A Mohammedan author says of the seventy three sects into which his coreligionists are divided, that seventy two are wrong ways, terminating in eternal d.a.m.nation; the remaining one alone, in which are the party of salvation, leads through the true faith into the City of Allah. The same unwise bigotry, the same unripeness of judgment, has been generally shown by Christians. It is time they were ashamed of it, and allowed their souls to mature and expand into a more liberal creed in fuller keeping with the hospitable amplitude of the righteousness and goodness of G.o.d.
Everything that tends to bring the will of man into loving submission to the infinite Father, to mould the structure of character into correspondence with those established conditions of rightful being represented by the moral and religious virtues, is an open highway of salvation. And all the great cardinal ordinations of life do legitimately tend to this result.
Therefore all these are gates of heaven. Some pa.s.s in through one of them, others through another; and by means of them all, it is decreed in the sovereign councils of the Divinity, as we believe, that, sooner or later, every intelligence shall reach the goal.
First is the gate of innocence. Little children, spotless youths and maidens who have known no malice or guile, the saintly few among mature men and women who by the untempted elevation and serenity of their temper have kept their integrity unmarred and their robes unsullied, enter by this nearest and easiest gate.
Borne aloft by their own native gravitation, we see the white procession of the innocent ones winding far up the cerulean height and defiling in long melodious line into heaven.
The second gate is prosperity. Through this enter those to whom good fortune has served as the guiding smile of G.o.d, not pampering them with arrogance, nor hardening them with careless egotism, but shaping them to thankful meekness and generosity. Exempt from lacerating trials, every want benignly supplied, girt with friends, they have grown up in goodness and grat.i.tude, obeying the will of G.o.d by the natural discharge of their duties, diffusing benedictions and benefits around them. To such beautiful spirits, saved from wrong and woe by the redemptive shelter of their lot, happiness is a better purgatory than wretchedness. The crystal stream of joy percolating throughout the soul cleanses it more perfectly than any flames of pain can. And so the virtuous children of a favored fortune, who have improved their privileges with pious fidelity, move on into heaven.
Then the third gate is victory. This is more arduous of approach, and yet a throng of heroic souls, the very chivalry of heaven, press through it, wounded and bleeding from the struggle, but triumphant. These are they who have endured hardship with uncomplaining fort.i.tude and fought their way through all enemies, seductions and tribulations. These are they who, armed with the native sacrament of righteousness, inspired with a loyal love, would never stoop their crests to wrong nor make a league with iniquity the conquering champions who tread down every vile temptation, ever hearing their Leader say, "In the world ye shall have trouble and sorrow; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."
Penitence is another gate of heaven. By the instructions of Providence, by the natural progress of experience, the evolution of wisdom, a sinner may become aware of the ingrat.i.tude of his disobedience, ashamed of the odiousness of his guilt; be smitten with a regenerating love of truth, beauty, goodness, G.o.d; and, without waiting for the lash of an external judgment to drive him the way he should go, by voluntary preference may grieve over his folly and sin, and turn to his duty and his Savior. Then the blessed gate of a spontaneous repentance stands open before him; and through this hospitable entrance mult.i.tudes find admission to the divine home.
Death often gives an otherwise unattainable deliverance, and so yields the poor victim of unhappy outer conditions a pa.s.sage to heaven. It is a thought no less false than it is frightful, which represents death as the vindictive turnkey of the creation, at whose approach probation ends, and the shuddering convict is thrust into h.e.l.l, the hopeless bolt dropping into its ward behind him. It is rather the divine messenger of deliverance for those who are borne down here under a fate too hard for them. Oh, what myriads of afflicted ones orphan children crushed by brutal treatment; poor seamstresses starving in garrets; men and women ground and grimed almost out of the semblance of humanity, in the drudgery and darkness of coal mines; hapless suicides, who have rashly fled from this step dame world, and whose alabaster forms, purpled with bruises, are laid on the dismal beds of bra.s.s in the morgue, where a ghastly light strains through the grates, and the crowd of gazers sweeps endlessly on; unsuccessful men of genius, unappreciated, neglected, cruelly wronged, their extreme sensitiveness making their lives a long martyrdom to these what a blessed angel is death, freeing them, setting them in a new state, starting them on a fresh career, amidst fairer circ.u.mstances, in front of better opportunities! To be saved, and in paradise, what is it but to be a pure instrument to echo the music of divine things? When the corruptible parts of the instrument are hopelessly discordant, or the circ.u.mstances of its place here are jangled with evils which it cannot overcome, then the disentanglement of the spiritual harp, and the translation of it to some finer sphere; where its free chords may ring their proper music clearly out, are a blessed redemption, making death itself a triumphant gate of heaven.
