It is not an unfrequent occurrence for a mixture of heaven and hell to be experienced. Here is an able and upright merchant who is about to fail, in consequence of disasters which he could neither foresee nor prevent, and for which he is in no sense responsible. He shrinks from bankruptcy with inexpressible shame and distress. He is mortified, cut to the quick, robbed of sleep, can hardly look his creditors in the face. Now, he reflects, "This is not my fault. I have been honest, prudent, economical, unwearied in effort, I have done my duty to the best of my ability. God approves me, and all good men would if they knew the exact facts." If that assurance does not shed an element of heaven into his hell, spread a soothing veil of light and oil over his stormy trouble, then it is because his pride is greater than his self respect, his vanity more keen than his conscience is strong, his regard for appearances more influential than his knowledge of the truth. And in that case the misery he suffers is the penalty of his excessive self sensitiveness.
The elements of hell are pain, slavery, imprisonment, rebellion, forced exertion, forced inaction, shame, fear, self condemnation, social condemnation, universal condemnation, aimlessness, and despair. He who seeks good only in the just order of its successive standards, gratifying no lower function, except in subservience to the higher ones, escapes these experiences, feels that he fulfills his destiny, and is an approved freeman of God. The service of truth and good alone makes free; all service of evil is slavery and wretchedness. For freedom is spontaneous obedience to that which has a right to command. The thirsty man who quaffs a glass of cold water does an act of liberty; but he who constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid and despotic appetite, knows that he is a slave, and feels condemned, and chafes in the hell of his bondage.
The dissipated sluggards and thieves who feed the vices and prey on the interests of the community, writhe under the rebuke of the higher laws they break in enthroning their selfish propensities above the cardinal standards of the public good; and in the stale monotony of their indulgences, they know nothing of the glorious zest shed by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of the virtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced on their way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows the forge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with all good not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generous sympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good it contemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an envious man in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to the experience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, and hate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys which sinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and then to lock the bolts behind.
A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, from the central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest and outer most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law of salvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending and expanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truth and life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are the reverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the law of perdition, which guides the soul in a descending and contracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and viler attractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve the superior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests and invitations above. When the members of a family erect their separate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniously blending around a common authority of truth and love, when they live in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, a poisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, a fiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domestic atmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is a concentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentions and encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishing alternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to be deprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of our being, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closer definition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoided or neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviously the inevitable result and penalty of sin.
The great mistake in the popular view or mythological doctrine of hell has arisen from conceiving of God under the image of a political ruler, acting from without, by wilful methods, and inflicting arbitrary judgments on his rebellious subjects. He should be conceived as the dynamic Creator, acting from within, through the intrinsic order and laws of things, for the instruction and guidance of his creatures. His condemnation is the inevitable culmination of a discordant state of being, rather than the verdict of a vindictive judge or the sentence of a forensic monarch. Every retribution is an impinge of the creature in the creation, and, so far from expressing destructive wrath, is an act of the self rectifying mechanism of the universe to readjust the part with the whole. With what pernicious folly, what cruel superstition, men have attributed their own miserable passions to their imperturbable Maker, breaking his infinite perfection into all sorts of frightful shapes, as seen through the blur and effervescence of their own imperfections! So the sun seems to go down with his garments rolled in blood, and to set angrily in a stormy ocean of fire: but really the great lamp of the universe shines serenely from the unalterable fixture of his central seat, and all this spectral tempest of blaze and glare is but a refraction of his beams through our vexed atmosphere.
God being infinitely perfect, does not change his dispositions and modes of action like a fickle man. His intentions and deeds are the same here and everywhere, now and always. If we wish to learn in what manner God will prepare a hell and punish the impenitent wicked after death, we must not, as men did in the barbaric and mythological ages, make an induction from the treatment of criminals by capricious and revengeful rulers in this world; we must see how God himself now treats his disobedient children for their demerits here, assured that his eternal temper and method are identical with his temporal temper and method.
Well, then, how does God treat offenders now? Incapable of anger or caprice, he retains his own steady procedures and absolute serenity unaltered, but leaves the culprits to endure the effects of their perverted bearing towards him and towards the order he has established.
If a man lies or defiles himself, or blasphemes, or murders, God does not dash him from a cliff or cast him into a furnace of fire. There would be no connection of cause and effect in
that; and to suppose it, is a gross superstition. He leaves the offender to the reactions of his own acts, the discordant vileness of his own degradation, the devouring return of his own passions, to punish him for his sin, and to purge him of his wrong. The true retribution of every wicked deed is contained in the recalcitration of its own motive. What fitter penalty can the soul suffer than that of being embraced in the hellish atmosphere of its own bad spirit, to teach it to reform itself and cultivate a better spirit?
What, then, is the meaning of the fear, suffering and horror, which so often accompany or follow sin? They do not, as has been commonly supposed, express the indignation and revengefulness of God. No, at their very darkest, they must suggest the shadow of his aggrieved will, not the lurid frown of his rage. A part of the discord which sin is and introduces, they denote the remedial struggles of nature and grace to restore the perverted being to its normal condition. If you put your finger in the fire the burning pain is the reaction of your act, and that pain is not vengeance, but preservative education. When some frightful disease seizes on a man, the inflammation and convulsions which succeed are the violent spring of the constitution on the enemy, its desperate attempt to shake off the fell grasp, and bring the organism to health and peace again. These efforts either succeed, or in the exhausting shocks the body is destroyed. It is the same with the soul. Sin is the displacement of the hierarchy of authorities in the soul, the misbalancing of its energies, the disturbance of its health and peace. And all the varieties of retribution are the recoil of the injured faculties, the struggles of the insulted authorities, to vindicate and reestablish themselves. Now, these efforts, if the soul is indestructible, must always, at last, be successful. Health in the body is the harmonious adjustment of its energies with its conditions; and a sufficient modicum must be obtained or death ensues. Virtue in the soul is the harmony of its powers with the laws of God; the measure of this is the measure of spiritual life; and granting the soul to be immortal, the tendency towards a complete measure of virtue must ultimately become irresistible, and every hell at last terminate in paradise. The persistent forces or laws of the divine environment steadily tend to draw the unstable forces or passions of all creatures into harmony with them, and that harmony is redemption. Perdition is consequently never, as the ecclesiastical doctrine makes it always, a state of fixed hopelessness. Though we make our bed in the nethermost hell, God is there. And wherever God is, penitence and grace, reformation and pardon, have a right of eminent domain between him and the souls of his children.
According to the common doctrine of hell as a physical locality, and the predestination of all men to it through the sin of Adam, birth is a universal gateway of perdition, the whole world one open course to damnation for all except the few elected to be saved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts the lineage of Adam as a dark river of perdition, choked with the souls of the damned, steadily pouring into hell ever since our human generations began. But in addition to the refutation of this terrible belief by its monstrous moral iniquity, science is now doubly refuting it by the proof of the existence of the human race on the earth for unnumbered centuries before the Biblical date of Adam. So this fictitious gate of a fictitious hell is shut and abolished. With it vanishes the horrible picture of this world as floored with omnipresent trap doors to the bottomless pit, and closed fatally around by a dead wall of doom, through which, by one bloody orifice alone, the believers in the vicarious atonement could crawl up into heaven. In place of this, we see the whole universe as one open House of God, traversed in all directions by the free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love.
