GIFT OF
SEELEY W. MUDD
GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER
DR. JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD
JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F.SARTORI
to ike
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SOUTHERN BRANCH
A STUDY OF DEATH
BV
HENRY MILLS ALDEN
AUTHOR OK
"GOD IN HIS WORLD: AN INTERPRETATION"
NKW York
H A k 1' L k & LKOTIIEkS 1' U I! L I S H K R i>
'S95
79GT1
f Tt'' 7
Copyright, 1S95, by Harper & Bkotheks.
All rights reserved.
TO AIY BELOVED WIFE
OnilT MAI VIII., MUCCCXCV
My earliest written expression of intimate thought or
cherished fancy was for your eyes only ; it was my first ap-
proach to your maidenly heart, a mystical wooing, which
neglected no resource, near or remote, for the enhancement
of its charm, and so involved all other mystery in its own.
In you childhood has been inviolate, never losing its power
of leading me by an unspoken invocation to a green field,
ever kept fresh by a living fountain, where the Shepherd
tends his flock. Now, through a body racked with pain and
sadly broken, still shines this unbroken childhood, teaching
me Love's deepest mystery.
It is fitting, then, that I should dedicate to you this book
touching that mystery. It has been written in the shadow,
but illumined by the brightness of an angel's face seen in
the darkness, so that it has seemed easy and natural for me
to find at the thorn's heart a secret and everlasting sweet-
ness far surpassing that of the rose itself, which ceases in its
own perfection.
Whether that angel we have seen shall, for my need and
comfort and for your own longing, hold back his greatest
gift, and leave you mine in the earthly ways we know and
love, or shall hasten to make the heavenly surprise, the
issue in either event will be a home-coming: if bcr,\ yet al-
ready the deeper secret will have been in part disclosed ; and
if hnond, that secret, fully known, will not betray the fond-
est hope of loving hearts. Love never denied Death, and
Death will not deny Love.
H. i\\. A.
.May 1, iSqs.
PREFACE
Death and Evil, as considered in this work, are
essentially one, and belong to Life not only in its
manifestation but in its creative, or genetic, qual-
ity. Life, in its principle, is not good or evil,
mortal or immortal ; but as creative it becomes
evil as well as good, and is immortal only as in-
cluding mortality. This is also true of its crea-
tive transformations, in that series which we call
its development. It is also, from the beginning,
redemption as it is creation. Redemption is crea-
tive and creation is redemptive. The fountain is
clear, and the stream clears itself.
This is our proposition. It is not new. It was
St. Paul's theme. Always it is the spiritual in-
tuition as distinguished from the strictly ethical
view of life. James Hinton, writing thirty -five
years ago, insisted upon the positive and radical
character of evil ; but he excluded sin from this
view — a reservation which seems to us unneces-
sary and which St. Paul did not make. The pres-
ent work had been practically completed when
the four volumes of Mr. Flinton's privately printcil
MSS. were placetl in my hands. Of these vol-
vi PREFACE
umes, comprising altogether about three thousand
royal octavo pages, I have been able to examine
only the first. I have found in this so many re-
markable resemblances to positions which I have
taken that, although the divergencies of view are
equally remarkable, I feel under an obligation
(such as would have no force in the case of a pub-
lished work) to allude to the fact. Mr. Hinton
lays more stress than I have done upon alterna-
tivity in cosmic processes, more, however, with
reference to polarisation and the vibratile charac-
ter of all motion than to the meaning I have had
in view in what I have designated as tropic re-
action. My idea of the term " Limit " more near-
ly corresponds to his use of it, though the applica-
tion is not the same. He thoroughly understood
the value of the paradox. Mr. Hinton's treatise
is not devoted to any particular theme ; it is
meant to represent the history of a mind in its
workings toward an interpretation of universal
life ; and so many of his propositions are of a
tentative character, being subsequently modified
and sometimes reversed, that only a critical sur-
vey of the entire MSS. would yield the residuum
of his thought. No one reading his writings can
fail to be impressed by the originality and depth
of his interpretation or to regret that his life was
not spared long enough to enable him to organise
his work into special theses upon the subjects
treated. He wrote at a time when the Darwinian
hypothesis had been but recently broached, yet
he anticipated much that has since been the re-
sult of patient scientific research. His little vol-
ume, entitled "The Mystery of Pain," by which
alone he is known to the t^eneral readini; public,
taken in connection with his unpublished writ-
ings, convinces nie that no writer could luuc
i^iven to the work! a work of such philosophic
value as he mii^ht have prepared on the subject I
have undertaken. After all, perhaps there has
been no deeper insight shown or more subtle in-
terpretation offered in this field than is to be
found in Robert Browning's poetrj-.
Recent science abounds in suggestions of which
I have availed most freely. Science discloses re-
demption in the realm of matter, and helps us
to sec death in birth aiui, in all development, the
radical disturbance. The course of science itself
is redemptive ; lost in its specialisations, its con-
finement .seeks release, anil an angel appears in
its prison. I-lven the reptile followed to the end
of its cinirse is seen to take to itself wings for
ascension. The bee, closely observed, is seen to
inject into each cell of honey some poison from
his sting which makes the sweetness wholesome
— a venom inherent in the virtue.
In my restatement of cosmic specialisation, fol-
lowing the clues furnished by science, I ha\e
sought to emphasise the creative (juality of Life
in all its transformations and the homely sense of
viii PREFACE
things in a living universe : to see that Genesis is
Kinship.
In our reasoning, which must be imaginative,
our path is through a series of analogues, which
cease to be helpful and, indeed, mislead us if they
are not themselves transformed in their trans-
lation from one order of existence to another.
Each successive order in the series of creative
transformations is a version or flexion, shown, in
due course of the general movement, as a rever-
sion. Then we see that from the first the entire
movement is reversion — the turning always a re-
turning — so that the universe reflects Godward.
We find that this reversion is conspicuously ap-
parent in the organic kingdom. It is triumphant-
ly manifest in the Christ-life.
But Death and Evil are continued (whatever
their transformation) into every new order — even
into the kingdom of heaven, being therein lifted
into their own heaven, where they are seen for
what, in creation and redemption, they essentially
are.
Faith boldly occupies the field of pessimism,
finding therein its largest hope.
Henry Mills Alden.
CONTENTS
rUOEM
THK DOVK AND THE SERPENT
l-Al.B
3
FIRST liOOK
CHAP. 1 wo VISIONS OF DEATH
I. THE liODY OF DEATH <>
11. IHE MV.STICAI, VISION 13
SECOND nooK
NATIVE IMPRESSIONS ...
27
TIIIKI) r.UUK
PRODIGAL sons: A COSMIC PARAIiLK
I. THE DIVIDED LIVINC. <.5
11. THE MORAL ORDER 133
III. ASCENT AND DESCENT OK I.IKE 183
FOURTH HOOK
Itr.ATH CNMASnCED
!. A SINGULAR REVELATION . .
11. THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION
III. CHRISTENDOM
IV. ANOTHER WtiUI.D ....
INDEX
PROEM
THK DOVE AND THE SHRPFNT
PROEM
THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT
THE Dove flies, and the Serpent creeps. Yet is the
Dove fond, while the Serpent is the emblem of
wisdom.
Uoth were in Eden : the cooinj]^, fluttering;, winged
spirit, loving to descend, companion - like, brooding,
following; and the creeping thing which had glided
into the sunshine of Paradise from the cold bosoms of
those nurses of an older world — Pain and Darkness
and Death — himself forgetting these in the warmth and
green life of the Garden. And our first parents knew
nought of these as yet unutterable mysteries, any more
than they knew that their roses bloomed over a tomb ;
so that when all animate creatures came to Adam to
be named, the meaning of this living allegory which
passed before him was in great part hidden, and he
saw no sharp line dividing the firmament below from
the firmament above ; rather he leaned toward the
ground, as one docs in a garden, seeing how quickly
it was fashioned into the climbing trees, into the clean
flowers, and into his own shapely frame. It was upon
the ground he lay when that deep sleep fell upon him
from which he woke to find his mate, lithe as the ser-
pent, yet with tiic MiitfiMiiig heart of the dove.
4 A STUDY OF DEATH
As the Dove, though winged for flight, ever de-
scended, so the Serpent, though unable to wholly leave
the ground, tried ever to lift himself therefrom, as if to
escape some ancient bond. The cool nights revived
and nourished his memories of an older time, wherein
lay his subtile wisdom, but day by day his aspiring
crest grew brighter. The life of Eden became for him
oblivion, the light of the sun obscuring and confound-
ing his reminiscence, even as for Adam and Eve this
life was Illusion, the visible disguising the invisible,
and pleasure veiling pain.
In Adam the culture of the ground maintained hu-
mility. He was held, moreover, in lowly content by
the charm of the woman, who was to him like the
earth grown human ; and since she was the daughter
of Sleep, her love seemed to him restful as the night.
Her raven locks were like the mantle of darkness, and
her voice had the laughter of streams that laj^sed into
unseen depths.
But Eve had something of the Serpent's unrest, as if
she too had come from the Underworld, which she
would fain forget, seeking liberation, urged by desire as
deep as the abyss she had left behind her and nour-
ished from roots unfathomly hidden — -the roots of the
Tree of Life. She thus came to have conversation
with the Serpent.
In the lengthening days of Eden's one Summer these
two were more and more completely enfolded in the
Illusion of Light. It was under this spell that, dwell-
ing upon the enticement of fruit good to look at and
pleasant to the taste, the Serpent denied Death, and
thought of Good as separate from Evil. "Ye shall not
THE DOyE AND THE SERPENT $
surely die, but shall be as the gods, knowing good and
evil." So far, in his aspiring day-dream, had the Ser-
pent fared from his old familiar haunts — so far from
his old-world wisdom !
A surer omen would have come to Eve had she
listened to the plaintive notes of the bewildered Dove
that in his downward tlutterings had begun to divine
what the Serpent had come to forget, and to confess
what he had come to deny.
For already was beginning to be felt " the season's
difference," and the grave mystery, without which Para-
dise itself could not have been, was about to be un-
veiled, the background of the picture becoming its fore-
ground. The fond hands plucking the rose had found
the thorn. Evil was known as something by itself,
apart from (iood, and Eden was left behind, as one
steps out of infancy.
From that hour have the eyes of the children of men
been turned from the accursed earth, looking into the
blue above, straining their vision for a glimpse of white-
robed angels.
Vet it was the Serpent that was lifted up in the wil-
derness ; and when lie who " became sin for us " was
being bruised in the heel by the old enemy, the Dove
descended upon him at his baptism. He united the
wisdom of the Serpent with the harmlessness of the
Dove. Thus in him were bound together and recon-
ciled the elements which in iiuman thought had been
put asunder. In him Evil is overcome of (iood, as in
him Death is swallowed up of Life ; and with his eyes
we see that the robes of angels arc white because tiiey
have been washed in blootl.
FIRST BOOK
TWO VISIONS OF DEATH
CIIAPTEK I
THK liODV OF nKAI'H
LI VK has f;one. There is no next l^reath, no return
of the pulse. No stillness is so blank and void of
all suggestion. The sculptured marble, through the
arrest of motion, becomes forever mobile ; but here
the interruption is final, fixed in a frozen
, ,„, . , . Fiiuility.
calm. 1 here is here no poetic cxsura, or
pause between two strains of the same harmony. The
way in which these feet have walked has come to a
full stop; of the motions and uses peculiar to this or-
ganism as a means of human expression there is no
continuance.
This abrupt conclusion begets in us a dull astonish-
ment, as if we were suddenly come against a blank
wall, an unyielding, insurmountable barrier. The op-
erations of Nature, the most obvious and the most im-
pressive, being forever recurrent, cultivate in us the
habit of expectation, so that we refuse to accept final-
ity. Lulls there may be, divitling pauses, but no ab-
solute conclusion. The thing which hath been is that
which shall be, and having the same form and charac-
ter. The same sun forever rises again, and whatever
the change of conditions, this change is itself repeated
in the uniform succession of seasons. The di.sappear-
ance of the individual organism, after its brief cvcle.
lo A STUDY OF DEATH
we scarcely note, since through the succession of gen-
erations we are surrounded by the same forms in all
their variety ; it is taken to heart only when the ties
of kinship or cherished companionship are broken.
Then, the first shock having passed — the wonder that
one so full of life has come into this blind silence — a
great wave bears us backward : we remember, and every
memory has its thorn of sharp regret ; every thought
of what has been is pierced by the arrows of sorrow,
as a cloud by lightnings, breaking into a storm of tears,
because that which has been can never be again.
Expectation is paralysed by this dull, unanswering
silence. There is no response to our love or our grief;
no future for our waiting. We are in no presence ; it
is the brutal fact of absence that stares us in the face.
We may not say that the beloved sleeps, for where
is this sleeper, who has so suddenly fled that it is left
for us to close the eyes and compose the rigid limbs ?
Instead of relaxation, as of one weary and brought to
rest, there is extreme rigor, as of one entering upon
some mighty travail. But this darkness veils not sleep
nor the free play of dreams ; and from it there is no
waking either to work or to weep.
This is the mere body of death, held out to us in its
stark and glacial calm for a moment of tender care,
which for it has no meaning — for our tribute of tears,
to which it is insensible ; for the ritual of
1 he After-part Qi^j. gj-jef ^^^ faith, in which it can have
of a Mystery. " '
no part. It offers no illusion ; every door
is shut. It is a mute and surd in any human harmo-
ny, a senseless contradiction, a brutal negation, an
THE BODY OF DF..4TH ii
irrational conclusion. If it were even dormant, then
might we await a transformation, like that of the chrys-
alis, or like that which happened to this very organism
when it emerged from its antenatal sleep. There is
indeed to be a change, but not like that. Instead
of a new synthesis, wherein, through a dormant larval
mystery, an organism climbs into an upper chamber
of the House of Life, freshly apparelled for a daintier
bridal-feast — instead of this increment of beauty and
wonder, we shall see dissolution, a sinking analytic mo-
tion, whereby every complexion simulating the proper
character and habit of a man shall be obliterated. In
this dissolving view all psychical and even all physio-
logical suggestions vanish, and are seen to be imperti-
nent to such processes as belong exclusively to the in-
organic kingdom. So alien to humanity is this change
that it is offensive to human sensibility and noxious to
human health ; and our most pressing xroncern, after
mourning over our dead, is that we may bury it out of
our sight.
A primal instinct urges the animal into seclusion at
the approach of death, and leads men to cover their
faces or turn them to the wall, signifying that here
beginneth a mystery not open to outward observation.
I'rom the beginning this was the soul's supreme con-
fessional, wherein it repented itself of the world, for-
saking all trodden ways, acknowledging their finality
and its own utter weariness of them, and was shown
the hidden thoroughfare leading to the Father's house.
The mystery has passed before its mere after-part
arrests our notice. There is in our staring eyes no
more than in those of the dead any speculation that
12 A STUDY OF DEATH
will help us to its comprehension. The gravedigger's
philosophy is as shallow and noisome as the work of
his hands. All considerations based upon what we
see, or think we see, of death are empty fallacies.
Hamlet at Ophelia's grave is not more fantastic in
considering " to what base uses we may return " than
is Claudio when he shapes his fears :
"Aye, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of rock-ribbed ice ;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling ! 'Tis too horrible !"
To the physicist death is but the exact payment of
man's debt to Nature, through the return of so much
matter and so much force to that general fund of mat-
ter and of force which, in the scientific view, remains in
all permutations forever the same unchangeable quan-
tity. But the scales of the chemist or his crucible
touch not the real mystery any more nearly tiian does
the gravedigger's spade. And for the most part those
homilies wherewith we help out the funereal gloss that
we have put upon death have the same open - eyed
emptiness and fatuity. Only to the closed eyes is
there the true vision.
CllAl'TKR II
THK MYSriCAI. VISION
The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.
While the organism is alive as a human embodiment
death is present, having the same human distinction
as the life, from which it is inseparable, be-
ing indeed the better half of living — its "'l^.^gX'^^"
winged half, its rest and inspiration, its secret
spring of elasticity and quickness. Life came upon
the wings of Death, and so departs.
If we think of life apart from death our thought is
partial, as if we would give flight to the arrow without
bending the bow. No living movement cither begins
or is completed save through death. If the shuttle
return not there is no web ; and the texture of life is
woven through this tropic movement.
It is a commonly accepted scientific truth that the
continuance of life in any living thing depends upon
death. But there are two ways of expressing this
truth : one, regarding merely the outward fact, as when
we say that animal or vegetable tissue is renewed
through decay ; the other, regarding the action and re-
action proper to life itself, whereby it forever springs
freshly from its source. The latter form of expression
is mystical, in the true meaning of that term. \\c
close our eyes to the outward appearance, in orilcr
14 A STUDY OF DEATH
that we may directly confront a mystery which is al-
ready past before there is any visible indication there-
of. Though the imagination engaged in this mystical
apprehension borrows its symbols or analogues from
observation and experience, yet these symbols are
spiritually regarded by looking at life on its living side
and abstracted as far as possible from outward em-
bodiment. We especially affect physiological ana-
logues because, being derived from our experience,
we may the more readily have the inward regard of
them; and bypassing from one physiological analogue
to another, and from all these to those furnished by
the processes of nature outside of our bodies, we come
to an apprehension of the action and reaction proper
to life itself as an idea independent of all its physical
representations.
Thus we trace the rhythmic beating of the pulse to
the systole and diastole of the heart, and we note a
similar alternation in the contraction and relaxation
of all our muscles. Breathing is alternately inspira-
tion and expiration. Sensation itself is by beats, and
falls into rhythm. There is no uninterrupted strain of
either action or sensibility; a current or a contact is
renewed, having been broken. In ps3'chical operation
there is the same alternate lapse and resurgence.
Memory rises from the grave of oblivion. No holding
can be maintained save through alternate release.
Pulsation establishes circulation, and vital motions pro-
ceed through cycles, each one of which, however mi-
nute, has its tropic of Cancer and of Capricorn. Then
there are the larger physiological cycles, like that
wherein sleep is the alternation of waking. Passing
THR MYSTIC/IL y IS ION 15
from the field of our direct experience to that of obser-
vation, we note similar alternations, as of day and night,
summer and winter, Hood and ebb tide ; and science
discloses them at every turn, especially in its recent
consideration of the subtle forces of Nature, leading
us back of all visible motions to the pulsations of the
ether.
Mechanism does not escape this trope and rhapsody,
being indeed their most conspicuous illustration, since
its fundamental principle is that of leverage, whereby
there is libration or oscillation, as of a scale or a pen-
dulum, or circular motion as of a wheel. In celestial
mechanism the material fulcrum disappears, and there
is the invisible centre of motion, of Might and return,
through tendencies which seem to balance each other,
giving the motion the orbital form.
In the nebular hypothesis Science has presented us
a view of the development of the universe from a neb-
ulous expanse, to which, in its final dissolution, it must
return. This immense pulsation is the grand cycle,
the tropics of which evade all human calculation.
Now all these analogues or phenomenal representa-
tions of tropic movement lead us to the apprehension
of the trope as proper to life itself; they are the for-
m;il imaginations of an imageless truth. The trope it-
self vanishes into its invisible ground, and wc have no
definite expression of it save in its manifestation.
The insistence, however, upon a mystical appre-
hension is not foreign to science, which demands for
its own completeness an invisible world. To account
for the communication of energy through cosmic space,
the physicist postnl.ites as a mcdiuni the invisible
i6 A STUDY OF DEATH
ether, the vortical motions of which have displaced
what were formerly known as the ultimate atoms. It
is but a step from the ethereal vibration to the pul-
sation of the Eternal Life. We say pulsation, still
clinging to an image, to the visible skirts of our ex-
pression of what is in itself ineffable, even as the
Prophet was placed in the cleft of a rock and so
had the vision of a God who had passed by, whose
face no man can see. We behold that movement of
pulsing life which is manifest, which is in time and
which measures time ; the alternate movement, out-
wardly apparent to us in dissolution only, is a vanishing
from our view into a field whither we may not follow
with the terms pertinent to existence in space and
time — the field of a measureless eternal life. We are
at a loss for predicates, and resort to negations. But
that concerning which our negation is — that is Being
itself, the ground of existence and of persistence, of
appearance and of reappearance.
In considering the action and reaction proper to life
itself, we here dismiss from view all measured cycles,
whose beginning and end are appreciably separate ;
our regard is confined to living moments, so fleet that
their beginning and ending meet as in one point, which
is seen to be at once the point of departure and of
return. Thus we may speak of a man's life as includ-
ed between his birth and his death, and, with reference
to this physiological term, think of him as living and
then as dead ; but we may also consider him while liv-
ing as yet every moment dying, and in this view death
is clearly seen to be the inseparable companion of life,
the way of return and so of continuance. This pulsa-
THF MYSTICAL I^ISION 17
tion, forever a vanishing and a resurgence, so incal-
culably swift as to escape observation, is proper to life
as life, does not begin with what we call birth nor end
with what we call death (considering birth and death
as terms applicable to ap individual existence) ; it is
forever beginning and forever ending. Thus to all
manifest existence we apply the term Nature [natum),
which means /on~fcr l>ei//,if l>orn ; and on its vanishing
side it is moritiira, or forci'er dying. Resurrection is
thus a natural and perpetual miracle. The idea of life
as transcending any individual embodiment is as ger-
mane to science as it is to faith.
Death, thus seen as essential, is lifted above its
temporary and visible accidents. It is no longer asso-
ciated with corruption, but rather with the sweet and
wholesome freshness of life, being the way of
.Absolution.
Its renewal. Sweeter than the honey which
Samson found in the lion's carcass is this everlasting
sweetness of Death ; and it is a mystery deeper than
the strong man's riddle.
So is Death pure and clean, as is the dew that comes
with the cool night when the sun has set ; clean and
white as the snow-tlakes that betoken the absolution
which Winter gives, shriving the earth of all her Sun>-
mer wantonness and excess, when only the trees that
yield balsam and aromatic fragrance remain green,
breaking the box of precious ointment for burial.
In this view also is restored the kinship of Dcaili
with Sleep.
The state of the infant seems to be one of chronic
i8 A STUDY OF DEATH
mysticism, since during the greater part of its days its
eyes are closed to the outer world. Its
^Death"*^ larger familiarity is still with the invisible,
and it almost seems as if the Mothers of
Darkness were still withholding it as their nursling,
accomplishing for it some mighty work in their proper
realm, some such fiery baptism of infants as is frequent-
ly instanced in Greek mythology, tempering them for
earthly trials. The infant must needs sleejD while this
work is being done for it ; it has been sleeping since the
work began, from the foundation of the world, and the
old habit still clings about it and is not easily laid aside.
In that new field now open to the nascent organism
• — a field of conscious eflort directed toward outward
ends — there is exhaustion and expenditure. There
must also be a special restoration, and this is given in
the regular and measured sleep of the adolescent and
adult organism, corresponding to its measured energy.
This later sleep differs from that of the infant in that
it is the relief from weariness, the winning back of a
spent force. In the main — that is, in all unconscious
activities — the burden is still borne by an unseen power,
but there is also a burden and strain felt by the indi-
vidual as in some way his own, appreciable in his con-
sciousness and subject to his arbitrary determination —
a burden which he may voluntarily increase or di-
minish. The loosening of the strain he does not thus
feel to be of his own ordering. Sleep comes to him as
does the night whereto it seems to belong. He may
resist it, but it will come, overtaking even the sentinel
at his post; or, again, he may court it with all dili-
gence and it shall fly away.
THE MYSTICAL y IS/ON 19
I'liat whicli we have been considering as the death
that is in every moment is a reaction proper to life it-
self, waking or sleeping, whereby it is renewed, sharing
at once Time and Eternity — time as outward form and
eternity as its essential quality. Sleep is a special re-
laxation, relieving a special strain. As daily we build
with effort and design an elaborate superstructure
above the living foundation, so must this edifice nightly
be laid in ruins. Sleep is thus a disembarrassment,
the unloading of a burden wherewith we have weighted
ourselves. Here again we are brought into a kind of
repentance and receive absolution. Sleep is forgive-
ness.
In some deeper sense sleep is one with death, and is
proper and essential to life itself. Life forever sleeps
beneath the masque of wakefulness, as it forever dies
beneath the masque of phenomenal existence. The
more of life, the more of death and the more of sleep.
Wakefulness is but partial, and is associated more
especially with age than with youth. Sleep, also, as
we know it, is partial, not the inmost withdrawal to its
chamber of eternal rest. For the recovery of man's
strength life gives him this partial release. A saving
hand is stretched forth out of the darkness, snatching
him from the world and locking his energies in sus-
pense. The world of conscious experience is cut off
by a temporarily impassable chasm, as if for the sleeper
it had no existence; and yet it is only the desire for
that world which is being renewed in this darkness.
That which we commonly call the dream, whose stuff
is borrowed from the daylight, occurs only on the out-
skirts of the domain of sleep. It has been f.iiic iitl
20 A STUDY OF DEATH
that in a deeper dream, never registered in conscious
memory, there may be a return to the associations of
former lives, but this deeper dream — if such a dream
may be — imageless and having no outward moorings,
must also be inhospitable to reminiscences of any pre-
vious individual existence. Though there is a suspen-
sion of individual activity, there is still the confinement
of individuality itself, whose integrity is never disturbed
in any normal condition of life. In hypnotism and in-
sanity there may be a schism or refraction of the indi-
vidual self, and even, it may be, the resumption of an
ancient habit and familiarity — an atavistic reversion —
but not in sleep. Hypnotism seems to be a kind of
necromancy, whereby the hidden depths of conscious-
ness are brought to the surface at the bidding of out-
ward suggestion. But in normal sleep, whatever re-
sponse there may be to outward suggestion, there is no
displacement of "the abysmal deeps of personality."
Sleep, in this special sense, is, indeed, akin to Death.
But he stands this side of the veil, only simulating the
offices of his invisible brother, who stands at the very
font of Life, the hierophant of the Greater Mysteries —
those of the eternal life. Death calls with the voice of
Life, calls from the central source to the remotest cir-
cumference of the universal life, calls with every pulsa-
tion of that life, and is, indeed, if we may use such an
image, the return beat of the pulse of the All-Father's
heart, the attraction of all being to its centre of rest in
that Father's bosom, whatever may be its separate
movements in the cycles of Time and Space. Sleep is
the hierophant of a Minor Mystery, folding us in his
mantle of darkness, renewing the world's desire, recov-
THi: MYSTICAL yiSION 2\
ering Time. Death from within tlic veil instantaneously
and every instant transforms life from its very source,
recovering Kternity. Sleep is re-creation. Death is
the mighty Negation, whereby all worlds vanish into
that Nothing from which all worlds are made, the vast
inbreathing of the Spirit of God for His ever-repeated
fiat of Creation. Sleep suspends the individuality
within its embodiment. Death shows the inmost per-
sonality in a divine presence — that angel of each one
of us which forever beholds the face of the I'ather.
( )ur usual reganl of death is one wiiich brings into
the foreground its accidental aspects, not pertinent to
its essential reality. Even our grief for dear ones taken
from us dwells upon our loss, upon the difference to us
which death has made, and so our attention is diverted
from the transcendent office. On the hither side Death
has no true interpreter, and none returns from its true
domain to be the witness of its invisible glory, none
save the risen Lord. lUtt though the loved
Ascendent
ones gone cannot return to us, we shall go MiniMmion
to them ; and this faith which follows that
which has vanished, the Christian hope of resurrection,
lifts us to a point of vision from which it is possible
for us to see death for what it really is as invisibly an
ascending ministrant, whatever frailty and decrepitude
may attend the visible descent.
The pagan idea of immortality insisted upon tleath
lessness. The Christian faith in resurrecticm gives
death back to life as essential to its transformation.
Death is swallowed up of Life— included therein. .As
22 A STUDY OF DEATH
" Children of the Resurrection," we have no part in
what is commonly called death — that visible declen-
sion and dissolution from which our life is withdrawn,
together with our true death, leaving the grave no
victory.
We have only to allow ourselves the liberty which
science takes, to arrive at this view as a philosophical
conviction. We have, indeed, in juvenes-
A Physical j,g^(,g ^ visible illustration of an ascent of
Analogue.
life upon the hidden wings of death. If
man were distinguished from all other organisms by
the possession of perpetual youth, we who are accus-
tomed to associate death only with decline might pro-
nounce him deathless, limiting the province of mor-
tality to those organisms whose descent maintains his
levitation. Gravitation, which is the physical symbol
of death, was before Newton not suspected as a cosmic
principle. Things were seen to fall upon the earth,
but the earth was not seen to fall toward the sun ;
there was, indeed, no appreciable evidence of such a
tendency. Yet, wholly apart from such visible signs
thereof, Newton's mystical imagination leaped to the
truth (afterward reasonably confirmed) that all bodies
are falling bodies ; and in his expression of this truth
he made gravitation something more than is indicated
in the outward aspects of falling and weight — he called
it an attraction, so that his thought became the mys-
tical apprehension of an unseen but universal cosmic
bond. Thus though man had never shown any visible
signs of decline, some Newton would have arisen in
the physiological field and asserted his mortality, see-
THE MYSTICAL VISION 23
ing tliat in youlli death is swallowed up of life, as grav-
itation is in the ascent of every organism and in the
sustained distance from the sun of every planet.
Every organism has an action and reaction quite dis-
tinct from those of inorganic substances, and which
vanish from our view before there is left behind merely
"the dust that riseth up and is lightly laid again." In
tiic complex human life there is much more that van-
ishes — the passing of a spiritual as well as a physiolog-
ical mystery, far withdrawn from outward observation
before the sceptical physicist or pessimist seizes upon
the mere residuum or precipitate as the object of his
fruitless investigation — fruitless, at least, as having anv
pertinence to human destiny. The body which Death
leaves behind is surrendered to that inorganic ciiemis-
try which was formerly in alliance with the more subtle
actions and reactions of a distinctively human life, and
to the physical bond of gravitation wliich was once the
condition of its consistency but w hich now brings it to
the dust. Are we any more mystical than N'ewton and
Laplace in our conviction that Death as a part of the
higher life is its unseen bond — the way of return to its
source ?
In the cycle of every living organism there is a de-
scending as well as an ascending movement — age as
well as youth, so that the forces to which
the outward structure is finally abandoned ^^^c^l'h!"'
seem to have upon it a lien anticipating
their full jDossession. This is simply saying that tiic
life and death proper to the organism are gradually
withdrawing before tliey together wliolly vanish, Icav-
24 A STUDY OF DEATH
ing the field to lower life and death. But there is no
claim of the lower upon the higher, save through the
surrender made by the higher as a part of its proper
destiny. The signal of retreat is not given from with-
out but from the inmost chamber of the citadel, where
reside the will and intelligence which determined the
distinctive architecture of the marvellous superstruct-
ure, and which hold also the secret of its ruin. That
secret is itself genetic : invisibly it looks toward palin-
genesis — toward the higher transformation of the van-
ishing life, and visibly toward the outward succession
of a new generation.
So Death is Janus-faced : toward an unseen resur-
rection, a reascendent ministration, and toward the
visible resurgence of new life upon the earth, to which
it ministers by descent and which, in the case of the
highest organisms, it sustains by prodigal expenditure,
during a period of helpless infancy and dependent ado-
lescence.
Nor is Death to be denied aught of the grace and
beauty of this descent and costly sacrifice, aught of
the sweetness of expiration — the incense of its con-
suming flame, since these truly belong to our mysti-
cal thanatopsis. We close our eyes only to the weak-
ness and decrepitude, to the rust and ashes, to the
mere outward accidents that disguise the might and
kindliness of Death,
Tlie mystery of Evil is bound up with that of death,
and the considerations already advanced respecting
THF. MYSTIC^II. VISION .'5
the CM1C are alike applicable to the other. I'lir mere
body of Kvil, like that of Dcatii. is the after-part of a
mystery far withdrawn from outward obser-
vation into the unseen depths of creative ^''J*]"^
' of fcvil.
purpose, as tlie secret of winter is hidden,
beneath its white frosts and behind its dun skies, at
the very roots of things in the earth and in tiie heav-
ens, and is not disclosed in the fallinjx leaves or in the
cold blast that sweeps through the naked forest. In
our mystical vision Kvil is seen to be essential to life
— to its tropical movement of Might and return, hidden
in its nascence and aspiration, and in its descent iti-
wardly beautiful ami gracious, looking toward renas-
cence ; being in reality one with Death in its intimate
association with the glory that is unseen, anil with
the pathos of all earthly experience, whatever ntay be
its outward disguises and contradictions.
Even Sin, which is the sting of Death, must have its
reconcilement with eternal life. We turn from the
raggedness, the vileness, and the emaciation of the
Prodigal, and regard only the unseen bond which
brings him home, while we hear a voice saying : 7///j" my
son was dcaii and is alive a^^ain, lie ivas lost anil is Jounil.
Here, too, we but follow the mystical imagination of
science, seeing in the spiritual world an attraction as
mighty and as effective as that of gravitation in the
physical ; and, like Newton, we turn from the acci-
dental appearance of falling to the unseen reality — the
mystical drawing to tiie heavenly centre ; we turn from
the weight that seems a burden to that which in the
new interpretation becomes "an eternal weiglu of
glory."
SECOND BOOK
NATIVE IMPRESSIONS
WHAl" was tlie earliest thought of Death? The
most primitive religious cult of which we have
any record was the worship of ancestors. This car-
ries us back to a time when in human thought there
was no distinction between humanity and divinity.
Man was a god in disguise, wearing the masque of
1 iine. and Death was the unmasquing of
.... !• ■ 1 1 1 • • • Native Im-
his divinity. Lvidently this ancient imag- predion or
inalion was in no wise misled by the dimin- ""'h
uendo of a descending movement that seemed to end
in utter weakness; the vanishing point divided appar-
ent impotence from an infinitude of power. 'I'o pass
wholly into the unseen was to re - enter the latL-nt
ground of that potency of which the visible world w.is
the manifestation in a continuous creation ; and, in
tiiis restoration of iiigher power, there was no oblitera-
tion of personality but rather an enhancement of it, so
that tile pulsations of the universe seemed to be from
stronger hearts than beat upon the earth.
The mighty resurgence of life in dawns and M^Rinlcr
spring-times was especiallv and most inti- «•■•»"«•><;
. . ' . l.iviiiR
niately associated with the dead — it was
their Kaster. Thus it ha|)penetl that trees and in-
deed all plant life came to be thought of as mysticallv
e.xpressing the newness and elastic upspringing of life
30 A STUDY OF DEATH
that had been buried out of sight, buried like the seed
which dissolves for germination, sown in weakness
and raised in strength, sown in corruption and raised
in incorruption. The golden myrtle bough which Virgil
makes ^neas pluck before he can descend to Hades is
a survival of the old association, and primitive folk-
lore abounds in similar instances.
The serpent, because of its complete exuviation and
brilliant juvenescence every spring-time, was a charac-
teristic symbol of underworld divinities, who presided
not only over the nascence of all things but over all
increase and fruitful ness. Even in the later mythol-
ogy Pluto was the god of wealth.
The reader will immediately connect all this with
what has already been presented as the mystical vision
of Death, and ree how accordant with that view was
man's earliest impression.
The modern habit, into whose texture enter so many
and so varied strains of sentiment, thought, and lan-
guage, is closely wrapped about us, and is quickly
adopted by each new generation, so that we have quite
lost the native sense of things ; and even so much of
it as lingered about our infancy is irrecoverable by
us save in the faintest reminiscences. The scarcely
awakened sensibility of the child of to-day is forth-
with clad in raiment ready-made and thrust upon it,
and confronts elaborate artificial structures that con-
fine it in many ways, while in others it is stimulated
by suggestions forcing it into the vast perspective of
intellectual and cxsthetic symbolism. In rare instances
is the child saved from this too hasty investiture by
fortunate neglect or the still more happy circumstance
N.^riri: /.\//7v7;.S.S/U,V.S 3 1
of solitude in the presence of Nature, and so enters into
the kin<;dom of tlie naive ; and in all cases he has some
protection throuj^h the long, slow waves of feeling that
resist invasion and fraction. Hut generally these mu-
niments of childhood's native realm are soon broken
down, and such impressions as are won in their naked
purity are rapidly dissipated.
It is difficult for us to abolish our perspective, and
such impressionism as we have in recent art and liter-
ature is so remote from native sensibility that it be-
longs rather to the end than to the beginning of things,
to they/// i/c- sihie than to a primitive age.
Poe and Maeterlinck are far removed from Homer,
who himself belongs to a period representing the youth
of the world, not its infancy. The impression of death
in Poe's poem 7'he A'aT'c/i, while it is more subtle than
that given in Maeterlinck's L Intruse, is not naive — it
is the reflex of experience. The native intimation is
more truly conveyed in De Quinccy's infantile associ-
ation of his little sister's death with the crocuses than
in "the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of the purple
curtain " and all the other shuddering sensations in-
spired by Poe's bird of ill-omen. The refrain of The
Raven is " Nevermore." But to the native sensibility
Death is not an alien or an intruder; nor are the I'ow-
crs of Darkness unfriendly, being the true Kumenides,
promising always bright returns. That which is taken
from the light is hidden in the quickening matrix. 'I'he
last gift of vanishing life is a seed, suggesting at once
burial and germination. Thus the many-seeded pome-
granate was the pledge between Persephone and Plu-
to. A sculptured slab recently excavated i" A"!' i
32 A STUDY OF DEATH
shows the Eumenides in their most archaic representa-
tion, before they were transformed into Furies. They
are figured as benignant goddesses, each holding in
one hand a serpent and in the other a pomegranate,
and before them stand a young husband and wife, ex-
pecting a blessing.
The later pagan mythology was as wide a divergence
from primitive impressions as is dogmatic theology
from early Christian feeling. The rude infancy of
humanity left of itself no record, and there is little to
reward our most diligent quest of the naive. The
savage races of to-day are degenerate, and their in-
veterate simplicity more completely veils the native
sense than does the complex environment of more as-
piring peoples ; even their myths, handed down by
tradition, lack the naivete of the Indo-European. The
retention of the native in indigenous races, in those
secluded from contact with others, and in those whose
development has been arrested, holds only the desic-
cated semblance, like an embalmed mummy ; and the
return of the native in degenerate races is no true res-
toration, belying and contradicting its original, being
indeed the more fallacious because of a fancied re-
semblance. The wildness of an old garden, once cul-
tivated but now come to decay, bears no true likeness
to the wildness of native flowers.
The archceological researches of this century have
given us some glimpses of a quasi-primitive humanity,
mere fugitive hints which, after all, are not more sig-
nificant than those furnished by old Hebrew scripture
in certain passages caught and held there from some
otherwise long-forgotten past.
N.-iTtyF. IMrRF.SSIONS 2>i
II
The childhood of a race has this in common witii
the infancy of an individual — that its larger familiarity
is with the invisible ; it is naturally mysti-
cal. The primitive man has not that facile Mys'lci'm.
handling of things which takes away their
wonder, nor that ease of thought and speech which
provides for him a fund of loose words and notions
which he can toss to and fro daringly and at random.
A look, a spoken word, an idea, a dream, is fatally real
to him, for gooil or for evil ; and he invests everything
about him with an ominous signilicance. Tokens have
not become common coin. 11 is industry is concerned
with living things, with flocks and herds. In his com-
merce values are real, not merely representative. To
him Nature lives in every fibre of her being, nothing
is motionless or insensate ; it is a Mowing world. No
masterful meddling or violence on his part disturbs
this impression. The growing tree is not to him some-
tiiing to be thought of simply for his use ; the forests
are as free from his invasion as the clouds above them,
and the streams pursue their course without diversion
or disturbance. There is nothing to break the living
veil of illusion — a shimmering veil of lights and siiail-
ows, of comings and goings, pulsing witii the beating
heart of the (Ireat Mother, whose changeful garment
forever hides and forever discloses the charm of her
wondrous beauty. In tiie free play of this sincere life,
where his naivete answered to the perennial freshness
of the world, there was no room for the unreal play.
3
34 A STUDY OF DEATH
No sharply defined perspective furnished the ground
for distinction between small and great, high or low.
There could be no idolatry in the Alagnificat of a wor-
ship that exalted the meanest creature. The sublime
superstition which lifted the lowest phenomenon to the
highest plane had nothing in common with what we
call superstition, whose omens are fortuitous and triv-
ial, and whose signs have lost their significance. To-
temism (as we understand it), fetichism, witchcraft, and
sorcery are perfunctory relics of what was once a living
correspondence. VVe juggle with the dry twigs of what
was then the green tree of life. All that we imagine
as possible in clairvoyance was more than realised in
the primitive sensibility, not as yet disturbed and con-
fused by those facile mental processes which loosen
the bond of the eternal familiarity.
When appropriation was limited to living uses, the
possession of things was not tenacious enough to im-
prison the soul in an artificial environment ; and thus
inward meanings were conserved in their newness. In
this regard of the world the new was still the old, the
surprise deepening the sense of familiarity. Time itself,
in the childhood of the world, is the reflex of eternity.
When only living uses were regarded, the seizure of
man upon his earthly kingdom was eager, swift, and
passionate, but the reaction was quick ; that which
was grasped was readily released. It is only against
the deep backward abyss that desire is a longing,
looking forward to untrodden ways, to a tale not yet
told, and yet falling back into the darkness as upon
the infinite source of its strength, with unfaltering faith
in resurgence.
N.ATiyH. IMPRESSIONS 35
III
It is peculiar, therefore, to primitive man that the
backward look seems dominant, even in eager forward
movement. Tenses are confused, as in the Hebrew
the past is the prophetic tense, and as in
our Anglo-Saxon the term 7ihis is the inten- Backward .md
sive form of the present, meaning sti// is, ^^°T^^''^
and so is caught passing into the future.
That of the stream which has passed is that which has
gone forward. In this primitive paradox and confu-
sion (which is, indeed, characteristic of all real think-
ing) we have the feeling of a flowing world, whose
end is its beginning, as the ultimate of a plant is its
seed. The prominence given to memory and tradition
in the early education of a race is not for the sake of
stability, but is rather the regard of a growing tree to
its roots, whither its juices perennially return ; it is
fidelity to the ground of quick transformation. This
backward look is evident in the phrase used in patri-
archal times, saying of a man when he died that he
was "gathered unto his fathers." Tiierefore it is that
among primitive peoples we find no allusion to a future
state. The idea of recession, of return, dominated
the native impression of all tropical movement. Tlie
blood was the life, and, wherever shed, it returned to
its source, as the waters returned to their springs.
This tidal stream or life current of Inimanity (limited
in the primitive conception to the family, or the gius)
found its way back to the well of its issue. Thus kin-
ship was the first of all sacraments, the fountain of ail
36 A STUDY OF DEATH
obligation, so that all sin was a kind of blood-guilti-
ness.
To this natural piety was joined a natural humility.
The tree of life, while it grows upward and its unfold-
ing leaves rejoice in the light, never loses its fidelity to
the darkness nor the habit of its descending juices.
The intimate association of man with the earth was
the largest reality in primitive faith, Semitic or Aryan.
The earth was the mother of all living, and the earliest
idea of divine as of human kinship was one deriving it
from motherhood rather than from fatherhood. Solar
and astral worship belonged to a somewhat later de-
velopment, when human thought entered upon a larger
range, taking the stars into its counsels, as is indicated
in the term cojisideraiion. Desire, in its earliest direc-
tion, was earthward, away from the stars — desiderinm.
The sun first entered into the sacred drama through
his association with the earth, through a divine hus-
bandry corresponding to the human ; and in the dark-
ness this association was continued through his par-
ticipation with the Great Mother (Isis, Rhea, Cybele,
Ishtar, Demeter, or by whatever name she was known)
in the dominion of the underworld. The sun-god was
ever a ministrant hero, like Heracles undergoing mighty
labors, and finally overborne by death, becoming a
theme for such passionate lament as wailed over autumn
fields in the song of Linus or the requiem of Adonis.
But in the Demetrian worship of primitive Attica
even this pathos was associated with Persephone, the
daughter of the Great Mother — so much nearer to the
heart of man, in these earliest mysteries, was the earth,
so much more impressive the sorrow of maternity !
NATiyP. IMPRESSIONS 37
From the Powers of Darkness and not from those of
Light was friendly aid solicited in the earliest human
worship. The I'itans were hrouglu into aUiancc with
man before he lifted his eyes in prayer to Apollo.
Divinity had its home in the earth, and its haunts in
the springs whicii quicken the ground. Death opened
not the gates of heaven ; and even at a later period,
when God was exalted, as the Most High, into the
heaven of heavens, the translation of mijrtals to His
presence was exceptional. Paradise, like Sheol. was
beneath the waters, and it was possible to look from
one into the other. In the most primitive period all
men alike passed to Sheol at death, the idea of Para-
dise, like that of Klysium, being a later conception,
when penalties and rewards, as the result of a divine
judgment, came to be associated with a future state.
Indeed, as we have seen, the tlomain to which death
introduced the soul was thought of as past rather than
future — the estate of the fathers.
It is not easy for us to even ideally reproduce a pe-
riod when men lived in a primary field so directly vital
that their uprightness seemed to them like that of a
tree, a living righteousness, having no consecpience
save in its fruit, the ultimate of which is expressed in
its seed ; when they looked upward by feeling down
ward, and forward by feeling backward ; when not only
the springs of life were divine, but its wlu)le procedure
so entirely of divine ordinance that to think of it as .1
probation or an experiment would have seemed blas-
phemous. The sense of a real Presence, holding them
by an inevitable bond, forbade conceptions quite ger-
mane to modern experience, when men think of them-
79G71
38 A STUDY OF DEATH
selves as the arbiters of their destiny. In the primi-
tive thought good and evil, blessing and damnation,
belonged to life, as such, from its beginning, even as
light and darkness, pleasure and pain. To the native
impression fear is as natural as hope, sensibility itself
having its beginning in tremor and irritation.
This view of primitive man is quite as mystical as
was the primitive man's view of life, and is largely the
product of our imagination. We can only ideally re-
produce absolute realism, and the men who had most
absolutely the historic sense are themselves prehis-
toric. The native man is as much a mystery to us as
a man born again seemed to Nicodemus. He is not
the man we know, and the attributes we have been
ascribing to him belong rather to dormant humanity
than to a progressive order. What amazing stupefac-
tion of abysmal slumber must have still held in sus-
pense all the proper activities of manhood in a being
who looked down to his God ; who confounded the
divine life with that of every living thing, looking in-
deed upon the lower animals, and even upon trees
and stones, as somewhat nearer divinity than was him-
self ; as if he must reverse the stages of his own ante-
natal evolution, in order that through the mediate se-
ries he might find the way to Him who was the Most
Low !
IV
The earliest spiritual lore was from the education of
sleep — of this very sleep which in the typical primitive
era withheld man himself, as in every new generation
NATiyP. IMPRESSIONS 39
it withlujicis the infant, froni merely outward meanings
and uses, and within the reahn of a divine
nusterv. What man was to be in his mas- .'^'"^ f'^"""
■' « tion ol Sleep.
tery of the world was a destiny hidden from
himself — a destiny dominatinj:^ him even while his an-
cient nurse and mother clung to iiim and often drew
him from the light which dazed his eyes back into ])er
helpful darkness. Indeed, it was from her bosom that
his strength was nourished for Hight ; she was at once
Lethe and Levana, giving him sleep and also lifting him
into the light. The lusty outward venture would have
seemed too perilous but for her helping hand, and the
visible world alien and fearsome but for her whispered
names of new shapes, linking them with an older wis-
dom. His infancy was thus the period of divination.
Naturally, therefore, he thought of death as divinisa-
tion — not as an exaltation through some starward
movement, as the apotheosis of a Cicsar seemed to
the Roman, but as the restoration of latent powers
through descent and by way of darkness.
We who know only the Hades of later mythology,
peopled by bloodless shades, weak wanderers shiver-
ing between two worlds, being neither wholly alive nor
wholly dead, but held in the vain suspense of an empty
dream, forget that, in the earliest thought of ukmi, the
dead were mightier than the living. The worship of
ancestors was the offspring of this impression. Men
covenanted with the dead as with the gods, and be-
lieved that they thus availed of the larger potency
and wisdom of the departed. I'he sword of an ances-
tor in the hand of his descendant had an access of this
superior energy.
40 A STUDY OF DEATH
In this time, wlien man especially leaned to the dark-
ness, he found the way to unseen springs of power, an-
cestral and divine — a direct and sure way, familiar then
but afterward forgotten or obscured. The spells of
sorcery and necromancy were the perversion of this
living ritual by which man once courted and won the
Invisible.
All rituals grew out of this primitive ritual, known as
the Way, but, losing the living reality, degenerated into
meaningless routine. The profound meaning attached
to the Way in all Oriental religions represents inade-
quately the original meaning. The plant knows the
way to the water-springs. The habit of animal instinct,
repeated from generation to generation, implies the
divining of its way of correspondence. The ancient
gathering of " simples " was the following of a path as
sure and as mystically familiar as that which led to
the means of nourishment. This Way began with the
beginning of an organism, of an embodiment whereby
the desire of the spirit became the desire of the flesh.
The hunger which shaped the mouth informed it with
a selective wisdom, whereby it found its response in a
world it had always known, being outwardly stimulated
and helped by a world which had- always known it.
The familiarity whereby Desire finds its Way in the
visible world, blindly recognising, courting, and winning
its respondents, which on their part are also seeking
and finding it with the same blind insistence, is nour-
ished in the darkness that is the background of all ex-
istence in time and in the world. Thus the Eternal
Bridegroom is met, in all His myriad disguises, in the
realm of His beautiful illusions; but in death, when
NATIVE IMPRESSIONS 4«
one turns back into the darkness, all disguises are laid
aside and He is seen face to face. And, as consub-
Stantiality is the ground of correspondence in the visi
ble world. Death is an awaking into His likeness.
Such was the native impression of Death. The eva-
niiion from the light into the darkness, recovering
eternity, could not be for the primitive man the occa-
sion of doubt or solicitude ; it was the ground of faith,
througii a covenant older than time.
Whenever any remarkable revelation was to be made
to man he was brought into " a deep sleep." The
ordinary occultation of the world in night and sleep be-
came for him liie supreme season — suprema tntipcstas
did, as it was phrased in the okl Latin sacred books.
Sleep was the undoing of all in man that grew in the
daylight, and a committal of him to invisible powers
which wrought in him their work, and from which there
was an inliux of divine wisdom :
/;; (/ dnuim, in a I'iiion of thf Xij^hi,
H'htii dfep slcfp falleth upon nun.
In slumberin^s upon the bed ;
Then he openeth the ears of men
And sealeth their instruction.
That he may -withdiaw man ftvm his purpose.
And hide pride from man.
In this occultation the sense of reality was enlarged
rather than diminished, raised to a higher power, and a
new world was created in a truer vision. The human
was so intimately blended with the divine that the dis-
tinction between them was blurred, even as in death
this distinction was completely lost. Accordingly the
intimatitMis of tin- dre.un were accepted as divine.
42 A STUDY OF DEATH
Wholly apart from the mystery of sleep and from the
divine intimations of the dream, there was for man in
this occultation the beginning of a spiritual phitosophy.
Sleep not only gave man a standing in a nearer divine
presence, but the fact that life and thought went on
when the body was motionless developed a conscious-
ness of the human soul as independent of the visible
world, and even of all that he ordinarily called himself.
There was movement which was not locomotion, and a
free play of mental activity involving an indefinite ex-
pansion of time. If there had been no night, a vague
and fragmentary spiritual consciousness might have
arisen from shadows and echoes. But in sleep the ab-
straction was complete, spontaneous, and inexplicable,
and there was added to the independent existence of
images their independent motion ; there was a moving
drama, wherein the self could become others, still re-
maining itself, being at the same time actor and spec-
tator. There was vision with closed eyes, and hearing
as with an inward ear ; while the immobility of the
bodily members seemed to be not merely the veil be-
tween two worlds, but the very condition of free psy-
chical activity.
When the habit of abstraction, thus begun, became
facile, the dream began to lose its importance as an
especially real psychical operation ; and its
The Awaking. .... i -i i
divme mtnnacywas loosened, until at length
the easily shifting notion displaced the intense reality.
A corresponding change affected the entire human re-
NATURE IMPRESSIONS 4^
j^ard of the world. Outward ends began to obscure
inward meanings ; the primary became secondary ; the
eternal familiarity yielded more and more to the tem-
poral; that which had been the most intimate became
alien. .Man was fully awake, realisinj:^ his peculiar des-
tiny as a progressive conscious being. His philosophy,
passing out of native impressionism, became, through
notional abstraction, the ground of the exact sciences ;
his language passed into its secondary meanings; loose
thinking came to be called close and rigid, as confined
within definite limitations ; art, in like manner, passed
from its purely vital field into that of representa-
tion, of images and similitudes; the sacrament of kin-
ship was weakened by the e.xpansion of the family into
wider communities ; and humanity flew out of its chrysa-
lis, as a planet from its nebulous m.itrix. The dead and
the divine became remote, no longer in immediate cor-
responilence, but visiting men as ghosts or as angels —
in either case still retaining their old divine designa-
tion as Klohim. The human cycle, distinct, self-con-
scious, and self-sufficient, sought completeness in the
visible world, evading and denying the eternal. The
conscious regard was mainly forward and upwani,
spurning the roots of the I'rce of Life, looking rather
to the fruit of the 'J'rce of Knowledge. (lod had re-
moved from His world to His heaven. Sheol was in-
habited by weaklings, and death became in human
thought the dread descent into that shadowy realm of
imjKjtence and insignificance.
'I'he Heroic age as represented in Homer's Epics —
especially in the Odyssey — had already lost the native
sense of the invisil^le world and all homelv familiaritv
44 A STUDY OF DEATH
therewith. The Hades of the Odyssey is a world of
gloom into which the glories of the earth pass as into
a garden of faded flowers. When Odysseus, still be-
longing to the world of the living, is permitted to enter
the confines of this awful realm, a throng of pallid
spectres presses forward with insane hunger to drink the
blood of his propitiatory sacrifice. He sees Achilles,
and the burden of his old comrade's speech with him
is envy of the joys of life in the cheerful light of clay.
The western sea bordering this underworld — the ele-
ment of water itself being associated with dissolution —
was the haunt of Gorgons and Chimceras, of Circe and
the Sirens, whose charms and sorceries wiled men to
nameless degradation and ruin. Homer's Poems and
the great Hindu Epic — -the Mahabarata — show the
Aryan race at a much more advanced stage of civilisa-
tion than is generally supposed ; and one important
evidence of this is the fact that already the Powers of
Darkness have been submerged and are held in awful
abeyance. The Eumenides have already been trans-
formed into avenging Furies.
The Babylonian conception of the underworld wxs
even more degenerate from the primitive idea. Our
first historic acquaintance with Phoenicia and Chaldea,
as with Egypt, is at a time when these countries are al-
ready famous for mighty cities, engaged in commerce
and in manifold industries ; and to their peoples the
thought of the world beneath the waters was like that of
a vast necropolis, whose dusty ways are untroubled as
in the suspense of an endless dream. Yet there was no
contrasting idea of heaven as a possible abode of mor-
tals after death ; all alike must pass from the life of a
NATiyii IMf'HHSSIONS 45
sunlit world to this realm of shadows. The earthly
aspirations of living men, in the full tide of youthful
strength engaging every energy in the accomplishment
of definite results, were jealous of invisible powers,
whose work seemed a negation of their own positive
constructions.
