dead. They killed his body, but the body is just the mask; that is why
great souls are unknown on earth. Jesus still lives. I cannot tell
if he spoke or not, or how he appeared or disappeared, but the word,
'Mary,' sounded just as he always spoke, and I saw him as distinctly
as I see you now. His attitude and movement were such that I supposed
he had come to life until he disappeared. The body is not the person,
Ruth. It is the form that we wear; it is ever dying, dying while the
unseen yet lives. Love me, sweet, dear Ruth, and let me go. John, come;
kiss me and say you will never cease to love. Dear ones, you must
not weep when I am gone. Think of me as living, as one who can still
commune, influence, comfort and help you when mystery darkens all your
ways."
Softly the fading flower swooned away, her lips parting and eyes
closing; then, strangely, a shadowy movement brightened her face and
a little flush came to her cheeks; while John and Ruth, in silence,
awaited the death angel.
Three days' journey brought the mourners to the hillside city of
Nazareth, where Magdalene had so often shocked the sanctimonious with
her naughty pranks.
The tide had turned, harsh criticism had changed to love, as from
Nazareth, Endor, Nain and Cana, together with the throng from the west
shore, they sadly approached the hillside home of Aunt Susanna, where,
near the close of day, in the old garden, they laid to sleep the form
of Mary Magdalene.
Here, when the tourist visits the ruins of Capernaum, where Jesus met
rebuff, they mention with pride Peter in prison, Paul before Agrippa
and John on the Isle of Patmos, while they never mention the heroic
maid to whom the Gate Beautiful first swung ajar.
THE PRICKETT HOME
Goshen, Ind., May 18, 1902.
My dear M. A.: I will now reply to yours, received a few days ago.
Yes, I hope our wedding day will be bright and sunny, and that
sunshine and affection may be with us as we journey together.
I have never seen a mountain, and if I appear green to your people
when we reach Connecticut, you must excuse me.
I am feeling somewhat depressed this evening, for my sister Minerva
and I have been over to Solomon's Creek today, visiting our old home
on the farm.
The enclosed is a picture of our old home, gotten up of late, but it
represents us children as we were years ago when we were all at home.
Now mother and James are gone to their long home; father is married
again; the farm is sold, but still it seems like home.
In imagination we were children again; Mahala, Minerva and I. We
were romping in the pastures, woods and fields; climbing pear trees,
gathering grapes, currants and cherries; and I told Minerva that I
could almost hear Jeff and the other boys laughing at us when the
naughty buck sheep chased us onto the haystack, our only safe retreat.
The old maple trees, from which we made sugar, are there and many of
the other trees, old fences and the like look natural. We talked of
how our brothers used to fit us out with hooks and bait to go fishing
in the creek, where our anticipation far exceeded our realization;
that is, as far as fish were concerned, but really, we did sometimes
get a bite.
[Illustration: PRICKETT HOME.
FATHER AND MOTHER, JEFFERSON, JAMES, WILLIAM AND GEORGE, MINERVA, MARY
AND MAHALA.]
We talked of how father always brought the minister home to dinner
Sunday, and how mother had to fly around waiting on them.
All these old times seem to come back to us in a sort of day dream, as
this evening Minerva, Cash and I are in their beautiful home here in
Goshen. You and I will soon be in ours in Oak Park. I know we shall
enjoy ourselves in the home which you are building for us, which we
went out to see.
I wish I might talk with you instead of writing. Shall anxiously await
your reply.
Good-night,
Your Mary.
OURSELVES
We are strange beings; our journey through life is a wonderful career.
Through unfolding years of childhood, later literary pursuits and life
experience, we hasten forward, aspiring to reach our day-dream fancies.
When about forty we seem to rest, reflect and soliloquize: "Who am I;
what am I; where from; where bound; why do I enjoy, and why do I weep?
How all these unseen emotions if my feelings are not controlled by an
invisible person who knows, thinks and dictates?"
Reason and science teach that we are complex beings, living on the
outside of a world which holds us from falling off by a force called
gravity.
