knowledge, not only easy to be believed, but hard to be resisted.
As an ethical scheme clearing up on principles of poetic justice the most perplexed and awful problems in the world, it throws streams of light through the abysses of evil, gives dramatic solution to many a puzzle, and, abstractly considered, charms the understanding and the conscience. As a philosophical dogma answering to some strange, vague pa.s.sages in human nature and experience, it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deep mystic chambers of our being. As the undisputed creed which has inspired and spell bound hundreds of millions of our race for perhaps over a hundred and fifty generations, it commands deference and deserves study. But, viewing it as a thesis in the light of to day, challenging intelligent scrutiny and sober belief, we scarcely need to say that, based on shadows and on arbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built of reveries and occult experiences, fortified by unreliable inferences, dest.i.tute of any substantial evidence, it is unable to face the severity of science.
A real investigation of its validity by the modern methods dissipates it as the sun scatters fog. First, the mutual correspondences between men and animals are explained by the fact that they are all living beings are the products of the same G.o.d and the same nature, and built according to one plan. They thus partake, in different degrees and on different planes, of many of the same elements and characteristics. Lucretius, with his usual mixture of acuteness and sophistry, objects to the doctrine that, if it were true, when the soul of a lion pa.s.sed into the body of a stag, or the soul of a man into the body of a horse, we should see a stag with the courage of a lion, a horse with the intelligence of a man. But of course the manifestations of soul depend on the organs of manifestation. Secondly, the singular psychological experiences referred to are explicable so far as we can expect with our present limited data and powers to solve the dense mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little ac.u.men in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure mixture of a.s.sociations, some discordant stroke on the keys of recollection, jumbling together echoes of bygone scenes, s.n.a.t.c.hes of unremembered dreams, and other hints and colors in a weird and uncommanded manner. The phenomenon is accounted for still more decisively by Dr. Wigand"s theory of the "Duality of the Mind."
The mental organs are double, one on each side of the brain. They usually act with perfect simultaneity. When one gets a slight start of the other, as the thought reaches the slow side a bewildered sense of a previous apprehension of it arises in the soul. And then, the fact that the supposition of a great system of adjusting transmigrations justifies the ways of Providence is no proof that the supposition is a true one. The difficulty is, that there is no evidence of the objective truth of the a.s.sumption, however well the theory applies; and the justice and goodness of G.o.d may as well be defended on the ground of a single life here and a discriminating retribution hereafter, as on the ground of an unlimited series of earthly births.
The doctrine evidently possesses two points of moral truth and power, and, if not tenable as strict science, is yet instructive as symbolic poetry. First, it embodies, in concrete shapes the most vivid and unmistakable, the fact that beastly and demoniac qualities of character lead men down towards the brutes and fiends. Rage makes man a tiger; low cunning, a fox; coa.r.s.eness and ferocity, a bear; selfish envy and malice, a devil. On the contrary, the attainment of better degrees of intellectual and ethical qualities elevates man towards the angelic and the Divine.
There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of routine in mechanical habits and indifference; the deteriorating life of abandonment in ignorance and vice. Timaus the Locrian, and some other ancient Pythagoreans, gave the whole doctrine a purely symbolic meaning. Secondly, the theory of transmigrating souls typifies the truth that, however it may fare with persons now, however ill their fortunes may seem to accord with their deserts here, justice reigns irresistibly in the universe, and sooner or later every soul shall be strictly compensated for every t.i.ttle of its merits in good or evil. There is no escaping the chain of acts and consequences.
This entire scheme of thought has always allured the Mystics to adopt it. In every age, from Indian Vyasa to Teutonic Boehme, we find them contending for it. Boehme held that all material existence was composed by King Satan out of the physical substance of his fallen followers.
The conception of the metempsychosis is strikingly fitted for the purposes of humor, satire, and ethical hortation; and literature abounds with such applications of it. In Plutarch"s account of what Thespesius saw when his soul was ravished away into h.e.l.l for a time, we are told that he saw the soul of Nero dreadfully tortured, transfixed with iron nails. The workmen forged it into the form of a viper; when a voice was heard out of an exceeding light ordering it to be transfigured into a milder being; and they made it one of those creatures that sing and croak in the sides of ponds and marshes.14 When Rosalind finds the verses with which her enamored Orlando had hung the trees, she exclaimed, "I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras" time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember." One of the earliest popular introductions of this Oriental figment to the English public was by Addison, whose Will Honeycomb tells an amusing story of his friend, Jack Freelove, how that, finding his mistress"s pet monkey alone one day, he wrote an autobiography of his monkeyship"s surprising adventures in the course of his many transmigrations. Leaving this precious doc.u.ment in the monkey"s hands, his mistress found it on her return, and was vastly bewildered by its pathetic and laughable contents.15 The fifth number of the "Adventurer" gives a very entertaining account of the "Transmigrations of a Flea."
