The Universal Belief in Life Beyond Death by Hugh Johnston 1903
Reason cannot answer the question, Does death end all? It lies outside our experience, and revelation alone can inform us. All that reason can do is to show us that the presumptions are in favor of this doctrine, and so put the burden of proof upon those who deny a future existence. What, then, are the probabilities in favor of life beyond death? What evidence have we that mind is indestructible? Why assume that the soul is immortal, and abides after death, and that it is not with man as with the lower order of animals and of plants that die and cease to be?
First, there is the universal belief in immortality. The religious consciousness of man bears testimony to the life beyond the grave. "If a man die, shall he live again?" "Yes!" say all the great religions of the world, from the gray antiquity of the East to the higher civilizations of the West. "Yes," say the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; "Yes," say Hinduism, Brahmanism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism. "Yes," say the fierce nations of the North, the Indian races of America, the savage tribes of Africa and of the islands of the sea. "Yes," say poetry, legend, and romance.
All ages, lands, civilizations, races, and religions have believed in a hereafter. All souls, from the lowest in the scale of human development, the simple, unsophisticated pagan, right up to the highest in mental and moral power have held more or less clearly the same faith. The Egyptians built the pyramids to defy the centuries; so that "all things dread time, but time itself dreads the pyramids." They embalmed their dead to preserve them from decay, and placed them within these enduring structures. They looked upon the seed in its progress from germination to decay, they beheld the yellow Nile in its rise and fall, and they thought that everything must have its cycle. They set the soul's cycle at three thousand years, after which it would return to the body again. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is but a record of the soul's passage to its new abode. The one Babylonian epic which has come down to us from the most remote antiquity, turns on a visit of its hero to the nether world, where he meets the patriarch of the flood. The inscriptions of Pan Amrau I, found on a statue of the god Hadad, the chief god of Damascus, whose name appears in Hadadrimmon, written in the language of the Phoenicians, show the strongest belief in the immortality of the soul.
In Persia the custom is to leave the grave partly open, to facilitate the resurrection of the dead. We know how strongly the Hebrew people held to this doctrine, which seems inseparable from religion in any form and which has entered into every system of religion that has prevailed since the world began. The untaught Indian places upon the grave of the dead brave his bow and arrows and other things necessary for his comfort in the Happy Hunting Grounds of the Hereafter. Even the degraded Patagonian believes in a future state of conscious existence. And thus, says Emerson, "In the minds of all men, or wherever man appears, this belief appears with him, in the savage savagely, in the pure purely."
The ancient Scythians believed that death was only a change of habitation. Zoroaster taught a future state, a general resurrection and a day of judgment. The Hindu believes in the transmigration of souls, and will eat no animal food lest he should eat the dwelling place of some friend or relative. The idea that the soul is living runs through the great "Iliad" of Homer and the future life is but a shadow of the present. It throbs through Plato's "Phaedo," the greatest and profoundest argument that reason ever produced. Wherever men have given up their hopes, their desires, their longings after immortality they have become beastly in their lives. The doctrine that there is no God, and that death is an eternal sleep, was the gospel of the French Revolution, and what a hell it kindled upon earth! The streets of Paris ran red with blood until, in horror, the leaders called a convention and sent out the declaration, "The French nation believes in God, and in a future state."
What means this world-wide belief, this universal faith? Men believe it because they desire a future life. Why should they have the wish to live hereafter, if there be no after life? Why this universal desire, if all that men know and love and hope for is here? Every other instinct has its appropriate object. There is an instinctive desire for food, and food is provided; a hunger for knowledge, and knowledge is given; a sense of beauty, and beauty is everywhere; a hunger for society, and society is provided. If, therefore, there is planted within us an instinctive hunger of soul, a longing, for immortality, we may be sure that the original instinct was given to be satisfied. These aspirations toward the life to come are native and divine. These heavenborn desires are destined to be realized. Addison puts the grounds of this conviction in the mouth of Cato:
"It must be so; Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, this inward horror
Of falling into naught;
Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself and startles at destruction?
"Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man."
Closely allied to this is the opinion, held in all ages, that man is endowed with an immortal nature and that he continues in conscious existence after the dissolution of the body. What are the facts of history? Why, this conviction is the foundation of the greater part of the literature that has come down to us from Chaldean tablets, Egyptian papyri, from polished Greek and crude Norseman; from modern poet and philosopher. It forms the speculations of Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras held that a man's soul comes to him from the body of some man that it has left, and that, leaving him, it will pass on to another; thus wandering on through eternal ages as the transient guest of myriads of successive bodies. Cicero accepted Plato's metaphysical arguments for the endless permanence of the human soul, and in his Tusculan Disputations he frequently uses the phrase immortalitas animorum, the immortality of souls.
Socrates, the great truth-seeker, while the poisoned cup was being prepared for him calmly and without fear devoted his last hours to answering the objections against immortality, and assured his friends that death would only touch his body and not his mind. When Crito asked, "How would you like to have us bury you?" the great philosopher, with a smile, replied, "Any way you wish, if you can catch me. Have I not shown you, Crito, that I who have been talking to you am not the Socrates who will soon be a dead body? Do not call this body Socrates, for when I have drunk the poison I shall depart to the occupations of the blessed. Do not say at my funeral, 'Let us bury Socrates;' say that you bury his body only."
Do not men everywhere believe that the soul may exist independently of the body? They believe in ghosts. Even Dr. Johnson believed in ghosts and was anxious to investigate all stories referring to them. What is a ghost? It is a being, without a body, capable of action, seeing, moving, speaking, and preserving its personal identity. Now either there are ghosts or there are no ghosts. If ghosts exist, then, clearly, the soul may exist when it has thrown off this
"Muddy vesture of decay
That doth so grossly close us in."
If there be no ghosts, then, clearly, mankind has always believed it possible for souls to exist without the body, though they have no proof of it whatever. This instinctive belief, like all other instincts, must have something in reality corresponding to it. This crude creed, that the ghost of a dead man continues to live, proves that there is something within us which feels itself capable of existing without the body. To explain that consciousness we must assume the reality of such a soul; one which, using the body as a means of communicating with the world, is capable of existing in some other way hereafter.
The conscious self or Ego, the "I," is the most perfect unity of which we have any knowledge. It abides through all our experiences, absolutely one and the same through all the stream of events. This abiding self-conscious "I" is able to discern the flux and transiency of things about it, while it remains unchanged. It belongs to an order of being which is above time. Our knowledge is a thing of time in the sense that it is progressive, and is acquired by successive steps; also in the sense that it takes time to think. But, with all the incessant changes of our individual life and the neverending flow of ideas and feelings, the principle by which we know ourselves belongs, essentially, to an order of things which is superior to change and death and is unaffected by the fluctuations which condition all finite things.
This abiding continuance of conscious identity from youth to age, notwithstanding the changes of our bodily frame, the constant flux of its component particles, in spite of sleep and periods of insensibility, is one of the strongest proofs that the thinking principle continues after death and survives the dissolution which takes place when the body molders in the grave. Professor Huxley, who, with advancing years confessed to a growing desire after immortality, has asked, "Is there any means of knowing whether the series of states of consciousness which has been casually associated, for threescore years and ten, with the arrangements and movements of innumerable millions of material molecules can be continued in like association with some substance which has not the properties of matter?" As Kant said, on a like occasion, "If anybody can answer that question he is just the man I want to see. If he says that consciousness cannot exist, except in the relation of cause and effect, with certain organic molecules, I must ask how he knows that; and if he says that it can, I must ask the same question." Think of this abiding unity of consciousness: everything else in constant flux, the course of rivers changing, mountains leveled, old landmarks removed, but human personality, from childhood to old age, holding fast to its identity. Such a spirit must be an abiding part of the universe.