Our abode, our home world, is so far from other worlds that we have
no communication with their inhabitants. In fact, we do not know that
other worlds are inhabited by beings standing around on their hind
legs like ourselves. We simply know that our world is voyaging among
millions of other worlds, which, at certain periods of their life-day,
must resemble the condition of our world today, for their elements and
movements are similar to ours.
Apparently the entire material universe, of which our bodies form a
part, is actuated by an invisible force of push. Everything is moving
on, giving place and taking place, cohesion followed by dissolution.
The velocity of this continued material movement is governed by
conditions. On one hand the mountains, or earth's age wrinkles, rise so
slowly that the changes of thousands of years may be imperceptible,
while, on the other, the velocity of the molecular forces astound
us, for we are taught that the electrons in our own bodies, and all
other material substance, are continually darting around the corners
of the atoms at the rapidity of more than one hundred thousand miles
per second. This statement seems incredible, except when we consider
telegraphy. In that, even if vibration is assumed, something travels
over the entire distance; or, something awakes something else, which,
in turn, arouses the next over the entire course. This astounding proof
encourages us in our faith in infinity and God.
Truly, death does not end the commotion, for, when we bury our dead the
molecules begin escaping up through the gravel to gain their freedom,
and it may require thousands of years or but a few seconds; in the end
all have flown away into the sweet, pure atmosphere, and the form has
disappeared.
This strange inquiry does not end with the study of the physical
system, for, as stated, we find we are possessed by something
invisible, and yet personal, to ourselves. That which loves, approves,
decides, reasons, knows right from wrong and wills to do. This
self-evident, mysterious thing we may be allowed to designate as self,
or soul.
WILLIAM JAMES, OF HARVARD
For information concerning these mysteries we turn to public
instructors of our country and Europe, and find that the higher
branches of education are controlled by men who teach that man has no
soul, or invisible guide. What we call soul action is nothing more than
reflex action from brain compound, aroused by external stimuli.
A sample of these teachings can be found in the works of William James,
Professor of Psychology in Harvard University of Cambridge, Mass.,
from where agnostic youths return home from college to sympathize with
father and mother, who are so old-fashioned and ignorant as to actually
believe they have a soul to save.
In James' works, of about 1400 pages, issued in 1902, which are
considered standard in Europe and the United States, we find, Volume 1,
Page 348:
"The soul, however, when carefully scrutinized, guarantees no
immortality; therefore I feel perfectly free to discard the word soul
from the rest of my books. The reader who finds any comfort in the idea
of the soul is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it."
Volume 2, Page 572: "My own belief is that the question of free will is
insoluble."
Page 576: "We can, therefore, leave the free will question out of our
account."
Page 108: "The entire nervous system is nothing but a system of paths
between a sensory terminous and a muscular glandular."
Page 179: "Every individual cell has its own consciousness, which no
other cell knows anything about."
Page 291: "A man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his,
not only his body, but his clothes."
Page 296: "Self, not personality, unity or pure ego."
Page 339: "Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each thought dies
away or is replaced."
Page 401: "Thought itself is a thinker."
Page 554: "Let us try as we will to express this cerebral activity in
exclusive mechanical terms. I, for one, find it quite impossible--the
soul presents nothing herself; and creates nothing."
Page 656: "The retention of the experience (memory) is nothing more
or less than the brain paths which associate the experience with the
occasion and the recall."
Volume 2, Page 487: "The only ends that follow immediately upon our
willing seem to be the movement of our bodies."
Page 495: "Why any state of consciousness should precede a movement we
do not know."
Volume 1, Page 64: "The highest centers do probably contain nothing
but arrangements for representing impressions and movements, and other
arrangements for coupling the activities of these arrangements, which
in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge occurs."
Page 29: "Can we tell precisely in what the feelings of the central
active self consists? When I forsake general principles and grapple
with particular it is difficult for me to detect any pure spiritual
elements at all."
Page 107: "The currents, once in, must find their way out. In getting
out they leave their track. The only thing they can do, in short, is
to deepen old paths or make new ones, and the whole plasticity of the
brain sums itself up in two words, when we call the brain an organ in
which currents passing in from the sense organs make paths which do not
easily disappear."
