Thirdly, the defenders of the Arkite theory are driven into gross

inconsistencies with themselves by the falsity of their views. The

dilaceration of Zagreus into fragments, the mangling of Osiris and

scattering of his limbs abroad, they say, refer to the throwing

open of the ark and the going forth of the inmates to populate the

earth. They usually make Osiris, Zagreus, Adonis, and the other

heroes of the legends enacted in the Mysteries, representatives of

the diluvian patriarch himself; but here, with no reason whatever

save the exigencies of their theory, they make these mythic

personages representatives of the ark, a view which is utterly

unfounded and glaringly wanting in analogy. When Zagreus is torn

in pieces, his heart is preserved alive by Zeus and born again

into the world within a human form. After the body of Osiris had

been strewn piecemeal, the fragments were fondly gathered by Isis,

and he was restored to life. There is no plausible correspondence

between these cases and the sending out from the ark of the

patriarchal family to repeople the world. Their real purpose would

seem plainly to be to symbolize the thought that, however the body

of man crumbles in pieces, there is life for him still, he does

not hopelessly die. They likewise say that the egg which was

consecrated in the Mysteries, at the beginning of the rites, was

intended as an emblem of the ark resting on the abyss of waters,

and that its latent hatching was meant to suggest the opening of

the ark to let the imprisoned patriarch forth. This hypothesis has

no proof, and is needless. It is much more plausible to suppose

that the egg was meant as a symbol of a new life about to burst

upon the candidate, a symbol of his resurrection from the mystic

tomb wherein he was buried during one stage of initiation; for we

know that the initiation was often regarded as the commencement of

a fresh life, as a new birth. Apuleius says, "I celebrated the

most joyful day of my initiation as my natal day."

Faber argues, from the very close similarity of all the

differently named Mysteries, that they were all Arkite, all

derived from one mass of traditions reaching from Noah and

embodying his history.43 The asserted fact of general resemblance

among the instituted Mysteries is unquestionable; but the

inference above drawn from it is unwarrantable, even if no better

explanation could be offered. But there is another explanation

ready, more natural in conception, more consistent in detail, and

better sustained by evidence. The various Mysteries celebrated in

the ancient nations were so much alike not because they were all

founded on one world wide tradition about the Noachian deluge, but

because they all grew out of the great common facts of human

destiny in connection with natural phenomena. The Mysteries were

funereal and festive, began in sorrow and ended in joy, not

because they represented first Noah's sad entrance into the ark

and then his glad exit from it, but because they began with

showing the initiate that he must die, and ended with showing him

that he should live again in a happier state. Even the most

prejudiced advocates of the Arkite theory

42 Procopius, in his History of the Gothic War, mentions a curious

popular British superstition concerning the ferriage of souls among

the neighboring islands at midnight. See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie,

kap. xxvi. zweite ausgabe.

43 Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10: Comparison of the Various

Mysteries.

are forced to admit, on the explicit testimony of the ancients,

that the initiates passed from the darkness and horrors of

Tartarus to the bliss and splendors of Elysium by a dramatic

resurrection from burial in the black caverns of probation to

admission within the illuminated hall or dome of perfection.44

That the idea of death and of another life runs through all the

Mysteries as their cardinal tenet is well shown in connection with

the rites of the celebrated Cave of Trophonius at Lebadea in

Boeotia. Whoso sought this oracle must descend head foremost over

an inclined plane, bearing a honey cake in his hand. Aristophanes

speaks of this descent with a shudder of fear.45 The adventurer

was suddenly bereft of his senses, and after a while returned to

the upper air. What he could then remember composed the Divine

revelation which had been communicated to him in his unnatural

state below. Plutarch has given a full account of this experience

from one Timarchus, who had himself passed through it.46 The

substance of it is this. When Timarchus reached the bottom of the

cave, his soul passed from his body, visited the under world of

the departed, saw the sphere of generation where souls were reborn

into the upper world, received some explanation of all these

things: then, returning into the body, he was taken up out of the

cave. Here is no allusion to any traditions of the Deluge or the

ark; but the great purpose is evidently a doctrine of the destiny

of man after death.

Before the eyes and upon the heart of all mankind in every age has

passed in common vision the revolution of the seasons, with its

beautiful and sombre changes, phenomena having a power of

suggestion irresistible to stir some of the most profound

sentiments of the human breast. The day rolls overhead full of

light and life and activity; then the night settles upon the scene

with silent gloom and repose. So man runs his busy round of toil

and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following

the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid

populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is

succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of

enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in

maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen

in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds the

leafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks of the funereal

blast. The flush of childish gayety, the bloom of youthful

promise, when a new comer is growing up sporting about the hearth

of home, are like the approach of the maiden and starry Spring,

"Who comes sublime, as when, from Pluto free, Came, through the

flash of Zeus, Persephone." And then draw hastily on the long,

lamenting autumnal days, when "Above man's grave the sad winds

wail and rain drops fall, And Nature sheds her leaves in yearly

funeral."

44 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10, pp. 331-356. Dion

Chrysostom describes this scene: Oration XII.

45 The Clouds, 1. 507.

46 Essay on the Demon of Socrates. See also Pansanias, lib. ix.

cap. xxxix.

The flowers are gone, the birds are gone, the gentle breezes are

gone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people of

dreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soars

into new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens on

the heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surely

returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the

renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over

the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus,

is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual

wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss

of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and

suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart,

enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized by

poets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestly

societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an

imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central

meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah

and his ark.

The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold;

and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The first

object was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence of

a doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearful

looking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerable

proportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be traced

to the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations and

terrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the good

and obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and glorious

rewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near the

close of his letter of consolation to her,) "Some say the soul

will be entirely insensible after death; but you are too well

acquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries of

Bacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such an

error." The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, the

secret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions,

thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish its

doctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus to

increase the power of the priesthood and the state. To compass

these ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vague

superstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resources

available by the ancient world, were marshalled and brought to

bear in the Mysteries. By chemical and mechanical secrets then in

their exclusive possession, the mystagogues worked miracles before

the astonished novices.47 They had the powers of electricity,

gunpowder, hydrostatic pressure, at their command.48 Their rites

were carried out on the most magnificent scale. The temple at

Eleusis could hold thirty thousand persons. Imagine what effect

might be produced, under such imposing and prepared circumstances,

on an ignorant multitude, by a set of men holding all the

scientific secrets and mechanical inventions till then discovered,

illumination flashing after darkness successively before their

smitten eyes, the floors seeming to heave and the walls to crack,

thunders bellowing through the mighty dome; now yawning revealed

beneath them the ghostly chimera of Tartarus, with all the

shrieking and horrid scenery gathered there; now

47 Anthon's Class. Dict., art. "Elicius."

48 Salverte, Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie. See

also editor's introduction to Thomson's Eng. trans. of Salverte's

work.

the mild beauties of Elysium dawning on their ravished vision,

amid strains of celestial music, through fading clouds of glory,

while nymphs, heroes, and gods walked apparent. Clement of

Alexandria tells us that one feature of the initiation was a

display of the grisly secrets of Hades.49 Apuleius, in his account

of his own initiation, says, "At midnight I saw the sun shining

with a resplendent light; and I manifestly drew near to the lower

and to the upper gods and adored them in immediate presence." 50

Lobeck says that, on the lifting of the veil exposing the adytum

to the gaze of the initiates, apparitions of the gods appeared to

them.51 Christie, in his little work on the Greek Mysteries, says

that the doctrines of the Eleusinian shows were explained by means

of transparent scenes, many of which were faithfully copied upon

the painted Greek vases; and these vase accordingly, were

deposited in tombs to evidence the faith of the deceased in a

future life. The foregoing conceptions may be illustrated by the

dramatic representations, scenic shadows behind transparent

curtains, in Java, alluded to by Sir Stamford Raffles.52

It is remarkable how far the Mysteries spread over the earth, and

what popularity they attained. They penetrated into almost every

nation under the sun. They admitted, in some degree, nearly the

whole people. Herodotus informs us that there were collected in

Egypt, at one celebration, seven hundred thousand men and women,

besides children.53 The greatest warriors and kings Philip,

Alexander, Sulla, Antony esteemed it an honor to be welcomed

within the mystic pale. "Men," says Cicero, "came from the most

distant shores to be initiated at Eleusis." Sophocles declares, as

quoted by Warburton, "True life is to be found only among the

initiates: all other places are full of evil." At the rise of the

Christian religion, all the life and power left in the national

religion of Greece and Rome were in the Mysteries. Accordingly,

here was the most formidable foe of the new faith. Standing in its

old entrenchments, with all its popular prestige around it, it

fought with desperate determination for every inch it was

successively forced to yield. The brilliant effort of Julian to

roll back the tide of Christianity and restore the pagan religion

to more than its pristine splendor an effort beneath which the

scales of the world's fortunes poised, tremulous, for a while was

chiefly an endeavor to revive and enlarge the Mysteries. Such was

the attachment of the people to these old rites even in the middle

of the fourth century of the Christian era, that a murderous riot

broke out at Alexandria, in which Bishop George and others were

slain, on occasion of the profanation by Christians of a secret

adytum in which the Mysteries of Mithra were celebrated.54 And

when, a little later, the Emperor Valentinian had determined to

suppress all nocturnal rites, he was induced to withdraw his

resolution by Pretextatus, proconsul in Greece, "a man endowed

with every virtue, who represented to him that the

49 Stromata, lib. iii., cited by a writer on the Mysteries in

Blackwood, Feb. 1853, pp. 201-203.

50 Taylor's trans. of Golden Ass, p. 283. In a note to p. 275 of

this work, the translator describes (with a citation of his

authorities) "the breathing resemblances of the gods used in the

Mysteries, statues fabricated by the telesta, so as to be

illuminated and to appear animated."

51 Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 7.

52 Discourse to the Lit. and Sci. Soc. of Java, 1815, pub. in

Valpy's Pamphleteer, No. 15.

