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+Project Gutenberg's The Destiny of the Soul, by William Rounseville Alger
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Destiny of the Soul
+       A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
+
+Author: William Rounseville Alger
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #19082]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Edmund Dejowski
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL.
+
+A CRITICAL HISTORY
+OF THE
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE,
+
+BY
+WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.
+
+TENTH EDITION,
+
+WITH SIX NEW CHAPTERS, AND
+
+A Complete Bibliography of the Subject.
+[Note: bibliography not included here]
+
+COMPRISING 4977 BOOKS RELATING TO THE NATURE, ORIGIN, AND
+DESTINY OF THE SOUL. THE TITLES CLASSIFIED AND ARRANGED
+CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH NOTES, AND INDEXES OF THE AUTHORS AND
+SUBJECTS.
+
+BY EZRA ABBOT,
+
+PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION IN
+THE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
+
+
+BOSTON:
+ROBERTS BROTHERS.
+1880
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
+WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER,
+in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
+States for the District of Massachusetts.
+
+Copyright 1878, W.R. Alger
+
+ELECTROTYPED BY JOHNSON & CO., PHILADA.
+
+University Press: John Wilson & Son,
+Cambridge.
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE TENTH EDITION.
+
+
+THIS work has passed through nine editions, and has been out of
+print now for nearly a year. During the twenty years which have
+elapsed since it was written, the question of immortality, the
+faith and opinions of men and the drift of criticism and doubt
+concerning it, have been a subject of dominant interest to me, and
+have occupied a large space in my reading and reflection.
+Accordingly, now that my publisher, moved by the constant demand
+for the volume, urges the preparation of a new edition introducing
+such additional materials as my continued researches have gathered
+or constructed, I gladly comply with his request.
+
+The present work is not only historic but it is also polemic;
+polemic, however, not in the spirit or interest of any party or
+conventicle, but in the spirit and interest of science and
+humanity. Orthodoxy insists on doctrines whose irrationality in
+their current forms is such that they can never be a basis for the
+union of all men. Therefore, to discredit these, in preparation
+for more reasonable and auspicious views, is a service to the
+whole human race. This is my justification for the controversial
+quality which may frequently strike the reader.
+
+Looking back over his pages, after nearly a quarter of a century
+more of investigation and experience, the author is grateful that
+he finds nothing to retract or expunge. He has but to add such
+thoughts and illustrations as have occurred to him in the course
+of his subsequent studies. He hopes that the supplementary
+chapters now published will be found more suggestive and mature
+than the preceding ones, while the same in aim and tone. For he
+still believes, as he did in his earlier time, that there is much
+of error and superstition, bigotry and cruelty, to be purged out
+of the prevailing theological creed and sentiment of Christendom.
+And he still hopes, as he did then, to contribute something of
+good influence in this direction. The large circulation of the
+work, the many letters of thanks for it received by the author
+from laymen and clergymen of different denominations, the numerous
+avowed and unavowed quotations from it in recent publications,
+all show that it has not been produced in vain, but has borne
+fruit in missionary service for reason, liberty, and charity.
+
+This ventilating and illumining function of fearless and
+reverential critical thought will need to be fulfilled much longer
+in many quarters. The doctrine of a future life has been made so
+frightful by the preponderance in it of the elements of material
+torture and sectarian narrowness, that a natural revulsion of
+generous sentiment joins with the impulse of materialistic science
+to produce a growing disbelief in any life at all beyond the
+grave. Nothing else will do so much to renew and extend faith in
+God and immortality as a noble and beautiful doctrine of God and
+immortality, freed from disfiguring terror, selfishness, and
+favoritism.
+
+The most popular preacher in England has recently asked his
+fellow believers, "Can we go to our beds and sleep while China,
+India, Japan, and other nations are being damned?" The proprietor
+of a great foundry in Germany, while he talked one day with a
+workman who was feeding a furnace, accidentally stepped back, and
+fell headlong into a vat of molten iron. The thought of what
+happened then horrifies the imagination. Yet it was all over in
+two or three seconds. Multiply the individual instance by
+unnumbered millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, and
+we confront the orthodox idea of hell!
+
+Protesting human nature hurls off such a belief with indignant
+disdain, except in those instances where the very form and
+vibration of its nervous pulp have been perverted by the hardening
+animus of a dogmatic drill transmitted through generations. To
+trace the origin of such notions, expose their baselessness,
+obliterate their sway, and replace them with conceptions of a more
+rational and benignant order, is a task which still needs to be
+done, and to be done in many forms, over and over, again and
+again. Though each repetition tell but slightly, it tells.
+
+Every sound argument is instantly crowned with universal victory
+in the sight of God, and therefore must at last be so in the sight
+of mankind. However slowly the logic of events limps after the
+logic of thoughts, it always follows. Let the mind of one man
+perceive the true meaning of the doctrine of the general
+resurrection and judgment and eternal life, as a natural evolution
+of history from within, and it will spread to the minds of all
+men; and the misinterpretation of that doctrine so long prevalent,
+as a preternatural irruption of power from without, will be set
+aside forever. For there is a providential plan of God, not
+injected by arbitrary miracle, but inhering in the order of the
+world, centred in the propulsive heart of humanity, which beats
+throb by throb along the web of events, removing obstacles and
+clearing the way for the revelation of the completed pattern. When
+it is done no trumpets may be blown, no rocks rent, no graves
+opened. But all immortal spirits will be at their goals, and the
+universe will be full of music.
+
+NEW YORK, February 22, 1878.
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+WHO follows truth carries his star in his brain. Even so bold a
+thought is no inappropriate motto for an intellectual workman, if
+his heart be filled with loyalty to God, the Author of truth and
+the Maker of stars. In this double spirit of independence and
+submission it has been my desire to perform the arduous task now
+finished and offered to the charitable judgment of the reader. One
+may be courageous to handle both the traditions and the novelties
+of men, and yet be modest before the solemn mysteries of fate and
+nature. He may place no veil before his eyes and no finger on his
+lips in presence of popular dogmas, and yet shrink from the
+conceit of esteeming his mind a mirror of the universe. Ideas,
+like coins, bear the stamp of the age and brain they were struck
+in. Many a phantom which ought to have vanished at the first cock
+crowing of reason still holds its seat on the oppressed heart of
+faith before the terror stricken eyes of the multitude. Every
+thoughtful scholar who loves his fellow men must feel it an
+obligation to do what he can to remove painful superstitions, and
+to spread the peace of a cheerful faith and the wholesome light of
+truth. The theories in theological systems being but philosophy,
+why should they not be freely subjected to philosophical
+criticism? I have endeavored, without virulence, arrogance, or
+irreverence towards any thing sacred, to investigate the various
+doctrines pertaining to the great subject treated in these pages.
+Many persons, of course, will find statements from which they
+dissent, sentiments disagreeable to them. But, where thought and
+discussion are so free and the press so accessible as with us, no
+one but a bigot will esteem this a ground of complaint. May all
+such passages be charitably perused, fairly weighed, and, if
+unsound, honorably refuted! If the work be not animated with a
+mean or false spirit, but be catholic and kindly, if it be not
+superficial and pretentious, but be marked by patience and
+thoroughness, is it too much to hope that no critic will assail it
+with wholesale condemnation simply because in some parts of it
+there are opinions which he dislikes? One dispassionate argument
+is more valuable than a shower of missile names. The most vehement
+revulsion from a doctrine is not inconsistent, in a Christian
+mind, with the sweetest kindness of feeling towards the persons
+who hold that doctrine. Earnest theological debate may be carried
+on without the slightest touch of ungenerous personality. Who but
+must feel the pathos and admire the charity of these eloquent
+words of Henry Giles?
+
+"Every deep and reflective nature looking intently 'before and
+after,' looking above, around, beneath, and finding silence and
+mystery to all his questionings of the Infinite, cannot but
+conceive of existence as a boundless problem, perhaps an
+inevitable darkness between the limitations of man and the
+incomprehensibility of God. A nature that so reflects, that
+carries into this sublime and boundless obscurity 'the large
+discourse of Reason,' will not narrow its concern in the solution
+of the problem to its own petty safety, but will brood over it
+with an anxiety which throbs for the whole of humanity. Such a
+nature must needs be serious; but never will it be arrogant: it
+will regard all men with an embracing pity. Strange it should ever
+be otherwise in respect to inquiries which belong to infinite
+relations, that mean enmities, bitter hatreds, should come into
+play in these fathomless searchings of the soul! Bring what
+solution we may to this problem of measureless alternatives,
+whether by Reason, Scripture, or the Church, faith will never
+stand for fact, nor the firmest confidence for actual
+consciousness. The man of great and thoughtful nature, therefore,
+who grapples in real earnest with this problem, however satisfied
+he may be with his own solution of it, however implicit may be his
+trust, however assured his convictions, will yet often bow down
+before the awful veil that shrouds the endless future, put his
+finger on his lips, and weep in silence."
+
+The present work is in a sense, an epitome of the thought of
+mankind on the destiny of man. I have striven to add value to it
+by comprehensiveness of plan, not confining myself, as most of my
+predecessors have confined themselves, to one province or a few
+narrow provinces of the subject, but including the entire subject
+in one volume; by carefulness of arrangement,  not piling the
+material together or presenting it in a chaos of facts and dreams,
+but grouping it all in its proper relations; by clearness of
+explanation, not leaving the curious problems presented wholly in
+the dark with a mere statement of them, but as far as possible
+tracing the phenomena to their origin and unveiling their purport;
+by poetic life of treatment, not handling the different topics
+dryly and coldly, but infusing warmth and color into them; by
+copiousness of information, not leaving the reader to hunt up
+every thing for himself, but referring him to the best sources for
+the facts, reasonings, and hints which he may wish; and by
+persevering patience of toil, not hastily skimming here and there
+and hurrying the task off, but searching and researching in every
+available direction, examining and re examining each mooted point,
+by the devotion of twelve years of anxious labor. How far my
+efforts in these particulars have been successful is submitted to
+the public.
+
+To avoid the appearance of pedantry in the multiplication of foot
+notes, I have inserted many authorities incidentally in the text
+itself, and have omitted all except such as I thought would be
+desired by the reader. Every scholar knows how easy it is to
+increase the number of references almost indefinitely, and also
+how deceptive such an ostensible evidence of wide reading may be.
+
+When the printing of this volume was nearly completed, and I had
+in some instances made more references than may now seem needful,
+the thought occurred to me that a full list of the books published
+up to the present time on the subject of a future life, arranged
+according to their definite topics and in chronological order,
+would greatly enrich the work and could not fail often to be of
+vast service. Accordingly, upon solicitation, a valued friend  Mr.
+Ezra Abbot, Jr., a gentleman remarkable for his varied and
+accurate scholarship  undertook that laborious task for me; and he
+has accomplished it in the most admirable manner. No reader,
+however learned, but may find much important information in the
+bibliographical appendix which I am thus enabled to add to this
+volume. Every student who henceforth wishes to investigate any
+branch of the historical or philosophical doctrine of the
+immortality of the soul, or of a future life in general, may thank
+Mr. Abbot for an invaluable aid.
+
+As I now close this long labor and send forth the result, the
+oppressive sense of responsibility which fills me is relieved by
+the consciousness that I have herein written nothing as a bigoted
+partisan, nothing in a petty spirit of opinionativeness, but have
+intended every thought for the furtherance of truth, the honor of
+God, the good of man.
+
+The majestic theme of our immortality allures yet baffles us. No
+fleshly implement of logic or cunning tact of brain can reach to
+the solution. That secret lies in a tissueless realm whereof no
+nerve can report beforehand. We must wait a little. Soon we shall
+grope and guess no more, but grasp and know. Meanwhile, shall we
+not be magnanimous to forgive and help, diligent to study and
+achieve, trustful and content to abide the invisible issue? In
+some happier age, when the human race shall have forgotten, in
+philanthropic ministries and spiritual worship, the bigotries and
+dissensions of sentiment and thought, they may recover, in its
+all embracing unity, that garment of truth which God made
+originally "seamless as the firmament," now for so long a time
+torn in shreds by hating schismatics. Oh, when shall we learn that
+a loving pity, a filial faith, a patient modesty, best become us
+and fit our state? The pedantic sciolist, prating of his clear
+explanations of the mysteries of life, is as far from feeling the
+truth of the case as an ape, seated on the starry summit of the
+dome of night, chattering with glee over the awful prospect of
+infinitude. What ordinary tongue shall dare to vociferate
+egotistic dogmatisms where an inspired apostle whispers, with
+reverential reserve, "We see through a glass darkly"? There are
+three things, said an old monkish chronicler, which often make me
+sad. First, that I know I must die; second, that I know not when;
+third, that I am ignorant where I shall then be.
+
+"Est primum durum quod scio me moriturum: Secundum, timeo quia hoc
+nescio quando: Hine tertium, flebo quod nescio ubi manebo."
+
+Man is the lonely and sublime Columbus of the creation, who,
+wandering on this cloudy strand of time, sees drifted waifs and
+strange portents borne far from an unknown somewhere, causing him
+to believe in another world. Comes not death as a means to bear
+him thither? Accordingly as hope rests in heaven, fear shudders at
+hell, or doubt faces the dark transition, the future life is a
+sweet reliance, a terrible certainty, or a pathetic perhaps. But
+living in the present in the humble and loving discharge of its
+duties, our souls harmonized with its conditions though aspiring
+beyond them, why should we ever despair or be troubled overmuch?
+Have we not eternity in our thought, infinitude in our view, and
+God for our guide?
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Part First.
+
+HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY VIEWS.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF DEATH
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION
+
+Part Second.
+
+ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+DRUIDIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SCANDINAVIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ETRUSCAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+EGYPTIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+BRAMANIC AND BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+PERSIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+HEBREW DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+RABBINICAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+GREEK AND DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MOHAMMEDAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+EXPLANATORY SURVEY OF THE FIELD AND ITS MYTHS
+
+Part Third.
+
+NEW TESTAMENT TEACHINGS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PETER'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE APOCALYPSE
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+JOHN'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHRIST'S TEACHINGS CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ESSENTIAL CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DEATH AND LIFE
+
+Part Fourth.
+
+CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PATRISTIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+MEDIAVAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+Part Fifth.
+
+HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+METEMPSYCHOIS; OR, TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF
+A HELL
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE FIVE THEORETIC MODES OF SALVATION
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+RECOGNITION OF FRIENDS IN A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE
+
+Part Sixth.
+
+SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE END OF THE WORLD
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE; OR, THE LAW OF PERDITION
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+RESUME OF THE SUBJECT: HOW THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY NOW STANDS
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL
+
+PART FIRST.
+
+
+HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY VIEWS.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S ORIGIN.
+
+PAUSING, in a thoughtful hour, on that mount of observation whence
+the whole prospect of life is visible, what a solemn vision greets
+us! We see the vast procession of existence flitting across the
+landscape, from the shrouded ocean of birth, over the illuminated
+continent of experience, to the shrouded ocean of death. Who can
+linger there and listen, unmoved, to the sublime lament of things
+that die? Although the great exhibition below endures, yet it is
+made up of changes, and the spectators shift as often. Each rank
+of the host, as it advances from the mists of its commencing
+career, wears a smile caught from the morning light of hope, but,
+as it draws near to the fatal bourne, takes on a mournful cast
+from the shadows of the unknown realm. The places we occupy were
+not vacant before we came, and will not be deserted when we go,
+but are forever filling and emptying afresh.
+
+"Still to every draught of vital breath
+Renew'd throughout the bounds of earth and ocean,
+The melancholy gates of death
+Respond with sympathetic motion."
+
+We appear, there is a short flutter of joys and pains, a bright
+glimmer of smiles and tears, and we are gone. But whence did we
+come? And whither do we go? Can human thought divine the answer?
+
+It adds no little solemnity and pathos to these reflections to
+remember that every considerate person in the unnumbered
+successions that have preceded us, has, in his turn, confronted
+the same facts, engaged in the same inquiry, and been swept from
+his attempts at a theoretic solution of the problem into the real
+solution itself, while the constant refrain in the song of
+existence sounded behind him, "One generation passeth away, and
+another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever." The
+evanescent phenomena, the tragic plot and scenery of human birth,
+action, and death, conceived on the scale of reality, clothed in
+
+"The sober coloring taken from an eye That hath kept watch o'er
+man's mortality,"
+
+and viewed in a susceptible spirit, are, indeed, overwhelmingly
+impressive. They invoke the intellect to its most piercing
+thoughts. They swell the heart to its utmost capacity of emotion.
+They bring us upon the bended knees of wonder and prayer.
+
+"Between two worlds life hovers, like a star'
+Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge.
+How little do we know that which we are!
+How less what we may be! The eternal surge
+Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
+Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge,
+Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the graves
+Of empires heave but like some passing waves."
+
+Widely regarding the history of human life from the beginning,
+what a visionary spectacle it is! How miraculously permanent in
+the whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic
+sentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! The
+subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussed
+by hundreds of philosophers, physicians, and poets, from Vyasa to
+Des Cartes, from Galen to Ennemoser, from Orpheus to Henry More,
+from Aristotle to Frohschammer. German literature during the last
+hundred years has teemed with works treating of this question from
+various points of view. The present chapter will present a sketch
+of these various speculations concerning the commencement and
+fortunes of man ere his appearance on the stage of this world.
+
+The first theory to account for the origin of souls is that of
+emanation. This is the analogical theory, constructed from the
+results of sensible observation. There is, it says, one infinite
+Being, and all finite spirits are portions of his substance,
+existing a while as separate individuals, and then reassimilated
+into the general soul. This form of faith, asserting the efflux of
+all subordinate existence out of one Supreme Being, seems
+sometimes to rest on an intuitive idea. It is spontaneously
+suggested whenever man confronts the phenomena of creation with
+reflective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth and
+death. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over the
+world; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamental
+postulate is that the necessary life of God is one constant
+process of radiation and resorption, "letting out and drawing in,"
+to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad and
+winsome child as
+
+"A silver stream
+Breaking with laughter from the lake Divine
+Whence all things flow."
+
+The conception that souls are emanations from God is the most
+obvious way of accounting for the prominent facts that salute our
+inquiries. It plausibly answers some natural questions, and boldly
+eludes others. For instance, to the early student demanding the
+cause of the mysterious distinctions between mind and body, it
+says, the one belongs to the system of passive matter, the other
+comes from the living Fashioner of the Universe. Again: this
+theory relieves us from the burden that perplexes the finite mind
+when it seeks to understand how the course of nature, the
+succession of lives, can be absolutely eternal without involving
+an alternating or circular movement. The doctrine of emanation
+has, moreover, been supported by the supposed analytic similarity
+of the soul to God. Its freedom, consciousness, intelligence,
+love, correspond with what we regard as the attributes and essence
+of Deity. The inference, however unsound, is immediate, that souls
+are consubstantial with God, dissevered fragments of Him, sent
+into bodies. But, in actual effect, the chief recommendation of
+this view has probably been the variety of analogies and images
+under which it admits of presentation. The annual developments of
+vegetable life from the bosom of the earth, drops taken from a
+fountain and retaining its properties in their removal, the
+separation of the air into distinct breaths, the soil into
+individual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying away in
+reverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light,
+the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the
+evolution of numbers out of an original unity, these are among the
+illustrations by which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported the
+notion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot
+come out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our
+rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension
+held in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolving
+from another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely the
+same with things beyond our comprehension, and that God is the
+aboriginal reservoir of being from which all the rills of finite
+existence are emitted.
+
+Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First,
+the analogies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit and
+those of matter have two distinct sets of predicates and
+categories. It is, for example, wholly illogical to argue that
+because the circuit of the waters is from the sea, through the
+clouds, over the land, back to the sea again, therefore the
+derivation and course of souls from God, through life, back to
+God, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with the
+soul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which no
+known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the
+scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the
+infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some
+necessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and
+therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is
+incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely,
+immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of the
+illimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the emanation
+of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a dreaming
+mind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and apparent
+correspondences.
+
+The second explanation of the origin of souls is that which says
+they come from a previous existence. This is the theory of
+imagination, framed in the free and seductive realm of poetic
+thought. It is evident that this idea does not propose any
+solution of the absolute origination of the soul, but only offers
+to account for its appearance on earth. The pre existence of souls
+has been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole world of Oriental
+thinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek philosophers
+held it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers believed
+it.1 And it is not without able advocates among the scholars and
+thinkers
+
+1 Keil, Opuscula; Be Pre existentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist. du
+Manicheisme, lib. vii. cap. iv.
+
+
+of our own age. There are two principal forms of this doctrine;
+one asserting an ascent of souls from a previous existence below
+the rank of man, the other a descent of souls from a higher
+sphere. Generation is the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls are
+ever ascending or descending. The former statement is virtually
+that of the modern theory of development, which argues that the
+souls known to us, obtaining their first organic being out of the
+ground life of nature, have climbed up through a graduated series
+of births, from the merest elementary existence, to the plane of
+human nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has said concerning pre
+existence in these two methods of conceiving it, writing in a
+half humorous, half serious, vein, "It is to be considered as
+expressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If here
+and there some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet voice,
+suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for human
+kind, and charged with celestial ministries, has condescended to
+
+'Soil his pure ambrosial weeds
+With the rank vapors of this sin worn mould,'
+
+or if, on the other hand, the 'superfluity of naughtiness'
+displayed by some abnormal felon seems to warrant the supposition
+of a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, we
+submit, are much too green for any plausible assumption of a
+foregone training in good or evil. This planet is not their
+missionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil.
+Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must rather believe
+they pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity by
+the fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes and
+dust of that tramp still sticking to them." The theory of
+development, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lower
+stages of rudimentary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesis
+or speculative toy, is interesting, and not destitute of plausible
+aspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is found
+devoid of proof. It is enough here to say that the most
+authoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, though
+there is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from the
+more general to the more specific, yet there is no advance from
+one type or race to another, no hint that the same individual ever
+crosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdom
+to another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward process
+of natural creation or the stages of life, yet to suppose that the
+life powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of their
+bodies, and, in successive crossings of the death gulf, ascend to
+humanity, is a bare assumption. It befits the delirious lips of
+Beddoes, who says,
+
+"Had I been born a four legg'd child, methinks I might have found
+the steps from dog to man And crept into his nature. Are there not
+Those that fall down out of humanity Into the story where the
+four legg'd dwell?"
+
+The doctrine that souls have descended from an anterior life on
+high may be exhibited in three forms, each animated by a different
+motive. The first is the view of some of the Manichean teachers,
+that spirits were embodied by a hostile violence and cunning, the
+force and fraud of the apostatized Devil. Adam and Eve were angels
+sent to observe the doings of Lucifer, the rebel king of matter.
+He seized these heavenly spies and encased them in fleshly
+prisons. And then, in order to preserve a permanent union of these
+celestial natures with matter, he contrived that their race should
+be propagated by the sexes. Whenever by the procreative act the
+germ body is prepared, a fiend hies from bale, or an angel stoops
+from bliss, or a demon darts from his hovering in the air, to
+inhabit and rule his growing clay house for a term of earthly
+life. The spasm of impregnation thrills in fatal summons to hell
+or heaven, and resistlessly drags a spirit into the appointed
+receptacle. Shakspeare, whose genius seems to have touched every
+shape of thought with adorning phrase, makes Juliet, distracted
+with the momentary fancy that Romeo is a murderous villain, cry,
+
+"O Nature! what hadst thou to do in hell
+When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
+In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?"
+
+The second method of explaining the descent of souls into this
+life is by the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrasted
+peace and sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last wearies
+the people of Paradise, until they seek relief in a fall. The
+perfect sweetness of heaven cloys, the utter routine and safety
+tire, the salient spirits, till they long for the edge and hazard
+of earthly exposure, and wander down to dwell in fleshly bodies
+and breast the tempest of sin, strife, and sorrow, so as to give a
+fresh charm once more to the repose and exempted joys of the
+celestial realm. In this way, by a series of recurring lives below
+and above, novelty and change with larger experience and more
+vivid contentment are secured, the tedium and satiety of fixed
+happiness and protection are modified by the relishing opposition
+of varied trials of hardship and pain, the insufferable monotony
+of immortality broken up and interpolated by epochs of surprise
+and tingling dangers of probation.
+
+"Mortals, behold! the very angels quit
+Their mansions unsusceptible of change,
+Amid your dangerous bowers to sit
+And through your sharp vicissitudes to range!"
+
+Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives and
+deaths. Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we
+"straggle down to this terrene nativity:" When, amid the sour
+exposures and cruel storms of the world, we have renewed our
+appetite for the divine ambrosia of peace and sweetness, we
+forsake the body and ascend to heaven; this constant recurrence
+illustrating the great truths, that alternation is the law of
+destiny, and that variety is the spice of life.
+
+But the most common derivation of the present from a previous life
+is that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. In
+that earlier and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, and
+were doomed to expiate their offences by a banished, imprisoned,
+and burdensome life on the earth. "The soul," Plutarch writes,
+"has removed, not from Athens to Sardis, or from Corinth to
+Lemnos, but from heaven to earth; and here, ill at ease, and
+troubled in this new and strange place, she hangs her head like a
+decaying plant."
+
+Hundreds of passages to the same purport might easily be cited
+from as many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls from
+their original estate was represented as a simultaneous event: a
+part of the heavenly army, under an apostate leader, having
+rebelled, were defeated, and sentenced to a chained bodily life.
+Our whole race were transported at once from their native shores
+in the sky to the convict land of this world. Sometimes the
+descent was attributed to the fresh fault of each individual, and
+was thought to be constantly happening. A soul tainted with impure
+desire, drawn downwards by corrupt material gravitation, hovering
+over the fumes of matter, inhaling the effluvia of vice, grew
+infected with carnal longings and contagions, became fouled and
+clogged with gross vapors and steams, and finally fell into a body
+and pursued the life fitted to it below. A clear human child is a
+shining seraph from heaven sunk thus low. Men are degraded
+cherubim.
+
+"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
+The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
+Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+And cometh from afar."
+
+The theory of the pre existence of the soul merely removes the
+mystery one stage further back, and there leaves the problem of
+our origin as hopelessly obscure as before. It is sufficiently
+refuted by the open fact that it is absolutely destitute of
+scientific basis. The explanation of its wide prevalence as a
+belief is furnished by two considerations. First, there were old
+authoritative sages and poets who loved to speculate and dream,
+and who published their speculations and dreams to reign over the
+subject fancies of credulous mankind. Secondly, the conception was
+intrinsically harmonious, and bore a charm to fascinate the
+imagination and the heart. The fragmentary visions, broken
+snatches, mystic strains, incongruous thoughts, fading gleams,
+with which imperfectrecollection comes laden from our childish
+years and our nightly dreams, are referred by self pleasing fancy
+to some earlier and nobler existence. We solve the mysteries of
+experience by calling them the veiled vestiges of a bright life
+departed, pathetic waifs drifted to these intellectual shores over
+the surge of feeling from the wrecked orb of an anterior
+existence. It gratifies our pride to think the soul "a star
+travelled stranger," a disguised prince, who has passingly
+alighted on this globe in his eternal wanderings. The gorgeous
+glimpses of truth and beauty here vouchsafed to genius, the
+wondrous strains of feeling that haunt the soul in tender hours,
+are feeble reminiscences of the prerogatives we enjoyed in those
+eons when we trod the planets that sail around the upper world of
+the gods. That ennui or plaintive sadness which in all life's deep
+and lonesome hours seems native to our hearts, what is it but the
+nostalgia of the soul remembering and pining after its distant
+home? Vague and forlorn airs come floating into our consciousness,
+as from an infinitely remote clime, freighted with a luxury of
+depressing melancholy.
+
+"Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
+Not daily labor's dull Lethean spring,
+Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
+Of the soil'd glory and the trailing wing."
+
+How attractive all this must be to the thoughts of men, how
+fascinating to their retrospective and aspiring reveries, it
+should be needless to repeat. How baseless it is as a
+philosophical theory demanding sober belief, it should be equally
+superfluous to illustrate further.
+
+The third answer to the question concerning the origin of the soul
+is that it is directly created by the voluntary power of God. This
+is the theory of faith, instinctively shrinking from the
+difficulty of the problem on its scientific ground, and evading it
+by a wholesale reference to Deity. Some writers have held that all
+souls were created by the Divine fiat at the beginning of the
+world, and laid up in a secret repository, whence they are drawn
+as occasion calls. The Talmudists say, "All souls were made during
+the six days of creation; and therefore generation is not by
+traduction, but by infusion of a soul into body." Others maintain
+that this production of souls was not confined to any past period,
+but is continued still, a new soul being freshly created for every
+birth. Whenever certain conditions meet,
+
+"Then God smites his hands together,
+And strikes out a soul as a spark,
+Into the organized glory of things,
+From the deeps of the dark."
+
+This is the view asserted by Vincentius Victor in opposition to
+the dogmatism of Tertullian on the one hand and to the doubts of
+Augustine on the other.2 It is called the theory of Insufflation,
+because it affirms that God immediately breathes a soul into each
+new being: even as in the case of Adam, of whom we read that "God
+breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a
+living soul." The doctrine drawn from this Mosaic text, that the
+soul is a divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathed
+by Him into every creature at the commencement of its existence,
+often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history of
+psychological opinions. It corresponds with the beautiful Greek
+myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image from
+the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to
+have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is
+made of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that forms his soul
+is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the real
+ground and essence of this theory, only to its form and
+accompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic; it conceives God
+as working, after the manner of a man, intermittently,
+arbitrarily. It insulates the origination of souls from the fixed
+course of nature, severs it from all connection with that common
+process of organic life which weaves its inscrutable web through
+the universe, that system of laws which expresses the unchanging
+will of God, and which constitutes the order by whose solemn logic
+alone He acts. The objection to this view is, in a word, that it
+limits the creative action of God to human souls. We suppose that
+He creates our bodies as well; that He is the immediate Author of
+all life in the same sense in which He is the immediate Author of
+our souls. The opponents of the creation theory, who strenuously
+fought it in the seventeenth century, were accustomed to urge
+against it the fanciful objection that "it puts God to an invenust
+
+2 Augustine, De Anima et ejus Origine, lib. iv.
+
+
+employment scarce consistent with his verecundious holiness; for,
+if it be true, whenever the lascivious consent to uncleanness and
+are pleased to join in unlawful mixture, God is forced to stand a
+spectator of their vile impurities, stooping from his throne to
+attend their bestial practices, and raining down showers of souls
+to animate the emissions of their concupiscence"3
+
+A fourth reply to the inquiry before us is furnished in
+Tertullian's famous doctrine of Traduction, the essential import
+of which is that all human souls have been transmitted, or brought
+over, from the soul of Adam. This is the theological theory: for
+it arose from an exigency in the dogmatic system generally held by
+the patristic Church. The universal depravity of human nature, the
+inherited corruption of the whole race, was a fundamental point of
+belief. But how reconcile this proposition with the conception,
+entertained by many, that each new born soul is a fresh creation
+from the "substance," "spirit," or "breath" of God? Augustine
+writes to Jerome, asking him to solve this question.4 Tertullian,
+whose fervid mind was thoroughly imbued with materialistic
+notions, unhesitatingly cut this Gordian knot by asserting that
+our first parent bore within him the undeveloped germ of all
+mankind, so that sinfulness and souls were propagated together. 5
+Thus the perplexing query, "how souls are held in the chain of
+original sin," was answered. As Neander says, illustrating
+Tertullian's view, "The soul of the first man was the fountain
+head of all human souls: all the varieties of individual human
+nature are but modifications of that one spiritual substance." In
+the light of such a thought, we can see how Nature might, when
+solitary Adam lived, fulfil Lear's wild conjuration, and
+
+"All the germens spill
+At once that make ingrateful man."
+
+In the seventh chapter of the Koran it is written, "The Lord drew
+forth their posterity from the loins of the sons of Adam." The
+commentators say that God passed his hand down Adam's back, and
+extracted all the generations which should come into the world
+until the resurrection. Assembled in the presence of the angels,
+and endued with understanding, they confessed their dependence on
+God, and were then caused to return into the loins of their great
+ancestor. This is one of the most curious doctrines within the
+whole range of philosophical history. It implies the strict
+corporeality of the soul; and yet how infinitely fine must be its
+attenuation when it has been diffused into countless thousands of
+millions! Der Urkeim theilt sich ins Unendliche.
+
+"What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?"
+
+The whole thought is absurd. It was not reached by an induction of
+facts, a study of phenomena, or any fair process of reasoning, but
+was arbitrarily created to rescue a dogma from otherwise
+inevitable rejection. It was the desperate clutch of a heady
+theologian reeling in a vortex of hostile argument, and ready to
+seize any fancy, however artificial, to save
+
+3 Edward Warren, No Pre Existence, p. 74.
+
+4 Epistola CLXVI.
+
+5 De Anima, cap. x. et xix.
+
+
+himself from falling under the ruins of his system. Henry Woolner
+published in London, in 1655, a book called "Extraction of Soul: a
+sober and judicious inquiry to prove that souls are propagated;
+because, if they are created, original sin is impossible."
+
+The theological dogma of traduction has been presented in two
+forms. First, it is declared that all souls are developed out of
+the one substance of Adam's soul; a view that logically implies an
+ultimate attenuating diffusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, it
+is held that "the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all the
+vital fluids of Eve; and this corruption carried vicious and
+chaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of all
+her posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing."6
+This form is as incredible as the other; for it equally implies a
+limitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. As Whewell
+says, "This successive inclusion of germs (Einschachtelungs
+Theorie) implies that each soul contains an infinite number of
+germs."7 It necessarily excludes the formation of new spiritual
+substance: else original transmitted sin is excluded. The doctrine
+finds no parallelism anywhere else in nature. Who, no matter how
+wedded to the theology of original sin and transmitted death,
+would venture to stretch the same thesis over the animal races,
+and affirm that the dynamic principles, or animating souls, of all
+serpents, eagles, and lions, were once compressed in the first
+patriarchal serpent, eagle, or lion?
+
+That the whole formative power of all the simultaneous members of
+our race was concentrated in the first cell germ of our original
+progenitor, is a scientific impossibility and incredibleness. The
+fatal sophistry in the traducian account of the transmission of
+souls may be illustrated in the following manner. The germs of all
+the apple trees now in existence did not lie in the first apple
+seed. All the apple trees now existing were not derived by literal
+development out of the actual contents of the first apple seed.
+No: but the truth is this. There was a power in the first apple
+seed to secure certain conditions; that is, to organize a certain
+status in which the plastic vegetative life of nature would posit
+new and similar powers and materials. So not all souls were latent
+in Adam's, but only an organizing power to secure the conditions
+on which the Divine Will that first began, would, in accordance
+with His creative plan, forever continue, His spirit creation. The
+distinction of this statement from that of traduction is the
+difference between evolution from one original germ or stock and
+actual production of new beings. Its distinction from the third
+theory the theory of immediate creation is the difference between
+an intermittent interposition of arbitrary acts and the continuous
+working of a plan according to laws scientifically traceable.
+
+There is another solution to the question of the soul's origin,
+which has been propounded by some philosophers and may be called
+the speculative theory. Its statement is that the germs of souls
+were created simultaneously with the formation of the material
+universe, and were copiously sown abroad through all nature,
+waiting there to be successively taken up and furnished with the
+conditions of development.8 These latent seeds of souls, swarming
+in all places, are drawn in with the first breath or imbibed with
+the earliest nourishment of the
+
+6 Hennings, Geschichte von den Seelen der Menschen, s. 500.
+
+7 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. I. b. ix. ch. iv.
+sect. 4.
+
+8 Ploucquet, De Origin atque Generatione Anima Humana ex
+Principiis Monadologicis stabilita.
+
+new born child into the already constructed body which before has
+only a vegetative life. The Germans call this representation
+panspermismus, or the dissemination theory. Leibnitz, in his
+celebrated monadology, carries the same view a great deal further.
+He conceives the whole created universe, visible and invisible, to
+consist of monads, which are not particles of matter, but
+metaphysical points of power. These monads are all souls. They are
+produced by what he calls fulgurations of God. The distinction
+between fulguration and emanation is this: in the latter case the
+procession is historically defined and complete; in the former
+case it is momentaneous. The monads are radiated from the Divine
+Will, forth through the creation, by the constant flashes of His
+volition. All nature is composed of them, and nothing is
+depopulated and dead. Their naked being is force, and their
+indestructible predicates are perception, desire, tendency to
+develop. While they lie dormant, their potential capacities all
+inwrapped, they constitute what we entitle matter. When, by the
+rising stir of their inherent longing, they leave their passive
+state and reach a condition of obscure consciousness, they become
+animals. Finally, they so far unwind their bonds and evolve their
+facultative potencies as to attain the rank of rational minds in
+the grade of humanity. Generation is merely the method by which
+the aspiring monad lays the organic basis for the grouped building
+of its body. Man is a living union of monads, one regent monad
+presiding over the whole organization. That king monad which has
+attained to full apperception, the free exercise of perfect
+consciousness, is the immortal human soul. 9 Any labored attempt
+to refute this ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrine
+itself is but the developed structure of a speculative conception
+with no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis,
+spun out of the self fed bowels of a priori assumption and
+metaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of their
+form, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deep as before. It is
+a beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution and
+architecture of which well display the wonderful genius of
+Leibnitz. It is a more subtle and powerful process of thought than
+Aristotle's Organon, a more pure and daring work of imagination
+than Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests of
+experimental science, and is entitled to rank only among the
+splendid curiosities of philosophy; a brilliant and plausible
+theorem, not a sober and solid induction.
+
+One more method of treating the inquiry before us will complete
+the list. It is what we may properly call the scientific theory,
+though in truth it is hardly a theory at all, but rather a careful
+statement of the observed facts, and a modest confession of
+inability to explain the cause of them. Those occupying this
+position, when asked what is the origin of souls, do not pretend
+to unveil the final secret, but simply say, everywhere in the
+world of life, from bottom to top, there is an organic growth in
+accordance with conditions. This is what is styled the theory of
+epigenesis, and is adopted by the chief physiologists of the
+present day. Swammerdam, Malebranche, even Cuvier, had defended
+the doctrine of successive inclusion; but Wolf, Blumenbach, and
+Von Baer established in its place the doctrine of epigenesis. 10
+
+9 Leibnitz, Monadologie.
+
+10 Ennemoser, Historisch psychologische Untersuchungen tiber den
+Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen, zweite Auflage.
+
+
+Scrupulously confining themselves to the mass of collected facts
+and the course of scrutinized phenomena, they say there is a
+natural production of new living beings in conformity to certain
+laws, and give an exposition of the fixed conditions and sequences
+of this production. Here they humbly stop, acknowledging that the
+causal root of power, which produces all these consequences, is an
+inexplicable mystery. Their attitude is well represented by
+Swedenborg when he says, in reference to this very subject, "Any
+one may form guesses; but let no son of earth pretend to penetrate
+the mysteries of creation." 11
+
+Let us notice now the facts submitted to us. First, at the base of
+the various departments of nature, we see a mass of apparently
+lifeless matter. Out of this crude substratum of the outward world
+we observe a vast variety of organized forms produced by a
+variously named but unknown Power. They spring in regular methods,
+in determinate shapes, exist on successive stages of rank, with
+more or less striking demarcations of endowment, and finally fall
+back again, as to their physical constituents, into the inorganic
+stuff from which they grew. This mysterious organizing Power,
+pushing its animate and builded receptacles up to the level of
+vegetation, creates the world of plants.
+
+"Every clod feels a stir of might,
+An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
+And, grasping blindly above it for light,
+Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers."
+
+On the level of sensation, where the obscure rudiments of will,
+understanding, and sentiment commence, this life giving Power
+creates the world of animals. And so, on the still higher level of
+reason and its concomitants, it creates the world of men. In a
+word, the great general fact is that an unknown Power call it what
+we may, Nature, Vital Force, or God creates, on the various planes
+of its exercise, different families of organized beings. Secondly,
+a more special fact is, that when we have overleaped the mystery
+of a commencement, every being yields seed according to its kind,
+wherefrom, when properly conditioned, its species is perpetuated.
+How much, now, does this second fact imply? It is by adding to the
+observed phenomena an indefensible hypothesis that the error of
+traduction is obtained. We observe that human beings are begotten
+by a deposit of germs through the generative process. To affirm
+that these germs are transmitted down the generations from the
+original progenitor of each race, in whom they all existed at
+first, is an unwarranted assertion and involves absurdities. It is
+refuted both by Geoffrey St. Hilaire's famous experiments on eggs,
+and by the crossing of species.12 In opposition to this
+theological figment, observation and science require the belief
+that each being is endowed independently with a germ forming
+power.
+
+Organic life requires three things: a fruitful germ; a quickening
+impulse; a nourishing medium. Science plainly shows us that this
+primal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of the
+contents of a sperm cell with those of a germ cell; that this
+dynamic start is imparted from the life force of the parents; and
+that this feeding environment is
+
+11 Tract on the Origin and Propagation of the Soul, chap. i.
+
+12 Flourens, Amount of Life on the Globe, part ii. ch. iii. sect. ii.
+
+furnished by the circle of co ordinated relations. That the
+formative power of the new organism comes from, or at least is
+wholly conditioned by, the parent organism, should be believed,
+because it is the obvious conclusion, against which there is
+nothing to militate. That the soul of the child comes in some way
+from the soul of the parent, or is stamped by it, is also implied
+by the normal resemblance of children to parents, not more in
+bodily form than in spiritual idiosyncrasies. This fact alone
+furnishes the proper qualification to the acute and significant
+lines of the Platonizing poet:
+
+"Wherefore who thinks from souls new souls to bring,
+The same let presse the sunne beames in his fist
+And squeeze out drops of light, or strongly wring
+The rainbow till it die his hands, well prest."
+
+"That which is born of the flesh is flesh: that which is born of
+the spirit is spirit." As the body of the child is the derivative
+of a germ elaborated in the body of the parent, so the soul of the
+child is the derivative of a developing impulse of power imparted
+from the soul of the parent. And as the body is sustained by
+absorbing nutrition from matter, so the soul is sustained by
+assimilating the spiritual substances of the invisible kingdom.
+The most ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consummate
+plant whose blossom is man's mind. This representation is not
+materialism; for spirit belongs to a different sphere and is the
+subject of different predicates from matter, though equally under
+a constitution of laws. Nor does this view pretend to explain what
+is inherently transcendent: it leaves the creation of the soul
+within as wide a depth and margin of mystery as ever. Neither is
+this mode of exposing the problem atheistic. It refers the forms
+of life, all growths, all souls, to the indefinable Power that
+works everywhere, creates each thing, vivifies, governs, and
+contains the universe. And, however that Power be named, is it not
+God? And thus we still reverently hold that it is God's own hands
+"That reach through nature, moulding men." The ancient heroes of
+Greece and India were fond of tracing their genealogy up directly
+to their deities, and were proud to deem that in guarding them the
+gods stooped to watch over a race of kings, a puissant and
+immortal stock,
+
+"Whose glories stream'd from the same clond girt founts
+Whence their own dawn'd upon the infant world."
+
+After all the researches that have been made, we yet find the
+secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless
+mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to
+the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical
+epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of
+skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern
+time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and
+sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fear
+enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us
+rarely, in the illimitable visions that emancipate us often, in
+the unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds,
+enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies of
+a super earthly destiny whose splendors already break through the
+clouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains of
+time in which our spirits here sit pavilioned.
+
+Augustine pointedly observes, "It is no evil that the origin of
+the soul remains obscure, if only its redemption be made
+certain."13 Non est periculum si origo animoe lateat, dum
+redemptio clareat. No matter how humanity originates, if its
+object be to produce fruit, and that fruit be immortal souls. When
+our organism has perfected its intended product, willingly will we
+let the decaying body return into the ground, if so be we are
+assured that the ripened spirit is borne into the heavenly garner.
+Let us, in close, reduce the problem of the soul's origin to its
+last terms. The amount of force in the universe is uniform.14
+Action and reaction being equal, no new creation of force is
+possible: only its directions, deposits, and receptacles may be
+altered. No combination of physical processes can produce a
+previously non existent subject: it can only initiate the
+modification, development, assimilation, of realities already in
+being. Something cannot come out of nothing. The quickening
+formation of a man, therefore, implies the existence, first, of a
+material germ, the basis of the body; secondly, of a power to
+impart to that germ a dynamic impulse, in other words, to deposit
+in it a spirit atom, or monad of life force. Now, the fresh body
+is originally a detached product of the parent body, as an apple
+is the detached product of a tree. So the fresh soul is a
+transmitted force imparted by the parent soul, either directly
+from itself, or else conditioned by it and drawn from the ground
+life of nature, the creative power of God. If filial soul be
+begotten by procession and severance of conscious force from
+parental soul, the spiritual resemblance of offspring and
+progenitors is clearly explained. This phenomenon is also equally
+well explained if the parent soul, so called, be a die striking
+the creative substance of the universe into individual form. The
+latter supposition seems, upon the whole, the more plausible and
+scientific. Generation is a reflex condition moving the life basis
+of the world to produce a soul, as a physical impression moves the
+soul to produce a perception.15
+
+But, however deep the mystery of the soul's origin, whatever our
+conclusion in regard to it, let us not forget that the inmost
+essence and verity of the soul is conscious power; and that all
+power defies annihilation. It is an old declaration that what
+begins in time must end in time; and with the metaphysical shears
+of that notion more than once the burning faith in eternal life
+has been snuffed out. Yet how obvious is its sophistry! A being
+beginning in time need not cease in time, if the Power which
+originated it intends and provides for its perpetuity. And that
+such is the Creative intention for man appears from the fact that
+the grand forms of belief in all ages issuing from his mental
+organization have borne the stamp of an expected immortality. Our
+ideas may disappear, but they are always recoverable. If the souls
+of men are ideas of God, must they not be as enduring as his mind?
+
+13 Epist. CLVI.
+
+14 Faraday, Conservation of Force, Phil. Mag., April, 1857.
+
+15 Dr. Frohschammer, Ursprang der menechlichen Seelen, sect. 115.
+
+
+The naturalist who so immerses his thoughts in the physical phases
+of nature as to lose hold on indestructible centres of
+personality, should beware lest he lose the motive which propels
+man to begin here, by virtue and culture, to climb that ladder of
+life whose endless sides are affections, but whose discrete rounds
+are thoughts.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+HISTORY OF DEATH.
+
+DEATH is not an entity, but an event; not a force, but a state.
+Life is the positive experience, death the negation. Yet in nearly
+every literature death has been personified, while no kindred
+prosopopoeia of life is anywhere to be found. With the Greeks,
+Thanatos was a god; with the Romans, Mors was a goddess: but no
+statue was ever moulded, no altar ever raised, to Zoe or Vita. At
+first thought, we should anticipate the reverse of this; but, in
+truth, the fact is quite naturally as it is. Life is a continuous
+process; and any one who makes the effort will find how difficult
+it is to conceive of it as an individual being, with distinctive
+attributes, functions, and will. It is an inward possession which
+we familiarly experience, and in the quiet routine of custom we
+feel no shock of surprise at it, no impulse to give it imaginative
+shape and ornament. On the contrary, death is an impending
+occurrence, something which we anticipate and shudder at,
+something advancing toward us in time to strike or seize us. Its
+externality to our living experience, its threatening approach,
+the mystery and alarm enwrapping it, are provocative conditions
+for fanciful treatment, making personifications inevitable.
+
+With the Old Aryan race of India, death is Yama, the soul of the
+first man, departed to be the king of the subterranean realm of
+the subsequent dead, and returning to call after him each of his
+descendants in turn. To the good he is mild and lovely, but to the
+impious he is clad in terror and acts with severity. The purely
+fanciful character of this thought is obvious; for, according to
+it, death was before death, since Yama himself died. Yama does not
+really represent death, but its arbiter and messenger. He is the
+ruler over the dead, who himself carries the summons to each
+mortal to become his subject.
+
+In the Hebrew conception, death was a majestic angel, named
+Sammael, standing in the court of heaven, and flying thence over
+the earth, armed with a sword, to obey the behests of God. The
+Talmudists developed and dressed up the thought with many details,
+half sublime, half fantastic. He strides through the world at a
+step. From the soles of his feet to his shoulders he is full of
+eyes. Every person in the moment of dying sees him; and at the
+sight the soul retreats, running through all the limbs, as if
+asking permission to depart from them. From his naked sword fall
+three drops: one pales the countenance, one destroys the vitality,
+one causes the body to decay. Some Rabbins say he bears a cup from
+which the dying one drinks, or that he lets fall from the point of
+his sword a single acrid drop upon the sufferer's tongue: this is
+what is called "tasting the bitterness of death." Here again, we
+see, it is not strictly death that is personified. The embodiment
+is not of the mortal act, but of the decree determining that act.
+The Jewish angel of death is not a picture of death in itself, but
+of God's decree coming to the fated individual who is to die.
+
+The Greeks sometimes depicted death and sleep as twin boys, one
+black, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother,
+night. In this instance the phenomenon of dissolving
+unconsciousness which falls on mortals, abstractly generalized in
+the mind, is then concretely symbolized. It is a bold and happy
+stroke of artistic genius; but it in no way expresses or suggests
+the scientific facts of actual death. There is also a classic
+representation of death as a winged boy with a pensive brow and
+an inverted torch, a butterfly at his feet. This beautiful image,
+with its affecting accompaniments, conveys to the beholder not
+the verity, nor an interpretation, of death, but the sentiments
+of the survivors in view of their bereavement. The sad brow denotes
+the grief of the mourner, the winged insect the disembodied
+psyche, the reversed torch the descent of the soul to the under
+world; but the reality of death itself is nowhere hinted.
+
+The Romans give descriptions of death as a female figure in dark
+robes, with black wings, with ravenous teeth, hovering everywhere,
+darting here and there, eager for prey. Such a view is a
+personification of the mysteriousness, suddenness, inevitableness,
+and fearfulness, connected with the subject of death in men's
+minds, rather than of death itself. These thoughts are grouped
+into an imaginary being, whose sum of attributes are then
+ignorantly both associated with the idea of the unknown cause and
+confounded with the visible effect. It is, in a word, mere poetry,
+inspired by fear and unguided by philosophy.
+
+Death has been shown in the guise of a fowler spreading his net,
+setting his snares for men. But this image concerns itself with
+the accidents of the subject, the unexpectedness of the fatal
+blow, the treacherous springing of the trap, leaving the root of
+the matter untouched. The circumstances of the mortal hour are
+infinitely varied, the heart of the experience is unchangeably the
+same: there are a thousand modes of dying, but there is only one
+death. Ever so complete an exhibition of the occasions and
+accompaniments of an event is no explanation of what the inmost
+reality of the event is.
+
+The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darkly
+sweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrapped in its
+sable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination brooding
+not so much on the distinct phenomena of an individual case as on
+the melancholy mystery of the disappearance of men from the
+familiar places that knew them once but miss them now. In a
+somewhat kindred manner, the startling magnificence of the sketch
+in the Apocalypse, of death on the pale horse, is a product of
+pure imagination meditating on the wholesale slaughter which was
+to deluge the earth when God's avenging judgments fell upon the
+enemies of the Christians. But to consider this murderous warrior
+on his white charger as literally death, would be as erroneous as
+to imagine the bare armed executioner and the guillotine to be
+themselves the death which they inflict. No more appalling picture
+of death has been drawn than that by Milton, whose dire image has
+this stroke of truth in it, that its adumbrate formlessness
+typifies the disorganizing force which reduces all cunningly built
+bodies of life to the elemental wastes of being. The incestuous
+and mistreated progeny of Sin is thus delineated:
+
+"The shape,
+If shape it might be call'd that shape had none
+Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
+Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
+For each seem'd either, black it stood as night,
+Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
+And shook a dreadful dart: what seem'd his head
+The likeness of a kingly crown had on."
+
+But the most common personification of death is as a skeleton
+brandishing a dart; and then he is called the grisly king of
+terrors; and people tremble at the thought of him, as children do
+at the name of a bugbear in the dark. What sophistry this is! It
+is as if we should identify the trophy with the conqueror, the
+vestiges left in the track of a traveller with the traveller
+himself. Death literally makes a skeleton of man; so man
+metaphorically makes a skeleton of Death! All these
+representations of death, however beautiful, or pathetic, or
+horrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleading
+analogies, arbitrary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on a
+firm hold of realities, insight of truth, and philosophical
+analysis. They are all to be brushed aside as phantoms of
+nightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostly
+rested, hitherto, on no veritable foundation of science, but on a
+visionary foundation of emotion. It has wrought upon flitting,
+sensible phenomena rather than upon abiding substrata of facts.
+For example, a tender Greek bard personified the life of a tree as
+a Hamadryad, the moving trunk and limbs her undulating form and
+beckoning arms, the drooping boughs her hair, the rustling foliage
+her voice. A modern poet, endowed with the same strength of
+sympathy, but acquainted with vegetable chemistry, might personify
+sap as a pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots and
+veins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descending
+through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the
+personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no
+penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute
+definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or
+accident, or emotion, associated with it.
+
+There are in popular usage various metaphors to express what is
+meant by death. The principal ones are, extinction of the vital
+spark, departing, expiring, cutting the thread of life, giving up
+the ghost, falling asleep. These figurative modes of speech spring
+from extremely imperfect correspondences. Indeed, the unlikenesses
+are more important and more numerous than the likenesses. They are
+simply artifices to indicate what is so deeply obscure and
+intangible. They do not lay the secret bare, nor furnish us any
+aid in reaching to the true essence of the question. Moreover,
+several of them, when sharply examined, involve a fatal error. For
+example, upon the admitted supposition that in every case of dying
+the soul departs from the body, still, this separation of the soul
+from the body is not what constitutes death. Death is the state of
+the body when the soul has left it. An act is distinct from its
+effects. We must, therefore, turn from the literary inquiry to the
+metaphysical and scientific method, to gain any satisfactory idea
+and definition of death.
+
+A German writer of extraordinary acumen and audacity has said,
+"Only before death, but not in death, is death death. Death is so
+unreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when he
+is."1 This paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear is
+susceptible of quite lucid interpretation and defence. For death
+is, in its naked significance, the state of not being. Of course,
+then, it has no existence save in the conceptions of the living.
+We compare a dead
+
+1 Feuerbach, Gedanken uber Tod and Unsterblichkeit, sect. 84.
+
+
+person with what he was when living, and instinctively personify
+the difference as death. Death, strictly analyzed, is only this
+abstract conceit or metaphysical nonentity. Death, therefore,
+being but a conception in the mind of a living person, when that
+person dies death ceases to be at all. And thus the realization of
+death is the death of death. He annihilates himself, dying with
+the dart he drives. Having in this manner disposed of the
+personality or entity of death, it remains as an effect, an event,
+a state. Accordingly, the question next arises, What is death when
+considered in this its true aspect?
+
+A positive must be understood before its related negative can be
+intelligible. Bichat defined life as the sum of functions by which
+death is resisted. It is an identical proposition in verbal
+disguise, with the fault that it makes negation affirmation,
+passiveness action. Death is not a dynamic agency warring against
+life, but simply an occurrence. Life is the operation of an
+organizing force producing an organic form according to an ideal
+type, and persistently preserving that form amidst the incessant
+molecular activity and change of its constituent substance. That
+operation of the organic force which thus constitutes life is a
+continuous process of waste, casting off the old exhausted matter,
+and of replacement by assimilation of new material. The close of
+this process of organific metamorphosis and desquamation is death,
+whose finality is utter decomposition, restoring all the bodily
+elements to the original inorganic conditions from which they were
+taken. The organic force with which life begins constrains
+chemical affinity to work in special modes for the formation of
+special products: when it is spent or disappears, chemical
+affinity is at liberty to work in its general modes; and that is
+death. "Life is the co ordination of actions; the imperfection of
+the co ordination is disease, its arrest is death." In other
+words, "life is the continuous adjustment of relations in an
+organism with relations in its environment." Disturb that
+adjustment, and you have malady; destroy it, and you have death.
+Life is the performance of functions by an organism; death is the
+abandonment of an organism to the forces of the universe. No
+function can be performed without a waste of the tissue through
+which it is performed: that waste is repaired by the assimilation
+of fresh nutriment. In the balancing of these two actions life
+consists. The loss of their equipoise soon terminates them both;
+and that is death. Upon the whole, then, scientifically speaking,
+to cause death is to stop "that continuous differentiation and
+integration of tissues and of states of consciousness"
+constituting life. 2 Death, therefore, is no monster, no force,
+but the act of completion, the state of cessation; and all the
+bugbears named death are but poor phantoms of the frightened and
+childish mind.
+
+Life consisting in the constant differentiation of the tissues by
+the action of oxygen, and their integration from the blastema
+furnished by the blood, why is not the harmony of these processes
+preserved forever? Why should the relation between the integration
+and disintegration going on in the human organism ever fall out of
+correspondence with the relation between the oxygen and food
+supplied from its environment? That is to say, whence originated
+the sentence of death upon man? Why do we not live immortally as
+we are? The current reply is, we die because our first parent
+sinned. Death is a penalty inflicted upon the
+
+2 Spencer, Principles of Psychology, pp. 334-373.
+
+
+human race because Adam disobeyed his Maker's command. We must
+consider this theory a little.
+
+The narrative in Genesis, of the creation of man and of the events
+in the Garden of Eden, cannot be traced further back than to the
+time of Solomon, three thousand years after the alleged
+occurrences it describes. This portion of the book of Genesis, as
+has long been shown, is a distinct document, marked by many
+peculiarities, which was inserted in its present place by the
+compiler of the elder Hebrew Scriptures somewhere between seven
+and ten centuries before Christ.3 Ewald has fully demonstrated
+that the book of Genesis consists of many separate fragmentary
+documents of different ages, arranged together by a comparatively
+late hand. Among the later of these pieces is the account of the
+primeval pair in paradise. Grotefend argues, with much force and
+variety of evidence, that this story was derived from a far more
+ancient legend book, only fragments of which remained when the
+final collection was made of this portion of the Old Testament.4
+Many scholars have thought the account was not of Hebrew origin,
+but was borrowed from the literary traditions of some earlier
+Oriental nation. Rosenmuller, Von Bohlen, and others, say it bears
+unmistakable relationship to the Zendavesta which tells how
+Ahriman, the old Serpent, beguiled the first pair into sin and
+misery. These correspondences, and also that between the tree of
+life and the Zoroastrian plant hom, which gives life and will
+produce the resurrection, are certainly striking. Buttmann sees in
+God's declaration to Adam, "Behold, I have given you for food
+every herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is fruit bearing
+seed," traces of a prohibition of animal food. This was not the
+vestige of a Hebrew usage, but the vegetarian tradition of some
+sect eschewing meat, a tradition drawn from South Asia, whence the
+fathers of the Hebrew race came.5 Gesenius says, "Many things in
+this narrative were drawn from older Asiatic tradition." 6 Knobel
+also affirms that numerous matters in this relation were derived
+from traditions of East Asian nations.7 Still, it is not necessary
+to suppose that the writer of the account in Genesis borrowed any
+thing from abroad. The Hebrew may as well have originated such
+ideas as anybody else. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the
+Chaldeans, the Persians, the Etruscans, have kindred narratives
+held as most ancient and sacred.8 The Chinese, the Sandwich
+Islanders, the North American Indians, also have their legends of
+the origin and altered fortunes of the human race. The
+resemblances between many of these stories are better accounted
+for by the intrinsic similarities of the subject, of the mind, of
+nature, and of mental action, than by the supposition of
+derivation from one another.
+
+Regarding the Hebrew narrative as an indigenous growth, then, how
+shall we explain its origin, purport, and authority? Of course we
+cannot receive it as a miraculous revelation conveying infallible
+truth. The Bible, it is now acknowledged, was not given in the
+providence
+
+3 Tuch, Kommentar uber Genesis, s. xcviii.
+
+4 Zur altesten Sagenpoesie des Orients. Zeitschrift der deutschen
+Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, band viii. ss. 772-779.
+
+5 Mythologus, (Schopfung and Sundenfall, ) band i. s. 137.
+
+6 Article "Adam," in Encyclopadia by Ersch and Gruber.
+
+7 Die Genesis erklart, s. 28.
+
+8 Palfrey's Academical Lectures, vol. ii. pp. 21-28.
+
+
+of God to teach astronomy, geology, chronology, and the operation
+of organic forces, but to help educate men in morality and piety.
+It is a religious, not a scientific, work. Some unknown Hebrew
+poet, in the early dawn of remembered time, knowing little
+metaphysics and less science, musing upon the fortunes of man, his
+wickedness, sorrow, death, and impressed with an instinctive
+conviction that things could not always have been so, casting
+about for some solution of the dim, pathetic problem, at last
+struck out the beautiful and sublime poem recorded in Genesis,
+which has now for many a century, by Jews, Christians,
+Mohammedans, been credited as authentic history. With his own
+hands God moulds from earth an image in his own likeness, breathes
+life into it, and new made man moves, lord of the scene, and lifts
+his face, illuminated with soul, in submissive love to his
+Creator. Endowed with free will, after a while he violated his
+Maker's command: the divine displeasure was awakened, punishment
+ensued, and so rushed in the terrible host of ills under which we
+suffer. The problem must early arise: the solution is, to a
+certain stage of thought, at once the most obvious and the most
+satisfactory conceivable. It is the truth. Only it is cast in
+imaginative, not scientific, form, arrayed in emblematic, not
+literal, garb. The Greeks had a lofty poem by some early unknown
+author, setting forth how Prometheus formed man of clay and
+animated him with fire from heaven, and how from Pandora's box the
+horrid crew of human vexations were let into the world. The two
+narratives, though most unequal in depth and dignity, belong in
+the same literary and philosophical category. Neither was intended
+as a plain record of veritable history, each word a naked fact,
+but as a symbol of its author's thoughts, each phrase the
+metaphorical dress of a speculative idea.
+
+Eichhorn maintains, with no slight plausibility, that the whole
+account of the Garden of Eden was derived from a series of
+allegorical pictures which the author had seen, and which he
+translated from the language of painting into the language of
+words. At all events, we must take the account as symbolic, a
+succession of figurative expressions. Many of the best minds have
+always so considered it, from Josephus to Origen, from Ambrose to
+Kant. What, then, are the real thoughts which the author of this
+Hebrew poem on the primal condition of man meant to convey beneath
+his legendary forms of imagery? These four are the essential ones.
+First, that God created man; secondly, that he created him in a
+state of freedom and happiness surrounded by blessings; third,
+that the favored subject violated his Sovereign's order; fourth,
+that in consequence of this offence he was degraded from his
+blessed condition, beneath a load of retributive ills. The
+composition shows the characteristics of a philosopheme or a myth,
+a scheme of conceptions deliberately wrought out to answer an
+inquiry, a story devised to account for an existing fact or
+custom. The picture of God performing his creative work in six
+days and resting on the seventh, may have been drawn after the
+septenary division of time and the religious separation of the
+Sabbath, to explain and justify that observance. The creation of
+Eve out of the side of Adam was either meant by the author as an
+allegoric illustration that the love of husband and wife is the
+most powerful of social bonds, or as a pure myth seeking to
+explain the incomparable cleaving together of husband and wife by
+the entirely poetic supposition that the first woman was taken out
+of the first man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. All early
+literatures teem with exemplifications of this process, a
+spontaneous secretion by the imagination to account for some
+presented phenomenon. Or perhaps this part of the relation
+"and he called her woman [manness], because she was taken
+out of man" may be an instance of those etymological myths with
+which ancient literature abounds. Woman is named Isha because she
+was taken out of man, whose name is Ish. The barbarous treatment
+the record under consideration has received, the utter
+baselessness of it in the light of truth as foundation for literal
+belief, find perhaps no fitter exposure than in the fact that for
+many centuries it was the prevalent faith of Christendom that
+every woman has one rib more than man, a permanent memorial of the
+Divine theft from his side. Unquestionably, there are many good
+persons now who, if Richard Owen should tell them that man has the
+same number of ribs as woman, would think of the second chapter of
+Genesis and doubt his word!
+
+There is no reason for supposing the serpent in this recital to be
+intended as a representative of Satan. The earliest trace of such
+an interpretation is in the Wisdom of Solomon, an anonymous and
+apocryphal book composed probably a thousand years later. What is
+said of the snake is the most plainly mythical of all the
+portions. What caused the snake to crawl on his belly in the dust,
+while other creatures walk on feet or fly with wings? Why, the
+sly, winding creature, more subtle, more detestable, than any
+beast of the field, deceived the first woman; and this is his
+punishment! Such was probably the mental process in the writer. To
+seek a profound and true theological dogma in such a statement is
+as absurd as to seek it in the classic myth that the lapwing with
+his sharp beak chases the swallow because he is the descendant of
+the enraged Tereus who pursued poor Progne with a drawn sword. Or,
+to cite a more apposite case, as well might we seek a reliable
+historical narrative in the following Greek myth. Zeus once gave
+man a remedy against old age. He put it on the back of an ass and
+followed on foot. It being a hot day, the ass grew thirsty, and
+would drink at a fount which a snake guarded. The cunning snake
+knew what precious burden the ass bore, and would not, except at
+the price of it, let him drink. He obtained the prize; but with
+it, as a punishment for his trick, he incessantly suffers the
+ass's thirst. Thus the snake, casting his skin, annually renews
+his youth, while man is borne down by old age.9 In all these cases
+the mental action is of the same kind in motive, method, and
+result.
+
+The author of the poem contained in the third chapter of Genesis
+does not say that man was made immortal. The implication plainly
+is that he was created mortal, taken from the dust and naturally
+to return again to the dust. But by the power of God a tree was
+provided whose fruit would immortalize its partakers. The penalty
+of Adam's sin was directly, not physical death, but being forced
+in the sweat of his brow to wring his subsistence from the sterile
+ground cursed for his sake; it was indirectly literal death, in
+that he was prevented from eating the fruit of the tree of life.
+"God sent him out of the garden, lest he eat and live forever." He
+was therefore, according to the narrative, made originally subject
+to death; but an immortalizing antidote was prepared for him,
+which he forfeited by his transgression. That the writer made use
+of the trees of life and knowledge as embellishing allegories is
+most
+
+9 Alian, no Nat. Animal., lib. vi. cap. 51.
+
+
+probable. But, if not, he was not the only devout poet who, in the
+early times, with sacred reverence believed the wonders the
+inspiring muse gave him as from God. It is not clear from the
+Biblical record that Adam was imagined the first man. On the
+contrary, the statement that Cain was afraid that those who met
+him would kill him, also that he went to the land of Nod and took
+a wife and builded a city, implies that there was another and
+older race. Father Peyrere wrote a book, called "Praadamita," more
+than two hundred years ago, pointing out this fact and arguing
+that there really were men before Adam. If science should
+thoroughly establish the truth of this view, religion need not
+suffer; but the common theology, inextricably built upon and
+intertangled with the dogma of "original sin," would be hopelessly
+ruined. But the leaders in the scientific world will not on that
+account shut their eyes nor refuse to reason. Christians should
+follow their example of truth seeking, with a deeper faith in God,
+fearless of results, but resolved upon reaching reality.
+
+It is a very singular and important fact that, from the appearance
+in Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and punishment
+of the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it is
+subsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time of
+Christ. Had it been all along credited in its literal sense, as a
+divine revelation, could this be so? Philo Judaus gives it a
+thoroughly figurative meaning. He says, "Adam was created mortal
+in body, immortal in mind. Paradise is the soul, piety the tree of
+life, discriminative wisdom the tree of knowledge; the serpent is
+pleasure, the flaming sword turning every way is the sun revolving
+round the world."10 Jesus himself never once alludes to Adam or to
+any part of the story of Eden. In the whole New Testament there
+are but two important references to the tradition, both of which
+are by Paul. He says, in effect, "As through the sin of Adam all
+are condemned unto death, so by the righteousness of Christ all
+shall be justified unto life." It is not a guarded doctrinal
+statement, but an unstudied, rhetorical illustration of the
+affiliation of the sinful and unhappy generations of the past with
+their offending progenitor, Adam, of the believing and blessed
+family of the chosen with their redeeming head, Christ. He does
+not use the word death in the Epistle to the Romans prevailingly
+in the narrow sense of physical dissolution, but in a broad,
+spiritual sense, as appears, for example, in these instances: "To
+be carnally minded is death;" "The law of the spirit of life in
+Christ hath made me free from the law of sin and death." For the
+spiritually minded were not exempt from bodily death. Paul himself
+died the bodily death. His idea of the relations of Adam and
+Christ to humanity is more clearly expressed in the other passage
+already alluded to. It is in the Epistle to the Corinthians, and
+appears to be this. The first man, Adam, was of the earth, earthy,
+the head and representative of a corruptible race whose flesh and
+blood were never meant to inherit the kingdom of God. The second
+man, Christ the Lord, soon to return from heaven, was a quickening
+spirit, head and representative of a risen spiritual race for whom
+is prepared the eternal inheritance of the saints in light. As by
+the first man came death, whose germ is transmitted with the
+flesh, so by the second man comes the resurrection of the dead,
+whose type is seen in his glorified ascension from Hades to
+heaven. "As in Adam all die, even so in
+
+10 De Mundi Opificio, liv lvi. De Cherub. viii.
+
+
+Christ shall all be made alive." Upon all the line of Adam sin has
+entailed, what otherwise would not have been known, moral death
+and a disembodied descent to the under world. But the gospel of
+Christ, and his resurrection as the first fruits of them that
+slept, proclaim to all those that are his, at his speedy coming, a
+kindred deliverance from the lower gloom, an investiture with
+spiritual bodies, and an admission into the kingdom of God.
+According to Paul, then, physical death is not the retributive
+consequence of Adam's sin, but is the will of the Creator in the
+law of nature, the sowing of terrestrial bodies for the gathering
+of celestial bodies, the putting off of the image of the earthy
+for the putting on of the image of the heavenly. The specialty of
+the marring and punitive interference of sin in the economy is, in
+addition to the penalties in moral experience, the interpolation,
+between the fleshly "unclothing" and the spiritual "clothing
+upon," of the long, disembodied, subterranean residence, from the
+descent of Abel into its palpable solitude to the ascent of Christ
+out of its multitudinous world. From Adam, in the flesh, humanity
+sinks into the grave realm; from Christ, in the spirit, it shall
+rise into heaven. Had man remained innocent, death, considered as
+change of body and transition to heaven, would still have been his
+portion; but all the suffering and evil now actually associated
+with death would not have been.
+
+Leaving the Scriptures, the first man appears in literature, in
+the history of human thought on the beginning of our race, in
+three forms. There is the Mythical Adam, the embodiment of
+poetical musings, fanciful conceits, and speculative dreams; there
+is the Theological Adam, the central postulate of a group of
+dogmas, the support of a fabric of controversial thought, the lay
+figure to fill out and wear the hypothetical dresses of a
+doctrinal system; and there is the Scientific Adam, the first
+specimen of the genus man, the supposititious personage who, as
+the earliest product, on this grade, of the Creative organic force
+or Divine energy, commenced the series of human generations. The
+first is a hypostatized legend, the second a metaphysical
+personification, the third a philosophical hypothesis. The first
+is an attractive heap of imaginations, the next a dialectic mass
+of dogmatisms, the last a modest set of theories.
+
+Philo says God made Adam not from any chance earth, but from a
+carefully selected portion of the finest and most sifted clay, and
+that, as being directly created by God, he was superior to all
+others generated by men, the generations of whom deteriorate in
+each remove from him, as the attraction of a magnet weakens from
+the iron ring it touches along a chain of connected rings. The
+Rabbins say Adam was so large that when he lay down he reached
+across the earth, and when standing his head touched the
+firmament: after his fall he waded through the ocean, Orion like.
+Even a French Academician, Nicolas Fleurion, held that Adam was
+one hundred and twenty three feet and nine inches in height. All
+creatures except the angel Eblis, as the Koran teaches, made
+obeisance to him. Eblis, full of envy and pride, refused, and was
+thrust into hell by God, where he began to plot the ruin of the
+new race. One effect of the forbidden fruit he ate was to cause
+rotten teeth in his descendants. He remained in Paradise but one
+day. After he had eaten from the prohibited tree, Eve gave of the
+fruit to the other creatures in Eden, and they all ate of it, and
+so became mortal, with the sole exception of the phoenix, who
+refused to taste it, and consequently remained immortal.
+
+The Talmud teaches that Adam would never have died had he not
+sinned. The majority of the Christian fathers and doctors, from
+Tertullian and Augustine to Luther and Calvin, have maintained the
+same opinion. It has been the orthodox that is, the prevailing
+doctrine of the Church, affirmed by the Synod at Carthage in the
+year four hundred and eighteen, and by the Council of Trent in the
+year fifteen hundred and forty five. All the evils which afflict
+the world, both moral and material, are direct results of Adam's
+sin. He contained all the souls of men in himself; and they all
+sinned in him, their federal head and legal representative. When
+the fatal fruit was plucked,
+
+"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through
+all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost."
+
+Earthquakes, tempests, pestilences, poverty, war, the endless
+brood of distress, ensued. For then were
+
+"Turn'd askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more
+From the sun's axle, and with labor push'd Oblique the centric
+globe."
+
+Adam's transcendent faculties and gifts were darkened and
+diminished in his depraved posterity, and all base propensities
+let loose to torment, confuse, and degrade them. We can scarcely
+form a conception of the genius, the beauty, the blessedness, of
+the first man, say the theologians in chorus.11 Augustine
+declares, "The most gifted of our time must be considered, when
+compared with Adam in genius, as tortoises to birds in speed."
+Adam, writes Dante, "was made from clay, accomplished with every
+gift that life can teem with." Thomas Aquinas teaches that "he was
+immortal by grace though not by nature, had universal knowledge,
+fellowshipped with angels, and saw God." South, in his famous
+sermon on "Man the Image of God," after an elaborate panegyric of
+the wondrous majesty, wisdom, peacefulness, and bliss of man
+before the fall, exclaims, "Aristotle was but the rubbish of an
+Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise!" Jean Paul has
+amusingly burlesqued these conceits. "Adam, in his state of
+innocence, possessed a knowledge of all the arts and sciences,
+universal and scholastic history, the several penal and other
+codes of law, and all the old dead languages, as well as the
+living. He was, as it were, a living Pegasus and Pindus, a movable
+lodge of sublime light, a royal literary society, a pocket seat of
+the Muses, and a short golden age of Louis the Fourteenth!"
+
+Adam has been called the Man without a Navel, because, not being
+born of woman, there could be no umbilical cord to cut. The
+thought goes deep. In addition to the mythico theological pictures
+of the mechanical creation and superlative condition of the first
+man, two forms of statement have been advanced by thoughtful
+students of nature. One is the theory of chronological progressive
+development; the other is the theory of the
+
+11 Strauss gives a multitude of apposite quotations in his
+Christliche Glaubenslehre, band i. s. 691, sect. 51, ff.
+
+
+simultaneous creation of organic families of different species or
+typical forms. The advocate of the former goes back along the
+interminable vistas of geologic time, tracing his ancestral line
+through the sinking forms of animal life, until, with the aid of a
+microscope, he sees a closed vesicle of structureless membrane;
+and this he recognises as the scientific Adam. This theory has
+been brought into fresh discussion by Mr. Darwin in his rich and
+striking work on the Origin of Species12 The other view contrasts
+widely with this, and is not essentially different from the
+account in Genesis. It shows God himself creating by regular
+methods, in natural materials, not by a vicegerent law, not with
+the anthropomorphitic hands of an external potter. Every organized
+fabric, however complex, originates in a single physiological
+cell. Every individual organism from the simple plant known as red
+snow to the oak, from the zoophyte to man is developed from such a
+cell. This is unquestionable scientific knowledge. The phenomenal
+process of organic advancement is through growth of the cell by
+selective appropriation of material, self multiplication of the
+cell, chemical transformations of the pabulum of the cell,
+endowment of the muscular and nervous tissues produced by those
+transformations with vital and psychical properties.
+
+But the essence of the problem lies in the question, Why does one
+of these simple cells become a cabbage, another a rat, another a
+whale, another a man? Within the limits of known observation
+during historic time, every organism yields seed or bears progeny
+after its own kind. Between all neighboring species there are
+impassable, discrete chasms. The direct reason, therefore, why one
+cell stops in completion at any given vegetable stage, another at
+a certain animal stage, is that its producing parent was that
+vegetable or that animal. Now, going back to the first individual
+of each kind, which had no determining parent like itself, the
+theory of the gradually ameliorating development of one species
+out of the next below it is one mode of solving the problem.
+Another mode more satisfactory at least to theologians and their
+allies is to conclude that God, the Divine Force, by whom the life
+of the universe is given, made the world after an ideal plan,
+including a systematic arrangement of all the possible
+modifications. This plan was in his thought, in the unity of all
+its parts, from the beginning; and the animate creation is the
+execution of its diagrams in organic life. Instead of the lineal
+extraction of the complicated scheme out of one cell, there has
+been, from epoch to epoch, the simultaneous production of all
+included in one of its sections. The Creator, at his chosen times,
+calling into existence a multitude of cells, gave each one the
+amount and type of organic force which would carry it to the
+destined grade and form. In this manner may have originated, at
+the same time, the first sparrow, the first horse, the first man,
+in short, a whole circle of congeners.
+
+"The grassy clods now calved; now half appear'd
+The tawny lion, pawing to get free
+His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
+And rampant shakes his brinded mane."
+
+12 The most forcible defence of this hypothesis is that made by
+Herbert Spencer. See, in his volume of Essays, No. 2 of the
+Haythorne Papers. Also see Oken, Entstehung des ersten Menechen,
+Isis, 1819, ss. 1117-1123.
+
+
+Each creature, therefore, would be distinct from others from the
+first. "Man, though rising from not man, came forth sharply
+defined." The races thus originated in their initiative
+representatives by the creative power of God, thenceforth possess
+in themselves the power, each one, in the generative act, to put
+its typical dynamic stamp upon the primordial cells of its
+immediate descendants. Adam, then, was a wild man, cast in
+favoring conditions of climate, endowed with the same faculties as
+now, only not in so high a degree. For, by his peculiar power of
+forming habits, accumulating experience, transmitting acquirements
+and tendencies, he has slowly risen to his present state with all
+its wealth of wisdom, arts, and comforts.
+
+By either of these theories, that of Darwin, or that of Agassiz,
+man, the head of the great organic family of the earth, and it
+matters not at all whether there were only one Adam and Eve, or
+whether each separate race had its own Adams and Eves,13 not
+merely a solitary pair, but simultaneous hundreds, man, physically
+considered, is indistinguishably included in the creative plan
+under the same laws and forces, and visibly subject to the same
+destination, as the lower animals. He starts with a cell as they
+do, grows to maturity by assimilative organization and endowing
+transformation of foreign nutriment as they do, his life is a
+continuous process of waste and repair of tissues as theirs is,
+and there is, from the scientific point of view, no conceivable
+reason why he should not be subject to physical death as they are.
+They have always been subject to death, which, therefore, is an
+aboriginal constituent of the Creative plan. It has been
+estimated, upon data furnished by scientific observation, that
+since the appearance of organic life on earth, millions of years
+ago, animals enough have died to cover all the lands of the globe
+with their bones to the height of three miles. Consequently, the
+historic commencement of death is not to be found in the sin of
+man. We shall discover it as a necessity in the first organic cell
+that was ever formed.
+
+The spherule of force which is the primitive basis of a cell
+spends itself in the discharge of its work. In other words, "the
+amount of vital action which can be performed by each living cell
+has a definite limit." When that limit is reached, the exhausted
+cell is dead. To state the fact differently: no function can be
+performed without "the disintegration of a certain amount of
+tissue, whose components are then removed as effete by the
+excretory processes." This final expenditure on the part of a cell
+of its modification of force is the act of molecular death, the
+germinal essence of all decay. That this organic law should rule
+in every living structure is a necessity inherent in the actual
+conditions of the creation. And wherever we look in the realm of
+physical man, even "from the red outline of beginning Adam" to the
+amorphous adipocere of the last corpse when fate's black curtain
+falls on our race, we shall discern death. For death is the other
+side of life. Life and death are the two hands with which the
+organic power works.
+
+The threescore simple elements known to chemists die, that is,
+surrender their peculiar powers and properties, and enter into new
+combinations to produce and support higher forms of life.
+Otherwise these inorganic elemental wastes would be all that the
+material universe could show.
+
+13 The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races, by Louis Agassiz,
+Christian Examiner, July, 1850.
+
+
+The simple plant consists of single cells, which, in its
+development, give up their independent life for the production
+of a more exalted vegetable form. The formation of a perfectly
+organized plant is made possible only through the continuous dying
+and replacement of its cells. Similarly, in the development of an
+animal, the constituent cells die for the good of the whole
+creature; and the more perfect the animal the greater the
+subordination of the parts. The cells of the human body are
+incessantly dying, being borne off and replaced. The epidermis or
+scarf skin is made of millions of insensible scales, consisting of
+former cells which have died in order with their dead bodies to
+build this guardian wall around the tender inner parts. Thus,
+death, operating within the individual, seen in the light of
+natural science, is a necessity, is purely a form of self
+surrendering beneficence, is, indeed, but a hidden and indirect
+process and completion of life.14
+
+And is not the death of the total organism just as needful, just
+as benignant, as the death of the component atoms? Is it not the
+same law, still expressing the same meaning? The chemicalelements
+wherein individuality is wanting, as Wagner says, die that
+vegetable bodies may live. Individual vegetable bodies die that
+new individuals of the species may live, and that they may supply
+the conditions for animals to live. The individual beast dies that
+other individuals of his species may live, and also for the good
+of man. The plant lives by the elements and by other plants: the
+animal lives by the elements, by the plants, and by other animals:
+man lives and reigns by the service of the elements, of the
+plants, and of the animals. The individual man dies if we may
+trust the law of analogy for the good of his species, and that he
+may furnish the conditions for the development of a higher life
+elsewhere. It is quite obvious that, if individuals did not die,
+new individuals could not live, because there would not be room.
+It is also equally evident that, if individuals did not die, they
+could never have any other life than the present. The foregoing
+considerations, fathomed and appreciated, transform the
+institution of death from caprice and punishment into necessity
+and benignity. In the timid sentimentalist's view, death is
+horrible. Nature unrolls the chart of organic existence, a
+convulsed and lurid list of murderers, from the spider in the
+window to the tiger in the jungle, from the shark at the bottom of
+the sea to the eagle against the floor of the sky. As the perfumed
+fop, in an interval of reflection, gazes at the spectacle through
+his dainty eyeglass, the prospect swims in blood and glares with
+the ghastly phosphorus of corruption, and he shudders with
+sickness. In the philosophical naturalist's view, the dying
+panorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more
+pain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life and death wear the
+solemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all is
+balanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safely
+soar the dove and the rainbow; out of the charnel blooms the rose
+to which the nightingale sings love; nor is there poison which
+helps not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation with
+nutriment for greater good and joy.
+
+By painting such pictures as that of a woman with "Sin" written on
+her forehead in great glaring letters, giving to Death a globe
+entwined by a serpent, or that of Death as a
+
+14 Hermann Wagner, Der Tod, beleuchtet vom Standpunkte der
+Naturwissenschaften.
+
+skeleton, waving a black banner over the world and sounding
+through a trumpet, "Woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth!" by
+interpreting the great event as punishment instead of fulfilment,
+extermination instead of transition, men have elaborated, in the
+faith of their imaginations, a melodramatic death which nature
+never made. Truly, to the capable observer, death bears the double
+aspect of necessity and benignity: necessity, because it is an
+ultimate fact, as the material world is made, that, since organic
+action implies expenditure of force, the modicum of force given to
+any physical organization must finally be spent; benignity,
+because a bodily immortality on earth would both prevent all the
+happiness of perpetually rising millions and be an unspeakable
+curse upon its possessors.
+
+The benevolence of death appears from this fact, that it
+boundlessly multiplies the numbers who can enjoy the prerogatives
+of life. It calls up ever fresh generations, with wondering eyes
+and eager appetites, to the perennial banquet of existence. Had
+Adam not sinned and been expelled from Paradise, some of the
+Christian Fathers thought, the fixed number of saints foreseen by
+God would have been reached and then no more would have been
+born.15
+
+Such would have been the necessity, there being no death. But, by
+the removal of one company as they grow tired and sated, room is
+made for a new company to approach and enjoy the ever renewing
+spectacle and feast of the world. Thus all the delightful boons
+life has, instead of being cooped within a little stale circle,
+are ceaselessly diffused and increased. Vivacious claimants
+advance, see what is to be seen, partake of what is furnished, are
+satisfied, and retire; and their places are immediately taken by
+hungry successors. Thus the torch of life is passed briskly, with
+picturesque and stimulating effect, along the manifold race of
+running ages, instead of smouldering stagnantly forever in the
+moveless grasp of one. The amount of enjoyment, the quantity of
+conscious experience, gained from any given exhibition by a
+million persons to each of whom it is successively shown for one
+hour, is, beyond all question, immensely greater and keener than
+one person could have from it in a million hours. The generations
+of men seem like fire flies glittering down the dark lane of
+History; but each swarm had its happy turn, fulfilled its hour,
+and rightfully gave way to its followers. The disinterested
+beneficence of the Creator ordains that the same plants, insects,
+men, shall not unsurrenderingly monopolize and stop the bliss of
+breath. Death is the echo of the voice of love reverberated from
+the limit of life.
+
+The cumulative fund of human experience, the sensitive affiliating
+line of history, like a cerebral cord of personal identity
+traversing the centuries, renders a continual succession of
+generations equivalent to the endless existence of one generation;
+but with this mighty difference, that it preserves all the edge
+and spice of novelty. For consider what would be the result if
+death were abolished and men endowed with an earthly immortality.
+At first they might rejoice, and think their last, dreadest enemy
+destroyed. But what a mistake! In the first place, since none are
+to be removed from the earth, of course none must come into it.
+The space and material are all wanted by those now in possession.
+All are soon mature men and women, not another infant ever to hang
+upon a mother's breast or be lifted in a father's arms.
+
+15 Augustine, Op. Imp. iii. 198.
+
+
+All the prattling music, fond cares, yearning love, and
+gushing joys and hopes associated with the rearing of children,
+gone! What a stupendous fragment is stricken from the fabric of
+those enriching satisfactions which give life its truest value and
+its purest charm! Ages roll on. They see the same everlasting
+faces, confront the same returning phenomena, engage in the same
+worn out exercises, or lounge idly in the unchangeable conditions
+which bear no stimulant which they have not exhausted. Thousands
+of years pass. They have drunk every attainable spring of
+knowledge dry. Not a prize stirs a pulse. All pleasures,
+permutated till ingenuity is baffled, disgust them. No terror
+startles them. No possible experiment remains untried; nor is
+there any unsounded fortune left. No dim marvels and boundless
+hopes beckon them with resistless lures into the future. They have
+no future. One everlasting now is their all. At last the incessant
+repetition of identical phenomena, the unmitigated sameness of
+things, the eternal monotony of affairs, become unutterably
+burdensome and horrible. Full of loathing and immeasurable
+fatigue, a weariness like the weight of a universe oppresses them;
+and what would they not give for a change! any thing to break the
+nightmare spell of ennui, to fling off the dateless flesh, to
+die, to pass into some unguessed realm, to lie down and sleep
+forever: it would be the infinite boon!
+
+Take away from man all that is dependent on, or interlinked with,
+the appointment of death, and it would make such fundamental
+alterations of his constitution and relations that he would no
+longer be man. It would leave us an almost wholly different race.
+If it is a divine boon that men should be, then death is a good to
+us; for it enables us to be men. Without it there would neither be
+husband and wife, nor parent and child, nor family hearth and
+altar; nor, indeed, would hardly any thing be as it is now. The
+existent phenomena of nature and the soul would comprise all. And
+when the jaded individual, having mastered and exhausted this
+finite sum, looked in vain for any thing new or further, the world
+would be a hateful dungeon to him, and life an awful doom; and how
+gladly he would give all that lies beneath the sun's golden round
+and top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region and
+state of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and lie
+down forever in the attractive slumber of the grave! Without
+death, mankind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, no future, and
+in the present the oppression of an intolerable task with an
+aching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of death
+create the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human race
+an earthly immortality, and you exclude them from every thing
+greater and diviner than the earth affords. Who could consent to
+that? Take away death, and a brazen wall girds in our narrow life,
+against which, if we remained men, we should dash and chafe in the
+climax of our miserable longing, as the caged lion or eagle beats
+against his bars.
+
+The gift of an earthly immortality conferred on a single person a
+boon which thoughtless myriads would clasp with frantic triumph
+would prove, perhaps, a still more fearful curse than if
+distributed over the whole species.
+
+Retaining his human affections, how excruciating and remediless
+his grief must be, to be so cut off from all equal community of
+experience and destiny with mankind, to see all whom he loves,
+generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, to
+form new ties again to be dissolved, to watch his beloved ones
+growing old and infirm, while he stands without a change! His love
+would be left, in agony of melancholy grandeur, "a solitary angel
+hovering over a universe of tombs" on the tremulous wings of
+memory and grief, those wings incapacitated, by his madly coveted
+prerogative of deathlessness, ever to move from above the sad rows
+of funereal urns. Zanoni, in Bulwer's magnificent conception, says
+to Viola, "The flower gives perfume to the rock on whose breast it
+grows. A little while, and the flower is dead; but the rock still
+endures, the snow at its breast, the sunshine on its summit." A
+deathless individual in a world of the dying, joined with them by
+ever bereaved affections, would be the wretchedest creature
+conceivable. As no man ever yet prayed for any thing he would pray
+to be released, to embrace dear objects in his arms and float away
+with them to heaven, or even to lie down with them in the kind
+embrace of mother earth. And if he had no affections, but lived a
+stoic existence, exempt from every sympathy, in impassive
+solitude, he could not be happy, he would not be man: he must be
+an intellectual marble of thought or a monumental mystery of woe.
+
+Death, therefore, is benignity. When men wish there were no such
+appointed event, they are deceived, and know not what they wish.
+Literature furnishes a strange and profound, though wholly
+unintentional, confirmation of this view. Every form in which
+literary genius has set forth the conception of an earthly
+immortality represents it as an evil. This is true even down to
+Swift's painful account of the Struldbrugs in the island of
+Laputa. The legend of the Wandering Jew,16 one of the most
+marvellous products of the human mind in imaginative literature,
+is terrific with its blazoned revelation of the contents of an
+endless life on earth. This story has been embodied, with great
+variety of form and motive, in more than a hundred works. Every
+one is, without the writer's intention, a disguised sermon of
+gigantic force on the benignity of death. As in classic fable poor
+Tithon became immortal in the dawning arms of Eos only to lead a
+shrivelled, joyless, repulsive existence; and the fair young witch
+of Cuma had ample cause to regret that ever Apollo granted her
+request for as many years as she held grains of dust in her hand;
+and as all tales of successful alchemists or Rosicrucians concur
+in depicting the result to be utter disappointment and revulsion
+from the accursed prize; we may take it as evidence of a
+spontaneous conviction in the depths of human nature a conviction
+sure to be brought out whenever the attempt is made to describe in
+life an opposite thought that death is benign for man as he is
+constituted and related on earth. The voice of human nature speaks
+truth through the lips of Cicero, saying, at the close of his
+essay on Old Age, "Quodsi non sumus immortales futuri, tamen
+exstingui homini suo tempore optabile est."
+
+In a conversation at the house of Sappho, a discussion once arose
+upon the question whether death was a blessing or an evil. Some
+maintained, the former alternative; but Sappho victoriously closed
+the debate by saying, If it were a blessing to die, the immortal
+gods would experience it. The gods live forever: therefore, death
+is an evil.17 The reasoning was plausible and brilliant. Yet its
+sophistry is complete. To men, conditioned as they are in this
+world, death may be the greatest blessing; while to the gods,
+conditioned so differently, it may have no similar application.
+
+16 Bibliographical notice of the legend of the wandering Jew, by
+Paul Lacroix; trans. into English by G.W. Thornbury. Grasse, Der
+ewige Jude.
+
+17 Fragment X. Quoted in Mare's Hist. Lit. Greece, book iii. chap.
+v. sect. 18.
+
+
+Because an earthly eternity in the flesh would be a frightful
+calamity, is no reason why a heavenly eternity in the spirit
+would be other than a blissful inheritance.
+
+Thus the remonstrance which may be fallaciously based on some of
+the foregoing considerations namely, that they would equally make
+it appear that the immortality of man in any condition would be
+undesirable is met. A conclusion drawn from the facts of the
+present scene of things, of course, will not apply to a scene
+inconceivably different. Those whose only bodies are their minds
+may be fetterless, happy, leading a wondrous life, beyond our
+deepest dream and farthest fancy, and eternally free from trouble
+or satiety.
+
+Death is to us, while we live, what we think it to be. If we
+confront it with analytic and defiant eye, it is that nothing
+which ever ceases in beginning to be. If, letting the
+superstitious senses tyrannize over us and cow our better part of
+man, we crouch before the imagination of it, it assumes the shape
+of the skeleton monarch who takes the world for his empire, the
+electric fluid for his chariot, and time for his sceptre. In the
+contemplation of death, hitherto, fancy inspired by fear has been
+by far too much the prominent faculty and impulse. The literature
+of the subject is usually ghastly, appalling, and absurd, with
+point of view varying from that of the credulous Hindu,
+personifying death as a monster with a million mouths devouring
+all creatures and licking them in his flaming lips as a fire
+devours the moths or as the sea swallows the torrents,18 to that
+of the atheistic German dreamer, who converts nature into an
+immeasurable corpse worked by galvanic forces, and that of the
+bold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to
+the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and
+constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead
+orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the
+extravagant author of Festus says,
+
+"God tore the glory from the sun's broad brow And flung the
+flaming scalp away."
+
+The subject should be viewed by the unclouded intellect, guided by
+serene faith, in the light of scientific knowledge. Then death is
+revealed, first, as an organic necessity in the primordial life
+cell; secondly, as the cessation of a given form of life in its
+completion; thirdly, as a benignant law, an expression of the
+Creator's love; fourthly, as the inaugurating condition of another
+form of life. What we are to refer to sin is all the seeming
+lawlessness and untimeliness of death. Had not men sinned, all
+would reach a good age and pass away without suffering. Death is
+benignant necessity; the irregularity and pain associated with it
+are an inherited punishment. Finally, it is a condition of
+improvement in life. Death is the incessant touch with which the
+artist, Nature, is bringing her works to perfection.
+
+Physical death is experienced by man in common with the brute.
+Upon grounds of physiology there is no greater evidence for man's
+Spiritual survival through that overshadowed crisis than there is
+for the brute's. And on grounds of sentiment man ought not to
+shrink from sharing his open future with these mute comrades. Des
+Cartes and Malebranche taught that animals are mere machines,
+without souls, worked by God's arbitrary power. Swedenborg held
+that "the souls of brutes are extinguished with their bodies." 19
+
+
+18 Thomson's trans. of Bhagavad Gita, p. 77.
+
+19 Outlines of the Infinite, chap. ii. sect. iv. 13.
+
+
+Leibnitz, by his doctrine of eternal monads, sustains the
+immortality of all creatures.
+
+Coleridge defended the same idea. Agassiz, with much power and
+beauty, advocates the thought that animals as well as men have a
+future life. 20 The old traditions affirm that at least four
+beasts have been translated to heaven; namely, the ass that spoke
+to Balaam, the white foal that Christ rode into Jerusalem, the
+steed Borak that bore Mohammed on his famous night journey, and
+the dog that wakened the Seven Sleepers. To recognise, as Goethe
+did, brothers in the green wood and in the teeming air, to
+sympathize with all lower forms of life, and hope for them an open
+range of limitless possibilities in the hospitable home of God, is
+surely more becoming to a philosopher, a poet, or a Christian,
+than that careless scorn which commonly excludes them from regard
+and contemptuously leaves them to annihilation. This subject has
+been genially treated by Richard Dean in his "Essay on the Future
+Life of Brutes."
+
+But on moral and psychological grounds the distinction is vast
+between the dying man and the dying brute. Bretschneider, in a
+beautiful sermon on this point, specifies four particulars. Man
+foresees and provides for his death: the brute does not. Man dies
+with unrecompensed merit and guilt: the brute does not. Man dies
+with faculties and powers fitted for a more perfect state of
+existence: the brute does not. Man dies with the expectation of
+another life: the brute does not. Three contrasts may be added to
+these. First, man desires to die amidst his fellows: the brute
+creeps away by himself, to die in solitude. Secondly, man inters
+his dead with burial rites, rears a memorial over them, cherishes
+recollections of them which often change his subsequent character:
+but who ever heard of a deer watching over an expiring comrade, a
+deer funeral winding along the green glades of the forest? The
+barrows of Norway, the mounds of Yucatan, the mummy pits of
+Memphis, the rural cemeteries of our own day, speak the human
+thoughts of sympathetic reverence and posthumous survival, typical
+of something superior to dust. Thirdly, man often makes death an
+active instead of a passive experience, his will as it is his
+fate, a victory instead of a defeat.21 As Mirabeau sank towards
+his end, he ordered them to pour perfumes and roses on him, and to
+bring music; and so, with the air of a haughty conqueror, amidst
+the volcanic smoke and thunder of reeling France, his giant spirit
+went forth. The patriot is proud to lay his body a sacrifice on
+the altar of his country's weal. The philanthropist rejoices to
+spend himself without pay in a noble cause, to offer up his life
+in the service of his fellow men. Thousands of generous students
+have given their lives to science and clasped death amidst their
+trophied achievements. Who can count the confessors who have
+thought it bliss and glory to be martyrs for truth and God?
+Creatures capable of such deeds must inherit eternity. Their
+transcendent souls step from their rejected mansions through the
+blue gateway of the air to the lucid palace of the stars. Any
+meaner allotment would be discordant and unbecoming their rank.
+
+Contemplations like these exorcise the spectre host of the brain
+and quell the horrid brood of fear. The noble purpose of self
+sacrifice enables us to smile upon the grave, "as some sweet
+clarion's breath stirs the soldier's scorn of danger."
+
+20 Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, vol.
+i. pp. 64-66. Umbreit, fiber das Sterben ais einen Akt menschlich
+personlicher Selbststandigkeit. Studien und Kritiken, 1837.
+
+
+Death parts with its false frightfulness, puts on its true beauty,
+and becomes at once the evening star of memory and the morning
+star of hope, the Hesper of the sinking flesh, the Phosphor of
+the rising soul. Let the night come, then: it shall be welcome.
+And, as we gird our loins to enter the ancient mystery, we will
+exclaim, with vanishing voice, to those we leave behind,
+
+"Though I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for
+a time I press God's lamp Close to my breast: its splendor, soon
+or late, Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge somewhere."
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+IT is the purpose of the following chapter to describe the
+originating supports of the common belief in a future life; not to
+probe the depth and test the value of the various grounds out of
+which the doctrine grows, but only to give a descriptive sketch of
+what they are, and a view of the process of growth. The objections
+urged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the question
+of immortality, not to an illustrative statement of the suggesting
+grounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficient
+investigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almost
+universal expectation of another life springs, and by what
+influences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer in
+less than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection.
+The doctrine of a future life for man has been created by the
+combined force of instinctive desire, analogical observation,
+prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These are
+the four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes;
+or the four glasses through which it looks to see its eternal
+heritage.
+
+First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once with
+foreknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is not
+a love of being here; for he often loathes the scene around him.
+It is a love of self possessed existence; a love of his own soul
+in its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is an
+inseparable element of his very entity. Crowned with free will,
+walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual
+faculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy,
+he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the
+general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated
+with a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of
+danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian
+instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroy
+the body, necessitates the conception of an escape into another
+state of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedily
+construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire first
+fathers thought, and then thought woos belief.
+
+Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond all
+things, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment of
+destined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature,
+with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena further
+developed, significant sequels in other creatures' fates, whose
+evolution and fulfilment may haply throw light on his own. With
+eager vision and heart prompted imagination he scrutinizes
+whatever appears related to his object. Seeing the snake cast its
+old slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death man
+but sheds his fleshly exuvia, while the spirit emerges,
+regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchre
+and commence its summer work; and straightway he hangs a golden
+scarsbaus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. After
+vegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring that
+brings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreams
+of some far off spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frosts
+of man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sown
+through ages in the great earth tomb shall shoot up in celestial
+shapes. On the moaning sea shore, weeping some dear friend, he
+perceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he lately
+saw declining in the dusk; and he is cheered by the thought that
+
+"As sinks the day star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his
+drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled
+ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunk
+low, shall mount on high."
+
+Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which,
+grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously
+burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a
+thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a
+miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from
+the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove
+its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until
+at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a
+winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a
+new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the
+fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of
+this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through
+heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the
+tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing
+observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an
+existence beyond death.
+
+Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and
+upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's
+survival and transference to another world, where its experience
+depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions
+somewhat within the control of a select class of men here, such a
+doctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, a
+vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of
+priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states
+subsidized. In most cases of this kind the asserted doctrine is
+placed on the basis of a divine revelation, and must be implicitly
+received. God proclaims it through his anointed ministers:
+therefore, to doubt it or logically criticize it is a crime.
+History bears witness to such a procedure wherever an organized
+priesthood has flourished, from primeval pagan India to modern
+papal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egypt
+and the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gaul
+and the Druidic conclave in the oak groves of Mona; from the
+reeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the masses
+for souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches of
+Christendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which has
+prevailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of its
+promulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people in
+the authoritative dicta of their religious teachers.
+
+In all the leading nations of the earth, the doctrine of a future
+life is a tradition handed down from immemorial antiquity,
+embalmed in sacred books which are regarded as infallible
+revelations from God. Of course the thoughtless never think of
+questioning it; the reverent piously embrace it; all are educated
+to receive it. In addition to the proclamation of a future life by
+the sacred books and by the priestly hierarchies, it has also been
+affirmed by countless individual saints, philosophers, and
+prophets. Most persons readily accept it on trust from them as a
+demonstrated theory or an inspired knowledge of theirs. It is
+natural for modest unspeculative minds, busied with worldly cares,
+to say, These learned sages, these theosophic seers, so much more
+gifted, educated, and intimate with the divine counsels and plan
+than we are, with so much deeper experience and purer insight than
+we have, must know the truth: we cannot in any other way do so well
+as to follow their guidance and confide in their assertions.
+Accordingly, multitudes receive the belief in a life to come on
+the authority of the world's intellectual and religious leaders.
+
+Fourthly, the belief in a future life results from philosophical
+meditation, and is sustained by rational proofs.1 For the
+completion of the present outline, it now remains to give a brief
+exposition of these arguments. For the sake of convenience and
+clearness, we must arrange these reasonings in five classes;
+namely, the physiological, the analogical, the psychological, the
+theological, and the moral.
+
+There is a group of considerations drawn from the phenomena of our
+bodily organization, life and death, which compose the
+physiological argument for the separate existence of the soul. In
+the first place, it is contended that the human organization, so
+wondrously vitalized, developed, and ruled, could not have grown
+up out of mere matter, but implies a pre existent mental entity, a
+spiritual force or idea, which constituted the primeval impulse,
+grouped around itself the organic conditions of our existence, and
+constrained the material elements to the subsequent processes and
+results, according to a prearranged plan.2 This dynamic agent,
+this ontological cause, may naturally survive when the fleshly
+organization which it has built around itself dissolves. Its
+independence before the body began involves its independence after
+the body is ended. Stahl has especially illustrated in physiology
+this idea of an independent soul monad.
+
+Secondly, as some potential being must have preceded our birth, to
+assimilate and construct the physical system, so the great
+phenomena attending our conscious life necessitate, both to our
+instinctive apprehension and in our philosophical conviction, the
+distinctive division of man into body and soul, tabernacle and
+tenant. The illustrious Boerhaave wrote a valuable dissertation on
+the distinction of the mind from the body, which is to be found
+among his works. Every man knows that he dwells in the flesh but
+is not flesh. He is a free, personal mind, occupying and using a
+material body, but not identified with it. Ideas and passions of
+purely immaterial origin pervade every nerve with terrific
+intensity, and shake his encasing corporeity like an earthquake. A
+thought, a sentiment, a fancy, may prostrate him as effectually as
+a blow on his brain from a hammer. He wills to move a palsied
+limb: the soul is unaffected by the paralysis, but the muscles
+refuse to obey his volition: the distinction between the person
+willing and the instrument to be wielded is unavoidable.
+
+Thirdly, the fact of death itself irresistibly suggests the
+duality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizing
+mind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of the
+undreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in its
+chemical embrace. A moment ago that hand was uplifted to clasp
+yours, intelligent accents were vocal on those
+
+1 Wohlfarth, Triumph des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit und
+Wiedersehen uber jeden Zweifel. Oporinus, Historia Critica
+Doctrina de Immortalitate Mortalium.
+
+2 Muller, Elements of Physiology, book vi. sect. i. ch. 1.
+
+
+lips, the light of love beamed in that eye. One shuddering sigh,
+and how cold, vacant, forceless, dead, lies the heap of clay! It
+is impossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible power
+has been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has
+produced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something
+which has gone still exist? Its vanishing from our sensible
+cognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuine
+evidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of any
+creature are destroyed.3 In the absence of that proof, a multitude
+of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is
+room enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundly
+observes, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form of
+life." Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, not
+appearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposed
+to live hereafter in some other form.4
+
+A second series of observations and reflections, gathered from
+partial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make
+the analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in
+the literature of many nations, a standard illustration of the
+thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiture
+has been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the
+butterfly.5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body is
+but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and
+stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit
+emerges from its cast off cocoon and broken cell into the more
+ethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day.
+The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference is
+obvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowments
+and privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it is
+from the slow and loathsome worm on the leaf to the swift and
+glittering insect in the air.
+
+Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothing
+is ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing as
+annihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; but
+essences do not cease to be. Take a given quantity of any kind of
+matter; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, by
+mechanical violence, by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as the
+same quantity of matter, with unchanged qualities as to its
+essence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all her
+laboratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception to
+this, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience,
+thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection,
+identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. And
+what method is there of crushing or evaporating these out of
+being? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death is
+not a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely an
+effect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That this
+change puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy,
+and wholly unsupported.
+
+Thirdly, following the analogy of science and the visible order of
+being, we are led to the conception of an ascending series of
+existences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, from
+brutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, and
+thus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature,
+to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship and
+common vocation with supernal beings, man is assured of a loftier
+condition of
+
+3 Sir Humphry Davy, Proteus or Immortality.
+
+4 Bakewell, Natural Evidence of a Future State.
+
+5 Butler, Analogy, part i. ch. 1.
+
+
+of existence reserved for him. There are no such immense, vacantly
+yawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate and
+the Godhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scaling
+advance is by staid and normal steps.
+
+"There's lifeless matter.
+Add the power of shaping,
+And you've the crystal: add again the organs
+Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form
+And manner of one's self, and you've the plant:
+Add power of motion, senses, and so forth,
+And you've all kinds of beasts: suppose a pig.
+To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff,
+Then you have man.
+What shall, we add to man
+To bring him higher?"
+
+Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into the
+full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers!
+
+Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this
+world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death
+is but another and higher birth.6 Any one acquainted with the
+state of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its very
+existence, from its vascular connection with its mother could
+hardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduce
+it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it
+would perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it may
+be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our
+latent or dimly groping senses were useless while we were
+developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have,
+in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination,
+and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity; and mysterious
+intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere,
+
+"Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the
+womb."
+
+The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme,
+
+"What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins of
+destiny. This world is the womb: the body, its enveloping
+membrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of
+childbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel of
+eternity."
+
+Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the
+soul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stager
+on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence,
+here or elsewhere.7 They sustain this conclusion by various
+considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the
+necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences,
+"shadowy recollections," of visions and events vanished long ago.
+Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft
+repeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has been
+by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the
+
+6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und
+Anferstehung.
+
+7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the
+Pre existence of Souls.
+
+
+connected analogies of the case carry us to the belief that
+immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition,
+as we have lived through the past ones.
+
+Sixthly, rejecting the hypothesis of an anterior life, and
+entertaining the supposition that there is no creating and
+overruling God, but that all things have arisen by spontaneous
+development or by chance, still, we are not consistently obliged
+to expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoning
+from the analogy of the past, across the facts of the present, to
+the impending contingencies of the future, we may say that the
+next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the
+destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life,
+elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that if
+mindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought us
+here, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bear
+us there. Law or chance excluding God from the question may as
+easily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by analogy, we may
+affirm that, as life has been given us, so it will be given us
+again and forever.
+
+Seventhly, faith in immortality is fed by another analogy, not
+based on reflection, but instinctively felt. Every change of
+material in our organism, every change of consciousness, is a kind
+of death. We partially die as often as we leave behind forgotten
+experiences and lost states of being. We die successively to
+infancy, childhood, youth, manhood. The past is the dead: but our
+course is still on, forever on. Having survived so many deaths, we
+expect to survive all others and to be ourselves eternally.
+
+There is a third cluster of reasonings, deduced from the
+distinctive nature of spirit, constituting the psychological
+argument for the existence of the soul independent of the body. In
+the outset, obviously, if the soul be an immaterial entity, its
+natural immortality follows; because death and decay can only be
+supposed to take effect in dissoluble combinations. Several
+ingenious reasons have been advanced in proof of the soul's
+immateriality, reasons cogent enough to have convinced a large
+class of philosophers.8 It is sufficient here to notice the
+following one. All motion implies a dynamic mover. Matter is
+dormant. Power is a reality entirely distinct from matter in its
+nature. But man is essentially an active power, a free will.
+Consequently there is in him an immaterial principle, since all
+power is immaterial. That principle is immortal, because
+subsisting in a sphere of being whose categories exclude the
+possibility of dissolution.9
+
+Secondly, should we admit the human soul to be material, yet if it
+be an ultimate monad, an indivisible atom of mind, it is immortal
+still, defying all the forces of destruction. And that it actually
+is an uncompounded unit may be thus proved. Consciousness is
+simple, not collective. Hence the power of consciousness, the
+central soul, is an absolute integer. For a living perceptive
+whole cannot be made of dead imperceptive parts. If the soul were
+composite, each component part would be an individual, a
+distinguishable consciousness. Such not being the fact, the
+conclusion results that the soul is one, a simple substance.10
+
+8 Astrue, Dissertation sur l'Immaterialite et l'Immortalite de
+l'Ame. Broughton, Defence of the Doctrine of the Human Soul as an
+Immaterial and Naturally Immortal Principle. Marstaller, Von der
+Unsterblichkeit der Menschlichen Seele.
+
+9 Andrew Baxter, Inquiry into the Nature of the Soul.
+
+10 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, sect. 150.
+
+
+Of course it is not liable to death, but is naturally eternal.
+
+Thirdly, the indestructibleness of the soul is a direct inference
+from its ontological characteristics. Reason, contemplating the
+elements of the soul, cannot but embrace the conviction of its
+perpetuity and its essential independence of the fleshly
+organization. Our life in its innermost substantive essence is
+best defined as a conscious force. Our present existence is the
+organic correlation of that personal force with the physical
+materials of the body, and with other forces. The cessation of
+that correlation at death by no means involves, so far as we can
+see, the destruction or the disindividualization of the primal
+personal force. It is a fact of striking significance, often
+noticed by psychologists, that we are unable to conceive ourselves
+as dead. The negation of itself is impossible to consciousness.
+The reason we have such a dread of death is that we conceive
+ourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering through
+horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material
+growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation,
+reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away?
+Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into
+inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of
+force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the
+simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain,
+belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates that
+rule there; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong to
+another, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn the
+fretful sieges of decay.
+
+Fourthly, the surviving superiority of the soul, inferred from its
+contrast of qualities to those of its earthy environment, is
+further shown by another fact, the mind's dream power, and the
+ideal realm it freely soars or walks at large in when it
+pleases.11 This view has often been enlarged upon, especially by
+Bonnet and Sir Henry Wotton. The unhappy Achilles, exhausted with
+weeping for his friend, lay, heavily moaning, on the shore of the
+far sounding sea, in a clear spot where the waves washed in upon
+the beach, when sleep took possession of him. The ghost of
+miserable Patroclus calve to him and said, "Sleepest thou and art
+forgetful of me, O Achilles?" And the son of Peleus cried, "Come
+nearer: let us embrace each other, though but for a little while."
+Then he stretched out his friendly hands, but caught him not; for
+the spirit, shrieking, vanished beneath the earth like smoke.
+
+Astounded, Achilles started up, clasped his hands, and said,
+dolefully, "Alas! there is then indeed in the subterranean abodes
+a spirit and image, but there is no body in it."12 The realm of
+dreams is a world of mystic realities, intangible, yet existent,
+and all prophetic, through which the soul nightly floats while the
+gross body slumbers. It is everlasting, because there is nothing
+in it for corruption to take hold of. The appearances and sounds
+of that soft inner sphere, veiled so remote from sense, are
+reflections and echoes from the spirit world. Or are they a direct
+vision and audience of it? The soul really is native resident in a
+world of truth, goodness, and beauty, fellow citizen with divine
+ideas and affections. Through the senses it has knowledge and
+communion with the hard outer world of matter. When the senses
+fall away, it is left, imperishable denizen of its own appropriate
+world of idealities.
+
+11 Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes.
+
+12 Iliad, lib. xxiii. ll. 60 106.
+
+
+Another assemblage of views, based on the character of God, form
+the theological argument for the future existence of man.13
+Starting with the idea of a God of infinite perfections, the
+immortality of his children is an immediate deduction from the
+eternity of his purposes. For whatever purpose God originally gave
+man being, for the disinterested distribution of happiness, for
+the increase of his own glory, or whatever else, will he not for
+that same purpose continue him in being forever? In the absence of
+any reason to the contrary, we must so conclude. In view of the
+unlimited perfections of God, the fact of conscious responsible
+creatures being created is sufficient warrant of their perpetuity.
+Otherwise God would be fickle. Or, as one has said, he would be a
+mere drapery painter, nothing within the dress.
+
+Secondly, leaving out of sight this illustration of an eternal
+purpose in eternal fulfilment, and confining our attention to the
+analogy of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker,
+we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has God moulded
+the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and
+ordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has he
+created, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalities
+reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in
+endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sunshine of a
+momentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works in
+vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting
+nonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness is
+concerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain,
+because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it had
+never been. God does nothing in sport or unmeaningly: least of all
+would he create filial spirits, dignified with the solemn
+endowments of humanity, without a high and serious end.14 To make
+men, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, wholly
+mortal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, were
+work far more unworthy of God than the task was to Michael Angelo
+set him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo the
+Magnificent in the dukedom of Florence, that he should scoop up
+the snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statue
+from it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun.
+
+Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportion
+powers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exact
+fitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath,
+then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowments
+and our opportunity; our attainments are most superfluously
+superior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of six feet
+is to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whose
+telescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity,
+systematized more worlds than there are grains of dust in this
+globe? the heart of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded to
+the limits of sympathetic being? the soul of a Wycliffe, whose
+undaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the fires
+of martyrdom and never blenched? the genius of a Shakspeare, whose
+imagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vast
+incongruity between our faculties and the scope given them here.
+On all it sees below the soul reads "Inadequate," and rises
+
+13 Aebli, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, sechster Brief.
+
+14 Ulrici, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele aus dem Wesen
+Gottes erwiesen.
+
+
+dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger and
+thirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortal
+world. Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, God
+would have harmonized our powers with our lot. He would never have
+set such magnificent conceptions over against such poor
+possibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for so
+trivial a prize of dust to dust.
+
+Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a future
+life is that yielded by the benevolence of God. Annihilation is
+totally irreconcilable with this. That He whose love for his
+creatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after their
+little span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets of
+existence and begun to know the noble delights of spiritual
+progress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessedness
+are beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe that
+while his children turn to him with yearning faith and gratitude,
+with fervent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them into
+unmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happiness
+which he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase.
+Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the field
+of being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by the
+hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were
+Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death
+these multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash
+into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a
+thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody of
+praise and bliss.
+
+Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof,
+hard to be resisted, of a future state wherein there are
+compensations for the unmerited ills, a complement for the
+fragmentary experiences, and rectification for the wrongs, of the
+present life.15 God is just; but he works without impulse or
+caprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires time to show
+their perfect results. Through the brief space of this existence,
+where the encountering of millions of free intelligences within
+the fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good and
+evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany
+often outreaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helpless
+innocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury,
+drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold
+minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of
+iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of
+society, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous suffer
+undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious.
+All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensating
+tendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of the
+mysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturates
+the moral atmosphere with influence, the world is full of wrongs,
+sufferings, and unfinished justice.16 There must be another world,
+where the remunerating processes interiorly begun here shall be
+openly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul and
+Nero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of death
+into precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if there
+be a God!
+
+15 M. Jules Simon, La Religion Naturelle, liv. iii.:
+l'Immortalite.
+
+16 Dr. Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, chap. 10.
+
+
+There is a final assemblage of thoughts pertaining to the
+likelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may be
+styled the moral argument in behalf of that belief.17 These
+considerations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things,
+claims of parts beseeching completion, vaticinations of
+experience. They form a cumulative array of probabilities whose
+guiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voices
+swell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider the
+shrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If man
+be not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of non
+existence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are co
+ordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its own
+fulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, still
+longing for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confiding
+in it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget me
+nots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom? Secondly,
+an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from the
+premature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in the
+human family. Nearly one half of our race perish before reaching
+the age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilled
+the total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, and
+not the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary will appear full
+circle beyond the grave.
+
+The argument is hardly met by asserting that this untimely
+mortality is the punishment for non observance of law; for,
+denying any further life, would a scheme of existence have been
+admitted establishing so awful a proportion of violations and
+penalties? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all should
+pass through the experience of a ripe and rounded life. But there
+is the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant,
+sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are snatched into the invisible
+state. There is, as a noble thinker has said, an apparent "caprice
+in the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hidden
+sequel." Immortality unravels the otherwise inscrutable mystery.
+
+Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestation
+to the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of God in the
+breast, arrayed in splendors and terrors, which shakes and
+illumines the whole circumference of our being with its thunders
+and lightnings, gives the good man, amidst oppressions and woes, a
+serene confidence in a future justifying reward, and transfixes
+the bad man, through all his retinue of guards and panoplied
+defences, with icy pangs of fear and with a horrid looking for
+judgment to come. The sublime grandeur of moral freedom, the
+imperilling dignities of probation, the tremendous
+responsibilities and hazards of man's felt power and position, are
+all inconsistent with the supposition that he is merely to cross
+this petty stage of earth and then wholly expire. Such momentous
+endowments and exposures imply a corresponding arena and career.
+After the trial comes the sentence; and that would be as if a
+palace were built, a prince born, trained, crowned, solely that he
+might occupy the throne five minutes! The consecrating, royalizing
+idea of duty cannot be less than the core of eternal life.
+Conscience is the sensitive corridor along which the mutual
+whispers of a divine communion pass and repass. A moral law and a
+free will
+
+17 Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV.: The Arguments for
+Immortality. Bretschneider, Die Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect.
+20-21.
+
+
+are the root by which we grow out of God, and the stem by which we
+are grafted into him.
+
+Fourthly, all probable surmisings in favor of a future life, or
+any other moral doctrine, are based on that primal postulate
+which, by virtue of our rational and ethical constitution, we are
+authorized and bound to accept as a commencing axiom, namely, that
+the scheme of creation is as a whole the best possible one,
+impelled and controlled by wisdom and benignity. Whatever, then,
+is an inherent part of the plan of nature cannot be erroneous nor
+malignant, a mistake nor a curse. Essentially and in the finality,
+every fundamental portion and element of it must be good and
+perfect. So far as science and philosophy have penetrated, they
+confirm by facts this a priori principle, telling us that there is
+no pure and uncompensated evil in the universe. Now, death is a
+regular ingredient in the mingled world, an ordered step in the
+plan of life. If death be absolute, is it not an evil? What can
+the everlasting deprivation of all good be called but an immense
+evil to its subject? Such a doom would be without possible solace,
+standing alone in steep contradiction to the whole parallel moral
+universe. Then might man utter the most moving and melancholy
+paradox ever expressed in human speech:
+
+"What good came to my mind I did deplore, Because it perish must,
+and not live evermore."
+
+Fifthly, the soul, if not outwardly arrested by some hostile
+agent, seems capable of endless progress without ever exhausting
+either its own capacity or the perfections of infinitude.18 There
+are before it unlimited truth, beauty, power, nobleness, to be
+contemplated, mastered, acquired. With indefatigable alacrity,
+insatiable faculty and desire, it responds to the infinite call.
+The obvious inference is that its destiny is unending advancement.
+Annihilation would be a sequel absurdly incongruous with the
+facts. True, the body decays, and all manifested energy fails; but
+that is the fault of the mechanism, not of the spirit. Were we to
+live many thousands of years, as Martineau suggests, no one
+supposes new souls, but only new organizations, would be needed.
+And what period can we imagine to terminate the unimpeded spirit's
+abilities to learn, to enjoy, to expand? Kant's famous
+demonstration of man's eternal life on the grounds of practical
+reason is similar. The related ideas of absolute virtue and a
+moral being necessarily imply the infinite progress of the latter
+towards the former. That progress is impossible except on
+condition of the continued existence of the same being. Therefore
+the soul is immortal.19
+
+Sixthly, our whole life here is a steady series of growing
+preparations for a continued and ascending life hereafter. All the
+spiritual powers we develop are so much athletic training, all the
+ideal treasures we accumulate are so many preliminary attainments,
+for a future life. They have this appearance and superscription.
+Man alone foreknows his own death and expects a succeeding
+existence; and that foresight is given to prepare him. There are
+wondrous impulses in us, constitutional convictions prescient of
+futurity, like those prevising instincts in birds leading them to
+take preparatory flights before their actual migration.
+
+18 Addison, Spectator, Nos. 3 and 210.
+
+19 Jacob, Beweis fur die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus dem
+Begriffe der Pflicht.
+
+
+Eternity is the stuff of which our love, flying forward, builds
+its nest in the eaves of the universe. If we saw wings growing
+out upon a young creature, we should be forced to conclude that
+he was intended some time to fly. It is so with man. By exploring
+thoughts, disciplinary sacrifices, supernal prayers, holy toils
+of disinterestedness, he fledges his soul's pinions, lays up
+treasures in heaven, and at last migrates to the attracting clime.
+
+"Here sits he, shaping wings to fly: His heart forebodes a
+mystery; He names the name eternity."
+
+Seventhly, in the degree these preparations are made in obedience
+to obscure instincts and the developing laws of experience, they
+are accompanied by significant premonitions, lucid signals of the
+future state looked to, assuring witnesses of its reality. The
+more one lives for immortality, the more immortal things he
+assimilates into his spiritual substance, the more confirming
+tokens of a deathless inheritance his faith finds. He becomes
+conscious of his own eternity.20 When hallowed imagination weighs
+anchor and spreads sail to coast the dim shores of the other
+world, it hears cheerful voices of welcome from the headlands and
+discerns beacons burning in the port. When in earnest communion
+with our inmost selves, solemn meditations of God, mysterious
+influences shed from unseen spheres, fall on our souls, and many a
+"strange thought, transcending our wonted themes, into glory
+peeps." A vague, constraining sense of invisible beings, by whom
+we are engirt, fills us. We blindly feel that our rank and
+destination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, and
+the occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudy
+crowds of angels. Thousand "hints chance dropped from nature's
+sphere," pregnant with friendly tidings, reassure us. "Strange,"
+said a gifted metaphysician once, "that the barrel organ, man,
+should terminate every tune with the strain of immortality!" Not
+strange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to the
+thrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score of
+destiny. When at night we gaze far out into immensity, along the
+shining vistas of God's abode, and are almost crushed by the
+overwhelming prospects that sweep upon our vision, do not some
+pre monitions of our own unfathomed greatness also stir within us?
+Yes: "the sense of Existence, the ideas of Right and Duty, awful
+intuitions of God and immortality, these, the grand facts and
+substance of the spirit, are independent and indestructible. The
+bases of the Moral Law, they shall stand in every tittle, although
+the stars should pass away. For their relations and root are in
+that which upholds the stars, even with worlds unseen from the
+finite, whose majestic and everlasting arrangements shall burst
+upon us as the heavens do through the night when the light of this
+garish life gives place to the solemn splendors of eternity."
+
+Eighthly, the belief in a life beyond death has virtually
+prevailed everywhere and always. And the argument from universal
+consent, as it is termed, has ever been esteemed one of the
+foremost testimonies, if not indeed the most convincing testimony,
+to the truth of the doctrine. Unless the belief can be shown to be
+artificial or sinful, it must seem conclusive. Its innocence is
+self evident, and its naturalness is evidenced by its
+universality.
+
+20 Theodore Parker, Sermon of Immortal Life.
+
+
+The rudest and the most polished, the simplest and the most
+learned, unite in the expectation, and cling to it through
+every thing. It is like the ruling presentiment implanted in
+those insects that are to undergo metamorphosis. This believing
+instinct, so deeply seated in our consciousness, natural,
+innocent, universal, whence came it, and why was it given?
+There is but one fair answer. God and nature deceive not.
+
+Ninthly, the conscious, practical faith of civilized nations, to
+day, in a future life, unquestionably, in a majority of
+individuals, rests directly on the basis of authority, trust in a
+foreign announcement. There are two forms of this authority. The
+authority of revelation is most prominent and extensive. God has
+revealed the truth from heaven. It has been exemplified by a
+miraculous resurrection. It is written in an infallible book, and
+sealed with authenticating credentials of super natural purport.
+It is therefore to be accepted with implicit trust. Secondly, with
+some, the authority of great minds, renowned for scientific
+knowledge and speculative acumen, goes far. Thousands of such men,
+ranking among the highest names of history, have positively
+affirmed the immortality of the soul as a reliable truth. For
+instance, Goethe says, on occasion of the death of Wieland, "The
+destruction of such high powers is something which can never, and
+under no circumstances, even come into question." Such a dogmatic
+expression of conviction resting on bare philosophical grounds,
+from a mind so equipped, so acute, and so free, has great weight,
+and must influence a modest student who hesitates in confessed
+incompetence.21 The argument is justly powerful when but humanly
+considered, and when divinely derived, of course, it absolutely
+forecloses all doubts.
+
+Tenthly, there is another life, because a belief in it is
+necessary to order this world, necessary as a comfort and an
+inspiration to man now. A good old author writes, "the very nerves
+and sinews of religion is hope of immortality." The conviction
+that there is a retributive life hereafter is the moral cement of
+the social fabric. Take away this truth, and one great motive of
+patriots, martyrs, thinkers, saints, is gone. Take it away, and to
+all low minded men selfishness becomes the law, earthly enjoyment
+the only good, suffering and death the only evil. Life then is to
+be supremely coveted and never put in risk for any stake. Self
+indulgence is to be secured at any hazard, little matter by what
+means. Abandon all hope of a life to come, and "from that instant
+there is nothing serious in mortality." In order that the world
+should be governable, ethical, happy, virtuous, magnanimous, is it
+possible that it should be necessary for the world to believe in
+an untruth?
+
+"So, thou hast immortality in mind?
+Hast grounds that will not let thee doubt it?
+The strongest ground herein I find:
+That we could never do without it!"
+
+Finally, the climax of these argumentations is capped by that
+grand closing consideration which we may entitle the force of
+congruity, the convincing results of a confluence of harmonious
+reasons. The hypothesis of immortality accords with the cardinal
+facts of observation, meets all points of the case, and
+satisfactorily answers every requirement.
+
+21 Lewis, Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.
+
+
+It is the solution of the problem, as the fact of Neptune explained
+the perturbations of the adjacent planets. Nothing ever gravitates
+towards nothing; and it must be an unseen orb that so draws our
+yearning souls. If it be not so, then what terrible contradictions
+stagger us, and what a chilling doom awaits us! Oh, what mocking
+irony then runs through the loftiest promises and hopes of the
+world! Just as the wise and good have learned to live, they
+disappear amidst the unfeeling waves of oblivion, like snow flakes
+in the ocean. "The super earthly desires of man are then created
+in him only, like swallowed diamonds, to cut slowly through his
+material shell" and destroy him.
+
+The denial of a future life introduces discord, grief, and despair
+in every direction, and, by making each step of advanced culture
+the ascent to a wider survey of tantalizing glory and experienced
+sorrow, as well as the preparation for a greater fall and a sadder
+loss, turns faithful affection and heroic thought into "blind
+furies slinging flame." Unless immortality be true, man appears a
+dark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable and
+desirous: every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of the
+present scene are unintelligible; the plainest analogies are
+violated; the delicately rising scale of existence is broken off
+abrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designs
+of God, also concerning the implications of our own being and
+experience, are futile; and the soul's proud faculties tell
+glorious lies as thick as stars. Such, at least, is the usual way
+of thinking.
+
+However formidable a front may be presented by the spectral array
+of doubts and difficulties, seeming impediments to faith in
+immortality, the faithful servant of God, equipped with
+philosophical culture and a saintly life, will fearlessly advance
+upon them, scatter them right and left, and win victorious access
+to the prize. So the mariner sometimes, off Sicilian shores, sees
+a wondrous island ahead, apparently stopping his way with its
+cypress and cedar groves, glittering towers, vine wreathed
+balconies, and marble stairs sloping to the water's edge. He sails
+straight forward, and, severing the pillared porticos and green
+gardens of Fata Morgana, glides far on over a glassy sea smiling
+in the undeceptive sun.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION.
+
+BEFORE examining, in their multifarious detail, the special
+thoughts and fancies respecting a future life prevalent in
+different nations and times, it may be well to take a sort of
+bird's eye view of those general theories of the destination of
+the soul under which all the individual varieties of opinion may
+be classified. Vast and incongruous as is the heterogeneous mass
+of notions brought forth by the history of this province of the
+world's belief, the whole may be systematized, discriminated, and
+reduced to a few comprehensive heads. Such an architectural
+grouping or outlining of the chief schemes of thought on this
+subject will yield several advantages.
+
+Showing how the different views arose from natural speculations on
+the correlated phenomena of the outward world and facts of human
+experience, it affords an indispensable help towards a
+philosophical analysis and explanation of the popular faith as to
+the destiny of man after death, in all the immense diversity of
+its contents. An orderly arrangement and exposition of these
+cardinal theories also form an epitome holding a bewildering
+multitude of particulars in its lucid and separating grasp,
+changing the fruits of learned investigation from a cumbersome
+burden on the memory to a small number of connected formularies in
+the reason. These theories serve as a row of mirrors hung in a
+line of historic perspective, reflecting every relevant shape and
+hue of meditation and faith humanity has known, from the ideal
+visions of the Athenian sage to the instinctive superstitions of
+the Fejee savage. When we have adequately defined these theories,
+of which there are seven, traced their origin, comprehended their
+significance and bearings, and dissected their supporting
+pretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in light
+before us; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle,
+may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the life
+beyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall know
+at once where to refer them and how to explain them. The precise
+object, therefore, of the present chapter is to set forth the
+comprehensive theories devised to solve the problem, What becomes
+of man when he dies?
+
+But a little while man flourishes here in the bosom of visible
+nature. Soon he disappears from our scrutiny, missed in all the
+places that knew him. Whither has he gone? What fate has befallen
+him? It is an awful question. In comparison with its concentrated
+interest, all other affairs are childish and momentary. Whenever
+that solemn question is asked, earth, time, and the heart, natural
+transformations, stars, fancy, and the brooding intellect, are
+full of vague oracles. Let us see what intelligible answers can be
+constructed from their responses.
+
+The first theory which we shall consider propounds itself in one
+terrible word, annihilation. Logically this is the earliest,
+historically the latest, view. The healthy consciousness, the
+eager fancy, the controlling sentiment, the crude thought, all the
+uncurbed instinctive conclusions of primitive human nature, point
+forcibly to a continued existence for the soul, in some way, when
+the body shall have perished. And so history shows us in all the
+savage nations a vivid belief in a future life. But to the
+philosophical observer, who has by dint of speculation freed
+himself from the constraining tendencies of desire, faith,
+imagination, and authority, the thought that man totally ceases
+with the destruction of his visible organism must occur as the
+first and simplest settlement of the question.1 The totality of
+manifested life has absolutely disappeared: why not conclude that
+the totality of real life has actually lost its existence and is
+no more? That is the natural inference, unless by some means the
+contrary can be proved. Accordingly, among all civilized people,
+every age has had its skeptics, metaphysical disputants who have
+mournfully or scoffingly denied the separate survival of the soul.
+This is a necessity in the inevitable sequences of observation and
+theory; because, when the skeptic, suppressing or escaping his
+biassed wishes, the trammels of traditional opinion, and the
+spontaneous convictions prophetic of his own uninterrupted being,
+first looks over the wide scene of human life and death, and
+reflectingly asks, What is the sequel of this strange, eventful
+history? obviously the conclusion suggested by the immediate
+phenomena is that of entire dissolution and blank oblivion. This
+result is avoided by calling in the aid of deeper philosophical
+considerations and of inspiring moral truths. But some will not
+call in that aid; and the whole superficial appearance of the
+case regarding that alone, as they then will is fatal to our
+imperial hopes. The primordial clay claims its own from the
+disanimated frame; and the vanished life, like the flame of an
+outburnt taper, has ceased to be. Men are like bubbles or foam
+flakes on the world's streaming surface: glittering in a momentary
+ray, they break and are gone, and only the dark flood remains
+still flowing forward. They are like tones of music, commencing
+and ending with the unpurposed breath that makes them. Nature is a
+vast congeries of mechanical substances pervaded by mindless
+forces of vitality. Consciousness is a production which results
+from the fermentation and elaboration of unconscious materials;
+and after a time it deceases, its conditions crumbling into their
+inorganic grounds again.
+
+From the abyss of silence and dust intelligent creatures break
+forth, shine, and sink back, like meteor flashes in a cloud. The
+generations of sentient being, like the annual growths of
+vegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring from
+dead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapse
+into dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, at once the
+wondrous womb and the magnificent mausoleum of man. Fate, like an
+iron skeleton seated at the summit of the world on a throne of
+fresh growing grass and mouldering skulls, presides over all, and
+annihilation is the universal doom of individual life. Such is the
+atheistic naturalist's creed. However indefensible or shocking it
+is, it repeatedly appears in the annals of speculation; and any
+synopsis of the possible conclusions in which the inquiry into
+man's destiny may rest that should omit this, would be grossly
+imperfect.
+
+This scheme of disbelief is met by insuperable objections. It
+excludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to a
+wholly empirical view; and consequently the relentless solution it
+announces applies only to a mutilated problem. To assert the
+cessation of the soul because its physical manifestations through
+the body have ceased, is certainly to affirm without just warrant.
+It would appear impossible for volition and intelligence to
+
+1 Lalande, Dictionnaire des Athees Anciens et Modernes.
+
+
+originate save from a free parent mind. Numerous cogent evidences
+of design seem to prove the existence of a God by whose will all
+things are ordered according to a plan. Many powerful impressions
+and arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teach
+that in the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, from
+the closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomes
+irresistible when we see how reason and conscience, with delighted
+avidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightest
+features and the darkest defects of the present life, whose
+imperfect symmetries and segments are harmoniously filled out by
+the adjusting complement of a future state.2
+
+The next representation of the fate of the soul disposes of it by
+re absorption into the essence from which it emanated. There is an
+eternal fountain of unmade life, from which all individual,
+transient lives flow, and into which they return. This conception
+arose in the outset from a superficial analogy which must have
+obtruded itself upon primitive notice and speculation; for man is
+led to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation
+of outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individual
+forms perish, each sensible component relapses into its original
+element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our
+exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it:
+the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and
+vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the
+souls of men, when they disappear from us, are remerged in the
+native spirit whence they came. The essential longing of every
+part for union with its whole is revealed and vocal throughout all
+nature. Water is sullen in stillness, murmurs in motion, and never
+ceases its gloom or its complaining until it sleeps in the sea.
+Like spray on the rock, the stranding generations strike the
+sepulchre and are dissipated into universal vapor. As lightnings
+slink back into the charged bosom of the thunder cloud, as eager
+waves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away in
+the great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, the
+struggling masses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade and
+dissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all engulfing SOUL.
+This simplest, earliest philosophy of mankind has had most
+extensive and permanent prevalence.3 For immemorial centuries it
+has possessed the mind of the countless millions of India. Baur
+thinks the Egyptian identification of each deceased person with
+Osiris and the burial of him under that name, were meant to denote
+the reception of the individual human life into the universal
+nature life. The doctrine has been implicitly held wherever
+pantheism has found a votary, from Anaximander, to whom finite
+creatures were "disintegrations or decompositions from the
+Infinite," to Alexander Pope, affirming that
+
+"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is,
+and God the soul."
+
+The first reasoners, who gave such an ineradicable direction and
+tinge to the thinking of after ages, were furthermore driven to
+the supposition of a final absorption, from the
+
+2 Drossbach, Die Harmonie der Ergebnisse der Naturforschung mit
+den Forderungen des Menschlichen Gemuthes.
+
+3 Blount, Anima Mundi; or, The Opinions of the Ancients concerning
+Man's Soul after this Life.
+
+
+impossibility, in that initiatory stage of thought, of grasping
+any other theory which would apparently meet the case so well or
+be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the
+idea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the
+constitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on
+his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetition
+or wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never
+ceasingmotion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said,
+forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They did
+not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making
+immortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it to
+themselves as a circle, making an everlasting individual
+consciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, an immense
+round of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth and
+returning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escape
+so repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencing
+integument of consciousness and empty all weary personalities into
+the absolute abyss of being.
+
+Again: the extreme difficulty of apprehending the truth of a
+Creator literally infinite, and of a limitless creation, would
+lead to the same result in another way. Without doubt, it seemed
+to the naive thinkers of antiquity, that if hosts of new beings
+were continually coming into life and increasing the number of the
+inhabitants of the future state, the fountain from which they
+proceeded would some time be exhausted, or the universe grow
+plethoric with population. There would be no more substance below
+or no more room above. The easiest method of surmounting this
+problem would be by the hypothesis that all spirits come out of a
+great World Spirit, and, having run their mortal careers, are
+absorbed into it again. Many especially the deepest Oriental
+dreamers have also been brought to solace themselves with this
+conclusion by a course of reasoning based on the exposures, and
+assumed inevitable sufferings, of all finite being. They argue
+that every existence below the absolute God, because it is set
+around with limitations, is necessarily obnoxious to all sorts of
+miseries. Its pleasures are only "honey drops scarce tasted in a
+sea of gall." This conviction, with its accompanying sentiment,
+runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heart
+of their theology, the dogma that makes the cruelest penances
+pleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentiment
+is not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the night
+thought of the English poet who, world sated, and sadly yearning,
+cries through the starry gloom to God,
+
+"When shall my soul her incarnation quit, And, readopted to thy
+blest embrace, Obtain her apotheosis in thee?"
+
+Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains to
+investigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from a
+premise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. We
+emanate from the creative power of God, and are sustained by the
+in flowing presence of his life, but are not discerptions from his
+own being, any more than beams of light are distinct substances
+shot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn back
+and assimilated into the parent orb. We are destined to a
+harmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lost
+as insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of
+
+God's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be in
+God as stars are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in a
+solvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments.
+
+In the first place, it is supported by the philosophical
+distinction between emanation and creation. The conception of
+creation gives us a personal God who wills to certain ends; that
+of emanation reduces the Supreme Being to a ghastly array of laws,
+revolving abysses, galvanic forces, nebular star dust, dead ideas,
+and vital fluids. According to the latter supposition, finite
+existences flow from the Infinite as consequences from a
+principle, or streams from a fountain; according to the former,
+they proceed as effects from a cause, or thoughts from a mind.
+That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical
+necessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose any
+circling return. Material things are thoughts which God
+transiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures are
+thoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality.
+The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which it is
+clothed.
+
+Secondly, the analogy which first leads to belief in absorption is
+falsely interpreted. Taken on its own ground, rightly appreciated,
+it legitimates a different conclusion.
+
+A grain of sand thrown into the bosom of Sahara does not lose its
+individual existence. Distinct drops are not annihilated as to
+their simple atoms of water, though sunk in the midst of the sea.
+The final particles or monads of air or granite are not
+dissolvingly blended into continuity of unindividualized
+atmosphere or rock when united with their elemental masses, but
+are thrust unapproachably apart by molecular repulsion. Now, a
+mind, being, as we conceive, no composite, but an ultimate unity,
+cannot be crushed or melted from its integral persistence of
+personality. Though plunged into the centre of a surrounding
+wilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlost
+in the multitude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of an
+inclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser souls
+received into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "one
+not otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity and
+contiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host of
+distinct spirits, as that is of aqueous particles; and as the
+rivers continually discharge into the sea, so the vehicular
+people, upon the disruption of their vehicles, discharge and
+incorporate into that ocean of spirits making the mundane Soul."4
+
+Thirdly, every consideration furnished by the doctrine of final
+causes as applied to existing creatures makes us ask, What use is
+there in calling forth souls merely that they may be taken back
+again? To justify their creation, the fulfilment of some educative
+aim, and then the lasting fruition of it, appear necessary. Why
+else should a soul be drawn from out the unformed vastness, and
+have its being struck into bounds, and be forced to pass through
+such appalling ordeals of good and evil, pleasure and agony? An
+individual of any kind is as important as its race; for it
+contains in possibility all that its type does. And the purposes
+of things, so far as we can discern them, the nature of our
+spiritual constitution, the meaning of our circumstances and
+probation, the resulting tendencies of our experience, all seem to
+prophesy, not the destruction, but the perfection and
+perpetuation, of individual being.
+
+4 Tucker, Light of Nature, Part II. chap. xxii.
+
+
+Fourthly, the same inference is yielded by applying a similar
+consideration to the Creator. Allowing him consciousness and
+intentions, as we must, what object could he have either in
+exerting his creative power or in sending out portions of himself
+in new individuals, save the production of so many immortal
+personalities of will, knowledge, and love, to advance towards the
+perfection of holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, filling his
+mansions with his children? By thus multiplying his own image he
+adds to the number of happy creatures who are to be bound together
+in bands of glory, mutually receiving and returning his affection,
+and swells the tide of conscious bliss which fills and rolls
+forever through his eternal universe.
+
+Nor, finally, is it necessary to expect personal oblivion in God
+in order to escape from evil and win exuberant happiness. Those
+ends are as well secured by the fruition of God's love in us as by
+the drowning of our consciousness in his plenitude of delight.
+Precisely herein consists the fundamental distinction of the
+Christian from the Brahmanic doctrine of human destiny. The
+Christian hopes to dwell in blissful union with God's will, not to
+be annihilatingly sunk in his essence. To borrow an illustration
+from Scotus Erigena,5 as the air when thoroughly illumined by
+sunshine still keeps its aerial nature and does not become
+sunshine, or as iron all red in the flame still keeps its metallic
+substance and does not turn to fire itself, so a soul fully
+possessed and moved by God does not in consequence lose its own
+sentient and intelligent being. It is still a bounded entity,
+though recipient of boundless divinity. Thus evil ceases, each
+personality is preserved and intensely glorified, and, at the same
+time, God is all in all. The totality of perfected, enraptured,
+immortalized humanity in heaven may be described in this manner,
+adopting the masterly expression of Coleridge:
+
+"And as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each
+organized, So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriads
+of self conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fills
+With absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, that
+yet seem Each to pursue its own self centring end."
+
+A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by the
+conception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave
+the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless
+grave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is
+completed, when the clock of time runs down and its lifeless
+weight falls in the socket, and "Death's empty helmet yawns grimly
+over the funeral hatchment of the world," the gates of this long
+barred receptacle of the deceased will be struck open, and its
+pale prisoners, in accumulated hosts, issue forth, and enter on
+the immortal inheritance reserved for them. In the sable land of
+Hades all departed generations are bivouacking in one vast army.
+On the resurrection morning, striking their shadowy tents, they
+will scale the walls of the abyss, and, reinvested with their
+bodies, either plant their banners on the summits of the earth in
+permanent encampment, or storm the battlements of the sky and
+colonize heaven with flesh and blood.
+
+5 Philosophy and Doctrines of Erigena, Universalist Quarterly
+Review, vol. vii. p. 100.
+
+
+All advocates of the doctrine of psychopannychism, or the sleep
+of souls from death till the last day, in addition to the general
+body of orthodox Christians, have been supporters of this
+conclusion.6
+
+Three explanations are possible of the origination of this belief.
+First, a man musing over the affecting panorama of the seasons as
+it rolls through the year, budding life alternating with deadly
+desolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves,
+flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual
+interment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destiny
+of his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed,
+how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and
+planted in the tomb, might naturally  especially if he had any
+thing of the poet's associating and creative mind say to himself,
+Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher
+fields, seed lying dormant now, but at last to sprout into swift
+immortality when God shall make a new sunshine and dew
+omnipotently penetrate the dry mould where we tarry? No matter how
+partial the analogy, how forced the process, how false the result,
+such imagery would sooner or later occur; and, having occurred, it
+is no more strange that it should get literal acceptance than it
+is that many other popular figments should have secured the firm
+establishment they have.
+
+Secondly, a mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole love
+was garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, his
+soul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaces
+himself with the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing what
+he thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pass through
+unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous
+power of his grief wielded imagination the world is fluent, and
+fate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on which
+corruption now banquets, he sees again, animated, beaming, clasped
+in his arms. He cries, It cannot be that those holy days are
+forever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dream
+in which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be that
+some time God will give me back again that beloved one! the
+sepulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored,
+and all be as it was before! The conception thus once born out of
+the delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnant
+imagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith.
+
+Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link in
+a chain of thought which, in the course of time and the range of
+speculation, the theorizing mind could not fail to forge. The
+concatenation of reflections is this. Death is the separation of
+soul and body. That separation is repulsive, an evil. Therefore it
+was not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by a
+foe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally God will vanquish
+his antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwarting
+interferences with the primitive perfection of harmony and
+happiness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to be
+separated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulness
+of time, when there shall be a universal resurrection and
+restoration. So far as reason is competent to pronounce on this
+view considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it is
+an arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science gives
+no hint of it.
+
+6 Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschreibens Heyns vom Schlafe
+der abgeschiedenen Seelen. Chalmers. Astronomical Discourses, iv.
+
+
+It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated,
+based on analogies not parallel. So far as it assumes to rest
+on revelation it will be examined in another place.
+
+Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a
+reply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma is
+next encountered which we shall style that of a local and
+irrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to some
+fixed region,7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarry
+unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls,
+according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace,
+into an anchored location called hell or heaven, a retributive or
+rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by with few words,
+because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the
+first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn from
+occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the
+fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The
+figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or
+planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and
+repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the
+noiseless continuity of God's self executing laws. It is a jarring
+mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual
+destinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the
+planets are swung around the sun by material chains compares with
+the law of gravitation.
+
+Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom
+in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the
+fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their
+relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist
+kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting
+habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as
+dissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes,
+one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the
+intelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since we
+are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is
+to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and
+since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the
+supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the
+departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associated
+belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not
+that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two
+immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and
+ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass into
+one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate
+attractions, to assimilate a strictly discriminative experience.
+But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion.
+
+The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the
+theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spirit is
+immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned in
+a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still
+forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific
+creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at
+once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over
+and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a
+gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied,
+"I was born murdered;" that is, the soul of a man who had been
+shot
+
+7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt.
+
+8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora.
+
+
+passed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young
+mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was
+snatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of
+connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule,
+in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those
+passes which the conductors of railroad trains give their
+passengers, "good for this trip only." The notion of an endless
+succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world,
+commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds
+a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pass on
+their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment
+"to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a
+renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and
+experiences drained before.
+
+Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his
+idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being,
+comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their
+connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand
+years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher
+planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that
+will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to
+enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading
+him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune,
+from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. The
+invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this
+globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the
+other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great
+Soul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnated
+souls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls
+taken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, we
+lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the
+Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives
+both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating
+passages between the two states will continue until the final
+swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of
+a better abode.10
+
+The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of
+meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker
+in his "Light of Nature Pursued." "The numbers of souls daily
+pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a
+proportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else the
+country might be overstocked." The objection urged against such a
+belief from the fact that we do not remember having lived before
+is rebutted by the assertion that
+
+"Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, The
+slipping through from state to state."
+
+The theory associated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by
+its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences,
+vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems
+as if occasionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote
+
+9 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ch. 12.
+
+10 Fourier, Passions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,)
+Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-236.
+
+
+administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only
+half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of
+a foregone state;
+
+"And ever something is or seems That touches us with mystic
+gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams."
+
+In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream,
+which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought,
+this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought
+to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is too
+destitute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against
+assault.11
+
+There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated,
+perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by
+successive deaths and births, traverses the universe, an
+everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds
+of space, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.12 All
+reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating
+Godhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to
+men. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligent
+spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of
+future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards
+his conscious estate, "the trees being imperfect men, that seem to
+bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground," so man himself
+shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star.
+The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose
+development begins with those substances with the production of
+which the life of an ordinary vegetable ends.13 The fact, too,
+that embryonic man passes through ascending stages
+undistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full of
+meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long
+history of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of
+time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria
+Regia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless
+mind of a Schelling! But, snail pace by snail pace, those
+immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so every
+thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach
+the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological
+prejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it is
+degrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen
+to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in
+one respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than a
+degraded god; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the
+latter it is downwards. "We wake," observes a profound thinker,
+"and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us,
+which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a
+one, which go upward and out of sight." Such was plainly the trust
+of the author of the following exhortation:
+
+"Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation
+of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be
+more pure and high."
+
+11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz der
+menechlichen Seele.
+
+12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der
+Seele.
+
+13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. ix.
+
+
+Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless series
+of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home
+after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after
+age, the spirit that glorious nomad may shift its tent, fated not
+to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it
+evermore its twin elements, activity and desire."
+
+But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in
+this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine
+and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with
+experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented
+fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so
+sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And,
+besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on
+the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other,
+and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower
+together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood,
+once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring
+stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far
+below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell
+from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one.
+Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest
+human desire,
+
+"How speeds, from in the river's thought,
+The spirit of the leaf that falls,
+Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought,
+As mine among yon crimson walls!
+From the dry bough it spins, to greet
+Its shadow on the placid river:
+So might I my companions meet,
+Nor roam the countless worlds forever!"
+
+Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the
+too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober
+credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in
+consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has
+risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red
+earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,
+
+"As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a god;"
+
+but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the
+supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous
+satire of good old Henry More,
+
+"Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy
+cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last
+shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And
+view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd:
+grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt
+philosophize!"
+
+The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of
+fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first
+critical probe.
+
+The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set
+forth, may be designated by the word transition.14 It affirms that
+at death they pass from the separate material worlds, which are
+their initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, which
+is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible,
+each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's
+rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling
+here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay,
+
+"We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth,
+On the last verge of mortal being stand,
+lose to the realm where angels have their birth,
+Just on the boundaries of the spirit land."
+
+Why has God "broken up the solid material of the universe into
+innumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of
+an impassable solitude of space," unless it be to train up in the
+various spheres separate households for final union as a single
+diversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 The
+surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly,
+that,
+
+"If yonder stars be fill'd with forms of breathing clay like ours,
+Perchance the space which spreads between is for a spirit's
+powers."
+
+The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, its
+natal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will,
+unobstructed, through every world and cerulean deep; and
+wheresoever it is, there, in proportion to its own capacity and
+fitness, is heaven and is God.16 All those world spots so thickly
+scattered through the Yggdrasill of universal space are but the
+brief sheltering places where embryo intelligences clip their
+shells, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline of
+earthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into the
+mighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternal
+emancipation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offered
+yet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended by
+its harmony with our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wish
+to rest in it with humble trust.
+
+The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into
+the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite
+perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then
+revolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuing
+an infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flying
+goal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due season
+touch its bound and there be satisfied,
+
+"When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circular
+joys Dance in an endless round."
+
+14 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xii.
+
+15 Taylor, Saturday Evening, pp. 95-111.
+
+16 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xvii.
+
+
+This result seems the more probable of the two; for the assertion
+of countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyond
+every conceivable limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. If
+endless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the whole
+universe would at last become a line! And though it is true that
+the idea of an ever novel chase attracts and refreshes the
+imagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels and
+wearies it, this is simply because we judge after our poor earthly
+experience and its flagging analogies. It will not be so if that
+revolution is the vivid realization of all our being's
+possibilities.
+
+Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence,
+migration, transition,  these seven answers to the question of our
+fate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkable
+in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real
+eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay.
+Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanation
+and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of
+the same persistent entities. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated
+to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless space.
+Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs be
+populated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlasting
+inhabitants, the present order continuing in each earth until
+enough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physically
+restored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, if
+matter be not transmutable to soul, when that peculiar reality
+from which souls are developed is exhausted, and the last
+generation of incarnated beings have risen from the flesh, the
+material creation may, in addition to the inter stellar region, be
+eternally appropriated by the spirit races to their own free range
+and use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now; else it
+may vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may be
+absolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of God, and
+the universe may be infinite: then the process may proceed
+forever.
+
+But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought they
+have learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not by
+argumentation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it.
+The moralist regards all creation as the work of a personal God, a
+theatre of moral ends, a just Providence watching over the parts,
+and the conscious immortality of the actors an inevitable
+accompaniment. The physicist contemplates the universe as
+constituted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist in
+perfect mobility through space, but are concreted in the molecular
+masses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for the
+distribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds of
+force. This, in its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations and
+combinations of the original atoms. Organic growth, life, is the
+fruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is the
+rendering up of that force in its equivalents. Thus, the universe
+is a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ultimate unities
+which are indestructible, though in constant circulation of new
+groupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist,
+man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To the
+speculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, to
+be liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed in
+some organism. In both cases he is immortal: but in that, as a
+free citizen of the ideal world; in this, as a flying particle of
+the dynamic immensity.
+
+PART SECOND.
+
+
+ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+PROCEEDING now to give an account of the fancies and opinions in
+regard to a future life which have been prevalent, in different
+ages, in various nations of the earth, it will be best to begin by
+presenting, in a rapid series, some sketches of the conceits of
+those uncivilized tribes who did not so far as our knowledge
+reaches possess a doctrine sufficiently distinctive and full, or
+important enough in its historical relations, to warrant a
+detailed treatment in separate chapters.
+
+We will glance first at the negroes. According to all accounts,
+while there are, among the numerous tribes, diversities and
+degrees of superstition, there is yet, throughout the native pagan
+population of Africa, a marked general agreement of belief in the
+survival of the soul, in spectres, divination, and witchcraft; and
+there is a general similarity of funeral usages. Early travellers
+tell us that the Bushmen conceived the soul to be immortal, and as
+impalpable as a shadow, and that they were much afraid of the
+return of deceased spirits to haunt them. They were accustomed to
+pray to their departed countrymen not to molest them, but to stay
+away in quiet. They also employed exorcisers to lay these ill
+omened ghosts. Meiners relates of some inhabitants of the Guinea
+coast that their fear of ghosts and their childish credulity
+reached such a pitch that they threw their dead into the ocean, in
+the expectation of thus drowning soul and body together.
+
+Superstitions as gross and lawless still have full sway. Wilson,
+whose travels and residence there for twenty years have enabled
+him to furnish the most reliable information, says, in his recent
+work,1 "A native African would as soon doubt his present as his
+future state of being." Every dream, every stray suggestion of the
+mind, is interpreted, with unquestioning credence, as a visit from
+the dead, a whisper from a departed soul. If a man wakes up with
+pains in his bones or muscles, it is because his spirit has
+wandered abroad in the night and been flogged by some other
+spirit. On certain occasions the whole community start up at
+midnight, with clubs, torches, and hideous yells, to drive the
+evil spirits out of the village. They seem to believe that the
+souls of dead men take rank with good or bad spirits, as they have
+themselves been good or bad in this life. They bury with the
+deceased clothing, ornaments, utensils,
+
+1 Western Africa, ch. xii.
+
+
+and statedly convey food to the grave for the use of the
+revisiting spirit. With the body of king Weir of the Cavalla
+towns, who was buried in December of 1854, in presence of several
+missionaries, was interred a quantity of rice, palm oil, beef, and
+rum: it was supposed the ghost of the sable monarch would come
+back and consume these articles. The African tribes, where their
+notions have not been modified by Christian or by Mohammedan
+teachings, appear to have no definite idea of a heaven or of a
+hell; but future reward or punishment is considered under the
+general conception of an association, in the disembodied state,
+with the benignant or with the demoniacal powers.
+
+The New Zealanders imagine that the souls of the dead go to a
+place beneath the earth, called Reinga. The path to this region is
+a precipice close to the sea shore at the North Cape. It is said
+that the natives who live in the neighborhood can at night hear
+sounds caused by the passing of spirits thither through the air.
+After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before
+the news can arrive by natural means.2 It is a common superstition
+with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death,
+becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs,
+brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in
+the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only
+part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the
+mythological doctrine of the glittering host of heaven being an
+assemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a more
+ingenious version.3 Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insular
+egotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor,
+having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyes
+up to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a celebrated New
+Zealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of a
+great chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thus
+increasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferred
+to the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that there
+was a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, the
+left ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of a
+spirit, taking flight for Reinga.
+
+The custom, common in Africa and in New Zealand, of slaying the
+slaves or the wives of an important person at his death and
+burying them with him, prevails also among the inhabitants of the
+Feejee Islands. A chief's wives are sometimes strangled on these
+occasions, sometimes buried alive. One cried to her brother, "I
+wish to die, that I may accompany my husband to the land where he
+has gone. Love me, and make haste to strangle me, that I may
+overtake him."4 Departing souls go to the tribunal of Ndengei, who
+either receives them into bliss, or sends them back, as ghosts, to
+haunt the scenes of their former existence, or distributes them as
+food to devils, or imprisons them for a period and then dooms them
+to annihilation. The Feejees are also very much afraid of Samiulo,
+ruler of a subterranean world, who sits at the brink of a huge
+fiery cavern, into which he hurls the souls he dislikes. In the
+road to Ndengei stands an enormous giant, armed with an axe, who
+tries to maim and murder the passing souls. A powerful chief,
+whose gun was interred with him, loaded it, and, when
+
+2 Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, ch. vii.
+
+3 Library of Ent. Knowl.: The New Zealanders, pp. 223-237.
+
+4 Wilkes, Narrative of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, vol. iii.
+ch. 3.
+
+
+he came near the giant, shot at him, and ran by while the monster
+was dodging the bullet.
+
+The people of the Sandwich Islands held a confused medley of
+notions as to another life. In different persons among them were
+found, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank
+indifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that the
+souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the
+"eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian
+souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Some
+thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others,
+that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others
+still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and
+butterflies.5 What a piteous life they must have led here whose
+imaginations could only soar to a future so unattractive as this!
+
+The Kamtschadales send all the dead alike to a subterranean
+elysium, where they shall find again their wives, clothes, tools,
+huts, and where they shall fish and hunt. All is there as here,
+except that there are no fire spouting mountains, no bogs,
+streams, inundations, and impassable snows; and neither hunting
+nor fishing is ever pursued in vain there. This lower paradise is
+but a beautified Kamtschatka, freed from discommoding hardships
+and cleansed of tormenting Cossacks and Russians. They have no
+hell for the rectification of the present wrong relations of
+virtue and misery, vice and happiness. The only distinction they
+appear to make is that all who in Kamtschatka are poor, and have
+few small and weak dogs, shall there be rich and be furnished with
+strong and fat dogs. The power of imagination is very remarkable
+in this raw people, bringing the future life so near, and
+awakening such an impatient longing for it and for their former
+companions that they often, the sooner to secure a habitation
+there, anticipate the natural time of their death by suicide.6
+
+The Esquimaux betray the influence of their clime and habits, in
+the formation of their ideas of the life to come, as plainly as
+the Kamtschadales do. The employments and enjoyments of their
+future state are rude and earthy. They say the soul descends
+through successive places of habitation, the first of which is
+full of pains and horrors. The good, that is, the courageous and
+skilful, those who have endured severe hardships and mastered many
+seals, passing through this first residence, find that the other
+mansions regularly improve. They finally reach an abode of perfect
+satisfaction, far beneath the storms of the sea, where the sun is
+never obscured by night, and where reindeer wander in great droves
+beside waters that never congeal, and wherein the whale, the
+walrus, and the best sea fowls always abound.7 Hell is deep, but
+heaven deeper still. Hell, they think, is among the roots, rocks,
+monsters, and cold of the frozen or vexed and suffering waters;
+but
+
+"Beneath tempestuous seas and fields of ice
+Their creed has placed a lowlier paradise."
+
+The Greenlanders, too, located their elysium beneath the abysses
+of the ocean, where the good Spirit Torngarsuk held his reign in a
+happy and eternal summer. The wizards, who pretended to visit this
+region at will, described the disembodied souls as pallid, and, if
+one
+
+5 Jarves, Hist. of the Sandwich Islands, p. 42.
+
+6 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, 169-173.
+
+7 Prichard, Physical Hist. of Mankind, vol. i. ch. 2.
+
+
+sought to seize them, unsubstantial.8 Some of these people,
+however, fixed the site of paradise in the sky, and regarded the
+aurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So Coleridge
+pictures the Laplander
+
+"Marking the streamy banners of the North, And thinking he those
+spirits soon should join Who there, in floating robes of rosy
+light, Dance sportively."
+
+But others believed this state of restlessness in the clouds was
+the fate only of the worthless, who were there pinched with hunger
+and plied with torments. All agreed in looking for another state
+of existence, where, under diverse circumstances, happiness and
+misery should be awarded, in some degree at least, according to
+desert.9
+
+The Peruvians taught that the reprobate were sentenced to a hell
+situated in the centre of the earth, where they must endure
+centuries of toil and anguish. Their paradise was away in the blue
+dome of heaven. There the spirits of the worthy would lead a life
+of tranquil luxury. At the death of a Peruvian noble his wives and
+servants frequently were slain, to go with him and wait on him in
+that happy region.10 Many authors, including Prescott, yielding
+too easy credence to the very questionable assertions of the
+Spanish chroniclers, have attributed to the Peruvians a belief in
+the resurrection of the body. Various travellers and writers have
+also predicated this belief of savage nations in Central Africa,
+of certain South Sea islanders, and of several native tribes in
+North America. In all these cases the supposition is probably
+erroneous, as we think for the following reasons. In the first
+place, the idea of a resurrection of the body is either a late
+conception of the associative imagination, or else a doctrine
+connected with a speculative theory of recurring epochs in the
+destiny of the world; and it is in both instances too subtle and
+elaborate for an uncultivated people. Secondly, in none of the
+cases referred to has any reliable evidence been given of the
+actual existence of the belief in question. It has merely been
+inferred, by persons to whose minds the doctrine was previously
+familiar, from phenomena by no means necessarily implying it. For
+example, a recent author ascribes to the Feejees the belief that
+there will be a resurrection of the body just as it was at the
+time of death. The only datum on which he founds this astounding
+assertion is that they often seem to prefer to die in the full
+vigor of manhood rather than in decrepit old age! 11 Thirdly, we
+know that the observation and statements of the Spanish monks and
+historians, in regard to the religion of the pagans of South
+America, were of the most imperfect and reckless character. They
+perpetrated gross frauds, such as planting in the face of high
+precipices white stones in the shape of the cross, and then
+pointing to them in proof of their assertion that, before the
+Christians came, the Devil had here parodied the rites and
+doctrines of the gospel. 12 They said the Mexican goddess, wife of
+the sun, was Eve, or
+
+8 Egede, Greenland, ch. 18.
+
+9 Dr. Karl Andree, Gronland.
+
+10 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, vol. i. ch. 3.
+
+11 Erskine, Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 248.
+
+12 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part v. p. 93.
+
+
+the Virgin Mary, and Quetzalcoatl was St. Thomas! 13 Such
+affirmers are to be cautiously followed. Finally, it is a quite
+significant fact that while some point to the pains which the
+Peruvians took in embalming their dead as a proof that they looked
+for a resurrection of the body, Acosta expressly says that they
+did not believe in the resurrection, and that this unbelief was
+the cause of their embalming.14 Garcilaso de la Vega, in his
+"Royal Commentaries of the Peruvian Incas," says that when he
+asked some Peruvians why they took so great care to preserve in
+the cemeteries of the dead the nails and hair which had been cut
+off, they replied that in the day of resurrection the dead would
+come forth with whatever of their bodies was left, and there would
+be too great a press of business in that day for them to afford
+time to go hunting round after their hair and nails.15 The fancy
+of a Christian is too plain here. If the answer were really made
+by the natives, they were playing a joke on their credulous
+questioner, or seeking to please him with distorted echoes of his
+own faith.
+
+The conceits as to a future life entertained by the Mexicans
+varied considerably from those of their neighbors of Peru. Souls
+neither good nor bad, or whose virtues and vices balanced each
+other, were to enter a medium state of idleness and empty content.
+The wicked, or those dying in any of certain enumerated modes of
+death, went to Mictlan, a dismal hell within the earth. The souls
+of those struck by lightning, or drowned, or dying by any of a
+given list of diseases, also the souls of children, were
+transferred to a remote elysium, Tlalocan. There was a place in
+the chief temple where, it was supposed, once a year the spirits
+of all the children who had been sacrificed to Tlaloc invisibly
+came and assisted in the ceremonies. The ultimate heaven was
+reserved for warriors who bravely fell in battle, for women who
+died in labor, for those offered up in the temples of the gods,
+and for a few others. These passed immediately to the house of the
+sun, their chief god, whom they accompanied for a term of years,
+with songs, dances, and revelry, in his circuit around the sky.
+Then, animating the forms of birds of gay plumage, they lived as
+beautiful songsters among the flowers, now on earth, now in
+heaven, at their pleasure.16 It was the Mexican custom to dress
+the dead man in the garb appropriated to the guardian deity of his
+craft or condition in life. They gave him a jug of water. They
+placed with him slips of paper to serve as passports through
+guarded gates and perilous defiles in the other world. They made a
+fire of his clothes and utensils, to warm the shivering soul while
+traversing a region of cold winds beyond the grave.17 The
+following sentence occurs in a poem composed by one of the old
+Aztec monarchs: "Illustrious nobles, loyal subjects, let us aspire
+to that heaven where all is eternal and corruption cannot come.
+The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun, and the
+shadows of death are brilliant lights for the stars." 18
+
+13 Squier, Serpent Symbol in America, p. 13.
+
+14 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, book v. ch. 7.
+
+15 Book ii. ch. 7.
+
+16 Clavigero, History of Mexico, book vi. sect. 1.
+
+17 Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, vol. i. ch. 6.
+
+18 Ibid. sect. 39.
+
+
+Amidst the mass of whimsical conceptions entering into the faith
+of the widely spread tribes of North America, we find a ruling
+agreement in the cardinal features of their thought concerning a
+future state of existence. In common with nearly all barbarous
+nations, they felt great fear of apparitions. The Sioux were in
+the habit of addressing the deceased at his burial, and imploring
+him to stay in his own place and not come to distress them. Their
+funeral customs, too, from one extremity of the continent to the
+other, were very much alike. Those who have reported their
+opinions to us, from the earliest Jesuit missionaries to the
+latest investigators of their mental characteristics, concur in
+ascribing to them a deep trust in a life to come, a cheerful view
+of its conditions, and a remarkable freedom from the dread of
+dying. Charlevoix says, "The best established opinion among the
+natives is the immortality of the soul." On the basis of an
+account written by William Penn, Pope composed the famous passage
+in his "Essay on Man:"
+
+Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
+Sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind.
+His soul proud Science never taught to stray
+Far as the solar walk or milky way:
+Yet simple nature to his faith hath given,
+Behind the cloud topp'd hill, an humbler heaven,
+Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
+Or happier island in the watery waste.
+To be, contents his natural desire:
+He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire,
+But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
+His faithful dog shall bear him company."
+
+Their rude instinctive belief in the soul's survival, and surmises
+as to its destiny, are implied in their funeral rites, which, as
+already stated, were, with some exceptions, strikingly similar
+even in the remotest tribes.19
+
+In the bark coffin, with a dead Indian the Onondagas buried a
+kettle of provisions, a pair of moccasins, a piece of deer skin
+and sinews of the deer to sew patches on the moccasins, which it
+was supposed the deceased would wear out on his journey. They also
+furnished him with a bow and arrows, a tomahawk and knife, to
+procure game with to live on while pursuing his way to the land of
+spirits, the blissful regions of Ha wah ne u.20 Several Indian
+nations, instead of burying the food, suspended it above the
+grave, and renewed it from time to time. Some writers have
+explained this custom by the hypothesis of an Indian belief in two
+souls, one of which departed to the realm of the dead, while the
+other tarried by the mound until the body was decayed, or until it
+had itself found a chance to be born in a new body.21 The
+supposition seems forced and extremely doubtful. The truth
+probably lies in a simpler explanation, which will be offered
+further on.
+
+19 Baumgarten, Geschichte der Volker von America, xiii. haupts.:
+vom Tod, Vergribniss, und Trauer.
+
+20 Clarke, Onondaga, vol. l. p. 51.
+
+21 Muller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, sect.
+66.
+
+
+The Winnebagoes located paradise above, and called the milky way
+the "Road of the Dead." 22 It was so white with the crowds of
+journeying ghosts! But almost all, like the Ojibways, imagined
+their elysium to lie far in the West. The soul, freed from the
+body, follows a wide beaten path westward, and enters a country
+abounding with all that an Indian covets. On the borders of this
+blessed land, in a long glade, he finds his relatives, for many
+generations back, gathered to welcome him.23 The Chippewas, and
+several other important tribes, always kindled fires on the fresh
+graves of their dead, and kept them burning four successive
+nights, to light the wandering souls on their way.24 An Indian
+myth represents the ghosts coming back from Ponemah, the land of
+the Hereafter, and singing this song to the miraculous Hiawatha:
+
+"Do not lay such heavy burdens
+On the graves of those you bury,
+Not such weight of furs and wampum,
+Not such weight of pots and kettles;
+For the spirits faint beneath them.
+Only give them food to carry,
+Only give them fire to light them.
+Four days is the spirit's journey
+To the land of ghosts and shadows,
+Four its lonely night encampments.
+Therefore, when the dead are buried,
+Let a fire, as night approaches,
+Four times on the grave be kindled,
+That the soul upon its journey
+May not grope about in darkness." 25
+
+The subject of a future state seems to have been by far the most
+prominent one in the Indian imagination. They relate many
+traditions of persons who have entered it, and returned, and given
+descriptions of it. A young brave, having lost his betrothed,
+determined to follow her to the land of souls. Far South, beyond
+the region of ice and snows, he came to a lodge standing before
+the entrance to wide blue plains. Leaving his body there, he
+embarked in a white stone canoe to cross a lake. He saw the souls
+of wicked Indians sinking in the lake; but the good gained an
+elysian shore, where all was warmth, beauty, ease, and eternal
+youth, and where the air was food. The Master of Breath sent him
+back, but promised that he might at death return and stay. 26 The
+Wyandots tell of a dwarf, Tcha ka bech, who climbed a tree which
+grew higher as often as he blew on it. At last he reached heaven,
+and discovered it to be an excellent place. He descended the tree,
+building wigwams at intervals in the branches. He then returned
+with his sister and nephew, resting each night in one of the
+wigwams.
+
+22 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part iv. p.
+240.
+
+23 Ibid. part ii. p. 135.
+
+24 Ibid. part v. p. 64; part iv. p. 55.
+
+25 Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, xix.: The Ghosts.
+
+26 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam. p 79.
+
+
+He set his traps up there to catch animals. Rising in the night to
+go and examine his traps, he saw one all on fire, and, upon
+approaching it, found that he had caught the sun!
+
+Where the Indian is found believing in a Devil and a hell, it is
+the result of his intercourse with Europeans. These elements of
+horror were foreign to his original religion.27 There are in some
+quarters faint traces of a single purgatorial or retributive
+conception. It is a representation of paradise as an island, the
+ordeal consisting in the passage of the dark river or lake which
+surrounds it. The worthy cross with entire facility, the unworthy
+only after tedious struggles. Some say the latter are drowned;
+others, that they sink up to their chins in the water, where they
+pass eternity in vain desires to attain the alluring land on which
+they gaze.28 Even this notion may be a modification consequent
+upon European influence. At all events, it is subordinate in force
+and only occasional in occurrence. For the most part, in the
+Indian faith mercy swallows up the other attributes of the Great
+Spirit. The Indian dies without fear, looking for no punishments,
+only for rewards.29 He regards the Master of Breath not as a holy
+judge, but as a kind father. He welcomes death as opening the door
+to a sweet land. Ever charmingly on his closing eyes dawns the
+prospect of the aboriginal elysium, a gorgeous region of soft
+shades, gliding streams, verdant groves waving in gentle airs,
+warbling birds, herds of stately deer and buffalo browsing on
+level plains. It is the earth in noiseless and solemn
+metamorphosis.30
+
+We shall conclude this chapter by endeavoring to explain the
+purport and origin of the principal ceremonies and notions which
+have now been set forth pertaining to the disembodied state. The
+first source of these particulars is to be sought, not in any
+clear mental perceptions, or conscious dogmatic belief, but in the
+natural workings of affection, memory, and sentiment. Among almost
+every people, from the Chinese to the Araucanians, from the
+Ethiopians to the Dacotahs, rites of honor have been paid to the
+dead, various offerings have been placed at their graves. The
+Vedas enjoin the offering of a cake to the ghosts of ancestors
+back to the third generation. The Greeks were wont to pour wine,
+oil, milk, and blood into canals made in the graves of their dead.
+The early Christians adopted these "Feasts of the Dead" as
+Augustine and Tertullian call them from the heathen, and
+Celebrated them over the graves of their martyrs and of their
+other deceased friends. Such customs as these among savages like
+the Shillooks or the Choctaws are usually supposed to imply the
+belief that the souls of the deceased remain about the places of
+sepulture and physically partake of the nourishment thus
+furnished. The interpretation is farther fetched than need be, and
+is unlikely; or, at all events, if it be true in some cases, it is
+not the whole truth. In the first place, these people see that the
+food and drink remain untouched, the weapons and utensils are left
+unused in the grave. Secondly, there are often certain features in
+the barbaric ritual obviously metaphorical, incapable of literal
+acceptance. For instance, the Winnebagoes light a small fire on
+the grave of a deceased warrior to light him on his journey to the
+land of souls,
+
+27 Loskiel, Hist. Mission of United Brethren to N. A. Indians,
+part i. ch. 3.
+
+28 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam, p. 202. History, &c. of
+Indian Tribes, part iv. p. 173.
+
+29 Schoolcraft, History of Indian Tribes, part ii. p. 68.
+
+30 Ibid. pp. 403, 404.
+
+
+although they say that journey extends to a distance of four days
+and nights and is wholly invisible. They light and tend that
+watch fire as a memorial of their departed companion and a rude
+expression of their own emotions; as an unconscious emblem of
+their own struggling faith, not as a beacon to the straying ghost.
+Again, the Indian mother, losing a nursing infant, spurts some of
+her milk into the fire, that the little spirit may not want for
+nutriment on its solitary path.31 Plato approvingly quotes
+Hesiod's statement that the souls of noble men become guardian
+demons coursing the air, messengers and agents of the gods in the
+world. Therefore, he adds, "we should reverence their tombs and
+establish solemn rites and offerings there;" though by his very
+statement these places were not the dwellings or haunts of the
+freely circuiting spirits.32
+
+Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctive
+association, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the souls
+of the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms.
+The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wandering
+souls within the enclosed graveyards.33 These sepulchral folds are
+full of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast draws
+pilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if not
+restrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them to
+make offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV., the kings of
+France lay in state and were served as in life for forty days
+after they died.34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any
+doctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentiment
+which, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the Arru
+Islands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble and
+destroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes the
+Papist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to
+recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in
+still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty
+playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this
+same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled
+the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his
+brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to
+hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. What
+should we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence,
+when the present doctrines and customs of France and America are
+forgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners in
+Pere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on the
+graves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude that
+it was believed the souls remained in the bodies in the tomb and
+enjoyed the perfume of the flowers? An American traveller, writing
+from Vienna on All Saints' Day, in 1855, describes the avenues of
+the great cemetery filled with people hanging festoons of flowers
+on the tombstones, and placing burning candles of wax on the
+graves, and kneeling in devotion; it being their childish belief,
+he says, that their prayers on this day have efficacy to release
+their deceased relatives from purgatory, and that the dim taper
+flickering on the sod lights the unbound soul to its heavenly
+home. Of course these rites are not literal expressions of literal
+beliefs, but are
+
+31 Andree, North America, p. 246.
+
+32 Republic, book v. ch. 15.
+
+33 R. Taylor, New Zealand, ch. 7.
+
+34 Meiners, Kritische Geschichte der Religionen, buch iii. absch.
+1.
+
+
+symbols of ideas, emblems of sentiments, figurative and inadequate
+shadows of a theological doctrine, although, as is well known,
+there is, among the most ignorant persons, scarcely any
+deliberately apprehended distinction between image and entity,
+material representation and spiritual verity.
+
+If a member of the Oneida tribe died when they were away from
+home, they buried him with great solemnity, setting a mark over
+the grave; and whenever they passed that way afterwards they
+visited the spot, singing a mournful song and casting stones upon
+it, thus giving symbolic expression to their feelings. It would be
+absurd to suppose this song an incantation to secure the repose of
+the buried brave, and the stones thrown to prevent his rising; yet
+it would not be more incredible or more remote from the facts than
+many a commonly current interpretation of barbarian usages. An
+amusing instance of error well enforcing the need of extreme
+caution in drawing inferences is afforded by the example of those
+explorers who, finding an extensive cemetery where the aborigines
+had buried all their children apart from the adults, concluded
+they had discovered the remains of an ancient race of pigmies! 35
+
+The influence of unspeculative affection, memory, and sentiment
+goes far towards accounting for the funeral ritual of the
+barbarians. But it is not sufficient. We must call in further aid;
+and that aid we find in the arbitrary conceits, the poetic
+associations, and the creative force of unregulated fancy and
+imagination. The poetic faculty which, supplied with materials by
+observation and speculation, constructed the complex mythologies
+of Egypt and Greece, and which, turning on its own resources,
+composed the Arabian tales of the genii and the modern literature
+of pure fiction, is particularly active, fertile, and tyrannical,
+though in a less continuous and systematic form, in the barbarian
+mind. Acting by wild fits and starts, there is no end to the
+extravagant conjectures and visions it bodies forth. Destitute of
+philosophical definitions, totally unacquainted with critical
+distinctions or analytic reflection, absurd notions, sober
+convictions, dim dreams, and sharp perceptions run confusedly
+together in the minds of savages. There is to them no clear and
+permanent demarcation between rational thoughts and crazy fancies.
+Now, no phenomenon can strike more deeply or work more powerfully
+in human nature, stirring up the exploring activities of intellect
+and imagination, than the event of death, with its bereaving
+stroke and prophetic appeal. Accordingly, we should expect to find
+among uncultivated nations, as we actually do, a vast medley of
+fragmentary thoughts and pictures plausible, strange, lovely, or
+terrible relating to the place and fate of the disembodied soul.
+These conceptions would naturally take their shaping and coloring,
+in some degree, from thescenery, circumstances, and experience
+amidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes these
+figments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions,
+distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they were
+superstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assent
+of soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. These
+lines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is to
+know where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples will
+serve at once to illustrate the
+
+35 Smithsonian Contributions, vol. ii. Squier's Aboriginal
+Monuments, appendix, pp. 127-131.
+
+
+operation of the principle now laid down, and to present still
+further specimens of the barbarian notions of a future life.
+
+Some Indian tribes made offerings to the spirits of their departed
+heroes by casting the boughs of various trees around the ash,
+saying that the branches of this tree were eloquent with the
+ghosts of their warrior sires, who came at evening in the chariot
+of cloud to fire the young to deeds of war.36 There is an Indian
+legend of a witch who wore a mantle composed of the scalps of
+murdered women. Taking this off, she shook it, and all the scalps
+uttered shrieks of laughter. Another describes a magician scudding
+across a lake in a boat whose ribs were live rattlesnakes.37 An
+exercise of mind virtually identical with that which gave these
+strokes made the Philippine Islanders say that the souls of those
+who die struck by lightning go up the beams of the rainbow to a
+happy place, and animated Ali to declare that the pious, on coming
+out of their sepulchres, shall find awaiting them white winged
+camels with saddles of gold. The Ajetas suspended the bow and
+arrows of a deceased Papuan above his grave, and conceived him as
+emerging from beneath every night to go a hunting.38 The fisherman
+on the coast of Lapland was interred in a boat, and a flint and
+combustibles were given him to light him along the dark cavernous
+passage he was to traverse. The Dyaks of Borneo believe that every
+one whose head they can get possession of here will in the future
+state be their servant: consequently, they make a business of
+"head hunting," accumulating the ghastly visages of their victims
+in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for
+the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy
+the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but
+the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal
+banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and
+driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate
+their elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, delicious
+fruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, where they expect to
+live again with their departed ancestors and friends.41 The
+Patagonians say the stars are their translated countrymen, and the
+milky way is a field where the departed Patagonians hunt
+ostriches. Clouds are the feathers of the ostriches they kill.42
+The play is here seen of the same mythological imagination which,
+in Italy, pictured a writhing giant beneath Mount Vesuvius, and,
+in Greenland, looked on the Pleiades as a group of dogs
+surrounding a white bear, and on the belt of Orion as a company of
+Greenlanders placed there because they could not find the way to
+their own country. Black Bird, the redoubtable chief of the O Ma
+Haws, when dying, said to his people, "Bury me on yonder lofty
+bluff on the banks of the Missouri, where I can see the men and
+boats passing by on the river." 43 Accordingly, as soon as he
+ceased
+
+36 Browne, Trees of America, p. 328.
+
+37 Schoolcraft, Hist. &c part i. pp. 32-34.
+
+38 Earl, The Papuans, p. 132.
+
+39 Earl, The Eastern Seas, ch. 8.
+
+40 Edwards, Hist. of the West Indies, book i. ch. 2.
+
+41 Ibid. ch. 3.
+
+42 Falkner, Patagonia, ch. 5.
+
+43 Catlin, North American Indians, vol. ii. p. 6.
+
+
+to breathe, they set him there, on his favorite steed, and heaped
+the earth around him. This does not imply any believed doctrine,
+in our sense of the term, but is plainly a spontaneous
+transference for the moment, by the poetic imagination, of the
+sentiments of the living man to the buried body.
+
+The unhappy Africans who were snatched from their homes, enslaved
+and cruelly tasked in the far West India islands, pined under
+their fate with deadly homesickness. The intense longing moulded
+their plastic belief, just as the sensation from some hot bricks
+at the feet of a sleeping man shaped his dreams into a journey up
+the side of Atna. They fancied that if they died they should
+immediately live again in their fatherland. They committed suicide
+in great numbers. At last, when other means had failed to check
+this epidemic of self destruction, a cunning overseer brought them
+ropes and every facility for hanging, and told them to hang
+themselves as fast as they pleased, for their master had bought a
+great plantation in Africa, and as soon as they got there they
+would be set to work on it. Their helpless credulity took the
+impression; and no more suicides occurred.44
+
+The mutual formative influences exerted upon a people's notions
+concerning the future state, by the imagination of their poets and
+the peculiarities of their clime, are perhaps nowhere more
+conspicuously exhibited than in the case of the Caledonians who at
+an early period dwelt in North Britain. They had picturesque
+traditions locating the habitation of ghosts in the air above
+their fog draped mountains. They promised rewards for nothing but
+valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and
+even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under
+world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally,
+true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where
+they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of
+the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations,
+chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow.
+The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains,"
+Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher importance as historical
+records than they can claim when considered as fragments of
+exquisite poetry."
+
+"A dark red stream comes down from the hill. Crugal sat upon the
+beam; he that lately fell by the hand of Swaran striving in the
+battle of heroes. His face is like the beam of the setting moon;
+his robes are of the clouds of the hill; his eyes are like two
+decaying flames; dark is the wound on his breast. The stars dim
+twinkled through his form, and his voice was like the sound of a
+distant stream. Dim and in tears he stood, and stretched his pale
+hand over the hero. Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like the
+gale of the reedy Lego. 'My ghost, O'Connal, is on my native
+hills, but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt never
+talk with Crugal nor find his lone steps on the heath. I am light
+as the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist.
+Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death. It hovers
+over the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Remove
+from the field of ghosts.' Like the darkened moon, he retired in
+the midst of the whistling blast."
+
+We recognise here several leading traits in all the early
+unspeculative faiths, the vapory form, the echoless motion, the
+marks of former wounds, the feeble voice, the memory
+
+44 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, buch xiv. sect. 765.
+
+
+of the past, the mournful aspect, and the prophetic words. But the
+rhetorical imagery, the scenery, the location of the spirit world
+in the lower clouds, are stamped by emphatic climatic
+peculiarities, whose origination, easily traceable, throws light
+on the growth of the whole mass of such notions everywhere.
+
+Two general sources have now been described of the barbarian
+conceptions in relation to a future state. First, the natural
+operation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy,
+regret, and reverence for them leading the thoughts and the heart
+to grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of their
+fate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly,
+the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination when it
+is set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomena
+associated with death. But beyond these two comprehensive
+statements there is, directly related to the matter, and worthy of
+separate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which has
+been very extensively experienced and fertile of results. It is a
+peculiar example of the unconscious impartation of objective
+existence to mental ideas. With the death of the body the man does
+not cease to live in the remembrance, imagination, and heart of
+his surviving friends. By an unphilosophical confusion, this
+internal image is credited as an external existence. The dead pass
+from their customary haunts in our society to the imperishable
+domain of ideas. This visionary world of memory and fantasy is
+projected outward, located, furnished, and constitutes the future
+state apprehended by the barbarian mind. Feuerbach says in his
+subtle and able Thoughts on Death and Immortality, "The Realm of
+Memory is the Land of Souls." Ossian, amid the midnight mountains,
+thinking of departed warriors and listening to the tempest, fills
+the gale with the impersonations, of his thoughts, and exclaims,
+"I hear the steps of the dead in the dark eddying blast."
+
+The barbarian brain seems to have been generally impregnated with
+the feeling that every thing else has a ghost as well as man. The
+Gauls lent money in this world upon bills payable in the next.
+They threw letters upon the funeral pile to be read by the soul of
+the deceased.45 As the ghost was thought to retain the scars of
+injuries inflicted upon the body, so, it appears, these letters
+were thought, when destroyed, to leave impressions of what had
+been written on them. The custom of burning or burying things with
+the dead probably arose, in some cases at least, from the
+supposition that every object has its mancs. The obolus for
+Charon, the cake of honey for Cerberus, the shadows of these
+articles would be borne and used by the shadow of the dead man.
+Leonidas saying, "Bury me on my shield: I will enter even Hades as
+a Lacedamonian," 46 must either have used the word Hades by
+metonymy for the grave, or have imagined that a shadowy fac simile
+of what was interred in the grave went into the grim kingdom of
+Pluto. It was a custom with some Indian tribes, on the new made
+grave of a chief, to slay his chosen horse; and when he fell they
+supposed
+
+"That then, upon the dead man's plain, The rider grasp'd his steed
+again."
+
+45 Pomponius Mela, De Orbis Situ, iii. 2.
+
+46 Translation of Greek Anthology, in Bohn's Library, p. 58.
+
+
+The hunter chases the deer, each alike a shade. A Feejee once, in
+presence of a missionary, took a weapon from the grave of a buried
+companion, saying, "The ghost of the club has gone with him." The
+Iroquois tell of a woman who was chased by a ghost. She heard his
+faint war whoop, his spectre voice, and only escaped with her life
+because his war club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air.
+The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb.47 Nothing
+seemed to the Northman so noble as to enter Valhalla on horseback,
+with a numerous retinue, in his richest apparel and finest armor.
+It was firmly believed, Mallet says, that Odin himself had
+declared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the dead
+accompanied them to his palace.48 Before the Mohammedan era, on
+the death of an Arab, the finest camel he had owned was tied to a
+stake beside his grave, and left to expire of hunger over the body
+of his master, in order that, in the region into which death had
+introduced him, he should be supplied with his usual bearer.49 The
+Chinese who surpass all other people in the offerings and worship
+paid at the sepulchres of their ancestors make little paper
+houses, fill them with images of furniture, utensils, domestics,
+and all the appurtenances of the family economy, and then burn
+them, thus passing them into the invisible state for the use of
+the deceased whom they mourn and honor.50 It is a touching thought
+with the Greenlanders, when a child dies, to bury a dog with him
+as a guide to the land of souls; for, they say, the dog is able to
+find his way anywhere.51 The shadow of the faithful servant guides
+the shadow of the helpless child to heaven. In fancy, not without
+a moved heart, one sees this spiritual Bernard dog bearing the
+ghost child on his back, over the spectral Gothard of death, safe
+into the sheltering hospice of the Greenland paradise.
+
+It is strange to notice the meeting of extremes in the rude
+antithetical correspondence between Plato's doctrine of archetypal
+ideas, the immaterial patterns of earthly things, and the belief
+of savages in the ghosts of clubs, arrows, sandals, and
+provisions. The disembodied soul of the philosopher, an eternal
+idea, turns from the empty illusions of matter to nourish itself
+with the substance of real truth. The spectre of the Mohawk
+devours the spectre of the haunch of roast venison hung over his
+grave. And why should not the two shades be conceived, if either?
+
+"Pig, bullock, goose, must have their goblins too,
+Else ours would have to go without their dinners:
+If that starvation doctrine were but true,
+How hard the fate of gormandizing sinners!"
+
+The conception of ghosts has been still further introduced also
+into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop
+Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he too
+was an idealist; for his ultimate ratios terms only appearing with
+the
+
+47 Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, vol. i. ch. 1.
+
+48 Northern Antiquities, ch. 10.
+
+49 Lamartine, History of Turkey, book i. ch. 10.
+
+50 Kidd, China, sect. 3.
+
+51 Crantz, History of Greenland, book iii. ch. 6, sect. 47.
+
+
+disappearance of the forms in whose relationship they consist were
+but the ghosts of departed quantities! It may be added here that,
+according to the teachings of physiological psychology, all
+memories or recollected ideas are literally the ghosts of departed
+sensations.
+
+We have thus seen that the conjuring force of fear, with its dread
+apparitions, the surmising, half articulate struggles of
+affection, the dreams of memory, the lights and groups of poetry,
+the crude germs of metaphysical speculation, the deposits of the
+inter action of human experience and phenomenal nature, now in
+isolated fragments, again, huddled indiscriminately together
+conspire to compose the barbarian notions of a future life.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+DRUIDIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THAT strange body of men, commonly known as the Druids, who
+constituted what may, with some correctness, be called the Celtic
+priesthood, were the recognised religious teachers throughout
+Gaul, Armorica, a small part of Germany on the southern border,
+all Great Britain, and some neighboring islands. The notions in
+regard to a future life put forth by them are stated only in a
+very imperfect manner by the Greek and Roman authors in whose
+surviving works we find allusions to the Druids or accounts of the
+Celts. Several modern writers especially Borlase, in his
+Antiquities of Cornwall1 have collected all these references from
+Diodorus, Strabo, Procopius, Tacitus, Casar, Mela, Valerius
+Maximus, and Marcellinus. It is therefore needless to cite the
+passages here, the more so as, even with the aid of all the
+analytic and constructive comments which can be fairly made upon
+them, they afford us only a few general views, leaving all the
+details in profound obscurity. The substance of what we learn from
+these sources is this. First, that the Druids possessed a body of
+science and speculation comprising the doctrine of immortality,
+which they taught with clearness and authority. Secondly, that
+they inculcated the belief in a future life in inseparable
+connection with the great dogma of metempsychosis. Thirdly, that
+the people held such cheerful and attractive views of the future
+state, and held them with such earnestness, that they wept around
+the newborn infant and smiled around the corpse; that they
+encountered death without fear or reluctance. This reversal of
+natural sentiments shows the tampering of a priesthood who had
+motives.
+
+A somewhat more minute conception of the Druidic view of the
+future life is furnished us by an old mythologic tale of Celtic
+origin.2 Omitting the story, as irrelevant to our purpose, we
+derive from it the following ideas. The soul, on being divested of
+its earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed of
+the souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads of
+armies, inspiring courage or striking terror. Not yet freed from
+terrestrial affections, they mingle in the passions and affairs of
+men. Vainly they strive to soar above the atmosphere; an
+impassable wall of sapphire resists their wings. In the moon,
+millions of souls traverse tremendous plains of ice, losing all
+perception but that of simple existence, forgetting the adventures
+they have passed through and are about to recommence. During
+eclipses, on long tubes of darkness they return to the earth, and,
+revived by a beam of light from the all quickening sun, enter
+newly formed bodies, and begin again the career of life. The disk
+of the sun consists of an assemblage of pure souls swimming in an
+ocean of bliss. Souls sullied with earthly impurities are to be
+purged by repeated births and probations till the last stain is
+removed, and they are all finally fitted to ascend to a succession
+of spheres still higher than the sun, whence they can never sink
+again to reside in the circle of the lower globes and grosser
+atmosphere.
+
+1 Book ii. ch. 14.
+
+2 Davies, Celtic Researches, appendix, pp. 558-561.
+
+
+These representations are neither Gothic nor Roman, but Celtic.
+
+But a far more adequate exposition of the Druidic doctrine of the
+soul's destinies has been presented to us through the translation
+of some of the preserved treasures of the old Bardic lore of
+Wales. The Welsh bards for hundreds of years were the sole
+surviving representatives of the Druids. Their poems numerous
+manuscripts of which, with apparent authentication of their
+genuineness, have been published and explained contain quite full
+accounts of the tenets of Druidism, which was nowhere else so
+thoroughly systematized and established as in ancient Britain.3
+The curious reader will find this whole subject copiously treated,
+and all the materials furnished, in the "Myvyrian Archaology of
+Wales," a work in two huge volumes, published at London at the
+beginning of the present century. After the introduction and
+triumph of Christianity in Britain, for several centuries the two
+systems of thought and ritual mutually influenced each other,
+corrupting and corrupted.4 A striking example in point is this.
+The notion of a punitive and remedial transmigration belonged to
+Druidism. Now, Taliesin, a famous Welsh bard of the sixth century,
+locates this purifying metempsychosis in the Hell of Christianity,
+whence the soul gradually rises again to felicity, the way for it
+having been opened by Christ! Cautiously eliminating the Christian
+admixtures, the following outline, which we epitomize from the
+pioneer5 of modern scholars to the Welsh Bardic literature,
+affords a pretty clear knowledge of that portion of the Druidic
+theology relating to the future life.