The reader will here observe that James refers to motor discharges and
brain paths as though he actually believed, or that there was evidence,
that such things existed.
All through his works he quotes freely from agnostic and atheistic
authors who have been attacking religion for about three hundred years,
from which I will copy samples:
_Spinoza_: "Extension is invisible thought, thought is invisible
extension. Man is not free-willed--God neither thinks nor creates."
_John Locke_: "Whatever any man may know, or reasonably believe in, or
even conceive, is dependent on human experience."
_David Hume_: "Ideas are but weakened copies of impressions."
_Herbert Spencer_: "No idea or feeling arises save as the result of
some physical force expended in producing it."
The teachings of this school of instructors are peculiar, inasmuch
as no such ambiguity concerning reason or will power has heretofore
been taught at large or sanctioned by any class of instructors in the
history of our world. The attempt to shelter under the wing of the
ancient Greeks is plainly a misconstruction, for the wise Greek bowed
in wonder before unknown cause.
_Pythagoras_, 582 B. C., used as the base of his arguments
transmigration of the soul. One of his expressions was: "The soul is a
harmony chained to the body."
_Socrates_: "Design proves that existence is God."
_Aristotle_: "Thinking or thought is God Theology--Soul always thinking
is immortal."
Thus I might quote from deep thinkers from Zoroaster down to our times.
If one feels disposed to study the works of those self-styled liberal
exponders from Spinoza to James, they will find their arguments running
essentially in the same groove, virtually this: Animals, including men,
are not possessed by an invisible guide. That something which discerns
between right and wrong and dictates to the body whether it should
follow the path of desire or virtue, they absolutely ignore. Because
they cannot comprehend the mysteries of the soul, they dwell upon and
cling to tangible material effects, actually assuming effect without
cause. They disallow that the good Samaritan and the Levite had exactly
the same exterior stimuli. They are like the woman at Jacob's well, who
could comprehend the well and mountain, but could not comprehend the
invisible spring. She awoke when told how her secrets were known, but
they awake not, as the result of intention.
James makes a feeble attempt to prove that matter thinks when he says:
"Every individual cell has its own consciousness, which no other cell
knows anything about--associated by brain paths."
What profound reasoning; think of it. Betts tells us that there are
three thousand million cells, or neurons, in an adult nervous system;
then think of the paths leading from one cell to the other. We learn
that light, or electricity, would travel around our world eight times
in one second; I wonder, if at the same rate of speed, how long it
would take an exterior stimulus to cover the distance over one of his
brain paths, from cell to cell.
"Oh," but one says, "Richardson, you do not understand James."
Allowed, but if a man of my experience does not understand materialism,
how is a youth of twenty years expected to understand it?
Man cannot explain memory, but he knows it is the principle in the
ego, or soul. To illustrate: In a crowd I overhear a voice. I say to
the talker, "I recognize your voice, but I cannot place you." "Think
again," he says. Now, I start back over life's trail, listening to
voices, one-two-twenty-forty years, then I say, "your name is Edwin
Pease." "Yes," he says, "we were boys together fifty years ago."
Did this familiar voice, the true External Stimulus, awaken something
which existed, or did it create something in my brain?
James calls this a motor discharge, which we will admit, but he wavers
when he says, "Why any state of consciousness should precede a movement
we do not know." Then he adds, "The soul presents nothing herself and
creates nothing."
Exterior Stimuli, he assumes, awakens the sinews, which in turn cause
the body to act. Do not External Stimuli cause the vegetable to act!
Go set your little geranium in the south window and see how soon it
turns its pretty face to the sun. These acts may receive their origin
in the law of inclination, permitted but not emitted, while every act
of a sane animal is an exhibition of intention. Exterior Stimuli are
individual causes. Intentional response is of invisible individual
origin. Reflex action would be nothing but continued Exterior Stimuli.
The invisible actor is the man; see him out on the wings of the soul
in the far away Eternity, weighing the stars, predicting their course,
calculating their velocity and testing their elements.
See our Edison bottling up the lightning's wild vim and causing it,
in its attempt to regain liberty, to serve man silently and safely.