And so of the remaining theoretic gates of hell, unbelief, ritual neglect, and the other technicalities on which priests and deluded zealots have always hinged the perdition of such as heed not their authority; none of them shall much longer prevail. With the wiping out of the mythological hell all these fanciful entrances to it likewise disappear. But instead of these visionary ones we should point out and warn men from the substantial gates of the true hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell. All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition, avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in. In holding back those who are approaching these fatal gates, in trying to contract them, to shut them up here is a vital work to be done, infinitely more promising than the brandishing of the terrors of that material hell in which sensible men can no longer believe. For the only true hell is the remedial vibration of truth in an uncoordinated soul, even when not remedial for the individual still remedial for the race.
It is not our outward abode, but our inmost spirit, that makes our experience infernal or heavenly: for, in the last result, it is the occupying spirit that moulds the environment, not the habitation that determines the tenant. This is the substance of the whole matter. An accomplished chemist, who was a good man in truth, but a heretic by the standard of orthodoxy, died. Being an unbeliever, of course, he went to hell. Seeing a group of children in torment there, he pitied them very deeply, and straightway began to devise measures, by means of his skill in chemical science, to shield them from the flame. Instantly the whole scene changed. The beauty of heaven lay around him, and all its blandness breathed through him. Forgetting his own sufferings in sympathy for those of others, he had obeyed the law of virtue, subjecting a selfish desire to a disinterested one; and the omnipotent God enveloped him with the heaven of his own spirit. Another man, who was hard and cruel in character, but perfectly sound in the orthodox faith and observances, died. It is true he was an avaricious and hard saint, but then he believed in the atoning blood; and so, of course, he went to heaven. No sooner did he find himself safely seated in bliss than he tried to peep over the golden wall into the pit of perdition, in order to heighten the relish of his favored lot by the contrast of the agonies of the lost. Instantly the celestial scenery about him was changed into infernal, and, by the radiation and return of his own bad spirit, he found himself plunged into hell and writhing under its retributive experience. His character exemplified the law of perdition, enthroning selfishness over disinterestedness, subverting the order of virtue; and the insulted will of God made his imagined heaven a real hell.
Hell is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishing quantity through the successive periods since war, cannibalism and slavery were universal. Will not the progressive process terminate in the utter extinction of it, paradise everywhere steadily encroaching on purgatory until at last the whole universe of matter and spirit composes an unbroken heaven?
According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was once a measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions, making a universal hell of matter. But the discords and perturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order more and more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled in their gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weaving throughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. The evolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and is more complex than the material, each mind being as complicated as the whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be as complete as the evolution of the astronomic motions already is, and a divine empire of holy and happy men be the goal of history? This hope carries the cross through hell, and leaves nothing unredeemed.
HEAVEN, in the crude fancy of mankind, has generally been conceived as a definite, exclusive, material abode; either some elysian clime on the surface of the earth; or some happy isle beyond the setting sun; or this whole globe, renovated by fire and peopled with a risen and ransomed race; or else some halcyon spot in the sky, curtained with inaccessible splendor and crowded with eternal blessings. It was natural that men should think thus of heaven as a place whence all the evils which they knew were excluded and where all the goods which they knew were carried to the highest pitch, God himself visibly enthroned there in entrancing glory amidst throngs of worshippers.
This was unavoidable, because, in an early age, before knowledge and reflection had trained men to the critical examination and correction of their instinctive conclusions, all the data which they possessed would naturally lead them to imagine the unknown God in the glorified form and circumstances of the most enviable being their experience had yet revealed to them; and to paint the unknown future state of perfected souls under the purest aspects of the most desirable boons they had known in the present state. It being a necessity of their uncritical minds to personify God by a definite picture of imagination, and to portray heaven to themselves as an external place, they could not do otherwise than work out the results by means of the most intense experiences and the most impressive imagery familiar to them. The highest idea they had of man, purified and expanded to the utmost, would be their idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions of existence within their observation, enhanced by the removal of every limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both would be outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royal courts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, with their exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, their processions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailing casts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion. For what were the most vivid of all the experiences men had among their fellows on earth? Why, the exhibitions of the sultan with his gorgeous ceremonial state, and of the high priest with the dread sacrifice and homage he paid amidst clouds of incense and rolling waves of song; the admission of the favored, in glittering robes, to share the privileges; the exclusion of the profane and vulgar in squalid misery and outer darkness. Consequently, except by a miracle, these sights could not fail largely to constitute the scenic elements for the popular belief concerning God and heaven. What should men reflect over into the unknown to portray their ideals there, if not the most coveted ingredients and the most impressive forms of the known? The great thing, then, inevitably, would be supposed to be to gain the personal favor of the supreme Sovereign by some artifice, some flattery, some fortunate compliance with his arbitrary caprice, and to get into the charmed enclosure of his abode by some special grace some authoritative passport or magic art.
But as soon as science and philosophy, and a spiritual experience rectifying its own errors by reflective criticism, have created a more competent theology it discredits all these raw schemes. It teaches that God, being the eternal omnipresent power and mystery which foreran, underlies, pervades and includes all things, cannot justly be figured as a man, locally here or there, and not elsewhere. He can be justly thought of only as the almighty Creator of the universe, intelligible in the order of his works and ways, but inscrutable in his essence, absent nowhere, present everywhere in general, and specially revealed anywhere whenever a fit experience in the soul awakens a special consciousness of him. This conception of God the only one any longer defensible as the Infinite Spirit, incapable, except in his various incarnations, of particular local enthronement and uncovering to the outward gaze of worshippers, necessitates a correspondent alteration in the vulgar idea of heaven as an exclusive spot in space.
In every form of being, in any portion of the universe, the central idea of a state of salvation, is the fulfillment of the will of the Creator in the faculties of the creature, the fruition of the ends of the whole in the consciousness of the part, the congruity of the forces of the soul with the requirements of its situation. If this definition be accepted, it is clear that no mere place of residence, however excellent, can be heaven. That is but one factor of heaven, and worthless without a corresponding factor of a spiritual kind. Essentially, heaven is a divine experience, not a divine location; yet constructively it is both of these. Ever so serene and pure a space, perfectly free from every perturbation of ill, and surrounded with all the outer provisions of power and order, would be no heaven, until a prepared soul entered it, furnishing the spiritual conditions for the forces to run into fruition, for the melody of blissful being to play. The material elements of the universe, so far as we know, are unconscious dynamics. However perfectly marshalled, they can by themselves compose no heaven. So the conscious soul, as far as we know, is incapable of an independent and unrelated existence in itself. All its experience, when ultimately analyzed, is the resultant of the mutual relations between its own energies and capacities and the forms and forces of things outside of itself. When there is a right arrangement of right realities in the residence, and a right development of faculties and affections within the resident, and such an adjustment of the spiritual states with the surrounding conditions, that, as these act and react upon each other, the laws of the universe break into conscious harmony, or the will of God is realized in a life of blessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean by heaven; and the conditions of its realization constitute the law of salvation.
