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/ 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- /