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 loathéd 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 selfsacrifice, 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 Fénélon, 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 49 Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. 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.' 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 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? 9151 We remember an old Brahmanic poem-brought from the East by Rückert 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. 50 Greenough, An Artist's Creed. 51 Memorial of Daniel Webster from the City of Boston, p. 16. 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 rightfully 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 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. 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 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 |