In a universe of law where God with all his attributes is

omnipresent no trick can ever be the pathway into paradise. The

true method of salvation is by the production of a good character

through divine grace and the discipline of life. Thus, the real

law of salvation through Christ consists not in the technical

belief that he shed his blood for our redemption, but in the

personal derival from him of that spirit which will make us

willing to shed our own blood for the good of others.

There was, not long ago, called to her eternal home, a young

woman, who, by the sweet gentleness, the heroic generosity and the

unspotted fidelity of her whole life, deserves an exalted place on

the roll of feminine chivalry and saintliness. Not a brighter

name, or one associated with a more fearless and accomplished

spirit, is recorded on the list of those Christian women who

volunteered to serve as nurses in the great American war of

nationality. No soldier was braver, few were more under fire, than

she; still plying her holy work with unfaltering love and

fortitude, both in the horrid miasma of camps and before the

charge of cavalry and the blaze of cannon. Many a time, the

livelong night, under the solemn stars, equipped with assuaging

stores, she threaded her way alone through the debris of carnage,

seeking out the wounded among the dead, lifting her voice in song

as a signal for any lingering survivor who might be near. Many a

time she broke on the vision of mutilated and dying men, with the

light of love in her eyes, a hymn of cheer on her lips, and

unwearied ministrations in her hands, transfigured with courage

and devotion, gleaming on their sight through the sulphurous flame

of battle or the darkening mists of disease like an angel from

heaven. Receiving the seeds of fatal illness from her exposures,

she returned home to delight with her noble qualities all who knew

her, to make a husband happy, and then to die a contented martyr.

Meekly folding her hands, and saying: "Thanks, Father, for what

thou hast enabled me to do, and still more for the new home to

which thou art calling me now" she was gone. The cruel creed of

superstition says: "Since she was a Universalist, having no part,

by faith, in the mystic sacrifice of Christ, she is doomed to

hell." But every attribute of God, every promise written by his

own finger in the sacred instincts of our nature, as well as the

cardinal teachings of the New Testament, assure us that as the

victorious purity and devotedness of her soul bore her away from

the tabernacle of flesh, the welcoming Savior said: "Come, thou

blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared from the

foundation of the world." And heaven swung wide its gate for her;

and excited fancy conceives that, as she passed in, there was a

gratulatory flutter of wings and waving of palms through the

angelic ranks.

In distinction from that hypothetical gate of blood, set up by a

crude theology in one narrow place alone, what, then, are the real

gates of heaven, which stand open throughout the realms of

responsible being? All the causes which bring the will of man into

consent with the will of God. Truth is the harmony of mind with

the divine order; beauty, the harmony of taste with the divine

symmetries; good, the harmony of volition with the divine ends.

Everything that secures these for us is an avenue into the

peaceful city of bliss. To be in heaven is to be a transparent

medium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections of

phenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessed

freedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysterious

attraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. To be there

in a superlative degree is to have a mind which is an

infinitesimal mirror of the All, and a heart responsive to that

mind, every perception of truth in the realm of the intellect

generating a correspondent emotion of good in the realm of

affection. Not any forensic act of faith in atoning blood, but

ingrained piety a modest renunciation before the reality of things

is the grand gateway of souls to the blessedness and repose of

God. Anselm, the great sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, said: "I

would rather be in hell without a fault than in heaven with one."

Can any defective technicality damn such a man? No; such a spirit

carries and radiates heaven is itself heaven. That spirit is God

himself in his creature, and can no more be imprisoned in hell

than God can be. On the other hand, any professing Orthodoxist

who, according to a horrible doctrine of the Calvinists in former

days, should hope in heaven to obtain a sharper relish for his own

joy by looking down on the tortures of the damned, and contrasting

his blissful safety with the hopeless agony of their perdition,

would find himself in hell. The infernal scenery, even there,

would burst on his gaze, its atmosphere of pain reek around him,

and the detestable turmoil of its experience rage in his breast.

The selfishness of his character, in steep contradiction to the

public disinterestedness belonging to the divine will, must invert

every proper experience of heaven. Could any conventional

arrangement, or accident of locality, save such a man, while his

character remained unchanged? No; such a spirit carries and

radiates hell, is itself hell.

A Mohammedan author says of the seventy three sects into which his

coreligionists are divided, that seventy two are wrong ways,

terminating in eternal damnation; the remaining one alone, in

which are the party of salvation, leads through the true faith

into the City of Allah. The same unwise bigotry, the same

unripeness of judgment, has been generally shown by Christians. It

is time they were ashamed of it, and allowed their souls to mature

and expand into a more liberal creed in fuller keeping with the

hospitable amplitude of the righteousness and goodness of God.

Everything that tends to bring the will of man into loving

submission to the infinite Father, to mould the structure of

character into correspondence with those established conditions of

rightful being represented by the moral and religious

virtues, is an open highway of salvation. And all the great

cardinal ordinations of life do legitimately tend to this result.

Therefore all these are gates of heaven. Some pass in through one

of them, others through another; and by means of them all, it is

decreed in the sovereign councils of the Divinity, as we believe,

that, sooner or later, every intelligence shall reach the goal.

First is the gate of innocence. Little children, spotless youths

and maidens who have known no malice or guile, the saintly few

among mature men and women who by the untempted elevation and

serenity of their temper have kept their integrity unmarred and

their robes unsullied, enter by this nearest and easiest gate.

Borne aloft by their own native gravitation, we see the white

procession of the innocent ones winding far up the cerulean height

and defiling in long melodious line into heaven.

The second gate is prosperity. Through this enter those to whom

good fortune has served as the guiding smile of God, not pampering

them with arrogance, nor hardening them with careless egotism, but

shaping them to thankful meekness and generosity. Exempt from

lacerating trials, every want benignly supplied, girt with

friends, they have grown up in goodness and gratitude, obeying the

will of God by the natural discharge of their duties, diffusing

benedictions and benefits around them. To such beautiful spirits,

saved from wrong and woe by the redemptive shelter of their lot,

happiness is a better purgatory than wretchedness. The crystal

stream of joy percolating throughout the soul cleanses it more

perfectly than any flames of pain can. And so the virtuous

children of a favored fortune, who have improved their privileges

with pious fidelity, move on into heaven.

Then the third gate is victory. This is more arduous of approach,

and yet a throng of heroic souls, the very chivalry of heaven,

press through it, wounded and bleeding from the struggle, but

triumphant. These are they who have endured hardship with

uncomplaining fortitude and fought their way through all enemies,

seductions and tribulations. These are they who, armed with the

native sacrament of righteousness, inspired with a loyal love,

would never stoop their crests to wrong nor make a league with

iniquity the conquering champions who tread down every vile

temptation, ever hearing their Leader say, "In the world ye shall

have trouble and sorrow; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the

world."

Penitence is another gate of heaven. By the instructions of

Providence, by the natural progress of experience, the evolution

of wisdom, a sinner may become aware of the ingratitude of his

disobedience, ashamed of the odiousness of his guilt; be smitten

with a regenerating love of truth, beauty, goodness, God; and,

without waiting for the lash of an external judgment to drive him

the way he should go, by voluntary preference may grieve over his

folly and sin, and turn to his duty and his Savior. Then the

blessed gate of a spontaneous repentance stands open before him;

and through this hospitable entrance multitudes find admission to

the divine home.

Death often gives an otherwise unattainable deliverance, and so

yields the poor victim of unhappy outer conditions a passage to

heaven. It is a thought no less false than it is frightful, which

represents death as the vindictive turnkey of the creation, at

whose approach probation ends, and the shuddering convict is

thrust into hell, the hopeless bolt dropping into its ward behind

him. It is rather the divine messenger of deliverance for those

who are borne down here under a fate too hard for them. Oh, what

myriads of afflicted ones orphan children crushed by brutal

treatment; poor seamstresses starving in garrets; men and women

ground and grimed almost out of the semblance of humanity, in the

drudgery and darkness of coal mines; hapless suicides, who have

rashly fled from this step dame world, and whose alabaster forms,

purpled with bruises, are laid on the dismal beds of brass in the

morgue, where a ghastly light strains through the grates, and the

crowd of gazers sweeps endlessly on; unsuccessful men of genius,

unappreciated, neglected, cruelly wronged, their extreme

sensitiveness making their lives a long martyrdom to these what a

blessed angel is death, freeing them, setting them in a new state,

starting them on a fresh career, amidst fairer circumstances, in

front of better opportunities! To be saved, and in paradise, what

is it but to be a pure instrument to echo the music of divine

things? When the corruptible parts of the instrument are

hopelessly discordant, or the circumstances of its place here are

jangled with evils which it cannot overcome, then the

disentanglement of the spiritual harp, and the translation of it

to some finer sphere; where its free chords may ring their proper

music clearly out, are a blessed redemption, making death itself a

triumphant gate of heaven.

Retribution is the remotest and most difficult of all the heavenly

gates; and yet it is one, and one that is indispensable for many a

neglectful, halting, and obstinate child of man. It is an extreme

error to think punishment a gate of hell. It is rather a result of

being already inside, and it legitimately serves as an outlet

thence. Whatever may be the case with imperfect human rulers, in

the government of God no punishment is ever inflicted for the sake

of vengeance, a gratuitous evil. It is blasphemy to deem God

vindictive. He always punishes for the sake of good, to awaken

attention, produce insight and sorrow, and cause a reattunement of

character and conduct with the laws of right, seen at last to be

supremely authoritative and benignant, indissolubly bound up with

the truest good of each and with the sole good of all. On every

gate of hell may be written. Wherever retribution is actual,

salvation is possible, equivalent to the great maxim of

jurisprudence: Ubi jus ibi remedium! So, even the dark door of

retribution, when men will advance by no other way, leads them to

thoughtfulness, regret, and a redemptive readjustment of their

passions and acts. Thus it becomes the ultimate gate of heaven.

And, alas! what a dismal crowd of sufferers, refusing all shorter

and happier ways, wait to be drawn through this torturing passage

of remedial mercy! May the number entering by the other gates ever

increase, and those entering this dwindle! And yet, may it forever

stand open for the unhappy culprits who must be lost unless saved

here!

Besides all these gates, and commanding them all, there is one

everywhere accessible, and never shut on any soul which has the

grace to try it the omnipresent gate of resignation. Remove the

conditions of resistance, or friction, by a total surrender of

self will and an absolute acceptance of the Divine Will, and, it

matters not where you are, the essence of perdition is destroyed

in your soul. The utter abandonment of pride, a pious submission

to the laws of things, a glad and grateful acquiescence in

whatever the Supreme Authority decrees this is the unrestricted

way into heaven which waits before the steps of all who will only

exhibit the requisite spirit, and enter. Yes, let any being but

banish from himself every vestige of personal dictation before God

and unexactingly identify his desires with universal good; and,

even though he stand on the bottom of hell, heaven will be directly

before him through the open gate of resignation. For the organic

attitude of a pure and loving submission tunes the discordant

creature to that eternal breath of God which blows everywhere

through the universe of souls, sighing until they conspire with

it to make the music of redemption.

CHAPTER V.

RESUME HOW THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY NOW STANDS.

IN THE leading nations of Christendom, the belief in the

immortality of the soul has for some time past obviously been

weakening. The number of those who assail the belief increases,

and their utterances become more frank and dogmatic. A multitude

of instances, clear to every careful observer, prove this.

