"Arrive at last the blessed goal

Where He that died in Holy Land

Might reach them out the shining hand

And take them as a single soul."

Denied that inmost wish, the rest of his widowed life below has

been one melancholy strain of "In Memoriam." Many a faithful and

noble mourner, whose garnered love and hope have been blighted for

this world, would tell you that, without meeting his lost ones

there, heaven itself would be no heaven to him. In such a state of

soul we must expect to know again in an unfading clime the

cherished dead. That belief is of Divine inspiration, an

arrangement to heal the deadly wounds of sorrow. It is madness not

to think it a verity. Who believes, as he shall float through the

ambrosial airs of heaven, he could touch, in passing, the radiant

robes of his chosen friends without a thrill of recognition, the

prelude to a blissful and immortal communion? Is there not truth

in the poet's picture of the meeting of child and parent in heaven?

4 Harbaugh, The Heavenly Recognition. Gisborne, Recollections of

Friends in the World to Come. Muston, Perpetuation of Christian

Friendship.

"It was not, mother, that I knew thy face: The luminous eclipse

that is on it now, Though it was fair on earth, would have made it

strange Even to one who knew as well as he loved thee; But my

heart cried out in me, Mother!"

Think of the unfathomable yearnings, the infinite ecstasies of

desire and faith from age to age swelling in the very heart of the

world, all set on the one hope of future union, and who then can

believe that God will coldly blast them all? They are innocent,

they are holy, they are meritorious, they are unspeakably dear. We

would not destroy them; and God will not.

Man's life is the true fable of that beautiful youth, Narcissus,

who had a twin sister of remarkable loveliness, strongly

resembling himself, and to whom he was most tenderly attached. She

dies young. He frequents fountains to gaze upon his own image

reflected in the waters, it seeming to him the likeness of her he

has lost. He is in pity transformed into a flower on the border of

a stream, where, bending on his fragile stem, he seeks his image

in the waters murmuring by, until he fades and dies. Has not God,

the all loving Author who composed the sweet poem of Man and

Nature, written at the close a reconciling Elysium wherein these

pure lovers, the fond Narcissus and his echo mate, shall wander in

perennial bliss, their embracing forms mirrored in unruffled

fountains?

Looking now for the conclusion of the whole matter, we find that

it lies in three different aspects, both of inquiring thought and

of practical morality, according to the lights and modes in which

three different classes of minds approach it. To the consistent

metaphysician, reasoning rigidly on grounds of science and

philosophy, every thing pertaining to the methods and circumstances

of the future life is an affair of entire uncertainty and hypothesis.5

If in the future state the soul retains its individuality as an

identical force, form, life, and memory, and if associates in the

present state are brought together, it is probable that old friends

will recognise each other. But if they are oblivious of the past,

if they are incommunicably separated in space or state, if one

progresses so much farther that the other can never overtake him,

if the personal soul blends its individual consciousness with the

unitary consciousness of the Over Soul, if it commences a new career

from a fresh psychical germ, then, by the terms, there will be no

mutual recognition. In that case his comfort and his duty are to

know that the anguish and longing he now feels will cease then; to

trust in the benignity of the Infinite Wisdom, who knows best what

to appoint for his creatures; and to submit with harmonizing

resignation to the unalterable decree, offering his private wish a

voluntary sacrifice on the altar of natural piety. That he shall

know his friends hereafter is not impossible, not improbable;

neither is it certain. He may desire it, expect it, but not with

speculative pride dogmatically affirm it, nor with insisting

egotism presumptuously demand it.

5 Gravell, Das Wiedersehen nach dem Tode. Wie es nur sein konne.

To the uncritical Christian the recognising reunion of friends in

heaven is an unshaken assurance.6 There is nothing to disturb his

implicit reception of the plain teaching of Scripture. The

legitimate exhortations of his faith are these. Mourn not too

bitterly nor too long over your absent dead; for you shall meet

them in an immortal clime. As the last hour comes for your dearest

ones or for yourself, be of good cheer; for an imperishable joy is

yours. You:

"Cannot lose the hope that many a year

Hath shone on a gleaming way,

When the walls of life are closing round

And the sky grows sombre gray."

Put not away the intruding thoughts of the departed, but let them

often recur. The dead are constant. You know not how much they may

think of you, how near they may be to you. Will you pass to meet

them not having thought of them for years, having perhaps

forgotten them? Let your mind have its nightly firmament of

religious communion, beneath which white and sable memories shall

walk, and the sphered spirits of your risen friends, like stars,

shed down their holy rays to soothe your feverish cares and hush

every murmuring doubt to rest. From the dumb heavings of your

loving and trustful heart, sometimes exclaim, Parents who nurtured

and watched over me with unwearied affection, I would remember you

oft, and love you well, and so live that one day I may meet you at

the right hand of God. Early friends, so close and dear once, who

in the light of young romance trod with me life's morning hills,

neither your familiar faces nor your sweet communion are forgotten

by me: I fondly think of you, and aspire towards you, and pray for

a purer soul, that I may mount to your celestial circle at last;

"For many a tear these eyes must weep,

And many a sin must be forgiven,

Ere these pale lids shall sink to sleep,

Ere you and I shall meet in heaven."

Blessed Jesus, elder Brother of our race, who sittest now by thy

Father's throne, or pacest along the crystal coast as a leader,

chief among ten thousand, whose condescending brow the bloody

thorns no longer press, but the dazzling crown of thy Divinity

encircles, oh, remember us, poor erring pilgrims after thine

earthly steps; pity us, help us, and after death bring us to thy

home.

To the sympathetic poet, the man of sentiment and meditation, who

views the question from the position of the heart, in the glory

and vistas of the imagination, but with all the known facts and

relations of the subject lying bare under his sight, the uniting

restoration, in another sphere, of earth's broken ties and parted

friends, is an unappeasable craving of the soul, in harmony with

the moral law, powerfully prophesied to his experience from all

quarters, and seemingly confirmed to his hopes by every promise of

God and nature.7

6 Grafe, Biblische Beitrage zu der Frage, Werden wir uns

wiedersehen nach dem Tode.

7 Engel, Wir werden uns wiedersehen. Halst, Beleuchtung der

Hauptgrunde fur den Glauben an Erinnerung und Wiedersehen nach dem

Tode. Streicher, Neue Beitrage zur Kritik des Glaubens an

Ruckerinnerung nach dem Tode.

Received as a truth, it is a well of inexhaustible comfort, making

experience a green oasis where it overflows. The denial of it as a

proven falsehood is a withering blast of dust blowing on the

friendly caravan of sojourners in the desert of life. If existence

is the enjoyment of a largess of social love, and death is to have

a solitary hand snatch it all away forever, how dismal is the

prospect to the poor heart that loves and clings, loses and

despairs, and can only falter hopelessly on! It cannot be so. Love

is the true prophet. Heaven will restore the treasures earth has

lost.

The mourner by the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel!

Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn of

Washington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is

the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the

pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast

in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings

above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were

brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in history

to brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears of

her grief and faith into the future to restore her deceased

children to life and draw them together within her embrace. And

that sublime Rachel will not easily be comforted except when her

thoughts, migrating whither her offspring have gone, seem to find

them happy in some happy heaven.

The poet, lover of his race, who cannot trust his happier

instinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line of

mortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helps

to a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of two

possible contemplations.8 He may sadly lay upon his heart the

stifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness,

but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstone

of my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowd

the capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, In the

unchangeable fulness of an infinite bliss, all specialties will be

merged and forgotten, and I shall be one of those to whom "the

wearisome disease" of remembered sorrow and anticipated joy "is an

alien thing."

8 Wieland's Euthanasia expresses disbelief in the preservation of

personality and consciousness after death. The same ground had

been taken in the work published anonymously at Halle in 1775,

Plato and Leibnitz jenseits des Styx. See, on the other side of

the question, Wohlfahrt, Tempel der Unsterblichkeit, oder neue

Anthologie der wichtigsten Ausspruche, besonders neuerer Weisen

uber Wiedersehen u. s. w.

CHAPTER VII.

LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE.

ACCORDING to the imagining of some speculative geologists, perhaps

this earth first floated in the abyss as a volume of vapor,

wreathing its enormous folds of mist in fantastic shapes as it was

borne along on the idle breath of law. Ages swept by, until this

stupendous fog ball was condensed into an ocean of fire, whose

billows heaved their lurid bosoms and reared their ashy crests

without a check, while their burning spray illuminated its track

around the sable vault. During periods which stagger computation,

this molten world was gradually cooled down; constant rivers wrung

from the densely swathing vapor poured over the heated mass and at

last submerged its crust in an immense sea. Then, for unknown

centuries, fire, water, and wind waged a Titanic war, that

imagination shudders to think of, jets of flame licking the stars,

massive battlements and columns of fire piled to terrific heights,

now the basin of the sea suddenly turned into a glowing caldron

and the atmosphere saturated with steam, again explosions hurling

mountains far into space and tearing the earth open in ghastly

rents to its very heart. At length the fire was partially subdued,

the peaceful deep glassed the sky in its bosom or rippled to the

whispers of the breeze, and from amidst the fertile slime and

mould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces of

organic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation.

Thousands of years rolled on. The world ocean subsided, the peaks

of mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged,

and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, a

gigantic growth of grass, every blade as large as our vastest oak,

shot from the soil, and the incalculable epoch of ferns commenced,

whose tremendous harvest clothed the whole land with a deep carpet

of living verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetation

were successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the dark

layers of inexhaustible coal beds, the world, one waving

wilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless and

silent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all its

magnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavily

surcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerable

ages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching its

limit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, the

earliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugs

of the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during which

animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by

plesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feet

in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight

loaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea,

the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the

nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, when

millions of aons had worn away, the creative process culminated in

Humanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let us

make man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with upright

form, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on the

summit of the world and gave names to all the races of creatures

beneath.1

At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whether

man is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan for

this world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to be

superseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, and

attributes transcending our conceptions, even as our own

transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence.

Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and

making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of

the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast,

crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep

for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have

replied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world.

What animal can there be superior to me? beyond a question, my

race shall possess the earth forever!" The mastodon could not know

any uses of nature except those he was fitted to experience, nor

imagine a being with the form and prerogatives of man. Therefore

he would not believe that the mastodon race would ever be

displaced by the human. We labor under the same disqualification

for judgment. There may be in the system of nature around us

adaptations, gifts, glories, as much higher than any we enjoy as

our noblest powers and privileges are in advance of those of the

tiger or the lark.

It is a remarkable fact that the mature states of the antediluvian

races correspond with the foetal states of the present races, and

that the foetal states of embryonic man are counterparts of the

mature states of the lower races now contemporaneous with him.

This great discovery of modern science, though perhaps destitute

of logical value, suggests to the imagination the thought that man

may be but the foetal state of a higher being, a regent

temporarily presiding here until the birth and inauguration of the

true king of the world, and destined himself to be born from the

womb of this world into the free light and air of the spirit

kingdom!

