66 Can every leaf a teeming world contain, Can every globule gird a countless race,- Life crowd a grain,—from air's vast realms effaced? An honest historical criticism forces us, however reluctantly, to loose our hold from the various supposed localities of the soul's destination, which have pleased the fancies and won the assent of mankind in earlier times. But it cannot touch the simple and cardinal fact of an immortal life for man. It merely forces us to acknowledge that while the fact stands clear and authoritative to instinct, reason, and faith, yet the how, and the where, and all such problems, are wrapped in unfathomable mystery. We are to obey and hope, not dissect and dogmatize. However the fantastic dreams of the imagination and the subtle speculations of the intellect may shift from time to time, and be routed and vanish, the deep yearning of the heart remains the same, the divine polarity of the reason changes not, and men will never cease fondly to believe that although they cannot tell where heaven is, yet surely there is a heaven reserved for them somewhere within the sheltering embrace of God's infinite providence. We may not say of that kingdom, Lo, here! or Lo, there! but it is wherever God's approving presence extends; and is that not wherever the pure in heart are found?40 Let every elysian clime the breezes blow over, every magic isle the waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy has devised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet that hangs afar on the neck of night, be disenchanted of their imaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, within the relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze of fleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MIND would not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still the unquenchable instincts of the HEART would retain, uninjured, the great expectation of ANOTHER WORLD, although no traveller returns from its voiceless bourne to tell in what local direction it lies, no voyager comes back from its mystic port to describe its latitude and longitude on the chartless infinite of space. Turn we now from the lateral distribution of notions as to a future life, to their lineal development. We have seen that the development of belief as to the locality of our future destination has been a chase of places, over the earth, under the earth, through the sky, as fast as the unknown was brought within the known, until it has stopped at the verge of the unknowable. There we stand, confessing our inability to fix the scene. The doctrine of the conditions and contents of the future life has followed the same course as that of its locality. In the first stage of belief the future life consists of the gross conditions and materials of the known present reflected, under the impulse of 40 Chalmers, Sermon, Heaven a Character and not a Locality. the senses, into the unknown future. This style of faith prevailed for a vast period, and is not yet obsolete. When the King of Dahomey has done a great feat, he kills a man to carry the tidings to the ghost of his royal father. When he dies himself, a host are killed, that he may enter Deadland with a becoming cortege. His wives also are slain, or commit suicide, that they may rejoin him. The second stage of belief is reached when, under the ethical impulse, only certain refined elements of the present, discriminated portions of the products of reason, imagination and sentiment, are reflected into the future, and accepted as the facts of the life there. Critical processes, applied to thought and faith, cause the rejection of much that was received. That alone which answers to our wants, and has coherence, continues to be held as truth. An example is afforded by Augustine in his essay, De Libero Arbitrio. He argues that the wicked are kept in being on the outskirts of the material universe; partly wretched, partly happy; too bad for heaven, too good for annihilation; incapable of attaining the summit of their beatified destiny. Not the crude reflection of the present state, but a criticized and purged portion of the results of speculation on it, is thrown forward, and composes the doctrine of the future life. This is the condition of faith in which civilized mankind, for the most part, now are. The third stage of development is that wherein the thinker perceives that it is illegitimate to reflect into the future any of the realities or relations of the present, and then to regard them as the truths of the experience which awaits him after death. His experience here is the resultant of his faculties as related to the universe. Destroy his organization, and what follows? One will say, "Nonentity." Another, more wise and modest, will say, "Something necessarily unknown as yet." We have no better right to project into the ideal space of futurity the ingredients of our thoughts than we have to project there the objects of our senses. Bunsen, whose thought and scholarship included pretty much all the knowledge of mankind, represents this stage of faith. He stands on the religious side of the movement of Science, believing in immortality without defining it. Comte stands on the positivist side, blankly denying all objective immortality. These two represent the results in which, advancing from its opposite sides, the logical development of the doctrine of a future life ends. With Comte, atheistic dogmatism crushing every eternal hope; with Bunsen, Christian faith pointing the child to an eternal home in the Father. For all but fetichistic minds the only choice lies between these two. The organic evolution of the doctrine of a life to come is, therefore, a process of faith beginning with the crude transference of the elements of the present into the future, continuing with refined modifications of that transference, ending with an entire cessation of it as inapplicable and incompetent. Having examined all the historic, experimental, and scientific data within our reach, we pause on the edge of the PART which we know, and wait, with serene trust, though with bowed head and silent lip, before the UNKNOWABLE WHOLE. CHAPTER VIII. CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE. Ir the first men were conscious spirits who, at the command of God, dropped from the skies into organic forms of matter, or who were created here on an exalted plane of insight and communion far above any thing now experienced by us, then the destination of man to a life after death may originally have been a fact of direct knowledge, universally seen and grasped without any obscuring peradventure. From that state it gradually declined into dubious dimness as successive generations grew sinful, sensual, hardened, immersed and bound in affairs of passion and earth. It became remoter, assumed a questionable aspect, gave rise to discussions and doubts, and here and there to positive disbelief and open denial. Thus, beginning as a clear reality within the vision of all, it sank into a matter of uncertain debate among individuals. But if the first men were called up into being from the earth, by the creative energy of God, as the distinct climax of the other species, then the early generations of our race, during the long ages of their wild and slowly-ameliorating state, were totally ignorant of any conscious sequel to the fate seemingly closed in death. They were too animal and rude yet to conceive a spiritual existence outside of the flesh and the earth. Among the accumulating trophies of their progressive intellectual conquests hung up by mankind in