"Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu Faxit. Cur? volito vivu' per ora virum." 44

Shakspeare likewise often expresses the same thought:

"When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men."

And again in similar strain:

"My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes."

Napoleon is reported to have said, "My soul will pass into history and the deathless memories of mankind; and thus in glory shall I be immortal." This characteristically French notion forms the essence of Comte's "positivist" doctrine of a future life. Those deemed worthy after their death to be incorporated, by vote of the people, in the Supreme Being, the Grand Etre, a fictitious product of a poetic personification, through the perpetual fame and influence thus secured have an immortal life in the thoughts and feelings of a grateful posterity. Comte says, "Positivism greatly improves immortality and places it on a firmer foundation, by changing it from objective to subjective." Great and eternal Humanity is God. The dead who are meritorious are alone remembered, and, thus incorporated into the Divinity, they have a "subjective immortality in the brains of the living." 45 It is a poor shadow of the sublime truth which the soul craves. Leopardi, in his Bruto Minore, expresses this "poor hope of being in the future's breath:"

44 Cicero, Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xv.

45 Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversation III.

"dell' atra morte ultima raggio Conscia future eta." That proud and gifted natures should have seriously stooped to such a toy, to solace themselves with it, is a fact strange and pathetic. With reverential tenderness of sympathy must we yearn towards those whose loving natures, baffled of any solid resource, turn appealingly, ere they fade away, to clasp this substanceless image of an image.

Another scheme is what may be called the "lampada tradunt" 46 theory of a future life. Generations succeed each other, and the course is always full. Eternal life takes up new subjects as fast as its exhausted receptacles perish. Men are the mortal cells of immortal humanity. The individual must comfort himself with the sympathetic reflection that his extinction destroys nothing, since all the elements of his being will be manipulated into the forms of his successors.

Life is a constant renovation, and its sum is forever full and equal on the globe. The only genuine resurrection unto eternal life is an unending re creation of organisms from the same materials to repeat the same physiological and psychological processes.47 There is a gleam of cheer and of nobleness in this representation; but, upon the whole, it is perhaps as ineffectual as the former. It is a vapid consolation, in view of our own annihilation, to think that others will then live and also be annihilated in their turn. It is pleasant to believe that the earth will forever be peopled with throngs of men; but though such a belief might help to reconcile us to our fate, it could not alter the intrinsic sadness of that fate.

A third substitute for the common view of immortality is a scientific perception of the fact that the peculiar force which each man is, the sum of his character and life, is a cause indestructibly mixed with the course of subsequent history, an objective personal immortality, though not a conscious one. What he was, remains and acts forever in the world.

The fourth substitute is an identification of self with the integral scheme of things. I am an inseparable portion of the totality of being, to move eternally in its eternal motion.

"If death seem hanging o'er thy separate soul, Discern thyself a part of life's great whole."

Lose the thought of thy particular evanescence in the thought of the universal permanence. The inverted torch denotes death to a mere inhabitant of the earth: to a citizen of the universe, downward and upward are the same. Perhaps one who rejects the ordinary doctrine of a future life can be solaced and edified by these substitutes in proportion to his fineness, greatness, and nobleness. But to most persons no substitute can atone for the withdrawn truth of immortality itself.

In regard to the eternal preservation of personal consciousness, it were bigoted blindness to deny that there is room for doubts and fears. While the monad soul so to call it lies here beneath the weak glimmer of suns so far off that they are forceless to develop it to a

46 Lucretius, De Nat. Rerum, lib. ii. 1. 78.

47 Schultz Schultzenstein, Die Bildung des menschlichen Geistes durch Kultur der Verjungung seines Lebens, ss. 834-847: Die Unsterblichkeitsbegriffe.

victorious assurance, we cannot but sometimes feel misgivings and be depressed by skeptical surmises. Accordingly, while belief has generally prevailed, disbelief has in every age had its representatives. The ancients had their Dicaarchus, Protagoras, Panatius, Lucan, Epicurus, Casar, Horace, and a long list besides. The moderns have had their Gassendi, Diderot, Condillac, Hobbes, Hume, Paine, Leopardi, Shelley, and now have their Feuerbach, Vogt, Moleschott, and scores of others needless to be named. And although in any argument from authority the company of the great believers would incomparably outshine and a thousand times outweigh the array of deniers, this does not alter the obvious fact that there are certain phenomena which are natural provocatives of doubt and whose troubling influence scarcely any one can always escape. Homer, in giving expression to Hector's confidence of victory over the Greeks, makes him wish that he were but as sure of entering the state of the immortal gods.48 When some one asked Dr. Johnson, "Have we not proof enough of the immortality of the soul?" he replied, "I want more." Davenant of whom Southey says, "I know no other author who has so often expressed his doubts respecting a future state and how burdensome he felt them" writes, "But ask not bodies doom'd to die, To what abode they go: Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know."

Charles Lamb writes, "If men would honestly confess their misgivings, (which few men will,) there are times when the strongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of such staggering obscurity." Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil of shifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations, voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictory queries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, before the darkness of unknown futurity might piteously exclaim, without deserving blame,

"I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which down hurls me to the ground."

Who that has reached maturity of reflection cannot appreciate and sympathize somewhat with these lines of Byron, when he stands before a lifeless form of humanity?

"I gazed, as oft I have gazed the same, To try if I could wrench aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make, a faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: but where? Five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far! And is this blood, then, form'd but to be shed? Can every element our elements mar? Can air, earth, water, fire, live and we dead? We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more."

48 Iliad, lib, viii. Il. 538-540.

Doubt is not sin, but rather a misfortune; for it is to adopt a suggestion from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thought steals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence of doubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are two attitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions and evidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints of the nails and lay my finger in the marks of the wounds." The other is, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." In abstract logic or rigid science the former may be appropriate and right. The latter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. If a man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, he shall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts, complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaron with his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist of disbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of what he is most assured, His glassy essence," his conduct is offensive to every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation of God. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager to destroy those lofty thoughts which so much help to make us men, is a shocking spectacle. Yet a few such there are, who seem delighted as by their dismal theory they bury mankind in an iron tomb of materialism and inscribe on the irrevocable door the solitary words, Fate and Silence.

The more attentively one dwells on the perishable physical side of life, the more prone he will be to believe in an absolute death; the more prevailingly he ponders the incorruptible psychical side, the more prepared he will be to credit immortality. The chemist who confines his studies exclusively within his own province, when he reflects on the probable sequence of life, will speculatively see himself vanish in his blowpipes and retorts. Whoso devotedly dabbles in organisms, nerves, and bloods may easily become skeptical of spirit; for it everywhere balks his analysis and eludes his search. The objects he deals with are things. They belong to change and dissolution. Mind and its proper home belong to a different category of being. Because no heaven appears at the end of the telescope, and no soul is seen on the edge of the dissecting knife, and no mind is found at the bottom of the crucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, nor soul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be to infer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilled in any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes into the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it, is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under Rome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thus lost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault of heaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine and sentient joy!