The resources of God are inexhaustible; and in the evolution of

his prearranged ages it may be that there will arise upon the

earth a race of beings of unforetold majesty, who shall disinter

the remnant bones and ponder the wrecked monuments of forgotten

man as we do those of the disgusting reptiles of the Saurian

epoch. But this is a mere conceit of possibility; and, so far as

the data for forming an opinion are in our hands, it is altogether

incredible. So far as appears, the adaptation between man and the

earth is exhaustive. He is able to subdue all her forces, reign

over all her provinces, enjoy all her delights, and gather into

his consciousness all her prophecies. And our practical conviction

is absolute that the race of men is the climax of being destined

for this earth, and that they will occupy its hospitable bosom

forever with their toils and their homes, their sports and their

graves.2

The other question is this: Was the subjection of the human race

to physical death a part of the Creator's original plan, or the

retributive result of a subsequent dislocation of that plan by

sin? a part of the great harmony of nature, or a discord marring

the happy destiny

1 Harris, The Pre Adamite Earth.

2 Agassiz says no higher creature than man is to be expected on

earth, because the capacities of the earthly plan of organic

creation are completed and exhausted with him. Introduction to

Study of Natural History, p. 57.

of man? Approaching this problem on grounds of science and reason

alone, there can be no hesitation as to the reply. There are but

two considerations really bearing upon the point and throwing

light upon it; and they both force us to the same conclusion.

First, it is a fact admitting no denial that death was the

predetermined natural fate of the successive generations of the

races that preceded man. Now, what conceivable reason is there for

supposing that man, constructed from the same elements, living

under the same organic laws, was exempt from the same doom? There

is not in the whole realm of science a single hint to that effect.

Secondly, the reproductive element an essential feature in the

human constitution, leading our kind to multiply and replenish the

earth is a demonstration that the office of death entered into

God's original plan of the world. For otherwise the earth at this

moment could not hold a tithe of the inhabitants that would be

demanding room. When God had permitted this world to roll in space

for awful ages, a lifeless globe of gas, fire, water, earth, and

then let it be occupied for incommensurable epochs more by snails,

vermin, and iguanodons, would he wind up the whole scene and

destroy it when the race of man, crowning glory of all, had only

flourished for a petty two thousand years? It is not credible. And

yet it must have been so unless it was decreed that the successive

generations should pass away and thus leave space for, the new

comers. We conclude, then, that it is the will of God and was in

the beginning that the human race shall possess the earth through

all the unknown periods of the future, the parents continually

passing off the stage in death as the children rise upon it to

maturity. We cannot discern any authority in those old traditions

which foretell the impending destruction of the world. On what

grounds are we to believe them? The great system of things is a

stable harmony. There is no wear or tear in the perfect machinery

of the creation, rolling noiseless in its blue bearings of ether.

It seems, comparatively speaking, to have just begun. Its

oscillations are self adjusted, and science prophesies for

humanity an illimitable career on this earthly theatre. The swift

melting of the elements and restoration of chaos is a mere heathen

whim or a poetic figment. It is the bards who sing,

"The earth shall shortly die. Her grave is dug. I see the worlds,

night clad, all gathering In long and dark procession. And the

stars, Which stand as thick as glittering dewdrops on The fields

of heaven, shall pass in blazing mist."

Such pictures are delusion winning the imagination, not truth

commanding the reason. In spite of all the Cassandra screams of

the priesthood, vaticinating universal ruin, the young old earth,

fresh every spring, shall remain under God's preserving

providence, and humanity's inexhaustible generations renewedly

reign over its kingdoms, forever. Plotinus said, "If God repents

having made the world, why does he defer its destruction? If he

does not yet repent, he never will, as being now accustomed to it,

and becoming through time more friendly to it."

3 Lucan says, "Our bones and the stars shall be mingled on one

funeral pyre." Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra

Misturus.

But to receive such a good piece of poetry as veritable prevision

is surely a puerile error which a mature mind in the nineteenth

century should be ashamed to commit.

The most recently broached theory of the end of the world is that

developed from some remarkable speculations as to the composition

and distribution of force. The view is briefly this. All force is

derived from heat. All heat is derived from the sun.4 The

mechanical value of a cubic mile of sunlight at the surface of the

earth is one horse power for a third of a minute; at the sun it is

fifteen thousand horse power for a minute. Now, it is calculated

that enough heat is radiated from the sun to require for its

production the annual consumption of the whole surface of the sun

to the depth of from ten to twenty miles. Of course, ultimately

the fuel will be all expended; then the forces of the system will

expire, and the creation will die.5 This brilliant and sublime

theorem assumes, first, that the heat of the sun arises from

consumption of matter, which may not be true; secondly, that it is

not a self replenishing process, as it certainly may be. Some have

even surmised that the zodiacal light is an illuminated tornado of

stones showering into the sun to feed its tremendous

conflagration. The whole scheme is a fine toy, but a very faint

terror. Even if it be true, then we are to perish at last from

lack of fire, and not, as commonly feared, from its abundance!

The belief of mankind that a soul or ghost survives the body has

been so nearly universal as to appear like the spontaneous result

of an instinct. We propose to trace the history of opinions

concerning the physical destination of this disembodied spirit,

its connection with localities, to give the historical topography

of the future life.

The earliest conception of the abode of the dead was probably that

of the Hebrew Sheol or the Greek Hades, namely, the idea born from

the silence, depth, and gloom of the grave of a stupendous

subterranean cavern full of the drowsy race of shades, the

indiscriminate habitation of all who leave the land of the living.

Gradually the thought arose and won acceptance that the favorites

of Deity, peerless heroes and sages, might be exempt from this

dismal fate, and migrate at death to some delightful clime beyond

some far shore, there, amidst unalloyed pleasures, to spend

immortal days. This region was naturally located on the surface of

the earth, where the cheerful sun could shine and the fresh

breezes blow, yet in some untrodden distance, where the gauntlet

of fact had not smitten the sceptre of fable. The paltry portion

of this earth familiar to the ancients was surrounded by an

unexplored region, which their fancy, stimulated by the legends of

the poets, peopled with mythological kingdoms, the rainbow bowers

and cloudy synods of Olympus, from whose glittering peak the

Thunderer threw his bolts over the south; the Golden Garden of the

3 Ennead ii. lib. ix.: Contra Gnosticos, cap. 4.

4 Helmholtz, Edinburgh Phil. Msg., series iv. vol. xi.:

Interaction of Natural Forces.

5 Thomson, Ibid. Dec. 1854: Mechanical Energies of the Solar

System.

Hesperides, whose dragons lay on guard in the remote west; the

divine cities of Meru, whose encircling towers pierced the eastern

sky; the Banquet Halls of Ethiopia, gleaming through the fiery

desert; the fragrant Islands of Immortality, musical and luring in

the central ocean; the happy land of the Hyperboreans, beyond the

snowy summits of northern Caucasus:

"How pleasant were the wild beliefs That dwelt in legends old!

Alas! to our posterity Will no such tales be told. We know too

much: scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves: Our only

point of ignorance Is centred in ourselves."

There was a belief among the Persians that Kaf, a mountain two

thousand miles high, formed a rim to the flat world and prevented

travellers from ever falling off.6 The fact that the earth is a

globe inhabited on all sides is a comparatively recent piece of

knowledge. So late as in the eighth century Pope Zachary accused

Virgilius, an Irish mathematician and monk, of heresy for

believing in the existence of antipodes.7 St. Boniface wrote to

the Pope against Virgilius; and Zachary ordered a council to be

held to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against God

and his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine." To the

ancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknown

land, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement.

Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hindu

placed the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalized

men.8 Under the attraction of a mystic curiosity, well might the

old, wearied Ulysses say,

"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push

off, and, sitting well in order, smite The sounding furrows; for

my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all

the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash

us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the

great Achilles, whom we knew."

Decius Brutus and his army, as Florus relates, reaching the coast

of Portugal, where, for the first time, they saw the sun setting

in the blood tinged ocean, turned back their standards with horror

as they beheld "the huge corpse of ruddy gold let down into the

deep." The Phoenician traders brought intelligence to Greece of a

people, the Cimmerians, who dwelt on the borders of Hades in the

umbered realms of perpetual night. To the dying Roman, on the

farthest verge of the known horizon hovered a vision of Elysian

Fields. And the American

6 Adventures of Hatim Tai, p. 36, note.

7 Whewell, Hist. Inductive Sciences, vol. i. book iv. ch. i. sect.

7.

8 Wilford, Essays on the Sacred Isles, In Asiatic Researches,

vols. viii. xi.

Indian, sinking in battle or the chase, caught glimpses of happier

Hunting Grounds, whose woods trooped with game, and where the

arrows of the braves never missed, and there was no winter. There

was a pretty myth received among some of the ancient Britons,

locating their paradise in a spot surrounded by tempests, far in

the Western Ocean, and named Flath Innis, or Noble Island.9 The

following legend is illustrative. An old man sat thoughtful on a

rock beside the sea. A cloud, under whose squally skirts the

waters foamed, rushed down; and from its dark womb issued a boat,

with white sails bent to the wind, and hung round with moving

oars. Destitute of mariners, itself seemed to live and move. A

voice said, "Arise, behold the boat of heroes: embark, and see the

Green Isle of those who have passed away!" Seven days and seven

nights he voyaged, when a thousand tongues called out, "The Isle!

the Isle!" The black billows opened before him, and the calm land

of the departed rushed in light on his eyes. We are reminded by

this of what Procopius says concerning the conveyal of the soul of

the barbarian to his paradise. At midnight there is a knocking at

the door, and indistinct voices call him to come. Mysteriously

impelled, he goes to the sea coast, and there finds a frail, empty

wherry awaiting him. He embarks, and a spirit crew row him to his

destination.10

"He finds with ghosts His boat deep freighted, sinking to the edge

Of the dark flood, and voices hears, yet sees No substance; but,

arrived where once again His skiff floats free, hears friends to

friends Give lamentable welcome. The unseen Shore faint resounds,

and all the mystic air Breathes forth the names of parent,

brother, wife."

During that period of poetic credulity while the face of the earth

remained to a great extent concealed from knowledge, wherever the

Hebrew Scriptures were known went the cherished traditions of the

Garden of Eden from which our first parents were driven for their

sin. Speculation naturally strove to settle the locality of this

lost paradise. Sometimes it was situated in the mysterious bosom

of India; sometimes in the flowery vales of Georgia, where roses

and spices perfumed the gales; sometimes in the guarded recesses

of Mesopotamia. Now it was the Grand Oasis in the Arabian desert,

flashing on the wilted pilgrim, over the blasted and blazing

wastes, with the verdure of palms, the play of waters, the smell

and flavor of perennial fruits. Again it was at the equator, where

the torrid zone stretched around it as a fiery sword waving every

way so that no mortal could enter. In the "Imago Mundi," a Latin

treatise on cosmography written early in the twelfth century, we

read, "Paradise is the extreme eastern part of Asia, and is made

inaccessible by a wall of fire surrounding it and rising unto

heaven." At a later time the Canaries were thought to be the

ancient Elysium, and were accordingly named the Fortunate Isles.

