CAIIFO/?^ 
 
 
 
 ^AMIB^ 
 
 Mi «S
 
 
 .-■"■ 
 
 m* Htfp %mhvo-jo*" 
 
 
 
 
 Ci5 
 
 
 so 2 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 \uvaau a* J JldJnY SI 
 
 
 V10S-A.N 
 
 
 ^aojircwo^ 
 
 l^ Tty'/ruTAiiin 'A/Ur\ \\tw\ irvNi' 
 
 ^vlOS-ANCELfjj> ^0FCALIF(%- ^0KALIF(% ^WEUNIVI 
 
 2 <* ^*— s ^ tfi ^d /" — v JL £? A /•"""'N. £- 
 
 
 ^A«vaaiii^ ^Anvaain^ 
 
 

 
 THE ASSURANCE OF 
 IMMORTALITY
 
 •*&&& 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 THE ASSURANCE OF 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 BY 
 
 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1913 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1913, 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1913. 
 
 Nortoooo $«ea 
 
 J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick <fc Sinith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass,, U.S.A.
 
 
 Enscrtfcetr 
 
 WITH AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE 
 
 TO THE CONGREGATION 
 
 OF THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH 
 
 MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY 

 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Significance of Immortality ... 3 
 The Possibility of Immortality ... 50 
 The Assurance of Immortality ... 94
 
 " If this life be not a real fight, in which something is 
 eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better 
 than a game of private theatricals from which one may with- 
 draw at will. But it feels like a real fight." 
 
 — William James.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 In publishing this essay upon immortal- 
 ity, it is useless, and in most cases impossible, 
 for me to indicate in detail my indebtedness 
 for the lines of thought which here are inter- 
 woven. The general considerations which 
 support faith in everlasting life have been 
 canvassed so often that extensive originality 
 in arguing for immortality is out of the 
 question. Whatever freshness of thought 
 this essay may possess will be found in the 
 fact that the problem of life after death is 
 viewed from the standpoint of the twentieth 
 century and is discussed in terms of the 
 special difficulties and the prevailing atti- 
 tudes which exist to-day. Old arguments 
 must take new direction from the banks of 
 the generation's thought between which they 
 flow. In particular I have had in mind the 
 man, conscientious about his daily work, 
 with whom the words honor and friendship, 
 fidelity and courage, weigh heavily, but who, 
 occasionally lifting his thought to the prob-
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 lem of life everlasting, speedily turns away, 
 saying: "What difference does it make? 
 At least I can do my present task well, and 
 if there be any world beyond the grave, I 
 will face it, when it comes." This prevalent 
 attitude is often maintained in admirable 
 spirit and is accompanied by an honorable 
 and useful life. But there are considera- 
 tions which such an attitude leaves out of 
 account, and to these the attention of this 
 essay is specially directed. 
 
 The reader will find the understanding of 
 the argument easier if he keeps in mind the 
 general outline of the thought. In the first 
 chapter, I try simply to point out the real 
 and present importance of the problem which 
 we are considering ; in the second chapter, 
 I try to show the inconclusive nature of the 
 arguments commonly urged against a future 
 life ; and in the third chapter, I try to pre- 
 sent the positive reasons for a modern man's 
 assurance that death does not end all. 
 
 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK. 
 August 6, 1913.
 
 THE 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY
 
 CHAPTER I 
 The Significance of Immortality 
 
 One of the most noticeable contrasts 
 between this generation and those imme- 
 diately preceding it, is the relative unim- 
 portance of the future life in the thought 
 of the present age. When our forefathers 
 were at all religious, and often when they 
 were not, they not only took for granted 
 the fact of continued existence beyond 
 the grave, but they regarded it as a matter 
 of supreme concern. When in the eigh- 
 teenth century Butler constructed his im- 
 pressive argument for revealed religion, 
 he used the soul's deathlessness, not as a 
 conclusion to be established, but as a 
 premise to be assumed. Even with rad- 
 ical thinkers outside the churches, faith 
 in the future life could then be presupposed 
 as a common point of agreement, while 
 within the churches men's hopes and fears 
 
 3
 
 4 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 of immortality dominated their religious 
 thought, and made this present life signifi- 
 cant largely because it was preparatory to 
 the glories or the terrors of the life to come. 
 Our fathers, therefore, hardly could have 
 understood the present generation's scep- 
 ticism about the truth of immortality ; 
 much less could they have comprehended 
 that modern nonchalance which speaks 
 and acts as though it made but little dif- 
 ference whether or not men live beyond 
 the grave. A recent writer tells us that 
 in our unwillingness to die and have that 
 the end of us, "We have not passed far 
 beyond the attitude of peevish children 
 who refuse to come in at nightfall after 
 they have played outdoors all day." This 
 cavalier belittling of the significance of 
 life to come is prevalent to-day even among 
 religious men. They do not so much dis- 
 believe in immortality ; their scepticism 
 lies deeper ; they do not care. With some 
 such phrase as "One world at a time," 
 they commonly dismiss consideration of 
 the future life, regarding immortality as 
 indeed a possibility, but a possibility whose 
 import is postponed until they die. To
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 5 
 
 insist, therefore, that the persistence of 
 personality beyond the grave involves tre- 
 mendous issues for our present life, is to- 
 day not by any means superfluous. . 
 
 The reasons for this decline of emphasis 
 upon the importance of the world to come 
 are easily discernible. For one thing, the 
 impact of new scientific information con- 
 cerning the evolutionary origin of man and 
 the intricate relationship between the mind 
 and brain has shattered confidence in the 
 certainty of life to come. The manifold 
 causes which in our day have unsettled 
 old religious beliefs, and have cast doubt 
 upon or utterly discredited supposed bases 
 of faith that had gone unquestioned for 
 two thousand years, have made unstable 
 the hopes of immortality. With that ad- 
 mirable power of adaptation, therefore, 
 which is one of the noblest elements in 
 human character, men, finding their con- 
 fidence in a future life vanishing, have set 
 themselves to make the best of the new 
 situation, and have stoutly asserted that 
 the change makes little difference. Even 
 a Robinson Crusoe looks for compensations 
 in his condition, when he finds himself
 
 6 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 upon a solitary island, and men, at their 
 best, believing that this life is all they have, 
 will resolutely make the most of that, and 
 as an armor against the malice of their 
 fate, will courageously affirm that they do 
 not care, that one life is enough, and that 
 the difference is inconsiderable after all. 
 In addition to this initial cause for the 
 decline of emphasis upon the importance 
 of immortality, is an even nobler reason. 
 Men have gathered new hopes of racial 
 progress in our day, and, at their best, 
 are increasingly inclined to sink their indi- 
 vidual prospects in their expectations for 
 humanity. The social passion finds voice 
 in pulpits as well as on secular platforms, 
 and proclaims there what our fathers would 
 not have thought of saying, that our mission 
 is not to get men into heaven, but somehow 
 to bring heaven to earth. What Narodny 
 said of Russia, "I am nothing; personal 
 success, happiness, they are nothing ; exile, 
 Siberia, the Czar's bullet, they are nothing ; 
 there is just one thing, that Russia must be 
 free," men in a larger sense are saying of 
 the human race. Hope of a future life, 
 with its rewards and possibilities, has a
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 7 
 
 mean look in the light of such self-forgetful 
 passion, and as new discoveries open new 
 hopes of progress for mankind, one hears 
 scores of men wish that they could see 
 America a hundred years from now, for 
 one man who, after the old fashion, longs for 
 heaven. What difference does it make 
 whether another life awaits us after death, 
 so long as here we play our part like men, 
 and hand down the heritage of the past, 
 so purified and furthered by our thought 
 and sacrifice that our children will rise 
 up to call us blessed ? 
 
 Another reason for the decline of emphasis 
 upon the importance of the life to come is 
 not so creditable as the other two. In the 
 present age, this life has been made vivid 
 and interesting in an unexampled way. 
 Old isolations have been overcome, so that 
 the whole world is now the province of any 
 mind that chooses to be cosmopolitan, 
 and rapidity of communication has made 
 possible world-wide enterprises on such a 
 scale as no previous age has ever known. 
 New knowledge has consumed the thoughts 
 of men, and new avenues of wealth have 
 engaged their ambitions, until the contem-
 
 8 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 plation of eternal destiny has paled before 
 the immediate brilliance of this present 
 world. For men are like auditoriums ; 
 they can hold so many occupants and no 
 more ; and when the seats are filled and 
 even the "Standing Room Only" sign 
 has been removed, the next comer, though 
 he be a prince, must cool his heels upon the 
 curb. The minds of men have been pre- 
 empted by the immediate and fascinating 
 interests of this vigorous, exciting age. 
 The fact is not so much that they through 
 reasoned disbelief have discarded faith in 
 immortality, as that through preoccupation 
 they have lost interest in anything beyond 
 the grave. 
 
 Even a deeper reason, in the realm of 
 serious thought, helps to explain the modern 
 depreciation of immortality. Eternal life 
 is a matter of quality and not of time, men 
 say. Justice and goodness, beauty and 
 truth exist eternally in God and may be 
 incarnate in our transient human lives. 
 Let the individual die ; the value of his 
 spiritual quality, which alone is worth pre- 
 serving, is perpetuated in the life of God. 
 From God came all the worth of our charac-
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY o 
 
 ters, to him it shall return and in him it 
 shall never die. Not in our small individ- 
 ualities, but in his persistent Being, 
 
 " All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good 
 shall exist." 
 
 The only Eternal is God ; of him we are 
 but broken lights ; and our nickering lives, 
 luminous with his quality, may be eternal 
 in this sense only, that we can mean what 
 he means, we can incarnate in time the 
 spiritual values that in him are absolute 
 and timeless. Must every little candle 
 burn forever, that so light may persist ? 
 Must each separate breeze be perpetual 
 in order that the air may still enswathe 
 the earth ? Shall the special waves insist 
 on perpetuity when they but represent the 
 ocean that abides behind them, and in 
 them and millions like them is expressed ? 
 These are four outstanding reasons for 
 the modern doubt, not only of the fact, but 
 of the importance of personal immortality. 
 There are other reasons, operative in all 
 generations — the pessimistic mood that 
 does not want to live again, the worldling's 
 hatred of the hopes and fears that would 
 deprive him of comfort in self-indulgence —
 
 10 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 but these four causes, not by any means 
 dishonorable, lead even the best of men 
 to-day to wonder how much difference it 
 makes whether belief in immortality be 
 accepted or denied. 
 
 To be sure, one value for our present life 
 which faith in immortality possesses is 
 evident to all. It comforts men in the hour 
 when bereavement comes, when human 
 hearts discover that by as much as love 
 is great, by so much must grief be deep. 
 But men are not assured that they have any 
 right to expect comfort from the universe. 
 They do not propose to find solace in a lie. 
 They do not want the opium of a dream to 
 ease them of their heart's distress. If the 
 only value for life which faith in immortality 
 possesses is the value of comfort, folk for 
 that very reason will mistrust their right to 
 it, will fear lest their desire for consolation 
 may drive them to seek it in a hope that is 
 not true. Even though a man has cried 
 with Tennyson : 
 
 "Ah, Christ ! if it were possible 
 For one short hour to see 
 The souls we loved, that they might tell us 
 Where and what they be,"
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY n 
 
 he has not drawn appreciably nearer to 
 confidence about the future, nor has he 
 even dimly seen the deepest issues which 
 are implied in the acceptance or denial of 
 immortality. 
 
 II 
 
 The directest way by which we may 
 perceive what difference to life is made 
 when we believe or disbelieve in the con- 
 tinuance of personality beyond the grave, 
 is to give free range to all our doubts and 
 let them carry us into a frank and full denial 
 of everlasting life. The affirmation that 
 death ends all is a creed as clearly as is the 
 assertion of immortality. Let that creed 
 be asserted, and let all the implications of 
 annihilation be followed to their logical 
 results. In what sort of world do we then 
 find ourselves ? What difference to life 
 does that assertion make ? 
 
 However superficial his first impression 
 may prove to be, the ordinary man who, 
 after believing in immortality, now turns 
 to consider a world from which the hope of 
 a future life has been obliterated, feels an 
 unavoidable sense of injustice to the race.
 
 i: ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 What Professor Palmer of Harvard wrote, 
 with fine restraint, when he recorded his 
 wife's decease, we instinctively feel about 
 the whole prospect of personality's annihila- 
 tion : "Though no regrets are proper for 
 the manner of her death, who can contem- 
 plate the fact of it and not call the world 
 irrational, if out of deference to a few par- 
 ticles of disordered matter it excludes so 
 fair a spirit?" If death ends personality, 
 the universe seems to be throwing away 
 with utter heedlessness its most precious 
 possessions. Whatever evaluations of the 
 world may be questioned, no one doubts 
 that personality, with its capacities for 
 thought, for character, for love and for 
 creative work is the crown of all existence. 
 'Out of what travail, age-long and full of 
 agony, has personality been born ! By 
 what vast struggles, admirable in their 
 sacrificial heroism, has the moral life of 
 man been attained and preserved ! A 
 reasonable person does not build a violin, 
 with infinite labor gathering the materials 
 and shaping the body of it, until upon it 
 he can play the compositions of the mas- 
 ters, and then in a whim of chance caprice
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 13 
 
 smash it into bits. Yet just this the uni- 
 verse seems to be doing if immortality is 
 false. Longer ages than our minds can con- 
 ceive she has been at work upon those 
 forces which underlie our personalities, and 
 now when Jesus and Augustine and Luther 
 and Lincoln are possible, when at last a 
 spiritual man can be the residence of poets' 
 dreams and martyrs' consecrations, when 
 the mind can think truth and the heart 
 can love righteousness, are these supreme 
 triumphs of the age-long, universal toil 
 thrown utterly to ruin ? 
 
 Before a man, however, surrenders him- 
 self to this instinctive revolt against the 
 unreasonableness and injustice of a world 
 that creates personality only to destroy 
 it, he must face the mitigating considera- 
 tions which have been suggested, the alter- 
 natives to personal immortality which have 
 displaced in many minds the hope of 
 individual continuance. Many take refuge 
 from the malice of an obliterated life in the 
 hope, already mentioned, that the worth of 
 personality, in terms of its goodness, its 
 justice and its love, is made perpetual in 
 the life of God. What we lay down, he
 
 i 4 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 gathers up and makes eternal, and so the 
 spiritual gains of our human struggle are 
 perpetuated even though human individ- 
 uals do not persist. But just what 
 does this mean ? It is easy to speak of 
 justice as a quality in God, of which we 
 may be the temporary representatives and 
 the value of which we, dying, may know 
 to be perpetual in him, but does not this 
 in the face of searching thought turn out 
 to be merely a form of words ? Justice 
 cannot exist in a solitary being whether he 
 be God or man ; justice is a quality impos- 
 sible except in social relationships ; and God 
 himself cannot be just without being just 
 to some one. So, all the moral values 
 that we know, truth, goodness, love, are 
 forms of personal activity that never would 
 have existed without social life, and that 
 have no meaning whatsoever apart from 
 relationships between persons. To imag- 
 ine God, therefore, in some sublime and 
 timeless solitude after the race is gone, 
 hoarding within himself the values of the 
 justice, truth and goodness, which have 
 been wrought out in the experience of the 
 race, is to conceive an absurdity. When
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 15 
 
 this earth has come to its inevitable dis- 
 solution and the persons who lived upon it 
 have vanished utterly, will God indeed pre- 
 serve within himself the spiritual gains of 
 our human struggles, just without being 
 just to any one, true yet true to no one, 
 perpetuating all our love, yet loving no 
 person save himself ? Then the justice, 
 truth and love which are eternal in God 
 have no imaginable likeness to the quali- 
 ties which we mean by the words. The 
 moral gains of the race are all social in their 
 genesis and in their expression. What can 
 altruism mean in a universe without sepa- 
 rate personalities ; or honor, or sincerity, 
 or loyalty, or faithfulness ? These are all 
 terms applicable only to individuals sus- 
 taining a mutual relationship. The obvious 
 fact is that the only hope of preserving the 
 moral gains of humanity lies in the per- 
 sistence of a community of human per- 
 sons. Love, righteousness, fidelity, in an 
 absolute and unrelated Being, are incon- 
 ceivable. 
 
 Moreover, spiritual quality in the very 
 nature of the case cannot be detached from 
 a man to be appropriated and preserved
 
 16 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 by God. All spiritual quality is simply 
 personality in action, and when the person- 
 ality perishes, the action ceases as well. 
 The human mind has been able to con- 
 ceive this reabsorption into God, to whom 
 in some mysterious way, we, with our 
 dying gasp, hand over all our moral gains, 
 only by translating it into physical terms. 
 The ocean can reabsorb and merge its 
 separate drops, that lose their identity 
 and give their substance to the sea. So 
 our bodies can commingle with the earth, 
 and dissolving can give their elements to 
 the common stock. But the essence of 
 personality is self-conscious separateness. 
 That men, on becoming extinct as persons, 
 can hand over their qualities, abstracted 
 from them, to swell the general sum of spirit 
 in the universe, is inconceivable. A man's 
 goodness is as inalienably his possession as 
 greenness is the possession of the tree, and 
 only when the greenness can persist after 
 the tree is gone, can righteousness, ab- 
 stracted from the personality whose func- 
 tion it is, fly unattached to be assimilated 
 by another. Such detached spiritual qual- 
 ities are as impossible as the grin of the
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 17 
 
 Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland," 
 that stayed after the cat was gone. The 
 philosophy of reabsorption offers no hope 
 of preserving the values which humanity 
 has attained ; it promises no future save 
 endless cycles of recurrent existence, as 
 the central Being sends out emanations 
 and reabsorbs them in unintermittent 
 and meaningless succession. If ever there 
 shines a gleam of hope in a thinker 
 of the pantheistic school, it is because 
 in spite of all his words, he has kept at 
 least the shadow of persistent personality, 
 in whose endless increase the spiritual 
 gains of experience can be preserved. The 
 plain fact is that moral qualities are forms 
 of personal energy, and cannot persevere 
 apart from the persons whose attributes 
 they are. 
 
 Another mitigating consideration that 
 is often urged to defeat the malice of per- 
 sonality's annihilation, is that no good life 
 can be in vain, because its influence goes on. 
 But George Eliot's 
 
 "Choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again, 
 In minds made better by their presence," 
 c
 
 18 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 while it has a literary and emotional value, 
 has little value for thought. One of our 
 leading American astronomers has elabo- 
 rated in a stirring lecture seven ways, in 
 one of which our present solar system must 
 come to its final cataclysm. Whether or 
 not he has canvassed all the possibilities, it 
 is obvious that the earth on which we live 
 is not a permanent affair. The influence, 
 therefore, which follows in the train of a 
 Christ or a Lincoln is essentially as tran- 
 sient as the personality that first created it, 
 if death ends all. For on a planet which 
 is but a temporary stage, as sure to dis- 
 appear in time as night is to follow day, we 
 use a few years of dwindling influence 
 as a blanket to cover the tragedy of an an- 
 nihilated life, when we plead that what 
 Lincoln did will last after what Lincoln 
 was has perished. Both what Lincoln was 
 and what he did, in a world where death 
 is the end, come at last to a like inglorious 
 conclusion. 
 