+
+There are, says one of the Bardic triads, three circles of
+existence. First, the Circle of Infinity, where of living or dead
+there is nothing but God, and which none but God can traverse.
+Secondly, the Circle of Metempsychosis, where all things that live
+are derived from death. This circle has been traversed by man.
+Thirdly, the Circle of Felicity, where all things spring from
+life. This circle man shall hereafter traverse. All animated
+beings originate in the lowest point of existence, and, by regular
+gradations through an ascending series of transmigrations, rise to
+the highest state of perfection possible for finite creatures.
+Fate reigns in all the states below that of humanity, and they are
+all necessarily evil. In the states above humanity, on the
+contrary, unmixed good so prevails that all are necessarily good.
+But in the middle state of humanity, good and evil are so balanced
+that liberty results; and free will and consequent responsibility
+are born. Beings who in their ascent have arrived at the state of
+man, if, by purity, humility, love, and righteousness, they keep
+the laws of the Creator, will, after death, rise into more
+glorious spheres, and will continue to rise still higher, until
+they reach the final destination of complete and endless
+happiness. But if, while in the state of humanity, one perverts
+his reason and will, and attaches himself to evil, he will, on
+dying, fall into such a state of animal existence as corresponds
+with the baseness of his soul. This baseness may be so great as to
+precipitate him to the lowest point of being; but he shall climb
+thence through a series of births best fitted to free him from his
+evil propensities. Restored to the probationary state, he may fall
+again; but, though this should occur again and again
+
+3 Sketch of British Bardism, prefixed to Owen's translation of the
+Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen.
+
+4 Herbert, Essay on the Neo Druidic Heresy in Britannia.
+
+5 Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, by Edward Williams, vol. ii. notes,
+pp. 194-256.
+
+
+for a million of ages, the path to happiness still remains open,
+and he shall at last infallibly arrive at his preordained
+felicity, and fall nevermore. In the states superior to humanity,
+the soul recovers and retains the entire recollection of its
+former lives.
+
+We will quote a few illustrative triads. There are three necessary
+purposes of metempsychosis: to collect the materials and
+properties of every nature; to collect the knowledge of every
+thing; to collect power towards removing whatever is pernicious.
+The knowledge of three things will subdue and destroy evil:
+knowledge of its cause, its nature, and its operation. Three
+things continually dwindle away: the Dark, the False, the Dead.
+Three things continually increase: Light, Truth, Life.
+
+These will prevail, and finally absorb every thing else. The soul
+is an inconceivably minute particle of the most refined matter,
+endowed with indestructible life, at the dissolution of one body
+passing, according to its merits, into a higher or lower stage of
+existence, where it expands itself into that form which its
+acquired propensities necessarily give it, or into that animal in
+which such propensities naturally reside. The ultimate states of
+happiness are ceaselessly undergoing the most delightful
+renovations, without which, indeed, no finite being could endure
+the tedium of eternity. These are not, like the death of the lower
+states, accompanied by a suspension of memory and of conscious
+identity. All the innumerable modes of existence, after being
+cleansed from every evil, will forever remain as beautiful
+varieties in the creation, and will be equally esteemed, equally
+happy, equally fathered by the Creator. The successive occupation
+of these modes of existence by the celestial inhabitants of the
+Circle of Felicity will be one of the ways of varying what would
+otherwise be the intolerable monotony of eternity. The creation is
+yet in its infancy. The progressive operation of the providence of
+God will bring every being up from the great Deep to the point of
+liberty, and will at last secure three things for them: namely,
+what is most beneficial, what is most desired, and what is most
+beautiful. There are three stabilities of existence: what cannot
+be otherwise, what should not be otherwise, what cannot be
+imagined better; and in these all shall end, in the Circle of
+Felicity.
+
+Such is a hasty synopsis of what here concerns us in the theology
+of the Druids. In its ground germs it was, it seems to us,
+unquestionably imported into Celtic thought and Cymrian song from
+that prolific and immemorial Hindu mind which bore Brahmanism and
+Buddhism as its fruit. Its ethical tone, intellectual elevation,
+and glorious climax are not unworthy that free hierarchy of
+minstrel priests whose teachings were proclaimed, as their
+assemblies were held, "in the face of the sun and in the eye of
+the light," and whose thrilling motto was, "THE TRUTH AGAINST THE
+WORLD."
+
+The latest publication on the subject of old Welsh literature is
+"Taliesin; or, The Bards and Druids of Britain." The author, D. W.
+Nash, is obviously familiar with his theme, and he throws much
+light on many points of it. His ridicule of the arbitrary tenets
+and absurdities which Davies, Pughe, and others have taught in all
+good faith as Druidic lore and practice is richly deserved. But,
+despite the learning and acumen displayed in his able and valuable
+volume, we must think Mr. Nash goes wholly against the record in
+denying the doctrine of metempsychosis to the Druidic system, and
+goes clearly beyond the record in charging Edward Williams and
+others with forgery and fraud in their representations of ancient
+Bardic doctrines.6 In support of such grave charges direct evidence
+is needed; only suspicious circumstances are adduced. The non
+existence of public documents is perfectly reconcilable with
+the existence of reliable oral accounts preserved by the initiated
+few, one of whom Williams, with seeming sincerity, claimed to be.
+
+6 Taliesin, ch. iv.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SCANDINAVIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+MANY considerations combine to make it seem likely that at an
+early period a migration took place from Southern Asia to Northern
+Europe, which constituted the commencement of what afterwards grew
+to be the great Gothic family. The correspondence of many of the
+leading doctrines and symbols of the Scandinavian mythology with
+well known Persian and Buddhist notions notions of a purely
+fanciful and arbitrary character is too peculiar, apparently, to
+admit of any other explanation.1 But the germs of thought and
+imagination transplanted thus from the warm and gorgeous climes of
+the East to the snowy mountains of Norway and the howling ridges
+of Iceland, obtained a fresh development, with numerous
+modifications and strange additions, from the new life, climate,
+scenery, and customs to which they were there exposed. The
+temptation to predatory habits and strife, the necessity for an
+intense though fitful activity arising from their geographical
+situation, the fierce spirit nourished in them by their actual
+life, the tremendous phenomena of the Arctic world around them,
+all these influences break out to our view in the poetry, and are
+reflected by their results in the religion, of the Northmen.
+
+From the flame world, Muspelheim, in the south, in which Surtur,
+the dread fire king, sits enthroned, flowed down streams of heat.
+From the mist world, Niflheim, in the north, in whose central
+caldron, Hvergelmir, dwells the gloomy dragon Nidhogg, rose floods
+of cold vapor. The fire and mist meeting in the yawning abyss,
+Ginungagap, after various stages of transition, formed the earth.
+There were then three principal races of beings: men, whose
+dwelling was Midgard; Jotuns, who occupied Utgard; and the Asir,
+whose home was Asgard. The Jotuns, or demons, seem to have been
+originally personifications of darkness, cold, and storm, the
+disturbing forces of nature, whatever is hostile to fruitful life
+and peace. They were frost giants ranged in the outer wastes
+around the habitable fields of men. The Asir, or gods, on the
+other hand, appear to have been personifications of light, and
+law, and benignant power, the orderly energies of the universe.
+Between the Jotuns and the Asir there is an implacable contest.2
+The rainbow, Bifrost, is a bridge leading from earth up to the
+skyey dwelling place of the Asir; and their sentinel, Heimdall,
+whose senses are so acute that he can hear the grass spring in the
+meadows and the wool grow on the backs of the sheep, keeps
+incessant watch upon it. Their chief deity, the father Zeus of the
+Northern pantheon, was Odin, the god of war, who wakened the
+spirit of battle by flinging his spear over the heads of the
+people, its inaudible hiss from heaven being as the song of Ate
+let loose on earth. Next in rank was Thor, the personification of
+the exploding tempest. The crashing echoes of the thunder are his
+chariot wheels rattling through the cloudy halls of Thrudheim.
+Whenever the lightning strikes a cliff or an iceberg, then Thor
+has flung his hammer, Mjolnir, at Joton's head.
+
+1 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, pp. 452, 463-464.
+
+2 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. ii.
+
+
+Balder was the god of innocence and gentleness, fairest,
+kindest, purest of beings. Light emanated from him, and
+all things loved him. After Christianity was established in the
+North, Jesus was called the White Christ, or the new Balder. The
+appearance of Balder amidst the frenzied and bloody divinities of
+the Norse creed is beautiful as the dew cool moon hanging calmly
+over the lurid storm of Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in the
+Wreath of the Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest
+was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity,
+would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the
+Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the
+half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and
+evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor
+on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his own
+kith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth environing sea,
+or in livid Helheim deep beneath the domain of breathing
+humanity.3
+
+With a Jotun woman, Angerbode, or Messenger of Evil, Loki begets
+three fell children. The first is Fenris, a savage wolf, so large
+that nothing but space can hold him. The second is Jormungandur,
+who, with his tail in his mouth, fills the circuit of the ocean.
+He is described by Sir Walter Scott as
+
+"That great sea snake, tremendous curl'd, Whose monstrous circle
+girds the world."
+
+The third is Hela, the grim goddess of death, whose ferocious
+aspect is half of a pale blue and half of a ghastly white, and
+whose empire, stretching below the earth through Niflheim, is full
+of freezing vapors and discomfortable sights. Her residence is the
+spacious under world; her court yard, faintness; her threshold,
+precipice; her door, abyss; her hall, pain; her table, hunger; her
+knife, starvation; her man servant, delay; her handmaid, slowness;
+her bed, sickness; her pillow, anguish; and her canopy, curse.
+Still lower than her house is an abode yet more fearful and
+loathsome. In Nastrond, or strand of corpses, stands a hall, the
+conception of which is prodigiously awful and enormously
+disgusting. It is plaited of serpents' backs, wattled together
+like wicker work, whose heads turn inwards, vomiting poison. In
+the lake of venom thus deposited within these immense wriggling
+walls of snakes the worst of the damned wade and swim.
+
+High up in the sky is Odin's hall, the magnificent Valhalla, or
+temple of the slain. The columns supporting its ceiling are
+spears. It is roofed with shields, and the ornaments on its
+benches are coats of mail. The Valkyrs are Odin's battle maids,
+choosers of heroes for his banquet rooms. With helmets on their
+heads, in bloody harness, mounted on shadowy steeds, surrounded by
+meteoric lightnings, and wielding flaming swords, they hover over
+the conflict and point the way to Valhalla to the warriors who
+fall. The valiant souls thus received to Odin's presence are
+called Einheriar, or the elect. The Valkyrs, as white clad virgins
+with flowing ringlets, wait on them in the capacity of cup
+bearers. Each morning, at the crowing
+
+3 Oehlenschlager, Gods of the North. This celebrated and brilliant
+poem, with the copious notes in Frye's translation, affords the
+English reader a full conception of the Norse pantheon and its
+salient adventures.
+
+
+of a huge gold combed cock, the well armed Einheriar rush through
+Valhalla's five hundred and forty doors into a great court yard,
+and pass the day in merciless fighting. However pierced and hewn
+in pieces in these fearful encounters, at evening every wound is
+healed, and they return into the hall whole, and are seated,
+according to their exploits, at a luxurious feast. The
+perennial boar Sehrimnir, deliciously cooked by Andrimnir, though
+devoured every night, is whole again every morning and ready to be
+served anew. The two highest joys these terrible berserkers and
+vikings knew on earth composed their experience in heaven: namely,
+a battle by day and a feast by night. It is a vulgar error, long
+prevalent, that the Valhalla heroes drink out of the skulls of
+their enemies. This notion, though often refuted, still lingers in
+the popular mind. It arose from the false translation of a phrase
+in the death song of Ragnar Lodbrok, the famous sea king, "Soon
+shall we drink from the curved trees of the head," which, as a
+figure for the usual drinking horns, was erroneously rendered by
+Olaus Wormius, "Soon shall we drink from the hollow cups of
+skulls." It is not the heads of men, but the horns of beasts, from
+which the Einheriar quaff Heidrun's mead.4
+
+No women being ever mentioned as gaining admission to Valhalla or
+joining in the joys of the Einheriar, some writers have affirmed
+that, according to the Scandinavian faith, women had no immortal
+souls, or, at all events, were excluded from heaven. The charge is
+as baseless in this instance as when brought against
+Mohammedanism. Valhalla was the exclusive abode of the most daring
+champions; but Valhalla was not the whole of heaven. Vingolf, the
+Hall of Friends, stood beside the Hall of the Slain, and was the
+assembling place of the goddesses.5 There, in the palace of Freya,
+the souls of noble women were received after death. The elder Edda
+says that Thor guided Roska, a swift footed peasant girl who had
+attended him as a servant on various excursions, to Freya's bower,
+where she was welcomed, and where she remained forever. The virgin
+goddess Gefjone, the Northern Diana, also had a residence in
+heaven, and all who died maidens repaired thither.6 The presence
+of virgin throngs with Gefjone, and the society of noble matrons
+in Vingolf, shed a tender gleam across the carnage and carousal of
+Valhalla. More is said of the latter the former is scarcely
+visible to us now because the only record we have of the Norse
+faith is that contained in the fragmentary strains of ferocious
+Skalds, who sang chiefly to warriors, and the staple matter of
+whose songs was feats of martial prowess or entertaining
+mythological stories. Furthermore, there is above the heaven of
+the Asir a yet higher heaven, the abode of the far removed and
+inscrutable being, the rarely named Omnipotent One, the true All
+Father, who is at last to come forth above the ruins of the
+universe to judge and sentence all creatures and to rebuild a
+better world. In this highest region towers the imperishable gold
+roofed hall, Gimle, brighter than the sun. There is no hint
+anywhere in the Skaldic strains that good women are repulsed from
+this dwelling.
+
+According to the rude morality of the people and the time, the
+contrasted conditions of admission to the upper paradise or
+condemnation to the infernal realm were the admired
+
+4 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, p. 65.
+
+5 Keyser, Religion of the Northmen, trans. by Pennock, p. 149.
+
+6 Pigott, p. 245.
+
+
+virtues of strength, open handed frankness, reckless audacity, or
+the hated vices of feebleness, cowardice, deceit, humility. Those
+who have won fame by puissant feats and who die in battle are
+snatched by the Valkyrs from the sod to Valhalla. To die in arms
+is to be chosen of Odin,
+
+"In whose hall of gold The steel clad ghosts their wonted orgies
+hold. Some taunting jest begets the war of words: In clamorous
+fray they grasp their gleamy swords, And, as upon the earth, with
+fierce delight By turns renew the banquet and the fight."
+
+All, on the contrary, who, after lives of ignoble labor or
+despicable ease, die of sickness, sink from their beds to the
+dismal house of Hela. In this gigantic vaulted cavern the air
+smells like a newly stirred grave; damp fogs rise, hollow sighs
+are heard, the only light comes from funeral tapers held by
+skeletons; the hideous queen, whom Thor eulogizes as the Scourger
+of Cowards, sits on a throne of skulls, and sways a sceptre, made
+of a dead man's bone bleached in the moonlight, over a countless
+multitude of shivering ghosts.7 But the Norse moralists plunge to
+a yet darker doom those guilty of perjury, murder, or adultery. In
+Nastrond's grisly hail, which is shaped of serpents' spines, and
+through whose loop holes drops of poison drip, where no sunlight
+ever reaches, they welter in a venom sea and are gnawed by the
+dragon Nidhogg.8 In a word, what to the crude moral sense of the
+martial Goth seemed piety, virtue, led to heaven; what seemed
+blasphemy, baseness, led to hell.
+
+The long war between good and evil, light and darkness, order and
+discord, the Asir and the Jotuns, was at last to reach a fatal
+crisis and end in one universal battle, called Ragnarokur, or the
+"Twilight of the Gods," whose result would be the total
+destruction of the present creation. Portentous inklings of this
+dread encounter were abroad among all beings. A shuddering
+anticipation of it sat in a lowering frown of shadow on the brows
+of the deities. In preparation for Ragnarokur, both parties
+anxiously secured all the allies they could. Odin therefore
+joyously welcomes every valiant warrior to Valhalla, as a recruit
+for his hosts on that day when Fenris shall break loose. When
+Hakon Jarl fell, the Valkyrs shouted, "Now does the force of the
+gods grow stronger when they have brought Hakon to their home." A
+Skald makes Odin say, on the death of King Eirilc Blood Axe, as an
+excuse for permitting such a hero to be slain, "Our lot is
+uncertain: the gray wolf gazes on the host of the gods;" that is,
+we shall need help at Ragnarokur. But as all the brave and
+magnanimous champions received to Valhalla were enlisted on the
+side of the Asir, so all the miserable cowards, invalids, and
+wretches doomed to Hela's house would fight for the Jotuns. From
+day to day the opposed armies, above and below, increase in
+numbers. Some grow impatient, some tremble. When Balder dies, and
+the ship Nagelfra is completed, the hour of infinite suspense will
+strike. Nagelfra is a vessel for the conveyance of the hosts of
+frost giants to the battle. It is to be built of dead men's nails:
+therefore no one should die with unpaired nails, for if he does he
+
+7 Pigott, pp. 137, 138.
+
+8 The Voluspa, strophes 34, 35.
+
+
+furnishes materials for the construction of that ship which men
+and gods wish to have finished as late as possible.9
+
+At length Loki treacherously compasses the murder of Balder. The
+frightful foreboding which at once flies through all hearts finds
+voice in the dark "Raven Song" of Odin. Having chanted this
+obscure wail in heaven, he mounts his horse and rides down the
+bridge to Helheim. With resistless incantations he raises from the
+grave, where she has been interred for ages, wrapt in snows, wet
+with the rains and the dews, an aged vala or prophetess, and
+forces her to answer his questions. With appalling replies he
+returns home, galloping up the sky. And now the crack of doom is
+at hand. Heimdall hurries up and down the bridge Bifrost, blowing
+his horn till its rousing blasts echo through the universe. The
+wolf Skoll, from whose pursuit the frightened sun has fled round
+the heavens since the first dawn, overtakes and devours his bright
+prey. Nagelfra, with the Jotun hosts on board, sails swiftly from
+Utgard. Loki advances at the head of the troops of Hela. Fenris
+snaps his chain and rushes forth with jaws so extended that the
+upper touches the firmament, while the under rests on the earth;
+and he would open them wider if there were room. Jormungandur
+writhes his entire length around Midgard, and, lifting his head,
+blows venom over air and sea. Suddenly, in the south, heaven
+cleaves asunder, and through the breach the sons of Muspel, the
+flame genii, ride out on horseback with Surtur at their head, his
+sword outflashing the sun. Now Odin leads forward the Asir and the
+Einheriar, and on the predestined plain of Vigrid the strife
+commences. Heimdall and Loki mutually slay each other. Thor kills
+Jormungandur; but as the monster expires he belches a flood of
+venom, under which the matchless thunder god staggers and falls
+dead. Fenris swallows Odin, but is instantly rent in twain by
+Vidar, the strong silent one, Odin's dumb son, who well avenges
+his father on the wolf by splitting the jaws that devoured him.
+Then Surtur slings fire abroad, and the reek rises around all
+things. Iggdrasill, the great Ash Tree of Existence, totters, but
+stands. All below perishes. Finally, the unnamable Mighty One
+appears, to judge the good and the bad. The former hie from fading
+Valhalla to eternal Gimle, where all joy is to be theirs forever;
+the latter are stormed down from Hela to Nastrond, there, "under
+curdling mists, in a snaky marsh whose waves freeze black and thaw
+in blood, to be scared forever, for punishment, with terrors ever
+new." All strife vanishes in endless peace. By the power of All
+Father, a new earth, green and fair, shoots up from the sea, to be
+inhabited by a new race of men free from sorrow. The foul, spotted
+dragon Nidhogg flies over the plains, bearing corpses and Death
+itself away upon his wings, and sinks out of sight.10
+
+It has generally been asserted, in consonance with the foregoing
+view, that the Scandinavians believed that the good and the bad,
+respectively in Gimle and Nastrond, would experience everlasting
+rewards and punishments. But Blackwell, the recent editor of
+Percy's translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities as published
+in Bohn's Antiquarian Library, argues with great force against the
+correctness of the assertion.11 The point is
+
+9 Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, s. 775, note.
+
+10 Keyser, Religion of the Northmen, part i. ch. vi.
+
+11 Pp. 497-503.
+
+
+dubious; but it is of no great importance, since we know that the
+spirit and large outlines of their faith have been reliably set
+forth. That faith, rising from the impetuous blood and rude mind
+of the martial race of the North, gathering wonderful
+embellishments from the glowing imagination of the Skalds,
+reacting, doubly nourished the fierce valor and fervid fancy from
+which it sprang. It drove the dragon prows of the Vikings
+marauding over the seas. It rolled the Goths' conquering squadrons
+across the nations, from the shores of Finland and Skager Rack to
+the foot of the Pyrenees and the gates of Rome. The very ferocity
+with which it blazed consumed itself, and the conquest of the
+flickering faith by Christianity was easy. During the dominion of
+this religion, the earnest sincerity with which its disciples
+received it appears alike from the fearful enterprises it prompted
+them to, the iron hardihood and immeasurable contempt of death it
+inspired in them, and the superstitious observances which, with
+pains and expenses, they scrupulously kept. They buried, with the
+dead, gold, useful implements, ornaments, that they might descend,
+furnished and shining, to the halls of Hela. With a chieftain they
+buried a pompous horse and splendid armor, that he might ride like
+a warrior into Valhalla. The true Scandinavian, by age or sickness
+deprived of dying in battle, ran himself through, or flung himself
+from a precipice, in this manner to make amends for not expiring
+in armed strife, if haply thus he might snatch a late seat among
+the Einheriar. With the same motive the dying sea king had himself
+laid on his ship, alone, and launched away, with out stretched
+sails, with a slow fire in the hold, which, when he was fairly out
+at sea, should flame up and, as Carlyle says, "worthily bury the
+old hero at once in the sky and in the ocean." Surely then, if
+ever, "the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent
+took it by force."
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ETRUSCAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+ALTHOUGH the living form and written annals of Etruria perished
+thousands of years ago, and although but slight references to her
+affairs have come down to us in the documents of contemporary
+nations, yet, through a comparatively recent acquisition of facts,
+we have quite a distinct and satisfactory knowledge of her
+condition and experience when her power was palmiest. We follow
+the ancient Etruscans from the cradle to the tomb, perceiving
+their various national costumes, peculiar physiognomies, names and
+relationships, houses, furniture, ranks, avocations, games, dying
+scenes, burial processions, and funeral festivals. And, further
+than this, we follow their souls into the world to come, behold
+them in the hands of good or evil spirits, brought to judgment and
+then awarded their deserts of bliss or woe. This knowledge has
+been derived from their sepulchres, which still resist the
+corroding hand of Time when nearly every thing else Etruscan has
+mingled with the ground.1 They hewed their tombs in the living
+rock of cliffs and hills, or reared them of massive masonry. They
+painted or carved the walls with descriptive and symbolic scenes,
+and crowded their interiors with sarcophagi, cinerary urns, vases,
+goblets, mirrors, and a thousand other articles covered with
+paintings and sculptures rich in information of their authors.
+From a study of these things, lately disinterred in immense
+quantities, has been constructed, for the most part, our present
+acquaintance with this ancient people. Strange that, when the
+whole scene of life has passed away, a sepulchral world should
+survive and open itself to reveal the past and instruct the
+future! We seem to see, rising from her tombs, and moving solemnly
+among the mounds where all she knew or cared for has for so many
+ages been inurned, the ghost of a mighty people. With dejected air
+she leans on a ruined temple and muses; and her shadowy tears fall
+silently over what was and is not.
+
+The Etruscans were accustomed to bury their deceased outside their
+walls; and sometimes the city of the living was thus surrounded by
+a far reaching city of the dead. At this day the decaying fronts
+of the houses of the departed, for miles upon miles along the
+road, admonish the living traveller. These stone hewn sepulchres
+crowd nearly every hill and glen. Whole acres of them are also
+found upon the plains, covered by several feet of earth, where
+every spring the plough passes over them, and every autumn the
+harvest waves; but the dust beneath reposes well, and knows
+nothing of this.
+
+"Time buries graves. How strange! a buried grave! Death cannot
+from more death its own dead empire save."
+
+The houses of the dead were built in imitation of the houses of
+the living, only on a smaller scale; and the interior arrangements
+were so closely copied that it is said the resemblance held in all
+but the light of day and the sound and motion of life. The images
+
+1 Mrs. Gray, Sepulchres of Etruria.
+
+
+painted or etched on the urns and sarcophagi that fill the
+sepulchres were portraits of the deceased, accurate likenesses,
+varying with age, sex, features, and expression. These personal
+portraits were taken and laid up here, doubtless, to preserve
+their remembrance when the original had crumbled to ashes. What a
+touching voice is this from antiquity, telling us that our poor,
+fond human nature was ever the same! The heart longed to be kept
+still in remembrance when the mortal frame was gone. But how vain
+the wish beyond the vanishing circle of hearts that returned its
+love! For, as we wander through those sepulchres now, thousands of
+faces thus preserved look down upon us with a mute plea, when
+every vestige of their names and characters is forever lost, and
+their very dust scattered long ago.
+
+Along the sides of the burial chamber were ranged massive stone
+shelves, or sometimes benches, or tables, upon which the dead were
+laid in a reclining posture, to sleep their long sleep. It often
+happens that on these rocky biers lie the helmet, breastplate,
+greaves, signet ring, and weapons, or, if it be a female, the
+necklace, ear rings, bracelet, and other ornaments, each in its
+relative place, when the body they once encased or adorned has not
+left a single fragment behind. An antiquary once, digging for
+discoveries, chanced to break through the ceiling of a tomb. He
+looked in; and there, to quote his own words, "I beheld a warrior
+stretched on a couch of rock, and in a few minutes I saw him
+vanish under my eyes; for, as the air entered the cemetery, the
+armor, thoroughly oxydized, crumbled away into most minute
+particles, and in a short time scarcely a trace of what I had seen
+was left on the couch. It is impossible to express the effect this
+sight produced upon me."
+
+An important element in the religion of Etruria was the doctrine
+of Genii, a system of household deities who watched over the
+fortunes of individuals and families, and who are continually
+shown on the engravings in the sepulchres as guiding, or actively
+interested in, all the incidents that happen to those under their
+care. It was supposed that every person had two genii allotted to
+him, one inciting him to good deeds, the other to bad, and both
+accompanying him after death to the judgment to give in their
+testimony and turn the scales of his fate. This belief, sincerely
+held, would obviously wield a powerful influence over their
+feelings in the conduct of life.
+
+The doctrine concerning the gods that prevailed in this ancient
+nation is learned partly from the classic authors, partly from
+sepulchral monumental remains. It was somewhat allied to that of
+Egypt, but much more to that of Rome, who indeed derived a
+considerable portion of her mythology from this source. As in
+other pagan countries, a multitude of deities were worshipped
+here, each having his peculiar office, form of representation, and
+cycle of traditions. It would be useless to specify all.2 The
+goddess of Fate was pictured with wings, showing her swiftness,
+and with a hammer and nail, to typify that her decrees were
+unalterably fixed. The name of the supreme god was Tinia. He was
+the central power of the world of divinities, and was always
+represented, like Jupiter Tonans, with a thunderbolt in his hand.
+There were twelve great "consenting gods," composing the council
+of Tinia, and called "The Senators of Heaven." They were pitiless
+beings, dwelling in the inmost recesses
+
+2 Muller, Die Etrusker, buch iii. kap. iv. sects. 7-14.
+
+
+of heaven, whose names it was not lawful to pronounce. Yet they
+were not deemed eternal, but were supposed to rise and fall
+together. There was another class, called "The Shrouded Gods,"
+still more awful, potent, and mysterious, ruling all things, and
+much like the inscrutable Necessity that filled the dark
+background of the old Greek religion. Last, but most feared and
+most prominent in the Etruscan mind, were the rulers of the lower
+regions, Mantus and Mania, the king and queen of the under world.
+Mantus was figured as an old man, wearing a crown, with wings at
+his shoulders, and a torch reversed in his hand. Mania was a
+fearful personage, frequently propitiated with human sacrifices.
+Macrobius says boys were offered up at her annual festival for a
+long time, till the heads of onions and poppies were substituted.3
+Intimately connected with these divinities was Charun, their chief
+minister, the conductor of souls into the realm of the future,
+whose dread image, hideous as the imagination could conceive, is
+constantly introduced in the sepulchral pictures, and who with his
+attendant demons well illustrates the terrible character of the
+superstition which first created, then deified, and then trembled
+before him. Who can become acquainted with such horrors as these
+without drawing a freer breath, and feeling a deeper gratitude to
+God, as he remembers how, for many centuries now, the religion of
+love has been redeeming man from subterranean darkness, hatred,
+and fright, to the happiness and peace of good will and trust in
+the sweet, sunlit air of day!
+
+That a belief in a future existence formed a prominent and
+controlling feature in the creed of the Etruscans4 is abundantly
+shown by the contents of their tombs. They would never have
+produced and preserved paintings, tracings, types, of such a
+character and in such quantities, had not the doctrines they
+shadow forth possessed a ruling hold upon their hopes and fears.
+The symbolic representations connected with this subject may be
+arranged in several classes. First, there is an innumerable
+variety of death bed scenes, many of them of the most touching and
+pathetic character, such as witnesses say can scarcely be looked
+upon without tears, others of the most appalling nature, showing
+perfect abandonment to fright, screams, sobbing, and despair. The
+last hour is described under all circumstances, coming to all
+sorts of persons, prince, priest, peasant, man, mother, and child.
+Patriarchs are dying surrounded by groups in every posture of
+grief; friends are waving a mournful farewell to their weeping
+lovers; wives are torn from the embrace of their husbands; some
+seem resigned and willingly going, others reluctant and driven in
+terror.
+
+The next series of engravings contain descriptions and emblems of
+the departure of the soul from this world, and of its passage into
+the next. There are various symbols of this mysterious transition:
+one is a snake with a boy riding upon its back, its amphibious
+nature plainly typifying the twofold existence allotted to man.
+The soul is also often shown muffled in a veil and travelling
+garb, seated upon a horse, and followed by a slave carrying a
+large sack of provisions, an emblem of the long and dreary journey
+about to be taken. Horses are depicted harnessed to cars in which
+disembodied spirits are seated, a token of the swift ride
+
+3 Saturnal. lib. i. cap. 7.
+
+4 Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, ch. xii.
+
+
+of the dead to their doom. Sometimes the soul is gently invited,
+or led, by a good spirit, sometimes beaten, or dragged away, by
+the squalid and savage Charun, the horrible death king, or one of
+his ministers; sometimes a good and an evil spirit are seen
+contending for the soul; sometimes the soul is seen, on its knees,
+beseeching the aid of its good genius and grasping at his
+departing wing, as, with averted face, he is retiring; and
+sometimes the good and the evil spirits are leading it away
+together, to abide the sentence of the tribunal of Mantus. Whole
+companies of souls are also set forth marching in procession,
+under the guidance of a winged genius, to their subterranean
+abode.
+
+Finally, there is a class of representations depicting the
+ultimate fate of souls after judgment has been passed. Some are
+shown seated at banquet, in full enjoyment, according to their
+ideas of bliss. Some are shown undergoing punishment, beaten with
+hammers, stabbed and torn by black demons. There are no proofs
+that the Etruscans believed in the translation of any soul to the
+abode of the gods above the sky, no signs of any path rising to
+the supernal heaven; but they clearly expected just discriminations
+to be made in the under world. Into that realm many gates are shown
+leading, some of them peaceful, inviting, surrounded by apparent
+emblems of deliverance, rest, and blessedness; others yawning,
+terrific, engirt by the heads of gnashing beasts and furies
+threatening their victim.
+
+"Shown is the progress of the guilty soul
+From earth's worn threshold to the throne of doom;
+Here the black genius to the dismal goal
+Drags the wan spectre from the unsheltering tomb,
+While from the side it never more may warn
+The better angel, sorrowing, flees forlorn.
+There (closed the eighth) seven yawning gates reveal
+The sevenfold anguish that awaits the lost.
+Closed the eighth gate, for there the happy dwell.
+No glimpse of joy beyond makes horror less."
+
+In these lines, from Bulwer's learned and ornate epic of King
+Arthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a future
+life is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts of
+it, and the impenetrable obscurity which enwraps the great sequel.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+EGYPTIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+IN attempting to understand the conceptions of the ancient
+inhabitants of Egypt on the subject of a future life, we are first
+met by the inquiry why they took such great pains to preserve the
+bodies of their dead. It has been supposed that no common motive
+could have animated them to such lavish expenditure of money,
+time, and labor as the process of embalming required. It has been
+taken for granted that only some recondite theological
+consideration could explain this phenomenon. Accordingly, it is
+now the popular belief that the Egyptians were so scrupulous in
+embalming their dead and storing them in repositories of eternal
+stone, because they believed that the departed souls would at some
+future time come back and revivify their former bodies, if these
+were kept from decay. This hypothesis seems to us as false as it
+is gratuitous. In the first place, there is no evidence of it
+whatever,  neither written testimony nor circumstantial hint.
+Herodotus tells us, "The Egyptians say the soul, on the
+dissolution of the body, always enters into some other animal then
+born, and, having passed in rotation through the various
+terrestrial, aquatic, and arial beings, again enters the body of a
+man then born."1 There is no assertion that, at the end of the
+three thousand years occupied by this circuit, the soul will re
+enter its former body. The plain inference, on the contrary, is
+that it will be born in a new body, as at each preceding step in
+the series of its transmigrations. Secondly, the mutilation of the
+body in embalming forbids the belief in its restoration to life.
+The brain was extracted, and the skull stuffed with cotton. The
+entrails were taken out, and sometimes, according to Porphyry2 and
+Plutarch,3 thrown into the Nile; sometimes, as modern examinations
+have revealed, bound up in four packages and either replaced in
+the cavity of the stomach or laid in four vases beside the mummy.
+It is absurd to attribute, without clear cause, to an enlightened
+people the belief that these stacks of brainless, eviscerated
+mummies, dried and shrunken in ovens, coated with pitch, bound up
+in a hundredfold bandages, would ever revive, and, inhabited by
+the same souls that fled them thirty centuries before, again walk
+the streets of Thebes! Besides, a third consideration demands
+notice. By the theory of metempsychosis universally acknowledged
+to have been held by the Egyptians it is taught that souls at
+death, either immediately, or after a temporary sojourn in hell or
+heaven has struck the balance of their merits, are born in fresh
+bodies; never that they return into their old ones. But the point
+is set beyond controversy by the discovery of inscriptions,
+accompanying pictures of scenes illustrating the felicity of
+blessed souls in heaven, to this effect: "Their bodies shall
+repose in their tombs forever; they live in the celestial regions
+eternally, enjoying the presence of the Supreme God." 4 A writer
+on this subject says, "A people who believed in the transmigration
+
+1 Herod. lib. ii. cap. 123.
+
+2 De Abstinentia, lib. iv. cap. 10.
+
+3 Banquet of the Seven Wise Men.
+
+4 Champollion, Descr. de l'Egypte, Antiq. tom ii. p. 132. Stuart's
+Trans. of Greppo's Essay, p. 262.
+
+
+of souls would naturally take extraordinary pains to preserve the
+body from putrefaction, in the hope of the soul again joining the
+body it had quitted." The remark is intrinsically untrue, because
+the doctrine of transmigration coexists in reconciled belief with
+the observed law of birth, infancy, and growth, not with the
+miracle of transition into reviving corpses. The notion is
+likewise historically refuted by the fact that the believers of
+that doctrine in the thronged East have never preserved the body,
+but at once buried or burned it. The whole Egyptian theology is
+much more closely allied to the Hindu, which excluded, than to the
+Persian, which emphasized, the resurrection of the body.
+
+Another theory which has been devised to explain the purpose of
+Egyptian embalming, is that "it was to unite the soul permanently
+to its body, and keep the vital principle from perishing or
+transmigrating; the body and soul ran together through the journey
+of the dead and its dread ordeal." 5 This arbitrary guess is
+incredible. The preservation of the body does not appear in any
+way not even to the rawest fancy to detain or unite the soul with
+it; for the thought is unavoidable that it is precisely the
+absence of the soul which constitutes death. Again: such an
+explanation of the motive for embalming cannot be correct, because
+in the hieroglyphic representations of the passage to the judgment
+the separate soul is often depicted as hovering over the body, 6
+or as kneeling before the judges, or as pursuing its adventures
+through the various realms of the creation. "When the body is
+represented," Champollion says, "it is as an aid to the spectator,
+and not as teaching a bodily resurrection. Sharpe's opinion that
+the picture of a bird poised over the mouth of a mummy, with the
+emblems of breath and life in its claws, implies the doctrine of a
+general physical resurrection, is an inferential leap of the most
+startling character. What proof is there that the symbol denotes
+this? Hundreds of paintings in the tombs show souls undergoing
+their respective allotments in the other world while their bodily
+mummies are quiet in the sepulchres of the present. In his
+treatise on "Isis and Osiris," Plutarch writes, "The Egyptians
+believe that while the bodies of eminent men are buried in the
+earth their souls are stars shining in heaven." It is equally
+nonsensical in itself and unwarranted by evidence to imagine that,
+in the Egyptian faith, embalming either retained the soul in the
+body or preserved the body for a future return of the soul. Who
+can believe that it was for either of those purposes that they
+embalmed the multitudes of animals whose mummies the explorer is
+still turning up? They preserved cats, hawks, bugs, crocodiles,
+monkeys, bulls, with as great pains as they did men.7 When the
+Canary Islands were first visited, it was found that their
+inhabitants had a custom of carefully embalming the dead. The same
+was the case among the Peruvians, whose vast cemeteries remain to
+this day crowded with mummies. But the expectation of a return of
+the souls into these preserved bodies is not to be ascribed to
+those peoples. Herodotus informs us that "the Ethiopians, having
+dried the bodies of their dead, coat them with white plaster,
+which they paint with colors to the likeness of the deceased and
+encase in a transparent substance. The dead, thus kept from being
+offensive, and yet plainly visible, are retained a
+
+5 Bonomi and Arundel on Egyptian Antiq., p. 46.
+
+6 Pl. xxxiii. in Lepsius' Todtenb. der. Agypter.
+
+7 Pettigrew, Hist of Egyptian Mummies, ch. xii.
+
+
+whole year in the houses of their nearest relatives. Afterwards
+they are carried out and placed upright in the tombs around the
+city." 8 It has been argued, because the Egyptians expended so
+much in preparing lasting tombs and in adorning their walls with
+varied embellishments, that they must have thought the soul
+remained in the body, a conscious occupant of the dwelling place
+provided for it.9 As well might it be argued that, because the
+ancient savage tribes on the coast of South America, who obtained
+their support by fishing, buried fish hooks and bait with their
+dead, they supposed the dead bodies occupied themselves in their
+graves by fishing! The adornment of the tomb, so lavish and varied
+with the Egyptians, was a gratification of the spontaneous
+workings of fancy and affection, and needs no far fetched
+explanation. Every nation has its funeral customs and its rites of
+sepulture, many of which would be as difficult of explanation as
+those of Egypt. The Scandinavian sea king was sometimes buried, in
+his ship, in a grave dug on some headland overlooking the ocean.
+The Scythians buried their dead in rolls of gold, sometimes
+weighing forty or fifty solid pounds. Diodorus the Sicilian says,
+"The Egyptians, laying the embalmed bodies of their ancestors in
+noble monuments, see the true visages and expressions of those who
+died ages before them. So they take almost as great pleasure in
+viewing their bodily proportions and the lineaments of their faces
+as if they were still living among them." 10 That instinct which
+leads us to obtain portraits of those we love, and makes us
+unwilling to part even with their lifeless bodies, was the cause
+of embalming. The bodies thus prepared, we know from the testimony
+of ancient authors, were kept in the houses of their children or
+kindred, until a new generation, "who knew not Joseph," removed
+them. Then nothing could be more natural than that the priesthood
+should take advantage of the custom, so associated with sacred
+sentiments, and throw theological sanctions over it, shroud it in
+mystery, and secure a monopoly of the power and profit arising
+from it. It is not improbable, too, as has been suggested, that
+hygienic considerations, expressing themselves in political laws
+and priestly precepts, may at first have had an influence in
+establishing the habit of embalming, to prevent the pestilences
+apt to arise in such a climate from the decay of animal
+substances.
+
+There is great diversity of opinion among Egyptologists on this
+point. One thinks that embalming was supposed to keep the soul in
+the body until after the funeral judgment and interment, but that,
+when the corpse was laid in its final receptacle, the soul
+proceeded to accompany the sun in its daily and nocturnal circuit,
+or to transmigrate through various animals and deities. Another
+imagines that the process of embalming was believed to secure the
+repose of the soul in the other world, exempt from
+transmigrations, so long as the body was kept from decay.11
+Perhaps the different notions on this subject attributed by modern
+authors to the Egyptians may all have prevailed among them at
+different times or among distinct sects. But it seems most likely,
+as we have said, that embalming first arose from physical and
+sentimental considerations naturally operating, rather than from
+any
+
+8 Lib. iii. cap. 24.
+
+9 Kenrick, Ancient Egypt, vol. i. ch. xxi. sect. iii.
+
+10 Lib. i. cap. 7.
+
+11 Library of Entertaining Knowledge, vol. ii. ch. iii.
+
+
+theological doctrine carefully devised; although, after the
+priesthood appropriated the business, it is altogether probable
+that they interwove it with an artificial and elaborate system of
+sacerdotal dogmas, in which was the hiding of the national power.
+
+The second question that arises is, What was the significance of
+the funeral ceremonies celebrated by the Egyptians over their
+dead? When the body had been embalmed, it was presented before a
+tribunal of forty two judges sitting in state on the eastern
+borders of the lake Acherusia. They made strict inquiry into the
+conduct and character of the deceased. Any one might make
+complaint against him, or testify in his behalf. If it was found
+that he had been wicked, had died in debt, or was otherwise
+unworthy, he was deprived of honorable burial and ignominiously
+thrown into a ditch. This was called Tartar, from the wailings the
+sentence produced among his relatives. But if he was found to have
+led an upright life, and to have been a good man, the honors of a
+regular interment were decreed him. The cemetery a large plain
+environed with trees and lined with canals lay on the western side
+of the lake, and was named Elisout, or rest. It was reached by a
+boat, the funeral barge, in which no one could cross without an
+order from the judges and the payment of a small fee. In these and
+other particulars some of the scenes supposed to be awaiting the
+soul in the other world were dramatically shadowed forth. Each
+rite was a symbol of a reality existing, in solemn correspondence,
+in the invisible state. What the priests did over the body on
+earth the judicial deities did over the soul in Amenthe. It seems
+plain that the Greeks derived many of their notions concerning the
+fate and state of the dead from Egypt. Hades corresponds with
+Amenthe; Pluto, with the subterranean Osiris; Mercury
+psychopompos, with Anubis, "the usher of souls;" Aacus, Minos, and
+Rhadamanthos, with the three assistant gods who help in weighing
+the soul and present the result to Osiris; Tartarus, to the ditch
+Tartar; Charon's ghost boat over the Styx, to the barge conveying
+the mummy to the tomb; Cerberus, to Oms; Acheron, to Acherusia;
+the Elysian Fields, to Elisout.12 Kenrick thinks the Greeks may
+have developed these views for themselves, without indebtedness to
+Egypt. But the notions were in existence among the Egyptians at
+least twelve hundred years before they can be traced among the
+Greeks.13 And they are too arbitrary and systematic to have been
+independently constructed by two nations. Besides, Herodotus
+positively affirms that they were derived from Egypt. Several
+other ancient authors also state this; and nearly every modern
+writer on the subject agrees in it.
+
+The triumphs of modern investigation into the antiquities of
+Egypt, unlocking the hieroglyphics and lifting the curtain from
+the secrets of ages, have unveiled to us a far more full and
+satisfactory view of the Egyptian doctrine of the future life than
+can be constructed from the narrow glimpses afforded by the
+accounts of the old Greek authorities. Three sources of knowledge
+have been laid open to us. First, the papyrus rolls, one of which
+was placed in the bosom of every mummy. This roll, covered with
+hieroglyphics, is called the funeral ritual, or book of the dead.
+It served as a passport through the burial rites. It contained the
+names of the deceased and his parents, a series of prayers he was
+to recite
+
+12 Spineto on Egyptian Antiq, Lectures IV., V.
+
+13 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 2d
+Series, vol. i. ch. 12.
+
+
+before the various divinities he would meet on his journey, and
+representations of some of the adventures awaiting him in the
+unseen state.14 Secondly, the ornamental cases in which the
+mummies are enclosed are painted all over with scenes setting
+forth the realities and events to which the soul of the dead
+occupant has passed in the other life.15 Thirdly, the various
+fates of souls are sculptured and painted on the walls in the
+tombs, in characters which have been deciphered during the present
+century:16
+
+"Those mystic, stony volumes on the walls long writ, Whose sense
+is late reveal'd to searching modern wit."
+
+Combining the information thus obtained, we learn that, according
+to the Egyptian representation, the soul is led by the god Thoth
+into Amenthe, the infernal world, the entrance to which lies in
+the extreme west, on the farther side of the sea, where the sun
+goes down under the earth. It was in accordance with this
+supposition that Herod caused to be engraved, on a magnificent
+monument erected to his deceased wife, the line, "Zeus, this
+blooming woman sent beyond the ocean." 17 At the entrance sits a
+wide throated monster, over whose head is the inscription, "This
+is the devourer of many who go into Amenthe, the lacerator of the
+heart of him who comes with sins to the house of justice." The
+soul next kneels before the forty two assessors of Osiris, with
+deprecating asseverations and intercessions. It then comes to the
+final trial in the terrible Hall of the two Truths, the approving
+and the condemning; or, as it is differently named, the Hall of
+the double Justice, the rewarding and the punishing. Here the
+three divinities Horns, Anubis, and Thoth proceed to weigh the
+soul in the balance. In one scale an image of Thmei, the goddess
+of Truth, is placed; in the other, a heart shaped vase,
+symbolizing the heart of the deceased with all the actions of
+his earthly life. Then happy is he "Who, weighed 'gainst Truth,
+down dips the awful scale."
+
+Thoth notes the result on a tablet, and the deceased advances with
+it to the foot of the throne on which sits Osiris, lord of the
+dead, king of Amenthe. He pronounces the decisive sentence, and
+his assistants see that it is at once executed. The condemned soul
+is either scourged back to the earth straightway, to live again in
+the form of a vile animal, as some of the emblems appear to
+denote; or plunged into the tortures of a horrid hell of fire and
+devils below, as numerous engravings set forth; or driven into the
+atmosphere, to be vexed and tossed by tempests, violently whirled
+in blasts and clouds, till its sins are expiated, and another
+probation granted through a renewed existence in human form.
+
+We have two accounts of the Egyptian divisions of the universe.
+According to the first view, they conceived the creation to
+consist of three grand departments. First came the earth, or zone
+of trial, where men live on probation. Next was the atmosphere, or
+zone of temporal
+
+14 Das Todtenbuch der Agypter, edited with an introduction by Dr.
+Lepsius.
+
+15 Ch. ix. of Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies.
+
+16 Champollion's Letter, dated Thebes, May 16, 1829. An abstract
+of this letter may be found in Stuart's trans. of Greppo's Essay
+on Champollion's Hieroglyphic System, appendix, note N.
+
+17 Basnage, Hist. of the Jews, lib. ii. ch. 12, sect. 19.
+
+
+punishment, where souls are afflicted for their sins. The ruler of
+this girdle of storms was Pooh, the overseer of souls in penance.
+Such a notion is found in some of the later Greek philosophers,
+and in the writings of the Alexandrian Jews, who undoubtedly drew
+it from the priestly science of Egypt. Every one will recollect
+how Paul speaks of "the prince of the power off the air." And
+Shakspeare makes the timid Claudio shrink from the verge of death
+with horror, lest his soul should, through ages,
+
+"Be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless
+violence round about The pendent world."
+
+After their purgation in this region, all the souls live again on
+earth by transmigration.18 The third realm was in the serene blue
+sky among the stars, the zone of blessedness, where the accepted
+dwell in immortal peace and joy. Eusebius says, "The Egyptians
+represented the universe by two circles, one within the other, and
+a serpent with the head of a hawk twining his folds around them,"
+thus forming three spheres, earth, firmament, divinity.
+
+But the representation most frequent and imposing is that which
+pictures the creation simply as having the earth in the centre,
+and the sun with his attendants as circulating around it in the
+brightness of the superior, and the darkness of the infernal,
+firmament. Souls at death pass down through the west into Amenthe,
+and are tried. If condemned, they are either sent back to the
+earth, or confined in the nether space for punishment. If
+justified, they join the blissful company of the Sun God, and rise
+with him through the east to journey along his celestial course.
+The upper hemisphere is divided into twelve equal parts,
+corresponding with the twelve hours of the day. At the gate of
+each of these golden segments a sentinel god is stationed, to whom
+the newly arriving soul must give its credentials to secure a
+passage. In like manner, the lower hemisphere is cut into the same
+number of gloomy sections, corresponding with the twelve hours of
+the night. Daily the chief divinity, in robes of light, traverses
+the beaming zones of the blessed, where they hunt and fish, or
+plough and sow, reap and gather, in the Fields of the Sun on the
+banks of the heavenly Nile. Nightly, arrayed in deep black from
+head to foot, he traverses the dismal zones of the damned, where
+they undergo appropriate retributions. Thus the future destiny of
+man was sublimely associated with the march of the sun through the
+upper and lower hemispheres.19 Astronomy was a part of the
+Egyptian's theology. He regarded the stars not figuratively, but
+literally, as spirits and pure genii; the great planets as
+deities. The calendar was a religious chart, each month, week,
+day, hour, being the special charge and stand point of a god.20
+
+There was much poetic beauty and ethical power in these doctrines
+and symbols. The necessity of virtue, the dread ordeals of the
+grave, the certainty of retribution, the mystic circuits of
+transmigration, a glorious immortality, the paths of planets and
+gods and souls through creation, all were impressively enounced,
+dramatically shown.
+
+18 Liber Metempsychosis Veterum Agyptiorum, edited and translated
+into Latin from the funeral papyri by H. Brugsch.
+
+19 L'Univers, Egypte Ancienne, par Champollion Figeac, pp. 123
+145.
+
+20 Agyptische Glaubenslehre von Dr. Ed. Roth, ss. 171, 174.
+
+
+"The Egyptain soul sail'd o'er the skyey sea
+In ark of crystal, mann'd by beamy gods,
+To drag the deeps of space and net the stars,
+Where, in their nebulous shoals, they shore the void
+And through old Night's Typhonian blindness shine.
+Then, solarized, he press'd towards the sun,
+And, in the heavenly Hades, hall of God,
+Had final welcome of the firmament."
+
+This solemn linking of the fate of man with the astronomic
+universe, this grand blending of the deepest of moral doctrines
+with the most august of physical sciences, plainly betrays the
+brain and hand of that hereditary hierarchy whose wisdom was the
+wonder of the ancient world. Osburn thinks the localization of
+Amenthe in the west may have arisen in the following way. Some
+superstitious Egyptians, travelling westwards, at twilight, on the
+great marshes haunted by the strange gray white ibis, saw troops
+of these silent, solemn, ghostlike birds, motionless or slow
+stalking, and conceived them to be souls waiting for the funeral
+rites to be paid, that they might sink with the setting sun to
+their destined abode.21
+
+That such a system of belief was too complex and elaborate to have
+been a popular development is evident. But that it was really held
+by the people there is no room to doubt. Parts of it were publicly
+enacted on festival days by multitudes numbering more than a
+hundred thousand. Parts of it were dimly shadowed out in the
+secret recesses of temples, surrounded by the most astonishing
+accompaniments that unrivalled learning, skill, wealth, and power
+could contrive. Its authority commanded the allegiance, its charm
+fascinated the imagination, of the people. Its force built the
+pyramids, and enshrined whole generations of Egypt's embalmed
+population in richly adorned sepulchres of everlasting rock. Its
+substance of esoteric knowledge and faith, in its form of exoteric
+imposture and exhibition, gave it vitality and endurance long. In
+the vortex of change and decay it sank at last. And now it is only
+after its secrets have been buried for thirty centuries that the
+exploring genius of modern times has brought its hidden
+hieroglyphics to light, and taught us what were the doctrines
+originally contained in the altar lore of those priestly schools
+which once dotted the plains of the Delta and studded the banks of
+eldest Nile, where now, disfigured and gigantic, the solemn
+
+"Old Syhinxes lift their countenances bland Athwart the river sea
+and sea of sand."
+
+21 Monumental History of Egypt, vol. i. ch. 8.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+BRAHMANIC AND BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+IN the Hindu views of the fate of the human soul, metaphysical
+subtlety and imaginative vastness, intellect and fancy, slavish
+tradition and audacious speculation, besotted ritualism and
+heaven storming spirituality, are mingled together on a scale of
+grandeur and intensity wholly without a parallel elsewhere in the
+literature or faith of the world. Brahmanism, with its hundred
+million adherents holding sway over India, and Buddhism, with
+its four hundred million disciples scattered over a dozen
+nations, from Java to Japan, and from the Ceylonese to the
+Samoyedes, practically considered, in reference to their actually
+received dogmas and aims pertaining to a future life, agree
+sufficiently to warrant us in giving them a general examination
+together. The chief difference between them will be explained in
+the sequel.
+
+The most ancient Hindu doctrine of the future fate of man, as
+given in the Vedas, was simple, rude, and very unlike the forms in
+which it has since prevailed. Professor Wilson says, in the
+introduction to his translation of the Rig Veda, that the
+references to this subject in the primeval Sanscrit scriptures are
+sparse and incomplete. But no one has so thoroughly elucidated
+this obscure question as Roth of Tubingen, in his masterly paper
+on the Morality of the Vedas, of which there is a translation, by
+Professor Whitney, in the Journal of the American Oriental
+Society.1 The results of his researches may be stated in few
+words.
+
+When a man dies, the earth is invoked to wrap his body up, as a
+mother wraps her child in her garment, and to lie lightly on him.
+He himself is addressed thus: "Go forth, go forth on the ancient
+paths which our fathers in old times have trodden: the two rulers
+in bliss, Yama and Varuna, shalt thou behold." Varuna judges all.
+He thrusts the wicked down into darkness; and not a hint or clew
+further of their doom is furnished. They were supposed either to
+be annihilated, as Professor Roth thinks the Vedas imply, or else
+to live as demons, in sin, blackness, and woe. The good go up to
+heaven and are glorified with a shining spiritual body like that
+of the gods. Yama, the first man, originator of the human race on
+earth, is the beginner and head of renewed humanity in another
+world, and is termed the Assembler of Men. It is a poetic and
+grand conception that the first one who died, leading the way,
+should be the patriarch and monarch of all who follow. The old
+Vedic hymns imply that the departed good are in a state of exalted
+felicity, but scarcely picture forth any particulars. The
+following passage, versified with strict fidelity to the original,
+is as full and explicit as any:
+
+Where glory never fading is, where is the world of heavenly light,
+The world of immortality, the everlasting, set me there!
+Where Yama reigns, Vivasvat's son, in the inmost sphere of heaven
+bright.
+Where those abounding waters flow, oh, make me but immortal there!
+Where there is freedom unrestrain'd, where the triple vault of
+heaven's in sight,
+Where worlds of brightest glory are, oh, make me but immortal
+there!
+Where pleasures and enjoyments are, where bliss and raptures ne'er
+take flight,
+Where all desires are satisfied, oh, make me but immortal there!
+
+1 Vol iii. pp. 342-346.
+
+
+But this form of doctrine long ago passed from the Hindu
+remembrance, lost in the multiplying developments and
+specifications of a mystical philosophy, and a teeming
+superstition nourished by an unbounded imagination.
+
+Both Brahmans and Buddhists conceive of the creation on the most
+enormous scale. Mount Meru rises from the centre of the earth to
+the height of about two millions of miles. On its summit is the
+city of Brahma, covering a space of fourteen thousand leagues, and
+surrounded by the stately cities of the regents of the spheres.
+Between Meru and the wall of stone forming the extreme
+circumference of the earth are seven concentric circles of rocks.
+Between these rocky bracelets are continents and seas. In some of
+the seas wallow single fishes thousands of miles in every
+dimension. The celestial spaces are occupied by a large number of
+heavens, called "dewa lokas," increasing in the glory and bliss of
+their prerogatives. The worlds below the earth are hells, called
+"naraka." The description of twenty eight of these, given in the
+Vishnu Purana,2 makes the reader "sup full of horrors." The
+Buddhist "Books of Ceylon" 3 tell of twenty six heavens placed in
+regular order above one another in the sky, crowded with all
+imaginable delights. They also depict, in the abyss underneath the
+earth, eight great hells, each containing sixteen smaller ones,
+the whole one hundred and thirty six composing one gigantic hell.
+The eight chief hells are situated over one another, each
+partially enclosing and overlapping that next beneath; and the
+sufferings inflicted on their unfortunate occupants are of the
+most terrific character. But these poor hints at the local
+apparatus of reward and punishment afford no conception whatever
+of the extent of their mythological scheme of the universe.
+
+They call each complete solar system a sakwala, and say that, if a
+wall were erected around the space occupied by a million millions
+of sakwalas, reaching to the highest heaven, and the entire space
+were filled with mustard seeds, a god might take these seeds, and,
+looking towards any one of the cardinal points, throw a single
+seed towards each sakwala until all the seeds were gone, and still
+there would be more sakwalas, in the same direction, to which no
+seed had been thrown, without considering those in the other three
+quarters of the heavens. In comparison with this Eastern vision of
+the infinitude of worlds, the wildest Western dreamer over the
+vistas opened by the telescope may hide his diminished head! Their
+other conceptions are of the same crushing magnitude, Thus, when
+the demons, on a certain occasion, assailed the gods, Siva using
+the Himalaya range for his bow, Vasuke for the string, Vishnu for
+his arrow, the earth for his chariot with the sun and moon for its
+wheels and the Vedas for its horses, the starry canopy for his
+banner with the tree of Paradise for its staff, Brahma for his
+charioteer, and the mysterious monosyllable Om for his whip
+reduced them all to ashes.4
+
+The five hundred million Brahmanic and Buddhist believers hold
+that all the gods, men, demons, and various grades of animal life
+occupying this immeasurable array of worlds compose one cosmic
+family. The totality of animated beings, from a detestable gnat to
+
+2 Wilson's trans. pp. 207-209.
+
+3 Upham's trans. vol. iii. pp. 8, 66, 159.
+
+4 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 429.
+
+
+thundering Indra, from the meanest worm to the supreme Buddha,
+constitute one fraternal race, by the unavoidable effects of the
+law of retribution constantly interchanging their residences in a
+succession of rising and sinking existences, ranging through all
+the earths, heavens, and hells of the universe, bound by the
+terrible links of merit and demerit in the phantasmagoric dungeon
+of births and deaths. The Vishnu Purana declares, "The universe,
+this whole egg of Brahma, is everywhere swarming with living
+creatures, all of whom are captives in the chains of acts." 5
+
+The one prime postulate of these Oriental faiths the ground
+principle, never to be questioned any more than the central and
+stationary position of the earth in the Ptolemaic system is that
+all beings below the Infinite One are confined in the circle of
+existence, the whirl of births and deaths, by the consequences of
+their virtues and vices. When a man dies, if he has an excess of
+good desert, he is born, as a superior being, in one of the
+heavens. According to the nature and degree of his merit, his
+heavenly existence is prolonged, or perhaps repeated many times in
+succession; or, if his next birth occurs on earth, it is under
+happy circumstances, as a sage or a king. But when he expires,
+should there, on the other hand, be an overbalance of ill desert,
+he is born as a demon in one of the hells, or may in repeated
+lives run the circuit of the hells; or, if he at once returns to
+the earth, it is as a beggar, a leprous outcast, a wretched
+cripple, or in the guise of a rat, a snake, or a louse.
+
+"The illustrious souls of great and virtuous men
+In godlike beings shall revive again;
+But base and vicious spirits wind their way
+In scorpions, vultures, sharks, and beasts of prey.
+The fair, the gay, the witty, and the brave,
+The fool, the coward, courtier, tyrant, slave,
+Each one in a congenial form, shall find
+A proper dwelling for his wandering mind."
+
+A specific evil is never cancelled by being counterbalanced by a
+greater good. The fruit of that evil must be experienced, and also
+of that greater good, by appropriate births in the hells and
+heavens, or in the higher and lower grades of earthly existence.
+The two courses of action must be run through independently. This
+is what is meant by the phrases, so often met with in Oriental
+works, "eating the fruits of former acts," "bound in the chains of
+deeds." Merit or demerit can be balanced or neutralized only by
+the full fruition of its own natural and necessary consequences.6
+The law of merit and of demerit is fate. It works irresistibly,
+through all changes and recurrences, from the beginning to the
+end. The cessation of virtue or of vice does not put an end to its
+effects until its full force is exhausted; as an arrow continues
+in flight until all its imparted power is spent. A man faultlessly
+and scrupulously good through his present life may be guilty of
+some foul crime committed a hundred lives before and not yet
+expiated. Accordingly, he may now suffer for it, or his next birth
+may take place in a hell. On the contrary, he may be credited with
+some great merit acquired thousands of
+
+5 P. 286.
+
+6 Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iv. p. 87.
+
+
+generations ago, whose fruit he has not eaten, and which may bring
+him good fortune in spite of present sins, or on the rolling and
+many colored wheel of metempsychosis may secure for him next a
+celestial birthplace. In short periods, it will be seen, there is
+moral confusion, but, in the long run, exact compensation.
+
+The exuberant prodigiousness of the Hindu imagination is
+strikingly manifest in its descriptions of the rewards of virtue
+in the heavens and of the punishments of sin in the hells. Visions
+pass before us of beautiful groves full of fragrance and music,
+abounding in delicious fruits, and birds of gorgeous plumage,
+crystal streams embedded with pearls, unruffled lakes where the
+lotus blooms, palaces of gems, crowds of friends and lovers,
+endless revelations of truth, boundless graspings of power, all
+that can stir and enchant intellect, will, fancy, and heart. In
+some of the heavens the residents have no bodily form, but enjoy
+purely spiritual pleasures. In others they are self resplendent,
+and traverse the ether. They are many miles in height, one being
+described whose crown was four miles high and who wore on his
+person sixty wagon loads of jewels. The ordinary lifetime of the
+inhabitants of the dewa loka named Wasawartti equals nine billions
+two hundred and sixteen millions of our years. They breathe only
+once in sixteen hours.
+
+The reverse of this picture is still more vigorously drawn, highly
+colored, and diversified in contents. The walls of the Hindu hell
+are over a hundred miles thick; and so dazzling is their
+brightness that it bursts the eyes which look at them anywhere
+within a distance of four hundred leagues.7 The poor creatures
+here, wrapped in shrouds of fire, writhe and yell in frenzy of
+pain. The very revelry and ecstasy of terror and anguish fill the
+whole region. The skins of some wretches are taken off from head
+to foot, and then scalding vinegar is poured over them. A glutton
+is punished thus: experiencing an insatiable hunger in a body as
+large as three mountains, he is tantalized with a mouth no larger
+than the eye of a needle.8 The infernal tormentors, throwing their
+victims down, take a flexible flame in each hand, and with these
+lash them alternately right and left. One demon, Rahu, is seventy
+six thousand eight hundred miles tall: the palm of his hand
+measures fifty thousand acres; and when he is enraged he rushes up
+the sky and swallows the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse!
+In the Asiatic Journal for 1840 is an article on "The Chinese
+Judges of the Dead," which describes a series of twenty four
+paintings of hell found in a Buddhist temple. Devils in human
+shapes are depicted pulling out the tongues of slanderers with
+redhot wires, pouring molten lead down the throats of liars, with
+burning prongs tossing souls upon mountains planted with hooks of
+iron reeking with the blood of those who have gone before,
+screwing the damned between planks, pounding them in husking
+mortars, grinding them in rice mills, while other fiends, in the
+shape of dogs, lap up their oozing gore. But the hardest
+sensibility must by this time cry, Hold!
+
+With the turmoil and pain of entanglement in the vortex of births,
+and all the repulsive exposures of finite life, the Hindus
+contrast the idea of an infinite rest and bliss, an endless
+
+7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 26.
+
+8 Coleman, Mythology of the Hindus, p. 198.
+
+
+exemption from evil and struggle, an immense receptivity of
+reposing power and quietistic contemplation. In consequence of
+their endlessly varied, constantly recurring, intensely earnest
+speculations and musings over this contrast of finite restlessness
+and pain with infinite peace and blessedness, a contrast which
+constitutes the preaching of their priests, saturates their sacred
+books, fills their thoughts, and broods over all their life, the
+Orientals are pervaded with a profound horror of individual
+existence, and with a profound desire for absorption into the
+Infinite Being. A few quotations from their own authors will
+illustrate this:
+
+"A sentient being in the repetition of birth and death is like a
+worm in the midst of a nest of ants, like a lizard in the hollow
+of a bamboo that is burning at both ends."9 "Emancipation from all
+existence is the fulness of felicity."10 "The being who is still
+subject to birth may now sport in the beautiful gardens of heaven,
+now be cut to pieces in hell; now be Maha Brahma, now a degraded
+outcast; now sip nectar, now drink blood; now repose on a couch
+with gods, now be dragged through a thicket of thorns; now reside
+in a mansion of gold, now be exposed on a mountain of lava; now
+sit on the throne of the gods, now be impaled amidst hungry dogs;
+now be a king glittering with countless gems, now a mendicant
+taking a skull from door to door to beg alms; now eat ambrosia as
+the monarch of a dewa loka, now writhe and die as a bat in the
+shrivelling flame."11 "The Supreme Soul and the human soul do not
+differ, and pleasure or pain ascribable to the latter arises from
+its imprisonment in the body. The water of the Ganges is the same
+whether it run in the river's bed or be shut up in a decanter; but
+a drop of wine added to the water in the decanter imparts its
+flavor to the whole, whereas it would be lost in the river. The
+Supreme Soul, therefore, is beyond accident; but the human soul is
+afflicted by sense and passion. Happiness is only obtained in
+reunion with the Supreme Soul, when the dispersed individualities
+combine again with it, as the drops of water with the parent
+stream. Hence the slave should remember that he is separated from
+God by the body alone, and exclaim, perpetually, 'Blessed be the
+moment when I shall lift the veil from off that face! the veil of
+the face of my Beloved is the dust of my body.'"12 "A pious man
+was once born on earth, who, in his various transmigrations, had
+met eight hundred and twenty five thousand Buddhas. He remembered
+his former states, but could not enumerate how many times he had
+been a king, a beggar, a beast, an occupant of hell. He uttered
+these words: 'A hundred thousand years of the highest happiness on
+earth are not equal to the happiness of one day in the dewa lokas;
+and a hundred thousand years of the deepest misery on earth are
+not equal to the misery of one day in hell; but the misery of hell
+is reckoned by millions of centuries. Oh, how shall I escape, and
+obtain eternal bliss?'" 13
+
+9 Eastern Monachism, p. 247.
+
+10 Vishnu Purana, p. 568.
+
+11 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 454.
+
+12 Asiatic Researches, vol. xvii. p. 298.
+
+13 Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iv. p. 114.
+
+
+The literary products of the Eastern mind wonderfully abound with
+painful descriptions of the compromises, uncleannesses, and
+afflictions inseparably connected with existence. Volumes would be
+required to furnish an adequate representation of the vivid and
+inexhaustible amplification with which they set forth the direful
+disgusts and loathsome terrors associated with the series of ideas
+expressed by the words conception, birth, life, death, hell, and
+regeneration. The fifth chapter in the sixth book of the Vishnu
+Purana affords a good specimen of these details; but, to
+appreciate them fully, one must peruse dispersed passages in a
+hundred miscellaneous works:
+
+"As long as man lives, he is immersed in afflictions, like the
+seed of the cotton amidst the down. . . . Where could man,
+scorched by the fires of the sun of this world, look for felicity,
+were it not for the shade afforded by the tree of emancipation? .
+. . Travelling the path of the world for many thousands of births,
+man attains only the weariness of bewilderment, and is smothered
+by the dust of imagination. When that dust is washed away by the
+bland water of real knowledge, then the weariness is removed. Then
+the internal man is at peace, and obtains supreme felicity."14
+
+The result of these views is the awakening of an unquenchable
+desire to "break from the fetters of existence," to be "delivered
+from the whirlpool of transmigration." Both Brahmanism and
+Buddhism are in essence nothing else than methods of securing
+release from the chain of incarnated lives, and attaining to
+identification with the Infinite. There is a text in the
+Apocalypse which may be strikingly applied to this exemption from
+further metempsychosis: "Him that overcometh I will make a pillar
+in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out forever." The
+testimony of all who have investigated the subject agrees with the
+following assertion by Professor Wilson: "The common end of every
+system studied by the Hindus is the ascertainment of the means by
+which perpetual exemption from the necessity of repeated births
+may be won."15 In comparison with this aim, every thing else is
+utterly insignificant. Prahlada, on being offered by Vishnu any
+boon he might ask, exclaimed, "Wealth, virtue, love, are as
+nothing; for even liberation is in his reach whose faith is firm
+in thee." And Vishnu replied, "Thou shalt, therefore, obtain
+freedom from existence."16 All true Orientals, however favored or
+persecuted by earthly fortune, still cry night and day upwards
+into the infinite, with outstretched arms and yearning voice,
+
+"O Lord, our separate lives destroy! Merge in thy gold our souls'
+alloy: Pain is our own, and Thou art Joy!"
+
+According to the system of Brahmanism, the creation is regularly
+called into being and again destroyed at the beginning and end of
+certain stupendous epochs called kalpas. Four thousand three
+hundred and twenty million years make a day of Brahma. At the end
+of this day the lower worlds are consumed by fire; and Brahma
+sleeps on the abyss for a night as long
+
+14 Vishnu Parana, p. 650.
+
+15 Sankhya Karika, preface, p. 3.
+
+16 Vishnu Purana, p. 144.
+
+
+as his day. During this night the saints, who in high Jana loka
+have survived the dissolution of the lower portions of the
+universe, contemplate the slumbering deity until he wakes and
+restores the mutilated creation. Three hundred and sixty of these
+days and nights compose a year of Brahma; a hundred such years
+measure his whole life. Then a complete destruction of all things
+takes place, every thing merging into the Absolute One, until he
+shall rouse himself renewedly to manifest his energies.17 Although
+created beings who have not obtained emancipation are destroyed in
+their individual forms at the periods of the general dissolution,
+yet, being affected by the good or evil acts of former existence,
+they are never exempted from their consequences, and when Brahma
+creates the world anew they are the progeny of his will, in the
+fourfold condition of gods, men, animals, and inanimate things.18
+And Buddhism embodies virtually the same doctrine, declaring "the
+whole universe of sakwalas to be subject alternately to
+destruction and renovation, in a series of revolutions to which
+neither beginning nor end can be discovered."
+
+What is the Brahmanic method of salvation, or secret of
+emancipation? Rightly apprehended in the depth and purity of the
+real doctrine, it is this. There is in reality but ONE SOUL: every
+thing else is error, illusion, misery. Whoever acquires the
+knowledge of this truth by personal perception is thereby
+liberated. He has won the absolute perfection of the unlimited
+Godhead, and shall never be born again. "Whosoever views the
+Supreme Soul as manifold, dies death after death." God is
+formless, but seems to assume form; as moonlight, impinging upon
+various objects, appears crooked or straight.19 Bharata says to
+the king of Sauriva, "The great end of all is not union of self
+with the Supreme Soul, because one substance cannot become
+another. The true wisdom, the genuine aim of all, is to know that
+Soul is one, uniform, perfect, exempt from birth, omnipresent,
+undecaying, made of true knowledge, dissociated with
+unrealities."20 "It is ignorance alone which enables Maya to
+impress the mind with a sense of individuality; for as soon as
+that is dispelled it is known that severalty exists not, and that
+there is nothing but one undivided Whole." 21 The Brahmanic
+scriptures say, "The Eternal Deity consists of true knowledge."
+"Brahma that is Supreme is produced of reflection."22 The logic
+runs thus. There is only One Soul, the absolute God. All beside is
+empty deception. That One Soul consists of true knowledge. Whoever
+attains to true knowledge, therefore, is absolute God, forever
+freed from the sphere of semblances.
+
+The foregoing exposition is philosophical and scriptural
+Brahmanism. But there are numerous schismatic sects which hold
+opinions diverging from it in regard to the nature and destiny of
+the human soul. They may be considered in two classes. First,
+there are some who defend the idea of the personal immortality of
+the soul. The Siva Gnana Potham "establishes the doctrine of the
+soul's eternal existence as an individual being." 23 The Saiva
+school
+
+17 Vishnu Purana, p. 25. Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 33, note.
+
+18 Vishnu Parana, pp. 39, 116.
+
+19 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 359.
+
+20 Vishnu Purana, p. 252.
+
+21 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 201.
+
+22 Vishnu Purana, pp. 546, 642.
+
+23 Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. ii. p. 141.
+
+
+teach that when, at the close of every great period, all other
+developed existences are rendered back to their primordial state,
+souls are excepted. These, once developed and delivered from the
+thraldom of their merit and demerit, will ever remain intimately
+united with Deity and clothed in the resplendent wisdom.24
+Secondly, there are others and probably at the present time they
+include a large majority of the Brahmans who believe in the real
+being both of the Supreme Soul and of separate finite souls,
+conceiving the latter to be individualized parts of the former and
+their true destiny to consist in securing absorption into it. The
+relation of the soul to God, they maintain, is not that of ruled
+and ruler, but that of part and whole. "As gold is one substance
+still, however diversified as bracelets, tiaras, ear rings, or
+other things, so Vishnu is one and the same, although modified in
+the forms of gods, animals, and men. As the drops of water raised
+from the earth by the wind sink into the earth again when the wind
+subsides, so the variety of gods, men, and animals, which have
+been detached by the agitation of the qualities, are reunited,
+when the disturbance ceases, with the Eternal." 25 "The whole
+obtains its destruction in God, like bubbles in water." The
+Madhava sect believe that there is a personal All Soul distinct
+from the human soul. Their proofs are detailed in one of the Maha
+Upanishads.26 These two groups of sects, however, agree perfectly
+with the ancient orthodox Brahmans in accepting the fundamental
+dogma of a judicial metempsychosis, wherein each one is fastened
+by his acts and compelled to experience the uttermost consequences
+of his merit or demerit. They all coincide in one common
+aspiration as regards the highest end, namely, emancipation from
+the necessity of repeated births. The difference between the three
+is, that the one class of dissenters expect the fruition of that
+deliverance to be a finite personal immortality in heaven; the
+other interpret it as an unwalled absorption in the Over Soul,
+like a breath in the air; while the more orthodox believers regard
+it as the entire identity of the soul with the Infinite One.
+
+Against the opinion that there is only one Soul for all bodies, as
+one string supports all the gems of a necklace, some Hindu
+philosophers argue that the plurality of souls is proved by the
+consideration that, if there were but one soul, then when any one
+was born, or died, or was lame, or deaf, or occupied, or idle, all
+would at once be born, die, be lame, deaf, occupied, or idle. But
+Professor Wilson says, "This doctrine of the multitudinous
+existence or individual incorporation of Soul clearly contradicts
+the Vedas. They affirm one only existent soul to be distributed in
+all beings. It is beheld collectively or dispersedly, like the
+reflection of the moon in still or troubled water. Soul, eternal,
+omnipresent, undisturbed, pure, one, is multiplied by the power of
+delusion, not of its own nature."27
+
+All the Brahmanic sects unite in thinking that liberation from the
+net of births is to be obtained and the goal of their wishes to be
+reached by one means only; and that is knowledge, real wisdom, an
+adequate sight of the truth. Without this knowledge there is no
+possible emancipation; but there are three ways of seeking the
+needed knowledge.
+
+24 Ibid. vol. iv. p. 15.
+
+25 Vishnu Purana, p. 287.
+
+26 Weber, Akademische Vorlesungen uber Indische
+Literaturgeschichte, s. 160.
+
+27 Sankbya Karika, p. 70.
+
+
+Some strive, by direct intellectual abstraction and effort, by
+metaphysical speculation, to grasp the true principles of being.
+Others try, by voluntary penance, self abnegation, and pain, to
+accumulate such a degree of merit, or to bring the soul into such
+a state of preparedness, as will compel the truth to reveal
+itself. And still others devote themselves to the worship of some
+chosen deity, by ritual acts and fervid contemplation, to obtain
+by his favor the needed wisdom. A few quotations may serve to
+illustrate the Brahmanic attempts at winning this one thing
+needful, the knowledge which yields exemption from all incarnate
+lives.
+
+The Sankhya philosophy is a regular system of metaphysics, to be
+studied as one would study algebra. It presents to its disciples
+an exhaustive statement of the forms of being in twenty five
+categories, and declares, "He who knows the twenty five
+principles, whatever order of life he may have entered, and
+whether he wear braided hair, a top knot only, or be shaven, he is
+liberated." "This discriminative wisdom releases forever from
+worldly bondage."28 "The virtuous is born again in heaven, the
+wicked is born again in hell; the fool wanders in error, the wise
+man is set free." "By ignorance is bondage, by knowledge is
+deliverance." "When Nature finds that soul has discovered that it
+is to her the distress of migration is owing, she is put to shame
+by the detection, and will suffer herself to be seen no more."29
+"Through knowledge the sage is absorbed into Supreme Spirit."30
+"The Supreme Spirit attracts to itself him who meditates upon it,
+as the loadstone attracts the iron."31 "He who seeks to obtain a
+knowledge of the Soul is gifted with it, the Soul rendering itself
+conspicuous to him." "Man, having known that Nature which is
+without a beginning or an end, is delivered from the grasp of
+death." "Souls are absorbed in the Supreme Soul as the reflection
+of the sun in water returns to him on the removal of the water."32
+
+The thought underlying the last statement is that there is only
+one Soul, every individual consciousness being but an illusory
+semblance, and that the knowledge of this fact constitutes the
+all coveted emancipation. As one diffusive breath passing through
+the perforations of a flute is distinguished as the several notes
+of the scale, so the Supreme Spirit is single, though, in
+consequence of acts, it seems manifold. As every placid lakelet
+holds an unreal image of the one real moon sailing above, so each
+human soul is but a deceptive reflection of the one veritable
+Soul, or God. It may be worth while to observe that Plotinus, as
+is well known, taught the doctrine of the absolute identity of
+each soul with the entire and indistinguishable entity of God:
+
+"Though God extends beyond creation's rim, Yet every being holds
+the whole of him."
+
+It belongs to an unextended substance, an immateriality, to be
+everywhere by totality, not by portions. If God be omnipresent, he
+cannot be so dividedly, a part of him here and a part
+
+28 Ibid. pp. 1, 16.
+
+29 Ibid. pp. 48, 142, 174.
+
+30 Vishnu Purana, p. 57.
+
+31 Ibid. p. 651.
+
+32 Rammohun Roy, Translations from the Veda, 2d ed., London, 1832,
+pp. 69, 39, 10.
+
+
+of him there; but the whole of him must be in every particle of
+matter, in every point of space, in all infinitude.
+
+The Brahmanic religion is a philosophy; and it keeps an
+incomparably strong hold on the minds of its devotees. Its most
+vital and comprehensive principle is expressed in the following
+sentence: "The soul itself is not susceptible of pain, or decay,
+or death; the site of these things is nature; but nature is
+unconscious; the consciousness that pain exists is restricted to
+the soul, although the soul is not the actual seat of pain." This
+is the reason why every Hindu yearns so deeply to be freed from
+the meshes of nature, why he so anxiously follows the light of
+faith and penance, or the clew of speculation, through all mazes
+of mystery. It is that he may at last gaze on the central TRUTH,
+and through that sight seize the fruition of the supreme and
+eternal good of man in the unity of his selfhood with the
+Infinite, and so be born no more and experience no more trouble.
+It is very striking to contrast with this profound and gorgeous
+dream of the East, whatever form it assumes, the more practical
+and definite thought of the West, as expressed in these lines of
+Tennyson's "In Memoriam:"
+
+"That each, who seems a separate whole,
+Should move his rounds, and, fusing all
+The skirts of self again, should fall
+Remerging in the general Soul,
+Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
+Eternal form shall still divide
+The eternal soul from all beside,
+And I shall know him when we meet."
+
+But is it not still more significant to notice that, in the lines
+which immediately succeed, the love inspired and deep musing
+genius of the English thinker can find ultimate repose only by
+recurring to the very faith of the Hindu theosophist?
+
+"And we shall sit at endless feast,
+Enjoying each the other's good:
+What vaster dream can hit the mood
+Of Love on earth! He seeks at least
+Upon the last and sharpest height,
+Before the spirits fade away,
+Some landing place, to clasp and say,
+Farewell! We lose ourselves in light!"
+
+We turn now to the Buddhist doctrine of a future life as
+distinguished from the Brahmanic. The "Four Sublime Truths" of
+Buddhism, as they are called, are these: first, that there is
+sorrow; secondly, that every living person necessarily feels it;
+thirdly, that it is desirable to be freed from it; fourthly, that
+the only deliverance from it is by that pure knowledge which
+destroys all cleaving to existence. A Buddha is a being who, in
+consequence of having reached the Buddhaship, which implies the
+possession of infinite goodness, infinite power, and infinite
+wisdom, is able to teach men that true knowledge which secures
+emancipation.
+
+The Buddhaship that is, the possession of Supreme Godhead is open
+to every one, though few ever acquire it. Most wonderful and
+tremendous is the process of its attainment. Upon a time, some
+being, perhaps then incarnate as a mosquito alighting on a muddy
+leaf in some swamp, pauses for a while to muse. Looking up through
+infinite stellar systems, with hungry love and boundless ambition,
+to the throne and sceptre of absolute immensity, he vows within
+himself, "I will become a Buddha." The total influences of his
+past, the forces of destiny, conspiring with his purpose,
+omnipotence is in that resolution. Nothing shall ever turn him
+aside from it. He might soon acquire for himself deliverance from
+the dreadful vortex of births; but, determined to achieve the
+power of delivering others from their miseries as sentient beings,
+he voluntarily throws himself into the stream of successive
+existences, and with divine patience and fortitude undergoes every
+thing.
+
+From that moment, no matter in what form he is successively born,
+whether as a disgusting bug, a white elephant, a monarch, or a
+god, he is a Bodhisat, that is, a candidate pressing towards the
+Buddhaship. He at once begins practising the ten primary virtues,
+called paramitas, necessary for the securing of his aim. The
+period required for the full exercise of one of these virtues is a
+bhumi. Its duration is thus illustrated. Were a Bodhisat once in a
+thousand births to shed a single drop of blood, he would in the
+space of a bhumi shed more blood than there is water in a thousand
+oceans. On account of his merit he might always be born amidst the
+pleasures of the heavens; but since he could there make no
+progress towards his goal, he prefers being born in the world of
+men. During his gradual advance, there is no good he does not
+perform, no hardship he does not undertake, no evil he does not
+willingly suffer; and all for the benefit of others, to obtain the
+means of emancipating those whom he sees fastened by ignorance in
+the afflictive circle of acts. Wherever born, acting, or
+suffering, his eye is still turned towards that EMPTY THRONE, at
+the apex of the universe, from which the last Buddha has vaulted
+into Nirwana. The Buddhists have many scriptures, especially one,
+called the "Book of the Five Hundred and Fifty Births," detailing
+the marvellous adventures of the Bodhisat during his numerous
+transmigrations, wherein he exhibits for each species of being to
+which he belongs a model character and life.
+
+At length the momentous day dawns when the unweariable Bodhisat
+enters on his well earned Buddhaship. From that time, during the
+rest of his life, he goes about preaching discourses, teaching
+every prepared creature he meets the method of securing eternal
+deliverance. Leaving behind in these discourses a body of wisdom
+sufficient to guide to salvation all who will give attentive ear
+and heart, the Buddha then his sublime work of disinterested love
+being completed receives the fruition of his toil, the super
+essential prize of the universe, the Infinite Good. In a word, he
+dies, and enters Nirwana. There is no more evil of any sort for
+him at all forever. The final fading echo of sorrow has ceased in
+the silence of perfect blessedness; the last undulation of the
+wave of change has rolled upon the shore of immutability.
+
+The only historic Buddha is Sakya Muni, or Gotama, who was born at
+Kapila about six centuries before Christ. His teachings contain
+many principles in common with those of the Brahmans. But he
+revolted against their insufferable conceit and cruelty. He
+protested against their claim that no one could obtain
+emancipation until after being born as a Brahman and passing
+through the various rites and degrees of their order. In the
+face of the most powerful and arrogant priesthood in the world,
+he preached the perfect equality of all mankind, and the consequent
+abolition of castes. Whoever acquires a total detachment of
+affection from all existence is thereby released from birth and
+misery; and the means of acquiring that detachment are freely
+offered to all in his doctrine.
+
+Thus did Gotama preach. He took the monopoly of religion out of the
+hands of a caste, and proclaimed emancipation to every creature
+that breathes. He established his system in the valley of the
+Ganges near the middle of the sixth century before Christ. It soon
+overran the whole country, and held sway until about eight hundred
+years after Christ, when an awful persecution and slaughter on the
+part of the uprising Brahmans drove it out of the land with sword
+and fire. "The colossal figure which for fourteen centuries had
+bestridden the Indian continent vanished suddenly, like a rainbow
+at sunset."33
+
+Gotama's philosophy, in its ontological profundity, is of a
+subtlety and vastness that would rack the brain of a Fichte or a
+Schelling; but, popularly stated, so far as our present purpose
+demands, it is this. Existence is the one all inclusive evil;
+cessation of existence, or Nirwana, is the infinite good. The
+cause of existence is ignorance, which leads one to cleave to
+existing objects; and this cleaving leads to reproduction. If one
+would escape from the chain of existence, he must destroy the
+cause of his confinement in it, that is, evil desire, or the
+cleaving to existing objects. The method of salvation in Gotama's
+system is to vanquish and annihilate all desire for existing
+things. How is this to be done? By acquiring an intense perception
+of the miseries of existence, on the one hand, and an intense
+perception, on the other hand, of the contrasted desirableness of
+the state of emancipation, or Nirwana. Accordingly, the discourses
+of Gotama, and the sacred books of the Buddhists, are filled with
+vivid accounts of every thing disgusting and horrible connected
+with existence, and with vivid descriptions, consciously faltering
+with inadequacy, of every thing supremely fascinating in
+connection with Nirwana. "The three reflections on the impermanency,
+suffering, and unreality of the body are three gates leading to
+the city of Nirwana." The constant claim is, that whosoever by
+adequate moral discipline and philosophical contemplation attains
+to a certain degree of wisdom, a certain degree of intellectual
+insight, instead of any longer cleaving to existence, will shudder
+at the thought of it, and, instead of shrinking from death, will
+be ravished with unfathomable ecstasy by the prospect of Nirwana.
+Then, when he dies, he is free from all liability to a return.
+
+When Gotama, early in life, had accidentally seen in succession a
+wretchedly decrepit old man, a loathsomely diseased man, and a
+decomposing dead man, then the three worlds of passion, matter,
+and spirit seemed to him like a house on fire, and he longed to be
+extricated from the dizzy whirl of existence, and to reach the
+still haven of Nirwana. Finding ere long that he had now, as the
+reward of his incalculable endurances through untold aons past,
+become Buddha, he said to himself, "You have borne the misery of
+the whole round of transmigrations, and have arrived at infinite
+wisdom, which is the highway to Nirwana, the
+
+33 Major Cunningham, Bbilsa Topes, or Buddhist Monuments of
+Central India, p. 168.
+
+
+city of peace. On that road you are the guide of all beings. Begin
+your work and pursue it with fidelity." From that time until the
+day of his death he preached "the three laws of mortality, misery,
+and mutability." Every morning he looked through the world to see
+who should be caught that day in the net of truth, and took his
+measures accordingly to preach in the hearing of men the truths by
+which alone they could climb into Nirwana. When he was expiring,
+invisible gods, with huge and splendid bodies, came and stood, as
+thick as they could be packed, for a hundred and twenty miles
+around the banyan tree under which he awaited Nirwana, to gaze on
+him who had broken the circle of transmigration.34
+
+The system of Gotama distinguishes seven grades of being: six
+subject to repeated death and birth; one the condition of the
+rahats and the Buddhaship exempt therefrom. "Who wins this has
+reached the shore of the stormy ocean of vicissitudes, and is in
+safety forever." Baur says, "The aim of Buddhism is that all may
+obtain unity with the original empty Space, so as to unpeople the
+worlds."35 This end it seeks by purification from all modes of
+cleaving to existing objects, and by contemplative discrimination,
+but never by the fanatical and austere methods of Brahmanism.
+Edward Upham, in his History of Buddhism, declares this earth to
+be the only ford to Nirwana. Others also make the same
+representation:
+
+"For all that live and breathe have once been men, And in
+succession will be such again."
+
+But the Buddhist authors do not always adhere to this statement.
+We sometimes read of men's entering the paths to Nirwana in some
+of the heavens, likewise of their entering the final fruition
+through a decease in a dewa loka. Still, it is the common view
+that emancipation from all existence can be secured only by a
+human being on earth. The last birth must be in that form. The
+emblem of Buddha, engraved on most of his monuments, is a wheel,
+denoting that he has finished and escaped from the circle of
+existences. Henceforth he is named Tathagata, he who has gone.
+
+Let us notice a little more minutely what the Buddhists say of
+Nirwana; for herein to them hides all the power of their
+philosophy and lies the absorbing charm of their religion.
+
+"The state that is peaceful, free from body, from passion, and
+from fear, where birth or death is not, that is Nirwana." "Nirwana
+puts an end to coming and going, and there is no other happiness."
+"It is a calm wherein no wind blows." "There is no difference in
+Nirwana." "It is the annihilation of all the principles of
+existence." "Nirwana is the completion and opposite shore of
+existence, free from decay, tranquil, knowing no restraint, and of
+great blessedness." "Nirwana is unmixed satisfaction, entirely
+free from sorrow." "The wind cannot be squeezed in the hand, nor
+can its color be told. Yet the wind is. Even so Nirwana is, but
+its properties cannot be told." "Nirwana, like space, is
+causeless, does not live nor die, and has no locality. It is the
+abode of those liberated from existence." "Nirwana is not, except
+to the being who attains it."36
+
+34 Life of Gotama in Journal of the American Oriental Society,
+vol. iii.
+
+35 Symbolik and Mythologie, th. ii. abth. 2, s. 407.
+
+36 For these quotations, and others similar, see Hardy's valuable
+work, "Eastern Monachism," chap. xxii., on "Nirwana, its Paths and
+Fruition."
+
+
+Some scholars maintain that the Buddhist Nirwana is nothing but
+the atheistic Annihilation. The subject is confessedly a most
+difficult one. But it seems to us that the opinion just stated is
+the very antithesis of the true interpretation of Nirwana. In the
+first place, it should be remembered that there are various sects
+of Buddhists. Now, the word Nirwana may be used in different
+senses by different schools.37 A few persons a small party,
+represented perhaps by able writers may believe in annihilation in
+our sense of the term, just as has happened in Christendom, while
+the common doctrine of the people is the opposite of that. In the
+second place, with the Oriental horror of individuated existence,
+and a highly poetical style of writing, nothing could be more
+natural, in depicting their ideas of the most desirable state of
+being, than that they should carry their metaphors expressive of
+repose, freedom from action and emotion, to a pitch conveying to
+our cold and literal thought the conceptions of blank
+unconsciousness and absolute nothingness.
+
+Colebrooke says, "Nirwana is not annihilation, but unceasing
+apathy. The notion of it as a happy state seems derived from the
+experience of ecstasies; or else the pleasant, refreshed feeling
+with which one wakes from profound repose is referred to the
+period of actual sleep."38 A Buddhist author speculates thus:
+"That the soul feels not during profound trance, is not for want
+of sensibility, but for want of sensible objects." Wilson,
+Hodgson, and Vans Kennedy three able thinkers, as well as
+scholars, in this field agree that Nirwana is not annihilation as
+we understand that word. Mr. Hodgson believes that the Buddhists
+expect to be "conscious in Nirwana of the eternal bliss of rest,
+as they are in this world of the ceaseless pain of activity."
+Forbes also argues against the nihilistic explanation of the
+Buddhist doctrine of futurity, and says he is compelled to
+conclude that Nirwana denotes imperishable being in a blissful
+quietude.39 Many additional authorities in favor of this view
+might be adduced, enough to balance, at least, the names on the
+other side. Koeppen, in his very fresh, vigorous, and lucid work,
+just published, entitled "The Religion of Buddha, and its Origin,"
+says, "Nirwana is the blessed Nothing. Buddhism is the Gospel of
+Annihilation." But he forgets that the motto on the title page of
+his volume is the following sentence quoted from Sakya Muni
+himself: "To those who know the concatenation of causes and
+effects, there is neither being nor nothing." To them Nirwana is.
+Considering it, then, as an open question, unsettled by any
+authoritative assertion, we will weigh the probabilities of the
+case.
+
+No definition of Nirwana is more frequent than the one given by
+the Kalpa Sutra,40 namely, "cessation from action and freedom from
+desire." But this, like many of the other representations, such,
+for instance, as the exclusion of succession, very plainly is not
+a denial of all being, but only of our present modes of
+experience. The dying Gotama is said to have "passed through the
+several states, one after another, until he arrived at the state
+where there is no pain. He then continued to enter the other
+higher states, and from the highest entered Nirwana." Can literal
+annihilation, the naked emptiness of nonentity, be better than
+
+37 Burnouf, Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien,
+Appendice No. I., Du mot Nirvana.
+
+38 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 353.
+
+39 Eleven Years in Ceylon, vol. ii. chap. ix.
+
+40 Tanslation by Dr. Stevenson, p. 23.
+
+
+the highest state of being? It can be so only when we view Nothing
+on the positive side as identical with All, make annihilating
+deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as
+affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the
+abysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The ideal
+zero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, but
+an indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, a
+translucency, a pure identity. It is neither great nor small,
+quiescent nor moved; but it is, and it is not, all this."41
+
+Furthermore, if some of the Buddhist representations would lead us
+to believe that Nirwana is utter nothingness, others apparently
+imply the opposite. "The discourses of Buddha are a charm to cure
+the poison of evil desire; a succession of fruit bearing trees
+placed here and there to enable the traveller to cross the desert
+of existence; a power by which every sorrow may be appeased; a
+door of entrance to the eternal city of Nirwana." "The mind of the
+rahat" (one who has obtained assurance of emancipation and is only
+waiting for it to arrive) "knows no disturbance, because it is
+filled with the pleasure of Nirwana." "The sight of Nirwana
+bestows perfect happiness." "The rahat is emancipated from
+existence in Nirwana, as the lotus is separated from the mud out
+of which it springs." "Fire may be produced by rubbing together
+two sticks, though previously it had no locality: it is the same
+with Nirawna." "Nirwana is free from danger, peaceful, refreshing,
+happy. When a man who has been broiled before a huge fire is
+released, and goes quickly into some open space, he feels the most
+agreeable sensation. All the evils of existence are that fire, and
+Nirwana is that open space." These passages indicate the cessation
+in Nirwana of all sufferings, perhaps of all present modes of
+existence, but not the total end of being. It may be said that
+these are but figurative expressions. The reply is, so are the
+contrasted statements metaphors, and it is probable that the
+expressions which denote the survival of pure being in Nirwana are
+closer approximations to the intent of their authors than those
+which hint at an unconscious vacancy. If Nirwana in its original
+meaning was an utter and infinite blank, then, "out of that very
+Nothing," as Max Muller says, "human nature made a new paradise."
+
+There is a scheme of doctrine held by some Buddhist philosophers
+which may be thus stated. There are five constituent elements of
+sentient existence. They are called khandas, and are as follows:
+the organized body, sensation, perception, discrimination, and
+consciousness. Death is the dissolution and entire destruction of
+these khandas, and apart from them there is no synthetical unit,
+soul, or personality. Yet in a certain sense death is not the
+absolute annihilation of a human existence, because it leaves a
+potentiality inherent in that existence. There is no identical ego
+to survive and be born again; but karma that is, the sum of a
+man's action, his entire merit and demerit produces at his death a
+new being, and so on in continued series until Nirwana is
+attained. Thus the succession of being is kept up with transmitted
+responsibility, as a flame is transferred from one wick to
+another. It is evident enough, as is justly claimed by Hardy and
+others, that the limitation of existence to the five khandas,
+excluding the idea of any independent individuality, makes death
+
+41 Elements of Physiophilosophy, Tulk's trans. p. 9.
+
+
+annihilation, and renders the very conception of a future life for
+those now living an absurdity. But we are convinced that this view
+is the speculative peculiarity of a sect, and by no means the
+common belief of the Buddhist populace or the teaching of Gotama
+himself. This appears at the outset from the fact that Gotama is
+represented as having lived through millions of existences, in
+different states and worlds, with preserved identity and memory.
+The history of his concatenated advance towards the Buddhaship is
+the supporting basis and the saturating spirit of documentary
+Buddhism. And the same idea pervades the whole range of narratives
+relating to the repeated births and deaths of the innumerable
+Buddhist heroes and saints who, after so many residences on earth,
+in the hells, in the dewalokas, have at last reached emancipation.
+They recollect their adventures; they recount copious portions of
+their experience stretching through many lives.
+
+Again: the arguments cited from Buddha seem aimed to prove, not
+that there is absolutely no self in man, but that the five khandas
+are not the self, that the real self is something distinct from
+all that is exposed to misery and change, something deep,
+wondrous, divine, infinite. For instance, the report of a debate
+on this subject between Buddha and Sachaka closes with these
+words: "Thus was Sachaka forced to confess that the five khandas
+are impermanent, connected with sorrow, unreal, not the self.42
+These terms appear to imply the reality of a self, only that it is
+not to be confounded with the apprehensible elements of existence.
+Besides, the attainment of Nirwana is held up as a prize to be
+laboriously sought by personal effort. To secure it is a positive
+triumph quite distinct from the fated dissolution of the khandas
+in death. Now, if there be in man no personal entity, what is it
+that with so much joy attains Nirwana? The genuine Buddhist
+notion, as seems most probable, is that the conscious essence of
+the rahat, when the exterior elements of existence fall from
+around him, passes by a transcendent climax and discrete leap
+beyond the outermost limits of appreciable being, and becomes that
+INFINITE which knows no changes and is susceptible of no
+definitions. In the Ka gyur collection of Tibetan sacred books,
+comprising a hundred volumes, and now belonging to the Cabinet of
+Manuscripts in the Royal Library of Paris, there are two volumes
+exclusively occupied by a treatise on Nirwana. It is a significant
+fact that the title of these volumes is "Nirwana, or Deliverance
+from Pain." If Nirwana be simply annihilation, why is it not so
+stated? Why should recourse be had to a phrase partially
+descriptive of one feature, instead of comprehensively announcing
+or implying the whole case?
+
+Still further: it deserves notice that, according to the unanimous
+affirmation of Buddhist authors, if any Buddhist were offered the
+alternative of an existence as king of a dewa loka, keeping his
+personality for a hundred million years in the uninterrupted
+enjoyment of perfect happiness, or of translation into Nirwana, he
+would spurn the former as defilement, and would with unutterable
+avidity choose the latter. We must therefore suppose that by
+Nirwana he understands, not naked destruction, but some mysterious
+good, too vast for logical comprehension, too obscure to
+Occidental thought to find expression in Occidental language.
+
+42 Hardy, Manual, p. 427.
+
+
+At the moment when Gotama entered upon the Buddhaship, like
+a vessel overflowing with honey, his mind overflowed with the
+nectar of oral instruction, and he uttered these stanzas:
+
+"Through many different births I have run, vainly seeking The
+architect of the desire resembling house. Painful are repeated
+births. O house builder! I have seen thee. Again a house thou
+canst not build for me. I have broken thy rafters and ridge pole;
+I have arrived at the extinction of evil desire; My mind is gone
+to Nirwana."
+
+Hardy, who stoutly maintains that the genuine doctrine of Buddha's
+philosophy is that there is no transmigrating individuality in
+man, but that the karma creates a new person on the dissolution of
+the former one, confesses the difficulties of this dogma to be so
+great that "it is almost universally repudiated." M. Obry
+published at Paris, in 1856, a small volume entirely devoted to
+this subject, under the title of "The Indian Nirwana, or the
+Enfranchisement of the Soul after Death." His conclusion, after a
+careful and candid discussion, is, that Nirwana had different
+meanings to the minds of the ancient Aryan priests, the orthodox
+Brahmans, the Sankhya Brahmans, and the Buddhists, but had not to
+any of them, excepting possibly a few atheists, the sense of
+strict annihilation. He thinks that Burnouf and Barthelemy Saint
+Hilaire themselves would have accepted this view if they had paid
+particular attention to the definite inquiry, instead of merely
+touching upon it in the course of their more comprehensive
+studies.
+
+What Spinoza declares in the following sentence "God is one,
+simple, infinite; his modes of being are diverse, complex,
+finite" strongly resembles what the Buddhists say of Nirwana and
+the contrasted vicissitudes of existence, and may perhaps throw
+light on their meaning. The supposition of immaterial, unlimited,
+absolutely unalterable being the scholastic ens sine qualitate
+answers to the descriptions of it much more satisfactorily than
+the idea of unqualified nothingness does. "Nirwana is real; all
+else is phenomenal." The Sankhyas, who do not hold to the
+nonentity nor to the annihilation of the soul, but to its eternal
+identification with the Infinite One, use nevertheless nearly the
+same phrases in describing it that the Buddhists do. For example,
+they say, "The soul is neither a production nor productive,
+neither matter nor form"43 The Vishnu Purana says, "The mundane
+egg, containing the whole creation, was surrounded by seven
+envelops, water, air, fire, ether, egotism, intelligence, and
+finally the indiscrete principle"44 Is not this Indiscrete
+Principle of the Brahmans the same as the Nirwana of the
+Buddhists? The latter explicitly claim that "man is capable of
+enlarging his faculties to infinity."
+
+43 Sankhya Karika, pp. 16-18.
+
+44 Vishnu Purana, p. 19.
+
+
+Nagasena says to the king of Sagal, "Neither does Nirwana exist
+previously to its reception, nor is that which was not, brought
+into existence: still, to the being who attains it, there is
+Nirwana." According to this statement, taken in connection with
+the hundreds similar to it, Nirwana seems to be a simple mental
+perception, most difficult of acquirement, and, when acquired,
+assimilating the whole conscious being perfectly to itself. The
+Asangkrata Sutra, as translated by Mr. Hardy, says, "From the
+joyful exclamations of those who have seen Nirwana, its character
+may be known by those who have not made the same attainment." The
+superficial thinker, carelessly scanning the recorded sayings of
+Gotama and his expositors in relation to Nirwana, is aware only of
+a confused mass of metaphysical hieroglyphs and poetical
+metaphors; but the Buddhist sages avow that whoso, by concentrated
+study and training of his faculties, pursues the inquiry with
+adequate perseverance, will at last elicit and behold the real
+meaning of Nirwana, the achieved insight and revelation forming
+the widest horizon of rapturous truth ever contemplated by the
+human mind. The memorable remark of Sir William Hamilton, that
+"capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of
+existence," should show the error of those who so unjustifiably
+affirm that, since Nirwana is said to be neither corporeal nor
+incorporeal, nor at all describable, it is therefore absolutely
+nothing. A like remark is also to be addressed to those who draw
+the same unwarrantable conclusion of the nothingness of Nirwana
+from the fact that it has no locality, or from the fact that it is
+sometimes said to exclude consciousness. Plato, in the Timaus,
+stigmatizes as a vulgar error the notion that what is not in any
+place is a nonentity. Many a weighty philosopher has followed him
+in this opinion. The denial of place is by no means necessarily
+the denial of being. So, too, with consciousness. It is
+conceivable that there is a being superior to all the modes of
+consciousness now known to us. We are, indeed, unable to define
+this, yet it may be. The profoundest analysis shows that
+consciousness consists of co ordinated changes.45 "Consciousness
+is a succession of changes combined and arranged in special ways."
+Now, in contrast to the Occidental thinker, who covets alternation
+because in his cold climate action is the means of enjoyment, the
+Hindu, in the languid East, where repose is the condition of
+enjoyment, conceives the highest blessedness to consist in
+exemption from every disturbance, in an unruffled unity excluding
+all changes. Therefore, while in some of its forms his dream of
+Nirwana admits not consciousness, still, it is not inconsistent
+with a homogeneous state of being, which he, in his metaphysical
+and theosophie soarings, apprehends as the grandest and most
+ecstatic of all.
+
+The etymological force of the word Nirwana is extinction, as when
+the sun has set, a fire has burned out, or a lamp is extinguished.
+The fair laws of interpretation do not compel us, in cases like
+this, to receive the severest literal significance of a word as
+conveying the meaning which a popular doctrine holds in the minds
+of its believers. There is almost always looseness, vagueness,
+metaphor, accommodation. But take the term before us in its
+strictest sense, and mark the result. When a fire is extinguished,
+it is obvious that, while the flame has disappeared, the substance
+of the flame, whatever it was, has not ceased to be, has not been
+
+45 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxv.
+
+
+actually annihilated. It has only ceased to be in a certain
+visible form in which it existed before; but it still survives
+under altered conditions. Now, to compare the putting out of a
+lamp to the death of a man, extinction is not actual destruction,
+but a transition of the flame into another state of being. That
+other state, in the case of the soul, is Nirwana.
+
+There is a final consideration, possibly of some worth in dealing
+with this obscure theme. We will approach it through a preliminary
+query and quotation. That nothing can extend beyond its limits is
+an identical proposition. How vast, then, must be the soul of man
+in form or in power!
+
+"If souls be substances corporeal, Be they as big just as the body
+is? Or shoot they out to the height ethereal? Doth it not seem the
+impression of a seal Can be no larger than the wax? The soul with
+that vast latitude must move Which measures the objects that it
+doth descry. So must it be upstretch'd unto the sky And rub
+against the stars."
+
+Cousin asserts that man is conscious of infinity, that "the
+unconditional, the absolute, the infinite, is immediately known in
+consciousness by difference, plurality, and relation." Now, does
+not the consciousness of infinity imply the infinity of
+consciousness? If not, we are compelled into the contradiction
+that a certain entity or force reaches outside of its outermost
+boundary. The Buddhist ideal is not self annihilation, but self
+universalization. It is not the absorption of a drop into the sea,
+but the dilatation of a drop to the sea. Each drop swells to the
+whole ocean, each soul becomes the Boundless One, each rahat is
+identified with the total Nirwana. The rivers of emancipated men
+neither disembogue into the ocean of spirit nor evaporate into the
+abyss of nonentity, but are blended with infinitude as an
+ontological integer. Nirwana is unexposed and illimitable space.
+Buddhism is perfect disinterestedness, absolute self surrender. It
+is the gospel of everlasting emancipation for all. It cannot be
+that a deliberate suicide of soul is the ideal holding the deepest
+desire of four hundred millions of people. Nirwana is not
+negation, but a pure positive without alternation or foil.
+
+Some light may be thrown on the subject by contemplating the
+successive states through which the dying Gotama passed. Max
+Muller describes them, after the Buddhist documents, thus: "He
+enters into the first stage of meditation when he feels freedom
+from sin, acquires a knowledge of the nature of all things, and
+has no desire except that of Nirvana. But he still feels pleasure;
+he even uses his reasoning and discriminating powers. The use of
+these powers ceases in the second stage of meditation, when
+nothing remains but a desire after Nirvana, and a general feeling
+of satisfaction arising from his intellectual perfection. That
+satisfaction, also, is extinguished in the third stage.
+Indifference succeeds; yet there is still self consciousness, and
+a certain amount of physical pleasure. In the fourth stage these
+last remnants are destroyed; memory fades away, all pleasure and
+pain are gone, and the doors of Nirvana now open before him. We
+must soar still higher, and, though we may feel giddy
+
+and disgusted,46 we must sit out the tragedy till the curtain
+falls. After the four stages of meditation are passed, the Buddha
+(and every being is to become a Buddha) enters first into the
+infinity of space, then into the infinity of intelligence, and
+thence he passes into the third region, the realm of nothing. But
+even here there is no rest. There is still something left, the
+idea of the nothing in which he rejoices. That also must be
+destroyed; and it is destroyed in the fourth and last region,
+where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and where
+there is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is not
+nothing."47 Analyze away all particulars until you reach an
+uncolored boundlessness of pure immateriality, free from every
+predicament; and that is Nirwana. This is one possible way of
+conceiving the fate of the soul; and the speculative mind must
+conceive it in every possible way. However closely the result
+resembles the vulgar notion of annihilation, the difference in
+method of approach and the difference to the contemplator's
+feeling are immense. The Buddhist apprehends Nirwana as infinitude
+in absolute and eternal equilibrium: the atheist finds Nirwana in
+a coffin. That is thought of with rapture, this, with horror.
+
+It should be noticed, before we close this chapter, that some of
+the Hindus give a spiritual interpretation to all the gross
+physical details of their so highly colored and extravagant
+mythology. One of their sacred books says, "Pleasure and pain are
+states of the mind. Heaven is that which delights the mind, hell
+is that which gives it pain. Hence vice is called hell, and virtue
+is called heaven." Another author says, "The fire of the angry
+mind produces the fire of hell, and consumes its possessor. A
+wicked person causes his evil deeds to impinge upon himself, and
+that is hell." The various sects of mystics, allied in faith and
+feeling to the Sufis, which are quite numerous in the East, agree
+in a deep metaphorical explanation of the vulgar notions
+pertaining to Deity, judgment, heaven, and hell.
+
+In conclusion, the most remarkable fact in this whole field of
+inquiry is the contrast of the Eastern horror of individuality and
+longing for absorption with the Western clinging to personality
+and abhorrence of dissolution.48 The true Orientalist, whether
+Brahman, Buddhist, or Sufi, is in love with death. Through this
+gate he expects to quit his frail and pitiable consciousness,
+losing himself, with all evil, to be born anew and find himself,
+with all good, in God. All sense, passion, care, and grief shall
+cease with deliverance from the spectral semblances of this false
+life. All pure contemplation, perfect repose, unsullied and
+unrippled joy shall begin with entrance upon the true life beyond.
+Thus thinking, he feels that death is the avenue to infinite
+expansion, freedom, peace, bliss; and he longs for it with an
+intensity not dreamed of by more frigid natures. He often compares
+himself, in this world aspiring towards another, to an enamored
+moth drawn towards the fire, and he exclaims, with a sigh and a
+thrill,
+
+46 Not disgust, but wonder and awe, fathomless intellectual
+emotion, at so unparalleled a phenomenon of our miraculous human
+nature.
+
+47 Buddhism and Buddhist Pilgrims, p. 19.
+
+48 Burnouf, Le Bhagavata Purana, tome i. livre iii. ch. 28:
+Acquisition de la Delivrance, ch. 31.
+
+Marche de l'ame individuelle. "Highest nature wills the capture;
+'Light to light!' the instinct cries; And in agonizing rapture
+falls the moth, and bravely dies. Think not what thou art,
+Believer; think but what thou mayst become For the World is thy
+deceiver, and the Light thy only home." 49
+
+The Western mind approaches the subject of death negatively,
+stripping off the attributes of finite being; the Eastern mind,
+positively, putting on the attributes of infinite being. Negative
+acts, denying function, are antipathetic, and lower the sense of
+life; positive acts, affirming function, are sympathetic, and
+raise the sense of life. Therefore the end to which those look,
+annihilation, is dreaded; that to which these look, Nirwana, is
+desired. To become nothing, is measureless horror; to become all,
+is boundless ecstasy.
+
+49 Milnes, Palm Leaves.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+PERSIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THE name of Zoroaster is connected, either as author or as
+reviser, with that remarkable system of rites and doctrines which
+constituted the religion of the ancient Iranians, and which yet
+finds adherents in the Ghebers of Persia and the Parsees of India.
+Pliny, following the affirmation of Aristotle, asserts that he
+flourished six thousand years before Plato. Moyle, Gibbon, Volney,
+Rhode, concur in throwing him back into this vast antiquity.
+Foucher, Holty, Heeren, Tychsen, Guizot, assign his birth to the
+beginning of the seventh century before Christ. Hyde, Prideaux, Du
+Perron, Kleuker, Herder, Klaproth, and others, bring him down to
+about a hundred and fifty years later. Meanwhile, several weighty
+names press the scale in favor of the hypothesis of two or three
+Zoroasters, living at separate epochs. So the learned men differ,
+and the genuine date in question cannot, at present at least, be
+decided. It is comparatively certain that, if he was the author of
+the work attributed to him, he must have flourished as early as
+the sixth century before Christ. The probabilities seem, upon the
+whole, that he lived four or five centuries earlier than that,
+even, "in the pre historic time," as Spiegel says. However, the
+settlement of the era of Zoroaster is not a necessary condition of
+discovering the era when the religion commonly traced to him was
+in full prevalence as the established faith of the Persian empire.
+The latter may be conclusively fixed without clearing up the
+former. And it is known, without disputation, that that religion
+whether it was primarily Persian, Median, Assyrian, or Chaldean
+was flourishing at Babylon in the maturity of its power in the
+time of the Hebrew prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel,
+twenty five hundred years ago.
+
+The celebrated work on the religion of the ancient Medes and
+Persians by Dr. Hyde, published in 1700, must be followed with
+much caution and be taken with many qualifications. The author was
+biassed by unsound theories of the relation of the Hebrew theology
+to the Persian, and was, of course, ignorant of the most
+authoritative ancient documents afterwards brought to light. His
+work, therefore, though learned and valuable, considering the time
+when it was written, is vitiated by numerous mistakes and defects.
+In 1762, Anquetil du Perron, returning to France from protracted
+journeying and abode in the East, brought home, among the fruits
+of his researches, manuscripts purporting to be parts of the old
+Persian Bible composed or collected by Zoroaster. It was written
+in a language hitherto unknown to European scholars, one of the
+primitive dialects of Persia. This work, of which he soon
+published a French version at Paris was entitled by him the "Zend
+Avesta." It confirmed all that was previously known of the
+Zoroastrian religion, and, by its allusions, statements, and
+implications, threw great additional light upon the subject.
+
+A furious controversy, stimulated by personal rivalries and
+national jealousy, immediately arose. Du Perron was denounced as
+an impostor or an ignoramus, and his publication stigmatized as a
+wretched forgery of his own, or a gross imposition palmed upon him
+by some lying pundit. Sir William Jones and John Richardson, both
+distinguished English Orientalists, and Meiners in Germany, were
+the chief impugners of the document in hand. Richardson
+obstinately went beyond his data, and did not live long enough to
+retract; but Sir William, upon an increase of information, changed
+his views, and regretted his first inconsiderate zeal and somewhat
+mistaken championship. The ablest defender of Du Perron was
+Kleuker, who translated the whole work from French into German,
+adding many corrections, new arguments, and researches of great
+ability. His work was printed at Riga, in seven quarto volumes,
+from 1777 to 1783. The progress and results of the whole
+discussion are well enough indicated in the various papers which
+the subject drew forth in the volumes of the "Asiatic Researches"
+and the numbers of the "Asiatic Journal." The conclusion was that,
+while Du Perron had indeed betrayed partial ignorance and crudity,
+and had committed some glaring errors, there was not the least
+ground for doubt that his asserted discovery was in every
+essential what it claimed to be. It is a sort of litany; a
+collection of prayers and of sacred dialogues held between Ormuzd
+and Zoroaster, from which the Persian system of theology may be
+inferred and constructed with some approach to completeness.
+
+The assailants of the genuineness of the "Zend Avesta" were
+effectually silenced when, some thirty years later, Professor
+Rask, a well known Danish linguist, during his inquiries in the
+East, found other copies of it, and gave to the world such
+information and proofs as could not be suspected. He, discovering
+the close affinities of the Zend with Sanscrit, led the way to the
+most brilliant triumph yet achieved by comparative philology.
+Portions of the work in the original character were published in
+1829, under the supervision of Burnouf at Paris and of Olshausen
+at Hamburg. The question of the genuineness of the dialect
+exhibited in these specimens, once so freely mooted, has been
+discussed, and definitively settled in the affirmative, by several
+eminent scholars, among whom may be mentioned Bopp, whose
+"Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend,
+Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, and German Languages" is an
+astonishing monument of erudition and toil. It is the conviction
+of Major Rawlinson that the Zoroastrian books of the Parsees were
+imported to Bombay from Persia in their present state in the
+seventh century of our era, but that they were written at least
+twelve centuries earlier.1
+
+But the two scholars whose opinions upon any subject within this
+department of learning are now the most authoritative are
+Professor Spiegel of Erlangen, and Professor Westergaard of
+Copenhagen. Their investigations, still in progress, made with all
+the aids furnished by their predecessors, and also with the
+advantage of newly discovered materials and processes, are of
+course to be relied on in preference to the earlier, and in some
+respects necessarily cruder, researches. It appears that the
+proper Zoroastrian Scriptures namely, the Yasna, the Vispered, the
+Vendidad, the Yashts, the Nyaish, the Afrigans, the Gahs, the
+Sirozah, and a few other fragments were composed in an ancient
+Iranian dialect, which may as Professor
+
+W. D. Whitney suggests in his very lucid and able article in vol.
+v. of the Journal of the American Oriental Society most fitly be
+called the Avestan dialect. (No other book in this dialect, we
+believe, is known to be in existence now.) It is difficult to say
+when these
+
+1 Wilson, Parsi Religion Unfolded, p. 405.
+
+
+documents were written; but in view of all the relevant
+information now possessed, including that drawn from the
+deciphered cuneiform inscriptions, the most probable date is about
+a thousand years before Christ. Professor R. Roth of Tubingen
+whose authority herein as an original investigator is perhaps
+hardly second to any other man's says the books of the Zoroastrian
+faith were written a considerable time before the rise of the
+Achamenian dynasty. He is convinced that the whole substantial
+contents of the Zend Avesta are many centuries older than the
+Christian era.2 Professor Muller of Oxford also holds the same
+opinion.3 And even those who set the date of the literary record a
+few centuries later, as Spiegel does, freely admit the great
+antiquity of the doctrines and usages then first committed to
+manuscript. In the fourth century before Christ, Alexander of
+Macedon overran the Persian empire. With the new rule new
+influences prevailed, and the old national faith and ritual fell
+into decay and neglect. Early in the third century of the
+Christian era, Ardeshir overthrew the Parthian dominion in Persia
+and established the Sassanian dynasty. One of his first acts was,
+stimulated doubtless by the surviving Magi and the old piety of
+the people, to reinaugurate the ancient religion. A fresh zeal of
+loyalty broke out, and all the prestige and vigor of the long
+suppressed worship were restored. The Zoroastrian Scriptures were
+now sought for, whether in manuscript or in the memories of the
+priests. It would seem that only remnants were found. The
+collection, such as it was, was in the Avestan dialect, which had
+grown partially obsolete and unintelligible. The authorities
+accordingly had a translation of it made in the speech of the
+time, Pehlevi. This translation most of which has reached us
+written in with the original, sentence after sentence forms the
+real Zend language, often confounded by the literary public with
+Avestan. The translation of the Avestan books, probably made under
+these circumstances as early as A. D. 350, is called the
+Huzvaresch. In regard to some of these particulars there are
+questions still under investigation, but upon which it is not
+worth our while to pause here. For example, Spiegel thinks the
+Zend identical with the Pehlevi of the fourth century; Westergaard
+believes it entirely distinct from Pehlevi, and in truth only a
+disguised mode of writing Parsee, the oldest form of the modern
+Persian language.
+
+The source from which the fullest and clearest knowledge of the
+Zoroastrian faith, as it is now held by the Parsees, is drawn, is
+the Desatir and the Bundehesh. The former work is the unique
+vestige of an extinct dialect called the Mahabadian, accompanied
+by a Persian translation and commentary. It is impossible to
+ascertain the century when the Mahabadian text was written; but
+the translation into Persian was, most probably, made in the
+seventh century of the Christian era.4 Spiegel, in 1847, says
+there can be no doubt of the spuriousness of the Desatir; but he
+gives no reasons for the statement, and we do not know that it is
+based on any other arguments than those which, advanced by De
+Sacy, were refuted by Von Hammer. The Bundehesh is in the Pehlevi
+or Zend language, and was written, it is
+
+2 Ueber die Heiligen Schriften der Arier. Jahrbucher fur Deutsche
+Theologie, 1857, band ii. ss. 146, 147.
+
+3 Essay on the Veda and the Zend Avesta, p. 24. See also Bunsen's
+Christianity and Mankind, vol. iii. p. 114.
+
+4 Baron von Hammer, in Heidelberger Jabrbucher der Literatur,
+1823. Id. in Journal Asiatique, Juillet, 1833. Dabistan,
+Preliminary Discourse, pp. xix.  lxv.
+
+
+thought, about the seventh century, but was derived, it is
+claimed, from a more ancient work.5 The book entitled "Revelations
+of Ardai Viraf" exists in Pehlevi probably of the fourth century,
+according to Troyer,6 and is believed to have been originally
+written in the Avestan tongue, though this is extremely doubtful.
+It gives a detailed narrative of the scenery of heaven and hell,
+as seen by Ardai Viraf during a visit of a week which his soul
+leaving his body for that length of time paid to those regions.
+Many later and enlarged versions of this have appeared. One of
+them, dating from the sixteenth century, was translated into
+English by T. A. Pope and published in 1816. Sanscrit translations
+of several of the before named writings are also in existence. And
+several other comparatively recent works, scarcely needing mention
+here, although considered as somewhat authoritative by the modern
+followers of Zoroaster, are to be found in Guzeratee, the present
+dialect of the Indian Parsees. A full exposition of the
+Zoroastrian religion, with satisfactory proofs of its antiquity
+and documentary genuineness, is presented in the Preliminary
+Discourse and Notes to the Dabistan. This curious and entertaining
+work, a fund of strange and valuable lore, is an historico
+critical view of the principal religions of the world, especially
+of the Oriental sects, schools, and manners. It was composed in
+Persian, apparently by Mohsan Fani, about the year 1645. An
+English translation, with elaborate explanatory matter, by David
+Shea and Anthony Troyer, was published at London and at Paris in
+1843.7
+
+In these records there are obscurities, incongruities, and chasms,
+as might naturally be anticipated, admitting them to be strictly
+what they would pass for. These faults may be accounted for in
+several ways. First, in a rude stage of philosophical culture,
+incompleteness of theory, inconsistent conceptions in different
+parts of a system, are not unusual, but are rather to be expected,
+and are slow to become troublesome to its adherents. Secondly,
+distinct contemporary thinkers or sects may give expression to
+their various views in literary productions of the same date and
+possessing a balanced authority. Or, thirdly, the heterogeneous
+conceptions in some particulars met with in these scriptures may
+be a result of the fact that the collection contains writings of
+distinct ages, when the same problems had been differently
+approached and had given birth to opposing or divergent
+speculations. The later works of course cannot have the authority
+of the earlier in deciding questions of ancient belief: they are
+to be taken rather as commentaries, interpreting and carrying out
+in detail many points that lie only in obscure hints and allusions
+in the primary documents. But it is a significant fact that, in
+the generic germs of doctrine and custom, in the essential
+outlines of substance, in rhetorical imagery, in practical morals,
+the statements of all these books are alike: they only vary in
+subordinate matters and in degrees of fulness.
+
+The charge has repeatedly been urged that the materials of the
+more recent of the Parsee Scriptures the Desatir and the
+Bundehesh were drawn from Christian and Mohammedan sources. No
+evidence of value for sustaining such assertions has been adduced.
+Under the circumstances, scarcely any motive for such an
+imposition appears. In view of the whole case,
+
+5 Dabistan, vol. i. p. 226, note.
+
+6 Ibid. p. 185, note.
+
+7 Reviewed in Asiatic Journal, 1844, pp. 582-595.
+
+
+the reverse supposition is rather to be credited. In the first
+place, we have ample evidence for the existence of the general
+Zoroastrian system long anterior to the rise of Christianity. The
+testimony of the classic authors to say nothing of the known
+antiquity of the language in which the system is preserved is
+demonstrative on this point. Secondly, the striking agreement in
+regard to fundamental doctrines, pervading spirit, and ritual
+forms between the accounts in the classics and those in the
+Avestan books, and of both these with the later writings and
+traditional practice of the Parsees, furnishes powerful
+presumption that the religion was a connected development,
+possessing the same essential features from the time of its
+national establishment. Thirdly, we have unquestionable proofs
+that, during the period from the Babylonish captivity to the
+advent of Christ, the Jews borrowed and adapted a great deal from
+the Persian theology, but no proof that the Persians took any
+thing from the Jewish theology. This is abundantly confessed by
+such scholars as Gesenius, Rosenmuller, Stuart, Lucke, De Wette,
+Neander; and it will hardly be challenged by any one who has
+investigated the subject. But the Jewish theology being thus
+impregnated with germs from the Persian faith, and being in a
+sense the historic mother of Christian theology, it is far more
+reasonable, in seeking the origin of dogmas common to Parsees and
+Christians, to trace them through the Pharisees to Zoroaster, than
+to imagine them suddenly foisted upon the former by forgery on the
+part of the latter at a late period. Fourthly, it is notorious
+that Mohammed, in forming his religion, made wholesale draughts
+upon previously existing faiths, that their adherents might more
+readily accept his teachings, finding them largely in unison with
+their own. It is altogether more likely, aside from historic
+evidence which we possess, that he drew from the tenets and
+imagery of the Ghebers, than that they, when subdued by his armies
+and persecuted by his rule from their native land, introduced new
+doctrines from the Koran into the ancestral creed which they so
+revered that neither exile nor death could make them abjure it.
+For, driven by those fierce proselytes, the victorious Arabs, to
+the mountains of Kirman and to the Indian coast, they clung with
+unconquerable tenacity to their religion, still scrupulously
+practising its rites, proudly mindful of the time when every
+village, from the shore of the Caspian Sea to the outlet of the
+Persian Gulf, had its splendid fire temple,
+
+"And Iran like a sunflower turn'd Where'er the eye of Mithra
+burn'd."
+
+We therefore see no reason for believing that important Christian
+or Mohammedan ideas have been interpolated into the old
+Zoroastrian religion. The influence has been in the other
+direction. Relying then, though with caution, on what Dr. Edward
+Roth says, that "the certainty of our possessing a correct
+knowledge of the leading ancient doctrines of the Persians is now
+beyond all question," we will try to exhibit so much of the system
+as is necessary for appreciating its doctrine of a future life.
+
+In the deep background of the Magian theology looms, in mysterious
+obscurity, the belief in an infinite First Principle, Zeruana
+Akerana. According to most of the scholars who have investigated
+it, the meaning of this term is "Time without Bounds," or absolute
+duration. But Bohlen says it signifies the "Untreated Whole;" and
+Schlegel thinksit denotes the "Indivisible One." The conception
+seems to have been to the people mostly an unapplied abstraction,
+too vast and remote to become prominent in their speculation or
+influential in their faith. Spiegel, indeed, thinks the conception
+was derived from Babylon, and added to the system at a later
+period than the other doctrines. The beginning of vital theology,
+the source of actual ethics to the Zoroastrians, was in the idea
+of the two antagonist powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman, the first
+emanations of Zeruana, who divide between them in unresting strife
+the empire of the universe. The former is the Principle of Good,
+the perfection of intelligence, beneficence, and light, the source
+of all reflected excellence. The latter is the Principle of Evil,
+the contriver of misery and death, the king of darkness, the
+instigator of all wrong. With sublime beauty the ancient Persian
+said, "Light is the body of Ormuzd; Darkness is the body of
+Ahriman." There has been much dispute whether the Persian theology
+grew out of the idea of an essential and eternal dualism, or was
+based on the conception of a partial and temporary battle; in
+other words, whether Ahriman was originally and necessarily evil,
+or fell from a divine estate.
+
+In the fragmentary documents which have reached us, the whole
+subject lies in confusion. It is scarcely possible to unravel the
+tangled mesh. Sometimes it seems to be taught that Ahriman was at
+first good, an angel of light who, through envy of his great
+compeer, sank from his primal purity, darkened into hatred, and
+became the rancorous enemy of truth and love. At other times he
+appears to be considered as the pure primordial essence of evil.
+The various views may have prevailed in different ages or in
+different schools. Upon the whole, however, we hold the opinion
+that the real Zoroastrian idea of Ahriman was moral and free, not
+physical and fatal. The whole basis of the universe was good; evil
+was an after perversion, a foreign interpolation, a battling
+mixture. First, the perfect Zeruana was once all in all: Ahriman,
+as well as Ormuzd, proceeded from him; and the inference that he
+was pure would seem to belong to the idea of his origin. Secondly,
+so far as the account of Satan given in the book of Job perhaps
+the earliest appearance of the Persian notion in Jewish
+literature warrants any inference or supposition at all, it would
+lead to the image of one who was originally a prince in heaven,
+and who must have fallen thence to become the builder and
+potentate of hell. Thirdly, that matter is not an essential core
+of evil, the utter antagonist of spirit, and that Ahriman is not
+evil by an intrinsic necessity, will appear from the two
+conceptions lying at the base and crown of the Persian system:
+that the creation, as it first came from the hands of Ormuzd, was
+perfectly good; and that finally the purified material world shall
+exist again unstained by a breath of evil, Ahriman himself
+becoming like Ormuzd. He is not, then, aboriginal and
+indestructible evil in substance. The conflict between Ormuzd and
+him is the temporary ethical struggle of light and darkness, not
+the internecine ontological war of spirit and matter. Roth says,
+"Ahriman was originally good: his fall was a determination of his
+will, not an inherent necessity of his nature." 8 Whatever other
+conceptions may be found, whatever inconsistencies or
+contradictions to this may appear, still, we believe the genuine
+Zoroastrian view was such as we have now stated. The opposite
+doctrine arose from the more abstruse lucubrations of a more
+modern time, and is Manichaan, not Zoroastrian.
+
+8 Zoroastrische Glaubenslehre, ss. 397, 398.
+
+
+Ormuzd created a resplendent and happy world. Ahriman instantly
+made deformity, impurity, and gloom, in opposition to it. All
+beauty, virtue, harmony, truth, blessedness, were the work of the
+former. All ugliness, vice, discord, falsehood, wretchedness,
+belonged to the latter. They grappled and mixed in a million
+hostile shapes. This universal battle is the ground of ethics, the
+clarion call to marshal out the hostile hosts of good and ill; and
+all other war is but a result and a symbol of it. The strife thus
+indicated between a Deity and a Devil, both subordinate to the
+unmoved ETERNAL, was the Persian solution of the problem of evil,
+their answer to the staggering question, why pleasure and pain,
+benevolence and malignity, are so conflictingly mingled in the
+works of nature and in the soul of man. In the long struggle that
+ensued, Ormuzd created multitudes of co operant angels to assail
+his foe, stocking the clean empire of Light with celestial allies
+of his holy banner, who hang from heaven in great numbers, ready
+at the prayer of the righteous man to hie to his aid and work him
+a thousandfold good. Ahriman, likewise, created an equal number of
+assistant demons, peopling the filthy domain of Darkness with
+counterbalancing swarms of infernal followers of his pirate flag,
+who lurk at the summit of hell, watching to snatch every
+opportunity to ply their vocation of sin and ruin. There are such
+hosts of these invisible antagonists sown abroad, and incessantly
+active, that every star is crowded and all space teems with them.
+Each man has a good and a bad angel, a ferver and a dev, who are
+endeavoring in every manner to acquire control over his conduct
+and possession of his soul.
+
+The Persians curiously personified the source of organic life in
+the world under the emblem of a primeval bull. In this symbolic
+beast were packed the seeds and germs of all the creatures
+afterwards to people the earth. Ahriman, to ruin the creation of
+which this animal was the life medium, sought to kill him. He set
+upon him two of his devs, who are called "adepts of death." They
+stung him in the breast, and plagued him until he died of rage.
+But, as he was dying, from his right shoulder sprang the
+androgynal Kaiomorts, who was the stock root of humanity. His body
+was made from fire, air, water, and earth, to which Ormuzd added
+an immortal soul, and bathed him with an elixir which rendered him
+fair and glittering as a youth of fifteen, and would have
+preserved him so perennially had it not been for the assaults of
+the Evil One.9 Ahriman, the enemy of all life, determined to slay
+him, and at last accomplished his object; but, as Kaiomorts fell,
+from his seed, through the power of Ormuzd, originated Meschia and
+Meschiane, male and female, the first human pair, from whom all
+our race have descended. They would never have died,10 but
+Ahriman, in the guise of a serpent, seduced them, and they sinned
+and fell. This account is partly drawn from that later treatise,
+the Bundehesh, whose mythological cosmogony reminds us of the
+Scandinavian Ymer. But we conceive it to be strictly reliable as a
+representation of the Zoroastrian faith in its essential
+doctrines; for the earlier documents, the Yasna, the Yeshts, and
+the Vendidad, contain the same things in obscure and undeveloped
+expressions. They, too, make repeated mention of the mysterious
+bull, and of Kaiomorts.11 They invariably represent death as
+resulting
+
+9 Kleuker, Zend Avesta, band i. anhang 1, s. 263.
+
+10 Ibid. band i. s. 27.
+
+11 Yasna, 24th IIa.
+
+
+from the hostility of Ahriman. The earliest Avestan account of the
+earthly condition of men describes them as living in a garden
+which Yima or Jemschid had enclosed at the command of Ormuzd.12
+During the golden age of his reign they were free from heat and
+cold, sickness and death. "In the garden which Yima made they led
+a most beautiful life, and they bore none of the marks which
+Ahriman has since made upon men." But Ahriman's envy and hatred
+knew no rest until he and his devs had, by their wiles, broken
+into this paradise, betrayed Yima and his people into falsehood,
+and so, by introducing corruption into their hearts, put an end to
+their glorious earthly immortality. This view is set forth in the
+opening fargards of the Vendidad; and it has been clearly
+illustrated in an elaborate contribution upon the "Old Iranian
+Mythology" by Professor Westergaard.13 Death, like all other
+evils, was an after effect, thrust into the purely good creation
+of Ormuzd by the cunning malice of Ahriman. The Vendidad, at its
+commencement, recounts the various products of Ormuzd's beneficent
+power, and adds, after each particular, "Thereupon Ahriman, who is
+full of death, made an opposition to the same."
+
+According to the Zoroastrian modes of thought, what would have
+been the fate of man had Ahriman not existed or not interfered?
+Plainly, mankind would have lived on forever in innocence and joy.
+They would have been blessed with all placid delights, exempt from
+hate, sickness, pain, and every other ill; and, when the earth was
+full of them, Ormuzd would have taken his sinless subjects to his
+own realm of light on high. But when they forsook the true service
+of Ormuzd, falling into deceit and defilement, they became
+subjects of Ahriman; and he would inflict on them, as the
+creatures of his hated rival, all the calamities in his power,
+dissolve the masterly workmanship of their bodies in death, and
+then take their souls as prisoners into his own dark abode. "Had
+Meschia continued to bring meet praises, it would have happened
+that when the time of man, created pure, had come, his soul,
+created pure and immortal, would immediately have gone to the seat
+of bliss."14 "Heaven was destined for man upon condition that he
+was humble of heart, obedient to the law, and pure in thought,
+word, and deed." But "by believing the lies of Ahriman they became
+sinners, and their souls must remain in his nether kingdom until
+the resurrection of their bodies."15 Ahriman's triumph thus
+culminates in the death of man and that banishment of the
+disembodied soul into hell which takes the place of its
+originally intended reception into heaven.
+
+The law of Ormuzd, revealed through Zoroaster, furnishes to all
+who faithfully observe it in purity of thought, speech, and
+action, "when body and soul have separated, attainment of paradise
+in the next world,"16 while the neglecters of it "will pass into
+the dwelling of the devs,"17 "after death will have no part in
+paradise, but will occupy the place of darkness
+
+12 Die Sage von Dschemschid. Von Professor R. Roth. In Zeitschrift
+der Deutschen Morgeulandischen Gesellschaft, band iv. ss. 417-431.
+
+13 Weber, Indische Studien, band iii. 8. 411.
+
+14 Yesht LXXXVII. Kleuker, band ii. sect. 211.
+
+15 Bundehesh, ch. xv.
+
+16 Avesta die Heiligen Schriften der Parsen. Von Dr. F. Spiegel,
+band i. s, 171.
+
+17 Ibid. s. 158.
+
+
+destined for the wicked."18 The third day after death, the soul
+advances upon "the way created by Ormuzd for good and bad," to be
+examined as to its conduct. The pure soul passes up from this
+evanescent world, over the bridge Chinevad, to the world of
+Ormuzd, and joins the angels. The sinful soul is bound and led
+over the way made for the godless, and finds its place at the
+bottom of gloomy hell.19 An Avestan fragment 20 and the Viraf
+Nameh give the same account, only with more picturesque fulness.
+On the soaring bridge the soul meets Rashne rast, the angel of
+justice, who tries those that present themselves before him. If
+the merits prevail, a figure of dazzling substance, radiating
+glory and fragrance, advances and accosts the justified soul,
+saying, "I am thy good angel: I was pure at the first, but thy
+good deeds have made me purer;" and the happy one is straightway
+led to Paradise. But when the vices outweigh the virtues, a dark
+and frightful image, featured with ugliness and exhaling a noisome
+smell, meets the condemned soul, and cries, "I am thy evil spirit:
+bad myself, thy crimes have made me worse." Then the culprit
+staggers on his uncertain foothold, is hurled from the dizzy
+causeway, and precipitated into the gulf which yawns horribly
+below. A sufficient reason for believing these last details no
+late and foreign interpolation, is that the Vendidad itself
+contains all that is essential in them, Garotman, the heaven of
+Ormuzd, open to the pure, Dutsakh, the abode of devs, ready for
+the wicked, Chinevad, the bridge of ordeal, upon which all must
+enter.21
+
+Some authors have claimed that the ancient disciples of Zoroaster
+believed in a purifying, intermediate state for the dead. Passages
+stating such a doctrine are found in the Yeshts, Sades, and in
+later Parsee works. But whether the translations we now possess of
+these passages are accurate, and whether the passages themselves
+are authoritative to establish the ancient prevalence of such a
+belief, we have not yet the means for deciding. There was a yearly
+solemnity, called the "Festival for the Dead," still observed by
+the Parsees, held at the season when it was thought that that
+portion of the sinful departed who had ended their penance were
+raised from Dutsakh to earth, from earth to Garotman. Du Perron
+says that this took place only during the last five days of the
+year, when the souls of all the deceased sinners who were
+undergoing punishment had permission to leave their confinement
+and visit their relatives; after which, those not yet purified
+were to return, but those for whom a sufficient atonement had been
+made were to proceed to Paradise. For proof that this doctrine was
+held, reference is made to the following passage, with others:
+"During these five days Ormuzd empties hell. The imprisoned souls
+shall be freed from Ahriman's plagues when they pay penance and
+are ashamed of their sins; and they shall receive a heavenly
+nature; the meritorious deeds of themselves and of their families
+cause this liberation: all the rest must return to Dutsakh."22
+Rhode thinks this was a part of the old Persian faith, and the
+source of
+
+18 Ibid. s. 127.
+
+19 Ibid. ss. 248-252. Vendidad, Fargard XIX.
+
+20 Kleuker, band i. ss. xxxi. xxxv.
+
+21 Spiegel, Vendidad, ss. 207, 229, 233, 250.
+
+22 Kleuker, band ii. s. 173.
+
+
+the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory.23 But, whether so or
+not, it is certain that the Zoroastrians regarded the whole
+residence of the departed souls in hell as temporary.
+
+The duration of the present order of the world was fixed at twelve
+thousand years, divided into four equal epochs. In the first three
+thousand years, Ormuzd creates and reigns triumphantly over his
+empire. Through the next cycle, Ahriman is constructing and
+carrying on his hostile works. The third epoch is occupied with a
+drawn battle between the upper and lower kings and their
+adherents. During the fourth period, Ahriman is to be victorious,
+and a state of things inconceivably dreadful is to prevail. The
+brightness of all clear things will be shrouded, the happiness of
+all joyful creatures be destroyed, innocence disappear, religion
+be scoffed from the world, and crime, horror, and war be rampant.
+Famine will spread, pests and plagues stalk over the earth, and
+showers of black rain fall. But at last Ormuzd will rise in his
+might and put an end to these awful scenes. He will send on earth
+a savior. Sosiosch, to deliver mankind, to wind up the final
+period of time, and to bring the arch enemy to judgment. At the
+sound of the voice of Sosiosch the dead will come forth. Good,
+bad, indifferent, all alike will rise, each in his order.
+Kaiomorts, the original single ancestor of men, will be the
+firstling. Next, Meschia and Meschiane, the primal parent pair,
+will appear. And then the whole multitudinous family of mankind
+will throng up. The genii of the elements will render up the
+sacred materials intrusted to them, and rebuild the decomposed
+bodies. Each soul will recognise, and hasten to reoccupy, its old
+tenement of flesh, now renewed, improved, immortalized. Former
+acquaintances will then know each other. "Behold, my father! my
+mother! my brother! my wife! they shall exclaim." 24
+
+In this exposition we have following the guidance of Du Perron,
+Foucher, Kleuker, J. G. Muller, and other early scholars in this
+field attributed the doctrine of a general and bodily resurrection
+of the dead to the ancient Zoroastrians. The subsequent researches
+of Burnouf, Roth, and others, have shown that several, at least,
+of the passages which Anquetil supposed to teach such a doctrine
+were erroneously translated by him, and do not really contain it.
+And recently the ground has been often assumed that the doctrine
+of the resurrection does not belong to the Avesta, but is a more
+modern dogma, derived by the Parsees from the Jews or the
+Christians, and only forced upon the old text by misinterpretation
+through the Pehlevi version and the Parsee commentary. A question
+of so grave importance demands careful examination. In the absence
+of that reliable translation of the entire original documents, and
+that thorough elaboration of all the extant materials, which we
+are awaiting from the hands of Professor Spiegel, whose second
+volume has long been due, and Professor Westergaard, whose second
+and third volumes are eagerly looked for, we must make the best
+use of the resources actually available, and then leave the point
+in such plausible light as existing testimony and fair reasoning
+can throw upon it. In the first place, it should be observed that,
+admitting the doctrine to be nowhere mentioned in the Avesta,
+still, it does not follow that the belief was not prevalent when
+the
+
+23 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 410.
+
+24 Bundehesh, ch. xxxi.
+
+
+Avesta was written. We know that the Christians of the first two
+centuries believed a great many things of which there is no
+statement in the New Testament. Spiegel holds that the doctrine in
+debate is not in the Avesta, the text of which in its present form
+he thinks was written after the time of Alexander.25 But he
+confesses that the resurrection theory was in existence long
+before that time.26 Now, if the Avesta, committed to writing three
+hundred years before Christ, at a time when the doctrine of the
+resurrection is known to have been believed, contains no reference
+to it, the same relation of facts may just as well have existed if
+we date the record seven centuries earlier. We possess only a
+small and broken portion of the original Zoroastrian Scriptures;
+as Roth says, "songs, invocations, prayers, snatches of
+traditions, parts of a code, the shattered fragments of a once
+stately building." If we could recover the complete documents in
+their earliest condition, it might appear that the now lost parts
+contained the doctrine of the general resurrection fully formed.
+We have many explicit references to many ancient Zoroastrian books
+no longer in existence. For example, the Parsees have a very early
+account that the Avesta at first consisted of twenty one Nosks. Of
+these but one has been preserved complete, and small parts of
+three or four others. The rest are utterly wanting. The fifth
+Nosk, whereof not any portion remains to us, was called the Do az
+ah Hamast. It contained thirty two chapters, treating, among other
+things, "of the upper and nether world, of the resurrection, of
+the bridge Chinevad, and of the fate after death." 27 If this
+evidence be true, and we know of no reason for not crediting it,
+it is perfectly decisive. But, at all events, the absence from the
+extant parts of the Zend Avesta of the doctrine under examination
+would be no proof that that doctrine was not received when those
+documents were penned.
+
+Secondly, we have the unequivocal assertion of Theopompus, in the
+fourth century before Christ, that the Magi taught the doctrine of
+a general resurrection.28 "At the appointed epoch Ahriman shall be
+subdued," and "men shall live again and shall be immortal." And
+Diogenes adds, "Eudemus of Rhodes affirms the same things."
+Aristotle calls Ormuzd Zeus, and Ahriman Haides, the Greek names
+respectively of the lord of the starry Olympians above, and the
+monarch of the Stygian ghosts beneath. Another form also in which
+the early Greek authors betray their acquaintance with the Persian
+conception of a conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman is in the
+idea expressed by Xenophon in his Cyropadia, in the dialogue
+between Araspes and Cyrus of two souls in man, one a brilliant
+efflux of good, the other a dusky emanation of evil, each bearing
+the likeness of its parent.29 Since we know from Theopompus that
+certain conceptions, illustrated in the Bundehesh and not
+contained in the fragmentary Avestan books which have reached us,
+were actually received Zoroastrian
+
+25 Studien uber das Zend Avesta, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen
+Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 1855, band ix. s. 192.
+
+26 Spiegel, Avesta, band i. s. 16.
+
+27 Dabistan, vol. i. pp. 272-274.
+
+28 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Introduction,
+sect. vi. Plutarch, concerning Isis and Osiris.
+
+29 Lib. vi. cap. i. sect. 41.
+
+
+tenets four centuries before Christ, we are strongly supported in
+giving credence to the doctrinal statements of that book as
+affording, in spite of its lateness, a correct epitome of the old
+Persian theology.
+
+Thirdly, we are still further warranted in admitting the antiquity
+of the Zoroastrian system as including the resurrection theory,
+when we consider the internal harmony and organic connection of
+parts in it; how the doctrines all fit together, and imply each
+other, and could scarcely have existed apart. Men were the
+creatures of Ormuzd. They should have lived immortally under his
+favor and in his realm. But Ahriman, by treachery, obtained
+possession of a large portion of them. Now, when, at the end of
+the fourth period into which the world course was divided by the
+Magian theory, as Theopompus testifies, Ormuzd overcomes this
+arch adversary, will he not rescue his own unfortunate creatures
+from the realm of darkness in which they have been imprisoned?
+When a king storms an enemy's castle, he delivers from the
+dungeons his own soldiers who were taken captives in a former
+defeat. The expectation of a great prophet, Sosiosch, to come and
+vanquish Ahriman and his swarms, unquestionably appears in the
+Avesta itself.30 With this notion, in inseparable union, the
+Parsee tradition, running continuously back, as is claimed, to a
+very remote time, joins the doctrine of a general resurrection; a
+doctrine literally stated in the Vendidad,31 and in many other
+places in the Avesta,32 where it has not yet been shown to be an
+interpolation, but only supposed so by very questionable
+constructive inferences. The consent of intrinsic adjustment and
+of historic evidence would, therefore, lead to the conclusion that
+this was an old Zoroastrian dogma. In disproof of this conclusion
+we believe there is no direct positive evidence whatever, and no
+inferential argument cogent enough to produce conviction.
+
+There are sufficient reasons for the belief that the doctrine of a
+resurrection was quite early adopted from the Persians by the
+Jews, not borrowed at a much later time from the Jews by the
+Parsees. The conception of Ahriman, the evil serpent, bearing
+death, (die Schlange Angramainyus der voll Tod ist,) is
+interwrought from the first throughout the Zoroastrian scheme. In
+the Hebrew records, on the contrary, such an idea appears but
+incidentally, briefly, rarely, and only in the later books. The
+account of the introduction of sin and death by the serpent in the
+garden of Eden dates from a time subsequent to the commencement of
+the Captivity. Von Bohlen, in his Introduction to the Book of
+Genesis, says the narrative was drawn from the Zend Avesta.
+Rosenmuller, in his commentary on the passage, says the narrator
+had in view the Zoroastrian notions of the serpent Ahriman and his
+deeds. Dr. Martin Haug an acute and learned writer, whose opinion
+is entitled to great weight, as he is the freshest scholar
+acquainted with this whole field in the light of all that others
+have done thinks it certain that Zoroaster lived in a remote
+antiquity, from fifteen hundred to two thousand years before
+Christ. He says that Judaism after the exile and, through Judaism,
+Christianity afterwards received an important influence from
+Zoroastrianism,
+
+30 Spiegel, Avesta, band i. ss. 16, 244.
+
+31 Fargard XVIII, Spiegel's Uebersetzung, s. 236.
+
+32 Kleuker, band ii. ss. 123, 124, 164.
+
+
+an influence which, in regard to the doctrine of angels, Satan,
+and the resurrection of the dead, cannot be mistaken.33 The Hebrew
+theology had no demonology, no Satan, until after the residence at
+Babylon. This is admitted. Well, is not the resurrection a pendant
+to the doctrine of Satan? Without the idea of a Satan there would
+be no idea of a retributive banishment of souls into hell, and of
+course no occasion for a vindicating restoration of them thence to
+their former or a superior state.
+
+On this point the theory of Rawlinson is very important. He
+argues, with various proofs, that the Dualistic doctrine was a
+heresy which broke out very early among the primitive Aryans, who
+then were the single ancestry of the subsequent Iranians and
+Indians. This heresy was forcibly suppressed. Its adherents,
+driven out of India, went to Persia, and, after severe conflicts
+and final admixture with the Magians, there established their
+faith.34 The sole passage in the Old Testament teaching the
+resurrection is in the so called Book of Daniel, a book full of
+Chaldean and Persian allusions, written less than two centuries
+before Christ, long after we know it was a received Zoroastrian
+tenet, and long after the Hebrews had been exposed to the whole
+tide and atmosphere of the triumphant Persian power. The
+unchangeable tenacity of the Medes and Persians is a proverb. How
+often the Hebrew people lapsed into idolatry, accepting Pagan
+gods, doctrines, and ritual, is notorious. And, in particular, how
+completely subject they were to Persian influence appears clearly
+in large parts of the Biblical history, especially in the Books of
+Esther and Ezekiel. The origin of the term Beelzebub, too, in the
+New Testament, is plain. To say that the Persians derived the
+doctrine of the resurrection from the Jews seems to us as
+arbitrary as it would be to affirm that they also borrowed from
+them the custom, mentioned by Ezekiel, of weeping for Tammuz in
+the gates of the temple.
+
+In view of the whole case as it stands, until further researches
+either strengthen it or put a different aspect upon it, we feel
+forced to think that the doctrine of a general resurrection was a
+component element in the ancient Avestan religion. A further
+question of considerable interest arises as to the nature of this
+resurrection, whether it was conceived as physical or as
+spiritual. We have no data to furnish a determinate answer.
+Plutarch quotes from Theopompus the opinion of the Magi, that
+when, at the subdual of Ahriman, men are restored to life, "they
+will need no nourishment and cast no shadow." It would appear,
+then, that they must be spirits. The inference is not reliable;
+for the idea may be that all causes of decay will be removed, so
+that no food will be necessary to supply the wasting processes
+which no longer exist; and that the entire creation will be so
+full of light that a shadow will be impossible. It might be
+thought that the familiar Persian conception of angels, both good
+and evil, fervers and devs, and the reception of departed souls
+into their company, with Ormuzd in Garotman, or with Ahriman in
+Dutsakh, would exclude the belief in a future bodily resurrection.
+But Christians and Mohammedans at this day believe in immaterial
+angels and devils, and in the immediate entrance of disembodied
+souls upon reward or
+
+33 Die Lehre Zoroasters nach den alten Liedern des Zendavesta.
+Zeitschrift der Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, band ix. ss. 286,
+683-692.
+
+34 Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. i. pp. 426-431.
+
+
+punishment in their society, and still believe in their final
+return to the earth, and in a restoration to them of their former
+tabernacles of flesh. Discordant, incoherent, as the two beliefs
+may be, if their coexistence is a fact with cultivated and
+reasonable people now, much more was it possible with an
+undisciplined and credulous populace three thousand years in the
+past. Again, it has been argued that the indignity with which the
+ancient Persians treated the dead body, refusing to bury it or to
+burn it, lest the earth or the fire should be polluted, is
+incompatible with the supposition that they expected a
+resurrection of the flesh. In the first place, it is difficult to
+reason safely to any dogmatic conclusions from the funeral customs
+of a people. These usages are so much a matter of capricious
+priestly ritual, ancestral tradition, unreasoning instinct, blind
+or morbid superstition, that any consistent doctrinal construction
+is not fairly to be put upon them. Secondly, the Zoroastrians did
+not express scorn or loathing for the corpse by their manner of
+disposing of it. The greatest pains were taken to keep it from
+disgusting decay, by placing it in "the driest, purest, openest
+place," upon a summit where fresh winds blew, and where certain
+beasts and birds, accounted most sacred, might eat the corruptible
+portion: then the clean bones were carefully buried. The dead body
+had yielded to the hostile working of Ahriman, and become his
+possession. The priests bore it out on a bed or a carpet, and
+exposed it to the light of the sun. The demon was thus exorcised;
+and the body became further purified in being eaten by the sacred
+animals, and no putrescence was left to contaminate earth, water,
+or fire.35 Furthermore, it is to be noticed that the modern
+Parsees dispose of their dead in exactly the same manner depicted
+in the earliest accounts; yet they zealously hold to a literal
+resurrection of the body. If the giving of the flesh to the dog
+and the vulture in their case exists with this belief, it may have
+done so with their ancestors before Nebuchadnezzar swept the Jews
+to Babylon. Finally, it is quite reasonable to conclude that the
+old Persian doctrine of a resurrection did include the physical
+body, when we recollect that in the Zoroastrian scheme of thought
+there is no hostility to matter or to earthly life, but all is
+regarded as pure and good except so far as the serpent Ahriman has
+introduced evil. The expulsion of this evil with his ultimate
+overthrow, the restoration of all as it was at first, in purity,
+gladness, and eternal life, would be the obvious and consistent
+carrying out of the system. Hatred of earthly life, contempt for
+the flesh, the notion of an essential and irreconcilable warfare
+of soul against body, are Brahmanic and Manichaan, not
+Zoroastrian. Still, the ground plan and style of thought may not
+have been consistently adhered to. The expectation that the very
+same body would be restored was known to the Jews a century or two
+before Christ. One of the martyrs whose history is told in the
+Second Book of Maccabees, in the agonies of death plucked out his
+own bowels, and called on the Lord to restore them to him again at
+the resurrection. Considering the notion of a resurrection of the
+body as a sensuous burden on the idea of a resurrection of the
+soul, it may have been a later development originating with the
+Jews. But it seems to us decidedly more probable that the Magi
+held it as a part of their creed before they came in contact with
+the children of Israel. Such an opinion may be modestly held until
+further information is
+
+35 Spiegel, Avesta, ss. 82, 104, 109, 111, 122.
+
+
+afforded 36 or some new and fatal objection brought.
+
+After this resurrection a thorough separation will be made of the
+good from the bad. "Father shall be divided from child, sister
+from brother, friend from friend. The innocent one shall weep over
+the guilty one, the guilty one shall weep for himself. Of two
+sisters one shall be pure, one corrupt: they shall be treated
+according to their deeds." 37 Those who have not, in the
+intermediate state, fully expiated their sins, will, in sight of
+the whole creation, be remanded to the pit of punishment. But the
+author of evil shall not exult over them forever. Their prison
+house will soon be thrown open. The pangs of three terrible days
+and nights, equal to the agonies of nine thousand years, will
+purify all, even the worst of the demons. The anguished cry of the
+damned, as they writhe in the lurid caldron of torture, rising to
+heaven, will find pity in the soul of Ormuzd, and he will release
+them from their sufferings. A blazing star, the comet Gurtzscher,
+will fall upon the earth. In the heat of its conflagration, great
+and small mountains will melt and flow together as liquid metal.
+Through this glowing flood all human kind must pass. To the
+righteous it will prove as a pleasant bath, of the temperature of
+milk; but on the wicked the flame will inflict terrific pain.
+Ahriman will run up and down Chinevad in the perplexities of
+anguish and despair. The earth wide stream of fire, flowing on,
+will cleanse every spot and every thing. Even the loathsome realm
+of darkness and torment shall be burnished and made a part of the
+all inclusive Paradise. Ahriman himself, reclaimed to virtue,
+replenished with primal light, abjuring the memories of his
+envious ways, and furling thenceforth the sable standard of his
+rebellion, shall become a ministering spirit of the Most High,
+and, together with Ormuzd, chant the praises of Time without
+Bounds. All darkness, falsehood, suffering, shall flee utterly
+away, and the whole universe be filled by the illumination of good
+spirits blessed with fruitions of eternal delight. In regard to
+the fate of man,
+
+Such are the parables Zartushi address'd To Iran's faith, in the
+ancient Zend Avest.
+
+36 Windischmann has now (1863) fully proved this, in his
+Zoroastrische Studien. Spiegel frankly avows it: Avesta, band
+iii., einleitung, s. lxxv.
+
+37 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 467.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+HEBREW DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+ON the one extreme, a large majority of Christian scholars have
+asserted that the doctrine of a retributive immortality is clearly
+taught throughout the Old Testament. Able writers, like Bishop
+Warburton, have maintained, on the other extreme, that it says
+nothing whatever about a future life, but rather implies the total
+and eternal end of men in death. But the most judicious,
+trustworthy critics hold an intermediate position, and affirm that
+the Hebrew Scriptures show a general belief in the separate
+existence of the spirit, not indeed as experiencing rewards and
+punishments, but as surviving in the common silence and gloom of
+the under world, a desolate empire of darkness yawning beneath all
+graves and peopled with dream like ghosts.1
+
+A number of important passages have been cited from different
+parts of the Old Testament by the advocates of the view first
+mentioned above. It will be well for us to notice these and their
+misuse before proceeding farther.
+
+The translation of Enoch has been regarded as a revelation of the
+immortality of man. It is singular that Dr. Priestley should
+suggest, as the probable fact, so sheer and baseless a hypothesis
+as he does in his notes upon the Book of Genesis. He says, "Enoch
+was probably a prophet authorized to announce the reality of
+another life after this; and he might be removed into it without
+dying, as an evidence of the truth of his doctrine." The gross
+materialism of this supposition, and the failure of God's design
+which it implies, are a sufficient refutation of it. And, besides
+the utter unlikelihood of the thought, it is entirely destitute of
+support in the premises. One of the most curious of the many
+strange things to be found in Warburton's argument for the Divine
+Legation of Moses an argument marked, as is well known, by
+profound erudition, and, in many respects, by consummate ability
+is the use he makes of this account to prove that Moses believed
+the doctrine of immortality, but purposely obscured the fact from
+which it might be drawn by the people, in order that it might not
+interfere with his doctrine of the temporal special providence of
+Jehovah over the Jewish nation. Such a course is inconsistent with
+sound morality, much more with the character of an inspired
+prophet of God.
+
+The only history we have of Enoch is in the fifth chapter of the
+Book of Genesis. The substance of it is as follows: "And Enoch
+walked with God during his appointed years; and then he was not,
+for God took him." The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
+following the example of those Rabbins who, several centuries
+before his time, began to give mystical interpretations of the
+Scriptures, infers from this statement that Enoch was borne into
+heaven without tasting death. But it is not certainly known who
+the author of that epistle was; and, whoever he was, his opinion,
+of course, can have no authority upon a subject of criticism like
+
+1 Boettcher, De Inferis Rebusque post mortem futuris ex Hebraorum
+et Gracoram Opinionibus.
+
+this. Replying to the supposititious argument furnished by this
+passage, we say, Take the account as it reads, and it neither
+asserts nor implies the idea commonly held concerning it. It says
+nothing about translation or immortality; nor can any thing of the
+kind be legitimately deduced from it. Its plain meaning is no more
+nor less than this: Enoch lived three hundred and sixty five
+years, fearing God and keeping his commandments, and then he died.
+Many of the Rabbins, fond as they are of finding in the Pentateuch
+the doctrine of future blessedness for the good, interpret this
+narrative as only signifying an immature death; for Enoch, it will
+be recollected, reached but about half the average age of the
+others whose names are mentioned in the chapter. Had this
+occurrence been intended as the revelation of a truth, it would
+have been fully and clearly stated; otherwise it could not answer
+any purpose. As Le Clerc observes, "If the writer believed so
+important a fact as that Enoch was immortal, it is wonderful that
+he relates it as secretly and obscurely as if he wished to hide
+it." But, finally, even admitting that the account is to be
+regarded as teaching literally that God took Enoch, it by no means
+proves a revelation of the doctrine of general immortality. It
+does not show that anybody else would ever be translated or would
+in any way enter upon a future state of existence. It is not put
+forth as a revelation; it says nothing whatever concerning a
+revelation. It seems to mean either that Enoch suddenly died, or
+that he disappeared, nobody knew whither. But, if it really means
+that God took him into heaven, it is more natural to think that
+that was done as a special favor than as a sign of what awaited
+others. No general cause is stated, no consequence deduced, no
+principle laid down, no reflection added. How, then, can it be
+said that the doctrine of a future life for man is revealed by it
+or implicated in it?
+
+The removal of Elijah in a chariot of fire, of which we read in
+the second chapter of the Second Book of Kings, is usually
+supposed to have served as a miraculous proof of the fact that the
+faithful servants of Jehovah were to be rewarded with a life in
+the heavens. The author of this book is not known, and can hardly
+be guessed at with any degree of plausibility. It was
+unquestionably written, or rather compiled, a long time probably
+several hundred years after the prophets whose wonderful
+adventures it recounts had passed away. The internal evidence is
+sufficient, both in quality and quantity, to demonstrate that the
+book is for the most part a collection of traditions. This
+characteristic applies with particular force to the ascension of
+Elijah. But grant the literal truth of the account: it will not
+prove the point in support of which it is advanced, because it
+does not purport to have been done as a revelation of the doctrine
+in question, nor did it in any way answer the purpose of such a
+revelation. So far from this, in fact, it does not seem even to
+have suggested the bare idea of another state of existence in a
+single instance. For when Elisha returned without Elijah, and told
+the sons of the prophets at Jericho that his master had gone up in
+a chariot of fire, which event they knew beforehand was going to
+happen, they, instead of asking the particulars or exulting over
+the revelation of a life in heaven, calmly said to him, "Behold,
+there be with thy servants fifty sons of strength: let them go, we
+pray thee, and seek for Elijah, lest peradventure a whirlwind, the
+blast of the Lord, hath caught him up and cast him upon one of the
+mountains or into one of the valleys. And he said, Ye shall not
+send. But when they urged him till he was ashamed, he said, Send."
+This is all that is told us. Had it occurred as is stated, it
+would not so easily have passed from notice, but mighty
+inferences, never to be forgotten, would have been drawn from it
+at once. The story as it stands reminds one of the closing scene
+in the career of Romulus, speaking of whom the historians say, "In
+the thirty seventh year of his reign, while he was reviewing an
+army, a tempest arose, in the midst of which he was suddenly
+snatched from the eyes of men. Hence some thought he was killed by
+the senators, others, that he was borne aloft to the gods."2 If
+the ascension of Elijah to heaven in a chariot of fire did really
+take place, and if the books held by the Jews as inspired and
+sacred contained a history of it at the time of our Savior, it is
+certainly singular that neither he nor any of the apostles allude
+to it in connection with the subject of a future life.
+
+The miracles performed by Elijah and by Elisha in restoring the
+dead children to life related in the seventeenth chapter of the
+First Book of Kings and in the fourth chapter of the Second Book
+are often cited in proof of the position that the doctrine of
+immortality is revealed in the Old Testament. The narration of
+these events is found in a record of unknown authorship. The mode
+in which the miracles were effected, if they were miracles, the
+prophet measuring himself upon the child, his eyes upon his eyes,
+his mouth upon his mouth, his hands upon his hands, and in one
+case the child sneezing seven times, looks dubious. The two
+accounts so closely resemble each other as to cast still greater
+suspicion upon both. In addition to these considerations, and even
+fully granting the reality of the miracles, they do not touch the
+real controversy, namely, whether the Hebrew Scriptures contain
+the revealed doctrine of a conscious immortality or of a future
+retribution. The prophet said, "O Lord my God, let this child's
+soul, I pray thee, come into his inward parts again." "And the
+Lord heard the voice of Elijah, and the soul of the child came
+into him again, and he revived." Now, the most this can show is
+that the child's soul was then existing in a separate state. It
+does not prove that the soul was immortal, nor that it was
+experiencing retribution, nor even that it was conscious. And we
+do not deny that the ancient Jews believed that the spirits of the
+dead retained a nerveless, shadowy being in the solemn vaults of
+the under world. The Hebrew word rendered soul in the text is
+susceptible of three meanings: first, the shade, which, upon the
+dissolution of the body, is gathered to its fathers in the great
+subterranean congregation; second, the breath of a person, used as
+synonymous with his life; third, a part of the vital breath of
+God, which the Hebrews regarded as the source of the life of all
+creatures, and the withdrawing of which they supposed was the
+cause of death. It is clear that neither of these meanings can
+prove any thing in regard to the real point at issue, that is,
+concerning a future life of rewards and punishments.
+
+One of the strongest arguments brought to support the proposition
+which we are combating at least, so considered by nearly all the
+Rabbins, and by not a few modern critics is the account of the
+vivification of the dead recorded in the thirty seventh chapter of
+the Book of Ezekiel. The prophet "was carried in the spirit of
+Jehovah" that is, mentally, in a prophetic ecstasy into a valley
+full of dry bones. "The bones came together, the flesh
+
+2 Livy, i. 16; Dion. Hal. ii. 56.
+
+
+grew on them, the breath came into them, and they lived and stood
+on their feet, an exceeding great army." It should first be
+observed that this account is not given as an actual occurrence,
+but, after the manner of Ezekiel, as a prophetic vision meant to
+symbolize something. Now, of what was it intended as the symbol? a
+doctrine, or a coming event? a general truth to enlighten and
+guide uncertain men, or an approaching deliverance to console and
+encourage the desponding Jews? It is fair to let the prophet be
+his own interpreter, without aid from the glosses of prejudiced
+theorizers. It must be borne in mind that at this time the prophet
+and his countrymen were bearing the grievous burden of bondage in
+a foreign nation. "And Jehovah said to me, Son of man, these bones
+denote the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, Our bones are
+dried, and our hope is lost, and we are cut off." This plainly
+denotes their present suffering in the Babylonish captivity, and
+their despair of being delivered from it. "Therefore prophesy, and
+say to them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I will open your
+graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people,
+and bring you into the land of Israel." That is, I will rescue you
+from your slavery and restore you to freedom in your own land. The
+dry bones and their subsequent vivification, therefore, clearly
+symbolize the misery of the Israelites and their speedy
+restoration to happiness. Death is frequently used in a figurative
+sense to denote misery, and life to signify happiness. But those
+who maintain that the doctrine of the resurrection is taught as a
+revealed truth in the Hebrew Scriptures are not willing to let
+this passage pass so easily. Mr. Barnes says, "The illustration
+proves that the doctrine was one with which the people were
+familiar." Jerome states the argument more fully, thus: "A
+similitude drawn from the resurrection, to foreshadow the
+restoration of the people of Israel, would never have been
+employed unless the resurrection itself were believed to be a fact
+of future occurrence; for no one thinks of confirming what is
+uncertain by what has no existence."
+
+It is not difficult to reply to these objections with convincing
+force. First, the vision was not used as proof or confirmation,
+but as symbol and prophecy. Secondly, the use of any thing as an
+illustration does by no means imply that it is commonly believed
+as a fact. For instance, we are told in the ninth chapter of the
+Book of Judges that Jotham related an allegory to the people as an
+illustration of their conduct in choosing a king, saying, "The
+trees once on a time went forth to anoint a king over them; and
+they said to the olive tree, Come thou and reign over us;" and so
+on. Does it follow that at that time it was a common belief that
+the trees actually went forth occasionally to choose them a king?
+Thirdly, if a given thing is generally believed as a fact, a
+person who uses it expressly as a symbol, of course does not
+thereby give his sanction to it as a fact. And if a belief in the
+resurrection of the dead was generally entertained at the time of
+the prophet, its origin is not implied, and it does not follow
+that it was a doctrine of revelation, or even a true doctrine.
+Finally, there is one consideration which shows conclusively that
+this vision was never intended to typify the resurrection; namely,
+that it has nothing corresponding to the most essential part of
+that doctrine. When the bones have come together and are covered
+with flesh, God does not call up the departed spirits of these
+bodies from Sheol, does not bring back the vanished lives to
+animate their former tabernacles, now miraculously renewed. No: he
+but breathes on them with his vivifying breath, and straightway
+they live and move. This is not a resurrection, but a new
+creation. The common idea of a bodily restoration implies and,
+that any just retribution be compatible with it, it necessarily
+implies the vivification of the dead frame, not by the
+introduction of new life, but by the reinstalment of the very same
+life or spirit, the identical consciousness that before animated
+it. Such is not represented as being the case in Ezekiel's vision
+of the valley of dry bones. That vision had no reference to the
+future state.
+
+In this connection, the revelation made by the angel in his
+prophecy, recorded in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Daniel,
+concerning the things which should happen in the Messianic times,
+must not be passed without notice. It reads as follows: "And many
+of the sleepers of the dust of the ground shall awake, those to
+life everlasting, and these to shame, to contempt everlasting. And
+they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament,
+and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever
+and ever." No one can deny that a judgment, in which reward and
+punishment shall be distributed according to merit, is here
+clearly foretold. The meaning of the text, taken with the
+connection, is, that when the Messiah appears and establishes his
+kingdom the righteous shall enjoy a bodily resurrection upon the
+earth to honor and happiness, but the wicked shall be left below
+in darkness and death.3 This seems to imply, fairly enough, that
+until the advent of the Messiah none of the dead existed
+consciously in a state of retribution. The doctrine of the
+passage, as is well known, was held by some of the Jews at the
+beginning of the Christian era, and, less distinctly, for about
+two centuries previous. Before that time no traces of it can be
+found in their history. Now, had a doctrine of such intense
+interest and of such vast importance as this been a matter of
+revelation, it seems hardly possible that it should have been
+confined to one brief and solitary text, that it should have
+flashed up for a single moment so brilliantly, and then vanished
+for three or four centuries in utter darkness. Furthermore, nearly
+one half of the Book of Daniel is written in the Chaldee tongue,
+and the other half in the Hebrew,  indicating that it had two
+authors, who wrote their respective portions at different periods.
+Its critical and minute details of events are history rather than
+prophecy. The greater part of the book was undoubtedly written as
+late as about a hundred and sixty years before Christ, long after
+the awful simplicity and solitude of the original Hebrew theology
+had been marred and corrupted by an intermixture of the doctrines
+of those heathen nations with whom the Jews had been often brought
+in contact. Such being the facts in the case, the text is
+evidently without force to prove a divine revelation of the
+doctrine it teaches.
+
+In the twenty second chapter of the Gospel by Matthew, Jesus says
+to the Sadducees, "But as touching the resurrection of the dead,
+have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I
+am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?
+God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." The passage to
+which reference is made is written in the third chapter of the
+Book of Exodus. In order to ascertain the force of the Savior's
+argument, the extent of meaning it had in his mind, and the amount
+of knowledge attributed by it to Moses, it will be necessary to
+determine first the definite purpose he had
+
+3 Wood, The Last Things, p. 45.
+
+
+in view in his reply to the Sadducees, and how he proposed to
+accomplish it. We shall find that the use he made of the text does
+not imply that Moses had the slightest idea of any sort of future
+life for man, much less of an immortal life of blessedness for the
+good and of suffering for the bad. We should suppose, beforehand,
+that such would be the case, since upon examining the declaration
+cited, with its context, we find it to be simply a statement made
+by Jehovah explaining who he was, that he was the ancient national
+guardian of the Jews, the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
+This does not seem to contain the most distant allusion to the
+immortality of man, or to have suggested any such thought to the
+mind of Moses. It should be distinctly understood from the outset
+that Jesus did not quote this passage from the Pentateuch as
+proving any thing of itself, or as enabling him to prove any thing
+by it directly, but as being of acknowledged authority to the
+Sadducees themselves, to form the basis of a process of reasoning.
+The purpose he had in view, plainly, was to convince the Sadducees
+either of the possibility or of the actuality of the resurrection
+of the dead: its possibility, if we assume that by resurrection he
+meant the Jewish doctrine of a material restoration, the reunion
+of soul and body; its actuality, if we suppose he meant the
+conscious immortality of the soul separate from the body. If the
+resurrection was physical, Christ demonstrates to the Sadducees
+its possibility, by refuting the false notion upon which they
+based their denial of it. They said, The resurrection of the body
+is impossible, because the principle of life, the consciousness,
+has utterly perished, and the body cannot live alone. He replied,
+It is possible, because the soul has an existence separate from
+the body, and, consequently, may be reunited to it. You admit that
+Jehovah said, after they were dead, I am the God of Abraham,
+Isaac, and Jacob: but he is the God of the living, and not of the
+dead, for all live unto him. You must confess this. The soul,
+then, survives the body, and a resurrection is possible. It will
+be seen that this implies nothing concerning the nature or
+duration of the separate existence, but merely the fact of it.
+But, if Christ meant by the resurrection of the dead as we think
+he did the introduction of the disembodied and conscious soul into
+a state of eternal blessedness, the Sadducees denied its reality
+by maintaining that no such thing as a soul existed after bodily
+dissolution. He then proved to them its reality in the following
+manner. You believe for Moses, to whose authority you implicitly
+bow, relates it that God said, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac,
+and Jacob," and this, long after they died. But evidently he
+cannot be said to be the God of that which does not exist:
+therefore their souls must have been still alive. And if Jehovah
+was emphatically their God, their friend, of course he will show
+them his loving kindness. They are, then, in a conscious state of
+blessedness. The Savior does not imply that God said so much in
+substance, nor that Moses intended to teach, or even knew, any
+thing like it, but that, by adding to the passage cited a premise
+of his own, which his hearers granted to be true, he could deduce
+so much from it by a train of new and unanswerable reasoning. His
+opponents were compelled to admit the legitimacy of his argument,
+and, impressed by its surpassing beauty and force, were silenced,
+if not convinced. The credit of this cogent proof of human
+immortality, namely, that God's love for man is a pledge and
+warrant of his eternal blessedness a proof whose originality and
+significance set it far beyond all parallel is due to the dim
+gropings of no Hebrew prophet, but to the inspired insight of the
+great Founder of Christianity.
+
+The various passages yet unnoticed which purport to have been
+uttered by Jehovah or at his command, and which are urged to show
+that the reality of a retributive life after death is a revealed
+doctrine of the Old Testament, will be found, upon critical
+examination, either to owe their entire relevant force to
+mistranslation, or to be fairly refuted by the reasonings already
+advanced. Professor Stuart admits that he finds only one
+consideration to show that Moses had any idea of a future
+retribution; and that is, that the Egyptians expressly believed
+it; and he is not able to comprehend how Moses, who dwelt so long
+among them, should be ignorant of it.4 The reasoning is obviously
+inconsequential. It is not certain that the Egyptians held this
+doctrine in the time of Moses: it may have prevailed among them
+before or after, and not during, that period. If they believed it
+at that time, it may have been an esoteric doctrine, with which he
+did not become acquainted. If they believed it, and he knew it, he
+might have classed it with other heathen doctrines, and supposed
+it false. And, even if he himself believed it, he might possibly
+not have inculcated it upon the Israelites; and the question is,
+what he did actually teach, not what he knew.
+
+The opinions of the Jews at the time of the Savior have no bearing
+upon the point in hand, because they were acquired at a later
+period than that of the writing of the records we are now
+considering. They were formed, and gradually grew in consistency
+and favor, either by the natural progress of thought among the
+Jews themselves, or, more probably, by a blending of the
+intimations of the Hebrew Scriptures with Gentile speculations,
+the doctrines of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Persians. We leave
+this portion of the subject, then, with the following proposition.
+In the canonic books of the Old Dispensation there is not a single
+genuine text, claiming to come from God, which teaches explicitly
+any doctrine whatever of a life beyond the grave. That doctrine as
+it existed among the Jews was no part of their pure religion, but
+was a part of their philosophy. It did not, as they held it, imply
+any thing like our present idea of the immortality of the soul
+reaping in the spiritual world what it has sowed in the physical.
+It simply declared the existence of human ghosts amidst unbroken
+gloom and stillness in the cavernous depths of the earth, without
+reward, without punishment, without employment, scarcely
+with consciousness, as will immediately appear.
+
+We proceed to the second general division of the subject. What
+does the Old Testament, apart from the revelation claimed to be
+contained in it, and regarding only those portions of it which are
+confessedly a collection of the poetry, history, and philosophy of
+the Hebrews, intimate concerning a future state of existence?
+Examining these writings with an unbiased mind, we discover that
+in different portions of them there are large variations and
+opposition of opinion. In some books we trace an undoubting belief
+in certain rude notions of the future condition of souls; in other
+books we encounter unqualified denials of every such thought. "Man
+lieth down and riseth not," sighs the despairing Job. "The dead
+cannot praise God, neither any that go down into darkness," wails
+the repining Psalmist. "All go to one place,"
+
+4 Exegetical Essays, (Andover, 1830,) p. 108.
+
+
+and "the dead know not any thing," asserts the disbelieving
+Preacher. These inconsistencies we shall not stop to point out and
+comment upon. They are immaterial to our present purpose, which is
+to bring together, in their general agreement, the sum and
+substance of the Hebrew ideas on this subject.
+
+The separate existence of the soul is necessarily implied by the
+distinction the Hebrews made between the grave, or sepulchre, and
+the under world, or abode of shades. The Hebrew words bor and
+keber mean simply the narrow place in which the dead body is
+buried; while Sheol represents an immense cavern in the interior
+of the earth where the ghosts of the deceased are assembled. When
+the patriarch was told that his son Joseph was slain by wild
+beasts, he cried aloud, in bitter sorrow, "I will go down to Sheol
+unto my son, mourning."
+
+He did not expect to meet Joseph in the grave; for he supposed his
+body torn in pieces and scattered in the wilderness, not laid in
+the family tomb. The dead are said to be "gathered to their
+people," or to "sleep with their fathers," and this whether they
+are interred in the same place or in a remote region. It is
+written, "Abraham gave up the ghost, and was gathered unto his
+people," notwithstanding his body was laid in a cave in the field
+of Machpelah, close by Hebron, while his people were buried in
+Chaldea and Mesopotamia. "Isaac gave up the ghost and died, and
+was gathered unto his people;" and then we read, as if it were
+done afterwards, "His sons, Jacob and Esau, buried him." These
+instances might be multiplied. They prove that "to be gathered
+unto one's fathers" means to descend into Sheol and join there the
+hosts of the departed. A belief in the separate existence of the
+soul is also involved in the belief in necromancy, or divination,
+the prevalence of which is shown by the stern laws against those
+who engaged in its unhallowed rites, and by the history of the
+witch of Endor. She, it is said, by magical spells evoked the
+shade of old Samuel from below. It must have been the spirit of
+the prophet that was supposed to rise; for his body was buried at
+Ramah, more than sixty miles from Endor. The faith of the Hebrews
+in the separate existence of the soul is shown, furthermore, by
+the fact that the language they employed expresses, in every
+instance, the distinction of body and spirit. They had particular
+words appropriated to each. "As thy soul liveth," is a Hebrew
+oath. "With my spirit within me will I seek thee early." "I,
+Daniel, was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body:" the
+figure here represents the soul in the body as a sword in a
+sheath. "Our bones are scattered at the mouth of the under world,
+as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth;" that is,
+the soul, expelled from its case of clay by the murderer's weapon,
+flees into Sheol and leaves its exuvioe at the entrance. "Thy
+voice shall be as that of a spirit out of the ground:" the word
+"Lhere used signifies the shade evoked by a necromancer from the
+region of death, which was imagined to speak in a feeble whisper.
+
+The term rephaim is used to denote the manes of the departed. The
+etymology of the word, as well as its use, makes it mean the weak,
+the relaxed. "I am counted as them that go down into the under
+world; I am as a man that hath no strength." This faint, powerless
+condition accords with the idea that they were destitute of flesh,
+blood, and animal life, mere umbroe. These ghosts are described as
+being nearly as destitute of sensation as they are of strength.
+They are called "the inhabitants of the land of stillness." They
+exist in an inactive, partially torpid state, with a dreamy
+consciousness of past and present, neither suffering nor enjoying,
+and seldom moving. Herder says of the Hebrews, "The sad and
+mournful images of their ghostly realm disturbed them, and were
+too much for their self possession." Respecting these images, he
+adds, "Their voluntary force and energy were destroyed. They were
+feeble as a shade, without distinction of members, as a nerveless
+breath. They wandered and flitted in the dark nether world." This
+"wandering and flitting," however, is rather the spirit of
+Herder's poetry than of that of the Hebrews; for the whole tenor
+and drift of the representations in the Old Testament show that
+the state of disembodied souls is deep quietude. Freed from
+bondage, pain, toil, and care, they repose in silence. The ghost
+summoned from beneath by the witch of Endor said, "Why hast thou
+disquieted me to bring me up?" It was, indeed, in a dismal abode
+that they took their long quiet; but then it was in a place "where
+the wicked ceased from troubling and the weary were at rest."
+
+Those passages which attribute active employments to the dwellers
+in the under world are specimens of poetic license, as the context
+always shows. When Job says, "Before Jehovah the shades beneath
+tremble," he likewise declares, "The pillars of heaven tremble and
+are confounded at his rebuke." When Isaiah breaks forth in that
+stirring lyric to the King of Babylon,
+
+"The under world is in commotion on account of thee, To meet thee
+at thy coming; It stirreth up before thee the shades, all the
+mighty of the earth; It arouseth from their thrones all the kings
+of the nations; They all accost thee, and say, Art thou too become
+weak as we?"
+
+he also exclaims, in the same connection,
+
+"Even the cypress trees exult over thee, And the cedars of
+Lebanon, saying, Since thou art fallen, No man cometh up to cut us
+down."
+
+The activity thus vividly described is evidently a mere figure of
+speech: so is it in the other instances which picture the rephaim
+as employed and in motion. "Why," complainingly sighed the
+afflicted patriarch, "why died I not at my birth? For now should I
+lie down and be quiet; I should slumber; I should then be at
+rest." And the wise man says, in his preaching, "There is no work,
+nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol." What has already
+been said is sufficient to establish the fact that the Hebrews had
+an idea that the souls of men left their bodies at death and
+existed as dim shadows, in a state of undisturbed repose, in the
+bowels of the earth.
+
+Sheol is directly derived from a Hebrew word, signifying, first,
+to dig or excavate. It means, therefore, a cavity, or empty
+subterranean place. Its derivation is usually connected, however,
+with the secondary meaning of the Hebrew word referred to, namely,
+to ask, to desire, from the notion of demanding, since rapacious
+Orcus lays claim unsparingly to all; or, as others have fancifully
+construed it, the object of universal inquiry, the unknown mansion
+concerning which all are anxiously inquisitive. The place is
+conceived on an immense scale, shrouded in accompaniments of
+gloomy grandeur and peculiar awe: an enormous cavern in the earth,
+filled with night; a stupendous hollow kingdom, to which are
+poetically attributed valleys and gates, and in which are
+congregated the slumberous and shadowy hosts of the rephaim, never
+able to go out of it again forever. Its awful stillness is
+unbroken by noise. Its thick darkness is uncheered by light. It
+stretches far down under the ground. It is wonderfully deep. In
+language that reminds one of Milton's description of hell, where
+was
+
+"No light, but rather darkness visible,"
+
+Job describes it as "the land of darkness, like the blackness of
+death shade, where is no order, and where the light is as
+darkness." The following passages, selected almost at random, will
+show the ideas entertained of the place, and confirm and
+illustrate the foregoing statements. "But he considers not that in
+the valleys of Sheol are her guests." "Now shall I go down into
+the gates of Sheol." "The ground slave asunder, and the earth
+opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all
+their men, and all their goods: they and all that appertained to
+them went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed upon them."
+Its depth is contrasted with the height of the sky. "Though they
+dig into Sheol, thence shall mine hand take them; though they
+climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down." It is the
+destination of all; for, though the Hebrews believed in a world of
+glory above the solid ceiling of the dome of day, where Jehovah
+and the angels dwelt, there was no promise, hope, or hint that any
+man could ever go there. The dirge like burden of their poetry was
+literally these words: "What man is he that liveth and shall not
+see death? Shall he deliver his spirit from the hand of Sheol?"
+The old Hebrew graves were crypts, wide, deep holes, like the
+habitations of the troglodytes. In these subterranean caves they
+laid the dead down; and so the Grave became the mother of Sheol, a
+rendezvous of the fathers, a realm of the dead, full of eternal
+ghost life.
+
+This under world is dreary and altogether undesirable, save as an
+escape from extreme anguish. But it is not a place of retribution.
+Jahn says, "That, in the belief of the ancient Hebrews, there were
+different situations in Sheol for the good and the bad, cannot be
+proved."5 The sudden termination of the present life is the
+judgment the Old Testament threatens upon sinners; its happy
+prolongation is the reward it promises to the righteous. Texts
+that prove this might be quoted in numbers from almost every page.
+"The wicked shall be turned into Sheol, and all the nations that
+forget God," not to be punished there, but as a punishment. It is
+true, the good and the bad alike pass into that gloomy land; but
+the former go down tranquilly in a good old age and full of days,
+as a shock of corn fully ripe cometh in its season, while the
+latter are suddenly hurried there by an untimely and miserable
+fate. The man that loves the Lord shall have length of days; the
+unjust, though for a moment he flourishes, yet the wind bloweth,
+and where is he?
+
+We shall perhaps gain a more clear and adequate knowledge of the
+ideas the Hebrews had of the soul and of its fate, by marking the
+different meanings of the words they used to
+
+5 Biblical Archeology, sect. 314.
+
+
+denote it. Neshamah, primarily meaning breath or airy effluence,
+next expresses the Spirit of God as imparting life and force,
+wisdom and love; also the spirit of man as its emanation,
+creation, or sustained object. The citation of a few texts in
+which the word occurs will set this in a full light. "The Lord God
+formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
+nostrils the spirit of existence, and man became a conscious
+being." "It is the divine spirit of man, even the inspiration of
+the Almighty, that giveth him understanding." "The Spirit of God
+made me, and his breath gave me life."
+
+Ruah signifies, originally, a breathing or blowing. Two other
+meanings are directly connected with this. First, the vital
+spirit, the principle of life as manifested in the breath of the
+mouth and nostrils. "And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two
+and two of all flesh in whose nostrils was the breath of life."
+Second, the wind, the motions of the air, which the Hebrews
+supposed caused by the breath of God. "By the blast of thine anger
+the waters were gathered on an heap." "The channels of waters were
+seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered, O Lord, at
+the blast of the breath of thy nostrils." So they regarded the
+thunder as his voice. "The voice of Jehovah cutteth out the fiery
+lightnings," and "shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh." This word is
+also frequently placed for the rational spirit of man, the seat of
+intellect and feeling. It is likewise sometimes representative of
+the character and disposition of men, whether good or bad. Hosea
+speaks of "a spirit of vile lust." In the Second Book of
+Chronicles we read, "There came out a spirit, and stood before
+Jehovah, and said, I will entice King Ahab to his destruction. I
+will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his
+prophets." Belshazzar says to Daniel, "I know that the spirit of
+the holy gods is in thee." Finally, it is applied to Jehovah,
+signifying the divine spirit, or power, by which all animate
+creatures live, the universe is filled with motion, all
+extraordinary gifts of skill, genius, strength, or virtue are
+bestowed, and men incited to forsake evil and walk in the paths of
+truth and piety. "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created,
+and thou renewest the face of the earth; thou takest away their
+breath, they die and return to their dust." "Jehovah will be a
+spirit of justice in them that sit to administer judgment." It
+seems to be implied that the life of man, having emanated from the
+spirit, is to be again absorbed in it, when it is said, "Then
+shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall
+return unto God who gave it."
+
+Nephesh is but partially a synonym for the word whose
+significations we have just considered. The different senses it
+bears are strangely interchanged and confounded in King James's
+version. Its first meaning is breath, the breathing of a living
+being. Next it means the vital spirit, the indwelling life of the
+body. "If any mischief follow, thou shalt take life for life." The
+most adequate rendering of it would be, in a great majority of
+instances, by the term life. "In jeopardy of his life [not soul]
+hath Adonijah spoken this." It sometimes represents the
+intelligent soul or mind, the subject of knowledge and desire. "My
+soul knoweth right well.". Also the heart, is often used more
+frequently perhaps than any other term as meaning the vital
+principle, and the seat of consciousness, intellect, will, and
+affection. Jehovah said to Solomon, in answer to his prayer, "Lo,
+I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart." The later
+Jews speculated much, with many cabalistic refinements, on these
+different words. They said many persons were supplied with a
+Nephesh without a Ruah, much more without a Neshamah. They
+declared that the Nephesh (Psyche) was the soul of the body, the
+Ruah (Pneuma) the soul of the Nephesh, and the Neshamah (Nous) the
+soul of the Ruah. Some of the Rabbins assert that the destination
+of the Nephesh, when the body dies, is Sheol; of the Ruah, the
+air; and of the Neshamah, heaven. 6
+
+The Hebrews used all those words in speaking of brutes, to denote
+their sensitive existence, that they did in reference to men. They
+held that life was in every instance an emission, or breath, from
+the Spirit of God. But they do not intimate of brutes, as they do
+of men, that they have surviving shades. The author of the Book of
+Ecclesiastes, however, bluntly declares that "all have one breath,
+and all go to one place, so that a man hath no pre eminence above
+a beast." As far as the words used to express existence, soul, or
+mind, legitimate any inference, it would seem to be, either that
+the essential life is poured out at death as so much air, or else
+that it is received again by God, in both cases implying
+naturally, though not of philosophic necessity, the close of
+conscious, individual existence. But the examination we have made
+of their real opinions shows that, however obviously this
+conclusion might flow from their pneumatology, it was not the
+expectation they cherished. They believed there was a dismal
+empire in the earth where the rephaim, or ghosts of the dead,
+reposed forever in a state of semi sleep.
+
+"It is a land of shadows: yea, the land
+Itself is but a shadow, and the race
+That dwell therein are voices, forms of forms.
+And echoes of themselves."
+
+That the Hebrews, during the time covered by their sacred records,
+had no conception of a retributive life beyond the present, knew
+nothing of a blessed immortality, is shown by two conclusive
+arguments, in addition to the positive demonstration afforded by
+the views which, as we have seen, they did actually hold in regard
+to the future lot of man. First, they were puzzled, they were
+troubled and distressed, by the moral phenomena of the present
+life, the misfortunes of the righteous, the prosperity of the
+wicked. Read the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job, some of
+the Psalms. Had they been acquainted with future reward and
+punishment, they could easily have solved these problems to their
+satisfaction. Secondly, they regarded life as the one blessing,
+death as the one evil. Something of sadness, we may suppose, was
+in the wise man's tones when he said, "A living dog is better than
+a dead lion." Obey Jehovah's laws, that thy days may be long in
+the land he giveth thee; the wicked shall not live out half his
+days: such is the burden of the Old Testament. It was reserved for
+a later age to see life and immortality brought to light, and for
+the disciples of a clearer faith to feel that death is gain.
+
+There are many passages in the Hebrew Scriptures generally
+supposed and really appearing, upon a slight examination, not
+afterwards to teach doctrines different from those here stated. We
+will give two examples in a condensed form. "Thou wilt not leave
+
+6 Tractatus de Anima a R. Moscheh Korduero. In Kabbala Denudata.
+tom. i. pars ii.
+
+
+my soul in Sheol: . . . at thy right hand are pleasures for
+evermore." This text, properly translated and explained, means,
+Thou wilt not leave me to misfortune and untimely death: . . . in
+thy royal favor is prosperity and length of days. "I know that my
+Redeemer liveth:. . . in my flesh I shall see God." The genuine
+meaning of this triumphant exclamation of faith is, I know that
+God is the Vindicator of the upright, and that he will yet justify
+me before I die. A particular examination of the remaining
+passages of this character with which erroneous conceptions are
+generally connected would show, first, that in nearly every case
+these passages are not accurately translated; secondly, that they
+may be satisfactorily interpreted as referring merely to this
+life, and cannot by a sound exegesis be explained otherwise;
+thirdly, that the meaning usually ascribed to them is inconsistent
+with the whole general tenor, and with numberless positive and
+explicit statements, of the books in which they are found;
+fourthly, that if there are, as there dubiously seem to be in some
+of the Psalms, texts implying the ascent of souls after death to a
+heavenly life, for example, "Thou shalt guide me with thy
+countenance, and afterward receive me to glory," they were the
+product of a late period, and reflect a faith not native to the
+Hebrews, but first known to them after their intercourse with the
+Persians.
+
+Christians reject the allegorizing of the Jews, and yet
+traditionally accept, on their authority, doctrines which can be
+deduced from their Scriptures in no other way than by the absurd
+hypothesis of a double or mystic sense. For example, scores of
+Christian authors have taught the dogma of a general resurrection
+of the dead, deducing it from such passages as God's sentence upon
+Adam: "From the dust wast thou taken, and unto the dust shalt thou
+return;" as Joel's patriotic picture of the Jews victorious in
+battle, and of the vanquished heathen gathered in the valley of
+Jehoshaphat to witness their installation as rulers of the earth;
+and as the declaration of the God of battles: "I am he that kills
+and that makes alive, that wounds and that heals." And they
+maintain that the doctrine of immortality is inculcated in such
+texts as these: when Moses asks to see God, and the reply is, "No
+man can see me and live;" when Bathsheba bows and says, "Let my
+lord King David live forever;" and when the sacred poet praises
+God, saying, "Thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes
+from tears, and my feet from falling." Such interpretations of
+Scripture are lamentable in the extreme; their context shows them
+to be absurd. The meaning is forced into the words, not derived
+from them.
+
+Such as we have now seen were the ancient Hebrew ideas of the
+future state. To those who received them the life to come was
+cheerless, offering no attraction save that of peace to the weary
+sufferer. On the other hand, it had no terror save the natural
+revulsion of the human heart from everlasting darkness, silence,
+and dreams. In view of deliverance from so dreary a fate, by
+translation through Jesus Christ to the splendors of the world
+above the firmament, there are many exultations in the Epistles of
+Paul, and in other portions of the New Testament.
+
+The Hebrew views of the soul and its destiny, as discerned through
+the intimations of their Scriptures are very nearly what, from a
+fair consideration of the case, we should suppose they would be,
+agreeing in the main with the natural speculations of other early
+nations upon the same subject. These opinions underwent but little
+alteration until a century or a century and a half before the dawn
+of the Christian era.