Such being the true idea of heaven, obviously, it cannot be limited to any particular locality. It may be here, elsewhere, anywhere, everywhere, before death, in death, after death; whenever and wherever the proper conditions meet inward state and outward circumstances so adjusted as to produce an experience which fulfills the will of God and realizes the end of the creation. Hereafter this may be, as we know it now on earth, a spiritual fruition in material conditions, or it may be something altered in accordance with the varying exigences of worlds whose details are as yet inconceivable by us, altogether hidden behind the veil of futurity and our ignorance. But its one fundamental condition, its eternal essence under all circumstances which can possibly happen, must always be the same. Whatever changes await the soul, embodied in a new form in the state after death, or remaining in pure disembodiment; whatever be the relation of the immaterial entity of mind to the circumference and contents of its new home, it can be in paradise, it can command peace and bliss, or any equivalent of these terms, only by the fulfillment of the will of God in its being. Heaven is, therefore, the reconciliation and unison of the soul with its divinely appointed lot, the identification of the ideal and the real.
The will of God is expressed in the soul in the submissive services and virtues of a pure and pious character it is expressed in the outward creation by the unbreakable persistency of his laws through all the aberrations and discords of accompaning evil or limitation. Nowhere can it ever be an impossibility to conjoin these and thus to make a heaven. The one thing which everywhere is variable and evanescent, is evil, or the imperfect adjustment of the creature with the works and designs of the Creator. The one thing which forever stays, and steadily invites the intelligent soul to its embrace, is good, that is, the opportunity to realize the divinely intended correspondence of the relations in the part with the relations in the whole, a serene movement of life through the unison of the soul with its true fate. Now, the one predicate which is essential in all things, without whose presence nothing can be, is the will of God. Even could that will be violated or withstood, still it would be there, upholding, forgiving, wooing Salvation, or a life of conscious harmony, is capable of realization, of course, wherever the means are offered for the performance and enjoyment of the will of God; and the infinity of his attributes necessarily makes that condition an omnipresent possibility in the realm of free spirits. Therefore, heaven is not outwardly limited to one place, or to one period, but may be achieved at any time, and anywhere. This throws light on the fallacy of the current, narrow doctrine of a limited probation. The oriental belief that the action of the present is the fate of the future unquestionably covers a profound truth. Yet, if there is always a future there must likewise always be a present, and the right action in this may forever redeem that. Probation is limited by no decree, only by the duration of free being.
Although the essential element in the idea of heaven is forever the same, it may be regarded in three different aspects, or on three different scales as an individual experience, as a social state, as a far off universal event. Heaven, as a private experience, is the harmonized intercourse of the soul with the divineness in its surrounding conditions. Heaven, as a public society, is the blessed communion of blessed souls, a complete adjustment of the lives of kindred natures. Heaven, as a final consummation, is the publication of the vindicated will of God in the total harmony of the universe, all individual wills so many separate notes blent in the collective consonance of the whole.
But, for all practical purposes, we may overlook this triple distinction and think of heaven simply as the correspondence of the life of the soul with those outward conditions which represent the will of God. And towards this conclusion everything, in its profoundest and most persistent tendency, is bearing. In spite of interruptions and seeming exceptions, it is towards this that the entire confluence of forces and beings gravitates and slowly advances. The universal law of evolution, in which a scientific philosophy has generalized its most comprehensive induction, is but a history and prophecy of the progress towards a moving equilibrium of the totality of worlds and intelligences, which can eventuate only in a universal heaven, or unimpeded completion of the creative design.
Do we not see all creatures tending towards the perfection of their respective types, every improvement selectively taken up and carried on, every deteriorating deviation eliminated, all errors and failures doomed to perish or change into new conditions for more hopeful attempts? This confirms the faith first based on the deeper argument. For, since the will of God is the one persistent reality, the one all evolving and all inclusive power of which evil is only the distorted and shadowy negation, that opposition to the will of God which constitutes sin and misery, that discord with him which generates hell, must prove an ever smaller accompaniment of his plan, a transitory phenomenon ceasing in even degree with the spreading conquests of his almighty purpose, as race on race of creatures, and system on system of worlds, sweep into the victorious harmony, until the boundless realm of being shall be boundless heaven.
Heaven, then, in essence, is not merely a favored locality, not merely a resigned soul, but the result of a combination of these in a just relation. It is not a playing power in the material environment nor an inherent attribute of the spiritual instrument; but it is the music which flows from the instrument when it is attuned to react in coordination with the acting environment. Salvation, consequently, is not simply a divine place of abode, not simply a divine state of soul; but it is these two conjoined. It is the experimental deposit between the two poles of rightly ordered conditions in the realm and rightly directed energies in the inhabitant. Heaven, then, in the best and briefest definition we can give, is the will of God in fulfillment, or the law of the whole in uncrossed action.
Hell is the experience produced by the rebound of violated law. Or, if we hold that, strictly speaking, a divine law is incapable of violation; as every seeming resistance to gravitation is in fact a deeper obedience to gravitation, then we may say, in more accurate phrase, hell is the collision and friction of the limitations of different laws. It is the discord of the part with the whole. It is the antagonism of the soul with God. But the perpetual preservation of a perfectly balanced antagonism with God is inconceivable. It must vary, totter, grow either worse or better. If it grows worse, it will finally destroy itself, the aberrant individuality or malign insurgence vanishing in the totality of force, as the filth of our sewers vanishes purely in the purity of the ocean. If it grows better, its improvement will finally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evil disappearing in good. Therefore, every being must at length be saved from misery, if not by redemptive atonement then by absolvent annihilation, and one absolute heaven finally absorb the dwindling hells.
The question of chief importance to us in relation to heaven is, How can we gain admission into it. The limitations of language necessitate the use of imagery for the expression of religious ideas: and there is no objection to it if it be recognized as imagery, and be interpreted accordingly. Considering, then, that beatific experience of which heaven consists, under the metaphor of a city, what are its ways of entrance? How can we pass to its citizenship?
The obstacles to our entrance exist not in the city itself. Its gates are never closed. The supreme conditions of redemption are spiritual, and not local or material. If there be within no fatal impediments to the free course of the will of God, all outer obstacles easily give way and cease. If we are ever to know heaven, it is within ourselves that we must find it out. Whatever abolishes that internal rebellion of the soul which makes its experience a purgatory, whatever replaces this confusion with an accord of the faculties, is a road to heaven. Whatever removes vices and inserts virtues in their stead, attuning us to the eternal laws of things, leads us through some gate into paradise. And nothing else can no ceremonial artifice, no external transference, no sacramental exorcism, no priestly dodge.