Indeed, among the motives that animated

9 Macpherson, Introduction to the History of Great Britain and

Ireland, pp. 180-186.

10 Procopius, Gothica, lib. iv.

Columbus on his adventurous voyage no inferior place must be

assigned to the hope of finding the primeval seat of Paradise.11

The curious traveller, exploring these visionary spots one by one,

found them lying in the light of common day no nearer heaven than

his own natal home; and at last all faith in them died out when

the whole surface of the globe had been surveyed, no nook left

wherein romance and superstition might any longer play at hide and

seek.

Continuing our search after the local abode of the departed, we

now leave the surface of the earth and descend beneath it. The

first haunted region we reach is the realm of the Fairies, which,

as every one acquainted with the magic lore of old Germany or

England knows, was situated just under the external ground, and

was clothed with every charm poets could imagine or the heart

dream. There was supposed to be an entrance to this enchanted

domain at the Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, and at several other

places. Sir Walter Scott has collected some of the best legends

illustrative of this belief in his "History of Demonology." Sir

Gawaine, a famous knight of the Round Table, was once admitted to

dine, above ground, in the edge of the forest, with the King of

the Fairies:

"The banquet o'er, the royal Fay, intent

To do all honor to King Arthur's knight,

Smote with his rod the bank on which they leant,

And Fairy land flash'd glorious on the sight;

Flash'd, through a silvery, soft, translucent mist,

The opal shafts and domes of amethyst;

Flash'd founts in shells of pearl, which crystal walls

And phosphor lights of myriad hues redouble.

There, in the blissful subterranean halls,

When morning wakes the world of human trouble

Glide the gay race; each sound our discord knows,

Faint heard above, but lulls them to repose."

To this empire of moonlit swards and elfin dances, of jewelled

banks, lapsing streams, and enchanting visions, it was thought a

few favored mortals might now and then find their way. But this

was never an earnest general faith. It was a poetic superstition

that hovered over fanciful brains, a legendary dream that pleased

credulous hearts; and, with the other romance of the early world,

it has vanished quite away.

The popular belief of Jews, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Germans,

and afterwards of Christians, was that there was an immense world

of the dead deep beneath the earth, subdivided into several

subordinate regions. The Greenlanders believed in a separated

heaven and hell, both located far below the Polar Ocean. According

to the old classic descriptions of the under world, what a scene

of colossal gloom it is! Its atmosphere murmurs with a breath of

plaintive sighs. Its population, impalpable ghosts timidly

flitting at every motion,

11 Irving, Life of Columbus: Appendix on the Situation of the

Terrestrial Paradise. By far the most valuable book ever published

on this subject is that of Schulthess, Das Paradies, das irdische

und uberirdische historische, mythische und mystische, nebst einer

kritischen Revision der allgemelnen biblischen Geographie.

crowd the sombre landscapes in numbers surpassing imagination.

There Cocytus creeps to the seat of doom, his waves emitting

doleful wails. Styx, nine times enfolding the whole abode, drags

his black and sluggish length around. Charon, the slovenly old

ferryman, plies his noiseless boat to and fro laden with shadowy

passengers. Far away in the centre grim Pluto sits on his ebony

throne and surveys the sad subjects of his dreadful domain. By his

side sits his stolen and shrinking bride, Proserpine, her

glimmering brows encircled with a wreath of poppies. Above the

subterranean monarch's head a sable rainbow spans the infernal

firmament; and when, with lifted hand, he announces his decrees,

the applause given by the twilight populace of Hades is a rustle

of sighs, a vapor of tears, and a shudder of submission.

The belief in this dolorous kingdom was early modified by the

reception of two other adjacent realms, one of reward, one of

torture; even as Goethe says, in allusion to the current Christian

doctrine, "Hell was originally but one apartment: limbo and

purgatory were afterwards added as wings." Passing through Hades,

and turning in one direction, the spirit traveller would arrive at

Elysium or Abraham's bosom:

"To paradise the gloomy passage winds Through regions drear and

dismal, and through pain, Emerging soon in beatific blaze Of

light."

There the blessed ones found respite and peaceful joys in flowery

fields, pure breezes, social fellowship, and the similitudes of

their earthly pursuits. In this placid clime, lighted by its own

constellations, favored souls roamed or reposed in a sort of

ineffectual happiness. According to the pagans, here were such

heroes as Achilles, such sages as Socrates, to remain forever, or

until the end of the world. And here, according to the Christians,

the departed patriarchs and saints were tarrying expectant of

Christ's arrival to ransom them. Dante thus describes that great

event:

"Then he, who well my covert meaning knew,

Answer'd, Herein I had not long been bound,

When an All puissant One I saw march through,

With victory's radiant sign triumphal crown'd.

He led from us our Father Adam's shade,

Abel and Noah, whom God loved the most,

Lawgiving Moses, him who best obey'd,

Abraam the patriarch, royal David's ghost;

Israel, his father, and his sons, and her

Whom Israel served for, faithfully and long,

Rachel, with more, to bliss did He transfer:

No souls were saved before this chosen throng." 12

At the opposite extremity of Hades was supposed to be an opening

that led down into Tartarus, "a place made underneath all things,

so low and horrible that hell is its heaven." Here the old earth

giants, the looming Titans, lay, bound, transfixed with

thunderbolts, their

12 Parsons's trans. Dell' Inferno, canto iv. ii. 55-63.

mountainous shapes half buried in rocks, encrusting lava, and

ashes. Rivers of fire seam the darkness, whose borders are braided

with sentinel furies. On every hand the worst criminals,

perjurers, blasphemers, ingrates, groan beneath the pitiless

punishments inflicted on them without escape. Any realization of

the terrific scenery of this whole realm would curdle the blood.13

There were fabled entrances to the dread under world at Acherusia,

in Bithynia, at Avernus, in Campania, where Ulysses evoked the

dead and traversed the grisly abodes, through the Sibyl's cave at

Cuma, at Hermione, in Argolis, where the people thought the

passage below so near and easy that they neglected to give the

dying an obolus to pay ferriage to Charon, at Tanarus, the

southern most point of Peloponnesus, where Herakles went down and

dragged the three headed dog up into day, at the cave of

Trophonius, in Lebadea, and at several other places.

Similar conceptions have been embodied in the ecclesiastical

doctrine which has generally prevailed in Christendom. Locating

the scene in the hollow of the earth, thus has it been described

by Milton,

"A dungeon horrible on all sides round As one great furnace

flamed; yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness

visible, Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of

anguish, doleful shades, where peace Nor hope can come, but

torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge fed With ever

burning sulphur unconsumed;" wherein, confined by adamantine

walls, the fallen angels and all the damned welter overwhelmed

with floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire. Shapes once

celestially fair and proud, but now scarred from battle and

darkened by sin into faded forms of haggard splendor, support

their uneasy steps over the burning marl. Everywhere shrieks and

moans resound, and the dusky vault of pandemonium is lighted by a

blue glare cast pale and dreadful from the tossings of the flaming

lake. This was hell, where the wicked must shrink and howl

forever. Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli, Hecla, were believed to be

vent holes from this bottomless and living pit of fire. The famous

traveller, Sir John Maundeville, asserted that he found a descent

into hell "in a perilous vale" in the dominions of Prester John.

Many a cavern in England still bears the name of "Hell hole." In a

dialogue between a clerk and a master, preserved in an old Saxon

catechism, the following question and reply occur: "Why is the sun

so red when she sets?" "Because she looks down upon hell."

Antonius Rusca, a learned professor at Milan, in the year 1621,

published a huge quarto in five books, giving a detailed

topographical account of the interior of the earth, hell,

purgatory, and limbo.14 There is a lake in the south of Ireland in

which is an island containing a cavern said to open down into

hell. This cave

13 Descriptions of the sufferings of hell, according to the

popular notions at different periods, are given in the work

published at Weimar in 1817, Das Rad der ewigen Hollenqual. In den

Curiositaten der physisch literarisch artistisch historischen Vor

und Mitwelt, band vi. st. 2.

14 De Inferno et Statn Damonum ante Mundi Exitium.

is called St. Patrick's Purgatory, and the pretence obtained quite

general credit for upwards of five centuries. Crowds of pilgrims

visited the place. Some who had the hardihood to venture in were

severely pinched, beaten, and burned, by the priests within,

disguised as devils, and were almost frightened out of their wits

by the diabolical scenes they saw where

"Forth from the depths of flame that singed the gloom Despairing

wails and piercing shrieks were heard."

Several popes openly preached in behalf of this gross imposition;

and the Church virtually authorized it by receiving the large

revenues accruing from it, until at last outraged common sense

demanded its repudiation and suppression.15

Few persons now, as they walk the streets and fields, are much

disturbed by the thought that, not far below, the vivid lake of

fire and brimstone, greedily roaring for new food, heaves its

tortured surges convulsed and featured with souls. Few persons now

shudder at a volcanic eruption as a premonishing message freshly

belched from hell.16 In fact, the old belief in a local physical

hell within the earth has almost gone from the public mind of to

day. It arose from pagan myths and figures of speech based on

ignorant observation and arbitrary fancy, and with the growth of

science and the enlightenment of reason it has very extensively

fallen and faded away. No honest and intelligent inquirer into the

matter can find the slightest valid support for such a notion. It

is now a mere tradition, upheld by groundless authority. And yet

the dim shadow of that great idea of a subterranean hell which

once burned so fierce and lurid in the brain of Christendom still

vaguely haunts the modern world. The dogma still lies in the

prevalent creeds, and is occasionally dragged out and brandished

by fanatic preachers. The transmitted literature and influences of

the past are so full of it that it cannot immediately cease.

Accordingly, while the common understanding no longer grasps it as

a definite verity, it lingers in the popular fancy as a half

credible image. The painful attempts made now and then by some

antiquated or fanatical clergyman to compel attention to it and

belief in it as a tangible fact of science, as well as an

unquestionable revelation of Scripture, scarcely win a passing

notice, but provoke a significant smile. Father Passaglia, an

eminent Jesuit theologian, in 1856 published in Italy a work on

the Literality of Hell Fire and the Eternity of the Punishments of

the Damned. He says, "In this world fire burns by chemical

operations; but in hell it burns by the breath of the Lord!" The

learned and venerable Faber, a voluminous author and distinguished

English divine, published in the year 1851 a large octavo entitled

"The Many Mansions in the House of the Father," discussing with

elaborate detail the question as to the locality of the scenes

awaiting souls after death. His grand conclusion the unreasonableness

of which will be apparent without comment is as follows:

"The saints having first risen with Christ into the highest

regions of the air, out of reach of the dreadful heat, the

tremendous flood of fire hitherto detained inside the earth will

be let loose, and an awful conflagration rage till the whole

material globe is dissipated into sublimated particles. Then the

world will be formed anew, in three parts. First, there will be

15 Wright, St. Patrick's Purgatory: an Essay on the Legends of

Paradise, Hell, and Purgatory, current during the Middle Ages.