We may also argue from the distinctions between the mind and all material forms. Animals and vegetables grow and decay around us, but the more we know of mind the more we realize the boundlessness of its powers. A tree grows, bearing leaves, flowers, and fruit, but it can do no more. It has reached its end, accomplished its purpose, exhausted its force. Not so with mind. You can never say, "It has now accomplished its whole purpose and reached the end of its progress." No matter what are man's attainments, he is conscious that he has not reached the limit of his power of knowing and acquiring; conscious that he is capable of still greater things.
This led Cicero to say, "The nature that contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal." The bodily life is limited to threescore years and ten, but no such limitation applies to the soul. Michael Angelo accomplished his greatest work at sixty-seven and at ninety his powers were in full activity, and he was creating ideals he could not embody in concrete form. Humboldt for ninety years, up to the last day of his life, was acquiring knowledge in all sciences, all languages, all history. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" in his old age, only a few years before his death. The mind of Gladstone, the great octogenarian, was continually expanding with advancing years. Dr. Martineau at ninety was in full possession of his profound mental powers. So with Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor; so with the octogenarian poet-thinker of Weimar, while the greatest scientist of our day, Professor Virchow, retained his intellectual vigor to the last, and at eighty was pursuing his pathological investigations. Beethoven said "Music ushers me into the portals of an intellectual world always ready to encompass me, but which I can never compass. I feel that there is an eternal and an infinite to be attained." "The consciousness of finiteness has always oppressed mankind," says Lotze. "Man's unhappiness comes of his greatness," says Carlyle. He is never satisfied with his attainments, and the soul is in conscious possession of endowments and capacities which appear in their very nature to be indestructible. In the South Kensington Museum, London, you are shown the rough sketches of the artist Turner; while over against them are the finished pictures of the master in all the magnificence of execution. Here we see, at best, but the rude efforts of the human mind with its royal powers; shall no finality be reached? Shall we not have the finished pictures?
The tree grows and stops, for to grow forever would be an infinite mischief; it would preclude every other growth, destroy other products, and yield its own fruit alone. But the indefinite expansion of mind does not interfere with the order of nature; it only awakens other minds, and more and more spreads life and blessing around it. Every high achievement in every form of excellence is linked with new development of thought, virtue, and goodness. The very reason which requires the limitation of material forms seems to demand the illimitable growth of mind. These unexhausted and seemingly inexhaustible endowments appear to show that we have a nature inherently and indefeasibly immortal. Man is called the "heir of all the ages," "the paragon of the world," the fruit and crown of the long past, the best that nature in her strength and opulence can produce.
"What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!"
Now what becomes of the dignity and worth of man and of his high place in creation if his ultimate goal is not to pass on to some higher life? His life on earth is of briefer duration than that of many plants and animals; and is dwarfed into insignificance by other magnitudes. Only in the conviction and expectation of a future life does man rise out of nature and assert his infinite superiority over it.
Another argument is from the great law of the conservation of matter and of force. Nature, by which we mean the immanent energy of the Creator, never lets one atom of matter perish. All is changed, but nothing is lost. What we call the destruction of material things is not annihilation, but only change. The tree is burned down; but collect the ashes, the smoke, the carbonic dioxide, and you will find that not a particle is lost. The animal form is resolved into its elements; but the elements survive, and survive to accomplish the same end which they before accomplished. Not a power of nature is lost. Now here is the mind of man, conscious of its inherent supremacy over the accidents and mutations of time and having the deepest interest in its own existence; is that to vanish as a firework in the night? To the animal the past is a blank, and so is the future. But the human mind has power over the past and over the future, and existence becomes infinitely dear. The thought of all the glittering resources of mind, its matured skill, its profound insight and affection, being blotted out suggests a loss absolute and irretrievable. Such endowments are absolutely personal and inalienable. For mind is something individual. It cannot be broken into parts, or enter into union with other minds. I am myself, and can become no other being.
Positivism offers an impersonal immortality and talks about the immortality of the race. But an impersonal being, unconscious so far as sensations are concerned, is not distinguishable from one annihilated. Of what value is an immortality of which we shall not be individually conscious? My experiences, my history, my consciousness, my memory, my feelings, my hopes, can never become parts of another mind. In the extinction of a thinking, moral being there would be not an eclipse of the sun but the quenching of its light; an absolute destruction of being; a ruin infinitely more appalling than the annihilation of the outward universe. For what are material suns and systems in their intrinsic worth in comparison with persons? and what the blotting out of rolling spheres compared, in wastefulness, with the extinction of conscious being? Would the Almighty, who is so careful of what he has made that not a particle or an atom can be lost, allow such powers as these to be resolved back into nothingness? Does he preserve every atom of matter, yet annihilate great minds as if they were of no value? We believe in the physical law of persistence of force; is there no law of conservation of the spirit? Do not the analogous presumptions of nature point to the existence of a future life?
This brings us face to face with a materialism which proclaims that all life and thought are mere results of organization. We are told that soul, instead of being an independent entity, is simply a convenient word to designate the complete sum total of the highest output of organized matter. The latest word of science on the soul is that it is dependent upon matter for its being, as matter is dependent upon it for its organization. Science, it is said, has put an end to the traditional belief in the soul as being separate from the body and breathed into the body by a distinct act of the Creator. The phenomenon of a human personality is no longer accounted for by the assumption of a temporary union of an immortal soul with a perishable body. What we call soul and body, the product and blending of two parental cells to form one indivisible whole, are adapted in their whole career, from the germ cell to the dissolution of the grave; and we cannot think of the psychic personality surviving the break-up of the physical organism.
But there are two things in the universe: mind and matter. My body is not myself. I call it mine, not me. Connected with it, I yet know that from it "I" am distinct as is the swimmer from the flood. My thoughts, emotions, and acts of will are not mere acids and phosphates. But, says the materialist, has not Cabanis delivered his dictum, "The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile"? Here is the brain, made up of eighty parts water, seven of albumen, five of fatty matter—and so on; is it any one or all of these that thinks, reasons, wills, and remembers? The brain is the instrument that the mind employs in thinking, and it has its sense-centers and its thought-centers; but to affirm that thinking is a property of matter is absurd beyond description. Can we see thought, hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it, or weigh and measure it?
True, the power of thought is affected by the condition of the brain. The story is told of a wounded soldier who lay in one of the London hospitals in a state of utter insensibility for two years, having been wounded in the head at the battle of Corunna. In the year 1809 Astley Cooper examined him and found the skull pressed down upon the brain. By the use of the trephine he contrived to raise the bones. When consciousness was restored the first words the man uttered were, "Who won the battle?" The attendants stared at him in astonishment. "Who has won the battle? I say," he shouted in great excitement. They had to tell him that he had been carried off the field, put on board ship, and that it was two years since the battle had been fought. The man burst into laughter and shook his head in utter incredulity. He had been in a state of unconsciousness during all that time, and it seemed to his own mind that he had just come from the field of Corunna.
Injury of the brain will blur the mind's perceptions just as with a grand piano—when under the musician's touch it is pouring forth the most exquisite music the sudden breaking of the strings will stop the full tide of harmony. Mental action does seem dependent upon definite functions of the brain. Yet, even half of the brain has been taken away, paralyzing half of the body, while the mind continued its operations. Raphael, while painting the "Transfiguration," might have been stopped by some defect in his oils or canvas; but that would not prove that this masterpiece of art was the result simply of his implements. The mind uses the brain as the artist uses his materials. Every mental action is accompanied by certain movements and rearrangements of the molecules of the brain. John Stuart Mill admitted that "the relation of thought to the brain is no metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant coexistence within the limits of observation. There is the reciprocal relation of body and mind, but mind is something better than the product of matter." The mind uses the brain; without it it is helpless; but that does not prove that thought is the result of matter. The power of memory, amid all the changes of the brain, proves that mind is a spiritual substance; for, if there be no soul, what retains the remembrance of facts and events when the worn-out fibers have passed away?