Retribution is the remotest and most difficult of all the heavenly gates; and yet it is one, and one that is indispensable for many a neglectful, halting, and obstinate child of man. It is an extreme error to think punishment a gate of h.e.l.l. It is rather a result of being already inside, and it legitimately serves as an outlet thence. Whatever may be the case with imperfect human rulers, in the government of G.o.d no punishment is ever inflicted for the sake of vengeance, a gratuitous evil. It is blasphemy to deem G.o.d vindictive. He always punishes for the sake of good, to awaken attention, produce insight and sorrow, and cause a reattunement of character and conduct with the laws of right, seen at last to be supremely authoritative and benignant, indissolubly bound up with the truest good of each and with the sole good of all. On every gate of h.e.l.l may be written. Wherever retribution is actual, salvation is possible, equivalent to the great maxim of jurisprudence: Ubi jus ibi remedium! So, even the dark door of retribution, when men will advance by no other way, leads them to thoughtfulness, regret, and a redemptive readjustment of their pa.s.sions and acts. Thus it becomes the ultimate gate of heaven.
And, alas! what a dismal crowd of sufferers, refusing all shorter and happier ways, wait to be drawn through this torturing pa.s.sage of remedial mercy! May the number entering by the other gates ever increase, and those entering this dwindle! And yet, may it forever stand open for the unhappy culprits who must be lost unless saved here!
Besides all these gates, and commanding them all, there is one everywhere accessible, and never shut on any soul which has the grace to try it the omnipresent gate of resignation. Remove the conditions of resistance, or friction, by a total surrender of self will and an absolute acceptance of the Divine Will, and, it matters not where you are, the essence of perdition is destroyed in your soul. The utter abandonment of pride, a pious submission to the laws of things, a glad and grateful acquiescence in whatever the Supreme Authority decrees this is the unrestricted way into heaven which waits before the steps of all who will only exhibit the requisite spirit, and enter. Yes, let any being but banish from himself every vestige of personal dictation before G.o.d and unexactingly identify his desires with universal good; and, even though he stand on the bottom of h.e.l.l, heaven will be directly before him through the open gate of resignation. For the organic att.i.tude of a pure and loving submission tunes the discordant creature to that eternal breath of G.o.d which blows everywhere through the universe of souls, sighing until they conspire with it to make the music of redemption.
CHAPTER V.
RESUME HOW THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY NOW STANDS.
IN THE leading nations of Christendom, the belief in the immortality of the soul has for some time past obviously been weakening. The number of those who a.s.sail the belief increases, and their utterances become more frank and dogmatic. A mult.i.tude of instances, clear to every careful observer, prove this.
Especially at the present moment do examples of painful doubt, profound misgiving, bold and exultant denial, mocking flippancy and ridicule, abound on all sides, in private conversation, in public discussion, and in every form of literary activity. The hearty thoroughness and fervor with which the faith of the Church was once held have gone from whole cla.s.ses. Subtle skepticism or blank negation is a common characteristic. Whether this tendency towards unbelief be sound or fallacious, temporary or permanent, it is at least actual. And it is important that we examine the causes of it, and test their logical validity while tracing their historic spread. Why, then, we ask, is the faith in a future life for man suffering such a marked decay in the present generation of Christendom?
In the first place, the faith pales and dwindles, from the general neglect of that strenuous and constant cultivation of it formerly secured by the stern doctrinal drill and by the rigid supervision of daily thought and habit in the interests of religion. Never before were men so absorbed as now in material toil and care during the serious portion of their existence; never before so beset as now during the leisure portion by innumerable forms of amus.e.m.e.nt and dissipation. The habit of lonely meditation and prayer grows rarer. The exactions of the struggle of ambition grow fiercer, the burdens of necessity press more heavily; the vices and temptations of society thicken: and they withdraw the attention of men from ideal and sacred aims. More and more men seem to live for labor and pleasure, for time and sense; less and less for truth and good, for G.o.d and eternity. Absorbed in the materialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolous diversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious age was maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilent an epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such a discount? But the things to which men really devote themselves dilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come to disbelieve that for which they take no thought and make no sacrifice or investment. The average men of our time, as well those of the educated cla.s.ses as those of the laboring cla.s.ses, do not live for immortality. Therefore their faith in it diminishes.