16 Patuzzi, De Sede inferni in Terris quarenda.

a solid central sphere of fire the flaming nucleus of Gehenna two

thousand miles in diameter. Secondly, there shall roll around this

central ball on all sides an ignited ocean of liquid fire two

thousand miles in depth, the peculiar residence of the wicked, the

sulphurous lake spoken of in the Apocalypse. Thirdly, around this

infernal sea a vast spherical arch will hang, a thousand miles

thick, a massive and unbroken shell, through which there are no

spiracles, and whose external surface, beautiful beyond

conception, becomes the heaven of the redeemed, where Christ

himself, perfect man as well as perfect God, fixes his residence

and establishes the local sovereignty of the Universal Archangel."

17 A comfortable thought it must be for the saints, as they roam

the flowery fields, basking in immortal bliss, to remember that

under the crust they tread, a soundless sea of fire is forever

plunging on its circular course, all its crimson waves packed with

the agonized faces of the damned as thick as drops! The whole

scheme is without real foundation. Science laughs at such a

theory. Its scriptural supports are either ethnic figments or

rhetorical tropes. Reason, recollecting the immateriality of the

soul, dissipates the ghastly dream beyond the possibility of

restoration to belief.

Following the historic locations of the abode of departed souls,

we next ascend from the interior of the earth, and above the

surface of the earth, into the air and the lofty realms of ether.

The ancient Caledonians fixed the site of their spirit world in

the clouds. Their bards have presented this conception in manifold

forms and with the most picturesque details. In tempests the

ghosts of their famous warriors ride on the thunderbolts, looking

on the earth with eyes of fire, and hurling lances of lightning.

They float over the summits of the hills or along the valleys in

wreaths of mist, on vapory steeds, waving their shadowy arms in

the moonlight, the stars dimly glimmering through their visionary

shapes. The Laplanders also placed their heaven in the upper air,

where the Northern Lights play. They regarded the auroral

streamers as the sport of departed spirits in the happy region to

which they had risen. Such ideas, clad in the familiar imagery

furnished by their own climes, would naturally be suggested to the

ignorant fancy, and easily commended to the credulous thoughts, of

the Celts and Finns. Explanation and refutation are alike

unnecessary.

Plutarch describes a theory held by some of the ancients locating

hell in the air, elysium in the moon.18 After death all souls are

compelled to spend a period in the region between the earth and

the moon, the wicked in severe tortures and for a longer time, the

good in a mild discipline soon purging away all their stains and

fitting them for the lunar paradise. After tarrying a season

there, they were either born again upon the earth, or transported

to the divine realm of the sun. Macrobius, too, says, "The

Platonists reckon as the infernal

17 Part iv. chap. ix. p. 417. Dr. Cumming (The End, Lect. X.)

teaches the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the flesh, and

the subsequent residence of the redeemed on this globe as their

eternal heaven under the immediate rule of Christ. Quite a full

detail of the historic and present belief in this scheme may be

found in the recent work of its earnest advocate, D. T. Taylor,

The Voice of the Church on the Coming of the Redeemer, or a

History of the Doctrine of the Reign of Christ on Earth.

18 In his Essay on the Face in the Orb of the Moon.

region the whole space between the earth and the moon."19 He also

adds, "The tropical signs Cancer and Capricorn are called the

gates of the sun, because there he meets the solstice and can go

no farther. Cancer is the gate of men, because by it is the

descent to the lower regions; Capricorn is the gate of gods,

because by it is a return for souls to the rank of gods in the

seat of their proper immortality." 20 The Manicheans taught that

souls were borne to the moon on leaving their bodies, and there

washed from their sins in water, then taken to the sun and further

cleansed in fire. They described the moon and sun as two splendid

ships prepared for transferring souls to their native country, the

world of perfect light in the heights of the creation.21

The ancient Hebrews thought the sky a solid firmament overarching

the earth, and supporting a sea of inexhaustible waters, beyond

which God and his angels dwelt in monopolized splendor. Eliphaz

the Temanite says, "Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold

the stars, how high they are; but he walketh upon the arch of

heaven!" And Job says, "He covereth the face of his throne, and

spreadeth his clouds under it. He hath drawn a circular bound upon

the waters to the confines of light and darkness." From the

dazzling realm above this supernal ocean all men were supposed,

until after the resurrection of Christ, to be excluded. But from

that time the belief gradually spread in Christendom that a way

was open for faithful souls to ascend thither. Ephraim the

Syrian,22 and Ambrose, located paradise in the outermost East on

the highest summit of the earth, stretching into the serene

heights of the sky. The ancients often conceived the universe to

form one solid whole, whose different provinces were accessible

from each other to gods and angels by means of bridges and golden

staircases. Hence the innumerable paradisal legends associated

with the mythic mountains of antiquity, such as Elborz, Olympus,

Meru, and Kaf. Among the strange legends of the Middle Age,

Gervase of Tilbury preserves the following one, illustrative of

this belief in a sea over the sky: "One Sunday the people of an

English village were coming out of church, a dark, gloomy day,

when they saw the anchor of a ship hooked to one of the

tombstones, the cable, tightly stretched, hanging down the air.

Presently they saw a sailor sliding down the rope to unfix the

anchor. When he had just loosened it the villagers seized hold of

him; and, while in their hands, he quickly died, as though he had

been drowned!" There is also a famous legend called "St. Brandon's

Voyage." The worthy saint set sail from the coast of Ireland, and

held on his way till he arrived at the moon, which he found to be

the location of hell. Here he saw Judas Iscariot in execrable

tortures, regularly respited, however, every week from Saturday

eve till Sunday eve!

The thought so entirely in accordance with the first impression

made by the phenomenon of the night sky on the ignorant senses and

imagination that the stars are set in a firm revolving dome, has

widely prevailed; and the thought that heaven lies beyond that

solid arch, in the unknown space is a popular notion lingering

still. The scriptural image declaring that the convulsions of the

last day will shake the stars from their sockets in the

19 In Somnium Scipionis, lib. i. cap. xi.

20 Ibid. cap. xii.

21 Augustine, De Natura Boni, cap. xliv.

22 De Paradiso Eden, Sermo I.

heavenly floor, "as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she

is shaken of a mighty wind," although so obviously a figure of

speech, has been very generally credited as the description of a

literal fact yet to occur. And how many thousands of pious

Christians have felt, with the sainted Doddridge,

"Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my Divine abode, The

pavement of those heavenly courts Where I shall see my God!"

The universal diffusion in civilized nations of the knowledge that

the visible sky is no substantial expanse, but only an illimitable

void of space hung with successive worlds, has by no means

banished the belief, originally based on the opposite error, in a

physical heaven definitely located far overhead, the destination

of all ransomed souls. This is undoubtedly the most common idea at

the present time. An English clergyman once wrote a book,

afterwards translated into German, to teach that the sun is hell,

and that the black spots often noticed on the disk of that orb are

gatherings of damned souls.23 Isaac Taylor, on the contrary,

contends with no little force and ingenuity that the sun may be

the heaven of our planetary system, a globe of immortal

blessedness and glory.24 The celebrated Dr. Whiston was convinced

that the great comet which appeared in his day was hell. He

imagined it remarkably fitted for that purpose by its fiery vapor,

and its alternate plunges, now into the frozen extremity of space,

now into the scorching breath of the sun. Tupper fastens the

stigma of being the infernal prison house on the moon, in this

style:

"I know thee well, O Moon, thou cavern'd realm, Sad satellite,

thou giant ash of death, Blot on God's firmament, pale home of

crime, Scarr'd prison house of sin, where damned souls Feed upon

punishment: Oh, thought sublime, That amid night's black deeds,

when evil prowls Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners

well, Glarest o'er all, the wakeful eye of Hell!"

Bailey's conception is the darker birth of a deeper feeling:

"There is a blind world, yet unlit by God, Rolling around the

extremest edge of light, Where all things are disaster and decay:

That black and outcast orb is Satan's home That dusky world man's

science counteth not Upon the brightest sky. He never knows How

near it comes to him; but, swathed in clouds, As though in plumed

and palled state, it steals, Hearse like and thief like, round the

universe, Forever rolling, and returning not,

23 Swinden, On the Nature and Location of Hell.

24 Physical Theory of Another Life, chap. xvi.

Robbing all worlds of many an angel soul, With its light hidden

in its breast, which burns With all concentrate and superfluent

woe."

In the average faith of individuals to day, heaven and hell exist

as separate places located somewhere in the universe; but the

notions as to the precise regions in which they lie are most vague

and ineffectual when compared with what they formerly were.

The Scandinavian kosmos contained nine worlds, arranged in the

following order: Gimle, a golden region at the top of the

universe, the eternal residence of Allfather and his chosen ones;

next below that, Muspel, the realm of the genii of fire; Asgard,

the abode of the gods in the starry firmament; Vindheim, the home

of the air spirits; Manheim, the earth, or middle realm;

Jotunheim, the world of the giants, outside the sea surrounding

the earth; Elfheim, the world of the black demons and dwarfs, just

under the earth's surface; Helheim, the domain of the goddess of

death, deep within the earth's bosom; and finally, Niflheim, the

lowest kingdom of horror and pain, at the very bottom of the

creation. The Buddhist kosmos, in the simplest form, as some of

them conceived it, was composed of a series of concentric spheres

each separated from the next by a space, and successively

overarching and under arching each other with circular layers of

brightness above and blackness beneath; each starry hollow

overhead being a heaven inhabited by gods and blessed souls, each

lurid hollow underfoot being a hell filled with demons and wicked

souls in penance. The Arabian kosmos, beginning with the earth,

ascended to a world of water above the firmament, next to a world

of air, then to a world of fire, followed in rising order by an

emerald heaven with angels in the form of birds, a heaven of

precious stones with angels as eagles, a hyacinth heaven with

angels as vultures, a silver heaven with angels as horses, a

golden and a pearl heaven each peopled with angel girls, a crystal

heaven with angel men, then two heavens full of angels, and

finally a great sea without bound, each sphere being presided over

by a chief ruler, the names of all of whom were familiar to the

learned Arabs. The Syrian kosmos corresponded closely to the

foregoing. It soared up the mounting steps of earth, water, air,

fire, and innumerable choruses successively of Angels, Archangels,

Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim

and Seraphim, unto the Expanse whence Lucifer fell; afterwards to

a boundless Ocean; and lastly to a magnificent Crown of Light

filling the uppermost space of all.25

It is hard for us to imagine the aspects of the universe to the

ancients and the impressions it produced in them, all seemed so

different then, in the dimness of crude observation, from the

present appearance in the light of astronomic science. Anaximander

held that the earth was of cylindrical form, suspended in the

middle of the universe and surrounded by envelopes of water, air,

and fire, as by the coats of an onion, but that the exterior

stratum was broken up and collected into masses, and thus

originated the sun, moon, and stars, which are carried around by

the three spheres in which they are fixed.26 Many of the Oriental

nations believed the planets to be animated beings, conscious

divinities, freely marching around their high realms, keeping

watch and ward over the creation, smiling their favorites on to

happy fortune,

25 Dupuis, L'Origine de tous les Cultes, Planche No. 21.

26 Arist. de Coel. ii. 13.

fixing their baleful eyes and shedding disastrous eclipse on

"falling nations and on kingly lines about to sink forever." This

belief was cherished among the later Greek philosophers and Roman

priests, and was vividly held by such men as Philo, Origen, and

even Kepler. It is here that we are to look for the birth of

astrology, that solemn lore, linking the petty fates of men with

the starry conjunctions, which once sank so deeply into the mind

of the world, but is now wellnigh forgotten:

"No more of that, ye planetary lights! Your aspects, dignities,

ascendancies, Your partite quartiles, and your plastic trines, And

all your heavenly houses and effects, Shall meet no more devout

expounders here.

