heritance is a stupendous freedom. The narrow limits that caged it here are gone, and it lives in an ethereal sphere with no, impeding bounds. Leaving its natal threshold of earth and the lazar-house of time, its home is immensity, and its lease is eternity. Even in our present state, to a true thinker there is no ascent or descent or terminating wall in space, but equal motion illimitably in all directions; and no absolute standard of duration, only a relative and variable one from the insect of an hour, to man, to an archangel, to that incomprehensible Being whose shortest moments are too vast to be noted by the awful nebula of the Hour-Glass, although its rushing sands are systems of worlds. The soul emerges from earthly bondage emancipated into eternity, while "The ages sweep around him with their wings, Like anger'd cagles cheated of their prey." We have now sufficient premonitions and examples of this wondrous enlargement to base a rational belief on. What hems us in when we think, feel, and imagine? And what is the heaven that shall dawn for us beyond the veil of death's domain but the realm of Thought, the sphere of the spirit's unhampered powers? There are often vouchsafed to us here hours of outsoaring emotion and conception which make the enclosures in which the astronomer loiters seem narrow. "His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty traveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary." There are moods of spiritual expansion and infinite longing that illustrate the train of thought so well expressed in the following lines:— "Even as the dupe in tales Arabian Dipp'd but his brow beneath the beaker's brim, And in that instant all the life of man From youth to age roll'd its slow years on him, The Immaterial, for the things earth glasses, Then we realize that the spiritual world does not form some now unseen and distant region of the visible creation, but that the astronomic universe is a speck lying in the invisible bosom of the spiritual world. "Space is an attribute of God in which all matter is laid, and other attributes he may have which are the home of mind and soul." We suppose the difference between the present embodied and the future disembodied 39 Bulwer, King Arthur, book xi. state to be so vast that the conditions of the latter cannot be intelligibly illustrated by the analogies of the former. It is not to be expected that the human soul will ever be absolutely independent of time and space, literally transcending them, but only relatively so as compared with its earthly predicament. For, as an able thinker and writer-a philosopher of the Swedenborgian school, too-has said, "The conception of a mind absolutely sundered from all connection with space is a mere pretence which words necessarily repudiate." The soul-on the hypothesis that there is a soul-is now in the body. Evidently, on leaving the body, it must either be nowhere,—and that is annihilation, which the vehement totality of our thought denies; or everywhere,—and that implies infinity, the loss of finite being in boundless Deity, a conclusion which we know of nothing to warrant; or somewhere,— and that predicates a surviving individuality related to surrounding externals, which is the prophesied and satisfactory result in which we rest in faith, humbly confessing our ignorance as to all the minutia. It does not necessarily follow from this view, however, that the soul is limited to a fixed region in space. It may have the freedom of the universe. More wonders, and sublimer than mortal fancies have ever suspected, are waiting to be revealed when we die: "For this life is but being's first faint ray, And heaven on heaven make up God's dazzling day." We are here living unconsciously engirt by another universe than the senses can apprehend, thinly veiled, but real, and waiting for us with hospitable invitation. "What are those dream-like and inscrutable thoughts which start up in moments of stillness, apparently as from the deeps,-like the movement of the leaves during a silent night, in prognostic of the breeze that has yet scarce come,-if not the rustlings of schemes and orders of existence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the soul's abode and destiny after death is all immensity. The interstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are utterly barren, unrelieved deserts where nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdom colonized by the spirits who since creation's beginning have sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be the crowded aisles of the universal temple trod by bright throngs of worshipping angels. The soul's home, the heaven of God, may be suffused throughout the material universe, ignoring the existence of physical globes and galaxies. So light and electricity pervade some solid bodies, as if for them there were no solidity. So, doubtless, there are millions of realities around us utterly eluding our finest senses. "A fact," Emerson says, "is the last issue of spirit," and not its entire extent. "The visible creation is the terminus of the invisible world," and not the totality of the universe. There are gradations of matter and being, from the rock to magnetism, from the vegetable to man. Is it most probable that the scale breaks abruptly there, or that other ranks of spiritual existence successively Can every globule gird a countless race,― An honest historical criticism forces us to loose our reluctant hold from the various localities of the soul's supposed destination which have pleased the rude fancies and won the credulous 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 its 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: "Tell me, ye winged winds That round my pathway roar, Do ye not know some spot Where mortals weep no more?— Some lone and pleasant dell, Some valley in the west, The weary soul may rest? The wild winds soften to a whisper low, 40 Chalmers, Sermon, Heaven a Character and not a Locality. "Tell me, thou mighty deep, Whose billows round me play, The bliss for which he sighs, And friendship never dies? The loud waves, rolling in perpetual flow, "And thou, serenest moon, That with such holy face Dost look upon the earth Asleep in Night's embrace, Tell me, in all thy round Hast thou not seen some spot Where miserable man May find a happier lot. Behind a cloud the moon withdraws in woe, And a voice sweet but mournful answers, 'No!' "Tell me, my secret SOUL, Inspired by God's own breath, Is there no resting-place From sorrow, sin, and death? Is there no happier spot, Where mortals may be bless'd, And weariness a rest? Faith, Hope, and Love, best boons to mortals given, Start up within the breast, and answer, 'HEAVEN !' "41 41 Charles Mackay. 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 was originally a fact of direct knowledge. It was 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 |