Our fathers, to a degree not common now, walked in mental companionship with G.o.d, practiced solitary devotion, shaped their daily feelings and deeds with reference to the effect on their future life. Thus that hidden life became real to them. Now the interests and provocations of the present world, concentrated and intensified as never before the strife of aspirants, the giddy enterprises of speculation and commerce and engineering, the chaos of caucuses and newspapers and telegraphs monopolize our faculties and exhaust our energies, leaving us but faint inclination to attend to the solemn themes of the soul and the mystic lures of infinity. To those crazed with greed, battling with rivals or sunk in debauchery, G.o.d naturally becomes a verbal phantom and immortality a foolish dream. There is nothing in mechanism and mammon worship, nothing in selfish sloth and laughter, nothing in cruel oppression and drudgery, to inspire belief in the deathless spirituality of man. Among a people prevailingly given over to these earthlinesses, faith in the transcendent verities of religion perforce dies out. In the long run the supreme devotion of the soul irresistibly moulds its faith. Christendom does not live in conscious sacrifices and aspirations for G.o.d and eternal life, but it lives chiefly for selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer and more harmonic insight. The pa.s.sing eclipse of faith in a future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this world, unveil all the elements of h.e.l.l and heaven really existing here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue and blessedness now. When this shall have been done the tangential and fractional character of our experience will be so obvious, the inadequacy of the earthly state for the wants of our transcendent and prophetic faculties will be so urgent, and the supplementing adaptations of the entire unseen but clearly divined future to the craving parts in the present will be so manifest, that a complete revelation of immortality will break upon the prepared mind of the race. Then history will take a new departure in breathing communion with the whole creation.
But infidelity to duty and privilege does not destroy the truth of duty and privilege. It only blinds the faithless eyes so that they cannot see the truth. If the immortality of the soul be a truth, the materialistic absorption of our life would blind us to it and make us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide the future from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on the dark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlasting invitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness of our age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it does not logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test of the genuine evidence.
The second reason for the apparent rapid crumbling away of the belief in immortality in Christendom is the recent wide diffusion of a critical knowledge of the comparative history of the opinions of all nations on the subject of a future life, revealing the mythological character common to them, and tracking them back to their origin in primitive superst.i.tions no longer is their literal purport credible to any educated intelligence. In many works by theological writers, and by scientific writers, of free habits of thought, like Strauss and Spencer, collections have been made of the fancies and theories of mankind respecting the survival of the spirit and the conditions of its experience after the death of the body. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the most enlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with the crudest notions of the barbarians of the prehistoric period, namely, the spontaneous workings of raw instinct and imagination.
Tracing the views of Christians as to the nature of the soul, and the life to come in heaven or h.e.l.l, back to the rude conceptions of the naked savages who fashioned their idea of the ghost from the shadow or the reflection of the man, which was a picture or representative of him, yet without matter, and from the phenomena of dreams, in which they supposed the spirit of the man left him and went through the adventures of the dream and returned ere he awoke it has been a.s.serted that every form of later faith, however refined and improved in details, yet really resting on such puerile fancies, such incompetent and absurd beginnings, is thereby discredited and must be rejected.
Now, it is true that when we find among Christian believers, connected with the doctrine of a future life, an incongruous medley of physical imagery and gross imaginative pictures, conceptions of just the same character as the grotesque dreamings of the earliest savages and the elaborate mythology of subsequent priesthoods, we are required to treat the whole suppositious ma.s.s as mere poetry or superst.i.tion, and to dismiss it from our faith.
But we are by no means justified in doing so with the essential fact itself of a future life. The essential fact, the a.s.sertion of immortality, may be true, even if the mythological dress be all fict.i.tious. It does not follow that man has no surviving soul because the local heaven or h.e.l.l, described by savage or priest as its residence, is unreal. It surely is no correct inference that the soul perishes with the body, because the barbarian mind generalized its idea of the soul from the phenomena of shadows, reflections, echoes and dreams. The critical scholar, who judges the case fairly, will correct the fallacies of the confused reasoning instinct, and relegate the mythology to its proper province, but reserve his judgment on the question itself of spiritual survival to be settled on the only appropriate evidence.
Although the habit thus formed by the critical scholar, and by those who follow his authority, of sweeping away as wholly untenable so many varieties of speculation, and so many groups of images connected with the belief in a future life, has unquestionably contributed powerfully to foster complete disbelief in the doctrine itself, yet it is equally unquestionable that this process of negation is illogical. Many a true doctrine has been cradled in superst.i.tions and absurdities. A faith supported by many cla.s.ses of independent arguments is not overthrown by the disproof of one of those cla.s.ses. It is as wrongful a procedure to deny the immortality of the soul because barbaric instinct grounded it on erroneous notions and enveloped it with falsehoods, as it would be to reject the established laws of gravitation and light and sound, for the reason that the various provisional theories, preceding the correct ones, were ridiculous mistakes.