 Moreover, the essential unreasonableness 
 of the universe in carelessly destroying its 
 most precious possessions, when with infi- 
 nite sacrifice they have been created, con-
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 19 
 
 cerns not so much the influence of a man as 
 it concerns the man himself. What Christ 
 was is far more significant than what Christ 
 did, and the latter, like a stream, gains all 
 its quality from the spring of personal 
 wealth and power out of which it flowed. 
 Granted that the influence of Jesus for a 
 few aeons will go on, what has become of 
 the creative source of that influence ? Does 
 the world build a character like that, which 
 has held now sixty generations in its spirit- 
 ual mastership, and then throw it utterly 
 away ? Is God blowing soap-bubbles ? 
 Did he dip the pipe of his power in the 
 suds of matter and blow the character of 
 Jesus, that it might entertain him with 
 its iridescence, burst to his satisfaction and 
 be gone ? Then in the end the whole race 
 is but a conglomerate bubble, such as 
 children love, in which one lobe adds to the 
 iridescent beauty of another, but in which 
 each in time will break and all at last will 
 disappear. This is the universe without 
 immortality. The words reasonableness 
 and purposefulness, in any connotation 
 known to man, can hardly be applied to 
 such a world.
 
 20 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 If, therefore, neither by the perpetuation 
 of our influence, which on a perishable 
 planet is impossible, nor by the assimilation 
 of our spiritual values by God, which is a 
 form of words without conceivable content, 
 can the moral gains of humanity be pre- 
 served, we face this consequence to the denial 
 of immortality, that the universe has no 
 way at all of perpetuating the moral gains 
 which our race achieves. Men do not 
 commonly feel that so great a consequence 
 can be involved, when they believe their 
 annihilation. But let a man give wings 
 to his thought ; let him rise above all care 
 for his individual destiny, and at an altitude 
 where no selfish desire for hope, no eager- 
 ness for personal comfort can deflect his 
 judgment, let him look down upon the earth, 
 and with the creed of annihilation in his 
 thought consider its origin and destiny. 
 What summary of them is possible but this ? 
 The planet forms itself gradually from 
 mysteriously whirling star dust, cooling 
 and condensing as it whirls ; on the earth 
 so formed life appears, growing in plants, 
 swimming in fish, crawling in reptiles, 
 and at last walking erect in man ; in man
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 21 
 
 life evolves into those mystic functions 
 which we call mind and character, — pre- 
 ferring, with Moses, service to ease, learning 
 with Ruth to cry, "The Lord do so to me 
 and more also if aught but death part thee 
 and me," praising God in David, in Jesus 
 dying on Calvary for men, and on innu- 
 merable altars giving itself in sacrifice for 
 honor's sake and truth's. At last, the 
 planet, its atmosphere devitalized, its heat 
 and light all gone, having come from chaos 
 to chaos must return. After that, not 
 even the memory shall be left of any good 
 that has been done under the sun, but with 
 the death of the last man who falls in a 
 world of graves, all the toil and sacrifice 
 of the race come to their futile end. That 
 is the world without immortality. 
 
 The same process may be going on in 
 Mars, but there too the race will work and 
 pray, aspire and sacrifice, only at last to 
 vanish, with not a vestige of memory to 
 hand down and not a moral gain to be pre- 
 served. In a world without immortality it 
 would seem that the only permanent forces 
 are physical. They build themselves into 
 solar systems and resolve themselves again,
 
 22 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 while life and character, knowledge and 
 spiritual quality, the pride and glory of the 
 race, are as transient as though like smoke 
 rings they had been blown for a moment and 
 had been dissolved. Without immortality 
 physical force alone persists, the builder 
 and destroyer of spirit, and at last the sole 
 survivor and victor over all. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It has been customary to enlarge upon 
 the blighting effects which such a concep- 
 tion of the world must have on character. 
 Unquestionably this can be greatly over- 
 done. Huxley is clearly right when in 
 his famous letter to Charles Kingsley, he 
 speaks with restrained indignation of the 
 collect which was read at his son's funeral. 
 "As I stood beside the coffin of my little 
 son the other day," he writes, "with 
 my mind bent on anything but disputation, 
 the officiating minister read, as a part of 
 his duty, the words, 'If the dead rise not 
 again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
 we die.' I cannot tell you how inexpres- 
 sibly they shocked me. I could have 
 laughed with scorn. What ! because I
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 23 
 
 am face to face with irreparable loss, because 
 I have given back to the source from which 
 it came, the cause of a great happiness, still 
 retaining through all my life the blessings 
 which have sprung and will spring from that 
 cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, 
 howling, grovel in bestiality ? Why, the 
 very apes know better, and if you shoot 
 their young, the poor brutes grieve their 
 grief out and do not immediately seek dis- 
 traction in a gorge." In many a hectic 
 description of the ethical results of dis- 
 belief in immortality, preachers have run 
 into danger of such condemnation. "If 
 you believe in no future life," said Luther, 
 "I would not give a mushroom for your 
 God. Do, then, as you like ! For if no 
 God, so no devil, no hell ; as with a fallen 
 tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge 
 into lechery, rascality, robbery and mur- 
 der." Such a description of the conse- 
 quences of doubting life to come is folly. 
 To be sure, a German philosopher, not 
 a preacher, has pictured in its most des- 
 perate terms the meaning of a hopeless 
 world. Men have entertained three kinds 
 of hope, he tells us, and all of them have
 
 24 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 failed : first, that they might find happiness 
 in the material comforts of life ; second, 
 that they might dwell in bliss in a future 
 heaven ; and, third, that they might be- 
 queath to their children a social state on 
 earth where ultimate satisfaction could be 
 found. And now that all these hopes 
 have failed, nothing is left but a univer- 
 sal compact of suicide. That is absurd. 
 Though we all believed that we were bodies 
 only, with a spiritual aspect, and that we 
 were working on a transient task that 
 must come to its finale in a planet's ruin, 
 we would not commit suicide. There are 
 sanctions for right conduct that do not 
 depend upon the outcome of the universe, 
 and values in living, that inhere in every 
 day's experience and do not ask ultimate 
 questions about eternity. Nevertheless, 
 when, believing in annihilation, one takes ac- 
 count of the long travail of the ages, weighs 
 in his imagination all the agony of struggle 
 and misfortune there, and perceives the 
 inevitable end, when, like a burned-out cin- 
 der, the earth whirls back to its primeval 
 chaos, he can understand the meaning of 
 the philosopher who wrote: "Considering
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 25 
 
 the immense and protracted sorrows of 
 mankind, it would have been better if the 
 earth had remained like the moon, a mass 
 of slag, idle and without a tenant." 
 
 It is impossible to suppose that this view 
 of the world, to which we are introduced 
 by the denial of immortality, can be with- 
 out effect upon moral motives and ideals 
 of character. To say that some special 
 man has disbelieved all forms of personal 
 permanence, and yet has lived a life notable 
 for its loftiness of aim and its integrity, 
 is not proof that belief in life to come has a 
 negligible influence on the characters of 
 men. For men everywhere and always 
 have cherished beliefs in some kind of im- 
 mortality, however undesirable ; in Chris- 
 tianity especially, moral motives have ever 
 been associated with affirmations of eternal 
 issues to spiritual life ; so that an individual, 
 in achieving his lofty character, may be a 
 pensioner on the accumulated faith of the 
 race, even while he himself denies the faith. 
 Upon the other side, to imagine the sud- 
 den breakdown of all belief in immor- 
 tality, so that the characters of men are 
 deprived of old sanctions and supports
 
 26 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 before new ones have been found to take 
 their places, is no fair test of the moral con- 
 sequences of denying immortality. For all 
 such sudden changes, whether in the end 
 their influence will prove a benefit or bane, 
 must cause an immediate disturbance, easily 
 picturable in desperate terms. If fairly we 
 are to test the moral results of affirming 
 that death ends all, we must grant that 
 affirmation to be true, and then we must 
 conceive the race as gradually discovering 
 the sort of world in which it lives, until at 
 last all men have been convinced that this 
 is the only world there is, that death 
 means annihilation, that in the end the 
 universe throws away its most priceless 
 possessions, and has no way of preserving 
 finally its moral gains. How will the 
 characters of men be affected by such a 
 conclusion, universally believed ? 
 
 Many a modern man, not altogether 
 thoughtless in his nonchalance about immor- 
 tality, answers this question with an asser- 
 tion both familiar and full of noble meaning. 
 "Virtue is its own reward," he says. "Our 
 goodness at its best does not depend for 
 inspiration on the pay it may receive.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 27 
 
 Spiritual quality is its own recompense, and 
 does not, like a Moslem beggar, with 
 outstretched palms, ask God for bak- 
 sheesh." That this affirmation of the self- 
 sufficiency of character is true and elevated 
 is clear to a man in proportion as he is free 
 from spiritual sordidness and is sensitive 
 to the intrinsic worth of moral excellence. 
 Even a little thought, however, reveals the 
 fact that the assertion that virtue is its own 
 reward is based upon a deeply spiritual 
 idea of life's significance. Virtue is its 
 own reward, but for whom ? If it be true 
 of all of us, as Tennyson sang of the dead 
 Wellington, 
 
 "We doubt not that for one so true, 
 There must be other nobler work to do 
 Than when he fought at Waterloo," 
 
 then it is plain that spiritual quality car- 
 ries with it its own recompense. For then 
 character is eternally progressive, and what- 
 ever may be the reaction of the world 
 upon us, whether in gratitude or gibes, in 
 praise or malediction, spiritual life, growing, 
 deepening, forever hopeful of climbing 
 heights of quality yet unattained, of ren- 
 dering service hitherto beyond our reach,
 
 2 S ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 is a possession so intrinsically and superla- 
 tively valuable, that to him who has it no 
 outward recompense is needed as a motive 
 for the love of goodness. But when you 
 take hope from character, when its pos- 
 sibility of progress is seen to end in a blind 
 alley, how is virtue its own reward then ? 
 When in some Cherry Hill mine disaster 
 the rescuers leap into the lift and, with 
 eyes wide open to their imminent danger, 
 plunge down into the burning mine intent 
 on saviourhood, and when they straight- 
 way are hauled up again, charred corpses 
 every one, in just what sense, if death ends 
 all, was virtue its own reward to them ? 
 The recompense of scholarship is the capac- 
 ity for increasing scholarship ; the reward of 
 spiritual life is the hope of the good man 
 to-day that to-morrow he may be better ; 
 and without this hope the saying that virtue 
 carries in its bosom its own remuneration 
 has a vastly diminished significance. The 
 pay of goodness is the opportunity to be- 
 come better. 
 
 When, therefore, a man of insight 
 demands a life to come, it is not because 
 he seeks outward recompense for a good life
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 29 
 
 here ; it is because his goodness here, if it 
 is to be passionate and earnest, must have 
 the eternal chance of being better. His 
 value lies in what he may become — not 
 in what he has or does or is, but in his 
 possibilities — and by as much as hope is 
 stolen from him, until he clearly sees that 
 his character is a seed which the frost of 
 accident may nip to-day and which the 
 winter of death will surely kill to-morrow, 
 in so far the heart is taken from the saying 
 that virtue is its own reward. 
 
 Of course this does not mean that in a 
 world without immortality an ethical life 
 is impossible. To say that would be pre- 
 posterous. If the world, long looked upon 
 as a ship whose captain knows the course 
 and outcome of the journey and whose 
 passengers have a destination worthy of 
 the cruise, is now to be regarded as a raft, 
 drifting aimlessly upon the high seas of ex- 
 istence, the temporary home of beings that 
 are born to die, this changed conception will 
 not do away either with the necessity or the 
 possibility of morals. Upon the raft, the 
 worst men will seize what they can for them- 
 selves ; but the best men, moved by pity for
 
 30 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the plight of their fellows, will establish 
 rules and regulations adapted to the wel- 
 fare of the whole, will punish offenders, 
 and in many a beautiful self-sacrifice will 
 prefer the good of others to their own. 
 "Pity," says Schopenhauer, the pessi- 
 mist, "is the only source of unselfish actions 
 and the true basis of morality." More- 
 over, on the raft, quite apart from ques- 
 tions of the future, fortitude, honor and 
 friendliness may well be recognized as the 
 most worthy attributes of character; scales 
 of moral value may be accepted in which 
 the noblest stoical virtues are made pre- 
 eminent ; and courage and kindliness may be 
 admirably exhibited. From such motives 
 an ethical life may result, hopeless, but 
 under the circumstances far from ignoble. 
 To be sure, when Haeckel, who counts God 
 and immortality delusions, declares that a 
 man has an "unquestioned right to put an 
 end to his own sufferings by death" ; 
 when he says, "We have a right, if not a 
 duty, under such conditions to put an end 
 to the sufferings of our fellow-men" ; when 
 he admires the ancient Spartan habit of 
 strangling new-born children if they are
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 31 
 
 weakly, and urges its general adoption, he 
 is making explicit the logical morality of the 
 raft. When Nietsche rails upon all hos- 
 pitals, orphanages and every kind of saving 
 agency by which we seek to help the 
 unfortunate, and so perpetuate the weak, 
 when the world is needed for the strong, 
 he is clearly stating his vision of the moral- 
 ity of the raft. Tenderness, sympathy, 
 self-sacrifice and love, doubtless would 
 persist, but their tone would certainly be 
 changed. They would be the old qualities 
 which we have known, no longer motived 
 by any eternal value in personality, by any 
 endless possibility of development in char- 
 acter, by any conviction that the spiritual 
 life has everlasting issues which make its 
 failure or success man's chief concern. 
 When one endeavors to picture to himself 
 the noblest sentiments that could find resi- 
 dence in men, in a world where no one 
 dreamed of immortality and all had seen 
 the implications of their disbelief, he can 
 rise no higher than the compassionate 
 spirit which Whittier's sonnet shows : 
 
 "My heart was heavy, for its trust had been 
 Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong :
 
 32 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, 
 One summer Sabbath-day, I strolled among 
 The green mounds of the village burial place ; 
 Where, pondering how all human love and hate 
 Find one sad level, and how, soon or late, 
 Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face, 
 And cold hands folded over a still heart, 
 Pass the green threshold of our common grave, 
 Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart, 
 Awed for myself and pitying my race, 
 Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave, 
 Swept all my pride away, and, trembling, I forgave." 
 
 So on the raft, for pity's sake men could 
 be kind and serviceable, and even could 
 forgive their enemies. But it is to be 
 remarked that when we seek an expression 
 of this compassionate pity, we must look 
 for it to a man like Whit tier, who believes 
 in God and immortality. No Haeckel or 
 Nietsche, who really does think the world 
 a raft and deeply sees the meaning of that 
 creed, has ever left on record any expression 
 of such compassionate regard for men. 
 
 IV 
 
 The reason for the difference which the 
 universal denial of immortality would make 
 to the motives and ideals of character is
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 33 
 
 not difficult to see. The attainment of 
 an honorable and useful life costs sacrifice. 
 Present pleasures must be foregone or 
 subordinated for the sake of a central moral 
 purpose, and this fact, which looks simple 
 and unimpassioned in print, in life involves 
 a sacrificial struggle whose depth and 
 intensity the novelists and dramatists of 
 the race have tried in vain adequately to 
 describe. Now, man's willingness to sac- 
 rifice for anything depends on his evaluation 
 of its worth. The principal effect of Christian 
 faith upon man's moral life is to be found 
 neither in the scruples which it induces 
 regarding certain sins, nor in the positive 
 duties which it enjoins, but in the tran- 
 scendent value it places on personality. 
 The New Testament is a treatise upon self- 
 respect. The central theme around which 
 all its harmonies are composed is the spirit- 
 ual nature, the permanent continuance, the 
 infinite value, the boundless possibility of 
 man. The great affirmations of the Chris- 
 tian Gospel that God created men and loves 
 them, that they are immortal and that 
 God needs them to perfect his work, merge 
 their influence in raising man's evaluation
 
 34 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 of himself. In the New Testament men 
 are sons of God, if sons, heirs, heirs of God 
 and joint heirs with Jesus Christ ; all things 
 are theirs, whether life or death, or things 
 present or things to come ; neither life nor 
 death, nor angels nor principalities nor 
 powers, nor things present nor things to 
 come, nor height nor depth, nor any other 
 creature can separate them from the love 
 of God ; and being now sons of God, they 
 cannot imagine what they shall be, save 
 that their destiny is exceeding abundantly 
 above all they can ask or think. Men had 
 never thought so highly of themselves before. 
 Celsus, the great opponent of the Christians 
 in the early centuries, goes to the heart of 
 the matter when he says, "The root of 
 Christianity is its excessive valuation of the 
 human soul, and the absurd idea that God 
 takes interest in man." Aristotle had said 
 that some men are born savages, no more 
 changeable than dogs ; that artisans are 
 living machines, incapable of virtue ; that 
 women are nature's failures in the attempt 
 to make men. The ancient laws had 
 encouraged the slaying of infants as a 
 measure of household economy and had
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 35 
 
 looked upon slaves in the arena with the 
 beasts as we look upon a hunt. Man- 
 kind had known benevolence in fraternal 
 orders, public charity, and the beautiful 
 meaning of sacrificial friendship, but phi- 
 lanthropy, the love of man as man, the 
 conception of personality in child or slave 
 or woman or king as a priceless spiritual 
 treasure, this is peculiarly the outcome of 
 those faiths in the Fatherhood of God and 
 in eternal life which made Jesus say, 
 "What shall it profit a man if he gain the 
 whole world and lose his own self?" Emer- 
 son is authority for the statement that 
 "Jesus alone in history estimated the 
 greatness of man." 
 
 Even when this principal emphasis of the 
 Christian faith has been poorly appre- 
 hended, even when it has been mangled 
 by gloomy theology or despoiled of its 
 effect by ecclesiastical folly, it has exercised 
 an incalculable influence on the characters 
 of men. It has made those who deeply 
 understood it feel that no sacrifice can be 
 too great for the preservation of spiritual 
 quality and the service of the personalities 
 of other men. Self-respect, that inward
 
 36 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 soul of the greatest motives for character, 
 is by it raised to loftiest terms. 
 
 When, therefore, the opposite creed is 
 asserted, how is it conceivable that motives 
 and ideals of character shall not suffer a 
 tremendous change ? The denial of immor- 
 tality leads a man by an inevitable drift 
 toward the affirmation that we essentially are 
 flesh, not spirit. When a man is asked if he 
 has a soul, even though he is a Christian, 
 he is likely to declare that he has one ; and 
 if it be inquired whether he has a body, he 
 will doubtless assert that he has a body too. 
 Such is our habit of colloquial speech, but 
 even to casual thought how palpably absurd 
 it is ! Who is this third party, this holding 
 corporation, this tertium quid, who on the 
 one side owns a body and on the other side, a 
 soul ? A man is not so divided into three 
 parts, one of which is possessor of the other 
 two. A man has two aspects. One aspect 
 of him is physical ; it can be seen and 
 touched, weighed and measured ; its chem- 
 ical constituents can be analyzed and 
 reduced to formulae. The other aspect of 
 him is invisible, intangible ; it cannot be 
 weighed or measured ; it is his world of loves,
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 37 
 
 hates, thoughts, ambitions ; in it are resident 
 his sense of duty and his aspirations after 
 God, and at the centre is that mystical, 
 self-conscious memory, which survives the 
 passage of the years, outlasts the building 
 and break-down of the flesh and gives con- 
 tinuity to all his personal experience. 
 
