounds alike of history, metaphysics, morals, and
science.
The changes of the popular Christian belief in regard to three
salient points have been especially striking. First, respecting
the immediate fate of the dead, an intermediate state. The
predominant Jewish doctrine was that all souls went indiscriminately
into a sombre under world, where they awaited a resurrection.
The earliest Christian view prevalent was the same, with the
exception that it divided that place of departed spirits
into two parts, a painful for the bad, a pleasant for the good.
The next opinion that prevailed the Roman Catholic was the same as
the foregoing, with two exceptions: it established a purgatory in
addition to the previous paradise and hell, and it opened heaven
itself for the immediate entrance of a few spotless souls. Pope
John XXII., as Gieseler shows, was accused of heresy by the
theological doctors of Paris because he declared that no soul
could enter heaven and enjoy the beatific vision until after the
resurrection. Pope Benedict XII. drew up a list of one hundred and
seventeen heretical opinions held by the Armenian Christians. One
of these notions was that the souls of all deceased adults wander
in the air until the Day of Judgment, neither hell, paradise, nor
heaven being open to them until after that day. Thomas Aquinas
says, "Each soul at death immediately flies to its appointed
place, whether in hell or in heaven, being without the body until
the resurrection, with it afterwards."16 Then came the
15 They are defended in all their literal grossness in the two
following works, both recent publications. The World to Come; by
the Rev. James Cochrane. Der Tod, das Todtenreich, und der Zustand
der abgeschiedenen Seelen; von P. A. Maywahlen.
16 Summa iii. in Suppl. 69. 2.
dogma of the orthodox Protestants, slightly varying in the
different sects, but generally agreeing that at death all redeemed
souls pass instantly to heaven and all unredeemed souls to hell.17
The principal variation from this among believers within the
Protestant fellowship has been the notion that the souls of all
men die or sleep with the body until the Day of Judgment, a notion
which peeps out here and there in superstitious spots along the
pages of ecclesiastical history, and which has found now and then
an advocate during the last century and a half. The Council of
Elvin, in Spain, forbade the lighting of tapers in churchyards,
lest it should disturb the souls of the deceased buried there. At
this day, in prayers and addresses at funerals, no phrases are
more common than those alluding to death as a sleep, and implying
that the departed one is to slumber peacefully in his grave until
the resurrection. And yet, at the same time, by the same persons
contrary ideas are frequently expressed. The truth is, the
subject, owing to the contradictions between their creed and their
reason, is left by most persons in hopeless confusion and
uncertainty. They have no determinately reconciled and conscious
views of their own. Rationalism sweeps away all the foregoing
incongruous medley at once, denying that we know any thing about
the precise localities of heaven and hell, or the destined order
of events in the hidden future of separate souls; affirming that
all we should dare to say is simply that the souls whether of good
or of bad men, on leaving the body, go at once into a spiritual
state of being, where they will live immortally, as God decrees,
never returning to be reinvested with the vanished charnel houses
of clay they once inhabited.
Secondly, the thought that Christ after his death descended into
the under world to ransom mankind, or a part of mankind, from the
doom there, is in the foundation of the apostolic theology. It was
a central element in the belief of the Fathers, and of the Church
for fourteen hundred years. None of the prominent Protestant
reformers thought of denying it. Calvin lays great stress on it.18
Apinus and others, at Hamburg, maintained that Christ's descent
was a part of his humiliation, and that in it he suffered
unutterable pains for us. On the other hand, Melancthon and the
Wittenbergers held that the descent was a part of Christ's
triumph, since by it he won a glorious victory over the powers of
hell.19 But gradually the importance and the redeeming effects
attached to Christ's descent into hell were transferred to his
death on the cross. Slowly the primitive dogma dwindled away, and
finally sunk out of sight, through an ever encroaching disbelief
in the physical conditions on which it rested and in the pictorial
environments by which it was recommended. And now it is scarcely
ever heard of, save when brought out from old scholastic tomes by
some theological delver. Baumgarten Crusius has learnedly
illustrated the important place long held by this notion, and well
shown its gradual retreat into the unnoticed background.20
17 Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland, ch. xxxii.
Calvin, Institutes, lib. iii. cap. xxv.; and his Psychopannychia.
Quenstedt also affirms it. Likewise the Confession of Faith of the
Westminster Divines, art. xxxii., says, "Souls neither die nor
sleep, but go immediately to heaven or hell."
18 Institutes, lib. ii. cap. 16, sects. 16, 19.
19 Ledderhose, Life of Melancthon, Eng. trans. by Krotel, ch. xxx.
20 Compendium der Christliche Dogmengeschichte, thl. ii. sects.
100-109.
The other particular doctrine which we said had undergone
remarkable change is in regard to the number of the saved. A
blessed improvement has come over the popular Christian feeling
and teaching in respect to this momentous subject. The Jews
excluded from salvation all but their own strict ritualists. The
apostles, it is true, excluded none but the stubbornly wicked. But
the majority of the Fathers virtually allowed the possibility of
salvation to few indeed. Chrysostom doubted if out of the hundred
thousand souls constituting the Christian population of Antioch in
his day one hundred would be saved! 21 And when we read, with
shuddering soul, the calculations of Cornelius a Lapide, or the
celebrated sermon of Massillon on the "Small Number of the Saved,"
we are compelled to confess that they fairly represent the almost
universal sentiment and conviction of Christendom for more than
seventeen hundred years. A quarto volume published in London in
1680, by Du Moulin, called "Moral Reflections upon the Number of
the Elect," affirmed that not one in a million, from Adam down to
our times, shall be saved. A flaming execration blasted the whole
heathen world, 22 and a metaphysical quibble doomed ninety nine of
every hundred in Christian lands. Collect the whole relevant
theological literature of the Christian ages, from the birth of
Tertullian to the death of Jonathan Edwards, strike the average
pitch of its doctrinal temper, and you will get this result: that
in the field of human souls Satan is the harvester, God the
gleaner; hell receives the whole vintage in its wine press of
damnation, heaven obtains only a few straggling clusters plucked
for salvation. The crowded wains roll staggering into the iron
doorways of Satan's fire and brimstone barns; the redeemed
vestiges of the world crop of men are easily borne to heaven in
the arms of a few weeping angels. How different is the prevailing
tone of preaching and belief now! What a cheerful ascent of views
from the mournful passage of the dead over the river of oblivion
fancied by the Greeks, or the excruciating passage of the river of
fire painted by the Catholics, to the happy passage of the river
of balm, healing every weary bruise and sorrow, promised by the
Universalists! It is true, the old harsh exclusiveness is still
organically imbedded in the established creeds, all of which deny
the possibility of salvation beyond the little circle who vitally
appropriate the vicarious atonement of Christ; but then this is,
for the most part, a dead letter in the creeds. In the hearts and
in the candid confessions of all but one in a thousand it is
discredited and sincerely repelled as an abomination to human
nature, a reflection against God, an outrage upon the substance of
ethics. Remorseless bigots may gloat and exult over the thought
that those who reject their dogmas shall be thrust into the
roaring fire gorges of hell; but a better spirit is the spirit of
the age we live in; and, doubtless, a vast majority of the men we
daily meet really believe that all who try to the best of their
ability, according to their light and circumstances, to do what is
right, in the love of God and man, shall be saved. In that moving
scene of the great dramatist where the burial of the innocent and
hapless Ophelia is represented, and Lacrtes vainly seeks to win
from the Church official
21 In Acta Apostolorum, homil. xxiv.
22 Gotze, Ueber die Neue Meinung von der Seligkeit der angeblich
guten und redlichen Seelen unter Juden, Heiden, und Turken durch
Christum, ohne dass sie an ihn glauben.
the full funeral rites of religion over her grave, the priest may
stand for the false and cruel ritual spirit, the brother for the
just and native sentiment of the human heart. Says the priest,
"We should profane the service of the dead To sing a requiem and
such rest to her As to peace parted souls." And Laertes replies,
"Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
Shall violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering
angel shall my sister be When thou liest howling."
