The third general plan of Christian salvation which we are to consider differs from the foregoing one in several essential particulars. It affirms the free will of man in opposition to a fatal predestination. It declares that the atonement is sufficient to redeem not only a portion of our race, but all who will put themselves in right spiritual relations with it. In a word, while it admits that some will actually be lost forever, it asserts that no one is doomed

7 Schweizer, Die Lehre des Apostels Paulus vom erlosenden Tode Christi. Theologische Studien und Kritiken, Jahrg. 1858, heft 3.

to be lost, but that the offer of pardon is made to every soul, and that every one has power to accept or reject it. The sacrifice of the incarnate Deity vindicated the majesty of the law, appeased the wrath of God, and purchased his saving favor towards all who, by a sound and earnest faith, seize the proffered justification, throw off all reliance on their own works, and present themselves before the throne of mercy clothed in the righteousness and sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Here the appropriation of the merits of Christ, through an orthodox and vivifying faith, is the real cause as well as the experimental assurance of salvation. This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in the wilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look on it and be healed, so the crucified God is lifted up, and all men, everywhere, are urged to kneel before him, accept his atonement, and thus enable his righteousness to be imputed to them, and their souls to be saved. The vital condition of salvation is an appropriating faith in the vicarious atonement. Without this no one can be saved. Thus with one word and a single breath whole nations and races are whiffed into hell. All that the good hearted Luther could venture to say of Cicero, whom he deeply admired and loved, was the kind ejaculation, "I hope God will be merciful to him!" To those who appreciate it with hostility, and look on all things in its light, the thought that there can be no salvation except by belief in the expiatory death of Christ, hopelessly dooming all the heathen,8 and all infant children, unless baptized in a proxy faith,9 builds an altar of blood among the stars and makes the universe reek with horror. Other crimes, though stained through with midnight dyes and heaped up to the brim of outrageous guilt, may be freely forgiven to him who comes heartily to credit the vicarious death of the Savior; but he who does not trust in that, though virtuous as man can be, must depart into the unappeasable fires. "Why this unintelligible crime of not seeing the atonement happens to be the only sin for which there is no atonement, it is impossible to say." Though this view of the method, extent, and conditions of redemption is less revolting and incredible than the other, still, it does not seem to us that any person whose mental and moral nature is unprejudiced, healthy, and enlightened, and who will patiently study the subject, can possibly accept either of them. The leading assumed doctrines common to them, out of which they severally spring, and on which they both rest, are not only unsupported by adequate proofs, but really have no evidence at all, and are absurd in themselves, confounding the broadest distinctions in morals, and subverting the best established principles of natural religion.10

The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicates the power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. This is the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state of nature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all men are alienated from God, and by the universal original sin universally exposed to damnation, indeed, the helpless victims of eternal misery. In the fulness of time, Christ appeared, and offered himself to suffer in their stead to secure their deliverance. His death cancelled the whole sum of

8 Bretschneider, Entwickelung der Dogmatik, sect. 112, Nos. 37 50.

9 So affirmed by the Council of Carthage, Canon II.

10 The violence done to moral reason by these views is powerfully exposed in Bushnell's Discourse on the Atonement: God in Christ, pp. 193-202.

original sin, and only that, thus taking away the absolute impossibility of salvation, and leaving every man in the world free to stand or fall, incur hell or win heaven, by his personal merits. From that time any person who lived a perfectly holy life which no man could find practically possible thereby secured eternal blessedness; but the moment he fell into a single sin, however trivial, he sealed his condemnation: Christ's sacrifice, as was just said, merely removed the transmitted burden of original sin from all mankind, but made no provision for their personal sins, so that practically, all men being voluntary as well as hereditary sinners, their condition was as bad as before: they were surely lost. To meet this state of the case, the Church, whose priests, it is claimed, are the representatives of Christ, and whose head is the vicegerent of God on earth, was empowered by the celebration of the mass to re enact, as often as it pleased, the tragedy of the crucifixion. In this service Christ is supposed literally to be put to death afresh, and the merit of his substitutional sufferings is supposed to be placed to the account of the Church.11 As Sir Henry Wotton says, "One rosy drop from Jesus' heart Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire."

In one of the Decretals of Clement VI., called "Extravagants," it is asserted that "one drop of Christ's blood [una guttula sanguinis] being sufficient to redeem the whole human race, the remaining quantity which was shed in the garden and on the cross was left as a legacy to the Church, to be a treasure whence indulgences were to be drawn and administered by the Roman pontiffs." Furthermore, saints and martyrs, by their constant self denial, voluntary sufferings, penances, and prayers, like Christ, do more good works than are necessary for their own salvation; and the balance of merit the works of supererogation is likewise accredited to the Church. In this way a great reserved fund of merits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasure they can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it in place of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolve them and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dread machinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale, heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. But whoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receive the sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey the priests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that those who neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost, by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, thereby typifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection and ascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject as alike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd to conscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in history through the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy of an interested body. There is not one text in the Bible which affords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughty pretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have the exclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It is incredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fates forever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mere accident of time

11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. pars iii. qu. 25, art. 1.

and place, or at best on the moral contingence of their acknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannical hierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent of their lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. One is here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Man ought to hear Poems." The lines in Sophocles which declare that the initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life, but that all others shall be wretched, having been read to Diogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion, the notorious robber, be better after death than that of Epaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" It is also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all proper appreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the gross mechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between the bad and the good, as if moral qualities were not personal, but might be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as the accounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoretic falsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as its practical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculous this ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as stated by Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, have entered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have, and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stake the argument on one question. If there be no salvation save by believing and accepting the sacraments with the authority of the Romanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in a hundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved. Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelming proportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonized drops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires of damnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that he believes?

We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkable for its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as those we have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, and severity. The theory referred to promises the natural and inevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on two positions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially and temporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfect wisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of this doctrine point first to observation and experience, and declare that no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable; those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, and hardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that may be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations. True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can endure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessedness come with the morning dawn of a better world. Exact retributions are awarded to all iniquity here; so

12 Julian, lib. vi. ix.

that at the termination of the present state there is nothing to prevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. The substantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good and right: only their action is perverted to evil.13 This perversion will cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus death is the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions for his creatures, again they argue, must be purely gracious and blessed; for Nature, the Bible, and the Soul blend their ultimate teachings in one affirmation that he is Love. Being omnipotent and of perfect wisdom, nothing can withstand his decrees or thwart his plans. His purpose, of course, must be fulfilled. There is every thing to prove, and nothing, rightly understood, to disprove, that that purpose is the eternal blessedness of all his intelligent offspring after death. Therefore, they think they are justified in concluding, the laws of nature, God's regular habits and course of government, the normal arrangement and process of things, will of themselves work out the inevitable salvation of all mankind. After the uproar and darkness, the peril and fear, of a tempestuous night, the all embracing smile of daylight gradually spreads over the world, and the turmoil silently subsides, and the scene sleeps. So after the sins and miseries, the condemnation and hell, of this state of existence, shall succeed the redemption, the holiness and happy peace, of heaven, into which all pass by the order of nature, the original and undisturbed arrangement of the creative Father. This view is advanced by some on grounds both of revelation and reason. It is the doctrine of those Beghards who taught that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; that no one is damned, neither Jew nor Saracen, because on the death of the body the soul returns to God."14 But the proper doctrine of the Universalist denomination is founded directly on Scripture, and seems now to be simply the absolute certainty of final salvation for all. Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will of God, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner, by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwise endless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossil now.15

It will be noticed that by this view salvation is an unlimited necessity, not a contingency, a boon thrown to all, and which no one has power to reject:

"The road to heaven is broader than the world, And deeper than the kingdoms of the dead; And up its ample paths the nations tread With all their banners furl'd."