+
+This is shown by the phraseology of the Septuagint version of
+the Pentateuch, and by the allusions in the so called
+Apocryphal books. In these, so far as there are any relevant
+statements or implications, they are of the same character as
+those which we have explained from the more ancient writings. This
+is true, with the notable exceptions of the Wisdom of Solomon and
+the Second Maccabees, neither of which documents can be dated
+earlier than a hundred and twenty years before Christ. The former
+contains the doctrine of transmigration. The author says, "Being
+wise, I came into a body undefiled."7 But, with the exception of
+this and one other passage, there is little or nothing in the book
+which is definite on the subject of a future life. It is difficult
+to tell what the author's real faith was: his words seem rather
+rhetorical than dogmatic. He says, "To be allied unto wisdom is
+immortality;" but other expressions would appear to show that by
+immortality he means merely a deathless posthumous fame, "leaving
+an eternal memorial of himself to all who shall come after him."
+Again he declares, "The spirit when it is gone forth returneth
+not; neither the soul received up cometh again." And here we find,
+too, the famous text, "God created man to be immortal, and made
+him to be an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless, through envy
+of the devil came death into the world, and they that hold of his
+side do find it."8 Upon the whole, it is pretty clear that the
+writer believed in a future life; but the details are too
+partially and obscurely shadowed to be drawn forth. We may,
+however, hazard a conjecture on the passage last quoted,
+especially with the help of the light cast upon it from its
+evident Persian origin. What is it, expressed by the term "death,"
+which is found by the adherents of the devil distinctively?
+"Death" cannot here be a metaphor for an inward state of sin and
+woe, because it is contrasted with the plainly literal phrases,
+"created to be immortal," "an image of God's eternity." It cannot
+signify simply physical dissolution, because this is found as well
+by God's servants as by the devil's. Its genuine meaning is, most
+probably, a descent into the black kingdom of sadness and silence
+under the earth, while the souls of the good were "received up."
+
+The Second Book of Maccabees with emphasis repeatedly asserts
+future retribution and a bodily resurrection. In the seventh
+chapter a full account is given of seven brothers and their mother
+who suffered martyrdom, firmly sustained by faith in a glorious
+reward for their heroic fidelity, to be reaped at the
+resurrection. One of them says to the tyrant by whose order he was
+tortured, "As for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life."
+Nicanor, bleeding from many horrible wounds, "plucked out his
+bowels and cast them upon the throng, and, calling upon the Lord
+of life and spirit to restore him those again, [at the day of
+resurrection,] he thus died."9 Other passages in this book to the
+same effect it is needless to quote. The details lying latent in
+those we have quoted will soon be illuminated and filled out when
+we come to treat of the opinions of the Pharisees. 10
+
+7 Cap. viii. 20.
+
+8 Cap. ii. 23, 24.
+
+9 Cap. xiv. 46.
+
+10 See a very able discussion of the relation between the ideas
+concerning immortality, resurrection, judgment, and retribution,
+contained in the Old Testament Apocrypha, and those in the New
+Testament, by Frisch, inserted in Eichhorn's Allgemeine Bibliothek
+der Biblischen Literatur, band iv. stuck iv.
+
+
+There lived in Alexandria a very learned Jew named Philo, the
+author of voluminous writings, a zealous Israelite, but deeply
+imbued both with the doctrines and the spirit of Plato. He was
+born about twenty years before Christ, and survived him about
+thirty years. The weight of his character, the force of his
+talents, the fascinating adaptation of his peculiar philosophical
+speculations and of his bold and subtle allegorical expositions of
+Scripture to the mind of his age and of the succeeding centuries,
+together with the eminent literary position and renown early
+secured for him by a concurrence of causes, have combined to make
+him exert according to the expressed convictions of the best
+judges, such as Lucke and Norton a greater influence on the
+history of Christian opinions than any single man, with the
+exception of the Apostle Paul, since the days of Christ. It is
+important, and will be interesting, to see some explanation of his
+views on the subject of a future life. A synopsis of them must
+suffice.
+
+Philo was a Platonic Alexandrian Jew, not a Zoroastrian
+Palestinian Pharisee. It was a current saying among the Christian
+Fathers, "Vel Plato Philonizat, vel Philo Platonizat." He has
+little to say of the Messiah, nothing to say of the Messianic
+eschatology. We speak of him in this connection because he was a
+Jew, flourishing at the commencement of the Christian epoch, and
+contributing much, by his cabalistic interpretations, to lead
+Christians to imagine that the Old Testament contained the
+doctrine of a spiritual immortality connected with a system of
+rewards and punishments.
+
+Three principal points include the substance of Philo's faith on
+the subject in hand. He rejected the notion of a resurrection of
+the body and held to the natural immortality of the soul. He
+entertained the most profound and spiritual conceptions of the
+intrinsically deadly nature and wretched fruits of all sin, and of
+the self contained welfare and self rewarding results of every
+element of virtue, in themselves, independent of time and place
+and regardless of external bestowments of woe or joy. He also
+believed at the same time in contrasted localities above and
+below, appointed as the residences of the disembodied souls of
+good and of wicked men. We will quote miscellaneously various
+passages from him in proof and illustration of these statements:
+
+"Man's bodily form is made from the ground, the soul from no
+created thing, but from the Father of all; so that, although man
+was mortal as to his body, he was immortal as to his mind."11
+"Complete virtue is the tree of immortal life."12 "Vices and
+crimes, rushing in through the gate of sensual pleasure, changed a
+happy and immortal life for a wretched and mortal one."13
+Referring to the allegory of the garden of Eden, he says, "The
+death threatened for eating the fruit was not natural, the
+separation of soul and body, but penal, the sinking of the soul in
+the body."14 "Death is twofold, one of man, one of the soul. The
+death of man is the separation of the soul from the body; the
+death of the soul is the corruption of virtue
+
+11 Mangey's edition of Philo's works, vol. i. p. 32.
+
+12 Ibid. p. 38.
+
+13 Ibid. p. 37.
+
+14 Ibid. p. 65.
+
+
+and the assumption of vice."15 "To me, death with the pious is
+preferable to life with the impious. For those so dying, deathless
+life delivers; but those so living, eternal death seizes."16 He
+writes of three kinds of life, "one of which neither ascends nor
+cares to ascend, groping in the secret recesses of Hades and
+rejoicing in the most lifeless life."17 Commenting on the promise
+of the Lord to Abram, that he should be buried in a good old age,
+Philo observes that "A polished, purified soul does not die, but
+emigrates: it is of an inextinguishable and deathless race, and
+goes to heaven, escaping the dissolution and corruption which
+death seems to introduce."18 "A vile life is the true Hades,
+despicable and obnoxious to every sort of execration." 19
+"Different regions are set apart for different things, heaven for
+the good, the confines of the earth for the bad."20 He thinks the
+ladder seen by Jacob in his dream "is a figure of the air, which,
+reaching from earth to heaven, is the house of unembodied souls,
+the image of a populous city having for citizens immortal souls,
+some of whom descend into mortal bodies, but soon return aloft,
+calling the body a sepulchre from which they hasten, and, on light
+wings seeking the lofty ether, pass eternity in sublime
+contemplations."21 "The wise inherit the Olympic and heavenly
+region to dwell in, always studying to go above; the bad, the
+innermost parts of Hades, always laboring to die."22 He literally
+accredits the account, in the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, of the
+swallowing of Korah and his company, saying, "The earth opened and
+took them alive into Hades."23 "Ignorant men regard death as the
+end of punishments, whereas in the Divine judgment it is scarcely
+the beginning of them."24 He describes the meritorious man as
+"fleeing to God and receiving the most intimate honor of a firm
+place in heaven; but the reprobate man is dragged below, down to
+the very lowest place, to Tartarus itself and profound
+darkness."25 "He who is not firmly held by evil may by repentance
+return to virtue, as to the native land from which he has
+wandered. But he who suffers from incurable vice must endure its
+dire penalties, banished into the place of the impious until the
+whole of eternity."26
+
+Such, then, was the substance of Philo's opinions on the theme
+before us, as indeed many more passages, which we have omitted as
+superfluous, might be cited from him to show. Man was made
+originally a mortal body and an immortal soul. He should have been
+happy and pure while in the body, and on leaving it have soared up
+to the realm of light and bliss on high, to join the angels.
+"Abraham, leaving his mortal part, was added to the people of God,
+
+15 Ibid. p. 65.
+
+16 Ibid. p. 233.
+
+17 Ibid. p. 479.
+
+18 Ibid. p. 513.
+
+19 Ibid. p. 527.
+
+20 Ibid. p. 555.
+
+21 Ibid. p. 641, 642.
+
+22 Ibid. p. 643.
+
+23 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 178.
+
+24 Ibid. p. 419.
+
+25 Mangey's edition of Philo's Works, vol. ii. p. 433.
+
+26 Ibid. vol. i. p. 139.
+
+
+enjoying immortality and made similar to the angels. For the
+angels are the army of God, bodiless and happy souls."27 But,
+through the power of evil, all who yield to sin and vice lose that
+estate of bright and blessed immortality, and become discordant,
+wretched, despicable, and, after the dissolution of the body, are
+thrust down to gloom and manifold just retribution in Hades. He
+believed in the pre existence, and in a limited transmigration, of
+souls. Here he leaves the subject, saying nothing of a
+resurrection or final restoration, and not speculating as to any
+other of the details. 28
+
+We pass on to speak of the Jewish sects at the time of Christ.
+There were three of these, cardinally differing from each other in
+their theories of the future fate of man. First, there were the
+skeptical, materialistic Sadducees, wealthy, proud, few. They
+openly denied the existence of any disembodied souls, avowing that
+men utterly perished in the grave. "The cloud faileth and passeth
+away: so he that goeth down to the grave doth not return."29 We
+read in the Acts of the Apostles, "The Sadducees say there is no
+resurrection, neither angel nor spirit." At the same time they
+accepted the Pentateuch, only rejecting or explaining away those
+portions of it which relate to the separate existence of souls and
+to their subterranean abode. They strove to confound their
+opponents, the advocates of a future life, by such perplexing
+questions as the one they addressed to Jesus, asking, in the case
+of a woman who had had seven successive husbands, which one of
+them should be her husband in the resurrection. All that we can
+gather concerning the Sadducees from the New Testament is amply
+confirmed by Josephus, who explicitly declares, "Their doctrine is
+that souls die with the bodies."
+
+The second sect was the ascetical and philosophical Essenes, of
+whom the various information given by Philo in his celebrated
+paper on the Therapeuta agrees with the account in Josephus and
+with the scattered gleams in other sources. The doctrine of the
+Essenes on the subject of our present inquiry was much like that
+of Philo himself; and in some particulars it remarkably resembles
+that of many Christians. They rejected the notion of the
+resurrection of the body, and maintained the inherent immortality
+of the soul. They said that "the souls of men, coming out of the
+most subtle and pure air, are bound up in their bodies as in so
+many prisons; but, being freed at death, they do rejoice, and are
+borne aloft where a state of happy life forever is decreed for the
+virtuous; but the vicious are assigned to eternal punishment in a
+dark, cold place." 30 Such sentiments appear to have inspired the
+heroic Eleazar, whose speech to his followers is reported by
+Josephus, when they were besieged at Masada, urging them to rush
+on the foe, "for death is better than life, is the only true life,
+leading the soul to infinite freedom and joy above."31
+
+27 Ibid. p. 164.
+
+28 See, in the Analekten of Keil and Tzschirner, band i stuck
+ii., an article by Dr. Schreiter, entitled Philo's Ideen uber
+Unsterblichkeit, Auferstehung, und Vergeltung.
+
+29 Lightfoot in Matt. xxii. 23.
+
+30 Josephus, De Bell. lib. ii. cap. 8.
+
+31 Ibid. lib. vii. cap. 8.
+
+
+But by far the most numerous and powerful of the Jewish sects at
+that time, and ever since, were the eclectic, traditional,
+formalist Pharisees: eclectic, inasmuch as their faith was formed
+by a partial combination of various systems; traditional, since
+they allowed a more imperative sway to the authority of the
+Fathers, and to oral legends and precepts, than to the plain
+letter of Scripture; formalist, for they neglected the weightier
+spiritual matters of the law in a scrupulous tithing of mint,
+cumin, and anise seed, a pretentious wearing of broad
+phylacteries, an uttering of long prayers in the streets, and the
+various other hypocritical priestly paraphernalia of a severe
+mechanical ritual.
+
+From Josephus we learn that the Pharisees believed that the souls
+of the faithful that is, of all who punctiliously observed the law
+of Moses and the traditions of the elders would live again by
+transmigration into new bodies; but that the souls of all others,
+on leaving their bodies, were doomed to a place of confinement
+beneath, where they must abide forever. These are his words: "The
+Pharisees believe that souls have an immortal strength in them,
+and that in the under world they will experience rewards or
+punishments according as they have lived well or ill in this life.
+The righteous shall have power to live again, but sinners shall be
+detained in an everlasting prison."32 Again, he writes, "The
+Pharisees say that all souls are incorruptible, but that only the
+souls of good men are removed into other bodies."33 The fragment
+entitled "Concerning Hades," formerly attributed to Josephus, is
+now acknowledged on all sides to be a gross forgery. The Greek
+culture and philosophical tincture with which he was imbued led
+him to reject the doctrine of a bodily resurrection; and this is
+probably the reason why he makes no allusion to that doctrine in
+his account of the Pharisees. That such a doctrine was held among
+them is plain from passages in the New Testament, passages which
+also shed light upon the statement actually made by Josephus.
+Jesus says to Martha, "Thy brother shall rise again." She replies,
+"I know that he shall rise in the resurrection, at the last day."
+Some of the Pharisees, furthermore, did not confine the privilege
+or penalty of transmigration, and of the resurrection, to the
+righteous. They once asked Jesus, "Who did sin, this man or his
+parents, that he was born blind?" Plainly, he could not have been
+born blind for his own sins unless he had known a previous life.
+Paul, too, says of them, in his speech at Casarea, "They
+themselves also allow that there shall be a resurrection of the
+dead, both of the just and of the unjust." This, however, is very
+probably an exception to their prevailing belief. Their religious
+intolerance, theocratic pride, hereditary national vanity, and
+sectarian formalism, often led them to despise and overlook the
+Gentile world, haughtily restricting the boon of a renewed life to
+the legal children of Abraham.
+
+But the grand source now open to us of knowledge concerning the
+prevailing opinions of the Jews on our present subject at and
+subsequent to the time of Christ is the Talmud. This is a
+collection of the traditions of the oral law, (Mischna,) with the
+copious precepts and comments (Gemara) of the most learned and
+authoritative Rabbins. It is a wonderful monument of myths and
+fancies, profound speculations and ridiculous puerilities, antique
+
+32 Antiq. lib. xviii. cap. 1.33 De Bell. lib. ii. cap. 8.
+
+
+legends and cabalistic subtleties, crowned and loaded with the
+national peculiarities. The Jews reverence it extravagantly,
+saying, "The Bible is salt, the Mischna pepper, the Gemara balmy
+spice." Rabbi Solomon ben Joseph sings, in our poet's version,
+
+"The Kabbala and Talmud hoar Than all the Prophets prize I more;
+For water is all Bible lore, But Mischna is pure wine."
+
+The rambling character and barbarous dialect of this work have
+joined with various other causes to withhold from it far too much
+of the attention of Christian critics. Saving by old Lightfoot and
+Pocock, scarcely a contribution has ever been offered us in
+English from this important field. The Germans have done far
+better; and numerous huge volumes, the costly fruits of their
+toils, are standing on neglected shelves. The eschatological views
+derived from this source are authentically Jewish, however closely
+they may resemble some portion of the popular Christian
+conceptions upon the same subject. The correspondences between
+some Jewish and some Christian theological dogmas betoken the
+influx of an adulterated Judaism into a nascent Christianity, not
+the reflex of a pure Christianity upon a receptive Judaism. It is
+important to show this; and it appears from several
+considerations. In the first place, it is demonstrable, it is
+unquestioned, that at least the germs and outlines of the dogmas
+referred to were in actual existence among the Pharisees before
+the conflict between Christianity and Judaism arose.Secondly, in
+the Rabbinical writings these dogmas are most fundamental, vital,
+and pervading, in relation to the whole system; but in the
+Christian they seem subordinate and incidental, have every
+appearance of being ingrafts, not outgrowths. Thirdly, in the
+apostolic age Judaism was a consolidated, petrified system,
+defended from outward influence on all sides by an invulnerable
+bigotry, a haughty exclusiveness; while Christianity was in a
+young and vigorous, an assimilating and formative, state.
+Fourthly, the overweening sectarian vanity and scorn of the Jews,
+despising, hating, and fearing the Christians, would not permit
+them to adopt peculiarities of belief from the latter; but the
+Christians were undeniably Jews in almost every thing except in
+asserting the Messiahship of Jesus: they claimed to be the genuine
+Jews, children of the law and realizers of the promise. The Jewish
+dogmas, therefore, descended to them as a natural lineal
+inheritance. Finally, in the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of
+Paul, and the progress of the Ebionites, (which sect included
+nearly all the Christians of the first century,) we can trace step
+by step the actual workings, in reliable history, of the process
+that we affirm, namely, the assimilation of Jewish elements into
+the popular Christianity.
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+RABBINICAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THE starting point in the Talmud on this subject is with the
+effects of sin upon the human race. Man was made radiant, pure,
+immortal, in the image of God. By sin he was obscured, defiled,
+burdened with mortal decay and judgment. In this representation
+that misery and death were an after doom brought into the world by
+sin, the Rabbinical authorities strikingly agree. The testimony is
+irresistible. We need not quote confirmations of this statement,
+as every scholar in this department will accept it at once. But as
+to what is meant precisely by the term "death," as used in such a
+connection, there is no little obscurity and diversity of opinion.
+In all probability, some of the Pharisaical fathers perhaps the
+majority of them conceived that, if Adam had not sinned, he and
+his posterity would have been physically immortal, and would
+either have lived forever on the earth, or have been successively
+transferred to the home of Jehovah over the firmament. They call
+the devil, who is the chief accuser in the heavenly court of
+justice, the angel of death, by the name of "Sammael." Rabbi
+Reuben says, "When Sammael saw Adam sin, he immediately sought to
+slay him, and went to the heavenly council and clamored for
+justice against him, pleading thus: 'God made this decree, "In the
+day thou eatest of the tree thou shalt surely die." Therefore give
+him to me, for he is mine, and I will kill him; to this end was I
+created; and give me power over all his descendants.' When the
+celestial Sanhedrim perceived that his petition was just, they
+decreed that it should be granted."1 A great many expressions of
+kindred tenor might easily be adduced, leaving it hardly possible
+to doubt as indeed we are not aware that any one does doubt that
+many of the Jews literally held that sin was the sole cause of
+bodily dissolution. But, on the other hand, there were as
+certainly others who did not entertain that idea, but understood
+and explained the terms in which it was sometimes conveyed in a
+different, a partially figurative, sense. Rabbi Samuel ben David
+writes, "Although the first Adam had not sinned, yet death would
+have been; for death was created on the first day." The reference
+here is, as Rabbi Berechias explains, to the account in Genesis
+where we read that "darkness was upon the face of the deep," "by
+which is to be understood the angel of death, who has darkened the
+face of man."2 The Talmudists generally believed also in the pre
+existence of souls in heaven, and in a spiritual body investing
+and fitting the soul for heaven, as the present carnal body
+invests and fits it for the earth. Schoettgen has collected
+numerous illustrations in point, of which the following may serve
+as specimens.3 "When the first Adam had not sinned, he was every
+way an angel of the Lord, perfect and spotless, and it was decreed
+that he should live forever like one of the celestial ministers."
+"The soul cannot ascend into Paradise except it be first invested
+with a
+
+1 Schoettgen, Dissertatio de Hierosolyma Coelesti, cap. iii. sect.
+9.
+
+2 Schoettgen, Hora Biblica et Talmudica, in Rom. v. 12, et in
+Johan. iii. 19.
+
+3 Ibid. in 2 Cor. v. 2.
+
+
+clothing adapted to that world, as the present is for this world."
+These notions do not harmonize with the thought that man was
+originally destined for a physical eternity on this globe. All
+this difficulty disappears, we think, and the true metaphorical
+force often intended in the word "death" comes to view, through
+the following conception, occupying the minds of a portion of the
+Jewish Rabbins, as we are led to believe by the clews furnished in
+the close connection between the Pharisaic and the Zoroastrian
+eschatology, by similar hints in various parts of the New
+Testament, and by some quite explicit declarations in the Talmud
+itself, which we shall soon cite in a different connection. God at
+first intended that man should live for a time in pure blessedness
+on the earth, and then without pain should undergo a glorious
+change making him a perfect peer of the angels, and be translated
+to their lofty abode in his own presence; but, when he sinned, God
+gave him over to manifold suffering, and on the destruction of his
+body adjudged his naked soul to descend to a doleful imprisonment
+below the grave. The immortality meant for man was a timely ascent
+to heaven in a paradisal clothing, without dying. The doom brought
+on him by sin was the alteration of that desirable change of
+bodies and ascension to the supernal splendors, for a permanent
+disembodiment and a dreaded descent to the subterranean glooms. It
+is a Talmudical as much as it is a Pauline idea, that the
+triumphant power of the Messiah would restore what the unfortunate
+fall of Adam forfeited. Now, if we can show as we think we can,
+and as we shall try to do in a later part of this article that the
+later Jews expected the Messianic resurrection to be the prelude
+to an ascent into heaven, and not the beginning of a gross earthly
+immortality, it will powerfully confirm the theory which we have
+just indicated. "When," says one of the old Rabbins, "the dead in
+Israelitish earth are restored alive," their bodies will be "as
+the body of the first Adam before he sinned, and they shall all
+fly into the air like birds."4
+
+At all events, whether the general Rabbinical belief was in the
+primitive destination of man to a heavenly or to an earthly
+immortality, whether the "death" decreed upon him in consequence
+of sin was the dissolution of the body or the wretchedness of the
+soul, they all agree that the banishment of souls into the realm
+of blackness under the grave was a part of the penalty of sin.
+Some of them maintained, as we think, that, had there been no sin,
+souls would have passed to heaven in glorified bodies; others of
+them maintained, as we think, that, had there been no sin, they
+would have lived eternally upon earth in their present bodies; but
+all of them agreed, it is undisputed, that in consequence of sin
+souls were condemned to the under world. No man would have seen
+the dismal realm of the sepulchre had there not been sin. The
+earliest Hebrew conception was that all souls went down to a
+common abode, to spend eternity in dark slumber or nerveless
+groping. This view was first modified soon after the Persian
+captivity, by the expectation that there would be discrimination
+at the resurrection which the Jews had learned to look for, when
+the just should rise but the wicked should be left.
+
+The next alteration of their notions on this subject was the
+subdivision of the underworld into Paradise and Gehenna, a
+conception known among them probably as early as a century before
+Christ, and very prominent with them in the apostolic age. "When
+Rabbi
+
+4 Schoettgen, in 1 Cor. xv. 44.
+
+
+Jochanan was dying, his disciples asked him, 'Light of Israel,
+main pillar of the right, thou strong hammer, why dost thou weep?'
+He answered, 'Two paths open before me, the one leading to bliss,
+the other to torments; and I know not which of them will be my
+doom.'"5 "Paradise is separated from hell by a distance no greater
+than the width of a thread."6 So, in Christ's parable of Dives and
+Lazarus, Abraham's bosom and hell are two divisions. "There are
+three doors into Gehenna: one in the wilderness, where Korah and
+his company were swallowed; one in the sea, where Jonah descended
+when he 'cried out of the belly of hell;' one in Jerusalem, for
+the Lord says, 'My furnace is in Jerusalem.'"7 "The under world is
+divided into palaces, each of which is so large that it would take
+a man three hundred years to roam over it. There are distinct
+apartments where the hell punishments are inflicted. One place is
+so dark that its name is 'Night of Horrors."8 "In Paradise there
+are certain mansions for the pious from the Gentile peoples, and
+for those mundane kings who have done kindness to the
+Israelites."9 "The fire of Gehenna was kindled on the evening of
+the first Sabbath, and shall never be extinguished."10 The
+Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, and Greeks, with all of whom the Jews
+held relations of intercourse, had, in their popular
+representations of the under world of the dead, regions of peace
+and honor for the good, and regions of fire for the bad. The idea
+may have been adopted from them by the Jews, or it may have been
+at last developed among themselves, first by the imaginative
+poetical, afterwards by the literally believing, transference
+below of historical and local imagery and associations, such as
+those connected with the ingulfing of Sodom and Gomorrah in fire
+and sulphur, and with the loathed fires in the valley of Hinnom.
+
+Many of the Rabbins believed in the transmigration or revolution
+of souls, an immemorial doctrine of the Fast, and developed it
+into the most ludicrous and marvellous details.11 But, with the
+exception of those who adopted this Indian doctrine, the Rabbins
+supposed all departed souls to be in the under world, some in the
+division of Paradise, others in that of hell. Here they fancied
+these souls to be longingly awaiting the advent of the Messiah.
+"Messiah and the patriarchs weep together in Paradise over the
+delay of the time of the kingdom."12 In this quotation the Messiah
+is represented as being in the under world, for the Jews expected
+that he would be a man, very likely some one who had already
+lived. For a delegation was once sent to ask Jesus, "Art thou
+Elias? art thou the Messiah? art thou that prophet?" Light is thus
+thrown upon the Rabbinical saying that "it was doubted whether the
+Messiah would come from the living, or the dead."13 Borrowing some
+Persian modes of thinking, and adding them to their own inordinate
+national pride, the Rabbins soon began
+
+5 Talmud, tract. Berachoth.
+
+6 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. cap. v. s. 315.
+
+7 Lightfoot, in Matt. v. 22.
+
+8 Schroder, Satzungen and Gebrauche des Talmudisch Rabbinischen
+Judenthums, s. 408.
+
+9 Schoettgen, in Johan. xiv. 2.
+
+10 Nov. Test. ex Talmude, etc. illustratum a J. G. Menschen, p.
+125.
+
+11 Basnage, Hist. of Jews, lib. iv. cap. 30. Also, Traditions of
+the Rabbins, in Blackwood for April, 1833.
+
+12 Eisenmenger, th. ii. s. 304.
+
+13 Lightfoot, in Matt. ii. 16.
+
+
+to fancy that the observance or non observance of the Pharisaic
+ritual, and kindred particulars, must exert a great effect in
+determining the destination of souls and their condition in the
+under world. Observe the following quotations from the Talmud.
+"Abraham sits at the gate of hell to see that no Israelite
+enters." "Circumcision is so agreeable to God, that he swore to
+Abraham that no one who was circumcised should descend into
+hell."14 "What does Abraham to those circumcised who have sinned
+too much? He takes the foreskins from Gentile boys who died
+without circumcision, and places them on those Jews who were
+circumcised but have become godless, and then kicks them into
+hell."15 Hell here denotes that division in the under world where
+the condemned are punished. The younger Buxtorf, in a preface to
+his father's "Synagoga Judaica," gives numerous specimens of
+Jewish representations of "the efficacy of circumcision being so
+great that no one who has undergone it shall go down into hell."
+Children can help their deceased parents out of hell by their good
+deeds, prayers, and offerings.16 "Beyond all doubt," says Gfrorer,
+"the ancient Jewish synagogue inculcated the doctrine of
+supererogatory good works, the merit of which went to benefit the
+departed souls."17 Here all souls were, in the under world, either
+in that part of it called Paradise, or in that named Gehenna,
+according to certain conditions. But in whichever place they were,
+and under whatever circumstances, they were all tarrying in
+expectation of the advent of the Messiah.
+
+How deeply rooted, how eagerly cherished, the Jewish belief in the
+approaching appearance of the Messiah was, and what a splendid
+group of ideas and imaginations they clustered around his reign,
+are well known facts. He was to be a descendant of royal David, an
+inspired prophet, priest, and king, was to subdue the whole earth
+beneath his Jewish sceptre and establish from Jerusalem a
+theocratic empire of unexampled glory, holiness, and delight. In
+so much the consent was general and earnest; though in regard to
+many further details there would seem to have been an incongruous
+diversity of opinions. They supposed the coming of the Messiah
+would be preceded by ten frightful woes,18 also by the appearance
+of the prophet Elias as a forerunner.19 There are a few passages
+in the Rabbinical writings which, unless they were forged and
+interpolated by Christians at a late period, show that there were
+in the Jewish mind anticipations of the personal descent of the
+Messiah into the under world.20 "After this the Messiah, the son
+of David, came to the gates of the underworld. But when the bound,
+who are in Gehenna, saw the light of the Messiah, they began
+rejoicing to receive him, saying, 'He shall lead us up from this
+darkness.'" "The captives shall
+
+14 Schroder, s. 332.
+
+15 Eisenmenger, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 340.
+
+16 Ibid. s. 358.
+
+17 Geschichte des Urchristenthums, zweit. abth. s. 186. Maimonides
+also asserts the doctrine of supererogatory works: see p. 237 of
+H. H. Bernard's Selections from the Yad Hachazakah of Maimonides.
+
+18 Surenhusius, Mischna, pars tertia, p. 308.
+
+19 Lightfoot, in Matt. xvii. 10.
+
+20 For a general view of the Jewish eschatology, see Gfrorer,
+Geschichte des Urchristenthums, kap. x.; Eisenmenger, Entdecktes
+Judenthum, th. ii. kap. xv. xvii.
+
+
+ascend from the under world, Schechinah at their head."21 Gfrorer
+derives the origin of the doctrine that Christ rescued souls out
+of the under world, from a Jewish notion, preserved in the
+Talmud,22 that the just patriarchs sometimes did it.23 Bertholdt
+adduces Talmudical declarations to show that through the Messiah
+"God would hereafter liberate the Israelites from the under world,
+on account of the merit of circumcision"24 Schoettgen quotes this
+statement from the Sohar: "Messia shall die, and shall remain in
+the state of death a time, and shall rise."25 The so called Fourth
+Book of Ezra says, in the seventh chapter, "My son, the Christ,
+shall die: then follow the resurrection and the judgment."
+Although it is clear, from various other sources, as well as from
+the account in John xii. 34, that there was a prevalent
+expectation among the Jews that "the Messiah would abide forever,"
+it also seems quite certain that there were at the same time at
+least obscure presentiments, based on prophecies and traditions,
+that he must die, that an important part of his mission was
+connected with his death. This appears from such passages as we
+have cited above, found in early Rabbinical writers, who would
+certainly be very unlikely to borrow and adapt a new idea of such
+a character from the Christians; and from the manner in which
+Jesus assumes his death to be a part of the Messianic fate and
+interprets the Scriptures as necessarily pointing to that effect.
+He charges his disciples with being "fools and blind" in not so
+understanding the doctrine; thus seeming to imply that it was
+plainly known to some. But this question the origin of the idea of
+a suffering, atoning, dying Messiah is confessedly a very nice and
+obscure one. The evidence, the silence, the inferences, the
+presumptions and doubts on the subject are such, that some of the
+most thorough and impartial students say they are unable to decide
+either way.
+
+However the foregoing question be decided, it is admitted by all
+that the Jews earnestly looked for a resurrection of the dead as
+an accompaniment of the Messiah's coming. Whether Christ was to go
+down into the under world, or to sit enthroned on Mount Zion, in
+either case the dead should come up and live again on earth at the
+blast of his summoning trumpet. Rabbi Jeremiah commanded, "When
+you bury me, put shoes on my feet, and give me a staff in my hand,
+and lay me on one side, that when the Messiah comes I may be
+ready."26 Most of the Rabbins made this resurrection partial.
+"Whoever denies the resurrection of the dead shall have no part in
+it, for the very reason that he denies it."27 "Rabbi Abbu says, "A
+day of rain is greater than the resurrection of the dead; because
+the rain is for all, while the resurrection is only for the
+just."28 "Sodom and Gomorrah shall not rise in the resurrection of
+the dead."29 Rabbi Chebbo says, "The patriarchs so vehemently
+desired to be buried in
+
+21 Schoettgen, De Messia, lib. vi. cap. v. sect. 1.
+
+22 Eisenmenger, th. ii. ss. 343, 364.
+
+23 Geschichte Urchrist. kap. viii. s. 184.
+
+24 Christologia Judaorum Jesu Apostolorumque Atate, sect. 34, (De
+Descensu Messia ad Inferos.)
+
+25 De Messia, lib. vi. cap. v. sect. 2.
+
+26 Lightfoot, in Matt. xxvii. 52.
+
+27 Witsius, Dissertatio de Seculo, etc. sect. 9.
+
+28 Nov. Test. Illustratum, etc. a Meuschen, p. 62.
+
+29 Schoettgen, in Johan. vi. 39.
+
+
+the land of Israel, because those who are dead in that land shall
+be the first to revive and shall devour his years, [the years of
+the Messiah.] But for those just who are interred beyond the holy
+land, it is to be understood that God will make a passage in the
+earth, through which they will be rolled until they reach the land
+of Israel."30 Rabbi Jochanan says, "Moses died out of the holy
+land, in order to show that in the same way that God will raise up
+Moses, so he will raise all those who observe his law." The
+national bigotry of the Jews reaches a pitch of extravagance in
+some of their views that is amusing. For instance, they declare
+that "one Israelitish soul is dearer and more important to God
+than all the souls of a whole nation of the Gentiles!" Again, they
+say, "When God judges the Israelites, he will stand, and make the
+judgment brief and mild; when he judges the Gentiles, he will sit,
+and make it long and severe!" They affirm that the resurrection
+will be effected by means of a dew; and they quote to that effect
+this verse from Canticles: "I sleep, but my heart waketh; my head
+is filled with dew, and my locks with drops of the night." Some
+assert that "the resurrection will be immediately caused by God,
+who never gives to any one the three keys of birth, rain, and the
+resurrection of the dead." Others say that the power to raise and
+judge the dead will be delegated to the Messiah, and even go so
+far as to assert that the trumpet whose formidable blasts will
+then shake the universe is to be one of the horns of that ram
+which Abraham offered up instead of his son Isaac! Some confine
+the resurrection to faithful Jews, some extend it to the whole
+Jewish nation, some think all the righteous of the earth will have
+part in it, and some stretch its pale around all mankind alike.31
+They seem to agree that the reprobate would either be left in the
+wretched regions of Sheol when the just arose, or else be thrust
+back after the judgment, to remain there forever. It was believed
+that the righteous after their resurrection would never die again,
+but ascend to heaven. The Jews after a time, when the increase of
+geographical knowledge had annihilated from the earth their old
+Eden whence the sinful Adam was expelled, changed its location
+into the sky. Thither, as the later fables ran, Elijah was borne
+in his chariot of fire by the horses thereof. Rabbi Pinchas says,
+"Carefulness leads us to innocence, innocence to purity, purity to
+sanctity, sanctity to humility, humility to fear of sins, fear of
+sins to piety, piety to the holy spirit, the holy spirit to the
+resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the dead to the
+prophet Elias."32 The writings of the early Christian Fathers
+contain many allusions to this blessed habitation of saints above
+the clouds. It is illustrated in the following quaint Rabbinical
+narrative. Rabbi Jehosha ben Levi once besought the angel of death
+to take him up, ere he died, to catch a glimpse of Paradise.
+Standing on the wall, he suddenly snatched the angel's sword and
+sprang over, swearing by Almighty God that he would not come out.
+Death was not allowed to enter Paradise, and the son of Levi did
+not restore his sword until he had promised to be more gentle
+towards the dying.33 The righteous were never to return to the
+dust, but "at the end
+
+30 Schoettgen, De Messia, lib. vi. cap. vi. sect. 27.
+
+31 See an able dissertation on Jewish Notions of the Resurrection
+of the Dead, prefixed to Humphrey's Translation of Athenagoras on
+the Resurrection.
+
+32 Surenhusius, Mischna, pars tertia, p. 309.
+
+33 Schroder, s. 419.
+
+
+of the thousand years," the duration of the Messiah's earthly
+reign, "when the Lord is lifted up, God shall fit wings to the
+just, like the wings of eagles."34 In a word, the Messiah and his
+redeemed ones would ascend into heaven to the right hand of God.
+So Paul, who said, "I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee,"
+declares that when the dead have risen "we shall be caught up in
+the clouds to be forever with the Lord."
+
+We forbear to notice a thousand curious details of speculation and
+fancy in which individual Rabbins indulged; for instance, their
+common notion concerning the bone luz, the single bone which,
+withstanding dissolution, shall form the nucleus of the
+resurrection body. It was a prevalent belief with them that the
+resurrection would take place in the valley of Jehoshaphat, in
+proof of which they quote this text from Joel: "Let the heathen be
+wakened and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I
+sit to judge the nations around." To this day, wherever scattered
+abroad, faithful Jews cling to the expectation of the Messiah's
+coming, and associate with his day the resurrection of the dead.35
+The statement in the Song of Solomon, "The king is held in the
+galleries," means, says a Rabbinical book, "that the Messiah is
+detained in Paradise, fettered by a woman's hair!" Every day,
+throughout the world, every consistent Israelite repeats the words
+of Moses Maimonides, the peerless Rabbi, of whom it is a proverb
+that "from Moses to Moses there arose not a Moses:" "I believe
+with a perfect faith that the Messiah will come, and though he
+delays, nevertheless, I will always expect him till he come." Then
+shall glory cover the living, and the risen, children of Israel,
+and confusion fall on their Gentile foes. In almost every inch of
+the beautiful valley of Jehoshaphat a Jew has been buried. All
+over the slopes of the hill sides around lie the thick clustering
+sepulchral slabs, showing how eagerly the chosen people seek to
+sleep in the very spot where the first rising of the dead shall
+be. Entranced and mute,
+
+"In old Jehoshaphat's valley, they
+Of Israel think the assembled world
+Will stand upon that awful day,
+When the Ark's light, aloft unfurl'd,
+Among the opening clouds shall shine,
+Divinity's own radiant shrine."
+
+Any one familiar with the Persian theology36 will at once notice a
+striking resemblance between many of its dogmas and those, first,
+of Pharisaism, secondly, of the popular Christianity. Some
+examination of this subject properly belongs here. There is, then,
+as is well known, a circle or group of ideas, particularly
+pertaining to eschatology, which appear in the later Jewish
+writings, and remarkably correspond to those held by the Parsees,
+the followers of Zoroaster. The same notions also reappear in the
+early Christianity as popularly understood. We will specify some
+of these correspondences. The doctrine of angels, received by the
+Jews, their names, offices, rank, and destiny, was borrowed and
+formed
+
+34 Schoettgen, de Messia, lib. vi. cap. vi. sect. 23; cap. vii.
+ss. 3, 4.
+
+35 John Allen, Modern Judaism, ch. vi. and xv.
+
+36 See Abriss der Religion Zoroasters nach den Zendbuchern, von
+Abbe Foucher, in Kleuker's Zend Avesta, band i. zweit anhang, ss.
+328-342.
+
+
+by them during and just after the Babylonish captivity, and is
+much like that which they found among their enslavers.37 The
+guardian angels appointed over nations, spoken of by Daniel, are
+Persian. The angels called in the Apocalypse "the seven spirits of
+God sent forth into all the earth," in Zechariah "the seven eyes
+of God which run to and fro through all the earth," are the
+Amschaspands of the Persian faith. The wars of the angels are
+described as minutely by the old Persians as by Milton. The Zend
+Avesta pictures Ahriman pregnant with Death, (die alte
+hollenschlange, todschwangere Ahriman,) as Milton describes the
+womb of Sin bearing that fatal monster. The Gahs, or second order
+of angels, the Persians supposed,38 were employed in preparing
+clothing and laying it up in heaven to clothe the righteous after
+the resurrection, a fancy frequent among the Rabbins and
+repeatedly alluded to in the New Testament. With both the Persians
+and the Jews, all our race both sexes sprang from one original
+man. With both, the first pair were seduced and ruined by means of
+fruit which the devil gave to them. With both, there was a belief
+in demoniacal possessions, devils or bad spirits entering human
+bodies. With both, there was the expectation of a great
+Deliverer,  the Persian Sosiosch, the Jewish Messiah, whose coming
+would be preceded by fearful woes, who would triumph over all
+evil, raise the dead, judge the world, separate the righteous and
+the wicked, purge the earth with fire, and install a reign of
+glorious blessedness.39 "The conception of an under world," says
+Dr. Roth, "was known centuries before Zoroaster; but probably he
+was the first to add to the old belief the idea that the under
+world was a place of purification, wherein souls were purged from
+all traces of sin."40 Of this belief in a subterranean purgatory
+there are numerous unmistakable evidences and examples in the
+Rabbinical writings.41
+
+These notions and others the Pharisees early adopted, and wrought
+into the texture of what they called the "Oral Law," that body of
+verbally transmitted legends, precepts, and dogmas, afterwards
+written out and collected in the Mischna, to which Christ
+repeatedly alluded with such severity, saying, "Ye by your
+traditions make the commandments of God of none effect." To some
+doctrines of kindred character and origin with these Paul refers
+when he warns his readers against "the worshipping of angels,"
+"endless genealogies," "philosophy falsely so called," and various
+besetting heresies of the time. But others were so woven and
+assimilated into the substance of the popular Judaism of the age,
+as inculcated by the Rabbins, that Paul himself held them, the
+lingering vestiges of his earnest Pharisaic education and
+organized experience. They naturally found their way into the
+Apostolic Church, principally composed of Ebionites, Christians
+who had been Jews; and from it they were never separated, but have
+come to us in seeming orthodox garb, and are generally
+
+37 Schroder, p. 385.
+
+38 Yacna, Ha 411. Kleuker, zweit. auf. s. 198.
+
+39 Die Heiligen Schriften der Parsen, von Dr. F. Spiegel, kap. ii.
+ss. 32-37. Studien and Kritiken, 1885, band i., "Ist die Lehre von
+der Anferstehung des Leibes nicht ein alt Persische Lehre?" F.
+Nork, Mythen der Alten Perser als Quellen Christlicher
+Glaubenslehren und Ritualien.
+
+40 Die Zoroastrischen Glaubenslehre, von Dr. Eduard Roth. s. 450.
+
+41 See, In tom. i. Kabbala Denudata, Synopsis Dogmatum Libri Sohar
+pp. 108, 109, 113.
+
+
+retained now. Still, they were errors. They are incredible to the
+thinking minds of to day. It is best to get rid of them by the
+truth, that they are pagan growths introduced into Christianity,
+but to be discriminated from it. By removing these antiquated and
+incredible excrescences from the real religion of Christ, we shall
+save the essential faith from the suspicion which their
+association with it, their fancied identity with it, invites and
+provokes.
+
+The correspondences between the Persian and the Pharisaic faith,
+in regard to doctrines, are of too arbitrary and peculiar a
+character to allow us for a moment to suppose them to have been an
+independent product spontaneously developed in the two nations;
+though even in that case the doctrines in question have no
+sanction of authority, not being Mosaic nor Prophetic, but only
+Rabbinical. One must have received from the other. Which was the
+bestower and which the recipient is quite plain.42 There is not a
+whit of evidence to show, but, on the contrary, ample presumption
+to disprove, that a certain cycle of notions were known among the
+Jews previous to a period of most intimate and constant
+intercourse between them and the Persians. But before that period
+those notions were an integral part of the Persian theology. Even
+Prideaux admits that the first Zoroaster lived and Magianism
+flourished at least a thousand years before Christ. And the dogmas
+we refer to are fundamental features of the religion. These dogmas
+of the Persians, not derived from the Old Testament nor known
+among the Jews before the captivity, soon after that time began to
+show themselves in their literature, and before the opening of the
+New Testament were prominent elements of the Pharisaic belief. The
+inference is unavoidable that the confluence of Persian thought
+and feeling with Hebrew thought and feeling, joined with the
+materials and flowing in the channels of the subsequent experience
+of the Jews, formed a mingled deposit about the age of Christ,
+which deposit was Pharisaism. Again: the doctrines common to
+Zoroastrianism and Pharisaism in the former seem to be prime
+sources, in the latter to be late products. In the former, they
+compose an organic, complete, inseparable system; in the latter,
+they are disconnected, mixed piecemeal, and, to a considerable
+extent, historically traceable to an origin beyond the native,
+national mind. It is a significant fact that the abnormal symbolic
+beasts described by several of the Jewish prophets, and in the
+Apocalypse, were borrowed from Persian art. Sculptures
+representing these have been brought to light by the recent
+researches at Persepolis. Finally, all early ecclesiastical
+history incontestably shows that Persian dogmas exerted on the
+Christianity of the first centuries an enormous influence, a
+pervasive and perverting power unspent yet, and which it is one of
+the highest tasks of honest and laborious Christian students in
+the present day to explain, define, and separate. What was that
+Manichaanism which nearly filled Christendom for a hundred years,
+what was it, in great part, but an influx of tradition,
+speculation, imagination, and sentiment, from Persia? The Gnostic
+Christians even had a scripture called "Zoroaster's Apocalypse."43
+"The wise men from the east," who knelt before the infant Christ,
+"and opened their treasures, and gave him gifts, gold,
+frankincense, and myrrh," were Persian Magi. We may imaginatively
+regard that sacred scene as an emblematical figure of the far
+different tributes which
+
+42 Lucke, Einleitung in die Offenbarung des Johannes, kap. 2,
+sect. 8.
+
+43 Kleuker, Zend Avesta, band ii. anhang i. s. 12.
+
+
+a little later came from their country to his religion, the
+unfortunate contributions that permeated and corrupted so much of
+the form in which it thenceforth appeared and spread. In the pure
+gospel's pristine day, ere it had hardened into theological dogmas
+or become encumbered with speculations and comments, from the lips
+of God's Anointed Son repeatedly fell the earnest warning, "Beware
+of the leaven of the Pharisees." There is far more need to have
+this warning intelligently heeded now, coming with redoubled
+emphasis from the Master's own mouth, "Beware of the leaven of the
+Pharisees." For, as the gospel is now generally set forth and
+received, that leaven has leavened well nigh the whole lump of it.
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+GREEK AND ROMAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THE disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks, and after them
+by the Romans, is material, but of so thin a contexture that it
+cannot be felt with the hands. It is exhaled with the dying
+breath, or issues through a warrior's wounds. The sword passes
+through its uninjured form as through the air. It is to the body
+what a dream is to waking action. Retaining the shape, lineaments,
+and motion the man had in life, it is immediately recognised upon
+appearing. It quits the body with much reluctance, leaving that
+warm and vigorous investiture for a chill and forceless existence.
+It glides along without noise and very swiftly, like a shadow. It
+is unable to enter the lower kingdom and be at peace until its
+deserted body has been buried with sacred rites: meanwhile, naked
+and sad, it flits restlessly about the gates, uttering doleful
+moans.
+
+The early Greek authors describe the creation as a stupendous
+hollow globe cut in the centre by the plane of the earth. The
+upper hemisphere is lighted by beneficent luminaries; the lower
+hemisphere is filled with unvarying blackness. The top of the
+higher sphere is Heaven, the bright dwelling of the Olympian gods;
+its bottom is the surface of the earth, the home of living men.
+The top of the lower sphere is Hades, the abode of the ghosts of
+the dead; its bottom is Tartarus, the prison of the Titans,
+rebellious giants vanquished by Zeus. Earth lies half way from the
+cope of Heaven to the floor of Tartarus. This distance is so great
+that, according to Hesiod, it would take an anvil nine days to
+fall from the centre to the nadir. Some of the ancients seem to
+have surmised the sphericity of the earth, and to have thought
+that Hades was simply its dark side, the dead being our antipodes.
+In the Odyssey, Ulysses reaches Hades by sailing across the ocean
+stream and passing the eternal night land of the Cimmerians,
+whereupon he comes to the edge of Acheron, the moat of Pluto's
+sombre house. Virgil also says, "One pole of the earth to us
+always points aloft; but the other is seen by black Styx and the
+infernal ghosts, where either dead night forever reigns or else
+Aurora returns thither from us and brings them back the day."1 But
+the prevalent notion evidently was that Hades was an immense
+hollow region not far under the surface of the ground, and that it
+was to be reached by descent through some cavern, like that at
+Avernus.
+
+This subterranean place is the destination of all alike, rapacious
+Orcus sparing no one, good or bad. It is wrapped in obscurity, as
+the etymology of its name implies, a place where one cannot see.
+
+"No sun e'er gilds the gloomy horrors there; No cheerful gales
+refresh the stagnant air."
+
+The dead are disconsolate in this dismal realm, and the living
+shrink from entering it, except as a refuge from intolerable
+afflictions. The shade of the princeliest hero dwelling there the
+
+1 Georg. lib. i. II. 242-250.
+
+
+swift footed Achilles says, "I would wish, being on earth, to
+serve for hire another man of poor estate, rather than rule over
+all the dead." Souls carry there their physical peculiarities, the
+fresh and ghastly likenesses of the wounds which have despatched
+them thither, so that they are known at sight. Companies of
+fellow countrymen, knots of friends, are together there,
+preserving their remembrance ofearthly fortunes and beloved
+relatives left behind, and eagerly questioning each newly arriving
+soul for tidings from above. When the soul of Achilles is told of
+the glorious deeds of Neoptolemus, "he goes away taking mighty
+steps through the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he had
+heard that his son was very illustrious."2 Sophocles makes the
+dying Antigone say, "Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that I
+shall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by my
+brother."3 It is important to notice that, according to the early
+and popular view, this Hades, the "dark dwelling of the joyless
+images of deceased mortals," is the destination of universal
+humanity. In opposition to its dolorous gloom and repulsive
+inanity are vividly pictured the glad light of day, the glory and
+happiness of life. "Not worth so much to me as my life," says the
+incomparable son of Peleus, "are all the treasures which populous
+Troy possessed, nor all which the stony threshold of Phoebus
+Apollo contains in rocky Pytho. Oxen, and fat sheep, and trophies,
+and horses with golden manes, may be acquired by effort; but the
+breath of man to return again is not to be obtained by plunder nor
+by purchase, when once it has passed the barrier of his teeth."
+
+It is not probable that all the ornamental details associated by
+the poets with the fate and state of the dead as they are set
+forth, for instance, by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aneid were
+ever credited as literal truth. But there is no reason to doubt
+that the essential features of this mythological scenery were
+accepted in the vulgar belief. For instance, that the popular mind
+honestly held that, in some vague sense or other, the ghost, on
+leaving the body, flitted down to the dull banks of Acheron and
+offered a shadowy obolus to Charon, the slovenly old ferryman, for
+a passage in his boat, seems attested not only by a thousand
+averments to that effect in the current literature of the time,
+but also by the invariable custom of placing an obolus in the dead
+man's mouth for that purpose when he was buried.
+
+The Greeks did not view the banishment of souls in Hades as a
+punishment for sin, or the result of any broken law in the plan of
+things. It was to them merely the fulfilment of the inevitable
+fate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like
+successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to
+rank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from
+his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless
+Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a
+ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or
+busying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits,
+was melancholy enough; but it was his natural destiny, and not an
+avenging judgment.
+
+But that powerful instinct in man which desires to see villany
+punished and goodness rewarded could not fail, among so cultivated
+a people as the Greeks, to develop a doctrine of future
+compensation for the contrasted deserts of souls. The earliest
+trace of the idea of
+
+2 Odyssey, lib. xi. II. 538, 539.
+
+3 Antigone, II. 872-874.
+
+
+retribution which we find carried forward into the invisible world
+is the punishment of the Titans, those monsters who tried by
+piling up mountains to storm the heavenly abodes, and to wrest the
+Thunderer's bolts from his hand. This germ is slowly expanded; and
+next we read of a few specified criminals, who had been
+excessively impious, personally offending Zeus, condemned by his
+direct indignation to a severe expiation in Tartarus. The insulted
+deity wreaks his vengeance on the tired Sisyphus, the mocked
+Tantalus, the gnawed Tityus, and others. Afterwards we meet the
+statement that condign retribution is always inflicted for the two
+flagrant sins of perjury and blasphemy. Finally, we discern a
+general prevalence of the belief that punishment is decreed, not
+by vindictive caprice, but on the grounds of universal morality,
+all souls being obliged in Hades to pass before Rhadamanthus,
+Minos, or Aacus, three upright judges, to be dealt with, according
+to their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution of
+poetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, so
+melodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Some
+ludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues of
+the Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the Emperor
+Julian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors a
+banquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors are
+admitted to the table with honors; but the bad ones are hurled
+headlong down into Tartarus, amidst the derisive shouts of the
+spectators.
+
+As the notion that the wrath of the gods would pursue their
+enemies in the future state gave rise to a belief in the
+punishments of Tartarus, so the notion that the distinguishing
+kindness of the gods would follow their favorites gave rise to the
+myth of Elysium. The Elysian Fields were earliest portrayed lying
+on the western margin of the earth, stretching from the verge of
+Oceanus, where the sun set at eve. They were fringed with
+perpetual green, perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and
+eternally fanned by refreshing breezes. They were represented
+merely as the select abode of a small number of living men, who
+were either the mortal relatives or the special favorites of the
+gods, and who were transported thither without tasting death,
+there to pass an immortality which was described, with great
+inconsistency, sometimes as purely happy, sometimes as joyless and
+wearisome. To all except a few chosen ones this region was utterly
+inaccessible. Homer says, "But for you, O Menelaus, it is not
+decreed by the gods to die; but the immortals will send you to the
+Elysian plain, because you are the son in law of Zeus."4 Had the
+inheritance of this clime been proclaimed as the reward of heroic
+merit, had it been really believed attainable by virtue, it would
+have been held up as a prize to be striven for. The whole account,
+as it was at first, bears the impress of imaginative fiction as
+legibly upon its front as the story of the dragon watched garden
+of Hesperus's daughters, whose trees bore golden apples, or the
+story of the enchanted isle in the Arabian tales.
+
+The early location of Elysium, and the conditions of admission to
+it, were gradually changed; and at length it reappeared, in the
+under world, as the abode of the just. On one side of the
+primitive Hades Tartarus had now been drawn up to admit the
+condemned into its penal tortures, and on the other side Elysium
+was lowered down to reward the justified by receiving them into
+its peaceful and perennial happiness; while, between the two,
+Erebus
+
+4 Odyssey, lib. iv. II. 555-570.
+
+
+remained as an intermediate state of negation and gloom for
+unsentenced shades. The highly colored descriptions of this
+subterranean heaven, frequently found thenceforth, it is to be
+supposed were rarely accepted as solid verities. They were
+scarcely ever used, to our knowledge, as motives in life,
+incitement in difficulties, consolation in sorrow. They were
+mostly set forth in poems, works even professedly fictitious. They
+were often denied and ridiculed in speeches and writings received
+with public applause. Still, they unquestionably exerted some
+influence on the common modes of thought and feeling, had a
+shadowy seat in the popular imagination and heart, helped men to
+conceive of a blessed life hereafter and to long for it, and took
+away something of the artificial horror with which, under the
+power of rooted superstition, their departing ghosts hailed the
+dusky limits of futurity:
+
+"Umbra Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi Pallida regna
+petunt."
+
+First, then, from a study of the Greek mythology we find all the
+dead a dull populace of ghosts fluttering through the neutral
+melancholy of Hades without discrimination. And finally we discern
+in the world of the dead a sad middle region, with a Paradise on
+the right and a Hell on the left, the whole presided over by three
+incorruptible judges, who appoint the new corners their places in
+accordance with their deserts.
+
+The question now arises, What did the Greeks think in relation to
+the ascent of human souls into heaven among the gods? Did they
+except none from the remediless doom of Hades? Was there no path
+for the wisest and best souls to climb starry Olympus? To dispose
+of this inquiry fairly, four distinct considerations must be
+examined. First, Ulysses sees in the infernal regions the image of
+Herakles shooting the shadows of the Stymphalian birds, while his
+soul is said to be rejoicing with fair legged Hebe at the banquets
+of the immortal gods in the skies. To explain this, we must
+remember that Herakles was the son of Alcmene, a mortal woman, and
+of Zeus, the king of the gods. Accordingly, in the flames on Mount
+Oeta, the surviving ghost which he derived from his mother
+descends to Hades, but the purified soul inherited from his father
+has the proper nature and rank of a deity, and is received into
+the Olympian synod.5 Of course no blessed life in heaven for the
+generality of men is here implied. Herakles, being a son and
+favorite of Zeus, has a corresponding destiny exceptional from
+that of other men.
+
+Secondly, another double representation, somewhat similar, but
+having an entirely different interpretation, occurs in the case of
+Orion, the handsome Hyrian hunter whom Artemis loved. At one time
+he is described, like the spectre of the North American Indian,
+chasing over the Stygian plain the disembodied animals he had in
+his lifetime killed on the mountains:
+
+"Swift through the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazen
+mace, with direful sway, Aloft he whirls to crush the savage prey;
+
+5 Ovid, Met. lib. ix. II. 245-272.
+
+
+Grim beasts in trains, that by his truncheon fell, Now, phantom
+forms, shoot o'er the lawn of hell."
+
+In the common belief this, without doubt, was received as actual
+fact. But at another time Orion is deified and shown as one of the
+grandest constellations of the sky,
+
+"A belted giant, who, with arm uplift, Threatening the throne of
+Zeus, forever stands, Sublimely impious."
+
+This, obviously, is merely a poetic symbol, a beautiful artifice
+employed by the poets to perpetuate a legend by associating it
+with the imperishable hieroglyphs of the galaxy. It is not
+credible that men imagined that group of stars only outlined in
+such shape by the help of arbitrary fancy to be literally the
+translated hunter himself. The meaning simply was that he was
+immortalized through the eternal linking of his name and form with
+a stellar cluster which would always shine upon men. "The
+reverence and gratitude of a weak world for the heroes and
+benefactors they could not comprehend, named them divinities, whom
+they did star together to an idolatrous immortality which
+nationalized the heavens" with the shining shapes of the great and
+brave. These types of poetry, symbols lent to infant science, were
+never meant to indicate a literal translation and metamorphosis of
+human souls, but were honors paid to the memories of illustrious
+men, emblems and pledged securities of their unfading fame. With
+what glorious characters, with what forms of deathless beauty,
+defiant of decay, the sky was written over! Go out this evening
+beneath the old rolling dome, when the starry scroll is outspread,
+and you may still read the reveries of the marvelling minds of the
+antique world, as fresh in their magic loveliness as when the
+bards and seers of Olympus and the Agean first stamped them in
+heaven. There "the great snake binds in his bright coil half the
+mighty host." There is Arion with his harp and the charmed
+dolphin. The fair Andromeda, still chained to her eternal rock,
+looks mournfully towards the delivering hero whose conquering hand
+bears aloft the petrific visage of Medusa. Far off in the north
+the gigantic Bootes is seen driving towards the Centaur and the
+Scorpion. And yonder, smiling benignantly upon the crews of many a
+home bound ship, are revealed the twin brothers, joined in the
+embrace of an undying friendship.
+
+Thirdly, it is asserted by several Latin authors, in general
+terms, that the ghost goes to Hades but the soul ascends to
+heaven; and it has been inferred most erroneously that this
+statement contains the doctrine of an abode for men after death on
+high with the gods. Ovid expresses the real thought in full,
+thus:
+
+"Terra tegit carnem; tumulum circumvolat umbra; Orcus habet manes;
+spiritus astra petit."
+
+"The earth conceals the flesh; the shade flits round the tomb; the
+under world receives the image; the spirit seeks the stars." Those
+conversant with the opinions then prevalent will scarcely doubt
+that these words were meant to express the return of the composite
+man to the primordial elements of which he was made. The
+particulars of the dissolving individual are absorbed in the
+general elements of the universe. Earth goes back to earth, ghost
+to the realm of ghosts, breath to the air, fiery essence of soul
+to the lofty ether in whose pure radiance the stars burn.
+Euripides expressly says that when man dies each part goes whence
+it came, "the body to the ground, the spirit to the ether."6
+Therefore the often misunderstood phrase of the Roman writers,
+"the soul seeks the stars," merely denotes the impersonal mingling
+after death of the divine portion of man's being with the parent
+Divinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but more
+especially to reside beyond the empyrean.
+
+Fourthly: what shall be said of the apotheosis of their celebrated
+heroes and emperors by the Greeks and Romans, whereby these were
+elevated to the dignity of deities, and seats were assigned them
+in heaven? What was the meaning of this ceremony? It does not
+signify that a celestial immortality awaits all good men; because
+it appears as a thing attainable by very few, is only allotted by
+vote of the Senate. Neither was it supposed actually to confer on
+its recipients equality of attributes with the great gods, making
+them peers of Zeus and Apollo. The homage received as gods by
+Alexander and others during their lives, the deification of Julius
+Casar during the most learned and skeptical age of Rome, with
+other obvious considerations, render such a supposition
+inadmissible. In view of all the direct evidence and collateral
+probabilities, we conclude that the genuine import of an ancient
+apotheosis was this: that the soul of the deceased person so
+honored was admitted, in deference to his transcendent merits, or
+as a special favor on the part of the gods, into heaven, into the
+divine society. He was really a human soul still, but was called a
+god because, instead of descending, like the multitude of human
+souls, to Hades, he was taken into the abode and company of the
+gods above the sky. This interpretation derives support from the
+remarkable declaration of Aristotle, that "of two friends one must
+be unwilling that the other should attain apotheosis, because in
+such case they must be forever separated."7 One would be in
+Olympus, the other in Hades. The belief that any, even a favored
+few, could ever obtain this blessing, was of quite limited
+development, and probably sprang from the esoteric recesses of the
+Mysteries. To call a human soul a god is not so bold a speech as
+it may seem. Plotinus says. "Whoever has wisdom and true virtue in
+soul itself differs but little from superior beings, in this alone
+being inferior to them, that he is in body. Such an one, dying,
+may therefore properly say, with Empedocles, 'Farewell! a god
+immortal now am I.'"
+
+The expiring Vespasian exclaimed, "I shall soon be a god."8 Mure
+says that the doctrine of apotheosis belonged to the Graco
+Pelasgic race through all their history.9 Seneca severely
+satirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, in
+an elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception of
+Claudius among the pumpkins. The broad travesty of
+
+6 The Suppliants, l. 533.
+
+7 Nicomachean Ethics, lib. viii. cap. 7.
+
+8 Suetonius, cap. xxiii.
+
+9 Hist. Greek Literature, vol. i. ch. 2, sect. 5.
+
+
+Deification exhibited in Pumpkinification obviously measures the
+distance from the honest credulity of one class and period to the
+keen infidelity of another.
+
+One of the most important passages in Greek literature, in
+whatever aspect viewed, is composed of the writings of the great
+Theban lyrist. Let us see what representation is there made of the
+fate of man in the unseen world. The ethical perception, profound
+feeling, and searching mind of Pindar could not allow him to
+remain satisfied with the undiscriminating views of the future
+state prevalent in his time. Upon such a man the problem of death
+must weigh as a conscious burden, and his reflections would
+naturally lead him to improved conclusions. Accordingly, we find
+him representing the Blessed Isles not as the haven of a few
+favorites of the gods, but as the reward of virtue; and the
+punishments of the wicked, too, are not dependent on fickle
+inclinations, but are decreed by immutable right. He does not
+describe the common multitude of the dead, leading a dark sad
+existence, like phantoms in a dream: his references to death and
+Hades seem cheerful in comparison with those of many other ancient
+Greek authors. Dionysius the Rhetorician, speaking of his
+Threnes, dirges sung at funerals, says, "Simonides lamented the
+dead pathetically, Pindar magnificently."
+
+His conceptions of the life to come were inseparably connected
+with certain definite locations. He believed Hades to be the
+destination of all our mortal race, but conceived it subdivided
+into a Tartarus for the impious and an Elysium for the righteous.
+He thought that the starry firmament was the solid floor of a
+world of splendor, bliss, and immortality, inhabited by the gods,
+but fatally inaccessible to man. When he thinks of this place, it
+is with a sigh, a sigh that man's aspirations towards it are vain
+and his attempts to reach it irreverent. This latter thought he
+enforces by an earnest allusion to the myth of Bellerophon, who,
+daring to soar to the cerulean seat of the gods on the winged
+steed Pegasus, was punished for his arrogance by being hurled down
+headlong. These assertions are to be sustained by citations of his
+own words. The references made are to Donaldson's edition.
+
+In the second Pythian Ode10 Pindar repeats, and would appear to
+endorse, the old monitory legend of Ixion, who for his outrageous
+crimes was bound to an ever revolving wheel in Hades and made to
+utter warnings against such offences as his own. In the first
+Pythian we read, "Hundred headed Typhon, enemy of the gods, lies
+in dreadful Tartarus."11 Among the preserved fragments of Pindar
+the one numbered two hundred and twenty three reads thus: "The
+bottom of Tartarus shall press thee down with solid necessities."
+The following is from the first Isthmian Ode: "He who, laying up
+private wealth, laughs at the poor, does not consider that he
+shall close up his life for Hades without honor."12 The latter
+part of the tenth Nemean Ode recounts, with every appearance of
+devout belief, the history of Castor and Pollux, the god begotten
+twins, who, reversing conditions with each other on successive
+days and nights, spent their interchangeable immortality each
+alternately in heaven and in Hades. The astronomical
+interpretation of this account may be correct; but its
+applicability to the wondering faith of the earlier poets is
+extremely doubtful.
+
+10 L. 39.
+
+11 LI. 15, 16.
+
+12 L. 68.
+
+
+The seventh Isthmian contains this remarkable sentence: "Unequal
+is the fate of man: he can think of great things, but is too
+ephemeral a creature to reach the brazen floored seat of the
+gods."13 A similar sentiment is expressed in the sixth Nemean:
+"Men are a mere nothing; while to the gods the brazen heaven
+remains a firm abode forever."14 The one hundred and second
+fragment is supposed to be a part of the dirge composed by Pindar
+on the death of the grandfather of Pericles. It runs in this way:
+"Whoso by good fortune has seen the things in the hollow under the
+earth knows indeed the end of life: he also knows the beginning
+vouchsafed by Zeus." It refers to initiation in the Eleusinian
+Mysteries, and means that the initiate understands the life which
+follows death. It is well known that a clear doctrine of future
+retribution was inculcated in the Mysteries long before it found
+general publication. The ninety fifth fragment is all that remains
+to us of a dirge which appears, from the allusion in the first
+line, to have been sung at a funeral service performed at
+midnight, or at least after sunset. "While it is night here with
+us, to those below shines the might of the sun; and the red rosied
+meadows of their suburbs are filled with the frankincense tree,
+and with golden fruits. Some delight themselves there with steeds
+and exercises, others with games, others with lyres; and among
+them all fair blossoming fortune blooms, and a fragrance is
+distilled through the lovely region, and they constantly mingle
+all kinds of offerings with the far shining fire on the altars of
+the gods." This evidently is a picture of the happy scenes in the
+fields that stretch around the City of the Blessed in the under
+world, and is introduced as a comfort to the mourners over the
+dead body.
+
+The ensuing passage the most important one on our subject is from
+the second Olympic Ode.15 "An honorable, virtuous man may rest
+assured as to his future fate. The souls of the lawless, departing
+from this life, suffer punishment. One beneath the earth,
+pronouncing sentence by a hateful necessity imposed upon him,
+declares the doom for offences committed in this realm of Zeus.
+But the good lead a life without a tear, among those honored by
+the gods for having always delighted in virtue: the others endure
+a life too dreadful to look upon. Whoever has had resolution
+thrice in both worlds to stand firm, and to keep his soul pure
+from evil, has found the path of Zeus to the tower of Kronos,
+where the airs of the ocean breathe around the Isle of the
+Blessed, and where some from resplendent trees, others from the
+water glitter golden flowers, with garlandsofwhich they wreathe
+their wrists and brows in the righteous assemblies of
+Rhadamanthus, whom father Kronos has as his willing assistant."
+The "path of Zeus," in the above quotation, means the path which
+Zeus takes when he goes to visit his father Kronos, whom he
+originally dethroned and banished, but with whom he is now
+reconciled, and who has become the ruler of the departed spirits
+of the just, in a peaceful and joyous region.
+
+The following passage constitutes the ninety eighth fragment. "To
+those who descend from a fruitless and ill starred life Persephone
+[the Queen of the Dead] will grant a compensation for their former
+misfortune, after eight years [the judicial period of atonement
+and lustration for great crimes] granting them their lives again.
+Then, illustrious kings, strong,
+
+13 Ll. 42-44.
+
+14 Ll. 4-6.
+
+15 Ll. 55-78.
+
+
+swift, wise, they shall become the mightiest leaders; and
+afterwards they shall be invoked by men as sacred heroes." In this
+piece, as in the preceding one where reference is made to the
+thrice living man, is contained the doctrine, early brought from
+the East, that souls may repeatedly return from the dead and in
+new bodies lead new lives. One other fragment, the ninety sixth,
+added to the foregoing, will make up all the important genuine
+passages in Pindar relating to the future life. "By a beneficent
+allotment, all travel to an end freeing from toil. The body indeed
+is subject to the power of death; but the eternal image is left
+alive, and this alone is allied to the gods. When we are asleep,
+it shows in many dreams the approaching judgment concerning
+happiness and misery." When our physical limbs are stretched in
+insensible repose, the inward spirit, rallying its sleepless and
+prophetic powers, foretells the balancing awards of another world.
+
+We must not wholly confound with the mythological schemes of the
+vulgar creed the belief of the nobler philosophers, many of whom,
+as is well known, cherished an exalted faith in the survival of
+the conscious soul and in a just retribution. "Strike!" one of
+them said, with the dauntless courage of an immortal, to a tyrant
+who had threatened to have him brayed in a mortar: "strike! you
+may crush the shell of Anaxarchus: you cannot touch his life."
+Than all the maze of fabulous fancies and physical rites in which
+the dreams of the poets and the guesses of the people were
+entangled, how much more
+
+"Just was the prescience of the eternal goalThat gleamed, 'mid
+Cyprian shades, on Zeno's soul, Or shone to Plato in the lonely
+cave, God in all space, and life in every grave!"
+
+An account of the Greek views on the subject of a future life
+which should omit the doctrine of Plato would be defective indeed.
+The influence of this sublime autocrat in the realms of intellect
+has transcended calculation. However coldly his thoughts may have
+been regarded by his contemporary countrymen, they soon obtained
+cosmopolitan audience, and surviving the ravages of time and
+ignorance, overleaping the bars of rival schools and sects,
+appreciated and diffused by the loftiest spirits of succeeding
+ages, closely blended with their own speculations by many
+Christian theologians have held an almost unparalleled dominion
+over the minds of millions of men for more than fifty generations.
+
+In the various dialogues of Plato, written at different periods of
+his life, there are numerous variations and inconsistencies of
+doctrine. There are also many mythical passages obviously intended
+as symbolic statements, poetic drapery, by no means to be handled
+or looked at as the severe outlines of dialectic truth.
+Furthermore, in these works there are a vast number of opinions
+and expressions introduced by the interlocutors, who often belong
+to antagonistic schools of philosophy, and for which, of course,
+Plato is not to be held responsible. Making allowance for these
+facts, and resolutely grappling with the many other difficulties
+of the task, we shall now attempt to exhibit what we consider were
+the real teachings of Plato in relation to the fate of the soul.
+This exposition, sketchy as it is, and open to question as it may
+be in some particulars, is the carefully weighed result of
+earnest, patient, and repeated study of all the relevant passages.
+
+In the first place, it is plain that Plato had a firm religious
+and philosophical faith in the immortality of the soul, which was
+continually attracting his thoughts, making it a favorite theme
+with him and exerting no faint influence on his life. This faith
+rested both on ancient traditions, to which he frequently refers
+with invariable reverence, and on metaphysical reasonings, which
+he over and over presents in forms of conscientious elaboration.
+There are two tests of his sincerity of faith: first, that he
+always treats the subject with profound seriousness; secondly,
+that he always uses it as a practical motive. "I do not think,"
+said Socrates, "that any one who should now hear us, even though
+he were a comic poet, would say that I am talking idly."16 Again,
+referring to Homer's description of the judgments in Hades, he
+says, "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts,
+and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in the
+most healthy condition."17 "To a base man no man nor god is a
+friend on earth while living, nor under it when dead," say the
+souls of their ancestors to the living; "but live honorably, and
+when your destined fate brings you below you shall come to us as
+friends to friends."18 "We are plants, not of earth, but of
+heaven."19 We start, then, with the affirmation that Plato
+honestly and cordially believed in a future life.
+
+Secondly, his ethical and spiritual beliefs, like those of nearly
+all the ancients, were closely interwoven with physical theories
+and local relations. The world to him consisted of two parts, the
+celestial region of ideas, and the mundane region of material
+phenomena,  corresponding pretty well, as Lewes suggests, to our
+modern conception of heaven and earth. Near the close of the
+Phado, Socrates says that the earth is not of the kind and
+magnitude usually supposed. "We dwell in a decayed and corroded,
+muddy and filthy region in the sediment and hollows of the earth,
+and imagine that we inhabit its upper parts; just as if one
+dwelling in the bottom of the sea should think that he dwelt on
+the sea, and, beholding the sun through the water, should imagine
+that the sea was the heavens. So, if we could fly up to the summit
+of the air as fishes emerging from the sea to behold what is on
+the earth here and emerge hence, we should know that the true
+earth is there. The people there dwell with the gods, and see
+things as they really are; and what the sea is to us the air is to
+them, and what the air is to us the ether is to them." Again, in
+the tenth book of the Republic, eleventh chapter, the soul is
+metaphorically said in the sea of this corporeal life to get
+stones and shell fish attached to it, and, fed on earth, to be
+rendered to a great extent earthy, stony, and savage, like the
+marine Glaucus, some parts of whose body were broken off and
+others worn away by the waves, while such quantities of shells,
+sea weed, and stones had grown to him that he more resembled a
+beast than a man. In keeping with the whole tenor of the Platonic
+teaching, this is a fine illustration of the fallen state of man
+in his vile environment of flesh here below. The soul, in its
+earthly sojourn, embodied here, is as much mutilated and degraded
+from its equipped and pure condition in its lofty natal home, the
+archetypal world of Truth above the base Babel of material
+existence, as Glaucus was on
+
+16 Phado, 40.
+
+17 Gorgias, 173.
+
+18 Menexenus, 19.
+
+19 Timaus, 71.
+
+
+descending from his human life on the sunny shore to his encrusted
+shape and blind prowling in the monstrous deep.
+
+At another time Plato contrasts the situation of the soul on earth
+with its situation in heaven by the famous comparison of the dark
+cave. He supposes men, unable to look upwards, dwelling in a
+cavern which has an opening towards the light extending lengthwise
+through the top of the cavern. A great many images, carrying
+various objects and talking aloud, pass and repass along the edge
+of the opening. Their shadows fall on the side of the cave below,
+in front of the dwellers there; also the echoes of their talk
+sound back from the wall. Now, the men, never having been or
+looked out of the cave, would suppose these shadows to be the real
+beings, these echoes the real voices. As respects this figure,
+says Plato, we must compare ourselves with such persons. The
+visible region around us is the cave, the sun is the light, and
+the soul's ascent into the region of mind is the ascent out of the
+cave and the contemplation of things above.20
+
+Still again, Plato describes the ethereal paths and motions of the
+gods, who, in their chariots, which are the planets and stars,
+ride through the universe, accompanied by all pure souls, "the
+family of true science, contemplating things as they really are."
+"Reaching the summit, they proceed outside, and, standing on the
+back of heaven, its revolution carries them round, and they behold
+that supercelestial region which no poet here can ever sing of as
+it deserves." In this archetypal world all souls of men have
+dwelt, though "few have memory enough left," "after their fall
+hither," "to call to mind former things from the present." "Now,
+of justice and temperance, and whatever else souls deem precious,
+there are here but faint resemblances, dull images; but beauty was
+then splendid to look on when we, in company with the gods, beheld
+that blissful spectacle, and were initiated into that most blessed
+of all mysteries, which we celebrated when we were unaffected by
+the evils that awaited us in time to come, and when we beheld, in
+the pure light, perfect and calm visions, being ourselves pure and
+as yet unmasked with this shell of a body to which we are now
+fettered."21
+
+To suppose all this employed by Plato as mere fancy and metaphor
+is to commit an egregious error. In studying an ancient author, we
+must forsake the modern stand point of analysis, and envelop
+ourselves in the ancient atmosphere of thought, where poetry and
+science were as indistinguishably blended in the personal beliefs
+as oxygen and nitrogen are in the common air. We have not a doubt
+that Plato means to teach, literally, that the soul was always
+immortal, and that in its anterior states of existence, in the
+realm of ideas on high, it was in the midst of those essential
+realities whose shifting shadows alone it can behold in its lapsed
+condition and bodily imprisonment here. That he closely
+intertwisted ethical with physical theories, spiritual destinies
+with insphering localities, the fortunes of men with the
+revolutions of the earth and stars, is a fact which one can hardly
+read the Timaus and fail to see; a fact which continually
+reappears. It is strikingly shown in his idea of the consummation
+of all things at regular epochs determined by the recurrence of a
+grand
+
+20 Republic, lib. vii. cap. 1 4.
+
+21 Phadrus, 56-58, 63, 64.
+
+
+revolution of the universe, a period vulgarly known under the name
+of the "Platonic Year."22 The second point, therefore, in the
+present explanation of Plato's doctrine of another life, is the
+conception that there is in the empyrean a glorious world of
+incorruptible truth, beauty, and goodness, the place of the gods,
+the native haunt of souls; and that human souls, having yielded to
+base attractions and sunk into bodies, are but banished sojourners
+in this phenomenal world of evanescent shadows and illusions,
+where they are "stung with resistless longings for the skies, and
+only solaced by the vague and broken reminiscences of their former
+state."
+
+Thirdly, Plato taught that after death an unerring judgment and
+compensation await all souls. Every soul bears in itself the plain
+evidence of its quality and deeds, its vices and virtues; and in
+the unseen state it will meet inevitable awards on its merits. "To
+go to Hades with a soul full of crimes is the worst of all
+evils."23 "When a man dies, he possesses in the other world a
+destiny suited to the life which he has led in this."24 In the
+second book of the Republic he says, "We shall in Hades suffer the
+punishment of our misdeeds here;" and he argues at much length the
+absolute impossibility of in any way escaping this. The fact of a
+full reward for all wisdom and justice, a full retribution for all
+folly and vice, is asserted unequivocally in scores of passages,
+most of them expressly connecting the former with the notion of an
+ascent to the bright region of truth and intellect, the latter
+with a descent to the black penal realm of Hades. Let the citation
+of a single further example suffice. "Some souls, being sentenced,
+go to places of punishment beneath the earth; others are borne
+upward to some region in heaven."25 He proves the genuineness of
+his faith in this doctrine by continually urging it, in the most
+earnest, unaffected manner, as an animating motive in the
+formation of character and the conduct of life, saying, "He who
+neglects his soul will pass lamely through existence, and again
+pass into Hades, aimless and unserviceable."26
+
+The fourth and last step in this exposition is to show the
+particular form in which Plato held his doctrine of future
+retribution, the way in which he supposed the consequences of
+present good and evil would appear hereafter. He received the
+Oriental theory of transmigration. Souls are born over and over.
+The banishment of the wicked to Tartarus is provisional, a
+preparation for their return to incarnate life. The residence of
+the good in heaven is contingent, and will be lost the moment they
+yield to carelessness or material solicitations. The circumstances
+under which they are reborn, the happiness or misery of their
+renewed existence, depend on their character and conduct in their
+previous career; and thus a poetic justice is secured. At the
+close of the Timaus, Plato describes the whole animal kingdom as
+consisting of degraded human souls, from "the tribe of birds,
+which were light minded souls, to the tribe of oysters, which have
+received the most remote habitations as a punishment of their
+extreme ignorance." "After this manner, then, both formerly and
+
+22 Statesman, 14, 15.
+
+23 Gorgias, 165.
+
+24 Republic, lib. vi. cap. i.
+
+25 Phadrus, 61.
+
+26 Timaus, 18.
+
+
+now, animals transmigrate, experiencing their changes through the
+loss or acquisition of intellect and folly." The general doctrine
+of metempsychosis is stated and implied very frequently in many of
+the Platonic dialogues. Some recent writers have tried to explain
+these representations as figures of speech, not intended to
+portray the literal facts, but merely to hint their moral
+equivalents. Such persons seem to us to hold Plato's pages in the
+full glare of the nineteenth century and read them in the
+philosophic spirit of Bacon and Comte, instead of holding them in
+the old shades of the Academy and pondering them in the marvelling
+spirit of Pythagoras and Empedocles.
+
+We are led by the following considerations to think that Plato
+really meant to accredit the transmigration of souls literally.
+First, he often makes use of the current poetic imagery of Hades,
+and of ancient traditions, avowedly in a loose metaphorical way,
+as moral helps, calling them "fables." But the metempsychosis he
+sets forth, without any such qualification or guard, with so much
+earnestness and frequency, as a promise and a warning, that we are
+forced, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, to
+suppose that he meant the statements as sober fact and not as
+mythical drapery. As with a parable, of course we need not
+interpret all the ornamental details literally; but we must accept
+the central idea. And in the present case the fundamental thought
+is that of repeated births of the soul, each birth trailing
+retributive effects from the foregone. For example, the last four
+chapters of the tenth book of the Republic contain the account of
+Erus, a Pamphylian, who, after lying dead on the battle field ten
+days, revived, and told what he had seen in the other state. Plato
+in the outset explicitly names this recital an "apologue." It
+recounts a multitude of moral and physical particulars. These
+details may fairly enough be considered in some degreeas mythical
+drapery, or as the usual traditional painting; but the essential
+conception running through the account, for the sake of which it
+is told, we are not at liberty to explain away as empty metaphor.
+Now, that essential conception is precisely this: that souls after
+death are adjudged to Hades or to heaven as a recompense for their
+sin or virtue, and that, after an appropriate sojourn in those
+places, they are born again, the former ascending, squalid and
+scarred, from beneath the earth, the latter descending, pure, from
+the sky. In perfect consonance with this conclusion is the moral
+drawn by Plato from the whole narrative. He simply says, "If the
+company will be persuaded by me, considering the soul to be
+immortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall always
+persevere in the road which leads upwards."
+
+Secondly, the conception of the metempsychosis is thoroughly
+coherent with Plato's whole philosophy. If he was in earnest about
+any doctrine, it was the doctrine that all knowledge is
+reminiscence. The following declarations are his. "Soul is older
+than body." "Souls are continually born over again from Hades into
+this life." "To search and learn is simply to revive the images of
+what the soul saw in its pre existent state of being in the world
+of realities."27 Why should we hesitate to attribute a sincere
+belief in the metempsychosis to the acknowledged author of the
+doctrine that the soul lived in another world before appearing
+here, and that its knowledge is but reminiscence? If born from the
+other world
+
+27 Menexenus, 15.
+
+
+once, we may be many times; and then all that is wanted to
+complete the dogma of transmigration is the idea of a presiding
+justice. Had not Plato that idea?
+
+Thirdly, the doctrine of a judicial metempsychosis was most
+profoundly rooted in the popular faith, as a strict verity,
+throughout the great East, ages before the time of Plato, and was
+familiarly known throughout Greece in his time. It had been
+imported thither by Musaus and Orpheus at an early period, was
+afterwards widely recommended and established by the Pythagoreans,
+and was unquestionably held by many of Plato's contemporaries. He
+refers once to those "who strongly believe that murderers who have
+gone to Hades will be obliged to come back and end their next
+lives by suffering the same fate which they had before inflicted
+on others."28 It is also a remarkable fact that he states the
+conditions of transmigration, and the means of securing exemption
+from it, in the same way that the Hindus have from immemorial
+time: "The soul which has beheld the essence of truth remains free
+from harm until the next revolution; and if it can preserve the
+vision of the truth it shall always remain free from harm," that
+is, be exempt from birth; but "when it fails to behold the field
+of truth it falls to the earth and is implanted in a body."29 This
+statement and several others in the context corresponds precisely
+with Hindu theology, which proclaims that the soul, upon attaining
+real wisdom, that is, upon penetrating beneath illusions and
+gazing on reality, is freed from the painful necessity of repeated
+births. Now, since the Hindus and the Pythagoreans held the
+doctrine as a severe truth, and Plato states it in the identical
+forms which they employed, and never implies that he is merely
+poetizing, we naturally conclude that he, too, veritably
+inculcates it as fact.
+
+Finally, we are the more confirmed in this supposition when we
+find that his lineal disciples and most competent expounders, such
+as Proclus, and nearly all his later commentators, such as Ritter,
+have so understood him. The great chorus of his interpreters, from
+Plotinus to Leroux, with scarcely a dissentient voice, approve the
+opinion pronounced by the learned German historian of philosophy,
+that "the conception of the metempsychosis is so closely
+interwoven both with his physical system and with his ethical as
+to justify the conviction that Plato looked upon it as legitimate
+and valid, and not as a merely figurative exposition of the soul's
+life after death." To sum up the whole in one sentence: Plato
+taught with grave earnestness the immortality of the soul, subject
+to a discriminating retribution, which opened for its temporary
+residences three local regions, heaven, earth, and Hades, and
+which sometimes led it through different grades of embodied being.
+"O thou youth who thinkest that thou art neglected by the gods,
+the person who has become more wicked departs to the more wicked
+souls; but he who has become better departs to the better souls,
+both in life and in all deaths."30
+
+Whether Aristotle taught or denied the immortality of the soul has
+been the subject of innumerable debates from his own time until
+now. It is certainly a most ominous fact that his great name has
+been cited as authority for rejecting the doctrine of a future
+life by so many
+
+28 The Laws, b. ix. ch. 10.
+
+29 Phadrus, 60-62.
+
+30 The Laws, lib. x. cap. 13.
+
+
+of his keenest followers; for this has been true of weighty
+representatives of every generation of his disciples. Antagonistic
+advocates have collected from his works a large number of varying
+statements, endeavoring to distinguish between the literal and the
+figurative, the esoteric and the popular. It is not worth our
+while here, either for their intrinsic interest or for their
+historic importance, to quote the passages and examine the
+arguments. All that is required for our purpose may be expressed
+in the language of Ritter, who has carefully investigated the
+whole subject: "No passage in his extant works is decisive; but,
+from the general context of his doctrine, it is clear that he had
+no conception of the immortality of any individual rational
+entity."31
+
+It would take a whole volume instead of a chapter to set forth the
+multifarious contrasting tenets of individual Greek philosophers,
+from the age of Pherecydes to that of Iamblichus, in relation to a
+future life. Not a few held, with Empedocles, that human life is a
+penal state, the doom of such immortal souls as for guilt have
+been disgraced and expelled from heaven. "Man is a fallen god
+condemned to wander on the earth, sky aspiring but sense clouded."
+Purged by a sufficient penance, he returns to his former godlike
+existence. "When, leaving this body, thou comest to the free
+ether, thou shalt be no longer a mortal, but an undying god."
+Notions of this sort fairly represent no small proportion of the
+speculations upon the fate of the soul which often reappear
+throughout the course of Greek literature. Another class of
+philosophers are represented by such names as Marcus Antoninus,
+who, comparing death to disembarkation at the close of a voyage,
+says, "If you land upon another life, it will not be empty of
+gods: if you land in nonentity, you will have done with pleasures,
+pains, and drudgery."32 And again he writes, "If souls survive,
+how has ethereal space made room for them all from eternity? How
+has the earth found room for all the bodies buried in it? The
+solution of the latter problem will solve the former. The corpse
+turns to dust and makes space for another: so the spirit, let
+loose into the air, after a while dissolves, and is either renewed
+into another soul or absorbed into the universe. Thus room is made
+for succession."33 These passages, it will be observed, leave the
+survival of the soul at all entirely hypothetical, and, even
+supposing it to survive, allow it but a temporary duration. Such
+was the common view of the great sect of the Stoics. They all
+agreed that there was no real immortality for the soul; but they
+differed greatly as to the time of its dissolution. In the words
+of Cicero, "Diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant:" they say
+souls endure for a long time, but not forever. Cleanthes taught
+that the intensity of existence after death would depend on the
+strength or weakness of the particular soul. Chrysippus held that
+only the souls of the wise and good would survive at all.34
+Panatius said the soul always died with the body, because it was
+born with it, which he proved by the resemblances of children's
+souls to those of their parents.35 Seneca has a great many
+contradictory passages on this subject
+
+31 Hist. Anc. Phil. p. iii. b. ix. ch. 4.
+
+32 Meditations, lib. iii. cap. 3.
+
+33 Ibid. lib. iv. cap. 21.
+
+34 Plutarch, Plac. Phil. iv. 7.
+
+35 Tusc. Quast. lib. i. cap. 32.
+
+
+in his works; but his preponderant authority, upon the whole, is
+that the soul and the body perish together.36 At one time he says,
+"The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity."
+"As an infant in the womb is preparing to dwell in this world, so
+ought we to consider our present life as a preparation for the
+life to come."37 At another time he says, with stunning bluntness,
+"There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."
+
+Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. 38
+
+Besides the mystics, like Plotinus, who affirmed the strict
+eternity of the soul, and the Stoics, like Poseidonius, who
+believed that the soul, having had a beginning, must have an end,
+although it might endure for a long period after leaving the body,
+there were among the Greeks and Romans two other classes of
+believers in a future life, namely, the ignorant body of the
+people, who credited, more or less fully, the common fables
+concerning Hades; and an educated body of select minds, who, while
+casting off the popular superstitions, yet clung tenaciously to
+the great fact of immortality in some form or other, without
+attempting to define the precise mode of it.
+
+There was among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman,
+even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of
+firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and
+particulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. A
+thousand current allusions and statements in the general
+literature of those times prove the actual existence of a common
+and literal belief in Hades with all its accompaniments. This was
+far from being, in the average apprehension, a mere myth. Plato
+says, "Many, of their own accord, have wished to descend into
+Hades, induced by the hope of there seeing and being with those
+they have loved."39 He also says, "When a man is about to die, the
+stories of future punishment which he had formerly ridiculed
+trouble him with fears of their truth."40 And that frightful
+accounts of hell really swayed and terrified the people, even so
+late as the time of the Roman republic, appears from the earnest
+and elaborate arguments employed by various writers to refute
+them.
+
+The same thing is shown by the religious ritual enacted at
+funerals and festivals, the forms of public and private worship
+observed till after the conversion of Constantine. The cake of
+rice and honey borne in the dead hand for Cerberus, the periodical
+offerings to the ghosts of the departed, as at the festivals
+called Feralia and Parentalia,41 the pictures of the scenery of
+the under world, hung in the temples, of which there was a famous
+one by Polygnotus,42 all imply a literal crediting of the vulgar
+doctrine. Altars were set up on the spots where Tiberius and Caius
+Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor
+of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in
+the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a
+stone covered pit which was supposed to be the
+
+36 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften.
+Commentarius quo Stoicorum Sententia; de Animorum post mortem
+Statu satis illustrantur.
+
+37 Epist. 102.
+
+38 Troades, 1. 397.
+
+39 Phado, 34.
+
+40 Republic, lib. i. cap. 5.
+
+41 Ovid, Fasti, lib. ii. II. 530-580.
+
+42 Pausanias, lib. x. cap. 28.
+
+
+mouth of Orcus, and was opened three days in the year for souls to
+rise out into the upper world.43 Apuleius describes, in his
+treatise on "the god of Socrates," the Roman conceptions of the
+departed spirits of men. They called all disembodied human souls
+"lemures." Those of good men were "lares," those of bad men
+"larva." And when it was uncertain whether the specified soul was
+a lar or a larva, it was named "manes." The lares were mild
+household gods to their posterity. The larva were wandering,
+frightful shapes, harmless to the pious, but destructive to the
+reprobate.44
+
+The belief in necromancy is well known to have prevailed
+extensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes represents
+the coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "see
+his own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man with
+breath alone."45 In Latin literature no popular terror is more
+frequently alluded to or exemplified than the dread of seeing
+ghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom that
+appeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. It
+pervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote the
+following couplet as an epitaph on the celebrated misanthrope:
+
+"Timon, hat'st thou the world or Hades worse? Speak clear! Hades,
+O fool, because there are more of us here!" 46
+
+Pythagoras is said once to have explained an earthquake as being
+caused by a synod of ghosts assembled under ground! It is one of
+the best of the numerous jokes attributed to the great Samian; a
+good nut for the spirit rappers to crack. There is an epigram by
+Diogenes Laertius, on one Lycon, who died of the gout:
+
+"He who before could not so much as walk alone, The whole long
+road to Hades travell'd in one night!"
+
+Philostratus declares that the shade of Apollonius appeared to a
+skeptical disciple of his and said, "The soul is immortal."47 It
+is unquestionable that the superstitious fables about the under
+world and ghosts had a powerful hold, for a very long period, upon
+the Greek and Roman imagination, and were widely accepted as
+facts.
+
+At the same time, there were many persons of more advanced culture
+to whom such coarse and fanciful representations had become
+incredible, but who still held loyally to the simple idea of the
+survival of the soul. They cherished a strong expectation of
+another life, although they rejected the revolting form and
+drapery in which the doctrine was usually set forth. Xenophon puts
+the following speech into the mouth of the expiring Cyrus: "I was
+never able, my children, to persuade myself that the soul, as long
+as it was in a mortal body, lived, but when it was removed from
+this, that it died; neither could I believe that the soul ceased
+to think when separated from the unthinking and senseless body;
+but it seemed to me most probable that when pure and free from any
+union with the body, then it became most
+
+43 De Significatione Verborum, verbum "Manalis."
+
+44 Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet.
+
+45 Ayes, I. 1485.
+
+46 Epigram IV.
+
+47 Vita Apollonii, lib. viii. cap. 31.
+
+
+wise."48 Every one has read of the young man whose faith and
+curiosity were so excited by Plato's writings that he committed
+suicide to test the fact of futurity. Callimachus tells the story
+neatly:
+
+"Cleombrotus, the Ambracian, having said, 'Farewell, O sun!'
+leap'd from a lofty wall into the world Of ghosts. No deadly ill
+had chanced to him at all; But he had read in Plato's book upon
+the soul." 49
+
+The falling of Cato on his sword at Utica, after carefully
+perusing the Phado, is equally familiar.
+
+In the case of Cicero, too, notwithstanding his fluctuations of
+feeling and the obvious contradictions of sentiment in some of his
+letters and his more deliberate essays, it is, upon the whole,
+plain enough that, while he always regarded the vulgar notions as
+puerile falsehoods, the hope of a glorious life to come was
+powerful in him. This may be stated as the result of a patient
+investigation and balancing of all that he says on the subject,
+and of the circumstances under which he says it. To cite and
+criticize the passages here would occupy too much space to too
+little profit.
+
+At the siege of Jerusalem, Titus made a speech to his soldiers, in
+the course of it saying to them, "Those souls which are severed
+from their fleshly bodies by the sword in battle, are received by
+the pure ether and joined to that company which are placed among
+the stars."50 The beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche, that
+loveliest of all the myths concerning the immortality of the soul,
+was a creation by no means foreign to the prevalent ideas and
+feelings of the time when it was written. The "Dissertations" of
+Maximus Tyrius abound with sentences like the following. "This
+very thing which the multitude call death is the birth of a new
+life, and the beginning of immortality."51 "When Pherecydes lay
+sick, conscious of spiritual energy, he cared not for bodily
+disease, his soul standing erect and looking for release from its
+cumbersome vestment. So a man in chains, seeing the walls of his
+prison crumbling, waits for deliverance, that from the darkness in
+which he has been buried he may soar to the ethereal regions and
+be filled with glorious light."52
+
+The conception of man as a member of the cosmic family of gods and
+genii was known to all the classic philosophers, and was cherished
+by the larger portion of them. Pindar affirms one origin for gods
+and men. Plato makes wise souls accompany the gods in their
+excursions about the sky. Cicero argues that heaven, and not
+Hades, is the destination of the soul at death, because the soul,
+being lighter than the earthly elements surrounding it here, would
+rise aloft through the natural force of gravitation.53 Plutarch
+says, "Demons are the spies and scouts of the gods, wandering and
+circuiting around on their commands." Disembodied souls
+
+48 Cyropadia, lib. viii. cap. 7.
+
+49 Epigram XXIV.
+
+50 Josephus, De Bell. lib. vi. cap. 1.
+
+51 Diss. XXV.
+
+52 Diss. XLI.
+
+53 Tusc. Quest. lib i. cap. 17.
+
+
+and demons were the same. The prevalence of such ideas as these
+produced in the Greek and Roman imagination a profound sense of
+invisible beings, a sense which was further intensified by the
+popular personifications of all natural forces, as in fountains
+and trees, full of lapsing naiads and rustling dryads. An
+illustrative fact is furnished by an effect of the tradition that
+Thetis, snatching the body of Achilles from the funeral pile,
+conveyed him to Leuke, an island in the Black Sea. The mariners
+sailing by often fancied they saw his mighty shade flitting along
+the shore in the dusk of evening.54 But a passage in Hesiod yields
+a more adequate illustration: "When the mortal remains of those
+who flourished during the golden age were hidden beneath the
+earth, their souls became beneficent demons, still hovering over
+the world they once inhabited, and still watching, clothed in thin
+air and gliding rapidly through every region of the earth, as
+guardians over the affairs of men."55
+
+But there were always some who denied the common doctrine of a
+future life and scoffed at its physical features. Through the
+absurd extravagances of poets and augurs, and through the growth
+of critical thought, this unbelief went on increasing from the
+days of Anaxagoras, when it was death to call the sun a ball of
+fire, to the days of Catiline, when Julius Casar could be chosen
+Pontifex Maximus, almost before the Senate had ceased to
+reverberate his voice openly asserting that death was the utter
+end of man. Plutarch dilates upon the wide skepticism of the
+Greeks as to the infernal world, at the close of his essay on the
+maxim, "Live concealed." The portentous growth of irreverent
+unbelief, the immense change of feeling from awe to ribaldry, is
+made obvious by a glance from the known gravity of Hesiod's
+"Descent of Theseus and Pirithous into Hades," to Lucian's
+"Kataplous," which represents the cobbler Mycillus leaping from
+the banks of the Styx, swimming after Charon's boat, climbing into
+it upon the shoulders of the tyrant Megapenthes and tormenting him
+the whole way. Pliny, in his Natural History, affirms that death
+is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans
+united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule
+and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by
+the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of
+Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the
+tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast
+audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman
+is so insane as to fear these things?"61
+
+There were two classes of persons who sought differently to free
+mankind from the terrors which had invested the whole prospect of
+death and another world. The first were the materialists, who
+endeavored to prove that death was to man the absolute end of
+every thing. Secondly, there were the later Platonists, who
+maintained that this world is the only Hades, that heaven is our
+home, that all death is ascent to better life. "To remain on high
+with the gods is life; to descend into this world is death, a
+descent into Orcus," they said. The following couplet, of an
+unknown date, is translated from the Greek Anthology:
+
+"Diogenes, whose tub stood by the road, Now, being dead, has the
+stars for his abode."
+
+54 Muller, Greek Literature, ch. vi.
+
+55 Works and Days, lib. i. II. 120-125.
+
+56 Lib. ii. cap. 7.
+
+57 Lib. i. epist. 16.
+
+58 Sat. II.
+
+59 Sat. II.
+
+60 Tusc. Quest. lib. i. cap. 16.
+
+61 Ibid. cap. 21.
+
+
+Macrobius writes, in his commentary on the "Dream of Scipio,"
+"Here, on earth, is the cavern of Dis, the infernal region. The
+river of oblivion is the wandering of the mind forgetting the
+majesty of its former life and thinking a residence in the body
+the only life. Phlegethon is the fires of wrath and desire.
+Acheron is retributive sadness. Cocytus is wailing tears. Styx is
+the whirlpool of hatreds. The vulture eternally tearing the liver
+is the torment of an evil conscience."62
+
+To the ancient Greek in general, death was a sad doom. When he
+lost a friend, he sighed a melancholy farewell after him to the
+faded shore of ghosts. Summoned himself, he departed with a
+lingering look at the sun, and a tearful adieu to the bright day
+and the green earth. To the Roman, death was a grim reality. To
+meet it himself he girded up his loins with artificial firmness.
+But at its ravages among his friends he wailed in anguished
+abandonment. To his dying vision there was indeed a future; but
+shapes of distrust and shadow stood upon its disconsolate borders;
+and, when the prospect had no horror, he still shrank from its
+poppied gloom.
+
+62 Lib. i. cap. 9, 10.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MOHAMMEDAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+ISLAM has been a mighty power in the earth since the middle of the
+seventh century. A more energetic and trenchant faith than it was
+for eight hundred years has not appeared among men. Finally
+expelled from its startling encampments in Spain and the
+Archipelago, it still rules with tenacious hold over Turkey, a
+part of Tartary, Palestine, Persia, Arabia, and large portions of
+Africa. At this moment, as to adherence and influence, it is
+subordinate only to the two foremost religious systems in the
+world, Buddhism and Christianity. The dogmatic structure of Islam
+as a theology and its practical power as an experimental religion
+offer a problem of the gravest interest. But we must hasten on to
+give an exposition of merely those elements in it which are
+connected with its doctrine of a future life.
+
+It is a matter of entire notoriety that there is but the least
+amount of originality in the tenets of the Mohammedan faith. The
+blending together of those tenets was distinctive, the unifying
+soul breathed into them was a new creation, and the great aim to
+which the whole was subordinated was peculiar; but the component
+doctrines themselves, with slight exception, existed before as
+avowed principles in the various systems of belief and practice
+that prevailed around. Mohammed adopted many of the notions and
+customs of the pagan Arabs, the central dogma of the Jews as to
+the unity of God, most of the traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures,
+innumerable fanciful conceits of the Rabbins,1 whole doctrines of
+the Magians with their details, some views of the Gnostics, and
+extensive portions of a corrupted Christianity, grouping them
+together with many modifications of his own, and such additions as
+his genius afforded and his exigencies required. The motley
+strangely results in a compact and systematic working faith.
+
+The Islamites are divided into two great sects, the Sunnees and
+the Sheeahs. The Arabs, Tartars, and Turks are Sunnees, are
+dominant in numbers and authority, are strict literalists, and are
+commonly considered the orthodox believers. The Persians are
+Sheeahs, are inferior in point of numbers, are somewhat freer in
+certain interpretations, placing a mass of tradition, like the
+Jewish Mischna, on a level with the Koran,2 and are usually
+regarded as heretical. To apply our own ecclesiastical phraseology
+to them, the latter are the Moslem Protestants, the former the
+Moslem Catholics. Yet in relation to almost every thing which
+should seem at all fundamental or vital they agree in their
+teachings. Their differences in general are upon trivial opinions,
+or especially upon ritual particulars. For instance, the Sheeahs
+send all the Sunnees to hell because in their ablutions they wash
+from the elbow to the finger tips; the Sunnees return the
+compliment to their rival sectarists because they wash from the
+finger tips to the elbow. Within these two grand denominations of
+Sheeah and
+
+1 Rabbi Abraham Geiger, Prize Essay upon the question, proposed by
+the University of Bonn, "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum
+aufgenommen?"
+
+2 Merrick, Translation of the Sheeah Traditions of Mohammed in the
+Hyat ul Kuloob, note x.
+
+
+Sunnee are found a multitude of petty sects, separated from each
+other on various questions of speculative faith and ceremonial
+practice. Some take the Koran alone, and that in its plain literal
+sense, as their authority. Others read the Koran in the
+explanatory light of a vast collection of parables, proverbs,
+legends, purporting to be from Mohammed. There is no less than a
+score of mystic allegorizing sects3 who reduce almost every thing
+in the Koran to symbol, or spiritual signification, and some of
+whom as the Sufis are the most rapt and imaginative of all the
+enthusiastic devotees in the world.
+
+A cardinal point in the Mohammedan faith is the asserted existence
+of angels, celestial and infernal. Eblis is Satan. He was an angel
+of lofty rank; but when God created Adam and bade all the angels
+worship him, Eblis refused, saying, "I was created of fire, he of
+clay: I am more excellent and will not bow to him."4 Upon this God
+condemned Eblis and expelled him from Paradise. He then became the
+unappeasable foe and seducing destroyer of men. He is the father
+of those swarms of jins, or evil spirits, who crowd all hearts and
+space with temptations and pave the ten thousand paths to hell
+with lures for men.
+
+The next consideration preliminary to a clear exhibition of our
+special subject, is the doctrine of predestination, the
+unflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. The
+breath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and its
+very name of Islam means "Submission." In heaven the prophet saw a
+prodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table," on which were
+written the decrees of all events between the morning of creation
+and the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preaching
+was the proclamation of the one true God whose volition bears the
+irresistible destiny of the universe; and inseparably associated
+with this was an intense hatred of idolatry, fanned by the wings
+of God's wrath and producing a fanatic sense of a divine
+commission to avenge him on his insulters and vindicate for him
+his rightful worship from every nation. There is an apparent
+conflict between the Mohammedan representations of God's absolute
+predestination of all things, and the abundant exhortations to all
+men to accept the true faith and bring forth good works, and thus
+make sure of an acceptable account in the day of judgment. The
+former make God's irreversible will all in all. The latter seem to
+place alternative conditions before men, and to imply in them a
+power of choice. But this is a contradiction inseparable from the
+discussion of God's infinite sovereignty and man's individual
+freedom. The inconsistency is as gross in Augustine and Calvinism
+as it is in the Arabian lawgiver and the creed of the Sunnees. The
+Koran, instead of solving the difficulty, boldly cuts it, and does
+that in exactly the same way as the thorough Calvinist. God has
+respectively elected and reprobated all the destined inhabitants
+of heaven and hell, unalterably, independently of their choice or
+action. At the same time, reception of the true faith, and a life
+conformed to it, are virtually necessary for salvation, because it
+is decreed that all the elect shall profess and obey the true
+faith. Their obedient reception of it proves them to be elected.
+On the other hand, it is foreordained that none of the reprobate
+shall become disciples and followers of the Prophet. Their
+rejection of
+
+3 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. i. ch. xv.
+
+4 Sale's Translation of the Koran, ch. vii.
+
+
+him, their wicked misbelief, is the evidence of their original
+reprobation. As the Koran itself expresses it, salvation is for
+"all who are willing to be warned; but they shall not be warned
+unless God please:"5 "all who shall be willing to walk uprightly;
+but they shall not be willing unless God willeth."6
+
+But such fine drawn distinctions are easily lost from sight or
+spurned in the eager affray of affairs and the imminent straits of
+the soul. While in dogma and theory the profession of an orthodox
+belief, together with scrupulous prayer, fasting, alms, and the
+pilgrimage to Mecca, or the absence of these things, simply
+denotes the foregone determinations of God in regard to the given
+individuals, in practice and feeling the contrasted beliefs and
+courses of conduct are held to obtain heaven and hell. And we
+find, accordingly, that Mohammed spoke as if God's primeval
+ordination had fixed all things forever, whenever he wished to
+awaken in his followers reckless valor and implicit submission.
+"Whole armies cannot slay him who is fated to die in his bed." On
+the contrary, when he sought to win converts, to move his hearers
+by threatenings and persuasions, he spoke as if every thing
+pertaining to human weal and woe, present and future, rested on
+conditions within the choice of men. Say, "'There is but one God,
+and Mohammed is his prophet,' and heaven shall be your portion;
+but cling to your delusive errors, and you shall be companions of
+the infernal fire." Practically speaking, the essence of
+propagandist Islam was a sentiment like this. All men who do not
+follow Mohammed are accursed misbelievers. We are God's chosen
+avengers, the commissioned instruments for reducing his foes to
+submission. Engaged in that work, the hilts of all our scimitars
+are in his hand. He snatches his servant martyr from the battle
+field to heaven. Thus the weapons of the unbelievers send their
+slain to paradise, while the weapons of the believers send their
+slain to hell. Up, then, with the crescent banner, and, dripping
+with idolatrous gore, let it gleam over mountain and plain till
+our sickles have reaped the earth! "The sword is the key of heaven
+and the key of hell. A drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a
+night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting
+and prayer. Whoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven. In the
+day of judgment his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion and
+odoriferous as musk."7 An infuriated zeal against idolaters and
+unbelievers inflamed the Moslem heart, a fierce martial enthusiasm
+filled the Moslem soul, and tangible visions of paradise and hell
+floated, illuminate, throughtheMoslem imagination. And so from the
+Persian Gulf to the Caucasus, from Sierra Leone to the Pyrenees,
+the polity of Mohammed overran the nations, with the Koran in its
+left hand, the exterminating blade in its right, one thunder shout
+still breaking from its awful lips: "Profess Islam, and live, with
+the clear prospect of eternal bliss beyond life; reject it, and
+die, with the full certainty of eternal anguish beyond death."
+When the crusading Christians and the Saracenic hosts met in
+battle, the conflict was the very frenzy of fanaticism. "There the
+question of salvation or damnation lay on the ground between the
+marshalled armies, to be fought for and carried by the stronger."
+Christ and Allah encountered, and the endless fate of their
+opposed
+
+5 Koran, ch. lxxiv.
+
+6 Ibid. ch. lxxxi.
+
+7 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of Rome, ch. 1.
+
+
+followers hung on the swift turning issue. "Never have the
+appalling ideas of the invisible world so much and so distinctly
+mingled with the fury of mortal strife as in this instance. To the
+eyes of Turk and Arab the smoke of the infernal pit appeared to
+break up from the ground in the rear of the infidel lines. As the
+squadrons of the faithful moved on to the charge, that pit yawned
+to receive the miscreant host; and in chasing the foe the
+prophet's champions believed they were driving their antagonists
+down the very slopes of perdition. When at length steel clashed
+upon steel and the yell of death shook the air, the strife was not
+so much between arm and arm as between spirit and spirit, and each
+deadly thrust was felt to pierce the life at once of the body and
+of the soul."8
+
+That terrible superstition prevails almost universally among the
+Mussulmans, designated the "Beating in the Sepulchre," or the
+examination and torture of the body in the grave. As soon as a
+corpse is interred, two black and livid angels, called the
+Examiners, whose names are Munkeer and Nakeer, appear, and order
+the dead person to sit up and answer certain questions as to his
+faith. If he give satisfactory replies, they suffer him to rest in
+peace, refreshed by airs from paradise; but if he prove to have
+been an unbeliever or heretic, they beat him on the temples with
+iron maces till he roars aloud with pain and terror. They then
+press the earth on the body, which remains gnawed and stung by
+dragons and scorpions until the last day. Some sects give a
+figurative explanation of these circumstances. The utter denial of
+the whole representation is a schismatic peculiarity of the sect
+of Motozallites. But all true believers, both Sunnee and Sheeah,
+devoutly accept it literally. The commentators declare that it is
+implied in the following verse of the Koran itself: "How,
+therefore, will it be with them when they die and the angels shall
+strike their faces and their backs?" 9
+
+The intermediate state of souls from the time of death until the
+resurrection has been the subject of extensive speculation and
+argument with the Islamites. The souls of the prophets, it is
+thought, are admitted directly to heaven. The souls of martyrs,
+according to a tradition received from Mohammed, rest in heaven in
+the crops of green birds who eat of the fruits and drink of the
+rivers there. As to the location of the souls of the common crowd
+of the faithful, the conclusions are various. Some maintain that
+they and the souls of the impious alike sleep in the dust until
+the end, when Israfil's blasts will stir them into life to be
+judged. But the general and orthodox impression is that they tarry
+in one of the heavens, enjoying a preparatory blessedness. The
+souls of the wicked, it is commonly held, after being refused a
+place in the tomb and also being repulsed from heaven, are carried
+down to the lower abyss, and thrown into a dungeon under a green
+rock, or into the jaw of Eblis, there to be treated with
+foretastes of their final doom until summoned to the judgment.10
+
+A very prominent doctrine in the Moslem creed is that of the
+resurrection of the body. This is a central feature in the
+orthodox faith. It is expounded in all the emphatic details of its
+gross literality by their authoritative doctors, and is dwelt upon
+with unwearied reiteration by the Koran. True, some minor
+heretical sects give it a spiritual interpretation; but the great
+
+8 Taylor, Hist. of Fanaticism, sect. vii.
+
+9 Ch. xlvii.
+
+10 Sale, Preliminary Discourse, sect. iv.
+
+
+body of believers accept it unhesitatingly in its most physical
+shape. The intrinsic unnaturalness and improbability of the dogma
+were evidently felt by Mohammed and his expositors; and all the
+more they strove to bolster it up and enforce its reception by
+vehement affirmations and elaborate illustrations. In the second
+chapter of the Koran it is related that, in order to remove the
+skepticism of Abraham as to the resurrection, God wrought the
+miracle of restoring four birds which had been cut in pieces and
+scattered. In chapter seventh, God says, "We bring rain upon a
+withered country and cause the fruits to spring forth. Thus will
+we bring the dead from their graves." The prophet frequently
+rebukes those who reject this belief. "What aileth them, that they
+believe not the resurrection?"11 "Is not He who created man able
+to quicken the dead?"12 "The scoffers say, 'Shall we be raised to
+life, and our forefathers too, after we have become dust and
+bones? This is nothing but sorcery.'"13 First, Israfil will blow
+the blast of consternation. After an interval, he will blow the
+blast of examination, at which all creatures will die and the
+material universe will melt in horror. Thirdly, he will blow the
+blast of resurrection. Upon that instant, the assembled souls of
+mankind will issue from his trumpet, like a swarm of bees, and
+fill the atmosphere, seeking to be reunited to their former
+bodies, which will then be restored, even to their very hairs.
+
+The day of judgment immediately follows. This is the dreadful day
+for which all other days were made; and it will come with
+blackness and consternation to unbelievers and evil doers, but
+with peace and delight to the faithful. The total race of man will
+be gathered in one place. Mohammed will first advance in front, to
+the right hand, as intercessor for the professors of Islam. The
+preceding prophets will appear with their followers. Gabriel will
+hold suspended a balance so stupendous that one scale will cover
+paradise, the other hell. "Hath the news of the overwhelming day
+of judgment reached thee?"14 "Whoever hath wrought either good or
+evil of the weight of an ant shall in that day behold the same."15
+An infallible scrutiny shall search and weigh every man's deeds,
+and exact justice shall be done, and no foreign help can avail any
+one. "One soul shall not be able to obtain any thing in behalf of
+another soul."16 "Every man of them on that day shall have
+business enough of his own to employ his thoughts."17 In all the
+Mohammedan representations of this great trial and of the
+principles which determine its decisions, no reference is made to
+the doctrine of predestination, but all turns on strict equity.
+Reckoning a reception or rejection of the true faith as a crowning
+merit or demerit, the only question is, Do his good works
+outweigh, by so much as a hair, his evil works? If so, he goes to
+the right; if not, he must take the left. The solitary trace of
+fatalism or rather favoritism is this: that no idolater, once in
+hell, can ever possibly be released, while no Islamite, however
+wicked, can be damned eternally. The punishment of unbelievers is
+everlasting, that of believers limited. The opposite of this
+opinion is a great heresy with the generality of the Moslems. Some
+say the judgment will require but the twinkling of an eye; others
+that it will occupy fifty thousand years, during which time the
+sun will be drawn from its sheath and burn insufferably, and the
+wicked will stand looking up, their feet shod with shoes of fire,
+and their skulls boiling like pots. At last,
+
+11 Ch. lxxxiv.
+
+12 Ch. lxxv.
+
+13 Ch. xxxvii., lvi.
+
+14 Koran, ch. lxxxviii.
+
+15 Ibid. ch. xcix.
+
+16 Ibid. ch. lxxxii.
+
+17 Ibid. ch. lxxx.
+
+
+when sentence has been passed on them, all souls are forced to try
+the passage of al Sirat, a bridge thinner than a hair, sharper
+than a razor, and hotter than flame, spanning in one frail arch
+the immeasurable distance, directly over hell, from earth to
+paradise. Some affect a metaphorical solution of this air severing
+causeway, and take it merely as a symbol of the true Sirat, or
+bridge of this world, namely, the true faith and obedience; but
+every orthodox Mussulman firmly holds it as a physical fact to be
+surmounted in the last day.18 Mohammed leading the way, the
+faithful and righteous will traverse it with ease and as quickly
+as a flash of lightning. The thin edge broadens beneath their
+steps, the surrounding support of convoying angels' wings hides
+the fire lake below from their sight, and they are swiftly
+enveloped in paradise. But as the infidel with his evil deeds
+essays to cross, thorns entangle his steps, the lurid glare
+beneath blinds him, and he soon topples over and whirls into the
+blazing abyss. In Dr. Frothingham's fine translation from
+Ruckert,
+
+"When the wicked o'er it goes, stands the bridge all sparkling;
+And his mind bewilder'd grows, and his eye swims darkling.
+Wakening, giddying, then comes in, with a deadly fright, Memory of
+all his sin, rushing on his sight. But when forward steps the
+just, he is safe e'en here: Round him gathers holy trust, and
+drives back his fear. Each good deed's a mist, that wide, golden
+borders gets; And for him the bridge, each side, shines with
+parapets."
+
+Between hell and paradise is an impassable wall, al Araf,
+separating the tormented from the happy, and covered with those
+souls whose good works exactly counterpoise their evil works, and
+who are, consequently, fitted for neither place. The prophet and
+his expounders have much to say of this narrow intermediate
+abode.19 Its lukewarm denizens are contemptuously spoken of. It is
+said that Araf seems hell to the blessed but paradise to the
+damned; for does not every thing depend on the point of view?
+
+The Mohammedan descriptions of the doom of the wicked, the
+torments of hell, are constantly repeated and are copious and
+vivid. Reference to chapter and verse would be superfluous, since
+almost every page of the Koran abounds in such tints and tones as
+the following. "The unbelievers shall be companions of hell fire
+forever." "Those who disbelieve we will surely cast to be broiled
+in hell fire: so often as their skins shall be well burned we will
+give them other skins in exchange, that they may taste the sharper
+torment." "I will fill hell entirely full of genii and men." "They
+shall be dragged on their faces into hell, and it shall be said
+unto them, 'Taste ye that torment of hell fire which ye rejected
+as a falsehood.'" "The unbelievers shall be driven into hell by
+troops." "They shall be taken by the forelocks and the feet and
+flung into hell, where they shall drink scalding water." "Their
+only entertainment shall be boiling water, and they shall be fuel
+for hell." "The smoke of hell shall cast forth sparks as big as
+towers, resembling yellow camels in color." "They who believe not
+shall
+
+18 W. C. Taylor, Mohammedanism and its Sects.
+
+19 Koran, ch. viii. Sale, Preliminary Discourse, p. 125.
+
+
+have garments of fire fitted on them, and they shall be beaten
+with maces of red hot iron." "The true believers, lying on
+couches, shall look down upon the infidels in hell and laugh them
+to scorn."
+
+There is a tradition that a door shall be shown the damned opening
+into paradise, but when they approach it, it shall be suddenly
+shut, and the believers within will laugh. Pitiless and horrible
+as these expressions from the Koran are, they are merciful
+compared with the pictures in the later traditions, of women
+suspended by their hair, their brains boiling, suspended by their
+tongues, molten copper poured down their throats, bound hands and
+feet and devoured piecemeal by scorpions, hung up by their heels
+in flaming furnaces and their flesh cut off on all sides with
+scissors of fire. 20 Their popular teachings divide hell into
+seven stories, sunk one under another. The first and mildest is
+for the wicked among the true believers. The second is assigned to
+the Jews. The third is the special apartment of the Christians.
+They fourth is allotted to the Sabians, the fifth to the Magians,
+and the sixth to the most abandoned idolaters; but the seventh the
+deepest and worst belongs to the hypocrites of all religions. The
+first hell shall finally be emptied and destroyed, on the release
+of the wretched believers there; but all the other hells will
+retain their victims eternally.
+
+If the visions of hell which filled the fancies of the faithful
+were material and glowing, equally so were their conceptions of
+paradise. On this world of the blessed were lavished all the
+charms so fascinating to the Oriental luxuriousness of sensual
+languor, and which the poetic Oriental imagination knew so well
+how to depict. As soon as the righteous have passed Sirat, they
+obtain the first taste of their approaching felicity by a
+refreshing draught from "Mohammed's Pond." This is a square lake,
+a month's journey in circuit, its water whiter than milk or silver
+and more fragrant than to be comparable to any thing known by
+mortals. As many cups are set around it as there are stars in the
+firmament; and whoever drinks from it will never thirst more. Then
+comes paradise, an ecstatic dream of pleasure, filled with
+sparkling streams, honeyed fountains, shady groves, precious
+stones, all flowers and fruits, blooming youths, circulating
+goblets, black eyed houris, incense, brilliant birds, delightsome
+music, unbroken peace.21 A Sheeah tradition makes the prophet
+promise to Ali twelve palaces in paradise, built of gold and
+silver bricks laid in a cement of musk and amber. The pebbles
+around them are diamonds and rubies, the earth saffron, its
+hillocks camphor. Rivers of honey, wine, milk, and water flow
+through the court of each palace, their banks adorned with various
+resplendent trees, interspersed with bowers consisting each of one
+hollow transparent pearl. In each of these bowers is an emerald
+throne, with a houri upon it arrayed in seventy green robes and
+seventy yellow robes of so fine a texture, and she herself so
+transparent, that the marrow of her ankle, notwithstanding robes,
+flesh, and bone, is as distinctly visible as a flame in a glass
+vessel. Each houri has seventy locks of hair, every one under the
+care of a maid, who perfumes it with a censer which God has made
+to smoke with incense without the presence of fire; and no mortal
+has ever breathed such fragrance as is there exhaled. 22
+
+20 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. x. p. 206.
+
+21 Koran, ch. lv. ch. lvi.
+
+22 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. xvi. p. 286.
+
+
+Such a doctrine of the future life as that here set forth, it is
+plain, was strikingly adapted to win and work fervidly on the
+minds of the imaginative, voluptuous, indolent, passionate races
+of the Orient. It possesses a nucleus of just and natural moral
+conviction and sentiment, around which is grouped a composite of a
+score of superstitions afloat before the rise of Islam, set off
+with the arbitrary drapery of a poetic fancy, colored by the
+peculiar idiosyncrasies of Mohammed, emphasized to suit his
+special ends, and all inflamed with a vindictive and propagandist
+animus. Any word further in explanation of the origin, or in
+refutation of the soundness, of this system of belief once so
+imminently aggressive and still so widely established would seem
+to be superfluous.
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+EXPLANATORY SURVEY OF THE FIELD AND ITS MYTHS.
+
+SURVEYING the thought of mankind upon the subject of a future
+life, as thus far examined, one can hardly fail to be struck by
+the multitudinous variety of opinions and pictures it presents.
+Whence and how arose this heterogeneous mass of notions?
+
+In consequence of the endowments with which God has created man,
+the doctrine of a future life arises as a normal fact in the
+development of his experience. But the forms and accompaniments of
+the doctrine, the immense diversity of dress and colors it appears
+in, are subject to all the laws and accidents that mould and
+clothe the products within any other department of thought and
+literature. We must refer the ethnic conceptions of a future state
+to the same sources to which other portions of poetry and
+philosophy are referred, namely, to the action of sentiment,
+fancy, and reason, first; then to the further action, reaction,
+and interaction of the pictures, dogmas, and reasonings of
+authoritative poets, priests, and philosophers on one side, and of
+the feeling, faith, and thought of credulous multitudes and docile
+pupils on the other. In the light of these great centres of
+intellectual activity, parents of intellectual products, there is
+nothing pertaining to the subject before us, however curious,
+which may not be intelligibly explained, seen naturally to spring
+out of certain conditions of man's mind and experience as related
+with the life of society and the phenomena of the world.
+
+So far as the views of the future life set forth in the religions
+of the ancient nations constitute systematically developed and
+arranged schemes of doctrine and symbol, the origin of them
+therefore needs no further explanation than is furnished by a
+contemplation of the regulated exercise of the speculative and
+imaginative faculties. But so far as those representations contain
+unique, grotesque, isolated particulars, their production is
+accounted for by this general law: In the early stages of human
+culture, when the natural sensibilities are intensely preponderant
+in power, and the critical judgment is in abeyance, whatever
+strongly moves the soul causes a poetical secretion on the part of
+the imagination.1 Thus the rainbow is personified; a waterfall is
+supposed to be haunted by spiritual beings; a volcano with fiery
+crater is seen as a Cyclops with one flaming eye in the centre of
+his forehead. This law holds not only in relation to impressive
+objects or appearances in nature, but also in relation to
+occurrences, traditions, usages. In this way innumerable myths
+arise, explanatory or amplifying thoughts secreted by the
+stimulated imagination and then narrated as events. Sometimes
+these tales are given and received in good faith for truth, as
+Grote abundantly proves in his volume on Legendary Greece;
+sometimes they are clearly the gleeful play of the fancy, as when
+it is said that the hated infant Herakles having been put to
+Hera's breast as she lay asleep in heaven, she, upon waking,
+thrust him away, and the lacteal fluid, streaming athwart the
+firmament, originated the Milky Way! To apply this law to our
+special subject:
+
+1 Chambers's Papers for the People, vol. i.: The Myth, p. 1.
+
+
+What would be likely to work more powerfully on the minds of a
+crude, sensitive people, in an early stage of the world, with no
+elaborate discipline of religious thought, than the facts and
+phenomena of death? Plainly, around this centre there must be
+deposited a vast quantity of ideas and fantasies. The task is to
+discriminate them, trace their individual origin, and classify
+them.
+
+One of the most interesting and difficult questions connected with
+the subject before us is this: What, in any given time and place,
+were the limits of the popular belief? How much of the current
+representations in relation to another life were held as strict
+verity? What portions were regarded as fable or symbolism? It is
+obvious enough that among the civilized nations of antiquity the
+distinctions of literal statement, allegory, historic report,
+embellished legend, satire, poetic creation, philosophical
+hypothesis, religious myth, were more or less generally known. For
+example, when Aschylus makes one of his characters say, "Yonder
+comes a herald: so Dust, Clay's thirsty sister, tells me," the
+personification, unquestionably, was as purposed and conscious as
+it is when a poet in the nineteenth century says, "Thirst dived
+from the brazen glare of the sky and clutched me by the throat."
+So, too, when Homer describes the bag of Aolus, the winds, in
+possession of the sailors on board Ulysses' ship, the half
+humorous allegory cannot be mistaken for religious faith. It is
+equally obvious that these distinctions were not always carefully
+observed, but were often confounded. Therefore, in respect to the
+faith of primitive times, it is impossible to draw any broad,
+fixed lines and say conclusively that all on this side was
+consciously considered as fanciful play or emblem, all on that
+side as earnest fact. Each particular in each case must be
+examined by itself and be decided on its own merits by the light
+and weight of the moral probabilities. For example, if there was
+any historic basis for the myth of Herakles dragging Cerberus out
+of Hades, it was that this hero forcibly entered the Mysteries and
+dragged out to light the enactor of the part of the three headed
+dog. The aged North man, committing martial suicide rather than
+die in his peaceful bed, undoubtedly accepted the ensanguined
+picture of Valhalla as a truth. Virgil, dismissing Aneas from the
+Tartarean realm through "the ivory gate by which false dreams and
+fictitious visions are wont to issue," plainly wrought as a poet
+on imaginative materials.
+
+It should be recollected that most of the early peoples had no
+rigid formularies of faith like the Christian creeds. The writings
+preserved to us are often rather fragments of individual
+speculations and hopes than rehearsals of public dogmas. Plato is
+far from revealing the contemporaneous belief of Greece in the
+sense in which Thomas Aquinas reveals the contemporaneous belief
+of Christendom. In Egypt, Persia, Rome, among every cultured
+people, there were different classes of minds, the philosophers,
+the priests, the poets, the warriors, the common multitude, whose
+modes of thinking were in contrast, whose methods of interpreting
+their ancestral traditions and the phenomena of human destiny were
+widely apart, whose respective beliefs had far different
+boundaries. The openly skeptical Euripides and Lucian are to be
+borne in mind as well as the apparently credulous Hesiod and
+Homer. Of course the Fables of Asop were not literally credited.
+Neither, as a general thing, were the Metamorphoses of Ovid. With
+the ancients, while there was a general national cast of faith,
+there were likewise varieties of individual and sectarian belief
+and unbelief, skepticism and credulity, solemn reason and
+recreative fancy.
+
+The people of Lystra, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles,
+actually thought Barnabas and Paul were Zeus and Hermes, and
+brought oxen and garlands to offer them the sacrifices appropriate
+to those deities. Peisistratus obtained rule over Athens by
+dressing a stately woman, by the name of Phye, as Athene, and
+passing off her commands as those of the tutelary goddess.
+Herodotus ridicules the people for unsuspiciously accepting her.2
+The incredibleness of a doctrine is no obstacle to a popular
+belief in it. Whosoever thinks of the earnest reception of the
+dogma of transubstantiation the conversion of a wheaten wafer into
+the infinite God by nearly three quarters of Christendom at this
+moment, must permit the paradox to pass unchallenged. Doubtless
+the closing eye of many an expiring Greek reflected the pitiless
+old oarsman plying his frost cold boat across the Stygian ferry,
+and his failing ear caught the rush of the Phlegethonian surge. It
+is equally certain that, at the same time, many another laughed at
+these things as childish fictions, fitted only to scare "the baby
+of a girl."
+
+Stricken memory, yearning emotion, kindled fancy, a sensitive and
+timorous observation of natural phenomena, rustling leaves,
+wavering shadows, apparent effects of unknown causes, each is a
+superstitious mother of beliefs. The Sonora Indians say that
+departed souls dwell among the caves and rocks of the cliffs, and
+that the echoes often heard there are their voices. Ruskin
+suggests that the cause of the Greeks surrounding the lower world
+residence of Persephone with poplar groves was that "the
+frailness, fragility, and inconstancy of the leafage of the
+poplar tree resembled the fancied ghost people." We can very
+easily imagine how, in the breeze at the entrance to some
+subterranean descent,
+
+"A ghostly rank Of poplars, like a halted train of shades,
+Trembled."
+
+The operations of fierce passions, hate, fright, and rage, in a
+brain boiling with blood and fire, make pictures which the savage
+afterwards holds in remembrance as facts. He does not by
+reflection consciously distinguish the internal acts and sights of
+the mind from objective verities. Barbarians as travellers and
+psychologists have repeatedly observed usually pay great attention
+to the vagaries of madmen, the doings and utterances of the
+insane. These persons are regarded as possessed by higher beings.
+Their words are oracles: the horrible shapes, the grotesque
+scenes, which their disordered and inflamed faculties conjure up,
+are eagerly caught at, and such accounts of them as they are able
+to make out are treasured up as revelations. This fact is of no
+slight importance as an element in the hinting basis of the
+beliefs of uncultivated tribes. Many a vision of delirium, many a
+raving medley of insanity, has been accepted as truth.3 Another
+phenomenon, closely allied to the former, has wrought in a similar
+manner and still more widely. It has been a common superstition
+with barbarous nations in every part of the world, from Timbuctoo
+to Siberia, to suppose that dreams are real
+
+2 Lib. i. cap. 60.
+
+3 De Boismont, Rational History of Hallucinations, ch. 15:
+Of Hallucinations considered in a Psychological, Historical,
+and Religious Point of View.
+
+
+adventures which the soul passes through, flying abroad while the
+body lies, a dormant shell, wrapped in slumber. The power of this
+influence in nourishing a copious credulity may easily be
+imagined.
+
+The origin of many notions touching a future state, found in
+literature, is to be traced to those rambling thoughts and poetic
+reveries with which even the most philosophical minds, in certain
+moods, indulge themselves. For example, Sir Isaac Newton "doubts
+whether there be not superior intelligencies who, subject to the
+Supreme, oversee and control the revolutions of the heavenly
+bodies." And Goethe, filled with sorrow by the death of Wieland,
+musing on the fate of his departed friend, solemnly surmised that
+he had become the soul of a world in some far realm of space. The
+same mental exercises which supply the barbarian superstitions
+reappear in disciplined minds, on a higher plane and in more
+refined forms. Culture and science do not deliver us from all
+illusion and secure us sober views conformed to fact. Still, what
+we think amid the solid realities of waking life, fancy in her
+sleep disjointedly reverberates from hollow fields of dream. The
+metaphysician or theologian, instead of resting contented with
+mere snatches and glimpses, sets himself deliberately to reason
+out a complete theory. In these elaborate efforts many an opinion
+and metaphor, plausible or absurd, sweet or direful, is born and
+takes its place. There is in the human mind a natural passion for
+congruity and completeness, a passion extremely fertile in
+complementary products. For example, the early Jewish notion of
+literally sitting down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,
+in the resurrection, was gradually developed by accretion of
+assisting particulars into all the details of a consummate
+banquet, at which Leviathan was to be the fish, Behemoth the
+roast, and so on.4 In the construction of doctrines or of
+discourses, one thought suggests, one premise or conclusion
+necessitates, another. This genetic application is sometimes
+plainly to be seen even in parts of incoherent schemes. For
+instance, the conception that man has returned into this life from
+anterior experiences of it is met by the opposing fact that he
+does not remember any preceding career. The explanatory idea is at
+once hit upon of a fountain of oblivion a river Lethe from which
+the disembodied soul drinks ere it reappears. Once establish in
+the popular imagination the conception of the Olympian synod of
+gods, and a thousand dramatic tales of action and adventure,
+appropriate to the characters of the divine personages, will
+inevitably follow.
+
+The interest, cunning, and authority of priesthoods are another
+source of prevailing opinions concerning a life to come. Many
+nations, early and late, have been quite under the spiritual
+direction of priests, and have believed almost every thing they
+said. Numerous motives conspire to make the priest concoct
+fictions and exert his power to gain credence for them. He must
+have an alluringly colored elysium to reward his obedient
+disciples. When his teachings are rejected and his authority
+mocked, his class isolation and incensed pride find a natural
+satisfaction in threatening the reprobate aliens that a rain of
+fire will one day wash them down the smoking gulfs of sulphur. The
+Maronites, a sect of Catholic Christians in Syria, purchase of
+their priests a few yards of land in heaven, to secure a residence
+there when
+
+4 Corrodi, Gesch. des Chiliasmns, th. i. abschn. 15: Gastmahl des
+Leviathan.
+
+they die.5 The Siamese Buddhists accumulate silver and bury it in
+secret, to supply the needs of the soul during its wandering in
+the separate state. "This foolish opinion robs the state of
+immense sums. The lords and rich men erect pyramids over these
+treasures, and for their greater security place them in charge of
+the talapoins!"6 When, for some reason or other,  either as a
+matter of neatness and convenience, or as a preventive of mutual
+clawing, or for some to us unimaginable end, the authoritative
+Skald wished to induce the Northmen to keep their nails close cut,
+he devised the awful myth of the ship Nagelfra, and made his raw
+minded people swallow it as truth. The same process was followed
+unquestionably in a thousand other cases, in different particulars
+of thought and aim, in different parts of the world.
+
+In a bird's eye survey of the broad field we have traversed, one
+cannot help noticing the marked influence of the present scenery
+and habits, history and associations, of a people in deciding the
+character of their anticipations of the future. The Esquimaux
+paradise is surrounded by great pots full of boiled walrus meat.
+The Turk's heaven is a gorgeously idealized pleasure garden or
+celestial harem. As the apparition of a man wanders into the next
+state, a shadow of his present state floats over into the future
+with him. The Hereafter is the image flung by the Now. Heaven and
+hell are the upward and downward echoes of the earth. Like the
+spectre of the Brocken on the Hartz Mountains, our ideas of
+another life are a reflection of our present experience thrown in
+colossal on the cloud curtains of futurity. Charles Lamb, pushing
+this elucidating observation much further, says, "The shapings of
+our heavens are the modifications of our constitutions." A tribe
+of savages has been described who hoped to go after death to their
+forefathers in an under ground elysium whose glory consisted in
+eternal drunkenness, that being their highest conception of bliss
+and glory. What can be more piteous than the contemplation of
+those barbarians whose existence here is so wretched that even
+their imagination and faith have lost all rebound, and who
+conceive of the land of souls only as poorer and harder than this,
+expecting to be tasked and beaten there by stronger spirits, and
+to have nothing to eat? The relation of master and servant, the
+tyranny of class, is reflected over into the other life in those
+aristocratic notions which break out frequently in the history of
+our subject. The Pharisees some of them, at least excluded the
+rabble from the resurrection. The Peruvians confined their heaven
+to the nobility. The New Zealanders said the souls of the Atuas,
+the nobles, were immortal, but the Cookees perished entirely.
+Meiners declares that the Russians, even so late as the times of
+Peter the Great, believed that only the Czar and the boyars could
+reach heaven. It was almost a universal custom among savage
+nations when a chieftain died to slay his wives and servants, that
+their ghosts might accompany his to paradise, to wait on him there
+as here. Even among the Greeks, as Bulwer has well remarked, "the
+Hades of the ancients was not for the many; and the dwellers of
+Elysium are chiefly confined to the oligarchy of earth."
+
+The coarse and selfish assumption on the part of man of
+superiority over woman, based on his brawniness and tyranny, has
+sometimes appeared in the form of an assertion that
+
+5 Churchill, Mt. Lebanon, vol. iii. ch. 7.
+
+6 Pallegoix, Description du Royaume de Siam, ch. xx. p. 113.
+
+
+women have no souls, or at least cannot attain to the highest
+heaven possible for man. The former statement has been vulgarly
+attributed to the Moslem creed, but with utter falsity. A pious
+and aged female disciple once asked Mohammed concerning her future
+condition in heaven. The prophet replied, "There will not be any
+old women in heaven." She wept and bewailed her fate, but was
+comforted upon the gracious assurance from the prophet's lips,
+"They will all be young again when there." The Buddhists relate
+that Gotama once directed queen Prajapati, his foster mother, to
+prove by a miracle the error of those who supposed it impossible
+for a woman to attain Nirwana. She immediately made as many
+repetitions of her own form as filled the skies of all the
+sakwalas, and, after performing various wonders, died and rose
+into Nirwana, leading after her five hundred virtuous princesses.7
+
+How spontaneously the idiosyncrasies of men in the present are
+flung across the abysm into the future state is exhibited
+amusingly, and with a rough pathos, in an old tradition of a
+dialogue between Saint Patrick and Ossian. The bard contrasts the
+apostle's pitiful psalms with his own magnificent songs, and says
+that the virtuous Fingal is enjoying the rewards of his valor in
+the aerial existence. The saint rejoins, No matter for Fingal's
+worth; being a pagan, assuredly he roasts in hell. In hot wrath
+the honest Caledonian poet cries, "If the children of Morni and
+the tribes of the clan Ovi were alive, we would force brave Fingal
+out of hell, or the same habitation should be our own."8
+
+Many of the most affecting facts and problems in human experience
+and destiny have found expression, hypothetic solution, in
+striking myths preserved in the popular traditions of nations. The
+mutual resemblances in these legends in some cases, though among
+far separated peoples, are very significant and impressive. They
+denote that, moved by similar motives and exercised on the same
+soliciting themes, human desire and thought naturally find vent in
+similar theories, stories, and emblems. The imagination of man, as
+Gfrorer says, runs in ruts which not itself but nature has beaten.
+
+The instinctive shrinking from death felt by man would, sooner or
+later, quite naturally suggest the idea that death was not an
+original feature in the divine plan of the world, but a
+retributive additional discord. Benignant nature meant her
+children should live on in happy contentment here forever; but sin
+and Satan came in, and death was the vengeance that followed their
+doings. The Persians fully developed this speculation. The Hebrews
+either also originated it, or borrowed it from the Persians; and
+afterwards the Christians adopted it. Traces of the same
+conception appear among the remotest and rudest nations. The
+Caribbeans have a myth to the effect that the whole race of men
+were doomed to be mortal because Carus, the first man, offended
+the great god Tiri. The Cherokees ascribe to the Great Spirit the
+intention of making men immortal on earth; but, they say, the sun
+when he passed over told them there was not room enough, and that
+people had better die! They also say that the Creator attempted to
+make the first man and woman out of two stones, but failed, and
+afterwards fashioned them of clay; and therefore it is that they
+are perishable.9 The
+
+7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 314.
+
+8 Logan, Scottish Gael, ch. xiv.
+
+9 Squier, Serpent Symbol, p. 67, note c.
+
+
+Indians of the Oronoco declare that the Great Spirit dwelt for a
+while, at first, among men. As he was leaving them, he turned
+around in his canoe and said, "Ye shall never die, but shall shed
+your skins." An old woman would not believe what he said; he
+therefore recalled his promise and vowed that they should die.
+
+The thought of more than one death that the composite man is
+simplified by a series of separating deaths has repeatedly found
+place. The New Testament speaks of "the second death;" but that is
+a metaphorical phrase, descriptive, as there employed, of
+condemnation and suffering. It is a thought of Plato that the
+Deity put intellect in soul, and soul in a material envelope.
+Following this hint, Plutarch says, in his essay on the Face in
+the Moon, that the earth furnishes the body, the moon the soul,
+the sun the mind. The first death we die, he continues, makes us
+two from three; the second makes us one from two. The Feejees tell
+how one of their warriors, seeing the spectre of a recently
+deceased enemy of his, threw his war club at it and killed it.
+They believed the spirit itself was thus destroyed. There is
+something pathetic in this accumulation of dissolution upon
+dissolution, this pursuit of death after death. We seem to hear,
+in this thin succession of the ghosts of ghosts, the fainter
+growing echoes of the body fade away.
+
+Many narratives reveal the fond hovering of the human mind over
+the problem of avoiding death altogether. The Hebrew Scriptures
+have made us familiar with the translation of Enoch and the
+ascension of Elijah without tasting death. The Hindus tell of
+Divadassa, who, as a reward for his exceeding virtue and piety,
+was permitted to ascend to heaven alive.10 They also say that the
+good Trisanku, having pleased a god, was elevated in his living
+body to heaven.11 The Buddhists of Ceylon preserve a legend of the
+elevation of one of the royal descendants of Maha Sammata to the
+superior heavens without undergoing death.12 There are Buddhist
+traditions, furthermore, of four other persons who were taken up
+to Indra's heaven in their bodies without tasting death, namely,
+the musician Gattila, and the kings Sadhina, Nirni, and
+Mandhatu.13 A beautiful myth of the translation of Cyrus is found
+in Firdousi's Shah Nameh:
+
+"Ky Khosru bow'd himself before his God: In the bright water he
+wash'd his head and his limbs; And he spake to himself the Zend
+Avesta's prayers; And he turn'd to the friends of his life and
+exclaim'd, 'Fare ye well, fare ye well for evermore! When to
+morrow's sun lifts its blazing banner, And the sea is gold, and
+the land is purple, This world and I shall be parted forever. Ye
+will never see me again, save in Memory's dreams.'When the sun
+uplifted his head from the mountain, The king had vanish'd from
+the eyes of his nobles. They roam'd around in vain attempts to
+find him;
+
+10 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 431.
+
+11 Vishnu Purana, p. 371.
+
+12 Upham, Sacred Books of Ceylon, vol. i. Introduction, p. 17.
+
+13 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 25, note.
+
+
+And every one, as he came back to the place, Bade a long farewell
+to the king of the world. Never hath any one seen such a marvel
+No, though he live long in the world That a man should go alive
+into the presence of God."
+
+There is a Greek story that Empedocles, "after a sacred festival,
+was drawn up to heaven in a splendor of celestial effulgence."14
+Philostratus relates a tradition of the Cretans, affirming that,
+Apollonius having entered a temple to worship, a sound was heard
+as of a chorus of virgins singing, "Come from the earth; come into
+heaven; come." And he was taken up, never having been seen
+afterwards. Here may be cited also the exquisite fable of
+Endymion. Zeus promised to grant what he should request. He begged
+for immortality, eternal sleep, and never fading youth.
+Accordingly, in all his surpassing beauty he slumbers on the
+summit of Latmus, where every night the enamored moon stoops to
+kiss his spotless forehead. One of the most remarkable fragments
+in the traditions of the American aborigines is that concerning
+the final departure of Tarenyawagon, a mythic chief of
+supernatural knowledge and power, who instructed and united the
+Iroquois. He sprang across vast chasms between the cliffs, and
+shot over the lakes with incredible speed, in a spotless white
+canoe. At last the Master of Breath summoned him. Suddenly the sky
+was filled with melody. While all eyes were turned up,
+Tarenyawagon was seen, seated in his snow white canoe, in mid air,
+rising with every burst of the heavenly music, till he vanished
+beyond the summer clouds, and all was still.15
+
+Another mythological method of avoidingdeath is by bathing in some
+immortal fountain. The Greeks tell of Glaucus, who by chance
+discovered and plunged in a spring of this charmed virtue, but was
+so chagrined at being unable to point it out to others that he
+flung himself into the ocean. He could not die, and so became a
+marine deity, and was annually seen off the headlands sporting
+with whales. The search for the "Fountain of Youth" by the
+Spaniards who landed in Florida is well known. How with a vain
+eagerness did Ponce de Leon, the battered old warrior, seek after
+the magic wave beneath which he should sink to emerge free from
+scars and stains, as fresh and fair as when first he donned the
+knightly harness! Khizer, the Wandering Jew of the East,
+accompanied Iskander Zulkarnain (the Oriental name for Alexander
+the Great) in his celebrated expedition to find the fountain of
+life.16 Zulkarnain, coming to a place where there were three
+hundred and sixty fountains, despatched three hundred and sixty
+men, ordering each man to select one of the fountains in which to
+wash a dry salted fish wherewith he was furnished. The instant
+Khizer's fish touched the water of the fountain which he had
+chosen, it sprang away, alive. Khizer leaped in after it and
+drank. Therefore he cannot die till the last trump sounds.
+Meanwhile, clad in a green garb, he roams through the world, a
+personified spring of the year.
+
+14 Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, vol. i. p. 135, (1st
+Eng. edit.)
+
+15 Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, ch. ix.
+
+16 Adventures of Hatim Tai, p. 125.
+
+
+The same influences which have caused death to be interpreted as a
+punitive after piece in the creation, and which have invented
+cases wherein it was set aside, have also fabricated tales of
+returns from its shrouded realm. The Thracian lover's harp,
+"drawing iron tears down Pluto's cheek," won his mistress half way
+to the upper light, and would have wholly redeemed her had he not
+in impatience looked back. The grim king of Hades, yielding to
+passionate entreaties, relented so far as to let the hapless
+Protesilaus return to his mourning Laodameia for three hours. At
+the swift end of this poor period he died again; and this time she
+died with him. Erus, who was killed in battle, and Timarchus,
+whose soul was rapt from him in the cave of Trophonius, both
+returned, as we read in Plato and Plutarch, to relate with
+circumstantial detail what they saw in the other world. Alcestis,
+who so nobly died to save her husband's life, was brought back
+from the region of the dead, by the interposition of Herakles, to
+spend happy years with her grateful Admetus. The cunning Sisyphus,
+who was so notorious for his treachery, by a shrewd plot obtained
+leave, after his death, to visit the earth again. Safely up in the
+light, he vowed he would stay; but old Hermes psychopompus
+forcibly dragged him down.
+
+When Columbus landed at San Salvador, the natives thought he had
+descended from the sun, and by signs inquired if he had not. The
+Hawaiians took Captain Cook for the god Lono, who was once their
+king but was afterwards deified, and who had prophesied, as he was
+dying, that he should in after times return. Te Wharewara, a New
+Zealand youth, relates a long account of the return of his aunt
+from the other world, with a minute description of her adventures
+and observations there.17 Schoolcraft gives a picturesque
+narrative of a journey made by a Wyandot brave to and from the
+land of souls.18
+
+There is a group of strangely pleasing myths, closely allied to
+the two preceding classes, showing how the popular heart and
+imagination glorify their heroes, and, fondly believing them too
+godlike to die, fancy them only removed to some secret place,
+where they still live, and whence in the time of need they will
+come again to rescue or to bless their people. Greece dreamed that
+her swift footed Achilles was yet alive in the White Island.
+Denmark long saw king Holger lingering on the old warrior cairns
+of his country. Portugal trusted that her beauteous prince
+Sebastian had escaped from the fatal field to the East, and would
+one day return to claim his usurped realm.19 So, too, of Roderick
+the Goth, who fell in disastrous battle with the Arabs, the
+Visiogothic traditions and faith of the people long insisted that
+he would reappear. The Swiss herdsmen believe the founders of
+their confederacy still sleep in a cavern on the shores of
+Lucerne. When Switzerland is in peril, the Three Tells, slumbering
+there in their antique garb, will wake to save her. Sweetly and
+often, the ancient British lays allude to the puissant Arthur
+borne away to the mystic vales of Avalon, and yet to be hailed in
+his native kingdom, Excalibur once more gleaming in his hand. The
+strains of the Troubadours swell and ring as they tell of
+Charlemagne sleeping beneath
+
+17 Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, p. 128.
+
+18 History, &c. of Indian Tribes, part ii. p. 235.
+
+19 There is a fanatic sect of Sebastianists in Brazil now. See
+"Brazil and the Brazilians," by Kidier and Fletcher, pp. 519-521.
+
+
+the Untersberg, biding his appointed time to rise, resume his
+unrivalled sceptre, and glorify the Frank race. And what grand and
+weird ballads picture great Barbarossa seated in the vaults of
+Kyffhauser, his beard grown through the stone table in front of
+him, tarrying till he may come forth, with his minstrels and
+knights around him, in the crisis hour of Germany's fortunes! The
+Indians of Pecos, in New Mexico, still anxiously expect the return
+of Montezuma; while in San Domingo, on the Rio Grande, a sentinel
+every morning ascends to the top of the highest house, at sunrise,
+and looks out eastward for the coming of the great chief.20 The
+peasants of Brittany maintain as a recent traveller testifies that
+Napoleon is still alive in concealment somewhere, and will one day
+be heard of or seen in pomp and victory. One other dead man there
+has been who was expected to return. the hated Nero, the popular
+horror of whom shows itself in the shuddering belief expressed in
+the Apocalypse and in the Sibylline Oracles that he was still
+alive and would reappear.21
+
+Alian, in his Various History, recounts the following singular
+circumstances concerning the Meropes who inhabited the valley of
+Anostan.22 It would seem to prove that no possible conceit of
+speculation pertaining to our subject has been unthought of. A
+river of grief and a river of pleasure, he says, lapsed through
+the valley, their banks covered with trees. If one ate of the
+fruit growing on the trees beside the former stream, he burst into
+a flood of tears and wept till he died. But if he partook of that
+hanging on the shore of the latter, his bliss was so great that he
+forgot all desires; and, strangest of all, he returned over the
+track of life to youth and infancy, and then gently expired. He
+turned
+
+"Into his yesterdays, and wander'd back To distant childhood, and
+went out to God By the gate of birth, not death."
+
+Mohammed, during his night journey, saw, in the lower heaven,
+Adam, the father of mankind, a majestic old man, with all his
+posterity who were destined for paradise on one side, and all who
+were destined for hell on the other. When he looked on the right
+he smiled and rejoiced, but as often as he looked on the left he
+mourned and wept. How finely this reveals the stupendous pathos
+there is in the theological conception of a Federal Head of
+humanity!
+
+The idea of a great terminal crisis is met with so often in
+reviewing the history of human efforts to grasp and solve the
+problem of the world's destiny, that we must consider it a normal
+concomitant of such theorizings. The mind reels and loses itself
+in trying to conceive of the everlasting continuance of the
+present order, or of any one fixed course of things, but finds
+relief in the notion of a revolution, an end, and a fresh start.
+The Mexican Cataclysm or universal crash, the close of the Hindu
+Calpa, the Persian Resurrection, the Stoic Conflagration, the
+Scandinavian Ragnarokur, the Christian Day of Judgment, all embody
+this one thought. The Drama of Humanity is played out, the curtain
+falls, and when it rises again
+
+20 Abbe Domenech's Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts of
+North America; Vol. I. ch. viii.
+
+21 Stuart, Commentary on the Apocalypse: Excursus upon ch. xiii.
+v. 18.
+
+22 Lib. iii. cap. 18.
+
+
+all is commenced afresh. The clock of creation runs down and has
+to be wound up anew. The Brahmans are now expecting the tenth
+avatar of Vishnu. The Parsees look for Sosiosch to come, to
+consummate the triumph of good, and to raise the dead upon a
+renewed earth. The Buddhists await the birth of Maitri Buddha, who
+is tarrying in the dewa loka Tusita until the time of his advent
+upon earth. The Jews are praying for the appearance of the
+Messiah. And many Christians affirm that the second advent of
+Jesus draws nigh.
+
+One more fact, even in a hasty survey of some of the most peculiar
+opinions current in bygone times as to a future life, can scarcely
+fail to attract notice. It is the so constant linking of the
+soul's fate with the skyey spaces and the stars, in fond
+explorings and astrologic dreams. Nowhere are the kingly greatness
+and the immortal aspiring of man more finely shown. The loadstone
+of his destiny and the prophetic gravitation of his thoughts are
+upward, into the eternal bosom of heaven's infinite hospitality.
+
+"Ye stars, which are the poetry of heaven!
+If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
+Of men and empires, 'tis to be forgiven,
+That, in our aspirations to be great,
+Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state
+And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
+A beauty and a mystery, and create
+In us such love and reverence from afar
+That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star."
+
+What an immeasurable contrast between the dying Cherokee, who
+would leap into heaven with a war whoop on his tongue and a string
+of scalps in his hand, and the dying Christian, who sublimely
+murmurs, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!" What a sweep
+of thought, from the poor woman whose pious notion of heaven was
+that it was a place where she could sit all day in a clean white
+apron and sing psalms, to the far seeing and sympathetic natural
+philosopher whose loving faith embraces all ranks of creatures and
+who conceives of paradise as a spiritual concert of the combined
+worlds with all their inhabitants in presence of their Creator!
+Yet from the explanatory considerations which have been set forth
+we can understand the derivation of the multifarious swarm of
+notions afloat in the world, as the fifteen hundred varieties of
+apple now known have all been derived from the solitary white
+crab. Differences of fancy and opinion among men are as natural as
+fancies and opinions are. The mind of a people grows from the
+earth of its deposited history, but breathes in the air of its
+living literature.23 By his philosophic learning and poetic
+sympathy the cosmopolitan scholar wins the last victory of mind
+over matter, frees himself from local conditions and temporal
+tinges, and, under the light of universal truth, traces, through
+the causal influences of soil and clime and history, and the
+colored threads of great individualities, the formation of
+peculiar national creeds. Through sense the barbarian mind feeds
+on the raw pabulum furnished by the immediate phenomena of the
+world and of its own life. Through culture the civilized mind
+feeds on the elaborated substance of literature,
+
+23 Schouw, Earth, Plants, and Man, ch. xxx.
+
+
+science, and art. Plants eat inorganic, animals eat organized,
+material. The ignorant man lives on sensations obtained directly
+from nature; the educated man lives also on sensations obtained
+from the symbols of other people's sensations. The illiterate
+savage hunts for his mental living in the wild forest of
+consciousness; the erudite philosopher lives also on the psychical
+stores of foregone men.
+
+NOTE. To the ten instances, stated on pages 210, 211, of
+remarkable men who after their death were popularly imagined to be
+still alive, and destined to appear again, an eleventh may be
+added. The Indians of Pecos, in New Mexico, anxiously expect the
+return of Montezuma. In San Domingo, on the Rio Grande, a sentinel
+every morning ascends to the roof of the highest house at sunrise
+and looks out eastward for the coming of the great chief. See the
+Abbe Domenech's "Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts of
+North America," vol. ii. ch. viii.
+
+PART THIRD.
+
+
+NEW TESTAMENT TEACHINGS CONCERNING AFUTURE LIFE.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PETER'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+IN entering upon an investigation of the thoughts of the New
+Testament writers concerning the fate of man after his bodily
+dissolution, we may commence by glancing at the various allusions
+contained in the record to opinions on this subject prevalent at
+the time of the Savior or immediately afterwards, but which formed
+no part of his religion, or were mixed with mistakes.
+
+There are several incidents recorded in the Gospels which show
+that a belief in the transmigration of the soul was received among
+the Jews. As Jesus was passing near Siloam with his disciples, he
+saw a man who had been blind from his birth; and the disciples
+said to him, "Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that
+he was born blind?" The drift of this question is, Did the parents
+of this man commit some great crime, for which they were punished
+by having their child born blind, or did he come into the world
+under this calamity in expiation of the iniquities of a previous
+life? Jesus denies the doctrine involved in this interrogation, at
+least, as far as his reply touches it at all; for he rarely enters
+into any discussion or refutation of incidental errors. He says,
+Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents as the cause of his
+blindness; but the regular workings of the laws of God are made
+manifest in him: moreover, it is a providential occasion offered
+me that I should show the divinity of my mission by giving him
+sight.
+
+When Herod heard of the miracles and the fame of Jesus, he said,
+This is John the Baptist, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the
+dead; and therefore mighty works are wrought by him. This brief
+statement plainly shows that the belief in the reappearance of a
+departed spirit, in bodily form, to run another career, was extant
+in Judea at that period. The Evangelists relate another
+circumstance to the same effect. Jesus asked his disciples who the
+people thought he was. And they replied, Some think that thou art
+John the Baptist, some Elias, and some Jeremiah or some other of
+the old prophets, a forerunner of the Messiah. Then Jesus asked,
+But who think ye that I am? And Simon Peter said, Thou art the
+promised Messiah himself. There was a prophetic tradition among
+the Jews, drawn from the words of Malachi, that before the Messiah
+was revealed Elias would appear and proclaim his coming.
+
+Therefore, when the disciples of Christ recognised him as the
+great Anointed, they were troubled about this prophecy, and said
+to their Master, Why do the Scribes say that Elias must first
+come? He replies to them, in substance, It is even so: the
+prophet's words shall not fail: they are already fulfilled. But
+you must interpret the prophecy aright. It does not mean that the
+ancient prophet himself, in physical form, shall come upon earth,
+but that one with his office, in his spirit and power, shall go
+before me. If ye are able to understand the true import of the
+promise, it has been realized. John the Baptist is the Elias which
+was to come. The New Testament, therefore, has allusions to the
+doctrine of transmigration, but gives it no warrant.
+
+The Jewish expectations in regard to the Messiah, the nature of
+his kingdom, and the events which they supposed would attend his
+coming or transpire during his reign, were the source and
+foundation of the phraseology of a great many passages in the
+Christian Scriptures and of the sense of not a few. The national
+ideas and hopes of the Jews at that time were singularly intense
+and extensive. Their influence over the immediate disciples of
+Jesus and the authors of the New Testament is often very evident
+in the interpretations they put upon his teachings, and in their
+own words. Still, their intellectual and spiritual obtuseness to
+the true drift of their Master's thoughts was not so great, their
+mistakes are neither so numerous nor so gross, as it is frequently
+supposed they were. This is proved by the fact that when they use
+the language of the Messianic expectations of the Jews in their
+writings they often do it, not in the material, but in a spiritual
+sense. When they first came under the instruction of Jesus, they
+were fully imbued with the common notions of their nation and age.
+By his influence their ideas were slowly and with great difficulty
+spiritualized and made to approach his own in some degree. But it
+is unquestionably true that they never not even after his death
+arrived at a clear appreciation of the full sublimity, the pure
+spirituality, the ultimate significance, of his mission and his
+words. Still, they did cast off and rise above the grossly carnal
+expectations of their countrymen. Partially instructed in the
+spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, and partially biassed by
+their Jewish prepossessions, they interpreted a part of his
+language figuratively, according to his real meaning, and a part
+of it literally, according to their own notions. The result of
+this was several doctrines neither taught by Christ nor held by
+the Jews, but formed by conjoining and elaborating a portion of
+the conceptions of both. These doctrines are to be found in the
+New Testament; but it should be distinctly understood that the
+religion of Christ is not responsible for them, is to be separated
+from them.
+
+The fundamental and pervading aim of that epistle of Peter the
+genuineness of which is unquestioned and the same is true in a
+great degree of his speeches recorded in the Acts of the Apostles
+is to exhort the Christians to whom it is written to purify
+themselves by faith, love, and good works; to stand firmly amidst
+all their tribulations, supported by the expectations and prepared
+to meet the conditions of a glorious life in heaven at the close
+of this life. Eschatology, the doctrine of the Last Things, with
+its practical inferences, all inseparably interwoven with the
+mission of Christ, forms the basis and scope of the whole
+document.
+
+Peter believed that when Christ had been put to death his spirit,
+surviving, descended into the separate state of departed souls.
+Having cited from the sixteenth Psalm the declaration, "Thou wilt
+not leave my soul in the under world," he says it was a prophecy
+concerning Christ, which was fulfilled in his resurrection. "The
+soul of this Jesus was not left in the under world, but God hath
+raised him up, whereof we all are witnesses." When it is written
+that his soul was not left in the subterranean abode of
+disembodied spirits, of course the inference cannot be avoided
+that it was supposed to have been there for a time.
+
+In the next place, we are warranted by several considerations in
+asserting that Peter believed that down there, in the gloomy realm
+of shades, were gathered and detained the souls of all the dead
+generations. We attribute this view to Peter from the combined
+force of the following reasons: because such was, notoriously, the
+belief of his ancestral and contemporary countrymen; because he
+speaks of the resurrection of Jesus as if it were a wonderful
+prophecy or unparalleled miracle, a signal and most significant
+exception to the universal law; because he says expressly of David
+that "he is not yet ascended into the heavens," and if David was
+still retained below, undoubtedly all were; because the same
+doctrine is plainly inculcated by other of the New Testament
+writers; and, finally, because Peter himself, in another part of
+this epistle, declares, in unequivocal terms, that the soul of
+Christ went and preached to the souls confined in the under
+world, for such is the perspicuous meaning of the famous text,
+"being put to death in the body, but kept alive in the soul, in
+which also he went and preached [went as a herald] to the spirits
+in prison." The meaning we have attributed to this celebrated
+passage is the simple and consistent explanation of the words and
+the context, and is what must have been conveyed to those familiar
+with the received opinions of that time. Accordingly, we find
+that, with the exception of Augustine, it was so understood and
+interpreted by the whole body of the Fathers.1 It is likewise so
+held now by an immense majority of the most authoritative modern
+commentators. Rosenmuller says, in his commentary on this text,
+"That by the spirits in prison is meant souls of men separated
+from their bodies and detained as in custody in the under world,
+which the Greeks call Hades, the Hebrews Sheol, can hardly be
+doubted," (vix dubitari posse videtur.) Such has ever been and
+still is the common conclusion of nearly all the best critical
+theologians, as volumes of citations might easily be made to show.
+The reasons which led Augustine to give a different exposition of
+the text before us are such as should make, in this case, even his
+great name have little or no weight. He firmly held, as revealed
+and unquestionable truth,2 the whole doctrine which we maintain is
+implied in the present passage; but he was so perplexed by certain
+difficult queries3 as to locality and method and circumstance,
+addressed to him with reference to this text, that he, waveringly,
+and at last, gave it an allegorical interpretation. His exegesis
+is not only arbitrary and opposed to the catholic doctrine of the
+Church; it is also so far fetched and forced as to be destitute of
+
+1 See, for example, Clem. Alex. Stromata, lib. vi.; Cyprian, Test.
+adv. Judaos, lib. ii. cap. 27, Lactantius, Divin. Instit. lib.
+vii. cap. 20.
+
+2 Epist. XCIX.
+
+3 Ibid.
+
+
+plausibility. He says the spirits in prison may be the souls of
+men confined in their bodies here in this life, to preach to whom
+Christ came from heaven. But the careful reader will observe that
+Peter speaks as if the spirits were collected and kept in one
+common custody, refers to the spirits of a generation long ago
+departed to the dead, and represents the preaching as taking place
+in the interval between Christ's death and his resurrection. A
+glance from the eighteenth to the twenty second verse inclusive
+shows indisputably that the order of events narrated by the
+apostle is this: First, Christ was put to death in the flesh,
+suffering for sins, the just for the unjust; secondly, he was
+quickened in the spirit; thirdly, he went and preached to the
+spirits in prison; fourthly, he rose from the dead; fifthly, he
+ascended into heaven. How is it possible for any one to doubt that
+the text under consideration teaches his subterranean mission
+during the period of his bodily burial?
+
+In the exposition of the Apostles' Creed put forth by the Church
+of England under Edward VI., this text in Peter was referred to as
+an authoritative proof of the article on Christ's descent into the
+under world; and when, some years later, thatreference was
+stricken out, notoriously it was not because the Episcopal rulers
+were convinced of a mistake, but because they had become afraid of
+the associated Romish doctrine of purgatory.
+
+If Peter believed as he undoubtedly did that Christ after his
+crucifixion descended to the place of departed spirits, what did
+he suppose was the object of that descent? Calvin's theory was
+that he went into hell in order that he might there suffer
+vicariously the accumulated agonies due to the LOST, thus
+placating the just wrath of the Father and purchasing the release
+of the elect. A sufficient refutation of that dogma, as to its
+philosophical basis, is found in its immorality, its forensic
+technicality. As a mode of explaining the Scriptures, it is
+refuted by the fact that it is nowhere plainly stated in the New
+Testament, but is arbitrarily constructed by forced and indirect
+inferences from various obscure texts, which texts can be
+perfectly explained without involving it at all. For what purpose,
+then, was it thought that Jesus went to the imprisoned souls of
+the under world? The most natural supposition the conception most
+in harmony with the character and details of the rest of the
+scheme and with the prevailing thought of the time would be that
+he went there to rescue the captives from their sepulchral
+bondage, to conquer death and the devil in their own domain, open
+the doors, break the chains, proclaim good tidings of coming
+redemption to the spirits in prison, and, rising thence, to ascend
+to heaven, preparing the way for them to follow with him at his
+expected return. This, indeed, is the doctrine of the Judaizing
+apostles, the unbroken catholic doctrine of the Church. Paul
+writes to the Colossians, and to the Ephesians, that, when Christ
+"had spoiled the principalities and powers" of the world of the
+dead, "he ascended up on high, leading a multitude of captives."
+Peter himself declares, a little farther on in his epistle, "that
+the glad tidings were preached to the dead, that, though they had
+been persecuted and condemned in the flesh by the will of men,
+they might be blessed in the spirit by the will of God."4 Christ
+fulfilled the law of
+
+4 See Rosenmuller's explanation in hoc loco.
+
+
+death,5 descending to the place of separate spirits, that he might
+declare deliverance to the quick and the dead by coming
+triumphantly back and going into heaven, an evident token of the
+removal of the penalty of sin which hitherto had fatally doomed
+all men to the under world.6
+
+Let us see if this will not enable us to explain Peter's language
+satisfactorily. Death, with the lower residence succeeding it, let
+it be remembered, was, according to the Jewish and apostolic
+belief, the fruit of sin, the judgment pronounced on sin. But
+Christ, Peter says, was sinless. "He was a lamb without blemish
+and without spot." "He did no sin, neither was guile found in his
+mouth." Therefore he was not exposed to death and the under world
+on his own account. Consequently, when it is written that "he bore
+our sins in his own body on the tree," that "he suffered for sins,
+the just for the unjust," in order to give the words their clear,
+full meaning it is not necessary to attribute to them the sense of
+a vicarious sacrifice offered to quench the anger of God or to
+furnish compensation for a broken commandment; but this sense,
+namely, that although in his sinlessness he was exempt from death,
+yet he "suffered for us," he voluntarily died, thus undergoing for
+our sakes that which was to others the penalty of their sin. The
+object of his dying was not to conciliate the alienated Father or
+to adjust the unbalanced law: it was to descend into the realm of
+the dead, heralding God's pardon to the captives, and to return
+and rise into heaven, opening and showing to his disciples the way
+thither. For, owing to his moral sinlessness, or to his delegated
+omnipotence, if he were once in the abode of the dead, he must
+return: nothing could keep him there. Epiphanius describes the
+devil complaining, after Christ had burst through his nets and
+dungeons, "Miserable me! what shall I do? I did not know God was
+concealed in that body. The son of Mary has deceived me. I
+imagined he was a mere man."7 In an apocryphal writing of very
+early date, which shows some of the opinions abroad at that time,
+one of the chief devils, after Christ had appeared in hell,
+cleaving its grisly prisons from top to bottom and releasing the
+captives, is represented upbraiding Satan in these terms: "O
+prince of all evil, author of death, why didst thou crucify and
+bring down to our regions a person righteous and sinless? Thereby
+thou hast lost all the sinners of the world."8 Again, in an
+ancient treatise on the Apostles' Creed, we read as follows: "In
+the bait of Christ's flesh was secretly inserted the hook of his
+divinity. This the devil knew not, but, supposing he must stay
+when he was
+
+5 See King's History of the Apostles' Creed, 3d ed., pp. 234-239.
+"The purpose of Christ's descent was to undergo the laws of death,
+pass through the whole experience of man, conquer the devil, break
+the fetters of the captives, and fix a time for their
+resurrection." To the same effect, old Hilary, Bishop of
+Poictiers, in his commentary on Psalm cxxxviii., says, "It is a
+law of human necessity that, the body being buried, the soul
+should descend ad interos."
+
+6 Ambrose, De Fide, etc., lib. iv. cap. 1, declares that "no one
+ascended to heaven until Christ, by the pledge of his
+resurrection, solved the chains of the under world and translated
+the souls of the pious." Also Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, in his
+fourth catechetical lecture, sect. 11, affirms "that Christ
+descended into the under world to deliver those who, from Adam
+downwards, had been imprisoned there."
+
+7 In Assumptionem Christi.
+
+8 Evan. Nicodemi, cap. xviii.
+
+
+devoured, greedily swallowed the corpse, and the bolts of the
+nether world were wrenched asunder, and the ensnared dragon
+himself dragged from the abyss."9 Peter himself explicitly
+declares, "It was not possible that he should be held by death."
+Theodoret says, "Whoever denies the resurrection of Christ rejects
+his death."10 If he died, he must needs rise again. And his
+resurrection would demonstrate the forgiveness of sins, the
+opening of heaven to men, showing that the bond which had bound in
+despair the captives in the regions of death for so many voiceless
+ages was at last broken. Accordingly, "God, having loosed the
+chains of the under world, raised him up and set him at his own
+right hand."11
+
+And now the question, narrowed down to the smallest compass, is
+this: What is the precise, real signification of the sacrificial
+and other connected terms employed by Peter,  those phrases which
+now, by the intense associations of a long time, convey so strong
+a Calvinistic sense to most readers? Peter says, "Ye know that ye
+were redeemed with the precious blood of Christ." If there were
+not so much indeterminateness of thought, so much unthinking
+reception of traditional, confused impressions of Scripture texts,
+it would be superfluous to observe that by the word blood here,
+and in all parallel passages, is meant simply and literally death:
+the mere blood, the mere shedding of the blood, of Christ, of
+course, could have no virtue, no moral efficacy, of any sort. When
+the infuriated Jews cried, "His blood be on us, and on our
+children!" they meant, Let the responsibility of his death rest on
+us. When the English historian says, "Sidney gave his blood for
+the cause of civil liberty," the meaning is, he died for it. So,
+no one will deny, whenever the New Testament speaks in any way of
+redemption by the blood of the crucified Son of Man, the
+unquestionable meaning is, redemption by his death. What, then,
+does the phrase "redemption by the death of Christ" mean? Let it
+be noted here let it be particularly noticed that the New
+Testament nowhere in explicit terms explains the meaning of this
+and the kindred phrases: it simply uses the phrases without
+interpreting them. They are rhetorical figures of speech,
+necessarily, upon whatever theological system we regard them. No
+sinner is literally washed from his transgressions and guilt in
+the blood of the slaughtered Lamb. These expressions, then, are
+poetic images, meant to convey a truth in the language of
+association and feeling, the traditionary language of imagination.
+The determination of their precise significance is wholly a matter
+of fallible human construction and inference, and not a matter of
+inspired statement or divine revelation. This is so, beyond a
+question, because, we repeat, they are figures of speech, having
+no direct explanation in the records where they occur. The
+Calvinistic view of the atonement was a theory devised to explain
+this scriptural language. It was devised without sufficient
+consideration of the peculiar notions and spirit, the peculiar
+grade of culture, and the time, from which that language sprang.
+We freely admit the inadequacy of the Unitarian
+
+9 Ruffinus, Expos. in Symb. Apost.
+
+10 Comm. in 2 Tim. ii. 19.
+
+11 By a mistake and a false reading, the common version has "the
+pains of death," instead of "the chains of the under world." The
+sense requires the latter. Besides, numerous manuscripts read
+[non ASCII characters]. See, furthermore, Rosenmuller's thorough
+criticism in loc. Likewise see Robinson's New Testament Greek
+Lexicon, in [NAC].
+
+
+doctrine of the atonement to explain the figures of speech in
+which the apostles declare their doctrine. But, since the
+Calvinistic scheme was devised by human thought to explain the New
+Testament language, any scheme which explains that language as
+well has equal Scripture claims to credence; any which better
+explains it, with sharper, broader meaning and fewer difficulties,
+has superior claims to be received.
+
+We are now prepared to state what we believe was the meaning
+originally associated with, and meant to be conveyed by, the
+phrases equivalent to "redemption by the death of Christ." In
+consequence of sin, the souls of all mankind, after leaving the
+body, were shut up in the oblivious gloom of the under world.
+Christ alone, by virtue of his perfect holiness, was not subject
+to any part of this fate. But, in fulfilment of the Father's
+gracious designs, he willingly submitted, upon leaving the body,
+to go among the dead, that he might declare the good tidings to
+them, and burst the bars of darkness, and return to life, and rise
+into heaven as a pledge of the future translation of the faithful
+to that celestial world, instead of their banishment into the
+dismal bondage below, as hitherto. The death of Christ, then, was
+the redemption of sinners, in that his death implied his ascent,
+"because it was not possible that he should be holden of death;"
+and his ascension visibly demonstrated the truth that God had
+forgiven men their sins and would receive their souls to his own
+abode on high.
+
+Three very strong confirmations of the correctness of this
+interpretation are afforded in the declarations of Peter. First,
+he never even hints, in the faintest manner, that the death of
+Christ was to have any effect on God, any power to change his
+feeling or his government. It was not to make a purchasing
+expiation for sins and thus to reconcile God to us; but it was, by
+a revelation of the Father's freely pardoning love, to give us
+penitence, purification, confidence, and a regenerating piety, and
+so to reconcile us to God. He says in one place, in emphatic
+words, that the express purpose of Christ's death was simply "that
+he might lead us to God." In the same strain, in another place, he
+defines the object of Christ's death to be "that we, being
+delivered from sins, should live unto righteousness." It is plain
+that in literal reality he refers our marvellous salvation to the
+voluntary goodness of God, and not to any vicarious ransom paid in
+the sacrifice of Christ, when he says, "The God of all grace hath
+called us unto his eternal glory by Jesus Christ." The death of
+Christ was not, then, to appease the fierce justice of God by
+rectifying the claims of his inexorable law, but it was to call
+out and establish in men all moral virtues by the power of faith
+in the sure gift of eternal life sealed to them through the
+ascension of the Savior.
+
+For, secondly, the practical inferences drawn by Peter from the
+death of Christ, and the exhortations founded upon it, are
+inconsistent with the prevailing theory of the atonement. Upon
+that view the apostle would have said, "Christ has paid the debt
+and secured a seat in heaven for you, elected ones: therefore
+believe in the sufficiency of his offerings, and exult." But not
+so. He calls on us in this wise: "Forasmuch as Christ hath
+suffered for us, arm yourselves with the same mind." "Christ
+suffered for you, leaving an example that ye should follow his
+steps." The whole burden of his practical argument based on the
+mission of Christ is, the obligation of a religious spirit and of
+pure morals. He does not speak, as many modern sectarists have
+spoken, of the "filthy rags of righteousness;" but he says, "Live
+no longer in sins," "have a meek and quiet spirit, which is in
+the sight of God of great price," "be ye holy in all manner of
+conversation," "purify your souls by obedience to the truth,"
+"be ye a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices," "have
+a good conscience," "avoid evil and do good," "above all, have
+fervent love, for love will cover a multitude of sins." No candid
+person can peruse the epistle and not see that the great moral
+deduced in it from the mission of Christ is this: Since heaven
+is offered you, strive by personal virtue to be prepared for it
+at the judgment which shall soon come. The disciple is not told
+to trust in the merits of Jesus; but he is urged to "abstain
+from evil," and "sanctify the Lord God in his heart," and
+"love the brethren," and "obey the laws," and "do well,"
+"girding up the loins of his mind in sobriety and hope."
+This is not Calvinism.
+
+The third fortification of this exposition is furnished by the
+following fact. According to our view, the death of Christ is
+emphasized, not on account of any importance in itself, but as the
+necessary condition preliminary to his resurrection, the
+humiliating prelude to his glorious ascent into heaven. The really
+essential, significant thing is not his suffering, vicarious
+death, but his triumphing, typical ascension. Now, the plain,
+repeated statements of Peter strikingly coincide with this
+representation. He says, "God raised Christ up from the dead, and
+gave him glory, [that is, received him into heaven,] that your
+faith and hope might be in God." Again he writes, "Blessed be God,
+who according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a
+lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead unto
+an incorruptible inheritance in heaven." Still again, he declares
+that "the figure of baptism, signifying thereby the answer of a
+good conscience toward God, saves us by the resurrection of Jesus
+Christ, who is gone into heaven." According to the commonly
+received doctrine, instead of these last words the apostle ought
+to have said, "saves us by the death of him who suffered in
+expiation of our sins." He does not say so. Finally, in the
+intrepid speech that Peter made before the Jewish council,
+referring to their wicked crucifixion of Jesus, he says, "Him hath
+God raised up to his own right hand, to be a Leader and a Savior,
+to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins." How plainly
+remission of sins is here predicated, not through Christ's
+ignominious suffering, but through his heavenly exaltation! That
+exaltation showed in dramatic proof that by God's grace the
+dominion of the lower world was about to be broken and an access
+to the celestial world to be vouchsafed.
+
+If Christ bought off our merited punishment and earned our
+acceptance, then salvation can no more be "reckoned of grace, but
+of debt." But the whole New Testament doctrine is, "that sinners
+are justified freely through the redemption that is in Christ
+Jesus." "The redemption that is in Christ"! Take these words
+literally, and they yield no intelligible meaning. The sense
+intended to be conveyed or suggested by them depends on
+interpretation; and here disagreement arises. The Calvinist says
+they mean the redemption undertaken, achieved, by Christ. We say
+they mean the redemption proclaimed, brought to light, by Christ.
+The latter explanation is as close to the language as the former.
+Neither is unequivocally established by the statement itself. We
+ought therefore to adopt the one which is at once most rational
+and plausible in itself, and most in harmony with the peculiar
+opinions and culture of the person by whom, and of the time when,
+the document was written. All these considerations, historical,
+philosophical, and moral, undeniably favor our interpretation,
+leaving nothing to support the other save the popular theological
+belief of modern Protestant Christendom, a belief which is the
+gradual product of a few great, mistaken teachers like Augustine
+and Calvin.
+
+We do not find the slightest difficulty in explaining sharply and
+broadly, with all its niceties of phraseology, each one of the
+texts urged in behalf of the prevalent doctrine of the atonement,
+without involving the essential features of that doctrine. Three
+demonstrable assertions of fact afford us all the requisite
+materials. First, it was a prevalent belief with the Jews, that,
+since death was the penalty of sin, the suffering of death was in
+itself expiatory of the sins of the dying man.12 Lightfoot says,
+"It is a common and most known doctrine of the Talmudists, that
+repentance and ritual sacrifice expiate some sins, death the rest.
+Death wipes off all unexpiated sins."13 Tholuck says, "It was a
+Jewish opinion that the death of the just atoned for the
+people."14 He quotes from the Talmud an explicit assertion to that
+effect, and refers to several learned authorities for further
+citations and confirmations.
+
+Secondly, the apostles conceived Christ to be sinless, and
+consequently not on his own account exposed to death and subject
+to Hades. If, then, death was an atonement for sins, and he was
+sinless, his voluntary death was expiatory for the sins of the
+world; not in an arbitrary and unheard of way, according to the
+Calvinistic scheme, but in the common way, according to a
+Pharisaic notion. And thirdly, it was partly a Jewish expectation
+concerning the Messiah that he would,15 and partly an apostolic
+conviction concerning Christ that he did, break the bolts of the
+old Hadean prison and open the way for human ascent to heaven. As
+Jerome says, "Before Christ Abraham was in hell, after Christ the
+crucified thief was in paradise;"16 for "until the advent of
+Christ all alike went down into the under world, heaven being shut
+until Christ threw aside the flaming sword that turned every
+way."17
+
+These three thoughts that death is the expiatory penalty of sin,
+that Christ was himself sinless, that he died as God's envoy to
+release the prisoners of gloom and be their pioneer to bliss leave
+nothing to be desired in explaining the sacrificial terms and
+kindred phrases employed by the apostles in reference to his
+mission.
+
+Without question, Peter, like his companions, looked for the
+speedy return of Christ from heaven to judge all, and to save the
+worthy. Indications of this belief are numerously afforded in his
+words. "The end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober
+and watch unto prayer." "You shall give account to him that is
+ready to judge the quick and the dead." Here the common idea of
+that time namely, that the resurrection of the captives of the
+
+12 Witsius, Dissertatio de Seculo hoc et futuro, sect. 8.
+
+13 Lightfoot on Matt. xii. 32.
+
+14 Comm. on John i. 29.
+
+15 "God shall liberate the Israelites from the under world."
+Bertholdt's Christologia Judaorum, sect. xxxiv., (De descensu
+Messia ad Inferos,) note 2. "The captives shall ascend from the
+under world, Shechinah at their head." Schoettgen de Messia, lib.
+vi. cap. 5, sect. 1.
+
+16 See his Letter to Heliodorus, Epiat. XXXV., Benedict. ed.
+
+17 Comm. in Eccles. cap. iii. 21, et cap. ix.
+
+
+under world would occur at the return of Christ is undoubtedly
+implied. "Salvation is now ready to be revealed in the last time."
+"That your faith may be found unto praise and honor and glory at
+the appearing of Jesus Christ." "Be sober, and hope to the end for
+the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of
+Jesus Christ." "Be ye examples to the flock, and when the chief
+Shepherd shall appear ye shall receive an unfading crown of
+glory." "God shall send Jesus Christ, . . . whom the heavens must
+receive until the times of the restitution of all things." It is
+evident that the author of these passages expected the second
+coming of the Lord Jesus to consummate the affairs of his kingdom.
+
+If the apostle had formed definite conclusions as to the final
+fate of unbelieving, wicked, reprobate men, he has not stated
+them. He undeniably implies certain general facts upon the
+subject, but leaves all the details in obscurity. He adjures his
+readers with exceeding earnestness he over and over again adjures
+them to forsake every manner of sinful life, to strive for every
+kind of righteous conversation, that by faith and goodness they
+may receive the salvation of their souls. He must have supposed an
+opposite fate in some sort to impend over those who did otherwise,
+rejecting Christ, "revelling in lasciviousness and idolatry."
+Everywhere he makes the distinction between the faithful and the
+wicked prominent, and presents the idea that Christ shall come to
+judge them both, and shall reward the former with gladness,
+crowns, and glory; while it is just as clearly implied as if he
+had said it that the latter shall be condemned and punished. When
+a judge sits in trial on the good and the bad, and accepts those,
+plainly the inference is that he rejects these, unless the
+contrary be stated. What their doom is in its nature, what in its
+duration, is neither declared, nor inferrible from what is
+declared. All that the writer says on this point is substantially
+repeated or contained in the fourth chapter of his epistle, from
+verses 12 to 19. A slight explanatory paraphrase of it will make
+the position clear so far as it can be made clear. "Christian
+believers, in the fiery trials which are to try you, stand firm,
+even rejoicing that you are fellow sufferers with Christ, a pledge
+that when his glory is revealed you shall partake of it with him.
+See to it that you are free from crime, free from sins for which
+you ought to suffer; then, if persecuted and slain for your
+Christian profession and virtues, falter not. The terrible time
+preceding the second advent of your Master is at hand. The
+sufferings of that time will begin with the Christian household;
+but how much more dreadful will be the sufferings of the close of
+that time among the disobedient that spurn the gospel of God! If
+the righteous shall with great difficulty be snatched from the
+perils and woes encompassing that time, surely it will happen very
+much worse with ungodly sinners. Therefore let all who suffer in
+obedience to God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well
+doing."
+
+The souls of men were confined in the under world for sin. Christ
+came to turn men from sin and despair to holiness and a
+reconciling faith in God. He went to the dead to declare to them
+the good tidings of pardon and approaching deliverance through the
+free grace of God. He rose into heaven to demonstrate and visibly
+exhibit the redemption of men from the under world doom of
+sinners. He was soon to return to the earth to complete the
+unfinished work of his commissioned kingdom. His accepted ones
+should then be taken to glory and reward. The rejected ones
+should Their fate is left in gloom, without a definite clew.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.
+
+THE Epistle to the Hebrews was written by some person who was
+originally a Jew, afterwards a zealous Christian. He was
+unquestionably a man of remarkable talent and eloquence and of
+lofty religious views and feelings. He lived in the time of the
+immediate followers of Jesus, and apparently was acquainted with
+them. The individual authorship it is now impossible to determine
+with certainty. Many of the most learned, unprejudiced, and able
+critics have ascribed it to Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, a compeer
+of Paul and a fellow citizen of Philo. This opinion is more
+probable than any other. Indeed, so numerous are the resemblances
+of thoughts and words in the writings of Philo to those in this
+epistle, that even the wild conjecture has been hazarded that
+Philo himself at last became a Christian and wrote to his Hebrew
+countrymen the essay which has since commonly passed for Paul's.
+No one can examine the hundreds of illustrations of the epistle
+gathered from Philo by Carpzov, in his learned but ill reasoned
+work, without being greatly impressed. The supposition which has
+repeatedly been accepted and urged, that this composition was
+first written in Hebrew, and afterwards translated into Greek by
+another person, is absurd, in view of the masterly skill and
+eloquence, critical niceties, and felicities in the use of
+language, displayed in it. We could easily fill a paragraph with
+the names of those eminent in the Church such as Tertullian,
+Hippolytus, Erasmus, Luther, Le Clerc, and Neander who have
+concluded that, whoever the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
+was, he was not Paul. The list of those names would reach from the
+Egyptian Origen, whose candor and erudition were without parallel
+in his age, to the German Bleek, whose masterly and exhaustive
+work is a monument of united talent and toil, leaving little to be
+desired. It is not within our present aim to argue this point: we
+will therefore simply refer the reader to the thorough and
+unanswerable discussion and settlement of it by Norton.1
+
+The general object of the composition is, by showing the
+superiority of the Christian system to the Hebrew, to arm the
+converts from Judaism to whom it is addressed against the
+temptations to desert the fulfilling faith of Christ and to return
+to the emblematic faith of their fathers. This aim gives a
+pervading cast and color to the entire treatment to the reasoning
+and especially to the chosen imagery of the epistle. Omitting, for
+the most part, whatever is not essentially interwoven with the
+subject of death, the resurrection, and future existence, and with
+the mission of Christ in relation to those subjects, we advance to
+the consideration of the views which the epistle presents or
+implies concerning those points. It is to be premised that we are
+forced to construct from fragments and hints the theological
+fabric that stood in the mind of the writer. The suggestion also
+is quite obvious that, since the letter is addressed solely to the
+Hebrews and describes Christianity as the completion of
+
+1 Christian Examiner, vols. for 1827 29.
+
+
+Judaism, an acquaintance with the characteristic Hebrew opinions
+and hopes at that time may be indispensable for a full
+comprehension of its contents.
+
+The view of the intrinsic nature and rank of Christ on which the
+epistle rests seems very plainly to be that great Logos doctrine
+which floated in the philosophy of the apostolic age and is so
+fully developed in the Gospel of John: "The Logos of God, alive,
+energetic, irresistibly piercing, to whose eyes all things are
+bare and open;" "first begotten of God;" "faithful to Him that
+made him;" inferior to God, superior to all beside; "by whom God
+made the worlds;" whose seat is at the right hand of God, the
+angels looking up to him, and "the world to come put in subjection
+to him." The author, thus assuming the immensely super human rank
+and the pre existence of Christ, teaches that, by the good will of
+God, he descended to the world in the form of a man, to save them
+that were without faith and in fear, them that were lost through
+sin. God "bringeth in the first begotten into the world." "When he
+cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou
+wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared for me." "Jesus was
+made a little while inferior to the angels." "Forasmuch, then, as
+the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself
+likewise partook of the same;" that is, in order to pass through
+an experience like that of those whom he wished to deliver, he
+assumed their nature. "He taketh not hold of angels, but he taketh
+hold of the seed of Abraham:" in other words, he aimed not to
+assist angels, but men. These passages, taken in connection with
+the whole scope and drift of the document in which they are found,
+declare that Jesus was a spirit in heaven, but came to the earth,
+taking upon him a mortal frame of flesh and blood.
+
+Why he did this is the question that naturally arises next. We do
+not see how it is possible for any person to read the epistle
+through intelligently, in the light of an adequate knowledge of
+contemporary Hebrew opinions, and not perceive that the author's
+answer to that inquiry is, that Christ assumed the guise and fate
+of humanity in order to die; and died in order to rise from the
+dead; and rose from the dead in order to ascend to heaven; and
+ascended to heaven in order to reveal the grace of God opening the
+way for the celestial exaltation and blessedness of the souls of
+faithful men. We will commence the proof and illustration of these
+statements by bringing together some of the principal passages in
+the epistle which involve the objects of the mission of Christ,
+and then stating the thought that chiefly underlies and explains
+them.
+
+"We see Jesus who was made a little while inferior to the angels,
+in order that by the kindness of God he might taste death for
+every man through the suffering of death crowned with glory and
+honor." With the best critics, we have altered the arrangement of
+the clauses in the foregoing verse, to make the sense clearer. The
+exact meaning is, that the exaltation of Christ to heaven after
+his death authenticated his mission, showed that his death had a
+divine meaning for men; that is, showed that they also should rise
+to heaven. "When he had by himself made a purification of our
+sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high." "For
+this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant, that, his death
+having occurred, (for the redemption of the transgressions under
+the first covenant,) they which are called might enter upon
+possession of the promised eternal inheritance." The force of this
+last passage, with its context, turns on the double sense of the
+Greek word for covenant, which likewise means a will. Several
+statements in the epistle show the author's belief that the
+subjects of the old dispensation had the promise of immortal life
+in heaven, but had never realized the thing itself.2 Now, he
+maintains the purpose of the new dispensation to be the actual
+revelation and bestowment of the reality which anciently was only
+promised and typically foreshadowed; and in the passage before us
+he figures Christ the author of the Christian covenant as the
+maker of a will by which believers are appointed heirs of a
+heavenly immortality. He then following the analogy of
+testamentary legacies and legatees  describes those heirs as
+"entering on possession of that eternal inheritance" "by the death
+of the Testator." He was led to employ precisely this language by
+two obvious reasons: first, for the sake of that paronomasia of
+which he was evidently fond; secondly, by the fact that it really
+was the death of Christ, with the succeeding resurrection and
+ascension, which demonstrated both the reality of the thing
+promised in the will and the authority of the Testator to bestow
+it.
+
+All the expressions thus far cited, and kindred ones scattered
+through the work, convey a clear and consistent meaning, with
+sharp outlines and coherent details, if we suppose their author
+entertained the following general theory; and otherwise they
+cannot be satisfactorily explained. A dreadful fear of death,
+introduced by sin, was tyrannizing over men. In consequence of
+conscious alienation from God through transgressions, they
+shuddered at death. The writer does not say what there was in
+death that made it so feared; but we know that the prevailing
+Hebrew conception was, that death led the naked soul into the
+silent, dark, and dreary region of the under world, a doleful
+fate, from which they shrank with sadness at the best, guilt
+converting that natural melancholy into dread foreboding. In the
+absence of any evidence or presumption whatever to the contrary,
+we are authorized, nay, rather forced, to conclude that such a
+conception is implied in the passages we are considering. Now, the
+mission of Jesus was to deliver men from that fear and bondage, by
+assuring them that God would forgive sin and annul its
+consequence. Instead of banishing their disembodied spirits into
+the sepulchral Sheol, he would take them to himself into the glory
+above the firmament. This aim Christ accomplished by literally
+exemplifying the truths it implies; that is, by personally
+assuming the lot of man, dying, rising from among the spirits of
+the dead, and ascending beyond the veil into heaven. By his death
+and victorious ascent "he purged our sins," "redeemed
+transgressions," "overthrew him that has the power of death," in
+the sense that he thereby, as the writer thought, swept away the
+supposed train of evils caused by sin, namely, all the
+concomitants of a banishment after death into the cheerless
+subterranean empire.
+
+It will be well now to notice more fully, in the author's scheme,
+the idea that Christ did locally ascend into the heavens, "into
+the presence of God," "where he ever liveth," and
+
+2 xi. 13, 16, et al. See chap. x. 36,
+
+where to receive the promise most plainly means to obtain the thing
+promised, as it does several times in the epistle.
+
+So Paul, in his speech at Antioch, (Acts xiii. 32, 33,) says,
+"We declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise which
+was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto us
+their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again" that by
+this ascent he for the first time opened the way for others to
+ascend to him where he is, avoiding the doom of Hades.
+
+"We have a great High Priest, who has passed through the
+heavens, Jesus, the Son of God." "Christ is not entered into the
+most holy place, made with hands, the figure of the true, but into
+heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us."
+Indeed, that Jesus, in a material and local sense, rose to heaven,
+is a conception fundamental to the epistle and prominent on all
+its face. It is much more necessary for us to show that the author
+believed that the men who had previously died had not risen
+thither, but that it was the Savior's mission to open the way for
+their ascension.
+
+It is extremely significant, in the outset, that Jesus is called
+"the first leader and the bringer to the end of our faith;" for
+the words in this clause which the common version renders "author"
+and "finisher"3 mean, from their literal force and the latent
+figure they contain, "a guide who runs through the course to the
+goal so as to win and receive the prize, bringing us after him to
+the same consummation." Still more striking is the passage we
+shall next adduce. Having enumerated a long list of the choicest
+worthies of the Old Testament, the writer adds, "These all, having
+obtained testimony through faith, did not realize the promise,4
+God having provided a better thing for us, that they without us
+should not be perfected," should not be brought to the end, the
+end of human destiny, that is, exaltation to heaven. Undoubtedly
+the author here means to say that the faithful servants of God
+under the Mosaic dispensation were reserved in the under world
+until the ascension of the Messiah. Augustine so explains the text
+in hand, declaring that Christ was the first that ever rose from
+the under world.5 The same exposition is given by Origen,6 and
+indeed by nearly every one of the Fathers who has undertaken to
+give a critical interpretation of the passage. This doctrine
+itself was held by Catholic Christendom for a thousand years; is
+now held by the Roman, Greek, and English Churches; but is, for
+the most part, rejected or forgotten by the dissenting sects, from
+two causes. It has so generally sunk out of sight among us, first,
+from ignorance, ignorance of the ancient learning and opinions on
+which it rested and of which it was the necessary completion;
+secondly, from rationalistic speculations, which, leading men to
+discredit the truth of the doctrine, led them arbitrarily to deny
+its existence in the Scripture, making them perversely force the
+texts that state it and wilfully blink the texts that hint it.