the historic hall of experience, this marvellous achievement is one of the sublimest. What a day was that for all humanity forever after, when for the first time, on some climbing brain, dawned from the great Sun of the spirit-world the idea of a personal immortality! It was announced. It dawned separately wherever there were prepared persons. It spread from soul to soul, and became the common faith of the world. Still, among every people there were pertinacious individuals, who swore not by the judge and went not with the multitude, persons of less credulous hearts and more skeptical faculties, who demurred at the great doctrine, challenged it in many particulars, gainsaid it on various grounds, disbelieved it from different motives, and fought it with numerous weapons. Whichever of the foregoing suppositions be adopted,—that the doctrine of a future life subsided from universal acceptance into party contention, or that it arose at length from personal perception and authority into common credit,-the fact remains equally prominent and interesting that throughout the traceable history of human opinion there is a line of dissenters who have thought death the finality of man, and the next world an illusion. The history of this special department of thought opens a wide and fertile subject. To gain a comprehensive survey of its boundaries and a compact epitome of its contents, it will be well to consider it in these two lights and divisions, all the time trying to see, step by step, what justice, and what injustice, is done: first, the dominant motive forces animating the disbelievers; secondly, the methods and materials they have employed. At first thought it would appear difficult to tell what impulses could move persons to undertake, as many constantly have undertaken, a crusade against a faith so dear to man, so ennobling to his nature. Peruse the pages of philosophical history with careful reflection, and the mystery is scattered, and various groups of disbelievers stand revealed, with earnest voices and gestures assailing the doctrine of a future life.' One company, having their representatives in every age, reject it as a protest in behalf of the right of private judgment against the tyranny of authority. The doctrine has been inculcated by priesthoods, embodied in sacred books, and wrought into the organic social life of states; and acceptance of it has been commanded as a duty, and expected as a decent and respectable thing. To deny it has required courage, implied independent opinions, and conferred singularity. To cast off the yoke of tradition, undermine the basis of power supporting a galling religious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in a generation of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely fail to exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of the present time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living core of the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God and futurity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign over them and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretended interests of a future life. The true way to secure the real desideratum corruptly indicated in this movement is not by denying the reality of a future life, but by removing the adjustment of its conditions and the administration of its rewards and penalties out of the hands of every clique of priests and rulers. A righteously and benignly ordered immortality, based in truth and adjudicated by the sole sovereignty of God, is no engine of oppression, though a doctrine of heaven and hell irresponsibly managed by an Orphic association, the guardians of a Delphic tripod, the owners of a secret confessional, or the interpreters of an exclusive creed, may be. In a matter of such grave importance, that searching and decisive discrimina-tion, so rare when the passions get enlisted, is especially needed. Because a doctrine is abused by selfish tyrants is no reason for supposing the doctrine itself either false or injurious. No little injury has been done to the common faith in a future life, 1 J. A. Luther, Recensetur numerus eorum, qui immortalitatem inficiati sunt. 2 Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii, kap. iv.: Der philosophische Radicalismus. great disbelief has been provoked unwittingly, by writers who have sought to magnify the importance of revealed religion at the expense of natural religion. Many such persons have labored to show that all the scientific, philosophical, and moral arguments for immortality are worthless, the teachings and resurrection of Christ, the revealed word of God, alone possessing any validity to establish that great truth. An accomplished author says, in a recent work, "The immortality of the soul cannot be proved without the aid of revelation." Bishop Courtenay published, a few years since, a most deliberate and unrelenting attack upon the arguments for the deathlessness of the soul, seeking with persevering remorselessness to demolish every one of them, and to prove that man totally perishes, but will be restored to life at the second coming of Christ. There can scarcely be a question that such statements usually awaken and confirm a deep skepticism as to a future life, instead of enhancing a grateful estimate of the gospel. If man is once annihilated, it is hardly credible that he will be identically restored. Such a stupendous and arbitrary miracle clashes with the continuity of the universe, and staggers rather than steadies faith. We should beg such volunteers-however sincere and good their intentions-to withhold the impoverishing gift of their service. And when kindred reasonings are advanced by such men as the unbelieving Hume, we feel tempted to say, in the language of a distinguished divine speaking on this very point, "Ah, gentlemen, we understand you: you belong to the sappers and miners in the army of the aliens!" Another party of disbelievers have repudiated the whole conception of a future state as a protest against the nonsense and cruelty associated with it in the prevailing superstitions and dogmatisms of their time. From the beginning of history in most nations, the details of another existence and its conditions have been furnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawless fancies of poets, the fine-spinning brains of metaphysicians, and the cold-blooded calculations or hot-headed zeal of sectarian leaders. Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around the central germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While the common throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculous and revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt, satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. So we find it was in Greece. The fables about the under-world-the ferriage over the Styx, poor Tantalus so torturingly mocked, the daughters of Danaus drawing water in sieves—all were accredited by the general crowd on one extreme. On the other extreme the whole scheme, root and branch, Bowen, Metaphysical and Ethical Science, part ii. ch. ix. 4 The Future States: Their Evidences and Nature considered on Principles Physical, Moral, and Scriptural, with the Design of Showing the Value of the Gospel Revelation. Plutarch, De Superstitione. The reality of the popular credulity and terror in later Reme clearly appears from the fact that Marcus Aurelius had a law passed condemning to banishment "those who do any thing through which men's excitable minds are alarmed by a superstitious fear |