53 Lib. ii. cap. ix.

54 Socrates, Ecc. Inst., lib. iii. cap. 2.

Greeks would consider life insupportable if they were forbidden to

celebrate those most sacred Mysteries which bind together the

human race."55 Upon the whole, we cannot fail to see that the

Mysteries must have exerted a most extensive and profound

influence alike in fostering the good hopes of human nature

touching a life to come, and in giving credit and diffusion to the

popular fables of the poets concerning the details of the future

state. Much of that belief which seems to us so absurd we can

easily suppose they sincerely embraced, when we recollect what

they thought they had seen under supernatural auspices in their

initiations.

In the Greek and Roman faith there was gradually developed in

connection chiefly with the Mysteries, as we believe an

aristocratic doctrine which allotted to a select class of souls an

abode in the sky as their distinguished destination after death,

while the common multitude were still sentenced to the shadow

region below the grave. As Virgil writes, "The descent to Avernus

is easy. The gate of dark Dis is open day and night. But to rise

into the upper world is most arduous. Only the few heroes whom

favoring Jove loves or shining virtue exalts thither can effect

it." 56 Numerous scattered, significant traces of a belief in this

change of the destination of some souls from the pit of Hades to

the hall of heaven are to be found in the classic authors. Virgil,

celebrating the death of some person under the fictitious name of

Daphnis, exclaims, "Robed in white, he admires the strange court

of heaven, and sees the clouds and the stars beneath his feet. He

is a god now." 57 Porphyry ascribes to Pythagoras the declaration

that the souls of departed men are gathered in the zodiac.58 Plato

earnestly describes a region of brightness and unfading realities

above this lower world, among the stars, where the gods live, and

whither, he says, the virtuous and wise may ascend, while the

corrupt and ignorant must sink into the Tartarean realm.59 A

similar conception of the attainableness of heaven seems to be

suggested in the old popular myths, first, of Hercules coming back

in triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, rising

to the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place among

them; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuing

his mother, the hapless Semele, and soaring with her to heaven,

where she henceforth resides, a peeress of the eldest goddesses.

Cicero expresses the same thought when he affirms that "a life of

justice and piety is the path to heaven, where patriots, exemplary

souls, released from their bodies, enjoy endless happiness amidst

the brilliant orbs of the galaxy." 60 The same author also speaks

of certain philosophers who flourished before his time, "whose

opinions encouraged the belief that souls departing from bodies

would arrive at heaven as their proper dwelling place." 61 He

afterwards stigmatizes the notion that the life succeeding death

is subterranean as an error,62 and in his own name addresses his

auditor thus: "I see you gazing upward and wishing to migrate into

heaven." 63 It was the common belief of the Romans for ages that

Romulus was taken up into heaven, where he would remain forever,

claiming Divine honors.64 The Emperor Julian says, in his Letter

on the

55 Essay on Mysteries, by M. Ouvaroff, Eng. trans. by J. D. Price,

p. 55.

56 Aneid, lib. vi. 11. 125-130.

57 Ecl. v. 11. 57, 58, 64.

58 De Antro Nympharum.

59 Phado sects. 136-138.

60 Soma. Scipionis.

61 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xi.

62 Ibid. cap. xvi.

63 Ibid. cap. xxxiv.

64 Ennius, e. g., sings, "Romulus in coelo cum diis agit avum"

Duties of a Priest, "God will raise from darkness and Tartarus the

souls of all of us who worship him sincerely: to the pious,

instead of Tartarus he promises Olympus." "It is lawful," writes

Plato, "only for the true lover of wisdom to pass into the rank of

gods." 65 The privilege here confined to philosophers we believe

was promised to the initiates in the Mysteries, as the special

prerogative secured to them by their initiation. "To pass into the

rank of the gods" is a phrase which, as here employed, means to

ascend into heaven and have a seat with the immortals, instead of

being banished, with the souls of common mortals, to the under

world.

In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed to

that set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth,

and who were called the chthonian gods.66 The hope of immortality

first sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship.

But in the progress of time and culture the supernal circle of

divinities who kept state on bright Olympus acquired a greater

share of attention, and at last received a degree of worship far

surpassing that paid to their swarthy compeers below. The

adoration of these bright beings, with a growing trust in their

benignity, the fables of the poets telling how they had sometimes

elevated human favorites to their presence, for instance,

receiving a Ganymede to the joys of their sublime society, the

encouraging thoughts of the more religious and cheerful of the

philosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking from

the dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and a

native longing for admission to the serene pleasures of the

unfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction,

perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of the

old faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, until

the hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithful

soul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor of

the celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of his

seventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him in

this strain: "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that if

you follow us you will be a god and with us will behold our

Father." Several learned writers have strenuously labored to prove

that the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealed

in them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the established

theology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods were

merely deified men. We believe the real significance of the

various collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which these

writers have been brought to such a conclusion is this; the

genuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the gods

were once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teach

that Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to tremble

at the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete,

whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterly

absurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligent

image of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to live

eternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have been

a brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and the

heart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citation

from Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send the

bodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuous

souls, by nature and the Divine justice, rise from men to heroes,

from heroes to genii; and if, as in the Mysteries, they are

65 Phado, sect. lxxi.

66 Muller, Mist. Greek Lit., cap. ii. sect. 5; cap. xvi. sect. 2.

purified, shaking off the remains of mortality and the power of

the passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascend

from genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the just

and established order of nature." 67

The reference in the last clause is to the decrees of the Senate

whereby apotheosis was conferred on various persons, placing them

among the gods. This ceremony has often been made to appear

unnecessarily ridiculous, through a perversion of its actual

meaning. When the ancients applied the term "god" to a human soul

departed from the body, it was not used as the moderns

prevailingly employ that word. It expressed a great deal less with

them than with us. It merely meant to affirm similarity of

essence, qualities, and residence, but by no means equal dignity

and power of attributes between the one and the others. It meant

that the soul had gone to the heavenly habitation of the gods and

was thenceforth a participant in the heavenly life.68 Heraclitus

was accustomed to say, "Men are mortal gods; gods are immortal

men." Macrobius says, "The soul is not only immortal, but a god."

69 And Cicero declares, "The soul of man is a Divine thing, as

Euripides dares to say, a god." 70 Milton uses language precisely

parallel, speaking of those who are "unmindful of the crown true

Virtue gives her servants, after their mortal change, among the

enthroned gods on sainted seats." Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch in

the second century, says that "to become a god means to ascend

into heaven." 71 The Roman Catholic ceremony of beatification and

canonization of saints, offering them incense and prayers

thereafter, means exactly what was meant by the ancient

apotheosis, namely, that while the multitudes of the dead abide

below, in the intermediate state, these favored souls have been

advanced into heaven. The papal functionaries borrowed this rite,

with most of its details, from their immediate pagan predecessors,

who themselves probably adopted it from the East, whence the

Mysteries came. It is well known that the Brahmans and Buddhists

believed, centuries before the Christian era, in the contrasted

fate of good men after death to enjoy the successive heavens above

the clouds, and of bad men to suffer the successive hells beneath

the earth. A knowledge of this attractive Oriental doctrine may

have united with the advance of their own speculations to win the

partial acceptance obtained among the Greeks and Romans for the

faith which broke the universal doom to Hades and opened heaven to

their hopeful aspirations. In a tragedy of Euripides the following

passage occurs, addressed to the bereaved Admetus: "Let not the

tomb of thy wife be looked on as the mound of the ordinary dead.

Some wayfarer, as he treads the sloping road, shall say, 'This

woman once died for her husband; but now she is a saint in

heaven.'" 72

When the meaning of the cheerful promises given to the initiates

of a more favored fate in the future life than awaited others

namely, as we think, that their spirits on leaving the body should

scale Olympus instead of plunging to Tartarus had been concealed

within the

67 Lives, Romulus, sect. xxviii.

68 See a valuable discussion of the ancient use of the terms theos

and deus in note D vol. iii. of Norton's Genuineness of the

Gospels.

69 Somn. Scip., lib. ii. cap. 12.

70 Tusc. Quest., lib. i. cap. 26.

71 We omit several other authorities, as the reader would probably

deem any further evidence superfluous.

72 Alcestis, ll. 1015-1025, ed. Glasg.

Mysteries for a long time, it at length broke into public view in

the national apotheosis of ancient heroes, kings, and renowned

worthies, the instances of which became so numerous that Cicero

cries, "Is not nearly all heaven peopled with the human race?" 73

Over the heads of the devout heathen, as they gazed up through the

clear night air, twinkled the beams of innumerable stars, each

chosen to designate the cerulean seat where some soul was

rejoicing with the gods in heaven over the glorious issue of the

toils and sufferings in which he once painfully trod this earthly

scene.

Herodian, a Greek historian of some of the Roman emperors, has

left a detailed account of the rite of apotheosis.74 An image of

the person to be deified was made in wax, looking all sick and

pale, laid in state on a lofty bed of ivory covered with cloth of

gold, surrounded on one side by choirs of noble lords, on the

other side by their ladies stripped of their jewels and clad in

mourning, visited often for several days by a physician, who still

reports his patient worse, and finally announces his decease. Then

the Senators and haughtiest patricians bear the couch through the

via sacra to the Forum. Bands of noble boys and of proud women

ranged opposite each other chant hymns and lauds over the dead in

solemn melody. The bier is next borne to the Campus Martius, where

it is placed upon a high wooden altar, a large, thin structure

with a tower like a lighthouse. Heaps of fragrant gums, herbs,

fruits, and spices are poured out and piled upon it. Then the

Roman knights, mounted on horseback, prance before it in beautiful

bravery, wheeling to and fro in the dizzy measures of the Pyrrhic

dance. Also, in a stately manner, purple clothed charioteers,

wearing masks which picture forth the features of the most famous

worthies of other days to the reverential recognition of the

silent hosts assembled, ride around the form of their descendant.

Suddenly a torch is set to the pile, and it is wrapped in flames.