The same mistake generally committed in regard to the nature of heaven, making it a mere local residence, has been as generally committed in regard to the conditions of admission. They have been made arbitrary, whereas they are intrinsic. They are inwrought with the substantial laws of being. The idea of God being first fashioned after the image of a sultan throned in his palace amidst his courtiers, ruling an empire by his whims, it was but natural that heaven, and the terms of entrance there, should be in a similar manner conceived under the forms of court ceremonial with its capricious favoritisms. Thus it has been supposed that by the atoning sacrifice of an incarnate person of the Godhead satisfaction has been made for the sins of the world, which was hopelessly ruined by its original federal representative, and that thus a pardon was offered to those alone who mentally accept the formula of the correspondent belief.
According to this view, the only open gateway of heaven is faith in the vicarious atonement, a baptismal passage through the blood of Christ. Science explodes this narrow and repulsive doctrine by demonstrating its irreconcilableness alike with physical fact and with moral law, first tracing the affiliated lines of our race back to many separate Adams in the shadows of an indeterminable antiquity, and then showing that the divine method of salvation is through substantial rejection of evil and appropriation of good in personal character, and not through royal proclamation and forensic conformity.
The plan of God for the salvation of men, as its culmination is seen in Christ, is the exhibition of the true type of being, the true style of motive and action, for their assimilation and reproduction: but Calvinism, when fundamentally analyzed, reduces it to a monarchical manifesto and spectacular drama working its effects through verbal terms, acts of mental assent and gesticular deeds. Every sound teaching of philosophy refutes this exclusive and arbitrary creed. In fact, its fictitious and mythological nature is obvious the moment we see that the will of God is represented in those laws of nature which are the direct articulations and embodiments of his eternal mind, and not in those political regulations or priestly and judicial formalities which express the perverted desires and artificial devices of men. The wearing of a certain dress, the bending of the knee, the muttering of a phrase, may flatter an earthly sovereign and gain a seat at his banquets. But it is childish folly to fancy any such thing of God. It is absurd to suppose that he has two schemes of government, one for the present state, another for the future; one for the elect, another for the reprobate; one for those who gaze on the spectacle of the crucifixion and make a certain sign, another for those who do not. His laws, identified with the unchangeable nature and course of the creation, sweep in one unbroken order throughout immensity and eternity, awarding perfect justice, and perfect mercy to all alike, making the experience of all souls a hell or a heaven to them accordingly as they strive against or harmonize with the divine system of existence in which they have their being. The mere acceptance of a technical dogma, the mere performance of a ritual action, cannot adjust a discordant character with the conditions of blessedness so as to reinstate an exile of heaven. To imagine that God will, in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven a man whose character fits him for hell, or, in default of that conventionality, place in hell a man whose character fits him for heaven, is to represent him as acting on an eccentric whim. And surely every one who has a worthy idea of God must find it much easier to believe that men have mixed mythological dreams with their religion, than to believe that the infinite God is capable of despotic freaks or melo dramatic caprices.
The poor, odious figment that baptism with the blood of Christ is the sole entrance to heaven, is rebuked by the sweet and awful imperturbableness with which the laws of being act, distributing the ingredients of hell or heaven to every one accordingly as his vices disobey or his virtues obey the will of God.
In a universe of law where God with all his attributes is omnipresent no trick can ever be the pathway into paradise. The true method of salvation is by the production of a good character through divine grace and the discipline of life. Thus, the real law of salvation through Christ consists not in the technical belief that he shed his blood for our redemption, but in the personal derival from him of that spirit which will make us willing to shed our own blood for the good of others.
There was, not long ago, called to her eternal home, a young woman, who, by the sweet gentleness, the heroic generosity and the unspotted fidelity of her whole life, deserves an exalted place on the roll of feminine chivalry and saintliness. Not a brighter name, or one associated with a more fearless and accomplished spirit, is recorded on the list of those Christian women who volunteered to serve as nurses in the great American war of nationality. No soldier was braver, few were more under fire, than she; still plying her holy work with unfaltering love and fortitude, both in the horrid miasma of camps and before the charge of cavalry and the blaze of cannon. Many a time, the livelong night, under the solemn stars, equipped with assuaging stores, she threaded her way alone through the debris of carnage, seeking out the wounded among the dead, lifting her voice in song as a signal for any lingering survivor who might be near. Many a time she broke on the vision of mutilated and dying men, with the light of love in her eyes, a hymn of cheer on her lips, and unwearied ministrations in her hands, transfigured with courage and devotion, gleaming on their sight through the sulphurous flame of battle or the darkening mists of disease like an angel from heaven. Receiving the seeds of fatal illness from her exposures, she returned home to delight with her noble qualities all who knew her, to make a husband happy, and then to die a contented martyr. Meekly folding her hands, and saying: "Thanks, Father, for what thou hast enabled me to do, and still more for the new home to which thou art calling me now" she was gone. The cruel creed of superstition says: "Since she was a Universalist, having no part, by faith, in the mystic sacrifice of Christ, she is doomed to hell." But every attribute of God, every promise written by his own finger in the sacred instincts of our nature, as well as the cardinal teachings of the New Testament, assure us that as the victorious purity and devotedness of her soul bore her away from the tabernacle of flesh, the welcoming Savior said: "Come, thou blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world." And heaven swung wide its gate for her; and excited fancy conceives that, as she passed in, there was a gratulatory flutter of wings and waving of palms through the angelic ranks.
In distinction from that hypothetical gate of blood, set up by a crude theology in one narrow place alone, what, then, are the real gates of heaven, which stand open throughout the realms of responsible being? All the causes which bring the will of man into consent with the will of God. Truth is the harmony of mind with the divine order; beauty, the harmony of taste with the divine symmetries; good, the harmony of volition with the divine ends. Everything that secures these for us is an avenue into the peaceful city of bliss. To be in heaven is to be a transparent medium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections of phenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessed freedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysterious attraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. To be there in a superlative degree is to have a mind which is an infinitesimal mirror of the All, and a heart responsive to that mind, every perception of truth in the realm of the intellect generating a correspondent emotion of good in the realm of affection. Not any forensic act of faith in atoning blood, but ingrained piety a modest renunciation before the reality of things is the grand gateway of souls to the blessedness and repose of God. Anselm, the great sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, said: "I would rather be in hell without a fault than in heaven with one." Can any defective technicality damn such a man? No; such a spirit carries and radiates heaven is itself heaven. That spirit is God himself in his creature, and can no more be imprisoned in hell than God can be. On the other hand, any professing Orthodoxist who, according to a horrible doctrine of the Calvinists in former days, should hope in heaven to obtain a sharper relish for his own joy by looking down on the tortures of the damned, and contrasting his blissful safety with the hopeless agony of their perdition, would find himself in hell. The infernal scenery, even there, would burst on his gaze, its atmosphere of pain reek around him, and the detestable turmoil of its experience rage in his breast. The selfishness of his character, in steep contradiction to the public disinterestedness belonging to the divine will, must invert every proper experience of heaven. Could any conventional arrangement, or accident of locality, save such a man, while his character remained unchanged? No; such a spirit carries and radiates hell, is itself hell.
