On the contrary, in the Western world, the characteristic tendencies are all different. Pantheistic theories are rarely held, and the dreams and emotions which those theories are fitted to feed are foreign and repulsive. An impa.s.sible barrier is imagined separating humanity from every other form of being.
Speculative reason, imagination and affection, are chiefly employed in scientific studies and social pursuits, or personal schemes, external rather than internal. This absorption in material things and evanescent affairs engenders in the spirit an arid atmosphere of doubt and denial, in which no efflorescence of poetic and mystic faiths can flourish. Thus, while the outward utilities abound, hard negations spread abroad; and living, personal apprehension of G.o.d, of an all pervasive Providence, and of the immortality of the soul in any form, dies out either in open infidelity or in a mere verbal acceptance of the established creed of society. Consequently, to the average mind of the modern Western world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a mere fancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strange poetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical and religious quality.
The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strong resemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beings with the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the senses in common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence and will. They all seem created after one plan, as if their varieties were the gradulations of a single original type. We recognize kindred forms of experience and modes of expression in ourselves and in them. Now the man seems a travesty of the hog, the parrot, the ape, the hawk, or the shark; now they seem travesties of him.
As we gaze at the ruminating ox, couched on the summer gra.s.s, notice the slow rhythm of his jaw, and the wondering dreaminess of his eyes, it is not difficult to fancy him some ancient Brahmin transmigrated to this, and patiently awaiting his release. Nor is it incongruous with our reason or moral feeling to suppose that the cruel monsters of humanity may in a succeeding birth find the fit penalty for their degradation and crime, in the horrid life of a crocodile or a boa constrictor.
The conception of a series of connected lives also furnishes a plausible explanation for many mysteries in our present experience. Reference is made to all that cla.s.s of phenomena covered by the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. Faces previously unseen, and localities unvisited, awaken in us a vivid feeling of a long familiarity with them. Thoughts and emotions, not hitherto entertained, come to us as if we had welcomed and dismissed them a thousand times in periods long gone by. Many an experience, apparently novel and untried, makes us start as at the shadowy reminder of something often known before. The supposition of forgotten lives preceding the present, portions of whose consciousness reverberate and gleam through the veils of thought and sense, seems to throw satisfactory light on this strange department of experience.
Much more weighty and penetrative, however, than the foregoing considerations is the philosophical argument in behalf of transmigration, drawn from the nature of the soul. Consciousness being in its very essence the feeling of itself, the conscious soul can never feel itself annihilated, even in thought it only loses the knowledge of its being when it lapses into unconsciousness, as in sleep or trance. The soul may indeed think of its own annihilation but cannot realize the thought in feeling, since the fainter emotional reflex upon the idea of its destruction is instantly contradicted and over borne by the more ma.s.sive and vivid sense of its persistent being in immediate consciousness. This incessant self a.s.sertion of consciousness at once suggests the idea of its being independent of the changing and vanishing body in which it is temporarily shrined. Then the conception naturally follows that the soul, as it has once appeared in human form, so it may reappear indefinitely in any of the higher or lower forms of being which compose the hierarchy of the universe. The eternity of the soul, past and future, once accepted by the mind, leads directly to the construction of the whole scheme of metempsychosis an everlasting succession of births and deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments, with their laws of personality and fortunes of time and s.p.a.ce weaving the boundless web of destiny and playing the endless drama of providence.
But the strongest support of the theory of transmigration is the happy moral solution it seems to give to the problem of the dark and distressing inequality and injustice which otherwise appear so predominant in the experience of the world. To the superficial observer of human life the whole scene of struggle, sin and sorrow, n.o.bleness and joy, triumph and defeat, is a tangled maze of inconsistencies, a painful combination of violent discords. But if we believe that every soul, from that of the lowest insect to that of the greatest archangel, forms an affiliated member of the infinite family of G.o.d, and is eternal in its conscious essence, perishable only as to its evanescent disguises of unconscious incarnation; that every act of every creature is followed by its legitimate reactions; that these actions and reactions const.i.tute a law of retribution absolutely perfect; that these souls, with all their doings and sufferings are interconnected with one another, and with the whole, all whose relationships copenetrate and cooperate with mutual influences whose reports are infallible and with lines of sequence that never break, then the bewildering maze becomes a vindicated plan, the horrible discord a divine harmony. What an explication it gives of those mysteries of evil, pain, sorrow and retribution, which often wrap the innocent and the wicked in one sad fate, if we but see that no individual stands alone, but trails along with him the unfinished sequels of all ancestral experience, and, furthermore, is so bound up with his simultaneous race that each is responsible for all and all for each, and that no one can be wholly saved or safe until all are redeemed and perfected! Then every suffering we endure for faults not our own, the consequence of the deeds of others, a.s.sumes a holy light and a sublime dignity, a.s.sociating us with that great sacrament of atoning pain whereof the crucified Christ is not the exclusive instance but the representative head.
The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciled with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some a very fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it is so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is advanced solely as an ill.u.s.tration of what may possibly be true, as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so wonderful, the method of it is so rational, the region of contemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the prospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, that the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication of providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of the powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After traversing the grounds here set forth we feel that if the view based on them be not the truth, it must be because G.o.d has in reserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner than our brightest dream hitherto. The worthiest theory of the fate of man which the spirit of man can construct must either be a revelatory divination of the truth, or an inadequate attempt to grasp the design of the Creator in its true glory. It is impious and absurd to hold that man can think out a scheme superior to the one G.o.d has decreed. And it seems equally unreasonable to suppose that the scheme of G.o.d for the future stages of our career is one which has no hints in our present experience. Certainly it appears more likely that the sequel will be discovered by the logical completion of the inwrought order which has been slowly unfolding from the first. And what do history and prophecy show more plainly than the tendency to a convergence of all humanity in every man?