The joy of Jupiter, The exaltation of the Dragon's head, The sun's

triplicity and glorious Day house on high, the moon's dim

detriment, And all the starry inclusions of all signs, Shall rise,

and rule, and pass, and no one know That there are spirit rulers

of all worlds, Which fraternize with earth, and, though unknown,

Hold in the shining voices of the stars Communion on high and

everywhere."

The belief that the stars were living beings, combining with the

fancy of an unscientific time, gave rise to the stellar apotheosis

of heroes and legendary names, and was the source of those

numerous asterisms, out lined groups of stars, which still bedeck

the skies and form the landmarks of celestial topography. It was

these and kindred influences that wrought together

"To make the firmament bristle with shapes Of intermittent motion,

aspect vague, And mystic bearings, which o'ercreep the earth,

Keeping slow time with horrors in the blood;" the Gorgon's

petrific Head, the Bear's frightful form, Berenice's streaming

Hair, the curdling length of Ophiuchus, and the Hydra's horrid

shape. The poetic eye of old religion saw gods in the planets

walking their serene blue paths,

"Osiris, Bel, Odin, Mithras, Brahm, Zeus, Who gave their names to

stars which still roam round The skies all worshipless, even from

climes Where their own altars once topp'd every hill."

By selected constellations the choicest legends of the antique

world are preserved in silent enactment. On the heavenly sea the

Argonautss keep nightly sail towards the Golden Fleece. There

Herakles gripes the hydra's heads and sways his irresistible club;

Arion with his harp rides the docile Dolphin; the Centaur's right

hand clutches the Wolf; the Hare flees from the raging eye and

inaudible bark of the Dog; and space crawls with the horrors of

the Scorpion.

In consequence of the earth's revolution in its orbit, the sun

appears at different seasons to rise in connection with different

groups of stars. It seems as if the sun made an annual journey

around the ecliptic. This circuit was divided into twelve parts

corresponding to the months, and each marked by a distinct

constellation. There was a singular agreement in regard to these

solar houses, residences of the gods, or signs of the zodiac,

among the leading nations of the earth, the Persians, Chaldeans,

Hebrews, Syrians, Hindus, Chinese, Arabians, Japanese, Siamese,

Goths, Javanese, Mexicans, Peruvians, and Scandinavians. 27 Among

the various explanations of the origin of these artificial signs,

we will notice only the one attributed by Volney to the Egyptians.

The constellations in which the sun successively appeared from

month to month were named thus: at the time of the overflow of the

Nile, the stars of inundation, (Aquarius;) at the time of

ploughing, stars of the ox, (Taurus;) when lions, driven forth by

thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile, stars of the lion,

(Leo;) at the time of reaping, stars of the sheaf, (Virgo;) stars

of the lamb and two kids, (Aries,) when these animals were born;

stars of the crab, (Cancer,) when the sun, touching the tropic,

returned backwards; stars of the wild goat, (Capricorn,) when the

sun reached the highest point in his yearly track; stars of the

balance, (Libra,) when days and nights were in equilibrium; stars

of the scorpion, (Scorpio,) when periodical simooms burned like

the venom of a scorpion; and so on of the rest.28

The progress of astronomical science from the wild time when men

thought the stars were mere spangles stuck in a solid expanse not

far off, to the vigorous age when Ptolemy's mathematics spanned

the scope of the sky; from the first reverent observations of the

Chaldean shepherds watching the constellations as gods, to the

magnificent reasonings of Copernicus dashing down the innumerable

crystalline spheres, "cycle on epicycle, orb on orb," with which

crude theorizers had crowded the stellar spaces; from the uncurbed

poetry of Hyginus writing the floor of heaven over with romantic

myths in planetary words, to the more wondrous truth of Le Verrier

measuring the steps from nimble Mercury flitting moth like in the

beard of the sun to dull Neptune sagging in his cold course twenty

six hundred million miles away; from the half inch orb of

Hipparchus's naked eye, to the six feet speculum of Rosse's awful

tube; from the primeval belief in one world studded around with

skyey torch lights, to the modern conviction of octillions of

inhabited worlds all governed by one law constitutes the most

astonishing chapter in the history of the human mind. Every step

of this incredible progress has had its effect in modifying the

conceptions of man's position and importance in nature and of the

connection of his future fate with localities. Of old, the entire

creation was thought to lie pretty much within the comprehension

of man's unaided senses, and man himself was supposed to be the

chief if not the sole object of Divine providence. The deities

often came down in incarnations and mingled with their favorites

and rescued the earth from evils. Every thing was anthropomorphized.

Man's relative magnitude and power were believed to be such

that he fancied during an eclipse that, by screams, the crashing

of gongs, and magic rites, he could scare away the monsters

27 Pigott, Scandinavian Mythology, chap. i. p. 31.

28 Volney, Ruins, chap. xxii. sect. 3. Maurice, Hist. Hindostan,

vol. i. pp. 145-147.

who were swallowing the sun or the moon. Meteors shooting through

the evening air the Arabs believed were fallen angels trying to

get back into heaven but hurled from the crystal battlements by

the flaming lances of the guardian watchers. Then the gazer saw

"The top of heaven full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets."

Now the student contemplates an abyss swarming with orbs each out

weighing millions of our earth. Then they read their nativities in

the planets and felt how great must be the state overwatched by

such resplendent servitors. Now "They seek communion with the stars

that they may know How petty is this ball on which they come and go."

Then the hugest view of the extent of the universal sphere was

that an iron mass would require nine days and nights to plunge

from its Olympian height to its Tartarean depth. Now we are told

by the masters of science that there are stars so distant that it

would take their light, travelling at a rate of nearly twelve

million miles a minute, thirty million years to reach us. The

telescope has multiplied the size of the creation by hundreds of

millions, and the grandest conception of the stellar universe

possible to the most capacious human mind probably bears no larger

proportion to the fact than an orrery does to the solar system.

Our earth is a hundred million miles from the sun, whose diameter

is so monstrous that a hundred such orbs strung in a straight line

would occupy the whole distance. The sun, with all his attendant

planets and moons, is sweeping around his own centre supposed by

some to be Alcyone at the rate of four hundred thousand miles a

day; and it will take him eighteen million years to complete one

revolution. Our firmamental cluster contains, it has been

calculated, in round numbers about twenty million stars. There are

many thousands of such nebula visible, some of them capable of

packing away in their awful bosoms hundreds of thousands of our

galaxies. Measure off the abysmal space into seven hundred

thousand stages each a hundred million miles wide, and you reach

the nearest fixed stars, for instance, the constellation of the

Lyre. Multiply that inconceivable distance by hundreds of

thousands, and still you will discern enormous sand banks of stars

obscurely glittering on the farthest verge of telescopic vision.

And even all this is but a little corner of the whole.

Coleridge once said, "To some infinitely superior Being, the whole

universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and

planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces

between system and system no greater than the intervals between

one grain and the grain adjacent." One of the vastest thoughts yet

conceived by any mortal mind is that of turning the universe from

a mechanical to a chemical problem, as illustrated by Prof.

Lovering.29 Assuming the acknowledged truths in physics, that the

ultimate particles of matter never actually touch each other, and

that water in evaporating expands into eighteen hundred times its

previous volume, he demonstrates that the porosity of our solar

system is no greater than that of steam. "The porosity of granite

or gold may be equal to that of steam,

29 Cambridge Miscellany, 1842.

the greater density being a stronger energy in the central

forces." And the conclusion is scientifically reached that "the

vast interval between the sun and Herschel is an enormous pore,

while the invisible distance that separates the most closely

nestled atoms is a planetary space, a stupendous gulf when

compared with the little spheres between which it flows." Thus we

may think of the entire universe as a living organism, like a

ripening orange, its component atoms worlds, the sidereal

movements its vital circulation.

Surely, when a man looks up from his familiar fields and household

roof to such incommensurable objects as scientific imagination

reveals in the sparkling sword handle of Perseus and the hazy

girdle of Andromeda, overpowering humility will fill his breast,

an unutterable solemnity will "fall on him as from the very

presence chamber of the Highest." And will he not, when he

contemplates the dust like shoals of stars, the shining films of

firmaments, that retreat and hover through all the boundless

heights, the Nubecula nebula, looking like a bunch of ribbons

disposed in a true love's knot, that most awful nebula whirled

into the shape and bearing the name of the Dumb Bell, the Crab

nebula, hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawling

terror, every point holding millions of worlds, thinking of these

all transcendent wonders, and then remembering his own

inexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of his

whole race does not occupy a single tick of the great Sidereal

Clock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he not

utterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King of

all this? In a word, how does the solemn greatness of man, the

supposed eternal destiny of man, stand affected by the modern

knowledge of the vastness of creation? Regarding the immensities

receding over him in unfathomable abysses bursting with dust heaps

of suns, must not man be dwarfed into unmitigated contempt, his

life and character rendered absolutely insignificant, the utmost

span of his fortunes seeming but as the hum and glitter of an

ephemeron in a moment's sunshine? Doubtless many a one has at

times felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying him

with a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him in

fatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the august

dome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes up

and sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth above

him in the order and silence of their primeval pomp. Peacefully

and forever they shine there. In nebula separated from nebula by

trillions of leagues, plane beyond plane, they stretch and glitter

to the feet of God. Falling on his knees, he clasps his hands in

speechless adoration, but feels, with an intolerable ache of the

heart, that in this infinitude such an one as he can be of no

consequence whatever. He waits passively for the resistless round

of fate to bear him away, ah, whither? "Conscious that he dwells

but as an atom of dust on the outskirts of a galaxy of

inconceivable glory" moving through eternity in the arms of law,

he becomes, in his own estimation, an insensible dot lost in the

uncontainable wilderness of firmamental systems. But this

conclusion of despair is a mistake as sophistical as it is

injurious, as baseless in reality as it is natural in seeming. Its

antidote and corrective are found in a more penetrative thought

and juster understanding of the subject, which will preserve the

greatness and the immortal destiny of man unharmed despite the

frowning vastitudes of creation. This will appear from fairly

weighing the following considerations.