This apparent denial of Death was an illusion nour-
ished by the very powers which it sought to thrust into
outer darkness and oblivion — nourished especially in
the heart and conscious thought of man, because it was
his peculiar destiny to express to the uttermost the
eartlily mastery and the temporal familiarity ; to lose
himself in the monuments of his art. whose duration in
time seemed a blazoned contradiction of eternity ; and,
like one in a dream, to be buried in his terrestrial
economies.
The denial began with the first conscious progres-
sion — the first lapse from instinct into rational proc-
esses, but it was completed only when man became
wholly absorbed in his Time-dream, when, with eyes
closed to the invisible world, he came to think of that
world as itself dormant and oblivious. The Eternal
taking upon itself the masque of Time, so man, one
always with the Paternal, became a part of the mas-
querade, contributing to its delicious anil painful be-
wilderment through disguises of his own, in the deep-
est sense inhabiting the world. Anil Death was tlie
master of the revels. In his secret heart is loilged
the power of a resurgent life, even as it is Lethe who
is the mother of Memory. He it is — this invisible
Angel of Life — who out of the rich darkness puts forth
the blade and bud and babe ; all the fresh and tender
46 A STUDY OF DEATH
luxuriance of growth is but the imagery of his abun-
dance. His potence is the hidden spring of youth. But
also it is he who is confronted at every turn as a smil-
ing wrestler inviting to conflict; he who uplifts appear-
ing to the outward vision as one who threatens a fall
— an archer inciting to protection against his own ar-
rows, to wariness against his waiting destruction. To
man lost in the things of time, he who is the Deliverer
appears as Gaoler — he who alone faces The Real as
the Kins of Shadows !
VI
But to the primitive man — at least to our imaginary
type, never, indeed, in any record, known to us as
wholly free from the outward entanglement
irtiie ot — Death and the underworld were not held
Annihilation.
as thus irreconcilably alien, nor as thus
shorn of their might.
The native impression, on the visible side, regarded
the universe as a living reality — the diversification of
the divine life — and, on the invisible or vanishing side,
felt the elastic tension and expansion of that life as a
vaster reality. This impression was not confined to
the term of an individual existence begun at birth
and ending in death, but embraced all appearance
and disappearance, having a sense of constant pul-
sation, in which there is always a coming and go-
ing, as in an ever- changing garment that is being
woven by a shuttle now darting into the light and
then back into the darkness. This reflex move-
ment, as connected with vanishing things — with all
NATIVF. IMPRESSIONS 47
things as momently vanishing — spontaneously re-
bounded to the central source, and was not interrupted
or distracted by any too fixed regard of the external
world, but rather took that world with it on its refluent
tide, bathing it forever anew in the pristine font of an
eternal life.
In the dissolving view disappearance was not merely
negative ; it was more positive than appearance. It
was from the ground that Abel's blood cried unto
(he Lord. Something of this feeling remains among
the Chinese, who having written their prayers upon
paper, then burn the paper, having more faith in the
obliteration than in the literal expression. There is
marvellous virtue in annihilation. The mystery of the
universe can be nakedly disclosed only in the death of
the universe ; nevertheless it is the mystery of every
moment of every living thing — lost in the life of that
moment and recovered in its death.
VII
We dwell upon this native sense of the wonder
which life has in its fresh and radiant appearances and
its more marvellous vanishings, because it
helps us to see how natural is that transcen- ^'/'Keai'y**
dental mysticism which by elastic rebound
overleaps the apparent finality of death : which finds
in the point of rest the initiation of a miraculous mo-
tion, so that zero becomes the symbol of the Infinite;
which has such faith in Life as to give no credence to
its apparent diniiiuitiuns as signs of weakness, seeing
48 A STUDY OF DEATH
in them rather the intimations of some mighty trans-
formation already begun. Such a miracle was wit-
nessed in an eclipse of the sun — especially in a total
eclipse, when complete annihilation seemed to be fol-
lowed by renascence.
It is very difficult for us to even imagine this native
mystical apprehension of an eternal life. We have the
impression in some degree awakened in us by vast bar-
ren places, by the immobility of landlocked waters, by
the silence of deep forests, and in seasons of unbroken
solitude. It is not a sense of lifelessness in these situ-
ations, but of deeper life suggested through the ab-
sence of color and sound and motion, which are usually
so prominent in our perspective. In the outward silence
the inward Voice is heard. To us, perhaps, the Voice
seems alien, but to the primitive man it was that of a
Familiar. We shrink from intimations which he court-
ed, his solicitation having become for us a dread solici-
tude ; and the Way frequented by him — kept open be-
tween him and his ancestral home — we seek to close,
setting a seal upon every sepulchre, barring out the
revenaut. In spiritualism and occultism we attempt
an awkward coquetry with vanished souls — and in this
casual necromancy how antique, indeed, seem our cor-
respondents, even the nearest of them ! In insanity
there appears to be an abnormal restoration of the
atavistic channel. How significant, then, it is to note
that there was a time when, in a sane mood and with-
out jugglery of any sort, the living had communion with
kindred souls departed — a cherished intimacy which
made the darkness friendly and as fragrant as the
breath of love, and which with resistless charm drew
NATiyi-: IMrRliSSIONS 49
them within tlic shelter of oversliadowiiipj winj;s. with
in the circle of fatiierly and motherly mij^hl and
bounty.
VIII
The naturalness of this mysticism distin;^uishes it
from medi;wal and modern mysticism. In the primi-
tive view, while the unseen was the larirer
• Ml Mcdii-val
reality, the visible world was not less real, and Modem
nor was the fresh and eager desire for that •'>'*'"•■"•'"
world in any way suppressed or deprecated. Its sul>-
lime negation, whereby that which passed from vision
entered into a new and greater glory, had no like-
ness to the Buddhistic Nirwana, though it may have
been identical with the earliest meaning of Nirwana as
entertained by the primitive Aryan. Modern religious
mysticism is not content with the natural transcendency
of a transforming life, and is therefore disposed to sac-
rifice Nature to the supernatural, so that its consid-
eration of the external order of things, whether as di-
vinely or humanly ordained, falls into the slough of
pessimism. Only the blood that leaps into the quick
and full pulsation of earthly life can have an elastic re-
bound to its eternal font. The sense of fatherhood
and motherhood, imperatively linked with the sacra-
ment of kinship among all primitive peoples, could not
have tolerated the Tolstoian view of marriage. Only
artificial uses were excluded from primitive life, and
even these lay ahead of it as inevitable in the natural
course of progress ; but, the.se not yet existing, the
abuses of convention prompted no revolt liki- lli.it
which enters into modern speculation.
50 A STUDY OF DEATH
The denunciation of selfhood which is the key-note
of all modern mysticism could have had no place in a
primitive estate, in which selfishness had no expression
save as the natural postulancy of childhood — a great
hunger to which all things responded. The need most
real was that of fellowship. Exiled from his fellows,
man in the presence of Nature experiences a strange
sensation. We say that a man is born alone and that
he dies alone; but he is born of his kind and to his
kind he dies, so that, in either case, fellowship is em-
phasised. But, in human embodiment, confronting
the physical world, unsustained by human companion-
ship, his loneliness is supremely awful, and, if pro-
longed, would in time deprive him of reason and
speech and of every distinctively human characteristic.
Nature, to the solitary individual man, is dumb and her
ministration meaningless. In this situation he is mor-
ally and spiritually a nonentity ; he can have neither
selfhood nor communion. He is not a normal animal,
but defective, degenerate man. The isolated man is a
man wholly, uselessly, irretrievably lost. Neither life
nor death has for him any meaning, and to him God
can in no way be revealed. He is nourished to no
purpose, increased for no proper function, and even his
diminution and disappearance seem anomalous. If
we could suppose him to have never had human fel-
lowship, he would be even physically incomplete, a lost
half of a being, the dominant system of his cellular or-
ganism — an impcriiim in wiperio — having no response
and mocking his empty arms, however much of the
world they might hold, despising his pain and travail
as utter vanity. Life would have no romance of its
N.4TiyF. IMPRESSIONS 51
adventure and the universe no prize in its treasure-
house worth the winninj^ or for whose loss one might
grieve. Only he who loves can weep, and man loves
not the world nor self until he has loved his kind.
N it selfishness, then, but sympathy is man's native
feeling. Only in a fellowship can he find himself, only
in a human kinship the divine. The cosmic prepara-
tion, outside of himself and in his own organism, is not
for an individual but for humanity; it is the founda-
tion of loving fellowship and broad enough for uni-
versal brotherhood ; indeed, the operations of the phys-
ical world as related to man can neither have their
full effect nor be fully understood save in such a broth-
erhood. The preparation is for love. The very di-
versity of individuation, the apparently sealed envelope
of separate embodiment, forbidding fusion, stimulate
association and enhance its charm. The first man-
child born into this fellowship may become his broth-
er's murderer; ambition may produce dissension and
promote violence, and the very closeness of family antl
tribal relationship may lead to conflict with other
equally solid leagues, and so appear dissociative ; but,
in the end, crime, oppression, and war will compel
larger solidarity and ampler freedom. The enlarge-
ment may substitute conventional for natural bonds,
but within the scope of the widest convention there
will remain the family on a surer basis, and the social
activities in their freest sympathetic expansion ; and
thus Love that seemed to be hidden will remain lord of
human hearts.
In any period, therefore, of iuiman progress, selfhood
is but the reflex of fellowship, first human and then
52 A STUDY OF DEATH
divine, or rather botli in one. A subjective mysticism,
contemplating as possible the exclusion of selfhood by
an influx of divine life, is irrational. It is the expan-
sion of selfhood, the deepening of its capacity through
its exhaustive demand upon all ministrants, human
and divine, that at the same time provides a guest-
chamber for the Lord and an abundant treasure-house
to be exhausted in ruinous expenditure for the service
of man — a service most effective when it most truly
expresses selfhood.
Since all religious mystics, of whatever creed and of
whatever race, have, from the beginning of a philosophic
era, agreed in this assault upon selfhood, their unani-
mous expression commands respect. The general as-
sent to a proposition, as, for example, that the sun re-
volves about the earth, does not prove the truth of the
proposition, in the absolute sense, but it does indicate
a general impression as its real and true basis. What
impression, then, is it that has been so generally enter-
tained as to be the real basis of this mystical revulsion
from selfhood ? The word mysticism is from the Greek
muesis, the dosi?ig of the eyes — that is, one turns from the
sensible appearance, shuts his eyes to the visible world,
in order to see true. Some fallacy, therefore, some in-
evitable delusion, is conveyed to the soul through the
appearances of things to the eye of sense, something
which must be corrected, even reversed, in the spiritual
vision. The spiritual is thus opposed to the natural,
even as the Creator has a perfection as opposed to the
imperfection of the creature. The universe stands in
contradiction to its source — the natural manifestation
opposed to the spiritual principle. How readily has
NATiyii IMPRI-SSIONS 53
this radical distinction between the creature and the
Creator commended itself to the prophet and spiritual
philosopher of all ages ! " Vea, the stars are not pure
in His sight. How much less man who is a worm !"
"There is none good but one." If a man turns from
the entire visible world to such truth as can be only
spiritually discerned, shall he not also turn from him-
self, making the vaslation complete.^ If nature is an
(^i/is/<i/uiis, misleading him, how much more deceptive
the imaginations of his own heart !
There is in this impression the deepest of all truth
both as to insight and as to action: as to insight, be-
cause it is the comprehension of evil as associated with
all manifestation, divine and human ; as to action, be-
cause it is a recognition of the necessity of repentance
and regeneration to all the transformations that have
ever been or ever shall be wrought in man or in the
world, so that the universe itself is forever being re-
pented of and created anew— the new creation being a
redemption.
The truth thus stated brings the impression resting
upon it into accord with the native and natural mysti-
cism ; the evasions and perverted expressions of it
have reflected the errors of existing systems — such er-
rors as were illustrated in Oriental dualisms (most no-
tably in Manicheism), in Neo- Platonic speculations,
like those of Philo Judanis concerning creation as
the work of good and evil angels, and in much of med-
ieval and modern Christian theology. All these er-
rors illustrate the fact that philosophy, even as a part
of theology, is in its development not exempt from the
evil which is inextricably involved in all manifestation,
54 ^ STUDY OF DEATH
and so is something to be itself forever repented of
and born again ; these errors being a contradiction of
the spiritual principle from which they are the depart-
ures.
The central principle of all systems, divine or hu-
man, impels the departure and demands the return,
thus involving the destruction of every edifice that is
builded; it gives into the light and takes into the
darkness ; it determines the maturing strength, the te-
nacity of structures, the consistency of systems, and it
determines the dissolution also of all embodiments,
for renewal and transformation. He who would for-
ever hold to the structure, losing himself therein, and
looking not to the source of life, is in prison, and for
him the illusions of the light become delusions ; but,
on the other hand, he who turns from his dwelling
save for new and brighter dwelling, who seeks the dark-
ness save for the renewal of desire, who in expecta-
tion of immortality denies resurrection as fresh em-
bodiment, sets his face against the mortal hope, and
for him there is only the prospect of some level world
in which there is no world to come. But Life knows
no such sterile issue, and into whatsoever chamber
the Bridegroom shall enter, again he shall go forth
therefrom, rejoicing as the strong man to run a race !
The ultimate mysticism will be that of science vital-
ised by the Christian faith and of that faith illuminated
in all its outward range by science ; and it will be seen
to be one with native intuition, but including a perspec-
tive commensurate with the visible universe. Christian-
ity will again accept Nature, as indeed it did in its
prime, holding it to be one with the Lord, and find in
NMTtyF. IMPRESSIONS 55
its wonders as disclosed by science the counterpart of
the glory revealed in him; while science, which is al-
ready insisting; upon so nuicli that no man has ever
seen, will translate its invisible elements into the living
language of faith.
The sequestration of spiritual life as something by
itself, apart from the life of the world and incomnunii-
cable therewith, is an exaltation that cannot be long
maintained, since the power of an eternal life must al-
ways be manifest in the freshness of time, in the re-
newal of the world. A new creation is only a new
nature, having its own trope, its proper action and re-
action, and tile inseparable companionship of life and
death.
What new embodiment awaits us at death — that
death in which we have no part and that has no part
in us — we know not, but we know that it is only trans-
formation. "We shall all be changed." A new
sensibility woi-.Ul, in this present life, reveal to us a
new universe. When we come to consider that what
we now know as se.\ and what we know as death are,
in the present order, only specialisations occurring at
their due time in organic development, we may com-
prehend a possible order in which these would have
no such meaning for us — some such order as our Lord
intimated when he said of the children of the resur-
rection that " they shall not marry nor be given in mar-
riage ; neither shall they die any more." lUit change
itself, unspecialised Death, these belong to any life,
as does also the unspecialised essential ground of
what, in all manifestation, we call evil.
56 A STUDY OF DEATH
IX
These considerations lead us to dwell more at length
upon the native impression which regarded life and
death as universal and inseparable.
The primitive man made no distinction between the
specialised and the unspecialised. The vast
^f'^ir'^!!,"^ background of the unseen to which he was
of Death. i=>
conjoined by ancestral familiarity, and which
therefore had for him only homely and friendly aspects,
was very near, an intimate council-chamber to which
he still had ready access and from participation in
whose eternal decrees he had never been excluded.
Here it was that Love and Death and Grief had been
assigned their part and place in the cosmic harmony.
In the visible foreground — to the primitive man a
very narrow field, in which a mere fragment of hu-
manity confronted the mere fragment of a world — were
to be enacted the mysteries of the ancient council-
chamber, represented in masquerade, wherein the old
meanings were to some extent disguised, but by a veil
far more transparent than that which we have clothed
them with in modern thought and custom. Between
the visible and the invisible there was a frank and easy
interchange, with no strain of religious awe, no logical
embarrassment, no grave solicitude. The human, the
natural, and the divine were blended into one very
simple drama, from which we would turn in mental,
cesthetic, and moral contempt.
There was no distinction such as we make between
living and non-living matter. The whole universe was
NATiyP. IMPRESSIONS 57
living and sentient; and so persistent was this native
impression of an animate world tliat it was entertained
for centuries by philosophers, and even by Kepler, who
first formulated the laws of planetary motion. The
domain of death was coextensive with that of life :
Nature was not only living in every part, but in every
part also dying. In this earliest faith even the gods
were mortal. That sacrament of kinship in which love
and death and grief were first known to the heart of
man, and known as inseparable, was a covenant which
had no limitations. Divine love, like the human, was
without death unavailing, lacking its crowning grace.
I'he Olympian dynasty of gods, hopelessly immortal,
was a later conception ; and this dynasty represented
relentless law and force, lovinji not man, nor comin£r
within the pale of Inunaii sympathy. 1 )uring the whole
l^eriod of ancient paganism, the human heart turned
from these passionless divinities to those of their
sacred mysteries — to gods who could die and grieve.
The first estate of paganism e.xtended the intimacy
of human kinship till it included the visible universe.
The fire upon the hearth-stone was but a spark of the
llame of Love that spent itself for all needs. The
bread and wine that gave strength to man were sym-
bols of the largest ministration — a descent and death
for human increase. The mother, who brought forth
children from her body and from the same body nour-
ished them, was the type of the divine motherhood,
whose bountv was freely exhausted for all, even unto
self-desolation.
In such a faith there could be no rebellious com-
plaint against pain and frailty and death ; the ab
S8 A STUDY OF DEATH
sence of these would have confounded men, making
of Hfe a nondescript, a shadowless, glaring absurdity.
Nearness to life, in this native feeling of its reality and
universal pathos, brought a reconcilement of its con-
tradictions, and the exclusion of any element would
have disturbed its harmony, even though that element,
seen by itself, might have appeared discordant.
The primitive faith accepted death and evil, as it
accepted darkness and frost, and at the same time re-
garded them as parts of Love's cycle. Thus it empha-
sised the limitless divine bounty and indulgence, and
had no conception of human or divine justice. Pain
was not penalty. Blood that was shed called for
blood, but, outside of the bond of kinship, the voice
was silent, alien, untranslatable.
The social order has progressed through stages in-
volving a constant and ever-widening departure from its
first estate of comparative simplicity and natural piety.
While man is pre-eminently a social being, the first
and natural bond of flesh and blood kinship is so intense,
reinforced by its vitality confined within a narrow field,
as to seem exclusive and dissociative. The
Weakness of P^^ent has a jcalous love of offspring which
Primitive makes cveu a neighbor seem alien and hos-
Paganism.
tile. How much stronger must be the na-
tive feeling of a community thus bound together tow-
ard others not included in this alliance ! There is in
this feeling a strange mingling of fear and curiosity.
NATiyR IMPRESSIONS 59
The desire for communication will in the end overcome
the jealousy. The most interesting feature of the ear-
liest historical records recently brought to light by ar-
chaeological exploration is the frequency of messages ex-
changed between princes of peoples widely separated,
indicating also exchanges of visits and gifts and often
intermarriage. Travelling was an ancient passion,
and the eagerness with which the Greeks at their Olym-
pic games listened to the foreign gossip of Herodotus
has been characteristic of men in all times. There is
in the satisfaction of this curiosity not merely the charm
of novelty, but an indication of that amicability which
is the ground of hospitality, lu the beginnings of com-
merce a certain shyness was apparent — as in the custom
of leaving articles of barter at places agreed upon ; and
the fact that no advantage was taken of this shows how
strong, in the crudest conventions, was the sentiment uf
honor between parties too timid to face each other in a
mercantile transaction. Thus from the fust there was
indicated the germinal principle of a social order, based
upon honor and justice, which was to extend over the
habitable globe.
As the living bond was relaxed, surrendering ils nat-
ural force for the gain of structural strength, the native
intuitions belonging thereto were in a corresponding
measure dissipated. The bond of kinship was jihysio-
logical and instinctive, giving free play to the animal
nature in the full range of its sympathies and also of
its animosities ; but it is instinct that is submerged by
rational and conventional systems, and hidden beneath
the more complex operations that are its specialisation.
The expansion was inevitable, resulting in the establish-
6o A STUDY OF DEATH
ment of a government quite different from the patri-
archal, of treaties between peoples, and of internal police
regulation ; national consolidation ; empire as the issue
of conquest ; institutional stability, and the consequent
development of science, art, and industry : an organised
moral world.
Knowing how severe a strain primitive Christianity
has sustained in the material and intellectual develop-
ment of western nations, we can readily understand
what havoc ancient civilisation made of primitive pa-
ganism. Among the Indo-European and Semitic peo-
ples, the worship of ancestors w^as a dying cult in the
very dawn of that civilisation. The same intellectual
culture which banished the gracious ancestral divinities
brought in a dynasty which ruled the world by inflexible
law, and which was in accord with the social solidarity
based upon justice. The Sacred Mysteries were re-
tained, and with them the popular faith in a dying Lord
who rose again, and in a sorrowing mother, as also in a
sentient universe, which was inseparably associated with
the divine death and sorrow and triumph — so that there
still remained for the human heart a field of divine love
and pathos into which were lifted its own love and frail-
ty, its passion and pain. But there had been a remark-
able change wrought in this faith. For, while only in
the minds of a few had the ancient philosophy succeed-
ed in interposing an insensate mechanism between man
and God — a realm of matter, lifeless and deathless and
so cut off by icy barriers from human sympathy, — while
the scientific view which thrust the human heart back
upon itself, isolating its hopes and fears from their con-
nection with the general course of nature, was not wide-
NATiyE IMPRESSIONS 6i
ly accepted by the people, owing to tlic limited diffu-
sion of knowledge, yet in the very development of a
complex order there was an inevitable tendency toward
this fatal schism ; and the idea of a future state as one
of rewards and punishments was generally adopted.
The recognition of a moral order under divine sanc-
tion ; the conception of retributive justice operating in
the future as in the present lite, only with greater etTi-
ciency ; the distinct separation in the minds of men be-
tween good and evil, so steadfastly maintained that the
moral ideal implied the possibility of absolute rectitude
as the result of conscious determination, a perfectness
unknown to Nature and wholly excluding evil — these
were the results and reflexes of a social economy far ad-
vanced beyond its primitive estate and brought within
rational control ; and these modifications of the relig-
ious view serveil incidentally to reinforce the restraints,
however arbitrary and conventional, of civil government
and social custom.
Because paganism, in its earliest estate, was not based
upon the spiritual principle of universal brotherhood ;
because it never transcended the limitations of an im-
agination strictly confined to natural cycles forever re-
turning into themselves, even as associated with the
unseen world, it was therefore irreparably damaged by
the incursions of a hostile philosophy, which preyed
upon its vitals, as did Jove's eagle upon those of the
Titan Prometheus. The destruction or the devitalisa-
tion of its material embodiment left it no place of ref-
uge, since only in that embodiment had it a habitation.
Its disintegration could not be followeil by rehabili-
tation from any principle within itself. As its action
62 A STUDY OF DEATH
in faith lacked the complete expression of a spiritual
fellowship, so its reaction and contradiction in the out-
ward social order was incomplete in the realisation of
equity.
The structure of paganism, considered as a whole, in
its religion and its outward economy, was, like its archi-
tecture, low-arched, too limited in its scope to escape
ruin as a whole. It lacked the Master Mason to build
it high, availing of weight for support, of descending
movements for new ascents, of death for life. It was
overweighted, and crumbled to the ground all along the
lines of its construction, beautiful in its ruins, which in
every part indicated a magnificent virile effort, and at
the same time a fatal inherent weakness.
We shall see hereafter, when we come to consider the
structure of Christendom, that whatever may be the de-
partures of the latter from its spiritual principle — de-
partures repeating and often exaggerating the defects
of paganism — yet its scope is large enough for the com-
pletion of its cycle, through the consummation of its
social and intellectual development, in a return to that
principle ; and we shall also see how science itself in
its later revelations helps to bring the human reason
back to the recognition of evil — or what we call evil —
as a reaction proper to life in all its manifestations, di-
vine or human. The fraternal sympathy, which is the
ultimate fruit of Christian faith, will restore, in new and
higher meanings and appreciations, the universal pathol-
ogy naively implied in primitive intuition.
THIRD BOOK
PROniGAL SONS: A COSMIC PARAMLH
CIIArTKR I
THE UIVIDEIJ LIVING
I
"PORMLESS, imageless, nowhere, nowhilc, non-cxist-
* cut — a Void : and over against this, all that is,
tiiat ever was, and ever shall be — a I'niverse. Every-
tiiing from nothing. We have no other
j)hrase for the mystery of Creation, save as ^"1,10,'"
we express it personally in the words Father
and Son. For that which, in this contradiction be-
tween the essential and the manifest, we call Nothing,
for want of a nominative, is the infniite source of all
life. When we say of the visible world that it is the
expression of Him, we are saying as best we can that
the world is because He is; but even this idea of
causation falls short of the mystery, of which, indeeil,
we can have no idea, since our imagination cannot
transcend the world of images. How can there be an
image of the imagelcss ? We proceed through a series
of negations, abolishing time and the world, existence
itself, and when our annihilation is complete, the Void,
in our spiritual apprehension, brings us face to face
with the Father of beginnings ; the boundless empti-
ness becomes the boundless ph-rot/iii, or fulness.
Therefore it is that Death, which brings to naught,
5
66 A STUDY OF DEATH
discloses the creative power of life. If this power
were simply creative and not re-creative, formative but
not transforming, the world would be the seamless,
never -changing garment of God. From the first, in
all this cosmic weaving. Death is at the shuttle, com-
pleting the trope in every movement, every fold ; with
his face turned always to the Father, he whispers re-
lease to every living thing; and thus he becomes the
Leader of Souls, bidding them turn from the world
that is, that he may show them a new heaven and a
new earth, calling them to repentance and a new birth.
He is the strong Israfil, winged for flight, and ever
folding his wings for new flight. Under his touch all
things turn — -to noon and then to night ; to maturity
and then to age ; but we shall not find him in the old
which we call dead — f/iat he has already left behind,
bidding us come and follow him, while with one hand
he points to a new generation upon the earth, and
with the other .to an unseen regeneration.
Thus inseparably associated with the genetic, Death
is bound up with the mystery of Creation itself. The
evening and the morning were the first day.
II
Who can bridge the chasm between the unseen sub-
stantive in the grammar of Life and its genitive case ?
Who shall find for us the dominant in the musical gamut
— that original trope of genesis, through which the sing-
ing stars danced into the field of Dawn ? Who shall
show us the invisible fulcrum of the first leverage, the
THF. DII^IDED Ul^lSC 67
initial of the celestial mechanics? There is no ship
we can make to launcli upon the ocean which separates
the finite from the infinite, time from eternity, the world
from God.
There is, indeed, no such ocean, no such separation
— no chasm to be bridged. The web of e.xistence may
liave interstices; in time and space there are intervals
between things, degrees, similitudes, diversi-
ties ; media that at once separate and unite. Ki^.^KlnsII"
1 lere nearness and distance are comparative ;
but no individual existence is near any other with that
intimacy which each has with the Spirit of Life ; there
is no familiarity in the world like the eternal familiarity.
It is spiritually represented in the nearness of the eter-
nally begotten Son to the Father ; the Son is forever
Sent, yet is always in the bosom of the Father. The uni-
verse, expressed in the term Nature, reflects this inti-
macy ; it is forever being born, living from its source,
yet there is in the consistency of all its parts in one
harmonious whole no bond so strong as that holding
it to the Father. Procreation is the nearest image of
creation, involving at once otherness and likeness.
Existence seems a denial of Heing, because we are
unable to predicate anything of Heing save by the ne-
gation of our predicates concerning existence. More-
over the progressive specialisation of existence seems to
involve successively more and more a surrender of the
potency anil wisdom that, in llie essential source of
all, are infinite, it is as if, in time and in the world,
the Father had divided unto all His living, every adtled
complexity signifying greater multiplicity and so a
greater division. The denial is aj)parent only. In
68 A STUDY OF DEATH
reality all visible existence is to invisible Being as the
stream to its fountain, so consubstantial therewitli that
it should be thought of as one with rather than as re-
lated thereto, than related even as effect to cause. The
embodiment is proper to the spirit. The ever repeated
creation is genesis, a constant Becoming. The Eternal
becomes the temporal. The boundless life is the
abounding, and its bounds, or limitations, while on the
visible side contradicting boundlessness, are really the
bonds of kinship with the Eternal. The quality of
life is the same in the limitations as in the boundless-
ness. Finitude is of the Infinite ;• Form is of the un-
seen shaping power ; and Transformation is essentially
genetic, creative.
Ill
In an unchanging world — if such a world were con-
ceivable — we would have no apprehension of this genetic
quality of life, which is not suggested in a persistent ap-
pearance, but only in disappearance, or disappearance
followed by reappearance. That trope of a
ingView^rRs cycle through which existence vanishes is,
Spiritual Bug- therefore, a dissolving view fraught with spir-
gestion. ' ^ _ ^ \
itual suggestion. The end is lost in begin-
ning. All transitions, all the phenomena of change,
become luminous points in consciousness, leading from
the fixed to the flowing, from ends to beginnings, from
the visible shapes passing before us to the invisible
shaping power ; and when anything so passes as to ut-
terly escape vision — like the passing of a soul — we
have the deeper suggestion, from which arises a tran-
THE DiyiDED LINING 69
scendent mystical vision ; a power is released in us
which follows the power that has been released, into its
unseen realm ; and so we are ever pursuing that which
Hies, even through the gate of its Nothingness, to ap-
prehend, though we may not define, its essential qual-
ity, as our eyes follow the ascending mists till they van-
ish and we see the clear heaven, from which they are
no longer distinct, being one therewith and participant of
its powers.
IV
As through the trope which is Death is the entrance
to greater potency, so in that -of Birth there is an ap-
parent surrender of power, a veiling thereof in embod-
iment ; and the first Genesis, if there were
a first, was the nrimarv abnegation, wherein '^'"^ 'nvolve-
the Infinite became the Finite.
Standing at the gate of Birth, it would seem as if it
were the vital destination of all things to Hy from their
source, as if it were the dominant desire of life to enter
into limitations, ^^'e might mentally represent to our
selves an essence simple and indivisible that denies
itself in diversified manifold existence. To us this side
the veil, nay immeshed in innumerable veils that hide
from us the Father's face, this insistence appears to
have the stress of urgency, as if the effort of all being,
its unceasing travail, were like the beating of the infi-
nite ocean upon the shores of Time, and as if, within the
continent of Time, all existence were forever knocking
at new gates, seeking, through some as yet untried path
of progression, greater complexity, a deeper involve-
yo A STUDY OF DEATH
ment. All the children seem to be beseeching the Fa-
ther to divide unto them His living, none willingly abid-
ing in that Father's house. But in reality their will is
His will — they fly and they are driven, like fledglings
from the mother nest.
The story of a solar system, or of any synthesis in
time, repeats the parable of the Prodigal Son, in its
essential features. It is a cosmic parable.
The planet is a wanderer {planes) and the individual
planetary destiny can be accomplished only through
flight from its source. After all its prodigality it shall
sicken and return.
Attributing to the Earth, thus apparently separated
from the Sun, some macrocosmic sentience, what must
have been her wondering dream, finding herself at once
thrust away and securely held, poised be-
^''pian"*!'^^^ tween her flight and her bond, and so swinging
into a regular orbit about the Sun, while at
the same time, in her rotation, turning to him and away
from him — into the light and into the darkness — for-
ever denying and confessing her lord ! Her emotion
must have been one of delight, however mingled with
a feeling of timorous awe, since her desire could not
have been other than one with her destination. De-
spite the distance and the growing coolness, she could
feel the kinship still ; her pulse, though modulated, was
still in rhythm with that of the solar heart, and in her
bosom were hidden consubstantial fires. But it was
the sense of otherness, of her own distinct individuation,
THi: DlVlDlil) Ul/ING Jl
tliat was mainly being nourished, this sense, moreover,
being proper to her destiny ; therefore the signs of her
hkeness to the Sun were more and more being buried
from her view; her fires were veiled by a hardening
crust, and her opaqueness stood out against his h'ght.
She had no regret for all she was surrendering, think-
ing only of her gain, of being clothed upon with a gar-
ment showing ever some new fold of surprising beauty
and wonder. If she had remained in the Father's
house — like the elder brother in the Parable — then
would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous sim-
plicity. But now, holding her revels apart, she seems
to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful
dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among
the gardens of cosmic order and loveliness. She glories
in her many veils, which, though they hide from her
both her source and her very self, are the media through
which the invisible light is broken into multiform illu-
sions that enrich her dream. She beholds the Sun as
a far-off insphered being e.xisting for her, her ministrant
bridegroom ; and when her face is turned away from hitn
into the night, she beholds innumerable suns, a myriad
of archangels, all witnesses of some infinitely remote
and central flame — the Spirit of all life. Vet, in the
midst of these visible images, she is absorbed in her in-
dividual dream, wherein she appears to herself to be the
mother of all living. It is proper to her destiny that
she should be thus enwrapped in her own distinct action
and passion and refer to herself the appearances of a
universe. While all that is not she is what she really
is — necessary, that is, to her full definition— she. on the
other liatul, from liersclf interprets all else. This is the
72 A STUDY OF DEATH
inevitable terrestrial idealism, peculiar to every individ-
uation in time — the individual thus balancing the uni-
verse.
VI
In reality, the Earth has never left the Sun ; apart
from him she has no life, any more than has the branch
severed from the vine. More truly it may
of Distance" be Said that the Sun has never left the
Earth.
No prodigal can really leave the Father's house, any
more than he can leave himself; coming to himself, he
feels the Father's arms about him — they have always
been there — he is newly apparelled, and wears the sig-
net ring of native prestige; he hears the sound of fa-
miliar music and dancing, and it may be that the young
and beautiful forms mingling with him in this festival
are the riotous youths and maidens of his far-country
revels, also come to themselves and home, of whom also
the Father saith : These were dead and are alive again,
they were lost and are found. The starvation and sense
of exile had been parts of a troubled dream — a dream
which had also had its ecstasy but had come into a
consuming fever, with delirious imaginings of fresh
fountains, of shapes drawn from the memory of child-
hood, and of the cool touch of kindred hands upon the
brow. So near is exile to home, misery to divine com-
miseration—so near are pain and death, desolation and
divestiture, to " a new creature " and to the kinship in-
volved in all creation and re-creation.
Distance in the cosmic order is a standing- apart,
Tkiii nivini-n lining 73
which is only another expression of the expansion and
abundance of creative life ; but at every remove its re-
tlcx is nearness, a bond of attraction, insphering and
curving, making orb and orbit. While in space this
attraction is diminished — being inversely as the square
of the distance — and so there is maintained and em-
phasised the appearance of suspension and isolation,
yet in time it gains preponderance, contracting sphere
and orbit, aging planets and suns, and accumulating
destruction, which at the point of annihilation becomes
a new creation. This (irand Cycle, which is but a
pulsation or breath of the eternal life, illustrates a truth
which is repeated in its least, and most minutely di-
vided, moment — that birth lies next to death, as water
crystallises at the freezing point, and the plant blossoms
at points most remote from the source of nutrition.
VII
VVc need to carry this idea of Death, as .i->>uLiali.d
with Creation and Transformation, into our study of
visible existence ; otherwise the claims of philosophy
as well as of faith are likely to be sacrificed -n.^
to those of a science which, in its persistent Tendency to
Ignore the
specialisation, tends to wholly ignore the Crcnive
prmciple of creative life. \\e have no lear
of honest agnosticism, of dilettanteism, or even of in
fidelity. The real danger lies in the inflexible certi-
tude of the specialist. The peril touches not religion
alone, nor is natural science its only source. The ex-
treme specialisation of modern lite in every field con-
inies thought as it does elfuil anil tends to conserva-
74 A STUDY OF DEATH
tion and stability- Its perversity is in its opposition to
reaction ; it will not readily admit a solvent, and resists
every subversive or destructive element, unwilling to let
the dead bury its dead. This tendency affects theology
more than it does physical, political, and economic sci-
ence. The children of this world are wiser in their
generation than the children of light, because they are
not so closely bound by unvital traditions, and also be-
cause a merely utilitarian interest compels solvency,
change, revolution.
The perversion of human thought, in its attitude tow-
ard Death and Evil, and its consequent exclusion and
ignorance of divine absolution as a constant and inti-
mate creative transformation in Nature and humanity, is
especially easy to the modern mind which regards Nature
as impersonal and man's relation thereto as accidental
and temporary and mainly significant in its utilitarian
aspects.
Generally the terms of science are unvital. Force,
matter, motions, vibrations, laws : these terms give us
no impression of a living world. Science is confined
to a formal conception of existence, and is concerned
with quantity (the measure and proportion of elements
and their relations in time and space, mathematically
expressed) rather than with quality. Even the theo-
logian thinks of eternity as duration, as quantitative
rather than qualitative. The Latin for reason is 7-afio ;
and to the Greek all learning was mathcsis, from which
the term mathematics is derived. Next to the stress
which science lays upon the form is that which it gives
to uniformity, from which it makes those generalisations
that are called laws. These limitations of science to
THF. niyiDF.n lining 75
consideration of method and proportion are inevitable ;
but since form is of the essence and quantitative
relations have a qualitative ground, the true philos-
opher apprehends a reality beneath as well as in the
form, the shaping power and wisdom transcending as
well as immanent in the visible shapes of the world, and
thus in every fresh scientific discovery he finds a new
intimation of spiritual truth. All the manners of the
universe become to him traits of the divine Personality
in whom it " lives and moves and has its being." Too
often it happens that the scientific specialist, when he
transcends his specialty and enters upon the larger
field of philosophy, brings with him into that field the
unvital terms which are there inadequate and mislead-
ing. How, for example, can one who insists upon ever-
lasting uniformity, and so upon invariable laws, express
truly the spiritual apprehension of Life as a transform-
ing power? The incompatibility is more conspicuous
if these laws are regarded as impersonal, as belonging
to matter, whether independently or by divine delega-
tion once and for all, and, however imposed, as limiting
the divine operation.
VIII
But all human specialisation, whether in science or
elsewhere, follows Nature's own leading. We deprecate
materialism, mechanism, and utilitarianism, but these
are most conspicuous in the cosmic order. _
Man's development of outward structure, so- Pattern of
cial, political, and industrial, corresponds to
the cosmic development which prcpannl the w.iy f'^r
76 A STUDY OF DEATH
his progress, which, indeed, by the constitution of firma-
ments gave him a standing-place in the world. God is
the first materialist. Mechanism is celestial before it is
earthly and human.
Seeing, then, a world prepared for him, a world of
things ready for his arbitrary fashioning — metal and
stone and wood — things cut off from their living cur-
rents by natural sequestration, or which he might him-
self so cut off for food, raiment, and shelter, and, later,
for these uses in more ambitious and luxurious fashion ;
seeing, in his further progress, that he might lay hold
upon the living currents themselves and divert them to
his use in more complex and heavier undertakings, di-
viding them according to his requisition, or even holding
them in storage for his convenient and leisurely division ;
taking note, moreover, of a constant providence, answer-
ing to his prudence, and the regularity of Nature's hab-
its, suiting a never-failing ministration to his needs — is
it strange that man should have yielded to the divine
temptation, conforming to the divine exemplar, the pat-
tern shown to him not only upon every mount, but in
every depth and in every path opened to his eager
feet?
For, on the human side, there was not merely passive
yielding and conformity; there was desire, which seized
with violence upon a kingdom at hand. Save unto de-
sire there is no temptation, no stimulation save of a
faculty, no ministration but to a craving capacity. All
embodiment is but the extension of importunate desire.
Man's entreating of the world is first and always a pas-
sionate entreaty; he " has no language but a cry." As
his embodiment is the outward projection of his clam-
THH Diyinr.n lining 77
oroiis need, so all he feeds upon and gathers to himself
as a possession, all that he unites with through kinship,
affinity, and the ever-broadening communion with Nat-
ure and his kind, is an extension of his organism in
time and in the world, an expansion of his exhaust-
less litany. And all his prayers are answered. What-
ever may be man's sense of responsibility,
the divine responsibility encompasses the '^''*''".?..,!**'
universe, not only at every point unfailing,
but all-inclusive, embracing all wanderings and all the
wanderers. There is no system in which light is broken
by shadows and alternates with darkness, where the
darkness is not of divine ordinance as well as the light;
no prison-house or place of exile in which man can
ever lind himself which was not prepared for him from
tiie foundation of the world.
IX
The Father hath, indeed, divided unto all His living.
In the structural specialisation which has gone on
with the division, one of the most striking
peculiarities is the arrest and suspense of "s,'X'i""
living currents, giving things upon the earth
the appearance of stability — a tendency to solidifica-
tion, to hardness, especially at points of su|)erficial con-
tact, until the hardness becomes brittleness, and from
extreme attrition all things seem to come to dust. Wiiile
this is more noticeable in inorganic matter, it is also a
characteristic of organisms. With the hardening of the
earth's crust there comes to be a tougher fibre of plant
life, and the vertebrate animal appears ; and in each
78 A STUDY OF DEATH
individual organism age is indicated by the induration
and fragility of structure. The hands grow hard like
the things they handle, as do the soles of the feet from
walking. Use and wont beget indifference and even
cruelty in the moral nature. Institutions have the same
tendency ; rituals become formal, governments rigid
and perfunctory, industry a dull routine. Social re-
finement at its extreme is hard enough to take a polish,
and aims to present a front of cold and staring imper-
turbability.
The points of contact between man and the outside
world, after the period of his first childlike wonder has
passed, are mainly those associated with his handling
of material things that may be moved about and manip-
ulated at his option. The timid reverence that belongs
to tender sensibility is dissipated by familiarity, which
leads first to na'ive play, wherein there still remains a
trace of shyness, and then to the bold workmanship of
the artificer. The wandering stream of nomadic hu-
manity is arrested, and the movable tent gives place to
the fixed dwelling. Social stability obtains firm founda-
tions ; the shepherd with his living flocks becomes an
episode, lingering in the fields outside the growing city ;
metals, at first used only for ornament, are coined into
tokens of commercial exchange ; temples are built for
the worship of Him who was once sought in every liv-
ing fountain ; and over the dust of kings arise the
pyramids.
All this is but a continuation of that terrestrial de-
velopment by which the rock-ribbed continents emerged
from the flowing seas ; and as upon the continents the
web of life is woven in more varied shapes of plant and
THE DiyinF.n lining 79
bird and beast, so about the fixed structures of man's
inakinjjj Hows the human current in a slower movement,
l)ut statcMer and more manifoldly beautiful. The insu-
lation and stability are only relative ; nothing is perma-
nently held aloof from the general circulation. Water
held in the closest receptacles sooner or later finds its
way to the sea ; and the sea, which is forever erod-
ing and transposing continents, is itself continually dis-
solving in vapour. Resistance becomes the fulcrum
of leverage. There is no point of rest in the uni-
verse.
Nevertheless the progressive specialisation of life
lays stress upon the separateness and insulation, and
this emphasis of Time punctuates the Word from the
beginning, until that Word is made flesh in the Christ,
who gathers up all the fragments that none may be lost,
who shows us the Father, and who is himself utterly
broken and made whole again before our eyes, that we
may comprehend the glory of Death.
The emphasis of Time begins with Creation. He-
ginning is genetic, creative, on its unseen side eternal,
though conceivable by the mind only as in
lime and space. Time, etymologically, means "j'f i^n^^'*
something cut otT, a section, a season (tctn-
/<i:\/,rs) ; anil in like manner we think of space as some-
thing in allolnient. Study demands attention — an arrest
of thought regarding an object also held in suspense.
Tims contemplation (from the same root as time") im-
8o A STUDY OF DEATH
plies the intent beholding of things confined within a
circle cast about them, like a spell in magic.
All these terms, signifying confinement, definition,
arrest, suspense, are expressions of finitude, of a world
passed, as it were, from its genitive to its accusative
case — to the field of objective reality, appearing in this
view as measurable matter and motion, as broken in
time and space into related parts and sections and even
into inert particular fragments that often, though near-
est our hands and feet and emphatically real, seem
irrelevant, trivial, and inconsequent.
It is far away from the plenty of the Father's house
to the husks on which men starve. There the abound-
ing, eternal life — here the limitation and involvement ;
there the infinite power — and here at the end of things
mere dust and impotence, empty travail, stumblings,
vexation, defeat. Finally the extremes meet — starva-
tion and the feast, sickness and healing. Not a sparrow
falls to the ground without the Father's notice, and the
very hairs of our head are numbered.
We must needs continually keep this everlasting
nearness of home at heart, and in this personal way,
because of the apparent remoteness, and because the
ordinary course of thought as well as the tendency of
scientific analysis is toward an impersonal view.
XI
The divided living or, as it is scientifically phrased,
the specialisation of life, is a development stretching
through long periods, each of which is marked by the
THE nil/IDFD l.iyiNG 8 1
appearance of some new form of existence upon the
earth. While the older theology accounted
for each new stage of development by a *-''f»"*'*_ Spe-
series of special creations, modern science
has sought to exclude altogether the idea of any crea-
tion, regarding each new form of life as evolved from
antecedent forms through natural selection and the
modification of environment. The older theology, as
represented by Paley, attempted to explain the mar-
vellous adaptations which constitute the rhytiimic har-
mony of the universe by the operations of an intelli-
gence patterned after the limited and specialised human
understanding, first choosing to create and then arbi-
trarily choosing means for the accomplishment of ra-
tionally conceived ends. Modern science has, in the
rejection of this idea, gone to the extreme of repudiat-
ing divine purpose, explaining cosmic co-ordination
by an impersonal selective wisdom inherent in matter
itself.
By substituting creative specialisation for special
creations and postulating a supreme Personal \\"\\\
and Intelligence, transcending specialisation ,^^ ,^^
but immanent therein, with a purposiveness «:en«ient I'cr-
spontaneous m its working, not according
to plan as the result of choice (in our luiinan sense of
the term), hut showing a plan, not limited by alterna-
tive, but itself the ground of alternation. Christian phi-
losophy presents to science not merely the ground of
common agreement, but a view involving no more mys-
tical assumption than is involved in tiie postulalions
made by science itself of an invisible ether and an in-
visible atom— whether the latter be considered the ulti-
82 A STUDY OF DEATH
mate material particle or a vortical motion of the ether
— a view, moreover, which, accordant with faith in a
loving Father as the source of all life, also clears the
scientific field of problems that from their very nature
are insoluble by any possibly discoverable facts. Such
problems as are presented in the questions : What is
the origin of organic life upon the earth ? and How is
the psychical developed from the physical ? cannot be
solved by any data lying within the limits of scientific
investigation; they arise, indeed, and assume their most
formidable shape through lack of faith in the sufficiency
of creative life for its own transformations. There is
really no greater chasm between the inorganic and the
organic, between neurosis and psychosis, than there is
at any stage of the progressive specialisation.
Regarding specialisation as at every point a creative
act, the problems disappear ; Life itself becomes the
great bridge-builder — the poniifex maxiinus ; and con-
sidering, furthermore, that reaction proper to Life, where-
by it has solvency and escape from any individual syn-
thesis, and even in due time repents itself of an entire
species, rising again in some other body or in some
wholly new type of embodiment, then indeed that sin-
gular Voice, saying / am the Resurrection and the Life,
may give the transcendent note to philosophy as it does
to faith.
It is indeed a singular Voice, and proclaims a truth
which, from the foundation of the world, has been
hidden.
THF. niyinF.n uyiNc 83
XII
The progressive specialisation of life is not through
evolution primarily, but through involution, every new
stage of progress being a new folding of the
veil. The universe is not an unfolding of o("<^'"^
(jod, but a folding of Him away from Him-
self, until the manifold hiding is completed in the hu-
man consciousness which is the ultimate fold of all.
i'here could be no more arbitrary and mechanical con-
ception of God than that of Him as a vast involute, im-
plicating the universe. Progress would then be from
what is most complex, through a series of explications
to what is most simple. This is pantheism in its bald-
est form, abrogating the mystery of Creation, which is
also abrogated in the theory of emanation.
Both the transcendency and the immanence of crea-
tive life begin to be hidden with the beginning of ex-
istence. When God said Let there be Light, the light
became the first veil hiding Him. Therefore it is that
no man hath seen the Father at any time, and when we
speak of His power and wisdom and purpose we have no
real idea of these attributes, which arc known to us only
as mediate and limited ; and when we say that He is
Love, we express not the reality, since our knowledge
i)f love like that of light is from broken images only.
I'rom the beginning, then, is the eternal life hidden,
and though the veil hiding it be light itself, that which
is concealed is beyonil our expression in thought or
speech.
.At every successive stage of the cosmic develop-
84 A STUDY OF DEATH
ment, or rather envelopment, there seems to be a fresh
surrender of potence and sentience, though with great-
er truth it may be said that these are more and more
veiled ; the organic tending toward variability and fal-
libility as compared with the inorganic, and the vege-
table instinct being surer than the animal. With the
growing complexity there is increased uncertainty and
indirection, until we reach the hesitancy and vacillation
of rational volition.
As heat is given up in the contraction of the earth
and the incrustation of its surface, and as the solar fire
is subdued to a lambent flame which runs through all
the variegated terrestrial life, so is the universal pulse
modulated more and more down to its measured beat
in the animal ; and with the increase of temperament,
adaptation considered as correlation, and outward cor-
respondence, interaction and interdependence are more
pronounced, just as with the loss of heat there is great-
er conductivity. Sentience, which is really mightier in
the less specialised forms of life, yet appears outward-
ly and in definite expression more intense and finer
in more complex forms, and is more communicable
mediately as it is the more patent. With the veiling
comes gain as well as loss, so that we properly think
of later forms as more advanced, though in
Gain of Per- ...
spective in a Certain sense division signifies diminution.
Specialisation, o- i , • -i i i ^i
Sight IS possible because the eye is a re-
fractive lens, and thus only because the solar light is
tempered by the medium of an atmosphere. The
blind feeling of which sight is a specialisation is a
surer sentience, a divination knowing no distance or
indirection, a wisdom therefore whose ways are never
THE DiyiDFD LINING 85
missed, an unbroken clairvoyance ; but the intense,
confined specialised sense of ocular vision is an out-
ward openness, aware of expansion. That which was
once blind, feeling its way by dead-reckoning, like a
mole in the dark, now takes in the heavenly blue and
(under the veil of night) the stars beyond, making for
itself a wondrous perspective. The same blind feeling
specialised as hearing catches vibrations slower than
those of light, making for itself another perspective of
beautiful harmony.
It is not unity which is divided ; our conception of
unity is the refle.v of our thought of the manifold. It
is not identity which is diversified. Absolute homo-
geneity as the initiative of a universe is the
most sterile mental notion ever conceived „ '°''."^
Reaction.
in the attempt of philosophy to evade the
mystery of Creation. From such homogeneity there is
no genetic thoroughfare — no way out. The idea of
absolute heterogeneity, on the other hand, leads only
to chaotic distraction, which has no recourse, no reac-
tion, no way back reHe.xively into the consistency of a
universe. The genesis itself — a mystery hidden from
human comprehension, yet mystically apprehended —
is action and reaction, and we see that as a mani-
festation it involves at once the idea of otherness and
consubstantiality, the nearness and kinship, at every
remove, being the reflex of distance. We have a nie-
chanical and therefore inadequate illustration of this
action and reaction, as essentially one and inseparable,
86 A STUDY OF DEATH
in all tropical movement. Thus the earth in her flight
from the sun is, at every moment of the flight, return-
ing ; as in her rotation her turning from the sun is at
every point a turning to him. The reaction is in the
action, and we cannot logically separate the one from
the other ; and when we separate them historically, we
make the diversification primary, supposing flight to
precede return, repulsion attraction, and all function-
ing its inhibition. Following this rule of precedence,
we should reverse the procedure of Herbert Spencer's
synthetic philosophy and give the initiative to hetero-
geneity.
XIV
Certainly it is the reflex, the feeling of the ancient
bond of nearness, that is more and more hidden from
the planetary prodigal in that far-country perspective
which at every step becomes more bewilder-
urpnsean -^ j^ j^.^ Varied charm of beauty and de-
t amilianty. "^ •'
light. There is no new surprise which has
not in it some homely reminiscence, but, by the very
urgency of destiny, it is the surprise itself which cap-
tivates and absorbs, leading the wanderer further
afield.
XV
There is this preoccupation and expectancy in what
we call the inorganic world. Here, at some critical
point, there is a sudden departure from the uniform
succession of phenomena, and a new synthesis is ap-
parent, not explicable by any antecedent situation or by
THi: niyim-n i.nnNG 87
any elements visibly entering into tlie first combina-
tion. These transformations do not come about ac-
cording to such laws of causation as are formulated
by the human mind for the explanation of phenomena
that come within the range of conscious volition. IJy
no calculation based upon any deductions of science
could these surprising changes have been anticipated.
" If we conceive," says Mr. N. S. Shaler,* " an intelli-
gent being looking upon a mass of nebulous
matter having only those forms of associa- ''"'^p"''^ •^'"'
" ■' I rophccy.
tion which are possible in gases, we must
believe that such a being would have been entirely
unable, if his intelligence were less than infinite, to
form any conception of the results which would arise
when that matter came to take the present shape of
this earth." But that intelligence which is immanent
in these transformations is prophetically expectant,
seeing the end from the beginning. It is not, there-
fore, to be supposed that to this profound intelligence
there is no delight in the wonderful surprises of the
ever-changing world. To man also belongs a prophet-
ic vision, however hidden or obscured, looking iner-
rantly toward the Things to Come, and it is because of
this undefined and sure expectation, and not because
of anything outwardly seen in the novel wonders of pro-
gressive life, that he has delight in them ; while a life
that in all its changing scenes should be the exact fulfil-
ment of definite mental anticipation would, on the other
hand, be tiresome, not answering to the unseen hope.
Nor is there such uniformity of routine even in the
* /'//«• Inti-rpntiition of Xatuit-, p. 55.
88 A STUDY OF DEATH
succession of grand cycles as to mar the divine delight
in creation. If at the end of each of these cycles the
entire universe is dissolved, the synthesis of a new uni-
verse would not be the exact repetition of that which
preceded it. No cycle of life returns into itself ; the
death completing it is always a transformation.
XVI
In the progressive cosmic involvement the reality of
Life— in its essential attributes — seems to be more and
more hidden beneath' appearance. Form hides the
formative ; and form, persistent and held in apparent
suspense, veils transformation. The appearance of
uniformity in the physical world especially impresses
our human intelligence, which is confined in its ob-
servation and investigation to a very limited period
,, .^ of cosmic development — the period of s;reat-
Uniformity '^_ _ ^ _ ° _
Veiling Trans- cst apparent Stability. If our point of view
crm ion. ^^^^^ transferred to an epoch indefinitely re-
mote, before the appearance of organic life, while we
would have the sense of order, yet would uniformity
seem a transparent veil. We were not indeed shut
out from that simplicity ; rather are we shut into the
l^resent manifold complexity. The quality of life is the
same, whatever the situation ; and its manifestation in
the simplest form was a Habit, however loose and flow-
ing in its longer waves of jDulsation and its marvellous-
ly swift alternations — its appearings and vanishings.
When he who is eternally the representative of man
spoke of sharing with him the glory of the Father be-
THii niyiDFn living 89
fore ever the world was, he was speaking of our native
heritage. The divine nature never had a habit that
was not also human, and the man we know — the ulti-
mate creative manifestation — still retiects that naturL*,
as its very image.
That period of comparative simplicity, when the
world which we call inorganic and lifeless was the
only living world, was vast as the ocean when meas-
ured against the mere island in time which is occu-
pied by animate existence, as we know it, in all its
wondrous variety. Now are we sheathed in integu-
ments that hide the older world which we still unwit-
tingly inhabit. When the darkness of our little night
lays open to our eyes the starry spaces we may still
behold the plasmic milky- way of that long night of
time whose possibilities were mightier than we can
even dream in such sleep as now befalls us.
