GIFT Of:. z fe J '•' THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY AN ESSAY INCORPORATING THE LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE UPON THE FOUNDATION OF THE REV. JOHN HULSE IN THE MICHAELMAS TERM, 1 897 AND THE LENT TERM, 1898 BY THE REV. J. E. C. WELLDON Head Master of Harrow School LONDON SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED 38, Great Russell Street vV PREFACE The circumstances in which this Essay has been written will account more or less for its character. Some time ago the publishers invited me to write a book upon the subject of Immortality. They thought that such a book, if addressed to the intelli- gence and information not of theological experts especially, but of educated men and women in general, would not be without a certain value, as showing h ow much of all that renders huma n life 7 sublime^ and sacred is involved in the beli ef that ' Man is an immortal be ing. The consciousness that I did not possess, and amidst my duties could scarcely hope to acquire, the knowledge necessary for the task so kindly laid upon me made me hesitate to undertake it ; but it coincided with my own interests and studies, and with the reflexions that had long been present to my mind, and I could 37C I Oo> vi PREFACE not resist the hope that, if I succeeded in executing it, it might do some good. The book was considerably advanced, when I was appointed to the Hulsean Lectureship in the Univer- sity of Cambridge ; and it was permitted me to utiHse for my Lectures some of the materials already col- lected for my book. In fact, the first and the three last chapters of the book contain the substance of the argument put forward in the Lectures, although a good deal that is explanatory or illustrative has been added to them ; the remaining two chapters are new. Thus the Essay is in part scholarly and in part popular ; it is not altogether such as it would have been if it were designed for one class of readers only ; but I trust that, with all its faults, it may be regarded as a serious contribution to theological thought upon one of the greatest of subjects. J. E. C. WELLDON. Harrow School, March, 1898. CONTENTS CHAP. INTRODUCTION I. NATURE OF THE BELIEF II. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF III. VALUE OF THE BELIEF... IV. EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF, Evidences V. EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF Evidences A, External B. Internal PAGE I II 64 120 162 VI. THE CHRISTIAN AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 269 " Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he ? " Job xiv. lo. ** Ttg oldev H TO Kfjv [jlev k(TTi KarBavuv rb KarOaveiv dk Kw-" Euripides. " II importe a toute la vie de savoir si I'ame est mortelle ou im- mortelle."— Pascal. THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY INTRODUCTION The object of this Essay may be easily stated. Controversy rages, and perhaps will always rage around the evidences and probabilities of the Christian Faith. Such controversy has its own necessity, its own value and its own end. But behind all such controversy lie those great questions without which the Christian Faith itself can hardly become a subject of discussion. The existence of God, and as its corollary the Immortality ( of the soul, are the postulates of all Revelation. If they are not true, neither Christianity nor any other spiritual religion can be true. In trying to recommend the belief in Immortality by such considerations as are independent of Chris- tianity, I hope it may be said that I am in a sense preparing the way for Christian belief. 2'' '■' '' " ' IKTRVDUCTION There are many persons who are not theologians and yet have deep thoughts and feeHngs about religion ; they may be more or less instructed, more or less convinced ; they may wish or they may not wish to believe ; but they are ready to face the facts of human nature and life, although they set little store by authority ; and an argument conscien- tiously addressed to them is sure of a conscientious criticism at their hands. It is to them that I would respectfully offer this little book. I do not ask them, and indeed it would be idle to ask them, to accept what is said, because this or that thinker has said it ; but I ask them to ponder it and then to accept or reject it as they may think well. At least they will recognise in simple honesty the vast and vital importance of the doctrine for which I plead. I plead for a belief in the soul's Immortality ; I seek no more than that. The revelations pro- pounded to mankind have filled up (so to say) the area of the Immortal Life more or less positively, more or less piously. I do not in this essay aspire to fill it up. It is enough for my purpose if there be an Immortality within which the Providence of the Almighty may work out its inscrutable designs. INTRODUCTION 3 It has seemed to me as a Christian that I ought to say something as to the special Hght which Christianity sheds upon the truth and nature of the Immortal Life, and I have tried to say it in the last chapter. But the readers whom I have had in view are not so much Christians as those who stand, as it were, on the borderland of Christianity, and would gladly be Christians if they could. The mystery of Immortality remains and must remain. Every mystery is a great possibility. Life is tolerable if it closes in darkness, but not if it is known to close in nothingness. To do away the hope of another life is, as Goethe said, to do away all or nearly all that makes this life worth living. But every spiritual conception of life, however inadequate, is a witness to the soul's immortal being. The one enemy of religion is materia- lism. I do not imagine that it is possible to prove Immortality. Divine truths may be believed, though they cannot be proved. Faith is the complement of reason, not its contradiction. Where facts and arguments are nearly balanced, it is Faith which turns the scale. I do not aspire to prove Immortality but to make it probable. In 4 INTRODUCTION Theology every belief is subject to difficulty ; but it is often necessary to ask not only whether a belief is difficult but whether other beliefs or denials are not more difficult. For Man, as a reasonable being, placed in a world where the phenomena invite and indeed demand speculation, cannot blow hot and cold upon all opinions, cannot face both ways perpetually, cannot live out his life in a state of suspense or neutrality. He must incline to one side of things or to the other ; he must hold one view to be more probable than another. If the soul is not immortal, then it perishes. But the belief that the soul perishes or that it may perish is in effect (as will presently be argued) the denial of God. For to deny or doubt a fact is not seldom to assert its opposite. Thus Agnosticism is not Atheism ; but as, like Atheism, it takes no account of God in providing the motives and sanctions of morality, its practical consequence is atheistical. The evidences of Immortality which are here offered are, I hope, such as the subject rightly allows. Two great principles — the principle of Aristotle, that every subject has its own laws and canons of evidence, and the principle of Bishop Butler, that probability is the guide of life — are INTRODUCTION 5 the mainstays of religious thought and action. No mathematical fact is doubtful. No historical fact is certain. Yet conclusions are necessary as much in History as in Mathematics. And action follows upon probability as well as upon proof. It must be remembered too that evidences, which may in themselves be inconclusive, gain weight by accumulation. Where a number of considerations tend towards a certain belief, the belief possesses a stronger assurance than any one or two or three of these considerations could impart to it. It is so especially in religion ; for religion, as expressing the relation of the Infinite to finite beings, transcends the limits of human reason, it does not admit of demonstrative conclusions, it must be to some extent vague, trustful, hypothetical. In religion he is wise who makes the most of such evidence as is possible and attainable. So Socrates in the PJicvdo says pathetically : ^^ A man should persevere until he has achieved one of two things ; either he should discover or be taught the truth about these questions ; or if this be impossible, I would have him take the best and most irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through life — not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find 6 INTRODUCTION some word of God which will more surely and safely carry him." ^ It is difficult to be familiar with the history of human thought upon the primary fundamental truths of religion, and not to feel how little progress Humanity has made in all the centuries. The spiritual experiences of mankind are in the Vedas. The questionings and agonies of soul are in the book of Job. The difficulties inherent in Im- mortality were present to the minds of Pythagoras, Plato, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius. The arguments for and against the Being of God Himself — the very arguments which are advanced and contested to- day — were the commonplaces of the Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptical Schools. Everywhere old ideas recur ; old theories reappear. Human thought seems to move in a cycle. There is nothing new under the sun. Yet who is there that may set a bound to the powers of the human intellect or the human spirit ? What man knows not yet, and what it seems that he can never know, he may know some day. The splendid science of Astronomy stands as a warning ^ Plato, Phcvdo, p, 85. The Translation is, here as elsewhere when Plato is quoted, the late Master of Balliol's. It would be dangerous, if not presumptuous, to translate after the Master. INTRODUCTION 7 against the prejudice that would set up, as it were, intellectual "pillars of Hercules" beyond which the inventiveness of man may not proceed. For both Socrates in ancient times and Comte in modern have disbelieved in astronomical discovery. Xenophon in the Memorabilia says of Socrates that he " did his utmost to discourage his pupils from studying astronomy to such an extent as to understand the heavenly bodies which did not move in the same orbit as the earth, and the planets and the stars which are not fixed stars, and from wasting their lives over questions about their distances from the earth and their orbits and the causes of them. For he saw no good (he said) in these speculations ; not that he was ignorant of them, but they were calcu- lated in his opinion to waste a man's life and to prevent his pursuing many useful studies. In fact, he was generally opposed to the investigation of the Divine method of ordering the movements of the heavenly bodies, on the ground that it was beyond the scope of human discovery, and that he did not think the gods would be pleased with a man for trying to find out what it was not their will to make plain to human intelligence." ^ * Memorabilia, iv. 7, 5. 8 INTRODUCTION Still more remarkable is Comte's scepticism, as being subsequent to those astronomical calculations and conclusions which are probably the greatest triumphs of the human intellect. Yet these are his words : ^^ Scientifically considered Astronomy can be little else than the application of mathematical truth to the phenomena of the heavenly bodies. . . . It is true that we are limited to the consideration of geo- metric or mechanical phenomena which have already been reduced to general and abstract theories by the preceding science. All attempts to outstep this field are necessarily as vain as they are idle, even in a problem so simple as that of temperature. Distant bodies accessible to no sense but that of vision will never admit of researches deserving to be called Positive in any other of their phenomena than Extension and Motion. So far as we are concerned, it is in these that their existence consists." i And these words were used within a few years of the revelations since made in Astronomy by the spectro- scope. It is evident that no position in science can be so unscientific as that of limiting the possibilities of ^ System of Positive Polity^ vol. i,, Introductory Principles, chap, ii,, p. 404, Bridges' Translation. INTRODUCTION 9 human knowledge. An inquiry into the evidences of Immortahty, if it had never yet produced any result, would still be always right and always reasonable. This essay, indeed, is not intended to be an exhaustive treatise. It is sometimes assumed that whoever deals with an important subject ought to say all that can be said about it. The result is apt to be that books are complete, but they are un- readable, and the teaching which they might give is borne down by their excessive weight of learning. I have deliberately left a good many things unsaid. After all, the object of writing is to please some one or to help some one. Protestantism is the democracy of religion. It appeals to the people not because they are always wise or competent judges of religious any more than of political questions, but because conscience is sacred and supreme, and, where many minds are brought to bear upon a subject, the prejudices and peculiarities of individuals are corrected, and because candour is a part of religion and truth in itself is great and it prevails. This essay is popular rather than scientific. It is intended for readers who are not specially scholars. It is for this reason that I have translated most lo INTRODUCTION quotations from classical or foreign authors which occur in it, and have generally, though not always, cited passages of the Bible in the Authorised Version. ^ I have tried to write it in a simple straightforward style. So far as was possible, I have avoided using technical terms. I have given at the foot of the pages the principal references for such quotations or allusions as are made in the text. But, upon the whole, I have avoided footnotes, as being needless and annoying disturbances of a reader's attention. No ancient classical writer used them or seemed to need them. If at the end of this essay as at the beginning the doctrine of Immortality is felt to be involved in some uncertainty, may I say that I do not regret it ? Uncertainty is the test of moral character. We are tested and approved by our attitude of belief and conduct in the presence of life's uncertainties. There is no such testing power in mathematical or scientific truth. It is moral and spiritual truth which tests a man and a nation of men. That is the reason why right belief as well as right action is presented as human duty in the Bible. And yet it is my humble prayer that the great doctrine of Immortality may through this essay be made a little clearer and dearer to some human soul. CHAPTER I NATURE OF THE BELIEF In the experience of every man there is no such moment as when he looks for the first time on the face of death. He can never forget that moment nor ever Hve as though it had not been. He may have spent many years in the world, and the years may have been rich in interest and happiness, but at last he stands face to face with the reality which solemnises and sanctifies all things. From that time, even if he be frivolous and careless, he never wholly loses the sense of the awful vision. He knows that for him — for all his hopes, desires, ambitions, enterprises, victories — there is but one end. He is another man. But as he looks upon the dead, when the first strong agony of bereavement begins to spend itself, the thoughts which are apt to arise in his mind will be such as these : The thought of peacef illness. 12 THE HOPE OE IMMORTALITY The life that is over now was embittered perhaps by circumstances ; it may have been harassed with care or stained with sin or tortured with pain ; it may have been distressed, misunderstood, scorned, reprobated, condemned ; but its end is peace. The beating heart is still. The lips are hushed. The eyes are closed as if in sleep. The last farewell has been spoken — or it will never be spoken. In spite of the keen inevitable regrets, when it is too late to speak the word which seems so necessary, so natural, comes the feeling that "the wicked" in death do " cease from troubling," and " the weary are at rest." The thought of beauty too. The beauty of death is as exquisite as it is transient. It has been portrayed in impressive language by a great poet whose thoughts were wont to play about the subject of Immortality. "He who hath bent him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled (Before decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers) And mark'd the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there, The lix'd yet tender traits that streak The languor of the placid cheek, NATURE OF THE BELIEF 13 Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour, He still might doubt the tyrant's power ; So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd The first, last look by death reveal'd."^ But no one who has seen how the traces of bitter- ness, disquietude, wrath and all unlovely passion die away from the face of the dead will call his language overstrained. This beauty is itself a suggestion of Immortality. Is it wrong to add that in the chamber of death yet another thought will occur to the watcher's heart ? It is (if I may so speak of it) the thought of expec- tancy, I do not know how to describe it, but it is there. The spectacle of death is somehow not com- plete in itself. It points to a past but to a future too. There is something unearthly — something prophetic — in the face of the dead. For upon it are written as by a Divine Hand the words Mors janna vitce, '^ Death is the portal of life." The language of religion answers to this intuition of the human heart. When it is said of the dead that " he is gone/' or that "he has been called away," or that "God has taken him to Himself," there is an implied belief in an existence following upon death. ^ Byron, The Giaour. 14 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY And not only so, but it is implied that that existence is stronger, better and more enduring than the life which the dead man lived before his death. In other words, it is implied that the immaterial part of him which survives and transcends death (however that part may be conceived) is superior to the material part which is soon or late dissolved and dissipated by death. For what is the change that death makes ? The body of the dead remains as it was before ; it is not less visible and tangible than it was ; it pre- serves (for the time at least) all its members, bones, tissues, muscles, flesh and blood. Something has departed from it, something invisible and intangible, something that in the three sacred languages of men has been instinctively compared or identified with the mere breath (as the words t:^3!l Trvevjuia and anima serve to show), something that in its passing defies the keenest power of the microscope ; and that something is the man himself. We say ^'he is gone;" for the soul is the man ; it is not only a part and the principal part of him, but in religious phraseology it is himself. It was not so always. In the early Greek world, where the belief in the soul was faint and shadowy, NATURE OF THE BELIEF 15 the body was the man. Thus in the beginning of Homer's Iliad, as is well known, the poet laments the many valiant souls of men that "divine Achilles" ^ in his wrath sent down to Hades, '^ but themselves " he adds, meaning their bodies, "made he to be carrion for the dogs and all the fowls of the air." What can be a greater difference between pagan and Christian thought than that to the one the body, and to the other the soul, should be the man ? To speak of a city as containing so many " souls " is to use the language of Christ. For it was Christ who set His seal upon the belief, to which the pagan thought of the East had long been tending, that the soul, and not the body, is the vital and essential part of a man, and is more than equivalent to all the possessions and adornments of which human nature is capable. "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " " What shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " Such is the soul in the Christian view, and the reason why the value of the soul is infinite is its Immortality. But to come back to the chamber of death : as soon as it is admitted that the soul is of higher ^ Iliad, I, 3-5. i6 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY dignity than the body, and that it is separated and released from the body at death, the questions arise, What becomes of the soul after death ? does it survive and survive eternally ? and if so, what is the nature of its novel or extended life ? and how is its future conditioned by its past ? The Immortality of the soul is a doctrine standing by itself. It is independent of such theories as have been propounded, in ancient or modern times, respecting the destiny of souls after death. Immor- tality, apart from particular theories of its nature, is like a vast unexplored country ; we know that the country exists ; we touch its borders in the voyage of life ; but no man has crossed these borders and recrossed them. So is it in the argu- ment of this essay with " The undiscovered country from whose bourne No traveller returns." That the future of the soul is veiled in darkness is an admission which all men must make. But the point upon which it is necessary to insist is that souls have a future. If the life of the soul ends in the hour of physical death, it is certain or highly probable that the discords of life cannot be har- monised. But assuming that the soul survives the NATURE OF THE BELIEF 17 death of the body; we are in possession of a truth that is invaluable. Life is then a mystery, unsolved as yet, but not insoluble. What will be God's dealing with the soul in Immortality we know not ; but we know that He will deal with it in accordance with His eternal attributes of justice, compassion and love. It is then the doctrine of Immortality, and that alone, which comes under consideration at present. But in considering the Immortality of the soul it will be well to begin by asking what is meant by " Immortality " and what is meant by " the soul." Immortality is a negative term. It denies some- thing directly ; it predicates something only indi- rectly. That is probably the reason why many thinkers who have agreed in making use of the term have not agreed upon its significance. They have believed in the Immortality of the soul, but they have not understood by "Immortality" the same thing. It will be right therefore to put aside such theories of Immortality as are contrary to the purpose of this essay. I. And of these the first is the great doctrine which has played so strange and so strong a part in the history of human thought — the doctrine of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls. 3 i8 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY It has sometimes been ascribed originally to Pytha- goras. But it is of higher antiquity and authority. Herodotus^ in his account of Egypt says explicitly that the Greek writers borrowed it from the Egyp- tians. Certainly it lies at the root of that remarkable practice, the worship of animals, which is almost the heart of the ancient Egyptian religious system. But it is found commonly among primitive and savage peoples, though so far separated as the North American Indians, the New Zealanders, the Lapps, the Mexicans, the Zulus and the negroes of the Gold Coast. It is one of the beliefs which descended intact from Brahminism to Buddhism ; nay, it was en- nobled by the 550 births of the Buddha himself, and it was believed that in those births his soul passed not only into many human and animal forms but into a tree. It is a world-old notion which Western philosophers, like Pythagoras, inherited from the primitive East and scarcely made their own. Yet it has been revived even in modern times by Fourier and Fichte. It has been based partly upon Physics, partly upon Ethics. It has had strange results ; for there can be little doubt that it originated the practice of abstinence from animal foods as a moral ^ Herodotus ii. 123. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 19 duty. Wherever it has existed it has produced a noble tenderness of man towards the lower animals. It has been thought to meet the scientific law of conservation of energy. It has been accepted by sensitive and scrupulous minds as answering to the requirements of the Divine equity. But it is essen- tially a philosophical doctrine, not a doctrine of religion. It is tinged with the mysticism, the speculative unreality which Oriental philosophy loves. It robs any particular life, and so life itself, of its unique dignity. It does not place the soul after death in any closer or more vital relation to its Creator. It affords no security, or no adequate security, for the final harmony between the soul and the conditions of its being. It has never been widely accepted, and it is now pretty generally rejected, in the Western world; and however great may be the historical and speculative interest attaching to it, it is not the doctrine advocated in this Essay. Nor again is the Immortality of the soul as here considered anything but a personal, individual Immortality. II. There may no doubt be an Immortality which is not individual or in which individuality is sub- 20 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY merged. The absorption of the individual soul after death in the Universal Soul of which it is an emanation is a belief which, if not primarily religious, is yet not alien from religion. It is ancient, as all ideas respecting the soul seem to be ancient. It was the teaching of Anaxagoras among Greek philosophers. The Greek and Roman poets not seldom make allusion to it, although somewhat obscurely. Thus Euripides says, ^' The mind {vovg) of the dead is not alive, yet hath it immortal con- sciousness, when it hath been merged in the immortal ether." ^ And again, " Let each depart into the element from which it came, the spirit to the ether, the body to the earth." 2 Similarly Virgil 3 speaks of the Deity who pervades the earth and the wide ocean and the vault of heaven, the Deity from whom the flocks and herds and men and all wild beasts do draw at birth the subtle, vital air, and into whom at length they all return and are re- solved. But it is in the writings of the Stoics that the doctrine of the Universal Soul becomes most fre- quent and authoritative. Thus Epictetus says of death : " God gives the signal for retreat, opens the "■ Helena, 1014. = SuppUccs, 532. 3 G<:orgics, iv. 221-226. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 21 door and says to you. Go. Go whither ? To nothing teiTible, but to the place from which you came, to your friends and kinsmen, to the elements : what there was in you of fire goes to fire ; of earth to earth ; of air (spirit) to air (oo-ov irvevfiariov slg ttvev- Hariov) ; of water to water ; no Hades nor Acheron nor Cocytus nor Pyriphlegethon, but all is full of Gods and Daemons."' So, too, Marcus Aurelius : " If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from Eternity ? But how does the earth con- tain the bodies of those who have been buried from time so remote ? For, as here, the mutation of these bodies after a certain continuance, whatever it may be, and their dissolution make room for other dead bodies, so the souls which are removed into the air after subsisting for some time are transmuted and diffused and assume a fiery nature by being received into the seminal intelligence of the Universe, and in this way make room for the fresh souls which come to dwell there." 2 The Stoics were indeed divided in opinion, some holding that the individual soul would at death be * The Discourses of Epictetus, translated by Long. Book iii., chap. 13. = The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, translated by Long. Book iv. § 21. 