Spreading consanguinity in descent and growth of sympathetic knowledge both point to this. Perfect this in each man, and illuminate his whole organism and its relations with adequate intelligence, and we have a true resurrection, not indeed of decayed bodies from the grave, but of historic states of consciousness from their latent embedment in the nervous system, and their undulatory record in the dynamic medium of the creation.
Our senses now convert certain sets of undulations of the ethereal medium into perceptions of light, heat, sound, and so interpret their contents and extract their tidings. It is not impossible that in a coming stage of development we may obtain additional senses; our spirits may command the means of translating into correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of vibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to recover and read its own.
As each generation is the inheritor of the preceding ones, all of which from the first prolong their existence into the last in unbroken continuity of historic conduct and responsibility, justice may at the ripened period be naturally summed up without any miracle. We all are projections of our ancestors. They properly in us suffer and enjoy in accordance with what has flowed from their lives. The whole of this, lighted up with consciousness at last, may be the real meaning of the burden of the spirit given to the apostle Paul, but misinterpreted by him into the mechanico scenic scheme of the Judaized Christian Church. For when the mighty influx struck the brain of the persecuting zealot, revolutionizing his life, it came into connection with all the inflamed theories and convictions so deeply drilled therein by his Pharisaic education. These convictions, partly of a mere local and transient character, a.s.sociated with legends of Adam and Abraham and the under world and Christ and the sky, mixed with the true and universal import of the higher inspiration now given him, caused his misconstrual of its message, and stamped the purely human and providential meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection with the rabbinical die of a politico mythological dogma. If this were so, it is not the only instance in which the preexistent discolorations in the mind of an inspired prophet have refracted the truth of his burden into distorted error and bequeathed the task of a future rectification when more light shall have come.
In the next place, we come to the fourth reason for the growing doubts and disbelief of our day in immortality. It is the remarkable diffusion of the habits of thought engendered by the study of materialistic science. The authority of physical science has been rapidly encroaching on and displacing the authority of the church theology and sectarian creeds. Belief in invariable laws has undermined belief in miracle and supernatural revelation.
Those who had been taught that the resurrection of Christ was the only adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, learning to deny the former, have naturally proceeded to question the latter.
For in such matters the real implications of logic are little noticed. The religious skepticism nourished by physical science is in all respects really as irrational and baseless as it is actual.
For example, the resurrection of Christ, admitting it to be a fact, did not create the immortality it was considered to ill.u.s.trate. If he rose, it was because men are immortal, and men are not immortal because he rose. If he did not rise, men are immortal all the same, provided human immortality be a truth; if it be not a truth, the resurrection of Christ would be an isolated abnormal event without any logical validity on the question. The truth or falsity of human immortality, therefore, is a question of the creative plan of G.o.d and the essential nature of man, to be decided on the intrinsic evidences, and cannot logically be affected one way or the other by any individual historic occurrence limited to a certain time and place. Yet it is a practical necessity that any great popular faith, if it rests on authority, will be shocked and weakened by everything which shocks and weakens that authority, no matter how advent.i.tious it is. If one cannot believe in the preternatural resurrection of Christ, that surely is no valid reason for denying the natural immortality of the soul, but only a good reason for seeking to learn if there be not adequate grounds for this faith quite independent of scripture text and priestly a.s.sertion.
Precisely the same reasoning holds in relation to the doubts about spiritual realities bred in the minds of those whose studies are conversant exclusively with material realities. The professors of physical science, thoroughly familiarized with things which combine and dissolve, often come to fancy that everything is phenomenal and evanescent, that there is no immaterial substance, that spirit is not ent.i.ty but process, that thought and feeling and will are mere transient functions of transient matter. Thus all faith in the individuality of mind is pulverized at the fountain head. There can be no question but that such is the common influence of a constant contemplation of the physical aspects alone of physical things. Mentality, consciousness, is regarded as the prismatic bow in the cloud, a spectral show that appears and vanishes, with no permanent substance. At the present time, in Christendom, the one conquering power in literature, the one fascinating absorption of thought in society, is that connected with the cultivation of physical science. Its prestige is overwhelming. Its prevalent methods and results give a materialistic turn of interpretation to the popular mind upon all subjects. The direct consequence, among that cla.s.s of minds who put physical science above theology, is the spreading disavowal of all belief in the immortality of the soul. The fallacy is obvious, and the remedy is simple, if there be at hand but enough of modest candor and patience fairly to weigh the facts of the case in the scales of a sound logic.
In the first place, by the very structure of our being, by the very necessity of our experience, the universe is divided into two irreconcilable cla.s.ses of realities, namely, spiritual subjects and material objects. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, volitions, all qualities of mind, all states of consciousness, are absolutely immaterial. They are more real to us, that is to say, they more inexpugnably a.s.sert and maintain themselves, than material things do: and it is only hopeless vulgarity and incompetence of thinking which can ever confuse or merge them with material things. Matter is that which proves itself to spirit by the effects it produces on spirit. Spirit is that which is its own evidence. The center of consciousness in us is its own proof of its own being, and all that occurs within it is its own proof, and is unsusceptible of any other or foreign demonstration. Hope, fear, love, imagination, reason, are absolutely unthinkable as forms of material substance, however exquisitely refined and exalted. There is no conceivable community of being between a sentiment and an atom, a gas and an aspiration, an idea of truth in the soul and any ma.s.s of matter in s.p.a.ce. Each of these facts, conscious thought and material extension, has its own incommunicable and incomparable sphere of being and laws of action, which can be confused only by ignorance and sophistry.