What we know as desire is away from all this, pro-
jecting its embodiments into that narrow island of
specialised life which, after all, still rests upon that
hidden ocean. We bask in what seems to us the
nearer and more familiar sunshine, and turning from
that simple estate which we still hold in the darkness
and which still holds us— that older deep which ever
felt the brooding Spirit of Life — we rejoice in the
broken lights ajid casual acquaintances, in the color
and temperament, in the poise and modulation of a
suspended workl. We glory in difference as a dis-
tinction and in individual isolation as the proper in-
tegrity of an organism, its inviolable virtue.
To us, in the suspense of a fixed order, the process-
es of Nature seem to be movements in cvcles that re-
90 A STUDY OF DEATH
turn into themselves. " The sun ariseth, and the sun
goeth down," says the Preacher, " and hasteth to the
place where he ariseth. The wind goeth toward the
South and turneth about unto the North ; it turneth
about continually in its course, and the wind returneth
again to its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea. . . .
Unto the place whither the rivers go thither they go
again." Science, especially in the departments of
physics and chemistry, easily regards these closed
circuits as somehow independent of and isolated from
creative action and reaction. The physical world is
thus considered as inanimate, having neither life nor
death but only motion proceeding from inherent forces
and according to laws of its own. So completely is
the universe separated from a personal creator that
even those who believe that it was originally His
creation accept the illusion of delegated and second-
ary forces that are like the servants of the vineyard
abandoned by its master, who has gone abroad, but
who may at his option return and in some marvellous
way assert his dominion.
But in reality God is always in His world, and al-
ways working the great miracle of creation.
XVII
" No man hath seen the Father at any time," but
the Son shall reveal him. The appearance
Organic Life, - -it i i i r i
a Pre-Messi- of Organic lifc upou the earth was the lul.
anic Reveia- fli,i-,e,^t of what uiav without irrcverencc be
tion. ■'
called the Messianic expectation of Nat-
ure. It was indeed a miraculous conception of the
THR niyiPFD i.iyisG 91
Spirit of Life, and was not witliout wonderful prepa-
ration and prophetic adumbration.
The later and closer scrutiny of the processes of the
mineral kingdom show that in many respects these are
not so sharply distinguished from those of living or.
ganisms as was formerly supposed. "It has been
found that finely divided particles of many substances
when suspended in a fluid will, under the inriuence of
some forces as yet not well understood, take on an in-
cessant movement. So perfectly does this motion re-
semble that of some of the microscopic forms of the
lower simple organisms that naturalists at first sup-
posed that in observing these movements they were
dealing with living beings. The crystals of the rocks
perform functions which were once supposed to be
peculiar to animals and plants ; they undergo changes
in their constitution, often taking in new materials,
which they sometimes decompose into their elements
and rebuild in the new growth. So, too, crystals are
in a way capable of multiplying themselves, for when
one begins to form, others of the same species, as it
were, sprout from it, much in the manner of certain
lowly forms which are certainly alive." *
After millions of years of cosmic preparation the cell
appears — the precious nursling of the ages. Yet, if
a human intelligence could be supposed to have been
present in the world before this remarkable advent, it
would have been unable to mentally conjecture what
was about to emerge from the matri.x of a world ih.ii
seemed already so old and barren , nor indeed would
* T/u- Intcr{>ntation of XiUttre, l)y N. S. Slialcr, pp. 1 1 1. 112.
92 A STUDY OF DEATH
such an intelligence, brought face to face with this
long-expected child of Time, so lowly at its birth,
wrapped, as it were, in swaddling-clothes and ignomin-
iously stalled, have had any prescience of its mighty
meaning and mission.
Nevertheless this was, as we now can see, a new
creation, a transformation so wonderful that only be-
cause thereof does the world seem to us to be alive.
The Prince was already within the portals of the Pal-
ace of the Sleeping Earth, and the heart of the virgin
planet was stirred by a new dream — the vision of a
lord to come who was older than the Sun. The Sun
also knew, for he was the flaming Witness of the Spirit
of Life, Who was now to begin His earthly ministra-
tion with mighty miracles, turning water into wine and
wine into blood. " He must increase, but I shall de-
crease."
Already, indeed, from the beginning of cosmic spec-
ialisation, there had been the diminution and descent
— the macrocosmic yielding to the microcosmic mys-
tery, the whole magnificent universe narrowing its cir-
cles, contracting its spheres, veiling its potencies and
lessening its velocities, stooping down to serve the
coming Prince of a new kingdom, all its strong, wise
ministrants gathering at his nativity, like worshipping
Magi, bringing special gifts, also, like the gold and
myrrh and frankincense of the Eastern Kings, signify-
ing Abundance, Burial, and Ascension.
THii DiyiniU) ijyiNii 93
will
The cell is not the introduction of life into a dead
world. The universe was from the first living and sen-
tient in its macrocosmic order, organic in that order.
The term inorganic is not properly applica-
ble to what was from the first an organism Mystery in a
and constantly reaching forward to more " '* °""'
complex organisation. Nevertheless the cell marks a
pivotal and critical point in the progress of existence.
Its appearance is a surprise, a fresh embodiment of the
all-shaping Power and Wisdom ; but there is nothing
more mysterious in a germ that grows than in a min-
eral which crystallises; it is the old mystery in a new
shape.
The new integration is not explicable through what
precedes it ; it would be truer to say that it is the
explication of all its antecedents. It is itself a new
hiding of life, a fresh strain of cosmic tension, a fur-
ther division and suspension, a more discrete modula-
tion, a more exquisite temperament. The outward bal-
ance of things, already so nicely adjusted, maintained
tiirough oppositions and contradictions, through at-
tractions and repulsions, through ascents and descents,
may have been suddenly disturbed through some vast
dissolution of existing forms, liberating mighty forces
for a new continence, and so have regained equilibra-
tion by the storage of this precious argosy, freshly
launched upon the ocean of existence. Hut, even so,
we are only attempting to express the niystery irj the
terms of an outward ccjuation, what is lost on the one
94 A STUDY OF DE/iTH
side being gained on the othei", as the ascent of one
arm of the scale is a descent of the other. Dissipa-
tion of energy is tlie concomitant of all integration ;
but these terms are not related to each other as cause
and effect (any more than one-half of a circle is the
cause or effect of the other) ; they are merely comple-
mentary. The specialisation is creative.
The evolutionist, while he helps us to see what is the
true outward sequence, confesses his inability to show
causation in the sequence. " The ultimate mystery —
the association of vital properties with the enormously
complex chemical compound known as protoplasm —
remains unsolved. Why the substance protoplasm
should manifest sundry properties which are not mani-
fested by any of its constituent substances, we do not
know ; and very likely we shall never know. But
whether the mystery be forever insoluble or not, it can
in no wise be regarded as a solitary mystery. It is
equally mysterious that starch or sugar or alcohol should
manifest properties not displayed by their elements —
oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon — when uncombined. It is
equally mysterious that a silvery metal and a suffocat-
ing gas should by their union become transformed
into table-salt. Yet, however mysterious, the fact re-
mains that one result of every chemical synthesis is
the manifestation of a new set of properties. The
case of living matter or protoplasm is in no wise ex-
ceptional." *
* John Fiske's Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. i., y. 434.
THE nii/inr.i) uyiMj 95
xix
This protoplasm is the nebulous bcginninpj of what
to us seems like a distinct universe, peculiarly open to
our sympathetic comprehension because of
its intimate association with our earthly fort- vouTmcnUn
unes and destiny, since humanity is its ulti- «he organic
. , . Synthesis.
mate issue and fruition. Physical and chem-
ical processes seem remote and obscure save as they
come into immediate contact with our life : in the air we
breathe, the water we drink, and the component ele-
ments of the food we eat; in the minerals which lend
themselves to our use in various ways , and in the lij^ht
and heat and electricity which seem like a part of our
vitality, and which outwardly are elements of comfort
or disturbance, conservation or destruction, according;
to their temperament. And beneath these is the univer-
sal physical bond of gravitation, which enters into the
rising wave of life, in certain forms of attraction, as a
ladder of ascent, and in the falling as a lethal burden.
Modern science has given us a clearer idea of these
forces and elements in their quantitative relations, and
a wider and more etTective adaptation of them to our
use; has made of their rhythmic motions a fairy tale
for wonder, a beautiful poem; has shown how the
world has given harbourage to vegetable and animal
life, within what narrow limits of temperature is possi-
ble the chemical action upon which molecular organi-
sation depends, anil within what still narrower linnts
a physiological synthesis can be maintained ; how ele-
nitMits like oxygen and hydrogen, which at a high degree
96 A STUDY OF DEATH
of temperature combine to form watery vapor, may at a
lower degree rest side by side for independent action,
and how peculiarly essential is nitrogen to the storage of
animal heat : in all these ways indicating the care and
providence of a loving Father in preparing a dwelling-
place for man. But we are so involved in the organic
synthesis that we translate all physical terms into those
which are more intimately familiar to us through our
specialised physiological sensibility and mental percep-
tions, our language in its primary meanings leaning
rather to the former, and, in its secondar}', to the
latter.
In the period of naive impressionism the whole uni-
verse was humanised, and even the gods were included
in this general incarnation ; and, considered simply as
to its reality, this impression was profoundly wise — a
deeper divination than the human reason reaches in
its supersensuous mathematics and formal knowledge,
though these have more truth of perspective and a
more exact discrimination. The extreme rationalistic
view of the world excludes all humor from its dry light ;
reduces the sensibility to the humble offices of a ser-
vant to the intellect — otherwise burying it out of sight;
and rejects physiological and anthropomorphic inter-
pretation. This is the inevitable tendency of special-
isation, which at every step is a new veiling of life —
of its essential wisdom as of its potency. The truth of
chemistry is not the truth of physiology, as is shown
by the inadequacy of the chemical analysis of food as
a test of its physiological action. So the truth of
physiology is not that of psychology. We see, then,
how remote and alien the true and proper life of what
THF. DiyiDFA) LiriNG 97
we call the inorcjanic world must be from our mental
vision and even from our sensibility.
XX
We are so accustomed to rej^ard dilTerent forms of life
as higher or lower according; to their place in a progres-
sive series, and thus to unduly emphasise the super-
lative importance of the most specialised Higher and
existence, that our view is distorted. In Lower Life.
tiiis way we come to depreciate the living values of
pre human nature. We form the same comparative
estimate of ditYerent periods of human history, under-
rating the eras of greatest simplicity , ami in like man-
ner, considering an individual life, we attribute a su-
perior excellence to maturity, as if we should prefer
-August to May. Consistently with such judgment, we
might reasonably question why manhood is not sus-
tained at its ascendant ; why one generation shoukl pass
away and another come, repeating the crudeness of
infancy; why the sun is not maintained at the zenith;
why civilisations disappear; and why, indeed, all sys-
tems are doomed to dissolution. Reversing our pref-
erence in any of these cases, our view would have the
same fault of disproportion.
Our human conduct, under the extreme limitation of
arbitrary and fallible choice, is so much a matter of
experimentation and discipline, involving moral prefer-
ence, wherein rising is a betterment and falling a vili-
fication, and having for its ideal field some lofty pla-
teau of stable and perfect goodness, unmixed witjj evil
7
98 A STUDY OF DEATH
and undisturbed by reactions, that we come to regard
the progression of all life as having this moral char-
acter, as if the Creator were in the same toils of ex-
perimentation, learning to create, and improving with
each new creation. To rid ourselves of this illusion,
whereby our limitations are transferred to the In-
finite, we have only to see that while there is al-
ways the world to come, it is not a better world,
according to moral preference, but a new world ; that
the creative life repents of the good grown old as well
as of the inveterate ill ; that this life is in its essential
quality a transforming, regenerative life.
The vital perspective is that of a circle, wherein
compensation is everywhere apparent — not a circle re-
turning into itself, but involving endless permutation
and variability. We need not resort to the familiar
similitude of a spiral ascent. To the undisturbed spir-
itual insight there is no higher or lower, no superior-
ity of the molecular to the molar, of the chemical to
the physical, of the physiological to the chemical, or
of the psychical to the physiological. As has been
already said, the quality of life is the same whatever
the situation.
When we think about nebulous expansion, ethereal
vibration, molar or molecular attractions and repul-
sions, our thought is empty as compared with our sym-
pathetic apprehension of those actions and passions
which belong to what we call the realm of biology.
THE DiyiDFD UyiNG 99
XXI
Our vision of life is like that of Jacob at Bethel,
one of ascending and descending angels; but the an
frc-ls descending are the same angels that ascend. If
the world were only "inorganic," and such only it is
believed to have been through the <rreater
^ "^ Why the In-
part of its existence, it would still have all <>ri^anic seems
the excellence of life in its essential quality
— an ineffable excellence of which we have no concep-
tion. Its ascending angels for the most part elude
our vision, only its descendent ministration being ap-
parent to us. The side of the inorganic world present-
ed to the organic is the dying side — chemical dissolu-
tion next to physiological integration. The crescent
organism confronts a world which is dying that it may
live. The cosmic accommodations which have made the
earth man's dwelling-place have been renunciations of
life in his behalf; and the dead moon is a nightly re-
minder of that Calvary from which Nature stretches
forth to us her skeleton hands and shows us her
hard, dumb countenance. When our Newton comes,
it is in the autumn field that he finds in a falling ap-
ple the suggestion of the universal law — that of gravi-
tation, the symbol of death.
The sun himself is dying, giving forth his light and
heat ; he is a true martyr — the witness of the Lord ;
and the coal deposits buried in our earth ages ago are
like the famed ossuaries of martyrs, having stored-up
virtues for miracles of warmth and light and healing.
We love to dwell upon this descent of the Lord and
loo A STUDY OF DEATH
his angels in the world of inorganic matter, which we
call dead ; in the light and heat and the refreshing
rain ; in the virtues of the cooling earth ; in chemical
disintegrations, and to see that it is all a descending
ministration for the lifting up of organisms. It is a
view of the world which invests with our pathetic
affection its very debris and the dust we tread upon.
Nature, in our observation of her apparently closed
circuits, is known to us, outside of organisms, mainly
in her descents for the risings of these. What are her
own proper ascensions for this beneficent ruin, or
what is her own World to Come — her transformation,
answering to our Resurrection — is hidden from us.
Biology, notwithstanding its rigid exclusion of the
inorganic world from its proper scope, furnishes sug-
gestions for the poetic and spiritual rehabilitation of
that world in the human imagination,
"And in our life alone doth Nature live,
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud."
Modern sentimentalism has undoubtedly carried this
ideal rehabilitation to an extreme, transferring to Nat-
ure solicitudes wholly alien to her and purely human,
and needing, therefore, for its correction, the scientific
comprehension of what is peculiar to physiological and
psychical specialisation.
XXII
The cell germ is the central sun of the physiological
planetary system — the beginning of a new career
THi: DIl/lDllD LIVING loi
of prodigal wanderinj;. The earliest and simplest or-
ganisms are unicellular, as if a new kind of universe
were bejiun in a single - niansioned econ- „ ...
" _ '^ _ Speculisa-
omy. I»ut wliat singular potency in this tionutscx
. ' ,. . , .,^, ... . , ' , and DmiIi.
Simplicity! liiis is shown in the ease and
quickness of reparation, by which any part of the or-
ganism lost or destroyed is restored. if the body
is cut in twain, each part continues its independent
life ; or rather we should say that such separation has
not at this stage of development the meaning which it
comes to have when the organism becomes more com-
plex, consisting of interdependent members. While
identity seems to be emphasised, yet there is the ten-
dency to diversification. Reproduction is by division,
by simple fission. In the infusoria reproduction is
preceded by a comatose state resembling death, an
arrest of activity during which the identity (jf the
parts soon to be separated seems to be assuredly es-
tablished ; and after the fission there is no distinction
by which one part may be designated as the parent
rather than the other. Such organisms, as Dr. Weiss-
mann has shown, have a kind of immortality, suffering
death only as an accident. The amceba of to-day is
tlie original amoeba.
With the multiplication and diversification of cells in
later and more specialised organisms, there is allotment
of function, a division of labor and an interdependence
of co-ordinate parts, and the same appearance of dele-
gated powers which is characteristic of comple.x econ-
omies, just as there seem to be secondary forces in the
inorganic world, which wc think of as acting indepen-
dently and yet interdependently as mutually related.
I02 A STUDY OF DEATH
With the specialisation of sex — a divulsion for union,
a repulsion for attraction — death also appears as a
specialisation, entering the world hand in hand with
love. From this point the variation goes on with re-
markable rapidity.
XXIII
The appearance of organic life upon the earth as a
prelusive analogue of the appearance of the Christ-life
in the human cycle has already been suggested. It is
thus seen to be one of the successive revelations of the
creative Logos. The analogy would require
ofu^c^if ^ separate thesis for its full elaboration.
It is only important here that we should
draw attention to a few points touching our present
theme.
1. The organic involution is the apparent beginning
of a motion of return. It is the beginning of the dis-
closure of conscious life, reflecting Godward. This
attitude of the vegetable and animal kingdoms was
recognised by Swedenborg.
2. The organic plasma, having its matrix in an ap-
parently dead world, is the beginning of life in a pro-
cession of generations. It is the physical analogue of
that childhood which is the type of the Christ-life.
3. Cell-life, in its simplest and most plastic forms,
has a marvellous potential energy, with spontaneous
power of self-reparation, and thus foreshadows miracle-
working and redemption.
4. The organism grows, and is thus the physical sym-
THli niVIDliD Liyisc. 105
bol of the increase and :\utliority of the "more abun-
dant " Christ-life.
5. The most significant point of the analogy is the
concurrent specialisation of sex and death : that with
the love which is the basis of genetic kinship came a
new mortality, just as in the spiritual development of hu-
manity the love which was the ground of a divine-human
fellowship was bound up with a divine-human death.
These points, more fully dwelt upon hereafter, are
here brought together as a natural introduction to the
consideration of the organic movement toward incar-
nation.
XXIV
Certain aspects of life, elsewhere hidden, are visibly
revealed or suggested in the realm of physiological ac-
tivity. P'or while the embodiments of this realm are
veils hiding life, and are indeed more complex, a closer
network and imprisonment, than are the manifestations
of physical and chemical energy, they are at
the same time more open to our study and ''^>*'"''«'"'
comprehension. Their history is more re-
cent, and h.is left its traces in fossil structures em-
bedded in the rocks. Many of the earliest species of
organic life remain in living specimens upon the sur-
face of the earth ftjr our observation of function as well
as of structure. Moreover, to us as a part of this realm
— its ultimate issue and consummation — there are in-
timate disclosures of its processes in our own sensi-
bililv and consciousness. Wc know what desire is and
aversion. Iiope anil fear, ple.isure and |)ain. action .uul
104 A STUDY OF DEATH
passion, faculty and capacity, aspiration and depres-
sion, sympathy and conflict, confinement and release,
rest and disturbance, bounty and want, demand and
renunciation ; and we know that structure is for these,
and not these for structure. We breathe and eat and
sleep and love and die ; and we have a sense of our
incarnate action and passion as such, and apart from
considerations transcending physiological limitations.
Beneath these is the eternal ground of these, the Word
which becomes flesh, and which in the flesh has again
its glorious appearance as the Word ; but we are now
considering what revelation of life there is in the won-
derful organic development of incarnation itself, ex-
cluding from the scope of our contemplation that
specialised intelligence which distinguishes man from
other animals.
The transformations by which the " inorganic " world
has come into its present state are hidden from us,
whereas in the historic development of organisms the
series, though not present to our view in its complete-
ness, is to such an extent observable or indicated as to
be profoundly impressive. Apart from the historic
series, there is everywhere open to our observation a
miracle of growing life which directly suggests the cre-
ative power. Nature becomes to us a Book of Genesis.
We seem everywhere to hear that first of all command-
ments, Be fruitful and multiply. And in this book of
Genesis how inevitably does the mind pass from the
first chapter, in which the earth brings forth the herb
yielding seed and the fruit-tree of every kind, whose
seed is in itself, and every living creature, multiplying
its kind, to the second chapter, in which it is declared '
THll DiyiDED Lll^lNG 105
that all these were created before their appearance—
tlie plant "before it was in the earth and every herb of
the field before it grew." The growth is the outward
manifestation of that genetic quality which is the eternal
attribute of boundless and abounding life.
x\v
We have seen th;it death, as a specialisation, enters
the world with love. There is an adumbration of this
association in the nearness of all desire to a kind of
death. Nutrition is the rising of one wave
I 1 ■ 1 /■ 1 I Nutrition.
next to the subsidence of some otiier, and
the wave that rises is not the same wave that falls.
Growth is genetic transformation. This nutrition is
one of the most suggestive of the object-lessons fur-
nished by organic life. The nucleus of a germ is first
manifest as a living thing in feeding upon its envel-
oping substance or integument. In the case of a seed,
so long as the outward muniment about it is secure
from dissolution, its power is latent ; but being buried
in the earth, where outwardly it is in peril, it inwardly
escapes, is liberated from its imprisonment, and feeds
upon its crumbling prison -walls. The nourishment
thus begun is in the same way extended. The tiame
once kindled upon the altar spreads, devouring sub-
stances beyond its original source of alimentation.
The vegetable, rooted in the earth, feeds upon the ele-
ments that come to it. these being broken for it, dis-
solving for its integrity. The animal carries its roots
about with it, having vulunlarv locomotion, and in its
io6 A STUDY OF DEATH
wider range of selection compels its victims. The de-
scent of the inorganic is for the rising of the vegetable,
which, transforming the material for its subsistence
from the earth and air, becomes itself a broken sacri-
fice for a new transubstantiation, falling for the rising
of the animal. From the first appearance of a cell to
the advent of man stretch millions of years, and at his
appearance the world has become his pasture, through
numberless varieties of vegetable and animal life. The
Lord is the shepherd. There has been this shepherd-
ing from the beginning of organic existence, life feed-
ing upon broken life. The functioning of organs thus
nourished is a wave of motion rising next to the dis-
solution of these members. And there are waves
beyond these, not properly within the scope of our
present consideration — the continuation of the de-
scending ministration, until the Lord becomes the
shepherd of souls — always a dying Lord.
XXVI
In the inorganic world we more especially note the
division involved in specialisation and the progressive
diminution, as in the contraction of spheres — the gravi-
. „ tational contraction of the sun being itself
Organic Re-
version of the a dcprcssion, or descent, for the generation
Inorganic. ^^ ^j^^ j^^^^ ^^^ j.^j^^ ^^ ^j^^ planetary system.
But in organic specialisation we see the division as
more conspicuously a multiplication — an increase. The
abundance of life is visibly manifest.
The vast amount of heat generated bv the contraction
THE DiyiDEO LiyiNC 1 07
of the sun must be very much diminished before organic
life is possible upon the surface of the earth. But in the
progression of organic life the store of heat is continu-
ally increased. The earliest animals are cold-blooded.
While the processes of the inorganic world tend toward
an appearance of rigid uniformity and fi.xed stability,
those of the organic render more conspicuous the ap-
pearance of variation, and the more complex the organ-
ism the greater becomes its instability ; and in many
ways the procession of organisms seems to reverse that
of inorganic matter, though in reality it only makes
visible to us tendencies and attributes of life which in
the macrocosmic procession are hidden from us. This
visible manifestion begins, indeed, for us in molecular
organisation as shown in the field of purely chemical
action. Thus the mineral, water, in its various states,
solid, liquid, and gaseous, more than adumbrates the
suggestions received by us from physiological action.
\.\\ II
The distinction wc have noted seems to be rather
between the molecular and the molar tiian between
tlie organic and inorganic synthesis ; and this distinc-
tion would doubtless disappear through a more inti-
mate acquaintance with the molar universe. The
atoms of a molecule imitate the motions of ^,. . , ^ .
Chemical Ad-
the solar system — having attraction and re- umbmiion oi
pulsion and troi)ic movement, dissociation
and reassociation of the dissociated atoms. The
study of solutions, combined with thu of thermo
io8 A STUDY OF DEATH
dj'namics, and later with that of electro-dynamics, has
thrown much light upon the vexed problem of the con-
stitution of matter. But even the simplest observa-
tions regarding so common a substance as water
comprise phenomena that look back to primordial
embodiments of mist and flame, and forward to the
flame of life incarnate. In its gaseous form, water is
absorbent of heat, which at the same time expands
and lifts it, and yet with this expansion there is a ten-
sion, as within the limits or bounds of its capacity, a
confinement by invisible walls. Or, to express the phe-
nomenon in another way, the heat expanding the air
makes it an absorbent of water, so that the flame has
an embodiment of vapour, both the embodiment and
its confines becoming invisible ; and this expansion
goes on until the tension reaches its limit of capacity,
when at a critical moment there is the explosion and
precipitation — the descendent ministration. We have
here a prophecy of the latency and storage of energy
in physiological capacity, as when the flaming desire
shapes the mouth of an animal, expanding it inwardly
into a stomacli as a receptacle for food, and into the
lungs as a receptacle for air. As these organic ca-
pacities are deepened inwardly, representing in their
sphering and involution and convolution the syn-
thetic action of cosmic envelopment from the begin-
ning, the desire which has thus shaped itself by intus-
susception, expressing its postulation, is outwardly a
flame of increase, ascending also while it is crescent
until it reaches the culminant point of its physiologi-
cal term, where it quickens and flowers and falls.
Water, when by the dissipation of its latent heat it
THE DiyiDFD Llt^lNG 109
reaches a certain critical point, suddenly quickens, and,
instead of contractinjj;, expands into its Horcsccnce of
crystallisation, here a<^ain foreshadowing that epoch of
organic development which determines generational
succession, where the Hame of increase becomes for
it own organism a consuming tlame of sacrifice, falling
to rise again in another but consubstantial incarnation.
We shall consider this point more at length when we
come to treat in greater particularity the ascent and
descent of life. We wish here only to draw attention
to the fact that while increase is so conspicuous in
organic existence, de.ith is equally conspicuous, and
is thus emphasised at the very point where nutrition
is arrested and transformed into a genetic process.
Death, which invisibly is Love — the attraction of grav-
itation in the spiritual as in the physical world, bind-
ing all spirits to the Father of Spirits, as all planets to
their suns, and bringing all prodigals home — is also born
of Love, when it visibly and conspicuously appears as
a specialisation, in connection with the procession of
generations in the organic kingdom.
XXVIll
Resuming the suggestions derived from a study of
organic specialisation, we find that they contradict cer-
tain propositions which are accepted as axiomatic
truths in the realm of phvsical science ; or, .
•^ - _ _ _ In»tAl)iIiiv ol
rather, they introduce opposite propositions sticnnhc
essential to a full comprehension of Nat-
ure, of which science professes to give but one side.
iro A STUDY Oh DEATH
I. Science, dealing only with structure antl function,
lays stress upon evolution. A philosophic view of Life
as transcending structure, as creative, brings into prom-
inence the opposite truth of Involution. In a single
passage of his Synthetic Philosophy. Herbert Spen-
cer admits that this philosophy woultl be more truly
indicated by the term Involution;* but generally his
consideration of nature ignores not only creation but
Life itself, and is confined to sequences so stated as to
imply the evolution of every new form of existence
from its antecedent. In reality, the term evolution is
properly applicable only to the processes of expendi-
ture, ignoring the original tension. It is as if we were
to consider a watch wholly with reference to its func-
tion as a time keeper — an office which it performs
through the relaxation of the tension of its spring —
giving no adequate consideration to the tension itself,
because our attention is fixed upon the action of the
escapement as more immediately associated with the
use or function of the machine. The scientific man
does not ignore latent potency, about which, indeed,
he has much to say. He will show us that the poten-
tial energy of the sun is greatest when its distance from
the earth is greatest, and when, therefore, the kinetic,
or patent, energy between the earth and the sun is
least ; but it is energy as kinetic, as manifest motion,
that comes within the scope of his measurement, and
whose laws he can formulate ; the potential energy, on
the other hand, he does not ignore, but simply assumes
as the A', or unknown and indeterminable element in
* First Principles, p. 26S.
THE DIVIDED LIVING iii
his computation, treating it as wholly divorced from
creative life, since his proper business is with motion,
not with creation.
II. The axiom that motion is always in the lines of
least resistance, while it is true of motion as function-
ing, is not true of the lifting power of life which gives
tension. Of motion before it moves, if we may be al-
lowed the use of such an expression, the opposite prop-
osition is true — namely, that it seeks difficulty. Life
as creative, as genetic, as in its specialisation a series
of transformations, withdraws from the facility of habit,
of a descending motion, for new involution. jNIore-
over, this tendency of life toward difficulty rather than
toward facility is illustrated in the continuation of the
same species through the procession of new genera-
tions.
III. Modern scientific views, as generally accepted,
lay undue stress upon the struggle for existence as a
competition between species and between individuals
of the same species. The result of this conflict is ex-
pressed in the familiar phrase, " The survival of the
fittest." Since structure itself is for stability and con-
servation, within the limitations imposed by life itself
(t. c, by the special form of life), it is true that, other
things being equal, the structure which is best adapted
to its environment will have the greatest stability. There
is travail in all forms of life, the struggle for a foothold,
the competition for vantage-ground. As has been al-
ready remarked, life seeks difficulty, and the progress
of specialisation involves at every stage of increasing
complexity greater difficulty and more frequent and
varied risk. An exceptionally fortunate environment
112 .-/ ST any oh dhath
leads more often to degeneration than to tlic pronu>
tion of tltness. The suppleness of the pursuer is not
more remarkable than that which is developed in the
game pursued. Taking the widest range of observa-
tion, we do not tind that either safety or ease is an ul-
timate objective aim in Nature ; she emphasises dis-
continuity rather than continuity, revival rather than
survival, running toward death in her progression,
burning all bridges behind her as she advances. In the
largest view, stability is an illusion, uniformity a dis-
guise, the persistence of type not an eternal concern.
Life, comprehending all involvements and the solici-
tudes pertaining to these, has itself no solicitude, and,
because it is esentially resurrection, it glorifies death.
The term survival is merely relative, and the conflict
for survival is a part of the universal harmony which,
in the partial vision, it seems to contradict. When we
consider that organic existence is possible only because
of a descending ministration from the beginning of a
cosmic order, and that it is sustained only through the
continuance of this ministration still further expanded
in the relations between the various species of organ-
isms, and in the succession of generations, we compre-
hend that sacrifice is as conspicuous in the natural
world as is demand, that there is no cycle of existence
in which altruism is not as fully illustrated as individu-
ation, interdependence as independence — this illustra-
tion becoming more luminous with the progression of
organic life.
Science in its specialisation deals with matter as
habit-taking. As morphology it considers the habit as
THE DIl^IDED LIVING 113
one of structural formation. Considering the habit as
one of functional activity, it formulates the laws of this
activity which in the organic world are called the laws
of physiology. In either case the habit is an investi-
ture, and as an outward visible manifestation hides the
principle of its own Becoming. The creative life thus
veiled must forever remain a mystery. Looking toward
the beginnings, seeing in every moment a renascence,
we find the veiling a revealing. There is even thus an
illusion, but the veil is at least transparent. But in the
study of an order we regard mainly the meanings of ex-
istence with reference to outward ends ; we follow the
stream away from its fountain ; we are lost in these di-
vergent paths, and what we see of life appears to con-
tradict the essential quality of life. Science in its very
modesty, in the recognition of its limitations, tends to
agnosticism. What at first was inevitably an illusion
becomes a delusion. The transcendency of life is not
apparent in the confinement of closed circuits, and its
veil is no longer a transparency, but an obscuration.
What began in modesty may thus end in inflexible cer-
titudes.
The habit of life has been truly and patiently fol-
lowed into its most intricate folds, but the scientific
prodigal has gone into the far country with his particu-
lar share of the Father's divided living ; and to him,
with his face turned that way, the order of things which
is the subject of his close scrutiny is seen true, but in
those aspects which contradict its essential truth. The
propositions which he makes concerning this order of
things, such propositions as those we have been con-
sidering, are verified by all the facts within liis range
8
114 A STUDY OF DEATH
of observation. He does not belie the order, but he
fails to see that every order, in its visible aspects, is in
planetary contradiction to its central sun. It is not in-
deed necessary that he should fail of this recognition ,
he has only to transcend the limitations of the partial
view, by which his consideration is confined to a study
of structure and function wholly with reference to en-
vironment, to see that the truths of this relation are the
disguises rather than the interpretations of life. Mor-
phology then becomes the science of creative trans-
formations, wherein, as also in all functioning, it is not
the environment which determines life, but life which
makes its demand upon the environment. The old
propositions will be maintained — expressing the visible
habit of inorganic and organic existence in terms the
most convenient and exact for the purposes of science
— but they will yield to their opposites, confessing the
truth of which they in their rigid outlines are denials ,
having indeed that reaction which belongs to life itself,
whereby all apparently fixed and inflexible certitudes
and stable embodiments dissolve into the unseen and
indefinable mystery from which they sprang. All mat-
ter, in all its forms, has this solvency and release.
XXIX
The cosmic desire and expectation from the begin-
ning reaches forward to incarnation. This in itself
is an intimation of some special glory con-
Incarnation. i • i n i i i i
summated in the flesh — the last and most
exquisite product of terrestrial culture. Whatever of
THE DIVIDED LINING 115
descent there may seem to have been from the ethereal
estate of nebulous flame to that of the mute insensate
crust of the earth, we cannot but regard the progres-
sion of cell-Hfe as an ascension, as if from the cinders
of extinguished fires some new flame had arisen more
nearly imaging the flame of the Spirit, since it had
breath, and in many ways witnessing that Spirit as no
star could do, nor the mightiest motion of the wind or
sea. This flame, which breathes in the vegetable as one
breathes in sleep, and which even there is aspirant, many-
colored and fragrant, and a flame of increase, in the ani-
mal awakes, and besides exhibiting a greater variety of
color and more wonderful fertility than in plant-life, has
will and sensibility. In animate life what marvellous
ascension — from the worm to the insect, from the creep-
ing reptile to the hot-blooded bird which encloses,
possesses, and commands the element upon which it
depends, more buoyant than that which supports it,
seeming to be an embodiment at once of flame and air,
expressing heaven and echoing the heaven-song ! The
animal seems to have won a kind of independence of
the earth, a show of separateness emphasised by its
power of voluntary motion. Its complex organism is a
deeper involvement than is apparent in less advanced
forms, and yet it seems to be the most perfect visible
revelation of the essential quality of life, as if in its
breathing and pulsation, in its spontaneity of motion
and feeling, and in its expansion and inhibition, it were
the living representation of that primordial manifesta-
tion which science strives to apprehend in its study of
the original constitution of matter. Since it is the visi-
ble realisation of the cosmic desire, therefore desire as
ir6 /I STUDY OF DEATH
manifested in its activities and impulses naturally
seems to us the very image of the divine yearning in
creation from the beginning. So, regarding the most
perfect fleshly embodiment, we speak of it as " the
human form divine " ; having reached the finest net-
work of imprisonment, we seem at the same time to
have reached a critical moment of emancipation, as if
in man — the extreme complication of finitude and the
most fallible of all creatures, considered simply as an
animal and without regard to his peculiar psychical de-
velopment — life for the first time assumed an erect
position and a divine gait. Thus always men have
imagined the divine after the human pattern ; it is an
inevitable idealism, and if it be the greatest of illusions,
it is one luminous with all the light there is for us in
the present order of things.
Nevertheless it is not an illusion in which the human
spirit finds rest; and though we can imagine no more
glorious forms for heavenly inhabitants, and St. John
in his Apocalypse admitted even the lower animals as
participants in the celestial ritual, yet is there the feel-
ing of spiritual revulsion from the flesh as from the
world itself, so strongly expressed by St. Paul in his
use of the term carnal and in his assertion that " flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven."
The finest cosmic texture which we know — the most
beautiful garment we see God by that issues from the
loom of time — is turned from as if it were also the
grossest. In it is stored all the sweetness of earthly
existence, a warmth and influence more magical than
is intimated in the forces disclosed in the chemist's
laboratory ; yet is it a glory that must pass, and in no
THE DIVIDED LIVING 117
dissolution is tliere corruption more repellent, not even
in the miasma of vegetable decomposition. But it is
repented of before its divestiture in that new involu-
tion of life — that psychical synthesis which is dis-
tinctive of human destiny.
XXX
Following the line of thought thus far taken, we may
not regard the human species as evolved from any
other ; and it is conceded by some of the most eminent
evolutionists that there is not the slightest evidence of
such a derivation nor any ground for its hypothetical
postulation.
Life has no beginning or end, save as it is always
beginning and always ending. Man, before his ap-
pearance as a distinct species in the specialisation of
cell life, was not excluded from the series of trans-
formations looking forward to his incarna- pigjin^,,;^^
tion. In all specialisations he was a distinct Human Spe-
. , . , . ... cialisation.
species, his royal line of kmship bemg, like
that of Melchisedec, without beginning or end of
days. That which he is now, in comparative physi-
ology, is typical of his relative position from the be-
ginning in all cosmic manifestation — a position which
we can no more represent to ourselves in any definite
conception than we can forecast what it will be in any
future existence.
INIan was not first an animal and afterward man.
In the earliest stages of his development his animality
suffered a kind of indignity from the psychical charac-
ii8 A STUDY OF DEATH
teristics which ultimately were to give him supremacy,
so that among animals he was at a disadvantage, lack-
ing somewhat of that infallible knowledge which be-
longed to their instinct, and appearing less competent
physically than many other species for the conflict
with external conditions. A rational intelligence, such
as distinguishes the man of to-day, transferred to that
period, would have regarded the human species as
ignominiously defective, and at a fatal disadvantage
even as compared with the apes, from some variety of
which he is thought to have descended ; every con-
spicuous difference from these, including his want of a
tail, would have seemed to emphasise his inferiority.
To such an intelligence the law of the survival of the
fittest would have seemed to put the human weakling
hors de cotnbat. Thus impossible is it logically to an-
ticipate the creative transformations of life!
In the case presented, the transformation had al-
ready been effected, though its glorious issues were
hidden beneath the masque of apparently hopeless
weakness and ineptitude.
The human infant in gestation is seen to resemble,
at various stages, animals of inferior species, as if
recapitulating its own association with the progressive
specialisation of animal life from the protozoan upward ;
but as we know that the infant is, at every one of
these stages, human, proceeding toward a distinctive
destiny heralded for it from its germination, so it is
not unreasonable to presume that the progression thus
represented was itself charged with the same distinctive
destiny. INIan as a protozoan was man, distinguished
from all other protozoans, having that likeness to them
THE DIVIDED LIl/ING 119
which the human germ has to the germs of all other
animals, one of appearance only.
We have been considering the illusions arising from
specialisation, from the progressive involution of life,
and increasing with the complexity of organisation ; but
the ever more and more manifold veiling of life, cer-
tainly in the organic kingdom, is for us a progressive
revelation, while the visible appearance of the simplest
forms of existence is of all appearances the most de-
lusive, a blind masque, insinuating identity and sterile
unity, and confounding all diverse destinies.
XXXI
Humanity is in its specialisation inseparable from
the specialisation of Will and Reason. We here touch
the pivotal point of a new world. All divergent rays
are here concentrated and reflected ; and it is thus
that the human incarnation becomes the
r r~, ^ T^ , , . , The Fall.
express image of God. from the long night
of time emerges the Logos become flesh, whose de-
sire for incarnation has dominated the cosmic pro-
cession, making the universe the complement of him-
self. All other embodiment was the adumbration and
expectation of his appearance. How long he was
withheld as the special nursling of Elohim, or with
what fiery baptism he was tempered in that brooding
infancy which we call Eden, we know not. We know
him only from the moment of his flight from Paradise,
when began for him the cycle of wandering which had
been foretokened in the movement of all worlds. Per-
I20 A STUDY OF DEATH
chance, if he might have turned and fallen upon the
flaming sword, there might have remained for him for-
ever the level world of innocence and simplicity ; but
as easily might the Earth have repudiated her planetary
destiny and have fallen into the sun.
That which we call the fall of man was in all primi-
tive legends represented as his levitation rather, or aspi-
ration, his entrance upon his proper destiny, and was
associated directly with the development of his rational
or discursive intelligence. He partook of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge — that knowledge which dis-
tinguishes between good and evil. The story is one
that shifts its shape and incidents and meaning accord-
ing to the human mood. In the Promethean legend it
is not the fall but the betterment of man that is inti-
mated. The Titan (belonging to the Earth dynasty,
which is in alliance with the human race against the
jealous Olympian gods) steals fire from the hostile
heaven for the benefit of man, who is thus enabled to
start upon his career of progress. In the Hebrew
legend there is a hint of Titanic help in the advice of
the serpent and a suggestion of jealous alarm on the
part of the Elohim who send in haste the cherubim to
guard the tree of Life. The first use of clothing is also
indicated, as the beginning of man's larger investiture.
But the time when the legend took its final shape was
evidently one of reaction against the artificial condi-
tions of civilised life — one of weariness and dissatisfac-
tion with " all the labor of man under the sun.'' At
such a time man would seem to have lost some higher
estate through vain curiosity and overweening pride,
and to have eaten fruit, for his own sake wisely forbid-
THE DIl^lDED LINING 121
den, v/hen he surrendered instinct for errant and falli-
ble reason and safe simplicity for the innumerable perils
of a haughty venture.
XXXII
But it was his destiny, and the very essence of it
was its psychical character. To all other animals
choice could have no rational meaning, since in their
selection the alternative is instinctively re- . ^.
•' A Singular
jected. All animal consciousness is doubt- Psychical
less in kind the same as the human, and ^^ '"y-
there is in it an adumbration of reason, having, how-
ever, no properly rational field or career, as in the
case of man. But man, as at the same time mastering
all other animality, and repenting himself of his own,
has a psychical nature wholly unique. The lion, his
embodiment having been perfected, has no iield of oper-
ation outside of his bodily functions. The corporeal
perfection of a man, on the other hand, is an utter
blank, from which no positive suggestion can be de-
rived as to his peculiar terrestrial destiny; as blank as
was the Earth in her merely structural perfection as to
any suggestion of the flora and fauna of which she was
to become mother and nurse.
One of the most interesting studies in natural science
is the consideration of the transformation which vege-
table and animal life have wrought in the earth : as in
the restoration by bacteria to the soil of elements
drawn from it and converted into animal tissue; in the
culture of the soil by earth-worms ; in the erosion of
stones by lichens ; in the storage of sunbeams by vege-
122 A STUDY OF DEATH
tables in coal deposits ; and in the building up of con-
tinents by lowly creatures living in shells, whose work
is completed by coral germs.* But the terrestrial trans-
formation wrought by man is much more remarkable,
because it is effected through an arbitrary selection
and adjustment, which, though in some ways fortu-
nately inapplicable, is, in others, almost limitless. He
cannot rival the earth-worm's ploughing, but he can
make a garden of the desert, and reduce to temperate
order the riotous wilderness. More rapidly than the
lichens he reduces the rocks to dust. His destruction
of certain species of animals and his domestication
and improvement of others ; his artificial modification
of plants and fruits ; and his diversion of water-
courses, have changed the outward appearance of the
globe. His temples and pyramids, his cities and towns
and hamlets upon the land and his fleets upon the sea
have humanised every landscape ; and even the mis-
chief resulting from his wasteful destruction of forests
and the blotches he has made upon the bright face of
Nature are evidences of his masterful power to impress
his mark upon the world. These are but the visible
signs of his psychical supremacy — such as would be
disclosed to the casual regard, and do not begin to tell
the story of this new universe of man and mind. A
visitor from some other planet who had no experience
of a similar development would find in these obvious
phenomena no adequate indication of their own mean-
ing; and a close scrutiny of details, disclosing temples,
* See The Study of Animal Life, by J. Arthur Thompson, pp.
21-26.
THE Dlt^IDED LINING 123
the edifices for varied social uses, tlie industrial ma-
chinery, the libraries and art galleries, the equipment of
museums and scientific laboratories, the insignia of po-
litical and military functions, the properties of diverse
amusements, and the paraphernalia of domestic econ-
omies, would bring into the view of such a stranger a
system of symbols requiring the most elaborate in-
struction for their comprehension, which would be the
revelation not only of what man has done for the earth,
but also of the uses he has made of matter and force
for purely human ends. A still closer study, even if it
were confined to the single department of literature,
would lay open the vista of human history and reveal
the marvellous imaginations and speculations of indi-
vidual poets and philosophers, showing man as the
thinker and interpreter as well as the doer. In this
view the human, or what is the same thing, the psychi-
cal, destiny transcends all earthly contacts and material
uses rising to the concerns of an invisible world, to so-
licitudes and aspirations which overleap the physical
limitations of existence.
Like a celestial firmament above the earthly is this
new realm of Thought, whose tension is broken in the
precipitate of speech — the Word from the beginning
ultimately expressed in the articulate word. The rhyth-
mic harmony of the animate, the incarnate, ascends
into overtones of psychical harmony. Here is a new
involution, a fresh embodiment — an adumbration, at
least, of what St. Paul calls a "spiritual body." The
tension here is a mystical unfathomable storage of po-
tential energy, next immediately to the quick deaths of
the brain, but for it less directly all the world dies ; it
124 ^ STUDY OF DEATH
is an ascension for which all the waves of cosmic life
forever rise and fall.
The desire which has shaped and informed macro-
cosm and microcosm, ever sphering itself anew, and
entering upon new tropes in its action and reaction,
passing from order to order, each wonderfully diversi-
fied and co-ordinated, becomes now the ensphered
rational Will. Every successiv^e stage of the progres-
sion up to this point had involved additional suspense,
more complex limitation, increased temperament, until
in the starved deeps of ocean and upon the barren crust
of earth the cell appeared. Extreme limitation, compen-
sation, balanced resistances, gave organic life its op-
portunity ; and in the development of this life that
balance became more conspicuous, the physiological
functions of the more complex organisms having a
dualistic or divided action, as in respiration and circu-
lation, and the interaction between the vegetable and
animal kingdom maintaining a contrapuntal harmony.
It was ever a more delicate poise of equilibration
until, in psychical action, it became a deliberate vo-
lition in the subtle temperament of consciousness.
What range of suspense from that of a planet like Sat-
urn, which in the poet's fancy
"Sleeps on his luminous ring,"
to that of the spirit's contemplation ! Earth has her
summer when she is at her greatest distance from the
sun, latency and ascension being greatest when the
patent energy is least, or when it is most in poise. So
man, upon creation's outermost rim, has his psychical
THE DIVIDED LIVING ^25
ascension, his will, though under the extremest limi-
tation, being the express image of the divine.
In the contradiction between man s position, as the
most helpless and fallible of all creatures, and his
destiny as the son of God, we confront the human
comedy, wherein the emphasis of time has its intensest
exaggeration, and the eternal familiarity its deepest
me an in 2:.
XXXITI
In the human world the outer worldliness is re-
peated and outdone, having an infinite projection.
The multiplicity and variety of the physical universe
sink into insignificance beside this new series of in-
volvements and complications. " The Father
, v •! 1 The Con-
worketh hitherto, and now man works, build- scions Veil-
ing his superstructure above the divine foun- "';^;;;'^^^;''
dation. Has God hidden Himself behind the
veils of His world ? Man has multiplied these veils,
whereby he has also hidden from himself his own es-
sential self. He comes into a world of hidden fires
and broken lights, a world of interrupted currents and
of apparent stabilities, rigid to the point of frangibility ;
and this broken world he still further breaks ; his mind
is a prism, and what to his vision is already partial
becomes more discrete in his analysis, and most artic-
ulate in his speech.
In the specialised consciousness nothing begins
save by interruption or termination. Definition is by
boundaries, by the lines of cleavage in the brokenness
of things in time and space, so that judgment is dis-
126 A STUDY OF DEATH
cernment. We would have no definite conception of
light and no name for it but for its interruption, or of
any current save as it is broken. Whatever elements
there may be in the universe, about us or within us,
that are not thus discurrent cannot enter into the dis-
course of our reason. Dissociation seems primary,
and our association is of the dissociated elements, co-
ordination being the reflex of radiant diversification.
It is true that our first sensibility seems to hold all
things in a kind of confusion, but the progress of
intelligent perception is through discrimination and
comparison.
XXXIV
The psychical, like every other order, is planetary.
Not only are all other systems therein reflected and
recognized, but it is itself a distinctively human system
of thought and volition throw'u off and dissociated from
the solar man, showing in the earliest period of its
development that fluidity and instability
tary MaT '^^^ich characterises the primitive planet, and
then gradually hiding its fires, losing its
clairvoyant transparency in opacity, and shaping its
firmaments. We have at last the superficial planetary
man, seeming to himself to have a motion wholly his
own ; and this illusion is fortified by the fact that in
his sky (which thus differs from all other planetary
skies) the central sun is never seen. There is no
blindness, no opacity, like that of the extremely spe-
cialised planetary consciousness, wherein knowledge
becomes wholly relative, objective, partial, and limited
THE Dlf/IDED LINING 127
to the visible course of things — to the closed circuits
of physical and mental phenomena. In its extreme
rationalism it excludes the miracle and becomes en-
tangled in the meshes of its own web, vainly attempt-
ing the solution of problems which are of its own
making, since they arise only within the network of
relation, association, and causation, whereby, as by the
links of an endless chain, it is imprisoned. The
strangest feature of this illusion is that the confine-
ment is known as liberation ; and such it truly is —
the planetary liberty of arbitrary selection, of choice.
Here, too, is maintained the likeness of the psychical
to the physical planetary system, in that the order
seems to deny its central principle : instinct is hidden
under arbitrary determination, the Son becomes the
Pupil, experimenting on his own account and learning
only by failure ; the fountain is lost in the stream, and
essential attributes are disguised in the outward and
structural integrity.
" God hath so set the world in the heart of man,"
saith the Preacher, " that man knoweth not what He
hath been doing from the beginning even unto the
end."
XXXV
Behold how the illusions thicken and multiply in
this world which includes the phenomena of conscious
will and intelligence. Life, in these outer
courts of its temple, seems to deny its essen- f^^sfo^s^
tial attributes. In itself spontaneous, direct,
immediate, it becomes the opposite of all these in a
128 A STUDY OF DH/1TH
secondary nature, where action and knowledge seem ar-
bitrary, where they are relative, through means toward
ends, all operation proceeding by indirection. Con-
sider the contradiction involved in the necessity of
making acquaintance in this casual and indirect way,
as in a game of hide-and-seek, with beings we have al-
ways known. In our relations to other existence, what
incongruity : that we should depend upon it for suste-
nance; that we should enter into alliance with it for
our protection and into apparent conflict with it for
very standing room ! Life only is potent : whence,
then, this guise of helplessness, this stress of concern
as to means of life, as to provision for safety against
impending perils.' W'iiat strange mansion is this,
against whose portals beat eagerly for entrance all
human souls ; and of those finding entrance how ques-
tionable their tenure ! From the open sea what winds
and currents drive against the reefs and rocks of a
coast that is at once hospitable and forbidding, invit-
ing to the shelter of secure havens, drawing also to
shallows and shipwreck, the merest triviality dividing
safety from destruction ! And this human drift, which
is the latest, with what reckless violence does it fling
itself against the indurations of time, seeking a foothold,
where with patient endurance it fortifies its position,
cheerfully trying conclusions with things in this rude
field of experimentation and adventure !
The greatest of all illusions dominating the mind of
man in the world of appearances is that of his outward
selfhood, eclipsing his inmost and essential personality.
It is a selfhood which seems to him a complete estate,
which he calls the Ego. He ignores the will and in-
THE DIVIDED LiyiNG 129
telligence which have fashioned and informed his mem-
bers, becoming at last sensibiUty and volition incar-
nate ; he ignores these as if they were not properly his
own, and calls his only the mind he has made, and the
will which he has formed and which he calls his char-
acter — just as he calls his only those corporeal motions
which arise from his conscious volition.
What we thus term illusions are but the habits where-
with we clothe ourselves, the masques and varied cos-
tumes which we wear in the Comedy — the veils of the
transformation-scene. What is within 1 What is that
Fire which never flames but is the ground of all flame ?
What is that Light which is unbroken and knows no
shadow ? What is that which itself flows not but is in
the fountain that by which the fountain rises and falls ?
What is that which is not born and never dies but is
the principle of nascence and destruction ? We know
not so as to name, and yet it is really all we know, the
ground of all our knowledge. It can be stalled in no
predicament. The Pantheist, Monist, and Dualist utter
their names and definitions in the face of the Unutter-
able. To say that beneath all that is disclosed in our
consciousness is the One Will and Intelligence — the
indivisible soul of the Universe — is an assertion de-
rived from our conception of a finite individuality. In
the very essence of Life is that which gives the mean-
ing to our terms One and Many, but not to the one
apart from the other. Any predication which is not
the absolute negation of all predicament brings us back
into the outer courts of the temple — into our ever-
changing habit and habitation — into the pulsation of
embodiment. We are clothed upon not with immor-
9
I30 A STUDY OF DEATH
tality but with mortality ; habit itself, whether of the
flesh or of the spirit, being, like memor}-. the resurgence
of a falling wave. As we have said before, our old
Nurse from the beginning is both Lethe and Levana.
Man, more than any other creature, is by his desire
and his destiny (which are one) thrust into exile,
thrown upon his own venture, absorbed in his volun-
tary endeavor. His is not the blind preoccupation of
instinct, but a wakeful, solicitous intention, engaging
every faculty of his complex nature. For a time in the
infancy of the race he leans to the earth in a natural
piety and humilitj-, worshipping Demeter, and looking
for help to the benignant powers of darkness. But
how quickly his old nurse shows herself as Levana
jather than Lethe ! From the first, indeed, the urgency
of his peculiar destiny is apparent, driving him into the
far-countr\-, and he stands face to face with his limita-
tions — peculiar limitations upon which only human life
enters, and which are at once the source of his weak-
ness and his strength. By his ver}' individuation he
is lost, and seems like one disinherited and at odds
with a rude, alien, and resistant world that tempts and
bewilders him. Reduced to a state of pupilage he
must strive for all he would have or know, only those
doors opening to him at which he knocks. From his
sensible contacts with the world he builds up mind and
experience, faltering into his intelligence. His walking
is a series of falls, and he stumbles into all his progres-
sion. Ignorance and fallibility seem to be the very
ground of his curiosity and aspiration. Disturbance
becomes stimulation, resistance the measure of his
strength ; that which is in the way becomes the way.
THE DIl/IDED LINING 131
These are the very conditions of that destiny which be-
gins in revulsion from animal instinct, a revolt involv-
ing shame and humiliation and defeat, a sense, also, of
conflict with Nature — with her life and her death —
but from these conditions arise the glory of the human
world.
The solar man — the centre of this planetary psychi-
cal system — though hidden, is still the potential energy
vitalising and illuminating the specialised individual
will and reason and the collective social order which is
the result of human eltort and intelligence. This latent
energy shines with native light through the rude dawn
of social culture ; an informing divination and inspira-
tion ; the initiation of mystical rites, with choral song
and dance ; the spring of buoyant adventure and hero-
ism ; the tender inward grace of faltering beginnings ;
the plenitude of faith, making up for inexpertness and
lack of outward vantage. Pessimism lies at the end of
things, waiting upon facilit}', as the sense of vanit)^ at-
tends accomplishment.
As blind feeling, hidden beneath the specialisation
of sensibility in vision and hearing, remains the living
ground of the beautiful perspective developed, so that
native divination which is buried beneath the construc-
tions of the human understanding remains the living
ground of the vast and varied rational perspective, be-
ing indeed the invisible and latent power which lifts
man into a realm whose interests range in ever-widen-
ing circles from the hearth-stone to the remotest star.