From the turret, amidst the aromatic fumes, an eagle is let loose.

Phoenix like symbol of the departed soul, he soars into the sky,

and the seven hilled city throbs with pride, reverberating the

shouts of her people. Thus into the residence of the gods "Sic

itur ad astra" was borne the divinely favored mortal; "And thus we

see how man's prophetic creeds Made gods of men when godlike were

their deeds."

For it was only in times of degradation and by a violent

perversion that the honor was allowed to the unworthy; and even in

such cases it was usually nullified as soon as the people

recovered their senses and their freedom. There is extant among

the works of Seneca a little treatise called Apocolocuntosis, that

is, pumpkinification, or the metamorphosis into a gourd, a sharp

satire levelled against the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius.

The deification of mortals among the ancients has long been

laughed at. When the great Macedonian monarch applied for a decree

for his apotheosis while he was yet alive, the Lacedemonian

Senate, with bitter sarcasm, voted, "If Alexander desires to be a

god, let him be a god." The doctrine is often referred to among us

in terms of mockery. But this is principally because it is not

understood. It simply signifies the ascent of the soul after death

into the Olympian halls instead of descending into the Acheronian

gulfs. And whether we

73 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. 12.

74 Lib. iv.

consider the symbolic justice and beauty of the conception as a

poetic image applied to the deathless heroes of humanity ensphered

above us forever in historic fame and natural worship, or regard

its comparative probability as the literal location of the

residence of departed spirits, it must recommend itself to us as a

decided improvement on the ideas previously prevalent, and as a

sort of anticipation, in part, of that bright faith in a heavenly

home for faithfuls souls, afterwards established in the world by

Him of whom it was written, "No man hath ascended up to heaven but

he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, who is now in

heaven." Indeed, so forcible and close is the correspondence

between the course of the aspirant in his initiation dramatically

dying, descending into Hades, rising again to life, and ascending

into heaven with the apostolic presentation of the redemptive

career of Christ, our great Forerunner, that some writers Nork,

for instance have suggested that the latter was but the exoteric

publication to all the world of what in the former was

esoterically taught to the initiates alone.

There was a striking naturalness, a profound propriety, in the

obscurities of secrecy and awe with which the ancient Mysteries

shrouded from a rash curiosity their instructions concerning the

future life and only unfolded them by careful degrees to the

prepared candidate. It is so with the reality itself in the nature

of things. It is the great mystery of mysteries, darkly hinted in

types, faintly gleaming in analogies, softly whispered in hopes,

passionately asked in desires, patiently confirmed in arguments,

suddenly blazed and thundered in revelation. Man from the very

beginning of his race on earth has been thickly encompassed by

mysteries, hung around by the muffling curtains of ignorance and

superstition. Through one after another of these he has forced his

way and gazed on their successive secrets laid bare. Once the

Ocean was an alluring and terrible mystery, weltering before him

with its endless wash of waves, into which the weary sun, in the

west, plunged at evening, and out of which, in the east, it

bounded refreshed in the morning. But the daring prows of his

ships, guided by pioneering thought and skill, passed its islands

and touched its ultimate shores. Once the Polar Circle was a

frightful and frozen mystery, enthroned on mountains of eternal

ice and wearing upon its snowy brow the flaming crown of the

aurora borealis. But his hardy navigators, inspired by enterprise

and philanthropy, armed with science, and supplied by art, have

driven the awful phantom back, league by league, until but a small

expanse of its wonders remains untracked by his steps. Once the

crowded Sky was a boundless mystery, a maze of motions, a field

where ghastly comets played their antics and shook down terrors on

the nations. But the theories of his reason, based on the gigantic

grasp of his calculus and aided by the instruments of his

invention, have solved perplexity after perplexity, blended

discords into harmony, and shown to his delighted vision the calm

perfection of the stellar system. So, too, in the moral world he

has lifted the shrouds from many a dark problem, and extended the

empire of light and love far out over the ancient realm of

darkness and terror. But the secret of Death, the mystery of the

Future, remains yet, as of old, unfathomed and inscrutable to his

inquiries. Still, as of old, he kneels before that unlifted veil

and beseeches the oracles for a response to faith.

The ancient Mysteries in their principal ceremony but copied the

ordination and followed the overawing spirit of Nature herself.

The religious reserve and awe about the entrance into the adytum

of their traditions were like those about the entrance into the

invisible scenes beyond the veils of time and mortality. Their

initiation was but a miniature symbol of the great initiation

through which, and that upon impartial terms, every mortal, from

King Solomon to the idiot pauper, must sooner or later pass to

immortality. When a fit applicant, after the preliminary

probation, kneels with fainting sense and pallid brow before the

veil of the unutterable Unknown, and the last pulsations of his

heart tap at the door of eternity, and he reverentially asks

admission to partake in the secrets shrouded from profane vision,

the infinite Hierophant directs the call to be answered by Death,

the speechless and solemn steward of the celestial Mysteries. He

comes, pushes the curtain aside, leads the awe struck initiate in,

takes the blinding bandage of the body from his soul; and

straightway the trembling neophyte receives light in the midst of

that innumerable Fraternity of Immortals over whom the Supreme

Author of the Universe presides.

CHAPTER II.

METEMPSYCHOSIS; OR, TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS.

NO other doctrine has exerted so extensive, controlling, and

permanent an influence upon mankind as that of the metempsychosis,

the notion that when the soul leaves the body it is born anew in

another body, its rank, character, circumstances, and experience

in each successive existence depending on its qualities, deeds,

and attainments in its preceding lives. Such a theory, well

matured, bore unresisted sway through the great Eastern world,

long before Moses slept in his little ark of bulrushes on the

shore of the Egyptian river; Alexander the Great gazed with

amazement on the self immolation by fire to which it inspired the

Gymnosophists; Casar found its tenets propagated among the Gauls

beyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as the

learned and travelled Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford tells us,

"without any sign of decrepitude or decay, over the Burman,

Chinese, Tartar, Tibetan, and Indian nations, including at least

six hundred and fifty millions of mankind."1 There is abundant

evidence to prove that this scheme of thought prevailed at a very

early period among the Egyptians, all classes and sects of the

Hindus, the Persian disciples of the Magi, and the Druids, and, in

a later age, among the Greeks and Romans as represented by Musaus,

Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Macrobius, Ovid, and many others. It

was generally adopted by the Jews from the time of the Babylonian

captivity. Traces of it have been discovered among the ancient

Scythians, the African tribes, some of the Pacific Islanders, and

various aboriginal nations both of North and of South America.

Charlevoix says some tribes of Canadian Indians believed in a

transmigration of souls; but, with a curious mixture of fancy and

reflection, they limited it to the souls of little children, who,

being balked of this life in its beginning, they thought would try

it again. Their bodies, accordingly, were buried at the sides of

roads, that their spirits might pass into pregnant women

travelling by. A belief in the metempsychosis limited in the same

way to the souls of children also prevailed among the Mexicans.2

The Maricopas, by the Gila, believe when they die they shall

transmigrate into birds, beasts, and reptiles, and shall return to

the banks of the Colorado, whence they were driven by the Yumas.

They will live there in caves and woods, as wolves, rats, and

snakes; so will their enemies the Yumas; and they will fight

together.3 On the western border of the United States, only three

or four years ago, two Indians having been sentenced to be hung

for murder, the chiefs of their tribe came in and begged that they

might be shot or burned instead, as they looked upon hanging with

the utmost horror, believing that the spirit of a person who is

thus strangled to death goes into the next world in a foul manner,

and that it assumes a beastly form. The Sandwich Islanders

sometimes threw their dead into the sea to be devoured by sharks,

supposing their souls would animate these monsters and cause them

1 Wilson, Two Lectures on the Religious Opinions of the Hindus, p.

64.

2 Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, vol. viii. p. 220.

3 Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations in Texas, New

Mexico, &c., ch. xxx.

to spare the living whom accident should throw within their

reach.4 Similar superstitions, but more elaborately developed, are

rife among many tribes of African negroes.5 It was inculcated in

the early Christian centuries by the Gnostics and the Manichaans;

also by Origen and several other influential Fathers. In the

Middle Ages the sect of the Cathari, the Bogomiles, the famous

scholastics Scotus Erigena and Bonaventura, as well as numerous

less distinguished authors, advocated it. And in modern times it

has been earnestly received by Lessing and Fourier, and is not

without its open defenders to day, as we can attest from our own

knowledge, even in the prosaic and enlightened circles of European

and American society.

There have been two methods of explaining the origin of the dogma

of transmigration. First, it has been regarded as a retribution,

the sequel to sin in a pre existent state:

"All that flesh doth cover,

Souls of source sublime,

Are but slaves sold over

To the Master Time

To work out their ransom

For the ancient crime."

With the ancient Egyptians the doctrine was developed in

connection with the conception of a revolt and battle among the

gods in some dim and disastrous epoch of the past eternity, when

the defeated deities were thrust out of heaven and shut up in

fleshly prison bodies. So man is a fallen spirit, heaven his

fatherland, this life a penance, sometimes necessarily repeated in

order to be effectual.6 The pre existence of the soul, whether

taught by Pythagoras, sung by Empedocles, dreamed by Fludd, or

contended for by Beecher, is the principal foundation of the

belief in the metempsychosis. But, secondly, the transmigration of

souls has been considered as the means of their progressive

ascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the

scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth,

climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless

aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are

thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man

soaring to God; but by sin the natural order and working of means

are inverted, and the series of births lead downward, until

expiation and merit restore the primal adjustment and direction.