+Whether this be a proper and sound method of proceeding in
+critical investigations any one may judge. To us it seems equally
+unmanly and immoral. We know of but one justifiable course, and
+that is, with patience, with earnestness, and with all possible
+aids, to labor to discern the real and full meaning of the words
+according to the understanding and intention of the author. We do
+so elsewhere, regardless of consequences. No other method, in the
+case of the Scriptures, is exempt from guilt.
+
+The meaning (namely, to bring to the end) which we have above
+attributed to the word [NAC](translated in the common version to
+make perfect) is the first meaning and the
+
+3 Robinson's Lexicon, first edition, under [NAC]; also see Philo,
+cited there.
+
+4 Ch. x. 36.
+
+5 Epist. CLXIV. sect. ix., ed. Benedictina.
+
+6 De Principiis, lib. ii. cap. 2.
+
+
+etymological force of the word. That we do not refine upon it
+over nicely in the present instance, the following examples from
+various parts of the epistle unimpeachably witness. "For it was
+proper that God, in bringing many sons unto glory, should make him
+who was the first leader of their salvation perfect [reach the
+end] through sufferings;" that is, should raise him to heaven
+after he had passed through death, that he, having himself arrived
+at the glorious heavenly goal of human destiny, might bring others
+to it. "Christ, being made perfect," (brought through all the
+intermediate steps to the end,) "became the cause of eternal
+salvation to all them that obey him; called of God an high
+priest." The context, and the after assertion of the writer that
+the priesthood of Jesus is exercised in heaven, show that the word
+"perfected," as employed here, signifies exalted to the right hand
+of God. "Perfection" (bringing unto the end) "was not by the
+Levitical priesthood." "The law perfected nothing, but it was the
+additional introduction of a better hope by which we draw near
+unto God." "The law maketh men high priests which have infirmity,
+which are not suffered to continue, by reason of death; but the
+word of the oath after the law maketh the Son perfect for
+evermore," bringeth him to the end, namely, an everlasting
+priesthood in the heavens. That Christian believers are not under
+the first covenant, whereby, through sin, men commencing with the
+blood of Abel, the first death were doomed to the lower world, but
+are under the second covenant, whereby, through the gracious
+purpose of God, taking effect in the blood of Christ, the first
+resurrection, they are already by faith, in imagination,
+translated to heaven, this is plainly what the author teaches in
+the following words: "Ye are not come to the palpable mount that
+burneth with fire, and to blackness and tempest, where so terrible
+was the sight that Moses exceedingly trembled, but ye are come to
+Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable
+company of angels, and to God, and to the spirits of the perfected
+just, and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, and to the
+lustral blood which speaks better things than that of Abel." The
+connection here demonstrates that the souls of the righteous are
+called "perfected," as having arrived at the goal of their destiny
+in heaven. Again, the author, when speaking of the sure and
+steadfast hope of eternal life, distinguishes Jesus as a
+[non-ASCII characters], one who runs before as a scout or leader:
+"the Forerunner, who for us has entered within the veil," that is,
+has passed beyond the firmament into the presence of God. The Jews
+called the outward or lowermost heaven the veil.7 But the most
+conclusive consideration upon the opinion we are arguing for and
+it must be entirely convincing is to be drawn from the first half
+of the ninth chapter. To appreciate it, it is requisite to
+remember that the Rabbins with whose notions our author was
+familiar and some of which he adopts in his reasoning were
+accustomed to compare the Jewish temple and city with the temple
+and city of Jehovah above the sky, considering the former as
+miniature types of the latter. This mode of thought was originally
+learned by philosophical Rabbins from the Platonic doctrine of
+ideas, without doubt, and was entertained figuratively,
+spiritually; but in the unreflecting, popular mind the Hebraic
+views to which it gave rise were soon grossly materialized and
+located. They also derived the same conception from God's command
+to Moses when he was about to build the tabernacle:
+
+7 Schoettgen, Hora Hebraica et Talmudica in 2 Cor. xii. 2.
+
+
+"See thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee
+in the mount." They refined upon these words with many conceits.
+They compared the three divisions of the temple to the three
+heavens: the outer Court of the Gentiles corresponded with the
+first heaven, the Court of the Israelites with the second heaven,
+and the Holy of Holies represented the third heaven or the very
+abode of God. Josephus writes, "The temple has three compartments:
+the first two for men, the third for God, because heaven is
+inaccessible to men."8 Now, our author says, referring to this
+triple symbolic arrangement of the temple, "The priests went
+always into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service, but
+into the second went the high priest alone, once every year, not
+without blood; this, which was a figure for the time then present,
+signifying that the way into the holiest of all9 was not yet laid
+open; but Christ being come, an high priest of the future good
+things, by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
+having obtained eternal deliverance." The points of the comparison
+here instituted are these: On the great annual day of atonement,
+after the death of the victim, the Hebrew high priest went into
+the adytum of the earthly temple, but none could follow; Jesus,
+the Christian high priest, went after his own death into the
+adytum of the heavenly temple, and enabled the faithful to enter
+there after him. Imagery like the fore going, which implies a
+Sanctum Sanctorum above, the glorious prototype of that below, is
+frequent in the Talmud.10 To remove all uncertainty from the
+exposition thus presented, if any doubt linger, it is only
+necessary to cite one more passage from the epistle. "We have,
+therefore, brethren, by the blood of Jesus, leading into the
+holiest, a free road, a new and blessed road, which he hath
+inaugurated for us through the veil, that is to say, through his
+flesh." As there was no entrance for the priest into the holiest
+of the temple save by the removal of the veil, so Christ could not
+enter heaven except by the removal of his body. The blood of Jesus
+here, as in most cases in the New Testament, means the death of
+Jesus, involving his ascension. Chrysostom, commenting on these
+verses, says, in explanation of the word [non-ASCII characters],
+"Christ laid out the road and was the first to go over it.
+The first way was of death, leading [ad inferos] to the under
+world; the other is of life," leading to heaven.
+
+The interpretation we have given of these passages reconciles
+and blends that part of the known contemporary opinions which
+applies to them, and explains and justifies the natural force
+of the imagery and words employed.
+
+Its accuracy seems to us unquestionable by any candid person who is
+competently acquainted with the subject. The substance of it is,
+that Jesus came from God to the earth as a man, laid down his life
+that he might rise from the dead into heaven again, into the real
+Sanctum Sanctorum of the universe, thereby proving that faithful
+believers also shall rise thither, being thus delivered, after the
+pattern of his evident deliverance, from the imprisonment of the
+realm of death below.
+
+We now proceed to quote and unfold five distinct passages, not yet
+brought forward, from the epistle, each of which proves that we
+are not mistaken in attributing to the writer
+
+8 Antiq. lib. iii. cap. 6, sect. 4; ibid. cap. 7, sect. 7.
+
+9 Philo declares, "The whole universe is one temple of God, in
+which the holiest of all is heaven." De Monarchia, p. 222, ed.
+Mangey.
+
+10 Schoettgen, Dissertatio de Hierosolyma Coelesti, cap. 2, sect.
+9.
+
+
+of it the above stated general theory. In the first verse which we
+shall adduce it is certain that the word "death" includes the
+entrance of the soul into the subterranean kingdom of ghosts. It
+is written of Christ that, "in the days of his flesh, when he had
+earnestly prayed to Him that was able to do it, to save him from
+death, he was heard," and was advanced to be a high priest in the
+heavens, "was made higher than the heavens." Now, obviously, God
+did not rescue Christ from dying, but he raised him, [non-ASCII
+characters], from the world of the dead.
+
+So Chrysostom declares, referring to this very text, "Not to be
+retained in the region of the dead, but to be delivered from it,
+is virtually not to die."11 Moreover, the phrase above translated
+"to save him from death" may be translated, with equal propriety,
+"to bring him back safe from death."
+
+The Greek verb [non-ASCII characters], to save, is often so used
+to denote the safe restoration of a warrior from an incursion into
+an enemy's domain. The same use made here by our author of the term
+"death" we have also found made by Philo Judaus. "The wise," Philo
+says, "inherit the Olympic and heavenly region to dwell in, always
+studying to go above; the bad inherit the innermost parts of the
+under world, always laboring to die."12 The antithesis between
+going above and dying, and the mention of the under world in
+connection with the latter, prove that to die here means, or at
+least includes, going below after death.
+
+The Septuagint version of the Old Testament twice translates Sheol
+by the word "death."13 The Hebrew word for death, maveth, is
+repeatedly used for the abode of the dead.14 And the nail of the
+interpretation we are urging is clenched by this sentence from
+Origen:  "The under world, in which souls are detained by death,
+is called death."15 Bretschneider cites nearly a dozen passages
+from the New Testament where, in his judgment, death is used to
+denote Hades.
+
+Again: we read that Christ took human nature upon him "in order
+that by means of [his own] death he might render him that has the
+power of death that is, the devil idle, and deliver those who
+through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage."
+It is apparent at once that the mere death of Christ, so far from
+ending the sway of Death, would be giving the grim monster a new
+victory, incomparably the most important he had ever achieved.
+Therefore, the only way to make adequate sense of the passage is
+to join with the Savior's death what followed it, namely, his
+resurrection and ascension. It was the Hebrew belief that sin,
+introduced by the fraud of the devil, was the cause of death, and
+the doomer of the disembodied spirits of men to the lower caverns
+of darkness and rest. They personified Death as king, tyrannizing
+over mankind; and, unless in severe affliction, they dreaded the
+hour when they must lie down under his sceptre and sink into his
+voiceless kingdom of shadows. Christ broke the power of Satan,
+closed his busy reign, rescued the captive souls, and relieved the
+timorous hearts of the faithful, by rising triumphantly from
+
+11 Homil. Epist. ad Heb. in hoc loc.
+
+12 Quod a Deo mitt. Somn., p. 643, ed. Mangey.
+
+13 2 Sam. xxii. 6; Prov. xxiii. 14.
+
+14 Ps. ix. 13. Prov. vii, 27.
+
+15 Comm. in Epist. ad Rom., lib. vi. cap. 6, sect. 6.: "Inferni
+locus in quo anima detinebantur a morte mors appellatur."
+
+
+the long bound dominion of the grave, and ascending in a new path
+of light, pioneering the saints to immortal glory.
+
+In another part of the epistle, the writer, having previously
+explained that as the high priest after the death of the expiatory
+goat entered the typical holy place in the temple, so Christ after
+his own death entered the true holy place in the heavens, goes on
+to guard against the analogy being forced any further to deny the
+necessity of Christ's service being repeated, as the priest's was
+annually repeated, saying, "For then he must have died many times
+since the foundation of the world; but, on the contrary, [it
+suffices that] once, at the close of the ages, through the
+sacrifice of himself he hath appeared [in heaven] for the
+abrogation of sin."16 The rendering and explanation we give of
+this language are those adopted by the most distinguished
+commentators, and must be justified by any one who examines the
+proper punctuation of the clauses and studies the context. The
+simple idea is, that, by the sacrifice of his body through death,
+Christ rose and showed himself in the presence of God. The author
+adds that this was done "unto the annulling of sin." It is with
+reference to these last words principally that we have cited the
+passage. What do they mean? In what sense can the passing of
+Christ's soul into heaven after death be said to have done away
+with sin? In the first place, the open manifestation of Christ's
+disenthralled and risen soul in the supernal presence of God did
+not in any sense abrogate sin itself, literally considered,
+because all kinds of sin that ever were upon the earth among men
+before have been ever since, and are now. In the second place,
+that miraculous event did not annul and remove human guilt, the
+consciousness of sin and responsibility for it, because, in fact,
+men feel the sting and load of guilt now as badly as ever; and the
+very epistle before us, as well as the whole New Testament,
+addresses Christians as being exposed to constant and varied
+danger of incurring guilt and woe. But, in the third place, the
+ascension of Jesus did show very plainly to the apostles and first
+Christians that what they supposed to be the great outward penalty
+of sin was annulled; that it was no longer a necessity for the
+spirit to descend to the lower world after death; that fatal doom,
+entailed on the generations of humanity by sin, was now abrogated
+for all who were worthy. Such, we have not a doubt, is the true
+meaning of the declaration under review.
+
+This exposition is powerfully confirmed by the two succeeding
+verses, which we will next pass to examine. "As it is appointed
+for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ,
+having been offered once to bear the sins of many, shall appear a
+second time, without sin, for salvation unto those expecting him."
+Man dies once, and then passes into that state of separate
+existence in the under world which is the legal judgment for sin.
+Christ, taking upon himself, with the nature of man, the burden of
+man's lot and doom, died once, and then rose from the dead by the
+gracious power of the Father, bearing away the outward penalty of
+sin. He will come again into the world, uninvolved, the next time,
+with any of the accompaniments or consequences of sin, to save
+them that look for him, and victoriously lead them into heaven
+with him. In this instance, as all through the writings of the
+apostles,
+
+16 Griesbach in loc.; and Rosenmuller.
+
+
+sin, death, and the under world are three segments of a circle,
+each necessarily implying the others. The same remark is to be
+made of the contrasted terms righteousness, grace, immortal life
+above the sky; 17 the former being traced from the sinful and
+fallen Adam, the latter from the righteous and risen Christ.
+
+The author says, "If the blood of bulls and goats sanctifies unto
+the purification of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of
+Christ, who having18 an eternal spirit offered himself faultless
+to God, cleanse your consciousness!" The argument, fully
+expressed, is, if the blood of perishable brutes cleanses the
+body, the blood of the immortal Christ cleanses the soul. The
+implied inference is, that as the former fitted the outward man
+for the ritual privileges of the temple, so the latter fitted the
+inward man for the spiritual privileges of heaven. This appears
+clearly from what follows in the next chapter, where the writer
+says, in effect, that "it is not possible for the blood of bulls
+and of goats to take away sins, however often it is offered, but
+that Christ, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins, forever
+sat down at the right hand of God." The reason given for the
+efficacy of Christ's offering is that he sat down at the right
+hand of God. When the chosen animals were sacrificed for sins,
+they utterly perished, and there was an end. But when Christ was
+offered, his soul survived and rose into heaven, an evident sign
+that the penalty of sin, whereby men were doomed to the under
+world after death, was abolished. This perfectly explains the
+language; and nothing else, it seems to us, can perfectly explain
+it.
+
+That Christ would speedily reappear from heaven in triumph, to
+judge his foes and save his disciples, was a fundamental article
+in the primitive Church scheme of the last things. There are
+unmistakable evidences of such a belief in our author. "For yet a
+little while, and the coming one will come, and will not delay."
+"Provoke one another unto love and good works, . . . so much the
+more as ye see the day drawing near." There is another reference
+to this approaching advent, which, though obscure, affords
+important testimony. Jesus, when he had ascended, "sat down at the
+right hand of God, henceforward waiting till his enemies be made
+his footstool." That is to say, he is tarrying in heaven for the
+appointed time to arrive when he shall come into the world again
+to consummate the full and final purposes of his mission. We may
+leave this division of the subject established beyond all
+question, by citing a text which explicitly states the idea in so
+many words: "Unto them that look for him he shall appear the
+second time." That expectation of the speedy second coming of the
+Messiah which haunted the early Christians, therefore,
+unquestionably occupied the mind of the composer of the Epistle to
+the Hebrews.
+
+If the writer of this epistolary essay had a firm and detailed
+opinion as to the exact fate to be allotted to wicked and
+persistent unbelievers, his allusions to that opinion are too few
+and vague for us to determine precisely what it was. We will
+briefly quote the substance of what he says upon the subject, and
+add a word in regard to the inferences it does, or it does not,
+warrant. "If under the Mosaic dispensation every transgression
+received a just recompense, how shall we escape if we neglect so
+great a salvation, first proclaimed by the
+
+17 Neander, Planting and Training of the Church, Ryland's trans.
+p. 298.
+
+18 [Non-ASCII characters] is often used in the sense of with,
+or possessing. See Wahl's New Testament Lexicon.
+
+
+Lord?" "As the Israelites that were led out of Egypt by Moses, on
+account of their unbelief and provocations, were not permitted to
+enter the promised land, but perished in the wilderness, so let us
+fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any
+of you should seem to come short of it." Christ "became the cause
+of eternal salvation to all them that obey him." "He hath brought
+unto the end forever them that are sanctified." It will be
+observed that these last specifications are partial, and that
+nothing is said of the fate of those not included under them. "It
+is impossible for those who were once enlightened, . . . if they
+shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance. . . . But,
+beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, even things that
+accompany salvation." "We are not of them who draw back unto the
+destruction, but of them who believe unto the preservation, of the
+soul." "If we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of
+the truth, there is no longer left a sacrifice for sins, but a
+certain fearful looking for of judgment, and of fiery indignation
+to devour the adversaries." "It is a fearful thing to fall into
+the hands of the living God." "If they escaped not who refused him
+that spoke on earth, [Moses,] much more we shall not escape if we
+turn away from him that speaks from heaven," (Christ.) In view of
+the foregoing passages, which represent the entire teaching of the
+epistle in relation to the ultimate destination of sinners, we
+must assert as follows. First, the author gives no hint of the
+doctrine of literal torments in a local hell. Secondly, he is
+still further from favoring nay, he unequivocally denies the
+doctrine of unconditional, universal salvation. Thirdly, he either
+expected that the reprobate would be absolutely destroyed at the
+second coming of Christ,  which does not seem to be declared; or
+that they would be exiled forever from the kingdom of glory into
+the sad and slumberous under world, which is not clearly implied;
+or that they would be punished according to their evil, and then,
+restored to Divine favor, be exalted into heaven with the original
+elect, which is not written in the record; or, lastly, that they
+would be disposed of in some way unknown to him, which he does not
+avow. He makes no allusion to such a terrific conception as is
+expressed by our modern use of the word hell: he emphatically
+predicates conditionality of salvation, he threatens sinners in
+general terms with severe judgment. Further than this he has
+neglected to state his faith. If it reached any further, he has
+preferred to leave the statement of it in vague and impressive
+gloom.
+
+Let us stop a moment and epitomize the steps we have taken. Jesus,
+the Son of God, was a spirit in heaven. He came upon the earth in
+the guise of humanity to undergo its whole experience and to be
+its redeemer. He died, passed through the vanquished kingdom of
+the grave, and rose into heaven again, to exemplify to men that
+through the grace of God a way was opened to escape the under
+world, the great external penalty of sin, and reach a better
+country, even a heavenly. From his seat at God's right hand, he
+should ere long descend to complete God's designs in his mission,
+judge his enemies and lead his accepted followers to heaven. The
+all important thought running through the length and breadth of
+the treatise is the ascension of Christ from the midst of the dead
+[non-ASCII characters]into the celestial presence, as the pledge of
+our ascent. "Among the things of which we are speaking, this is the
+capital consideration, [non-ASCII characters] the most essential
+point, "that we have such a high priest, who hath sat down at the
+right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens." Neander
+says, though apparently without perceiving the extent of its
+ulterior significance, "The conception of the resurrection in
+relation to the whole Christian system lies at the basis of this
+epistle."
+
+A brief sketch and exposition of the scope of the epistle in
+general will cast light and confirmation upon the interpretation
+we have given of its doctrine of a future life in particular. The
+one comprehensive design of the writer, it is perfectly clear, is
+to prove to the Christian converts from the Hebrews the
+superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and thus to arm them
+against apostasy from the new covenant to the ancient one. He
+begins by showing that Christ, the bringer of the gospel, is
+greater than the angels, by whom the law was given,19 and
+consequently that his word is to be reverenced still more than
+theirs.20 Next he argues that Jesus, the Christian Mediator, as
+the Son of God, is crowned with more authority and is worthy of
+more glory than Moses, the Jewish mediator, as the servant of God;
+and that as Moses led his people towards the rest of Canaan, so
+Christ leads his people towards the far better rest of heaven. He
+then advances to demonstrate the superiority of Christ to the
+Levitical priesthood. This he establishes by pointing out the
+facts that the Levitical priest had a transient honor, being after
+the law of a carnal commandment, his offerings referring to the
+flesh, while Christ has an unchangeable priesthood, being after
+the power of an endless life, his offering referring to the soul;
+that the Levitical priest once a year went into the symbolic holy
+place in the temple, unable to admit others, but Jesus rose into
+the real holy place itself above, opening a way for all faithful
+disciples to follow; and that the Hebrew temple and ceremonies
+were but the small type and shadow of the grand archetypal temple
+in heaven, where Christ is the immortal High Priest, fulfilling in
+the presence of God the completed reality of what Judaism merely
+miniatured, an emblematic pattern that could make nothing perfect.
+"By him therefore let us continually offer to God the sacrifice of
+praise." The author intersperses, and closes with, exhortations to
+steadfast faith, pure morals, and fervent piety.
+
+There is one point in this epistle which deserves, in its
+essential connection with the doctrine of the future life, a
+separate treatment. It is the subject of the Atonement. The
+correspondence between the sacrifices in the Hebrew ritual and the
+sufferings and death of Christ would, from the nature of the case,
+irresistibly suggest the sacrificial terms and metaphors which our
+author uses in a large part of his argument. Moreover, his precise
+aim in writing compelled him to make these resemblances as
+prominent, as significant, and as effective as possible. Griesbach
+says well, in his learned and able essay, "When it was impossible
+for the Jews, lately brought to the Christian faith, to tear away
+the attractive associations of their ancestral religion, which
+were twined among the very roots of their minds, and they were
+consequently in danger of falling away from Christ, the most
+ingenious author of this epistle met the case by a masterly
+expedient. He instituted a careful comparison, showing the
+superiority of Christianity to Judaism even in regard to the very
+point where the latter seemed so much more glorious, namely, in
+priesthoods, temples,
+
+19 Heb. i. 4 14, ii. 2; Acts vii. 53; Gal. iii.
+
+20 Heb. ii. 1 3.
+
+
+altars, victims, lustrations, and kindred things."21 That these
+comparisons are sometimes used by the writer analogically,
+figuratively, imaginatively, for the sake of practical
+illustration and impression, not literally as logical expressions
+and proofs of a dogmatic theory of atonement, is made sufficiently
+plain by the following quotations. "The bodies of those beasts
+whose blood is brought into the holy place by the high priest for
+sin are burned without the camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that he
+might sanctify the people through his own blood, suffered without
+the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp,
+bearing his reproach." Every one will at once perceive that these
+sentences are not critical statements of theological truths, but
+are imaginative expressions of practical lessons, spiritual
+exhortations. Again, we read, "It was necessary that the patterns
+of the heavenly things should be purified with sacrificed animals,
+but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than
+these." Certainly it is only by an exercise of the imagination,
+for spiritual impression, not for philosophical argument, that
+heaven can be said to be defiled by the sins of men on earth so as
+to need cleansing by the lustral blood of Christ. The writer also
+appeals to his readers in these terms: "To do good and to
+communicate forget not; for with such sacrifices God is well
+pleased." The purely practical aim and rhetorical method with
+which the sacrificial language is employed here are evident
+enough. We believe it is used in the same way wherever it occurs
+in the epistle.
+
+The considerations which have convinced us, and which we think
+ought to convince every unprejudiced mind, that the Calvinistic
+scheme of a substitutional expiation for sin, a placation of
+Divine wrath by the offering of Divine blood, was not in the mind
+of the author, and does not inform his expressions when they are
+rightly understood, may be briefly presented. First, the notion
+that the suffering of Christ in itself ransomed lost souls, bought
+the withheld grace and pardon of God for us, is confessedly
+foreign and repulsive to the instinctive moral sense and to
+natural reason, but is supposed to rest on the authority of
+revelation. Secondly, that doctrine is nowhere specifically stated
+in the epistle, but is assumed, or inferred, to explain language
+which to a superficial look seems to imply it,  perhaps even seems
+to be inexplicable without it;22 but in reality such a view is
+inconsistent with that language when it is accurately studied. For
+example, notice the following passage: "When Christ cometh into
+the world," he is represented as saying, "I come to do thy will, O
+God." "By the which will," the writer continues, "we are
+sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus." That is,
+the death of Christ, involving his resurrection and ascension into
+heaven, fulfils and exemplifies the gracious purpose of God, not
+purchases for us an otherwise impossible benignity. The above
+cited explicit declaration is irreconcilable
+
+21 Opuscula: De Imaginibus Judaicis in Epist. ad Hebraos.
+
+22 That these texts were not originally understood as implying any
+vicarious efficacy in Christ's painful death, but as attributing a
+typical power to his triumphant resurrection, his glorious return
+from the world of the dead into heaven, appears very plainly in
+the following instance, Theodoret, one of the earliest explanatory
+writers on the New Testament, says, while expressly speaking of
+Christ's death, the sufferings through which he was perfected,
+"His resurrection certified a resurrection for us all." Comm. in
+Epist. ad Heb. cap. 2, v. 10.
+
+
+with the thought that Christ came into the world to die that he
+might appease the flaming justice and anger of God, and by
+vicarious agony buy the remission of human sins: it conveys the
+idea, on the contrary, that God sent Christ to prove and
+illustrate to men the free fulness of his forgiving love. Thirdly,
+the idea, which we think was the idea of the author of the Epistle
+to the Hebrews, that Christ, by his death, resurrection, and
+ascent, demonstrated to the faith of men God's merciful removal of
+the supposed outward penalty of sin, namely, the banishment of
+souls after death to the under world, and led the way, as their
+forerunner, into heaven, this idea, which is not shocking to the
+moral sense nor plainly absurd to the moral reason, as the
+Augustinian dogma is, not only yields a more sharply defined,
+consistent, and satisfactory explanation of all the related
+language of the epistle, but is also which cannot be said of the
+other doctrine in harmony with the contemporary opinions of the
+Hebrews, and would be the natural and almost inevitable
+development from them and complement of them in the mind of a
+Pharisee, who, convinced of the death and ascension of the sinless
+Jesus, the appointed Messiah, had become a Christian.
+
+In support of the last assertion, which is the only one that needs
+further proof, we submit the following considerations. In the
+first place, every one familiar with the eschatology of the
+Hebrews knows that at the time of Christ the belief prevailed that
+the sin of Adam was the cause of death among men. In the second
+place, it is equally well known that they believed the destination
+of souls upon leaving the body to be the under world. Therefore
+does it not follow by all the necessities of logic? they believed
+that sin was the cause of the descent of disembodied spirits to
+the dreary lower realm. In the third place, it is notorious and
+undoubted that the Jews of that age expected that, when the
+Messiah should appear, the dead of their nation, or at least a
+portion of them, would be raised from the under world and be
+reclothed with bodies, and would reign with him for a period on
+earth and then ascend to heaven. Now, what could be more natural
+than that a person holding this creed, who should be brought to
+believe that Jesus was the true Messiah and after his death had
+risen from among the dead into heaven, should immediately conclude
+that this was a pledge or illustration of the abrogation of the
+gloomy penalty of sin, the deliverance of souls from the
+subterranean prison, and their admission to the presence of God
+beyond the sky? We deem this an impregnable position. Every
+relevant text that we consider in its light additionally fortifies
+it by the striking manner in which such a conception fits, fills,
+and explains the words. To justify these interpretations, and to
+sustain particular features of the doctrine which they express,
+almost any amount of evidence may be summoned from the writings
+both of the most authoritative and of the simplest Fathers of the
+Church, beginning with Justin Martyr,23 philosopher of Neapolis,
+at the close of the apostolic age, and ending with John Hobart,24
+Bishop of New York, in the early part of the nineteenth century.
+We refrain from adducing the throng of such authorities here,
+because they will be more appropriately brought forward in future
+chapters.
+
+23 Dial. cum Tryph. cap. v. et cap. lxxx.24 State of the Departed.
+
+
+The intelligent reader will observe that the essential point of
+difference distinguishing our exposition of the fundamental
+doctrine of the composition in review, on the one hand, from the
+Calvinistic interpretation of it, and, on the other hand, from the
+Unitarian explanation of it, is this. Calvinism says that Christ,
+by his death, his vicarious pains, appeased the wrath of God,
+satisfied the claims of justice, and purchased the salvation of
+souls from an agonizing and endless hell. Unitarianism says that
+Christ, by his teachings, spirit, life, and miracles, revealed the
+character of the Father, set an example for man, gave certainty to
+great truths, and exerted moral influences to regenerate men,
+redeem them from sin, and fit them for the blessed kingdom of
+immortality. We understand the writer of the Epistle to the
+Hebrews really to say in subtraction from what the Calvinist, in
+addition to what the Unitarian, says that Christ, by his
+resurrection from the tyrannous realm of death, and ascent into
+the unbarred heaven, demonstrated the fact that God, in his
+sovereign grace, in his free and wondrous love, would forgive
+mankind their sins, remove the ancient penalty of transgression,
+no more dooming their disembodied spirits to the noiseless and
+everlasting gloom of the under world, but admitting them to his
+own presence, above the firmamental floor, where the beams of his
+chambers are laid, and where he reigneth forever, covered with
+light as with a garment.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE APOCALYPSE.
+
+BEFORE attempting to exhibit the doctrine of a future life
+contained in the Apocalypse, we propose to give a brief account of
+what is contained, relating to this subject, in the Epistle of
+James, the Epistle of Jude, and the (so called) Second Epistle of
+Peter.
+
+The references made by James to the group of points included under
+the general theme of the Future Life are so few and indirect, or
+vague, that it is impossible to construct any thing like a
+complete doctrine from them, save by somewhat arbitrary and
+uncertain suppositions. His purpose in writing, evidently, was
+practical exhortation, not dogmatic instruction. His epistle
+contains no expository outline of a system; but it has allusions
+and hints which plainly imply some partial views belonging to a
+system, while the other parts of it are left obscure. He says that
+"evil desire brings forth sin, and sin, when it is finished,
+brings forth death." But whether he intended this text as a moral
+metaphor to convey a spiritual meaning, or as a literal statement
+of a physical fact, or as a comprehensive enunciation including
+both these ideas, there is nothing in the context positively to
+determine. He offers not the faintest clew to his conception of
+the purpose of the death and resurrection of Christ. He uses the
+word for the Jewish hell but once, and then, undeniably, in a
+figurative sense, saying that a "curbless and defiling tongue is
+set on fire of Gehenna." He appears to adopt the common notion of
+his contemporary countrymen in regard to demoniacal existences,
+when he declares that "the devils believe there is one God, and
+tremble," and when he exclaims, "Resist the devil, and he will
+flee from you." He insists on the necessity of a faith that
+evinces itself in good works and in all the virtues, as the means
+of acceptance with God. He compares life to a vanishing vapor,
+denounces terribly the wicked and dissolute rich men who wanton in
+crimes and oppress the poor. Then he calls on the suffering
+brethren to be patient under their afflictions "until the coming
+of the Lord;" to abstain from oaths, be fervent in prayer, and
+establish their hearts, "for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh."
+"Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned:
+behold, the Judge standeth before the door." Here the return of
+Christ, to finish his work, sit in judgment, accept some, and
+reject others, is clearly implied. And if James held this element
+of the general scheme of eschatology held by the other apostles as
+shown in their epistles, it is altogether probable that he also
+embraced the rest of that scheme. There are no means of definitely
+ascertaining whether he did or did not; though, according to a
+very learned and acute theologian, another fundamental part of
+that general system of doctrine is to be found in the last verse
+of the epistle, where James says that "he who converts a sinner
+from the error of his ways shall save a soul from death and hide a
+multitude of sins." Bretschneider thinks that saving a soul from
+death here means rescuing it from a descent into the under world,
+the word death being often used in the New Testament as by the
+Rabbins to denote the subterranean abode of the dead.1 This
+
+1 Bretschneider, Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 59.
+
+
+interpretation may seem forced to an unlearned reader, who
+examines the text for personal profit, but will not seem at all
+improbable to one who, to learn its historic meaning, reads the
+text in the lighted foreground of a mind over whose background
+lies a fitly arranged knowledge of all the materials requisite for
+an adequate criticism. For such a man was Bretschneider himself.
+
+The eschatological implications and references in the Epistle of
+Jude are of pretty much the same character and extent as those
+which we have just considered. A thorough study and analysis of
+this brief document will show that it may be fairly divided into
+three heads and be regarded as having three objects. First, the
+writer exhorts his readers "to contend earnestly for the faith
+once delivered to the saints," "to remember the words of Christ's
+apostles," "to keep themselves in the love of God, looking for
+eternal life." He desires to stir them up to diligence in efforts
+to preserve their doctrinal purity and their personal virtue.
+Secondly, he warns them of the fearful danger of depravity, pride,
+and lasciviousness. This warning he enforces by several examples
+of the terrible judgments of God on the rebellious and wicked in
+other times. Among these instances is the case of the Cities of
+the Plain, eternally destroyed by a storm of fire for their
+uncleanness; also the example of the fallen angels, "who kept not
+their first estate, but left their proper habitation, and are
+reserved in everlasting chains and darkness unto the judgment of
+the great day." The writer here adopts the doctrine of fallen
+angels, and the connected views, as then commonly received among
+the Jews. This doctrine is not of Christian origin, but was drawn
+from Persian and other Oriental sources, as is abundantly shown,
+with details, in almost every history of Jewish opinions, in
+almost every Biblical commentary.2 In this connection Jude cites a
+legend from an apocryphal book, called the "Ascension of Moses,"
+of which Origen gives an account.3 The substance of the tradition
+is, that, at the decease of Moses, Michael and Satan contended
+whether the body should be given over to death or be taken up to
+heaven. The appositeness of this allusion is, that, while in this
+strife the archangel dared not rail against Satan, yet the wicked
+men whom Jude is denouncing do not hesitate to blaspheme the
+angels and to speak evil of the things which they know not. "Woe
+unto such ungodly men: gluttonous spots, dewless clouds, fruitless
+trees plucked up and twice dead, they are ordained to
+condemnation." Thirdly, the epistle announces the second coming of
+Christ, in the last time, to establish his tribunal. The Prophecy
+of Enoch an apocryphal book, recovered during the present century
+is quoted as saying, "Behold, the Lord cometh, with ten thousand
+of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict the
+ungodly of their ungodly deeds."4 Jude, then, anticipated the
+return of the Lord, at "the judgment of the great day," to judge
+the world; considered the under world, or abode of the dead, not
+as a region of fire, but a place of imprisoning gloom, wherein "to
+defiled and blaspheming dreamers is reserved the blackness of
+darkness forever;"
+
+2 E. g. Stuart's Dissertation on the Angelology of the Scriptures,
+published in vol. i. of the Bibliotheca Sacra.
+
+3 De Principiis, lib. iii. cap 2. See, also, in Michaelis's
+Introduction to the New Testament, sect. 4 of the chapter on Jude.
+
+4 Book of Enoch, translated by Dr. R. Laurence, cap. ii.
+
+
+thought it imminently necessary for men to be diligent in striving
+to secure their salvation, because "all sensual mockers, not
+having the spirit, but walking after their own ungodly lusts,"
+would be lost. He probably expected that, when all free
+contingencies were past and Christ had pronounced sentence, the
+condemned would be doomed eternally into the black abyss, and the
+accepted would rise into the immortal glory of heaven. He closes
+his letter with these significant words, which plainly imply much
+of what we have just been setting forth: "Everlasting honor and
+power, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be unto God, who is able to
+keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the face
+of his glory with exceeding joy."5
+
+The first chapter of the so called Second Epistle of Peter is not
+occupied with theological propositions, but with historical,
+ethical, and practical statements and exhortations. These are,
+indeed, of such a character, and so expressed, that they clearly
+presuppose certain opinions in the mind of the writer. First, he
+evidently believed that a merciful and holy message had been sent
+from God to men by Jesus Christ, whereby are given unto us
+exceeding great and precious promises." The substance of these
+promises was "a call to escape the corruption of the world, and
+enter into glory and be partakers of the Divine nature." By
+partaking of the Divine nature, we understand the writer to mean
+entering the Divine abode and condition, ascending into the safe
+and eternal joy of the celestial prerogatives. That the author
+here denotes heaven by the term glory, as the other New Testament
+writers frequently do, appears distinctly from the seventeenth and
+eighteenth verses of the chapter, where, referring to the incident
+at the baptism of Jesus, he declares, "There came a voice from the
+excellent glory, saying, 'This is my beloved Son;' and this voice,
+which came from heaven, we heard." Secondly, our author regarded
+this glorious promise as contingent on the fulfilment of certain
+conditions. It was to be realized by means of "faith, courage,
+knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, kindness, and love."
+"He that hath these things shall never fall," "but an entrance
+shall be ministered unto him abundantly into the everlasting
+kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." The writer
+furnishes us no clew to his idea of the particular part performed
+by Christ in our salvation. He says not a word concerning the
+sufferings or death of the Savior; and the extremely scanty and
+indefinite allusions made to the relation in which Christ was
+supposed to stand between God and men, and the redemption and
+reconciliation of men with God, do not enable us to draw any
+dogmatic conclusions. He speaks of "false teachers, who shall
+bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought
+them." But whether by this last phrase he means to imply a ransom
+of imprisoned souls from the under world by Christ's descent
+thither and victory over its powers, or a purchased exemption of
+sinners from their merited doom by the vicarious sufferings of
+Christ's death, or a practical regenerative redemption of
+disciples from their sins by the moral influences of his mission,
+his teachings, example, and character, there is nothing in the
+epistle clearly to decide; though, forming our judgment by the aid
+of other sources of information, we should conclude in favor of
+the first of these three conceptions as most probably expressing
+the writer's thought.
+
+5 Griesbuch's reading of the 25th verse of Jude.
+
+
+The second chapter of the epistle is almost an exact parallel with
+the Epistle of Jude: in many verses it is the same, word for word.
+It threatens "unclean, self willed, unjust, and blaspheming men,"
+that they shall "be reserved unto the day of judgment, to be
+punished." It warns such persons by citing the example of the
+rebellious "angels, who were thrust down into Tartarus, and
+fastened in chains of darkness until the judgment." It speaks of
+"cursed children, to whom is reserved the mist of darkness
+forever." Herein, plainly enough, is betrayed the common notion of
+the Jews of that time, the conception of a dismal under world,
+containing the evil angels of the Persian theology, and where the
+wicked were to be remanded after judgment and eternally
+imprisoned.
+
+The third and last chapter is taken up with the doctrine of the
+second coming of Christ. "Be mindful of the words of the prophets
+and apostles, knowing this first, that in the last days there
+shall be scoffers, who will say, 'Where is the promise of his
+coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as
+from the beginning.'" The writer meets this skeptical assertion
+with denial, and points to the Deluge, "whereby the world that
+then was, being overflowed with water, perished." His argument is,
+the world was thus destroyed once, therefore it may be destroyed
+again. He then goes on to assert positively relying for authority
+on old traditions and current dogmas that "the heavens and the
+earth which are now are kept by the word of God in store to be
+destroyed by fire in the day of judgment, when the perdition of
+ungodly men shall be sealed." "The delay of the Lord to fulfil his
+promise is not from procrastination, but from his long suffering
+who is not willing that any should perish." He waits "that all may
+come to repentance." But his patience will end, and "the day of
+God come as a thief in the night, when the heavens, being on fire,
+shall pass away with a crash, and the elements melt with fervent
+heat." There are two ways in which these declarations may be
+explained, though in either case the events they refer to are to
+occur in connection with the physical reappearance of Christ.
+First, they may be taken in a highly figurative sense, as meaning
+the moral overthrow of evil and the establishment of righteousness
+in the world. Similar expressions were often used thus by the
+ancient Hebrew prophets, who describe the triumphs of Israel and
+the destruction of their enemies, the Edomites or the Assyrians,
+by the interposition of Jehovah's arm, in such phrases as these.
+"The mountains melt, the valleys cleave asunder like wax before a
+fire, like waters poured over a precipice." "The heavens shall be
+rolled up like a scroll, all their hosts shall melt away and fall
+down; for Jehovah holdeth a great slaughter in the land of Edom:
+her streams shall be turned into pitch, and her dust into
+brimstone, and her whole land shall become burning pitch." The
+suppression of Satan's power and the setting up of the Messiah's
+kingdom might, according to the prophetic idiom, be expressed in
+awful images of fire and woe, the destruction of the old, and the
+creation of a new, heaven and earth. But, secondly, this
+phraseology, as used by the writer of the epistle before us, may
+have a literal significance,  may have been intended to predict
+strictly that the world shall be burned and purged by fire at the
+second coming of the Lord. That such a catastrophe would take
+place in the last day, or occurred periodically, was notoriously
+the doctrine of the Persians and of the Stoics.6 For our own part,
+we are convinced that the latter is the real meaning of the
+writer. This seems to be shown alike by the connection of his
+argument, by the prosaic literality of detail with which he
+speaks, and by the earnest exhortations he immediately bases on
+the declaration he has made. He reasons that, since the world was
+destroyed once by water, it may be again by fire. The deluge he
+certainly regarded as literal: was not, then, in his conception,
+the fire, too, literal? He says, with calm, prosaic precision,
+"The earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
+Seeing, then, that all these things shall be dissolved, what
+manner of persons ought ye to be in all holiness, looking for a
+new heaven and a new earth, and striving that ye may be found by
+him in peace, without spot, and blameless!" We do not suppose this
+writer expected the annihilation of the physical creation, but
+only that the fire would destroy all unransomed creatures from its
+surface, and thoroughly purify its frame, and make it clean and
+fit for a new race of sinless and immortal men.
+
+"Tears shall not break from their full source,
+Nor Anguish stray from her Tartarean den,
+The golden years maintain a course
+Not undiversified, though smooth and even,
+We not be mock'd with glimpse and shadow then,
+Bright seraphs mix familiarly with men,
+And earth and sky compose a universal heaven."
+
+We have now arrived at the threshold of the last book in the New
+Testament, that book which, in the words of Lucke, "lies like a
+Sphinx at the lofty outgate of the Bible." There are three modes
+of interpreting the Apocalypse, each of which has had numerous and
+distinguished advocates. First, it may be regarded as a congeries
+of inspired prophecies, a scenic unfolding, with infallible
+foresight, of the chief events of Christian history from the first
+century till now, and onwards. This view the combined effect of
+the facts in the case and of all the just considerations
+appropriate to the subject compels us to reject. There is no
+evidence to support it; the application of it is crowded with
+egregious follies and absurdities. We thus simply state the result
+of our best investigation and judgment, for there is no space here
+to discuss it in detail. Secondly, the book may be taken as a
+symbolic exhibition of the transitional crises, exposures,
+struggles, and triumphs of the individual soul, a description of
+personal experience, a picture of the inner life of the Christian
+in a hostile world. The contents of it can be made to answer to
+such a characterization only by the determined exercise of an
+unrestrained fancy, or by the theory of a double sense, as the
+Swedenborgians expound it. This method of interpreting the
+Revelation is adopted, not by scholarly thinkers, who, by the
+light of learning and common sense, seek to discern what the
+writer meant to express, but by those persons who go to the
+obscure document, with traditional superstition and lawless
+imaginations, to see what lessons they can find there for their
+experimental guidance and edification. We suppose that every
+intelligent and informed student who has
+
+6 Cicero de Nat. Deorum, lib. ii. cap. 46. Also Ovid, Minucius
+Felix, Seneca, and other authorities, as quoted by Rosenmuller on
+2 Peter iii. 7.
+
+
+examined the subject with candid independence holds it as an
+exegetical axiom that the Apocalypse is neither a pure prophecy,
+blazing full illumination from Patmos along the track of the
+coming centuries, nor an exhaustive vision of the experience of
+the faithful Christian disciple. We are thus brought to the third
+and, as we think, the correct mode of considering this remarkable
+work. It is an outburst from the commingled and seething mass of
+opinions, persecutions, hopes, general experience, and expectation
+of the time when it was written. This is the view which would
+naturally arise in the mind of an impartial student from the
+nature of the case, and from contemplating the fervid faith,
+suffering, lowering elements, and thick coming events of the
+apostolic age. It also strikingly corresponds with numerous
+express statements and with the whole obvious spirit and plan of
+the work; for its descriptions and appeals have the vivid colors,
+the thrilling tones, the significantly detailed allusions to
+experiences and opinions and anticipations notoriously existing at
+the time, which belong to present or immediately impending scenes.
+This way of considering the Apocalypse likewise enables one who is
+acquainted with the early Jewish Christian doctrines, legends, and
+hopes, to explain clearly a large number of passages in it whose
+obscurity has puzzled many a commentator. We should be glad to
+give various illustrations of this, if our limits did not confine
+us strictly to the one class of texts belonging to the doctrine of
+a future life. Furthermore, nearly all the most gifted critics,
+such as Ewald, Bleek, Lucke, De Wette,  those whose words on such
+matters as these are weightiest, now agree in concluding that the
+Revelation of John was a product springing out of the intense
+Jewish Christian belief and experience of the age, and referring,
+in its dramatic scenery and predictions, to occurrences supposed
+to be then transpiring or very close at hand. Finally, this view
+in regard to the Apocalypse is strongly confirmed by a comparison
+of that production with the several other works similar to it in
+character and nearly contemporaneous in origin. These apocryphal
+productions were written or compiled according to the pretty
+general agreement of the great scholars who have criticized them
+somewhere between the beginning of the first century before, and
+the middle of the second century after, Christ. We merely propose
+here, in the briefest manner, to indicate the doctrine of a future
+life contained in them, as an introduction to an exposition of
+that contained in the New Testament Apocalypse.
+
+In the TESTAMENT OF THE TWELVE PATRIARCHS it is written that "the
+under world shall be spoiled through the death of the Most
+Exalted."7 Again, we read, "The Lord shall make battle against the
+devil, and conquer him, and rescue from him the captive souls of
+the righteous. The just shall rejoice in Jerusalem, where the Lord
+shall reign himself, and every one that believes in him shall
+reign in truth in the heavens."8 Farther on the writer says of the
+Lord, after giving an account of his crucifixion, "He shall rise
+up from the under world and ascend into heaven."9 These extracts
+seem to imply the common doctrine of that time, that Christ
+descended into the under world, freed the captive saints, and rose
+into heaven, and would soon return to establish his throne in
+Jerusalem, to reign there for a time with his accepted followers.
+
+7 See this book in Fabricii Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris
+Testamenti, Test. Lev. sect. iv.
+
+8 Ibid. Test. Dan. sect. v.
+
+9 Ibid. Test. Benj. sect. ix.
+
+
+The FOURTH BOOK OF EZRA contains scattered declarations and hints
+of the same nature.10 It describes a vision of the Messiah, on
+Mount Zion, distributing crowns to those confessors of his name
+who had died in their fidelity.11 The world is said to be full of
+sorrows and oppressions; and as the souls of the just ask when the
+harvest shall come,12 for the good to be rewarded and the wicked
+to be punished, they are told that the day of liberation is not
+far distant, though terrible trials and scourges must yet precede
+it. "My Son Jesus shall be revealed." "My Son the Christ shall
+die; and then a new age shall come, the earth shall give up the
+dead, sinners shall be plunged into the bottomless abyss, and
+Paradise shall appear in all its glory."13 The "Son of God will
+come and consume his enemies with fire; but the elect will be
+protected and made happy."14
+
+The ASCENSION OF ISAIAH is principally occupied with an account of
+the rapture of the soul of that prophet through the seven heavens,
+and of what he there saw and learned. It describes the descent of
+Christ, the beloved Son of God, through all the heavens, to the
+earth; his death; his resurrection after three days; his victory
+over Satan and his angels, who dwell in the welkin or higher
+region of the air; and his return to the right hand of God.15 It
+predicts great apostasy and sin among the disciples of the
+apostles, and much dissension respecting the nearness of the
+second advent of Christ.16 It emphatically declares that "Christ
+shall come with his angels, and shall drag Satan and his powers
+into Gehenna. Then all the saints shall descend from heaven in
+their heavenly clothing, and dwell in this world; while the saints
+who had not died shall be similarly clothed, and after a time
+leave their bodies here, that they may assume their station in
+heaven. The general resurrection and judgment will follow, when
+the ungodly will be devoured by fire."17 The author as Gesenius,
+with almost all the rest of the critics, says was unquestionably a
+Jewish Christian, and his principal design was to set forth the
+speedy second coming of Christ, and the glorious triumph of the
+saints that would follow with the condign punishment of the
+wicked.
+
+The first book of the SIBYLLINE ORACLES contains a statement that
+in the golden age the souls of all men passed peacefully into the
+under world, to tarry there until the judgment; a prediction of a
+future Messiah; and an account of his death, resurrection, and
+ascension. The second book begins with a description of the
+horrors that will precede the last time, threats against the
+persecuting tyrants, and promises to the faithful, especially to
+the martyrs, and closes with an account of the general judgment,
+when Elijah shall come from heaven, consuming flames break out,
+all souls be summoned to the tribunal of God at whose right hand
+Christ will sit, the bodies of the dead be raised, the righteous
+be purified, and the wicked be plunged into final ruin.
+
+The fundamental thought and aim of the apocryphal BOOK OF ENOCH
+are the second coming of Christ to judge the world, the
+encouragement of the Christians, and the warning
+
+10 See the abstract of it given in section vi. of Stuart's
+Commentary on the Apocalypse.
+
+11 Cap. ii. 12 Cap. iv. 13 Cap. v., vii. 14 Cap. xiii., xvi.
+
+15 Ascensio Isaia Vatis, a Ricardo Laurence, cap. ix., x., xi.
+
+16 Ibid. cap. ii., iii.
+
+17 Ibid. cap. iv. 13-18.
+
+
+of their oppressors by declarations of approaching deliverance to
+those and vengeance to these. This is transparent at frequent
+intervals through the whole book.18 "Ye righteous, wait with
+patient hope: your cries have cried for judgment, and it shall
+come, and the gates of heaven shall be opened to you." "Woe to
+you, powerful oppressors, false witnesses! for you shall suddenly
+perish." "The voices of slain saints accusing their murderers, the
+oppressors of their brethren, reach to heaven with interceding
+cries for swift justice."19 When that justice comes, "the horse
+shall wade up to his breast, and the chariot shall sink to its
+axle, in the blood of sinners."20 The author teaches that the
+souls of men at death go into the under world, "a place deep and
+dark, where all souls shall be collected;" "where they shall
+remain in darkness till the day of judgment," the spirits of the
+righteous being in peace and joy, separated from the tormented
+spirits of the wicked, who have spurned the Messiah and persecuted
+his disciples.21 A day of judgment is at hand. "Behold, he cometh,
+with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment." Then the
+righteous shall rise from the under world, be approved, become as
+angels, and ascend to heaven. But the wicked shall not rise: they
+remain imprisoned below forever.22 The angels descend to earth to
+dwell with men, and the saints ascend to heaven to dwell with
+angels.23 "From beginning to end, like the Apocalypse, the book is
+filled," says Professor Stuart, (and the most careless reader must
+remark it,) "with threats for the wicked persecutors and
+consolations for the suffering pious." A great number of
+remarkable correspondences between passages in this book and
+passages in the Apocalypse solicit a notice which our present
+single object will not allow us to give them here. An under world
+divided into two parts, a happy for the good, a wretched for the
+bad; temporary woes prevailing on the earth; the speedy advent of
+Christ for a vindication of his power and his servants; the
+resurrection of the dead; the final translation of the accepted
+into heaven, and the hopeless dooming of the rejected into the
+abyss, these are the features in the book before us which we are
+now to remember.
+
+There is one other extant apocryphal book whose contents are
+strictly appropriate to the subject we have in hand, namely, the
+APOCALYPSE OF JOHN.24 It claims to be the work of the Apostle John
+himself. It represents John as going to Mount Tabor after the
+ascension of Christ, and there praying that it may be revealed to
+him when the second coming of Christ will occur, and what will be
+the consequences of it. In answer to his request, a long and
+minute disclosure is made. The substance of it is, that, after
+famines and woes, Antichrist will appear and reign three years.
+Then Enoch and Elijah will come to expose him; but they will die,
+and all men with them. The earth will be purified with fire, the
+dead will rise, Christ
+
+18 Book of Enoch, translated into English by Dr. R. Laurence. See
+particularly the following places: i. 1 5; lii. 7; liv. 12; lxi.
+15; lxii. 14, 15; xciv.; xcv.; civ.
+
+19 Ibid. cap. ix. 9 11; xxii. 5 8; xlvii. 1-4.
+
+20 Ibid. cap. xcviii. 3.
+
+21 Ibid. cap. x. 6 9, 15, 16; xxii. 2 5, 11 13; cii. 6; ciii. 5.
+
+22 Ibid. cap. xxii. 14, 15; xlv. 2; xlvi. 4; 1. 1-4.
+
+23 cap. xxxviii. xl.
+
+24 See the abstract of it given in Lucke's Einleit. in die
+Offenbar. Joh., cap. 2, sect. 17.
+
+
+will descend in pomp, with myriads of angels, and the judgment
+will follow. The spirits of Antichrist will be hurled into a gulf
+of outer darkness, so deep that a heavy stone would not plunge to
+the bottom in three years. Unbelievers, sinners, hypocrites, will
+be cast into the under world; while true Christians are placed at
+the right hand of Christ, all radiant with glory. The good and
+accepted will then dwell in an earthly paradise, with angels, and
+be free from all evils.
+
+In addition to these still extant Apocalypses, we have references
+in the works of the Fathers to a great many others long since
+perished; especially the Apocalypses of Adam, Abraham, Moses,
+Elijah, Hystaspes, Paul, Peter, Thomas, Cerinthus, and Stephen. So
+far as we have any clew, by preserved quotations or otherwise, to
+the contents of these lost productions, they seem to have been
+much occupied with the topics of the avenging and redeeming advent
+of the Messiah, the final judgment of mankind, the supernal and
+subterranean localities, the resurrection of the dead, the
+inauguration of an earthly paradise, the condemnation of the
+reprobate to the abyss beneath, the translation of the elect to
+the Angelic realm on high. These works, all taken together, were
+plainly the offspring of the mingled mass of glowing faiths,
+sufferings, fears, and hopes, of the age they belonged to. An
+acquaintance with them will help us to appreciate and explain many
+things in our somewhat kindred New Testament Apocalypse, by
+placing us partially in the circumstances and mental attitude of
+the writer and of those for whom it was written.
+
+The Persian Jewish and Jewish Christian notions and
+characteristics of the Book of Revelation are marked and
+prevailing, as every prepared reader must perceive. The threefold
+division of the universe into the upper world of the angels, the
+middle world of men, and the under world of the dead; the keys of
+the bottomless pit; the abode of Satan, the accuser, in heaven;
+his revolt; the war in the sky between his seduced host and the
+angelic army under Michael, and the thrusting down of the former;
+the banquet of birds on the flesh of kings, mighty men, and
+horses; the battle of Gog and Magog; the tarrying of souls under
+the altar of God; the temple in heaven containing the ark of the
+covenant, and the scene of a various ritual service; the twelve
+gates of the celestial city bearing the names of the twelve tribes
+of the children of Israel, and the twelve foundations of the walls
+having the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb; the bodily
+resurrection and general judgment, and the details of its sequel,
+all these doctrines and specimens of imagery, with a hundred
+others, carry us at once into the Zend Avesta, the Talmud, and the
+Ebionitish documents of the earliest Christians, who mixed their
+interpretations of the mission and teaching of Christ with the
+poetic visions of Zoroaster and the cabalistic dogmatics of the
+Pharisees. 25
+
+It is astonishing that any intelligent person can peruse the
+Apocalypse and still suppose that it is occupied with prophecies
+of remote events, events to transpire successively in distant ages
+and various lands. Immediateness, imminency, hazardous urgency,
+swiftness, alarms, are written all over the book. A suspense,
+frightfully thrilling, fills it, as if the world were holding its
+breath in view of the universal crash that was coming with
+electric velocity.
+
+25 See, e. g., Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, band
+ii. th. 3 7; Gfrorer, Geschichte Urchristenthums, abth. ii. kap.
+8 10; Schottgen in Apoc. xii. 6 9; ibid. in 2 Cor. v. 2.
+
+
+Four words compose the key to the Apocalypse: Rescue, Reward,
+Overthrow, Vengeance. The followers of Christ are now persecuted
+and slain by the tyrannical rulers of the earth. Let them be of
+good cheer: they shall speedily be delivered. Their tyrants shall
+be trampled down in "blood flowing up to the horse bridles," and
+they shall reign in glory. "Here is the faith and the patience of
+the saints," trusting that, if "true unto death, they shall have a
+crown of life," and "shall not be hurt of the second death," but
+shall soon rejoice over the triumphant establishment of the
+Messiah's kingdom and the condign punishment of his enemies who
+are now "making themselves drunk with the blood of the martyrs of
+Jesus." The Beast, described in the thirteenth chapter, is
+unquestionably Nero; and this fact shows the expected
+immediateness of the events pictured in connection with the rise
+and destruction of that monstrous despot.26 The truth of this
+representation is sealed by the very first verses of the book,
+indicating the nature of its contents and the period to which they
+refer: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him,
+to show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass:
+Blessed are they who hear the words of this prophecy and keep
+them; for the time is at hand."
+
+This rescue and reward of the faithful, this overthrow and
+punishment of the wicked, were to be effected by the agency of a
+unique and sublime personage, who was expected very soon to
+appear, with an army of angels from heaven, for this purpose. The
+conception of the nature, rank, and offices of Jesus Christ which
+existed in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse is in some
+respects but obscurely hinted in the words he employs; yet the
+relationship of those words to other and fuller sources of
+information in the contemporaneous notions of his countrymen is
+such as to give us great help in arriving at his ideas. He
+represents Christ as distinct from and subordinate to God. He
+makes Christ say, "To him that overcometh I will give power over
+the nations, even as I received of my Father." He characterizes
+him as "the beginning of the creation of God," and describes him
+as "mounted on a white horse, leading the heavenly armies to war,
+and his name is called the Logos of God." These terms evidently
+correspond to the phrases in the introduction to the Gospel of
+John, and in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, where are unfolded
+some portions of that great doctrine, so prevalent among the early
+Fathers, which was borrowed and adapted by them from the Persian
+Honover, the Hebrew Wisdom, and the Platonic Logos.27 "In the
+beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and all
+things were made by him;... and the Logos was made flesh and dwelt
+among us."28 "God of our fathers, and Lord of mercy, who hast made
+all things by thy Logos."29 "Thine almighty Logos leaped down from
+heaven from his royal throne, a fierce warrior, into the midst of
+a land of destruction."30 "Plainly enough, the Apocalyptic view of
+Christ is based on that profound Logos doctrine so copiously
+
+26 See the excursus by Stuart in his Commentary on the Apoc. xiii.
+18, which conclusively shows that the Beast could be no other than
+Nero.
+
+27 Lucke, Einleitung in das Evang. Joh.
+
+28 Evang. Joh. i. 1, 3, 14.
+
+29 Wisdom of Solomon, ix. 1, 2.
+
+30 Ibid. xviii. 15.
+
+
+developed in the writings of Philo Judaus and so distinctly
+endorsed in numerous passages of the New Testament. First, there
+is the absolute God. Next, there is the Logos, the first begotten
+Son and representative image of God, the instrumental cause of the
+creation, the head of all created beings. This Logos, born into
+our world as a man, is Christ. Around him are clustered all the
+features and actions that compose the doctrine of the last things.
+The vast work of redemption and judgment laid upon him has in part
+been already executed, and in part remains yet to be done.
+
+We are first to inquire, then, into the significance of what the
+writer of the Apocalypse supposes has already been effected by
+Christ in his official relations between God and men, so far as
+regards the general subject of a life beyond the grave. A few
+brief and vague but comprehensive expressions include all that he
+has written which furnishes us a guide to his thoughts on this
+particular. He describes Jesus, when advanced to his native
+supereminent dignity in heaven, as the "Logos, clothed in a
+vesture dipped in blood," and also as "the Lamb that was slain,"
+to whom the celestial throng sing a new song, saying, "Thou hast
+redeemed us unto God by thy blood." Christ, he says, "loved us,
+and washed us from our sins in his own blood." He represents the
+risen Savior as declaring, "I am he that liveth, and was dead,
+and, behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of the
+under world and of death." "Jesus Christ," again he writes, "is
+the faithful witness, the first begotten from the dead." What,
+now, is the real meaning of these pregnant phrases? What is the
+complete doctrine to which fragmentary references are here made?
+We are confident that it is this. Mankind, in consequence of sin,
+were alienated from God, and banished, after death, to Hades, the
+subterranean empire of shadows. Christ, leaving his exalted state
+in heaven, was born into the world as a messenger, or "faithful
+witness," of surprising grace to them from God, and died that he
+might fulfil his mission as the agent of their redemption, by
+descending into the great prison realm of the dead, and, exerting
+his irresistible power, return thence to light and life, and
+ascend into heaven as the forerunner and pledge of the deliverance
+and ascension of others. Moses Stuart, commenting on the clause
+"first begotten from the dead," says, "Christ was in fact the
+first who enjoyed the privilege of a resurrection to eternal glory
+and he was constituted the leader of all who should afterwards be
+thus raised from the dead."31 All who had died, with the sole
+exception of Christ, were yet in the under world. He, since his
+triumphant subdual of its power and return to heaven, possessed
+authority over it, and would ere long summon its hosts to
+resurrection, as he declares: "I was dead, and, behold, I am alive
+for ever more, and have the keys of the under world." The figure
+is that of a conqueror, who, returning from a captured and subdued
+city, bears the key of it with him, a trophy of his triumph and a
+pledge of its submission. The text "Thou hast redeemed us unto God
+by thy blood" is not received in an absolutely literal sense by
+any theological sect whatever. The severest Calvinist does not
+suppose that the physical blood shed on the cross is meant; but he
+explains it as denoting the atoning efficacy of the vicarious
+sufferings of Christ. But this interpretation is as forced and
+constructive an exposition as the one we have given, and is not
+
+31 Stuart, Comm. in Apoc. i. 5.
+
+
+warranted by the theological opinions of the apostolic age, which
+do, on the contrary, support and necessitate the other. The direct
+statement is, that men were redeemed unto God by the blood of
+Christ. All agree that in the word "blood" is wrapped up a
+figurative meaning. The Calvinistic dogma makes it denote the
+satisfaction of the law of retributive justice by a substitutional
+anguish. We maintain that a true historical exegesis, with far
+less violence to the use of language, and consistently with known
+contemporaneous ideas, makes it denote the death of Christ, and
+the events which were supposed to have followed his death, namely,
+his appearance among the dead, and his ascent to heaven,
+preparatory to their ascent, when they should no longer be exiled
+in Hades, but should dwell with God. Out of an abundance of
+illustrative authorities we will cite a few.
+
+Augustine describes "the ancient saints" as being "in the under
+world, in places most remote from the tortures of the impious,
+waiting for Christ's blood and descent to deliver them."32
+Epiphanius says, "Christ was the first that rose from the under
+world to heaven from the time of the creation."33 Lactantius
+affirms, "Christ's descent into the under world and ascent into
+heaven were necessary to give man the hope of a heavenly
+immortality."34 Hilary of Poictiers says, "Christ went down into
+Hades for two reasons: first, to fulfil the law imposed on mankind
+that every soul on leaving the body shall descend into the under
+world, and, secondly, to preach the Christian religion to the
+dead."35 Chrysostom writes, "When the Son of God cometh, the earth
+shall burst open, and all the men that ever were born, from Adam's
+birth up to that day, shall rise up out of the earth."36 Irenaus
+testifies, "I have heard from a certain presbyter, who heard it
+from those who had seen the apostles and received their
+instructions, that Christ descended into the under world, and
+preached the gospel and his own advent to the souls there, and
+remitted the sins of those who believed on him."37 Eusebius
+records that, "after the ascension of Jesus, Thomas sent Thaddeus,
+one of the Seventy, to Abgarus, King of Edessa. This disciple told
+the king how that Jesus, having been crucified, descended into the
+under world, and burst the bars which had never before been
+broken, and rose again, and also raised with himself the dead that
+had slept for ages; and how he descended alone, but ascended with
+a great multitude to his Father; and how he was about to come
+again to judge the living and the dead."38 Finally, we cite the
+following undeniable statement from Daille's famous work on the
+"Right Use of the Fathers:" "That heaven shall not be opened till
+the second coming of Christ and the day of judgment, that during
+this time the souls of all men, with a few exceptions, are shut up
+in the under world,  was held by Justin Martyr, Irenaus,
+Tertullian, Augustine, Origen, Lactantius, Victorinus, Ambrose,
+Chrysostom, Theodoret, OEcumenius, Aretas, Prudentius,
+Theophylact, Bernard,
+
+32 De Civitate Dei, lib. xx. cap. 15.
+
+33 In Resurrectionem Christi.
+
+34 Divin. Instit. lib. iv. cap. 19, 20.
+
+35 Hilary in Ps. cxviii. et cxix.
+
+36 Homil. in Rom. viii. 25.
+
+37 Adv. Hares. lib. iv. sect. 45.
+
+38 Ecc. Hist. lib. i. cap. 13.
+
+
+and many others, as is confessed by all. This doctrine is
+literally held by the whole Greek Church at the present day. Nor
+did any of the Latins expressly deny any part of it until the
+Council of Florence, in the year of our Lord 1439."39
+
+In view of these quotations, and of volumes of similar ones which
+might be adduced, we submit to the candid reader that the meaning
+most probably in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse when he
+wrote the words "redemption by the Blood of Christ" was this, the
+rescue certified to men by the commissioned power and devoted
+self sacrifice of Christ in dying, going down to the mighty
+congregation of the dead, proclaiming good tidings, breaking the
+hopeless bondage of death and Hades, and ascending as the pioneer
+of a new way to God. If before his death all men were supposed to
+go down to helpless confinement in the under world on account of
+sin, but after his resurrection the promise of an ascension to
+heaven was made to them through his gospel and exemplification,
+then well might the grateful believers, fixing their hearts on his
+willing martyrdom in their behalf, exclaim, "He loved us, and
+washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings
+and priests unto God." It is certainly far more natural, far more
+reasonable, to suppose that the scriptural phrase "the blood of
+Christ" means "the death of Christ," with its historical
+consequences, than to imagine that it signifies a complicated and
+mysterious scheme of sacerdotal or ethical expiation, especially
+when that scheme is unrelated to contemporaneous opinion,
+irreconcilable withmorality,and confessedly nowhere plainly stated
+in Scripture, but a matter of late and laborious construction and
+inference. We have not spoken of the strictly moral and subjective
+mission and work of Christ, as conceived by the author of the
+Apocalypse,  his influences to cleanse the springs of character,
+purify and inspire the heart, rectify and elevate the motives,
+regenerate and sanctify the soul and the life, because all this is
+plain and unquestioned. But he also believed in something
+additional to this, an objective function: and what that was we
+think is correctly explained above.
+
+We are next to inquire more immediately into the closing parts of
+the doctrine of the last things. Christ has appeared, declared the
+tidings of grace, died, visited the dead, risen victoriously, and
+gone back to heaven, where he now tarries. But there remain many
+things for him, as the eschatological King, yet to do. What are
+they? and what details are connected with them? First of all, he
+is soon to return from heaven, visiting the earth a second time.
+The first chapter of the book begins by declaring that it is "a
+revelation of things which must shortly come to pass," and
+"blessed is he that readeth; for the time is at hand." The last
+chapter is full of such repetitions as these: "things which must
+shortly be done;" "Behold, I come quickly;" "The time is at hand;"
+"He that is unjust, let him be unjust still, and he that is holy,
+let him be holy still;" "Surely I come quickly;" "Even so, come,
+Lord Jesus." Herder says, in his acute and eloquent work on the
+Apocalypse, "There is but one voice in it, through all its
+epistles, seals, trumpets, signs, and plagues, namely, THE LORD IS
+COMING!" The souls of the martyrs, impatiently waiting, under the
+altar, the completion of the great drama, cry, "How long, O Lord,
+dost thou delay to avenge our blood?" and they are told that "they
+shall
+
+39 Lib. ii. cap. 4, pp. 272, 273 of the English translation.
+
+
+rest only for a little season." Tertullian writes, without a trace
+of doubt, "Is not Christ quickly to come from heaven with a
+quaking of the whole universe, with a shuddering of the world,
+amidst the wailings of all men save the Christians?" The
+Apocalyptic seer makes Christ say, "Behold, I come as a thief in
+the night: blessed is he that watcheth." Accordingly, "a sentinel
+gazed wherever a Christian prayed, and, though all the watchmen
+died without the sight," the expectation lingered for centuries.
+The Christians of the New Testament time to borrow the words of
+one of the most competent of living scholars "carried forward to
+the account of Christ in years to come the visions which his stay,
+as they supposed, was too short to realize, and assigned to him a
+quick return to finish what was yet unfulfilled. The suffering,
+the scorn, the rejection of men, the crown of thorns, were over
+and gone; the diadem, the clarion, the flash of glory, the troop
+of angels, were ready to burst upon the world, and might be looked
+for at midnight or at noon."40
+
+Secondly, when Christ returned, he was to avenge the sufferings
+and reward the fidelity of his followers, tread the heathen
+tyrants in the wine press of his wrath, and crown the persecuted
+saints with a participation in his glory. When "the time of his
+wrath is come, he shall give reward to the prophets, and to the
+saints, and to them that fear his name, and shall destroy them
+that destroy the earth." "The kings, captains, mighty men, rich
+men, bondmen, and freemen, shall cry to the mountains and rocks,
+Fall on us, and hide us from the wrath of the Lamb." "To him that
+overcometh, and doeth my works, I will give power over the
+Gentiles;" "I will give him the morning star;" "I will grant him
+to sit with me on my throne." Independently, moreover, of these
+distinct texts, the whole book is pervaded with the thought that,
+at the speedy second advent of the Messiah, all his enemies shall
+be fearfully punished, his servants eminently compensated and
+glorified.41
+
+Thirdly, the writer of the Apocalypse expected in accordance with
+that Jewish anticipation of an earthly Messianic kingdom which was
+adopted with some modifications by the earliest Christians that
+Jesus, on his return, having subdued his foes, would reign for a
+season, in great glory, on the earth, surrounded by the saints. "A
+door was opened in heaven," and the seer looked in, and saw a
+vision of the redeemed around the throne, and heard them "singing
+a new song unto the Lamb that was slain," in the course of which,
+particularizing the favors obtained for them by him, they say, "We
+shall reign upon the earth." Again, the writer says that "the
+worshippers of the beast and of his image shall be tormented with
+fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the
+presence of the Lamb." Now, the lake of sulphurous fire into which
+the reprobate were to be thrust was located, not in the sky, but
+under the surface of the earth. The foregoing statement,
+therefore, implies that Christ and his angels would be tarrying on
+the earth when the final woe of the condemned was inflicted. But
+we need not rely on indirect arguments. The writer explicitly
+declares
+
+40 Martineau, Sermon, "The God of Revelation his own Interpreter."
+
+41 It seems to have been a Jewish expectation that when the
+Messiah should appear he would thrust his enemies into Hades. In a
+passage of the Talmud Satan is represented as seeing the Messiah
+under the Throne of Glory: he falls on his face at the sight,
+exclaiming, "This is the Messiah, who will precipitate me and all
+the Gentiles into the under world." Bertholdt, Christologia, sect.
+36.
+
+
+that, in his vision of what was to take place, the Christian
+martyrs, "those who were slain for the witness of Jesus, lived and
+reigned with Christ a thousand years, while the rest of the dead
+lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is
+the first resurrection. Then Satan was loosed out of his prison,
+and gathered the hosts of Gog and Magog to battle, and went up on
+the breadth of the earth and compassed the camp of the saints
+about, and fire came down out of heaven and devoured them." It
+seems impossible to avoid seeing in this passage a plain statement
+of the millennial reign of Christ on the earth with his risen
+martyrs.
+
+Fourthly, at the termination of the period just referred to, the
+author of the Apocalypse thought all the dead would be raised and
+the tribunal of the general judgment held. As Lactantius says,
+"All souls are detained in custody in the under world until the
+last day; then the just shall rise and reign; afterwards there
+will be another resurrection of the wicked."42 "The time of the
+dead is come, that they should be judged." "And I saw the dead,
+small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and
+the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the
+books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead
+which were in it, and death and the under world delivered up the
+dead which were in them, and they were judged, every man according
+to his works." "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first
+resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they
+shall be priests of God and of Christ, and reign with him a
+thousand years." This text, with its dark and tacit reference by
+contrast to those who have no lot in the millennial kingdom,
+brings us to the next step in our exposition.
+
+For, fifthly, after the general resurrection and judgment at the
+close of the thousand years, the sentence of a hopeless doom to
+hell is to be executed on the condemned. "Whosoever was not found
+written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." "The
+fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and
+whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall
+have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone;
+which is the second death." The "second death" is a term used by
+Onkelos in his Targum,43 and sometimes in the Talmud, and by the
+Rabbins generally. It denotes, as employed by them, the return of
+the wicked into hell after their summons thence for judgment.44 In
+the Apocalypse, its relative meaning is this. The martyrs, who
+were slain for their allegiance to the gospel, died once, and
+descended into the under world, the common realm of death. At the
+coming of Christ they were to rise and join him, and to die no
+more. This was the first resurrection. At the close of the
+millennium, all the rest of the dead were to rise and be judged,
+and the rejected portion of them were to be thrust back again
+below. This was a second death for them, a fate from which the
+righteous were exempt. There was a difference, greatly for the
+worse in the latter, between their condition in the two deaths. In
+the former they descended to the dark under world, the silent and
+temporary abode of the universal dead; but in the latter they went
+down "into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the devil and the
+beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and
+night for
+
+42 Divin. Instit. lib. vii. cap. 20, 21, 26.
+
+43 on Deut. xxxiii. 6.
+
+44 Gfrorer, Geschichte des Urchristenthums, kap. 10. s. 289.
+
+
+ever and ever." For "Death and Hades, having delivered up the dead
+which were in them, were cast into the lake of fire. This is the
+second death." It is plain that here the common locality of
+departed souls is personified as two demons, Death and Hades, and
+the real thought meant to be conveyed is, that this region is to
+be sunk beneath a "Tartarean drench," which shall henceforth roll
+in burning billows over its victims there, "the smoke of their
+torment ascending up for ever and ever." This awful imagery of a
+lake of flaming sulphur, in which the damned were plunged, was of
+comparatively late origin or adoption among the Jews, from whom
+the Christians received it. The native Hebrew conception of the
+state of the dead was that of the voiceless gloom and dismal
+slumber of Sheol, whither all alike went. The notion of fiery
+tortures inflicted there on the wicked was either conceived by the
+Pharisees from the loathed horrors of the filth fire kept in the
+vale of Hinnom, outside of Jerusalem, (which is the opinion of
+most commentators,) or was imagined from the sea of burning
+brimstone that showered from heaven and submerged Sodom and
+Gomorrah in a vast fire pool, (which is maintained by
+Bretschneider and others,) or was derived from the Egyptians, or
+the Persians, or the Hindus, or the Greeks, all of whom had lakes
+and rivers of fire in their theological hells, long before history
+reveals the existence of such a belief among the Jews, (which is
+the conclusion of many learned authors and critics.)
+
+We have now reached the last feature in the scheme of eschatology
+shadowed forth in the Apocalypse, the most obscure and difficult
+point of all, namely, the locality and the principal elements of
+the final felicity of the saved. The difficulty of clearly
+settling this question is twofold, arising, first, from the swift
+and partial glimpses which are all that the writer yields us on
+the subject, and, secondly, from the impossibility of deciding
+with precision how much of his language is to be regarded as
+figurative and how much as literal, where the poetic presentation
+of symbol ends and where the direct statement of fact begins. A
+large part of the book is certainly written in prophetic figures
+and images, spiritual visions, never meant to be accepted in a
+prosaic sense with severe detail. And yet, at the same time, all
+these imaginative emblems were, unquestionably, intended to
+foreshadow, in various kinds and degrees, doctrinal conceptions,
+hopes, fears, threats, promises, historical realities, past,
+present, or future. But to separate sharply the dress and the
+substance, the superimposed symbols and the underlying realities,
+is always an arduous, often an impossible, achievement. The writer
+of the Apocalypse plainly believed that the souls of all, except
+the martyrs, at death descended to the under world, and would
+remain there till after the second coming of Christ. But whether
+he thought that the martyrs were excepted, and would at death
+immediately rise into heaven and there await the fulfilment of
+time, is a disputed point. For our own part, we think it extremely
+doubtful, and should rather decide in the negative. In the first
+place, his expressions on this subject seem essentially
+figurative. He describes the prayers of the saints as being poured
+out from golden vials and burned as incense on a golden altar in
+heaven before the throne of God. "Under that altar," he says, "I
+saw the souls of them that were slain for the word of God." If the
+souls of the martyrs, in his belief, were really admitted into
+heaven, would he have conceived of them as huddled under the altar
+and not walking at liberty? Does not the whole idea appear rather
+like a rhetorical image than like a sober theological doctrine?
+True, the scene is pictured in heaven; but then it is a picture,
+and not a conclusion. With De Wette, we regard it, not as a
+dogmatic, but as a poetical and prophetic, representation. And
+in regard to the seer's vision of the innumerable company of the
+redeemed in heaven, surrounding the throne and celebrating the
+praises of God and the Lamb, surely it is obvious enough that
+this, like the other affiliated visions, is a vision, by
+inspired insight, in the present tense, of what is yet to
+occur in the successive unfolding of the rapid scenes in the
+great drama of Christ's redemptive work, a prophetic vision of
+the future, not of what already is. We know that in Tertullian's
+time the idea was entertained by some that Christian martyrs, as
+a special allotment, should pass at once from their sufferings to
+heaven, without going, as all others must, into the under world;
+but the evidence preponderates with us, upon the whole, that no
+such doctrine is really implied in the Apocalypse. In the
+fourteenth chapter, the author describes the hundred and forty
+four thousand who were redeemed from among men, as standing with
+the Lamb on Mount Zion and hearing a voice from heaven singing a
+new song, which no man, save the hundred and forty four thousand,
+could learn. The probabilities are certainly strongest that this
+great company of the selected "first fruits unto God and the
+Lamb," now standing on the earth, had not yet been in heaven; for
+they only learn the heavenly song which is sung before the throne
+by hearing it chanted down from heaven in a voice like
+multitudinous thunders.
+
+Finally, the most convincing proof that the writer did not suppose
+that the martyrs entered heaven before the second advent of
+Christ a proof which, taken by itself, would seem to leave no
+doubt on the subject is this. In the famous scene detailed in the
+twentieth chapter usually called by commentators the martyr scene
+it is said that "the souls of them that were beheaded for the word
+of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, lived and reigned
+with Christ a thousand years. This is the first resurrection."
+Now, is it not certain that if the writer supposed these souls had
+never been in the under world, but in heaven, he could not have
+designated their preliminary descent from above as "the first
+resurrection," the first rising up? That phrase implies, we think,
+that all the dead were below: the faithful and chosen ones were to
+rise first to reign a while with Jesus, and after that the rest
+should rise to be judged. After that judgment, which was expected
+to be on earth in presence of the descended Lamb and his angels,
+the lost were to be plunged, as we have already seen, into the
+subterranean pit of torture, the unquenchable lake of fire. But
+what was to become of the righteous and redeemed? Whether, by the
+Apocalyptic representation, they were to remain forever on earth,
+or to ascend into heaven, is a question which has been zealously
+debated for over sixteen hundred years, and in some theological
+circles is still warmly discussed. Were the angels who came down
+to the earth with Christ to the judgment never to return to their
+native seats? Were they permanently to transfer their deathless
+citizenship from the sky to Judea? Were the constitution of human
+nature and the essence of human society to be abrogated, and the
+members of the human family to cease enlarging, lest they should
+overflow the borders of the world? Was God himself literally to
+desert his ancient abode, and, with the celestial city and all its
+angelic hierarchy, float from the desolated firmament to Mount
+Zion, there to set up the central eternity of his throne. We
+cannot believe that such is the meaning, which the seer of the
+Apocalypse wished to convey by his symbolic visions and pictures,
+any more than we can believe that he means literally to say that
+he saw "a woman in heaven clothed with the sun, and the moon under
+her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars," or that
+there were actually "armies in heaven, seated on white horses
+and clothed in fine linen, white and clean, which is the
+righteousness of saints." Our conviction is that he expected
+the Savior would ascend with his angels and the redeemed
+into heaven, the glorious habitation of God above the sky. He
+speaks in one place of the "temple of God in heaven, into which no
+man could enter until the seven plagues were fulfilled," and in
+another place says that the "great multitude of the redeemed are
+before the throne of God in heaven, and serve him day and night in
+his temple;" and in still another place he describes two prophets,
+messengers of God, who had been slain, as coming to life, "and
+hearing a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up
+hither;' and they ascended up to heaven in a cloud, and their
+enemies beheld them." De Wette writes, "It is certain that an
+abstract conception of heavenly blessedness with God duskily
+hovers over the New Testament eschatology." We think this is true
+of the Book of Revelation.
+
+It was a Persian Jewish idea that the original destination of man,
+had he not sinned, was heaven. The apostles thought it was a part
+of the mission of Christ to restore that lost privilege. We think
+the writer of the Apocalypse shared in that belief. His allusions
+to a new heaven and a new earth, and to the descent of a New
+Jerusalem from heaven, and other related particulars, are symbols
+neither novel nor violent to Jewish minds, but both familiar and
+expressive, to denote a purifying glorification of the world, the
+installation of a divine kingdom, and the brilliant reign of
+universal righteousness and happiness among men, as if under the
+very eyes of the Messiah and the very sceptre of God. The
+Christians shall reign in Jerusalem, which shall be adorned with
+indescribable splendors and shall be the centre of a world wide
+dominion, the saved nations of the earth surrounding it and
+"walking in the light of it, their kings bringing their glory and
+honor into it." "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,
+and there shall be no more death." That is, upon the whole, as we
+understand the scattered hints relevant to the subject to imply,
+when Christ returns to the Father with his chosen, he will leave a
+regenerated earth, with Jerusalem for its golden and peerless
+capital, peopled, and to be peopled, with rejoicing and immortal
+men, who will keep the commandments, be exempt from ancient evils,
+hold intimate communion with God and the Lamb, and, from
+generation to generation, pass up to heaven through that swift and
+painless change, alluded to by Paul, whereby it was intended at
+the first that sinless man, his corruptible and mortal putting on
+incorruption and immortality, should be fitted for the
+companionship of angels in the pure radiance of the celestial
+world, and should be translated thither without tasting the
+bitterness of death, which was supposed to be the subterranean
+banishment of the disembodied ghost.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THE principal difficulty in arriving at the system of thought and
+faith in the mind of Paul arises from the fragmentary character of
+his extant writings. They are not complete treatises drawn out in
+independent statements,butspecial letters full of latent
+implications. They were written to meet particular emergencies, to
+give advice, to convey or ask information and sympathy, to argue
+or decide concerning various matters to a considerable extent of a
+personal or local and temporal nature. Obviously their author
+never suspected they would be the permanent and immensely
+influential documents they have since become. They were not
+composed as orderly developments or full presentations of a creed,
+but rather as supplements to more adequate oral instruction
+previously imparted. He says to the Thessalonians, "Brethren,
+stand fast and hold the traditions which ye have been taught,
+whether by word or by our epistle." Several of his letters also
+perhaps many have been lost. He exhorts the Colossians to "read
+likewise the epistle from Laodicea." In his present First Epistle
+to the Corinthians he intimates that he had previously
+corresponded with them, in the words, "I wrote to you in a
+letter." There are good reasons, too, for supposing that he
+transmitted other epistles of which we have now no account. Owing,
+therefore, to the facts that his principal instructions were given
+by word of mouth, and that his surviving writings set forth no
+systematic array of doctrines, we have no choice left, if we
+desire to know what his opinions concerning the future life were,
+when deduced and arranged, but to exercise our learning and our
+faculties upon the imperfect discussions and the significant hints
+and clews in his extant epistles. Bringing these together, in the
+light of contemporary Pharisaic and Christian conceptions and
+opinions, we may construct a system from them which will represent
+his theory; somewhat as the naturalist from a few fragmentary
+bones describes the entire skeleton to which they belonged. As we
+proceed to follow this process, we must particularly remember the
+leading notions in the doctrinal belief of the Jews at that
+period, and the fact that Paul himself was "brought up at the feet
+of Gamaliel," "after the most straitest order of the sect, a
+Pharisee." When on trial at Jerusalem, he cried, "Men and
+brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope of
+the resurrection of the dead I am called in question." We can
+hardly suppose that he would entirely throw off the influence and
+form of the Pharisaic dogmas and grasp Christianity in its pure
+spirituality. It is most reasonable to expect what we shall find
+actually the fact that he would mix the doctrinal and emotional
+results of his Pharisaic training with the teachings of Christ,
+thus forming a composite system considerably modified from any
+then existing. Indeed, a great many obscure texts in Paul may be
+made perspicuous by citations from the old Talmudists. Considering
+the value and the importance of this means of illustrating the New
+Testament, it is neglected by modern commentators in a very
+remarkable manner.
+
+In common with his countrymen and the Gentiles, Paul undoubtedly
+believed in a world of light and bliss situated over the sky,
+where the Deity, surrounded by his angels, reigns in immortal
+splendor. According to the Greeks, Zeus and the other gods,
+with a few select heroes, there lived an imperishable life.
+According to the Hebrews, there was "the house of Jehovah," "the
+habitation of eternity," "the world of holy angels." The Old
+Testament contains many sublime allusions to this place. Jacob in
+his dream saw a ladder set up that reached unto heaven, and the
+angels were ascending and descending upon it. Fixing his eyes upon
+the summit, the patriarch exclaimed, not referring, as is commonly
+supposed, to the ground on which he lay, but to the opening in the
+sky through which the angels were passing and repassing, "Surely
+this is the house of God and this the gate of heaven." Jehovah is
+described as "riding over the heaven of heavens;" as "treading
+upon the arch of the sky." The firmament is spoken of as the solid
+floor of his abode, where "he layeth the beams of his chambers in
+the waters," the "waters above," which the Book of Genesis says
+were "divided from the waters beneath." Though this divine world
+on high was in the early ages almost universally regarded as a
+local reality, it was not conceived by Jews or Gentiles to be the
+destined abode of human souls. It was thought to be exclusively
+occupied by Jehovah and his angels, or by the gods and their
+messengers. Only here and there were scattered a few dim
+traditions, or poetic myths, of a prophet, a hero, a god descended
+man, who, as a special favor, had been taken up to the supernal
+mansions. The common destination of the disembodied spirits of men
+was the dark,stupendous realms of the under world. As Augustine
+observes, "Christ died after many; he rose before any: by dying he
+suffered what many had suffered before; by rising he did what no
+one had ever done before."1 These ideas of the celestial and the
+infernal localities and of the fate of man were of course
+entertained by Paul when he became a Christian. A few texts by way
+of evidence of this fact will here suffice. "That at the name of
+Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and those on
+earth, and those under the earth." "He that descended first into
+the lower parts of the earth is the same also that ascended up far
+above all heavens." The untenableness of that explanation which
+makes the descent into the lower parts of the earth refer to
+Christ's descent to earth from his pre existent state in heaven
+must be evident, as it seems to us, to every mind. Irenaus,
+discussing this very text from Ephesians, exposes the absurdity
+and stigmatizes the heresy of those who say that the infernal
+world is this earth, ("qui dicunt inferos quidem esse hunc
+mundum.")2 "I knew a man caught up to the third heaven, . . .
+caught up into paradise." The threefold heaven of the Jews, here
+alluded to, was, first, the region of the air, supposed to be
+inhabited by evil spirits. Paul repeatedly expresses this idea, as
+when he speaks of "the prince of the power of the air, the spirit
+that worketh in the children of disobedience," and when he says,
+"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
+principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
+darkness, against wicked spirits in heavenly places." The second
+heaven comprised the region of the planetary bodies. The third lay
+beyond the firmament, and was the actual residence of God and the
+angelic hosts. These quotations, sustained as they are by the
+well known previous opinions of the Jews, as well as by numerous
+unequivocal texts in the writings of the other apostles and by
+many additional ones in those
+
+1 Enarratio in Psalmum XC.
+
+2 Adv. Hares. lib. v. cap. 31.
+
+
+of Paul, are conclusive evidence that he believed in the received
+heaven above the blue ether and stellar dome, and in the received
+Hadean abyss beneath the earth. In the absence of all evidence to
+the contrary, every presumption justifies the supposition that he
+also believed  as we know all his orthodox contemporaries did that
+that under world was the abode of all men after death, and that
+that over world was solely the dwelling place of God and the
+angels. Nay, we are not left to conjecture; for he expressly
+declares of God that he "dwelleth in the light which no man can
+approach unto." This conclusion will be abundantly established in
+the course of the following exposition.
+
+With these preliminaries, we are prepared to see what was Paul's
+doctrine of death and of salvation. There are two prevalent
+theories on this subject, both of which we deem partly scriptural,
+neither of them wholly so. On the one extreme, the consistent
+disciple of Augustine the historic Calvinist attributes to the
+apostle the belief that the sin of Adam was the sole cause of
+literal death, that but for Adam's fall men would have lived on
+the earth forever or else have been translated bodily to heaven
+without any previous process of death. That such really was not
+the view held by Paul we are convinced. Indeed, there is one
+prominent feature in his faith which by itself proves that the
+disengagement of the soul from the material frame did not seem to
+him an abnormal event caused by the contingency of sin. We refer
+to his doctrine of two bodies, the "outward man" and the "inward
+man," the "earthly house" and the "heavenly house," the "natural
+body" and the "spiritual body." Neander says this is "an express
+assertion" of Paul's belief that man was not literally made mortal
+by sin, but was naturally destined to emerge from the flesh into a
+higher form of life.3 Paul thought that, in the original plan of
+God, man was intended to drop his gross, corruptible body and put
+on an incorruptible one, like the "glorious body" of the risen
+Christ. He distinctly declares, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit
+the kingdom of God." Therefore, we cannot interpret the word
+"death" to mean merely the separation of the soul from its present
+tabernacle, when he says, "By one man sin entered into the world,
+and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men." On the other
+extreme, the fully developed Pelagian the common Unitarian holds
+that the word "death" is always used in the arguments of Paul in a
+spiritual or figurative sense, merely meaning moral alienation
+from God in guilt, misery, and despair. Undoubtedly it is used
+thus in many instances, as when it is written, "I was alive
+without the law once; but, when the commandment came, sin rose to
+life, and I died." But in still more numerous cases it means
+something more than the consciousness of sin and the resulting
+wretchedness in the breast, and implies something external,
+mechanical, visible, as it were. For example, "Since by man came
+death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead." Any one who
+reads the context of this sentence may see that the terms "death"
+and "resurrection" antithetically balance each other, and refer
+not to an inward experience, but to an outward event, not to a
+moral change, but to the physical descent and resurrection. It is
+certain that here the words are not employed in a moral sense. The
+phraseology Paul uses in stating the connection of the sin of Adam
+with death, the connection of the resurrection of Christ with
+immortal life, is too peculiar, emphatic, and extensive not to be
+loaded with
+
+3 Planting and Training, Ryland's trans. p. 240.
+
+
+a more general and vivid significance than the simple unhappiness
+of a sense of guilt, the simple peace and joy of a reconciled
+conscience. The advocates, then, of both theories the Calvinist
+asserting that Paul supposed sin to be the only reason why we do
+not live eternally in the world with our present organization, and
+the Rationalist asserting that the apostle never employs the word
+"death" except with a purely interior signification are alike
+beset by insuperable difficulties, perplexed by passages which
+defy their fair analysis and force them either to use a violent
+interpretation or to confess their ignorance.
+
+We must therefore seek out some third view, which, rejecting the
+errors, shall combine the truths and supply the defects of the two
+former. We have now to present such a view, a theory of the
+Pauline doctrine of the last things which obviously explains and
+fills out all the related language of the epistles. We suppose he
+unfolded it fully in his preaching, while in his supplementary and
+personal letters he only alludes to such disconnected parts of it
+as then rose upon his thoughts. A systematic development of it as
+a whole, with copious allusions and labored defences, was not
+needed then, as it might seem to us to have been. For the
+fundamental notions on which it rested were the common belief of
+the nation and age. Geology and astronomy had not disturbed the
+credit of a definitely located Hades and heaven, nor had free
+metaphysics sharpened the common mind to skeptical queries. The
+view itself, as we conceive it occupied the mind of Paul, is this.
+Death was a part of the creative plan for us from the first,
+simply loosing the spirit from its corruptible body, clothing it
+with an ethereal vehicle, and immediately translating it to
+heaven. Sin marred this plan, alienated us from the Divine favor,
+introduced all misery, physical and moral, and doomed the soul,
+upon the fall of its earthly house, to descend into the slumberous
+gloom of the under world. Thus death was changed from a pleasant
+organic fulfilment and deliverance, spiritual investiture and
+heavenly ascent, to a painful punishment condemning the naked
+ghost to a residence below the grave. As Ewald says, through
+Adam's sin "death acquired its significance as pain and
+punishment."4 Herein is the explanation of the word "death" as
+used by Paul in reference to the consequence of Adam's offence.
+Christ came to reveal the free grace and gift of God in redeeming
+us from our doom and restoring our heavenly destiny. This he
+exemplified, in accordance with the Father's will, by dying,
+descending into the dreary world of the dead, vanquishing the
+forces there, rising thence, and ascending to the right hand of
+the throne of heaven as our forerunner. On the very verge of the
+theory just stated as Paul's, Neander hovers in his exposition of
+the apostle's views, but fails to grasp its theological scope and
+consequences. Krabbe declares that "death did not arise from the
+native perishableness of the body, but from sin."5 This statement
+Neander controverts, maintaining that "sin introduced no essential
+change in the physical organization of man, but merely in the
+manner in which his earthly existence terminates. Had it not been
+for sin, death would have been only the form of a higher
+development of life."6 Exactly so. With innocence, the soul at
+death
+
+4 Sendschreiben des Apostels Paulus, s. 210.
+
+5 Die Lehre von oer Sunde und vom Tode, cap. xi, s. 192.
+
+6 Neander's Planting and Training, book vi. ch. 1.
+
+
+would have ascended pleasantly, in a new body, to heaven; but sin
+compelled it to descend painfully, without any body, to Hades. We
+will cite a few of the principal texts from which this general
+outline has been inferred and constructed.
+
+The substance of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans
+may be thus stated. As by the offence of one, sin entered into the
+world, and the judgment of the law came upon all men in a sentence
+of condemnation unto death, so by the righteousness of one, the
+free gift of God came upon all men in a sentence of justification
+unto life; that as sin, by Adam's offence, hath reigned unto
+death, so grace, by Christ's righteousness, might reign unto
+eternal life. Now, we maintain that the words "death" and "life"
+cannot in the present instance be entirely explained, in a
+spiritual sense, as signifying disturbance and woe in the breast,
+or peace and bliss there, because the whole connected discourse is
+not upon the internal contingent experience of individuals, but
+upon the common necessity of the race, an objective sentence
+passed upon humanity, followed by a public gift of reversal and
+annulment. So, too, we deny that the words can be justly taken, in
+their strictly literal sense, as meaning cessation or continuance
+of physical existence on the earth, because, in the first place,
+that would be inconsistent with the doctrine of a spiritual body
+within the fleshly one and of a glorious inheritance reserved in
+heaven, a doctrine by which Paul plainly shows that he recognised
+a natural organic provision, irrespective of sin, for a change in
+the form and locality of human existence. Secondly, we submit that
+death and life here cannot mean departure from the body or
+continuance in it, because that is a matter with which Christ's
+mission did in no way interfere, but left exactly as it was
+before; whereas, in the thing really meant by Paul, Christ is
+represented as standing, at least partially, in the same relation
+between life and men that Adam stands in between death and men.
+The reply to the question, What is that relation? will at once
+define the genuine signification of the terms "death" and "life"
+in the instance under review. And thus it is to be answered. The
+death brought on mankind by Adam was not only internal
+wretchedness, but also the condemnation of the disembodied soul to
+the under world; the life they were assured of by Christ was not
+only internal blessedness, but also the deliverance of the soul
+from its subterranean prison and its reception into heaven in a
+"body celestial," according to its original destiny had sin not
+befallen. This interpretation is explicitly put forth by Theodoret
+in his comments on this same passage, (Rom. v. 15-18.) He says,
+"There must be a correspondence between the disease and the
+remedy. Adam's sin subjected him to the power of death and the
+tyranny of the devil. In the same manner that Adam was compelled
+to descend into the under world, we all are associates in his
+fate. Thus, when Christ rose, the whole humankind partook in his
+vivification."7 Origen also and who, after the apostles
+themselves, knew their thoughts and their use of language better
+than he? emphatically declares in exposition of the expression of
+Paul, "the wages of sin is death" that "the
+
+7 Impatib., dialogue iii. pp. 132, 133, ed. Sirmondi.
+
+
+under world in which souls are detained is called death."8
+
+"As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
+These words cannot be explained, "As in Adam the necessity of
+physical death came on all, so in Christ that necessity shall be
+removed," because Christ's mission did not touch physical death,
+which was still reigning as ever, before Paul's eyes. Neither can
+the passage signify, "As through Adam wretchedness is the portion
+of every heart of man, so through Christ blessedness shall be
+given to every heart," because, while the language itself does not
+hint that thought, the context demonstrates that the real
+reference is not to an inward experience, but to an outward
+event, not to the personal regeneration of the soul, but to a
+general resurrection of the dead. The time referred to is the
+second coming of Christ; and the force of the text must be this:
+As by our bodily likeness to the first man and genetic connection
+with him through sin we all die like him, that is, leave the body
+and go into the under world, and remain there, so by our spiritual
+likeness to the second man and redeeming connection with him
+through the free grace of God we shall all rise thence like him,
+revived and restored. Adam was the head of a condemned race,
+doomed to Hades by the visible occurrence of death in lineal
+descent from him; Christ is the head of a pardoned race, destined
+for heaven in consonance with the plain token of his resurrection
+and ascension. Again, the apostle writes, "In the twinkling of an
+eye, at the last trump, the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
+and we (who are then living) shall be changed; for this
+corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality.
+Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, 'Death
+is swallowed up in victory?" O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades,
+where is thy victory?'" The writer evidently exults in the thought
+that, at the second coming of Christ, death shall lose its
+retributive character and the under world be baffled of its
+expected prisoners, because the living shall instantly experience
+the change of bodies fitting them to ascend to heaven with the
+returning and triumphant Lord. Paul also announces that "Jesus
+Christ hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortality
+to light." The word "death" here cannot mean physical dissolution,
+because Christ did not abolish that. It cannot denote personal sin
+and unhappiness, because that would not correspond with and
+sustain the obvious meaning of the contrasted member of the
+sentence. Its adequate and consistent sense is this. God intended
+that man should pass from a preliminary existence on earth to an
+eternal life in heaven; but sin thwarted this glorious design and
+altered our fate to a banishment into the cheerless under world.
+But now, by the teachings and resurrection of Christ, we are
+assured that God of his infinite goodness has determined freely to
+forgive us and restore our original destination. Our descent and
+abode below are abolished and our heavenly immortality made clear.
+"We earnestly desire to be clothed upon with our house which is
+from heaven, if so be that, being clothed, we shall not be found
+naked. Not that we desire to be unclothed, but clothed upon, that
+mortality may be swallowed up of life."
+
+8 Comm. in Epist. ad Rom. lib. vi. cap. 6, sect. 6. Also see
+Jerome, Comm. in Ecc. iii. 21. Professor Mau, in his able treatise
+"Von dem Tode dem Solde der Sunden, and der Aufhebung desselben
+durch die Auferstehung Christi," cogently argues, against Krabbe,
+that death as the punishment of sin is not bodily dissolution, but
+wretchedness and condemnation to the under world, (amandatio
+Orcum.) In Pelt's Theologische Mitarbeiten, 1838, heft ii. ss.
+107-108.
+
+
+In these remarkable words the apostle expresses several particulars
+of what we have already presented as his general doctrine. He
+states his conviction that, when his "earthly house of this
+tabernacle" dissolves, there is a "divinely constructed, heavenly,
+and eternal house" prepared for him. He expresses his desire at
+the coming of the Lord not to be dead, but still living, and then
+to be divested of his earthly body and invested with the heavenly
+body, that thus, being fitted for translation to the incorruptible
+kingdom of God, he might not be found a naked shadow or ghost in
+the under world. Ruckert says, in his commentary, and the best
+critics agree with him, "Paul herein desires to become immortal
+without passing the gates of death." Language similar to the
+foregoing in its peculiar phrases is found in the Jewish Cabbala.
+The Zohar describes the ascent of the soul to heaven clothed with
+splendor, and afterwards illustrates its meaning in these terms:
+"As there is given to the soul a garment with which she is clothed
+in order to establish her in this world, so there is given her a
+garment of heavenly splendor in order to establish her in that
+world."9 So in the "Ascension of Isaiah the Prophet" an apocryphal
+book written by some Jewish Christian as early, without doubt, as
+the close of the second century the following passages occur.
+Speaking of what was revealed to him in heaven, the prophet says,
+"There I saw all the saints, from Adam, without the clothing of
+the flesh: I viewed them in their heavenly clothing like the
+angels who stood there in great splendor." Again he says, "All the
+saints from heaven in their heavenly clothing shall descend with
+the Lord and dwell in this world, while the saints who have not
+died shall be clothed like those who come from heaven. Then the
+general resurrection will take place and they will ascend together
+to heaven."10 Schoettgen, commenting on this text, (2 Cor. v. 2, )
+likewise quotes a large number of examples of like phraseology
+from Rabbinical writers. The statements thus far made and proofs
+offered will be amply illustrated and confirmed as we go on to
+consider the chief component parts of the Pauline scheme of the
+last things. For, having presented the general outline, it will be
+useful, in treating so complex and difficult a theme, to analyze
+it by details.
+
+We are met upon the threshold of our inquiry by the essential
+question, What, according to Paul, was the mission of Christ? What
+did he accomplish? A clear reply to this question comprises three
+distinct propositions. First, the apostle plainly represents the
+resurrection, and not the crucifixion, as the efficacious feature
+in Christ's work of redemption. When we recollect the almost
+universal prevalence of the opposite notion among existing sects,
+it is astonishing how clear it is that Paul generally dwells upon
+the dying of Christ solely as the necessary preliminary to his
+rising. "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and
+your faith also is vain: ye are yet in your sins." These words are
+irreconcilable with that doctrine which connects our
+"justification" with the atoning death, and not with the typical
+resurrection, of Christ. "That Christ died for our sins, and that
+he was buried, and that he rose again the third day." To place a
+vicarious stress upon the first clause of this text is as
+arbitrary as it would be to place it upon the second; but
+naturally emphasize the third clause,
+
+9 Laurence, Ascensio Isaia Vatis, appendix, p. 168.
+
+10 Laurence, Ascensio Isaia atis, cap. 9, v. 7, 9; cap. 4.
+
+
+and all is clear. The inferences and exhortations drawn from the
+mission of Christ are not usually connected in any essential
+manner with his painful death, but directly with his glorious
+resurrection out from among the dead unto the heavenly
+blessedness. "If we have been planted together in the likeness of
+his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection."
+Sinking into the water, when "buried by baptism into the death of
+Christ," was, to those initiated into the Christian religion, a
+symbol of the descent of Christ among the dead; rising out of the
+water was a symbol of the ascent of Christ into heaven. "If ye
+then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
+where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God." When Paul cries,
+exultingly, "Thanks be to God, who through Christ giveth us the
+victory over the sting of death and the strength of sin," Jerome
+says, "We cannot and dare not interpret this victory otherwise
+than by the resurrection of the Lord."11 Commenting on the text
+"To this end Christ both died and lived again, that he might reign
+both over the dead and the living," Theodoret says that Christ,
+going through all these events, "promised a resurrection to us
+all." Paul makes no appeal to us to believe in the death of
+Christ, to believe in the atoning sacrifice of Christ, but he
+unequivocally affirms, "If thou shalt believe in thine heart that
+God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Paul
+conceived that Christ died in order to rise again and convince men
+that the Father would freely deliver them from the bondage of
+death in the under world. All this took place on account of sin,
+was only made requisite by sin, one of whose consequences was the
+subterranean confinement of the soul, which otherwise, upon
+deserting its clayey tent, would immediately have been clothed
+with a spiritual body and have ascended to heaven. That is to say,
+Christ "was delivered because of our offences and was raised again
+because of our justification." In Romans viii. 10 the preposition
+occurs twice in exactly the same construction as in the text
+just quoted. In the latter case the authors of the common version
+have rendered it "because of." They should have done so in the
+other instance, in accordance with the natural force and
+established usage of the word in this connection. The meaning is,
+Our offences had been committed, therefore Christ was delivered
+into Hades; our pardon had been decreed, therefore Christ was
+raised into heaven. Such as we have now stated is the real
+material which has been distorted and exaggerated into the
+prevalent doctrine of the vicarious atonement, with all its dread
+concomitants.12 The believers of that doctrine suppose themselves
+obliged to accept it by the language of the epistles. But the view
+above maintained as that of Paul solves every difficulty and gives
+an intelligent and consistent meaning to all the phrases usually
+thought to legitimate the Calvinistic scheme of redemption. While
+we deny the correctness of the Calvinistic interpretation of those
+passages in which occur such expressions as "Christ gave himself
+for us," "died for our sins," we also affirm the inadequacy
+
+11 Comm. in Osee, lib. iii. cap. 13.
+
+12 Die Lehre von Christi Hollenfahrt nach der Heil. Schrift, der
+altesten Kirche, den Christlichen Symbolen, und nach ihrer
+unendlichen Wichtigkeit und vielumfassenden Bedeutung dargestellt,
+von Joh. Ludwig Konig. The author presents in this work an
+irresistible array of citations and authorities. In an appendix he
+gives a list of a hundred authors on the theme of Christ's descent
+into hell.
+
+
+of the explanations of them proposed by Unitarians, and assert
+that their genuine force is this. Christ died and rose that we
+might be freed through faith from the great entailed consequence
+of sin, the bondage of the under world; beholding, through his
+ascension, our heavenly destination restored. "God made him, who
+knew no sin, to be sin on our account, that we might become the
+righteousness of God in him," might through faith in him be
+assured of salvation. In other words, Christ, who was not exposed
+to the evils brought on men by sin, did not think his divine
+estate a thing eagerly to be retained, but descended to the estate
+of man, underwent the penalties of sin as if he were himself a
+sinner, and then rose to the right hand of God, by this token to
+assure men of God's gracious determination to forgive them and
+reinstate them in their forfeited primal privileges. "If we be
+reconciled by his death, much more shall we be saved by his life."
+That is, if Christ's coming from heaven as an ambassador from God
+to die convinces us of God's pardoning good will towards us, much
+more does his rising again into heaven, where he now lives,
+deliver us from the fear of the under world condemnation and
+assure us of the heavenly salvation. Except in the light and with
+the aid of the theory we have been urging, a large number of texts
+like the foregoing cannot, as we think, be interpreted without
+constructive violence, and even with that violence cannot convey
+their full point and power.
+
+Secondly, in Paul's doctrine of the redeeming work of Christ we
+recognise something distinct from any subjective effect in
+animating and purifying the hearts and lives of men. "Christ hath
+redeemed us from the curse of the law." "In Christ we have
+redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins."
+Nothing but the most desperate exegesis can make these and many
+similar texts signify simply the purging of individual breasts
+from their offences and guilt. Seeking the genuine meaning of
+Paul, we are forced to agree with the overwhelming majority of the
+critics and believers of all Christendom, from the very times of
+the apostles till now, and declare that these passages refer to an
+outward deliverance of men by Christ, the removal by him of a
+common doom resting on the race in consequence of sin. What Paul
+supposed that doom was, and how he thought it was removed, let us
+try to see. It is necessary to premise that in Paul's writings the
+phrase "the righteousness of God" is often used by metonymy to
+mean God's mode of accounting sinners righteous, and is equivalent
+to "the Christian method of salvation." "By the deeds of the law
+no flesh shall be justified; but the righteousness of God without
+the law is manifested, freely justifying them through the
+redemption that is in Christ." How evidently in this verse "the
+righteousness of God" denotes God's method of justifying the
+guilty by a free pardon proclaimed through Christ! The apostle
+employs the word "faith" in a kindred technical manner, sometimes
+meaning by it "promise," sometimes the whole evangelic apparatus
+used to establish faith or prove the realization of the promise.
+"What if some did not believe? Shall their unbelief make the faith
+of God without effect?" Evidently by "faith" is intended "promise"
+or "purpose." "Is the law against the promises of God? God forbid!
+But before faith came we were kept under the law, shut up unto the
+faith which should afterwards be revealed." Here "faith" plainly
+means the object of faith, the manifested fulfilment of the
+promises: it means the gospel. Again, "Whereof he hath offered
+faith to all, in that he hath raised him from the dead." "Hath
+offered faith" here signifies, unquestionably, as the common
+version well expresses it, "hath given assurance," or hath
+exemplified the proof. "Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to
+bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But
+after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster."
+In this instance "faith" certainly means Christianity, in
+contradistinction to Judaism, and "justification by faith" is
+equivalent to "salvation by the grace of God, shown through the
+mission of Christ." It is not so much internal and individual in
+its reference as it is public and general. We believe that no man,
+sacredly resolved to admit the truth, can study with a purposed
+reference to this point all the passages in Paul's epistles where
+the word "faith" occurs, without being convinced that for the most
+part it is used in an objective sense, in contradistinction to the
+law, as synonymous with the gospel, the new dispensation of grace.
+Therefore "justification by faith" does not usually mean salvation
+through personal belief, either in the merits of the Redeemer or
+in any thing else, but it means salvation by the plan revealed in
+the gospel, the free remission of sins by the forbearance of God.
+In those instances where "faith" is used in a subjective sense for
+personal belief, it is never described as the effectual cause of
+salvation, but as the condition of personal assurance of
+salvation. Grace has outwardly come to all; but only the believers
+inwardly know it. This Pauline use of terms in technical senses
+lies broadly on the face of the Epistles to the Romans and the
+Galatians. New Testament lexicons and commentaries, by the best
+scholars of every denomination, acknowledge it and illustrate it.
+Mark now these texts. "And by him all that believe are justified
+from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of
+Moses." "To declare his righteousness, that he might be just and
+the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus." "What things were
+gain to me [under Judaism] I counted loss in comparison with
+Christ, that I may be found in him, not having mine own
+righteousness, which is of the law, but the righteousness which is
+of God through faith in Christ." "By the deeds of the law no man
+can be justified," "but ye are saved through faith." We submit
+that these passages, and many others in the epistles, find a
+perfect explanation in the following outline of faith, commenced
+in the mind of Paul while he was a Pharisee, completed when he was
+a Christian. The righteousness of the law, the method of salvation
+by keeping the law, is impossible. The sin of the first man broke
+that whole plan and doomed all souls helplessly to the under
+world. If a man now should keep every tittle of the law without
+reservation, it would not release him from the bondage below and
+secure for him an ascent to heaven. But what the law could not do
+is done for us in Christ. Sin having destroyed the righteousness
+of the law, that is, the fatal penalty of Hades having rendered
+salvation by the law impossible, the righteousness of God, that
+is, a new method of salvation, has been brought to light. God has
+sent his Son to die, descend into the under world, rise again, and
+return to heaven, to proclaim to men the glorious tidings of
+justification by faith, that is, a dispensation of grace freely
+annulling the great consequence of sin and inviting them to heaven
+in the Redeemer's footsteps. Paul unequivocally declares that
+Christ broke up the bondage of the under world by his irresistible
+entrance and exit, in the following text: "When he had descended
+first into the lower parts of the earth, he ascended up on high,
+leading a multitude of captives." What can be plainer than that?
+The same thought is also contained in another passage, a passage
+which was the source of those tremendous pictures so frequent in
+the cathedrals of the Middle Age,  Christus spoliat Infernum: "God
+hath forgiven you all trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of
+ordinances that was against us, and took it away, nailing it to
+Christ's cross; and, having spoiled principalities and powers, he
+made a show of them, openly triumphing over them in Christ." The
+entire theory which underlies the exposition we have just set
+forth is stated in so many words in the passage we next cite. For
+the word "righteousness" in order to make the meaning more
+perspicuous we simply substitute "method of salvation," which is
+unquestionably its signification here. "They [the Jews] being
+ignorant of God's method of salvation, and going about to
+establish their own method, have not submitted themselves unto
+God's. For Christ is the end of the law for a way of salvation to
+every one that believeth. For Moses describeth the method of
+salvation which is of the law, that the man who doeth these things
+shall be blessed in them. But the method of salvation which is of
+faith ["faith" here means the gospel, Christianity] speaketh on
+this wise: Say not in thy heart, 'Who shall ascend into heaven?'
+that is, to bring Christ down; or, 'Who shall descend into the
+under world?' that is, to bring up Christ again from among the
+dead." This has been done already, once for all. "And if thou
+shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the
+dead, thou shalt be saved." The apostle avows that his "heart's
+desire and his prayer unto God for Israel is, that they may be
+saved;" and he asserts that they cannot be saved by the law of
+Moses, but only by the gospel of Christ; that is, "faith;" that
+is, "the dispensation of grace."
+
+Paul's conception of the foremost feature in Christ's mission is
+precisely this. He came to deliver men from the stern law of
+Judaism, which could not wipe away their transgressions nor save
+them from Hades, and to establish them in the free grace of
+Christianity, which justifies them from all past sin and seals
+them for heaven. What could be a more explicit declaration of this
+than the following? "When the fulness of the time was come, God
+sent forth his Son to redeem them that were under the law." Herein
+is the explanation of that perilous combat which Paul waged so
+many years, and in which he proved victorious, the great battle
+between the Gentile Christians and the Judaizing Christians; a
+subject of altogether singular importance, without a minute
+acquaintance with which a large part of the New Testament cannot
+be understood. "Christ gave himself for our sins, that he might
+deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of
+God." Now, the Hebrew terms corresponding with the English terms
+"present world" and "future world" were used by the Jews to denote
+the Mosaic and the Messianic dispensations. We believe with
+Schoettgen and other good authorities that such is the sense of
+the phrase "present world" in the instance before us. Not only is
+that interpretation sustained by the usus loquendi, it is also the
+only defensible meaning; for the effect of the establishment of
+the gospel was not to deliver men from the present world, though
+it did deliver them from the hopeless bondage of Judaism, wherein
+salvation was by Christians considered impossible. And that is
+precisely the argument of the Epistle to the Galatians, in which
+the text occurs. In a succeeding chapter, while speaking expressly
+of the external forms of the Jewish law, Paul says, "By the cross
+of Christ the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world;"
+and he instantly adds, by way of explanation, "for in Christ Jesus
+neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision."
+Undeniably, "world" here means "Judaism;" as Rosenmuller phrases
+it, Judaica vanitas. In another epistle, while expostulating with
+his readers on the folly of subjecting themselves to observances
+"in meat and drink, and new moons and sabbaths," after "the
+handwriting of ordinances that was against them had been blotted
+out, taken away, nailed to the cross," Paul remonstrates with them
+in these words: "Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from the
+rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye
+subject to ordinances?" We should suppose that no intelligent
+person could question that this means, "Now that by the gospel of
+Christ ye are emancipated from the technical requisitions of
+Judaism, why are ye subject to its ordinances, as if ye were still
+living under its rule?" as many of the best commentators agree in
+saying, "tanquam viventes adhuc in Judaismo." From these
+collective passages, and from others like them, we draw the
+conclusion, in Paul's own words, that, "When we were children, we
+were in bondage under the rudiments of the world," "the weak and
+beggarly elements" of Judaism; but, now that "the fulness of the
+time has come, and God has sent forth his Son to redeem us," we
+are called "to receive the adoption of sons" and "become heirs of
+God," inheritors of a heavenly destiny.
+
+We think that the intelligent and candid reader, who is familiar
+with Paul's epistles, will recognise the following features in his
+belief and teaching. First, all mankind alike were under sin and
+condemnation. "Jews and Gentiles all are under sin." "All the
+world is subject to the sentence of God." And we maintain that
+that condemning sentence consisted, partly at least, in the
+banishment of their disembodied souls to Hades. Secondly, "a
+promise was given to Abraham," before the introduction of the
+Mosaic dispensation, "that in his seed [that is, in Christ] all
+the nations of the earth should be blessed." When Paul speaks, as
+he does in numerous instances, of "the hope of eternal life which
+God, who cannot lie, promised before the world began," "the
+promise given before the foundation of the world," "the promise
+made of God unto the fathers, that God would raise the dead," the
+date referred to is not when the decree was formed in the eternal
+counsels of God, previous to the origin of the earth, but when the
+covenant was made with Abraham, before the establishment of the
+Jewish dispensation. The thing promised plainly was, according to
+Paul's idea, a redemption from Hades and an ascension to heaven;
+for this is fully implied in his "expectation of the resurrection
+of the dead" from the intermediate state, and their being "clothed
+in celestial bodies." This promise made unto Abraham by God, to be
+fulfilled by Christ, "the law, which was four hundred and thirty
+years afterwards, could not disannul." That is, as any one may see
+by the context, the law could not secure the inheritance of the
+thing promised, but was only a temporary arrangement on account of
+transgressions, "until the seed should come to whom the promise
+was made." In other words, there was "no mode of salvation by the
+law;" "the law could not give life;" for if it could it would have
+"superseded the promise," made it without effect, whereas the
+inviolable promise of God was, that in the one seed of Abraham
+that is, in Christ alone should salvation be preached to all that
+believed. "For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is
+made useless, and the promise is made useless." In the mean time,
+until Christ be come, all are shut up under sin. Thirdly, the
+special "advantage of the Jews was, that unto them this promise of
+God was committed," as the chosen covenant people.
+
+The Gentiles, groaning under the universal sentence of sin,
+were ignorant of the sure promise of a common salvation yet
+to be brought. While the Jews indulged in glowing and exclusive
+expectations of the Messiah who was gloriously to redeem them, the
+Gentiles were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers
+from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in
+the world." Fourthly, in the fulness of time long after "the
+Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen, had
+preached the gospel beforehand unto Abraham, saying, In thy seed
+shall all nations be blessed" "Christ redeemed us from the curse
+of the law, being made a curse for us, that the blessing promised
+to Abraham might come upon the Gentiles." It was the precise
+mission of Christ to realize and exemplify and publish to the
+whole world the fulfilment of that promise. The promise itself
+was, that men should be released from the under world through the
+imputation of righteousness by grace that is, through free
+forgiveness and rise to heaven as accredited sons and heirs of
+God. This aim and purpose of Christ's coming were effected in his
+resurrection. But how did the Gentiles enter into belief and
+participation of the glad tidings? Thus, according to Paul: The
+death, descent, resurrection, and ascent of Jesus, and his
+residence in heaven in a spiritual form, divested him of his
+nationality.13 He was "then to be known no more after the flesh."
+He was no longer an earthly Jew, addressing Jews, but a heavenly
+spirit and son of God, a glorified likeness of the spirits of all
+who were adopted as sons of God, appealing to them all as joint
+heirs with himself of heaven. He has risen into universality, and
+is accessible to the soul of every one that believeth. "In him
+there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision,
+barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." The experience resulting in a
+heart raised into fellowship with him in heaven is the inward seal
+assuring us that our faith is not vain. "Ye Gentiles, who formerly
+were afar off, are now made nigh by the blood of Christ; for he
+hath broken down the middle wall of partition between Jews and
+Gentiles, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, namely, the
+law of commandments in ordinances, in order to make in himself of
+twain one new man. For through him we both have access by one
+spirit unto the Father. Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers
+and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the
+household of God." Circumcision was of the flesh; and the vain
+hope of salvation by it was confined to the Jews. Grace was of the
+spirit; and the revealed assurance of salvation by it was given to
+the Gentiles too, when Christ died to the nationalizing flesh,
+rose in the universalizing spirit, and from heaven impartially
+exhibited himself, through the preaching of the gospel, to the
+appropriating faith of all.
+
+The foregoing positions might be further substantiated by applying
+the general theory they contain to the explication of scores of
+individual texts which it fits and unfolds, and which, we think,
+cannot upon any other view be interpreted without forced
+constructions unwarranted by a thorough acquaintance with the mind
+of Paul and with the mind of his age. But we must be content with
+one or two such applications as specimens. The word "mystery"
+often occurs in the letters of Paul. Its current meaning in his
+time was "something concealed," something into which one must be
+initiated in order to understand it.
+
+13 Martineau, Liverpool Controversy: Inconsistency of the Scheme
+of Vicarious Redemption.
+
+
+The Eleusinian Mysteries, for instance, were not necessarily any thing
+intrinsically dark and hard to be comprehended, but things hidden
+from public gaze and only to be known by initiation into them.
+Paul uses the term in a similar way to denote the peculiar scheme
+of grace, which "had been kept secret from the beginning of the
+world," "hidden from ages and generations, but now made manifest."
+No one denies that Paul means by "this mystery" the very heart and
+essence of the gospel, precisely that which distinguishes it from
+the law and makes it a universal method of salvation, a wondrous
+system of grace. So much is irresistibly evident from the way and
+the connection in which he uses the term. He writes thus in
+explanation of the great mystery as it was dramatically revealed
+through Christ: "Who was manifested in the flesh, [i. e. seen in
+the body during his life on earth,] justified in the spirit,
+[i. e. freed after death from the necessity of imprisonment in
+Hades,] seen of angels, [i. e. in their fellowship after his
+resurrection,] preached unto the Gentiles, [i. e. after the gift
+of tongues on Pentecost day,] believed on in the world, [i. e. his
+gospel widely accepted through the labors of his disciples,]
+received up into glory, [i. e. taken into heaven to the presence
+of God.]" "The revelation of the mystery" means, then, the visible
+enactment and exhibition, through the resurrection of Christ, of
+God's free forgiveness of men, redeeming them from the Hadean
+gloom to the heavenly glory. The word "glory" in the New Testament
+confessedly often signifies the illumination of heaven, the
+defined abode of God and his angels. Robinson collects, in his
+Lexicon, numerous examples wherein he says it means "that state
+which is the portion of those who dwell with God in heaven." Now,
+Paul repeatedly speaks of the calling of believers to glory as one
+of the chief blessings and new prerogatives of the gospel. "Being
+justified by faith, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God." "Walk
+worthy of God, who hath called you unto his glory." "We speak
+wisdom to the initiates, the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery,
+which before the world [the Jewish dispensation] God ordained for
+our glory." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God:
+behold, I show you a mystery: we shall all be changed in a moment,
+and put on immortality." In the first chapter of the letter to the
+Colossians, Paul speaks of "the hope which is laid up for you in
+heaven, whereof ye have heard in the gospel;" also of "the
+inheritance of the saints in light:" then he says, "God would now
+make known among the Gentiles the mystery, which is, Christ among
+you, the hope of glory." In the light of what has gone before, how
+significant and how clear is this declaration! "All have sinned,
+and failed to attain unto the glory of God; but now, through the
+faith of Jesus Christ, [through the dispensation brought to light
+by Christ,] the righteousness of God [God's method of salvation]
+is unto all that believe." That is, by the law all were shut up in
+Hades, but by grace they are now ransomed and to be received to
+heaven. The same thought or scheme is contained in that remarkable
+passage in the Epistle to the Galatians where Paul says the free
+Isaac and the bond woman Hagar were an allegory, teaching that
+there were two covenants, one by Abraham, the other by Moses. The
+Mosaic covenant of the law "answers to the Jerusalem which is on
+earth, and is in bondage with her children," and belongs only to
+the Jews. The Abrahamic covenant of promise answers to "the
+Jerusalem which is above, and is free, and is the mother of us
+all." In the former, we were "begotten unto bondage." In the
+latter, "Christ hath made us free."
+
+We will notice but one more text in passing: it is, of all the
+proof texts of the doctrine of a substitutional expiation, the one
+which has ever been regarded as the very Achilles. And yet it can
+be made to support that doctrine only by the aid of arbitrary
+assumptions and mistranslations, while by its very terms it
+perfectly coincides with nay, expressly declares  the theory which
+we have been advocating as the genuine interpretation of Paul. The
+usual commentators, in their treatment of this passage, have
+exhibited a long continued series of perversions and sophisms,
+affording a strong example of unconscious prejudice. The correct
+Greek reading of the text is justly rendered thus: "Whom God set
+forth, a mercy seat through the faith in his blood, to exhibit his
+righteousness through the remission of former sins by the
+forbearance of God." For rendering [non-ASCII characters]
+"mercy seat," the usus loquendi and the internal harmony of meaning
+are in our favor, and also the weight of many orthodox authorities,
+such as Theodoret, Origen, Theophylact, OEcumenius, Erasmus, Luther,
+and from Pelagius to Bushnell. Still, we are willing to admit the
+rendering of it by "sin offering." That makes no important
+difference in the result. Christ was a sin offering, in the
+conception of Paul, in this sense: that when he was not himself
+subject to death, which was the penalty of sin, he yet died in
+order to show God's purpose of removing that penalty of sin
+through his resurrection. For rendering [non-ASCII characters]
+"through," no defence is needed: the only wonder is, how it ever
+could have been here translated "for." Now, let two or three facts
+be noticed.
+
+First, the New Testament phrase "the faith of Christ," "the faith of
+Jesus," is very unfairly and unwarrantably made to mean an
+internal affection towards Christ, a belief of men in him. Its
+genuine meaning is the same as "the gospel of Christ," or the
+religion of Christ, the system of grace which he brought.14 Who
+can doubt that such is the meaning of the word in these instances?
+"Contend for the faith once delivered to the saints;" "Greet them
+that love us in the faith;" "Have not the faith of our Lord Jesus
+Christ with respect of persons." So, in the text now under our
+notice, "the faith which is in his blood" means the dispensation
+of pardon and justification, the system of faith, which was
+confirmed and exemplified to us in his death and resurrection.
+Secondly, "the righteousness of God," which is here said to be
+"pointed out" by Christ's death, denotes simply, in Professor
+Stuart's words, "God's pardoning mercy," or "acquittal," or
+"gratuitous justification," "in which sense," he says truly, "it
+is almost always used in Paul's epistles."15 It signifies neither
+more nor less than God's method of salvation by freely forgiving
+sins and treating the sinner as if he were righteous, the method
+of salvation now carried into effect and revealed in the gospel
+brought by Christ, and dramatically enacted in his passion and
+ascension. Furthermore, we ask attention to the fact that the
+ordinary interpreter, hard pressed by his unscriptural creed,
+interpolates a disjunctive conjunction in the opposing teeth of
+Paul's plain statement. Paul says, as the common version has it,
+God is "just, and [i. e. even] the justifier." The creed bound
+commentators read it,
+
+14 Robinson has gathered a great number of instances in his
+Lexicon, under the word "Faith," wherein it can only mean, as he
+says, "the system of Christian doctrines, the gospel."
+
+15 Stuart's Romans i. 17, iii. 25, 26, &c.
+
+
+"just and yet the justifier." We will now present the true meaning
+of the whole passage, in our view of it, according to Paul's own
+use of language. To establish a conviction of the correctness of
+the exposition, we only ask the ingenuous reader carefully to
+study the clauses of the Greek text and recollect the foregoing
+data. "God has set Christ forth, to be to us a sure sign that we
+have been forgiven and redeemed through the faith that was proved
+by his triumphant return from death, the dispensation of grace
+inaugurated by him. Herein God has exhibited his method of saving
+sinners, which is by the free remission of their sins through his
+kindness. Thus God is proved to be disposed to save, and to be
+saving, by the system of grace shown through Jesus, him that
+believeth." In consequence of sin, men were under sentence of
+condemnation to the under world. In the fulness of time God
+fulfilled his ancient promise to Abraham. He freely justified
+men, that is, forgave them, redeemed them from their doom, and
+would soon open the sky for their abode with him. This scheme of
+redemption was carried out by Christ. That is to say, God
+proclaimed it to men, and asked their belief in it, by "setting
+forth Christ" to die, descend among the dead, rise thence, and
+ascend into heaven, as an exemplifying certification of the truth
+of the glad tidings.
+
+Thirdly, Paul teaches that one aim of Christ's mission was to
+purify, animate, and exalt the moral characters of men, and
+rectify their conduct, to produce a subjective sanctification in
+them, and so prepare them for judgment and fit them for heaven.
+The establishment of this proposition will conclude the present
+part of our subject. He writes, "Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, gave
+himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and
+purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works." "Let
+every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." In
+various ways he often represents the fact that believers have been
+saved by grace through Christ as the very reason, the intensified
+motive, why they should scrupulously keep every tittle of the
+moral law and abstain even from the appearance of evil, walking
+worthy of their high vocation. "The grace of God that bringeth
+salvation to all men hath appeared, teaching us that, denying all
+ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly,
+righteously, and godly in this present world." Bad men, "that obey
+not the gospel of Christ," such characters as "thieves,
+extortioners, drunkards, adulterers, shall not inherit the kingdom
+of God." He proclaims, in unmistakable terms, "God will render to
+every man according to his deeds, wrath and tribulation to the
+evil doer, honor and peace to the well doer, whether Jew or
+Gentile." The conclusion to be drawn from these and other like
+declarations is unavoidable. It is that "every one, Jew and
+Gentile, shall stand before the judgment seat of Christ and
+receive according to the deeds done in the body; for there is no
+respect of persons." And one part of Christ's mission was to exert
+a hallowing moral influence on men, to make them righteous, that
+they might pass the bar with acquittal. But the reader who
+recollects the class of texts adduced a little while since will
+remember that an opposite conclusion was as unequivocally drawn
+from them. Then Paul said, "By faith ye are justified, without the
+deeds of the law." Now he says, "For not the hearers of the law
+are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified
+in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus
+Christ." Is there a contradiction, then, in Paul? Only in
+appearance. Let us distinguish and explain. In the two quotations
+above, the apostle is referring to two different things.
+
+First, he would say, By the faith of Christ, the free grace of God
+declared in the gospel of Christ, ye are justified, gratuitously
+delivered from that necessity of imprisonment in Hades which is
+the penalty of sin doomed upon the whole race from Adam, and from
+which no amount of personal virtue could avail to save men.
+Secondly, when he exclaims, "Know ye not that the unrighteous
+shall not inherit the kingdom of God?" his thought is of a
+spiritual qualification of character, indispensable for positive
+admission among the blest in heaven. That is to say, the impartial
+penalty of primeval sin consigned all men to Hades. They could not
+by their own efforts escape thence and win heaven. That fated
+inability God has removed, and through Christ revealed its
+removal; but, that one should actually obtain the offered and
+possible prize of heaven, personal purity, faith, obedience,
+holiness, are necessary. In Paul's conception of the scheme of
+Christian salvation, then, there were two distinct parts: one,
+what God had done for all; the other, what each man was to do for
+himself. And the two great classes of seemingly hostile texts
+filling his epistles, which have puzzled so many readers, become
+clear and harmonious when we perceive and remember that by
+"righteousness" and its kindred terms he sometimes means the
+external and fulfilled method of redeeming men from the
+transmitted necessity of bondage in the under world, and sometimes
+means the internal and contingent qualifications for actually
+realizing that redemption. In the former instance he refers to the
+objective mode of salvation and the revelation of it in Christ. In
+the latter, he refers to the subjective fitness for that salvation
+and the certitude of it in the believer. So, too, the words
+"death" and "life," in Paul's writings, are generally charged, by
+a constructio proegnans, with a double sense, one spiritual,
+individual, contingent, the other mechanical, common, absolute.
+Death, in its full Pauline force, includes inward guilt,
+condemnation, and misery, and outward descent into the under
+world. Life, in its full Pauline force, includes inward rectitude,
+peace, and joy, and outward ascent into the upper world. Holiness
+is necessary, "for without it no one can see the Lord;" yet by
+itself it can secure only inward life: it is ineffectual to win
+heaven. Grace by itself merely exempts from the fatality of the
+condemnation to Hades: it offers eternal life in heaven only upon
+condition of "patient continuance in well doing" by "faith,
+obedience to the truth, and sanctification of the spirit." But
+God's free grace and man's diligent fidelity, combined, give the
+full fruition of blessedness in the heart and of glory and
+immortality in the sky.
+
+Such, as we have set forth in the foregoing three divisions, was
+Paul's view of the mission of Christ and of the method of
+salvation. It has been for centuries perverted and mutilated. The
+toil now is by unprejudiced inspection to bring it forward in its
+genuine completeness, as it stood in Paul's own mind and in the
+minds of his contemporaries. The essential view, epitomized in a
+single sentence, is this. The independent grace of God has
+interfered, first, to save man from Hades, and secondly, to enable
+him, by the co operation of his own virtue, to get to heaven. Here
+are two separate means conjoined to effect the end, salvation.
+Now, compare, in the light of this statement, the three great
+theological theories of Christendom. The UNITARIAN, overlooking
+the objective justification, or offered redemption from the death
+realm to the sky home, which whether it be a truth or an error is
+surely in the epistles, makes the subjective sanctification all in
+all. The CALVINIST, in his theory, comparatively scorns the
+subjective sanctification, which Paul insists on as a necessity
+for entering the kingdom of God, and, having perverted the
+objective justification from its real historic meaning,
+exaggerates it into the all in all. The ROMAN CATHOLIC holds that
+Christ simply removed the load of original sin and its entailed
+doom, and left each person to stand or fall by his own merits, in
+the helping communion of the Church. He also maintains that a part
+of Christ's office was to exert an influence for the moral
+improvement and consecration of human character. His error, as an
+interpreter of Paul's thought, is, that he, like the Calvinist,
+attributes to Christ's death a vicarious efficacy by suffering the
+pangs of mankind's guilt to buy their ransom from the inexorable
+justice of God; whereas the apostle really represents Christ's
+redeeming mission as consisting simply in a dramatic
+exemplification of the Father's spontaneous love and purpose to
+pardon past offences, unbolt the gates of Hades, and receive the
+worthy to heaven. Moreover, while Paul describes the heavenly
+salvation as an undeserved gift from the grace of God, the
+Catholic often seems to make it a prize to be earned, under the
+Christian dispensation, by good works which may fairly challenge
+that reward. However, we have little doubt that this apparent
+opposition is rather in the practical mode of exhortation than in
+any interior difference of dogma; for Paul himself makes personal
+salvation hinge on personal conditions, the province of grace
+being seen in the new extension to man of the opportunity and
+invitation to secure his own acceptance. And so the Roman Catholic
+exposition of Paul's doctrine is much more nearly correct than any
+other interpretation now prevalent. We should expect, a priori,
+that it would be, since that Church, containing two thirds of
+Christendom, is the most intimately connected, by its scholars,
+members, and traditions, with the apostolic age.
+
+A prominent feature in the belief of Paul, and one deserving
+distinct notice as necessarily involving a considerable part of
+the theory which we have attributed to him, is the supposition
+that Christ was the first person, clothed with humanity and
+experiencing death, admitted into heaven. Of all the hosts who had
+lived and died, every soul had gone down into the dusky under
+world. There they all were held in durance, waiting for the Great
+Deliverer. In the splendors of the realm over the sky, God and his
+angels dwelt alone. That we do not err in ascribing this belief to
+Paul we might summon the whole body of the Fathers to testify in
+almost unbroken phalanx, from Polycarp to St. Bernard. The Roman,
+Greek, and English Churches still maintain the same dogma. But the
+apostle's own plain words will be sufficient for our purpose.
+"That Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that
+should rise from among the dead." "Now is Christ risen from among
+the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept." "He is
+the beginning, the first born from among the dead, that among all
+he might have the pre eminence." "God raised Christ from among the
+dead, and set him at his own right hand16 in the heavenly places,
+far above every principality, and power, and might, and dominion."
+The last words refer to different orders of spirits, supposed
+
+16 Griesbach argues at length, and shows unanswerably, that this
+passage cannot bear a moral interpretation, but necessarily has a
+physical and local sense. Griesbachii Opuscula Academica, ed.
+Gabler, vol. ii. pp. 145-149.
+
+
+by the Jews to people the aerial region below the heaven of God.
+"God hath" (already in our anticipating faith) "raised us up
+together with Christ and made us sit in heavenly places with him."
+These testimonies are enough to show that Paul believed Jesus to
+have been raised up to the abode of God, the first man ever
+exalted thither, and that this was done as a pledge and
+illustration of the same exaltation awaiting those who believe.
+"If we be dead with Christ, we believe we shall also live with
+him." And the apostle teaches that we are not only connected with
+Christ's resurrection by the outward order and sequence of events,
+but also by an inward gift of the spirit. He says that to every
+obedient believer is given an experimental "knowledge of the power
+of the resurrection of Christ," which is the seal of God within
+him, the pledge of his own celestial destination. "After that ye
+believed, ye were sealed with that holy spirit of promise which is
+the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the
+purchased possession." The office of this gift of the spirit is to
+awaken in the believing Christian a vivid realization of the
+things in store for him, and a perfect conviction that he shall
+yet possess them in the unclouded presence of God, beyond the
+canopy of azure and the stars. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,
+nor the heart of man conceived, the things which God hath prepared
+for them that love him. But he hath revealed them unto us; for we
+have received his spirit, that we might know them." "The spirit
+beareth witness with our spirit that we are children and heirs of
+God, even joint heirs with Christ, that we may be glorified [i. e.
+advanced into heaven] with him."
+
+We will leave this topic with a brief paraphrase of the celebrated
+passage in the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. "Not
+only do the generality of mankind groan in pain in this decaying
+state, under the bondage of perishable elements, travailing for
+emancipation from the flesh into the liberty of the heavenly glory
+appointed for the sons and heirs of God, but even we, who have the
+first fruits of the spirit, [i. e. the assurance springing from
+the resurrection of Christ,] we too wait, painfully longing for
+the adoption, that is, our redemption from the body." By longing
+for the adoption, or filiation, is meant impatient desire to be
+received into heaven as children to the enjoyment of the
+privileges of their Father's house. "God predetermined that those
+called should be conformed to the image of his Son, [i. e. should
+pass through the same course with Christ and reach the heavenly
+goal,] that he might be the first born among many brethren." To
+the securing of this end, "whom he called, them he also justified,
+[i. e. ransomed from Hades;17] and whom he justified, them he also
+glorified," (i. e. advanced to the glory of heaven.) It is evident
+that Paul looked for the speedy second coming of the Lord in the
+clouds of heaven, with angels and power and glory. He expected
+that at that time all enemies would be overthrown and punished,
+the dead would be raised, the living would be changed, and all
+that were Christ's would be translated to heaven.18 "The Lord
+Jesus shall be revealed from
+
+17 That "justify" often means, in Paul's usage, to absolve from
+Hades, we have concluded from a direct study of his doctrines and
+language. We find that Bretschneider gives it the same definition
+in his Lexicon of the New Testament. See [non ASCII characters]
+
+18 "Every one shall rise in his own division" of the great army of
+the dead, "Christ, the first fruits; afterwards, they that are
+Christ's, at his coming."
+
+
+heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance
+on them that know not God and obey not the gospel of Christ." "We
+shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, at
+the last trump." "We who are alive and remain until the coming of
+the Lord shall not anticipate those that are asleep. For the Lord
+himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of
+the archangel, and with the trump of God;19 and the dead in Christ
+shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught
+up with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so we
+shall always be with the Lord. Brethren, you need not that I
+should specify the time to you; for yourselves are perfectly aware
+that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night." "The
+time is short." "I pray God your whole spirit, soul, and body be
+preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." "At
+his appearing he shall judge the living and the dead." "The Lord
+is at hand." The author of these sentences undeniably looked for
+the great advent soon. Than Paul, indeed, no one more earnestly
+believed (or did more to strengthen in others that belief) in that
+speedy return of Christ, the anticipation of which thrilled all
+early Christendom with hope and dread, and kept the disciples day
+and night on the stretch and start of expectation to hear the
+awful blast of the judgment trump and to see the glorious vision
+of the Son of God descending amidst a convoy of angels. What
+sublime emotions must have rushed through the apostle's soul when
+he thought that he, as a survivor of death's reign on earth, might
+behold the resurrection without himself entering the grave! Upon a
+time when he should be perchance at home, or at Damascus, or, it
+might be, at Jerusalem, the sun would become as blood, the moon as
+sackcloth of hair, the last trump would swell the sky, and,
+
+"Lo! the nations of the dead, Which do outnumber all earth's
+races, rise, And high in sumless myriads overhead Sweep past him
+in a cloud, as 'twere the skirts Of the Eternal passing by."
+
+The resurrection which Paul thought would attend the second coming
+of Christ was the rising of the summoned spirits of the deceased
+from their rest in the under world. Most certainly it was not the
+restoration of their decomposed bodies from their graves, although
+that incredible surmise has been generally entertained. He says,
+while answering the question, How are the dead raised up, and with
+what body do they come? "That which thou sowest, thou sowest not
+that body which shall be, but naked grain: God giveth it a body as
+it hath pleased him." The comparison is, that so the naked soul is
+sown in the under world, and God, when he raiseth it, giveth it a
+fitting body. He does not hesitate to call the man "a fool" who
+expects the restoration of the same body that was buried. His
+whole argument is explicitly against that idea. "There are bodies
+celestial, as well as bodies terrestrial: the first man was
+
+19 Rabbi Akiba says, in the Talmud, "God shall take and blow a
+trumpet a thousand godlike yards in length, whose echo shall sound
+from end to end of the world. At the first blast the earth shall
+tremble. At the second, the dust shall part. At the third, the
+bones shall come together. At the fourth, the members shall grow
+warm. At the fifth, they shall be crowned with the head. At the
+sixth, the soul shall re enter the body. And at the seventh, they
+shall stand erect." Corrodi, Geschichte des Chiliasmus, band i. s.
+355.
+
+
+of the earth, earthy; the second man was the Lord from heaven; and
+as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the
+image of the heavenly; for flesh and blood cannot inherit the
+kingdom of God." In view of these declarations, it is astonishing
+that any one can suppose that Paul believed in the resurrection of
+these present bodies and in their transference into heaven. "In
+this tabernacle we groan, being burdened," and, "Who shall deliver
+me from this body of death?" he cries. If ever there was a man
+whose goading experience, keen intellectual energies, and moral
+sensibilities, made him weary of this slow, gross body, and
+passionately to long for a more corresponding, swift, and pure
+investiture, it was Paul. And in his theory of "the glorious body
+of Christ, according to which our vile body shall be changed," he
+relieved his impatience and fed his desire. What his conception of
+that body was, definitely, we cannot tell; but doubtless it was
+the idea of a vehicle adapted to his mounting and ardent soul, and
+in many particulars very unlike this present groaning load of
+clay. The epistles of Paul contain no clear implication of the
+notion of a millennium, a thousand years' reign of Christ with his
+saints on the earth after his second advent. On the contrary, in
+many places, particularly in the fourth chapter of the First
+Epistle to the Thessalonians, (supposing that letter to be his,)
+he says that the Lord and they that are his will directly pass
+into heaven after the consummation of his descent from heaven and
+their resurrection from the dead. But the declaration "He must
+reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet," taken with its
+context, is thought, by Bertholdt, Billroth, De Wette, and others,
+to imply that Christ would establish a millennial kingdom on
+earth, and reign in it engaged in vanquishing all hostile forces.
+Against this exegesis we have to say, first, that, so far as that
+goes, the vast preponderance of critical authorities is opposed to
+it. Secondly, if this conquest were to be secured on earth, there
+is nothing to show that it need occupy much time: one hour might
+answer for it as well as a thousand years. There is nothing here
+to show that Paul means just what the Rabbins taught. Thirdly,
+even if Paul supposed a considerable period must elapse before
+"all enemies" would be subdued, during which period Christ must
+reign, it does not follow that he believed that reign would be on
+earth: it might be in heaven. The "enemies" referred to are, in
+part at least, the wicked spirits occupying the regions of the
+upper air; for he specifies these "principalities, authorities,
+and powers."20 And the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
+represents God as saying to Jesus, "Sit thou on my right hand,
+until I make thine enemies thy footstool." Fourthly, it seems
+certain that, if in the apostle's thought a thousand years were
+interpolated between Christ's second coming and the delivering of
+his mediatorial sceptre to God, he would have said so, at least
+somewhere in his writings. He would naturally have dwelt upon it a
+little, as the Chiliasts did so much. Instead of that, he
+repeatedly contradicts it. Upon the whole, then, with Ruckert, we
+cannot
+
+20 The apocryphal "Ascension of Isaiah," already spoken of, gives
+a detailed description of the upper air as occupied by Satan and
+his angels, among whom fighting and evil deeds rage; but Christ in
+his ascent conquers and spoils them all, and shows himself a
+victor ever brightening as he rises successively through the whole
+seven heavens to the feet of God. Ascensio Vatis Isaia, cap. vi x.
+
+
+see any reason for not supposing that, according to Paul, "the
+end" was immediately to succeed "the coming," as  [non-ASCII
+characters] would properly indicate.
+
+The doctrine of a long earthly reign of Christ is not deduced
+from this passage, by candid interpretation, because it must be
+there, but foisted into it, by Rabbinical information, because
+it may be there.
+
+Paul distinctly teaches that the believers who died before the
+second coming of the Savior would remain in the under world until
+that event, when they and the transformed living should ascend
+"together with the Lord." All the relevant expressions in his
+epistles, save two, are obviously in harmony with this conception
+of a temporary subterranean sojourn, waiting for the appearance of
+Jesus from heaven to usher in the resurrection. But in the fifth
+chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians he writes,
+"Abiding in the body we are absent from the Lord." It is usually
+inferred, from these words and those which follow them, that the
+apostle expected whenever he died to be instantly with Christ.
+Certainly they do mean pretty nearly that; but they mean it in
+connection with the second advent and the accompanying
+circumstances and events; for Paul believed that many of the
+disciples  possibly himself would live until Christ's coming. All
+through these two chapters (the fourth and fifth) it is obvious,
+from the marked use of the terms "we" and "you," and from other
+considerations, that "we" here refers solely to the writer, the
+individual Paul. It is the plural of accommodation used by common
+custom and consent. In the form of a slight paraphrase we may
+unfold the genuine meaning of the passage in hand. "In this body I
+am afflicted: not that I would merely be released from it, for
+then I should be a naked spirit. But I earnestly desire,
+unclothing myself of this earthly body, at the same time to clothe
+myself with my heavenly body, that I may lose all my mortal part
+and its woes in the full experience of heaven's eternal life. God
+has determined that this result shall come to me sooner or later,
+and has given me a pledge of it in the witnessing spirit. But it
+cannot happen so long as I tarry in the flesh, the Lord delaying
+his appearance. Having the infallible earnest of the spirit, I do
+not dread the change, but desire to hasten it. Confident of
+acceptance in that day at the judgment seat of Christ, before
+which we must all then stand, I long for the crisis when, divested
+of this body and invested with the immortal form wrought for me by
+God, I shall be with the Lord. Still, knowing the terror which
+shall environ the Lord at his coming to judgment, I plead with men
+to be prepared." Whoever carefully examines the whole connected
+passage, from iv. 6 to v. 16, will see, we think, that the above
+paraphrase truly exposes its meaning.
+
+The other text alluded to as an apparent exception to the doctrine
+of a residence in the lower land of ghosts intervening between
+death and the ascension, occurs in the Epistle to the
+Philippians: "I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to
+depart and to be with Christ, which is far better; but that I
+should abide in the flesh is more needful for you." There are
+three possible ways of regarding this passage. First, we may
+suppose that Paul, seeing the advent of the Lord postponed longer
+and longer, changed his idea of the intermediate state of deceased
+Christians, and thought they would spend that period of waiting in
+heaven, not in Hades. Neander advocates this view. But there is
+little to sustain it, and it is loaded with fatal difficulties. A
+change of faith so important and so bright in its view as this
+must have seemed under the circumstances would have been clearly
+and fully stated. Attention would have been earnestly invited to
+so great a favor and comfort; exultation and gratitude would have
+been expressed over so unheard of a boon. Moreover, what had
+occurred to effect the alleged new belief? The unexpected delay of
+Christ's coming might make the apostle wish that his departed
+friends were tarrying above the sky instead of beneath the
+sepulchre; but it could furnish no ground to warrant a sudden
+faith in that wish as a fulfilled fact. Besides, the truth is that
+Paul never ceased, even to the last, to expect the speedy arrival
+of the Lord and to regard the interval as a comparative trifle. In
+this very epistle he says, "The Lord is at hand: be careful for
+nothing." Secondly, we may imagine that he expected himself, as a
+divinely chosen and specially favored servant, to go to Christ in
+heaven as soon as he died, if that should happen before the Lord's
+appearance, while the great multitude of believers would abide in
+the under world until the general resurrection. The death he was
+in peril of and is referring to was that of martyrdom for the
+gospel at the hands of Nero. And many of the Fathers maintained
+that in the case of every worthy Christian martyr there was an
+exception to the general doom, and that he was permitted to enter
+heaven at once. Still, to argue such a thought in the text before
+us requires an hypothesis far fetched and unsupported by a single
+clear declaration of the apostle himself. Thirdly, we may assume
+and it seems to us by far the least encumbered and the most
+plausible theory that attempts to meet the case that Paul believed
+there would be vouchsafed to the faithful Christian during his
+transient abode in the under world a more intimate and blessed
+spiritual fellowship with his Master than he could experience
+while in the flesh. "For I am persuaded that neither death
+[separation from the body] nor depth [the under world] shall be
+able to separate us from God's love, which he has manifested
+through Christ." He may refer, therefore, by his hopes of being
+straightway with Christ on leaving the body, to a spiritual
+communion with him in the disembodied state below, and not to his
+physical presence in the supernal realm, the latter not being
+attainable previous to the resurrection. Indeed, a little farther
+on in this same epistle, he plainly shows that he did not
+anticipate being received to heaven until after the second coming
+of Christ. He says, "We look for the Savior from heaven, who shall
+change our vile body and fashion it like unto his own glorious
+body." This change is the preliminary preparation to ascent to
+heaven, which change he repeatedly represents as indispensable.
+
+What Paul believed would be the course and fate of things on earth
+after the final consummation of Christ's mission is a matter of
+inference from his brief and partial hints. The most probable and
+consistent view which can be constructed from those hints is this.
+He thought all mankind would become reconciled and obedient to
+God, and that death, losing its punitive character, would become
+what it was originally intended to be, the mere change of the
+earthly for a heavenly body preparatory to a direct ascension.
+"Then shall the Son himself be subject unto Him that put all
+things under him, that God may be all in all." Then placid virtues
+and innocent joys should fill the world, and human life be what it
+was in Eden ere guilt forbade angelic visitants and converse with
+heaven.21 "So when" without a
+
+21 Neander thinks Paul's idea was that "the perfected kingdom of
+God would then blend itself harmoniously throughout his unbounded
+dominions." We believe his apprehension is correct. This globe
+would become a part of the general paradise, an ante room or a l
+ower story to the Temple of the Universe.
+
+
+previous descent into Hades, as the context proves "this mortal
+shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the
+saying which is written, 'Death shall be swallowed up in victory.
+O Death, thou last enemy, where is thy sting? O Hades, thou gloomy
+prison, where is thy victory?'" The exposition just offered is
+confirmed by its striking adaptedness to the whole Pauline scheme.
+It is also the interpretation given by the earliest Fathers, and
+by the Church in general until now. This idea of men being changed
+and rising into heaven without at all entering the disembodied
+state below was evidently in the mind of Milton when he wrote the
+following lines:
+
+"And from these corporeal nutriments, perhaps. Your bodies may at
+last turn all to spirit, And, wing'd, ascend ethereal, may, at
+choice, Here, or in heavenly paradise, dwell."
+
+It now remains to see what Paul thought was to be the final
+portion of the hardened and persevering sinner. One class of
+passages in his writings, if taken by themselves, would lead us to
+believe that on that point he had no fixed convictions in regard
+to particulars, but, thinking these beyond the present reach of
+reason, contented himself with the general assurance that all such
+persons would meet their just deserts, and there left the subject
+in obscurity. "God will render to every man to the Jew first, and
+also to the Greek according to his deeds." "Whatsoever a man
+soweth, that shall he also reap." "So then every one of us shall
+give an account of himself to God." "At the judgment seat of
+Christ every one shall receive the things done in his body,
+according to that he hath done, whether it be good or whether it
+be bad." From these and a few kindred texts we might infer that
+the author, aware that he "knew but in part," simply held the
+belief without attempting to pry into special methods, details,
+and results that at the time of the judgment all should have exact
+justice. He may, however, have unfolded in his preaching minutia
+of faith not explained in his letters.
+
+A second class of passages in the epistles of Paul would naturally
+cause the common reader to conclude that he imagined that the
+unregenerate those unfit for the presence of God were to be
+annihilated when Christ, after his second coming, should return to
+heaven with his saints. "Those who know not God and obey not the
+gospel of Christ shall be punished with everlasting destruction
+from the presence and glory of the Lord when he shall come." "The
+end of the enemies of the cross of Christ is destruction." "The
+vessels of wrath fitted for destruction." "As many as have sinned
+without law shall perish without law." But it is to be observed
+that the word here rendered "destruction" need not signify
+annihilation. It often, even in Paul's epistles, plainly means
+severe punishment, dreadful misery, moral ruin, and retribution.
+For example, "foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in
+destruction and perdition," "piercing them through with many
+sorrows." It may or may not have that sense in the instances above
+cited. Their meaning is intrinsically uncertain: we must bring
+other passages and distinct considerations to aid our
+interpretation.
+
+From a third selection of texts in Paul's epistles it is not
+strange that some persons have deduced the doctrine of
+unconditional, universal salvation. "As in Adam all die, even so
+in Christ shall all be made alive." But the genuine explanation of
+this sentence, we are constrained to believe, is as follows: "As,
+following after the example of Adam, all souls descend below, so,
+following after Christ, all shall be raised up," that is, at the
+judgment, after which event some may be taken to heaven, others
+banished again into Hades. "We trust in the living God, who is the
+Savior of all men, especially of them that believe." This means
+that all men have been saved now from the unconditional sentence
+to Hades brought on them by the first sin, but not all know the
+glad tidings: those who receive them into believing hearts are
+already exulting over their deliverance and their hopes of heaven.
+All are objectively saved from the unavoidable and universal
+necessity of Hadean imprisonment; the obedient believers are also
+subjectively saved from the contingent and personal risk of
+incurring that doom. "God hath shut them all up together in
+unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all." "All" here means
+both Jews and Gentiles; and the reference is to the universal
+annulment of the universal fatality, and the impartial offer of
+heaven to every one who sanctifies the truth in his heart. In some
+cases the word "all" is used with rhetorical looseness, not with
+logical rigidness, and denotes merely all Christians. Ruckert
+shows this well in his commentary on the fifteenth chapter of
+First Corinthians. In other instances the universality, which is
+indeed plainly there, applies to the removal from the race of the
+inherited doom; while a conditionality is unquestionably implied
+as to the actual salvation of each person. We say Paul does
+constantly represent personal salvation as depending on
+conditions, as beset by perils and to be earnestly striven for.
+"Lest that by any means I myself should be a castaway." "Deliver
+such an one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the
+spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." "Wherefore we
+labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of the
+lord." "To them that are saved we are a savor of life unto life;
+to them that perish, a savor of death unto death." "Charge them
+that are rich that they be humble and do good, laying up in store
+a good foundation, that they may lay hold on eternal life." It is
+clear, from these and many similar passages of Paul, that he did
+not believe in the unconditional salvation, the positive
+mechanical salvation, of all individuals, but held personal
+salvation to be a contingent problem, to be worked out, through
+the permitting grace of God, by Christian faith, works, and
+character. How plainly this is contained, too, in his doctrine of
+"a resurrection of the just and the unjust," and of a day of
+judgment, from whose august tribunal Christ is to pronounce
+sentence according to each man's deeds! At the same time, the
+undeniable fact deserves particular remembrance that he says, and
+apparently knows, nothing whatever of a hell, in the present
+acceptation of that term, a prison house of fiery tortures. He
+assigns the realm of Satan and the evil spirits to the air, the
+vexed region between earth and heaven, according to the demonology
+of his age and country. 22
+
+Finally, there is a fourth class of passages, from which we might
+infer that the apostle's faith merely excluded the reprobate from
+participating in the ascent with Christ, just as some of the
+Pharisees excluded the Gentiles from their resurrection, and there
+left the subject in darkness.
+
+22 A detailed and most curious account of this region, which he
+calls Tartarus, is given by Angustine. De Gen. ad. lit. lib. iii.
+cap. 14, 15, ed. Benedictina.
+
+
+"They that are Christ's," "the dead in Christ, shall rise."
+"No sensualist, extortioner, idolater, hath any inheritance
+in the kingdom of Christ and of God." "There is laid up a crown of
+righteousness, which the Lord shall give in that day to all them
+that love his appearing." In all these, and in many other cases,
+there is a marked omission of any reference to the ultimate
+positive disposal of the wicked. Still, against the supposition of
+his holding the doctrine that all except good Christians would be
+left below eternally, we have his repeated explicit avowals. "I
+have hope towards God that there shall be a resurrection both of
+the just and the unjust." "We must all appear before the judgment
+seat of Christ." These last statements, however, prove only that
+Paul thought the bad as well as the good would be raised up and
+judged: they are not inconsistent with the belief that the
+condemned would afterwards either be annihilated, or remanded
+everlastingly to the under world. This very belief, we think, is
+contained in that remarkable passage where Paul writes to the
+Philippians that he strives "if by any means he may attain unto
+the resurrection." Now, the common resurrection of the dead for
+judgment needed not to be striven for: it would occur to all
+unconditionally. But there is another resurrection, or another
+part remaining to complete the resurrection, namely, after the
+judgment, a rising of the accepted to heaven. All shall rise from
+Hades upon the earth to judgment. This Paul calls simply the
+resurrection, [Non ASCII Characters] After the judgment, the
+accepted shall rise to heaven. This Paul calls, with distinctive
+emphasis, [Non ASCII Characters] the pre eminent or complete
+resurrection, the prefix being used as an intensive. This is what
+the apostle considers uncertain and labors to secure, "stretching
+forward and pressing towards the goal for the prize of that call
+upwards," [Non ASCII Characters] (that invitation to heaven,)
+"which God has extended through Christ." Those who are condemned
+at the judgment can have no part in this completion of the
+resurrection, cannot enter the heavenly kingdom, but must be
+"punished with everlasting destruction from the presence and glory
+of the Lord," that is, as we suppose is signified, be thrust into
+the under world for evermore. As unessential to our object, we
+have omitted an exposition of the Pauline doctrine of the natural
+rank and proper or delegated offices of Christ in the universe;
+also an examination of the validity of the doubts and arguments
+brought against the genuineness of the lesser epistles ascribed to
+Paul. In close, we will sum up in brief array the leading
+conceptions in his view of the last things. First, there is a
+world of immortal light and bliss over the sky, the exclusive
+abode of God and the angels from of old; and there is a dreary
+world of darkness and repose under the earth, the abode of all
+departed human spirits. Secondly, death was originally meant to
+lead souls into heaven, clothed in new and divine bodies,
+immediately on the fall of the present tabernacle; but sin broke
+that plan and doomed souls to pass disembodied into Hades.
+Thirdly, the Mosaic dispensation of law could not deliver men from
+that sentence; but God had promised Abraham that through one of
+his posterity they should be delivered. To fulfil that promise
+Christ came. He illustrated God's unpurchased love and forgiveness
+and determination to restore the original plan, as if men had
+never sinned. Christ effected this aim, in conjunction with his
+teachings, by dying, descending into Hades, as if the doom of a
+sinful man were upon him also, subduing the powers of that prison
+house, rising again, and ascending into heaven, the first one ever
+admitted there from among the dead, thus exemplifying the
+fulfilled "expectation of the creature that was groaning and
+travailing in pain" to be born into the freedom of the heavenly
+glory of the sons of God. Fourthly, "justification by faith,"
+therefore, means the redemption from Hades by acceptance of the
+dispensation of free grace which is proclaimed in the gospel.
+Fifthly, every sanctified believer receives a pledge or earnest of
+the spirit sealing him as God's and assuring him of acceptance
+with Christ and of advance to heaven. Sixthly, Christ is speedily
+to come a second time, come in glory and power irresistible, to
+consummate his mission, raise the dead, judge the world, establish
+a new order of things, and return into heaven with his chosen
+ones. Seventhly, the stubbornly wicked portion of mankind will be
+returned eternally into the under world. Eighthly, after the
+judgment the subterranean realm of death will be shut up, no more
+souls going into it, but all men at their dissolution being
+instantly invested with spiritual bodies and ascending to the
+glories of the Lord. Finally, Jesus having put down all enemies
+and restored the primeval paradise will yield up his mediatorial
+throne, and God the Father be all in all.
+
+The preparatory rudiments of this system of the last things
+existed in the belief of the age, and it was itself composed by
+the union of a theoretic interpretation of the life of Christ and
+of the connected phenomena succeeding his death, with the elements
+of Pharasaic Judaism, all mingled in the crucible of the soul of
+Paul and fused by the fires of his experience. It illustrates a
+great number of puzzling passages in the New Testament, without
+the necessity of recourse to the unnatural, incredible,
+unwarranted dogmas associated with them by the unique, isolated
+peculiarities of Calvinism. The interpretation given above, moreover,
+has this strong confirmation of its accuracy, namely, that it is
+arrived at from the stand point of the thought and life of the
+Apostle Paul in the first century, not from the stand point of the
+theology and experience of the educated Christian of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+JOHN'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+WE are now to see if we can determine and explain what were the
+views of the Apostle John upon the subject of death and life,
+condemnation and salvation, the resurrection and immortality. To
+understand his opinions on these points, it is obviously necessary
+to examine his general system of theological thought. John is
+regarded as the writer of the proem to the fourth Gospel, also of
+three brief epistles. There are such widely spread doubts of his
+being the author of the Apocalypse that it has seemed better to
+examine that production separately, leaving each one free to
+attribute its doctrine of the last things to whatever person known
+or unknown he believes wrote the book. It is true that the
+authorship of the fourth Gospel itself is powerfully disputed; but
+an investigation of that question would lead us too far and detain
+us too long from our real aim, which is not to discuss the
+genuineness or the authority of the New Testament documents, but
+to show their meaning in what they actually contain and imply
+concerning a future life. It is necessary to premise that we think
+it certain that John wrote with some reference to the sprouting
+philosophy of his time, the Platonic and Oriental speculations so
+early engrafted upon the stock of Christian doctrine. For the
+peculiar theories which were matured and systematized in the
+second and third centuries by the Gnostic sects were floating
+about, in crude and fragmentary forms, at the close of the first
+century, when the apostle wrote. They immediately awakened
+dissension and alarm, cries of heresy and orthodoxy, in the
+Church. Some modern writers deny the presence in the New Testament
+of any allusion to such views; but the weight of evidence on the
+other side internal, from similarity of phrase, and external, from
+the testimony of early Fathers is, when accumulated and
+appreciated, overwhelming. Among these Gnostic notions the most
+distinctive and prominent was the belief that the world was
+created and the Jewish dispensation given, not by the true and
+infinite God, but by a subordinate and imperfect deity, the
+absolute God remaining separate from all created things, unknown
+and afar, in the sufficiency of his aboriginal pleroma or fulness.
+The Gnostics also maintained that Creative Power, Reason, Life,
+Truth, Love, and other kindred realities, were individual beings,
+who had emanated from God, and who by their own efficiency
+constructed, illuminated, and carried on the various provinces of
+creation and races of existence. Many other opinions, fanciful,
+absurd, or recondite, which they held, it is not necessary here to
+state. The evangelist, without alluding perhaps to any particular
+teachers or systems of these doctrines, but only to their general
+scope, traverses by his declarations partially the same ground of
+thought which they cover, stating dogmatically the positive facts
+as he apprehended them. He agrees with some of the Gnostic
+doctrines and differs from others, not setting himself to follow
+or to oppose them indiscriminately, but to do either as the truth
+seemed to him to require.
+
+There are two methods of seeking the meaning of the introduction
+to the fourth Gospel where the Johannean doctrine of the Logos is
+condensed. We may study it grammatically, or historically;
+morally, or metaphysically; from the point of view of experimental
+religious faith, or from that of contemporary speculative
+philosophy. He who omits either of these ways of regarding the
+subject must arrive at an interpretation essentially defective.
+Both modes of investigation are indispensable for acquiring a full
+comprehension of the expressions employed and the thoughts
+intended. But to be fitted to understand the theme in its
+historical aspect which, in this case, for purposes of criticism,
+is by far the more important  one must be intelligently acquainted
+with the Hebrew personification of the Wisdom, also of the Word,
+of God; with the Platonic conception of archetypal ideas; with the
+Alexandrian Jewish doctrine of the Divine Logos; and with the
+relevant Gnostic and Christian speculation and phraseology of the
+first two centuries. Especially must the student be familiar with
+Philo, who was an eminent Platonic Jewish philosopher and a
+celebrated writer, flourishing previous to the composition of the
+fourth Gospel, in which, indeed, there is scarcely a single
+superhuman predicate of Christ which may not be paralleled with
+striking closeness from his extant works. In all these fields are
+found, in imperfect proportions and fragments, the materials which
+are developed in John's belief of the Logos become flesh. To
+present all these materials here would be somewhat out of place
+and would require too much room. We shall, therefore, simply
+state, as briefly and clearly as possible, the final conclusions
+to which a thorough study has led us, drawing such illustrations
+as we do advance almost entirely from Philo.1
+
+1 The reader who wishes to see in smallest compass and most lucid
+order the facts requisite for the formation of a judgment is
+referred to Lucke's "Dissertation on the Logos," to Norton's
+"Statement of Reasons," and to Neander's exposition of the
+Johannean theology in his "Planting and Training of the Church."
+Nearly every thing important, both external and internal, is
+collected in these three sources taken together, and set forth
+with great candor, power, and skill. Differing in their conclusions,
+they supply pretty adequate means for the independent student to
+conclude for himself.
+
+
+In the first place, what view of the Father himself, the absolute
+Deity, do these writings present? John conceives of God no one can
+well collate the relevant texts in his works without perceiving
+this as the one perfect and eternal Spirit, in himself invisible
+to mortal eyes, the Personal Love, Life, Truth, Light, "in whom is
+no darkness at all." This corresponds entirely with the purest and
+highest idea the human mind can form of the one untreated infinite
+God. The apostle, then, going back to the period anterior to the
+material creation, and soaring to the contemplation of the sole
+God, does not conceive of him as being utterly alone, but as
+having a Son with him, an "only begotten Son," a beloved companion
+"before the foundation of the world." "In the beginning was the
+Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was
+in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and
+without him was nothing made that was made." The true explanation
+of these words, according to their undeniable historical and their
+unforced grammatical. There is an English translation of it, by
+Professor G. R. Noyes, in the numbers of the Christian Examiner
+for March and May, 1849, meaning, is as follows. Before the
+material creation, when God was yet the sole being, his first
+production, the Logos, was a Son, at once the image of himself and
+the idea of the yet uncreated world. By him this personal Idea,
+Son, or Logos all things were afterward created; or, more exactly,
+through him, by means of him, all things became, that is, were
+brought, from their being in a state of conception in the mind of
+God, into actual existence in space and time. Thus Philo says,
+"God is the most generic; second is the Logos of God."2 "The Logos
+is the first begotten Son."3 "The Logos of God is above the whole
+world, and is the most ancient and generic of all that had a
+beginning."4 "Nothing intervenes between the Logos and God on whom
+he rests."5 "This sensible world is the junior son of God; the
+Senior is the Idea,"6 or Logos. "The shadow and seeming portrait
+of God is his Logos, by which, as by an assumed instrument, he
+made the world. As God is the original of the image here called
+shadow, so this image becomes the original of other things."7 "The
+intelligible world, or world of archetypal ideas, is the Logos of
+the world creating God; as an intelligible or ideal city is the
+thought of the architect reflecting to build a sensible city."8
+"Of the world, God is the cause by which, the four elements the
+material from which, the Logos the instrument through which, the
+goodness of the Creator the end for which, it was made."9 These
+citations from Philo clearly show, in various stages of
+development, that doctrine of the Logos which began first arguing
+to the Divine Being from human analogies with separating the
+conception of a plan in the mind of God from its execution in
+fact; proceeded with personifying that plan, or sum of ideas, as a
+mediating agent between motive and action, between impulse and
+fulfilment; and ended with hypostatizing the arranging power of
+the Divine thought as a separate being, his intellectual image or
+Son, his first and perfect production. They unequivocally express
+these thoughts: that God is the only being who was from eternity;
+that the Logos was the first begotten, antemundane being, that he
+was the likeness, image, immediate manifestation, of the Father;
+that he was the medium of creation, the instrumental means in the
+outward formation of the world. History shows us this doctrine
+unfolded by minute steps, which it would be tedious to follow,
+from the Book of Proverbs to Philo Judaus and John, from Plato to
+Justin Martyr and Athanasius. But the rapid sketch just presented
+may be sufficient now.
+
+When it is written, "and the Logos was God," the meaning is not
+strictly literal. To guard against its being so considered, the
+author tautologically repeats what he had said immediately before,
+"the same was in the beginning with God." Upon the supposition
+that the Logos is strictly identical with God, the verses make
+utter nonsense. "In the beginning was God, and God was with God,
+and God was God. God was in the beginning with God." But suppose
+the Logos to mean an ante mundane but subordinate being, who was a
+perfect image or likeness of God, and the sense is both clear and
+satisfactory, and no violence is done either to historical data or
+to grammatical demands. "And the Logos was God," that is, was the
+mirror or facsimile of God. So, employing the same idiom, we are
+accustomed to say
+
+2 Mangey's edition of Philo, vol. i. p. 82.
+
+3 Ibid. p. 308.
+
+4 Ibid. p. 121.
+
+5 Ibid. p. 560.
+
+6 Ibid. p. 277.
+
+7 Ibid. p. 106.
+
+8 Ibid. p. 5.
+
+9 Ibid. p. 162.
+
+
+of an accurate representation of a person, It is the very man
+himself! Or, without the use of this idiom, we may explain the
+expression "the Logos was God" thus: He stands in the place of God
+to the lower creation: practically considered, he is as God to us.
+As Philo writes, "To the wise and perfect the Most High is God;
+but to us, imperfect beings, the Logos God's interpreter is
+God."10
+
+The inward significance of the Logos doctrine, in all its degrees
+and phases, circumstantially and essentially, from first to last,
+is the revelation of God. God himself, in himself, is conceived as
+absolutely withdrawn beyond the apprehension of men, in boundless
+immensity and inaccessible secrecy. His own nature is hidden, as a
+thought is hidden in the mind; but he has the power of revealing
+it, as a thought is revealed by speaking it in a word. That
+uttered word is the Logos, and is afterwards conceived as a
+person, and as creative, then as building and glorifying the
+world. All of God that is sent forth from passive concealment into
+active manifestation is the Logos. "The term Logos comprehends,"
+Norton says, "all the attributes of God manifested in the creation
+and government of the universe." The Logos is the hypostasis of
+"the unfolded portion," "the revealing power," "the self showing
+faculty," "the manifesting action," of God. The essential idea,
+then, concerning the Logos is that he is the means through which
+the hidden God comes to the cognizance of his creatures. In
+harmony with this prevailing philosophy one who believed the Logos
+to have been incarnated in Christ would suppose the purpose of his
+incarnation to be the fuller revelation of God to men. And
+Martineau says, "The view of revelation which is implicated in the
+folds of the Logos doctrine that everywhere pervades the fourth
+Gospel, is that it is the appearance to beings who have something
+of a divine spirit within them, of a yet diviner without them,
+leading them to the divinest of all, who embraces them both." This
+is a fine statement of the practical religious aspect of John's
+conception of the nature and office of the Savior.
+
+Since he regarded God as personal love, life, truth, and light,
+and Christ, the embodied Logos, as his only begotten Son, an exact
+image of him in manifestation, it follows that John regarded
+Christ, next in rank below God, as personal love, life, truth, and
+light; and the belief that he was the necessary medium of
+communicating these Divine blessings to men would naturally
+result. Accordingly, we find that John repeats, as falling from
+the lips of Christ, all the declarations required by and
+supporting such an hypothesis. "I am the way, the truth, and the
+life." "No man cometh unto the Father but by me." But Philo, too,
+had written before in precisely the same strain. Witness the
+correspondences between the following quotations respectively from
+John and Philo. "I am the bread which came down from heaven to
+give life to the world."11 Whoso eateth my body and drinketh my
+blood hath eternal life."12 "Behold, I rain bread upon you from
+heaven: the heavenly food of the soul is the word of God, and the
+Divine Logos, from whom all eternal instructions and wisdoms
+flow."13 "The bread the Lord gave us to eat was his word."14
+"Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, ye have no life
+
+10 Mangey's edition of Philo, vol. ii. p. 128.
+
+11 John vi. 33. 41.
+
+12 Ibid. 54.
+
+13 Quoted by G. Scheffer in his Treatise "De Usu
+Philonis in Interpretatione Novi Testamenti," p. 82.
+
+14 lbid. p. 81.
+
+
+in you."15 "He alone can become the heir of incorporeal and divine
+things whose whole soul is filled with the salubrious Word."16
+"Every one that seeth the Son and believeth on him shall have
+everlasting life."17 "He strains every nerve towards the highest
+Divine Logos, who is the fountain of wisdom, in order that,
+drawing from that spring, he may escape death and win everlasting
+life."18 "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if
+any man eat of this bread he shall live forever."19 "Lifting up
+his eyes to the ether, man receives manna, the Divine Logos,
+heavenly and immortal nourishment for the right desiring soul."20
+"God is the perennial fountain of life; God is the fountain of the
+most ancient Logos."21 "As the living Father hath sent me, and I
+live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by
+me."22 Does it not seem perfectly plain that John's doctrine of
+the Christ is at bottom identical with Philo's doctrine of the
+Logos? The difference of development in the two doctrines, so far
+as there is a difference, is that the latter view is
+philosophical, abstract; the former, practical, historical. Philo
+describes the Logos ideally, filling the supersensible sphere,
+mediating between the world and God; John presents him really,
+incarnated as a man, effecting the redemption of our race. The
+same dignity, the same offices, are predicated of him by both.
+John declares, "In him [the Divine Logos] was life, and the life
+was the light of men."23 Philo asserts, "Nothing is more luminous
+and irradiating than the Divine Logos, by the participation of
+whom other things expel darkness and gloom, earnestly desiring to
+partake of living light."24 John speaks of Christ as "the only
+begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father."25 Philo says,
+"The Logos is the first begotten Son of God," "between whom and
+God nothing intervenes."26 John writes, "The Son of man will give
+you the food of everlasting life; for him hath God the Father
+sealed."27 Philo writes, "The stamp of the seal of God is the
+immortal Logos."28 We have this from John: "He was manifested to
+take away our sins; and in him is no sin."29 And this from Philo:
+"The Divine Logos is free from all sins, voluntary and
+involuntary."30
+
+The Johannean Christ is the Philonean Logos born into the world as
+a man. "And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of
+grace and truth." The substance of what has thus far been
+established may now be concisely stated. The essential thought,
+whether the subject be metaphysically or practically considered,
+is this. God is the eternal, infinite personality of love and
+truth, life and light. The Logos is his first born Son, his exact
+image, the reproduction of his being, the next lower personality
+of love and truth, life and light, the instrument for creating and
+ruling the world, the revelation of God, the medium of
+communication between God and his works. Christ is that Logos come
+upon the earth as a man to save the perishing, proving his pre
+existence and superhuman nature by his miraculous knowledge and
+works. That the belief expressed in the last sentence is correctly
+attributed to John will
+
+15 John vi. 53.
+
+16 Philo, vol. i. p. 482.
+
+17 John vi. 40.
+
+18 Philo, vol. i. p. 560.
+
+19 John vi. 51.
+
+20 Philo, vol. i. p. 498.
+
+21 Ibid. pp. 575, 207.
+
+22 John vi. 57.
+
+23 John i. 4.
+
+24 Philo, vol. i. p. 121.
+
+25 John i. 18.
+
+26 Philo, vol. i. pp. 427, 560.
+
+27 John vi. 27.
+
+28 Philo, vol. ii. p. 606.
+
+29 1 John iii. 5.
+
+30 Philo, vol. i. p. 562.
+
+
+be repeatedly substantiated before the close of this chapter: in
+regard to the statements in the preceding sentences no further
+proof is thought necessary.
+
+With the aid of a little repetition, we will now attempt to make a
+step of progress. The tokens of energy, order, splendor,
+beneficence, in the universe, are not, according to John, as we
+have seen, the effects of angelic personages, emanating gods,
+Gnostic aons, but are the workings of the self revealing power of
+the one true and eternal God, this power being conceived by John,
+according to the philosophy of his age, as a proper person, God's
+instrument in creation. Reason, life, light, love, grace,
+righteousness, kindred terms so thickly scattered over his pages,
+are not to him, as they were to the Gnostics, separate beings, but
+are the very working of the Logos, consubstantial manifestations
+of God's nature and attributes. But mankind, fallen into folly and
+vice, perversity and sin, lying in darkness, were ignorant that
+these Divine qualities were in reality mediate exhibitions of God,
+immediate exhibitions of the Logos. "The light was shining in
+darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." Then, to reveal
+to men the truth, to regenerate them and conjoin them through
+himself with the Father in the experience of eternal life, the
+hypostatized Logos left his transcendent glory in heaven and came
+into the world in the person of Jesus. "No man hath seen God at
+any time: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father,
+he hath revealed him." "I came down from heaven to do the will of
+Him that sent me." This will is that all who see and believe on
+the Son shall have everlasting life. "God so loved the world that
+he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him
+should not perish, but have everlasting life." "The bread of God
+is He who cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world."
+The doctrine of the pre existence of souls, and of their being
+born into the world in the flesh, was rife in Judea when this
+Gospel was written, and is repeatedly alluded to in it.31 That
+John applies this doctrine to Christ in the following and in other
+instances is obvious. "Before Abraham was, I am." "I came forth
+from the Father and am come into the world." "Father, glorify thou
+me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was."
+"What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where he was
+before?" As for ourselves, we do not see how it is possible for
+any unprejudiced person, after studying the fourth Gospel
+faithfully with the requisite helps, to doubt that the writer of
+it believed that Jesus pre existed as the Divine Logos, and that
+he became incarnate to reveal the Father and to bring men into the
+experience of true eternal life. John declares this, in his first
+epistle, in so many words, saying, "The living Logos, the eternal
+life which was with the Father from the beginning, was manifested
+unto us;" and, "God sent his only begotten Son into the world that
+we might live through him." Whether the doctrine thus set forth
+was really entertained and taught by Jesus himself, or whether it
+is the interpretation put on his language by one whose mind was
+full of the notions of the age, are distinct questions. With the
+settlement of these questions we are not now concerned: such a
+discussion would be more appropriate when examining the genuine
+meaning of the words of Christ. All that is necessary here is the
+suggestion that when we show the theological system of John it
+does not necessarily follow that that is the true
+
+31 John i. 21; ix. 2.
+
+
+teaching of Christ. Having adopted the Logos doctrine, it might
+tinge and turn his thoughts and words when reporting from memory,
+after the lapse of many years, the discourses of his Master. He
+might unconsciously, under such an influence, represent literally
+what was figuratively intended, and reflect from his own mind
+lights and shades, associations and meanings, over all or much of
+what he wrote. There are philosophical and literary peculiarities
+which have forced many of the best critics to make this
+distinction between the intended meaning of Christ's declarations
+as he uttered them, and their received meaning as this evangelist
+reported them. Norton says, "Whether St. John did or did not adopt
+the Platonic conception of the Logos is a question not important
+to be settled in order to determine our own judgment concerning
+its truth."32 Lucke has written to the same effect, but more
+fully: "We are allowed to distinguish the sense in which John
+understood the words of Christ, from the original sense in which
+Christ used them."33
+
+It is to be observed that in all that has been brought forward,
+thus far, there is not the faintest hint of the now current notion
+of the Trinity. The idea put forth by John is not at all allied
+with the idea that the infinite God himself assumed a human shape
+to walk the earth and undergo mortal sufferings. It is simply said
+that that manifested and revealing portion of the Divine
+attributes which constituted the hypostatized Logos was incarnated
+and displayed in a perfect, sinless sample of man, thus exhibiting
+to the world a finite image of God. We will illustrate this
+doctrine with reference to the inferences to be drawn from it in
+regard to human nature. John repeatedly says, in effect, "God is
+truth," "God is light," "God is love," "God is life." He likewise
+says of the Savior, "In him was life, and the life was the light
+of men," and reports him as saying of himself, "I am the truth,"
+"I am the life," "I am the light of the world." The fundamental
+meaning of these declarations so numerous, striking, and varied in
+the writings of John is, that all those qualities which the
+consciousness of humanity has recognised as Divine are
+consubstantial with the being of God; that all the reflections of
+them in nature and man belong to the Logos, the eldest Son, the
+first production, of God; and that in Jesus their personality, the
+very Logos himself, was consciously embodied, to be brought nearer
+to men, to be exemplified and recommended to them. Reason, power,
+truth, light, love, blessedness, are not individual aons, members
+of a hierarchy of deities, but are the revealing elements of the
+one true God. The personality of the abstract and absolute fulness
+of all these substantial qualities is God. The personality of the
+discerpted portion of them shown in the universe is the Logos.
+Now, that latter personality Christ was. Consequently, while he
+was a man, he was not merely a man, but was also a supernatural
+messenger from heaven, sent into the world to impersonate the
+image of God under the condition of humanity, free from every
+sinful defect and spot. Thus, being the manifesting representative
+of the Father, he could say, "He that hath seen me hath
+[virtually] seen the Father." Not that they were identical in
+person, but that they were similar in nature and character, spirit
+and design: both were eternal holiness, love, truth, and life. "I
+and my Father are one thing," (in essence, not in personality.)
+Nothing can be more
+
+32 Statement of Reasons, 1st ed. p. 239.
+
+33 Christian Examiner, May, 1849, p. 431.
+
+
+unequivocally pronounced than the subordination of the Son to the
+Father that the Father sent him, that he could do nothing without
+the Father, that his Father was greater than he, that his
+testimony was confirmed by the Father's in a hundred places by
+John, both as author writing his own words and as interpreter
+reporting Christ's. There is not a text in the record that implies
+Christ's identity with God, but only his identity with the Logos.
+The identity of the Logos with God is elementary, not personal.
+From this view it follows that every man who possesses, knows, and
+exhibits the elements of the Divine life, the characteristics of
+God, is in that degree a son of God, Christ being pre eminently
+the Son on account of his pre eminent likeness, his supernatural
+divinity, as the incarnate Logos.
+
+That the apostle held and taught this conclusion appears, first,
+from the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that he records the same
+sublime statements concerning all good Christians, with no other
+qualification than that of degree, that he does concerning Christ
+himself. Was Jesus the Son of God? "To as many as received him he
+gave power to become the sons of God." There is in Philo a passage
+corresponding remarkably with this one from John:  "Those who have
+knowledge of the truth are properly called sons of God: he who is
+still unfit to be named a son of God should endeavor to fashion
+himself to the first born Logos of God."34 Was Jesus "from above,"
+while wicked men were "from beneath"? "They are not of the world,
+even as I am not of the world." Was Jesus sent among men with a
+special commission? "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so
+have I also sent them into the world." Was Jesus the subject of a
+peculiar glory, bestowed upon him by the Father? "The glory which
+thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, even as we
+are one." Had Jesus an inspiration and a knowledge not vouchsafed
+to the princes of this world? "Ye have an unction from the Holy
+One, and ye know all things." Did Jesus perform miraculous works?
+"He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also."
+In the light of the general principle laid down, that God is the
+actual fulness of truth and love and light and blessedness; that
+Christ, the Logos, is the manifested impersonation of them; and
+that all men who receive him partake of their Divine substance and
+enjoy their prerogative, the texts just cited, and numerous other
+similar ones, are transparent. It is difficult to see how on any
+other hypothesis they can be made to express an intelligible and
+consistent meaning.
+
+Secondly, we are brought to the same conclusion by the synonymous
+use and frequent interchange of different terms in the Johannean
+writings. Not only it is said, "Whoever is born of God cannot
+sin," but it is also written, "Every one that doeth righteousness
+is born of God;" and again, "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the
+Christ is born of God." In other words, having a good character
+and leading a just life, heartily receiving and obeying the
+revelation made by Christ, are identical phrases. "He that hath
+the Son hath life." "Whosoever transgresseth and abideth not in
+the doctrine of Christ hath not God." "This is the victory that
+overcometh the world, even our faith" in the doctrine of Christ.
+"He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him." "He
+that keepeth the commandments dwelleth in God and God in him." "He
+that confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God, God
+
+34 Philo, vol. i. p. 427.
+
+
+dwelleth in him and he in God." "He that doeth good is of God."
+"God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son."
+"The Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that
+we may know the true God and eternal life." From these citations,
+and from other passages which will readily occur, we gather the
+following pregnant results. To "do the truth," "walk in the
+truth," "walk in the light," "keep the commandments," "do
+righteousness," "abide in the doctrine of Christ," "do the will of
+God," "do good," "dwell in love," "abide in Christ," "abide in
+God," "abide in life," all are expressions meaning precisely the
+same thing. They all signify essentially the conscious possession
+of goodness; in other words, the practical adoption of the life
+and teachings of Jesus; or, in still other terms, the personal
+assimilation of the spiritual realities of the Logos, which are
+love, life, truth, light. Jesus having been sent into the world to
+exemplify the characteristics and claims of the Father, and to
+regenerate men from unbelief and sin to faith and righteousness,
+those who were walking in darkness, believers of lies and doers of
+unrighteousness, those who were abiding in alienation and death,
+might by receiving and following him be restored to the favor of
+God and pass from darkness and death into life and light. "This is
+eternal life, that they should know thee, the only true God, and
+Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."
+
+The next chief point in the doctrine of John is his belief in an
+evil being, the personality of wickedness, and the relation
+between him and bad men. There have been, from the early
+centuries, keen disputes on the question whether this apostle uses
+the terms devil and evil one with literal belief or with
+figurative accommodation. We have not a doubt that the former is
+the true view. The popular denial of the existence of evil
+spirits, with an arch demon over them, is the birth of a
+philosophy much later than the apostolic age. The use of the term
+"devil" merely as the poetic or ethical personification of the
+seductive influences of the world is the fruit of theological
+speculation neither originated nor adopted by the Jewish prophets
+or by the Christian apostles. Whoso will remember the prevailing
+faith of the Jews at that time, and the general state of
+speculative opinion, and will recollect the education of John, and
+notice the particular manner in which he alludes to the subject
+throughout his epistles and in his reports of the discourses of
+Jesus, we think will be convinced that the Johannean system
+includes a belief in the actual existence of Satan according to
+the current Pharisaic dogma of that age. It is not to be
+disguised, either, that the investigations of the ablest critics
+have led an overwhelming majority of them to this interpretation.
+"I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the evil
+one." "He that is begotten of God guardeth himself, and the evil
+one toucheth him not." "He that committeth sin is of the devil,
+for the devil sinneth from the beginning." "Whosoever is born of
+God cannot sin. In this the children of God are manifest, and the
+children of the devil." "Ye are of your father the devil, and his
+lusts ye will do." There can be no doubt that these, and other
+passages of a kindred and complementary nature, yield the
+following view. Good men are allied to God, because their
+characteristics are the same as his, truth, light, love, life,
+righteousness. "As he is, so are we in this world." Bad men are
+allied to the devil, because their characteristics are the same as
+his, falsehood, darkness, hatred, death, sin. "Cain, who slew his
+brother, was of the evil one." The facts, then, of the great moral
+problem of the world, according to John, were these. God is the
+infinite Father, whose nature and attributes comprehend all holy,
+beautiful, desirable realities, and who would draw mankind to his
+blessed embrace forever. The goodness, illumination, and joy of
+holy souls reflect his holiness and display his reign. The devil
+is the great spirit of wickedness, whose attributes comprehend all
+evil, dark, fearful realities, and who entices mankind to sin. The
+wickedness, gloom, and misery of corrupt souls reveal his likeness
+and his kingdom.
+
+The former manifests himself in the glories of the world and in
+the divine qualities of the soul. The latter manifests himself in
+the whole history of temptation and sin and in the vicious
+tendencies of the heart. Good men, those possessing pre eminently
+the moral qualities of God, are his children, are born of him,
+that is, are inspired and led by him. Bad men, those possessing in
+a ruling degree the qualities of the devil, are his children, are
+born of him, that is, are animated and governed by his spirit.
+
+Whether the evangelist gave to his own mind any philosophical
+account of the origin and destiny of the devil or not is a
+question concerning which his writings are not explicit enough for
+us to determine. In the beginning he represents God as making, by
+means of the Logos, all things that were made, and his light as
+shining in darkness that comprehended it not. Now, he may have
+conceived of matter as uncreated, eternally existing in formless
+night, the ground of the devil's being, and may have limited the
+work of creation to breaking up the sightless chaos, defining it
+into orderly shapes, filling it with light and motion, and
+peopling it with children of heaven. Such was the Persian faith,
+familiar at that time to the Jews. Neander, with others, objects
+to this view that it would destroy John's monotheism and make him
+a dualist, a believer in two self existents, aboriginal and
+everlasting antagonists. It only needs to be observed, in reply,
+that John was not a philosopher of such thorough dialectic
+training as to render it impossible for inconsistencies to coexist
+in his thoughts. In fact, any one who will examine the beliefs of
+even such men as Origen and Augustine will perceive that such an
+objection is not valid. Some writers of ability and eminence have
+tried to maintain that the Johannean conception of Satan was of
+some exalted archangel who apostatized from the law of God and
+fell from heaven into the abyss of night, sin, and woe. They could
+have been led to such an hypothesis only by preconceived notions
+and prejudices, because there is not in John's writings even the
+obscurest intimation of such a doctrine. On the contrary, it is
+written that the devil is a liar and the father of lies from the
+beginning, the same phrase used to denote the primitive
+companionship of God and his Logos anterior to the creation. The
+devil is spoken of by John, with prominent consistency, as bearing
+the same relation to darkness, falsehood, sin, and death that God
+bears to light, truth, righteousness, and life, that is, as being
+their original personality and source. Whether the belief itself
+be true or not, be reconcilable with pure Christianity or not, in
+our opinion John undoubtedly held the belief of the personality of
+the source of wickedness, and supposed that the great body of
+mankind had been seduced by him from the free service of heaven,
+and had become infatuated in his bondage.
+
+Just here in the scheme of Christianity arises the necessity,
+appears the profound significance in the apostolic belief, of that
+disinterested interference of God through his revelation in Christ
+which aimed to break the reigning power of sin and redeem lost
+men from the tyranny of Satan. "For this purpose the Son of God
+was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil."
+
+That is to say, the revelation of the nature and will of God in
+the works of the creation and in the human soul was not enough,
+even when aided by the law of Moses, to preserve men in the
+truth and the life. They had been seduced by the evil one into
+sin, alienated from the Divine favor, and plunged in darkness
+and death. A fuller, more powerful manifestation of the
+character, claims, attractions of the Father was necessary to
+recall the benighted wanderers from their lost state and restore
+them to those right relations and to that conscious communion with
+God in which alone true life consists. Then, and for that purpose,
+Jesus Christ was commissioned to appear, a pre existent being of
+most exalted rank, migrating from the super stellar sphere into
+this world, to embody and mirror forth through the flesh those
+characteristics which are the natural attributes of God the Father
+and the essential conditions of heaven the home. In him the
+glorious features of the Divinity were miniatured on a finite
+scale and perfectly exhibited, "thus revealing," (as Neander says,
+in his exposition of John's doctrine,) "for the first time, in a
+comprehensible manner, what a being that God is whose holy
+personality man was created to represent." So Philo says, "The
+Logos is the image of God, and man is the image of the Logos."35
+Therefore, according to this view, man is the image of the image
+of God. The dimmed, imperfect reflection of the Father, originally
+shining in nature and the soul, would enable all who had not
+suppressed it and lost the knowledge of it, to recognise at once
+and adore the illuminated image of Him manifested and moving
+before them in the person of the Son; the faint gleams of Divine
+qualities yet left within their souls would spontaneously blend
+with the full splendors irradiating the form of the inspired and
+immaculate Christ. Thus they would enter into a new and
+intensified communion with God, and experience an unparalleled
+depth of peace and joy, an inspired assurance of eternal life. But
+those who, by worldliness and wickedness, had obscured and
+destroyed all their natural knowledge of God and their affinities
+to him, being without the inward preparation and susceptibility
+for the Divine which the Savior embodied and manifested, would not
+be able to receive it, and thus would pass an infallible sentence
+upon themselves. "When the Comforter is come, he will convict the
+world of sin, because they believe not on me." "He that believeth
+on the Son hath eternal life; but he that believeth not is
+condemned already, in that he loveth darkness rather than light."
+"Hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error: he
+that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not
+us." "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?"
+The idea is, that such a denial must be caused by inward
+depravity, could only spring from an evil character.
+
+In the ground thought just presented we may find the explanation
+of the seemingly obscure and confused use of terms in the
+following instances, and learn to understand more fully John's
+idea of the effect of spiritual contact with Christ. "He that
+doeth righteousness is born of God." "He that believeth Jesus to
+be the Christ is born of God." "He that denieth the Son, the same
+hath not the Father." "He that hath the Son hath life." These
+passages all become perspicuous and concordant in view of John's
+conception of the inward unity of
+
+35 Philo, vol. i. p. 106.
+
+
+truth, or the universal oneness of the Divine life, in God, in
+Christ, in all souls that partake of it. A character in harmony
+with the character of God will, by virtue of its inherent light
+and affinity, recognise the kindred attributes or characteristics
+of God, wherever manifested. He who perceives and embraces the
+Divinity in the character of Christ proves thereby that he was
+prepared to receive it by kindred qualities residing in himself,
+proves that he was distinctively of God. He who fails to perceive
+the peculiar glory of Christ proves thereby that he was alienated
+and blinded by sin and darkness, distinctively of the evil one.
+Varying the expression to illustrate the thought, if the light and
+warmth of a living love of God were in a soul, it would
+necessarily, when brought into contact with the concentrated
+radiance of Divinity incarnated and beaming in Christ, effect a
+more fervent, conscious, and abiding union with the Father than
+could be known before he was thus revealed. But if iniquities,
+sinful lusts, possessing the soul, had made it hard and cold, even
+the blaze of spotless virtues and miraculous endowments in the
+manifesting Messiah would be the radiation of light upon darkness
+insensible to it. Therefore, the presentation of the Divine
+contents of the soul or character of Jesus to different persons
+was an unerring test of their previous moral state: the good would
+apprehend him with a thrill of unison, the bad would not. To have
+the Son, to have the Father, to have the truth, to have eternal
+life, all are the same thing: hence, where one is predicated or
+denied all are predicated or denied.