But it is the hiding of this power that accentuates the
human perspective and makes possible certain peculiar
conceits in the human consciousness — such as have
132 A STUDY OF DEATH
been already instanced as illusions, all emphasising the
apparent independence of that outward integrity which
is built up by the individual and collective will, and
which, as a whole, constitutes what we call the moral
order.
CHAPTER II
THE MORAL ORDER
The term moral is derived from the Latin word inos^
meaning custom, and ethical, from a Greek word (e6>oc)
having a similar meaning. Primarily these terms sug-
gest wont, inclination that has become habit-
ual, a spontaneous disposition. This sponta- ^'°pos"fi°n^
neity is apparent in the beginnings of a social
order and in the first stages of aesthetic development.
Human actions, like the operations of Nature, seem to
fall into order of themselves, and with reference to some
unseen centre of harmony. Choice, instead of being an
arbitrary action of the will, is rather a dilection, ac-
cordant to the invisible harmony, a natural selection in
the subjective sense of the term, a divine motion and
passion, having also natural inhibition or restraint, cor-
responding to the modulation and temperament of the
cosmic order. Nothing in the human world is vitalised
save by the divine action and passion, and the vitality
is not an endowment, it is genetic. In this view the
problem concerning Free-will could not occur. We do
not question whether the flower turns to the sun or the
sun turns the flower, when these are seen not as two
motions but as parts of one.
134 A STUDY OF DEATH
II
In the complex specialisation of the moral order this
spontaneity is more and more hidden and apparently
contradicted in the prominence given to arbi-
^Sta'ndar"'' trary selection. In the Latin word 7nos
there is the suggestion of measure (from the
old root ma), so that one comes to say of his habitual
conduct that it is not only his wont, but his rule ; and
in the social evolution the individual comes under a
rule not his own, to which both his inclination and his
reason may be subjected. The tendency is to substi-
tute for flexible principle the inflexible rule. As the in-
dividual artificer works with plummet and level and rule
and according to some rational plan, so does society
collectively seem to build up its institutions in con-
formity to some outward standard and according to
reason. Whatever is necessary to maintain the tone,
health, and vigor of an organisation (a family, a tribe, a
nation, or a confederacy of nations) pertains to its
morale and determines moral obligations, and these ob-
ligations will be rigorous as against whatever tends to
disintegration. Life will be more and more hidden for
the gain of structural strength, until in the most com-
plex of civilisations it will seem to be buried under its
mechanical framework. In a merely superficial view
the entire moral order seems to depend upon arbitrary
selection, to be the result of experimentation, the sum
of which we call experience. If we were confined to
this view, absolute pessimism would be the only goal
of our philosophy. Considering the moral order merely
THE MORAL ORDER 135
for what it outwardly seems to be, as summed up in
man's accomplishment and what he aims to accomplish,
our vision of the human prodigal would end in utter
nakedness and inanition, just as any theory of the cos-
mic order confined to the study of structure and func-
tion would lead us finally to the view of an intensely
cold and sterile space filled with dead worlds.
Ill
Seen only as shut into the field of his exile — of his
conscious plans and efforts — the weakness of man is
conspicuous, and his shame and misery in-
tolerable ; no joys within these limitations Aspects of
can balance his pains : the last word of all Human Ex-
^ _ perience.
his speech must be Vanity ! Elsewhere in
the boundless universe there is no such sense of humil-
iation, as elsewhere there is no such capacity for vacilla-
tion, misadventure, and defeat. All other cosmic opera-
tion has its prodigality of a divided living, its error and
defect, its vagrancy and avoidance of perfection, its
swerving from straight lines and from regularity of
form, but its procedure, however mediate, is sure, with-
out indirection, never mistaking its course ; and this is
true also of human corporeal and psychical action not
under the control of conscious volition. Life outside
of the field of arbitrary choice knows no outward rule
or standard ; its order is of sure ordinance, a spon-
taneous co-ordination, involving no experiments, no
misfits, and never missing the happiness of harmonious
adaptation — constituting a world of everlasting loyalty
136 A STUDY OF DEATH
and fidelity to the brooding Spirit, which is at every
point unfalteringly wise and potent. Here there is,
properly speaking, no experience, no cumulative knowl-
edge. There is, indeed, variability of habit, discontinu-
ity, transformation — a series of surprises delighting even
an all - wise expectation ; but, whatever the habit or
change of habit, there is thereby no formation of a di-
vine character or increase of a divine knowledge. The
Spirit of Life becomes the universe, which is always and
everywhere a fitness as well as a becoming, and as
much so at the first (if there were a first) as it can
ever be.
Human experience, on the other hand, is quite dis-
tinct from these cosmic phenomena, and, considering
its scope and its aims, is widely different from that of
all other animals. But the distinction is not so abso-
lute in reality as it is in appearance. There seems to
be a great chasm between a voluntary effort which in a
brief period accomplishes its purpose and those physi-
cal operations which for the attainment of a similar end
would take millions of years. What a vast period of
time is occupied in the development of a human hand
or eye ! But the machines invented by man in a single
century give him a hundred hands, and enlarge a thou-
sand-fold his scope of vision. In making his engines
and his telescope, however, he is compelled to avail
himself of the properties of things, of natural forces
and laws, and it has taken ages for him to learn these
uses. He can arbitrarily regulate the speed of his ma-
chinery and the power of his telescope, but his water-
wheel is of no advantage apart from the gravitation of
water, and his telescope is useless apart from his living
THE MORAL ORDER 137
eye. He cannot impart life to the products of his arti-
fice, and such modifications of living things as are the
result of his deliberate adjustments are really brought
about by vital processes that in themseh-es are inde-
pendent of his will. What he has gained has been ac-
quired by slow and faltering processes, and as the re-
sult of innumerable failures. If we regard only the
ends which he consciously proposes to himself in his
experimentation, these in themselves are utterly vain,
having no value save in the living principle from which
all human aspiration springs, and which reaches its
true and living issue only as it overleaps his goals, dis-
closing their unreality — the emptiness of all which we
call a conclusion and accomplishment.
IV
This living principle is hidden — it is the secret dis-
position of our divine -human destiny, and when, in
some luminous moment, it shines through all its veils,
or when, in some flaming moment of transformation, the
vesture is consumed, then indeed our con- ^.
Disposition
scious plans and propositions are disclosed and
as mere broken fragments, the partial seg- '^°'^°^' '°"'
ments of a cycle which is completed in a movement
that escapes observation. This hidden life it is — our
own very inmost life — which tianks every strongest for-
tress we can build.
Now, when our old Nurse Lethe becomes to us
Levana, putting us away from herself, setting us upon
our feet and turning our faces toward outward goals,
138 A STUDY OF DEATH
she still attends us, though unseen. She lodges cour-
age in our hearts to meet the bewilderments of a world
that at once tempts and betrays ; she assists our fal-
tering steps, making inert, resistant matter our sup-
port and our very fears an inspiration, deepening
our hearts through solicitudes, enlarging our strength
through travail. She it is who, though taking us often
back into the merciful oblivion of sleep, yet draws
about our busy day-dream a curtain, hiding from our
specialised vision both the fountains and the issues of
our life, and shutting us into our game of Hide-and-
seek, to which she gives zest by wonderful surprises,
showing us at moments of defeat gifts more precious
than those we have sought and lost. Following our
blush of shame because of something marred or missed
is seen upon her countenance a special grace — a favour-
ing glimpse of the Ideal. She sets us at our looms,
and though we weave but shreds and shrouds, text-
ures whereby we are clothed upon with mortality, she
sometimes gives us glimpses of the other side of the
web, where it is mystically seen as whole, or at least
suggests some beautiful inward integrity marvellously
contrasting with the apparent outside raggedness. The
emphasis of Time would paralyse our hearts but for her
quickening of prophetic hope, showing escape where we
behold only a barrier, and reserving as the largest of all
her favours that last release, when she sets our feet
toward the door of our dwelling, which they re-enter not.
While, therefore, our experience seems to us experi-
mentation for the most part, so that we have come
to look upon the present existence as a period of pro-
bation and even to think of eternity as dependent
THE MORAL ORDER 139
upon time, imagining some everlasting mansion pat-
terned and determined by our shaping of its mere
scaffolding; while we magnifj' our exploitation and our
conscious manipulation of things, laying supreme stress
upon arbitrary choice and upon human responsibility,
yet such a view interposes an irrational chasm between
human existence and the general course of things. It
is especially a modern view, confirmed by the impres-
sions derived from an extremely specialised order — in-
dustrial, political, and ethical — where artifice seems to
displace creation and the thing made the thing that
grows ; where formal and lifeless mechanism is most
conspicuous, and where the ends proposed appear to
be as far removed as possible from such as lie in the
line of natural selection. The aggregation of people
in large cities, the accumulation of wealth, the artificial
conditions of civilisation, the absorption of so many
human lives in efforts to secure simple subsistence, the
magnitude of enterprises undertaken, the mastery over
natural forces, the devitalisation of industry through
the extreme division of labour, the secularisation of in-
stitutions, the tendency toward a social collectivism in
which the individual and the family shall be subjected
to a general control, and the supreme confidence of
society in systems of reform, and in the power of statu-
tory legislation — all these indicate the predominance
of arbitrary over natural selection. Free human will
and human responsibility are transferred from the cir-
cumference of a specialised order, where properly they
belong, to its very centre ; they seem to overshadow
all other factors of progress, and in the moral order
thev claim the entire domain.
I40 A STUDY OF DEATH
In the absolute sense there is no purely arbitrary
selection, and what we call free will is so in appear-
ance only and by virtue of limitation, being
No Absolute- ....
ly Arbitrary the ultimate Specialisation of spontaneous
Selection. \Yii]^ j^gt as our rcason is the ultimate spec-
ialisation of spontaneous intelligence. Choice seems
arbitrary because of our consciousness of its most deli-
cate poise and balance in % world of librations only less
specialised ; because of its extreme variableness be-
yond that of any other functioning in the organic realm,
becoming sometimes even caprice ; because also of its
fallibility, which is associated with the empirical or ex-
perimental.
, Human experience is not divorced from human des-
tinj', but is rather its masque, that which man proposes
to himself, in the line of his phenomenal progression,
disguising his secret disposition. All appearance dis-
guises Reality. There is the Real Will with a hidden
purpose deeper than any particular intention — a Real
Reason deeper than is shown in any definite rational
process. The Cosmos hides the true Logos — that light
which lighteth every man, and which is the Light of the
World. In man as in the world it is the genetic or cre-
ative that is hidden.
Nothing falls outside of this genetic reality, though
everything thus seems to fall outside of it in our con-
scious representation of a world to ourselves. There
is no power or knowledge separate from it. We say
that we make something common by communicating it;
THF. MORAL ORDER 141
in reality it can be communicated only because it is
common. We call that general which is the result of
our generalisation, but the ground of generalisation is
the genetic. There is no familiarity out of the family
or home. What we see as a divided living is genetically
the abounding life — the ground of multiplication; what
seems to us under restraint, in tension within walls visi-
ble or invisible, is genetically the bounding as it is the
abounding — the ground of all inhibition ; what we see
as form is here formative, informing, and transforming,
and that which we know as order is here undistributed
harmony. Herein is the eternal life — to know the
Father and the Son — eternal kinship, eternal familiari-
ty. Life in this transcendency needs no chart or guide
or standard ; has no prudence or economy or any moral
virtue; cares not for any structure or type; it stands
for all that falls as for all that rises, for evil as for
good, for divestiture and destruction as for embodi-
ment and growth, for mourning and fasting as for a
festival, for the old as for the new, seeing both as one
— the reaction in the action, repentance in regeneration.
VI
The genetic eternal life is the ground of all action
and reaction, which are proper thereto in a sense
wholly indefinable in our specialised con-
sciousness. No predication we make con- ^^^hoj.-, ■^"'
cerning the action and reaction as seen in
the visible world — a world of suspense, where begin-
ning and end are regarded as separate — is applicable
142 A STUDY OF DEATH
to the invisible genesis where death and birth (if these
terms could there be used) are inseparable. Neverthe-
less the genetic and eternal meanings dominate and
give significance to all phenomenal existence — consti-
tuting the bond of kinship which makes the whole uni-
verse the Father's House, whatever our illusions of
flight and exile, of freedom and integrity.
The genetic is revealed even in its veilings, and in
the illusions of our divided living it has a varied and
beautiful disclosure — a confession in its very denial.
In the inorganic world the hiding seems more complete
because we see that world only on its dying side, in its
descent and diminution for the ascent of organisms ;
though even here we see death as genetic, the barren
becoming fruitful, the desert inflorescent. In the invo-
lutions of the organic the revelation is clearer and more
intimate, the abounding creative life showing itself in
ascension, growth, and procreation, in all forms of in-
crease signifying its original authority.
In the physiology of advanced organisms this genetic
authority is conspicuous, though its source is hidden,
residing in a system of cells quite distinct from those of
the general system, and having a sacred inviolability
and immunity, secure from waste and expenditure in
ordinary functioning ; an empire far withdrawn from
the outer courts of the temple of life into its Holy of
Holies. The nebulous and comparatively unspecialised
germ plasma dominates the whole embodiment, being
the source of its motion and passion — the physiological
symbol of eternal life, of that which was from the be-
ginning and which is to come. This tenseless potency
is surrendered only in such germs as come into embodi-
THE MOR/iL ORDER 143
ment, wherein again it is hidden, since of its kingdom
there is no end.
In the human world the dominion of this principle
is supreme. We see it in the primitive worship of an-
cestors and in the symbolism of all sacred mysteries ;
it is associated with all human heroism and chivalry as
with native virtue and piety, with the beautiful in art
as with the sanctities of home — the one lien which Nat-
ure has upon man in the most artificial conditions of
his civilisation. It is not of matter, but of the spirit,
or, rather, it is of matter because it is of the spirit.
Man is the incarnation of the spontaneous Logos, where-
of all else in Nature is only a less specialised mani-
festation ; and the essential idea of the Logos is genetic
— it is Sonship.
We dwell upon this conception of the genetic, as the
basis of all natural selection, of vital destination, of
harmonious ordinance, as the Reality beneath all ap-
pearances of individuation and altruism, of separation,
conflict, and association, because it impresses upon our
minds and hearts the sense of a universal homely dis-
position of things ; also because in any order, and es-
pecially in the moral, the Appearance is regarded rather
than the Reality.
Birth itself is a break with the eternal, and the first
deliverance of infantile consciousness, separating the
me from the not-me, is the beginning of a perspective
of wonderful beauty and variety, pulsing with the life it
veils, at once an involution and an evolution, a folding
away of the self and an unfolding of it, and in the
same movement an assimilation and a differentiation.
Individuation is by inclusion and at the same time by
144 A STUDY OF DEATH
exclusion. In the many-mansioned house when one
door is opened another is shut, when a fold of its cur-
tains is drawn another side of the fold shows a with-
drawing ; a falling at one point is a rising at the next,
so that the whole architecture is a succession of living
waves. It is a Passing Scene — a constant Trope — a
turning and a re-turning. Every point is the centre of
repulsion and attraction — one the complement of the
other, and both together making spheres of matter and
cycles of motion. In this flowing equation the very
contradiction of the two sides represents their identity
— but also their interchangeability. This Protean me-
tabolism is the outward revelation of the essential con-
substantiality of all things with each other and of all
with the Father. The hunger of every desire has its
satisfaction, partaking of what becomes its own, only
because that which is appropriated was already its por-
tion — a part of itself — as God is the portion of every
creature. Each desire is in the line of its special ac-
cords, but the largest harmony encloses all these. The
divided living is a specialisation, but in the eternal
reality all that the Father hath belongs to the prodigal
as to the elder brother. The line of a family in genet-
ic succession is one of special accords— of special at-
tractions and repulsions — and in this line vital destina-
tion is pronounced and plainly seen to be inevitable ;
but in its destiny, and really the largest part thereof,
is included the dominion and service of the univer-
sal kinship which it seems to exclude as alien. The
more particular specialisation in the predilection of pri-
mogeniture, both as to honors and sacrifices, privi-
leges and responsibilities, is really an exaltation of the
THE MORAL ORDER 145
genetic principle itself, whose glory is summed up in
the First, Only, and Eternally 13egotten.
The real Personality is a mystery transcending any
possible mental analysis. The analyses attempted in
recent psychological speculation have but one result —
the multiplication of personalities within what is usually
regarded as the embodiment of one ; and in the monad-
ological theory the multiplication is extended indefi-
nitely. Such notional analysis is itself a specialised
rational process, hiding the real truth, stalling it in the
numerical predication, and leading to just such irrecon-
cilable contradictions as result from the consideration
of a divisible Space or Time. The principle of divisi-
bility is itself a genetic mystery, which is disguised in
the mathematical process. We say " apart from," ex-
pressing distance — in a real apprehension we would
say " a part of." * Separation, if it be a vital depart-
ure, is the breaking of a union which still remains one,
including the fragment. This is not Pantheism, unless
St. Paul was a pantheist, declaring that in God " we
live and move and have our being." To think of our-
selves as " without God," and of our wills as other than
indissoluble from His will, is the falsehood.
Matter is not acted upon by other matter, as indi-
cated in the statement of physical laws, or a spirit by
other spirits : the action, including the reaction, is in
each but of ^\\. There is no dominion of quantity, no
majority. The infinitesimal germ balances the universe,
and, while in its individuation it seems to hermetically
* The word part has itself the genetic meaning : pars, from
pario, allied to portio, which has the same root as the Greek iiropov
{ga'c'f), perfect nfTrpojTai (it is destined).
146 A STUDY OF DEATH
seal its integrity, it has infinite endosmosis — an open-
ness to all currents ; and though it seems to gather
where it has not strewn, yet its vital use and posses-
sion is the appropriation of its own : it is in debt for
no endowment, save as owing and owning are one.
There is no fund of potency and wisdom, or of life —
only an eternal fount of these which we call our Father,
to Whom our vital relation is not one of accountability.
Neither is the individual, as a living being, indebted
to Society. The bond is vital, conferring upon the
individual no rights and devolving no duties. Rights
and duties are not pertinent to natural laws, but only
to conventional regulations and adjustments growing
out of the specialisation of social functions. The son
has no duty to the parent from his sonship, but be-
cause of his tutelage. We do not associate debt and
credit or any merit with parental instinct or natural
piety. The bond is so close and intimate that these
terms are not adequate to its expression. But the
period of human infancy is prolonged far beyond the
limitations of such a state in other animals, and more
extended in the advanced than in the primitive stages
of progress, so that the family, though primarily a
natural institution, involves a care and culture over-
stepping the bounds of instinct, varying according to
circumstance and guided by rational motives. This
special tutelage assumes functions whose exercise has
an important bearing upon social interests outside of
the family ; it is moral and educational, demanding
outward rules and standards and requiring obedience
and conformity.
THE MORAL ORDER 147
VII
The patriarchate is the similitude of the Father's
House, and in passing from it to the tribal organisa-
tion natural vitalism was still maintained. When, in
more complex grouping and a more special-
ised social life, a conventional bond took ^^t^os^J'
the place of the primitive sacrament of kin-
ship, human progress assumed new aspects ; and in
our retrospect of this departure it seems like an en-
trance upon a new world. As in the first development
of human intelligence the rational is differentiated
from the instinctive, involving a peculiar weakness and
also a peculiar strength, so in the beginning of conven-
tional institutions this differentiation is more marked,
and with the weakening of living bonds there is fortifi-
cation of the social structure. History and the science
of history deal mainly with this structure — with the
deliberate human efforts engaged in its elaboration,
and with the outward conditions affecting the growth
and decay of social systems. While the thoughtful
student regards this structure as a living organism, a
superficial view discloses the mechanism only, which
has indeed the semblance of an organism, but seems
independent of the general course of things — a drama
whose scenes are shifted arbitrarily by a human will that
has somehow broken loose from the universal harmony
— a by-play of Destiny rather than its ultimate expres-
sion. We are apt to review the history of mankind in
the lights and shadows affecting our conception of the
present situation, beset by problems of every sort that
148 A STUDY OF DEATH
seem to defy solution — a transitional situation the
issue of which no man can see. Human progress,
thus regarded, appears to be from the vital to the un-
vital, from the strength of a flowing life to the brittle-
ness of mechanical stability, a constantly greater sur-
render of potential energy for structural completeness.
The traces of that golden age of humanity, which our
imagination vaguely locates in some remote past, re-
treat before our longing backward vision until they are
lost to view. We assume that at some unhappy epoch
in the very dawn of history man abandoned a first
estate of innocence and was himself abandoned, thrown
upon his own resources of will and reason, and com-
pelled to win his way upon an earth accursed for his
sake, through harsh conflicts with a hostile nature and
with hostile aliens of his own race, and under the over-
whelming shadow of jealous gods whose angels fiercely
guarded his forfeit heritage, and who baffled his heaven-
piercing aspirations with such confusion as befell the
builders of the Tower of Babel — gods who were wor-
shipped because of fear and in a perpetual ritual of
propitiatory sacrifices. We picture to ourselves this
Marplot of the universe, this Protagonist who by his
first arbitrary choice involved a world in death and
woe, as forever after shut into such edifices as his arbi-
trary choice might erect for his pleasure, protection,
and use, and in all his ways brought face to face with
the Death whom by denying he had invoked, and with
the dread monsters following in Death's train or antici-
pating his approach. The development of this victim
of so many pursuers appears to us the result of his
antagonisms, and especially of his conflict with Death,
THE MORAL ORDER 149
whose terrors become the chief inspiration of life, giv-
ing swiftness and suppleness to his flying limbs, sharp-
ness to his faculties, and cunning to his intelligence;
deepening his imagination ; and prompting him to
build monuments that shall survive his brief exist-
ence. Even the procession of generations appears to
be a defiance to the arch-enemy, each one that passes
smiling in the face of the great Destroyer and pointing
to its successor.
Beholding man as thus the arbiter of his own des-
tiny, scheming, ambitious, and selfish, in all his strug-
gles seeking and slowly gaining vantage by the sheer
force of his own will guided by the light of a mind
built up by experience, and considering the solicitudes
and apprehensions attending his first rude exploitation
of a refractory world, wrecked in his own ruin, we fol-
low with a feeling of mingled pity and admiration his
ruggedly adventurous career from his first attempts to
clothe his conscious nakedness until his habit has har-
dened into a mailed armour covering his infinite vulner-
ability. While all living things erect and expand their
structures in apparent defiance of gravitation, and he
likewise counteracts this force in his upright frame,
using it and breaking it in his gait, yet in his artificial
constructions, dealing with inert materials, he must
build with level and plummet and upon a firm founda-
tion. In place of the sureness of instinct he must estab-
lish for himself the certitudes of reason, and in accord-
ance with these adjust every detail of his individual
life and of his more elaborate social economies. In his
reason he must find compensations for its own fallibil-
ity, the rule for righting himself against his many falls.
ISO A STUDY OF DEATH
As, according to this view of history, religion is born of
fear and the love of mastery is nourished by incessant
antagonism against hostile elements and forces, so the
shyness, suspicion, and cunning arising from apprehen-
sion and developed in constant efforts for resistance and
protection bring one tribe into war with another or
several tribes into alliance against a common foe; so
that it is through conflict, through conciliations to
avoid conflict or to solidify attack or defence, and
through treaties following the issues of conflict, that
the larger social groupings are formed.
In this more complex organisation a new element of
weakness calls for a new system of fortifications. In
the single tribe the blood of kindred was the sole
fountain of law, and morality was hardly distinguished
from natural piety. Restraints were vital. We see
from the scriptural account how God is said to have
treated the first murderer, sending him forth as a wan-
derer, but setting upon him a seal for his protection — a
very different procedure from that enjoined by the Mo-
saic law for the government of the aggregated Hebrew
tribes. The arbitrarily devised statutes, for the regula-
tion of peoples acknowledging no living bond of social
obligation, seem to us to have been wholly arbitrary,
and we represent to ourselves a deliberately wrought
political system, with conventional allotment of prop-
erty, of rights, and of duties, and even the fabrication
of a secondary conscience. In a word, formal justice,
regulating every social economy, takes the place of
the natural, living control ; and the substitute appears
to us so inherently weak because of its conventional
character that we inquire how it was reinforced. The
THE MORAL ORDER 151
weakness itself, the dire necessity, would have prompted
to rigorous discipline, to a severe penal code. The very-
frailty of government would have enthroned the gov-
ernor and hedged him about with divinity. The priest
would have stood at his side and forged the thunder-
bolts of heaven for the enforcement of the civil edict.
The military sacrament, displacing that of kinship,
would have stood for protection not only against for-
eign invasion, but against internal revolt. The inflexi-
ble barriers separating castes would have given soli-
darity to the social structure. Empires would have
grown by conquest, securing peace within their borders,
and fostering the culture of art and science and juris-
prudence. Thus Rome became the mistress of the
world, nations seeking alliance with her even more for
the benefits of her stable dominion than from fear of
her victorious legions.
In this benignant atmosphere a sense of mastery
succeeds to that of weakness, and the poet forecasts a
new golden age of world-wide peace, stability, and
equity. The will of man has conquered Fate, and has
caused to grow in the garden of Experience fruits of
virtue outrivalling any products of Nature's fairest
fields. It has especially transcended Nature in bring-
ing to bloom the thornless rose of Merit — a flower to
which no instinct may lay claim and which may not
fitly lie within even a mother's bosom^the mead alone
of Virtue's brow. Nature can bring forth only new
things ; Man, by the exercise of arbitrary selection,
makes a better world, a worthier manhood ; against
her vagrancy and defect he shows his moral rectitude
and the faultless symmetry of his art ; against her
152 A STUDY OF DEATH
prodigality his prudence ; against her spontaneity and
surprises his care and calculation ; against her undis-
criminating beneficence and pain his evenly measured
equity — not yet fully realised, but perfect in its ideal
aim and sure of ultimate outward completeness.
Has, then, the Promethean dream come true, despite
the jealousy of Jove and the arrows of Apollo ? And
has the spark the old Titan stole from heaven grown
into the soft flame of human amiability, courtesy, and
easy tolerance, subduing ancient enmities, and newly
limning the face of man into this frank mien that shows
no traces of the ancient fear and furtive cunning?
What betterment! — a term which Nature knows not in
its moral sense — and all from Choice, the device of
human will and reason in their revolt from a first nat-
ure and in their emancipation from its bondage ! The
old gods have new faces — not only in their fashioning
from the sculptor's chisel, but as feigned by human
thought. Long ago, in the inspiration of its revolt
against the nature-gods, the Hellenic mind had found
a new goddess — Athene Parthenos — the unbegotten
virgin, springing fully equipped from the brain of Zeus,
having no taint of that injustice which runs in every
line of Nature, and fitly representing the completeness
of outward integrity — the Queen of the Air, the pa-
troness of Athens and of the culture whose procedure
is by arbitrary selection. Now there is a kindlier
thought of all the gods. Perhaps they were benevo-
lent, but not omnipotent, themselves limited by a re-
lentless fate, which, like man, and possibly with the
help of man, they could only slowly overcome ; per-
haps they, too, were struggling against refractory mat-
THE MORAL ORDER 153
ter for the establishment of justice and for the ex-
clusion of darkness and death and evil from the uni-
verse.
But even while the poet dreams, the vast empire is
crumbling, soon to be broken into a hundred frag-
ments. The Age of Gold again recedes into the irre-
coverable past, and philosophy bewails the vanity of
all the labour of man under the sun.
A new civilisation begins the building of its temple
of Justice — an association involving new impulses and
motives which tend to the enlightenment and emanci-
pation of all peoples. But the leaven is hidden, and in
this new world, as in the old, there are cruel wars, feuds
of caste, the development of selfish interests and of
altruism as the expression of educated selfishness ;
slaveries are abolished only to give place to others
harsher and less vital ; and, regarding the merely out-
ward aspects of all human economies, we seem, at the
end of this nineteenth century, to be approaching an era
of sterility like that reached in the development of the
earth's structure before the appearance of cellular life.
From such a consideration, and in accordance with the
cosmic analogy, we might reasonably look for the ad-
vent of some entirely new order of terrestrial beings as
distinct from humanity as the organic kingdom is from
the inorganic.
VIII
This view of human history, while containing much
that is true, is partial — distorted by false dogma and
false philosophy.
154 -^ STUDY OF DEATH
It is true that fear has been an important element
in the human drama, especially the fear of Death. But
in the dawn of conscious endeavour, in the
voivedln th"e earliest intimations man gave of his peculiar
Superficial destinv, this fear was not an oppression and
Retrospect. ■'
did not beget panic ; it was the shadow of
a brightness. Sensibility trembles into its outward
manifestation. The eye is at first dazed and troubled
by the light to which it awakens. Yet the organised
embodiment reaches in man its greatest eagerness and
hunger. It is the urgency of vital destination rather
than a deliberate choice, an inward boldriess showing
itself at first in outward shyness. As we have already
seen, the advance of all organic existence is toward a
greater peril, a more conspicuous mortality ; and in
man the venture trespasses all limits, inviting number-
less risks. How violent must be the subjective uncon-
scious (or sub -conscious) will which maintains its
secret disposition despite the conscious avoidance, con-
flict, and solicitude — characteristics that are, indeed,
much more apparent in the attitude of modern man
than in that of a primitive race ! The difference be-
tween a Roman of the time of Marcus Aurelius and the
immediate offspring of the fabled wolf-nursed Romu-
lus and Remus is as great as that between the dainty,
comfort-loving kitten and its fierce feline prototype,
the lion, in whose heart was lodged a native courage,
generosity, and temperance, sharply contrasted with
the cowardly alarm, the developed cunning, and treach-
erous playfulness of its sleek descendant.
Native races show the mark of an urgent destiny,
which is hidden more and more with the development
THE MORAL ORDER 155
of consciousness, and they are not fairly represented
in the degenerate cave-dwellers, the easy preserva-
tion and exposure of whose bones, in their secure re-
treats, have misled or, at least, unduly impressed the
anthropologist. We are apt to overestimate the con-
scious weakness of men in those periods when conven-
tional institutions first began to overshadow natural
control, just as we exaggerate the artificial character
of those institutions. The potential energy is at its
maximum in the least specialised stages of human
progress-, and though the outward weakness, leading
to much faltering and stumbling, is manifest to our
historical judgment, we also discern indications of a
natural heroism and enthusiasm which gave buoyancy
to enterprise — a sublime confidence not to be ac-
counted for save by reference to that vital destination
which defies external conditions, transcending experi-
ence. The human will, in its more spontaneous move-
ment, had no help from a logical plan, but in reality
determined the plan itself, establishing that rhythm
which was essential to the social order, and which, in
its elaborate distribution, is modulated, losing the vio-
lent impulse in the regular pulsation.
The social evolution, primarily an involution, while
producing a world of its own, distinctive in all its
aspects, proceeds by natural selection as does all cos-
mic development— the selection in either case being
determined by the living will and not by environment,
which is indeed itself only the result of this sponta-
neous and harmonious determination. In the social
as in the cosmic order there is a progressive modu-
lation of forces, and tendency to uniformity and ap-
156 A STUDY OF DEATH
parent stability, until in the extreme poise of the
human will we observe an apparent indifference, trivial
casualty, and easily shifting caprice, corresponding to
similar indications of fortuity and inconsequence in
happenings upon the surface of things in the material
world. It is here, in the field of the extremely trite
and partial, quite divorced from any manifest desire or
meaning, that we become casuists and fatalists, seek-
ing for omens in what is least pre-calculable, making a
lottery in the chances of indeterminate allotment. The
original divination, however, was based upon the spon-
taneity rather than upon the mere fortuity of these
happenings, which, because of their dissociation from
any definite mental reckoning, were thought to betray
a hidden divine disposition. The chance at the sur-
face was thus associated with destiny at the centre.
To the ancient mind the "fortuitous concourse of
atoms," as the initiation of a universe, would have sug-
gested divinity. How often it happens that the Gate
of Accident opens upon some movement hitherto con-
cealed from our conscious observation, but which has
been going on behind the curtain of the " common
light of day." When we touch chance, we broach
God.
Destiny is only another name for Life itself — Life
considered not as a fund upon which the will draws, but
as itself personal Will, and sufficient to its own issues,
as not only from eternity consenting to what in time
engages its forces for resistance and conflict, but from
eternity determining its embodiment, its limitations,
and death itself.
When, therefore, a critical point in human history is
THE MORAL ORDER 157
reached, like that which separates civilisation from the
simpler native conditions which preceded it, we need
not regard the transition as abrupt and involving the
sharp distinction given to it in our logical analysis.
We look upon civilisation as a kind of second nature
of humanity, but it is not the less nature, nor less a
part of human destiny, being indeed that which out-
wardly distinguishes man from the brute creation.
Neither is it less spontaneously determined, however
the genetic quality may be hidden in artifice and con-
trivance. There is nothing in the dry tree that was
not begun in the green — not even its dryness. At the
extremity we see in fi.xed form what at the centre is
formative in the genetic sense, and the dead leaves
falling disclose the seed, so that genesis is proclaimed
at the last as at the first.
If it could be supposed that the type of existence
known to us as the human had failed of an earthly
manifestation, no other type could, through whatever
environment, have taken its place ; and all that is dis-
tinctive to this type in its actual development was per-
tinent thereto from the beginning. The terrestrial
headship assumed by man and his mastery, in Deed
and in Interpretation, were intimated in his simplest
estate. The conscious human Accord, in tlie full per-
spective of its harmony — to which no other note in
the universe is alien — will sound true to its original
key, whatever the variations or dissonances in its pro-
cession.
But for the upholding and sure efficiency of vital
destination, life w^ould be at a loss at every critical
turn. Even the ant or bee or beaver, if there is a
158 A STUDY OF DEATH
break in its instinctive construction, has some flash
from the broken current which gives a guiding light,
helping it to a kind of conscious recovery. In human
experience, by its very terms and limitations, an inces-
sant discurrence calls for constant recovery — so that
the entire existence comes to seem a fault, demanding
redemption. Every illusion of the phenomenal world
arises from this brokenness, inwardly made whole when
we see others as ourselves, aliens as kin ; this conscious
vision being possible only when the perspective is com-
plete. Destiny, the eternal life, has the mystical vision
of the kinship from the beginning even unto the end.
In the successive sphering of self, family, tribe, nation
— each individuation being in its special involvement a
kind of seclusion and dissociation, presenting the aspects
of conflict — there is the vital co-ordination of the plan-
etary system of humanity, the distribution, throughout
the series, of the harmony which becomes the system.
Repulsion — the dissociation already alluded to as
necessary to integration, so that to the family the neigh-
bour seems an alien, and still more therefore the adja-
cent tribe — is shown in conflict ; but the social instinct
was always a re-agent in a corresponding attraction,
without which there could have been no conflict — that
is, none that could be distinguished from the predatory
and destructive warfare waged by the brute beasts for
the satisfaction of physical hunger. Hospitality toward
the stranger was always stronger than the hostile dis-
position. Isaac was the type and Ishmael the excep-
tion. It is because man is more social than any other
animal that he is so pre-eminently a fighter; and his bat-
tles have even an element of romance in them not asso-
THE MORAL ORDfIR 159
ciated with struggles for mere material advantage or
for the "survival of the fittest." In the lines of destiny
affiliation lies beyond as well as before the struggle,
and those who have been shedding each other's blood
mingle their blood afterward in a solemn pact, establish-
ing kinship, which is to be still more closely cemented by
intermarriage ; thus the civil intercourse that follows
has not wholly passed beyond the living bond. To the
victors belong not only the spoils, but the vanquished
themselves, so that, though a man may fail to be his
brother's keeper, his victim's he must be ; and some-
times it happens that the situation is reversed, as when
Rome conquered Greece.
In the series of social integrations there is in each
some point of departure, of flight from its own restrict-
ed economy, toward something outside of itself. Desire
is itself altruistic. Reproduction, even by fission in the
lowest organisms, is the becoming another. This altru-
ism is transformed into that of nutrition, wherein the
hunger of one individual seizes upon another for assim-
ilation. Marriage is out of the family, often out of the
tribe, as in the Roman seizure of Sabine wives. " More
than my brothers are to me," is the expression of
friendship in all times. Thus life confesses the larger
kinship. AUdilection is vital, and the rational element
involved is only its light, not its inward motive. It is
probably true that integral exclusiveness begets shy-
ness and human contacts take first the outward ap-
pearance of antipathy, but it is the sympathy which is
inwardly dominant, 'i'he plunge into the cold stream
leads to an inward reaction in the vital current, and so
to <rreater warmth. It is because of the dominant in-
i6o A STUDY OF DEATH
terest promoting harmony through discord that native
warfare developed generous sentiments and a discipline
afterward of great value in civil administration. The
first slaves were captives taken in war, and their capt-
ure, being the alternative to their extermination, was
one of the alleviations of warfare. Their subsequent
domestication " set them in families " and developed in
both masters and slaves the loyalty and afifection nat-
ural to so intimate familiarity.
However complex the grouping, the family remained
in all its sanctities and tender emotions, and was an
important factor in all strifes and alliances. In the
most complex and formal of all ancient civilisations,
that of Rome, we see in the last pages of its long rec-
ord how persistent to the end was the worship of the
Lares and Penates and the care of the ancestral tomb
within the sacred precincts of the home. During the
period of Roman civilisation scarcely a single animal
was added to the number of those which had been do-
mesticated in primitive times ; but these tamed beasts,
in so far as they were directly associated with the land,
and the land itself, could not be sold ; they were sacred
to the family. In all ages one's country is his father-
land — patria — this term continuing the semblance of
the patriarchate, as all economy is, by its very etymol-
ogy, associated with the household.
The civil economy grew as naturally as the domestic,
and was from the first sustained by the urgency of
sentiments and interests which, transcending human ex-
perience, were its ground and not its product. There
was no need of new reinforcement from any source
not already existing.
THE MORAL ORDER i6i
Religion cannot properly be said to be or to have
been a necessary sanction of the moral order. Prima-
rily morality was in no way distinct from religion. The
secularisation of government, ethics, art, and philosophy
went on fari J>assu with the progressive specialisation;
and at the same time religious expression was in like
manner specialised and in the same degree, itself in
its outward form as much an apparent departure from
and contradiction to the central spiritual principle of
human life as was every other manifestation. It is
only because of this departure that religion has seemed
to be even incidentally a sanction of morality.
For the sake of clearness and at the risk of repeti-
tion, we must here revert to considerations already ad-
vanced in previous sections of this work. The original
sacrament of kinship — the fountain of primitive piety,
God-ward or man-ward — laid no more stress upon jus-
tice than does Nature, save that it was not, like Nature,
impartial in its inequit}'. It claimed indulgence from
the human or divine father rather than justice — ex-
cessive and exclusive indulgence. With the expansion
of kinship the limits of exclusiveness were also wi-
dened, looking forward to the idea of the All-Father
— a spiritual idea, the perfect realisation of which is
the kingdom of heaven, whose inequities, whether of
bliss or of pain, are as impartial as those of Nature — a
kingdom, moreover, of living righteousness rather than
of formal rectitude.
The illusions connected with the phenomenal world
— /. e., the world as represented in our consciousness,
and as affecting our volitions directed toward outward
ends — contradict, or seem to contradict, the Reality of
1 62 A STUDY OF DEATH
eternal life as apprehended by that consciousness and
determined by that will whereby we are the partakers
of this life. These illusions of the broken world to the
broken mind are inevitable, are vital. It is as if hu-
man destiny were itself thus broken and specialised,
making for us the beauty of color and sound and
speech and thought and feeling — at the same time also
the defect in these, that in them which, while essential
to all integration or limited embodiment, must work a
dissolution of every synthesis, wearing the bravest
vesture to rags.
These illusions belong to the very beginnings of
structural development in religion, art, and ethics ; but
in these first aspirations, where the difficulty is the
greatest, and where the view is narrowest and there is
the least help from accumulated experience, the poten-
tial energy is miraculous, overleaping barriers, lifting
easily the burden of life, with a strength to spare that
transcends the task, and solicitudes are not oppressive.
The first sacrifices in religious rituals are not propitia-
tions but festivals ; the first art was spontaneous, and
the pursuit of virtue easy and natural. In the golden
dawn the prodigal sets out upon his journey with no
grave misgivings. The sense of facility comes with
the descent, when the uplifting force of life which once
lightened and vitalised the whole structure is being
withdrawn, yielding it to gravitating and destructive
tendencies. In this dull twilight, full of solicitudes,
the illusions of time imprison and oppress. The bub-
bling fountain that became an impetuous torrent is
swallowed up in the dry sands of the desert.
Every manifestation of human life passes through
THE MORAL ORDER 163
this cycle. The reaction is in every moment, hidden
at first but finally conspicuous. The structure gains
upon the life, absorbing more and more the conscious
will and attention, until it seems all in all; the impet-
uous current bears man on to the completeness of in-
tegral form, which he regards with pride and strives to
hold at its noontide culmination of beauty and strength,
its full content; this is the height of his illusions,
which now have wrapped him in their luminous veils,
becoming his whole expression, his very thought and
language ; but while, in conscious complacence, he re-
joices in his integrity, in his formed character, in his
complete art. in his argent-rounded thought, in his es-
tablished polity, and in his consummate religious rite
and dogma, his inmost will repents itself of its accom-
plishment, and the reaction becomes outwardly evident
in induration and senescence.
The illusions, then, that arise in the human con-
sciousness from the specialisation of existence and
of consciousness itself, pertain to the whole phenom-
enal world, including human experience ; in their
beauty and glory they are associated with the passions
and aspirations, tlie attractions and repulsions, the as-
similations and jealousies that are involved in every
integration of individual and social life- — fluent in the
superabundant vitalities engaged in crescent organ-
isation, and fixed in the mature and stable structure,
where they are stereotyped in scripture and speech, in
established customs and codes, in the formal certitudes
of science, in the canons of arrested art and impulse,
and in the suspended inspiration and ritualistic ex-
pression of a settled faith ; and in their graver hues
i64 A STUDY OF DEATH
they blend with the purple shadows of dissolution,
when stability itself is seen to be the flimsiest and
raggedest of all the veils hiding the eternal Reality.
That which we have been urgently persuaded to call
something is brought to naught ; no trace is left of
outward goal and object — our very habitation and in-
vestment gone.
No form of life can claim pre-eminence over any
other as escaping these illusions. No wise virgins of
Religion can give of their oil to the foolish virgins of
Art or Philosophy or Morality, where all alike are shut
out from the Bridegroom's presence, save as in every
room — in Academe or Hall of Judgment as in a Tem-
ple — He is given lodgment and met or overtaken on
every path of the devious pilgrimages. To all alike the
veils that hide are the only revelations ; and all alike
deny as well as confess — Peter the same as Judas.
In the building up of any order the spiritual princi-
ple is veiled and apparently contradicted, whether the
order be religious or moral ; between these no dis-
tinction arises in human consciousness before each has
been so specialised as to take the form of a definite
system ; and always the prevailing characteristics of
the one are those of the other. What men at any time
feel and believe socially is precisely what they feel and
believe in their religious life, the rule of their conduct
showing their thought of the divine. If they have a
living righteousness, from hearts loving, forgiving, not
judging, generous not according to exact measure, with-
out servile fear of others or a desire to inspire such
fear toward themselves, then to them God has this
same living righteousness, from the same disposition
THE MORAL ORDER 165
of heart. What men think it is right for them to do
they regard also as the righteousness of God. If they
are satisfied with formal justice and with conformity to
outward standards, then they deem such satisfaction
an essential feature of divine government.
It cannot, then, be properly said that religion is the
sanction of the moral order ; it would indeed seem
more rational to derive religious doctrine from the ex-
igencies of that order, since those features of the latter
which grow out of its peculiar limitations come to be
dogmatically associated with divine action in a sphere
where such limitations cannot be supposed to exist.
In reality religious practice and thought have the same
tendencies as all other practice and thought — the rite
and dogma becoming, in the specialisation of a system,
as formal and unvital as an outworn state ceremony or
a stale maxim of experience. It is not that the rite or
dogma are essentially lifeless or insignificant, but that
in their fixed form, their integral completeness, they
have confined their life and meaning within the form,
which has itself lost plasticity, and that as an expres-
sion of the human heart they have become automatic
through vain repetition,
" Like a song of little meaning though the words are strong."
A creed may express a universal truth, a spiritual reality
in itself so profound as to lie at the very root of life —
such a creed as is expressed in the simple phrase Our
Father, which, seen in its genetic reality, transcends
space, time, and causation, and can never be outworn.
But within what narrow limitations may this creed be
1 66 A STUDY OF DH/ITH
held ? We need not go back to find its provincial limi-
tation in tribal theology or the early Hebrew theocracy ;
it is equally implied in the latest Te Deum sung in
all the churches of a civilised country because of a
great national victory. In every social organisation
less inclusive than that of a universal brotherhood this
simple creed must be denied, and in the competitions
of every practical economy it is irreparably broken
and compounded. It is urged by those who desire a
revision of our religious creeds that these should be
adapted to the advanced conditions of human prog-
ress; but it is by this very adaptation, which is a con-
stant necessity in order to a modus vivendi, that their
essential principle is contradicted. While social organ-
isation at every stage of its progress brings peoples
nearer together and expands the sentiment of human
brotherhood, developing a cosmopolitan sympathy, yet
it at the same time stimulates competition, multiplying
its opportunities in the ever-widening field of industrial
enterprise and commercial exchange.
We cannot here consider the possibilities anticipated
in the dreams of socialism, and which may indeed
transcend those dreams when the sentiment of hu-
man brotherhood becomes universally prevalent. We
are here confined to a view of social economies as
they have been and are now organised ; and in
this view it is evident that both the religious and the
moral sentiment accommodate themselves to the con-
ditions of social organisation, though in so doing they
contradict themselves, slay the prophets, and crucify
the Lord. It may more truly be said that they l^ecome
that organisation, in all its exclusions and inclusions —
THE MORAL ORDER 1 67
its strifes and aftiliations ; they are genetic in their
operation, and in becoming that which contradicts
themselves they only express the tropical action and
reaction proper to life itself.
Thus human experience, which, in a superficial his-
torical retrospect, seems to depend so much upon arbi-
trary selection, following some rational plan con-
sciously devised, appears upon a closer study to be as
spontaneous as nature, having its roots in the quick
ground of a life invisible and inexplicable. Its possi-
bilities are incalculable, and it is as difiicult to trace a
logical plan in its past as to forecast its future. There
is no science of history, and our philosophy of human-
ity as of the individual man is confined to a study of
growth and decay. Our mental analysis and our im-
aginative constructions fall short of the hidden pur-
pose, which is shown, and is yet to be shown, only in
the issues of Life itself^Life creative, genetic, tran-
scending causation. What we see at any period of
history, in so far as wc truly see anything, is some por-
tion of humanity in the stress of social integration, all
its vital forces engaged in the process, eagerly, passion-
ately, and, with feverish excess of zeal, violently seizing
upon all earthly materials and boldly annexing to the
terrestrial realm the celestial and infernal ; or we behold
it in the relaxation of these energies, in a process of
decline or degeneration. 'I'he types differ — as the
Hebrew, Greek, and Roman in the ancient world — and
with them the kind and degree of accomplishment and
the character of dissolution. 'I'he same external con-
ditions affect different races in different ways, and an
i68 A STUDY OF DEATH
extensive movement, like that of the mediaeval cru-
sades, involving many peoples, produces certain results
in some countries, and quite diverse or even contrary
results in others. The genius of a race or of some
individual leader standing for a race — a Caesar, a
Mohammed, or a Napoleon — determines the political
complexion of a continent, upsetting all previous calcu-
lations. Our host we have to reckon with is not Logic
but Life — a vital destination determining distinctive
types, temperaments, aspirations, and jealousies.
IX
The categorical imperative — what we call conscience
— proceeds from the practical or living Will and
Reason, and the form of the mandate is plastic,
according to the vital determination. Its
Conscience. ... ^ r i
variation is not from one hxed proposition
to another, thus presenting itself as an incongruous
series — it is a variation in the disposition of life.
This imperative is a bond in integration, and in death
an absolution. Take, for example, the family rela-
tion — of husbands to wives and children to parents ;
this involves obligations which are vital to social in-
tegration, and which are varied in passing from a
patriarchate to a more complex society. He who pro-
nounced against divorce, when asked whose wife she
should be in the resurrection who had had seven suc-
cessive husbands in this life, regarded the question as
not pertinent to the state awaiting us which should
know no marriasje. He taught that the commandment
THR MORAL ORDER 169
to observe the Sabbath was for man and not man for
the commandment — a truth appUcable to all command-
ment, which must be a vital requirement.
All selection is for a living use in the most com-
plex as in the simplest social order. What in a no-
madic habit is a quick taking and leaving becomes in
more stable communities a long holding and a slow
release ; the suspense is emphasised. The co-ordi-
nation of an elaborate system affects the sentiment re-
lating to property, reputation, rights, and duties. The
categorical imperative reaches out to every manifold
detail; and in all relations honour yields honesty and
faith fidelity. The fruits in the garden of experience
are growths and not mere fashions arbitrarily wrought
by cunning artifice ; even the flower of Merit has its
living root, however much in its nice human culture it
may have lost of the wild flavour of its native stock.
The honey of the hive is, not far away, the wild honey
of the tree. The grape in the autumn sunshine seems
to invite the bruising of the contrived human press that
so, by its ultimate fermentation, it may yield its finer
spirit. The things men try for or by which they are
tried are in themselves nothings, nor has the trial itself
any meaning apart from the spontaneous life which is
the ground of all experience. The doors we knock at
with importunity, or which we unlock by the mechanic
leverage of our keys, open to the treasures of life,
which have no wealth save for that life's native abun-
dance. Opportunity and temptation have only the sub-
jective significance given them by the heart's desire.
Our existence, in so far as it has worth and beauty
and dignity, is made up of passions, which, however
lyo A STUDY OF DEATH
modulated in temperament, must for their freshness
be forever renewed from their inmost source, and
which are never very far removed from the native at-
tractions and repulsions that originally determined
their spheres and orbits. We do not prize unim-
passioned goodness. Culture is worthless save for
its secret inspiration.
Accordingly we find that human sentiment, in the
most refined civilisation and brought into its most
orderly realm, is not so much a revolt from
Convention •'
not a Revolt Nature as in many of its moral aspects it
from Nature. t y-. • . • i
seems to be. Conscious restraint, or rational
control, regarded as a moral merit, is but a specialised
form of that inhibition which, unconscious and un-
trained, is yet a more potent and surer bond in all
natural operation. There is no such temperance attain-
able as that which Nature has spontaneou.sly — no posi-
tive purity like that of passion itself. The conscious
voluntary effort in this direction has its ground in the
inward temper.
X
Rectitude rigidly conceived, whose sign is a straight
line, is not a living ideal, but in every real motion it
Formal is 3. notional standard which is shunned as
Justice, .^ygji g^g sought. Righteousness has its out-
ward notional standard of formal justice, but no real
righteousness is ever truly represented by the even
balance of the scales. The flowing equation of life
suggests compensation, but cannot even for an infini-
tesimal moment rest therein. There is no motion
THtl MORAL ORDER 171
but for some preponderance that disturbs equilibrium.
A single inflexibility in any order would destroy it.
Justice even in its own field refuses to be just.
Having reference to illusory appearance, we think
that our aim is to secure rectitude, justice, stability;
but, as in nature there is no point of rest, so in human
nature satisfaction seeks emptiness as eagerly as emp-
tiness satisfaction. Men neither desire to render or to
receive absolute justice, having therefor a contempt
as for anything Laodicean. Even in business, a dollar
is parted with for the sake of or received at the risk of
usury ; and the zest of all commercial exchange is the
thought of vantage on either side ; and as a benefit is
given as well as taken, the barter resembles that benefi-
cent and complementary interchange always going on
in Nature. Any withdrawal from this commerce, by a
refusal to expend or to produce, checks the natural in-
crease and tends to sterility. The general disposition
of the merchant is toward an overflowing measure
rather than the close, hard bargain. Men love to act
the part of the host, and are gracious enough also to
cheerfully receive hospitality. In such amenities they
console themselves for the necessary restraints upon
their generosity imposed by the conditions of trade ;
and one of the sweetest graces of home is that there
one may give and take with no thought of return. Few
are they who keep within bounds even in the perform-
ance of duties, especially of those duties which involve
sentiment ; few who are careful, prudent, or thrifty
enough to manage a business for themselves, or who,
in subordinate positions, do not overdo service ; few
who are as conscious of their merits as they are self-
172 A STUDY OF DEATH
reproachful for their faults ; few indeed who do not
carry altruism to a mischievous extreme, regarding the
affairs of others more than their own.
As every natural tendency is, as Emerson says, " over-
loaded," so in human conduct every sentiment engaged
is overcharged and runs into excess. Men are enthu-
siastic and intemperate in their patriotism ; they will
not measure their loyalty. They retain, as long as they
may, devotion to a personal sovereign for the vitality it
seems to have as compared with the service of even an
ideal commonwealth. They cling to an intimate house-
hold economy, even if it involves slavery, or to a feudal
bond, until in the relentless course of progress they are
perforce emancipated. In a democracy based upon uni-
versal suffrage the masses of men will yield to the mas-
tery of leaders rather than to that of ideas, regardless
of material interests at stake, and will fight for a preju-
dice sooner and with more zeal than for an ethical prin-
ciple. They will, indeed, more readily follow the leader-
ship of good men than that of demagogues, if they are
thus brought into an association of sympathetic fellow-
ship instead of being invited by argument. Humour
and prejudice are more vital than logic.
In religion also the human disposition rebels against
a measured service, and the desire of the heart could not
be satisfied by a divine ministration exactly compensa-
tory. Man wants nothing of divine justice ; his appeal
is to a partial and special providence, to paternal indul-
gence. If punishments apprehended are incommensu-
rate with the offence, in his imagination of them, the
hoped-for rewards are equally incommensurate with any
possible merit. In all genuine faith from the begin-
THF. MORAL ORDF.R 1 73
ninc^, Grace has been tlie essential divine quality — the
basis of a forgiveness as free as the fallibility of man
is inevitable.
XI
Progress in all systems has tendencies that seem to
contradict human sympathy and faith. Every human
synthesis, become a sphere, hardens at the , . . .
■' ^ ' Limitation
surface, and the superficial contacts in the and
field of outward experience disclose the hard-
ness and intractability and attrition. It is here, in a
field of effort — training, culture, severe discipline^that
the sense of arbitrary volition is intensified ; here, in
this scant and rocky soil, that man cultivates the hardy
virtues which are prized exceedingly as the fruitage of
patient toil ; here where he stumbles most that he
idealises rectitude ; here where he is a pupil, gaining
knowledge and power by slow acquirement, tliat the
aim of all life seems to be improvement, betterment.
Here are his varied and exquisite pleasures as well as
his pains ; his successes as well as his failures ,- the
llush of pride as well as the blush of shame.
The induration, like the limitation, is a Mercy, the
express favour of a life lost for an exquisite sensibility
and capacity through which it is consciously recovered.
This human incarnation — the latest and most wondrous
of all creative miracles known to us — surely it was the
divine longing from the beginning, gained only after
many avatars. Eagerly the water became the wine and
tiie wine the blood, until in psychical man the univ-crse
is reflected as in a microcosm. He stands upon an
174 A STUDY OF DEATH
earth dulled and stilled for his sake, stands where the
sun meets the dark glebe and gives forth a warmth not
known to interstellar spaces ; he rejoices in the same
intimate warmth through all his pulses and in the
breath of the tempered and tempering atmosphere.