Indeed, who that has a heart in his bosom would not be ashamed not
to sympathize with the gentle hearted Burns when he expresses even
to the devil himself the quaint and kindly wish, "Oh wad ye tak' a
thought and mend!"
The creeds and the priests, in congenial alliance with many evil
things, may strive to counteract this progressive self
emancipation from cruel falsehoods and superstitions, but in vain.
The terms of salvation are seen lying in the righteous will of a
gracious God, not in the heartless caprice of a priesthood nor in
the iron gripe of a set of dogmas. The old priestly monopoly over
the way to heaven has been taken off in the knowledge of the
enlightened present, and, for all who have unfettered feet to walk
with, the passage to God is now across a free bridge. The ancient
exactors may still sit in their toll house creeds and confessionals;
but their authority is gone, and the virtuous traveller, stepping
from the ground of time upon the planks that lead over into eternity,
smiles as he passes scot free by their former taxing terrors.
The reign of sacramentalists and dogmatists rapidly declines.
Reason, common sentiment, the liberal air, the best and
strongest tendencies of the people, are against them to
day, and will be more against them in every coming day. Every
successive explosion of the Second Adventist fanaticism will leave
less of that element behind. Its rage in America, under the
auspices of Miller, in the nineteenth century, was tame and feeble
when compared with the terror awakened in Europe in the fifteenth
century by Stofler's prediction of an approaching comet.23 Every
new discovery of the harmonies of science, and of the perfections
of nature, and of the developments of the linear logic of God
consistently unfolding in implicated sequences of peaceful order
unperturbed by shocks of failure and epochs of remedy, will
increase and popularize an intelligent faith in the original
ordination and the intended permanence of the present constitution
of things. Finally men will cease to be looking up to see the blue
dome cleave open for the descent of angelic squadrons headed by
the majestic Son of God, the angry breath of his mouth consuming
the world, cease to
23 Bayle, Historical Dictionary, art. Stofler, note B.
expect salvation by any other method than that of earnest and
devout truthfulness, love, good works, and pious submissiveness to
God, cease to fancy that their souls, after waiting through the
long sleep or separation of death, will return and take on their
old bodies again. Recognizing the Divine plan for training souls
in this lower and transient state for a higher and immortal state,
they will endeavor, in natural piety and mutual love, while they
live, to exhaust the genuine uses of the world that now is, and
thus prepare themselves to enter with happiest auspices, when they
die, the world prepared for them beyond these mortal shores.
These cheerful prophecies must be verified in the natural course
of things. The rapid spread of the doctrine of a future life
taught by the "Spirit rappers" is a remarkable revelation of the
great extent to which the minds of the common people have at last
become free from the long domination of the ecclesiastical dogmas
on that subject. The leading representatives of the "Spiritualists"
affirm, with much unanimity, the most comforting conclusions
as to the condition of the departed. They exclude all wrath
and favoritism from the disposition of the Deity. They have
little in fact, they often have nothing whatever to say of hell.
They emphatically repudiate the ordinarily taught terms of
salvation, and deny the doctrine of hopeless reprobation. All
death is beautiful and progressive. "Every form and thing is
constantly growing lovelier and every sphere purer." The abode of
each soul in the future state is determined, not by decrees or
dogmas or forms of any kind, but by qualities of character,
degrees of love, purity, and wisdom. There are seven ascending
spheres, each more abounding than the one below it in beauties,
glories, and happiness. "The first sphere is the natural; the
second, the spiritual; the third, the celestial; the fourth, the
supernatural; the fifth, the superspiritual; the sixth, the
supercelestial; the seventh, the Infinite Vortex of Love and
Wisdom."24 Whatever be thought of the pretensions of this doctrine
to be a Divine revelation, whatever be thought of its various
psychological, cosmological, and theological characteristics, its
ethics are those of natural reason. It is wholly irreconcilable
with the popular ecclesiastical system of doctrines. Its epidemic
diffusion until now burdened as it is with such nauseating
accompaniments of crudity and absurdity, it reckons its adherents
by millions is a tremendous evidence of the looseness with which
the old, cruel dogmas sit on the minds of the masses of the
people, and of their eager readiness to welcome more humane views.
In science the erroneous doctrines of the Middle Age are now
generally discarded. The mention of them but provokes a smile or
awakens surprise. Yet, as compared with the historic annals of our
race, it is but recently that the true order of the solar system
has been unveiled, the weight of the air discovered, the
circulation of the blood made known, the phenomena of insanity
intelligently studied, the results of physiological chemistry
brought to light, the symmetric domain and sway of calculable law
pushed far out in every direction of nature and experience. It
used to be supposed that digestion was effected by means of a
mechanical power equal to many tons. Borelli asserted that the
muscular force of the heart was one hundred and eighty thousand
pounds. These absurd estimates only disappeared when the
24 Andrew Jackson Davis, Nature's Divine Revelations, sects. 192
203.
properties of the gastric juice were discerned. The method in
which we distinguish the forms and distances of objects was not
understood until Berkeley published his "New Theory of Vision."
Few persons are aware of the opposition of bigotry, stolidity, and
authority against which the brilliant advances of scientific
discovery and mechanical invention and social improvement have
been forced to contend, and in despite of which they have slowly
won their way. Excommunications, dungeons, fires, sneers, polite
persecution, bitter neglect, tell the story, from the time the
Athenians banned Anaxagoras for calling the sun a mass of fire, to
the day an English mob burned the warehouses of Arkwright because
he had invented the spinning jenny. But, despite all the hostile
energies of establishment, prejudice, and scorn, the earnest
votaries of philosophical truth have studied and toiled with ever
accumulating victories, until now a hundred sciences are ripe with
emancipating fruits and perfect freedom to be taught. Railroads
gird the lands with ribs of trade, telegraphs thread the airs with
electric tidings of events, and steamships crease the seas with
channels of foam and fire. There is no longer danger of any one
being put to death, or even being excluded from the "best
society," for saying that the earth moves. An eclipse cannot be
regarded as the frown of God when it is regularly foretold with
certainty. The measurement of the atmosphere exterminated the
wiseacre proverb, "Nature abhors a vacuum," by the burlesque
addition, "but only for the first thirty two feet." The madman
cannot be looked on as divinely inspired, his words to be caught
as oracles, or as possessed by a devil, to be chained and
scourged, since Pinel's great work has brought insanity within the
range of organic disease. When Franklin's kite drew electricity
from the cloud to his knuckle, the superstitious theory of thunder
died a natural death.