 Concerning this strangely divided nature 
 of man, the body and the soul, the central 
 question upon whose answer all interpreta- 
 tion of life's meaning waits is this : Are 
 we bodies that have spirits, or are we 
 spirits that have bodies ? Which is essen- 
 tially the man ? The Christian affirmation 
 is not that we have souls, but that we are 
 souls ; that we substantially are spirit, as 
 invisible as God, since no one ever saw 
 himself or saw another man. The affirma- 
 tion of the materialist is not that we have 
 bodies, but that we are bodies ; that flesh is 
 the essence of us, and that all our intellec- 
 tual and moral life, like the peal of a bell, 
 is a transient result of physical vibrations, 
 and ceases when the cause is stopped. 
 Between these two affirmations the deci- 
 sion lies : either we are bodies that for a 
 little time possess a spiritual aspect, or
 
 38 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 else we are spirits using an instrument of 
 flesh. 
 
 Long ago in an Athenian death-cell, where 
 Socrates awaited the poisoned hemlock, this 
 question was discussed. Some there com- 
 pared man to a harp, and thought his 
 intellectual and moral life the harmony 
 that comes from the vibrating strings. 
 Since, therefore, he essentially is the in- 
 strument, which gives being to the music, 
 the music cannot outlast the destruction 
 of the harp. But Socrates insisted that 
 man is neither harp nor harmony ; that he 
 is a harper who plays upon the physical 
 strings, dependent upon them for the 
 quality of music he produces, but inde- 
 pendent of them for his existence, since the 
 player may leave one instrument and find 
 another. So to-day the assertion of our 
 immortality involves the faith that we are 
 invisible, spiritual personalities ; but belief 
 in annihilation is coupled with the thought 
 that we are the physical instruments, which, 
 perishing, bring to an end the harmony 
 they caused. 
 
 If we are thus transient beings, funda- 
 mentally physical, shall we long make the
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 39 
 
 great sacrifices which spiritual character 
 demands ? Does Ictinus pick out a quick- 
 sand on which to build the Parthenon and 
 lavish on it there the genius of his art, 
 knowing that every stroke of his mallet 
 is making a beauty that to-day is and to- 
 morrow will be gone ? Does Raphael 
 choose cotton cloth, whose slender and 
 loosely woven fibres will hardly bear the 
 strokes of his brush, on which to paint a 
 Sistine Madonna ? And will a man develop 
 passionate moral enthusiasms and aspiring 
 virtues on any other basis than spiritual 
 permanence ? The value of the object 
 of sacrifice always determines the willing- 
 ness of men to pay the cost, and immortality 
 is that affirmation of the eternal worth of 
 character which alone can make reasonable 
 the devotion, aspiration and self-denial 
 which great character requires. No man 
 will work hard sewing diamonds on tissue 
 paper. 
 
 V 
 
 If the devaluation of personality which 
 inevitably follows the assertion that death 
 ends all so affects the struggle for spiritual
 
 4 o ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 quality in the individual, it must neces- 
 sarily affect those enthusiasms for social 
 service on which the future of philan- 
 thropy and democracy depends. Professor 
 Hyslop can hardly be suspected of a prej- 
 udiced interest in evangelical theology ; 
 yet he affirms without qualification : ' ' The 
 ideals of democracy will live or die with 
 the belief in immortality." His meaning 
 clearly is that only moral permanence can 
 furnish the necessary basis for those devo- 
 tions which the perpetuation of democracy 
 requires. If they are to be in earnest, men 
 must feel when they invest their sacrifices 
 in society that they are investing in a bank 
 that will not fail. 
 
 To such a statement the reply continually 
 is made that though the individual does die, 
 humanity goes on, and that personal im- 
 mortality has nothing to do with the con- 
 tinuance of those social causes which, 
 persisting, may well come to their victory 
 on earth, whether life beyond the grave be 
 true or false. In May, 1865, a triumphal 
 procession moved down Pennsylvania Ave- 
 nue in Washington. The victors of a great 
 war were coming home amid the accla-
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 41 
 
 mations of their fellow-citizens. But their 
 comrades who had marched with them to 
 the front, who had borne with them the 
 danger and adventure of the great cam- 
 paign, were lying buried under the sod at 
 Antietam or at Gettysburg. So, say the 
 men who cannot see the crucial import of 
 immortality to social service, let us die, 
 and some day the survivors of the war will 
 celebrate a triumph for our cause and will 
 gratefully remember our share in making 
 the consummation possible. Noble as this 
 exhortation is, it depends for its apparent 
 validity upon a short look into the future. 
 A long look negatives the force of its appeal. 
 The polar ice-caps now hold undisputed 
 sway over territory where, so scientists 
 inform us, the most luxurious fauna and 
 flora once were flourishing. Whether the 
 planet tarries until the polar ice-caps seize 
 it all, or whether some swifter cataclysm 
 wrecks it, the earth is as temporary as any 
 other sphere, that, slowly built out of spirals 
 of revolving dust, in the end must dis- 
 appear. The race is not immortal if the 
 individuals are not. A limited succession of 
 transient men does not make a permanent
 
 42 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 society. A long look into the future does 
 not show us a triumphant humanity, rejoic- 
 ing because the war is over. In the end 
 some solitary survivor of mankind must 
 hold alone his triumphal procession down 
 the Pennsylvania Avenue of the earth, and, 
 if he can, cry "Victory" when he dies. 
 
 Without immortality, therefore, the long 
 struggle of humanity has no consummation 
 in which harmony comes at last out of the 
 present discord of inequity. Behind all the 
 labor of saints and martyrs has been the 
 hope, held in innumerable forms, that some 
 worthy end would crown their toil, that 
 when Paul planted and Apollos watered, 
 God would give the increase. In the old 
 poem on the Battle of Blenheim, where 
 little Peterkin climbs on Caspar's knee to 
 hear the thrilling tale of brave fighting 
 and bloody sacrifice, the boy interrupts 
 the narrative to ask, "What good 
 came of it at last?" That has always 
 been humanity's question about life's bat- 
 tle, and one of the distinctive ministries 
 of religious faith to social service has been 
 the affirmation of a coming Kingdom, 
 "toward which the whole creation moves,"
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 43 
 
 and in which justice shall at last be done. 
 Some such hope is fundamental to undis- 
 courageable social sacrifice. 
 
 Emerson, indeed, in the seclusion of his 
 academic study may inveigh against thus 
 appealing to the future for justice, against 
 trusting the arbitrament of eternity to 
 level the scales of judgment on sin, and may 
 insist that with indefectible exactitude 
 justice is rendered every hour. He may 
 even affirm that the thief who steals sil- 
 ver steals more from himself than from 
 the man he robs, since from his victim he 
 pilfers only material wealth, while from him- 
 self he takes character. But when from 
 the quiet of philosophic study into the 
 thick of life we carry the idea that justice 
 is done every hour, the assertion grows less 
 clear and certain. The problem is not 
 solved by balancing the theft of silver 
 spoons against the despoiling of the thief's 
 own character. When, rather, some Phar- 
 isee robs widows' houses and for a pre- 
 tence makes long prayers, or some human 
 beast sells girls to shame while still so 
 young that they cry for their dolls, and 
 when at last the despoilers grow fat, revel-
 
 44 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 ling in their gain, while their victims starve 
 in desolation or slay themselves to escape 
 from their despair ; if that is the finale of 
 the matter, to be left there an enigma of 
 injustice, it is impossible by any smooth 
 words to cover the fact of utter inequity. 
 Striking and true though Emerson's fig- 
 ure be that we cannot have sin without 
 immediate punishment, any more than we 
 can have positive magnetism at one end of 
 a needle without negative magnetism at the 
 other, the analogy does not cover the case. 
 When Roman soldiers take the loftiest 
 soul that ever blessed the earth, and mock 
 him, spit upon him, crown him with thorns 
 and crucify him ; when the scene ends with a 
 scribe wagging his head and calling, "Save 
 thyself," while from the cross the cry comes 
 down, "My God! My God! Why hast 
 thou forsaken me?" and when we believe 
 that to be the last of the matter, scribe 
 and Christ alike annihilated, and in a few 
 aeons their influence even, good or bad, 
 brought inconsequentially to an end in the 
 planet's dissolution, a profound injustice is 
 there asserted which no glozing words can 
 hide.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 45 
 
 The demand for justice is not a cry for 
 vengeance, nor, as Emerson suggests, a 
 desire that the oppressed shall share at 
 some future time the sort of pleasure in 
 which their oppressors revelled here. The 
 demand for justice requires that a solution 
 shall be reached, in which the oppressors, 
 brought to their senses by the reforming 
 influence of punishment or by the con- 
 quering power of love, shall join with the 
 oppressed, redeemed from their disasters, 
 and that together both shall bear a part in 
 some universal consummation that is ade- 
 quate to explain and justify the strife and 
 suffering of earth. Without that, reason- 
 ableness and justice, in any connotation 
 known to man, cannot be affirmed of the 
 world. 
 
 "Right forever on the scaffold, 
 Wrong forever on the throne," 
 
 how all the vicarious servants of humanity 
 bear witness to it ! Only of a universe 
 that preserves its moral gains, and resolves 
 to harmony the dissonance of its inequities, 
 can justice be asserted — 
 
 "But that scaffold sways the future, 
 And behind the dim unknown
 
 46 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Standcth God within the shadow, 
 Keeping watch above his own." 
 
 Without immortality all such hopeful 
 outlook on the future becomes impossible. 
 Society itself, then, has a limited existence. 
 As another put it, the social task of 
 humanity, with all its cost in blood and 
 tears that righteousness may reign, is, 
 from the standpoint of the everlasting ages, 
 as unenduring as Michael Angelo's, when 
 Pietro, the tyrant, commissioned him to 
 scoop up snow in the Via Larga, and with 
 painstaking art model a statue that before 
 evening would melt in the Italian sun. 
 
 That this thought of the consummation 
 of the long, sacrificial struggle of humanity, 
 when it is fully and universally believed 
 and understood, will blight the deepest 
 incentives for social service, has been the 
 fear even of those who were convinced 
 that such a consummation is the inevitable 
 end. Professor Gold win Smith in a nota- 
 ble essay, published in 1904 in the North 
 American Review, speaks frankly of his 
 apprehension that when all men believe, 
 as he does, that immortality is false, the 
 soul of public-mindedness will die and the
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 47 
 
 great inspirations perish that have motived 
 our social service and our passion for 
 democracy. "A man of sense (disbeliev- 
 ing in immortality)," he concludes, "will 
 probably be satisfied to let reforms alone, 
 and to consider how he may best go through 
 the journey of life with comfort and, if 
 possible, with enjoyment to himself." Such 
 is the testimony of a great man to the con- 
 sequences of his own creed. 
 
 If it be asserted that the truth of immor- 
 tality does not prevent a lamentable end to 
 humanity's long, sacrificial toil, the answer 
 is evident at once. The purpose of all 
 social service is man's progress in character. 
 The horrors of the white slave traffic, of 
 tenements in city slums, and of corruption 
 in city government, the evils of war and 
 drunkenness and tyranny, all lie in this, 
 that they debase, demoralize and in the end 
 utterly ruin the characters of men. The 
 exhaustless motive for philanthropy is 
 not that we are toning down life's worst 
 iniquities until our ultimate dissolution 
 comes, but that we are altering the environ- 
 ments that are inimical to personal charac- 
 ter, and that personal character is an eternal
 
 48 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 matter, the one means by which the uni- 
 verse can preserve its moral gains. The 
 infinite value of personality, which immor- 
 tality asserts, makes any fight for social 
 justice worth while. 
 
 When the modern man, therefore, is 
 nonchalant about the affirmation or denial 
 of a future life, he is nonchalant about all 
 the deepest problems of humanity. The 
 denial of imfnortality introduces us into a 
 world where men are flesh with a transient 
 spiritual aspect; where there are no per- 
 manent elements save the physical forces 
 which build solar systems and destroy 
 them ; where earth throws away with 
 utter carelessness its most precious treas- 
 ures, never resolves to harmony the dis- 
 sonance of its inequities and has no way 
 of preserving its moral gains ; where no 
 eternal value in personality motives sacri- 
 fice for spiritual quality in the individual 
 or furnishes basis for passionate and hope- 
 ful service to the race. If life eternal is 
 not true, that is our world, and sooner or 
 later men will find it out. To such a world 
 we must accommodate ourselves as best we 
 can, if immortality is false.
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY 49 
 
 This plain issue .to the creed of annihila- 
 tion induces many a thoughtful man, who 
 has traced to their last blind alley the 
 hopes of humanity in a world where death 
 ends all, to assert the truth of immortality, 
 not because he can prove it, as he can the 
 multiplication table or the expanding power 
 of heat, but because he finds it necessary, 
 as an adventure of faith, to make the uni- 
 verse reasonable.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Possibility of Immortality 
 
 In spite of all that we have said about 
 the nonchalance of modern men concerning 
 life to come, the possibility of immortality 
 is far more in question with many of them 
 than is its significance. While they may 
 not have traced through all its implications 
 the meaning of annihilation, they have felt 
 instinctively the difference that is involved 
 for personal hope in the affirmation or denial 
 of life to come. Facing their own death 
 or enduring bereavement in the loss of 
 others, they have found their apathetic 
 attitude dissolved in grief and in unquench- 
 able desire for hope ; and when, in addition 
 to this natural reaction in the presence of 
 death, they come to see the baneful mean- 
 ing for the whole of life involved in the creed 
 that the grave ends all, they do not ask 
 whether immortality makes a difference to 
 
 so
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 51 
 
 life, but whether it is at all possible for their 
 belief reasonably to follow their desire for 
 immortality. Huxley, although he was ag- 
 nostic concerning life to come, wrote to John 
 Morley in 1883: "It flashes across me at 
 all sorts of times with a sort of horror 
 that in 1900 I shall probably know no more 
 of what is going on than I did in 1800. 
 I would sooner be in Hell a good deal, at 
 any rate in one of the upper circles where 
 the climate and company are not too trying. 
 I wonder if you are plagued in this way." 
 Sooner or later, either by personal experi- 
 ence of bondage to the fear of death or by 
 insight into the sort of world which dis- 
 belief in immortality creates, most men 
 reach the place where the possibility of 
 believing in life to come is an urgent ques- 
 tion with them. 
 
 When, therefore, we insist, as we have 
 done, that the denial of personal permanence 
 makes a vast difference to the whole mean- 
 ing of human life, many a man will turn on 
 us to say : "No one need tell me that the 
 question of immortality involves great con- 
 sequences for me now. I have stood beside 
 my dead ; I know. With increasing years
 
 5 2 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 I have thought of my own mortality and 
 have considered with what irreversible 
 steps I walk to my certain end. It is not 
 easy to think of my loves vanquished, 
 my ideals unattained, my memory quite 
 extinct, and I as though I had never been 
 at all. At times I, too, have brooded over 
 our race, its mysterious birth, its long 
 travail, its strange fight with sin and cir- 
 cumstance, and have wondered whether 
 it can be that in the end there will be 
 nothing to show for all this struggle, aspi- 
 ration, hope and sacrifice, except new 
 worlds built from the ruins of the old, and 
 in those new worlds no memory even of all 
 that here was attempted, partially achieved, 
 and at last utterly undone. No one need 
 tell me that this makes a difference. I 
 want to believe in immortality, but can I ? 
 Is immortality possible ? What weighty 
 arguments range themselves against it ! 
 Just because I want so to believe it, I will 
 not sell my reason out to my desire. Show 
 me that it is possible." 
 
 When one sets himself to answer this 
 deeper question and endeavors clearly to 
 discern whether the objections to belief
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 53 
 
 in immortality are conclusive, he faces at 
 the beginning this impressive fact, that 
 plenty of men to-day, thoroughly familiar 
 with all arguments against faith in the world 
 to come, and able to weigh their full sig- 
 nificance, still cherish hopes, quite undis- 
 mayed, of everlasting life. The fact that 
 men like Sir Oliver Lodge in natural science, 
 Professor William James in Psychology, 
 Professor Hermann Lotze in Philosophy, Dr. 
 William Osier in Medicine have thought it 
 reasonable to cherish hopes of immortality, 
 suggests at once that while immortality 
 may not be proved, it certainly has not been 
 disproved. It is evident in view of such 
 men's faith that nothing which science or 
 philosophy has ever discovered necessarily 
 prevents a man from a reasonable hope of life 
 to come. Personal permanence is possible. 
 This is well worth emphasizing because 
 so often the reverse is urgently insisted 
 on ; because continually we are reminded 
 that no satisfactory demonstration of life 
 beyond the grave has ever yet been found. 
 There are weighty considerations, positive 
 and assuring, which can be adduced to 
 strengthen hope in immortality, but in the
 
 54 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 nature of the case it cannot be proved with 
 the certainty of a mathematical proposi- 
 tion or with the verifiable accuracy of a 
 scientific hypothesis concerning tangible 
 affairs. This, every believer in the world 
 to come must readily admit, but coupled 
 with it is the companion fact that if men 
 have found it difficult satisfactorily to 
 prove immortality, they have found it 
 absolutely impossible to disprove it. When 
 Goldwin Smith concludes his essay in which 
 he surrenders for himself all faith in life 
 beyond the grave, he justly adds these 
 closing sentences: "All this is said on the 
 hypothesis that scientific scepticism suc- 
 ceeds in demolishing the hope of a future 
 life. After all, great is our ignorance, and 
 there may be something yet behind the 
 veil." Many men to-day labor under the 
 delusion that to the illumined and initiated 
 man's mortality has now become a certain 
 fact, and for the sake of such it needs to 
 be affirmed that nobody, whose words are 
 to be taken seriously, claims to have dis- 
 proved life to come. Although there are 
 many considerable objections, they are 
 admittedly inconclusive.
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 55 
 
 One more preliminary matter, worth 
 remarking, is that in the nature of the case 
 we may well expect belief in immortality 
 to be beset by countless difficulties. Grant- 
 ing that we are to live beyond the grave, 
 is it to be supposed that we readily can con- 
 ceive it possible ? Must not our minds be 
 thwarted in the attempt to understand the 
 continuance of life under circumstances so 
 alien from those in which life has always 
 been experienced, and must not our imag- 
 ination quite break down in the endeavor 
 to conceive how thought and love can still 
 persist, when the conditions which have 
 made thought and love a possibility here 
 have been removed ? An unborn child, 
 even though he were a philosopher, would 
 have no easy time making clear to himself 
 the facts of our earthly life. He lives 
 without air ; how can he live with it ? 
 He never saw light ; how can he conceive 
 it ? He is absolutely dependent upon the 
 cherishing environment in which he finds 
 himself, and he cannot well imagine him- 
 self living without it. The crisis of birth 
 would seem like death to an unborn child, 
 if he could foresee himself wrenched from
 
 56 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 all the conditions which have hitherto 
 sustained his life. If in his unremembered 
 embryonic days, 
 
 " the days before 
 God shut the doorways of his head," 
 
 a man had philosophies of hope or hopeless- 
 ness, they must have been strikingly like his 
 scepticisms and his hardly cherished expec- 
 tations, when now he dreams of life to come. 
 So difficult must we expect to find the task 
 of understanding the possibility of person- 
 ality's continuance after death. 
 