In the first place, the immensity of the material universe is an

element entirely foreign to the problem of human fate. When

seeking to solve the question of human destiny, we are to study

the facts and prophecies of human nature, and to conclude

accordingly. It is a perversion of reason to bring from far an

induction of nebular magnitudes to crush with their brute weight

the plain indications of the spirit of humanity. What though the

number of telescopic worlds were raised to the ten thousandth

power, and each orb were as large as all of them combined would

now be? what difference would that make in the facts of human

nature and destiny? It is from the experience going on in man's

breast, and not from the firmaments rolling above his head, that

his importance and his final cause are to be inferred. The human

mind, heart, and conscience, thought, love, faith, and piety,

remain the same in their intrinsic rank and capacities whether the

universe be as small as it appeared to the eyes of Abraham or as

large as it seems in the cosmical theory of Humboldt. Thus the

spiritual position of man really remains precisely what it was

before the telescope smote the veils of distance and bared the

outer courts of being.

Secondly, if we do bring in the irrelevant realms of science to

the examination of our princely pretensions, it is but fair to

look in both directions. And then what we lose above we gain

below. The revelations of the microscope balance those of the

telescope. The animalcula magnify man as much as the nebulsa

belittle him. We cannot help believing that He who frames and

provides for those infinitesimal animals quadrillions of whom

might inhabit a drop of water or a leaf and have ample room and

verge enough, and whose vital and muscular organization is as

complicated and perfect as that of an elephant, will much more

take care of man, no matter how numerous the constellations are.

Let us see how far scientific vision can look beneath ourselves as

the question is answered by a few well known facts. In each drop

of human blood there are three million vitalized corpuscular

disks. Considering all the drops made up in this way, man is a

kosmos, his veins galaxies through whose circuits these red

clustering planets perform their revolutions. How small the

exhaling atoms of a grain of musk must be, since it will perfume

every breath of air blowing through a hall for a quarter of a

century, and then not be perceptibly diminished. An ounce of gold

may be reduced into four hundred and thirty two billion parts,

each microscopically visible.30 There is a deposit of slate in

Bohemia covering forty square miles to the depth of eight feet,

each cubic inch of which Ehrenberg found by microscopic

measurement to contain forty one thousand million infusorial

animals. Sir David Brewster says, "A cubic inch of the Bilin

polieschiefer slate contains above one billion seven hundred and

fifty thousand millions of distinct individuals of Galionella

ferruginea."31 It is a fact that the size of one of these insects

as compared with the bulk of a man is virtually as small as that

of a man compared with the whole scheme of modern astronomy. Thus,

if the problem of our immortal consequence is prejudicially

vitiated by contemplating the immense extremity of vision, it is

rectified by gazing on the opposite extremity. If man justly

scrutinized, without comparisons, is fitted for and worthy of

eternity,

30 Lardner, Hand Book of Natural Philosophy, book i. chap. v.31

More Worlds than One, ch. viii. note 3.

no foreign facts, however magnificent or minute, should alter our

judgment from the premises.

Thirdly, is it not evident that man's greatness keeps even pace

along the scale of magnitude with the widening creation, since it

is his mind that sees and comprehends how wondrous the dimensions

of the universe are? The number of stars and the limits of space

are not more astounding than it is that he should be capable of

knowing such things, enumerating and staking them off. When man

has measured the distance and weighed the bulk of Sirius, it is

more appropriate to kneel in amazement before the inscrutable

mystery of his genius, the irrepressible soaring of his soul, than

to sink in despair under the swinging of those lumps of dirt in

their unapproachable spheres because they are so gigantic! The

appearance of the creation to man is not vaster than his

perception of it. They are exactly correlated by the very terms of

the statement. As the astronomic world expands, the astronomer's

mind dilates and must be as large as it in order to contain it in

thought. What we lose in relative importance from the enlargement

of the boundaries of the universe we gain from the new revelation

of our capacities that is made through these transcendent

achievements of our science. That we are favorites of the Creator

and destined for immortal glories is therefore logically and

morally just as credible after looking through Herschel's forty

feet reflector and reading La Place's Mecanique Celeste as it

would be were this planet, suspended in a hollow dome, the

entirety of material being.

Furthermore, we can reason only from the data we have; and, doing

that, we should conclude, from the intrinsic and incomparable

superiority of spirit to matter, that man and his kindred

scattered in families over all the orbs of space were the especial

objects of the infinite Author's care. They are fitted by their

filial attributes to commune with Him in praise and love. They

know the prodigious and marvellous works of mechanical nature;

mechanical nature knows nothing. Man can return his Maker's

blessing in voluntary obedience and thanks; matter is inanimate

clay for the Potter's moulding. Turning from the gleaming

wildernesses of star land to the intellect and heart, appreciating

the infinite problems and hopes with which they deal and aspire,

we feel the truth expressed by Wordsworth in his tremendous lines:

"I must, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of

heavens is but a veil. Not chaos, darkest pit of Erebus, Nor aught

of blinder vacancy, scoop'd out By help of dreams, can breed such

fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our minds,

into the mind of man."

Is not one noble thought of truth, one holy emotion of love, one

divine impulse of devotion, better than a whole planet of mud, a

whole solar system of gas and dust? Who would not rather be the

soul that gauges the deeps, groups the laws, foretells the

movements, of the universe, writing down in a brief mathematical

formula a complete horoscope of the heavens as they will appear on

any given night thousands of years hence, than to be all that

array of swooping systems? To think the world is to be superior to

the world. That which appreciates is akin to that which makes; and

so we are the Creator's children, and these crowding nebula,

packed with orbs as thick as the ocean beach with sands, are the

many mansions of the House fitted up for His abode and ours. An

only prince would be of more consideration than a palace, although

its foundation pressed the shoulders of Serpentarius, its turret

touched the brow of Orion, and its wings reached from the Great

Bear to the Phoenix. So a mind is of more importance than the

material creation, and the moral condition of a man is of greater

moment than the aspect of stellar firmaments.

Another illustration of the truth we are considering is to be

drawn from the idealist theory, to which so many of the ablest

thinkers of the world have given their devoted adhesion, that

matter is merely phenomenal, no substantial entity, but a

transient show preserved in appearance for some ulterior cause,

and finally, at the withdrawal or suspension of God's volition, to

return into annihilating invisibility as swiftly as a flash of

lightning. The solid seeming firmaments are but an exertion of

Divine force projected into vision to serve for a season as a

theatre for the training of spirits. When that process is

complete, in the twinkling of an eye the phantasmal exhibition of

matter will disappear, leaving only the ideal realm of

indestructible things, souls with their inward treasures remaining

in their native sphere of the infinite, while the outward universe

"Doth vanish like a ghost before the sun."

The same practical result may also be reached by a different path,

may be attained by the road of physics as well as by that of

transcendental metaphysics. For Newton has given in his Principia

a geometrical demonstration of the infinite compressibility of

matter. All the worlds, therefore, that cluster in yon swelling

vault can be condensed into a single globe of the size of a

walnut; and then, on that petty lump of apparent substance, the

enfranchised soul might trample in an exultation of magnanimous

scorn upon the whole universe of earths, and soar through its own

unlimited dominion, Monarch of Immortality, the snatched glory of

shrunken firmaments flashing from its deathless wings.

Finally, a proper comprehension of the idea of God will neutralize

the skepticism and despondency sometimes stealthily nourished or

crushingly impressed by contemplations of the immensity of nature.

If one, from regarding the cold and relentless mechanism of the

surrounding system, tremble for fear of there being no kind

Overruler, let him gaze on the warm beauty that flushes the

countenance of day, the mystic meditativeness that hangs on the

pensive and starry brow of night, let him follow the commanding

instincts of his own heart, and he will find himself clinging in

irresistible faith and filial love to the thought of an infinite

Father. If still the atheistic sentiment obtrudes upon him and

oppresses him, let him observe how every spot of immensity whereon

the eye of science has fallen is crowded with unnumbered amazing

examples of design, love, beneficence, and he will perceive that

the irrefragable lines of argument drawn through the boundless

spaces of creation light up the stupendous contour of God and show

the expression of his features to be love. It seems as though any

man acquainted with the truths and magnitudes of astronomy, who,

after seeing the star strewn abysses, would look in his mirror and

ask if the image reflected there is that of the greatest being in

the universe, would need nothing further to convince him that a

God, the Creator, Preserver, Sovereign, lives. And then, if,

mistakenly judging from his own limitations, he thinks that the

particular care of all the accumulated galaxies of worlds, every

world perhaps teeming with countless millions of conscious

creatures, would transcend the possibilities even of God, a

moment's reflection will dissolve that sophistry in the truth that

God is infinite, and that to his infinite attributes globule and

globe are alike, the oversight of the whole and of each part a

matter of instantaneous and equal ease. Still further: if this

abstract truth be insufficient to support faith and bestow peace,

what will he say to the visible fact that all the races of beings,

and all the clusters of worlds, from the motes in a sunbeam to the

orbs of the remotest firmament, are now taken care of by Divine

Providence? God now keeps them all in being and order, unconfused

by their multiplicity, unoppressed by their magnitude, and not for

an instant forgetting or neglecting either the mightiest or the

least. Morbidly suspicious, perversely incredulous, must be the

mind that denies, since it is so now in this state, that it may be

so as well in the other state and forever! Grasping the conception

of one God, who creates, rules, and loves all, man may

unpresumptuously feel himself to be a child of the Infinite and a

safe heir of immortality. Looking within and without, and soaring

in fancy amidst the blue and starry altitudes interspersed with

blazing suns and nebulous oceans, he may cry, from a sober

estimate of all the experimental and phenomenal facts within his

reach,

"Even here I feel,

Among these mighty things, that as I am

I am akin to God; that I am part

Of the use universal, and can grasp

Some portion of that reason in the which

The whole is ruled and founded; that I have

A spirit nobler in its cause and end,

Lovelier in order, greater in its powers,

Than all these bright and swift immensities."

Perhaps the force of these arguments may be better condensed and

expressed by help of an individual illustration. While the pen is

forming these words, the announcement of the death of Dr. Kane

saddens the world. Alas that the gallant heart no longer beats,

the story of whose noble generosity and indomitable prowess has

just thrilled the dull nations of men of meaner mould! Who even

though standing before a telescope under the full architecture of

the heavens can believe that that maiden soul of heroism and

devotion is now but an extinguished spark, that the love, honor,

intelligence, self sacrificing consecration which enswathed him as

with a saintly halo have all gone out? Turning from that pale

form, stretched on the couch of death in fatal Cuba, through the

receding gulfs of space where incomputable systems of worlds are

wheeling on their eternal courses, and then looking back again

from the noiseless glitter and awful bulk of the creation, do you

despair of the immortal consequence of the poor sufferer whose

fleshly moorings to existence are successively loosening at every

gasp? Ah, remember that Matter and the Soul are not alone! Far

above that clay bound, struggling soul, and far above those

measureless, firmamental masses, is God, the Maker of them both,

and the Lover of his child. Glancing in His omniscience down upon

that human death couch, around which affectionate prayers are

floating from every part of the earth, and from whose pallid

occupant confiding sighs are rising to His ear, He sees the

unutterable mysteries of yearning thought, emotion, and power,

which are the hidden being of man, and which so ally the filial

spirit to the parent Divinity. As beneath His gaze the faithful

soul of Elisha Kane slowly extricating itself from its overwrought

tabernacle, and also extricating itself from the holy network of

heart strings which sixty millions of men speaking one speech have

flung around him, if haply so they might retain him to earth to

take their love and waiting honors rises into the invisible,

seeking to return, bearing its virgin purity with it, to the bosom

of God, will He overlook it, or carelessly spurn it into night,

because the banks of stars are piled up so thick and high that

they absorb His regards? My soul, come not thou into the counsels

of them that think so! It should not be believed though astronomy

were a thousand times astronomy. But it shall rather be thought

that, ere now, the brave American has discovered the Mariner whom

he sought, though sailing on far other seas, where there is no

destroying winter and no need of rescue.