When we contemplate men in a mass, like a swarm of bees or a hive of ants, we find ourselves doubting their immortality. They melt away, in swiftly confused heaps and generations, into the bosom of nature. On the other hand, when we think of individuals, an almost unavoidable thought of personal identity makes us spontaneously conclude them immortal. It rather requires the effort then to think them otherwise. But obviously the real problem is never of the multitudinous throng, but always of the solitary person. In reference

to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinese city as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable human inhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin. Fairness requires that our imaginations and reasonings upon the subject fasten upon an individual, set apart and uplifted, like a king, in the incommunicable distinctness and grandeur of selfhood and responsibility.

From looking about this grave paved star, from painful and degrading contemplations of dead bodies, "the snuff and loathed part of nature which burns itself out," let a man turn away, and send his interior kingly glance aloft into ideal realms, let him summon up the glorious sentiments of freedom, duty, admiration, the noble experiences of self sacrifice, love, and joy, and his soul will extricate itself from the filthy net of material decay, and feel the divine exemption of its own clean prerogatives, dazzling types of eternity, and fragments of blessedness that "Promise, on our Maker's truth, Long morrow to this mortal youth." Martyrdom is demonstration of immortality; for self preservation is the innermost, indestructible instinct of every conscious being. When the soul, in a sacred cause, enthusiastically rushes upon death, or in calm composure awaits death, it is irresistibly convinced that it cannot be hurt, but will be blessed, by the crisis. It knows that in an inexpressibly profound sense whosoever would ignobly save his life loses it, but whosoever would nobly lose his life saves it. Martyrdom demonstrates immortality.

"Life embark'd out at sea, 'mid the wave tumbling roar, The poor ship of my body went down to the floor; But I broke, at the bottom of death, through a door, And, from sinking, began forever to soar."

The most lamentable and pertinacious doubts of immortality sometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness, sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, as these undeniably are palpable violations of the creative intention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness the argument demands that we select the noblest, healthiest specimens of completed humanity to reason from. Should we not take a case in which God's will is so far plainly fulfilled, in order to trace that will farther and even to its finality? And regarding on his death bed a Newton, a Fenelon, a Washington, is it difficult to conceive him surviving the climax and catastrophe of his somatic cell basis and soaring to a more august range of existence? Remembering that such as these have lived and died, ay, and even the godlike Nazarene, can we believe that man is merely a white interrogation point lifted on the black margin of matter to ask the answerless secret of the universe and be erased?

Such a conclusion charges God with the transcendent crime of infanticide perpetrated in the most deliberate manner and on the most gigantic scale. Who can bear, by thus quenching the hope of another life, to add death to death, and overcast, to every thoughtful eye, the whole sunny field of life with the melancholy shadow of a bier? There is a noble strength and confidence, cheering to the reader, in these words of one of the wisest and boldest of thinkers: "I should be the very last man to be willing to dispense with the faith in a future life: nay, I would say, with Lorenzo de'Medici, that all those are dead, even for the present life, who do not hope for another. I have the firm conviction that our soul is an existence of indestructible nature, whose working is from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, that seems indeed to set, but really never sets, shining on in unchangeable splendor." 49 Such a view of our destiny incomparably inspires and ennobles us. Man, discovering under all the poor, wretched accidents of earth and sense and hard fortune the immortality of his soul, feels as that king's son who, lost in infancy, and growing up under the care of a forest hind, supposed himself to belong to the rude class among whom he lived; but one day, learning his true parentage, he knew beneath his mean disguise that he was a prince, and immediately claimed his kingdom. These facts of experience show clearly how much it behooves us to cultivate by every honest method this cardinal tenet of religion, how much wiser faith is in listening to the lucid echoes of the sky than despair in listening to the muffled reverberations of the grave. All noble and sweet beliefs grow with the growing nobleness and tenderness of characters sensitive to those fine revealings which pachydermatous souls can never know. In the upper hall of reason, before the high shrine of faith, burn the base doubts begotten in the cellars of sense; and they may serve as tapers to light your tentative way to conviction. If the floating al Sirat between physiology and psychology, earth and heaven, is too slippery and perilous for your footing, where heavy limbed science cannot tread, nerve the wings of faith for a free flight. Or, if every effort to fasten a definite theory on some solid support on the other side of the gulf fails, venture forth on the naked line of limitless desire, as the spider escapes from an unwelcome position by flinging out an exceedingly long and fine thread and going forth upon it sustained by the air.50 Whoever preserves the full intensity of the affections is little likely to lose his trust in God and a future life, even when exposed to lowering and chilling influences from material science and speculative philosophy: the glowing of the heart, as Jean Paul says, relights the extinguished torch in the night of the intellect, as a beast stunned by an electric shock in the head is restored by an electric shock in the breast. Daniel Webster says, in an expression of his faith in Christianity written shortly before his death, "Philosophical argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith which is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me."51 Contemplating the stable permanence of nature as it swallows our fleet generations, we may feel that we vanish like sparks in the night; but when we think of the persistent identity of the soul, and of its immeasurable superiority to the brute mass of matter, the aspect of the case changes and the moral inference is reversed. Does not the simple truth of love conquer and trample the world's aggregated lie? The man who, with assiduous toil and earnest faith, develops his forces, and disciplines his faculties, and cherishes his aspirations, and accumulates virtue and wisdom, is thus preparing the auspicious stores and conditions of another existence. As he slowly journeys over the mountains of life, aware that there can be

49 Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.

50 Greenough, An Artist's Creed.

51 Memorial of Daniel Webster from the City of Boston, p. 16.

no returning, he gathers and carries with him materials to build a ship when he reaches the strand of death. Upon the mist veiled ocean launching then, he will sail where? Whither God orders. Must not that be to the right port?

We remember an old Brahmanic poem brought from the East by Ruckert and sweetly resung in the speech of the West full of encouragement to those who shall die.52 A man wrapped in slumber calmly reclines on the deck of a ship stranded and parting in the breakers. The plank on which he sleeps is borne by a huge wave upon a bank of roses, and he awakes amidst a jubilee of music and a chorus of friendly voices bidding him welcome. So, perhaps, when the body is shattered on the death ledge, the soul will be tossed into the fragrant lap of eternal life on the self identified and dynamic plank of personality.

52 Brahmanische Erzahlungen, s. 5.

CHAPTER IX.

MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. IN discussing the ethics of the doctrine of a future life a subject here amazingly neglected, there more amazingly maltreated, and nowhere, within our knowledge, truly analyzed and exhibited1 it is important that the theme be precisely defined and the debate kept strictly to the lines. Let it be distinctly understood, therefore, that the question to be handled is not, "Whether there ought to be a future life or not," nor, "Whether there is a future life or not." The question is, "What difference should it make to us whether we admit or deny the fact of a future life?" If we believe that we are to pass through death into an immortal existence, what inferences pertaining to the present are right, fully to be drawn from the supposition? If, on the other hand, we think there is nothing for us after the present, what are the logical consequences of that faith in regard to our aims and rules of conduct in this world?