The vast progress effected in all departments of physical science
during the last four centuries has not been made in any kindred
degree in the prevailing theology. Most of the harsh, unreasonable
tenets of the elaborately morbid and distorted mediaval
theologyare still retained in the creeds of the great majority of
Christendom. The causes of this difference are plain. The
establishment of newly discovered truths in material science being
less intimately connected with the prerogatives of the ruling
classes, less clearly hostile to the permanence of their power,
they have not offered so pertinacious an opposition to progress in
this province: they have yielded a much larger freedom to
physicists than to moralists, to discoverers of mathematical,
chemical, and mechanical law than to reformers of political and
religious thought. Livy tells us that, in the five hundred and
seventy third year of Rome, some concealed books of Numa were
found, which, on examination by the priests, being thought
injurious to the established religion, were ordered to be
burned.25 The charge was not that they were ungenuine, nor that
their contents were false; but they were dangerous. In the second
century, an imperial decree forbade the reading of the Sibylline
Oracles, because they contained prophecies of Christ and doctrines
of Christianity. By an act of the English Parliament, in the
middle of the seventeenth century, every copy of the Racovian
Catechism (an exposition of the Socinian doctrine) that could be
obtained was burned in the streets.
25 Lib. xl. cap. xxix.
The Index Expurgatorius for Catholic countries is still freshly
filled every year. And in Protestant countries a more subtle and a
more effectual influence prevents, on the part of the majority,
the candid perusal of all theological discussions which are not
pitched in the orthodox key. Certain dogmas are the absorbed
thought of the sects which defend them: no fresh and independent
thinking is to be expected on those subjects, no matter how purely
fictitious these secretions of the brain of the denomination or of
some ancient leader may be, no matter how glaringly out of keeping
with the intelligence and liberty which reign in other realms of
faith and feeling. There is nowhere else in the world a tyranny so
pervasive and despotic as that which rules in the department of
theological opinion. The prevalent slothful and slavish surrender
of the grand privileges and duties of individual thought,
independent personal conviction and action in religious matters,
is at once astonishing, pernicious, and disgraceful. The effect of
entrenched tradition, priestly directors, a bigoted, overawing,
and persecuting sectarianism, is nowhere else a hundredth part so
powerful or so extensive.
In addition to the bitter determination by interested persons to
suppress reforming investigations of the doctrines which hold
their private prejudices in supremacy, and to the tremendous
social prestige of old establishment, another cause has been
active to keep theology stationary while science has been making
such rapid conquests. Science deals with tangible quantities,
theology with abstract qualities. The cultivation of the former
yields visible practical results of material comfort; the
cultivation of the latter yields only inward spiritual results of
mental welfare. Accordingly, science has a thousand resolute
votaries where theology has one unshackled disciple. At this
moment, a countless multitude, furnished with complex apparatus,
are ransacking every nook of nature, and plucking trophies, and
the world with honoring attention reads their reports. But how few
with competent preparation and equipment, with fearless
consecration to truth, unhampered, with fresh free vigor, are
scrutinizing the problems of theology, enthusiastically bent upon
refuting errors and proving verities! And what reception do the
conclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surely
not prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgment
or courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice,
or sophistical evasions and insulting vituperation.
What a striking and painful contrast is afforded by the generous
encouragement given to the students of science by the annual
bestowment of rewards by the scientific societies such as the
Cuvier Prize, the Royal Medal, the Rumford Medal and the jealous
contempt and assaults visited by the sectarian authorities upon
those earnest students of theology who venture to propose any
innovating improvement! Suppose there were annually awarded an
Aquinas Prize, a Fenelon Medal, a Calvin Medal, a Luther Medal, a
Channing Medal, not to the one who should present the most
ingenious defence of any peculiar tenet of one of those masters,
but to him who should offer the most valuable fresh contribution
to theological truth! What should we think if the French Institute
offered a gold medal every year to the astronomer who presented
the ablest essay in support of the Ptolemaic system, or if the
Royal Society voted a diploma for the best method of casting
nativities? Such is the course pursued in regard to dogmatic
theology. The consequence has been that while elsewhere the
ultimate standard by which to try a doctrine is, What do the
most competent judges say? What does unprejudiced reason dictate?
What does the great harmony of truth require? in theology it is,
What do the committed priests say? How does it comport with the
old traditions?
We read in the Hak ul Yakeen that the envoy of Herk, Emperor of
Rum, once said to the prophet, "You summon people to a Paradise
whose extent includes heaven and earth: where, then, is hell?"
Mohammed replied, "When day comes, where is night?" That is to
say, according to the traditionary glosses, as day and night are
opposite, so Paradise is at the zenith and hell at the nadir. Yes;
but if Paradise be above the heavens, and hell below the seventh
earth, then how can Sirat be extended over hell for people to pass
to Paradise? "We reply," say the authors of the Hak ul Yakeen,
"that speculation on this subject is not necessary, nor to be
regarded. Implicit faith in what the prophets have revealed must
be had; and explanatory surmises, which are the occasion of
Satanic doubts, must not be indulged."26 Certainly this exclusion
of reason cannot always be suffered. It is fast giving way
already. And it is inevitable that, when reason secures its right
and bears its rightful fruits in moral subjects as it now does in
physical subjects, the mediaval theology must be rejected as
mediaval science has been. It is the common doctrine of the Church
that Christ now sits in heaven in a human body of flesh and blood.
Calvin separated the Divine nature of Christ from this human body;
but Luther made the two natures inseparable and attributed
ubiquity to the body in which they reside, thus asserting the
omnipresence of a material human body, a bulk of a hundred and
fifty pounds' weight more or less. He furiously assailed Zwingle's
objection to this monstrous nonsense, as "a devil's mask and
grandchild of that old witch, mistress Reason." 27 The Roman
Church teaches, and her adherents devoutly believe, that the house
of the Virgin Mary was conveyed on the wings of angels from
Nazareth to the eastern slope of the Apennines above the Adriatic
Gulf.28 The English Church, consistently interpreted, teaches that
there is no salvation without baptism by priests in the line of
apostolic succession. These are but ordinary specimens of
teachings still humbly received by the mass of Christians. The
common distrust with which the natural operations of reason are
regarded in the Church, the extreme reluctance to accept the
conclusions of mere reason, seem to us discreditable to the
theological leaders who represent the current creeds of the
approved sects. Many an influential theologian could learn
invaluable lessons from the great guides in the realm of science.
The folly which acute learned wise men will be guilty of the
moment they turn to theological subjects, where they do not allow
reason to act, is both ludicrous and melancholy. The victim of
lycanthropy used to be burned alive; he is now placed under the
careful treatment of skilful and humane physicians. But the
heretic or infidel is still thought to be inspired by the devil, a
fit subject for discipline here and hell hereafter. The light shed
abroad by the rising spirit of rational investigation must
gradually dispel the delusions which lurk in the vales of
theology, as it already has dispelled those that formerly haunted
the hills of science. The spectres which have so long terrified a
childish world will successively vanish
26 Merrick, Hyat ul Kuloob, note 74.
27 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 265, note 2.
28 Christian Remembrancer, April, 1855. A full and able history of
the "Holy House of Loretto."
from the path of man as advancing reason, in the name of the God
of truth, utters its imperial "Avaunt!"
