"By chemistry the pale-faced modern Faust, working in his laboratory, makes metals out of clay and many marvellous combinations. What they will do when skilfully proportioned and exposed to heat, the story related gives a hint,--accounting, as it were, for the forces at work in s.p.a.ce, creating heat and electricity, making suns burn with indescribable fury, colliding with peaceful planets, mixing their metals in a second of time,--and new worlds seem to leap into vision, b.a.l.l.s of molten fire sweeping through s.p.a.ce; vast cyclones of flame, making Pelee a cold-storage vault by comparison. All this seems simple enough as explained by modern chemistry, giving men unlimited power, making them G.o.ds, as it were, to first master themselves and then the universe."
This description of the new force, whose intensity is almost beyond realization, is hardly less remarkable than is the energy described; and it lends itself, with perfect rhythm of correspondence, to a.n.a.lysis on the side of the spiritual forces of life. "Cast thyself into the will of G.o.d and thou shalt become as G.o.d" is one of the most illuminating of the mystic truths. The "will of G.o.d" is the supreme potency, the very highest degree of energy, in the spiritual realm, which is the realm of cause, while the outer world is the realm of effects. Now if one may so ally himself to the divine will as to share in its all-conquering power, he partakes of creative power and eternal life, now and here, just in proportion to the degree to which he can identify his entire trend of desire and purpose with this Infinite will. This energy is fairly typified in the physical world by the stupendous new force called "thermite," and it is as resistless as that attraction which holds the stars in their courses and the universe in their solar relations.
[Sidenote: The Diviner Possibilities.]
It is a fallacy to suppose that it is a hards.h.i.+p and a trial to live the more divine and uplifting life, and that ease and pleasure are only to be found in non-resistance to the faults and defects of character. The truth is just the opposite of this, and the twentieth century will reveal a fairly revolutionary philosophy in this respect. Heretofore poet and prophet have always questioned despondently,--
"Does the road wind up hill all the way?"
as if to wind up hill were the type of trial, and the "descent of Avernus" were the type of joy.
Does the road wind up hill? Most certainly, and thereby it leads on into the purer light, the fairer radiance, the wider view. Does one prefer to go down hill into some dark ravine or deep mountain gorge? It is a great fallacy that it is the hards.h.i.+p of life to live in the best instead of in the worst. It is the way of the _transgressor_ which is hard--not of him who endeavors to follow the divine leading. The deeper truth is that the moment one commits all his purposes and his aspirations into the Divine keeping he connects himself by that very act with a current of irresistible energy; one that reinforces him with power utterly undreamed of before.
There is no limit to the power one may draw from the unseen universe.
"It is possible, I dare to say," says a thoughtful writer, "for those who will indeed draw on their Lord"s power for deliverance and victory, to live a life on which His promises are taken as they stand and found to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to see the will of G.o.d in everything, and to find it not a sigh but a song. It is possible in the world of inner act and motion to put away all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible, by unreserved resort to divine power, under divine conditions, to become strongest at our weakest point; to find the thing which yesterday upset all our obligations to patience, an occasion to-day, through Him who loveth us and worketh in us, for a joyful consent to His will and a delightful sense of His presence. These things are divinely possible."
One very practical question that cannot but confront the world at the present time is as to whether there is any relation between religion, in its highest and most inclusive and spiritually uplifting sense, and the possibility of communication between those in this life and those who have pa.s.sed through the change we call death and have entered on the next round of experience. It is a fact--albeit a rather curious and unaccountable one--that organized religion, as a whole, has been largely opposed to the idea of possible communication between what is currently termed the living and the dead. Yet when one focusses the question to a matter of personal individuality, it does not stand the test. Take, for instance, the revered name of a man who was universally recognized as one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known,--Phillips Brooks. When he was the rector of Trinity Church, or the Bishop of the Ma.s.sachusetts diocese, no one who sought his companions.h.i.+p or counsel would have been regarded as being wrong to do so. Now,--always provided that there is full conviction of immortality,--why should it be wrong to seek his companions.h.i.+p or counsel from the unseen life? Death has no power over the essential individuality. Indeed, in being freed from the physical body, the spiritual man becomes only more powerful, and with his power acting from a higher plane of energy. Regarding ourselves as spiritual beings,--and if we are not that we are nothing,--regarding ourselves as _temporarily inhabiting_ a physical body, but in no sense identified with it save as we use this body for our instrument of communication with the physical world; what more logical or natural than that the spiritual being, not yet released from his physical body, should hold sweet and intimate communion with the spiritual being that _has_ been released from this physical environment? Telepathy has already become a recognized law. That mind to mind, spirit to spirit, flashes its messages here in this present life, is a fact attested by too great an array of evidence to be doubted or denied. Now the spiritual being who is released from the physical body is infinitely more sensitive to impression, more responsive to mental call, than was possible in conditions here. The experimental research and investigation in psychology, as shown in such work as that of Professor Munsterberg of Harvard in the university laboratory, reveals increasingly that the brain is an electric battery of the most potent and sensitive order; that it generates electric thought waves and receives them. Does it lose this power by the change called death? Is this power only inherent in the physical structure? On the contrary, Professor William James has demonstrated with scientific accuracy in his book called "Human Freedom," that this is not the case. If, then, intellectual energy survives the process of death,--and if it does not then there is no immortality,--the communication between those in the Unseen and those in the Seen is as perfectly natural as is any form of companions.h.i.+p or of social life here.
