CHRISTIAN CONSOLATION. OPINIONS CONCERNING THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.
The voice which I did more esteem
Than music in her sweetest key;
Those eyes which unto me did seem
More comfortable than the day;
Those now by me, as they have been,
Shall never more be heard, or seen;
But what I once enjoyed in them,
Shall seem hereafter as a dream.
All earthly comforts vanish thus;
So little hold of them have we,
That we from them, or they from us,
May in a moment ravished be.
Yet we are neither just nor wise,
If present mercies we despise;
Or mind not how there may be made
A thankful use of what we had.
WITHER.
There is a book written in Latin by the Flemish Jesuit Sarasa, upon
the Art of rejoicing always in obedience to the Apostle's
precept,—‘_Ars semper gaudendi, demonstrata ex solâ consideratione
Divinæ Providentiæ._’ Leibnitz and Wolf have commended it; and a
French Protestant minister abridged it under the better title of
_L'Art de se tranquiliser dans tous les evenemens de la vie_. “I
remember,” says Cowper, “reading many years ago, a long treatise on
the subject of consolation, written in French; the author's name I
have forgotten; but I wrote these words in the margin,—‘special
consolation!’ at least for a Frenchman, who is a creature the most
easily comforted of any in the world!” It is not likely that this
should have been the book which Leibnitz praised; nor would Cowper
have thus condemned one which recommends the mourner to seek for
comfort, where alone it is to be found, in resignation to God's will,
and in the prospect of the life to come. The remedy is infallible for
those, who, like Mr. Bacon, faithfully pursue the course that the only
true philosophy prescribes.
At first, indeed, he had felt like the bereaved maiden in Schiller's
tragedy, and could almost have prayed like her, for a speedy
deliverance,—
Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer,
Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nichts mehr.
Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück!
Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,
Ich habe gelebt und geliebet.
But even at first the sense of parental duty withheld him from such a
prayer. The grief, though “fine, full, perfect,” was not a grief that
violenteth in a sense as strong
As that which causeth it.[1]
[Footnote 1: SHAKESPEARE.]
There was this to compress, as it were, and perhaps to mitigate it,
that it was wholly confined to himself, not multiplied among others,
and reflected from them. In great public calamities when fortunes are
wrecked in revolutionary storms, or families thinned or swept off by
pestilence, there may be too many who look upon it as
_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris;_[2]
and this is not so much because
—fellowship in woe doth woe assuage,[3]
and that
—the mind much sufferance doth oerskip
When grief hath mates and bearing fellowship[3]
as because the presence of a fellow sufferer at such times calls forth
condolence, when that of one who continues in the sunshine of fortune
might provoke an envious self-comparison, which is the commonest of
all evil feelings. But it is not so with those keener griefs which
affect us in our domestic relations. The heart-wounds which are
inflicted by our fellow creatures, are apt to fester: those which we
receive in the dispensations of Almighty wisdom and the course of
nature, are remedial and sanative. There are some fruits which must be
punctured before they can ripen kindly; and there are some hearts
which require an analogous process.
[Footnote 2: INCERTI AUCTORIS.]
[Footnote 3: SHAKESPEARE.]
He and Margaret had been all in all to each other, and the child was
too young to understand her loss, and happily just too old to feel it
as an infant would have felt it. In the sort of comfort which he
derived from this sense of loneliness, there was nothing that
resembled the pride of stoicism; it was a consideration that tempered
his feelings and assisted in enabling him to control them, but it
concentrated and perpetuated them.
Whether the souls of the departed are cognizant of what passes on
earth, is a question which has been variously determined by those who
have reasoned concerning the state of the dead. Thomas Burnet was of
opinion that they are not, because they “rest from their labours.” And
South says, “it is clear that God sometimes takes his Saints out of
the world for this very cause, that they may not see and know what
happens in it. For so says God to King Josiah, ‘Behold, I will gather
thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace;
neither shall thy eyes see all the evil that I will bring upon this
place, and the inhabitants thereof.’” This he adduces as a conclusive
argument against the invocation of Saints, saying the “discourse would
have been hugely absurd and inconsequent, if so be the saints
separation from the body gave them a fuller and a clearer prospect
into all the particular affairs and occurrences that happen here upon
earth.”