Henry More wrote a book on the "Immortality of the Soul," printed
in London in 1659, just two hundred years ago. It is full of
beauty, acumen, and power. He was one of the first men of the
time. Yet he seriously elaborates an argument like this: "The scum
and spots that lie on the sun are as great an Argument that there
is no Divinity in him as the dung of Owls and Sparrows that is
found on the faces and shoulders of Idols in Temples are clear
evidences that they are no true Deities."29 He also in good faith
tells a story like this: "That a Woman with child, seeing a
Butcher divide a Swine's head with a Cleaver, brought forth her
Child with its face cloven in the upper jaw, the palate, and upper
lip to the very nose."30 The progress marked by the contrast of
the scientific spirit of the present time with the ravenous
credulity of even two centuries back must continue and spread into
every province. Some may vilify it; but in vain. Some may
sophisticate against it; but in vain. Some may invoke authority
and social persecution to stop it; but in vain. Some may appeal to
the prejudices and fears of the timid; but in vain. Some may close
their own eyes, and hold their hands before their neighbors' eyes,
and attempt to shut out the light; but in vain. It will go on. It
is the interest of the world that it should go on. It is the manly
and the religious course to help this progress with prudence and
reverence. Truth is the will of God, the way he has made things to
be and to act, the way he wishes free beings to exist and to act.
He has ordained the gradual discovery of truth. And despite the
struggles of selfish tyranny, and the complacence of luxurious
ease, and the terror of ignorant cowardice, truth will be more and
more brought to universal acceptance. Some men have fancied their
bodies composed of butter or of glass; but when compelled to move
out into the sunlight or the crowd they did not melt nor break.31
Esquirol had a patient who did not dare to bend her thumb, lest
the world should come to an end. When forced to bend it, she was
surprised that the crack of doom did not follow.
The mechanico theatrical character of the popular theology is
enough to reveal its origin and its fundamental falsity. The
difference between its lurid and phantasmal details and the calm
eternal verities in the divinely constituted order of nature is as
great as the difference between those stars which one sees in
consequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turning
his gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bare
appreciation of such a passage as that which closes
Chateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathos
of its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is its
sufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moon
is covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang half
detached from the vault of heaven, and the agony of the world
commences. Now resounds the trump of the angel. The sepulchres
burst: the human race issues all at once, and fills the Valley of
Jehoshaphat! The Son of Man appears in the clouds; the powers of
hell ascend from the infernal depths; the goats are separated from
the sheep; the wicked are plunged into the gulf; the just ascend
to heaven; God returns to his repose,
29 Preface, p. 10.
30 Ibid. p. 392.
31 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, ch. ix.
and the reign of eternity begins."32 Nothing saves this whole
scheme of doctrine from instant rejection except neglect of
thought, or incompetence of thought, on the part of those who
contemplate it. The peculiar dogmas of the exclusive sects are the
products of mental and social disease, psychological growths in
pathological moulds. The naked shapes of beautiful women floating
around St. Anthony in full display of their maddening charms are
interpreted by the Romanist Church as a visible work of the devil.
An intelligent physician accounts for them by the laws of
physiology, the morbid action of morbid nerves. There is no doubt
whatever as to which of these explanations is correct. The
absolute prevalence of that explanation is merely a question of
time. Meanwhile, it is the part of every wise and devout man,
without bigotry, without hatred for any, with strict fidelity to
his own convictions, with entire tolerance and kindness for all
who differ from him, sacredly to seek after verity himself and
earnestly to endeavor to impart it to others. To such men forms of
opinion, instead of being prisons, fetters, and barriers, will be
but as tents of a night while they march through life, the burning
and cloudy column of inquiry their guide, the eternal temple of
truth their goal.
The actual relation, the becoming attitude, the appropriate
feeling, of man towards the future state, the concealed segment of
his destiny, are impressively shown in the dying scene of one of
the wisest and most gifted of men, one of the fittest representatives
of the modern mind. In a good old age, on a pleasant spring day,
with a vast expanse of experience behind him, with an immensity of
hope before him, he lay calmly expiring.
"More light!" he cried, with departing breath; and Death, solemn
warder of eternity, led him, blinded, before the immemorial veil
of awe and secrets. It uprolled as the flesh bandage fell from his
spirit, and he walked at large, triumphant or appalled, amidst the
unimagined revelations of God.
And now, recalling the varied studies we have passed through, and
seeking for the conclusion or root of the matter, what shall we
say? This much we will say. First, the fearless Christian, fully
acquainted with the results of a criticism unsparing as the
requisitions of truth and candor, can scarcely, with intelligent
honesty, do more than place his hand on the beating of his heart,
and fix his eye on the riven tomb of Jesus, and exclaim, "Feeling
here the inspired promise of immortality, and seeing there the
sign of God's authentic seal, I gratefully believe that Christ has
risen, and that my soul is deathless!" Secondly, the trusting
philosopher, fairly weighing the history of the world's belief in
a future life, and the evidences on which it rests, can scarcely,
with justifying warrant, do less than lay his hand on his body,
and turn his gaze aloft, and exclaim, "Though death shatters this
shell, the soul may survive, and I confidently hope to live
forever." Meanwhile, the believer and the speculator, combining to
form a Christian philosophy wherein doubt and faith, thought and
freedom, reason and sentiment, nature and revelation, all embrace,
even as the truth of things and the experience of life demand, may
both adopt for their own the expression wrought for himself by a
pure and fervent poet in these freighted lines of pathetic beauty:
32 Genius of Christianity, part ii. book vi. ch. vii.
"I gather up the scattered rays Of wisdom in the early days, Faint
gleams and broken, like the light Of meteors in a Northern night,
Betraying to the darkling earth The unseen sun which gave them
birth; I listen to the sibyl's chant, The voice of priest and
hierophant; I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, And what of life
and what of death The demon taught to Socrates, And what, beneath
his garden trees Slow pacing, with a dream like tread, The solemn
thoughted Plato said; Nor Lack I tokens, great or small, Of God's
clear light in each and all, While holding with more dear regard
Than scroll of heathen seer and bard The starry pages, promise
lit, With Christ's evangel overwrit, Thy miracle of life and
death, O Holy One of Nazareth!" 33
33 Whittier, Questions of Life.
PART FIFTH.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES.
THE power of the old religions was for centuries concentrated in
the Mysteries. These were recondite institutions, sometimes
wielded by the state, sometimes by a priesthood, sometimes by a
ramifying private society. None could be admitted into them save
with the permission of the hierarchs, by rites of initiation, and
under solemn seals of secrecy. These mysterious institutions,
charged with strange attractions, shrouded in awful wonder, were
numerous, and, agreeing in some of their fundamental features,
were spread nearly all over the world. The writings of the
ancients abound with references to them, mostly eulogistic. The
mighty part played by these veiled bodies in the life of the
periods when they flourished, the pregnant hints and alluring
obscurities amid which they stand in relation to the learning of
modern times, have repeatedly obtained wide attention, elicited
opposite opinions, provoked fierce debates, and led different
inquirers to various conclusions as to their true origin,
character, scope, meaning, and results.
One of the principal points in discussion by scholars concerning
the Mysteries has been whether they inculcated an esoteric
doctrine of philosophy, opposed to the popular religion. Some
writers have maintained that in their symbols and rites was
contained a pure system of monotheistic ethics and religion. Our
own opinion is that in some of these institutions, at one period,
higher theological views and scientific speculations were
unfolded, but in others never. Still, it is extremely difficult to
prove any thing on this part of the general subject: there is much
that is plausible to be said on both sides of the question.