"O," you say, "the old brain cells leave their impressions upon the new brain cells." What impressions? Do you mean that the old brain cells leave thoughts to the new brain tissues? Fancy those minute globules of the brain, that are constantly forming and passing away, leaving their impressions on and on, so that we can call up as from the grave of fifty years a long-forgotten event! What pigeon holes and shelves, what maps and charts the brain must have! No. It is the mind that stores these facts, and memory is a spiritual act; it is something else than the output of organized matter.
So with consciousness. I know that I am I, and not another. I know the existence of mind better than I know the existence of matter. When I reflect on my own existence, when I say to myself, "I know that I exist," this is no material process, it is a mental action; it is purely an attribute of the spirit.
Now, when we have proved the mind immaterial, we have gone a long way toward proving it immortal. If the soul, spite of the apparent dependence of mental action upon bodily organization, is independent of its relations to the body then it can survive death; and if it can survive death and the grave it can survive forever. The great Webster, when dying, said, "I should like to bear witness to the Gospel before I die;" and having uttered those words, carved on the marble shaft over his sacred dust, though scarcely able to whisper, he asked, as though anxious to preserve his consciousness to the last, whether he were alive or not. On being assured that he was he responded "I still live." They were his last words. Does not his mighty soul still live?
Who has not heard of that ancient ring, taken from the flanks of a brazen horse, which when the stone was turned inward made the wearer of it invisible? Suppose this Gyges's ring were placed upon an organist's fingers and he became invisible as he sat at the organ. We see the motion of the keys and hear the music swelling. We note the perfect correspondence between the motion of the keys and the pulsations of the music, and an observer says that the keys cause the music. How so? "Because with the rise and fall of the keys come the notes of music?" True, but keys in motion is not music; there must be a musician somewhere. He replies, "I see no musician; I see the keys in motion, and therefore those keys must be the cause of the music." But how can that be? No musician is seen, yet there must be one, unseen, at the organ. There is more than motion in that music; there is something that takes hold of the heart, that expresses soul, and somehow, mind must go into that instrument, for mind comes out.
The moving keys will not explain the music. In like manner the brain can never explain thought. There is a musician playing on the instrument, though he is invisible.
Now, while the organist with Gyges's ring sits there, invisible, suppose the strings break, or the wind no longer moves through the organ. The music dies, but the organist still lives. That is the relation of the soul to the body. The harp is broken at death, but the harper is unhurt. If, then, death does not end all, what does or can? If I can sail down the Potomac and out of the Chesapeake Bay into the ocean I can go where I please; and if the soul can sail past death and enter on the ocean beyond it, what shall arrest its progress in the endless futurity of being?
Rev. Dr. S. D. McConnell in his recent singular work, The Evolution of Immortality, asks, "Is man immortal or is he only immortable?" He maintains that if any human life become capable of passing into another life, with personality intact, it is not because all men are inherently immortal, but because such a life has reached a stage of spiritual fixedness and stability which will make survival natural to it and destruction unnatural. And such achievement must be by an extension of the long path by which the soul has climbed up from the primordial slime. He thinks that the ultimate goal of each individual is to pass on to some other than the life it possesses. He cannot define the point at which the capacity for eternal life is reached in the development of the individual, but the idea is always associated with that of moral goodness. "This is eternal life, to know God." And God is apprehended only through the moral sense.
A finely constructed theory; but, if immortality is to be predicted of some members of the race and not of all, where is the line to be drawn? Upon what does this potential immortality depend? It is simply the old doctrine of "conditional immortality" in new dress. Man's unique and solitary position, at the head of the sentient creation, points to the probability of a life hereafter. There is a wide gulf, if not an impassable one, between man and the animal creation. True, man's descent from prehuman or semihuman ancestry is a current theory of science. But he stands alone in the place assigned him in the universe and in the care bestowed upon him by Providence. He also possesses reason, sympathy, memory, and love. True, germs of these mighty capabilities are shown in the creatures below man. "The difference in mind," says Darwin, "between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind." The senses and instincts, the various emotions and faculties of which man boasts, may be found incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. The animal is conscious but not self-conscious; the animal is sentient but not personal. The animal reasons, has maternal affection, in many interesting ways brute natures resemble man's nature. Yet there is a difference that is fundamental. The intelligence of the animal is for the outward life and for the guidance of its purely animal existence; with man the outward life is for the inward. With the animal the physical life is the all in all; with man, the true relation of the physical is in subordination to the moral and spiritual.
"The body at its best
How far can it project the soul on its lone way?"
Bodily strength and grace we all admire, but who would not sacrifice an athlete to gain a sage or a saint?
Again, the outfit of the animal is for a purely terrestrial sphere. If man is to be confined to this sphere then he has a vast overpossession of powers. The range of the animal is the immediate and the present. Its space is here; around it bends the narrow circle of the horizon. Its time is now; behind it is a past that invites no retrospect, before it a future that beckons with no wondrous vision. But man has not only ability to draw food from the earth, provide clothing for protection, medicine for his ills, wood and brick for his dwellings, make servants of wind and wave, fire and electricity, construct an alphabet and a language, build up a social and civil structure, but the scope of his powers reaches immeasurably beyond all these realities. He has ideas and hopes that wander through infinity. While other creatures live in time, time lives in man alone; to him alone is the past, with its glories and shames, and the future with its radiant hopes or dreads. He has a spirit that has power to realize itself; and before it stretches a future of illimitable knowledge. For while, in one point of view, the realm of knowledge extends far and forever beyond the powers of the highest human intelligence, yet, with all the illimitableness, it is not a foreign territory but a realm increasingly its own. To be capable of this life of thought is to be capable of a life that is eternal; capable of participating in the life of that Intelligence for which and in which all things have their being. Let the fact of immortality be taken for granted and there is no incongruity between the powers of man and the career appointed for him. If these vast endowments are only for the life that now is, then why has a ship been builded to sail all the seas, when it is to be confined to the harbors and creeks of this terrestrial sphere? Why this surplus of faculty and capacity? Why bring together all the materials necessary to construct a Westminster Abbey if only a temporary shanty is needed? What an enormous waste of gifts and powers? If in this life only we have hope we are of all men most miserable; and we cry out, "Wherefore, O God, hast thou made all men in vain?"
We have given the argument from the general consent of mankind and the argument from the constitution of things around us. If the principle of conservation exists everywhere then surely man's nature cannot be exempted from its operation. Death puts a stop to bodily activities; what has become of that to which these activities were due? We have also dwelt upon man's rational endowments and his evident possibilities of a life beyond the grave. There is, further, what may be called the argument from moral considerations. Deep-seated in the soul is the sense of justice. There is confusion in the moral world; there must be an after life in which right and wrong will ultimately be dealt with. The law which conscience declares, and which is at work in the world about us, is the law of righteous retribution. Goodness deserves happiness, sin deserves misery and suffering; but the good suffer, the wicked prosper; vanity rises, merit languishes. There is a disproportion between character and happiness; between moral deserts and the rewards and penalties attached to them. Perfect justice demands that goodness and happiness, sin and misery, should be invariably connected. The present moral discord makes necessary a future life in order to redress the unequal or inequitable distribution of outward good and evil in the present life. Shall this life end all, and the greatest benefactors of our race rot, undistinguished, in the grave with the worst enemies of mankind? Against this belief our moral nature rebels. Shall there be no connection between right and blessedness, between wrong and pain? Shall villainy carry off so many of the prizes of life and might be right? If so, the Power that rules the universe cannot be just. Let this life be but the vestibule of a life to come, assume the reality of a future existence, and all is clear. Many a blighted life shall bloom again. Anomalies will all be explained and countless enigmas solved. Socrates said, "I believe a future life is needed to arrange the things of this present life." Here are darkness and clouds, but
"Once reach the roof,
Break through, and there is all the sky above."