As all kinds of people live, so all kinds of people die, and the mere fact of death is not a transforming process, spiritually. He who has not developed the spiritual faculties while here; who has lived the mere life of the senses with the mere ordinary intelligence, or without it, but never rising to the n.o.bler intellectual and moral life--is no more desirable as a companion because he has died than he was before he died.
And the objection to any of the ordinary _seance_ phenomena is, that whatever manifestations are genuine proceed very largely, if not entirely, from this strata of the crude and inconsequential, if not the vicious, with whom the high-minded man or woman would not have a.s.sociated in life, and after death their presence would be quite as much to be deplored. Granted all these exceptions. One may sweep them off and clear the decks. Then what remains? There remains the truth of the unity of the spiritual universe; of the truth that the mere change of death is not a revolutionary one, transforming the individual into some inconceivable state of being and removing him, in a geographical sense, into some unrevealed region in s.p.a.ce; there remains the truth that life is evolutionary in its processes; that there is no more violent and arbitrary and instantaneous change by the event of death, than there is in the change from infancy into childhood, from childhood into manhood. There remains the truth that the ethereal and the physical worlds are inter-related, inter-blended; that man, now and here, lives partially in each, and that the more closely he can relate himself to the diviner forces by prayer, by aspiration, by every thought and deed that is n.o.ble and generous and true, and inspired by love, the more he dwells in this ethereal atmosphere and is in touch with its forces and in companions.h.i.+p with his chosen friends who have gone on into that world. There is nothing in this theory that is incompatible with the teachings of the Church, with all that makes up for us the religious life. On the contrary, it vitalizes and reinforces that life. This life of the spirit must be in G.o.d. Let one, indeed, on his first waking each day, place his entire life, all his heart, mind, and faculties, in G.o.d"s hands; asking Him "to take entire possession, to be the guide of the soul." Thus one shall dwell hourly, daily, in the divine atmosphere, and spirit to spirit may enjoy their communion and companions.h.i.+p. The experience of personal spiritual companions.h.i.+p between those here and those on the next plane of life is included in the higher religious life of the spirit while living here on earth. It vivifies and lends joy to it; for the joy of sympathetic companions.h.i.+p is the one supreme and transcendent happiness in life. And to live in this atmosphere requires one absolute and inevitable condition, the constant exercise of the moral virtues,--of truth, rect.i.tude, generosity, and love. The life held amenable to these, the life which commits itself utterly into the divine keeping, is not a life of hards.h.i.+p; the "road that winds up hill" is the road of perpetual interest and exhilaration. It is a fatal fallacy to invest it with gloom and despair. It is the only possible source of the constant, intellectual energy of life, of sweetness, of joy, of happiness.
The only standard which is worthy for one to hold as that by which he measures his life is the divine one ill.u.s.trated in the character of Jesus. To measure one"s quality of daily life by this is always to fall short of satisfactory achievement; and still there is always the realization that its achievement is only a question of persistence and of time. It is the direction in which one is moving that determines his final destination. There is the deepest inspiration to the soul in taking for one"s perpetual watchword, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Not that this divine state is attained; but there is perpetual aid in the conviction that one"s self--his spiritual self--_can_ "press on to the high calling of G.o.d."
Man is a divine being; the divine life is his only true life.