There is also a poem on this subject by Dr. Donne, full of strength and wit. It traces a soul through ten or twelve births, giving the salient points of its history in each. First, the soul animates the apple our hapless mother Eve ate, bringing "death into the world and all our woe." Then it appeared
14 Sera Numinis Vindicta: near the close.
15 Spectator, No. 343.
successively as a mandrake, a c.o.c.k, a herring, a whale, "Who spouted rivers up as if he meant o join our seas with seas above the firmament." Next, as a mouse, it crept up an elephant"s sinewy proboscis to the soul"s bedchamber, the brain, and, gnawing the life cords there, died, crushed in the ruins of the gigantic beast. Afterwards it became a wolf, a dog, an ape, and finally a woman, where the quaint tale closes. Fielding is the author of a racy literary performance called "A Journey from this World to the Next." The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysium the adventures he had pa.s.sed through, living successively in the character of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a beau, a monk, a fiddler, a wise man, a king, a fool, a beggar, a prince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, a knight, a dancing master, and a bishop. Whoever would see how vividly, with what an honest and vigorous verisimilitude, the doctrine can be embodied, should read "The Modern Pythagorean," by Dr. Macnish. But perhaps the most humorous pa.s.sage of this sort is the following description from a remarkable writer of the present day:
"In the mean while all the sh.o.r.e rang with the trump of bull frogs, the st.u.r.dy spirits of ancient wine bibbers and wa.s.sailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake; who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoa.r.s.e and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern sh.o.r.e quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and pa.s.ses round the cup with the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n tr r r oonk, tr r r oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same pa.s.sword repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the sh.o.r.es, then e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr r r conk! and each in his turn, down to the flabbiest paunched, repeats the same, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply." 16
The doctrine of the metempsychosis, which was the priest"s threat against sin, was the poet"s interpretation of life. The former gave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latter imparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to the contemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullest development, the mountains piled towering to the sky and the plains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dust of souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight, was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated form that caught his attention might be the dwelling of some ancestor, or of some once cherished companion of his own. Hence the Hindu"s so sensitive kindness towards animals:
16 Th.o.r.eau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, p. 137.
"Crush not the feeble, inoffensive worm: Thy sister"s spirit wears that humble form. Why should thy cruel arrow smite yon bird? In him thy brother"s plaintive song is beard. Let not thine anger on thy dog descend: That faithful animal was once thy friend."
There is a strange grandeur, an affecting mystery, in the view of the creation from the stand point of the metempsychosis. It is an awful dream palace all aswarm with falling and climbing creatures clothed in ever shifting disguises. The races and changes of being const.i.tute a boundless masquerade of souls, whose bodies are vizards and whose fortunes poetic retribution. The motive furnished by the doctrine to self denial and toil has a peerless sublimity. In our Western world, the hope of acquiring large possessions, or of attaining an exalted office, often stimulates men to heroic efforts of labor and endurance. What, then, should we not expect from the application to the imaginative minds of the Eastern world of a motive which, transcending all set limits, offers unheard of prizes, to be plucked in life after life, and at the end unveils, for the occupancy of the patient aspirant, the Throne of Immensity? No wonder that, under the propulsion of a motive so exhaustless, a motive not remote nor abstract, but concrete, and organized in indissoluble connection with the visible chain of eternal causes and effects, no wonder we see such tremendous exhibitions of superst.i.tion, voluntary sufferings, superhuman deeds. Here is the secret fountain of that irresistible force which enables the devotee to measure journeys of a thousand miles by prostrations of his body, to hold up his arm until it withers and remains immovably erect as a stick, or to swing himself by red hot hooks through his flesh. The poorest wretch of a soul that has wandered down to the lowest grade of animate existence can turn his resolute and longing gaze up the resplendent ranks of being, and, conscious of the G.o.d head"s germ within, feel that, though now unspeakably sunken, he shall one day spurn every vile integument and vault into seats of heavenly dominion. Crawling as an almost invisible bug in a heap of carrion, he can still think within himself, holding fast to the law of righteousness and love, "This is the infinite ladder of redemption, over whose rounds of purity, penance, charity, and contemplation I may ascend, through births innumerable, till I reach a height of wisdom, power, and bliss that will cast into utter contempt the combined glory of countless millions of worlds, ay, till I sit enthroned above the topmost summit of the universe as omnipotent Buddha." 17
17 Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find the following references useful: Hardy, "Manual of Buddhism," ch. v.