Suppose a man who has always imagined that death is utter annihilation should in some way suddenly acquire knowledge that an endless existence immediately succeeds the termination of this: what would be the legitimate instructions of his new information? Before we can fairly answer this inquiry, we need to know what relations connect the two states of existence. A knowledge of the law and method and means of man's destiny is more important for his guidance than the mere ascertainment of its duration. With reference to the query before us, four hypotheses are conceivable. If, in the first place, there be no connection whatever except that of temporal sequence between the present life and the future, then, so far as duty is concerned, the expectation of a world to come yields not the slightest practical application for the experience that now is. It can only be a source of comfort or of terror; and that will be accordingly as it is conceived under the aspect of benignity or of vengeance. If, secondly, the character of the future life depend on conditions to be fulfilled here, but those conditions be not within our control, then, again, no inferences of immediate duty can be drawn from the apprehended hereafter. Being quasi actors in a scene prearranged and with a plot predetermined, we can no more be capable of any obligation or choice, in regard to the end, than puppets which some unseen Harlequin moves by the terrible wires of primitive decree or transmitted depravity towards the genial or the tragic crisis. If the soul's fate there is to be heaven or hell according to the part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future life is reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source of complacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect and the reprobate.

Thirdly, it may be conceived that the future life is a state of everlasting reward and punishment unchangeably decided by the way in which the probationary period allotted on

1 The only direct treatise on the subject known to us is Tilemann's Kritik der Unsterblichkeitslehre in Ansehung des Sittengesetzes, published in 1789. And this we have not seen.

earth is passed through. Here are men, for a brief time, free to act thus or otherwise. Do thus, and the endless bliss of heaven is won. Do otherwise, and the endless agony of hell is incurred. The plain rule of action yielded by this doctrine is, Sacrifice all other things to the one thing needful. The present life is in itself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustible eternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends on how you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing to do while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To waste a single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness of folly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and then to improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energy and every thought and every desire of every moment. This world is a bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is there leisure for sport and business, or room for science and literature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to get ourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, which will waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lake packed with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls the floating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, this should intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can be admitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not one flexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantine immortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makes eternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleeting probation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that it pronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. The only true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure the forensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointed means. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathless moment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea of blessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, such should be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety that there would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Every object should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, every sound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatory confession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single and preternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing could allow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting or blinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Such would be a logical application to life of the genuine morals of the doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to be rejected as false on many grounds. It is deduced from Scripture by a technical and unsound interpretation. It is unjust and cruel, irreconcilable with the righteousness or the goodness of God. It is unreasonable, opposed to the analogies of nature and to the experience of man. It is wholly impossible to carry it out consistently in the practice of life. If it were thoroughly credited and acted upon, all the business of the world would cease, and the human race would soon die out.

There remains one other view of the relationship of a future life with the present. And it seems to be the true view. The same Creator presiding, the same laws prevailing, over infinitude and eternity that now rule over time and earth, our immortality cannot reasonably be imagined either a moment of free action and an eternity of fixed consequences, or a series of separate fragments patched into a parti colored experience with blanks of death between the patterns of life. It must be conceived as one endless existence in linear connection of cause and effect developing in progressive phases under varying conditions of motive and scenery. With what we are at death we live on into the next life. In every epoch and world of our destiny our happiness depends on the possession of a harmoniously working soul harmoniously related with its environment. Each stage and state of our eternal existence has its peculiarities of duty and privilege. In this one our proper work is to improve the opportunities, discharge the tasks, enjoy the blessings, belonging here. We are to do the same in the next one when we arrive in that. All the wealth of wisdom, virtue, strength, and harmony we acquire in our present life is the vantage ground and capital wherewith we start in the succeeding life. Therefore the true preparation for the future is to fit ourselves to enter it under the most favorable auspices, by accumulating in our souls all the spiritual treasures afforded by the present. In other words, the truest aim we can set before ourselves during our existence on earth is to make it yield the greatest possible results of the noblest experience. The life hereafter is the elevated and complementary continuation of the life here; and certainly the directest way to ameliorate the continuation is to improve the commencement.

But, it may be said, according to this representation, the fact of a future life makes no difference in regard to our duty now; for if the grave swallows all, still, it is our duty and our interest to make the best and the most of our life in the world while it lasts. True; and really that very consideration is a strong proof of the correctness of the view in question. It corresponds with the other arrangements of God. He makes every thing its own end, complete in itself, at the same time that it subserves some further end and enters into some higher unity. He is no mere Teleologist, hobbling towards his conclusions on a pair of decayed logic crutches,2 but an infinite Artist, whose means and ends are consentaneous in the timeless and spaceless spontaneity and perfection of his play. If the tomb is our total goal, our genuine aim in this existence is to win during its course an experience the largest in quantity and the best in quality. On the other hand, if another life follows this, our wisdom is just the same; because that experience alone, with the favor of God, can constitute our fitness and stock to enter on the future. And yet between the two cases there is this immense difference, not indeed in duty, but in endowment, that in the latter instance we work out our allotted destiny here, in a broader illumination, with grander incentives, and with vaster consolations. A future life, then, really imposes no new duty upon the present, alters no fundamental ingredient in the present, takes away none of the charms and claims of the present, but merely sheds an additional radiance upon the shaded lights already shining here, infuses an additional motive into the stimulants already animating our purposes, distills an additional balm into the comforts which already assuage our sorrows amidst an evanescent scene. The belief that we are to live hereafter in a compensating world explains to us many a sad mystery, strengthens us for many an oppressive burden, consoles us in many a sharp grief. Else we should oftener go mad in the baffling whirl of problems, oftener obey the baser voice, oftener yield to despair. These three are the moral uses, in the present life, of the

2 "Seht, an der morschen Syllogismenkrucke Hinkt Gott in Seine Welt."Lenau's Satire auf einen Professor philosophia.

doctrine of a future life. Outside of these three considerations the doctrine has no ethical meaning for human observance here.

It will be seen, according to the foregoing representation, that the expectation of a future life, instead of being harmful to the interests and attractions of the present, simply casts a cheering and magnifying light upon them. It does not depreciate the realities or nullify the obligations now upon us, but emphasizes them, flinging their lights and shades forward through a mightier vista. Consequently there is no reason for assailing the idea of another life in behalf of the interests of this. Such an opposition between the two states is entirely sophistical, resulting from a profound misinterpretation of the truemoral relations connecting them.

The belief in immortality has been mistakenly attacked, not merely as hostile to our welfare on earth, but likewise as immoral in itself, springing from essential selfishness, and in turn nourishing selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with that central vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identical individual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination of avaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out of sight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makes his poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfish desire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation of self will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face of the solemn and all submerging order of the universe, is the very essence and climax of immorality and irreligiousness. To this assault on the morality of the belief in a future life, whether made in the devout tones of magnanimous sincerity, as by the sublime Schleiermacher, or with the dishonest trickiness of a vulgar declaimer for the rehabilitation of the senses, as by some who might be named, several fair replies may be made. In the first place, the objection begs the question, by assuming that the doctrine is a falsehood, and that its disciples wilfully set up their private wishes against the public truth. Such tremendous postulates cannot be granted. It is seizing the victory before the battle, grasping the conclusion without establishing the premises. For, if there be a future life provided by the Creator, it cannot be sinful or selfish in us to trust in it, to accept it with humble gratitude, and to prepare our souls for it. That, instead of being rebellious arrogance or overweening selfishness, would simply be conforming our thoughts and plans, our desires and labors, to the Divine arrangements. That would be both morality and piety. When one clings by will to a doctrine known to be a falsehood, obstinately suppressing reason to affirm it as a truth, and, in obedience to his personal whims, trying to force all things into conformity with it, he does act as a selfish egotist in full violation of the moral law and the spirit of religion. But a future life we believe to be a fact; and therefore we are, in every respect, justified in gladly expecting it and consecratedly living with reference to it.