Our moral instincts are to be trusted just as well as the instincts of bodily sense.
Allied to these moral considerations is the religious argument for an existence that does not terminate with bodily death. Man is a religious being. He has essential kinship with the everliving God. Plato called the soul a divine idea bound up in the very image of God. Man alone has communication with the divine. He possesses a life that is spirit, a life that is one with the life that is eternal. His capacities are correlated to an infinite environment, and his ethical relations to God show that he is capable of a life wholly divine and therefore immortal. "The soul of man," says Professor Drummond, "in the highest sense is a vast capacity of God." "Every rational being, as such, is a religious being," says Professor Caird in his Evolution of Religion. "Man is made for the Infinite," says Pascal. "We desire immortality, not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance," says Jean Paul Richter. Soclose is this kinship with the divine that to lose faith in God and immortality is to lose hope in the world. Professor Le Conte has wisely said, "Without immortality this beautiful cosmos, which has been developing into increasing beauty for so many millions of years, when it has run its course and all is over would be precisely as if it had never been, an idle dream, an idle talk, signifying nothing" (Evolution in Relation to Religious Thought, p. 329). Sully says, "To abandon hope of a future life is a vast loss, not to be made good, so far as I can see, by any new idea of service to humanity."
Strauss confessed that when he had lost his faith in God and immortality he lost his interest in human life and in the world he inhabited. He saw nothing to live for. And Professor Clifford, after losing his religious faith, said, "We have seen the sun shine out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless world; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead." A being thus related to God, made in his image and fitted for communion with him, endowed with the capacity of knowing, loving, and enjoying him forever, prepared and disciplined for a career of never-ending glory and blessedness hereafter, can have its full fruition only in a life beyond the grave. If, then, there be a God, if he is a spiritual being, the Father of all spirits, no need of fear but that this treasure which we now have in an earthen vessel will find adequate scope and enjoyment of all its capacities and endowments in a life that is immortal.
These are the nonscriptural arguments upon which we base our belief in a life hereafter. They do not amount to a demonstration, for that is impossible; but they are cumulative, and they furnish an irrefutable presumption in favor of immortality. The conviction deepens as life is keyed to the highest pitch. Let men live nobly and they have the assurance that they shall live forever. The worldly and sensual life tends to throw doubt upon a future life, while the belief in immortality grows brighter and brighter with each new experience of divine goodness and divine love.
On this supreme subject, however, "we see through a glass, darkly," until we come to the sure, authoritative light of God's word. Immortality is the grand discovery of Christianity. It animates the hopes and sustains the courage of all true believers by the revelations of an endless life beyond the grave. It has converted the vague hopes and fond desires of the race, the better guesses and speculations of philosophy, into a glorious certainty. Destructive criticism has of late been asserting that the Old Testament does not recognize the continuance of the soul after death, and that death is synonymous with cessation of existence. Nothing, it seems to me, could be farther from the truth. There are two immortalities in the Old Testament: a corporate, national one, the immortality of the people of God; and an individual one, the immortality of the person. The immortality of man is everywhere taken for granted while the fact of survival after death is often distinctly stated. The doctrine of a life beyond death underlies the history of the creation and of the fall of man. When it is said of Enoch, "He was not; for God took him" (Gen. v, 24), it cannot mean that he ceased to exist, any more than the declaration concerning another prophet, "And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven" ( 2 Kings ii, 11) can mean that he ceased to exist. When it is said of one patriarch after another that he was "gathered to his people," "gathered to his fathers," it does not refer to burial, for many were laid away far from the graves of their ancestors; it can only refer to the gathering place of souls. It is a familiar phrase for death and a clear intimation of the continued existence of the fathers. The book of Job is, throughout, a very hymn of immortality. In the depth of his anguish the afflicted sheik of Uz knows that his Redeemer liveth. "And after my skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another" (Job xix, 26, 27). The sweet singer Asaph and Israel's saintly shepherd king pour out in clear, exultant notes the songs of immortality: "My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever" (Psa. lxxiii, 26). "As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness" (Psa. xvii, 15).
The prohibition of necromancy by the Jewish law and the story of King Saul's experience with the witch of Endor show clearly the prevalent view of the Hebrew people as to survival after death. It is said of the king of Babylon when he is smitten down, "Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the shades for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath roused up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall answer and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? (Isa. xiv, 9, 10.)
In the Old Testament the doctrine is dimly outlined in the prophecies of resurrection. "Thy dead shall live; thy dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead" (Isa. xxvi, 19). It is also indicated in the doctrine of rewards and punishments in the other world. "For their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (Isa. lxvi, 24). "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Dan. xii, 2).
But the gospel turns a flood of brightness on the life to come. It "illuminates" the old truth, so that in the New Testament all obscurity disappears. Christ "abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel" (2 Tim. i, 10) ; that is, revealed the life of the soul and the imperishableness of the body. The Lord Jesus Christ gave a new and deeper meaning to the words life and death. He said, "And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ" (John xvii, 3). "He that believeth on me hath eternal life" (John vi, 47). He also said, "And be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. x, 28). Bruce in his exposition holds that the person to be feared is not God or the persecutor but the tempter— "not the man who wants to kill you, but the man who wants to buy you off, and the devil whose agent he is." But even this fanciful exegesis does not destroy the force of the truth which lies in the background of the text. He confounded Sadducean unbelief—which taught that man had no spirit, that life was his only destiny and the grave his end—by showing that Jehovah, who revealed himself to Moses at the bush, declared himself to be the God of the Patriarchs long since dead. "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; ye do greatly err" (Markxii, 26, 27). He appeals to what God is and to what man is. He places the subject upon the deepest and broadest basis. To God all are living; in his eyes there are no dead. He further declares that all "that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth" (John v, 28). Of himself he says, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die" (John xi, 25, 26). And he consoles his faint-hearted disciples with the assurance "Because I live, ye shall live also." He, the author of immortality, resplendent with such titles as "the Prince of life," "the Living One," "the Life and the Light of men," "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever," whose "goings forth have been from everlasting," whose name is "Father of eternity," formally pledges his own existence for theirs; as if they might fear extinction when he, the "Lord of life," should be no more.
Especially by his own resurrection in power and glory has he bridged over the gulf between this life and the next. He has swept away the darkness of the grave, vanquished death, and proclaimed the immortal destiny of redeemed humanity. It is in the gospel that we have light, light beyond doubt. There are some who have never believed strongly enough to doubt. They have never thrown their hopes with such earnestness into the other world as to have anxiety for fear it should not all be true. O, to see the coffin lowered into the grave, and when the heart is wrung with the sense of desolation to have the thought intrude, "What if the life to come be all a dream, and my buried treasure shall never come forth again!"
But our Lord's resurrection is a world-fact and the anchor holds. At the bedside of the dying and beside the open grave how glorious this truth! Man is an immortal being. And it is a personal immortality. No mere projection of ourselves into the future as an influence, will satisfy the cravings of the soul. It is not enough to join the invisible choir
"Of those immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence."
Each one of us shall live forever, in our own proper personality, with memory, will, self-consciousness, and love. Before this certainty all else fades into utter insignificance. Some preparation we should surely make for the hereafter. Who would attend only to the present and ignore the life to come? If there be a future life it has a most important connection with the present. Is it of no consequence that childhood should prepare for youth, and youth for manhood, and manhood for the period of age? Yet childhood, youth, manhood, age are but successive waves on the river of years which rolls onward to that mighty ocean whose tideless waves beat on for evermore.
Who would cast himself, reckless, from the headlands of time? If we are afloat, and the shores are receding from us, and farewells are wafted from the pier, shall we not ask, Whither are we going? Whither? "If a man die shall he live again?" "Yes," says reason. "Yes," says revelation. "For me to live is Christ; to die is gain." "So shall we be ever with the Lord."