Another query to be noticed in passing is in regard to the degree
of exclusiveness and concealment really attached to the form of
initiation. Lobeck, in his celebrated work, "Aglaophamus," borne
away by a theory, assumes the extravagant position that the
Eleusinian Mysteries were almost freely open to all.1 His error
seems to lie in not distinguishing sufficiently between the Lesser
and the Greater Mysteries, and in not separating the noisy shows
of the public festal days from the initiatory and explanatory
rites of personal admission within the mystic pale. The notorious
1 Lib. i. sects. 4, 5.
facts that strict inquiry was made into the character and fitness
of the applicant before his admission, and that many were openly
rejected, that instant death was inflicted on all who intruded
unprepared within the sacred circuits, and that death was the
penalty of divulging what happened during the celebrations, all
are inconsistent with the notion of Lobeck, and prove that the
Mysteries were hedged about with dread. Aschylus narrowly escaped
being torn in pieces upon the stage by the people on suspicion
that in his play he had given a hint of something in the
Mysteries. He delivered himself by appealing to the Areopagus, and
proving that he had never been initiated. Andocides also, a Greek
orator who lived about four hundred years before Christ, was
somewhat similarly accused, and only escaped by a strenuous
defence of himself in an oration, still extant, entitled
"Concerning the Mysteries."
A third preliminary matter is as to the moral character of the
services performed by these companies. Some held that their
characteristics were divinely pure, intellectual, exalting; others
that in abandoned pleasures they were fouler than the Stygian pit.
The Church Fathers, Clement, Irenaus, Tertullian, and the rest,
influenced by a mixture of prejudice, hatred, and horror, against
every thing connected with paganism, declared, in round terms,
that the Mysteries were unmitigated sinks of iniquity and shame,
lust, murder, and all promiscuous deviltry. Without pausing to
except or qualify, or to be thoroughly informed and just, they
included the ancient stern generations and their own degraded
contemporaries, the vile rites of the Corinthian Aphrodite and the
solemn service of Demeter, the furious revels of the Bacchanalians
and the harmonious mental worship of Apollo, all in one
indiscriminate charge of insane beastliness and idolatry. Their
view of the Mysteries has been most circulated among the moderns
by Leland's learned but bigoted work on the "Use and Necessity of
a Divine Revelation." He would have us regard each one as a vortex
of atheistic sensuality and crime. There should be discrimination.
The facts are undoubtedly these, as we might abundantly
demonstrate were it in the province of the present essay. The
original Mysteries, the authoritative institutions co ordinated
with the state or administered by the poets and philosophers, were
pure: their purpose was to purify the lives and characters of
their disciples. Their means were a complicated apparatus of
sensible and symbolic revelations and instructions admirably
calculated to impress the most salutary moral and religious
lessons. In the first place, is it credible that the state would
fling its auspices over societies whose function was to organize
lawlessness and debauchery, to make a business of vice and filth?
Among the laws of Solon is a regulation decreeing that the Senate
shall convene in the Eleusinian temple, the day after the
festival, to inquire whether every thing had been done with
reverence and propriety. Secondly, if such was the character of
these secrets, why was inquisition always made into the moral
habits of the candidate, that he might be refused admittance if
they were bad? This inquiry was severe, and the decision
unrelenting. Alcibiades was rejected, as we learn from Plutarch's
life of him, on account of his dissoluteness and insubordination
in the city. Nero dared not attend the Eleusinian Mysteries,
"because to the murder of his mother he had joined the slaughter
of his paternal aunt."2 All accepted candidates were scrupulously
purified in thought and body, and clad in white robes, for nine
days previous to their reception. Thirdly, it is intrinsically
absurd to suppose that an institution of gross immorality and
cruelty could have flourished in the most polite and refined Greek
nation, as the Eleusinian Mysteries did for over eighteen hundred
years, ranking among its members a vast majority of both sexes, of
all classes, of all ages, and constantly celebrating its rites
before immense audiences of them all. Finally, a host of men like
Plato, Sophocles, Cimon, Lycurgus, Cicero, were members of these
bodies, partook in their transactions, and have left on record
eulogies of them and of their influence. The concurrent testimony
of antiquity is that in the Great Mysteries the desires were
chastened, the heart purified, the mind calmed, the soul inspired,
all the virtues of morality and hopes of religion taught and
enforced with sublime solemnities. There is no just ground for
suspecting this to be false.
But there remains something more and different to be said also.
While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, there
did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and
pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the
control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which
unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and
prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign
grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous
climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in
Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as
compelled the Senate to suppress them. Livy gives a detailed and
vivid account of the whole affair in his history.3 But the
gladiators, scoundrels, rakes, bawds, who swarmed in these stews
of rotting Rome, are hardly to be confounded with the noble men
and matrons of the earlier time who openly joined in the pure
Mysteries with the approving example of the holiest bards, the
gravest statesmen, and the profoundest sages, men like Pindar,
Pericles, and Pythagoras. Ample facilities are afforded in the
numerous works to which we shall refer for unmasking the different
organizations that travelled over the earth in the guise of the
Mysteries, and of seeing what deceptive arts were practised in
some, what superhuman terrors paraded in others, what horrible
cruelties perpetrated in others, what leading objects sought in
each.
The Mysteries have many bearings on several distinct subjects; but
in those aspects we have not space here to examine them. We
purpose to consider them solely in their relation to the doctrine
of a future life. We are convinced that the very heart of their
secret, the essence of their meaning in their origin and their
end, was no other than the doctrine of an immortality succeeding a
death. Gessner published a book at Gottingen, so long ago as the
year 1755, maintaining this very assertion. His work, which is
quite scarce now, bears the title "Dogma de perenni Animoruin
Natura per Sacra pracipue Eleusinia Propagata." The consenting
testimony of more than forty of the most authoritative ancient
writers comes down to us in their surviving works to the effect
that those who were admitted into the Mysteries were thereby
purified, led to holy lives, joined in communion with the gods,
and
2 Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.
3 Lib. xxxix. cap. viii xvi.
assured of a better fate than otherwise could be expected in the
future state. Two or three specimens from these witnesses will
suffice. Aristophanes, in the second act of the Frogs, describes
an elysium of the initiates after death, where he says they bound
"in sportive dances on rose enamelled meadows; for the light is
cheerful only to those who have been initiated."4 Pausanias
describes the uninitiated as being compelled in Hades to carry
water in buckets bored full of holes.5 Isocrates says, in his
Panegyric, "Demeter, the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries,
fortifies those who have been initiated against the fear of death,
and teaches them to have sweet hopes concerning eternity." The old
Orphic verses cited by Thomas Taylor in his Treatise on the
Mysteries run thus: "The soul that uninitiated dies Plunged in the
blackest mire in Hades lies." 6
The same statement is likewise found in Plato, who, in another
place, also explicitly declares that a doctrine of future
retribution was taught in the Mysteries and believed by the
serious.7 Cicero says, "Initiation makes us both live more
honorably and die with better hopes." 8 In seasons of imminent
danger as in a shipwreck it was customary for a man to ask his
companion, Hast thou been initiated? The implication is that
initiation removed fear of death by promising a happy life to
follow.9 A fragment preserved from a very ancient author is plain
on this subject. "The soul is affected in death just as it is in
the initiation into the great Mysteries: thing answers to thing.