Light is broken for his eye and sound for his ear, and
the whole world for his varied hunger. After the tre-
mendous clashings of the elements and in the midst of
clashings still continued, but which he perceives not,
there is this armistice for his peace, this suspense for
the happiness of his dwelling. The isolation of his in-
dividuality is a blissful seclusion into whose penumbra
only the predestined guest may enter, who, however re-
pellent in his first guise, is afterward surely unmasqued
as an accordant friend. The day is meted to his
measured effort and the night to the measured rhythm
of his sleep. As his pulse repeats itself for his body's
growth, so does the pulse of memory and habit for the
gradual increase of his experience. The successive
days, like the successive moments, are
"Linked each to each by natural piety,"
and he does not see what wondrous change is in the
transition, and that what seems to him continuous is a
series of deaths and resurrections ; the dead quietly
buries its dead, and each day is new, not overmuch
troubled by the ghost of yesterday or the shadow of
to-morrow. The blessed oblivion of the past and igno-
rance of the future secure the clearness of the present,
giving to each moment its particularity and that suffi-
ciency which it properly has, since in it is eternity, as
in every particular is the universe. In this comforta-
THF. MORAL ORDHR 175
l)Ie seclusion he does not hear the <:;rass ^xow and is
not sensible of the swift motion of the earth in space ;
his communication and correspondence are well guard-
ed, so that but little of the joys and sorrows of the wide
world enter to confuse his individual portion, which is
itself, whether sad or joyous, an allotment by littles and
tempered to his limitations. As pet names take the form
of diminutives, so our intense delights and sympathies
are inseparably associated with our limitations, with what
is petty and partial in our lot. Fidelity in small things
is the test of the faithful, who, though they may be
made rulers over many things, still hold the small things
nearest and dearest, finding in close intimacies the home-
liness of existence. The wife of one's bosom, the few
friends of choice — these for nearly all men make up
the sum of all that gives joy and worth and dignity to
the earthly life, and the virtues and duties born of these
are christened again with colder names for larger asso-
ciations. Here is the nucleus of all social order, pre-
served fresh and tender by the very hardnesses of
elaborate system, as the soft children are guarded by
the toil-hardened hands of parents, whose wearisome
routine encircles them w'ith a wall of defence. All in-
durations are walls about the free play of life within.
So fortitude becomes sacrifice. The more complex and
formal and unyielding the social order is in its outward
structure, the more nearly does it secure the inviola-
bility of the individual and domestic seclusion. The
sign of life within the veil of the temple seems reversed
in the outer courts, becoming the contradictory sign.
The flexible, the flowing, the spontaneous becomes
there the fixed, the arbitrary, the inllexible. Grace
176 A STUDY OF DEATH
there becomes Justice, the Trope of Hfe relentless
Atropos. Thus life is fully clothed upon with mor-
tality.
As it is the complex vertebrate animal which is also
the warm-blooded and delicately nerved, and as the
tough shell encases the sweet kernel or vital germ, so
that ancient civilisation in which the family institution
was regarded the most precious and important, and in
which close intimacies had the deepest sincerity, so
that it gave to the modern world the name for piety
and every other virtue, developed also from the sacred
domestic penetralia the most complete system of public
functions and laws, the highest dignity and most in-
violable obligations of citizenship, the most binding
soldier sacrament, and the toughest fibre of an imperial
structure, thus becoming the very backbone of the
world it dominated.
But the hard envelope about the seed must be
broken for the seed's germination and new abundance,
contributing in its dissolution to the sustenance of
the fresh growth, as in its outward completeness it
served for protection ; so the induration of all human
systems is the indication of their maturity, their readi-
ness for death ; their suns at apogee have proclaimed
a new summer. The systems, like generations, pass
away, not because of their imperfections, but rather be-
cause they have reached such perfectness as their scope
has permitted ; not to give place to the better, but to
the new. In this passing, that which seemed stable
and inflexible becomes the flowing ; that which seemed
complete discloses its corruptibility ; all that has been
formed or acquired, whatever its excellence, beauty,
THE MORAL ORDl'.R 177
and loveliness, is brouj^ht to naught, save for its ser-
vice of descent — its liberation of the spirit.
"So God fulfils himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
XII
In the completion of the cycle is confessed its spirit-
ual principle, which in the stress of structural forma-
tion and functioning was obscured and apparently con-
tradicted. /// articulo mortis is uttered the
true countersign to the eternal verity ; and ^"''^ p.""'
° ■> ' f esses Life.
it is seen that stability, fi.vity, immutability,
and infle.\ibility are not pertinent to the eternal life —
that these are terms which destroy themselves by nat-
ural termination and recourse.
To the eye of sense, regarding the worth of the
structure as belonging to the edifice itself, seeing
beauty and truth only in the formed thing — the formed
mind, the formed character, the acquired e.\-perience —
and the good of anything only in its possession, this
vastation of a system seems utter vanity; but to the
spiritual apprehension the loss is wholly gain — redemp-
tion, rehabilitation, a new creation ; the eternal life,
itself the truth, beauty, and charm of all that is visible,
depends not upon any structure or acquisition.
It is because the eternal life is in the bright day
that we ask for its continuance and regret its decline ;
also, it is because of this eternal life in it that it can-
not stay ; but that life is in the darkness as in the
178 A STUDY OF DEATH
light. Happily our conservatism, sound and whole-
some as it seems, nay, as it is, at the noontide of ma-
ture integrity, like the fixed fibre of the strong oak, is
itself the habit of induration, ready to fall into the rou-
tine of descent and release, and serving as it falls. So
turns the planet into new dark, new dawn. So turns
the Wheel of Life.
It is only in our conscious representation to our-
selves of life seen in a partial arc of its cycle that even
in ascending movements there seems to be a con-
flict with death. It is here that death is included in
its essential meaning for the constant renewal of youth.
It is a part of our planetary opacity and confinement,
and because our attention is fixed upon outward uses,
that we regard evil as merely disciplinary and our pres-
ent existence as peculiarly a probation — the contracted
ante-chamber of eternity. The emphasis of Time pre-
vents our seeing that our existence now is as truly
grounded in the eternal as it ever can be, and that
this is the ground of our reconcilement with all that
we contend with and resist.
XIII
If our exile were real, if we could really leave the
Father's house, if by some chasm Time were divorced
from Eternity, and if human existence were wholly ex-
perimentation, consciously regulated and in
^InTime '*' ^^^ entirety determined by arbitrary choice
on a rational plan — as from partial aspects
it seems to be — then indeed might w-e pray for absolute
THF. MORAL ORDER 179
annihilation. In this view the moral order would be a
system of inextricable confusion. If we can believe in
such separation of humanity from its Lord that our
life is hidden elsewhere than in him, then is inevitable
that other belief, formulated in the extreme rational-
istic specialisation of dogma, that there are dread
realms of unutterable woe forever excluded from the
divine presence and from the operation of divine laws
and uses. If the material is separated by an impassa-
ble chasm from the spiritual, then may we accept the
dualism of the Manicha.-ist or adopt the scepticism of
the biologist who asserts that matter only is eternal
and that the entire realm of life is but a fleeting mo-
ment of cosmic time, a shuddering pulsation that for
an instant disturbs the monstrous and heartless mech-
anism, an alien dream as inexplicable as it is transient.
If his rectitude, his formed character — that outward
integrity which he builds up for himself — is at its very
best man's only blessedness, then is his experience
vain ; if that whereof he is ashamed or that of which
he is proud, if what he consciously shuns or what he
consciously seeks be the full measure of his evil or of
his good, then, in the superficial jaggedness of the
things wherein he is entangled, is his destiny the most
trivial of inconsequences, the ultimate caprice.
Not thus is he to be accounted for, and never in the
depths of his spiritual being has he thus accounted for
himself — as if he were a fragment of the world, appear-
ing suddenly upon the ocean of existence, moved this
way and that by varying winds and currents and by
the whims of his own variable and near-sighted intelli-
gence, and then as suddenly submerged beneath the
i8o A STUDY OF DE/iTH
waves. He never had a spiritual philosophy which did
not make him one with the Eternal — which did not
make him the measure and explanation of the world
rather than the world the measure and explanation of
him — one in which the scope of his evil and of his
good did not embrace all evil and all good. In him
alone did life awake and think and speak, but not thus
did he forego his share in the eternal silence. What-
ever his forfeit, it compromised the universe, and en-
gaged all the powers of the universe for his redemp-
tion. No transaction could in its scope be too far-
reaching to be commensurate with his eternal interests.
XIV
The moral order must be referred to a spiritual
source, and whatever its contrary aspects, those are
such as characterise any order when seen in the light of
its central principle. Regarded as a whole,
Progress de- the iHOfal Order is that cycle of human experi-
Spirituai ^iice which, beginning in a flesh-and-blood kin-
Growth. ship, is completed in a kinship which embraces
the universe. Whatever it may seem to be in any part
of the cycle, it must in its totality be the outward ex-
pression of man's spiritual destiny. Conducted to its
completeness by any rational plan or by rules derived
from experience, it would be as remote from the King-
dom of Heaven as is the embodiment of Confucian
ethics in the Chinese social system ; but if we conceive
the psychical progress of man to include his spiritual
growth in that garden of which the Father of Spirits is
THE MORAL ORDF.R i8i
the husbandman, and to be in its largest expression a
harmony whose centre is in the regenerate heart of a
divine humanity, then must this progress as a whole
transcend as well as include those constructions of
human will and reason which lie within the limitations
of experience — must indeed so far transcend these as
in its regeneration to be a repentance thereof, a re-
pentance beyond all the natural repentances in the
series of creative transformations, bringing in the new
heavens and the new cartli wherein dwellcth the living
righteousness.
These considerations whicli, in so far as they are
based upon a Christian philosophy, more properly be-
long to a subsequent chapter, are here introduced as a
protest against the identification of human regenera-
tion with any possible outward accomplishment or in-
tegral completeness. But it is natural and consistent
with all analogies to regard man's ps)'chical progress
as, in its mightiest reaction, associated with liis redemp-
tion.
XV
Regarding the moral order as grounded in a spiritual
principle, we see the working of tiiis principle in what
seems most arbitrary and conventional. Our plans
and charts of life are not merely subject to
revision, but they become parts of a dissolv- i he Hidden
ing view, the material world itself becoming
spiritually solvent. We cannot but fix an intent and
expectant gaze upon the objects of our striving ; hut
even while we look there is a chance like that wiiich
i83 A STUDY OF DEATH
comes in dreams, and some hidden hope is answered
that is often contrary to the conscious expectation and
always different. There is a real world nearer and
more intimate than that which lies next to our eyes or
our hands. It is as if we were projecting our oppo-
sites, really yielding when we seem to resist, and releas-
ing what we seem to seize, some deeper dilection con-
tradicting the apparent choice and taking the evil
which we outwardly reject ; so that, while we are load-
ing the scapegoat with our sins to bear them away into
the wilderness, there is something within us that takes
sin itself into that ancient confessional, wherein it is
conjoined with all dark mysteries and finds its recon-
cilement with the eternal life. What outwardly seems
weakness and shame is inwardly glorified, becoming a
part of the creative transformation whereby the quick-
ening spirit moves to issues registered, indeed, in time,
but known for what they really are and mean only in
the council-chamber of the Eternal, where the Son is
one with the Father.
CIIAl'TER III
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE
T
"Remember now thy Creator* in the days of thy
youth," says the Preacher, recognising the nearness of
youth to its mystical source, as if in the as-
cendent movement of the fountain it might peaih"
feel its motion ere it moved — as if through
a gate not yet closed it had some vision of unwasted
brightness and power.
Wordsworth associated childhood with intimations
of immortality, though, as presented in his sublime ode,
these intimations are those of an Eternal Life rather
than of immortality — the native sense of that life as an
unseen ocean whose waves are heard beating upon
the shores of Time, " though inland far we be."
In the scientific view birth is most intimately associ-
ated with death. Thus, in the series of creative spe-
cialisations, sex appears simultaneously with death.
Reproduction is a katabolic, or descending, process .
the matri.x is a tomb, from wliich Childhood is the
resurrection. The highest organisms show most com-
plex dying as well as most complex living; and in
* In tlic IIi;l)ri.w llic word signifies " Well."
184 A STUDY OF DEATH
every physiological operation the dying lies next the
living process ; thus the metabolism goes on, nutri-
tion turning and falling into secretion and secretion
stimulating nutrition.
Looking upon birth as the beginning of an organ-
ism, or the apparent beginning, and upon death as its
apparent conclusion, then the whole term or cycle of
its visible existence is the interval between these ; but
the extremes which we thus separate in thought are in
every living moment of the organism brought togeth-
er. The most significant fact disclosed by recent
embryological research is the intimate connection of
death with birth. Death permits birth.
In the most complex forms of life both death and
birth are specialised and accentuated and are, more-
over, prolonged and elaborate periods. In certain
species, between the lowest and highest, the death of
the parent seems to be the immediate sequel of the
parental function, thus conspicuously emphasising the
katabolic or mortal characteristic of the reproductive
process.
II
The earth, before it could be the dwelling-place of
man (of man as we know him) had come into a state
of suspense and temperament, wherein her veiled poten-
cies had a novel and varied manifestation —
Specific the cosmic habit and constitution of a plan-
Preparation
for Ascent et, showing what would almost seem a new
of Organisms, j^.^^ ^^ ^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ ^j j^^^ ^jgj^j^
bringing her into her destined orbit, disclosed grav-
/ISCF.NT AND DFSCF.NT OF LIFF 185
ily, so the hiding of her heat permitted the molar at-
traction to enter into a free play of molecular afTinities
hitherto latent in the primal expansion and tension.
The heat radiated from the contracting sphere is spe-
cific ; indeed, all the energies manifest in this ultimate
constitution of matter have a microcosmic specialty,
and in their planetary transmutation are released for
new tensions, diversely, multiformly, and minutely ex-
pressing the old theme in temperate and discrete ar-
ticulation. It is as if what Plato, thinking of the ge-
neric, meant in his conception of Ideas had become
species, diversified in bewildering variety, especially in
organic existence. The very distance of the planet
from the sun seems to permit this free play of life
upon its surface, as the departure of heat from water
permits crystallisation, or as the arrest of nutrition
brings fruit and seed.
In this complex hierarchy of Nature discrete accords
are sustained, so that they fall not into indifference
and confusion ; degrees of excellence are marked — of
truth, beauty, and goodness ; individual sequestration
and tranquillity are secured, and for each life a way —
its own that no other can take, and yet open to ac-
cordant intimacies and correspondences -, and in the
psychical involvement life acquires a feeling of itself
and a conscious control, the liberty of its dwelling.
Everything becomes special — birth, existence, death,
providence itself. Space and Time are but the room
allowed for tiie play of action and interaction within
an appreciable scope, and the varied seasons tlirough
which all things pass in their limited cycles. I'or all
living things repose, like work, is special, giving to
1 86 A STUDY OF DEATH
night and sleep and oblivion — to all kinds of release
— peculiar and grateful meanings.
Moreover, in this ultimate constitution of matter, we
note a special latency of forces, a vis mertice of the ele-
ments — terrestrial insignia of the primal potency. Ele-
ments which readily combine at ordinary temperatures
are set far apart. Thus it is said that there is iron
enough hidden within the earth to wholly deprive the
atmosphere of its oxygen if it were all exposed at the
surface. Receptacles are provided for storage and
immunity, and walls for protection. In living organ-
isms vitality includes the physical and chemical pro-
cesses, holding them in suspense for its own ascent or
allowing their disclosure in its descent, just as the ex-
pansive power which we call the centrifugal force in
the solar system includes and veils gravitation until
the limit of expansion is reached, when the reaction is
disclosed.
At the last point of descent in the specialisation of
inorganic matter, which we call dead — at the point of
barrenness, appears the plasma of ascending organisms.
Science for the explication of undulations or waves of
energy (the forces themselves which we call heat, elec-
tricity, etc., being diversified according to wave-lengths)
postulates the ether as a vibratory medium pervading
all matter — the atoms of matter being vortical motions
of this ether. These vortical motions are likened to
smoke-wreaths, versions which are at the same time
introversions or retroversions. We would prefer to say
that life pervades the universe, and to designate these
motions of the ether as the tropic action and reaction
proper to life itself — an evolution which is at the same
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 187
time involution. For whatever we may interpose be-
tween the phenomenal world and its Creator — whether
it be the absolute of abstract metaphysics or the ether
of physical science — the medium itself demands expli-
cation, and we must in the end confront the mystery of
the Eternal Life. In the organic plasma, then — in this
nucleus of a universe which, seen by us as ascending
(since we are a part of the ascension), we are willing to
call living — there is the action and reaction of life.
We may think of these as internal motions, represent-
ing them through such images as to our limited under-
standing seem most adequate for their expression ; but
the only real apprehension of them we can ever have
is through their own expression in living manifestation.
If we consider this protoplasm as a material sub-
stance having certain properties and certain chemical
constituents ^///s vitality; if we think of it as an in-
volute in which all forms of vegetable and animal life
are held latently and implicitly, awaiting the stimulus
of environment for their evolution and taking such di-
verse shapes and functions as may be determined by
mechanical and chemical resistances and pressures, we
reckon without our host. For this substance in its
apparent homogeneity and indilTerence does not more
completely obscure its possible issues than it veils the
unseen spirit unto which it is pKistic. It is because of
its apparent simplicity, insignificance, and characterless-
ness that it is susceptible to the infinite potency of the
abounding life which is to become tiie finite fulness
and variety — of that same abounding life which gives
the ether its pulsation.
This protoplasm, as already intimated, lies next an
i88 A STUDY OF DEATH
utter barrenness in the inorganic world — next the win-
ter-like stillness and calm severity of natural elements
and forces hushed and checked for some singular Na-
tivity. All the travail and prodigal expenditure of
Nature, all her gracious descents await here in peace-
ful silence to catch the whispered longings of a new
Desire, which shall call for further and more special
ministrations.
Ill
We have noted that in organic specialisation there is
a physiological insphering, incavations for the recep-
tion into the organism itself of this descending minis-
tration of Nature, hungry receptacles which
vouTdon-'a ^^^ ^^ once tombs of decay and matrices of
Capacity jjfg — t^g dving being thus intimately brought
for Death. ^ ,^. ^ ^ . ^ ^
next to the living. The life of the organism
demands the sacrifice -, it not only includes death, ever
multiplying and deepening its capacity therefor, but
gives it a physiological character as distinguished from
merely chemical disintegration, so that the descent
conforms to the physiological ascent which it promotes.
Moreover, each part of the organism thus nourished
suffers disintegration for its own functioning, and even
during a certain period gains structural strength through
this intimacy with death. The waves of psychical as-
cent in like manner rise next to the quick deaths of
the brain. Capacity and involution are for ascent ;
faculty, function, all evolution, for descent. The com-
plete physiological term for each organism is a cycle the
curvature of which is determined by the limit of capacity.
^SLhNT .-I NO nrSCHNT OF /.IFF 189
IV
When Euripides said that what we call living is
really dying, he expressed a truth as scientific as it
is poetic. What is it that we especially call living ?
Is it notour complex functioning, our development in-
dividually and socially, something associ-
ated with our waking hours rather than with *^"ny|,'|g"^
those of sleep, with the expenditure of en-
ergies rather than with their expansion and absorption,
with the exercise of trained faculties, with active hero-
ism and passionate romance, with the contests in the
arena, rather than with the crudeness of infancy, the
dependency of pupilage, the inly-folded dreams of
youth that give no outward sign, and the mimic con-
flicts of the gymnasium and pala;stra ? Rut wakefulness
is mortal exhaustion — functioning is a release of ten-
sion, like that of a watch which serves as time-keeper
only when it is "running down." No work is done
save by bodies that fall or in some way give up poten-
tial energy ; all development or unfolding — what we
call evolution — is a descent. We know the tree by its
fruits, but inflorescence and fruition, beginning from
arrested nutrition, belong to the falling life, to its dim-
inution.
Expression, all definite and visible manifestation, is
a witnessing — a martyrdom. Evaporation becomes in-
visible, but we see the descending rain, the flowing
stream, the crystalline ice : contraction, solidification,
and fixity of structure show the degrees of falling. In
the material world these processes of descent are most
IQO A STUDY OF DEATH
in evidence ; and their precipitate — what is known to
us as dead matter — is an ever-present object of vision
and touch, inert, resistant. Therefore it is that gravi-
tation, which is the physical symbol of death, seems to
us the prime universal force, and weight is made the
measure of value to the disparagement of levity, being
associated also with importance and impressiveness.
The root of the Hebrew word for glory signifies heavi-
ness. Solidity and stability bear down upon us with
a like emphasis of force and pressure, becoming also
the basis of confidence and firm support. So Death
which draws us down becomes a prop against descent,
the means of protection and fortification against his
ruinous assault.
Mechanical work, like the functioning of living or-
ganisms, is made to depend upon this "dying fall."
We accumulate gravitation by damming a stream, bar-
ring and accumulating its gravity, and then permit its
operation as a driving force. We confine the tension of
steam and then release it, regulating the escapement
to suit our purpose. We even imitate the organic
stimulation of nutrition through waste, as in the electric
dynamo the reinforcement of the tension is increased
by the larger outlet in expenditure.
The record of human history is a Book of Martyrs ;
the vista is lined with ruins. The beginnings of all
races are lost to view. The biographer of eminent
men searches in vain for traces of the child that is
"father to the man." Our own first years are hidden
in oblivion. The fountain of youth eludes discovery,
escaping even contemporaneous observation. Our
present is known to us only as it passes. Thought,
/1SCENT y4ND DESCENT Oh LIFE iQi
rcc;arclecl as a definite manifestation, is a precipitate ;
and the formed mental structure, like the formed moral
cliaracter, is a mortal framework that needs support
against its tendency to flxU, as does any material edi-
fice ; indeed the time inevitably comes for its maturity,
induration, fragility, and ruin — a season of autumn,
postponed only, like the decay of the body, by nutrition
and the stimulus of expenditure.
Death is, then, so inseparable from life that we speak
of one in terms of the other ; and in an external and
objective view we must think of all action in an em-
bodiment as finally taking upon itself the appearance
of decrepitude and diminution — the original potency
lost in impotence. In this view every embodiment is
a prison-house, gradually closing in upon life with an
absurd conclusion.
In reality, the involution is the tension and confine-
ment, and development the graduated release. An
invisible reaction in the ascending movement deter-
mines the limitation of every organism after
its type — that is to say, in its special accord ^""actfon"*
as part of the cosmic harmony. It is a bond
in the expansion and fixes the bounds apparent in the
development ; it controls the method and defines the
shape ; it establishes the curvature of the cycle com-
pleted in descending processes of evolution. Thus
reaction seems to dominate action — hidden in ascent
and conspicuous in descent. The smaller cycles of
activity illustrate this domination of reaction as does
192 A STUDY OF DEATH
the full term including them. Thus every expert vocal-
ist knows that inspiration controls expiration. The elas-
ticity is in the inbreathing, the withdrawal, the rebound,
the undoing (as in sleep), the moment of the heart's re-
pose — always the vanishing side, as into creative void.
Invisibly, or subjectively, the limitation is the seal and
commission of power, but objectively, as seen in struct-
ure, it is a barrier — the sign of that impotence into
which it descends ; and it is in this outward view that
the confinement oppresses or harasses and seems like
an entanglement full of hard knots that make us quer-
ulous and beget in us miserable solicitudes. Here it
is, and associated with the sense of imprisonment, that
problems arise to vex our souls, concerning life itself —
that life which transcends the prison and yet so seems
to belie and contradict itself within the narrow hedge-
ment. Thus our queries about a future life take their
very form and color from our cloistral structure — like
those which the Sadducees, who believed not in the
Resurrection, put to our Lord. We are apt, like the
Sadducees, to ignore the peculiar conditions of our
confinement, and most of all the fact that it is spon-
taneously determined by Life itself — by our own in-
most and essential life, which is one with the Logos
from the beginning. Our distorted views of the pres-
ent as well as of a future life arise from this ignorance,
which, as in the case of the Sadducees, is radically a
lack of faith in Life's proper reaction — its resurgence,
since the reaction is an ascent completed in descent,
a flight completed in return, a repulsion finally dis-
closed as attraction.
Concentrating our attention upon the visible world.
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 193
upon human development regarded externally, in re-
lation to its environment, we are lost. Life's own in-
sistence upon its limitation is so sure that it controls
every form of thought and action. The closure is ef-
fective. The limitation is special, as if holding us to
the key-note of a particular harmony. The protoplas-
mic basis of organic life is itself to a definite extent
specialised, being a composite of nitrogen, carbon, hy-
drogen, oxygen, and sulphur — plastic to the vitality
which is to give it embodiment and meaning. The
variety of the types developed is a diversification of the
organic harmony, but the most advanced organisms be-
fore at birth they emerge, each upon its own particular
strain, must rise from the basic note, recapitulating
ante-natally every variation of the entire gamut, each
clothing itself in one singing-robe after another until it
is habilitated for its proper song. This recapitulation
is a successive involution rather than an evolution, no
special development being allowed until the ultimate
stage is reached.
Our present existence is not only an allotment in
time and space, but a special allotment ; every embodi-
ment being a peculiar sequestration with tU and com-
plementary environment. If we could see the entire
synthesis in all its correspondences, the attunement
would be manifest, and we would not tiiink of one part
as acting upon another, but of all as a living sym-
[)hony.
194 ^ STUDY OF DEATH
VI
In an inclusion so insulated (in order that an organ-
ism may have, in any proper sense, individuality), so
special, and so complex, it is inevitable that illusions
must arise, enhancing the delights and deepening the
anxieties and sorrows of the human pilgrim-
Mental ^ ^y^ havc considered these illusions in
Inversions. »
a general way, but we desire here to show
how directly they are associated with a definite term or
cycle of existence, and especially with the apparent im-
potence of its conclusion. In this connection they
dominate our emotional and intellectual life, and they
do this by a projection which is an inversion of the liv-
ing truth. This inversion begins with integration itself.
That reaction which is in the expanding and ascending
life, and by which it becomes an involution, we project
as an external limitation. Time and space, which are
only the forms of our thought, we project outside of our-
selves, as if we were in them and not they in us. Re-
sistance, which is inherent in repulsion, we attribute to
outward objects. Control or restraint, essentially sub-
jective, we regard as pressure or urgency from without.
What is merely concomitant or complementary in our
environment becomes in our thought the cause of
states in us. We say we love what is lovable, whereas
nothing is lovable save through our loving. We think
of matter as eternal and of ourselves as having begun
at birth — of vitality itself as something permitted for
a brief period by suitable conditions of the elements.
We say that life depends upon structure, and are anx-
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 195
ious as to means of its sustentation. During a portion
of our brief cycle we grow in stature and strength and
knowledge, and in the full enjoyment of our heritage
and the widening of our perspective it seems as if life
were overflowing its bounds, and we think of ourselves
as nourished and filled from some fund provided for
this plenitude ; then waste gains upon repair, and the
wide fields grow dim and gray — when it seems to us
as if we were defrauded of all the wealth bestowed
upon us, until at last we are reduced to nakedness
and pass into the world of shadows. But, in reality,
the diminution, like the increase, is subjectively deter-
mined ; both are the visible signs of the imageless re-
action of Life, which itself can be neither increased nor
diminished.
VII
In the phenomenal world, as we know it, the appar-
ent diminution of potential energy begins with the spe-
cialisation of existence, with the divided living: it is
the sign of every beginning as of every ending, and is
more evident at every successive involution,
as in every individual organism it is con- Limitation
spicuous in its special development. It is
the sign of advance in the order, in the species, in the
individual ; but because we are so sensible of it as a
barrier, in that conclusion of a term of existence which
we ordinarily call death, we associate it with weakness
and decrepitude, with the manifest impotence, forget-
tiiiL; that the so patent blank wall which then closes
ill about us beiian its closure with our first moment.
196 A STUDY OF DEATH
Death which at last seems an intruder is in reality,
and in so far as we have part in it, what it was at our
first germination and what it has been all along — the
master inspiration, our nourishment, the storage of our
increase, our habilitation and restoration. The masque
he wears as last he looks upon us belies his mighty
office which he invisibly performs, clothing anew that
which he divests, bringing to resurgence that which
he seems to seal in with the outward hardness of stone.
Outwardly we note the final encroachment ; inwardly
it is our withdrawal, the vanishing curve of our brief
cycle, a yielding to earthly elements as soft as our first
seizure upon them— a yielding which is our release,
such as we have so often had in sleep.
VIII
The sense of independence on the part of an indi-
vidual organism is as illusive as that of dependence.
The harmony of the world, including humanity, con-
sists through a relation which is complementary and
not causal. The strains blend without confu-
Our Cosmic ^j^j^^ ^j^^ interaction between the animal
Partners.
and vegetable kingdoms illustrates this blend-
ing, as if there were oneness of action rather than in-
teraction. It is impossible, therefore, to overestimate
the importance of environment. Human action is thus
conjoined with cosmic operation indissolubly and in
an everlasting partnership. This is as true of psychical
as of physiological manifestation, what we know as
thought having its physical side. The cosmic comple-
/1SCF.NT AND DFSCF.NT OF I. IFF 197
ment has its own reactions, apparent to us, indeed, only
in sucii investiture as we give them, yet inseparably in-
terwoven with that investiture — as external vibrations
are with our hearing and seeing. In the ascent of life,
desire seems to compel its cosmic partner, as hunger
its victim, suspending that operation of physical and
ciiemical forces proper to them outside of this dominion
of vitality ; in its descent these forces more and more
tend to resume their proper action, until finally they
bring into their own domain the structure they have
served ; their hardening of the walls of life's outward
temple, begun for protection, has gone on to the ex-
treme of fragility and destruction — an office as kindly
as any they have performed. It is a partnership to the
very end, for while essential life can suffer no diminu-
tion, yet the individual living organism declines, the
declension being a part of its self-imposed limitation,
and to this falling the cosmic forces lean as readily as
to the rising — soon themselves to be freed from their
loving service, as is Ariel when his master escapes the
island seclusion. The partnership is continued through
successive generations of humanity. The descent of
the individual has, in its service of the new generation,
the aspect of a sacrifice in whose consummation Nature
officiates as high priest, burning upon altars firmly built
the last dry sheaves of the harvest. For the passing
generation her work seems here to reach its con-
clusion ; but she also will have her transmutations,
and meet on new terms these vanished souls. The
descent began in the service of new life and was con-
tinued in that service; its completion is for its own
invisible asccnsif)n, as tiie stream, serving while it
198 A STUDY OF DEATH
falls, disappears only to be caught up by the sun to
its hidden fountains in the sky.
IX
The integration of the individual life is a tension, an
involution, a reaction and limitation. In its very ex-
pansion it becomes an inclusion and confinement, in-
sisting upon the partial, the divided living,
through Limi- at whatcvcr loss and exclusion. The sim-
plest and most plastic organisms are incon-
ceivably more potent than the most advanced and com-
plex, the latter also having the greatest potency before
germination, before they are aware of living. Blind
feeling is sensitive to vibrations from which specialised
sensation is excluded, and chemical processes depend
upon solar rays more powerful than those to which any
developed organism is sensible. Kinetic energy is patent
through the latency of the potential. Thus the inclu-
sion becomes an ever vaster exclusion, as if life ad-
vanced through the recession of its powers, getting its
values through distance, holding its revels aloof from
its central fires, distilling its dews ujjon the cool hard
surface from which the sun has fled. The story of life
is from the beginning one of abnegation. Man in his
psychical progress largely surrenders the instinct com-
mon to all other animals, thus limiting his knowledge,
confining it to slow and definite processes of accumu-
lation — limiting his action also within the scope of de-
sign and invention. He seems a mere nothing in the
immensity of space, and the whole cycle of his earthly
ASCENT /tND DFSCENT OF LIFE 199
history but a moment in the world's time ; his work
upon the eartli is like writing upon the sands soon to
be obliterated, and his conscious correspondences with
the universe are but flashes of light in the vast dark-
ness. Of the complex synthesis in time to which, in
his present state, he belongs he knows very little, and
of any other absolutely nothing. Least of all does he
know himself — what was his being before he appeared
in his present form, what it shall be when he is divested
of that form, or even what it is now in the depths
whose movements are not registered in his conscious-
ness, certainly not registered so that he may take note
of the index. Indeed, the full knowledge of any living
reality would operate like the coming of Zeus to Semele,
shattering his intelligence. Life so turns upon itself,
in its tropical reaction, that the very terms of his knowl-
edge change into their opposites. While he stead-
fastly gazes upon red it becomes green. He can make
no assertion which he must not come to deny, and no
denial that in its own completion shall not be confes-
sion. The trope makes the terms, and makes them
those of a paradox.
But the loss is for gain; the more partial is the more
complex, the divided living the field of multiplicity and
variety, what is mercifully excluded therefrom permit-
ting the express and manifold excellence of the virtue
and beauty and truth of our human life; and as the con-
tracting rocky crust of the earth is covered with tender
and luxuriant growth, so man, ever at the surface of
things, has there the open and extended view,
" Tlie harvest of the quiet eye,"
200 A STUDY OF DEATH
the subdued melody of earth's voices, vast and intimate
communicability with things and forces tempered and
brought near, and the exquisite sensibility and motion
of the soft flesh that covers his vertebrate frame, even as
this hard structure veils the inmost plasticity of his in-
carnation. The social plexus, too, above the tenacious
fabric of its unyielding laws, has the play of its gra-
cious amenities, warm sympathies, and gentle charities.
The psychical development relieves its own inflexible
logic with the poetic dream and all the airy forms
created by the imagination; and religious faith rises
above its firmament of creeds, transmuting the con-
ditions of divine justice into the intimacies of a mys-
tical incarnation, wherein it has a new motion and sen-
sibility — the plasticity of a new principle, the oldest
of all, hidden from the foundation of the world, the
eternal kinship. Thus the organic kingdom, ending
in man, is the reflection of the whole cosmic cycle back
to God. It is a fleeting season, but it is the world's
summer, whose express glory is due to the veiling of
potential energy, every new limitation and hiding of
life being a fresh and more marvellous manifestation
of its creative power.
X
It is a glory that must pass, known only as it passes.
That defect, or what we deem defect, in all manifesta-
tion from the beginning, which has led so
Radical iT^^ny minds to associate matter with diabo-
lism—that disturbance of equilibrium by
which motion is possible, so that the wheel of life may
ASCENT AND DFSCENT OF LIFE 201
turn — that slight friction which, for tlie same possibil-
ity, science postulates as an attribute of the ether, itself
the elasticity of all tension ; all these are but other
designations for that tropic reaction of life, determin-
ing every specialised manifestation, hidden in ascent,
expansion, and increase, and disclosed in contraction
and descent. Urahnia becomes \'ishnu, the Preserver,
and then Siva, the Destroyer. This trope is ever
present to the mind of the Preacher: the crookedness
that cannot be made straight, a wanting that cannot be
numbered, the one event that happeneth to all, the
great evil under the sun. "To everything there is a
season ... a time to be born and a time to die ; a time
to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
... a time to get and a time to lose ; a time to keep and
a time to cast away." Looking toward the inevitable
end, the view becomes pessimistic: the limitation sug-
gests weakness, malady, and corruption, and in human
life is associated with a deeper frailty, the taint of
souls, the lapse unutterable into the bottomless pit.
"To be weak is miserable," and this weakness, this
goal of impotence so apparent in old age, when de-
sire fails and the grasshopper becomes a burden, so
seems to set vanity at the end of things that we
wonder, in our philosophic musings, why we should
take such pains to set straight any crookedness, to
build up and buttress structures that must so surely
fall, why. indeed, our cup is filled with sweets that must
all turn bitter. The end of life thus reflects its gloom
upon the whole course, especially in the minds of those
whose hold upon existence is all along timid and feeble,
and in those ages which lack faith and vitality ; and
202 A STUDY OF DEATH
we almost envy that strong desire which in more primi-
tive times led men to believe in the possibility of tak-
ing into another life their earthly possessions — wealth,
wives, and servants — that were buried or burned with
their bodies, confident, as the bees in making honey
for their winter, that somehow, though the vase of life
were broken, they might avail of its precious storage
for death's hibernation. Better still is the faith in life's
resurgence, for new increase, thus bringing us back to
the fountain.
XI
The weakness and pains of infancy are as great as
those of age : the latter call forth more of commisera-
tion, because for them the relief is wholly invisible, and
is not ours to give; the former appeal to our helpful
sympathy, and also have help that we know
not of, even as we only partially comprehend
their magnitude. The mother knows her own
travail, but not that of her child, who never in his con-
scious life will undertake a labour equal to that he must
bear before he is born. Within what a brief period
does he repeat from the simplest of organic forms ev-
ery stage of a development that has taken thousands
of years within its scope ! We have here in this reca-
pitulation, this foreshortening of the work of ages, a
hint of that potential energy which is greatest in the
least specialised forms of existence — open to the Infi-
nite. "My substance was not hid from Thee, when I
was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the low-
est parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my sub-
ASCENT AND D ESC I: NT Oh /.IFF 203
stance yet being imperfect ; and in Thy book all my
members were written, which in continuance were fash-
ioned when as yet there was none of them."
The human germ, having accomplished its ante-natal
miracle, is brought into the light of day a helpless in-
fant ; but though seeming a mere weakling, it has still
before it new mountains to remove. It must wholly
vitalise and bring under control its plastic embodi-
ment; must make its connections, physically and men-
tally, with its natural and human environment ; and, in
doing this, it must supplement the subtle architecture
of its brain, here again repeating in a brief period what
centuries have done for its ancestors. It cannot in-
herit thought and speech or any experience ; in all
these it must begin at the beginning, and yet catch up
with whatever advance has been made by its kind.
Very little of this inconceivable burden can be borne
for it by parents, kindred, or teachers — subjectively,
indeed, naught of it; in arbitrary symbolism the signs
are held out to the child, but the latter must give these
their significance. The invisible power of life which
shaped its organism, already limited and veiled by that
organism, is still called upon to perform miracles. Out-
wardly there is no sign of this travail, and when it is
greatest the child is nourished with milk, and spends
most of its time in sleep ; indeed, the tender plasticity
is the essential condition of the miracle.
204 A STUDY OF DEATH
XII
The season of infancy has much in common with
that of age, though so different are these in our
thought of them. The burden of the child is invisible,
not apparent in consciousness, its gravity being hid-
den in the expansion which is an uplifting tension ; in
age the gravity is disclosed and shown as oppressive
weight. The jaded sensibility of age toys with the
objects of its diminished desire, simulating the dalli-
ance and shy coquetry of the child's first contact with
the world. The new desire has pain, as the old has
weariness, and we see the children, thrust upon this
earthly coast as by the impulse of a tide at
Desire begins jj-g ^qq^ ygf crying bccause they have come,
m Aversion. ^ j j o j '
and seeming to question if they will stay.
How coyly do they take their places at life's feast, as
if nibbling at some possibly treacherous bait with
dainty and quickly surfeited appetite ! Never does
sweet milk sour so quickly as the mother's in the gorge
of her nursling; and the regurgitation is alike promi-
nent in Shakespeare's portrayal of the infant and in
Swedenborg's vision of heavenly innocents. The un-
conscious desire, with its sure wisdom, though it lacks
the eagerness of an acquired taste, of an appetite that
has grown by what it has fed on, has yet a hidden vio-
lence ; but because the sensibility is new and fresh, its
first contacts with an untried world are attended by
pain and irritation and the difficulty of crudeness, as
newly awakened eyes suffer the dawn, seeming to shun
what they await. The bold venture is outwardly shy
ASCENT /1ND DESCENT Of' LIEE 205
and full of a play in which repulsion seems primary
rather than attraction. The seizure begins with an
open hand that would seem about to put aside its
object before grasping it, even as it ends in relaxation,
in the rejection of its fulness.
Thus, though childhood is so postulant, asking for
all things, yet the first responses to its prayers are ac-
cepted with an averted face, as of those who are leaving
the world instead of those who are taking it — the cur-
vature of departure being the same at the beginning of
the cycle as at the end. The cup of life has no more
of bitterness in its dregs than there is in its first relish.
Novelty excites nausea as does satiety ; a wholly
new sensation or situation produces a kind of dizziness
and bewilderment. The taste for any food, as well as
for stimulants and narcotics, must be acquired, and a
different zone becomes compatible only through ac-
climatisation. Precisely this arrangement of harmony
which we enter into at birth has never been ours be-
fore, and there is a sense of discord at first and the at-
tunement is gradual ; a chaotic disturbance precedes
the cosmic agreeableness. We are at first in the strange
situation of the blind man whose sight has been sud-
denly restored — at a loss, even as one suddenly deprived
of sight. Hence the feeling of sane restfulness that
comes from familiarity. We are pilgrims in the far
country and must be naturalised. We observe, if we
do not remember, the child's timid aversion to a new-
face or a strange garment, and in the beginning all out-
ward shapes are rude disguises — even all that is stim-
ulant and helpful being first seen as hostile, and only
slowly disclosing the intimate friendliness.
2o6 A STUDY OF DEATH
XIII
Pathology begins with existence, showing the as-
pects of malady in nascent conditions, as might be ex-
pected, since the seed must die for its own abundance.
Our physical functioning results not only in
thoioey^ wastc but in the actual precipitation of a
poison, which adds malignancy to weariness.
The first stage of nutrition is toxic, the stomach produc-
ing peptones, whose poison is eliminated by the liver,
itself the cause of sweetness and the seat of melancholy.
Even medicine relieves disease by virtue of its bitter-
ness, and by every moment tasting death our life is
forever renewed, while we smile contempt at the angel
we have wrestled with for his blessing.
Difificulty, resistance, disturbance, pain — whatever
names we give to the limitation upon which we enter —
belong to life, to its proper reaction from the begin-
ning, and are the basis of a normal pathology. Nas-
cent and renascent life is in the line of resistance, is in
its expansion aware of its bond, and involves disease.
Comparing its repulsion to what in physics we call the
centrifugal force, we think of it as resisted by attrac-
tion and as thus brought into flexion ; but, really, the
repulsion is from the first an attraction, and so a flex-
ion at every point of the cycle, or vibration. The ex-
pansion involves the tension, and therefore it is that it
becomes confinement.
The reaction is constant through the whole term of
existence — the basis of endless change and infinite
variability ; forever interrupting the tendency of habit,
ASCENT AND DHSCHNT OF LIFE 207
which is toward stabiHty, uniformity, and facility, and
introducing the hostile, alien elements, dissociable for
new association. For every sign of the zodiac there is
some new labor; and in this travail all outward assist-
ance involves resistance. The latent inward potency
is outwardly maintained in the deepening of capacity,
whose tension is buoyant, lifting as it deepens. Rut in
tile aspiration every movement is a spurning of what it
meets, contempt of what it embraces, and though life
makes terms with its adversary quickly, they are terms
of reconciliation whose first and last import is one of
disdain. We turn with weariness from Day to Night,
and at dawn smite with rosy arrows the breast that has
renewed our strength. The children turn against the
parents, truants from home and at enmity with teachers
and nurses. The Lord of Life brings not peace but a
sword,'' setting a man at variance against his father, and
a daughter against her mother," so that a man's foes
shall be of his own household. Normal like abnormal
pathology has its shocks and chills, its fevers and its an-
gers — its pool of Bethesda, whose waters are troubled by
the Angel of Death, who is invisibly the .Angel of Life.
The strongest passion of animal life is the beginning
of physical death, and we are not wholly amiss in call-
ing its first appearance a '• love-sickness,'' for what is
there so full of pains and rages and fevers? It is the
first note of command issued by That which is to Come,
calling for the sacrificial festival and procession, for the
Passing of the Present, bedecking every barge upon
the stream witli bright-coloured garlands, with music
and dancing, so that no earthly vesture can vie witli
the gaiety of this mortal habit.
2o8 A STUDY OF DEATH
Death, as the end of life, seems especially the time
of parting ; but a closer intimacy is broken by birth,
and every crisis of our existence is home-breaking as
well as home-making. The very specialisation of life —
cosmic, individual, and social — is, as we have seen,
through division, every division or involution being a
new manifestation of reaction, and always a marvellous
surprise. In the individual the germ becomes organ and
the organ function, and so the stream runs away from
its fountain. If it were a perpetual cycle it would still
be through waves ascending and descending ; the in-
tegration being forever renewed through disintegration.
In such organic life as we know the term is limited,
with constant alternation of increase and expenditure ;
but a point is reached where nutrition is checked, and
waste gains upon reparation — the line of demarcation
between youth and age.
XIV
The burdens and pains of plastic childhood are
quite hidden, not only from outward observation but
from consciousness itself. The ascent is not like the
climbing of the Hill of Difficulty, but rather like a
translation into the heavens, the burden and difficulty
being included, as if they were participant
^chiidhood°^ in the exaltation, upborne by some invisible
power. The expansion is at the same time
a withdrawing and an imperative absorption. Hence
the quaint mastery of childhood, its native hauteur, its
sublime sefishness. It is said by those who have stud-
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 209
ied the child's ways of thinking, that he regards aged
people as in the state of becoming little ones. We,
on the other hand, looking at children's faces, seem to
see beyond them the abysmal realm of the Ancient of
Days. How swiftly have their softly fashioned limbs
scaled the old battlements ! Ruddier and stronger than
the dawn, fresher than the spring-time, older than the
stars, they spring forever from the loins of the Eternal,
and no visible constellations may yield their true horo-
scope.
The ancient symbolism representing the apparent
movement of the sun through the twelve signs of the
Zodiac (corresponding to the twelve labours of Her-
acles) is true also in its application to the cycle of a
human life. First the solar hero is lifted by the help
of Aries and Cancer in his ascending movement, reach-
ing finally the summer solstice in the House of the
Lion ; then gently declining into the arms of the Vir-
gin, he is held for a time in the pause of Libra ; and
finally, having received the sting of the Scorpion and
the arrows of the Archer, he passes through the trope
of Capricorn into the watery region of Aquarius and
risces — the signs of dissolution.
The human child, like the infant Heracles, avails of
the heavenly powers with which it is secretly allied, be-
ing for a time withheld in its true kingdom, which is
not of this world. For childhood Time itself is an in-
fmite expansion, a verisimilitude of Eternity ; the reac-
tion of tender puissance is quick and mighty, so that
its release is as ready as its seizure, and the aged
Reaper with the scythe is not needed to make sure
the severance, as he is for them that are inveterately
210 A STUDY OF DEATH
rooted in the earthly soil. The strain of buoyancy is
also its restraint, herein also showing the reaction in a
sure inhibition, a marvellous continence.
Childhood, as measured by outward observation, is
very brief, but in the calendar of the individual con-
sciousness it transcends all seasons, and is indeed im-
measurable. It is sacred and inviolate, guarded from
the use and waste of expenditure, keeping still the se-
cret of its deathless power, while most including and
hiding death. It is a flame which consumes not — the
flame of increase. The heavenly foundations are laid
of life's temple, which rises like an exhalation in un-
sullied purity.
XV
But this wholeness is an integration which rises above
ruins, and while itself inviolable is a resistless violence
and ravishment. It takes all and gives nothing. Its
^j^^ dominion is greatest when it is most with-
Outward drawn from earthly contacts, when its walls
Quickening. /• i i -i i
are soft as clouds, and when as yet its vo-
racity shows no teeth for crushing and no sting for
wounding. All signs of conflict are hidden in this su-
preme self -centring absorption, this primal storage.
The quickness of life, also, is veiled beneath the out-
ward aspect of inertia and somnolence.
Achilles is still among the maidens, like one of
them, and wearing their garments ; the swiftness of
his feet is not yet disclosed, and for him neither spear
nor shield has yet been fashioned.
The time comes when the limit of capacity is reached.
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE -Mi
when the invisible quickness becomes an outward quick-
ening, as when the lightning that has been hidden in the
depths of the tense cloud leaps from its lair and breaks
the heavenly silence. It is as when the bow has been
drawn to its full tension and is released for the other
half of its vibration, speeding the arrow.
We have, in another chapter, considered those " crit-
ical moments" in all development, inorganic and or-
ganic, which Mr. N. S. Shaler, in his Fntcrpretation of
Nature, has treated with luminous significance. These
belong not only to every complete cycle, but also to
every living moment, which has its two sides — of ten-
sion and release. When the limit of tension is reached
the reaction is manifest in the abrupt action which
seems explosive in the escape. There is this limit to
the involution of every type of existence ; and it is also
indicated in every diverse plane of the same existence
and in every particular process. In purely physical
phenomena it is more conspicuous, as in the sudden
precipitation of a shower or in a bolt of lightning. In
the organic world there is greater suspension and more
modulated strain. We do, indeed, note the quick out-
burst of a flower, the mark of hysterical violence in
laughter and sobbing and in a passionate word or act ;
but for the most part temper disguises the tempest,
and the critical point escapes notice. Yet every mo-
tion, every word, every thought, marks this sudden ac-
cess, whereby, indeed, they become motion, word, and
thought. There is in every process the point of ab-
rupt precipitation, though the movement break as qui-
etly as the surf of a summer sea, or progress in rhyth-
mic harmony like the more distant waves, whose rupture
212 A STUDY OF DEATH
is hidden in their fluxion. There is the gradual reinforce-
ment, the movement itself becoming momentum, to the
point of excess ; in youth the expenditure, or release, is
an overflow, an invisible exhalation, while the hard-
ened walls of age resist and are broken. In human
affairs there are crises so sudden as to be unanticipated
in the slow increment of movements leading up to them.
The masterly practical man is quick to see the first
signs of the storm before it breaks. Hence the em-
phasis of opportunity, the taking of the tide at its flood.
In every great movement there is a storm-centre, tow-
ard which all the elements are drawn; the demand is
exhaustive ; it is as if the spirit of the time were mar-
shalling his hosts for an issue known only to him,
crowding expectancy, accumulating enthusiasm to fanat-
ic excess, overcharging the capacities engaged. Then
suddenly the meaning of the movement is known, as if
certified by the announcement of angelic choirs, whose
theme becomes thenceforth the burden of human speech
and song , the passion is expressed in the prodigality
of its blossoming, which speedily becomes the prodi-
gality of ruin. What matters it if the blossoms are
swept away by the wind and rain, so the fruit is set ; if
the walls of the temple fall, so the Presence that filled
the temple is glorified ; or even if the entire structure
of a civilisation is destroyed, so the race is reborn !
There is no outward explication of such crises ; it is
upon the environment that the relentless demand has
been made ; it is the external structure that has yielded
to the transformation of creative life.
/^jyy^i^ii I /*i/v/^ i^i^oiwU/Y I K^r uii i^
XVI
Life so insists upon integration — makes such de-
mands for it in every involution — that we come to look
upon the temple, thus wondrously fashioned and at
such costly sacrifice, as its end ; but the
Lord, looking thereupon, saith : " Not one in''Rutn°"
stone shall stand upon another." The ex-
pression of the life which shaped the structure is possi-
ble only through disintegration. Things high and holy
are for brokenness and descent, whereby their essential
quality is manifested. Life ascends to that point from
which it may most expressively fall.
Childhood is the fountain in the sky, lifted thither by
its vital tension, and there permitted an unadulterated
storage ; in its exaltation an image of primal holiness,
an unmoral innocence, not knowing evil as distinct
from good. But when the time comes for it to descend
into earthly channels and contacts — this is the other
side of life, the contraction of its sphere, wherein it loses
its translucent and crystalline purity. Yet it is at this
turning-point that the individual human life enters upon
its fruition, its summer, as if in the wanton prodigality
of its functioning— its action and its passion— it would
express all the wonder and glory hitherto hidden. It
is a trope, a change as remarkable as that which befell
the planet when its self-luminous orb became opaque
and its barrens blossomed into the luxuriant life which
expresses the flaming wonder they had veiled. Thus
life falls into its special excellence, having thus also the
special defects of its excellences. A special and con-
214 A STUDY OF DEATH
sciously recognised pathology is developed which even
in its normal course has its fevers of excess and its
chills of failure. There is specific good and specific
evil after the fall, and seen as distinct in amoral sense.
In a period of fruition we distinguish between fruits,
and guard against the poisonous ; we especially con-
sider consequences. Thus virtues are defined by ends.
In a delicately poised order, of complexly interdepend-
ent relations, conscience has its culture, emphasising
special control and solicitude. Prudence and temper-
ance are appreciated as supports, maintaining integrity
in a world where all things are falling and where riot-
ous waste is so conspicuous.
XVII
As we have seen, in our consideration of the progres-
sive specialisation of life, the suspense and tempera-
ment are more apparent at every successive
^ "" ^ stage. The species have continuance ; the
wave is caught in falling, and there is the undulatory
procession of generations. Man dwells upon the earth,
and this dwelling has new and stronger meaning with
the advance of civilisation ; so the moral aspect of hu-
man society is deepened from age to age in a constant-
ly increasing conservatism. As in mechanics gravita-
tion is made to promote levitation, so even the ruins of
civilisations contribute to the greater permanence of
societies that inherit their virtues. The spiritual exal-
tation of the Hebrew, the art of Greece, the jurispru-
dence of Rome, though they could not save from fall-
ASCENT AND DESCENT Of- LIFE 215
ing the structures in which they were originally en-
shrined, have become elements of sustaining power in
the structural development of modern social life.
The individual also has the advantage of this sus-
tained undulation at the noontide height of maturity,
the prolongation of which is an extended plateau hiding
from vision the precipitous declivity. He does not see
in fruitfulness the signs of decay or how much of do-
minion he has surrendered for his conscious mastery.
He is not sensible of the curvature fixed by his limita-
tion ; he has the habit of walking, forgetting that there
is falling in his erect progression — the habit of speech,
unfaltering, of facile thought and action ; he is con-
scious of rectitude, and he glories in his strength and
in the far-reaching utilities of domestic and civic func-
tions. Like the river in the full volume of its progress,
he possesses and enriches the plain. He rejoices in
the full splendour of summer, in the decency and dig-
nity of ample investiture. The green slowly turns to
golden, first the blades, then the ear upon the silken-
tasselled stalk, then the full corn in the ear. Surely the
value of life is expressed in its harvests, and in the
west is gathered all the wealth of the world ; there are
the golden fruits of the Hesperides. These gardens
lie, indeed, on the verge of Pluto's realm ; but man in
his full strength docs not suspect how far the Dark
King ventures inland. The streams, of course, belong
to this invader, all lapsing Letheward, and his hands
stretch forth in the darkness of night and the chill of
winter ; but Persephone, plucking Howcrs, found him
ere the shades had fallen upon the fields of Enna ;
Adam and Eve heard the voice proclaiming him among
2i6 A STUDY OF DEATH
the trees of Eden, just in the cool of the day; and the
bright-crested aspiring serpent who had denied death
slunk away among the dry, rustling leaves to his still
confessional. All climbing things deny him, but the
very outburst of their denial is into the leaf and flower
and fruit that in their fall shall confess him. Yet is he
patient, letting the fruit slowly ripen. He permits the
long-withholding of childhood from the summer heat,
waits through the long noon of manhood, and even gives
old age a staff against too swift decline. The prolon-
gation of maturity is itself a support to the declining
years of a passing generation, while it gives sustenance
and protection to helpless childhood and tutelage to
adolescence.