So clear has this become to all profound reflection, that the ablest supporters of the theory of evolution, with all their preponderant bias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words of Herbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking of spirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the terms of spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give an idealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialistic interpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despite the fallacious influences of habit to the contrary, that no progress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount of induction and generalization as to the composition or decomposition of material bodies, can throw any new light or darkness on the nature and destiny of the immaterial soul.
The incessant flux of phenomena constructing and destroying apparent things, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing but mirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence of spiritual ident.i.ty. To force it to discredit our claim to a divine descent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. The question must be s.n.a.t.c.hed back from the a.s.sumption of the retort and crucible, the observational and numerical methods of the physical realm, and relegated to the legitimate tests of the moral and metaphysical realm.
Again, there is furnished in the results of the study of physical science itself, as pursued by its most gifted masters, a glorious overthrow and neutralization of the moral and religious doubts called out in its shallower votaries by their absorption in its more superficial phases. The scientific men of the most profound intellectual power and the most brilliant original genius, the supreme heads of chemistry, dynamics and mathematics, have applied to the phenomena of the material creation modes of observation and instruments of reasoning before whose compelling efficacy the whole frowning vast.i.tude of the outer universe melts into ideal points of force and forms of law. Everything in time and s.p.a.ce is reduced to molecular vibrations, regulated by the mental conceptions of number, weight and measure. The reasonings of such men as Oersted and Faraday on electricity and magnetism; of Sir William Thomson and Clerk Maxwell on thermodynamics; the theories of the greatest mathematicians, grasping all things in heaven and earth with their irresistible calculus, literally using infinites as toys, creating imaginary quant.i.ties, and, going through certain operations with them, actually discovering new truths in the solid domain of reality yield conceptions of order, beauty and sublimity, and emotions of wonder, awe and delight, nowhere else surpa.s.sed. They exalt the spectacle of nature into a vision of poetic intelligence, and show the theorizing mind of man to be akin to the creating mind of G.o.d. Thus, if skepticism as to the deathless royalty of soul is bred in the physicist who constantly stoops with the scalpel and the microscope, it is offset in him who, with as steady a judgment, soars to the contemplation of the ethereal medium with its lines of force traversing immensity and vibrating timelessly along their whole length, loaded, for those who can interpret them, with tidings of all that happens. Instead of spirit being materialized, matter is spiritualized and nature transfigured into the ideal home of ideal ent.i.ties. Dumas, years ago, a.s.serted that hydrogen gas is but an etherealized metal. Just now, it is said, Pictet has succeeded, under a pressure of six hundred and fifty atmospheres, in actually crystallizing oxygen and hydrogen. One has only to read such papers as those of Stallo on the fundamental concepts of science to learn that if matter or mind is ever to be lost, it will not be mind.
But there remains a more direct and more important way of correcting the dismal or defiant doubts of immortality caused by the inferior phases of materialistic study; and that is, by bringing up to a correspondent fullness and intensity the counter activity of the ideal powers. Let justice be done to the subject as well as to the object. Over against the watching of clouds and waves, the sorting of herbs, the weighing of metals, the measuring of quant.i.ties, bring up the exercise of the mind on the treasures of qualitative substance in its own proper sphere of reason and love and faith. Admire the beautiful, love the good, obey the true, worship the right, aspire to the highest, subordinate or sacrifice everything base or wrong in a generous service of duty, and thus nourish a consciousness of those ontological relations by which the soul is rooted in the G.o.dhead, and stimulate that intuitive efflorescence of faith which grows out of progressive fulfillment and which prophecies perpetuity of fulfillment. To say the least, the subject is as real as the object, the contemplating faculty as valid as the phenomenon it confronts. The teachings of the soul rightly construed are as authentic as the teachings of nature. And, some day in the future, a complete system of truth developed from the central principle of the one by the subjective method will be found to correspond perfectly with the complete system of truth developed by the objective method from the central principle of the other. As the objective scientific principle is the persistence of force, the subjective scientific principle is the potential infinity of individual spirit, each one the equivalent of the all. What else than this can be the ultimate meaning of the primal, universal, indestructible ant.i.thesis or dual cla.s.sification of being, the ego and the non ego, self and not self, the former including each individual in his own apprehension, the latter including all besides?
There is a philosophical authority which, for those incompetent to judge for themselves, should properly take the place vacated by the ecclesiastical authority, which, in our day, is plainly on the wane. Mult.i.tudes no longer believe in the immortality of their souls on the ground of the resurrection of Christ, or the a.s.sertion of Scripture or creed. Shall they, then, deny it altogether because the materialistic band clamor that it is a delusion, and they themselves see no sufficient evidence for it?