Aristotle came to an opposite conclusion; he thought not only that the
works of the deceased follow them, but that the dead are sensible of
the earthly consequences of those works, and are affected in the other
world by the honour or the reproach which is justly ascribed to their
memory in this. So Pindar represents it as one of the enjoyments of
the blessed, that they behold and rejoice in the virtues of their
posterity:
Ἔστι δε καί τι θανόντεσσιν μέρος
Καννόμον ἑρδόμενον,
Κατακρύπτει δ᾽οὐ κόνις
Συγγόνων κεδνὰν χάριν.[4]
[Footnote 4: PINDAR.]
So Sextus, or Sextius, the Pythagorean, taught; “_immortales crede te
manere in judicio honores et pœnas._” And Bishop Ken deemed it would
be an addition to his happiness in Paradise, if he should know that
his devotional poems were answering on earth the purpose for which he
had piously composed them:
—should the well-meant songs I leave behind
With Jesus' lovers an acceptance find,
'Twill heighten even the joys of Heaven to know
That in my verse the Saints hymn God below.
The _consensus gentium universalis_, is with the Philosophers and the
Bishop, against South and Burnet: it affords an argument which South
would not have disregarded, and to which Burnet has, on another
occasion, triumphantly appealed.
All sacrifices to the dead, and all commemorations of them, have
arisen from this opinion, and the Romish Church established upon it
the most lucrative of all its deceitful practises. Indeed the belief
in apparitions, could not prevail without it; and that belief, which
was all but universal a century ago, is still, and ever will be held
by the great majority of mankind. Call it a prejudice if you will:
“what is an universal prejudice,” says Reginald Heber, “but the voice
of human nature?”—And Shakespeare seems to express his own opinion
when he writes, “They say miracles are past; and we have our
philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things
supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of
terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should
submit ourselves to an unknown fear.”
That the spirits of the departed are permitted to appear only for
special purposes, is what the most credulous believer in such
appearances would probably admit, if he reasoned at all upon the
subject. On the other hand, they who are most incredulous on this
point, would hardly deny that to witness the consequences of our
actions may be a natural and just part of our reward or punishment in
the intermediate state. We may well believe that they whom faith has
sanctified, and who upon their departure join the spirits of the “just
made perfect,” may at once be removed from all concern with this world
of probation, except so far as might add to their own happiness, and
be made conducive to the good of others, in the ways of Providence.
But by parity of reason, it may be concluded that the sordid and the
sensual, they whose affections have been set upon worldly things, and
who are of the earth earthy, will be as unable to rise above this
earth, as they would be incapable of any pure and spiritual enjoyment.
“He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.”
When life is extinguished, it is too late for them to struggle for
deliverance from the body of that death, to which, while the choice
was in their power, they wilfully and inseparably bound themselves.
The popular belief that places are haunted where money has been
concealed (as if where the treasure was and the heart had been, there
would the miserable soul be also), or where some great and
undiscovered crime has been committed, shews how consistent this is
with our natural sense of likelihood and fitness.
There is a tale in the Nigaristan of Kemal-Pascha-zade, that one of
the Sultans of Khorassan saw in a dream, Mahmoud a hundred years after
his death, wandering about his palace,—his flesh rotten, his bones
carious, but his eyes full, anxious and restless. A dervise who
interpreted the dream, said that the eyes of Mahmoud were thus
troubled, because the kingdom, his beautiful spouse, was now in the
embrace of another.
This was that great Mahmoud the Gaznevide, who was the first
Mohammedan conqueror that entered India, and the first who dropt the
title of Malek and assumed that of Sultan in its stead. He it was, who
after having broken to pieces with his own hands the gigantic idol of
Soumenat, put to death fifty thousand of its worshippers, as a further
proof of his holy Mohammedan indignation. In the last days of his
life, when a mortal disease was consuming him, and he himself knew
that no human means could arrest its course, he ordered all his
costliest apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, and his pearls
and precious stones, the inestimable spoils of the East, to be
displayed before him,—the latter were so numerous that they were
arranged in separate cabinets according to their colour and size. It
was in the royal residence which he had built for himself in Gazna,
and which he called the Palace of Felicity, that he took from this
display, wherewith he had formerly gratified the pride of his eye, a
mournful lesson; and in the then heartfelt conviction that all is
vanity, he wept like a child. “What toils,” said he, “what dangers,
what fatigues of body and mind have I endured for the sake of
acquiring these treasures, and what cares in preserving them, and now
I am about to die and leave them!” In this same palace he was
interred, and there it was that his unhappy ghost, a century
afterwards, was believed to wander.