The deepest loyalty to the divine ideal involves, however, not only the striving after perfection, but the charity for imperfection. To denounce evil is a part of rect.i.tude; to condemn sin is a moral duty; but to condemn the sinner is not infrequently to be more deeply at fault than is he who thus offended. An ill.u.s.tration of this point has recently been before the public. A New York clergyman preached on Easter Sunday a sermon that was not his own. He gave no credit to its writer. The sermon was published, and a minister of another church, recognizing it, at once proceeded to "expose" the matter in the daily press. Not only did he call public attention to the error, but he did it in a manner that seemed to rejoice in the opportunity; a manner so devoid of sorrow or sympathy as to fill the reader with despair at such an exhibition. Rev.
E. Walpole Warren fittingly rebuked the evident malice with which the fault was exposed, and quoted the words of Saint Paul in the injunction: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted." To have gone, in a spirit of love, privately and quietly, and pointed out the error, would have been Christian-like; to exult in it must be described by a very different term. Devotion to truth is good, but it is "speaking the truth in love" that is the ideal.
It is even possible to convey questioning, counsel, encouragement, or reproach without the spoken word; to send the message by the law of suggestion from mind to mind. The mental intimation will reach the one to whom it is sent if the conditions for telepathy are observed, for thought is far more penetrative than the Roentgen ray, and the atmosphere is magnetic, and carries it as the wire does the electric current. All these finer conditions are beginning to make themselves felt as practicable forces. Humanity is becoming "plastic to the spirit touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the outward ear.
"Thought is the wages For which I sell days,"
said Emerson. Thought is the motor of the future. "As a man thinketh, so is he," is one of the most practical and literal truths.
It is only by the divine law that one can measure the ethics of companions.h.i.+p. The frequent experiences in life of broken friends.h.i.+ps; of those alliances of good will, of mutual sympathies and mutual enjoyment, that, at last, some way became entangled amid discords and barriers, and thus come to a disastrous end,--such experiences could be escaped were life lived by the diviner standards. Friends.h.i.+p need never deteriorate in quality if each lives n.o.bly. If one conceives of life more n.o.bly and generously than the other, it may become, not a means of separation and alienation, but a means and measure of just responsibility. There are friends.h.i.+ps whose s.h.i.+pwreck is on the rock of undue encroachment on one side and undue endurance--which has not the n.o.ble and spontaneous character of generosity--on the other. One imposes, the other is imposed on,--and so things run on from bad to worse, till at last a crisis comes, and those who had once been much to each other are farther apart than strangers. In such circ.u.mstances there has been a serious failure,--the failure of not speaking the truth in love. The failure on the part of the one more spiritually enlightened toward the one less enlightened. One should no more consent that his friend should do an ign.o.ble thing than he should consent to do an ign.o.ble thing himself. He should hold his friend in thought to the divine standard. He should conceive of him n.o.bly and expect from him only honor and integrity. "Those who trust us educate us," says George Eliot; and still more do they who hold us in the highest thought draw us upward to that atmosphere through which no evil may pa.s.s. Each one is his brother"s keeper, and life achieves only its just and reasonable possibilities when it is held constantly amenable to the divine ideal,--when it is lived according to that inspiring injunction of Phillips Brooks: "Be such a man, live such a life, that if all lives were like yours earth would be Paradise."
Let one put aside sorrow and enter into the joy and radiance. "Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives." If biography teaches any lesson, it is that the events which occur in life are of far less consequence than the spirit in which they are received.
It is the att.i.tude of mental receptivity which is the alchemy to trans.m.u.te events and circ.u.mstances into experience, and it is experience alone which determines both the quality and the trend of life. It is in activity; in doing and giving and loving, that the joy of life must be sought. And it is joy which is the normal condition rather than depression and sadness, as health and not illness is the normal state.
Disease and sadness are abnormal, and if one finds himself "blue," it is his first business to escape from it, to change the conditions and the atmosphere. The radiant life is the ideal state, both for achievement as well as for that finer quality of personal influence which cannot emanate from gloom and depression. "Everything good is on the highway,"
said Emerson, and the first and only lasting success is that of character. It may not be, for the moment, exhilarating to realize that one"s ill fortune is usually the result of some defect in his selection, or error in his judgment, but, on the other hand, if the cause of his unhappiness lies in himself, the cause of his happiness may also lie with himself, and thus it is in his power to so transform his att.i.tude to life as to reverse the gloom and have the joy and sweetness rather than the bitterness and sadness of life. Everything, in the last a.n.a.lysis, is a matter of temperament. Nothing is hopeless, for life is infinite, and new factors can be evolved whose working out will create the new heaven and the new earth.