22 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY immediately reabsorbed into the Universal Soul, others that it would retain its individuality until the final conflagration, which was an article of the Stoic creed, and would then be reabsorbed ; but that the individual soul, as it had emanated from the Universal Soul, so into it would be soon or late reabsorbed, was a general doctrine of the Stoic philosophy. It is curious that this doctrine of the soul's sur- vival after death, i.e., of its temporary survival as distinct from its Immortality, has been asserted in modern times by some few thinkers, though they have expressed themselves rather hesitatingly, and the ultimate destiny of the soul as they conceived it, where it has fallen short of Immortality, has been not reabsorption but annihilation. They are chiefly the religious thinkers who, while postulating Im- mortality for the souls of the virtuous, have seemed to find by a strange rational process, in the idea that other souls would enjoy a qualified or limited Immortality (if it may be so spoken of), a halfway house between Immortality which they conceived as being the recompense of virtue, and annihilation as the penal destiny of vice. But they have been few, and it has been felt that they had been driven into NATURE OF THE BELIEF 23 a logical difficulty by their denial of the absolute Immortality of all souls. The doctrine of reabsorption, or in other words the belief that the individual soul is in the moment of death reabsorbed into the Universal Soul stands on firmer philosophical ground, and it has been held even by some Christian authorities. In one of Schleiermacher's letters (which has lately been quoted by Dr. Martineau^) an attempt is made to present the doctrine as if it were equivalent to the truth revealed by Christ. To a lady whose heart was torn by longing for personal reunion in the future life with the young husband taken from her soon after their marriage, he wrote : " When your imagination brings before you the idea of a melting away into the great All, let it not, dear child, lay on you any touch of bitter sorrow. Do but think of it as a merging not into death, but into life, and that the highest life. It is indeed that after which we all strive in this life, only that we never reach it, viz., to live simply in the Divine Whole to which we belong, and to put away from us the pretension to set up for ourselves, as if we could be our own. If he now is living in God, and you love him eter- * A Study of Religion, vol. ii. pp. 335, sqq. 24 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY nally in God, as you loved and knew God in him, can you think of anything subHmer and more glorious ? Is not this the highest end of love, in comparison with which everything which clings only to the personal life and arises thence is nothing ? " Such is the doctrine of reabsorption, as put for- ward by one whose life was illuminated by many beautiful graces of the Christian character ; and if any one could recommend it by personal authority, it would be he. Philosophically, indeed, it is incontestable. But it is not the doctrine so dear to human hearts. It breaks down just where it is most needed as a satisfaction for the sorrows and shortcomings of Humanity. All the comfort which the doctrine of Immortality affords is dependent upon the continuance of individuality. To lose individuality — to be merged soon or late, in the Infinite Whole is, according to the conscience of men, to forfeit the boon of the Immortal Life. It is Pantheism, not Christianity. It touches the mind, but it cannot touch the heart. By the graveside, where the mourners lay their loved ones to rest, it is felt to be impotent and vain. It is such doctrine as may issue from the life of a Spinoza, but it fails in NATURE OF THE BELIEF 25 the presence of Christ. It is not the doctrine for which this Essay is a plea. III. Again, the ImmortaHty for which I plead is not conditional but absolute. I do not urge that Immortality is attainable, but that it is actual ; not that it is partial, but that it is universal ; not that it may be, but that it is. It has been already intimated that some modern thinkers, under the pressure of logical difficulties which they had commonly made for themselves, have been led to argue, though as a rule faintheartedly, for a conditional Immortality, i.e., for the Immortality of some souls under certain conditions and not of all souls intrinsically. But this too is an old-world theory, like so many others. No idea is more usual among savage peoples, where Immortality is believed in at all, than that it is certain privileged souls alone which will be Immortal. But while Immortality, if regarded as conditional, has in the modern world been assumed to be the privilege of virtue, it was assumed by savage peoples to be the privilege of i^cJU^^ or rank. For to savages who are naturally disposed to look upon the future life not as a compensation or retribution for the present, but as a mere contin- uation of the present life (the idea of future 26 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY retribution being much later) it seems a thing of course that the aristocracy of the world which they know should be prolonged into the world which they do not know ; and as existence after death is itself in their eyes a privilege and not (as in this world) a common possession, they conclude that the warriors and chiefs will live again, but the common people will lie in their graves eternally. It is true that this belief is not consistently main- tained ; sometimes the kinsfolk or servants of a chief, or even his animals, are said to possess a life immortal as his own. But the reason of their Immortality will be found to lie not in their nature but in their relation to the master whom they serve ; and it is in order to do him service that they are gifted with Immortality, as when the faithful dog of the Red Indian warrior was slain by his grave in the belief that, when he came to the happy hunting grounds of the Blessed, he would find his dog at his side. Such practices as Suttee in India are witnesses to the belief in this Immortality (if I may call it so) of relation. They do not signify the Immortality of all men — still less of all living creatures ; but they enhance the power and dignity NATURE OF THE BELIEF 27 of the Immortality inherent in the great men. That Immortality, as has been said, belongs to greatness, not to goodness. But modern thought, in so far as it has made Immortality conditional, has found its condition in virtue. It is the good who live for ever ; the wicked perish. That is the doctrine of some theo- logians ; it is the tacit assumption of a good many Christians. It may be supported (like almost any other belief) by isolated passages of Holy Scripture, though the interpreters of these passages have sometimes confused the final destruction of evil, which is an admittedly Christian doctrine, with the destruction of individual sinners ; but it runs counter to the teaching of Scripture as a whole. We shall see hereafter what has been the attitude of the Church and of the most eminent of the Fathers towards the doctrine of conditional Im- mortality. It is enough to say now that it could not be believed by any Christian except upon the authority of direct Revelation. For the idea of a conditional Immortality — i.e,^ of an Immortality which may or may not be, and which is the attribute of some but not of all — cuts away the main supports of the belief in Immortality itself. For 28 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY apart from Revelation (which is out of court in a general religious argument) the belief in the Im- mortality of the soul principally depends upon the soul's intrinsic nature. It is because Immortality is the natural property of the human soul that the thought of its destruction is intolerable and impossible. Neither philosophy nor religion possesses the means (apart from Revelation) of making a distinction between souls in respect of their Immortality. The argument which proves the soul immortal, proves all souls immortal. " The unconditional destiny of all men/' says Bishop Martensen, ^'is Immortality."^ But what becomes of this destiny, if Immortality is con- ditioned by human merit or demerit, if it is the lot of some souls and not of others, if it is not an absolute intrinsic quality of human nature ? No doubt a direct revelation, if it were explicit and authoritative, might prove what is called conditional Immortality, but it would destroy nearly all the evidences for Immortality except that of the revelation itself. It is the object of this essay to show, as far as possible, that the soul which is in every man is immortal. ^ Christian Dogmatics, § 274. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 29 IV. But if the various theories of Immortality which have been considered are thus put aside, it can hardly be necessary to say that there is no room within the scope of this Essay for that strange illogical view of the Immortal Life which is taught in the Positivist Creed. ^^ Words/' says Bacon, "as a Tartar's bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment, so as it is almost necessary in all controversies and disputations to imitate the wisdom of the mathematicians in setting down in the very beginning the definitions of our words and terms, that others may know how we accept and understand them, and whether they concur with us or no." But I know no more striking example of the influence which words, even when the life is gone out of them, still exercise upon the human mind than that the word " Immortality," like the word " religion " itself, should be cherished and usurped by thinkers, who have robbed it of all its native force and dignity. Comte himself indeed, in speaking of the Positivist Immortality, or (as he preferred to call it) " the subjective life," generally employed 30 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY language that veiled its paradox in a certain senti- mental ambiguity. Thus, in reference to the cry of Danton on the scaffold, " Perish my memory, only let my country be free ! " he says : ^^ Even in this heroic cry we trace the idea that the outward reward of a great life extends to its subjective Immortality. He who has truly lived for others should hope to live on, in and by others. This subjective return is purer at once and surer than the objective, for it carries on the services rendered and perfects the judgment of those services. Under the impulse given by the Positivist spirit, spontaneously and systematically, this noble recom- pense is accessible to all who are capable of under- standing it and deserving it." ^ Comte's disciples have, as often happens, gone beyond their master ; they have filled in his shadowy outlines of religion, they have clothed his skeleton of Immortality in the phrases of a beautiful and touching poetry. It is to this investiture that it owes what grace or charm it has. Many persons who would scorn such an Immortality as Comte offers find an echo in their ^ System of Positive Polity, vol. iv. chap, i., p. 45, Congreve's Translation. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 31 hearts (and it is a nobly unselfish echo) to George Eliot's eloquent lines — " O may I join the choir invisible, Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence, . . . So to live is heaven. To make undying music in the world. Breathing as beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. This is life to come, Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow." and what they appreciate they fancy they believe. But this is not a doctrine which can bear the scrutiny of close thought. It is playing with names, playing with facts. It is taking, or trying to take, the shadow for the substance. An Im- mortality of being remembered is no Immortality except in metaphor. Regret is not life ; and even if it were, what would then be the Immortality of those souls (than whom none are more sacred upon earth) whose virtue is never heard of nor ever dreamt of — the souls that live and die in obscurity and do good by stealth and suffer many things for others, though they thank them not and often revile them, and are only seen by Him who "seeth in secret" ? The Positivist Creed fails; for it makes 32 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Immortality to depend upon the judgment of men, and for the most part we judge each other wrongly, if at all. It is not for a hope like this that the heart of Man is athirst ; and I put it aside in this essay. The Immortality for which I plead is the per- sonal, intrinsic, inalienable, eternal attribute of every individual soul of man. But what is the soul ? This is evidently an important question ; it is the most important question with which this Essay deals. For the doctrine that the soul survives after death, and survives eternally, possesses little value, unless it be known what is the nature of the soul. But if the nature of the soul as it is in itself, without regard to limiting material conditions, is ascertained, it will be possible to form some estimate of the life that is proper to the soul when emancipated from the body. Human nature is divisible into parts. It is not necessary to consider whether the division is ultimately reasonable or not. We are not con- sidering human nature as it is in the sight of God ; we are considering it as men speak and think of it. The common speech of mankind treats body and soul together as the equivalent of Man's NATURE OF THE BELIEF 33 whole being. If it is said that a person is ruined ^^ body and soul/' the meaning is that the ruin is complete. About the word ^'body" there is no doubt or difficulty. It has always and everywhere signified the same thing. But the English word " soul/' or the word which corresponds to it in some other languages, has not always been used in the same sense. We do not, it would seem, use it uniformly even now. Thus it may be doubted whether we mean the same thing, i.e., the same part of man's composite being, when we say that a person's soul is given to music or art, as when we say that his soul is in God's keeping. The only way of arriving at a definition of the word ^' soul " is, I think, to examine it historically. The philosophers of ancient Greece were the first persons who occupied themselves with the scientific and logical treatment of the soul. The Greek word usually translated " soul " — the word \pvxn — was not yet solidified when it came into the hands of Plato and Aristotle ; it was in a sort of fluid state, and they could more or less mould it at will. Still it possessed a certain definite signi- fication. 4 34 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Greek thought recognised in human nature body and soul. It understood by the body the material substance which is visible and tangible, and which is laid after death in the grave. It understood by the soul all that is not body. But for a long time it did not inquire how the non-corporeal part of human nature should be defined. It is clear, however, that, if the -^v^n or "soul" were an equivalent expression for all that is not corporeal in human nature, it would possess a very wide range of meaning. It might be pre- dicated of beings, and even of inanimate things, which would not be looked upon in the modern world as having souls. Thus Aristotle quotes a saying of Thales, the first of the celebrated Seven Wise Men of Greece, that " the magnet must have a soul {\pvxh)f for it attracts iron." He himself speaks of the " soul " (^^x*') ^^ ^ plant, under- standing no more by it than the vital principle, which is the source of growth and fertility. Similarly he speaks of the "soul" of an animal as, e.g.f of a horse or a dog ; and here the \Ijvxv is higher and nobler than in a plant, as it includes not life alone but instinct, appetite and affection ; but it is not yet all that is understood by " soul " to- NATURE OF THE BELIEF 35 day. It would be difficult to put the Aristotelian view more exactly than in Grote's words, ^'The varieties of soul are distributed into successive stages, gradually narrowing in extension and enlarging in comprehension ; the first or lowest stage being co-extensive with the whole, but con- noting only two or three simple attributes ; the second or next above connoting all these and more besides, but denoting only part of the individuals denoted by the first ; the third connoting all this and more, but denoting yet fewer individuals, and so forward. Thus the concrete individuals, called living bodies, include all plants as well as all animals ; but the soul, called Nutritive by Aristotle, corresponding thereto connotes only nutrition, growth, decay, and generation of another similar individual. In the second stage, plants are left out, but all animals remain ; the Sentient soul, belonging to animals, but not belonging to any plants connotes all the functions and faculties of the Nutritive soul, together with sensible perception (at least in its rudest shape) besides. We proceed onward in the same direction, taking in additional faculties — the Movent, Appetitive, Phantastic (Imaginative) Noetic (Intelligent) soul, and thus diminishing the 36 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY total of individuals denoted. But each higher variety of soul continues to possess all the faculties of the lower. Thus the Sentient soul cannot exist without comprehending all the faculties of the Nutritive, though the Nutritive exists (in plants) without any admixture of the Sentient. Again, the Sentient soul does not necessarily possess either memory, imagination, or intellect {NoiUs)^ but no soul can be either Imaginative or Noetic without being Sentient as well as Nutritive. The Noetic soul, as the highest of all, retains in itself all the lower faculties, but these are found to exist apart from it." I There is then a •'pvxi] or '' soul " of men as well as of the lower animals or of plants, and it is in a fuller sense a soul ; for it is the seat not of the vital principle only nor of the appetite and affection only, but of the rational and moral faculties. Aristotle calls it the intelligent or ratiocinative soul. It is the part of human nature which in the Aristotelian philosophy is supreme. As a Greek, although the wisest of the Greeks, Aristotle recognised, and could recognise, nothing higher than this intellectual soul. His philoso- ' Grote, Aristotle, vol, ii., chap. xii. p. 191, NATURE OF THE BELIEF 37 phical doctrine of the soul is the highest of which Greek thought was capable. It can now be seen that the ^vx^i or ^^soul" as conceived by the Greeks possessed three several meanings which may be ranged, as it were, in an ascending scale of dignity. If it were necessary to find English equivalents for them (though the equivalence cannot be exact) they might perhaps be taken as "life," "sense," and "reason." For " life " may naturally represent the vital principle, "sense" the emotional, and "reason" the intel- lectual or ratiocinative. But in the Greek, and specially the Aristotelian uses of " soul," the higher meaning, as it was developed, included the lower ; it was not something generically different from the lower, but was always that and something added to it, and although the something so added was infinitely the greater part of the soul in its new meaning, it was not the whole. Thus the ip^x'i of a plant was its life, or, more strictly, its principle of growth and fertility. The \pvxri of an animal was its life plus its sen- tient or appetitive principle ; it was primarily the sense and only in a secondary degree the life, but strictly considered it was made up of both. 38 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY The ypvxh of a man was his Hfe or vital prin- ciple and his sentient or appetitive principle, but it was above all his intellectual principle or reason. Beyond this point, as has been said, the Greek thought, and therefore the Greek conception of the soul, did not go. The reason was the '^end" or supreme part of human nature. If we pass now to the Hebrew Scriptures, as interpreted by the harmonious voices of the Jewish and Christian religions, we are struck by a differ- ence in the conception or estimate of human nature. It corresponds to the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew characters. To the Greek, reason was the highest thing ; its supremacy could not be disputed. But it was not the highest thing to the Hebrew. He had not apprehended the supreme truths of life, nor did he expect any one to apprehend them, by a process of the reason. " Canst thou by wisdom find out God ? " is a question issuing from the very heart of Jewish religious thought. No Jew could have hesitated as to the answer which it required. The desire of the Jewish nation was for God. The Hebrew psalmists and prophets give repeated expression to that desire. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 39 "As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks," i.e., as the hart pursued by huntsmen on the mountains longs for a refreshing draught, '^so panteth my soul after Thee, O God." ' " O God, Thou art my God ; early will I seek Thee : my soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee, in a dry and thirsty land where no water is." ^ But it was not reason which inspired, or could satisfy, the passion of the Hebrew soul for God. In the Hebrew view, reason, if it stood by itself, neither prevented nor ensured the knowledge of God. It was in another way, by another faculty than the reason, that God and Divine things came to be known. What that faculty was the Scriptures of the Old Testament intimate, though but faintly ; in the New Testament it is defined and explained. We shall find the explanation in St. Paul's writings. The theology of St. Paul may be said to represent the Hebrew conception of human nature in its highest form. St. Paul was by birth and education a Jew, but he had studied in the Greek University of Tarsus, and he was familiar with the language and literature of Greece. The limitations of his ^ Psalm xlii. i. = Psalm Ixiii. i. 40 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY intellectual scope had been enlarged by philosophy, but his imagination was controlled by religious awe. In him therefore, far better than in Philo, Hebrew and Greek thought found a meeting-place. Consi- dering that St. Paul had never spoken to and indeed had never seen in the flesh the Master to whose service he consecrated his life, I think his intel- lectual influence upon Christian theology (though sometimes exaggerated, as by Renan) ought to be regarded as one of the marvels of speculative history. But his intellectual powers were sublime ; he scanned with penetrating vision the depths of Divine truth ; the eighteen centuries of Christianity have not exhausted the profundity of his teaching ; and apart altogether from the spiritual intuitions and revelations which he claimed as his personal experiences, it is doubtful if the Christian or pagan world has ever produced a thinker of more acute and subtle intellect than his. St. Paul's view of human nature is different from Aristotle's. In his view hmnan nature consists of three parts or elements, which are distinct.i The first of these is the (jCjfjia or *' body," and it is what has been always understood by the body. The second is the ^ux// or " soul," including the NATURE OF THE BELIEF 41 life, the sense, the affection or appetite and the reason. The third is the Trvevfia or ^^ spirit," i.e., the faculty by which Man apprehends God. It appears, then, that St. Paul adds the ^' spirit" or spiritual part of human nature to the parts enume- rated by Aristotle. That is the faculty which, as the Hebrew Scriptures implicitly taught, places Man in relation to his Maker. And as constituting or creating this Divine relation, that faculty is in human nature supreme. It is important to observe what a light this tripar- tition of human nature seems to shed upon the facts of human life and human thought. The three parts are logically distinct ; each exists and may be developed independently of the others. To assume that the cultivation of one part necessa- rily improves or corroborates the others, or either of the others, is to misunderstand the Pauline theology. Suppose, e.g., that the body of a man is developed by exercise and discipline ; the development is a good thing in itself, but it does not necessarily or naturally imply a corresponding development of the soul i'ipvxii). Thus a man may be a brilliant athlete 42 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY but a poor thinker. It is not said that athletic energy and logical acumen are not found together, they may or may not coexist ; it is enough that the one does not imply the other. Or, again, suppose that the soul and especially that part of it which is highest, viz., the reason, is fully developed ; the development is good in itself, but it does not imply a corresponding development of the TTvev/uLa or " spirit." Just as the athlete is not necessarily a thinker, so the thinker is not neces- sarily a saint. It may indeed be suggested, not without some apparent reason, that the equal and simultaneous culture of all the parts of human nature is itself a difBculty, and that, where one is highly cultivated, the others are apt to be proportionately enfeebled. But this suggestion St. Paul does not make. His argument turns simply upon the way in which Humanity becomes cognisant of Divine truth. He is not concerned with historical revelations, which are evidently liable, in some at least of their aspects, to the judgment of the intellect, but with the per- sonal consciousness of God. He realises the fact, not less conspicuous in modern than in ancient times, that, where two persons possess equal ability. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 43 equal information and equal character, to one the Being of God may be a doubt or a paradox or an absurdity, and to the other it may be the most luminous of truths. The line of demarcation between these persons and between others like them, whatever it is, is not intellectual ; but the one is religious because he possesses, and the other is non-religious because he does not possess, some- thing that is not intellect, and yet ex hypothesl can sit in judgment upon a problem of the soul. That something is the faculty which St. Paul calls trvtvfia or ^' spirit." The relation of the Spirit of God to the spirit or spiritual faculty in Man, is a cardinal matter in the PauUne theology. It can only be alluded to here. Between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man there is in St. Paul's view a correspondence or intercommunion. The Divine Spirit " beareth wit- ness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." The Divine Spirit "helpeth our infirmi- ties." He " maketh intercession for us." ^ He is the earnest as He is the attestation of the future blessings reserved for those who are called the " saints " or the ^^ sons of God." ^ Romans viii. i6, 26. 44 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY But the activity of the Divine Spirit in the souls of men is contingent upon the sympathetic activity of the spiritual faculty in men themselves. The spiritual faculty may be cultivated, illumined, purified by human co-operation with the Divine Spirit until men enjoy the perfect vision of God. Or, again, it may be starved and atrophied by neglect ; then men become at last incapable of seeing Him. For ''the natural " (or psychical) "man" in St. Paul's words, i.e.j the ipvxiKhg avOpwirogj the man of ^pvxn or " soul," but not of TrvevjuLa or '' spirit," " receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, .... neither can he know them, because they are spiri- tually discerned." ^ To one whose spiritual faculty is dead the Being of God is as sunlight to the bUnd, or as music to the deaf. But to the spiri- tual man it is the truth of truths, the joy of joys. This is St. Paul's philosophical account of human nature. Thus, in his view, the trinity of human nature is complete. Man — the three in one — is made in the image of the Triune God. '' I pray God," he says, writing to the Thessalonians of human nature regarded as a whole, "your whole ' I Corinthians ii. 14. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 45 Spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." ^ It would seem proper, then, to speak of human nature as threefold, and no doubt that is the strictly philosophical, as it is also the strictly religious, manner of speech ; but the tripartition is not always observed. For t//ux^ or ^^ soul " may denote all that is not spiritual in human nature ; it may be set as a single comprehensive term against Trvcvjua or ^^ spirit," and then, but only then, it includes the body. Or ^vx^'/ I'nay be, and often is, used, in contrast with (TC)ixa, to denote all the parts of human nature that are not in themselves visible and material ; and in this use it includes not the life only, nor the life and the appetite only, nor the life the appetite and the reason only, but the spirit. It is so when " body and soul " are treated as repre- sentative of the whole human being. It is so, when the soul is taken, as in our Lord's teaching, to signify the part which is most sacred and sublime in human nature ; for that is clearly not the appetite or the reason, but the spirit, the eternal element, the part which is immediately related to God. We see, then, that the word ^pvx>h or ^^ soul," ^ I Thessalonians v, 23, 46 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY possesses two meanings, a narrower meaning in which it stands for the life, the appetite and the reason, and a larger meaning in which it includes the spirit as well. Nay, the spirit is so transcend- ently important in view of Immortality that, when it is included, it tends to overshadow the other attributes or faculties of human nature, it usurps or tends to usurp to itself the whole meaning of "soul." This is the case in the Greek language, but it is the case in English also. When we speak of a man's "soul," or of his "spirit," we generally mean the same thing, i.e., the part of him which is invisible and immortal. We may say indiscrimi- nately that in death his " soul " has departed, or his " spirit." So true is this that while the body has an adjective "bodily" corresponding to it, and the spirit has " spiritual," there is in English no adjective corresponding to " soul " ; for " psychical " is a late invention and its meaning is not in fact co-extensive with the "soul." The adjective "spiritual" does duty for the soul as well as the spirit in many uses, because the "spirit" and the "soul" of a man as commonly understood are one and the same. It is convenient, however, as well as correct, to make a distinction between them. In this Essay, when I NATURE OF THE BELIEF 47 speak of '^ spirit/' I shall mean the spiritual faculty alone; when I speak of ^^soul," I shall mean the whole invisible, immaterial part of human nature, i.e., the life, the sense, the reason and the spirit. For the union of life, sense and reason, apart from the spirit, there is no English word. Perhaps the word least inappropriate would be ^^ nature." The distinction between the soul, or more properly the being, and the spirit is not essential, as will, I think, appear, in the treatment of human Immortality. Still, it cannot be ignored without some loss. It is now possible to ask. What is the element or part of human nature which is believed to survive the grave and to last for ever ? The answer to that question will throw a light upon the nature of Immortality itself. For the scope or destiny of the Immortal Life must apparently be determined by the nature of the subject which is endowed with Immortality. The ancient story of Tithonus who was said to have obtained the gift of eternal life, but not of eternal youth, is a witness that Immortality is not a boon, unless certain graces or faculties are implied in it. In other words, Immortality is con- ditioned by the nature of the immortal being. What is it, then, which survives or is immortal ? 48 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY In order to see what is the immortal part of human nature, it will be well to refer once more, however briefly, to the contrast between the pagan and Christian conceptions of Immortality. In the pagan world the thought of Immortality or of the soul's survival after death, even when it was accepted as possible or probable, inspired no happiness. There was no anticipation or exultation in the prospect of a future life. The best and wisest of the ancient Greeks, with the possible exception of a few philo- sophers, such as Socrates, if it had been open to them to choose or refuse the gift of Immortality, would have refused it. That Immortality could be the satisfaction of human desires, or the compen- sation for human sufferings, or the reward of human virtues, was an idea that did not occur to them, and would not have been intelligible to their minds. Immortality did not appear to them as a joyful hope, but as a bad dream, or a painful necessity, or at the best a tolerable fate. Let me illustrate this feeling of the pagan world by quoting two passages taken, as it were, the one from the dawn, the other from the sunset of clas- sical literature. It is well known how in the Odyssey of Homer NATURE OF THE BELIEF 49 Odysseus goes down to the lower world and, meeting Achilles there, seeks to comfort him in his death, by telling him that, as he had been honoured like a god while he lived upon the earth, so, too, he was a mighty prince among the dead. But Achilles makes answer — *' Speak not comfortably to me of death, O great Odysseus. Rather would I live on ground as the hireling of another, with a landless man who has no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that be departed." ^ What a witness is such language as this to the gloom of the destiny (as Homer conceived it) reserved in the after-life for the most exalted and distinguished of mankind ! The other passage shall be the familiar address of the Emperor Hadrian to his own departing soul, an address which has often been translated ; but it may here be given in the original Latin, and in the English of Matthew Prior. " Animula vagula blandula Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula, rigida, nudula, Nee, ut soles, dabis jocos ? " * Odyssey, xi. 489. The translation is that of Messrs. Butcher and Lang. 50 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY " Poor little pretty fluttering thing, Must we no longer live together ? And dost thou prune thy trembling wing ; To take thy flight, thou know'st not whither ? Thy humorous vein, thy pleasing folly, Lies all neglected, all forgot ; And pensive, wavering, melancholy, Thou dread'st and hop'st thou know'st not what. Can any words be more sorrowful or more hope- less ? There is in them no sense of gain, but all is loss. The very diminutives imply the vanity of the soul's existence. Not a word suggests that the soul, as soon as it is emancipated from the body, will enter upon a larger life. It is earth which is heaven to the Emperor ; the future is darkness. How strange too, how significant is the phrase, ** Nee, ut soles, dabis jocos," as if the highest quality of the soul were ^' pleasing folly " ! Is it possible to explain the gloom which hangs as a pall over the anticipation of a future life from the beginning to the end of pagan history ? The explanation lies in the conception of the soul. In Homer's poetry the soul which is deemed to survive the body is Httle more than the mere vital principle. The life of Achilles, ^^ the divine son of NATURE OF THE BELIEF 51 Peleus," in Hades is a life of mere existence, a life without powers or passions, a life that is only a shadow of the earthly life. But a life devoid of hope, solace, affection or imagination can scarce be regarded as a boon. It is a life of the ^^x^' in its lowest, or all but its lowest, sense. Nor is it to a much higher level of religious philosophy that the Emperor Hadrian's thought ascends so late as in the second century of the Christian era. He, too, looks for existence, but for little more. His soul, when it leaves the body whose guest and companion it has been, will lack the warmth, the grace, the joyousness which have clothed it in life. The Emperor Hadrian was not an ordinary man ; he had played a great part in history, his mind had been elevated by dignity and solemnised by responsibility, and this was his whole idea of the life after death. What could the future seem to him but dark and sad ? His voice is the highest perhaps of political paganism. He believed (if indeed he did believe) in a life reaching beyond the grave, but it was a life bereft of all that makes this life worth living, and in spite of himself he shrank from it with pain. Homer and Hadrian may be taken as representing 52 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the general sentiment of the pagan world at different stages in regard to the prospect of the soul's Immor- tality. But they do not represent the highest specu- lation. The religious teachers of classical antiquity were not the priests ; they were first the poets, and afterwards the philosophers. Let us then appeal to the greatest and best of the philosophers, to Socrates. The teaching of Socrates upon the future of the soul is represented, at its highest elevation, by the Platonic dialogue which bears the name of his beloved disciple, the Phcedo. The Phcedo stands among the masterpieces of human literature. It is one of those works in which the perfect harmony of the subject and of the circumstances in which it is treated, create an indelible impression. ^^ No- body," says Socrates, with his quiet irony, ^^can pretend that I am talking of what does not concern me at this time." And the dignity of Socrates him- self, his impressive serenity, his love of philosophical discussion, strong even in death, his abiding personal faith in the future of wise and holy souls, have united to win for the Dialogue of the Immortal Life, as the Phcedo may be justly called, an Im- mortality as true as the subject with which it deals. But it is not with the Socratic arguments for NATURE OF THE BELIEF 53 Immortality that I am concerned ; they will claim consideration in a later chapter. It is with the nature of Immortality as Socrates conceived it. The soul which Socrates in the Phcedo called immortal is not the soul or spirit of the Christian doctrine. It is more than the vital principle, but less than the spiritual principle, in man ; it is the mind, the seat of the desire, affection, and reason, but chiefly of the reason ; for in the eyes of Socrates the reason was the highest of human faculties ; to know right was necessarily to do it ; dialectic was the end of life, and dialectical communion with the elect souls in the world beyond the grave was the supreme intellectual satisfaction. He who thought that virtue was knowledge could look for no higher end than the perfecting of knowledge by discussion. Rational existence, existence chastened and elevated by reason, was the goal, as of his belief, so also of his desire. Thus it was that his anticipation of the future life was not, like the pagan poet's, sombre and regretful, nor like the Christian saint's, rap- turous and ecstatic ; it was simply and calmly acquiescent in a destiny which, if it were not a dream, would surely in the nature of things be better, as being more rational, more intellectual 54 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY than the present. But it might be a dream, and the fear that it might be is apparent in the Phcvdo, underlying the very arguments that seek to dispel it ; and in the Apology the last words of Socrates are these : ^^ The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows." How different from this is the language of Christian belief ! It will be enough to cite such passages as St. Paul's : ^^ To me to live is Christ, to die is gain," '^ For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better " ; ^ or, '' I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day, and not to me only, but unto them also that love His appearing" ;2 or, St. John's : ^^It doth not yet appear what we shall be : but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him ; for we shall see Him as He is." 3 And the difference is that, when the soul is conceived, as it is by the Christian Apostles, to be not only sentient and intellectual, ^ Philippians i. 21-23. ^ 2 Timothy iv. 18. 3 I John iii. 2. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 55 but above all to be spiritual, then alone is it felt to be capable of the joy, the rapture, the beatitude of communion with the Father of Spirits. To this beatitude we shall return in the last chapter. For the present we are concerned with the nature of Immortality. And in view of Immortality (apart of course from Revelation) it would seem that the distinction between body and soul, i.e., between the material and the immaterial parts of human nature is fundamental ; but it is not so with the distinction between what is psychical or of the soul, and what is spiritual in human nature. The confusion of " soul " and *' spirit," or more properly the comprehension of "spirit" under '^soul," is a wit- ness to the interlacing of the two concepts. " Soul " includes " spirit," as has been said ; it is sometimes used for " spirit." Whether the spirit is a principle distinct from the affection and reason, or the same principle is on the one side appetitive and logical, and on the other side spiritual, is not essential to the doctrine of Immortality. St. Paul's tripartition of human nature may affect the character, but not the fact, of the Immortal Life. Apart from the soul, the body is incapable of thought and worship. But there is in human 56 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY nature something which is not the body — an entity opposed to the body and superior to the body — something which is the very life or being of the individual ; in a word, which is himself. Dr. Martineau defines it clearly when he says : ^' This constant centre to which we refer all our acts as their source, and all our experiences as their receptacle, is what we mean by the soul." ' It remains to ask, then. What is presumably the change effected by death ? Death is dissolution, but it is the dissolution not of mind and spirit, so far as present experience tells, but of body and soul ; for it is the body alone which is left behind at death, the body which dies, and all else that constitutes being passes into eternity. As is the fate of the affection or the desire in death, so is that of the reason, and so, too, that of the spirit. Death works the same effect upon all. What survives or passes at death out of human cognition is the whole immaterial part of human nature, or in one word, the soul. And herein lies the answer (so far as any can be given) to the question. In what does identity consist ? Not in the body of a man, it is clear ; for the material * A study of Religion, vol. ii. p. 330, NATURE OF THE BELIEF 57 particles constituting the body are for ever under- going change. It is the persistency of the life, the reason, the spirit, that makes the man, and of these the seat is the soul ; and the soul, if it survive the grave (as argument shows), not only constitutes identity in this life, but continues and conserves it in the life to come. The seat of human identity is the soul. It is the man himself who lives after death if the soul is immortal. His mental, moral, and spiritual powers survive. It is only the vesture of his powers — the body — the least and lowest part of him — that dies. In his soul is the principle of life. There are certain inferences flowing from the true conception of the soul's nature ; and they may properly be indicated here. I. The soul is immortal, i.e., everlasting. It does not merely survive death, or a series of deaths ; it survives everlastingly. It survives in virtue of the character which distinguishes it from all that is dissoluble and destructible. It possesses in itself the potency of an unending existence. It partakes of the Immortal Nature, which is centred and consummated in God, and, as partaking of that Nature, it is gifted with Immortality. 58 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 2. The soul, as it is immortal, is immaterial. This may seem to be a truth which it is needless to emphasise. We do not naturally think of the soul as in any sense substantial. We can realise, or we imagine that we can realise, pure spirit. Yet there has been no greater difficulty in human thought than the intellectual emancipation of spirit from matter. ^^The ancients," says Dr. Ddllinger, "understood by the soul a kind of secretion or evaporation of brain, blood, or heart, or a sort of respiration. They described it as a subtle aerial or fiery substance, or conceived it to be a mere quality, like the harmony of a musical instrument, which was lost in the dissolution of the body." ^ In Homer, for example, the soul is imagined as a vapour or smoke or similar to these. Thus Achilles puts forth his hands to seize the spirit or soul of Patroclus, but in vain ; for " the soul had sped like a vapour gibbering beneath the earth." 2 Similarly in Virgil Eurydice fades from the sight of Orpheus, " mingling as the smoke with the thin air." 3 Modern fancy even now clothes the spirit or ghost with the form of humanity. Modern supersti- ^ The Gentile and the Jew, vol. ii. p. 144, Darnell's Translation. = Iliad, xxiii, 100. 3 Georgics, iv. 499, NATURE OF THE BELIEF 59 tion requires the doors or windows of the death- chamber to be opened at death, that the spirit may- depart in peace. Not such is the Christian doctrine of ImmortaHty, although the fathers of the Church have sometimes failed to comprehend it in its integrity, as when Tertullian argued that, if the soul were not material, it could not act upon the body nor be acted upon by it.^ It is with a finer perception that Dante makes the spirits in his Purgatorio tremble at finding that his body, unlike their own, casts a shadow on the ground. " Feriami il Sole in su Tomero destro Che gia, raggiando, tutto roccidente Mutava in bianco aspetto di cilestro ; Ed io facea con I'ombra piu rovente Parer la fiamma ; e pure a tanto indizio Vidi molt' ombre, andando, poner mente. Questa fu la cagion che diede inizio Loro a parlar di me, e cominciarsi A dir : — ' Colui non par corpo fittizio." ' " The sun Now all the western clime irradiate chang'd From azure tinct to white ; and as I pass'd. My passing shadow made the umber'd flame Burn ruddier. At so strange a sight I mark'd De Anima, chap. v. 6o THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY That many a spirit marvel'd on his way. This bred occasion first to speak of me, ' He seems,' said they, 'no insubstantial frame.' " ^ 3. Another point which emerges clearly upon con- sideration is that the Immortality of the lower animals (if it exists) must be something essentially different from human Immortality. What are the arguments for Immortality, and how far, if they hold good for men, they will hold good also for the lower animals is a question which will be considered in its place. All that need be said here is that the nature of Immortality must depend upon the nature of the soul. Now the lower animals consist of a material element, viz., the body which remains at death, like the human body, and decays, and also of certain immaterial elements or principles, viz., the life, the sense, the appetite and (under certain limitations) the reason, but not of spirit. The Immortality then of the lower animals, if they are endowed with it at all, may well be such as allows of life, movement, desire and instinctive action ; but it cannot be more than this, unless in virtue of some special Divine operation, such as the original creation of life upon the earth, or the birth ^ Piirgatorio, Canto xxvi., Gary's Translation. The same thought occurs in Cantos v. and xxv. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 6i of the individual soul within the embryo ; it cannot be in itself a life of the spirit, and therefore it cannot admit of the spiritual prerogatives of worship or rapture or communion with God. 4. There is another inference not less important, which results from the true conception of human nature as a whole. We are too apt to suppose that the only part of human nature which sur- vives the grave is the spirit, though we speak of it as the ^^ soul." We have pictured to our- selves the Immortal Life as circumscribed by the duties and prerogatives of devotion ; we have not thought of it as affording any scope for the play of intellect or passion. But the soul has been shown to be intellectual and moral as well as spiritual ; it must therefore be capable of intellectual and moral activities. It is not only the disposition to virtue, it is equally the disposition to learning and affection, which transcends death. Whatever seed of knowledge or dutifulness or industry or virtue is sown in this life will bear fruit in Immortality. This is the solemnising, inspiring lesson of human life. Life is not rightly conceived as terminating in the grave. Death interrupts not the continuity of existence. The faculties of human nature, so far as 62 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY they are immaterial, are projected at death into a new and ample sphere. We shall enter that sphere with the attainments and graces of this life, only with- out the limitations to which this life is necessarily subject. We shall reap as we have sown. "That which makes the question concerning a future life to be of so great importance to us," says Bishop Butler, "is our capacity of happiness and misery. And that which makes the consideration of it to be of so great importance to us, is the supposition of our happiness and misery hereafter depending upon our actions here." ^ Let me sum up the conclusions of this chapter. We have seen that Immortality as a doctrine has not always and everywhere borne the same meaning. It cannot be rightly understood except by a study of human nature in its elements or parts. Human nature consists not of body and the bodily powers alone, but of the vital principle, the desire, the affection, the reason and the spirit. All that is not body, when set against the body, is the soul. The distinction between soul and body is im- portant as affecting the fact of Immortality. * Analogy^ part i. chap. ii. p. 33. NATURE OF THE BELIEF 63 The distinction between the spirit and the other parts of the soul is important as affecting the nature of Immortahty. The soul which lives after death is not only spiritual but emotional and rational. It is the whole immaterial part of Man. It survives and survives eternally in the fulness of its intellectual, moral, and spiritual powers. And its fate in the future life is in some manner — which will be presently investigated — fixed or con- ditioned by its character and discipline in this life. CHAPTER II HISTORY OF THE BELIEF The prevalent doctrine of Immortality has been largely determined by the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. But it is a belief which reaches beyond and behind those Scriptures. It is one of those world-thoughts (if they may be so called) which are not of one place or time, but of all places and all times, and may be said to be the common heritage of mankind. ^* Ut deos esse natura opinamur/' says Cicero, ^^ qualesque sint ratione cognoscimus, sic permanere animos arbitramur consensu omnium nationum." ^ Modern research has been largely successful in tracing the phenomena of human life and thought ^ " As it is by nature that we believe in the being of the Gods and by reason that we apprehend their nature, so it is by the unanimous opinion of all nations that we hold the doctrine of the permanent existence of the soul." — Ttisc. Disp., i., i6, 36. 64 HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 65 back to their origin. It has laid bare the beginnings of things. The sciences of Anatomy and Embryology have demonstrated the close connexion between the human and even the lowest animal forms. Com- parative Philology has revealed, by the intimate study of language, national and social relations which were scarcely imagined a century ago ; it has followed the many diverging currents of human speech to their source. Comparative Mythology has shown the evolution of refined and disciplined beliefs from a few crude and simple apprehensions. Sociology has discovered the germs of modern institutions in the usages of primitive society. Everywhere it is the sense of history — the sense of development — which is men's guide in judging the present by the past. But while primitive ideas, beliefs and usages have been thus brought prominently into light, the actual speculative value which belongs to them has been often forgotten or misunderstood. Some time ago their importance was minimised ; it is now apt to be exaggerated. For instance, the Darwinian theory, establishing the descent of man, or the possibility of his descent, from a lower form of animal life, has been taken in a sense to fetter his capacity for the development of spiritual powers. But nothing in 66 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the past of man can cripple his present or his future. Man is what he is, and he will be what he will be ; he is not, nor will he be, merely what he was. However lowly his origin may have been, even if he were made, as the Scripture tells, of the dust of the ground, there can be no limitation of his possible greatness. In the Divine view the end is prior to the beginning. The early beliefs which human history exhibits are not complete or absolute ; they are promises of better things ; they are the germs out of which new and great beliefs will some day grow ; they are the steps of the ladder by which man climbs to his splendid destiny, and the ladder, though it is set up on earth, ascends to Heaven. The behef in God is itself an instance of this law. History does not exhibit this belief as fully realised in the dawn of human society ; it has been doubted if the belief exists then at all. Monotheism is not the basis of religious thought, but its climax. In the history of belief man ascends from many gods to one God, or, indeed, from many powers, physical and animate, but not Divine, to Polytheism, and so to the worship of the one true God. Beyond that worship, beyond that belief, it is impossible to rise. It is felt to be true because it is final. To it all HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 67 prior beliefs and speculations tend. From it issue the consequent beliefs which sanctify life. There is a slow but sure consolidation of belief regarding the Divine Nature, and it assumes the permanent form of a belief in the one God. It is so too with the doctrine of the human soul. The belief in the soul — in its reality, its continuous existence, its supreme value — is not an initial but a final belief of Humanity. It is the highest article of the highest Faith. No more than the germ — the primordial spring — of this great belief is discernible in the early movements of the human intellect and conscience. But it is beliefs which are germinal that elevate human nature ; the revelations of God are never complete, they are gradual and progressive, and it is ^' at sundry times and in divers manners," i.e., in many parts and in many modes, that He unfolds the truths which men most need to know. To argue that the truth of Divine things is more likely to reside in the feelings and imaginations of savage races than in the sustained and reasoned convictions of civilised society is to read history backwards ; it is to argue that infancy is wiser than maturity, and that the child knows more of his Maker than the full-grown man. Belief, like 68 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY civilisation, is a development, it advances by steps ; and every step is won slowly and even painfully, but the last stage is truer than the first. All that may be justly said of human nature is that the first faint germ of belief, no less than its full flower, is a witness to the native intuitions of the heart. It is not true that Man believes, always and every- where, in the one God. But it is true that everywhere, when man attains to a certain stage of intellectual and moral progress, he developes or tends to develope a belief in one God. That belief is the crown of all preceding beliefs. They point or converge towards it. And beyond it they cannot reach. Monotheism is, as it were, the resting-place of the human soul after many questionings and many strivings through long ages. Similarly it is not true that Man at all stages of his history has logically realised or expressed the doctrine of the soul, although it has lain, as a seed, within his conscience. But it is true that Man, as he advances in thought and culture, becomes more and more inspired with a conviction of the soul's proper being and character and destiny. The higher his civilisation, the greater is the value which he sets upon the soul, whether in itself or in its relation to the body. And the teaching of Jesus Christ in HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 69 regard to the soul is as far in advance of all other religious teachings as is His morality of other morali- ties or His Person of the persons of all who in human history have been the foundei*s and ex- ponents of other religions than the Christian. Thus it appears that the belief in the existence and dignity of the soul is as it were the focus in which other beliefs, simpler and more primitive, are found to unite. The object of this chapter is to trace the progress of religious thought respecting the soul until it reaches its climax in the Gospel of Christ. Such a survey of beliefs can be but imperfect ; but it may perhaps not be inadequate to its purpose. The primitive beliefs of men assume or tend to assume the form which by Dr. Tylor and others after him has been termed Animism. Animism is the sense of universal personality. It was natural that man should realise in himself the fact of personality. It was not less natural that he should ascribe to all animate beings, and in a measure even to inanimate things, the personality of which he was conscious in himself. And it was natural, or not unnatural, that he should distinguish the personality so completely from the matter or 70 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY vesture in which it was contained as to imagine that the two could be divorced without any necessary destruction or injury of the person. Animism, then, is the first philosophical, as w^ell as the first religious, theory of life. From it arose the impersonation of natural objects, Man saw^ not fountains only, but the goddesses of fountains, or Naiads ; not woods only, but the nymphs of the woods, or Dryads. He lived in an invisible fairy-land ; nay, he could often persuade himself that he beheld in valley or forest, or on the green grass of the moorland, the evident traces of the fairy-forms in which he believed. The world seemed richer then and brighter to all men than it has seemed since ; but of all men it seemed richest and brightest to the Greeks. Hence arose, too, in human minds the belief in the ghosts or spirits of the dead, a belief to which the consciousness of dreams may well have given probability and effect. And although the belief in human spirits as manifesting themselves after death has been much discredited by folly and imposture, yet from its strength and universality it deserves respect as attesting a powerful intuitive conviction of Humanity. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 71 And hence arose in human minds the conscious- ness of something more precious, because more permanent, than the body, a reaHty underlying the phenomena of personal experience, and of that something as being essentially the man. From the primary intuitions or imaginations of Animism to the Christian conception and cultivation of the soul, as transcendently superior to the body, the process ot thought is simple, constant and inevitable. The great belief once sown in the field of human conscience springs up and bears its natural fruit. But this belief, as has been said, is independent of Christianity or any supposed Divine Revelation. It is found not only among such peoples as have con- sidered themselves to be in one sense or other the favourites of Heaven, but among peoples who did not understand it and could give no account of it, but regarded it as a natural self-evident truth. Neither Judaism nor Christianity originated it ; they did but accept it as pre-existent and modify or expand it. Literature is in its nature no sufficient witness to the beliefs of an uncivilised and unlettered society. Yet as soon as human thought began to express itself in writing, one of its most frequent expressions 72 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY was the belief in the soul's Immortality. A few passages chosen for their typical significance will illustrate the widespread character of the belief. Upon its existence among primitive races it will be sufficient to quote the statements made, as the results of prolonged inquiry, by authorities so dis- tinguished as M. Renouf and Dr. Tylor. Of these the former says : — " A belief in the persistence of life after death, and the observation of religious practices founded upon the belief, may be dis- covered in every part of the world, in every age, and among men representing every degree and variety of culture." ^ The latter : — " Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole, we shall at least not be ill- advised in taking as one of its general and principal elements the doctrine of the soul's future life." 2 Mr. Alger, then, is not wrong in his conclusion, '^ The belief of mankind that a soul or ghost survives the body has been so nearly universal as to appear like the spontaneous result of an instinct." 3 Literature from its birth attests the belief in the survival of the soul after death, or its Immortality. * Hibhert Lectures, p. 124. ^ Primitive Culture, vol, ii. p. 21. 3 A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 583. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 73 Thus Bunsen, following Professor Max Miiller, quotes, as from the Vedas, such passages as these : — • 1. An address to the spirit of the dead, when the funeral pile is lighted : " Depart, depart, along these ancient paths. By which our fathers have gone home to rest ; The God Varuna shalt thou now behold And Yama, the two kings who take our gifts. Go to the fathers, sojourn there with Yama In highest heaven, fit meed of thy deserts. Leave there all evil, then go home once more, And take a form of radiant glory bright. . . . There where the pious dwell, and roam in peace, Shall God Savitri bear thee to their ranks." ^ 2. An appeal to Soma in the hymn of Kasyapa : " To the world where unfading Light, where Sunshine itself hath its home, Thither bring me, O Soma, where no harm and no death ever come ; Where Yama as sovereign rules, where the innermost heaven exists, Where the great waters repose, oh, there let me dwell an immortal ! In the heavenly vaults where man lives and moves at his pleasure, Where are the mansions of light, oh, there let me dwell an immortal ! Where wishes and longing abide, where the sun ever beams in his glory, Where bliss that can satisfy dwells, oh, there let me dwell, an immortal ! God in History, vol. i. p. 310, Winkworth's Translation. 74 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Where gladness and joy may be found, where pleasure and rapture prevail, Where every wish is fulfilled, oh, there let me dwell an immortal ! " * But even more striking is the noble passage of the Bhagavadgitd where the Deity is represented as saying of men slain in battle : ^^ You have grieved for those who deserve no grief, and you talk words of wisdom. Learned men grieve not for the living nor the dead. Never did I not exist, nor you, nor these rulers of men ; nor will any one of us ever hereafter cease to be. . . . These bodies appertaining to the embodied (self) which is eternal, indestructible, and indefinable, are said to be perishable ; therefore do engage in battle, O descen- dant of Bharata ! He who thinks it to be the killer and he who thinks it to be the killed, both know nothing. It kills not, is not killed. It is not born, nor does it ever die, nor, having existed, does it exist no more. Unborn, everlasting, unchangeable, and primeval, it is not killed when the body is killed. O son of Pritha ! how can that man who knows it thus to be indestructible, everlasting, unborn, and inexhaustible, how and whom can he kill, whom can he cause to be killed ? As a man, casting off old ^ God in History, vol. i. p. 314. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 75 clotheS; puts on others and new ones, so the em- bodied (self) casting off old bodies, goes to others and new ones. Weapons do not divide it (into pieces) ; fire does not burn it ; waters do not moisten it ; the wind does not dry it up. It is not divisible ; it is not combustible ; it is not to be moistened ; it is not to be dried up. It is everlast- ing, all-pervading, staple, firm, and eternal." ^ But a passage of still more venerable antiquity occurs in the Katha-Upanishad, which is an allegory of a sage who descended into the invisible world to wrest the secret of existence from Death : ^' Beyond the senses is the mind, beyond the mind is the highest (created) Being, higher than that Being is the Great Self, higher than the Great, the highest Undeveloped. "Beyond the Undeveloped is the Person, the all-pervading and entirely imperceptible. Every creature that knows him is liberated, and obtains Immortality. " His form is not to be seen, no one beholds him with the eye. He is imagined by the heart, by wisdom, by the mind. Those who know this, are immortal. "When the five instruments of knowledge stand ^ Sacred Books of the East, vol. viii. pp. 43, 44. 76 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY still together with the mind, and when the intellect does not move, that is called the highest state. "This, the firm holding back of the senses, is what is called Yoga. He must be free from thought- lessness then, for Yoga comes and goes. "He (the Self) cannot be reached by speech, by mind, or by the eye. How can it be apprehended except by him who says : ' He is ' ? " By the words ^ He is,' is he to be apprehended, and by (admitting) the reality of both (the invisible Brahman and the visible world, as coming from Brahman). When he has been apprehended by the w^ords * He is,' then his reality reveals itself. " When all desires that dwell in his heart cease, then the mortal becomes immortal, and obtains Brahman. " When all the ties of the heart are severed here on earth, then the mortal becomes immortal — here ends the teaching." ^ It is not my purpose, nor am I competent, to examine the theology of the Vedic hymns, ranging as they do perhaps over a period of a thousand years ; I am only concerned to show that they * Sacred Books of the East, vol. xv. pp. 22, 23. I owe this reference to the kindness of Professor Cowell. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 77 contain and express the hope of personal existence after death, of ImmortaHty. The same hope asserts itself, though with nume- rous variations, in the religious systems (so far as they are ascertainable) of the Accadians and after them of the Babylonians and Assyrians, of the Persians, of the Egyptians, whose influence upon Jewish thought will be presently considered, and of the Greeks. In them all it is interesting to observe how the idea of the future life was gradually purified, gradually spiritualised. Of the Babylonians, for instance. Professor Sayce says that their Hades "closely resembles the Hades of the Homeric poems ; " it is ^' a land of forgetfulness and of darkness, where the good and evil deeds of this life are remembered no more." But he adds : "Side by side with this pitiful picture of the world beyond the grave, there were the beginnings of higher and nobler ideas. . . . Little by little, as the conception of the gods and their dwelling-place became spiri- tualised, the conception of the future condition of mankind became spiritualised also. The condition of the Immortality of the conscious soul began to dawn upon the Babylonian mind, and along with it necessarily went the doctrine of rewards and 78 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY punishments for the actions committed in the flesh." I For the teaching of the Zend-Avesta in its highest form it is enough to refer to the striking passage in which it is told how the soul of the righteous and the soul of the wicked quit the body at death, and each of them after three days meets its own con- science, the one as a beauteous maid, the other as a foul old woman, and the one passes through the three paradises of Good-Thought, Good-Word and Good-Deed to the celestial bliss, and the other through the three hells of Evil-Thought, Evil- Word and Evil-Deed to the infernal misery. 2 And these quotations, so significant of a hope in things unseen, may end with some lines of the most religious of the Greek poets, the poet Pindar. For he too had caught a vision of reward and penalty waiting upon the deeds of earth, and he sang how " the guilty souls no sooner die than they pay the penalty of their sin, and one there is who judgeth beneath the earth the evil deeds wrought within the realm of Zeus and doth pronounce sentence under a compulsion that he loathes ; but the good dwell for * Hibbert Lectures, v. pp. 364, 365. = Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxiii. pp. 314 sqq. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 79 ever in the light of the sun, ahke by day and by night, and are the inheritors of an unlaborious Hfe, they vex not the earth with strength of arm nor the waters of the sea all through their days, but as many as were gladly true to their plighted word pass a tearless time among the honoured of the gods ; the others endure trouble too piteous to look upon." ^ For enough has now been said to demonstrate the reality and universality of the hope of a life trans- cending the grave. It is well known that to this rising and spreading tide of behef in a life of the soul, distinct from the physical life and transcending and surviving it, there is one remarkable exception. Just where the belief might have been expected to be strongest, it fails. The early books of the Old Testament afford, it is said, no traces of a belief in the soul's Immortality. The strangeness of this fact demands considera- tion. The Jews, as a people, were inspired with a strong and vital feeling for religion. The constant assertion of that feeling was the great service which Judaism rendered to Humanity. The Jews had always many faults ; they were narrow, isolated, and ^ Olympian Odes, ii, 57 sqq. 8o THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY self-centred ; they were deficient in many of the powers and graces of their neighbours ; they were not distinguished in arms or in arts ; they were unpopular, and the secular world looked down upon them as a prey ; yet their religious literature has occupied, and occupies still, an unrivalled place in the affections and interests of mankind. They possessed what may be called a genius for religion. They were in the realm of faith supreme authorities, as in the realm of art were the Greeks, and in the realm of politics the Romans. No disappointment, no disaster could injure the supremacy of the religious sentiment among the Jews. It centred all through their history in that Messianic hope which has been the great centripetal force of Judaism in all ages and among all nations of the world. Yet it is in this people, the most religious people among men, that the hope of the Immortal Life — the hope most deeply characteristic of religion — was for many centuries practically non-existent. How is it possible to account for this fact ? It is perhaps hardly necessary at this present day to consider in detail the paradoxical explanation of Bishop Warburton. His argument, advanced with much dialectical ingenuity and with a vast display HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 8i of learning in the Divine Legation of Moses ^ is briefly this : that a reHgion invented by Man could not have failed to assume a life beyond the grave as one of its cardinal tenets, that the Mosaic Law makes no such assumption, that it could not therefore be the invention of Man, and that, not being the inven- tion of Man, it must have been the revelation of God. To quote his own words : ^^If religion be necessary to civil Government, and if religion cannot subsist under the common dispensation of Providence without a future state of rewards or punishments ; so consummate a lawgiver (as Moses) would never have neglected to inculcate the belief of such a state, had he not been well assured that an extraordinary Providence was indeed to be administered over his people : or were it possible he had been so infatu- ated, the impotency of a religion wanting a future state must very soon have concluded in the destruction of his Republic. Yet nevertheless it flourished and continued sovereign for many ages. These two proofs of the proposition (that an extra- ordinary Providence was really administered) drawn from the thing omitted and the person omitting, may be reduced to the following syllogisms : 7 82 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY ** I. Whatsoever religion and society have no future state for their support, must be supported by an extraordinary Providence. ^' The Jewish reHgion and society had no future state for their support. "Therefore the Jewish religion and society were supported by an extraordinary Providence. " And again : '' 2. The ancient lawgivers universally believed that a religion without a future state could be sup- ported only by an extraordinary Providence. *^ Moses, an ancient lawgiver, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (the principal part of which wisdom was inculcating the doctrine of a future life) instituted such a religion. '^Therefore Moses believed that his religion was supported by an extraordinary Provid- ence." ^ The argument is a paradox, and little more ; still it rests upon a singular phenomenon. In all, or nearly all, religious literature, except the Mosaic, the belief in God and the belief in the soul's Immortality however erroneously held, are inextricably blended * TJic Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, book vi., section vi., vol. iii., p. 241. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 83 together. In the Mosaic Law the belief in God is strongest, the beHef in Immortality is weakest. This is a fact that needs to be explained. It appears to me that whatever explanation is offered must take account of the special character attaching to the early books of the Old Testament. In primitive society, not among the Jews only, but everywhere, the individual is of slight importance ; it is the race — the tribe — the family which is every- thing. The individual can hardly be said to enjoy a personal existence, or at least a personal moral existence, in himself. It is not the individual who holds property. It is not the individual who con- ducts business. It is not the individual who sins or who is punished for sinning. *^The moral elevation and moral debasement of the individual appear to be confounded with, or postponed to, the merits and offences of the group to which the individual belongs. If the community sins, its guilt is much more than the sum of the offences committed by its members ; the crime is a corporate act, and extends in its consequences to many more persons than have shared in its actual perpetration. If, on the other hand, the individual is conspicuously guilty, it is his children, his kinsfolk, his tribesmen, or his 84 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY fellow-citizens who suffer with him, and sometimes for him." "■ Society, in fact, begins with collectivism, in what- ever sense or degree the collectivism may be under- stood ; it does not begin with individualism. The individual is regarded as a member of a body ; he is not regarded in himself. The second commandment of the Decalogue is a witness to the Jewish sense of corporate or collective responsibility for the actions of the individual. It is strange that Christians should so often hear and read that commandment without appreciating either its close affinity to the teachings of modern science upon heredity, or its wide departure from the code of current Christian morals. But it is enough to say now that the moral consequences of actions are represented in it as collective and not as individual. " I the Lord thy God visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth gene- ration of them that hate Me, and show mercy unto thousands in them that love Me and keep My com- mandments." Such moral teaching is accepted as natural throughout the Pentateuchal literature. It marks a stage in the history of human thought * Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law, chap. v. p. 127. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 85 — a stage where the individual is worth little, and the body of which he is a member is supreme. Collectivism then, and not individualism, is the keynote of the moral teaching in the Pentateuch. But if the individual counted for little in this life, it was not to be expected that he would count for more in the next. Personality, thrown into the shade, as it was, in this world could not well be projected into another world. Therefore it was that the same difficulty which in pagan nations and among pagan thinkers of acute and enlightened intellectuality, as among the Greeks, obscured the doctrine of an absolute Immortal Life — the difficulty of conceiving personality — told among the Jews against the belief that the soul of each individual would survive in simple personal existence after death. There is another thought which throws light upon the attitude of the early Hebrew Scriptures towards Immortality. What is the great conception which these Scriptures keep in view ? It is not the privi- lege or destiny of the individual, it is the institution of a Divine society upon earth. The Messianic idea, as has been said, pervades the Old Testament ; but the idea of the Messiah was not originally, or princi- pally, that he would be the Saviour of individual 86 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY souls, it was rather that he would be the Founder of a Kingdom. The Gospels in the New Testament show clearly enough that the contemporaries of our Lord's life not only conceived of the Messianic Kingdom as a deliverance from thraldom, or in other words as the creation of a new secular Theo- cracy, but were impatient and intolerant of any other conception than this. But it was the object of the Mosaic law to foster and cultivate the idea of a Divine Kingdom on earth. For this the ritual of Judaism was a preparation ; of this it was a type and an exponent. "The conception of a perfect kingdom," says Dorner,! " overpowers that of personality." The Old Testament is the history of an elect people, but not of elect persons. Thus it is that in the Scrip- tures of the Old Testament the fate of the individual, whether it be present or future, does not come fre- quently or directly into question. It matters little what happens to the individual, so that the Divine Kingdom is set up in the world. Apart from the spiritual or religious aspect of life, the case of Greek thought is not dissimilar to that of Hebrew. In the * System oj Christian Doctrine, vol. ii. p. 85, in Clark's Foreign Theological Library. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 87 writings of Plato and Aristotle as much as in the Law of Moses the individual is merged in the society of which he is a member. The duty of the State to the individual is scarcely considered. That the State exists for the good of the citizens who compose it, if it be a truism in the modern world, would in the ancient have seemed a paradox. But the duty of the individual to the State is paramount. It is the State which invests his life with meaning and dignity ; to the State, therefore, he owes not his life only but, if the demand is made of him, all that constitutes life a boon. Thus Ethics is itself, as Aristotle says, a branch of Politics. There is no morality but such as is relative to the needs and capacities of the State. It would not have occurred to the ancient Greek philosopher to inquire if the individual life withered or flourished, so long as the State was secure. Nor did it occur to the ancient Hebrew legislator to discuss the fate of the indi- vidual either in this life or in the next, when his heart was bent upon establishing and ennobling the Divine Kingdom in the world of men. If this is a just interpretation of the Mosaic law, it follows that the absence of the soul's Immortality, as a doctrine regulating man's conception of the 88 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY universe and of his own relation to the present and the future, is not an evidence, any more than it is a disproof, of Divine inspiration ; it is the natural out- come of circumstances. That the circumstances were special and transitory may be admitted ; but they could not have been other than they were. Spiritual individualism, although foreshadowed in several passages of prophetical and still more of apocryphal literature, is the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Jews learnt much about the soul in the course of centuries ; but they did not learn the two great truths, that all human souls are of equal value and that the value of each soul is supreme. Again, it is necessary to remember that the Mosaic law was in some sense an inevitable reaction against the creed and ritual of Egypt. When '^ Israel came out of Egypt," they came with deeply imprinted memories of oppression. Except, indeed, in certain few rebellious hours, of which the Pentateuch speaks with a solemnity approximating to horror, they cast the beliefs and symbols of the Egyptian religious system behind their backs. It was because the episode of the Golden Calf was a return to the life which symbolised for the Jews a state of spiritual darkness that it awoke sentiments of indignation HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 89 and severity in the heart of Moses. For the deUver- ance from Egypt was a type of the soul's deUverance from ignominy and sin. What, then, was the striking feature of Egyptian Hfe ? It was rehgion. But not only so, it was a religion in which the present was enveloped in the future and life was overshadowed by death. A living writer says : " The Egyptian lived among tombs whose size and splendour reduced into insignificance the dwellings of the living, and the most characteristic features of his mythology were representations of the death and resurrection of nature in winter and summer, as types representing the death and resurrection of man." ^ The story of ancient Egypt is a warning of the paralysis that may creep over the beneficent activities of the religious spirit, when it is used to divert men's thoughts from the things of sight to the unseen world. For religion is the aspiration of the human soul to God ; but it ceases to be true religion, if it loses the sense either of Heaven or of earth. The Egyptians of old dwelt in their minds and con- sciences upon the life beyond the grave ; their reflective habit solemnised and elevated their lives, ' Caird, Evohitiou of Religion, vol. i. p. 32. 90 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY but it sterilised them. The shadow of futurity rested, as a cloud, upon the present. They thought not how to live, but how to survive death. The striking edifices of Egypt were tombs, and to-day the ancient homes of the living have long since mouldered in decay, but the tombs and the sepul- chral monuments remain. The pyramids of Ghizeh and Sakhara are undying witnesses to death. The effect of Egypt as it now is upon the mind of a traveller who visits it from the West is probably less uniform and therefore less impressive than it was in antiquity. To-day a stir of life pulses through the veins and arteries of that mysterious country. Egypt is felt to have a future as well as a past. But during the centuries of Egyptian history to which the pyramids afford an immortal attest- ation, the sense of a never-ceasing, never-ending struggle against the power of death — a struggle carried on with the accumulated resources of human labour, human skill and human devotion — must have seemed, as indeed it was, supreme. It was upon death and upon the fate of the soul after death that the thoughts of the Egyptian priests and people brooded perpetually. They evolved a positive complete theory of the future life. The HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 91 Book of the Dead is at once an eschatology and a ritual of the dead. And here it may be permitted me to quote the words of Professor Salmond : " The idea of a future judgment for all men was a cardinal point in the Egyptian conception of a future life. This made it a distinctly moral con- ception. The soul, which seems to have been thought of as coming from the gods, had a retri- butive future before it. It was for Osiris or for Set I on earth, and its deeds here decided its future. Osiris was the judge. Everything turned upon his judgment. The justified one was identified with him, received his name, enjoyed his protection and guidance, and became himself an Osiris. When the dead man reaches the Hall of the Double Truth, he is before the throne of this Divine judge. The goddess Maat, the goddess of Justice, Truth, or Law, is there, holding a sceptre and the symbol of life. The scales are set ; the man's heart in the one, the image of Maat in the other. Horus watches the index. Thoth or Tehati, the god of letters, takes the record. The standard of judgment is high. It covers all the great requirements of truth, * Set was, in the Egyptian mythology, the principle of evil, as Osiris was of good. 92 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY purity, righteousness, charity, piety. Above the balance are the forty-two assessors, whose office is with the forty-two great forms of sin. The departed makes his confession. It takes the form of a negative statement, denying his guilt in respect of these sins. His conscience, or moral nature, symbolised by the heart in the scale, speaks for him. If the judgment is favourable, he regains the use of hands, limbs and mind ; he receives back what he had lost by death. His soul, his Ka, his shadow are restored, and he begins a new life. If the judgment is unfavourable, he bears the penalty of loss and pain." ^ Much more is there in the Book of the Dead respecting the discipline of the justified soul for its full and final blessing ; but it lies beyond the scope of this essay. For I am seeking to delineate, how- ever briefly, the general progress of the belief in the invisible future life ; I am not writing a history of Egyptian beliefs. But the special Egyptian belief concerning the dead is emphasised in the many poetic symbols and images with which the life of ancient Egypt was replete. The serpent, the scarabaeus, the butterfly, ^ The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, chap. iv. p. 59. I HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 93 are all suggestive of the soul's emancipation from the prison of the body into a new Immortal Life. And everywhere the death and resurrection of nature — the death in winter, the resurrection in the springtide — typified as they are by the loss and the finding of Osiris, appear as emblems of Man's death, and of his resurrection after death into Immortality. Thus the Jews had in Egypt been the witnesses of a religious system in which the creed and ritual of a dominant hierarchy pervaded and regulated human life. The Egyptians passed their days under the shadow of religion, and their present was insensibly darkened by the thought of the unknown and awful future. It may well be believed, then, that the great Legislator under whose guidance the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt took place, desired in the interest of true religion to break with the religious beliefs and practices of Egyptian society. The breach so made by the Mosaic law was complete and irreparable. If the Egyptians wor- shipped many gods, the Israelites were to " have none other God " than Jehovah. If the Egyptians employed innumerable forms and idols as sym- bolising the various aspects of the Divine Nature, 94 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the Israelites were cautioned against ^'making any graven image." If the Egyptians sought to immor- talise their mighty dead by monuments that should endure as long as time, the leaders and reformers of Hebrew society were "gathered to their fathers" without any pageant of religious ceremonial. And if the Egyptians brooded over the fate of the dead, if they diversified it with an elaboration of pictorial art and fancy and invested it with the solemn mystery of judgment, the Israelites must find their hopes and gratifications and the practical sanctions of their morality within the confines of the present life. It was not irreligion then, but the strength of the religious feeling, that confined the beliefs and specu- lations of the Jewish people after the Exodus to the present life. The theology of the Pentateuch is a reaction against the superstition of the Egyptian hierarchy. It would seem to me that the Mosaic secularism (if it may be called so), i.e.y the limitation of the religious view to the present life, is in some senses a parallel to the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana ; for obscure as that doctrine is and various as are the interpretations which have been given of it, it may, I think, be most reasonably regarded as a reaction against the composite imagin- HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 95 ations which had gathered in the successive phases of Brahmin ical religion around the Hfe of Man beyond the grave. In the one case the human mind found a refuge in the disregard of the future spiritual existence, and in the other it found a refuge in the conception of a future existence calm, passionless, and all but dead. But whether this be so or not, it is safe to assert that the Jews, being under the Mosaic law, put aside to a large extent the thought of the future, because they were unwilling that the future, with its sombre gloom, should overshadow the practical immediate duties of the present. Their present- worldliness (so to speak of it), was a protest against the Egyptian other-worldliness. It was a protest not only of logical necessity, but of definite moral elevation. The theology of the Pentateuch may be said to embody the first stage in the beliefs of the Jewish nation touching Immortality. The soul's Immor- tality was not declared, it was not denied ; it was simply left out of sight. Yet the Jews, like other nations, could not rest content with a mere indifference to the future life of the soul. They could not avoid the question, Is 96 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY death the end of the soul's life ? Does the soul indeed perish with the body ? The answer supplied by Jewish thought is the doctrine of Sheol.