 II 
 
 One difficulty in believing in life eternal 
 does not arise from the nature of the case, 
 but has been created for us by the ignorance, 
 the dogmatism and the superstition of 
 men. In how many minds is life beyond 
 the grave so intimately associated with 
 special ideas of the nature of the future 
 world, that, by a lamentable non sequitur, 
 men deny immortality because they can no 
 longer hold their old ways of conceiving it! 
 The setting is rejected and with it the 
 diamond is thrown away. A cheap and 
 easy method of arguing against life to come
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 57 
 
 is to insist upon some obsolete conception 
 of heaven or hell, and then rail at so absurd 
 a faith. The history of human thought 
 upon the future world lends itself to such 
 derision. There are terrible passages in 
 Christian writers where the desire for ven- 
 geance, in most abhorrent forms, gives 
 itself vent, the more unrestrained because 
 the excuse of piety is present. "How shall 
 I admire," cries Tertullian, "how laugh, 
 how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so 
 many proud monarchs and fancied gods 
 groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness ; 
 so many magistrates, who persecuted in the 
 name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires 
 than ever they kindled against the Chris- 
 tians ; so many sage philosophers blush- 
 ing in red-hot flames, with their deluded 
 scholars ; so many celebrated poets trem- 
 bling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but 
 of Christ ! " If immortality involves such a 
 belief, then immortality cannot longer be 
 considered seriously by any man of reason- 
 able mind. We may well insist, therefore, 
 that immortality may be true, and yet 
 every form of thought in which mankind has 
 hitherto conceived it may be false. Indeed,
 
 58 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 when one considers how necessarily we use 
 the symbols of our earthly life in every 
 endeavor to portray the life to come ; how 
 in our loftiest nights of descriptive language 
 we have streets of gold and gates of pearl, 
 rivers of water and trees with healing 
 leaves ; how music itself, the most natural 
 symbol of ecstasy, becomes so appallingly 
 tedious when we conceive the joy of heaven 
 in terms of it, that, as Doctor Jowett says, 
 " To beings constituted as we are, the monot- 
 ony of singing psalms would be as great an 
 affliction as the pains of hell and might even 
 be pleasantly interrupted by them " ; when 
 one considers the utter inconceivability of a 
 world in which we have never been, whose 
 circumstances by the necessity of the case 
 are alien from anything that we can dream, 
 it is not simply probable, it is inevitable, 
 that all our thoughts of the future are more 
 unlike the facts than a child's house of 
 blocks is unlike the Taj Mahal. Wooden 
 blocks and marble minarets are at least in 
 the same plane of existence, but this world 
 and the next are unimaginably different. 
 No one but a charlatan pretends to know 
 the circumstances of the world to come.
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 59 
 
 The best description of the future life yet 
 written is to be found in the New Testa- 
 ment, ''What eye hath not seen, what 
 ear hath not heard, and what hath not 
 entered into the heart of man." 
 
 The truth of immortality, therefore, does 
 not depend upon the acceptance of any 
 thoughts of it which ever have been believed 
 by men. The tides are no less facts because 
 mankind once thought that they were caused 
 by a leviathan who swallowed up the sea 
 and gulped it out again ; nor are the eclipses 
 a delusion because the Chinese beat tom- 
 toms to scare the dragon that devours the 
 sun. No truth depends upon the accept- 
 ance of man's inadequate ideas of it. The 
 permanence of personality may involve the 
 continued memory of all that has happened 
 here on earth, or it may involve no more 
 recollection than we have of our own embry- 
 onic days or of our earliest infancy. Our 
 best imaginations of the soul's adventure, 
 when through death we pass into another 
 world, are surely all inadequate, perhaps 
 so inadequate that not a detail of them is 
 true, and yet immortality may be a fact, 
 and the soul's adventure no delusion. No
 
 60 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 objection to a future life, therefore, based 
 upon aversion to some special conception 
 of the nature of the world to come, can hold 
 its ground. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Perhaps the most familiar difficulty in 
 the way of belief in immortality is that 
 appearances are against it. Whoever has 
 seen a man grow gradually old, his mind 
 failing as his body drooped, until, the mind 
 a blank, the body slept itself away, under- 
 stands the insistent argument of appearance 
 against immortality. All that we can see 
 dies, and because to us the most convincing 
 evidence is the direct testimony of our 
 senses, there is interposed between our 
 minds and faith in personality's continuance 
 the obstacle of looks. Our eyes bear wit- 
 ness to the dead and crumbling body ; 
 our ears bear witness to the fact that the 
 voice is still ; our hands bear witness that 
 no longer can response be won, even by a 
 hand clasp, to our most urgent and affec- 
 tionate appeals. All our senses rise up and 
 cry that our friend has perished. For most 
 men, this simple fact is the greatest single 
 difficulty in the way of faith.
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 61 
 
 This obstacle, however, even to casual 
 thought is manifestly inconclusive. If we 
 were to live by looks, we should live in 
 grossest ignorance of all the most important 
 facts, not only of the spiritual, but of the 
 physical world. The sun looks as though 
 it were moving, but it is not ; the earth 
 looks as though it were flat, when it is 
 round, and as though it were standing still, 
 when it is moving over a thousand miles a 
 minute. At noon the stars seem to be 
 gone, but they are there. Put a straight 
 stick in a calm pool and it appears to be 
 crooked, while it still is straight. Put a 
 blue glass upon one eye and a yellow glass 
 upon the other and, going into a white 
 room, you will see it all as green. All prog- 
 ress in knowledge of the physical universe 
 has been won through criticism of the 
 senses' testimony, by going behind the way 
 things look to the way things are. 
 
 When first the new astronomy proposed 
 its revolutionary conception of the world, 
 endeavoring to persuade men of a spherical 
 earth describing ellipses about the sun, the 
 traditional view took refuge in manifest 
 appearance, as in an impregnable citadel.
 
 62 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Said Melanchthon, in condemnation of 
 Copernicus, "The eyes are witnesses 
 that the heavens revolve in the space of 
 twenty-four hours. But certain men, either 
 from love of novelty or to make a display of 
 ingenuity, have concluded that the earth 
 moves." All men of common sense arose 
 in contemptuous certainty to assert the 
 plain evidence of sight. So persistent is 
 the power of appearance over the minds of 
 men that even within the last half century 
 the old arguments have been countless 
 times presented, in a famous sermon, to 
 applauding audiences. In the morning the 
 sun is on one side of the house, said the 
 preacher, and in the afternoon it is on the 
 other side, and since the house has not 
 moved, the sun has. So valuable is the 
 argument of looks. The substitution of 
 judgment for sight, of verified realities for 
 the appearance of things, is an achievement 
 involved with every step of progress in the 
 knowledge of the world. 
 
 No more in physical science than in the 
 search for spiritual truth, may a man walk 
 by sight ; he must walk by insight. Sight 
 says that a man grows smaller as he recedes
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 63 
 
 into the distance ; insight says he does not. 
 Sight sees only unconnected series of events ; 
 insight perceives governing laws, dominant 
 and irreversible. Sight sees a flat earth, 
 circled by planets, and all that science 
 teaches does not change the looks one whit ; 
 but insight knows that all the looks are 
 false. So universal is this criticism of 
 sight by insight that the presumption 
 always is that the superficial appearance of 
 anything is inadequate or quite untrue. 
 The analogy of all our other knowledge 
 would be fulfilled, if sight said that man dies 
 and insight declared that he lives beyond 
 the grave. 
 
 This general consideration gains point for 
 our problem, when we perceive that, grant- 
 ing the truth of immortality, it stands to 
 reason that we cannot see the truth with our 
 physical eyes. In a great observatory, when 
 the clock that moves the telescope in time 
 with the movement of the earth chances 
 to stop, it is possible to see the earth go 
 round. For then the stars and planets 
 in a stately march move across the face of 
 the lens, and as one watches, the truth of 
 insight is made clear even to physical
 
 64 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 vision. By such ingenuity of invention 
 can the movement of the earth be seen, 
 but who can hope by any means to carry 
 the function of the eye out of the realm 
 where it properly belongs, and expect it to 
 bring him witness of the life to come ? 
 Save possibly in the realm of psychic inves- 
 tigation, he must admit the utter inappli- 
 cability of sight to the problem of immor- 
 tality. The only valuable testimony in any 
 mooted matter is the testimony of those 
 powers of perception and of understanding 
 which are appropriate to the case in hand. 
 The truth of immortality is a matter of 
 thought not of appearance, of reason not of 
 looks ; the organ of perception fitted to 
 deal with immortality is the mind and not 
 the eye. Looks, therefore, are an utterly 
 inconclusive argument, and he who dis- 
 believes immortality because of appearances 
 is essentially in the same intellectual class 
 as the young child, who, after the fashion 
 of Alice in Wonderland, supposes that folks 
 really grow small or large in proportion to 
 their distance from the eye of the beholder, 
 because it looks that way.
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 65 
 
 IV 
 
 Another obstacle in the way of accepting 
 immortality, not so common as the fore- 
 going, but full of impressiveness for many 
 minds, is the lowly origin of man's belief in 
 the future world. A primitive savage, 
 safely housed in his home village, goes 
 forth in dreams at night to visit hunting- 
 grounds or to wage war in countries far 
 removed from the place where his body 
 lies. How inevitable, then, is his assump- 
 tion that he has a soul, separable from his 
 body, which can leave the house of flesh 
 at will, traverse great distances and return 
 again ! Such, says Herbert Spencer, is the 
 lowly origin of the idea of soul. To many 
 it is a disconcerting thought that man's 
 belief in his invisible self takes its rise so 
 superstitiously in an assumption which 
 now is negatived by the psychology of 
 sleep. And even more disconcerting is it 
 when, upon this basis, the rise of belief 
 in immortality is circumstantially described. 
 For when the primitive savage loses his 
 chief in battle, and on the very night after 
 the funeral sees in his dreams the honored
 
 66 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 warrior return, hears him speak and speaks 
 to him in answer, how inevitable is the as- 
 sumption that the soul, absent from the 
 body in death as in sleep, still exists and pos- 
 sesses the powers which here belonged to it ! 
 Therefore, among all primitive people, the 
 abode of the dead was definitely imagined, 
 and from that place of shadows the friends 
 who had gone came back in dreams to warn 
 and counsel their descendants. To the 
 North American Indian the abode of the 
 dead was a happy hunting-ground away in 
 the west ; to the Maori it lay at the base of a 
 great precipice ; to the Finns and Australians 
 the dead inhabited a distant island ; to the 
 Polynesians they dwelt in the moon ; to 
 the Mexicans and Peruvians in the sun ; 
 and, most popular idea of all, to the ancient 
 Teutons, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and 
 Hebrews a subterranean cavern, from which 
 mysterious, well-guarded passages led to 
 the surface of the earth, was the destina- 
 tion of the dying. From these residences, 
 the shades of the deceased could sometimes 
 be summoned as the Witch of Endor 
 summoned Samuel ; from them resurrec- 
 tions oftentimes occurred, with which the
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 67 
 
 records of all religions are replete ; and 
 continually in dreams the living were 
 counseled by the dead. Such, say the 
 anthropologists, is the origin and early 
 history of man's belief in immortality. 
 Among all people everywhere such ideas 
 of a future world have arisen, and all our 
 hopes of immortality are the lineal descend- 
 ants of these early superstitious dreams. 
 "It is true," says Max Muller, "and I 
 believe has never been contested, that even 
 the lowest savages now living possess words 
 for body and for soul. If we take the Tas- 
 manians, a recently extinct race of savages, 
 we find that, however much different observ- 
 ers may contradict each other as to their 
 intellectual faculties and acquirements, they 
 all agree that they have names for soul and 
 souls ; nay, that they all believe in the im- 
 mortality of the soul." What confidence 
 can we place in a faith that has arisen 
 among all primitive savages through the 
 mistaking of dreams for realities ? 
 
 It is true, to be sure, that there are many 
 differences of opinion among scholars 
 regarding this fascinating story of man's 
 growing belief in immortality, but it is clear
 
 68 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 that along some path, however hard now 
 to trace, we must follow the faith of man 
 in life eternal back to lowly origins. Al- 
 though like a butterfly, with gorgeous 
 wings, our hope may now be free to fly, it 
 was once a crawling worm. Of that, the 
 facts of history, the evidences of litera- 
 ture and custom, the testimony of psychol- 
 ogy definitely assure us. The reasons on 
 account of which mankind first began to 
 believe in life beyond the grave are reasons 
 that we would count the grossest supersti- 
 tions. When, however, this patent fact 
 is urged, as in many minds it is, as a cause 
 for distrusting immortality, how clearly 
 inconclusive the objection is ! All things 
 have a lowly origin. Conscience itself 
 which so imperiously commands us now ; 
 capacity for thought by which our scien- 
 tific investigations are themselves made pos- 
 sible ; all our faculties and endowments 
 have lowly origins. Are ethical ideals to 
 be e valued, and their validity to be deter- 
 mined, in the light of the earliest stages of 
 them which can be discovered ? Though 
 each stage in the development of ethical 
 responsibility be exquisitely traced, until
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 69 
 
 from the most rudimental form of moral 
 feeling to the loyalty of Savonarola or the 
 patient self-sacrifice of Lincoln not a fibre 
 is missing in the reconstruction of the pro- 
 cess, the real problem has not thus been 
 touched. Can a man explain an oak by 
 tracing it back into the acorn ? Does he 
 not rather have the task of explaining 
 how an acorn came to be an undeveloped 
 oak ? The interpretation of any process 
 must be sought in its issue, not in its genesis, 
 for the outcome only makes manifest what 
 was involved in the germ. Therefore, could 
 the most rudimental moral consciousness 
 be discovered, its appreciation must always 
 be in terms of that imperious sense of obli- 
 gation, which was inherent in it and which 
 now, developed from it, has become the 
 chiefest concern of the world. No tracing 
 of origins can effect the real significance of 
 anything. We do not judge the man by the 
 embryo ; we judge the embryo by the man. 
 When we perceive that with the first 
 dawning of intelligence men question about 
 the sun, whether it is the same orb to-day 
 that was here yesterday, or is some different 
 body created anew daily by the gods, we
 
 70 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 do not, because this is the beginning of 
 astronomy, rule out of court our Galileos 
 and Keplers, taunting them with the abo- 
 riginal beginnings of their science. Rather 
 we watch with pride the dawning mind of 
 man, dimly perceiving problems on which 
 the intelligence of the wisest of the race 
 shall yet exert itself, and vaguely reaching 
 for solutions, which, however primitive, 
 are prophetic of centuries of growing knowl- 
 edge. When cathedrals are outlawed be- 
 cause our aboriginal ancestors built only 
 straw huts ; when Bach and Mozart are 
 laughed at because early music was coaxed 
 from conch-shells or beaten sticks ; when 
 poetry and love, science and education, 
 are railed at because of their crude origins, — 
 then man's faith in immortality may trem- 
 ble before the undeveloped ways in which 
 the earliest men we know conceived it. 
 We must not compel larks to live under 
 water because their forefathers were fishes. 
 
 V 
 
 The doctrine of evolution has its more 
 discouraging effect on man's belief in immor- 
 tality, not when it traces the rise in the
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 71 
 
 human mind of faith in the future world, 
 but when it traces the rise of the human 
 mind itself. When science discloses to 
 us a vast physical universe, unfolding in 
 unimaginable ways through age-long cos- 
 mic changes, and, in one corner of this 
 immeasurable expanse, puts man upon a 
 world so small that its total conflagration 
 would be invisible to the strongest telescope 
 upon the nearest star, it prepares us for a 
 disparagement of man that makes his 
 ultimate annihilation seem entirely reason- 
 able. An angel commissioned by God to 
 discover the earth amid the innumerable 
 hosts of stars, says an astronomer, would 
 be like a child sent out upon a vast prairie, 
 to find a speck of sand at the root of some 
 blade of grass. When on this insignificant 
 planet science pictures a process of growth 
 that has lifted inorganic matter into organic 
 life, has moved organic life from plants 
 through ascending series of animal forms to 
 the erect mammals, and has at last raised 
 this organic life in man to the functions of 
 thought and speech and character, science, 
 so emphasizing our kinship with the brutes 
 and our personalities' intimate dependence
 
 72 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 on our physical structure, has made immor- 
 tality seem to multitudes utterly impos- 
 sible. Here we face an objection to faith 
 in the future life, in comparison with which 
 the obstacles which we have hitherto con- 
 sidered are superficial. Man is a lineal 
 descendant of the beasts ; as they are 
 dependent on their bodies for life and all 
 its functions, so is he ; and his capacity for 
 thought, however far-ranging and exalted, 
 has grown like a blossom out of that won- 
 derfully organized stalk, his brain. Such 
 is the picture which in many minds to-day 
 creates an insuperable objection to faith in 
 immortality. 
 
 In mitigation of the effect of this idea of 
 man's origin, it is worth noting that the 
 evolution of the race does not create a sin- 
 gle difficulty in the way of believing in a 
 self, separable from the body, that is not 
 really present in the evolution of each indi- 
 vidual. Whatever may be the facts about 
 the race, every one of us evolved from a 
 primal cell. All the mystery of the race's 
 origin, and all the difficulties in the way of 
 believing in an immortal self, are present in 
 the familiar facts of each man's develop-
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 73 
 
 ment from his conception to his maturity. 
 From an original cell, through the compli- 
 cated building of physical structure, until 
 at last the capacity for thought emerges, 
 and personality is slowly gained as the brain 
 is organized, — such is the life-story of 
 each individual and of the race. In any 
 text -book on theology one will find the pos- 
 sibility of a separable soul discussed, in 
 view of the evolution not of the race but of 
 the individual. Four theories have been ad- 
 vanced to explain the presence of the spirit- 
 ual element in man, and its relationship 
 with his growing physical organism : that 
 the soul is preexist ent, and that when the 
 body is prepared the soul inhabits it ; that 
 God creates the soul complete and places 
 it in a body prepared for its residence; 
 that soul and body together grow, the first 
 developing as the second gives it opportu- 
 nity ; and last, that the body creates the soul 
 and functions mentally on one side as it 
 does physically upon the other. Such are 
 the speculations with which men have 
 endeavored to explain the mysterious co- 
 ordination of mind and brain. "When did 
 the race become immortal?" asks the
 
 74 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 materialist in derision, as he points out the 
 imperceptible gradations by which animal 
 existence has passed into human life. But 
 that same question has always been appli- 
 cable to the growing embryo or the new- 
 born babe. When does any man become 
 immortal ? Such difficulties, immense and 
 elemental, are all present in the plain fact of 
 each individual's growth from a primal 
 cell, and the evolution of the race adds not 
 a single essential factor to the problem. 
 The gradual development of all mankind 
 from lowly forms of life simply presents in 
 general the same question which in par- 
 ticular the mind of man has always faced, 
 when he has considered the relation of his 
 invisible self to his mysteriously evolving 
 body. 
 