There is a more appropriate alternative. Many theories in natural philosophy have been exploded by the proof of their absurdity, and the correct explanations are accepted on trust by the mult.i.tudes incompetent to master their logical and mathematical grounds. Very few understand the proofs of the chief laws of nature, but the vast majority of men implicitly trust the a.s.sertions of those who do know them. In like manner there is a legitimate sphere for authority in moral and religious beliefs; only it should be the authority of the competent and disinterested. Now, it is a fact that the very greatest philosophers who have ever lived, the preeminently imperial thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Anselm, Hegel, and the resplendent group of their peers, have a.s.serted as a necessary principle the real being and eternal substantiality of the soul. Besides all the combinations of matter that dissolve, all the phenomena that pa.s.s, they affirm the existence of enduring ent.i.ties, individual spirits, thinkers conscious of their thoughts. In central calm, far within the struggle and vex of the rolling elements, throned in its own serene realm of law, lives the free, conscious soul, and will live eternally, actualizing its potentialities. Nothing can disintegrate it, because it is not an aggregate but a unity, not a quant.i.tative ma.s.s of matter, but a s.p.a.celess monad of power. It is a closed circuit of thinking activity, impenetrable to everything else. Spirits are the only solids, matter being endlessly penetrable and trans.m.u.table.
We are all obliged to think of ourselves as ent.i.ties, and not as mere phenomenal series of states. There must be a substratum for the affections of consciousness. All changes are changes of something. It is true there is a mystery involved here which no words can make clear; yet the more deeply one thinks and feels the more intense will be his a.s.surance that there is something in him which thinks and feels, or rather that he himself is a something which thinks and feels. The best conception we can get of the soul is that it is a subject which is its own object and a mirror for the inner reflection of all other objects. G.o.d is not an object, because He is the actualized infinite Subject. His thoughts are concrete creations, the objective realities of the universe phenomenal and substantial. We are actually finite subjects, but with a potential infinity, patterned in free correspondence with Him. Our thoughts are subjective reflections of His, modified by the contents of our facultative const.i.tution and the peculiarities of our historic experience. What const.i.tutes my soul is the potentiality of all states of consciousness, actual and latent, past, present and future. It reveals itself to me, so to speak, in my actual thoughts and feelings. So far as these are true and good, they correspond with and represent the will of G.o.d, and must share the fortunes of the Divine Reality with which they are implicitly joined. Then my soul cannot be annihilated unless the will of G.o.d is so far annihilated. But G.o.d is infinite being, and there is nothing outside of or counter to infinite being to destroy it. All evil is but defect or negation. I am only in so far as I am positive reality. Nothing of me, therefore, can ever perish, except my imperfections; and the thought of the perishing of imperfections is a thought of joy. Welcome, then, be the approach of death which shall cleanse and dislimit me into unimprisonable divineness of being, the crystalline sphere of pure intelligence and immortality!
The only real proof of immortality in the sight of the intellect, is the perception of the necessity of self determining ent.i.ties as the causes and grounds of the facts of experience. A series of states implies something of which they are states. There seems to be no possible explanation or understanding of the phenomena which confront our experience without the conception of ultimate individualities, indestructible subject objects, centers of spiritual activity, monistic selfhoods, conscious egos, each of which distinguishes itself from every other, and contrasts itself with the All. Now it is claimed that every thinker who reaches the maturest stage of thought attains to this insight. It is the imperial mark of a certain stage of knowledge. Here the supreme thinkers, sceptered with final perception of the truth of their own eternity, sit at ease, enthroned in the serene and lucid realm of law, beyond the reach of the dark tempest of cavils and doubts.
And there is a larger company who on easier terms have attained the same result. For, without this wearisome metaphysical hewing of conclusions from the quarries of ontology, the good and pure, who, in their loving obedience and aspiration, keep the harmonic quickness and innocence of their intuitions uninjured, also have an unshaken a.s.surance that they live in G.o.d and shall share his life forevermore. The mystics of every period seem in feeling to have an immediate grasp of all that the greatest philosophers have painfully conquered by speculation. These two cla.s.ses may claim to possess direct cert.i.tude of eternal life. All others must either attain to the stage of development and mount of vision of these, or receive the faith on their authority, or else be subject to doubt and unbelief.
To accept the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on the authority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints, is a legitimate procedure perfectly in keeping with what the human race does in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable of proving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easily appreciate and make practical application of the truths they have affirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains are scientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules are implicitly followed by the common mult.i.tude. One form or receptacle of authority after another may be superseded; but authority itself always remains. And the true course for those to pursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, or church creed, or the resurrection of Christ, as a proof of the future life of man, is not at once to abandon all belief in a future state, but to accept the guidance of the most competent independent thinkers in place of that of the most arbitrary dogmatists. For unto all who do not arrogate to themselves a transcendent competency to judge, the general consensus of the thought and feeling of the world, clarified and interpreted by the fittest few, will always be a grateful ground of reliance and trust. And the verdict thus revealed is unequivocally in favor of the doctrine of immortality.
There can be no changes independently of something which is changed. Amidst all the changeable in us which pa.s.ses and is forgotten, there is something which stays and is inexpugnable. It is our ident.i.ty. That which appears in consciousness first, which recurs oftenest, and which persists longest, is the most valid object of belief. And what is that but the very consciousness, or the subject as its own object? Surely, the one invariable accompaniment of all the shifting states of consciousness is the bare essential consciousness itself: this is, so to speak, the unitary vessel containing all their varieties. This unquestionably exists now. The burden of proof, then, as Bishop Butler long ago showed, is on those who affirm its destruction in the article of death. Consciousness is purely immaterial, as every one who has pa.s.sed beyond the most ignorant and childish stages of thought must see. Merely because it is, in our present experience, a.s.sociated in time and s.p.a.ce with a material organism, therefore to declare that it is a dependent production of matter, or a transient concomitant of the transient body, is a gratuitous a.s.sertion with not one scintilla of evidence.