Reason cannot answer the question, Does death end all? It lies outside our experience, and revelation alone can inform us. All that reason can do is to show us that the presumptions are in favor of this doctrine, and so put the burden of proof upon those who deny a future existence. What, then, are the probabilities in favor of life beyond death? What evidence have we that mind is indestructible? Why assume that the soul is immortal, and abides after death, and that it is not with man as with the lower order of animals and of plants that die and cease to be?
First, there is the universal belief in immortality. The religious consciousness of man bears testimony to the life beyond the grave. "If a man die, shall he live again?" "Yes!" say all the great religions of the world, from the gray antiquity of the East to the higher civilizations of the West. "Yes," say the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; "Yes," say Hinduism, Brahmanism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism. "Yes," say the fierce nations of the North, the Indian races of America, the savage tribes of Africa and of the islands of the sea. "Yes," say poetry, legend, and romance.
All ages, lands, civilizations, races, and religions have believed in a hereafter. All souls, from the lowest in the scale of human development, the simple, unsophisticated pagan, right up to the highest in mental and moral power have held more or less clearly the same faith. The Egyptians built the pyramids to defy the centuries; so that "all things dread time, but time itself dreads the pyramids." They embalmed their dead to preserve them from decay, and placed them within these enduring structures. They looked upon the seed in its progress from germination to decay, they beheld the yellow Nile in its rise and fall, and they thought that everything must have its cycle. They set the soul's cycle at three thousand years, after which it would return to the body again. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is but a record of the soul's passage to its new abode. The one Babylonian epic which has come down to us from the most remote antiquity, turns on a visit of its hero to the nether world, where he meets the patriarch of the flood. The inscriptions of Pan Amrau I, found on a statue of the god Hadad, the chief god of Damascus, whose name appears in Hadadrimmon, written in the language of the Phoenicians, show the strongest belief in the immortality of the soul.
In Persia the custom is to leave the grave partly open, to facilitate the resurrection of the dead. We know how strongly the Hebrew people held to this doctrine, which seems inseparable from religion in any form and which has entered into every system of religion that has prevailed since the world began. The untaught Indian places upon the grave of the dead brave his bow and arrows and other things necessary for his comfort in the Happy Hunting Grounds of the Hereafter. Even the degraded Patagonian believes in a future state of conscious existence. And thus, says Emerson, "In the minds of all men, or wherever man appears, this belief appears with him, in the savage savagely, in the pure purely."
The ancient Scythians believed that death was only a change of habitation. Zoroaster taught a future state, a general resurrection and a day of judgment. The Hindu believes in the transmigration of souls, and will eat no animal food lest he should eat the dwelling place of some friend or relative. The idea that the soul is living runs through the great "Iliad" of Homer and the future life is but a shadow of the present. It throbs through Plato's "Phaedo," the greatest and profoundest argument that reason ever produced. Wherever men have given up their hopes, their desires, their longings after immortality they have become beastly in their lives. The doctrine that there is no God, and that death is an eternal sleep, was the gospel of the French Revolution, and what a hell it kindled upon earth! The streets of Paris ran red with blood until, in horror, the leaders called a convention and sent out the declaration, "The French nation believes in God, and in a future state."
What means this world-wide belief, this universal faith? Men believe it because they desire a future life. Why should they have the wish to live hereafter, if there be no after life? Why this universal desire, if all that men know and love and hope for is here? Every other instinct has its appropriate object. There is an instinctive desire for food, and food is provided; a hunger for knowledge, and knowledge is given; a sense of beauty, and beauty is everywhere; a hunger for society, and society is provided. If, therefore, there is planted within us an instinctive hunger of soul, a longing, for immortality, we may be sure that the original instinct was given to be satisfied. These aspirations toward the life to come are native and divine. These heavenborn desires are destined to be realized. Addison puts the grounds of this conviction in the mouth of Cato:
"It must be so; Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, this inward horror
Of falling into naught;
Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself and startles at destruction?
"Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man."
Closely allied to this is the opinion, held in all ages, that man is endowed with an immortal nature and that he continues in conscious existence after the dissolution of the body. What are the facts of history? Why, this conviction is the foundation of the greater part of the literature that has come down to us from Chaldean tablets, Egyptian papyri, from polished Greek and crude Norseman; from modern poet and philosopher. It forms the speculations of Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras held that a man's soul comes to him from the body of some man that it has left, and that, leaving him, it will pass on to another; thus wandering on through eternal ages as the transient guest of myriads of successive bodies. Cicero accepted Plato's metaphysical arguments for the endless permanence of the human soul, and in his Tusculan Disputations he frequently uses the phrase immortalitas animorum, the immortality of souls.
Socrates, the great truth-seeker, while the poisoned cup was being prepared for him calmly and without fear devoted his last hours to answering the objections against immortality, and assured his friends that death would only touch his body and not his mind. When Crito asked, "How would you like to have us bury you?" the great philosopher, with a smile, replied, "Any way you wish, if you can catch me. Have I not shown you, Crito, that I who have been talking to you am not the Socrates who will soon be a dead body? Do not call this body Socrates, for when I have drunk the poison I shall depart to the occupations of the blessed. Do not say at my funeral, 'Let us bury Socrates;' say that you bury his body only."
Do not men everywhere believe that the soul may exist independently of the body? They believe in ghosts. Even Dr. Johnson believed in ghosts and was anxious to investigate all stories referring to them. What is a ghost? It is a being, without a body, capable of action, seeing, moving, speaking, and preserving its personal identity. Now either there are ghosts or there are no ghosts. If ghosts exist, then, clearly, the soul may exist when it has thrown off this
"Muddy vesture of decay
That doth so grossly close us in."
If there be no ghosts, then, clearly, mankind has always believed it possible for souls to exist without the body, though they have no proof of it whatever. This instinctive belief, like all other instincts, must have something in reality corresponding to it. This crude creed, that the ghost of a dead man continues to live, proves that there is something within us which feels itself capable of existing without the body. To explain that consciousness we must assume the reality of such a soul; one which, using the body as a means of communicating with the world, is capable of existing in some other way hereafter.
The conscious self or Ego, the "I," is the most perfect unity of which we have any knowledge. It abides through all our experiences, absolutely one and the same through all the stream of events. This abiding self-conscious "I" is able to discern the flux and transiency of things about it, while it remains unchanged. It belongs to an order of being which is above time. Our knowledge is a thing of time in the sense that it is progressive, and is acquired by successive steps; also in the sense that it takes time to think. But, with all the incessant changes of our individual life and the neverending flow of ideas and feelings, the principle by which we know ourselves belongs, essentially, to an order of things which is superior to change and death and is unaffected by the fluctuations which condition all finite things.
This abiding continuance of conscious identity from youth to age, notwithstanding the changes of our bodily frame, the constant flux of its component particles, in spite of sleep and periods of insensibility, is one of the strongest proofs that the thinking principle continues after death and survives the dissolution which takes place when the body molders in the grave. Professor Huxley, who, with advancing years confessed to a growing desire after immortality, has asked, "Is there any means of knowing whether the series of states of consciousness which has been casually associated, for threescore years and ten, with the arrangements and movements of innumerable millions of material molecules can be continued in like association with some substance which has not the properties of matter?" As Kant said, on a like occasion, "If anybody can answer that question he is just the man I want to see. If he says that consciousness cannot exist, except in the relation of cause and effect, with certain organic molecules, I must ask how he knows that; and if he says that it can, I must ask the same question." Think of this abiding unity of consciousness: everything else in constant flux, the course of rivers changing, mountains leveled, old landmarks removed, but human personality, from childhood to old age, holding fast to its identity. Such a spirit must be an abiding part of the universe.