At first it passes through darkness, horrors, and toils. Then are
disclosed a wondrous light, pure places, flowery meads, replete
with mystic sounds, dances, and sacred doctrines, and holy
visions. Then, perfectly enlightened, they are free: crowned, they
walk about worshipping the gods and conversing with good men."10
The principal part of the hymn to Ceres, attributed to Homer, is
occupied with a narrative of her labors to endow the young
Demophoon, mortal child of Metaneira, with immortality. Now, Ceres
was the goddess of the Mysteries; and the last part of this very
hymn recounts how Persephone was snatched from the light of life
into Hades and restored again. Thus we see that the implications
of the indirect evidence, the leanings and guidings of all the
incidental clews now left us to the real aim and purport of the
Mysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was a
doctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards and
punishments. All this we shall more fully establish, both by
direct proofs and by collateral supports.
It is a well known fact, intimately connected with the different
religions of Greece and Asia Minor, that during the time of
harvest in the autumn, and again at the season of sowing in the
spring, the shepherds, the vintagers, and the people in general,
were accustomed to observe certain sacred festivals, the autumnal
sad, the vernal joyous. These undoubtedly grew out of the deep
sympathy between man and nature over the decay and disappearance,
the revival and return, of vegetation. When the hot season had
withered the verdure of the
4 Scene iii.
5 Lib. x. cap. xxxi.
6 Phadon, sect. xxxviii.
7 Leg., lib. ix. cap. x.
8 De Leg., lib. ii. cap. xiv.
9 St. John, Hellenes, ch. xi.
10 Sentences of Stobaus, Sermo CXIX.
fields, plaintive songs were sung, their wild melancholy notes and
snatches borne abroad by the breeze and their echoes dying at last
in the distance. In every instance, these mournful strains were
the annual lamentation of the people over the death of some
mythical boy of extraordinary beauty and promise, who, in the
flower of youth, was suddenly drowned, or torn in pieces by wild
beasts, "Some Hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April
bloom."
Among the Argives it was Linus. With the Arcadians it was
Scephrus. In Phrygia it was Lityerses. On the shore of the Black
Sea it was Bormus. In the country of the Bithynians it was Hylas.
At Pelusium it was Maneros. And in Syria it was Adonis. The
untimely death of these beautiful boys, carried off in their
morning of life, was yearly bewailed, their names re echoing over
the plains, the fountains, and among the hills. It is obvious that
these cannot have been real persons whose death excited a sympathy
so general, so recurrent. "The real object of lamentation," says
Muller, "was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the raging
heat, and other similar phenomena, which the imagination of those
early times invested with a personal form."11 All this was woven
into the Mysteries, whose great legend and drama were that every
autumn Persephone was carried down to the dark realm of the King
of Shadows, but that she was to return each spring to her mother's
arms. Thus were described the withdrawal and reappearance of
vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. But these
changes of nature typified the changes in the human lot; else
Persephone would have been merely a symbol of the buried grain and
would not have become the Queen of the Dead.12 Her return to the
world of light, by natural analogy, denoted a new birth to men.
Accordingly, "all the testimony of antiquity concurs in saying
that these Mysteries inspired the most animating hopes with regard
to the condition of the soul after death."13 That the fate of man
should by imagination and sentiment have been so connected with
the phenomena of nature in myths and symbols embodied in pathetic
religious ceremonies was a spontaneous product. For how "Her fresh
benignant look Nature changes at that lorn season when, With
tresses drooping o'er her sable stole, She yearly mourns the
mortal doom of man, Her noblest work! So Israel's virgins erst
With annual moan upon the mountains wept Their fairest gone!"
And soon again the birds begin to warble, the leaves and blossoms
put forth, and all is new life once more. In every age the gentle
heart and meditative mind have been impressed by the mournful
correspondence and the animating prophecy.
11 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. iii. sects. 2
3.
12 For the connection of the Eleusinian goddesses with
agriculture, the seasons, the under world, death, resurrection,
etc., see "Demeter and Persephone," von Dr. Ludwig Preller, kap.
i. sects. 9 11.
13 Muller, Hist. Gr. Lit., ch. xvi. sect. 2.
But not only was the changing recurrence of dreary winter and
gladsome summer joined by affecting analogies with the human doom
of death and hope of another life. The phenomena of the skies, the
impressive succession of day and night, also were early seized
upon and made to blend their shadows and lights, by means of
imaginative suggestions, into an image of the decease and
resurrection of man. Among the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, so
called, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage is
identified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus and
soaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak of
the setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension in
the horizon being its return to life.14 The black abysm under the
earth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above the
earth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun rises
royally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth and
splendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of his
ambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves in
mourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffled
in his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial.
How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolically
interwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joy
and activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness and
sad repose of midnight and of death.
The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor
Nature loves to weep."
Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, does
mother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, in
type of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buried
seed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day bursting
fruit.
These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together with
explanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by the
peculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among the
earliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth as
literal history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth once
historically exemplified by some traditional personage. It was
dramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiation
into the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatrical
representation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years,
of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, his
flight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king of
the dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ran
along the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of the
god in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurel
from the sacred valley.15 The doctrine of a future life connected
with the legend of some hero who had died, descended into the
under world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramatically
represented in the personal experience of the initiate, was the
heart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity.
"Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death bolted
Mysteries."
14 Leitch's Eng. trans. of K. O. Muller's Introduction to a
Scientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342.
15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also his
Dorian, lib. ii. cap. vii. sect. 8.
Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grew
up naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed at
once, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology,
by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral and
religious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps it
was gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives.
Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliant
primeval revelation. This question of the origination, the first
causes and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopeless
obscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thing
we know, namely, that at an early age these societies formed
organizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitally
connected with the prevailing religions of the principal nations
of the earth.
In Egypt the legend of initiation was this.16 Typhon, a wicked,
destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against his
brother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest,
inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose body
would fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhon
instantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into the
river. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and was
annually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But the
winds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, the
inconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband's
remains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. This
part of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection of
Osiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestation
of excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in the
finding him again," Augustine writes, "first their lamentation,
then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yet
the fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weep
and rejoice truly."17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration,
and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religious
festivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration of
Typhon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, the
subsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of the
delicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, the
encroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, the
disappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness of
winter.18 But the real interest and power of the whole subject
probably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena,
traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a future
life for man.
In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, and
doctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They are
credulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself,
who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, where
thousands thronged to be initiated by him.19 This Mithraic cave
was an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with the
constellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black and
fiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blue
and starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangers
and instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathing
celestial music. In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, in
dramatic show, died, was laid in a coffin, and
16 Wilkinson, Egyptian Antiquities, series i. vol. i. ch. 3.
17 De Civitate Dei, lib. vi. cap. 10.
18 De Is. et Osir.
19 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her.,
cap. xl., where he refers the mimic death and resurrection in the
Mithraic Mysteries to the teaching of Satan.
afterwards rose unto a new life, all of which was a type of the
natural fate of man.20 The descent of the soul from heaven and its
return thither were denoted by a torch borne alternately reversed
and upright, and by the descriptions of the passage of spirits, in
the round of the metempsychosis, through the planetary gates of
the zodiac. The sun and moon and the morning and evening star were
depicted in brilliant gold or blackly muffled, according to their
journeying in the upper or in the lower hemisphere.21
The hero of the Syrian Mysteries was Adonis or Thammuz, the
beautiful favorite of Aphrodite, untimely slain by a wild boar.