Even, for the moment, admitting it to be true that no argument of irresistible cogency has yet been advanced to prove the immortality of the soul, it is certain that no proof has ever been given of its mortality. The very utmost that can be claimed by any skeptic who fairly understands the whole case, is that the different arguments, for and against, offset one another, and leave the question in a neutral balance of suspense, just where it was before the debate began. Many persons hold that the counter reasonings do thus balance and annul one another. For them the problem remains to be decided on other grounds than those of the logical disputation which has proved inadequate to its settlement.
These other grounds are considerations of congruity, probability, the prophetic preparations and demands of present experience. What sort of a figure would the segments which we now see, compose, if they were completed? What in the hidden future portions of our destiny would be harmonic and complementary as related with the parts here experienced? When the other modes of inquiry are abandoned this mode remains. Its teachings are rich and impressive in proportion to the greatness of the faculties and the wealth of knowledge and love brought to its consideration. And thus we come face to face with the fifth and last cause of the failing faith in immortality confessed to characterize the present day.
That cause is the common inability to realize in the thoughts of the mind, and to hold in the faith of the feelings, a conception so vast, so mysterious, so remote from the usual routine of the selfish trifles and petty notions which monopolize the powers and fritter down the faculties of the average people of the nineteenth century. The battle of sensualism, the scramble over material interests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescent struggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to the ever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizing discussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatal to that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of pa.s.sion, that serene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, that docile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fit contemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that of immortality. The grade of thought and scale of emotion ordinarily characteristic of ordinary men are utterly out of keeping with the inexpressible grandeur of themes like that of the divine kinship and eternity of the soul. The reason and fancy, before they can be competent to appreciate such truths, must be trained in the study and worshipful meditation of subjects of commensurate mystery and sublimity. It is no wonder that when minds and hearts familiar only with houses and clothes and food, the trivial gossip and vanity of the hour, are summoned to grasp the idea of spiritual survival and an everlasting destiny of conscious adventures, they are overwhelmed and helplessly fail to represent to themselves the possibility of any such truth. This cause of doubt is very prevalent and effective; for ever more and more in our age conscious attention is turned away from states within and fixed upon things without. The natural consequence is that the objective world is arrogating the first place in consciousness, and the subjective world is sinking into the secondary rank. Whatever exalts the object at the expense of the subject tends to materialism, unbelief in the separate being of the spirit. On the other hand whatever gives the panoramic pa.s.sage of subjective states in the soul greater apparent vividness and tenacity than belong to outer phenomena, tends to produce faith in the independence and immortality of the spirit. Hence it is quite to be expected that until our modern concentration on objective toil and study and amus.e.m.e.nt reaches its destined climax and begins the return career to subjective reason and feeling, the skepticism of the age will increase.
Meanwhile the remedy for the evil is, first, to perceive it, and then, to cultivate the kinds of experience calculated to neutralize it. For the logical invalidity and fallaciousness of the doubts concerning immortality, arising from the immense disparity of such a belief with the mental habits of ignorant earthlings and social parasites, appear from the fact that there are others with whose experience and thought the doctrine has no such disparity, but for whose spiritual range and haunt it is as natural to believe it as to breathe. And, in explaining the destiny of man, it is legitimate to take the most finished and furnished specimens, not the abortive ones. There are grounds of knowledge, domains of imagination, heights of n.o.bility, familiar to the most exalted characters, perfectly cognate and harmonious with the conception of eternal life, and making the faith in it fully as credible as the transcendent truths of science and philosophy which have been actually demonstrated. Those who are familiar only with the little affairs of sense, in narrow bounds of time and s.p.a.ce, may well gasp in despair and denial when the bewildering contents of the doctrine of immortality are held before them; but for all who have mastered what science reveals of the objective world of nature, and what literature records of the subjective world of soul, both these spheres furnish ample ill.u.s.trative examples and data to make the faith in every way congruous with what else they know, and as easy as it is pleasing to receive. a.s.suredly the belief resulting in this latter cla.s.s from their positive perception and correspondent desire and persuasion, are, on every ground of reason or moral fitness, more than a counterbalance for the unbelief resulting in the former cla.s.s from their negative experience and incompetency. If we sought to estimate the possibility and destined fulfillment of human nature when all its conditions shall have been perfected, should we choose for the basis of our judgment the incapacity of the lower specimens of man? or the capacity of the higher? After considering the chief achievements of human genius, the mysterious powers of the human soul now, the doctrine of immortality does not seem too great and wonderful for belief; but, on the contrary, it appears the coherent complement of the facts of the present.
Nothing can be more marvelous or imply greater glory for the destiny of the individual being than the fact that each consciousness is to itself the ant.i.thetical equivalent or balance of the totality of being beside; since the whole universe, all other beings, G.o.d himself, are known to the individual consciousness only as revealed in itself through its personal faculties. The slightest change in the subject is reported by a correspondent change in objects. Heighten the internal activities of the soul to a certain pitch, and the convictions they engender will be so intense, and the experience so absorbing, as irresistibly to sweep away all opposing doubts and fill every craving with the triumphant flood of life. What overwhelming revelations of the providence of G.o.d and eternal life, crowding the cosmos at every point with the workings of poetic justice, may thus be made to prepared spirits, only those who receive them know. Paul said he was caught up into the third heaven and heard unspeakable words. It is to be believed that such visions, while often illusory, are sometimes genuine. A test to discriminate the spurious and the authentic will one day be secured. Meanwhile it is either a faithless faintheartedness or a vulgar arrogance to omit from the data of our expected fate those thoughts, which, though beyond the reaches of our souls, nevertheless irresistibly allure our attention and enchain our affection; ideas belonging to our nature, though transcending our experience, and, while surpa.s.sing our faculties, still attracting us to our destiny. What are presentiments but divine wings of the spirit fluttering toward our unseen goal?
