To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity, the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt act is the same. This general moral problem has been more accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as follows: "The creatures of a summer"s day might be imagined, when
7 OEuvres Completes, tome xiii.: Immortalite de l"Ame.
8 Sermons of Theism, Sermon VII.
9 Werke, band x.x.xiii. s. 240.
they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of his government; for these are to be the law of their season of life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from the greater stake."
Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in human society cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedly weakened, its basis variously altered, but as a confessed sovereign principle it cannot be expelled. The denial of the freedom of the will theoretically explodes it; but social custom, law, and opinion will enforce it still. Make man a mere dissoluble mixture of carbon and magnetism, yet so long as he can distinguish right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and, unsophisticated by dialectics, can follow either of opposite courses of action, the moral law exists and exerts its sway.
It has been asked, "If the incendiary be, like the fire he kindles, a result of material combinations, shall he not be treated in the same way?" 10 We should reply thus: No matter what man springs from or consists of, if he has moral ideas, performs moral actions, and is susceptible of moral motives, then he is morally responsible: for all practical and disciplinary purposes he is wholly removed from the categories of physical science.
Another pernicious misrepresentation of the fair consequences of the denial of a life hereafter is shown in the frequent declaration that then there would be no motive to any thing good and great. The incentives which animate men to strenuous services, perilous virtues, disinterested enterprises, spiritual culture, would cease to operate. The essential life of all moral motives would be killed. This view is to be met by a broad and indignant denial based on an appeal to human consciousness and to the reason of the thing. Every man knows by experience that there are a mult.i.tude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with future reward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do good even with self sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman risks his life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, is the hope of heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offered bribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is the fear of h.e.l.l all that animates him? A million such decisive specifications might be made. The renowned sentence of Cicero, "Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerret ad mortem," 11 is effective eloquence; but it is a baseless libel against humanity and the truth. In every moment of supreme n.o.bleness and sacrifice personality vanishes. Thousands of patriots, philosophers, saints, have been glad to die for the freedom of native land, the cause of truth, the welfare of fellow men, without a taint of selfish reward touching their wills. Are there not souls "To whom dishonor"s shadow is a substance More terrible than death here and hereafter"?
He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences of it eternally. Is there no motive for the
10 Some discussion of this general subject is to be found in Schaller, Leib nod Seele. kap. 5: Die Consequentzen des Materialismus. And in Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik.
11 Tuscul. Quast. lib. i. cap. 15.
preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever, shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating poisons?
If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot, the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike, who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like the fool and the felon? Shall heaven be held before man simply as a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the theory of annihilation a.s.sume its direst phase, still, our perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly to every n.o.ble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving abyss. But some one may say, "If I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?" It advantageth you every thing until you are dead, although there be nothing afterwards. As long as you live, is it not glory and reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This is sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law.
And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worth our affection, let great Shakspeare advance, with his matchless depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and p.r.o.nouncing, in tones of cordial solidity,
"This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long."
What though Decay"s shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in the valleys of ign.o.ble fear and selfishness, leaving all the clear road lines of moral truth and practical virtue and heroic consecration still high and bright on the table land of a worthy life; and every honorable soul, calmly confronting its fate, will cry, despite the worst, "The pathway of my duty lies in sunlight; And I would tread it with as firm a step, Though it should terminate in cold oblivion, As if Elysian pleasures at its Close Gleam"d palpable to sight as things of earth."
If a captain knew that his ship would never reach her port, would he therefore neglect his functions, be slovenly and careless, permit insubordination and drunkenness among the crew, let the broad pennon draggle in filthy rents, the cordage become tangled and stiff, the planks be covered with dirt, and the guns be grimed with rust? No: all generous hearts would condemn that. He would keep every inch of the deck scoured, every piece of metal polished like a mirror, the sails set full and clean, and, with shining muzzles out, ropes hauled taut in their blocks, and every man at his post, he would sweep towards the reef, and go down into the sea firing a farewell salute of honor to the sun, his flag flying above him as he sunk.