His death was sadly, his resurrection joyously, celebrated every
year at Byblus with great pomp and universal interest. The
festival lasted two days. On the first, all things were clad in
mourning, sorrow was depicted in every face, and wails and weeping
resounded. Coffins were exposed at every door and borne in
numerous processions. Frail stalks of young corn and flowers were
thrown into the river to perish, as types of the premature death
of blooming Adonis, cut off like a plant in the bud of his age.22
The second day the whole aspect of things was changed, and the
greatest exultation prevailed, because it was said Adonis had
returned from the dead.23 Venus, having found him dead, deposited
his body on a bed of lettuce and mourned bitterly over him. From
his blood sprang the adonium, from her tears the anemone.24 The
Jews were captivated by the religious rites connected with this
touching myth, and even enacted them in the gates of their holy
temple. Ezekiel says, "Behold, at the gate of the Lord's house
which was towards the north [the direction of night and winter]
there sat women weeping for Tammuz." It was said that Aphrodite
prevailed on Persephone to let Adonis dwell one half the year with
her on earth, and only the rest among the shades, a plain
reference to vegetable life in summer and winter.25 Lucian, in his
little treatise on the Syrian Goddess, says that "the river
Adonis, rising out of Mount Libanus, at certain seasons flows red
in its channel: some say it is miraculously stained by the blood
of the fresh wounded youth; others say that the spring rains,
washing in a red ore from the soil of the country, discolor the
stream." Dupuis remarks that this redness was probably an artifice
of the priests.26 Milton's beautiful allusion to this fable is
familiar to most persons. Next came he "Whose annual wound in
Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous
ditties all a summer's day, While smooth Adonis from his native
rock Ran purple to the sea with Thammuz' blood."
20 Julius Firmicus, De Errore Prof. Relig.
21 Mithraica, Memoire Academique sur le Culte Solaire de Mithra,
par Joseph de Hammer, pp: 66-68, 125-127. Tertullian, Prescript.
ad Her., cap. xl. Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lib. iv. sect. 16.
Hyde. Hist. Vet. Pers. Relig., p. 254.
22 Hist. du Culte d'Adonis, Mem. Acad. des Inscript., vol. iv. p.
136.
23 Theocritus, Idyl XV.
24 Bion, Epitaph Adon., l. 66.
25 See references in Anthon's Class. Dict., art. Adonis.
26 Dupuis, Orig. de Cultes, vol. iv. p. 121, ed. 1822.
There is no end to the discussions concerning the secret purport
of this fascinating story. But, after all is said, it seems to us
that there are in it essentially two significations, one relating
to the phenomena of the sun and the earth, the other to the mutual
changes of nature and the fate of humanity. Aphrodite bewailing
Adonis is surviving Nature mourning for departed Man.
In India the story was told of Mahadeva searching for his lost
consort Sita, and, after discovering her lifeless form, bearing it
around the world with dismal lamentations. Sometimes it was the
death of Camadeva, the Hindu Cupid, that was mourned with solemn
dirges.27 He, like Osiris, was slain, enclosed in a chest, and
committed to the waves. He was afterwards recovered and
resuscitated. Each initiate passed through the emblematic
ceremonies corresponding to the points of this pretended history.
The Phrygians associated the same great doctrine with the persons
of Atys and Cybele. Atys was a lovely shepherd youth passionately
loved by the mother of the gods.28 He suddenly died; and she, in
frantic grief, wandered over the earth in search of him, teaching
the people where she went the arts of agriculture. He was at
length restored to her. Annually the whole drama was performed by
the assembled nation with sobs of woe succeeded by ecstasies of
joy.29 Similar to this, in the essential features, was the
Eleusinian myth. Aidoneus snatched the maiden Kore down to his
gloomy empire. Her mother, Demeter, set off in search of her,
scattering the blessings of agriculture, and finally discovered
her, and obtained the promise of her society for half of every
year. These adventures were dramatized and explained in the
mysteries which she, according to tradition, instituted at
Eleusis.
The form of the legend was somewhat differently incorporated with
the Bacchic Mysteries. It was elaborately wrought up by the Orphic
poets. The distinctive name they gave to Bacchus or Dionysus was
Zagreus. He was the son of Zeus, and was chosen by him to sit on
the throne of heaven. Zeus gave him Apollo and the Curetes as
guards; but the brutal Titans, instigated by jealous Hera,
disguised themselves and fell on the unfortunate youth while his
attention was fixed on a splendid mirror, and, after a fearful
conflict, overcame him and tore him into seven pieces. Pallas,
however, saved his palpitating heart, and Zeus swallowed it.
Zagreus was then begotten again.30 He was destined to restore the
golden age. His devotees looked to him for the liberation of their
souls through the purifying rites of his Mysteries. The initiation
shadowed out an esoteric doctrine of death and a future life, in
the mock murder and new birth of the aspirant, who impersonated
Zagreus.31
The Northmen constructed the same drama of death around the young
Balder, their god of gentleness and beauty. This legend, as Dr.
Oliver has shown, constituted the secret of the Gothic
Mysteries.32 Obscure and dread prophecies having crept among the
gods that the death of the beloved Balder was at hand, portending
universal ruin, a consultation was held to devise means for
averting the calamity. At the suggestion of Balder's mother,
Freya, the Scandinavian Venus, an oath that they would not be
instrumental in causing his death was
27 Asiatic Researches, vol. iii. p. 187.
28 See article Atys in Smith's Class. Dict. with references.
29 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, lib. ii. 11. 605-655.
30 Muller, Hist. Greek Lit., ch. xvi.
31 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. iii. cap. 5, sect. 13.
32 History of Initiation, Lect. X.
exacted from all things in nature except the mistletoe, which, on
account of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfully
neglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, taking
advantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe,
and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicing
in fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed exemption
from wounds, persuaded him to be the mark for the weapons of the
gods. But, alas! when Hodur tilted at him, the devoted victim was
transpierced and fell lifeless to the ground. Darkness settled
over the world, and bitter was the grief of men and gods over the
innocent and lovely Balder. A deputation imploring his release was
sent to the queen of the dead. Hela so far relented as to promise
his liberation to the upper world on condition that every thing on
earth wept for him. Straightway there was a universal mourning.
Men, beasts, trees, metals, stones, wept. But an old withered
giantess Asa Loke in disguise shed no tears; and so Hela kept her
beauteous and lamented prey. But he is to rise again to eternal
life and joy when the twilight of the gods has passed.33 This
entire fable has been explained by the commentators, in all its
details, as a poetic embodiment of the natural phenomena of the
seasons. But it is not improbable that, in addition, it bore a
profound doctrinal reference to the fate of man which was
interpreted to the initiates.
A great deal has been written concerning the ceremonies and
meaning of the celebrated Celtic Mysteries established so long at
Samothrace, and under the administration of the Druids throughout
ancient Gaul and Britain. The aspirant was led through a series of
scenic representations, "without the aid of words," mystically
shadowing forth in symbolic forms the doctrine of the transmigration
of souls. He assumed successively the shapes of a rabbit, a hen,
a grain of wheat, a horse, a tree, and so on through a wide range
of metamorphoses enacted by the aid of secret dramatic machinery.
He died, was buried, was born anew, rising from his dark confinement
to life again. The hierophant enclosed him in a little boat and
set him adrift, pointing him to a distant rock, which he calls
"the harbor of life." Across the black and stormy waters he strives
to gain the beaconing refuge.