Furthermore, admitting it to be an open question, neither proved nor disproved, but poised in equal uncertainty, still, it is not immoral nor undevout deeply to desire and fondly to hope a personal immortality. "The aim of religion," it has been said, "is the annihilation of one's own individuality, the living in the All, the becoming one with the universe." But in such a definition altogether too much is assumed. The aim of religion is only the annihilation of the self will of the individual as opposed to the Will of the Whole, not the losing of one's self in the unconscious wastes of the universe, but the harmonizing of one's self with the Supreme Law of the universe.

An humble, loving, and joyous conformity to the truth constitutes morality and religion. This is not necessarily inconsistent with a personal immortality. Besides, the charge may be retorted. To be identified with the universe is a prouder thought than to be subordinated to it as an infinitesimal individual. It is a far haughtier conceit to fancy one's self an integral part of God's substance than to believe one's self a worshipping pensioner of God's will. The conception, too, is less native to the mind, has been more curiously sought out, and is incomparably more pampering to speculative luxury. If accusations of selfishness and wilfulness are to be hurled upon any modes of preferred faith as to our destiny, this self styled disinterested surrender of our personality to the pantheistic Soul is as obnoxious to them as the common belief.

If a desire for personal immortality be a normal experience in the development of our nature, it cannot be indictable as an offence, but must be recognised as an indication of God's design. Whether the desire is a cold and degraded piece of egotism deserving rebuke and contempt, or a lofty and sympathetic affection worthy of reverence and approval, depends on no intrinsic ingredient of the desire itself, but on the character in which it has its being. One person will be a heartless tyrant, another a loving saint, in his hope of a future life. Shall our love of the dead, our prayers to meet them again, our unfathomed yearnings to know that they still live and are happy, be stigmatized as mean and evil? Regard for others as much as for ourselves prompts the eternal sigh. Nor will Divinity ever condemn the feeling himself has awakened. It is said that Xerxes, gazing once upon his gorgeous army of a million men spread out below hire, sheathed in golden armor, white plumes nodding, purple standards waving, martial horns blowing, wept as he thought that in thirty years the entire host composing that magnificent spectacle would be dead. To have gazed thoughtfully upon such a sight with unmoved sensibilities would imply a much more selfish and hard hearted egotist. So when a lonely philanthropist from some meditative eminence looks down on the human race, if, as the contemplation of their pathetic fading and decay wounds his saddened heart, he heals and cheers it with the faith of a glorious immortality for them all, who shall call him selfish and sinful? To rest contented with the speedy night and the infinite oblivion, wiping off all the unsolved sums from the slate of existence with annihilation's remorseless sponge, that would be the selfishness and the cruelty.

When that sweet asp, death, fastens on our vein of earthly life, we all feel, like the dying queen of Egypt, that we have "immortal longings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinacious instinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rational to conclude that this is a pledge of her indestructible personality, God's impregnable defence reared around the citadel of her being, than to consider it the artificial rampart flung up by an insurgent egotism. In like manner, it is a misrepresentation of the facts to assert the culpable selfishness of the faith in a future life as a demanded reward for fidelity and merit here. No one demands immortality as pay for acquired desert. It is modestly looked for as a free boon from the God who freely gave the present and who has by a thousand symbolic prophecies promised it. Richter says, with great insight, "We desire immortality not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewarded than joy can: it is its own reward." Kant says, "Immortality has been left so uncertain in order that pure freedom of choice, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations." "But," Jean Paul keenly replies, "as we have now discovered this intention, its object is defeated. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so." The anticipation of heaven can hardly make man a selfish calculator of profit; because heaven is no reward for crafty reckoning, but the home of pure and holy souls. Virtue which resists temptation and perseveres in rectitude because it has a sharp eye to an ulterior result is not virtue. No credible doctrine of a future life offers a prize except to those who are just and devout and strenuous in sacred service from free loyalty to the right and the good, spontaneously obeying and loving the higher and better call because it divinely commands their obedience and love. The law of duty is the superior claim of truth and goodness. Virtue, yielding itself filially to this, finds in heaven not remuneration, but a sublimer theatre and an immortal career. Egotistic greed, all mere prudential considerations as determining conditions or forces in the award, are excluded as unclean and inadmissible by the very terms; and the doctrine stands justified on every ground as pure and wholesome before the holiest tribunal of ethics. Surely it is right that goodness should be blessed; but when it continues good only for the sake of being blessed it ceases to be goodness. It is not the belief in immortality, but only the belief in a corrupt doctrine of immortality which can poison the springs of disinterested virtue.

The morality of the doctrine of a future life having thus been defended from the attacks of those who have sought to destroy it in the fancied interests either of the enjoyments of the earth or of the purity of virtue and religion, it now remains to free it from the still more fatal supports which false or superficial religionists have sought to give it by wrenching out of it meanings it never held, by various perverse abuses of it, by monstrous exaggerations of its moral importance to the present. We have seen that the supposition of another life, correctly interpreted, lays no new duty upon man, takes away from him no old duty or privilege, but simply gives to the previously existing facts of the case the intensifying glory and strength of fresh light, motive, and consolation. But many public teachers, not content to treat the subject with this sobriety of reason, instead of presenting the careful conclusions of a conscientious analysis, have sought to strengthen their argument to the feelings by help of prodigious assumptions, assumptions hastily adopted, highly colored, and authoritatively urged. Upon the hypothesis that annihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely to take away from the present all the additional light, incentive, and comfort imparted by the faith in a future existence, but they arbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsically belonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues, and set it in a frame of midnight. Thus, instead of calmly seeking to elicit and recommend truth, they strive, by terrifying the fancy and shocking the prejudices, to make people accept their dogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejecting it. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which have been employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used for the same purpose.

Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton has said, "Without the belief in personal immortality there can be no religion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelings and the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a few years in this world?" 3 Such a statement from such a quarter is astonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person or incumbent upon him do not depend on the duration of his being, but on the character, endowments, and relations of his being. The hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy God, does not destroy man's dependence on God for all his privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness, does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility, while they last. The soul's gratitude, wonder, love, and worship are just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience on earth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and in conscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does not cause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may be doubted if heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerity in such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add to its qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of our capacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injurious error in saying, as he does, "If there be no future life, the moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor." 4 The creative Sovereign of fifty million firmaments of worlds "stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor" because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal! Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations and ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion is fitted for us on the former supposition, it is also on the latter. To any dependent intelligence blessed with our human susceptibilities, reverential love and submission are as obligatory, natural, and becoming on the brink of annihilation as on the verge of immortality.

Rebellious egotism makes all the difference. Truth is truth, whatever it be. Religion is the meek submission of self will to God's will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what the future reserves or excludes for us.