The dogmatic a.s.sertors of a future life, in a partisan spirit set upon making out the most impressive case in its behalf, have been guilty of painting frightful caricatures of the true nature and significance of the opposite conclusion. Instead of saying, "If such a thing be fated, why, then, it must be right, G.o.d"s will be done," they frantically rebel against any such admission, and declare that it would make G.o.d a liar and a fiend, man a "magnetic mockery," and life a h.e.l.lish taunt. This, however unconscious it may be to its authors, is blasphemous egotism. One of the tenderest, devoutest, richest, writers of the century has unflinchingly affirmed that if man who trusted that love was the final law of creation, although nature, her claws and teeth red with raven, shrieked against his creed be left to be blown about the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills,
"No more! a monster, then, a dream, A discord; dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match"d with Him!"
Epictetus says, "When death overtakes me, it is enough if I can stretch out my hands to G.o.d, and say, "The opportunities which thou hast given me of comprehending and following thy government, I have not neglected. I thank thee that thou hast brought me into being. I am satisfied with the time I have enjoyed the things thou hast given me. Receive them again, and a.s.sign them to whatever place thou wilt."" 12 Surely the pious heathen here speaks more worthily than the presumptuous Christian! How much fitter would it be, granting that death is the end all, to revise our interpretation, look at the subject from the stand point of universal order, not from this opinionative narrowness, and see if it be not susceptible of a benignant meaning, worthy of grateful acceptance by the humble mind of piety and the dispa.s.sionate spirit of science!
Yea, let G.o.d and his providence stand justified, though man prove to have been egregiously mistaken.
"Though He smite me, yet will I praise Him; though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
To return into the state we were in before we were created is not to suffer any evil: it is to be absolutely free from all evil. It is but the more perfect playing of that part, of which every sound sleep is a rehearsal. The thought of it is mournful to the enjoying soul, but not terrific; and even the mournfulness ceases in the realization. He uttered a piece of cruel madness who said, "h.e.l.l is more bearable than nothingness." Is it worse to have nothing than it is to have infinite torture? Milton asks,
"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being?"
Every creature that exists, if full of pain, would s.n.a.t.c.h at the boon of ceasing to be. To be blessed is a good; to be wretched is an evil; not to be is neither a good nor an evil, but simply
12 Dissert., lib. iv. cap. x. sect. 2.
nothing. If such be our necessary fate, let us accept it with a harmonized mind, not entertaining fear nor yielding to sadness.
Why should we shudder or grieve? Every time we slumber, we try on the dress which, when we die, we shall wear easily forever.
Not satisfied to let the result rest in this somewhat sad but peaceful aspect, it is quite customary to give it a turn and hue of ghastly horribleness, by casting over it the dyspeptic dreams, injecting it with the lurid lights and shades, of a morbid and wilful fancy. The most loathsome and inexcusable instance in point is the "Vision of Annihilation" depicted by the vermicular, infested imagination of the great Teutonic phantasist while yet writhing under the sanguinary fumes of some horrid attack of nightmare. Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad executioner"s block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, pa.s.ses by each unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as a corpse bleeds when its murderer approaches." Pah! Out upon this execrable retching of a nauseated fancy! What good is there in the baseless conceit and gratuitous disgust of saying, "The next world is in the grave, betwixt the teeth of the worm"? In the case supposed, the truth is merely that there is no next world anywhere; not that all the horrors of h.e.l.l are scooped together into the grave, and there multiplied by others direr yet and unknown before. Man"s blended duty and interest, in such a case, are to try to see the interior beauty and essential kindness of his fate, to adorn it and embrace it, fomenting his resignation with the sweet lotions of faith and peace, not exasperating his wounds with the angry pungents of suspicion, alarm, and complaint.
At the worst, amidst all our personal disappointments, losses, and decay, "the view of the great universal whole of nature," as Humboldt says, "is rea.s.suring and consolatory." If the boon of a future immortality be not ours, therefore to scorn the gift of the present life, is to act not like a wise man, who with grateful piety makes the best of what is given, but like a spoiled child, who, if he cannot have both his orange and his gingerbread, pettishly flings his gingerbread in the mud.
The future life, outside of the realm of faith, to an earnest and independent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question, lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, and there is room for doubt. The wavering evidences in some moods preponderate on that side, in other moods on this side. Meanwhile it is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do is to cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a n.o.ble character, lead a pure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and G.o.d, and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue with reverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms.
Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert"s dying flower, "Thanks to day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and earth and sky, for all the gifts from men and G.o.d which have made my little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thine azure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring tide, roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shall rise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I now fall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh." Surely the mournful n.o.bility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much to the selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in the Middle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columns and doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by a hunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced in thousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, "I blessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of h.e.l.l!"
Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is an achievement whose n.o.bleness outweighs its sorrow, even if the gazer foresee his own destruction.
It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the unwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christian writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to do with its quant.i.tative contents: our duties rest not on the length, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Make the life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; make the life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has the psychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality may enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and n.o.ble conduct; it does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and contract those motives; it does not take them away.
Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not knowledge that the spirit is without terminus or rest. The faithful truth hunter, in dying, finds not a covert, but a better trail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged from prejudice and self will. With G.o.d we are not to prescribe conditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must die with the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious and dangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view is obviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophical thinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in the individual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole.
This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of G.o.d to a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law with disinterested conformity.
The influence of the doctrine of reward and punishment in a future state, as a working motive for the observance of the moral law, is enormously overestimated. The influence, as such a motive, of the public opinion of mankind, with the legal and social sanctions, is enormously underestimated. And the authority of a personal perception of right is also most unbecomingly depreciated.
UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of G.o.d, not as arbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in a book, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works.
The true basis of morality is universal order. The true end of morality is life, the sum of moral laws being identical with the sum of the conditions in accordance with which the fruition of the functions of life can be secured with nearest approach to perfectness, perpetuity, and universality. The true sanctions of morality are the manifold forms in which consciousness of life is heightened by harmony with universal order or lowered by discord with it. The true law of moral sacrifice or resistance to temptation is misrepresented by the common doctrine of heaven and h.e.l.l, which makes it consist in the renunciation of a present good for the clutching of a future good, the voluntary suffering of a small present evil to avoid the involuntary suffering of an immense future evil. The true law of moral sacrifice is deeper, purer, more comprehensive, than that. It expresses our duty, in accordance with the requirements of universal order, to subordinate the gratification of any part of our being to that of the whole of our being, to forego the good of any portion of our life in deference to that of all our life, to renounce any happiness of the individual which conflicts with the welfare of the race, to hold the spiritual atom in absolute abeyance to the spiritual universe, to sink self in G.o.d. If a man believe in no future life, is he thereby absolved from the moral law? The kind and number of his duties remain as before: only the apparent grandeur of their scale and motives is diminished. The two halves of morality are the co ordination of separate interests in universal order, and the loyalty of the parts to the wholes. The desire to remove the obligations and sanctions of the moral law from their intrinsic supports, and posit them on the fict.i.tious pedestals of a forensic heaven and h.e.l.l, reveals incompetency of thought and vulgarity of sentiment in him who does it, and is a procedure not less perilous than unwarranted. If the creation be conceived as a machine, it is a machine self regulating in all its parts by the immanent presence of its Maker.
When we die, may the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter of Christ, be our confessor; the last inhaled breath our cup of absolution; the tears of some dear friend our extreme unction; no complaint for past trials, but a grateful acknowledgment for all blessings, our parting word. And then, resigning ourselves to the universal Father, a.s.sured that whatever ought to be, and is best to be, will be, either absolute oblivion shall be welcome, or we will go forward to new destinies, whether with preserved ident.i.ty or with transformed consciousness and powers being indifferent to us, since the will of G.o.d is done. In the mean time, until that critical pa.s.s and all decisive hour, as Milnes says:
"We all must patient stand, Like statues on appointed pedestals: Yet we may choose since choice is given to shun Servile contentment or ign.o.ble fear In the expression of our att.i.tude; And with far straining eyes, and hands upcast, And feet half raised, declare our painful state, Yearning for wings to reach the fields of truth, Mourning for wisdom, panting to be free."
PART SIXTH SUPPLEMENTARY.
[FIFTEEN YEARS LATER]
CHAPTER I.
THE END OF THE WORLD.
WE read in the New Testament that the heavens and the earth are reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, when they shall be burned up, and all be made new. It is said that the elements shall melt with ferment heat, the stars fall, and the sky pa.s.s away like a scroll that is rolled together. On these and similar pa.s.sages is based the belief of Christendom in the destined destruction of the world by fire and in the scenic judgment of the dead and the living gathered before the visible tribunal of Christ. This belief was once general and intense. It is still common, though more vague and feeble than formerly. In whatever degree it is held, it is a doctrine of terror. We hope by tracing its origin, and showing how mistaken it is, to help dispel its sway, free men from the further oppression of its fearfulness, and put in its place the just and wholesome authority of the truth. The true doctrine of the divine government of the world, the correct explanation of the course and sequel of history, must be more honorable to G.o.d, more useful to men, of better working and omen in the life of society, than any error can be. Let us then, as far as we are able, displace by the truth the errors prevalent around us in regard to the end of the world and the day of judgment.