Again, the great metaphysicians, who have elaborated the idealistic philosophy in so many forms, exhibit the mind of man to us as superior to the cosmic spectacle it contemplates projected in immensity. They portray the material creation as a phantasmal show of mind, a phenomenal process and aspect of spirit, indissoluble centers of consciousness alone having solid verity and stay, while matter and force and times and places whirl and pa.s.s, combine and dissolve.
Likewise the mathematicians, with their mighty calculus, translate all quant.i.ties and qualities, all objects and operations, into numerical symbols, and with these intellectual toys play the same miraculous tricks that the Creator himself plays with the originals. They symbolize purely imaginary quant.i.ties, bring them into relations and pa.s.s them through certain operations, and thereby discover truths which are found to have permanent objective validity. It demonstrates, as said before, that the filial mind which thus wanders in thought through the house of the Father, and, everywhere making itself familiarly at home, disports among His treasures, is of the same type with the parental Mind.
And now, still farther, that the cultivators of physical science are pushing their discoveries and their theories to ultimates, we begin to see the adamantine structure of material nature melting into a system of ideal equivalents, vaporizing into an undulatory ether, vanishing before our microscopes in immaterial bases of thought, reason, law and will. The gases have just been first liquified and then actually solidified, confirming the speculative announcement long before made that oxygen and hydrogen are metals volatilized. Many valuable and strange discoveries have been reached in physical science by following prophetic declarations made a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs of intellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order of atomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops and snowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals and flowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a tree and of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artistic works of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in the production of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poem And so, before the gaze of the accomplished and devout scientist, matter is translated into terms of mind, rather than the reverse, and the whole cosmos is trans.m.u.ted into a divine laboratory of ideal powers, a divine gallery of ideal pictures, a divine theater for the eternal adventures of conscious spirits.
In mental conception man deals with mathematical infinites as easily as with the pettiest objects, dilates a point to the universe and shrinks the universe to a point, condenses eternity into a moment or stretches a moment to eternity. It has been shown that if correspondent diminution or enlargement in the faculties of sense and intelligence and in all the forces concerned were made, the whole stellar system and its contents might be dwarfed into the bulk of a grain of sand, or so magnified that each grain would fill the s.p.a.ce now occupied by the whole, and no one would perceive any change whatever in the scale. In reply to the statement that nothing can act where it is not, it has been proved that every atom is virtually omnipresent. It takes the entire universe to const.i.tute an atom, since the forces centered in each atom are connected with the whole by the insunderable continuity of all the laws of being. The science of molecular physics as expounded by its latest masters is not less astounding than the wildest soarings of transcendental metaphysics. For instance, it is proved that if there be ultimate atoms their size must be so small that it would require at least five hundred millions of them to an inch in length. In a cubic inch of hydrogen gas, then, for example, there are 125,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 one hundred and twenty five septillions of atoms, moving with the inconceivable velocity that is implied by their making thousands of millions of changes of direction every second. The view of the dynamic s tructure of the universe opened in this direction is as appalling as that unveiled in the opposite direction by the largest extension of the nebular hypothesis. He who can gaze here with steady reason need not be staggered by the sublimest doctrine of religion. Amazed at the spectacle of creative power and wisdom, equally amazed at the discovering faculty of man, we feel it to be incredible that he should have been made capable of such thoughts only to be annihilated after a brief tantalization. Confronting the immeasurable wilderness of divine glory, strewn all through with prizes before which his soul burns with the unconsumable fire of a G.o.d like ambition, man lifts his eye to worship and reaches out his hand to receive. Is he merely taunted with the starry sky, and mocked with an infinite illusion of progress, suddenly barred with endless night and oblivion? Behold him emerging out of nothingness, mastering his self conscious ident.i.ty, climbing over the rounds of symbolic experience and language through the heights of knowledge and love. Strange, helpless, sublime prince of the universe, beggar of G.o.d, when he has attained the summit of illimitable perception, holding immortal joys in full prospect, shall he be dashed back into nonent.i.ty? Is it not fitter that he be welcomed by triumphant initiation into the family of the deathless Father?
Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was a cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers, holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a ma.s.s of incandescent hydrogen. From such a background of accomplished fact he seems really to have a right to peer forth into the unbounded future and promise himself an unbounded destiny. The repet.i.tion of such a progress, nay much less, it may not unreasonably be imagined would raise the curtains from unsuspected secrets, bring the family of intelligences scattered over all worlds into conscious communication, and accomplish the deliverance of the whole creation travailing and groaning together unto this day for the redemption of the creature. What a splendid, almost incredible task man has already achieved in disentangling the apparent astronomic motions and converting them into the real ones. How immensely sublimer and more complex is the position of man on this planet than it seemed to the primitive savage, who knew only what his crude senses taught him, although, all the while, the moon was circling about him twenty five hundred miles an hour, and he was whirling with the revolving earth a thousand miles an hour, and spinning around the sun over thirty thousand miles an hour, and swooping with the whole solar system through the blue void with a still swifter gyre in a yet vaster cycle! This is demonstrated physical fact. Its harmonic correlate in the spiritual sphere would be nothing less than a lease of eternal existence for the soul which sees endless invitations ahead, and exults at the prospect of an eternal pursuit of them, its reason and affection affiliated with those of the whole divine household of immortals.