Especially at the present moment do examples of painful doubt,

profound misgiving, bold and exultant denial, mocking flippancy

and ridicule, abound on all sides, in private conversation, in

public discussion, and in every form of literary activity. The

hearty thoroughness and fervor with which the faith of the Church

was once held have gone from whole classes. Subtle skepticism or

blank negation is a common characteristic. Whether this tendency

towards unbelief be sound or fallacious, temporary or permanent,

it is at least actual. And it is important that we examine the

causes of it, and test their logical validity while tracing their

historic spread. Why, then, we ask, is the faith in a future life

for man suffering such a marked decay in the present generation of

Christendom?

In the first place, the faith pales and dwindles, from the general

neglect of that strenuous and constant cultivation of it formerly

secured by the stern doctrinal drill and by the rigid supervision

of daily thought and habit in the interests of religion. Never

before were men so absorbed as now in material toil and care

during the serious portion of their existence; never before so

beset as now during the leisure portion by innumerable forms of

amusement and dissipation. The habit of lonely meditation and

prayer grows rarer. The exactions of the struggle of ambition grow

fiercer, the burdens of necessity press more heavily; the vices

and temptations of society thicken: and they withdraw the

attention of men from ideal and sacred aims. More and more men

seem to live for labor and pleasure, for time and sense; less and

less for truth and good, for God and eternity. Absorbed in the

materialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolous

diversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious age

was maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilent

an epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such a

discount? But the things to which men really devote themselves

dilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come to

disbelieve that for which they take no thought and make no

sacrifice or investment. The average men of our time, as well

those of the educated classes as those of the laboring classes, do

not live for immortality. Therefore their faith in it diminishes.

Our fathers, to a degree not common now, walked in mental

companionship with God, practiced solitary devotion, shaped their

daily feelings and deeds with reference to the effect on their

future life. Thus that hidden life became real to them. Now the

interests and provocations of the present world, concentrated and

intensified as never before the strife of aspirants, the giddy

enterprises of speculation and commerce and engineering, the chaos

of caucuses and newspapers and telegraphs monopolize our

faculties and exhaust our energies, leaving us but faint

inclination to attend to the solemn themes of the soul and the

mystic lures of infinity. To those crazed with greed, battling

with rivals or sunk in debauchery, God naturally becomes a verbal

phantom and immortality a foolish dream. There is nothing in

mechanism and mammon worship, nothing in selfish sloth and

laughter, nothing in cruel oppression and drudgery, to inspire

belief in the deathless spirituality of man. Among a people

prevailingly given over to these earthlinesses, faith in the

transcendent verities of religion perforce dies out. In the long

run the supreme devotion of the soul irresistibly moulds its

faith. Christendom does not live in conscious sacrifices and

aspirations for God and eternal life, but it lives chiefly for

selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore

in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe

this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer

and more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in a

future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present

to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this

world, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existing

here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue and

blessedness now. When this shall have been done the tangential and

fractional character of our experience will be so obvious, the

inadequacy of the earthly state for the wants of our transcendent

and prophetic faculties will be so urgent, and the supplementing

adaptations of the entire unseen but clearly divined future to the

craving parts in the present will be so manifest, that a complete

revelation of immortality will break upon the prepared mind of the

race. Then history will take a new departure in breathing

communion with the whole creation.

But infidelity to duty and privilege does not destroy the truth of

duty and privilege. It only blinds the faithless eyes so that they

cannot see the truth. If the immortality of the soul be a truth,

the materialistic absorption of our life would blind us to it and

make us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide the

future from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on the

dark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlasting

invitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness of

our age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it does

not logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test of

the genuine evidence.

The second reason for the apparent rapid crumbling away of the

belief in immortality in Christendom is the recent wide diffusion

of a critical knowledge of the comparative history of the opinions

of all nations on the subject of a future life, revealing the

mythological character common to them, and tracking them back to

their origin in primitive superstitions no longer is their literal

purport credible to any educated intelligence. In many works by

theological writers, and by scientific writers, of free habits of

thought, like Strauss and Spencer, collections have been made of

the fancies and theories of mankind respecting the survival of the

spirit and the conditions of its experience after the death of the

body. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the most

enlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with the

crudest notions of the barbarians of the prehistoric period,

namely, the spontaneous workings of raw instinct and imagination.

Tracing the views of Christians as to the nature of the soul, and

the life to come in heaven or hell, back to the rude conceptions

of the naked savages who fashioned their idea of the ghost from

the shadow or the reflection of the man, which was a picture or

representative of him, yet without matter, and from the phenomena

of dreams, in which they supposed the spirit of the man left him

and went through the adventures of the dream and returned ere he

awoke it has been asserted that every form of later faith, however

refined and improved in details, yet really resting on such

puerile fancies, such incompetent and absurd beginnings, is

thereby discredited and must be rejected.

Now, it is true that when we find among Christian believers,

connected with the doctrine of a future life, an incongruous

medley of physical imagery and gross imaginative pictures,

conceptions of just the same character as the grotesque dreamings

of the earliest savages and the elaborate mythology of subsequent

priesthoods, we are required to treat the whole suppositious mass

as mere poetry or superstition, and to dismiss it from our faith.

But we are by no means justified in doing so with the essential

fact itself of a future life. The essential fact, the assertion of

immortality, may be true, even if the mythological dress be all

fictitious. It does not follow that man has no surviving soul

because the local heaven or hell, described by savage or priest as

its residence, is unreal. It surely is no correct inference that

the soul perishes with the body, because the barbarian mind

generalized its idea of the soul from the phenomena of shadows,

reflections, echoes and dreams. The critical scholar, who judges

the case fairly, will correct the fallacies of the confused

reasoning instinct, and relegate the mythology to its proper

province, but reserve his judgment on the question itself of

spiritual survival to be settled on the only appropriate evidence.

Although the habit thus formed by the critical scholar, and by

those who follow his authority, of sweeping away as wholly

untenable so many varieties of speculation, and so many groups of

images connected with the belief in a future life, has

unquestionably contributed powerfully to foster complete disbelief

in the doctrine itself, yet it is equally unquestionable that this

process of negation is illogical. Many a true doctrine has been

cradled in superstitions and absurdities. A faith supported by

many classes of independent arguments is not overthrown by the

disproof of one of those classes. It is as wrongful a procedure to

deny the immortality of the soul because barbaric instinct

grounded it on erroneous notions and enveloped it with falsehoods,

as it would be to reject the established laws of gravitation and

light and sound, for the reason that the various provisional

theories, preceding the correct ones, were ridiculous mistakes.

The problem to be solved is, Does the man who is now a soul in a

body remain a soul when the body dissolves? The inadequacy or

folly of a hundred provisional answers does not affect the final

answer. Instead of denying immortality because the childish mind

of the early world feigned impossible things about it, we should

change the question by appeal to a more competent court, and

inquire what Pythagoras, Augustine, Dante, Leibnitz, Fichte,

Schelling, Swedenborg, Goethe, thought about it. It is a question

for the consensus of the most gifted and impartial minds, the very

Areopagus of Humanity, to decide. Furthermore, on a deeper

inquiry, it seems clear that the real belief in immortality did

not originate from the contemplation of the phenomena of dreams

and shadows and echoes, but arose rather from the inexpugnable

self assertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself non

existent. This persistency of consciousness, following it in all

its imaginative flights of thought beyond the death of the body,

was the cause of the mythological creativeness of the barbaric

mind. And thus the elaboration of the imagery of ghosts and a

ghostly realm was not the precursor, but the result of a belief in

another life. The belief sprang directly out of the feeling of a

continuous being unconquerably connected with human self

consciousness, and is independent of the imagery in which it has

been clothed, may clothe itself in endless forms of imagery, and

survive their removal on the discovery of their incompetence.

Besides, the savage himself was, after all, not so far out of the

way. His mythology was not a mere fiction concreted into fact by

superstition. He was on that track of analogy which, when cleared,

will be, perhaps, the luminous highway to universal truth. The

savage was obscurely conscious that the objects which appeared

around him as solid material realities had their immaterial

correspondences within his spirit. The tree, the stone, the

flower, the star, the beast, the man, had within him correspondent

mental images or ideas just as real as they, but without sensible

qualities, and incapable of hurt. With creative wonder he

recognized a symbol or analogy of this inner world in the shadow

and the reflection. The shadow or the reflection is a representation

of its original, but without material substance.

See, it lies there, wavering, on the rock, or in the water. No

arrow can pierce it, no club bruise it, no pestle pulverize it, no

chemistry disintegrate it. It is an emblem of the immaterial and

indestructible spirit, revealed in the outer world of matter,

where everything changes and passes away except the noumena under

the phenomena. No wonder it stirred the brooding fancy of the

ignorant, but prophetic primitive man, and made it teem with poesy

and personification.

Freely, then, let us brush aside the mythological extravagance and

irrational errors in the entire cosmopolitan doctrine of a future

life, but beware of rejecting the fact itself of immortality until

we have better grounds than have yet been afforded by the

accumulating insight of literary history. As the world moves on,

and the human mind develops with it, the crude must give way to

the mature, and the false be replaced, not with vacancy, but with

the true. The problem of the nature and destiny of the soul will

not be solved by tearing away the fictitious drapery thrown around

it, but by piercing to the roots of the reality within the

drapery.

And now we come to the third reason for the increasing doubt and

decreasing faith in regard to a future life: that reason is that

the form of the belief in it prevalent in Christendom has become

incredible, and the rejection of the form has loosened the hold on

the substance. The philosophic mind, which has attained to the

idea of the infinite God, without body, or parts, or passions,

omnipresent in his total perfection, can reason to the belief in a

kindred immortality for its own finite being. But since our

experience is here limited to the life now known, we are utterly

without data or ability to image forth such a conception of

immortality in any form of picture or mental scenery. There seem

to be only three ways in which we can give imaginative

representation of a future life. The first is the method of the

universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a

shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an

unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of

ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former

adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy which

is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest

as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who

are unwilling to leave their thoughts of the future life in empty

rational abstraction, portray it in vivid concrete. This they do

by means of the doctrine of a general bodily resurrection of the

dead.

It is a striking fact that four of the great historic and literary

religions have taught the doctrine of immortality under the form

of a physical resurrection, namely: Zoroastrianism, Judaism,

Christianity, and Mohammedanism. It has been attributed, also, to

the ancient religion of Egypt, but erroneously. Its belief there

is a mere inference from facts which do not really imply it. The

Egyptians plainly believed in a series of individual reincarnations,

not in any general resurrection. But it is a sufficiently

interesting and impressive fact that over one third of the human

race have embodied their expectation of a future eternal life

in this concrete and astonishing form. It has not rested on a basis

of reason, but on one of asserted revelation and authority. It

originated in the fact that the only life of which we now have

any experience is a life in the body, and, therefore, this is the

life which we instinctively love and prefer; also in the fact

that this is the only mode of life which we are able to

represent to ourselves in any satisfactory, apprehensible image.