This theory contains elements, it seems to us, both of truth and falsehood. It casts off gross mistakes, announces some fundamental realities, overlooks, perverts, exaggerates, some essential facts in the case. There is so much in it that is grateful and beautiful that we cannot wonder at its reception where the tender instincts of the heart are stronger than the stern decisions of the conscience, where the kindly sentiments usurp the province of the critical reason and sit in judgment upon evidence for the construction of a dogmatic creed. We

13 Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. x. art. xvi.: Character and its Predicates.

14 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 209, note 14.

15 See Ballou, Examination of the Doctrine of Future Punishment, pp. 152-157. Williamson, Exposition of Universalism, Sermon XL: Nature of Salvation. Cobb, Compend. of Divinity, ch. ix. sect. 3.

cannot accept it as a whole, cannot admit its great unqualified conclusion, not only because there is no direct evidence for it, but because there are many potent presumptions against it. It is not built upon the facts of our consciousness and present experience, but is resolutely constructed in defiance of them by an arbitrary process of assumption and inference; for since God's perfections are as absolute now as they ever can be, and he now permits sin and misery, there is no impossibility that they will be permitted for a season hereafter. If they are necessary now, they may be necessary hereafter. An experience of salvation by all, regardless of what they do or what they leave undone, would also defeat what we have always considered the chief final cause of man, namely, the self determined resistance of Evil and choice of Good, the free formation of virtuous character. The plan of a necessary and indiscriminate redemption likewise breaks the evident continuity of life, ignores the lineal causative power of experience, whereby each moment partially produces and moulds the next, destroys the probationary nature of our lot, and palsies the strength of moral motive. It is furthermore the height of injustice, awarding to all men the same condition, remorselessly swallowing up their infinite differences, making sin and virtue, sloth and toil, exactly alike in the end. Whose earnestly embraces the theory, and meditates much upon it, and reasons closely, will be likely to become an Antinomian. It overlooks the loud, omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state is incomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visible segment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisible world to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses will satisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. We reject this scheme, as to its distinctive feature, for all those reasons which lead us to accept that final view to which we now turn.

The theory of Christian redemption which seems to us correct, represents the good and evil forces of personal character, harmonious or discordant with the mind of God, as the conditions of salvation or of reprobation. Swedenborg, who teaches that man in the future state is the son of his own deeds in the present state, says he once saw Melancthon in hell, writing, "Faith alone saves," the words fading out as fast as written, because expressive of a falsehood! It is not belief, but love, that dominates the soul, not a mental act, but a spiritual substance. According as the realities of the soul are what they should be, just and pure, or what they should not be, perverted and corrupt, and according as the realities of the soul are in right relations with truth, beauty, goodness, or in vitiated relations with them, so, and to that extent, is the soul saved or lost. This is not a matter of arbitrary determination on one hand; and of helpless submission on the other: it is a matter of Divine permission on one hand, and of free, though sometimes unintelligent and mistaken, choice on the other. The only perdition is to be out of tune with the right constitution and exercise of things and rules. That, of itself, makes a man the victim of guilt and wretchedness. The only salvation is the restoration of the balance and normal efficiency of the faculties, the restoration of their harmony with the moral law, the recommencement of their action in unison with the will of God. When a soul, through its exposure and freedom, becomes and experiences what God did not intend and is not pleased with, what his creative and executive arrangements are not purposely ordered for, it is, for the time, and so far forth, lost. It is saved, when knowledge of truth illuminates the mind, love of goodness warms the heart, energy, purity, and aspiration fill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in its experience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims of its existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmonious fruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, all things work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beams of the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnation and misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever and wherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations with the universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienated mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice, impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is not, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawing fires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as it is to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseased condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers and relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of some physical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain side to a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just as badly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, wherever he may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so to speak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions of salvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle, but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of the universe. "Every devil," Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumference to afflict him." If there are, as there may be, two entirely separate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclose hell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into the other, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perdition or of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but the characteristic condition of the soul, which produces its experience and decides its destination, that is the essential thing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening is intolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but most welcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects, operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostile and retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify the soul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing is transfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven.

We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles of this theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience to which souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on them by an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by free agency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritual world. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particular localities into which spirits are thrust, nor states of consciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character.

Thirdly, condemnation, or justification, is not absolute and complete, equalizing all on each side of a given line, but is a thing of degrees, not exactly the same in any two individuals, or in the same person at all times. Fourthly, we have no reason to suppose that probation closes with the closing of the present life; but every relevant consideration leads us to conclude that the same great constitution of laws pervades all worlds and reigns throughout eternity, so that the fate of souls is not unchangeably fixed at death. No analogy indicates that after death all will be thoroughly different from what it is before death. Rather do all analogies argue that the hell and heaven of the future will be the aggravation, or mitigation, or continuation, of the perdition and salvation of the present. It is altogether a sentence of exact right according to character, a matter of personal achievement depending upon freedom, an experience of inward elements and states, a thing of degrees, and a subject of continued probation.

The condition of the heathen nations in reference to salvation is satisfactory only in the light of the foregoing theory. If a person is what God wishes, as shown by his revealed will in the model of Christ, pure, loving, devout, wise, and earnest, he is saved, whether he ever heard of Christ or not. Are Plato and Aristides, Cato and Antoninus, to be damned, while Pope Alexander VI. and King Philip II are saved, because those glorious characters merely lived at the then height of attainable excellence, but these fanatic scoundrels made a technical profession of Christianity? The "Athanasian" creed asserts that whoever doth not fully believe its dogmas "shall without doubt perish everlastingly." And the eighteenth article in the creed of the Church of England declares "them accursed who presume to say that any man can be saved by diligently framing his life according to the law or sect which he professeth, and the light of nature."16

Another particular in which the present view of salvation is satisfactory, in opposition to the other theories, is in leaving the personal nature of sin clear, the realm of personal responsibility unconfused. Why should a system of thought be set up and adhered to in religion that would be instantly and universally scouted at if applied to any other subject? 17 "No one dreams that the sin of an unexercised intellect, of gross ignorance, can be pardoned only through faith in the sacrifice of some incarnation of the Perfect Reason. No one expects to be told that the violation of the bodily laws can be forgiven by the Infinite Creator only on the ground that some perfect physician honors them by obedience and death. It is by opening the mind to God's published truth, and by conformity to the discovered philosophical

16 Arnauld, Emes, Goeze, and others, have written volumes to prove the indiscriminate damnation of the heathen. On the contrary, Muller, in his "Diss. de Paganorum poet Mortem Conditione," and Marmontel, in his "Belisaire," take a more favorable view of the fate of the ethnic world. The best work on the subject a work of great geniality and ability is Eberhard's "Neue Apologie des Socrates." Also see Knapp's Christian Theology, sect. lxxxviii.