Two or three generations ago it would have been more inconceivable that men a hundred miles apart could audibly converse together, as they now do by means of the telephone, than it is at this day to believe that communication may at some future time be opened between the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of Sirius through the vibrations of the ethereal medium.
Futhermore, the idea of the infinite G.o.d, in possession of which man finds himself, is a warrant for his immortality. There cannot be more in an effect than was in its cause, though there may be less. We perceive intelligence, orderly purpose, as well as power, in nature. We find in ourselves all the explicit attributes and treasures of consciousness. Reasoning back by indubitable steps we come to an uncaused, unlimited, infinite Being, the underived and eternal source of all that is. This idea in our minds of a Being of absolute perfection, whose boundless consciousness as being necessarily indivisible must be totally present at every point of infinitude, is the charter of our own divine nature and heirship.
For we can become, even here, friends and companions of this omnipresent One, of whose essence and attributes everything below is but a defective transcript or dimmed revelation. This idea of Himself is the gift of G.o.d to us. To suppose that we are capable of originating it implies a greater miracle than the one it seeks to account for, and really puts ourselves in the place of G.o.d. Can we imagine that we are the creators of G.o.d? If the absolute noumenal Power beyond all phenomena be unknowable, it cannot contain less, but must contain more than all the attributes of the material and spiritual creation which has proceeded thence. The n.o.blest and best spirits of all lands and ages have walked in full fellowship with this Being, seeking supremely to serve and love Him in the subjection of self will and in the doing of good. Many a nameless saint, in a pure consecration, has heroically thought and suffered and aspired, worn out life in slow toils or offered it up in sharp sacrifice, for the good of fellow creatures, as a tribute to G.o.d, and exhaled the last breath in a prayer of love and trust. Such faithful servants and comrades must be dear to the Infinite Spirit, and it is natural to believe that He will keep them with him forever. When Christ, in self sacrificing love, submitted to death on the cross, saying, "Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit," he who can believe that the magnanimous sufferer was disappointed, blotted out and extinguished, thus reveals the grade of his own insight, but does not refute the greater hope of n.o.bler seers. It seems as if the idea of G.o.d, with loving faith and obedience to its requirements, planted in a soul which had not inherited immortality would straightway begin to develop it there. The atmosphere of eternity alone befits a nature which feels itself living in the companionship of G.o.d. Everything subject to decay cowers into oblivion from before the idea of that august, incorruptible presence. The fear of death is but the recoil of the immortal from mortality. When man voluntarily faces death without fear, even courting martyrdom with a radiant joy, it is because there is in him, deeper than consciousness, a mystic knowledge that he is essentially eternal and cannot perish. He who freely sacrifices anything thereby proves himself superior to that which he sacrifices. Man freely sacrifices his life. Therefore he is immortal.
The ancient Semitic philosopher and poet who wrote the book of Job, brooding on the strange problem of life and death, murmured, "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" With each successive generation, for many ages, countless millions have dissolved and vanished into the vast, dumb mystery. Now, the spectator, remembering all this, stands beneath the dome of midnight, imploringly breathes the mystic sigh, "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" The only responses is the same dread silence still maintained as of old. And, in a moment more, he who breathed the wondering inquiry is himself gone. Whither? Into the vacant dark of nothingness? Into the transparent sphere of perfect intelligence? The sublimity of the demand seems to ally the finite questioner with the infinite Creator; and, with a presentiment of marvelous joy, we look beyond the ignorant veil at the close of earth, and hold that eternity itself will not exhaust the possibilities of the soul, whose career shall be kept from stagnation by constant interspersals of death and birth, refreshing disembodiments from worn out forms and reincarnations in new.
If this life on the earth, where man feels himself a stranger, be his all, how superfluously he is equipped with foresights and longings that outrun every conceivable limit! Why is he gifted with powers of reason and demands of love so far beyond his conditions? If there be no future for him, why is he tortured with the inspiring idea of the eternal pursuit of the still flying goal of perfection? Is it possible that the hero and the martyr and the saint, whose experience is laden with painful sacrifices for humanity, are mistaken? and that the slattern and the voluptuary and the sluggard, whose course is one of base self indulgence, are correct? Is it credible that, with no justifying explanation hereafter, it should be ordained that the more gifted and disinterested a man is the more he shall uselessly suffer, from his sympathetic carriage of the greater share in the sin and sorrow of all his race? No, far back in the past there has been some dark mystery which yet flings its dense shadows over our history here; and in the obscurity we cannot read its solution.
But there is a solution. And when in some blessed age to come mankind shall outgrow their discords and be reconciled, so that their divinest living member can become the focalizing center of their collective inspiration, through him the truth will be revealed. The most inspired individual can only in a degree antic.i.p.ate his age. At a certain distance he is tethered by his connections with the race. They must be near the goal before he can deliver the final message. Inspiration and revelation are as real as the sensuous method of outer knowledge. Spirit or consciousness, as that which is its own evidence, has a more than mathematic validity. When men purely love one another, and, with supreme loyalty, seek truth, ignorance and delusion will melt away before the encroaching illumination from G.o.d, and the dominion of death will be abolished.