It then bolstered itself up by arbitrary theological theorizings,

and proclaimed itself with sanctions of a pretended supernatural

authority. Slowly the minds of its disciples were drilled to a

familiarity with it, and to a habit of implicitly believing it,

which grew strong enough to make them hold to it in spite of its

difficulty as a sheer and violent miracle having no connection

whatever with the natural order of things. Authority and passive

habit long maintained the belief in unbroken sway. They still so

support it in the Mohammedan world, where there is almost no

science, but little skeptical thought, and a common uniformity of

abject submission to the word of the Koran. But in Christendom it

fares differently. Here, the knowledge of modern science and

habits of free inquiry are almost universally diffused. The

consequence is, since the chief Christian belief in immortality

has been identified with the notion of a general physical

resurrection of the dead at the last day, and since all

philosophical and scientific thinking refutes that notion by

setting its arbitrariness and monstrous abnormality in high and

steep relief against the consensus of demonstrated knowledge and

moral probability, that the popular belief of Christendom in

immortality itself is depolarized and swiftly dropping into decay

with a large class of persons. But this spread of doubt and

denial, while a natural process, is yet an illogical and

unnecessary one. The competent thinker will extricate the question

of the immortality of the soul from its accidental entanglement

with the doctrine of the resurrection, and, rejecting the latter

as incredible, still affirm the former on its own independent

grounds. To prove and illustrate these statements we must here

give a little additional study, fresh and independent study, to

the subject.

The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is bound up with the

whole fabric of the Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic theology of

Christendom, and cannot be removed without logically shaking that

system of belief into pieces. And yet the doctrine, as has been

shown in a previous chapter, is unscriptural and of a purely pagan

origin, the New Testament foretelling a resurrection of spirits

from the underworld, not of bodies from the grave. It has no real

analogies in the world, but is a figment of fancy, unsupported by

reason on any authentic physical or moral grounds. It is,

furthermore, a doctrine whose realization is impossible, because

it is a self destroying absurdity.

All that we need for demonstrating its absolute incredibility, is

simply to ultimate its implications, carry it out in thought to

the necessary results which its ignorant originators never

foresaw. The doctrine of a physical resurrection presupposes that

our race was originally intended to be immortal on earth, and that

death was a penalty for sin. Fill out the theory. Adam and Eve,

made male and female, were commanded to multiply and replenish the

earth. Their descendants, doubling every twenty five years, would,

after sixty or seventy generations had accumulated, have covered

the whole earth so thickly that they would be packed in one

immovable mass, the whole planet carpeted with their forms and

paved with their upturned faces. Not an inch of room on the globe

for any harvest to grow or any creature to move; the world,

crowded and imbedded at every point with one continuous multitude

of immortal human beings, would have then rolled around the

zodiac, presenting this chronic and motionless picture, to all

eternity!

If it be maintained that had it not been for sin and its penalty,

the successive generations would neither have died nor have

remained forever on the earth, but would have been translated

bodily to some other world, the absurdity just exposed is escaped

only to introduce another one equally glaring. For in time, the

entire solid contents of the globe would thus be removed, and the

disappearance of our planet unhinge the solar system and produce a

general cataclysm. The solid contents of the earth have been

estimated at about thirty nine trillions of cubic feet. Seventy

five doublings of the primal pair would reach to over seventy

trillions of human beings, each containing more than a solid cubic

foot.

It is perfectly clear, therefore, in any view, that the only way

in which the human race, with their reproductive constitution,

could permanently inhabit the world is by the present system of

successive births and deaths; a system, furthermore, which science

shows to have been in working existence among the preceding races

of creatures for innumerable ages before the mythical sin of Adam

and Eve, with its mythical consequences.

The fabulous scheme of an intended bodily immortality on the earth

is a discordant and disagreeable one in every respect, asthetic,

rational, and moral. It jars incongruously with the great order of

nature and providence, which everywhere interpolates a night

between two days, a sleep between two wakings, to keep the edge of

consciousness fresh and the possibilities of pleasure alive.

Imprisoned in this carcass of flesh with its ignoble necessities

for endless ages, the contemplation of the fearful burden of

monotony would be insufferable to any one who had thought the case

out in all its details with vivid realization. And yet, so

unthinking are most persons in regard to the conventional beliefs

prevalent in society, Parsees, Jews, Christians and Mohammedans,

professedly base their entire faith in immortality on this dogma

with the resurrection involved in it.

When carried out in its particulars by the imagination, the

doctrine is self evidently untenable, contradictory to the

essential facts of human nature under the given conditions of the

material creation. It had its theologic birth in the speculations

of the dualistic religion of Persia, whence it was first borrowed

by the Jews, then secondarily adopted into Christianity, and

thence finally impacted into the mongrel creed of Mohammed and his

followers. It is philosophically irreconcilable with a pure

monotheism; for, if God be infinite, no enemy could subvert his

original scheme and force Him to an arbitrary miracle to restore

it. It is a creaking and dissonant artifice, every way repugnant

to all whose reason and sentiment have learned to love the smooth

and continuous evolution of the order of the cosmos and the

connected destinies of conscious beings. It is absolutely refuted

by the double reductio ad absurdum shown above to be contained in

it.

Yet, while the grounds on which the common belief in a destined

general resurrection of the dead rests have really lost their

validity to the mind of the nineteenth century, the millions of

Islam and Christendom retain the article unchanged in their

creeds, and to question it is a heresy. No wonder skepticism

flourishes and genuine faith decays. This clinging to an outgrown

scheme is not only from the strong drift of a passive mental

conformity, as the train of cars keeps on for some time after the

dynamic locomotive has been taken off. Another reason is that the

tenet is so centrally imbedded in the dogmatic ecclesiasticism

that it cannot be extricated without involving all the associated

dogmas. Therefore, one portion of this knowing generation repeat

the formula and blink the difficulties, while another portion go

over to open disbelief of any future life. The doctrine of the

literal resurrection of the body from the grave is incredible to

the educated and free intelligence of the age. In continuing to

affirm it ecclesiastical Christendom brands itself with frivolity,

not earnest enough to carry its thought in loyalty to truth as far

as possible, or with hypocrisy, consciously dishonest to its

doubts.

It is a precious boon to be rid of such an unnatural and ominous

belief as that in the final disemboguing of the dead by sea and

land, the tumbling of the rocks, the falling of the stars, and the

everlasting torture of the condemned in a prison of fire. Far

better than any such doctrine is a calm confronting of the mystery

of the future in its confessed secrecy as it is, and a peaceful

resignation to the will of God in conscious ignorance and trust.

And yet the believer in this scheme of colossal and ghastly

necromancy, when confronted with the unanswerable arguments

against it, is sometimes found clinging to it with willful

tenacity, and bitterly complaining of those who refute it, that

they would rob him of his faith and give him nothing in exchange.

Suppose a man to believe that in the year nineteen hundred the

earth will be exploded, and that all men, except himself and the

little clique of his friends, will be strung for eternity on a red

hot iron wire in empty space. Suppose that this horrid notion is

clearly proved to him to be an error. Then, because he is not

taught exactly what will happen in the year nineteen hundred, he,

the unhappy man, assails his enlightener for having robbed him of

his faith and given him nothing in exchange! Is not the truth of

ignorance better than the falsity of superstition? Modest faith in

front of the shrouded unknown can well stand comparison with the

arrogant and incompetent exultation of fanaticism. In regard to

that belated relic of the belief in magic, the doctrine of the

literal resurrection of the dead in their fleshy bodies, let us

gratefully wipe it all out and draw a long breath of relief. Let

us rejoice to know that the will of God will be done in the

fulfilling order of the universe, although we may now be ignorant

of precisely what that will is. Believing the will of God to be

good, whether revealed or concealed, we can afford to wait in

peace, trying in the meantime to carry our individual character

and our social state and experience here steadily toward

perfection. Surely, that is the best way to prepare ourselves for

whatever lies beyond.

And yet we are not wholly shut up to mere blind faith. There is

always some ground of moral truth in every widely extended

dogmatic belief. In casting off the dogma we should carefully

extract its moral purport and try to give it a more authentic

setting. It will not be hard to do this with reference to the

doctrine now under consideration.

Obscure and complicated and baffling as the problem of our future

destiny is, we can already trace many a line of light, many a

prophetic signal and hint suggestive of what is ordained to happen

to the individual and the race.

Unquestionably, the genuine moral reason why the belief in the

fleshly resurrection has been so general and tenacious is the two

fold consideration: first; that we desire our future life to be an

incarnate life because our experience makes that form of being

realizable and precious to our imagination, while a disembodied

ghostliness is, perforce, repulsively vacant and abstract; and,

secondly because our affection and our imagination and our

conscience profoundly crave the complete fulfillment of the scheme

of the historic career of collective humanity in this world in

some such manner, that here, on this dear old earth, the

experience of our whole race may be brought to a clear epical

unity, and may close with an illuminating justification of

providence in the sight of all men, who shall then read the

interpretation of their entire past, and see together eye to eye.

Now we believe that the essence of this natural desire and this

sublime hope is a divine prophecy which shall be fulfilled. We

believe that in the very falsity of the doctrine of a carnal

resurrection and judgment there lurks a truth yet to break out in

overwhelming refulgence and perfectly satisfy every soul of man.

But it will be brought about by the gradual culmination of the

means and processes which God is now visibly carrying forward, and

not by any sudden convulsion of miracle.

The faculties of human consciousness in the individual and the

race are in process of development. Also the transmissible sum of

knowledge, on which those faculties employ themselves, is in

process of rapid increase. The faculties of knowledge possessed by

an accomplished master of literature and science now, contrasted

with those of a cannibal savage of the pre glacial epoch, reveal

an advance which hardly needs to be repeated in order to give us a

comprehension of the whole experience of our kind on earth, quite

ample to explain the facts of the case and solve the problem of

our destiny. The grasp of our intelligence and the richness of our

sensibility increase along the ages. The generalizations of our

philosophy grow wider, the gropings of our sympathetic faith

become vaster, the retrospection and the prevision of our science

keener and longer and more inclusive, every generation. It is very

significant that the further away we get from the prehistoric

times the more we learn about them. Archaology is one of the

latest and most swiftly enlarging branches of knowledge. Let the

processes thus indicated go on, as they have gone on and are with

accelerated pace going on, and the date is not beyond prophecy

when all earthly and human secrets will be solved, and their

mysteries be revealed, and the autobiographic book and volume of

the world be opened, and the universal tribunal be set in the

light of every life, and the irreversible judgment be declared, by

the simple revelation of the truth of history in the web of its

relations. For as every atom of matter is conjoined by all the

laws of nature with all other atoms of matter, and the history of

all their adventures is registered by their own indestructible

vibrations in the elemental spaces of the universe where they run

their career, so every identity of spirit is conjoined by all the

laws of spirit with all other spirits, and all their deeds and

sufferings are ineffaceably self registered in their reactions

upon the authors, in the pictures they shed upon space, and the

influences they set rolling through the eternity of successive

souls and lives. All, then, that is needed for a perfectly

vindicating judgment is the awakening of consciousness to the full

view of the facts. And the tendencies are powerfully moving in

that direction. What was the illumination of Swedenborg but the

taking possession by his consciousness of the unconscious lower

nervous system, with all its impacted ancestral experiences and

wondrous relations with the visible and invisible worlds? And this

may be repeated, by and by, and be perfected, and become common.

What may result is as yet almost inconceivable. Let us trace a

little, in this regard, the connections of the individual and the

face, and follow out some of their implications.