The problem to be solved is, Does the man who is now a soul in a body remain a soul when the body dissolves? The inadequacy or folly of a hundred provisional answers does not affect the final answer. Instead of denying immortality because the childish mind of the early world feigned impossible things about it, we should change the question by appeal to a more competent court, and inquire what Pythagoras, Augustine, Dante, Leibnitz, Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling, Swedenborg, Goethe, thought about it. It is a question for the consensus of the most gifted and impartial minds, the very Areopagus of Humanity, to decide. Furthermore, on a deeper inquiry, it seems clear that the real belief in immortality did not originate from the contemplation of the phenomena of dreams and shadows and echoes, but arose rather from the inexpugnable self a.s.sertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself non existent. This persistency of consciousness, following it in all its imaginative flights of thought beyond the death of the body, was the cause of the mythological creativeness of the barbaric mind. And thus the elaboration of the imagery of ghosts and a ghostly realm was not the precursor, but the result of a belief in another life. The belief sprang directly out of the feeling of a continuous being unconquerably connected with human self consciousness, and is independent of the imagery in which it has been clothed, may clothe itself in endless forms of imagery, and survive their removal on the discovery of their incompetence.
Besides, the savage himself was, after all, not so far out of the way. His mythology was not a mere fiction concreted into fact by superst.i.tion. He was on that track of a.n.a.logy which, when cleared, will be, perhaps, the luminous highway to universal truth. The savage was obscurely conscious that the objects which appeared around him as solid material realities had their immaterial correspondences within his spirit. The tree, the stone, the flower, the star, the beast, the man, had within him correspondent mental images or ideas just as real as they, but without sensible qualities, and incapable of hurt. With creative wonder he recognized a symbol or a.n.a.logy of this inner world in the shadow and the reflection. The shadow or the reflection is a representation of its original, but without material substance.
See, it lies there, wavering, on the rock, or in the water. No arrow can pierce it, no club bruise it, no pestle pulverize it, no chemistry disintegrate it. It is an emblem of the immaterial and indestructible spirit, revealed in the outer world of matter, where everything changes and pa.s.ses away except the noumena under the phenomena. No wonder it stirred the brooding fancy of the ignorant, but prophetic primitive man, and made it teem with poesy and personification.
Freely, then, let us brush aside the mythological extravagance and irrational errors in the entire cosmopolitan doctrine of a future life, but beware of rejecting the fact itself of immortality until we have better grounds than have yet been afforded by the acc.u.mulating insight of literary history. As the world moves on, and the human mind develops with it, the crude must give way to the mature, and the false be replaced, not with vacancy, but with the true. The problem of the nature and destiny of the soul will not be solved by tearing away the fict.i.tious drapery thrown around it, but by piercing to the roots of the reality within the drapery.
And now we come to the third reason for the increasing doubt and decreasing faith in regard to a future life: that reason is that the form of the belief in it prevalent in Christendom has become incredible, and the rejection of the form has loosened the hold on the substance. The philosophic mind, which has attained to the idea of the infinite G.o.d, without body, or parts, or pa.s.sions, omnipresent in his total perfection, can reason to the belief in a kindred immortality for its own finite being. But since our experience is here limited to the life now known, we are utterly without data or ability to image forth such a conception of immortality in any form of picture or mental scenery. There seem to be only three ways in which we can give imaginative representation of a future life. The first is the method of the universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of a.n.a.logy which is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who are unwilling to leave their thoughts of the future life in empty rational abstraction, portray it in vivid concrete. This they do by means of the doctrine of a general bodily resurrection of the dead.
It is a striking fact that four of the great historic and literary religions have taught the doctrine of immortality under the form of a physical resurrection, namely: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. It has been attributed, also, to the ancient religion of Egypt, but erroneously. Its belief there is a mere inference from facts which do not really imply it. The Egyptians plainly believed in a series of individual reincarnations, not in any general resurrection. But it is a sufficiently interesting and impressive fact that over one third of the human race have embodied their expectation of a future eternal life in this concrete and astonishing form. It has not rested on a basis of reason, but on one of a.s.serted revelation and authority. It originated in the fact that the only life of which we now have any experience is a life in the body, and, therefore, this is the life which we instinctively love and prefer; also in the fact that this is the only mode of life which we are able to represent to ourselves in any satisfactory, apprehensible image.
It then bolstered itself up by arbitrary theological theorizings, and proclaimed itself with sanctions of a pretended supernatural authority. Slowly the minds of its disciples were drilled to a familiarity with it, and to a habit of implicitly believing it, which grew strong enough to make them hold to it in spite of its difficulty as a sheer and violent miracle having no connection whatever with the natural order of things. Authority and pa.s.sive habit long maintained the belief in unbroken sway. They still so support it in the Mohammedan world, where there is almost no science, but little skeptical thought, and a common uniformity of abject submission to the word of the Koran. But in Christendom it fares differently. Here, the knowledge of modern science and habits of free inquiry are almost universally diffused. The consequence is, since the chief Christian belief in immortality has been identified with the notion of a general physical resurrection of the dead at the last day, and since all philosophical and scientific thinking refutes that notion by setting its arbitrariness and monstrous abnormality in high and steep relief against the consensus of demonstrated knowledge and moral probability, that the popular belief of Christendom in immortality itself is depolarized and swiftly dropping into decay with a large cla.s.s of persons. But this spread of doubt and denial, while a natural process, is yet an illogical and unnecessary one. The competent thinker will extricate the question of the immortality of the soul from its accidental entanglement with the doctrine of the resurrection, and, rejecting the latter as incredible, still affirm the former on its own independent grounds. To prove and ill.u.s.trate these statements we must here give a little additional study, fresh and independent study, to the subject.