17 Martineau, Studies of Christianity, pp. 153-176: Mediatorial Religion. Ibid. pp. 468-477: Sin What it is, What it is not.

order, or the reception of the adopted remedy, that the mind and the frame experience new life. And our souls are redeemed, not by any expiation on account of which penalties are lifted, but by reception of spiritual truth and consecration of will, which push away penalties by wholesome life." 18

The awful inviolability of justice is shown by the eternal course of God's laws bringing the exactly deserved penalty upon every soul that sinneth. Whoever breaks a Divine decree puts all sacred things in antagonism to him, and the precise punishment of his offences not the worth of worlds nor the blood of angels can avert. The boundless mercy of God, his atoning love, is shown by the absence of all vindictiveness from his judgments, their restorative aim and tendency. Whenever the sinner repents, reforms, puts himself in a right attitude, God is waiting to pardon and bless him, the sun shines and the happy heart is glad as at first, the cloudy screen of sin and fear and retributive alienation being removed. This view, when appreciated, affords as impressive a sanction to law, and as affecting an exhibition of love, as are theoretically ascribed to the doctrine of vicarious expiation. The infinite sanctity of justice and the fathomless love of God are certainly much more plainly and satisfactorily shown by the righteous nature and beneficent operation of the law, than by its terrible severity and arbitrary subversion. According to the present view, the relation of Christ to human redemption is as simple and rational as it is divinely appointed and perfectly fulfilled. Accredited with miraculous seals, presenting the most pathetic and inspiring motives, he reveals the truths and exemplifies the virtues which, when adopted, regenerate the springs of faith and character, rectify the lines of conduct, and change men from sinful and wretched to saintly and blessed. He stirs the stagnant soul, that man may replunge into his native self, and rise redeemed.

For the more distinct comprehension and remembrance of the schemes of Christian salvation we have been considering, it may be well to recapitulate them.

The first theory is this: When, by the fall of Adam, all men were utterly lost and doomed to hell forever, the vicarious sufferings of Christ cancelled sin, and unconditionally purchased and saved all. This was the original development of Universalism. It sprang consistently from Augustinian grounds. It was taught by a party in the Church of the first centuries, was afterwards repeatedly condemned as a heresy by popes and by councils, and was revived by Kelly, Murray, and others. We are not aware that it now has any avowed disciples.

The second conception is, in substance, that God, foreseeing from eternity the fall of Adam and the consequent damnation of his posterity, arbitrarily elected a portion of them to salvation, leaving the rest to their fate; and the vicarious sufferings of Christ were the only possible means of carrying that decree into effect. This is the Augustinian and Calvinistic theology, and has had a very extensive prevalence among Christians. Many church creeds still embody the doctrine; but in its original, uncompromising form it is rapidly fading from belief. Even now few persons can be found to profess it without essential modifications, so

18 T. S. King, Endless Punishment Unchristian and Unreasonable, p. 65.

qualifying it as to destroy its identity.

The third plan of delivering souls from the doom supposed to rest on them attributes to the vicarious sufferings of Christ a conditional efficacy, depending upon personal faith. Every one who will heartily believe in the substitutional death of Christ, and trust in his atoning merits, shall thereby be saved. This was the system of Pelagius, Arminius, Luther. It prevails now in the so called Evangelical Churches more generally than any other system.

The fourth received method of salvation, assuming the same premises which the three foregoing schemes assume, namely, that through the fall all men are eternally sentenced to hell, declares that, by Christ's vicarious sufferings, power is given to the Church, a priestly hierarchy, to save such as confess her authority and observe her rites. All others must continue lost.19 This theory early began to be constructed and broached by the Fathers. It is held by the Roman Catholic Church, and by all the consistent portion of the Episcopalian. A part of the Baptist denomination also through their popular preachers, if not in their recognised symbols assert the indispensableness of ritual baptism to salvation.

The fifth view of the problem is that no soul is lost or doomed except so far as it is personally, voluntarily depraved and sinful. And even to that extent, and in that sense, it can be called lost only in the present life. After death every soul is freed from evil, and ushered at once into heaven. This is the distinctive doctrine of the ultra Universalists. It is disappearing from among its recent advocates. As a body they have already exchanged its arbitrary conceptions of "death and glory" for the more rational conclusions of the "Restorationists." 20

The sixth and final scheme of Christian salvation teaches that, by the immutable laws which the Creator has established in and over his works and creatures, a free soul may choose good or evil, truth or falsehood, love or hate, beneficence or iniquity. Just so far and just so long as it partakes of the former it is saved; as it partakes of the latter it is lost, that is, alienates the favor of God, forfeits so much of the benefits of creation and of the blessings of being. The conditions and means of repentance, reformation, regeneration, are always within its power, the future state being but the unencumbered, more favorable experience of the spiritual elements of the present, under the same Divine constitution and laws. This is the common belief of Unitarians and Universalists, the latter alone teaching it as a sure doctrine of Revelation.

Salvation by purchase, by the redeeming blood of Christ; salvation by election, by the independent decree of God, sealed by the blood of Christ; salvation by faith, by an appropriating faith in the blood of Christ; salvation by the Church, by the sacraments made efficacious to that end by the blood of Christ; salvation by nature, by the irresistible working of the natural order of things, declared by the teachings of Christ; salvation by a resurrection from the dead, miraculously effected by the delegated power of Christ; salvation by character, by conformity of character to the spiritual laws of the universe, to the nature and will of God, revealed, urged, exemplified, by the whole mission of Christ; these are the different theories

19 Adams, Mercy to Babes. (A plea for the baptism of infants, that they may not be damned.)

20 Adin Ballou, Universalism and Restorationism Moral Contraries, 1837.

proposed for the acceptance of Christians.

Outside of Christendom we discern, received and operative in various forms, all the theoretic modes of salvation acknowledged within it, and some others in addition. The creed and practice of the Mohammedans afford a more unflinching embodiment of the conception of salvation by election than is furnished anywhere else. Islam denotes Fate. All is predestinated and follows on in inevitable sequence. No modifying influence is possible. Can a breath move Mount Kaf? The chosen of Allah shall believe; the rejected of Allah shall deny. Every believer's bower is blooming for him in Paradise; every unbeliever's bed is burning for him in hell. And nothing whatever can avail to change the persons or the total number elected for each.

There is one theory of salvation scarcely heard of in the West, but extensively held in the East. The Brahmanic as well as the Buddhist thinker relies on obtaining salvation by knowledge. Life in a continual succession of different bodies is his perdition. His salvation is to be freed from the vortex of births and deaths, the fret and storm of finite existence. Neither goodness nor piety can ever release him. Knowledge alone can do it: an unsullied intellectual vision and a free intellectual grasp of truth and love alone can rescue him from the turbid sea of forms and struggles. "As a lump of salt is of uniform taste within and without, so the soul is nothing but intelligence."21 If the soul be an entire mass of intelligence, a current of ideas, its real salvation depends on its becoming pure and eternal truth without mixture of falsehood or of emotional disturbance. He "must free himself from virtues as well as from sins; for the confinement of fetters is the same whether the chain be of gold or of iron."22 Accordingly, the Hindu, to secure emancipation, planes down the mountainous thoughts and passions of his soul to a desert level of indifferent insight. And when, in direct personal knowledge, free from joy and sorrow, free from good and ill, he gazes into the limitless abyss of Divine truth, then he is sure of the bosom of Brahm, the door of Nirwana. Then the wheel of the Brahmanic Ixion ceases revolving, and the Buddhist Ahasuerus flings away his staff; for salvation is attained.