This suspense, in every period of human life, empha-
sises the value and importance of that life, considered
solely in its terrestrial relations. Mr. John Fiske, in
showing that the prolongation of human infancy has
been one of the principal factors in the progress of the
race, made a novel and original contribution to the sci-
ence of sociology. But if the weakness and depend-
ence of childhood, evoking loving care and sympathy,
counts for so much, how much more must be accred-
ited to the invisible might of childhood as the hope of
the world. During this period of protection, while it is
establishing its cerebral channels of communication
with the outside world, it is at the same time, by its
withholding from that world, allowed freedom for ex-
pansion, for the deepening of its capacity, for that ex-
alted tension which society has come to recognise as
the mightiest of its inspirations. This mystical appre-
hension of childhood becomes the poet's assertion and
ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 217
the popular intuition ; and, since it regards elements
not open to observation, it is a view falling outside the
scientific scrutiny that regards only the stimulation of
environment, the nutritive processes involved, and the
resultant structural development. "What is this won-
drous font of power?" asks science. "Is it anything
more than a fund of vital energy dependent upon nu-
trition for its storage ?" In return, we ask, what is it
at any stage of its outward development? At what
point in the stream does this transcendent, invisible
power which gives human life its spiritual meaning en-
ter, if it is not at the fountain ? It is not an acquisi-
tion. If we admit it into our view of human existence
as a whole, we must include it from the beginning.
Indeed, as we have seen, this involution which we
know as childhood is at the fountain something that it
is not in the stream. Its expression is also its veiling.
" It is not as it hath been of yore," the poet complains.
A glamoui- is gone that never comes again, it
"... fades into the light of common day."
The virginal sense of things first seen ; the surprise of
fragrance ; the native feeling of i)rimal dawns, of the
heavenly azure, of woods and streams, of haunting
shadows and whispering winds, we cannot recall. The
steps that halted then are hurried now, following well-
worn paths and yet lost in them. The storage of
strength against strain, of reparation against waste,
is not like that primal storage, which had its basis in
a hunger that was not want. No after-sleep is like the
sleep of the infant, which is not measured to meet a
special weariness, hut is rather the sign of the hidden
2i8 A STUDY OF DEATH
quickness of life in its infolding, as wakefulness is of
the quick unfolding, growing into the insomnia of old
age. Yet the nutrition and sleep of adolescence and
maturity are special infoldings, whereby the haste of
the consuming flame is retarded and the plasticity of
childhood is in some degree renewed, though it cannot
be wholly regained ; and waste and weariness induce
and stimulate these processes of renewal.
This period of maturity, sustained by constant rein-
forcement of energy, is far remote from childhood, but
it is true of the man as of the youth, that he, though he
"... daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended,"
and this vision illumines his ripe knowledge and gives
its own transcendent meaning to all he does.
XVIII
The suspense is in some measure maintained in the
period of decline. The urgency of physical passion is
spent and the intense strain of effort is relaxed ; in the
golden silence, beneath all the easy garru-
Decline.
lousness, contemplation is deepened, undis-
turbed by passionate interest. The last juice expressed
from the vine is unutterably rich. Memory seems
weaker, but it is busy at the old font. The flame of
life which burned only green in the spring-time bursts
forth into many brilliant autumnal colors, as if death
/1SCENT /tND DESCENT OF l.ll-E 219
Ii.ul more gaiety than birth. Age seems to be a tak-
ing on anew of childhood, but with this difference —
that the reaction awaits some other sphering of the
withdrawn life. Instead of the aversion which ends in
seizure there is the lingering clasp of cherished things
about to be released — love mingling with the weari-
ness, so that the final human repentance of the visible
world is unlike that of any other species in its regret-
ful, backward glance of farewell. In man alone does
love conquer the strong animal instinct which insists
upon solitude and utter aversion of the face in death.
XIX
The urgency of the movement, hidden in the ascent
of life, is outwardly conspicuous in the descent. There
is more of death and destruction at the beginning than
at the end ; the unconsuming flame is most intense,
though there is no smoke nor conflagration.
It is with Dcatli as with Evil — neither is t^. ^'"^
Disarray.
apparent to us, under its name, in the up-
lifting tension of life, which most completely mcludes
both. The flame is tropical, and when it turns it rends ;
its reaction is disclosed as a wasting consumption. In
all germinant organisms we note the hidden quickness
of tiie tender infolding life, and in the unfolding an
outward quickening in blossom and song and radiant
plumage, when, with the prophecy of new life to come
in the ripening grain, the fertilisation of flowers, the
mating of the birds, and the myriad forms of love-life
in the whole realm of animate Nature, Another move-
220 A STUDY OF DEATH
ment begins, hurrying into flight, which comes at length
to have in it a suggestion of disorder and disarray. The
song sung by the weird Sisters, when they unravel
their slowly woven web, has reckless, dissolute notes.
The ascendant movement of life, with its hidden quick-
ness, its virginal restraint, seems outwardly slow, and
has outwardly also the aspect of ease and buoyant rest,
because the travail of its climbing is mainly borne by
unseen powers ; but, in the descent, it would almost
seem that these benignant powers, breaking through
the veil, had suffered a transformation and become de-
structive foes, losing their coy reticence and playful
ease, and were striding forth in open, undisguised vio-
lence, and with indecorous haste were flinging their
garments to the winds, bringing all things to naked-
ness, profaning all shrines, ravishing all Beauty, brand-
ing Plenty as wantonness, and Accomplishment as van-
ity. What was, in the nascent organism, abundant,
graceful ease and rhythmic overflow, nourished from
hidden sources, becomes, in the decay of the organism,
a feverish excess, a hectic waste. It is the trope of
Capricorn, and the pagan imagination was easily in-
fected by its disturbance ; the followers of Pan clothed
themselves with goat-skins, and grinning satyrs min-
gled in the wild rout.
For man as for all other organisms there is, in the
visible course of things, the lax and ragged conclusion
— the broken golden bowl at the fountain and the
wheel broken at the cistern. The fountain cannot re-
fuse to become the stream, nor the stream to pass;
any arrest of the descending movement only accumu-.
lates disturbance and hastens the ruin. It is the bitter-
/tSCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 221
ness of Dead Seas that they have no outlet. The un-
broken storage of the miser becomes itself corruption.
The belief of Heraclitus in the eternal flux of things
must somehow be reconciled with Plato's plea for sta-
bility through a harmony that is eternal.
There is no ethical resolution of the problem ; there
is indeed no problem save of our own making. The
issues of life have their spontaneous reconcilement, be-
cause Life itself is eternal. There is in that life a
principle which is creative ; which is as unmoral as
is Childhood, because it transcends morality ; which
makes not for mere rectitude, but for righteousness, not
for betterment merely, but for renewal ; which does not
mend the Prodigal's rags, but brings him home.
FOURTH BOOK
HEATH UNMASQUED
CIIAPTKR I
A SINGULAR REVELATION
IX every system known to us some singular and
striking phenomenon presents itself — a certain
insistent strain of the harmony, not easily explained,
and in many cases remaining forever an
insoluble mystery. The Milky Way, the i,^^;.^',"^^!^,,
(nilf Stream, the Trade Winds, the current
that rules the magnetic needle, are such phenomena in
the physical world. In physiology the quickening and
dominant power of germ-cells discloses to the student
the plasmic Milky Way of organic life. The Dream
impresses us as a similar mystery in psychical mani-
festation. Thus singular and inexplicable, in the cur-
rents of human history, is that one of them which de-
termined the Hebrew destiny.
The Gentile, or pagan, races of the ancient world
accomplished outward integrity, or completeness, in
the development of art, science, and polity ; they had
humane literature and elaborate religious ritual. The
Hebrew was pre-eminently the broken man. Those
prophecies which we usually regard as wholly Messi-
anic were first of all applicable to Israel. He is the
one spoken of by Isaiah as " a root out of a dry ground :
226 A STUDY OF DEATH
he hath no form nor comehness ; and when we see him
there is no beauty that we should desire him. He was
despised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief. . . . He was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities : the
chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his
stripes we are healed." All this, consummated in the
person of the Christ, pertained to the race whence he
sprang. For the Hebrew the promise of the rose pre-
sumed a desert. "Look unto the rock whence ye were
hewn," says the prophet, " and to the hole of the pit
whence ye were digged. Look unto Abraham, your
father, and unto Sarah that bare you." In Abraham's
seed all nations were to be blessed ; but how sugges-
tive in this primitive gospel is the emphasis upon the
sterility of Sarah, and, after the birth of Isaac, upon
Abraham's renunciation of him, completed in the
heart, though the hand stretched forth to slay was
stayed !
Always in the history of this race, despised above all
others yet above all others glorified, Canaan must
have its prelude in the wilderness ; some bitter tribula-
tion like that of the Egyptian bondage lies ever in the
background. Canaan itself — the land flowing with milk
and honey — was a field of terrible carnage, possessed
only after many fierce battles, and with difficulty main-
tained, lying between Assyria and Egypt as between an
upper and nether millstone. Its captive children were
sold in every slave-market of the Mediterranean. The
kingdom established by David was short-lived ; in the
generation succeeding Solomon it was broken in pieces,
and ten of the (.welve tribes soon disappeared so com-
.-/ SlNGUL/fR RF.y FLAT ION 227
pletely from view that their fate has become a histori-
cal enigma. The remaining tribes of Judah and Ben-
jamin, harassed for several generations by foreign and
intestine wars, were carried away in captivity to Baby-
lon, from which a small remnant returned to rebuild
the ruined temple and rescue from oblivion the pre-
cious records of the past.
It was after this captivity that the more gracious as-
pects of the Mosaic law were emphasised, and there
arose the sect of the Pharisees, in its origin representing
the loftiest spiritual ideal ; for the first time formulat-
ing the belief in a resurrection ; and, in the institution
of synagogue worship throughout Palestine, establish-
ing the simplest form of religious liberty ever known
upon the earth.
After every black night in Jcwisli history there was
some such glorious morning. It is true that in our
Lord's time Pharisaism, especially in Jerusalem, had
degenerated into a habit of formal righteousness, but
the simple religious life in the country villages was to
some extent maintained, and here it was that the mere
remnant of a renniant awaited the blossoming of a
people's hope.
-At the birth of Christ his couiury was reduced to
the position of an insignificant province of the Roman
i-'.inpire, and his people were dispersed throughout the
then known world. Into the deepest darkness shone
the star of Bethlehem.
Other races seem to have grown corrupt within tlieir
outwardly completed structures. The Hebrew, out-
wardly broken, was inwardly ni.ule wholi- in the beauty
of holiness. Manv were called l»nt few were chosen ;
228 A STUDY OF DEATH
and it is not strange that in this trial by fire there was
so large a refusal of dross, and that only in the hearts
of a faithful few was a destiny so singular maintained
and cherished to its final consummation.
II
Looking back from the eminence of our Aryan civil-
isation, and considering what different races have con-
tributed thereto, we behold this one vaulting, flame-
fretted arch, distinct from and overreaching
Fiam"^ all others. It is a sacred flame — how dread
even to the Hebrews, who in the wilderness
saw it as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by
night, and would fain have fled from its awful illumi-
nation back to the flesh-pots of Egypt ! With what nat-
ural yearning toward some familiar human imagination
they moulded the golden calf, even at the bidding of
Aaron, while Moses was with God in the mount in the
midst of the cloud which was the glory of the Lord,
and the sight of which was like devouring fire.
Repellent also to all men is this sacred flame, and it
is with serene satisfaction that our Western thought
turns to " the glory which was Greece and the grandeur
that was Rome" — to those elements in the fabric of
our modern life which are of classic origin, and which
commend themselves to our esteem as associated with
aesthetic development, with intellectual culture, with
ethical stabilit}', and with the pride of human accom-
plishment, attested by monuments whose ruins seem
to us more hospitable than do the tents of Shem, or
A SINGULAR RF.yF.LATlON 229
that holy tabernacle built l)y the descendants of the
Ucdouin patriarch, in wliich dwelt the rtaming Pres-
ence.
Nevertheless, this arch of tire transcends all others
in our spiritual temple, surpassing all earthly splen-
dours ; it is the illumination of our heavenly heritage,
from a promise uttered to man in some earlier and
deeper sleep than fell upon Abraham — a promise an-
swering to the inmost desire of the human heart. The
outward aversion from it has recourse in an irresistible
attraction thereto. The glory of the Lord, shining in
another face than that of Moses, subdued all hearts,
and the world eagerly ran after that from which it had
seemed to be running away.
Ill
The tendency toward structural completeness is nat-
ural and wholesome ; it is development in human ex-
istence as it is in the entire cosmos. It is
itself a breaking, but a breaking into wholes, c've^Jt'^l^re^
even in the minutest molecules. The frac-
tions of living Nature are themselves integers. Form
and comeliness are cosmic distinctions. The bride is
arrayed for her lord. The lack of proper vestment,
like deformity, is a cause for shame and disappoint-
ment. Nakedness is clothed upon. The more sacred
the flame, the more carefully it is hidden, and the
holiest passion is veiled. Life's revels are masqued,
and the vesture is manifold ; this is the way of all
prodigal sons, yet the fact that it ends in raggedness
230 A STUDY OF DEATH
and ruin is Nature's confession that the Life is more
than meat and the body than raiment.
This truth which Nature confesses at the end of
things, in articulo mortis^ the Lord disclosed at the
fountain, as the spiritual principle of life. Thus was
the inclusion of death in life illustrated, in his personal
career upon earth, by his denial of those things which
in the natural course of human lives are accounted
most desirable. He renounced without denunciation.
He never married, but marriage he blessed. He sought
not earthly honours, possessions, " troops of friends,"
but to these in themselves he attached no blame ; he
counselled his disciples to make friends of even the
mammon of unrighteousness. In saying that Mary
had chosen the good part there was no reflection upon
Martha. He was not an ascetic ; his very divestiture
was abundantly vital. As Nature, insisting upon death,
yet values not the waste and ruin but rather refuses
them, driving them out of sight with the violence of
her winter winds and utterly consuming them in the
white heat of her frost, so the Lord reckoned not with
the dead while he glorified Death. " Let the dead
bury its dead." He was at one with Nature, who lays
such emphasis on death, because through death is her
resurrection ; but the truth in his word was a spiritual
principle transcending that expressed in the apparently
closed circles of all natural procession ; it revealed
the reality hidden beneath the appearance from the
foundation of the world.
A SINGULAR RF.y ELATION 231
IV
In the natural course of things man sees good and
evil apart, taking the one with delight, succumbing to
the other as inevitable. He rejoices in the morning,
but night wins acceptance because of his weariness,
which is a kind of forced repentance of the ^,
* Natural and
day; and the deeper night of death over- Spiritual
h,, j.\ ^ -L. Repentance.
, im in the same way, so that he
seems in a natural repentance to turn from the world
to his confessional. He is overcome of evil. But the
Lord said, " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil
with good." Again he said, ''Resist not evil." Now,
he well knew that as in time past so in all time to come
the phenomenal conflict with evil must continue. In
the prayer he taught to his disciples were the petitions
" Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
He was not enjoining upon men, in the practical con-
flict of life, to confound evil with good. He might as
well have bid them confound light with darkness.
Tares were not wheat, though they grow together and
must continue to grow together until the harvest.
What he announced was a spiritual principle touching
the reality beneath the phenomenal struggle. It is as
if he had said : " Evil and Good as seen by you appear
separate and irreconcilable, because of the limitation
of your vision and of your existence ; your thought and
care and effort are engaged in a conflict whose terms
and conditions you cannot evade, and yet no man by
thinking or striving can add one cubit to his stature ;
the visible limitation remains ; and the conclusion of the
232 A STUDY OF DEATH
struggle is the apparent triumph of Evil — even as the
grave swallows up all that live and Death seems the Con-
queror. In this partial view, this finitude, this closed
circle which you call the course of nature, you are like
prisoners and captives, accepting evil as slaves accept
the lash of a taskmaster. But I show you a hidden
truth, masqued and disguised by visible Nature — a di-
vine way, whereby as children and not as servants you
shall accept Death and Evil, including and comprehend-
ing them in that true knowledge of the Father and the
Son which is eternal life, in its spiritual meaning. Out-
wardly there is the striving in narrow ways, seeking ever
narrower and straighter, but inwardly there is peace and
reconcilement. This is faith in the abounding life that
forever springs freshly from its fountain ; herein is the
willing repentance that is not mere weariness — the
losing of the soul to save itself, the taking of the yoke
to find it easy, the drinking of the cup to its dregs to
taste in these its sweetness. The Pharisee comes to the
temple and offers up to God his righteousness ; the
publican comes and offers up his sins — in him is re-
pentance possible, a complete burial, a new birth. A
man may strive outwardly against evil in every shape
it outwardly takes, and yet so know the Father that he
shall see that against which he strives as something
essential, lying at the very root of life — that his open
adversary, stripped of his disguises, is invisibly his
friend from the beginning. And, again, a man may
strive and trust alone to his strength, seeing good
and evil only in their disguises, and for a season he
may accumulate the good and fortify himself against
the evil, securing comfort, safety, and outward integ-
A SINGULAR RF. DELATION 233
rity; yet shall the inevital)le end come when the edifice
shall be broken up and its treasure be found corrupt-
ible, having no heavenly root or lodgment. Kvil is
known only as an enemy, and Death as the last enemy ;
the adversary is never seen as the friend — there is no
reconcilement. The whole need not a physician, but
they that are sick. IMessed therefore are the meek in
their expansive heritage ; blessed they that take to their
hearts grief and poverty, hunger and thirst, and deso-
lating defeat — for in all tb.ese they shall know Kvil and
Death for what they truly are in a divine Creation."
But the Lord did better than say all this : his life
was this eternal truth incarnate. He " became Sin "
and glorified Death.
The imagination which created the legend of the
Wandering Jew, upon whom, in the presence of a di-
vine death, fell the doom of deathlessness,
introduced into the scene with which it was t^''"=^' C"'""-
fied Death.
associated an element of striking contrast,
suggesting the beatitude of mortality at the moment of
its brightest illumination. Even as contrasted with
Evil and Death not thus divinely illustrated, no more
dreadful sentence could be pronounced upon any child
of Earth than this : that for him there should never be
pain or sickness, any hunger or thirst, any shadow to
break the endless continuity of light, or any death. To
make utterly impossible any benediction, to this exist-
ence upon ground not accursed for its sake, it would
234 A STUDY OF DEATH
only be necessary to add to the sentence its awful con-
comitant : Thou shalt never fall. Atropos, the un-
turning one, could take no surer shape. The fixed
horror of such a fate, so suggestive to us of utter
weariness, would in reality lack even that relenting in
its motionless apathy. But in the presence of the meek
and lowly Jesus, bending beneath the weight of the
cross, the blank, inflexible doom becomes unutterable
and unthinkable, until the imagination of it vanishes
into absurdity.
For, behold, the Lord had fallen ! He had descend-
ed from the bosom of the heavenly Father, and all his
life upon the earth had been downward — away from
the rich and powerful and wise and consciously correct
to the poor and sick and sinful; and now this descent
was to be completed, in the grave, even in hell — from
the zenith to the nadir. Lucifer no farther fell, nor any
son of Adam following him, than did this second Adam —
Life-bearer, but drinking all of the mortal cup ; Lighter
of the Way, but taking all its darkness, even the mid-
night of its lowest abyss.
Thus was Death illustrated and made glorious, show-
ing at its core, its sting having been taken, a strange
and mystical beauty, not hitherto suspected, and not
apparent in the shining perfections and accomplish-
ments which men reach after all their lives. The
Lord's blessings had always been upon the victims in
the strife of earth, and in the most human of his para-
bles he had shown how the returning prodigal had been
given the best robe and the merry-making feast — signs
of a loving father's rejoicing that aroused the envy of
the unroving elder brother; and in many ways he had
// SINGULAR RF.yF.LATlON 235
i.ui;;ht tlie preciousness of lost things found, the glory
of defeat turned into victory. Now he was about to
make deatli itself enviable, so that men would run after
it, fearful, indeed, lest they should escape martyrdom —
so that they would listen with delight to the prayer for
the passing soul, invoking the sure and speedy work
upon it of purgatorial Hames, expecting that way some
secret excellence.
VI
Ikit the Lord did not teach men to seek that which
we commonly call death any more than he taught them
to do evil. It is true, moreover, that he saw no living
righteousness in what men call good — in
conduct having reference to those particular ''''^''"^'.°"
f *^ of Lvil.
ends which men seek as children of this
world. He revealed to men a larger heritage, an eter-
nal kinship — they were the children of God. He re-
ferred them to this fountain of love and light, from which
every human heart had its pulsation, as the well lives
from its spring. To be born again was to know one's
self as a child of the Father — to know and do His
will. As children of this world, men distinguish between
• good and evil, and so, under their limitation, they must,
knowing benefit and harm from their relations to a sys-
tem which has beginning and end ; but a new birth
brings a new vision, wherein it is seen that God creates
Evil as He creates Good, and that, as parts of this Crea-
tion, they are coinplementary.
Is not Christ the Word from the beginning, and so
Nature before he was the Christ — includinii all that in
236 A STUDY OF DEATH
Nature we call evil as well as what we call good ? He
was the first Adam as he is the last; as the first espe-
cially the son of God, and as the last especially the son
of man. Thus twice humanly incarnate — the root and
flower of the race — he is truly the Head of humanity,
identified therewith from the beginning even unto the
end.
He never blamed men for their failures or praised
them for their goodness, because he knew the limita-
tion of every creature. From the heart of man, as from
the source of all life, proceeded both good and evil, but
in the new heart — that of the child born of the spirit,
and seeking perfection not after an outward pattern but
after the divine type; that is, to be "perfect as your
Father in heaven is perfect " — the good included the evil.
This is the reconcilement. To do the will of the Fa-
ther, life must be willingly accepted on its own flaming
terms, including that which will ultimately burn away
all its outward vesture — even its habit of goodness.
Is not this to bring man into harmony with Nature,
in all whose cycles of motion, truly seen, repulsion ends
in attraction, and is really one therewith from the point
of departure ?
The limitation itself is a bond of return. The place
of exile is sure to be home, and existence in time has its
ground in the life eternal.
VII
Why do we think of Christ as the Eternal Child ?
And why did he present childhood as the type of the
kingdom of heaven ? The child is unmoral, has not dis-
A SINGULAR REVELATION 237
cretion or prudence, and is not guided by the maxims
of experience. These are negations perti-
nent to a spiritual life in its latent powers ; J^ g'
but positively childhood represents the prin-
ciple of such a life, because in it evil is hidden, as, indeed,
goodness is also ; its germinant and expansive life is an
ascent upon the wings ofdeath. It is the season of taking
rather than of giving, when capacity is deepened ; when,
at the same time that it is most energetically making its
connections with the outside world, it is most withdrawn
from that world, its communications with which are
wholly for its own sake, availing of the descending min-
istrations of other life for its own ascension. When, at
a later period, it knows self-sacrifice, then is the abun-
dant death it has taken given up, yielded in expenditure,
becoming patent.
It is this uplifting power, making death and evil its
ministrants — wondrous in its growth, in its vitalisation
of its plastic organism, and in its supreme elasticity ;
quick in its reaction, so that no possession clogs or
encumbers; the fittest symbol of creative might and
authority — which the Lord had in view when he made
childhood the type of his kingdom. In that view also
was comprehended the unhesitating trust of the child
and his fearless meekness and docility. All these
qualities, in their heavenliest excellence, are combined
in our conception of the Christ Child.
238 A STUDY OF DEATH
VIII
But childhood is the type only ; that which it repre-
sents is a fuller expression, with deeper meanings. The
^, . ^ childhood is continued into manhood in the
This Type
as Developed Christ-life — into the expenditure, the sacri-
fice, the descent, and yet in these maintain-
ing the type. The latent potency is developed, but
still keeps its plasticit)', through a willing surrender
of all those outward things which, in the ordinary line
of human experience, make manhood desirable. The
exercise of power in this line was suggested to the
Lord in the temptation on the mount. To the child
the possession of earthly things has little meaning ; he
accepts all gifts as toys and falls asleep among them,
showing instinctive contempt of those functions and
uses familiar to mature experience ; but to the man the
offer of external grandeur is the great temptation, and
he may yield to it legitimately with the determination
of a righteous exercise of power, truly magnifying his of-
fice. Therefore when Christ puts aside the temptation it
means more than the instinctive contempt of the child ;
it is a willing rejection. It is something, too, quite
different from what is commonly called self-denial ;
in the course of ordinary experience, the acceptance
might be the true altruism. The Lord would have re-
jected the office of High Priest of Jerusalem as readily
as he did that of King of the Jews, which the people ex-
pected the Messiah to take. It was officialism itself,
whether sacred or secular, that he renounced. He re-
frained from entering: into those domestic relations
// SINGULAR RF.y ELATION 239
properly enjoined as duties upon a citizen of this
world. Because he was to be the real priest and king
of ail men, because he was to illustrate man's divine
sonship, he repudiated for himself the insignia of a
power and kinship which meant less tiian these. The
renunciation was a sacrifice only in the meaning ex-
pressed by the Psalmist : " Lo, I come to do thy will,
God." In the worldly view this withdrawal from
benefits ardently sought by all men, and from duties
held to be most binding and sacred, seems to be an
anticipation of the divestiture wrought by death. In
reality it is the introduction of a new death, bring-
ing it ne.\t the new birth. It is a natural intimacy, re-
peating the process which goes on in the germination
of any seed, the outward husk of which is dissolved
for the abounding of the inward life : in another sense
it is mystical, since the new life is drawn from an in-
visible fountain. It is the abundance rather than the
divestiture that is the spiritual reality. As in child-
hood, so in all germinant life : there is a hidden vio-
lence, an immeasurable might, something imperative,
which makes a kingdom. In the Christ this is marvel-
lously shown in the multiplication of the loaves and
fishes under his dividing hand, and in the healing
virtue of his touch. His growth to manhood is de-
scribed as a growth in grace, keeping the plastic and
creative potency ; and that all evil as well as death is
solvent at this fountain is aptly expressed in St. Paul's
saying that " Wiiere sin abounded, grace did much
more abound."
J40 A STUDY OF DEATH
IX
We see, then, why loss is the first word of the king-
dom of heaven, and why the baptism of the Lord is
with fire. It is because flame destroys that it is
constructive ; and this thought brings us bade to
the Hebrew, and enables us to better comprehend his
outward brokenness and divestiture ; for the flame
which in the Christ was the illumination of the spir-
itual truth of an eternal life ; which in its fusion
absorbed and consumed the external fabric of exist-
^, .,,^ ence — the habit which men called good
Child Type _ °
Developed in as wcll as that which they called evil — and
which became the pentecostal flame of a
new human fellowship, was the consummation of that
which burned in the heart of every faithful Hebrew
from Abraham to Simeon — a torment without, but an
inward peace.
In many ways the Hebrew race, in the fulfilment of
its peculiar destiny, foreshadowed the spiritual principle
illustrated in the singular life of Jesus. As he was the
Desire of all nations, and therefore could not mar his
brightness as the Sun of a spiritual system embracing
all humanity through any merely worldly aspiration, so
the promise made to Abraham was one including all
nations, and this large expectation would have failed
of its true expression in earthly successes and triumphs,
in the attainment of those things " which the Gentiles
seek."
We think, too, of the ancient Hebrew as a child, and
in a peculiar sense the child of God. "The Hebrew
A SINGULAR REVELATION 241
children "is a characteristic phrase, as applicable to a
people always in a comparatively plastic state, and
whose language never departed from its native and
radical simplicity.
Considering what the spiritual life of the Hebrew
means for us, we are surprised that a vine which has
spread over the earth occupied so small a garden in its
original growth, quite escaping the notice of classic his-
tory. In no field of human achievement has the ancient
Hebrew left any signal monument of worldly grandeur.
\Vc can account for his political insignificance by situa-
tion and circumstance, but for his lack of any positive
accomplishment in science, art, or philosophy we can
find no explanation save in his peculiar genius and des-
tiny; and of these the only ancient sign left us is his
sacred literature. That he was not destitute of imagina-
tion is shown in this literature, which is as singular in
its distinction from all others as was his whole history
from that of all other peoples. Here the imagination
takes its loftiest flight in song and prophecy, and its
simplest strain in the quaint records of patriarchal life,
in the story of Joseph and of Ruth, and in the most
fully incarnate idyl of passionate love ever put in words
— the Song of Solomon ; and there is no appearance of
incongruity in bringing together all these into that sacred
collection known to us as the Holy Dible. Never in
human expression has there been so intimate associa-
tion of the sensibility of the flesh with the highest spir-
itual exaltation ; and we note the absence of that which
lies between the spirit and the sensibility — that play of
mental activity which is so especially the charm of al-
most all classic and of all modern literature. In this
16
242 A STUDY OF DEATH
connection, it is significant that while the Hebrew gave
a natural expression to his emotions in the song and
the dance, and delighted in personal adornments, in per-
fumes and savory foods and wines, bringing these also
into close association with religious worship, he had no
representative arts, such as painting, sculpture, or the
drama. While his spiritual expression was thus so di-
rectly incarnate, he did not seek that perfection of bodily
exercise which, among the Greeks, was the result of
elaborate athletic training.
It may be said that this lack of completeness is ex-
plained, as in the case of any barbaric race, by the fact
that the Hebrew was so backward and unprogressive —
so slow to put away his childhood. But this is his very
singularity. Why was he thus withheld in the plastic
state of childhood? It is not true of the Hebrew race
that it was barbaric, in the proper sense of the term.
Other Semitic peoples from the same old Arabian desert,
like the Phoenician and the Assyrian, were builders of
cities, and advanced rapidly from the nomadic state into
very complex forms of civilisation. Others still re-
mained in the desert, where they may be found to-day,
degenerate, indeed, but otherwise living in the same
manner as did their ancestral tribes four thousand years
ago. During the long period of the patriarchate, which
was a prolonged childhood, the spiritual capacity of the
Hebrew was deepened ; but the quality and might of
this expansion are indicated and measured by the re-
sultant movement, culminating in the appearance of
the Messiah and the resurrection and revitalisation of a
dead world ; and they are not to be accounted for by
any outward condition.
A SINGULAR. RE INFLATION 243
The prolonged childhood was an essential prelude
to a so singular manifestation : it was a childhood
maintained after the disappearance of the patriarchate,
and through the entire cycle of the Hebrew destiny.
One of its characteristic traits is shown in the wonder-
ful power of assimilation. It has been asserted by pro-
found scholars that the Hebrew derived his Sabbath
from the Babylonian, the institution of the Judges from
the Phoenicians, and the rite of circumcision from the
Egyptians, along with the ark, the Shekinah, and the
Neshulon, or brazen serpent, which held its place in the
Holy of Holies until it was thrust out by Ezekiel. Even
his idea of angels and of a future life is said to have
taken definite shape through contact with the Persians
after the great captivity. Assuming that all this is true, it
would only show the marvellous selective genius of the
Hebrew. Does the child prepare for himself his heri-
tage ? He accepts that which he has not made, but
he makes it his own, and from his own heart gives it a
meaning. The purpose involved in the spiritual des-
tiny of the Hebrew " is purposed upon the whole earth ;"
therefore to this child the earth is a heritage, and the
whole world brings its offerings. What, then, if the
skilled men of Tyre built Solomon's temple ? In
Isaiah's forecast of glorified Zion the stranger's will-
ing tribute to that glory is magnified. "■ The Gentiles
shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of
thy rising. . . . The abundance of the sea shall be
converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall
come unto thee. . . . And the sons of strangers shall
build up thy wails." This Hebrew childhood stands
for that of humanity — its issue is the Son of Man.
244 A STUDY OF DEATH
This people was by its fervid enthusiasm lifted to a
plane of expression so lofty that its pride was not in
the initiation of institutions any more than in their per-
fection ; only that inward grace was regarded which
gave them a living soul. Its possession of outward
things was an adoption in the name of the Holy One.
The zeal was also a jealousy. Whatever hands raised
the temple, the Jews would have destroyed the edifice
rather than admit within its sacred enclosure the statue
of a Roman emperor. The attempt of Antiochus Epiph-
anes to merge Hebraism into Hellenism aroused the
heroic and successful revolt of the Maccabees. In the
early period, when the patriarchs in alien territory rec-
ognized the power therein of alien gods, the jealousy
of a tribal religion was consistent with the tolerance of
other religions equally provincial, and was very differ-
ent from that which in later times guarded a compre-
hensive faith in a Jehovah who is the God of all the
earth — this guardianship implying a responsibility as
broad as the faith. In this higher view, Israel was a
peculiar people, not as one enjoying exclusive benefits,
but rather as undergoing special sufferings for the
whole human race — a view not easily maintained save
by the very elect, but cherished by the prophets in
every age.
The divestiture of the Hebrew was as conspicuous
in his religious as in his secular life. He was forbid-
den to make an image or likeness of anything in the
heavens or in the earth or in the waters under the earth.
Every other prohibition of the Decalogue was deemed
as obligatory in the Egyptian system of ethics as in the
Mosaic law, but this was distinctively Hebraic. In
A SINGULAR REy ELATION 245
their beginnings the arts of painting and sculpture
have always been associated with the expression of re-
ligious feeling, but they were denied any nurture by the
Hebrew faith. The prohibition is not merely the ex-
clusion of polytheism and idolatry, but of all represent-
ative art. A living movement must in no way be ar-
rested in a dead thing. The swiftness of the primitive
paschal feast, the erect attitude of the participants sug-
gesting expedition, showed the indispositon to loiter in
any sacred way. The prophets always regarded with
aversion the elaborate ritual of the temple worship at
Jerusalem — a living movement arrested in fixed forms.
Symbolism was not excluded by the prohibition of
the simulacrum ; rather it was heightened, keeping more
closely to an inward meaning. The one essential di-
vine symbol was man himself, God's express image in
the world of living things. The Hebrew progression
in spiritual lines was toward the God-man , it was the
culture of an Emmanuel.
The human nature of the Hebrew was the same as
that of every other race, having the same aspirations,
mental, moral, and religious, the same eager desires
for earthly possession and power — for all, indeed,
which it seems to have been denied , and these natural
tendencies common to all mankind were not only amply
illustrated at every period of this people's history, but
intensified by unsatisfied hunger. The great majority
fell away centuries before the appearance of the Mes-
siah, drawn almost irresistibly by the fascinations of
the pagan world — its nature worship, its indulgence of
fond imaginations, its splendours and dramatic pomp ;
and of those who were held to the loftv strain, how
246 A STUDY OF DEATH
many were hedged in by the compelling Angel of the
Lord or subdued by suffering and the pressure of cir-
cumstance ; how many were alarmed by the threaten-
ings or persuaded by the pleadings of the prophets !
But to the faithful few who waited for the glory to be
revealed — to the seers and the prophets and the guile-
less country shepherds — there w-as another charm, more
potent than any which could appeal to the sense or the
intellect — the charm of that expectation which lifts the
heart of the mother waiting her time, radiant in her
travail. Here was that Israel which should " see of
the travail of his soul and be satisfied." Here burned
that sacred flame which preyed upon and devoured the
embodiment.
X
To the early Aryan also God was a fire — a fire which
built and beautified the world ; which was the fervour of
the animal and the glory of the flower, and which had
its intimate human symbol in tlie flame upon
Distinction , , , , ^ ^ ... „
between He- the hearth-stone, the centre of familiar anec-
brewand tion and loving kinship. But to the Hebrew,
Pagan Faitli. _ . .
his God was a consuming lire, which so re-
buildcd life in a new heaven and a new earth. Where
the pagan saw creation with its ceaseless round of
birth and death, the Hebrew with prophetic vision saw
recreation — a new death and a new birth. " Art thou
a master in Israel," said the Lord to Nicodemus, "and
knowest not these things .''"—the things pertaining to
the mystery of regeneration. The charm of such a
faith is that of a desire never exhausted in outward
^ mmjLL.-ir Rr.yiu.ATtoN 347
realisation, and so conserving its native might. In
paganism the religious instinct was given complete
scope. Paul complained of the Greeks that they were
too religious, and he welcomed the signs of a worship
of the unknown God, of a divinity not circumscribed
by the limits of imaginative definition and of ritualistic
familiarity. The pagan system of worship was a net-
work of ritualism and a hotbed of sacerdotalism. In its
beginnings, true to Nature, the lines of its development
were brought to completion within the closed circle of
a visible environment, so that the secret of Nature
itself was hidden. The Hebrew faith looked forward
to the divine-human Incarnation ; the pagan anticipated
this incarnation, exhausting its imagination of it in
types which fell short of and precluded the transcend-
ent intuition.
XI
The conservation of the spiritual principle tiirougli
the incompleteness of outward form and structure was
promoted by the Hebrew prophets. Whenever the
race was borne aloft in the common aspira- ... .
' Mission of
tion of all civilised peoples for military glory, ihc
for the luxury and grandeur of cities, for the '^"''"' ^
splendours of a royal court and a temple ritual, it was
continually thrust back to earth, prostrate as one pos-
sessed by demons, and by prophetic exorcism was com-
pelled to confess its peculiar destiny. These prophets
were thorns in the tlesh of kings and of priests ; they
were the great disturbers, the preachers of humiliation ;
but they were the people's hope, and thougli in their
248 A STUDY OF DEATH
sadly triumphal journeys they rode upon asses, they
were hailed by popular acclamations and recognized
as pre-eminently men of God. Through their influ-
ence social ambitions as well as national aspirations
were held in check. The Prophet was ubiquitous and
irrepressible, and from the time of Samuel there was
a school, a continuous succession, of these witnesses
to a Lord surely to come on earth. Tliey remoulded
sacred traditions, and the critical scholar detects traces
of their illuminating and transforming influence in the
pages of holy writ, giving a deeper meaning to the
record of creation, the legend of Eden, and the summa-
tion of the Law.
XII
To bring in the Eternal Child, and to show that in
him man is, even within the limitations of time, the
heir of an eternal life, was the Messianic destiny of the
Hebrew. This plant in the garden of the
Hebrew * "
Thought of Lord was diligently tended by the divine
husbandman, relentlessly pruned, cut back to
the quick, and thus was ever kept green and tender, as
on the very brink of an exhaustless fountain.
Often the vine strayed beyond the garden wall and
lost its succulence ; perversions there were to which
even the prophets were reluctantly indulgent, as in the
popular clamour for a king; the law, so gentle in its
spirit and associated with the meekest of men in its
beginnings, came to tolerate a kind of rigid justice —
the requirement of an eye for an eye, a life for a life ;
and, according to Ezekiel, the perversion was some-
A SINGULAR RH DELATION 249
times of divine origin, Jehovah himself giving his peo-
ple "statutes that were not good and judgments where-
in they should not live," and " polluted them in their
own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire
all their first-born, that He might make them desolate . . .
to the end that they might know that He was the Lord."
This declaration, so startling to a modern ear, was not
intended to convey the impression that God tempted
men to do evil, but was a forcible expression of a con-
viction, characteristic of Hebrew faith, that the respon-
sibility for evil as for good was in the largest sense
divine. " ' I create good and I create evil,' saith the
Lord." It was not permitted the Hebrew to think of
his sins as his own. His derelictions were monstrous,
and he needed the prophetic consolation that the Fa-
ther shared the wanderings of His children, encompass-
ing them in infinite wisdom and compassion, so that in
the end they might see that the way of even the widest
wanderer was the way home.
Thus the flexibility and plasticity of the Hebrew
childhood was maintained even in his idea of the law.
Through the Pentateuch runs the warm current of
divine tenderness, in its merciful intention including
also with the children the stranger within their gates.
It is a protest against inhumanity of every sort. In
no sacred scripture is there shown such a sense of
childlike dependence upon the Giver of all good (in-
cluding all evil), or such faith in the unfailing mercy
and free forgiveness of God as in the Psalms and in
the Prophets.
The Hebrew thought of God was the child's thought
— the child's intimate thought, and had in it a naive
250 A STUDY OF DF./1TH
feeling not discoverable in the early pagan thought.
The latter was more completely crystallised in its ex-
pression, more definitely projected in the form of
myths that sought correlation and consistency, while
the Hebrew thought became neither mythology nor
theology, being withheld in that flowing realm where
all life is a constant miracle — a field of easy transfor-
mations, of shadowy appearances that come and go as
in a dream, of living truths completed in their own
contradiction.
The instability of his environment impressed the
Hebrew. E.xistence seemed to him like the fluidity of
water, now lifted up in unsubstantial vapour and again
taking visible shape, falling to the earth and dispersed
over its surface — a blessing even in its descent and
dispersion. P'ormal ethics was as impossible to him
as was fixed dogma. It never occurred to him to de-
termine the consistent structure of human character
any more than it would to make a chart of the divine
nature and attributes, limiting his God by definition.
His hope was not a logical expectation ; and therefore
we do not find in the Prophets any formal determina-
tion of Messiahship, which nevertheless we, looking
back, can see dominant in living imagination and
pregnant phrase. Some issue, it was felt, there must
be of deliverance ; but when we read in Isaiah of " a
sword bathed in heaven " we know better than he what
depth of meaning was in his words. There is no
generalisation in the expression of the great hope ; the
imagination always takes a concrete shape, but capable
of expansion into what we see is the spiritual principle
of a new kingdom, as when the prophet foresees some
A SINGULAR REVELATION 251
reconciliation to come of good and evil : " The wolf
also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie
down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion
and the fatling together ; and a little child shall lead
them."
For the Hebrew there was no logical plan of any
life. He saw no anomaly in the suffering of the inno-
cent for the guilty — the procession of life was in no
other way ; it was a course of vicarious passion from
generation to generation. In the time immediately
preceding the coming of Christ, the belief gained
ground and became a conviction that the sufferings of
an innocent man were of living value to the race, hav-
ing not merit as satisfying divine justice, but a com-
municable virtue in the action and reaction of a life
Avherein formal justice had no place. Reaction, often
taking the extreme form of contradiction, was so famil-
iar to his experience that the Hebrew conceived it as
prominent in divine as in human operation. The wheel
was always turning, so that the low were lifted up and
the exalted were cast down. His beatitudes were, like
those of our Lord, apparent paradoxes. Repentance,
associated in his mind with abject misery, as in the
mind of the Prodigal Son, was the great reaction in the
life of a man, bringing him home ; and he would as
soon have had a god of wood or stone as one who did
not himself repent, so that the Father's mood could
respond to that of His returning child. To him God
was not the Immutable. The visible universe was
but His vesture, to be folded up like a garment in His
own good time — forever, indeed, being folded and un-
folded. What, then, was there which man could wrap
252 A STUDY OF DEATH
about himself, whether of goodness or badness, that
must not fall away, leaving him naked in the day of the
Lord ? Tiie outwardly built-up character, of whatever
sort, must be consumed in His fire. The flame which
destroys is the flame of Love ; though seeming to
angrily swell and roar, devouring every dry thing,
yet the beginning thereof is the tender yearning, and
the issue the tender renewal of the eternal kinship.
The wheel of life, showing red and black beneath,
shows green in the softness of warmth and light above;
and when the revolving spheres in heaven themselves
grow old, the fire that consumes them destroys utterly,
that there may be completeness of annihilation and so
entire transformation — a new wheeling and sphering of
morning stars.
The flame of life is tropical, forever turning and final-
ly rending. But the obverse of nothingness is Crea-
tion. Therefore the Hebrew, in the loftiest strain of
his spiritual imagination, loved to dwell upon the signs
of destruction. To him life presented the constant al-
ternation of wrath and love, of storm and peace, of dark
oblivion and softly rising dawns of remembrance. In
the extremity of affliction he rent his clothes; then he
anointed his head and washed his face. This man of
sorrows was anointed with the oil of gladness above
his fellows.
XIII
The anthropomorphism of the Hebrew w^as implied
in a faith which so closely united the divine with the
human. The earliest conception of this union was that
A SINGULAR REVELATION 253
of a flesh and blood kinship, and sacrifice in its origi-
nal form was a feast, celebrating and renew-
Hebrew
ing this intimate covenant. The Hebrew Symbolism
continuation of this old Bedouin kinship, t""^'^";? i"-
r' carnation.
while it was really a transformation, yet main-
tained the intimacy of the divine relationship. Blood
was still its livin*^ current, and, wherever shed, returned
to its source. Next to the current of life, the increase
thereof, whose symbol was fatness, was held especially
sacred, and in sacrificial rites the fat which was burned
went up as a sweet savour of grateful return for the
abounding of life, as the blood shed was a response for
life itself. The Hebrews were forbidden to eat the
blood or the fat of an animal, since these are the
Lord's. Perhaps it was from this association that
Sweden borg regarded fat as the celestial principle.
With the Hebrews it was associated with the feeling of
mercy and compassion, and was the sign of bounty ;
but its essential mystical significance relates to abun-
dance not as plenty, but as increment — the power of in-
crease which is so pre-eminently the miracle of life in
its wondrous fertility and growth. In the spiritual as
in the physical world the first of all commandments is
" Be fruitful and multiply.'' Herein also is the princi-
ple of authority {audoritas from aiigeo, to increase), the
gracious marrow of our hard bones. The perversion of
the principle is avarice, oppression, hardness of heart,
scripturally indicated in the phrase, as applied to a
man thus degenerate, designating him as "enclosed in
his own fat." In the Oriental conception the beauty
of woman, was the favour of embonpoint ; and according
to the most recent deliverance of embryological science
254 ^ STUDY OF DEATH
tlie better nourished ovum becomes the female. In
maternity the two sacred Hebrew symbols are united.
The blood of the mother is turned into milk, and from
the roundness of her breasts flows into the roundness
of cheek and limbs that give to infancy its grace and
favour.
Attention has already been drawn to the fact that
Hebrew symbolism was confined to a living, growing
organism, as distinguished from aesthetic re-presentation
in alia materia — in stone or on the canvas. We see
in this symbolism, as above indicated, an especial con-
finement to a human body, as the real spiritual temple
— "the temple of God " in St. Paul's interpretation. It
is the carnal which becomes the Incarnate : cast down
to hell and lifted up to heaven. The symbolism reached
its most profound meaning in the words of Christ:
" Except ye eat the fiesh of the son of man and drink
his blood, ye have no life in you." And he who said
this, in the same breath repudiated the flesh as profit-
ing nothing . " The words that I speak unto you — they
are the spirit and they are life." While this is a con-
tradiction of the one declaration to the other, both to-
gether are really an expression of the identity of em-
bodiment with spirit, " He who hath seen me hath seen
the Father." The vine which has been so long tended
and pruned has come to its fruitage ; its grapes have
been trodden in the wine-press, and here is expressed its
free spirit — that which was its life from the beginning.
The Hebrew idea of spirit implied personality ; it
was not an abstraction. Therefore, the adjective " spir-
itual " was not in use. It occurs but once in the Old
Testament (Hosea ix. 7), where it has not the modern
A SINGULAR RE y EL/IT ION 255
sense, and never in the Gospels, though so frequent in
St. Paul's Epistles. The phrase "spiritual life,'' so fa-
miliar to modern thought, is not to be found in the
Bible. Tlie spirit must have embodiment, and could
not otherwise be conceived. Thus the Spirit of God de-
scended upon Christ when he was baptised, taking the
body of a dove. To the polytheistic Aryan this Spirit
would have taken diverse shapes in numberless divini-
ties — dryads and naiads and nymphs; but to the He-
brew it was the One. Pagan divinities were given the
human shape ; in the Hebrew faith man was fashioned
in the image of God, and though the visage of humanity
was marred, yet had the Divine Spirit seized upon the
seed of Abraham for the renewal of His image. The
divine kinship was to be realised in the flesh, and in a
sense far deeper and more intimate than that in which
the Jews "had Abraham for their father." This in-
timacy is sometimes expressed in the scriptural phrase,
designating a man in a state of peculiar exaltation as
"in the Spirit." They were sons of God to whom the
Word came, and, in an especial sense, Christ, who was
the Word become flesh.
In Christ the Spirit, which had been veiled and hid-
den, was revealed as free — in a mystery openly wrought
in his very body. " I have power to lay down my life,
and I have power to take it again." Is not this the
full expression of a freedom which may well be called
that '• of the sons of God " — the breaking of a circle
hitherto closed as to human vision it seemed, or, rather,
the completion of the circle by showing, in the Resur-
rection, the other half of it, hitherto shadowed by the
apparent conclusion of Death?
256 A STUDY OF DEATH
XIV
We must be on our guard against the conception of
what we have called the Hebrew destinj', as being, be-
cause it was so singular, something contrary to the
course of Nature, when that course is truly seen. The
^, ^. parabola described by a comet seems singu-
The Singu- ^ _ -^ . . .
larity not lar to the dcnizcus of planets moving in ellip-
^uper . un . j^j^^j orbits, but we do not therefore exclude
this phenomenon from our science of astronomy. What
we call supernatural, applying the term to any singular
manifestation of life, is something in nature itself which
is inexplicable through any co-ordination we have been
able to make. Even the mystical view, which tran-
scends the visible in its intuition of creative life, only
postulates the hidden side of nature — the fountain of
its issue ; as if, recognising the visible as development
in form and structure, and in a harmony imperfectly
comprehended by us, we saw also, with the poet, that
"All foundations are laid in heaven." While we are
naturally apt to think of vital systems as planned, all
forms having been divinely premeditated and all rela-
tions preconceived with reference to adaptation, still
we know that the creative must be the formative and
involve the adaptation, and that the admission of a
single arbitrary element, such as we associate with
human design and the adaptation of means to ends,
would introduce into the universe the operation of a
limited wisdom — not of wisdom spontaneously coming
under a limit, but finite at its source, and liable to the
fallibility and uncertainty attending all human experi-
A SINGULAR REVELATION 257
mentation. Moreover, we know that even in human
Hfe — in all that determines its real issues, as distin-
guished from ends consciously in view — there is no
such arbitrament, but rather a vital destination from a
purpose that cannot fail, inerrantly wise.
The Hebrew was no more a man of destiny than was
the Assyrian, the Chinese, or the Indo-European. In
the physiology of humanity, each of these races had its
special allotment of function by a yital destination like
that which determines the drift of constellations, the
configuration of continents and the currents of the air
and the sea. Yet the mission of the Hebrew was as
peculiar and distinct as are the course and temperature
of the Gulf Stream in the midst of the waters. It can-
not, in our thought of it, be separated from the incar-
nate Lord, to whom was given "power over all flesh,"
so that the mystery of the Incarnation, though so inti-
mately associated with the seed of Abraham, is yet
catholic and genetically dominant as associated with
the destiny of the whole human race.
XV
The repudiation of Christ by the Hebrews is as re-
markable as his acceptance by the Gentiles. " He
came to his own, and his own received him not." This
was but the continuation of the hostility
1 1 T-> I r 1 1 • Attitude of
shown to the Prophets, of the recalcitrance jewandGen-
of this obstinate and stiff-necked people "'^,|°s"**
against its peculiar destiny from the begin-
ning. There had been the deepening of a vast hun-
258 A STUDY OF DEATH
ger — in the few, indeed, for the bread fronni heaven,
but in the many, especially at Jerusalem, for earthly
rehabilitation. To these latter the Son of David, the
long-expected redeemer of his people, seemed only to
aggravate their desolation. He despised the glory
upon which their hearts were set, bringing their pride
to the dust even as had the Prophets before him. He
repudiated them, even their boasted kinship with Abra-
ham and their consciousness of an especial divine elec-
tion ; his sermons and parables exalted other peoples
at the Jews' expense ; he predicted the destruction of
their temple. He put aside his own mother and breth-
ren in favour of a more blessed kinship. He chose for
his companions those whom the pious Pharisees and
Levites deemed outcasts. He crucified them, and they
crucified him. He told them that publicans and har-
lots entered the kingdom before them ; they preferred
Barabbas, the robber, to him, and condemned him to
die between two thieves. He seemed to Judas false
to a cherished hope, and Judas betrayed him. Even
his friends, those who believed in him, were com-
pelled to drink the cup of bitter humiliation at his
defeat and death, and to listen to the jeers of them
that said in scorn : Others he saved, himself he could
not save. In this dark hour his disciples were stricken
with shame and fear, and one of them denied him.
Failure was turned into triumph by the Lord's resur-
rection ; but the full meaning of this glorious morning
was not appreciated by the believers who remained at
Jerusalem, clinging to the old ritual and still rejecting
the uncircumcised, while the sect of Ebionites wholly
misconceived the new life, ignoring its positive princi-
A SINGULAR REVELATION 259
pie, which was to revitalise and transform the world,
and continued beyond the Jordan the practice of a
sterile asceticism, maintaining that divestiture which
in itself was merely a negative and accidental aspect
of the Christ-life.
The hunger of the Gentile for the Clirist was due to
inanition, to the vanity of earthly accomplishment, and
was a downright malady; like the fever of the prod-
igal, who, having been sated with revels, had been
brought to starvation, while the Hebrew, like the elder
brother in the parable, had been kept, albeit by a kind
of compulsion, in the Father's house. The Gentile
had come into a barrenness which, left to itself, must
become utter sterility, as of a rod that could not blos-
som. He had not been tormented by the consuming
flame of a sacred fire or by a school of prophets for-
ever cutting his life back to its root. His oracles were
dumb ; his temples, adorned with the statues of divini-
ties, were haunted by the ghosts of dead gods and not
filled by a living presence ; his ritual was more easily
repudiated than that of Jerusalem could be by Hebrews
as devout as the apostle James. Therefore he not only
with greater avidity accepted the new faith, but was
more alive to its newness, and readier to give it a prac-
tical embodiment, making our Christendom.
Very likely, if we had the means of ascertaining the
historical truth of the matter, we should find that
among the Jews those who most eagerly embraced
Christianity were the Pharisees, not only because the
idea of the resurrection associated with the early and
beautiful faith of this sect had been in so remarkable
a way revived, but because their religious observances
26o A STUDY OF DEATH
— like those of the pagans — had become so formal in
minute and trivial details as to the more readily fall
into oblivion and disuse. Certainly, after the resurrec-
tion of Christ, we have no record of their opposition
to the new faith, and Paul, who boasted himself "a
Pharisee of the Pharisees," was the great apostle to
the Gentiles.
The Gentiles, who stood outside of that earthly kin-
ship which related the Hebrews to Christ, and who had
directly no part in his birth, have yet given him his
embodiment in the world, overshadowed by the Holy
Spirit for a new conception of the Emmanuel. There-
fore said Isaiah :
"Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break
forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not
travail with child : for more are the children of the
desolate than the children of the married wife, saith
the Lord."
Another Sarah laughed in her tent. Another virgin
was to magnify the Lord.
XVI
The real meaning of a movement is disclosed in the
issue. The personality of Jesus was the issue of the
Hebrew destiny. He was the Child of that race, and
as it is that which is to come that is domi-
The Umver- j-)j^j-,t j-^jg singularity determined the singular
sal Hope. ^ b J &
character of his people from the beginning,
who thus became the progressive incarnation of him.
In him was concluded this embodiment through a flesh-
A SINGULAR REVELATION 261
and-blood kinship. Through that more intimate kin-
ship with the Father, which it was especially his mis-
sion to reveal and make real for all men, Christian hu-
manity is a new incarnation of him, as in a spiritual
body. Thus the Lord is ever to come, reappearing in
every renascence of human society. The Divine name
Jehovah, or Javch, as Dr. John De Witt has shown
in his version of the Psalms, means not merely / iz?//,
but I ajH to come ; so that in the largest sense all mani-
festation is his appearance. The history of humanity
is a divine history.
What we commonly call history is a record of struct-
ural development ending in decay. In a spiritual in-
terpretation of human history we see death only as
birth, regarding not merely what falls but also and
chiefly resurrections — a line of successive manifesta-
tions ever newly revealing the Father; and in such a
view we trace from the earliest record to the present
time a more or less distinct line of progressive revela-
tion. It is a prophetic line, as remote as possible from
any sacerdotal association, yet ecclesiastical in the orig-
inal meaning of the term (from ecclesia, a calling out)
since the call of Abraham out from his country and his
people into a new promise and possession. It begins
at every epoch, like all new life, in dissociation and re-
pulsion, disclosing in its development the bond of at-
traction and association.