Suppose that in turn every child born begets or bears two

children. Then in the thirtieth generation the transmitted

qualities of spirit, nerve and blood, of the single original pair

of parents will be represented in upwards of one thousand millions

of descendants. It is clear from this law, allowing for all

deviations from its numerical progression on account of inter

marriages and of failures of offspring, how powerfully and swiftly

the ever multiplying streams of consanguinity are spreading in

every direction, affiliating and fraternizing the whole human race

literally into one family, the innumerable rills of separate

descent intermingling as they flow on, and finally diffusing over

the earth in that oceanic unity of humanity, which, when full,

will beat with the tidal pulse of a single sympathy. It is

believed by many that no experience of any living creature is ever

lost, but is by its own spontaneous and exact reflex vibrations

either registered in the conscious memory or deposited in the

unconscious organism in latent perfection of vestige and tendency.

Memory is a faithful treasurer of all the stores of events.

Suppose now that each parent bequeaths in the dynamic germ of his

progeny the possibility of reviving into consciousness, when the

proper conditions shall be furnished, the accumulated sum of all

that has happened throughout the entire line of his ancestry. And

again, imagine that all the souls composing the human race each of

which is a substantial and indestructible entity, living

incarnated over and over, and not a mere phenomenal process that

vanishes into nothing with the dissolution of the body are so

limited in number that they may be embodied on the earth in one

generation, whose members shall be so conjoined in knowledge and

fellowship that the life of the whole is concentrated in every

one, and the life of every one mirrored in the whole. Now,

finally, let it be conceived that this latest generation,

including all who have ever inhabited the world, at last attain a

development which enables them to grasp in distinct consciousness

the collective sum of the organic heritage of the race, each one

reading with perfect clearness in every particular the complete

history of humanity from the beginning to the end, understanding

all its causes, courses and consequences, and beholding with

unspeakable delight the justification of the ways of God, the

whole universe opening into free intercommunication, as if time

and space were either no more or else their measures were of

boundless subjective elasticity, every creature found in peace and

rapture at the goal of his destiny. That, indeed, would be a

realization of the day of judgment and the resurrection of the

dead, but without a shock or a jar in the course of things which

science reveals. The process of development now going on, if

carried far enough, will naturally result in this or in something

equivalent to it; while the notion of the vomiting forth of the

accumulated dead from land and sea, at the blast of a trumpet, is

a wild piece of imagery, borrowed from startling political

phenomena, and applied with absurd incongruity to the chronic

providence of God. The former view contains all the moral

significance of the latter, but without its violation of

probability. Nor is it all necessary that the climax shall be

brought about of a simultaneous universal judgment, or of the

appearance of our whole race on the earth at one time. The giving

of the vision to souls subjectively, one after another, in the

order of their attainment of the conditions, would meet every

requirement of the case. To each one in turn, wherever he was, as

the result broke on him in the ecstatic glory of all it means, the

essence of the so long cherished faith of Christendom would be

justified, and the providential theater and scenery of human

experience would appear under its illumination as a dazzling

vision of poetic justice perfect at every point.

Marvelous and almost incredible as this scheme of thought may

seem, it is not more mysterious in itself, or more staggering in

its demand on our faith, than many things successively were which

are now established beyond a doubt such as the telegraphic

conversation of men through the ocean and around the globe; the

seven hundred and thirty three thousand millions of ethereal

vibrations in a second, which cause the report of the violet ray

in consciousness; the transcendent disclosures of the spectrum

analysis; the conception of gravitation as a force which holds all

matter in unbroken union, and acts throughout the stellar universe

with timeless simultaneity. It is in entire keeping with

everything else in the workings of God, as demonstrated by

science, on every hand, both in nature and history. The atomic

theory and the nebular hypothesis, the chemical crucible and the

mathematical calculus, the microscope and the telescope discover

to our senses and our reason, wherever we look, facts as

mysterious to the understanding, and as baffling to the

imagination as any of the foregoing implications; showing us, in

every department of nature and experience, the bewildering

miracles of the infinitely little and the infinitely great exactly

balanced and perpetually passing into one another.

There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of the

primitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of the

Christian and Parsee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which the

imagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, has

concreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine of

transmigration. A striking feature and no slight recommendation of

the foregoing view of the true meaning of the dogma of the

resurrection is that it reconciles these two chief forms of the

belief in immortal life. For resurrection and transmigration agree

in the central point of a restoration of the disembodied soul to a

new bodily existence, only the former represents this as a single

collective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of God at the

close of the earthly drama, the latter depicts it as constantly

taking place in the regular fulfillment of the divine plan in the

creation. This difference is certainly, to a scientific and

philosophical thinker, who reasons on the data of nature and

experience and not on the dicta of theologians, strongly in favor

of the Oriental theory. We have no experience whatever of any

general resurrection, but all experience is full of the constant

appearances of souls in freshly created bodies throughout the

scale of sentient being. If our final future life is to be a

bodily one there surely is a world of presumptive evidence,

therefore, in behalf of transmigration as opposed to resurrection.

Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason

for the resurrection holds with at least equal force for

transmigration. The argument from analogy is especially strong. It

is natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated

life that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety of

souls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting series of

adventures, in appropriate organisms; there being, as Paul said,

one kind of flesh of birds, another kind of flesh of beasts,

another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of

recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality.

Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we

reawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in

one life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the whole

thread of experience from the beginning.

In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful

and refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so

extensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of

the majority, having for ages on ages been held by half of the

human race with an intensity of conviction almost without a

parallel. Indeed the most striking fact, at first sight, about the

doctrine of the repeated existences of the soul incarnated in

different organisms, its form and experience in each successive

embodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in the

preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of the faith in it in

all parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain great

nations. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose contrasted

splendors and horrors awaken astonishment more and more with each

step in the progressive decipherment of its mysterious record,

seems largely to have grown out of this faith. The swarming

millions of India also, through the chief periods of their

history, have lain under its spell, suffered their lives, wrought

their great works of government, architecture, philosophy, and

poetry, and in its belief meditated, aspired, and exhaled their

souls. Ruder forms of it are reported among innumerable barbaric

tribes. It played an important part in the speculations of the

early Fathers of the Christian Church, and has often cropped out

in the works of later theologians. Men of the profoundest

metaphysical genius, like Scotus Erigena and Leibnitz, have

affirmed it, and sought to give it a logical or scientific basis.

And even amidst the predominance of skeptical and materialistic

influences in Europe and America, at the present time, we

constantly meet individuals with independent minds who earnestly

believe the alluring dogma. For, to a large and varied class of

minds, the doctrine holds a transcendent attraction as well as a

manifold plausibility.

Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it

seems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the Oriental

world; but appears in the Western world only in scattered

instances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growing

freedom and liberality of thought, which no less than its doubt

and denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the full

time had come for a greater mental and asthetic hospitality on the

part of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of the

resurrection should not confine their attention to the repellent

or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to its

claim and its charm. The Pantheistic tendency which possessed and

overwhelmed the Brahminic mind, shaping and tinging its views

opened the whole range of sentient existences to an indiscriminate

sympathy, and made the idea of transmigration natural, and more

pleasing than repugnant. Furthermore, the Brahminic thinkers and

sages were a distinct class of men whose whole lives were absorbed

in introspective reveries and metaphysical broodings calculated to

stimulate the imagination and arouse to the keenest consciousness

all the latent marvels and possibilities of human experience, thus

furnishing the most favorable conditions for exactly such a belief

as that of transmigration, an endless series of ever varying

adventures for the imperishable soul. And the vast swarms of the

common people in the East are the passive followers of this high

caste of thinkers, abjectly accepting what they teach.

Accordingly, the mysterious doctrine of the metempsychosis has

held the entire mind, sentiment and civilization of the East,

through every period of its history, as with an irreversible

spell.

The persistent practice of various modes of profound and

rhythmical breathing by which the Brahmins perfect their

respiration, and the keen and sustained concentration of their

attention on their inner states, tend at the same time to heighten

the richness and intensity of the cerebral nerves, to unify the

connections of the lower nerve centres with them, and to fuse the

unconscious physiological processes with the conscious

psychological processes. Then the persevering disuse and

suppression of the action of their outer senses cause the objects

of the material world around them to seem more vague and dreamy

than the impressions of the ideal world within. And so the earth

with all its affairs seems an illusion, while their own unsought

trains of thought, feeling and imagery the rich mental panorama of

pictures and events, are taken for a series of substantial

revelations of the universe of being. An irresistible belief in

preexistence, immortality and transmigration, results.

On the contrary, in the Western world, the characteristic

tendencies are all different. Pantheistic theories are rarely

held, and the dreams and emotions which those theories are fitted

to feed are foreign and repulsive. An impassible barrier is

imagined separating humanity from every other form of being.

Speculative reason, imagination and affection, are chiefly

employed in scientific studies and social pursuits, or personal

schemes, external rather than internal. This absorption in

material things and evanescent affairs engenders in the spirit an

arid atmosphere of doubt and denial, in which no efflorescence of

poetic and mystic faiths can flourish. Thus, while the outward

utilities abound, hard negations spread abroad; and living,

personal apprehension of God, of an all pervasive Providence, and

of the immortality of the soul in any form, dies out either in

open infidelity or in a mere verbal acceptance of the established

creed of society. Consequently, to the average mind of the modern

Western world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a mere

fancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strange

poetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical and

religious quality.

The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strong

resemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beings

with the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the senses

in common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence and

will. They all seem created after one plan, as if their varieties

were the gradulations of a single original type. We recognize

kindred forms of experience and modes of expression in ourselves

and in them. Now the man seems a travesty of the hog, the parrot,

the ape, the hawk, or the shark; now they seem travesties of him.

As we gaze at the ruminating ox, couched on the summer grass,

notice the slow rhythm of his jaw, and the wondering dreaminess of

his eyes, it is not difficult to fancy him some ancient Brahmin

transmigrated to this, and patiently awaiting his release. Nor is

it incongruous with our reason or moral feeling to suppose that

the cruel monsters of humanity may in a succeeding birth find the

fit penalty for their degradation and crime, in the horrid life of

a crocodile or a boa constrictor.

The conception of a series of connected lives also furnishes a

plausible explanation for many mysteries in our present

experience. Reference is made to all that class of phenomena

covered by the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. Faces previously

unseen, and localities unvisited, awaken in us a vivid feeling of

a long familiarity with them. Thoughts and emotions, not hitherto

entertained, come to us as if we had welcomed and dismissed them a

thousand times in periods long gone by. Many an experience,

apparently novel and untried, makes us start as at the shadowy

reminder of something often known before. The supposition of

forgotten lives preceding the present, portions of whose

consciousness reverberate and gleam through the veils of thought

and sense, seems to throw satisfactory light on this strange

department of experience.