The conception of salvation by ritual works based on faith either faith in Deity or in some redemptive agency is exhibited all over the world. Hani, a Hindu devotee, dwelt in a thicket, and repeated the name of Krishna a hundred thousand times each day, 23 and thus saved his soul. The saintly Muni Shukadev said, as is written in the most popular religious authority of India, "Who even ignorantly sing the praises of Krishna undoubtedly obtain final beatitude; just as, if one ignorant of the properties of nectar should drink it, he would still become immortal. Whoever worships Hari, with whatever disposition of mind, obtains beatitude."24 "The repetition of the names of Vishnu purifies from all sins, even when invoked by an evil minded person, as fire burns even him who approaches it unwillingly."25 Nothing is more common in the sacred writings of the Hindus than the promise that "whoever reads or hears this narrative with a devout mind shall receive final beatitude." Millions on millions of these docile and abject devotees undoubtingly expect salvation by such merely ritual

21 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 359.

22 Ibid. p. 363.

23 Asiatic Researches, vol. xvi. p. 115.

24 Eastwick, Prem Sagar, p. 56.

25 Vishnu Parans, p. 210, note 13.

observances. One cries "Lord!" "Lord!" Another thumbs a book, as if it were an omnipotent amulet. Another meditates on some mystic theme, as if musing were a resistless spell of silent exorcism and invocation. Another pierces himself with red hot irons, as if voluntary pain endured now could accumulate merit for him and buy off future inflictions.

It is surprising to what an extent men's efforts for salvation seem underlaid by conceptions of propitiation, the placation of a hatred, the awakening of a love, in the objects of their worship. In all these cases salvation is sought indirectly through works, though not particularly good works. The savage makes an offering, mutters a prayer, or fiercely wounds his body, before the hideous idol of his choice. The fakir, swung upon sharp hooks, revolves slowly round a fire. The monk wears a hair shirt, and flagellates himself until blood trickles across the floor of his cell. The Portuguese sailor in a storm takes a leaden saint from his bosom and kneels before it for safety. The offending Bushman crawls in the dust and shudders as he seeks to avert the fury of the fetich which he has carved and set in a tree. The wounded brigand in the Apennines, with unnumbered robberies and murders on his soul, finds perfect ease to his conscience as his glazing eye falls on a carefully treasured picture of the Virgin, and he expires in a triumph of faith, saying, "Sweet Mother of God, intercede for me." The Calvinistic convert, about to be executed for his fearful crimes, kneels at the foot of the gallows, and exclaims, as in a recent well known instance, "I hold the blood of Christ between my soul and the flaming face of God, and die happy, assured that I am going to heaven."

It is all a terrible delusion, arising from perverted sentiment and degraded thought. Of the five theoretical modes of salvation taught in the world, Election, Faith, Works, Knowledge, Harmony, one alone is real and divine, although it contains principles taken from all the rest and blended with its own. There is no salvation by foregone election; for that would dethrone the moral laws and deify caprice. There is no salvation by dogmatic faith; because faith is not a matter of will, but of evidence, not within man's own power, and a thousand varieties of faith are necessitated among men. There is no salvation by determinate works; for works are measurable quantities, whose rewards and punishments are meted and finally spent, but salvation is qualitative and infinite. There is no salvation by intellectual knowledge; for knowledge is sight, not being, an accident, not an essence, an attribute of one faculty, not a right state and ruling force in all. The true salvation is by harmony; for harmony of all the forces of the soul with themselves and with all related forces beyond, harmony of the individual will with the Divine will, harmony of personal action with the universal activity, what other negation of perdition is possible? what other definition and affirmation of salvation conceivable? By the Creator's fiat, man is first elected to be. By the guiding stimulus of faith, he is next animated to spiritual exertion. By the performance of good works, he then brings his moral nature into beautiful form and attitude. By knowledge of truth, he furthermore sees how to direct, govern, and attune himself. And finally, by the accomplishment of all this in the organized harmony of a wise and holy soul, there results that state of being whose passive conditions constitute salvation, and whose active experience is eternal life.

CHAPTER VI.

RECOGNITION OF FRIENDS IN A FUTURE LIFE.

OF all the sorrows incident to human life, none is so penetrating to gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets, and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearest treasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of all the questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for a solution, beseeching the oracles of the universe for a response, none can have a more intense interest than gathers about the irrepressible inquiry, "Shall we ever meet again, and know, the friends we have lost? somewhere in the ample creation and in the boundless ages, join, with the old familiar love, our long parted, fondly cherished, never forgotten dead?" The grief of bereavement and the desire of reunion are experienced in an endless diversity of degrees by different persons, according as they are careless, hard, and sense bound, or thoughtful, sympathizing, and imaginative; undisciplined by the mysteries and afflictions of our mortal destiny, or profoundly tried by the disappointments and prophecies of time and fate; and as they are shadowed by the gloom of despair, or cheered by the radiance of belief. But to all who feel, even the least, the uncertain but deep monitions of the silent pall, the sad procession, and the burial mound, the impressive problem must occur, with frequency and power, Does the grave sunder us and the objects of our affection forever? or, across that dark gulf, shall we be united again in purer bonds? Outside of the atheistic dissolution and the pantheistic absorption, it is supposable that, surviving the blow of death, our spirits may return to God and run their endless course in divine solitude. On the other hand, it is supposable that, possessed with all the memories of this probationary state, blessed by the companionship of our earthly friends, we may aspire together along the interminable gradations of the world to come. If the former supposition be true, and the farewell of the dying is the announcement of an irrevocable separation, then the tears we shed over the shrouded clay, once so prized, should be distillations from Lethe's flood, to make us forget all. But if the latter be true, then our deadly seeming losses are as the partings of travellers at night to meet in the morning; and, as friend after friend retires, we should sigh to each departing spirit a kind adieu till we meet again, and let pleasing memories of them linger to mingle in the sacred day dreams of remaining life.

Evidently it is of much importance to a man which of these views he shall take; for each exerts a distinctive influence in regard to his peace of mind, his moral strength, and his religious character. On one who believes that hereafter, beyond all the partings in this land of tombs, he shall never meet the dear companions who now bless his lot, the death of friends must fall, if he be a person of strong sensibilities, as a staggering blow, awakening an agony of sorrow, taking from the sky and the earth a glory nothing can ever replace, and leaving in his heart a wretched void nothing can ever fill. Henceforth he will be deprived mostly for all felt connection between them is hopelessly sundered of the good influences they exerted on him when present: he must try, by all expedients, to forget them; think no more of their virtues, their welcome voices and kindly deeds; wipe from the tablets of his soul all fond records of their united happy days; look not to the future, let the past be as though it had never been, and absorb his thoughts and feelings in the turmoil of the present. This is his only course; and even then, if true to the holiest instincts of his soul, he will find the fatal separation has lessened his being and impoverished his life,

"For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's down lying, This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world resigning."

But to him who earnestly expects soon to be restored under fairer auspices and in a deathless world to those from whom he parted as he laid their crumbling bodies in the earth, the death of friends will come as a message from the Great Father, a message solemn yet kind, laden indeed with natural sadness yet brightened by sure promise and followed by heavenly compensations. If his tears flow, they flow not in scalding bitterness from the Marah fountain of despair, but in chastened joy from the smitten rock of faith. So far from endeavoring to forget the departed, he will cling to their memories with redoubled tenderness, as a sacred trust and a redeeming power. They will be more precious to him than ever, stronger to purify and animate. Their saintly examples will attract him as never before, and their celestial voices plead from on high to win him to virtue and to heaven. The constant thought of seeing them once more, and wafting in their arms through the enchanted spaces of Paradise, will wield a sanctifying force over his spirit. They will make the invisible sphere a peopled reality to him, and draw him to God by the diffused bonds of a spiritual acquaintance and an eternal love.