Another sophism almost universally accepted needs to be shown. Man, it is said, has no interest in a future life if not conscious in it of the past. If, on exchange of worlds, man loses his memory, he virtually ceases to exist, and might just as well be annihilated. A future life with perfect oblivion of the present is no life at all for us. Is not this style of thought the most provincial egotism, the utter absence of all generous thought and sympathy unselfishly grasping the absolute boons of being? It is a shallow error, too, even on the grounds of selfishness itself. In any point of view the difference is diametric and immense between a happy being in an eternal present, unconscious of the past, and no being at all. Suppose a man thirty years of age were offered his choice to die this moment, or to live fifty years longer of unalloyed success and happiness, only with a complete forgetfulness of all that has happened up to this moment. He would not hesitate to grasp the gift, however much he regretted the condition.

3 Tracts concerning Christianity, p. 307.

4 Bridgewater Treatise, part ii. ch. 10, sect. 15.

It has often been argued that with the denial of a retributive life beyond the grave all restraints are taken off from the passions, free course given to every impulse. Chateaubriand says, bluntly, "There can be no morality if there be no future state." 5 With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensible recklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to the essential nobleness of his loving, heroic nature, "If you believe in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do, then, as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery, rascality, robbery, and murder." What bible of Moloch had he been studying to form, for the time, so horrid a theory of the happiest life, and to put so degrading an estimate upon human nature? Is man's will a starved wolf only held back by the triple chain of fear of death, Satan, and hell, from tearing forth with ravenous bounds to flesh the fangs of his desires in bleeding virtue and innocence? Does the greatest satisfaction man is capable of here, the highest blessedness he can attain to, consist in drunkenness, gluttony, dishonesty, violence, and impiety? If he had the appetite of a tiger or a vulture, then, thus to wallow in the offal of vice, dive into the carrion of sensuality, abandon himself to revelling in carnivorous crime, might be his instinct and his happiness. But by virtue of his humanity man loves his fellows, enjoys the scenery of nature, takes delight in thought and art, dilates with grand presentiments of glory and eternity, mysteriously yearns after the hidden God. To a reasonable man and no other is to be reasoned with on matters of truth and interest the assumption of this brief season as all, will be a double motive not to hasten and embitter its brevity by folly, excess, and sin. If you are to be dead to morrow, for that very reason, in God's name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate death to day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a chasm of fire, but a high toned conscience of reason and honor, perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneously loathing them.

Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on passion within, but no moral law without; every man is free to do what he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, in his "Treatise on Man's Soule," that "to predicate mortality in the soule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, by removing the ground of all difference in those thinges which are to governe our actions." 6 This style of teaching is a very mischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in the woods of Brazil, and Schiller in the brilliant circles of Weimar, will at last meet the same fate in the dusty grasp of death; yet, while they live, one is an ape, the other is a man. And the differences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense. The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The words of an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than those of the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could be uttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamation on immortality, "If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty.

5 Genie du Christianisme, partie ii. livre vi. chap. 3.

6 Ch. ix. sect. 10.

If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention." 7 What debauched unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Its utter barelessness, as a single illustration may show, is obvious at a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, the relations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material world although they may be lost sight of when time and space are transcended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, the relations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifold grades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for human nature and experience in this life even if men perish in the grave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endure they are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strange slip of the mind, showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are the common prejudice and falsehood on this subject, even so bold and fresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his own philosophy by declaring, "If to morrow I perish utterly, then my fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread corn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations of mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will vanish." 8 Ah, man reveres his fathers and loves to act nobly, not because he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And, though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken from human life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish, as it is said the German crossbill pairs and broods in the dead of winter. The martyr's sacrifice and the voluptuary's indulgence are very different things to day, if they do both cease to morrow. No speed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon and Thersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice and fraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that they will interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutable morality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, and triangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties or compression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds of duty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil, magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery.

Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter the inherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. The most it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to give the great motor nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke of palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral law? Richter reasons as follows: "Suppose a statue besouled for two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob it of one day's life, would you be guilty of murder? One can injure only an immortal." 9 The sophistry appears when we rectify the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an immortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong and injury, for the time, to destroy one day's life of a man whose entire existence was confined to two days, than it would be to take away the same period from the bodily existence of one who immediately thereupon passes into a more exalted and eternal life. To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity, the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt act is the same. This general moral problem has been more accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as follows: "The creatures of a summer's day might be imagined, when

7 OEuvres Completes, tome xiii.: Immortalite de l'Ame.

8 Sermons of Theism, Sermon VII.

9 Werke, band xxxiii. s. 240.

they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of his government; for these are to be the law of their season of life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from the greater stake."

Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in human society cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedly weakened, its basis variously altered, but as a confessed sovereign principle it cannot be expelled. The denial of the freedom of the will theoretically explodes it; but social custom, law, and opinion will enforce it still. Make man a mere dissoluble mixture of carbon and magnetism, yet so long as he can distinguish right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and, unsophisticated by dialectics, can follow either of opposite courses of action, the moral law exists and exerts its sway.

It has been asked, "If the incendiary be, like the fire he kindles, a result of material combinations, shall he not be treated in the same way?" 10 We should reply thus: No matter what man springs from or consists of, if he has moral ideas, performs moral actions, and is susceptible of moral motives, then he is morally responsible: for all practical and disciplinary purposes he is wholly removed from the categories of physical science.

Another pernicious misrepresentation of the fair consequences of the denial of a life hereafter is shown in the frequent declaration that then there would be no motive to any thing good and great. The incentives which animate men to strenuous services, perilous virtues, disinterested enterprises, spiritual culture, would cease to operate. The essential life of all moral motives would be killed. This view is to be met by a broad and indignant denial based on an appeal to human consciousness and to the reason of the thing. Every man knows by experience that there are a multitude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with future reward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do good even with self sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman risks his life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, is the hope of heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offered bribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is the fear of hell all that animates him? A million such decisive specifications might be made. The renowned sentence of Cicero, "Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerret ad mortem," 11 is effective eloquence; but it is a baseless libel against humanity and the truth. In every moment of supreme nobleness and sacrifice personality vanishes. Thousands of patriots, philosophers, saints, have been glad to die for the freedom of native land, the cause of truth, the welfare of fellow men, without a taint of selfish reward touching their wills. Are there not souls "To whom dishonor's shadow is a substance More terrible than death here and hereafter"?

He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences of it eternally. Is there no motive for the

10 Some discussion of this general subject is to be found in Schaller, Leib nod Seele. kap. 5: Die Consequentzen des Materialismus. And in Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik.

11 Tuscul. Quast. lib. i. cap. 15.

preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever, shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating poisons?

If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot, the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike, who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like the fool and the felon? Shall heaven be held before man simply as a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving abyss. But some one may say, "If I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?" It advantageth you every thing until you are dead, although there be nothing afterwards. As long as you live, is it not glory and reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This is sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law. And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worth our affection, let great Shakspeare advance, with his matchless depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing, in tones of cordial solidity,

"This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

What though Decay's shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in the valleys of ignoble fear and selfishness, leaving all the clear road lines of moral truth and practical virtue and heroic consecration still high and bright on the table land of a worthy life; and every honorable soul, calmly confronting its fate, will cry, despite the worst, "The pathway of my duty lies in sunlight; And I would tread it with as firm a step, Though it should terminate in cold oblivion, As if Elysian pleasures at its Close Gleam'd palpable to sight as things of earth."