Much more weighty and penetrative, however, than the foregoing

considerations is the philosophical argument in behalf of

transmigration, drawn from the nature of the soul. Consciousness

being in its very essence the feeling of itself, the conscious

soul can never feel itself annihilated, even in thought it only

loses the knowledge of its being when it lapses into unconsciousness,

as in sleep or trance. The soul may indeed think of its own

annihilation but cannot realize the thought in feeling,

since the fainter emotional reflex upon the idea of its

destruction is instantly contradicted and over borne by the more

massive and vivid sense of its persistent being in immediate

consciousness. This incessant self assertion of consciousness at

once suggests the idea of its being independent of the changing

and vanishing body in which it is temporarily shrined. Then the

conception naturally follows that the soul, as it has once

appeared in human form, so it may reappear indefinitely in any of

the higher or lower forms of being which compose the hierarchy of

the universe. The eternity of the soul, past and future, once

accepted by the mind, leads directly to the construction of the

whole scheme of metempsychosis an everlasting succession of births

and deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments, with their laws of

personality and fortunes of time and space weaving the boundless

web of destiny and playing the endless drama of providence.

But the strongest support of the theory of transmigration is the

happy moral solution it seems to give to the problem of the dark

and distressing inequality and injustice which otherwise appear so

predominant in the experience of the world. To the superficial

observer of human life the whole scene of struggle, sin and

sorrow, nobleness and joy, triumph and defeat, is a tangled maze

of inconsistencies, a painful combination of violent discords. But

if we believe that every soul, from that of the lowest insect to

that of the greatest archangel, forms an affiliated member of the

infinite family of God, and is eternal in its conscious essence,

perishable only as to its evanescent disguises of unconscious

incarnation; that every act of every creature is followed by its

legitimate reactions; that these actions and reactions constitute

a law of retribution absolutely perfect; that these souls, with

all their doings and sufferings are interconnected with one

another, and with the whole, all whose relationships copenetrate

and cooperate with mutual influences whose reports are infallible

and with lines of sequence that never break, then the bewildering

maze becomes a vindicated plan, the horrible discord a divine

harmony. What an explication it gives of those mysteries of evil,

pain, sorrow and retribution, which often wrap the innocent and

the wicked in one sad fate, if we but see that no individual

stands alone, but trails along with him the unfinished sequels of

all ancestral experience, and, furthermore, is so bound up with

his simultaneous race that each is responsible for all and all for

each, and that no one can be wholly saved or safe until all are

redeemed and perfected! Then every suffering we endure for faults

not our own, the consequence of the deeds of others, assumes a

holy light and a sublime dignity, associating us with that great

sacrament of atoning pain whereof the crucified Christ is not the

exclusive instance but the representative head.

The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the

resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciled

with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some a

very fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it is

so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is

advanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true,

as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history

and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so

wonderful, the method of it is so rational, the region of

contemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the

prospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, that

the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime

scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication

of providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the

littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it

easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever

known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny

to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of

the powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After

traversing the grounds here set forth we feel that if the view

based on them be not the truth, it must be because God has in

reserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner than our

brightest dream hitherto. The worthiest theory of the fate of man

which the spirit of man can construct must either be a revelatory

divination of the truth, or an inadequate attempt to grasp the

design of the Creator in its true glory. It is impious and absurd

to hold that man can think out a scheme superior to the one God

has decreed. And it seems equally unreasonable to suppose that the

scheme of God for the future stages of our career is one which has

no hints in our present experience. Certainly it appears more

likely that the sequel will be discovered by the logical

completion of the inwrought order which has been slowly unfolding

from the first. And what do history and prophecy show more plainly

than the tendency to a convergence of all humanity in every man?

Spreading consanguinity in descent and growth of sympathetic

knowledge both point to this. Perfect this in each man, and

illuminate his whole organism and its relations with adequate

intelligence, and we have a true resurrection, not indeed of

decayed bodies from the grave, but of historic states of

consciousness from their latent embedment in the nervous system,

and their undulatory record in the dynamic medium of the creation.

Our senses now convert certain sets of undulations of the ethereal

medium into perceptions of light, heat, sound, and so interpret

their contents and extract their tidings. It is not impossible

that in a coming stage of development we may obtain additional

senses; our spirits may command the means of translating into

correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of

vibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited

knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole

universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all

deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to

recover and read its own.

As each generation is the inheritor of the preceding ones, all of

which from the first prolong their existence into the last in

unbroken continuity of historic conduct and responsibility,

justice may at the ripened period be naturally summed up without

any miracle. We all are projections of our ancestors. They

properly in us suffer and enjoy in accordance with what has flowed

from their lives. The whole of this, lighted up with consciousness

at last, may be the real meaning of the burden of the spirit given

to the apostle Paul, but misinterpreted by him into the mechanico

scenic scheme of the Judaized Christian Church. For when the

mighty influx struck the brain of the persecuting zealot,

revolutionizing his life, it came into connection with all the

inflamed theories and convictions so deeply drilled therein by his

Pharisaic education. These convictions, partly of a mere local and

transient character, associated with legends of Adam and Abraham

and the under world and Christ and the sky, mixed with the true

and universal import of the higher inspiration now given him,

caused his misconstrual of its message, and stamped the purely

human and providential meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection

with the rabbinical die of a politico mythological dogma. If this

were so, it is not the only instance in which the preexistent

discolorations in the mind of an inspired prophet have refracted

the truth of his burden into distorted error and bequeathed the

task of a future rectification when more light shall have come.

In the next place, we come to the fourth reason for the growing

doubts and disbelief of our day in immortality. It is the

remarkable diffusion of the habits of thought engendered by the

study of materialistic science. The authority of physical science

has been rapidly encroaching on and displacing the authority of

the church theology and sectarian creeds. Belief in invariable

laws has undermined belief in miracle and supernatural revelation.

Those who had been taught that the resurrection of Christ was the

only adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, learning to

deny the former, have naturally proceeded to question the latter.

For in such matters the real implications of logic are little

noticed. The religious skepticism nourished by physical science is

in all respects really as irrational and baseless as it is actual.

For example, the resurrection of Christ, admitting it to be a

fact, did not create the immortality it was considered to

illustrate. If he rose, it was because men are immortal, and men

are not immortal because he rose. If he did not rise, men are

immortal all the same, provided human immortality be a truth; if

it be not a truth, the resurrection of Christ would be an isolated

abnormal event without any logical validity on the question. The

truth or falsity of human immortality, therefore, is a question of

the creative plan of God and the essential nature of man, to be

decided on the intrinsic evidences, and cannot logically be

affected one way or the other by any individual historic

occurrence limited to a certain time and place. Yet it is a

practical necessity that any great popular faith, if it rests on

authority, will be shocked and weakened by everything which shocks

and weakens that authority, no matter how adventitious it is. If

one cannot believe in the preternatural resurrection of Christ,

that surely is no valid reason for denying the natural immortality

of the soul, but only a good reason for seeking to learn if there

be not adequate grounds for this faith quite independent of

scripture text and priestly assertion.

Precisely the same reasoning holds in relation to the doubts about

spiritual realities bred in the minds of those whose studies are

conversant exclusively with material realities. The professors of

physical science, thoroughly familiarized with things which

combine and dissolve, often come to fancy that everything is

phenomenal and evanescent, that there is no immaterial substance,

that spirit is not entity but process, that thought and feeling

and will are mere transient functions of transient matter. Thus

all faith in the individuality of mind is pulverized at the

fountain head. There can be no question but that such is the

common influence of a constant contemplation of the physical

aspects alone of physical things. Mentality, consciousness, is

regarded as the prismatic bow in the cloud, a spectral show that

appears and vanishes, with no permanent substance. At the present

time, in Christendom, the one conquering power in literature, the

one fascinating absorption of thought in society, is that

connected with the cultivation of physical science. Its prestige

is overwhelming. Its prevalent methods and results give a

materialistic turn of interpretation to the popular mind upon all

subjects. The direct consequence, among that class of minds who

put physical science above theology, is the spreading disavowal of

all belief in the immortality of the soul. The fallacy is obvious,

and the remedy is simple, if there be at hand but enough of modest

candor and patience fairly to weigh the facts of the case in the

scales of a sound logic.

In the first place, by the very structure of our being, by the

very necessity of our experience, the universe is divided into two

irreconcilable classes of realities, namely, spiritual subjects

and material objects. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts,

volitions, all qualities of mind, all states of consciousness, are

absolutely immaterial. They are more real to us, that is to say,

they more inexpugnably assert and maintain themselves, than

material things do: and it is only hopeless vulgarity and

incompetence of thinking which can ever confuse or merge them with

material things. Matter is that which proves itself to spirit by

the effects it produces on spirit. Spirit is that which is its own

evidence. The center of consciousness in us is its own proof of

its own being, and all that occurs within it is its own proof, and

is unsusceptible of any other or foreign demonstration. Hope,

fear, love, imagination, reason, are absolutely unthinkable as

forms of material substance, however exquisitely refined and

exalted. There is no conceivable community of being between a

sentiment and an atom, a gas and an aspiration, an idea of truth

in the soul and any mass of matter in space. Each of these facts,

conscious thought and material extension, has its own incommunicable

and incomparable sphere of being and laws of action, which can be

confused only by ignorance and sophistry.

So clear has this become to all profound reflection, that the ablest

supporters of the theory of evolution, with all their preponderant

bias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words of

Herbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking of

spirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the terms

of spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give an

idealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialistic

interpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despite

the fallacious influences of habit to the contrary, that no

progress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount of

induction and generalization as to the composition or decomposition

of material bodies, can throw any new light or darkness on the

nature and destiny of the immaterial soul.

The incessant flux of phenomena constructing and destroying apparent

things, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing but

mirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence of

spiritual identity. To force it to discredit our claim to a divine

descent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. The

question must be snatched back from the assumption of the retort

and crucible, the observational and numerical methods of the

physical realm, and relegated to the legitimate tests of the moral

and metaphysical realm.

Again, there is furnished in the results of the study of physical

science itself, as pursued by its most gifted masters, a glorious

overthrow and neutralization of the moral and religious doubts

called out in its shallower votaries by their absorption in its

more superficial phases. The scientific men of the most profound

intellectual power and the most brilliant original genius, the

supreme heads of chemistry, dynamics and mathematics, have applied

to the phenomena of the material creation modes of observation and

instruments of reasoning before whose compelling efficacy the

whole frowning vastitude of the outer universe melts into ideal

points of force and forms of law. Everything in time and space is

reduced to molecular vibrations, regulated by the mental

conceptions of number, weight and measure. The reasonings of such

men as Oersted and Faraday on electricity and magnetism; of Sir

William Thomson and Clerk Maxwell on thermodynamics; the theories

of the greatest mathematicians, grasping all things in heaven and

earth with their irresistible calculus, literally using infinites

as toys, creating imaginary quantities, and, going through certain

operations with them, actually discovering new truths in the solid

domain of reality yield conceptions of order, beauty and

sublimity, and emotions of wonder, awe and delight, nowhere else

surpassed. They exalt the spectacle of nature into a vision of

poetic intelligence, and show the theorizing mind of man to be

akin to the creating mind of God. Thus, if skepticism as to the

deathless royalty of soul is bred in the physicist who constantly

stoops with the scalpel and the microscope, it is offset in him

who, with as steady a judgment, soars to the contemplation of the

ethereal medium with its lines of force traversing immensity and

vibrating timelessly along their whole length, loaded, for those

who can interpret them, with tidings of all that happens. Instead

of spirit being materialized, matter is spiritualized and nature

transfigured into the ideal home of ideal entities. Dumas, years

ago, asserted that hydrogen gas is but an etherealized metal. Just

now, it is said, Pictet has succeeded, under a pressure of six

hundred and fifty atmospheres, in actually crystallizing oxygen

and hydrogen. One has only to read such papers as those of Stallo

on the fundamental concepts of science to learn that if matter or

mind is ever to be lost, it will not be mind.