In these scenes and rites a recondite doctrine of the physical
and moral relations and destiny of man was shrouded, to be unveiled
by degrees to their docile disciples by the Druidic mystagogues.34
It may appear strange that there should be in connection with so
many of the old religions of the earth these arcana only to be
approached by secret initiation at the hands of hierophants. But
it will seem natural when we remember that those religions were in
the exclusive keeping of priesthoods, which, organized with
wondrous cunning and perpetuated through ages, absorbed the
science, art, and philosophy of the world, and, concealing their
wisdom in the mystic signs of an esoteric language, wielded the
mighty enginery of superstition over the people at will. The
scenes and instructions through which the priests led the
unenlightened candidate were the hiding of their power. Thus,
wherever was a priesthood we should expect to find mysteries and
initiations. Historic fact justifies the
33 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, pp. 288-300.
34 Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, pp. 207-257;
390-392; 420, 555, 572. The accuracy of many of Davies's
translations has been called in question. His statements, even on
the matters affirmed above, must be received with some reservation
of faith.
supposition; learning unveils the obscure places of antiquity, and
shows us the templed or cavernous rites of the religious world,
from Hindostan to Gaul, from Egypt to Norway, from Athens to
Mexico. And this brings us to the Mysteries of Vitzliputzli,
established in South America. Dr. Oliver, in the twelfth lecture
of his History of Initiation, gathering his materials from various
sources, gives a terrific account of the dramatic ritual here
employed. The walls, floor, images, were smeared and caked with
human blood. Fresh slaughters of victims were perpetrated at
frequent intervals. The candidate descended to the grim caverns
excavated under the foundations of the temple. This course was
denominated "the path of the dead." Phantoms flitted before him,
shrieks appalled him, pitfalls and sacrificial knives threatened
him. At last, after many frightful adventures, the aspirant
arrived at a narrow stone fissure terminating the range of
caverns, through which he was thrust, and was received in the open
air, as a person born again, and welcomed with frantic shouts by
the multitudes who had been waiting for him without during the
process of his initiation.
Even among the savage tribes of North America striking traces have
been found of an initiation into a secret society by a mystic
death and resurrection. Captain Jonathan Carver, who spent the
winter of 1776 with the Naudowessie Indians, was an eye witness of
the admission of a young brave into a body which they entitled
Wakou Kitchewah, or Friendly Society of the Spirit. "This singular
initiation," he says, "took place within a railed enclosure in the
centre of the camp at the time of the new moon." First came the
chiefs, clad in trailing furs. Then came the members of the
society, dressed and painted in the gayest manner. When all were
seated, one of the principal chiefs arose, and, leading the young
man forward, informed the meeting of his desire to be admitted
into their circle. No objection being offered, the various
preliminary arrangements were made; after which the director began
to speak to the kneeling candidate, telling him that he was about
to receive a communication of the spirit. This spirit would
instantly strike him dead; but he was told not to be terrified,
because he should immediately be restored to life again, and this
experience was a necessary introduction to the advantages of the
community he was on the point of entering. Then violent agitation
distorted the face and convulsed the frame of the old chief. He
threw something looking like a small bean at the young man. It
entered his mouth, and he fell lifeless as suddenly as if he had
been shot. Several assistants received him, rubbed his limbs, beat
his back, stripped him of his garments and put a new dress on him,
and finally presented him to the society in full consciousness as
a member.36
All the Mysteries were funereal. This is the most striking single
phenomenon connected with them. They invariably began in darkness
with groans and tears, but as invariably ended in festive triumph
with shouts and smiles. In them all were a symbolic death, a
mournful entombment, and a glad resurrection. We know this from
the abundant direct testimony of unimpeachable ancient writers,
and also from their indirect descriptions of the ceremonies and
allusions to them. For example, Apuleius says, "The delivery of
the Mysteries is celebrated as a thing resembling a voluntary
death: the initiate, being, after a manner, born
36 Travels in the Interior of North America, ch. vii.
again, is restored to a new life." 36 Indeed, all who describe the
course of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant was
buried for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin or
grave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins of
the chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. These
abound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curious
recesses; and in connection with them is always found some
excavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollow
beds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to be
seen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as in
nearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration of
the Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt.37
It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols and
rites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadow
forth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well known
mythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity,
to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of the
Deluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death,
burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are a
representation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, his
dark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out of
it. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariably
began, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over their
confinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphant
rejoicings with which the initiations always ended, referred to
the glad exit of the patriarchal family from their floating prison
into the blooming world. The advocates of this theory have
laboriously collected all the materials that favor it, and
skilfully striven by their means to elucidate the whole subject of
ancient paganism, especially of the Mysteries. But, after reading
all that they have written, and considering it in the light of
impartial researches, one is constrained to say that they have by
no means made out their case. It is somewhat doubtful if there be
any ground whatever for believing that traditions concerning
Noah's deluge and the ark, and his doings in connection with them,
in any way entered into the public doctrines and forms, or into
the secret initiations, of the heathen religions. At all events,
there can be no doubt that the Arkite theorists have exaggerated
the importance and extent of these views beyond all tolerable
bounds, and even to absurdity. But our business with them now is
only so far as they relate to the Mysteries. Our own conviction is
that the real meaning of the rites in the Mysteries was based upon
the affecting phenomena of human life and death and the hope of
another life. We hold the Arkite theory to be arbitrary in
general, unsupported by proofs, and inconsistent in detail, unable
to meet the points presented.
In the first place, a fundamental part of the ancient belief was
that below the surface of the earth was a vast, sombre under
world, the destination of the ghosts of men, the Greek Hades, the
Roman Orcus, the Gothic Hell. A part of the service of initiation
was a symbolic descent into this realm. Apuleius, describing his
initiation, says, "I approached to the confines
36 Golden Ass, Eng. trans., by Thomas Taylor, p. 280.
37 Copious instances are given in Oliver's History of Initiation,
in Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, and in Maurice's Indian
Antiquities.
of death and trod on the threshold of Proserpine." 38 Orpheus, to
whom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the East
was ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent into
Hades." Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus,
Rhampsinitus, and many others.39 It is painted in detail by Homer
in the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much more
minutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with great
learning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, with
irresistible cogency, to show that these descents are no more nor
less than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted in
the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries.40 Any person must be
invincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant a
capacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryant
and his disciples do,41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah's
ark," or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as a
coffin bearing the relics of dead Nature," is a purely arbitrary
step taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means the
under world of the dead, and not the interior of Noah's ark.
Indeed, in the second place, Faber admits that in the Mysteries
"the ark itself was supposed to be in Hades, the vast central
abyss of the earth." But such was not the location of Noah's
vessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above the
tops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonable
supposition in itself, and the one best supported by historic
facts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in a
ship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic rites
drawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressive
phenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and some
other early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the sky
as ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself was
sometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was the
sepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over the
Acherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in which
Charon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surely
there was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likely
that what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into the
Arkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematic
showing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death and
future fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, with
striking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life,
as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a golden
cup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also represent
the cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing him
fearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcoming
society of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over the
tempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to the
sheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state and
lot, with their mysteries, perils, threats, and promises, could be
either more natural or more impressive than that of a vessel
launched on the deep. The dying Socrates said "that he should
trust his soul on the hope of a future life as upon a raft, and
launch away into the unknown." Thus the imagination broods over
and explores the shows and secrets, presageful warnings and
alluring
38 Golden Ass, Taylor's trans., p. 283.
39 Herodotus, lib. il. cap. cxxii.
40 Divine Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. iv.
41 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. v.: On the Connection of
the Fabulous Hades with the Mysteries.
invitations, storms and calms, island homes and unknown havens, of
the dim seas of nature and of man, of time and of eternity.42