A Mohammedan author says of the seventy three sects into which his coreligionists are divided, that seventy two are wrong ways, terminating in eternal damnation; the remaining one alone, in which are the party of salvation, leads through the true faith into the City of Allah. The same unwise bigotry, the same unripeness of judgment, has been generally shown by Christians. It is time they were ashamed of it, and allowed their souls to mature and expand into a more liberal creed in fuller keeping with the hospitable amplitude of the righteousness and goodness of God. Everything that tends to bring the will of man into loving submission to the infinite Father, to mould the structure of character into correspondence with those established conditions of rightful being represented by the moral and religious virtues, is an open highway of salvation. And all the great cardinal ordinations of life do legitimately tend to this result. Therefore all these are gates of heaven. Some pass in through one of them, others through another; and by means of them all, it is decreed in the sovereign councils of the Divinity, as we believe, that, sooner or later, every intelligence shall reach the goal.
First is the gate of innocence. Little children, spotless youths and maidens who have known no malice or guile, the saintly few among mature men and women who by the untempted elevation and serenity of their temper have kept their integrity unmarred and their robes unsullied, enter by this nearest and easiest gate. Borne aloft by their own native gravitation, we see the white procession of the innocent ones winding far up the cerulean height and defiling in long melodious line into heaven.
The second gate is prosperity. Through this enter those to whom good fortune has served as the guiding smile of God, not pampering them with arrogance, nor hardening them with careless egotism, but shaping them to thankful meekness and generosity. Exempt from lacerating trials, every want benignly supplied, girt with friends, they have grown up in goodness and gratitude, obeying the will of God by the natural discharge of their duties, diffusing benedictions and benefits around them. To such beautiful spirits, saved from wrong and woe by the redemptive shelter of their lot, happiness is a better purgatory than wretchedness. The crystal stream of joy percolating throughout the soul cleanses it more perfectly than any flames of pain can. And so the virtuous children of a favored fortune, who have improved their privileges with pious fidelity, move on into heaven.
Then the third gate is victory. This is more arduous of approach, and yet a throng of heroic souls, the very chivalry of heaven, press through it, wounded and bleeding from the struggle, but triumphant. These are they who have endured hardship with uncomplaining fortitude and fought their way through all enemies, seductions and tribulations. These are they who, armed with the native sacrament of righteousness, inspired with a loyal love, would never stoop their crests to wrong nor make a league with iniquity the conquering champions who tread down every vile temptation, ever hearing their Leader say, "In the world ye shall have trouble and sorrow; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."
Penitence is another gate of heaven. By the instructions of Providence, by the natural progress of experience, the evolution of wisdom, a sinner may become aware of the ingratitude of his disobedience, ashamed of the odiousness of his guilt; be smitten with a regenerating love of truth, beauty, goodness, God; and, without waiting for the lash of an external judgment to drive him the way he should go, by voluntary preference may grieve over his folly and sin, and turn to his duty and his Savior. Then the blessed gate of a spontaneous repentance stands open before him; and through this hospitable entrance multitudes find admission to the divine home.
Death often gives an otherwise unattainable deliverance, and so yields the poor victim of unhappy outer conditions a passage to heaven. It is a thought no less false than it is frightful, which represents death as the vindictive turnkey of the creation, at whose approach probation ends, and the shuddering convict is thrust into hell, the hopeless bolt dropping into its ward behind him. It is rather the divine messenger of deliverance for those who are borne down here under a fate too hard for them. Oh, what myriads of afflicted ones orphan children crushed by brutal treatment; poor seamstresses starving in garrets; men and women ground and grimed almost out of the semblance of humanity, in the drudgery and darkness of coal mines; hapless suicides, who have rashly fled from this step dame world, and whose alabaster forms, purpled with bruises, are laid on the dismal beds of brass in the morgue, where a ghastly light strains through the grates, and the crowd of gazers sweeps endlessly on; unsuccessful men of genius, unappreciated, neglected, cruelly wronged, their extreme sensitiveness making their lives a long martyrdom to these what a blessed angel is death, freeing them, setting them in a new state, starting them on a fresh career, amidst fairer circumstances, in front of better opportunities! To be saved, and in paradise, what is it but to be a pure instrument to echo the music of divine things? When the corruptible parts of the instrument are hopelessly discordant, or the circumstances of its place here are jangled with evils which it cannot overcome, then the disentanglement of the spiritual harp, and the translation of it to some finer sphere; where its free chords may ring their proper music clearly out, are a blessed redemption, making death itself a triumphant gate of heaven.
Retribution is the remotest and most difficult of all the heavenly gates; and yet it is one, and one that is indispensable for many a neglectful, halting, and obstinate child of man. It is an extreme error to think punishment a gate of hell. It is rather a result of being already inside, and it legitimately serves as an outlet thence. Whatever may be the case with imperfect human rulers, in the government of God no punishment is ever inflicted for the sake of vengeance, a gratuitous evil. It is blasphemy to deem God vindictive. He always punishes for the sake of good, to awaken attention, produce insight and sorrow, and cause a reattunement of character and conduct with the laws of right, seen at last to be supremely authoritative and benignant, indissolubly bound up with the truest good of each and with the sole good of all. On every gate of hell may be written. Wherever retribution is actual, salvation is possible, equivalent to the great maxim of jurisprudence: Ubi jus ibi remedium! So, even the dark door of retribution, when men will advance by no other way, leads them to thoughtfulness, regret, and a redemptive readjustment of their passions and acts. Thus it becomes the ultimate gate of heaven. And, alas! what a dismal crowd of sufferers, refusing all shorter and happier ways, wait to be drawn through this torturing passage of remedial mercy! May the number entering by the other gates ever increase, and those entering this dwindle! And yet, may it forever stand open for the unhappy culprits who must be lost unless saved here!
Besides all these gates, and commanding them all, there is one everywhere accessible, and never shut on any soul which has the grace to try it the omnipresent gate of resignation. Remove the conditions of resistance, or friction, by a total surrender of self will and an absolute acceptance of the Divine Will, and, it matters not where you are, the essence of perdition is destroyed in your soul. The utter abandonment of pride, a pious submission to the laws of things, a glad and grateful acquiescence in whatever the Supreme Authority decrees this is the unrestricted way into heaven which waits before the steps of all who will only exhibit the requisite spirit, and enter. Yes, let any being but banish from himself every vestige of personal dictation before God and unexactingly identify his desires with universal good; and, even though he stand on the bottom of hell, heaven will be directly before him through the open gate of resignation. For the organic attitude of a pure and loving submission tunes the discordant creature to that eternal breath of God which blows everywhere through the universe of souls, sighing until they conspire with it to make the music of redemption.
IN THE leading nations of Christendom, the belief in the immortality of the soul has for some time past obviously been weakening. The number of those who assail the belief increases, and their utterances become more frank and dogmatic. A multitude of instances, clear to every careful observer, prove this. Especially at the present moment do examples of painful doubt, profound misgiving, bold and exultant denial, mocking flippancy and ridicule, abound on all sides, in private conversation, in public discussion, and in every form of literary activity. The hearty thoroughness and fervor with which the faith of the Church was once held have gone from whole classes. Subtle skepticism or blank negation is a common characteristic. Whether this tendency towards unbelief be sound or fallacious, temporary or permanent, it is at least actual. And it is important that we examine the causes of it, and test their logical validity while tracing their historic spread. Why, then, we ask, is the faith in a future life for man suffering such a marked decay in the present generation of Christendom?