Upham, "History of Buddhism," ch. iii. Beausobre, "Histoire du Manicheisme," livre vi. ch. iv. Helmont, "De Revolution Animarum."
Richter, "Das Christenthum und die Kitesten Religionen des Orients," sects. 54-65. Sinner, "Essai sur les Dogmes de la Metempsychose et du Purgatoire." Conz, "Schicksale der Seelenwanderungshypothese unter verschiedenen Volkern und in verschiedenen Zeiten." Dubois, "People of India," part iii. ch.
vii. Werner, "Commentatio Psychologica contra Metempsychosin."
CHAPTER III.
RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.
A DOCTRINE widely prevalent a.s.serts that, at the termination of this probationary epoch, Christ will appear with an army of angels in the clouds of heaven, descend, and set up his tribunal on the earth. The light of his advancing countenance will be the long waited Aurora of the Grave. All the souls of men will be summoned from their tarrying places, whether in heaven, or h.e.l.l, or purgatory, or the sepulchre; the fleshly tabernacles they formerly inhabited will be re created, a strong necromancy making the rooty and grave floored earth give up its dust of ruined humanity, and moulding it to the identical shapes it formerly composed; each soul will enter its familiar old house in company with which its sins were once committed; the books will be opened and judgment will be pa.s.sed; then the accepted will be removed to heaven, and the rejected to h.e.l.l, both to remain clothed with those same material bodies forever, the former in celestial bliss, the latter in infernal torture.
In the present dissertation we propose to exhibit the sources, trace the developments, explain the variations, and discuss the merits, of this doctrine.
The first appearance of this notion of a bodily restoration which occurs in the history of opinions is among the ancient Hindus.
With them it appears as a part of a vast conception, embracing the whole universe in an endless series of total growths, decays, and exact restorations. In the beginning the Supreme Being is one and alone. He thinks to himself, "I will become many." Straightway the multiform creation germinates forth, and all beings live. Then for an inconceivable period a length of time commensurate with the existence of Brahma, the Demiurgus the successive generations flourish and sink. At the end of this period all forms of matter, all creatures, sages, and G.o.ds, fall back into the Universal Source whence they arose. Again the Supreme Being is one and alone. After an interval the same causes produce the same effects, and all things recur exactly as they were before.1
We find this theory sung by some of the Oriental poets: "Every external form of things, and every object which disappear"d, Remains stored up in the storehouse of fate: When the system of the heavens returns to its former order, G.o.d, the All Just, will bring them forth from the veil of mystery." 2
The same general conception, in a modified form, was held by the Stoics of later Greece, who doubtless borrowed it from the East, and who carried it out in greater detail. "G.o.d is an artistic fire, out of which the cosmopoeia issues." This fire proceeds in a certain fixed course, in obedience to a fixed law, pa.s.sing through certain intermediate gradations and established periods, until it ultimately returns into itself and closes with a universal conflagration. It is to this catastrophe that reference is made in the following pa.s.sage of Epictetus: "Some say that when Zeus is left alone at the time of the conflagration, he is solitary, and bewails himself
1 Wilson, Lectures on the Hindus, pp. 53-56.
2 The Dabistan, vol. iii. p. 169.
that he has no company."3 The Stoics supposed each succeeding formation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particular that happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before, and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connected with astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creating of the world coincide with the same position of the stars as that at which it previously occurred.4 This they called the restoration of all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identical epochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Plato is a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of the past, by reproducing it over and over forever.
Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "In submitting," he says, "physical phenomena and historical events to the exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to their causes by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by that ancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and those regulating the moral world, exert their action under the presence of a primordial necessity and according to movements periodically renewed." The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." The conception of the destinies of the universe as a circle returning forever into itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind early seizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeble powers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but the infinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformations ever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend and master satisfactorily the eternal duration of one visible order, the incessant rolling on of races and stars:
"And doth creation"s tide forever flow, Nor ebb with like destruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and still The mighty measure never, never full?"
And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinity threatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in the view of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end from time to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for us simply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception to which we have recourse is evidently a mere conceit of imagination, without scientific basis or philosophical confirmation.
The doctrine of a bodily resurrection, resting on a wholly different ground, again emerges upon our attention in the Zoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to be pure and happy and to pa.s.s to a heavenly immortality. The evil Ahriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primal destiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their material frames to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to a painful abode in h.e.l.l. Meanwhile, the war between the Light G.o.d and the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good One shall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evil deeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed at first be restored. Then all
3 Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 13. Sonntag, De Palingenesia Stoicorum.