+
+Continuing our investigation, we shall find the distinction drawn
+of a sensual or perishing life and a spiritual or eternal life.
+The term world (kosmos) is used by John apparently in two
+different senses. First, it seems to signify all mankind, divided
+sometimes into the unbelievers and the Christians. "Christ is the
+propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the
+sins of the whole world." "God sent not his Son to condemn the
+world, but that the world through him might be saved." It is
+undeniable that "world" here means not the earth, but the men on
+the earth. Secondly, "world" in the dialect of John means all the
+evil, all the vitiating power, of the material creation. "Now
+shall the Prince of this world be cast out." It is not meant that
+this is the devil's world, because John declares in the beginning
+that God made it; but he means that all diabolic influence comes
+from the darkness of matter fighting against the light of
+Divinity, and by a figure he says "world," meaning the evils in
+the world, meaning all the follies, vanities, sins, seductive
+influences, of the dark and earthy, the temporal and sensual. In
+this case the love of the world means almost precisely what is
+expressed by the modern word worldliness. "Love not the world,
+neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the
+world, the love of the Father is not in him."
+
+In a vein strikingly similar, Philo writes, "It is impossible for
+the love of the world and the love of God to coexist, as it is
+impossible for light and darkness to coexist."36 "For all that is
+in the world," says John, "the lust of the flesh, and the greed of
+the eyes, and the pomp of living, is not of the Father, but is of
+the world. And the world passes away, with the lust thereof: but
+he that does the will of God abides forever." He who is taken up
+and absorbed in the gauds and pleasures of time and sense has no
+deep spring of religious experience:
+
+36 Philo, vol. ii. p. 649.
+
+
+his enjoyments are of the decaying body; his heart and his thoughts
+are set on things which soon fly away. But the earnest believer in
+God pierces through all these superficial and transitory objects
+and pursuits, and fastens his affections to imperishable verities:
+he feels, far down in his soul, the living well of faith and
+fruition, the cool fresh fountain of spiritual hope and joy, whose
+stream of life flows unto eternity. The vain sensualist and hollow
+worldling has no true life in him: his love reaches not beyond the
+grave. The loyal servant of duty and devout worshipper of God has
+a spirit of conscious superiority to death and oblivion: though
+the sky fall, and the mountains melt, and the seas fade, he knows
+he shall survive, because immaterial truth and love are deathless.
+The whole thought contained in the texts we are considering is
+embodied with singular force and beauty in the following passage
+from one of the sacred books of the Hindus: "Who would have
+immortal life must beware of outward things, and seek inward
+truth, purity, and faith; for the treacherous and evanescent world
+flies from its votaries, like the mirage, or devil car, which
+moves so swiftly that one cannot ascend it." The mere negation of
+real life or blessedness is predicated of the careless worldling;
+positive death or miserable condemned unrest is predicated of the
+bad hearted sinner. Both these classes of men, upon accepting
+Christ, that is, upon owning the Divine characteristics incarnate
+in him, enter upon a purified, exalted, and new experience. "He
+that hates his brother is a murderer and abides in death." "We
+know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the
+brethren." This new experience is distinctively, emphatically,
+life; it is spiritual peace, joy, trust, communion with God, and
+therefore immortal. It brings with it its own sufficient evidence,
+leaving its possessor free from misgiving doubts, conscious of his
+eternity. "He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in
+himself." "Hereby know we that we dwell in him and he in us,
+because he hath given us of his spirit." "That ye may know that ye
+have eternal life."
+
+The objects of Christ's mission, so far as they refer to the
+twofold purpose of revealing the Father by an impersonation of his
+image, and giving new moral life to men by awakening within them a
+conscious fellowship with Divine truth and goodness, have already
+been unfolded. But this does not include the whole: all this might
+have been accomplished by his appearance, authoritative teachings,
+miracles, and return to heaven, without dying. Why, then, did he
+die? What was the meaning or aim of his death and resurrection?
+The apostle conceives that he came not only to reveal God and to
+regenerate men, but also to be a "propitiation" for men's sins, to
+redeem them from the penalty of their sins; and it was for this
+end that he must suffer the doom of physical death. "Ye know that
+he was manifested to take away our sins." It is the more difficult
+to tell exactly what thoughts this language was intended by John
+to convey, because his writings are so brief and miscellaneous, so
+unsystematic and incomplete. He does not explain his own terms,
+but writes as if addressing those who had previously received such
+oral instruction as would make the obscurities clear, the hints
+complete, and the fragments whole. We will first quote from John
+all the important texts bearing on the point before us, and then
+endeavor to discern and explain their sense. "If we walk in the
+light as God is in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son,
+cleanseth us from all sin." "He is the propitiation for our sins."
+"Your sins are forgiven through his name."
+
+"The whole world is subject to the evil one." These texts, few and
+vague as they are, comprise every thing directly said by John upon
+the atonement and redemption: other relevant passages merely
+repeat the same substance. Certainly these statements do not of
+themselves teach any thing like the Augustinian doctrine of
+expiatory sufferings to placate the Father's indignation at sin
+and sinners, or to remove, by paying the awful debt of justice,
+the insuperable bars to forgiveness. Nothing of that sort is
+anywhere intimated in the Johannean documents, even in the
+faintest manner. So far from saying that there was unwillingness
+or inability in the Father to take the initiative for our ransom
+and pardon, he expressly avows, "Herein is love, not that we loved
+God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation
+for our sins." Instead of exclaiming, with the majority of modern
+theologians, "Believe in the atoning death, the substitutional
+sufferings, of Christ, and your sins shall then all be washed
+away, and you shall be saved," he explicitly says, "If we confess
+our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins." And
+again: "Whosoever believeth in him" not in his death, but in him
+"shall have eternal life." The allusions in John to the doctrine
+of redemption and reconciliation do not mean, it is plain enough,
+the buying off of the victims of eternal condemnation by the
+vicarious pains of Jesus. What, then, do they mean? They are too
+few, short, and obscure for us to decide this question
+conclusively by their own light alone. We must get assistance from
+abroad.
+
+The reader will remember that it was the Jewish belief, and the
+retained belief of the converts to Christianity, at that time,
+that men's souls, in consequence of sin, were doomed upon leaving
+the body to descend into the under world. This was the objective
+penalty of sin, inherited from Adam. Now, Christ in his
+superangelic state in heaven was not involved in sin or in its
+doom of death and subterranean banishment. Yet at the will of the
+Father he became a man, went through our earthly experiences, died
+like a sinner, and after death descended into the prison of
+disembodied souls below, then rose again and ascended into heaven
+to the Father, to show men that their sins were forgiven, the
+penalty taken away, and the path opened for them too to rise to
+eternal life in the celestial mansions with Christ "and be with
+him where he is." Christ's death, then, cleanses men from sin, he
+is a propitiation for their sins, in two ways. First, by his
+resurrection from the power of death and his ascent to heaven he
+showed men that God had removed the great penalty of sin: by his
+death and ascension he was the medium of giving them this
+knowledge. Secondly, the joy, gratitude, love to God, awakened in
+them by such glorious tidings, would purify their natures, exalt
+their souls into spiritual freedom and virtue, into a blessed and
+Divine life. According to this view, Christ was a vicarious
+sacrifice, not in the sense that he suffered instead of the
+guilty, to purchase their redemption from the iron justice of God,
+but in the sense that, when he was personally free from any need
+to suffer, he died for the sake of others, to reveal to them the
+mighty boon of God's free grace, assuring them of the wondrous
+gift of a heavenly immortality. This representation perfectly
+fills and explains the language, without violence or arbitrary
+suppositions, does it in harmony with all the exegetical
+considerations, historical and grammatical; which no other view
+that we know of can do.
+
+There are several independent facts which lend strong confirmation
+to the correctness of the exposition now given. We know that we
+have not directly proved the justice of that exposition, only
+constructively, inferentially, established it; not shown it to be
+true, only made it appear plausible. But that plausibility becomes
+an extreme probability nay, shall we not say certainty? when we
+weigh the following testimonies for it. First, this precise
+doctrine is unquestionably contained in other parts of the New
+Testament. We have in preceding chapters demonstrated its
+existence in Paul's epistles, in Peter's, in the Epistle to the
+Hebrews, and in the Apocalypse. Therefore, since John's
+phraseology is better explained by it than by any other
+hypothesis, it is altogether likely that his real meaning was the
+same.
+
+Secondly, the terms "light" and "darkness," so frequent in this
+evangelist, were not originated by him, but adopted. They were
+regarded by the Persian theology, by Plato, by Philo, by the
+Gnostics, as having a physical basis as well as a spiritual
+significance. In their conceptions, physical light, as well as
+spiritual holiness, was an efflux or manifestation from the
+supernal God; physical darkness, as well as spiritual depravity,
+was an emanation or effect from the infernal Satan, or principle
+of evil. Is it not so in the usage of John? He uses the terms, it
+is true, prevailingly in a moral sense: still, there is much in
+his statements that looks as if he supposed they had a physical
+ground. If so, then how natural is this connection of thought! All
+good comes from the dazzling world of God beyond the sky; all evil
+comes from the nether world of his adversary, the prince of
+darkness. That John believed in a local heaven on high, the
+residence of God, is made certain by scores of texts too plain to
+be evaded. Would he not, then, in all probability, believe in a
+local hell? Believing, as he certainly did, in a devil, the author
+and lord of darkness, falsehood, and death, would he not conceive
+a kingdom for him? In the development of ideas reached at that
+time, it is evident that the conception of God implied an upper
+world, his resplendent abode, and that the conception of Satan
+equally implied an under world, his gloomy realm. To the latter
+human souls were doomed by sin. From the former Christ came, and
+returned to it again, to show that the Father would forgive our
+sins and take us there.
+
+Thirdly, John expected that Christ, after death, would return to
+the Father in heaven. This appears from clear and reiterated
+statements in his reports of the Savior's words. But after the
+resurrection he tells us that Jesus had not yet ascended to the
+Father, but was just on the point of going. "Touch me not, for I
+am not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren, and say
+unto them, I ascend unto my Father." Where, then, did he suppose
+the soul of his crucified Master had been during the interval
+between his death and his resurrection? Dormant in the body, dead
+with the body, laid in the tomb? That is opposed to the doctrine
+of uninterrupted life which pervades his writings. Besides, such a
+belief was held only by the Sadducees, whom the New Testament
+stigmatizes. To assume that such was John's conception of the fact
+is an arbitrary supposition, without the least warrant from any
+source whatever. If he imagined the soul of Jesus during that time
+to have been neither in heaven nor in the sepulchre, is it not
+pretty sure that he supposed it was in the under world, the common
+receptacle of souls, where, according to the belief of that age,
+every man went after death?
+
+Fourthly, it is to be observed, in favor of this general
+interpretation, that the doctrine it unfolds is in harmony with
+the contemporary opinions, a natural development from them, a
+development which would be forced upon the mind of a Jewish
+Christian accepting the resurrection of Christ as a fact. It was
+the Jewish opinion that God dwelt with his holy angels in a world
+of everlasting light above the firmament. It was the Jewish
+opinion that the departed souls of men, on account of sin, were
+confined beneath the earth in Satan's and death's dark and
+slumberous cavern of shadows. It was the Jewish opinion that the
+Messiah would raise the righteous dead and reign with them on
+earth. Now, the first Christians clung to the Jewish creed and
+expectations, with such modifications merely as the variation of
+the actual Jesus and his deeds from the theoretical Messiah and
+his anticipated achievements compelled. Then, when Christ having
+been received as the bringer of glad tidings from the Father died,
+and after three days rose from the dead and ascended to God,
+promising his brethren that where he was they should come, must
+they not have regarded it all as a dramatic exemplification of the
+fact that the region of death was no longer a hopeless dungeon,
+since one mighty enough to solve its chains and burst its gates
+had returned from it? must they not have considered him as a
+pledge that their sins were forgiven, their doom reversed, and
+heaven attainable?
+
+John, in common with all the first Christians, evidently expected
+that the second advent of the Lord would soon take place, to
+consummate the objects he had left unfinished, to raise the dead
+and judge them, justifying the worthy and condemning the unworthy.
+There was a well known Jewish tradition that the appearance of
+Antichrist would immediately precede the triumphant coming of the
+Messiah. John says, "Even now are there many Antichrists: thereby
+we know that it is the last hour."37 "Abide in him, that, when he
+shall appear, we may not be ashamed before him at his coming."
+"That we may have boldness in the day of judgment." The
+evangelist's outlook for the return of the Savior is also shown at
+the end of his Gospel. "Jesus said not unto him, 'He shall not
+die;' but, 'If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to
+thee?'" That the doctrine of a universal resurrection which the
+Jews probably derived, through their communication with the
+Persians, from the Zoroastrian system, and, with various
+modifications, adopted is embodied in the following passage, who
+can doubt? "The hour is coming when all that are in the graves
+shall hear the voice of the Son of Man and shall come forth." That
+a general resurrection would literally occur under the auspices of
+Jesus was surely the meaning of the writer of those words. Whether
+that thought was intended to be conveyed by Christ in the exact
+terms he really used or not is a separate question, with which we
+are not now concerned, our object being simply to set forth John's
+views. Some commentators, seizing the letter and neglecting the
+spirit, have inferred from various texts that John expected that
+the resurrection would be limited to faithful Christians, just as
+the more rigid of the Pharisees confined it to the righteous Jews.
+"Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye
+have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood
+hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day."
+
+37 See the able and impartial discussion of John's belief on this
+subject contained in Lucke's Commentary on the First Epistle of
+John, i. 18-28.
+
+
+To force this figure into a literal meaning is a mistake; for in
+the preceding chapter it is expressly said that "They that have
+done good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; they
+that have done evil unto the resurrection of condemnation." Both
+shall rise to be judged; but as we conceive the most probable
+sense of the phrases the good shall be received to heaven, the bad
+shall be remanded to the under world. "Has no life in him" of
+course cannot mean is absolutely dead, annihilated, but means has
+not faith and virtue, the elements of blessedness, the
+qualifications for heaven. The particular figurative use of words
+in these texts may be illustrated by parallel idioms from Philo,
+who says, "Of the living some are dead; on the contrary, the dead
+live. For those lost from the life of virtue are dead, though they
+reach the extreme of old age; while the good, though they are
+disjoined from the body, live immortally."38 Again he writes,
+"Deathless life delivers the dying pious; but the dying impious
+everlasting death seizes."39 And a great many passages plainly
+show that one element of Philo's meaning, in such phrases as
+these, is, that he believed that, upon their leaving the body, the
+souls of the good would ascend to heaven, while the souls of the
+bad would descend to Hades. These discriminated events he supposed
+would follow death at once. His thorough Platonism had weaned him
+from the Persian Pharisaic doctrine of a common intermediate state
+detaining the dead below until the triumphant advent of a Redeemer
+should usher in the great resurrection and final judgment.40
+
+John declares salvation to be conditional. "The blood of Christ"
+that is, his death and what followed "cleanses us from all sin, if
+we walk in the light as he is in the light;" not otherwise. "He
+that believeth not the Son shall not see eternal life, but the
+wrath of God abideth on him." "If any man see his brother commit a
+sin which is not unto death, he shall pray, and shall receive life
+for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do
+not say that he shall pray for it." "Beloved, now are we the sons
+of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know
+that when he [Christ] shall appear we shall be like him, for we
+shall see him as he is. Every man that hath this hope in him
+purifieth himself, even as he is pure." The heads of the doctrine
+which seems to underlie these statements are as follow. Christ
+shall come again. All the dead shall rise for judicial ordeal.
+Those counted worthy shall be accepted, be transfigured into the
+resemblance of the glorious Redeemer and enter into eternal
+blessedness in heaven. The rest shall be doomed to the dark
+kingdom of death in the under world, to remain there for aught
+that is hinted to the contrary forever. From these premises two
+practical inferences are drawn in exhortations. First, we should
+earnestly strive to fit ourselves for acceptance by moral purity,
+brotherly love, and pious faith. Secondly, we should seek pardon
+for our sins by confession and prayer, and take heed lest by
+aggravated sin we deprave our souls beyond recovery. There are
+those who sin unto death, for whom it is hopeless to pray. Light,
+truth, and the divine life of heaven can never receive them;
+darkness, falsehood, and the deep realm of death irrevocably
+swallow them.
+
+And now we may sum up in a few words the essential results of this
+whole inquiry into the principles of John's theology, especially
+as composing and shown in his doctrine of a
+
+38 Vol. i. p. 554.
+
+39 Ibid. p. 233.
+
+40 See vol. i. pp. 139, 416, 417, 555, 643, 648; vol. ii. pp. 178,
+433.
+
+
+future life. First, God is personal love, truth, light, holiness,
+blessedness. These realities, as concentrated in their
+incomprehensible absoluteness, are the elements of his infinite
+being. Secondly, these spiritual substances, as diffused through
+the worlds of the universe and experienced in the souls of moral
+creatures, are the medium of God's revelation of himself, the
+direct presence and working of his Logos. Thirdly, the persons who
+prevailingly partake of these qualities are God's loyal subjects
+and approved children, in peaceful communion with the Father,
+through the Son, possessing eternal life. Fourthly, Satan is
+personal hatred, falsehood, darkness, sin, misery. These
+realities, in their abstract nature and source, are his being; in
+their special manifestations they are his efflux and power.
+Fifthly, the persons who partake rulingly of these qualities are
+the devil's enslaved subjects and lineal children: in sinful
+bondage to him, in depraved communion with him, they dwell in a
+state of hostile banishment and unhappiness, which is moral death.
+Sixthly, Christ was the Logos who, descending from his anterior
+glory in heaven, and appearing in mortal flesh, embodied all the
+Divine qualities in an unflawed model of humanity, gathered up and
+exhibited all the spiritual characteristics of the Father in a
+stainless and perfect soul supernaturally filled and illumined,
+thus to bear into the world a more intelligible and effective
+revelation of God the Father than nature or common humanity
+yielded, to shine with regenerating radiance upon the deadly
+darkness of those who were groping in lying sins, "that they might
+have life and that they might have it more abundantly." Seventhly,
+the fickle and perishing experience of unbelieving and wicked men,
+the vagrant life of sensuality and worldliness, the shallow life
+in vain and transitory things, gives place in the soul of a
+Christian to a profoundly earnest, unchanging experience of truth
+and love, a steady and everlasting life in Divine and everlasting
+things. Eighthly, the experimental reception of the revealed grace
+and verity by faith and discipleship in Jesus is accompanied by
+internal convincing proofs and seals of their genuineness,
+validity, and immortality. They awaken a new consciousness, a new
+life, inherently Divine and self warranting. Ninthly, Christ, by
+his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension, was a
+propitiation for our sins, a mercy seat pledging forgiveness; that
+is, he was the medium of showing us that mercy of God which
+annulled the penalty of sin, the descent of souls to the gloomy
+under world, and opened the celestial domains for the ransomed
+children of earth to join the sinless angels of heaven. Tenthly,
+Christ was speedily to make a second advent. In that last day the
+dead should come forth for judgment, the good be exalted to
+unfading glory with the Father and the Son, and the bad be left in
+the lower region of noiseless shadows and dreams. These ten points
+of view, we believe, command all the principal features of the
+theological landscape which occupied the mental vision of the
+writer of the Gospel and epistles bearing the superscription,
+John.
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHRIST'S TEACHINGS CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE.
+
+IN approaching the teachings of the Savior himself concerning the
+future fate of man, we should throw off the weight of creeds and
+prejudices, and, by the aid of all the appliances in our power,
+endeavor to reach beneath the imagery and unessential particulars
+of his instructions to learn their bare significance in truth.
+This is made difficult by the singular perversions his religion
+has undergone; by the loss of a complete knowledge of the
+peculiarities of the Messianic age in the lapse of the ages since;
+by the almost universal change in our associations, modes of
+feeling and thought, and styles of speech; and by the gradual
+accretion and hardening of false doctrines and sectarian biases
+and wilfulness. As we examine the words of Christ to find their
+real meaning, there are four prominent considerations to be
+especially weighed and borne in mind.
+
+First, we must not forget the poetic Eastern style common to the
+Jewish prophets; their symbolic enunciations in bold figures of
+speech: "I am the door;" "I am the bread of life;" "I am the
+vine;" "My sheep hear my voice;" "If these should hold their
+peace, the stones would immediately cry out." This daring
+emblematic language was natural to the Oriental nations; and the
+Bible is full of it. Is the overthrow of a country foretold? It is
+not said, "Babylon shall be destroyed," but "The sun shall be
+darkened at his going forth, the moon shall be as blood, the stars
+shall fall from heaven, and the earth shall stagger to and fro as
+a drunken man." If we would truly understand Christ's
+declarations, we must not overlook the characteristics of
+figurative language. For "he spake to the multitude in parables,
+and without a parable spake he not unto them;" and a parable, of
+course, is not to be taken literally, but holds a latent sense and
+purpose which are to be sought out. The greatest injustice is done
+to the teachings of Christ when his words are studied as those of
+a dry scholastic, a metaphysical moralist, not as those of a
+profound poet, a master in the spiritual realm.
+
+Secondly, we must remember that we have but fragmentary reports of
+a small part of the teachings of Christ. He was engaged in the
+active prosecution of his mission probably about three years, at
+the shortest over one year; while all the different words of his
+recorded in the New Testament would not occupy more than five
+hours. Only a little fraction of what he said has been transmitted
+to us; and though this part may contain the essence of the whole,
+yet it must naturally in some instances be obscure and difficult
+of apprehension. We must therefore compare different passages with
+each other, carefully probe them all, and explain, so far as
+possible, those whose meaning is recondite by those whose meaning
+is obvious. Some persons may be surprised to think that we have
+but a small portion of the sayings of Jesus. The fact, however, is
+unquestionable. And perhaps there is no more reason that we should
+have a full report of his words than there is that we should have
+a complete account of his doings; and the evangelist declares,
+"There are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if
+they should every one be written, I suppose that even the world
+itself could not contain the books."
+
+Thirdly, when examining the instructions of Jesus, we should
+recollect that he adopted, and applied to himself and to his
+kingdom, the common Jewish phraseology concerning the Messiah and
+the events that were expected to attend his advent and reign. But
+he did not take up these phrases in the perverted sense held in
+the corrupt opinions and earthly hopes of the Jews: he used them
+spiritually, in the sense which accorded with the true Messianic
+dispensation as it was arranged in the forecasting providence of
+God. No investigation of the New Testament should be unaccompanied
+by an observance of the fundamental rule of interpretation,
+namely, that the strident of a book, especially of an ancient,
+obscure, and fragmentary book, should imbue himself as thoroughly
+as he can with the knowledge and spirit of the opinions, events,
+influences, circumstances, of the time when the document was
+written, and of the persons who wrote it. The inquirer must be
+equipped for his task by a mastery of the Rabbinism of Gamaliel,
+at whose feet Paul was brought up; for the Jewish mind of that age
+was filled, and its religious language directed, by this
+Rabbinism. Guided by this principle, furnished with the necessary
+information, in the helpful light of the best results of modern
+critical scholarship, we shall be able to explain many dark texts,
+and to satisfy ourselves, at least in a degree, as to the genuine
+substance of Christ's declarations touching the future destinies
+of men.
+
+Finally, he who studies the New Testament with patient
+thoroughness and with honest sharpness will arrive at a
+distinction most important to be made and to be kept in view,
+namely, a distinction between the real meaning of Christ's words
+in his own mind and the actual meaning understood in them by his
+auditors and reporters.1 Here we approach a most delicate and
+vital point, hitherto too little noticed, but destined yet to
+become prominent and fruitful. A large number of religious phrases
+were in common use among the Jews at the time of Jesus. He adopted
+them, but infused into them a deeper, a correct meaning, as
+Copernicus did into the old astronomic formulas. But the
+bystanders who listened to his discourses, hearing the familiar
+terms, seized the familiar meaning, and erroneously attributed it
+to him. It is certain that the Savior was often misunderstood and
+often not understood at all. When he declared himself the Messiah,
+the people would have made him a king by force! Even the apostles
+frequently grossly failed to appreciate his spirit and aims,
+wrenched unwarrantable inferences from his words, and quarrelled
+for the precedency in his coming kingdom and for seats at his
+right hand. In numerous cases it is glaringly plain that his ideas
+were far from their conceptions of them. We have no doubt the same
+was true in many other instances where it is not so clear. He
+repeatedly reproves them for folly and slowness because they did
+not perceive the sense of his instructions. Perhaps there was a
+slight impatience in his tones when he said, "How is it that ye do
+not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that
+ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the
+Sadducees?" Jesus uttered in established phrases new and
+profoundly spiritual thoughts. The apostles educated in, and full
+of, as they evidently were, the dogmas, prejudices, and
+
+1 See this distinction affirmed by De Wette, in the preface to his
+Commentatio de Morte Jesus Christi Expiatoria. See also Thurn,
+Jesus und seine Apostel in Widerspruch in Ansehung der Lehre von
+der Ewigcn Verdamnniss. In Scherer's Schriftforsch. sect. i. nr.
+4.
+
+
+hopes of their age and land would naturally, to some extent,
+misapprehend his meaning. Then, after a tumultuous interval,
+writing out his instructions from memory, how perfectly natural
+that their own convictions and sentiments would have a powerful
+influence in modifying and shaping the animus and the verbal
+expressions in their reports! Under the circumstances, that we
+should now possess the very equivalents of his words with strict
+literalness, and conveying his very intentions perfectly
+translated from the Aramaan into the Greek tongue, would imply the
+most sustained and amazing of all miracles. There is nothing
+whatever that indicates any such miraculous intervention. There is
+nothing to discredit the fair presumption that the writers were
+left to their own abilities, under the inspiration of an earnest
+consecrating love and truthfulness. And we must, with due
+limitations, distinguish between the original words and conscious
+meaning of the sublime Master, illustrated by the emphasis and
+discrimination of his looks, tones, and gestures, and the
+apprehended meaning recorded long afterwards, shaped and colored
+by passing through the minds and pens of the sometimes dissentient
+and always imperfect disciples. He once declared to them, "I have
+many things to say unto you, but ye are not able to bear them."
+Admitting his infallibility, as we may, yet asserting their
+fallibility, as we must, and accompanied, too, as his words now
+are by many very obscuring circumstances, it is extremely
+difficult to lay the hand on discriminated texts and say,
+"[non ASCII characters]"
+
+The Messianic doctrine prevalent among the Jews in the time of
+Jesus appears to have been built up little by little, by religious
+faith, national pride, and priestly desire, out of literal
+interpretations of figurative prophecy, and Cabalistic
+interpretations of plain language, and Rabbinical traditions and
+speculations, additionally corrupted in some particulars by
+intercourse with the Persians. Under all this was a central
+spiritual germ of a Divine promise and plan. A Messiah was really
+to come. It was in answering the questions, what kind of a king he
+was to be, and over what sort of a kingdom he was to reign, that
+the errors crept in. The Messianic conceptions which have come
+down to us through the Prophets, the Targums, incidental allusions
+in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the few other traditions and
+records yet in existence, are very diverse and sometimes
+contradictory. They agreed in ardently looking for an earthly
+sovereign in the Messiah, one who would rise up in the line of
+David and by the power of Jehovah deliver his people, punish their
+enemies, subdue the world to his sceptre, and reign with Divine
+auspices of beneficence and splendor. They also expected that then
+a portion of the dead would rise from the under world and assume
+their bodies again, to participate in the triumphs and blessings
+of his earthly kingdom. His personal reign in Judea was what they
+usually meant by the phrases "the kingdom of heaven," "the kingdom
+of God." The apostles cherished these ideas, and expressed them in
+the terms common to their countrymen. But we cannot doubt that
+Jesus employed this and kindred language in a purer and deeper
+sense, which we must take pains to distinguish from the early and
+lingering errors associated with it.
+
+Upon the threshold of our subject we meet with predictions of a
+second coming of Christ from heaven, with power and glory, to sit
+on his throne and judge the world. The portentous imagery in which
+these prophecies are clothed is taken from the old prophets; and
+to them
+
+we must turn to learn its usage and force. The Hebrews called any
+signal manifestation of power especially any dreadful calamity a
+coming of the Lord. It was a coming of Jehovah when his vengeance
+strewed the ground with the corpses of Sennacherib's host; when
+its storm swept Jerusalem as with fire, and bore Israel into
+bondage; when its sword came down upon Idumea and was bathed in
+blood upon Edom. "The day of the Lord" is another term of
+precisely similar import. It occurs in the Old Testament about
+fifteen times. In every instance it means some mighty
+manifestation of God's power in calamity. These occasions are
+pictured forth with the most astounding figures of speech. Isaiah
+describes the approaching destruction of Babylon in these terms:
+"The stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall give no
+light; the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not shine, the
+heavens shall shake, and the earth shall remove out of her place
+and be as a frightened sheep that no man taketh up." The Jews
+expected that the coming of the Messiah would be preceded by many
+fearful woes, in the midst of which he would appear with peerless
+pomp and might. The day of his coming they named emphatically the
+day of the Lord. Jesus actually appeared, not, as they expected, a
+warrior travelling in the greatness of his strength, with dyed
+garments from Bozrah, staining his raiment with blood as he
+trampled in the wine vat of vengeance, but the true Messiah, God's
+foreordained and anointed Son, despised and rejected of men,
+bringing good tidings, publishing peace. It must have been
+impossible for the Jews to receive such a Messiah without
+explanations. Those few who became converts apprehended his
+Messianic language, at least to some extent, in the sense which
+previously occupied their minds. He knew that often he was not
+understood; and he frequently said to his followers, "Who hath
+ears to hear, let him hear." His disciples once asked him, "What
+shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" He
+replied, substantially, "There shall be wars, famines, and
+unheard of trials; and immediately after the sun shall be
+darkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fall
+from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Then
+shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with
+great power. And he shall sit upon the throne of his glory, and
+all nations shall be gathered before him, and he shall separate
+them one from another." That this language was understood by the
+evangelists and the early Christians, in accordance with their
+Pharisaic notions, as teaching literally a physical reappearance
+of Christ on the earth, a resurrection, and a general judgment, we
+fully believe. Those ideas were prevalent at the time, are
+expressed in scores of places in the New Testament, and are the
+direct strong assertion of the words themselves. But that such was
+the meaning of Christ himself we much more than doubt.
+
+In the first place, in his own language in regard to his second
+coming there is not the least hint of a resurrection of the dead:
+the scene is confined to the living, and to the earth. Secondly,
+the figures which he employs in this connection are the same as
+those used by the Jewish prophets to denote great and signal
+events on the earth, and may be so taken here without violence to
+the idiom. Thirdly, he expressly fixed the date of the events he
+referred to within that generation; and if, therefore, he spoke
+literally, he was grossly in error, and his prophecies failed of
+fulfilment, a conclusion which we cannot adopt. To suppose that he
+partook in the false, mechanical dogmas of the carnal Jews would
+be equally irreconcilable with the common idea of his Divine
+inspiration, and with the profound penetration and spirituality
+of his own mind.
+
+He certainly used much of the phraseology of his contemporary
+countrymen, metaphorically, to convey his own purer thoughts. We
+have no doubt he did so in regard to the descriptions of his
+second coming. Let us state in a form of paraphrase what his real
+instructions on this point seem to us to have been: "You cannot
+believe that I am the Messiah, because I do not deliver you from
+your oppressors and trample on the Gentiles. Your minds are
+clouded with errors. The Father hath sent me to found the kingdom
+of peace and righteousness, and hath given me all power to reward
+and punish. By my word shall the nations of the earth be honored
+and blessed, or be overwhelmed with fire; and every man must stand
+before my judgment seat. The end of the world is at the doors. The
+Mosaic dispensation is about to be closed in the fearful
+tribulations of the day of the Lord, and my dispensation to be set
+up. When you see Jerusalem encompassed with armies, know that the
+day is at hand, and flee to the mountains; for not one stone shall
+be left upon another. Then the power of God will be shown on my
+behalf, and the sign of the Son of Man be seen in heaven. My
+truths shall prevail, and shall be owned as the criteria of Divine
+judgment. According to them, all the righteous shall be
+distinguished as my subjects, and all the iniquitous shall be
+separated from my kingdom. Some of those standing here shall not
+taste death till all these things be fulfilled. Then it will be
+seen that I am the Messiah, and that through the eternal
+principles of truth which I have proclaimed I shall sit upon a
+throne of glory, not literally, in person, as you thought,
+blessing the Jews and cursing the Gentiles, but spiritually, in
+the truth, dispensing joy to good men and woe to bad men,
+according to their deserts." Such we believe to be the meaning of
+Christ's own predictions of his second coming. He figuratively
+identifies himself with his religion according to that idiom by
+which it is written, "Moses hath in every city them that read him,
+being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day." His figure of
+himself as the universal judge is a bold personification; for he
+elsewhere says, "He that believeth in me believeth not in me, but
+in Him that sent me." And again, "He that rejecteth me, I judge
+him not: the word that I have spoken, that shall judge him." His
+coming in the clouds of heaven with great power and glory was
+when, at the destruction of Jerusalem, the old age closed and the
+new began, the obstacles to his religion were removed and his
+throne established on the earth.2 The apostles undoubtedly
+understood the doctrine differently; but that such was his own
+thought we conclude, because he did sometimes undeniably use
+figurative language in that way, and because the other meaning is
+an error, not in harmony either with his character, his mind, or
+his mission.
+
+This interpretation is so important that it may need to be
+illustrated and confirmed by further instances: "When the Son of
+Man sits on the throne of his glory, and all nations are gathered
+before him, his angels shall sever the wicked from among the just,
+and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be weeping
+and gnashing of teeth." A few such picturesque phrases have led to
+the general belief in a great world judgment at the end of the
+
+2 Norton, Statement of Reasons, Appendix.
+
+
+appointed time, after which the condemned are to be thrown into
+the tortures of an unquenchable world of flame. How arbitrary and
+violent a conclusion this is, how unwarranted and gross a
+perversion of the language of Christ it is, we may easily see. The
+fact that the old prophets often described fearful misfortunes and
+woes in images of clouds and flame and falling stars, and other
+portentous symbols, and that this style was therefore familiar to
+the Jews, would make it very natural for Jesus, in foretelling
+such an event as the coming destruction of Jerusalem, in
+conflagration and massacre, with the irretrievable subversion of
+the old dispensation, to picture it forth in a similar way. Fire
+was to the Jews a common emblem of calamity and devastation; and
+judgments incomparably less momentous than those gathered about
+the fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the self boasted
+favorites of Jehovah were often described by the prophets in
+appalling images of darkened planets, shaking heavens, clouds,
+fire, and blackness. Joel, speaking of a "day of the Lord," when
+there should be famine and drought, and a horrid army of
+destroying insects, "before whom a fire devoureth, and behind them
+a flame burneth," draws the scene in these terrific colors: "The
+earth shall quake before them; the sun and moon shall be dark, and
+the stars shall withdraw their shining; and the Lord shall utter
+his voice before his terrible army of locusts, caterpillars, and
+destroying worms:" Ezekiel represents God as saying, "The house of
+Israel is to me become dross: therefore I will gather you into the
+midst of Jerusalem: as they gather silver, brass, iron, tin, and
+lead into the midst of the furnace to blow the fire upon it, so
+will I gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, and
+ye shall be melted in the midst thereof." We read in Isaiah, "The
+Assyrian shall flee, and his princes shall be afraid, saith the
+Lord, whose fire is in Zion and his furnace in Jerusalem." Malachi
+also says, "The day cometh that shall burn as a furnace, and all
+that do wickedly shall be stubble, and shall be burned up root and
+branch. They shall be trodden as ashes beneath the feet of the
+righteous." The meaning of these passages, and of many other
+similar ones, is, in every instance, some severe temporal
+calamity, some dire example of Jehovah's retributions among the
+nations of the earth. Their authors never dreamed of teaching that
+there is a place of fire beyond the grave in which the wicked dead
+shall be tormented, or that the natural creation is finally to be
+devoured by flame. It is perfectly certain that not a single text
+in the Old Testament was meant to teach any such doctrine as that.
+The judgments shadowed forth in kindred metaphors by Christ are to
+be understood in the light of this fact. Their meaning is, that
+all unjust, cruel, false, impure men shall endure severe
+punishments. This general thought is fearfully distinct; but every
+thing beyond all details are left in utter obscurity.
+
+In the august scene of the King in judgment, when the sentence has
+been pronounced on those at the left hand, "Depart from me, ye
+cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his
+angels," it is written, "and they shall go away into everlasting
+punishment." It is obvious to remark that the imagery of a fiery
+prison built for Satan and the fallen angels, and into which the
+bad shall be finally doomed, is poetical language, or language of
+accommodation to the current notions of the time. These startling
+Oriental figures are used to wrap and convey the assertion that
+the wicked shall be severely punished according to their deserts.
+No literal reference seems to be made either to the particular
+time, to the
+
+special place, or to the distinctive character, of the punishment;
+but the mere fact is stated in a manner to fill the conscience
+with awe and to stamp the practical lesson vividly on the memory.
+But admitting the clauses apparently descriptive of the nature of
+this retribution to be metaphorical, yet what shall we think of
+its duration? Is it absolutely unending? There is nothing in the
+record to enable a candid inquirer to answer that question
+decisively. So far as the letter of Scripture is concerned, there
+are no data to give an indubitable solution to the problem. It is
+true the word "everlasting" is repeated; but, when impartially
+weighed, it seems a sudden rhetorical expression, of indefinite
+force, used to heighten the impressiveness of a sublime dramatic
+representation, rather than a cautious philosophical term employed
+to convey an abstract conception. There is no reason whatever for
+supposing that Christ's mind was particularly directed to the
+metaphysical idea of endlessness, or to the much more metaphysical
+idea of timelessness. The presumptive evidence is that he spoke
+popularly. Had he been charged to reveal a doctrine so tremendous,
+so awful, so unutterably momentous in its practical relations, as
+that of the endless close of all probation at death, is it
+conceivable that he would merely have couched it in a few
+figurative expressions and left it as a matter of obscure
+inference and uncertainty? No: in that case, he would have
+iterated and reiterated it, defined, guarded, illustrated it, and
+have left no possibility of honest mistake or doubt of it.
+
+The Greek word [non-ASCII characters], and the same is true of the
+corresponding Hebrew word, translated "everlasting" in the English
+Bible, has not in its popular usage the rigid force of eternal
+duration, but varies, is now applied to objects as evanescent as
+man's earthly life, now to objects as lasting as eternity.3
+Its power in any given case is to be sought from the context and
+the reason of the thing.
+
+Isaiah, having threatened the unrighteous nations that they
+"should conceive chaff and bring forth stubble, that their own
+breath should be fire to devour them, and that they should be
+burnt like lime, like thorns cut up in the fire," makes the
+terror smitten sinners and hypocrites cry, "Who among us can dwell
+in devouring fire? Who among us can dwell in everlasting
+burnings?" Yet his reference is solely to an outward, temporal
+judgment in this world. The Greek adjective rendered "everlasting"
+is etymologically, and by universal usage, a term of duration, but
+indefinite, its extent of meaning depending on the subjects of
+which it is predicated. Therefore, when Christ connects this word
+with the punishment of the wicked, it is impossible to say with
+any certainty, judging from the language itself, whether he
+implies that those who die in their sins are hopelessly lost,
+perfectly irredeemable forever, or not, though the probabilities
+are very strongly in the latter direction. "Everlasting
+punishment" may mean, in philosophical strictness, a punishment
+absolutely eternal, or may be a popular expression denoting, with
+general indefiniteness, a very long duration. Since in all Greek
+literature, sacred and profane, [non-ASCII characters] is applied
+to things that end, ten times as often as it is to things immortal,
+no fair critic can assert positively that when it is connected
+with future punishment it has the stringent meaning of
+metaphysical endlessness. On the other hand, no one has any
+critical
+
+3 See Christian Examiner for March, 1854, pp. 280-297.
+
+
+right to say positively that in such cases it has not that
+meaning. The Master has not explained his words on this point, but
+has left them veiled. We can settle the question itself concerning
+the limitedness or the unlimitedness of future punishment only on
+other grounds than those of textual criticism, even on grounds of
+enlightened reason postulating the cardinal principles of
+Christianity and of ethics. Will not the unimpeded Spirit of
+Christ lead all free minds and loving hearts to one conclusion?
+But that conclusion is to be held modestly as a trusted inference,
+not dogmatically as a received revelation.
+
+Another point in the Savior's teachings which it is of the utmost
+importance to understand is the sense in which he used the Jewish
+phrases "Resurrection of the Dead" and "Resurrection at the Last
+Day." The Pharisees looked for a restoration of the righteous from
+their graves to a bodily life. This event they supposed would take
+place at the appearance of the Messiah; and the time of his coming
+they called "the last day." So the Apostle John says, "Already are
+there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time."
+Now, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, clothed in his functions,
+though he interpreted those functions as carrying an interior and
+moral, not an outward and physical, force. "This is the will of
+Him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son and believeth
+on him should have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at
+the last day." Again, when Martha told Jesus that "she knew her
+brother Lazarus would rise again in the resurrection at the last
+day," he replied, "I am the resurrection and the life: he that
+believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and
+whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This
+utterance is surely metaphorical; for belief in Jesus does not
+prevent physical dissolution. The thoughts contained in the
+various passages belonging to this subject, when drawn out,
+compared, and stated in general terms, seem to us to be as
+follows: "You suppose that in the last day your Messiah will
+restore the dead to live again upon the earth. I am the Messiah,
+and the last days have therefore arrived. I am commissioned by the
+Father to bestow eternal life upon all who believe on me; but not
+in the manner you have anticipated. The true resurrection is not
+calling the body from the tomb, but opening the fountains of
+eternal life in the soul. I am come to open the spiritual world to
+your faith. He that believeth in me and keepeth my commandments
+has passed from death unto life, become conscious that though
+seemingly he passes into the grave, yet really he shall live with
+God forever. The true resurrection is, to come into the experience
+of the truth that 'God is not the God of the dead, but of the
+living; for all live unto him.' Over the soul that is filled with
+such an experience, death has no power. Verily, I say unto, you,
+the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead, the ignorant and
+guilty, buried in trespasses and sins, shall hear these truths
+declared, and they that believe shall lay hold of the life thus
+offered and be blessed. The Father hath given me authority to
+execute judgment, that is, to lay down the principles by which men
+shall be judged according to their deserts. All mankind shall be
+judged in the spiritual state by the spirit and precepts of my
+religion as veritably as if in their graves the generations of the
+dead heard my voice and came forth, the good to blessedness, the
+evil to misery. The judgment which is, as it were, committed unto
+me, is not really committed unto me, but unto the truth which I
+declare; for of mine own self I can do nothing." We believe this
+paraphrase expresses the essential meaning of Christ's own
+declarations concerning a resurrection and an associated judgment.
+Coming to bring from the Father authenticated tidings of
+immortality, and to reveal the laws of the Divine judgment,
+he declared that those who believed and kept his words were
+delivered from the terror of death, and, knowing that an endless
+life of blessedness was awaiting them, immediately entered upon
+its experience. He did not teach the doctrine of a bodily
+restoration, but said, "In the resurrection," that is, in the
+spiritual state succeeding death, "they neither marry nor are
+given in marriage, but are as the angels of heaven."
+
+He did not teach the doctrine of a temporary sleep in the grave,
+but said to the penitent thief on the cross, "This day shalt thou
+be with me in Paradise:" instantly upon leaving the body their
+souls would be together in the state of the blessed.
+
+It is often said that the words of Jesus in relation to the dead
+hearing his voice and coming forth must be taken literally; for
+the metaphor is of too extreme violence. But it is in keeping with
+his usage. He says, "Let the dead bury their dead." It is far less
+bold than "This is my body; this is my blood." It is not nearly so
+strong as Paul's adjuration, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise
+from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." It is not more
+daringly imaginative than the assertion that "the heroes sleeping
+in Marathon's gory bed stirred in their graves when Leonidas
+fought at Thermopyla; or than Christ's own words, "If thou hadst
+faith like a grain of mustard seed, thou couldst say to this
+mountain, Be thou cast into yonder sea, and it should obey you."
+So one might say,
+
+"Where'er the gospel comes,
+It spreads diviner light;
+It calls dead sinners from their tombs
+And gives the blind their sight."
+
+And in the latter days, when it has done its work, and the
+glorious measure of human redemption is full, liberty,
+intelligence, and love shall stand hand in hand on the mountain
+summits and raise up the long generations of the dead to behold
+the completed fruits of their toils. In this figurative moral
+sense Jesus probably spoke when he said, "Thou shalt be
+recompensed at the resurrection of the just." He referred simply
+to the rewards of the virtuous in the state beyond the grave. The
+phraseology in which he clothed the thought he accommodatingly
+adopted from the current speech of the Pharisees. They
+unquestionably meant by it the group of notions contained in their
+dogma of the destined physical restoration of the dead from their
+sepulchres at the advent of the Messiah. And it seems perfectly
+plain to us, on an impartial study of the record, that the
+evangelist, in reporting his words, took the Pharisaic dogma, and
+not merely the Christian truth, with them. But that Jesus himself
+modified and spiritualized the meaning of the phrase when he
+employed it, even as he did the other contemporaneous language
+descriptive of the Messianic offices and times, we conclude for
+two reasons. First, he certainly did often use language in that
+spiritual way, dressing in bold metaphors moral thoughts of
+inspired insight and truth. Secondly, the moral doctrine is the
+only one that is true, or that is in keeping with his penetrative
+thought. The notion of a physical resurrection is an error
+borrowed most likely from the Persians by the Pharisees, and not
+belonging to the essential elements of Christianity. The notion
+being prevalent at the time in Judea, and being usually expressed
+in certain appropriated phrases, when Christ used those phrases in
+a true spiritual sense the apostles would naturally apprehend from
+them the carnal meaning which already filled their minds in common
+with the minds of their countrymen.
+
+The word Hades, translated in the English New Testament by the
+word "hell," a word of nearly the same etymological force, but now
+conveying a quite different meaning, occurs in the discourses of
+Jesus only three several times. The other instances of its use are
+repetitions or parallels. First, "And thou, Capernaum, which art
+exalted to heaven, shalt be brought down to the under world;" that
+is, the great and proud city shall become powerless, a heap of
+ruins. Second, "Upon this rock I will found my Church, and the
+gates of the under world shall not prevail against it;" that is,
+the powers of darkness, the opposition of the wicked, the strength
+of evil, shall not destroy my religion; in spite of them it shall
+assert its organization and overcome all obstacles.
+
+The remaining example of the Savior's use of this word is in the
+parable of Dives and Lazarus. The rich man is described, after
+death, as suffering in the under world. Seeing the beggar afar off
+in Abraham's bosom, he cries, "Father Abraham, pity me, and send
+Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool
+my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame." Well known fancies
+and opinions are here wrought up in scenic form to convey certain
+moral impressions. It will be noticed that the implied division of
+the under world into two parts, with a gulf between them,
+corresponds to the common Gentile notion of an Elysian region of
+delightful meadows for the good and a Tartarean region of
+blackness and fire for the bad, both included in one subterranean
+kingdom, but divided by an interval. 4
+
+The dramatic details of the account Lazarus being borne into bliss
+by angels, Dives asking to have a messenger sent from bale to warn
+his surviving brothers rest on opinions afloat among the Jews of
+that age, derived from the Persian theology. Zoroaster prays,
+"When I shall die, let Aban and Bahman carry me to the bosom of
+joy."5 And it was a common belief among the Persians that souls
+were at seasons permitted to leave purgatory and visit their
+relatives on earth.6 It is evident that the narrative before us is
+not a history to be literally construed, but a parable to be
+carefully analyzed. The imagery and the particulars are to be laid
+aside, and the central thoughts to be drawn forth. Take the words
+literally, that the rich man's immaterial soul, writhing in
+flames, wished the tip of a finger dipped in water to cool his
+tongue, and they are ridiculous. Take them figuratively, as a type
+of unknown spiritual anguish, and they are awful. Besides, had
+Christ intended to teach the doctrine of a local burning hell, he
+surely would have enunciated it in plain words, with solemn
+iteration and explanatory amplifications, instead of merely
+insinuating it incidentally, in metaphorical
+
+4 See copious illustrations by Rosenmuller, in Luc. cap. xvi. 22,
+23.
+"Hic locus est partes ubi se via findit in ambas:
+Dextera, qua Ditis magni sub moenia tendit;
+Hac iter Elysium nobis: at lava malorum
+Exercet poenas, et ad impia Tartara mittit."
+
+5 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 408.
+
+6 Ibid. s. 410.
+
+
+terms, in a professed parable. The sense of the parable is, that
+the formal distinctions of this world will have no influence in
+the allotments of the future state, but will often be reversed
+there; that a righteous Providence, knowing every thing here,
+rules hereafter, and will dispense compensating justice to all;
+that men should not wait for a herald to rise from the dead to
+warn them, but should heed the instructions they already have, and
+so live in the life that now is, as to avoid a miserable
+condemnation, and secure a blessed acceptance, in the life that is
+to come. By inculcating these truths in a striking manner, through
+the aid of a parable based on the familiar poetical conceptions of
+the future world and its scenery, Christ no more endorses those
+conceptions than by using the Messianic phrases of the Jews he
+approves the false carnal views which they joined with that
+language. To interpret the parable literally, then, and suppose it
+meant to teach the actual existence of a located hell of fire for
+sinners after death, is to disregard the proprieties of criticism.
+
+"Gehenna," or the equivalent phrase, "Gehenna of fire,"
+unfortunately translated into our tongue by the word "hell," is to
+be found in the teachings of Christ in only five independent
+instances, each of which, after tracing the original Jewish usage
+of the term, we will briefly examine. Gehenna, or the Vale of
+Hinnom, is derived from two Hebrew words, the first meaning a
+vale, the second being the name of its owner. The place thus
+called was the eastern part of the beautiful valley that forms the
+southern boundary of Jerusalem. Here Moloch, the horrid idol god
+worshipped by the Ammonites, and by the Israelites during their
+idolatrous lapses, was set up. This monstrous idol had the head of
+an ox and the body of a man. It was hollow; and, being filled with
+fire, children were laid in its arms and devoured alive by the
+heat. This explains the terrific denunciations uttered by the
+prophets against those who made their children pass through the
+fire to Moloch. The spot was sometimes entitled Tophet, a place of
+abhorrence; its name being derived, as some think, from a word
+meaning to vomit with loathing, or, as others suppose, from a word
+signifying drum, because drums were beaten to drown the shrieks of
+the burning children. After these horrible rites were abolished by
+Josiah, the place became an utter abomination. All filth, the
+offal of the city, the carcasses of beasts, the bodies of executed
+criminals, were cast indiscriminately into Gehenna. Fires were
+kept constantly burning to prevent the infection of the atmosphere
+from the putrifying mass. Worms were to be seen preying on the
+relics. The primary meaning, then, of Gehenna, is a valley outside
+of Jerusalem, a place of corruption and fire, only to be thought
+of with execration and shuddering.
+
+Now, it was not only in keeping with Oriental rhetoric, but also
+natural in itself, that figures of speech should be taken from
+these obvious and dreadful facts to symbolize any dire evil. For
+example, how naturally might a Jew, speaking of some foul wretch,
+and standing, perhaps, within sight of the place, exclaim, "He
+deserves to be hurled into the fires of Gehenna!" So the term
+would gradually become an accepted emblem of abominable
+punishment. Such was the fact; and this gives a perspicuous
+meaning to the word without supposing it to imply a fiery prison
+house of anguish in the future world. Isaiah threatens the King of
+Assyria with ruin in these terms: "Tophet is ordained of old, and
+prepared for the king: it is made deep and large; the pile thereof
+is fire and much wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream of
+brimstone, doth kindle it." The prophet thus portrays, with the
+dread imagery of Gehenna, approaching disaster and overthrow. A
+thorough study of the Old Testament shows that the Jews, during
+the period which it covers, did not believe in future rewards and
+punishments, but expected that all souls without discrimination
+would pass their shadowy dream lives in the silence of Sheol.
+
+Between the termination of the Old Testament history and the
+commencement of the New, various forms of the doctrine of future
+retribution had been introduced or developed among the Jews. But
+during this period few, if any, decisive instances can be found in
+which the image of penal fire is connected with the future state.
+On the contrary, "darkness," "gloom," "blackness," "profound and
+perpetual night," are the terms employed to characterize the abode
+and fate of the wicked.
+
+Josephus says that, in the faith of the Pharisees, "the worst
+criminals were banished to the darkest part of the under world."
+Philo represents the depraved and condemned as "groping in the
+lowest and darkest part of the creation. The word Gehenna is
+rarely found in the literature of this time, and when it is it
+commonly seems to be used either simply to denote the detestable
+Vale of Hinnom, or else plainly as a general symbol of calamity
+and horror, as in the elder prophets.
+
+But in some of the Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases of the Hebrew
+Scriptures,  especially in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, we
+meet repeated applications of the word Gehenna to signify a
+punishment by fire in the future state.7 This is a fact about
+which there can be no question. And to the documents showing such
+a usage of the word, the best scholars are pretty well agreed in
+assigning a date as early as the days of Christ. The evidence
+afforded by these Targums, together with the marked application of
+the term by Jesus himself, and the similar general use of it
+immediately after both by Christians and Jews, render it not
+improbable that Gehenna was known to the contemporaries of the
+Savior as the metaphorical name of hell, a region of fire, in the
+under world, where the reprobate were supposed to be punished
+after death. But admitting that, before Christ began to teach, the
+Jews had modified their early conception of the under world as the
+silent and sombre abode of all the dead in common, and had divided
+it into two parts, one where the wicked suffer, called Gehenna,
+one where the righteous rest, called Paradise, still, that
+modification having been borrowed, as is historically evident,
+from the Gentiles, or, if developed among themselves, at all
+events unconnected with revelation, of course Christianity is not
+involved with the truth or falsity of it, is not responsible for
+it. It does not necessarily follow that Jesus gave precisely the
+same meaning to the word Gehenna that his contemporaries or
+successors did. He may have used it in a modified emblematic
+sense, as he did many other current terms. In studying his
+language, we should especially free our minds both from the
+tyranny of pre Christian notions and dogmas and from the
+associations and influences of modern creeds, and seek to
+interpret it in the light of his own instructions and in the
+spirit of his own mind.
+
+We will now examine the cases in which Christ uses the term
+Gehenna, and ask what it means.
+
+First: "Whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou vile wretch!
+shall be in danger of the fiery Gehenna." Interpret this
+literally, and it teaches that whosoever calls his brother a
+
+7 Gesenius, Hebrew Thesaurus, Ge Hinnom.
+
+
+wicked apostate is in danger of being thrown into the filthy
+flames in the Vale of Hinnom. But no one supposes that such was
+its meaning. Jesus would say, as we understand him, "I am not come
+to destroy, but to fulfil, the law; to show how at the culmination
+of the old dispensation a higher and stricter one opens. I say
+unto you, that, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the
+Pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The conditions
+of acceptance under the new order are far more profound and
+difficult than under the old. That said, Whosoever commits murder
+shall be exposed to legal punishment from the public tribunal.
+This says, An invisible inward punishment, as much to be dreaded
+as the judgments of the Sanhedrim, shall be inflicted upon those
+who harbor the secret passions that lead to crime; whosoever, out
+of an angry heart, insults his brother, shall be exposed to
+spiritual retributions typified by the horrors of yon flaming
+valley. They of old time took cognizance of outward crimes by
+outward penalties. I take cognizance of inward sins by inward
+returns more sure and more fearful."
+
+Second: "If thy right eye be a source of temptation to thee, pluck
+it out and fling it away; for it is better for thee that one of
+thy members perish than that thy whole body should be cast into
+Gehenna." Give these words a literal interpretation, and they
+mean, "If your eyes or your hands are the occasions of crime, if
+they tempt you to commit offences which will expose you to public
+execution, to the ignominy and torture heaped upon felons put to a
+shameful death and then flung among the burning filth of Gehenna,
+pluck them out, cut them off betimes, and save yourself from such
+a frightful end; for it is better to live even thus maimed than,
+having a whole body, to be put to a violent death." No one can
+suppose that Jesus meant to convey such an idea as that when he
+uttered these words. We must, then, attribute a deeper, an
+exclusively moral, significance to the passage. It means, "If you
+have some bosom sin, to deny and root out which is like tearing
+out an eye or cutting off a hand, pause not, but overcome and
+destroy it immediately, at whatever cost of effort and suffering;
+for it is better to endure the pain of fighting and smothering a
+bad passion than to submit to it and allow it to rule until it
+acquires complete control over you, pervades your whole nature
+with its miserable unrest, and brings you at last into a state of
+woe of which Gehenna and its dreadful associations are a fit
+emblem." A verse spoken, according to Mark, in immediate
+connection with the present passage, confirms the figurative sense
+we have attributed to it: "Whosoever shall cause one of these
+little ones that believe in me to fall, it were better for him
+that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were plunged
+into the midst of the sea;" that is, in literal terms, a man had
+better meet a great calamity, even the loss of life, than commit a
+foul crime and thus bring the woe of guilt upon his soul.
+
+The phrase, "their worm dieth not, and their fire is not
+quenched," is a part of the imagery naturally suggested by the
+scene in the Valley of Hinnom, and was used to give greater
+vividness and force to the moral impression of the discourse. By
+an interpretation resulting either from prejudice or ignorance, it
+is generally held to teach the doctrine of literal fire torments
+enduring forever. It is a direct quotation from a passage in
+Isaiah which signifies that, in a glorious age to come, Jehovah
+will cause his worshippers to go forth from new moon to new moon
+and look upon the carcasses of the wicked, and see them devoured
+by fire which shall not be quenched and gnawed by worms which
+shall not die, until the last relics of them are destroyed.
+
+Third: "Fear not them that kill the body but are not able to kill
+the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and
+body in Gehenna." A similar use of figurative language, in a still
+bolder manner, is found in Isaiah. Intending to say nothing more
+than that Assyria should be overthrown and crushed, the prophet
+bursts out, "Under the glory of the King of Assyria Jehovah shall
+kindle a burning like the burning of a fire; and it shall burn and
+devour his thorns and his briers in one day, and shall consume the
+glory of his forest and of his fruitful field, both soul and
+body." Reading the whole passage in Matthew with a single eye, its
+meaning will be apparent. We may paraphrase it thus. Jesus says to
+his disciples, "You are now going forth to preach the gospel. My
+religion and its destinies are intrusted to your hands. As you go
+from place to place, be on your guard; for they will persecute
+you, and scourge you, and deliver you up to death. But fear them
+not. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master; and
+if they have done so unto me, how much more shall they unto you!
+Do not, through fear of hostile men, who can only kill your bodies
+and are not able in any wise to injure your souls, shrink from
+danger and prove recreant to the momentous duties imposed upon
+you; but be inspired to proclaim the principles of the heavenly
+kingdom with earnestness and courage, in the face of all perils,
+by fearing God, him who is able to plunge both your souls and your
+bodies in abomination and agony, him who, if you prove unfaithful
+and become slothful servants or wicked traitors, will leave your
+bodies to a violent death and after that your souls to bitter
+shame and anguish. Fear not the temporal, physical power of your
+enemies, to be turned from your work by it; but rather fear the
+eternal, spiritual power of your God, to be made faithful by it."
+
+Fourth: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye
+compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and, when he is made,
+ye make him twofold more a child of Gehenna than yourselves." That
+is, "Ye make him twice as bad as yourselves in hypocrisy, bigotry,
+extortion, impurity, and malice, a subject of double guilt and of
+double retribution."
+
+Finally, Jesus exclaims to the children of those who killed the
+prophets, "Serpents, brood of vipers! how can ye escape the
+condemnation of Gehenna?" That is to say, "Venomous creatures, bad
+men! you deserve the fate of the worst criminals; you are worthy
+of the polluted fires of Gehenna; your vices will surely be
+followed by condign punishment: how can such depravity escape the
+severest retributions?"
+
+These five are all the distinct instances in which Jesus uses the
+word Gehenna. It is plain that he always uses the word
+metaphorically. We therefore conclude that Christianity, correctly
+understood, never implies that eternal fire awaits sinners in the
+future world, but that moral retributions, according to their
+deeds, are the portion of all men here and hereafter. There is no
+more reason to suppose that essential Christianity contains the
+doctrine of a fiery infernal world than there is to suppose that
+it really means to declare that God is a glowing mass of flame,
+when it says, "Our God is a consuming fire." We must remember the
+metaphorical character of much scriptural language. Wickedness is
+a fire, in that it preys upon men and draws down the displeasure
+of the Almighty, and consumes them.
+
+As Isaiah writes, "Wickedness burneth as the fire, the anger of
+Jehovah darkens the land, and the people shall be the food of the
+fire." And James declares to proud extortioners, "The rust of your
+cankered gold and silver shall eat your flesh as it were fire."
+
+When Jesus says, "It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and
+Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city" which will not
+listen to the preaching of my kingdom, but drives my disciples
+away, he uses a familiar figure to signify that Sodom and Gomorrah
+would at such a call have repented in sackcloth and ashes. The
+guilt of Chorazin and Bethsaida was, therefore, more hardened than
+theirs, and should receive a severer punishment; or, making
+allowance for the natural exaggeration of this kind of language,
+he means, That city whose iniquities and scornful unbelief lead it
+to reject my kingdom when it is proffered shall be brought to
+judgment and be overwhelmed with avenging calamities. Two parallel
+illustrations of this image are given us by the old prophets.
+Isaiah says, "Babylon shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and
+Gomorrah." And Jeremiah complains, "The punishment of Jerusalem is
+greater than the punishment of Sodom." It is certainly remarkable
+that such passages should ever have been thought to teach the
+doctrine of a final, universal judgment day breaking on the world
+in fire.
+
+The subject of our Lord's teachings in regard to the punishment of
+the wicked is included in two classes of texts, and may be summed
+up in a few words. One class of texts relate to the visible
+establishment of Christianity as the true religion, the Divine
+law, at the destruction of the Jewish power, and to the frightful
+woes which should then fall upon the murderers of Christ, the
+bitter enemies of his cause. All these things were to come upon
+that generation,  were to happen before some of them then standing
+there tasted death. The other class of texts and they are by far
+the more numerous signify that the kingdom of Truth is now
+revealed and set up; that all men are bound to accept and obey it
+with reverence and love, and thus become its blessed subjects, the
+happy and immortal children of God; that those who spurn its
+offers, break its laws, and violate its pure spirit shall be
+punished, inevitably and fearfully, by moral retributions
+proportioned to the degrees of their guilt. Christ does not teach
+that the good are immortal and that the bad shall be annihilated,
+but that all alike, both the just and the unjust, enter the
+spiritual world. He does not teach that the bad shall be eternally
+miserable, cut off from all possibility of amendment, but simply
+that they shall be justly judged. He makes no definitive reference
+to duration, but leaves us at liberty, peering into the gloom as
+best we can, to suppose, if we think it most reasonable, that the
+conditions of our spiritual nature are the same in the future as
+now, and therefore that the wicked may go on in evil hereafter,
+or, if they will, all turn to righteousness, and the universe
+finally become as one sea of holiness and as one flood of praise.
+
+Another portion of Christ's doctrine of the future life hinges on
+the phrase "the kingdom of heaven." Much is implied in this term
+and its accompaniments, and may be drawn out by answering the
+questions, What is heaven? Who are citizens of, and who are aliens
+from, the kingdom of God? Let us first examine the subordinate
+meanings and shades of meaning with which the Savior sometimes
+uses these phrases.
+
+"Ye shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and
+descending upon the Son of Man." No confirmation of the literal
+sense of this that is afforded by any incident found in the
+Gospels. There is every reason for supposing that he meant by it,
+"There shall be open manifestations of supernatural power and
+favor bestowed upon me by God, evident signs of direct
+communications between us." His Divine works and instructions
+justified the statement. The word "heaven" as here used, then,
+does not mean any particular place, but means the approving
+presence of God. The instincts and natural language of man prompt
+us to consider objects of reverence as above us. We kneel below
+them. The splendor, mystery, infinity, of the starry regions help
+on the delusion. But surely no one possessing clear spiritual
+perceptions will think the literal facts in the case must
+correspond to this, that God must dwell in a place overhead called
+heaven. He is an Omnipresence.
+
+"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you for my
+sake: rejoice, for great is your reward in heaven." This passage
+probably means, "In the midst of tribulation be exceeding glad;
+because you shall be abundantly rewarded in a future state for all
+your present sufferings in my cause." In that case, heaven
+signifies the spiritual world, and does not involve reference to
+any precisely located spot. Or it may mean, "Be not disheartened
+by insults and persecutions met in the cause of God; for you shall
+be greatly blessed in your inward life: the approval of
+conscience, the immortal love and pity of God, shall be yours: the
+more you are hated and abused by men unjustly, the closer and
+sweeter shall be your communion with God." In that case, heaven
+signifies fellowship with the Father, and is independent of any
+particular time or place.
+
+"Our Father, who art in heaven." Jesus was not the author of this
+sentence. It was a part of the Rabbinical synagogue service, and
+was based upon the Hebrew conception of God as having his abode in
+an especial sense over the firmament. The Savior uses it as the
+language of accommodation, as is evident from his conversation
+with the woman of Samaria; for he told her that no exclusive spot
+was an acceptable place of worship, since "God is a Spirit; and
+they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." No
+one who comprehends the meaning of the words can suppose that the
+Infinite Spirit occupies a confined local habitation, and that men
+must literally journey there to be with him after death. Wherever
+they may be now, they are away from him or with him, according to
+their characters. After death they are more banished from him or
+more immediately with him, instantly, wherever they are, according
+to the spirit they are of.
+
+"Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, but in heaven." In
+other words, Be not absorbed in efforts to accumulate hoards of
+gold and silver, and to get houses and lands, which will soon pass
+away; but rather labor to acquire heavenly treasures, wisdom,
+love, purity, and faith, which will never pass from your
+possession nor cease from your enjoyment.
+
+"I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place
+for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where
+I am there ye may be also." To understand this text, we must
+carefully study the whole four chapters of the connection in which
+it stands. They abound in bold symbols. An instance of this is
+seen where Jesus, having washed his disciples' feet, says to them,
+"Ye are clean, but not all. For he knew who should betray him.
+Therefore said he, Ye are not all clean." The actual meaning of
+the passage before us may be illustrated by a short paraphrase of
+it with the context: "Let not your hearts be troubled by the
+thought that I must die and be removed from you; for there are
+other states of being besides this earthly life. When they crucify
+me, as I have said to you before, I shall not perish, but shall
+pass into a higher state of existence with my Father. Whither I go
+ye know, and the way ye know: my Father is the end, and the truths
+that I have declared point out the way. If ye loved me, ye would
+rejoice because I say that I go to the Father. And if I go to him,
+if, when they have put me to death, I pass into an unseen state of
+blessedness and glory (as I prophesy unto you that I shall,) I
+will reveal myself unto you again, and tell you. I go before you
+as a pioneer, and will surely come back and confirm, with
+irresistible evidence, the reality of what I have already told
+you. Therefore, trouble not your hearts, but be of good cheer."
+
+"There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner
+that repenteth." The sentiment of this Divine declaration simply
+implies that all good beings sympathize with every triumph of
+goodness; that the living chain of mutual interest runs through
+the spiritual universe, making one family of those on earth and
+those in the invisible state.
+
+"Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father." "Cling not
+to me, detain me not, for I have not yet left the world forever,
+to be in the spiritual state with my Father; and ere I do this I
+must seek my disciples, to convince them of my resurrection and to
+give them my parting commission and blessing." He used the common
+language, for it was the only language which she whom he addressed
+would understand; and although, literally interpreted, it conveyed
+the idea of a local heaven on high, yet at the same time it
+conveyed, and in the only way intelligible to her, all the truth
+that was important, namely, that when he disappeared he would
+still be living, and be, furthermore, with God.
+
+When Christ finally went from his disciples, he seemed to them to
+rise and vanish towards the clouds. This would confirm their
+previous material conceptions, and the old forms of speech would
+be handed down, strengthened by these phenomena, misunderstood in
+themselves and exaggerated in their importance. We generally speak
+now of God's "throne," of "heaven," as situated far away in the
+blue ether; we point upward to the world of bliss, and say, There
+the celestial hosannas roll; there the happy ones, the unforgotten
+ones of our love, wait to welcome us. These forms of speech are
+entirely natural; they are harmless; they aid in giving
+definiteness to our thoughts and feelings, and it is well to
+continue their use; it would be difficult to express our thoughts
+without them. However, we must understand that they are not
+strictly and exclusively true. God is everywhere; and wherever he
+is there is heaven to the spirits that are like him and,
+consequently, see him and enjoy his ineffable blessedness.
+
+Jesus sometimes uses the phrase "kingdom of heaven" as synonymous
+with the Divine will, the spiritual principles or laws which he
+was inspired to proclaim. Many of his parables were spoken to
+illustrate the diffusive power and the incomparable value of the
+truth he taught, as when he said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a
+grain of mustard seed, which becomes a great tree;" it is "like
+unto leaven, which a woman put in two measures of meal until the
+whole was leavened;" it is "like a treasure hid in a field," or
+"like a goodly pearl of great price, which, a man finding, he goes
+and sells all that he has and buys it." In these examples "the
+kingdom of heaven" is plainly a personification of the revealed
+will of God, the true law of salvation and eternal life. In answer
+to the question why he spoke so many things to the people in
+parables, Jesus said to his disciples, "Because it is given unto
+you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto them
+it is not given;" that is, You are prepared to understand the
+hitherto concealed truths of God's government, if set forth
+plainly; but they are not prepared.
+
+Here as also in the parables of the vineyard let out to
+husbandmen, and of the man who sowed good seed in his field, and
+in a few other cases "the kingdom of heaven" means God's
+government, his mode of dealing with men, his method of
+establishing his truths in the hearts of men. "The kingdom of
+heaven" sometimes signifies personal purity and peace, freedom
+from sensual solicitations. "There be eunuchs which have made
+themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is
+able to receive it, let him receive it."
+
+Christ frequently uses the term "kingdom of heaven" in a somewhat
+restricted, traditional sense, based in form but not in spirit
+upon the Jewish expectations of the Messiah's kingdom. "Be ye sure
+of this, that the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you;" "I must
+preach the kingdom of God to other cities also;" "Repent, for the
+kingdom of heaven is at hand." Christ was charged to bear to men a
+new revelation from God of his government and laws, that he might
+reign over them as a monarch over conscious and loyal subjects.
+"Many shall come from the East and the West, and shall sit down
+with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the
+children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness."
+The sense of these texts is as follows. "God is now offering unto
+you, through me, a spiritual dispensation, a new kingdom; but,
+unless you faithfully heed it and fulfil its conditions, you shall
+be rejected from it and lose the Divine favor. Although, by your
+position as the chosen people, and in the line of revelation, you
+are its natural heirs, yet, unless you rule your spirits and lives
+by its commands, you shall see the despised Gentiles enjoying all
+the privileges your faith allows to the revered patriarchs of your
+nation, while yourselves are shut out from them and overwhelmed
+with shame and anguish. Your pride of descent, haughtiness of
+spirit, and reliance upon dead rites unfit you for the true
+kingdom of God, the inward reign of humility and righteousness;
+and the very publicans and harlots, repenting and humbling
+themselves, shall go into it before you."
+
+To be welcomed under this Messianic dispensation, to become a
+citizen of this spiritual kingdom of God, the Savior declares that
+there are certain indispensable conditions. A man must repent and
+forsake his sins. This was the burden of John's preaching, that
+the candidate for the kingdom of heaven must first be baptized
+with water unto repentance, as a sign that he abjures and is
+cleansed from all his old errors and iniquities. Then he must be
+baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire, that is, must learn
+the positive principles of the coming kingdom, and apply them to
+his own character, to purge away every corrupt thing. He must be
+born again, born of water and of the Spirit: in other words, he
+must be brought out from his impurity and wickedness into a new
+and Divine life of holiness, awakened to a conscious experience of
+purity, truth, and love, the great prime elements in the reign of
+God. He must be guileless and lowly. "Whosoever will not receive
+the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter
+therein."
+
+The kingdom of heaven, the better dispensation which Christ came
+to establish, is the humility of contrite hearts, the innocence of
+little children, the purity of undefiled consciences, the fruit of
+good works, the truth of universal laws, the love of God, and the
+conscious experience of an indestructible, blessed being. Those
+who enter into these qualities in faith, in feeling, and in action
+are full citizens of that eternal kingdom; all others are aliens
+from it.
+
+Heaven, then, according to Christ's use of the word, is not
+distinctively a world situated somewhere in immensity, but a
+purely spiritual experience, having nothing to do with any special
+time or place. It is a state of the soul, or a state of society,
+under the rule of truth, governed by God's will, either in this
+life or in a future. He said to the young ruler who had walked
+faithfully in the law, and whose good traits drew forth his love,
+"Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." It is evident that
+this does not mean a bounded place of abode, but a true state of
+character, a virtuous mode of life "My kingdom is not of this
+world." "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." That
+is, "My kingdom is the realm of truth, the dominion of God's will,
+and all true men are my subjects." Evidently this is not a
+material but a moral reign and therefore unlimited by seasons or
+places. Wherever purity, truth, love, obedience, prevail, there is
+God, and that is heaven. It is not necessary to depart into some
+distant sphere to meet the Infinite Holy One and dwell with him.
+He is on the very dust we tread, he is the very centre of our
+souls and breath of our lives, if we are only in a state that is
+fitted to recognise and enjoy him. "He that hath sent me is with
+me: the Father hath not left me alone, for I always do those
+things which please him." It is a fair inference from such
+statements as this that to do with conscious adoration and love
+those things that please God is to be with him, without regard to
+time or place; and that is heaven. "I speak that which I have seen
+with my Father," God, "and ye do that which ye have seen with your
+father, the devil." No one will suppose that Jesus meant to tell
+the wicked men whom he was addressing that they committed their
+iniquities in consequence of lessons learned in a previous state
+of existence with an arch fiend, the parent of all evil. His
+meaning, then, was, I bring forth in words and deeds the things
+which I have learned in my secret soul from inspired communion
+with infinite goodness and perfection; you bring forth the things
+which you have learned from communion with the source of sin and
+woe, that is, foul propensities, cruel passions, and evil
+thoughts.
+
+"I come forth from the Father and am come into the world; again I
+leave the world and go unto the Father." "I go unto Him that sent
+me." Since it is declared that God is an Omnipresent Spirit, and
+that those who obey and love him see him and are with him
+everywhere, these striking words must bear one of the two
+following interpretations. First, they may imply in general that
+man is created and sent into this state of being by the Father,
+and that after the termination of the present life the soul is
+admitted to a closer union with the Parent Spirit. This gives a
+natural meaning to the language which represents dying as going to
+the Father. Not that it is necessary to travel to reach God, but
+that the spiritual verity is most adequately expressed under such
+a metaphor. But, secondly, and more probably, the phraseology
+under consideration may be meant as an assertion of the Divine
+origin and authority of the special mission of Christ. "Neither
+came I of myself, but He sent me;" "The words that I speak unto
+you I speak not of myself;" "As the Father hath taught me, I speak
+these things." These passages do not necessarily teach the pre
+existence of Christ and his descent from heaven in the flesh. That
+is a carnal interpretation which does great violence to the
+genuine nature of the claims put forth by our Savior. They may
+merely declare the supernatural commission of the Son of God, his
+direct inspiration and authority. He did not voluntarily assume
+his great work, but was Divinely ordered on that service. Compare
+the following text: "The baptism of John, whence was it, from
+Heaven, or of men?" That is to say, was it of human or of Divine
+origin and authority? So when it is said that the Son of Man
+descended from heaven, or was sent by the Father, the meaning in
+Christ's mind probably was that he was raised up, did his works,
+spoke his words, by the inspiration and with the sanction of God.
+The accuracy of this interpretation is seen by the following
+citation from the Savior's own words, when he is speaking in his
+prayer at the last supper of sending his disciples out to preach
+the gospel: "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I
+also sent them into the world." The reference, evidently, is to a
+Divine choice and sealing, not to a descent upon the earth from
+another sphere.
+
+That the author of the Fourth Gospel believed that Christ
+descended from heaven literally we have not the shadow of a doubt.
+He repeatedly speaks of him as the great super angelic Logos, the
+first born Son and perfect image of God, the instrumental cause of
+the creation. His mind was filled with the same views, the same
+lofty Logos theory that is so abundantly set forth in the writings
+of Philo Judaus. He reports and describes the Savior in conformity
+with such a theological postulate. Possessed with the foregone
+conclusion that Jesus was the Divine Logos, descended from the
+celestial abode, and born into the world as a man, in endeavoring
+to write out from memory, years after they were uttered, the
+Savior's words, it is probable that he unconsciously
+misapprehended and tinged them according to his theory. The
+Delphic apothegm, "Know thyself," was said to have descended from
+heaven:
+
+"E coelo descendit [non ASCII characters]."
+
+By a familiar Jewish idiom, "to ascend into heaven" meant to learn
+the will of God.8 And whatever bore the direct sancion of God was
+said to descend from heaven. When in these figurative terms Jesus
+asserted his Divine commission, it seems that some understood him
+literally, and concluded perhaps in consequence of his miracles,
+joined with their own speculations that he was the Logos
+incarnated. That such a conclusion was an unwarranted inference
+from metaphorical language and from a foregone pagan dogma appears
+from his own explanatory and justifying words spoken to the Jews.
+For when they accused him of making himself God, he replies, "If
+in your law they are called gods to whom the word of God came,
+charge ye him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the
+world with blasphemy, because he says he is the Son of God?"
+Christ's language in the Fourth Gospel
+
+8 Schoettgen, in John iii. 13.
+
+
+may be fairly explained without implying his actual pre existence
+or superhuman nature. But it does not seem to us that John's
+possibly can be. His miracles, according to the common idea of
+them, did not prove him to be the coequal fac simile, but merely
+proved him to be the delegated envoy, of God.
+
+We may sum up the consideration of this point in a few words.
+Christ did not essentially mean by the term "heaven" the world of
+light and glory located by the Hebrews, and by some other nations,
+just above the visible firmament. His meaning, when he spoke of
+the kingdom of God or heaven, was always, in some form, either the
+reign of justice, purity, and love, or the invisible world of
+spirits. If that world, heaven, be in fact, and were in his
+conception, a sphere located in space, he never alluded to its
+position, but left it perfectly in the dark, keeping his
+instructions scrupulously free from any such commitment. He said,
+"I go to Him that sent me;" "I will come again and receive you
+unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also." The references
+to locality are vague and mysterious. The nature of his words, and
+their scantiness, are as if he had said, We shall live hereafter;
+we shall be with the Father; we shall be together. All the rest is
+mystery, even to me: it is not important to be known, and the
+Father hath concealed it. Such, almost, are his very words. "A
+little while, and ye shall not see me; again, a little while, and
+ye shall see me, because I go to the Father." "Father, I will that
+they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am." Whether
+heaven be technically a material abode or a spiritual state it is
+of little importance to us to know; and the teachings of Jesus
+seem to have nothing to do with it. The important things for us to
+know are that there is a heaven, and how we may prepare for it;
+and on these points the revelation is explicit. To suppose the
+Savior ignorant of some things is not inconsistent with his
+endowments; for he himself avowed his ignorance, saying, "Of that
+day knoweth no man; no, not even the angels which are in heaven,
+neither the Son, but the Father." And it adds an awful solemnity,
+an indescribably exciting interest, to his departure from the
+world, to conceive him hovering on the verge of the same mystery
+which has enveloped every passing mortal,  hovering there with
+chastened wonder and curiosity, inspired with an absolute trust
+that in that fathomless obscurity the Father would be with him,
+and would unveil new realms of life, and would enable him to come
+back and assure his disciples. He certainly did not reveal the
+details of the future state: whether he was acquainted with them
+himself or not we cannot tell.
+
+We next advance to the most important portion of the words of
+Christ regarding the life and destiny of the soul, those parts of
+his doctrine which are most of a personal, experimental character,
+sounding the fountains of consciousness, piercing to the dividing
+asunder of our being. It is often said that Jesus everywhere takes
+for granted the fact of immortality, that it underlies and
+permeates all he does and says. We should know at once that such a
+being must be immortal; such a life could never be lived by an
+ephemeral creature; of all possible proofs of immortality he is
+himself the sublimest. This is true, but not the whole truth. The
+resistless assurance, the Divine inspiration, the sublime repose,
+with which he enunciates the various thoughts connected with the
+theme of endless existence, are indeed marvellous. But he not only
+authoritatively assumes the truth of a future life: he speaks
+directly of it in many ways, often returns to it, continually
+hovers about it, reasons for it, exhorts upon it, makes most of
+his instructions hinge upon it, shows that it is a favorite
+subject of his communion. We may put the justice of these
+statements in a clear light by bringing together and explaining
+some of his scattered utterances.
+
+His express language teaches that man in this world is a twofold
+being, leading a twofold life, physical and spiritual, the one
+temporal, the other eternal, the one apt unduly to absorb his
+affections, the other really deserving his profoundest care. This
+separation of the body and the soul, and survival of the latter,
+is brought to light in various striking forms and with various
+piercing applications. In view of the dangers that beset his
+disciples on their mission, he exhorted and warned them thus:
+"Fear not them which have power to kill the body and afterwards
+have no more that they can do; but rather fear Him who can kill
+both soul and body;" "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it;
+and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it;" that
+is, whosoever, for the sake of saving the life of his body,
+shrinks from the duties of this dangerous time, shall lose the
+highest welfare of the soul; but whosoever loveth his lower life
+in the body less than he loves the virtues of a consecrated spirit
+shall win the true blessedness of his soul. Both of these passages
+show that the soul has a life and interest separate from the
+material tabernacle. With what pathos and convincing power was the
+same faith expressed in his ejaculation from the cross, "Father,
+into thy hands I commend my spirit!" an expression of trust which,
+under such circumstances of desertion, horror, and agony, could
+only have been prompted by that inspiration of God which he always
+claimed to have.
+
+Christ once reasoned with the Sadducees "as touching the dead,
+that they rise;" in other words, that the souls of men upon the
+decease of the body pass into another and an unending state of
+existence: "Neither can they die any more; for they are equal with
+the angels, and are children of God, being children of the
+resurrection." His argument was, that "God is the God of the
+living, not of the dead;" that is, the spiritual nature of man
+involves such a relationship with God as pledges his attributes to
+its perpetuity. The thought which supports this reasoning
+penetrates far into the soul and grasps the moral relations
+between man and God. It is most interesting viewed as the
+unqualified affirmation by Jesus of the doctrine of a future life
+which shall be deathless.
+
+But the Savior usually stood in a more imposing attitude and spoke
+in a more commanding tone than are indicated in the foregoing
+sentences. The prevailing stand point from which he spoke was that
+of an oracle giving responses from the inner shrine of the
+Divinity. The words and sentiments he uttered were not his, but
+the Father's; and he uttered them in the clear tones of knowledge
+and authority, not in the whispering accents of speculation or
+surmise. How these entrancing tidings came to him he knew not:
+they were no creations of his; they rose spontaneously within him,
+bearing the miraculous sign and seal of God, a recommendation he
+could no more question or resist than he could deny his own
+existence. He was set apart as a messenger to men. The tide of
+inspiration welled up till it filled every nerve and crevice of
+his being with conscious life and with an overmastering
+recognition of its living relations with the Omnipresent and
+Everlasting Life. Straightway he knew that the Father was in
+him and he in the Father, and that he was commissioned to
+reveal the mind of the Father to the world.
+
+He knew, by the direct knowledge of inspiration and consciousness,
+that he should live forever. Before his keen, full, spiritual
+vitality the thought of death fled away, the thought of
+annihilation could not come. So far removed was his soul from the
+perception of interior sleep and decay, so broad and powerful was
+his consciousness of indestructible life, that he saw quite
+through the crumbling husks of time and sense to the crystal sea
+of spirit and thought. So absorbing was his sense of eternal life
+in himself that he even constructed an argument from his personal
+feeling to prove the immortality of others, saying to his
+disciples, "Because I live, ye shall live also;" "Ye believe in
+God, believe also in me." Ye believe what God declares, for he
+cannot be mistaken; believe what I declare for his inspiration
+makes me infallible when I say there are many spheres of life for
+us when this is ended.
+
+It was from the fulness of this experience that Jesus addressed
+his hearers. He spoke not so much as one who had faith that
+immortal life would hereafter be revealed and certified, but
+rather as one already in the insight and possession of it, as one
+whose foot already trod the eternal floor and whose vision pierced
+the immense horizon. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that
+heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me hath everlasting
+life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from
+death unto life." Being himself brought to this immovable
+assurance of immortal life by the special inspiration of God, it
+was his aim to bring others to the same blessed knowledge. His
+efforts to effect this form a most constant feature in his
+teachings. His own definition of his mission was, "I am come that
+they might have life, and that they might have it more
+abundantly." We see by the persistent drift of his words that he
+strove to lead others to the same spiritual point he stood at,
+that they might see the same prospect he saw, feel the same
+certitude he felt, enjoy the same communion with God and sense of
+immortality he enjoyed. "As the Father raiseth up the dead and
+quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will;" "For as
+the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given the Son to have
+life in himself;" "Father, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may
+glorify thee; as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he
+might give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him: and
+this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true
+God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." In other words, the
+mission of Christ was to awaken in men the experience of immortal
+life; and that would be produced by imparting to them reproducing
+in them the experience of his own soul. Let us notice what steps
+he took to secure this end.
+
+He begins by demanding the unreserved credence of men to what he
+says, claiming to say it with express authority from God, and
+giving miraculous credentials. "Whatsoever I speak, therefore, as
+the Father said to me, so I speak." This claim to inspired
+knowledge he advances so emphatically that it cannot be
+overlooked. He then announces, as an unquestionable truth, the
+supreme claim of man's spiritual interests upon his attention and
+labor, alike from their inherent superiority and their enduring
+subsistence. "For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
+world and lose his own soul?" "Thou fool, this night thy soul
+shall be required of thee: then whose shall be those things thou
+hast gathered?" "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for
+that meat which endureth unto everlasting life."
+
+The inspiration which dictated these instructions evidently
+based them upon the profoundest spiritual philosophy,  upon the
+truth that man lives at once in a sphere of material objects which
+is comparatively unimportant because he will soon leave it, and in
+a sphere of moral realities which is all important because he will
+live in it forever. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by
+every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The body,
+existing in the sphere of material relations, is supported by
+material bread; but the soul, existing in the sphere of spiritual
+relations, is supported by truth, the nourishing breath of God's
+love. We are in the eternal world, then, at present. Its laws and
+influences penetrate and rule us; its ethereal tides lave and bear
+us on; our experience and destiny in it are decided every moment
+by our characters. If we are pure in heart, have vital faith and
+force, we shall see God and have new revelations made to us. Such
+are among the fundamental principles of Christianity.
+
+There is another class of texts, based upon a highly figurative
+style of speech, striking Oriental idioms, the explanation of
+which will cast further light upon the branch of the subject
+immediately before us. "As the living Father hath sent me, and I
+live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by
+me;" that is, As the blessed Father hath inspired me with the
+knowledge of him, and I am blessed with the consciousness of his
+immortal love, so he that believes and assimilates these truths as
+I proclaim them, he shall experience the same blessedness through
+my instruction. The words. "I am the bread of life" are explained
+by the words "I am the truth." The declaration "Whoso eateth my
+flesh hath eternal life" is illustrated by the declaration
+"Whosoever heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me hath
+everlasting life." There is no difficulty in understanding what
+Jesus meant when he said, "I have meat to eat ye know not of: my
+meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." Why should we not
+with the same ease, upon the same principles, interpret his
+kindred expression, "This is the bread which cometh down from
+heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die"? The idea to be
+conveyed by all this phraseology is, that whosoever understands,
+accepts, assimilates, and brings out in earnest experience, the
+truths Christ taught, would realize the life of Christ, feel the
+same assurance of Divine favor and eternal blessedness. "He that
+eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in
+him;" that is, we have the same character, are fed by the same
+nutriment, rest in the same experience. Fortunately, we are not
+left to guess at the accuracy of this exegesis: it is demonstrated
+from the lips of the Master himself. When he knew that the
+disciples murmured at what he had said about eating his flesh, and
+called it a hard saying, he said to them, "It is the spirit that
+quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak
+unto you, they are spirit and they are life. But there are some of
+you that believe not." Any man who heartily believed what Christ
+said that he was Divinely authorized to declare, and did declare,
+the pervading goodness of the Father and the immortal blessedness
+of the souls of his children, by the very terms was delivered from
+the bondage of fear and commenced the consciousness of eternal
+life. Of course, we are not to suppose that faith in Christ
+obtains immortality itself for the believer: it only rectifies and
+lights up the conditions of it, and awakens the consciousness of
+it. "I am the resurrection and the life: whosoever liveth and
+believeth in me shall never die." We suppose this means, he shall
+know that he is never to perish: it cannot refer to physical
+dissolution, for the believer dies equally with the unbeliever; it
+cannot refer to immortal existence in itself, for the unbeliever
+is as immortal as the believer: it must refer to the blessed
+nature of that immortality and to the personal assurance of it,
+because these Christ does impart to the disciple, while the
+unregenerate unbeliever in his doctrine, of course, has them not.
+Coming from God to reveal his infinite love, exemplifying the
+Divine elements of an immortal nature in his whole career, coming
+back from the grave to show its sceptre broken and to point the
+way to heaven, well may Christ proclaim, "Whosoever believes in
+me" knows he "shall never perish."
+
+Among the Savior's parables is an impressive one, which we cannot
+help thinking  perhaps fancifully was intended to illustrate the
+dealings of Providence in ordering the earthly destiny of
+humanity. "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed
+into the ground and the seed should grow up; but when the fruit is
+ripe he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." Men
+are seed sown in this world to ripen and be harvested in another.
+The figure, taken on the scale of the human race and the whole
+earth, is sublime. Whether such an image were originally suggested
+by the parable or not, the conception is consistent with Christian
+doctrine. The pious Sterling prays,
+
+"Give thou the life which we require, That, rooted fast in thee,
+From thee to thee we may aspire, And earth thy garden be."
+
+The symbol shockingly perverted from its original beautiful
+meaning by the mistaken belief that we sleep in our graves until a
+distant resurrection day is often applied to burial grounds. Let
+its appropriate significance be restored. Life is the field, death
+the reaper, another sphere of being the immediate garner. An
+enlightened Christian, instead of entitling a graveyard the garden
+of the dead, and looking for its long buried forms to spring from
+its cold embrace, will hear the angel saying again, "They are not
+here: they are risen." The line which written on Klopstock's tomb
+is a melancholy error, engraved on his cradle would have been an
+inspiring truth:  "Seed sown by God to ripen for the harvest."
+
+Several fragmentary speeches, which we have not yet noticed, of
+the most tremendous and even exhaustive import, are reported as
+having fallen from the lips of Christ at different times. These
+sentences, rapid and incomplete as they are in the form in which
+they have reached us, do yet give us glimpses of the most
+momentous character into the profoundest thoughts of his mind.
+They are sufficient to enable us to generalize their fundamental
+principles, and construct the outlines, if we may so speak, of his
+theology, his inspired conception of God, the universe, and man,
+and the resulting duties and destiny of man. We will briefly bring
+together and interpret these passages, and deduce the system which
+they seem to presuppose and rest upon.
+
+Jesus told the woman of Samaria that God was to be worshipped
+acceptably neither in that mountain nor at Jerusalem exclusively,
+but anywhere, if it were worthily done. "God is a Spirit; and they
+that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." This
+passage, with others, teaches the spirituality and omnipresence of
+God. Christ conceived of God as an infinite Spirit. Again,
+comforting his friends in view of his approaching departure, he
+said, "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so I
+would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." Here he
+plainly figures the universe as a house containing many
+apartments, all pervaded and ruled by the Father's presence. He
+was about taking leave of this earth to proceed to another part of
+the creation, and he promised to come back to his followers and
+assure them there was another abode prepared for them. Christ
+conceived of the universe, with its innumerable divisions, as the
+house of God. Furthermore, he regarded truth or the essential laws
+and right tendencies of things and the will of God as identical.
+He said he came into the world to do the will of Him that sent
+him; that is, as he at another time expressed it, he came into the
+world to bear witness unto the truth. Thus he prayed, "Father,
+sanctify them through the truth: thy word is truth." Christ
+conceived of pure truth as the will of God. Finally, he taught
+that all who obey the truth, or do the will of God, thereby
+constitute one family of brethren, one family of the accepted
+children of God, in all worlds forever. "He that doeth the truth
+cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they
+are wrought in God;" "Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same
+is my brother, and my sister, and mother;" "Ye shall know the
+truth, and the truth shall make you free. Whosoever committeth sin
+is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house
+forever; but the son abideth forever. If the Son, therefore, make
+you free, ye shall be free indeed." That is to say, truth gives a
+good man the freedom of the universe, makes him know himself an
+heir, immortally and everywhere at home; sin gives the wicked man
+over to bondage, makes him feel afraid of being an outcast, loads
+him with hardships as a servant. Whoever will believe the
+revelations of Christ, and assimilate his experience, shall lose
+the wretched burdens of unbelief and fear and be no longer a
+servant, but be made free indeed, being adopted as a son.
+
+The whole conception, then, is this: The universe is one vast
+house, comprising many subordinate mansions. All the moral beings
+that dwell in it compose one immortal family. God is the universal
+Father. His will the truth is the law of the household. Whoever
+obeys it is a worthy son and has the Father's approbation; whoever
+disobeys it is alienated and degraded into the condition of a
+servant. We may roam from room to room, but can never get lost
+outside the walls beyond the reach of the Paternal arms. Death is
+variety of scenery and progress of life:
+
+"We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight
+Another golden chamber of the King's, Larger than this we leave,
+and lovelier."
+
+Who can comprehend the idea, in its overwhelming magnificence and
+in its touching beauty, its sweeping amplitude embracing all
+mysteries, its delicate fitness meeting all wants, without being
+impressed and stirred by it, even to the regeneration of his soul?
+If there is any thing calculated to make man feel and live like a
+child of God, it would surely seem to be this conception. Its
+unrivalled simplicity and verisimilitude compel the assent of the
+mind to its reality. It is the most adequate and sublime view of
+things that ever entered the reason of man. It is worthy the
+inspiration of God, worthy the preaching of the Son of God. All
+the artificial and arbitrary schemes of fanciful theologians are
+as ridiculous and impertinent before it as the offensive flaring
+of torches in the face of one who sees the steady and solemn
+splendors of the sun. To live in the harmony of the truth of
+things, in the conscious love of God and enjoyment of immortality,
+blessed children, everywhere at home in the hospitable mansions of
+the everlasting Father, this is the experience to which Christ
+calls his followers; and any eschatology inconsistent with such a
+conception is not his.
+
+There are two general methods of interpretation respectively
+applied to the words of Christ, the literal, or mechanical, and
+the spiritual, or vital. The former leads to a belief in his
+second visible advent with an army of angels from heaven, a bodily
+resurrection of the dead, a universal judgment, the burning up of
+the world, eternal tortures of the wicked in an abyss of infernal
+fire, a heaven located on the arch of the Hebrew firmament. The
+latter gives us a group of the profoundest moral truths clustered
+about the illuminating and emphasizing mission of Christ, sealed
+with Divine sanctions, truths of universal obligation and of all
+redeeming power. The former method is still adopted by the great
+body of Christendom, who are landed by it in a system of doctrines
+well nigh identical with those of the Pharisees, against which
+Christ so emphatically warned his followers, a system of
+traditional dogmas not having the slightest support in philosophy,
+nor the least contact with the realities of experience, nor the
+faintest color of inherent or historical probability. In this age
+they are absolutely incredible to unhampered and studious minds.
+On the other hand, the latter method is pursued by the growing
+body of rational Christians, and it guides them to a consistent
+array of indestructible moral truths, simple, fundamental, and
+exhaustive, an array of spiritual principles commanding universal
+and implicit homage, robed in their own brightness, accredited by
+their own fitness, armed with the loveliness and terror of their
+own rewarding and avenging divinity, flashing in mutual lights and
+sounding in consonant echoes alike from the law of nature and from
+the soul of man, as the Son of God, with miraculous voice, speaks
+between.
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+RESURRECTION OF CHRIST.
+
+OF all the single events that ever were supposed to have occurred
+in the world, perhaps the most august in its moral associations
+and the most stupendous in its lineal effects, both on the outward
+fortunes and on the inward experience of mankind, is the
+resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If, therefore, there
+is one theme in all the range of thought worthy of candid
+consideration, it is this. There are two ways of examining it. We
+may, as unquestioning Christians, inquire how the New Testament
+writers represent it, what premises they assume, what statements
+they make, and what inferences they draw. Thus, without
+perversion, without mixture of our own notions, we should
+construct the Scripture doctrine of the resurrection of the
+Savior. Again as critical scholars and philosophical thinkers, we
+may study that doctrine in all its parts, scrutinize it in all its
+bearings, trace, as far as possible, the steps and processes of
+its formation, discriminate as well as we can, by all fair tests,
+whether it be entirely correct, or wholly erroneous, or partly
+true and partly false. Both of these methods of investigation are
+necessary to a full understanding of the subject. Both are
+obligatory upon the earnest inquirer. Whoso would bravely face his
+beliefs and intelligently comprehend them, with their grounds and
+their issues, with a devout desire for the pure truth, whatsoever
+it may be, putting his trust in the God who made him, will never
+shrink from either of these courses of examination. Whoso does
+shrink from these inquiries is either a moral coward, afraid of
+the results of an honest search after that truth of things which
+expresses the will of the Creator, or a spiritual sluggard,
+frightened by a call to mental effort and torpidly clinging to
+ease of mind. And whoso, accepting the personal challenge of
+criticism, carries on the investigation with prejudice and
+passion, holding errors because he thinks them safe and useful,
+and rejecting realities because he fancies them dangerous and
+evil, is an intellectual traitor, disloyal to the sacred laws by
+which God hedges the holy fields and rules the responsible
+subjects of the realm of truth. We shall combine the two modes of
+inquiry, first singly asking what the Scriptures declare, then
+critically seeking what the facts will warrant, it being
+unimportant to us whether these lines exactly coincide or diverge
+somewhat, the truth itself being all. We now pass to an
+examination of Christ's resurrection from five points of view:
+first, as a fact; second, as a fulfilment of prophecy; third, as a
+pledge; fourth, as a symbol; and fifth, as a theory.
+
+The writers of the New Testament speak of the resurrection of
+Christ, in the first place, as a fact. "Jesus whom ye slew and
+hanged on a tree, him hath God raised up." It could not have been
+viewed by them in the light of a theory or a legend, nor, indeed,
+as any thing else than a marvellous but literal fact. This appears
+from their minute accounts of the scenes at the sepulchre and of
+the disappearance of his body. Their declarations of this are most
+unequivocal, emphatic, iterated, "The Lord is risen indeed." All
+that was most important in their faith they based upon it, all
+that was most precious to them in this life they staked upon it.
+"Else why stand we in jeopardy every hour?" They held it before
+their inner vision as a guiding star through the night of their
+sufferings and dangers, and freely poured out their blood upon the
+cruel shrines of martyrdom in testimony that it was a fact.
+That they believed he literally rose from the grave in visible
+form also appears, and still more forcibly, from their descriptions
+of his frequent manifestations to them. These show that in their
+faith he assumed at his resurrection the same body in which he had
+lived before, which was crucified and buried. All attempts, whether
+by Swedenborgians or others, to explain this Scripture language as
+signifying that he rose in an immaterial body, are futile.1 He
+appeared to their senses and was recognised by his identical
+bodily form. He partook of physical food with them. "They gave him
+a piece of broiled fish and of an honey comb; and he ate before
+them." The marks in his hands and side were felt by the
+incredulous Thomas, and convinced him. He said to them, "Handle
+me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me
+have." To a candid mind there can hardly be a question that the
+gospel records describe the resurrection of Christ as a literal
+fact, that his soul reanimated the deceased body, and that in it
+he showed himself to his disciples. Yet that there are a few texts
+implying the immateriality of his resurrection body that there are
+two accounts of it in the gospels we cannot deny.
+
+We advance to see what is the historical evidence for the fact of
+the resurrection of Christ. This argument, of course, turns
+chiefly on one point, namely, the competency of the witnesses, and
+the validity of their testimony.2 We will present the usually
+exhibited scheme of proof as strongly as we can.3 In the first
+place, those who testified to the resurrection were numerous
+enough, so far as mere numbers go, to establish the fact beyond
+question. Paul declares there were above five hundred who from
+their personal knowledge could affirm of the Lord's resurrection.
+But particularly there were the eleven apostles, the two Marys,
+Cleopas, and the disciples from whom Joseph and Matthias the
+candidates for Judas Iscariot's apostleship were selected,
+consisting probably of most of the seventy. If the evidence of any
+number of men ought to convince us of the alleged event, then,
+under the existing circumstances, that of twelve ought. Important
+matters of history are often unhesitatingly received on the
+authority of a single historian. If the occurrences at the time
+were sufficient to demonstrate to a reasonable mind the reality of
+the resurrection, then the unanimous testimony of twelve men to
+those occurrences should convince us. The oaths of a thousand
+would be no stronger.
+
+These men possessed sufficient abilities to be trusted, good
+powers of judgment, and varied experience. The selection of them
+by Him who "knew what was in man," the boldness and efficiency of
+their lives, the fruits of their labors everywhere, amply prove
+their
+
+1 The opposite view is ably argued by Bush in his valuable
+treatise on the Resurrection.
+
+2 Sherlock, Trial of the Witnesses.
+
+3 Ditton, Demonstration of the Resurrection of Christ. For a
+sternly faithful estimate of the cogency of this argument, it must
+be remembered that all the data, every fact and postulate in each
+step of the reasoning, rest on the historical authority of the
+four Gospels, documents whose authorship and date are lost in
+obscurity. Even of "orthodox" theologians few, with any claims to
+scholarship, now hold that these Gospels, as they stand, were
+written by the persons whose names they bear. They wander and
+waver in a thick fog. See Milman's "History of Christianity," vol.
+i. ch. ii. appendix ii.
+
+
+general intelligence and energy. And they had, too, the most
+abundant opportunities of knowledge in regard to the facts to
+which they bore witness. They were present in the places, at the
+times, when and where the events occurred. Every motive would
+conspire to make them scrutinize the subject and the attendant
+circumstances. And it seems they did examine; for at first some
+doubted, but afterwards believed. They had been close companions
+of Jesus for more than a year at the least. They had studied his
+every feature, look, gesture. They must have been able to
+recognise him, or to detect an impostor, if the absurd idea of an
+attempted imposition can be entertained. They saw him many times,
+near at hand, in the broad light. Not only did they see him, but
+they handled his wounded limbs and listened to his wondrous voice.
+If these means of knowing the truth were not enough to make their
+evidence valid, then no opportunities could be sufficient.
+
+Whoso allows its full force to the argument thus far will admit
+that the testimony of the witnesses to the resurrection is
+conclusive, unless he suspects that by some cause they were either
+incapacitated to weigh evidence fairly, or were led wilfully to
+stifle the truth and publish a falsehood. Very few persons have
+ever been inclined to make this charge, that the apostles were
+either wild enthusiasts of fancy, or crafty calculators of fraud;
+and no one has ever been able to support the position even with
+moderate plausibility. Granting, in the first place,
+hypothetically, that the disciples were ever so great enthusiasts
+in their general character and conduct, still, they could not have
+been at all so in relation to the resurrection, because, before it
+occurred, they had no belief, expectations, nor thoughts about it.
+By their own frank confessions, they did not understand Christ's
+predictions, nor the ancient supposed prophecies of that event.
+And without a strong faith, a burning hopeful desire, or something
+of the kind, for it to spring from, and rest on, and be nourished
+by, evidently no enthusiasm could exist. Accordingly, we find that
+previous to the third day after Christ's death they said nothing,
+thought nothing, about a resurrection; but from that time, as by
+an inspiration from heaven, they were roused to both words and
+deeds. The sudden astonishing change here alluded to is to be
+accounted for only by supposing that in the mean time they had
+been brought to a belief that the resurrection had occurred. But,
+secondly, it is to be noticed that these witnesses were not
+enthusiasts on other subjects. No one could be the subject of such
+an overweening enthusiasm as the hypothesis supposes, without
+betraying it in his conduct, without being overmastered and led by
+it as an insane man is by his mania. The very opposite of all this
+was actually the case with the apostles. The Gospels are
+unpretending, dispassionate narratives, without rhapsody,
+adulation, or vanity. Their whole conduct disproves the charge of
+fanaticism. Their appeals were addressed more to reason than to
+feeling; their deeds were more courageous than rash. They avoided
+tumult, insult, and danger whenever they could honorably do so;
+but, when duty called, their noble intrepidity shrank not. They
+were firm as the trunks of oaks to meet the agony and horror of a
+violent death when it came; yet they rather shunned than sought to
+wear the glorious crown from beneath whose crimson circlet drops
+of bloody sweat must drip from a martyr's brows. The number of the
+witnesses for the resurrection, the abilities they possessed,
+their opportunities for knowing the facts, prove the impossibility
+of their being duped, unless we suppose them to have been blind
+fanatics. This we have just shown they were not. Would it not,
+moreover, be most marvellous if they were such heated fanatics,
+all of them, so many men?
+
+But there is one further foothold for the disbeliever in the
+historic resurrection of Christ. He may say, "I confess the
+witnesses were capable of knowing, and undoubtedly did know, the
+truth; but, for some reason, they suppressed it, and proclaimed a
+deception." As to this charge, we not only deny the actuality, but
+even the possibility, of its truth. The narratives of the
+evangelists contain the strongest evidences of their honesty. The
+many little unaccountable circumstances they recount, which are so
+many difficulties in the way of critical belief, the real and the
+apparent inconsistencies, none of these would have been permitted
+by fraudulent authors. They are the most natural things in the
+world, supposing their writers unsuspiciously honest. They also
+frankly confess their own and each others' errors, ignorance,
+prejudices, and faults. Would they have done this save from
+simple hearted truthfulness? Would a designing knave voluntarily
+reveal to a suspicious scrutiny actions and traits naturally
+subversive of confidence in him? The conduct of the disciples
+under the circumstances, through all the scenes of their after
+lives, proves their undivided and earnest honesty. The cause they
+had espoused was, if we deny its truth, to the last degree
+repulsive in itself and in its concomitants, and they were
+surrounded with allurements to desert it. Yet how unyielding,
+wonderful, was their disinterested devotedness to it, without
+exception! Not one, overcome by terror or bowed by strong anguish,
+shrank from his self imposed task and cried out, "I confess!" No;
+but when they, and their first followers who knew what they knew,
+were laid upon racks and torn, when they were mangled and devoured
+alive by wild beasts, when they were manacled fast amidst the
+flames till their souls rode forth into heaven in chariots of
+fire, amidst all this, not one of them ever acknowledged fraud or
+renounced his belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Were they not
+honest? Others have died in support of theories and opinions with
+which their convictions and passions had become interwoven: they
+died rather than deny facts which were within the cognizance of
+their senses. Could any man, however firm and dauntless, under the
+circumstances, go through the trials they bore, without a feeling
+of truth and of God to support him?
+
+These remarks are particularly forcible in connection with the
+career of Paul. Endowed with brilliant talents, learned, living at
+the time and place, he must have been able to form a reliable
+opinion. And yet, while all the motives that commonly actuate men
+loudmouthed consistency, fame, wealth, pride, pleasure, the rooted
+force of inveterate prejudices  all were beckoning to him from the
+temples and palaces of the Pharisaic establishment, he spurned the
+glowing visions of his ambition and dashed to earth the bright
+dreams of his youth. He ranged himself among the Christians, the
+feeble, despised, persecuted Christians; and, after having suffered
+every thing humanity could bear, having preached the resurrection
+everywhere with unflinching power, he was at last crucified, or
+beheaded, by Nero; and there, expiring among the seven hills of
+Rome, he gave the resistless testimony of his death to the
+resurrection of Jesus, gasping, as it were, with his last breath,
+"It is true." Granting the honesty of these men, we could not have
+any greater proof of it than we have now.
+
+But dishonesty in this matter was not merely untrue; it was also
+impossible. If fraud is admitted, a conspiracy must have been
+formed among the witnesses. But that a conspiracy of such a
+character should have been entered into by such men is in itself
+incredible, in the outset. And then, if it had been entered into,
+it must infallibly have broken through, been found out, or been
+betrayed, in the course of the disasters, perils, terrible trials,
+to which it and its fabricators were afterwards exposed. Prove
+that a body of from twelve to five hundred men could form a plan
+to palm off a gross falsehood upon the world, and could then
+adhere to it unfalteringly through the severest disappointments,
+dangers, sufferings, differences of opinion, dissension of feeling
+and action, without retiring from the undertaking, letting out the
+secret, or betraying each other in a single instance in the course
+of years, prove this, and you prove that men may do and dare, deny
+and suffer, not only without motives, but in direct opposition to
+their duty, interest, desire, prejudice, and passion. The
+disciples could not have pretended the resurrection from
+sensitiveness to the probable charge that they had been miserably
+deceived; for they did not understand their Master to predict any
+such event, nor had they the slightest expectation of it. They
+could not have pretended it for the sake of establishing and
+giving authority to the good precepts and doctrines Jesus taught;
+because such a course would have been in the plainest antagonism
+to all those principles themselves, and because, too, they must
+have known both the utter wickedness and the desperate hazards and
+forlornness of such an attempt to give a fictitious sanction to
+moral truths. In such an enterprise there was before them not the
+faintest probability of even the slightest success. Every selfish
+motive would tend to deter them; for poverty, hatred, disgrace,
+stripes, imprisonment, contempt, and death stared in their faces
+from the first step that way. Dishonesty, deliberate fraud, then,
+in this matter, was not merely untrue, but was impossible. The
+conclusion from the whole view is, therefore, the conviction that
+the evidence of the witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus is
+worthy of credence.
+
+There are three considerations, further, worthy of notice in
+estimating the strength of the historic argument for the
+resurrection. First, the conduct of the Savior himself in relation
+to the subject. The charge of unbalanced enthusiasm is
+inconsistent with the whole character and life of Jesus; but
+suppose on this point he was an enthusiast, and really believed
+that three days after his death he would rise again. In that case,
+would not his mind have dwelt upon the wonderful anticipated
+phenomenon? Would not his whole soul have been wrapped up in it,
+and his speech have been almost incessantly about it? Yet he spoke
+of it only three or four times, and then with obscurity. Again:
+suppose he was an impostor. An impostor would hardly have risked
+his reputation voluntarily on what he knew could never take place.
+Had he done so, his only reliance must have been upon the
+credulous enthusiasm of his followers. He would then have made it
+the chief topic, would have striven strenuously to make it a
+living and intense hope, an immovable, all controlling faith,
+concentrating on it their desires and expectations, heart and
+soul. But he really did not do this at all. He did not even make
+them understand what his vaticinations of the resurrection meant.
+And when they saw his untenanted body hanging on the cross, they
+slunk away in confusion and despair. Admit, again, that Christ was
+enthusiast, or impostor, or both: these qualities exist not in the
+grave. Here was their end. They could neither raise him from the
+dead nor move him from the tomb. No considerations in any way
+connected with Christ himself, therefore, can account for the
+occurrences that succeeded his death.
+
+Secondly, if the resurrection did not take place, what became of
+the Savior's body? We have already given reasons why the disciples
+could not have falsely pretended the resurrection. It is also
+impossible that they obtained, or surreptitiously disposed of, the
+dead and interred body; because it was in a tomb of rock securely
+sealed against them, and watched by a guard which they could
+neither bribe nor overpower; because they were too much
+disheartened and alarmed to try to get it; because they could not
+possibly want it, since they expected a temporal Messiah, and had
+no hope of a resurrection like that which they soon began
+proclaiming to the world. And as for the story told by the watch,
+or rather by the chief priests and Pharisees, it has not
+consistency enough to hold together. Its foolish unlikelihood has
+always been transparent. It is unreasonable to suppose that fresh
+guards would slumber at a post where the penalty of slumbering was
+death. And, if one or two did sleep, it is absurd to think all
+would do so. Besides, if they slept, how knew they what transpired
+in the mean time? Could they have dreamed it? Dreams are not taken
+in legal depositions; and, furthermore, it would be an astounding,
+gratuitous miracle if they all dreamed the same thing at the same
+time.
+
+Finally, a powerful collateral argument in proof of the
+resurrection of Christ is furnished by the conduct of the Jews. It
+might seem that if the guards told the chief priests, scribes, and
+Pharisees, of the miracles which occurred at the sepulchre, they
+must immediately have believed and proclaimed their belief in the
+Messiahship and resurrection of the crucified Savior. But they had
+previously remained invulnerable to as cogent proof as this would
+afford. They had acknowledged the miracles wrought by him when he
+was alive, but attributed them even his works of beneficence to
+demoniacal power. They said, "He casteth out devils by the power
+of Beelzebub, the prince of devils." So they acted in the present
+case, and, notwithstanding the peerless miracle related by the
+sentinels, still persisted in their alienation from the Christian
+faith. Their intensely cherished preconceptions respecting the
+Messiah, their persecution and crucifixion of Jesus, the glaring
+inconsistency of his teachings and experience with most that they
+expected, these things compelled their incredulity to every proof
+of the Messiahship of the contemned and murdered Nazarene. For, if
+they admitted the facts on which such proof was based, they would
+misinterpret them and deny the inferences justly drawn from them.
+This was plainly the case. It may be affirmed that the Jews
+believed the resurrection, because they took no fair measures to
+disprove it, but threatened those who declared it. Since they had
+every inducement to demonstrate its falsity, and might, it seems,
+have done so had it been false, and yet never made the feeblest
+effort to unmask the alleged fraud, we must suspect that they were
+themselves secretly convinced of its truth, but dared not let it
+be known, for fear it would prevail, become mighty in the earth,
+and push them from their seats. In the rage and blindness of their
+prejudices, they cried, "His blood be on us and on our children!"
+And from that generation to our own, their history has afforded a
+living proof of the historic truth of the gospel, and of the
+stability of its chief corner stone, the resurrection of Christ.
+The triumphal progress of Christianity from conquering to
+conquering, together with the baffled plans and complete
+subjection of the Jews, show that their providential preparatory
+mission has been fulfilled. If God is in history, guiding the
+moral drift of human affairs, then the dazzling success of the
+proclamation of the risen Redeemer is the Divine seal upon the
+truth of his mission and the reality of his apotheosis. Planting
+himself on this ground, surrounding himself with these evidences,
+the reverential Christian will at least for a long time to come
+cling firmly to the accepted fact of the resurrection of Christ,
+regardless of whatever misgivings and perplexities may trouble the
+mind of the iconoclastic and critical truth seeker.
+
+The Christian Scriptures, assuming the resurrection of Christ as a
+fact, describe it as a fulfilment of prophecy. Luke reports from
+the risen Savior the words, "O fools, and slow of heart to believe
+all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have
+suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" "Thus it is
+written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from
+the dead the third day." Peter declares that the patriarch David
+before "spake of the resurrection of Christ." And Paul also
+affirms, "That the promise which was made unto the fathers, God
+hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath
+raised up Jesus again." One can scarcely hesitate in deciding the
+meaning of these words as they were used by the apostles. The
+unanimous opinion and interpretation of the Christians of the
+first centuries, and of all the Church Fathers, leave no shadow of
+a doubt that it was believed that the resurrection of Jesus was
+repeatedly foretold in the Old Testament, expected by the
+prophets, and fulfilled in the event as a seal of the inspired
+prophecy. Furthermore, Jesus himself repeatedly prophesied his own
+resurrection from the dead,  though his disciples did not
+understand his meaning until the event put a clear comment on the
+words. He charged those who saw his transfiguration on the mount,
+"Tell it to no man until the Son of Man be risen again from the
+dead." The chief priests told Pilate that they remembered that
+Jesus said, while he was yet alive, "After three days I will rise
+again." Standing in the temple at Jerusalem, Jesus said once,
+"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."
+"When, therefore, he was risen from the dead, his disciples
+remembered that he had said this unto them;" and then they
+understood that "he had spoken of the temple of his body." It is
+perfectly plain that the New Testament represents the resurrection
+of Christ as the fulfilment of prophecies, those prophecies having
+been so expounded by him.
+
+There are few problems presented to the candid Christian scholar
+of to day more perplexing than the one involved in the subject of
+these prophecies. Paul declares to King Agrippa, "I say none other
+things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should
+come: that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first
+that should rise from the dead and should show light unto the
+Gentiles." It is vain to attempt to disguise the fact that the
+ingenuous student cannot find these prophecies in the Old
+Testament as we now have it. He will search it through in vain,
+unless his eyes create what they see. Let any man endeavor to
+discover a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures which, taken with its
+context, can fairly bear such a sense. There is not a shadow of
+valid evidence of any kind to support the merely traditional
+notions on this subject. The only way of discerning predictions of
+a death, descent, and ascent, of the Messiah, in the law and the
+prophets, is by the application of Cabalistic methods of
+interpretation, theories of occult types, double senses, methods
+which now are not tolerable to intelligent men. That Rabbinical
+interpretation which made the story of Ishmael and Isaac, the two
+children borne to Abraham by Hagar and Sarah, an allegory
+referring to the two covenants of Judaism and Christianity, could
+easily extract any desired meaning from any given text. Bearing in
+mind the prevalence of this kind of exegesis among the Jews, and
+remembering also that they possessed in the times of Jesus a vast
+body of oral law, to which they attributed as great authority as
+to the written, there are two possible ways of honestly meeting
+the difficulty before us.
+
+First: in God's counsels it was determined that a Messiah should
+afterwards arise among the Jews. The revealed hope of this stirred
+the prophets and the popular heart. It became variously and
+vaguely hinted in their writings, still more variously and
+copiously unfolded in their traditions. The conception of him
+gradually took form; and they began to look for a warrior prophet,
+a national deliverer, a theocratic king. Jesus, being the true
+Messiah, though a very different personage from the one meant by
+the writers and understood by the people, yet being the Messiah
+foreordained by God, applied these Messianic passages to himself,
+and explained them according to his experience and fate. This will
+satisfactorily clear up the application of some texts. And others
+may be truly explained as poetical illustrations, rhetorical
+accommodations, as when he applies to Judas, at the Last Supper,
+the words of the Psalm, "He that eateth with me lifteth up his
+heel against me;" and when he refers to Jonah's tarry in the
+whale's belly as a symbol of his own destined stay beneath the
+grave for a similar length of time. Or, secondly, we may conclude
+that the prophecies under consideration, referred to in the New
+Testament, were not derived from any sacred documents now in our
+possession, but either from perished writings, or from oral
+sources, which we know were abundant then. Justin Martyr says
+there was formerly a passage in Jeremiah to this effect: "The Lord
+remembered the dead who were sleeping in the earth, and went down
+to them to preach salvation to them." 4 There were floating in the
+Jewish mind, at the time of Christ, at least some fragmentary
+traditions, vague expectations, that the Messiah was to die,
+descend to Sheol, rescue some of the captives, and triumphantly
+ascend. It is true, this statement is denied by some; but the
+weight of critical authorities seems to us to preponderate in its
+favor, and the intrinsic historical probabilities leave hardly a
+doubt of it in our own minds.5 Now, three alternatives are offered
+us. Either Jesus interpreted Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets,
+on the Rabbinical ground of a double sense, with mystic
+applications; or he accepted the prophecies referred to, from oral
+traditions held by his countrymen; or the apostles misunderstood,
+and in consequence partially misreported, him. All we can
+positively say is that these precise predictions are plainly not
+in the Jewish Scriptures, undoubtedly were in the oral law, and
+were certainly received by the apostles as authoritative.
+
+Continuing our inquiry into the apostolic view of the resurrection
+of Christ, we shall perceive that it is most prominently set forth
+as the certificate of our redemption from the
+
+4 Dial. cum Tryph. sect. lxxii.
+
+5 Discussed, with full list of references, in Strauss's Life of
+Jesus, part iii. cap. i. sect.
+112.
+
+
+kingdom of death to the same glorious destiny which awaited him
+upon his ascension into heaven. The apostles regarded his
+resurrection as a supernatural seal set on his mission, warranting
+his claims as an inspired deliverer and teacher. Thereby, they
+thought, God openly sanctioned and confirmed his promises.
+Thereby, they considered, was shown to men God's blessed grace,
+freely forgiving their sins, and securing to them, by this pledge,
+a deliverance from the doom of sin as he had risen from it, and an
+acceptance to a heavenly immortality as he had ascended to it. The
+resurrection of Christ, then, and not his death, was to them the
+point of vital interest, the hinge on which all hung. Does not the
+record plainly show this to an impartial reader? Wherever the
+apostles preach, whenever they write, they appeal not to the death
+of a veiled Deity, but to the resurrection of an appointed
+messenger; not to a vicarious atonement or purchase effected by
+the mortal sufferings of Jesus, but to the confirmation of the
+good tidings he brought, afforded by the Father's raising him from
+the dead. "Whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that he
+hath raised him from the dead," Paul proclaimed on Mars Hill. In
+the discourses of the apostles recorded in the Book of Acts, we
+find that, when they preached the new religion to new audiences,
+the great doctrine in all cases set forth as fundamental and
+absorbing is the resurrection; not an atoning death, but a
+justifying resurrection. "He died for our sins, and rose for our
+justification." Some of the Athenians thought Paul "a setter forth
+of two strange gods, Jesus and Resurrection." And when they desire
+to characterize Christ, the distinguishing culminating phrase
+which they invariably select shows on what their minds rested as
+of chief import: they describe him as the one "whom God hath
+raised from the dead." "If we believe that Jesus died and rose
+again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with
+him." "That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of God's
+power toward us who believe, according to the working of his
+mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from
+the dead and set him at his own right hand in heaven." It is plain
+here that the dying of Christ is regarded merely as preliminary to
+his rising, and that his resurrection and entrance into heaven are
+received as an assurance that faithful disciples, too, shall
+obtain admission into the heavenly kingdom.
+
+The Calvinistic doctrine is that the unutterable vicarious agonies
+of the death of Christ placated the wrath of God, satisfied his
+justice, and ransomed the souls of the elect from the tortures of
+hell, and that his resurrection was simply his victorious return
+from a penal conflict with the powers of Satan. The Unitarian
+doctrine is that the violent death of Christ was an expression of
+self sacrificing love, to exert a moral power on the hearts of
+men, and that his resurrection was a miraculous proof of the
+authority and truth of his teachings, a demonstration of human
+immortality. We maintain that neither of these views fully
+contains the true representation of the New Testament. The
+artificial horrors of the former cannot be forced into nor wrung
+out of the written words; while the natural simplicity and
+meagerness of the latter cannot be made to fill up the written
+words with adequate significance. There is a medium doctrine,
+based on the conceptions prevalent at the time the Christian
+system was constructed and written; a doctrine which equally
+avoids the credulous excess of the Calvinistic interpretation and
+the skeptical poverty of the Unitarian; a doctrine which fully
+explains all the relevant language of the New Testament without
+violence; a doctrine which, for our own part, we feel sure
+accurately represents the ideas meant to be conveyed by the
+Scripture authors. We will state it, and then quote, for its
+illustration and for their own explanation, the principal texts
+relating to the resurrection of Jesus.
+
+On account of sin, which had alienated man from God and unfitted
+him for heaven, he was condemned after death to descend as a
+disembodied soul into the dark kingdom of the grave, the under
+world. In that cheerless realm of helpless shades and stillness
+all departed human spirits were prisoners, and must be, until the
+advent of the Messiah, when they, or a part of them, should rise.
+This was the Jewish belief. Now, the apostles were Jews, who had
+the ideas of their countrymen, to which, upon becoming Christians,
+they added the new conceptions formed in their minds by the
+teachings, character, deeds, death, resurrection, of Christ, mixed
+with their own meditations and experience. Accepting, with these
+previous notions, the resurrection of Christ as a fact and a
+fulfilment of prophecy, they immediately supposed that his
+triumphant exit from the prison of the dead and return to heaven
+were the prefiguration of the similar deliverance of others and
+their entrance into heaven. They considered him as "the first born
+from the dead," "the first fruits of the dead." They emphatically
+characterize his return to life as a "resurrection out from among
+the dead," "[non-ASCII characters], plainly implying that the rest
+of the dead still remained below.6 They received his experience in
+this respect as the revealing type of that which was awaiting his
+followers. So far as relates to the separate existence of the
+soul, the restoration of the widow's son by Elijah, or the
+resurrection of Lazarus, logically implies all that is implied in
+the mere resurrection of Christ. But certain notions of
+localities, of a redemptive ascent, and an opening of heaven for
+the redeemed spirits of men to ascend thither, were associated
+exclusively with the last. When, through the will of God, Christ
+rose, "then first humanity triumphant passed the crystal ports of
+light, and seized eternal youth!" Their view was not that Christ
+effected all this by means of his own; but that the free grace of
+God decreed it, and that Christ came to carry the plan into
+execution. "God, for his great love to us, even when we were dead
+in sins, has quickened us together with Christ." This was effected
+as in dramatic show: Christ died, which was suffering the fate of
+a sinner; he went in spirit to the subterranean abode of spirits,
+which was bearing the penalty of sin; he rose again, which was
+showing the penalty of sin removed by Divine forgiveness; he
+ascended into heaven,  which was revealing the way for our ascent
+thrown open. Such is the general scope of thought in close and
+vital connection with which the doctrine of the resurrection of
+Christ stands. We shall spare enlarging on those parts of it which
+have been sufficiently proved and illustrated in preceding
+chapters, and confine our attention as much as may be to those
+portions which have direct relations with the resurrection of
+Christ. It is our object, then, to show what we think will plainly
+appear in the light of the above general statement that, to the
+New Testament writers, the resurrection, and not the death, of
+Christ is the fact of central moment, is the assuring seal of our
+forgiveness, reconciliation, and heavenly adoption.
+
+6 Wood, The Last Things, pp. 31-44.
+
+
+They saw two antithetical starting points in the history of
+mankind: a career of ruin, beginning with condemned Adam in the
+garden of Eden at the foot of the forbidden tree, dragging a
+fleshly race down into Sheol; a career of remedy, beginning with
+victorious Christ in the garden of Joseph at the mouth of the rent
+sepulchre, guiding a spiritual race up into heaven.
+
+The Savior himself is reported as saying, "I lay down my life that
+I may take it again:" the dying was not for the sake of
+substitutional suffering, but for the sake of a resurrection.
+"Except a corn of wheat die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, it
+bringeth forth much fruit." "A woman when she is in travail hath
+sorrow; but as soon as she is delivered of the child she
+remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into
+the world." The context here shows the Savior's meaning to be that
+the woe of his death would soon be lost in the weal of his
+resurrection. The death was merely the necessary antecedent to the
+significant resurrection. "Blessed be the God and Father of our
+Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to his abundant mercy, hath
+begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus
+Christ from the dead unto an inheritance, incorruptible,
+undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you
+who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation
+ready to be revealed." "Him hath God raised on high by his right
+hand, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins." How
+clear it is here that not the vicarious death of Christ buys off
+sinners, but his resurrection shows sins to be freely forgiven,
+the penalty remitted! "Remember that Jesus Christ was raised from
+the dead, according to my gospel: therefore I endure all things
+for the elect's sake, that they may obtain the salvation which is
+in Christ Jesus with eternal glory." "Be it known unto you,
+therefore, men, brethren, that through Him whom God raised again
+is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins." The passage in the
+Epistle to the Hebrews, ninth chapter, from the twenty third verse
+to the twenty seventh, most emphatically connects the annulling of
+sin through the sacrifice of Christ with his ascended appearance
+in heaven. "Jesus who was delivered for our offences and was
+raised again for our justification:" that is, Jesus died because
+he had entered the condition of sinful humanity, the penalty of
+which was death; he was raised to show that God had forgiven us
+our sins and would receive us to heaven instead of banishing us to
+the under world. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord
+Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him
+from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Belief in the resurrection of
+Christ is here undeniably made the great condition of salvation.
+No text can be found in which belief in the death, or blood, or
+atoning merits, of Christ is made that condition. And yet nine
+tenths of Christendom by their creeds are to day proclaiming,
+"Believe in the vicarious sufferings of Christ, and thou shalt be
+saved; believe not in them, and thou shalt be damned!" "God hath
+both raised up the Lord and will also raise up us." "If Christ be
+not raised, your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins." This
+text cannot be explained upon the common Calvinistic or Unitarian
+theories. Whether Christ was risen or not made no difference in
+their justification before God if his death had atoned for them,
+made no difference in their moral condition, which was as it was;
+but if Christ had not risen, then they were mistaken in supposing
+that heaven had been opened for them: they were yet held in the
+necessity of descending to the under world, the penalty of their
+sins. The careful reader will observe that, in many places in the
+Scriptures where a burden and stress of importance seem laid upon
+the death of Christ, there immediately follows a reference to his
+resurrection, showing that the dying is only referred to as the
+preparatory step to the rising, the resurrection being the
+essential thing. "The Apostle Paul scarcely speaks of the death of
+the Savior except in connection with his resurrection," Bleek
+says, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. "It is
+Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again and is now at
+the right hand of God."
+
+"If we believe that Jesus died and rose again." "To this end
+Christ both died, and rose and lived again." "He died for them and
+rose again." We confidently avow, therefore, that the Christian
+Scriptures concentrate the most essential significance and value
+of the mission of Jesus in his resurrection, describing it as the
+Divine seal of his claims, the visible proof and pledge of our
+redemption, by God's freely forgiving grace, from the fatal
+bondage of death's sepulchral domain to the blessed splendors of
+heaven's immortal life.
+
+There remain a class of passages to be particularly noticed, in
+which an extraordinary emphasis seems to be laid on Christ's
+sufferings, Christ's blood, Christ's death, three phrases that
+mean virtually the same thing and are used interchangeably. The
+peculiar prominence given to the idea of the sacrifice of Christ
+in the instances now referred to is such as might lead one to
+suppose that some mysterious efficacy was meant to be attributed
+to it. But we think an accurate examination of the subject will
+show that these texts are really in full harmony with the view we
+have been maintaining. Admitting that the resurrection of Christ
+was the sole circumstance of ultimate meaning and importance,
+still, his violent and painful death would naturally be spoken of
+as often and strongly as it is, for two reasons. First, the chief
+ground of wonder and claim for gratitude to him was that he should
+have left his pre existent state of undisturbed bliss and glory,
+and submitted to such humiliation and anguish for others, for
+sinners. Secondly, it was the prerequisite to his resurrection,
+the same, in effect, with it, since the former must lead to the
+latter; for, as the foremost apostle said, "It was not possible
+that he should be holden in death."
+
+The apostolical writers do not speak of salvation by the blood of
+Christ any more plainly than they do of salvation by the name of
+Christ, salvation by grace, and salvation by faith. If at one time
+they identify him with the sacrificial "lamb," at another time
+they as distinctively identify him with the "high priest offering
+himself," and again with "the great Shepherd of the sheep," and
+again with "the mediator of the new covenant," and again with "the
+second Adam." These are all figures of speech, and, taken
+superficially, they determine nothing as to doctrine. The
+propriety and the genuine character and force of the metaphor are
+in each case to be carefully sought with the lights of learning
+and under the guidance of a docile candor. The thoughts that, in
+consequence of transmitted sin, all departed souls of men were
+confined in the under world that Christ, to carry out and
+revealingly exemplify the free grace of the Father, came into the
+world, died a cruel death, descended to the prison world of the
+dead, declared there the glad tidings, rose thence and ascended
+into heaven, the forerunner of the ransomed hosts to follow, these
+thoughts enable us to explain, in a natural, forcible, and
+satisfactory manner, the peculiar phraseology of the New Testament
+in regard to the death of Christ, without having recourse to the
+arbitrary conceptions and mystical horror usually associated with
+it now.
+
+For instance, consider the passage in the second chapter of the
+Epistle to the Ephesians, from the eleventh verse to the
+nineteenth. The writer here says that "the Gentiles, who formerly
+were far off, strangers from the covenants of promise, are now
+made nigh by the blood of Christ." This language he clearly
+explains as meaning that through the death and resurrection of
+Christ "the middle wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles was
+broken down" and a universal religion inaugurated, free from all
+invidious distinctions and carnal ordinances. In his bodily death
+and spiritual ascension the Jewish ritual law was abolished and
+the world wide moral law alone installed. From his spirit, rising
+into heaven, all national peculiarities fell away, and through him
+Jews and Gentiles both had access, by communion with his ascended
+and cosmopolitan soul, unto the Father. A careful study of all the
+passages in the New Testament which speak of Christ as delivering
+men from the wrath of God will lead, it seems to us, almost every
+unprejudiced person to agree with one of the ablest German
+critics, who says that "the technical phrase 'wrath of God' here
+means, historically, banishment of souls into the under world, and
+that the fact of Christ's triumph and ascent was a precious pledge
+showing to the Christians that they too should ascend to eternal
+life in heaven."7 The doctrine of the descent of Christ among the
+dead and of his redemptive mission there has of late wellnigh
+faded from notice; but if any one wishes to see the evidence of
+its universal reception and unparalleled importance in the
+Christian Church for fifteen hundred years, presented in
+overwhelming quantity and irresistible array, let him read the
+learned work devoted to this subject recently published in
+Germany.8 He can hardly peruse this work and follow up its
+references without seeing that, almost without an exception, from
+the days of Peter and Paul to those of Martin Luther, it has been
+held that "the death and resurrection of Christ are the two poles
+between which," as Guder says, "his descent into the under world
+lies." The phrase "blood of Christ" is often used in Scripture in
+a pregnant sense, including the force of meaning that would be
+expressed by his death, descent, resurrection, and ascension, with
+all their concomitants. As a specimen of innumerable passages of
+like import which might be cited, we will quote a single
+expression from Epiphanius, showing that the orthodox teachers in
+the fourth century attributed redeeming efficacy to Christ's
+resurrection rather than to his death." As the pelican restores
+its dead offspring by dropping its own blood upon their wounds, so
+our Lord Jesus Christ dropped his blood upon Adam, Eve, and all
+the dead, and gave them life by his burial and resurrection." 9
+
+It was a part of the Mosaic ritual, laid down in the sixteenth
+chapter of Leviticus, that on the great annual day of expiation
+there should be two goats chosen by lot, one for the Lord and one
+for Azazel. The former the high priest was to slay, and with his
+blood sprinkle
+
+7 Bretschneider, Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 59: Christus der
+Erloser vom Tode.
+
+8 Guder, Die Lehre von der Erscheinung Jesu Christi unter den
+Todten: In ihrem Zusammenhange mit der Lehre von den Letzten
+Dingen.
+
+9 Physiol., cap. 8: De Pelecano.
+
+
+the mercy seat. The latter, when the high priest's hands had been
+laid on his head and all the iniquities of the children of Israel
+confessed over him, was to be sent into the wilderness and loosed.
+The former goat is called "a sin offering for the people." The
+latter is called "a scape goat to make an atonement with the
+Lord." The blood of the sin offering could not have been supposed
+to be a substitute purchasing the pardon of men's offences,
+because there is no hint of any such idea in the record, and
+because it was offered to reconcile "houses," "tabernacles,"
+"altars," as well as to reconcile men. It had simply a ceremonial
+significance. Such rites were common in many of the early
+religions. They were not the efficient cause of pardon, but were
+the formal condition of reconciliation. And then, in regard to the
+scapegoat, it was not sacrificed as an expiation for sinners; it
+merely symbolically carried off the sins already freely forgiven.
+All these forms and phrases were inwrought with the whole national
+life and religious language of the Jews. Now, when Jesus appeared,
+a messenger from God, to redeem men from their sins and to promise
+them pardon and heaven, and when he died a martyr's death in the
+fulfilment of his mission, how perfectly natural that this
+sacrificial imagery these figures of blood, propitiation,
+sprinkling the mercy seat should be applied to him, and to his
+work and fate! The burden of sins forgiven by God's grace in the
+old covenant the scape goat emblematically bore away, and the
+people went free. So if the words must be supposed to have an
+objective and not merely a moral sense when the Baptist cried,
+"Behold the Lamb of God, that beareth off the sin of the world,"
+his meaning was that Jesus was to bear off the penalty of sin that
+is, the Hadean doom which God's free grace had annulled and open
+heaven to the ranks of reconciled souls. There is not the least
+shadow of proof that the sacrifices in the Mosaic ritual were
+Divinely ordained as types pre figuring the great sacrifice of
+Christ. There is no such pretence in the record, no such tradition
+among the people, not the slightest foundation whatever of any
+sort to warrant that arbitrary presumption. All such applications
+of them are rhetorical; and their historical force and moral
+meaning are clearly explicable on the views which we have
+presented in the foregoing pages, but are most violently strained
+and twisted by the Calvinistic theory to meet the severe
+exigencies of a theoretical dogma.
+
+If any one, granting that the central efficacy of the mission of
+Christ, dogmatically and objectively considered, lay in his
+descent into Hades and in his resurrection, maintains that still
+certain passages in the New Testament do ascribe an expiatory
+effect directly to his death as such, we reply that this
+interpretation is quite likely to be correct. And we can easily
+trace the conception to its origin beyond the pale of revelation.
+It was an idea prevalent among the Jews in the time of the
+apostles, and before, that death was an atonement for all sins,
+and that the death of the righteous atoned for the sins of
+others.10 Now, the apostles might adopt this view and apply it
+pre eminently to the case of Christ. This is the very explanation
+given by Origen.11 De Wette quotes the following sentence, and
+many others of the same purport,
+
+10 Gfrorer, Gesehichte des Urchristenthums, abth. ii. pp. 187
+190.
+
+11 Mosheim, Commentaries on Christianity in the First Three
+Centuries, Eng. trans., vol. ii. pp. 162-163.
+
+from the Talmud: "The death of the just is the redemption of
+sinners."12 The blood of any righteous man was a little atonement;
+that of Christ was a vast one. The former all Protestants call a
+heathen error. So they should the latter, because it sprung from
+the same source and is the same in principle. If, then, there are
+any scriptural texts which imply that the mere death of Christ had
+a vicarious, expiatory efficacy, they are, so far forth, the
+reflection of heathen and Jewish errors yet lingering in the minds
+of the writers, and not the inspired revelation of an isolated,
+arbitrary after expedient contrived in the secret counsels of God
+and wonderfully interpolated into the providential history of the
+world. But, if there are any such passages, they are few and
+unimportant. The great mass of the scriptural language on this
+subject is fairly and fully explained by the historical theory
+whose outlines we have sketched. The root of the matter is the
+resurrection of Christ out from among the dead and his ascent into
+heaven.
+
+It has not been our purpose in this chapter, or in the preceding
+chapters, to present the history of the Christian doctrine of the
+atonement, either in its intrinsic significance or in its
+relations to subjective religious experience. We have only sought
+to explain it, according to the original understanding of it, in
+its objective relations to the fate of men in the future life. The
+importance of the subject, its difficulty, and the profound
+prejudices connected with it, are so great as not only to excuse,
+but even to require, much explanatory repetition to make the truth
+clear and to recommend it, in many lights, with various methods,
+and by accumulated authorities. Those who wish to see the whole
+subject of the atonement treated with consummate fulness and
+ability, leaving nothing to be desired from the historical point
+of view, have only to read the masterly work of Baur.13
+
+In leaving this part of our subject here, we would submit the
+following considerations to the candid judgment of the reader.
+Admitting the truth of the common doctrine of the atonement, why
+did Christ die? It does not appear how there could be any
+particular efficacy in mere death. The expiation of sin which he
+had undertaken required only a certain amount of suffering. It did
+not as far as we can see on the theory of satisfaction by an
+equivalent substituted suffering require death. It seems as if
+local and physical ideas must have been associated with the
+thought of his death. And we find the author of the Epistle to the
+Hebrews thus replying to the question, Why did Christ die? "That
+through death he might destroy him that hath the power of death,
+that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death
+were all their lifetime subject to bondage." Now, plainly, this
+end was accomplished by his resurrection bursting asunder the
+bonds of Hades and showing that it was no longer the hopeless
+prison of the dead. The justice of this explanation appears from
+the logical necessity of the series of ideas, the internal
+coherence and harmony of thought. It has been ably shown that
+substantially this view is the accurate interpretation of the New
+Testament doctrine by
+
+12 Comm. de Morte Christi Expiatoria, cap. iii.: Qua Judaorum
+Recentiorum Christologia de Passione ac Morte Messia docet.
+
+13 Die Christliche Lehre von der Versohnung in ihrer
+Geschichtlichen Entwicklung von der Alteaten Zeit bis auf die
+Neueste.
+
+Steinbart,14 Schott,15 Bretschneider,16 Klaiber,17 and others. The
+gradual deviations from this early view can be historically
+traced, step by step, through the refining speculations of
+theologians. First, in ecclesiastical history, after the New
+Testament times, it is thought the devil has a right over all
+souls in consequence of sin. Christ is a ransom offered to the
+devil to offset his claim. Sometimes this is represented as a fair
+bargain, sometimes as a deception practised on the devil,
+sometimes as a battle waged with him. Next, it is conceived that
+the devil has no right over human souls, that it is God who has
+doomed them to the infernal prison and holds them there for their
+sin. Accordingly, the sacrifice of Christ for their ransom is
+offered not to the tyrannical devil but to the offended God.
+Finally, in the progress of culture, the satisfaction theory
+appears; and now the suffering of Christ is neither to buy souls
+from the devil nor to appease God and soften his anger into
+forgiveness; but it is to meet the inexorable exigencies of the
+abstract law of infinite justice and deliver sinners by bearing
+for them the penalty of sin. The whole course of thought, once
+commenced, is natural, inevitable; but the starting point is from
+an error, and the pausing places are at false goals.
+
+The view which we have asserted to be the scriptural view
+prevailed as the orthodox doctrine of the Church throughout the
+first three centuries, as Bahr has proved in his valuable treatise
+on the subject.18 He shows that during that period Christ's death
+was regarded as a revelation of God's love, a victory over the
+devil, (through his resurrection,) a means of obtaining salvation
+for men, but not as a punitive sacrifice, not as a vindication of
+God's justice, not as a vicarious satisfaction of the law.19 If
+the leading theologians of Christendom, such as Anselm, Calvin,
+and Grotius, have so thoroughly repudiated the original Christian
+and patristic doctrine of the atonement, and built another
+doctrine upon their own uninspired speculations, why should our
+modern sects defer so slavishly to them, and, instead of freely
+investigating the subject for themselves from the first sources of
+Scripture and spiritual philosophy, timidly cling to the results
+reached by these biassed, morbid, and over sharp thinkers? In
+proportion as scholarly, unfettered minds engage in such a
+criticism, we believe the exposition given in the foregoing pages
+will be recognised as scriptural. Without involving this whole
+theory, how can any one explain the unquestionable fact that
+during the first four centuries the entire orthodox Church
+believed that Christ at his resurrection from the under world
+delivered Adam from his imprisonment there?20 All acknowledge that
+the phrase "redemption by the blood of Christ" is a metaphor. The
+only question is, what meaning was it intended to convey? We
+maintain its meaning to be that
+
+14 System der Reinen Philosophie, oder Gluckseligkeitslehre des
+Christenthums, u.s.f.
+
+15 Epitome Theologia Christiana Dogmatica.
+
+16 Die Lehren von Adam's Fall, der Erbsunde, und dem Opfer
+Christi.
+
+17 Studien der Evang. Geietlichkeit Wurtemburgs, viii. 1, 2.
+Doederlein, Morus, Knapp, Schwarze, and Reinhard affirm that the
+death of Christ was not the price of our pardon, but the
+confirming declaration of free pardon from God. Hagenbach,
+Dogmengeschichte, sect. 297, note 5.
+
+18 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei
+Jahrhunderteu.
+
+19 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten Drei
+Jahrhunderten, ss. 176-180.
+
+20 Augustine, Epist. ad Evodium 99. Op. Imp. vi. 22, 30. Epist.
+164. Dante makes Adam say he had been 4302 years in Limbo when
+Christ, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi.
+
+
+through all the events and forces associated with the death of
+Christ, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, men
+are delivered from the doom of the under world. The common
+theology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatory
+efficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system known
+as Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a saving
+spiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretation
+charges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of the
+love of God freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. The
+second seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeance
+legally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appetite. The
+third fills it with a regenerative moral influence to be
+distributed upon the characters of believers. The two former also
+include the last; but it excludes them. Now, as it seems to us,
+the first is the form of mistake in which the early Church,
+including the apostles, embodied the true significance of the
+mission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which they
+lived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples of
+Jesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortality
+brought to light by Christianity.21 The second is the form of
+false theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruel
+results of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third is
+the dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truth
+in the case.
+
+There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holds
+up the resurrection of Christ. It is regarded as a summons to a
+moral and spiritual resurrection within the breast of the
+believer. As the great Forerunner had ascended to a spiritual and
+immortal life in the heavens, so his followers should be inspired
+with such a realizing sense of heavenly things, with such Divine
+faith and fellowship, as would lift them above the world, with all
+its evanescent cares, and fix their hearts with God. This high
+communion with Christ, and intense assurance of a destined speedy
+inheritance with him, should render the disciple insensible to the
+clamorous distractions of earth, invulnerable to the open and
+secret assaults of sin, as if in the body he were already dead,
+and only alive in the spirit to the obligations of holiness, the
+attractions of piety, and the promises of heaven. "When we were
+dead in trespasses and sins, God loved us, and hath quickened us
+together with Christ, and hath raised us up together and made us
+sit together in heavenly places." "If ye, then, be risen with
+Christ, set your affection on things above, not on earthly things;
+for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." This
+moral symbolic application of the resurrection is most beautiful
+and effective. Christ has risen, immaculate and immortal, into the
+pure and holy heaven: then live virtuously and piously, that you
+may be found worthy to be received unto him. "He that hath this
+hope purifieth himself, even as He is pure." Paul enforces this
+thought through the striking figure that, since "we are freed from
+the law through the death of Christ, we should be married to his
+risen spirit and bring forth fruit unto God." And again, when he
+speaks in these words, "Christ in you the hope of glory," we
+suppose he refers to the spiritual image of the risen Redeemer
+formed in the disciples' imagination and heart, the prefiguring
+and witnessing pledge of their ascension also to heaven. The same
+practical use is made of the doctrine through the rite and sign of
+baptism. "Ye are buried with Christ in
+
+21 Bretschneider forcibly illustrates this in his Handbuch der
+Dogmatik der Evang.  Luther. Kirche, sects. 156-158, band ii.
+
+
+baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through faith in the
+working of God, who hath raised him from the dead." "Wherefore, if
+ye be dead with Christ, why are ye subject to worldly ordinances?
+and if ye be risen with him, seek those things which are above."
+When the disciple sunk beneath the baptizing waters, he was
+typically dead and buried, as Jesus was in the tomb; when he rose
+from the waters into the air again, he figuratively represented
+Christ rising from the dead into heaven. Henceforth, therefore, he
+was to consider himself as dead to all worldly sins and lusts,
+alive to all heavenly virtues and aspirations. "Therefore," the
+apostle says, "we are buried with Christ by baptism unto death,
+that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should
+walk in newness of life." "In that Christ died, he died unto sin
+once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon
+ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto
+God." "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:
+old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
+This was strictly true to the immediate disciples of Jesus. When
+he died, their hearts died within them; they shrank away in
+hopeless confusion and gloom. When he returned to life and
+ascended to heaven, in feeling and imagination they went with him.
+Every moral power and motive started into new life and energy.
+
+"The day when from the dead Our Lord arose, then everywhere, Out
+of their darkness and despair, Triumphant over fears and foes, The
+souls of his disciples rose."
+
+An unheard of assurance of the Father's love and of their eternal
+inheritance flooded their being with its regenerating, uplifting
+power. To their absorbing anticipations the mighty consummation of
+all was at hand. In reflective imagination it was already past,
+and they, dead to the world, only lived to God. The material world
+and the lust thereof had sunk beneath them and vanished. They were
+moving in the universe of imperishable realities unseen by the
+fleshly eye. To their faith already was unrolled over them that
+new firmament in whose spanless welkin no cloudy tempests ever
+gather and break, and the serene lights never fade nor go down.
+This experience of a spiritual exaltation above the sins and
+degrading turmoils of passion, above the perishing baubles of the
+earth, into the religious principles which are independent and
+assured, peace, and bliss, and eternity, is attainable by all who
+with the earnestness of their souls assimilate the moral truths of
+Christianity, pressing in pious trust after the steps of the risen
+Master. And this, after all, is the vital essence of the doctrine
+of the resurrection as it makes practical appeal to us. This will
+stand, though gnawing time and hostile criticism should assail and
+shake all the rest. It is something not to be mechanically wrought
+upon us from without, but to be done within by our own voluntary
+effort and prayer, by God's help. To rise from sloth, unbelief,
+sin, from moral death, to earnestness, faith, beneficence, to
+eternal life in the breast, is a real and most sublime
+resurrection, the indispensable preparation for that other and
+final one which shall raise us from the sepulchre to the sky.
+When, on Easter morning, Christian disciples throughout the world
+hear the joyous cry, "Christ is risen," and their own
+hearts instinctively respond, with an unquenchable persuasion that
+he is now alive somewhere in the heights of the universe, "Christ
+is risen indeed," they should endeavor in spirit to rise too, rise
+from the deadly bondage and corruption of vice and indifference.
+While the earth remains, and men survive, and the evils which
+alienate them from God and his blessedness retain any sway over
+them, so oft as that hallowed day comes round, this is the
+kindling message of Divine authority ever fresh, and of
+transcendent import never old, that it bears through all the
+borders of Christendom to every responsible soul: "Awake from your
+sleep, arise from your death, lift up your eyes to heaven, and the
+risen Redeemer will give you the light of immortal life!" Have
+this awakening and deathless experience in the soul, and you will
+be troubled by no doubts about an everlasting life succeeding the
+close of the world. But so long as this spiritual resurrection in
+the breast is unknown, you can have no knowledge of eternal life,
+no experimental faith in a future entrance from the grave into
+heaven, no, not though millions of resurrections had crowded the
+interstellar space with ascending shapes. Rise, then, from your
+moral graves, and already, by faith and imagination, sit in
+heavenly places with Christ Jesus.
+
+Before leaving this subject, it belongs to us to look at it as a
+theory; that is, to consider with critical scrutiny the
+conclusions which are supposed to flow from its central fact. We
+must regard it from three distinct points of view, seeking its
+meaning in sound logic, its force in past history, its value in
+present experience. First, then, we are to inquire what really is
+the logical significance of the resurrection of Christ. The
+looseness and confusion of thought prevailing in relation to this
+point are amazing. It seems as if mankind were contented with
+investigations careless, reasonings incoherent, and inferences
+arbitrary, in proportion to the momentousness of the matter in
+hand. In regard to little details of sensible fact and daily
+business their observation is sharp, their analysis careful, their
+reflection patient; but when they approach the great problems of
+morality, God, immortality, they shrink from commensurate efforts
+to master those mighty questions with stern honesty, and remain
+satisfied with fanciful methods and vague results. The
+resurrection of Christ is generally regarded as a direct
+demonstration of the immortality of man, an argument of
+irrefragable validity. But this is an astonishing mistake. The
+argument was not so constructed by Paul. He did not seek directly
+to prove the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the
+dead. He took for granted the Pharisaic doctrine that all souls on
+leaving their bodies descended to Sheol, where they darkly
+survived, waiting to be summoned forth at the arrival of the
+Messianic epoch. Assuming the further premise that Christ after
+death went down among these imprisoned souls, and then rose thence
+again, Paul infers, by a logical process strictly valid and
+irresistible to one holding those premises, that the general
+doctrine of a resurrection from the dead is true, and that by this
+visible pledge we may expect it soon, since the Messiah, who is to
+usher in its execution, has already come and finished the
+preliminary stages of his work. The apostle's own words plainly
+show this to be his meaning. "If there be no resurrection of the
+dead, then is Christ not risen. But now is Christ risen from the
+dead, become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man
+came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Every
+man shall be made alive in his own order: Christ the first fruits;
+then they that are Christ's, at his coming; then the last remnant,
+when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God." The notions
+of a universal imprisonment of souls in the intermediate state,
+and of a universal raising of them thence at an appointed time,
+having faded from a deep and vivid belief into a cold traditional
+dogma, ridiculed by many, cared for at all by few, realizingly
+held by almost none, Paul's argument has been perverted and
+misinterpreted, until it is now commonly supposed to mean this:
+Christ has risen from the dead: therefore the soul of man is
+immortal. Whereas the argument really existed in his mind in the
+reverse form, thus: The souls of men are immortal and are
+hereafter to be raised up: therefore Christ has risen as an
+example and illustration thereof. It is singular to notice that he
+has himself clearly stated the argument in this form three times
+within the space of four consecutive verses, as follows: "If there
+be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:" "God
+raised Christ not up, if so be that the dead rise not." "For if
+the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised." The fact of the
+resurrection of Christ, taken in connection with the related
+notions previously held in the mind of Paul, formed the complement
+of an irresistible argument to prove the impending resurrection of
+the dead, But if it be now perceived that those other notions were
+Pharisaic errors, the argument, as he employed it, falls to the
+ground.
+
+Taken by itself and analyzed by a severe logic, the resurrection
+of Christ proves nothing conclusively in regard to our
+immortality. If it did of itself prove any thing, the direct
+logical inference from it would be that henceforth all men, three
+days after death, would rise bodily from the dead, appear for a
+season on earth as before, and then ascend visibly into the sky.
+If at the present time a man who had been put to death and
+entombed three days should openly come forth alive, considered as
+an isolated fact, what would it prove? It would merely prove that
+a wonderful event had occurred. It would show that either by some
+mysterious means he had escaped death, or else that by some
+apparently preternatural agency he had been restored to life from
+the dead. Taken by itself, it could not prove whether the
+occurrence was caused by a demoniacal or by a Divine power, or by
+some occult force of nature developed by a peculiar combination of
+conditions. The strange event would stand clear to our senses; but
+all beyond that would be but an hypothesis of our own, and liable
+to mistake. Consequently, we say, the resurrection, taken by
+itself, proves no doctrine. But we may so suppose the case that
+such an event would, from its relation to something else, acquire
+logical meaning. For instance, if Christ had taught that he had
+supernatural knowledge of truth, a Divine commission to reveal a
+future life, and said that, after he should have been dead and
+buried three days, God would restore him to life to authenticate
+his words, and if, then, so stupendous a miracle occurred in
+accordance with his prediction, it would prove that his claims and
+doctrine were true, because God is no accomplice in deception.
+Such was the case with Jesus as narrated; and thus his
+resurrection appears, not as having doctrinal significance and
+demonstrative validity in itself, but as a miraculous
+authentication of his mission. That is to say, the Christian's
+faith in immortality rests not directly on the resurrection of
+Christ, but on his teachings, which were confirmed and sealed by
+his resurrection. It is true that, even in this modified form,
+some persons of dialectical minds will deny all validity to the
+argument. What necessary connection is there, they will ask,
+between the exhibition of mechanico chemical wonders, physical
+feats, however abnormal and inexplicable, and the possession of
+infallibility of intellectual insight and moral utterance? If a
+man should say, God is falsehood and hatred, and in evidence of
+his declaration should make a whole cemetery disembogue its dead
+alive, or cause the sun suddenly to sink from its station at noon
+and return again, would his wonderful performance prove his
+horrible doctrine? Why, or how, then, would a similar feat prove
+the opposite doctrine? Plainly, there is not, on rigid logical
+principles, any connecting tie or evidencing coherence between a
+physical miracle and a moral doctrine.22 We admit the correctness
+of this, on philosophical grounds. But the validity of a miracle
+as proof of a doctrine rests on the spontaneous assumption that no
+man can work a miracle unless God specially delegate him the
+power: thereby God becomes the voucher of his envoy. And when a
+person claiming to be a messenger from God appears, saying, "The
+Father hath commanded me to declare that in the many mansions of
+his house there is a blessed life for men after the close of this
+life," and when he promises that, in confirmation of his claim,
+God will restore him to life after he shall have been three days
+dead, and when he returns accordingly triumphant from the
+sepulchre, the argument will be unquestioningly received as valid
+by the instinctive common sense of all who are convinced of the
+facts.
+
+We next pass from the meaning of the resurrection in logic to its
+force and working in history. When Jesus hung on the cross, and
+the scornful shouts of the multitude murmured in his ears, the
+disciples had fled away, disappointed, terror stricken,
+despairing. His star seemed set in a hopeless night of shame and
+defeat. The new religion appeared a failure. But in three days
+affairs had taken a new aspect. He that was crucified had risen,
+and the scattered disciples rallied from every quarter, and,
+animated by faith and zeal, went forth to convert the world. As an
+organic centre of thought and belief, as a fervid and enduring
+incitement to action, in the apostolic times and all through the
+early centuries, the received fact of the resurrection of Christ
+wielded an incomparable influence and produced incalculable
+results. Christianity indeed rose upon it, and, to a great extent,
+flourished through it. The principal effect which the gospel has
+had in bringing life and immortality to light throughout a large
+part of the world is to be referred to the proclaimed resurrection
+of Christ. For without the latter the former would not have been.
+Its historical value has therefore been immense. More than nine
+tenths of the dormant common faith of Christendom in a future life
+now outwardly reposes on it from tradition and custom. The great
+majority of Christians grow up, by education and habit, without
+any sharp conscientious investigation of their own, to an
+undisturbed belief in immortality, a belief passively resting on
+the demonstration of the doctrine supposed to have been furnished
+by the resurrection of Christ in Judea two thousand years ago. The
+historical power of that fact has therefore been inexpressibly
+important; and its vast and happy consequences as food and basis
+of faith still remain. But this historic force is no longer what
+it once was as a living and present cause. It now operates mostly
+through traditional reception as an established doctrine to be
+taken
+
+22 J. Blanco White, Letter on Miracles, in appendix to Martineau's
+Rationale of Religious Inquiry.
+
+
+for granted, without fresh individual inquiry. Education and
+custom use it as an unexamined but trusted foundation to build on
+by common assumptions. And so the historic impetus is not yet
+spent. But it certainly has diminished; and it will diminish more.
+When faced with dauntless eyes and approached by skeptical
+methods, it of course cannot have the silencing, all sufficient
+authority, now that it is buried in the dim remoteness of nineteen
+centuries and surrounded by obscuring accompaniments, that it had
+when its light blazed close at hand. The historical force of the
+alleged resurrection of Christ must evidently, other things being
+equal, lessen to an unprejudiced inquirer in some proportion to
+the lengthening distance of the event from him in time, and the
+growing difficulties of ignorance, perplexity, doubt, manifold
+uncertainty, deficiency, infidel suggestions, and naturalistic
+possibilities, intervening between it and him. The shock of faith
+given by the miracle is dissipated in coming through such an abyss
+of time. The farther off and the longer ago it was, the more
+chances for error and the more circumstances of obscurity there
+are, and so much the worth and force of the historical belief in
+it will naturally become fainter, till they will finally fade
+away. An honest student may bow humbly before the august front of
+Christian history and join with the millions around in
+acknowledging the fact of the resurrection of Christ. But we
+maintain that the essential fact in this historic act is not the
+visible resuscitation of the dead body, but the celestial
+reception of the deathless spirit. So Paul evidently thought; for
+he had never seen Christ in the flesh, yet he places himself, as a
+witness to the resurrection of Christ, in the same rank with those
+who had seen him on his reappearance in the body: "Last of all he
+was seen of me also." Paul had only seen him in vision as a
+glorified spirit of heaven.
+
+We know that our belief in the fleshly resurrection of Jesus rests
+on education and habit, on cherished associations of reverence and
+attachment, rather than on sifted testimony and convincing proof.
+It is plain, too, that if a person takes the attitude, not of
+piety and receptive trust, but of skeptical antagonism, it is
+impossible, as the facts within our reach are to day, to convince
+him of the asserted reality in question. An unprejudiced mind
+competently taught and trained for the inquiry, but whose attitude
+towards the declared fact is that of distrust, a mind which will
+admit nothing but what is conclusively proved, cannot be driven
+from its position by all the extant material of evidence.
+Education, associations, hopes, affections, leaning that way, he
+may be convinced; but leaning the other way, or poised in
+indifference on a severe logical ground, he will honestly remain
+in his unbelief despite of all the arguments that can be
+presented. In the first place, he will say, "The only history we
+have of the resurrection is in the New Testament; and the
+testimony of witnesses in their own cause is always suspicious;
+and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote those
+documents, or precisely when and how they originated: besides
+that, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterly
+uncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation which
+satisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in any
+severe court of reason." And in reply, although we may claim that
+there is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble Christian,
+previously inclined to such a faith, that the New Testament
+documents were written by the persons whose names they bear, and
+that their accounts are true, yet we cannot pretend that there is
+sufficient evidence effectually to convince a critical inquirer
+that there is no possibility of ungenuineness and unauthenticity.
+In the second place, such a person will say, "Many fabulous
+miracles have been eagerly credited by contemporaries of their
+professed authors, and handed down to the credulity of after
+times; many actual events, honestly, interpreted as miracles,
+without fraud in any party concerned, have been so accepted and
+testified to.
+
+Roman Catholic Christendom claims to this day the performance of
+miracles within the Church; while all Protestant Christendom
+scouts them as ridiculous tales: and this may be one of them. How
+can we demonstrate that it does not fall within the same class on
+the laws of evidence?" And although our own moral beliefs and
+sympathies may force upon us the most profound conviction to the
+contrary, it is plainly out of our power to disprove the
+possibility of this hypothesis being true. In the third place, he
+will say, "Of all who testify to the resurrection, there is
+nothing in the record admitting its entire reliableness as an
+ingenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors to
+show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or
+that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may
+have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his
+grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last
+have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was
+used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with
+perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion or
+deceit anywhere, may have put a miraculous interpretation upon it
+all, such additional particulars as his visible ascension into the
+sky being a later mythical accretion." This view may well seem
+offensive, even shocking, to the pious believer; but it is plainly
+possible. It is intrinsically more easily conceivable than the
+accredited miracle. It is impossible positively to refute it: the
+available data do not exist. Upon the whole, then, we conclude
+that the time is coming when the basis of faith in immortality, in
+order to stand the tests of independent scrutiny, must be
+historically as well as logically shifted from a blind dependence
+on the miraculous resurrection of Christ to a wise reliance on
+insight into the supernatural capacity and destiny of man, on the
+deductions of moral reason and the prophecies of religious trust.
+
+Finally, we pause a moment, in closing this discussion, to weigh
+the practical value of the resurrection of Christ as acknowledged
+in the experience of the present time. How does that event,
+admitted as a fact, rest in the average personal experience of
+Christians now? We shall provoke no intelligent contradiction when
+we say that it certainly does not often rest on laborious research
+and rigorous testing of evidence. We surely risk nothing in saying
+that with the multitude of believers it rests on a docile
+reception of tradition, an unquestioning conformity to the
+established doctrine. And that reception and conformity in the
+present instance depend, we shall find by going a step further
+back, upon a deep a priori faith in God and immortality. When Paul
+reasons that, if the dead are not to rise, Christ is not risen,
+but that the dead are to rise, and therefore Christ is risen, his
+argument reposes on a spontaneous practical method of moral
+assumption, not on a judicial process of logical proof. So is it
+with Christians now. The intense moral conviction that God is
+good, and that there is another life, and that it would be
+supremely worthy of God to send a messenger to teach that doctrine
+and to rise from the dead in proof of it, it is this earnest
+previous faith that gives plausibility, vitality, and power to the
+preserved tradition of the actual event. If we trace the case home
+to the last resort, as it really lies in the experience developed
+in us by Christianity, we shall find that a deep faith in God is
+the basis of our belief, first in general immortality, and
+secondly in the special resurrection of Christ as related thereto.
+But, by a confusion, or a want, of thought, the former is
+mistakenly supposed to rest directly and solely on the latter. The
+doctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection of Christ
+fall within the province of faith, resting on moral grounds, not
+within that of knowledge, resting on logical grounds. For example:
+what direct proof is there that Christ, when he vanished from the
+disciples, went to the presence of God in heaven, to die no more?
+It was only seen that he disappeared: all beyond that except as it
+rests on belief in the previous words of Christ himself is an
+inference of faith, a faith kindled in the soul by God and not
+created by the miracle of the resurrection.
+
+That imagination, tradition, feeling, and faith, have much more to
+do with the inferences commonly drawn from the resurrection of
+Christ than any strict investigation of its logical contents has,
+appears clearly enough from the universal neglect to draw any
+inferences from, or to attribute any didactic importance to, the
+other resurrections recorded in the New Testament. We refer
+especially to the resurrection narrated in the twenty seventh
+chapter of Matthew, "the most stupendous miracle ever wrought upon
+earth," it has been termed; and yet hardly any one ever deigns to
+notice it. Thus the evangelist writes: "And the graves were
+opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and came
+out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy
+city, and appeared unto many." Nothing is inferred from this
+alleged event but the power of God. Yet logically what separates
+it from the resurrection of Christ? In Greece there was the
+accredited account of the resurrection of Er, in Persia that of
+Viraf, in Judea that of Lazarus, in other nations those of other
+persons. None of these ever produced great results. Yet the
+resurrection of one individual from the dead logically contains
+all that that of any other individual can. Why, then, has that of
+Christ alone made such a change in the faith of the world?
+Because, through a combination of causes, it has appealed to the
+imagination and heart of the world and stirred their believing
+activity, because the thought was here connected with a person, a
+history, a moral force, and a providential interposition, fit for
+the grandest deductions and equal to the mightiest effects. It is
+not accurate philosophical criticism that has done this, but
+humble love and faith.
+
+In the experience of earnest Christians, a personal belief in the
+resurrection of Christ, vividly conceived in the imagination and
+taken home to the heart, is chiefly effective in its spiritual,
+not in its argumentative, results. It stirs up the powers and
+awakens the yearnings of the soul, opens heaven to the gaze,
+locates there, as it were visibly, a glorious ideal, and thus
+helps one to enter upon an inward realization of the immortal
+world. The one essential thing is not that Jesus appeared alive in
+the flesh after his physical death, the revealer of superhuman
+power and possessor of infallibility, but that he divinely lives
+now, the forerunner and type of our immortality.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+ESSENTIAL CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF DEATH AND LIFE.
+
+LET US first notice the uncommon amount of meaning which Christ
+and the apostolic writers usually put into the words "death,"
+"life," and other kindred terms. These words are scarcely ever
+used in their merely literal sense, but are charged with a vivid
+fulness of significance not to be fathomed without especial
+attention. "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments."
+Obviously this means more than simple life; because those who
+neglect the laws of virtue may live. It signifies, distinctively,
+true life, the experience of inward peace and of Divine favor.
+"Whosoever hateth his brother hath not eternal life abiding in
+him, but abideth in death;" that is to say, a soul rankling with
+bad passions is "in the gall of bitterness and the bond of
+iniquity," but, when converted from hatred to love, it passes from
+wretchedness to blessedness. "Let the dead bury their dead." No
+one reading this passage with its context can fail to perceive
+that it means, substantially, "Let those who are absorbed in the
+affairs of this world, and indifferent to the revelation I have
+brought from heaven, attend to the interment of the dead; but
+delay not thou, who art kindled with a lively interest in the
+truth, to proclaim the kingdom of God." When the returning
+prodigal had been joyfully received, the father said, in reply to
+the murmurs of the elder son, "Thy brother was dead and is alive
+again;" he was lost in sin and misery, he is found in penitence
+and happiness. Paul writes to the Romans, "Without the law sin was
+dead, and I was alive; but when the law was made known, sin came
+to life, and I died." In other words, when a man is ignorant of
+the moral law, immoral conduct does not prevent him from feeling
+innocent and being at peace; but when a knowledge of the law shows
+the wickedness of that conduct, he becomes conscious of guilt, and
+is unhappy. For instance, to state the thought a little
+differently, to a child knowing nothing of the law, the law, or
+its purposed violation, sin, does not exist, is dead: he therefore
+enjoys peace of conscience; but when he becomes aware of the law
+and its authority, if he then break it, sin is generated and
+immediately stings, and spiritual happiness dies.
+
+These passages are sufficient to show that Christianity uses the
+words "death" and "life" in a spiritual sense, penetrating to the
+hidden realities of the soul. To speak thus of the guilty,
+unbelieving man as dead, and only of the virtuous, believing man
+as truly alive, may seem at first a startling use of figurative
+language. It will not appear so when we notice its appropriateness
+to the case, or remember the imaginative nature of Oriental speech
+and recollect how often we employ the same terms in the same way
+at the present time. We will give a few examples of a similar use
+of language outside of the Scriptures. That which threatens or
+produces death is sometimes, by a figure, identified with death.
+Orpheus, in the Argonautika, speaks of "a terrible serpent whose
+yawning jaw is full of death." So Paul says he was "in deaths
+oft." Ovid says, "The priests poured out a dog's hot life on the
+altar of Hecate at the crossing of two roads." The Pythagoreans,
+when one of their number became impious and abandoned, were
+accustomed to consider him dead, and to erect a tomb to him, on
+which his name and his age at the time of his moral decease were
+engraved. The Roman law regarded an excommunicated citizen as
+civilis mortuus, legally dead. Fenelon writes, "God has kindled a
+flame at the bottom of every heart, which should always burn as a
+lamp for him who hath lighted it; and all other life is as death."
+Chaucer says, in one of his Canterbury Tales, referring to a man
+enslaved by dissolute habits,
+
+"But certes, he that haunteth swiche delices Is ded while that he
+liveth in tho' vices."
+
+And in a recent poem the following lines occur:
+
+"From his great eyes The light has fled: When faith departs, when
+honor dies, The man is dead."
+
+To be subjected to the lower impulses of our nature by degraded
+habits of vice and criminality is wretchedness and death. The true
+life of man consists, the Great Teacher declared, "not in the
+abundance of the things which he possesseth, but rather in his
+being rich toward God," in conscious purity of heart, energy of
+faith, and union with the Holy Spirit. "He that lives in sensual
+pleasure is dead while he lives," Paul asserts; but he that lives
+in spiritual righteousness has already risen from the dead. To sum
+up the whole in a single sentence, the service and the fruits of
+sin form an experience which Christianity calls death, because it
+is a state of insensibility to the elements and results of true
+life, in the adequate sense of that term, meaning the serene
+activity and religious joy of the soul.
+
+The second particular in the essential doctrine of Christianity
+concerning the states of human experience which it entitles death
+and life is their inherent, enduring nature, their independence on
+the objects and changes of this world. The gospel teaches that the
+elements of our being and experience are transferred from the life
+that now is into the life that is to come, or, rather, that we
+exist continuously forever, uninterrupted by the event of physical
+dissolution. "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give
+him," Jesus declares, "shall never thirst; but the water that I
+shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into
+everlasting life." John affirms, "The world passeth away, and the
+lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever."
+Paul writes to the Christians at Rome, "In that Christ died, he
+died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.
+Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but
+alive unto God." Numerous additional texts of kindred import might
+be cited. They announce the immortality of man, the unending
+continuance of the Christian consciousness, unless forfeited by
+voluntary defection. They show that sin and woe are not
+arbitrarily bounded by the limits of time and sense in the grave,
+and that nothing can ever exhaust or destroy the satisfaction of
+true life, faith in the love of God: it abides, blessed and
+eternal, in the uninterrupted blessedness and eternity of its
+Object. The revelation and offer of all this to the acceptance of
+men, its conditions, claims, and alternative sanctions, were first
+divinely made known and planted in the heart of the world, as the
+Scriptures assert, by Jesus Christ, who promulgated them by his
+preaching, illustrated them by his example, proved them by his
+works, attested them by his blood, and crowned them by his
+resurrection.
+
+And now there is opened for all of us, through him, that is to
+say, through belief and obedience of what he taught and
+exemplified, an access unto the Father, an assurance of his
+forgiveness of us and of our reconciliation with him. We thus
+enter upon the experience of that true life which is "joy and
+peace in believing," and which remains indestructible through all
+the vanishing vagrancy of sin, misery, and the world. "This is
+eternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and
+Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent:" that is, imperishable life is
+to be obtained by union with God in faith and love, through a
+hearty acceptance of the instructions of Christ.
+
+The two points thus far considered are, first, that the sinful,
+unbelieving, wretched man abides in virtual death, while the
+righteous, happy believer in the gospel has the experience of
+genuine life; and, secondly, that these essential elements of
+human character and experience survive all events of time and
+place in everlasting continuance.
+
+The next consideration prominent in the Christian doctrine of
+death and life is the distinction continually made between the
+body and the soul. Man is regarded under a twofold aspect, as
+flesh and spirit, the one a temporal accompaniment and dependent
+medium, the other an immortal being in itself. The distinction is
+a fundamental one, and runs through nearly all philosophy and
+religion in their reference to man. In the Christian Scriptures it
+is not sharply drawn, with logical precision, nor always
+accurately maintained, but is loosely defined, with waving
+outlines, is often employed carelessly, and sometimes, if strictly
+taken, inconsistently. Let us first note a few examples of the
+distinction itself in the instructions of the Savior and of the
+different New Testament writers.
+
+"That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born
+of the spirit is spirit." "Fear not them which kill the body but
+are not able to kill the soul." "Though our outward man perish,
+yet the inward man is renewed." "He that soweth to his flesh shall
+reap corruption; he that soweth to the spirit shall reap life
+everlasting." "Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in
+the spirit." "Knowing that I must shortly put off this
+tabernacle." "The body without the spirit is dead." It would be
+useless to accumulate examples. It is plain that these authors
+distinguish the body and the soul as two things conjoined for a
+season, the latter of which will continue to live when the other
+has mixed with the dust. The facts and phenomena of our being from
+which this distinction springs are so numerous and so influential,
+so profound and so obvious, that it is impossible they should
+escape the knowledge of any thinking person. Indeed, the
+distinction has found a recognition everywhere among men, from the
+ignorant savage, whose instincts and imagination shadow forth a
+dim world in which the impalpable images of the departed dwell, to
+the philosopher of piercing intellect and universal culture,
+
+"Whose lore detects beneath our crumbling clay A soul, exiled, and
+journeying back to day."
+
+"Labor not for the meat which perisheth," Jesus exhorts his
+followers, "but labor for the meat which endureth unto everlasting
+life." The body and the luxury that pampers it shall perish, but
+the spirit and the love that feeds it shall abide forever.
+
+We now pass to examine some metaphorical terms often erroneously
+interpreted as conveying merely their literal force. Every one
+familiar with the language of the New Testament must remember how
+repeatedly the body and the soul, or the flesh and the spirit, are
+set in direct opposition to each other, sin being referred to the
+former, righteousness to the latter. "I know that in my flesh
+there is no good thing; but with my mind I delight in the law of
+God." "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit
+lusteth against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the
+other." All this language and it is extensively used in the
+epistles is quite generally understood in a fixed, literal sense;
+whereas it was employed by its authors in a fluctuating,
+figurative sense, as the critical student can hardly help
+perceiving. We will state the real substance of Christian teaching
+and phraseology on this point in two general formulas, and then
+proceed to illustrate them. First, both the body and the soul may
+be corrupt, lawless, empty of Divine belief, full of restlessness
+and suffering, in a state of moral death; or both may be pure,
+obedient, acceptable in the sight of God, full of faith, peace,
+and joy, in a state of genuine life. Secondly, whatever tends in
+any way to the former result to make man guilty, feeble, and
+wretched, to deaden his spiritual sensibilities, to keep him from
+union with God and from immortal reliances is variously
+personified as "the Flesh," "Sin," "Death," "Mammon," "the World,"
+"the Law of the Members," "the Law of Sin and Death;" whatever, on
+the contrary, tends in any way to the latter result to purify man,
+to intensify his moral powers, to exalt and quicken his
+consciousness in the assurance of the favor of God and of eternal
+being is personified as "the Spirit," "Life," "Righteousness,"
+"the Law of God," "the Law of the Inward Man," "Christ," "the Law
+of the Spirit of Life in Christ." Under the first class of terms
+are included all the temptations and agencies by which man is led
+to sin, and the results of misery they effect; under the second
+class are included all the aspirations and influences by which he
+is led to righteousness, and the results of happiness they insure.
+For example, it is written, in the Epistle to the Galatians, that
+"the manifest works of the flesh are excessive sensuality,
+idolatry, hatred, emulations, quarrels, heresies, murders, and
+such like." Certainly some of these evils are more closely
+connected with the mind than with the body. The term "flesh" is
+obviously used in a sense coextensive with the tendencies and
+means by which we are exposed to guilt and degradation. These
+personifications, it will therefore be seen, are employed with
+general rhetorical looseness, not with definite logical exactness.
+
+It is self evident that the mind is the actual agent and author of
+all sins and virtues, and that the body in itself is unconscious,
+irresponsible, incapable of guilt. "Every sin that man doeth is
+without the body." In illustration of this point Chrysostom says,
+"If a tyrant or robber were to seize some royal mansion, it would
+not be the fault of the house." And how greatly they err who think
+that any of the New Testament writers mean to represent the flesh
+as necessarily sinful and the spirit as always pure, the following
+cases to the contrary from Paul, whose speech seems most to lean
+that way, will abundantly show. "Glorify God in your body and in
+your spirit, which are his." "Know ye not that your body is the
+temple of the Holy Ghost?" "Yield not your members as instruments
+of unrighteousness unto sin, but as instruments of righteousness
+unto God." "That the life of Jesus might be made manifest in our
+mortal flesh." "Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy,
+acceptable unto God." It is clear that the author of these
+sentences did not regard the body, or literal flesh, as
+necessarily unholy, but as capable of being used by the man
+himself in fulfilling the will of God. Texts that appear to
+contradict this must be held as figures, or as impassioned
+rhetorical exclamations. We also read of "the lusts of the mind,"
+the "fleshly mind," "filthiness of the spirit," "seducing
+spirits," "corrupt minds," "mind and conscience defiled,"
+"reprobate mind,"  showing plainly that the spirit was sometimes
+regarded as guilty and morally dead. The apostle writes, "I pray
+that your whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved
+blameless." The scriptural declarations now cited teach explicitly
+that both the body and the soul may be subjected to the perfect
+law of God, or that both may abide in rebellion and wickedness,
+the latter state being called, metaphorically, "walking after the
+flesh," the former "walking after the spirit," that being sin and
+death, this being righteousness and life.
+
+An explanation of the origin of these metaphors will cast further
+light upon the subject. The use of a portion of them arose from
+the fact that many of the most easily besetting and pernicious
+vices, conditions and allurements of sin, defilements and clogs of
+the spirit, come through the body, which, while it is itself
+evidently fated to perish, does by its earthly solicitations
+entice, contaminate, and debase the soul that by itself is invited
+to better things and seems destined to immortality. Not that these
+evils originate in the body, of course, all the doings of a man
+spring from the spirit of man which is in him, but that the body
+is the occasion and the aggravating medium of their manifestation.
+This thought is not contradicted, it is only omitted, in the words
+of Peter: "I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from
+fleshly lusts, which war against the soul." For such language
+would be spontaneously suggested by the fact that to be in bondage
+to the baser nature is hostile alike to spiritual dignity and
+peace, and to physical health and strength. The principles of the
+moral nature are at war with the passions of the animal nature;
+the goading vices of the mind are at war with the organic
+harmonies of the body; and on the issues of these conflicts hang
+all the interests of life and death, in every sense the words can
+be made to bear.
+
+Another reason for the use of these figures of speech,
+undoubtedly, was the philosophy of the ineradicable hostility of
+matter and spirit, the doctrine, so prevalent in the East from the
+earliest times, that matter is wholly corrupt and evil, the
+essential root and source of all vileness. An old, unknown Greek
+poet embodies the very soul of this faith in a few verses which we
+find in the Anthology. Literally rendered, they run thus:
+
+"The body is the torment, hell, fate, load, tyrant,
+Dreadful pest, and punishing trial, of the soul
+Which, when it quits the body, flies, as from the bonds
+Of death, to immortal God."
+
+It was this idea that produced the wild asceticism prevalent in
+the Christian Church during the Middle Age and previously, the
+fearful macerations, scourgings, crucifixions of the flesh. It
+should be understood that, though some of the phraseology of the
+Scriptures is tinged by the influence of this doctrine, the
+doctrine itself is foreign to Christianity. Christ came eating and
+drinking, not abjuring nature, but adopting its teachings, viewing
+it as a Divine work through which the providence of God is
+displayed and his glory gleams. He was no more of a Pharisee than
+nature is. As corn grows on the Sabbath, so it may be plucked and
+eaten on the Sabbath. The apostles never recommend self inflicted
+torments. The ascetic expressions found in their letters grew
+directly out of the perils besetting them and their expectation of
+the speedy end of the world. Christianity, rightly understood,
+renders even the body of a good man sacred and precious, through
+the indwelling of the Infinite. "We have this treasure in earthen
+vessels," and the poor, dying tenement of flesh is hallowed as
+"A vase of earth, a trembling clod, Constrain'd to hold the breath
+of God."
+
+The chief secret, however, of the origin of the peculiar phrases
+under consideration consisted in their striking fitness to the
+nature and facts of the case, their adaptedness to express these
+facts in a bold and vivid manner. The revelation of the
+transcendent claims of holiness, of the pardoning love of God, of
+the splendid boon of immortality, made by Christ and enforced by
+the miraculous sanctions and the kindling motives presented in his
+example, thrilled the souls of the first converts, shamed them of
+their degrading sins, opened before their imaginations a vision
+that paled the glories of the world, and regenerated them,
+stirring up the depths of their religious sensibilities, and
+flooding their whole being with a warmth, an energy, a
+spirituality, that made their previous experience seem a gross
+carnal slumber, a virtual death. "And you hath he quickened, who
+were dead in trespasses and sins." They were animated and raised
+to a new, pure, glad life, through the feeling of the hopes and
+the practice of the virtues of the gospel of Christ. Unto those
+who "were formerly in the flesh, the servants of sin, bringing
+forth fruit unto death," but now obeying the new form of doctrine
+delivered unto them, with renewed hearts and changed conduct, it
+is written, "If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin;
+but the spirit is life because of righteousness;" that is, If
+Christian truth reign in you, the body may still be tormented, or
+powerless, owing to your previous bad habits; but the soul will be
+redeemed from its abandonment to error and vice, and be assured of
+pardon and immortal life by the witnessing spirit of God.
+
+The apostle likewise says unto them, "If the Spirit of God dwell
+in you, it shall also quicken your mortal bodies." This remarkable
+expression was meant to convey a thought which the observation of
+common facts approves and explains. If the love of the pure
+principles of the gospel was established in them, their bodies,
+debilitated and deadened by former abandonment to their lusts,
+should be freed and reanimated by its influence. The body to a
+great extent reflects the permanent mind and life of a man. It is
+an aphorism of Solomon that "a sound heart is the life of the
+flesh." And Plotinus declares, "Temperance and justice are the
+saviors of the body so far as they are received by it." Deficiency
+of thought and knowledge, laziness of spirit, animality of habits,
+betray themselves plainly enough in the state and expression of
+the physical frame: they render it coarse, dim, and insensible;
+the person verges towards the condition of a clod; spiritual
+things are clouded, the beacon fire of his destiny wanes, the
+possibilities of Christian faith lessen, "the external and the
+insensate creep in on his organized clay," he feels the chain of
+the brute earth more and more, and finally gives himself up to
+utter death. On the other hand, the assimilation of Divine truth
+and goodness by a man, the cherishing love of all high duties and
+aspirations, exert a purifying, energizing power both on the flesh
+and the mind, animate and strengthen them, like a heavenly flame
+burn away the defiling entanglements and spiritual fogs that fill
+and hang around the wicked and sensual, increasingly pervade his
+consciousness with an inspired force and freedom, illuminate his
+face, touch the magnetic springs of health and healthful sympathy,
+make him completely alive, and bring him into living connection
+with the Omnipresent Life, so that he perceives the full testimony
+that he shall never die. For, when brought into such a state by
+the experience of live spirits in live frames, "We feel through
+all this fleshly dresse Bright shootes of everlastingnesse."
+
+Spiritual sloth and sensual indulgence stupefy, blunt, and confuse
+together in lifeless meshes, the vital tenant and the mortal
+tenement; they grow incorporate, alike unclean, powerless, guilty,
+and wretched. Then "Man lives a life half dead, a living death,
+Himself his sepulchre, a moving grave." Active virtue, profound
+love, and the earnest pursuit, in the daily duties of life, of
+"Those lofty musings which within us sow The seeds of higher kind
+and brighter being." Cleanse, vivify, and distinguish the body and
+the soul, so that, when this tabernacle of clay crumbles from
+around it, the unimprisoned spirit soars into the universe at
+once, and, looking back upon the shadowy king bearing his pale
+prey to the tomb, exclaims, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave,
+where is thy victory?" The facts, then, of sin, guilt, weakness,
+misery, unbelief, decay, insensibility, and death, joined with the
+opposite corresponding class of facts, and considered in their
+mutual spiritual and physical relations and results, originally
+suggested, and now interpret and justify, that peculiar
+phraseology of the New Testament which we have been investigating.
+It has no recondite meaning drawn from arbitrary dogmas, but a
+plain meaning drawn from natural truths.
+
+It remains next to see what is the Christian doctrine concerning
+literal, physical death,  concerning the actual origin and
+significance of that solemn event. This point must be treated the
+more at length on account of the erroneous notions prevailing upon
+the subject. For that man's first disobedience was the procuring
+cause of organic, as well as of moral, death, is a doctrine quite
+generally believed. It is a fundamental article in the creeds of
+all the principal denominations of Christendom, and is
+traditionally held, from the neglect of investigation, by nearly
+all Christians. By this theory the words of James who writes,
+"Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death" are interpreted
+with strict literalness. It is conceived that, had not evil
+entered the first man's heart and caused him to fall from his
+native innocence, he would have roamed among the flowers of Eden
+to this day. But he violated the commandment of his Maker, and
+sentence of death was passed upon him and his posterity. We are
+now to prove that this imaginative theory is far from the truth.
+
+1. The language in which the original account of Adam's sin and
+its punishment is stated shows conclusively that the penalty of
+transgression was not literal death, but spiritual, that is,
+degradation, suffering. God's warning in relation to the forbidden
+tree was, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
+die." Of course, Jehovah's solemn declaration was fulfilled as he
+had said. But in the day that man partook of the prohibited fruit
+he did not die a physical death. He lived, driven from the
+delights of Paradise, (according to the account,) upwards of eight
+hundred years, earning his bread by the sweat of his brow.
+Consequently, the death with which he had been threatened must
+have been a moral death, loss of innocence and joy, experience of
+guilt and woe.
+
+2. The common usage of the words connected with this subject in
+the New Testament still more clearly substantiates the view here
+taken of it. There is a class of words, linked together by
+similarity of meaning and closeness of mutual relation, often used
+by the Christian writers loosely, figuratively, and sometimes
+interchangeably, as has been shown already in another connection.
+We mean the words "sin," "flesh," "misery," "death." The same
+remark may be made of another class of words of precisely opposite
+signification,  "righteousness," "faith," "life," "blessedness,"
+"eternal life." These different words frequently stand to
+represent the same idea. "As the law hath reigned through sin unto
+death, so shall grace reign through righteousness unto life." In
+other terms, as the recognition of the retributive law of God
+through rebellion and guilt filled the consciences of men with
+wretchedness, so the acceptance of the pardoning love of God
+through faith and conformity will fill them with blessedness. Sin
+includes conscious distrust, disobedience, and alienation;
+righteousness includes conscious faith, obedience, and
+reconciliation. Sin and death, it will be seen, are related just
+as righteousness and life are. The fact that they are sometimes
+represented in the relation of identity "the minding of the flesh
+is death, but the minding of the spirit is life" and sometimes in
+the relation of cause and effect "the fruit of sin is death, the
+fruit of righteousness is life" proves that the words are used
+metaphorically, and really mean conscious guilt and misery,
+conscious virtue and blessedness. No other view is consistent. We
+are urged to be "dead unto sin, but alive unto God;" that is, to
+be in a state of moral perfection which turns a deaf and
+invincible front to all the influences of evil, but is open and
+joyfully sensitive to every thing good and holy. Paul also wrote,
+in his letter to the Philippians, that he had "not yet attained
+unto the resurrection," but was striving to attain unto it; that
+is, he had not yet reached, but was striving to reach, that lofty
+state of holiness and peace invulnerable to sin, which no change
+can injure, with which the event of bodily dissolution cannot
+interfere, because its elements faith, truth, justice, and love
+are the immutable principles of everlasting life.
+
+3. In confirmation of this conclusion, an argument amounting to
+certainty is afforded by the way in which the disobedience of Adam
+and its consequences, and the obedience of Christ and its
+consequences, are spoken of together; by the way in which a sort
+of antithetical parallel is drawn between the result of Adam's
+fall and the result of Christ's mission. "As by one man sin
+entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon
+all men, so much more shall all receive the gift of God by one
+man, Jesus Christ, and reign unto eternal life." This means, as
+the writer himself afterwards explains, that "as by one man's
+disobedience many were made sinners" and suffered the consequences
+of sin, figuratively expressed by the word "death," "so by the
+obedience of one shall many be made righteous" and enjoy the
+consequences of righteousness, figuratively expressed by the word
+"life." Give the principal terms in this passage their literal
+force, and no meaning which is not absolutely incompatible with
+the plainest truths can be drawn from it. Surely literal death had
+come equally and fully upon all men everywhere; literal life could
+do no more. But render the idea in this way, the blessedness
+offered to men in the revelation of grace made by Jesus outweighs
+the wretchedness brought upon them through the sin introduced by
+Adam, and the sense is satisfactory. That which Adam is
+represented as having lost, that, the apostle affirms, Christ
+restored; that which Adam is said to have incurred, that Christ is
+said to have removed. But Christ did not restore to man a physical
+immortality on the earth: therefore that is not what Adam
+forfeited; but he lost peace of conscience and trust in the Divine
+favor. Furthermore, Christ did not free his followers from natural
+decay and death: therefore that is not what Adam's transgression
+brought upon his children; but it entailed upon them proclivities
+to evil, spiritual unrest, and woe. The basis of the comparison is
+evidently this: Adam's fall showed that the consequences of sin,
+through the stern operation of the law, were strife, despair, and
+misery, all of which is implied in the New Testament usage of the
+word "death;" Christ's mission showed that the consequences of
+righteousness, through the free grace of God, were faith, peace,
+and indestructible happiness, all of which is implied in the New
+Testament usage of the word "life." In the mind of Paul there was
+undoubtedly an additional thought, connecting the descent of the
+soul to the under world with the death of the sinful Adam, and its
+ascent to heaven with the resurrection of the immaculate Christ;
+but this does not touch the argument just advanced, because it
+does not refer to the cause of physical dissolution, but to what
+followed that event.
+
+4. It will not be out of place here to demonstrate that sin
+actually was not the origin of natural decay, by the revelations
+of science, which prove that death was a monarch on the earth for
+ages before moral transgression was known. As the geologist
+wanders, and studies the records of nature, where earthquake,
+deluge, and volcano have exposed the structure of the globe and
+its organic remains in strata piled on strata, upon these, as upon
+so many pages of the earth's autobiography, he reads the history
+of a hundred races of animals which lived and died, leaving their
+bones layer above layer, in regular succession, centuries before
+the existence of man. It is evident, then, that, independent of
+human guilt, and from the very first, chemical laws were in force,
+and death was a part of God's plan in the material creation. As
+the previous animals perished without sin, so without sin the
+animal part of man too would have died. It was made perishable
+from the outset. The important point just here in the theology of
+Paul was, as previously implied, that death was intended to lead
+the soul directly to heaven in a new "spiritual body" or "heavenly
+house;" but sin marred the plan, and doomed the soul to go into
+the under world, a naked manes, when "unclothed" of "the natural
+body" or "earthly house." The mission of Christ was to restore the
+original plan; and it would be consummated at his second coming.
+
+5. There is a gross absurdity involved in the supposition that an
+earthly immortality was the intended destiny of man. That
+supposition necessarily implies that the whole groundwork of God's
+first design was a failure, that his great purpose was thwarted
+and changed into one wholly different. And it is absurd to think
+such a result possible in the providence of the Almighty. Besides,
+had there been no sin, could not man have been drowned if he fell
+into the water without knowing how to swim? If a building tumbled
+upon him, would he not have been crushed? Nor is this theory free
+from another still more palpable absurdity; for, had there been no
+interference of death to remove one generation and make room for
+another, the world could not support the multitudes with which it
+would now swarm. Moreover, the time would arrive when the earth
+could not only not afford sustenance to its so numerous
+inhabitants, but could not even contain them. So that if this were
+the original arrangement, unless certain other parts which were
+indisputable portions of it were cancelled, the surplus myriads
+would have to be removed to some other world. That is just what
+death accomplishes. Consequently, death was a part of God's primal
+plan, and not a contingence accidentally caused by sin.
+
+6. If death be the result of sin, then, of course, it is a
+punishment inflicted upon man for his wickedness. In fact, this is
+an identical proposition. But death cannot be intended as a
+punishment, because, viewed in that light, it is unjust. It comes
+equally upon old and young, good and bad, joyous and wretched. It
+does not permit the best man to live longest; it does not come
+with the greatest terror and agony to the most guilty. All these
+things depend on a thousand contingencies strung upon an iron law,
+which inheres to the physical world of necessity, and has not its
+basis and action in the spiritual sphere of freedom, character,
+and experience. The innocent babe and the hardened criminal are
+struck at the same instant and die the same death. Solomon knew
+this when he said, "As dieth the fool, so the wise man dieth."
+Death regarded as a retribution for sin is unjust, because it is
+destitute of moral discrimination. It therefore is not a
+consequence of transgression, but an era, incident, and step in
+human existence, an established part of the visible order of
+things from the beginning. When the New Testament speaks of death
+as a punishment, it always uses the word in a symbolic sense,
+meaning spiritual deadness and misery, which is a perfect
+retribution, because it discriminates with unerring exactness.
+This has been conclusively proved by Klaiber,1 who shows that the
+peculiar language of Paul in regard to the trichotomist division
+of man into spirit, soul, and body necessarily involves the
+perception of physical death as a natural fact.
+
+7. Finally, natural death cannot be the penalty of
+unrighteousness, because it is not a curse and a woe, but a
+blessing and a privilege. Epictetus wrote, "It would be a curse
+upon ears of corn not to be reaped; and we ought to know that it
+would be a curse upon man not to die." 2 It cannot be the effect
+of man's sin, because it is the improvement of man's condition.