If a captain knew that his ship would never reach her port, would he therefore neglect his functions, be slovenly and careless, permit insubordination and drunkenness among the crew, let the broad pennon draggle in filthy rents, the cordage become tangled and stiff, the planks be covered with dirt, and the guns be grimed with rust? No: all generous hearts would condemn that. He would keep every inch of the deck scoured, every piece of metal polished like a mirror, the sails set full and clean, and, with shining muzzles out, ropes hauled taut in their blocks, and every man at his post, he would sweep towards the reef, and go down into the sea firing a farewell salute of honor to the sun, his flag flying above him as he sunk.

The dogmatic assertors of a future life, in a partisan spirit set upon making out the most impressive case in its behalf, have been guilty of painting frightful caricatures of the true nature and significance of the opposite conclusion. Instead of saying, "If such a thing be fated, why, then, it must be right, God's will be done," they frantically rebel against any such admission, and declare that it would make God a liar and a fiend, man a "magnetic mockery," and life a hellish taunt. This, however unconscious it may be to its authors, is blasphemous egotism. One of the tenderest, devoutest, richest, writers of the century has unflinchingly affirmed that if man who trusted that love was the final law of creation, although nature, her claws and teeth red with raven, shrieked against his creed be left to be blown about the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills,

"No more! a monster, then, a dream, A discord; dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match'd with Him!"

Epictetus says, "When death overtakes me, it is enough if I can stretch out my hands to God, and say, 'The opportunities which thou hast given me of comprehending and following thy government, I have not neglected. I thank thee that thou hast brought me into being. I am satisfied with the time I have enjoyed the things thou hast given me. Receive them again, and assign them to whatever place thou wilt.'" 12 Surely the pious heathen here speaks more worthily than the presumptuous Christian! How much fitter would it be, granting that death is the end all, to revise our interpretation, look at the subject from the stand point of universal order, not from this opinionative narrowness, and see if it be not susceptible of a benignant meaning, worthy of grateful acceptance by the humble mind of piety and the dispassionate spirit of science! Yea, let God and his providence stand justified, though man prove to have been egregiously mistaken.

"Though He smite me, yet will I praise Him; though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."

To return into the state we were in before we were created is not to suffer any evil: it is to be absolutely free from all evil. It is but the more perfect playing of that part, of which every sound sleep is a rehearsal. The thought of it is mournful to the enjoying soul, but not terrific; and even the mournfulness ceases in the realization. He uttered a piece of cruel madness who said, "Hell is more bearable than nothingness." Is it worse to have nothing than it is to have infinite torture? Milton asks,

"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being?"

Every creature that exists, if full of pain, would snatch at the boon of ceasing to be. To be blessed is a good; to be wretched is an evil; not to be is neither a good nor an evil, but simply

12 Dissert., lib. iv. cap. x. sect. 2.

nothing. If such be our necessary fate, let us accept it with a harmonized mind, not entertaining fear nor yielding to sadness. Why should we shudder or grieve? Every time we slumber, we try on the dress which, when we die, we shall wear easily forever.

Not satisfied to let the result rest in this somewhat sad but peaceful aspect, it is quite customary to give it a turn and hue of ghastly horribleness, by casting over it the dyspeptic dreams, injecting it with the lurid lights and shades, of a morbid and wilful fancy. The most loathsome and inexcusable instance in point is the "Vision of Annihilation" depicted by the vermicular, infested imagination of the great Teutonic phantasist while yet writhing under the sanguinary fumes of some horrid attack of nightmare. Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad executioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by each unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as a corpse bleeds when its murderer approaches." Pah! Out upon this execrable retching of a nauseated fancy! What good is there in the baseless conceit and gratuitous disgust of saying, "The next world is in the grave, betwixt the teeth of the worm"? In the case supposed, the truth is merely that there is no next world anywhere; not that all the horrors of hell are scooped together into the grave, and there multiplied by others direr yet and unknown before. Man's blended duty and interest, in such a case, are to try to see the interior beauty and essential kindness of his fate, to adorn it and embrace it, fomenting his resignation with the sweet lotions of faith and peace, not exasperating his wounds with the angry pungents of suspicion, alarm, and complaint. At the worst, amidst all our personal disappointments, losses, and decay, "the view of the great universal whole of nature," as Humboldt says, "is reassuring and consolatory." If the boon of a future immortality be not ours, therefore to scorn the gift of the present life, is to act not like a wise man, who with grateful piety makes the best of what is given, but like a spoiled child, who, if he cannot have both his orange and his gingerbread, pettishly flings his gingerbread in the mud.

The future life, outside of the realm of faith, to an earnest and independent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question, lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, and there is room for doubt. The wavering evidences in some moods preponderate on that side, in other moods on this side. Meanwhile it is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do is to cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a noble character, lead a pure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and God, and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue with reverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms. Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert's dying flower, "Thanks to day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and earth and sky, for all the gifts from men and God which have made my little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thine azure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring tide, roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shall rise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I now fall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh." Surely the mournful nobility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much to the selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in the Middle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columns and doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by a hunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced in thousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, "I blessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of hell!"

Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is an achievement whose nobleness outweighs its sorrow, even if the gazer foresee his own destruction.

It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the unwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christian writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to do with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on the length, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Make the life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; make the life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has the psychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality may enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; it does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and contract those motives; it does not take them away.

Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not knowledge that the spirit is without terminus or rest. The faithful truth hunter, in dying, finds not a covert, but a better trail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged from prejudice and self will. With God we are not to prescribe conditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must die with the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious and dangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view is obviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophical thinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in the individual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole. This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God to a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law with disinterested conformity.

The influence of the doctrine of reward and punishment in a future state, as a working motive for the observance of the moral law, is enormously overestimated. The influence, as such a motive, of the public opinion of mankind, with the legal and social sanctions, is enormously underestimated. And the authority of a personal perception of right is also most unbecomingly depreciated. UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of God, not as arbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in a book, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works. The true basis of morality is universal order. The true end of morality is life, the sum of moral laws being identical with the sum of the conditions in accordance with which the fruition of the functions of life can be secured with nearest approach to perfectness, perpetuity, and universality. The true sanctions of morality are the manifold forms in which consciousness of life is heightened by harmony with universal order or lowered by discord with it. The true law of moral sacrifice or resistance to temptation is misrepresented by the common doctrine of heaven and hell, which makes it consist in the renunciation of a present good for the clutching of a future good, the voluntary suffering of a small present evil to avoid the involuntary suffering of an immense future evil. The true law of moral sacrifice is deeper, purer, more comprehensive, than that. It expresses our duty, in accordance with the requirements of universal order, to subordinate the gratification of any part of our being to that of the whole of our being, to forego the good of any portion of our life in deference to that of all our life, to renounce any happiness of the individual which conflicts with the welfare of the race, to hold the spiritual atom in absolute abeyance to the spiritual universe, to sink self in God. If a man believe in no future life, is he thereby absolved from the moral law? The kind and number of his duties remain as before: only the apparent grandeur of their scale and motives is diminished. The two halves of morality are the co ordination of separate interests in universal order, and the loyalty of the parts to the wholes. The desire to remove the obligations and sanctions of the moral law from their intrinsic supports, and posit them on the fictitious pedestals of a forensic heaven and hell, reveals incompetency of thought and vulgarity of sentiment in him who does it, and is a procedure not less perilous than unwarranted. If the creation be conceived as a machine, it is a machine self regulating in all its parts by the immanent presence of its Maker.