Since the result in which a man rests on this subject, believing or disbelieving that he shall recognise his beloved ones the other side of the grave, exerts a deep influence on him, in one case disheartening, in the other uplifting, it is incumbent on us to investigate the subject, try to get at the truth, clear it up, and appreciate it as well as we can. It is a theme to interest us all. Who has not endeared relatives, choice friends, freshly or long ago removed from this earth into the unknown clime? In a little while, as the ravaging reaper sweeps on his way, who will not have still more there, or be there himself? Whether old acquaintance shall be all forgot or be well remembered there, is an inquiry which must profoundly interest all who have hearts to love their companions, and minds to perceive the creeping shadows of mystery drawing over us as we approach the sure destiny of age and the dim confines of the world. It is a theme, far removed from noisy strifes and vain shows, penetrating that mysterious essence of affection and thought which we are. The thing of first importance is not the conclusion we reach, but the spirit in which we seek and hold it. The Christian says to his friend, "Our souls will be united in yonder heaven." Danton, with a horrible travesty, said to his comrades on the scaffold, "Our heads will meet in that sack."

Before engaging directly in the discussion, it will be interesting to notice, for an instant, the verdict which history, in the spontaneous suppositions and rude speculations of ancient peoples, pronounces on this subject.1 Among their various opinions about the state after death, it is a prominent circumstance that they generally agree in conceiving it as a social state in which personal likenesses and memories are retained, fellow countrymen are grouped together, and friends united. This is minutely true of those nations with the details of whose faith we are acquainted, and is implied in the general belief of all others, except those who expected the individual spirit to be absorbed in the soul of the universe. Homer shows Ulysses and Virgil in like manner shows Aneas upon his entrance into the other world mutually recognising his old comrades and recognised by them. The two heroes whose inseparable friendship on earth was proverbial are still together in Elysium:

"Then, side by side, along the dreary coast Advanced Achilles' and Patroclus' ghost, A friendly pair."

In this representation that there was a full recognition of acquaintances, all the accounts of the other world given in Greek and Roman literature harmonize. The same is true of the accounts contained in the literature of the ancient Hebrews. In the Book of Genesis, when Jacob hears of the death of his favorite child, he exclaims, "I shall go down to my son Joseph in the under world, mourning." When the witch of Endor raised the ghost of Samuel, Saul knew him by the description she gave of him as he rose. The monarch shades in the under world are pictured by Isaiah as recognising the shade of the king of Babylon and rising from their sombre thrones to greet him with mockery. Ezekiel shows us each people of the heathen nations in the under world in a company by themselves. When David's child died, the king sorrowfully exclaimed, "He will not return to me; but I shall go to him." All these passages are based on the conception of a gloomy subterranean abode where the ghosts of the dead are reunited after their separation at death on earth. An old commentator on the Koran says a Mohammedan priest was once asked how the blessed in paradise could be happy when missing some near relative or dear friend whom they were thus forced to suppose in hell. He replied, God will either cause believers to forget such persons or else to rest in expectation of their coming. The anecdote shows affectingly that the same yearning heart and curiosity are possessed by Moslem and Christian. A still more impressive case in point is furnished by a picture in a Buddhist temple in China. The painting represents the story of the priest Lo Puh, who, on passing into paradise at death, saw his mother, Yin Te, in hell. He instantly descended into the infernal court, Tsin Kwang Wang, where she was suffering, and, by his valor, virtues, and intercessions, rescued her. The picture vividly portraying the whole story may be seen and studied at the present time by Christian missionaries who enter that temple of the benevolent Buddha.2 From the faith of many other nations illustrations might be brought of the same fact, that the great common instinct which has led men to believe in a future life has at the same time caused them to believe that in that life there would be a union and recognition of friends. Let this far reaching historical fact be taken at its just value,

1 Alexius, Tod and Wiedersehen. Eine Gedankenfolge der besten Schriftsteller aller Zeiten und Volker.

2 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 211.

while we proceed to the labor in hand. The fact referred to is of some value, because, being an expression of the heart of man as God made it, it is an indication of his will, a prophecy.

There are three ways of trying the problem of future recognition. The cool, skeptical class of persons will examine the present related facts of the case; argue from what they now know; test the question by induction and inference. Let us see to what results they will thus be led. In the first place, we learn upon reflection that we now distinguish each other by the outward form, physical proportion, and combination of looks, tones of voice, and other the like particulars. Every one has his individuality in these respects, by which he is separable from others. It may be hastily inferred, then, that if we are to know our friends hereafter it will be through the retention or the recovery of their sensible peculiarities. Accordingly, many believe the soul to be a perfect reflection or immaterial fac simile of the body, the exact correspondence in shadowy outline of its gross tabernacle, and consequently at once recognizable in the disembodied state. The literature of Christendom we may almost say of the world teems with exemplifications of this idea. Others, arguing from the same acknowledged premises, conclude that future recognition will be secured by the resurrection of the material body as it was in all its perfection, in renovated and unfading prime. But, leaving out of view the inherent absurdity of the doctrine of a physical resurrection, there is a fatal difficulty in the way of both these supposititious modes of mutual knowledge in another world. It is this. The outward form, features, and expression sometimes alter so thoroughly that it is impossible for us to recognise our once most intimate companions. Cases are not rare of this kind. Let one pass in absence from childhood to maturity, and who that had not seen him in the mean time could tell that it was he? The trouble arising thence is finely illustrated by Shakspeare in the motherly solicitude of Constance, who, on learning that her young son has been imprisoned by his uncle, King John, and will probably be kept until he pines to death, cries in anguish to her confessor,

"Father cardinal, I have heard you say That we shall see and know our friends in heaven: If that be true, I shall see my boy again; For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child, To him that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born. But now will canker sorrow eat my bud And chase the native beauty from his cheek, And he will look as hollow as a ghost, As dim and meagre as an ague's fit; And so he'll die; and, rising so again, When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him: therefore never, never Must I behold my pretty Arthur more."

Owing to the changes of all sorts which take place in the body, future recognition cannot safely depend upon that or upon any resemblance of the spirit to it. Besides, not the faintest proof can be adduced of any such perceptible correspondence subsisting between them.

Turning again to the facts of experience, we find that it is not alone, nor indeed chiefly, by their visible forms and features that we know our chosen ones. We also, and far more truly, know them by the traits of their characters, the elements of their lives, the effluence of their spirits, the magic atmosphere which surrounds them, the electric thrill and communication which vivify and conjoin our souls. And even in the exterior, that which most reveals and distinguishes each is not the shape, but the expression, the lights and shades, reflected out from the immortal spirit shrined within. We know each other really by the mysterious motions of our souls. And all these things endure and act uninterrupted though the fleshly frame alter a thousand times or dissolve in its native dust. The knowledge of a friend, then, being independent of the body, spirits may be recognised in the future state by the associations mutually surrounding them, the feelings connecting them. Amidst all the innumerable thronging multitudes, through all the immeasurable intervening heights and depths, of the immaterial world, remembered and desired companions may be selected and united by inward laws that act with the ease and precision of chemical affinities. We may therefore recognise each other by the feelings which now connect us, and which shall spontaneously kindle and interchange when we meet in heaven, as the signs of our former communion.