In association with the measureless spaces and countless worlds

brought to light by astronomic science naturally arises the

question whether the other worlds are, like our earth, peopled

with responsible intelligences. In ancient times the stars were

not generally thought to be worlds, but to be persons, genii or

gods. At the dawn of creation "the morning stars sang together;"

that is, "the sons of God shouted for joy." The stars were the

living army of "Jehovah of hosts." At the time when the

theological dogmas now prevalent were first conceived, the

greatness and glory of the universe were supposed to centre on

this globe. The fortunes of man wellnigh absorbed, it was

imagined, the interest of angels and of God. The whole creation

was esteemed a temporary theatre for the enactment of the sublime

drama of the fall and redemption of man. The entire heavens with

all their host were thought to revolve in satellite dependence

around this stationary and regal planet. For God to hold long,

anxious, repeated councils to devise means to save us, was not

deemed out of keeping with the relative dignity of the earth and

the human race. But at length the progress of discovery put a

different aspect on the physical conditions of the problem. The

philosopher began to survey man's habitation and history, and to

estimate man's comparative rank and destiny, not from the stand

point of a solitary planet dating back only a few thousand years,

but in the light of millions of centuries of duration and from a

position among millions of crowded firmaments whence our sun

appears as a dim and motionless star. This new vision of science

required a new construction of theology. The petty and monstrous

notions of the ignorant superstition of the early age needed

rectification. In the minds of the wise and devout few this was

effected; but with the great majority the two sets of ideas

existed side by side in unreconciled confusion and contradiction,

as they even continue to do unto this day.

When it came to be believed that the universe teemed with suns,

moons, and planets, composed of material substances, subject to

day and night, and various other laws and changes, like our own

abode, it was natural to infer that these innumerable worlds were

also inhabited by rational creatures akin to ourselves and capable

of worshipping God. Numerous considerations, possessing more or

less weight, were brought forward to confirm such a conclusion.

The most striking presentation ever made of the argument, perhaps,

is that in Oersted's essay on the "Universe as a Single

Intellectual Realm." It became the popular faith, and is

undoubtedly more so now than ever before. Towards the end of the

seventeenth century a work was published in explicit support of

this faith by Fontenelle. It was entitled "Conversations on the

Plurality of Worlds," and had marked success, running through many

editions. A few years later, Huygens wrote a book, called

"Cosmotheoros," in maintenance of the same thesis. The more this

doctrine obtained root and life in the convictions of men, the

more strongly its irreconcilableness with the ordinary theology

must have made itself felt by fearless and competent thinkers.

Could a quadrillion firmaments loaded with stars, each inhabited

by its own race of free intelligences, all be burned up and

destroyed in the Day of Judgment provoked on this petty grain of

dust by the sin of Adam? 32 Were the stars mere sparks and

spangles stuck in heaven for us to see by, it would be no shock to

our reason to suppose that they might be extinguished with our

extinction; but, grasping the truths of astronomy as they now lie

in the brain of a master in science, we can no longer think of God

expelling our race from the joys of being and then quenching the

splendors of his hall "as an innkeeper blows out the lights when

the dance is at an end." God rules and over rules all, and

serenely works out his irresistible ends, incapable of wrath or

defeat. Would it be more incongruous for Him to be angry with an

ant hill and come down to trample it, than to be so with the earth

and appear in vindictive fire to annihilate it?

From time to time, in the interests of the antiquated ideas,

doubts have been raised as to the validity of the doctrine of

stellar worlds stocked with intellectual families.33 Hegel, either

imbued with that Gnostic contempt and hatred for matter which

described the earth as "a dirt ball for the extrication of light

spirits," or from an obscure impulse of pantheistic thought,

sullies the stars with every demeaning phrase, even stigmatizing

them as "pimples of light." Michelet, a disciple of Hegel,

followed his example, and, in a work published in 1840, strove

vigorously to aggrandize the earth and man at the expense of the

accepted teachings of astronomy.34 With argument and ridicule, wit

and reason, he endeavored to make it out that the stars are no

better than gleaming patches of vapor. We are the exclusive

autocrats of all immensity. Whewell has followed up this species

of thought with quite remarkable adroitness, force, and

brilliance.35 Whether his motive in this undertaking is purely

scientific and artistic, or whether he is impelled by a fancied

religious animus, having been bitten by some theological fear

which has given him the astrophobia, does not clearly appear.

32 As specimens of the large number of treatises which have been

published asserting the destruction of the whole creation in the

Day of Judgment, the following may be consulted. Osiander, De

Consummatione Saculi Dissertationum Pentus. Lund, De Excidio

Universi Totali et Substantiali. Frisch, Die Welt im Feuer, oder

das wahre Vergehen und Ende der Welt durch den letzen Sundenbrand.

For a century past the opinion has been gaining favor that the

great catastrophe will be confined to our earth, and that even

this is not to be annihilated, but to be transformed, purged, and

beautified by the crisis. See, e. g., Brumhey, Ueber die endliche

Umwandlung der Erde durch Feuer.

33 Kurtz, Bibel and Astronomie. Simonton's Eng. trans., ch. vi.

sect. 14: Incarnation of God.

34 Vorlesungen uber die ewige Personlichkeit des Geistes. 35 Of a

Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.

Brewster has replied to Whewell's disturbing essay in a volume

which more commands our sympathies and carries our reason,

but is less sustained in force and less close in logic.36 Powell

has still more recently published a very valuable treatise on the

subject;37 and with this work the discussion rests thus far,

leaving, as we believe, the popular faith in an astronomic

universe of inhabited worlds unshaken, however fatal the

legitimate implications of that faith may be to other doctrines

simultaneously held.38 It is curious to observe the shifting

positions taken up by skepticism in science, now, with powerful

recoil from the narrow bigotries of theology, eagerly embracing

the sublimest dreams of astronomic speculation, and now inclining

to the faith that the remoter stars are but brilliant globules

trickling from the poles of some terrible battery in the godless

heights of space. But if there be any thing sure in science at

all, it is that the material creation is inconceivably vast,

including innumerable systems, and all governed by invariable

laws. But let us return from this episode.

The foregoing sixfold argument, preserving us from the remorseless

grasp of annihilation, leaves to us unchanged the problem of the

relations which shall be sustained by the disembodied soul to time

and space, the question as to the locality of the spirit world,

the scene of our future life. Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, Valhalla

with its mead brimmed horns, Blessed Isles, Elysium, supernal

Olympus, firmamental Heaven, paradisal Eden, definite sites of

celestial Worlds for departed souls, the Chaldee's golden orbs,

the Sanscrit Meru, the Indian Hunting Ground, the Moslem's love

bowers, and wine rivers, and gem palaces thronged with dark eyed

houris, these notions, and all similar ones, of material

residences for spirits, located and bounded, we must dismiss as

dreams and cheats of the childish world's unripe fancy. There is

no evidence for any thing of that coarse, crude sort. The

fictitious theological Heaven is a deposit of imagination on the

azure ground of infinity, like a bird's nest on Himalaya. What,

then, shall we say? Why, in the first place, that, while there are

reasons enough and room enough for an undisheartened faith in the

grand fact of human immortality, it is beyond our present powers

to establish any detailed conclusions in regard to its locality or

its scenery.

But surely, in the second place, we should say that it becomes us,

when reflecting on the scenes to be opened to us at death, to rise

to a more ideal and sublime view than any of those tangible

figments which were the products of untrained sensual imagination

and gross materialistic theory. When the fleshly prison walls of

the mind fall, its first inheritance is a stupendous freedom. The

narrow limits that caged it here are gone, and it lives in an

ethereal sphere with no impeding bounds. Leaving its natal

threshold of earth and the lazar house of time, its home is

immensity, and its lease is eternity. Even in our present state,

to a true

36 More Worlds than One the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope

of the Christian.

37 Essay on the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. See, furthermore, in

Westminster Review, July, 1858, Recent Astronomy and the Nebular

Hypothesis.

38 Volger, Erde and Ewigkeit. (Natural History of the Earth as a

Periodical Process of Development in Opposition to the Unnatural

Geology of Revolutions and Catastrophes.) Treise, Dag Endlose der

grossen und der kleinen materiellen Welt.

thinker there is no ascent or descent or terminating wall in

space, but equal motion illimitably in all directions; and no

absolute standard of duration, only a relative and variable one

from the insect of an hour, to man, to an archangel, to that

incomprehensible Being whose shortest moments are too vast to be

noted by the awful nebula of the Hour Glass, although its rushing

sands are systems of worlds. The soul emerges from earthly bondage

emancipated into eternity, while "The ages sweep around him with

their wings, Like anger'd eagles cheated of their prey."

We have now sufficient premonitions and examples of this wondrous

enlargement to base a rational belief on. What hems us in when we

think, feel, and imagine? And what is the heaven that shall dawn

for us beyond the veil of death's domain but the realm of Thought,

the sphere of the spirit's unhampered powers? There are often

vouchsafed to us here hours of outsoaring emotion and conception

which make the enclosures in which the astronomer loiters seem

narrow. "His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty

traveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind

impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like

cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where

distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered,

grows weak and weary." There are moods of spiritual expansion and

infinite longing that illustrate the train of thought so well

expressed in the following lines:

"Even as the dupe in tales Arabian

Dipp'd but his brow beneath the beaker's brim,

And in that instant all the life of man

From youth to age roll'd its slow years on him,

And, while the foot stood motionless, the soul

Swept with deliberate wing from pole to pole;

So when the man the Grave's still portal passes,

Closed on the substances or cheats of earth,

The Immaterial, for the things earth glasses,

Shapes a new vision from the matter's dearth:

Before the soul that sees not with our eyes

The undefined Immeasurable lies." 39

Then we realize that the spiritual world does not form some now

unseen and distant region of the visible creation, but that the

astronomic universe is a speck lying in the invisible bosom of the

spiritual world. "Space is an attribute of God in which all matter

is laid, and other attributes he may have which are the home of

mind and soul." We suppose the difference between the present

embodied and the future disembodied state to be so vast that the

conditions of the latter cannot be intelligibly illustrated by the

analogies of the former. It is not to be expected that the human

soul will ever be absolutely independent of time and space,

literally transcending them, but only relatively so as compared

with its earthly predicament.