+Who can believe it would be better for man to remain on earth
+forever, under any
+
+1 Die Neutestamentliche Lehre von der Sunde and Erlosung, ss. 22
+45.
+
+2 Dissert. ii. 6, 2.
+
+
+circumstances, than it is for him to go to heaven to such an
+experience as the faithful follower of Christ supposes is there
+awaiting him? It is not to be thought by us that death is a
+frowning enemy thrusting us into the gloom of eternal night or
+into the flaming waves of irremediable torment, but rather a
+smiling friend ushering us into the endless life of the spiritual
+world and into the unveiled presence of God. According to the
+arrangement and desire of God, for us to die is gain: every
+personal exception to this if there be any exception is caused
+through the marring interference of personal wickedness with the
+Creator's intention and with natural order. Who has not sometimes
+felt the bondage of the body and the trials of earth, and peered
+with awful thrills of curiosity into the mysteries of the unseen
+world, until he has longed for the hour of the soul's liberation,
+that it might plume itself for an immortal flight? Who has not
+experienced moments of serene faith, in which he could hardly help
+exclaiming, "I would not live alway; I ask not to stay: Oh, who
+would live alway away from his God?"
+
+A favorite of Apollo prayed for the best gift Heaven could bestow
+upon man. The god said, "At the end of seven days it shall be
+granted: in the mean time, live happy." At the appointed hour he
+fell into a sweet slumber, from which he never awoke.3 He who
+regards death as upon the whole an evil does not take the
+Christian's view of it, not even the enlightened pagan's view, but
+the frightened sensualist's view, the superstitious atheist's
+view. And if death be upon the whole normally a blessing, then
+assuredly it cannot be a punishment brought upon man by sin. The
+common hypothesis of our mortality namely, that sin, hereditarily
+lodged in the centre of man's life, spreads its dynamic virus
+thence until it appears as death in the periphery, expending its
+final energy within the material sphere in the dissolution of the
+physical frame is totally opposed to the spirit of philosophy and
+to the most lucid results of science. Science announces death
+universally as the initial point of new life.4
+
+The New Testament does not teach that natural death, organic
+separation, is the fruit of sin, that, if man had not sinned, he
+would have lived forever on the earth. But it teaches that moral
+death, misery, is the consequence of sin. The pains and
+afflictions which sometimes come upon the good without fault of
+theirs do yet spring from human faults somewhere, with those
+exceptions alone that result from the necessary contingencies of
+finite creatures, exposures outside the sphere of human
+accountability. With this qualification, it would be easy to show
+in detail that the sufferings of the private individual and of
+mankind at large are, directly or indirectly, the products of
+guilt, violated law. All the woes, for instance, of poverty are
+the results of selfishness, pride, ignorance, and vice. And it is
+the same with every other class of miseries.
+
+"The world in Titanic immortality Writhes beneath the burning
+mountain of its sins."
+
+3 Herod. i. 31; Cic. Tusc. Quast. i. 47.
+
+4 Klencke, Das Buch vom Tode. Entwurf einer Lehre vom Sterben in
+der Natur und vom Tode des Mensehen insbesondere. Fur denkende
+Freunde der Wissenschaft.
+
+
+Had there been no sin, men's lives would have glided on like the
+placid rivers that flow through the woodlands. They would have
+lived without strife or sorrow, grown old without sadness or
+satiety, and died without a pang or a sigh. But, alas! sin so
+abounds in the world that "there is not a just man that lives and
+sins not;" and it is a truth whose omnipresent jurisdiction can
+neither be avoided nor resisted that every kind of sin, every
+offence against Divine order, shall somewhere, at some time, be
+judged as it deserves. He who denies this only betrays the
+ignorance which conceals from him a pervading law of inevitable
+application, only reveals the degradation and insensibility which
+do not allow him to be conscious of his own experience. A
+harmonious, happy existence depends on the practice of pure morals
+and communion with the love of God. This great idea that the
+conscientious culture of the spiritual nature is the sole method
+of Divine life is equally a fundamental principle of the gospel
+and a conclusion of observation and reason: upon the devout
+observance of it hinge the possibilities of true blessedness. The
+pursuit of an opposite course necessitates the opposite
+experience, makes its votary a restless, wretched slave, wishing
+for freedom but unable to obtain it.
+
+The thought just stated, we maintain, strikes the key note of the
+Christian Scriptures; and the voices of truth and nature accord
+with it. That Christianity declares sin to be the cause of
+spiritual death, in all the deep and wide meaning of the term, has
+been fully shown; that this is also a fact in the great order of
+things has been partially illustrated, but in justice to the
+subject should be urged, in a more precise and adequate form. In
+the first place, there is a positive punishment flowing evidently
+from sin, consisting both in outward inflictions of suffering and
+disgrace through human laws and social customs, and in the private
+endurance of bodily and mental pains and of strange misgivings
+that load the soul with fear and anguish. Subjection to the animal
+nature in the obedience of unrighteousness sensibly tends to bring
+upon its victim a woeful mass of positive ills, public and
+personal, to put him under the vile tyranny of devouring lusts, to
+induce deathlike enervation and disease in his whole being, to
+pervade his consciousness with the wretched gnawings of remorse
+and shame, and with the timorous, tormenting sense of guilt,
+discord, alienation, and condemnation.
+
+In the second place, there is a negative punishment for impurity
+and wrong doing, less gross and visible than the former, but
+equally real and much more to be dreaded. Sin snatches from a man
+the prerogatives of eternal life, by brutalizing and deadening his
+nature, sinking the spirit with its delicate delights in the body
+and its coarse satisfactions, making him insensible to his highest
+good and glory, lowering him in the scale of being away from God,
+shutting the gates of heaven against him, and leaving him to
+wallow in the mire. The wages of sin is misery, and its gift is a
+degradation which prevents any elevation to true happiness. These
+positive and negative retributions, however delayed or disguised,
+will come where they are deserved, and will not fail. Do a wrong
+deed from a bad motive, and, though you fled on the pinions of the
+inconceivable lightning from one end of infinite space to the
+other, the fated penalty would chase you through eternity but that
+you should pay its debt; or, rather, the penalty is grappling with
+you from within on the instant, is a part of you.
+
+Thirdly, if, by the searing of his conscience and absorption in
+the world, a sinner escapes for a season the penal consequences
+threatened in the law, and does not know how miserable he is, and
+thinks he is happy, yet let him remember that the remedial,
+restorative process through which he must pass, either in this
+life or in the next, involves a concentrated experience of
+expiatory pangs, as is shown both by the reason of the thing and
+by all relevant analogies. When the bad man awakes as some time or
+other he will awake to the infinite perfections and unalterable
+love of the Father whose holy commands he has trampled and whose
+kind invitations he has spurned, he will suffer agonies of
+remorseful sorrow but faintly shadowed in the bitterness of
+Peter's tears when his forgiving Master looked on him. Such is the
+common deadness of our consciences that the vices of our corrupt
+characters are far from appearing to us as the terrific things
+they really are. Angels, looking under the fleshly garment we
+wear, and seeing a falsehood or a sin assimilated as a portion of
+our being, turn away with such feeling as we should experience at
+beholding a leprous sore beneath the lifted ermine of a king. A
+well taught Christian will not fail to contemplate physical death
+as a stupendous, awakening crisis, one of whose chief effects will
+be the opening to personal consciousness, in the most vivid
+manner, of all the realities of character, with their relations
+towards things above and things below himself.
+
+This thought leads us to a fourth and final consideration, more
+important than the previous. The tremendous fact that all the
+inwrought elements and workings of our being are self retributive,
+their own exceeding great and sufficient good or evil, independent
+of external circumstances and sequences, is rarely appreciated.
+Men overlook it in their superficial search after associations,
+accompaniments, and effects. When all tangible punishments and
+rewards are wanting, all outward penalties and prizes fail, if we
+go a little deeper into the mysterious facts of experience we
+shall find that still goodness is rewarded and evil is punished,
+because "the mind is its own place, and can itself," if virtuous,
+"make a heaven of hell, if wicked, "a hell of heaven." It is a
+truth, springing from the very nature of God and his irreversible
+relations towards his creatures, that his united justice and love
+shall follow both holiness and iniquity now and ever, pouring his
+beneficence upon them to be converted by them into their food and
+bliss or into their bane and misery. There is, then, no essential
+need of adventitious accompaniments or results to justify and pay
+the good, or to condemn and torture the bad, here or hereafter. To
+be wise, and pure, and strong, and noble, is glory and blessedness
+enough in itself. To be ignorant, and corrupt, and mean, and
+feeble, is degradation and horror enough in itself. The one abides
+in true life, the other in moral death; and that is sufficient.
+Even now, in this world, therefore, the swift and diversified
+retributions of men's characters and lives are in them and upon
+them, in various ways, and to a much greater extent than they are
+accustomed to think. History preaches this with all her revealing
+voices. Philosophy lays it bare, and points every finger at the
+flaming bond that binds innocence to peace, guilt to remorse. It
+is the substance of the gospel, emphatically pronounced. And the
+clear experience of every sensitive soul confirms its truth,
+echoing through the silent corridors of the conscience the
+declarations which fell in ancient Judea from the lips of Jesus
+and the pen of Paul: "The pure in heart shall see God;" "The wages
+of sin is death."
+
+We will briefly sum up the principal positions of the ground we
+have now traversed. To be enslaved by the senses in the violation
+of the Divine laws, neglecting the mind and abusing the members,
+is to be dead to the goodness of God, the joys of virtue, and the
+hopes of heaven, and alive to guilt, anguish, and despair. To obey
+the will of God in love, keeping the body under, and cherishing a
+pure soul, is to be dead to the evil of the world, the goading of
+passions, and the fears of punishment, and alive to innocence,
+happiness, and faith. According to the natural plan of things from
+the dawn of creation, the flesh was intended to fall into the
+ground, but the spirit to rise into heaven. Suffering is the
+retributive result and accumulated merit of iniquity; while
+enjoyment is the gift of God and the fruit of conformity to his
+law. To receive the instructions of Christ and obey them with the
+whole heart, walking after his example, is to be quickened from
+that deadly misery into this living blessedness. The inner life of
+truth and goodness thus revealed and proposed to men, its personal
+experience being once obtained, is an immortal possession, a
+conscious fount springing up unto eternity through the beneficent
+decree of the Father, to play forever in the light of his smile
+and the shadow of his arm. Such are the great component elements
+of the Christian doctrine of life and death, both present and
+eternal.
+
+The purely interior character of the genuine teachings of
+Christianity on this subject is strikingly evident in the
+foregoing epitome. The essential thing is simply that the hate
+life of error and sin is inherent alienation from God, in slavery,
+wretchedness, death; while the love life of truth and virtue is
+inherent communion with God, in conscious freedom and blessedness.
+Here pure Christianity leaves the subject, declaring this with
+authority, but not pretending to clear up the mysteries or set
+forth the details of the subject. Whatever in the New Testament
+goes beyond this and meddles with minute external circumstances we
+regard as a corrupt addition or mixture drawn from various Gentile
+and Pharisaic sources and erroneously joined with the authentic
+words of Christ. What we maintain in regard to the apostles and
+the early Christians in general is not so much that they failed to
+grasp the deep spiritual principles of the Master's teaching, not
+that they were essentially in error, but that, while they held the
+substance of the Savior's true thoughts, they also held additional
+notions which were errors retained from their Pharisaic education
+and only partially modified by their succeeding Christian culture,
+a set of traditional and mechanical conceptions. These errors, we
+repeat, concern not the heart and essence of ideas, but their form
+and clothing. For instance, Christ teaches that there is a heaven
+for the faithful; the apostles suppose that it is a located region
+over the firmament. The dying Stephen said, "Behold, I see the
+heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of
+God." Again: Christ teaches that there is a banishment for the
+wicked; the apostles suppose that it is into a located region
+under the earth. In accordance with the theological dogmas of
+their time and countrymen, with such modification as the peculiar
+character, teachings, and life of Jesus enforced, they believed
+that sin sent through the black gates of Sheol those who would
+otherwise have gone through the glorious doors of heaven; that
+Christ would return from heaven soon, raise the dead from the
+under world, judge them, rebanish the reprobate, establish his
+perfect kingdom on earth, and reascend to heaven with his elect.
+That these distinctive notions came into the New Testament
+through the mistakes and imperfect knowledge of the apostles,
+how can any candid and competent scholar doubt?5 In the
+first place, the process whereby these conceptions were
+transmitted and assimilated from Zoroastrian Persia to Pharisaic
+Judea is historically traceable. Secondly, the brevity and
+vagueness of the apostolic references to eschatology, and their
+perfect harmony with known Pharisaic beliefs, prove their mutual
+consonance and the derivation of the later from the earlier. If
+the supposed Christian views had been unheard of before, their
+promulgators would have taken pains to define them carefully and
+give detailed expositions of them. Thirdly, it was natural almost
+inevitable  that the apostles would retain at least some of their
+original peculiarities of belief, and mix them with their new
+ideas, unless they were prevented by an infallible inspiration. Of
+the presence of any such infallibility there is not a shadow of
+evidence; but, on the contrary, there is a demonstration of its
+absence. For they differed among themselves, carried on violent
+controversies on important points. Paul says of Peter, "I
+withstood him to the face." The Gentile and Judaic dissensions
+shook the very foundations of the Apostolic Church. Paul and
+Barnabas "had a sharp controversy, insomuch that they parted
+asunder." Almost every commentator and scholar worthy of notice
+has been compelled to admit the error of the apostles in expecting
+the visible return of Christ in their own day. And, if they erred
+in that, they might in other matters. The progress of positive
+science and the improvement of philosophical thought have rendered
+the mechanical dogmas popularly associated with Christianity
+incredible to enlightened minds. For this reason, as for many
+others, it is the duty of the Christian teacher to show that those
+dogmas are not an integral part of the gospel, but only an
+adventitious element imported into it from an earlier and
+unauthoritative system. Take away these incongruous and outgrown
+errors, and the pure religion of Christ will be seen, and will be
+seen to be the everlasting truth of God.
+
+In attempting to estimate the actual influence of Christianity,
+wherever it has spread, in establishing among men a faith in
+immortality, we must specify six separate considerations. First,
+the immediate reception of the resurrection and ascension of
+Christ as a miraculous and typical fact, putting an infallible
+seal on his teachings, and demonstrating, even to the senses of
+men, the reality of a heavenly life, was an extremely potent
+influence in giving form and vigor to faith, more potent for ages
+than every thing else combined. The image of the victorious Christ
+taken up to heaven and glorified there forever, this image,
+pictured in every believer's mind, stimulated the imagination and
+kept an ideal vision of heaven in constant remembrance as an
+apprehended reality. "There is Jesus," they said, pointing up to
+heaven; "and there one day we shall be with him."
+
+Secondly, the obloquy and desertion experienced by the early
+Christians threw them back upon a double strength of spiritual
+faith, and opened to them an intensified communion with God. As
+worldly goods and pleasures were sacrificed, the more powerful
+became their
+
+5 Eschatologie, oder die Lebre von den Letzten Dingen. Mit
+besonderer Rucksicht anf die gangbare Irriehre vom Hades. Basel,
+1840. De Wette interprets the doctrine of Christ's descent into
+Hades as a myth derived from the idea that he was the Savior not
+only of his living followers but also of the heathen and the dead.
+Bibl. Dogmatik, s. 272.
+
+
+perception of moral truths and their grasp of invisible treasures.
+The more fiercely they were assailed, the dearer became the cause
+for which they suffered, and the more profoundly the moral springs
+of faith were stirred in their souls. The natural revulsion of
+their souls was from destitution, contempt, peril, and pain on
+earth to a more vivid and magnified trust in a great reward laid
+up for them in heaven.
+
+Thirdly, the unflinching zeal kindled in the early confessors of
+Christianity, the sublime heroism shown by them amidst the awful
+tortures inflicted on them by the persecuting Jews and Romans,
+reacted on their brethren to give profounder firmness and new
+intensity to their faith in a glorious life beyond the grave. The
+Christians thrown into the amphitheatre to the lions calmly
+kneeled in prayer, and to the superstitious bystanders a bright
+nimbus seemed to play around their brows and heaven to be opened
+above. As they perished at the stake, amidst brutal jeers and
+shrivelling flames, serenely maintaining their profession, and
+calling on Christ, over the lurid vista of smoke and fire broke on
+their rapt vision the blessed splendors of Paradise; and their joy
+seemed, to the enthusiastic believers around, no less than a
+Divine inspiration, confirming their faith, and preaching, through
+the unquestionable truthfulness of martyrdom, the certainty of
+immortal life. The survivors celebrated the anniversaries of the
+martyrs' deaths as their birthdays into the endless life.
+
+Fourthly, another means by which Christianity operated to deepen
+and spread a belief in the future life was, indirectly, through
+its influence in calling out and cultivating the affections of the
+heart. The essence of the gospel in theory, as taught by all its
+teachers, in fact, as incarnated by Christ, and in practice, as
+working in history is love. From the first it condemned and tended
+to destroy all the coldness and hatred of human hearts; and it
+strove to elicit and foster every kindly sentiment and generous
+impulse, to draw its disciples together by those yearning ties of
+sympathy and devotion which instinctively demand and divinely
+prophesy an eternal union in a better world. The more mightily two
+human hearts love each other, the stronger will be their
+spontaneous longing for immortality. The unrivalled revelation of
+the disinterested love of God made by Christianity, and its effect
+in refining and increasing the love of men, have contributed in a
+most important degree to sanction and diffuse the faith in a
+blessed life reserved for men hereafter. One remarkable
+specification may be noticed. The only pagan description of
+children in the future life is that given by some of the classic
+poets, who picture the infant shades lingering in groups around
+the dismal gates of the under world, weeping and wailing because
+they could never find admittance.
+
+"Continuo audita voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque
+animaflentes in limine primo."
+
+Go the long round of the pagan heavens, you will find no trace of
+a child. Children were withered blossoms blown to oblivion. The
+soft breezes that fanned the Blessed Isles and played through the
+perennial summer of Elysium blew upon no infant brows. The grave
+held all the children very fast. By the memorable words, "Of such
+is the kingdom of heaven," Christ unbarred the portals of the
+future world and revealed therein hosts of angelic children. Ever
+since then children have been seen in heaven. The poet has sung
+that the angel child is first on the wing to welcome the parent
+home. Painters have shown us, in their visions of the blessed
+realms, crowds of cherubs, have shown us
+
+"How at the Almighty Father's hand,
+Nearest the throne of living light,
+The choirs of infant seraphs stand,
+And dazzling shine where all are bright."
+
+Fifthly, the triumphant establishment of Christianity in the world
+has thrown the prestige of public opinion, the imposing authority
+of general affirmation and acceptance, around its component
+doctrines chief among which is the doctrine of immortality and
+secured in their behalf the resistless influences of current
+custom and education. From the time the gospel was acknowledged by
+a nation as the true religion, each generation grew up by habitual
+tutelage to an implicit belief in the future life. It became a
+dogma not to be questioned. And the reception of it was made more
+reasonable and easy by the great superiority of its moral features
+over those of the relative superstitions embodied in the ethnic
+religions which Christianity displaced.
+
+Finally, Christianity has exerted no small influence both in
+expressing and imparting faith in immortality by means of the art
+to which it has given birth. The Christian ritual and symbolism,
+which culminated in the Middle Age, from the very first had their
+vitality and significance in the truth of another life. Every
+phase and article of them implied, and with mute or vocal
+articulation proclaimed, the superiority and survival of mind and
+heart, the truth of the gospel history, the reality of the opened
+heaven. Who, in the excited atmosphere, amidst the dangers, living
+traditions, and dramatic enactments of that time, could behold the
+sacraments of the Church, listen to a mighty chant, kneel beside a
+holy tomb, or gaze on a painting of a gospel scene, without
+feeling that the story of Christ's ascent to God was true, being
+assured that elsewhere than on earth there was a life for the
+believer, and in rapt imagination seeing visions of the
+supernatural kingdom unveiled?
+
+The inmost thought or sentiment of mediaval art to adapt a
+remarkable passage from Heine6 was the depression of the body and
+the elevation of the soul. Statues of martyrs, pictures of
+crucifixions, dying saints, pale, faint sufferers, drooping heads,
+long, thin arms, meager bones, poor, awkwardly hung dresses,
+emaciated features celestially illuminated by faith and love,
+expressed the Christian self denial and unearthliness.
+Architecture enforced the same lesson as sculpture and painting.
+Entering a cathedral, we at once feel the soul exalted, the flesh
+degraded. The inside of the dome is itself a hollow cross, and we
+walk there within the very witness work of martyrdom. The gorgeous
+windows fling their red and green lights upon us like drops of
+blood and decay. Funereal music wails and fades away along the dim
+arches. Under our feet are gravestones and corruption. With the
+colossal columns the soul climbs aloft, loosing itself from the
+body, which sinks to the floor as a weary weed. And when we look
+on one of these vast Gothic structures from without, so airy,
+graceful, tender, transparent, it seems cut out of one piece, or
+may be taken for an ethereal lace work of marble.
+
+6 Die Romantische Schule, buch i.
+
+
+Then only do we feel the power of the inspiration which
+could so subdue even stone that it shines spectrally possessed,
+and make the most insensate of materials voice forth the grand
+teaching of Christianity, the triumph of the spirit over the
+flesh.
+
+In these six ways, therefore, by placing a tangible image of it in
+the imagination through the resurrection of Christ, by the
+powerful stirring of the springs of moral faith through the
+persecutions that attended its confession, by the apparent
+inspiration of the martyrs who died in its strength, by calling
+out the latent force of the heart's affections that crave it, by
+the moulding power of establishment, custom, and education, by the
+spiritualizing, vision conjuring effect of its worship and art,
+has Christianity done a work of incalculable extent in
+strengthening the world's belief in a life to come.7
+
+A remarkable evidence of the impression Christianity carried
+before it is furnished by an incident in the history of the
+missionary Paulinus. He had preached before Edwin, King of
+Northumbria. An old earl stood up and said, "The life of man
+seems, when compared with what is hidden, like the sparrow, who,
+as you sit in your hall, with your thanes and attendants, warmed
+by the blazing fire, flies through. As he flies through from door
+to door, he enjoys a brief escape from the chilling storms of rain
+and snow without. Again he goes forth into the winter and
+vanishes. So seems the short life of man. If this new doctrine
+brings us something more certain, in my mind it is worthy of
+adoption."8
+
+The most glorious triumph of Christianity in regard to the
+doctrine of a future life was in imparting a character of
+impartialness and universality to the proud, oligarchic faith
+which had previously excluded from it the great multitude of men.
+The lofty conceptions of the fate of the soul cherished by the
+illustrious philosophers of Greece and Rome were not shared by the
+commonalty until the gospel its right hand touching the throne of
+God, its left clasping humanity announced in one breath the
+resurrection of Jesus and the brotherhood of man.
+
+"Their highest lore was for the few conceived, By schools
+discuss'd, but not by crowds believed. The angel ladder clomb the
+heavenly steep, But at its foot the priesthoods lay, asleep. They
+did not preach to nations, 'Lo, your God!' No thousands follow'd
+where their footsteps trod: Not to the fishermen they said,
+'Arise!' Not to the lowly offer'd they the skies. Wisdom was
+theirs: alas! what men most need Is no sect's wisdom, but the
+people's creed. Then, not for schools, but for the human kind, The
+uncultured reason, the unletter'd mind, The poor, the oppress'd,
+the laborer, and the slave, God said, 'Be light!' and light was on
+the grave! No more alone to sage and hero given, For all wide oped
+the impartial gates of heaven." 9
+
+7 Compare Bengal's essay, Quid Doctrina de Animarum Immortalitate
+Religioni Christiana debeat.
+
+8 Venerable Bede, book ii. ch. xiv.
+
+9 Bulwer, New Timon, part iv.
+
+
+PART FOURTH
+
+
+CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PATRISTIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+WITH reference to the present subject, we shall consider the
+period of the Church Fathers as including the nine centuries
+succeeding the close of the apostolic age. It extends from
+Clement, Barnabas, and Hermas to OEcumenius and Gerbert.
+
+The principal components of the doctrine of the future life held
+during this period, though showing some diversities and changes,
+are in their prevailing features of one consistent type,
+constituting the belief which would in any of those centuries have
+been generally recognised by the Church as orthodox.
+
+For reasons previously given, we believe that Jesus himself taught
+a purely moral doctrine concerning the future life, a doctrine
+free from arbitrary, mechanical, or sacerdotal peculiarities. With
+experimental knowledge, with inspired insight, with fullest
+authority, he set forth conclusions agreeing with the wisest
+philosophy and confirmatory of our noblest hopes, namely, that a
+conscious immortality awaits the soul in the many mansions of the
+Father's house, which it enters on leaving the body, and where its
+experience will depend upon ethical and spiritual conditions. To
+this simple and sublime doctrine announced by Jesus, so rational
+and satisfactory, we believe for reasons already explained that
+the apostles joined various additional and modifying notions,
+Judaic and Gentile, such as the local descent of Christ into the
+prison world of the dead, his mission there, his visible second
+coming, a bodily resurrection, a universal scenic judgment, and
+other kindred views. The sum of results thus reached the Fathers
+developed in greater detail, distinguishing and emphasizing them,
+and also still further corrupting them with some additional
+conceptions and fancies, Greek and Oriental, speculative and
+imaginative. The peculiar theological work of the apostles in
+regard to this subject was the organizing of the Persian Jewish
+doctrine of the Pharisees, with a Christian complement and
+modifications, around the person of Christ, and fixing so near in
+the immediate future the period when it was to be consummated that
+it might be looked for at any time. The peculiar theological work
+of the Fathers in regard to the doctrine thus formed by the
+apostles was twofold. First, being disappointed of the expected
+speedy second coming of Christ, they developed the intermediate
+state of the dead more fully, and made it more prominent.
+Secondly, in the course of the long and vehement controversies
+which sprang up, they were led to complete and systematize their
+theology, to define their terms, to explain and defend their
+doctrines, comparing them together and attempting to harmonize
+them with history, reason, and ethics, as well as with Scripture
+and tradition. In this way the patristic mind became familiar with
+many processes of thought, with many special details, and with
+some general principles, quite foreign to the apostolic mind.
+Meanwhile, defining and systematizing went on, loose notions
+hardened into rigid dogmas, free thought was hampered by
+authority, the scheme generally received assumed the title of
+orthodox, anathematizing all who dared to dissent, and the
+fundamental outlines of the patristic eschatology were firmly
+established.1
+
+In seeking to understand and to give an exposition of this scheme
+of faith, we have, besides various collateral aids, three chief
+guidances. First, we possess the symbols or confessions of faith
+put forth by several of the leading theologians of those times, or
+by general councils, and openly adopted as authority in many of
+the churches, the creed falsely called the Apostles', extant as
+early as the close of the third century, the creed of Arius, that
+of Cyril, the Nicene creed, the creed falsely named the
+Athanasian, and others. Secondly, we have the valuable assistance
+afforded by the treatises of Irenaus, Tertullian, Epiphanius,
+Augustine, and others still later, on the heresies that had arisen
+in the Church, treatises which make it easy to infer, by contrast
+and construction, what was considered orthodox from the statement
+of what was acknowledged heretical. And, thirdly, abundant
+resources are afforded us in the extant theological dissertations,
+and historical documents of the principal ecclesiastical authors
+of the time in review, a cycle of well known names, sweeping from
+Theophilus of Antioch to Photius of Byzantium, from Cyprian of
+Carthage to Maurus of Mentz. We think that any candid person,
+mastering these sources of information in the illustrating and
+discriminating light of a sufficient knowledge of the previous and
+the succeeding related opinions, will recognise in the following
+abstract a fair representation of the doctrine of a future life as
+it was held by the orthodox Fathers of the Christian Church in the
+period extending from the first to the tenth century.
+
+Before proceeding to set forth the common patristic scheme, a few
+preliminary remarks are necessary in relation to some of the
+peculiar, prominent features of Origen's theology, and in relation
+to the rival systems of Augustine and Pelagius. Origen was a man
+of vast learning, passionately fond of philosophy; and he
+modifyingly mingled a great many Oriental and Platonic notions
+with his theology. He imagined that innumerable worlds like this
+had existed and perished before it, and that innumerable others
+will do so after it in endless succession.2 He held that all souls
+whether devils, men, angels, or of whatever rank were of the same
+nature; that all who exist in material bodies are imprisoned in
+them as a punishment for sins committed in a previous state; the
+fig leaves in which Adam and Eve were dressed after their sin were
+the fleshly bodies they were compelled to assume on being expelled
+from the Paradise of their previous existence; that in proportion
+to their sins they are confined in subtile or gross bodies of
+adjusted grades until by penance and wisdom they slowly win their
+
+1 Bretschneider, Was lehren die altesten Kirchenvater uber die
+Entstehung der Sude und des Todes, Adam's Vergehen und die
+Versohnung durch Christum. Oppositionsschrift, band viii. hft. 3,
+ss. 380-407.
+
+2 De Principiis, lib. lit. cap. 5.
+
+
+deliverance, this gradual descent and ascent of souls being
+figuratively represented by Jacob's ladder; that all punishments
+and rewards are exactly fitted to the degree of sin or merit,
+without possibility of failure; that all suffering even that in
+the lowest hell is benevolent and remedial, so that even the worst
+spirits, including Satan himself, shall after a time be restored
+to heaven; that this alternation of fall and restoration shall be
+continued so often as the cloy and satiety of heavenly bliss, or
+the preponderant power of temptation, pervert free will into sin.3
+He declared that it was impossible to explain the phenomena and
+experience of human life, or to justify the ways of God, except by
+admitting that souls sinned in a pre existent state. He was
+ignorant of the modern doctrine of vicarious atonement, considered
+as placation or satisfaction, and regarded Christ's suffering not
+as a substitute for ours, but as having merely the same efficacy
+in kind as the death of any innocent person, only more eminent in
+degree. He represents the mission of Christ to be to show men that
+God can forgive and recall them from sin, banishment, and hell,
+and to furnish them, in various ways, helps and incitements to win
+salvation. The foregoing assertions, and other kindred points, are
+well established by Mosheim, in his exposition of the characteristic
+views of Origen.4
+
+The famous controversy between Augustine and Pelagius shook
+Christendom for a century and a half, and has rolled its echoing
+results even to the theological shores of to day. Augustine was
+more Calvinistic in his doctrines than the Fathers before him, and
+even than most of those after him. In a few particulars perhaps a
+majority of the Fathers really agreed more nearly with Pelagius
+than with him. But his system prevailed, and was publicly adopted
+for all Christendom by the third general council at Ephesus in the
+year 431. Yet some of its principles, in their full force, were
+actually not accepted. For instance, his dogma of unconditional
+election that some were absolutely predestinated to eternal
+salvation, others to eternal damnation has never been taught by
+the Roman Catholic Church. When Gottschalk urged it in the ninth
+century, it was condemned as a heresy;5 and among the Protestants
+in the sixteenth century Calvin was obliged to fight for it
+against odds. Augustine's belief must therefore be taken as a
+representation of the general patristic belief only with caution
+and with qualifications. The distinctive views of Augustine as
+contrasted with those of Pelagius were as follow.6 Augustine held
+that, by Adam's fault, a burden of sin was entailed on all souls,
+dooming them, without exception, to an eternal banishment in the
+infernal world. Pelagius denied the doctrine of "original sin,"
+and made each one responsible only for his own personal sins.
+Augustine taught that baptism was necessary to free its subject
+from the power which the devil had over the soul on account of
+original sin, and that all would infallibly be doomed to hell who
+were not baptized, except, first, the ancient saints, who foreknew
+the evangelic doctrines and believed, and, secondly, the martyrs,
+whose blood was their baptism. Pelagius claimed that Christian
+baptism was only necessary to secure an
+
+3 Ibid. lib. ii. cap. 9, 10.
+
+4 Commentaries on the Affairs of the Christians in the First Three
+Centuries: Third Century sects. 27-29.
+
+5 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 183.
+
+6 Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, trans. from the German by
+R. Emerson, ch. xix.; also pp. 62, 68, 75, 79.
+
+
+entrance into heaven: infants and good men, if unbaptized; would
+enjoy a happy immortality in Paradise, but they never could enter
+the kingdom of heaven. Augustine affirmed that Adam's sin
+destroyed the freedom of the will in the whole human race.
+Pelagius asserted the freedom of the individual will. Augustine
+declared that a few were arbitrarily elected to salvation from
+eternity, and that Christ died only for them. Pelagius taught that
+salvation or reprobation depended on personal deserts, and that
+the Divine election was merely through prescience of merits.
+Augustine said that saving grace was supernatural, irresistible,
+unattainable by human effort. Pelagius said it might be won or
+resisted by conformity to certain conditions in each person's
+power. Augustine believed that bodily death was inflicted as a
+punishment for sin;7 Pelagius, that it was the result of a natural
+law. The extensive, various learning, massive, penetrating mind,
+and remorseless logical consistency, of Augustine, enabled him to
+gather up the loose, floating theological elements and notions of
+the time, and generalize them into a complete system, in striking
+harmony, indeed, with the general character and drift of patristic
+thought, but carried out more fully in its details and applied
+more unflinchingly in its principles than had been done before,
+and therefore in some of its dogmas outstripping the current
+convictions of his contemporaries. His dogma of election was too
+revolting and immoral ever to win universal assent; and few could
+have the heart to unite with him in stigmatizing the whole human
+race in their natural state as "one damned batch and mass of
+perdition!" (conspersio damnata, massa perditionis.) With these
+hints, we are ready to advance to the general patristic scheme of
+eschatology. The exceptional variations and heresies will be
+referred to afterwards.
+
+First, in regard to the natural state of men under the law, from
+the time of Adam's sin to the time of Christ's suffering, their
+moral condition and destination, no one can deny that the Fathers
+commonly supposed that the dissolution of the body and the descent
+of the soul to the under world were a penalty brought on all men
+through the sin of the first man. Wherever the lengthening line of
+human generations wandered, the trail of the serpent, stamp of
+depravity, was on them, sealing them as Death's and marking them
+for the Hadean prison. This was the indiscriminate and the
+inevitable doom. There is no need of citing proofs of this
+statement, as it is well known that the writings of the Fathers
+are thronged both with indirect implications and with explicit
+avowals of it.
+
+Secondly, they thought that Christ came from heaven to redeem men
+from their lost state and subterranean bondage and to guide them
+to heaven. Augustine, and perhaps some others, maintained that he
+came merely to effectuate the salvation of a foreordained few; but
+undoubtedly the common belief was that he came to redeem all who
+would conform to certain conditions which he proposed and made
+feasible. The important question here is, What did the Fathers
+suppose the essence of Christ's redemptive work to be? and how, in
+their estimation, did he achieve that work? Was it the renewal and
+sanctification of human character by the melting power of a
+proclamation of mercy and love from God, by the regenerating
+influences and motives of the truths and appeals spoken by his
+lips, illustrated
+
+7 In Gen. lib. ix. cap. 10, 11: "Parents would have yielded to
+children not by death, but by translation, and would have become
+as the angels."
+
+in his life, and brought to a focus in his martyr death? Certainly
+this was too plainly and prominently a part of the mission of
+Christ ever to be wholly overlooked. And yet one acquainted with
+the writings of the Fathers can hardly mistake so widely as to
+think that they esteemed this the principal element in Christ's
+redemptive work. Was the essence of that work, then, the making of
+a vicarious atonement, according to the Calvinistic interpretation
+of that phrase, the offering of a substitutional anguish
+sufficient to satisfy the claims of inexorable justice, so that
+the guilty might be pardoned? No. The modern doctrine of the
+atonement the satisfaction theory, as it is called was unknown to
+the Fathers. It was developed, step by step, after many
+centuries.8 It did not receive its acknowledged form until it came
+from the mind of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, as
+late as the twelfth century. No scholar will question this
+confessed fact. What, then, were the essence and method of
+Christ's redemptive mission according to the Fathers? In brief,
+they were these. He was, as they believed, a superangelic being,
+the only begotten Son of God, possessing a nature, powers, and
+credentials transcending those delegated to any other being below
+God himself. He became flesh, to seek and to save the lost. This
+saving work was done not by his mortal sufferings alone, but by
+the totality of labors extending through the whole period of his
+incarnation. The subjective or moral part of his redemptive
+mission was to regenerate the characters of men and fit them for
+heaven by his teachings and example; the objective or physical
+part was to deliver their souls from the fatal confinement of the
+under world and secure for them the gracious freedom of the sky,
+by descending himself as the suppressing conqueror of death and
+then ascending as the beckoning pioneer of his followers. The
+Fathers did not select the one point or act of Christ's death as
+the pivot of human redemption; but they regarded that redemption
+as wrought out by the whole of his humiliation, instruction,
+example, suffering, and triumph, as the resultant of all the
+combined acts of his incarnate drama. Run over the relevant
+writings of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius,
+Cyril, Ambrose, Augustine himself, Jerome, Chrysostom, and the
+rest of the prominent authors of the first ten centuries, and you
+cannot fail to be struck with the fact that they invariably speak
+of redemption, not in connection with Christ's death alone, but
+emphatically in connection with the group of ideas, his
+incarnation, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension! For the
+most part, they received it by tradition as a fact, without much
+philosophizing, that, in consequence of the sin of Adam, all men
+were doomed to die, that is, to leave their bodies and descend
+into the shadowy realm of death. They also accepted it as a fact,
+without much attempt at theoretical explanation, that when Christ,
+the sinless and resistless Son of God, died and went thither,
+before his immaculate Divinity the walls fell, the devils fled,
+the prisoners' chains snapped, and the power of Satan was broken.
+They received it as a fact that through the mediation of Christ
+the original boon forfeited by Adam was to be restored, and that
+men, instead of undergoing death and banishment to Hades, should
+be translated to heaven. So far as they had a theory about the
+cause, it turned on two simple points: first, the free grace and
+love of God; second, the self sacrifice and sufficient power of
+
+8 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 68.
+
+
+Christ. In the progressive course of dogmatic controversy,
+metaphysical speculation, and desire for system, explanations have
+been devised in a hundred different forms, from that of Aquinas to
+that of Calvin; from that of Anselm to that of Grotius; from that
+of Socinus to that of Bushnell. Tertullian describes the profound
+abyss beneath the grave, in the bowels of the earth, where, he
+says, all the dead are detained unto the day of judgment, and
+where Christ in his descent made the patriarchs and prophets his
+companions.9 Augustine says that nearly the whole Church agreed in
+believing that Christ delivered Adam from the under world when he
+rose thence himself.10 One must be very ignorant on the subject to
+doubt that the Fathers attributed unrivalled importance to the
+literal descent of Christ into the abode of the departed.11
+
+Thirdly, after the advent of Christ, what were the conditions
+proposed for the actual attainment of personal salvation? It was
+the orthodox belief that Christ led up into Paradise with him the
+ancient saints who were awaiting his appearance in the under
+world:12 but with this exception it was not supposed that he saved
+any outright: he only put it in their power to save themselves,
+removing the previously insuperable obstacles. In the faith of
+those who accepted the dogma of predestination, of course, the
+presupposed condition of actual personal salvation was that the
+given individual should become one of the elect number. But it
+seems to have been usually believed that baptism was indispensable
+to give final efficacy to the decree of election in each
+individual case.13 Augustine says, "All are born under the power
+of the devil, held in chains by him as a jailer: baptism alone,
+through the force of Christ's redemptive work, breaks these chains
+and secures heaven." In regard to this necessity of baptism
+Pelagius agreed with his great adversary, saving an unessential
+modification, as we have seen before. The same may be said of
+Cyprian, Tertullian, and many other leading Fathers. Again, the so
+called Athanasian Creed, which shows the prevalent opinion of the
+Church in the fifth and sixth centuries, asserts that whoso
+believes not in the Trinity and kindred dogmas as therein laid
+down "without doubt shall perish everlastingly." In other words,
+assent of mind to the established creed of the Church is a vital
+condition of salvation. Finally, in the writings of nearly all of
+the Fathers we find frequent declarations of the necessity of
+moral virtue, righteous conduct, and piety, as a condition of
+admission into the kingdom of heaven. For example, Augustine says,
+"Such as have been baptized, partaken of the sacraments, and
+remained always in the catholic faith, but have led wicked lives,
+can have no hope of escaping eternal damnation." 14 These points
+were not sharply defined, authoritatively established, and
+consistently adhered to; and yet there was a pretty general
+agreement among the body of the Fathers that for actual salvation
+there were three practical necessary conditions, baptism, a sound
+faith, a good life.
+
+9 De Anima, sects. 7 et 55.
+
+10 Epist. CLXIV.
+
+11 Huidekoper, Belief of the First Three Centuries concerning
+Christ's Mission to the Under World.
+
+12 Augustine, De Civ. Del. lib. xx. cap. xv. Wiedenfeld, De
+Exorcismi Origine, Mutatione, deque hujus Actus peragendi Ratione
+Neander, Church History, vol. i. p. 3
+
+13 Torrey's trans.
+
+14 De Civ. Dei., lib. xxi. cap. xxv.
+
+
+Fourthly, the Fathers believed that none of the righteous dead
+could be admitted into heaven itself, the abode of God and his
+angels, until after the second coming of Christ and the holding of
+the general judgment; neither were any of the reprobate dead,
+according to their view, to be thrust into hell itself until after
+those events; but meanwhile all were detained in an intermediate
+state, the justified in a peaceful region of the under world
+enjoying some foretaste of their future blessedness, the condemned
+in a dismal region of the same under world suffering some
+foretaste of their future torment.15 After the numerous evidences
+given in previous chapters of the prevalence of this view among
+the Fathers, it would be superfluous to cite further authorities
+here. We will only reply to an objection which may be urged. It
+may be said, the Fathers believed that Enoch and Elijah were
+translated to heaven, also that the patriarchs, whom Christ
+rescued on his descent to Hades, were admitted thither, and,
+furthermore, that the martyrs by special privilege were granted
+entrance there. The point is an important one. The reply turns on
+the broad distinction made by the Fathers between heaven and
+Paradise. Some of the Fathers regarded Paradise as one division of
+the under world; some located it in a remote and blessed region of
+the earth; others thought it was high in the air, but below the
+dwelling place of God.16 Now, it was to "Paradise," not to heaven,
+that the dying thief, penitent on the cross, was promised
+admission. It was of "Paradise," not of heaven, that Tertullian
+said "the blood of the martyrs is the perfect key." So, too, when
+Jerome, Chrysostom, and others speak of a few favored ones
+delivered from the common fate before the day of judgment, it is
+"Paradise," and not heaven, that is represented as being thrown
+open to them. Irenaus says, "Those who were translated were
+translated to the Paradise whence disobedient Adam was driven into
+the world."17
+
+A notable attempt has been repeatedly made for example, by the
+famous Dr. Coward, by Dodwell, and by some other more obscure
+writers to prove that the Fathers of the Greek Church, in
+opposition to the Latin Fathers, denied the consciousness of the
+soul during the interval from death to the resurrection, and
+maintained that the soul died with the body and would be restored
+with it at the last day. But this is an error arising from the
+misinterpretation of the figurative terms in which the Greek
+Fathers express themselves. Tatian, Justin, Theophilus, and
+Irenaus do not differ from the others in reality, but only in
+words. The opinion that the soul is literally mortal is
+erroneously attributed to those Greek Fathers, who in truth no
+more held it than Tertullian did. "The death" they mean is, to
+borrow their own language, "deprived of the rays of Divine light,
+to bear a deathly immortality," (in immortalitate mortem
+tolerantes,) an eternal existence in the ghostly under world.18
+The con
+
+15 They feel, as Novatian says, (De Trinitate, 1,) a prajudicium
+futuri judicii. See also Ernesti, Excurs. de Veter. Patrum
+Opinione de Statu Medio Animor. a Corpore sejunctorum. In his
+Lect. Acad. in Ep. ad Hebr.
+
+16 E. g., see Ambrose, De Paradiso.
+
+17 Adv. Hares., lib. v. cap. v.
+
+18 See this point ably argued in an academic dissertation
+published at Konigsberg, 1827, bearing the title "Antiquissimorum
+Ecclesia Grsecte Patrum de Immortalitate Anima Sententia
+Recensentur."
+
+
+They held that the inner man was originally a spirit [non-ASCII
+characters omitted] and a soul [non-ASCII characters omitted]
+blended and immortal, that is, indestructibly united and blessed.
+But by sin the soul loses the spirit and becomes subject to death.
+that is, to ignorance of its Divine origin, alienation from God,
+darkness, and an abode in Hades. By the influences flowing from the
+mission of Christ, man is elevated again to conscious communion with
+God, and the spirit is restored to the soul. "Si restituitur, manet
+[non-ASCII characters omitted] fit autem [non-ASCII characters
+omitted]; si non restituitur, manet [non-ASCII characters omitted],
+fit autem [non-ASCII characters omitted], quod haud differt a morte."
+cordant doctrine of the Fathers as to the intermediate state of the
+dead was that, with the exception of a few admitted to Paradise,
+they were in the under world waiting the fulness of time, when the
+world should be judged and their final destination be assigned to them.
+As Tertullian says, "constituimus omnem animam apud inferos
+seguestrari in diem Domini."
+
+Finally, the Fathers expected that Christ would return from
+heaven, hold a general day of judgment, and consummate all things.
+The earliest disciples seem to have looked anxiously, almost from
+hour to hour, for that awful crisis. But, as years rolled on and
+the last apostle died, and it came not, the date was fixed more
+remotely; and, as other years passed away, and still no clear
+signs of its arrival appeared, the date grew more and more
+indefinite. Some still looked for the solemn dawn speedily to
+break; others assigned it to the year 1000; others left the time
+utterly vague; but none gave up the doctrine. All agreed that
+sooner or later a time would come when the deep sky would open,
+and Christ, clothed in terrors and surrounded by pomp of angels,
+would alight on the globe, when:
+
+"The angel of the trumpet Shall split the charnel earth With his
+blast so clear and brave, And quicken the charnel birth At the
+roots of the grave, Till the dead all stand erect."
+
+Augustine, representing the catholic faith, says, "The coming of
+Elias, the conversion of the Jews, Antichrist's persecution, the
+setting up of Christ's tribunal, the raising of the dead, the
+severing of the good and the bad, the burning of the world, and
+its renovation, this is the destined order of events."19 The saved
+were to be transported bodily to the eternal bliss of heaven; the
+damned, in like manner, were to be banished forever to a fiery
+hell in the centre of the earth, there to endure uncomprehended
+agonies, both physical and spiritual, without any respite, without
+any end. There were important, and for a considerable period quite
+extensive, exceptions, to the belief in this last dogma:
+nevertheless, such was undeniably the prevailing view, the
+orthodox doctrine, of the patristic Church. The strict literality
+with which these doctrines were held is strikingly shown in
+Jerome's artless question: "If the dead be not raised with flesh
+and bones, how can the damned, after the judgment, gnash their
+teeth in hell?"
+
+During the period now under consideration there were great
+fluctuations, growths, changes, of opinion on three subjects in
+regard to which the public creeds did not prevent all freedom of
+thought by laying down definite propositions. We refer to baptism,
+the millennium, and purgatory. Christian baptism was first simply
+a rite of initiation into the Christian religion. Then it became
+more distinctly a symbol of faith in Christ and in his gospel, and
+an emblem of a new birth. Next it was imagined to be literally
+efficacious to
+
+19 De Civ. Del, lib. xx. cap. 30, sect. 5.
+
+
+personal salvation, solving the chains of the devil, washing off
+original sin, and opening the door of heaven.20 To trace the
+doctrine through its historical variations and its logical
+windings would require a large volume, and is not requisite for
+our present purpose.
+
+Almost all the early Fathers believingly looked for a millennium,
+a reign of Christ on earth with his saints for a thousand years.
+Daille has shown that this belief was generally held, though with
+great diversities of conception as to the form and features of the
+doctrine.21 It was a Jewish notion which crept among the
+Christians of the first century and has been transmitted even to
+the present day. Some supposed the millennium would precede the
+destruction of the world, others that it would follow that
+terrible event, after a general renovation. None but the faithful
+would have part in it; and at its close they would pass up to
+heaven. Irenaus quotes a tradition, delivered by Papias, that "in
+the millennium each vine will bear ten thousand branches, each
+branch ten thousand twigs, each twig ten thousand clusters, each
+cluster ten thousand grapes, each grape yielding a hogshead of
+wine; and if any one plucks a grape its neighbors will cry, Take
+me: I am better!" This, of course, was a metaphor to show what the
+plenty and the joy of those times would be. According to the
+heretics Cerinthus and Marcion, the millennium was to consist in
+an abundance of all sorts of sensual riches and delights. Many of
+the orthodox Fathers held the same view, but less grossly; while
+others made its splendors and its pleasures mental and moral.22
+Origen attacked the whole doctrine with vehemence and cogency. His
+admirers continued the warfare after him, and the belief in this
+celestial Cocaigne suffered much damage and sank into comparative
+neglect. The subject rose into importance again at the approaching
+close of the first chiliad of Christianity, but soon died away as
+the excitement of that ominous epoch passed with equal
+disappointment to the hopes and the fears of the believers. A
+galvanized controversy has been carried on about it again in the
+present century, chiefly excited by the modern sect of Second
+Adventists. Large volumes have recently appeared, principally
+aiming to decide whether the millennium is to precede or to follow
+the second coming of Christ! 23 The doctrine itself is a Jewish
+Christian figment supported only by a shadowy basis of fancy. The
+truth contained in it, though mutilated and disguised, is that
+when the religion of Christ is truly enthroned over the earth,
+when his real teachings and life are followed, the kingdom of God
+will indeed cover the world, and not for a thousand years only,
+but unimaginable glory and happiness shall fill the dwellings of
+the successive generations of men forever.24
+
+The doctrine of a purgatory a place intermediate between Paradise
+and hell, where souls not too sinful were temporarily punished,
+and where their condition and stay were in the power of the Church
+on earth, a doctrine which in the Middle Age became practically
+
+20 Neander, Planting and Training, Eng. trans. p. 102.
+
+21 De Usu Patrum, lib. ii. cap. 4.
+
+22 Munscher, Entwickelung der Lehre vom Tausendjahrigen Reiche in
+den Drei Ersten Jahrhunderten. In Henke's Magaz. b. vi. ss. 233
+254.
+
+23 See e. g. The End, by Dr. Cumming. The Second Advent, by D.
+Brown.
+
+24 Bush, On the Millennium. Bishop Russell, Discourses on the
+Millennium. Carroll, Geschichte des Chiliasmus.
+
+
+the foremost instrument of ecclesiastical influence and income was
+through the age of the Fathers gradually assuming shape and
+firmness. It seems to have been first openly avowed as a Church
+dogma and effectively organized as a working power by Pope Gregory
+the Great, in the latter part of the sixth century.25 No more
+needs to be said here, as the subject more properly belongs to the
+next chapter.
+
+It but remains in close to notice those opinions relating to the
+future life which were generally condemned as heresies by the
+Fathers. One of the earliest of these was the destruction of the
+intermediate state and the denial of the general judgment by the
+assertion, which Paul charges so early as in his day upon Hymeneus
+and Philetus, "that the resurrection has passed already;" that is,
+that the soul, when it leaves the body, passes immediately to its
+final destination. This opinion reappeared faintly at intervals,
+but obtained very little prevalence in the early ages of the
+Church. Hierax, an author who lived at Leontopolis in Egypt early
+in the fourth century, denied the resurrection of the body, and
+excluded from the kingdom of heaven all who were married and all
+who died before becoming moral agents.
+
+Another heretical notion which attracted some attention was the
+opposite extreme from the foregoing, namely, that the soul totally
+dies with the body, and will be restored to life with it in the
+general resurrection at the end of the world; an opinion held by
+an Arabian sect of Christians, who were vanquished in debate upon
+it by Origen, and renounced it.26
+
+Still another doctrine known among the Fathers was the belief that
+Christ, when he descended into the under world, saved and led away
+in triumph all who were there, Jews, pagans, good, bad, all,
+indiscriminately. This is number seventy nine in Augustine's list
+of the heresies. And there is now extant among the writings of
+Pope Boniface VI, of the ninth century, a letter furiously
+assailing a man who had recently maintained this "damnable
+doctrine."
+
+The numerous Gnostic sects represented by Valentinus, Cerinthus,
+Marcion, Basilides, and other less prominent names, held a system
+of speculation copious, complex, and of intensely Oriental
+character. That portion of it directly connected with our subject
+may be stated in few words. They taught that all souls pre existed
+in a world of pure light, but, sinning through the instigation and
+craft of demons, they fell, were mixed with darkness and matter,
+and bound in bodies. Through sensual lusts and ignorance, they
+were doomed to suffer after death in hell for various periods, and
+then to be born again. Jehovah was the enemy of the true God, and
+was the builder of this world and of hell, wherein he contrives to
+keep his victims imprisoned by deceiving them to worship him and
+to live in errors and indulgences. Christ came, they said, to
+reveal the true God, unmask the infernal character and wiles of
+Jehovah, rescue those whom he had cruelly shut up in hell, and
+teach men the real way of salvation. Accordingly, Marcion declared
+that when Christ descended into the under world he released and
+took into his own kingdom Cain, and the Sodomites, and all the
+
+25 Flugge, Geschichte der Lehre vom Zustande des Menschen nach dem
+Tode in der Christlichen Kirche, absch. v. ss. 320-352.
+
+26 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. lib. vi. cap. 37.
+
+Gentiles who had refused to obey the demon worshipped by the Jews,
+but left there, unsaved, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and the other
+patriarchs, together with all the prophets.27 The Gnostics agreed
+in attributing evil to matter, and made the means of redemption to
+consist in fastings and scourgings of the flesh, with denial of
+all its cravings, and in lofty spiritual contemplations. Of
+course, with one accord they vehemently assailed the dogma of the
+resurrection of the flesh. Their views, too, were inconsistent
+with the strict eternity of future hell punishments. The
+fundamental basis of their system was the same as that of nearly
+all the Oriental philosophies and religions, requiring an ascetic
+war against the world of sense. The notion that the body is evil,
+and the cause of evil, was rife even among the orthodox Fathers;
+but they stopped guardedly far short of the extreme to which the
+Gnostics carried it, and indignantly rejected all the strange
+imaginations which those heretics had devised to explain the
+subject of evil in a systematic manner.28 Augustine said, "If we
+say all sin comes from the flesh, we make the fleshless devil
+sinless!" Hermogenes, some of whose views at least were tinged
+with Gnosticism, believed the abyss of hell was formed by the
+confluence of matter, and that the devil and all his demons would
+at last be utterly resolved into matter.29
+
+The theological system of the Manichaan sect was in some of its
+cardinal principles almost identical with those of the Gnostics,
+but it was still more imaginative and elaborate.30 It started with
+the Persian doctrine of two antagonist deities, one dwelling with
+good spirits in a world of light and love, the other with demons
+in a realm of darkness and horror. Upon a time the latter,
+sallying forth, discovered, far away in the vastness of space, the
+world of light. They immediately assailed it. They were conquered
+after a terrible struggle and driven back; but they bore with them
+captive a multitude of the celestial souls, whom they instantly
+mixed with darkness and gross matter. The good God built this
+world of mingled light and darkness to afford these imprisoned
+souls an opportunity to purge themselves and be restored to him.
+In arranging the material substances to form the earth, a mass of
+evil fire, with no particle of good in it, was found. It had been
+left in their flight by the vanquished princes of darkness. This
+was cast out of the world and shut up somewhere in the dark air,
+and is the Manichaan hell, presided over by the king of the
+demons. If a soul, while in the body, mortify the flesh, observe a
+severe ascetic moral discipline, fix its thoughts, affections, and
+prayers on God and its native home, it will on leaving the body
+return to the celestial light. But if it neglect these duties and
+become more deeply entangled in the toils of depraved matter, it
+is cast into the awful fire of hell, where the cleansing flames of
+torture partially purify it; and then it is born again and put on
+a new trial. If after ten successive births twice in each of five
+different forms the soul be still unreclaimed, then it is
+permanently remanded to the furnace of hell. At last, when all the
+celestial souls seized by the princes of darkness have returned to
+God, save those just mentioned, this world will be burned. Then
+the children
+
+27 Irenaus, Adv. Herres., lib. i. cap. 22.
+
+28 Account of the Gnostic Sects, in Moshelm's Comm., II. Century,
+sect. 65.
+
+29 Lardner, Hist. of Heretics, ch. xviii. sect. 9.
+
+30 Baur, Das Manichaische Religionssystem.
+
+
+of God will lead a life of everlasting blessedness with him in
+their native land of light; the prince of evil, with his fiends,
+will exist wretchedly in their original realm of darkness. Then
+all those souls whose salvation is hopeless shall be drawn out of
+hell and be placed as a cordon of watchmen and a phalanx of
+soldiers entirely around the world of darkness, to guard its
+frontiers forever and to see that its miserable inhabitants never
+again come forth to invade the kingdom of light.31
+
+The Christian after Christ's own pattern, trusting that when the
+soul left the body it would find a home in some other realm of
+God's universe where its experience would be according to its
+deserts, capacity, and fittedness, sought to do the Father's will
+in the present, and for the future committed himself in faith and
+love to the Father's disposal. The apostolic Christian, conceiving
+that Christ would soon return to raise the dead and reward his
+own, eagerly looked for the arrival of that day, and strove that
+he might be among the saints who, delivered or exempt from the
+Hadean imprisonment, should reign with the triumphant Messiah on
+earth and accompany him back to heaven. The patristic Christian,
+looking forward to the divided under world where all the dead must
+spend the interval from their decease to the general resurrection,
+shuddered at the thought of Gehenna, and wrestled and prayed that
+his tarrying might be in Paradise until Christ should summon his
+chosen ones, justified from the great tribunal, to the Father's
+presence. The Manichaan Christian, believing the soul to be
+imprisoned in matter by demons who fought against God in a
+previous life, struggled, by fasting, thought, prayer, and
+penance, to rescue the spirit from its fleshly entanglements, from
+all worldly snares and illusions, that it might be freed from the
+necessity of any further abode in a material body, and, on the
+dissolution of its present tabernacle, might soar to its native
+light in the blissful pleroma of eternal being.
+
+31 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sects. 44-52.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+MEDIAVAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THE period of time covered by the present chapter reaches from the
+close of the tenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, from
+the first full establishment of the Roman Catholic theology and
+the last general expectation of the immediate end of the world to
+the commencing decline of mediaval faith and the successful
+inauguration of the Protestant Reformation. The principal mental
+characteristic of that age, especially in regard to the subject of
+the future life, was fear. "Never," says Michelet, "can we know in
+what terrors the Middle Age lived." There was all abroad a living
+fear of men, fear of the State, fear of the Church, fear of God,
+fear of the devil, fear of hell, fear of death. Preaching
+consisted very much in the invitation, "Submit to the guidance of
+the Church while you live," enforced by the threat, "or you shall
+go to hell when you die." Christianity was practically reduced to
+some cruel metaphysical dogmas, a mechanical device for rescuing
+the devil's captives from him, and a system of ritual magic in the
+hands of a priesthood who wielded an authority of supernatural
+terrors over a credulous and shuddering laity. It is true that the
+genuine spirit and contents of Christianity were never wholly
+suppressed. The love of God, the blessed mediation of the
+benignant Jesus, the lowly delights of the Beatitudes, the
+redeeming assurance of pardon, the consoling, triumphant
+expectation of heaven, were never utterly banished even from the
+believers of the Dark Age. Undoubtedly many a guilty but repentant
+soul found forgiveness and rest, many a meek and spotless breast
+was filled with pious rapture, many a dying disciple was comforted
+and inspired, by the good tidings proclaimed from priestly lips
+even then. No doubt the sacred awe and guarded peace surrounding
+their precincts, the divine lessons inculcated within their walls,
+the pathetic prayers breathed before their altars, the traditions
+of saintly men and women who had drawn angelic visitants down to
+their cells and had risen long ago to be angels themselves, the
+strains of unearthly melody bearing the hearts of the kneeling
+crowd into eternity, no doubt these often made cathedral and
+convent seem "islands of sanctity amidst the wild, roaring,
+godless sea of the world." Still, the chief general feeling of the
+time in relation to the future life was unquestionably fear
+springing from belief, the wedlock of superstitious faith and
+horror.
+
+During the six centuries now under review the Roman Catholic
+Church and theology were the only Christianity publicly
+recognised. The heretics were few and powerless, and the papal
+system had full sway. Since the early part of the period
+specified, the working theology of the Roman Church has undergone
+but few, and, as pertaining to our subject, unimportant, changes
+or developments. Previous to that time her doctrinal scheme was
+inchoate, gradually assimilating foreign elements and developing
+itself step by step. The principal changes now concerning us to
+notice in the passage from patristic eschatology as deducible, for
+instance, from the works of Chrysostom, or as seen in the
+"Apostles' Creed" to mediaval eschatology  as displayed in the
+"Summa" of Thomas Aquinas or in the Catechism of Trent are these.
+The supposititious details of the under world have been definitely
+arranged in greater subdivision; heaven has been opened for the
+regular admission of certain souls; the loose notions about
+purgatory have been completed and consolidated; and the whole
+combined scheme has been organized as a working instrument of
+ecclesiastical power and profit.
+
+These changes seem to have been wrought out, first, by
+continual assimilations of Christianity to paganism,1 both in
+doctrine and ceremony, to win over the heathen; and, secondly, by
+modifications and growths to meet the exigencies of doctrinal
+consistency and practical efficiency, exigencies repeatedly
+arising from philosophical discussion and political opposition.
+
+The degree in which papal Christianity was conformed to the
+prejudices and customs of the heathen believers, whose allegiance
+was sought, is astonishing. It extended to hundreds of
+particulars, from the most fundamental principles of theological
+speculation to the most trivial details of ritual service. We
+shall mention only a few instances of this kind immediately
+belonging to the subject we are treating. In the first place, the
+hierophant in the pagan Mysteries, and the initiatory rites, were
+the prototypes of the Roman Catholic bishop and the ceremonies
+under his direction.2 Christian baptism was made to be the same as
+the pagan initiation: both were supposed to cleanse from sin and
+to secure for their subject a better fate in the future life: they
+were both, therefore, sometimes delayed until just before death.3
+The custom of initiating children into the Mysteries was also
+common, as infant baptism became.4 When the public treasury was
+low, the magistrates sometimes raised a fund by recourse to the
+initiating fees of the Mysteries, as the Christian popes
+afterwards collected money from the sale of pardons.
+
+In the second place, the Roman Catholic canonization was the same
+as the pagan apotheosis. Among the Gentiles, the mass of mankind
+were supposed to descend to Hades at death; but a few favored ones
+were raised to the sky, deified, and a sort of worship paid to
+them. So the Roman Church taught that nearly all souls passed to
+the subterranean abodes, but that martyrs and saints were admitted
+to heaven and might lawfully be prayed to.5
+
+Thirdly, the heathen under world was subdivided into several
+regions, wherein different persons were disposed according to
+their deserts. The worst criminals were in the everlasting penal
+fire of Tartarus; the best heroes and sages were in the calm
+meadows of Elysium; the hapless children were detained in the
+dusky borders outside the grim realm of torture; and there was a
+purgatorial place where those not too guilty were cleansed from
+their stains. In like manner, the Romanist theologians divided the
+under world into four parts: hell for the final abode of the
+stubbornly wicked; one limbo for the painless, contented tarrying
+of the good patriarchs who died before the advent of Christ had
+made salvation possible, and another limbo for the sad and pallid
+resting place of those children who died unbaptized; purgatory, in
+which expiation is offered in agony for sins committed on earth
+and unatoned for.6
+
+1 Middleton, Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between
+Popery and Paganism.
+
+2 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 6. Mosheim's Comm., ch. i.
+sect. 13.
+
+3 Warburton, Div. Leg., book ii. sect. 4.
+
+4 Terence, Phormio, act i scene 1.
+
+5 Council of Trent, sess. vi. can. xxx. Sess. xxv.: Decree on
+Invocation of Saints.
+
+6 See Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, book xiv. ch. ii.
+
+
+Before proceeding further, we must trace the prevalence and
+progress of the doctrine of purgatory a little as it was known
+before its embodiment in mediaval mythology, and then as it was
+embodied there. The fundamental doctrine of the Hindu hell was
+that a certain amount of suffering undergone there would expiate a
+certain amount of guilt incurred here. When the disembodied soul
+had endured a sufficient quantity of retributive and purifying
+pain, it was loosed, and sent on earth in a new body. It was
+likewise a Hindu belief that the souls of deceased parents might
+be assisted out of this purgatorial woe by the prayers and
+offerings of their surviving children.7 The same doctrine was held
+by the Persians. They believed souls could be released from
+purgatory by the prayers, sacrifices, and good deeds of righteous
+surviving descendants and friends. "Zoroaster said he could, by
+prayer, send any one he chose to heaven or to hell." 8 Such
+representations are found obscurely in the Vendidad and more fully
+in the Bundehesh. The Persian doctrine that the living had power
+to affect the condition of the dead is further indicated in the
+fact that, from a belief that married persons were peculiarly
+happy in the future state, they often hired persons to be espoused
+to such of their relatives as had died in celibacy.9 The doctrine
+of purgatory was known and accepted among the Jews too. In the
+Second Book of Maccabees we read the following account:  "Judas
+sent two thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to defray the
+expense of a sin offering to be offered for the sins of those who
+were slain, doing therein very well and honestly, in that he was
+mindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they who
+were slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to
+pray for the dead. Whereupon he made an atonement for the dead,
+that they might be delivered from sin."10 The Rabbins taught that
+children by sin offerings could help their parents out of their
+misery in the infernal world.11 They taught, furthermore, that all
+souls except holy ones, like those of Rabbi Akiba and his
+disciples, must lave themselves in the fire river of Gehenna; that
+therein they shall be like salamanders; that the just shall soon
+be cleansed in the fire river, but the wicked shall be lastingly
+burned.12 Again, we find this doctrine prevailing among the
+Romans. In the great Forum was a stone called "Lapis Manalis,"
+described by Festus, which was supposed to cover the entrance to
+hell. This was solemnly lifted three times a year, in order to let
+those souls flow up whose sins had been purged away by their
+tortures or had been remitted in consideration of the offerings
+and services paid for them by the living. Virgil describes how
+souls are purified by the action of wind, water, and fire.13 The
+feast day of purgatory observed by papal Rome corresponds to the
+Lemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinal
+basis. In the Catholic countries of Europe at the present time, on
+All Saints' Day, festoons of sweet smelling flowers are hung on
+the tomb stones, and the people kneeling there repeat the prayer
+prescribed for releasing the souls of their relatives and friends
+from the plagues of purgatory. There is a notable coincidence
+between the Buddhist
+
+7 See references to "Sraddha" in index to Vishnu Purana.
+
+8 Atkinson's trans. of the Shah Nameh, p. 386.
+
+9 Richardson, Dissertation on the Language, Literature, and
+Manners of the Eastern Nations, p. 347.
+
+10 Cap. xii. 42-45.
+
+11 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 357.
+
+12 Kabbala Denudata, tom ii. pars. i. pp. 108, 109, 113.
+
+13 Aneid, lib. vi. 1. 739.
+
+
+and the Romanist usages. Throughout the Chinese Empire, during the
+seventh moon of every year, prayers are offered up accompanied by
+illuminations and other rites for the release of souls in
+purgatory. At these times the Buddhist priests hang up large
+pictures, showing forth the frightful scenes in the other world,
+to induce the people to pay them money for prayers in behalf of
+their suffering relatives and friends in purgatory.14
+
+Traces of belief in a purgatory early appear among the Christians.
+Many of the gravest Fathers of the first five centuries naturally
+conceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, that
+after death some souls will be punished for their sins until they
+are cleansed, and then will be released from pain. The Manichaans
+imagined that all souls, before returning to their native heaven,
+must be borne first to the moon, where with good waters they would
+be washed pure from outward filth, and then to the sun, where they
+would be purged by good fires from every inward stain.15 After
+these lunar and solar lustrations, they were fit for the eternal
+world of light. But the conception of purgatory as it was held by
+the early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects,
+was merely the just and necessary result of applying to the
+subject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishment
+should partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that it
+should be restorative. Jeremy Taylor conclusively argues that the
+prayers for the dead used by the early Christians do not imply any
+belief in the Papal purgatory.16 The severity and duration of the
+sufferings of the dead were not supposed to be in the power of the
+living, either their relatives or the clergy, but to depend on the
+moral and physical facts of the case according to justice and
+necessity, qualified only by the mercy of God.
+
+Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, either borrowing
+some of the more objectionable features of the purgatory doctrine
+previously held by the heathen, or else devising the same things
+himself from a perception of the striking adaptedness of such
+notions to secure an enviable power to the Church, constructed,
+established, and gave working efficiency to the dogmatic scheme of
+purgatory ever since firmly defended by the papal adherents as an
+integral part of the Roman Catholic system.17 The doctrine as
+matured and promulgated by Gregory, giving to the representatives
+of the Church an almost unlimited power over purgatory, rapidly
+grew into favor with the clergy and sank with general conviction
+into the hopes and fears of the laity. Venerable Bede, in the
+eighth century, gives a long account of the fully developed
+doctrine concerning purgatory, hell, paradise, and heaven. It is
+narrated in the form of a vision seen by Drithelm, who, in a
+trance, visits the regions which, on his return, he describes. The
+whole thing is gross, literal, horrible, closely resembling
+several well known descriptions given under similar circumstances
+and preserved in ancient heathen writers.18 The Church, seeing how
+admirably this instrument was calculated to promote her interest
+and deepen her power, left hardly any means untried to enlarge its
+sweep and intensify its operation. Accordingly, from the ninth to
+the sixteenth century, no doctrine was so central, prominent, and
+effective in the common teaching and
+
+14 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 210, note.
+
+15 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sect. 49, note 3.
+
+16 Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. book ii. sect. 2.
+
+17 Edgar, Variations of Popery, ch. xvi.
+
+18 Hist. Ecc., lib. v. cap. xii. See also lib. iii. cap. xix.
+
+
+practice of the Church, no fear was so widely spread and vividly
+felt in the bosom of Christendom, as the doctrine and the fear of
+purgatory.
+
+The Romanist theory of man's condition in the future life is this,
+in brief. By the sin of Adam, heaven was closed against him and
+all his posterity, and the devil acquired a right to shut up their
+disembodied souls in the under world. In consequence of the
+"original sin" transmitted from Adam, every human being, besides
+suffering the other woes flowing from sin, was helplessly doomed
+to the under world after death. In addition to this penalty, each
+one must also answer for his own personal sins. Christ died to
+"deliver mankind from sin," "discharge the punishment due them,"
+and "rescue them from the tyranny of the devil." He "descended
+into the under world," "subdued the devil," "despoiled the
+depths," "rescued the Fathers and just souls," and "opened
+heaven."19 "Until he rose, heaven was shut against every child of
+Adam, as it still is to those who die indebted." "The price paid
+by the Son of God far exceeded our debts." The surplus balance of
+merits, together with the merits accruing from the supererogatory
+good works of the saints and from the Divine sacrifice continually
+offered anew by the sacrament of the mass, constituted a reserved
+treasure upon which the Church was authorized to draw in behalf of
+any one she chose to favor. The localities of the future life were
+these:20 Limbus Patrum, or Abraham's Bosom, a place of peace and
+waiting, where the good went who died before Christ; Limbus
+Infantum, a mild, palliated hell, where the children go who, since
+Christ, have died unbaptized; Purgatory, where all sinners suffer
+until they are purified, or are redeemed by the Church, or until
+the last day; Hell, or Gehenna, whither the hopelessly wicked have
+always been condemned; and Heaven, whither the spotlessly good
+have been admitted since the ascension of Jesus. At the day of
+judgment the few human souls who have reached Paradise, together
+with the multitudes that crowd the regions of Gehenna, Purgatory,
+and Limbo, will reassume their bodies: the intermediate states
+will then be destroyed, and when their final sentence is
+pronounced all will depart forever,  the acquitted into heaven,
+the condemned into hell. In the mean time, the poor victims of
+purgatory, by the prayers of the living for them, by the transfer
+of good works to their account, above all, by the celebration of
+masses in their behalf, may be relieved, rescued, translated to
+paradise. The words breathed by the spirit of the murdered King of
+Denmark in the ears of the horror stricken Hamlet paint the
+popular belief of that age in regard to the grisly realm where
+guilty souls were plied with horrors whereof, but that they were
+forbidden:
+
+"To tell the secrets of their prison house, They could a tale
+unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy
+young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their
+spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each
+particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful
+porcupine."
+
+19 Catechism of the Council of Trent.
+
+20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, pars Suppl. Quast. 69.
+
+
+A few specimens of the stories embodying the ideas and
+superstitions current in the Middle Age may better illustrate the
+characteristic belief of the time than much abstract description.
+An unquestioning faith in the personality, visibility, and
+extensive agency of the devil was almost universal. Ascetics,
+saints, bishops, peasants, philosophers, kings, Gregory the Great,
+Martin Luther, all testified that they had often seen him. The
+mediaval conception of the devil was sometimes comical, sometimes
+awful. Grimm says, "He was Jewish, heathenish, Christian,
+idolatrous, elfish, titanic, spectral, all at once." He was "a
+soul snatching wolf," a "hell hound," a "whirlwind hammer;" now an
+infernal "parody of God" with "a mother who mimics the Virgin
+Mary," and now the "impersonated soul of evil."21 The well known
+story of Faust and the Devil, which in so many forms spread
+through Christendom, is so deeply significant of the faith and
+life of the age in which it arose that a volume would be required
+to unfold all its import. There was an old tradition that the
+students of necromancy or the black art, on reaching a certain
+pitch of proficiency, were obliged to run through a subterranean
+hall, where the devil literally caught the hindmost unless he sped
+so swiftly that the arch enemy could only seize his shadow, and in
+that case, a veritable Peter Schlemihl, he never cast a shadow
+afterwards! A man stood by his furnace one day casting eyes for
+buttons. The devil came up and asked what he was doing. "Casting
+eyes," replied the man. "Can you cast a pair for me?" quoth the
+devil. "That I can," says the man: "will you have them large or
+small?" "Oh, very large," answered the devil. He then ties the
+fiend on a bench and pours the molten lead into his eyes. Up jumps
+the devil, with the bench on his back, flees howling, and has
+never been seen since! There was also in wide circulation a wild
+legend to the effect that a man made a compact with the devil on
+the condition that he should secure a new victim for hell once in
+a century. As long as he did this he should enjoy life, riches,
+power, and a limited ubiquity; but failing a fresh victim at the
+end of each hundred years his own soul should be the forfeit. He
+lived four or five centuries, and then, in spite of his most
+desperate efforts, was disappointed of his expected victim on the
+last night of the century; and when the clock struck twelve the
+devil burst into his castle on a black steed and bore him off in a
+storm of lightning amidst the crash of thunders and the shrieks of
+fiends. St. Britius once during mass saw the devil in church
+taking account of the sins the congregation were committing. He
+covered the parchment all over, and, afraid of forgetting some of
+the offences, seized the scroll in his teeth and claws to stretch
+it out. It snapped, and his head was smartly bumped against the
+wall. St. Britius laughed aloud. The officiating priest rebuked
+him, but, on being told what had happened, improved the accident
+for the edification of his hearers.22 On the bursting of a certain
+glacier on the Alps, it is said the devil was seen swimming down
+the Rhone, a drawn sword in one hand, a golden ball in the other:
+opposite the town of Martigny, he cried, "Rise," and instantly the
+obedient river swelled above its banks and destroyed the town.
+
+Ignes fatui, hovering about marshes and misty places, were thought
+to be the spirits of unbaptized children endeavoring to guide
+travellers to the nearest water. A kindred fancy
+
+21 Deutsche Mythologie, cap. xxxiii.: Teufel.
+
+22 Quarterly Review, Jan. 1820: Pop. Myth. of the Middle Ages.
+
+
+also heard a spectral pack, called "yell hounds," afterwards
+corrupted to "hell hounds," composed of the souls of unbaptized
+children, which could not rest, but roamed and howled through the
+woods all night.23 A touching popular myth said, the robin's
+breast is so red because it flies into hell with drops of water in
+its bill to relieve the children there, and gets scorched.
+
+In 1171, Silo, a philosopher, implored a dying pupil of his to
+come back and reveal his state in the other world. A few days
+after his death the scholar appeared in a cowl of flames covered
+with logical propositions. He told Silo that he was from
+purgatory, that the cowl weighed on him worse than a tower, and
+said he was doomed to wear it for the pride he took in sophisms.
+As he thus spoke he let fall a drop of sweat on his master's hand,
+piercing it through. The next day Silo said to his scholars, "I
+leave croaking to frogs, cawing to crows, and vain things to the
+vain, and hie me to the logic which fears not death."
+
+"Linquo coax ranis, cras corvis, vanaque vanis, Ad logicen pergo
+qua mortis non timet ergo." 24
+
+In the long, quaint poem, "Vision of William concerning Piers
+Ploughman," written probably by Robert Langland about the year
+1362, there are many things illustrative of our subject. "I,
+Trojanus, a true knight, after death was condemned to hell for
+dying unbaptized. But, on account of my mercy and truth in
+administering the laws, the pope wished me to be saved; and God
+mercifully heard him and saved me without the help of masses."25
+"Ever since the fall of Adam, Age has shaken the Tree of Human
+Life, and the devil has gathered the fruit into hell."26 The
+author gives a most spirited account of Christ's descent into the
+under world after his death, his battle with the devils there, his
+triumph over them, his rescue of Adam, and other particulars.27 In
+this poem, as in nearly all the extant productions of that period,
+there are copious evidences of the extent and power of the popular
+faith in the devil and in purgatory, and in their close connection
+with the present life, a faith nourishingly embodied in thousands
+of singular tales. Thomas Wright has collected many of these in
+his antiquarian works. He relates an amusing incident that once
+befell a minstrel who had been borne into hell by a devil. The
+devils went forth in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Lucifer
+left the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, if
+he let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monk
+roasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiends
+were away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel to
+play at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture under
+his care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils,
+coming back and finding the fires all out and hell empty, kicked
+the hapless minstrel out, and Lucifer swore a big oath that no
+minstrel should ever darken the door of hell again!
+
+The mediaval belief in a future life was practically concentrated,
+for the most part, around the ideas of Satan, purgatory, the last
+judgment, hell. The faith in Christ, God,
+
+23 Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, 2d ed. p. 256.
+
+24 Michelet, Hist. de France, livre iv. chap. ix.
+
+25 Vision of Dowell, part iii.
+
+26 Vision of Dobet, part ii.
+
+27 Ibid., part iv.
+
+
+heaven, was much rarer and less influential. Neander says, "The
+inmost distinction of mediaval experience was an awful sense of
+another life and an invisible world." A most piteous illustration
+of the conjoined faith and fear of that age is furnished by an old
+dialogue between the "Soul and the Body" recently edited by
+Halliwell, an expression of humble trust and crouching horror
+irresistibly pathetic in its simplicity.28 A flood of revealing
+light is given as to the energy with which the doctrine of
+purgatory impressed itself on the popular mind, by the two facts,
+first, that the Council of Auxerre, in 1578, prohibited the
+administration of the eucharist to the dead; and, secondly, that
+in the eleventh and twelfth centuries "crosses of absolution" that
+is, crosses cut out of sheet lead, with the formula of absolution
+engraved on them were quite commonly buried with the dead.29 The
+eager sincerity of the mediaval belief in another life is
+attested, too, by the correspondence of the representations of the
+dead in their legends to the appearance, disposition, and pursuits
+they had in life. No oblivious draught, no pure spiritualization,
+had freed the departed souls from earthly bonds and associations.
+Light pretexts drew them back to their wonted haunts. A buried
+treasure allowed them no rest till they had led some one to raise
+it. An unfinished task, an uncancelled obligation, forced them
+again to the upper world. In ruined castles the ghosts of knights,
+in their accustomed habiliments, held tournaments and carousals.
+The priest read mass; the hunter pursued his game; the spectre
+robber fell on the benighted traveller.30 It is hard for us now to
+reproduce, even in imagination, the fervid and frightful
+earnestness of the popular faith of the Middle Age in the
+ramifying agency of the devil and in the horrors of purgatory. We
+will try to do it, in some degree, by a series of illustrations
+aiming to show at once how prevalent such a belief and fear were,
+and how they became so prevalent.
+
+First, we may specify the teaching of the Church whose authority
+in spiritual concerns bore almost unquestioned sway over the minds
+of more than eighteen generations. By the logical subtleties of
+her scholastic theologians, by the persuasive eloquence of her
+popular preachers, by the frantic ravings of her fanatic devotees,
+by the parading proclamation of her innumerable pretended
+miracles, by the imposing ceremonies of her dramatic ritual,
+almost visibly opening heaven and hell to the over awed
+congregation, by her wonder working use of the relics of martyrs
+and saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal the
+sick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to be
+hostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinal
+system into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people,
+and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wand
+convulsed the world. In a pastoral letter addressed to the
+Carlovingian prince Louis, the grandson of Charlemagne,  a letter
+probably composed by the famous Hincmar, bearing date 858, and
+signed by the Bishops of Rheims and Rouen, a Gallic synod
+authoritatively declared that Charles Martel was damned; "that on
+the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell
+of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon, and that a saint of the
+times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of
+this great hero burning to all eternity in the abyss of hell."
+
+28 Early English Miscellanies, No. 2.
+
+29 London Antiquaries' Archaologis, vol. xxxv. art. 22.
+
+30 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. i., appendix.
+
+
+A tremendous impulse, vivifying and emphasizing the eschatological
+notions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease when
+it died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation of
+the impending end of the world which wellnigh universally
+prevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the charters
+given at that time commence with the words, "As the world is now
+drawing to a close." 31 This expectation drew additional strength
+from the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence,
+war, superstition  then weighing on the people. "The idea of the
+end of the world," we quote from Michelet, "sad as that world was,
+was at once the hope and the terror of the Middle Age. Look at
+those antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute,
+meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with a
+look of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. See
+how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreaded
+moment when the resurrection shall redeem them from their
+unspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existence
+and from the grave to God."
+
+Furthermore, this superstitious character of the mediaval belief
+in the future life acquired breadth and intensity from the
+profound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of that
+whole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, romances,
+fears, when every landscape of life "wore a strange hue, as if
+seen through the sombre medium of a stained casement." While
+congregations knelt in awe beneath the lifted Host, and the image
+of the dying Savior stretched on the rood glimmered through clouds
+of incense, perhaps an army of Flagellants would march by the
+cathedral, shouting, "The end of the world is at hand!" filling
+the streets with the echoes of their torture as they lashed their
+naked backs with knotted cords wet with blood; and no soul but
+must shudder with the infection of horror as the dreadful notes of
+the "Dies Iioe" went sounding through the air. The narratives of
+the desert Fathers, the miracles wrought in convent cells, the
+visions of pillar saints, the thrilling accompaniments of the
+Crusades, and other kindred influences, made the world a perpetual
+mirage. The belching of a volcano was the vomit of uneasy hell.
+The devil stood before every tempted man, Ghosts walked in every
+nightly dell. Ghastly armies were seen contending where the aurora
+borealis hung out its bloody banners. The Huns under Attila,
+ravaging Southern Europe, were thought to be literal demons who
+had made an irruption from the pit. The metaphysician was in peril
+of the stake as a heretic, the natural philosopher as a magician.
+A belief in witchcraft and a trust in ordeals were universal, even
+from Pope Eugenius, who introduced the trial by cold water, and
+King James, who wrote volumes on magic, to the humblest monk who
+shuddered when passing the church crypt, and the simplest peasant
+who quaked in his homeward path at seeing a will o' the wisp.
+"Denounced by the preacher and consigned to the flames by the
+judge, the wizard received secret service money from the Cabinet
+to induce him to destroy the hostile armament as it sailed before
+the wind." As a vivid writer has well said, "A gloomy mist of
+credulity enwrapped the cathedral and the hall of justice, the
+cottage and the throne. In the dank shadows of the universal
+ignorance a thousand superstitions, like foul animals of night,
+were propagated and nourished."
+
+31 Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. ix.
+
+
+The beliefs and excitements of the mediaval period partook of a
+sort of epidemic character, diffusing and working like a
+contagion.32 There were numberless throngs of pilgrims to famous
+shrines, immense crowds about the localities of popular legends,
+relics, or special grace. In the magnetic sphere of such a fervid
+and credulous multitude, filled with the kindling interaction of
+enthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables would
+flourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. In
+commemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St.
+Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church at
+Assisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of August
+each year that being the anniversary of the saint's achievement a
+free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their
+baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked
+thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the
+suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two
+thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years
+the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the
+temple of Juggernaut.33
+
+Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see it
+everywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it.
+Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Its
+applications and results were constantly and universally thrust
+into notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching of
+excommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagne
+complained that the bishops and abbots forced property from
+foolish people by promises and threats: "Suadendo de coelestis
+regni beatitudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni."34 The
+rival mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans,
+acquired great riches and power by the traffic in indulgences.
+They even had the impudence to affirm that the members of their
+orders were privileged above all other men in the next world.
+Milton alludes to those who credited these monstrous assumptions:
+"And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of
+Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised."
+
+The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monks
+that their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thence
+to heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order.
+The Carmelites also asserted that the Virgin Mary appeared to
+Simon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemn
+promise that the souls of such as left the world with the
+Carmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infallibly
+preserved from eternal damnation. Mosheim says that Pope Benedict
+XIV. was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction.35
+
+If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine of the
+future life, whether with respect to the hair drawn scholastic
+metaphysics by which it was defended, or with respect to the
+concrete forms in which the popular apprehension held it, let him
+read the Divina Commedia of Dante; for it is all there. Whoso with
+adequate insight and sympathy peruses
+
+32 Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages.
+
+33 Quarterly Review, July, 1819: article on Monachism.
+
+34 Perry, History of the Franks, p. 467.
+
+35 Eccl. Hist., XIII. Century, part ii. ch. 2, sect. 29.
+
+
+the pages of the immortal Florentine at whom the people pointed as
+he walked the streets, and said, "There goes the man who has been
+in hell" will not fail to perceive with what a profound sincerity
+the popular breast shuddered responsive to ecclesiastical threats
+and purgatorial woes.
+
+The tremendous moral power of this solitary work lies in the fact
+that it is a series of terrific and fascinating tableaux,
+embodying the idea of inflexible poetic justice impartially
+administered upon king and varlet, pope and beggar, oppressor and
+victim, projected amidst the unalterable necessities of eternity,
+and moving athwart the lurid abyss and the azure cope with an
+intense distinctness that sears the gazer's eyeballs. The Divina
+Commedia, with a wonderful truth, also reflects the feeling of the
+age when it was written in this respect, that there is a grappling
+force of attraction, a compelling realism, about its "Purgatory"
+and "Hell" which are to be sought in vain in the delineations of
+its "Paradise." The mediaval belief in a future life had for its
+central thought the day of judgment, for its foremost emotion
+terror.36
+
+The roots of this faith were unquestionably fertilized, and the
+development of this fear quickened, to a very great extent, by
+deliberate and systematic delusions. One of the most celebrated of
+these organized frauds was the gigantic one perpetrated under the
+auspices of the Dominican monks at Berne in 1509, the chief actors
+in which were unmasked and executed. Bishop Burnet has given an
+extremely interesting account of this affair in his volume of
+travels. Suffice it to say, the monks appeared at midnight in the
+cells of various persons, now impersonating devils, in horrid
+attire, breathing flames and brimstone, now claiming to be the
+souls of certain sufferers escaped from purgatory, and again
+pretending to be celebrated saints, with the Virgin Mary at their
+head. By the aid of mechanical and chemical arrangements, they
+wrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of the
+spectators in a frightful manner.37 There is every reason to
+suppose that such deceptions  miracles in which secret speaking
+tubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were most
+frequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors were
+unscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one of
+the foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Age
+in the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and so
+intense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarming
+spirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So the
+Danish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says to
+Hamlet, "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the
+night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul
+crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away."
+
+36 If any one would see in how many forms the faith in hell and in
+the devil appeared, let him look over the pages of the
+"Dictionnaire Infernal," by J. Collin de Plancy.
+
+37 Maclaine's trans, of Mosheim's Eccl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 10,
+note.
+
+38 Manufactures of the Ancients, pub. by Harper and Brothers,
+1845, part iv. ch. 3.
+
+
+When the shadows began to fall thick behind the sunken sun, these
+poor creatures were thought to spring from their beds of torture,
+to wander amidst the scenes of their sins or to haunt the living;
+but at the earliest scent of morn, the first note of the cock,
+they must hie to their fire again. Midnight was the high noon of
+ghostly and demoniac revelry on the earth. As the hour fell with
+brazen clang from the tower, the belated traveller, afraid of the
+rustle of his own dress, the echo of his own footfall, the
+wavering of his own shadow, afraid of his own thoughts, would
+breathe the suppressed invocation, "Angels and ministers of grace
+defend us!" as the idea crept curdling over his brain and through
+his veins, "It is the very witching time of night, When
+churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this
+world."
+
+Working in alliance with the foregoing forces of superstition was
+the powerful influence of the various forms of insanity which
+remarkably abounded in the Middle Age. The insane person, it was
+believed, was possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives,
+were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernal
+visions, diabolical interviews, encounters with apparitions, and
+every thing that would naturally arise in a deranged and
+preternaturally sensitive mind from the chief conceptions then
+current concerning the invisible world.39
+
+The principal works of art exposed to the people were such as
+served to impress upon their imaginations the Church doctrine of
+the future life in all its fearfulness, with its vigorous dramatic
+points. In the cathedral at Antwerp there is a representation of
+hell carved in wood, whose marvellous elaborateness astonishes,
+and whose painful expressiveness oppresses, every beholder. With
+what excruciating emotions the pious crowds must have contemplated
+the harrowingly vivid paintings of the Inferno, by Orcagna, still
+to be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa! In the cathedral at
+Canterbury there was a window on which was painted a detailed
+picture of Christ vanquishing the devils in their own domain; but
+we believe it has been removed. However, the visitor still sees on
+the fine east window of York Cathedral the final doom of the
+wicked, hell being painted as an enormous mouth; also in the west
+front of Lincoln Cathedral an ancient bas relief representing hell
+as a monstrous mouth vomiting flame and serpents, with two human
+beings walking into it. The minster at Freyburg has a grotesque
+bas relief over its main portal, representing the Judgment. St.
+Nicholas stands in the centre, and the Savior is seated above him.
+On the left, an angel weighs mankind in a huge pair of scales, and
+a couple of malicious imps try to make the human scale kick the
+beam. Underneath, St. Peter is ushering the good into Paradise. On
+the right is shown a devil, with a pig's head, dragging after him
+a throng of the wicked. He also has a basket on his back filled
+with figures whom he is in the act of flinging into a reeking
+caldron stirred by several imps. Hell is typified, on one side, by
+the jaws of a monster crammed to the teeth with reprobates, and
+Satan is seen sitting on his throne above them. A recent traveller
+writes from
+
+39 De Boismont, Rational Hist. of Hallucivatious, ch. xiv.
+
+
+Naples, "The favorite device on the church walls here is a
+vermilion picture of a male and a female soul, respectively up to
+the waist [the waist of a soul!] in fire, with an angel over each
+watering them from a water pot. This is meant to get money from
+the compassionate to pay for the saying of masses in behalf of
+souls in purgatory." Ruskin has described some of the church
+paintings of the Last Judgment by the old masters as possessing a
+power even now sufficient to stir every sensibility to its depths.
+Such works, gazed on day after day, while multitudes were kneeling
+beneath in the shadowy aisles, and clouds of incense were floating
+above, and the organ was pealing and the choir chanting in full
+accord, must produce lasting effects on the imagination, and thus
+contribute in return to the faith and fear which inspired them.
+
+Villani as also Sismondi gives a description of a horrible
+representation of hell shown at Florence in 1304 by the
+inhabitants of San Priano, on the river Arno. The glare of flames,
+the shrieks of men disguised as devils, scenes of infernal
+torture, filled the night. Unfortunately, the scaffolding broke
+beneath the crowd, and many spectators were burned or drowned, and
+that which began as an entertaining spectacle ended as a direful
+reality. The whole affair is a forcible illustration of the
+literality with which the popular mind and faith apprehended the
+notion of the infernal world.
+
+Another means by which the views we have been considering were
+both expressed and recommended to the senses and belief of the
+people was those miracle plays that formed one of the most
+peculiar features of the Middle Age. These plays, founded on, and
+meant to illustrate, Scripture narratives and theological
+doctrines, were at first enacted by the priests in the churches,
+afterwards by the various trading companies or guilds of
+mechanics. In 1210, Pope Gregory "forbade the clergy to take any
+part in the plays in churches or in the mummings at festivals." A
+similar prohibition was published by the Council of Treves, in
+1227. The Bishop of Worms, in 1316, issued a proclamation against
+the abuses which had crept into the festivities of Easter, and
+gives a long and curious description of them.40 There were two
+popular festivals, of which Michelet gives a full and amusing
+description, one called the "Fete of the Tipsy Priests," when they
+elected a Bishop of Unreason, offered him incense of burned
+leather, sang obscene songs in the choir, and turned the altar
+into a dice table; the other called the "Fete of the Cuckolds,"
+when the laymen crowned each other with leaves, the priests wore
+their surplices wrong side out and threw bran in each others'
+eyes, and the bell ringers pelted each other with biscuits. There
+is a religious play by Calderon, entitled "The Divine Orpheus," in
+which the entire Church scheme of man's fall the devil's empire,
+Christ's descent there, and the victorious sequel is embodied in a
+most effective manner. In the priestly theology and in the popular
+heart of those times there was no other single particular one
+tenth part so prominent and vivid as that of Christ's entrance
+after his death into hell to rescue the old saints and break down
+Satan's power.41
+
+40 Early Mysteries and Latin Poems of the XII. and XIII.
+Centuries, edited by Thomas Wright. See the eloquent sermon on
+this subject preached by Luis de Granada in the sixteenth century.
+Ticknor's Hist. Spanish Lit., vol. iii. pp. 123-127.
+
+
+Peter Lombard says, "What did the Redeemer do to the despot who
+had us in his bonds? He offered him the cross as a mouse trap, and
+put his blood on it as bait." 42 About that scene there was an
+incomparable fascination for every believer. Christ laid aside his
+Godhead and died. The devil thought he had secured a new victim,
+and humanity swooned in grief and despair. But, lo! the Crucified,
+descending to the inexorable dungeons, puts on all his Divinity,
+and suddenly "The captive world awakt, and founde The pris'ner
+loose, the jailer bounde!" 43
+
+A large proportion of the miracle plays, or Mysteries, turned on
+this event. In the "Mystery of the Resurrection of Christ" occurs
+the following couplet: "This day the angelic King has risen,
+Leading the pious from their prison." 44
+
+The title of one of the principal plays in the Towneley Mysteries
+is "Extractio Animarum ab Inferno." It describes Christ descending
+to the gates of hell to claim his own. Adam sees afar the gleam of
+his coming, and with his companions begins to sing for joy. The
+infernal porter shouts to the other demons, in alarm, "Since first
+that hell was made and I was put therein, Such sorrow never ere I
+had, nor heard I such a din. My heart begins to start; my wit it
+waxes thin; I am afraid we can't rejoice, these souls must from
+us go. Ho, Beelzebub! bind these boys: such noise was never heard
+in hell."
+
+Satan vows he will dash Beelzebub's brains out for frightening him
+so. Meanwhile, Christ draws near, and says, "Lift up your gates,
+ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the
+King of glory shall come in." The portals fly asunder. Satan
+shouts up to his friends, "Dyng the dastard down;" but Beelzebub
+replies, "That is easily said." Jesus and the devil soon meet,
+face to face. A long colloquy ensues, in the course of which the
+latter tells the former that he knew his Father well by sight! At
+last Jesus frees Adam, Eve, the prophets, and others, and ascends,
+leaving the devil in the lowest pit, resolving that hell shall
+soon be fuller than before; for he will walk east and he will walk
+west, and he will seduce thousands from their allegiance. Another
+play, similar to the foregoing, but much more extensively known
+and acted, was called the "Harrowing of Hell." Christ and Satan
+appear on the stage and argue in the most approved scholastic
+style for the right of possession in the human race. Satan says,
+"Whoever purchases any thing, It belongs to him and to his
+children. Adam, hungry, came to me;
+
+42 Sententia, lib. iii. distinctio 19.
+
+43 Hone, Ancient Mysteries.
+
+44 "Resurrexit hodie Rex angelorum Ducitur de tenebris turba
+piorum."
+
+
+I made him do me homage: For an apple, which I gave him, He and
+all his race belong to me." But Christ instantly puts a different
+aspect on the argument, by replying, "Satan! it was mine, The
+apple thou gavest him. The apple and the apple tree Both were made
+by me. As he was purchased with my goods, With reason will I have
+him." 45
+
+In a religious Mystery exhibited at Lisbon as late as the close of
+the eighteenth century, the following scene occurs. Cain kicks his
+brother Abel badly and kills him. A figure like a Chinese
+mandarin, seated in a chair, condemns Cain and is drawn up into
+the clouds. The mouth of hell then appears, like the jaws of a
+great dragon: amid smoke and lightning it casts up three devils,
+one of them having a wooden leg. These take a dance around Cain,
+and are very jocose, one of them inviting him to hell to take a
+cup of brimstone coffee, and another asking him to make up a party
+at whist. Cain snarls, and they tumble him and themselves headlong
+into the squib vomiting mouth.
+
+Various books of accounts kept by the trading companies who
+celebrated these Mysteries of the expenses incurred have been
+published, and are exceedingly amusing. "Item: payd for kepyng of
+fyer at hellmothe, four pence." "For a new hoke to hang Judas, six
+pence." "Item: payd for mendyng and payntyng hellmouthe, two
+pence." "Girdle for God, nine pence." "Axe for Pilatte's son, one
+shilling." "A staff for the demon, one penny." "God's coat of
+white leather, three shillings." The stage usually consisted of
+three platforms. On the highest sat God, surrounded by his angels.
+On the next were the saints in Paradise, the intermediate state of
+the good after death. On the third were mere men yet living in the
+world. On one side of the lowest stage, in the rear, was a fearful
+cave or yawning mouth filled with smoke and flames, and denoting
+hell. From this ever and anon would issue the howls and shrieks of
+the damned. Amidst hideous yellings, devils would rush forth and
+caper about and snatch hapless souls into this pit to their
+doom.46 The actors, in their mock rage, sometimes leaped from the
+pageant into the midst of the laughing, screaming, trembling
+crowd. The dramatis personoe included many queer characters, such
+as a "Worm of Conscience," "Deadman," (representing a soul
+delivered from hell at the descent of Christ,) numerous "Damned
+Souls," dressed in flame colored garments, "Theft," "Lying,"
+"Gluttony." But the devil himself was the favorite character; and
+often, when his personified vices jumped on him and pinched and
+cudgelled him till he roared, the mirth of the honest audience
+knew no bounds. For there were in the Middle Age two sides to the
+popular idea of the devil and of all appertaining to him. He was a
+soul harrowing bugbear or a rib shaking jest according to the hour
+and one's
+
+45 Halliwell's edition of the Harrowing of Hell, p. 18.
+
+46 Sharp, Essay on the Dramatic Mysteries, p. 24.
+
+
+humor. Rabelais's Pantagruel is filled with irresistible
+burlesques of the doctrine of purgatory. The ludicrous side of
+this subject may be seen by reading Tarlton's "Jests" and his
+"Newes out of Purgatorie." 47 Glimpses of it are also to be caught
+through many of the humorous passages in Shakspeare. Dromio says
+of an excessively fat and greasy kitchen wench, "If she lives till
+doomsday she'll burn a week longer than the whole world!" And
+Falstaff, cracking a kindred joke on Bardolph's carbuncled nose,
+avows his opinion that it will serve as a flaming beacon to light
+lost souls the way to purgatory! Again, seeing a flea on the same
+flaming proboscis, the doughty knight affirmed it was "a black
+soul burning in hell fire." In this element of mediaval life, this
+feature of mediaval literature, a terrible belief lay under the
+gay raillery. Here is betrayed, on a wide scale, that natural
+reaction of the faculties from excessive oppression to sportive
+wit, from deep repugnance to superficial jesting, which has often
+been pointed out by philosophical observers as a striking fact in
+the psychological history of man.
+
+One more active and mighty cause of the dreadful faith and fear
+with which the Middle Age contemplated the future life was the
+innumerable and frightful woes, crimes, tyrannies, instruments of
+torture, engines of persecution, insane superstitions, which then
+existed, making its actual life a hell. The wretchedness and
+cruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightful
+beliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earth
+was full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse with
+them. The Inquisition sat shrouded and enthroned in supernatural
+obscurity of cunning and awfulness of power, and thrust its
+invisible daggers everywhere. The facts men knew here around them
+gave credibility to the imagery in which the hereafter was
+depicted. The flaming stakes of an Auto da Fe around which the
+victims of ecclesiastical hatred writhed were but faint emblems of
+what awaited their souls in the realm of demons whereto the tender
+mercies of the Church consigned them. Indeed, the fate of myriads
+of heretics and traitors could not fail to project the lurid
+vision of hell with all its paraphernalia into the imaginations of
+the people of the Dark Age. The glowing lava of purgatory heated
+the soil they trod, and a smell of its sulphur surcharged the air.
+A stupendous revelation of terror, bearing whole volumes of
+direful meaning, is given in the single fact that it was a common
+belief of that period that the holy Inquisitors would sit with
+Christ in the judgment at the last day.48 If king or noble took
+offence at some uneasy retainer or bold serf, he ordered him to be
+secretly buried in the cell of some secluded fortress, and he was
+never heard of more. So, if pope or priest hated or feared some
+stubborn thinker, he straightway, "Would banish him to wear a
+burning chain In the great dungeons of the unforgiven, Beneath
+the space deep castle walls of heaven."
+
+It was an age of cruelty, never to be restored, when the world was
+boiling in tempest and men rode on the crests of fear.
+
+47 Recently edited by Halliwell and published by the Shakspeare
+Society.
+
+48 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 205.
+
+
+Researches made within the last century among the remains of
+famous mediaval edifices, both ecclesiastic and state, have
+brought to light the dismal records of forgotten horrors. In many
+a royal palace, priestly building, and baronial castle, there were
+secret chambers full of infernal machinery contrived for
+inflicting tortures, and under them concealed trap doors opening
+into rayless dungeons with no outlet and whose floors were covered
+with the mouldering bones of unfortunate wretches who had
+mysteriously disappeared long ago and tracelessly perished there.
+Sometimes these trap doors were directly above profound pits of
+water, in which the victim would drown as he dropped from the
+mangling hooks, racks, and pincers of the torture chamber. There
+were horrible rumors current in the Middle Age of a machine called
+the "Virgin," used for putting men to death; but little was known
+about it, and it was generally supposed to be a fable, until, some
+years ago one of the identical machines was discovered in an old
+Austrian castle. It was a tall wooden woman, with a painted face,
+which the victim was ordered to kiss. As he approached to offer
+the salute, he trod on a spring, causing the machine to fly open,
+stretch out a pair of iron arms, and draw him to its breast
+covered with a hundred sharp spikes, which pierced him to death.49
+
+Ignorance and alarm, in a suffering and benighted age, surrounded
+by sounds of superstition and sights of cruelty, must needs breed
+and foster a horrid faith in regard to the invisible world.
+Accordingly, the common doctrine of the future life prevailing in
+Christendom from the ninth century till the sixteenth was as we
+have portrayed it. Of course there are exceptions to be admitted
+and qualifications to be made; but, upon the whole, the picture is
+faithful. Fortunately, intellect and soul could not slumber
+forever, nor the mediaval nightmares always keep their torturing
+seat on the bosom of humanity. Noble men arose to vindicate the
+rights of reason and the divinity of conscience. The world was
+circumnavigated, and its revolution around the sun was
+demonstrated. A thousand truths were discovered, a thousand
+inventions introduced. Papacy tottered, its prestige waned, its
+infallibility sunk. The light of knowledge shone, the simplicity
+of nature was seen, and the benignity of God was surmised.
+Thought, throwing off many restrictions and accumulating much
+material, began to grow free, and began to grow wise. And so,
+before the calm, steady gaze of enlightened and cheerful reason,
+the live and crawling smoke of hell, which had so long enwreathed
+the mind of the time with its pendent and breathing horrors,
+gradually broke up and dissolved, "Like a great superstitious
+snake, uncurled From the pale temples of the awakening world."
+
+49 The Kiss of the Virgin, in the Archaologia published by the
+Antiquaries of London, vol. xxviii.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+THE folly and paganism of some of the Church dogmas, the rapacious
+haughtiness of its spirit, the tyranny of its rule, and the
+immoral character of many of its practices, had often awakened the
+indignant protests and the determined opposition of men of
+enlightened minds, vigorous consciences, and generous hearts, both
+in its bosom and out of it. Many such men, vainly struggling to
+purify the Church from its iniquitous errors or to relieve mankind
+from its outrageous burdens, had been silenced and crushed by its
+relentless might. Arnold, Wickliffe, Wessel, Savonarola, and a
+host of others, are to be gratefully remembered forever as the
+heroic though unsuccessful forerunners of the mighty monk of
+Wittenberg.1 The corruption of the mediaval Church grew worse, and
+became so great as to stir a very extensive disgust and revulsion.
+Wholesale pardons for all their sins were granted indiscriminately
+to those who accepted the terms of the papal officials; while
+every independent thinker, however evangelical his faith and
+exemplary his character, was hopelessly doomed to hell. Especially
+were these pardons given to pilgrims and to the Crusaders. Bernard
+of Clairvaux, exhorting the people to undertake a new Crusade,
+tells them that "God condescends to invite into his service
+murderers, robbers, adulterers, perjurers, and those sunk in other
+crimes; and whosoever falls in this cause shall secure pardon for
+the sins which he has never confessed with contrite heart."2 At
+the opening of "Piers the Ploughman's Crede" a person is
+introduced saying, "I saw a company of pilgrims on their way to
+Rome, who came home with leave to lie all the rest of their
+lives!" Nash, in his "Lenten Stuff," speaks of a proclamation
+which caused "three hundred thousand people to roam to Rome for
+purgatorie pills." Ecclesiasticism devoured ethics. Allegiance to
+morality was lowered into devotion to a ritual. The sale of
+indulgences at length became too impudent and blasphemous to be
+any longer endured, when John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, travelled
+over Europe, and, setting up his auction block in the churches,
+offered for sale those famous indulgences of Leo X. which
+promised, to every one rich enough to pay the requisite price,
+remission of all sins, however enormous, and whether past,
+present, or future!3 This brazen but authorized charlatan boasted
+that "he had saved more souls from hell by the sale of indulgences
+than St. Peter had converted to Christianity by his preaching." He
+also said that "even if any one had ravished the Mother of God he
+could sell him a pardon for it!" The soul of Martin Luther took
+fire. The consequence to which a hundred combining causes
+contributed was the Protestant Reformation. This great movement
+produced, in relation to our subject, three important results. It
+noticeably modified the practice and the popular preaching of the
+Roman Catholic Church.
+
+1 Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation.
+
+2 Epist. CCCLXIII. ad Orientalis Francia Clerum et Populum.
+
+3 D'Aubigne, Hist. Reformation, book iii.
+
+
+The dogmas of the Romanist theology remained as they were before.
+But a marked change took place in the public conduct of the papal
+functionaries. Morality was made more prominent, and mere
+ritualism less obtrusive. Comparatively speaking, an emphasis was
+taken from ecclesiastic confession and indulgence, and laid upon
+ethical obedience and piety. The Council of Trent, held at this
+time, says, in its decree concerning indulgences, "In granting
+indulgences, the Church desires that moderation be observed, lest,
+by excessive facility, ecclesiastical discipline be enervated."
+Imposture became more cautious, threats less frequent and less
+terrible; the teeth of persecution were somewhat blunted; miracles
+grew rarer; the insufferable glare of purgatory and hell faded,
+and the open traffic in forgiveness of sins, or the compounding
+for deficiencies, diminished. But among the more ignorant papal
+multitudes the mediaval superstition holds its place still in all
+its virulence and grossness. "Heaven and hell are as much a part
+of the Italian's geography as the Adriatic and the Apennines; the
+Queen of Heaven looks on the streets as clear as the morning star;
+and the souls in purgatory are more readily present to conception
+than the political prisoners immured in the dungeons of Venice."
+
+A second consequence of the Reformation is seen in the numerous
+dissenting sects to which its issues gave rise. The chief
+peculiarities of the Protestant doctrines of the future life are
+embodied in the four leading denominations commonly known as
+Lutheran, Calvinistic, Unitarian, and Universalist. Each of these
+includes a number of subordinate parties bearing distinctive
+names, (such as Arminian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist,
+Restorationist, and many others;) but these minor differences are
+too trivial to deserve distinctive characterization here. The
+Lutheran formula is that, through the sacrifice of Christ,
+salvation is offered to all who will accept it by a sincere faith.
+Some will comply with these terms and secure heaven; others will
+not, and so will be lost forever. Luther's views were not firmly
+defined and consistent throughout his career; they were often
+obscure, and they fluctuated much. It is true he always insisted
+that there was no salvation without faith, and that all who had
+faith should be saved. But, while he generally seems to believe in
+the current doctrine of eternal damnation, he sometimes appears to
+encourage the hope that all will finally be saved. In a remarkable
+letter to Hansen von Rechenberg, dated 1522, he says, in effect,
+"Whoso hath faith in Christ shall be saved. God forbid that I
+should limit the time for acquiring this faith to the present
+life! In the depths of the Divine mercy, there may be opportunity
+to win it in the future state."
+
+The Calvinistic formula is that heaven is attainable only for
+those whom the arbitrary predestination of God has elected; all
+others are irretrievably damned. Calvin was the first Christian
+theologian who succeeded in giving the fearful doctrine of
+unconditional election and reprobation a lodgment in the popular
+breast. The Roman Catholic Church had earnestly repudiated it.
+Gotteschalk was condemned and died in prison for advocating it, in
+the ninth century. But Calvin's character enabled him to believe
+it, and his talents and position gave great weight to his advocacy
+of it, and it has since been widely received. Catholicism,
+Lutheranism, Calvinism, all agreed in the general proposition that
+by sin physical death came into the world, heaven was shut against
+man, and all men utterly lost. They differed only in some
+unessential details concerning the condition of that lost state.
+They also agreed in the general proposition that Christ came, by
+his incarnation, death, descent to hell, resurrection, and
+ascension, to redeem men from their lost state. They only differed
+in regard to the precise grounds and extent of that redemption.
+The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score of
+original sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelity
+and the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonement
+made all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all may
+have faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would fall
+and incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatched
+as brands from the burning, while the mass should be left to
+eternal torture; and Christ's atonement purchased the predestined
+salvation of the chosen few. Furthermore, Lutherans and
+Calvinists, in all their varieties, agree with the Romanist in
+asserting that Christ shall come again, the dead be raised bodily,
+a universal judgment be held, and that then the condemned shall
+sink into the everlasting fire of hell, and the accepted rise into
+the endless bliss of heaven.
+
+The Socinian doctrine relative to the future fate of man differed
+from the foregoing in the following particulars. First, it limited
+the redeeming mission of Christ to the enlightening influences of
+the truths which he proclaimed with Divine authority, the moral
+power of his perfect example, and the touching motives exhibited
+in his death. Secondly, it asserted a natural ability in every man
+to live a life conformed to right reason and sound morality, and
+promised heaven to all who did this in obedience to the
+instructions and after the pattern of Christ. Thirdly, it declared
+that the wicked, after suffering excruciating agonies, would be
+annihilated. Respecting the second coming of Christ, a physical
+resurrection of the dead, and a day of judgment, the Socinians
+believed with the other sects.4 Their doctrine scarcely
+corresponds with that of the present Unitarians in any thing. The
+dissent of the Unitarian from the popular theology is much more
+fundamental, detailed, and consistent than that of the Socinian
+was, and approaches much closer to the Rationalism of the present
+day.
+
+The Universalist formula every soul created by God shall sooner or
+later be saved from sin and woe and inherit everlasting happiness
+has been publicly defended in every age of the Christian Church.5
+It was first publicly condemned as a heresy at the very close of
+the fourth century. It ranks among its defenders the names of
+Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of
+Nyssa, and several other prominent Fathers. Universalism has been
+held in four forms, on four grounds. First, it has been supposed
+that Christ died for all, and that, by the infinite efficacy of
+his redeeming merits, all sins shall be cancelled and every soul
+be saved. This was the scheme of those early Universalist
+Christians whom Epiphanius condemns as heretics; also of a few in
+more modern times. Secondly, it has been thought that each person
+would be punished in the future state according to the deeds done
+in the body, each sin be expiated by a proportionate amount of
+suffering, the retribution of some souls being severe and long,
+that of others light and brief; but, every penalty being at
+
+4 Flugge gives a full exposition of these points with references
+to the authorities. Lehre vom Zustande, u. s. f., abth. ii. ss.
+243-260.
+
+5 Dietelmaier, Commenti Fanatici [non-ASCII characters omitted] Hist.
+Antiquar.
+
+
+length exhausted, the last victim would be restored. This was the
+notion of Origen, the basis of the doctrine of purgatory, and the
+view of most of the Restorationists. Thirdly, it has been imagined
+that, by the good pleasure and fixed laws of God, all men are
+destined to an impartial, absolute, and instant salvation beyond
+the grave: all sins are justly punished, all moral distinctions
+equitably compensated, in this life; in the future an equal glory
+awaits all men, by the gracious and eternal election of God, as
+revealed to us in the benignant mission of Christ. This is the
+peculiar conception distinguishing some members of the
+denomination now known as Universalists. Finally, it has been
+believed that the freedom and probation granted here extend into
+the life to come; that the aim of all future punishment will be
+remedial, beneficent, not revengeful; that stronger motives will
+be applied for producing repentance, and grander attractions to
+holiness be felt; and that thus, at some time or other, even the
+most sunken and hardened souls will be regenerated and raised up
+to heaven in the image of God. Almost all Universalists, most
+Unitarians, and large number of individual Christians outwardly
+affiliated with other denominations, now accept and cherish this
+theory.
+
+One important variation from the doctrine of the dominant sects,
+in connection with the present subject, is worthy of special
+notice. We refer to the celebrated controversy waged in England,
+in the first part of the eighteenth century, in regard to the
+intermediate state of the dead. The famous Dr. Coward and a few
+supporters labored, with much zeal, skill, and show of learning,
+to prove the natural mortality of the soul. They asserted this to
+be both a philosophical truth proved by scientific facts and a
+Christian doctrine declared in Scripture and taught by the
+Fathers. They argued that the soul is not an independent entity,
+but is merely the life of the body. Proceeding thus far on the
+principles of a materialistic science, they professed to complete
+their theory from Scripture, without doing violence to any
+doctrine of the acknowledged religion.6 The finished scheme was
+this. Man was naturally mortal; but, by the pleasure and will of
+God, he would have been immortally preserved alive had he not
+sinned. Death is the consequence of sin, and man utterly perishes
+in the grave. But God will restore the dead, through Christ, at
+the day of the general resurrection which he has foretold in the
+gospel.7 Some of the writers in this copious controversy
+maintained that previous to the advent of Christ death was eternal
+annihilation to all except a few who enjoyed an inspired
+anticipatory faith in him, but that all who died after his coming
+would be restored in the resurrection, the faithful to be advanced
+to heaven, the wicked to be the victims of unending torture.8
+Clarke and Baxter both wrote with extreme ability in support of
+the natural immortality and separate existence of the soul. On the
+other hand, the learned Henry Dodwell cited, from the lore of
+three thousand years, a plausible body of authorities to show that
+the soul is in itself but a mortal breath. He also contended, by a
+singular perversion of figurative phrases from the New Testament
+and from some of the Fathers, that,
+
+6 Coward, Search after Souls.
+
+7 Hallet, No Resurrection, no Future State.
+
+8 Coward, Defence of the Search after Souls. Dodwell, Epistolary
+Discourse. Peckard, Observations. Fleming, Survey of the Search
+after Souls. Law, State of Separate Spirits. Layton, Treatise of
+Departed Souls.
+
+
+in counteraction of man's natural mortality, all who undergo
+baptism at the hands of the ordained ministers of the Church of
+England the only true priesthood in apostolic succession thereby
+receive an immortalizing spirit brought into the world by Christ
+and committed to his successors. This immortalizing spirit
+conveyed by baptism would secure their resurrection at the last
+day. Those destitute of this spirit would never awake from the
+oblivious sleep of death, unless as he maintained will actually be
+the case with a large part of the dead they are arbitrarily
+immortalized by the pleasure of God, in order to suffer eternal
+misery in hell! Absurd and shocking as this fancy was, it obtained
+quite a number of converts, and made no slight impression at the
+time. One of the writers in this controversy asserted that Luther
+himself had been a believer in the death or sleep of the soul
+until the day of judgment.9 Certain it is that such a belief had
+at one period a considerable prevalence. Its advocates were called
+Psychopannychians. Calvin wrote a vehement assault on them. The
+opinion has sunk into general disrepute and neglect, and it would
+be hard to find many avowed disciples of it. The nearly universal
+sentiment of Christendom would now exclaim, in the quaint words of
+Henry More,
+
+"What! has old Adam snorted all this time Under some senselesse
+clod, with sleep ydead?" 10
+
+John Asgill printed, in the year 1700, a tract called "An argument
+to prove that by the new covenant man may be translated into
+eternal life without tasting death." He argues that the law of
+death was a consequence of Adam's sin and was annulled by Christ's
+sacrifice. Since that time men have died only because of an
+obstinate habit of dying formed for many generations. For his
+part, he has the independence and resolution to withstand the
+universal pusillanimity and to refuse to die. He has discovered
+"an engine in Divinity to convey man from earth to heaven." He
+will "play a trump on death and show himself a match for the
+devil!"
+
+While treating of the various Protestant views of the future life,
+it would be a glaring defect to overlook the remarkable doctrine
+on that subject published by Emanuel Swedenborg and now held by
+the intelligent, growing body of believers called after his name.
+It would be impossible to exhibit this system adequately in its
+scientific bases and its complicated details without occupying
+more space than can be afforded here. Nor is this necessary, now
+that his own works have been translated and are easily accessible
+everywhere. His "Heaven and Hell," "Heavenly Arcana," "Doctrine of
+Influx," and "True Christian
+
+9 Blackburne, View of the Controversy Concerning an Intermediate
+State: appendix. It is probable that the great Reformer's opinion
+on this point was not always the same. For he says, distinctly,
+"The first man who died, when he awakes at the last day, will
+think he has been asleep but an hour" Beste, Dr. M. Luther's
+Glaubenslehre, cap. iv.: Die Lehre von den Letzen Dingen. Yet. J.
+S. Muller seems conclusively to prove the truth of the proposition
+which forms the title of his book, "Dass Luther die Lehre vom
+Seelenschlafe nie geglaubt habe."
+
+10 The controversy concerning the natural immortality of the soul
+has within a few years raged afresh. The principal combatants were
+Dobney, Storrs, White, Morris, and Hinton. See Athanasia, by J. H.
+Hinton, London, 1849.
+
+
+Religion," contain manifold statements and abundant illustrations
+of every thing important bearing on his views of the theme before
+us. We shall merely attempt to present a brief synopsis of the
+essential principles, accompanied by two or three suggestions of
+criticism.
+
+Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truth
+and love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed for
+a season of probation in a perishable material body. Every moment
+receiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returning
+it through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in conscious
+obedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal,
+and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power of
+man's life, and the understanding is its form. When the will is
+disinterested love and the understanding is celestial truth, then
+man fulfils the end of his being, and his home is heaven; he is a
+spirit frame into which the goodness of God perpetually flows, is
+humbly acknowledged, gratefully enjoyed, and piously returned. But
+when his will is hatred or selfishness and his understanding is
+falsehood or evil, then his powers are abused, his destiny
+inverted, and his fate hell. While in the body in this world he is
+placed in freedom, on probation, between these two alternatives.
+
+The Swedenborgian universe is divided into four orders of abodes.
+In the highest or celestial world are the heavens of the angels.
+In the lowest or infernal world are the hells of the demons. In
+the intermediate or spiritual world are the earths inhabited by
+men, and surrounded by the transition state through which souls,
+escaping from their bodies, after a while soar to heaven or sink
+to hell, according to their fitness and attraction. In this life
+man is free, because he is an energy in equilibrium between the
+influences of heaven and hell. The middle state surrounding man is
+full of spirits, some good and some bad. Every man is accompanied
+by swarms of both sorts of spirits, striving to make him like
+themselves. Now, there are two kinds of influx into man. Mediate
+influx is when the spirits in the middle state flow into man's
+thoughts and affections. The good spirits are in communication
+with heaven, and they carry what is good and true; the evil
+spirits are in communication with hell, and they carry what is
+evil and false. Between these opposed and reacting agencies man is
+in an equilibrium whose essence is freedom. Deciding for himself,
+if he turns with embracing welcome to the good spirits, he is
+thereby placed and lives in conjunction with heaven; but if he
+turns, on the contrary, with predominant love to the bad spirits,
+he is placed in conjunction with hell and draws his life thence.
+From heaven, therefore, through the good spirits, all the elements
+of saving goodness flow sweetly down and are appropriated by the
+freedom of the good man; while from hell, through the bad spirits,
+all the elements of damning evil flow foully up and are
+appropriated by the freedom of the bad man.
+
+The other kind of influx is called immediate. This is when the
+Lord himself, the pure substance of truth and good, flows into
+every organ and faculty of man. This influx is perpetual, but is
+received as truth and good only by the true and good. It is
+rejected, suffocated, or perverted by those who are in love with
+falsities and evils. So the light of the sun produces colors
+varying with the substances it falls on, and water takes forms
+corresponding to the vessels it is poured into.
+
+The whole invisible world heaven, hell, and the middle state is
+peopled solely from the different families of the human race
+occupying the numerous material globes of the universe. The good,
+on leaving the fleshly body, are angels, the bad, demons. There is
+no angel nor demon who was created such at first. Satan is not a
+personality, but is a figurative term standing for the whole
+complex of hell. In the invisible world, time and space in one
+sense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. They
+virtually cease because all our present measures of them are
+annihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondences
+to them are left. To spirits, time is no longer measured by the
+revolution of planets, but by the succession of inward states;
+space is measured not by way marks and the traversing of
+distances, but by inward similitudes and dissimilitudes. Those who
+are unlike are sundered by gulfs of difference. Those who are
+alike are together in their interiors. Thought and love,
+forgetfulness and hate, are not hampered by temporal and spatial
+boundaries. Spiritual forces and beings spurn material
+impediments, and are united or separate, reciprocally visible or
+invisible, mutually conscious or unconscious, according to their
+own laws of kindred or alien adaptedness.
+
+The soul the true man is its own organized and deathless body, and
+when it leaves its earthly house of flesh it knows the only
+resurrection, and the cast off frame returns to the dust forever.
+Swedenborg repeatedly affirms with emphasis that no one is born
+for hell, but that all are born for heaven, and that when any one
+comes into hell it is from his own free fault. He asserts that
+every infant, wheresoever born, whether within the Church or out
+of it, whether of pious parents or of impious, when he dies is
+received by the Lord, and educated in heaven, and becomes an
+angel. A central principle of which he never loses sight is that
+"a life of charity, which consists in acting sincerely and justly
+in every function, in every engagement, and in every work, from a
+heavenly motive, according to the Divine laws, is possible to
+every one, and infallibly leads to heaven." It does not matter
+whether the person leading such a life be a Christian or a
+Gentile. The only essential is that his ruling motive be divine
+and his life be in truth and good.
+
+The Swedenborgian doctrine concerning Christ and his mission is
+that he was the infinite God incarnate, not incarnate for the
+purpose of expiating human sin and purchasing a ransom for the
+lost by vicarious sufferings, but for the sake of suppressing the
+rampant power of the hells, weakening the influx of the infernal
+spirits, setting an example to men, and revealing many important
+truths. The advantage of the Christian over the pagan is that the
+former is enlightened by the celestial knowledge contained in the
+Bible, and animated by the affecting motives presented in the
+drama of the Divine incarnation. There is no probation after this
+life. Just as one is on leaving the earth he goes into the
+spiritual world. There his
+
+11 Philo the Jew says, (vol. i. p. 277, ed. Mangey,) "God is the
+Father of the world: the world is the father of time, begetting it
+by its own motion: time, therefore, holds the place of grandchild
+to God." But the world is only one measure of time; another, and a
+more important one, is the inward succession of the spirit's
+states of consciousness. Between Philo and Swedenborg, it may be
+remarked here, there are many remarkable correspondences both of
+thought and language. For example, Philo says, (vol. i. p. 494,)
+"Man is a small kosmos, the kosmos is a grand man."
+
+
+ruling affection determines his destiny, and that affection can
+never be extirpated or changed to all eternity. After death, evil
+life cannot in any manner or degree be altered to good life, nor
+infernal love be transmuted to angelic love, inasmuch as every
+spirit from head to foot is in quality such as his love is, and
+thence such as his life is, so that to transmute this life into
+the opposite is altogether to destroy the spirit. It were easier,
+says Swedenborg, to change a night bird into a dove, an owl into a
+bird of paradise, than to change a subject of hell into a subject
+of heaven after the line of death has been crossed. But why the
+crossing of that line should make such an infinite difference he
+does not explain; nor does he prove it as a fact.
+
+The moral reason and charitable heart of Swedenborg vehemently
+revolted from the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and
+vicarious atonement, and the group of thoughts that cluster around
+them. He always protests against these dogmas, refutes them with
+varied power and consistency; and the leading principles of his
+own system are creditable to human nature, and attribute no
+unworthiness to the character of God. A debt of eternal gratitude
+is due to Swedenborg that his influence, certainly destined to be
+powerful and lasting, is so clearly calculated to advance the
+interests at once of philosophic intelligence, social affection,
+and true piety. The superiorities of his view of the future life
+over those which it seeks to supplant are weighty and numerous.
+The following may be reckoned among the most prominent.
+
+First, without predicating of God any aggravated severity or
+casting the faintest shadow on his benevolence, it gives us the
+most appalling realization of the horribleness of sin and of its
+consequences. God is commonly represented in effect, at least as
+flaming with anger against sinners, and forcibly flinging them
+into the unappeasable fury of Tophet, where his infinite vengeance
+may forever satiate itself on them. But, Swedenborg says, God is
+incapable of hatred or wrath: he casts no one into hell; but the
+wicked go where they belong by their own election, from the
+inherent fitness and preference of their ruling love. The evil man
+desires to be in hell because there he finds his food, employment,
+and home; in heaven he would suffer unutterable agonies from every
+circumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary and
+benignant love of God, not by his indignation; and their
+retributions are in their own characters, not in their prison
+house. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shock
+the heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to prefer
+wallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to the
+very evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst of
+all the impressions of sin, and beneath the lowest deep of the
+popular hell opens to our shuddering conceptions a deep of
+loathsomeness immeasurably lower still.
+
+Secondly, the Swedenborgian doctrine of the conditions of
+salvation or reprobation, when compared with the popular doctrine,
+is marked by striking depth of insight, justice, and liberality.
+Every man is free. Every man has power to receive the influx of
+truth and good from the Lord and convert it to its blessed and
+saving uses, piety towards God, good will towards the neighbor,
+and all kinds of right works. Who does this, no matter in what
+land or age he lives, becomes an heir of heaven. Who perverts
+those Divine gifts to selfishness and unrighteous deeds becomes a
+subject of hell. No mere opinion, no mere profession, no mere
+ritual services, no mere external obedience, not all these things
+together, can save a man, nor their absence condemn him; but the
+controlling motive of his life, the central and ruling love which
+constitutes the substance of his being, this decides every man's
+doom. The view is simple, reasonable, just, necessary. And so is
+the doctrine of degrees accompanying it; namely, that there are in
+heaven different grades and qualities of exaltation and delight,
+and in hell of degradation and woe, for different men according to
+their capacities and deserts. A profoundly ethical character
+pervades the scheme, and the great stamp of law is over it all.
+
+Thirdly, a manifest advantage of Swedenborg's doctrine over the
+popular doctrine is the intimate connection it establishes between
+the present and the future, the visible and the invisible, God and
+man. Heaven and hell are not distant localities, entrance into
+which is to be won or avoided by moral artifices or sacramental
+subterfuges, but they are states of being depending on personal
+goodness or evil. God is not throned at the heart or on the apex
+of the universe, where at some remote epoch we hope to go and see
+him, but he is the Life feeding our lives freshly every instant.
+The spiritual world, with all its hosts, sustains and arches,
+fills and envelops us. Death is the dropping of the outer body,
+the lifting of an opaque veil, and we are among the spirits,
+unchanged, as we were before. Judgment is not a tribunal dawning
+on the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentary
+assimilation of a celestial or an infernal love leading to states
+and acts, rewards and retributions, corresponding. Before this
+view the dead universe becomes a live transparency overwritten
+with the will, tremulous with the breath, and irradiate with the
+illumination of God.
+
+We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the future
+life should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error of
+the dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of all
+the subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness,
+denying that they can ever make the slightest ameliorating
+progress. We have never been able to see force enough in any of
+the arguments or assertions advanced in support of this tremendous
+horror to warrant the least hesitation in rejecting it. For
+ourselves, we must regard it as incredible, and think that God
+cannot permit it. Instruction, reformation, progress, are the
+final aims of punishment. Aspiration is the concomitant of
+consciousness, and the authentic voice of God. Surely, sooner or
+later, in the boonful eternities of being, every creature capable
+of intelligence, allied to the moral law, drawing life from the
+Infinite, must begin to travel the ascending path of virtue and
+blessedness, and never retrograde again.
+
+Neither can we admit in general the claim made by Swedenborg and
+by his disciples that the way in which he arrived at his system of
+theology elevates it to the rank of a Divine revelation. It is
+asserted that God opened his interior vision, so that he saw what
+had hitherto been concealed from the eyes of men in the flesh,
+namely, the inhabitants, laws, contents, and experiences of the
+spiritual world, and thus that his statements are not speculations
+or arguments, but records of unerring knowledge, his descriptions
+not fanciful pictures of the imagination, but literal transcripts
+of the truth he saw. This, in view of the great range of known
+experience, is not intrinsically probable, and we have seen no
+proof of it. Judging from what we know of psychological and
+religious history, it is far more likely that a man should
+confound his intangible reveries with solid fact than that he
+should be inspired by God to reveal a world of mysterious truths.
+Furthermore, while we are impressed with the reasonableness,
+probability, and consistency of most of the general principles of
+Swedenborg's exposition of the future life, we cannot but shrink
+from many of the details and forms in which he carries them out.
+Notwithstanding the earnest avowals of able disciples of his
+school that all his details are strictly necessitated by his
+premises, and that all his premises are laws of truth, we are
+compelled to regard a great many of his assertions as purely
+arbitrary and a great many of his descriptions as purely fanciful.
+But, denying that his scheme of eschatology is a scientific
+representation of the reality, and looking at it as a poetic
+structure reared by co working knowledge and imagination on the
+ground of reason, nature, and morality,  whose foundation walls,
+columns, and grand outlines are truth, while many of its details,
+ornaments, and images are fancy, it must be acknowledged to be one
+of the most wonderful examples of creative power extant in the
+literature of the world. No one who has mastered it with
+appreciative mind will question this. There are, expressed and
+latent, in the totality of Swedenborg's accounts of hell and
+heaven, more variety of imagery, power of moral truth and appeal,
+exhibition of dramatic justice, transcendent delights of holiness
+and love, curdling terrors of evil and woe, strength of
+philosophical grasp, and sublimity of emblematic conception, than
+are to be found in Dante's earth renowned poem. We say this of the
+substance of his ideas, not of the shape and clothing in which
+they are represented. Swedenborg was no poet in language and form,
+only in conception.
+
+Take this picture. In the topmost height of the celestial world
+the Lord appears as a sun, and all the infinite multitudes of
+angels, swarming up through the innumerable heavens, wherever they
+are, continually turn their faces towards him in love and joy. But
+at the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness,
+towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through the
+successive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God. Or
+consider this. Every thing consists of a great number of perfect
+leasts like itself: every heart is an aggregation of little
+hearts, every lung an aggregation of little lungs, every eye an
+aggregation of little eyes. Following out the principle, every
+society in the spiritual world is a group of spirits arranged in
+the form of a man, every heaven is a gigantic man composed of an
+immense number of individuals, and all the heavens together
+constitute one Grand Man, a countless number of the most
+intelligent angels forming the head, a stupendous organization of
+the most affectionate making the heart, the most humble going to
+the feet, the most useful attracted to the hands, and so on
+through every part.
+
+With exceptions, then, we regard Swedenborg's doctrine of the
+future life as a free poetic presentment, not as a severe
+scientific statement, of views true in moral principle, not of
+facts real in literal detail. His imagination and sentiment are
+mathematical and ethical instead of asthetic and passionate. Milk
+seems to run in his veins instead of blood, but he is of
+truthfulness and charity all compact. We think it most probable
+that the secret of his supposed inspiration was the abnormal
+frequent or chronic turning of his mind into what is called the
+ecstatic or clairvoyant state. This condition being spontaneously
+induced, while he yet, in some unexplained manner, retained
+conscious possession and control of his usual faculties, he
+treated his subjective conceptions as objective realities,
+believed his interior contemplations were accurate visions of
+facts, and took the strange procession of systematic reveries
+through his teeming brain for a scenic revelation of the
+exhaustive mysteries of heaven and hell. "Each wondrous guess
+beheld the truth it sought, And inspiration flash'd from what was
+thought."
+
+This hypothesis, taken in conjunction with the comprehensiveness
+of his mind, the vastness of his learning, the integral
+correctness of his conscience, and his disciplined habits of
+thought, will go far towards explaining the unparalleled
+phenomenon of his theological works; and, though it leaves many
+things unaccounted for, it seems to us more credible than any
+other which has yet been suggested.
+
+The last of the three prominent phenomena which as before said
+followed the Protestant Reformation was rationalism, an attempt to
+try all religious questions at the tribunal of reason and by the
+tests of conscience. The great movement led by Luther was but one
+element in a numerous train of influences and events all yielding
+their different contributions to that resolute rationalistic
+tendency which afterwards broke out so powerfully in England,
+France, and Germany, and, spreading thence into every country in
+Christendom, has been, in secret and in public, with slow, sure
+steps, irresistibly advancing ever since. In the history of
+scholasticism there were three distinct epochs. The first period
+was characterized by the servile submission and conformity of
+philosophy to the theology dictated by the Church. The second
+period was marked by the formal alliance and attempted
+reconciliation of philosophy and theology. The third period saw an
+ever increasing jealousy and separation between the philosophers
+and the theologians.12 Many an adventurous thinker pushed his
+speculations beyond the limits of the established theology, and
+deliberately dissented from the orthodox standards in his
+conclusions. Perhaps Abelard, who openly strove to put all the
+Church dogmas in forms acceptable to philosophy, and who did not
+hesitate to reject in many instances what seemed to him
+unreasonable, deserves to be called the father of rationalism. The
+works of Des Cartes, Leibnitz, Wolf, Kant's "Religion within the
+Bounds of Pure Reason," together with the influence and the
+writings of many other eminent philosophers, gradually gave
+momentum to the impulse and popularity to the habits of free
+thought and criticism even in the realm of theology. The dogmatic
+scheme of the dominant Church was firmly seized, many errors
+shaken out to the light and exposed, and many long received
+opinions questioned and flung into doubt.13 The authenticity of
+many of the popular doctrines regarding the future life could not
+fail to be denied as soon as it was attempted as was extensively
+done about the middle of the eighteenth century to demonstrate
+them by mathematical methods, with all the array of axioms,
+theorems, lemmas, doubts, and solutions. Flugge has historically
+illustrated the employment of this method at considerable
+length.14
+
+12 Cousin, Hist. Mod. Phil., lect. ix.
+
+13 Staudlin, Geschichte des Rationalismus. Saintes, Histoire
+Critique du Rationalisme en Allemagne, Eng. trans. by Dr. Beard.
+
+14 Geschichte des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit, u. s. f., th. iii.
+abth. ii. ss. 281-289.
+
+
+The essence of rationalism is the affirmation that neither the
+Fathers, nor the Church, nor the Scriptures, nor all of them
+together, can rightfully establish any proposition opposed to the
+logic of sound philosophy, the principles of reason, and the
+evident truth of nature. Around this thesis the battle has been
+fought and the victory won; and it will stand with spreading favor
+as long as there are unenslaved and cultivated minds in the world.
+This position is, in logical necessity, and as a general thing in
+fact, that of the large though loosely cohering body of believers
+known as "Liberal Christians;" and it is tacitly held by still
+larger and ever growing numbers nominally connected with sects
+that officially eschew it with horror. The result of the studies
+and discussions associated with this principle, so far as it
+relates to the subject before us, has been the rejection of the
+following popular doctrines:  the plenary inspiration of the
+Scriptures as an ultimate authority in matters of belief;
+unconditional predestination; the satisfaction theory of the
+vicarious atonement; the visible second coming of Christ, in
+person, to burn up the world and to hold a general judgment; the
+intermediate state of souls; the resurrection of the body; a local
+hell of material fire in the bowels of the earth; the eternal
+damnation of the wicked. These old dogmas,15 scarcely changed,
+still remain in the stereotyped creeds of all the prominent
+denominations; but they slumber there to an astonishing extent
+unrealized, unnoticed, unthought of, by the great multitude of
+common believers, while every consciously rational investigator
+vehemently repudiates them. To every candid mind that has really
+studied their nature and proofs their absurdity is now transparent
+on all the grounds alike of history, metaphysics, morals, and
+science.
+
+The changes of the popular Christian belief in regard to three
+salient points have been especially striking. First, respecting
+the immediate fate of the dead, an intermediate state. The
+predominant Jewish doctrine was that all souls went indiscriminately
+into a sombre under world, where they awaited a resurrection.
+
+The earliest Christian view prevalent was the same, with the
+exception that it divided that place of departed spirits
+into two parts, a painful for the bad, a pleasant for the good.
+The next opinion that prevailed the Roman Catholic was the same as
+the foregoing, with two exceptions: it established a purgatory in
+addition to the previous paradise and hell, and it opened heaven
+itself for the immediate entrance of a few spotless souls. Pope
+John XXII., as Gieseler shows, was accused of heresy by the
+theological doctors of Paris because he declared that no soul
+could enter heaven and enjoy the beatific vision until after the
+resurrection. Pope Benedict XII. drew up a list of one hundred and
+seventeen heretical opinions held by the Armenian Christians. One
+of these notions was that the souls of all deceased adults wander
+in the air until the Day of Judgment, neither hell, paradise, nor
+heaven being open to them until after that day. Thomas Aquinas
+says, "Each soul at death immediately flies to its appointed
+place, whether in hell or in heaven, being without the body until
+the resurrection, with it afterwards."16 Then came the
+
+15 They are defended in all their literal grossness in the two
+following works, both recent publications. The World to Come; by
+the Rev. James Cochrane. Der Tod, das Todtenreich, und der Zustand
+der abgeschiedenen Seelen; von P. A. Maywahlen.
+
+16 Summa iii. in Suppl. 69. 2.
+
+dogma of the orthodox Protestants, slightly varying in the
+different sects, but generally agreeing that at death all redeemed
+souls pass instantly to heaven and all unredeemed souls to hell.17
+The principal variation from this among believers within the
+Protestant fellowship has been the notion that the souls of all
+men die or sleep with the body until the Day of Judgment, a notion
+which peeps out here and there in superstitious spots along the
+pages of ecclesiastical history, and which has found now and then
+an advocate during the last century and a half. The Council of
+Elvin, in Spain, forbade the lighting of tapers in churchyards,
+lest it should disturb the souls of the deceased buried there. At
+this day, in prayers and addresses at funerals, no phrases are
+more common than those alluding to death as a sleep, and implying
+that the departed one is to slumber peacefully in his grave until
+the resurrection. And yet, at the same time, by the same persons
+contrary ideas are frequently expressed. The truth is, the
+subject, owing to the contradictions between their creed and their
+reason, is left by most persons in hopeless confusion and
+uncertainty. They have no determinately reconciled and conscious
+views of their own. Rationalism sweeps away all the foregoing
+incongruous medley at once, denying that we know any thing about
+the precise localities of heaven and hell, or the destined order
+of events in the hidden future of separate souls; affirming that
+all we should dare to say is simply that the souls whether of good
+or of bad men, on leaving the body, go at once into a spiritual
+state of being, where they will live immortally, as God decrees,
+never returning to be reinvested with the vanished charnel houses
+of clay they once inhabited.
+
+Secondly, the thought that Christ after his death descended into
+the under world to ransom mankind, or a part of mankind, from the
+doom there, is in the foundation of the apostolic theology. It was
+a central element in the belief of the Fathers, and of the Church
+for fourteen hundred years. None of the prominent Protestant
+reformers thought of denying it. Calvin lays great stress on it.18
+Apinus and others, at Hamburg, maintained that Christ's descent
+was a part of his humiliation, and that in it he suffered
+unutterable pains for us. On the other hand, Melancthon and the
+Wittenbergers held that the descent was a part of Christ's
+triumph, since by it he won a glorious victory over the powers of
+hell.19 But gradually the importance and the redeeming effects
+attached to Christ's descent into hell were transferred to his
+death on the cross. Slowly the primitive dogma dwindled away, and
+finally sunk out of sight, through an ever encroaching disbelief
+in the physical conditions on which it rested and in the pictorial
+environments by which it was recommended. And now it is scarcely
+ever heard of, save when brought out from old scholastic tomes by
+some theological delver. Baumgarten Crusius has learnedly
+illustrated the important place long held by this notion, and well
+shown its gradual retreat into the unnoticed background.20
+
+17 Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland, ch. xxxii.
+Calvin, Institutes, lib. iii. cap. xxv.; and his Psychopannychia.
+Quenstedt also affirms it. Likewise the Confession of Faith of the
+Westminster Divines, art. xxxii., says, "Souls neither die nor
+sleep, but go immediately to heaven or hell."
+
+18 Institutes, lib. ii. cap. 16, sects. 16, 19.
+
+19 Ledderhose, Life of Melancthon, Eng. trans. by Krotel, ch. xxx.
+
+20 Compendium der Christliche Dogmengeschichte, thl. ii. sects.
+100-109.
+
+
+The other particular doctrine which we said had undergone
+remarkable change is in regard to the number of the saved. A
+blessed improvement has come over the popular Christian feeling
+and teaching in respect to this momentous subject. The Jews
+excluded from salvation all but their own strict ritualists. The
+apostles, it is true, excluded none but the stubbornly wicked. But
+the majority of the Fathers virtually allowed the possibility of
+salvation to few indeed. Chrysostom doubted if out of the hundred
+thousand souls constituting the Christian population of Antioch in
+his day one hundred would be saved! 21 And when we read, with
+shuddering soul, the calculations of Cornelius a Lapide, or the
+celebrated sermon of Massillon on the "Small Number of the Saved,"
+we are compelled to confess that they fairly represent the almost
+universal sentiment and conviction of Christendom for more than
+seventeen hundred years. A quarto volume published in London in
+1680, by Du Moulin, called "Moral Reflections upon the Number of
+the Elect," affirmed that not one in a million, from Adam down to
+our times, shall be saved. A flaming execration blasted the whole
+heathen world, 22 and a metaphysical quibble doomed ninety nine of
+every hundred in Christian lands. Collect the whole relevant
+theological literature of the Christian ages, from the birth of
+Tertullian to the death of Jonathan Edwards, strike the average
+pitch of its doctrinal temper, and you will get this result: that
+in the field of human souls Satan is the harvester, God the
+gleaner; hell receives the whole vintage in its wine press of
+damnation, heaven obtains only a few straggling clusters plucked
+for salvation. The crowded wains roll staggering into the iron
+doorways of Satan's fire and brimstone barns; the redeemed
+vestiges of the world crop of men are easily borne to heaven in
+the arms of a few weeping angels. How different is the prevailing
+tone of preaching and belief now! What a cheerful ascent of views
+from the mournful passage of the dead over the river of oblivion
+fancied by the Greeks, or the excruciating passage of the river of
+fire painted by the Catholics, to the happy passage of the river
+of balm, healing every weary bruise and sorrow, promised by the
+Universalists! It is true, the old harsh exclusiveness is still
+organically imbedded in the established creeds, all of which deny
+the possibility of salvation beyond the little circle who vitally
+appropriate the vicarious atonement of Christ; but then this is,
+for the most part, a dead letter in the creeds. In the hearts and
+in the candid confessions of all but one in a thousand it is
+discredited and sincerely repelled as an abomination to human
+nature, a reflection against God, an outrage upon the substance of
+ethics. Remorseless bigots may gloat and exult over the thought
+that those who reject their dogmas shall be thrust into the
+roaring fire gorges of hell; but a better spirit is the spirit of
+the age we live in; and, doubtless, a vast majority of the men we
+daily meet really believe that all who try to the best of their
+ability, according to their light and circumstances, to do what is
+right, in the love of God and man, shall be saved. In that moving
+scene of the great dramatist where the burial of the innocent and
+hapless Ophelia is represented, and Lacrtes vainly seeks to win
+from the Church official
+
+21 In Acta Apostolorum, homil. xxiv.
+
+22 Gotze, Ueber die Neue Meinung von der Seligkeit der angeblich
+guten und redlichen Seelen unter Juden, Heiden, und Turken durch
+Christum, ohne dass sie an ihn glauben.
+
+
+the full funeral rites of religion over her grave, the priest may
+stand for the false and cruel ritual spirit, the brother for the
+just and native sentiment of the human heart. Says the priest,
+"We should profane the service of the dead To sing a requiem and
+such rest to her As to peace parted souls." And Laertes replies,
+"Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
+Shall violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministering
+angel shall my sister be When thou liest howling."
+
+Indeed, who that has a heart in his bosom would not be ashamed not
+to sympathize with the gentle hearted Burns when he expresses even
+to the devil himself the quaint and kindly wish, "Oh wad ye tak' a
+thought and mend!"
+
+The creeds and the priests, in congenial alliance with many evil
+things, may strive to counteract this progressive self
+emancipation from cruel falsehoods and superstitions, but in vain.
+The terms of salvation are seen lying in the righteous will of a
+gracious God, not in the heartless caprice of a priesthood nor in
+the iron gripe of a set of dogmas. The old priestly monopoly over
+the way to heaven has been taken off in the knowledge of the
+enlightened present, and, for all who have unfettered feet to walk
+with, the passage to God is now across a free bridge. The ancient
+exactors may still sit in their toll house creeds and confessionals;
+but their authority is gone, and the virtuous traveller, stepping
+from the ground of time upon the planks that lead over into eternity,
+smiles as he passes scot free by their former taxing terrors.
+
+The reign of sacramentalists and dogmatists rapidly declines.
+Reason, common sentiment, the liberal air, the best and
+strongest tendencies of the people, are against them to
+day, and will be more against them in every coming day. Every
+successive explosion of the Second Adventist fanaticism will leave
+less of that element behind. Its rage in America, under the
+auspices of Miller, in the nineteenth century, was tame and feeble
+when compared with the terror awakened in Europe in the fifteenth
+century by Stofler's prediction of an approaching comet.23 Every
+new discovery of the harmonies of science, and of the perfections
+of nature, and of the developments of the linear logic of God
+consistently unfolding in implicated sequences of peaceful order
+unperturbed by shocks of failure and epochs of remedy, will
+increase and popularize an intelligent faith in the original
+ordination and the intended permanence of the present constitution
+of things. Finally men will cease to be looking up to see the blue
+dome cleave open for the descent of angelic squadrons headed by
+the majestic Son of God, the angry breath of his mouth consuming
+the world, cease to
+
+23 Bayle, Historical Dictionary, art. Stofler, note B.
+
+
+expect salvation by any other method than that of earnest and
+devout truthfulness, love, good works, and pious submissiveness to
+God, cease to fancy that their souls, after waiting through the
+long sleep or separation of death, will return and take on their
+old bodies again. Recognizing the Divine plan for training souls
+in this lower and transient state for a higher and immortal state,
+they will endeavor, in natural piety and mutual love, while they
+live, to exhaust the genuine uses of the world that now is, and
+thus prepare themselves to enter with happiest auspices, when they
+die, the world prepared for them beyond these mortal shores.
+
+These cheerful prophecies must be verified in the natural course
+of things. The rapid spread of the doctrine of a future life
+taught by the "Spirit rappers" is a remarkable revelation of the
+great extent to which the minds of the common people have at last
+become free from the long domination of the ecclesiastical dogmas
+on that subject. The leading representatives of the "Spiritualists"
+affirm, with much unanimity, the most comforting conclusions
+as to the condition of the departed. They exclude all wrath
+and favoritism from the disposition of the Deity. They have
+little in fact, they often have nothing whatever to say of hell.
+They emphatically repudiate the ordinarily taught terms of
+salvation, and deny the doctrine of hopeless reprobation. All
+death is beautiful and progressive. "Every form and thing is
+constantly growing lovelier and every sphere purer." The abode of
+each soul in the future state is determined, not by decrees or
+dogmas or forms of any kind, but by qualities of character,
+degrees of love, purity, and wisdom. There are seven ascending
+spheres, each more abounding than the one below it in beauties,
+glories, and happiness. "The first sphere is the natural; the
+second, the spiritual; the third, the celestial; the fourth, the
+supernatural; the fifth, the superspiritual; the sixth, the
+supercelestial; the seventh, the Infinite Vortex of Love and
+Wisdom."24 Whatever be thought of the pretensions of this doctrine
+to be a Divine revelation, whatever be thought of its various
+psychological, cosmological, and theological characteristics, its
+ethics are those of natural reason. It is wholly irreconcilable
+with the popular ecclesiastical system of doctrines. Its epidemic
+diffusion until now burdened as it is with such nauseating
+accompaniments of crudity and absurdity, it reckons its adherents
+by millions is a tremendous evidence of the looseness with which
+the old, cruel dogmas sit on the minds of the masses of the
+people, and of their eager readiness to welcome more humane views.
+
+In science the erroneous doctrines of the Middle Age are now
+generally discarded. The mention of them but provokes a smile or
+awakens surprise. Yet, as compared with the historic annals of our
+race, it is but recently that the true order of the solar system
+has been unveiled, the weight of the air discovered, the
+circulation of the blood made known, the phenomena of insanity
+intelligently studied, the results of physiological chemistry
+brought to light, the symmetric domain and sway of calculable law
+pushed far out in every direction of nature and experience. It
+used to be supposed that digestion was effected by means of a
+mechanical power equal to many tons. Borelli asserted that the
+muscular force of the heart was one hundred and eighty thousand
+pounds. These absurd estimates only disappeared when the
+
+24 Andrew Jackson Davis, Nature's Divine Revelations, sects. 192
+203.
+
+
+properties of the gastric juice were discerned. The method in
+which we distinguish the forms and distances of objects was not
+understood until Berkeley published his "New Theory of Vision."
+Few persons are aware of the opposition of bigotry, stolidity, and
+authority against which the brilliant advances of scientific
+discovery and mechanical invention and social improvement have
+been forced to contend, and in despite of which they have slowly
+won their way. Excommunications, dungeons, fires, sneers, polite
+persecution, bitter neglect, tell the story, from the time the
+Athenians banned Anaxagoras for calling the sun a mass of fire, to
+the day an English mob burned the warehouses of Arkwright because
+he had invented the spinning jenny. But, despite all the hostile
+energies of establishment, prejudice, and scorn, the earnest
+votaries of philosophical truth have studied and toiled with ever
+accumulating victories, until now a hundred sciences are ripe with
+emancipating fruits and perfect freedom to be taught. Railroads
+gird the lands with ribs of trade, telegraphs thread the airs with
+electric tidings of events, and steamships crease the seas with
+channels of foam and fire. There is no longer danger of any one
+being put to death, or even being excluded from the "best
+society," for saying that the earth moves. An eclipse cannot be
+regarded as the frown of God when it is regularly foretold with
+certainty. The measurement of the atmosphere exterminated the
+wiseacre proverb, "Nature abhors a vacuum," by the burlesque
+addition, "but only for the first thirty two feet." The madman
+cannot be looked on as divinely inspired, his words to be caught
+as oracles, or as possessed by a devil, to be chained and
+scourged, since Pinel's great work has brought insanity within the
+range of organic disease. When Franklin's kite drew electricity
+from the cloud to his knuckle, the superstitious theory of thunder
+died a natural death.
+
+The vast progress effected in all departments of physical science
+during the last four centuries has not been made in any kindred
+degree in the prevailing theology. Most of the harsh, unreasonable
+tenets of the elaborately morbid and distorted mediaval
+theologyare still retained in the creeds of the great majority of
+Christendom. The causes of this difference are plain. The
+establishment of newly discovered truths in material science being
+less intimately connected with the prerogatives of the ruling
+classes, less clearly hostile to the permanence of their power,
+they have not offered so pertinacious an opposition to progress in
+this province: they have yielded a much larger freedom to
+physicists than to moralists, to discoverers of mathematical,
+chemical, and mechanical law than to reformers of political and
+religious thought. Livy tells us that, in the five hundred and
+seventy third year of Rome, some concealed books of Numa were
+found, which, on examination by the priests, being thought
+injurious to the established religion, were ordered to be
+burned.25 The charge was not that they were ungenuine, nor that
+their contents were false; but they were dangerous. In the second
+century, an imperial decree forbade the reading of the Sibylline
+Oracles, because they contained prophecies of Christ and doctrines
+of Christianity. By an act of the English Parliament, in the
+middle of the seventeenth century, every copy of the Racovian
+Catechism (an exposition of the Socinian doctrine) that could be
+obtained was burned in the streets.
+
+25 Lib. xl. cap. xxix.
+
+
+The Index Expurgatorius for Catholic countries is still freshly
+filled every year. And in Protestant countries a more subtle and a
+more effectual influence prevents, on the part of the majority,
+the candid perusal of all theological discussions which are not
+pitched in the orthodox key. Certain dogmas are the absorbed
+thought of the sects which defend them: no fresh and independent
+thinking is to be expected on those subjects, no matter how purely
+fictitious these secretions of the brain of the denomination or of
+some ancient leader may be, no matter how glaringly out of keeping
+with the intelligence and liberty which reign in other realms of
+faith and feeling. There is nowhere else in the world a tyranny so
+pervasive and despotic as that which rules in the department of
+theological opinion. The prevalent slothful and slavish surrender
+of the grand privileges and duties of individual thought,
+independent personal conviction and action in religious matters,
+is at once astonishing, pernicious, and disgraceful. The effect of
+entrenched tradition, priestly directors, a bigoted, overawing,
+and persecuting sectarianism, is nowhere else a hundredth part so
+powerful or so extensive.
+
+In addition to the bitter determination by interested persons to
+suppress reforming investigations of the doctrines which hold
+their private prejudices in supremacy, and to the tremendous
+social prestige of old establishment, another cause has been
+active to keep theology stationary while science has been making
+such rapid conquests. Science deals with tangible quantities,
+theology with abstract qualities. The cultivation of the former
+yields visible practical results of material comfort; the
+cultivation of the latter yields only inward spiritual results of
+mental welfare. Accordingly, science has a thousand resolute
+votaries where theology has one unshackled disciple. At this
+moment, a countless multitude, furnished with complex apparatus,
+are ransacking every nook of nature, and plucking trophies, and
+the world with honoring attention reads their reports. But how few
+with competent preparation and equipment, with fearless
+consecration to truth, unhampered, with fresh free vigor, are
+scrutinizing the problems of theology, enthusiastically bent upon
+refuting errors and proving verities! And what reception do the
+conclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surely
+not prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgment
+or courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice,
+or sophistical evasions and insulting vituperation.
+
+What a striking and painful contrast is afforded by the generous
+encouragement given to the students of science by the annual
+bestowment of rewards by the scientific societies such as the
+Cuvier Prize, the Royal Medal, the Rumford Medal and the jealous
+contempt and assaults visited by the sectarian authorities upon
+those earnest students of theology who venture to propose any
+innovating improvement! Suppose there were annually awarded an
+Aquinas Prize, a Fenelon Medal, a Calvin Medal, a Luther Medal, a
+Channing Medal, not to the one who should present the most
+ingenious defence of any peculiar tenet of one of those masters,
+but to him who should offer the most valuable fresh contribution
+to theological truth! What should we think if the French Institute
+offered a gold medal every year to the astronomer who presented
+the ablest essay in support of the Ptolemaic system, or if the
+Royal Society voted a diploma for the best method of casting
+nativities? Such is the course pursued in regard to dogmatic
+theology. The consequence has been that while elsewhere the
+ultimate standard by which to try a doctrine is, What do the
+most competent judges say? What does unprejudiced reason dictate?
+What does the great harmony of truth require? in theology it is,
+What do the committed priests say? How does it comport with the
+old traditions?
+
+We read in the Hak ul Yakeen that the envoy of Herk, Emperor of
+Rum, once said to the prophet, "You summon people to a Paradise
+whose extent includes heaven and earth: where, then, is hell?"
+Mohammed replied, "When day comes, where is night?" That is to
+say, according to the traditionary glosses, as day and night are
+opposite, so Paradise is at the zenith and hell at the nadir. Yes;
+but if Paradise be above the heavens, and hell below the seventh
+earth, then how can Sirat be extended over hell for people to pass
+to Paradise? "We reply," say the authors of the Hak ul Yakeen,
+"that speculation on this subject is not necessary, nor to be
+regarded. Implicit faith in what the prophets have revealed must
+be had; and explanatory surmises, which are the occasion of
+Satanic doubts, must not be indulged."26 Certainly this exclusion
+of reason cannot always be suffered. It is fast giving way
+already. And it is inevitable that, when reason secures its right
+and bears its rightful fruits in moral subjects as it now does in
+physical subjects, the mediaval theology must be rejected as
+mediaval science has been. It is the common doctrine of the Church
+that Christ now sits in heaven in a human body of flesh and blood.
+Calvin separated the Divine nature of Christ from this human body;
+but Luther made the two natures inseparable and attributed
+ubiquity to the body in which they reside, thus asserting the
+omnipresence of a material human body, a bulk of a hundred and
+fifty pounds' weight more or less. He furiously assailed Zwingle's
+objection to this monstrous nonsense, as "a devil's mask and
+grandchild of that old witch, mistress Reason." 27 The Roman
+Church teaches, and her adherents devoutly believe, that the house
+of the Virgin Mary was conveyed on the wings of angels from
+Nazareth to the eastern slope of the Apennines above the Adriatic
+Gulf.28 The English Church, consistently interpreted, teaches that
+there is no salvation without baptism by priests in the line of
+apostolic succession. These are but ordinary specimens of
+teachings still humbly received by the mass of Christians. The
+common distrust with which the natural operations of reason are
+regarded in the Church, the extreme reluctance to accept the
+conclusions of mere reason, seem to us discreditable to the
+theological leaders who represent the current creeds of the
+approved sects. Many an influential theologian could learn
+invaluable lessons from the great guides in the realm of science.
+The folly which acute learned wise men will be guilty of the
+moment they turn to theological subjects, where they do not allow
+reason to act, is both ludicrous and melancholy. The victim of
+lycanthropy used to be burned alive; he is now placed under the
+careful treatment of skilful and humane physicians. But the
+heretic or infidel is still thought to be inspired by the devil, a
+fit subject for discipline here and hell hereafter. The light shed
+abroad by the rising spirit of rational investigation must
+gradually dispel the delusions which lurk in the vales of
+theology, as it already has dispelled those that formerly haunted
+the hills of science. The spectres which have so long terrified a
+childish world will successively vanish
+
+26 Merrick, Hyat ul Kuloob, note 74.
+
+27 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 265, note 2.
+
+28 Christian Remembrancer, April, 1855. A full and able history of
+the "Holy House of Loretto."
+
+
+from the path of man as advancing reason, in the name of the God
+of truth, utters its imperial "Avaunt!"
+
+Henry More wrote a book on the "Immortality of the Soul," printed
+in London in 1659, just two hundred years ago. It is full of
+beauty, acumen, and power. He was one of the first men of the
+time. Yet he seriously elaborates an argument like this: "The scum
+and spots that lie on the sun are as great an Argument that there
+is no Divinity in him as the dung of Owls and Sparrows that is
+found on the faces and shoulders of Idols in Temples are clear
+evidences that they are no true Deities."29 He also in good faith
+tells a story like this: "That a Woman with child, seeing a
+Butcher divide a Swine's head with a Cleaver, brought forth her
+Child with its face cloven in the upper jaw, the palate, and upper
+lip to the very nose."30 The progress marked by the contrast of
+the scientific spirit of the present time with the ravenous
+credulity of even two centuries back must continue and spread into
+every province. Some may vilify it; but in vain. Some may
+sophisticate against it; but in vain. Some may invoke authority
+and social persecution to stop it; but in vain. Some may appeal to
+the prejudices and fears of the timid; but in vain. Some may close
+their own eyes, and hold their hands before their neighbors' eyes,
+and attempt to shut out the light; but in vain. It will go on. It
+is the interest of the world that it should go on. It is the manly
+and the religious course to help this progress with prudence and
+reverence. Truth is the will of God, the way he has made things to
+be and to act, the way he wishes free beings to exist and to act.
+He has ordained the gradual discovery of truth. And despite the
+struggles of selfish tyranny, and the complacence of luxurious
+ease, and the terror of ignorant cowardice, truth will be more and
+more brought to universal acceptance. Some men have fancied their
+bodies composed of butter or of glass; but when compelled to move
+out into the sunlight or the crowd they did not melt nor break.31
+Esquirol had a patient who did not dare to bend her thumb, lest
+the world should come to an end. When forced to bend it, she was
+surprised that the crack of doom did not follow.
+
+The mechanico theatrical character of the popular theology is
+enough to reveal its origin and its fundamental falsity. The
+difference between its lurid and phantasmal details and the calm
+eternal verities in the divinely constituted order of nature is as
+great as the difference between those stars which one sees in
+consequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turning
+his gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bare
+appreciation of such a passage as that which closes
+Chateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathos
+of its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is its
+sufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moon
+is covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang half
+detached from the vault of heaven, and the agony of the world
+commences. Now resounds the trump of the angel. The sepulchres
+burst: the human race issues all at once, and fills the Valley of
+Jehoshaphat! The Son of Man appears in the clouds; the powers of
+hell ascend from the infernal depths; the goats are separated from
+the sheep; the wicked are plunged into the gulf; the just ascend
+to heaven; God returns to his repose,
+
+29 Preface, p. 10.
+
+30 Ibid. p. 392.
+
+31 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, ch. ix.
+
+
+and the reign of eternity begins."32 Nothing saves this whole
+scheme of doctrine from instant rejection except neglect of
+thought, or incompetence of thought, on the part of those who
+contemplate it. The peculiar dogmas of the exclusive sects are the
+products of mental and social disease, psychological growths in
+pathological moulds. The naked shapes of beautiful women floating
+around St. Anthony in full display of their maddening charms are
+interpreted by the Romanist Church as a visible work of the devil.
+An intelligent physician accounts for them by the laws of
+physiology, the morbid action of morbid nerves. There is no doubt
+whatever as to which of these explanations is correct. The
+absolute prevalence of that explanation is merely a question of
+time. Meanwhile, it is the part of every wise and devout man,
+without bigotry, without hatred for any, with strict fidelity to
+his own convictions, with entire tolerance and kindness for all
+who differ from him, sacredly to seek after verity himself and
+earnestly to endeavor to impart it to others. To such men forms of
+opinion, instead of being prisons, fetters, and barriers, will be
+but as tents of a night while they march through life, the burning
+and cloudy column of inquiry their guide, the eternal temple of
+truth their goal.
+
+The actual relation, the becoming attitude, the appropriate
+feeling, of man towards the future state, the concealed segment of
+his destiny, are impressively shown in the dying scene of one of
+the wisest and most gifted of men, one of the fittest representatives
+of the modern mind. In a good old age, on a pleasant spring day,
+with a vast expanse of experience behind him, with an immensity of
+hope before him, he lay calmly expiring.
+
+"More light!" he cried, with departing breath; and Death, solemn
+warder of eternity, led him, blinded, before the immemorial veil
+of awe and secrets. It uprolled as the flesh bandage fell from his
+spirit, and he walked at large, triumphant or appalled, amidst the
+unimagined revelations of God.
+
+And now, recalling the varied studies we have passed through, and
+seeking for the conclusion or root of the matter, what shall we
+say? This much we will say. First, the fearless Christian, fully
+acquainted with the results of a criticism unsparing as the
+requisitions of truth and candor, can scarcely, with intelligent
+honesty, do more than place his hand on the beating of his heart,
+and fix his eye on the riven tomb of Jesus, and exclaim, "Feeling
+here the inspired promise of immortality, and seeing there the
+sign of God's authentic seal, I gratefully believe that Christ has
+risen, and that my soul is deathless!" Secondly, the trusting
+philosopher, fairly weighing the history of the world's belief in
+a future life, and the evidences on which it rests, can scarcely,
+with justifying warrant, do less than lay his hand on his body,
+and turn his gaze aloft, and exclaim, "Though death shatters this
+shell, the soul may survive, and I confidently hope to live
+forever." Meanwhile, the believer and the speculator, combining to
+form a Christian philosophy wherein doubt and faith, thought and
+freedom, reason and sentiment, nature and revelation, all embrace,
+even as the truth of things and the experience of life demand, may
+both adopt for their own the expression wrought for himself by a
+pure and fervent poet in these freighted lines of pathetic beauty:
+
+32 Genius of Christianity, part ii. book vi. ch. vii.
+
+
+"I gather up the scattered rays Of wisdom in the early days, Faint
+gleams and broken, like the light Of meteors in a Northern night,
+Betraying to the darkling earth The unseen sun which gave them
+birth; I listen to the sibyl's chant, The voice of priest and
+hierophant; I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, And what of life
+and what of death The demon taught to Socrates, And what, beneath
+his garden trees Slow pacing, with a dream like tread, The solemn
+thoughted Plato said; Nor Lack I tokens, great or small, Of God's
+clear light in each and all, While holding with more dear regard
+Than scroll of heathen seer and bard The starry pages, promise
+lit, With Christ's evangel overwrit, Thy miracle of life and
+death, O Holy One of Nazareth!" 33
+
+33 Whittier, Questions of Life.
+
+
+PART FIFTH.
+
+
+HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES.
+
+THE power of the old religions was for centuries concentrated in
+the Mysteries. These were recondite institutions, sometimes
+wielded by the state, sometimes by a priesthood, sometimes by a
+ramifying private society. None could be admitted into them save
+with the permission of the hierarchs, by rites of initiation, and
+under solemn seals of secrecy. These mysterious institutions,
+charged with strange attractions, shrouded in awful wonder, were
+numerous, and, agreeing in some of their fundamental features,
+were spread nearly all over the world. The writings of the
+ancients abound with references to them, mostly eulogistic. The
+mighty part played by these veiled bodies in the life of the
+periods when they flourished, the pregnant hints and alluring
+obscurities amid which they stand in relation to the learning of
+modern times, have repeatedly obtained wide attention, elicited
+opposite opinions, provoked fierce debates, and led different
+inquirers to various conclusions as to their true origin,
+character, scope, meaning, and results.
+
+One of the principal points in discussion by scholars concerning
+the Mysteries has been whether they inculcated an esoteric
+doctrine of philosophy, opposed to the popular religion. Some
+writers have maintained that in their symbols and rites was
+contained a pure system of monotheistic ethics and religion. Our
+own opinion is that in some of these institutions, at one period,
+higher theological views and scientific speculations were
+unfolded, but in others never. Still, it is extremely difficult to
+prove any thing on this part of the general subject: there is much
+that is plausible to be said on both sides of the question.
+Another query to be noticed in passing is in regard to the degree
+of exclusiveness and concealment really attached to the form of
+initiation. Lobeck, in his celebrated work, "Aglaophamus," borne
+away by a theory, assumes the extravagant position that the
+Eleusinian Mysteries were almost freely open to all.1 His error
+seems to lie in not distinguishing sufficiently between the Lesser
+and the Greater Mysteries, and in not separating the noisy shows
+of the public festal days from the initiatory and explanatory
+rites of personal admission within the mystic pale. The notorious
+
+1 Lib. i. sects. 4, 5.
+
+
+facts that strict inquiry was made into the character and fitness
+of the applicant before his admission, and that many were openly
+rejected, that instant death was inflicted on all who intruded
+unprepared within the sacred circuits, and that death was the
+penalty of divulging what happened during the celebrations, all
+are inconsistent with the notion of Lobeck, and prove that the
+Mysteries were hedged about with dread. Aschylus narrowly escaped
+being torn in pieces upon the stage by the people on suspicion
+that in his play he had given a hint of something in the
+Mysteries. He delivered himself by appealing to the Areopagus, and
+proving that he had never been initiated. Andocides also, a Greek
+orator who lived about four hundred years before Christ, was
+somewhat similarly accused, and only escaped by a strenuous
+defence of himself in an oration, still extant, entitled
+"Concerning the Mysteries."
+
+A third preliminary matter is as to the moral character of the
+services performed by these companies. Some held that their
+characteristics were divinely pure, intellectual, exalting; others
+that in abandoned pleasures they were fouler than the Stygian pit.
+The Church Fathers, Clement, Irenaus, Tertullian, and the rest,
+influenced by a mixture of prejudice, hatred, and horror, against
+every thing connected with paganism, declared, in round terms,
+that the Mysteries were unmitigated sinks of iniquity and shame,
+lust, murder, and all promiscuous deviltry. Without pausing to
+except or qualify, or to be thoroughly informed and just, they
+included the ancient stern generations and their own degraded
+contemporaries, the vile rites of the Corinthian Aphrodite and the
+solemn service of Demeter, the furious revels of the Bacchanalians
+and the harmonious mental worship of Apollo, all in one
+indiscriminate charge of insane beastliness and idolatry. Their
+view of the Mysteries has been most circulated among the moderns
+by Leland's learned but bigoted work on the "Use and Necessity of
+a Divine Revelation." He would have us regard each one as a vortex
+of atheistic sensuality and crime. There should be discrimination.
+The facts are undoubtedly these, as we might abundantly
+demonstrate were it in the province of the present essay. The
+original Mysteries, the authoritative institutions co ordinated
+with the state or administered by the poets and philosophers, were
+pure: their purpose was to purify the lives and characters of
+their disciples. Their means were a complicated apparatus of
+sensible and symbolic revelations and instructions admirably
+calculated to impress the most salutary moral and religious
+lessons. In the first place, is it credible that the state would
+fling its auspices over societies whose function was to organize
+lawlessness and debauchery, to make a business of vice and filth?
+Among the laws of Solon is a regulation decreeing that the Senate
+shall convene in the Eleusinian temple, the day after the
+festival, to inquire whether every thing had been done with
+reverence and propriety. Secondly, if such was the character of
+these secrets, why was inquisition always made into the moral
+habits of the candidate, that he might be refused admittance if
+they were bad? This inquiry was severe, and the decision
+unrelenting. Alcibiades was rejected, as we learn from Plutarch's
+life of him, on account of his dissoluteness and insubordination
+in the city. Nero dared not attend the Eleusinian Mysteries,
+"because to the murder of his mother he had joined the slaughter
+of his paternal aunt."2 All accepted candidates were scrupulously
+purified in thought and body, and clad in white robes, for nine
+days previous to their reception. Thirdly, it is intrinsically
+absurd to suppose that an institution of gross immorality and
+cruelty could have flourished in the most polite and refined Greek
+nation, as the Eleusinian Mysteries did for over eighteen hundred
+years, ranking among its members a vast majority of both sexes, of
+all classes, of all ages, and constantly celebrating its rites
+before immense audiences of them all. Finally, a host of men like
+Plato, Sophocles, Cimon, Lycurgus, Cicero, were members of these
+bodies, partook in their transactions, and have left on record
+eulogies of them and of their influence. The concurrent testimony
+of antiquity is that in the Great Mysteries the desires were
+chastened, the heart purified, the mind calmed, the soul inspired,
+all the virtues of morality and hopes of religion taught and
+enforced with sublime solemnities. There is no just ground for
+suspecting this to be false.
+
+But there remains something more and different to be said also.
+While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, there
+did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and
+pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the
+control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which
+unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and
+prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign
+grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous
+climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in
+Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as
+compelled the Senate to suppress them. Livy gives a detailed and
+vivid account of the whole affair in his history.3 But the
+gladiators, scoundrels, rakes, bawds, who swarmed in these stews
+of rotting Rome, are hardly to be confounded with the noble men
+and matrons of the earlier time who openly joined in the pure
+Mysteries with the approving example of the holiest bards, the
+gravest statesmen, and the profoundest sages, men like Pindar,
+Pericles, and Pythagoras. Ample facilities are afforded in the
+numerous works to which we shall refer for unmasking the different
+organizations that travelled over the earth in the guise of the
+Mysteries, and of seeing what deceptive arts were practised in
+some, what superhuman terrors paraded in others, what horrible
+cruelties perpetrated in others, what leading objects sought in
+each.
+
+The Mysteries have many bearings on several distinct subjects; but
+in those aspects we have not space here to examine them. We
+purpose to consider them solely in their relation to the doctrine
+of a future life. We are convinced that the very heart of their
+secret, the essence of their meaning in their origin and their
+end, was no other than the doctrine of an immortality succeeding a
+death. Gessner published a book at Gottingen, so long ago as the
+year 1755, maintaining this very assertion. His work, which is
+quite scarce now, bears the title "Dogma de perenni Animoruin
+Natura per Sacra pracipue Eleusinia Propagata." The consenting
+testimony of more than forty of the most authoritative ancient
+writers comes down to us in their surviving works to the effect
+that those who were admitted into the Mysteries were thereby
+purified, led to holy lives, joined in communion with the gods,
+and
+
+2 Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.
+
+3 Lib. xxxix. cap. viii xvi.
+
+
+assured of a better fate than otherwise could be expected in the
+future state. Two or three specimens from these witnesses will
+suffice. Aristophanes, in the second act of the Frogs, describes
+an elysium of the initiates after death, where he says they bound
+"in sportive dances on rose enamelled meadows; for the light is
+cheerful only to those who have been initiated."4 Pausanias
+describes the uninitiated as being compelled in Hades to carry
+water in buckets bored full of holes.5 Isocrates says, in his
+Panegyric, "Demeter, the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries,
+fortifies those who have been initiated against the fear of death,
+and teaches them to have sweet hopes concerning eternity." The old
+Orphic verses cited by Thomas Taylor in his Treatise on the
+Mysteries run thus: "The soul that uninitiated dies Plunged in the
+blackest mire in Hades lies." 6
+
+The same statement is likewise found in Plato, who, in another
+place, also explicitly declares that a doctrine of future
+retribution was taught in the Mysteries and believed by the
+serious.7 Cicero says, "Initiation makes us both live more
+honorably and die with better hopes." 8 In seasons of imminent
+danger as in a shipwreck it was customary for a man to ask his
+companion, Hast thou been initiated? The implication is that
+initiation removed fear of death by promising a happy life to
+follow.9 A fragment preserved from a very ancient author is plain
+on this subject. "The soul is affected in death just as it is in
+the initiation into the great Mysteries: thing answers to thing.
+At first it passes through darkness, horrors, and toils. Then are
+disclosed a wondrous light, pure places, flowery meads, replete
+with mystic sounds, dances, and sacred doctrines, and holy
+visions. Then, perfectly enlightened, they are free: crowned, they
+walk about worshipping the gods and conversing with good men."10
+The principal part of the hymn to Ceres, attributed to Homer, is
+occupied with a narrative of her labors to endow the young
+Demophoon, mortal child of Metaneira, with immortality. Now, Ceres
+was the goddess of the Mysteries; and the last part of this very
+hymn recounts how Persephone was snatched from the light of life
+into Hades and restored again. Thus we see that the implications
+of the indirect evidence, the leanings and guidings of all the
+incidental clews now left us to the real aim and purport of the
+Mysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was a
+doctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards and
+punishments. All this we shall more fully establish, both by
+direct proofs and by collateral supports.
+
+It is a well known fact, intimately connected with the different
+religions of Greece and Asia Minor, that during the time of
+harvest in the autumn, and again at the season of sowing in the
+spring, the shepherds, the vintagers, and the people in general,
+were accustomed to observe certain sacred festivals, the autumnal
+sad, the vernal joyous. These undoubtedly grew out of the deep
+sympathy between man and nature over the decay and disappearance,
+the revival and return, of vegetation. When the hot season had
+withered the verdure of the
+
+4 Scene iii.
+
+5 Lib. x. cap. xxxi.
+
+6 Phadon, sect. xxxviii.
+
+7 Leg., lib. ix. cap. x.
+
+8 De Leg., lib. ii. cap. xiv.
+
+9 St. John, Hellenes, ch. xi.
+
+10 Sentences of Stobaus, Sermo CXIX.
+
+
+fields, plaintive songs were sung, their wild melancholy notes and
+snatches borne abroad by the breeze and their echoes dying at last
+in the distance. In every instance, these mournful strains were
+the annual lamentation of the people over the death of some
+mythical boy of extraordinary beauty and promise, who, in the
+flower of youth, was suddenly drowned, or torn in pieces by wild
+beasts, "Some Hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April
+bloom."
+
+Among the Argives it was Linus. With the Arcadians it was
+Scephrus. In Phrygia it was Lityerses. On the shore of the Black
+Sea it was Bormus. In the country of the Bithynians it was Hylas.
+At Pelusium it was Maneros. And in Syria it was Adonis. The
+untimely death of these beautiful boys, carried off in their
+morning of life, was yearly bewailed, their names re echoing over
+the plains, the fountains, and among the hills. It is obvious that
+these cannot have been real persons whose death excited a sympathy
+so general, so recurrent. "The real object of lamentation," says
+Muller, "was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the raging
+heat, and other similar phenomena, which the imagination of those
+early times invested with a personal form."11 All this was woven
+into the Mysteries, whose great legend and drama were that every
+autumn Persephone was carried down to the dark realm of the King
+of Shadows, but that she was to return each spring to her mother's
+arms. Thus were described the withdrawal and reappearance of
+vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. But these
+changes of nature typified the changes in the human lot; else
+Persephone would have been merely a symbol of the buried grain and
+would not have become the Queen of the Dead.12 Her return to the
+world of light, by natural analogy, denoted a new birth to men.
+Accordingly, "all the testimony of antiquity concurs in saying
+that these Mysteries inspired the most animating hopes with regard
+to the condition of the soul after death."13 That the fate of man
+should by imagination and sentiment have been so connected with
+the phenomena of nature in myths and symbols embodied in pathetic
+religious ceremonies was a spontaneous product. For how "Her fresh
+benignant look Nature changes at that lorn season when, With
+tresses drooping o'er her sable stole, She yearly mourns the
+mortal doom of man, Her noblest work! So Israel's virgins erst
+With annual moan upon the mountains wept Their fairest gone!"
+
+And soon again the birds begin to warble, the leaves and blossoms
+put forth, and all is new life once more. In every age the gentle
+heart and meditative mind have been impressed by the mournful
+correspondence and the animating prophecy.
+
+11 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. iii. sects. 2
+3.
+
+12 For the connection of the Eleusinian goddesses with
+agriculture, the seasons, the under world, death, resurrection,
+etc., see "Demeter and Persephone," von Dr. Ludwig Preller, kap.
+i. sects. 9 11.
+
+13 Muller, Hist. Gr. Lit., ch. xvi. sect. 2.
+
+
+But not only was the changing recurrence of dreary winter and
+gladsome summer joined by affecting analogies with the human doom
+of death and hope of another life. The phenomena of the skies, the
+impressive succession of day and night, also were early seized
+upon and made to blend their shadows and lights, by means of
+imaginative suggestions, into an image of the decease and
+resurrection of man. Among the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, so
+called, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage is
+identified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus and
+soaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak of
+the setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension in
+the horizon being its return to life.14 The black abysm under the
+earth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above the
+earth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun rises
+royally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth and
+splendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of his
+ambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves in
+mourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffled
+in his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial.
+How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolically
+interwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joy
+and activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness and
+sad repose of midnight and of death.
+
+The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor
+Nature loves to weep."
+
+Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, does
+mother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, in
+type of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buried
+seed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day bursting
+fruit.
+
+These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together with
+explanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by the
+peculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among the
+earliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth as
+literal history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth once
+historically exemplified by some traditional personage. It was
+dramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiation
+into the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatrical
+representation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years,
+of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, his
+flight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king of
+the dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ran
+along the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of the
+god in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurel
+from the sacred valley.15 The doctrine of a future life connected
+with the legend of some hero who had died, descended into the
+under world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramatically
+represented in the personal experience of the initiate, was the
+heart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity.
+
+"Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death bolted
+Mysteries."
+
+14 Leitch's Eng. trans. of K. O. Muller's Introduction to a
+Scientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342.
+
+15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also his
+Dorian, lib. ii. cap. vii. sect. 8.
+
+
+Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grew
+up naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed at
+once, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology,
+by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral and
+religious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps it
+was gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives.
+Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliant
+primeval revelation. This question of the origination, the first
+causes and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopeless
+obscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thing
+we know, namely, that at an early age these societies formed
+organizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitally
+connected with the prevailing religions of the principal nations
+of the earth.
+
+In Egypt the legend of initiation was this.16 Typhon, a wicked,
+destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against his
+brother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest,
+inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose body
+would fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhon
+instantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into the
+river. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and was
+annually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But the
+winds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, the
+inconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband's
+remains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. This
+part of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection of
+Osiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestation
+of excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in the
+finding him again," Augustine writes, "first their lamentation,
+then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yet
+the fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weep
+and rejoice truly."17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration,
+and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religious
+festivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration of
+Typhon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, the
+subsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of the
+delicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, the
+encroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, the
+disappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness of
+winter.18 But the real interest and power of the whole subject
+probably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena,
+traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a future
+life for man.
+
+In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, and
+doctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They are
+credulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself,
+who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, where
+thousands thronged to be initiated by him.19 This Mithraic cave
+was an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with the
+constellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black and
+fiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blue
+and starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangers
+and instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathing
+celestial music. In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, in
+dramatic show, died, was laid in a coffin, and
+
+16 Wilkinson, Egyptian Antiquities, series i. vol. i. ch. 3.
+
+17 De Civitate Dei, lib. vi. cap. 10.
+
+18 De Is. et Osir.
+
+19 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her.,
+cap. xl., where he refers the mimic death and resurrection in the
+Mithraic Mysteries to the teaching of Satan.
+
+
+afterwards rose unto a new life, all of which was a type of the
+natural fate of man.20 The descent of the soul from heaven and its
+return thither were denoted by a torch borne alternately reversed
+and upright, and by the descriptions of the passage of spirits, in
+the round of the metempsychosis, through the planetary gates of
+the zodiac. The sun and moon and the morning and evening star were
+depicted in brilliant gold or blackly muffled, according to their
+journeying in the upper or in the lower hemisphere.21
+
+The hero of the Syrian Mysteries was Adonis or Thammuz, the
+beautiful favorite of Aphrodite, untimely slain by a wild boar.
+His death was sadly, his resurrection joyously, celebrated every
+year at Byblus with great pomp and universal interest. The
+festival lasted two days. On the first, all things were clad in
+mourning, sorrow was depicted in every face, and wails and weeping
+resounded. Coffins were exposed at every door and borne in
+numerous processions. Frail stalks of young corn and flowers were
+thrown into the river to perish, as types of the premature death
+of blooming Adonis, cut off like a plant in the bud of his age.22
+The second day the whole aspect of things was changed, and the
+greatest exultation prevailed, because it was said Adonis had
+returned from the dead.23 Venus, having found him dead, deposited
+his body on a bed of lettuce and mourned bitterly over him. From
+his blood sprang the adonium, from her tears the anemone.24 The
+Jews were captivated by the religious rites connected with this
+touching myth, and even enacted them in the gates of their holy
+temple. Ezekiel says, "Behold, at the gate of the Lord's house
+which was towards the north [the direction of night and winter]
+there sat women weeping for Tammuz." It was said that Aphrodite
+prevailed on Persephone to let Adonis dwell one half the year with
+her on earth, and only the rest among the shades, a plain
+reference to vegetable life in summer and winter.25 Lucian, in his
+little treatise on the Syrian Goddess, says that "the river
+Adonis, rising out of Mount Libanus, at certain seasons flows red
+in its channel: some say it is miraculously stained by the blood
+of the fresh wounded youth; others say that the spring rains,
+washing in a red ore from the soil of the country, discolor the
+stream." Dupuis remarks that this redness was probably an artifice
+of the priests.26 Milton's beautiful allusion to this fable is
+familiar to most persons. Next came he "Whose annual wound in
+Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous
+ditties all a summer's day, While smooth Adonis from his native
+rock Ran purple to the sea with Thammuz' blood."
+
+20 Julius Firmicus, De Errore Prof. Relig.
+
+21 Mithraica, Memoire Academique sur le Culte Solaire de Mithra,
+par Joseph de Hammer, pp: 66-68, 125-127. Tertullian, Prescript.
+ad Her., cap. xl. Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lib. iv. sect. 16.
+Hyde. Hist. Vet. Pers. Relig., p. 254.
+
+22 Hist. du Culte d'Adonis, Mem. Acad. des Inscript., vol. iv. p.
+136.
+
+23 Theocritus, Idyl XV.
+
+24 Bion, Epitaph Adon., l. 66.
+
+25 See references in Anthon's Class. Dict., art. Adonis.
+
+26 Dupuis, Orig. de Cultes, vol. iv. p. 121, ed. 1822.
+
+
+There is no end to the discussions concerning the secret purport
+of this fascinating story. But, after all is said, it seems to us
+that there are in it essentially two significations, one relating
+to the phenomena of the sun and the earth, the other to the mutual
+changes of nature and the fate of humanity. Aphrodite bewailing
+Adonis is surviving Nature mourning for departed Man.
+
+In India the story was told of Mahadeva searching for his lost
+consort Sita, and, after discovering her lifeless form, bearing it
+around the world with dismal lamentations. Sometimes it was the
+death of Camadeva, the Hindu Cupid, that was mourned with solemn
+dirges.27 He, like Osiris, was slain, enclosed in a chest, and
+committed to the waves. He was afterwards recovered and
+resuscitated. Each initiate passed through the emblematic
+ceremonies corresponding to the points of this pretended history.
+The Phrygians associated the same great doctrine with the persons
+of Atys and Cybele. Atys was a lovely shepherd youth passionately
+loved by the mother of the gods.28 He suddenly died; and she, in
+frantic grief, wandered over the earth in search of him, teaching
+the people where she went the arts of agriculture. He was at
+length restored to her. Annually the whole drama was performed by
+the assembled nation with sobs of woe succeeded by ecstasies of
+joy.29 Similar to this, in the essential features, was the
+Eleusinian myth. Aidoneus snatched the maiden Kore down to his
+gloomy empire. Her mother, Demeter, set off in search of her,
+scattering the blessings of agriculture, and finally discovered
+her, and obtained the promise of her society for half of every
+year. These adventures were dramatized and explained in the
+mysteries which she, according to tradition, instituted at
+Eleusis.
+
+The form of the legend was somewhat differently incorporated with
+the Bacchic Mysteries. It was elaborately wrought up by the Orphic
+poets. The distinctive name they gave to Bacchus or Dionysus was
+Zagreus. He was the son of Zeus, and was chosen by him to sit on
+the throne of heaven. Zeus gave him Apollo and the Curetes as
+guards; but the brutal Titans, instigated by jealous Hera,
+disguised themselves and fell on the unfortunate youth while his
+attention was fixed on a splendid mirror, and, after a fearful
+conflict, overcame him and tore him into seven pieces. Pallas,
+however, saved his palpitating heart, and Zeus swallowed it.
+Zagreus was then begotten again.30 He was destined to restore the
+golden age. His devotees looked to him for the liberation of their
+souls through the purifying rites of his Mysteries. The initiation
+shadowed out an esoteric doctrine of death and a future life, in
+the mock murder and new birth of the aspirant, who impersonated
+Zagreus.31
+
+The Northmen constructed the same drama of death around the young
+Balder, their god of gentleness and beauty. This legend, as Dr.
+Oliver has shown, constituted the secret of the Gothic
+Mysteries.32 Obscure and dread prophecies having crept among the
+gods that the death of the beloved Balder was at hand, portending
+universal ruin, a consultation was held to devise means for
+averting the calamity. At the suggestion of Balder's mother,
+Freya, the Scandinavian Venus, an oath that they would not be
+instrumental in causing his death was
+
+27 Asiatic Researches, vol. iii. p. 187.
+
+28 See article Atys in Smith's Class. Dict. with references.
+
+29 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, lib. ii. 11. 605-655.
+
+30 Muller, Hist. Greek Lit., ch. xvi.
+
+31 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. iii. cap. 5, sect. 13.
+
+32 History of Initiation, Lect. X.
+
+
+exacted from all things in nature except the mistletoe, which, on
+account of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfully
+neglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, taking
+advantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe,
+and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicing
+in fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed exemption
+from wounds, persuaded him to be the mark for the weapons of the
+gods. But, alas! when Hodur tilted at him, the devoted victim was
+transpierced and fell lifeless to the ground. Darkness settled
+over the world, and bitter was the grief of men and gods over the
+innocent and lovely Balder. A deputation imploring his release was
+sent to the queen of the dead. Hela so far relented as to promise
+his liberation to the upper world on condition that every thing on
+earth wept for him. Straightway there was a universal mourning.
+Men, beasts, trees, metals, stones, wept. But an old withered
+giantess Asa Loke in disguise shed no tears; and so Hela kept her
+beauteous and lamented prey. But he is to rise again to eternal
+life and joy when the twilight of the gods has passed.33 This
+entire fable has been explained by the commentators, in all its
+details, as a poetic embodiment of the natural phenomena of the
+seasons. But it is not improbable that, in addition, it bore a
+profound doctrinal reference to the fate of man which was
+interpreted to the initiates.
+
+A great deal has been written concerning the ceremonies and
+meaning of the celebrated Celtic Mysteries established so long at
+Samothrace, and under the administration of the Druids throughout
+ancient Gaul and Britain. The aspirant was led through a series of
+scenic representations, "without the aid of words," mystically
+shadowing forth in symbolic forms the doctrine of the transmigration
+of souls. He assumed successively the shapes of a rabbit, a hen,
+a grain of wheat, a horse, a tree, and so on through a wide range
+of metamorphoses enacted by the aid of secret dramatic machinery.
+
+He died, was buried, was born anew, rising from his dark confinement
+to life again. The hierophant enclosed him in a little boat and
+set him adrift, pointing him to a distant rock, which he calls
+"the harbor of life." Across the black and stormy waters he strives
+to gain the beaconing refuge.
+
+In these scenes and rites a recondite doctrine of the physical
+and moral relations and destiny of man was shrouded, to be unveiled
+by degrees to their docile disciples by the Druidic mystagogues.34
+
+It may appear strange that there should be in connection with so
+many of the old religions of the earth these arcana only to be
+approached by secret initiation at the hands of hierophants. But
+it will seem natural when we remember that those religions were in
+the exclusive keeping of priesthoods, which, organized with
+wondrous cunning and perpetuated through ages, absorbed the
+science, art, and philosophy of the world, and, concealing their
+wisdom in the mystic signs of an esoteric language, wielded the
+mighty enginery of superstition over the people at will. The
+scenes and instructions through which the priests led the
+unenlightened candidate were the hiding of their power. Thus,
+wherever was a priesthood we should expect to find mysteries and
+initiations. Historic fact justifies the
+
+33 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, pp. 288-300.
+
+34 Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, pp. 207-257;
+390-392; 420, 555, 572. The accuracy of many of Davies's
+translations has been called in question. His statements, even on
+the matters affirmed above, must be received with some reservation
+of faith.
+
+
+supposition; learning unveils the obscure places of antiquity, and
+shows us the templed or cavernous rites of the religious world,
+from Hindostan to Gaul, from Egypt to Norway, from Athens to
+Mexico. And this brings us to the Mysteries of Vitzliputzli,
+established in South America. Dr. Oliver, in the twelfth lecture
+of his History of Initiation, gathering his materials from various
+sources, gives a terrific account of the dramatic ritual here
+employed. The walls, floor, images, were smeared and caked with
+human blood. Fresh slaughters of victims were perpetrated at
+frequent intervals. The candidate descended to the grim caverns
+excavated under the foundations of the temple. This course was
+denominated "the path of the dead." Phantoms flitted before him,
+shrieks appalled him, pitfalls and sacrificial knives threatened
+him. At last, after many frightful adventures, the aspirant
+arrived at a narrow stone fissure terminating the range of
+caverns, through which he was thrust, and was received in the open
+air, as a person born again, and welcomed with frantic shouts by
+the multitudes who had been waiting for him without during the
+process of his initiation.
+
+Even among the savage tribes of North America striking traces have
+been found of an initiation into a secret society by a mystic
+death and resurrection. Captain Jonathan Carver, who spent the
+winter of 1776 with the Naudowessie Indians, was an eye witness of
+the admission of a young brave into a body which they entitled
+Wakou Kitchewah, or Friendly Society of the Spirit. "This singular
+initiation," he says, "took place within a railed enclosure in the
+centre of the camp at the time of the new moon." First came the
+chiefs, clad in trailing furs. Then came the members of the
+society, dressed and painted in the gayest manner. When all were
+seated, one of the principal chiefs arose, and, leading the young
+man forward, informed the meeting of his desire to be admitted
+into their circle. No objection being offered, the various
+preliminary arrangements were made; after which the director began
+to speak to the kneeling candidate, telling him that he was about
+to receive a communication of the spirit. This spirit would
+instantly strike him dead; but he was told not to be terrified,
+because he should immediately be restored to life again, and this
+experience was a necessary introduction to the advantages of the
+community he was on the point of entering. Then violent agitation
+distorted the face and convulsed the frame of the old chief. He
+threw something looking like a small bean at the young man. It
+entered his mouth, and he fell lifeless as suddenly as if he had
+been shot. Several assistants received him, rubbed his limbs, beat
+his back, stripped him of his garments and put a new dress on him,
+and finally presented him to the society in full consciousness as
+a member.36
+
+All the Mysteries were funereal. This is the most striking single
+phenomenon connected with them. They invariably began in darkness
+with groans and tears, but as invariably ended in festive triumph
+with shouts and smiles. In them all were a symbolic death, a
+mournful entombment, and a glad resurrection. We know this from
+the abundant direct testimony of unimpeachable ancient writers,
+and also from their indirect descriptions of the ceremonies and
+allusions to them. For example, Apuleius says, "The delivery of
+the Mysteries is celebrated as a thing resembling a voluntary
+death: the initiate, being, after a manner, born
+
+36 Travels in the Interior of North America, ch. vii.