It needs but little thought to perceive that by this view future recognition is conditional, being made to depend on the permanence of our sympathies: there must be the same mutual relations, affinities, fitness to awaken the same emotions upon approaching each other's sphere, or we shall neither know nor be known. But in fact our sympathies and aversions change as much as our outward appearance does. The vices and virtues, loves and hatreds, of our hearts alter, the peculiar characteristics of our souls undergo as great a transformation, sometimes, as thorough a revolution, as the body does in the interval between childhood and manhood. These changes going on in our associates frequently change our feelings towards them, heightening or diminishing our affection, creating a new interest, destroying an old one, now making enemies lovers, and now thoroughly alienating very friends. Such fundamental alterations of character may occur in us, or in our friend, before we meet in the unseen state, that we shall no more recognise each other's spirits than we should know each other on earth after a separation in which our bodily appearances and voices had been entirely changed. These considerations would induce us to think that recognition hereafter is not sure, but turns on the condition that we preserve a remembrance, desire, and adaptedness for one another.

If now the critical inquirer shall say there is no evidence, and it is incredible, that the body will be restored to a future life, or that the soul has any resemblance to the body by which it may be identified, furthermore, if he shall maintain that the doctrine of the revelation and recognition of the souls of friends in another life by an instinctive feeling, a mysterious attraction and response, is fanciful, an overdrawn conclusion of the imagination, not warranted by a stern induction of the average realities of the subject, and if he shall then ask, how are we to distinguish our former acquaintances among the hosts of heaven? there is one more fact of experience which meets the case and answers his demand. When long absence and great exposures have wiped off all the marks by which old companions knew each other, it has frequently happened that they have met and conversed with indifference, each being ignorant of whom the other was; and so it has continued until, by some indirect means, some accidental allusion, or the agency of a third person, they have been suddenly revealed. Then, with throbbing hearts, in tears and rapture, they have rushed into each other's arms, with an instantaneous recurrence of their early friendship in all its original warmth, fulness, and flooding associations. Many such instances are related in books of romance with strict truth to the actual occurrences of life. Several instances of it are authenticated in the early history of America, when children, torn from their homes by the Indians, were recovered by their parents after twenty or thirty years had elapsed and they were identified by circumstantial evidence. Let any parent ask his heart, any true friend ask his heart, if, discovering by some foreign means the object of his love, he would not embrace him with just as ardent a gratitude and devotion as though there were no outward change and they had known one another at sight. So, in the life beyond the grave, if we are not able to recognise our earthly companions directly, either by spiritual sight or by intuitive feeling, we may obtain knowledge of each other indirectly by comparison of common recollections, or by the mediation of angels, or by some other Divine arrangement especially prepared for that purpose. And therefore, whether in heaven we look or feel as we do here or not, whether there be any provision in our present constitution for future recognition or not, is of no consequence. In a thousand ways the defect can be remedied, if such be the will of God. And that such is his will every relevant fact and consideration would seem to prove. It is a consistent and seemingly requisite continuation and completion of that great scheme of which this life is a part. It is an apparently essential element and fulfilment of the wonderful apparatus of retribution, reward, and discipline, intended to educate us as members of God's eternal family. Because from the little which we now understand we cannot infer with plainness and certainty the precise means and method by which we can discriminate our friends in heaven need be no obstacle to believing the fact itself; for there are millions of undoubted truths whose conditions and ways of operation we can nowise fathom. Upon the whole, then, we conclude that we cannot by our mere understandings decide with certainty the question concerning future recognition; but we are justified in trusting to the accuracy of that doctrine, since it rests safely with the free pleasure of God, who is both infinitely able and disposed to do what is best, and we cannot help believing that it is best for us to be with and love hereafter those whom we are with and love here.3

There is a way of dealing with the general subject before us wholly different from the course thus far pursued. Ceasing to act the philosopher, laying aside all arguments and theories, all dry speculations, we may come as simple believers to the Christian Scriptures and investigate their teachings to accept whatever they pronounce as the word of God's truth. Let us see to what results we shall thus be led. Searching the New Testament to learn its doctrine

3 Munch, Werden wir uns wiedersehen nach dem Tode. This work, based on the Kantian philosophy, denies future recognition. There is an able reply to it by Vogel, Ueber die Hoffnung des Wiedersehens.

in regard to reunion in a future state, we are very soon struck with surprise at the mysterious reserve, so characteristic of its pages, on this entire theme. Instead of a full and minute revelation blazing along the track of the gospel pens, a few fragmentary intimations, incidental hints, scattered here and there, are the substance of all that it expressly says. But though little is directly declared, yet much is plainly implied: especially the one great inference with which we are now concerned may be unequivocally and repeatedly drawn. In the parable of the Rich Man and the Beggar the Savior pictures forth the recognition of their souls in the disembodied state. Dives also is described as recollecting with intense interest, with the most anxious sympathy, his endangered brethren on earth. Although this occurs in a parable, yet it is likely that so prominent and vital a feature of it would be moulded, as to its essential significance, in accordance with what the author intended should be received as truth. Jesus also speaks of many who should come from the east and the west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; from which it would appear that the patriarchs are together in fellowship and that the righteous of after times were to be received with them in mutual acquaintance. On the Mount of Transfiguration the witnessing disciples saw Moses and Elias together with Jesus, and recognised them, probably from their resemblance to traditional descriptions of them. Jesus always represented the future state as a society. He said to his followers, "I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there ye may be also;" and he prayed to his Father that his disciples might be with him where he was going. At another time he declared of little children, "Their angels always behold the face of my Father in heaven:" he also taught that "there is joy in heaven over every sinner that repenteth;" passages that presuppose such a community of faculties, sympathies, in heaven and earth, in angels and men, as certainly implies the doctrine of continued knowledge and fellowship. When heaven was opened before the dying Stephen, he saw and instantly knew his Divine Master, the Lord Jesus, and called to him to welcome his ascending spirit. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that he would not have them sorrow concerning the dead as those who have no hope, assuring them that when Christ reappears they shall all be united again. In the Apocalypse, John saw, in a vision, the souls of the martyrs, who had died for the faith of the gospel, together, under the altar. From community of suffering and a common abode together in heaven we may safely infer their recognition of each other. The Gospels declare that Christ after his death remembered his disciples and came back to them to assure them that they should rejoin him on high; and the apostles assert that we are to be with Christ and to be like him in the future state. It follows from the admission of these declarations that we shall remember our friends and be united with them in conscious knowledge. Few, and brief, and vague as the utterances of the Scriptures are in relation to this theme, they necessarily involve all the results of an avowed doctrine. They undeniably involve the supposition that in the other life we shall be conscious personalities as here, retaining our memories and constituting a society. From these implications the fact of the future recognition of friends irresistibly results, unless there be some special interference to prevent it; and such an interposition there is no hint of and can be no reason for fearing.

Such is really all that we can learn from the Scriptures on the subject of our inquiry.4 Its indirectness and brevity would convince us that God did not intend to betray to us in clear light the secrets of the shrouded future, that for some reason it is best that his teaching should be so reserved, and leave us to the haunting wonder, the anxious surmise, the appalling mystery, the alluring possibilities, that now meet our gaze on the unmoving veil of death. God intends we shall trust in him without knowledge, and by faith, not by sight, pursue his guidance into the silent and unknown land.