The idea of a metempsychosis, or soul wandering, as the Germans

call it, has been broached in various forms widely differing in

the extent of their application. Among the Jews the writings of

Philo, the Talmud, and other documents, are full of it. They seem,

for the most part, to have confined the mortal residence of souls

to human bodies. They say that God created all souls on the first

day, the only day in which he made aught out of nothing; and they

imply, in their doctrine of the revolution of souls, that these

are born over and over, and will continue wandering thus until the

Messiah comes and the resurrection occurs. The

4 Jarves, Hist. Sandwich Islands, p. 82.

5 Wilson, Western Africa, p. 210.

6 Dr. Roth, Agyptische Glaubenslehre.

Rabbins distinguish two kinds of metempsychosis; namely, "Gilgul,"

which is a series of single transmigrations, each lasting till

death; and "Ibbur," which is where one soul occupies several

bodies, changing its residence at pleasure, or where several souls

occupy one body.7 The latter kind is illustrated by examples of

demoniacal possession in the New Testament. The demons were

supposed to be the souls of deceased wicked men. Sometimes they

are represented as solitary and flitting from one victim to

another; sometimes they swarm together in the same person, as

seven were at once cast out of Mary Magdalene.

More frequently, however, the range of the soul's travels in its

repeated births has been so extended as to include all animal

bodies, beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects. In this extent

the doctrine was held by the Pythagoreans and Platonists, and in

fact by a majority of its believers. Shakspeare's wit is not

without historical warrant when he makes the clown say to

Malvolio, "Thou shalt fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou

dispossess the soul of thy grandam." Many the Manichaans, for

instance taught that human souls transmigrated not only through

the lowest animal bodies but even through all forms of vegetable

life. Souls inhabit ears of corn, figs, shrubs. "Whoso plucks the

fruit or the leaves from trees, or pulls up plants or herbs, is

guilty of homicide," say they; "for in each case he expels a soul

from its body." 8 And some have even gone so far as to believe

that the soul, by a course of ignorance, cruelty, and uncleanness

pursued through many lives, will at length arrive at an inanimate

body, and be doomed to exist for unutterable ages as a stone or as

a particle of dust. The adherents of this hypothesis regard the

whole world as a deposition of materialized souls. At every step

they tread on hosts of degraded souls, destined yet, though now by

sin sunk thus low, to find their way back as redeemed and blessed

spirits to the bosom of the Godhead.

Upon the whole, the metempsychosis may be understood, as to its

inmost meaning and its final issue, to be either a Development, a

Revolution, or a Retribution, a Divine system of development

eternally leading creatures in a graduated ascension from the base

towards the apex of the creation, a perpetual cycle in the order

of nature fixedly recurring by the necessities of a physical fate

unalterable, unavoidable, eternal, a scheme of punishment and

reward exactly fitted to the exigencies of every case, presided

over by a moral Nemesis, and issuing at last in the emancipation

of every purified soul into infinite bliss, when, by the upward

gravitation of spirit, they shall all have been strained through

the successively finer growing filters of the worlds, from the

coarse grained foundation of matter to the lower shore of the

Divine essence.

In seeking to account for the extent and the tenacious grasp of

this antique and stupendous belief, in looking about for the

various suggestions or confirmations of such a dogma, we would

call attention to several considerations, each claiming some

degree of importance. First, among the earliest notions of a

reflecting man is that of the separate existence of the soul after

the dissolution of the body. He instinctively distinguishes the

7 Basnage, Hist. Jews, lib. iv. cap. xxx.: Schroder, Judenthum,

buch ii. kap. iii. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum. th. ii. kap.

i.

8 Augustine, De Morlb. Manicha., lib. ii. cap. xvii.: De Hares..

cap. xlvi.: Contra Faustum, lib. xvi. cap. xxviii.

thinking substance he is from the material vestment he wears.

Conscious of an unchanged personal identity beneath the changes

and decays everywhere visible around him, he naturally imagines

that "As billows on the undulating main, That swelling fall and

falling swell again, So on the tide of time inconstant roll The

dying body and the deathless soul."

To one thus meditating, and desiring, as he surely would, to

perceive or devise some explanation of the soul's posthumous

fortunes, the idea could hardly fail to occur that the destiny of

the soul might be to undergo a renewed birth, or a series of

births in new bodies. Such a conception, appearing in a rude state

of culture, before the lines between science, religion, and poetry

had been sharply drawn, recommending itself alike by its

simplicity and by its adaptedness to gratify curiosity and

speculation in the formation of a thousand quaint and engaging

hypotheses, would seem plausible, would be highly attractive,

would very easily secure acceptance as a true doctrine.

Secondly, the strange resemblances and sympathies between men and

animals would often powerfully suggest to a contemplative observer

the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.9 Looking over those

volumes of singular caricatures wherein certain artists have made

all the most distinctive physiognomies of men and beasts mutually

to approximate and mingle, one cannot avoid the fancy that the

bodies of brutes are the masks of degraded men. Notice an ox

reclining in the shade of a tree, patiently ruminating as if sadly

conscious of many things and helplessly bound in some obscure

penance, a mute world of dreamy experiences, a sombre mystery: how

easy to imagine him an enchanted and transformed man! See how

certain animals are allied in their prominent traits to humanity,

the stricken deer, weeping big, piteous tears, the fawning

affection and noble fidelity of the dog, the architectural skill

of the beaver, the wise aspect of the owl, the sweet plaint of the

nightingale, the shrieks of some fierce beasts, and the howls of

others startlingly like the cries of children and the moans of

pain, the sparkling orbs and tortuous stealthiness of the snake;

and the hints at metempsychosis are obvious. Standing face to face

with a tiger, an anaconda, a wild cat, a monkey, a gazelle, a

parrot, a dove, we alternately shudder with horror and yearn with

sympathy, now expecting to see the latent devils throw off their

disguise and start forth in their own demoniac figures, now

waiting for the metamorphosing charm to be reversed, and for the

enchanted children of humanity to stand erect, restored to their

former shapes. Pervading all the grades and forms of distinct

animal life there seems to be a rudimentary unity. The fundamental

elements and primordial germs of consciousness, intellect, will,

passion, appear the same, and the different classes of being seem

capable of passing into one another by improvement or deterioration.

Spontaneously, then, might a primitive observer, unhampered by

prejudices, think that the soul of man on leaving its present body

would find or construct another according to its chief intrinsic

qualities and

9 Scholz, Beweis, dass es eine Seelenwanderung bei den Thieren

giebt.

forces, whether those were a leonine magnanimity of courage, a

vulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. The

spirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energy

another form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims as

an eagle in the eye of noon, Or wails, a screech owl, to the deaf,

cold moon, Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare,

Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air."

The hypothesis is equally forced on our thoughts by regarding the

human attributes of some brutes and the brutal attributes of some

men. Thus Gratiano, enraged at the obstinate malignity of Shylock,

cries to the hyena hearted Jew, "Thou almost mak'st me waver in my

faith, To hold opinion, with Pythagoras, That souls of animals

infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit

Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter, Even from the

gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thine

unhallow'd dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are

wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous."

Thirdly, there is a figurative metempsychosis, which may sometimes

the history of mythology abounds in examples of the same sort of

thing have been turned from an abstract metaphor into a concrete

belief, or from a fanciful supposition have hardened into a

received fact. There is a poetic animation of objects whereby the

imaginative person puts himself into other persons, into trees,

clouds, whirlwinds, or what not, and works them for the time in

ideal realization. The same result is put in speech sometimes as

humorous play: for example, a celebrated English author says,

"Nature meant me for a salamander, and that is the reason I have

always been discontented as a man: I shall be a salamander in the

next world!" Such imagery stated to a mind of a literal order

solidifies into a meaning of prosaic fact. It is a common mode of

speech to say of an enthusiastic disciple that the spirit of his

master possesses him. A receptive student enters into the soul of

Plato, or is full of Goethe. We say that Apelles lived again in

Titian. Augustine reappeared in Calvin, and Pelagius in Arminius,

to fight over the old battle of election and freedom. Luther rose

in Ronge. Take these figures literally, construct what they imply

into a dogma, and the product is the transmigration of souls. The

result thus arrived at finds effective support in the striking

physical resemblance, spiritual likeness, and similarity of

mission frequently seen between persons in one age and those in a

former age. Columbus was the modern Jason sailing after the Golden

Fleece of a New World. Glancing along the portrait gallery of some

ancient family, one is sometimes startled to observe a face,

extinct for several generations, suddenly confronting him again

with all its features in some distant descendant. A peculiarity of

conformation, a remarkable trait of character, suppressed for a

century, all at once starts into vivid prominence in a remote

branch of the lineage, and men say, pointing back to the ancestor,

"He has revived once more." Seeing Elisha do the same things that

his departed master had done before him, the people exclaimed,

"The spirit of Elijah is upon him." Beholding in John the Baptist

one going before him in the spirit of that expected prophet, Jesus

said, "If ye are able to receive it, this is he." Some of the

later Rabbins assert many entertaining things concerning the

repeated births of the most distinguished personages in their

national history. Abel was born again in Seth; Cain, in that

Egyptian whom Moses slew; Abiram, in Ahithophel; and Adam, having

already reappeared once in David, will live again in the Messiah.

The performance by an eminent man of some great labor which had

been done in an earlier age in like manner by a kindred spirit

evokes in the imagination an apparition of the return of the dead

to repeat his old work.

Fourthly, there are certain familiar psychological experiences

which serve to suggest and to support the theory of transmigration,

and which are themselves in return explained by such a surmise.

Thinking upon some unwonted subject, often a dim impression

arises in the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot help

feeling, that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections

before. Learning a fact, meeting a face, for the first time, we

are puzzled with an obscure assurance that it is not the first

time. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted by

a sense of familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude that

surely we have more than once trodden those fields and gazed on

those scenes; and from hoary mountain, trickling rill, and vesper

bell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial music seem to

sigh, in remembered accents, through the soul's plaintive echoing

halls, "'Twas auld lang syne, my dear, 'Twas auld lang syne."