We may also argue from the distinctions between the mind and all material forms. Animals and vegetables grow and decay around us, but the more we know of mind the more we realize the boundlessness of its powers. A tree grows, bearing leaves, flowers, and fruit, but it can do no more. It has reached its end, accomplished its purpose, exhausted its force. Not so with mind. You can never say, "It has now accomplished its whole purpose and reached the end of its progress." No matter what are man's attainments, he is conscious that he has not reached the limit of his power of knowing and acquiring; conscious that he is capable of still greater things.
This led Cicero to say, "The nature that contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal." The bodily life is limited to threescore years and ten, but no such limitation applies to the soul. Michael Angelo accomplished his greatest work at sixty-seven and at ninety his powers were in full activity, and he was creating ideals he could not embody in concrete form. Humboldt for ninety years, up to the last day of his life, was acquiring knowledge in all sciences, all languages, all history. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" in his old age, only a few years before his death. The mind of Gladstone, the great octogenarian, was continually expanding with advancing years. Dr. Martineau at ninety was in full possession of his profound mental powers. So with Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor; so with the octogenarian poet-thinker of Weimar, while the greatest scientist of our day, Professor Virchow, retained his intellectual vigor to the last, and at eighty was pursuing his pathological investigations. Beethoven said "Music ushers me into the portals of an intellectual world always ready to encompass me, but which I can never compass. I feel that there is an eternal and an infinite to be attained." "The consciousness of finiteness has always oppressed mankind," says Lotze. "Man's unhappiness comes of his greatness," says Carlyle. He is never satisfied with his attainments, and the soul is in conscious possession of endowments and capacities which appear in their very nature to be indestructible. In the South Kensington Museum, London, you are shown the rough sketches of the artist Turner; while over against them are the finished pictures of the master in all the magnificence of execution. Here we see, at best, but the rude efforts of the human mind with its royal powers; shall no finality be reached? Shall we not have the finished pictures?
The tree grows and stops, for to grow forever would be an infinite mischief; it would preclude every other growth, destroy other products, and yield its own fruit alone. But the indefinite expansion of mind does not interfere with the order of nature; it only awakens other minds, and more and more spreads life and blessing around it. Every high achievement in every form of excellence is linked with new development of thought, virtue, and goodness. The very reason which requires the limitation of material forms seems to demand the illimitable growth of mind. These unexhausted and seemingly inexhaustible endowments appear to show that we have a nature inherently and indefeasibly immortal. Man is called the "heir of all the ages," "the paragon of the world," the fruit and crown of the long past, the best that nature in her strength and opulence can produce.
"What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!"
Now what becomes of the dignity and worth of man and of his high place in creation if his ultimate goal is not to pass on to some higher life? His life on earth is of briefer duration than that of many plants and animals; and is dwarfed into insignificance by other magnitudes. Only in the conviction and expectation of a future life does man rise out of nature and assert his infinite superiority over it.
Another argument is from the great law of the conservation of matter and of force. Nature, by which we mean the immanent energy of the Creator, never lets one atom of matter perish. All is changed, but nothing is lost. What we call the destruction of material things is not annihilation, but only change. The tree is burned down; but collect the ashes, the smoke, the carbonic dioxide, and you will find that not a particle is lost. The animal form is resolved into its elements; but the elements survive, and survive to accomplish the same end which they before accomplished. Not a power of nature is lost. Now here is the mind of man, conscious of its inherent supremacy over the accidents and mutations of time and having the deepest interest in its own existence; is that to vanish as a firework in the night? To the animal the past is a blank, and so is the future. But the human mind has power over the past and over the future, and existence becomes infinitely dear. The thought of all the glittering resources of mind, its matured skill, its profound insight and affection, being blotted out suggests a loss absolute and irretrievable. Such endowments are absolutely personal and inalienable. For mind is something individual. It cannot be broken into parts, or enter into union with other minds. I am myself, and can become no other being.
Positivism offers an impersonal immortality and talks about the immortality of the race. But an impersonal being, unconscious so far as sensations are concerned, is not distinguishable from one annihilated. Of what value is an immortality of which we shall not be individually conscious? My experiences, my history, my consciousness, my memory, my feelings, my hopes, can never become parts of another mind. In the extinction of a thinking, moral being there would be not an eclipse of the sun but the quenching of its light; an absolute destruction of being; a ruin infinitely more appalling than the annihilation of the outward universe. For what are material suns and systems in their intrinsic worth in comparison with persons? and what the blotting out of rolling spheres compared, in wastefulness, with the extinction of conscious being? Would the Almighty, who is so careful of what he has made that not a particle or an atom can be lost, allow such powers as these to be resolved back into nothingness? Does he preserve every atom of matter, yet annihilate great minds as if they were of no value? We believe in the physical law of persistence of force; is there no law of conservation of the spirit? Do not the analogous presumptions of nature point to the existence of a future life?
This brings us face to face with a materialism which proclaims that all life and thought are mere results of organization. We are told that soul, instead of being an independent entity, is simply a convenient word to designate the complete sum total of the highest output of organized matter. The latest word of science on the soul is that it is dependent upon matter for its being, as matter is dependent upon it for its organization. Science, it is said, has put an end to the traditional belief in the soul as being separate from the body and breathed into the body by a distinct act of the Creator. The phenomenon of a human personality is no longer accounted for by the assumption of a temporary union of an immortal soul with a perishable body. What we call soul and body, the product and blending of two parental cells to form one indivisible whole, are adapted in their whole career, from the germ cell to the dissolution of the grave; and we cannot think of the psychic personality surviving the break-up of the physical organism.
But there are two things in the universe: mind and matter. My body is not myself. I call it mine, not me. Connected with it, I yet know that from it "I" am distinct as is the swimmer from the flood. My thoughts, emotions, and acts of will are not mere acids and phosphates. But, says the materialist, has not Cabanis delivered his dictum, "The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile"? Here is the brain, made up of eighty parts water, seven of albumen, five of fatty matter—and so on; is it any one or all of these that thinks, reasons, wills, and remembers? The brain is the instrument that the mind employs in thinking, and it has its sense-centers and its thought-centers; but to affirm that thinking is a property of matter is absurd beyond description. Can we see thought, hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it, or weigh and measure it?
True, the power of thought is affected by the condition of the brain. The story is told of a wounded soldier who lay in one of the London hospitals in a state of utter insensibility for two years, having been wounded in the head at the battle of Corunna. In the year 1809 Astley Cooper examined him and found the skull pressed down upon the brain. By the use of the trephine he contrived to raise the bones. When consciousness was restored the first words the man uttered were, "Who won the battle?" The attendants stared at him in astonishment. "Who has won the battle? I say," he shouted in great excitement. They had to tell him that he had been carried off the field, put on board ship, and that it was two years since the battle had been fought. The man burst into laughter and shook his head in utter incredulity. He had been in a state of unconsciousness during all that time, and it seemed to his own mind that he had just come from the field of Corunna.
Injury of the brain will blur the mind's perceptions just as with a grand piano—when under the musician's touch it is pouring forth the most exquisite music the sudden breaking of the strings will stop the full tide of harmony. Mental action does seem dependent upon definite functions of the brain. Yet, even half of the brain has been taken away, paralyzing half of the body, while the mind continued its operations. Raphael, while painting the "Transfiguration," might have been stopped by some defect in his oils or canvas; but that would not prove that this masterpiece of art was the result simply of his implements. The mind uses the brain as the artist uses his materials. Every mental action is accompanied by certain movements and rearrangements of the molecules of the brain. John Stuart Mill admitted that "the relation of thought to the brain is no metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant coexistence within the limits of observation. There is the reciprocal relation of body and mind, but mind is something better than the product of matter." The mind uses the brain; without it it is helpless; but that does not prove that thought is the result of matter. The power of memory, amid all the changes of the brain, proves that mind is a spiritual substance; for, if there be no soul, what retains the remembrance of facts and events when the worn-out fibers have passed away?