When we die, may the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter of Christ, be our confessor; the last inhaled breath our cup of absolution; the tears of some dear friend our extreme unction; no complaint for past trials, but a grateful acknowledgment for all blessings, our parting word. And then, resigning ourselves to the universal Father, assured that whatever ought to be, and is best to be, will be, either absolute oblivion shall be welcome, or we will go forward to new destinies, whether with preserved identity or with transformed consciousness and powers being indifferent to us, since the will of God is done. In the mean time, until that critical pass and all decisive hour, as Milnes says:

"We all must patient stand, Like statues on appointed pedestals: Yet we may choose since choice is given to shun Servile contentment or ignoble fear In the expression of our attitude; And with far straining eyes, and hands upcast, And feet half raised, declare our painful state, Yearning for wings to reach the fields of truth, Mourning for wisdom, panting to be free."

PART SIXTH SUPPLEMENTARY.

[FIFTEEN YEARS LATER]

CHAPTER I.

THE END OF THE WORLD.

WE read in the New Testament that the heavens and the earth are reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, when they shall be burned up, and all be made new. It is said that the elements shall melt with ferment heat, the stars fall, and the sky pass away like a scroll that is rolled together. On these and similar passages is based the belief of Christendom in the destined destruction of the world by fire and in the scenic judgment of the dead and the living gathered before the visible tribunal of Christ. This belief was once general and intense. It is still common, though more vague and feeble than formerly. In whatever degree it is held, it is a doctrine of terror. We hope by tracing its origin, and showing how mistaken it is, to help dispel its sway, free men from the further oppression of its fearfulness, and put in its place the just and wholesome authority of the truth. The true doctrine of the divine government of the world, the correct explanation of the course and sequel of history, must be more honorable to God, more useful to men, of better working and omen in the life of society, than any error can be. Let us then, as far as we are able, displace by the truth the errors prevalent around us in regard to the end of the world and the day of judgment.

It will help us in our proposed investigation, if we first notice that the ecclesiastical doctrine as to an impending destruction of the world is not solitary, but has prototypes and parallels in the faiths of other nations and ages. Almost every people, every tribe, has its cosmogony or theory of the creation, in which there are accounts, more or less rude or refined, general or minute, of the supposed beginning and of the imagined end of nature. All early literatures from the philosophic treatises of the Hindus to the oral traditions of the Polynesians are found to contain either sublime dreams or obscure prophecies or awful pictures of the final doom and destruction of earth and man. The Hebrew symbols and the Christian beliefs in relation to this subject therefore stand not alone, but in connection with a multitude of others, each one plainly reflecting the degree of knowledge and stage of development attained by the minds which originated it. Before proceeding to examine the familiar doctrine so enveloped in our prejudices, a brief examination of some kindred doctrines, less familiar to us and quite detached from our prejudices, will be of service.

The sacred books of the Hindus describe certain enormous periods of time in which the universe successively begins and ends, springs into being and sinks into nothing. These periods are called kalpas, and each one covers a duration of thousands of millions of years. Each kalpa of creation is called a day of Brahma; each kalpa of destruction, a night of Brahma. The belief is that Brahma, waking from the slumber of his self absorbed solitude, feels his loneliness, and his thoughts and emotions go forth in creative forms, composing the immense scheme of worlds and creatures. These play their parts, and run their courses, until the vast day of Brahma is completed; when he closes his eyes, and falls to rest, while the whole system of finite things returns to the silence and darkness of its aboriginal unity, and remains there in invisible annihilation through the stupendous night that precedes the reawaking of the slumbering Godhead and the appearance of the creation once more.

A little reflection makes the origin of this imagery and belief clear. Each night, as the darkness comes down, and the outer world disappears, man falls asleep, and, so far as he is consciously concerned, every thing is destroyed. In his unconsciousness, everything ceases to be. The light dawns again, he awakes, and his reopened senses create anew the busy frame and phenomena of nature. Transfer this experience from man to God; consider it not as abstract and apparent, but as concrete and real, and you have the Hindu doctrine of the kalpa. When we sleep, to us all things are destroyed; and when we awake, to us they reappear. When God sleeps, all things in themselves really end; and when he wakes, they begin anew to be. The visible and experimental phenomena of day and night, sleeping and waking, are universalized, and attributed to God, It is a poetic process of thought, natural enough to a rich minded, simple people, but wholly illegitimate as a logical ground of belief, But being stated in books supposed to be infallibly inspired, and in the absence of critical tests for the discrimination of sound from unsound thought, it was implicitly accepted by multitudes.

Closely allied to the foregoing doctrine, yet in several particulars strikingly different from it, and evidently quite independent in its origin, was the Great Year of the Stoics, or the alternative blotting out and restoration of all things. This school of philosophers conceived of God as a pure artistic force or seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in the evolution of the kosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms into fire, and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagration destroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible God alone in his pure essence again. The artistic germ or seed force then begins, under its laws of intrinsic necessity, to go once more through the same process to the same end.

The rise of this imagery and belief is not so obvious as in the last instance, but it is equally discoverable and intelligible. Every animal, every flower, every plant, begins from its proper specific germ or force, goes through a fixed series of growths and changes, and relapses into its prime elements, and another and another follow after it in the same order. The seasons come and go, and come again and go again, Every planet repeats its revolutions over and over. Wherever we look, this repetition of identical processes greets our vision. Now, by imaginative association universalize this repetition of the course of phenomena as seen in the parts, and take it up and apply it to the whole creation, and you have the doctrine in hand.

It is a poetic process of thought not scientific or philosophic, and without claim to belief; yet, in the absence of scientific data and standards, it might easily win acceptance on authority.

The Scandinavians, also, have transmitted to us, in their sacred books, descriptions of their belief in the approaching end of the world, descriptions rude, wild, terrible, not without elements of appalling grandeur. They foretell a day called Ragnarok, or the Twilight of the gods, when all the powers of good and evil shall join in battle, and the whole present system of things perish in a scene of unutterable strife and dismay. The Eddas were composed in an ignorant but deeply poetic and fertile age, when all the mythological elements of mind were in full action. Their authors looking within, on their own passions, and without, on the natural scenery around them, conscious of order and disorder, love and hate, virtue and crime, beholding phenomena of beauty and horror, sun and stars, night and tempest, winter and summer, icebergs and volcanoes, placid moonlight and blinding mist, assisting friends and battling foes, personified everything as a demon or a divinity. Asgard, above the blue firmament, was the bright home of the gods, the Asir. Helheim, beneath the rocky earth and the frozen ocean, was the dark and foul abode of the bad spirits, the Jotuns. Everywhere in nature, fog and fire, fertility and barrenness, were in conflict; everywhere in society, law and crime were contending. In the moon followed by a drifting cloud, they saw a goddess chased by a wolf. The strife goes on waxing, and must sooner or later reach a climax. Each side enlists its allies, until all are ranged in opposition, from Jormungandur, the serpent of the deep, to Heindall, the warder of the rainbow, gods and brave men there, demons, traitors, and cowards here. Then sounds the horn of battle, and the last day dawns in fire and splendor from the sky, in fog and venom from the abyss. Flame devours the earth. For the most part, the combatants mutually slay each other. Only Gimli, the high, safe heaven of All Father, remains as a refuge for the survivors and the beginning of a new and fairer world.