That the human mind shall be the victim of death is incongruous with its rank. The atheistic scientist who imagines that the energy of the stellar creation is gradually dissipating, so that the whole scheme must at last perish; and who sees the soul, then, like a belated b.u.t.terfly, fall frozen on the boundary of a dead universe, refutes his own dismal creed by the grandeur of the power shown in thinking it. The might of love, the faculty of thought, the instinct of curiosity, are insatiable; and that which remains wooing them to grasp it, is infinite. And, after all is said, it seems certain that we are either discerpted emanations and avatars of G.o.d suffering transient incarnations for a purpose, and then to be resumed, immortal in his immortality; or else we are separate and inherent ent.i.ties, immortal in ourselves. The former faith ought to satisfy the proudest ambition. The latter faith yields every motive for contentment and aspiring obedience.
Man, forever feeding on the unknown, is the mysterious guest of G.o.d in the universe. We cannot believe that, the hospitality of the infinite Housekeeper becoming exhausted, He will ever blow out the lights and quench the guests.
CHAPTER VI.
THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE DESTINY OF MAN.
A COMPANION of Solomon once said to him, "Give me, O king of wisdom, a maxim equally applicable on all occasions, that I may fortify myself with it against the caprices of fortune." Solomon reflected a moment, then gave him, in these words, the maxim he sought: "This, too, shall pa.s.s away." The courtier at first felt disappointed, but, meditating awhile, perceived the pertinent and profound meaning hidden in the transparent simplicity of the words. Are you afflicted? Be not despondent or rash, This, too, shall pa.s.s away. Are you blessed? Be not elated or careless, This too shall pa.s.s away. Are you in danger? in temptation? in glory?
Still, for your proper guidance, in relation to each one, remember; This too shall pa.s.s away. And so on, under every diversity of situation in which man can be placed. Whatever restraint, whatever encouragement, whatever consolation he needs, it is all contained in the profound thought, This too shall pa.s.s away.
This maxim for all times needs to be supplemented by a corresponding maxim for all persons. There is a truth constantly suited for the variety of immortal souls, as the foregoing one is for the variety of temporal changes. Let us see what that truth is and set it in a fitting aphorism.
The desires of the human soul are boundless. Nothing can satisfy its wishes by fulfilling them and circ.u.mscribing there a fixed limit. It would devour the whole creation, and hungrily cry for more. Whatever extension of power or fruition it can conceive, it wants for its own, and frets if deprived of it. Now, if the spirit of the Creator is in the creature, this illimitable pa.s.sion of acquisition cannot be a mere mockery. It must be a hint of the will of G.o.d and of the destiny of his child in whom He has implanted it. It is prophetic of something awaiting fulfillment.
But what is the prophecy, and how is it to be fulfilled? The answer to this question will give us that maxim of eternal humanity which accords with the maxim of transient fortune. And thus it reads: Over all the things for which men struggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of struggle, which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one thing is the whole universe! Be not baffled by the appearance of transcendental mysticism in this maxim, as the ancient inquirer was by the appearance of commonplace in his, but seek its significance.
A son is an heir of his father. All men are sons of G.o.d, though only a few, and that in varying degree, are distinctly conscious as yet of their sonship. But, despite their ignorance, all are tending, more or less swiftly, toward the goal of their nature and inheritance.
There are exclusive prizes which men can monopolize: and they fight with one another for these, because the more some have the less others can obtain. There are also inclusive prizes, or modes of holding and enjoying property which do not interfere with universal partic.i.p.ation, with universal, undivided ownership. In these no one need have any the less because every one has all.
This is the region of reason, imagination, affection, the empire of the soul. The more one knows of mathematical truth, poetic beauty or moral good, the easier it is, not the harder, for others to know and enjoy as much or more. In this divine domain no monopoly or conflict is possible, because the outward moving fence of each consciousness, retreating and vanishing before its conquests of experience, is a vacuum with respect to that of every other. They overlap and penetrate one another as if they were mutually nonexistent. For example, the pleasure any one takes in a picture, or in a play, does not lessen the pleasure which remains for the other spectators; but, on the contrary, adds to it if they have sympathy.
Now, the all inclusive prize of desire, the very secret of the G.o.dhead namely, the power of taking a full pure joy in every form of being, in every substance and phenomenon of the creation is forever wooing every soul; and every soul, in proportion to its advancement, is forever embracing it just as freely as if no other soul existed, yet has the zest of its enjoyments endlessly varied and heightened by mutual contemplations and reflections of those of all the rest. Such is the superiority of the disinterested spirit over the selfish flesh, of the inner world over the outer world, of good over evil.
Mental ownership is sympathetic and universal, physical appropriation antagonistic and individual. We hate and oppose our fellows that with hand and foot we may monopolize some wretched grains of good, while G.o.d is inviting every one of us with our mind and heart to accept as fast as we can his whole undivided infinitude of good. The universe is the house of the Father; the true spirit of the family is disinterested, and consequently every child is heir of the whole even as the apostle Paul said, joint heir with Christ. Register, then, deeply in memory, side by side with the historic maxim for all times, This too shall pa.s.s away!
the religious maxim for all souls. Over those things for which men struggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of struggle, which belongs indivisibly to every man, and that one thing is the whole universe! Then, should you ever feel vexed or disheartened by the irritations and failures you meet in your journey through the evanescent masquerade of this world, pause and say to yourself, Is it worthy of me, while the entire realm of existence asks me to appropriate it in ever expansive possession, to be angry or sad because some infinitesimal speck of it does not grant me as much of itself as I crave?