39 Bulwer, King Arthur, book xi.

For, as an able thinker and writer a philosopher of the

Swedenborgian school, too has said, "The conception of a mind

absolutely sundered from all connection with space is a mere

pretence which words necessarily repudiate."

The soul on the hypothesis that there is a soul is now in the

body. Evidently, on leaving the body, it must either be nowhere,

and that is annihilation, which the vehement totality of our

thought denies; or everywhere, and that implies infinity, the loss

of finite being in boundless Deity, a conclusion which we know of

nothing to warrant; or somewhere, and that predicates a surviving

individuality related to surrounding externals, which is the

prophesied and satisfactory result in which we rest in faith,

humbly confessing our ignorance as to all the minutia. It does not

necessarily follow from this view, however, that the soul is

limited to a fixed region in space. It may have the freedom of the

universe. More wonders, and sublimer than mortal fancies have ever

suspected, are waiting to be revealed when we die:

"For this life is but being's first faint ray, And heaven on

heaven make up God's dazzling day."

We are here living unconsciously engirt by another universe than

the senses can apprehend, thinly veiled, but real, and waiting for

us with hospitable invitation. "What are those dream like and

inscrutable thoughts which start up in moments of stillness,

apparently as from the deeps, like the movement of the leaves

during a silent night, in prognostic of the breeze that has yet

scarce come, if not the rustlings of schemes and orders of

existence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the abode

and destiny of the soul after death is all immensity. The

interstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are barren deserts

where nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdom

colonized by the spirits who since the beginning of the creation

have sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be the

crowded aisles of the universal temple trod by bright throngs of

worshipping angels. The soul's home, the heaven of God, may be

suffused throughout the material universe, ignoring the existence

of physical globes and galaxies. So light and electricity pervade

some solid bodies, as if for them there were no solidity. So,

doubtless, there are millions of realities around us utterly

eluding our finest senses. "A fact," Emerson says, "is the last

issue of spirit," and not its entire extent. "The visible creation

is the terminus of the invisible world," and not the totality of

the universe. There are gradations of matter and being, from the

rock to the flower, from the vegetable to man. Is it most probable

that the scale breaks abruptly there, or that other ranks of

spiritual existence successively rise peopling the seeming abysses

unto the very confines of God?

"Can every leaf a teeming world contain,

Can every globule gird a countless race,

Yet one death slumber in its dreamless reign

Clasp all the illumed magnificence of space?

Life crowd a grain, from air's vast realms effaced?

The leaf a world, the firmament a waste?"

An honest historical criticism forces us, however reluctantly, to

loose our hold from the various supposed localities of the soul's

destination, which have pleased the fancies and won the assent of

mankind in earlier times. But it cannot touch the simple and

cardinal fact of an immortal life for man. It merely forces us to

acknowledge that while the fact stands clear and authoritative to

instinct, reason, and faith, yet the how, and the where, and all

such problems, are wrapped in unfathomable mystery. We are to obey

and hope, not dissect and dogmatize. However the fantastic dreams

of the imagination and the subtle speculations of the intellect

may shift from time to time, and be routed and vanish, the deep

yearning of the heart remains the same, the divine polarity of the

reason changes not, and men will never cease fondly to believe

that although they cannot tell where heaven is, yet surely there

is a heaven reserved for them somewhere within the sheltering

embrace of God's infinite providence. We may not say of that

kingdom, Lo, here! or Lo, there! but it is wherever God's

approving presence extends: and is that not wherever the pure in

heart are found? 40

Let every elysian clime the breezes blow over, every magic isle

the waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy has

devised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet that

hangs afar on the neck of night, be disenchanted of their

imaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, within

the relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze of

fleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MIND

would not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still the

unquenchable instincts of the HEART would retain, uninjured, the

great expectation of ANOTHER WORLD, although no traveller returns

from its voiceless bourne to tell in what local direction it lies,

no voyager comes back from its mystic port to describe its

latitude and longitude on the chartless infinite of space.

Turn we now from the lateral distribution of notions as to a

future life, to their lineal development. We have seen that the

development of belief as to the locality of our future destination

has been a chase of places, over the earth, under the earth,

through the sky, as fast as the unknown was brought within the

known, until it has stopped at the verge of the unknowable. There

we stand, confessing our inability to fix the scene. The doctrine

of the conditions and contents of the future life has followed the

same course as that of its locality.

In the first stage of belief the future life consists of the gross

conditions and materials of the known present reflected, under the

impulse of the senses, into the unknown future. This style of

faith prevailed for a vast period, and is not yet obsolete. When

the King of Dahomey has done a great feat, he kills a man to carry

the tidings to the ghost of his royal father. When he dies

himself, a host are killed, that he may enter Deadland with a

becoming cortege. His wives also are slain, or commit suicide,

that they may rejoin him.

The second stage of belief is reached when, under the ethical

impulse, only certain refined elements of the present,

discriminated portions of the products of reason, imagination and

sentiment, are reflected into the future, and accepted as the

facts of the life there. Critical processes, applied to thought

and faith, cause the rejection of much that was received. That

alone which answers to our wants, and has coherence, continues to

be held

40 Chalmers, Sermon, Heaven a Character and not a Locality.

as truth. An example is afforded by Augustine in his essay, De

Libero Arbitrio. He argues that the wicked are kept in being on

the out skirts of the material universe; partly wretched, partly

happy; too bad for heaven, too good for annihilation; incapable of

attaining the summit of their beatified destiny. Not the crude

reflection of the present state, but a criticized and purged

portion of the results of speculation on it, is thrown forward,

and composes the doctrine of the future life. This is the

condition of faith in which civilized mankind, for the most part,

now are.

The third stage of development is that wherein the thinker

perceives that it is illegitimate to reflect into the future any

of the realities or relations of the present, and then to regard

them as the truths of the experience which awaits him after death.

His experience here is the resultant of his faculties as related

to the universe. Destroy his organization, and what follows? One

will say, "Nonentity." Another, more wise and modest, will say,

"Something necessarily unknown as yet." We have no better right to

project into the ideal space of futurity the ingredients of our

thoughts than we have to project there the objects of our senses.

Bunsen, whose thought and scholarship included pretty much all the

knowledge of mankind, represents this stage of faith. He stands on

the religious side of the movement of Science, believing in

immortality without defining it. Comte stands on the positivist

side, blankly denying all objective immortality. These two

represent the results in which, advancing from its opposite sides,

the logical development of the doctrine of a future life ends.

With Comte, atheistic dogmatism crushing every eternal hope; with

Bunsen, Christian faith pointing the child to an eternal home in

the Father. For all but fetichistic minds the only choice lies

between these two.

The organic evolution of the doctrine of a life to come is,

therefore, a process of faith beginning with the crude

transference of the elements of the present into the future,

continuing with refined modifications of that transference, ending

with an entire cessation of it as inapplicable and incompetent.

Having examined all the historic, experimental, and scientific

data within our reach, we pause on the edge of the PART which we

know, and wait, with serene trust, though with bowed head and

silent lip, before the UNKNOWABLE WHOLE.

CHAPTER VIII.

CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.

IF the first men were conscious spirits who, at the command of

God, dropped from the skies into organic forms of matter, or who

were created here on an exalted plane of insight and communion far

above any thing now experienced by us, then the destination of man

to a life after death may originally have been a fact of direct

knowledge, universally seen and grasped without any obscuring

peradventure. From that state it gradually declined into dubious

dimness as successive generations grew sinful, sensual, hardened,

immersed and bound in affairs of passion and earth. It became

remoter, assumed a questionable aspect, gave rise to discussions

and doubts, and here and there to positive disbelief and open

denial. Thus, beginning as a clear reality within the vision of

all, it sank into a matter of uncertain debate among individuals.

But if the first men were called up into being from the earth, by

the creative energy of God, as the distinct climax of the other

species, then the early generations of our race, during the long

ages of their wild and slowly ameliorating state, were totally

ignorant of any conscious sequel to the fate seemingly closed in

death. They were too animal and rude yet to conceive a spiritual

existence outside of the flesh and the earth. Among the

accumulating trophies of their progressive intellectual conquests

hung up by mankind in the historic hall of experience, this

marvellous achievement is one of the sublimest. What a day was

that for all humanity forever after, when for the first time, on

some climbing brain, dawned from the great Sun of the spirit world

the idea of a personal immortality! It was announced. It dawned

separately wherever there were prepared persons. It spread from

soul to soul, and became the common faith of the world. Still,

among every people there were pertinacious individuals, who swore

not by the judge and went not with the multitude, persons of less

credulous hearts and more skeptical faculties, who demurred at the

great doctrine, challenged it in many particulars, gainsaid it on

various grounds, disbelieved it from different motives, and fought

it with numerous weapons.

Whichever of the foregoing suppositions be adopted, that the

doctrine of a future life subsided from universal acceptance into

party contention, or that it arose at length from personal

perception and authority into common credit, the fact remains

equally prominent and interesting that throughout the traceable

history of human opinion there is a line of dissenters who have

thought death the finality of man, and the next world an illusion.

The history of this special department of thought opens a wide and

fertile subject. To gain a comprehensive survey of its boundaries

and a compact epitome of its contents, it will be well to consider

it in these two lights and divisions, all the time trying to see,

step by step, what justice, and what injustice, is done: first,

the dominant motive forces animating the disbelievers; secondly,

the methods and materials they have employed.

At first thought it would appear difficult to tell what impulses

could move persons to undertake, as many constantly have

undertaken, a crusade against a faith so dear to man, so ennobling

to his nature. Peruse the pages of philosophical history with

careful reflection, and the mystery is scattered, and various

groups of disbelievers stand revealed, with earnest voices and

gestures assailing the doctrine of a future life.1

One company, having their representatives in every age, reject it

as a protest in behalf of the right of private judgment against

the tyranny of authority. The doctrine has been inculcated by

priesthoods, embodied in sacred books, and wrought into the

organic social life of states; and acceptance of it has been

commanded as a duty, and expected as a decent and respectable

thing. To deny it has required courage, implied independent

opinions, and conferred singularity. To cast off the yoke of

tradition, undermine the basis of power supporting a galling

religious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in a

generation of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely fail

to exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of the

present time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kings

and the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living core

of the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God and

futurity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign over

them and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretended

interests of a future life.2 The true way to secure the real

desideratum corruptly indicated in this movement is not by denying

the reality of a future life, but by removing the adjustment of

its conditions and the administration of its rewards and penalties

out of the hands of every clique of priests and rulers. A

righteously and benignly ordered immortality, based in truth and

adjudicated by the sole sovereignty of God, is no engine of

oppression, though a doctrine of heaven and hell irresponsibly

managed by an Orphic association, the guardians of a Delphic

tripod, the owners of a secret confessional, or the interpreters

of an exclusive creed, may be. In a matter of such grave

importance, that searching and decisive discrimination, so rare

when the passions get enlisted, is especially needed. Because a

doctrine is abused by selfish tyrants is no reason for supposing

the doctrine itself either false or injurious.