This line is human before it is Hebrew. To us Abra-
ham appears as the first of the prophets, but in some
more primitive faith what line may have preceded him
of men who heard the divine voice calling them out
from among peoples degenerate in custom to begin in
262 A STUDY OF DEATH
another land a new order, conserving a seed of promise
for mankind ? Who knows what nursery this earlier
church may have had, perhaps in old Accadia, from
which comes to us a faint breathing of the eternal
hope ? The figure of Melchisedec stands boldly out
against that ancient sunrise. And, before all, was not
the promise made to Abraham first made to Eve, so
that divinity was bound up with our very mortality,
seizing upon " the seed of the woman " in the begin-
ning of generations ? In the Gospel of John all the
generations of time bear the impress of this hope, and
we behold the Logos as the light of the world, the
glory of an Evangel coeternal with God.
In the identification, from Eternity, of man with the
Lord is held, behind all veils, the living meaning of the
Universe.
XVII
But it is with Abraham that modern history begins —
our history, the warp and woof of whose variegated
web may with more or less certainty be traced to its
original patterns. This venerable patriarch ;
oTthe^Type^ ^hc friend of God ; the father of many peo-
ples besides the Hebrew; the peace-loving
brother ; owner of flocks and herds and gold and silver ;
the victorious warrior honoured of Melchisedec ; the ear-
liest of Semitic sojourners in Egypt ; the first merchant
on record dealing with money; the zealous intercessor
with God for the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomor-
rah ; and the father of the faithful, whose Paradise was
his bosom, represented to his descendants the golden
A SINGULAR. REy ELATION 263
age. David and Solomon were glorious nieinories to
the Hebrews , but the thought of Abraham carried them
back beyond their trials and distresses to a period of
calm content associated with spiritual promise, but not
with the fiery furnace through which they passed to its
fulfilment.
The long patriarchate was, as has already been indi-
cated, a happy preparation for the peculiar life of the
children of Israel. Its background stretched far back
into the Bedouin past. The deep impulse which sent
Abraham forth from Chaldea, instead of disturbing the
patriarchal habit of tent and shepherd life, gave it dis-
tinct form and character. Thus was nourished the
genius of the race, and doubtless if we could penetrate
the veil which hides from us all but the superficial
aspects of life in those early days, we would be able
to note even there the singularity afterward so con-
spicuous, and, in the dreams of the shepherds as they
watched their flocks by night, discern some tokens of
a mood not elsewhere deepening and expanding, but
there alone increasing, inbreathing, and infolding God,
and making for Him spacious reception, and so en-
larging the capacity for the spiritual promise— for its
heavenly hope and its earthly desolation. It was a
mood prescient of the Psalmist who should sing, "The
Lord is my shepherd ;" especially was it prescient of
the words of Isaiah : " Enlarge the place of thy tent,
and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habita-
tions ; spare not : lengthen thy cords, and strengthen
thy stakes."
Time was given for this enlargement, for the expan-
sive culture of the shepherd's dream, full of the night
264 A STUDY OF DEATH
and the stars and God ; but it was of eternity rather
than of time, so that the mood of it was a strong hold-
ing of things inwardly precious and incorruptible, and
a strong withholding from artificial constructions — from
the things which make cities and kingdoms and the
institutions of civilisation. The religious instinct com-
mon to all peoples was in these tribes lifted out of its
usual plane of development.
From the first, then, the singular type was set, which,
though it had so little outward stability, was, as it al-
ways has been and is to - day, the most insistent and
abiding racial type on earth. Even in the primitive
patriarchal era there was something more than a noble
quality of animal life, than the strong instincts of a
vital manhood, fierce in its virility, yet with a natu-
ral restraint ; all this was exalted and intensified by
that divine alliance which was already recognised as
a reality, the ground of the later covenant, embrac-
ing a world. Some special readiness to receive was
the basis of a special revelation, though the reception
was in trembling fear and with many signs of repul-
sion. They were themselves gods unto whom the
word of the Lord came, else it could not have come ;
some consubstantial flame in man was witness to the
flame of the spirit. That which was in the heart of the
child Samuel — -that waiting desire which made him
listen in the still night for the divine Voice — that which
in the inmost heart of man makes it the bride of God,
was a determining element in the vital destination of
the Hebrew.
The nomadic shepherd life had always some unrest.
The tent was forever being shifted, if only for new past-
A SINGULAR REVELATION 265
urage ; but there was in this wandering impulse, as
affecting the early Hebrew, a spiritual disturbance un-
settling content, the expedition of a mystical pilgrim-
age.
As in all childhood there is a heavenly holding and
withholding, which in some one child becomes a special
nurture with more ample storage of buoyant hope, a
deeper inbreathing of the air of dawn, so, while we dis-
cern in all race-beginnings a spiritual impulse, a fresh
and living flame like that which breathed through the
Vedic Hymns, yet in the Hebrew origin we behold
such seizure upon God that the divine seems to be in-
sphered in the human, increasing and abounding there
through the long morning ; and, though that which
holds it so largely is finally broken, it is broken as is
some precious argosy whose treasure is bestowed upon
all lands — is indeed the broken matrix which has held
Emmanuel.
In the prolonged patriarchate was set the type of
this peculiar people — the note to which it was held ac-
cordant, though the discords were many and violent.
Here were engendered Psalm and Prophecy and the
Messianic hope. This period lasted long enough to
become an exemplar. The tent, so easily folded and
removed, was the foretype of that earthly instability
which characterised the fortunes of this people — an
ideal standard of divestiture to which the prophet was
always calling back, reducing life to its simplest prin-
ciple. The familiar watchword, "To your tents, O
Israel !" remains to the last the refrain of Hebrew his-
tory.
How difTerent this Hebrew patriarchate from that
266 A STUDY OF DEATH
of the Chinese, which we see to-day in the crystaUine
calm where it has been held in arrest for centuries !
How different from the obese degeneration of the an-
cestral type among the Bedouins of the desert ! And as
to its outcome, we see clearly how distinct it is by com-
paring the Hebrew religious movement with that which
emerged in Islam — the difference between enslave-
ment, defeat, and captivity disguising heavenly do-
minion, and that kind of possession and conquest
which is the dissipation of spiritual energy.
The peace which the Hebrew loved, the longing for
Avhich led him inland while the adventurous Phoenician
sought the mastery of the sea — that rest besought by
the Psalmist, such as the dove seeks in its flight : these
stand out in pathetic contrast against a troubled career
of fiery trial and chastisement. It is just such a con-
trast that impresses us in the personal life of Jesus,
between the serenity of Galilee— that charmed circle
of security from which he sends forth his defiance to
Herod — and the fretful tumult, the cruel hostility of
Jerusalem. The deepening of capacity is for the larger
inclusion of pain and strife, as well as for that of a
heavenly peace ; and so it was in the divine life of the
Son of Man, who had not where to lay his head, who
took the stings and arrows of every enmity, and who
not merely suffered evil and death but included all
evil and all death, so that his rising again might stand
against all falling. He descended into hell, so enlarg-
ing the scope of that descent that it emerged in heaven.
Before him, neither in pagan nor Jewish thought, was
such emergence conceived as possible, just as before
him the mortal issue was not seen as life.
A SINGULAR REVELATION 267
XVIII
The idea of heaven as the eternal habitation of souls
freed from earthly bondage is so familiar to us that
we are apt to forget that it is wholly a crea-
tion of the Christ-life and the Christ-death, The Opening
' of Heaven.
followed by his resurrection and ascension.
The phrase " going to heaven " is strictly modern, and
as indicating the direct destination of a departed spirit
is quite wholly Protestant, since the great majority of
Christians believe that there is an intermediate state.
To the martyrs, as to Stephen, heaven seemed to open
for their immediate reception ; but to the Lord himself
there was no such invitation. Therefore he said to the
penitent thief : " This day shalt thou be witii me in
Paradise " — meaning that happier part of Sheol allotted
to the faithful. Hitherto, in the hope of pagan or of
Jew, the movement of the soul had been arrested at
this point, as if by fixed conclusion. The only He-
brews in heaven were those who had been divinely
translated thither — Enoch and Elijah, and, it was be-
lieved, Moses ; besides these, it was the abode of God
only and the angels.
The Lord never directly promised his disciples en-
trance to heaven, though intimating that in his Father's
house were many mansions, and that he would prepare
a place for them — praying, moreover, that where he
was they might be also. The resurrection in which
the Pharisees believed was a return to earthly em-
bodiment and habitation. Only the Lord's ascension
opened heaven. The Gentile Christians, by swift re-
268 A STUDY OF DEATH
action, readily accepted the idea of the supreme exalta-
tion ; but the Hebrew, as shown in the Apocalypse of
St. John, expected the descent upon the earth of a new
Jerusalem.
The idea of place, in this connection, has no impor-
tance ; what is really significant is the ascension, as the
complement of so deep descent — the escape from that
old and sterile conclusion in Hades which had so long
impressed the minds of men as something inevitable —
the completion in ineffable light of the soul's wander-
ing that hitherto seemed to have been arrested in dark-
ness. The descent was not evaded ; death still awaited
every man, and the grave deepened into the Inferno,
but the cycle was completed, and what had been
bounden was free — the bond itself finally shown as a
home-bringing of God's children to the bosom of
another Father than Abraham.
It is interesting to trace the adumbration of this
freedom in the Hebrew consciousness. The primitive
thought of another world was backward and downward,
but with the spirit of prophecy there was a turning of
the face to the light, forward-looking. After the Cap-
tivity the idea of angelic beings became more and
more familiar to the Hebrew, mingUng with his hope
of resurrection, though the angels should descend to
him rather than he should ascend to their abode. The
Lord spoke of the children of the resurrection as be-
coming like the angels in heaven. From this it was
only a step to heaven itself — but that step halted. Then
there was that last week in Jerusalem, with its gather-
ing trouble, relieved by visits to the restful home of
Mary and Martha in Bethany ; the raising of Lazarus,
A SINGULAR REy ELATION 269
and the evident expansion of some mighty and lu-
minous thought in the mind of Jesus, prophetic, absorb-
ing, withholding itself from expression even to his disci-
ples, as something they could not yet bear and which must
await disclosure from the spirit — from that free spirit
which was in him, made wholly free when he should
"go away." Flesh and blood could not reveal it, but
rather the vanishing of these. With the resurrection
of the Lord — which, though it only brought him back to
the light of earthly day, still seemed to remove him from
the accustomed familiarity, so that he only at times
suddenly appeared to them for brief converse and then
as suddenly vanished — their spiritual sense was deep-
ened. Their hearts burned within them while he talked
with them on the way to Emmaus, showing them what
was the real meaning of his sufferings and death and
resurrection, as completing the divine mission of Israel
in the person of the Messiah. "Ought not Christ to
have suffered these things and to enter into his glory ?"
The consummation of the lifting power of the life
manifested in the Christ was reached in his ascension.
He who had " descended into the lower parts of the
earth . . . ascended up far above all heavens, that he
might fill all things." The tree of Life could not fill
the heavens till its roots had taken hold of the nether-
most abyss.
Therefore it is that, for the Christian, Death and
Evil are deepened to the utmost, and in like manner
the consciousness of Guilt, that nothing may be left
outside of the comprehension of the lifting Life — that
tiie ascent may " lead captivity captive."
270 A STUDY OF DEATH
XIX
The Hebrew movement, thus consummated in the
Christ-life, represents the epos of the human soul, not
in such terms as the ancient poets used in their epics
celebrating heroic adventure — the quest of
^dea"f sir the Golden Fleece or the taking of Troy—
but far withdrawn from any idea of mere
outward accomplishment and confined within the scope
of a spiritual destiny expressed in terms of living guilt
and living righteousness.
Childhood is unmoral. It has the primary con-
science, whose instinctive feeling is not expressed in
abstractions or in such judgments as are ethical in our
modern sense. It has natural control, a vital restraint,
deeper and surer than that which is concerned with ex-
ternal relations and consequences rationally considered.
The Hebrew, keeping much of the plasticity of child-
hood, had this living conscience, not merely in the
sense in which all primitive tribes have it, but in that
sense exalted, so that sin was felt to be blood-guiltiness,
as violence of the bond of kinship between men and
God. When the Prophet wished to convince David of
his great sin, he did not refer to the broken law but to
the home he had broken. So the Lord made the test
of a divine judgment not any dogmatic or ethical con-
dition, but only tenderness of heart toward all men as
toward brethren ; as if this were itself the fulfilment
of the law. He who was to come with the spirit and
power of Elias was to turn the hearts of the fathers to
the children, and of the children to the fathers : it was
A SINGULAR REV FA. AT ION 271
the concern of kinship. Paul's definition of " rehg-
ion pure andundefiled " points to the same living truth.
Not moral perfection but newness of heart is the vital
distinction : the newness is for tenderness. The idea
of sin entertained by the Greek and Roman was con-
fined to failure, with reference to that outward com-
pleteness which was to them the chief end of life.
The (}reek word for sin means the falling short of a
mark : some outward standard is implied. The older
idea^ expressed in the Latin nc-fas, was originally allied to
the Hebrew sense of guilt; but this meaning had beeti
outgrown, surviving only in the lingering regard for the
Lares and Penates, the deities of the hearth, and in that
tenderness of piety which never became wholly extinct,
and which, indeed, was the great softness that, turning
into manly fibre, was the basis of Roman virtue and
mastery. Rome made for herself a world of depend-
ent children by somewhat the same quality as that
whereby, maintained in its plasticity, the Hebrew be-
came a Child for the world.
XX
The Hebrew movement, culminatinuj in the Christ,
was a discrete destiny, necessary, once and for all, to a
singular issue — to the Appearing, in time and in the
world and in human form, of Eternal Light and Love —
an Appearing so wonderful that we ask how
1 1 r "^''^ Issue.
it could have been, and yet so longed for,
and so resuming all other appearances in Nature and
humanitv, as their central illumination and essential
272 A STUDY OF DEATH
glory, that we ask how it could not have been ! God
so loved the world: the world so desired God! Be-
cause the sun is in the heavens the waters that run into
the sea are lifted again to their native heights; and
so, in all ways, is the pulsation of the physical earth
maintained. How else could there be the full pulsation
of the spiritual world save as its sun responded to the
desire in the heart of man ? Christ is that Sun. We
were in him, though we knew it not, and he appeared
in us and to us. He descended and he arose, and he
stood for our falling and rising, and we saw in him
what we turn from, as worlds from their light and that to
which, following the same old planetary habit, we for-
ever return — what we deny and what we confess. Apart
from this movement, which had for its issue the Eternal
Child, full of grace and truth, shaping for us the lan-
guage of a new kingdom, we should be at a loss, having
no clew to our labyrinth leading outward into freedom,
no escape from our entanglement. That which is hid-
den could never have come to the light.
To suppose this movement as not having been would
be to suppose humanity — the ultimate specialisation of
cosmic life — to be completely insulated, an island from
which its embosoming ocean could at no point be seen.
The spiritual loss might be compared to the sterile
physical existence of man upon the earth, supposing
human life to have no hidden fountain in its organic
cell structure whence proceeds any child. The new-
ness, of which the child is the symbol, is the charm of
existence, the charm of an expansion renewed by at-
traction, of desire renewed by death. As in the rising
again of the Lord — the " one si^n given unto men " — the
A SINGULAR REyELATION 273
way of deatli was seen to be the way of life, this re-
surgence, to the early Christians, stood for a new child-
hood ; it was the transcendent Nativity, whereby they
were "the children of the Resurrection."
CHAPTER II
THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION
It has been charged against Christianity that it loolcs
ever toward a dying Lord, drawing always near to the
grave, emphasising sin, also, as it does mortality, and
clothing itself in a sorrowful habit, loving rather to
dwell in the house of mourning than in that of feasting.
This attitude has been contrasted with that of pagan
philosophy, which appealed to aspiration and extolled
virtue, finding the highest excellence in outward accom-
plishment and inward serenity.
As in no ancient faith was there the exaltation of a
sure and steadfast hope such as lifted the heart of
Israel, so was there never such a sunburst of dawn as
that which exalted and illumined the hearts of the early
Christians. Nevertheless it is true that these Chris-
tians turned their faces away from the vision of any
earthly sunrise, literally as well as figuratively faring
westward, renouncing the hallowed traditions and as-
sociations of the Holy Land, seeking discomfort, court-
ing persecution, facing death in every Roman am-
phitheatre, and leaving upon their tombs the only
inscriptions of their faith recoverable from this period
of their tribulation.
The Apostles were the witnesses to an eternal verity,
disclosed in their Lord's resurrection — that death is in-
THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION 275
deed the unseen angel of life, with wings that lifted to
heights beyond the reach of mortal vision and earthly
aspiration. Death had not befallen the Lord, but he
had pursued death, had clothed himself in the mortal
habit, and in its corruptible had shown its incorruptible.
The followers of Christ, therefore, sought not safety ;
their pilgrimage was not away from the City of Destruc-
tion but through its flaming streets. To them, indeed,
every city, every structure which had been raised by
human effort seemed about to fall. They were on fire
within, and imagined a world on the verge of conflagra-
tion ; the framework of Nature as of all human systems
seemed "like an unsubstantial pageant" soon to dis-
appear, dissolved in fervent heat. They built no church
edifices and established no elaborately formal rites.
They took no active part in the social or political func-
tions of the world about them.
St. John's Apocalypse and St. Paul's Epistles disclose
in different ways the prevailing conviction that the end
of things was at hand. In John's vision everything
seemed to vanish before the " wrath of the Lamb."
Paul looked for the speedy emancipation of a universe.
John saw a new Jerusalem, Paul " a new creature."
The Lord had said that the Gospel would be preached
to all nations before the end of the world, and to them
the swiftness and magnitude of the pentecostal revival
seemed the beginning of a movement which would not
halt short of its rapid consummation. St. James alone,
with steadfast zeal for the ritual of his fathers, was
conservative and temperate in his expectation, repre-
senting ecclesiastical stability, and probably for this
reason he gave more consideration to the ethical side
276 A STUDY OF DEATH
of a Christian life, emphasising the value of good
works.
Each of these apostles was mistaken in his forecast
of the immediate future, though each, through the dis-
tinct phase of his hope, contributed to the completeness
of that testimony which is known to us as the " new
testament." No greater confusion fell upon Peter
when he reflected upon his denial of the Master than
awaited James when he was overtaken by the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem ; and we can imagine the consterna-
tion of John if he could have foreseen the position which
was to be held in Christendom by that Rome upon which
he saw emptied the vials of God's wrath, or that of
Paul if he could have followed the lines of Christian
development into an ecclesiasticism more elaborate than
that of Jerusalem, and have seen the world which he felt
crumbling beneath his feet enter upon an era of unprec-
edented stability in every field of human activity.
Paul's thought never crystallised into either a philo-
sophic or theological system ; it was so close to a nas-
cent and flaming life that it was luminous with its light
and plastic to its creative spirit — a quickening spirit
that impelled his swift journeyings over the whole known
world even to its westernmost limits, and at the same
time gave him the deepest insight into the mysteries of
the Christian faith.
It was because Paul's faith was fixed upon the invisi-
ble and the eternal that the whole visible universe seemed
to him so unstable. " The fashion of this world passeth
away." This dissolving view was ever present to his
mind, because he felt the power of a new creation. He
THF. PAULINE INTERPRETATION 277
dwelt upon death because his chief theme was the res-
urrection, and upon sin, which is the sting of death, be-
cause for him had arisen the Sun of Righteousness. The
principle of a new life dominated his thought. It was
not a new life as having just begun to be. The power
which raised Christ from the dead was the creative
power from the beginning, hidden under the masque of
Nature's bondage — hidden also in the heart of man. It
was the power manifest in the world as a vital pre-
destination, not to be thwarted by human traditions or
aims ; the power working in evil as well as in good, in
the hardness of Pharaoh's heart as in the faith of Moses;
the power of the law as well as the power of grace.
In the light of the renascent spiritual principle, Paul
saw a new humanity, as from a second Adam, and a new
creation. .\ revelation had been made, which gave a
new scope to human life, and a new meaning to the
universe ; but it was the first purpose of the divine will
for man and the world, though last in the e.xpress bright-
ness of its manifestation. It was not a new cycle of
human or cosmic life, but the completion of the old :
the fulfilment of its divine meaning. The natural body
was raised a spiritual body, and so the natural man was
raised a spiritual man, growing into the stature of the per-
fect man in Christ. The living soul, animating the flesh
and boasting in the works of the flesh, was disclosed as
the quickening spirit, one with the Father, and inspiring
a universal fellowship, which had been from everlasting
but was now for the first time luminously real to human
faith.
Paul regarded human destiny as inseparably bound
up with that of the universe. The visible world, though
278 A STUDY OF DEATH
imaging tlie spiritual, "was made subject to vanity,"
under the bondage of corruption, and man, as a part of
this creation, was under the same bondage, and there-
fore mortal and sinful, the sting of death being sin and
the strength of sin the law. The subjection was a di-
vine limitation and was universal, pertaining to all visi-
ble manifestation : it was not of the will of man but of
God. As the whole order, seen in its natural operation
in time, was clothed upon with the mortal habit, every
structure being brought to naught and thus "subject to
vanity," so in humanity there was a special death and a
special evil. Sin was something more than was defina-
ble in particular acts : it was a state. Thus Paul speaks
of Christ, who knew no sin, as becoming Sin, wholly
identified with man in his limitation. Paul emphasises
the descent of Christ, thus bringing him into the estate
of falling man. As Christ had all of death, in its essen-
tial meaning, and yet saw not its corruption, so he took
the inmost reality of sin in such wise that the divinity of
it was blamelessly transparent in its humanity — its crim-
son ever turning white, as was natural in a life essen-
tially redemptive, and whose blood flowed for remission.
He was the reconcilement of sin with the eternal life.
Thus the bondage itself came to be seen as the bond
of kinship ; showing that originally it was this in its di-
vine ordinance.
Paul contrasts, by sharp antithesis, the works of the
law with the operation of grace. But the law was, at its
fountain, holy — a fatherly commandment, a gracious pro-
vision suited to fallible humanity, and even with its thorns
hedging in the truant nature, pricking the conscience,
convincing of sin. While it hardened with the hardness
THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION 279
of the human heart, and the men who sat in Moses'
seat laid upon the people burdens too grievous to be
borne; while it became itself a part of the bondage,
yielding to corruption, so that the works of the law par-
took of the vanity of all outward accomplishment ; yet
this very inanition was a preparation for the gospel of
grace. Thus the law was a schoolmaster leading men
to Christ.
To Paul's vision was opened a spring-time for the
whole world, with issues unforeseen, indeed, and im-
measurable, but whose meaning had been fully dis-
closed. A new principle, hitherto hidden beneath the
mortal masque, was manifest. The followers of Christ
need not turn away from death, or regret any outward
desolation, however complete the divestiture. Death
could not bankrupt life, being indeed its only solvency ;
though it stripped the soul of its investment of good
works as of all other vesture, the nakedness was that of
the child of the kingdom of grace ; this absolution
took no note of works of merit any more than of any
other works. This death, moreover, unmasquing all else,
put aside also its own disguise, repudiating mortality.
But for this absolute newness there could be no deliv-
erance from the body of death.
So significant was the resurrection of Christ to Paul :
the revelation of a new death hidden in the old, even
as the spiritual principle is hidden in the visible world.
What was implicit in the bondage had become explicit,
a manifest redemption. A body inviolable and incor-
ruptible had been returned from the grave, raised by a
power which lifted it out of the closed circle of mor-
tal change and progression in which the visible world
28o A STUDY OF DEATH
seemed locked — even lifted it up into heaven. The
suspense was broken. This revelation had been made
not in an analogue, or symbol appealing to the mind,
but in an appearance to the sense — like a flash of the
Eternal into Time — of a spiritual body. Thus was
shown the fashion of the world to come, into which all
vanishing things were transformed, so that the univer-
sality of death was the hope of the universe.
It was not merely the illumination of a truth, but
became a living, working principle. In its light the
Christian could not only face death, but anticipate it
by the inclusion of it in life, and thus bring into earth-
ly manifestation the power of the resurrection, lift-
ing up the spiritual man just as the nutrition and
function of the physical man were from the inclusion
of death for the resurgence and ascension of the or-
ganism.
This anticipation of death was the essential condi-
tion of a new life, in a Christian fellowship, on earth.
If the Kingdom of God was to have an earthly realisa-
tion, it must be through dying daily, both for minis-
tering and to be ministered unto. To become like
children, after this new type of childhood, meant a
withdrawal from the world for spiritual expansion at
the same time that contacts with that world were mul-
tiplied — channels for freely receiving and then for free-
ly giving. Baptism was a burial with Christ that the
Christian might rise again with him, lifted up by the
same spirit. The burial and the rising, begun in this
symbolic rite, were repeated continually in the pulsa-
tion of Christian life — the vanishing side of which was
a hiding with Christ, the return beat spiritually vital-
THE P/IULINE INTERPRET^lTlOhl 281
ising the outward body of the individual and social
organism. On the one side the flesh was denied, on
the other it was made the temple of God, and upon the
heart of flesh was freshly inscribed the law in its origi-
nal terms of love.
The formal obedience of the law in every point could
not in itself secure deliverance from its bondage; might,
indeed, result in self-complacency and pharisaical self-
justification, the very habit of such obedience becom-
ing automatic routine, and ending in a stoical accept-
ance of death. In this fulfilment the law destroyed
itself, became crystallised in a heart of stone, losing its
proper virtue in a life thus arrested, and death would
be liberation only as breaking up the brittle structure
and so forcing the final confession of a corruption re-
sisted and denied but inevitable. On the other hand,
the willing acceptance of the mortal state, its burdens
and its bondage, by the tender hearts of God's children,
judging not, repudiating merit, failing at every point, as
fail they must, yet having faith in the Father's love, and
lifted from every fall by His grace into living righteous-
ness — this obedience is that love which fulfils the law,
eclipsing and transcending its letter, and rising into its
spirit. Thus are all systems, whatever virtue they may
have, urged on to their mortal issue for the regenera-
tion of goodness itself.
The quickness of life, including death as itself a
quickness, a lifting and transforming power, was re-
creative, making a new or newly visible organisation
of humanity in a spiritual body — a fellowship setting
up new activities, nutritive and functional. As in the
282 A STUDY OF DEATH
animal organism the maintenance, through nutrition,
of vital activity depends largely upon nitrogen, the
most inert of all elements (excepting the recently
discovered argon, an equally important constituent of
the air we breathe), so the spiritually organic body
includes for its nutrition the death and inertia of the
human world. Its catholic kinship includes the out-
cast, the reprobate, the utterly condemned, finding in
the extremity of human wretchedness and sin the point
of penitent return.
It was God's pleasure in humanity that was the
burden of the angels' song announcing to the shep-
herds the birth of Jesus ; and we may without pre-
sumption interpret the heavenly voice declaring at
Christ's baptism, " This is my beloved Son, in whom
I am well pleased," as especially emphasising the ut-
terance already made to the shepherds, and as cele-
brating the new birth of humanity.
We can imagine the change which came over the
spirit of man's dream concerning himself and his
earthly station when the Copernican astronomy dis-
closed the fact that what had been thought the flat
and inert earth — a condemned world, the degraded
footstool of the universe, the alone dead and motion-
less, and enclosing death and hell in its secret depths,
as if these were its own peculiar possession — was it-
self one of the celestial spheres, and so restored to its
heavenly place and motion, no longer excommunicate.
That catholicity which included it in the universal
harmony made also a catholic distribution of such
evil as had seemed its singular portion, and its cen-
tral fires were seen to be like those which tormented
THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION 2 S3
the bosoms of all the celestial wanderers. In the
catholic life was included the catholicity of death.
How much more glorious was the revelation through
the Son of Man of the divine spiritual kinship, into
whose bond was turned the bondage of every creature !
Man, the most fallible of all living beings, and who so
accumulated death and evil that he seemed to monopo-
lise corruption and to be inert — "dead in trespasses
and sins" — was shown to be, because most lost, the
best beloved.
The charm and excellence of this new creation could
not be expressed in the terms of physical sensibility,
of mental appreciation, or even of ethical motives and
restraints. All the sensations possible to the most ex-
quisite bodily organism, heightened by aesthetic and
intellectual refinement ; the sum of attainable power
and virtue : these belonged to a world which had
dwindled into insignificance in the presence of a king-
dom whose activities were characterised by Paul as
" the works of the spirit." The law of altruistic ser-
vice and sacrifice had belonged to every order of exist-
ence, and belonged also to the new, but was distinctive
to the latter only through its heavenly transformation
and reversion from the measurable merit and value,
hitherto associated with its human expression, to the
original and immeasurable grace which is the quality
of a creative act. The Lord, as the bridegroom of
humanity, lifts it into participation with himself in
creative action, and in this conjugal relation human-
ity is no limited saintly company, but a catholic and
spontaneous fellowship.
All were under sin, and in all the new creation was
284 A STUDY OF DEATH
redemptive, "especially in them that believed.'" While
the tree is known by its fruits, and the early Christians
showed an outward excellence beyond the require-
ments of law and duty, yet those loving believers at-
tached no merit to such performance, and, having
done all, deemed themselves unworthy, and as falling
short of the divine glory revealed to their anointed
eyes. No sum of deeds could fill out the measure of a
life which was supremely Being above all Doing. The
deed could not seem to them other than decrepit, like
the blossom that withers and the fruit that falls. They
tried with glowing lips to tell men what the new crea-
tive principle was, but none could understand who
had not their spiritual experience. Paul said it was
Love, and then described every known manifestation of
love as falling short thereof ; for how is one to know
Love save in the wonder of what it is above all it can
do ? It is a creative power, but the creature falls into
impotence.
As a social power, in its primitive manifestation,
Christianity converted altruism into identification. The
neighbor was loved not as another, but as the self of
the lover. Sacrifice was the blending of the human
with the divine will ; not renunciation for mere loss or
divestiture, but for recovery. Suffering was incident-
ally, and in the sequence of things in time, a discipline,
but in the eternal meaning was one with the divine ■
passion from the beginning, and as belonging to a liv-
ing creation. Death and sin were involved in the
resurrection and redemption whereby man became a
new creature.
Paul's idea of dying to sin was not that of ascetic
THB PAULINE INTERPRETATION 285
mortification ; he meant thereby a dying to the dying
environment of the old creature and living to that of
the new. Instead of escaping from a sinful world, he
sought every possible contact with it, knowing that
where sin abounded there did grace much more abound.
The seed of the kingdom was sown in corruption.
Thus the Christ-life took possession of the world
with no dainty selection, but, seizing upon the worst,
brought out of it an excellence far exceeding what had
been found in the best. Only a creative and trans-
forming life, drawing its inspiration from a heavenly
source, could have so confidently leaned to all human
moods, following them into their faltering descents, in-
dulgent and compassionate. Thus primitive Christian-
ity followed the pagan world into its own Sacred Mys-
teries. Paul used the very terms associated with these
for the illustration of spiritual truth. The pagan con-
verts were baptised under a formula conveying the
thought so familiar to them, and so repugnant to the
Hebrew, of a diversified divine manifestation in three
persons.
Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles, as " all things to
all men," turned his face quite away from Jerusalem
and toward the Western world. In his catholicity was
that world fully embraced, while in his doctrine of elec-
tion was expressed the principle of integration, the
principle of the church militant in the development of
Christendom.
CHAPTER III
CHRISTENDOM
The nihilism of the mystic, if cherished for its own
sake, would be disintegration, refusing investiture, a
sterile simplicit}^
The idea that we should attain supreme felicity if we
could put aside all veils forever and in a pure spiritual
vision always behold God face to face is a dazzling
conjecture. Suppose a planet to be able to refuse
separation from her sun, would her eternal identifica
tion with her lord be any true union — like
Espousals. . . ..,,,.,,
the " union m partition which she enjoys
in all her varied life ? Or, if she might choose, having
set out upon her wanderings, to retain her similitude
to him — to be forever self-luminous, herself always just
another sun, would she not, through lack of contra-
diction, miss the ultimate dramatic excellence and de-
light of her destiny ?
For, see what happens to the Earth because of her
apparent loss and self-desolation. Coming into her hard
limitations, she has the inestimable honour of preparing
a bridal chamber for the Sun, being nearer and dear-
er to her lord in her set distance than if she had for-
ever rested in his bosom, for now he rests in hers. As
CHRISTENDOM 287
the mother cell is separate from the father cell, so that
the latter must go forth, like a hunter to the chase, to
possess its sundered mate, so it is in this mystical
attraction, first seen as repulsion, which is the charm
that binds the Earth to her bridegroom.
Has she pride that she, as it seems to her, is the cen-
tre and he the satellite ? Or, rather, is it her modesty
that she imputes to herself all the inertia and to him
all the motion ? Really the motion is of neither to the
other as to a centre, but both are possessed by the same
motion, which is not material but of the spirit. Their
union is but the expression of the eternal consubstan-
tiation.
The gain of this planetary bride, the Earth, is through
what she has given up. Because of her distance she
can be visited by her lord. Divesting herself of her
own garment of light, she can be clothed upon with
his ; hiding her own fires, she can be sensible of his
joyous warmth in manifold intimacy. Brought to
very barrenness in the diminution of her own force
and swiftness, it is given her to sing the virgin's Afag-
nificat^ and to know that all born of her are the chil-
dren of the Sun. There is healing in his touch,
and all that she perforce distils of poison and bitter-
ness — all the maladies of her desolate nights — yield to
his radiant strength. With her he sups and takes up
his abode, knowing no delight or charm in the vast
distance traversed by his swift wings until he keeps
tryst with her. Here only, and not in that blank
space, has his face brightness and colour ; here only
is there for him nutrience and increase and content.
This is the garden of his love ; of his labour, also, since
288 A STUDY OF DEATH
here are done his mighty works for his children ; and
of his deatli, since virtue goes out of him with every
revival of earthly life, until he wears the wan smile of
the physician who saves not himself — like the sunset
benediction in the face of Heracles when, after his
grim struggle, he brought Alcestis back to the halls of
Admetus, having himself taken the chill and the mys-
terious silence.
So is it with all espousals. The union is because of
divulsion, and has the value of distance ; its intimacies
have their ground in distinction, which becomes con-
tradiction, like that of a planet to its sun ; its special
activities and capacities seek sequestration in a limited
field, "an enclosed garden," sometimes curtained in by
the darkness and again veiled by the light; its investi-
ture is mortal and its fruition is death.
The spiritual espousal, wherein humanity is united
with the Lord, is not only catholic, including all the
elements in a human world, but, whatever may be its
heavenly consummation, is, in its earthly expression
and as a visible manifestation, a limited estate, involv-
ing conditions such as attend all other espousals : on
the Bride's part a destination separating her from the
Bridegroom, and in many ways seeming a contradiction
of her inmost desire for Him, so that she becomes a
poor starveling, a distraught and desolate Psyche, be-
reft of Love ; and on the part of the Bridegroom a run-
ning after her, as if in answer to some great need and
hunger developed in her desolation, as if He had in-
dulged her aversion that He might follow her into her
darkest hiding, standing at her door and knocking while
CHRISTENDOM 2 89
His locks are wet with the cold dews of her night — He
also having veiled His essential might and brightness
lest she should be dismayed at His coming, yet re-
taining enough of His original majesty that she may
see Him as the one altogether lovely, the wonderful.
Such, at least, is the modest human regard of this
spiritual marriage, which includes and transcends all
the other espousals for which the world is made : the
Bride taking upon her all the blame, the reproach of
her very destiny. This has been the cry of the human
soul since its bondage began : Mine is the shame, the
low estate ; there is none good but the One. But all
ways the Bridegroom answered : Fear not, in thee only
is My delight ; Mine is the darkness and the evil, and
no glory belongs to Me that is not also thine. These
are the everlasting Canticles.
This similitude of a conjugal relation between man
and the Lord has been a symbol familiar to the re-
ligious thought of the race in all ages, from the Vedic
Hymns to Swedenborg, and is especially frequent in
Hebrew prophecy. Science shows that all cosmic life
is expressed through repulsions turned into attractions
and affinities — what seems repulsion being itself an
undisclosed, or hidden, attraction ; and if we substi-
tute living terms for these, we see that universally Nat-
ure is the harmony of conjugal associations, in all of
which the primary note seems to emphasise disjunc-
tion.
290 A STUDY OF DEATH
II
Now when the Bridegroom was seen as Emmanuel,
in whom were manifest the power and wisdom of crea-
^ . tive Life that had been hidden beneath veils
Continuance
of the through which now it shone; when he was
on age. j-jgj^jjpg j-j-,g gj^.], ^j-j^j niakiug the blind to see
and releasing the captives of every earthly bondage, it
seemed then to those who witnessed these things that
the bondage itself was ended. " If thou hadst been
here, our brother would not have died," said the two
sisters of Lazarus. And seeing in him this Life as not
only curative but redemptive, men said that now there
need be no more sin, since here was a living stream
which turned its scarlet white.
But while they were saying this the Bridegroom said,
" I must go away."
So the sun had nightly left the Earth to her dark-
ness and yearly to her winter, since the Night and the
Winter had their own work to do with the Earth — the
very complement of his.
When the Lord left men to their old bondage of
death and sin ; left even those whom he had healed or
raised from the dead to yet again sicken and die — it
was evident that it was no part of his mission to abol-
ish the captivity or to reverse the lines of development
in the world or in man as connected with the world.
As we have seen, the creative life manifest in him was
a singular illumination of what this life had been doing
in the world and in man ; it was a revelation of the
truth hidden in the bondage itself, and to be expressed
CHRISTENDOM 291
only in its fulfilment ; and since it was the life of the
Father in him, it was something more than a disclosure,
transforming man's view of his finite, mortal, and sinful
state : before it could be this marvellous revelation, it
must be creative in the human heart, making therein a
kingdom, whose principle was a working power in the
world, having, indeed, a worldliness of its own in a visi-
ble social organism, and at the same time making for
heavenliness — for an estate native to man as the
child of God and the heir to eternal life, for a king-
dom not of this world. It was to be at once an earthly
unfolding and a heavenly involution. It was for this in-
volution that the Bridegroom must go away. There was
a World to Come, a new habit and habitation, a trans-
formed Bridegroom accordingly. "I go to prepare a
place for you." The new expansion involved new
distance. " And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men
unto me." Moreover, for the completion of his revela-
tion he must show not only the creative life, but that
Death is creative. He must die for resurrection — to
give the note of the new harmony, the theme of the
spiritual life.
If the Lord had remained forever, continuing his
manifestation of the Creative life, annulling sickness
and death and sin, as well as all natural evil, instead of
unmasquing all these, then all the discords attendant
upon this harmony, which is the one known to us here,
would have been resolved not positively but by nega-
tion. The harmony itself would be confined within its
own null perfection, with no openness to a World to
Come. It would have been an arrest of creation ; nay,
more, it would have been a consummate illustration of
292 A STUDY OF DEATH
the folly of creation itself, which eternally includes
the Evil, and in every new specialisation — in human
existence most of all — accumulating and exaggerating
the Evil.
Ill
There must be the full human comprehension of
Evil, like the divine comprehension, before we can un-
derstand that our inheritance of the earth is of all des-
tinies known to us the most glorious — the ultimate ex-
pression, so far as we yet know, of the divine will and
^, „.,^ pleasure. The sense of this is our only as-
The Hidden '^ ■'
Glory of our suraucc of a morc glorious world to come,
y ' '^' For what hope have we if the Father's work
hitherto has so far miscarried that redemption must
mean the reversal of its whole procedure in Time ?
Surely we derive no help or consolation from the belief
that either fallen man or fallen angels have been able
to oppose His will with even temporary success.
The difficulty or problem is not in the divine crea-
tion, but in our partial conception of it. What seems
to us an opposition or resistance to the divine will is an
essential element in its operation. There is no reason-
ableness in the supposition that God created Evil in or-
der that He might destroy it, or that the specialisation of
life should have its ultimate issue in a human conscious-
ness involving not merely fallibility, but falling, as the
very condition of its progress, in order that He might
redeem man from that estate. Evil is not for the sake
of Good. While it is true that life is from death, that
good comes from evil, and that pain is a discipline, yet
CHRISTENDOM 293
these issues are no adequate explication of death, evil,
and pain. Our idea of the good is as partial as that of
the evil, and the deeper our insight the more difficult it
becomes to separate the one from the other, each in-
deed being comprehensible only in terms of the other ;
in a vision perfectly whole Evil would be seen to be the
other name of Good. In the series of creative special-
isations the more advanced and complex existence
multiplies and emphasises all that goes under either
name, not because evil is necessary to good or good to
evil, but because the reality underlying either concep-
tion is essential and eternal — proper to Life. Lucifer
is Light-bearer, the morning star, and whatever disguises
he may take in falling, there can be no new dawn
that shall not witness his rising in his original bright-
ness.
Nothing can be whole, or positively holy, which does
not include evil, the negation of which would also annul
goodness. We say that God makes the wrath of man
to praise Him : aye, and but for wrath, human and di-
vine, there would be neither praise nor praiseworthiness.
Hate is Love's other name, as Evil is that of Good.
Christ came not to destroy or to reverse the Father's
work, but to fulfil it.
In the bewilderment of our Garden, so enclosed,
whose springs are hidden and whose fountains sealed,
where we have eaten of one tree while a sword guards
the other ; where Love takes on the masques of an-
ger and hate, emphasising division and strife ; where
pleasure begins and ends in pain ; where motion begins
in disturbance and ends in ruin ; and where the ad-
vance of life and the enhancement of its charms are
294 A STUDY OF DEATH
through the more and more complicate involvement of
bondage, through the multiplication of perils and solic-
itudes, and through a constantly increasing capacity
for the inclusion of death as well as an accumulation
outwardly of the mortal structure and fabric : in this
estate the stress and travail are conspicuous, and the
glory of our existence is hidden. But it is only that
the Bridegroom may surprise us, shining through every
fold of our heavy vesture, lifting the clouds in our
sky, lightening our burdens, disclosing the redemptive
course of evil and unmasquing death. To His vision
the glory of our earthly life is ever open, tempting Him
to share it (as it does the angels), and leading Him on
to His incarnation. We look upon this glory in Him
as a divine disclosure, but it is a re-presentation to us
of our humanity, and He stands for us and falls for us,
in our image, so that we may comprehend our standing
and falling, in His image.
Redemption is the other name of creation — the lu-
minous reflection and complement of all in creative
specialisation that we call evil.
IV
The bondage, then, is continued and completed in
the spiritual organisation which we know as Chris-
tendom, and which is the coming in all flesh
Fallibility in of the Kingdom whose principle was ex-
Chnstian Ex- pressed in the Lord incarnate — expressed
penence.
for what it is essentially, as the principle
of an eternal life.
CHRISTENDOM 295
The Bridegroom was always visiting humanity before
He came in the flesh, and always had a spiritual king-
dom in human hearts. After His ascension, in a body
already adumbrating that wherewith all the Children of
the Resurrection shall hereafter be clothed, He was still
a real presence in His earthly kingdom — a kingdom in-
cluding all the evil of the world and all that belongs to
man in his sinful and mortal estate. Even the regen-
erate, while in the flesh, retain the fallibility which hu-
manity has had from the beginning : only it has for
them its full meaning. The increase and progression of
the spiritual life in all outward embodiment and devel-
opment is a planetary wandering, a prodigal exile, show-
ing often a ragged vesture, and full of repentances.
The authority of this life, being one with its growth,
does not exclude but depends upon the human fallibil-
ity. It is an experience.
The ecclesiastical not less than the secular history of
Christendom is an illustration of fallibility as a condi-
tion of progress. The movement is a succession of
nights and mornings, of stumblings and ascents. Al-
ways the aversion from the Bridegroom is followed by
a fuller reception of Him. Often it seems that Christ
is asleep in his disciples' bark while the storm is brew-
ing : nevertheless, the storm is his as is the calm.
In the Christian world outside of the ecclesiastical
system all development seems to contradict the Ser-
mon on the Mount, and this opposition follows the
296 A STUDY OF DEATH
laws of life expressed in all organic structure and func-
tioning since the world began. Only thus
Contradiction , /-^u • ,-■ ■ .. ■ t. ■ -4- • ,.
j,ci,g does Christianity maintain its existence as a
System to its vvorking DOwcr in human society. The kins:-
Priiiciple. ^ ^ ...
dom of God on earth is an integration — not
merely an inward wholeness, as it was in the singular
destiny of the Hebrew people, but an outward organ-
isation seeking completeness in polity, art, philosophy,
and ethics ; and the more earnestly it pursues these
lines the more it has of inward grace, vitality, and il-
lumination. The glory of Christianity is chiefly mani-
fest in that it is a continually lifting and transforming
power notwithstanding its inclusion of evil, nay, by
virtue thereof, since no new ascent is made save through
descent and apparent recession.
Christian peoples accept the vital principle illumi-
nated by Hebrew prophecy and by the life and teach-
ings of Jesus, but they do not repeat the process through
which that luminous revelation was vouchsafed to them.
Rather they appear to contradict it, seeking especially
that outward excellence and accomplishment which were
denied to the Hebrew exemplar. Nor does the indi-
vidual Christian repeat the divestiture of the Lord's
life. He follows, but he avoids the exact similitude.
The original exemplar, bringing into clear light what
had been hidden, would have been marred and con-
fused by that outward fabric and equipment which had
always been its obscuration, Emphasis given to even
the outward moral habit would have disguised the light of
life. Nevertheless, the very elements which would have
blurred the central light — which had indeed hidden it
from the beginning, and which will continue to veil it in
CHRISTENDOM 297
every earthly manifestation of it to the end — are neces-
sary to any orderly planetary system revolving about it.
The development of the Mosaic Law obscured its
original principle. Pagan systems in like manner veiled
and in the end perverted and disguised the bright truths
which irradiated and graced their beginnings. The in-
stitutions which had so stable, so vast, and so complex
development in the Roman Empire were woven into a
f;ibric of conventional habit and tradition which became
dull and lifeless. Such reaction as gave them any
bright illusion came from no zeal like that of the Hebrew
prophets, but chiefly from the poets and philosophers
inspired by Greek culture ; it was not radical in reaction,
and it antagonised structural degeneration rather than
the systems themselves, whose dissolution was necessary
to any genuine renascence. The old sentiment of kin-
ship was weakened, while the lines of caste became more
rigid; social amenities consisted with fine cruelties ; civic
grandeur and formal justice tended to exclude living
graces, until the only really vital current was the life of
the lowly people, broken and downcast, and so prepared
to receive the Christian Gospel, while the hard, artificial
crust, lifted far above the stream, awaited the hammer
of the Goth which was to break it in pieces. Yet in all
these systems are found mundane charms, not appar-
ent in Hebraic life, which are associated only with the
finesse of culture in manners, literature, and art, being
inseparable from a stable order of things having the fe-
icity of outward completeness, in a movement not hasti-
ly arrested by violence from without, by holy zeal, or by
prophetic paralysis, but allowed its natural modulation
and conclusion.
298 A STUDY OF DEATH
Because the Hebrew race, or that remnant of it which
was held to its peculiar destiny, was withheld from the
outward accomplishments which have constituted the
greatness of other peoples, it is not therefore to be ac-
cepted as the model of national development. The
little child is the type of the spiritual life of the Chris-
tian ; but the Christian is not therefore denied the sturdy
maturity of manhood. The ethical conception of the
Greek, Roman, or modern world is not prominent in the
Sermon on the Mount, but we are not therefore called
upon to repudiate ethics, or even that social specialisa-
tion of morality which seems to contradict the words
of the Master. We do not instruct our police to ignore
the overt act and to regard only the inward motive ; we
maintain our conventional procedure in government and
in all social functions ; and in the conduct of our indi-
vidual life we do not practise celibacy because the
Lord did not marry ; though he said, Give to him that
asketh, we do not indulge ourselves in indiscriminate
alms - giving, nor do we discard prudence because he
said, Take no thought for the morrow.
The disintegration of Hebrew life and that divesti-
ture which characterised the life of the Lord and his
disciples served a singular purpose for all humanity,
baring the inmost heart, the supreme desire, "the one
thing needful." That purpose was served so effectively
that the true Christian can never lose sight of the spir-
itual principle. While there are circumstances in which
men who would secure the greatest fruitfulness of work
for others must be " eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heav-
en's sake," freshly illustrating the central principle of
their faith, yet from the foundation laid by these must
CHRISTENDOM 299
be erected a superstructure which shall at the same time
express the divine-human fellowship and the economies
of a complex social order, civil, moral, intellectual, aes-
thetic, and industrial. There are times when the preach-
er must take the humble garb of the prophet, and, like
St. Francis of Assisi, teach the lesson of poverty ; and
there are periods of wide-spread corruption and dead
formalism, when superstructures must be destroyed, and
the over-ripe and morbid summer, vaunting her distain-
ment and reeking in wantonness, must yield to the
rigour and release of winter. But for Puritan, Methodist,
and Quaker — for all the prophets of divestiture — there
is the spring-time also and the foison of another
summer.
VI
Either season has its evils as well as its goods ; its
characteristic violence, whether it be the fanaticism of
destruction or the madness of merrymaking; and its
peculiar grace, whether it be that of candid „.,
_ _ 1 lie .Slimmer
and unyielding virtue, or that of virtue's sac- amnvinter
rifice. Christianity frankly owns both sea-
sons. The Lord himself, in the most sublime utterance
that ever fell from human lips, said: " Whereunto then
shall I liken the men of this generation ? . . . They are
like unto children that sit in the marketplace, and call
one to another, which say. We piped unto you, and ye
did not dance ; we wailed, and ye did not weep. For
John the Baptist is come eating no bread nor drinking
wine ; and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of man
is come eating and drinking ; and ye say, Behold, a
300 A STUDY OF DEATH
gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publi-
cans and sinners! But wisdom is justified of all her
children."
It is the bridegroom's presence that prompts the fes-
tival, and in his absence there is fasting. Devoid as
was the life of Christ of everything associated with ma-
terial wealth and worldly pomp, yet the seed of his
kingdom, which in him suffered death, divesting itself
of every outward integument, so that it was seen in the
naked essence of its germinant power, was to abound in
the world because of that death, showing its heavenly
might in earthly investiture.
Christ as a Prophet reversed the prophet's primitive
habit. Among all Oriental peoples the earliest mani-
festation of prophecy was attended with a kind of
frenzy, with wild antics, repellent yet fascinating and
awe-inspiring, like the frantic mood of a Delphic priest-
ess. Islam began in epilepsy. Prophecy in these as-
pects is corrosive and like a biting frost, with an eager
momentum of destruction. It tears away all veils, as
does insanity, and dispels illusions. Life in its fresh
vigour turns away from this hoary violence and seeks
investment and plenitude, dramatic masques, the full
volume of its harmony, the momentum of its procession.
But this movement also comes into its fever and drastic
violence.
Storage is for expenditure, and the expenditure runs
into ruin, so that there seems to be the divine law of im-
poverishment, bringing desire back to its hunger. But
the hungry are blessed only because they shall be filled.
If one rests in the hunger for its own sake, then has it
a greater peril than gluttony and drunkenness, as is il-
CHRISTENDOM 301
liistrated in the temptations of St. Antliony. The empty
room, swept and garnished, is especially prepared for
demoniacal possession.
The Messiah did not come to men as an impalpable
ghost (even after his resurrection), inviting them to dis-
embodiment. Rather was our human flesh as dear to
him as that of children to their mother, and never in
word of his was there any animadversion upon our
carnal plight. He enjoyed the festival, and even turned
water into wine for those already well-drunken.
VII
While the deepest spiritual insight reverts to the Child
Jesus and to the plasticity of the Christian type in his
followers; to the love which judgeth not and thinketh
no evil, yet it is a view which may be so held
as to arrest all development, and to neutralise "uhLes."
Christianity as an organ of social movement
and as a working power in the world. The injunc-
tion to turn the other cheek also to the smiter is one
that if followed would truly express the spiritual at-
titude of the Christian toward all men, as preferring
peace to strife. But the Lord himself gave quite anoth-
er view of the practical operation of Christianity as a
promoter of strife, setting a man at variance with those
of his own household. " The zeal of thine house hath
eaten me up ;" but this zeal for the inmost Presence be-
came in the outer court a flagellation of those who made
it a den of thieves. He bade his disciples to pray in
secret to Him who seeth in secret, and in alms-giving to
302 A STUDY OF DEATH
not let the left hand know what the right hand doeth —
as if goodness had only a hidden excellence, and should
be removed from the field of self-consciousness. Yet
he bade them let their light shine before men that these
might see their good works. The children of the house-
hold were free from obligation to Caesar, yet he advised
the payment of the tribute. The miracle was the sign of
the hidden potency of the life that was in him, but he
exercised this power reluctantly, and declared wicked
and adulterous the generation seeking the sign. " If
they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they
be persuaded, if one rise from the dead."
The principle of the heavenly kingdom was flexible,
spontaneous in its operation, as of a spirit that is like
the wind, which bloweth where it listeth, and thou
canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.
Yet in many ways the Lord recognised as necessary an
order which tends to hardness and firm stability, as of
a house founded upon a rock. The hard lines of de-
velopment are not ignored. Strait is the gate, and
narrow is the way. Strive to enter in. Thou knewest
that I was a hard master, gathering where I have not
strewn ; therefore even thy one talent must not be
hidden, but must return to me with usury. Seek, and ye
shall find , knock, and it shall be opened unto you. By
their fruits ye shall know the Children of the Father.
Christ himself had come into an order more ancient
than the earth ; he had always been in it, the creative
life thereof, determining its course ; but he had now
come into it as man, with all the passions of a man,
with all the limitations of a human consciousness ; and
he had come into it not for its abrogation but for its
CHRISTENDOM 303
fulfilment. Christianity was in its organisation to be
the fulfilment for man of his destiny in the course
already begun, including all human elements ; it was to
be an order as an organised human experience. With
the harmlessness of the dove was to be united the
wisdom of the serpent — that very wisdom which led
man out of Eden.
The divine temptation leads us into the illusions of
the phenomenal world. The divine redemption partici-
pates in these illusions. The coming of the Lord was
an appearing. But he made all veils transparent.
VIII
Any religious system which should profess to rend
all veils , which should attempt the abrogation of time
and the world, and of the desire which makes
its way outwardly into worldly embodiments ExtremeTof
and constructions, would rest in Buddhistic Religious
nihilism. This is "the will not to live," the
characteristic, or rather the characterless, aim of Scho-
penhauer's pessimistic philosophy. It is not one with
the divine will, and it is not an acceptance or compre-
hension of that will, but is rather its repudiation.
Mahometanism, going to the other extreme, even
promising to its adherents a sensual Paradise, frankly
accepts all illusions, but makes them the everlasting
cerements of the soul. Islam is the modern Ishmael,
whose hand is against every man, and every man's hand
against him. This faith began in the insanity of the
prophetic function unaccompanied by prophetic insight;
304 A STUDY OF DEATH
began in brutalities, and has progressed through con-
quest based upon insolence and signalised by its atroci-
ties. It is perversely dissociative, incapable of catholic
fellowship, or even of coherence among its own constitu-
ents. It has been of service to the modern world chief-
ly as a menace and a challenge, holding shrines not
its own, and so provoking the crusades, and promoting
organisation as against itself, very much as Napoleon
caused the rehabilitation of Europe as the sole means
of its security against his inordinate rapacity.
Christendom, mainly Indo-European in its constitu-
tion ; anti-Semitic, though deriving its religious inspira-
tion from the Hebrew; in its westward course of empire
never wholly losing its inward orientation, has been al-
lowed its steady growth because the monstrous aggre-
gations of humanity in Asia have slumbered, the Mos-
lem alone having shown a strong hand, but disturbing
only to stimulate.