Plato's doctrine of reminiscence here finds its basis. We have

lived before, perchance many times, and through the clouds of

sense and imagination now and then float the veiled visions of

things that were. Efforts of thought reveal the half effaced

inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches of

dialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of old

friendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deeds

performed long ago pass in weird procession before the mind's half

opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachable

veracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm

believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his

present life. He testifies that on innumerable occasions he has

experienced remembrances of events and recognitions of places,

accompanied by a flash of irresistible conviction that he had

known them in a former state. Nearly every one has felt instances

of this, more or less numerous and vivid. The doctrine at which

such things hint that "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in

utter nakedness," but trailing vague traces and enigmas from a

bygone history, "do we come" yields the secret of many a mood and

dream, the spell of inexplicable hours, the key and clew to

baffling labyrinths of mystery. The belief in the doctrine of the

metempsychosis, among a fanciful people and in an unscientific

age, need be no wonder to any cultivated man acquainted with the

marvels of experience and aware that every one may say,

"Full oft my feelings make me start,

Like footprints on some desert shore,

As if the chambers of my heart

Had heard their shadowy step before."

Fifthly, the theory of the transmigration of souls is marvellously

adapted to explain the seeming chaos of moral inequality,

injustice, and manifold evil presented in the world of human life.

No other conceivable view so admirably accounts for the

heterogeneousness of our present existence, refutes the charge of

a groundless favoritism urged against Providence, and completely

justifies the ways of God to man. The loss of remembrance between

the states is no valid objection to the theory; because such a

loss is the necessary condition of a fresh and fair probation.

Besides, there is a parallel fact of deep significance in our

unquestionable experience; "For is not our first year forgot? The

haunts of memory echo not."

Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regard

to moral justice vanish. If a man be born blind, deaf, a cripple,

a slave, an idiot, it is because in a previous life he abused his

privileges and heaped on his soul a load of guilt which he is now

expiating. If a sudden calamity overwhelm a good man with

unmerited ruin and anguish, it is the penalty of some crime

committed in a state of responsible being beyond the confines of

his present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrue

to any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerless

friendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlier

life. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled,

awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every man

deformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hard

conditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favored

and perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregone

existence. When the Hindu looks on a man beautiful, learned,

noble, fortunate, and happy, he exclaims, "How wise and good must

this man have been in his former lives!" In his philosophy, or

religion, the proof of the necessary consequences of virtue and

vice is deduced from the metempsychosis, every particular of the

outward man being a result of some corresponding quality of his

soul, and every event of his experience depending as effect on his

previous merit as cause.10 Thus the principal physical and moral

phenomena of life are strikingly explained; and, as we gaze around

the world, its material conditions and spiritual elements combine

in one vast scheme of unrivalled order, and the total experience

of humanity forms a magnificent picture of perfect poetic justice.

We may easily account for the rise and spread of a theory whose

sole difficulty is a lack of positive proof, but whose

applications are so consistent and fascinating alike to

imagination and to conscience. Hierocles said, and distinguished

philosophers both before and since have said, "Without the

doctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways

of Providence."

10 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 286.

Finally, this doctrine, having been suggested by the various

foregoing considerations, and having been developed into a

practical system of conceptions and motives by certain leading

thinkers, was adopted by the principal philosophers and

priesthoods of antiquity, and taught to the common people with

authority. The popular beliefs of four thousand years ago depended

for their prevalence, not so much on cogent arguments or intrinsic

probability, as upon the sanctions thrown around them by renowned

teachers, priests, and mystagogues. Now, the doctrine of the

transmigration of souls was inculcated by the ancient teachers,

not as a mere hypothesis resting on loose surmises, but as an

unquestionable fact supported by the experimental knowledge of

many individuals and by infallible revelation from God. The sacred

books of the Hindus abound in detailed histories of transmigrations.

Kapila is said to have written out the Vedas from his remembrance

of them in a former state of being.

The Vishnu Purana gives some very entertaining examples of

the retention of memory through several successive lives.11

Pythagoras pretended to recollect his adventures in previous lives;

and on one occasion, as we read in Ovid, going into the temple of

Juno, he recognised the shield he had worn as Euphorbus at the

siege of Troy.

Diogenes Laertius also relates of him, that one day meeting a man

who was cruelly beating a dog, the Samian sage instantly detected

in the piteous howls of the poor beast the cries of a dear friend

of his long since deceased, and earnestly and successfully

interceded for his rescue.

In the life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, numerous

extraordinary instances are told of his recognitions of

persons he had known in preceding lives. Such examples as these

exactly met the weakest point in the metempsychosis theory, and

must have had vast influence in fostering the common faith.

Plotinus said, "Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plunged

in it forget all." Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defender

of the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objection

drawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appeal

rather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves the

doubts unsolved.12 His supposition is that in each spirit life we

remember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but in

each earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here,

every night we lose in sleep all memory of the past, but recover

it each day again as we awake. Throughout the East this general

doctrine is no mere superstition of the masses of ignorant people:

it is the main principle of all Hindu metaphysics, the foundation

of all their philosophy, and inwrought with the intellectual

texture of their inspired books. It is upheld by the venerable

authority of ages, by an intense general conviction of it, and by

multitudes of subtle conceits and apparent arguments. It was also

impressed upon the initiates in the old Mysteries, by being there

dramatically shadowed forth through masks, and quaint symbolic

ceremonies enacted at the time of initiation.13

This, then, is what we must say of the ancient and widely spread

doctrine of transmigration. As a suggestion or theory naturally

arising from empirical observation and confirmed by a variety of

phenomena, it is plausible, attractive, and, in some stages of

11 Professor Wilson's translation, p. 343.

12 De l'Humanite, livre v. chap. xlii.

13 Porphyry, De Abstinentis, lib. iv. sect. 16. Davies, Rites of

the Druids.

knowledge, not only easy to be believed, but hard to be resisted.

As an ethical scheme clearing up on principles of poetic justice

the most perplexed and awful problems in the world, it throws

streams of light through the abysses of evil, gives dramatic

solution to many a puzzle, and, abstractly considered, charms the

understanding and the conscience. As a philosophical dogma

answering to some strange, vague passages in human nature and

experience, it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deep

mystic chambers of our being. As the undisputed creed which has

inspired and spell bound hundreds of millions of our race for

perhaps over a hundred and fifty generations, it commands

deference and deserves study. But, viewing it as a thesis in the

light of to day, challenging intelligent scrutiny and sober

belief, we scarcely need to say that, based on shadows and on

arbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built of

reveries and occult experiences, fortified by unreliable

inferences, destitute of any substantial evidence, it is unable to

face the severity of science.

A real investigation of its validity by the modern methods

dissipates it as the sun scatters fog. First, the mutual

correspondences between men and animals are explained by the fact

that they are all living beings are the products of the same God

and the same nature, and built according to one plan. They thus

partake, in different degrees and on different planes, of many of

the same elements and characteristics. Lucretius, with his usual

mixture of acuteness and sophistry, objects to the doctrine that,

if it were true, when the soul of a lion passed into the body of a

stag, or the soul of a man into the body of a horse, we should see

a stag with the courage of a lion, a horse with the intelligence

of a man. But of course the manifestations of soul depend on the

organs of manifestation. Secondly, the singular psychological

experiences referred to are explicable so far as we can expect

with our present limited data and powers to solve the dense

mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the

doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen

in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated

by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense

of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have

thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is

explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure

mixture of associations, some discordant stroke on the keys of

recollection, jumbling together echoes of bygone scenes, snatches

of unremembered dreams, and other hints and colors in a weird and

uncommanded manner. The phenomenon is accounted for still more

decisively by Dr. Wigand's theory of the "Duality of the Mind."

The mental organs are double, one on each side of the brain. They

usually act with perfect simultaneity. When one gets a slight

start of the other, as the thought reaches the slow side a

bewildered sense of a previous apprehension of it arises in the

soul. And then, the fact that the supposition of a great system of

adjusting transmigrations justifies the ways of Providence is no

proof that the supposition is a true one. The difficulty is, that

there is no evidence of the objective truth of the assumption,

however well the theory applies; and the justice and goodness of

God may as well be defended on the ground of a single life here

and a discriminating retribution hereafter, as on the ground of an

unlimited series of earthly births.

The doctrine evidently possesses two points of moral truth and

power, and, if not tenable as strict science, is yet instructive

as symbolic poetry. First, it embodies, in concrete shapes the

most vivid and unmistakable, the fact that beastly and demoniac

qualities of character lead men down towards the brutes and

fiends. Rage makes man a tiger; low cunning, a fox; coarseness and

ferocity, a bear; selfish envy and malice, a devil. On the

contrary, the attainment of better degrees of intellectual and

ethical qualities elevates man towards the angelic and the Divine.

There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds

of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring

life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of

routine in mechanical habits and indifference; the deteriorating

life of abandonment in ignorance and vice. Timaus the Locrian, and

some other ancient Pythagoreans, gave the whole doctrine a purely

symbolic meaning. Secondly, the theory of transmigrating souls

typifies the truth that, however it may fare with persons now,

however ill their fortunes may seem to accord with their deserts

here, justice reigns irresistibly in the universe, and sooner or

later every soul shall be strictly compensated for every tittle of

its merits in good or evil. There is no escaping the chain of acts

and consequences.

This entire scheme of thought has always allured the Mystics to

adopt it. In every age, from Indian Vyasa to Teutonic Boehme, we

find them contending for it. Boehme held that all material

existence was composed by King Satan out of the physical substance

of his fallen followers.

The conception of the metempsychosis is strikingly fitted for the

purposes of humor, satire, and ethical hortation; and literature

abounds with such applications of it. In Plutarch's account of

what Thespesius saw when his soul was ravished away into hell for

a time, we are told that he saw the soul of Nero dreadfully

tortured, transfixed with iron nails. The workmen forged it into

the form of a viper; when a voice was heard out of an exceeding

light ordering it to be transfigured into a milder being; and they

made it one of those creatures that sing and croak in the sides of

ponds and marshes.14 When Rosalind finds the verses with which her

enamored Orlando had hung the trees, she exclaimed, "I was never

so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which

I can hardly remember." One of the earliest popular introductions

of this Oriental figment to the English public was by Addison,

whose Will Honeycomb tells an amusing story of his friend, Jack

Freelove, how that, finding his mistress's pet monkey alone one

day, he wrote an autobiography of his monkeyship's surprising

adventures in the course of his many transmigrations. Leaving this

precious document in the monkey's hands, his mistress found it on

her return, and was vastly bewildered by its pathetic and

laughable contents.15 The fifth number of the "Adventurer" gives a

very entertaining account of the "Transmigrations of a Flea."