"O," you say, "the old brain cells leave their impressions upon the new brain cells." What impressions? Do you mean that the old brain cells leave thoughts to the new brain tissues? Fancy those minute globules of the brain, that are constantly forming and passing away, leaving their impressions on and on, so that we can call up as from the grave of fifty years a long-forgotten event! What pigeon holes and shelves, what maps and charts the brain must have! No. It is the mind that stores these facts, and memory is a spiritual act; it is something else than the output of organized matter.
So with consciousness. I know that I am I, and not another. I know the existence of mind better than I know the existence of matter. When I reflect on my own existence, when I say to myself, "I know that I exist," this is no material process, it is a mental action; it is purely an attribute of the spirit.
Now, when we have proved the mind immaterial, we have gone a long way toward proving it immortal. If the soul, spite of the apparent dependence of mental action upon bodily organization, is independent of its relations to the body then it can survive death; and if it can survive death and the grave it can survive forever. The great Webster, when dying, said, "I should like to bear witness to the Gospel before I die;" and having uttered those words, carved on the marble shaft over his sacred dust, though scarcely able to whisper, he asked, as though anxious to preserve his consciousness to the last, whether he were alive or not. On being assured that he was he responded "I still live." They were his last words. Does not his mighty soul still live?
Who has not heard of that ancient ring, taken from the flanks of a brazen horse, which when the stone was turned inward made the wearer of it invisible? Suppose this Gyges's ring were placed upon an organist's fingers and he became invisible as he sat at the organ. We see the motion of the keys and hear the music swelling. We note the perfect correspondence between the motion of the keys and the pulsations of the music, and an observer says that the keys cause the music. How so? "Because with the rise and fall of the keys come the notes of music?" True, but keys in motion is not music; there must be a musician somewhere. He replies, "I see no musician; I see the keys in motion, and therefore those keys must be the cause of the music." But how can that be? No musician is seen, yet there must be one, unseen, at the organ. There is more than motion in that music; there is something that takes hold of the heart, that expresses soul, and somehow, mind must go into that instrument, for mind comes out.
The moving keys will not explain the music. In like manner the brain can never explain thought. There is a musician playing on the instrument, though he is invisible.
Now, while the organist with Gyges's ring sits there, invisible, suppose the strings break, or the wind no longer moves through the organ. The music dies, but the organist still lives. That is the relation of the soul to the body. The harp is broken at death, but the harper is unhurt. If, then, death does not end all, what does or can? If I can sail down the Potomac and out of the Chesapeake Bay into the ocean I can go where I please; and if the soul can sail past death and enter on the ocean beyond it, what shall arrest its progress in the endless futurity of being?
Rev. Dr. S. D. McConnell in his recent singular work, The Evolution of Immortality, asks, "Is man immortal or is he only immortable?" He maintains that if any human life become capable of passing into another life, with personality intact, it is not because all men are inherently immortal, but because such a life has reached a stage of spiritual fixedness and stability which will make survival natural to it and destruction unnatural. And such achievement must be by an extension of the long path by which the soul has climbed up from the primordial slime. He thinks that the ultimate goal of each individual is to pass on to some other than the life it possesses. He cannot define the point at which the capacity for eternal life is reached in the development of the individual, but the idea is always associated with that of moral goodness. "This is eternal life, to know God." And God is apprehended only through the moral sense.
A finely constructed theory; but, if immortality is to be predicted of some members of the race and not of all, where is the line to be drawn? Upon what does this potential immortality depend? It is simply the old doctrine of "conditional immortality" in new dress. Man's unique and solitary position, at the head of the sentient creation, points to the probability of a life hereafter. There is a wide gulf, if not an impassable one, between man and the animal creation. True, man's descent from prehuman or semihuman ancestry is a current theory of science. But he stands alone in the place assigned him in the universe and in the care bestowed upon him by Providence. He also possesses reason, sympathy, memory, and love. True, germs of these mighty capabilities are shown in the creatures below man. "The difference in mind," says Darwin, "between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind." The senses and instincts, the various emotions and faculties of which man boasts, may be found incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. The animal is conscious but not self-conscious; the animal is sentient but not personal. The animal reasons, has maternal affection, in many interesting ways brute natures resemble man's nature. Yet there is a difference that is fundamental. The intelligence of the animal is for the outward life and for the guidance of its purely animal existence; with man the outward life is for the inward. With the animal the physical life is the all in all; with man, the true relation of the physical is in subordination to the moral and spiritual.
"The body at its best
How far can it project the soul on its lone way?"
Bodily strength and grace we all admire, but who would not sacrifice an athlete to gain a sage or a saint?
Again, the outfit of the animal is for a purely terrestrial sphere. If man is to be confined to this sphere then he has a vast overpossession of powers. The range of the animal is the immediate and the present. Its space is here; around it bends the narrow circle of the horizon. Its time is now; behind it is a past that invites no retrospect, before it a future that beckons with no wondrous vision. But man has not only ability to draw food from the earth, provide clothing for protection, medicine for his ills, wood and brick for his dwellings, make servants of wind and wave, fire and electricity, construct an alphabet and a language, build up a social and civil structure, but the scope of his powers reaches immeasurably beyond all these realities. He has ideas and hopes that wander through infinity. While other creatures live in time, time lives in man alone; to him alone is the past, with its glories and shames, and the future with its radiant hopes or dreads. He has a spirit that has power to realize itself; and before it stretches a future of illimitable knowledge. For while, in one point of view, the realm of knowledge extends far and forever beyond the powers of the highest human intelligence, yet, with all the illimitableness, it is not a foreign territory but a realm increasingly its own. To be capable of this life of thought is to be capable of a life that is eternal; capable of participating in the life of that Intelligence for which and in which all things have their being. Let the fact of immortality be taken for granted and there is no incongruity between the powers of man and the career appointed for him. If these vast endowments are only for the life that now is, then why has a ship been builded to sail all the seas, when it is to be confined to the harbors and creeks of this terrestrial sphere? Why this surplus of faculty and capacity? Why bring together all the materials necessary to construct a Westminster Abbey if only a temporary shanty is needed? What an enormous waste of gifts and powers? If in this life only we have hope we are of all men most miserable; and we cry out, "Wherefore, O God, hast thou made all men in vain?"
We have given the argument from the general consent of mankind and the argument from the constitution of things around us. If the principle of conservation exists everywhere then surely man's nature cannot be exempted from its operation. Death puts a stop to bodily activities; what has become of that to which these activities were due? We have also dwelt upon man's rational endowments and his evident possibilities of a life beyond the grave. There is, further, what may be called the argument from moral considerations. Deep-seated in the soul is the sense of justice. There is confusion in the moral world; there must be an after life in which right and wrong will ultimately be dealt with. The law which conscience declares, and which is at work in the world about us, is the law of righteous retribution. Goodness deserves happiness, sin deserves misery and suffering; but the good suffer, the wicked prosper; vanity rises, merit languishes. There is a disproportion between character and happiness; between moral deserts and the rewards and penalties attached to them. Perfect justice demands that goodness and happiness, sin and misery, should be invariably connected. The present moral discord makes necessary a future life in order to redress the unequal or inequitable distribution of outward good and evil in the present life. Shall this life end all, and the greatest benefactors of our race rot, undistinguished, in the grave with the worst enemies of mankind? Against this belief our moral nature rebels. Shall there be no connection between right and blessedness, between wrong and pain? Shall villainy carry off so many of the prizes of life and might be right? If so, the Power that rules the universe cannot be just. Let this life be but the vestibule of a life to come, assume the reality of a future existence, and all is clear. Many a blighted life shall bloom again. Anomalies will all be explained and countless enigmas solved. Socrates said, "I believe a future life is needed to arrange the things of this present life." Here are darkness and clouds, but
"Once reach the roof,
Break through, and there is all the sky above."