 When, therefore, we grant all that scien- 
 tists affirm concerning the evolution of the 
 race, we are facing the same elemental 
 facts, in the light of which immortality has 
 always been discussed. Personality and 
 body, whether in single men or in mankind 
 as a whole, grow in intimate correlation. 
 They mutually condition each other. The 
 wisdom of the sage is not expected in a
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 75 
 
 child because the brain is not yet organized 
 to make it possible, and in the newly born 
 we know that there is nothing to be looked 
 for save capacity for sensation and response 
 to simple outward stimuli. Some form of 
 mutual dependence exists between the mind 
 and brain, and upon the nature of that de- 
 pendence rests the possibility of immortal 
 life. Does the organization of the brain 
 produce personality, or does personality 
 endeavor to express itself through brain ? 
 The effect of the doctrine of evolution upon 
 the problem of immortality is simply to 
 drive home with more urgent emphasis the 
 ancient question upon the answer to which 
 belief in life everlasting always waits : what 
 is the nature of the mind's dependence 
 upon the brain ? 
 
 Indeed, so far are the facts of racial evo- 
 lution from being conclusive against life 
 to come, that many of our most scholarly 
 and thoughtful men have found in the impli- 
 cations of evolution a strong argument for 
 immortality. The manifest trend of the 
 whole creative process is toward the build- 
 ing of personality. The story of humanity's 
 evolving life, traced backward from the
 
 7 6 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 present toward the unknown beginnings, 
 presents a record of successive derivations 
 from forms of existence ever simpler and less 
 complicated ; but the same story traced from 
 the remotest origins onward toward to-day, 
 presents a record of ascent, in which all 
 physical changes seem to be intended for a 
 psychical result. God in evolution no less 
 than in Genesis, appears to be taking the 
 dust of the earth, and breathing into it the 
 breath of life until man becomes a living 
 soul. If a man insists that there is no 
 purpose in the universe at all, that the 
 entire process means nothing, he must do 
 it now not alone in the face of an opposing 
 theology, but in the face of an evolutionary 
 science which presents an ascending series 
 of physical forms, ending with a being in 
 whom evolution has changed from progress 
 in physical structure to growth in intelli- 
 gence and character. If, on the other hand, 
 a man believes that the universe means 
 anything, he must, in the light of manifest 
 facts, believe that it has been aiming at 
 personality. If, then, the entire labor of 
 the universe, culminating in spiritual per- 
 sons, is to be thrown away and nothing
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 77 
 
 come of it, we indeed are "put to permanent 
 intellectual confusion." Such considera- 
 tions as this have made evolution the 
 strong ally of belief in immortality to many 
 minds. At least it is evident that the facts 
 of evolution are not conclusive against 
 immortality. Professor Fiske, one of Amer- 
 ica's leading evolutionists, states the truth 
 with less restraint. "The materialistic as- 
 sumption," he says, "that the life of the 
 soul ends with the life of the body, is per- 
 haps the most colossal instance of baseless 
 assumption that is known to the history of 
 philosophy." 
 
 VI 
 
 We come, therefore, in our discussion of 
 the possibility of life beyond the grave, to 
 that difficult question in which all other ob- 
 jections to immortality have their culmina- 
 tion : is not the mind absolutely dependent 
 on the brain ? Not the evolutionary doc- 
 trine, but the modern laboratory study of 
 the physical basis of personality, most urges 
 this query on us. There is no longer any 
 doubt about the facts to be interpreted. 
 A continuous layer of gray matter, varying
 
 7 8 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 in thickness from one-twelfth to one-eighth 
 of an inch, and folded upon itself "as one 
 would crumple up a handkerchief," forms 
 the outer surface of our brains. No think- 
 ing is ever done by men without the 
 cooperation of this delicate and highly or- 
 ganized nervous tissue. Each psychical 
 function has some special lobe or convolution 
 in the gray matter, without which the cor- 
 responding mental activity is utterly impos- 
 sible. In many cases the exact location of 
 the sensitive surface, where the special 
 forms of intellectual activity are carried 
 on, is known to the psychologists. They 
 know the area in the brain with which we 
 hear, the area with which we see ; they know 
 the lobes by which we move our arms and 
 legs, our lips and tongues and eyes ; they 
 know the convolution where the function of 
 speech is carried on and without which 
 abstract thinking is impossible. They can 
 even distinguish the surface with which we 
 hear words from the surface with which 
 we read them. Nothing is clearer than that 
 for every functioning of the minds of men 
 there is a corresponding molecular activity 
 in the gray matter of the brain. The con-
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 79 
 
 elusion at first seems inevitable, that the 
 mind is absolutely dependent on the physi- 
 cal structure and is inseparable from it. 
 
 It is well to note that as the doctrine of 
 racial evolution only makes more urgent a 
 problem always faced by those who watched 
 the development of any individual, so here 
 the discoveries of physiological psychology 
 only assert with greater particularity and 
 assurance what is the common experience 
 of every man. We know that we are de- 
 pendent on our brains. Every fever that 
 congests our nervous systems ; every para- 
 lytic stroke that attacking the right hemis- 
 phere of the brain cripples the left side of 
 the body ; every illness that reduces our 
 power of thought by disabling the machin- 
 ery with which our thinking must be done, 
 says in popular speech what the psycholo- 
 gists assert in scientific terms, that we are 
 dependent on our brains. When a good 
 character is altered by a blow upon the 
 skull, and is restored again by surgeons who 
 trephine the bone and relieve the press- 
 ure upon the convolution underneath, 
 that fact only makes more vivid and explicit 
 what every ordinary man has known, that
 
 80 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the healthy condition of his nervous system 
 is prerequisite to a healthy personality. 
 The essential problem has not been altered 
 by the modern discoveries of the physio- 
 logical investigators ; it has only been made 
 more manifest, more circumstantial and 
 more urgent. The intimate relationship 
 between the mind and the brain has been 
 so illustrated in detail, so proved by experi- 
 ments verifiable and clear, that the modern 
 man has come to say with a definiteness and 
 an assurance which his own experience never 
 would have wrought in him, that his per- 
 sonality is absolutely dependent on his 
 brain. How can we be separable selves, 
 when we and our nervous systems are so 
 intermeshed and apparently indissoluble ? 
 Our initial fear that the dependence of 
 our minds upon our brains must conclu- 
 sively banish the hope of immortality is 
 mitigated somewhat when we turn to books, 
 such as Doctor Thompson's work on "Brain 
 and Personality." Here is a man who 
 knows the facts, and in the elucidation of 
 them and the practice of the inferences 
 drawn from them, has played no inconsider- 
 able part. So far, however, is he from
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 81 
 
 being convinced that they imply the anni- 
 hilation of a man at death, that to him the 
 details of the brain's organization and the 
 way in which the centres of psychical func- 
 tioning are built up in the gray matter of 
 its surface, seem clearly to indicate, not that 
 the brain makes the person, but that the 
 person is using the brain as his instrument 
 and is educating it to serve his will. If the 
 gray matter made the person, he argues, the 
 more gray matter the more possibility of 
 personal power. But on the contrary, not 
 only are many of the greatest minds asso- 
 ciated with brains of less than medium 
 weight, but in every brain only one hemis- 
 phere is used for thinking, as one eye may be 
 used for seeing, so that a paralytic stroke 
 may utterly destroy one hemisphere, and 
 the man still think on as clearly as he 
 thought before. The gray matter does not 
 make the person, he asserts, the person 
 organizes a small portion of the gray mat- 
 ter, and uses it as an instrument for think- 
 ing. However one may disagree with special 
 aspects of this argument, or however one 
 may be unable to comprehend the argu- 
 ment at all, when one considers the eminent
 
 82 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 investigators whose knowledge of the facts 
 is comprehensive and exact, and whose 
 hope of immortality is yet unshaken, he 
 sees that there must be a possible inter- 
 pretation of the mind's dependence on the 
 brain, which does not necessarily negative 
 the hope of life eternal. 
 
 That the present contingency of a living 
 being upon a physical structure does not 
 by itself argue that such a relationship must 
 exist forever, is clear. The worm in the 
 cocoon, or the babe in the womb, or the 
 bird in the egg, depends on the warm and 
 nourishing environment in which he is 
 enclosed, and with which he is connected 
 by ties that condition the possibility of 
 his existence. But this present relation- 
 ship is not permanent. A life is being 
 wrought in the temporary matrix which 
 some day will outgrow the old necessities. 
 Such an analogy is no argument at all for 
 the immortality of man, but it is a clear dis- 
 closure of the fact that the absolute depen- 
 dence of life upon a physical structure may 
 be of such a nature that the dependence 
 is a temporary preparation for a future 
 independence.
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 83 
 
 This suggestion is entirely pertinent to 
 the problem of man's future life. The 
 present contingency of mind on brain nega- 
 tives the hope of immortality only under one 
 condition : that the brain creates the mind. 
 If the man's invisible self is conditioned 
 by his physical structure as the blossom is 
 by its stalk and cusp, then his annihilation 
 is assured ; but what if the dependence 
 of his personality upon his nervous system 
 were like the dependence of a telegrapher 
 upon his instruments ? Every fact known 
 to science is at least as satisfactorily 
 explained by the latter idea as by the 
 former. In either case any injury to the 
 physical structure means a corresponding 
 disability to the life that is dependent on it 
 for its expression. A man cannot see with- 
 out eyes, but the eyes are not the man ; 
 he cannot see without the optic nerve, but 
 the nerve is not the man ; he cannot see 
 without the visual lobe of the brain, but 
 the lobe is not the man. Why are they not 
 alike instruments which the man uses, 
 upon which his present activities are con- 
 tingent, but apart from which he can still 
 exist ? For all that any investigation ever
 
 8 4 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 has ascertained, such may be the case. 
 Science has discovered only that for every 
 activity of the mind there is a corresponding 
 molecular change in the brain, and that is 
 equally true whether we regard the brain 
 as an agent that creates the mind, or as an 
 instrument on which the mind is playing. 
 If a man is riding in his limousine, he is 
 dependent on the windows for his impression 
 of the outside world. If the glass is cov- 
 ered by curtains or besmeared with mud, 
 he cannot see. All that happens to the 
 windows affects his power either to receive 
 impressions from without or to signal to his 
 friends. Yet the man is not thereby proved 
 to be the glass, nor is it clear that he may 
 not some day leave his limousine and see 
 all the better because the old mediums are 
 now discarded. A man's dependence on 
 his instruments can never be used to prove 
 that he is his instruments or is created by 
 them. Every man who is acquainted with 
 the exact discoveries of physiological psy- 
 chology, understands that they leave the 
 question of immortality where they found 
 it, unanswered still. Science is sure that 
 thought and the brain's activity now go
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 85 
 
 hand in hand ; but whether the brain is the 
 creator of the mind or is simply the tem- 
 porary instrument of mind, must be deter- 
 mined by considerations with which the 
 physiological laboratory cannot deal. All 
 objections to eternal life, based upon the 
 present dependence of the mind upon the 
 body, are admittedly inconclusive. "How 
 much does this argument amount to," 
 asks Professor Fiske, "as against the belief 
 that the soul survives the body? The 
 answer is, Nothing ! absolutely nothing ! 
 It not only fails to disprove the validity of 
 the belief, but it does not raise even the 
 slightest prima facie presumption against 
 it." 
 
 VII 
 
 Many men compelled by the testimony 
 of the experts and the obvious evidence of 
 the facts, to acknowledge that even this 
 strongest argument against immortality 
 is indecisive, take final refuge, as an expla- 
 nation of their disbelief, in the incon- 
 ceivable mysteriousness of an invisible self 
 using a visible body. The unimaginable 
 nature of such a relationship between the
 
 86 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 mind and brain urges them to deny its 
 possibility. Granted that, as a matter of 
 theory, science never has proved, and in 
 the nature of the case never can prove, the 
 indissoluble connection between the body 
 and the self ; yet the ties that bind the two 
 are so obviously close and intimate that 
 one cannot easily conceive them torn asun- 
 der. A disembodied self is an unpictur- 
 able thing. What I would be without my 
 instruments of perception and my nervous 
 organism, is beyond my power to appre- 
 hend, and what is unimaginable can only 
 with difficulty be believed. But if the brain 
 conceived as the instrument of personality 
 is an enigma, what is the mystery of the 
 brain, conceived as the creator of person- 
 ality ! That is the alternative. Either 
 mind uses brain or is produced by it. 
 If our physical structure is not the instru- 
 ment on which we play, our physical struc- 
 ture is our originator, and we are creatures 
 whose builder and maker is brain. If, 
 therefore, the difficulty of conceiving a 
 mind that uses gray matter as a means of 
 thinking seems insuperable, it is well to 
 face the alternative, and see the mystery
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 87 
 
 which we necessarily prefer when we, denying 
 that personality uses flesh, thereby assert 
 that flesh produces personality. How much 
 less mysterious is gray matter creating 
 mind, than is mind making an instrument 
 of gray matter ? 
 
 The lobe of the brain with which the 
 function of thought is associated is made 
 up of a definite number of physical cells, 
 reticulated by innumerable nervous av- 
 enues of communication. How can these 
 cells be pictured as conspiring to write 
 "Hamlet" or to compose the sonatas of 
 Beethoven ? Has each cell a mental 
 aspect ? If each cell has, how can it com- 
 municate its mental power, and arrange 
 with its neighbors so to contribute theirs, 
 that altogether they shall produce an 
 Emancipation Proclamation or a deter- 
 mination to die on Calvary rather than be 
 untrue ? The thing is inconceivable. It 
 is not the brain as a whole that is associated 
 with thinking ; it is a special lobe in one 
 hemisphere of the brain ; and because that 
 lobe is compounded of distinguishable cells, 
 the function of the lobe must be a sum made 
 up of the functions of the parts. In the
 
 88 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 last analysis, therefore, we have a single 
 cell, made out of subtile matter and infin- 
 itesimally minute, and in the physical vi- 
 bration of this cell and others like it, lies the 
 potency that has written all our literature, 
 achieved all our knowledge, composed all 
 our music, dreamed all our ideals, and 
 attained all our spiritual character. How 
 incredible a mystery is this ! 
 
 It is sufficiently strange that man should 
 build a violin and play upon it, but that a 
 violin should fortuitously build itself, organ- 
 ize its atoms, shape its body and make taut 
 its strings, and then with no one to play 
 upon it, should play upon itself Joachim's 
 "Hungarian Concerto," how shall a man 
 make that seem reasonable ? Just such an 
 unimaginable thing must one believe, who 
 asserts that brain creates the mind. This 
 affirmation of materialism is the one unbe- 
 lievable mystery. A ' ' mobile cosmic ether,'* 
 as Haeckel calls it, that can arrange itself 
 into mothers and music and the laughter of 
 children at play: a "mobile cosmic ether" 
 that can compose itself into Isaiah and 
 Jesus and Livingston and Phillips Brooks ; 
 a "mobile cosmic ether" that can organize
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 89 
 
 itself into the Psalms of David and the 
 dramas of Shakespeare, into Magna Chart as 
 and Declarations of Independence ; what 
 intellectual gymnastics must a man per- 
 form to make such a process thinkable ? 
 And this materialistic explanation of per- 
 sonality nowhere appears so incompre- 
 hensible as when from vague generalities 
 like Haeckel's ether it is driven to the plain 
 assertion that a visible, ponderable, gray 
 tissue with its little cells is the transient 
 creator of all the character and intelligence 
 of the race. If one desires to avoid mystery, 
 he does ill to deny that mind uses brain, 
 in order that he may assert that brain 
 creates mind. 
 
 Indeed, the consequences of affirming that 
 flesh, however finely organized, is the 
 producer of personality, are far wider than 
 the comparatively insignificant matter of 
 mystery. Everything physical always 
 tends to act along the path of least resist- 
 ance. In a world, therefore, where mind is 
 the creature of nervous organization, when 
 a man asserts a universal truth, such as 
 that the shortest distance between two 
 points is a straight line joining them, he
 
 go ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 is not saying this because it is true, but 
 because the molecules of his brain al- 
 ways find that the path of least resistance 
 leads them to function towards such an 
 affirmation. If truth is thus a matter of the 
 physical paths of least resistance in the 
 brain, one can readily understand the 
 suspended judgment of the man, of whom 
 Macaulay tells, who was inclined to think 
 that parallel lines would never meet, but 
 who would not be dogmatic on the subject. 
 A man may well suspend his judgment on 
 every axiom, if axioms are simply nervous 
 discharges along lines of least resistance. 
 This unaccountable enigma confronts us in 
 a world where mind is made by brain, that 
 everybody who can think at all believes that 
 three times three make nine. How did it 
 happen in a universe where no one ever 
 thought this truth until man thought it, 
 that the material substance of human 
 brains has so organized itself that it always 
 finds the path of least resistance leading to 
 this conclusion ? For in such a world, all 
 truth, as well as all beauty and goodness, 
 is reduced to a question of brain avenues 
 and cellular functions. When Haydn com-
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 91 
 
 posed "The Creation," saying, "Not from 
 me, but from above it all has come," he 
 was mistaken about the source of his 
 inspiration, for the fact was that his gray 
 matter had merely executed a neurosis 
 along the lines of least resistance in the 
 brain ; when John Napier discovered the 
 process of logarithms, it was because his 
 unusually agile brain cells achieved a for- 
 tunate manoeuvre whereby they reached 
 an unforeseen result ; and when Latimer, 
 burning at the stake in Oxford Square, 
 said to his companion in martyrdom, "Be 
 of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play 
 the man. We shall this day light such a 
 candle, by God's grace, in England, as I 
 trust shall never be put out," the cause 
 was that by a happy conspiracy among the 
 molecules in his Brocca convolution, they 
 had succeeded in pooling their psychical 
 aspects and producing the heroic words. 
 Perhaps most strange of all, the hope of 
 immortality itself, that has made men die 
 singing, that has inspired poems like "In 
 Memoriam" and music like Christendom's 
 Easter hymns and anthems, and that into 
 the commonplace endurance of innumer-
 
 9 2 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 able humble men has put cheer and courage, 
 is at bottom nothing but an explosion of 
 excitable nerve cells. This interpretation 
 of the beauty, knowledge, goodness and 
 faith of mankind cannot be disproved. 
 As Paulsen says, "The proposition that 
 thoughts are in reality nothing but move- 
 ments in the brain, that feelings are nothing 
 but bodily processes in the vaso-motor 
 system, is absolutely irrefutable ; not be- 
 cause it is true, however, but because it is 
 meaningless. The absurd has this advan- 
 tage in common with truth, that it cannot be 
 refuted." At any rate, the old fable of 
 the fish that leaped from the frying-pan 
 into the fire, because the pan was hot, is a 
 mild simile for the estate of the man who 
 gives up belief in immortality and accepts 
 its alternative, because immortality is mys- 
 terious. One is reminded, in this wild 
 attempt to escape mystery, of George 
 Sand's character, Gribouille, "who threw 
 herself into the river at the approach of rain, 
 for fear of getting wet ! " 
 
 When thus a man has canvassed all the 
 standard objections to belief in personal 
 permanence, he finds them manifestly incon-
 
 THE POSSIBILITY OF IMMORTALITY 93 
 
 elusive. So far as anything that science 
 has discovered is concerned, immortality 
 is as possible as it is significant. The as- 
 surance of its truth must rest on consider- 
 ations that overpass the boundaries of 
 scientific investigation, but when the stream 
 of a human life turns the great bend in its 
 banks which we call death, and passes out 
 of sight, there is no fact known to man 
 which negatives our right to seek those 
 further reasons which may assure us that 
 the stream flows on. 