Here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination.--FICHTE.
[Sidenote: The Weight of the Past.]
One of the most inspiring injunctions of Saint Paul is that in which he bids us to "lay aside every weight." Poet and prophet have always recognized the weight of the past as a serious problem. One has made all sorts of mistakes; he is entangled in the consequences of his "errors and ignorances," if not in his sins, and how can he enter on a Life Radiant with this burden? Well does Sidney Lanier express this feeling in the stanzas:--
"My soul is sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me, The Past hath crusted c.u.mbrous sh.e.l.ls That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells About my soul.
The huge waves wash, the high waves roll, Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole, And hindereth me from sailing!
"Old Past, let go and drop i" the sea Till fathomless waters cover thee!
For I am living, but thou art dead; Thou drawest back, I strive ahead The day to find.
Thy sh.e.l.ls unbind! Night comes behind, I needs must hurry with the wind And trim me best for sailing."
There is no question but that the past is heavy and hindereth every one.
Its "c.u.mbrous sh.e.l.ls" cling like dead weights around man, and keep him from the larger, freer life. "Man is not by any means convinced as yet of his immortality," says Sir Edwin Arnold; "all the great religions have in concert more or less positively affirmed it to him; but no safe logic proves it, and no entirely accepted voice from some farther world proclaims it."
The one proof, of course, so far as absolute evidential demonstration goes, lies in the communication from those who have pa.s.sed through death. There unfolds an increasingly impressive ma.s.s of logical probabilities that point to but one conclusion to every student of science and of spiritual laws. Biology offers its important testimony.
The law of the conservation of forces,--of motion and matter,--which is definitely proven by actual demonstration, suggests with a potency which no one can evade that intellect, emotion, and will--the most intense and resistless forces of the universe--can hardly be extinguished when the forces of matter persist. The study of the nature of the ether alone pours a flood of illumination on the theory of an ethereal world,--a theory with which all the known facts of science and psychology accord, and with which they range themselves. Rev. Doctor Newman Smyth says that the facts disclosed by a study of biology, as well as the theories advanced by some trained biologists, fairly open the new and interesting question whether death itself does not fall naturally under some principle of selection and law of utility for life? "It is of religious concern as well as of scientific interest," he continues, "for us to learn, as far as possible, all the facts and suggestions which microscopic researches may bring to our knowledge concerning the minute processes or most intimate and hidden laws of life and death. For if we, children of an age of questioning and change, are to keep a rational faith in spiritual reality,--strong and genuine as was our fathers"
faith according to their light, ours must be a faith that shall strike its roots deep down into all knowledge, although light from above alone may bring it to its perfect Christian trust and sweetness.... The least facts of nature may be germinal with high spiritual significance and beauty."
The twentieth century leads faith to the brink of knowledge. The deepest spiritual feeling must perpetually recognize that faith alone--Christ"s words alone--are enough for every human soul; but faith grows not less, but more, when informed by knowledge. When man measures and weighs the star and discovers their composition; when he sends messages without visible means, then he may believe with Fichte, that "here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination." Mr.
Weiss objected to any (possible) evidential demonstration of immortality, because (as he said), "If you owe your belief in immortality to the a.s.sumed facts of a spiritual intercourse, your belief is at the mercy of your a.s.sumption.... It is merely an opinion derived from phenomena." But this reasoning would not hold good regarding any other trend of knowledge; the vital necessity of the soul to lay hold on G.o.d and immortality is not lessened, but rather deepened and reinforced by understanding, when knowledge goes hand in hand with faith. And the one supreme argument of all is that a truer knowledge of man"s spiritual being--now and here--with a truer conception of his destiny in the part of life immediately succeeding the change of death, would make so marvellous a difference in all his relations on earth, in all his conceptions of achievement, and would, as Sir Edwin Arnold says, "turn nine-tenths of the sorrows of earth into glorious joys and abolish quite as large a proportion of the faults and vices of mankind."