Would the Stimuli which cause Edison to invent cause any other man of
the same experience and education to evolve the same results? Answer
yes, and you expose your weakness. Answer no, and you establish the
mysterious, invisible thinking soul.
Materialism is an educational attempt to compel the religious world
to prove that which they do not profess to comprehend. Knowledge is
the accumulation of past earthly experience. Send a weakling through
college and he has obtained knowledge, but he is the same simple Simon.
Wisdom is innate; it consists of individual ability to comprehend. It
is peculiar to each self, and cannot be obtained through experience or
education.
According to James, self is the body, clothes and surroundings.
According to Genesis it is the image of God. Is God an animal? Jesus
said to the Samaritan woman: "God is spirit." Is Jesus authority? Man's
body, wealth and surroundings are not even his, they are simply under
his control for a season. Self is that strange quality which designates
one person from another. Memory and self are closely connected. It may
be that the soul possesses memory of experience in other worlds, which,
like all absent memory, awaits recall.
Sleep represents a mysterious condition of the soul. When the veil
of consciousness begins to vanish one enters a sphere which is not
controlled by reason, but rather by emotion; which, in dreaming, is
often very intense and dictates wildly.
The lower animals are possessed of a soul, but if they have a sense
of right and wrong it is undeveloped, in fact, the connecting link
between man and beast may be consciousness of wrong.
Faith is an easy couch on which to repose; as a bridge it spans dark
rivers of uncertainty, but it requires no faith to believe in the soul.
Even Spinoza must have observed that desire, reason and conscience are
under the control of a distant power which can brush them all aside and
go on its way, but it does not control memory.
Unconsciousness, whether in sleep or in death, ought not to frighten
us. If in sleep it does not impair memory, it does not in death, as
they are both simply the veil which shuts off our view.
In short, the soul appears through the body as its organ, giving us a
view of its wonder through the flashlight of sensibility, one view at a
time and no more.
In some mysterious, incomprehensible way the past travels with the
present. Memory, anticipation and dreams are often far more real than
when face to face with animal activity.
We cannot comprehend first cause; result is our only guide, but we
dimly comprehend the apparent steps from the mineral to the spiritual.
Mineral life is inspiring in that it represents the star-lit
Eternity into which we gaze in wonder and contemplate the incessant
transformation.
Vegetable life creeps softly after, in obedience to the law of
inclination, the roots search in darkness for moisture while the
foliage turns to the morning sun in gladness.
Animal life cuts clear from vegetable moorings mysteriously equipped
with an invisible guide.
GLADSTONE
Spiritual life is the soul unincumbered by material bondage.
To prove that extinction or enfeeblement of the body does not impair
the soul, we will consider the life of Gladstone, for if we find an
isolated case whose mind did not weaken along with the body, it is
positive proof that all so-called dotage or drowsiness of the aged is
simply the effect of the live soul impeded in its effort to recall
familiar occurrences through impaired organs. This is obvious from the
fact that when the object has been recalled the spiritual vision of the
object appears in all its original minuteness.
Everyone who reads knows that Gladstone when he carried the Home
Rule Bill in the House of Commons, at the age of eighty-four, was as
elegant, scrutinizing, and powerful in his debates as when forty-four
years old. Still at that age his sight, hearing, power of recall of
names, and tottering form were incessantly passing away.
Is not this evidence that two distinct agencies were at the time
involved, life and death.
According to James' no-soul theory, his speech was involuntary reflex
action, governed by neither will nor memory, while according to reason
the spirit which controlled this wonderful man's feeble, tottering form
was as clear and bright as it had been in days gone by.
Falling asleep in death is not a new venture. We are unconscious
through life of all we know except as momentary knowledge comes forth
through the organs, which in sleep as in death are unconscious of
surrounding existence.
Jesus said, "I go that I may wake him out of sleep." "She is not dead
but sleepeth."
If man is simply a creation of animated matter, he dies like a
vegetable, if he is a dual creature, soul and body, when one part
ceases to be, the other is not self, but if man is a spiritual being
temporarily inhabiting and partially controlling a creation of
animation the dissolution of the animated form must set him free and
leave the spiritual being intact.