There is also a poem on this subject by Dr. Donne, full of

strength and wit. It traces a soul through ten or twelve births,

giving the salient points of its history in each. First, the soul

animates the apple our hapless mother Eve ate, bringing "death

into the world and all our woe." Then it appeared

14 Sera Numinis Vindicta: near the close.

15 Spectator, No. 343.

successively as a mandrake, a cock, a herring, a whale, "Who spouted

rivers up as if he meant o join our seas with seas above

the firmament." Next, as a mouse, it crept up an elephant's sinewy

proboscis to the soul's bedchamber, the brain, and, gnawing the

life cords there, died, crushed in the ruins of the gigantic

beast. Afterwards it became a wolf, a dog, an ape, and finally a

woman, where the quaint tale closes. Fielding is the author of a

racy literary performance called "A Journey from this World to the

Next." The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysium

the adventures he had passed through, living successively in the

character of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a

beau, a monk, a fiddler, a wise man, a king, a fool, a beggar, a

prince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, a

knight, a dancing master, and a bishop. Whoever would see how

vividly, with what an honest and vigorous verisimilitude, the

doctrine can be embodied, should read "The Modern Pythagorean," by

Dr. Macnish. But perhaps the most humorous passage of this sort is

the following description from a remarkable writer of the present

day:

"In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bull

frogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine bibbers and wassailers,

still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake;

who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal

tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave,

mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor. The most

aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart leaf, which serves for a

napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a

deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup

with the ejaculation tr r r oonk, tr r r oonk! and straightway

comes over the water from some distant cove the same password

repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to

his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the

shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with

satisfaction, tr r r conk! and each in his turn, down to the

flabbiest paunched, repeats the same, that there be no mistake;

and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun

disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under

the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and

pausing for a reply." 16

The doctrine of the metempsychosis, which was the priest's threat

against sin, was the poet's interpretation of life. The former

gave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latter

imparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to the

contemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullest

development, the mountains piled towering to the sky and the

plains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dust

of souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight,

was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated form

that caught his attention might be the dwelling of some ancestor,

or of some once cherished companion of his own. Hence the Hindu's

so sensitive kindness towards animals:

16 Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, p. 137.

"Crush not the feeble, inoffensive worm: Thy sister's spirit wears

that humble form. Why should thy cruel arrow smite yon bird? In

him thy brother's plaintive song is beard. Let not thine anger on

thy dog descend: That faithful animal was once thy friend."

There is a strange grandeur, an affecting mystery, in the view of

the creation from the stand point of the metempsychosis. It is an

awful dream palace all aswarm with falling and climbing creatures

clothed in ever shifting disguises. The races and changes of being

constitute a boundless masquerade of souls, whose bodies are

vizards and whose fortunes poetic retribution. The motive

furnished by the doctrine to self denial and toil has a peerless

sublimity. In our Western world, the hope of acquiring large

possessions, or of attaining an exalted office, often stimulates

men to heroic efforts of labor and endurance. What, then, should

we not expect from the application to the imaginative minds of the

Eastern world of a motive which, transcending all set limits,

offers unheard of prizes, to be plucked in life after life, and at

the end unveils, for the occupancy of the patient aspirant, the

Throne of Immensity? No wonder that, under the propulsion of a

motive so exhaustless, a motive not remote nor abstract, but

concrete, and organized in indissoluble connection with the

visible chain of eternal causes and effects, no wonder we see such

tremendous exhibitions of superstition, voluntary sufferings,

superhuman deeds. Here is the secret fountain of that irresistible

force which enables the devotee to measure journeys of a thousand

miles by prostrations of his body, to hold up his arm until it

withers and remains immovably erect as a stick, or to swing

himself by red hot hooks through his flesh. The poorest wretch of

a soul that has wandered down to the lowest grade of animate

existence can turn his resolute and longing gaze up the

resplendent ranks of being, and, conscious of the god head's germ

within, feel that, though now unspeakably sunken, he shall one day

spurn every vile integument and vault into seats of heavenly

dominion. Crawling as an almost invisible bug in a heap of

carrion, he can still think within himself, holding fast to the

law of righteousness and love, "This is the infinite ladder of

redemption, over whose rounds of purity, penance, charity, and

contemplation I may ascend, through births innumerable, till I

reach a height of wisdom, power, and bliss that will cast into

utter contempt the combined glory of countless millions of worlds,

ay, till I sit enthroned above the topmost summit of the universe

as omnipotent Buddha." 17

17 Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find the

following references useful: Hardy, "Manual of Buddhism," ch. v.

Upham, "History of Buddhism," ch. iii. Beausobre, "Histoire du

Manicheisme," livre vi. ch. iv. Helmont, "De Revolution Animarum."

Richter, "Das Christenthum und die Kitesten Religionen des

Orients," sects. 54-65. Sinner, "Essai sur les Dogmes de la

Metempsychose et du Purgatoire." Conz, "Schicksale der

Seelenwanderungshypothese unter verschiedenen Volkern und in

verschiedenen Zeiten." Dubois, "People of India," part iii. ch.

vii. Werner, "Commentatio Psychologica contra Metempsychosin."

CHAPTER III.

RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

A DOCTRINE widely prevalent asserts that, at the termination of

this probationary epoch, Christ will appear with an army of angels

in the clouds of heaven, descend, and set up his tribunal on the

earth. The light of his advancing countenance will be the long

waited Aurora of the Grave. All the souls of men will be summoned

from their tarrying places, whether in heaven, or hell, or

purgatory, or the sepulchre; the fleshly tabernacles they formerly

inhabited will be re created, a strong necromancy making the rooty

and grave floored earth give up its dust of ruined humanity, and

moulding it to the identical shapes it formerly composed; each

soul will enter its familiar old house in company with which its

sins were once committed; the books will be opened and judgment

will be passed; then the accepted will be removed to heaven, and

the rejected to hell, both to remain clothed with those same

material bodies forever, the former in celestial bliss, the latter

in infernal torture.

In the present dissertation we propose to exhibit the sources,

trace the developments, explain the variations, and discuss the

merits, of this doctrine.

The first appearance of this notion of a bodily restoration which

occurs in the history of opinions is among the ancient Hindus.

With them it appears as a part of a vast conception, embracing the

whole universe in an endless series of total growths, decays, and

exact restorations. In the beginning the Supreme Being is one and

alone. He thinks to himself, "I will become many." Straightway the

multiform creation germinates forth, and all beings live. Then for

an inconceivable period a length of time commensurate with the

existence of Brahma, the Demiurgus the successive generations

flourish and sink. At the end of this period all forms of matter,

all creatures, sages, and gods, fall back into the Universal

Source whence they arose. Again the Supreme Being is one and

alone. After an interval the same causes produce the same effects,

and all things recur exactly as they were before.1

We find this theory sung by some of the Oriental poets:

"Every external form of things, and every object which

disappear'd, Remains stored up in the storehouse of fate: When the

system of the heavens returns to its former order, God, the All

Just, will bring them forth from the veil of mystery." 2

The same general conception, in a modified form, was held by the

Stoics of later Greece, who doubtless borrowed it from the East,

and who carried it out in greater detail. "God is an artistic

fire, out of which the cosmopoeia issues." This fire proceeds in a

certain fixed course, in obedience to a fixed law, passing through

certain intermediate gradations and established periods, until it

ultimately returns into itself and closes with a universal

conflagration. It is to this catastrophe that reference is made in

the following passage of Epictetus: "Some say that when Zeus is

left alone at the time of the conflagration, he is solitary, and

bewails himself

1 Wilson, Lectures on the Hindus, pp. 53-56.

2 The Dabistan, vol. iii. p. 169.

that he has no company."3 The Stoics supposed each succeeding

formation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particular

that happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before,

and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connected

with astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creating

of the world coincide with the same position of the stars as that

at which it previously occurred.4 This they called the restoration

of all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identical

epochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Plato

is a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of the

past, by reproducing it over and over forever.

Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "In

submitting," he says, "physical phenomena and historical events to

the exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to their

causes by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by that

ancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and those

regulating the moral world, exert their action under the presence

of a primordial necessity and according to movements periodically

renewed." The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, it

is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall

be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." The conception

of the destinies of the universe as a circle returning forever

into itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind early

seizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeble

powers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but the

infinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformations

ever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend and

master satisfactorily the eternal duration of one visible order,

the incessant rolling on of races and stars:

"And doth creation's tide forever flow, Nor ebb with like

destruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and still

The mighty measure never, never full?"

And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinity

threatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in the

view of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end from

time to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for us

simply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception to

which we have recourse is evidently a mere conceit of imagination,

without scientific basis or philosophical confirmation.

The doctrine of a bodily resurrection, resting on a wholly

different ground, again emerges upon our attention in the

Zoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to be

pure and happy and to pass to a heavenly immortality. The evil

Ahriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primal

destiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their material

frames to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to a

painful abode in hell. Meanwhile, the war between the Light God

and the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good One

shall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evil

deeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed at

first be restored. Then all

3 Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 13. Sonntag, De Palingenesia

Stoicorum.

4 Ritter's Hist. of An. Phil., lib. xi. cap. 4.

souls shall be redeemed from hell and their bodies be rebuilt from

their scattered atoms and clothed upon them again.5 This

resurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, nor

is it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzd

of the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred and

defeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is still

understood and looked for by the Parsees.