But there remains a more direct and more important way of

correcting the dismal or defiant doubts of immortality caused by

the inferior phases of materialistic study; and that is, by

bringing up to a correspondent fullness and intensity the counter

activity of the ideal powers. Let justice be done to the subject

as well as to the object. Over against the watching of clouds and

waves, the sorting of herbs, the weighing of metals, the measuring

of quantities, bring up the exercise of the mind on the treasures

of qualitative substance in its own proper sphere of reason and

love and faith. Admire the beautiful, love the good, obey the

true, worship the right, aspire to the highest, subordinate or

sacrifice everything base or wrong in a generous service of duty,

and thus nourish a consciousness of those ontological relations by

which the soul is rooted in the Godhead, and stimulate that

intuitive efflorescence of faith which grows out of progressive

fulfillment and which prophecies perpetuity of fulfillment. To say

the least, the subject is as real as the object, the contemplating

faculty as valid as the phenomenon it confronts. The teachings of

the soul rightly construed are as authentic as the teachings of

nature. And, some day in the future, a complete system of truth

developed from the central principle of the one by the subjective

method will be found to correspond perfectly with the complete

system of truth developed by the objective method from the central

principle of the other. As the objective scientific principle is

the persistence of force, the subjective scientific principle is

the potential infinity of individual spirit, each one the

equivalent of the all. What else than this can be the ultimate

meaning of the primal, universal, indestructible antithesis or

dual classification of being, the ego and the non ego, self and

not self, the former including each individual in his own

apprehension, the latter including all besides?

There is a philosophical authority which, for those incompetent to

judge for themselves, should properly take the place vacated by

the ecclesiastical authority, which, in our day, is plainly on the

wane. Multitudes no longer believe in the immortality of their

souls on the ground of the resurrection of Christ, or the

assertion of Scripture or creed. Shall they, then, deny it

altogether because the materialistic band clamor that it is a

delusion, and they themselves see no sufficient evidence for it?

There is a more appropriate alternative. Many theories in natural

philosophy have been exploded by the proof of their absurdity, and

the correct explanations are accepted on trust by the multitudes

incompetent to master their logical and mathematical grounds. Very

few understand the proofs of the chief laws of nature, but the

vast majority of men implicitly trust the assertions of those who

do know them. In like manner there is a legitimate sphere for

authority in moral and religious beliefs; only it should be the

authority of the competent and disinterested. Now, it is a fact

that the very greatest philosophers who have ever lived, the

preeminently imperial thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,

Anselm, Hegel, and the resplendent group of their peers, have

asserted as a necessary principle the real being and eternal

substantiality of the soul. Besides all the combinations of matter

that dissolve, all the phenomena that pass, they affirm the

existence of enduring entities, individual spirits, thinkers

conscious of their thoughts. In central calm, far within the

struggle and vex of the rolling elements, throned in its own

serene realm of law, lives the free, conscious soul, and will live

eternally, actualizing its potentialities. Nothing can

disintegrate it, because it is not an aggregate but a unity, not a

quantitative mass of matter, but a spaceless monad of power. It is

a closed circuit of thinking activity, impenetrable to everything

else. Spirits are the only solids, matter being endlessly

penetrable and transmutable.

We are all obliged to think of ourselves as entities, and not as

mere phenomenal series of states. There must be a substratum for

the affections of consciousness. All changes are changes of

something. It is true there is a mystery involved here which no

words can make clear; yet the more deeply one thinks and feels the

more intense will be his assurance that there is something in him

which thinks and feels, or rather that he himself is a something

which thinks and feels. The best conception we can get of the soul

is that it is a subject which is its own object and a mirror for

the inner reflection of all other objects. God is not an object,

because He is the actualized infinite Subject. His thoughts are

concrete creations, the objective realities of the universe

phenomenal and substantial. We are actually finite subjects, but

with a potential infinity, patterned in free correspondence with

Him. Our thoughts are subjective reflections of His, modified by

the contents of our facultative constitution and the peculiarities

of our historic experience. What constitutes my soul is the

potentiality of all states of consciousness, actual and latent,

past, present and future. It reveals itself to me, so to speak, in

my actual thoughts and feelings. So far as these are true and

good, they correspond with and represent the will of God, and must

share the fortunes of the Divine Reality with which they are

implicitly joined. Then my soul cannot be annihilated unless the

will of God is so far annihilated. But God is infinite being, and

there is nothing outside of or counter to infinite being to

destroy it. All evil is but defect or negation. I am only in so

far as I am positive reality. Nothing of me, therefore, can ever

perish, except my imperfections; and the thought of the perishing

of imperfections is a thought of joy. Welcome, then, be the

approach of death which shall cleanse and dislimit me into

unimprisonable divineness of being, the crystalline sphere of pure

intelligence and immortality!

The only real proof of immortality in the sight of the intellect,

is the perception of the necessity of self determining entities as

the causes and grounds of the facts of experience. A series of

states implies something of which they are states. There seems to

be no possible explanation or understanding of the phenomena which

confront our experience without the conception of ultimate

individualities, indestructible subject objects, centers of

spiritual activity, monistic selfhoods, conscious egos, each of

which distinguishes itself from every other, and contrasts itself

with the All. Now it is claimed that every thinker who reaches the

maturest stage of thought attains to this insight. It is the

imperial mark of a certain stage of knowledge. Here the supreme

thinkers, sceptered with final perception of the truth of their

own eternity, sit at ease, enthroned in the serene and lucid realm

of law, beyond the reach of the dark tempest of cavils and doubts.

And there is a larger company who on easier terms have attained

the same result. For, without this wearisome metaphysical hewing

of conclusions from the quarries of ontology, the good and pure,

who, in their loving obedience and aspiration, keep the harmonic

quickness and innocence of their intuitions uninjured, also have

an unshaken assurance that they live in God and shall share his

life forevermore. The mystics of every period seem in feeling to

have an immediate grasp of all that the greatest philosophers have

painfully conquered by speculation. These two classes may claim to

possess direct certitude of eternal life. All others must either

attain to the stage of development and mount of vision of these,

or receive the faith on their authority, or else be subject to

doubt and unbelief.

To accept the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on the

authority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints, is a

legitimate procedure perfectly in keeping with what the human race

does in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable of

proving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easily

appreciate and make practical application of the truths they have

affirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains are

scientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules are

implicitly followed by the common multitude. One form or

receptacle of authority after another may be superseded; but

authority itself always remains. And the true course for those to

pursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, or

church creed, or the resurrection of Christ, as a proof of the

future life of man, is not at once to abandon all belief in a

future state, but to accept the guidance of the most competent

independent thinkers in place of that of the most arbitrary

dogmatists. For unto all who do not arrogate to themselves a

transcendent competency to judge, the general consensus of the

thought and feeling of the world, clarified and interpreted by the

fittest few, will always be a grateful ground of reliance and

trust. And the verdict thus revealed is unequivocally in favor of

the doctrine of immortality.

There can be no changes independently of something which is

changed. Amidst all the changeable in us which passes and is

forgotten, there is something which stays and is inexpugnable. It

is our identity. That which appears in consciousness first, which

recurs oftenest, and which persists longest, is the most valid

object of belief. And what is that but the very consciousness, or

the subject as its own object? Surely, the one invariable

accompaniment of all the shifting states of consciousness is the

bare essential consciousness itself: this is, so to speak, the

unitary vessel containing all their varieties. This unquestionably

exists now. The burden of proof, then, as Bishop Butler long ago

showed, is on those who affirm its destruction in the article of

death. Consciousness is purely immaterial, as every one who has

passed beyond the most ignorant and childish stages of thought

must see. Merely because it is, in our present experience,

associated in time and space with a material organism, therefore

to declare that it is a dependent production of matter, or a

transient concomitant of the transient body, is a gratuitous

assertion with not one scintilla of evidence.

Even, for the moment, admitting it to be true that no argument of

irresistible cogency has yet been advanced to prove the

immortality of the soul, it is certain that no proof has ever

been given of its mortality. The very utmost that can be claimed

by any skeptic who fairly understands the whole case, is that the

different arguments, for and against, offset one another, and

leave the question in a neutral balance of suspense, just where it

was before the debate began. Many persons hold that the counter

reasonings do thus balance and annul one another. For them the

problem remains to be decided on other grounds than those of the

logical disputation which has proved inadequate to its settlement.

These other grounds are considerations of congruity, probability,

the prophetic preparations and demands of present experience. What

sort of a figure would the segments which we now see, compose, if

they were completed? What in the hidden future portions of our

destiny would be harmonic and complementary as related with the

parts here experienced? When the other modes of inquiry are

abandoned this mode remains. Its teachings are rich and impressive

in proportion to the greatness of the faculties and the wealth of

knowledge and love brought to its consideration. And thus we come

face to face with the fifth and last cause of the failing faith in

immortality confessed to characterize the present day.

That cause is the common inability to realize in the thoughts of

the mind, and to hold in the faith of the feelings, a conception

so vast, so mysterious, so remote from the usual routine of the

selfish trifles and petty notions which monopolize the powers and

fritter down the faculties of the average people of the nineteenth

century. The battle of sensualism, the scramble over material

interests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescent

struggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to the

ever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizing

discussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatal

to that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of passion, that

serene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, that

docile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fit

contemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that of

immortality. The grade of thought and scale of emotion ordinarily

characteristic of ordinary men are utterly out of keeping with the

inexpressible grandeur of themes like that of the divine kinship

and eternity of the soul. The reason and fancy, before they can be

competent to appreciate such truths, must be trained in the study

and worshipful meditation of subjects of commensurate mystery and

sublimity. It is no wonder that when minds and hearts familiar

only with houses and clothes and food, the trivial gossip and

vanity of the hour, are summoned to grasp the idea of spiritual

survival and an everlasting destiny of conscious adventures, they

are overwhelmed and helplessly fail to represent to themselves the

possibility of any such truth. This cause of doubt is very

prevalent and effective; for ever more and more in our age

conscious attention is turned away from states within and fixed

upon things without. The natural consequence is that the objective

world is arrogating the first place in consciousness, and the

subjective world is sinking into the secondary rank. Whatever

exalts the object at the expense of the subject tends to

materialism, unbelief in the separate being of the spirit. On the

other hand whatever gives the panoramic passage of subjective

states in the soul greater apparent vividness and tenacity than

belong to outer phenomena, tends to produce faith in the

independence and immortality of the spirit. Hence it is quite to

be expected that until our modern concentration on objective toil

and study and amusement reaches its destined climax and begins the

return career to subjective reason and feeling, the skepticism of

the age will increase.