^ It is the second stage in the belief of Immortality. The word " Sheol " is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek ^^ Hades " and the Egyptian "Amenti." It is said to mean '^ the hollow place " ; and, if so, it is exactly represented by the English word '^ hell/' when used, as in the Creed, to denote the unseen world of spirits, and not, as too often in common phraseology, the place in which spirits are believed to undergo a ceaseless pain. The Hebrew word Sheol, as is well known, is variously translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible ; it is '' hell," '' the grave," '' the pit," and so on. One of the signal services of the Revised Version is that it brings out the conception of Sheol into a clear and definite light. Sheol, then, is the under-world, the world of spirits. Into it all men descend. " What man is he that shall live and not see death," says one of the Psalmists, " that shall deliver his soul from ^ In the part of this essay which relates to the Hebrew Sheol, I have been much indebted to Professor Salmond's treatise on The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, book ii. chap. ii. pp. 198, sqq. / HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 97 the power of Sheol ? " ^ All the dead are there, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, the lord and his slaves, fathers and mothers, young men and maidens, and little children. In the Book of Proverbs it is told that Sheol is one of the four things that are ^^ never satisfied," and ''say not, It is enough." 2 Sheol is contrasted with the upper world of light and life. It lies deep down in the bowels of the earth. It is " a land of darkness, as darkness itself ; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness." 3 It is a land of silence and sadness and immortal sleep, a land in which the Almighty shows no marvels, and the soul wanders in a random life. What or where Sheol is, the Scripture tells not, except in words as dubious as these. It is a place but not a place, a home but a home unwelcome, a mere negation of all that makes life sweet and dear. Yet into it, as has been said, all men descend at death. There is no difference. Manifold as is the fate of the myriads of human beings in life, in Sheol it is one. The thought of a distinction among the dead, whether it be due to rank or ' Psalm Ixxxix. 48. ^ Proverbs xxx. 15, 16. 3 Job x. 22. 8 98 THE HOPE OE IMMORTALITY character in the present life, is foreign to the Hebrew conception of Sheol. The good and the evil, the happy and the miserable, are alike there. A life unending and unbroken — a life which is but as the shadow of the present — awaits them all. All go unto one place ; for all there is one fate. It is not impossible to deduce from the words of Holy Scripture some idea, though faint and feeble, of the life imagined in Sheol. When the spirit is said to go down into Sheol, it is the man's personality which survives. But it is his personality alone. He is the same man, but he is no more the man endowed with his proper faculties of will, emotion, intellect and conscience. He is but the shadow of himself, as his life is no longer real and actual, but shadowy. He is the same man ; for others can recognise him, and he them, in the world of spirits ; but all that gives strength and purpose to life is gone from him. No words can describe the vacuity of the life in Sheol better than some of the Preacher, Koheleth or Ecclesiastes : '^ The living know that they shall die : but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and I HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 99 their envy is now perished ; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun. . . . Whatsoever thy hand findeth to dO; do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol, whither thou goest." ^ As in the Homeric Hades, so too in the Scriptural Sheol the loss of human interests and associations is acutely regretted. That such a life should be worth living in comparison with the life of earth is a thought which does not enter the mind of the heathen poet or the Hebrew Psalmist. They who live in Sheol are, as it were, but shadowy kings on shadowy thrones, men who have lost the pleasure of knowledge, the capacity and even the memory of friendship, the hope and desire of better things. They can no more learn or labour or be happy. They can but cast their eyes half-consciously back- wards to their own past, and, remembering but imperfectly what it was, pray that their present should be even as the past. But to the Hebrew poets and thinkers it was not the loss of human interests and associations that seemed the most painful deprivation. They believed ^ Ecclesiastes ix. 5, 6, 10. 100 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY that the spirits in Sheol were cut off not only from Man, but from God. In Sheol there was no room for praise or prayer, no room for communion with the Eternal. It is difficult to over-estimate the pathos of such words as these, spoken by devout Jews to whom the presence of God was as life itself : " What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit ? Shall the dust praise Thee ? Shall it declare Thy truth ?"i ^^ In death there is no remembrance of Thee ; in Sheol who shall give Thee thanks ?"2 ^^ Shall Thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave ? or Thy faithfulness in destruction ? Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark ? and Thy righteousness in the land of forget- fulness?"3 "Sheol cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee ; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth." '^ These words are enough, though it were easy to multiply them, and they prove that the most devout and spiritually-minded Jews looked forward to Sheol as a place which none could escape, and yet which none could enter without a mournful sinking of heart. Sorrow, failure, weariness, despondency — * Psalm XXX. 9. ^ Psalm vi. 5. 3 Psalm Ixxxviii. 11, 12. * Isaiah xxxviii. 18. HISTORY OF rtiE BELIEF loi these are the thoughts suggested by Sheol. And, still more, when the spirit of a man went down to Sheol, it abandoned the hope of a better life. The destiny of Sheol was universal, and it was eternal. None might escape going down into it, and none that went down might return. In it the highest and the lowest of mankind, the saints and the sinners, those whose lives had been the blessings and those whose lives had been the curses of the world, were alike, and alike eternally. In the mournful words of the patriarch Job, "As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away ; so he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more."^ Such was the second stage of Jewish belief touch- ing the future of the soul ; it was the second, but it could not be final. The belief in Sheol is a denial of the soul's extinction, it is an assertion of the soul's existence after death ; but it possesses no element of the moralising, sanctifying associations, no satisfaction of the hopes and yearnings and aspirations which cluster and, so long as human nature remains unchanged, will cluster still around the creed of Immortality, * Job vii. 9. 102 TfIE"ffdPt: OF IMMORTALITY There is a third stage, not altogether clearly defined, in Hebrew theology. That theology had rejected the idea of annihilation and had so created the belief in Sheol ; but in process of time it rejected the idea of Sheol as the receptacle of all the spirits of men. In both cases the process was moral rather than intellectual. To the student of the Old Testament, if he stops short of the prophetical books, it becomes clear that the early Hebrew writers, having limited their religious conceptions to the present world, were often at a loss for the means of reconciling the Divine justice with the actual conditions and dis- pensations of human life. The simple theory of the Pentateuch that temporal felicity is the reward of temporal virtue broke down. The Book of Job — perhaps the earliest book in the Bible — is itself a protest against that theory ; for every reader of the book must feel that the restoration of Job to all and more than all his temporal blessings in the last chapter is at the best an inadequate solution of the problem with which the book attempts to deal. But it is in the Psalms that the sense of an unsolved mystery in human life assumes the most definite form. One of the Psalmists confesses in touching I HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 103 language how the mystery puzzled and distressed him, and how insoluble it seemed, until he went into the sanctuary of God, though even there the solution which occurred to him was only the assurance that the punishment of sin, however long it may be delayed, is actually accomplished in the present life. ^^ Until I went," he says, " into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. Surely thou didst set them (the wicked) in slippery places ; thou castedst them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment ! they are utterly consumed with terrors. As a dream when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest, Thou shalt despise their image."' But the facts of life are positive ; and they tell so strongly against the present necessary connexion of moral virtue and temporal success that the thoughts of men were inevitably drawn beyond the limits of the present world, and in proportion as the moral contradictions of life pressed themselves upon the conscience, the belief in the soul's Immortality assumed a greater strength and solidity. Thoughtful and devout men felt instinctively that religion demanded a life other and larger than the * Psalm Ixxiii. 17-20. I04 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY present. But Sheol was no satisfaction of that demand. For the two innate ideas which have in the course of human history rendered the beHef in Immortality axiomatic are the longing of the spirit of man for continued existence and the desire of the conscience for a vindication of God's moral dealing with His children. But the life of Sheol was too faint and shadowy, too near to death, to afford the sense of Immortality. And the life of Sheol, being in its nature the same for the good and the evil, left the moral problem of the conscience where it had been. Thus the thinkers who in the later days of the monarchy tried to face the problem of life could not rest in the mere doctrine of the Sheol ; they had taken one step, and they must take yet another. That step, as will be seen, was the conception of a spiritual and retributory Immortality. It cannot be denied that in this case as in others the religious ideas of the Hebrew nation were at once quickened and purified by the painful expe- rience of the Captivity. The effect of the Captivity in its influence upon Jewish thought and Jewish sentiment was profound. It finds no parallel, or finds it only in the effect produced by the capture HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 105 and destruction of Jerusalem under Titus upon the mind of the early Christian Church. These great events were strong, cleansing moral forces. The destruction of Jerusalem swept away the local or national limitations which might have fettered the free development of the Christian Church. The Captivity, by breaking the continuity of the Jewish national life, threw the thoughts of the devout Israelites back upon the relation of the individual soul to God. Thus it purified religion. It put an end to the idolatrous ritual which had come to be associated with the Monotheism of Israel. It awakened the sentiment of sacred personal responsibility as appears in such passages as that of Ezekiel : ^^ The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son ; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."^ Above all, it was the Cap- tivity which led men to look for the Divine bene- diction, not in any national earthly prosperity, how- ever great, but in that spiritual satisfaction which is the boon of all who, in any age or any land, repose their simple faith in God. * Ezekiel xviii. 20. io6 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Thus the conception of a personal Immortality rose before the eyes of men. It was the natural outcome of devout religious thought concentrating itself upon personal character and personal respon- sibility. The conception, it is true, had dawned upon men's eyes before the Captivity. It is enough to quote the wonderful words of the patriarch Job. *' I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand up at the last upon the earth : And after my skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall I see God ; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. My reins are consumed within me." ^ The translation is that of the Revisers of the Old Testament and, as so translated, the passage implies that for Job himself there is a Redeemer or a Vindicator ; that Job shall die, but that his Redeemer shall live and live eternally ; that though his skin shall wither and his flesh decay, yet shall Job behold his Re- deemer, who is God ; that he shall see Him with his own eyes, and, as it were, face to face, and his reins shall be consumed with the transport of the vision. But it is in the Psalms and prophecies of the Exilic ^ Job xix, 25-27. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 107 or Post-exilic period that the faith in personal Immortality becomes most impressive. Let the following passages evince it : — 1. The 49th Psalm tells of the proud and impious men who trust in their riches as going down into the darkness of Sheol, but it tells also of a better fate laid up for the righteous. '^ Like sheep they are laid in Sheol." ^' Death shall feed on them . . . and their beauty shall consume in Sheol from their dwelling. But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol ; for he shall receive me." ^ 2. The 73rd Psalm rises, like the 49th; to a higher thought than that of Sheol. "Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory." 2 3. Hosea's prophecy may be thought to contain the first idea, not of Immortality alone, but of Resurrection. " I will ransom them from the power of Sheol ; I will redeem them from death : O death, I will be thy plagues ; O Sheol, I wdll be thy destruction."3 Such are his words, and they are echoed by St. Paul in the great chapter which Christian mourners know by heart. ^ Psalm xlix. 14, 15. - Ps^ilm Ixxiii. 23, 24. 3 Hosea xiii. 14. io8 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 4. Ezekiel's vision ' of the dry bones may perhaps be national rather than individual ; it may typify the resurrection of a nation and not of its members. ^* Son of man," he writes, " these bones are the whole house of Israel." Yet it is difEcult to believe that they who read of the breath coming from the four winds upon the bones that filled the valley until ^^ they lived and stood up upon their feet, an exceed- ing great army," should have failed to catch the inspiration of a living personal Immortality. 5. Still stronger and more striking is the prophecy of Isaiah, designed to comfort the chosen people in their affliction. "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust ; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead." ^ 6. And this glowing hope — so sacred and sublime — which pervades the later canonical books of the Old Testament finds its consummation in the closing chapter of Daniel's prophecy. "But go thou thy way till the end be : for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of thy days." 3 It were easy to pass from these passages to the teaching of our Lord in the Gospels. But between * Ezekiel xxxvii. 1-14. ^ Isaiah xxvi. 19. 3 Daniel xii. 13. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 109 the prophetical writings and the Gospels there is a link which is too frequently forgotten. That link is the Apocrypha. It is one of the curious facts of ecclesiastical history, as Dr. Salmon has observed, that the action of the Council of Trent in placing the Apocrypha upon a level with the canonical writings of the Old and New Testament has led the Reformed Churches to disparage the Apocrypha. Yet the value of the Apocrypha is great as shedding light upon Jewish religious beliefs and hopes in the four centuries which lie between the close of the Old Testament Canon and the birth of our Lord, and upon none more than upon the faith in Immortality. "The Apocrypha," says Dr. Salmon,^ " contains evidence that, in the later times to which it belongs, the doc- trine of a future life had taken hold of the people as it had not done earlier. The third part of the Homily on the Fear of Death offers proofs of the belief in a future life held by ^the holy fathers of the old law,* but these proofs are taken exclusively from the Book of Wisdom. And it would not be possible to replace the two lessons for All Saints' Day by * speaker's Commentary. General Introduction to the Apocrypha, § 73. no THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY two other Old Testament chapters expressing the same behef with equal distinctness." The belief in Immortality is not always in the Apocrypha expressed with equal clearness and cer- tainty, but it is there. The following passages of the Book of Wisdom will show how strong the belief was and how greatly it had been developed. "God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of His own eternity." ^ " The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seem to die, and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be utter destruction ; but they are in peace. For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full of Immortality." 2 " The righteous live for evermore ; their reward also is with the Lord, and the care of them is with the Most High." 3 *' To know Thee is perfect righteous- ness : yea, to know Thy power is the root of Immortality." 4 Along with these passages, which express a belief in Immortality as the reward of holy lives, others * Wisdom of Solomon ii. 23. ^ Ibid. iii. 1-4. 3 Ibid. V. 15. 4 Ibid, xv. 3. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF in occur, not always definite or consistent, but suggest- ing the doctrine of retribution for the wicked. '^ They/' i,e.f the unrighteous, *^ shall see him," i.e., the wise, '^ and despise him ; but God shall laugh them to scorn, and they shall hereafter be a vile carcase, and a reproach among the dead for ever- more And when they cast up the accounts of their sins, they shall come with fear, and their own iniquities shall convince them to their face." ^ *' Over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterwards receive them : but yet were they unto themselves more grievous than the darkness." 2 In the Book of Wisdom, then, appears the thought of a life surviving the grave, and of that life as containing in itself the reward of virtue and the penalty of sin. It is not uniformly or con- sistently maintained in the Apocrypha. It is strong in one book, as in the Wisdom, weak or fitful in another, as in Ecclesiasticus ; at the most it is a hope or an aspiration rather than a faith ; and it is only, as I think, in the Books of the Maccabees that the faith becomes definite and sure. The history of these books is not less inspiring than instructive. It ' Wisdom of Solomon iv, 18, 20. = Ibid. xvii. 21. 1 112 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY is in the nature of a supreme national agony to elicit great thoughts and high aspirations. What the struggle of the Persian wars was to ^schylus and the struggle of the Reformation to Shakespeare, all that, and more than that, was the struggle against Antiochus Epiphanes to the contemporaries of the Maccabees. There is no occasion then for surprise that this should be the time when the thought of Immortality begins to dominate men's minds. Thus in the story of the seven brethren who were martyred and their mother occur these passages : — ^^ When he," the fourth son, " was ready to die, he said thus. It is good, being put to death by men, to look for hope from God to be raised up again by Him : as for thee " — he is addressing the king — " thou shalt have no resurrection to life." ^ And again in the story of Nicanor, '^ When as his blood was now quite gone, he plucked out his bowels, and taking them in both his hands he cast them upon the throng, and calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to restore him those again, he thus died." 2 Passages such as these imply a faith not only in a spiritual life transcending the present, but indeed in a corporeal resurrection. ^ 2 Maccabees vii. 14. ^ Ibid. xiv. 46. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 113 Thus the agony of the Maccabean struggle set the crown upon the Jewish desire for Immortality. That which had been a despair, then a dream, then a hope, then an aspiration became a fixed article of belief. To sum up what has been said : By the time when the canon of the Old Testament closed in Malachi, or soon afterwards, and certainly before the coming of our Lord, the thought of the personal soul as endowed with Immortality had dawned as a vision of desire upon the hearts of the devout and religious Israelites. And not only so, but it was acknowledged that the soul, more than the body, more than the intellect, was the part of Man that was most closely related to his Maker. The soul would survive the body. It would inherit an eternal life. It would enter into the Divine Presence. It would attain the celestial beatitude. This was the thought which animated the Jews in their contests with their enemies, which gave them faith and courage and endurance, and which made them invincible, as all nations have been invincible when the certainty of the Divine protecting grace has possessed their minds. The Jewish world then at the coming of our Lord stood, as it were, prepared for His teaching. 9 114 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY The line of thought touching Immortality in the Apocrypha is a true prcvparatio evangelica. The teaching of our Lord carries the doctrine of the soul to the highest point which it has reached or can reach. It is the supreme insuperable stage in the belief of the soul's Immortality. But about His teaching in general, and in this matter especially, it needs to be said that He does not so much teach new truths, but He changes the perspective of truths. In His Gospel the soul is not forgotten, nor is the body, but the relation between them is transformed. It is no more the body — no more the present life — that seems important. The body is inconsiderable in com- parison of the soul. The present is inconsider- able in comparison of the future. Our Lord does not teach the present or future existence of the soul. He takes that existence for granted. What he does is to emphasise the intrinsic and absolute moment of the life of the soul. How awful, how impressive are His words ! ^' What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " ^ And again, ^^ Fear not ^ St. Matthew xvi. 26. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 115 them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul ; but rather fear Him that is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." ^ That the soul, religiously considered, is of such value as infinitely to transcend all other parts of human nature is, it may be said, an axiom of His creed. And in conformity to the value which He set, and His disciples after Him, upon the soul was His conception, and theirs in obedience to Him, of His own redeeming work upon the Cross. It was not for the bodies or minds of men that He died, but for their souls. Thus St. Peter says of Him, ^^ Whom having not seen, ye love, in Whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory ; receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls." 2 This is the substance — the very heart — of the Christian Faith. "Why all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy." 3 It is the Atonement as taught by the writers of ^ St. Matthew x. 28. ' 2 Peter i. 8, 9. 