The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is bound up with the whole fabric of the Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic theology of Christendom, and cannot be removed without logically shaking that system of belief into pieces. And yet the doctrine, as has been shown in a previous chapter, is unscriptural and of a purely pagan origin, the New Testament foretelling a resurrection of spirits from the underworld, not of bodies from the grave. It has no real a.n.a.logies in the world, but is a figment of fancy, unsupported by reason on any authentic physical or moral grounds. It is, furthermore, a doctrine whose realization is impossible, because it is a self destroying absurdity.
All that we need for demonstrating its absolute incredibility, is simply to ultimate its implications, carry it out in thought to the necessary results which its ignorant originators never foresaw. The doctrine of a physical resurrection presupposes that our race was originally intended to be immortal on earth, and that death was a penalty for sin. Fill out the theory. Adam and Eve, made male and female, were commanded to multiply and replenish the earth. Their descendants, doubling every twenty five years, would, after sixty or seventy generations had acc.u.mulated, have covered the whole earth so thickly that they would be packed in one immovable ma.s.s, the whole planet carpeted with their forms and paved with their upturned faces. Not an inch of room on the globe for any harvest to grow or any creature to move; the world, crowded and imbedded at every point with one continuous mult.i.tude of immortal human beings, would have then rolled around the zodiac, presenting this chronic and motionless picture, to all eternity!
If it be maintained that had it not been for sin and its penalty, the successive generations would neither have died nor have remained forever on the earth, but would have been translated bodily to some other world, the absurdity just exposed is escaped only to introduce another one equally glaring. For in time, the entire solid contents of the globe would thus be removed, and the disappearance of our planet unhinge the solar system and produce a general cataclysm. The solid contents of the earth have been estimated at about thirty nine trillions of cubic feet. Seventy five doublings of the primal pair would reach to over seventy trillions of human beings, each containing more than a solid cubic foot.
It is perfectly clear, therefore, in any view, that the only way in which the human race, with their reproductive const.i.tution, could permanently inhabit the world is by the present system of successive births and deaths; a system, furthermore, which science shows to have been in working existence among the preceding races of creatures for innumerable ages before the mythical sin of Adam and Eve, with its mythical consequences.
The fabulous scheme of an intended bodily immortality on the earth is a discordant and disagreeable one in every respect, asthetic, rational, and moral. It jars incongruously with the great order of nature and providence, which everywhere interpolates a night between two days, a sleep between two wakings, to keep the edge of consciousness fresh and the possibilities of pleasure alive.
Imprisoned in this carca.s.s of flesh with its ign.o.ble necessities for endless ages, the contemplation of the fearful burden of monotony would be insufferable to any one who had thought the case out in all its details with vivid realization. And yet, so unthinking are most persons in regard to the conventional beliefs prevalent in society, Pa.r.s.ees, Jews, Christians and Mohammedans, professedly base their entire faith in immortality on this dogma with the resurrection involved in it.
When carried out in its particulars by the imagination, the doctrine is self evidently untenable, contradictory to the essential facts of human nature under the given conditions of the material creation. It had its theologic birth in the speculations of the dualistic religion of Persia, whence it was first borrowed by the Jews, then secondarily adopted into Christianity, and thence finally impacted into the mongrel creed of Mohammed and his followers. It is philosophically irreconcilable with a pure monotheism; for, if G.o.d be infinite, no enemy could subvert his original scheme and force Him to an arbitrary miracle to restore it. It is a creaking and dissonant artifice, every way repugnant to all whose reason and sentiment have learned to love the smooth and continuous evolution of the order of the cosmos and the connected destinies of conscious beings. It is absolutely refuted by the double reductio ad absurdum shown above to be contained in it.