 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Assurance of Immortality 
 
 The bare possibility that after death we 
 may continue to exist falls far short of 
 satisfying the interest of men in immor- 
 tality. There may be some, indeed, whose 
 desires for life eternal are so strong that 
 when the arguments against it are proved 
 inconclusive, their hearts, like coiled springs 
 released, leap out in confident affirmation 
 that the possible is true. Such an attitude is 
 not altogether unreasonable, for when a great 
 life, pulsating with energy and hope, bur- 
 dened with powers but half -expressed, aspir- 
 ing with a reach that is larger than its grasp, 
 suddenly passes from our sight, the respon- 
 sibility of proof seems to rest with those, 
 who, in the face of mankind's universal 
 hope, assert that the life has been anni- 
 hilated. If, therefore, such proof is quite 
 impossible, if all the nooks and crannies of 
 the mental universe hide not a single fact 
 
 94
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 95 
 
 that demonstrates the dissolution of the 
 personality, a man may well feel the strong 
 presumption of probability that the life 
 goes on. More cautious minds, however, 
 will not be greatly influenced by this 
 consideration. If the bare possibility of 
 life eternal is all that they can affirm, their 
 resultant attitude will be not positive confi- 
 dence but agnosticism. However much they 
 may desire to be convinced of immortality, 
 they will feel themselves in honor bound not 
 to go beyond the evidence. 
 
 Moreover, the bare possibility that man 
 may live through death is insufficient, 
 because the profoundest meanings which 
 faith in immortality possesses for the lives 
 of men cannot belong to one who, perceiv- 
 ing that existence beyond the grave is pos- 
 sible or even probable, is yet not positively 
 convinced that it is true. If belief in per- 
 sonal permanence concerned only a myste- 
 rious future, uncertainty about it would be 
 of no great moment, and the possibility of 
 its truth might serve most of the needs 
 which could be met by confident assurance. 
 Life beyond the grave, however, is not an 
 artificial addition to this present existence,
 
 9 6 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 but a natural continuation of it ; if a man 
 is immortal at all, he is immortal now. 
 Eternal life, to those who are destined to 
 live forever, is not a possession conferred 
 at death, but a present endowment, the full 
 appreciation of which incalculably deepens, 
 beautifies and solemnizes the meaning of 
 our most common days. For if a man 
 is immortal, he now has entered on an 
 endless course of spiritual growth with 
 limitless possibilities latent in it ; he has 
 now begun a journey in which death is an 
 incident, a life story which the grave will 
 simply punctuate to more exalted mean- 
 ing. If this faith in life eternal as a present 
 possession is to be so apprehended that it 
 will make a vital difference to character, 
 if a man to-day is to take advantage of the 
 comforts, sanctions, motives and hopes 
 which properly belong to an immortal per- 
 sonality, until, aware that he is deathless, 
 he begins now to live the kind of life that 
 it will be worth his while to live forever, 
 immortality must be to him not a proba- 
 bility but an assured conviction. Confident 
 belief in immortality is important for this 
 fundamental reason, that upon it depends
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 97 
 
 the practice of immortality now. No man 
 will really live as though he were an eternal 
 person until he is assured that such an 
 interpretation of his life is true. 
 
 Now, when a man seeks positive and 
 assuring reasons for faith in personal per- 
 manence, he may well be discouraged at the 
 beginning by the unanimity with which men 
 agree, sometimes triumphantly and some- 
 times reluctantly, that immortality cannot 
 be proved. To be sure, some psychic in- 
 vestigators, with more or less confidence, 
 assert that they have held communion with 
 the dead. Facts which suggest spiritual 
 intercourse between the other world and 
 this, and which have been impressive 
 enough tentatively to convince Sir William 
 Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and men of 
 like scientific temperament and training, 
 may not cavalierly be laughed out of 
 court, but such evidence is too difficult of 
 access, too dubious at present in its impli- 
 cations, to assure any considerable number 
 of people that the world to come is true. 
 It may be that great light will break upon 
 us from this quarter, and that, as Frederick 
 Myers prophesied, a few generations hence
 
 98 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 it will be impossible for any man to doubt 
 the appearances of Jesus to his disciples 
 after Calvary, but at present, the evidence, 
 whether of our own immortality or of the 
 Master's, must move for most men in a 
 realm quite other than that of psychic 
 phenomena. There are, to be sure, multi- 
 tudes, who take their faith in immortality, 
 without evidence, on the dictum of an ex- 
 ternal authority, but such a credulous atti- 
 tude is increasingly impossible. If the as- 
 sertion of immortality in book and church 
 cannot find positive support in discoverable 
 facts, mankind's conviction of its truth will 
 surely wane. Men to-day demand proof. 
 Because, therefore, belief in immortality 
 seems to be amenable to no scientific 
 processes of thought, and to allow no veri- 
 fiable confirmation, man's faith in it natu- 
 rally tends to grow unsure, to become a 
 tentative and uncertain hope, until at last 
 the future world for him pales into a dim 
 possibility. 
 
 II 
 
 The common statement, therefore, that 
 immortality cannot be proved, must be sub-
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 99 
 
 jected to searching analysis. As a matter 
 of fact, it is untrue that the assertion of 
 immortality and the assertion of a scientific 
 law involve radically different intellectual 
 processes, and the popular idea that they 
 do is based upon an utter misunderstanding 
 of the methods which scientists continually 
 employ. The fundamental assumption of 
 all science is that the universe is truly a 
 universe, consistent in its regularity of pro- 
 cedure, not erratic and whimsical, but uni- 
 form, dependable and law-abiding. With- 
 out this faith, which never has been and 
 never can be fully demonstrated, science 
 would be impossible. Huxley calls him- 
 self an agnostic with reference to God's 
 being and character, but in regard to the 
 consistency and regularity of the universe 
 he could not be agnostic and still be a scien- 
 tist. He must make that leap of faith, and 
 he makes it with gladness and confidence. 
 "As for the strong conviction," he says, 
 "that the cosmic order is rational, and the 
 faith that, throughout all duration, unbroken 
 order has reigned in the universe, I not only 
 accept it, but I am disposed to think it the 
 most important of all truths." Exactly !
 
 ioo ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Than this there are few more amazing 
 ventures of faith for a man to make, and 
 yet this lies at the basis of all science. 
 For this assumption that the universe 
 always has been and always will be a reason- 
 able and law-abiding whole, is, in the nature 
 of the case, not amenable to complete 
 verification. So many confirming facts, 
 however, indicate, and within limited 
 spheres strictly demonstrate, the depend- 
 ableness of nature, that the assertion of a 
 universal cosmic order is a reasonable con- 
 viction, as certain as it is supremely im- 
 portant. Men discovered the laws of the 
 ellipse and found afterwards that the plan- 
 ets in their courses observe them per- 
 fectly. The chemical conditions and qual- 
 ities of fire, whether on earth or in the stars, 
 are found to be identical. In special sci- 
 ences the dependableness of nature is so 
 completely verified that the exultant asser- 
 tion of a professor in chemistry is readily 
 transferred to the whole cosmic order : 
 "Ask nature the same question in the same 
 way, and she will always give you the 
 same answer." The universe is everywhere 
 amenable to thought ; it can be understood ;
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 101 
 
 it is trustworthy, not capricious, — this is 
 the conviction which, proved in segments, is 
 confidently affirmed as the faith of science 
 concerning the entire cosmic process. 
 
 A notable consequence is involved in 
 this affirmation that the universe is 
 rational. What does this assertion mean, 
 if not that the world acts as it might be 
 expected to act, had it been thought through 
 by Mind. When Charles Darwin exclaims, 
 "If we consider the whole universe, the 
 mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of 
 chance," he is saying that the cosmic pro- 
 cess is rational and that nothing rational 
 ever comes by accident. Reasonableness 
 is the work of mind. Can a man read 
 sense into a printed page that bears the 
 impress of type which, haphazard, has 
 pied itself ? Type must express previous 
 thought before any man can discover 
 thought there. When, therefore, as Dar- 
 win says, the mind refuses to believe that 
 the planets accidentally arranged them- 
 selves, and that the story of evolving 
 human life comes from the pied type of a 
 fortuitous creation, we are compelled to the 
 alternative, that the cosmic order has
 
 ioa ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 reasonableness inherent in it, discovered, 
 not created by the thought of man. The 
 only way we have of asserting the reason- 
 ableness of the world involves the assertion 
 that the world has been thought through, 
 that there is mind behind it and in it, that 
 it did not come by chance, and that the 
 human mind studying it, discovers thought 
 already there. When Kepler, sweeping the 
 heavens with his telescope, cried : "O God, 
 I think Thy thoughts after Thee," he was 
 affirming the logical result of believing that 
 the universe is rational. 
 
 Because science starts with this funda- 
 mental assumption of the cosmic order's 
 rationality, it goes on to affirm as true all 
 propositions, whether they can be com- 
 pletely verified or not, that are necessary 
 to make intelligible and reasonable the 
 facts of experience. The scientist notes the 
 facts first, and then makes a venture of 
 faith, which in ordinary parlance is con- 
 cealed under various names, — doctrine, as 
 in the "doctrine of evolution," law, as in 
 the "law of gravitation," theory, as in the 
 "theory of electrons," — but all of which 
 have this in common, that they are science's
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 103 
 
 attempts to frame a proposition that will 
 make intelligible and reasonable the facts 
 of experience. Every statement of scien- 
 tific law is a venture of faith in disguise 
 as a hypothesis. The Copernican astron- 
 omy was at first a sublime guess, and the 
 conservation of energy, still incapable of 
 universal proof, was an enormous assump- 
 tion, but since without them the data of 
 the physical world are not understandable, 
 they are confidently affirmed as true. "He 
 who does not go beyond the facts," says 
 Huxley, "will seldom get as far as the 
 facts" ; and even Haeckel adds, "Scientific 
 faith fills the gaps in our knowledge of 
 natural laws with temporary hypotheses." 
 Take away this privilege of faith, and from 
 the foundation to the topmost pinnacle 
 the elaborate structure of science falls 
 apart into unrelated, inchoate elements. 
 As the president of the Massachusetts Insti- 
 tute of Technology expresses it, "Science 
 is grounded in faith just as is religion, 
 and scientific truth, like religious truth, 
 consists of hypotheses, never wholly veri- 
 fied, that fit the facts more or less closely." 
 Without the exercise of faith, therefore,
 
 io 4 ASSURANCE OF I M MORTALITY 
 
 the world of knowledge would be reduced to 
 factual elements, disparate and unorgan- 
 ized by law, a topsy-turvy jumble of units 
 without sequence or relation. But even 
 this sort of world is too rich and copious 
 to be obtained without faith. Indeed, let 
 a man once begin to be a thoroughgoing 
 agnostic, to refuse utterly to go beyond the 
 facts, and he speedily reduces the universe 
 to absurdity. To believe at all in the 
 existence of an outer world or in the reality 
 of other persons is a gigantic venture of con- 
 fidence. To trust as veracious one's sen- 
 sations of things and people is prerequisite 
 to thinking that things and people exist at 
 all, so that if by proof is meant the achieve- 
 ment of undoubtable certainty, Tennyson's 
 sage is strictly correct : 
 
 "Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, 
 Thou canst not prove the world thou movest in, 
 Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, 
 Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 
 Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: 
 Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, 
 Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay, my son, 
 Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, 
 Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 
 For nothing worthy proving can be proven, 
 Nor yet disproven."
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 105 
 
 Indeed, such unmitigated scepticism, not 
 to be evaded except by faith in those per- 
 ceptions which assure us of an outer world 
 of things and persons, forces us even to dis- 
 believe our own identity. That I myself 
 am the same person whose experiences are 
 transmitted in the flow of my memory is 
 an unprovable conviction. My recollection 
 is assumed for true on faith, and my sense of 
 personal identity is the result of trust in the 
 veracity of my remembrance. If a man 
 decides to have done with faith, from its 
 largest and most comprehensive exercise 
 to its most simple functioning, this vast and 
 complicated world will be reduced for him 
 to the luminous pin-point of his immediate 
 sensation. This is the only strictly demon- 
 strable experience which we can know, and 
 even while we are knowing it, it is gone. 
 Everything in the universe beyond that 
 momentary flash of consciousness, our per- 
 sonal identity, the existence of an objective 
 world, the reality of other persons, and our 
 scientific laws, are creations saturated thor- 
 oughly with faith. That this is a reduc- 
 tio ad absurdum is obvious, but it is agnos- 
 ticism readily reduced to absurdity because,
 
 106 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 in its essential nature, agnosticism is absurd. 
 No one has ever really practised it, save as a 
 tentative confession of embarrassment, in 
 the attempt to push to its limit the construc- 
 tion of a world out of chaos. 
 
 The plain fact, therefore, is that every 
 man must and does build up by faith the 
 conception of the world in which he lives, 
 and the regulating principle of this scien- 
 tific process, by which a man "sees life 
 steadily and sees it whole," is the assump- 
 tion that those propositions are true which 
 are necessary to make the facts of life intel- 
 ligible and reasonable. On this principle 
 man believes in his personal identity, the 
 existence of an objective world and the 
 reality of other persons ; on this principle he 
 constructs theories in astronomy to explain 
 the stars, in geology to explain the rocks 
 and in psychology to explain the mental 
 processes ; and on this same principle he 
 affirms the truth of God and immortality. 
 To be sure, the facts involved in this last 
 affirmation are spiritual, not material, are 
 more subtile, less tangible, and lend them- 
 selves with greater difficulty to confident 
 verification, than the facts of the physical
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 107 
 
 world, but so far as the fundamental intel- 
 lectual processes are concerned, the reli- 
 gious interpretation of life, affirming God 
 and immortality, is a venture of faith, like t 
 the law of gravitation, to explain the facts. 
 The desires of men, the necessities of their 
 intellectual and moral life, their loves, 
 faiths, hopes and spiritual possibilities, are 
 not only facts, but are facts incomparably 
 more significant than subhuman things, 
 rocks, flowers, fossils, stars, on which the 
 natural sciences are founded. Must not 
 hypotheses be advanced to make these 
 greater facts intelligible ? When one re- 
 members that all science is based upon the 
 fundamental assumption that the universe 
 is reasonable, when one considers that all 
 propositions are affirmed as true which are 
 necessary to rationalize the facts of experi- 
 ence, it is clear that if personal permanence 
 is necessary to the reasonableness of human 
 life, which is the most important part of the 
 universe, we have proof of immortality, in 
 which essentially the same intellectual pro- 
 cess used by science in asserting the con- 
 servation of energy, is applied to the loftier 
 ranges of the spiritual life of man.
 
 108 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 III 
 
 The necessity of personal permanence to 
 the reasonableness of human life may be, 
 perhaps, most clearly seen when we consider 
 the essentially limitless possibilities which 
 inhere in knowledge and in character. If 
 death ends all, these possibilities are involved 
 in man's very nature only that without 
 excuse they may be brusquely and abruptly 
 snatched away. The body has its cycle of 
 existence, like a tree ; it is born, reaches its 
 climacteric, withers and dies, but the mind 
 consciously walks an ascending avenue, 
 widens its horizons, deepens its insight, 
 and is ever aware that there are no limits 
 to the possibilities of growing knowledge. 
 The world of mind is an illimitable realm ; 
 thought amid all its achievements is ever 
 a pioneer that hears the call of undiscovered 
 countries over the next range of hills ; and 
 the intellect of man, conscious of these 
 exhaustless potentialities, dies, as Goethe 
 did, crying in his last moments, "More 
 light!" To feel the endless lure of truth 
 yet unattained is the essential nature of 
 the intellectual life. If Huxley prefers
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 109 
 
 Hell to the stoppage of his growing power 
 to know, he is but feeling that elemental 
 passion whose most notable expression 
 Milton puts into the mouth of his mag- 
 nificent Satan, writhing in the agonies of 
 the pit : 
 
 "For who would lose, 
 Though full of pain, this intellectual being, 
 Those thoughts that wander through eternity, — 
 To perish rather, swallowed up and lost 
 In the wide womb of uncreated night, 
 Devoid of sense and motion?" 
 
 Not the small men, but the men of largest 
 mental life most have felt the unforgiv- 
 able cheat which the universe practises on 
 us, if it opens to us the endless possibility 
 of knowing, only to refuse us its fruition. 
 What is thus true of mind, is true of 
 character, for there is no conceivable limit 
 to the potentiality of spiritual life. A 
 traveller in Switzerland tells us that, uncer- 
 tain of his way, he asked a small lad by 
 the roadside where Kandersteg was, and 
 received, so he remarks, the most signifi- 
 cant answer that was ever given him. "I 
 do not know, sir," said the boy, "where 
 Kandersteg is, but there is the road to it."
 
 no ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 That is an epitome of the spiritual experi- 
 ence of man. The ideal is beyond our ken, 
 it is a goal that never can be located, but 
 always in the progressive achievement of 
 character, we are conscious that we are 
 on an endless road that leads toward 
 unknown perfection. While death, there- 
 fore, seems logically the portion of the 
 body, it comes as an impertinent intruder, 
 a meddling interloper into the progress of 
 a spiritual life. Death resides in the body 
 from the beginning ; but death is a thief 
 who breaks into the character and steals 
 from it its essential nature of endless 
 aspiration. Not small souls, but the great 
 men of spirit have most been conscious of 
 the illimitable realm into which they are 
 introduced by even the faint beginnings of 
 moral character, and are most aware of the 
 fraud which life practises on them, if it 
 creates, only to disappoint, what Words- 
 worth calls, 
 
 "That most noble attribute of man, 
 Though yet untutored and inordinate, 
 That wish for something loftier, more adorned, 
 That is the common aspect, daily garb 
 Of human life."
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY in 
 
 Now the argument for immortality has 
 always included the fact which we have just 
 been stating, that human life on the plane of 
 earth alone promises more than it attains, 
 aspires beyond its grasp, and is left at 
 death an unfinished and disappointing frag- 
 ment, truncated, partial, incomplete, expir- 
 ing like Moses on Nebo's top, vainly look- 
 ing towards the lands that he dreamed of 
 conquering but that he never reached. 
 This argument, however, is often stated so 
 that it seems to say in language more or 
 less learned and grandiloquent, that men 
 want to live after death and that, therefore, 
 immortality must be considered true. But 
 this is an utter perversion and caricature of 
 the bearing which the incompleteness of 
 human life at death has upon the problem 
 of life everlasting. The persuasive con- 
 sideration is not that men want to live 
 after death, but that now after countless 
 ages of painful evolution, the creative 
 process has brought into existence beings 
 who have set their feet upon endless avenues 
 of knowledge and of character. They are the 
 crown of creation ; no mother could insist 
 that her babe is worth more than all the
 
 ii2 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Alps with greater assurance than reason 
 insists on evaluing personalities above un- 
 conscious and unmoral rocks and stars. And 
 now when the universe has so achieved a 
 creature in whom evolution has ceased 
 being physical and has become psychical, 
 in whom exhaustless possibilities are at 
 last begotten, does the universe in utter 
 unconsciousness of her achievement toss 
 the potentialities of mind and spirit into 
 Sheol with the refuse of the flesh, and caring 
 no more for one than for the other, bring 
 all alike to a dismal and inconsequential 
 end? Then human life, as we know it, is 
 utterly unreasonable. The most hopeful 
 attitude which we can take towards it is 
 that of the King of Hearts in "Alice in 
 Wonderland," when he examines the cryptic 
 document introduced at the historic trial. 
 "If there is no meaning in it," he says, 
 " that saves a world of trouble, as we needn't 
 try to find it." One generation of incom- 
 plete, aspiring persons is wiped off the earth, 
 as a child erases unfinished problems from his 
 slate, that another generation of incomplete, 
 aspiring persons may be created — created 
 and then annihilated. Nothing ever is
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 113 
 
 finished anywhere. God, like a half-witted 
 artist, amusing himself with tasks that 
 have no meaning, paints pictures in which 
 he barely outlines forms of beauty, full of 
 promise, only to erase them and begin 
 again. Aspiring characters, as an agnostic 
 said, are "trying to get music out of 
 sackbuts and psalteries, that never were 
 in tune and seemingly never will be," 
 and our social labors simply build tran- 
 sient oases in a desert world, empty of 
 spiritual meaning — oases that in the end 
 the desert will consume in burning sand. 
 To say that the loftiest aspects of our human 
 life in such a universe are unintelligible 
 and unreasonable is surely far within the 
 boundaries of the obvious. 
 