Therefore, after analyzing the relevant facts of present experience and inferring what we can from them, and after studying the Scriptures and finding what they say, there is yet another method of considering the problem of recognition in the future state. That is without caring for critical discussion, without deferring to extraneous authority, we may follow the gravitating force of instinct, imagination, and moral reason. We are made to love and depend on each other. The longer, the more profoundly, we know and admire the good, the more our being becomes intertwined with theirs, so much the more intensely we desire to be with them always, and so much the more awful is the agony of separation. This, what is it but great Nature's testimony, God's silent avowal, that we are to meet in eternity? Can the fearful anguish of bereavement be gratuitous? can the yearning prophecies of the smitten heart be all false? Belief in reunion hereafter is spontaneously adopted by humanity. We therefore esteem it divinely ordered or true. Without that soothing and sustaining trust, the unrelieved, intolerable wretchedness in many cases would burst through the fortress of the mind, hurl reason from its throne, and tear the royal affections and their attendants in the trampled dust of madness. Many a rarely gifted soul, unknown in his nameless privacy of life, has been so conjoined with a worthy peer, through precious bonds of unutterable sympathy, that, rather than be left behind, "the divided half of such a friendship as had mastered time," he has prayed that they, dying at once, might, involved together, hover across the dolorous strait to the other shore, and

"Arrive at last the blessed goal Where He that died in Holy Land Might reach them out the shining hand And take them as a single soul."

Denied that inmost wish, the rest of his widowed life below has been one melancholy strain of "In Memoriam." Many a faithful and noble mourner, whose garnered love and hope have been blighted for this world, would tell you that, without meeting his lost ones there, heaven itself would be no heaven to him. In such a state of soul we must expect to know again in an unfading clime the cherished dead. That belief is of Divine inspiration, an arrangement to heal the deadly wounds of sorrow. It is madness not to think it a verity. Who believes, as he shall float through the ambrosial airs of heaven, he could touch, in passing, the radiant robes of his chosen friends without a thrill of recognition, the prelude to a blissful and immortal communion? Is there not truth in the poet's picture of the meeting of child and parent in heaven?

4 Harbaugh, The Heavenly Recognition. Gisborne, Recollections of Friends in the World to Come. Muston, Perpetuation of Christian Friendship.

"It was not, mother, that I knew thy face: The luminous eclipse that is on it now, Though it was fair on earth, would have made it strange Even to one who knew as well as he loved thee; But my heart cried out in me, Mother!"

Think of the unfathomable yearnings, the infinite ecstasies of desire and faith from age to age swelling in the very heart of the world, all set on the one hope of future union, and who then can believe that God will coldly blast them all? They are innocent, they are holy, they are meritorious, they are unspeakably dear. We would not destroy them; and God will not.

Man's life is the true fable of that beautiful youth, Narcissus, who had a twin sister of remarkable loveliness, strongly resembling himself, and to whom he was most tenderly attached. She dies young. He frequents fountains to gaze upon his own image reflected in the waters, it seeming to him the likeness of her he has lost. He is in pity transformed into a flower on the border of a stream, where, bending on his fragile stem, he seeks his image in the waters murmuring by, until he fades and dies. Has not God, the all loving Author who composed the sweet poem of Man and Nature, written at the close a reconciling Elysium wherein these pure lovers, the fond Narcissus and his echo mate, shall wander in perennial bliss, their embracing forms mirrored in unruffled fountains?

Looking now for the conclusion of the whole matter, we find that it lies in three different aspects, both of inquiring thought and of practical morality, according to the lights and modes in which three different classes of minds approach it. To the consistent metaphysician, reasoning rigidly on grounds of science and philosophy, every thing pertaining to the methods and circumstances of the future life is an affair of entire uncertainty and hypothesis.5 If in the future state the soul retains its individuality as an identical force, form, life, and memory, and if associates in the present state are brought together, it is probable that old friends will recognise each other. But if they are oblivious of the past, if they are incommunicably separated in space or state, if one progresses so much farther that the other can never overtake him, if the personal soul blends its individual consciousness with the unitary consciousness of the Over Soul, if it commences a new career from a fresh psychical germ, then, by the terms, there will be no mutual recognition. In that case his comfort and his duty are to know that the anguish and longing he now feels will cease then; to trust in the benignity of the Infinite Wisdom, who knows best what to appoint for his creatures; and to submit with harmonizing resignation to the unalterable decree, offering his private wish a voluntary sacrifice on the altar of natural piety. That he shall know his friends hereafter is not impossible, not improbable; neither is it certain. He may desire it, expect it, but not with speculative pride dogmatically affirm it, nor with insisting egotism presumptuously demand it.

5 Gravell, Das Wiedersehen nach dem Tode. Wie es nur sein konne.

To the uncritical Christian the recognising reunion of friends in heaven is an unshaken assurance.6 There is nothing to disturb his implicit reception of the plain teaching of Scripture. The legitimate exhortations of his faith are these. Mourn not too bitterly nor too long over your absent dead; for you shall meet them in an immortal clime. As the last hour comes for your dearest ones or for yourself, be of good cheer; for an imperishable joy is yours. You:

"Cannot lose the hope that many a year Hath shone on a gleaming way, When the walls of life are closing round And the sky grows sombre gray."

Put not away the intruding thoughts of the departed, but let them often recur. The dead are constant. You know not how much they may think of you, how near they may be to you. Will you pass to meet them not having thought of them for years, having perhaps forgotten them? Let your mind have its nightly firmament of religious communion, beneath which white and sable memories shall walk, and the sphered spirits of your risen friends, like stars, shed down their holy rays to soothe your feverish cares and hush every murmuring doubt to rest. From the dumb heavings of your loving and trustful heart, sometimes exclaim, Parents who nurtured and watched over me with unwearied affection, I would remember you oft, and love you well, and so live that one day I may meet you at the right hand of God. Early friends, so close and dear once, who in the light of young romance trod with me life's morning hills, neither your familiar faces nor your sweet communion are forgotten by me: I fondly think of you, and aspire towards you, and pray for a purer soul, that I may mount to your celestial circle at last;

"For many a tear these eyes must weep, And many a sin must be forgiven, Ere these pale lids shall sink to sleep, Ere you and I shall meet in heaven."

Blessed Jesus, elder Brother of our race, who sittest now by thy Father's throne, or pacest along the crystal coast as a leader, chief among ten thousand, whose condescending brow the bloody thorns no longer press, but the dazzling crown of thy Divinity encircles, oh, remember us, poor erring pilgrims after thine earthly steps; pity us, help us, and after death bring us to thy home.

To the sympathetic poet, the man of sentiment and meditation, who views the question from the position of the heart, in the glory and vistas of the imagination, but with all the known facts and relations of the subject lying bare under his sight, the uniting restoration, in another sphere, of earth's broken ties and parted friends, is an unappeasable craving of the soul, in harmony with the moral law, powerfully prophesied to his experience from all quarters, and seemingly confirmed to his hopes by every promise of God and nature.7

6 Grafe, Biblische Beitrage zu der Frage, Werden wir uns wiedersehen nach dem Tode.

7 Engel, Wir werden uns wiedersehen. Halst, Beleuchtung der Hauptgrunde fur den Glauben an Erinnerung und Wiedersehen nach dem Tode. Streicher, Neue Beitrage zur Kritik des Glaubens an Ruckerinnerung nach dem Tode.

Received as a truth, it is a well of inexhaustible comfort, making experience a green oasis where it overflows. The denial of it as a proven falsehood is a withering blast of dust blowing on the friendly caravan of sojourners in the desert of life. If existence is the enjoyment of a largess of social love, and death is to have a solitary hand snatch it all away forever, how dismal is the prospect to the poor heart that loves and clings, loses and despairs, and can only falter hopelessly on! It cannot be so. Love is the true prophet. Heaven will restore the treasures earth has lost.