Meanwhile the remedy for the evil is, first, to perceive it, and

then, to cultivate the kinds of experience calculated to

neutralize it. For the logical invalidity and fallaciousness of

the doubts concerning immortality, arising from the immense

disparity of such a belief with the mental habits of ignorant

earthlings and social parasites, appear from the fact that there

are others with whose experience and thought the doctrine has no

such disparity, but for whose spiritual range and haunt it is as

natural to believe it as to breathe. And, in explaining the

destiny of man, it is legitimate to take the most finished and

furnished specimens, not the abortive ones. There are grounds of

knowledge, domains of imagination, heights of nobility, familiar

to the most exalted characters, perfectly cognate and harmonious

with the conception of eternal life, and making the faith in it

fully as credible as the transcendent truths of science and

philosophy which have been actually demonstrated. Those who are

familiar only with the little affairs of sense, in narrow bounds

of time and space, may well gasp in despair and denial when the

bewildering contents of the doctrine of immortality are held

before them; but for all who have mastered what science reveals of

the objective world of nature, and what literature records of the

subjective world of soul, both these spheres furnish ample

illustrative examples and data to make the faith in every way

congruous with what else they know, and as easy as it is pleasing

to receive. Assuredly the belief resulting in this latter class

from their positive perception and correspondent desire and

persuasion, are, on every ground of reason or moral fitness, more

than a counterbalance for the unbelief resulting in the former

class from their negative experience and incompetency. If we

sought to estimate the possibility and destined fulfillment of

human nature when all its conditions shall have been perfected,

should we choose for the basis of our judgment the incapacity of

the lower specimens of man? or the capacity of the higher? After

considering the chief achievements of human genius, the mysterious

powers of the human soul now, the doctrine of immortality does not

seem too great and wonderful for belief; but, on the contrary, it

appears the coherent complement of the facts of the present.

Nothing can be more marvelous or imply greater glory for the

destiny of the individual being than the fact that each

consciousness is to itself the antithetical equivalent or balance

of the totality of being beside; since the whole universe, all

other beings, God himself, are known to the individual

consciousness only as revealed in itself through its personal

faculties. The slightest change in the subject is reported by a

correspondent change in objects. Heighten the internal activities

of the soul to a certain pitch, and the convictions they engender

will be so intense, and the experience so absorbing, as

irresistibly to sweep away all opposing doubts and fill every

craving with the triumphant flood of life. What overwhelming

revelations of the providence of God and eternal life, crowding

the cosmos at every point with the workings of poetic justice, may

thus be made to prepared spirits, only those who receive them

know. Paul said he was caught up into the third heaven and heard

unspeakable words. It is to be believed that such visions, while

often illusory, are sometimes genuine. A test to discriminate the

spurious and the authentic will one day be secured. Meanwhile it

is either a faithless faintheartedness or a vulgar arrogance to

omit from the data of our expected fate those thoughts, which,

though beyond the reaches of our souls, nevertheless irresistibly

allure our attention and enchain our affection; ideas belonging to

our nature, though transcending our experience, and, while

surpassing our faculties, still attracting us to our destiny. What

are presentiments but divine wings of the spirit fluttering toward

our unseen goal?

Again, the great metaphysicians, who have elaborated the

idealistic philosophy in so many forms, exhibit the mind of man to

us as superior to the cosmic spectacle it contemplates projected

in immensity. They portray the material creation as a phantasmal

show of mind, a phenomenal process and aspect of spirit,

indissoluble centers of consciousness alone having solid verity

and stay, while matter and force and times and places whirl and

pass, combine and dissolve.

Likewise the mathematicians, with their mighty calculus, translate

all quantities and qualities, all objects and operations, into

numerical symbols, and with these intellectual toys play the same

miraculous tricks that the Creator himself plays with the

originals. They symbolize purely imaginary quantities, bring them

into relations and pass them through certain operations, and

thereby discover truths which are found to have permanent

objective validity. It demonstrates, as said before, that the

filial mind which thus wanders in thought through the house of the

Father, and, everywhere making itself familiarly at home, disports

among His treasures, is of the same type with the parental Mind.

And now, still farther, that the cultivators of physical science

are pushing their discoveries and their theories to ultimates, we

begin to see the adamantine structure of material nature melting

into a system of ideal equivalents, vaporizing into an undulatory

ether, vanishing before our microscopes in immaterial bases of

thought, reason, law and will. The gases have just been first

liquified and then actually solidified, confirming the speculative

announcement long before made that oxygen and hydrogen are metals

volatilized. Many valuable and strange discoveries have been

reached in physical science by following prophetic declarations

made a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs of

intellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order of

atomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops and

snowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals and

flowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a tree

and of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artistic

works of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in the

production of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poem

And so, before the gaze of the accomplished and devout scientist,

matter is translated into terms of mind, rather than the reverse,

and the whole cosmos is transmuted into a divine laboratory of

ideal powers, a divine gallery of ideal pictures, a divine theater

for the eternal adventures of conscious spirits.

In mental conception man deals with mathematical infinites as

easily as with the pettiest objects, dilates a point to the

universe and shrinks the universe to a point, condenses eternity

into a moment or stretches a moment to eternity. It has been shown

that if correspondent diminution or enlargement in the faculties

of sense and intelligence and in all the forces concerned were

made, the whole stellar system and its contents might be dwarfed

into the bulk of a grain of sand, or so magnified that each grain

would fill the space now occupied by the whole, and no one would

perceive any change whatever in the scale. In reply to the

statement that nothing can act where it is not, it has been proved

that every atom is virtually omnipresent. It takes the entire

universe to constitute an atom, since the forces centered in each

atom are connected with the whole by the insunderable continuity

of all the laws of being. The science of molecular physics as

expounded by its latest masters is not less astounding than the

wildest soarings of transcendental metaphysics. For instance, it

is proved that if there be ultimate atoms their size must be so

small that it would require at least five hundred millions of them

to an inch in length. In a cubic inch of hydrogen gas, then, for

example, there are 125,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 one hundred

and twenty five septillions of atoms, moving with the inconceivable

velocity that is implied by their making thousands of millions

of changes of direction every second. The view of the dynamic s

tructure of the universe opened in this direction is as

appalling as that unveiled in the opposite direction by the

largest extension of the nebular hypothesis. He who can gaze here

with steady reason need not be staggered by the sublimest doctrine

of religion. Amazed at the spectacle of creative power and wisdom,

equally amazed at the discovering faculty of man, we feel it to be

incredible that he should have been made capable of such thoughts

only to be annihilated after a brief tantalization. Confronting

the immeasurable wilderness of divine glory, strewn all through

with prizes before which his soul burns with the unconsumable fire

of a god like ambition, man lifts his eye to worship and reaches

out his hand to receive. Is he merely taunted with the starry sky,

and mocked with an infinite illusion of progress, suddenly barred

with endless night and oblivion? Behold him emerging out of

nothingness, mastering his self conscious identity, climbing over

the rounds of symbolic experience and language through the heights

of knowledge and love. Strange, helpless, sublime prince of the

universe, beggar of God, when he has attained the summit of

illimitable perception, holding immortal joys in full prospect,

shall he be dashed back into nonentity? Is it not fitter that he

be welcomed by triumphant initiation into the family of the

deathless Father?

Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was a

cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and

contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now

that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of

Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers,

holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose

it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass of

incandescent hydrogen. From such a background of accomplished fact

he seems really to have a right to peer forth into the unbounded

future and promise himself an unbounded destiny. The repetition of

such a progress, nay much less, it may not unreasonably be

imagined would raise the curtains from unsuspected secrets, bring

the family of intelligences scattered over all worlds into

conscious communication, and accomplish the deliverance of the

whole creation travailing and groaning together unto this day for

the redemption of the creature. What a splendid, almost incredible

task man has already achieved in disentangling the apparent

astronomic motions and converting them into the real ones. How

immensely sublimer and more complex is the position of man on this

planet than it seemed to the primitive savage, who knew only what

his crude senses taught him, although, all the while, the moon was

circling about him twenty five hundred miles an hour, and he was

whirling with the revolving earth a thousand miles an hour, and

spinning around the sun over thirty thousand miles an hour, and

swooping with the whole solar system through the blue void with a

still swifter gyre in a yet vaster cycle! This is demonstrated

physical fact. Its harmonic correlate in the spiritual sphere

would be nothing less than a lease of eternal existence for the

soul which sees endless invitations ahead, and exults at the

prospect of an eternal pursuit of them, its reason and affection

affiliated with those of the whole divine household of immortals.

Two or three generations ago it would have been more inconceivable

that men a hundred miles apart could audibly converse together, as

they now do by means of the telephone, than it is at this day to

believe that communication may at some future time be opened

between the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of Sirius

through the vibrations of the ethereal medium.

Futhermore, the idea of the infinite God, in possession of which

man finds himself, is a warrant for his immortality. There cannot

be more in an effect than was in its cause, though there may be

less. We perceive intelligence, orderly purpose, as well as power,

in nature. We find in ourselves all the explicit attributes and

treasures of consciousness. Reasoning back by indubitable steps we

come to an uncaused, unlimited, infinite Being, the underived and

eternal source of all that is. This idea in our minds of a Being

of absolute perfection, whose boundless consciousness as being

necessarily indivisible must be totally present at every point of

infinitude, is the charter of our own divine nature and heirship.

For we can become, even here, friends and companions of this

omnipresent One, of whose essence and attributes everything below

is but a defective transcript or dimmed revelation. This idea of

Himself is the gift of God to us. To suppose that we are capable

of originating it implies a greater miracle than the one it seeks

to account for, and really puts ourselves in the place of God. Can

we imagine that we are the creators of God? If the absolute

noumenal Power beyond all phenomena be unknowable, it cannot

contain less, but must contain more than all the attributes of the

material and spiritual creation which has proceeded thence. The

noblest and best spirits of all lands and ages have walked in full

fellowship with this Being, seeking supremely to serve and love

Him in the subjection of self will and in the doing of good. Many

a nameless saint, in a pure consecration, has heroically thought

and suffered and aspired, worn out life in slow toils or offered

it up in sharp sacrifice, for the good of fellow creatures, as a

tribute to God, and exhaled the last breath in a prayer of love

and trust. Such faithful servants and comrades must be dear to the

Infinite Spirit, and it is natural to believe that He will keep

them with him forever. When Christ, in self sacrificing love,

submitted to death on the cross, saying, "Father, into Thy hands I

commit my spirit," he who can believe that the magnanimous

sufferer was disappointed, blotted out and extinguished, thus

reveals the grade of his own insight, but does not refute the

greater hope of nobler seers. It seems as if the idea of God, with

loving faith and obedience to its requirements, planted in a soul

which had not inherited immortality would straightway begin to

develop it there. The atmosphere of eternity alone befits a nature

which feels itself living in the companionship of God. Everything

subject to decay cowers into oblivion from before the idea of that

august, incorruptible presence. The fear of death is but the

recoil of the immortal from mortality. When man voluntarily faces

death without fear, even courting martyrdom with a radiant joy, it

is because there is in him, deeper than consciousness, a mystic

knowledge that he is essentially eternal and cannot perish. He who

freely sacrifices anything thereby proves himself superior to that

which he sacrifices. Man freely sacrifices his life. Therefore he

is immortal.

The ancient Semitic philosopher and poet who wrote the book of

Job, brooding on the strange problem of life and death, murmured,

"Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" With each successive

generation, for many ages, countless millions have dissolved and

vanished into the vast, dumb mystery. Now, the spectator,

remembering all this, stands beneath the dome of midnight,

imploringly breathes the mystic sigh, "Man giveth up the ghost,

and where is he?" The only responses is the same dread silence

still maintained as of old. And, in a moment more, he who breathed

the wondering inquiry is himself gone. Whither? Into the vacant

dark of nothingness? Into the transparent sphere of perfect

intelligence? The sublimity of the demand seems to ally the finite

questioner with the infinite Creator; and, with a presentiment of

marvelous joy, we look beyond the ignorant veil at the close of

earth, and hold that eternity itself will not exhaust the

possibilities of the soul, whose career shall be kept from

stagnation by constant interspersals of death and birth,

refreshing disembodiments from worn out forms and reincarnations

in new.