4 Ritter"s Hist. of An. Phil., lib. xi. cap. 4.
souls shall be redeemed from h.e.l.l and their bodies be rebuilt from their scattered atoms and clothed upon them again.5 This resurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, nor is it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzd of the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred and defeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is still understood and looked for by the Pa.r.s.ees.
The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with which it is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitous a.s.sumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. The hypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battle between two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neither the scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic of reason; and it has long since been driven from the arena of earnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violent curse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform and spoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now, as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, a punishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system." It is unreasonable to suppose that the Infinite G.o.d would deliberately lay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. And it is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or an after result foisted into the system of the world. Death that is, a succession of generations is surely an essential part of the very const.i.tution of nature, plainly stamped on all those "medals of the creation" which bear the features of their respective ages and which are laid up in the archives of geological epochs.
Successive growth and decay is a central part of G.o.d"s original plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the restoration of G.o.d"s broken plan to its completeness falls to the ground.
The Jews, in the course of their frequent and long continued intercourse with the Persians, did not fail to be much impressed with the vivid melodramatic outlines of the Zoroastrian doctrine of the resurrection. They finally adopted it themselves, and joined it, with such modifications as it naturally underwent from the union, with the great dogmas of their own faith. A few faint references to it are found in the Old Testament. Some explicit declarations and boasts of it are in the Apocrypha. In the Targums, the Talmud, and the a.s.sociated sources, abundant statements of it in copious forms are preserved. The Jews rested their doctrine of the resurrection on the same general ground as the Persians did, from whom they borrowed it. Man was meant to be immortal, either on earth or in heaven; but Satan seduced him to sin, and thus wrested from him his privilege of immortality, made him die and descend into a dark nether realm which was to be filled with the disembodied souls of his descendants. The resurrection was to annul all this and restore men to their original footing.
We need not labor any disproof of the truth or authority of this doctrine as the Pharisees held it, because, admitting that they had the record of a revelation from G.o.d, this doctrine was not a part of it. It is only to be found in their canonic scriptures by way of vague and hasty allusion, and is historically traceable to its derivation from the pagan oracles of Persia.
5 Frazer, History of Persia, chap. iv. Baur, Symbolik und Mythologice thl. ii. absch. ii. cap. ss. 394-404.
Of course it is possible that the doctrine of the resurrection, as the Hebrews held it, was developed by themselves, from imaginative contemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectres seen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in the under world; ideas of G.o.d as the deliverer of living men from the open gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapes from destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Before advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized, incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.
Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose and spread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect.
Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years were Christian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolic age virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it, then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salient dogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality and bigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission of Christianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retained by early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In the New Testament itself there are seeming references to this doctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrection of the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it found in any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourth century.6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrine was not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The fact is, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of the descent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called in question at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up on the symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. As soon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and all but unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in every creed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has been denied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy and schism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, who concerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was past already." The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church has always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodies formerly inhabited by men shall be raised from the earth, sea, and air, and given to them again to be everlastingly a.s.sumed. The scattered exceptions to the believers in this doctrine have been few, and have ever been styled heretics by their contemporaries.
Any one who will glance over the writings of the Fathers with reference to this subject will find the foregoing statements amply confirmed.7 Justin Martyr wrote a treatise on the resurrection, a fragment of which is still extant. Athenagoras has left us an extremely elaborate and able discussion of the whole doctrine, in a separate work. Tertullian is author of a famous book on the subject, ent.i.tled "Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh," in which he says, "The teeth are providentially made eternal to serve as the seeds of the
6 Dr. Sykes, Inquiry when the Article of the Resurrection of the Body or Flesh was first introduced into the Public Creeds.
7 Mosheim, De Resurrectione Mortuorum.
resurrection." Chrysostom has written fully upon it in two of his eloquent homilies. All these, in company indeed with the common body of their contemporaries, unequivocally teach a carnal resurrection with the grossest details. Augustine says, "Every man"s body, howsoever dispersed here, shall be restored perfect in the resurrection. Every body shall be complete in quant.i.ty and quality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut, shall not return in such enormous quant.i.ties to deform their original places; but neither shall they perish: they shall return into the body into that substance from which they grew." 8 As if that would not cause any deformity! 9 Some of the later Origenists held that the resurrection bodies would be in the shape of a ball, the mere heads of cherubs! 10