 When, therefore, we assume, as science 
 always does in the physical realm, that this 
 is a reasonable world, we have a positive 
 and assuring argument for immortality. 
 Of course, this may be an utterly erratic 
 universe, not in the least to be depended on 
 to furnish reliable clews to truth, but such 
 a conception makes science as impossible as 
 it makes immortality unlikely. When ir- 
 regularities in the orbit of Uranus were dis-
 
 ii 4 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 covered, for which there was no visible 
 explanation, science did not throw up her 
 hands in hopelessness, consenting that the 
 heavens were capricious and whimsical. 
 Rather, Leverrier computed the size, po- 
 sition and orbit of a planet which, if the per- 
 turbations of Uranus were to be made 
 intelligible, must be in the heavens. Be- 
 cause of her fundamental faith that the uni- 
 verse is not irrational, science knew that the 
 planet must be there, although unseen, and 
 when sight consummated insight, and Nep- 
 tune was discovered, less than one degree 
 from the spot indicated in the prophetic 
 affirmations of Leverrier, the faith of sci- 
 ence in the dependableness of the world 
 was justified. Not otherwise is personal 
 permanence essential to the reasonableness 
 of human life ; the orbits of aspiring mind 
 and character demand it to make them 
 intelligible ; and the faith that insight, so 
 based upon the reasonableness of creation, 
 shall some day be turned to sight, when we 
 have eyes to see the unseen world, is a 
 faith built on foundations firm and deep.
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 115 
 
 IV 
 
 If the basal assumption of science that 
 the universe is reasonable supplies so strong 
 a foundation for faith in immortality, how 
 much more does the basal assumption 
 of religion that the universe is beneficent 
 argue, of necessity, the permanence of 
 personality ! If God is good in any sense 
 imaginable to man, then he cares for his 
 creatures, has a purposeful meaning in 
 them, and regards them with solicitous 
 concern. A just and fatherly God cannot 
 have brought into being children, capable 
 of endless growth, aspiring after perfect 
 knowledge and character, only to toss them 
 one by one into oblivion, until at last, 
 tired even of the house he built for them, 
 he burns it up. As the seers have always 
 felt, the goodness and honor of God are 
 at stake in the question of immortality, — 
 
 "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 
 Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
 He thinks he was not made to die ; 
 And thou hast made him: thou art just." 
 
 Of course the confident affirmation that 
 God is good has always met the amazed
 
 n6 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 and jeering accusation of anthropomor- 
 phism. Your God is your lengthened 
 shadow, men say ; you have taken the 
 coin of the realm universal and stamped 
 your own visage on it. What the accuser 
 obviously means is that a man has com- 
 mitted an astonishing blunder when he 
 goes down into his own experience, and 
 there takes the best and highest that he 
 knows for his interpretation of God. The 
 suggestion is that when a materialist takes 
 rocks and stars, or a monist takes abstract 
 notions like energy and law, for his idea of 
 Deity, he has performed the sublimely 
 ingenious feat of overleaping the boundaries 
 of human experience and finding a symbol 
 of God that is not anthropomorphic. Of 
 course he has done no such thing. Can 
 a man leap outside himself and look at the 
 world through other than human eyes or con- 
 ceive it in other than human terms ? All the 
 rocks and stars I know and can use in 
 thought, are rocks and stars which, in the 
 form I know them, have been made inside 
 my experience ; all the abstract ideas of 
 energy and law I have are those of my 
 own mind's construction ; the entire world
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 117 
 
 in which I live and from which I can pick 
 symbols by which to interpret God is the 
 world of my own consciousness — an an- 
 thropomorphic world, because conformed 
 to the laws of my own thinking. I have no 
 pool other than my own consciousness in 
 which to fish for my ideas of anything. 
 The question is never whether or not a 
 man will interpret God by some element in 
 his experience, he cannot help that ; the 
 question is only whether he will interpret 
 God at all, and if so, what elements of his 
 experience he will use, the low or the high. 
 Physical energy is just as much our expe- 
 rience of body read out into the world as 
 personality is our experience of self-con- 
 sciousness. Materialist though a man be, 
 down into his own experience he must 
 plunge like the veriest Christian, however 
 he tries to escape it ; only if he chooses, he 
 may bring up body instead of soul, the 
 lowest instead of the highest, for his inter- 
 pretation of Deity. It is faith in either 
 case, however, and it is anthropomorphism 
 too. Christianity's method, therefore, is 
 not one whit different from the materialist's 
 or the monist's save in this, that instead
 
 nS ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 of choosing a lower part of experience, or 
 a by-product of experience, Christianity, 
 ranging over the hierarchy of elements 
 there, from the vassal serf of physical energy 
 to the spiritual king, self-conscious per- 
 sonality, hungering for righteousness and 
 ablaze with love, takes this last, this highest 
 form of life it knows, and that too with 
 lofty and undiscourageable optimism ex- 
 tended to the farthest boundaries of imag- 
 ination, as the only adequate highway to 
 travel toward the truth about God. The 
 Christian is anthropomorphic, as every one 
 has to be, but being under such necessity, 
 he thinks that the whole of man is not too 
 big nor too good to be the symbol of God. 
 "But," says some one, now no longer 
 able to contain impatience with such an 
 exultant idea of God, "do you mean that 
 by interpreting God in terms of the hu- 
 manly best you can imagine, you have 
 comprehended absolute Deity, the omnip- 
 otent, omnipresent, omniscient God, the 
 philosophic world-ground, the ontological 
 essence of the universe?" To which the 
 Christian, likewise impatient, answers, 
 "Do you think that I go hunting for
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 119 
 
 the sun at noon with a butterfly net, that 
 I seek to imprison the Most High in a hu- 
 man symbol ? Who am I that I should 
 talk about absolute Deity or seek to grasp 
 the Infinite with a finite mind ? Only this 
 is my faith, that through all eternity, with 
 all new disclosures of God, never will a 
 man who starts with the best he knows 
 have to stop, turn around, come back, and 
 begin again on a road toward God that is 
 less than that best. Never will he have to 
 take a path that is lower than personal, 
 or that negatives holiness and love. The 
 road leads what distance beyond my gaze 
 I cannot guess, but it is the same road and 
 not another." Sir Oliver Lodge has given 
 in one sentence a complete summary of 
 the Christian's method of approach to the 
 idea of God: "I will not believe that it is 
 given to man to have thoughts, nobler or 
 loftier than the real truth of things." 
 
 When, therefore, to the Christian the old 
 taunt is flung, "The lions, if they could 
 have pictured God, would have pictured 
 him in fashion like a lion," the answer is 
 ready at once : Good for the lions ! For if 
 they had been gifted with a faith superb
 
 i2o ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 enough to do so worthy and exalted a thing 
 as to take the best they had and think out 
 toward God along the pathway of it, they 
 would have been in so far Christian in their 
 philosophy of life. It were certainly nobler 
 and truer to be a lion interpreting God in 
 terms of the best lion he could imagine, 
 than to be a man interpreting God in terms 
 of dirt. 
 
 But if God is good in any such way as 
 this, then death does not end all. Not 
 only in general is an unreasonable world 
 utterly incompatible with a just and benef- 
 icent God, but in particular, a God of good 
 will must care for his creation. What, 
 then, in all the universe can be the object of 
 the divine solicitude ? Is God vain about 
 his sun and stars ? Is he twirling them 
 about his thumb and finger, like a child, 
 proud of their scintillating revolutions, 
 until transposing them and caring nothing 
 that the transposition incidentally anni- 
 hilates the transient race of beings on the 
 earth, he will twirl them in some other way ? 
 Such a conception of God is impossible. 
 If God exists at all, he must care for his 
 creation, and if he cares at all, he must care
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 121 
 
 for the crown of creation, personality. 
 Charles Darwin tells us that at times he 
 had a warm sense of a friendly God, but 
 that at other times this feeling vanished. 
 Yet even with so fugitive a faith in a uni- 
 verse that cared for its creatures, he wrote, 
 "It is an intolerable thought that man and 
 all other sentient beings are doomed to 
 complete annihilation, after such long-con- 
 tinued slow progress." To one who is 
 deeply convinced that Darwin's occasional 
 and evanescent sense of a friendly God may 
 be a man's reasonable and constant faith, 
 such a conception of the world is not only 
 intolerable ; it is impossible. To talk about 
 the fatherhood of a God, who begets chil- 
 dren, only to annihilate them, is absurd. 
 The goodness of God is plainly at stake 
 when one discusses immortality, for if death 
 ends all, the Creator is building men like 
 sand houses on the shore, caring not a 
 whit that the fateful waves will quite 
 obliterate them all. If death ends all, 
 the struggle and aspiration of humanity 
 have meant no more to him than the mist 
 that rests in the morning on the Alps and 
 at noon is gone. If death ends all, there is
 
 122 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 no God of whom goodness, in any conno- 
 tation imaginable to man, can be predi- 
 cated. 
 
 How indissolubly faith in immortality 
 is interwoven with faith in a beneficent 
 Deity is plain when one considers the 
 venerable objection to belief that God is 
 good, which has always made acceptance 
 of Christian optimism difficult. The pres- 
 ent evils of human life, its miseries, dis- 
 eases and sins, its Lisbon earthquake that 
 caused Goethe even when six years old to 
 doubt the justice of the universe, and its 
 San Francisco fire that made more atheists 
 than preachers will convert in many a 
 year, — these are the standard and colossal 
 arguments against the honor and benefi- 
 cence of God. To this objection only one 
 answer ever has been possible. Those 
 who in spite of the injustice and evil of our 
 present life have still believed that God 
 is good have insisted that there is no more 
 reason to interpret human existence evilly 
 in terms of its woes, than to interpret it 
 happily in terms of its amazing story of 
 spiritual growth, and that while it is impos- 
 sible to account for goodness in man if
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 123 
 
 there is no goodness at the heart of the 
 world, it is entirely possible that the inci- 
 dental evils of a process, leading toward a 
 worthy consummation, may be explicable 
 when the process is complete. The asser- 
 tion of the beneficence of God has always 
 depended for its full support upon this 
 appeal to the arbitrament of the future. 
 Like Gladstone, defeated in the House of 
 Commons, the man of faith has returned 
 undismayed to face his enemies, wearing 
 a boutonnidre of defiance on his coat, and 
 saying, "I appeal to time !" 
 
 If, therefore, all worthy consummation 
 to human life is denied, if men, seeing their 
 present inexplicable woes, are convinced 
 that no resultant future will ever show the 
 reason for a process that here was mys- 
 terious and hard, as a vase might under- 
 stand in retrospect the deft and strenuous 
 fingering of the potter and the overwhelm- 
 ing heat of the furnace, then the basis is 
 removed on which man can rest his faith 
 in a friendly universe. The universe dis- 
 tinctly is not friendly, if it has reared with 
 such pain the moral life of man, only to 
 topple it over like a house of cards.
 
 i2 4 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 While a man, therefore, may believe in 
 immortality without believing in the good- 
 ness of God, he cannot reasonably believe 
 in the goodness of God without believing 
 in immortality. Indeed, the Buddhist pas- 
 sion to escape continued existence bears 
 impressive witness that without a benefi- 
 cent Deity, life everlasting, while believ- 
 able, is positively undesirable. The "noble, 
 eightfold path" of Buddha, by which a 
 man shall reach Nirvana, and become 
 "like a flame that has been blown out," 
 has been preached to men with a mis- 
 sionary enthusiasm that can find its equal, 
 if at all, only in Christianity, not because 
 Buddhists do not believe in immortality, 
 but because they do believe in it, and 
 because, conceiving God not as beneficent, 
 but as unconscious, unmoral Being, devoid 
 of character and purpose, immortality to 
 them is so undesirable that to escape it is 
 their supreme ambition. The wheel of 
 continuous existence is their terror. They 
 proclaim as a gospel that to become here 
 a passionless sepulchre in which all desires 
 are dead is the way to that reabsorp- 
 tion into unconscious Being which is
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 125 
 
 the great salvation of the race, the 
 passionately desired escape from the neces- 
 sity of living. "Let, therefore, no man 
 love anything!" says Buddha. "Loss of 
 the beloved is evil. Those who love 
 nothing and hate nothing have no fetters." 
 Continuous life in a universe that is not 
 friendly is a bane to be abhorred. When, 
 however, a man positively believes in 
 a God of good will and purpose, eternal 
 life to him is not only inevitable ; it is 
 desirable. The difference between Buddha's 
 attitude towards immortality and the 
 New Testament's is not that one believes 
 in existence after death, while the other 
 is unsure or disbelieving ; both alike 
 are positively convinced of the soul's 
 continuance. But one, conceiving ever- 
 lasting life in terms of a Fatherless world, 
 dreads it as a mediaeval Christian dreaded 
 Hell ; while the other, crying that death 
 cannot separate us from the love of God, 
 claims it as an inspiration and a glorious 
 hope. One strength of Buddhism lies in the 
 fact that the idea of a perpetual, self- 
 conscious existence, which through everlast- 
 ing ages trails after it the full memory of all
 
 i26 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 previous experience and from itself never can 
 escape, causes to the man who endeavors to 
 imagine it what Professor Goldwin Smith 
 calls "mental vertigo." The human mind 
 finds it as impossible to handle this concep- 
 tion as in mathematics it finds it impossible 
 to make infinity a member of an equation 
 without invalidating the result. Absolute 
 infinity in any realm cannot be dealt with 
 by the human mind. What God may 
 mean by personal permanence beyond our 
 present power to picture or to compre- 
 hend, the thought of man may not usefully 
 inquire, but with the faith that the uni- 
 verse is friendly comes the faith that it 
 purposes endless progress for us, and this 
 is sufficient, without knowing more, for the 
 deepest human needs. 
 
 Whether one starts, therefore, from the 
 scientific affirmation that the universe is 
 reasonable or from the religious faith that 
 the universe is friendly, he comes inevi- 
 tably to the conviction that death does not 
 end all. The assurance of immortality is 
 grounded on great foundations. The rea- 
 sonableness and beneficence of creation are 
 pledged against the annihilation of man.
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 127 
 
 V 
 
 No other reasons for faith in immortality 
 compare in fundamental importance with 
 those which have been mentioned, but there 
 are at least two further considerations which 
 tend greatly to confirm belief in everlast- 
 ing life. That the universe is reasonable 
 and beneficent and so will certainly pre- 
 serve its moral gains, is a judgment of value, 
 in making which the single individual, un- 
 supported by his fellows, might well feel 
 insecure. The main facts of Beethoven's 
 life may be so clearly ascertained by one 
 investigator that, whether any one agrees 
 with him or not, he is convinced ; but that 
 Beethoven's music is beautiful would be 
 exceedingly difficult for a single critic to 
 maintain, if all those most competent to 
 judge in the aesthetic realm insisted that 
 the sonatas were miserable music. If one 
 inquires the nature of the proof demanded 
 when men seek to demonstrate that the 
 Sistine Madonna is glorious, or that the 
 Prize Song in "Die Meistersinger " is superb, 
 he sees that it depends in no small degree 
 upon the consensus of opinion among those
 
 128 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 most competent to judge. If, therefore, 
 a man, feeling that the reasonableness and 
 friendliness of the cosmic order are worthy- 
 foundations for his faith in a future life, 
 should find himself alone in such an esti- 
 mate, while ranged against him the seers 
 of the race marshalled their contrary judg- 
 ments, it would require an almost unattain- 
 ably heroic obstinacy of opinion to insist 
 that he is right. Who, upon the other hand, 
 can calculate the confirming influence on 
 our faith, if the judgment which we have 
 reached is not withstood, but with aston- 
 ishing unanimity is supported by the author- 
 ity of those spiritual seers who have seen 
 most deeply the significance of life ? 
 
 This use of authority is not by any 
 means irrational. Even science, from 
 whose realm authority in the old sense of 
 dictatorial dogmatism has been banished, 
 welcomes authority in the opinions of 
 able and disinterested experts. Few men of 
 all the millions who believe the facts have 
 ever measured the 92,000,000 miles to the 
 sun, or for themselves have fathomed the 
 secrets of the scientific theories which, 
 taken for granted on expert authority, are
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 129 
 
 used in daily business. If a man refused 
 to make use of any knowledge save that 
 which he personally had proved, he would 
 live in a universe painfully meagre and 
 desiccated. When a man believes Mr. 
 Edison's assertions in the realm of elec- 
 tricity, it is generally not because he him- 
 self has demonstrated them, but because he 
 trusts Mr. Edison's ability and honesty, 
 finds what he himself knows of electricity 
 not negatived, but illustrated and com- 
 pleted by the opinions of the specialist, 
 and is confirmed in his faith by the prac- 
 tical results which Mr. Edison manifestly 
 attains on the basis of his truths. Even in 
 science one cannot easily exaggerate the 
 practical importance of the expert's author- 
 ity. 
 
 This use of authority in science, however, 
 is insignificant in comparison with its use in 
 those higher ranges of man's life where judg- 
 ments of worth are necessary. There, as 
 Browning says, 
 " One wise man's verdict outweighs all the fools ! " 
 
 If in the establishment of some scientific 
 theory all Asia and Africa count for noth- 
 ing, and the masses of unqualified men pro-
 
 i 3 o ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 test and disbelieve in vain, because the 
 specialists who really know have seen the 
 truth and spoken it, how much more in the 
 rating of beautiful music, painting and 
 architecture, do men of dull eyes shrug 
 their shoulders to no effect, and insensitive 
 minds seek in vain to turn appreciation into 
 cynicism ! The seers are the demonstrators 
 of the value- judgments of the world. Not 
 in religious truth alone, but in all spiritual 
 concerns of beauty and goodness, we ordi- 
 nary men stand upon the slope and cry to 
 those upon the summit, that with their 
 wider vision they must interpret to us the 
 real truth of life. 
 