+
+
+again, is restored to a new life." 36 Indeed, all who describe the
+course of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant was
+buried for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin or
+grave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins of
+the chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. These
+abound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curious
+recesses; and in connection with them is always found some
+excavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollow
+beds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to be
+seen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as in
+nearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration of
+the Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt.37
+
+It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols and
+rites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadow
+forth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well known
+mythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity,
+to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of the
+Deluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death,
+burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are a
+representation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, his
+dark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out of
+it. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariably
+began, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over their
+confinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphant
+rejoicings with which the initiations always ended, referred to
+the glad exit of the patriarchal family from their floating prison
+into the blooming world. The advocates of this theory have
+laboriously collected all the materials that favor it, and
+skilfully striven by their means to elucidate the whole subject of
+ancient paganism, especially of the Mysteries. But, after reading
+all that they have written, and considering it in the light of
+impartial researches, one is constrained to say that they have by
+no means made out their case. It is somewhat doubtful if there be
+any ground whatever for believing that traditions concerning
+Noah's deluge and the ark, and his doings in connection with them,
+in any way entered into the public doctrines and forms, or into
+the secret initiations, of the heathen religions. At all events,
+there can be no doubt that the Arkite theorists have exaggerated
+the importance and extent of these views beyond all tolerable
+bounds, and even to absurdity. But our business with them now is
+only so far as they relate to the Mysteries. Our own conviction is
+that the real meaning of the rites in the Mysteries was based upon
+the affecting phenomena of human life and death and the hope of
+another life. We hold the Arkite theory to be arbitrary in
+general, unsupported by proofs, and inconsistent in detail, unable
+to meet the points presented.
+
+In the first place, a fundamental part of the ancient belief was
+that below the surface of the earth was a vast, sombre under
+world, the destination of the ghosts of men, the Greek Hades, the
+Roman Orcus, the Gothic Hell. A part of the service of initiation
+was a symbolic descent into this realm. Apuleius, describing his
+initiation, says, "I approached to the confines
+
+36 Golden Ass, Eng. trans., by Thomas Taylor, p. 280.
+
+37 Copious instances are given in Oliver's History of Initiation,
+in Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, and in Maurice's Indian
+Antiquities.
+
+
+of death and trod on the threshold of Proserpine." 38 Orpheus, to
+whom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the East
+was ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent into
+Hades." Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus,
+Rhampsinitus, and many others.39 It is painted in detail by Homer
+in the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much more
+minutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with great
+learning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, with
+irresistible cogency, to show that these descents are no more nor
+less than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted in
+the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries.40 Any person must be
+invincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant a
+capacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryant
+and his disciples do,41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah's
+ark," or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as a
+coffin bearing the relics of dead Nature," is a purely arbitrary
+step taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means the
+under world of the dead, and not the interior of Noah's ark.
+Indeed, in the second place, Faber admits that in the Mysteries
+"the ark itself was supposed to be in Hades, the vast central
+abyss of the earth." But such was not the location of Noah's
+vessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above the
+tops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonable
+supposition in itself, and the one best supported by historic
+facts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in a
+ship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic rites
+drawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressive
+phenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and some
+other early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the sky
+as ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself was
+sometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was the
+sepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over the
+Acherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in which
+Charon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surely
+there was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likely
+that what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into the
+Arkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematic
+showing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death and
+future fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, with
+striking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life,
+as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a golden
+cup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also represent
+the cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing him
+fearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcoming
+society of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over the
+tempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to the
+sheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state and
+lot, with their mysteries, perils, threats, and promises, could be
+either more natural or more impressive than that of a vessel
+launched on the deep. The dying Socrates said "that he should
+trust his soul on the hope of a future life as upon a raft, and
+launch away into the unknown." Thus the imagination broods over
+and explores the shows and secrets, presageful warnings and
+alluring
+
+38 Golden Ass, Taylor's trans., p. 283.
+
+39 Herodotus, lib. il. cap. cxxii.
+
+40 Divine Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. iv.
+
+41 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. v.: On the Connection of
+the Fabulous Hades with the Mysteries.
+
+
+invitations, storms and calms, island homes and unknown havens, of
+the dim seas of nature and of man, of time and of eternity.42
+
+Thirdly, the defenders of the Arkite theory are driven into gross
+inconsistencies with themselves by the falsity of their views. The
+dilaceration of Zagreus into fragments, the mangling of Osiris and
+scattering of his limbs abroad, they say, refer to the throwing
+open of the ark and the going forth of the inmates to populate the
+earth. They usually make Osiris, Zagreus, Adonis, and the other
+heroes of the legends enacted in the Mysteries, representatives of
+the diluvian patriarch himself; but here, with no reason whatever
+save the exigencies of their theory, they make these mythic
+personages representatives of the ark, a view which is utterly
+unfounded and glaringly wanting in analogy. When Zagreus is torn
+in pieces, his heart is preserved alive by Zeus and born again
+into the world within a human form. After the body of Osiris had
+been strewn piecemeal, the fragments were fondly gathered by Isis,
+and he was restored to life. There is no plausible correspondence
+between these cases and the sending out from the ark of the
+patriarchal family to repeople the world. Their real purpose would
+seem plainly to be to symbolize the thought that, however the body
+of man crumbles in pieces, there is life for him still, he does
+not hopelessly die. They likewise say that the egg which was
+consecrated in the Mysteries, at the beginning of the rites, was
+intended as an emblem of the ark resting on the abyss of waters,
+and that its latent hatching was meant to suggest the opening of
+the ark to let the imprisoned patriarch forth. This hypothesis has
+no proof, and is needless. It is much more plausible to suppose
+that the egg was meant as a symbol of a new life about to burst
+upon the candidate, a symbol of his resurrection from the mystic
+tomb wherein he was buried during one stage of initiation; for we
+know that the initiation was often regarded as the commencement of
+a fresh life, as a new birth. Apuleius says, "I celebrated the
+most joyful day of my initiation as my natal day."
+
+Faber argues, from the very close similarity of all the
+differently named Mysteries, that they were all Arkite, all
+derived from one mass of traditions reaching from Noah and
+embodying his history.43 The asserted fact of general resemblance
+among the instituted Mysteries is unquestionable; but the
+inference above drawn from it is unwarrantable, even if no better
+explanation could be offered. But there is another explanation
+ready, more natural in conception, more consistent in detail, and
+better sustained by evidence. The various Mysteries celebrated in
+the ancient nations were so much alike not because they were all
+founded on one world wide tradition about the Noachian deluge, but
+because they all grew out of the great common facts of human
+destiny in connection with natural phenomena. The Mysteries were
+funereal and festive, began in sorrow and ended in joy, not
+because they represented first Noah's sad entrance into the ark
+and then his glad exit from it, but because they began with
+showing the initiate that he must die, and ended with showing him
+that he should live again in a happier state. Even the most
+prejudiced advocates of the Arkite theory
+
+42 Procopius, in his History of the Gothic War, mentions a curious
+popular British superstition concerning the ferriage of souls among
+the neighboring islands at midnight. See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie,
+kap. xxvi. zweite ausgabe.
+
+43 Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10: Comparison of the Various
+Mysteries.
+
+
+are forced to admit, on the explicit testimony of the ancients,
+that the initiates passed from the darkness and horrors of
+Tartarus to the bliss and splendors of Elysium by a dramatic
+resurrection from burial in the black caverns of probation to
+admission within the illuminated hall or dome of perfection.44
+That the idea of death and of another life runs through all the
+Mysteries as their cardinal tenet is well shown in connection with
+the rites of the celebrated Cave of Trophonius at Lebadea in
+Boeotia. Whoso sought this oracle must descend head foremost over
+an inclined plane, bearing a honey cake in his hand. Aristophanes
+speaks of this descent with a shudder of fear.45 The adventurer
+was suddenly bereft of his senses, and after a while returned to
+the upper air. What he could then remember composed the Divine
+revelation which had been communicated to him in his unnatural
+state below. Plutarch has given a full account of this experience
+from one Timarchus, who had himself passed through it.46 The
+substance of it is this. When Timarchus reached the bottom of the
+cave, his soul passed from his body, visited the under world of
+the departed, saw the sphere of generation where souls were reborn
+into the upper world, received some explanation of all these
+things: then, returning into the body, he was taken up out of the
+cave. Here is no allusion to any traditions of the Deluge or the
+ark; but the great purpose is evidently a doctrine of the destiny
+of man after death.
+
+Before the eyes and upon the heart of all mankind in every age has
+passed in common vision the revolution of the seasons, with its
+beautiful and sombre changes, phenomena having a power of
+suggestion irresistible to stir some of the most profound
+sentiments of the human breast. The day rolls overhead full of
+light and life and activity; then the night settles upon the scene
+with silent gloom and repose. So man runs his busy round of toil
+and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following
+the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid
+populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is
+succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of
+enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in
+maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen
+in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds the
+leafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks of the funereal
+blast. The flush of childish gayety, the bloom of youthful
+promise, when a new comer is growing up sporting about the hearth
+of home, are like the approach of the maiden and starry Spring,
+"Who comes sublime, as when, from Pluto free, Came, through the
+flash of Zeus, Persephone." And then draw hastily on the long,
+lamenting autumnal days, when "Above man's grave the sad winds
+wail and rain drops fall, And Nature sheds her leaves in yearly
+funeral."
+
+44 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10, pp. 331-356. Dion
+Chrysostom describes this scene: Oration XII.
+
+45 The Clouds, 1. 507.
+
+46 Essay on the Demon of Socrates. See also Pansanias, lib. ix.
+cap. xxxix.
+
+
+The flowers are gone, the birds are gone, the gentle breezes are
+gone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people of
+dreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soars
+into new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens on
+the heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surely
+returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the
+renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over
+the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus,
+is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual
+wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss
+of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and
+suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart,
+enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized by
+poets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestly
+societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an
+imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central
+meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah
+and his ark.
+
+The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold;
+and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The first
+object was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence of
+a doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearful
+looking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerable
+proportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be traced
+to the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations and
+terrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the good
+and obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and glorious
+rewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near the
+close of his letter of consolation to her,) "Some say the soul
+will be entirely insensible after death; but you are too well
+acquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries of
+Bacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such an
+error." The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, the
+secret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions,
+thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish its
+doctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus to
+increase the power of the priesthood and the state. To compass
+these ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vague
+superstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resources
+available by the ancient world, were marshalled and brought to
+bear in the Mysteries. By chemical and mechanical secrets then in
+their exclusive possession, the mystagogues worked miracles before
+the astonished novices.47 They had the powers of electricity,
+gunpowder, hydrostatic pressure, at their command.48 Their rites
+were carried out on the most magnificent scale. The temple at
+Eleusis could hold thirty thousand persons. Imagine what effect
+might be produced, under such imposing and prepared circumstances,
+on an ignorant multitude, by a set of men holding all the
+scientific secrets and mechanical inventions till then discovered,
+illumination flashing after darkness successively before their
+smitten eyes, the floors seeming to heave and the walls to crack,
+thunders bellowing through the mighty dome; now yawning revealed
+beneath them the ghostly chimera of Tartarus, with all the
+shrieking and horrid scenery gathered there; now
+
+47 Anthon's Class. Dict., art. "Elicius."
+
+48 Salverte, Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie. See
+also editor's introduction to Thomson's Eng. trans. of Salverte's
+work.
+
+
+the mild beauties of Elysium dawning on their ravished vision,
+amid strains of celestial music, through fading clouds of glory,
+while nymphs, heroes, and gods walked apparent. Clement of
+Alexandria tells us that one feature of the initiation was a
+display of the grisly secrets of Hades.49 Apuleius, in his account
+of his own initiation, says, "At midnight I saw the sun shining
+with a resplendent light; and I manifestly drew near to the lower
+and to the upper gods and adored them in immediate presence." 50
+Lobeck says that, on the lifting of the veil exposing the adytum
+to the gaze of the initiates, apparitions of the gods appeared to
+them.51 Christie, in his little work on the Greek Mysteries, says
+that the doctrines of the Eleusinian shows were explained by means
+of transparent scenes, many of which were faithfully copied upon
+the painted Greek vases; and these vase accordingly, were
+deposited in tombs to evidence the faith of the deceased in a
+future life. The foregoing conceptions may be illustrated by the
+dramatic representations, scenic shadows behind transparent
+curtains, in Java, alluded to by Sir Stamford Raffles.52
+
+It is remarkable how far the Mysteries spread over the earth, and
+what popularity they attained. They penetrated into almost every
+nation under the sun. They admitted, in some degree, nearly the
+whole people. Herodotus informs us that there were collected in
+Egypt, at one celebration, seven hundred thousand men and women,
+besides children.53 The greatest warriors and kings Philip,
+Alexander, Sulla, Antony esteemed it an honor to be welcomed
+within the mystic pale. "Men," says Cicero, "came from the most
+distant shores to be initiated at Eleusis." Sophocles declares, as
+quoted by Warburton, "True life is to be found only among the
+initiates: all other places are full of evil." At the rise of the
+Christian religion, all the life and power left in the national
+religion of Greece and Rome were in the Mysteries. Accordingly,
+here was the most formidable foe of the new faith. Standing in its
+old entrenchments, with all its popular prestige around it, it
+fought with desperate determination for every inch it was
+successively forced to yield. The brilliant effort of Julian to
+roll back the tide of Christianity and restore the pagan religion
+to more than its pristine splendor an effort beneath which the
+scales of the world's fortunes poised, tremulous, for a while was
+chiefly an endeavor to revive and enlarge the Mysteries. Such was
+the attachment of the people to these old rites even in the middle
+of the fourth century of the Christian era, that a murderous riot
+broke out at Alexandria, in which Bishop George and others were
+slain, on occasion of the profanation by Christians of a secret
+adytum in which the Mysteries of Mithra were celebrated.54 And
+when, a little later, the Emperor Valentinian had determined to
+suppress all nocturnal rites, he was induced to withdraw his
+resolution by Pretextatus, proconsul in Greece, "a man endowed
+with every virtue, who represented to him that the
+
+49 Stromata, lib. iii., cited by a writer on the Mysteries in
+Blackwood, Feb. 1853, pp. 201-203.
+
+50 Taylor's trans. of Golden Ass, p. 283. In a note to p. 275 of
+this work, the translator describes (with a citation of his
+authorities) "the breathing resemblances of the gods used in the
+Mysteries, statues fabricated by the telesta, so as to be
+illuminated and to appear animated."
+
+51 Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 7.
+
+52 Discourse to the Lit. and Sci. Soc. of Java, 1815, pub. in
+Valpy's Pamphleteer, No. 15.
+
+53 Lib. ii. cap. ix.
+
+54 Socrates, Ecc. Inst., lib. iii. cap. 2.
+
+
+Greeks would consider life insupportable if they were forbidden to
+celebrate those most sacred Mysteries which bind together the
+human race."55 Upon the whole, we cannot fail to see that the
+Mysteries must have exerted a most extensive and profound
+influence alike in fostering the good hopes of human nature
+touching a life to come, and in giving credit and diffusion to the
+popular fables of the poets concerning the details of the future
+state. Much of that belief which seems to us so absurd we can
+easily suppose they sincerely embraced, when we recollect what
+they thought they had seen under supernatural auspices in their
+initiations.
+
+In the Greek and Roman faith there was gradually developed in
+connection chiefly with the Mysteries, as we believe an
+aristocratic doctrine which allotted to a select class of souls an
+abode in the sky as their distinguished destination after death,
+while the common multitude were still sentenced to the shadow
+region below the grave. As Virgil writes, "The descent to Avernus
+is easy. The gate of dark Dis is open day and night. But to rise
+into the upper world is most arduous. Only the few heroes whom
+favoring Jove loves or shining virtue exalts thither can effect
+it." 56 Numerous scattered, significant traces of a belief in this
+change of the destination of some souls from the pit of Hades to
+the hall of heaven are to be found in the classic authors. Virgil,
+celebrating the death of some person under the fictitious name of
+Daphnis, exclaims, "Robed in white, he admires the strange court
+of heaven, and sees the clouds and the stars beneath his feet. He
+is a god now." 57 Porphyry ascribes to Pythagoras the declaration
+that the souls of departed men are gathered in the zodiac.58 Plato
+earnestly describes a region of brightness and unfading realities
+above this lower world, among the stars, where the gods live, and
+whither, he says, the virtuous and wise may ascend, while the
+corrupt and ignorant must sink into the Tartarean realm.59 A
+similar conception of the attainableness of heaven seems to be
+suggested in the old popular myths, first, of Hercules coming back
+in triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, rising
+to the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place among
+them; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuing
+his mother, the hapless Semele, and soaring with her to heaven,
+where she henceforth resides, a peeress of the eldest goddesses.
+Cicero expresses the same thought when he affirms that "a life of
+justice and piety is the path to heaven, where patriots, exemplary
+souls, released from their bodies, enjoy endless happiness amidst
+the brilliant orbs of the galaxy." 60 The same author also speaks
+of certain philosophers who flourished before his time, "whose
+opinions encouraged the belief that souls departing from bodies
+would arrive at heaven as their proper dwelling place." 61 He
+afterwards stigmatizes the notion that the life succeeding death
+is subterranean as an error,62 and in his own name addresses his
+auditor thus: "I see you gazing upward and wishing to migrate into
+heaven." 63 It was the common belief of the Romans for ages that
+Romulus was taken up into heaven, where he would remain forever,
+claiming Divine honors.64 The Emperor Julian says, in his Letter
+on the
+
+55 Essay on Mysteries, by M. Ouvaroff, Eng. trans. by J. D. Price,
+p. 55.
+
+56 Aneid, lib. vi. 11. 125-130.
+
+57 Ecl. v. 11. 57, 58, 64.
+
+58 De Antro Nympharum.
+
+59 Phado sects. 136-138.
+
+60 Soma. Scipionis.
+
+61 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xi.
+
+62 Ibid. cap. xvi.
+
+63 Ibid. cap. xxxiv.
+
+64 Ennius, e. g., sings, "Romulus in coelo cum diis agit avum"
+
+
+Duties of a Priest, "God will raise from darkness and Tartarus the
+souls of all of us who worship him sincerely: to the pious,
+instead of Tartarus he promises Olympus." "It is lawful," writes
+Plato, "only for the true lover of wisdom to pass into the rank of
+gods." 65 The privilege here confined to philosophers we believe
+was promised to the initiates in the Mysteries, as the special
+prerogative secured to them by their initiation. "To pass into the
+rank of the gods" is a phrase which, as here employed, means to
+ascend into heaven and have a seat with the immortals, instead of
+being banished, with the souls of common mortals, to the under
+world.
+
+In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed to
+that set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth,
+and who were called the chthonian gods.66 The hope of immortality
+first sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship.
+But in the progress of time and culture the supernal circle of
+divinities who kept state on bright Olympus acquired a greater
+share of attention, and at last received a degree of worship far
+surpassing that paid to their swarthy compeers below. The
+adoration of these bright beings, with a growing trust in their
+benignity, the fables of the poets telling how they had sometimes
+elevated human favorites to their presence, for instance,
+receiving a Ganymede to the joys of their sublime society, the
+encouraging thoughts of the more religious and cheerful of the
+philosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking from
+the dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and a
+native longing for admission to the serene pleasures of the
+unfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction,
+perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of the
+old faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, until
+the hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithful
+soul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor of
+the celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of his
+seventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him in
+this strain:  "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that if
+you follow us you will be a god and with us will behold our
+Father." Several learned writers have strenuously labored to prove
+that the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealed
+in them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the established
+theology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods were
+merely deified men. We believe the real significance of the
+various collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which these
+writers have been brought to such a conclusion is this; the
+genuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the gods
+were once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teach
+that Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to tremble
+at the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete,
+whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterly
+absurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligent
+image of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to live
+eternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have been
+a brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and the
+heart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citation
+from Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send the
+bodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuous
+souls, by nature and the Divine justice, rise from men to heroes,
+from heroes to genii; and if, as in the Mysteries, they are
+
+65 Phado, sect. lxxi.
+
+66 Muller, Mist. Greek Lit., cap. ii. sect. 5; cap. xvi. sect. 2.
+
+
+purified, shaking off the remains of mortality and the power of
+the passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascend
+from genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the just
+and established order of nature." 67
+
+The reference in the last clause is to the decrees of the Senate
+whereby apotheosis was conferred on various persons, placing them
+among the gods. This ceremony has often been made to appear
+unnecessarily ridiculous, through a perversion of its actual
+meaning. When the ancients applied the term "god" to a human soul
+departed from the body, it was not used as the moderns
+prevailingly employ that word. It expressed a great deal less with
+them than with us. It merely meant to affirm similarity of
+essence, qualities, and residence, but by no means equal dignity
+and power of attributes between the one and the others. It meant
+that the soul had gone to the heavenly habitation of the gods and
+was thenceforth a participant in the heavenly life.68 Heraclitus
+was accustomed to say, "Men are mortal gods; gods are immortal
+men." Macrobius says, "The soul is not only immortal, but a god."
+69 And Cicero declares, "The soul of man is a Divine thing, as
+Euripides dares to say, a god." 70 Milton uses language precisely
+parallel, speaking of those who are "unmindful of the crown true
+Virtue gives her servants, after their mortal change, among the
+enthroned gods on sainted seats." Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch in
+the second century, says that "to become a god means to ascend
+into heaven." 71 The Roman Catholic ceremony of beatification and
+canonization of saints, offering them incense and prayers
+thereafter, means exactly what was meant by the ancient
+apotheosis, namely, that while the multitudes of the dead abide
+below, in the intermediate state, these favored souls have been
+advanced into heaven. The papal functionaries borrowed this rite,
+with most of its details, from their immediate pagan predecessors,
+who themselves probably adopted it from the East, whence the
+Mysteries came. It is well known that the Brahmans and Buddhists
+believed, centuries before the Christian era, in the contrasted
+fate of good men after death to enjoy the successive heavens above
+the clouds, and of bad men to suffer the successive hells beneath
+the earth. A knowledge of this attractive Oriental doctrine may
+have united with the advance of their own speculations to win the
+partial acceptance obtained among the Greeks and Romans for the
+faith which broke the universal doom to Hades and opened heaven to
+their hopeful aspirations. In a tragedy of Euripides the following
+passage occurs, addressed to the bereaved Admetus: "Let not the
+tomb of thy wife be looked on as the mound of the ordinary dead.
+Some wayfarer, as he treads the sloping road, shall say, 'This
+woman once died for her husband; but now she is a saint in
+heaven.'" 72
+
+When the meaning of the cheerful promises given to the initiates
+of a more favored fate in the future life than awaited others
+namely, as we think, that their spirits on leaving the body should
+scale Olympus instead of plunging to Tartarus had been concealed
+within the
+
+67 Lives, Romulus, sect. xxviii.
+
+68 See a valuable discussion of the ancient use of the terms theos
+and deus in note D vol. iii. of Norton's Genuineness of the
+Gospels.
+
+69 Somn. Scip., lib. ii. cap. 12.
+
+70 Tusc. Quest., lib. i. cap. 26.
+
+71 We omit several other authorities, as the reader would probably
+deem any further evidence superfluous.
+
+72 Alcestis, ll. 1015-1025, ed. Glasg.
+
+
+Mysteries for a long time, it at length broke into public view in
+the national apotheosis of ancient heroes, kings, and renowned
+worthies, the instances of which became so numerous that Cicero
+cries, "Is not nearly all heaven peopled with the human race?" 73
+Over the heads of the devout heathen, as they gazed up through the
+clear night air, twinkled the beams of innumerable stars, each
+chosen to designate the cerulean seat where some soul was
+rejoicing with the gods in heaven over the glorious issue of the
+toils and sufferings in which he once painfully trod this earthly
+scene.
+
+Herodian, a Greek historian of some of the Roman emperors, has
+left a detailed account of the rite of apotheosis.74 An image of
+the person to be deified was made in wax, looking all sick and
+pale, laid in state on a lofty bed of ivory covered with cloth of
+gold, surrounded on one side by choirs of noble lords, on the
+other side by their ladies stripped of their jewels and clad in
+mourning, visited often for several days by a physician, who still
+reports his patient worse, and finally announces his decease. Then
+the Senators and haughtiest patricians bear the couch through the
+via sacra to the Forum. Bands of noble boys and of proud women
+ranged opposite each other chant hymns and lauds over the dead in
+solemn melody. The bier is next borne to the Campus Martius, where
+it is placed upon a high wooden altar, a large, thin structure
+with a tower like a lighthouse. Heaps of fragrant gums, herbs,
+fruits, and spices are poured out and piled upon it. Then the
+Roman knights, mounted on horseback, prance before it in beautiful
+bravery, wheeling to and fro in the dizzy measures of the Pyrrhic
+dance. Also, in a stately manner, purple clothed charioteers,
+wearing masks which picture forth the features of the most famous
+worthies of other days to the reverential recognition of the
+silent hosts assembled, ride around the form of their descendant.
+Suddenly a torch is set to the pile, and it is wrapped in flames.
+From the turret, amidst the aromatic fumes, an eagle is let loose.
+Phoenix like symbol of the departed soul, he soars into the sky,
+and the seven hilled city throbs with pride, reverberating the
+shouts of her people. Thus into the residence of the gods "Sic
+itur ad astra" was borne the divinely favored mortal; "And thus we
+see how man's prophetic creeds Made gods of men when godlike were
+their deeds."
+
+For it was only in times of degradation and by a violent
+perversion that the honor was allowed to the unworthy; and even in
+such cases it was usually nullified as soon as the people
+recovered their senses and their freedom. There is extant among
+the works of Seneca a little treatise called Apocolocuntosis, that
+is, pumpkinification, or the metamorphosis into a gourd, a sharp
+satire levelled against the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius.
+The deification of mortals among the ancients has long been
+laughed at. When the great Macedonian monarch applied for a decree
+for his apotheosis while he was yet alive, the Lacedemonian
+Senate, with bitter sarcasm, voted, "If Alexander desires to be a
+god, let him be a god." The doctrine is often referred to among us
+in terms of mockery. But this is principally because it is not
+understood. It simply signifies the ascent of the soul after death
+into the Olympian halls instead of descending into the Acheronian
+gulfs. And whether we
+
+73 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. 12.
+
+74 Lib. iv.
+
+
+consider the symbolic justice and beauty of the conception as a
+poetic image applied to the deathless heroes of humanity ensphered
+above us forever in historic fame and natural worship, or regard
+its comparative probability as the literal location of the
+residence of departed spirits, it must recommend itself to us as a
+decided improvement on the ideas previously prevalent, and as a
+sort of anticipation, in part, of that bright faith in a heavenly
+home for faithfuls souls, afterwards established in the world by
+Him of whom it was written, "No man hath ascended up to heaven but
+he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, who is now in
+heaven." Indeed, so forcible and close is the correspondence
+between the course of the aspirant in his initiation dramatically
+dying, descending into Hades, rising again to life, and ascending
+into heaven with the apostolic presentation of the redemptive
+career of Christ, our great Forerunner, that some writers Nork,
+for instance have suggested that the latter was but the exoteric
+publication to all the world of what in the former was
+esoterically taught to the initiates alone.
+
+There was a striking naturalness, a profound propriety, in the
+obscurities of secrecy and awe with which the ancient Mysteries
+shrouded from a rash curiosity their instructions concerning the
+future life and only unfolded them by careful degrees to the
+prepared candidate. It is so with the reality itself in the nature
+of things. It is the great mystery of mysteries, darkly hinted in
+types, faintly gleaming in analogies, softly whispered in hopes,
+passionately asked in desires, patiently confirmed in arguments,
+suddenly blazed and thundered in revelation. Man from the very
+beginning of his race on earth has been thickly encompassed by
+mysteries, hung around by the muffling curtains of ignorance and
+superstition. Through one after another of these he has forced his
+way and gazed on their successive secrets laid bare. Once the
+Ocean was an alluring and terrible mystery, weltering before him
+with its endless wash of waves, into which the weary sun, in the
+west, plunged at evening, and out of which, in the east, it
+bounded refreshed in the morning. But the daring prows of his
+ships, guided by pioneering thought and skill, passed its islands
+and touched its ultimate shores. Once the Polar Circle was a
+frightful and frozen mystery, enthroned on mountains of eternal
+ice and wearing upon its snowy brow the flaming crown of the
+aurora borealis. But his hardy navigators, inspired by enterprise
+and philanthropy, armed with science, and supplied by art, have
+driven the awful phantom back, league by league, until but a small
+expanse of its wonders remains untracked by his steps. Once the
+crowded Sky was a boundless mystery, a maze of motions, a field
+where ghastly comets played their antics and shook down terrors on
+the nations. But the theories of his reason, based on the gigantic
+grasp of his calculus and aided by the instruments of his
+invention, have solved perplexity after perplexity, blended
+discords into harmony, and shown to his delighted vision the calm
+perfection of the stellar system. So, too, in the moral world he
+has lifted the shrouds from many a dark problem, and extended the
+empire of light and love far out over the ancient realm of
+darkness and terror. But the secret of Death, the mystery of the
+Future, remains yet, as of old, unfathomed and inscrutable to his
+inquiries. Still, as of old, he kneels before that unlifted veil
+and beseeches the oracles for a response to faith.
+
+The ancient Mysteries in their principal ceremony but copied the
+ordination and followed the overawing spirit of Nature herself.
+The religious reserve and awe about the entrance into the adytum
+of their traditions were like those about the entrance into the
+invisible scenes beyond the veils of time and mortality. Their
+initiation was but a miniature symbol of the great initiation
+through which, and that upon impartial terms, every mortal, from
+King Solomon to the idiot pauper, must sooner or later pass to
+immortality. When a fit applicant, after the preliminary
+probation, kneels with fainting sense and pallid brow before the
+veil of the unutterable Unknown, and the last pulsations of his
+heart tap at the door of eternity, and he reverentially asks
+admission to partake in the secrets shrouded from profane vision,
+the infinite Hierophant directs the call to be answered by Death,
+the speechless and solemn steward of the celestial Mysteries. He
+comes, pushes the curtain aside, leads the awe struck initiate in,
+takes the blinding bandage of the body from his soul; and
+straightway the trembling neophyte receives light in the midst of
+that innumerable Fraternity of Immortals over whom the Supreme
+Author of the Universe presides.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+METEMPSYCHOSIS; OR, TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS.
+
+NO other doctrine has exerted so extensive, controlling, and
+permanent an influence upon mankind as that of the metempsychosis,
+the notion that when the soul leaves the body it is born anew in
+another body, its rank, character, circumstances, and experience
+in each successive existence depending on its qualities, deeds,
+and attainments in its preceding lives. Such a theory, well
+matured, bore unresisted sway through the great Eastern world,
+long before Moses slept in his little ark of bulrushes on the
+shore of the Egyptian river; Alexander the Great gazed with
+amazement on the self immolation by fire to which it inspired the
+Gymnosophists; Casar found its tenets propagated among the Gauls
+beyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as the
+learned and travelled Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford tells us,
+"without any sign of decrepitude or decay, over the Burman,
+Chinese, Tartar, Tibetan, and Indian nations, including at least
+six hundred and fifty millions of mankind."1 There is abundant
+evidence to prove that this scheme of thought prevailed at a very
+early period among the Egyptians, all classes and sects of the
+Hindus, the Persian disciples of the Magi, and the Druids, and, in
+a later age, among the Greeks and Romans as represented by Musaus,
+Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Macrobius, Ovid, and many others. It
+was generally adopted by the Jews from the time of the Babylonian
+captivity. Traces of it have been discovered among the ancient
+Scythians, the African tribes, some of the Pacific Islanders, and
+various aboriginal nations both of North and of South America.
+Charlevoix says some tribes of Canadian Indians believed in a
+transmigration of souls; but, with a curious mixture of fancy and
+reflection, they limited it to the souls of little children, who,
+being balked of this life in its beginning, they thought would try
+it again. Their bodies, accordingly, were buried at the sides of
+roads, that their spirits might pass into pregnant women
+travelling by. A belief in the metempsychosis limited in the same
+way to the souls of children also prevailed among the Mexicans.2
+The Maricopas, by the Gila, believe when they die they shall
+transmigrate into birds, beasts, and reptiles, and shall return to
+the banks of the Colorado, whence they were driven by the Yumas.
+They will live there in caves and woods, as wolves, rats, and
+snakes; so will their enemies the Yumas; and they will fight
+together.3 On the western border of the United States, only three
+or four years ago, two Indians having been sentenced to be hung
+for murder, the chiefs of their tribe came in and begged that they
+might be shot or burned instead, as they looked upon hanging with
+the utmost horror, believing that the spirit of a person who is
+thus strangled to death goes into the next world in a foul manner,
+and that it assumes a beastly form. The Sandwich Islanders
+sometimes threw their dead into the sea to be devoured by sharks,
+supposing their souls would animate these monsters and cause them
+
+1 Wilson, Two Lectures on the Religious Opinions of the Hindus, p.
+64.
+
+2 Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, vol. viii. p. 220.
+
+3 Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations in Texas, New
+Mexico, &c., ch. xxx.
+
+
+to spare the living whom accident should throw within their
+reach.4 Similar superstitions, but more elaborately developed, are
+rife among many tribes of African negroes.5 It was inculcated in
+the early Christian centuries by the Gnostics and the Manichaans;
+also by Origen and several other influential Fathers. In the
+Middle Ages the sect of the Cathari, the Bogomiles, the famous
+scholastics Scotus Erigena and Bonaventura, as well as numerous
+less distinguished authors, advocated it. And in modern times it
+has been earnestly received by Lessing and Fourier, and is not
+without its open defenders to day, as we can attest from our own
+knowledge, even in the prosaic and enlightened circles of European
+and American society.
+
+There have been two methods of explaining the origin of the dogma
+of transmigration. First, it has been regarded as a retribution,
+the sequel to sin in a pre existent state:
+
+"All that flesh doth cover,
+Souls of source sublime,
+Are but slaves sold over
+To the Master Time
+To work out their ransom
+For the ancient crime."
+
+With the ancient Egyptians the doctrine was developed in
+connection with the conception of a revolt and battle among the
+gods in some dim and disastrous epoch of the past eternity, when
+the defeated deities were thrust out of heaven and shut up in
+fleshly prison bodies. So man is a fallen spirit, heaven his
+fatherland, this life a penance, sometimes necessarily repeated in
+order to be effectual.6 The pre existence of the soul, whether
+taught by Pythagoras, sung by Empedocles, dreamed by Fludd, or
+contended for by Beecher, is the principal foundation of the
+belief in the metempsychosis. But, secondly, the transmigration of
+souls has been considered as the means of their progressive
+ascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the
+scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth,
+climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless
+aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are
+thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man
+soaring to God; but by sin the natural order and working of means
+are inverted, and the series of births lead downward, until
+expiation and merit restore the primal adjustment and direction.
+
+The idea of a metempsychosis, or soul wandering, as the Germans
+call it, has been broached in various forms widely differing in
+the extent of their application. Among the Jews the writings of
+Philo, the Talmud, and other documents, are full of it. They seem,
+for the most part, to have confined the mortal residence of souls
+to human bodies. They say that God created all souls on the first
+day, the only day in which he made aught out of nothing; and they
+imply, in their doctrine of the revolution of souls, that these
+are born over and over, and will continue wandering thus until the
+Messiah comes and the resurrection occurs. The
+
+4 Jarves, Hist. Sandwich Islands, p. 82.
+
+5 Wilson, Western Africa, p. 210.
+
+6 Dr. Roth, Agyptische Glaubenslehre.
+
+
+Rabbins distinguish two kinds of metempsychosis; namely, "Gilgul,"
+which is a series of single transmigrations, each lasting till
+death; and "Ibbur," which is where one soul occupies several
+bodies, changing its residence at pleasure, or where several souls
+occupy one body.7 The latter kind is illustrated by examples of
+demoniacal possession in the New Testament. The demons were
+supposed to be the souls of deceased wicked men. Sometimes they
+are represented as solitary and flitting from one victim to
+another; sometimes they swarm together in the same person, as
+seven were at once cast out of Mary Magdalene.
+
+More frequently, however, the range of the soul's travels in its
+repeated births has been so extended as to include all animal
+bodies, beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects. In this extent
+the doctrine was held by the Pythagoreans and Platonists, and in
+fact by a majority of its believers. Shakspeare's wit is not
+without historical warrant when he makes the clown say to
+Malvolio, "Thou shalt fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou
+dispossess the soul of thy grandam." Many the Manichaans, for
+instance taught that human souls transmigrated not only through
+the lowest animal bodies but even through all forms of vegetable
+life. Souls inhabit ears of corn, figs, shrubs. "Whoso plucks the
+fruit or the leaves from trees, or pulls up plants or herbs, is
+guilty of homicide," say they; "for in each case he expels a soul
+from its body." 8 And some have even gone so far as to believe
+that the soul, by a course of ignorance, cruelty, and uncleanness
+pursued through many lives, will at length arrive at an inanimate
+body, and be doomed to exist for unutterable ages as a stone or as
+a particle of dust. The adherents of this hypothesis regard the
+whole world as a deposition of materialized souls. At every step
+they tread on hosts of degraded souls, destined yet, though now by
+sin sunk thus low, to find their way back as redeemed and blessed
+spirits to the bosom of the Godhead.
+
+Upon the whole, the metempsychosis may be understood, as to its
+inmost meaning and its final issue, to be either a Development, a
+Revolution, or a Retribution, a Divine system of development
+eternally leading creatures in a graduated ascension from the base
+towards the apex of the creation, a perpetual cycle in the order
+of nature fixedly recurring by the necessities of a physical fate
+unalterable, unavoidable, eternal, a scheme of punishment and
+reward exactly fitted to the exigencies of every case, presided
+over by a moral Nemesis, and issuing at last in the emancipation
+of every purified soul into infinite bliss, when, by the upward
+gravitation of spirit, they shall all have been strained through
+the successively finer growing filters of the worlds, from the
+coarse grained foundation of matter to the lower shore of the
+Divine essence.
+
+In seeking to account for the extent and the tenacious grasp of
+this antique and stupendous belief, in looking about for the
+various suggestions or confirmations of such a dogma, we would
+call attention to several considerations, each claiming some
+degree of importance. First, among the earliest notions of a
+reflecting man is that of the separate existence of the soul after
+the dissolution of the body. He instinctively distinguishes the
+
+7 Basnage, Hist. Jews, lib. iv. cap. xxx.: Schroder, Judenthum,
+buch ii. kap. iii. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum. th. ii. kap.
+i.
+
+8 Augustine, De Morlb. Manicha., lib. ii. cap. xvii.: De Hares..
+cap. xlvi.: Contra Faustum, lib. xvi. cap. xxviii.
+
+
+thinking substance he is from the material vestment he wears.
+Conscious of an unchanged personal identity beneath the changes
+and decays everywhere visible around him, he naturally imagines
+that "As billows on the undulating main, That swelling fall and
+falling swell again, So on the tide of time inconstant roll The
+dying body and the deathless soul."
+
+To one thus meditating, and desiring, as he surely would, to
+perceive or devise some explanation of the soul's posthumous
+fortunes, the idea could hardly fail to occur that the destiny of
+the soul might be to undergo a renewed birth, or a series of
+births in new bodies. Such a conception, appearing in a rude state
+of culture, before the lines between science, religion, and poetry
+had been sharply drawn, recommending itself alike by its
+simplicity and by its adaptedness to gratify curiosity and
+speculation in the formation of a thousand quaint and engaging
+hypotheses, would seem plausible, would be highly attractive,
+would very easily secure acceptance as a true doctrine.
+
+Secondly, the strange resemblances and sympathies between men and
+animals would often powerfully suggest to a contemplative observer
+the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.9 Looking over those
+volumes of singular caricatures wherein certain artists have made
+all the most distinctive physiognomies of men and beasts mutually
+to approximate and mingle, one cannot avoid the fancy that the
+bodies of brutes are the masks of degraded men. Notice an ox
+reclining in the shade of a tree, patiently ruminating as if sadly
+conscious of many things and helplessly bound in some obscure
+penance, a mute world of dreamy experiences, a sombre mystery: how
+easy to imagine him an enchanted and transformed man! See how
+certain animals are allied in their prominent traits to humanity,
+the stricken deer, weeping big, piteous tears, the fawning
+affection and noble fidelity of the dog, the architectural skill
+of the beaver, the wise aspect of the owl, the sweet plaint of the
+nightingale, the shrieks of some fierce beasts, and the howls of
+others startlingly like the cries of children and the moans of
+pain, the sparkling orbs and tortuous stealthiness of the snake;
+and the hints at metempsychosis are obvious. Standing face to face
+with a tiger, an anaconda, a wild cat, a monkey, a gazelle, a
+parrot, a dove, we alternately shudder with horror and yearn with
+sympathy, now expecting to see the latent devils throw off their
+disguise and start forth in their own demoniac figures, now
+waiting for the metamorphosing charm to be reversed, and for the
+enchanted children of humanity to stand erect, restored to their
+former shapes. Pervading all the grades and forms of distinct
+animal life there seems to be a rudimentary unity. The fundamental
+elements and primordial germs of consciousness, intellect, will,
+passion, appear the same, and the different classes of being seem
+capable of passing into one another by improvement or deterioration.
+
+Spontaneously, then, might a primitive observer, unhampered by
+prejudices, think that the soul of man on leaving its present body
+would find or construct another according to its chief intrinsic
+qualities and
+
+9 Scholz, Beweis, dass es eine Seelenwanderung bei den Thieren
+giebt.
+
+
+forces, whether those were a leonine magnanimity of courage, a
+vulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. The
+spirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energy
+another form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims as
+an eagle in the eye of noon, Or wails, a screech owl, to the deaf,
+cold moon, Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
+Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air."
+
+The hypothesis is equally forced on our thoughts by regarding the
+human attributes of some brutes and the brutal attributes of some
+men. Thus Gratiano, enraged at the obstinate malignity of Shylock,
+cries to the hyena hearted Jew, "Thou almost mak'st me waver in my
+faith, To hold opinion, with Pythagoras, That souls of animals
+infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit
+Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter, Even from the
+gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thine
+unhallow'd dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are
+wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous."
+
+Thirdly, there is a figurative metempsychosis, which may sometimes
+the history of mythology abounds in examples of the same sort of
+thing have been turned from an abstract metaphor into a concrete
+belief, or from a fanciful supposition have hardened into a
+received fact. There is a poetic animation of objects whereby the
+imaginative person puts himself into other persons, into trees,
+clouds, whirlwinds, or what not, and works them for the time in
+ideal realization. The same result is put in speech sometimes as
+humorous play: for example, a celebrated English author says,
+"Nature meant me for a salamander, and that is the reason I have
+always been discontented as a man: I shall be a salamander in the
+next world!" Such imagery stated to a mind of a literal order
+solidifies into a meaning of prosaic fact. It is a common mode of
+speech to say of an enthusiastic disciple that the spirit of his
+master possesses him. A receptive student enters into the soul of
+Plato, or is full of Goethe. We say that Apelles lived again in
+Titian. Augustine reappeared in Calvin, and Pelagius in Arminius,
+to fight over the old battle of election and freedom. Luther rose
+in Ronge. Take these figures literally, construct what they imply
+into a dogma, and the product is the transmigration of souls. The
+result thus arrived at finds effective support in the striking
+physical resemblance, spiritual likeness, and similarity of
+mission frequently seen between persons in one age and those in a
+former age. Columbus was the modern Jason sailing after the Golden
+Fleece of a New World. Glancing along the portrait gallery of some
+ancient family, one is sometimes startled to observe a face,
+extinct for several generations, suddenly confronting him again
+with all its features in some distant descendant. A peculiarity of
+conformation, a remarkable trait of character, suppressed for a
+century, all at once starts into vivid prominence in a remote
+branch of the lineage, and men say, pointing back to the ancestor,
+"He has revived once more." Seeing Elisha do the same things that
+his departed master had done before him, the people exclaimed,
+"The spirit of Elijah is upon him." Beholding in John the Baptist
+one going before him in the spirit of that expected prophet, Jesus
+said, "If ye are able to receive it, this is he." Some of the
+later Rabbins assert many entertaining things concerning the
+repeated births of the most distinguished personages in their
+national history. Abel was born again in Seth; Cain, in that
+Egyptian whom Moses slew; Abiram, in Ahithophel; and Adam, having
+already reappeared once in David, will live again in the Messiah.
+The performance by an eminent man of some great labor which had
+been done in an earlier age in like manner by a kindred spirit
+evokes in the imagination an apparition of the return of the dead
+to repeat his old work.
+
+Fourthly, there are certain familiar psychological experiences
+which serve to suggest and to support the theory of transmigration,
+and which are themselves in return explained by such a surmise.
+
+Thinking upon some unwonted subject, often a dim impression
+arises in the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot help
+feeling, that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections
+before. Learning a fact, meeting a face, for the first time, we
+are puzzled with an obscure assurance that it is not the first
+time. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted by
+a sense of familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude that
+surely we have more than once trodden those fields and gazed on
+those scenes; and from hoary mountain, trickling rill, and vesper
+bell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial music seem to
+sigh, in remembered accents, through the soul's plaintive echoing
+halls, "'Twas auld lang syne, my dear, 'Twas auld lang syne."
+
+Plato's doctrine of reminiscence here finds its basis. We have
+lived before, perchance many times, and through the clouds of
+sense and imagination now and then float the veiled visions of
+things that were. Efforts of thought reveal the half effaced
+inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches of
+dialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of old
+friendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deeds
+performed long ago pass in weird procession before the mind's half
+opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachable
+veracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm
+believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his
+present life. He testifies that on innumerable occasions he has
+experienced remembrances of events and recognitions of places,
+accompanied by a flash of irresistible conviction that he had
+known them in a former state. Nearly every one has felt instances
+of this, more or less numerous and vivid. The doctrine at which
+such things hint that "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in
+utter nakedness," but trailing vague traces and enigmas from a
+bygone history, "do we come" yields the secret of many a mood and
+dream, the spell of inexplicable hours, the key and clew to
+baffling labyrinths of mystery. The belief in the doctrine of the
+metempsychosis, among a fanciful people and in an unscientific
+age, need be no wonder to any cultivated man acquainted with the
+marvels of experience and aware that every one may say,
+
+"Full oft my feelings make me start,
+Like footprints on some desert shore,
+As if the chambers of my heart
+Had heard their shadowy step before."
+
+Fifthly, the theory of the transmigration of souls is marvellously
+adapted to explain the seeming chaos of moral inequality,
+injustice, and manifold evil presented in the world of human life.
+No other conceivable view so admirably accounts for the
+heterogeneousness of our present existence, refutes the charge of
+a groundless favoritism urged against Providence, and completely
+justifies the ways of God to man. The loss of remembrance between
+the states is no valid objection to the theory; because such a
+loss is the necessary condition of a fresh and fair probation.
+Besides, there is a parallel fact of deep significance in our
+unquestionable experience; "For is not our first year forgot? The
+haunts of memory echo not."
+
+Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regard
+to moral justice vanish. If a man be born blind, deaf, a cripple,
+a slave, an idiot, it is because in a previous life he abused his
+privileges and heaped on his soul a load of guilt which he is now
+expiating. If a sudden calamity overwhelm a good man with
+unmerited ruin and anguish, it is the penalty of some crime
+committed in a state of responsible being beyond the confines of
+his present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrue
+to any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerless
+friendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlier
+life. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled,
+awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every man
+deformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hard
+conditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favored
+and perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregone
+existence. When the Hindu looks on a man beautiful, learned,
+noble, fortunate, and happy, he exclaims, "How wise and good must
+this man have been in his former lives!" In his philosophy, or
+religion, the proof of the necessary consequences of virtue and
+vice is deduced from the metempsychosis, every particular of the
+outward man being a result of some corresponding quality of his
+soul, and every event of his experience depending as effect on his
+previous merit as cause.10 Thus the principal physical and moral
+phenomena of life are strikingly explained; and, as we gaze around
+the world, its material conditions and spiritual elements combine
+in one vast scheme of unrivalled order, and the total experience
+of humanity forms a magnificent picture of perfect poetic justice.
+We may easily account for the rise and spread of a theory whose
+sole difficulty is a lack of positive proof, but whose
+applications are so consistent and fascinating alike to
+imagination and to conscience. Hierocles said, and distinguished
+philosophers both before and since have said, "Without the
+doctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways
+of Providence."
+
+10 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 286.
+
+
+Finally, this doctrine, having been suggested by the various
+foregoing considerations, and having been developed into a
+practical system of conceptions and motives by certain leading
+thinkers, was adopted by the principal philosophers and
+priesthoods of antiquity, and taught to the common people with
+authority. The popular beliefs of four thousand years ago depended
+for their prevalence, not so much on cogent arguments or intrinsic
+probability, as upon the sanctions thrown around them by renowned
+teachers, priests, and mystagogues. Now, the doctrine of the
+transmigration of souls was inculcated by the ancient teachers,
+not as a mere hypothesis resting on loose surmises, but as an
+unquestionable fact supported by the experimental knowledge of
+many individuals and by infallible revelation from God. The sacred
+books of the Hindus abound in detailed histories of transmigrations.
+Kapila is said to have written out the Vedas from his remembrance
+ of them in a former state of being.
+
+The Vishnu Purana gives some very entertaining examples of
+the retention of memory through several successive lives.11
+Pythagoras pretended to recollect his adventures in previous lives;
+and on one occasion, as we read in Ovid, going into the temple of
+Juno, he recognised the shield he had worn as Euphorbus at the
+siege of Troy.
+
+Diogenes Laertius also relates of him, that one day meeting a man
+who was cruelly beating a dog, the Samian sage instantly detected
+in the piteous howls of the poor beast the cries of a dear friend
+of his long since deceased, and earnestly and successfully
+interceded for his rescue.
+
+In the life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, numerous
+extraordinary instances are told of his recognitions of
+persons he had known in preceding lives. Such examples as these
+exactly met the weakest point in the metempsychosis theory, and
+must have had vast influence in fostering the common faith.
+Plotinus said, "Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plunged
+in it forget all." Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defender
+of the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objection
+drawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appeal
+rather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves the
+doubts unsolved.12 His supposition is that in each spirit life we
+remember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but in
+each earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here,
+every night we lose in sleep all memory of the past, but recover
+it each day again as we awake. Throughout the East this general
+doctrine is no mere superstition of the masses of ignorant people:
+it is the main principle of all Hindu metaphysics, the foundation
+of all their philosophy, and inwrought with the intellectual
+texture of their inspired books. It is upheld by the venerable
+authority of ages, by an intense general conviction of it, and by
+multitudes of subtle conceits and apparent arguments. It was also
+impressed upon the initiates in the old Mysteries, by being there
+dramatically shadowed forth through masks, and quaint symbolic
+ceremonies enacted at the time of initiation.13
+
+This, then, is what we must say of the ancient and widely spread
+doctrine of transmigration. As a suggestion or theory naturally
+arising from empirical observation and confirmed by a variety of
+phenomena, it is plausible, attractive, and, in some stages of
+
+11 Professor Wilson's translation, p. 343.
+
+12 De l'Humanite, livre v. chap. xlii.
+
+13 Porphyry, De Abstinentis, lib. iv. sect. 16. Davies, Rites of
+the Druids.
+
+
+knowledge, not only easy to be believed, but hard to be resisted.
+As an ethical scheme clearing up on principles of poetic justice
+the most perplexed and awful problems in the world, it throws
+streams of light through the abysses of evil, gives dramatic
+solution to many a puzzle, and, abstractly considered, charms the
+understanding and the conscience. As a philosophical dogma
+answering to some strange, vague passages in human nature and
+experience, it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deep
+mystic chambers of our being. As the undisputed creed which has
+inspired and spell bound hundreds of millions of our race for
+perhaps over a hundred and fifty generations, it commands
+deference and deserves study. But, viewing it as a thesis in the
+light of to day, challenging intelligent scrutiny and sober
+belief, we scarcely need to say that, based on shadows and on
+arbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built of
+reveries and occult experiences, fortified by unreliable
+inferences, destitute of any substantial evidence, it is unable to
+face the severity of science.
+
+A real investigation of its validity by the modern methods
+dissipates it as the sun scatters fog. First, the mutual
+correspondences between men and animals are explained by the fact
+that they are all living beings are the products of the same God
+and the same nature, and built according to one plan. They thus
+partake, in different degrees and on different planes, of many of
+the same elements and characteristics. Lucretius, with his usual
+mixture of acuteness and sophistry, objects to the doctrine that,
+if it were true, when the soul of a lion passed into the body of a
+stag, or the soul of a man into the body of a horse, we should see
+a stag with the courage of a lion, a horse with the intelligence
+of a man. But of course the manifestations of soul depend on the
+organs of manifestation. Secondly, the singular psychological
+experiences referred to are explicable so far as we can expect
+with our present limited data and powers to solve the dense
+mysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving the
+doctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumen
+in three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis," beautifully translated
+by the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany." The sense
+of pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences have
+thus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, is
+explicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscure
+mixture of associations, some discordant stroke on the keys of
+recollection, jumbling together echoes of bygone scenes, snatches
+of unremembered dreams, and other hints and colors in a weird and
+uncommanded manner. The phenomenon is accounted for still more
+decisively by Dr. Wigand's theory of the "Duality of the Mind."
+The mental organs are double, one on each side of the brain. They
+usually act with perfect simultaneity. When one gets a slight
+start of the other, as the thought reaches the slow side a
+bewildered sense of a previous apprehension of it arises in the
+soul. And then, the fact that the supposition of a great system of
+adjusting transmigrations justifies the ways of Providence is no
+proof that the supposition is a true one. The difficulty is, that
+there is no evidence of the objective truth of the assumption,
+however well the theory applies; and the justice and goodness of
+God may as well be defended on the ground of a single life here
+and a discriminating retribution hereafter, as on the ground of an
+unlimited series of earthly births.
+
+The doctrine evidently possesses two points of moral truth and
+power, and, if not tenable as strict science, is yet instructive
+as symbolic poetry. First, it embodies, in concrete shapes the
+most vivid and unmistakable, the fact that beastly and demoniac
+qualities of character lead men down towards the brutes and
+fiends. Rage makes man a tiger; low cunning, a fox; coarseness and
+ferocity, a bear; selfish envy and malice, a devil. On the
+contrary, the attainment of better degrees of intellectual and
+ethical qualities elevates man towards the angelic and the Divine.
+There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kinds
+of metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiring
+life of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life of
+routine in mechanical habits and indifference; the deteriorating
+life of abandonment in ignorance and vice. Timaus the Locrian, and
+some other ancient Pythagoreans, gave the whole doctrine a purely
+symbolic meaning. Secondly, the theory of transmigrating souls
+typifies the truth that, however it may fare with persons now,
+however ill their fortunes may seem to accord with their deserts
+here, justice reigns irresistibly in the universe, and sooner or
+later every soul shall be strictly compensated for every tittle of
+its merits in good or evil. There is no escaping the chain of acts
+and consequences.
+
+This entire scheme of thought has always allured the Mystics to
+adopt it. In every age, from Indian Vyasa to Teutonic Boehme, we
+find them contending for it. Boehme held that all material
+existence was composed by King Satan out of the physical substance
+of his fallen followers.
+
+The conception of the metempsychosis is strikingly fitted for the
+purposes of humor, satire, and ethical hortation; and literature
+abounds with such applications of it. In Plutarch's account of
+what Thespesius saw when his soul was ravished away into hell for
+a time, we are told that he saw the soul of Nero dreadfully
+tortured, transfixed with iron nails. The workmen forged it into
+the form of a viper; when a voice was heard out of an exceeding
+light ordering it to be transfigured into a milder being; and they
+made it one of those creatures that sing and croak in the sides of
+ponds and marshes.14 When Rosalind finds the verses with which her
+enamored Orlando had hung the trees, she exclaimed, "I was never
+so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which
+I can hardly remember." One of the earliest popular introductions
+of this Oriental figment to the English public was by Addison,
+whose Will Honeycomb tells an amusing story of his friend, Jack
+Freelove, how that, finding his mistress's pet monkey alone one
+day, he wrote an autobiography of his monkeyship's surprising
+adventures in the course of his many transmigrations. Leaving this
+precious document in the monkey's hands, his mistress found it on
+her return, and was vastly bewildered by its pathetic and
+laughable contents.15 The fifth number of the "Adventurer" gives a
+very entertaining account of the "Transmigrations of a Flea."
+There is also a poem on this subject by Dr. Donne, full of
+strength and wit. It traces a soul through ten or twelve births,
+giving the salient points of its history in each. First, the soul
+animates the apple our hapless mother Eve ate, bringing "death
+into the world and all our woe." Then it appeared
+
+14 Sera Numinis Vindicta: near the close.
+
+15 Spectator, No. 343.
+
+
+successively as a mandrake, a cock, a herring, a whale, "Who spouted
+rivers up as if he meant o join our seas with seas above
+the firmament." Next, as a mouse, it crept up an elephant's sinewy
+proboscis to the soul's bedchamber, the brain, and, gnawing the
+life cords there, died, crushed in the ruins of the gigantic
+beast. Afterwards it became a wolf, a dog, an ape, and finally a
+woman, where the quaint tale closes. Fielding is the author of a
+racy literary performance called "A Journey from this World to the
+Next." The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysium
+the adventures he had passed through, living successively in the
+character of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a
+beau, a monk, a fiddler, a wise man, a king, a fool, a beggar, a
+prince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, a
+knight, a dancing master, and a bishop. Whoever would see how
+vividly, with what an honest and vigorous verisimilitude, the
+doctrine can be embodied, should read "The Modern Pythagorean," by
+Dr. Macnish. But perhaps the most humorous passage of this sort is
+the following description from a remarkable writer of the present
+day:
+
+"In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bull
+frogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine bibbers and wassailers,
+still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake;
+who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal
+tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave,
+mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor. The most
+aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart leaf, which serves for a
+napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a
+deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup
+with the ejaculation tr r r oonk, tr r r oonk! and straightway
+comes over the water from some distant cove the same password
+repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to
+his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the
+shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with
+satisfaction, tr r r conk! and each in his turn, down to the
+flabbiest paunched, repeats the same, that there be no mistake;
+and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun
+disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under
+the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and
+pausing for a reply." 16
+
+The doctrine of the metempsychosis, which was the priest's threat
+against sin, was the poet's interpretation of life. The former
+gave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latter
+imparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to the
+contemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullest
+development, the mountains piled towering to the sky and the
+plains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dust
+of souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight,
+was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated form
+that caught his attention might be the dwelling of some ancestor,
+or of some once cherished companion of his own. Hence the Hindu's
+so sensitive kindness towards animals:
+
+16 Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, p. 137.
+
+
+"Crush not the feeble, inoffensive worm: Thy sister's spirit wears
+that humble form. Why should thy cruel arrow smite yon bird? In
+him thy brother's plaintive song is beard. Let not thine anger on
+thy dog descend: That faithful animal was once thy friend."
+
+There is a strange grandeur, an affecting mystery, in the view of
+the creation from the stand point of the metempsychosis. It is an
+awful dream palace all aswarm with falling and climbing creatures
+clothed in ever shifting disguises. The races and changes of being
+constitute a boundless masquerade of souls, whose bodies are
+vizards and whose fortunes poetic retribution. The motive
+furnished by the doctrine to self denial and toil has a peerless
+sublimity. In our Western world, the hope of acquiring large
+possessions, or of attaining an exalted office, often stimulates
+men to heroic efforts of labor and endurance. What, then, should
+we not expect from the application to the imaginative minds of the
+Eastern world of a motive which, transcending all set limits,
+offers unheard of prizes, to be plucked in life after life, and at
+the end unveils, for the occupancy of the patient aspirant, the
+Throne of Immensity? No wonder that, under the propulsion of a
+motive so exhaustless, a motive not remote nor abstract, but
+concrete, and organized in indissoluble connection with the
+visible chain of eternal causes and effects, no wonder we see such
+tremendous exhibitions of superstition, voluntary sufferings,
+superhuman deeds. Here is the secret fountain of that irresistible
+force which enables the devotee to measure journeys of a thousand
+miles by prostrations of his body, to hold up his arm until it
+withers and remains immovably erect as a stick, or to swing
+himself by red hot hooks through his flesh. The poorest wretch of
+a soul that has wandered down to the lowest grade of animate
+existence can turn his resolute and longing gaze up the
+resplendent ranks of being, and, conscious of the god head's germ
+within, feel that, though now unspeakably sunken, he shall one day
+spurn every vile integument and vault into seats of heavenly
+dominion. Crawling as an almost invisible bug in a heap of
+carrion, he can still think within himself, holding fast to the
+law of righteousness and love, "This is the infinite ladder of
+redemption, over whose rounds of purity, penance, charity, and
+contemplation I may ascend, through births innumerable, till I
+reach a height of wisdom, power, and bliss that will cast into
+utter contempt the combined glory of countless millions of worlds,
+ay, till I sit enthroned above the topmost summit of the universe
+as omnipotent Buddha." 17
+
+17 Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find the
+following references useful: Hardy, "Manual of Buddhism," ch. v.
+Upham, "History of Buddhism," ch. iii. Beausobre, "Histoire du
+Manicheisme," livre vi. ch. iv. Helmont, "De Revolution Animarum."
+Richter, "Das Christenthum und die Kitesten Religionen des
+Orients," sects. 54-65. Sinner, "Essai sur les Dogmes de la
+Metempsychose et du Purgatoire." Conz, "Schicksale der
+Seelenwanderungshypothese unter verschiedenen Volkern und in
+verschiedenen Zeiten." Dubois, "People of India," part iii. ch.
+vii. Werner, "Commentatio Psychologica contra Metempsychosin."
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.
+
+A DOCTRINE widely prevalent asserts that, at the termination of
+this probationary epoch, Christ will appear with an army of angels
+in the clouds of heaven, descend, and set up his tribunal on the
+earth. The light of his advancing countenance will be the long
+waited Aurora of the Grave. All the souls of men will be summoned
+from their tarrying places, whether in heaven, or hell, or
+purgatory, or the sepulchre; the fleshly tabernacles they formerly
+inhabited will be re created, a strong necromancy making the rooty
+and grave floored earth give up its dust of ruined humanity, and
+moulding it to the identical shapes it formerly composed; each
+soul will enter its familiar old house in company with which its
+sins were once committed; the books will be opened and judgment
+will be passed; then the accepted will be removed to heaven, and
+the rejected to hell, both to remain clothed with those same
+material bodies forever, the former in celestial bliss, the latter
+in infernal torture.
+
+In the present dissertation we propose to exhibit the sources,
+trace the developments, explain the variations, and discuss the
+merits, of this doctrine.
+
+The first appearance of this notion of a bodily restoration which
+occurs in the history of opinions is among the ancient Hindus.
+With them it appears as a part of a vast conception, embracing the
+whole universe in an endless series of total growths, decays, and
+exact restorations. In the beginning the Supreme Being is one and
+alone. He thinks to himself, "I will become many." Straightway the
+multiform creation germinates forth, and all beings live. Then for
+an inconceivable period a length of time commensurate with the
+existence of Brahma, the Demiurgus the successive generations
+flourish and sink. At the end of this period all forms of matter,
+all creatures, sages, and gods, fall back into the Universal
+Source whence they arose. Again the Supreme Being is one and
+alone. After an interval the same causes produce the same effects,
+and all things recur exactly as they were before.1
+
+We find this theory sung by some of the Oriental poets:
+"Every external form of things, and every object which
+disappear'd, Remains stored up in the storehouse of fate: When the
+system of the heavens returns to its former order, God, the All
+Just, will bring them forth from the veil of mystery." 2
+
+The same general conception, in a modified form, was held by the
+Stoics of later Greece, who doubtless borrowed it from the East,
+and who carried it out in greater detail. "God is an artistic
+fire, out of which the cosmopoeia issues." This fire proceeds in a
+certain fixed course, in obedience to a fixed law, passing through
+certain intermediate gradations and established periods, until it
+ultimately returns into itself and closes with a universal
+conflagration. It is to this catastrophe that reference is made in
+the following passage of Epictetus: "Some say that when Zeus is
+left alone at the time of the conflagration, he is solitary, and
+bewails himself
+
+1 Wilson, Lectures on the Hindus, pp. 53-56.
+
+2 The Dabistan, vol. iii. p. 169.
+
+
+that he has no company."3 The Stoics supposed each succeeding
+formation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particular
+that happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before,
+and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connected
+with astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creating
+of the world coincide with the same position of the stars as that
+at which it previously occurred.4 This they called the restoration
+of all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identical
+epochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Plato
+is a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of the
+past, by reproducing it over and over forever.
+
+Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "In
+submitting," he says, "physical phenomena and historical events to
+the exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to their
+causes by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by that
+ancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and those
+regulating the moral world, exert their action under the presence
+of a primordial necessity and according to movements periodically
+renewed." The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, it
+is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall
+be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." The conception
+of the destinies of the universe as a circle returning forever
+into itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind early
+seizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeble
+powers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but the
+infinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformations
+ever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend and
+master satisfactorily the eternal duration of one visible order,
+the incessant rolling on of races and stars:
+
+"And doth creation's tide forever flow, Nor ebb with like
+destruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and still
+The mighty measure never, never full?"
+
+And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinity
+threatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in the
+view of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end from
+time to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for us
+simply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception to
+which we have recourse is evidently a mere conceit of imagination,
+without scientific basis or philosophical confirmation.
+
+The doctrine of a bodily resurrection, resting on a wholly
+different ground, again emerges upon our attention in the
+Zoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to be
+pure and happy and to pass to a heavenly immortality. The evil
+Ahriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primal
+destiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their material
+frames to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to a
+painful abode in hell. Meanwhile, the war between the Light God
+and the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good One
+shall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evil
+deeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed at
+first be restored. Then all
+
+3 Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 13. Sonntag, De Palingenesia
+Stoicorum.
+
+4 Ritter's Hist. of An. Phil., lib. xi. cap. 4.
+
+
+souls shall be redeemed from hell and their bodies be rebuilt from
+their scattered atoms and clothed upon them again.5 This
+resurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, nor
+is it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzd
+of the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred and
+defeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is still
+understood and looked for by the Parsees.
+
+The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with which
+it is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitous
+assumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. The
+hypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battle
+between two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neither
+the scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic of
+reason; and it has long since been driven from the arena of
+earnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violent
+curse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform and
+spoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now,
+as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, a
+punishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system." It is
+unreasonable to suppose that the Infinite God would deliberately
+lay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. And
+it is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or an
+after result foisted into the system of the world. Death that is,
+a succession of generations is surely an essential part of the
+very constitution of nature, plainly stamped on all those "medals
+of the creation" which bear the features of their respective ages
+and which are laid up in the archives of geological epochs.
+Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's original
+plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the
+whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore
+actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of
+man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And
+so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the
+restoration of God's broken plan to its completeness falls to the
+ground.
+
+The Jews, in the course of their frequent and long continued
+intercourse with the Persians, did not fail to be much impressed
+with the vivid melodramatic outlines of the Zoroastrian doctrine
+of the resurrection. They finally adopted it themselves, and
+joined it, with such modifications as it naturally underwent from
+the union, with the great dogmas of their own faith. A few faint
+references to it are found in the Old Testament. Some explicit
+declarations and boasts of it are in the Apocrypha. In the
+Targums, the Talmud, and the associated sources, abundant
+statements of it in copious forms are preserved. The Jews rested
+their doctrine of the resurrection on the same general ground as
+the Persians did, from whom they borrowed it. Man was meant to be
+immortal, either on earth or in heaven; but Satan seduced him to
+sin, and thus wrested from him his privilege of immortality, made
+him die and descend into a dark nether realm which was to be
+filled with the disembodied souls of his descendants. The
+resurrection was to annul all this and restore men to their
+original footing.
+
+We need not labor any disproof of the truth or authority of this
+doctrine as the Pharisees held it, because, admitting that they
+had the record of a revelation from God, this doctrine was not a
+part of it. It is only to be found in their canonic scriptures by
+way of vague and hasty allusion, and is historically traceable to
+its derivation from the pagan oracles of Persia.
+
+5 Frazer, History of Persia, chap. iv. Baur, Symbolik und
+Mythologice thl. ii. absch. ii. cap. ss. 394-404.
+
+
+Of course it is possible that the doctrine of the resurrection, as
+the Hebrews held it, was developed by themselves, from imaginative
+contemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectres
+seen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in the
+under world; ideas of God as the deliverer of living men from the
+open gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapes
+from destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Before
+advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some
+of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from
+the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized,
+incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical
+bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.
+
+Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose and
+spread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect.
+Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years were
+Christian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolic
+age virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it,
+then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salient
+dogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality and
+bigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission of
+Christianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retained
+by early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In the
+New Testament itself there are seeming references to this
+doctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrection
+of the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it found
+in any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourth
+century.6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrine
+was not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The fact
+is, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of the
+descent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called in
+question at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up on
+the symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. As
+soon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and all
+but unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in every
+creed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has been
+denied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy and
+schism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, who
+concerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was past
+already." The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church
+has always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodies
+formerly inhabited by men shall be raised from the earth, sea, and
+air, and given to them again to be everlastingly assumed. The
+scattered exceptions to the believers in this doctrine have been
+few, and have ever been styled heretics by their contemporaries.
+
+Any one who will glance over the writings of the Fathers with
+reference to this subject will find the foregoing statements amply
+confirmed.7 Justin Martyr wrote a treatise on the resurrection, a
+fragment of which is still extant. Athenagoras has left us an
+extremely elaborate and able discussion of the whole doctrine, in
+a separate work. Tertullian is author of a famous book on the
+subject, entitled "Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh," in
+which he says, "The teeth are providentially made eternal to serve
+as the seeds of the
+
+6 Dr. Sykes, Inquiry when the Article of the Resurrection of the
+Body or Flesh was first introduced into the Public Creeds.
+
+7 Mosheim, De Resurrectione Mortuorum.
+
+
+resurrection." Chrysostom has written fully upon it in two of his
+eloquent homilies. All these, in company indeed with the common
+body of their contemporaries, unequivocally teach a carnal
+resurrection with the grossest details. Augustine says, "Every
+man's body, howsoever dispersed here, shall be restored perfect in
+the resurrection. Every body shall be complete in quantity and
+quality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut,
+shall not return in such enormous quantities to deform their
+original places; but neither shall they perish: they shall return
+into the body into that substance from which they grew." 8 As if
+that would not cause any deformity! 9 Some of the later Origenists
+held that the resurrection bodies would be in the shape of a ball,
+the mere heads of cherubs! 10
+
+In the seventh century Mohammed flourished. His doctrinal system,
+it is well known, was drawn indiscriminately from many sources,
+and mixed with additions and colors of his own. Finding the dogma
+of a general bodily resurrection already prevailing among the
+Parsees, the Jews, and the Christians, and perceiving, too, how
+well adapted for purposes of vivid representation and practical
+effect it was, or perhaps believing it himself, the Arabian
+prophet ingrafted this article into the creed of his followers. It
+has ever been with them, and is still, a foremost and controlling
+article of faith, an article for the most part held in its literal
+sense, although there is a powerful sect which spiritualizes the
+whole conception, turning all its details into allegories and
+images. But this view is not the original nor the orthodox view.
+
+The subject of the resurrection was a prominent theme in the
+theology of the Middle Age. Only here and there a dissenting voice
+was raised against the doctrine in its strict physical form. The
+great body of the Scholastics stood stanchly by it. In defence and
+support of the Church thesis they brought all the quirks and
+quiddities of their subtle dialectics. As we take down their
+ponderous tomes from their neglected shelves, and turn over the
+dusty, faded old leaves, we find chapter after chapter in many a
+formidable folio occupied with grave discussions, carried on in
+acute logical terminology, of questions like these: "Will the
+resurrection be natural or miraculous?" "Will each one's hairs and
+nails all be restored to him in the resurrection?" "When bodies
+are raised, will each soul spontaneously know its own and enter
+it? or will the power of God distribute them as they belong?"
+"Will the deformities and scars of our present bodies be retained
+in the resurrection?" "Will all rise of the same age?" "Will all
+have one size and one sex?" 11 And so on with hundreds of kindred
+questions. For instance, Thomas Aquinas contended "that no other
+substance would rise from the grave except that which belonged to
+the individual in the moment of death."12 What dire prospects this
+proposition must conjure up before many minds! If one chance to
+grow prodigiously obese before death, he must lug that enormous
+corporeity wearily about forever; but if he happen to die when
+wasted, he must then flit through eternity as thin as a lath.
+
+8 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 19, 20.
+
+9 See the strange speculations of Opitz in his work "De Statura et
+Atate Resurgentium.
+
+10 Redepenning, Origenes, b. ii. s. 463.
+
+11 Summa Theologia, Thoma Aquinatis, tertia pars, Supplementum,
+Quastiones 79-87.
+
+12 Hagenbuch, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 204.
+
+
+Those who have had the misfortune to be amputated of legs or arms
+must appear on the resurrection stage without those very
+convenient appendages. There will still be need of hospitals for
+the battered veterans of Chelsea and Greenwich, mutilated heroes,
+pensioned relics of deck and field. Then in the resurrection the
+renowned "Mynheer von Clam, Richest merchant in Rotterdam,"
+will again have occasion for the services of the "patent cork leg
+manufacturer," though it is hardly to be presumed he will accept
+another unrestrainable one like that which led him so fearful a
+race through the poet's verses.
+
+The Manichaans denied a bodily resurrection. In this all the sects
+theologically allied to them, who have appeared in ecclesiastical
+history, for instance, the Cathari, have agreed. There have also
+been a few individual Christian teachers in every century who have
+assailed the doctrine. But, as already declared, it has uniformly
+been the firm doctrine of the Church and of all who acknowledged
+her authority. The old dogma still remains in the creeds of the
+recognised Churches, Papal, Greek, and Protestant. It has been
+terribly shattered by the attacks of reason and of progressive
+science. It lingers in the minds of most people only as a dead
+letter. But all the earnest conservative theologians yet cling to
+it in its unmitigated grossness, with unrelaxing severity. We hear
+it in practical discourses from the pulpit, and read it in
+doctrinal treatises, as offensively proclaimed now as ever.
+Indeed, it is an essential part of the compact system of the
+ruling theology, and cannot be taken out without loosening the
+whole dogmatic fabric into fragments. Thus writes to day a
+distinguished American divine, Dr. Spring: "Whether buried in the
+earth, or floating in the sea, or consumed by the flames, or
+enriching the battle field, or evaporate in the atmosphere, all,
+from Adam to the latest born, shall wend their way to the great
+arena of the judgment. Every perished bone and every secret
+particle of dust shall obey the summons and come forth. If one
+could then look upon the earth, he would see it as one mighty
+excavated globe, and wonder how such countless generations could
+have found a dwelling beneath its surface." 13 This is the way the
+recognised authorities in theology still talk. To venture any
+other opinion is a heresy all over Christendom at this hour.
+
+We will next bring forward and criticize the arguments for and
+against the doctrine before us. It is contended that the doctrine
+is demonstrated in the example of Christ's own resurrection. "The
+resurrection of the flesh was formerly regarded as incredible,"
+says Augustine; "but now we see the whole world believing that
+Christ's earthly body was borne into heaven." 14 It is the faith
+of the Church that "Christ rose into heaven with his body of flesh
+and blood, and wears it there now, and will forever." "Had he been
+there in body before, it would have been no such wonder that he
+should have returned with it; but that the flesh of our flesh and
+bone of our bone should be seated at the right hand of God is
+worthy of the greatest admiration." 15 That is to say, Christ was
+from eternity God, the Infinite Spirit, in
+
+13 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 237.
+
+14 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 5.
+
+15 Pearson on the Creed, 12th ed., pp. 272-275.
+
+
+heaven; he came to earth and lived in a human body; on returning
+to heaven, instead of resuming his proper form, he bears with him,
+and will eternally retain, the body of flesh he had worn on earth!
+Paul says, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God."
+The Church, hastily following the senses, led by a carnal,
+illogical philosophy, has deeply misinterpreted and violently
+abused the significance of Christ's ascension. The drama of his
+resurrection, with all its connected parts, was not meant
+throughout as a strict representation of our destiny. It was a
+seal upon his commission and teachings, not an exemplification of
+what should happen to others. It was outwardly a miracle, not a
+type, an exceptional instance of super natural power, not a
+significant exhibition of the regular course of things. The same
+logic which says, "Christ rose and ascended with his fleshly body:
+therefore we shall," must also say, "Christ rose visibly on the
+third day: therefore we shall." Christ's resurrection was a
+miracle; and therefore we cannot reason from it to ourselves. The
+common conception of a miracle is that it is the suspension, not
+the manifestation, of ordinary laws. We have just as much logical
+right to say that the physical appearance in Christ's resurrection
+was merely an accommodation to the senses of the witnesses, and
+that on his ascension the body was annihilated, and only his soul
+entered heaven, as we have to surmise that the theory embodied in
+the common belief is true. The record is according to mere
+sensible appearances. The reality is beyond our knowledge. The
+record gives no explanation. It is wiser in this dilemma to follow
+the light of reason than to follow the blind spirit of tradition.
+The point in our reasoning is this. If Christ, on rising from the
+world of the dead, assumed again his former body, he assumed it by
+a miracle, and for some special purpose of revealing himself to
+his disciples and of finishing his earthly work; and it does not
+follow either that he bore that body into heaven, or that any
+others will ever, even temporarily, reassume their cast off forms.
+
+The Christian Scriptures do not in a single passage teach the
+popular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text in
+the New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanation
+without implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it is
+undeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul does
+not perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, from
+numerous explicit passages, that the New Testament authors, in
+common with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departed
+to be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls the
+intermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterranean
+realm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiah
+to release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of the
+doctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the New
+Testament is fully met by the simple ascension of this
+congregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of the
+upper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up to
+heaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefully
+observed, there is not one text in the New Testament, as before
+stated, which speaks of the resurrection of the "body" or of the
+"flesh." The expression is simply the resurrection of "the dead,"
+or of "them that slept." If by "the dead" was meant "the bodies,"
+why are we not told so? Locke, in the Third Letter of his
+controversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, very
+pointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the
+words "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall
+come forth." Nothing can come out of the grave except what is in
+it. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separate
+state. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they long
+ago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulations
+of the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto the
+resurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the under
+world, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events,
+nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is a
+matter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to have
+material bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection ye
+shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the
+angels of heaven." It seems clear to us that the author of the
+Epistle to the Hebrews also looked for no restoration of the
+fleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintest
+allusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spirits
+of just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with an
+innumerable company of angels, and with the general assembly and
+church of the first born." The Jews and early Christians who
+believed in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departed
+could enter heaven until after that great consummation.
+
+The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach the
+resurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave is
+furnished by the celebrated passage in Paul's Epistle to the
+Corinthians. The apostle's premises, reasoning, and conclusion are
+as follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the first
+fruits of them that slept." That is to say, all who have died,
+except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of souls
+under the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so the
+solitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the general
+resurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the dead
+raised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle's
+reply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can consider
+him as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that was
+laid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that which
+thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but naked
+grain, and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." "There
+are celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a natural
+body, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of the
+earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh and
+blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" "we shall all be
+changed," and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have borne
+the image of the earthy." The analogy which has been so strangely
+perverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germ
+which was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, was
+not any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was the
+soul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from its
+hull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christ
+shall call it forth to be invested with a "glorious," "powerful,"
+"spiritual," "incorruptible" body. When a grain of wheat is sown,
+that is not the body that shall be; but the mysterious principle
+of life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up and puts on
+its body fashioned appropriately for it. So, according to Paul's
+conception, when a man is buried, the material corpse is not the
+resurrection body that shall be; but the living soul which
+occupied it is the germ that shall put on a new body of
+immortality when the spring tide of Christ's coming draws the
+buried treasures of Hades up to the light of heaven.
+
+A species of proof which has been much used by the advocates of
+the dogma of a bodily resurrection is the argument from analogy.
+The intimate connection of human feeling and fancy with the
+changing phenomena of Nature's seasons would naturally suggest to
+a pensive mind the idea, Why, since she has her annual
+resurrection, may not humanity some time have one? And what first
+arose as a poetic conceit or stray thought, and was expressed in
+glowing metaphors, might by an easy process pass abroad and harden
+into a prosaic proposition or dogmatic formula.
+
+"O soul of the spring time, now let us behold The stone from the
+mouth of the sepulchre roll'd, And Nature rise up from her death's
+damp mould; Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has
+lain, Revive with the warmth and the brightness again, And in
+blooming of flower and budding of tree The symbols and types of
+our destiny see."
+
+Standing by the graves of our loved and lost ones, our inmost
+souls yearn over the very dust in which their hallowed forms
+repose. We feel that they must come back, we must be restored to
+each other as we were before. Listening to the returned birds
+whose warble fills the woods once more, gazing around on the
+verdant and flowery forms of renewed life that clothe the
+landscape over again, we eagerly snatch at every apparent emblem
+or prophetic analogy that answers to our fond imagination and
+desiring dream. Sentiment and fancy, especially when stimulated by
+love and grief, and roving in the realms of reverie, free from the
+cold guidance and sharp check of literal fact and severe logic,
+are poor analysts, and then we easily confuse things distinct and
+wander to conclusions philosophy will not warrant. Before building
+a dogmatic doctrine on analogies, we must study those analogies
+with careful discrimination, must see what they really are, and to
+what they really lead. There is often an immense difference
+between the first appearance to a hasty observer and the final
+reality to a profound student. Let us, then, scrutinize a little
+more closely those seeming analogies which, to borrow a happy
+expression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sister
+of Immortality."
+
+Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in a
+new shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof of
+any doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, what
+would the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, that
+humanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her living
+handiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature does
+not reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perished
+the previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not a
+resurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The passage of
+the worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbol
+of a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emancipation, not
+resuming a deserted dead body, but assuming a new live one. Does
+the butterfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that have
+perished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, not
+return, ascent through future developments, not descent through
+the stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of a
+seed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seed
+of? Of a soul."
+
+Sir Thomas Browne, after others, argues for the restoration of
+man's body from the grave, from the fancied analogy of the
+palingenesis or resurrection of vegetables which the magicians of
+the antique East and the mystic chemists of the Middle Age boasted
+of effecting. He having asserted in his "Religion of a Physician"
+that "experience can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant,
+and from its cinders recall it into its stalk and leaves again,"
+Dr. Henry Power wrote beseeching "an experimental eviction of so
+high and noble a piece of chemistry, the reindividuality of an
+incinerated plant." We are not informed that Sir Thomas ever
+granted him the sight. Of this beautiful error, this exquisite
+superstition, which undoubtedly arose from the crystallizations of
+certain salts in arborescent forms which suddenly surprised the
+early alchemists in some of their experiments, we have the
+following account in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature:" "The
+semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the
+blood of man. The ashes of roses will again revive into roses,
+though smaller and paler than if they had been planted
+unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew on
+rose trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions,
+they are seen but for a moment. This magical phoenix lies thus
+concealed in its cold ashes till the presence of a certain
+chemical heat produces its resurrection." Any refutation of this
+now would be considered childish. Upon the whole, then, while
+recurrent spring, bringing in the great Easter of the year,
+typifies to us indeed abundantly the development of new life, the
+growth of new bodies out of the old and decayed, but nowhere hints
+at the gathering up and wearing again of the dusty sloughs and
+rotted foliage of the past, let men cease to talk of there being
+any natural analogies to the ecclesiastical dogma of the
+resurrection of the flesh. The teaching of nature finds a truer
+utterance in the words of Aschylus: "There is no resurrection for
+him who is once dead." 16
+
+The next argument is that based on considerations of reason and of
+ethics. The supporters of the doctrine of the resurrection of the
+body have often disingenuously evaded the burden of proof thrown
+upon them by retreating beneath loud assertions of God's power.
+From the earliest dawn of the hypothesis to the present time,
+every perplexity arising from it, every objection brought against
+it, every absurdity shown to be involved in it, has been met and
+confidently rebutted with declarations of God's abundant power to
+effect a physical resurrection, or to do any thing else he
+pleases, however impossible it may appear to us. Now, it is true
+the power of God is competent to innumerable things utterly beyond
+our skill, knowledge, or conception. Nevertheless, there is a
+province within which our reason can judge of probabilities, and
+can, if not absolutely grasp infallible truth, at least reach
+satisfactory convictions. God is able to restore the vast coal
+deposits of the earth, and the ashes of all the fuel ever burned,
+to their original condition when they covered the world with
+
+16 Eumenides, 1. 648, Oxford edition.
+
+
+dense forests of ferns; but we have no reason to believe he will
+do it. The truth or falsity of the popular theory of the
+resurrection is not a question of God's power; it is simply a
+question of God's will. A Jewish Rabbin relates the following
+conversation, as exultingly as if the quibbling evasion on which
+it turns positively settled the question itself, which in fact it
+does not approach. A Sadducee says, "The resurrection of the dead
+is a fable: the dry, scattered dust cannot live again." A by
+standing Pharisee makes this reply: "There were in a city two
+artists: one made vases of water, the other made them of clay:
+which was the more wondrous artist?" The Sadducee answered, "The
+former." The Pharisee rejoins, "Cannot God, then, who formed man
+of water, (gutta seminis humida,) much more re form him of clay?"
+Such a method of reasoning is an irrelevant impertinence. God can
+call Nebuchadnezzar from his long rest, and seat him on his old
+throne again to morrow. What an absurdity to infer that therefore
+he will do it! God can give us wings upon our bodies, and enable
+us to fly on an exploring trip among the planets. Will he do it?
+The question, we repeat, is not whether God has the power to raise
+our dead bodies, but whether he has the will. To that question
+since, as we have already seen, he has sent us no miraculous
+revelation replying to it we can only find an answer by tracing
+the indications of his intentions contained in reason, morals, and
+nature.
+
+One of the foremost arguments urged by the Fathers for the
+resurrection was its supposed necessity for a just and complete
+judgment. The body was involved and instrumental in all the sins
+of the man: it must therefore bear part in his punishment. The
+Rabbins tell this allegory: "In the day of judgment the body will
+say, The soul alone is to blame: since it left me, I have lain
+like a stone in the grave. The soul will retort, The body alone is
+sinful: since released from it, I fly through the air like a bird.
+The Judge will interpose with this myth: A king once had a
+beautiful garden full of early fruits. A lame man and a blind man
+were in it. Said the lame man to the blind man, Let me mount upon
+your shoulders and pluck the fruit, and we will divide it. The
+king accused them of theft; but they severally replied, the lame
+man, How could I reach it? the blind man, How could I see it? The
+king ordered the lame man to be placed upon the back of the blind
+man, and in this position had them both scourged. So God in the
+day of judgment will replace the soul in the body, and hurl them
+both into hell together." There is a queer tradition among the
+Mohammedans implying, singularly enough, the same general thought.
+The Prophet's uncle, Hamzah, having been slain by Hind, daughter
+of Atabah, the cursed woman cut out his liver and gnawed it with
+fiendish joy; but, lest any of it should become incorporated with
+her system and go to hell, the Most High made it as hard as a
+stone; and when she threw it on the ground, an angel restored it
+to its original nature and place in the body of the martyred hero,
+that lion of God.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church endorses the representation that the
+body must be raised to be punished. In the Catechism of the
+Council of Trent, which is an authoritative exposition of Romanist
+theology, we read that the "identical body" shall be restored,
+though "without deformities or superfluities;" restored that "as
+it was a partner in the man's deeds, so it may be a partner in his
+punishments." The same Catechism also gives in this connection the
+reason why a general judgment is necessary after each individual
+has been judged at his death, namely, this: that they may be
+punished for the evil which has resulted in the world since they
+died from the evil they did in the world while they lived! Is it
+not astonishing how these theologians find out so much? A living
+Presbyterian divine of note says, "The bodies of the damned in the
+resurrection shall be fit dwellings for their vile minds. With all
+those fearful and horrid expressions which every base and
+malignant passion wakes up in the human countenance stamped upon
+it for eternity and burned in by the flaming fury of their own
+terrific wickedness, they will be condemned to look upon their own
+deformity and to feel their fitting doom." It is therefore urged
+that the body must be raised to suffer the just penalty of the
+sins man committed while occupying it. Is it not an absurdity to
+affirm that nerves and blood, flesh and bones, are responsible,
+guilty, must be punished? Tucker, in his "Light of Nature
+Pursued," says, "The vulgar notion of a resurrection in the same
+form and substance we carry about at present, because the body
+being partaker in the deed ought to share in the reward, as well
+requires a resurrection of the sword a man murders with, or the
+bank note he gives to charitable uses." We suppose an intelligent
+personality, a free will, indispensable to responsibleness and
+alone amenable to retributions. Besides, if the body must be
+raised to undergo chastisement for the offences done in it and by
+means of it, this insurmountable difficulty by the same logic
+confronts us. The material of our bodies is in a constant change,
+the particles becoming totally transferred every few years. Now,
+when a man is punished after the general judgment for a certain
+crime, he must be in the very body he occupied when that crime was
+perpetrated. Since he was a sinner all his days, his resurrection
+body must comprise all the matter that ever formed a part of his
+corporeity, and each sinner may hereafter be as huge as the
+writhing Titan, Tityus, whose body, it was fabled, covered nine
+acres. God is able to preserve the integral soul in being, and to
+punish it according to justice, without clothing it in flesh. This
+fact by itself utterly vacates and makes gratuitous the hypothesis
+of a physical resurrection from punitive considerations, an
+hypothesis which is also refuted by the truth contained in Locke's
+remark to Stillingfleet, "that the soul hath no greater congruity
+with the particles of matter which were once united to it, but are
+so no longer, than it hath with any other particles of matter."
+When the soul leaves the body, it would seem to have done with
+that stage of its existence, and to enter upon another and higher
+one, leaving the dust to mix with dust forever. The body wants not
+the soul again; for it is a senseless clod and wants nothing. The
+soul wants not its old body again: it prefers to have the freedom
+of the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in the
+twelfth century, a book called "Dioptra," presenting the
+controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at
+length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a
+"Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and
+Future State." William Crashaw, an old English poet, translated
+from the Latin a poem entitled "The Complaint: a Dialogue between
+the Body and the Soul of a Damned Man."17 But any one who will
+peruse with intelligent heed the works that have been written on
+this whole subject must be amazed to see how exclusively the
+doctrine which we are opposing has rested on pure grounds of
+tradition and fancy, alike destitute of authority and reason. Some
+authors have indeed attempted to support the doctrine with
+arguments: for
+
+17 Also see Dialogue inter Corpus et Animam, p. 95 of Latin Poems
+attributed to Walter Mapes.
+
+
+instance, there are two German works, one by Bertram, one by
+Pflug, entitled "The Resurrection of the Dead on Grounds of
+Reason," in which recourse is had to every possible expedient to
+make out a case, not even neglecting the factitious assistance of
+Leibnitz's scheme of "Pre established Harmony." But it may be
+deliberately affirmed that not one of their arguments is worthy of
+respect. Apparently, they do not seek to reach truth, but to
+bolster up a foregone conclusion held merely from motives of
+tradition.
+
+The Jews had a favorite tradition, developed by their Rabbins in
+many passages, that there was one small, almond shaped bone,
+(supposed now to have been the bone called by anatomists the os
+coccygis,) which was indestructible, and would form the nucleus
+around which the rest of the body would gather at the time of the
+resurrection. This bone, named Luz, was miraculously preserved
+from demolition or decay. Pound it furiously on anvils with heavy
+hammers of steel, burn it for ages in the fiercest furnaces, soak
+it for centuries in the strongest solvents, all in vain: its magic
+structure still remained. So the Talmud tells. "Even as there is a
+round dry grain In a plant's skeleton, which, being buried, Can
+raise the herb's green body up again; So is there such in man, a
+seed shaped bone, Aldabaron, call'd by the Hebrews Luz, Which,
+being laid into the ground, will bear, After three thousand years,
+the grass of flesh, The bloody, soul possessed weed called man."
+
+The Jews did not, as these singular lines represent, suppose this
+bone was a germ which after long burial would fructify by a
+natural process and bear a perfect body: they regarded it only as
+a nucleus around which the Messiah would by a miracle compel the
+decomposed flesh to return as in its pristine life. All that the
+Jews say of Luz the Mohammedans repeat of the bone Al Ajib.
+
+This conceit of superstition has been developed by a Christian
+author of considerable reputation into a theory of a natural
+resurrection. The work of Mr. Samuel Drew on the "Identity and
+General Resurrection of the Human Body" has been quite a standard
+work on the subject of which it treats. Mr. Drew believes there is
+a germ in the body which slowly ripens and prepares the
+resurrection body in the grave. As a seed must be buried for a
+season in order to spring up in perfect life, so must the human
+body be buried till the day of judgment. During this period it is
+not idle, but is busily getting ready for its consummation. He
+says, "There are four distinct stages through which those parts
+constituting the identity of the body must necessarily pass in
+order to their attainment of complete perfection beyond the grave.
+The first of these stages is that of its elementary principles;
+the second is that of an embryo in the womb; the third is that of
+its union with an immaterial spirit, and with the fluctuating
+portions of flesh and blood in our present state; and the fourth
+stage is that of its residence in the grave. All these stages are
+undoubtedly necessary to the full perfection of the body: they are
+alembics through which its parts must necessarily move to attain
+that vigor which shall continue forever."18 To state this figment
+is enough. It would be folly to attempt any refutation of a fancy
+so obviously a pure contrivance to fortify a preconceived opinion,
+a fancy, too, so preposterous, so utterly without countenance,
+either from experience, observation, science, reason, or
+Scripture. The egg of man's divinity is not laid in the nest of
+the grave.
+
+Another motive for believing the resurrection of the body has been
+created by the exigencies of a materialistic philosophy. There was
+in the early Church an Arabian sect of heretics who were reclaimed
+from their errors by the powerful reasonings and eloquence of
+Origen.19 Their heresy consisted in maintaining that the soul dies
+with the body being indeed only its vital breath and will be
+restored with it at the last day. In the course of the Christian
+centuries there have arisen occasionally a few defenders of this
+opinion. Priestley, as is well known, was an earnest supporter of
+it. Let us scan the ground on which he held this belief. In the
+first place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal life
+to come had been supernaturally revealed to men by God through
+Christ. Secondly, as a philosopher he was intensely a materialist,
+holding with unwavering conviction to the conclusion that life,
+mind, or soul, was a concomitant or result of our physical
+organism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to him
+was the total destruction of man for the time. There was therefore
+plainly no alternative for him but either to abandon one of his
+fundamental convictions as a Christian and a philosopher, or else
+to accept the doctrine of a future resurrection of the body into
+an immortal life. He chose the latter, and zealously taught always
+that death is an annihilation lasting till the day of judgment,
+when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this whole
+course of thought there are several replies to be made. In the
+first place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism is
+false: standing in the province of science and reason, it may be
+affirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on the
+body, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, but
+merely state it. Secondly, it is certain that the doctrine which
+makes soul perish with body finds no countenance in the New
+Testament. It is inconsistent with the belief in angelic spirits,
+in demoniac possessions, in Christ's descent as a spirit to preach
+to the spirits of departed men imprisoned in the under world, and
+with other conceptions underlying the Gospels and the Epistles.
+But, thirdly, admitting it to be true, then, we affirm, the
+legitimate deduction from all the arrayed facts of science and all
+the presumptive evidence of appearances is not that a future
+resurrection will restore the dead man to life, but that all is
+over with him, he has hopelessly perished forever. When the breath
+ceases, if nothing survives, if the total man is blotted out, then
+we challenge the production of a shadow of proof that he will ever
+live again. The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fate
+may make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a future
+arbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificial
+expedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that the
+body is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are gone
+forever. One intuition of the spirit, seizing the conscious
+supports of eternal ideas, casts contempt on "The doubtful
+prospects of our painted dust,"
+
+18 Drew on Resurrection, ch. vi. sect. vii. pp. 326-332.
+
+19 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. lib. vi. cap. xxxvii.
+
+
+and outvalues all the gross hopes of materialism. Between
+nonentity and being yawns the untraversable gulf of infinity. No:
+the body of flesh falls, turns to dust and air; the soul,
+emancipated, rejoices, and soars heavenwards, and is its own
+incorruptible frame, mocking at death, a celestial house, whose
+maker and builder is God.
+
+Finally, there remain to be weighed the bearings of the argument
+from chemical and physiological science on the resurrection. Here
+is the chief stumbling block in the way of the popular doctrine.
+The scientific absurdities connected with that doctrine have been
+marshalled against it by Celsus, the Platonist philosopher, by
+Avicenna, the Arabian physician, and by hundreds more, and have
+never been answered, and cannot be answered. As long as man lives,
+his bodily substance is incessantly changing; the processes of
+secretion and absorption are rapidly going forward. Every few
+years he is, as to material, a totally new man. Dying at the age
+of seventy, he has had at least ten different bodies. He is one
+identical soul, but has lived in ten separate houses. With which
+shall he be raised? with the first? or the fifth? or the last? or
+with all? But, further, the body after death decays, enters into
+combination with water, air, earth, gas, vegetables, animals,
+other human bodies. In this way the same matter comes to have
+belonged to a thousand persons. In the resurrection, whose shall
+it be? We reply, nearly in the language of Christ to the
+Sadducees, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the will of
+God: in the resurrection they have not bodies of earthly flesh,
+but are spirits, as the angels of God."
+
+The argument against the common theory of a material resurrection,
+on account of numerous claimants for the same substance, has of
+late derived a greatly increased force from the brilliant
+discoveries in chemistry. It is now found that only a small number
+of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20
+The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized
+substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former
+alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few
+in number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life depends
+on a relatively small quantity of matter. Over and over again, as
+the modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out of
+the same material." The particles that composed Adam's frame may
+before the end of the world have run the circuit of ten thousand
+bodies of his descendants: "'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been
+slave to thousands." To proclaim the resurrection of the flesh as
+is usually done, seems a flat contradiction of clear knowledge.21
+A late writer on this subject, Dr. Hitchcock, evades the
+insuperable difficulty by saying, "It is not necessary that the
+resurrection body should contain a single particle of the body
+laid in the grave, if it only contain particles of the same kind,
+united in the same proportion, and the compound be made to assume
+the same form and structure as the natural body." 22 Then two men
+who look exactly alike may in the resurrection exchange bodies
+without any harm! Here the theory of punishment clashes. Does not
+the esteemed author see that this would not be a resurrection of
+the old bodies, but a creation of new ones
+
+20 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, sect. xix.
+
+21 The Circulation of Matter, Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1853.
+
+22 The Resurrection of Spring, p. 26.
+
+
+just like them? And is not this a desertion of the orthodox
+doctrine of the Church? If he varies so far from the established
+formularies out of a regard for philosophy, he may as well be
+consistent and give up the physical doctrine wholly, because it
+rests solely on the tradition which he leaves and is every whit
+irreconcilable with philosophy. This device is as wilful an
+attempt to escape the scientific difficulty as that employed by
+Candlish to avoid the scriptural difficulty put in the way of the
+doctrine by the apostolic words "Flesh and blood cannot inherit
+the kingdom of God." The eminent Scottish divine affirms that
+"flesh and bones"  that is, these present bodies made
+incorruptible can inherit the kingdom of God; although "flesh and
+blood" that is, these present bodies subject to decay cannot.23 It
+is surely hard to believe that the New Testament writers had such
+a distinction in their minds. It is but a forlorn resource
+conjured up to meet a desperate exigency.
+
+At the appearing of Christ in glory,
+
+"When the Day of Fire shall have dawn'd, and sent Its deadly
+breath into the firmament," as it is supposed, the great earth
+cemetery will burst open and its innumerable millions swarm forth
+before him. Unto the tremendous act of habeas corpus, then
+proclaimed, every grave will yield its prisoner. Ever since the
+ascension of Jesus his mistaken followers have been anxiously
+expecting that awful advent of his person and his power in the
+clouds; but in vain. "All things remain as they were: where is the
+promise of his appearing?" As the lookers out hitherto have been
+disappointed, so they ever will be. Say not, Lo here! or, Lo
+there! for, behold, he is within you. The reason why this carnal
+error, Jewish conceit, retains a hold, is that men accept it
+without any honest scrutiny of its foundations or any earnest
+thought of their own about it. They passively receive the
+tradition. They do not realize the immensity of the thing, nor the
+ludicrousness of its details. To their imaginations the awful
+blast of the trumpet calling the world to judgment, seems no more,
+as Feuerbach says, than a tone from the tin horn of a postillion,
+who, at the post station of the Future, orders fresh horses for
+the Curriculum Vita! President Hitchcock tells us that, "when the
+last trumpet sounds, the whole surface of the earth will become
+instinct with life, from the charnels of battle fields alone more
+than a thousand millions of human beings starting forth and
+crowding upwards to the judgment seat." On the resurrection
+morning, at the first tip of light over acres of opening monument
+and heaving turf, "Each member jogs the other, And whispers, Live
+you, brother?"
+
+And how will it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth
+of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be
+again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band?
+Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which
+they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work of
+God"? 24
+
+23 Candlish, Life in a Risen Savior: Discourse XV.
+
+24 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. xiv.
+
+
+Young sings, "Now charnels rattle; scatter'd limbs, and all The
+various bones, obsequious to the call, Self moved, advance; the
+neck perhaps to meet The distant head; the distant head the feet.
+Dreadful to view! see, through the dusky sky Fragments of bodies
+in confusion fly, To distant regions journeying, there to claim
+Deserted members and complete the frame."
+
+The glaring melodramatic character, the startling mechanico
+theatrical effects, of this whole doctrine, are in perfect keeping
+with the raw imagination of the childhood of the human mind, but
+in profound opposition to the working philosophy of nature and the
+sublime simplicity of God.
+
+Many persons have never distinctly defined their views upon the
+subject before us. In the minds even of many preachers and
+writers, several different and irreconcilable theories would seem
+to exist together in confused mixture. Now they speak as if the
+soul were sleeping with the body in the grave; again they appear
+to imply that it is detained in an intermediate state; and a
+moment afterwards they say it has already entered upon its final
+reward or doom. Jocelyn relates, in his Life of St. Patrick, that
+"as the saint one day was passing the graves of two men recently
+buried, observing that one of the graves had a cross over it, he
+stopped his chariot and asked the dead man below of what religion
+he had been. The reply was, 'A pagan.' 'Then why was this cross
+put over you?' inquired St. Patrick. The dead man answered, 'He
+who is buried near me is a Christian; and one of your faith,
+coming hither, placed the cross at my head.' The saint stepped out
+of his chariot, rectified the mistake, and went his way." Calvin,
+in the famous treatise designated "Psychopannychia," which he
+levelled against those who taught the sleep of souls until the day
+of judgment, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediately
+to heaven, the souls of the reprobate to hell. Here they tarry in
+bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth,
+they assume their bodies and return to their respective places.
+But if the souls live so long in heaven and hell without their
+flesh, why need they ever resume it? The cumbrous machinery of the
+scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further
+specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and
+unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought
+by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop
+Burnet's work "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium," which teaches
+that at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be the
+same as the present, but at the second resurrection, after the
+millennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritual
+body will be developed.
+
+The true idea of man's future destiny appears to be that no
+resurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man never
+dies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonable
+ways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaves
+his present frame. It may be that within his material system lurks
+an exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it and
+constituting its vital power. This ethereal structure is
+disengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soars
+to the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an "inner
+body" is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet's
+"Palingenesie Philosophique." Or it may be that there is in each
+one a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organic
+identity of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant,
+unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spirit
+germ, born into the present life, assimilates and holds the
+present body around it, out of the materials of this world; born
+into the future life, it will assimilate and hold around it a
+different body, out of the materials of the future world.25 Thus
+there are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory of
+the terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the glory
+of the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of things
+hereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the material
+furnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall we
+bear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible mass,
+heir to a thousand ills. Our body shall rather be such  "If
+lightning were the gross corporeal frame Of some angelic essence,
+whose bright thoughts As far surpass'd in keen rapidity The
+lagging action of his limbs as doth Man's mind his clay; with like
+excess of speed To animated thought of lightning flies That spirit
+body o'er life's deeps divine, Far past the golden isles of
+memory."
+
+What man knows constitutes his present world. All beyond that
+constitutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which his
+desire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into the
+Unknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the latter
+supposition the restoration of the flesh is involved.
+
+Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan of
+the world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, but
+that the essence of his life should escape from the flesh and
+depart to some other sphere of being, there either to fashion
+itself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold the
+common doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out with
+philosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves to
+all existing planetary races as well as to their own, should they
+cause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine to
+go on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the final
+consummation the sundered earths approach each other, and
+firmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred in
+one orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of being
+would be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar system
+making a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities constituting
+one prodigious, death exempted empire, its solitary sovereign GOD.
+But this is pure poetry, and not science nor philosophy.
+
+25 Lange on the Resurrection of the Body, Studien und Kritiken, 1836.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF
+A HELL.
+
+A HELL of fire and brimstone has been, perhaps still is, the most
+terrible of the superstitions of the world. We propose to give a
+historic sketch of the popular representations on this subject,
+trace them to their origin, and discuss the merits of the question
+itself. To follow the doctrine through all its variations,
+illustrating the practical and controversial writings upon it,
+would require a large volume; but, by a judicious arrangement, all
+that is necessary to a fair understanding of the subject, or
+really interesting, may be presented within the compass of an
+essay. Any one who should read the literature of this subject
+would be astonished at the almost universal prevalence of the
+doctrine and at the immense diversity of appalling descriptions of
+it, and would ask, Whence arises all this? How have these horrors
+obtained such a seated hold in the world?
+
+In the first place, it is to be replied, as soon as reason is in
+fair possession of the idea of a continued individual existence
+beyond the grave, the moral sense, discriminating the deeds,
+tempers, and characters of men, would teach that there must be
+different allotments and experiences for them after death. It is
+not right, say reason and conscience, for the coward, the idler,
+fool, knave, sot, murderer, to enter into the same realm and have
+the same bliss with heroes, sages, and saints; neither are they
+able to do it. The spontaneous thought and sentiment of humanity
+would declare, if the soul survives the body, passing into the
+invisible world, its fortunes there must depend somewhat upon its
+fitness and deserts, its contained treasures and acquired habits.
+Reason, judging the facts of observation according to the
+principles of ethics and the working of experienced spiritual
+laws, at once decides that there is a difference hereafter between
+the fate of the good heart and the bad one, the great soul and the
+mean one: in a word, there is, in some sense or other, a heaven
+and a hell.
+
+Again: the same belief would be necessitated by the conception, so
+deeply entertained by the primitive people of the earth, of
+overruling and inspecting gods. They supposed these gods to be in
+a great degree like themselves, partial, fickle, jealous,
+revengeful. Such beings, of course, would caress their favorites
+and torture their offenders. The calamities and blessings of this
+life were regarded as tokens, revengeful or loving, of the ruling
+deities, now pleased, now enraged. And when their votaries or
+victims had passed into the eternal state, how natural to suppose
+them still favored or cursed by the passionate wills of these
+irresponsible gods! Plainly enough, they who believe in gods that
+launch thunderbolts and upheave the sea in their rage and take
+vengeance for an insult by sending forth a pestilence, must also
+believe in a hell where Ixion may be affixed to the wheel and
+Tantalus be tortured with maddening mockeries. These two
+conceptions of discriminating justice and of vengeful gods both
+lead to the theoretic construction of a hell, and to the growth of
+doctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, the
+former illustrating a pervasive law which distributes men
+according to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings with
+human passions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties according
+to their pleasure.
+
+Thirdly, when the general idea of a hell has once obtained
+lodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented,
+carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popular
+teachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative views
+and pictures act and react both upon the sources and the products
+of faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblems
+addressing the imagination, after a while are received in a
+literal sense, become physically located and clothed with the
+power of horror. A Hindu poet says, "The ungrateful shall remain
+in hell as long as the sun hangs in heaven." An old Jewish Rabbi
+says that after the general judgment "God shall lead all the
+blessed through hell and all the damned through paradise, and show
+to each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, so
+that they shall not be able to say, 'We are not to be blamed or
+praised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand.' Such
+utterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic assertions;
+and yet in a rude age they very easily pass into the popular mind
+as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer
+says, "There are in hell seven abodes, in each abode seven
+thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each
+cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and
+on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in
+hell seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches
+it he bursts." Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minute
+descriptions of hell and its agonies, descriptions which have
+unquestionably had a tremendous influence in cherishing and
+fashioning the world's faith in that awful empire. The poems of
+Dante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrific
+pictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and the
+popular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far more
+closely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations of
+the New Testament. The English poet's "Paradise Lost" has
+undoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparable
+with that of the Genevan theologian's "Institutes of the Christian
+Religion." There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by the
+Jewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiends
+called the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, make
+him sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul,
+and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy iron
+maces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purely
+arbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitness
+or probability; but they are received because unthinking ignorance
+and hungry superstition will greedily believe any thing they hear.
+Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forth
+the scene of damnation: "Doom'd to live death and never to expire,
+In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The damn'd shall
+groan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, in
+hurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, A
+flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid fire
+makes seas, the solid, shores; Arch'd o'er with flames, the horrid
+concave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, And
+sulphurous surges on each other ride. The hollow winding vaults,
+and dens, and caves, Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves.
+Pillars of flame in spiral volumes rise, Like fiery snakes, and
+lick the infernal skies. Sulphur, the eternal fuel, unconsumed,
+Vomits redounding smoke, thick, unillumed."
+
+But all other paintings of the fear and anguish of hell are vapid
+and pale before the preternatural frightfulness of those given at
+unmerciful length and in sickening specialty in some of the Hindu
+and Persian sacred books.1 Here worlds of nauseating disgusts, of
+loathsome agonies, of intolerable terrors, pass before us. Some
+are hung up by their tongues, or by their eyes, and slowly
+devoured by fiery vermin; some scourged with whips of serpents
+whose poisonous fangs lacerate their flesh at every blow; some
+forced to swallow bowls of gore, hair, and corruption, freshly
+filled as fast as drained; some packed immovably in red hot iron
+chests and laid in raging furnaces for unutterable millions of
+ages. One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist hells
+will think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor and
+Jonathan Edwards, were dipped in water. There is just as much
+ground for believing the accounts of the former to be true as
+there is for crediting those of the latter: the two are
+fundamentally the same, and the pagan had earlier possession of
+the field.
+
+Furthermore, in the early ages, and among people where castes were
+prominent, when the learning, culture, and power were confined to
+one class at the expense of others, it is unquestionable that
+copious and fearful descriptions of the future state were spread
+abroad by those who were interested in establishing such a dogma.
+The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, the
+exclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancient
+priesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing the
+people, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought to
+devise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentrate
+power in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly,
+in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the lurid
+and dusky image of hell, gathering around it all that was most
+abominated and awful. Then they set up certain fanciful
+conditions, without the strict observance of which no one could
+avoid damnation. The animus of a priesthood in the structure of
+this doctrine is shown by the glaring fact that in the old
+religions the woes of hell were denounced not so much upon bad men
+who committed crimes out of a wicked heart, as upon careless men
+who neglected priestly guidance and violated the ritual. The
+omission of a prayer or an ablution, the neglect of baptism or
+confession, a slight thrown upon a priest, a mental conception
+differing from the decree of the "Church," would condemn a man far
+more surely and deeply into the Egyptian, Hindu, Persian,
+Pharisaic, Papal, or Calvinistic hell than any amount of moral
+culpability according to the standard of natural ethics.
+
+1 See Pope's translation of the Viraf Nameh. Also the Dabistan,
+vol. i. pp. 295-304, of the translation by Shea and Troyer; and
+Coleman's Mythology of the Hindus, chapter on the hells.
+
+
+The popular hells have ever been built on hierarchic selfishness,
+dogmatic pride, and personal cruelty, and have been walled around
+with arbitrary and traditional rituals. Through the breaches made
+in these rituals by neglect, souls have been plunged in. The
+Parsee priest describes a woman in hell "beaten with stone clubs
+by two demons twelve miles in size, and compelled to continue
+eating a basin of putridity, because once some of her hair, as she
+combed it, fell into the sacred fire." The Brahmanic priest tells
+of a man who, for "neglecting to meditate on the mystic
+monosyllable Om before praying, was thrown down in hell on an iron
+floor and cleaved with an axe, then stirred in a caldron of molten
+lead till covered all over with the sweated foam of torture like a
+grain of rice in an oven, and then fastened, with head downwards
+and feet upwards, to a chariot of fire and urged onwards with a
+red hot goad." The Papal priest declares that the schismatic,
+though the kindest and justest man, at death drops hopelessly into
+hell, while the devotee, though scandalously corrupt in heart and
+life, who confesses and receives extreme unction, treads the
+primrose path to paradise. The Episcopalian priest dooms the
+dissenter to everlasting woe in spite of every virtue, because he
+has not known sacramental baptism in the apostolic line. The
+Arminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires of
+eternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation of
+the Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been the
+priestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that has
+deepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportioned
+the victims, of hell. The perversions and excesses of the doctrine
+have grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and been
+received by docile ignorance and superstition on the other, and
+been mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessive
+vanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude all
+the Gentiles, whom they stigmatized as "uncircumcised dogs," from
+the Jewish salvation. The same spirit, aggravated if possible,
+passed lineally into Christendom, causing the Orthodox Church to
+exclude all the heathen, all heretics, and the unbaptized, from
+the Christian salvation.
+
+A fifth explanation of the wholesale severity and multiplied
+details of horror, which came to be incorporated with the doctrine
+of hell, is to be found in the gloomy theories of certain
+philosophers whose relentless speculations were tinged and moulded
+by their own recluse misanthropy and the prevailing superstitions
+of their time. Out of the old asceticism of the East the false
+spiritualism which regarded matter as the source of evil and this
+life as a penance arose the dogma of metempsychosis. The
+consequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created a
+descending congeries of hells, reaching from centre to nadir, in
+correspondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching from
+centre to zenith. Out of the myth of the Fall sprang the dogma of
+total depravity, dooming our whole race to hell forever, except
+those saved by the subsequent artifice of the atonement. Theories
+conjured up and elaborated by fanciful and bloodless metaphysicians,
+in an age when the milk of public human kindness was thinned,
+soured, poisoned, by narrow and tyrannical prejudices, might
+easily legitimate and establish any conclusions, however
+unreasonable and monstrous. The history of philosophy is
+the broad demonstration of this. The Church philosophers, (with
+exceptions, of course,) receiving the traditions of the common
+faith, partaking in the superstitions of their age, banished from
+the bosoms of men by their monastic position, and inflamed with
+hierarchic pride, with but a faint connection or intercourse
+between conscience and intellect or between heart and fancy,
+strove to spin out theories which would explain and justify the
+orthodox dogmas.
+
+Working with metaphysical tools of abstract reason, not with the
+practical faculties of life, dealing with the fanciful materials
+of priestly tradition, not with the solid facts of ethical
+observation, they would naturally be troubled with but few qualms
+and make but few reservations, however overwhelming the results of
+horror at which they might arrive. Habituated for years to hair
+drawn analyses and superstitious broodings upon the subject,
+overshadowed by the supernatural hierarchy in which they lived,
+surrounded by a thick night of ignorance, persecution, and
+slaughter, it was no wonder they could believe the system they
+preached, although in reality it was only a traditional
+abstraction metaphysically wrought up and vivified by themselves.
+Being thus wrought out and animated by them, who were the sole
+depositaries of learning and the undisputed lords of thought, the
+mass of the people, lying abjectly in the fetters of authority,
+could not help accepting it. Ample illustrations of these
+assertions will occur to all who are familiar with the theological
+schemes and the dialectic subtleties of the early Church Fathers
+and of the later Church Scholastics.
+
+Finally, by the combined power, first, of natural conscience
+affirming a future distinction between the good and the bad;
+secondly, of imperfect conceptions of God as a passionate avenger;
+thirdly, of the licentious fancies of poets drawing awful
+imaginative pictures of future woe; fourthly, of the cruel spirit
+and the ambitious plans of selfish priesthoods; and fifthly, of
+the harsh and relentless theories of conforming metaphysicians,
+the doctrine of hell, as a located place of manifold terrific
+physical tortures drawing in vast majorities of the human race,
+became established in the ruling creeds and enthroned as an
+orthodox dogma. In some heathen nations the descriptions of the
+poets, in others the accounts of the priestly books, were held to
+be inspired revelations. To call them in question was blasphemous.
+In Christendom the scriptural representations of the subject,
+which were general moral adaptations, incidentally made, of
+representations already existing, obtained a literal interpretation,
+had the stamp of infallibility put on them and immense perverted
+additions joined to them. Thus everywhere the dogma became
+associated with the established authority. To deny it was heresy.
+Heretics were excommunicated, loaded with pains and penalties,
+and, for many centuries, often put to death with excruciating
+tortures. From that moment the doctrine was taken out of
+the province of natural reason, out of the realm of ethical
+truth. The absurdities, wrongs, and barbarities deducible from it
+were a part and parcel of it, and not to be considered as any
+objection to it. No free thought and honest criticism were
+allowed. Because taught by authority, it must be submissively
+taken for granted. Henceforth we are not to wonder at the
+revolting inhumanity of spirit and horribleness of gloating hatred
+shown in connection with the doctrine; for it was not the
+independent thought and proper moral spirit of individuals, but
+the petrified dogma and irresponsible corporate spirit of that
+towering hierarchy, the Church.
+
+The Church set forth certain conditional offers of salvation. When
+those offers were spurned or neglected, the Church felt personally
+insulted and aggrieved. Her servants hurled on the hated heretics
+and heathen the denunciations of bigotry and the threats of rage.
+Rugged old Tertullian, in whose torrid veins the fire of his
+African deserts seems infused, revels with infernal glee over the
+contemplation of the sure damnation of the heathen. "At that
+greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment," he
+says, "how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when
+I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of
+darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than
+they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage
+philosophers blushing in red hot fires with their deluded pupils;
+so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own
+sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than
+ever before from applause."2 Hundreds of the most accredited
+Christian writers have shown the same fiendish spirit. Drexel the
+Jesuit, preaching of Dives, exclaims, "Instead of a lofty bed of
+down on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying in
+the flames; his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are taken
+from him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his food
+but smoke and sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on
+the "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of his
+matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination
+in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with
+infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable
+abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who
+roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that
+fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming
+them;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their
+children, tormented before their eyes;" "the bodies of the damned
+shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press,
+which press one another till they burst;" "every distinct sense
+and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most
+exquisite sufferings." Christopher Love belying his name says of
+the damned, "Their cursings are their hymns, howlings their tunes,
+and blasphemies their ditties." Calvin writes, "Forever harassed
+with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder
+by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings,
+terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of
+his hand, so that to sink into any gulfs would be more tolerable
+than to stand for a moment in these terrors." A living divine, Dr.
+Gardiner Spring, declares, "When the omnipotent and angry God, who
+has access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frame
+and all the inlets to agony in the intellectual constitution,
+undertakes to punish, he will convince the universe that he does
+not gird himself for the work of retribution in vain;" "it will be
+a glorious deed when He who hung on Calvary shall cast those who
+have trodden his blood under their feet, into the furnace of fire,
+where there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth."
+Thousands of passages like these, and even worse, might easily be
+collected from Christian authors, dating their utterance from the
+days of St. Irenaus, Bishop of Lyons, who flamed against the
+heretics, to the days of Nehemiah Adams, Congregational preacher
+of Boston, who says, "It is to be feared the forty two children
+that mocked Elisha are now in hell." 4 There is an unmerciful
+animus in them, a vindictiveness of thought and feeling, far oh,
+how far! removed from the meek and loving
+
+2 De Spectaculis, cap. xxx., Gibbon's trans.
+
+3 Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 6 8.
+
+4 Friends of Christ, p. 149.
+
+
+soul of Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and loved the
+"unevangelical" young lawyer who was "not far from the kingdom of
+heaven," and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from the
+tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress,
+"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some
+sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and
+rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened
+conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and
+artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily
+believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human race
+were placed in their hands, they would with scarcely a twinge of
+pain perhaps some of them even with a horrid satisfaction and
+triumph doom all except their own dogmatic coterie to hell. They
+are bound to do so. They profess to know infallibly that God will
+do so: if, therefore, the case being in their arbitration, they
+would decide differently, they thereby impeach the action of God,
+confess his decrees irreconcilable with reason and justice, and
+set up their own goodness as superior to his. Burnet has preserved
+the plea of Bloody Mary, which was in these words: "As the souls
+of heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in hell, there
+can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divine
+vengeance by burning them on earth." Thanks be to the infinite
+Father that our fate is in his hands, and not in the hands of men
+who are bigots,
+
+"Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God,
+Who write down judgments with a pen hard nibb'd:
+Ushers of Beelzebub's black rod,
+Commending sinners, not to ice thick ribb'd,
+But endless flames to scorch them up like flax,
+Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribb'd
+The impression of St. Peter's keys in wax!"
+
+It may be thought that this doctrine and its awful concomitants,
+though once promulgated, are now nearly obsolete. It is true that,
+in thinking minds and generous hearts, they are getting to be
+repudiated. But by no means is it so in the recognised formularies
+of the established Churches and in the teachings of the popular
+clergy. All through the Gentile world, wherever there is a
+prevailing religion, the threats and horrors of a fearful doctrine
+of hell are still brandished over the trembling or careless
+multitudes. In Christendom, the authoritative announcement of the
+Roman and Greek Churches, and the public creeds confessed by every
+communicant of all the denominations, save two or three which are
+comparatively insignificant in numbers, show that the doctrine is
+yet held without mitigation. The Bishop of Toronto, only a year or
+two ago, published the authoritative declaration that "every child
+of humanity, except the Virgin Mary, is from the first moment of
+conception a child of wrath, hated by the blessed Trinity,
+belonging to Satan, and doomed to hell!" Indeed, the doctrine, in
+its whole naked and frightful extent, is necessarily, in strict
+logic, an integral part of the great system of the popular
+Christianity, that is, Christianity as falsely interpreted,
+paganized, and scholasticized. For if by the sin of Adam the
+entire race were totally depraved and condemned to a hopeless
+hell, and only those can be saved who personally appropriate by a
+realizing faith the benefits of the subsequent artifice carried
+out in the atoning blood of the incarnate God, certainly the
+extremist advocate of the doctrine concerning hell has not
+exceeded the truth, and cannot exceed it. All the necessities of
+logic rebuke the tame hearted theologians, and great Augustine's,
+great Calvin's, ghost walks unapproached among them, crying out
+that they are slow and inefficient in describing the enormous
+sweep of the inherited penalty! Many persons who have not taken
+pains to examine the subject suppose that the horrifying
+descriptions given by Christian authors of the state and
+sufferings of the lost were not intended to be literally received,
+but were meant as figures of speech, highly wrought metaphors
+calculated to alarm and impress with physical emblems corresponding
+only to moral and spiritual realities. The progress of
+thought and refinement has made it natural that recourse should
+often be had to such an explanation; but unquestionably it is a
+mistake. The annals of theology, both dogmatic and homiletic, from
+the time of the earliest Fathers till now, abound in detailed
+accounts of the future punishment of the wicked, whereof the
+context, the train of thought, and all the intrinsic characteristics
+of style and coherence, do not leave a shadow of doubt that they
+were written as faithful, though inadequate, accounts of facts.
+The Church, the immense bulk of Christendom, has in theory always
+regarded hell and its dire concomitants as material facts,
+and not as merely spiritual experiences.
+
+Tertullian says, "The damned burn eternally without consuming, as
+the volcanoes, which are vents from the stored subterranean fire
+of hell, burn forever without wasting." 5 Cyprian declares that
+"the wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze in
+those living fires." Augustine argues at great length and with
+ingenious varieties of reasoning to show how the material bodies
+of the damned may withstand annihilation in everlasting fire.6
+Similar assertions, which cannot be figuratively explained, are
+made by Irenaus, Jerome, Athanasius, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura,
+Gerson, Bernard, and indeed by almost all the Christian writers.
+Origen, who was a Platonist, and a heretic on many points, was
+severely condemned for saying that the fire of hell was inward and
+of the conscience, rather than outward and of the body. For the
+strict materiality of the fire of hell we might adduce volumes of
+authorities from nearly every province of the Church. Dr. Barrow
+asserts that "our bodies will be afflicted continually by a
+sulphurous flame, piercing the inmost sinews." John Whitaker
+thinks "the bodies of the damned will be all salted with fire, so
+tempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely and yet never
+consume." Jeremy Taylor teaches that "this temporal fire is but a
+painted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire in
+hell." Jonathan Edwards soberly and believingly writes thus: "The
+world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe
+of fire, a vast ocean of fire, in which the wicked shall be
+overwhelmed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shall
+be tost to and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves or
+billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which
+they shall forever be full of a quick sense within and without:
+their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet,
+their loins, and their vitals shall forever be full of a glowing,
+melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements;
+and also they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively
+sense
+
+5 Apol. cap. 47-48.
+
+6 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxi. cap. 2 4.
+
+
+to feel the torments; not for one minute, nor for one day, nor for
+one age, nor for two ages, nor for a hundred ages, nor for ten
+thousands of millions of ages one after another, but for ever and
+ever, without any end at all, and never, never be delivered." 7
+Calvin says, "Iterum quaro, unde factum est, ut tot gentes una cum
+liberis eorum infantibus aterna morti involveret lapsus Ada absque
+remedio, nisi quia Deo ita visum est? Decretum horribile fateor."
+8 Outraged humanity before the contemplation cries, "O God, horror
+hath overwhelmed me, for thou art represented as an omnipotent
+Fiend." It is not the Father of Christ, but his Antagonist, whose
+face glares down over such a scene as that! The above diabolical
+passage at the recital of which from the pulpit, Edwards's
+biographers tell us, "whole congregations shuddered and
+simultaneously rose to their feet, smiting their breasts, weeping
+and groaning" is not the arbitrary exaggeration of an individual,
+but a fair representation of the actual tenets and vividly held
+faith of the Puritans. It is also, in all its uncompromising
+literality, a direct and inevitable part of the system of doctrine
+which, with insignificant exceptions, professedly prevails
+throughout Christendom at this hour. We know most persons will
+hesitate at this statement; but let them look at the logic of the
+case in the light of its history, and they must admit the
+correctness of the assertion. Weigh the following propositions,
+the accuracy of which no one, we suppose, will question, and it
+will appear at once that there is no possibility of avoiding the
+conclusion.
+
+First, it is the established doctrine of Christendom that no one
+can be saved without a supernatural regeneration, or sincere faith
+in the vicarious atonement, or valid reception of sacramental
+grace at the hands of a priest, conditions which it is not
+possible that one in a hundred thousand of the whole human race
+has fulfilled. Secondly, it is the established doctrine of
+Christendom that there will be a general day of judgment, when all
+men will be raised in the same bodies which they originally
+occupied on earth, when Christ and his angels will visibly descend
+from heaven, separate the elect from the reprobate, summon the
+sheep to the blissful pastures on the right hand, but "Proclaim
+The flocks of goats to folds of flame."
+
+The world is to be burnt up, and the damned, restored to their
+bodies, are to be driven into the everlasting fire prepared for
+them. The resurrection of the body, still held in all Christendom,
+taken in connection with the rest of the associated scheme,
+necessitates the belief in the materiality of the torments of
+hell. That eminent living divine, Dr. Gardiner Spring, says, "The
+souls of all who have died in their sins are in hell; and there
+their bodies too will be after the resurrection." 9 Mr. Spurgeon
+also, in his graphic and fearful sermon on the "Resurrection of
+the Dead," uses the following language: "When thou diest, thy soul
+will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it: but at the
+day of judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt
+have twin hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body
+suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that which we have on
+earth thy body will lie,
+
+7 Edwards's Works, vol. viii. p. 166.
+
+8 Instit., lib. iii. cap. xxiii. sect. 7.
+
+9 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 258.
+
+
+asbestos like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the
+feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devil
+shall forever play his diabolical tune of Hell's Unutterable
+Lament!" And, if this doctrine be true, no ingenuity, however
+fertile in expedients and however fiendish in cruelty, can
+possibly devise emblems and paint pictures half terrific enough to
+present in imagination and equal in moral impression what the
+reality will be to the sufferers. It is easy to speak or hear the
+word "hell;" but to analyze its significance and realize it in a
+sensitive fancy is difficult; and whenever it is done the fruit is
+madness, as the bedlams of the world are shrieking in testimony at
+this instant. The Revivalist preachers, so far from exaggerating
+the frightful contents latent in the prevalent dogma concerning
+hell, have never been able and no man is able to do any thing like
+justice to its legitimate deductions. Edwards is right in
+declaring, "After we have said our utmost and thought our utmost,
+all that we have said and thought is but a faint shadow of the
+reality." Think of yourselves, seized, just as you are now, and
+flung into the roaring, glowing furnace of eternity; think of such
+torture for an instant, multiply it by infinity, and then say if
+any words can convey the proper force of impression. It is true
+these intolerable details are merely latent and unappreciated by
+the multitude of believers; and when one, roused to fanaticism by
+earnest contemplation of his creed, dares to proclaim its logical
+consequences and to exhort men accordingly, they shrink, and
+charge him with excess. But they should beware ere they repudiate
+the literal horrors of the historic orthodox doctrine for any
+figurative and moral views accommodated to the advanced reason and
+refinement of the times, beware how such an abandonment of a part
+of their system affects the rest.
+
+Give up the material fire, and you lose the bodily resurrection.
+Renounce the bodily resurrection, and away goes the visible coming
+of Christ to a general judgment. Abandon the general judgment, and
+the climacteric completion of the Church scheme of redemption is
+wanting. Mar the wholeness of the redemption plan, and farewell to
+the incarnation and vicarious atonement. Neglect the vicarious
+atonement, and down crumbles the hollow and broken shell of the
+popular theology helplessly into its grave. The old literal
+doctrine of a material hell, however awful its idea, as it has
+been set forth in flaming views and threats by all the accredited
+representatives of the Church, must be uncompromisingly clung to,
+else the whole popular system of theology will be mutilated,
+shattered, and lost from sight. The theological leaders understand
+this perfectly well, and for the most part they act accordingly.
+We have now under our hand numerous extracts, from writings
+published within the last five years by highly influential
+dignitaries in the different denominations, which for frightfulness
+of outline and coloring, and for unshrinking assertions of
+literality, will compare with those already quoted.
+
+Especially read the following description of this kind from John
+Henry Newman: "Oh, terrible moment for the soul, when it suddenly
+finds itself at the judgment seat of Christ, when the Judge speaks
+and consigns it to the jailers till it shall pay the endless debt
+which lies against it! 'Impossible! I a lost soul? I separated
+from hope and from peace forever? It is not I of whom the Judge so
+spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Savior, hold thy
+hand: one minute to explain it! My name is Demas: I am but Demas,
+not Judas, or Nicholas, or Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes.
+What! eternal pain for me? Impossible! it shall not be!' And the
+poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon
+which has hold of it, and whose every touch is torment. 'Oh,
+atrocious!' it shrieks, in agony, and in anger too, as if the
+very keenness of the infliction were a proof of its injustice.
+'A second! and a third! I can bear no more! Stop, horrible fiend!
+give over: I am a man, and not such as thou! I am not food for
+thee, or sport for thee! I have been taught religion; I have had
+a conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in science
+and art; I am a philosopher, or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men,
+or a hero, or a statesman, or an orator, or a man of wit and humor.
+Nay, I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the
+sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I died
+in communion with the Church: nothing, nothing which I have ever
+been, which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, and
+to the flame and stench which exhale from thee: so I defy thee,
+and abjure thee, O enemy of man!'
+
+"Alas! poor soul! and, whilst it thus fights with that destiny
+which it has brought upon itself and those companions whom it has
+chosen, the man's name perhaps is solemnly chanted forth, and his
+memory decently cherished, among his friends on earth. Men talk of
+him from time to time; they appeal to his authority; they quote
+his words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, or
+write his history. 'So comprehensive a mind! such a power of
+throwing light on a perplexed subject and bringing conflicting
+ideas or facts into harmony!' 'Such a speech it was that he made
+on such and such an occasion: I happened to be present, and never
+shall forget it;' or, 'A great personage, whom some of us knew;'
+or, 'It was a rule with a very worthy and excellent friend of
+mine, now no more;' or, 'Never was his equal in society, so just
+in his remarks, so lively, so versatile, so unobtrusive;' or, 'So
+great a benefactor to his country and to his kind;' or, 'His
+philosophy so profound.' 'Oh, vanity! vanity of vanities! all is
+vanity! What profiteth it? What profiteth it? His soul is in hell,
+O ye children of men! While thus ye speak, his soul is in the
+beginning of those torments in which his body will soon have part,
+and which will never die!" 10
+
+Some theologians do not hesitate, even now, to say that "in hell
+the bodies of the damned shall be nealed, as we speak of glass, so
+as to endure the fire without being annihilated thereby." "Made of
+the nature of salamanders," they shall be "immortal kept to feel
+immortal fire." Well may we take up the words of the Psalmist and
+cry out of the bottomless depths of disgust and anguish, "I am
+overwhelmed with horror!"
+
+Holding this abhorrent mass of representations, so grossly carnal
+and fearful, up in the free light of to day, it cannot stand the
+test of honest and resolute inquiry. It exists only by timid,
+unthinking sufferance. It is kept alive, among the superstitious
+vestiges of the outworn and out grown past, only by the power of
+tradition, authority, and custom. In refutation of it we shall not
+present here a prolonged detail of learned researches and logical
+processes; for that would be useless to those who are enslaved to
+the foregone conclusions of a creed and possessed by invulnerable
+prejudices, while those who are thoughtful and candid can make
+
+10 Sermon on "Neglect of Divine Calls and warnings."
+
+
+such investigations themselves. We shall merely state, in a few
+clear and brief propositions, the results in which we suppose all
+free and enlightened minds who have adequately studied the subject
+now agree, leaving the reader to weigh these propositions for
+himself, with such further examination as inclination and
+opportunity may cause him to bestow upon the matter.
+
+We reject the common belief of Christians in a hell which is a
+local prison of fire where the wicked are to be tortured by
+material instruments, on the following grounds, appealing to God
+for the reverential sincerity of our convictions, and appealing to
+reason for their truth. First, the supposition that hell is an
+enormous region in the hollow of the earth is a remnant of ancient
+ignorance, a fancy of poets who magnified the grave into Hades, a
+thought of geographers who supposed the earth to be flat and
+surrounded by a brazen expanse bright above and black beneath.
+Secondly, the soul, on leaving the body, is a spiritual substance,
+if it be any substance at all, eluding our senses and all the
+instruments of science. Therefore, in the nature of things, it
+cannot be chained in a dungeon, nor be cognizant of suffering from
+material fire or other physical infliction, but its woes must be
+moral and inward; and the figment that its former fleshly body is
+to be restored to it is utterly incredible, being an absurdity in
+science, and not affirmed, as we believe, in Scripture. Thirdly,
+the imagery of a subterranean hell of fire, brimstone, and undying
+worms, as used in the Scriptures of the New Testament, is the same
+as that drawn from heathen sources with modifications and employed
+by the Pharisees before the time of Christ and his disciples; and
+we must therefore, since neither Persians nor Pharisees were
+inspired, either suppose that this imagery was adopted by the
+apostles figuratively to convey moral truths, or else that they
+were left, in common with their countrymen, at least partially
+under the dominion of the errors of their time. Thus in every
+alternative we deny that the interior of the earth is, or ever
+will be, an abode of souls, full of fire, a hell in which the
+damned are to be confined and physically tormented.
+
+The elements of the popular doctrine of future punishment which we
+thus reject are the falsities contributed by superstition and the
+priestly spirit. The truths remaining in the doctrine, furnished
+by conscience, reason, and Scripture, we will next exhibit, in
+order not to dismiss this head, on the nature of future
+punishment, with negations. What is the real character of the
+retributions in the future state? We do not think they are
+necessarily connected with any peculiar locality or essentially
+dependent on any external circumstances. As Milton says, when
+speaking of the best theologians, "To banish forever into a local
+hell, whether in the air, or in the centre, or in that uttermost
+and bottomless gulf of chaos deeper from holy bliss than the
+world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishment so
+proper and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with
+sin."
+
+God does not arbitrarily stretch forth his arm, like an enraged
+and vindictive man, and take direct vengeance on offenders; but by
+his immutable laws, permeating all beings and governing all
+worlds, evil is, and brings, its own punishment. The intrinsic
+substances and forces of character and their organized
+correlations with the realities of eternity, the ruling
+principles, habits, and love of the soul, as they stand affected
+towards the world to which they go, these are the conditions on
+which experience depends, herein is the hiding of retribution.
+"Each one," as Origen says, "kindles the flame of his own
+appropriate fire." Superior spirits must look on a corrupted human
+soul with a sorrow similar, though infinitely profounder, to that
+with which the lapidary contemplates a splendid pearl with a dark
+flaw in its centre. The Koran says, "Men sleep while they live,
+and when they die they wake." The sudden infliction of pain in the
+future state comes from the sudden unveiling of secrets,
+quickening of the moral consciousness, and exposure of the naked
+soul's fitnesses to the spiritual correspondences of its deserts.
+It is said,  "Death does Away disguise: souls see each other
+clear, At one glance, as two drops of rain in air Might look into
+each other had they life."
+
+The quality of the soul's character decides the elements of the
+soul's life; and, as this becomes known on crossing the death
+drawn line of futurity, conscious retribution then arises in the
+guilty. This is a retribution which is reasonable, moral,
+unavoidable, before which we may well pause and tremble. The great
+moral of it is that we should not so much dread being thrust into
+an eternal hell as we should fear carrying a hell with us when we
+go into eternity. It is not so bad to be in hell as to be forced
+truly to say, "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."
+
+If these general ideas are correct, it follows even as all common
+sense and reflection affirm that every real preparation for death
+and for what is to succeed must be an ingrained characteristic,
+and cannot consist in a mere opinion, mood, or act. Here we strike
+at one of the shallowest errors, one of the most extensive and
+rooted superstitions, of the world. Throughout the immense
+kingdoms of the East, where the Brahmanic and Buddhist religions
+hold sway over six hundred millions of men, the notion of
+yadasanna that is, the merit instantaneously obtained when at the
+point of death fully prevails. They suppose that in that moment,
+regardless of their former lives and of their present characters,
+by bringing the mind and the heart into certain momentary states
+of thought and feeling, and meditating on certain objects or
+repeating certain sacred words, they can suddenly obtain exemption
+from punishment in their next life.11 The notion likewise obtains
+almost universally among Christians, incredible as it may seem.
+With the Romanists, who are three fourths of the Christian world,
+it is a most prominent doctrine, everywhere vehemently proclaimed
+and acted on: that is the meaning of the sacrament of extreme
+unction, whereby, on submission to the Church and confession to a
+priest, the venal sins of the dying man are forgiven, purgatory
+avoided or lessened, and heaven made sure. The ghost of the King
+of Denmark complains most of the unwarned suddenness of his
+murder, not of the murder itself, but of its suddenness, which
+left him no opportunity to save his soul: "Sleeping, was I by a
+brother's hand Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
+
+11 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 489.
+
+
+Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd; No reckoning made, but sent to
+my account With all my imperfections on my head."
+
+Hamlet, urged by supernatural solicitings to vengeance, finds his
+murderous uncle on his knees at prayer. Stealing behind him with
+drawn sword, he is about to strike the fatal blow, when the
+thought occurs to him that the guilty man, if killed when at his
+devotions, would surely go to heaven; and so he refrains until a
+different opportunity. For to send to heaven the villain who had
+slain his father,
+
+"That would be hire and salary, not revenge. He took my father
+grossly full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flush
+as May; And how his audit stands who knows save Heaven? But, in
+our circumstance and course of thought, 'Tie heavy with him. And
+am I then revenged To take him in the purging of his soul, When he
+is fit and season'd for his passage? No; but when he is drunk,
+asleep, enraged, Or in the incestuous pleasures of his bed, At
+gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of
+salvation in't: Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
+And that his soul may be as damn'd and black As hell, whereto it
+goes."
+
+This, though poetry, is a fair representation of the mediaval
+faith held by all Christendom in sober prose. The same train of
+thought latently underlies the feelings of most Protestants too,
+though it is true any one would now shrink from expressing it with
+such frankness and horrible gusto. But what else means the minute
+morbid anatomy of death beds, the prurient curiosity to know how
+the dying one bore himself in the solemn passage? How commonly, if
+one dies without physical anguish, and with the artificial
+exultations of a fanatic, rejoiceful auguries are drawn! if he
+dies in physical suffering, and with apparent regret, a gloomy
+verdict is rendered! It is superstition, absurdity, and injustice,
+all. Not the accidental physical conditions, not the transient
+emotions, with which one passes from the earth, can decide his
+fate, but the real good or evil of his soul, the genuine fitness
+or unfitness of his soul, his soul's inherent merits of bliss or
+bale. There is no time nor power in the instant of death, by any
+magical legerdemain, to turn away the impending retributions of
+wickedness and guilt. What is right, within the conditions of
+Infinite wisdom and goodness, will be done in spite of all
+traditional juggles and spasmodic spiritual attitudinizations.
+What can it avail that a most vile and hardened wretch, when
+dying, convulsed with fright and possessed with superstition,
+compels, or strives to compel, a certain sentiment into his soul,
+conjures, or tries to conjure, his mind into the relation of
+belief towards a certain ancient and abstract dogma?
+
+"Yet I've seen men who meant not ill, Compelling doctrine out of
+death, With hell and heaven acutely poised Upon the turning of a
+breath."
+
+Cruelly racking the soul with useless probes of theological
+questions and statements, they stand by the dying to catch the
+words of his last breath, and, in perfect consistence with their
+faith, they pronounce sentence accordingly. If, as the pallid lips
+faintly close, they hear the magic words, "I put my trust in the
+atoning blood of Christ," up goes the soul to heaven. If they hear
+the less stereotyped words, "I have tried to do as well as I
+could: I hope God will be merciful towards me and receive me,"
+down goes the soul to hell. Strange and cruel superstition, that
+imagines God to act towards men only according to the evanescent
+temper and technical phrase with which they leave the world! The
+most popular English preacher of the present day, the Rev. Mr.
+Spurgeon, after referring to the fable that those before whom
+Perseus held the head of Medusa were turned into stone in the very
+act and posture of the moment when they saw it, says, "Death is
+such a power. What I am when death is held before me, that I must
+be forever. When my spirit goes, if God finds me hymning his
+praise, I shall hymn it in heaven: doth he find me breathing out
+oaths, I shall follow up those oaths in hell. As I die, so shall I
+live eternally!" 12
+
+No: the true preparation for death and the invisible realm of
+souls is not the eager adoption of an opinion, the hurried
+assumption of a mood, or the frightened performance of an outward
+act: it is the patient culture of the mind with truth, the pious
+purification of the heart with disinterested love, the consecrated
+training of the life in holiness, the growth of the soul in habits
+of righteousness, faith, and charity, the organization of divine
+principles into character. Every real preparation of the soul for
+death must be a characteristic rightly related to the immortal
+realities to which death is the introduction of the soul. An evil
+soul is not thrust into a physical and fiery hell, fenced in and
+roofed over from the universal common; but it is revealed to
+itself, and consciously enters on retributive relations. In the
+spiritual world, whither all go at death, we suppose that like
+perceives like, and thus are they saved or damned, having, by the
+natural attraction and elective seeing of their virtues or vices,
+the beatific vision of God, or the horrid vision of iniquity and
+terror.
+
+It cannot be supposed that God is a bounded shape so vast as to
+fill the entire circuits of the creation. Spirit transcends the
+categories of body, and it is absurd to apply the language of
+finite things to the illimitable One, except symbolically. When we
+die, we do not sink or soar to the realm of spirits, but are in
+it, at once, everywhere; and the resulting experience will depend
+on the prevailing elements of our moral being. If we are bad, our
+badness is our banishment from God; if we are good, our goodness
+is our union with God. In every world the true nature and law of
+retribution lie in the recoil of conduct on character, and the
+assimilated results ensuing. Take a soul that is saturated with
+the rottenness of depravity into the core of heaven, and it is in
+the heart of hell still. Take a soul that is compacted of divine
+
+12 Sermons, 3d Series. Sermon XIV., Thoughts on the Last Battle.
+
+
+realities to the very bottom of hell, and heaven is with it there.
+
+We are treading on eternity, and infinitude is all around us. Now,
+as well as hereafter, to us, the universe is action, the soul is
+reaction, experience is the resultant. Death but unveils the
+facts. Pass that great crisis, in the passage becoming conscious
+of universal realities and of individual relations to them, and
+the Father will say to the discordant soul, "Alienated one,
+incapable of my embrace, change and come to me;" to the harmonious
+soul, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."
+
+Having thus considered the question as to the nature of future
+punishments, it now remains to discuss the question concerning
+their duration. The fact of a just and varied punishment for souls
+we firmly believe in. The particulars of it in the future, or the
+degrees of its continuance, we think, are concealed from the
+present knowledge of man. These details we do not profess to be
+able to settle much about. We have but three general convictions
+on the subject. First, that these punishments will be experienced
+in accordance with those righteous and inmost laws which
+indestructibly express the mind of God and rule the universe, and
+will not be vindictively inflicted through arbitrary external
+penalties. Secondly, that they will be accurately tempered to the
+just deserts and qualifications of the individual sufferers. And
+thirdly, that they will be alleviated, remedial, and limited, not
+unmitigated, hopeless, and endless.
+
+Upon the first of these thoughts perhaps enough has already been
+said, and the second and third may be discussed together. Our
+business, therefore, in the remainder of this dissertation, is to
+disprove, if truth in the hands of reason and conscience will
+enable us to disprove, the popular dogma which asserts that the
+state of the condemned departed is a state of complete damnation
+absolutely eternal. Against that form of representing future
+punishment which makes it unlimited by conceiving the destiny of
+the soul to be an eternal progress, in which their initiative
+steps of good or evil in this life place different souls under
+advantages or disadvantages never relatively to be lost, we have
+nothing to object. It is reasonable, in unison with natural law,
+and not frightful.13 But we are to deal, if we fairly can, a
+refutation against the doctrine of an intense endless misery for
+the wicked, as that doctrine is prevailingly taught and received.
+
+The advocates of eternal damnation primarily plant themselves upon
+the Christian Scriptures, and say that there the voice of an
+infallible inspiration from heaven asserts it. First of all, let
+us examine this ground, and see if they do not stand there only
+upon erroneous premises sustained by prejudices. In the beginning,
+then, we submit to candid minds that, if the literal eternity of
+future torment be proclaimed in the New Testament, it is not a
+part of the revelation contained in that volume; it is not a truth
+revealed by inspiration; and that we maintain for this reason. The
+same representations of the everlasting duration of future
+punishment in hell, the same expressions for an unlimited
+duration, which occur in the New Testament, were previously
+employed by the Hindus, Greeks, and Pharisees, who were not
+inspired, but must have drawn the doctrine from fallible sources.
+Now, to say the least, it is as reasonable to suppose that these
+expressions, when found in the New Testament, were
+
+13 Lessing, Ueber Leibnitz von den Ewigen Strafen.
+
+
+employed by the Saviour and the evangelists in conformity with the
+prevailing thought and customary phraseology of their time, as to
+conclude that they were derived from an unerring inspiration. The
+former is a natural and reasonable inference; the latter is a
+gratuitous hypothesis for which we have never heard of any
+evidence. If its advocates will honestly attempt really to prove
+it, we are convinced they will be forced to renounce it. The only
+way they continue to hold it is by taking it for granted. If,
+therefore, the strict eternity of future woe be declared in the
+New Testament, we regard it not as a part of the inspired
+utterance of Jesus, but as an error which crept in among others
+from the surrounding notions of a benighted pagan age.
+
+But, in the next place, we do not admit by any means that the
+literal eternity of future damnation is taught in the Scriptures.
+On the contrary, we deny such an assertion, for several reasons.
+First, we argue from the usage of language before the New
+Testament was written. The Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, often make
+most emphatic use of phrases declaring the eternal sufferings of
+the wicked in hell; but they must have meant by "eternal" only a
+very long time, because a fundamental portion of the great system
+of thought on which their religions rested was the idea of
+recurring epochs, sundered by immense periods statedly arriving,
+when all things were restored, the hells and heavens vanished
+away, and God was all in all. If the representations of the
+eternal punishment of the wicked, made before the New Testament
+was written, were not significant, with metaphysical severity, of
+an eternity of duration, but only, with popular looseness, of an
+extremely long period, the same may be true of the similar
+expressions found in that record.
+
+Secondly, we argue from the usage of language in and after the New
+Testament age. The critics have collected, as any one desirous may
+easily find, and as every theological scholar well knows, scores
+of instances from the writings of authors contemporary with Christ
+and his apostles, and succeeding them, where the Greek word for
+"eternal" is used popularly, not strictly, in a rhetorical, not in
+a philosophical, sense, not denoting a duration literally endless,
+but one very prolonged. In all Greek literature the word is
+undoubtedly used in a careless and qualified sense at least a
+hundred times where it is used once with its close etymological
+force. And the same is true of the corresponding Hebrew term. The
+writer of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs," at the close
+of every chapter, describing the respective patriarch's death,
+says, "he slept the eternal sleep," though by "eternal" he can
+only mean a duration reaching to the time of the resurrection, as
+plainly appears from the context. Iamblichus speaks of "an eternal
+eternity of eternities."14 Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, and
+others, the fact of whose belief in final universal salvation no
+one pretends to deny, do not hesitate with earnestness and
+frequency to affirm the "eternal" punishment of the wicked in
+hell. Now, if the contemporaries of the evangelists, and their
+successors, often used the word "eternal" popularly, in a
+figurative, limited sense, then it may be so employed when it
+occurs in the New Testament in connection with the future pains of
+the bad.
+
+Thirdly, we argue from the phraseology and other peculiarities of
+the representation of the future woe of the condemned, given in
+the New Testament itself, that its authors
+
+14 De Mysteriis Egyptiorum, cap. viii. sect. 10.
+
+
+did not consciously intend to proclaim the rigid endlessness of
+that woe.15 "These shall go away into everlasting punishment."
+Since the word "everlasting" was often used simply to denote a
+long period, what right has any one to declare that here it must
+mean an absolutely unending duration? How does any one know that
+the mind of Jesus dialectically grasped the metaphysical notion of
+eternity and deliberately intended to express it? Certainly the
+intrinsic probabilities are all the other way. Such a conclusion
+is hardly compatible with the highly tropical style of speech
+employed throughout the discourse. Besides, had he wished to
+convey the overwhelming idea that the doom of the guilty would be
+strictly irremediable, their anguish literally infinite, would he
+not have taken pains to say so in definite, guarded, explained,
+unmistakable terms? He might easily, by a precise prosaic
+utterance, by explanatory circumlocutions, have placed that
+thought beyond possibility of mistake.
+
+Fourthly, we have an intense conviction not only that the leaving
+of such a doctrine by the Savior in impenetrable obscurity and
+uncertainty is irreconcilable with the supposition of his
+deliberately holding it in his belief, but also that a belief in
+the doctrine itself is utterly irreconcilable with the very
+essentials of his teachings and spirit, his inmost convictions and
+life. He taught the infinite and unchangeable goodness of God:
+confront the doctrine of endless misery with the parable of the
+prodigal son. He taught the doctrine of unconquerable forgiveness,
+without apparent qualification: bring together the doctrine of
+never relenting punishment and his petition on the cross, "Father,
+forgive them." He taught that at the great judgment heaven or hell
+would be allotted to men according to their lives; and the notion
+of endless torment does not rest on the demerit of sinful deeds,
+which is the standard of judgment that he holds up, but on
+conceptions concerning a totally depraved nature, a God inflamed
+with wrath, a vicarious atonement rejected, or some other ethnic
+tradition or ritual consideration equally foreign to his mind and
+hostile to his heart.
+
+Fifthly, if we reason on the popular belief that the letter of
+Scripture teaches only unerring truth, we have the strongest
+argument of all against the eternal hopelessness of future
+punishment. The doctrine of Christ's descent to hell underlies the
+New Testament. We are told that after his death "he went and
+preached to the spirits in prison." And again we read that "the
+gospel was preached also to them that are dead." This New
+Testament idea was unquestionably a vital and important feature in
+the apostolic and in the early Christian belief. It necessarily
+implies that there is probation, and that there may be salvation,
+after death. It is fatal to the horrid dogma which commands all
+who enter hell to abandon every gleam of hope, utterly and
+forever. The symbolic force of the doctrine of Christ's descent
+and preaching in hell is this, as Guder says in his "Appearance of
+Christ among the Dead,"  that the deepest and most horrible depth
+of damnation is not too deep and horrible for the pitying love
+which wishes to save the lost: even into the veriest depth of hell
+reaches down the love of God, and his beatific call sounds to the
+most distant distances. There is no outermost darkness to which
+his heavenly and all conquering light cannot shine. The book which
+teaches that Christ went even into hell itself, to seek and to
+save that which was lost,
+
+15 Corrodi, Ueber die Ewigkeit der Hollenetrafen. In den Beitragen
+zur Beforderung des Vernunft. Denk. n. s. w. heft vii. ss. 41-72.
+
+
+does not teach that from the instant of death the fate of the
+wicked is irredeemably fixed.
+
+Upon the whole, then, we reach the clear conclusion that the
+Christian Scriptures do not really declare the hopeless eternity
+of future punishment.16 They speak popularly, not scientifically,
+speak in metaphors which cannot be analyzed and reduced to
+metaphysical precision. The subject is left with fearful warnings
+in an impressive obscurity. There we must either leave it, in awe
+and faith, undecided; or, if not content to do that, we must
+examine and decide it on other grounds than those of traditional
+authority, and with other instruments than those of textual
+interpretation.
+
+Let us next sift and weigh the arguments from reason by which the
+dogma of the eternity of future misery is respectively defended
+and assailed. The advocates of it have sought to support it by
+four positions, which are such entire assumptions that only a word
+will be requisite to expose each of them to logical rejection.
+First, it is said that sin is infinite and deserves an infinite
+penalty because it is an outrage against an infinite being.17 A
+more absurd perversion of logic than this, a more glaring
+violation of common sense, was never perpetrated. It directly
+reverses the facts and subverts the legitimate inference. Is the
+sin measured by the dignity of the lawgiver, or by the
+responsibility of the law breaker? Does justice heed the wrath of
+the offended, or the guilt of the offender? As well say that the
+eye of man is infinite because it looks out into infinite space,
+as affirm that his sin is infinite because committed against an
+infinite God. That man is finite, and all his acts finite, and
+consequently not in justice to be punished infinitely, is a plain
+statement of fact which compels assent. All else is empty
+quibbling, scholastic jugglery. The ridiculousness of the argument
+is amusingly apparent as presented thus in an old Miracle Play,
+wherein Justice is made to tell Mercy "That man, havinge offended
+God who is endlesse, His endlesse punchement therefore may nevyr
+seese."
+
+The second device brought forward to sustain the doctrine in
+question is more ingenious, but equally arbitrary. It is based on
+the foreknowledge of God. He foresaw that the wicked, if allowed
+to live on earth immortally in freedom, would go on forever in a
+course of constant sin. They were therefore constructively guilty
+of all the sin which they would have committed; but he saved the
+world the ravages of their actual crimes by hurling them into hell
+beneath the endless penalty of their latent infinite guilt. In
+reply to those who argue thus, it is obvious to ask, whence did
+they learn all this? There is no such scheme drawn up or hinted in
+Scripture; and surely it is not within the possible discoveries of
+reason. Plainly, it is not a known premise legitimating a result,
+not a sound argument proving a conclusion: it is merely a conceit,
+devised to explain and fortify a theory already embraced from
+other considerations. It is an imaginative hypothesis without
+confirmation.
+
+16 Bretschneider, in his Systematische Entwickelung aller in der
+Dogmatik vorkommenden Begriffe, gives the literature of this
+subject in a list of thirty six distinct works. Sect. 139, Ewig
+keit der Hollenstrafen.
+
+17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars iii. suppl. qu. 99, art. 1.
+
+
+Thirdly, it has been said that future punishment will be endless
+because sin will be so. The evil soul, growing ever more evil,
+getting its habits of vice and passions of iniquity more deeply
+infixed, and surrounded in the infernal realm with all the
+incentives to wickedness, will become confirmed in depravity
+beyond all power of cure, and, sinning forever, be necessarily
+damned and tortured forever. The same objection holds to this
+argument as to the former. Its premises are daring assumptions
+beyond the province of our knowledge. They are assumptions, too,
+contrary to analogy, probability, the highest laws of humanity,
+and the goodness of God. Without freedom of will there cannot be
+sin; and those who retain moral freedom may reform, cease to do
+evil and learn to do good. There are invitations and opportunities
+to change from evil to good here: why not hereafter? The will is
+free now: what shall suddenly paralyze or annihilate that freedom
+when the soul leaves the body? Why may not such amazing
+revelations be made, such regenerating motives be brought to bear,
+in the spiritual world, as will soften the hardest, convince the
+stubbornest, and, sooner or later, transform and redeem the worst?
+It is true the law of sinful habit is dark and fearful; but it is
+frequently neutralized. The argument as the support of a positive
+dogma is void because itself only hypothetical.
+
+Some have tried to prove eternal condemnation by an assumed
+necessity of moral gravitation. There is a great deal of loose and
+hasty talk afloat about the law of affinities distributing souls
+hereafter in fitted companies. Similar characters will
+spontaneously come together. The same qualities and grades of
+sympathy will coalesce, the unlike will fly apart. And so all
+future existence will be arranged in circles of dead equality on
+stagnant levels of everlasting hopelessness of change. The law of
+spiritual attraction is no such force as that, produces no such
+results. It is broken up by contrasts, changes, multiplicity of
+other interacting forces. We are not only drawn by affinity to
+those like ourselves, but often still more powerfully, with
+rebuking and redeeming effect, to those above us that we may
+become like them, to those beneath us that we may pity and help
+them. The law of affinity is not in moral beings a simple force
+necessitating an endless uniformity of state, but a complex of
+forces, sometimes mingling the unlike by stimulants of wedded
+similarity and contrast to bless and advance all, now punishing,
+now rewarding, but ever finally intended to redeem. Reasoning by
+sound analogy, the heavens and hells of the future state are not
+monotonous circles each filled with mutually reflecting
+personalities, but one fenceless spiritual world of distinctive,
+ever varying degrees, sympathetic and contrasted life, circulating
+freshness, variety of attractions and repulsions, divine
+advancement.
+
+Finally, it is maintained by many that endless misery is the fate
+of the reprobate because such is the sovereign pleasure of God.
+This is no argument, but a desperate assertion. It virtually
+confesses that the doctrine cannot be defended by reason, but is
+to be thrown into the province of wilful faith. A host of gloomy
+theologians have taken this ground as the forlorn hope of their
+belief. The damned are eternally lost because that is the
+arbitrary decree of God. Those who thus abandon reason for
+dogmatic authority and trample on logic with mere reiterated
+assertion can only be met with the flat denial, such is not the
+arbitrary pleasure of God. Then, as far as argument is concerned,
+the controversy ends where it began.
+
+These four hypotheses include all the attempted justifications of
+the doctrine of eternal misery that we have ever seen offered from
+the stand point of independent thought. We submit that, considered
+as proofs, they are utterly sophistical.
+
+There are three great arguments in refutation of the endlessness
+of future punishment, as that doctrine is commonly held. The first
+argument is ethical, drawn from the laws of right; the second is
+theological, drawn from the attributes of God; the third is
+experimental, drawn from the principles of human nature. We shall
+subdivide these and consider them successively.
+
+In the first place, we maintain that the popular doctrine of
+eternal punishment is unjust, because it overlooks the differences
+in the sins of men, launching on all whom it embraces one infinite
+penalty of undiscriminating damnation. The consistent advocates of
+the doctrine, the boldest creeds, unflinchingly avow this, and
+defend it by the plea that every sin, however trivial, is equally
+an offence against the law of the infinite God with the most
+terrible crime, and equally merits an infinite punishment. Thus,
+by a metaphysical quibble, the very basis of morals is overturned,
+and the child guilty of an equivocation through fear is put on a
+level with the pirate guilty of robbery and murder through cold
+blooded avarice and hate. In a hell where all are plunged in
+physical fire for eternity there are no degrees of retribution,
+though the degrees of evil and demerit are as numerous and various
+as the individuals. The Scriptures say, "Every man shall receive
+according to the deeds done in the body:" some "shall be beaten
+with many stripes," others "with few stripes."
+
+The first principle of justice exact discrimination of judgment
+according to deeds and character is monstrously violated and all
+differences blotted out by the common dogma of hell. A better
+thought is shown in the old Persian legend which tells that God
+once permitted Zoroaster to accompany him on a visit to hell. The
+prophet saw many in grievous torments. Among the rest, he saw one
+who was deprived of his right foot. Asking the meaning of this,
+God replied, "Yonder sufferer was a king who in his whole life did
+but one kind action. Passing once near a dromedary which, tied up
+in a state of starvation, was vainly striving to reach some
+provender placed just beyond its utmost effort, the king with his
+right foot compassionately kicked the fodder within the poor
+beast's reach. That foot I placed in heaven: the rest of him is
+here." 18
+
+Again: there is the grossest injustice in the first assumption or
+fundamental ground on which the theory we are opposing rests. That
+theory does not teach that men are actually damned eternally on
+account of their own personal sins, but on account of original
+sin: the eternal tortures of hell are the transmitted penalty
+hurled on all the descendants of Adam, save those who in some way
+avoid it, in consequence of his primal transgression. Language
+cannot characterize with too much severity, as it seems to us, the
+injustice, the immorality, involved in this scheme. The belief in
+a sin, called "original," entailed by one act of one person upon a
+whole immortal race of countless millions, dooming vast majorities
+of them helplessly to a hopeless torture prison, can rest only on
+a sleep of reason and a delirium of
+
+18 Wilson's ed. of Mill's Hist. of British India, vol. i. p. 429,
+note.
+
+
+conscience. Such a "sin" is no sin at all; and any penalty
+inflicted on it would not be the necessary severity of a holy God,
+but a species of gratuitous vengeance. For sin, by the very
+essence of ethics, is the free, intelligent, wilful violation of a
+law known to be right; and every punishment, in order to be just,
+must be the suffering deserved by the intentional fault, the
+personal evil, of the culprit himself. The doctrine before us
+reverses all this, and sends untold myriads to hell forever for no
+other sin than that of simply having been born children of
+humanity. Born totally depraved, hateful to God, helpless through
+an irresistible proclivity to sin and an ineradicable aversion to
+evangelical truth, and asked to save themselves, asked by a
+mockery like that of fettering men hand and foot, clothing them in
+leaden straitjackets, and then flinging them overboard, telling
+them not to drown! What justice, what justice, is here in this?
+
+Thirdly, the profound injustice of this doctrine is seen in its
+making the alternative of so unutterably awful a doom hinge upon
+such trivial particulars and upon merely fortuitous circumstances.
+One is born of pious, orthodox parents, another of heretics or
+infidels: with no difference of merit due to them, one goes to
+heaven, the other goes to hell. One happens to form a friendship
+with an evangelical believer, another is influenced by a
+rationalist companion: the same fearful diversity of fate ensues.
+One is converted by a single sermon: if he had been ill that day,
+or had been detained from church by any other cause, his fated bed
+would have been made in hell, heaven closed against him forever.
+One says, "I believe in the Trinity of God, in the Deity of
+Christ;" and, dying, he goes to heaven. Another says, "I believe
+in the Unity of God and in the humanity of Christ:" he, dying,
+goes to hell. Of two children snatched away by disease when twenty
+four hours old, one has been baptized, the other not: the angels
+of heaven welcome that, the demons of hell clutch this. The
+doctrine of infant damnation, intolerably painful as it is, has
+been proclaimed thousands of times by authoritative teachers and
+by large parties in the Church, and is a logical sequence from the
+popular theology. It is not a great many years since people heard,
+it is said, the celebrated statement that "hell is paved with the
+skulls of infants not a span long!" Think of the everlasting bliss
+or misery of a helpless infant depending on the petty accident of
+whether it was baptized or not! There are hypothetical cases like
+the following: If one man had died a year earlier, when he was a
+saint, he would not have fallen from grace, and renounced his
+faith, and rolled in crimes, and sunk to hell. If another had
+lived a year later, he would have been smitten with conviction,
+and would have repented, and made his peace, and gone to heaven.
+To the everlasting loss of each, an eternity of bliss against an
+eternity of woe hung fatally poised on the time appointed for him
+to die. Oh how the bigoted pride, the exclusive dogmatism of self
+styled saints, self flatterers equally satisfied of their own
+election and of the rejection of almost everybody else, ought to
+sink and fade when they reflect on the slight chances, mere
+chances of time and place, by which the infinite contingency has
+been, or is to be, decided! They should heed the impregnable good
+sense and logic conveyed in the humane hearted poet's satirical
+humor when he advises such persons to
+
+"Consider well, before, like Hurlothrumbo,
+They aim their clubs at any creed on earth,
+That by the simple accident of birth
+They might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo."
+
+It is evidently but the rankest mockery of justice to suspend an
+infinite woe upon an accident out of the power of the party
+concerned.
+
+Still further: there is a tremendous injustice even in that form
+of the doctrine of endless punishment, the most favorable of all,
+which says that no one is absolutely foreordained to hell, but
+that all are free, and that life is a fixed season of probation
+wherein the means of salvation are offered to all, and if they
+neglect or spurn them the fault is their own, and eternal pain
+their merited portion. The perfectly apparent inconsistency of
+this theory with known facts is fatal to it, since out of every
+generation there are millions on millions of infants, idiots,
+maniacs, heathen, within whose hearing or power the means of
+salvation by a personal appropriation of the atoning merit of
+Christ's blood were never brought; so that life to them is no
+scene of Christian probation. But, waiving that, the probation is
+not a fair one to anybody. If the indescribable horror of an
+eternal damnation be the consequence that follows a certain course
+while we are on trial in this life, then a knowledge of that fact
+in all its bearings ought to be given us, clear, explicit, beyond
+any possibility of mistake or doubt. Otherwise the probation is
+not fair. To place men in the world, as millions are constantly
+placed, beset by allurements of every sort within and without, led
+astray by false teachings and evil examples, exposed in ignorance,
+bewildered with uncertainties of conflicting doubts and surmises,
+either never hearing of the way of salvation at all, or hearing of
+it only in terms that seem absurd in themselves and unaccompanied
+by sufficient, if by any, proof, and then, if under these fearful
+hazards they waver from strict purity of heart, rectitude of
+conduct, or orthodoxy of belief, to condemn them to a world of
+everlasting agony, would be the very climax of cruelty, with no
+touch of mercy or color of right.
+
+Beneath such a rule the universe should be shrouded in the
+blackness of despair, and God be thought of with a convulsive
+shudder. Such a "probation" would be only like that on which the
+Inquisitors put their victims who were studiously kept ignorant in
+their dungeons, waiting for the rack and the flame to be made
+ready. Few persons will deny that, as the facts now are, a good,
+intelligent, candid man may doubt the reality of an endless
+punishment awaiting men in hell. But if the doctrine be true, and
+he is on probation under it, is it fair that he should be left
+honestly in ignorance or doubt about it? No: if it be true, it
+ought to be burned into his brain and crushed into his soul with
+such terrific vividness and abiding constancy of impression as
+would deter him ever from the wrong path, keep him in the right. A
+distinguished writer has represented a condemned delinquent,
+suffering on, and still interminably on, in hell, thus complaining
+of the unfairness of his probation: "Oh, had it been possible for
+me to conceive even the most diminutive part of the weight and
+horror of this doom, I should have shrunk from every temptation to
+sin, with the most violent recoil."19
+
+19 John Foster, Letter on the Eternity of Future Punishments.
+
+If an endless hell is to be the lot of the sinner, he ought to
+have an infallible certainty of it, with all possible helps and
+incentives to avoid it. Such is not the case; and therefore, since
+God is just and generous, the doctrine is not true.
+
+Finally, the injustice of the dogma of everlasting punishment is
+most emphatically shown by the fact that there is no sort of
+correspondence or possible proportion between the offence and the
+penalty, between the moment of sinning life and the eternity of
+suffering death. If a child were told to hold its breath thirty
+seconds, and, failing to do it, should be confined in a dark
+solitary dungeon for seventy years amidst loathsome horrors and
+speechless afflictions, and be frightfully scourged six times a
+day for that entire period, there would be just proportion nay, an
+inexpressibly merciful proportion between the offence and the
+punishment, in comparison with that which, being an absolutely
+infinite disproportion, does not really admit of any comparison,
+the sentence to an eternal abode in hell as a penalty for the
+worst kind and the greatest amount of crime a man could possibly
+crowd into a life of a thousand years. Think, then, of passing
+such a sentence on one who has struggled hard against temptation,
+and yielded but rarely, and suffered much, and striven to do as
+well as he could, and borne up courageously, with generous
+resolves and affections, and died commending his soul to God in
+hope.
+
+"Fearfully fleet is this life," says one, "and yet in it eternal
+life is lost or won: profoundly wretched is this life, yet in it
+eternal bliss is lost or won." Weigh the words adequately, and say
+how improbable is the thought, and how terribly unjust. Perhaps
+there have already lived upon this earth, and died, and passed
+into the invisible world, two hundred thousand millions of men,
+the everlasting doom of every one of whom, it is imagined, was
+fixed unalterably during the momentary period of his mortal
+transit from cradle to grave. In respect of eternity, six thousand
+years and this duration must be reduced to threescore years and
+ten, since that is all that each generation enjoyed is the same as
+one hour. Suppose, now, that all these two hundred thousand
+millions of men were called into being at once; that they were
+placed on probation for one hour; that the result of their choice
+and action in that hour was to decide their irrevocable fate,
+actually forever, to ecstatic bliss or to ecstatic woe; that
+during that hour they were left, as far as clear and stable
+conviction goes, in utter ignorance and uncertainty as to the
+great realities of their condition, courted by opposing theories
+and modes of action; and that, when the clock of time knelled the
+close of that awful, that most evanescent hour, the roaring gulf
+of torture yawned, and its jaws of flame and blackness closed over
+ninety nine hundredths of them for eternity! That is a fair
+picture of the popular doctrine of temporal probation and eternal
+punishment, when examined in the light of the facts of human life.
+Of course, no man at this day, who is in his senses and thinks
+honestly upon the subject, can credit such a doctrine, unless
+indeed he believes that a lawless fiend sits on the throne of the
+universe and guides the helm of destiny. And lives there a man of
+unperverted soul who would not decidedly prefer to have no God
+rather than to have such a one? Ay, "Rather than so, come FATE
+into the list And champion us to the utterance."
+
+Let us be atheists, and bow to mortal Chance, believe there is no
+pilot at all at the rudder of Creation's vessel, no channel before
+the prow, but the roaring breakers of despair to right and left,
+and the granite bluff of annihilation full in front!
+
+In the next place, then, we argue against the doctrine of eternal
+damnation that it is incompatible with any worthy idea of the
+character of God. God is love; and love cannot consent to the
+useless torture of millions of helpless souls for eternity. The
+gross contradiction of the common doctrine of hell to the spirit
+of love is so obvious that its advocates, unable to deny or
+conceal it, have often positively proclaimed it, avowing that, in
+respect to the wicked, God is changed into a consuming fire full
+of hatred and vengeance. But that is unmitigated blasphemy. God is
+unchangeable, his very nature being disinterested, immutable
+goodness. The sufferings of the wicked are of their own
+preparation. If a pestilential exhalation is drawn from some
+decaying substance, it is not the fault of any alteration in the
+sunlight. But a Christian writer assures us that when "the damned
+are packed like brick in a kiln, so bound that they cannot move a
+limb nor even an eyelid, God shall blow the fires of hell through
+them for ever and ever."
+
+And another writer says, "All in God is turned into fury: in hell
+he draws out into the field all his forces, all his attributes,
+whereof wrath is the leader and general."20 Such representations
+may be left without a comment. Every enlightened mind will
+instantly reject with horror the doctrine which necessitates a
+conception of God like that here pictured forth. God is a being of
+infinite forgiveness and magnanimity. To the wandering sinner,
+even while a great way off, his arms are open, and his inviting
+voice, penetrating the farthest abysses, says, "Return." His sun
+shines and his rain falls on the fields of the unjust and
+unthankful. What is it, the instant mortals pass the line of
+death, that shall transform this Divinity of yearning pity and
+beneficence into a devil of relentless hate and cruelty? It cannot
+be. We shall find him dealing towards us in eternity as he does
+here. An eminent theologian says, "If mortal men kill the body
+temporally in their anger, it is like the immortal God to damn the
+soul eternally in his." "God holds sinners in his hands over the
+mouth of hell as so many spiders; and he is dreadfully provoked,
+and he not only hates them, but holds them in utmost contempt, and
+he will trample them beneath his feet with inexpressible
+fierceness, he will crush their blood out, and will make it fly so
+that it will sprinkle his garments and stain all his raiment."21
+Oh, ravings and blasphemies of theological bigotry, blinded with
+old creeds, inflamed with sectarian hate, soaked in the gall of
+bitterness, encompassed by absurd delusions, you know not what you
+say!
+
+A daring writer of modern times observes that God can never say
+from the last tribunal, in any other than a limited and
+metaphorical sense, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting
+fire," because that would not be doing as he would be done by.
+Saving the appearance of irreverence, we maintain his assertion to
+be just, based on impregnable morality. A recent religious poet
+describes Jesus, on descending into hell after his crucifixion,
+
+20 For these and several other quotations we are indebted to the
+Rev. T. J. Sawyer's work, entitled "Endless Punishment: its Origin
+and Grounds Examined."
+
+21 Edwards's works, vol. vii. p. 499.
+
+
+meeting Judas, and when he saw his pangs and heard his stifled
+sobs, "Pitying, Messiah gazed, and had forgiven, But Justice her
+eternal bar opposed." 22
+
+The instinctive sentiment is worthy of Jesus, but the deliberate
+thought is worthy of Calvin. Why is it so calmly assumed that God
+cannot pardon, and that therefore sinners must be given over to
+endless pains? By what proofs is so tremendous a conclusion
+supported? Is it not a gratuitous fiction of theologians? The
+exemplification of God's character and conduct given in the
+spirit, teachings, and deeds of Christ is full of a free mercy, an
+eager charity that rushes forward to forgive and embrace the
+sinful and wretched wanderers. He is a very different being whom
+the evangelist represents saying of Jesus, "This is my beloved
+Son, in whom I am well pleased," from Him whom Professor Park
+describes "drawing his sword on Calvary and smiting down his Son!"
+
+Why may not pardon from unpurchased grace be vouchsafed as well
+after death as before? What moral conditions alter the case then?
+Ah! it is only the metaphysical theories of the theologians that
+have altered the case in their fancies and made it necessary for
+them to limit probation. The attributes of God are laws, his modes
+of action are the essentialities of his being, the same in all the
+worlds of boundless extension and all the ages of endless
+duration. How far some of the theologians have perverted the
+simplicity of the gospel, or rather how utterly they have strayed
+from it, may be seen when we remember that Christ said concerning
+little children, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven," and then
+compare with this declaration such a statement as this: "Reprobate
+infants are vipers of vengeance which Jehovah will hold over hell
+in the tongs of his wrath, till they writhe up and cast their
+venom in his face." We deliberately assert that no depraved,
+insane, pagan imagination ever conceived of a fiend malignant and
+horrible enough to be worthily compared with this Christian
+conception of God. Edwards repeatedly says, in his two sermons on
+the "Punishment of the Wicked" and "Sinners in the Hands of an
+Angry God," "You cannot stand an instant before an infuriated
+tiger even: what, then, will you do when God rushes against you in
+all his wrath?" Is this Christ's Father?
+
+The God we worship is "the Father of lights, with whom there is
+neither variableness nor shadow of turning, from whom cometh down
+every good and every perfect gift." It is the Being referred to by
+the Savior when he said, in exultant trust and love, "I am not
+alone; for the Father is with me." It is the infinite One to whom
+the Psalmist says, "Though I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art
+there." If God is in hell, there must be mercy and hope there,
+some gleams of alleviation and promise there, surely; even as the
+Lutheran creed says that "early on Easter morning, before his
+resurrection, Christ showed himself to the damned in hell." If God
+is in hell, certainly it must be to soothe, to save. "Oh, no,"
+says the popular theologian. Let us quote his words. "Why is God
+here? To keep the tortures of the damned freshly plied, and to see
+that no one ever escapes!" Can the climax of horror and
+
+22 Lord, Christ in Hades.
+
+
+blasphemy any further go? How much more reasonable, more moral and
+Christ like, to say, with one of the best authors of our time,
+
+"What hell may be I know not: this I know: I cannot lose the
+presence of the Lord: One arm humility takes hold upon His dear
+Humanity; the other love Clasps his Divinity: so, where I go He
+goes; and better fire wall'd Hell with him Than golden gated
+Paradise without."
+
+The irreconcilableness of the common doctrine of endless misery
+with any worthy idea of God is made clear by a process of
+reasoning whose premises are as undeniable as its logic is
+irrefragable and its conclusion consolatory. God is infinite
+justice and goodness. His purpose in the creation, therefore, must
+be the diffusion and triumph of holiness and blessedness. God is
+infinite wisdom and power. His design, therefore, must be
+fulfilled. Nothing can avail to thwart the ultimate realization of
+all his intentions. The rule of his omnipotent love pervades
+infinitude and eternity as a shining leash of law whereby he holds
+every child of his creation in ultimate connection with his
+throne, and will sooner or later bring even the worst soul to a
+returning curve from the career of its wildest orbit. In the realm
+and under the reign of a paternal and omnipotent God every being
+must be salvable. Remorse itself is a recoil which may fling the
+penitent into the lap of forgiving love. Any different thought
+appears narrow, cruel, heathen. The blackest fiend that glooms the
+midnight air of hell, bleached through the merciful purgation of
+sorrow and loyalty, may become a white angel and be drawn into
+heaven.
+
+Lavater writes of himself, and the same is true of many a good
+man, "I embraced in my heart all that is called man, past,
+present, and future times and nations, the dead, the damned, even
+Satan. I presented them all to God with the warmest wishes that he
+would have mercy upon all." This is the true spirit of a good man.
+And is man better than his Maker? We will answer that question,
+and leave this head of the discussion, by presenting an Oriental
+apologue.
+
+God once sat on his inconceivable throne, and far around him, rank
+after rank, angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim, resting
+on their silver wings and lifting their dazzling brows, rose and
+swelled, with the splendors of an illimitable sea of immortal
+beings, gleaming and fluctuating to the remotest borders of the
+universe. The anthem of their praise shook the pillars of the
+creation, and filled the vault of heaven with a pulsing flood of
+harmony. When, as they closed their hymn, stole up, faint heard,
+as from some most distant region of all space, in dim accents
+humbly rising, a responsive "Amen." God asked Gabriel, "Whence
+comes that Amen?" The hierarchic peer replied, "It rises from the
+damned in hell." God took, from where it hung above his seat, the
+key that unlocks the forty thousand doors of hell, and, giving it
+to Gabriel, bade him go release them. On wings of light sped the
+enraptured messenger, rescued the millions of the lost, and, just
+as they were, covered all over with the traces of their sin,
+filth, and woe, brought them straight up into the midst of heaven.
+Instantly they were transformed, clothed in robes of glory, and
+placed next to the throne; and henceforth, for evermore, the
+dearest strain to God's ear, of all the celestial music, was that
+borne by the choir his grace had ransomed from hell. And, because
+there is no envy or other selfishness in heaven, this promotion
+sent but new thrills of delight and gratitude through the heights
+and depths of angelic life.
+
+We come now to the last class of reasons for disbelieving the
+dogma of eternal damnation, namely, those furnished by the
+principles of human nature and the truths of human experience. The
+doctrine, as we think can be clearly shown, is literally
+incredible to the human mind and literally intolerable to the
+human heart. In the first place, it is, viewed in the abstract,
+absolutely incredible because it is inconceivable: no man can
+possibly grasp and appreciate the idea. The nearest approximation
+to it ever made perhaps is in De Quincey's gorgeous elaboration of
+the famous Hindu myth of an enormous rock finally worn away by the
+brushing of a gauze veil; and that is really no approximation at
+all, since an incommensurable chasm always separates the finite
+and the infinite. John Foster says, "It is infinitely beyond the
+highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the
+horror of the doom to eternal damnation." The Buddhists, who
+believe that the severest sentence passed on the worst sinner will
+be brought to an end and his redemption be attained, use the
+following illustration of the staggering periods that will first
+elapse. A small yoke is thrown into the ocean and borne about in
+every direction by the various winds. Once in a hundred thousand
+years a blind tortoise rises to the surface of the water. Will the
+time ever come when that tortoise shall so rise up that its neck
+shall enter the hole of the yoke? It may, but the time required
+cannot be told; and it is equally difficult for the unwise man,
+who has entered one of the great hells, to obtain deliverance.
+There is a remarkable specimen of the attempt to set forth the
+idea of endless misery, by Suso, a mystic preacher who flourished
+several centuries ago. It runs thus. "O eternity, what art thou?
+Oh, end without end! O father, and mother, and all whom we love!
+May God be merciful unto you for evermore! for we shall see you no
+more to love you; we must be separated forever! O separation,
+everlasting separation, how painful art thou! Oh, the wringing of
+hands! Oh, sighing, weeping, and sobbing, unceasing howling and
+lamenting, and yet never to be pardoned! Give us a millstone, says
+the damned, as large as the whole earth, and so wide in
+circumference as to touch the sky all around, and let a little
+bird come in a hundred thousand years, and pick off a small
+particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain
+of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come
+again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as
+much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire
+nothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus our
+pains also; yet even that cannot be."23 But, after all the
+struggles of reason and all the illustrations of laboring
+imagination, the meaning of the phrase "eternal suffering in hell"
+remains remote, dim, unrealized, an abstraction in words. If we
+could adequately apprehend it, if its full significance should
+burst upon us, as sometimes in fearful dreams the spaceless,
+timeless, phantasmal, reeling sense of
+
+23 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 210.
+
+
+the infinite seems to be threatening to break into the brain, an
+annihilating shudder would seize and destroy the soul.
+
+We say, therefore, that the doctrine of the eternity of future
+punishment is not believed as an intellectually conceived truth,
+because that is a metaphysical impossibility. But more: we affirm,
+in spite of the general belief in it publicly professed, that it
+is actually held by hardly any one as a practical vivid belief
+even within the limits wherein, as an intellectual conception, it
+is possible. When intellect and imagination do not fail, heart and
+conscience do, with sickened faintness and convulsive protest. In
+his direful poem on the Last Day, Young makes one of the condemned
+vainly beg of God to grant "This one, this slender, almost no,
+request: When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment is
+grown weary of its prey, When I have raved of anguish'd years in
+fire Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire."
+
+Such a thought, when confronted with any generous holy sentiment
+or with any worthy conception of the Divine character, is
+practically incredible. The men all around us in whose Church
+creed such a doctrine is written down do not truly believe it.
+"They delude themselves," as Martineau well says, "with the mere
+fancy and image of a belief. The death of a friend who departs
+from life in heresy affects them in the same way as the loss of
+another whose creed was unimpeachable: while the theoretic
+difference is infinite, the practical is virtually nothing." Who
+that had a child, parent, wife, brother, or other precious friend,
+condemned to be roasted to death by a slow fire, would not be
+frantic with agony? But there are in the world literally millions
+on millions, some of whose nearest and dearest ones have died
+under circumstances which, by their professed creeds, can leave no
+doubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguish
+unutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about as
+smilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame,
+in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerly
+and as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth of
+this exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma to
+whose technical terms they formally subscribe.
+
+A small proportion of its professors do undeniably believe the
+doctrine so far as it can be sanely believed; and accordingly the
+world is to them robed in a sable shroud, and life is an awful
+mockery, under a flashing surface of sports concealing a
+bottomless pit of horror. Every observing person has probably
+known some few in his life who, in a degree, really believed the
+common notions concerning hell, and out of whom, consequently, all
+geniality, all bounding impulses, all magnanimous generosities,
+were crushed, and their countenances wore the perpetual livery of
+mourning, despair, and misanthropy. We will quote the confessions
+of two persons who may stand as representatives of the class of
+sincere believers in the doctrine. The first is a celebrated
+French preacher of a century and a half ago, the other a very
+eminent American divine of the present day. Saurin says, in his
+great sermon on Hell, "I sink under the weight of this subject,
+and I find in the thought a mortal poison which diffuseth itself
+into every period of my life, rendering society tiresome,
+nourishment insipid, pleasure disgustful, and life itself a cruel
+bitter." Albert Barnes writes, "In the distress and anguish of my
+own spirit, I confess I see not one ray to disclose to me the
+reason why man should suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a
+particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a
+moment's ease to my tortured mind. It is all dark dark dark to my
+soul; and I cannot disguise it."
+
+Such a state of mind is the legitimate result of an endeavor
+sincerely to grasp and hold the popularly professed belief. So
+often as that endeavor reaches a certain degree of success, and
+the idea of an eternal hell is reduced from its vagueness to an
+embraced conception, the over fraught heart gives way, the brain,
+stretched on too high a tension, reels, madness sets in, and one
+more case is added to that list of maniacs from religious causes
+which, according to the yearly reports of insane asylums, forms so
+large a class. Imagine what a vast and sudden change would come
+over the spirit and conduct of society if nineteen twentieths of
+Christendom believed that at the end of a week a horrible influx
+of demons, from some insurgent region, would rush into our world
+and put a great majority of our race to death in excruciating
+tortures! But the doctrine of future punishment professed by
+nineteen twentieths of Christendom is, if true, an evil
+incomparably worse than that, though every element of its
+dreadfulness were multiplied by millions beyond the power of
+numeration; and yet all goes on as quietly, the most of these
+fancied believers live as chirpingly, as if heaven were sure for
+everybody! Of course in their hearts they do not believe the
+terrific formula which drops so glibly from their tongues.
+
+Again: it is a fatal objection to the doctrine in question that if
+it be true it must destroy the happiness of the saved and fill all
+heaven with sympathetic woe. Jesus teaches that "there is joy in
+heaven over every sinner that repenteth." By a moral necessity,
+then, there is sorrow in heaven over the wretched, lost soul. That
+sorrow, indeed, may be alleviated, if not wholly quenched, by the
+knowledge that every retributive pang is remedial, and that God's
+glorious design will one day be fully crowned in the redemption of
+the last prodigal. But what shall solace or end it if they know
+that hell's borders are to be enlarged and to rage with avenging
+misery forever? The good cannot be happy in heaven if they are to
+see the ascending smoke and hear the resounding shrieks of a hell
+full of their brethren, the children of a common humanity, among
+whom are many of their own nearest relatives and dearest friends.
+
+True, a long list of Christian writers may be cited as maintaining
+that this is to be a principal element in the felicity of the
+redeemed, gloating over the tortures of the damned, singing the
+song of praise with redoubled emphasis as they see their parents,
+their children, their former bosom companions, writhing and
+howling in the fell extremities of torture. Thomas Aquinas says,
+"That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God
+more richly, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is
+granted to them."24 Especially did the Puritans seem to revel in
+this idea, that "the joys of the blessed were to be deepened and
+sharpened by constant contrast with the sufferings of the damned."
+One of them thus expresses the delectable thought: "The sight of
+hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever, as a
+sense of the opposite misery always increases the relish of any
+pleasure."
+
+24 Summa, pars iii., Suppl. Qu. 93, art. i.
+
+
+But perhaps Hopkins caps the climax of the diabolical pyramid of
+these representations, saying of the wicked, "The smoke of their
+torment shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed for ever and
+ever, and serve, as a most clear glass always before their eyes,
+to give them a bright and most affecting view. This display of the
+Divine character will be most entertaining to all who love God,
+will give them the highest and most ineffable pleasure. Should the
+fire of this eternal punishment cease, it would in a great measure
+obscure the light of heaven and put an end to a great part of the
+happiness and glory of the blessed."25 That is to say, in plain
+terms, the saints, on entering their final state of bliss in
+heaven, are converted into a set of unmitigated fiends, out
+sataning Satan, finding their chief delight in forever comparing
+their own enjoyments with the pangs of the damned, extracting
+morsels of surpassing relish from every convulsion or shriek of
+anguish they see or hear. It is all an exquisite piece of
+gratuitous horror arbitrarily devised to meet a logical exigency
+of the theory its contrivers held. When charged that the knowledge
+of the infinite woe of their friends in hell must greatly affect
+the saints, the stern old theologians, unwilling to recede an inch
+from their dogmas, had the amazing hardihood to declare that, so
+far from it, on the contrary their wills would so blend with God's
+that the contemplation of this suffering would be a source of
+ecstasy to them. It is doubly a blank assumption of the most
+daring character, first assuming, by an unparalleled blasphemy,
+that God himself will take delight in the pangs of his creatures,
+and secondly assuming, by a violation of the laws of human nature
+and of every principle of morals, that the elect will do so too.
+In this world a man actuated by such a spirit would be styled a
+devil. On entering heaven, what magic shall work such a demoniacal
+change in him? There is not a word, direct or indirect, in the
+Scriptures to warrant the dreadful notion; nor is there any
+reasonable explanation or moral justification of it given by any
+of its advocates, or indeed conceivable. The monstrous hypothesis
+cannot be true. Under the omnipotent, benignant government of a
+paternal God, each change of character in his chosen children, as
+they advance, must be for the better, not for the worse.
+
+We once heard a father say, running his fingers the while among
+the golden curls of his child's hair, "If I were in heaven, and
+saw my little daughter in hell, should not I be rushing down there
+after her?" There spoke the voice of human nature; and that love
+cannot be turned to hatred in heaven, but must grow purer and
+intenser there. The doctrine which makes the saints pleased with
+contemplating the woes of the damned, and even draw much of their
+happiness from the contrast, is the deification of the absolute
+selfishness of a demon. Human nature, even when left to its
+uncultured instincts, is bound to far other and nobler things.
+Radbod, one of the old Scandinavian kings, after long resistance,
+finally consented to be baptized. After he had put one foot into
+the water, he asked the priest if he should meet his forefathers
+in heaven. Learning that they, being unbaptized pagans, were
+victims of endless misery, he drew his foot back, and refused the
+rite, choosing to be with his brave ancestors in hell rather than
+to be in heaven with the Christian priests. And, speaking from the
+stand point of the highest refinement of feeling and virtue, who
+that has a heart in his
+
+25 Park, Memoir of Hopkins, pp. 201, 202.
+
+
+bosom would not say, "Heaven can be no heaven to me, if I am to
+look down on the quenchless agonies of all I have loved here!" Is
+it not strictly true that the thought that even one should have
+endless woe "Would cast a shadow on the throne of God And darken
+heaven"?
+
+If a monarch, possessing unlimited power over all the earth, had
+condemned one man to be stretched on a rack and be freshly plied
+with incessant tortures for a period of fifty years, and if
+everybody on earth could hear his terrible shrieks by day and
+night, though they were themselves all, with this sole exception,
+blessed with perfect happiness, would not the whole human race,
+from Spitzbergen to Japan, from Rio Janeiro to Liberia, rise in a
+body and go to implore the king's clemency for the solitary
+victim? So, if hell had but one tenant doomed to eternal anguish,
+a petition reaching from Sirius to Alcyone, signed by the universe
+of moral beings, borne by a convoy of angels representing every
+star in space, would be laid and unrolled at the foot of God's
+throne, and He would read thereon this prayer: "FORGIVE HIM, AND
+RELEASE HIM, WE BESEECH THEE, O GOD." And can it be that every
+soul in the universe is better than the Maker and Father of the
+universe?
+
+The popular doctrine of eternal torment threatening nearly all our
+race is refuted likewise by the impossibility of any general
+observance of the obligations morally and logically consequent
+from it. In the first place, as the world is constituted, and as
+life goes on, the great majority of men are upon the whole happy,
+evidently were meant to be happy. But every believer of the
+doctrine in debate is bound to be unutterably wretched. If he has
+any gleam of generous sentiment or touch of philanthropy in his
+bosom, if he is not a frozen petrifaction of selfishness or an
+incarnate devil, how can he look on his family, friends,
+neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow beings, in the light of his
+faith seeing them quivering over the dizzy verge of a blind
+probation and momentarily dropping into the lake of fire and
+brimstone that burns forever, how can he do this without being
+ceaselessly stung with wretchedness and crushed with horror by the
+perception? For a man who appreciatingly believes that hell is
+directly under our meadows, streets, and homes, and that nine
+tenths of the dead are in it, and that nine tenths of the living
+soon will be, for such a man to be happy and jocose is as horrible
+as it would be for a man, occupying the second story of a house,
+to light it up brilliantly with gas, and make merry with his
+friends, eating tidbits, sipping wine, and tripping it on the
+light fantastic toe to the strains of gay music, while,
+immediately under him, men, women, and children, including his own
+parents and his own children, were stretched on racks, torn with
+pincers, lacerated with surgical instruments, cauterized, lashed
+with whips of fire, their half suppressed shrieks and groans
+audibly rising through the floor!
+
+Secondly, if the doctrine be true, then all unnecessary worldly
+enterprises, labors, and studies should at once cease. One moment
+on earth, and then, accordingly as we spend that moment, an
+eternity in heaven or in hell: in heaven, if we succeed in
+placating God by a sound belief and ritual proprieties; in hell,
+if we are led astray by philosophy, nature, and the attractions of
+life! On these suppositions, what time have we for any thing but
+reciting our creed, meditating on the atonement, and seeking to
+secure an interest for ourselves with God by flouting at our
+carnal reason, praying in church, and groaning, "Lord, Lord, have
+mercy on us miserable sinners"? What folly, what mockery, to be
+searching into the motions of the stars, and the occult forces of
+matter, and the other beautiful mysteries of science! There will
+be no astronomy in hell, save vain speculations as to the distance
+between the nadir of the damned and the zenith of the saved; no
+chemistry in hell, save the experiments of infinite wrath in
+distilling new torture poisons in the alembics of memory and
+depositing fresh despair sediments in the crucibles of hope. If
+Calvin's doctrine be true, let no book be printed, save the
+"Westminster Catechism;" no calculation be ciphered, save how to
+"solve the problem of damnation;" no picture be painted, save
+"pictures of hell;" no school be supported, save "schools of
+theology;" no business be pursued, save "the business of
+salvation." What have men who are in imminent peril, who are in
+truth almost infallibly sure, of being eternally damned the next
+instant, what have they to do with science, literature, art,
+social ambition, or commerce? Away with them all! Lures of the
+devil to snare souls are they! The world reflecting from every
+corner the lurid glare of hell, who can do any thing else but
+shudder and pray? "Who could spare any attention for the
+vicissitudes of cotton and the price of shares, for the merits of
+the last opera and the bets upon the next election, if the actors
+in these things were really swinging in his eye over such a verge
+as he affects to see?"