In the first place, the faith pales and dwindles, from the general neglect of that strenuous and constant cultivation of it formerly secured by the stern doctrinal drill and by the rigid supervision of daily thought and habit in the interests of religion. Never before were men so absorbed as now in material toil and care during the serious portion of their existence; never before so beset as now during the leisure portion by innumerable forms of amusement and dissipation. The habit of lonely meditation and prayer grows rarer. The exactions of the struggle of ambition grow fiercer, the burdens of necessity press more heavily; the vices and temptations of society thicken: and they withdraw the attention of men from ideal and sacred aims. More and more men seem to live for labor and pleasure, for time and sense; less and less for truth and good, for God and eternity. Absorbed in the materialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolous diversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious age was maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilent an epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such a discount? But the things to which men really devote themselves dilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come to disbelieve that for which they take no thought and make no sacrifice or investment. The average men of our time, as well those of the educated classes as those of the laboring classes, do not live for immortality. Therefore their faith in it diminishes. Our fathers, to a degree not common now, walked in mental companionship with God, practiced solitary devotion, shaped their daily feelings and deeds with reference to the effect on their future life. Thus that hidden life became real to them. Now the interests and provocations of the present world, concentrated and intensified as never before the strife of aspirants, the giddy enterprises of speculation and commerce and engineering, the chaos of caucuses and newspapers and telegraphs monopolize our faculties and exhaust our energies, leaving us but faint inclination to attend to the solemn themes of the soul and the mystic lures of infinity. To those crazed with greed, battling with rivals or sunk in debauchery, God naturally becomes a verbal phantom and immortality a foolish dream. There is nothing in mechanism and mammon worship, nothing in selfish sloth and laughter, nothing in cruel oppression and drudgery, to inspire belief in the deathless spirituality of man. Among a people prevailingly given over to these earthlinesses, faith in the transcendent verities of religion perforce dies out. In the long run the supreme devotion of the soul irresistibly moulds its faith. Christendom does not live in conscious sacrifices and aspirations for God and eternal life, but it lives chiefly for selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer and more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in a future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this world, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existing here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue and blessedness now. When this shall have been done the tangential and fractional character of our experience will be so obvious, the inadequacy of the earthly state for the wants of our transcendent and prophetic faculties will be so urgent, and the supplementing adaptations of the entire unseen but clearly divined future to the craving parts in the present will be so manifest, that a complete revelation of immortality will break upon the prepared mind of the race. Then history will take a new departure in breathing communion with the whole creation.
But infidelity to duty and privilege does not destroy the truth of duty and privilege. It only blinds the faithless eyes so that they cannot see the truth. If the immortality of the soul be a truth, the materialistic absorption of our life would blind us to it and make us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide the future from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on the dark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlasting invitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness of our age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it does not logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test of the genuine evidence.
The second reason for the apparent rapid crumbling away of the belief in immortality in Christendom is the recent wide diffusion of a critical knowledge of the comparative history of the opinions of all nations on the subject of a future life, revealing the mythological character common to them, and tracking them back to their origin in primitive superstitions no longer is their literal purport credible to any educated intelligence. In many works by theological writers, and by scientific writers, of free habits of thought, like Strauss and Spencer, collections have been made of the fancies and theories of mankind respecting the survival of the spirit and the conditions of its experience after the death of the body. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the most enlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with the crudest notions of the barbarians of the prehistoric period, namely, the spontaneous workings of raw instinct and imagination. Tracing the views of Christians as to the nature of the soul, and the life to come in heaven or hell, back to the rude conceptions of the naked savages who fashioned their idea of the ghost from the shadow or the reflection of the man, which was a picture or representative of him, yet without matter, and from the phenomena of dreams, in which they supposed the spirit of the man left him and went through the adventures of the dream and returned ere he awoke it has been asserted that every form of later faith, however refined and improved in details, yet really resting on such puerile fancies, such incompetent and absurd beginnings, is thereby discredited and must be rejected.
Now, it is true that when we find among Christian believers, connected with the doctrine of a future life, an incongruous medley of physical imagery and gross imaginative pictures, conceptions of just the same character as the grotesque dreamings of the earliest savages and the elaborate mythology of subsequent priesthoods, we are required to treat the whole suppositious mass as mere poetry or superstition, and to dismiss it from our faith. But we are by no means justified in doing so with the essential fact itself of a future life. The essential fact, the assertion of immortality, may be true, even if the mythological dress be all fictitious. It does not follow that man has no surviving soul because the local heaven or hell, described by savage or priest as its residence, is unreal. It surely is no correct inference that the soul perishes with the body, because the barbarian mind generalized its idea of the soul from the phenomena of shadows, reflections, echoes and dreams. The critical scholar, who judges the case fairly, will correct the fallacies of the confused reasoning instinct, and relegate the mythology to its proper province, but reserve his judgment on the question itself of spiritual survival to be settled on the only appropriate evidence. Although the habit thus formed by the critical scholar, and by those who follow his authority, of sweeping away as wholly untenable so many varieties of speculation, and so many groups of images connected with the belief in a future life, has unquestionably contributed powerfully to foster complete disbelief in the doctrine itself, yet it is equally unquestionable that this process of negation is illogical. Many a true doctrine has been cradled in superstitions and absurdities. A faith supported by many classes of independent arguments is not overthrown by the disproof of one of those classes. It is as wrongful a procedure to deny the immortality of the soul because barbaric instinct grounded it on erroneous notions and enveloped it with falsehoods, as it would be to reject the established laws of gravitation and light and sound, for the reason that the various provisional theories, preceding the correct ones, were ridiculous mistakes. The problem to be solved is, Does the man who is now a soul in a body remain a soul when the body dissolves? The inadequacy or folly of a hundred provisional answers does not affect the final answer. Instead of denying immortality because the childish mind of the early world feigned impossible things about it, we should change the question by appeal to a more competent court, and inquire what Pythagoras, Augustine, Dante, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, Swedenborg, Goethe, thought about it. It is a question for the consensus of the most gifted and impartial minds, the very Areopagus of Humanity, to decide. Furthermore, on a deeper inquiry, it seems clear that the real belief in immortality did not originate from the contemplation of the phenomena of dreams and shadows and echoes, but arose rather from the inexpugnable self assertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself non existent. This persistency of consciousness, following it in all its imaginative flights of thought beyond the death of the body, was the cause of the mythological creativeness of the barbaric mind. And thus the elaboration of the imagery of ghosts and a ghostly realm was not the precursor, but the result of a belief in another life. The belief sprang directly out of the feeling of a continuous being unconquerably connected with human self consciousness, and is independent of the imagery in which it has been clothed, may clothe itself in endless forms of imagery, and survive their removal on the discovery of their incompetence.