Yet, while the grounds on which the common belief in a destined general resurrection of the dead rests have really lost their validity to the mind of the nineteenth century, the millions of Islam and Christendom retain the article unchanged in their creeds, and to question it is a heresy. No wonder skepticism flourishes and genuine faith decays. This clinging to an outgrown scheme is not only from the strong drift of a pa.s.sive mental conformity, as the train of cars keeps on for some time after the dynamic locomotive has been taken off. Another reason is that the tenet is so centrally imbedded in the dogmatic ecclesiasticism that it cannot be extricated without involving all the a.s.sociated dogmas. Therefore, one portion of this knowing generation repeat the formula and blink the difficulties, while another portion go over to open disbelief of any future life. The doctrine of the literal resurrection of the body from the grave is incredible to the educated and free intelligence of the age. In continuing to affirm it ecclesiastical Christendom brands itself with frivolity, not earnest enough to carry its thought in loyalty to truth as far as possible, or with hypocrisy, consciously dishonest to its doubts.
It is a precious boon to be rid of such an unnatural and ominous belief as that in the final disemboguing of the dead by sea and land, the tumbling of the rocks, the falling of the stars, and the everlasting torture of the condemned in a prison of fire. Far better than any such doctrine is a calm confronting of the mystery of the future in its confessed secrecy as it is, and a peaceful resignation to the will of G.o.d in conscious ignorance and trust.
And yet the believer in this scheme of colossal and ghastly necromancy, when confronted with the unanswerable arguments against it, is sometimes found clinging to it with willful tenacity, and bitterly complaining of those who refute it, that they would rob him of his faith and give him nothing in exchange.
Suppose a man to believe that in the year nineteen hundred the earth will be exploded, and that all men, except himself and the little clique of his friends, will be strung for eternity on a red hot iron wire in empty s.p.a.ce. Suppose that this horrid notion is clearly proved to him to be an error. Then, because he is not taught exactly what will happen in the year nineteen hundred, he, the unhappy man, a.s.sails his enlightener for having robbed him of his faith and given him nothing in exchange! Is not the truth of ignorance better than the falsity of superst.i.tion? Modest faith in front of the shrouded unknown can well stand comparison with the arrogant and incompetent exultation of fanaticism. In regard to that belated relic of the belief in magic, the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the dead in their fleshy bodies, let us gratefully wipe it all out and draw a long breath of relief. Let us rejoice to know that the will of G.o.d will be done in the fulfilling order of the universe, although we may now be ignorant of precisely what that will is. Believing the will of G.o.d to be good, whether revealed or concealed, we can afford to wait in peace, trying in the meantime to carry our individual character and our social state and experience here steadily toward perfection. Surely, that is the best way to prepare ourselves for whatever lies beyond.
And yet we are not wholly shut up to mere blind faith. There is always some ground of moral truth in every widely extended dogmatic belief. In casting off the dogma we should carefully extract its moral purport and try to give it a more authentic setting. It will not be hard to do this with reference to the doctrine now under consideration.
Obscure and complicated and baffling as the problem of our future destiny is, we can already trace many a line of light, many a prophetic signal and hint suggestive of what is ordained to happen to the individual and the race.
Unquestionably, the genuine moral reason why the belief in the fleshly resurrection has been so general and tenacious is the two fold consideration: first; that we desire our future life to be an incarnate life because our experience makes that form of being realizable and precious to our imagination, while a disembodied ghostliness is, perforce, repulsively vacant and abstract; and, secondly because our affection and our imagination and our conscience profoundly crave the complete fulfillment of the scheme of the historic career of collective humanity in this world in some such manner, that here, on this dear old earth, the experience of our whole race may be brought to a clear epical unity, and may close with an illuminating justification of providence in the sight of all men, who shall then read the interpretation of their entire past, and see together eye to eye.
Now we believe that the essence of this natural desire and this sublime hope is a divine prophecy which shall be fulfilled. We believe that in the very falsity of the doctrine of a carnal resurrection and judgment there lurks a truth yet to break out in overwhelming refulgence and perfectly satisfy every soul of man.
But it will be brought about by the gradual culmination of the means and processes which G.o.d is now visibly carrying forward, and not by any sudden convulsion of miracle.