It will help us in our proposed investigation, if we first notice that the ecclesiastical doctrine as to an impending destruction of the world is not solitary, but has prototypes and parallels in the faiths of other nations and ages. Almost every people, every tribe, has its cosmogony or theory of the creation, in which there are accounts, more or less rude or refined, general or minute, of the supposed beginning and of the imagined end of nature. All early literatures from the philosophic treatises of the Hindus to the oral traditions of the Polynesians are found to contain either sublime dreams or obscure prophecies or awful pictures of the final doom and destruction of earth and man. The Hebrew symbols and the Christian beliefs in relation to this subject therefore stand not alone, but in connection with a mult.i.tude of others, each one plainly reflecting the degree of knowledge and stage of development attained by the minds which originated it. Before proceeding to examine the familiar doctrine so enveloped in our prejudices, a brief examination of some kindred doctrines, less familiar to us and quite detached from our prejudices, will be of service.
The sacred books of the Hindus describe certain enormous periods of time in which the universe successively begins and ends, springs into being and sinks into nothing. These periods are called kalpas, and each one covers a duration of thousands of millions of years. Each kalpa of creation is called a day of Brahma; each kalpa of destruction, a night of Brahma. The belief is that Brahma, waking from the slumber of his self absorbed solitude, feels his loneliness, and his thoughts and emotions go forth in creative forms, composing the immense scheme of worlds and creatures. These play their parts, and run their courses, until the vast day of Brahma is completed; when he closes his eyes, and falls to rest, while the whole system of finite things returns to the silence and darkness of its aboriginal unity, and remains there in invisible annihilation through the stupendous night that precedes the reawaking of the slumbering G.o.dhead and the appearance of the creation once more.
A little reflection makes the origin of this imagery and belief clear. Each night, as the darkness comes down, and the outer world disappears, man falls asleep, and, so far as he is consciously concerned, every thing is destroyed. In his unconsciousness, everything ceases to be. The light dawns again, he awakes, and his reopened senses create anew the busy frame and phenomena of nature. Transfer this experience from man to G.o.d; consider it not as abstract and apparent, but as concrete and real, and you have the Hindu doctrine of the kalpa. When we sleep, to us all things are destroyed; and when we awake, to us they reappear. When G.o.d sleeps, all things in themselves really end; and when he wakes, they begin anew to be. The visible and experimental phenomena of day and night, sleeping and waking, are universalized, and attributed to G.o.d, It is a poetic process of thought, natural enough to a rich minded, simple people, but wholly illegitimate as a logical ground of belief, But being stated in books supposed to be infallibly inspired, and in the absence of critical tests for the discrimination of sound from unsound thought, it was implicitly accepted by mult.i.tudes.
Closely allied to the foregoing doctrine, yet in several particulars strikingly different from it, and evidently quite independent in its origin, was the Great Year of the Stoics, or the alternative blotting out and restoration of all things. This school of philosophers conceived of G.o.d as a pure artistic force or seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in the evolution of the kosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms into fire, and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagration destroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible G.o.d alone in his pure essence again. The artistic germ or seed force then begins, under its laws of intrinsic necessity, to go once more through the same process to the same end.
The rise of this imagery and belief is not so obvious as in the last instance, but it is equally discoverable and intelligible.
Every animal, every flower, every plant, begins from its proper specific germ or force, goes through a fixed series of growths and changes, and relapses into its prime elements, and another and another follow after it in the same order. The seasons come and go, and come again and go again, Every planet repeats its revolutions over and over. Wherever we look, this repet.i.tion of identical processes greets our vision. Now, by imaginative a.s.sociation universalize this repet.i.tion of the course of phenomena as seen in the parts, and take it up and apply it to the whole creation, and you have the doctrine in hand.
It is a poetic process of thought not scientific or philosophic, and without claim to belief; yet, in the absence of scientific data and standards, it might easily win acceptance on authority.