In memory, of childhood days, we apparently go back and view the scenes
again, but if we really did go back we would see them as they are and
not as they were, so we must give up that theory.
The most prevalent materialistic doctrine is that memory is an
impression of the occurrences stamped on the brain. This theory when
turned upon itself plainly establishes the invisible soul as the being
who discerns the impressions.
The most modern atheistic theory is that memory is not a retained
impression, but rather a new creation caused by immediate external
stimuli. See Volume 1, page 649, of James' Psychology.
As all sane expressions are based on foreknowledge, this theory assumes
that the cold exterior stimuli at the motor discharge instantly
re-create the experience of our entire passed life.
This fallacy, together with the brain path theory, proves that excess
of possessions coupled with classical education creates degeneracy.
Under the guise of philosophy and science these instructors are not
only attacking the church but the vital spark of life.
[Illustration: ARTHUR RICHARDSON AND HIS TWINS.]
I have spent years in the principal parts of the world studying the
people and their modes of worship and I have found that all religions
are one and beautiful in that they teach that at death the soul will
be free. The righteous and wicked will be separated and our future
destination will depend upon our personal motives while living in the
body.
Whether our soul theory be a myth, mystery or truism, one thing is
obvious, those living under the conviction that their apparent secret
motives are in some way actually known, and will stand for or against
them at death, will lead more pure lives, and make better parents,
citizens and neighbors than those who imbibe materialism through
faithless instructors who apparently hope there will be no reckoning
day.
The immortal soul has been the staff of hope on which frail humanity
has leaned for ages. The American Indian stood in the evening gloom,
shading his brows with his feeble hand as he tried to look over the
cold waves of death just to get a glimpse of the unexplored happy
hunting ground. John, while on the isle of Patmos invented pearly gates
and golden streets. He had caught the symbolic mode of teaching from
Jesus in that ideas transformed into object lessons are more easily
comprehended.
Jesus taught the soul theory from start to finish. "The kingdom of God
cometh not by observation--the kingdom of God is within you." "Fear not
them which kill the body but rather fear Him who is able to destroy
both body and soul in Hell." "It is the spirit that quickeneth, the
flesh profiteth nothing." "The words I speak unto you are spirit and
are life." Still he illustrated his ideas through object lessons.
Many who do not profess actually believe in the immortality of the
soul. When unprofessing parents weep at the death of their sweet babe;
they somehow believe that after life's dark storms are all passed, they
will find that their pet has been in the care of loved ones who have
gone before.
Any thoughtful person when observing their hand must discern two
distinct forces in existence, spiritual and material or visible and
invisible. And that the invisible is the force which knows and drives
the material. Thus, as the exterior stimuli through the ear or other
senses awaken the reason, so the invisible through the different
functions of the brain emit their conclusion, based on world experience
and scrutinized by the spirit, or a God-given power we call reason,
which is often swayed by sly will power.
The aged are continually calling up minor incidents of forty years ago,
while yesterday's events evade recall. Why is this?
It is not that the obscurity of vision, confusion of results and
uncertainty of doubt which befogs life today darkened the path in the
same way fifty years ago, but time has removed the obscurity and the
original appears. Could we live another fifty years, might not the
cloud which now befogs our path have vanished and we again remember the
glance of recognition of yesterday, which now seems hard to recall.
No one contends but that our journey of life is traveled in utter
darkness. No recall of the past, no discernment of the future. If then
one unimportant act or thought of the long ago did record itself, may
not all have done the same, and may it not be that when the veil of
obscurity is drawn aside, all the minute details of life will blend
the awakened past with the present, and we discover that our birth was
not a beginning but rather a forgetting, and death the welcome morning
call.
[Illustration: OUR OAK PARK HOME--MRS. RICHARDSON, OUR DOG JOE, AND
FAMILY GROUP.]
I stood with the mother of the James boys, beside the grave of Jesse,
in her door yard, when she told how that once when Jesse thought he was
dying he took his watch charm and handed it to a comrade, saying, "Take
this to sister Anna and tell her to pray that we meet in Heaven."