The mourner by the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel! Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn of Washington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in history to brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears of her grief and faith into the future to restore her deceased children to life and draw them together within her embrace. And that sublime Rachel will not easily be comforted except when her thoughts, migrating whither her offspring have gone, seem to find them happy in some happy heaven.

The poet, lover of his race, who cannot trust his happier instinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line of mortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helps to a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of two possible contemplations.8 He may sadly lay upon his heart the stifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness, but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstone of my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowd the capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, In the unchangeable fulness of an infinite bliss, all specialties will be merged and forgotten, and I shall be one of those to whom "the wearisome disease" of remembered sorrow and anticipated joy "is an alien thing."

8 Wieland's Euthanasia expresses disbelief in the preservation of personality and consciousness after death. The same ground had been taken in the work published anonymously at Halle in 1775, Plato and Leibnitz jenseits des Styx. See, on the other side of the question, Wohlfahrt, Tempel der Unsterblichkeit, oder neue Anthologie der wichtigsten Ausspruche, besonders neuerer Weisen uber Wiedersehen u. s. w.

CHAPTER VII.

LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE.

ACCORDING to the imagining of some speculative geologists, perhaps this earth first floated in the abyss as a volume of vapor, wreathing its enormous folds of mist in fantastic shapes as it was borne along on the idle breath of law. Ages swept by, until this stupendous fog ball was condensed into an ocean of fire, whose billows heaved their lurid bosoms and reared their ashy crests without a check, while their burning spray illuminated its track around the sable vault. During periods which stagger computation, this molten world was gradually cooled down; constant rivers wrung from the densely swathing vapor poured over the heated mass and at last submerged its crust in an immense sea. Then, for unknown centuries, fire, water, and wind waged a Titanic war, that imagination shudders to think of, jets of flame licking the stars, massive battlements and columns of fire piled to terrific heights, now the basin of the sea suddenly turned into a glowing caldron and the atmosphere saturated with steam, again explosions hurling mountains far into space and tearing the earth open in ghastly rents to its very heart. At length the fire was partially subdued, the peaceful deep glassed the sky in its bosom or rippled to the whispers of the breeze, and from amidst the fertile slime and mould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces of organic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation. Thousands of years rolled on. The world ocean subsided, the peaks of mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged, and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, a gigantic growth of grass, every blade as large as our vastest oak, shot from the soil, and the incalculable epoch of ferns commenced, whose tremendous harvest clothed the whole land with a deep carpet of living verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetation were successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the dark layers of inexhaustible coal beds, the world, one waving wilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless and silent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all its magnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavily surcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerable ages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching its limit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, the earliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugs of the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during which animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by plesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feet in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight loaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea, the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, when millions of aons had worn away, the creative process culminated in Humanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let us make man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with upright form, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on the summit of the world and gave names to all the races of creatures beneath.1

At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whether man is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan for this world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to be superseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, and attributes transcending our conceptions, even as our own transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence. Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast, crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have replied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world. What animal can there be superior to me? beyond a question, my race shall possess the earth forever!" The mastodon could not know any uses of nature except those he was fitted to experience, nor imagine a being with the form and prerogatives of man. Therefore he would not believe that the mastodon race would ever be displaced by the human. We labor under the same disqualification for judgment. There may be in the system of nature around us adaptations, gifts, glories, as much higher than any we enjoy as our noblest powers and privileges are in advance of those of the tiger or the lark.

It is a remarkable fact that the mature states of the antediluvian races correspond with the foetal states of the present races, and that the foetal states of embryonic man are counterparts of the mature states of the lower races now contemporaneous with him. This great discovery of modern science, though perhaps destitute of logical value, suggests to the imagination the thought that man may be but the foetal state of a higher being, a regent temporarily presiding here until the birth and inauguration of the true king of the world, and destined himself to be born from the womb of this world into the free light and air of the spirit kingdom!

The resources of God are inexhaustible; and in the evolution of his prearranged ages it may be that there will arise upon the earth a race of beings of unforetold majesty, who shall disinter the remnant bones and ponder the wrecked monuments of forgotten man as we do those of the disgusting reptiles of the Saurian epoch. But this is a mere conceit of possibility; and, so far as the data for forming an opinion are in our hands, it is altogether incredible. So far as appears, the adaptation between man and the earth is exhaustive. He is able to subdue all her forces, reign over all her provinces, enjoy all her delights, and gather into his consciousness all her prophecies. And our practical conviction is absolute that the race of men is the climax of being destined for this earth, and that they will occupy its hospitable bosom forever with their toils and their homes, their sports and their graves.2

The other question is this: Was the subjection of the human race to physical death a part of the Creator's original plan, or the retributive result of a subsequent dislocation of that plan by sin? a part of the great harmony of nature, or a discord marring the happy destiny

1 Harris, The Pre Adamite Earth.

2 Agassiz says no higher creature than man is to be expected on earth, because the capacities of the earthly plan of organic creation are completed and exhausted with him. Introduction to Study of Natural History, p. 57.

of man? Approaching this problem on grounds of science and reason alone, there can be no hesitation as to the reply. There are but two considerations really bearing upon the point and throwing light upon it; and they both force us to the same conclusion. First, it is a fact admitting no denial that death was the predetermined natural fate of the successive generations of the races that preceded man. Now, what conceivable reason is there for supposing that man, constructed from the same elements, living under the same organic laws, was exempt from the same doom? There is not in the whole realm of science a single hint to that effect. Secondly, the reproductive element an essential feature in the human constitution, leading our kind to multiply and replenish the earth is a demonstration that the office of death entered into God's original plan of the world. For otherwise the earth at this moment could not hold a tithe of the inhabitants that would be demanding room. When God had permitted this world to roll in space for awful ages, a lifeless globe of gas, fire, water, earth, and then let it be occupied for incommensurable epochs more by snails, vermin, and iguanodons, would he wind up the whole scene and destroy it when the race of man, crowning glory of all, had only flourished for a petty two thousand years? It is not credible. And yet it must have been so unless it was decreed that the successive generations should pass away and thus leave space for, the new comers. We conclude, then, that it is the will of God and was in the beginning that the human race shall possess the earth through all the unknown periods of the future, the parents continually passing off the stage in death as the children rise upon it to maturity. We cannot discern any authority in those old traditions which foretell the impending destruction of the world. On what grounds are we to believe them? The great system of things is a stable harmony. There is no wear or tear in the perfect machinery of the creation, rolling noiseless in its blue bearings of ether. It seems, comparatively speaking, to have just begun. Its oscillations are self adjusted, and science prophesies for humanity an illimitable career on this earthly theatre. The swift melting of the elements and restoration of chaos is a mere heathen whim or a poetic figment. It is the bards who sing,

"The earth shall shortly die. Her grave is dug. I see the worlds, night clad, all gathering In long and dark procession. And the stars, Which stand as thick as glittering dewdrops on The fields of heaven, shall pass in blazing mist."

Such pictures are delusion winning the imagination, not truth commanding the reason. In spite of all the Cassandra screams of the priesthood, vaticinating universal ruin, the young old earth, fresh every spring, shall remain under God's preserving providence, and humanity's inexhaustible generations renewedly reign over its kingdoms, forever. Plotinus said, "If God repents having made the world, why does he defer its destruction? If he does not yet repent, he never will, as being now accustomed to it, and becoming through time more friendly to it."

3 Lucan says, "Our bones and the stars shall be mingled on one funeral pyre." Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra Misturus.

But to receive such a good piece of poetry as veritable prevision is surely a puerile error which a mature mind in the nineteenth century should be ashamed to commit.