Besides, the savage himself was, after all, not so far out of the way. His mythology was not a mere fiction concreted into fact by superstition. He was on that track of analogy which, when cleared, will be, perhaps, the luminous highway to universal truth. The savage was obscurely conscious that the objects which appeared around him as solid material realities had their immaterial correspondences within his spirit. The tree, the stone, the flower, the star, the beast, the man, had within him correspondent mental images or ideas just as real as they, but without sensible qualities, and incapable of hurt. With creative wonder he recognized a symbol or analogy of this inner world in the shadow and the reflection. The shadow or the reflection is a representation of its original, but without material substance.
See, it lies there, wavering, on the rock, or in the water. No arrow can pierce it, no club bruise it, no pestle pulverize it, no chemistry disintegrate it. It is an emblem of the immaterial and indestructible spirit, revealed in the outer world of matter, where everything changes and passes away except the noumena under the phenomena. No wonder it stirred the brooding fancy of the ignorant, but prophetic primitive man, and made it teem with poesy and personification.
Freely, then, let us brush aside the mythological extravagance and irrational errors in the entire cosmopolitan doctrine of a future life, but beware of rejecting the fact itself of immortality until we have better grounds than have yet been afforded by the accumulating insight of literary history. As the world moves on, and the human mind develops with it, the crude must give way to the mature, and the false be replaced, not with vacancy, but with the true. The problem of the nature and destiny of the soul will not be solved by tearing away the fictitious drapery thrown around it, but by piercing to the roots of the reality within the drapery.
And now we come to the third reason for the increasing doubt and decreasing faith in regard to a future life: that reason is that the form of the belief in it prevalent in Christendom has become incredible, and the rejection of the form has loosened the hold on the substance. The philosophic mind, which has attained to the idea of the infinite God, without body, or parts, or passions, omnipresent in his total perfection, can reason to the belief in a kindred immortality for its own finite being. But since our experience is here limited to the life now known, we are utterly without data or ability to image forth such a conception of immortality in any form of picture or mental scenery. There seem to be only three ways in which we can give imaginative representation of a future life. The first is the method of the universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy which is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who are unwilling to leave their thoughts of the future life in empty rational abstraction, portray it in vivid concrete. This they do by means of the doctrine of a general bodily resurrection of the dead.
It is a striking fact that four of the great historic and literary religions have taught the doctrine of immortality under the form of a physical resurrection, namely: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. It has been attributed, also, to the ancient religion of Egypt, but erroneously. Its belief there is a mere inference from facts which do not really imply it. The Egyptians plainly believed in a series of individual reincarnations, not in any general resurrection. But it is a sufficiently interesting and impressive fact that over one third of the human race have embodied their expectation of a future eternal life in this concrete and astonishing form. It has not rested on a basis of reason, but on one of asserted revelation and authority. It originated in the fact that the only life of which we now have any experience is a life in the body, and, therefore, this is the life which we instinctively love and prefer; also in the fact that this is the only mode of life which we are able to represent to ourselves in any satisfactory, apprehensible image. It then bolstered itself up by arbitrary theological theorizings, and proclaimed itself with sanctions of a pretended supernatural authority. Slowly the minds of its disciples were drilled to a familiarity with it, and to a habit of implicitly believing it, which grew strong enough to make them hold to it in spite of its difficulty as a sheer and violent miracle having no connection whatever with the natural order of things. Authority and passive habit long maintained the belief in unbroken sway. They still so support it in the Mohammedan world, where there is almost no science, but little skeptical thought, and a common uniformity of abject submission to the word of the Koran. But in Christendom it fares differently. Here, the knowledge of modern science and habits of free inquiry are almost universally diffused. The consequence is, since the chief Christian belief in immortality has been identified with the notion of a general physical resurrection of the dead at the last day, and since all philosophical and scientific thinking refutes that notion by setting its arbitrariness and monstrous abnormality in high and steep relief against the consensus of demonstrated knowledge and moral probability, that the popular belief of Christendom in immortality itself is depolarized and swiftly dropping into decay with a large class of persons. But this spread of doubt and denial, while a natural process, is yet an illogical and unnecessary one. The competent thinker will extricate the question of the immortality of the soul from its accidental entanglement with the doctrine of the resurrection, and, rejecting the latter as incredible, still affirm the former on its own independent grounds. To prove and illustrate these statements we must here give a little additional study, fresh and independent study, to the subject.
The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is bound up with the whole fabric of the Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic theology of Christendom, and cannot be removed without logically shaking that system of belief into pieces. And yet the doctrine, as has been shown in a previous chapter, is unscriptural and of a purely pagan origin, the New Testament foretelling a resurrection of spirits from the underworld, not of bodies from the grave. It has no real analogies in the world, but is a figment of fancy, unsupported by reason on any authentic physical or moral grounds. It is, furthermore, a doctrine whose realization is impossible, because it is a self destroying absurdity.
All that we need for demonstrating its absolute incredibility, is simply to ultimate its implications, carry it out in thought to the necessary results which its ignorant originators never foresaw. The doctrine of a physical resurrection presupposes that our race was originally intended to be immortal on earth, and that death was a penalty for sin. Fill out the theory. Adam and Eve, made male and female, were commanded to multiply and replenish the earth. Their descendants, doubling every twenty five years, would, after sixty or seventy generations had accumulated, have covered the whole earth so thickly that they would be packed in one immovable mass, the whole planet carpeted with their forms and paved with their upturned faces. Not an inch of room on the globe for any harvest to grow or any creature to move; the world, crowded and imbedded at every point with one continuous multitude of immortal human beings, would have then rolled around the zodiac, presenting this chronic and motionless picture, to all eternity!
If it be maintained that had it not been for sin and its penalty, the successive generations would neither have died nor have remained forever on the earth, but would have been translated bodily to some other world, the absurdity just exposed is escaped only to introduce another one equally glaring. For in time, the entire solid contents of the globe would thus be removed, and the disappearance of our planet unhinge the solar system and produce a general cataclysm. The solid contents of the earth have been estimated at about thirty nine trillions of cubic feet. Seventy five doublings of the primal pair would reach to over seventy trillions of human beings, each containing more than a solid cubic foot.
It is perfectly clear, therefore, in any view, that the only way in which the human race, with their reproductive constitution, could permanently inhabit the world is by the present system of successive births and deaths; a system, furthermore, which science shows to have been in working existence among the preceding races of creatures for innumerable ages before the mythical sin of Adam and Eve, with its mythical consequences.
The fabulous scheme of an intended bodily immortality on the earth is a discordant and disagreeable one in every respect, asthetic, rational, and moral. It jars incongruously with the great order of nature and providence, which everywhere interpolates a night between two days, a sleep between two wakings, to keep the edge of consciousness fresh and the possibilities of pleasure alive. Imprisoned in this carcass of flesh with its ignoble necessities for endless ages, the contemplation of the fearful burden of monotony would be insufferable to any one who had thought the case out in all its details with vivid realization. And yet, so unthinking are most persons in regard to the conventional beliefs prevalent in society, Parsees, Jews, Christians and Mohammedans, professedly base their entire faith in immortality on this dogma with the resurrection involved in it.