IX
The Christianity which has made this Christendom
did not owe its first expansion in the West to its organ-
isation. It was in its plastic childhood, and when it
seemed most averse to worldly offices and
Chri'stianh^ emoluments, when its ritual was a simple,
homely affair not yet associated with Church
edifices, that it established its contacts with the world,
spreading as a gentle insinuation throughout the Roman
empire. This was also the time of its inspired writings.
The wonderful expansion and inspiration were miracles
such as belong to infancy, spontaneous manifestations
CHRISTENDOM 305
native to the spirit and not apparent, but rather obscured
in later periods of structural development. A mighty
wave of heavenly strength and peace seemed to pass
over the whole earth, quite in accord with the condi-
tions of the general armistice then prevailing, and espe-
cially comfortable to the down-trodden and distressed
poor, to whom no worldly armistice brought rest or con-
solation. The Gospels and the Epistles breathed the
spirit of love and peace, bidding men love one another
and bear each other's burdens. At Jerusalem, where
there was the greatest tenacity of the old forms, and
also the insistence upon justification by works, before the
name of Christian was adopted by the Church, the fol-
lowers of Jesus in a singular manner illustrated the gra-
cious spirit of a new faith in a communistic economy.
It was a mode of life that could not be maintained, and
the Christians at Jerusalem became, in consequence of
it, a burden upon the Western churches ; but it lasted
long enough to find expression in the sublime ethics of
St. James's Epistle, which shows what the moral order
may become when wholly vitalised by the spirit of
Christ, and when society, though it may not have be-
come communistic, shall in its economic expression
have reconciled with the law of Love all the competi-
tions and antagonisms necessary to outward integration
and development. This reconcilement is indicated in
those words of the Lord, not recorded in the gospels,
but quoted in early Christian writings : " When the out-
side is as the inside, then the kingdom of heaven is
come." Only in that consummation visibly realised
could we see what was the scope of the kingdom deter-
mined in its marvellous germination. The definite an-
3o6 A STUDY OF DEATH
ticipation of the issue is not possible even in the most
hopeful dream of the optimist.
In a very vital sense there was organisation even in
this earliest manifestation of Christianity. The fellow-
ship was itself a living organism, a vine with tender
branches widely and swiftly spreading, throwing its soft
tendrils about the hearts of the lowly, and thus for a
long time escaping the notice of the powerful. This
was its native disposition, following closely the ways of
the Master. We think of it as a power building up
from the bottom, and so it was, if we consider only its
main constituency; but in a society like that of the
pagan world at this period — a world prepared for its
own dissolution, and expecting, as in a dream, some
transformation from a mysterious source — there are al-
ways wise men, and wise especially in the culture of the
heart, to whom nothing human is alien ; who for human-
ity are willing to give up class, in an order where no
class is fortunate and all are at a loss ; who are looking
for some new star of hope in their heavens. To such
men Christianity from the first made a strong appeal,
and they naturally became the leaders of the people.
Others there may have been, men of religious zeal and
high intellectual attainments, who, like Saul of Tarsus,
first came into contact with the Christians as their per-
secutors, and, seeing in the new faith a greater motive
for their zeal, became its ardent adherents.
CHRISTENDOM 307
X
Certainly the ecclesiastical organisation must have
been far advanced, and must have shown a disposition
toward authority and influence in society and the State,
when Constantine became the champion of Christianity,
and took its symbol of the cross as the sign through
which his armies should become victorious.
When at a later period the Church came into close
alliance with the State, becoming the arbiter of empires,
its organisation as a world-power had com-
plete development, entering into the full am- vaT church."
plitude of its earthly investiture. Catholic
brotherly love was at the heart of it, and in every fold
of its garment. It was the cosmic order of the Lord's
spiritual kingdom — the field of the Lord's espousal
with humanity. That was a true pontificate which
bridged all the chasms between social classes — be-
tween wealth and poverty, culture and ignorance, mas-
tery and service, and also between heavenly grace and
the arbitrary limitations of formal justice. It was such
a hierarchy as naturally found its typical representative
in St. Augustine.
The Church had placed in tlie hands of the Roman
Pontiff" not only the crosier, but also the sword and scep-
tre ; and the social order of Christendom in the mediae-
val period could not otherwise have been established
and maintained on a Christian basis. Not less but
more than in the age of primitive Christianity was this
organisation the embodiment of the Spirit, for, though
the Pentecostal flame was hidden, yet it was the same
3o8 A STUDY OF DEATH
flame that vitalised the whole structure in its vigorous
growth for the full measure of its beneficent ministra-
tion. The dove, which is the emblem of the Holy Spirit,
because it has wings for flight, does not therefore make
his fixed abode in the heavens, but rather descends and
makes his home among the haunts of men. The min-
istration of the Spirit is by descent. It was so in the
Christ ; it is so in the Church, which as a fellowship is
everlasting, but which as visibly manifested in any spe-
cial embodiment has a beneficence in its expenditure
and even in its disintegration measured by the degree
in which it has received and manifested the spirit of
fellowship. As a world-power an ecclesiastical, like any
other organism, rises to the height from which it may
most beneficently fiill.
That alliance of Church ;ind State in which the former
was authoritatively dominant lasted long enough to se-
cure its ends ; and during this period the wisdom of the
serpent, so necessary to its efficiency, was fully evident
in its practical working and in its development of dog-
ma. The exigencies of the ecclesiastical situation de-
manded a dramatic theology as well as a dramatic
ritual ; and in both became manifest the inevitable con-
tradiction of the formal system to its formative prin-
ciple.
Regarding merely external appearances, it would seem
that the integration of Christendom had been secured
by the surrender of Christianity itself. The Church
would appear to have been dominated by the world.
The Protestant reformers easily substituted for the scar-
let woman of the Apocalypse, there indicating the Rome
of Nero, the papal Rome of their own century. But in
CHRISTENDOM 309
realit)' an inestimable service had been rendered to hu-
manity by the mediaeval Church. Pagan Europe had
been brought into the Christian fold ; among the com-
mon people the faith had been accepted in its sim-
plicity, and, though mingled with superstitious imagin-
ings, it had nourished and brought into activity the
sentiments and impulses peculiarly distinctive to a Chris-
tian life, individual and social. The people were lifted
into a freer atmosphere and yet remained unsophisti-
cated, readily moved by generous enthusiasms and hos-
pitable to the lofty motives of an age which abounded
in chivalric romance and saintly legend. They inter-
preted so much of the Gospel as reached them with
their hearts rather than with their intellects. Theology
and ritual were the concern of the bishops, and the side
of these presented to the popular heart was that best
ministering to its need — impressive, nutritive, and dis-
ciplinary. Thus was preserved within the hard enclos-
ure of official ecclesiasticism a genuine spiritual fellow-
ship ; for this indeed was the induration of the system
necessary, as government is necessary for the protection
of home life and social activities. No system retaining
the simple plasticity of primitive Christianity could have
withstood the invasion of Islam ; nor would it have
sufficed for the building up of Christendom through
the tutelage and discipline of the swarming Barbarians
whose rude strength had throttled Roman civilisation.
The degeneration and corruption which in a natural
sequence followed this ecclesiastical evolution were but
the accidents attending the completion of a sacrifice be-
gun in the fortitude of a necessary but arbitrary sov-
ereignty; and the forces of the Reformation were nour-
3IO A STUDY OF DEATH
ished by the fortitude and found their opportunity in
the weakness and corruption of a structure which had
done its work in the world.
XI
The popular life in the Middle Ages owed to the
Church its happiest moods, and the natural and sponta-
neous exaltation of these. The plastic state of child-
hood was marvellously maintained. Faith
Accommoda- _ _ ^
tion to the was Creative, the builder of cathedrals, the
opuar 1 e. j^^j.^j. of legends ; and, as in the creation of
the world, it included the grotesque as well as the beau-
tiful. As the child fondles fear and insists upon the
dragon element in the fairy-tale, naively clinging to the
"mark of the beast" in every fanciful representation,
so the mediaeval Christian imagination, with the divine
catholicity which saw the original creation to be good —
though including radical evil and all dark provisions —
freely mingled old Titanic glooms with new-born hopes,
cherishing the fiery baptism of purgatorial pains. In
the creations of art, the ugly and miscreant had their
place in the triumphant harmony. All things were to-
gether "bound under hope." As the child expects the
loving spell that shall show the Beast to be really beau-
tiful beneath his unshapely masque, so Christian love
judgeth not, but awaits that vision whose light shall
eclipse discrimination between the clean and unclean of
God's creatures, showing what we call ugly really beau-
tiful after a pattern older than we see in what appears
to us most comely.
CHRISTENDOM 311
Certain indulgences and accommodations of the med-
ia,'val Church to the popular mood, both in the matter
.of belief and practice, seem quite natural from this point
of view : such, for example, as the tolerance of Mariolatry
among peoples accustomed to the worship of Isis and
other female divinities, and the adoption of pagan
feast-days. The growth of the kingdom was from a
seed that might be planted in any human heart, just
where that heart was found, sure to burst its cerements
and to find its proper nutriment even in the husks of
an outworn faith — to shed the false and rise the true.
Nurture itself implies a life diminished and broken
for the increase and integrity of the nursling, so that
Christian beliefs have often had in outward form the
fallibility peculiar to the estate of humanity : not cor-
rupt or corrupting as received by the fervid believer,
though if not thus hungrily taken into his organic spir-
itual life, if regarded as having a use and meaning
apart from such spiritual assimilation, or if received by
the mind only as logical formulations, they, like the un-
consumed manna in the wilderness, disclose their cor-
ruptibility. The "means of grace " are not objects of
worship ; it is some descent in them from the heavenly
height of the principle they embody which brings them
ne.xt the craving of a spiritual hunger, and but for the
expedition of that satisfaction they suffer vilification.
It is not a matter of indifference what a man believes,
or what otherwise may be offered for his spiritual nour-
ishment. The same food is not suited to all physical
organisms, or to any one organism at every stage of its
growth. The kingdom of heaven is within us, and hence
there is in us its spiritual hunger, which determines its
312 A STUDY OF DEATH
own selection ; and because of the marvellous growth
of this kingdom, there is a development of the hunger
itself and also of the nurture — the source and principle*
in either case remaining the same, being essential and
eternal. But the growth is an ascension, and that which
ministers to it a descension. This is the ministration
of death unto life.
XII
Protestantism, however, was very far from being a
revival of primitive Christianity. Luther, indeed, re-
vived Paul's doctrine of Justification by Faith, and
^ , . with such vehemence that he denounced
Ecclesias-
tical Special- the Epistlc of James as " an epistle of straw ;"
but the movement of the Reformation was
itself so far dominated by State policy that its immedi-
ate result seemed to be a mere schism rather than the
great spiritual reaction which radically it really was.
Wherever this reaction was not at first evident it was
afterward fully developed, as in English Puritanism.
The dissension itself, like that which originally had
divided the Western from the Eastern Church, was for
new integration, and it was attended with violence and
persecutive hate, such as in the Athanasian Creed had
consigned to eternal damnation all Christians not as-
senting to its doctrine — showing that not only the wis-
dom of the serpent but its venom also entered into the
ecclesiastical edification, even as the horrors of war
mark every critical epoch in the progress of civilisation.
There is no nutritive process, for the building up of any
structure, that does not involve the production of poison,
CHRISTENDOM ^i2>
and still more conspicuously does this malady attend all
organic functioning.
Christian fellowship does not, even in its beginning,
mean the destruction of antipathies, and the divine life
no more than the human has for its aim security, peace,
and quietness. That would be to substitute salvation
for redemption. Ecclesiastical, like all other specialisa-
tion, is through division. It is as inevitable that the
visible Church should be broken up into sects as that a
vast empire should be divided between different races —
each of these developing a separate nationality. This
tendency leads, as disciplined intelligence becomes gen-
eral, to individualism and the emphatic recognition of
personal liberty and responsibility.
Our Christian civilisation is fortunate in having
reached a point, never even approached by any ancient
civilisation, where we can frankly give up the poet's
dream of
" Tlie Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."
The individual does not wither as the world grows more
and more. He who in the true sense is most himself
is most for the world. The profoundest patriotism is
the truest cosmopolitanism. We can already see that
the kingdom of heaven cometh not by observation. It
is no external dynastic bond that can unite nations :
the outward delimitation promotes the inward bond. It
is fortunate for both State and Church that the social
order has entered upon that stage in its progression in
which each can best perform its functions independent-
ly of the other, and in such manner as to leave the in-
dividual, in his proper field, perfectly free, unconscious
314 A STUDY OF DEATH
of any outward authority exercised by either ; fortunate
also for society that it can hope in the near future to
have the perfectly free play of all its proper activities in
the development of industry, science, and art.
This is, indeed, the sum of the advance made by
Christendom since the Renaissance, which gave to the
modern world all that was worth having from the old —
not as a mere heritage, but as something to be crea-
tively transformed by the Christian spirit.
In all these lines of advance the kingdom of heaven
after the Christ type has its specialisation. It is the
specialisation of humanity — not of a visible Church, of a
visible State, or of that which we call Society; least of
all is it a realisation of St. Augustine's Civitas Dei : all
these are but the masques of the surely though invisibly
coming kingdom. Other masques will follow these, the
same veils indeed, but clarified and made transparent
in the process of human redemption. The dramatic
theology of St. Augustine, so alien to the conceptions of
redemption entertained by Paul and by the Greek Fa-
thers, with its peculiar doctrine of Grace as confined
within sacramental limitations, must, like the dramatic
pomp of ritual, pass into its drastic stage and disappear.
The meanings of the divine Logos, as manifested in
Nature and in the Incarnation, will be ultimately as
they were primarily seen to be for all humanity, and to
themselves transcend an historical Christ, an Apostolic
succession, and a limited fellowship.
CHRISTENDOM 315
XIII
It seems strange that at the very stage of progression,
when this noble prospect is possible, the superficial view
of our civilisation is made the basis of the profoundest
pessimism. But it is in this very field of „ , „
* ■' Ready Reac-
pessimism that the Christian finds the signs lionof
^ ,.,.,.. , _ , . . , . . , Modern Life.
of his brightest hope. In his view the rigid
worldly mechanism becomes celestial, and materialism
is seen as solvent to the Spirit of Life. The automatism
of habit, a facile descent into oblivion, from which life
and meaning are withdrawn, is seen as a release of life
for new initiation; and though in this mortal habit the
whole world should slip away it would be for the resur-
gence of a new world. Stability itself is kinetic, the re-
sultant of velocities inconceivably swift. The diabolism,
which in the old systems of dualism was regarded as in-
herent in matter, is exorcised.
The Christian idea of Death, confirmed by every dis-
closure of science, is itself that of solution, through the
reaction proper to Life. The Christian idea of a univer-
sal human fellowship, a recognition of the eternal kin-
ship, gives to Christendom its scope, broad enough to
include all reactions in the harmonious interaction of
all the forces and elements involved. The fundamental
difference between Paganism and Christendom is that
the latter, though its systems fail, has within itself the
secret principle of renascence, so that the Child Jesus is
forever being born. Owing to the readiness of reaction,
which increases with the expansion of knowledge among
all classes of the people, the Order, like a living organ-
3i6 A STUDY OF DEATH
ism, is conserved through its inclusion of death, and
revolutions are possible without that extreme violence
which marked those of earlier times. That in the sys-
tem which falls is doing its work.
All specialisation is a hiding of Life, whose authority
in our human progression is thus secluded from the au-
thority of institutions, retaining its creative potency. At
every step in advance something is given up which to
our backward look seems more precious than what we
have gained. Thus we regret the picturesque medieeval
life with its marvellous enthusiasms, its chivalric impulse,
and romantic heroism, even as many souls in that period
regretted paganism and longed for the return of Pan.
Even in the emancipation of our slaves we seem to
have suffered a loss through the rupture of an intimate
bond of affection like that which holds together the
members of a household.
The gain from these successive revulsions is apparent
from a wider view. Every emancipation is an entrance
upon a life involving severer limitations, but the en-
largement of our perspective and the free play of our
emotional and intellectual activities depend upon this
complexity of our finitude. In the discreteness of the
special accord is its proper excellence and also its cor-
respondence t-o the universal harmony. The complete
perspective would receive the full pulsation of the eter-
nal life and its full illumination.
The Hidden Life — our life hidden with Christ in God —
is our eternal and inalienable heritage. The issues of
this life in the visible world, in the procession of genera-
tions, we cannot mentally anticipate, nor are they dis-
closed in any prophecy. The creative specialisation
CHRISTENDOM 317
will ^o on, and will surely be completed in redemption.
Action will still be reaction, antipathy resolved as sym-
pathy, repulsion as attraction, bondage as freedom, and
death as swallowed up of life. Evil — all that we have
called evil from the beginning — will remain, even as
darkness will alternate with light , and to whatever ex-
tent abnormal perversion, inordinate selfishness, and ar-
bitrary caprice — the accidents of a partially completed
order — may disappear, life will still have its normal pa-
thology — its pain and frailty and repentance.
CHAPTER IV
ANOTHER WORLD
What do we or can we know about the thither side
of Death ?
There is no sequel to the story of Lazarus, who was
raised from the dead, disclosing the secrets of that es-
tate which had been a reality to him for four days, as
we count time upon the earth.
The Lord himself, the revealer, in a singular sense, of
spiritual truth, and especially the illuminator of Death,
gave, so far as we know, no intimation to his disciples
of the life beyond the grave. Nor is it recorded that they
asked for any. Death was unmasqued in the Resurrec-
tion and was shown as one with creation, but the full
light of this wonderful illumination was thrown upon
life here, showing not one definite lineament, not even
a shadowy trace of the life beyond. There never has
been any but an imaginative disclosure of that life to
men living upon the earth.
A curtain drawn so closely about the present exist-
ence must have excited the vivid curiosity of the pagan
mind. We find in ancient literature no trace of this
curiosity in the shape it takes in recent times, because
it was so vivid and therefore so immediately took a fixed
shape in an imagination whose constructions were real
beyond the shadow of a doubt. There was a develop-
ANOTHER IVORLD 319
ment of this imagination from age to age, but at every
point its creations were regarded as unquestionable real-
ities, as certain as the objects of present experience.
To the Egyptian the Book of the Dead was a genuine
and trustworthy itinerary. What Polygnotus painted
or Homer described concerning Hades was but - re-
script of what the Greek already knew with unwavering
assurance.
It was only when, in a comparatively recent period,
men began to question the reality of the immediately
external w'orld and to impugn the trustworthiness of
their senses that the "other world" also became un-
stable and the sport of a mutable fancy.
When we say that the ancient imaginations of the un-
seen world were held as certitudes, like the sense-per-
ceptions of objects in the visible w'orld, it is not there-
fore to be supposed that these imaginations constituted
a real knowledge. Indeed, our sense-perceptions do
not constitute a real knowledge of the external world
with which we are in contact ; how much less truly
could imagination render to us the world beyond. The
belief which men have had in such imaginings is very
much like our belief in dreams which seem to us real
even though, in some deeper consciousness, we know
that we are dreaming. Any disclosure or communica-
tion must be in the terms of a life that now is ; and
sensibility — whatever illusion it may involve — is at least
this vital and present contact. But men have always
suspected the masque of the world in their sensibility.
It is not likely that the more complex disguise of the
imagination has at any time escaped suspicion. In the
background of all human thinking, however crude, has
320 A STUDY OF DEATH
been this intuition : we know only that which, knowing,
we do not know that we know. Gnosticism is of the
eternal. Conscious knowledge is of things in time —
present, past, and future — things veiled by virtue of
manifestation. " Another world," considered as a defi-
nite existence, is the only field for absolute agnosticism,
wholly cut off" from human knowledge through sense,
intellect, or spiritual apprehension ; it is not veiled but
absolutely hidden, and of it there is no possible revela-
tion, save through entrance upon its actualities, when it
ceases to be "another." We know the divine, the eter-
nal ; indeed, these alone are really known since life
itself is essentially these ; but what we call another
world is not simply invisible, not simply a future or a
next world in the sense that we think of to-morrow or
next year ; it is another by an inconceivable diversity —
a distinct harmonic synthesis, for us unrelated, and un-
translatable in any terms known to us. The world to
come we know, since it is that which this world be-
comes. Another world is a new becoming, having its
own "world to come;" it is the only incommunicable.
No divine revelation has ever attempted to broach
the inviolable secret. Eye hath not seen, ear hath not
heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive.
There is one utterance by the Lord, recorded in the
Gospel, concerning the state of the Children of the Res-
urrection : "They shall not marry, nor be given in
marriage : neither shall they die any more." It is re-
markable that, in this declaration, sex and death are
joined together, as science shows them to be in the
specialisation of organic life.
ANOTHER IVORLD 321
The Lord referred to sex and death as we know them,
in their specialisation. While the essential principle of
espousal and that of death are eternal, proper to any life
here or hereafter, it is possible to conceive of a state of
existence wherein the manifestation of these involves
none of the external features associated with our knowl-
edge of them in their earthly manifestation. As there
are lower organisms which we know to be sexless and
deathless, in the sense we have of sex and death in
an advanced specialisation, so there may be higher or-
ganisms, belonging to that "other world," to which these
special terms are inapplicable. We say there may be :
Christ says there are ; and although this assertion is the
only one made by him directly bearing upon the condi-
tions of a future life, it is very far-reaching in its sug-
gestions.
Even in this earthly human, life all desire is spirit-
ually lifted into its heaven, not as being destroyed, but
as dying to one environment and being raised into an-
other, where its manifestation takes higher forms and its
ministrations seem like those of the angels. It is as if
out of the earthly matrix of Passion had been born its
heavenly embodiment, not associated with corruption
and so seeming something deathless, though it lives
through the quickness of what Death essentially is in an
eternal life. It is possible that the Lord's saying had
its real meaning as applicable to the heavenly exaltation
of any life, present or future. Certainly the characteristic
of Christian life is its realisation here of an eternal life,
through a constant death and resurrection ; and this ex-
altation belongs to our antipathies as well as to our
sympathies — to hate and anger as well as to love : these
32 2 A STUDY OF DEATH
also having their heaven and angelic scope, in a field
of reconcilement.
We can see, then, why Christian thought is fixed
upon a World to Come rather than upon what is called
Another World. This present life has part in the
eternal as truly as any life ever can have.
We pass from glory to glory, and that crisis which we
call death is only a transition from one harmony to an-
other. In certain forms of the Polish national dances,
the guests move from room to room in the palace, the
music and the movement ever changing in the proces-
sional march, according to the progressive phases of the
theme enacted. From beginning to end it is the same
theme, and the guests are the same. So it may be in
the progression of our human life from one mansion to
another of the Father's House ; there is a mystic change,
not of personalities but of special individual guises, in-
volving complete divestiture, the theme enacted remain-
ing the same.
It is because of the complete divestiture that entire
newness is possible. Our attention is so fixed upon
structure and upon changes as themselves structural
that we seem at a loss when the entire structure disap-
pears from our view. But how does a structure begin ?
Is not birth as much a mystery as death ? Form is of
the essence ; and, in a sense not to be expressed in
language, the personality has eternal form.
" Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside."
In the same sense, familiarity in time has its ground
ANOTHER irORLD 323
in the eternal familiarity, whereby alone we know and
are known. Our cognition here is re-cognition.
The formed memory and the formed character may be
destroyed ; but the life withdrawn from these, their es-
sential ground, has its spiritual embodiment after its
distinct type, still remembering and re-cognisant. The
" deeds done in the body " are not, but the doer is, and
according to those deeds : in essential form accordant,
whatever the new environment. The child seems an
entirely new creature, but, whatever science may deter-
mine as to his inheritance of characteristics acquired
in preceding generations, he is surely and wholly an
heir in that he can himself acquire anything — an heir,
not simply because of and in relation to an outward
heritage, but because of what he is. There is in this
continuity an inscrutable mystery : that which deter-
mines the accord in the series is invisible. It is the
mystery of Genesis itself. The continuity phenome-
nally is through discontinuity; death is essential in
birth as in growth. Now, let the break — that interval
in the harmony which we call death — be, to all appear-
ance, absolute ; then the resurgence, beyond our vision,
is in the very field of creation ; passing out of the
known series, out of the succession of what we know
as in Time, it is the property of life as eternal, the heri-
tage of the eternal kinship, under a ne^v limitation.
What is the continuity from the limitation known to
us to that new and wholly unimaginable limitation.^
The mystery is transferred from the visible to an invis-
ible death, which is one with the invisible birth. But
the new birth — what is its niatri.x ?
Suppose we were permitted to resume a position at
324 A STUDY OF DEATH
a point in time before the appearance of organic life
upon the earth. Would any then existing form of in-
organic life help us to an imagination of physiological
embodiment ? Science confesses its inability to answer
the question, What was the matrix of cell-life ?
An equally insoluble mystery is presented, if we in-
quire what is the matrix of any form, or how the con-
tinuity of either a generic or an. individual type of
organic life is maintained in all permutations of environ-
ment. It is a mystery belonging to creation, incom-
municable, itself the ground of communication. No
considerations derived from what we know of the con-
stitution of matter or of material structures, and none
derived from mental categories, explain the transforma-
tions of the visible world: how much less can they be
expected to even suggest the forms and limitations of
an order of existence not yet creatively communicated !
Because we, in our present existence, have no con-
scious knowledge of pre-existent states, it does not fol-
low that the future life will be wholly denied such
knowledge. Our conscious intelligence here is a dis-
tinctive characteristic of the ultimate order in the
known series ; and in man this intelligence involves
peculiar powers of reflection, co-ordination, and inter-
pretation, so that the psychical as well as the physical
man surmounts the entire series resumed in him. In
a new order it may be a characteristic of the creative
communication that conscious intelligence shall be a
clearer resumption, involving at least the conscious
recognition of friends and kindred. Our cognition
here of anything is unconsciously re-cognition, a seeing
as through a glass darkly, a mere adumbration of a
ANOTHER IVORLD 325
recognition hereafter which shall be a seeing face to
face. Illusions there may be — the face itself is a veil
— but there may be a more transparent mediation in
the communication, undisturbed by the obscurations
and refractions such as limit our present mental vision.
We speak of what may be ; every presumption of a
revelation which is itself a transcendent creative com-
munication gives j^ssurance instead of mere hypoth-
esis.
To our reason this subject is beset with difficulties,
because we become entangled in dilemmas suggested
by present relations, such as imprisoned the minds of
the Sadducees in the problem they presented to Christ.
Because the new assumption or embodiment is not
of flesh and blood, as we know them, it is not necessary
to suppose that it is immaterial. To it a new sensibil-
ity and a new thought would involve space and time as
forms to which our corresponding terms for these would
be merely analogues.
Given us a new sensibility, there would be given us a
new universe. We say the dead have passed away from
us, but it is perfectly reasonable to conceive of them as
nearer to us than ever, in a closer intimacy than any
known to us.
During tlie century now closing man has made an
important advance through dealing with subtle cosmic
forces which had hitheito been known only as dealing
with him, and, even thus, scarcely appreciated. Elec-
trical phenomena had been observed in sparks occa-
sioned by friction and in the lightning, and the magnetic
current had been utilised in the compass ; but the terms
electricity and magnetism had but a glint of the mean-
326 A STUDY OF DEATH
ing now attaclicd to them. We do not yet know what
these invisible currents are, but we have made our-
selves at home with them, and comprehend what for-
merly was not suspected — their intimacies with all cos-
mic operation and with our animate economies. For
the obvious terrestrial forces, manifest in weight and
pressure and elasticity, we are now rapidly substituting
these finer tensions, thus driving the horses of the sun
without risking the fate of Icarus. It is as if our solar
heritage had been restored to us. Through this widened
familiarity in a field which until so recent a period was
wholly hidden from us, w^e have reached a new and
etherealised conception of matter, and have come to
feel the pulse of a living universe. Science is redeem-
ing matter, making its veils transparent.
In this new view it is not difficult for us to conceive of
spiritual intimacies more subtle and pervasive than any
which science has disclosed in the material world,
though these cannot be apparent to us in a definitely
conscious appreciation.
If on the same wire, through electrical vibrations in
musical accord, several distinct messages may be simul-
taneously conveyed, why may not all that we call matter
be at the same time the medium for the expression of
distinct orders of intelligences.-'
All reasoning proceeds through analogy, but we must
be on our guard against the fallacy involved in the proc-
ess. The truth in physics or chemistry can become a
biological truth only by such transformation as is in-
volved in the inorganic world becoming the organic.
Any conception of our present conditions carried for-
ward into our imagination of those pertinent to a future
ANOTHER IVORLD 327
life must undergo an inconceivable and, to us here, im-
possible transformation.
What we know as good and evil, life and death, is
but the analogue to these as we shall know them in an-
other harmony. It is sufficient for us that in the Christ-
life Death and Evil are unmasqued for us and reconciled
with the Eternal Life. Our faith is in the Resurrection
through the power of this eternal life : in what form we
know not, but we know in what similitude — in the like-
ness of the Son of God.
For the lifting and illumination of our life here is the
great disclosure made. Our Lord's resurrection brought
him back to us, as if born to us a second time, showing
us the nativity of a spiritual body. His new words to
his disciples, instead of intimating the joys and pains
of another world, dwelt upon the sufferings of the son
of man before he could enter into his glory. So does
our faith comprehend our travail and sorrow, finding in
these the true way of life and that there is no other
way. Christian philosoph)'', like science, finds in that
which is the ground of heaviness the charm of levitation,
the attraction which binds together a universe.
INDEX
Abraham, 261-3.
Abstraction, 42.
Accords : Desire, in the line of special,
144; true to the original key, what-
ever dissonance in the procession,
157; discrete, sustained, 1S5 ; diver-
sification of, in the organic harmony,
193 ; special for each new form of
existence, 205, 316.
Achilles, in Hades, 44; among the
maidens, a type of juvenescence,2io.
Age, wakefulness of, 19, 218.
Alternativity, 13-16.
Altruism, illustrated in all cosmic de-
velopment, 112; in every economy
of animal and social life, 159; excess
of, in human relations, 172; Chris-
tianity substitutes identification for,
2S4.
Ancestor worship, 29.
Animal life, ascension of, 115.
Annihilation, virtue of, 46.
Another world, 31S-27.
Antipathy becomes sympathy, from
which it springs, 159.
Antitheses of the Gospel, 301-2.
Apollo, 37.
Appearance disguises Reality, 88, 140,
3'9-
Arbitrary, the, in human conduct, 136,
140.
Art, beginning of representative, 43.
Ascent of Life, 1S3.
Association from dissociation, 126, 150,
.58.
Athene Parthenos, the type of outward
completeness, 152.
Atoms, 1S6.
Attraction and repulsion, comple-
mentary, 144, 158, 236, 289.
Augustine, his mission, 307-g, 313.
Authority, genetic, 142 ; associated
with growth, 253 ; grounded in falli-
bility, 295.
Aversion, first manifestation of De-
sire, 205.
Baptism, a burial with Christ, 280.
Barrenness, for life, iSS, 287; Hebrew
stress upon, 226.
Becoming involves fitness, 136.
Birth, a flight, 69 ; lies next to Death,
73, 1S4 ; a break with the Eternal,
143 ; a mysterj'as profound as death,
322.
Blood in Hebrew symbolism, 253.
Bridegroom, the, 40, 54, 164, 2S6-9,
294-5. 300-
Brotherhood, universal, 51, 62.
Buddhism, nihilistic, 303.
Cell, gospel of the, 102.
Chance, divine, 156.
Chemical adumbration of physiology,
107.
Childhood, familiarity of, with the in-
visible, 18; rapid investiture of, in
modern life, 30; plasticity of, 203 ;
pains of, 204 ; exaltation of, a with-
drawal from the world and an imper-
ative absorption, 208 ; hauteur of,
208; tension and storage of, 213;
maintained into maturity, 21S; un-
moral, 236, 270; type of the kingdom
of heaven, 237-243 ; in the Christ-
life, 238 ; in the Hebrew, 240 ; in
primitive Christianity, 304-5 : in
Christian peoples of the Middle
Ages, 310.
Choice, 127, 135, 140, 152.
Christ, one with Nature, 54 ; became
Sin and glorified Death, 233 ; falling
33°
INDEX
of, 234 ; attitude toward, of Jew and
Gentile, 258 ; the universal hope,
260; ever the Lord to come, 261;
opened heaven, 267-8 ; ascension of,
269; the sun of the spiritual world,
272; stands and falls for humanity,
266, 272, 294 ; his resurrection the
transcendent nativity, 273 ; Bride-
groom of humanity, 2S9; no part of
his mission to abolish evil, 290; not
to be wholly imitated, 296 ; as a
Prophet, 300.
Christendom, 286-317.
Christian Philosophy and Science,
81.
Christianity, gave death back to Life,
62 ; fully confronted Death, 274,
279; its pilgrimage not away from,
but through the City of Destruction,
275; a catholic fellowship, 280; con-
verted altruism into identification,
284 -, accommodation of, to Pagan-
ism, 285 ; in its worldly develop-
ment contradicts the Sermon on the
Mount, 295; its summer and win-
ter, 299; extension of, before or-
ganisation, 304 ; organisation of the
early, 306 ; in the time of Constan-
tine, 307; medisval, 307, 309; dis-
sension of, for integration, 312.
Church, the mediseval, 307-S.
Civil economy, as natural as domestic,
160.
Clairvoyance, of primitive sensibility,
34 ; of blind feeling, 84.
Comedy, the human, 125.
Commandment for life, 169.
Communication, 140.
Communism of Christians at Jerusa-
lem, 305.
Competition, iii.
Completeness, outward, 43, 152, 176,
181, 297.
Conjugal relation between man and
the Lord, 289.
Conscience, plastic to vital determi-
nation, 168; the Hebrew, 270.
Consciousness, 68, 125.
Constantine, 307.
Consubstantiation, 41, 68, 287.
Contradiction of system to principle,
52, 127, 164, 166, 177, 182, 2S6-8, 296,
308.
i Conventional institutions not artifi-
cial, 155, 170.
Copernican astronomy restored the
earth to its heavenly station, 2S2.
Creation imagcless, 65 ; hidden in
specialisation, 73-5, S3, 84 ; continu-
ous, 90 ; confessed in its denial, 142 ;
emphasised in Hebrew faith, 252 ;
Paul's idea of a new, -277, 283 ; in
grace, 289; redemptive, 294.
Creative communication, 325.
Creative specialisation instead of spe-
cial creations, 81.
Critical points, 86, 109, 211.
Crystallisation a florescence, log.
Darkness, Powers of, first regarded
as friendly, 37.
De Quincey, 31.
Dead, the, mightier than the living,
39; plant-life associated with the,
29.
Death, before Eden, 3 ; the body of,
9-12 ; and sleep, 10, 17-21 ; seclusion
and introspection of, 1 1 ; the soul's
confessional, 1 1 ; the invisible Angel
of Life, 13, 275 ; no movement of life
begun or completed save through,
13 ; a mystery escaping observation,
14; a reaction proper to life, 14;
essential, an absolution, 17; gravita-
tion the physical symbol of, 22 ;
Janus-faced, looking to palitif^cnesis
and to resurgence of new life upon
the earth, 24 ; mystery of, bound up
with that of evil, 25; primitive
thought of, 29 ; denial of, in human
progress, 45 ; the power of resur-
gence, 45 ; a wrestler, inviting con-
flict, 46; for renewal, 54; universal-
ity of, 56; inseparable from Love
and Grief, 56; in the Sacred Myste-
ries of Paganism, 60; in creation, 65;
the vv'inged Israfil, 66; genetic, not
to be found in the old and dead, 66 ;
lies next to birth, 73, 184; solvency
of, 82; in completing a cycle, always
a transformation, 88; of the inor-
ganic for ascent of organisms, gg ; as
specialised, enters the world with
Love, 102, 321; conspicuous in or-
ganic life, log; invisibly is Love,
and visibly is born of Love, 109 ;
INDEX
3>2>''
Nature runs toward, and accumu-
lates in her progression, 112, 154;
ministrant to psychical development,
123, 18S; conflict witli, in the moral
order, 134; genetic, 142; develop-
ment from conflict with, 148; the
shadow of a brightness, 154; con-
fesses Life, 177; included in as-
cent of life, 178, 28 1 ; in reproduc-
tion, 184 ; organic capacity for, 187 ,
expressed in the terms of life, iSg,
191 ; in functioning, florescence, and
fruition, 189, 28S; a prop, igo; an
inspiration, 196 ; obscuration of, in
maturity, 215; unmasqued, 223;
illustrated and glorified by Christ,
233 ; Pauline interpretation of, 274-
317 ; in spiritual nurture, 311 ;
thither side of, what do we know of?
3.8-27.
Decline, 218-20; disarray of, 320.
Deeds, inipotency of, 2S4 ; "done itj
the body," 323.
Defect, radical, 200,
Degeneration, 112.
Demeter, 36.
Design, 81, 167, 256.
Desire, earthward, 36 ; finding its
Way, 40; shaping power of, 40,
importunity of, 76 ; follows accord,
144 ; begins in aversion, 204-5.
Dissociation, seems primary, 126; be-
comes association, 126, 159.
Dissolving view, spiritual suggestion
of, 68.
Distance, illusion of, 72 ; value of, 124,
185, 198,288.
Disturbance, a stimulation, 130; the
beginning of motion, 293.
Divestiture, 229 ; in life of the Hebrew
and of Christ, 229, 238-46, 298.
Divided Living, the, 66-132.
Divination, 39, 156.
Divinisation at death, 39.
Dove, the, and the serpent, 3-5,
303-
Dreams, 19, 20, 41.
Dualism, Manichajan, 53, 179.
Duty, 146.
Earth, nearness of, to the primitive
man, 36; the Great Mother, 36; the
prodigal planet, 70 ; Copernican re-
demption of, 282 ; bride of the Sun,
286-8 ; glory of life on the, 292.
Ebionites, sterile asceticism of, 25S.
Election the principle of integration,
285.
Elohim, the dead and angels so called,
43-
Elysium, 37.
Espousals, 286-9.
Eternal in Time, 17S-S0, 2S0.
Ether, vortical motions of, 1S6.
Eumenides, 31, 32, 44.
Evil, inseparable from Good, 5; mys-
terj' of, bound up with that of Death,
25; attempt to exclude, in moral
ideals, 61, 98; not merely disci-
plinary, 17S; begins with life, 206 ;
unmasqued by Christ, 231-2; inclu-
sion of, in the Christ life, 235, 266;
Pauline interpretation of, 274-285 ;
not abolished by Christ, 290 ; not
for the sake of Good, 292 ; the other
name of Good, 293 ; included in the
kingdom of heaven, 295 , lifted into
its heaven, 321 ; like Good, and
Death, as known here, merely ana-
logues of what they will be in another
world, 327.
Evolution, 81, 94, no.
Evolution and Involution, S3, in, 143,
155, 186.
Expectancy in creative transformation,
87; in man, 87.
Experience, limitations of, 127; pecul-
iar aspects of human, 135-7; not di-
vorced from vital destination, 140;
fruits in the garden of, 151 ; not de-
pendent on arbitrary selection, 167.
Explosiveness of precipitation at crit-
ical points, 211.
Fai.i. of Man, 120, 148.
Fallibility, of the regenerate, 295 ;
necessary to progress, 295.
Familiarity, the eternal, 43, 67,
323-
Family, the, 144, 160, 175-6.
Fatness in Hebrew symbolism, 253.
Fear, as natural as hope, 38 ; origin
of religion attributed to, 150; de-
velops cunning, 150; rather an in-
ward boldness, shown outwardly as
shyness, 154.
332
INDEX
Feeling, blind, specialisation of, S5,
Fiske, John, ot, 216.
Flesh and Spirit, 116, 254.
Formed Life, mortal, 177, 323.
Fortitude becomes sacrifice, 175, 309.
Free-will, 133, 140.
Functioning, a dying, iSg.
F'uture State, primitive idea of, 35, 37,
61 ; we have no definite conception
of, 318; ancient imaginations of,
318-19; continuity of, from present,
324.
Genetic Quality of Life, 67, 68, 105,
'33. '4'. M3, 157. i(>7-
Gentile embodiment of Christ, 259-60.
Germ plasma, physiological doininion
of, 142.
God, the Prophet's vision of, as of one
who has passed by, lO; the Most
Low to the primitive thought, 38;
the first materialist, 76; responsible
for His universe, 77; the hiding of,
83, 125; always in His world, and
always creative, go; "hath so set
the world in the heart of man,"' 127 ;
has not experience, 136; portion of
every creature, 144 ; when we touch
chance, we broach, 156, good plea-
sure of, in humanity, 282.
Golden age, 14S, 153.
Good, repented of, 98 ; our idea of, as
partial as our idea of Evil, 293.
Government, weakness of, requires
special fortification, 151 ; is natural,
160.
Grace and works, in Paul's interpre-
tation, 277, 279, 2S4.
Gravitation, physical symbol of Death,
22, igo; included in ascent, 23, 25,95.
Growth, genetic transformation, 105.
Habit, 113, 149; automatism of, a
release, 315.
Hades, 39, 43, 26S; primitive idea of,
as the ground of germinant life, 29,
32 ; riuto, the god of wealth, 30.
Harmony, distributed in order, 155,
198.
Heaven, 267-g.
Hebrew: the broken man, 225; singu-
lar destiny of, 226; had no outwardly
completed art, science, or polity, 227,
242 ; his inward wholeness, 227 ; re-
pellent sacred flame of his destiny,
228; distinguished from other Se-
mitic races, 242 ; his prolonged pa-
triarchate, 243, 265; his marvellous
assimilation, 243 ; his culture of Em-
manuel, 245, 265 ; held with diflfi-
culty to his destiny, 245 ; his faith
as distinguished from the pagan,
246 ; prophetic compulsion of, 247 ;
his thought of God, 24S ; anthropo-
morphism of. 252 ; symbolism touch-
ing incarnation, 253-4 ; his singular
destiny not supernatural 256 ; atti-
tude toward Jesus, 258 ; type set in
the patriarchal, shepherd, and tent
life, 262-6; movement consummated
in Christ, 270; his idea of Sin as con-
nected with that of kinship, 270-1;
the issue of his destiny, 271-3.
Hebrew Scripture, 32, 241.
Heracles, 36, 209, 288.
Heraclitus, 221.
Hiding of God, 83, 125; of life, 84,
137. 3'6.
Homely sense of things, 67, 72, 80, 86,
96, 142-3, 174.
Homer, his representation of Hades,
44. 3 '9-
Hospitality, 158.
Humanity a disguised Divinity, 29,
41-
Hunger, selective wisdom of, 40, 311-
12 ; perils of, 300.
Illusions, of appearance, 52 ; of sci-
ence, 113; of arbitrary freedom, 127,
142 ; the veils of transformation-
scenes, 129 ; of experience in a moral
order, 161-4; as mental inversions,
194.
Imitation of Christ, must avoid exact
similitude, 296.
Incarnation, physiological intimations
of, 103-4; the eternal Word becom-
ing, 104; the cosmic expectancy of,
114; the central idea in Hebrew
symbolism, 253-5.
Individualism and free play of all ac-
tivities developed in Christendom,
313-
Induration, 77, 173.
INDEX
3ZZ
Inertia, 186, iqo; in nutrition and res-
piration, 2S2.
Infancy, miracle of, 202.
Inhibition in nature, 133, 141, 170.
Inorganic life, living and sentient, 57,
91,93; ascents of, hidden from us.
99 ; why we call it dead, 99; descent
and diminution of, for the ascent of
organisms, 100, 106.
Instinct, hidden beneath rational pro-
cesses, 59, 127 ; conscious intelli-
gence from interruption of, 158.
Involution, 83, ni, 143, 155, 186, 191,
19S, 20S.
James's Epistle, ethics of, 305.
Jew, the Wandering, 233.
Justice, 61, 150, 161, 170-1, 251.
Juvenescence, includes death, 23 ;
sleep characteristic of, ig, 218.
Kei'i.er, belief of, in an animate and
sentient universe, 57.
Kinship, primitive, 35, 49 ; first de-
rived from motherhood, 36 ; first
seen as dissociative, 58 ; primitive
thought of, as including the universe,
57 ; genetic, involved in creation,
67, the eternal, 141-2, 200, the par-
ticular, determined by the universal,
144, 159, lays no stress upon justice,
161 ; the beginning and end of the
moral order, 180; revelation of by
Christ, 235 , Hebrew idea of, 252-3,
255, 261, 276; Paul's view of, 277;
bondage the bond of, 278, 283 ; re-
alised in Christian fellowship, 282.
Lethe and Levana, 39, 130, 137.
Liberty, 127.
Life : transcends embodiment, 17 ;
holds the secret of its ruin, 24; the
pontifcx jiKixiiitiis, 82 ; hiding of,
84, 137, 316; quality of, the same,
whatever the situation, 88; higher
and lower, 97; seeks difficulty,
III ; determines environment, 114;
15s, 212; spontaneous disposition
of, 133 ; in its spontaneity unmoral,
141; not an endowment, 146, 195;
does not follow a logical plan, 155,
167, 172; one with destiny, 156;
originally consents to what in the
phenomenal strife it antagonises,
156; outwardly a dying, 189; deter-
mines its own limit, 192 ; begins in
disturbance, 204 ; outward quicken-
ing of, 210; momentum of, 212;
beneficence of its ruins, 214; must
be accepted on its own flaming
terms, 236.
Light, the first veil hiding God, 83.
Limit: a bound and a bond, 68; more
complex in advanced specialisation,
124; in human experience, 130;
merciful, 173, 286; of capacity, dis-
closing reaction, 186; determined by
the reaction proper to Lite, 191-92,
2o5; ab initio, 195; the bond of re-
turn, 236; the sign of emancipation,
316; the Resurrection involves new
form of, 323-
Loss, for gain, 199 ; the first word of
the kingdom, 240.
Lucifer, Light-bearer, must rise again,
293-
Luther, 312.
Maeterlinck, 31.
IMahometanisni, the modern Ishmael,
303 ; the opposite extreme of Nihi-
listic Buddhism, 303.
Malady, normal, 205.
Man : primitive, 33 ; brotherhood of,
51 , development of, corresponds to
that of the cosmos, 75-6 ; distinctive
in his specialisation, 117; his reca-
pitulation of antecedent forms, 118,
193; fall of, 120, 148; his insignifi-
cance as a mere animal, 121 j his
singular psychic destiny, 121 ; plan-
etary and solar, 126; fallibility of,
130; lost in the Prodigal's "far
country," 130; superficial retrospect
of his progress, 147-53 ; a closer
view of, 153-68; not a fragment of
the world, 179; one with the Eter-
nal, 180; his restoration, 283; re-
covers his solar heritage, 326.
Manich.Tcism, 53.
Materialism, divine pattern of, 76.
Matter, living and non - living, 57 ;
why we call it dead, 99 ; solvency of,
114, iSi, 326; is not acted upon by
other matter, 145 ; idea of it as refrac-
tory, 152 ; diabolism of, 315 ; may be
334
INDEX
the medium of ihc simultaneous ex-
pression of distinct orders of intelli-
gences, 326.
Maturity, 214.
Mechanism, 15, 67, 139, 179, 190.
Merit, 146, 151, 169.
Metabolism, 144, 184.
Middle Ages, popular life in, 310.
Mineral kingdom foreshadows phys-
iological processes, 91.
Molecular imitation of the molar,
107.
Momentum, 212.
Moral Order, 133-1S2 ; begins in spon-
taneous disposition, 133 ; tendency
of, to inflexible rule, 134 ; resists dis-
integration, 134; superficial view
of, emphasises arbitrary selection;
134-9; duty in the, 146; kinship
modified by, 147 ; superficial view of
human experience in the, 147-153;
a closer view, 153-168; does not
derive its sanction from religion, 161 ;
begins and ends in kinship, 180 ;
grounded in a spiritual principle,
181.
Mortal habit, the, 130, 176, 190, 191,
196, 207, 288.
Mosaic Law, the, tenderness of, 249;
in its origin a fatherly command-
ment, 278 ; leading to Christ, 279
Mother, the Great, 36.
Motion in lines of least resistance,
true in evolution but not in involu-
tion, III.
Mysticism, native, 33; inedia;val and
modern, 49; meaning of the term,
52 ; the ultimate, 54 ; nihilism of, a
sterile simplicity, 286.
Native impressions, 29-62 ; not found
in degenerate races called " savage,"
32 ; survive in some passages of
Hebrew Scripture, 32.
Native Races, characteristics of, 155
Nature, meaning of the term, 17, one
with the Lord, 54 ; her apparently
closed circles, 90 ; apparent hostility
to man, 148; inhibition in, 133, 141,
170.
Newton's mystical apprehension of
gravitation as an attraction, 22.
Nirwana, 49.
Nothing, creative void, 65; vanishing
side of life, 192.
Nutrition, 105-6 ; a conversion of the
altruism of reproduction into identi-
fication, 159; fruition from check of,
109; spiritual, a descent and broken-
ness, 311.
Odvssei;s in Hades, 44.
Olympian divinities outside the pale of
human sympathy, 57, 120.
Organic I^ife ; adumbration of the
Christ-life, 90, 102-3 ; preparation
for, 92, 184-5; 3 physiological plan-
etary system, 100; fully expressed
in incarnation, 103-4; reflecting
Godward, 103, 200 ; reveals creation,
105 ; reversion of the inorganic, 106 ;
suggestions derived from, contra-
dicting scientific dicta, 109-14;
earth as modified by, 121-3; rises
out of a barren world, 186, its
especial inclusion of death, 1S7.
Organisms, lower, have a kind of im-
mortality and marvellous potency,
lOI.
Paganism, disintegrated by civilisa-
tion, 60 ; confined to Nature's closed
circles, 6i ; weakness of, 61, 297;
distinguished from Christendom, 62;
distinguished from Hebraism, 246.
Paradise, 37, 267.
Paradox, 35, 199.
Partners, our Cosmic, 196.
Pathology, normal and universal, 58,
214; so recognised by Christianity,
62; especially associated with be-
ginnings, 205.
Paul, his interpretation of Death and
Evil, 274-285 ; his view of bondage
and redemption as universal, 278;
his idea of Grace and of Works of
the Law, 278, his doctrine of elec-
tion, 285.
Persephone, 31, 36.
Personality, mystery of, 21, 145; form
of, eternal, 322.
Perspective, gain of, in specialisation,
84-
Pessimism, 134 ; field of, that of the
largest hope, 315.
Pharisees, sect of, began in the loftiest
INDEX
335
spiritual ideal, 227; early adherents
to Cliristiaiiity, 260.
Pliilo Jud»us, 53.
Physiology foreshadowed iu chemis-
tr)', 107-S.
Plato, 221 ; his " Ideas," 1S5.
Pluto, 30, 31.
Poe, 31.
Polygnotus, 319.
Pomegranate, many - seeded, pledge
between Persephone and Pluto, 31 ;
held in one hand by the Eumenides,
32-
Prejudice more vital than logic, 172.
Primitive man, 29, 33, 56.
Probation, 37, 178.
Prodigal Sons, a Cosmic Parable,
63-182.
Prometheus, 61.
Prophets, Hebrew, 247 ; primitive
habit of, reversed by Christ, 300.
Protestantism, 308, 312.
Protoplasm, wonderful potency of, 1S7.
Quickness, the invisible and the vis-
ible, 211 ; of Death, 2S1.
Reaction, tropic, 13-16, 35, 85 ; dis-
closed at limit of tension, 186 ; is in
the action, 86 ; in conservatism, 178 ;
gives limit and dominates expres-
sion, igi ; of childhood, 209; readi-
ness of, in modern Christendom, 315.
Recapitulation in man of antecedent
forms, I iS, 193, 202.
Recognition, 40j 128; in another world,
324-
Rectitude, 61.
Redemption, creative, 53, 294
Religion not a necessary sanction to
morality, 161.
Repentance in natural and human
transformations, 53, 231, 251.
Reproduction, in the lower organisms,
IGI ; beginning of death, 1S4, 207.
Repulsion, seems primary, 205 ; begins
and ends in attraction, 236.
Resistance becomes assistance, 130.
Responsibility, human and divine, 77,
14S, 249.
Resurrection, 82, 255, 269, 272, 273,
277. 279-80, 291, 31S, 327.
Revelation, a transcendent creative
communication, 325; kinship the
basis of, 41, 264.
Roman Empire, 151; family life in,
160, expansion of early Christianity
in, 304.
Safety not an objective aim in Nat-
ure, 112.
Samson's Riddle, 17.
Schopenhauer: " the will not to live,"
303-
Science postulates an invisible world,
15; mysticism of, 23-4; ignores the
creative principle, 73 ; its possible
Christian philosophy, Si ; deals with
quantitative relations, 95, no; certi-
tudes of, denied by creative life,
109-14.
Seed, liberation of, by Death, 31.
Selection, no absolutely arbitrary,
140.
Selfhood, 50, 128.
Sensibility begins in pain, 38, 154,
204-5-
Separation, if vital, the breaking of a
union, which still remains one, in-
cluding the fragment, 145.
Sequestration, mercy of, 174, 193, 199
Serpent, and the dove, 3-5 ; sign of the
underworld divinities, 30.
Sex, specialisation of, 102 , and Death,
102, 321 ; divulsion for union, 288.
Shaler, N. S., 87,91, 211.
Sheol, 37, 43, 267.
Sin, reconciliation of, with the eternal
life, 25, 1S2 ; Hebrew idea of, 270;
Paul's interpretation of, 27S.
Singularity, 225.
Sleep, and Death, 10, 17-21 ; a charac-
teristic of juvenescence, 19, 21S;
education of, 39.
Social evolution like the cosmic, 155.
Solar system, repeats the parable of
the Prodigal Son, 70.
Solitude, dehumanising, 50.
Son and the Father, 67, 182.
Specialisation, 6g, 73, 75, 77, So, 185,
195 ; creative, 8r, 92, 94 ; of Death
and Sex concurrent, 102 ; a hiding of
life, 316.
Specific forces, 1S5.
Spencer, Herbert, 86, no.
Spirit, Hebrew idea of, 254.
336
INDEX
Spiritual life not divorced from Nat-
ure, 55.
Spontaneity, 133, i6g.
Stability, tendency toward, 78 ; an illu-
sion, 1 12, 164, 177 , is kinetic, 315.
Structure, strength of, gained at ex-
pense of life, 134, 147, 163, 177.
Sun, worship of, 36; witness of the,
92 ; a martyr, 99.
Superstition, original exaltation of, 34.
Surprise, 86-7.
Survival, Nature seeks revival ratlier
than, 112.
Suspense, 77, 124, 141, 184, 216
System, contradicts its principle, 52,
67, 70-1, 127, 164, 166, 177, 182,286-
8, 2q6. 308.
Swedenborg, 102.
Thompson, J. Arthur, 122.
Time, emphasis of, 79, 138, 178.
Titans, 37.
Transformations, genetic, creative, 68.
Tropic movement, 13-16, 35, 85, 143,
167, 178, 1S6, 199, 252,
Uniformity, disguising transforma-
tion, 88.
Unity, a sterile conception, 85.
Universe, living and sentient, 57, 91,
93-
Veiling of Life, 83, 84, 96, 19S, 316.
Vital and chemical processes, 23, 186.
Water, associated with death and
birth, 44 ; transformations of adum-
brating physiological processes,
107-8.
Wave lengths of forces, 186.
Way, the, 40.
World to come, not a better, accord-
ing to moral preference, but a new,
98; of nature, 100; distinguished
from " another world," 320, 322.
Youth and age, 204.
Zero, the sign of infinity, 47.
Zodiac, signs of, applicable to every
cycle of life, 209.
THE END
GOD IN HIS WORLD
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