The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with which

it is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitous

assumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. The

hypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battle

between two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neither

the scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic of

reason; and it has long since been driven from the arena of

earnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violent

curse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform and

spoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now,

as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, a

punishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system." It is

unreasonable to suppose that the Infinite God would deliberately

lay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. And

it is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or an

after result foisted into the system of the world. Death that is,

a succession of generations is surely an essential part of the

very constitution of nature, plainly stamped on all those "medals

of the creation" which bear the features of their respective ages

and which are laid up in the archives of geological epochs.

Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's original

plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the

whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore

actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of

man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And

so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the

restoration of God's broken plan to its completeness falls to the

ground.

The Jews, in the course of their frequent and long continued

intercourse with the Persians, did not fail to be much impressed

with the vivid melodramatic outlines of the Zoroastrian doctrine

of the resurrection. They finally adopted it themselves, and

joined it, with such modifications as it naturally underwent from

the union, with the great dogmas of their own faith. A few faint

references to it are found in the Old Testament. Some explicit

declarations and boasts of it are in the Apocrypha. In the

Targums, the Talmud, and the associated sources, abundant

statements of it in copious forms are preserved. The Jews rested

their doctrine of the resurrection on the same general ground as

the Persians did, from whom they borrowed it. Man was meant to be

immortal, either on earth or in heaven; but Satan seduced him to

sin, and thus wrested from him his privilege of immortality, made

him die and descend into a dark nether realm which was to be

filled with the disembodied souls of his descendants. The

resurrection was to annul all this and restore men to their

original footing.

We need not labor any disproof of the truth or authority of this

doctrine as the Pharisees held it, because, admitting that they

had the record of a revelation from God, this doctrine was not a

part of it. It is only to be found in their canonic scriptures by

way of vague and hasty allusion, and is historically traceable to

its derivation from the pagan oracles of Persia.

5 Frazer, History of Persia, chap. iv. Baur, Symbolik und

Mythologice thl. ii. absch. ii. cap. ss. 394-404.

Of course it is possible that the doctrine of the resurrection, as

the Hebrews held it, was developed by themselves, from imaginative

contemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectres

seen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in the

under world; ideas of God as the deliverer of living men from the

open gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapes

from destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Before

advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some

of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from

the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized,

incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical

bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.

Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose and

spread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect.

Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years were

Christian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolic

age virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it,

then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salient

dogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality and

bigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission of

Christianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retained

by early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In the

New Testament itself there are seeming references to this

doctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrection

of the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it found

in any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourth

century.6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrine

was not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The fact

is, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of the

descent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called in

question at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up on

the symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. As

soon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and all

but unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in every

creed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has been

denied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy and

schism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, who

concerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was past

already." The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church

has always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodies

formerly inhabited by men shall be raised from the earth, sea, and

air, and given to them again to be everlastingly assumed. The

scattered exceptions to the believers in this doctrine have been

few, and have ever been styled heretics by their contemporaries.

Any one who will glance over the writings of the Fathers with

reference to this subject will find the foregoing statements amply

confirmed.7 Justin Martyr wrote a treatise on the resurrection, a

fragment of which is still extant. Athenagoras has left us an

extremely elaborate and able discussion of the whole doctrine, in

a separate work. Tertullian is author of a famous book on the

subject, entitled "Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh," in

which he says, "The teeth are providentially made eternal to serve

as the seeds of the

6 Dr. Sykes, Inquiry when the Article of the Resurrection of the

Body or Flesh was first introduced into the Public Creeds.

7 Mosheim, De Resurrectione Mortuorum.

resurrection." Chrysostom has written fully upon it in two of his

eloquent homilies. All these, in company indeed with the common

body of their contemporaries, unequivocally teach a carnal

resurrection with the grossest details. Augustine says, "Every

man's body, howsoever dispersed here, shall be restored perfect in

the resurrection. Every body shall be complete in quantity and

quality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut,

shall not return in such enormous quantities to deform their

original places; but neither shall they perish: they shall return

into the body into that substance from which they grew." 8 As if

that would not cause any deformity! 9 Some of the later Origenists

held that the resurrection bodies would be in the shape of a ball,

the mere heads of cherubs! 10

In the seventh century Mohammed flourished. His doctrinal system,

it is well known, was drawn indiscriminately from many sources,

and mixed with additions and colors of his own. Finding the dogma

of a general bodily resurrection already prevailing among the

Parsees, the Jews, and the Christians, and perceiving, too, how

well adapted for purposes of vivid representation and practical

effect it was, or perhaps believing it himself, the Arabian

prophet ingrafted this article into the creed of his followers. It

has ever been with them, and is still, a foremost and controlling

article of faith, an article for the most part held in its literal

sense, although there is a powerful sect which spiritualizes the

whole conception, turning all its details into allegories and

images. But this view is not the original nor the orthodox view.

The subject of the resurrection was a prominent theme in the

theology of the Middle Age. Only here and there a dissenting voice

was raised against the doctrine in its strict physical form. The

great body of the Scholastics stood stanchly by it. In defence and

support of the Church thesis they brought all the quirks and

quiddities of their subtle dialectics. As we take down their

ponderous tomes from their neglected shelves, and turn over the

dusty, faded old leaves, we find chapter after chapter in many a

formidable folio occupied with grave discussions, carried on in

acute logical terminology, of questions like these: "Will the

resurrection be natural or miraculous?" "Will each one's hairs and

nails all be restored to him in the resurrection?" "When bodies

are raised, will each soul spontaneously know its own and enter

it? or will the power of God distribute them as they belong?"

"Will the deformities and scars of our present bodies be retained

in the resurrection?" "Will all rise of the same age?" "Will all

have one size and one sex?" 11 And so on with hundreds of kindred

questions. For instance, Thomas Aquinas contended "that no other

substance would rise from the grave except that which belonged to

the individual in the moment of death."12 What dire prospects this

proposition must conjure up before many minds! If one chance to

grow prodigiously obese before death, he must lug that enormous

corporeity wearily about forever; but if he happen to die when

wasted, he must then flit through eternity as thin as a lath.

8 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 19, 20.

9 See the strange speculations of Opitz in his work "De Statura et

Atate Resurgentium.

10 Redepenning, Origenes, b. ii. s. 463.

11 Summa Theologia, Thoma Aquinatis, tertia pars, Supplementum,

Quastiones 79-87.

12 Hagenbuch, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 204.

Those who have had the misfortune to be amputated of legs or arms

must appear on the resurrection stage without those very

convenient appendages. There will still be need of hospitals for

the battered veterans of Chelsea and Greenwich, mutilated heroes,

pensioned relics of deck and field. Then in the resurrection the

renowned "Mynheer von Clam, Richest merchant in Rotterdam,"

will again have occasion for the services of the "patent cork leg

manufacturer," though it is hardly to be presumed he will accept

another unrestrainable one like that which led him so fearful a

race through the poet's verses.

The Manichaans denied a bodily resurrection. In this all the sects

theologically allied to them, who have appeared in ecclesiastical

history, for instance, the Cathari, have agreed. There have also

been a few individual Christian teachers in every century who have

assailed the doctrine. But, as already declared, it has uniformly

been the firm doctrine of the Church and of all who acknowledged

her authority. The old dogma still remains in the creeds of the

recognised Churches, Papal, Greek, and Protestant. It has been

terribly shattered by the attacks of reason and of progressive

science. It lingers in the minds of most people only as a dead

letter. But all the earnest conservative theologians yet cling to

it in its unmitigated grossness, with unrelaxing severity. We hear

it in practical discourses from the pulpit, and read it in

doctrinal treatises, as offensively proclaimed now as ever.

Indeed, it is an essential part of the compact system of the

ruling theology, and cannot be taken out without loosening the

whole dogmatic fabric into fragments. Thus writes to day a

distinguished American divine, Dr. Spring: "Whether buried in the

earth, or floating in the sea, or consumed by the flames, or

enriching the battle field, or evaporate in the atmosphere, all,

from Adam to the latest born, shall wend their way to the great

arena of the judgment. Every perished bone and every secret

particle of dust shall obey the summons and come forth. If one

could then look upon the earth, he would see it as one mighty

excavated globe, and wonder how such countless generations could

have found a dwelling beneath its surface." 13 This is the way the

recognised authorities in theology still talk. To venture any

other opinion is a heresy all over Christendom at this hour.

We will next bring forward and criticize the arguments for and

against the doctrine before us. It is contended that the doctrine

is demonstrated in the example of Christ's own resurrection. "The

resurrection of the flesh was formerly regarded as incredible,"

says Augustine; "but now we see the whole world believing that

Christ's earthly body was borne into heaven." 14 It is the faith

of the Church that "Christ rose into heaven with his body of flesh

and blood, and wears it there now, and will forever." "Had he been

there in body before, it would have been no such wonder that he

should have returned with it; but that the flesh of our flesh and

bone of our bone should be seated at the right hand of God is

worthy of the greatest admiration." 15 That is to say, Christ was

from eternity God, the Infinite Spirit, in

13 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 237.

14 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 5.

15 Pearson on the Creed, 12th ed., pp. 272-275.

heaven; he came to earth and lived in a human body; on returning

to heaven, instead of resuming his proper form, he bears with him,

and will eternally retain, the body of flesh he had worn on earth!

Paul says, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God."

The Church, hastily following the senses, led by a carnal,

illogical philosophy, has deeply misinterpreted and violently

abused the significance of Christ's ascension. The drama of his

resurrection, with all its connected parts, was not meant

throughout as a strict representation of our destiny. It was a

seal upon his commission and teachings, not an exemplification of

what should happen to others. It was outwardly a miracle, not a

type, an exceptional instance of super natural power, not a

significant exhibition of the regular course of things. The same

logic which says, "Christ rose and ascended with his fleshly body:

therefore we shall," must also say, "Christ rose visibly on the

third day: therefore we shall." Christ's resurrection was a

miracle; and therefore we cannot reason from it to ourselves. The

common conception of a miracle is that it is the suspension, not

the manifestation, of ordinary laws. We have just as much logical

right to say that the physical appearance in Christ's resurrection

was merely an accommodation to the senses of the witnesses, and

that on his ascension the body was annihilated, and only his soul

entered heaven, as we have to surmise that the theory embodied in

the common belief is true. The record is according to mere

sensible appearances. The reality is beyond our knowledge. The

record gives no explanation. It is wiser in this dilemma to follow

the light of reason than to follow the blind spirit of tradition.