When carried out in its particulars by the imagination, the doctrine is self evidently untenable, contradictory to the essential facts of human nature under the given conditions of the material creation. It had its theologic birth in the speculations of the dualistic religion of Persia, whence it was first borrowed by the Jews, then secondarily adopted into Christianity, and thence finally impacted into the mongrel creed of Mohammed and his followers. It is philosophically irreconcilable with a pure monotheism; for, if God be infinite, no enemy could subvert his original scheme and force Him to an arbitrary miracle to restore it. It is a creaking and dissonant artifice, every way repugnant to all whose reason and sentiment have learned to love the smooth and continuous evolution of the order of the cosmos and the connected destinies of conscious beings. It is absolutely refuted by the double reductio ad absurdum shown above to be contained in it.
Yet, while the grounds on which the common belief in a destined general resurrection of the dead rests have really lost their validity to the mind of the nineteenth century, the millions of Islam and Christendom retain the article unchanged in their creeds, and to question it is a heresy. No wonder skepticism flourishes and genuine faith decays. This clinging to an outgrown scheme is not only from the strong drift of a passive mental conformity, as the train of cars keeps on for some time after the dynamic locomotive has been taken off. Another reason is that the tenet is so centrally imbedded in the dogmatic ecclesiasticism that it cannot be extricated without involving all the associated dogmas. Therefore, one portion of this knowing generation repeat the formula and blink the difficulties, while another portion go over to open disbelief of any future life. The doctrine of the literal resurrection of the body from the grave is incredible to the educated and free intelligence of the age. In continuing to affirm it ecclesiastical Christendom brands itself with frivolity, not earnest enough to carry its thought in loyalty to truth as far as possible, or with hypocrisy, consciously dishonest to its doubts.
It is a precious boon to be rid of such an unnatural and ominous belief as that in the final disemboguing of the dead by sea and land, the tumbling of the rocks, the falling of the stars, and the everlasting torture of the condemned in a prison of fire. Far better than any such doctrine is a calm confronting of the mystery of the future in its confessed secrecy as it is, and a peaceful resignation to the will of God in conscious ignorance and trust. And yet the believer in this scheme of colossal and ghastly necromancy, when confronted with the unanswerable arguments against it, is sometimes found clinging to it with willful tenacity, and bitterly complaining of those who refute it, that they would rob him of his faith and give him nothing in exchange. Suppose a man to believe that in the year nineteen hundred the earth will be exploded, and that all men, except himself and the little clique of his friends, will be strung for eternity on a red hot iron wire in empty space. Suppose that this horrid notion is clearly proved to him to be an error. Then, because he is not taught exactly what will happen in the year nineteen hundred, he, the unhappy man, assails his enlightener for having robbed him of his faith and given him nothing in exchange! Is not the truth of ignorance better than the falsity of superstition? Modest faith in front of the shrouded unknown can well stand comparison with the arrogant and incompetent exultation of fanaticism. In regard to that belated relic of the belief in magic, the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the dead in their fleshy bodies, let us gratefully wipe it all out and draw a long breath of relief. Let us rejoice to know that the will of God will be done in the fulfilling order of the universe, although we may now be ignorant of precisely what that will is. Believing the will of God to be good, whether revealed or concealed, we can afford to wait in peace, trying in the meantime to carry our individual character and our social state and experience here steadily toward perfection. Surely, that is the best way to prepare ourselves for whatever lies beyond.
And yet we are not wholly shut up to mere blind faith. There is always some ground of moral truth in every widely extended dogmatic belief. In casting off the dogma we should carefully extract its moral purport and try to give it a more authentic setting. It will not be hard to do this with reference to the doctrine now under consideration.
Obscure and complicated and baffling as the problem of our future destiny is, we can already trace many a line of light, many a prophetic signal and hint suggestive of what is ordained to happen to the individual and the race.
Unquestionably, the genuine moral reason why the belief in the fleshly resurrection has been so general and tenacious is the two fold consideration: first; that we desire our future life to be an incarnate life because our experience makes that form of being realizable and precious to our imagination, while a disembodied ghostliness is, perforce, repulsively vacant and abstract; and, secondly because our affection and our imagination and our conscience profoundly crave the complete fulfillment of the scheme of the historic career of collective humanity in this world in some such manner, that here, on this dear old earth, the experience of our whole race may be brought to a clear epical unity, and may close with an illuminating justification of providence in the sight of all men, who shall then read the interpretation of their entire past, and see together eye to eye. Now we believe that the essence of this natural desire and this sublime hope is a divine prophecy which shall be fulfilled. We believe that in the very falsity of the doctrine of a carnal resurrection and judgment there lurks a truth yet to break out in overwhelming refulgence and perfectly satisfy every soul of man. But it will be brought about by the gradual culmination of the means and processes which God is now visibly carrying forward, and not by any sudden convulsion of miracle.
The faculties of human consciousness in the individual and the race are in process of development. Also the transmissible sum of knowledge, on which those faculties employ themselves, is in process of rapid increase. The faculties of knowledge possessed by an accomplished master of literature and science now, contrasted with those of a cannibal savage of the pre glacial epoch, reveal an advance which hardly needs to be repeated in order to give us a comprehension of the whole experience of our kind on earth, quite ample to explain the facts of the case and solve the problem of our destiny. The grasp of our intelligence and the richness of our sensibility increase along the ages. The generalizations of our philosophy grow wider, the gropings of our sympathetic faith become vaster, the retrospection and the prevision of our science keener and longer and more inclusive, every generation. It is very significant that the further away we get from the prehistoric times the more we learn about them. Archaology is one of the latest and most swiftly enlarging branches of knowledge. Let the processes thus indicated go on, as they have gone on and are with accelerated pace going on, and the date is not beyond prophecy when all earthly and human secrets will be solved, and their mysteries be revealed, and the autobiographic book and volume of the world be opened, and the universal tribunal be set in the light of every life, and the irreversible judgment be declared, by the simple revelation of the truth of history in the web of its relations. For as every atom of matter is conjoined by all the laws of nature with all other atoms of matter, and the history of all their adventures is registered by their own indestructible vibrations in the elemental spaces of the universe where they run their career, so every identity of spirit is conjoined by all the laws of spirit with all other spirits, and all their deeds and sufferings are ineffaceably self registered in their reactions upon the authors, in the pictures they shed upon space, and the influences they set rolling through the eternity of successive souls and lives. All, then, that is needed for a perfectly vindicating judgment is the awakening of consciousness to the full view of the facts. And the tendencies are powerfully moving in that direction. What was the illumination of Swedenborg but the taking possession by his consciousness of the unconscious lower nervous system, with all its impacted ancestral experiences and wondrous relations with the visible and invisible worlds? And this may be repeated, by and by, and be perfected, and become common. What may result is as yet almost inconceivable. Let us trace a little, in this regard, the connections of the individual and the face, and follow out some of their implications.