The faculties of human consciousness in the individual and the race are in process of development. Also the transmissible sum of knowledge, on which those faculties employ themselves, is in process of rapid increase. The faculties of knowledge possessed by an accomplished master of literature and science now, contrasted with those of a cannibal savage of the pre glacial epoch, reveal an advance which hardly needs to be repeated in order to give us a comprehension of the whole experience of our kind on earth, quite ample to explain the facts of the case and solve the problem of our destiny. The grasp of our intelligence and the richness of our sensibility increase along the ages. The generalizations of our philosophy grow wider, the gropings of our sympathetic faith become vaster, the retrospection and the prevision of our science keener and longer and more inclusive, every generation. It is very significant that the further away we get from the prehistoric times the more we learn about them. Archaology is one of the latest and most swiftly enlarging branches of knowledge. Let the processes thus indicated go on, as they have gone on and are with accelerated pace going on, and the date is not beyond prophecy when all earthly and human secrets will be solved, and their mysteries be revealed, and the autobiographic book and volume of the world be opened, and the universal tribunal be set in the light of every life, and the irreversible judgment be declared, by the simple revelation of the truth of history in the web of its relations. For as every atom of matter is conjoined by all the laws of nature with all other atoms of matter, and the history of all their adventures is registered by their own indestructible vibrations in the elemental s.p.a.ces of the universe where they run their career, so every ident.i.ty of spirit is conjoined by all the laws of spirit with all other spirits, and all their deeds and sufferings are ineffaceably self registered in their reactions upon the authors, in the pictures they shed upon s.p.a.ce, and the influences they set rolling through the eternity of successive souls and lives. All, then, that is needed for a perfectly vindicating judgment is the awakening of consciousness to the full view of the facts. And the tendencies are powerfully moving in that direction. What was the illumination of Swedenborg but the taking possession by his consciousness of the unconscious lower nervous system, with all its impacted ancestral experiences and wondrous relations with the visible and invisible worlds? And this may be repeated, by and by, and be perfected, and become common.
What may result is as yet almost inconceivable. Let us trace a little, in this regard, the connections of the individual and the face, and follow out some of their implications.
Suppose that in turn every child born begets or bears two children. Then in the thirtieth generation the transmitted qualities of spirit, nerve and blood, of the single original pair of parents will be represented in upwards of one thousand millions of descendants. It is clear from this law, allowing for all deviations from its numerical progression on account of inter marriages and of failures of offspring, how powerfully and swiftly the ever multiplying streams of consanguinity are spreading in every direction, affiliating and fraternizing the whole human race literally into one family, the innumerable rills of separate descent intermingling as they flow on, and finally diffusing over the earth in that oceanic unity of humanity, which, when full, will beat with the tidal pulse of a single sympathy. It is believed by many that no experience of any living creature is ever lost, but is by its own spontaneous and exact reflex vibrations either registered in the conscious memory or deposited in the unconscious organism in latent perfection of vestige and tendency.
Memory is a faithful treasurer of all the stores of events.
Suppose now that each parent bequeaths in the dynamic germ of his progeny the possibility of reviving into consciousness, when the proper conditions shall be furnished, the acc.u.mulated sum of all that has happened throughout the entire line of his ancestry. And again, imagine that all the souls composing the human race each of which is a substantial and indestructible ent.i.ty, living incarnated over and over, and not a mere phenomenal process that vanishes into nothing with the dissolution of the body are so limited in number that they may be embodied on the earth in one generation, whose members shall be so conjoined in knowledge and fellowship that the life of the whole is concentrated in every one, and the life of every one mirrored in the whole. Now, finally, let it be conceived that this latest generation, including all who have ever inhabited the world, at last attain a development which enables them to grasp in distinct consciousness the collective sum of the organic heritage of the race, each one reading with perfect clearness in every particular the complete history of humanity from the beginning to the end, understanding all its causes, courses and consequences, and beholding with unspeakable delight the justification of the ways of G.o.d, the whole universe opening into free intercommunication, as if time and s.p.a.ce were either no more or else their measures were of boundless subjective elasticity, every creature found in peace and rapture at the goal of his destiny. That, indeed, would be a realization of the day of judgment and the resurrection of the dead, but without a shock or a jar in the course of things which science reveals. The process of development now going on, if carried far enough, will naturally result in this or in something equivalent to it; while the notion of the vomiting forth of the acc.u.mulated dead from land and sea, at the blast of a trumpet, is a wild piece of imagery, borrowed from startling political phenomena, and applied with absurd incongruity to the chronic providence of G.o.d. The former view contains all the moral significance of the latter, but without its violation of probability. Nor is it all necessary that the climax shall be brought about of a simultaneous universal judgment, or of the appearance of our whole race on the earth at one time. The giving of the vision to souls subjectively, one after another, in the order of their attainment of the conditions, would meet every requirement of the case. To each one in turn, wherever he was, as the result broke on him in the ecstatic glory of all it means, the essence of the so long cherished faith of Christendom would be justified, and the providential theater and scenery of human experience would appear under its illumination as a dazzling vision of poetic justice perfect at every point.
Marvelous and almost incredible as this scheme of thought may seem, it is not more mysterious in itself, or more staggering in its demand on our faith, than many things successively were which are now established beyond a doubt such as the telegraphic conversation of men through the ocean and around the globe; the seven hundred and thirty three thousand millions of ethereal vibrations in a second, which cause the report of the violet ray in consciousness; the transcendent disclosures of the spectrum a.n.a.lysis; the conception of gravitation as a force which holds all matter in unbroken union, and acts throughout the stellar universe with timeless simultaneity. It is in entire keeping with everything else in the workings of G.o.d, as demonstrated by science, on every hand, both in nature and history. The atomic theory and the nebular hypothesis, the chemical crucible and the mathematical calculus, the microscope and the telescope discover to our senses and our reason, wherever we look, facts as mysterious to the understanding, and as baffling to the imagination as any of the foregoing implications; showing us, in every department of nature and experience, the bewildering miracles of the infinitely little and the infinitely great exactly balanced and perpetually pa.s.sing into one another.