Our moral instincts are to be trusted just as well as the instincts of bodily sense.
Allied to these moral considerations is the religious argument for an existence that does not terminate with bodily death. Man is a religious being. He has essential kinship with the everliving God. Plato called the soul a divine idea bound up in the very image of God. Man alone has communication with the divine. He possesses a life that is spirit, a life that is one with the life that is eternal. His capacities are correlated to an infinite environment, and his ethical relations to God show that he is capable of a life wholly divine and therefore immortal. "The soul of man," says Professor Drummond, "in the highest sense is a vast capacity of God." "Every rational being, as such, is a religious being," says Professor Caird in his Evolution of Religion. "Man is made for the Infinite," says Pascal. "We desire immortality, not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance," says Jean Paul Richter. Soclose is this kinship with the divine that to lose faith in God and immortality is to lose hope in the world. Professor Le Conte has wisely said, "Without immortality this beautiful cosmos, which has been developing into increasing beauty for so many millions of years, when it has run its course and all is over would be precisely as if it had never been, an idle dream, an idle talk, signifying nothing" (Evolution in Relation to Religious Thought, p. 329). Sully says, "To abandon hope of a future life is a vast loss, not to be made good, so far as I can see, by any new idea of service to humanity."
Strauss confessed that when he had lost his faith in God and immortality he lost his interest in human life and in the world he inhabited. He saw nothing to live for. And Professor Clifford, after losing his religious faith, said, "We have seen the sun shine out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless world; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead." A being thus related to God, made in his image and fitted for communion with him, endowed with the capacity of knowing, loving, and enjoying him forever, prepared and disciplined for a career of never-ending glory and blessedness hereafter, can have its full fruition only in a life beyond the grave. If, then, there be a God, if he is a spiritual being, the Father of all spirits, no need of fear but that this treasure which we now have in an earthen vessel will find adequate scope and enjoyment of all its capacities and endowments in a life that is immortal.
These are the nonscriptural arguments upon which we base our belief in a life hereafter. They do not amount to a demonstration, for that is impossible; but they are cumulative, and they furnish an irrefutable presumption in favor of immortality. The conviction deepens as life is keyed to the highest pitch. Let men live nobly and they have the assurance that they shall live forever. The worldly and sensual life tends to throw doubt upon a future life, while the belief in immortality grows brighter and brighter with each new experience of divine goodness and divine love.
On this supreme subject, however, "we see through a glass, darkly," until we come to the sure, authoritative light of God's word. Immortality is the grand discovery of Christianity. It animates the hopes and sustains the courage of all true believers by the revelations of an endless life beyond the grave. It has converted the vague hopes and fond desires of the race, the better guesses and speculations of philosophy, into a glorious certainty. Destructive criticism has of late been asserting that the Old Testament does not recognize the continuance of the soul after death, and that death is synonymous with cessation of existence. Nothing, it seems to me, could be farther from the truth. There are two immortalities in the Old Testament: a corporate, national one, the immortality of the people of God; and an individual one, the immortality of the person. The immortality of man is everywhere taken for granted while the fact of survival after death is often distinctly stated. The doctrine of a life beyond death underlies the history of the creation and of the fall of man. When it is said of Enoch, "He was not; for God took him" (Gen. v, 24), it cannot mean that he ceased to exist, any more than the declaration concerning another prophet, "And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven" ( 2 Kings ii, 11) can mean that he ceased to exist. When it is said of one patriarch after another that he was "gathered to his people," "gathered to his fathers," it does not refer to burial, for many were laid away far from the graves of their ancestors; it can only refer to the gathering place of souls. It is a familiar phrase for death and a clear intimation of the continued existence of the fathers. The book of Job is, throughout, a very hymn of immortality. In the depth of his anguish the afflicted sheik of Uz knows that his Redeemer liveth. "And after my skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another" (Job xix, 26, 27). The sweet singer Asaph and Israel's saintly shepherd king pour out in clear, exultant notes the songs of immortality: "My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever" (Psa. lxxiii, 26). "As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness" (Psa. xvii, 15).
The prohibition of necromancy by the Jewish law and the story of King Saul's experience with the witch of Endor show clearly the prevalent view of the Hebrew people as to survival after death. It is said of the king of Babylon when he is smitten down, "Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the shades for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath roused up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall answer and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? (Isa. xiv, 9, 10.)
In the Old Testament the doctrine is dimly outlined in the prophecies of resurrection. "Thy dead shall live; thy dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead" (Isa. xxvi, 19). It is also indicated in the doctrine of rewards and punishments in the other world. "For their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (Isa. lxvi, 24). "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Dan. xii, 2).
But the gospel turns a flood of brightness on the life to come. It "illuminates" the old truth, so that in the New Testament all obscurity disappears. Christ "abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel" (2 Tim. i, 10) ; that is, revealed the life of the soul and the imperishableness of the body. The Lord Jesus Christ gave a new and deeper meaning to the words life and death. He said, "And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ" (John xvii, 3). "He that believeth on me hath eternal life" (John vi, 47). He also said, "And be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. x, 28). Bruce in his exposition holds that the person to be feared is not God or the persecutor but the tempter— "not the man who wants to kill you, but the man who wants to buy you off, and the devil whose agent he is." But even this fanciful exegesis does not destroy the force of the truth which lies in the background of the text. He confounded Sadducean unbelief—which taught that man had no spirit, that life was his only destiny and the grave his end—by showing that Jehovah, who revealed himself to Moses at the bush, declared himself to be the God of the Patriarchs long since dead. "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; ye do greatly err" (Markxii, 26, 27). He appeals to what God is and to what man is. He places the subject upon the deepest and broadest basis. To God all are living; in his eyes there are no dead. He further declares that all "that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth" (John v, 28). Of himself he says, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die" (John xi, 25, 26). And he consoles his faint-hearted disciples with the assurance "Because I live, ye shall live also." He, the author of immortality, resplendent with such titles as "the Prince of life," "the Living One," "the Life and the Light of men," "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever," whose "goings forth have been from everlasting," whose name is "Father of eternity," formally pledges his own existence for theirs; as if they might fear extinction when he, the "Lord of life," should be no more.
Especially by his own resurrection in power and glory has he bridged over the gulf between this life and the next. He has swept away the darkness of the grave, vanquished death, and proclaimed the immortal destiny of redeemed humanity. It is in the gospel that we have light, light beyond doubt. There are some who have never believed strongly enough to doubt. They have never thrown their hopes with such earnestness into the other world as to have anxiety for fear it should not all be true. O, to see the coffin lowered into the grave, and when the heart is wrung with the sense of desolation to have the thought intrude, "What if the life to come be all a dream, and my buried treasure shall never come forth again!"
But our Lord's resurrection is a world-fact and the anchor holds. At the bedside of the dying and beside the open grave how glorious this truth! Man is an immortal being. And it is a personal immortality. No mere projection of ourselves into the future as an influence, will satisfy the cravings of the soul. It is not enough to join the invisible choir
"Of those immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence."
Each one of us shall live forever, in our own proper personality, with memory, will, self-consciousness, and love. Before this certainty all else fades into utter insignificance. Some preparation we should surely make for the hereafter. Who would attend only to the present and ignore the life to come? If there be a future life it has a most important connection with the present. Is it of no consequence that childhood should prepare for youth, and youth for manhood, and manhood for the period of age? Yet childhood, youth, manhood, age are but successive waves on the river of years which rolls onward to that mighty ocean whose tideless waves beat on for evermore.
Who would cast himself, reckless, from the headlands of time? If we are afloat, and the shores are receding from us, and farewells are wafted from the pier, shall we not ask, Whither are we going? Whither? "If a man die shall he live again?" "Yes," says reason. "Yes," says revelation. "For me to live is Christ; to die is gain." "So shall we be ever with the Lord."
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