The point in our reasoning is this. If Christ, on rising from the

world of the dead, assumed again his former body, he assumed it by

a miracle, and for some special purpose of revealing himself to

his disciples and of finishing his earthly work; and it does not

follow either that he bore that body into heaven, or that any

others will ever, even temporarily, reassume their cast off forms.

The Christian Scriptures do not in a single passage teach the

popular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text in

the New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanation

without implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it is

undeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul does

not perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, from

numerous explicit passages, that the New Testament authors, in

common with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departed

to be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls the

intermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterranean

realm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiah

to release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of the

doctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the New

Testament is fully met by the simple ascension of this

congregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of the

upper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up to

heaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefully

observed, there is not one text in the New Testament, as before

stated, which speaks of the resurrection of the "body" or of the

"flesh." The expression is simply the resurrection of "the dead,"

or of "them that slept." If by "the dead" was meant "the bodies,"

why are we not told so? Locke, in the Third Letter of his

controversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, very

pointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the

words "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall

come forth." Nothing can come out of the grave except what is in

it. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separate

state. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they long

ago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulations

of the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto the

resurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the under

world, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events,

nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is a

matter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to have

material bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection ye

shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the

angels of heaven." It seems clear to us that the author of the

Epistle to the Hebrews also looked for no restoration of the

fleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintest

allusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spirits

of just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with an

innumerable company of angels, and with the general assembly and

church of the first born." The Jews and early Christians who

believed in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departed

could enter heaven until after that great consummation.

The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach the

resurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave is

furnished by the celebrated passage in Paul's Epistle to the

Corinthians. The apostle's premises, reasoning, and conclusion are

as follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the first

fruits of them that slept." That is to say, all who have died,

except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of souls

under the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so the

solitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the general

resurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the dead

raised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle's

reply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can consider

him as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that was

laid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that which

thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but naked

grain, and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." "There

are celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a natural

body, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of the

earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh and

blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" "we shall all be

changed," and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have borne

the image of the earthy." The analogy which has been so strangely

perverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germ

which was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, was

not any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was the

soul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from its

hull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christ

shall call it forth to be invested with a "glorious," "powerful,"

"spiritual," "incorruptible" body. When a grain of wheat is sown,

that is not the body that shall be; but the mysterious principle

of life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up and puts on

its body fashioned appropriately for it. So, according to Paul's

conception, when a man is buried, the material corpse is not the

resurrection body that shall be; but the living soul which

occupied it is the germ that shall put on a new body of

immortality when the spring tide of Christ's coming draws the

buried treasures of Hades up to the light of heaven.

A species of proof which has been much used by the advocates of

the dogma of a bodily resurrection is the argument from analogy.

The intimate connection of human feeling and fancy with the

changing phenomena of Nature's seasons would naturally suggest to

a pensive mind the idea, Why, since she has her annual

resurrection, may not humanity some time have one? And what first

arose as a poetic conceit or stray thought, and was expressed in

glowing metaphors, might by an easy process pass abroad and harden

into a prosaic proposition or dogmatic formula.

"O soul of the spring time, now let us behold The stone from the

mouth of the sepulchre roll'd, And Nature rise up from her death's

damp mould; Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has

lain, Revive with the warmth and the brightness again, And in

blooming of flower and budding of tree The symbols and types of

our destiny see."

Standing by the graves of our loved and lost ones, our inmost

souls yearn over the very dust in which their hallowed forms

repose. We feel that they must come back, we must be restored to

each other as we were before. Listening to the returned birds

whose warble fills the woods once more, gazing around on the

verdant and flowery forms of renewed life that clothe the

landscape over again, we eagerly snatch at every apparent emblem

or prophetic analogy that answers to our fond imagination and

desiring dream. Sentiment and fancy, especially when stimulated by

love and grief, and roving in the realms of reverie, free from the

cold guidance and sharp check of literal fact and severe logic,

are poor analysts, and then we easily confuse things distinct and

wander to conclusions philosophy will not warrant. Before building

a dogmatic doctrine on analogies, we must study those analogies

with careful discrimination, must see what they really are, and to

what they really lead. There is often an immense difference

between the first appearance to a hasty observer and the final

reality to a profound student. Let us, then, scrutinize a little

more closely those seeming analogies which, to borrow a happy

expression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sister

of Immortality."

Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in a

new shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof of

any doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, what

would the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, that

humanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her living

handiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature does

not reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perished

the previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not a

resurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The passage of

the worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbol

of a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emancipation, not

resuming a deserted dead body, but assuming a new live one. Does

the butterfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that have

perished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, not

return, ascent through future developments, not descent through

the stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of a

seed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seed

of? Of a soul."

Sir Thomas Browne, after others, argues for the restoration of

man's body from the grave, from the fancied analogy of the

palingenesis or resurrection of vegetables which the magicians of

the antique East and the mystic chemists of the Middle Age boasted

of effecting. He having asserted in his "Religion of a Physician"

that "experience can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant,

and from its cinders recall it into its stalk and leaves again,"

Dr. Henry Power wrote beseeching "an experimental eviction of so

high and noble a piece of chemistry, the reindividuality of an

incinerated plant." We are not informed that Sir Thomas ever

granted him the sight. Of this beautiful error, this exquisite

superstition, which undoubtedly arose from the crystallizations of

certain salts in arborescent forms which suddenly surprised the

early alchemists in some of their experiments, we have the

following account in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature:" "The

semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the

blood of man. The ashes of roses will again revive into roses,

though smaller and paler than if they had been planted

unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew on

rose trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions,

they are seen but for a moment. This magical phoenix lies thus

concealed in its cold ashes till the presence of a certain

chemical heat produces its resurrection." Any refutation of this

now would be considered childish. Upon the whole, then, while

recurrent spring, bringing in the great Easter of the year,

typifies to us indeed abundantly the development of new life, the

growth of new bodies out of the old and decayed, but nowhere hints

at the gathering up and wearing again of the dusty sloughs and

rotted foliage of the past, let men cease to talk of there being

any natural analogies to the ecclesiastical dogma of the

resurrection of the flesh. The teaching of nature finds a truer

utterance in the words of Aschylus: "There is no resurrection for

him who is once dead." 16

The next argument is that based on considerations of reason and of

ethics. The supporters of the doctrine of the resurrection of the

body have often disingenuously evaded the burden of proof thrown

upon them by retreating beneath loud assertions of God's power.

From the earliest dawn of the hypothesis to the present time,

every perplexity arising from it, every objection brought against

it, every absurdity shown to be involved in it, has been met and

confidently rebutted with declarations of God's abundant power to

effect a physical resurrection, or to do any thing else he

pleases, however impossible it may appear to us. Now, it is true

the power of God is competent to innumerable things utterly beyond

our skill, knowledge, or conception. Nevertheless, there is a

province within which our reason can judge of probabilities, and

can, if not absolutely grasp infallible truth, at least reach

satisfactory convictions. God is able to restore the vast coal

deposits of the earth, and the ashes of all the fuel ever burned,

to their original condition when they covered the world with

16 Eumenides, 1. 648, Oxford edition.

dense forests of ferns; but we have no reason to believe he will

do it. The truth or falsity of the popular theory of the

resurrection is not a question of God's power; it is simply a

question of God's will. A Jewish Rabbin relates the following

conversation, as exultingly as if the quibbling evasion on which

it turns positively settled the question itself, which in fact it

does not approach. A Sadducee says, "The resurrection of the dead

is a fable: the dry, scattered dust cannot live again." A by

standing Pharisee makes this reply: "There were in a city two

artists: one made vases of water, the other made them of clay:

which was the more wondrous artist?" The Sadducee answered, "The

former." The Pharisee rejoins, "Cannot God, then, who formed man

of water, (gutta seminis humida,) much more re form him of clay?"

Such a method of reasoning is an irrelevant impertinence. God can

call Nebuchadnezzar from his long rest, and seat him on his old

throne again to morrow. What an absurdity to infer that therefore

he will do it! God can give us wings upon our bodies, and enable

us to fly on an exploring trip among the planets. Will he do it?

The question, we repeat, is not whether God has the power to raise

our dead bodies, but whether he has the will. To that question

since, as we have already seen, he has sent us no miraculous

revelation replying to it we can only find an answer by tracing

the indications of his intentions contained in reason, morals, and

nature.

One of the foremost arguments urged by the Fathers for the

resurrection was its supposed necessity for a just and complete

judgment. The body was involved and instrumental in all the sins

of the man: it must therefore bear part in his punishment. The

Rabbins tell this allegory: "In the day of judgment the body will

say, The soul alone is to blame: since it left me, I have lain

like a stone in the grave. The soul will retort, The body alone is

sinful: since released from it, I fly through the air like a bird.

The Judge will interpose with this myth: A king once had a

beautiful garden full of early fruits. A lame man and a blind man

were in it. Said the lame man to the blind man, Let me mount upon

your shoulders and pluck the fruit, and we will divide it. The

king accused them of theft; but they severally replied, the lame

man, How could I reach it? the blind man, How could I see it? The

king ordered the lame man to be placed upon the back of the blind

man, and in this position had them both scourged. So God in the

day of judgment will replace the soul in the body, and hurl them

both into hell together." There is a queer tradition among the

Mohammedans implying, singularly enough, the same general thought.

The Prophet's uncle, Hamzah, having been slain by Hind, daughter

of Atabah, the cursed woman cut out his liver and gnawed it with

fiendish joy; but, lest any of it should become incorporated with

her system and go to hell, the Most High made it as hard as a

stone; and when she threw it on the ground, an angel restored it

to its original nature and place in the body of the martyred hero,

that lion of God.