There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of the primitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of the Christian and Pa.r.s.ee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which the imagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, has concreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine of transmigration. A striking feature and no slight recommendation of the foregoing view of the true meaning of the dogma of the resurrection is that it reconciles these two chief forms of the belief in immortal life. For resurrection and transmigration agree in the central point of a restoration of the disembodied soul to a new bodily existence, only the former represents this as a single collective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of G.o.d at the close of the earthly drama, the latter depicts it as constantly taking place in the regular fulfillment of the divine plan in the creation. This difference is certainly, to a scientific and philosophical thinker, who reasons on the data of nature and experience and not on the dicta of theologians, strongly in favor of the Oriental theory. We have no experience whatever of any general resurrection, but all experience is full of the constant appearances of souls in freshly created bodies throughout the scale of sentient being. If our final future life is to be a bodily one there surely is a world of presumptive evidence, therefore, in behalf of transmigration as opposed to resurrection.
Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason for the resurrection holds with at least equal force for transmigration. The argument from a.n.a.logy is especially strong. It is natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated life that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety of souls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting series of adventures, in appropriate organisms; there being, as Paul said, one kind of flesh of birds, another kind of flesh of beasts, another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality.
Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we reawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in one life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the whole thread of experience from the beginning.
In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful and refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so extensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of the majority, having for ages on ages been held by half of the human race with an intensity of conviction almost without a parallel. Indeed the most striking fact, at first sight, about the doctrine of the repeated existences of the soul incarnated in different organisms, its form and experience in each successive embodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in the preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of the faith in it in all parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain great nations. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose contrasted splendors and horrors awaken astonishment more and more with each step in the progressive decipherment of its mysterious record, seems largely to have grown out of this faith. The swarming millions of India also, through the chief periods of their history, have lain under its spell, suffered their lives, wrought their great works of government, architecture, philosophy, and poetry, and in its belief meditated, aspired, and exhaled their souls. Ruder forms of it are reported among innumerable barbaric tribes. It played an important part in the speculations of the early Fathers of the Christian Church, and has often cropped out in the works of later theologians. Men of the profoundest metaphysical genius, like Scotus Erigena and Leibnitz, have affirmed it, and sought to give it a logical or scientific basis.
And even amidst the predominance of skeptical and materialistic influences in Europe and America, at the present time, we constantly meet individuals with independent minds who earnestly believe the alluring dogma. For, to a large and varied cla.s.s of minds, the doctrine holds a transcendent attraction as well as a manifold plausibility.
Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it seems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the Oriental world; but appears in the Western world only in scattered instances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growing freedom and liberality of thought, which no less than its doubt and denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the full time had come for a greater mental and asthetic hospitality on the part of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of the resurrection should not confine their attention to the repellent or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to its claim and its charm. The Pantheistic tendency which possessed and overwhelmed the Brahminic mind, shaping and tinging its views opened the whole range of sentient existences to an indiscriminate sympathy, and made the idea of transmigration natural, and more pleasing than repugnant. Furthermore, the Brahminic thinkers and sages were a distinct cla.s.s of men whose whole lives were absorbed in introspective reveries and metaphysical broodings calculated to stimulate the imagination and arouse to the keenest consciousness all the latent marvels and possibilities of human experience, thus furnishing the most favorable conditions for exactly such a belief as that of transmigration, an endless series of ever varying adventures for the imperishable soul. And the vast swarms of the common people in the East are the pa.s.sive followers of this high caste of thinkers, abjectly accepting what they teach.
Accordingly, the mysterious doctrine of the metempsychosis has held the entire mind, sentiment and civilization of the East, through every period of its history, as with an irreversible spell.
The persistent practice of various modes of profound and rhythmical breathing by which the Brahmins perfect their respiration, and the keen and sustained concentration of their attention on their inner states, tend at the same time to heighten the richness and intensity of the cerebral nerves, to unify the connections of the lower nerve centres with them, and to fuse the unconscious physiological processes with the conscious psychological processes. Then the persevering disuse and suppression of the action of their outer senses cause the objects of the material world around them to seem more vague and dreamy than the impressions of the ideal world within. And so the earth with all its affairs seems an illusion, while their own unsought trains of thought, feeling and imagery the rich mental panorama of pictures and events, are taken for a series of substantial revelations of the universe of being. An irresistible belief in preexistence, immortality and transmigration, results.