If this life on the earth, where man feels himself a stranger, be

his all, how superfluously he is equipped with foresights and

longings that outrun every conceivable limit! Why is he gifted

with powers of reason and demands of love so far beyond his

conditions? If there be no future for him, why is he tortured with

the inspiring idea of the eternal pursuit of the still flying goal

of perfection? Is it possible that the hero and the martyr and the

saint, whose experience is laden with painful sacrifices for

humanity, are mistaken? and that the slattern and the voluptuary

and the sluggard, whose course is one of base self indulgence, are

correct? Is it credible that, with no justifying explanation

hereafter, it should be ordained that the more gifted and

disinterested a man is the more he shall uselessly suffer, from

his sympathetic carriage of the greater share in the sin and

sorrow of all his race? No, far back in the past there has been

some dark mystery which yet flings its dense shadows over our

history here; and in the obscurity we cannot read its solution.

But there is a solution. And when in some blessed age to come

mankind shall outgrow their discords and be reconciled, so that

their divinest living member can become the focalizing center of

their collective inspiration, through him the truth will be

revealed. The most inspired individual can only in a degree

anticipate his age. At a certain distance he is tethered by his

connections with the race. They must be near the goal before he

can deliver the final message. Inspiration and revelation are as

real as the sensuous method of outer knowledge. Spirit or

consciousness, as that which is its own evidence, has a more than

mathematic validity. When men purely love one another, and, with

supreme loyalty, seek truth, ignorance and delusion will melt away

before the encroaching illumination from God, and the dominion of

death will be abolished.

That the human mind shall be the victim of death is incongruous

with its rank. The atheistic scientist who imagines that the

energy of the stellar creation is gradually dissipating, so that

the whole scheme must at last perish; and who sees the soul, then,

like a belated butterfly, fall frozen on the boundary of a dead

universe, refutes his own dismal creed by the grandeur of the

power shown in thinking it. The might of love, the faculty of

thought, the instinct of curiosity, are insatiable; and that which

remains wooing them to grasp it, is infinite. And, after all is

said, it seems certain that we are either discerpted emanations

and avatars of God suffering transient incarnations for a purpose,

and then to be resumed, immortal in his immortality; or else we

are separate and inherent entities, immortal in ourselves. The

former faith ought to satisfy the proudest ambition. The latter

faith yields every motive for contentment and aspiring obedience.

Man, forever feeding on the unknown, is the mysterious guest of

God in the universe. We cannot believe that, the hospitality of

the infinite Housekeeper becoming exhausted, He will ever blow out

the lights and quench the guests.

CHAPTER VI.

THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE DESTINY OF MAN.

A COMPANION of Solomon once said to him, "Give me, O king of

wisdom, a maxim equally applicable on all occasions, that I may

fortify myself with it against the caprices of fortune." Solomon

reflected a moment, then gave him, in these words, the maxim he

sought: "This, too, shall pass away." The courtier at first felt

disappointed, but, meditating awhile, perceived the pertinent and

profound meaning hidden in the transparent simplicity of the

words. Are you afflicted? Be not despondent or rash, This, too,

shall pass away. Are you blessed? Be not elated or careless, This

too shall pass away. Are you in danger? in temptation? in glory?

Still, for your proper guidance, in relation to each one,

remember; This too shall pass away. And so on, under every

diversity of situation in which man can be placed. Whatever

restraint, whatever encouragement, whatever consolation he needs,

it is all contained in the profound thought, This too shall pass

away.

This maxim for all times needs to be supplemented by a

corresponding maxim for all persons. There is a truth constantly

suited for the variety of immortal souls, as the foregoing one is

for the variety of temporal changes. Let us see what that truth is

and set it in a fitting aphorism.

The desires of the human soul are boundless. Nothing can satisfy

its wishes by fulfilling them and circumscribing there a fixed

limit. It would devour the whole creation, and hungrily cry for

more. Whatever extension of power or fruition it can conceive, it

wants for its own, and frets if deprived of it. Now, if the spirit

of the Creator is in the creature, this illimitable passion of

acquisition cannot be a mere mockery. It must be a hint of the

will of God and of the destiny of his child in whom He has

implanted it. It is prophetic of something awaiting fulfillment.

But what is the prophecy, and how is it to be fulfilled? The

answer to this question will give us that maxim of eternal

humanity which accords with the maxim of transient fortune. And

thus it reads: Over all the things for which men struggle with

each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of struggle,

which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one thing is the

whole universe! Be not baffled by the appearance of transcendental

mysticism in this maxim, as the ancient inquirer was by the

appearance of commonplace in his, but seek its significance.

A son is an heir of his father. All men are sons of God, though

only a few, and that in varying degree, are distinctly conscious

as yet of their sonship. But, despite their ignorance, all are

tending, more or less swiftly, toward the goal of their nature and

inheritance.

There are exclusive prizes which men can monopolize: and they

fight with one another for these, because the more some have the

less others can obtain. There are also inclusive prizes, or modes

of holding and enjoying property which do not interfere with

universal participation, with universal, undivided ownership. In

these no one need have any the less because every one has all.

This is the region of reason, imagination, affection, the empire

of the soul. The more one knows of mathematical truth, poetic

beauty or moral good, the easier it is, not the harder, for others

to know and enjoy as much or more. In this divine domain no

monopoly or conflict is possible, because the outward moving fence

of each consciousness, retreating and vanishing before its

conquests of experience, is a vacuum with respect to that of every

other. They overlap and penetrate one another as if they were

mutually nonexistent. For example, the pleasure any one takes in a

picture, or in a play, does not lessen the pleasure which remains

for the other spectators; but, on the contrary, adds to it if they

have sympathy.

Now, the all inclusive prize of desire, the very secret of the

Godhead namely, the power of taking a full pure joy in every form

of being, in every substance and phenomenon of the creation is

forever wooing every soul; and every soul, in proportion to its

advancement, is forever embracing it just as freely as if no other

soul existed, yet has the zest of its enjoyments endlessly varied

and heightened by mutual contemplations and reflections of those

of all the rest. Such is the superiority of the disinterested

spirit over the selfish flesh, of the inner world over the outer

world, of good over evil.

Mental ownership is sympathetic and universal, physical

appropriation antagonistic and individual. We hate and oppose our

fellows that with hand and foot we may monopolize some wretched

grains of good, while God is inviting every one of us with our

mind and heart to accept as fast as we can his whole undivided

infinitude of good. The universe is the house of the Father; the

true spirit of the family is disinterested, and consequently every

child is heir of the whole even as the apostle Paul said, joint

heir with Christ. Register, then, deeply in memory, side by side

with the historic maxim for all times, This too shall pass away!

the religious maxim for all souls. Over those things for which men

struggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of

struggle, which belongs indivisibly to every man, and that one

thing is the whole universe! Then, should you ever feel vexed or

disheartened by the irritations and failures you meet in your

journey through the evanescent masquerade of this world, pause and

say to yourself, Is it worthy of me, while the entire realm of

existence asks me to appropriate it in ever expansive possession,

to be angry or sad because some infinitesimal speck of it does not

grant me as much of itself as I crave?

The more things we love the richer we are. The fewer things we

care for the freer we are. O blessed wealth and wretched freedom,

how shall we perfect and reconcile them? This is the secret: If we

love the divine and eternal in everything, and care not for the

limiting and perishable evil connected with it, then we shall at

once be both rich and free. The former practice educates our

powers; the latter emancipates them. The true use of renunciation

is as a means for larger fulfillment. Detach from lower and lesser

objects in order to attach to higher and greater ones. Be always

ready to renounce the meaner at the invitation of the nobler. The

soul, like a grand frigate, may be loosely tied by a thousand

separate strings, but should be held firm by one cable. Our

relations to fellow creatures are those threads; our supreme

relation to God, that cable. Those are the gossamer of time; this

the adamant of eternity.

The lame man cries, O, that I could walk! He who can walk says, O,

that I could fly! If he could soar, he would sigh, O, that I were

omnipresent, and therefore had no need to move! The end of one

wish is but the beginning of another; and the craving of every

human soul, let loose in sincere expression, is absolutely

illimitable. It always comes, in the last analysis, to this; every

one really longs to be God. Therefore, unless the rational

creation is mendacious, to be deified, is, in some mystical but

true sense, the final destiny of all souls. Every one, in its

consciousness fully developed and harmonized, shall become a focus

of universal being, a finite reflex of God, the infinite God

himself remaining eternally the same unescapable and incomprehensible

mystery as ever.

There are, therefore, two supreme maxims for souls conditioned in

time and space but destined for eternity and infinity a maxim of

comfort for those who suffer, and a maxim of impulse for those who

aspire. The one, to be used in view of every fear, every evil or

limit. This, too, shall pass away! The other, to be used in view

of every insatiable desire, Over all those things for which men

struggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of

struggle, which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one

thing is the whole universe!

Nothing but the Absolute Good is everlasting: and that must belong

to all who, being essential personalities, are superior to death.

Blessed, blessed, then, are they who hunger and thirst after God;

for, by a real transubstantiation assimilating Him, they shall as

divinely live forevermore. They shall cease to say any more of

anything, This, too, shall pass away! because the infinite God

shall have said to each of them, Son, thou art ever with me, and

all that I have is thine!

If the view above marked out, a view in many respects so sublime

and satisfactory, a view which goes so far to explain the

mysteries, reconcile the contradictions, and transfigure the evils

of our transient life and lot below be not true, it must either be

because some other higher and better view is the truth in which

case we certainly ought to be contented or else the creative and

providential plan of God is inferior to the thought of one of his

creatures. It is not possible for me to suppose that a speculative

theory of my brain can transcend in harmony and beneficence the

design of the infinite God. Could it do so, then, in reality, I

should be a higher being than He. I should veritably have

dethroned Him and vaulted into his place. Is not that a pitch of

impiety and absurdity too great even for the pride of man,

insurgent atom of criticising assumption, set, baffled at every

point, amidst the awful immensity of existence? Here, then, is

rest. Either our highest view is the truth, or the truth is higher

and better than that. For to think that his thought is superior to

the purpose of God, thus making himself the real God, is too much

for the extremist human egotist within the limits of sanity.

Therefore, until a better theory is propounded, we hold that the

destiny of the soul is to become, through the progressive

actualization of its potential consciousness, a free thinking

center of the universe, an infinitesimal mirror of God. The

adventures of the different souls, full of inexhaustible curiosity

and relish in the mutually revealing contacts of their degrees of

development and originalities of personal character and treasure,

constitute the endless drama of spiritual existence within the

phenomenal theater of the material creation. And still the

infinite One serenely smiles on the troubled play of the eternal

Many; because the psychological kaleidoscope of their experience

is a continuous improvisation of justice, weaving the fate of Each

with the fates of All, and transfusing the monotonous unity of the

Same with the zestful variety of the Other.