THE AFTER DEATH.
It is two years and a half ago now that I passed through Westminster
Hall, one of a great multitude. They went in double file, thickly packed
between barriers of rails on either side the hall, and between where
everyone looked there lay--what? A plain oak coffin on a table.
Within this coffin there lay the body of Mr. Gladstone, he who in his
day had filled the public eye in England more than any other man. His
body lay there in state, and the people came to see.
Emerging into the street beyond and seeing the ceaseless stream of
people that flowed past, I wondered to myself. These people are
Christians. If you ask them where Mr. Gladstone is now, they will, if
they reply hurriedly, answer, "He is dead and in there"; but if they
pause to reflect they will say, "He is in heaven. His soul is with
God."
If, then, his soul, if _he_ be with God, what are you come to see?
Shortly there will be a funeral, and what will it be called? The funeral
of Mr. Gladstone. But Mr. Gladstone is in heaven, not here. Surely this
is strange.
* * * * *
"If there is anything I can do for you be sure you tell me, for your
husband was my great friend." So wrote the man. And to him came her
reply: "Sometimes when you are near go and see his grave where he sleeps
in that far land, and put a flower upon it for your remembrance and for
mine."
But if he, too, be in heaven and not there at all? If it be, as the
Burmans say, but the empty shell that lies there? Why should we visit
graves if the soul be indeed separate from the body? If he be far away
in happiness, why go to his grave? To remember but the corruption that
lies beneath?
Men use words and phrases remembering what they ought to believe. For
very few are sincere and know what really they do believe. You cannot
tell from their professions, only from their unconscious words and their
acts.
What do these unconscious words, these acts, tell us of the belief
about the soul and body? That they are separable and separate? No, but
that they are inseparable. No one in the West, I am sure--no one
anywhere, I think--has ever been able to conceive of the soul as apart
from the body. We cannot do so. Try, try honestly, and remember your
dead friends. What is it you recall and long for and miss so bitterly?
It was his voice that awoke echoes in you, it was the clasp of his hand
in yours, it was his eyes looking back to you the love you felt for him.
It was his footfall on the stair, his laugh, the knowledge of his
presence. And are not these all of the body?
Men talk glibly of the soul as apart from the body. What do they mean?
Nothing but words, for the soul without a body is an incomprehensible
thing, certainly to us.
And it is always the same body, not another. It is the old hand, the
face, that we want. Not the soul, if it could be possible, looking at us
out of other eyes. No; we want him we lost, and not another. It is the
cry of our hearts.
And therefore, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life
everlasting." Have you wondered how that came into the creed? It came
into religion as came all that we believe in, never out of theory but
out of instinct.
What is your feeling towards the dead? Is it envy that they have reached
everlasting happiness? Is it gladness to reflect that they are no longer
with us? Do we think of them as superior to us? Alas, no. The great and
overpowering sentiment we have for them is pity. The tears come to our
eyes for them, because they are dead. They have left behind them light
and life and gone into the everlasting forgetfulness. "The night hath
come when no man can work." That is our real instinct towards the dead.
"Poor fellow." And you will hear people say, with tardy remembrance of
their creeds, "But for his sake we ought to rejoice, because he is at
peace."
We ought? But _do_ we? Surely we never do. We are sorry for the dead.
All the compassion that is in us goes out to them, because they are
dead.
The Catholic Church has prayers for the dead. There was never a Church
yet that knew the hearts of men as that Church of Rome. Prayers for the
dead. Masses for the dead.
Our Protestant theories forbid such. But tell me, is there a woman who
has lost those she loves to whom such prayers would not come home? How
narrow sometimes are the Reformed Creeds in their refusal to help the
sorrow of their people.
"In the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection." What is to
arise? The disembodied soul? But you say it is already with God. What is
to arise? It is the body. It is more. It is he who is dead--who sleeps;
he whom we have buried there. Whatever our creeds may say, we do not, we
cannot ever understand the soul without the body. Not _a_ body, but
_the_ body. We believe not in the life of a soul previous to the body.
They are born together, and they die together. If they live hereafter it
must be together. For they are one.
Never be deceived by theories or professions. No one in the West has
ever understood the soul without the body, no one can do so. The
conception is wanting. We play with the theory in words as we do with
the fourth dimension. But who ever realised either?