The natural history of this mythological mess is clear enough. It arises from the poetic embodiment and personification of phenomena, the grouping together of all evil and of all good, then imaginatively universalizing the conflict, and carrying it out in idea to its inevitable ultimatum. The process of thought was obviously natural in its ground, but fictitious in its result. Yet in a period when no sharp distinction was drawn between fancy and fact, song and science, but an indiscriminate faith was often yielded to both, even such a picturesque medley as this might be held as religious truth.

The Zarathustrian or Persian scheme of a general judgment of men and of the world in some respects resembles the systems already set forth, in other respects more closely approaches that Christian doctrine partially borrowed from it, and which is hereafter to be noticed. Ahura Mazda, the God of light and truth, creates the world full of all sorts of blessings. His adversary, Angra Mainyus, the author of darkness and falsehood, seeks to counteract and destroy the works of Ahura Mazda by means of all sorts of correspondent evils and woes. When Ahura Mazda creates the race of men happy and immortal, Angra Mainyus, the old serpent, full of corruption and destruction, steals in, seduces them from their allegiance, and brings misery and death on them, and then leads their souls to his dark abode. The whole creation is supposed to be crowded with good spirits, the angels of Ahura Mazda,

seeking to carry out his beneficent designs; and also with evil spirits, the ministers of Angra Mainyus, plotting to make men wicked, and to pervert and poison every blessing with an answering curse. Light is the symbol of God, darkness the symbol of his Antagonist. Under these hostile banners are ranged all living creatures, all created objects. For long periods this dreadful contention rages, involving everything below in its fluctuations. But at last Ahura Mazda subdues Angra Mainyus, overturns all the mischief he has done, by means of a great deliverer whom he has sent among men to instruct and redeem them raises the dead, purifies the world with fire, and, after properly punishing the guilty, restores all nature to its original paradisal condition, free from pain and death.

In the primitive state of mankind, when the germs of this religion were conceived, when men dwelt in ignorance, exposure, and fear, they naturally shuddered at darkness as a supernatural enemy, and worshipped light as a supernatural friend. That became the emblem or personification of the Devil, this the emblem or personification of God. They grouped all evils with that, all goods with this.

Imaginatively associating all light and darkness, all blessing and bale, respectively with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyus, they universalized the fragmentary embodiments and oppositions of these into one great battle; and under the impulse of worshipping faith and hope, carried it to its crisis in the final victory of the good. Plainly, it is mere poetry injected a little with a later speculative element, and dealing in mythological fashion chiefly with the phenomena of nature as related to the experience of man. No one now can accept it literally.

This survey of the various heathen myths of the end of the world has prepared us, in some degree, to consider the corresponding view held by the Jews, and more completely developed by the Christian successors to the Jewish heritage of thought and feeling.

The Hebrews believed themselves to be exclusively the chosen people of God, who directly ruled over them himself by a theocratic government represented in their patriarchs, law givers, prophets, and kings. Jehovah was the only true God; they were his only pure and accepted worshippers, sharply distinguished from the whole idolatrous world. The heathen nations, uncircumcised adorers of vain idols or of demons, were by consequence enemies both of the true God and of his servants. This contrast and hostility they even carried over into the unseen world, and imagined that each nation had its own guardian angel in the Court of Jehovah in heaven, who contended there for its interests; their own national guardian, the angel Michael, being more powerful and nearer to the throne than any other one. In the calamities that fell on them, they recognized the vengeance of Jehovah for the violation of his commands. In their victories, their deliverances, their great blessings, especially in their rescue from Egypt, and in the many miracles which they believed to have accompanied that great passage, they saw the signal superiority of their God over every other god, and the proofs of his particular providence over them in distinct preference to all other peoples. He had, as they piously believed, made a special covenant with Abraham, and set apart his posterity as a sacred family, exclusively intrusted with the divine law, and commissioned to subdue and govern all the other families of the earth. When this proud and intensely cherished faith was baffled of fulfillment, they never dreamed of abandoning it.

They only supposed its triumphant execution postponed, as a penalty for their sins, and looked forward with redoubled ardor to a better time when their hopes should break into fruition, their exile be ended, their captivity appear as a dream, Jerusalem be the central gem of the world, and the anointed ruler wield his sceptre over all mankind.

But misfortunes and woes were heaped on them. Their city was sacked, their temple desecrated, their people dragged into foreign slavery, forbidden to celebrate the rites of their religion, slaughtered by wholesale. Many times, during the two centuries before and the first century after Christ, did they suffer these terrible sorrows. Their hatred and scorn of their heathen persecutors; their faith in their own incomparable destiny; their expectation of the speedy appearance of an anointed deliverer, raised up by Jehovah to avenge them and vindicate their trust, all became the more fervent and profound the longer the delay. Under these circumstances grew up the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, as it is seen in that Apocalyptic literature represented by the Book of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, the Book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Fourth Book of Esdras, and similar documents.

The Jews were remarkably free from that habit of mind which led almost all the other nations to personify the most startling phenomena of nature as living beings, which created fetiches of stocks and stones and animals; saw a god in every wind, season, star, and cloud. The Semitic mind and literature were more sober, rational, and monotheistic. The place occupied in the thoughts of other peoples by the phenomena of nature was held in the thoughts of the Jews by political phenomena, by ritual, legal, and military relations. And the poetic action of fancy, the mythological creativeness and superstitious feeling which other people exercised on the objects and changes of nature, the Jews exercised on the phenomena of their own national history. The burning central point of their polity and belief and imagination was the conviction of their own national consecration as the exclusive people of God, meant to conquer, teach, and rule all the infidel nations; that Jehovah was literally their invisible King, represented in their chief ruler; that every great triumph or disaster was a signal Day of the Lord, a special Coming of Jehovah to reward or punish his people. During their repeated bondages under the Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, their feeling of the antagonism between themselves and the other people increased. From the time of the Babylonish captivity the Persian doctrine of good and evil spirits had infiltrated into their belief; and they adopted the notion of Angra Mainyus, and developed it (with certain modifications) into their conception of Satan. Then, in their faith, the war of Jews and Gentiles spread into the invisible world, and took up on its opposite sides the good and the fallen angels. And, finally, the idea of their Messiah became the centre of a battle and a judgment in which all the generations of the dead as well as of the living were to have a part; and which should culminate in the overthrow of evil, the subjection of the heathen, the assignment of the righteous to a paradisal reign, and of the wicked to a doom typified by the submersion of Sodom and Gomorrah in fiery brimstone.

How plainly this doctrine was the result of the same poetic process of thought with the other schemes already depicted! Only they were developed on the basis of natural phenomena; this, on the basis of political phenomena. It is simply the imaginative universalization of the struggle between Jew and Gentile, and the carrying of it to its crisis and sequel. And when inexplicable delays and the accumulation of obstacles made the realization of the expected result amidst the conditions of the present world seem ever more and more hopeless, the growing and assimilative action of faith and fancy expanded the scene, and transferred it to a transmundane state, involving the destruction of the heavens and earth and their replacement with a new creation.