3 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure^ Act ii. Scene ii. ii6 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the New Testament, by St. Paul especially, and by the Fathers of the Church. Salvation is a spiritual term. It is a deliverance not of the body or the intellect but of the soul, a deliverance not from pains or sorrows or sufferings, but from sin. Nay, it may often happen that physical and mental sufferings are the conditions of spiritual good, and, if so, they are blessings, though in disguise. The Church of Christ, despite her manifold lapses and errors, has not lost the thought or the sight of her Master's teaching. She may serve the bodily interests of men ; she has nobly served them. She has shown by her example that it is not where the body aspires to the first place in the life of Man, but where it holds the second place as inferior to the soul that it attains to its true and proper dignity ; asylums, hospitals, infirmaries, and homes of refuge are the witnesses of her charity ; but it is not for these things that she exists. She exists to save men's souls. Her Divine Founder was the Healer of men's bodies as well as of their souls, but it was for their souls that He died. And all that the Church has done or can do must be subordinated to her one essential work of saving souls. For HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 117 this she was born, for this she came into the world ; it is her function, her very Hfe, and rather than surrender this she would die. Such is the belief of the Church of Christ, and from it issue two or three consequent beliefs which it is right to specify. The first is the consciousness of sin. That con- sciousness is strictly a religious sentiment. Human philosophies ignore or impair the sense of sin. They recognise crime, they do not recognise sin. It is because they have no strong realisation of the soul's personal life. For sin (apart from external consequences) is a stain upon the soul, and, if the soul be that for which the Saviour died, then how terrible is a stain upon it ! There is no deeper need of the present day than to revivify the decadent or dying sense of sin. Yet again, the value set upon the soul in our Lord's teaching affects (as has been already inti- mated) the estimate of the sorrows, sufferings and disappointments which are inevitable parts of human destiny. It expands the significance of the word ^' good," which is too often limited to physical and corporeal benefits. But the good of the soul may be the exact opposite of a physical good. A privation which depresses the body may be itself ii8 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY an elevation of the soul. Therefore, the Christian or the religious man in general, having regard to the soul, and not only so but to the soul as endowed with Immortality, may well accept and rejoice in such a fate as is contrary to the dispositions and inclinations of the body. The ascetic life, with its manifold, mysterious applications, depends upon the regard paid to the soul. It is in the nature of the soul too that there lies the secret of the great distinction which was not known even as a fancy to the classical pagan world, though that world was so clever and refined, but is an axiom of every modern polity — the distinction between the world and the Church, between the secular life and the spiritual, between the things which in their nature are temporal and the things which are eternal and Divine. What the issue of that distinction may be in the coming days none can tell, but it touches the very nature of Man. It determines what should be his character and his conduct in the crises of life. It renders the actions and even the language of one section of society un- familiar, if not unintelligible, to the other. But if the soul be transcendently greater than the body, then they who render it its due importance will win the day. HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 119 The conclusions and inferences of this chapter may be briefly stated as follows : — The conception, more or less vague, of the human spirit or soul as in its nature surviving the bodily life appears to be universal among the primitive and savage races of mankind. That conception was originally crude and material ; it has been slowly refined into spirituality. It was the destiny of the Jewish people, though they were late in realising the conception of a future spiritual existence, to accept it eventually in its purest form and to commend it most persuasively to mankind. That conception, first imagined by the Psalmists and prophets, and afterwards purified in the Apocryphal literature, was elevated to its sublime dignity by Jesus Christ. He taught not only the existence and the pure spirituality of the soul, but its paramount superiority to any other part, and to all the other parts, of human nature. This superiority was the axiom of His own re- demptive work. It is equally the axiom of all Christian devotion and philanthropy. Religion is, in a word, a cultivation of the soul. Beyond this cultivation no religious system or creed can ever rise. CHAPTER III VALUE OF THE BELIEF We have seen what is the true belief in the soul's Immortality, and how it arose and was historically developed. We have seen that it has been purged, by slow degrees, not without difficulty, of the material grossness originally attaching to it, and has become a pure spiritual faith. But it remains to ask — What is the bearing of this belief upon the common daily practical human life ? Would the world be affected, and if so, how affected ? would it be the better or the worse, if the belief in Immortality should cease ? This chapter, it is necessary to say, is concerned solely with the value of the belief — not with its truth or its probability, but with its value. There is no assumption that, because a belief is valuable, there- fore it is true. It may indeed be urged upon the hypothesis of a beneficent Almighty Providence that VALUE OF THE BELIEF 121 it is not probable that Man would be left in the unhappy position of finding a belief to be essential or important to his moral welfare and yet to be false. The belief in God then lends a certain strength to the argument from the value or necessity of any other belief to its truth. But the belief in God may or may not be treated as reasonable. The object of this chapter is to inquire the value of the belief in Immortality without any regard to its validity. But in no part of this essay is candour or moderation more necessary, and in none, perhaps, is it more difficult. It is argued that men have lived good lives, and even lives of special and remarkable virtue, without the sanction or motive of an immortal hope ; that they have loved righteousness for its own sake, with- out any thought of reward or penalty ; and that it is a foolish policy therefore to make the duty or possi- bility of virtuous living dependent in any sense upon a belief which has been shown to be not essen- tial, and which may not improbably prove to be fallacious. It is better, according to this argument, so to educate and discipline mankind, that they may feel virtue to be its own reward. That good and noble lives have been lived in the 122 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY absence of religious belief, in the absence of a belief in Immortality, is probable enough ; it will readily be admitted by Christians. There is not so much virtue in the world that it can be right or wise to disparage what there is. The theory that human nature is absolutely corrupt is disproved by human nature itself. And if it were absolutely corrupt, it would be incapable of responding to the appeal which religion makes to it, and religion would languish or die. The sanctions and motives of religion do not re-create human nature ; they take it as it is ; they elevate and purify it ; they could not find root in human nature if the soil were utterly hard. No doubt the virtue as well as the vice of human nature may be exaggerated. Anti-Christian writers have made too much of the one, as Christian writers of the other; for human nature is not wholly good or wholly bad, but is composed of good and bad qualities in dififering degrees, although, if no external influences were brought to bear upon it, it would probably sink, instead of rising, in moral dignity. But Theology forfeits the confidence of sensible and reasonable thinkers, if it denies such tendencies to goodness as exist in human nature, for the sake of magnifying the work of the Divine grace VALUE OF THE BELIEF 123 in human liearts and lives. That human nature is crossed, as it were, by a dark streak or flaw, which is what is called in the language of Theology " original sin/' is one belief ; that it is absolutely vile is quite another. The former accords with the facts of con- science and history. The latter is a desperate con- clusion to which men have not come spontaneously, but have felt themselves driven at times by the cogency of their own theological premisses. Still, grave as is the mistake of representing human nature bad, it is a yet graver mistake to represent it as wholly good. The simple truth of human nature seems to be that it is prone partly to goodness, partly to evil ; but that, if it is to ascend to a high moral elevation, it needs all, or more than all, the help and support that systems of belief or laws of conduct have ever afforded it. Upon a study of human history or of the human soul it is impossible to doubt that Man, in spite of his innate promptings to righteousness, can ill afford to dispense with any incentive or motive to virtuous living. But of such incentives the belief in God, and, as its corollary, the belief in Immortality, is the strongest. And it is only too sadly apparent that human nature, though it be reinforced with this 124 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY strong motive to morality, has found hard work in making its way through failure and suffering to the gates of the Celestial City. It is not indeed altogether safe to argue from the assumed integrity of certain lives, whether Christian or non-Christian. Men are not in general competent judges of each other's lives. They see only what is obvious and external. It is God who reads the heart. His alone is the unerring Judgment-Seat. Of the sacred rules laid down by Christ for human conduct none is more equitable or charitable than this, " Judge not, that ye be not judged." The fallibility of human, the accuracy of Divine judgment, are the principles which nerve and inspire the personal life. It is right that man should be judged, but that he should be judged by One Whose judgment is just. For except upon the supposition of a Divine Almighty Judgment, it seems that there is no security, and little probability, that justice will be done to individuals in this life or afterwards. It may be admitted, however, that men have lived good lives without the sanction of religion. It may be admitted too, that men possessing religious faith have often failed in the practice of virtue. But to make these admissions is not to admit that religious VALUE OF THE BELIEF 125 faith as a motive is ineffectual. It is only to allow — what experience attests — that motives are not so influential as they ought in logic to be upon human lives, Man is not a creature of reason only, but of desire, emotion, sentiment, as well as reason ; and the fact that motives do not always work their logical effect, is an argument, not for destroying or impairing, but for fortifying the motives. For motives are operative in proportion to their own strength and to the strength of the belief with which men apprehend them ; if they are inadequate there- fore, it is necessary to strengthen them. And when it is said that virtue is its own reward, this is a statement which may be either a truism or a paradox. To whom is virtue its own reward ? Not indeed to everybody ; so much is plain ; for if virtue were everywhere its own reward, and were known to be so, the world would be virtuous ; it would not be, as in fact it is, a scene of tangled good and evil, where generous aspirations are too often marred by deep and melancholy failures. Man, it has been said, stands alone among animate beings, in that he recognises and admits his own true interest and yet acts against it. Such human action is indisputable ; but it is an evidence that virtue, if it is sometimes a 1 126 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY pleasure, is or may be at other times a painful sacrifice. Suppose that a person who has lived long years in sin determines to break by resolute effort the bands of sinful habit, as when a drunkard takes the pledge of abstinence from drink; his virtuous action is not pleasant to him, but painful ; it is so painful that he often sinks under the burden of it. The first step in the path of penitence must be diffi- cult ; there are times when it cannot be taken except under the constraining influence of a belief in the righteous anger of God against iniquity. It is true indeed that one, who begins by abstain- ing from evil in the belief that it will involve shame or punishment, may in the end rise to so high a moral elevation as to find in the practice of virtue not only a pleasure but a passionate delight. This, however, is the supreme attainment of the moral life. Few are they — and those the saints — who have aspired to it. What a wilful error it would be to treat a temper so sublime as if it were the common lot of ordinary men and women ! The love of virtue for its own sake is the reward of those who have practised virtue as a hard duty. It is not the sinner who loves virtue, but the saint. Yet saints are few^ and sinners many, and how a sinner may be VALUE OF THE BELIEF 127 brought to lead the saintly life is the most difficult problem of religion or morality. The law of the moral life, has nowhere, I think, been expressed more truly than in a passage of the ancient Greek poet, Hesiod, *^ Thou mayest choose vice and plenty of it, and the choice shall not be hard. The path is smooth, and vice dwells at thy door. But the immortal Gods have set toil at the threshold of virtue ; long and arduous is the way thereto, and at the first it is rough ; but when a man has reached the summit, then is virtue easy, though so hard." ^ It is the privilege of the saint not only to practise virtue but to love it. To one who has spent his life in sanctity, virtue may be, and often is, its own reward. It is so to him, it is not so to others. The sinner, to whom his sin is not a pain, but, at least for a time, a satisfaction, needs an overmastering motive, if he is to turn his back upon sin and to set his face towards the vision of holiness. The faith in Immor- ^ Hesiod, Works and Days, 285 sqq. : rijv fitv Toi KaKOTrjra Kai iXadbv tcrriv IXecnOai pt]iSiu}g ' Xeir] fxkv oSbg, fxaXa S' kyyvdi vdiei. Ttjg d'apET^g idpCjra Oeol irpowapoiOtv iOijKUv dOdvaroi ' fiaKpbg Sk Kai opQiog olfiog tg avrijy Kai rpijxvg TOTTputTOV ' sTrtjv S'slg aKpov 'iKTjrai, prjiditj Stj tiruTa TtkXH, xaXeTT)) irep iovcra. 128 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY tality affords this motive, and there is no other faith that equally affords it. It is impossible to deny or dispute the bearing of the faith in Immortality upon conduct, unless it be supposed either that human nature stands in no need of motives to virtue, or that motives do not influence action. But these sup- positions are untenable. They display a singular ignorance of the human nature to which they relate ; they render the theory of conduct not logical or intelligible but chaotic. For Man has sore need, as experience proves, of the incentives and induce- ments to virtue. How can it be argued that men are enamoured of virtue and disposed to practise it with a pure, un- selfish affection, when the world is strewn with the wreckage of lives, and hopes are frustrate and opportunities wasted and promises end in despair ? How can it be said in the face of fraud and cruelty and lust ? How can it be said by any one who studies himself or the world ? The history of humanity and the conscience of each man are alike the witnesses that the waves of interest and passion are ceaselessly surging against the barrier of human morality and threatening to sweep it away. Historically Man has been a bad judge of human VALUE OF THE BELIEF 129 nature. The theologians of old, as has been said; could discern in it nothing but evil. Some modern thinkers have seemed to discern nothing but good. Yet it is simply absurd to speak as though men were everywhere and always inclined to righteousness, if only they could find some sufficient reason for following it. The theological doctrine of innate sinfulness is probably truer than the opposite doctrine of innate righteousness. He who knows himself knows that good and evil are ever at war within his soul, and that, if he is to refuse the evil and to choose the good, he needs the strongest possible motive to morality. For to him the Apostle's words are vividly present as expressing the truth of his own personal experience. " I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man ; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am ! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " i So evident is the testimony of human nature to * Romans vii, 21-24. 10 I30 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY sin as a fact and to the consequent need of moral sanctions. Nor is the connexion of belief with conduct less evident. For if action, i.e., rational action, is not caused by belief, how is it caused ? On what principle does a man choose one line of action rather than another ? The reason lies, as is plain, in his belief. He believes the line which he chooses to be right or necessary or expedient. He believes that he will be rewarded for taking it or punished if he does not take it, whatever the form of reward or punishment may be, and thus his choice is made. Actions then, so far as they are reasonable, are the consequences of belief. It is belief which determines the choice of actions. No doubt the choice is not always, as it ought to be, consistently made. Beliefs do not always dominate action ; for it is subject to counter- balancing influences such as desires, sentiments, interests, and the like. Beliefs, too, may be more or less cogent ; one belief is authoritative, another persuasive, another so faint as to be only suggestive. But it remains true that, so far as action is reason- able, it depends on belief ; there is nothing else on which it can depend. And if it be so, then there VALUE OF THE BELIEF 131 is no belief which is naturally qualified to exercise such influence upon conduct as the faith in Immor- tality. For when full allowance has been made, as it ought to be made, for the circumstances by which the natural effect of belief upon action is more or less modified, it is mere playing with facts to argue that one, who limits his view of responsibility to the present life and to such laws and sanctions as are operative in it, possesses the same imperious motive to amoral life as one who holds that for all the actions and intentions of his life he is ultimately responsible after death at the bar of an Almighty and Omniscient Judge. The believer in a retributory Immortality is far more strongly bound to virtue than others who lack this or any such belief ; and if the moral level of his life is not higher than theirs, his culpability is proportionately greater. The moral value then of a belief in Immortality may now be taken as established. But although the faith in Immortality, with such convictions as issue from it, may be the most potent motive to morality, it is not the only motive. Writers both ancient and modern have sometimes set its value too high. Thus Cicero says — but who will justify his words ? 132 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY — "Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerret ad mortem." ^ Similarly the great French preacher Massillon, in his discourse on the Immortality of the Soul, says, " La society universelle des hommes, les lois qui nous unissent les uns aux autres, les devoirs les plus sacres et les plus inviolables de la vie civile, tout cela n'est fond^ que sur la certitude d'un avenir. Ainsi si tout meurt avec le corps, il faut que I'univers prenne d'autres lois, d'autres mceurs, d'autres usages, et que tout change de face sur la terre. Les maximes de requite, de I'amitie, de I'honneur, de la bonne foi, de la reconnaissance ne sont plus que des erreurs populaires, puisque nous ne devons rien a des hommes, qui ne nous sont rien, auxquels aucun noeud commun de culte et d'esp^rance ne nous lie, qui vont demain retomber dans le n^ant, et qui ne sont deja plus." 2 But the supreme value of a faith in Immortality has been nowhere put in stronger language than by Robert Hall in his once famous sermon on Modern Infidelity con- sidered with respect to its Influence on Society. The ^ " No one would ever expose himself to death for his country if he had not a strong hope of Immortality." — Tttsc. Disp., i. 15, 32. " De VImmortalitc de vAme. VALUE OF THE BELIEF 133 following passage will serve as a specimen of his argument : — " As the present world, on sceptical principles, is the only place of recompense, whenever the practice of virtue fails to promise the greatest sum of present good (cases which often occur in reality and much oftener in appearance) every motive to virtuous conduct is superseded ; a deviation from rectitude becomes the part of wisdom, and should the path of virtue, in addition to this, be obstructed by disgrace, torment or death, to persevere would be madness or folly, and a violation of the first and most essential law of Nature. Virtue, on these principles, being in numberless instances at war with self-preservation, never can or ought to become a fixed habit of the mind." Such passages are no doubt guilty of exaggeration. For the truth is that under all moral systems, whether actual or possible, some men will be virtuous and others vicious, and still more, men will, in their characters, exhibit varied blendings or interlacings of virtue and vice. Nor indeed is the habit of mind which takes pleasure in classifying men as good or evil, saved or unsaved, Christian or non-Christian, in any high degree salutary or charitable. Divine Omnis- 134 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY cience alone can distinguish the tares from the wheat in the harvest-field of life ; to the Divine Master men alike stand or fall. It is wise to discuss the natural tendencies rather than the actual results of moral systems; for it is a safe assumption that soon or late the natural tendencies will develope and display themselves in experience. The singular advantage of the belief in Immor- tality is that it provides a sanction, and other beliefs do not, for the exceptional or extreme cases of moral duty. For a moral system must be tested by extreme cases. It must provide an adequate sanction for morality not only in the ordinary, but in the special and sublime, decisions of life. If such a system does not meet the extreme cases, if it does not in these cases satisfy the demand of the con- science, then it will ultimately fail in other cases. It is rightly demanded then that a moral system should justify the supreme manifestations of human virtue. If it is incapable of producing saints and martyrs, or, in other words, of justifying sanctity and martyrdom, it will soon or late fail to produce men and women, or to produce many men and women, of the virtue which is now assumed to be general among Christians. For a moral system VALUE OF THE BELIEF 135 tends ultimately to produce such consequences as ordinary people deduce from its principles. No moral system of antiquity was illumined by a brighter example in its founder's life than Epicure- anism ; but the name of Epicurus has in history become no more than a synonym for a bon vivant ; and it has become so because Epicurus preached the doctrine of pleasure, and men have accepted from him his special doctrine, and have interpreted it according to their own disposition. It may be taken for granted then that a moral system, whatever it may be, will not in practice ultimately rise to a higher level than the interpre- tation which ordinary men and women put upon its principles. And here perhaps Robert Hall's sermon may be quoted once more, " By great and sublime virtues are meant those which are called into action on great and trying occasions, which demand the sacrifice of the dearest interests and prospects of human life and sometimes of life itself ; the virtues, in a word, which by their rarity and splendour draw admiration, and have rendered illustrious the character of patriots, martyrs, and confessors. It requires but little reflexion to perceive that what- ever veils a future world and contracts the limits 136 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY of existence within the present life must tend in a proportionable degree to diminish the grandeur and narrow the sphere of human agency." The matter then would appear to stand in this way. The belief in Immortality supplies a sanction for all virtues. There is no discipline — no sacrifice — so great that it cannot be justified upon the plain assumption that God Who is Almighty will at His pleasure within the eternal spaces of futurity re- compense and satisfy all such virtuous actions as are performed, at whatever present loss or sorrow, for His sake. It is here that upon a secular system of morality -^e ultimate coincidence of virtue with happiness, which is the postulate of the human conscience, seems to fail. The difficulty of such a system is to provide a moral sanction for the noblest actions. For such a system this life is all. Morality is relative to this life. It must find its sanction, its justification in this life. Life becomes then, if not the stimmum bonum, yet the condition under which alone the siimmiim honiim is attainable. Secular morality, as it follows, cannot justify to the individual the sacrifice of his life for any cause. To say so is not VALUE OF THE BELIEF 137 to say that men have not sacrificed their Hves for truth and honour without the faith in a personal ImmortaHty. Men are not seldom better than their creeds. But it is to say that the sacrifice of life is not justifiable upon secular principles. The martyr acts nobly but irrationally, as there is no recompense possible to him when life is taken from him. That " he who loses his life shall find it " is not a belief which secular morality can entertain. The world has instinctively felt the danger which belongs to the loss of faith in the soul's Immortality. It shrinks from the thought of an atheistical society. Yet if it is asked what would be the necessary consequence of a purely secular morality, it is perhaps not so much that the world would im- mediately lose virtuous conduct as that it would lose the fine or delicate flower of virtue. It would lose in fact not virtue but sanctity. Sanctity is the flower or fragrance of virtue. How shall I speak of it ? It is to virtue what grace is to behaviour, what expression is to beauty. It elevates by spiritualising, as grace by refining. It is something added to virtue, something higher than virtue. The saint does often the same actions as the moral person, only he does them in a different way. He 138 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY is free from worldliness. He thinks not of himself. He breathes a serener atmosphere than other men. He is nearer to God. The difference between sanctity and mere dutiful- ness was seen, it is said, in the hospitals of Paris, when the Sisters of Mercy yielded their place to secular nurses. The duty done was the same, yet not the same ; it missed the special charm of devotion, of piety. What, then, was the secret of this charm ? It is told that the Sisters whose task is hardest and most painful, such as they who spend their lives in ministering to the fallen abandoned women in the great cities, sometimes feel their hearts sinking within them at the contact with so great and terrible impurity ; then they retire into the little chapel set apart for them and pray awhile before the altar, and when their prayer is finished, they are strengthened again for their ministry. It was even so with the Master Himself, Who "continued all night in prayer to God." This, or such as this, is indeed the flower of sanctity. It is not the avoidance only, but the abhor- rence of evil. It is not the practice only, but the joy of devotion. Yet it is in the power of loving souls, however weak. It is delicacy, refinement, purity, VALUE OF THE BELIEF 139 yet sacrifice too. In it is something that is unearthly, something Divine. For it issues chiefly or solely from the example of Him Who, being in the world, was yet not of it, but lived above it in the perfect- ness of an immaculate purity ; for Him alone among the children of men evil could not approach or defile, and from the cradle to the Cross there rested not upon His soul even the passing shadow of sin. This it is that the world will lose, if it loses religion. Yet is there no greater sorrow than the loss of an ideal. For though the ideal be never realised, it has the power of attracting thoughts and hopes and desires upwards to itself. Sanctity is rare among men. The saints are few ; but the world is saved by its saints. They alone, it may be, ascend to the highest height, and their feet are set on the untrodden snow ; but others struggling heavenwards from the lowlands take hope from the vision of the saints. The beliefs and habits of religion constitute the saintly life. Apart from them there would in the end be no saints. And it may be feared that, when the supreme attainment of virtue is done away, the moral standard of the world would gradually be lowered. 