The Past is heavy with misconceptions of the simple truths of life and immortality as Jesus taught them. The Present seeks to throw off these "c.u.mbrous sh.e.l.ls." Death is the liberator, the divinely appointed means for ushering man into the more real, the more significant life, whose _degree_ of reality and significance depends wholly on ourselves; which is simply the achievement--better or poorer--which man creates now and here, in the same manner in which the quality of manhood and womanhood depends wholly on the degree of achievement in childhood and youth. We do not "find," but instead, create our lives. As we are perpetually creating, we are perpetually making them anew. If we must, this year, live out the errors that we made last year, there is an encouragement rather than a penalty in the fact, as this truth argues that if we now enter on a loftier plane and realize in outward life a n.o.bler experience, we shall, next year, or in some future time, find ourselves entirely free from the weight of the errors we have abandoned, the mistakes we have learned not to make, and the entanglements that our "negligences and ignorances" created. If we have caused our own sorrow, we can cause our own joy. For the Golden Age lies onward.
DISCERNING THE FUTURE.
_As the sun, Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits Of great events stride on before the events, And in to-day already walks to-morrow._
_There exist moments in the life of man When he is nearer the great Soul of the world Than is man"s custom, and possesses freely The power of questioning his destiny._
--COLERIDGE.
Think of the power of antic.i.p.ation everywhere! Think of the difference it would make to us if events rose above the horizon of our lives with no twilight that announced their coming. G.o.d has given man the powers which compel him to antic.i.p.ate the future _for something_.
--PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The unexpected and the unaccountable play so large a part in human life that they may well incite study. It is not conceivable that man should always remain at the mercy of events without conscious and intelligent choice in selecting and grouping them. Is there no Roentgen ray that will pierce the horizon of the future and disclose to us what lies beyond? Of course it is a sort of stock-in-trade, axiomatic a.s.sertion, that if it were intended for man to know the future G.o.d would have revealed it to him; and as it is not thus revealed, it is unwise, or unlawful, or immoral to seek to read it. On the same principle and with just as much logic, it might be solemnly declared that we have no right to endeavor to surprise any of the secrets of the Universe; that if it had been intended for us to know the weight and composition of the stars, to understand the laws that hold them in their courses, or to know what is conquered by the scientist in geology, or chemistry, or anything else, that the knowledge would have been ready made, and as it is not so, it is not lawful for man to explore any of these territories of the unknown. Or this a.s.sertion could be carried to a still further absurdity, and construed that if man had been intended to read he would have been born with the knowledge, and have had no need of learning the alphabet; or that if G.o.d had intended man to dwell in cities they would have sprung up spontaneously like forests. As a matter of fact, the extending of the horizon line of knowledge in every direction is man"s business in this part of life; and why, indeed, if he can weigh and measure the stars in s.p.a.ce, shall he not be able to compel some magic mirror to reveal to him his future? As it is, we all tread on quicksands of mystery, that may open and engulf us at any instant. It is simply appalling when one stops to think of it,--to realize the degree to which all one"s achievements, and possibilities, and success, and happiness depend on causes apparently outside his own control. One awakens to begin the day without the remotest idea of what that day holds for him. All his powers of accomplishment, all his energy, all his peace of mind,--even the very matter of life or death hangs in the balance, and the scales are to him invisible and intangible. The chance of a moment may make or mar. A letter, a telegram, with some revelation or expression that paralyzes all his powers; the arrival of an unforeseen friend or guest, a sudden summons to an unexpected matter,--all these and a thousand other nebulous possibilities that may, at any instant, fairly revolutionize his life, are in the air, and may at any moment precipitate themselves.
Is not the next step in scientific progress to be into the invisible and the unknown?
Doctor Loeb conceived the idea that the forces which rule in the realm of living things are not different from the forces that we know in the inanimate world. He has made some very striking and arresting experiments with protoplasm and chemical stimuli and opened a new field of problems in biology. If the physical universe can be so increasingly explored, shall not the spiritual universe be also penetrated by the spiritual powers of man?
There is no reason why clairvoyance should not be developed into a science as rational as any form of optical research or experiment. Not an exact science, like mathematics, for the future is a combination of the results of the past with the will and power and purposes of the individual in the present, and of those events that have been in train and are already on their way. It is a sort of spiritual chemistry. But it seems reasonably clear that all the experiences on this plane have already transpired in the life of the spirit on the other plane of that twofold life that we live, and they occur here because they have already occurred there. They are precipitated into the denser world after having taken place in the ethereal world. And so, if the vision can be cultivated that penetrates into this ethereal world, the future can thereby be read. It is the law and the prophets.
Now as the present largely determines the future, the things that shall be are partly of our own creation.
"We shape ourselves the joy or fear Of which our coming life is made, And fill our future"s atmosphere With suns.h.i.+ne or with shade."