 Men's faith in immortality, therefore, is 
 immeasurably confirmed by the testimony 
 of the spiritual seers. With overwhelming 
 unanimity they bear witness to their faith 
 in a reasonable world that "will not leave 
 us in the dust." If we seek counsel of 
 the most comprehensive spirit outside the 
 range of the Jewish-Christian development, 
 we hear Socrates saying through Plato : 
 "Then beyond question the soul is immor- 
 tal and imperishable and will truly exist in 
 another world." If we seek counsel of that
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 131 
 
 spiritual Master, who most seems to include 
 in himself the ideals of all centuries, all 
 races, both sexes, all ages, as the pure white 
 light gathers up and blends the split and 
 partial colors of the spectrum, we hear him 
 saying with perfect confidence: "In my 
 Father's house are many mansions." The 
 argument is often urged that the universal 
 belief in immortality, held by all men in all 
 ages, makes strong presumption of im- 
 mortality's truth ; that if the analogy of 
 physical life holds good, no universal human 
 functioning exists without an objective 
 fact to call it into being ; so that without the 
 stimulus of the existence of another world, 
 it is inconceivable that all races would have 
 believed in it. But this argument, founded 
 on the faith of the vast, obscure masses of 
 mankind, while it has its place, does not 
 compare in persuasive power with the con- 
 sideration of those elevated souls, who, 
 rising far above the common levels of our 
 human life, have from their altitude assured 
 us, not with less confidence, but ever with 
 more positiveness as they stood higher in 
 the spiritual scale, that everlasting life is 
 true. Unless Germany denies that men
 
 i 3 2 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 like Kant are her deep-seeing prophets ; 
 unless England chooses lesser souls than her 
 Wordsworth, Browning, and Tennyson to 
 represent her loftiest spiritual insight ; un- 
 less America says to Emerson, to Whittier, 
 and to their like that they are not our seers ; 
 men must confess that with marvellous una- 
 nimity the most elevated and far-seeing 
 spirits of the race have most believed in 
 immortality. Not the small souls, but the 
 men of "a lordly great compass within" 
 have felt most keenly the necessity, reason- 
 ableness and assured certainty of life eternal. 
 Now this appeal to the seers is not in its 
 deepest significance an appeal to an exter- 
 nal authority. What the greatest men 
 ordinarily feel is what ordinary men feel 
 in their greatest moments. The appeal 
 to the seers is an appeal to the plain man's 
 best hours. In a singularly revealing sen- 
 tence, Professor Tyndall says: "I have 
 noticed during years of self- observation 
 that it is not in hours of clearness and of 
 vigor that this doctrine (of materialism) 
 commends itself to my mind ; for in the 
 presence of stronger and healthier thought 
 it ever dissolves and disappears, as offering
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 133 
 
 no solution of the mystery in which we 
 dwell and of which we form a part." So 
 every man is aware of his self-evidencing 
 high moments, when the ground rises under 
 his feet and he reaches for a time a spiritual 
 eminence, from which horizons are visible 
 and vistas stand clear that are not within 
 his ken on ordinary days. The arbitra- 
 ment of the great spirits of the race gets its 
 authority for us because they but confirm 
 the vision of our own elevated hours. 
 The most significant choice which in the 
 end every man makes, is between his own 
 low and his own high moments, as inter- 
 preters of life's true meaning. When then 
 a man appeals from himself at his worst to 
 himself at his best, is there any question 
 what the decision is upon the matter of 
 eternal life and all its implications ? Does 
 a man at his best tend to think that he is 
 flesh with a transient mental aspect, that 
 there are no permanent forces save the 
 physical powers that build the solar systems 
 and destroy them ; that the earth throws 
 away with utter carelessness personality, 
 her most precious treasure, and never 
 resolves to harmony the dissonance of her
 
 134 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 inequities ? Does a man at his best feel 
 in human life no intrinsic and eternal value 
 to inspire sacrifice for spiritual quality in 
 the individual and to furnish basis for pas- 
 sionate and hopeful service to the race ? 
 Above all, does any man in his sanest, wor- 
 thiest moments, consent to think that the 
 universe preserves none of the moral gains, 
 which have cost such an incalculable price 
 in blood and tears and toil ? Is he willing 
 to accept as his view of the cosmic mean- 
 ing Thompson's portrayal of a world that 
 throws away with heedless hand the spirit- 
 ual achievements it has wrought ? 
 
 "The world rolls round forever like a mill, 
 It grinds out life and death, and good and ill, 
 It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will. 
 
 While air of space and Time's full river flow, 
 The mill must blindly whirl unresting so, 
 It may be wearing out, but who can know ? 
 
 Man might know one thing were his sight less dim, 
 That it whirls, not to suit his petty whim, 
 That it is quite indifferent to him: 
 
 Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith ? 
 It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, 
 Then grinds him back into eternal death."
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 135 
 
 Is that the truth of the universe, as in 
 a man's best hours, it appeals to him ? 
 Rather a wholesome mind must finally 
 protest against a useless creation, that as 
 Professor James put it, could as well, 
 like a reversed cinematograph, run one 
 way as another, because it means nothing 
 and issues nowhere. Platonic dialectics to 
 prove the immateriality of the soul and 
 hence its necessary immortality no longer 
 interest the human mind ; the bare con- 
 tinuance of a spiritual substance, deathless 
 because it essentially is uncompounded 
 and therefore indestructible, is not even 
 desired ; but desire for the preservation 
 of the race's active, spiritual values no 
 generation can outgrow. The passing of 
 special arguments and of whole philo- 
 sophical systems leaves that problem still 
 central and dominant. Here, after all, is 
 the crux of the whole question, that no man 
 in those hours when he is intellectually and 
 spiritually at his best can consent, without 
 violence to his profoundest instincts, to 
 believe in a world that loses all its gains, a 
 world in which nothing that we have 
 willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall
 
 i 3 6 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 exist. Without some form of personal 
 permanence that issue to the cosmic pro- 
 cess seems inevitable. 
 
 VI 
 
 The underlying reason for the seeming 
 inadequacy of all proofs of the life to come 
 is that their absolute verification is impos- 
 sible. Hypotheses in geology can be veri- 
 fied beyond a peradventure by putting 
 them to the test of facts visible and tangi- 
 ble. But hypotheses about the future life, 
 in the nature of the case, cannot be con- 
 firmed by an appeal to experiences beyond 
 the grave. When, in answer to this objec- 
 tion, it is said that to require a kind of 
 proof which necessarily is out of the ques- 
 tion is an unreasonable demand, this, 
 obviously, does not better the case. The 
 really fruitful consideration in this regard 
 is that verification of the hypothesis of 
 everlasting life is not altogether impos- 
 sible. Immortality does not concern the 
 future world alone ; it concerns this present 
 existence, for, as we have said, if a man is 
 immortal at all, he is immortal now. 
 Whenever a man, therefore, begins now to
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 137 
 
 live as though he were immortal, he is 
 putting the truth to the test of life, and 
 seeking verification of its validity in terms 
 of its practical consequences. A world in 
 which poison made men strong and foods 
 destroyed them would be no more unreason- 
 able than a world in which falsehood made 
 great characters while truth applied issued 
 in ignoble spirit and unworthy life. Indeed, 
 we call arsenic poison just because it does 
 destroy us, and good bread we call food, 
 because it builds us up. So in practical 
 life we count those things true which, taken 
 for true, prove useful, and those things 
 false which will not verify themselves by 
 the difference that they make to life. The 
 engineer, who, engaged in the construction 
 of a bridge, first plots his plans according 
 to the laws of mathematics, then submits 
 them to experts for corroboration, and 
 then building his structure, looks for the ul- 
 timate confirmation of his judgment in the 
 completed work, standing the test of use, 
 indicates by his method of procedure the 
 road to all verification of truth. Let a man 
 so test the affirmation of immortality. 
 Let his best judgment decide that it is true,
 
 138 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 and this judgment be substantiated by the 
 verdict of the seers, and then let him start 
 to live now as though he were immortal. 
 What confirming consequences are sure to 
 come ! The man who lives as though he 
 were immortal lives in a universe where the 
 highest spiritual values are permanent, 
 outlasting the growth and dissolution of the 
 stars ; where personality, whether in himself 
 or others, is infinitely precious and has 
 everlasting issues ; where character is the 
 supreme concern of life, in behalf of which 
 all else may reasonably be sacrificed ; where 
 no social service ever can be vain, if it reg- 
 isters itself in even one man made better, 
 and where, in all public-minded devotion to 
 moral causes on the earth, we are not dig- 
 ging artificial lakes to be filled by our own 
 buckets, in hopeless contest with an alien 
 universe, but are rather building channels 
 down which the eternal spiritual purpose 
 of the living God shall flow to its "far-off 
 divine event." The truth of immortality 
 makes great living. 
 
 It is just here that Jesus gives his most 
 substantial contribution to faith in life 
 everlasting. His teaching of immortality
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 139 
 
 has the authoritative value of a verdict 
 from a spiritual seer, but his life has a veri- 
 fying value, exhibiting to us once for all the 
 sort of character resultant from living as 
 though immortality were true. At least 
 once, in him, we have seen what assurance 
 of eternal life means to character. For 
 Jesus differs even from Socrates in this, 
 that while Socrates argued for immortality 
 and believed it, Jesus never stopped to 
 argue, but taking it for granted, as an 
 immediate and unquestionable intuition, 
 lived as though it undoubtedly were true. 
 Others have analyzed the reasons for believ- 
 ing in life everlasting, as one might analyze 
 a score of Mozart and discuss arguments to 
 prove its beauty ; but Jesus lived immor- 
 tality, as one might play Mozart perfectly. 
 When one considers, therefore, the character 
 of Jesus, in which faith in God was the warp 
 and certainty of life eternal was the woof, 
 he is seeing the consummate verification of 
 faith in immortality. This is the result in 
 human life when personal permanence passes 
 from theory into the verifying test of char- 
 acter. Let a man begin to live as though 
 he were not going to die, and his tone of
 
 i 4 o ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 spiritual quality rises by sure degrees 
 towards Christlikeness ; let a man begin 
 to live as though death were the end of all, 
 and even those who themselves have held 
 this creed confess that the deepest motives 
 for character grow dim, and that social ser- 
 vice is blighted by disillusionment. Before 
 a man gives himself to disbelief in personal 
 permanence, let him consider this result, 
 that in such a world falsehood makes the 
 best character and truth destroys it. 
 
 No man, therefore, need stop with the 
 vague possibility of life to come. Immor- 
 tality is a hypothesis, if you will, but so is 
 gravitation, and around them both con- 
 siderations weighty and assuring gather in 
 support. The reasonableness of the uni- 
 verse is pledged to the immortality of man : 
 the beneficence of God is unthinkable with- 
 out it ; the verdict of the spiritual seers 
 confirms it ; and when it is put to the veri- 
 fying test of life it builds the loftiest charac- 
 ter. 
 
 Death is a great adventure, but none 
 need go unconvinced that there is an issue 
 to it. The man of faith may face it as 
 Columbus faced his first voyage from the
 
 ASSURANCE OF IMMORTALITY 141 
 
 shores of Spain. What lies across the sea, 
 he cannot tell ; his special expectations all 
 may be mistaken ; but his insight into the 
 clear meanings of present facts may per- 
 suade him beyond doubt that the sea has 
 another shore. Such confident faith, so 
 founded upon reasonable grounds, shall be 
 turned to sight, when, for all the dismay of 
 the unbelieving, the hope of the seers is 
 rewarded by the vision of a new continent.
 
 'T'HE following pages contain advertisements of a 
 few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects.
 
 The Problem of Christianity 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 
 By Josiah Royce, LL.D., Litt. D. 
 
 Professor or the History of Philosophy, Harvard University; Author 
 of "Outlines of Psychology," "The Philosophy of Loyalty," 
 "William James," etc. 
 
 Vol. I. The Christian Doctrine of Life. 
 
 Vol. II. The Real World and the Christian Ideas. 
 
 Cloth, i2tno, Set, $3.50 net; carriage extra 
 
 A work of great importance to all students of religion and philoso- 
 phy and to the general reader who keeps abreast with progress in these 
 fields is Dr. Josiah Royce's "The Problem of Christianity," in two 
 volumes, the first, "The Christian Doctrine of Life," and, the second, 
 "The Real World and the Christian Ideas." 
 
 Volume I is a study of the human and empirical aspects of some of 
 the leading ideas of Christianity; Volume II deals with the technically 
 metaphysical problems to which these ideas give rise. The two vol- 
 umes are contrasted in their methods, the first discussing religious 
 experience, the second dealing with its metaphysical foundations. 
 They are, however, closely connected in their purposes, and at the 
 end the relations between the metaphysical and the empirical aspects 
 of the whole undertaking are reviewed. 
 
 The "Christian Ideas" which Dr. Royce treats as "leading and 
 essential" are, first, the Idea of the "Community," historically 
 represented by the Church; second, the Idea of the "Lost State of 
 the Natural Man," and the third, the Idea of "Atonement," to- 
 gether with the somewhat more general Idea of "Saving Grace." 
 
 "These three," Dr. Royce says, "have a close relation to a doctrine 
 of life which, duly generalized, can be, at least in part, studied as a 
 purely human 'philosophy of loyalty' and can be estimated in em- 
 pirical terms apart from any use of technical dogmas and apart from 
 any metaphysical opinion. . . . Nevertheless no purely empirical 
 study of the Christian doctrine of life can, by itself, suffice to answer 
 our main questions. It is indeed necessary to consider the basis in 
 human nature which the religion of loyalty possesses and to portray 
 the relation of this religion to the social experience of mankind. To 
 this task the first part of these lectures is confined, but such a pre- 
 liminary study sends us beyond itself. 
 
 The second part of these lectures considers the neglected phil- 
 osophical problem of the sense in which the community and its Spirit 
 are realities." 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
 
 Social Idealism and the Changing Theology 
 
 A Study of the Ethical Aspects of Christian Doctrine 
 
 The Nathaniel William Taylor Lectures for 191 2. Delivered before 
 the Yale Divinity School 
 
 By Gerald Birney Smith 
 
 Associate Professor of Christian Theology in the Divinity School of 
 
 the University of Chicago 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 net; postpaid, $1.37 
 
 "It has for some time seemed to me," says Gerald Birney Smith, 
 in the preface to his new book, "that theological scholarship is in 
 danger of pursuing a course which might end in a somewhat exclusive 
 intellectualism. As the progress of Biblical criticism has compelled 
 us to reconstruct our conception of the way in which the Bible is to 
 be used, the appeal to the Bible, which to Luther seemed so simple 
 and democratic a matter, has become hedged in with considerations 
 of critical scholarship difficult for those who are not specialists to 
 comprehend. While theologians have been giving attention to the 
 problems created by this phase of scholarship the movements of life 
 in our day have brought to the front aspects of the social question 
 sadly needing the guidance and the control which can be supplied 
 only by an ethical religion. The utterances of theology, in so far as it 
 has followed traditional paths, have been somewhat remote from these 
 pressing moral questions of social justice." 
 
 Professor Smith then says that the aristocratic conception of social 
 guidance is gradually giving way to a democratic conception, and goes 
 on to show how and why this change from aristocratic to democratic 
 ideals has taken place, indicating wherein an understanding of the 
 significance of this ethical evolution may aid in the reconstruction of 
 theology. 
 
 The author believes when this is clearly apprehended by theo- 
 logians and ministers the reconstruction of religious beliefs may be 
 more closely related to the great problems of social ethics, now loom- 
 ing so large and needing the help which a positive religious faith can 
 supply. 
 
 The work is divided into five sections, considering in turn ecclesi- 
 astical ethics and authoritative theology, the discrediting of ecclesi- 
 astical ethics, the moral challenge of the modern world, the ethical 
 basis of religious assurance and the ethical transformation of theology. 
 
 "Dr. Smith's book should interest all those who are broad enough 
 to realize that as the world advances, theological religion must also 
 advance." — Pittsburgh Post. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
 
 Christianizing the Social Order 
 
 By Walter Rauschenbusch 
 
 Professor of Church History in Rochester Theological Seminary 
 
 Author of "Christianity and the Social Crisis" 
 
 $1.50 net; postpaid, $1.65 
 
 Supplements the powerful message of "Christianity and the Social 
 Crisis" as a study of present-day problems written with even greater 
 insight and appeal. 
 
 Christianity and the Social Crisis 
 
 Cloth, i2tno, $1.50 net 
 
 "It is of the sort to make its readers feel that the book was bravely 
 written to free an honest man's heart; that conscientious scholarship 
 and hard thinking have wrought it out and enriched it; that it is 
 written in a clear, incisive style; that stern passion and gentle senti- 
 ment stir at times among the words, and keen wit and grim humor 
 flash here and there in the turn of a sentence. It is a book to like, to 
 learn from, and, though the theme be sad and serious, to be charmed 
 with." — N. Y. Times Sunday Review of Books. 
 
 Social Religion 
 
 By Scott Nearing 
 Author of "Woman and Social Progress," "Social Adjustment," etc. 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.00 net; postpaid, $1.13 
 
 There is probably no more popular writer on present-day social 
 problems than the professor in the Wharton School of the University 
 of Pennsylvania. Dr. Nearing has a way of expressing his statements 
 that makes an irresistible appeal to the general reader, and the interest 
 once gained is held by the importance and absolute authoritativeness 
 of the facts which he presents. In his new book he takes up the more 
 deplorable elements in the modern social and industrial world, analyz- 
 ing them in the light of a practical Christianity. The church-going 
 public, the non-church goers and those who are openly opposed to the 
 methods of the church of to-day should all find this book equally 
 interesting, and no matter what the opinion of the reader may be he 
 will be forced to admit the truth of the author's argument. Dr. Near- 
 ing's final presentation of a religion that is really social, a religion the 
 function of which is "to abolish ignorance and graft and to provide 
 for normal manhood and adjusted life toward which society may 
 strive" is particularly suggestive. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
 
 1 he Church and the Labor Conflict 
 
 By Parley Paul Womer 
 
 Author of "Relation of Healing to Law," "A Valid Religion for the 
 
 Times," "The Coming Creed" 
 
 Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 net; postpaid, $1.63 
 
 To supply concreteness to the discussion of the social mission of the 
 church is Parley Paul Womer's purpose in The Church and the Labor 
 Conflict. Dr. Womer believes that in dealing with the relationship 
 of Christianity to industry there has been too much generalization, 
 a lack of definiteness and a failure to grapple the fundamental facts 
 of our contemporary social and economic developments. Accordingly 
 he does not approach his subject by the usual theorizing, but im- 
 mediately gets down to the essentials — to the conditions which have 
 brought about the present state of affairs and their causes. "While 
 the Christ of the churches is scorned and rejected," he says, "the 
 Nazarene carpenter is enthusiastically lauded as a labor leader and 
 revolutionist, a man of the common people who fought hard for their 
 moral and economic welfare, to intents and purposes the first socialist. 
 Because the church is untrue to the ideals of the Nazarene, say these 
 spokesmen of the wage-earners, it is looked upon with suspicion and 
 hostility. The church is repudiated not because it is Christian, but 
 precisely because it is not Christian." Accepting this as a statement 
 of fact, what should the church do to regain its influence? What 
 should be its attitude to labor and capital, and this attitude once 
 defined, what will be the final effect not only upon the church, but 
 upon humanity at large? These are some of the all-absorbing ques- 
 tions to which the author devotes himself. 
 
 "The author outlines very clearly the social mission of the church 
 in overcoming many of the ills of society in its present state of unrest 
 and forecasts the new church and its future work." — Boston Globe. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■LIE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .^c-y* 
 
 o 

 
 
 
 
 3 1158 00162 3049 
 
 
 
 j£S2SJS"S REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 001272 138 
 
 
 
 
 o» o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -> ^"i