140 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY And not only would the moral standard be lowered, but morality itself would suffer a change. Morality is a word of various meaning ; it did not mean the same thing in the ancient classical as in the modern world ; it would not mean the same thing in an infidel as in a religious society. For the virtues which relate to or depend on Immortality, such as the reverence for human life, the habit of worship, the culture of purity, would languish, if Immortality were no longer a faith. Every religion has its own morality, and the morality approved, if not always practised, in Christian society, is the morality which Jesus Christ taught. Thus the value of the belief in Immortality is a conclusion arising from a just estimate of human nature. While it is admitted that the virtuous tendencies of Humanity are the ground upon which the hope of human progress rests, it remains true that the moral dignity of man is less positive and stable than it is sometimes imagined to be. Human virtue cannot yet make boast of itself. It is not an immutable fact. The best of men are not far removed from the worst sins. Humanity stands, as it were, on the slope of a high mountain, it VALUE OF THE BELIEF 141 breathes the pure and bracing air of Heaven, but it may soon and easily lose its footing and sink backwards into the depths which lie below. Great and awful, then, is the responsibility of those who would cut away any sanction or support of the moral life. But the chief of these sanctions and supports is Immortality. The faith in Immortality, then, if it be lost, is irreplaceable. But it is not only the morality of individuals which is at stake in the battle of belief ; it is also the morality, and with it the felicity, of nations. And here it is perhaps worth while to notice that it is not so much the wealthy or privileged or cultivated classes who are so dependent upon a faith in Immortality ; it is, however little they may themselves know it, the poor, the ignorant, the unhappy, the debased. The faith of these classes may be tacit or inarticulate or concealed, as their faith in God is often ; but if it exists, though lying ever so deep within them, it is a check upon wild action and a solace in the sufferings of life. It cannot, I think, be proved, but neither can it be denied, that the social and political movements, indicating in many European countries a discontent 142 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY and an impatience which are dangerous signs of the time, are largely the outcome of the speculations which have taught men, in the name of Philosophy or Science or any other name, to cast away the restraining power of belief in God. Certainly it is remarkable that that discontent or impatience in its most pronounced form, when it calls itself anarch- ism, is equally intolerant and contemptuous of autho- rity, human and Divine ; it treats the laws of men with as little respect as the laws of God. And, indeed, if the faith of the people in God and Immortality is done away, and their privations, their labours, their sufferings remain, is it reasonable to think that they will acquiesce in an inequality which was always hard to bear and is now felt to be hopeless, because it fills the whole space of their existence ? The faith in Immortality where it exists is always a motive — the strongest of all motives — to a patient self-restraint. And not only so, but that faith, whether among individuals or among nations, is a spur to moral action. He who possesses it, however often he may have failed, yet possesses in himself the potency of better things. For human life, if it be complete within itself, does not authorise an absolute morality. It is the doctrine of Im- VALUE OF THE BELIEF 143 mortality which harmonises duty and reward. For Immortality throws its protecting shield over the whole wide field of human duty. It is the pro- mise that no resolute effort or generous service, no refusal of sin, no persistency in virtue, no cup of cold water given in charity to a disciple shall lose its reward. Within the sphere of Immortality lies the justification for all the demands that conscience makes of Humanity. But it is not only as a moral motive, it is also as a moral satisfaction, that the belief in Immortality commends itself to human hearts. It is the one belief that sets and can set the mind at rest in the contemplation of the ways of Providence. It is well to consider what is the proper attitude of the finite human mind towards an Infinite Intelligence. Ex hypothesi such a mind is impotent to understand the full scope of the Providential scheme. It must confess the limitations and imperfections of its knowledge. That there should be difficulties in the human estimate of Providence is only a way of saying that Providence is Divine. But it were wrong to look upon these difficulties as only so many intellectual hardships ; they are moral tests ; and it is as tests that they are essential elements in the Divine dealings with mankind. 144 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY It is necessary, then, that Man, as a finite being, should be subject to doubt in his apprehension of Divine Providence. Mystery is the element in which Man lives as Man. But mystery, however natural, is none the less painful ; if it be hopeless, it may become intolerable. What is it, then, that Man may reverently and not unreasonably ask of God ? It is that the mystery of life, if as yet unsolved, should not be proved to be insoluble. He may not demand to see the solution in this life, but he cannot forego the hope that it will be seen hereafter. Faith, in short, will carry him as far as, but no further than, the words : " What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." That his present knowledge is imperfect he may admit ; that it can never be com- pleted he will deny. Thus the relation of man to God is, in familiar language, as that of a child to his earthly father whose motives he cannot understand but whose goodness he trusts implicitly. He waits, but his waiting is full of hope. He reposes his trust in God. The curtain hangs, as it were, between him and the truth on which his heart is set ; he cannot tell, he can scarcely imagine, what is hidden behind it, but VALUE OF THE BELIEF 145 he knows that some day the curtain will be lifted. Thus the discipline of this life, the anticipation of a life after this, are the consequences issuing from the fact of an Invisible Immortal Will in which he believes. This hope or this faith naturally influences the Christian view of life taken as a whole. Life is not free from puzzling and distressing features. The inequalities of life, for instance, cannot but excite a certain feeling of sadness in the mind. It is a just moral expectation that all men should ultimately enjoy a fair or equal chance of happiness, whether it be given them in the present or in the future. But upon a survey of the present life men are not equal ; they do not enjoy the same or nearly the same chances. The disparity which exists between them is not merely or principally relative to such goods as are called external, e.g., wealth or social circumstances or honour, and if it were so, it would be easily overrated ; for of these goods the influence upon happiness is probably less than it seems to be, as the enjoyment depends upon the sense of need, when they are wanting, or of appreciation, when they are attained. There is reason to think that, if it were possible to compare II 146 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the tastes, desires and satisfactions of two persons taken from opposite or widely different social strata, the positive inequality of happiness would often be found to be slight. Still differences of place and privilege exist, and they affect the character or condition of life. One man is born in such circum- stances as facilitate the cultivation of virtuous habits, another is the victim of hereditary taint or vicious example or base associations. Or again, the sin of one man is visited with a life-long stigma ; another, who may be a worse sinner, goes un- punished. No view of the present human life taken in itself can adequately interpret these inequalities ; they postulate the justice of the Almighty acting in an Immortal Existence. Thus the belief in Im- mortality is in effect the belief that an equalisation of human destinies (subject, of course, to human freedom) will be realised at the last. Pain again is a mystery which has always weighed upon the sensitive conscience of mankind. If it be considered in relation to the present life, and to that alone, it must be said to lack not only beneficence, but in a great degree significance. For pain is not intelligible, as an element in experience, unless it be educative. It must promise, it must more or less VALUE OF THE BELIEF 147 promote, a future blessing. In this life its educative effect is not always seen. But assume an Immortal Life, and pain becomes at once a discipline of whose beneficence Man is permitted to catch a glimpse even in this life. For pain contains in itself a moralising or sanctifying power. Human nature, being constituted as it is, can afford as little to dispense with pain as it can with death. Death is the great solemnising power ; it redeems life from flippancy, it constrains the most thoughtless souls to pause and think. Pain too is the spring of generous sympathies and sacrifices. Nay, not so only ; but it is the special function of pain to evoke the sentiments and qualities which are preparatory, as it were, to the Eternal Life. Humility, patience, resignation, faith, devotion are spiritual qualities, and, as such, they are prophetic of Immortality. It follows that pain, although in human eyes it may seem mere loss or indignity, is in the Divine view a scarcely veiled benediction. Pain is a mark of Divine favour, as it creates the temper or character which is pleasing to God. Thus it is true that " whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." ^ * Hebrews xii. 6. 148 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Lastly, death, though it ceases not to be terrible, is in the view of Immortality not intolerable. It were a hopeless evil, if it were the end. It is not, or not necessarily, an evil, if it be not the end of life, but a stage or an incident in life itself, if it is, as an ancient writer says, " midway in life." ^ But this is the religious view ; it is the Christian view. It leaves the future dark yet vast ; it does not shut the door on hope. It invests with deep and awful, yet blessed, possibility the shadowy spaces which lie behind the veil. There is no beatitude vouchsafed to man so great as this. No discovery of Philosophy or Art or Science is so rich in its solace for anguished souls as the revelation of Immortality. That One greater than death holds the keys of hell and death is the supreme beHef to which Humanity rises. I dare to say that without it life is not worth living. But to those who embrace it life is hopeful, it is sacred, it is Divine. In the faith of Immortality, then, lies the solution of the mystery encircling life and death. What the ^ Lucan, Pharsalia 1,457 (of the Druids). " Longae canitis si cognita vitae Mors media est." VALUE OF THE BELIEF 149 ultimate solution may be Man knows not. But he knows that it is there. In that knowledge he is content — nay, happy. His life rests upon God. So it is that the doctrine of Immortality not only coheres, as has been said, with the faith in God, but is indispensable to it. The eternity of God and the eternity of the individual life are the keys to the interpretation of Providence. The doctrine of Immortality is of infinite value, alike as affording an absolute sanction for the efforts and sacrifices of virtue, and as yielding strength to human nature in its anxieties, and solace in its bitter bereavements. So far, however, it has been treated only in its relation to the Divine Economy. It has been shown to be a necessary condition of the belief in a Providential Government of the world. But every doctrine which expresses, or seeks to express, the relation of Man to God has its human side as well as its Divine. It will necessarily answer to the demand of human nature in itself, i.e,, without regard to the view which man may take of Providence. Thus it is necessary in considering Immortality to consider some special features of Man's nature. I50 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY For the object of this chapter is to inquire what would be the loss of virtue or happiness, if men were forbidden to speculate religiously upon the future. This loss will be the measure of the value which properly belongs to the belief. The passionate longing of mankind for a death- less life may be regarded, and will hereafter be regarded, as an argument. It is here to be treated as a need. It is a need which Immortality satisfies, and no other doctrine or theory can satisfy it. The desire of man for Immortality has not always and everywhere been equally strong. In some, if not all, of the more refined and cultivated races of mankind it has been and is so powerful as to amount to an irresistible prejudice. And upon the whole, the greater the refinement or the cultivation of the race, the more intense is the longing for Immortality. This desire is in general independent of special conditions attaching to the Immortal Life. It is not a desire for equalisation or retribution or advancement. It is a desire for existence. It is an intuitive consciousness of persistency. In Mr. Alger's words, '^ It seems clear that the real belief in Immortality did not originate from the contem- VALUE OF THE BELIEF 151 plation of the phenomena of dreams and shadows and echoes, but arose from the inexpugnable self- assertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself non-existent." ^ This desire, however interpreted, is the more remarkable, as it seems to distinguish Man broadly from the other animals to which his physical structure and character are akin. It is right to speak of those animals with reserve ; so little is known of their nature or sentiments ; but at least the appearance is that they take death, like life itself, as a natural thing, without any wonder or difficulty or pain. Man alone resents and regrets the idea of death. He refuses to die. He would sooner live in pain than perish in peace. He demands for himself unending life. Of all strange and striking facts in human history none throws more light upon man's inalienable desire of Immortality, than that an everlasting doom of woe should have been found in the history of thought a creed less intolerable than annihilation or absolute death. But there is another way in which it is possible to form some estimate of the loss which would fall upon Humanity, if by any arbitrary or self-imposed * A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 728. IS2 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY decree it were forbidden to mankind to extend the range of their thoughts and hopes and even their behefs beyond and above the Hmits of the present Hfe ; and what can be said of it but that it would be a bUght covering the face of all the earth ? It would be a narrowing or impoverishing of all that makes human nature sublime. The spring of imagination and devotion would be dried up. In whatever direction the human spirit might seek to move, it would be stayed as if by some invisible bar. Literature is a witness that human life or thought, if it were cut off from the hope of Immortality, would become a sterilised thing. For the master- pieces of literary genius, whether ancient or modern, are largely occupied with questions re- lating to the invisible world. If Man were limited to the present, if he might not in fancy or belief speculate upon the destiny of the soul when it passes at death beyond the sphere of sense, what would become — it is not necessary to say of the sacred books of all religions — but of the Odyssey or the Prometheus Vinchis or the Alcestis or the Mneid or the Dlvina Commedia or Hamlet or Paradise Lost or In Memoriam f The invisible world and all that VALUE OF THE BELIEF 153 belongs to it have been the nursery of great thoughts and burning aspirations. To the high theme of ImmortaHty poets, artists, and philosophers, no less than preachers or theologians, have been drawn by an irresistible attraction. They have spent upon it reverent, earnest thought and labour. How much light has been so shed upon the dark- ness encompassing the future of the soul is not now the question. It is enough that in seeking to illumine the darkness (even though the effort has been made in vain), they have enlarged and enriched the spiritual thoughts of Humanity, and have lifted them to a brighter and purer world. For, apart from all particular theories of Immor- tality, it is the belief in a personal Immortal Life of human souls which gives Man his proper dignity in the scale of Nature. As Science lowers him in his own eyes. Theology exalts him. On the one hand he is little higher than the beasts ; on the other hand he is little lower than the angels. For Our Lord in the mysterious passage in which He speaks of the angels, says explicitly that they ^^die not." Death is the lot of Humanity. Deathlessness is the boon of the angelic life. Spiritual beings, as the angels, cannot die. So too the spirit of Man, as 154 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY being itself immortal, approximates to the angelic life. There is much in Nature which tends to overpower human thought. The vast spaces of Astronomy, the vast periods of Geology, stand in contrast with the narrow limits of human being. The mighty powers which Nature now and again puts forth in the earthquake or the hurricane or the cataclysm reduce Man's physical activity to insignificance. What is to be set against this great overmastering thought ? It can be nothing else than the belief that Man possesses in himself an immortal treasure, and that treasure is the soul. The soul is the witness of its own eternity as of its own spirituality. It is, as Democritus said, '^ the house of God." ^ Or as Epictetus said, every man " carries about a God within him." To know this truth is to know the dignity of Man. It is no part of this essay to discuss the theory of Man's origin. But among the seeming evidences of a lost potency or capacity, as of a vision half- forgotten yet half-remembered, is his dissatisfaction with himself and the conditions of his being. He does not think of himself as of one whose history ' 4'^X^ oiKtjTrjpiov Saifiovog. VALUE OF THE BELIEF 155 had been a continuous progress from a lower to a higher state. He has felt always that he might be better than he is, and ought to do more than he has ever done. He is conscious of powers which do not find full play in this world. He is oppressed by the sense of contrast between his ideal and the realisation which falls so far short of it. Hence his spirit is for ever in unrest. What a pain there is in human inability to do more work ! How waste- ful and saddening seem the hours spent in sleep ! The limitations of his physical senses are distressful to him. The imperfection of his moral nature jars upon his conscience. He feels within himself the yearnings for a sanctity not of earth. Nay, as he looks around him his pathetic regret is only intensi- fied. He erects buildings, and they outlive him. He makes calculations, such as Halley's, and he may not live to verify them. His purposes are immortal. His earthly life closes as a tale that is told. With infinite hopes and aspirations, with poor sinful deeds, striving and failing and learning by failure to strive again, he seems to himself as a prince immured in a gloomy prison house. But let Man, so cramped and saddened, be suddenly invested with the promise or potency of 156 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY an everlasting life ; then his being assumes a new dignity, as being fraught with endless issues ; his actions, his very thoughts bear the stamp of Immor- tality ; he is as a pauper who has succeeded unexpectedly to an inheritance of vast and ample riches. " I am fully persuaded that one of the best springs of generous and worthy actions, is the having generous and worthy thoughts of ourselves. Whoever has a mean opinion of the dignity of his nature, will act in no higher a rank than he has allotted himself in his own estimation. If he con- siders his being as circumscribed by the uncertain term of a few years, his designs will be contracted into the same narrow span he imagines is to bound his existence. How can he exalt his thoughts to anything great and noble who only believes that after a short term on the stage of this world, he is to sink into oblivion and to lose his consciousness for ever ? " i Thus it is true that the belief in Immortality dignifies life as nothing else can dignify it. " Life is real ! Life is earnest ! And the grave is not its goal. * Dust thou art, to dust returnest,' Was not spoken of the soul." ^ Spectator^ No. 210. ' Longfellow, A Psalm of Life VALUE OF THE BELIEF 157 The assurance of Immortality is generally pro- portionate to the elevation of the personal life. As Dr. Martineau has said : ^' The great essential to this belief is a sufficiently elevated estimate of human nature ; no man will ever deny its Immortality who has a deep impression of its capacity for so great a destiny." ^ But conversely the belief in Immortality inspires great thoughts of the potency lying in the present life. He who is possessed with the thought of his own immortal being, and of that being especially as spiritual, will make it his aim, in the noble words of a pagan philosopher, " to live as far as possible an immortal Ufe."^ What then is the character of that life ? This is a question which will be more fully considered here- after. The Immortal Life must depend, as has been seen, upon the constitution of human nature. All the parts of human nature possess their own graces. But the graces of the body, though beautiful and splendid, are evidently transient. Long before the approach of death they are seen to decay. The soul, too, has its graces, partly intellectual, partly * Five Points of Christian Faith, p. 19. ~ l(})' o Galatiansv. 17. 3 Romans viii. 6. 22 322 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY spiritual life which Christ enjoined ; and both are intimately associated with matter. One is the world — the Kocrjuog, properly the ordered visible Universe, the opposite of Chaos, but taken by our Lord and by His Apostles after Him to signify the total sum of the secular or material interests, influences, occupations and associations which tend to come between the soul of Man and God. This it is which our Lord treated as His main enemy ; it was this which nailed Him to the Cross. To save men from the world was the object of His life and of His death. Thus He said, " If the world (6 Kocrfiog) hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own ; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you."' And soon afterwards, *' In the world (ev ti^ Koo-jutj)) ye shall have tribulation ; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."^ So too, St. John in a remarkable passage which reflects the specially Christian tone of thought respecting the material world, uses these words, " Love not the world (tov KOdiiov), neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the » St. John XV. 19. ^ Ibid. xvi. 33. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 323 Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof ; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever."i The world, then, or K6(Tfjiogy is the material Universe. Sometimes, as in the passage of St. John's Epistle, it includes the lower or sensual side of human nature, " the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes," but it is not so used generally. "The world," strictly considered, stands for all that in external Nature tells against sanctity or against spirituality, for all that is contrary to the Will of God. But all this is essentially material ; its sphere is the visible or tangible or substantial ; it is different and distant from what is spiritual. The other anti-spiritual force is the flesh (77 aapQ. And as " the world " is used for all such material objects as, lying outside the nature of Man, do yet in their measure and degree draw him away from God, so is " the flesh " used for the material and secular tendencies of his nature itself. Christian souls know only too well what this power of " the flesh " is. For, as they feel after God and aspire to ^ I St. John ii. 15-17. 324 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Him, they are sorrowfully conscious of something within them that impedes and degrades their higher being, something that drags them back as with chains irresistible, and thwarts the nobility and sanctity that is in them, and compels or inclines them to do what they hate and contemn themselves for doing. How true to life is St. Paul's confession — as true as it is graphic ! " I delight in the law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am ! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? "^ But it is important to observe that this influence of evil is by St. Paul conceived as essentially material. His words, *^the law of sin which is in my members," '^the body of this death," as else- where, "the mind of the flesh," point to matter as the seat and centre of evil. And is it not a simple fact of human experience that besides the devil and the world there is in Man an influence drawing him away from God — an influence of which he is conscious in all the difficulties and * Romans vii. 22-24. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 325 embarrassments of his moral life — and that the seat of this influence is the sense or the body, the material part of his composite being ; in one word, the " flesh " ? But if this be so, it follows that the emancipation of the soul from the body at death will be, at least in the instance of the blessed souls, a deliverance from the lowering, humiliating ten- dency of matter, whether in the world or in the flesh. The soul will no more experience a constant antinomy. It will no more approve one thing and do another, no more act as it would fain not have acted, no more see the vision of beauty and forget or neglect it. Moral duty will become clear and commanding. It will speak in imperious and irresistible tones. It will be freed from the pains and difficulties which now attend it ; for as it is the association of the soul with the body that in the present life renders the performance of duty difficult and painful, so when the soul is set free from the body it will realise at last the perfect and cloudless felicity of doing the Will of God as a simple pleasure continually without any hindrance at all or failure or distress. Such, then, in its moral aspect is "the Eternal Life " as our Lord taught it, the pure spiritual life. 3^6 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the life of Heaven. Such too was the lesson of His own Life, as when He said, ^^ Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business ? " ^ or '' My meat is to do the Will of Him that sent Me and to finish His work/' 2 or again, ^' I do always those things that please Him." 3 For indeed He lived on earth the heavenly life ; and to do the Will of God perfectly and to be perfectly happy in doing it is Heaven. This is the life for which Man, as redeemed by Christ, is permitted to look. It will be to him a restoration, a regeneration. His moral nature, clouded as it has been upon earth, shall become purified. As the saints upon earth — the souls who stand nearest to God — have many a time found happiness and peace unspeakable, amidst most bitter sufferings of the flesh, in doing God's Will ; so shall the redeemed and sanctified souls in Heaven ex- perience what it is to toil without effort or reluc- tance, and to serve without weariness, and to fulfil the moral law of their being in complete felicity, knowing God even as they are known of Him. But the life of Heaven, if it is intellectual, if it is moral, is also spiritual or devotional — nay, it is this above all else. And that it must be so is evident ^ St. Luke ii. 49. ^ St. John iv. 34. 3 St. John viii. 29. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 3^7 in the nature of things. For what is the true attitude of Man toward his Maker ? It is not reflexion, still less is it criticism ; it is worship. The proper dignity of Man lies in worship. Humility is his honour. Prostration before the throne of the Supreme is his exaltation. It is not when he gives himself airs as though he were lord of the visible Universe, but when he cries, standing afar off, *' God be merciful to me a sinner," that he rises to the true height of his nature. Higher than the hero, higher than the philosopher is, in the standard of Divine realities, the saint. Yet to Man upon earth it is almost infinitely difficult to enter upon his right relation to his Maker. He does not know God. He does not know even himself. His opinion of his own place in Nature is, as has been said, at one time too high, at another too low. Were it not for special ex- periences such as suffering, bereavement, and death, or again such as moments of ecstasy and inspiration, he would not feel that he was or could be a son of God. And even when he realises the duty and blessing of worshipping God, how much is there that comes between him and the heavenly vision I 328 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY There is no such humbhng fact of human nature as that Man cannot even worship as he would. His supphcations, his adorations are always im- perfect. His very prayers need to be prayed over again. His penitences need themselves to be repented of. It is this fact which makes the spiritual life even of the best men a spectacle so pathetic, so tragical. And yet man feels within himself a longing after God, a power of communion with God. Nothing can wholly destroy or disguise it. It is an element of his humanity. It is a witness to his capacity for ^' the Eternal Life." *^ The spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." I But when it is asked what are the causes that make Man, in his earthly life, only half-conscious of his affinity to God, or only half-capable of Divine worship, the answer must inevitably be that they lie in the material or carnal appetites and tendencies of his nature, i.e., in the flesh. Thus it is that in his best moments he longs above all else to be freed from the flesh. He desires to become a pure spiritual being, as are the angels who do * Romans viii. i6. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 329 God's Will perfectly. It would seem, then, that the condition of spirituality is the emancipation of the soul from the body. For ^^ flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God/' ^ as St. Paul says. But this is just the change which death effects ; and such a change, unless it be vitiated by a personal taint, e.g., by sin, as it places Man in direct relation to his Maker, will necessarily elicit his full energy of admiring and adoring veneration. When we see God as He is, we shall worship Him as we ought. While it would be a speculative error then, and in some sense a detraction from the full Christian doctrine of Immortality, to imagine that " the Eternal Life " beyond the grave will be wholly devotional, and while it is a part of the Christian Revelation to believe that that life will afford scope for the intellectual and moral excellences of which human nature is capable, as well as for the devotional, yet the whole tenour of Christ's teach- ing implies that worship will be the soul's most potent and persistent exercise in futurity. We shall know then, not partially, as now, but fully. We shall understand the deep mysteries of Providence. =" I Corinthians xv. 50. 330 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY But the knowledge, the revelation will issue in an unspeakable rapture of worship. Thus in the imagery of the Apocalypse it is ever worship which fills the picture of the unseen world. ^^The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power ; for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created." ^ To sum up what has been said : The conditions of the perfected or Eternal Life in Immortality seem to be these : 1. An intuitive understanding of the Providential purpose of God as revealed in the Creation, Salvation and Regeneration of the world, but especially and pre-eminently of Mankind. 2. A loyal and happy obedience to the Will of God in ministration, self-sacrifice and purity. 3. A continuous ecstasy of devotion before the throne of God and of Christ. These are the conditions of the heavenly life, and ^ Revelation iv. 10, 11. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 331 adow or reverse of these, with its keen, incessant sense of misery, is Hell. But it still remains to inquire : If such is the Life Immortal, what is the relation of souls on earth to those that have passed, for happiness or woe, behind the veil ? Can we do aught for them or they for us ? Is intelligence possible between them and us, or sympathy or affection ? The instinctive sentiment of Humanity suggests that, if the dead live after death and live a higher or more spiritual life, though it is in a sense a continuation of the present, death cannot be an absolute bar to the interests and associations which were so rich and so precious in the present life. The Christian Creed responds to this strong human sentiment by its doctrine of the Communion of Saints. It teaches that the holy ones on earth and in Heaven are knit together as members of one family by spiritual ties. Bishop Pearson, in his Exposition of the Creedf writes as follows : " The communion of saints in the Church of Christ with those which are departed is demonstrated by their communion with the saints alive. For if I have a communion with a saint of God, as such, while he liveth here, I must 332 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY still have communion with him when he is departed hence ; because the foundation of that communion cannot be removed by death. The mystical union between Christ and His Church, the spiritual conjunction of the members to the Head, is the true foundation of that communion which one member hath with another, all the members living and increasing by the same influence which they receive from Him. But death, which is nothing else but the separation of the soul from the body, maketh no separation in the mystical union, no breach of the spiritual conjunction, and consequently there must continue the same communion, because there remaineth the same foundation." ^ The Bishop, as is known, is singularly cautious in drawing any practical inferences from the doctrine which he expounds. Yet it would seem that the doctrine implies, if it does not actually enforce, certain lessons. For if a sympathy exists between the living and the dead, as may be inferred not only from our Lord's explicit teaching but from the Christian conception of death itself as an entrance upon Immortality, there can be no other channel or * Article ix. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 333 instrument of such sympathy than prayer. For it is the pecuHar quaHty of prayer that it transcends, as nothing else can, the Hmitations of place and time and of matter in general, and that, wherever and by whomever and for whomever it is offered, its efficacy is the same. Prayer, then, may be justly regarded as the medium of spiritual sympathy between the living and the dead. But the essence of prayer is mutual helpfulness. We pray for others, as they for us. We seek to strengthen them and to comfort them by our prayers. And whatever blessing we hope to receive as an answer to prayer, we are eager to give. Christian souls, impressed with the mystery of the Universe, will be the last to doubt the help- fulness of prayer. " More things (says the poet) are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of." ^ And when all the mystery underlying phe- nomena, in the latest age of human thought as in the earliest, is deeply felt, it will be owned that opportunity remains and must remain for prayer. Intercessory prayer is the privilege of Humanity. God has not revealed its full virtue ^ Tennyson, The Passing af Arthur. 334 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY or efficacy. But is it not a probable thought that the mysterious longings after holiness, the intense desires for a purity not of earth, which come we know not whence and arise we know not how in human hearts, the high immortal aspirations, are, as it were, echoes of the prayers that those who love us, as well the dead as the living, breathe for ourselves ? They descend like the showers of Heaven, and like the showers they return not in vain. But we too may and must pray for the dead, as they for us. Without such prayer the Com- munion of Saints becomes but a dream. We know not how or in what degree prayer is opera- tive, although we know that so it is, upon earth, and we cannot know how it may affect them who have passed within the veil. But to pray for them is an act of faith and reverence. No act sustains so well as this the sympathy of saints. None is so potent to create and energise the assurance that the dead are still the living. None is such a witness to the reality of a purely spiritual exist- ence and communion. None is so deep and true a solace in the presence of the realities which ever and again darken and sadden human life. The duty or privilege of prayer for the dead does AMPLIFICAflON OF THE BELIEF 335 not so much rest upon isolated passages of Holy Scripture ; it rests upon the whole conception of Immortality as expressed in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. To believe in intercessory prayer for the dead is not to believe that the state of the dead is mapped out in purgatorial or other periods which a living human authority can modify at will. It is indeed the very opposite of that belief. For a belief so formal or mechanical touching the dead is opposed to the fine and sensitive outlines of the Gospel. Our Lord did not teach, nor empower any one to teach, what the future life precisely is, or how it may be affected or influenced by acts done upon earth. He taught only the doctrine of the Communion of Saints ; and from that doctrine flows the spiritual sympathy, of which intercessory prayer is the expression, between the living and the dead. And he who has appre- hended the eternal verity of the spiritual life will no more doubt that prayer can pass the barriers of the unseen world than he will doubt that the spirit itself passes those barriers when it is emancipated from the body at death. For Jesus Christ in His exaltation holds the keys not of Hell only (i.e., of Hades), but of death. 336 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY And yet another inference seems to follow as certain. If the future life is a continuation of the present, and if prayer is the spiritual link between the visible and invisible worlds, then the helpfulness of intercessory prayer depends at once upon the possibility — I do not say the certainty — of the soul's progress or development in the future. There is no word in Holy Scripture to suggest that the fate of souls, whether the good or the wicked, will be uniform after death. It is an assump- tion of a wilful Theology that all who are happy in the future Life will be equally happy, and all who suffer will suffer alike. The Scriptural intima- tions are wholly contrary. Our Lord speaks of some who have done wrong as being punished with many and others with few stripes. Similarly He promises that less or greater fidelity in the present life shall be rewarded with less or greater opportunity of service in the future, as in the parable of the talents, where the servant whose pound had gained ten pounds is appointed to " have authority over ten cities," and he whose pound had gained five pounds is appointed to ^^ be over five cities." AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 337 But if a variety of destinies in the unseen world, whether of happiness or of suffering, is reserved for mankind, and yet more if the principle of that world is not inactivity but energy or character or life, it is reasonable to believe that the souls, which enter upon the future state, with the taint of sin clinging to them in whatever form or degree, will be slowly cleansed by a disciplinary or purificatory process from whatever it is that, being evil in itself, necessarily obstructs or obscures the Vision of God. The parable of Dives and Lazarus seems clearly to indicate a certain moral progress as the effect of retributory discipline. But it is natural and neces- sary to believe in such a progress, as a part of Christ's Revelation, if it be true, as this Essay has tended to show, that the future life is a continua- tion of the present, only that it is a purely spiritual life, and as such is emancipated from the limita- tions which render the suffering that comes of sin, as also the happiness that comes of virtue, less vivid and evident than in the nature of things they properly are. And this is the benediction of human nature, to feel that, as souls upon earth are fortified and elevated by the prayers offered for them in the unseen world, so too by our prayers may the souls 23 338 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY which have passed behind the veil be Hfted higher and higher into the knowledge and contemplation and fruition of God. The conception of the future life, as spiritually continuing and completing the present, sheds a light upon the problem, which it is impossible to ignore, of mutual recognition in eternity. In the human hours of bereavement and desolation, when it is as though the sun had been blotted out from the heaven, we ask ourselves by the grave of our beloved ones, Shall we meet again ? Shall we know one another in Heaven ? To this deep anxiety of the heart Shakespeare gives expression in the lines where Constance cries — " Father cardinal, I have heard you say That we shall see and know our friends in heaven : If that be true, I shall see my boy again ; For since the birth of Cain, the first male child To him that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born. But now will canker sorrow eat my bud. And chase the native beauty from his cheek, And he will look as hollow as a ghost ; As dim and meagre as an ague's lit ; And so he'll die ; and, rising so again. When I shall meet him in the court of heaven, I shall not know him : therefore never, never Must I behold my pretty Arthur more." ^ King John, Act iii. scene iv. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 339 Nor is any satisfaction of this anxiety possible, unless it be found in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. But if the spiritual life of Man be, as He taught, eternal, and if it be a life beginning on earth but transcending the earthly bounds of place or time, then the identity of the life before and after death would seem to imply that they who knew and loved each other upon earth will not forfeit the exquisite happiness of such mutual knowledge and love in the world to come. For that which passes into Immor- tality is the whole man, except only his body. It is the person himself, his consciousness, his intellect, his moral, emotional and spiritual being. For per- sonality survives death. It is the soul, which begins a new or larger life, but does not begin life, behind the veil. The earthly human material relations of the present life disappear when the body moulders in the grave, as our Lord Himself teaches when He says that there is no such thing as marrying or giving in marriage in eternity ; but the spiritual affections and affinities endure eternally. And, where no loss of personality takes place, the power of mutual recognition must remain. The poet of the /// Memoriam in his musings upon the Eternal Life in which he exhibited so strong a faith puts this truth clearly — 340 THE HOPE OF iMMOkTALlTY " Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside ; And I shall know him when we meet." Such is the Christian thought of the dead as hving still, and living a life more subtle and spiritual than upon earth ; and of all thoughts it is perhaps the most hallowing, the most ennobling in its in- fluence upon mankind. For he who believes in the life of the dead must himself live not unworthily of the dead. " How pure at heart and sound in head, With what Divine affections bold Should be the man whose thought would hold An hour's communion with the dead." Le culte des morts — that beautiful habit and act of the Catholic Faith — needs revival in Protestant Theology. Protestantism, which so well exhibits the strength, and so ill the poetry or romance of religion, and is always in danger of losing the delicate flower of devotion, has too much forgotten the dead. It has buried them out of mind as out of sight. It has not thought of them as dwelling in communion with the progress, the sympathies, the aspirations of the holy and eternal souls upon earth. It will not be altogether in vain that this Essay has been written, if it shall help to inspire any living human soul with a more AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 341 tender and constant memory of the dead. The Festival of All Souls is a commemoration which enriches and ennobles Humanity. Thus to one who lives on earth the Eternal Life which is Christ's revelation and benediction to the world, death, it would seem, makes some such diffe- rence as this : It is a rending of the veil of the flesh. It is a passing, as it were, within the sanctuary. It is a quickening of the intellectual and moral sensi- bility. The faculties and energies of the soul are intensified, as the material barriers which the body sets to them are done away. Thus faith merges in knowledge. Hope attains to realisation. Life be- comes a pure spiritual activity. Whatever is gross or material or sensual in human nature ceases. Whatever is pure and sacred is purified and sancti- fied. The soul, unclouded and unimpeded, stands before God. This is the celestial state ; the beatific vision. It is for this that the saints have prayed so long and striven. Of its felicity they have enjoyed glimpses few and far, as when St. Paul was " caught up to the third heaven " and ^^ heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter." ^ But such rapture is only the faint anticipation of the * 2 Corinthians xii. 24. 342 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY beatitude which the souls, redeemed by Christ, enjoy for ever and ever. Of Hell, as it is called, and of the disciplinary process to which unhallowed souls are subjected when this life is ended, it is impossible to form a conception save through the contrast in which it stands to the beatific state ; for it has not been the Will of God to reveal more than its mere shadowy outline. But if the flesh or material part of human nature is indeed, as has been argued in this essay, a force that mitigates and obscures the natural necessary effect of the Divine indignation against sin, it must be inferred that, when the soul stands at the Judgment-bar, the misery of sin, the pain of loss, the burning sense of all that might have been and yet is not and may never be, above all the ever present consciousness of alienation from Him to Whom Man's spiritual being tends unceasingly, will be an agony so sharp and subtle as to extort an exceeding bitter cry for the pardon and peace of Heaven. Beyond this point Revelation does not pass ; and it were idle, if not even impious, to dream of passing. God has taught in His Gospel as much as Man needs to know for his conduct in life ; it has not been the Divine Will to teach more. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 343 But the Christian Revelation adds to the creed of Immortality one special doctrine which may not be omitted, though it may be felt to lie beyond the just scope of this Essay. It is the doctrine of the cor- poreal Resurrection. It demands consideration, because at first sight it seems to make against the pure and perfect spirituality of the Life Immortal. And, indeed, it is a doctrine which must be accepted, if at all, upon the authority of a Divine Revelation. It is not recommended by such general arguments as have been adduced in behalf of Immortality. The analogies of which Nature is full, though persuasively used by a thinker so profound as St. Paul, must be admitted, as has been urged in the fourth chapter of this Essay, to possess but slight evidential validity as witnesses to the corporeal resurrection of the dead. It is not in this way that the Resurrection has been taught to the world. It is a belief distinctively Christian. The Apostles of Christianity believed, and insisted upon belief in the Resurrection, because they believed that Jesus Christ had risen from the grave. Of the evidence for the Resurrection this is not 344 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the place to speak. All that need be said is that His Resurrection must not be treated as if it were the final act of a Life which was in all respects, except this act, assimilated to the common conditions of Humanity. The Resurrection was not an extra- ordinary event in an ordinary life ; it was the extraordinary consummation of a Life which, from its beginning to its end, was all extraordinary. That Jesus Christ should rise from the grave was undoubtedly a superhuman event. But His claims to be sinless, to forgive the sins of others, to be the Judge of the quick and the dead, were equally super- human. It is the whole Life — the whole Personality — of Jesus Christ, not His Resurrection alone, which stands upon a higher than human level of being. His whole Life, His whole Personality is superhuman ; but it is uniform. To Christian hearts the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is an absolute assurance that the dead shall rise. *Mf the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised : and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain ; ye are yet in your sins." ^ For by His Resurrection — the most completely attested event in the origin of Christianity — He proved for all time that, where the * I Corinthians xv. i6, 17. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 345 Spirit is supreme in human nature, death, as an ultimate fact, is impossible ; and in proportion as men are inheritors of His Nature, His Immortality is theirs ; and the Resurrection of His body is an evidence, as it is an illustration, of the destiny await- ing theirs beyond the grave. His Resurrection, then, is a proof of Immortality ; for it could not be true if Immortality were not a truth. But while the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, involving, as it seems, the Resurrection of Mankind, is always treated in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles as the very heart of the Christian Reve- lation, it would not be consistent with the purpose of this Essay to go beyond the question. What will be the nature of the body as it rises into life ? The New Testament supplies an answer to that question so far as it affects the bodies of the holy dead, but not otherwise. For in the New Testament two dis- tinct Resurrections are contemplated — the general resurrection of all men, called in the Greek 17 avdaraaig tu)v veKpC)v, and the special resurrection of Christians, called 17 e^avaarramg y] Ik tCov vcKpwv, though it is true that some variety of terms occurs. It is to the specially Christian Resurrection that I now refer. 346 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY There are, then, in Christian Theology, two bodies, or phases of the same body, belonging to every man. One is *^ the body of humiliation," i.e.^ the body which he possesses upon earth, a weak, fragile, material, perishing, sinful body. The other is ^^the body of glory," i.e.y the same body but no longer material or moribund, a body conformable to the body which our Lord Himself possesses in His glory.^ And the change which will pass upon the human body at the Resurrection is that it will emerge, as the butterfly from the chrysalis, out of its present material environment into a purified and glorified existence. Bishop Pearson hardly rises to an adequate realisation of the celestial body in its dignity and spirituality w^hen he writes, ^'We can, therefore, no otherwise expound this article, touching ^ the resur- rection of the body,' than by asserting that the bodies which have lived and died shall live again after death, and that the same flesh which is corrupted shall be restored ; whatsoever alteration shall be made shall not be of their nature, but of ^ See Philippians iii. 21. AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 347 their conditions ; not of their substance, but of their quaHties." ^ The body at its Resurrection will be the same body, but it will be glorified. It will be emanci- pated from the limiting and tainting conditions of matter. It will be a spiritual and sacred body. It will be such a body as is necessary to personality, but not such as is necessary to material life. What the body will then be it is not given to Man to realise, unless approximately and figuratively. But there is one incident of the Gospel which illustrates its nature. It is told that our Lord on one occasion ^^ took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as He prayed the fashion of His countenance was altered and His raiment was white and glistering. And behold, there talked with Him two men, which were Moses and Elias ; who appeared in glory, and spake of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem." 2 The Transfiguration — that unique event in His human history — exemplifies the change which shall pass upon the body at its Resurrection. It indicates that the glory of the Lord shall be shared by His * Exposition of the Creed. Article xi. '^ Luke ix. 28-31. 34« THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY saints ; for Moses and Elias appeared with Him ^^ in glory." It indicates, too, the possibiHty of a spiritual communion far transcending the limits of time or place or condition ; for the three disciples knew and recognised the saints of olden days ; and so it sheds a light upon the life of Heaven. The Resurrection of the body is, as has been said, a Christian doctrine. It is believed, simply and solely, on the authority of the Lord and His Apostles. But it completes or consummates the theory of Redemption as sanctifying the whole triune nature of Man. It places the body in its true light, not as a mere prison-house of the spirit, not as a necessary centre and source of evil, but as a material form endued with a sovereign destiny, or, in St. Paul's words, as ^^ a shrine of the Holy Spirit." But all that need here be said is that in this true conception of the body of the Resurrection there is nothing that militates against the pure, immortal, spiritual, eternal life for which this Essay has been a plea. For this is certain that, when the body revives at the Resurrection, it will not be a material body, but etherealised and glorified. The faith of Christ adds a glorified, immortal body, however it AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 349 may be most justly imagined, to a glorified, immortal soul. This is the full doctrine of Immortality as revealed in the Gospel. Immortality, as this Essay has argued, is the in- alienable prerogative of Man. It is the prerogative not of his body but of his soul and, above all, of his spirit. At death the human body is dissolved ; but the soul survives in the plenitude of its intellectual, moral and spiritual powers. * Jesus Christ revealed " the Eternal Life," which was His own Life, as the true or perfect life of the soul. And they in whom "the Eternal Life" is realised possess in themselves the secret of Immor- tality. To attain this Life is the hope and effort of Christians. To give it to others was the privilege of Christ. Human nature, in winning "the Eternal Life " has reached the highest point of which it is or can ever be capable. It is the life that the angels live. In the cloudless contemplation of God's glory, in the luminous understanding of His Providence, in the devout adoration of His wisdom and His love, the human soul, being emancipated from the bonds of the material body, enjoys and exhibits its full affinity to the Godhead. 350 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY Beyond and above human apprehension Hes '' the Eternal Life" in its integrity. It is begun, it is not completed or perfected, on earth. No living soul may know its wonders or its joys. To it belong the things that eye has never seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived. It is the fruition of peace and purity and love. It is the satisfaction of the longings and desires by which human nature on earth is quickened and sanctified. All that is vital to Humanity depends upon the faith of the soul's Immortality. To plead for that faith, to make it reasonable and acceptable, has been the object of this Essay. For to Man it is all in all. Without it life is poor and sad and purposeless. It were better — I speak as I think — not to be born. But the soul which looks to the infinite spaces of Immortality may wait, in tranquil hope and faith, until God shall in His mercy make the mysteries of life to be clear. For where the Eternal Life springs up in the soul, there is the peace that passes under- standing. May they who read this Essay — and he too who has written it — not come short of ^^the Eternal Life," which is in Christ Jesus ! UNWIN BROTHERS, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LOXIjON. RECE^CFLT PUBLISHED. THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHARLES PRITCHARD, D.D., F.R.S., late Savilian Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford, Memoirs compiled by his Daughter, Ada Pritchard, with an 'Account of his Theological Work by the Bishop of Worcester. and of his Astronomical Work by Professor H. H. Turner, F.R.A.S, With a Portrait. Demy 8vo, cloth, los. 6d. 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