But with the Oriental it is different. He believes in the migration of
souls. They pass from body to body. He can realise this--somehow, I know
not--but he can. Those who have read my "Soul of a People" will remember
that they not only believe it but _know_ it. They are sure of it
because it has happened to each one, and he can remember his former
lives. This comes not from Buddhism, because Buddhist theory denies the
existence of soul at all, nor from Brahminism. It is the Oriental's
instinct. He does not, I think, ever realise a soul apart from any body,
but he can and does realise a soul exhibited first in one body then in
another, as a lamp shining through different globes.
Therefore, when a Christian tells him of the resurrection of the body he
cannot understand. "Which body," he asks, "for I have had so many?"
Neither can he understand a Christian heaven of bodies risen from the
earth. His heaven is immaterial. It is the Great Peace, where life has
passed away. That he can understand. For neither can he conceive a life
of the soul without some body. When perfection is reached and the last
weary body done with, then life, too, is gone--life and all passion, all
love, all happiness, all fear, all the emotions that are life. They are
gone, and there is left only the Great Peace.
Our heaven grows out of our instincts as his does out of his instincts.
Our dead without their bodies would not be those we love, and hence our
heaven, where we shall recognise each other and love them as we did. I
did not understand heaven when I read books, but out of men have I
learned what I wished to know. Reason alone can tell you nothing, but
sympathy will tell you all things.
It would be interesting, it is very interesting, to look back into our
past histories and see these instincts grow and wane, to mark how they
have influenced not only our religious theories, but our lives; to trace
in other people like or opposed instincts. The Mahommedans refuse
amputation because they will not appear maimed in the next world. For
they, too, cannot distinguish soul from one body. The Jews had no idea
of soul at all as existing after death, whether with or without a body.
"As a man dies so will he be, all through the ages of eternity." They
learned the idea of immortality from Egypt, but it never took root
because they had no instinctive feeling of soul. Their witches were
foreigners. "You shall not suffer a witch to live." The incantation of
ghosts was utterly forbidden by them as a foreign wickedness. It has so
been forbidden by _all_ religions. Yet there are people who think
religions arise from ideas of ghosts.
The African negroes have no idea of life after death, as witness the
story of Dr. Livingstone and the negro king about the seed. It is a
very curious history this of the longing for immortality, the belief in
a life beyond the grave.
But I am not now concerned with the past only with the present. The
history of instincts is never the explanation of them. If we could
unravel clearly all the history of the instincts of all peoples as
regards the after death, we should be no nearer an explanation of why
the instinct exists at all, why it grows or decays, why it takes one
form or another. But we might, as so many do, blind ourselves to the
fact that instincts exist now quite apart from reason, either now or
previously. No reasoning can explain the absolute clinging of the
European peoples to the resurrection of the body. No reasoning can
possibly explain the Burman's remembrance of previous lives. Reasoning
would deny both. Observation and sympathy know that both exist.
And which is true? No one can tell.
"Not one returns to tell us of the Road
Which to discover we must travel too."
For some years now there has been a movement in England to introduce
cremation as a method of disposing of the dead. There can be no doubt of
its sanitary superiority to burial; there can be no doubt that, as far
as reason and argument go, cremation should be preferred to the grave.
There seems to be absolutely no good reason to bring forward in favour
of the latter. And yet cremation makes no way. Men die and they are
buried, and if over their tombs we do not now write "Hic jacet," but "In
memory of," our ideas have suffered no change.
We cannot bear to burn the bodies of the dead because we cannot
disassociate the body from the soul. The body is to rise, and if we burn
it, what then? What will there be to rise? Man has but one body and one
soul dwelling therein, and if you destroy the body the soul is dead too.
Only people who believe in the transmigration of souls burn their
dead--the Hindus and, in Burma, the monks of Buddha. They see no
objection to the destruction of the body because the soul is migratory,
and has passed into another. What is left after death is but the "empty
shell."
Therefore do Hindus and Buddhists cremate, whereas Christians and
Mahommedans bury. Nor does rejection of creed alter this instinct.
Intellectual France boasts of its freedom from religion. But _is_ it
free? Has it outgrown the instincts that are the root of religion? One
certainly it has not yet done, for secularists are buried just as
believers are, usually with the same rites. And even if the funeral be
secular, the body is buried, not burnt. Why do they shrink from
cremation if reason is to be the only guide? The creed is outworn but
the roots of faith are never dead.