[Illustration]
It has been said that men fear death much as the child cries at
entering the world, being unable to know what loving hands are waiting
to receive it. Certainly this comparison will not bear scientific
examination. But as a happy fancy it is beautiful, even for those to
whom it can make no religious appeal whatever,--those who must believe
that the individual mind dissolves with the body, and that an eternal
continuance of personality could only prove an eternal misfortune.
It is beautiful, I think, because it suggests, in so intimate a way,
the hope that to larger knowledge the Absolute will reveal itself
as mother-love made infinite. The imagining is Oriental rather than
Occidental; yet it accords with a sentiment vaguely defined in most of
our Western creeds. Through ancient grim conceptions of the Absolute as
Father, there has gradually been infused some later and brighter dream
of infinite tenderness--some all-transfiguring hope created by the
memory of Woman as Mother; and the more that races evolve toward higher
things, the more Feminine becomes their idea of a God.
Conversely, this suggestion must remind even the least believing that
we know of nothing else, in all the range of human experience, so
sacred as mother-love,--nothing so well deserving the name of divine.
Mother-love alone could have enabled the delicate life of thought to
unfold and to endure upon the rind of this wretched little planet:
only through that supreme unselfishness could the nobler emotions ever
have found strength to blossom in the brain of man;--only by help of
mother-love could the higher forms of trust in the Unseen ever have
been called into existence.
*
But musings of this kind naturally lead us to ask ourselves emotional
questions about the mysteries of Whither and Whence. Must the
evolutionist think of mother-love as a merely necessary result of
material affinities,--the attraction of the atom for the atom? Or can
he venture to assert, with ancient thinkers of the East, that all
atomic tendencies are shapen by one eternal moral law, and that some
are in themselves divine, being manifestations of the Four Infinite
Feelings?... What wisdom can decide for us? And of what avail to know
our highest emotions divine,--since the race itself is doomed to
perish? When mother-love shall have wrought its uttermost for humanity,
will not even that uttermost have been in vain?
*
At first thought, indeed, the inevitable dissolution must appear the
blackest of imaginable tragedies,--tragedy made infinite! Eventually
our planet must die: its azure ghost of air will shrink and pass, its
seas dry up, its very soil perish utterly, leaving only a universal
waste of sand and stone--the withered corpse of a world. Still for a
time this mummy will turn about the sun, but only as the dead moon
wheels now across our nights,--one face forever in scorching blaze, the
other in icy darkness. So will it circle, blank and bald as a skull;
and like a skull will it bleach and crack and crumble, ever drawing
nearer and yet more near to the face of its flaming parent, to vanish
suddenly at last in the cyclonic lightning of his breath. One by one
the remaining planets must follow. Then will the mighty star himself
begin to fail--to flicker with ghastly changing colours--to crimson
toward his death. And finally the monstrous fissured cinder of him,
hurled into some colossal sun-pyre, will be dissipated into vapour more
tenuous than the dream of the dream of a ghost....
What, then, will have availed the labour of the life that was,--the
life effaced without one sign to mark the place of its disparition
in the illimitable abyss? What, then, the worth of mother-love, the
whole dead world of human tenderness, with its sacrifices, hopes,
memories,--its divine delights and diviner pains,--its smiles and tears
and sacred caresses,--its countless passionate prayers to countless
vanished gods?
*
Such doubts and fears do not trouble the thinker of the East. Us
they disturb chiefly because of old wrong habits of thought, and the
consequent blind fear of knowing that what we have so long called
Soul belongs, not to Essence, but to Form.... Forms appear and vanish
in perpetual succession; but the Essence alone is Real. Nothing
real can be lost, even in the dissipation of a million universes.
Utter destruction, everlasting death,--all such terms of fear have
no correspondence to any truth but the eternal law of change. Even
forms can perish only as waves pass and break: they melt but to swell
anew,--nothing can be lost....
In the nebulous haze of our dissolution will survive the essence of
all that has ever been in human life,--the units of every existence
that was or is, with all their affinities, all their tendencies, all
their inheritance of forces making for good or evil, all the powers
amassed through myriad generations, all energies that ever shaped the
strength of races;--and times innumerable will these again be orbed
into life and thought. Transmutations there may be; changes also made
by augmentation or diminution of affinities, by subtraction or addition
of tendencies; for the dust of us will then have been mingled with
the dust of other countless worlds and of their peoples. But nothing
essential can be lost. We shall inevitably bequeath our part to the
making of the future cosmos--to the substance out of which another
intelligence will slowly be evolved. Even as we must have inherited
something of our psychic being out of numberless worlds dissolved, so
will future humanities inherit, not from us alone, but from millions of
planets still existing.
For the vanishing of our world can represent, in the disparition of a
universe, but one infinitesimal detail of the quenching of thought: the
peopled spheres that must share our doom will exceed for multitude the
visible lights of heaven.
Yet those countless solar fires, with their viewless millions of
living planets, must somehow reappear: again the wondrous Cosmos,
self-consumed, must resume its sidereal whirl over the deeps of the
eternities. And the love forever with rise again, infinitudes of the
everlasting battle. The light of the mother's smile will survive
our sun;--the thrill of her kiss will last beyond the thrilling of
stars;--the sweetness of her lullaby will endure in the cradle-songs
of worlds yet unevolved;--the tenderness of her faith will quicken the
fervour of prayers to be made to the hosts of another heaven,--to the
gods of a time beyond Time. And the nectar of her breasts can never
fail: that snowy stream will still flow on, to nourish the life of some
humanity more perfect than our own, when the Milky Way that spans our
night shall have vanished forever out of Space.