+
+Thirdly, those who believe the popular theory on this subject are
+bound to live in cheap huts, on bread and water, that they may
+devote to the sending of missionaries among the heathen every cent
+of money they can get beyond that required for the bare
+necessities of life. If our neighbor were perishing of hunger at
+our door, it would be our duty to share with him even to the last
+crust we had. How much more, then, seeing millions of our poor
+helpless brethren sinking ignorantly into the eternal fires of
+hell, are we bound to spare no possible effort until the
+conditions of salvation are brought within the reach of every one!
+An American missionary to China said, in a public address after
+his return, "Fifty thousand a day go down to the fire that is not
+quenched. Six hundred millions more are going the same road.
+Should you not think at least once a day of the fifty thousand who
+that day sink to the doom of the lost?" The American Board of
+Commissioners of Foreign Missions say, "To send the gospel to the
+heathen is a work of great exigency. Within the last thirty years
+a whole generation of five hundred millions have gone down to
+eternal death." Again: the same Board say, in their tract entitled
+"The Grand Motive to Missionary Effort," "The heathen are involved
+in the ruins of the apostasy, and are expressly doomed to
+perdition. Six hundred millions of deathless souls on the brink of
+hell! What a spectacle!" How a man who thinks the heathen are thus
+sinking to hell by wholesale through ignorance of the gospel can
+live in a costly house, crowded with luxuries and splendors,
+spending every week more money on his miserable body than he gives
+in his whole life to save the priceless souls for which he says
+Christ died, is a problem admitting but two solutions. Either his
+professed faith is an unreality to him, or else he is as selfish
+as a demon and as hard hearted as the nether millstone. If he
+really believed the doctrine, and had a human heart, he must feel
+it to be his duty to deny himself every indulgence and give his
+whole fortune and earnings to the missionary fund. And when he had
+given all else, he ought to give himself, and go to pagan lands,
+proclaiming the means of grace until his last breath. If he does
+not that, he is inexcusable.
+
+Should he attempt to clear himself of this obligation by adopting
+the theory of predestination, which asserts that all men were
+unconditionally elected from eternity, some to heaven, others to
+hell, so that no effort can change their fate, logical consistency
+reduces him to an alternative more intolerable in the eyes of
+conscience and common sense than the other was. For by this theory
+the gates of freedom and duty are hoisted, and the dark flood of
+antinomian consequences rushes in. All things are fated. Let men
+yield to every impulse and wish. The result is fixed. We have
+nothing to do. Good or evil, virtue or crime, alter nothing.
+
+Fourthly, if the common doctrine of eternal damnation be true,
+then surely no more children should be brought into the world: it
+is a duty to let the race die out and cease. He who begets a
+child, forcing him to run the fearful risk of human existence,
+with every probability of being doomed to hell at the close of
+earth, commits a crime before whose endless consequences of horror
+the guilt of fifty thousand deliberate murders would be as
+nothing. For, be it remembered, an eternity in hell is an infinite
+evil; and therefore the crime of thrusting such a fate on a single
+child, with the unasked gift of being, is a crime admitting of no
+just comparison. Rather than populate an everlasting hell with
+human vipers and worms, a hell whose fires, alive and wriggling
+with ghastly shapes of iniquity and anguish, shall swell with a
+vast accession of fresh recruits from every generation, rather
+than this, let the sacred lights on the marriage altar go out, no
+more bounding forms of childhood be seen in cottage or hall, the
+race grow old, thin out, and utterly perish, all happy villages be
+overgrown, all regal cities crumble down, and this world roll
+among the silent stars henceforth a globe of blasted deserts and
+rank wildernesses, resonant only with the shrieks of the wind, the
+yells of wild beasts, and the thunder's crash.
+
+Fifthly, there is one more conclusion of moral duty deducible from
+the prevalent theory of infinite torment. It is this. God ought
+not to have permitted Adam to have any children. Let us not seem
+presumptuous and irreverent in speaking thus. We are merely
+reasoning on the popular theory of the theologians, not on any
+supposition of our own or on any truth; and by showing the
+absurdity and blasphemy of the moral consequences and duties
+flowing from that theory, the absurdity, blasphemy, and
+incredibility of the theory itself appear. We are not responsible
+for the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who charge
+God with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin of
+Adam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty of
+suffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocent
+because not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause the
+race to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woe
+that would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line of
+generations? Or, to go still further back, why did he not,
+foreseeing Adam's fall, refrain from creating even him? There was
+no necessity laid on God of creating Adam. No positive evil would
+have been done by omitting to create him. An infinite evil,
+multiplied by the total number of the lost, was done by creating
+him. Why, then, was he not left in peaceful nonentity? On the
+Augustinian theory we see no way of escaping this awful dilemma.
+Who can answer the question which rises to heaven from the abyss
+of the damned?  "Father of mercies, why from silent earth Didst
+thou awake and curse me into birth, Push into being a reverse of
+thee, And animate a clod with misery?"
+
+Satan is a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernal
+cellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot by
+which he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the world
+parliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Will
+the King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to carry
+out his design?
+
+The doctrine of eternal damnation, as it has prevailed in the
+Christian Church, appears to the natural man so unreasonable,
+immoral, and harrowingly frightful, when earnestly contemplated,
+that there have always been some who have shrunk from its
+representations and sought to escape its conclusions. Many of its
+strongest advocates in every age have avowed it to be a fearful
+mystery, resting on the inscrutable sovereignty of God, and beyond
+the power of man's faculties to explain and justify. The dogma has
+been eluded in two ways. Some have believed in the annihilation of
+the wicked after they should have undergone just punishment
+proportioned to their sins. This supposition has had a
+considerable number of advocates. It was maintained, among others,
+by Arnobius, at the close of the third century, by the Socini, by
+Dr. Hammond, and by some of the New England divines.26 All that
+need be said in opposition to it is that it is an arbitrary device
+to avoid the intolerable horror of the doctrine of endless misery,
+unsupported by proof, extremely unsatisfactory in many of its
+bearings, and really not needed to achieve the consummation
+desired.
+
+Others have more wisely maintained that all will finally be saved:
+however severely and long they may justly suffer, they will at
+last all be mercifully redeemed by God and admitted to the common
+heaven. Defenders of the doctrine of ultimate universal salvation
+have appeared from the beginning of Christian history.27 During
+the last century and a half their numbers have rapidly
+increased.28 A dignified and influential class of theologians,
+represented by such names as Tillotson. Bahrdt, and Less, say that
+the threats of eternal punishment, in the Scriptures, are
+exaggerations to deter men from sin, and that God will not really
+execute them, but will mercifully abate and limit them.29 Another
+class of theologians, much more free, consistent, and numerous,
+base their reception of the doctrine of final restoration on
+figurative explanations of the scriptural language seemingly
+opposed to it, and on arguments drawn from the character of God,
+from reason, and from morals. This view of the subject is
+spreading fast. All independent, genial, and cultivated thought
+naturally leads to it. The central principles of the gospel
+necessitate it. The spirit of the age cries for it. Before it the
+old antagonistic dogma must fall and perish from respect. Dr.
+Spring says, in reference to the hopeless condemnation of the
+wicked to hell, "It puts in requisition all our confidence
+
+26 This theory bas been resuscitated and advocated within a few
+years by quite a number of writers, among whom may be specified
+the Rev. C. F. Hudson, author of "Debt and Grace," a learned,
+earnest, and able work, pervaded by an admirable spirit.
+
+27 Ballou, Ancient History of Universalism.
+
+28 Whittemore, Modern History of Universalism.
+
+29 Knapp, Christian Theology, Woods's translation, sect. 158.
+
+
+in God to justify this procedure of his government."30
+
+A few devout and powerful minds have sought to avoid the gross
+horrors and unreasonableness of the usual view of this subject, by
+changing the mechanical and arithmetical values of the terms for
+spiritual and religious values. They give the word "eternity" a
+qualitative instead of a quantitative meaning. The everlasting woe
+of the damned consists not in mechanical inflictions of torture
+and numerical increments of duration, but in spiritual discord,
+alienation from God, a wretched state of being, with which times
+and spaces have nothing to do.31
+
+How much better were it for the advocates of the popular theory,
+instead of forcing their moral nature to bear up against the awful
+perplexities and misgivings as to the justice and goodness of God
+necessarily raised in them whenever they really face the dark
+problems of their system of faith,32 resolutely to ask whether
+there are any such problems in the actual government of God, or
+anywhere else, except in their own "Bodies of Divinity"! It is an
+extremely unfortunate and discreditable evasion of responsibility
+when any man, especially when a teacher, takes for granted the
+received formularies handed down to him, and, instead of honestly
+analyzing their genuine significance and probing their foundations
+to see if they be good and true, spends his genius in contriving
+excuses and supports for them.
+
+It is the very worst policy at this day to strive to fasten the
+dogma of eternal misery to the New Testament. If both must be
+taken or rejected together, an alternative which we emphatically
+deny, what sincere and earnest thinker now, whose will is
+unterrifiedly consecrated to truth, can be expected to hesitate
+long? The doctrine is sustained in repute at present principally
+for two reasons. First, because it has been transmitted to us from
+the Church of the past as the established and authoritative
+doctrine. It is yet technically current and popular because it has
+been so: that is, it retains its place simply by right of
+possession. The question ought to be sincerely and universally
+raised whether it is true or false. Then it will swiftly lose its
+prestige and disappear. Secondly, it is upheld and patronized by
+many as a useful instrument for frightening the people and through
+their fears deterring them from sin. We have ourselves heard
+clergymen of high reputation say that it would never do to admit,
+before the people, that there is any chance whatever of penitence
+and salvation beyond the grave, because they would be sure to
+abuse the hope as a sort of permission to indulge and continue in
+sin. Thus to ignore the only solemn and worthy standard of judging
+an abstract doctrine, namely, Is it a truth or a falsehood? and
+put it solely on grounds of working expediency, is disgraceful,
+contemptible, criminal. Watts exposes with well merited rebuke a
+gross instance of pious frail in Burnet, who advised preachers to
+teach the eternity of future punishment whether they believed it
+or not.33 It is by such a course that error and superstition
+reign, that truckling conformity, intellectual disloyalty, moral
+indifference, vice, and infidelity, abound. It is practical
+atheism, debauchery of conscience, and genuine spiritual
+
+30 Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 268.
+
+31 Lange, Positive Dogmatik, sect. 131: Die Aeonen der Verdammten.
+Maurice, Theological Essays: Future Punishment.
+
+32 See Beecher's Conflict of Ages, b. ii. ch. 4, 13.
+
+33 World to Come, Disc. XIII.
+
+
+death. Besides, the course we are characterizing is actually as
+inexpedient in practice as it is wrong in theory. Experience and
+observation show it to be as pernicious in its result as it is
+immoral in its origin. Is a threat efficacious over men in
+proportion to its intrinsic terror, or in proportion as it is
+personally felt and feared by them? Do the menacing penalties of a
+sin deter a man from it in proportion to their awfulness, or in
+proportion to his belief in their reality and unavoidableness?
+Eternal misery would be a threat of infinite frightfulness, if it
+were realized and believed. But it is incredible. Some reject it
+with indignation and an impetuous recoil that sends them much too
+far towards antinomianism. Others let it float in the spectral
+background of imagination, the faint reflection of a disagreeable
+and fading dream. To all it is an unreality. An earnest belief in
+a sure retribution exactly limited to desert must be far more
+effective. If an individual had a profound conviction that for
+every sin he committed he must suffer a million centuries of
+inexpressible anguish, realizing that thought, would he commit a
+sin?
+
+If he cannot appreciate that enormous penalty, much less can he
+the infinite one, which is far more likely to shade off and blur
+out into a vague and remote nothing. Truth is an expression of
+God's will, which we are bound exclusively to accept and employ
+regardless of consequences. When we do that, God, the author of
+truth, is himself solely responsible for the consequences. But
+when, thinking we can devise something that will work better, we
+use some theory of our own, we are responsible for the
+consequences. Let every one beware how he ventures to assume that
+dread responsibility. It is surely folly as well as sin. For
+nothing can work so well as truth, the simple, calm, living truth,
+which is a chime in the infinite harmony of morals and things. It
+is only the morbid melodramatic tastes and incompetencies of an
+unfinished culture that make men think otherwise. The magnificent
+poetry of the day of judgment an audience of five hundred thousand
+millions gathered in one throng as the Judge rises to pronounce
+the last oration over a dissolving universe takes possession of
+the fancy, and people conceive it so vividly, and are so moved by
+it, that they think they see it to be true.
+
+Grant for a moment the truth of the conception of hell as a
+physical world of fiery torture full of the damned. Suppose the
+scene of probation over, hell filled with its prisoners shut up,
+banished and buried in the blackest deeps of space. Can it be left
+there forever? Can it be that the roar of its furnace shall rage
+on, and the wail of the execrable anguish ascend, eternally?
+Endeavor to realize in some faint degree what these questions
+mean, and then answer. If anybody can find it in his heart or in
+his head to say yes, and can gloat over the idea, and wish to have
+it continually brandished in terrorem over the heads of the
+people, one feels impelled to declare that he of all men the most
+needs to be converted to the Christian spirit. An unmitigated hell
+of depravity, pain, and horror, would be Satan's victory and God's
+defeat; for the very wish of a Satanic being must be for the
+everlasting prevalence of sin and wretchedness. As above the
+weltering hosts of the lost, each dreadful second, the iron clock
+of hell ticked the thunder word "eternity," how would the devil on
+his sulphurous dais shout in triumph! But if such a world of fire,
+crowded with the writhing damned, ever existed at all, could it
+exist forever?
+
+Could the saved be happy and passive in heaven when the muffled
+shrieks of their brethren, faint from the distance, fell on their
+ears? In tones of love and pity that would melt the very
+mountains, they would plead with God to pardon and free the lost.
+Many a mourning lover would realize the fable of the Thracian poet
+who wandered into Hades searching for his Eurydice; many a heroic
+son would emulate the legend of the Grecian god who burst through
+the iron walls of Tartarus and rescued his mother, the unfortunate
+Semele, and led her in triumph up to heaven.
+
+Could the angels be contented when they contemplated the far off
+lurid orb and knew the agonies that fed its conscious conflagration?
+Their gentle bosoms would be racked with commiserating pangs,
+they would fly down and hover around that anguished world,
+to moisten its parched tongues with the dropping of their sympathetic
+tears and to cool its burning brows with the fanning of their wings.
+
+Could Christ be satisfied? he who once was rich but for our sakes
+became poor? he whose loving soul breathed itself forth in the
+tender words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy
+laden, and I will give you rest"? he who poured his blood on
+Judea's awful summit, be satisfied? Not until he had tried the
+efficacy of ten thousand fresh crucifixions, on as many new
+Calvaries, would he rest.
+
+Could God suffer it? God! with the full rivers of superfluous
+bliss rolling around thy throne, couldst thou look down and hear
+thy creatures calling thee Father, and see them plunging in a sea
+of fire eternally eternally eternally and never speak the
+pardoning word? It would not be like thee, it would be like thine
+adversary to do that. Not so wouldst thou do. But if Satan had
+millions of prodigals, snatched from the fold of thy family, shut
+up and tortured in hell, paternal yearnings after them would fill
+thy heart. Love's smiles would light the dread abyss where they
+groan. Pity's tears would fall over it, shattered by the radiance
+into rainbows. And through that illumination THOU wouldst descend,
+marching beneath the arch of its triumphal glories to the rescue
+of thy children! Therefore we rest in hope, knowing that "Thou
+wilt not leave our souls in hell."
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE FIVE THEORETIC MODES OF SALVATION.
+
+THE conceptions and fore feelings of immortality which men have
+entertained have generally been accompanied by a sense of
+uncertainty in regard to the nature of that inheritance, by a
+perception of contingent conditions, yielding a twofold fate of
+bliss and woe, poised on the perilous hinge of circumstance or
+freedom. Almost as often and profoundly, indeed, as man has
+thought that he should live hereafter, that idea has been followed
+by the belief that if, on the one hand, salvation gleamed for him
+in the possible sky, on the other hand perdition yawned for him in
+the probable abyss. Heaven and Hell are the light side and shade
+side of the doctrine of a future life. Few questions are more
+interesting, as none can be more important, than that inquiry
+which is about the salvation of the soul. The inherent reach of
+this inquiry, and the extent of its philosophical and literary
+history, are great. But, by arranging under certain heads the
+various principal schemes of salvation which Christian teachers
+have from time to time presented for popular acceptance, and
+passing them before the mind in order and in mutual lights, we can
+very much narrow the space required to exhibit and discuss them.
+When the word "salvation" occurs in the following investigation,
+it means unless something different be shown by the context the
+removal of the soul's doom to misery beyond the grave, and the
+securing of its future blessedness. Heaven and hell are terms
+employed with wide latitude and fluctuating boundaries of literal
+and figurative meaning; but their essential force is simply a
+future life of wretchedness, a future life of joy; and salvation,
+in its prevailing theological sense, is the avoidance of that and
+the gaining of this. We shall not attempt to present the different
+theories of redemption in their historical order of development,
+or to give an exhaustive account of their diversified prevalence,
+but shall arrange them with reference to the most perspicuous
+exhibition of their logical contents and practical bearings.
+
+The first scheme of Christian salvation to be noticed is the one
+by which it is represented that the interference and suffering of
+Christ, in itself, unconditionally saved all souls and emptied
+hell forever. This theory arose in the minds of those who received
+it as the natural and consistent completion of the view they held
+concerning the nature and consequences of the fall of Adam, the
+cause and extent of the lost state of man. Adam, as the federal
+head of humanity, represented and acted for his whole race: the
+responsibility of his decision rested, the consequences of his
+conduct would legitimately descend, it was thought, upon all
+mankind. If he had kept himself obedient through that easy yet
+tremendous probation in Eden, he and all his children would have
+lived on earth eternally in perfect bliss. But, violating the
+commandment of God, the burden of sin, with its terrible penalty,
+fell on him and his posterity. Every human being was henceforth to
+be alien from the love of goodness and from the favor of God,
+hopelessly condemned to death and the pains of hell. The sin of
+Adam, it was believed, thoroughly corrupted the nature of man, and
+incapacitated him from all successful efforts to save his soul
+from its awful doom. The infinite majesty of God's will, the law
+of the universe, had been insulted by disobedience. The only just
+retribution was the suffering of an endless death. The adamantine
+sanctities of God's government made forgiveness impossible. Thus
+all men were lost, to be the prey of blackness, and fire, and the
+undying worm, through the remediless ages of eternity. Just then
+God had pity on the souls he had made, and himself came to the
+rescue. In the person of Christ, he came into the world as a man,
+and freely took upon himself the infinite debt of man's sins, by
+his death on the cross expiated all offences, satisfied the claims
+of offended justice, vindicated the inexpressible sacredness of
+the law, and, at the same time, opened a way by which a full and
+free reconciliation was extended to all. When the blood of Jesus
+flowed over the cross, it purchased the ransom of every sinner. As
+Jerome says, "it quenched the flaming sword at the entrance of
+Paradise." The weary multitude of captives rose from their bed,
+shook off the fetters and stains of the pit, and made the cope of
+heaven snowy with their white winged ascent. The prison house of
+the devil and his angels should be used no more to confine the
+guilty souls of men.1 Their guilt was all washed away in the blood
+of the Lamb. Their spirits, without exception, should follow to
+the right hand of the Father, in the way marked out by the
+ascending Redeemer. This is the first form of Universalism, the
+form in which it was held by several of the Fathers in the earlier
+ages of the Church, and by the pioneers of that doctrine in modern
+times. Cyril of Jerusalem says, "Christ went into the under world
+alone, but came out with many." 2 Cyril of Alexandria says that
+when Christ ascended from the under world he "emptied it, and left
+the devil there utterly alone." 3 The opinion that the whole
+population of Hades was released, is found in the lists of ancient
+heresies.4 It was advanced by Clement, an Irish priest, antagonist
+of Boniface the famous Archbishop of Mentz, in the middle of the
+eighth century. He was deposed by the Council of Soissons, and
+afterwards anathematized by Pope Zachary. Gregory the Great also
+refers in one of his letters with extreme severity to two
+ecclesiastics, contemporaries of his own, who held the same
+belief. Indeed, this conclusion is a necessary result of a
+consistent development of the creed of the Orthodox Church, so
+called. By the sin of one, even Adam, through the working of
+absolute justice, hell became the portion of all, irrespective of
+any fault or virtue of theirs; so, by the voluntary sacrifice, the
+infinite atonement, of one, even Christ, through the unspeakable
+mercy of God, salvation was effected for all, irrespective of any
+virtue or fault of theirs. One member of the scheme is the exact
+counterpoise of the other; one doctrine cries out for and
+necessitates the other. Those who accept the commonly received
+dogmas of original sin, total depravity, and universal
+condemnation entailed upon all men in lineal descent from Adam,
+and the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Vicarious
+Atonement, are bound, by all the constructions of logic, to accept
+the scheme of salvation just set forth, namely, that the death of
+Christ secured the deliverance of all unconditionally. We do not
+believe that doctrine, only because we do not believe the other
+associated doctrines out of which it springs and of whose system
+it is the complement.
+
+1 Doederlein, De Redemptione a Potestate Diaboli. In Opuse.
+Theolog.
+
+2 Catechesis xis. 9.
+
+3 De Festis Paschalibus, homilia vii.
+
+4 Augustine, De Haresibus, lxxix.
+
+
+The reasons why we do not believe that our race fell into helpless
+depravity and ruin in the sin of the first man are, in essence,
+briefly these: First, we have never been able to perceive any
+proof whatever of the truth of that dogma; and certainly the onus
+probandi rests on the side of such an assumption. It arose
+partially from a misinterpretation of the language of the Bible;
+and so far as it has a basis in Scripture, we are compelled by
+force of evidence to regard it as a Jewish adoption of a pagan
+error without authority. Secondly, this doctrinal system seems to
+us equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seems
+to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and
+spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken
+and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous
+horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful
+barbarity. How can men be guilty of a sin committed thousands of
+years before they were born, and deserve to be sent to hopeless
+hell for it? What justice is there in putting on one sinless head
+the demerits of a world of reprobates, and then letting the
+criminal go free because the innocent has suffered? A third
+objection to this whole view an objection which, if sustained,
+will utterly annihilate it is this: It is quite possible that,
+momentous as is the part he has played in theology, the Biblical
+Adam is not at all a historical personage, but only a significant
+figment of poetry. The common belief of the most authoritative men
+of science, that the human race has existed on this earth for a
+vastly longer period than the Hebrew statement affirms, may yet be
+completely established. It may also yet be acknowledged that each
+distinct race of men had its own Adam.5 Then the dogmatic
+theology, based on the fall of our entire race into perdition in
+its primary representative, will, of course, crumble.
+
+The second doctrine of Christian salvation is a modification and
+limitation of the previous one. This theory, like the former,
+presupposes that a burden of original sin and natural depravity
+transmitted from the first man had doomed, and, unless prevented
+in some supernatural manner, would forever press, all souls down
+to the realms of ruin and woe; also that an infinite graciousness
+in the bosom of the Godhead led Christ to offer himself as an
+expiation for the sins, an atoning substitute for the condemnation,
+of men. But, according to the present view, this interference
+of Christ did not by itself save the lost: it only removed
+the otherwise insuperable bar to forgiveness, and presented
+to a chosen portion of mankind the means of experiencing
+a condition upon the realization of which, in each individual
+case, the certainty of salvation depends. That condition is a
+mysterious conversion, stirring the depths of the soul through an
+inspired faith in personal election by the unchanging decree of
+God. The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods of
+salvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume that
+mankind are doomed to death and hell in consequence of the sin of
+Adam, the one asserts that the interference of Christ of itself
+saved all souls, the other asserts that that interference cannot
+save any soul except those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure,
+had from eternity arbitrarily elected.6 This scheme grew directly
+out of the dogma of fatalism, which sinks human freedom in Divine
+predestination. God having solely of his
+
+5 Burdach, Carus, Oken, Bayrhoffer, Agassiz. See Bunsen,
+Christianity and Mankind, vol. iv. p. 28; Mott and Gliddon, Types
+of Mankind, p. 338.
+
+6 Confession of Faith of Westminster Divines, ch. iii. sect. 3.
+
+
+own will foreordained that a certain number of mankind should be
+saved, Christ died in order to pay the penalty of their sins and
+render it possible for them to be forgiven and taken into heaven
+without violating the awful bond of justice. The benefits of the
+atonement, therefore, are limited to the elect. Nor is this to be
+regarded as an act of severity; on the contrary, it is an act of
+unspeakable benevolence. For by the sin of Adam the whole race of
+men, without exception, were hateful to God, and justly sentenced
+to eternal damnation. When, consequently, he devised a plan of
+redemption by which he could himself bear the guilt, and suffer
+the agony, and pay the debt of a few, and thus ransom them from
+their doom, the reprobates who were left had no right to complain,
+but the chosen were a monument of disinterested love, because all
+alike deserved the endless tortures of hell. According to this
+conception, all men being by their ancestral act and inherited
+nature irretrievably lost, God's arbitrary pleasure was the cause,
+Christ's voluntary death was the means, by which a certain number
+were to be saved. What individuals should compose this portion of
+the race, was determined from eternity beyond all contingencies.
+The effect of faith and conversion, and of the new birth, is not
+to save the soul, but simply to convince the soul that it is
+saved. That is to say, a regenerating belief and love is not the
+efficient cause, it is merely the revealed assurance, of
+salvation, proving to the soul that feels it, by the testimony of
+the Holy Spirit, that it is of the chosen number. The preaching of
+the gospel is to be extended everywhere, not for the purpose of
+saving those who would otherwise be lost, but because its
+presentation will awaken in the elect, and in them alone, that
+responsive experience which will reveal their election to them,
+and make them sure of it, already foretasting it; though it is
+thought that no one can be saved who is ignorant of the gospel: it
+is mysteriously ordered that the terms of the covenant shall be
+preached to all the elect. There are correlated complexities,
+miracles, absurdities, in wrought with the whole theory,
+inseparable from it. The violence it does to nature, to thought,
+to love, to morals, its arbitrariness, its mechanical form, the
+wrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from the
+Bible,7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are its
+sufficient refutation and condemnation. If the death of Christ has
+such wondrous saving efficacy, and nothing else has, what keeps
+him from dying again to convince the unbelieving and to save the
+lost? What man is there who, if he knew that, after thirty years
+of suffering terminated by a fearful death, he should rise again
+into boundless bliss and glory while rapt infinitude rung with the
+paans of an applauding universe, and that by means of his
+humiliation he could redeem countless millions from eternal
+torture, would not with a joyous spring undertake the task? And is
+a common man better than Christ?
+
+The third general plan of Christian salvation which we are to
+consider differs from the foregoing one in several essential
+particulars. It affirms the free will of man in opposition to a
+fatal predestination. It declares that the atonement is sufficient
+to redeem not only a portion of our race, but all who will put
+themselves in right spiritual relations with it. In a word, while
+it admits that some will actually be lost forever, it asserts that
+no one is doomed
+
+7 Schweizer, Die Lehre des Apostels Paulus vom erlosenden Tode
+Christi. Theologische Studien und Kritiken, Jahrg. 1858, heft 3.
+
+
+to be lost, but that the offer of pardon is made to every soul,
+and that every one has power to accept or reject it. The sacrifice
+of the incarnate Deity vindicated the majesty of the law, appeased
+the wrath of God, and purchased his saving favor towards all who,
+by a sound and earnest faith, seize the proffered justification,
+throw off all reliance on their own works, and present themselves
+before the throne of mercy clothed in the righteousness and
+sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Here the appropriation of the
+merits of Christ, through an orthodox and vivifying faith, is the
+real cause as well as the experimental assurance of salvation.
+This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in the
+wilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look on
+it and be healed, so the crucified God is lifted up, and all men,
+everywhere, are urged to kneel before him, accept his atonement,
+and thus enable his righteousness to be imputed to them, and their
+souls to be saved. The vital condition of salvation is an
+appropriating faith in the vicarious atonement. Without this no
+one can be saved. Thus with one word and a single breath whole
+nations and races are whiffed into hell. All that the good hearted
+Luther could venture to say of Cicero, whom he deeply admired and
+loved, was the kind ejaculation, "I hope God will be merciful to
+him!" To those who appreciate it with hostility, and look on all
+things in its light, the thought that there can be no salvation
+except by belief in the expiatory death of Christ, hopelessly
+dooming all the heathen,8 and all infant children, unless baptized
+in a proxy faith,9 builds an altar of blood among the stars and
+makes the universe reek with horror. Other crimes, though stained
+through with midnight dyes and heaped up to the brim of outrageous
+guilt, may be freely forgiven to him who comes heartily to credit
+the vicarious death of the Savior; but he who does not trust in
+that, though virtuous as man can be, must depart into the
+unappeasable fires. "Why this unintelligible crime of not seeing
+the atonement happens to be the only sin for which there is no
+atonement, it is impossible to say." Though this view of the
+method, extent, and conditions of redemption is less revolting and
+incredible than the other, still, it does not seem to us that any
+person whose mental and moral nature is unprejudiced, healthy, and
+enlightened, and who will patiently study the subject, can
+possibly accept either of them. The leading assumed doctrines
+common to them, out of which they severally spring, and on which
+they both rest, are not only unsupported by adequate proofs, but
+really have no evidence at all, and are absurd in themselves,
+confounding the broadest distinctions in morals, and subverting
+the best established principles of natural religion.10
+
+The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicates
+the power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. This
+is the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state of
+nature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all men
+are alienated from God, and by the universal original sin
+universally exposed to damnation, indeed, the helpless victims of
+eternal misery. In the fulness of time, Christ appeared, and
+offered himself to suffer in their stead to secure their
+deliverance. His death cancelled the whole sum of
+
+8 Bretschneider, Entwickelung der Dogmatik, sect. 112, Nos. 37 50.
+
+9 So affirmed by the Council of Carthage, Canon II.
+
+10 The violence done to moral reason by these views is powerfully
+exposed in Bushnell's Discourse on the Atonement: God in Christ,
+pp. 193-202.
+
+
+original sin, and only that, thus taking away the absolute
+impossibility of salvation, and leaving every man in the world
+free to stand or fall, incur hell or win heaven, by his personal
+merits. From that time any person who lived a perfectly holy life
+which no man could find practically possible thereby secured
+eternal blessedness; but the moment he fell into a single sin,
+however trivial, he sealed his condemnation: Christ's sacrifice,
+as was just said, merely removed the transmitted burden of
+original sin from all mankind, but made no provision for their
+personal sins, so that practically, all men being voluntary as
+well as hereditary sinners, their condition was as bad as before:
+they were surely lost. To meet this state of the case, the Church,
+whose priests, it is claimed, are the representatives of Christ,
+and whose head is the vicegerent of God on earth, was empowered by
+the celebration of the mass to re enact, as often as it pleased,
+the tragedy of the crucifixion. In this service Christ is supposed
+literally to be put to death afresh, and the merit of his
+substitutional sufferings is supposed to be placed to the account
+of the Church.11 As Sir Henry Wotton says,  "One rosy drop from
+Jesus' heart Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire."
+
+In one of the Decretals of Clement VI., called "Extravagants," it
+is asserted that "one drop of Christ's blood [una guttula
+sanguinis] being sufficient to redeem the whole human race, the
+remaining quantity which was shed in the garden and on the cross
+was left as a legacy to the Church, to be a treasure whence
+indulgences were to be drawn and administered by the Roman
+pontiffs." Furthermore, saints and martyrs, by their constant self
+denial, voluntary sufferings, penances, and prayers, like Christ,
+do more good works than are necessary for their own salvation; and
+the balance of merit the works of supererogation is likewise
+accredited to the Church. In this way a great reserved fund of
+merits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasure
+they can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it in
+place of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolve
+them and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dread
+machinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale,
+heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. But
+whoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receive
+the sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey the
+priests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that those
+who neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost,
+by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, thereby
+typifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection and
+ascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject as
+alike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd to
+conscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in history
+through the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy of
+an interested body. There is not one text in the Bible which
+affords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughty
+pretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have the
+exclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It is
+incredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fates
+forever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mere
+accident of time
+
+11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. pars iii. qu. 25, art. 1.
+
+
+and place, or at best on the moral contingence of their
+acknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannical
+hierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent of
+their lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. One
+is here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Man
+ought to hear Poems." The lines in Sophocles which declare that
+the initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life,
+but that all others shall be wretched, having been read to
+Diogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion,
+the notorious robber, be better after death than that of
+Epaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" It
+is also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all proper
+appreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the gross
+mechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between the
+bad and the good, as if moral qualities were not personal, but
+might be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as the
+accounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoretic
+falsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as its
+practical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculous
+this ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as stated
+by Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, have
+entered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have,
+and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stake
+the argument on one question. If there be no salvation save by
+believing and accepting the sacraments with the authority of the
+Romanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in a
+hundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved.
+Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelming
+proportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonized
+drops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires of
+damnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that he
+believes?
+
+We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkable
+for its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as those
+we have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, and
+severity. The theory referred to promises the natural and
+inevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on two
+positions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially and
+temporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfect
+wisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of this
+doctrine point first to observation and experience, and declare
+that no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable;
+those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, and
+hardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that may
+be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the
+whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the
+Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations.
+True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by
+the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to
+spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious
+belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But
+this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can
+endure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessedness
+come with the morning dawn of a better world. Exact retributions
+are awarded to all iniquity here; so
+
+12 Julian, lib. vi. ix.
+
+
+that at the termination of the present state there is nothing to
+prevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. The
+substantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good and
+right: only their action is perverted to evil.13 This perversion
+will cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus death
+is the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions for his
+creatures, again they argue, must be purely gracious and blessed;
+for Nature, the Bible, and the Soul blend their ultimate teachings
+in one affirmation that he is Love. Being omnipotent and of
+perfect wisdom, nothing can withstand his decrees or thwart his
+plans. His purpose, of course, must be fulfilled. There is every
+thing to prove, and nothing, rightly understood, to disprove, that
+that purpose is the eternal blessedness of all his intelligent
+offspring after death. Therefore, they think they are justified in
+concluding, the laws of nature, God's regular habits and course of
+government, the normal arrangement and process of things, will of
+themselves work out the inevitable salvation of all mankind. After
+the uproar and darkness, the peril and fear, of a tempestuous
+night, the all embracing smile of daylight gradually spreads over
+the world, and the turmoil silently subsides, and the scene
+sleeps. So after the sins and miseries, the condemnation and hell,
+of this state of existence, shall succeed the redemption, the
+holiness and happy peace, of heaven, into which all pass by the
+order of nature, the original and undisturbed arrangement of the
+creative Father. This view is advanced by some on grounds both of
+revelation and reason. It is the doctrine of those Beghards who
+taught that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; that no one is
+damned, neither Jew nor Saracen, because on the death of the body
+the soul returns to God."14 But the proper doctrine of the
+Universalist denomination is founded directly on Scripture, and
+seems now to be simply the absolute certainty of final salvation
+for all. Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will of
+God, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner,
+by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwise
+endless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossil
+now.15
+
+It will be noticed that by this view salvation is an unlimited
+necessity, not a contingency,  a boon thrown to all, and which no
+one has power to reject:
+
+"The road to heaven is broader than the world,
+And deeper than the kingdoms of the dead;
+And up its ample paths the nations tread
+With all their banners furl'd."
+
+This theory contains elements, it seems to us, both of truth and
+falsehood. It casts off gross mistakes, announces some fundamental
+realities, overlooks, perverts, exaggerates, some essential facts
+in the case. There is so much in it that is grateful and beautiful
+that we cannot wonder at its reception where the tender instincts
+of the heart are stronger than the stern decisions of the
+conscience, where the kindly sentiments usurp the province of the
+critical reason and sit in judgment upon evidence for the
+construction of a dogmatic creed. We
+
+13 Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. x. art. xvi.: Character and
+its Predicates.
+
+14 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 209, note 14.
+
+15 See Ballou, Examination of the Doctrine of Future Punishment,
+pp. 152-157. Williamson, Exposition of Universalism, Sermon XL:
+Nature of Salvation. Cobb, Compend. of Divinity, ch. ix. sect. 3.
+
+
+cannot accept it as a whole, cannot admit its great unqualified
+conclusion, not only because there is no direct evidence for it,
+but because there are many potent presumptions against it. It is
+not built upon the facts of our consciousness and present
+experience, but is resolutely constructed in defiance of them by
+an arbitrary process of assumption and inference; for since God's
+perfections are as absolute now as they ever can be, and he now
+permits sin and misery, there is no impossibility that they will
+be permitted for a season hereafter. If they are necessary now,
+they may be necessary hereafter. An experience of salvation by
+all, regardless of what they do or what they leave undone, would
+also defeat what we have always considered the chief final cause
+of man, namely, the self determined resistance of Evil and choice
+of Good, the free formation of virtuous character. The plan of a
+necessary and indiscriminate redemption likewise breaks the
+evident continuity of life, ignores the lineal causative power of
+experience, whereby each moment partially produces and moulds the
+next, destroys the probationary nature of our lot, and palsies the
+strength of moral motive. It is furthermore the height of
+injustice, awarding to all men the same condition, remorselessly
+swallowing up their infinite differences, making sin and virtue,
+sloth and toil, exactly alike in the end. Whose earnestly embraces
+the theory, and meditates much upon it, and reasons closely, will
+be likely to become an Antinomian. It overlooks the loud,
+omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state is
+incomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visible
+segment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisible
+world to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses will
+satisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. We reject
+this scheme, as to its distinctive feature, for all those reasons
+which lead us to accept that final view to which we now turn.
+
+The theory of Christian redemption which seems to us correct,
+represents the good and evil forces of personal character,
+harmonious or discordant with the mind of God, as the conditions
+of salvation or of reprobation. Swedenborg, who teaches that man
+in the future state is the son of his own deeds in the present
+state, says he once saw Melancthon in hell, writing, "Faith alone
+saves," the words fading out as fast as written, because
+expressive of a falsehood! It is not belief, but love, that
+dominates the soul, not a mental act, but a spiritual substance.
+According as the realities of the soul are what they should be,
+just and pure, or what they should not be, perverted and corrupt,
+and according as the realities of the soul are in right relations
+with truth, beauty, goodness, or in vitiated relations with them,
+so, and to that extent, is the soul saved or lost. This is not a
+matter of arbitrary determination on one hand; and of helpless
+submission on the other: it is a matter of Divine permission on
+one hand, and of free, though sometimes unintelligent and
+mistaken, choice on the other. The only perdition is to be out of
+tune with the right constitution and exercise of things and rules.
+That, of itself, makes a man the victim of guilt and wretchedness.
+The only salvation is the restoration of the balance and normal
+efficiency of the faculties, the restoration of their harmony with
+the moral law, the recommencement of their action in unison with
+the will of God. When a soul, through its exposure and freedom,
+becomes and experiences what God did not intend and is not pleased
+with, what his creative and executive arrangements are not
+purposely ordered for, it is, for the time, and so far forth,
+lost. It is saved, when knowledge of truth illuminates the mind,
+love of goodness warms the heart, energy, purity, and aspiration
+fill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in its
+experience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims of
+its existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmonious
+fruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, all
+things work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beams
+of the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnation
+and misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever and
+wherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations with
+the universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienated
+mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of
+things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural
+necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits
+poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and
+wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice,
+impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these
+evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy
+and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is
+not, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawing
+fires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as it
+is to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseased
+condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and
+retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures
+a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its
+indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may
+reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with
+delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious
+blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers
+and relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of some
+physical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain side
+to a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just as
+badly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, wherever
+he may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so to
+speak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions of
+salvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle,
+but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of the
+universe. "Every devil," Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough of
+torture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumference
+to afflict him." If there are, as there may be, two entirely
+separate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclose
+hell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into the
+other, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perdition
+or of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but the
+characteristic condition of the soul, which produces its
+experience and decides its destination, that is the essential
+thing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening is
+intolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but most
+welcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects,
+operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostile
+and retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify the
+soul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing is
+transfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven.
+
+We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles of
+this theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience to
+which souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on them
+by an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by free
+agency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritual
+world. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particular
+localities into which spirits are thrust, nor states of
+consciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward
+ reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character.
+
+Thirdly, condemnation, or justification, is not absolute and
+complete, equalizing all on each side of a given line, but is a
+thing of degrees, not exactly the same in any two individuals,
+or in the same person at all times. Fourthly, we have no reason
+to suppose that probation closes with the closing of the
+present life; but every relevant consideration leads us to
+conclude that the same great constitution of laws pervades all
+worlds and reigns throughout eternity, so that the fate of souls
+is not unchangeably fixed at death. No analogy indicates that
+after death all will be thoroughly different from what it is
+before death. Rather do all analogies argue that the hell and
+heaven of the future will be the aggravation, or mitigation, or
+continuation, of the perdition and salvation of the present. It is
+altogether a sentence of exact right according to character, a
+matter of personal achievement depending upon freedom, an
+experience of inward elements and states, a thing of degrees, and
+a subject of continued probation.
+
+The condition of the heathen nations in reference to salvation is
+satisfactory only in the light of the foregoing theory. If a
+person is what God wishes, as shown by his revealed will in the
+model of Christ, pure, loving, devout, wise, and earnest, he is
+saved, whether he ever heard of Christ or not. Are Plato and
+Aristides, Cato and Antoninus, to be damned, while Pope Alexander
+VI. and King Philip II are saved, because those glorious
+characters merely lived at the then height of attainable
+excellence, but these fanatic scoundrels made a technical
+profession of Christianity? The "Athanasian" creed asserts that
+whoever doth not fully believe its dogmas "shall without doubt
+perish everlastingly." And the eighteenth article in the creed of
+the Church of England declares "them accursed who presume to say
+that any man can be saved by diligently framing his life according
+to the law or sect which he professeth, and the light of
+nature."16
+
+Another particular in which the present view of salvation is
+satisfactory, in opposition to the other theories, is in leaving
+the personal nature of sin clear, the realm of personal
+responsibility unconfused. Why should a system of thought be set
+up and adhered to in religion that would be instantly and
+universally scouted at if applied to any other subject? 17 "No one
+dreams that the sin of an unexercised intellect, of gross
+ignorance, can be pardoned only through faith in the sacrifice of
+some incarnation of the Perfect Reason. No one expects to be told
+that the violation of the bodily laws can be forgiven by the
+Infinite Creator only on the ground that some perfect physician
+honors them by obedience and death. It is by opening the mind to
+God's published truth, and by conformity to the discovered
+philosophical
+
+16 Arnauld, Emes, Goeze, and others, have written volumes to prove
+the indiscriminate damnation of the heathen. On the contrary,
+Muller, in his "Diss. de Paganorum poet Mortem Conditione," and
+Marmontel, in his "Belisaire," take a more favorable view of the
+fate of the ethnic world. The best work on the subject a work of
+great geniality and ability is Eberhard's "Neue Apologie des
+Socrates." Also see Knapp's Christian Theology, sect. lxxxviii.
+
+17 Martineau, Studies of Christianity, pp. 153-176: Mediatorial
+Religion. Ibid. pp. 468-477: Sin What it is, What it is not.
+
+
+order, or the reception of the adopted remedy, that the mind and
+the frame experience new life. And our souls are redeemed, not by
+any expiation on account of which penalties are lifted, but by
+reception of spiritual truth and consecration of will, which push
+away penalties by wholesome life." 18
+
+The awful inviolability of justice is shown by the eternal course
+of God's laws bringing the exactly deserved penalty upon every
+soul that sinneth. Whoever breaks a Divine decree puts all sacred
+things in antagonism to him, and the precise punishment of his
+offences not the worth of worlds nor the blood of angels can
+avert. The boundless mercy of God, his atoning love, is shown by
+the absence of all vindictiveness from his judgments, their
+restorative aim and tendency. Whenever the sinner repents,
+reforms, puts himself in a right attitude, God is waiting to
+pardon and bless him, the sun shines and the happy heart is glad
+as at first, the cloudy screen of sin and fear and retributive
+alienation being removed. This view, when appreciated, affords as
+impressive a sanction to law, and as affecting an exhibition of
+love, as are theoretically ascribed to the doctrine of vicarious
+expiation. The infinite sanctity of justice and the fathomless
+love of God are certainly much more plainly and satisfactorily
+shown by the righteous nature and beneficent operation of the law,
+than by its terrible severity and arbitrary subversion. According
+to the present view, the relation of Christ to human redemption is
+as simple and rational as it is divinely appointed and perfectly
+fulfilled. Accredited with miraculous seals, presenting the most
+pathetic and inspiring motives, he reveals the truths and
+exemplifies the virtues which, when adopted, regenerate the
+springs of faith and character, rectify the lines of conduct, and
+change men from sinful and wretched to saintly and blessed. He
+stirs the stagnant soul, that man may replunge into his native
+self, and rise redeemed.
+
+For the more distinct comprehension and remembrance of the schemes
+of Christian salvation we have been considering, it may be well to
+recapitulate them.
+
+The first theory is this: When, by the fall of Adam, all men were
+utterly lost and doomed to hell forever, the vicarious sufferings
+of Christ cancelled sin, and unconditionally purchased and saved
+all. This was the original development of Universalism. It sprang
+consistently from Augustinian grounds. It was taught by a party in
+the Church of the first centuries, was afterwards repeatedly
+condemned as a heresy by popes and by councils, and was revived by
+Kelly, Murray, and others. We are not aware that it now has any
+avowed disciples.
+
+The second conception is, in substance, that God, foreseeing from
+eternity the fall of Adam and the consequent damnation of his
+posterity, arbitrarily elected a portion of them to salvation,
+leaving the rest to their fate; and the vicarious sufferings of
+Christ were the only possible means of carrying that decree into
+effect. This is the Augustinian and Calvinistic theology, and has
+had a very extensive prevalence among Christians. Many church
+creeds still embody the doctrine; but in its original,
+uncompromising form it is rapidly fading from belief. Even now few
+persons can be found to profess it without essential modifications,
+so
+
+18 T. S. King, Endless Punishment Unchristian and Unreasonable, p.
+65.
+
+
+qualifying it as to destroy its identity.
+
+The third plan of delivering souls from the doom supposed to rest
+on them attributes to the vicarious sufferings of Christ a
+conditional efficacy, depending upon personal faith. Every one who
+will heartily believe in the substitutional death of Christ, and
+trust in his atoning merits, shall thereby be saved. This was the
+system of Pelagius, Arminius, Luther. It prevails now in the so
+called Evangelical Churches more generally than any other system.
+
+The fourth received method of salvation, assuming the same
+premises which the three foregoing schemes assume, namely, that
+through the fall all men are eternally sentenced to hell, declares
+that, by Christ's vicarious sufferings, power is given to the
+Church, a priestly hierarchy, to save such as confess her
+authority and observe her rites. All others must continue lost.19
+This theory early began to be constructed and broached by the
+Fathers. It is held by the Roman Catholic Church, and by all the
+consistent portion of the Episcopalian. A part of the Baptist
+denomination also through their popular preachers, if not in their
+recognised symbols assert the indispensableness of ritual baptism
+to salvation.
+
+The fifth view of the problem is that no soul is lost or doomed
+except so far as it is personally, voluntarily depraved and
+sinful. And even to that extent, and in that sense, it can be
+called lost only in the present life. After death every soul is
+freed from evil, and ushered at once into heaven. This is the
+distinctive doctrine of the ultra Universalists. It is
+disappearing from among its recent advocates. As a body they have
+already exchanged its arbitrary conceptions of "death and glory"
+for the more rational conclusions of the "Restorationists." 20
+
+The sixth and final scheme of Christian salvation teaches that, by
+the immutable laws which the Creator has established in and over
+his works and creatures, a free soul may choose good or evil,
+truth or falsehood, love or hate, beneficence or iniquity. Just so
+far and just so long as it partakes of the former it is saved; as
+it partakes of the latter it is lost, that is, alienates the favor
+of God, forfeits so much of the benefits of creation and of the
+blessings of being. The conditions and means of repentance,
+reformation, regeneration, are always within its power, the future
+state being but the unencumbered, more favorable experience of the
+spiritual elements of the present, under the same Divine
+constitution and laws. This is the common belief of Unitarians and
+Universalists, the latter alone teaching it as a sure doctrine of
+Revelation.
+
+Salvation by purchase, by the redeeming blood of Christ; salvation
+by election, by the independent decree of God, sealed by the blood
+of Christ; salvation by faith, by an appropriating faith in the
+blood of Christ; salvation by the Church, by the sacraments made
+efficacious to that end by the blood of Christ; salvation by
+nature, by the irresistible working of the natural order of
+things, declared by the teachings of Christ; salvation by a
+resurrection from the dead, miraculously effected by the delegated
+power of Christ; salvation by character, by conformity of
+character to the spiritual laws of the universe, to the nature and
+will of God, revealed, urged, exemplified, by the whole mission of
+Christ; these are the different theories
+
+19 Adams, Mercy to Babes. (A plea for the baptism of infants, that
+they may not be damned.)
+
+20 Adin Ballou, Universalism and Restorationism Moral Contraries,
+1837.
+
+
+proposed for the acceptance of Christians.
+
+Outside of Christendom we discern, received and operative in
+various forms, all the theoretic modes of salvation acknowledged
+within it, and some others in addition. The creed and practice of
+the Mohammedans afford a more unflinching embodiment of the
+conception of salvation by election than is furnished anywhere
+else. Islam denotes Fate. All is predestinated and follows on in
+inevitable sequence. No modifying influence is possible. Can a
+breath move Mount Kaf? The chosen of Allah shall believe; the
+rejected of Allah shall deny. Every believer's bower is blooming
+for him in Paradise; every unbeliever's bed is burning for him in
+hell. And nothing whatever can avail to change the persons or the
+total number elected for each.
+
+There is one theory of salvation scarcely heard of in the West,
+but extensively held in the East. The Brahmanic as well as the
+Buddhist thinker relies on obtaining salvation by knowledge. Life
+in a continual succession of different bodies is his perdition.
+His salvation is to be freed from the vortex of births and deaths,
+the fret and storm of finite existence. Neither goodness nor piety
+can ever release him. Knowledge alone can do it: an unsullied
+intellectual vision and a free intellectual grasp of truth and
+love alone can rescue him from the turbid sea of forms and
+struggles. "As a lump of salt is of uniform taste within and
+without, so the soul is nothing but intelligence."21 If the soul
+be an entire mass of intelligence, a current of ideas, its real
+salvation depends on its becoming pure and eternal truth without
+mixture of falsehood or of emotional disturbance. He "must free
+himself from virtues as well as from sins; for the confinement of
+fetters is the same whether the chain be of gold or of iron."22
+Accordingly, the Hindu, to secure emancipation, planes down the
+mountainous thoughts and passions of his soul to a desert level of
+indifferent insight. And when, in direct personal knowledge, free
+from joy and sorrow, free from good and ill, he gazes into the
+limitless abyss of Divine truth, then he is sure of the bosom of
+Brahm, the door of Nirwana. Then the wheel of the Brahmanic Ixion
+ceases revolving, and the Buddhist Ahasuerus flings away his
+staff; for salvation is attained.
+
+The conception of salvation by ritual works based on faith either
+faith in Deity or in some redemptive agency is exhibited all over
+the world. Hani, a Hindu devotee, dwelt in a thicket, and repeated
+the name of Krishna a hundred thousand times each day, 23 and thus
+saved his soul. The saintly Muni Shukadev said, as is written in
+the most popular religious authority of India, "Who even
+ignorantly sing the praises of Krishna undoubtedly obtain final
+beatitude; just as, if one ignorant of the properties of nectar
+should drink it, he would still become immortal. Whoever worships
+Hari, with whatever disposition of mind, obtains beatitude."24
+"The repetition of the names of Vishnu purifies from all sins,
+even when invoked by an evil minded person, as fire burns even him
+who approaches it unwillingly."25 Nothing is more common in the
+sacred writings of the Hindus than the promise that "whoever reads
+or hears this narrative with a devout mind shall receive final
+beatitude." Millions on millions of these docile and abject
+devotees undoubtingly expect salvation by such merely ritual
+
+21 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 359.
+
+22 Ibid. p. 363.
+
+23 Asiatic Researches, vol. xvi. p. 115.
+
+24 Eastwick, Prem Sagar, p. 56.
+
+25 Vishnu Parans, p. 210, note 13.
+
+
+observances. One cries "Lord!" "Lord!" Another thumbs a book, as
+if it were an omnipotent amulet. Another meditates on some mystic
+theme, as if musing were a resistless spell of silent exorcism and
+invocation. Another pierces himself with red hot irons, as if
+voluntary pain endured now could accumulate merit for him and buy
+off future inflictions.
+
+It is surprising to what an extent men's efforts for salvation
+seem underlaid by conceptions of propitiation, the placation of a
+hatred, the awakening of a love, in the objects of their worship.
+In all these cases salvation is sought indirectly through works,
+though not particularly good works. The savage makes an offering,
+mutters a prayer, or fiercely wounds his body, before the hideous
+idol of his choice. The fakir, swung upon sharp hooks, revolves
+slowly round a fire. The monk wears a hair shirt, and flagellates
+himself until blood trickles across the floor of his cell. The
+Portuguese sailor in a storm takes a leaden saint from his bosom
+and kneels before it for safety. The offending Bushman crawls in
+the dust and shudders as he seeks to avert the fury of the fetich
+which he has carved and set in a tree. The wounded brigand in the
+Apennines, with unnumbered robberies and murders on his soul,
+finds perfect ease to his conscience as his glazing eye falls on a
+carefully treasured picture of the Virgin, and he expires in a
+triumph of faith, saying, "Sweet Mother of God, intercede for me."
+The Calvinistic convert, about to be executed for his fearful
+crimes, kneels at the foot of the gallows, and exclaims, as in a
+recent well known instance, "I hold the blood of Christ between my
+soul and the flaming face of God, and die happy, assured that I am
+going to heaven."
+
+It is all a terrible delusion, arising from perverted sentiment
+and degraded thought. Of the five theoretical modes of salvation
+taught in the world, Election, Faith, Works, Knowledge, Harmony,
+one alone is real and divine, although it contains principles
+taken from all the rest and blended with its own. There is no
+salvation by foregone election; for that would dethrone the moral
+laws and deify caprice. There is no salvation by dogmatic faith;
+because faith is not a matter of will, but of evidence, not within
+man's own power, and a thousand varieties of faith are
+necessitated among men. There is no salvation by determinate
+works; for works are measurable quantities, whose rewards and
+punishments are meted and finally spent, but salvation is
+qualitative and infinite. There is no salvation by intellectual
+knowledge; for knowledge is sight, not being, an accident, not an
+essence, an attribute of one faculty, not a right state and ruling
+force in all. The true salvation is by harmony; for harmony of all
+the forces of the soul with themselves and with all related forces
+beyond, harmony of the individual will with the Divine will,
+harmony of personal action with the universal activity, what other
+negation of perdition is possible? what other definition and
+affirmation of salvation conceivable? By the Creator's fiat, man
+is first elected to be. By the guiding stimulus of faith, he is
+next animated to spiritual exertion. By the performance of good
+works, he then brings his moral nature into beautiful form and
+attitude. By knowledge of truth, he furthermore sees how to
+direct, govern, and attune himself. And finally, by the
+accomplishment of all this in the organized harmony of a wise and
+holy soul, there results that state of being whose passive
+conditions constitute salvation, and whose active experience is
+eternal life.
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+RECOGNITION OF FRIENDS IN A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+OF all the sorrows incident to human life, none is so penetrating
+to gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets,
+and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearest
+treasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of all
+the questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for a
+solution, beseeching the oracles of the universe for a response,
+none can have a more intense interest than gathers about the
+irrepressible inquiry, "Shall we ever meet again, and know, the
+friends we have lost? somewhere in the ample creation and in the
+boundless ages, join, with the old familiar love, our long parted,
+fondly cherished, never forgotten dead?" The grief of bereavement
+and the desire of reunion are experienced in an endless diversity
+of degrees by different persons, according as they are careless,
+hard, and sense bound, or thoughtful, sympathizing, and
+imaginative; undisciplined by the mysteries and afflictions of our
+mortal destiny, or profoundly tried by the disappointments and
+prophecies of time and fate; and as they are shadowed by the gloom
+of despair, or cheered by the radiance of belief. But to all who
+feel, even the least, the uncertain but deep monitions of the
+silent pall, the sad procession, and the burial mound, the
+impressive problem must occur, with frequency and power, Does the
+grave sunder us and the objects of our affection forever? or,
+across that dark gulf, shall we be united again in purer bonds?
+Outside of the atheistic dissolution and the pantheistic
+absorption, it is supposable that, surviving the blow of death,
+our spirits may return to God and run their endless course in
+divine solitude. On the other hand, it is supposable that,
+possessed with all the memories of this probationary state,
+blessed by the companionship of our earthly friends, we may aspire
+together along the interminable gradations of the world to come.
+If the former supposition be true, and the farewell of the dying
+is the announcement of an irrevocable separation, then the tears
+we shed over the shrouded clay, once so prized, should be
+distillations from Lethe's flood, to make us forget all. But if
+the latter be true, then our deadly seeming losses are as the
+partings of travellers at night to meet in the morning; and, as
+friend after friend retires, we should sigh to each departing
+spirit a kind adieu till we meet again, and let pleasing memories
+of them linger to mingle in the sacred day dreams of remaining
+life.
+
+Evidently it is of much importance to a man which of these views
+he shall take; for each exerts a distinctive influence in regard
+to his peace of mind, his moral strength, and his religious
+character. On one who believes that hereafter, beyond all the
+partings in this land of tombs, he shall never meet the dear
+companions who now bless his lot, the death of friends must fall,
+if he be a person of strong sensibilities, as a staggering blow,
+awakening an agony of sorrow, taking from the sky and the earth a
+glory nothing can ever replace, and leaving in his heart a
+wretched void nothing can ever fill. Henceforth he will be
+deprived mostly for all felt connection between them is hopelessly
+sundered of the good influences they exerted on him when present:
+he must try, by all expedients, to forget them; think no more of
+their virtues, their welcome voices and kindly deeds; wipe from
+the tablets of his soul all fond records of their united happy
+days; look not to the future, let the past be as though it had
+never been, and absorb his thoughts and feelings in the turmoil of
+the present. This is his only course; and even then, if true to
+the holiest instincts of his soul, he will find the fatal
+separation has lessened his being and impoverished his life,
+
+"For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's down lying,
+This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world
+resigning."
+
+But to him who earnestly expects soon to be restored under fairer
+auspices and in a deathless world to those from whom he parted as
+he laid their crumbling bodies in the earth, the death of friends
+will come as a message from the Great Father, a message solemn yet
+kind, laden indeed with natural sadness yet brightened by sure
+promise and followed by heavenly compensations. If his tears flow,
+they flow not in scalding bitterness from the Marah fountain of
+despair, but in chastened joy from the smitten rock of faith. So
+far from endeavoring to forget the departed, he will cling to
+their memories with redoubled tenderness, as a sacred trust and a
+redeeming power. They will be more precious to him than ever,
+stronger to purify and animate. Their saintly examples will
+attract him as never before, and their celestial voices plead from
+on high to win him to virtue and to heaven. The constant thought
+of seeing them once more, and wafting in their arms through the
+enchanted spaces of Paradise, will wield a sanctifying force over
+his spirit. They will make the invisible sphere a peopled reality
+to him, and draw him to God by the diffused bonds of a spiritual
+acquaintance and an eternal love.
+
+Since the result in which a man rests on this subject, believing
+or disbelieving that he shall recognise his beloved ones the other
+side of the grave, exerts a deep influence on him, in one case
+disheartening, in the other uplifting, it is incumbent on us to
+investigate the subject, try to get at the truth, clear it up, and
+appreciate it as well as we can. It is a theme to interest us all.
+Who has not endeared relatives, choice friends, freshly or long
+ago removed from this earth into the unknown clime? In a little
+while, as the ravaging reaper sweeps on his way, who will not have
+still more there, or be there himself? Whether old acquaintance
+shall be all forgot or be well remembered there, is an inquiry
+which must profoundly interest all who have hearts to love their
+companions, and minds to perceive the creeping shadows of mystery
+drawing over us as we approach the sure destiny of age and the dim
+confines of the world. It is a theme, far removed from noisy
+strifes and vain shows, penetrating that mysterious essence of
+affection and thought which we are. The thing of first importance
+is not the conclusion we reach, but the spirit in which we seek
+and hold it. The Christian says to his friend, "Our souls will be
+united in yonder heaven." Danton, with a horrible travesty, said
+to his comrades on the scaffold, "Our heads will meet in that
+sack."
+
+Before engaging directly in the discussion, it will be interesting
+to notice, for an instant, the verdict which history, in the
+spontaneous suppositions and rude speculations of ancient peoples,
+pronounces on this subject.1 Among their various opinions about
+the state after death, it is a prominent circumstance that they
+generally agree in conceiving it as a social state in which
+personal likenesses and memories are retained, fellow countrymen
+are grouped together, and friends united. This is minutely true of
+those nations with the details of whose faith we are acquainted,
+and is implied in the general belief of all others, except those
+who expected the individual spirit to be absorbed in the soul of
+the universe. Homer shows Ulysses and Virgil in like manner shows
+Aneas upon his entrance into the other world mutually recognising
+his old comrades and recognised by them. The two heroes whose
+inseparable friendship on earth was proverbial are still together
+in Elysium:
+
+"Then, side by side, along the dreary coast Advanced Achilles' and
+Patroclus' ghost, A friendly pair."
+
+In this representation that there was a full recognition of
+acquaintances, all the accounts of the other world given in Greek
+and Roman literature harmonize. The same is true of the accounts
+contained in the literature of the ancient Hebrews. In the Book of
+Genesis, when Jacob hears of the death of his favorite child, he
+exclaims, "I shall go down to my son Joseph in the under world,
+mourning." When the witch of Endor raised the ghost of Samuel,
+Saul knew him by the description she gave of him as he rose. The
+monarch shades in the under world are pictured by Isaiah as
+recognising the shade of the king of Babylon and rising from their
+sombre thrones to greet him with mockery. Ezekiel shows us each
+people of the heathen nations in the under world in a company by
+themselves. When David's child died, the king sorrowfully
+exclaimed, "He will not return to me; but I shall go to him." All
+these passages are based on the conception of a gloomy
+subterranean abode where the ghosts of the dead are reunited after
+their separation at death on earth. An old commentator on the
+Koran says a Mohammedan priest was once asked how the blessed in
+paradise could be happy when missing some near relative or dear
+friend whom they were thus forced to suppose in hell. He replied,
+God will either cause believers to forget such persons or else to
+rest in expectation of their coming. The anecdote shows
+affectingly that the same yearning heart and curiosity are
+possessed by Moslem and Christian. A still more impressive case in
+point is furnished by a picture in a Buddhist temple in China. The
+painting represents the story of the priest Lo Puh, who, on
+passing into paradise at death, saw his mother, Yin Te, in hell.
+He instantly descended into the infernal court, Tsin Kwang Wang,
+where she was suffering, and, by his valor, virtues, and
+intercessions, rescued her. The picture vividly portraying the
+whole story may be seen and studied at the present time by
+Christian missionaries who enter that temple of the benevolent
+Buddha.2 From the faith of many other nations illustrations might
+be brought of the same fact, that the great common instinct which
+has led men to believe in a future life has at the same time
+caused them to believe that in that life there would be a union
+and recognition of friends. Let this far reaching historical fact
+be taken at its just value,
+
+1 Alexius, Tod and Wiedersehen. Eine Gedankenfolge der besten
+Schriftsteller aller Zeiten und Volker.
+
+2 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 211.
+
+
+while we proceed to the labor in hand. The fact referred to is of
+some value, because, being an expression of the heart of man as
+God made it, it is an indication of his will, a prophecy.
+
+There are three ways of trying the problem of future recognition.
+The cool, skeptical class of persons will examine the present
+related facts of the case; argue from what they now know; test the
+question by induction and inference. Let us see to what results
+they will thus be led. In the first place, we learn upon
+reflection that we now distinguish each other by the outward form,
+physical proportion, and combination of looks, tones of voice, and
+other the like particulars. Every one has his individuality in
+these respects, by which he is separable from others. It may be
+hastily inferred, then, that if we are to know our friends
+hereafter it will be through the retention or the recovery of
+their sensible peculiarities. Accordingly, many believe the soul
+to be a perfect reflection or immaterial fac simile of the body,
+the exact correspondence in shadowy outline of its gross
+tabernacle, and consequently at once recognizable in the
+disembodied state. The literature of Christendom we may almost say
+of the world teems with exemplifications of this idea. Others,
+arguing from the same acknowledged premises, conclude that future
+recognition will be secured by the resurrection of the material
+body as it was in all its perfection, in renovated and unfading
+prime. But, leaving out of view the inherent absurdity of the
+doctrine of a physical resurrection, there is a fatal difficulty
+in the way of both these supposititious modes of mutual knowledge
+in another world. It is this. The outward form, features, and
+expression sometimes alter so thoroughly that it is impossible for
+us to recognise our once most intimate companions. Cases are not
+rare of this kind. Let one pass in absence from childhood to
+maturity, and who that had not seen him in the mean time could
+tell that it was he? The trouble arising thence is finely
+illustrated by Shakspeare in the motherly solicitude of Constance,
+who, on learning that her young son has been imprisoned by his
+uncle, King John, and will probably be kept until he pines to
+death, cries in anguish to her confessor,
+
+"Father cardinal, I have  heard you say
+That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
+If that be true, I shall see my boy again;
+For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
+To him that did but yesterday suspire,
+There was not such a gracious creature born.
+But now will canker sorrow eat my bud
+And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
+And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
+As dim and meagre as an ague's fit;
+And so he'll die; and, rising so again,
+When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
+I shall not know him: therefore never, never
+Must I behold my pretty Arthur more."
+
+Owing to the changes of all sorts which take place in the body,
+future recognition cannot safely depend upon that or upon any
+resemblance of the spirit to it. Besides, not the faintest proof
+can be adduced of any such perceptible correspondence subsisting
+between them.
+
+Turning again to the facts of experience, we find that it is not
+alone, nor indeed chiefly, by their visible forms and features
+that we know our chosen ones. We also, and far more truly, know
+them by the traits of their characters, the elements of their
+lives, the effluence of their spirits, the magic atmosphere which
+surrounds them, the electric thrill and communication which vivify
+and conjoin our souls. And even in the exterior, that which most
+reveals and distinguishes each is not the shape, but the
+expression, the lights and shades, reflected out from the immortal
+spirit shrined within. We know each other really by the mysterious
+motions of our souls. And all these things endure and act
+uninterrupted though the fleshly frame alter a thousand times or
+dissolve in its native dust. The knowledge of a friend, then,
+being independent of the body, spirits may be recognised in the
+future state by the associations mutually surrounding them, the
+feelings connecting them. Amidst all the innumerable thronging
+multitudes, through all the immeasurable intervening heights and
+depths, of the immaterial world, remembered and desired companions
+may be selected and united by inward laws that act with the ease
+and precision of chemical affinities. We may therefore recognise
+each other by the feelings which now connect us, and which shall
+spontaneously kindle and interchange when we meet in heaven, as
+the signs of our former communion.
+
+It needs but little thought to perceive that by this view future
+recognition is conditional, being made to depend on the permanence
+of our sympathies: there must be the same mutual relations,
+affinities, fitness to awaken the same emotions upon approaching
+each other's sphere, or we shall neither know nor be known. But in
+fact our sympathies and aversions change as much as our outward
+appearance does. The vices and virtues, loves and hatreds, of our
+hearts alter, the peculiar characteristics of our souls undergo as
+great a transformation, sometimes, as thorough a revolution, as
+the body does in the interval between childhood and manhood. These
+changes going on in our associates frequently change our feelings
+towards them, heightening or diminishing our affection, creating a
+new interest, destroying an old one, now making enemies lovers,
+and now thoroughly alienating very friends. Such fundamental
+alterations of character may occur in us, or in our friend, before
+we meet in the unseen state, that we shall no more recognise each
+other's spirits than we should know each other on earth after a
+separation in which our bodily appearances and voices had been
+entirely changed. These considerations would induce us to think
+that recognition hereafter is not sure, but turns on the condition
+that we preserve a remembrance, desire, and adaptedness for one
+another.
+
+If now the critical inquirer shall say there is no evidence, and
+it is incredible, that the body will be restored to a future life,
+or that the soul has any resemblance to the body by which it may
+be identified, furthermore, if he shall maintain that the doctrine
+of the revelation and recognition of the souls of friends in
+another life by an instinctive feeling, a mysterious attraction
+and response, is fanciful, an overdrawn conclusion of the
+imagination, not warranted by a stern induction of the average
+realities of the subject, and if he shall then ask, how are we to
+distinguish our former acquaintances among the hosts of heaven?
+there is one more fact of experience which meets the case and
+answers his demand. When long absence and great exposures have
+wiped off all the marks by which old companions knew each other,
+it has frequently happened that they have met and conversed with
+indifference, each being ignorant of whom the other was; and so it
+has continued until, by some indirect means, some accidental
+allusion, or the agency of a third person, they have been suddenly
+revealed. Then, with throbbing hearts, in tears and rapture, they
+have rushed into each other's arms, with an instantaneous
+recurrence of their early friendship in all its original warmth,
+fulness, and flooding associations. Many such instances are
+related in books of romance with strict truth to the actual
+occurrences of life. Several instances of it are authenticated in
+the early history of America, when children, torn from their homes
+by the Indians, were recovered by their parents after twenty or
+thirty years had elapsed and they were identified by circumstantial
+evidence. Let any parent ask his heart, any true friend ask his heart,
+if, discovering by some foreign means the object of his love,
+he would not embrace him with just as ardent a gratitude and
+devotion as though there were no outward change and they had
+known one another at sight. So, in the life beyond the
+grave, if we are not able to recognise our earthly companions
+directly, either by spiritual sight or by intuitive feeling, we
+may obtain knowledge of each other indirectly by comparison of
+common recollections, or by the mediation of angels, or by some
+other Divine arrangement especially prepared for that purpose. And
+therefore, whether in heaven we look or feel as we do here or not,
+whether there be any provision in our present constitution for
+future recognition or not, is of no consequence. In a thousand
+ways the defect can be remedied, if such be the will of God. And
+that such is his will every relevant fact and consideration would
+seem to prove. It is a consistent and seemingly requisite
+continuation and completion of that great scheme of which this
+life is a part. It is an apparently essential element and
+fulfilment of the wonderful apparatus of retribution, reward, and
+discipline, intended to educate us as members of God's eternal
+family. Because from the little which we now understand we cannot
+infer with plainness and certainty the precise means and method by
+which we can discriminate our friends in heaven need be no
+obstacle to believing the fact itself; for there are millions of
+undoubted truths whose conditions and ways of operation we can
+nowise fathom. Upon the whole, then, we conclude that we cannot by
+our mere understandings decide with certainty the question
+concerning future recognition; but we are justified in trusting to
+the accuracy of that doctrine, since it rests safely with the free
+pleasure of God, who is both infinitely able and disposed to do
+what is best, and we cannot help believing that it is best for us
+to be with and love hereafter those whom we are with and love
+here.3
+
+There is a way of dealing with the general subject before us
+wholly different from the course thus far pursued. Ceasing to act
+the philosopher, laying aside all arguments and theories, all dry
+speculations, we may come as simple believers to the Christian
+Scriptures and investigate their teachings to accept whatever they
+pronounce as the word of God's truth. Let us see to what results
+we shall thus be led. Searching the New Testament to learn its
+doctrine
+
+3 Munch, Werden wir uns wiedersehen nach dem Tode. This work,
+based on the Kantian philosophy, denies future recognition. There
+is an able reply to it by Vogel, Ueber die Hoffnung des
+Wiedersehens.
+
+
+in regard to reunion in a future state, we are very soon struck
+with surprise at the mysterious reserve, so characteristic of its
+pages, on this entire theme. Instead of a full and minute
+revelation blazing along the track of the gospel pens, a few
+fragmentary intimations, incidental hints, scattered here and
+there, are the substance of all that it expressly says. But though
+little is directly declared, yet much is plainly implied:
+especially the one great inference with which we are now concerned
+may be unequivocally and repeatedly drawn. In the parable of the
+Rich Man and the Beggar the Savior pictures forth the recognition
+of their souls in the disembodied state. Dives also is described
+as recollecting with intense interest, with the most anxious
+sympathy, his endangered brethren on earth. Although this occurs
+in a parable, yet it is likely that so prominent and vital a
+feature of it would be moulded, as to its essential significance,
+in accordance with what the author intended should be received as
+truth. Jesus also speaks of many who should come from the east and
+the west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the
+kingdom of heaven; from which it would appear that the patriarchs
+are together in fellowship and that the righteous of after times
+were to be received with them in mutual acquaintance. On the Mount
+of Transfiguration the witnessing disciples saw Moses and Elias
+together with Jesus, and recognised them, probably from their
+resemblance to traditional descriptions of them. Jesus always
+represented the future state as a society. He said to his
+followers, "I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there
+ye may be also;" and he prayed to his Father that his disciples
+might be with him where he was going. At another time he declared
+of little children, "Their angels always behold the face of my
+Father in heaven:" he also taught that "there is joy in heaven
+over every sinner that repenteth;" passages that presuppose such a
+community of faculties, sympathies, in heaven and earth, in angels
+and men, as certainly implies the doctrine of continued knowledge
+and fellowship. When heaven was opened before the dying Stephen,
+he saw and instantly knew his Divine Master, the Lord Jesus, and
+called to him to welcome his ascending spirit. Paul writes to the
+Thessalonians that he would not have them sorrow concerning the
+dead as those who have no hope, assuring them that when Christ
+reappears they shall all be united again. In the Apocalypse, John
+saw, in a vision, the souls of the martyrs, who had died for the
+faith of the gospel, together, under the altar. From community of
+suffering and a common abode together in heaven we may safely
+infer their recognition of each other. The Gospels declare that
+Christ after his death remembered his disciples and came back to
+them to assure them that they should rejoin him on high; and the
+apostles assert that we are to be with Christ and to be like him
+in the future state. It follows from the admission of these
+declarations that we shall remember our friends and be united with
+them in conscious knowledge. Few, and brief, and vague as the
+utterances of the Scriptures are in relation to this theme, they
+necessarily involve all the results of an avowed doctrine. They
+undeniably involve the supposition that in the other life we shall
+be conscious personalities as here, retaining our memories and
+constituting a society. From these implications the fact of the
+future recognition of friends irresistibly results, unless there
+be some special interference to prevent it; and such an
+interposition there is no hint of and can be no reason for
+fearing.
+
+Such is really all that we can learn from the Scriptures on the
+subject of our inquiry.4 Its indirectness and brevity would
+convince us that God did not intend to betray to us in clear light
+the secrets of the shrouded future, that for some reason it is
+best that his teaching should be so reserved, and leave us to the
+haunting wonder, the anxious surmise, the appalling mystery, the
+alluring possibilities, that now meet our gaze on the unmoving
+veil of death. God intends we shall trust in him without
+knowledge, and by faith, not by sight, pursue his guidance into
+the silent and unknown land.
+
+Therefore, after analyzing the relevant facts of present
+experience and inferring what we can from them, and after studying
+the Scriptures and finding what they say, there is yet another
+method of considering the problem of recognition in the future
+state. That is without caring for critical discussion, without
+deferring to extraneous authority, we may follow the gravitating
+force of instinct, imagination, and moral reason. We are made to
+love and depend on each other. The longer, the more profoundly, we
+know and admire the good, the more our being becomes intertwined
+with theirs, so much the more intensely we desire to be with them
+always, and so much the more awful is the agony of separation.
+This, what is it but great Nature's testimony, God's silent
+avowal, that we are to meet in eternity? Can the fearful anguish
+of bereavement be gratuitous? can the yearning prophecies of the
+smitten heart be all false? Belief in reunion hereafter is
+spontaneously adopted by humanity. We therefore esteem it divinely
+ordered or true. Without that soothing and sustaining trust, the
+unrelieved, intolerable wretchedness in many cases would burst
+through the fortress of the mind, hurl reason from its throne, and
+tear the royal affections and their attendants in the trampled
+dust of madness. Many a rarely gifted soul, unknown in his
+nameless privacy of life, has been so conjoined with a worthy
+peer, through precious bonds of unutterable sympathy, that, rather
+than be left behind, "the divided half of such a friendship as had
+mastered time," he has prayed that they, dying at once, might,
+involved together, hover across the dolorous strait to the other
+shore, and
+
+"Arrive at last the blessed goal
+Where He that died in Holy Land
+Might reach them out the shining hand
+And take them as a single soul."
+
+Denied that inmost wish, the rest of his widowed life below has
+been one melancholy strain of "In Memoriam." Many a faithful and
+noble mourner, whose garnered love and hope have been blighted for
+this world, would tell you that, without meeting his lost ones
+there, heaven itself would be no heaven to him. In such a state of
+soul we must expect to know again in an unfading clime the
+cherished dead. That belief is of Divine inspiration, an
+arrangement to heal the deadly wounds of sorrow. It is madness not
+to think it a verity. Who believes, as he shall float through the
+ambrosial airs of heaven, he could touch, in passing, the radiant
+robes of his chosen friends without a thrill of recognition, the
+prelude to a blissful and immortal communion? Is there not truth
+in the poet's picture of the meeting of child and parent in heaven?
+
+4 Harbaugh, The Heavenly Recognition. Gisborne, Recollections of
+Friends in the World to Come. Muston, Perpetuation of Christian
+Friendship.
+
+
+"It was not, mother, that I knew thy face: The luminous eclipse
+that is on it now, Though it was fair on earth, would have made it
+strange Even to one who knew as well as he loved thee; But my
+heart cried out in me, Mother!"
+
+Think of the unfathomable yearnings, the infinite ecstasies of
+desire and faith from age to age swelling in the very heart of the
+world, all set on the one hope of future union, and who then can
+believe that God will coldly blast them all? They are innocent,
+they are holy, they are meritorious, they are unspeakably dear. We
+would not destroy them; and God will not.
+
+Man's life is the true fable of that beautiful youth, Narcissus,
+who had a twin sister of remarkable loveliness, strongly
+resembling himself, and to whom he was most tenderly attached. She
+dies young. He frequents fountains to gaze upon his own image
+reflected in the waters, it seeming to him the likeness of her he
+has lost. He is in pity transformed into a flower on the border of
+a stream, where, bending on his fragile stem, he seeks his image
+in the waters murmuring by, until he fades and dies. Has not God,
+the all loving Author who composed the sweet poem of Man and
+Nature, written at the close a reconciling Elysium wherein these
+pure lovers, the fond Narcissus and his echo mate, shall wander in
+perennial bliss, their embracing forms mirrored in unruffled
+fountains?
+
+Looking now for the conclusion of the whole matter, we find that
+it lies in three different aspects, both of inquiring thought and
+of practical morality, according to the lights and modes in which
+three different classes of minds approach it. To the consistent
+metaphysician, reasoning rigidly on grounds of science and
+philosophy, every thing pertaining to the methods and circumstances
+of the future life is an affair of entire uncertainty and hypothesis.5
+If in the future state the soul retains its individuality as an
+identical force, form, life, and memory, and if associates in the
+present state are brought together, it is probable that old friends
+will recognise each other. But if they are oblivious of the past,
+if they are incommunicably separated in space or state, if one
+progresses so much farther that the other can never overtake him,
+if the personal soul blends its individual consciousness with the
+unitary consciousness of the Over Soul, if it commences a new career
+from a fresh psychical germ, then, by the terms, there will be no
+mutual recognition. In that case his comfort and his duty are to
+know that the anguish and longing he now feels will cease then; to
+trust in the benignity of the Infinite Wisdom, who knows best what
+to appoint for his creatures; and to submit with harmonizing
+resignation to the unalterable decree, offering his private wish a
+voluntary sacrifice on the altar of natural piety. That he shall
+know his friends hereafter is not impossible, not improbable;
+neither is it certain. He may desire it, expect it, but not with
+speculative pride dogmatically affirm it, nor with insisting
+egotism presumptuously demand it.
+
+5 Gravell, Das Wiedersehen nach dem Tode. Wie es nur sein konne.
+
+To the uncritical Christian the recognising reunion of friends in
+heaven is an unshaken assurance.6 There is nothing to disturb his
+implicit reception of the plain teaching of Scripture. The
+legitimate exhortations of his faith are these. Mourn not too
+bitterly nor too long over your absent dead; for you shall meet
+them in an immortal clime. As the last hour comes for your dearest
+ones or for yourself, be of good cheer; for an imperishable joy is
+yours. You:
+
+"Cannot lose the hope that many a year
+Hath shone on a gleaming way,
+When the walls of life are closing round
+And the sky grows sombre gray."
+
+Put not away the intruding thoughts of the departed, but let them
+often recur. The dead are constant. You know not how much they may
+think of you, how near they may be to you. Will you pass to meet
+them not having thought of them for years, having perhaps
+forgotten them? Let your mind have its nightly firmament of
+religious communion, beneath which white and sable memories shall
+walk, and the sphered spirits of your risen friends, like stars,
+shed down their holy rays to soothe your feverish cares and hush
+every murmuring doubt to rest. From the dumb heavings of your
+loving and trustful heart, sometimes exclaim, Parents who nurtured
+and watched over me with unwearied affection, I would remember you
+oft, and love you well, and so live that one day I may meet you at
+the right hand of God. Early friends, so close and dear once, who
+in the light of young romance trod with me life's morning hills,
+neither your familiar faces nor your sweet communion are forgotten
+by me: I fondly think of you, and aspire towards you, and pray for
+a purer soul, that I may mount to your celestial circle at last;
+
+"For many a tear these eyes must weep,
+And many a sin must be forgiven,
+Ere these pale lids shall sink to sleep,
+Ere you and I shall meet in heaven."
+
+Blessed Jesus, elder Brother of our race, who sittest now by thy
+Father's throne, or pacest along the crystal coast as a leader,
+chief among ten thousand, whose condescending brow the bloody
+thorns no longer press, but the dazzling crown of thy Divinity
+encircles, oh, remember us, poor erring pilgrims after thine
+earthly steps; pity us, help us, and after death bring us to thy
+home.
+
+To the sympathetic poet, the man of sentiment and meditation, who
+views the question from the position of the heart, in the glory
+and vistas of the imagination, but with all the known facts and
+relations of the subject lying bare under his sight, the uniting
+restoration, in another sphere, of earth's broken ties and parted
+friends, is an unappeasable craving of the soul, in harmony with
+the moral law, powerfully prophesied to his experience from all
+quarters, and seemingly confirmed to his hopes by every promise of
+God and nature.7
+
+6 Grafe, Biblische Beitrage zu der Frage, Werden wir uns
+wiedersehen nach dem Tode.
+
+7 Engel, Wir werden uns wiedersehen. Halst, Beleuchtung der
+Hauptgrunde fur den Glauben an Erinnerung und Wiedersehen nach dem
+Tode. Streicher, Neue Beitrage zur Kritik des Glaubens an
+Ruckerinnerung nach dem Tode.
+
+
+Received as a truth, it is a well of inexhaustible comfort, making
+experience a green oasis where it overflows. The denial of it as a
+proven falsehood is a withering blast of dust blowing on the
+friendly caravan of sojourners in the desert of life. If existence
+is the enjoyment of a largess of social love, and death is to have
+a solitary hand snatch it all away forever, how dismal is the
+prospect to the poor heart that loves and clings, loses and
+despairs, and can only falter hopelessly on! It cannot be so. Love
+is the true prophet. Heaven will restore the treasures earth has
+lost.
+
+The mourner by the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel!
+Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn of
+Washington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is
+the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the
+pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast
+in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings
+above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were
+brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in history
+to brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears of
+her grief and faith into the future to restore her deceased
+children to life and draw them together within her embrace. And
+that sublime Rachel will not easily be comforted except when her
+thoughts, migrating whither her offspring have gone, seem to find
+them happy in some happy heaven.
+
+The poet, lover of his race, who cannot trust his happier
+instinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line of
+mortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helps
+to a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of two
+possible contemplations.8 He may sadly lay upon his heart the
+stifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness,
+but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstone
+of my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowd
+the capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, In the
+unchangeable fulness of an infinite bliss, all specialties will be
+merged and forgotten, and I shall be one of those to whom "the
+wearisome disease" of remembered sorrow and anticipated joy "is an
+alien thing."
+
+8 Wieland's Euthanasia expresses disbelief in the preservation of
+personality and consciousness after death. The same ground had
+been taken in the work published anonymously at Halle in 1775,
+Plato and Leibnitz jenseits des Styx. See, on the other side of
+the question, Wohlfahrt, Tempel der Unsterblichkeit, oder neue
+Anthologie der wichtigsten Ausspruche, besonders neuerer Weisen
+uber Wiedersehen u. s. w.
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE.
+
+ACCORDING to the imagining of some speculative geologists, perhaps
+this earth first floated in the abyss as a volume of vapor,
+wreathing its enormous folds of mist in fantastic shapes as it was
+borne along on the idle breath of law. Ages swept by, until this
+stupendous fog ball was condensed into an ocean of fire, whose
+billows heaved their lurid bosoms and reared their ashy crests
+without a check, while their burning spray illuminated its track
+around the sable vault. During periods which stagger computation,
+this molten world was gradually cooled down; constant rivers wrung
+from the densely swathing vapor poured over the heated mass and at
+last submerged its crust in an immense sea. Then, for unknown
+centuries, fire, water, and wind waged a Titanic war, that
+imagination shudders to think of, jets of flame licking the stars,
+massive battlements and columns of fire piled to terrific heights,
+now the basin of the sea suddenly turned into a glowing caldron
+and the atmosphere saturated with steam, again explosions hurling
+mountains far into space and tearing the earth open in ghastly
+rents to its very heart. At length the fire was partially subdued,
+the peaceful deep glassed the sky in its bosom or rippled to the
+whispers of the breeze, and from amidst the fertile slime and
+mould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces of
+organic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation.
+Thousands of years rolled on. The world ocean subsided, the peaks
+of mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged,
+and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, a
+gigantic growth of grass, every blade as large as our vastest oak,
+shot from the soil, and the incalculable epoch of ferns commenced,
+whose tremendous harvest clothed the whole land with a deep carpet
+of living verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetation
+were successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the dark
+layers of inexhaustible coal beds, the world, one waving
+wilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless and
+silent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all its
+magnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavily
+surcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerable
+ages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching its
+limit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, the
+earliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugs
+of the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during which
+animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by
+plesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feet
+in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight
+loaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea,
+the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the
+nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, when
+millions of aons had worn away, the creative process culminated in
+Humanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let us
+make man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with upright
+form, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on the
+summit of the world and gave names to all the races of creatures
+beneath.1
+
+At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whether
+man is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan for
+this world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to be
+superseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, and
+attributes transcending our conceptions, even as our own
+transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence.
+Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and
+making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of
+the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast,
+crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep
+for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have
+replied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world.
+What animal can there be superior to me? beyond a question, my
+race shall possess the earth forever!" The mastodon could not know
+any uses of nature except those he was fitted to experience, nor
+imagine a being with the form and prerogatives of man. Therefore
+he would not believe that the mastodon race would ever be
+displaced by the human. We labor under the same disqualification
+for judgment. There may be in the system of nature around us
+adaptations, gifts, glories, as much higher than any we enjoy as
+our noblest powers and privileges are in advance of those of the
+tiger or the lark.
+
+It is a remarkable fact that the mature states of the antediluvian
+races correspond with the foetal states of the present races, and
+that the foetal states of embryonic man are counterparts of the
+mature states of the lower races now contemporaneous with him.
+This great discovery of modern science, though perhaps destitute
+of logical value, suggests to the imagination the thought that man
+may be but the foetal state of a higher being, a regent
+temporarily presiding here until the birth and inauguration of the
+true king of the world, and destined himself to be born from the
+womb of this world into the free light and air of the spirit
+kingdom!
+
+The resources of God are inexhaustible; and in the evolution of
+his prearranged ages it may be that there will arise upon the
+earth a race of beings of unforetold majesty, who shall disinter
+the remnant bones and ponder the wrecked monuments of forgotten
+man as we do those of the disgusting reptiles of the Saurian
+epoch. But this is a mere conceit of possibility; and, so far as
+the data for forming an opinion are in our hands, it is altogether
+incredible. So far as appears, the adaptation between man and the
+earth is exhaustive. He is able to subdue all her forces, reign
+over all her provinces, enjoy all her delights, and gather into
+his consciousness all her prophecies. And our practical conviction
+is absolute that the race of men is the climax of being destined
+for this earth, and that they will occupy its hospitable bosom
+forever with their toils and their homes, their sports and their
+graves.2
+
+The other question is this: Was the subjection of the human race
+to physical death a part of the Creator's original plan, or the
+retributive result of a subsequent dislocation of that plan by
+sin? a part of the great harmony of nature, or a discord marring
+the happy destiny
+
+1 Harris, The Pre Adamite Earth.
+
+2 Agassiz says no higher creature than man is to be expected on
+earth, because the capacities of the earthly plan of organic
+creation are completed and exhausted with him. Introduction to
+Study of Natural History, p. 57.
+
+
+of man? Approaching this problem on grounds of science and reason
+alone, there can be no hesitation as to the reply. There are but
+two considerations really bearing upon the point and throwing
+light upon it; and they both force us to the same conclusion.
+First, it is a fact admitting no denial that death was the
+predetermined natural fate of the successive generations of the
+races that preceded man. Now, what conceivable reason is there for
+supposing that man, constructed from the same elements, living
+under the same organic laws, was exempt from the same doom? There
+is not in the whole realm of science a single hint to that effect.
+Secondly, the reproductive element an essential feature in the
+human constitution, leading our kind to multiply and replenish the
+earth is a demonstration that the office of death entered into
+God's original plan of the world. For otherwise the earth at this
+moment could not hold a tithe of the inhabitants that would be
+demanding room. When God had permitted this world to roll in space
+for awful ages, a lifeless globe of gas, fire, water, earth, and
+then let it be occupied for incommensurable epochs more by snails,
+vermin, and iguanodons, would he wind up the whole scene and
+destroy it when the race of man, crowning glory of all, had only
+flourished for a petty two thousand years? It is not credible. And
+yet it must have been so unless it was decreed that the successive
+generations should pass away and thus leave space for, the new
+comers. We conclude, then, that it is the will of God and was in
+the beginning that the human race shall possess the earth through
+all the unknown periods of the future, the parents continually
+passing off the stage in death as the children rise upon it to
+maturity. We cannot discern any authority in those old traditions
+which foretell the impending destruction of the world. On what
+grounds are we to believe them? The great system of things is a
+stable harmony. There is no wear or tear in the perfect machinery
+of the creation, rolling noiseless in its blue bearings of ether.
+It seems, comparatively speaking, to have just begun. Its
+oscillations are self adjusted, and science prophesies for
+humanity an illimitable career on this earthly theatre. The swift
+melting of the elements and restoration of chaos is a mere heathen
+whim or a poetic figment. It is the bards who sing,
+
+"The earth shall shortly die. Her grave is dug. I see the worlds,
+night clad, all gathering In long and dark procession. And the
+stars, Which stand as thick as glittering dewdrops on The fields
+of heaven, shall pass in blazing mist."
+
+Such pictures are delusion winning the imagination, not truth
+commanding the reason. In spite of all the Cassandra screams of
+the priesthood, vaticinating universal ruin, the young old earth,
+fresh every spring, shall remain under God's preserving
+providence, and humanity's inexhaustible generations renewedly
+reign over its kingdoms, forever. Plotinus said, "If God repents
+having made the world, why does he defer its destruction? If he
+does not yet repent, he never will, as being now accustomed to it,
+and becoming through time more friendly to it."
+
+3 Lucan says, "Our bones and the stars shall be mingled on one
+funeral pyre." Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra
+Misturus.
+
+But to receive such a good piece of poetry as veritable prevision
+is surely a puerile error which a mature mind in the nineteenth
+century should be ashamed to commit.
+
+The most recently broached theory of the end of the world is that
+developed from some remarkable speculations as to the composition
+and distribution of force. The view is briefly this. All force is
+derived from heat. All heat is derived from the sun.4 The
+mechanical value of a cubic mile of sunlight at the surface of the
+earth is one horse power for a third of a minute; at the sun it is
+fifteen thousand horse power for a minute. Now, it is calculated
+that enough heat is radiated from the sun to require for its
+production the annual consumption of the whole surface of the sun
+to the depth of from ten to twenty miles. Of course, ultimately
+the fuel will be all expended; then the forces of the system will
+expire, and the creation will die.5 This brilliant and sublime
+theorem assumes, first, that the heat of the sun arises from
+consumption of matter, which may not be true; secondly, that it is
+not a self replenishing process, as it certainly may be. Some have
+even surmised that the zodiacal light is an illuminated tornado of
+stones showering into the sun to feed its tremendous
+conflagration. The whole scheme is a fine toy, but a very faint
+terror. Even if it be true, then we are to perish at last from
+lack of fire, and not, as commonly feared, from its abundance!
+
+The belief of mankind that a soul or ghost survives the body has
+been so nearly universal as to appear like the spontaneous result
+of an instinct. We propose to trace the history of opinions
+concerning the physical destination of this disembodied spirit,
+its connection with localities, to give the historical topography
+of the future life.
+
+The earliest conception of the abode of the dead was probably that
+of the Hebrew Sheol or the Greek Hades, namely, the idea born from
+the silence, depth, and gloom of the grave of a stupendous
+subterranean cavern full of the drowsy race of shades, the
+indiscriminate habitation of all who leave the land of the living.
+Gradually the thought arose and won acceptance that the favorites
+of Deity, peerless heroes and sages, might be exempt from this
+dismal fate, and migrate at death to some delightful clime beyond
+some far shore, there, amidst unalloyed pleasures, to spend
+immortal days. This region was naturally located on the surface of
+the earth, where the cheerful sun could shine and the fresh
+breezes blow, yet in some untrodden distance, where the gauntlet
+of fact had not smitten the sceptre of fable. The paltry portion
+of this earth familiar to the ancients was surrounded by an
+unexplored region, which their fancy, stimulated by the legends of
+the poets, peopled with mythological kingdoms, the rainbow bowers
+and cloudy synods of Olympus, from whose glittering peak the
+Thunderer threw his bolts over the south; the Golden Garden of the
+
+3 Ennead ii. lib. ix.: Contra Gnosticos, cap. 4.
+
+4 Helmholtz, Edinburgh Phil. Msg., series iv. vol. xi.:
+Interaction of Natural Forces.
+
+5 Thomson, Ibid. Dec. 1854: Mechanical Energies of the Solar
+System.
+
+
+Hesperides, whose dragons lay on guard in the remote west; the
+divine cities of Meru, whose encircling towers pierced the eastern
+sky; the Banquet Halls of Ethiopia, gleaming through the fiery
+desert; the fragrant Islands of Immortality, musical and luring in
+the central ocean; the happy land of the Hyperboreans, beyond the
+snowy summits of northern Caucasus:
+
+"How pleasant were the wild beliefs That dwelt in legends old!
+Alas! to our posterity Will no such tales be told. We know too
+much: scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves: Our only
+point of ignorance Is centred in ourselves."
+
+There was a belief among the Persians that Kaf, a mountain two
+thousand miles high, formed a rim to the flat world and prevented
+travellers from ever falling off.6 The fact that the earth is a
+globe inhabited on all sides is a comparatively recent piece of
+knowledge. So late as in the eighth century Pope Zachary accused
+Virgilius, an Irish mathematician and monk, of heresy for
+believing in the existence of antipodes.7 St. Boniface wrote to
+the Pope against Virgilius; and Zachary ordered a council to be
+held to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against God
+and his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine." To the
+ancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknown
+land, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement.
+Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hindu
+placed the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalized
+men.8 Under the attraction of a mystic curiosity, well might the
+old, wearied Ulysses say,
+
+"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push
+off, and, sitting well in order, smite The sounding furrows; for
+my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all
+the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash
+us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the
+great Achilles, whom we knew."
+
+Decius Brutus and his army, as Florus relates, reaching the coast
+of Portugal, where, for the first time, they saw the sun setting
+in the blood tinged ocean, turned back their standards with horror
+as they beheld "the huge corpse of ruddy gold let down into the
+deep." The Phoenician traders brought intelligence to Greece of a
+people, the Cimmerians, who dwelt on the borders of Hades in the
+umbered realms of perpetual night. To the dying Roman, on the
+farthest verge of the known horizon hovered a vision of Elysian
+Fields. And the American
+
+6 Adventures of Hatim Tai, p. 36, note.
+
+7 Whewell, Hist. Inductive Sciences, vol. i. book iv. ch. i. sect.
+7.
+
+8 Wilford, Essays on the Sacred Isles, In Asiatic Researches,
+vols. viii. xi.
+
+
+Indian, sinking in battle or the chase, caught glimpses of happier
+Hunting Grounds, whose woods trooped with game, and where the
+arrows of the braves never missed, and there was no winter. There
+was a pretty myth received among some of the ancient Britons,
+locating their paradise in a spot surrounded by tempests, far in
+the Western Ocean, and named Flath Innis, or Noble Island.9 The
+following legend is illustrative. An old man sat thoughtful on a
+rock beside the sea. A cloud, under whose squally skirts the
+waters foamed, rushed down; and from its dark womb issued a boat,
+with white sails bent to the wind, and hung round with moving
+oars. Destitute of mariners, itself seemed to live and move. A
+voice said, "Arise, behold the boat of heroes: embark, and see the
+Green Isle of those who have passed away!" Seven days and seven
+nights he voyaged, when a thousand tongues called out, "The Isle!
+the Isle!" The black billows opened before him, and the calm land
+of the departed rushed in light on his eyes. We are reminded by
+this of what Procopius says concerning the conveyal of the soul of
+the barbarian to his paradise. At midnight there is a knocking at
+the door, and indistinct voices call him to come. Mysteriously
+impelled, he goes to the sea coast, and there finds a frail, empty
+wherry awaiting him. He embarks, and a spirit crew row him to his
+destination.10
+
+"He finds with ghosts His boat deep freighted, sinking to the edge
+Of the dark flood, and voices hears, yet sees No substance; but,
+arrived where once again His skiff floats free, hears friends to
+friends Give lamentable welcome. The unseen Shore faint resounds,
+and all the mystic air Breathes forth the names of parent,
+brother, wife."
+
+During that period of poetic credulity while the face of the earth
+remained to a great extent concealed from knowledge, wherever the
+Hebrew Scriptures were known went the cherished traditions of the
+Garden of Eden from which our first parents were driven for their
+sin. Speculation naturally strove to settle the locality of this
+lost paradise. Sometimes it was situated in the mysterious bosom
+of India; sometimes in the flowery vales of Georgia, where roses
+and spices perfumed the gales; sometimes in the guarded recesses
+of Mesopotamia. Now it was the Grand Oasis in the Arabian desert,
+flashing on the wilted pilgrim, over the blasted and blazing
+wastes, with the verdure of palms, the play of waters, the smell
+and flavor of perennial fruits. Again it was at the equator, where
+the torrid zone stretched around it as a fiery sword waving every
+way so that no mortal could enter. In the "Imago Mundi," a Latin
+treatise on cosmography written early in the twelfth century, we
+read, "Paradise is the extreme eastern part of Asia, and is made
+inaccessible by a wall of fire surrounding it and rising unto
+heaven." At a later time the Canaries were thought to be the
+ancient Elysium, and were accordingly named the Fortunate Isles.
+Indeed, among the motives that animated
+
+9 Macpherson, Introduction to the History of Great Britain and
+Ireland, pp. 180-186.
+
+10 Procopius, Gothica, lib. iv.
+
+
+Columbus on his adventurous voyage no inferior place must be
+assigned to the hope of finding the primeval seat of Paradise.11
+The curious traveller, exploring these visionary spots one by one,
+found them lying in the light of common day no nearer heaven than
+his own natal home; and at last all faith in them died out when
+the whole surface of the globe had been surveyed, no nook left
+wherein romance and superstition might any longer play at hide and
+seek.
+
+Continuing our search after the local abode of the departed, we
+now leave the surface of the earth and descend beneath it. The
+first haunted region we reach is the realm of the Fairies, which,
+as every one acquainted with the magic lore of old Germany or
+England knows, was situated just under the external ground, and
+was clothed with every charm poets could imagine or the heart
+dream. There was supposed to be an entrance to this enchanted
+domain at the Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, and at several other
+places. Sir Walter Scott has collected some of the best legends
+illustrative of this belief in his "History of Demonology." Sir
+Gawaine, a famous knight of the Round Table, was once admitted to
+dine, above ground, in the edge of the forest, with the King of
+the Fairies:
+
+"The banquet o'er, the royal Fay, intent
+To do all honor to King Arthur's knight,
+Smote with his rod the bank on which they leant,
+And Fairy land flash'd glorious on the sight;
+Flash'd, through a silvery, soft, translucent mist,
+The opal shafts and domes of amethyst;
+Flash'd founts in shells of pearl, which crystal walls
+And phosphor lights of myriad hues redouble.
+There, in the blissful subterranean halls,
+When morning wakes the world of human trouble
+Glide the gay race; each sound our discord knows,
+Faint heard above, but lulls them to repose."
+
+To this empire of moonlit swards and elfin dances, of jewelled
+banks, lapsing streams, and enchanting visions, it was thought a
+few favored mortals might now and then find their way. But this
+was never an earnest general faith. It was a poetic superstition
+that hovered over fanciful brains, a legendary dream that pleased
+credulous hearts; and, with the other romance of the early world,
+it has vanished quite away.
+
+The popular belief of Jews, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Germans,
+and afterwards of Christians, was that there was an immense world
+of the dead deep beneath the earth, subdivided into several
+subordinate regions. The Greenlanders believed in a separated
+heaven and hell, both located far below the Polar Ocean. According
+to the old classic descriptions of the under world, what a scene
+of colossal gloom it is! Its atmosphere murmurs with a breath of
+plaintive sighs. Its population, impalpable ghosts timidly
+flitting at every motion,
+
+11 Irving, Life of Columbus: Appendix on the Situation of the
+Terrestrial Paradise. By far the most valuable book ever published
+on this subject is that of Schulthess, Das Paradies, das irdische
+und uberirdische historische, mythische und mystische, nebst einer
+kritischen Revision der allgemelnen biblischen Geographie.
+
+
+crowd the sombre landscapes in numbers surpassing imagination.
+There Cocytus creeps to the seat of doom, his waves emitting
+doleful wails. Styx, nine times enfolding the whole abode, drags
+his black and sluggish length around. Charon, the slovenly old
+ferryman, plies his noiseless boat to and fro laden with shadowy
+passengers. Far away in the centre grim Pluto sits on his ebony
+throne and surveys the sad subjects of his dreadful domain. By his
+side sits his stolen and shrinking bride, Proserpine, her
+glimmering brows encircled with a wreath of poppies. Above the
+subterranean monarch's head a sable rainbow spans the infernal
+firmament; and when, with lifted hand, he announces his decrees,
+the applause given by the twilight populace of Hades is a rustle
+of sighs, a vapor of tears, and a shudder of submission.
+
+The belief in this dolorous kingdom was early modified by the
+reception of two other adjacent realms, one of reward, one of
+torture; even as Goethe says, in allusion to the current Christian
+doctrine, "Hell was originally but one apartment: limbo and
+purgatory were afterwards added as wings." Passing through Hades,
+and turning in one direction, the spirit traveller would arrive at
+Elysium or Abraham's bosom:
+
+"To paradise the gloomy passage winds Through regions drear and
+dismal, and through pain, Emerging soon in beatific blaze Of
+light."
+
+There the blessed ones found respite and peaceful joys in flowery
+fields, pure breezes, social fellowship, and the similitudes of
+their earthly pursuits. In this placid clime, lighted by its own
+constellations, favored souls roamed or reposed in a sort of
+ineffectual happiness. According to the pagans, here were such
+heroes as Achilles, such sages as Socrates, to remain forever, or
+until the end of the world. And here, according to the Christians,
+the departed patriarchs and saints were tarrying expectant of
+Christ's arrival to ransom them. Dante thus describes that great
+event:
+
+"Then he, who well my covert meaning knew,
+Answer'd, Herein I had not long been bound,
+When an All puissant One I saw march through,
+With victory's radiant sign triumphal crown'd.
+He led from us our Father Adam's shade,
+Abel and Noah, whom God loved the most,
+Lawgiving Moses, him who best obey'd,
+Abraam the patriarch, royal David's ghost;
+Israel, his father, and his sons, and her
+Whom Israel served for, faithfully and long,
+Rachel, with more, to bliss did He transfer:
+No souls were saved before this chosen throng." 12
+
+At the opposite extremity of Hades was supposed to be an opening
+that led down into Tartarus, "a place made underneath all things,
+so low and horrible that hell is its heaven." Here the old earth
+giants, the looming Titans, lay, bound, transfixed with
+thunderbolts, their
+
+12 Parsons's trans. Dell' Inferno, canto iv. ii. 55-63.
+
+
+mountainous shapes half buried in rocks, encrusting lava, and
+ashes. Rivers of fire seam the darkness, whose borders are braided
+with sentinel furies. On every hand the worst criminals,
+perjurers, blasphemers, ingrates, groan beneath the pitiless
+punishments inflicted on them without escape. Any realization of
+the terrific scenery of this whole realm would curdle the blood.13
+There were fabled entrances to the dread under world at Acherusia,
+in Bithynia, at Avernus, in Campania, where Ulysses evoked the
+dead and traversed the grisly abodes, through the Sibyl's cave at
+Cuma, at Hermione, in Argolis, where the people thought the
+passage below so near and easy that they neglected to give the
+dying an obolus to pay ferriage to Charon, at Tanarus, the
+southern most point of Peloponnesus, where Herakles went down and
+dragged the three headed dog up into day, at the cave of
+Trophonius, in Lebadea, and at several other places.
+
+Similar conceptions have been embodied in the ecclesiastical
+doctrine which has generally prevailed in Christendom. Locating
+the scene in the hollow of the earth, thus has it been described
+by Milton,
+
+"A dungeon horrible on all sides round As one great furnace
+flamed; yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness
+visible, Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of
+anguish, doleful shades, where peace Nor hope can come, but
+torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge fed With ever
+burning sulphur unconsumed;" wherein, confined by adamantine
+walls, the fallen angels and all the damned welter overwhelmed
+with floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire. Shapes once
+celestially fair and proud, but now scarred from battle and
+darkened by sin into faded forms of haggard splendor, support
+their uneasy steps over the burning marl. Everywhere shrieks and
+moans resound, and the dusky vault of pandemonium is lighted by a
+blue glare cast pale and dreadful from the tossings of the flaming
+lake. This was hell, where the wicked must shrink and howl
+forever. Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli, Hecla, were believed to be
+vent holes from this bottomless and living pit of fire. The famous
+traveller, Sir John Maundeville, asserted that he found a descent
+into hell "in a perilous vale" in the dominions of Prester John.
+Many a cavern in England still bears the name of "Hell hole." In a
+dialogue between a clerk and a master, preserved in an old Saxon
+catechism, the following question and reply occur: "Why is the sun
+so red when she sets?" "Because she looks down upon hell."
+Antonius Rusca, a learned professor at Milan, in the year 1621,
+published a huge quarto in five books, giving a detailed
+topographical account of the interior of the earth, hell,
+purgatory, and limbo.14 There is a lake in the south of Ireland in
+which is an island containing a cavern said to open down into
+hell. This cave
+
+13 Descriptions of the sufferings of hell, according to the
+popular notions at different periods, are given in the work
+published at Weimar in 1817, Das Rad der ewigen Hollenqual. In den
+Curiositaten der physisch literarisch artistisch historischen Vor
+und Mitwelt, band vi. st. 2.
+
+14 De Inferno et Statn Damonum ante Mundi Exitium.
+
+
+is called St. Patrick's Purgatory, and the pretence obtained quite
+general credit for upwards of five centuries. Crowds of pilgrims
+visited the place. Some who had the hardihood to venture in were
+severely pinched, beaten, and burned, by the priests within,
+disguised as devils, and were almost frightened out of their wits
+by the diabolical scenes they saw where
+
+"Forth from the depths of flame that singed the gloom Despairing
+wails and piercing shrieks were heard."
+
+Several popes openly preached in behalf of this gross imposition;
+and the Church virtually authorized it by receiving the large
+revenues accruing from it, until at last outraged common sense
+demanded its repudiation and suppression.15
+
+Few persons now, as they walk the streets and fields, are much
+disturbed by the thought that, not far below, the vivid lake of
+fire and brimstone, greedily roaring for new food, heaves its
+tortured surges convulsed and featured with souls. Few persons now
+shudder at a volcanic eruption as a premonishing message freshly
+belched from hell.16 In fact, the old belief in a local physical
+hell within the earth has almost gone from the public mind of to
+day. It arose from pagan myths and figures of speech based on
+ignorant observation and arbitrary fancy, and with the growth of
+science and the enlightenment of reason it has very extensively
+fallen and faded away. No honest and intelligent inquirer into the
+matter can find the slightest valid support for such a notion. It
+is now a mere tradition, upheld by groundless authority. And yet
+the dim shadow of that great idea of a subterranean hell which
+once burned so fierce and lurid in the brain of Christendom still
+vaguely haunts the modern world. The dogma still lies in the
+prevalent creeds, and is occasionally dragged out and brandished
+by fanatic preachers. The transmitted literature and influences of
+the past are so full of it that it cannot immediately cease.
+Accordingly, while the common understanding no longer grasps it as
+a definite verity, it lingers in the popular fancy as a half
+credible image. The painful attempts made now and then by some
+antiquated or fanatical clergyman to compel attention to it and
+belief in it as a tangible fact of science, as well as an
+unquestionable revelation of Scripture, scarcely win a passing
+notice, but provoke a significant smile. Father Passaglia, an
+eminent Jesuit theologian, in 1856 published in Italy a work on
+the Literality of Hell Fire and the Eternity of the Punishments of
+the Damned. He says, "In this world fire burns by chemical
+operations; but in hell it burns by the breath of the Lord!" The
+learned and venerable Faber, a voluminous author and distinguished
+English divine, published in the year 1851 a large octavo entitled
+"The Many Mansions in the House of the Father," discussing with
+elaborate detail the question as to the locality of the scenes
+awaiting souls after death. His grand conclusion the unreasonableness
+of which will be apparent without comment is as follows:
+"The saints having first risen with Christ into the highest
+regions of the air, out of reach of the dreadful heat, the
+tremendous flood of fire hitherto detained inside the earth will
+be let loose, and an awful conflagration rage till the whole
+material globe is dissipated into sublimated particles. Then the
+world will be formed anew, in three parts. First, there will be
+
+15 Wright, St. Patrick's Purgatory: an Essay on the Legends of
+Paradise, Hell, and Purgatory, current during the Middle Ages.
+
+16 Patuzzi, De Sede inferni in Terris quarenda.
+
+
+a solid central sphere of fire the flaming nucleus of Gehenna two
+thousand miles in diameter. Secondly, there shall roll around this
+central ball on all sides an ignited ocean of liquid fire two
+thousand miles in depth, the peculiar residence of the wicked, the
+sulphurous lake spoken of in the Apocalypse. Thirdly, around this
+infernal sea a vast spherical arch will hang, a thousand miles
+thick, a massive and unbroken shell, through which there are no
+spiracles, and whose external surface, beautiful beyond
+conception, becomes the heaven of the redeemed, where Christ
+himself, perfect man as well as perfect God, fixes his residence
+and establishes the local sovereignty of the Universal Archangel."
+17 A comfortable thought it must be for the saints, as they roam
+the flowery fields, basking in immortal bliss, to remember that
+under the crust they tread, a soundless sea of fire is forever
+plunging on its circular course, all its crimson waves packed with
+the agonized faces of the damned as thick as drops! The whole
+scheme is without real foundation. Science laughs at such a
+theory. Its scriptural supports are either ethnic figments or
+rhetorical tropes. Reason, recollecting the immateriality of the
+soul, dissipates the ghastly dream beyond the possibility of
+restoration to belief.
+
+Following the historic locations of the abode of departed souls,
+we next ascend from the interior of the earth, and above the
+surface of the earth, into the air and the lofty realms of ether.
+The ancient Caledonians fixed the site of their spirit world in
+the clouds. Their bards have presented this conception in manifold
+forms and with the most picturesque details. In tempests the
+ghosts of their famous warriors ride on the thunderbolts, looking
+on the earth with eyes of fire, and hurling lances of lightning.
+They float over the summits of the hills or along the valleys in
+wreaths of mist, on vapory steeds, waving their shadowy arms in
+the moonlight, the stars dimly glimmering through their visionary
+shapes. The Laplanders also placed their heaven in the upper air,
+where the Northern Lights play. They regarded the auroral
+streamers as the sport of departed spirits in the happy region to
+which they had risen. Such ideas, clad in the familiar imagery
+furnished by their own climes, would naturally be suggested to the
+ignorant fancy, and easily commended to the credulous thoughts, of
+the Celts and Finns. Explanation and refutation are alike
+unnecessary.
+
+Plutarch describes a theory held by some of the ancients locating
+hell in the air, elysium in the moon.18 After death all souls are
+compelled to spend a period in the region between the earth and
+the moon, the wicked in severe tortures and for a longer time, the
+good in a mild discipline soon purging away all their stains and
+fitting them for the lunar paradise. After tarrying a season
+there, they were either born again upon the earth, or transported
+to the divine realm of the sun. Macrobius, too, says, "The
+Platonists reckon as the infernal
+
+17 Part iv. chap. ix. p. 417. Dr. Cumming (The End, Lect. X.)
+teaches the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the flesh, and
+the subsequent residence of the redeemed on this globe as their
+eternal heaven under the immediate rule of Christ. Quite a full
+detail of the historic and present belief in this scheme may be
+found in the recent work of its earnest advocate, D. T. Taylor,
+The Voice of the Church on the Coming of the Redeemer, or a
+History of the Doctrine of the Reign of Christ on Earth.
+
+18 In his Essay on the Face in the Orb of the Moon.
+
+
+region the whole space between the earth and the moon."19 He also
+adds, "The tropical signs Cancer and Capricorn are called the
+gates of the sun, because there he meets the solstice and can go
+no farther. Cancer is the gate of men, because by it is the
+descent to the lower regions; Capricorn is the gate of gods,
+because by it is a return for souls to the rank of gods in the
+seat of their proper immortality." 20 The Manicheans taught that
+souls were borne to the moon on leaving their bodies, and there
+washed from their sins in water, then taken to the sun and further
+cleansed in fire. They described the moon and sun as two splendid
+ships prepared for transferring souls to their native country, the
+world of perfect light in the heights of the creation.21
+
+The ancient Hebrews thought the sky a solid firmament overarching
+the earth, and supporting a sea of inexhaustible waters, beyond
+which God and his angels dwelt in monopolized splendor. Eliphaz
+the Temanite says, "Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold
+the stars, how high they are; but he walketh upon the arch of
+heaven!" And Job says, "He covereth the face of his throne, and
+spreadeth his clouds under it. He hath drawn a circular bound upon
+the waters to the confines of light and darkness." From the
+dazzling realm above this supernal ocean all men were supposed,
+until after the resurrection of Christ, to be excluded. But from
+that time the belief gradually spread in Christendom that a way
+was open for faithful souls to ascend thither. Ephraim the
+Syrian,22 and Ambrose, located paradise in the outermost East on
+the highest summit of the earth, stretching into the serene
+heights of the sky. The ancients often conceived the universe to
+form one solid whole, whose different provinces were accessible
+from each other to gods and angels by means of bridges and golden
+staircases. Hence the innumerable paradisal legends associated
+with the mythic mountains of antiquity, such as Elborz, Olympus,
+Meru, and Kaf. Among the strange legends of the Middle Age,
+Gervase of Tilbury preserves the following one, illustrative of
+this belief in a sea over the sky: "One Sunday the people of an
+English village were coming out of church, a dark, gloomy day,
+when they saw the anchor of a ship hooked to one of the
+tombstones, the cable, tightly stretched, hanging down the air.
+Presently they saw a sailor sliding down the rope to unfix the
+anchor. When he had just loosened it the villagers seized hold of
+him; and, while in their hands, he quickly died, as though he had
+been drowned!" There is also a famous legend called "St. Brandon's
+Voyage." The worthy saint set sail from the coast of Ireland, and
+held on his way till he arrived at the moon, which he found to be
+the location of hell. Here he saw Judas Iscariot in execrable
+tortures, regularly respited, however, every week from Saturday
+eve till Sunday eve!
+
+The thought so entirely in accordance with the first impression
+made by the phenomenon of the night sky on the ignorant senses and
+imagination that the stars are set in a firm revolving dome, has
+widely prevailed; and the thought that heaven lies beyond that
+solid arch, in the unknown space is a popular notion lingering
+still. The scriptural image declaring that the convulsions of the
+last day will shake the stars from their sockets in the
+
+19 In Somnium Scipionis, lib. i. cap. xi.
+
+20 Ibid. cap. xii.
+
+21 Augustine, De Natura Boni, cap. xliv.
+
+22 De Paradiso Eden, Sermo I.
+
+
+heavenly floor, "as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she
+is shaken of a mighty wind," although so obviously a figure of
+speech, has been very generally credited as the description of a
+literal fact yet to occur. And how many thousands of pious
+Christians have felt, with the sainted Doddridge,
+
+"Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my Divine abode,  The
+pavement of those heavenly courts Where I shall see my God!"
+
+The universal diffusion in civilized nations of the knowledge that
+the visible sky is no substantial expanse, but only an illimitable
+void of space hung with successive worlds, has by no means
+banished the belief, originally based on the opposite error, in a
+physical heaven definitely located far overhead, the destination
+of all ransomed souls. This is undoubtedly the most common idea at
+the present time. An English clergyman once wrote a book,
+afterwards translated into German, to teach that the sun is hell,
+and that the black spots often noticed on the disk of that orb are
+gatherings of damned souls.23 Isaac Taylor, on the contrary,
+contends with no little force and ingenuity that the sun may be
+the heaven of our planetary system, a globe of immortal
+blessedness and glory.24 The celebrated Dr. Whiston was convinced
+that the great comet which appeared in his day was hell. He
+imagined it remarkably fitted for that purpose by its fiery vapor,
+and its alternate plunges, now into the frozen extremity of space,
+now into the scorching breath of the sun. Tupper fastens the
+stigma of being the infernal prison house on the moon, in this
+style:
+
+"I know thee well, O Moon, thou cavern'd realm, Sad satellite,
+thou giant ash of death, Blot on God's firmament, pale home of
+crime, Scarr'd prison house of sin, where damned souls Feed upon
+punishment: Oh, thought sublime, That amid night's black deeds,
+when evil prowls Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners
+well, Glarest o'er all, the wakeful eye of Hell!"
+
+Bailey's conception is the darker birth of a deeper feeling:
+
+"There is a blind world, yet unlit by God, Rolling around the
+extremest edge of light, Where all things are disaster and decay:
+That black and outcast orb is Satan's home That dusky world man's
+science counteth not Upon the brightest sky. He never knows How
+near it comes to him; but, swathed in clouds, As though in plumed
+and palled state, it steals, Hearse like and thief like, round the
+universe, Forever rolling, and returning not,
+
+23 Swinden, On the Nature and Location of Hell.
+
+24 Physical Theory of Another Life, chap. xvi.
+
+
+Robbing all worlds of many an angel soul,  With its light hidden
+in its breast, which burns With all concentrate and superfluent
+woe."
+
+In the average faith of individuals to day, heaven and hell exist
+as separate places located somewhere in the universe; but the
+notions as to the precise regions in which they lie are most vague
+and ineffectual when compared with what they formerly were.
+
+The Scandinavian kosmos contained nine worlds, arranged in the
+following order:  Gimle, a golden region at the top of the
+universe, the eternal residence of Allfather and his chosen ones;
+next below that, Muspel, the realm of the genii of fire; Asgard,
+the abode of the gods in the starry firmament; Vindheim, the home
+of the air spirits; Manheim, the earth, or middle realm;
+Jotunheim, the world of the giants, outside the sea surrounding
+the earth; Elfheim, the world of the black demons and dwarfs, just
+under the earth's surface; Helheim, the domain of the goddess of
+death, deep within the earth's bosom; and finally, Niflheim, the
+lowest kingdom of horror and pain, at the very bottom of the
+creation. The Buddhist kosmos, in the simplest form, as some of
+them conceived it, was composed of a series of concentric spheres
+each separated from the next by a space, and successively
+overarching and under arching each other with circular layers of
+brightness above and blackness beneath; each starry hollow
+overhead being a heaven inhabited by gods and blessed souls, each
+lurid hollow underfoot being a hell filled with demons and wicked
+souls in penance. The Arabian kosmos, beginning with the earth,
+ascended to a world of water above the firmament, next to a world
+of air, then to a world of fire, followed in rising order by an
+emerald heaven with angels in the form of birds, a heaven of
+precious stones with angels as eagles, a hyacinth heaven with
+angels as vultures, a silver heaven with angels as horses, a
+golden and a pearl heaven each peopled with angel girls, a crystal
+heaven with angel men, then two heavens full of angels, and
+finally a great sea without bound, each sphere being presided over
+by a chief ruler, the names of all of whom were familiar to the
+learned Arabs. The Syrian kosmos corresponded closely to the
+foregoing. It soared up the mounting steps of earth, water, air,
+fire, and innumerable choruses successively of Angels, Archangels,
+Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim
+and Seraphim, unto the Expanse whence Lucifer fell; afterwards to
+a boundless Ocean; and lastly to a magnificent Crown of Light
+filling the uppermost space of all.25
+
+It is hard for us to imagine the aspects of the universe to the
+ancients and the impressions it produced in them, all seemed so
+different then, in the dimness of crude observation, from the
+present appearance in the light of astronomic science. Anaximander
+held that the earth was of cylindrical form, suspended in the
+middle of the universe and surrounded by envelopes of water, air,
+and fire, as by the coats of an onion, but that the exterior
+stratum was broken up and collected into masses, and thus
+originated the sun, moon, and stars, which are carried around by
+the three spheres in which they are fixed.26 Many of the Oriental
+nations believed the planets to be animated beings, conscious
+divinities, freely marching around their high realms, keeping
+watch and ward over the creation, smiling their favorites on to
+happy fortune,
+
+25 Dupuis, L'Origine de tous les Cultes, Planche No. 21.
+
+26 Arist. de Coel. ii. 13.
+
+
+fixing their baleful eyes and shedding disastrous eclipse on
+"falling nations and on kingly lines about to sink forever." This
+belief was cherished among the later Greek philosophers and Roman
+priests, and was vividly held by such men as Philo, Origen, and
+even Kepler. It is here that we are to look for the birth of
+astrology, that solemn lore, linking the petty fates of men with
+the starry conjunctions, which once sank so deeply into the mind
+of the world, but is now wellnigh forgotten:
+
+"No more of that, ye planetary lights! Your aspects, dignities,
+ascendancies, Your partite quartiles, and your plastic trines, And
+all your heavenly houses and effects, Shall meet no more devout
+expounders here.
+
+The joy of Jupiter, The exaltation of the Dragon's head, The sun's
+triplicity and glorious Day house on high, the moon's dim
+detriment, And all the starry inclusions of all signs, Shall rise,
+and rule, and pass, and no one know That there are spirit rulers
+of all worlds, Which fraternize with earth, and, though unknown,
+Hold in the shining voices of the stars Communion on high and
+everywhere."
+
+The belief that the stars were living beings, combining with the
+fancy of an unscientific time, gave rise to the stellar apotheosis
+of heroes and legendary names, and was the source of those
+numerous asterisms, out lined groups of stars, which still bedeck
+the skies and form the landmarks of celestial topography. It was
+these and kindred influences that wrought together
+
+"To make the firmament bristle with shapes Of intermittent motion,
+aspect vague, And mystic bearings, which o'ercreep the earth,
+Keeping slow time with horrors in the blood;" the Gorgon's
+petrific Head, the Bear's frightful form, Berenice's streaming
+Hair, the curdling length of Ophiuchus, and the Hydra's horrid
+shape. The poetic eye of old religion saw gods in the planets
+walking their serene blue paths,
+
+"Osiris, Bel, Odin, Mithras, Brahm, Zeus, Who gave their names to
+stars which still roam round The skies all worshipless, even from
+climes Where their own altars once topp'd every hill."
+
+By selected constellations the choicest legends of the antique
+world are preserved in silent enactment. On the heavenly sea the
+Argonautss keep nightly sail towards the Golden Fleece. There
+Herakles gripes the hydra's heads and sways his irresistible club;
+Arion with his harp rides the docile Dolphin; the Centaur's right
+hand clutches the Wolf; the Hare flees from the raging eye and
+inaudible bark of the Dog; and space crawls with the horrors of
+the Scorpion.
+
+In consequence of the earth's revolution in its orbit, the sun
+appears at different seasons to rise in connection with different
+groups of stars. It seems as if the sun made an annual journey
+around the ecliptic. This circuit was divided into twelve parts
+corresponding to the months, and each marked by a distinct
+constellation. There was a singular agreement in regard to these
+solar houses, residences of the gods, or signs of the zodiac,
+among the leading nations of the earth, the Persians, Chaldeans,
+Hebrews, Syrians, Hindus, Chinese, Arabians, Japanese, Siamese,
+Goths, Javanese, Mexicans, Peruvians, and Scandinavians. 27 Among
+the various explanations of the origin of these artificial signs,
+we will notice only the one attributed by Volney to the Egyptians.
+The constellations in which the sun successively appeared from
+month to month were named thus: at the time of the overflow of the
+Nile, the stars of inundation, (Aquarius;) at the time of
+ploughing, stars of the ox, (Taurus;) when lions, driven forth by
+thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile, stars of the lion,
+(Leo;) at the time of reaping, stars of the sheaf, (Virgo;) stars
+of the lamb and two kids, (Aries,) when these animals were born;
+stars of the crab, (Cancer,) when the sun, touching the tropic,
+returned backwards; stars of the wild goat, (Capricorn,) when the
+sun reached the highest point in his yearly track; stars of the
+balance, (Libra,) when days and nights were in equilibrium; stars
+of the scorpion, (Scorpio,) when periodical simooms burned like
+the venom of a scorpion; and so on of the rest.28
+
+The progress of astronomical science from the wild time when men
+thought the stars were mere spangles stuck in a solid expanse not
+far off, to the vigorous age when Ptolemy's mathematics spanned
+the scope of the sky; from the first reverent observations of the
+Chaldean shepherds watching the constellations as gods, to the
+magnificent reasonings of Copernicus dashing down the innumerable
+crystalline spheres, "cycle on epicycle, orb on orb," with which
+crude theorizers had crowded the stellar spaces; from the uncurbed
+poetry of Hyginus writing the floor of heaven over with romantic
+myths in planetary words, to the more wondrous truth of Le Verrier
+measuring the steps from nimble Mercury flitting moth like in the
+beard of the sun to dull Neptune sagging in his cold course twenty
+six hundred million miles away; from the half inch orb of
+Hipparchus's naked eye, to the six feet speculum of Rosse's awful
+tube; from the primeval belief in one world studded around with
+skyey torch lights, to the modern conviction of octillions of
+inhabited worlds all governed by one law constitutes the most
+astonishing chapter in the history of the human mind. Every step
+of this incredible progress has had its effect in modifying the
+conceptions of man's position and importance in nature and of the
+connection of his future fate with localities. Of old, the entire
+creation was thought to lie pretty much within the comprehension
+of man's unaided senses, and man himself was supposed to be the
+chief if not the sole object of Divine providence. The deities
+often came down in incarnations and mingled with their favorites
+and rescued the earth from evils. Every thing was anthropomorphized.
+Man's relative magnitude and power were believed to be such
+that he fancied during an eclipse that, by screams, the crashing
+of gongs, and magic rites, he could scare away the monsters
+
+27 Pigott, Scandinavian Mythology, chap. i. p. 31.
+
+28 Volney, Ruins, chap. xxii. sect. 3. Maurice, Hist. Hindostan,
+vol. i. pp. 145-147.
+
+
+who were swallowing the sun or the moon. Meteors shooting through
+the evening air the Arabs believed were fallen angels trying to
+get back into heaven but hurled from the crystal battlements by
+the flaming lances of the guardian watchers. Then the gazer saw
+"The top of heaven full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets."
+
+Now the student contemplates an abyss swarming with orbs each out
+weighing millions of our earth. Then they read their nativities in
+the planets and felt how great must be the state overwatched by
+such resplendent servitors. Now "They seek communion with the stars
+that they may know How petty is this ball on which they come and go."
+
+Then the hugest view of the extent of the universal sphere was
+that an iron mass would require nine days and nights to plunge
+from its Olympian height to its Tartarean depth. Now we are told
+by the masters of science that there are stars so distant that it
+would take their light, travelling at a rate of nearly twelve
+million miles a minute, thirty million years to reach us. The
+telescope has multiplied the size of the creation by hundreds of
+millions, and the grandest conception of the stellar universe
+possible to the most capacious human mind probably bears no larger
+proportion to the fact than an orrery does to the solar system.
+Our earth is a hundred million miles from the sun, whose diameter
+is so monstrous that a hundred such orbs strung in a straight line
+would occupy the whole distance. The sun, with all his attendant
+planets and moons, is sweeping around his own centre supposed by
+some to be Alcyone at the rate of four hundred thousand miles a
+day; and it will take him eighteen million years to complete one
+revolution. Our firmamental cluster contains, it has been
+calculated, in round numbers about twenty million stars. There are
+many thousands of such nebula visible, some of them capable of
+packing away in their awful bosoms hundreds of thousands of our
+galaxies. Measure off the abysmal space into seven hundred
+thousand stages each a hundred million miles wide, and you reach
+the nearest fixed stars, for instance, the constellation of the
+Lyre. Multiply that inconceivable distance by hundreds of
+thousands, and still you will discern enormous sand banks of stars
+obscurely glittering on the farthest verge of telescopic vision.
+And even all this is but a little corner of the whole.
+
+Coleridge once said, "To some infinitely superior Being, the whole
+universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and
+planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces
+between system and system no greater than the intervals between
+one grain and the grain adjacent." One of the vastest thoughts yet
+conceived by any mortal mind is that of turning the universe from
+a mechanical to a chemical problem, as illustrated by Prof.
+Lovering.29 Assuming the acknowledged truths in physics, that the
+ultimate particles of matter never actually touch each other, and
+that water in evaporating expands into eighteen hundred times its
+previous volume, he demonstrates that the porosity of our solar
+system is no greater than that of steam. "The porosity of granite
+or gold may be equal to that of steam,
+
+29 Cambridge Miscellany, 1842.
+
+
+the greater density being a stronger energy in the central
+forces." And the conclusion is scientifically reached that "the
+vast interval between the sun and Herschel is an enormous pore,
+while the invisible distance that separates the most closely
+nestled atoms is a planetary space, a stupendous gulf when
+compared with the little spheres between which it flows." Thus we
+may think of the entire universe as a living organism, like a
+ripening orange, its component atoms worlds, the sidereal
+movements its vital circulation.
+
+Surely, when a man looks up from his familiar fields and household
+roof to such incommensurable objects as scientific imagination
+reveals in the sparkling sword handle of Perseus and the hazy
+girdle of Andromeda, overpowering humility will fill his breast,
+an unutterable solemnity will "fall on him as from the very
+presence chamber of the Highest." And will he not, when he
+contemplates the dust like shoals of stars, the shining films of
+firmaments, that retreat and hover through all the boundless
+heights, the Nubecula nebula, looking like a bunch of ribbons
+disposed in a true love's knot, that most awful nebula whirled
+into the shape and bearing the name of the Dumb Bell, the Crab
+nebula, hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawling
+terror, every point holding millions of worlds,  thinking of these
+all transcendent wonders, and then remembering his own
+inexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of his
+whole race does not occupy a single tick of the great Sidereal
+Clock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he not
+utterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King of
+all this? In a word, how does the solemn greatness of man, the
+supposed eternal destiny of man, stand affected by the modern
+knowledge of the vastness of creation? Regarding the immensities
+receding over him in unfathomable abysses bursting with dust heaps
+of suns, must not man be dwarfed into unmitigated contempt, his
+life and character rendered absolutely insignificant, the utmost
+span of his fortunes seeming but as the hum and glitter of an
+ephemeron in a moment's sunshine? Doubtless many a one has at
+times felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying him
+with a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him in
+fatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the august
+dome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes up
+and sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth above
+him in the order and silence of their primeval pomp. Peacefully
+and forever they shine there. In nebula separated from nebula by
+trillions of leagues, plane beyond plane, they stretch and glitter
+to the feet of God. Falling on his knees, he clasps his hands in
+speechless adoration, but feels, with an intolerable ache of the
+heart, that in this infinitude such an one as he can be of no
+consequence whatever. He waits passively for the resistless round
+of fate to bear him away, ah, whither? "Conscious that he dwells
+but as an atom of dust on the outskirts of a galaxy of
+inconceivable glory" moving through eternity in the arms of law,
+he becomes, in his own estimation, an insensible dot lost in the
+uncontainable wilderness of firmamental systems. But this
+conclusion of despair is a mistake as sophistical as it is
+injurious, as baseless in reality as it is natural in seeming. Its
+antidote and corrective are found in a more penetrative thought
+and juster understanding of the subject, which will preserve the
+greatness and the immortal destiny of man unharmed despite the
+frowning vastitudes of creation. This will appear from fairly
+weighing the following considerations.
+
+In the first place, the immensity of the material universe is an
+element entirely foreign to the problem of human fate. When
+seeking to solve the question of human destiny, we are to study
+the facts and prophecies of human nature, and to conclude
+accordingly. It is a perversion of reason to bring from far an
+induction of nebular magnitudes to crush with their brute weight
+the plain indications of the spirit of humanity. What though the
+number of telescopic worlds were raised to the ten thousandth
+power, and each orb were as large as all of them combined would
+now be? what difference would that make in the facts of human
+nature and destiny? It is from the experience going on in man's
+breast, and not from the firmaments rolling above his head, that
+his importance and his final cause are to be inferred. The human
+mind, heart, and conscience, thought, love, faith, and piety,
+remain the same in their intrinsic rank and capacities whether the
+universe be as small as it appeared to the eyes of Abraham or as
+large as it seems in the cosmical theory of Humboldt. Thus the
+spiritual position of man really remains precisely what it was
+before the telescope smote the veils of distance and bared the
+outer courts of being.
+
+Secondly, if we do bring in the irrelevant realms of science to
+the examination of our princely pretensions, it is but fair to
+look in both directions. And then what we lose above we gain
+below. The revelations of the microscope balance those of the
+telescope. The animalcula magnify man as much as the nebulsa
+belittle him. We cannot help believing that He who frames and
+provides for those infinitesimal animals quadrillions of whom
+might inhabit a drop of water or a leaf and have ample room and
+verge enough, and whose vital and muscular organization is as
+complicated and perfect as that of an elephant, will much more
+take care of man, no matter how numerous the constellations are.
+Let us see how far scientific vision can look beneath ourselves as
+the question is answered by a few well known facts. In each drop
+of human blood there are three million vitalized corpuscular
+disks. Considering all the drops made up in this way, man is a
+kosmos, his veins galaxies through whose circuits these red
+clustering planets perform their revolutions. How small the
+exhaling atoms of a grain of musk must be, since it will perfume
+every breath of air blowing through a hall for a quarter of a
+century, and then not be perceptibly diminished. An ounce of gold
+may be reduced into four hundred and thirty two billion parts,
+each microscopically visible.30 There is a deposit of slate in
+Bohemia covering forty square miles to the depth of eight feet,
+each cubic inch of which Ehrenberg found by microscopic
+measurement to contain forty one thousand million infusorial
+animals. Sir David Brewster says, "A cubic inch of the Bilin
+polieschiefer slate contains above one billion seven hundred and
+fifty thousand millions of distinct individuals of Galionella
+ferruginea."31 It is a fact that the size of one of these insects
+as compared with the bulk of a man is virtually as small as that
+of a man compared with the whole scheme of modern astronomy. Thus,
+if the problem of our immortal consequence is prejudicially
+vitiated by contemplating the immense extremity of vision, it is
+rectified by gazing on the opposite extremity. If man justly
+scrutinized, without comparisons, is fitted for and worthy of
+eternity,
+
+30 Lardner, Hand Book of Natural Philosophy, book i. chap. v.31
+More Worlds than One, ch. viii. note 3.
+
+
+no foreign facts, however magnificent or minute, should alter our
+judgment from the premises.
+
+Thirdly, is it not evident that man's greatness keeps even pace
+along the scale of magnitude with the widening creation, since it
+is his mind that sees and comprehends how wondrous the dimensions
+of the universe are? The number of stars and the limits of space
+are not more astounding than it is that he should be capable of
+knowing such things, enumerating and staking them off. When man
+has measured the distance and weighed the bulk of Sirius, it is
+more appropriate to kneel in amazement before the inscrutable
+mystery of his genius, the irrepressible soaring of his soul, than
+to sink in despair under the swinging of those lumps of dirt in
+their unapproachable spheres because they are so gigantic! The
+appearance of the creation to man is not vaster than his
+perception of it. They are exactly correlated by the very terms of
+the statement. As the astronomic world expands, the astronomer's
+mind dilates and must be as large as it in order to contain it in
+thought. What we lose in relative importance from the enlargement
+of the boundaries of the universe we gain from the new revelation
+of our capacities that is made through these transcendent
+achievements of our science. That we are favorites of the Creator
+and destined for immortal glories is therefore logically and
+morally just as credible after looking through Herschel's forty
+feet reflector and reading La Place's Mecanique Celeste as it
+would be were this planet, suspended in a hollow dome, the
+entirety of material being.
+
+Furthermore, we can reason only from the data we have; and, doing
+that, we should conclude, from the intrinsic and incomparable
+superiority of spirit to matter, that man and his kindred
+scattered in families over all the orbs of space were the especial
+objects of the infinite Author's care. They are fitted by their
+filial attributes to commune with Him in praise and love. They
+know the prodigious and marvellous works of mechanical nature;
+mechanical nature knows nothing. Man can return his Maker's
+blessing in voluntary obedience and thanks; matter is inanimate
+clay for the Potter's moulding. Turning from the gleaming
+wildernesses of star land to the intellect and heart, appreciating
+the infinite problems and hopes with which they deal and aspire,
+we feel the truth expressed by Wordsworth in his tremendous lines:
+
+"I must, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of
+heavens is but a veil. Not chaos, darkest pit of Erebus, Nor aught
+of blinder vacancy, scoop'd out By help of dreams, can breed such
+fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our minds,
+into the mind of man."
+
+Is not one noble thought of truth, one holy emotion of love, one
+divine impulse of devotion, better than a whole planet of mud, a
+whole solar system of gas and dust? Who would not rather be the
+soul that gauges the deeps, groups the laws, foretells the
+movements, of the universe, writing down in a brief mathematical
+formula a complete horoscope of the heavens as they will appear on
+any given night thousands of years hence, than to be all that
+array of swooping systems? To think the world is to be superior to
+the world. That which appreciates is akin to that which makes; and
+so we are the Creator's children, and these crowding nebula,
+packed with orbs as thick as the ocean beach with sands, are the
+many mansions of the House fitted up for His abode and ours. An
+only prince would be of more consideration than a palace, although
+its foundation pressed the shoulders of Serpentarius, its turret
+touched the brow of Orion, and its wings reached from the Great
+Bear to the Phoenix. So a mind is of more importance than the
+material creation, and the moral condition of a man is of greater
+moment than the aspect of stellar firmaments.
+
+Another illustration of the truth we are considering is to be
+drawn from the idealist theory, to which so many of the ablest
+thinkers of the world have given their devoted adhesion, that
+matter is merely phenomenal, no substantial entity, but a
+transient show preserved in appearance for some ulterior cause,
+and finally, at the withdrawal or suspension of God's volition, to
+return into annihilating invisibility as swiftly as a flash of
+lightning. The solid seeming firmaments are but an exertion of
+Divine force projected into vision to serve for a season as a
+theatre for the training of spirits. When that process is
+complete, in the twinkling of an eye the phantasmal exhibition of
+matter will disappear, leaving only the ideal realm of
+indestructible things, souls with their inward treasures remaining
+in their native sphere of the infinite, while the outward universe
+"Doth vanish like a ghost before the sun."
+
+The same practical result may also be reached by a different path,
+may be attained by the road of physics as well as by that of
+transcendental metaphysics. For Newton has given in his Principia
+a geometrical demonstration of the infinite compressibility of
+matter. All the worlds, therefore, that cluster in yon swelling
+vault can be condensed into a single globe of the size of a
+walnut; and then, on that petty lump of apparent substance, the
+enfranchised soul might trample in an exultation of magnanimous
+scorn upon the whole universe of earths, and soar through its own
+unlimited dominion, Monarch of Immortality, the snatched glory of
+shrunken firmaments flashing from its deathless wings.
+
+Finally, a proper comprehension of the idea of God will neutralize
+the skepticism and despondency sometimes stealthily nourished or
+crushingly impressed by contemplations of the immensity of nature.
+If one, from regarding the cold and relentless mechanism of the
+surrounding system, tremble for fear of there being no kind
+Overruler, let him gaze on the warm beauty that flushes the
+countenance of day, the mystic meditativeness that hangs on the
+pensive and starry brow of night, let him follow the commanding
+instincts of his own heart, and he will find himself clinging in
+irresistible faith and filial love to the thought of an infinite
+Father. If still the atheistic sentiment obtrudes upon him and
+oppresses him, let him observe how every spot of immensity whereon
+the eye of science has fallen is crowded with unnumbered amazing
+examples of design, love, beneficence, and he will perceive that
+the irrefragable lines of argument drawn through the boundless
+spaces of creation light up the stupendous contour of God and show
+the expression of his features to be love. It seems as though any
+man acquainted with the truths and magnitudes of astronomy, who,
+after seeing the star strewn abysses, would look in his mirror and
+ask if the image reflected there is that of the greatest being in
+the universe, would need nothing further to convince him that a
+God, the Creator, Preserver, Sovereign, lives. And then, if,
+mistakenly judging from his own limitations, he thinks that the
+particular care of all the accumulated galaxies of worlds, every
+world perhaps teeming with countless millions of conscious
+creatures, would transcend the possibilities even of God, a
+moment's reflection will dissolve that sophistry in the truth that
+God is infinite, and that to his infinite attributes globule and
+globe are alike, the oversight of the whole and of each part a
+matter of instantaneous and equal ease. Still further: if this
+abstract truth be insufficient to support faith and bestow peace,
+what will he say to the visible fact that all the races of beings,
+and all the clusters of worlds, from the motes in a sunbeam to the
+orbs of the remotest firmament, are now taken care of by Divine
+Providence? God now keeps them all in being and order, unconfused
+by their multiplicity, unoppressed by their magnitude, and not for
+an instant forgetting or neglecting either the mightiest or the
+least. Morbidly suspicious, perversely incredulous, must be the
+mind that denies, since it is so now in this state, that it may be
+so as well in the other state and forever! Grasping the conception
+of one God, who creates, rules, and loves all, man may
+unpresumptuously feel himself to be a child of the Infinite and a
+safe heir of immortality. Looking within and without, and soaring
+in fancy amidst the blue and starry altitudes interspersed with
+blazing suns and nebulous oceans, he may cry, from a sober
+estimate of all the experimental and phenomenal facts within his
+reach,
+
+"Even here I feel,
+Among these mighty things, that as I am
+I am akin to God; that I am part
+Of the use universal, and can grasp
+Some portion of that reason in the which
+The whole is ruled and founded; that I have
+A spirit nobler in its cause and end,
+Lovelier in order, greater in its powers,
+Than all these bright and swift immensities."
+
+Perhaps the force of these arguments may be better condensed and
+expressed by help of an individual illustration. While the pen is
+forming these words, the announcement of the death of Dr. Kane
+saddens the world. Alas that the gallant heart no longer beats,
+the story of whose noble generosity and indomitable prowess has
+just thrilled the dull nations of men of meaner mould! Who even
+though standing before a telescope under the full architecture of
+the heavens can believe that that maiden soul of heroism and
+devotion is now but an extinguished spark, that the love, honor,
+intelligence, self sacrificing consecration which enswathed him as
+with a saintly halo have all gone out? Turning from that pale
+form, stretched on the couch of death in fatal Cuba, through the
+receding gulfs of space where incomputable systems of worlds are
+wheeling on their eternal courses, and then looking back again
+from the noiseless glitter and awful bulk of the creation, do you
+despair of the immortal consequence of the poor sufferer whose
+fleshly moorings to existence are successively loosening at every
+gasp? Ah, remember that Matter and the Soul are not alone! Far
+above that clay bound, struggling soul, and far above those
+measureless, firmamental masses, is God, the Maker of them both,
+and the Lover of his child. Glancing in His omniscience down upon
+that human death couch, around which affectionate prayers are
+floating from every part of the earth, and from whose pallid
+occupant confiding sighs are rising to His ear, He sees the
+unutterable mysteries of yearning thought, emotion, and power,
+which are the hidden being of man, and which so ally the filial
+spirit to the parent Divinity. As beneath His gaze the faithful
+soul of Elisha Kane slowly extricating itself from its overwrought
+tabernacle, and also extricating itself from the holy network of
+heart strings which sixty millions of men speaking one speech have
+flung around him, if haply so they might retain him to earth to
+take their love and waiting honors rises into the invisible,
+seeking to return, bearing its virgin purity with it, to the bosom
+of God, will He overlook it, or carelessly spurn it into night,
+because the banks of stars are piled up so thick and high that
+they absorb His regards? My soul, come not thou into the counsels
+of them that think so! It should not be believed though astronomy
+were a thousand times astronomy. But it shall rather be thought
+that, ere now, the brave American has discovered the Mariner whom
+he sought, though sailing on far other seas, where there is no
+destroying winter and no need of rescue.
+
+In association with the measureless spaces and countless worlds
+brought to light by astronomic science naturally arises the
+question whether the other worlds are, like our earth, peopled
+with responsible intelligences. In ancient times the stars were
+not generally thought to be worlds, but to be persons, genii or
+gods. At the dawn of creation "the morning stars sang together;"
+that is, "the sons of God shouted for joy." The stars were the
+living army of "Jehovah of hosts." At the time when the
+theological dogmas now prevalent were first conceived, the
+greatness and glory of the universe were supposed to centre on
+this globe. The fortunes of man wellnigh absorbed, it was
+imagined, the interest of angels and of God. The whole creation
+was esteemed a temporary theatre for the enactment of the sublime
+drama of the fall and redemption of man. The entire heavens with
+all their host were thought to revolve in satellite dependence
+around this stationary and regal planet. For God to hold long,
+anxious, repeated councils to devise means to save us, was not
+deemed out of keeping with the relative dignity of the earth and
+the human race. But at length the progress of discovery put a
+different aspect on the physical conditions of the problem. The
+philosopher began to survey man's habitation and history, and to
+estimate man's comparative rank and destiny, not from the stand
+point of a solitary planet dating back only a few thousand years,
+but in the light of millions of centuries of duration and from a
+position among millions of crowded firmaments whence our sun
+appears as a dim and motionless star. This new vision of science
+required a new construction of theology. The petty and monstrous
+notions of the ignorant superstition of the early age needed
+rectification. In the minds of the wise and devout few this was
+effected; but with the great majority the two sets of ideas
+existed side by side in unreconciled confusion and contradiction,
+as they even continue to do unto this day.
+
+When it came to be believed that the universe teemed with suns,
+moons, and planets, composed of material substances, subject to
+day and night, and various other laws and changes, like our own
+abode, it was natural to infer that these innumerable worlds were
+also inhabited by rational creatures akin to ourselves and capable
+of worshipping God. Numerous considerations, possessing more or
+less weight, were brought forward to confirm such a conclusion.
+The most striking presentation ever made of the argument, perhaps,
+is that in Oersted's essay on the "Universe as a Single
+Intellectual Realm." It became the popular faith, and is
+undoubtedly more so now than ever before. Towards the end of the
+seventeenth century a work was published in explicit support of
+this faith by Fontenelle. It was entitled "Conversations on the
+Plurality of Worlds," and had marked success, running through many
+editions. A few years later, Huygens wrote a book, called
+"Cosmotheoros," in maintenance of the same thesis. The more this
+doctrine obtained root and life in the convictions of men, the
+more strongly its irreconcilableness with the ordinary theology
+must have made itself felt by fearless and competent thinkers.
+Could a quadrillion firmaments loaded with stars, each inhabited
+by its own race of free intelligences, all be burned up and
+destroyed in the Day of Judgment provoked on this petty grain of
+dust by the sin of Adam? 32 Were the stars mere sparks and
+spangles stuck in heaven for us to see by, it would be no shock to
+our reason to suppose that they might be extinguished with our
+extinction; but, grasping the truths of astronomy as they now lie
+in the brain of a master in science, we can no longer think of God
+expelling our race from the joys of being and then quenching the
+splendors of his hall "as an innkeeper blows out the lights when
+the dance is at an end." God rules and over rules all, and
+serenely works out his irresistible ends, incapable of wrath or
+defeat. Would it be more incongruous for Him to be angry with an
+ant hill and come down to trample it, than to be so with the earth
+and appear in vindictive fire to annihilate it?
+
+From time to time, in the interests of the antiquated ideas,
+doubts have been raised as to the validity of the doctrine of
+stellar worlds stocked with intellectual families.33 Hegel, either
+imbued with that Gnostic contempt and hatred for matter which
+described the earth as "a dirt ball for the extrication of light
+spirits," or from an obscure impulse of pantheistic thought,
+sullies the stars with every demeaning phrase, even stigmatizing
+them as "pimples of light." Michelet, a disciple of Hegel,
+followed his example, and, in a work published in 1840, strove
+vigorously to aggrandize the earth and man at the expense of the
+accepted teachings of astronomy.34 With argument and ridicule, wit
+and reason, he endeavored to make it out that the stars are no
+better than gleaming patches of vapor. We are the exclusive
+autocrats of all immensity. Whewell has followed up this species
+of thought with quite remarkable adroitness, force, and
+brilliance.35 Whether his motive in this undertaking is purely
+scientific and artistic, or whether he is impelled by a fancied
+religious animus, having been bitten by some theological fear
+which has given him the astrophobia, does not clearly appear.
+
+32 As specimens of the large number of treatises which have been
+published asserting the destruction of the whole creation in the
+Day of Judgment, the following may be consulted. Osiander, De
+Consummatione Saculi Dissertationum Pentus. Lund, De Excidio
+Universi Totali et Substantiali. Frisch, Die Welt im Feuer, oder
+das wahre Vergehen und Ende der Welt durch den letzen Sundenbrand.
+For a century past the opinion has been gaining favor that the
+great catastrophe will be confined to our earth, and that even
+this is not to be annihilated, but to be transformed, purged, and
+beautified by the crisis. See, e. g., Brumhey, Ueber die endliche
+Umwandlung der Erde durch Feuer.
+
+33 Kurtz, Bibel and Astronomie. Simonton's Eng. trans., ch. vi.
+sect. 14: Incarnation of God.
+
+34 Vorlesungen uber die ewige Personlichkeit des Geistes. 35 Of a
+Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.
+
+
+Brewster has replied to Whewell's disturbing essay in a volume
+which more commands our sympathies and carries our reason,
+but is less sustained in force and less close in logic.36 Powell
+has still more recently published a very valuable treatise on the
+subject;37 and with this work the discussion rests thus far,
+leaving, as we believe, the popular faith in an astronomic
+universe of inhabited worlds unshaken, however fatal the
+legitimate implications of that faith may be to other doctrines
+simultaneously held.38 It is curious to observe the shifting
+positions taken up by skepticism in science, now, with powerful
+recoil from the narrow bigotries of theology, eagerly embracing
+the sublimest dreams of astronomic speculation, and now inclining
+to the faith that the remoter stars are but brilliant globules
+trickling from the poles of some terrible battery in the godless
+heights of space. But if there be any thing sure in science at
+all, it is that the material creation is inconceivably vast,
+including innumerable systems, and all governed by invariable
+laws. But let us return from this episode.
+
+The foregoing sixfold argument, preserving us from the remorseless
+grasp of annihilation, leaves to us unchanged the problem of the
+relations which shall be sustained by the disembodied soul to time
+and space, the question as to the locality of the spirit world,
+the scene of our future life. Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, Valhalla
+with its mead brimmed horns, Blessed Isles, Elysium, supernal
+Olympus, firmamental Heaven, paradisal Eden, definite sites of
+celestial Worlds for departed souls, the Chaldee's golden orbs,
+the Sanscrit Meru, the Indian Hunting Ground, the Moslem's love
+bowers, and wine rivers, and gem palaces thronged with dark eyed
+houris, these notions, and all similar ones, of material
+residences for spirits, located and bounded, we must dismiss as
+dreams and cheats of the childish world's unripe fancy. There is
+no evidence for any thing of that coarse, crude sort. The
+fictitious theological Heaven is a deposit of imagination on the
+azure ground of infinity, like a bird's nest on Himalaya. What,
+then, shall we say? Why, in the first place, that, while there are
+reasons enough and room enough for an undisheartened faith in the
+grand fact of human immortality, it is beyond our present powers
+to establish any detailed conclusions in regard to its locality or
+its scenery.
+
+But surely, in the second place, we should say that it becomes us,
+when reflecting on the scenes to be opened to us at death, to rise
+to a more ideal and sublime view than any of those tangible
+figments which were the products of untrained sensual imagination
+and gross materialistic theory. When the fleshly prison walls of
+the mind fall, its first inheritance is a stupendous freedom. The
+narrow limits that caged it here are gone, and it lives in an
+ethereal sphere with no impeding bounds. Leaving its natal
+threshold of earth and the lazar house of time, its home is
+immensity, and its lease is eternity. Even in our present state,
+to a true
+
+36 More Worlds than One the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope
+of the Christian.
+
+37 Essay on the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. See, furthermore, in
+Westminster Review, July, 1858, Recent Astronomy and the Nebular
+Hypothesis.
+
+38 Volger, Erde and Ewigkeit. (Natural History of the Earth as a
+Periodical Process of Development in Opposition to the Unnatural
+Geology of Revolutions and Catastrophes.) Treise, Dag Endlose der
+grossen und der kleinen materiellen Welt.
+
+
+thinker there is no ascent or descent or terminating wall in
+space, but equal motion illimitably in all directions; and no
+absolute standard of duration, only a relative and variable one
+from the insect of an hour, to man, to an archangel, to that
+incomprehensible Being whose shortest moments are too vast to be
+noted by the awful nebula of the Hour Glass, although its rushing
+sands are systems of worlds. The soul emerges from earthly bondage
+emancipated into eternity, while "The ages sweep around him with
+their wings, Like anger'd eagles cheated of their prey."
+
+We have now sufficient premonitions and examples of this wondrous
+enlargement to base a rational belief on. What hems us in when we
+think, feel, and imagine? And what is the heaven that shall dawn
+for us beyond the veil of death's domain but the realm of Thought,
+the sphere of the spirit's unhampered powers? There are often
+vouchsafed to us here hours of outsoaring emotion and conception
+which make the enclosures in which the astronomer loiters seem
+narrow. "His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty
+traveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind
+impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like
+cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where
+distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered,
+grows weak and weary." There are moods of spiritual expansion and
+infinite longing that illustrate the train of thought so well
+expressed in the following lines:
+
+"Even as the dupe in tales Arabian
+Dipp'd but his brow beneath the beaker's brim,
+And in that instant all the life of man
+From youth to age roll'd its slow years on him,
+And, while the foot stood motionless, the soul
+Swept with deliberate wing from pole to pole;
+So when the man the Grave's still portal passes,
+Closed on the substances or cheats of earth,
+The Immaterial, for the things earth glasses,
+Shapes a new vision from the matter's dearth:
+Before the soul that sees not with our eyes
+The undefined Immeasurable lies." 39
+
+Then we realize that the spiritual world does not form some now
+unseen and distant region of the visible creation, but that the
+astronomic universe is a speck lying in the invisible bosom of the
+spiritual world. "Space is an attribute of God in which all matter
+is laid, and other attributes he may have which are the home of
+mind and soul." We suppose the difference between the present
+embodied and the future disembodied state to be so vast that the
+conditions of the latter cannot be intelligibly illustrated by the
+analogies of the former. It is not to be expected that the human
+soul will ever be absolutely independent of time and space,
+literally transcending them, but only relatively so as compared
+with its earthly predicament.
+
+39 Bulwer, King Arthur, book xi.
+
+
+For, as an able thinker and writer a philosopher of the
+Swedenborgian school, too has said, "The conception of a mind
+absolutely sundered from all connection with space is a mere
+pretence which words necessarily repudiate."
+
+The soul on the hypothesis that there is a soul is now in the
+body. Evidently, on leaving the body, it must either be nowhere,
+and that is annihilation, which the vehement totality of our
+thought denies; or everywhere, and that implies infinity, the loss
+of finite being in boundless Deity, a conclusion which we know of
+nothing to warrant; or somewhere,  and that predicates a surviving
+individuality related to surrounding externals, which is the
+prophesied and satisfactory result in which we rest in faith,
+humbly confessing our ignorance as to all the minutia. It does not
+necessarily follow from this view, however, that the soul is
+limited to a fixed region in space. It may have the freedom of the
+universe. More wonders, and sublimer than mortal fancies have ever
+suspected, are waiting to be revealed when we die:
+
+"For this life is but being's first faint ray, And heaven on
+heaven make up God's dazzling day."
+
+We are here living unconsciously engirt by another universe than
+the senses can apprehend, thinly veiled, but real, and waiting for
+us with hospitable invitation. "What are those dream like and
+inscrutable thoughts which start up in moments of stillness,
+apparently as from the deeps, like the movement of the leaves
+during a silent night, in prognostic of the breeze that has yet
+scarce come, if not the rustlings of schemes and orders of
+existence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the abode
+and destiny of the soul after death is all immensity. The
+interstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are barren deserts
+where nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdom
+colonized by the spirits who since the beginning of the creation
+have sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be the
+crowded aisles of the universal temple trod by bright throngs of
+worshipping angels. The soul's home, the heaven of God, may be
+suffused throughout the material universe, ignoring the existence
+of physical globes and galaxies. So light and electricity pervade
+some solid bodies, as if for them there were no solidity. So,
+doubtless, there are millions of realities around us utterly
+eluding our finest senses. "A fact," Emerson says, "is the last
+issue of spirit," and not its entire extent. "The visible creation
+is the terminus of the invisible world," and not the totality of
+the universe. There are gradations of matter and being, from the
+rock to the flower, from the vegetable to man. Is it most probable
+that the scale breaks abruptly there, or that other ranks of
+spiritual existence successively rise peopling the seeming abysses
+unto the very confines of God?
+
+"Can every leaf a teeming world contain,
+Can every globule gird a countless race,
+Yet one death slumber in its dreamless reign
+Clasp all the illumed magnificence of space?
+Life crowd a grain, from air's vast realms effaced?
+The leaf a world, the firmament a waste?"
+
+An honest historical criticism forces us, however reluctantly, to
+loose our hold from the various supposed localities of the soul's
+destination, which have pleased the fancies and won the assent of
+mankind in earlier times. But it cannot touch the simple and
+cardinal fact of an immortal life for man. It merely forces us to
+acknowledge that while the fact stands clear and authoritative to
+instinct, reason, and faith, yet the how, and the where, and all
+such problems, are wrapped in unfathomable mystery. We are to obey
+and hope, not dissect and dogmatize. However the fantastic dreams
+of the imagination and the subtle speculations of the intellect
+may shift from time to time, and be routed and vanish, the deep
+yearning of the heart remains the same, the divine polarity of the
+reason changes not, and men will never cease fondly to believe
+that although they cannot tell where heaven is, yet surely there
+is a heaven reserved for them somewhere within the sheltering
+embrace of God's infinite providence. We may not say of that
+kingdom, Lo, here! or Lo, there! but it is wherever God's
+approving presence extends: and is that not wherever the pure in
+heart are found? 40
+
+Let every elysian clime the breezes blow over, every magic isle
+the waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy has
+devised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet that
+hangs afar on the neck of night, be disenchanted of their
+imaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, within
+the relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze of
+fleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MIND
+would not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still the
+unquenchable instincts of the HEART would retain, uninjured, the
+great expectation of ANOTHER WORLD, although no traveller returns
+from its voiceless bourne to tell in what local direction it lies,
+no voyager comes back from its mystic port to describe its
+latitude and longitude on the chartless infinite of space.
+
+Turn we now from the lateral distribution of notions as to a
+future life, to their lineal development. We have seen that the
+development of belief as to the locality of our future destination
+has been a chase of places, over the earth, under the earth,
+through the sky, as fast as the unknown was brought within the
+known, until it has stopped at the verge of the unknowable. There
+we stand, confessing our inability to fix the scene. The doctrine
+of the conditions and contents of the future life has followed the
+same course as that of its locality.
+
+In the first stage of belief the future life consists of the gross
+conditions and materials of the known present reflected, under the
+impulse of the senses, into the unknown future. This style of
+faith prevailed for a vast period, and is not yet obsolete. When
+the King of Dahomey has done a great feat, he kills a man to carry
+the tidings to the ghost of his royal father. When he dies
+himself, a host are killed, that he may enter Deadland with a
+becoming cortege. His wives also are slain, or commit suicide,
+that they may rejoin him.
+
+The second stage of belief is reached when, under the ethical
+impulse, only certain refined elements of the present,
+discriminated portions of the products of reason, imagination and
+sentiment, are reflected into the future, and accepted as the
+facts of the life there. Critical processes, applied to thought
+and faith, cause the rejection of much that was received. That
+alone which answers to our wants, and has coherence, continues to
+be held
+
+40 Chalmers, Sermon, Heaven a Character and not a Locality.
+
+
+as truth. An example is afforded by Augustine in his essay, De
+Libero Arbitrio. He argues that the wicked are kept in being on
+the out skirts of the material universe; partly wretched, partly
+happy; too bad for heaven, too good for annihilation; incapable of
+attaining the summit of their beatified destiny. Not the crude
+reflection of the present state, but a criticized and purged
+portion of the results of speculation on it, is thrown forward,
+and composes the doctrine of the future life. This is the
+condition of faith in which civilized mankind, for the most part,
+now are.
+
+The third stage of development is that wherein the thinker
+perceives that it is illegitimate to reflect into the future any
+of the realities or relations of the present, and then to regard
+them as the truths of the experience which awaits him after death.
+His experience here is the resultant of his faculties as related
+to the universe. Destroy his organization, and what follows? One
+will say, "Nonentity." Another, more wise and modest, will say,
+"Something necessarily unknown as yet." We have no better right to
+project into the ideal space of futurity the ingredients of our
+thoughts than we have to project there the objects of our senses.
+Bunsen, whose thought and scholarship included pretty much all the
+knowledge of mankind, represents this stage of faith. He stands on
+the religious side of the movement of Science, believing in
+immortality without defining it. Comte stands on the positivist
+side, blankly denying all objective immortality. These two
+represent the results in which, advancing from its opposite sides,
+the logical development of the doctrine of a future life ends.
+With Comte, atheistic dogmatism crushing every eternal hope; with
+Bunsen, Christian faith pointing the child to an eternal home in
+the Father. For all but fetichistic minds the only choice lies
+between these two.
+
+The organic evolution of the doctrine of a life to come is,
+therefore, a process of faith beginning with the crude
+transference of the elements of the present into the future,
+continuing with refined modifications of that transference, ending
+with an entire cessation of it as inapplicable and incompetent.
+Having examined all the historic, experimental, and scientific
+data within our reach, we pause on the edge of the PART which we
+know, and wait, with serene trust, though with bowed head and
+silent lip, before the UNKNOWABLE WHOLE.
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CRITICAL HISTORY OF DISBELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.
+
+IF the first men were conscious spirits who, at the command of
+God, dropped from the skies into organic forms of matter, or who
+were created here on an exalted plane of insight and communion far
+above any thing now experienced by us, then the destination of man
+to a life after death may originally have been a fact of direct
+knowledge, universally seen and grasped without any obscuring
+peradventure. From that state it gradually declined into dubious
+dimness as successive generations grew sinful, sensual, hardened,
+immersed and bound in affairs of passion and earth. It became
+remoter, assumed a questionable aspect, gave rise to discussions
+and doubts, and here and there to positive disbelief and open
+denial. Thus, beginning as a clear reality within the vision of
+all, it sank into a matter of uncertain debate among individuals.
+
+But if the first men were called up into being from the earth, by
+the creative energy of God, as the distinct climax of the other
+species, then the early generations of our race, during the long
+ages of their wild and slowly ameliorating state, were totally
+ignorant of any conscious sequel to the fate seemingly closed in
+death. They were too animal and rude yet to conceive a spiritual
+existence outside of the flesh and the earth. Among the
+accumulating trophies of their progressive intellectual conquests
+hung up by mankind in the historic hall of experience, this
+marvellous achievement is one of the sublimest. What a day was
+that for all humanity forever after, when for the first time, on
+some climbing brain, dawned from the great Sun of the spirit world
+the idea of a personal immortality! It was announced. It dawned
+separately wherever there were prepared persons. It spread from
+soul to soul, and became the common faith of the world. Still,
+among every people there were pertinacious individuals, who swore
+not by the judge and went not with the multitude, persons of less
+credulous hearts and more skeptical faculties, who demurred at the
+great doctrine, challenged it in many particulars, gainsaid it on
+various grounds, disbelieved it from different motives, and fought
+it with numerous weapons.
+
+Whichever of the foregoing suppositions be adopted, that the
+doctrine of a future life subsided from universal acceptance into
+party contention, or that it arose at length from personal
+perception and authority into common credit, the fact remains
+equally prominent and interesting that throughout the traceable
+history of human opinion there is a line of dissenters who have
+thought death the finality of man, and the next world an illusion.
+The history of this special department of thought opens a wide and
+fertile subject. To gain a comprehensive survey of its boundaries
+and a compact epitome of its contents, it will be well to consider
+it in these two lights and divisions, all the time trying to see,
+step by step, what justice, and what injustice, is done: first,
+the dominant motive forces animating the disbelievers; secondly,
+the methods and materials they have employed.
+
+At first thought it would appear difficult to tell what impulses
+could move persons to undertake, as many constantly have
+undertaken, a crusade against a faith so dear to man, so ennobling
+to his nature. Peruse the pages of philosophical history with
+careful reflection, and the mystery is scattered, and various
+groups of disbelievers stand revealed, with earnest voices and
+gestures assailing the doctrine of a future life.1
+
+One company, having their representatives in every age, reject it
+as a protest in behalf of the right of private judgment against
+the tyranny of authority. The doctrine has been inculcated by
+priesthoods, embodied in sacred books, and wrought into the
+organic social life of states; and acceptance of it has been
+commanded as a duty, and expected as a decent and respectable
+thing. To deny it has required courage, implied independent
+opinions, and conferred singularity. To cast off the yoke of
+tradition, undermine the basis of power supporting a galling
+religious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in a
+generation of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely fail
+to exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of the
+present time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kings
+and the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living core
+of the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God and
+futurity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign over
+them and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretended
+interests of a future life.2 The true way to secure the real
+desideratum corruptly indicated in this movement is not by denying
+the reality of a future life, but by removing the adjustment of
+its conditions and the administration of its rewards and penalties
+out of the hands of every clique of priests and rulers. A
+righteously and benignly ordered immortality, based in truth and
+adjudicated by the sole sovereignty of God, is no engine of
+oppression, though a doctrine of heaven and hell irresponsibly
+managed by an Orphic association, the guardians of a Delphic
+tripod, the owners of a secret confessional, or the interpreters
+of an exclusive creed, may be. In a matter of such grave
+importance, that searching and decisive discrimination, so rare
+when the passions get enlisted, is especially needed. Because a
+doctrine is abused by selfish tyrants is no reason for supposing
+the doctrine itself either false or injurious.
+
+No little injury has been done to the common faith in a future
+life, great disbelief has been provoked unwittingly, by writers
+who have sought to magnify the importance of revealed religion at
+the expense of natural religion. Many such persons have labored to
+show that all the scientific, philosophical, and moral arguments
+for immortality are worthless, the teachings and resurrection of
+Christ, the revealed word of God, alone possessing any validity to
+establish that great truth. An accomplished author says, in a
+recent work, "The immortality of the soul cannot be proved without
+the aid of revelation." 3 Bishop Courtenay published, a few years
+since, a most deliberate and unrelenting attack upon the arguments
+for the deathlessness of the soul, seeking with persevering
+remorselessness to demolish every one of them, and to prove that
+man totally perishes, but will be restored to life at the second
+coming of Christ.4 There can scarcely be a question that such
+statements usually awaken and confirm a deep skepticism as to a
+future life, instead of enhancing a grateful estimate of the
+gospel.
+
+1 J. A. Luther, Recensetur numerus eorum, qui immortalitatem
+inficiati sunt.
+
+2 Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im neunzehnten
+Jahrhundert, band iii. kap. iv.: Der philosophische Radicalismus.
+
+
+3 Bowen, Metaphysical and Ethical Science, part ii. ch. ix. The
+Future States: Their Evidences and Nature considered on Principles
+Physical, Moral, and Scriptural, with the Design of Showing the
+Value of the Gospel Revelation.
+
+
+If man is once annihilated, it is hardly credible that he will be
+identically restored. Such a stupendous and arbitrary miracle
+clashes with the continuity of the universe, and staggers rather
+than steadies faith. We should beg such volunteers however sincere
+and good their intentions to withhold the impoverishing gift of
+their service. And when kindred reasonings are advanced by such
+men as the unbelieving Hume, we feel tempted to say, in the
+language of a distinguished divine speaking on this very point,
+"Ah, gentlemen, we understand you: you belong to the sappers and
+miners in the army of the aliens!"
+
+Another party of disbelievers have repudiated the whole conception
+of a future state as a protest against the nonsense and cruelty
+associated with it in the prevailing superstitions and dogmatisms
+of their time. From the beginning of history in most nations, the
+details of another existence and its conditions have been
+furnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawless
+fancies of poets, the fine spinning brains of metaphysicians, and
+the cold blooded calculations or hot headed zeal of sectarian
+leaders. Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around the
+central germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While the
+common throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculous
+and revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt,
+satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. So we
+find it was in Greece. The fables about the under world the
+ferriage over the Styx, poor Tantalus so torturingly mocked, the
+daughters of Danaus drawing water in sieves all were accredited by
+the general crowd on one extreme.5 On the other extreme the whole
+scheme, root and branch, was flung away with scorn. The following
+epitaph on an unbeliever is attributed to Callimachus. "O
+Charidas, what are the things below? Vast darkness. And what the
+returns to earth? A falsehood. And Pluto? A fable. We have
+perished: this is my true speech to you; but, if you want the
+flattering style, the Pellaan's great ox is in the shades."6
+Meanwhile, a few judicious mediators, neither swallowing the whole
+gross draught at a gulp, nor throwing the whole away with utter
+disgust, drank through the strainer of a discriminative
+interpretation. Because caprice, hatred, and favoritism are
+embalmed in some perverse doctrine of future punishment is no
+defensible reason for denying a righteous retribution. Because
+heaven has been located on a hill top, and its sublime denizens
+made to eat ambrosia and sometimes to fall out among themselves,
+is no adequate reason for rejecting the idea of a heavenly life.
+Puerilities of fancy and monstrosities of passion arbitrarily
+connected with principles claiming to be eternal truths should be
+carefully separated, and not the whole be despised and trodden on
+together. From lack of this analysis and discrimination, in the
+presence of abnormal excrescences and offensive secretions dislike
+and disbelief have often flourished where, if judicial thought and
+conscience had cut off the imposed deformities
+
+5 Plutarch, De Superstition. The reality of the popular credulity
+and terror in later Rome clearly appears from the fact that Marcus
+Aurelius had a law passed condemning to banishment "those who do
+any thing through which men's excitable minds are alarmed by a
+superstitious fear of the Deity." Nero, after murdering his
+mother, haunted by her ghost and tortured by the Furies, attempted
+by magical rites to bring up her shade from below, and soften her
+vindictive wrath Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.
+
+6 Epigram. XIV.
+
+
+and dispelled the discoloring vengeance, faith and love would have
+been confirmed in contemplating the pure and harmonious form of
+doctrine left exposed in the beauty of benignant truth. The aim
+ostensibly proposed by Lucretius, in his elaborate and masterly
+exposition of the Epicurean philosophy, is to free men from their
+absurd belief in childish legends and their painful fears of death
+and hell. As far as merely this purpose is concerned, he might
+have accomplished it as effectually, perhaps, and more directly,
+by exposing the adventitious errors without assailing the great
+doctrine around which they had been gathered. Bion the
+Borysthenite is reported by Diogenes Laertius to have said, with a
+sharp humor, that the souls below would be more punished by
+carrying water in whole buckets than in such as had been bored! A
+soul may pass into the unseen state though there be no Plutonian
+wherry, suffer woe though there be no river Pyriphlegethon, enjoy
+bliss though there be no cup of nectar borne by Hebe. But to fly
+to rash extremes and build positive conclusions on mere ignorance
+has always been natural to man, not only as a believer, but also
+as an iconoclastic denier.
+
+A third set of disbelievers in a future life consists of those who
+advocate the "emancipation of the flesh" and assert the
+sufficiency of this life when fully enjoyed. They attack the dogma
+of immortality as the essential germ of asceticism, and abjure it
+as a protest against that superstitious distrust and gloom which
+put a ban on the pleasures of the world. These are the earthlings
+who would fain displace the stern law of self denial with the
+bland permission of self indulgence, rehabilitate the senses, feed
+every appetite full, and, when satiated of the banquet of
+existence, fall asleep under the table of the earth. The
+countenance of Duty, severe daughter of God, looks commands upon
+them to turn from dallying ease and luxury, to sacrifice the
+meaner inclinations, to gird themselves for an arduous race
+through difficulties, to labor and aspire evermore towards the
+highest and the best. They prefer to install in her stead
+Aphrodite crowned with Paphian roses, her eyes aglow with the
+light of misleading stars, her charms bewitching them with fatal
+enchantments and melting them in softest joys. The pale face of
+Death, with mournful eyes, lurks at the bottom of every winecup
+and looks out from behind every garland; therefore brim the purple
+beaker higher and hide the unwelcome intruder under more flowers.
+We are a cunning mixture of sense and dust, and life is a fair but
+swift opportunity. Make haste to get the utmost pleasure out of it
+ere it has gone, scorning every pretended bond by which sour
+ascetics would restrain you and turn your days into penitential
+scourges. This gospel of the senses had a swarm of apostles in the
+last century in France, when the chief gates of the cemetery in
+Paris bore the inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." It has
+had more in Germany in this century; and voices of enervating
+music are not wanting in our own literature to swell its siren
+chorus.7 Perhaps the greatest prophet it has had was Heine, whose
+pages reek with a fragrance of pleasure through which sighs, like
+a fading wail from the solitary string of a deserted harp struck
+by a lonesome breeze, the perpetual refrain of death! death!
+death! His motto seems to be, "Quick! let me
+
+7 Pierer, Universal Lexikon, dritte Auflage, Deutsche Literatur,
+sect. 42. Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im
+neuntzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii: kap. i.: Das junge
+Deutschland.
+
+
+enjoy what there is; for I must die. Oh, the gusty relish of life!
+Oh, the speechless mystery, the infinite reality, of death!" He
+says himself, comparing the degradation of his later experience
+with the soaring enthusiasm of his youth, "It is as if a star had
+fallen from heaven upon a hillock of muck, and swine were gnawing
+at it!"
+
+These men think that the doctrine of a future life, like a great
+magnet, has drawn the needle of human activity out of its true
+direction; that the dominant tendency of the present age is, and
+of right ought to be, towards the attainment of material well
+being, in a total forgetfulness to lay up treasures in heaven. The
+end is enjoyment; the obstacle, asceticism; the means to secure
+the end, the destruction of faith in immortality, so that man,
+having nothing left but this world, will set himself to improve
+and enjoy it. The monkish severity of a morbid and erroneous
+theology, darkening the present and prescribing pain in it to
+brighten the future and increase its pleasures, legitimates an
+earnest reaction. But that reaction should be wise, measured by
+truth. It should rectify, not demolish, the prevailing faith. For
+the desired end is most likely to be reached by perceiving, not
+that all terminates in the grave, but that the greatest enjoyment
+flows from a self controlling devotedness to noble ends, that the
+claims of another life are in perfect unison with the interests of
+this life, that the lawful fruition of every function of human
+nature, each lower faculty being subordinated to each higher one,
+and the highest always reigning, at once yields the most immediate
+pleasure and makes the completest preparation for the hereafter.
+In the absence of the all irradiating sun of immortality, these
+disbelievers, exulting over the pale taper of sensual pleasure,
+remind us of a parcel of apes gathered around a cold glow worm and
+rejoicing that they have found a fire in the damp, chilly night.
+
+Besides the freethinkers, who will not yield to authority, but
+insist upon standing apart from the crowd, and the satirists, who
+level their shafts undiscriminatingly against what they perceive
+associated with absurdity, and the worldlings, who prefer the
+pleasures of time to the imaginarily contrasted goods of eternity,
+there is a fourth class of men who oppose the doctrine of a
+personal immortality as a protest against the burdensome miseries
+of individuality. The Gipseys exclaimed to Borrow, "What! is it
+not enough to have borne the wretchedness of this life, that we
+must also endure another?" 8 A feeling of the necessary
+limitations and suffering exposures of a finite form of being has
+for untold ages harassed the great nations of the East with
+painful unrest and wondrous longing. Pantheistic absorption  to
+lose all imprisoning bounds, and blend in that ecstatic flood of
+Deity which, forever full, never ebbs on any coast has been
+equally the metaphysical speculation, the imaginative dream, and
+the passionate desire, of the Hindu mind. It is the basis and
+motive of the most extensive disbelief of individual immortality
+the world has known. "The violence of fruition in these foul
+puddles of flesh and blood presently glutteth with satiety," and
+the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and
+pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead.
+Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that
+grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish
+instincts, crawling on brutish grounds,
+
+8 The Zincali, part ii. ch. i.
+
+
+cannot awaken the creative force of spiritual wants slumbering
+within, nor lift its head high enough out of the dust to see the
+stars of a deathless destiny; and a fifth group of disbelievers
+deny immortality because their degraded experience does not
+prophesy it. Many a man might say, with Autolycus, "For the life
+to come, I sleep out the thought of it." A mind holy and loving,
+communing with God and an ideal world, "lighted up as a spar grot"
+with pure feelings and divine truths, is mirrored full of
+incorporeal shapes of angels, and aware of their immaterial
+disentanglement and eternity. A brain surcharged with fires of
+hatred, drowsed with filthy drugs, and drenched with drunkenness,
+will teem, on the contrary, with vermin writhing in the meshes of
+decaying matter. Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that they
+are passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictions
+rooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abide
+in serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from every
+obscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenly
+vision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials and
+toils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divine
+treasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and at
+the same time consciousness will crave and faith behold an
+illimitable destiny. Experiences worthy of being eternal generate
+faith in their own eternity. But the ignorant and selfish
+sensualist, whose total experience is of the earth earthy, who has
+no realization of pure truth, goodness, beauty, is incapable of
+sincere faith in immortal life. The dormancy of his higher powers
+excludes the necessary conditions of such a faith. His ignoble
+bodily life does not furnish the conscious basis and prophecy of a
+glorious spiritual life, but shudderingly proclaims the cessation
+of all his experience with the destruction of his senses. The
+termination of all the functions he knows, what else can it be but
+his virtual annihilation? When to the privative degradations of an
+uncultivated and earthy experience, naturally accompanied by a
+passive unbelief in immortality, are added the positive coarseness
+and guilt of a thick insensibility and a wicked life, aggressive
+disbelief is quite likely to arise, the essay of an uneasy
+conscience to slay what it feels would be a foe, and strangle the
+worm that never dies. The denial springing from such sources is
+refuted when it is explained. Its motive should never by any man
+be yielded to, much less be willingly nourished. It should be
+resisted by a devout culture courting the smiles of God, by rising
+into the loftier airs of meditation and duty, by imaginative
+sentiment and practical philanthropy, until the eternal instinct,
+long smothered under sluggish loads of sense and sin, reached by a
+soliciting warmth from heaven, stirs with demonstrating vitality.
+
+The last and largest assemblage of dissenters from the prevailing
+opinion on this subject comprises those who utter their disbelief
+in a future existence out of simple loyalty to seeming truth, as a
+protest against what they think a false doctrine, and against the
+sophistical and defective arguments by which it has been propped.
+It may be granted that the five previously named classes are
+equally sincere in their convictions, honest assailants of error
+and adherents of truth; but they are actuated by animating motives
+of a various moral character. In the present case, the ruling
+motive is purely a determination, as Buchner says, to stand by the
+facts and to establish the correct doctrine. The directest and
+clearest way of giving a descriptive account of the active
+philosophical history of this class of disbelievers will be to
+follow on the lines of their tracks with statements and criticisms
+of their procedures.9 Disbelief in the doctrine of a future life
+for man has planted itself upon bold affirmation, and fortified
+itself with arguments which may most conveniently be considered
+under five distinct heads.
+
+First is the sensational Argument from Appearance. In death the
+visible functions cease, the organism dissolves, the mind
+disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the
+individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of
+annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is
+absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very
+problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the
+visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and
+superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future life is that
+founded on narratives of ghosts, appearances and visions of the
+dead. Dr. Tafel published at Tubingen in 1853 a volume aiming to
+demonstrate the immortality and personal identity of the soul by
+citation of ninety cases of supernatural appearances, extending
+from the history of the ghost whose address to Curtius Rufus is
+recorded by Tacitus, to the wonderful story told by Renatus
+Luderitz in 1837. Such efforts are worse than vain. Their data are
+so explicable in many cases, and so inconclusive in all, that they
+quite naturally provoke deeper disbelief and produce telling
+retorts. While here and there a credulous person is convinced of a
+future life by the asserted appearance of a spirit, the well
+informed psychologist refers the argument to the laws of insanity
+and illusions, and the skeptic adds as a finality his belief that
+there is no future life, because no ghost has ever come back to
+reveal and certify it. The argument on both sides is equally
+futile, and removed from the true requisitions of the problem.
+
+To the philosophical thinker a mere appearance is scarcely a
+presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it.
+Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity
+or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the
+earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and
+the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see
+nothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based on
+acquired experience. The first darkness would seem to the
+trembling contemplator absolutely to blot out the universe; but in
+truth it only prevented him from seeing it. The first thorough
+unconscious sleep would seem to be the hopeless destruction of the
+soul in its perfect oblivion. Death is forever for the first time,
+shrouded in the misleading obscurities of an unknown novelty.
+Appearances are often deceitful, yielding obvious clews only to
+mistakes and falsehoods. They are always superficial, furnishing
+no reliable evidence of the reality.
+
+"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
+Within thy beams, O Sun! Or who could find,
+Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,
+That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
+Why then do we shun death with anxious strife?
+If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"
+
+9 Spazier, Antiphadon, oder Prufung einiger Hauptbeweise fur die
+Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele.
+
+
+When the body dies, the mind is no longer manifested through it.
+That is all we immediately know by perception. The inference that
+the mind has therefore ceased to be at all, is a mere supposition.
+It may still live and act, independently of the body. An outside
+phenomenon can prove nothing here. We must by some psychological
+probe pierce to the core of the being and discern, as there
+concealed, the central interpretation of truth, or else, in want
+of this, turn from these surface shadows and seek the solution in
+some other province. Millions of appearances being opposed to the
+truth or inadequate to hint it, we must never implicitly trust
+their suggestions. What microscope can reveal the organic life in
+a kernel of corn, and show that through the decay of that kernel a
+stalk will spring up and bear a thousand kernels more? But if a
+new mental life emerges from the dying form of man, it lies in a
+spiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Every
+existent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only final
+weapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goes
+into nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; into
+infinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie in
+discerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universe
+is the body of our body." The boundary of our life is boundless
+life. Schlegel has somewhere asked the question, "Is life in us,
+or are we in life?" Because man appears to be wholly extinguished
+in death, we have no right whatever in reason to conclude that he
+really is so. The star which seemed to set in the western grave of
+aged and benighted time, we, soon coming round east to the true
+spirit sky, may discern bright in the morning forehead of
+eternity. There can be no safe reasoning from the outmost husk and
+phenomenon of a thing to its inmost essence and result. And, in
+spite of any possible amount of appearance, man himself may pass
+distinct and whole into another sphere of being when his flesh
+falls to dust. That science should search in vain with her finest
+glasses to discern a royal occupant reigning in the purple
+chambered palace of the heart, or to trace any such mysterious
+tenant departing in sudden horror from the crushed and bleeding
+house of life, belongs to the necessary conditions of the subject;
+for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. As well might you
+seek to smell a color, or taste a sound, tie a knot of water, or
+braid a cord of wind.
+
+Next comes the abstract Argument from Speculative Philosophy.
+Under this head are to be included all those theories which deny
+the soul to be a spiritual entity, but reduce it to an atomic
+arrangement, or a dependent attribute, or a process of action.
+Heracleitus held that the soul was fire: of course, when the fuel
+was exhausted the fire would go out. Thales taught that it was
+water: this might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it
+was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and
+condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent
+personal identity. Critias said it was blood: this might
+degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground.
+Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as
+these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end
+of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that it
+was a fifth unknown substance, with properties of its own, unlike
+those of fire, air, water, and earth. This might be mortal or
+immortal: there was nothing decisive in the conception or the
+defining terms to prove which it was. Accordingly, the Peripatetic
+school has always been divided on the question of the immortality
+of the soul, from the time of its founder's immediate disciples to
+this day. It cannot be clearly shown what the mighty Stagyrite's
+own opinion really was.
+
+Speculative conceptions as to the nature of the soul like the
+foregoing, when advanced as arguments to establish its proper
+mortality, are destitute of force, because they are gratuitous
+assumptions. They are not generalizations based on careful
+induction of facts; they are only arbitrary hypotheses.
+Furthermore, they are inconsistent both with the facts and
+phenomena of experience. Mind cannot fairly be brought into the
+category of the material elements; for it has properties and
+performs functions emphatically distinguishing it from every thing
+else, placing it in a rank by itself, with exclusive predicates of
+its own. Can fire think? Can water will? Can air feel? Can blood
+see? Can a mathematical number tell the difference between good
+and evil? Can earth be jealous of a rival and loyal to a duty? Can
+a ganglion solve a problem in Euclid or understand the Theodicee
+of Leibnitz? It is absurd to confound things so distinct. Mind is
+mind, and matter is matter; and though we are now consciously
+acquainted with them only in their correlation, yet there is as
+much reason for supposing that the former survives the close of
+that correlation as for supposing that the latter does. True, we
+perceive the material remaining and do not perceive the spirit.
+Yes; but the differentiation of the two is exactly this, that one
+is appreciable by the senses, while the other transcends and
+baffles them. It is absolutely inconceivable in imagination,
+wholly incredible to reason, intrinsically nonsensical every way,
+that a shifting concourse of atoms, a plastic arrangement of
+particles, a regular succession of galvanic shocks, a continuous
+series of nervous currents, or any thing of the sort, should
+constitute the reality of a human soul, the process of a human
+life, the accumulated treasures of a human experience, all
+preserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personal
+identity. The things lie in different spheres and are full of
+incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately
+correlated the physical and psychical constituents of man are,
+yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply
+opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise
+consciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recent
+able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms
+the brain and whose action constitutes the mind." 10 The mind,
+then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and
+resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an
+agent necessary for an action? All such speculative conceptions as
+to the nature of soul as make it purely phenomenal are to be
+offset, if they can be, by the view which exhibits the personal
+ego or conscious selfhood of the soul, not as an empty spot in
+which a swarm of relations centre as their goal point, but as an
+indestructible monad, the innermost and substantial essence and
+cause of the organization, the self apprehending and unchangeable
+axis of all thinking and acting. Some of the most free, acute,
+learned, wise, and powerful thinkers of the world have been
+champions of this doctrine; especially among the moderns may be
+named Leibnitz, Herbart, Goethe, and Hartenstein. Jacobi most
+earnestly maintained it both against Mendelssohn and against
+Fichte.
+
+10 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 371.
+
+
+That the mind is a substantial entity, and therefore may be
+conceived as immortal, that it is not a mere functional operation
+accompanying the organic life, a phantom procession of conscious
+states filing off on the stage of the cerebrum "in a dead march of
+mere effects,"  that it is not, as old Aristoxenus dreamed, merely
+a harmony resulting from the form and nature of the body in the
+same way that a tune springs from the consenting motions of a
+musical instrument, seems to be shown by facts of which we have
+direct knowledge in consciousness. We think that the mind is an
+independent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighing
+opposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting some
+tendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding upon
+its own course of action and carrying out its chosen designs
+accordingly. If the soul were a mere process, it could not pause
+in mid career, select from the mass of possible considerations
+those adapted to suppress a base passion or to kindle a generous
+sentiment, deliberately balance rival solicitations, and, when
+fully satisfied, proceed. Yet all this it is constantly doing. So,
+if the soul were but a harmony, it would give no sounds contrary
+to the affections of the lyre it comes from. But actually it
+resists the parts of the instrument from which they say it
+subsists, exercising dominion over them, punishing some,
+persuading others, and ruling the desires, angers, and fears, as
+if itself of a different nature.11 Until an organ is seen to blow
+its own bellows, mend its shattered keys, move its pedals, and
+play, with no foreign aid, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," or a
+violin tunes up its discordant strings and wields its bow in a
+spontaneous performance of the Carnival, showing us every Cremona
+as its own Paganini, we may, despite the conceits of speculative
+disbelief, hold that the mind is a dynamic personal entity. That
+thought is the very "latch string of a new world's wicket."
+
+Thirdly, we have the fanciful Argument from Analogy. The keen
+champions of disbelief, with their athletic agility of dialectics,
+have made terrible havoc among the troops of poetic arguments from
+resemblance, drawn up to sustain the doctrine of immortality. They
+have exposed the feebleness of the argument for our immortality
+from the wonderful workmanship and costliness of human nature, on
+the ground that what requires the most pains and displays the most
+skill and genius in its production is the most lovingly preserved.
+For God organizes the mind of a man just as easily as he
+constructs the geometry of a diamond. His omnipotent attributes
+are no more enlisted in the creation of the intelligence of an
+elephant or the gratitude of a soul than they are in the
+fabrication of the wing of a gnat or the fragrance of a flower.
+Infinite wisdom and power are equally implied in each and in all.
+They have shown the gross defectiveness of the comparison of the
+butterfly and psyche. The butterfly, lying in the caterpillar
+neatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comes
+forth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a common
+demonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spirit
+from a fleshly encasement, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesis
+wholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel in
+the cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato's
+famous analogical argument that by a general law of nature all
+things are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies into
+the
+
+11 Plato, Phado, 98.
+
+
+life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is born
+from the death of day, and day is born from the death of night;
+and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life from
+death.12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of human
+immortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. When
+one hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it is
+night there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again.
+To this state of facts this revolving succession there is
+obviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases of
+man, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then the
+other seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor,13
+after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus,
+argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for the
+immortality of the soul from the analogy of lamps burning in tombs
+for centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite and
+valid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable.
+An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independent
+spiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from the
+flesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, we
+recollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author.14 He
+reasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels the
+lost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpable
+proof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Of
+course, the simple physiological explanation is that the mind
+instinctively refers the sensations brought in by the severed
+nerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has hitherto
+learned to trace their origination. The report being the same, it
+is naturally attributed to the same source.
+
+But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallacious
+arguments from analogy have themselves reasoned in the same way as
+fallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves the
+physical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters the
+corpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so when
+personal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universal
+spirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet,
+a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortex
+of force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy,
+and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a water
+spout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, man
+goes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from a
+broken harp string. All these analogies are vitiated by radical
+unlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they are
+perfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in the
+cases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vital
+point. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentary
+gyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by a
+sun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using a
+dependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his own
+destiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring the
+materials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision of
+eternity. A flower may just as well perish as live, a musical
+sound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they know
+not the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpass
+a discrete degree and enter upon a subject
+
+12 Crawford, On the Phadon of Plato.
+
+13 Heber's Life and Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. i. p. 69.
+
+14 Dee Guays, True System of Religious Philosophy, Letter V.
+
+
+within another circle of categories. Let the rash reasoner who
+madly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith and
+moment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horror
+before, having first "Put out the light, he then puts out
+THE LIGHT!"
+
+There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the range
+of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly
+predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a self
+contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps
+transcendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of the
+ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on
+leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm,
+would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has a
+hearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it.15 The
+answer to the skeptical reasoning from analogy is double. First,
+the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate within
+our tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination of
+other lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritual
+region. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatally
+limited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But no
+such limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, as
+far as there is genuine analogy, its implications are much
+stronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whose
+essence is materiality, survives all apprehensible changes;
+spirit, whose essence is spirituality, should do the same.
+
+Another attack on the doctrine of a future life is masked in the
+negative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall live
+again; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain the
+details of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it is
+said, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. The
+proposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it really
+amounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in the
+sky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor water
+in stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and the
+blood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question.
+Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of the
+conditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yet
+experienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millions
+of facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It is
+not in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions of
+experiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powers
+may hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved.
+Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of the
+universe? In the present, experience must be confined within its
+own boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo were
+endowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could not
+construct any intelligible theory of the world and life into which
+it was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logic
+to infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materials
+within its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, and
+the what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other life
+reserved for it. An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould,
+if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know any
+definite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upper
+light and air, with cattle in its shade and
+
+15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.
+
+
+singing birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground of
+argument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what we
+know. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with which
+science abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, melt
+and remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Any
+quantity of facts have been scientifically established as real
+which are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to belief
+than the assertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is no
+more mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in its
+having been kept out of life through a past eternity. The
+authentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been made
+from the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that,
+from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, we
+shall continue to be." 16
+
+The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and open
+to imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that we
+cannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state.
+Had one little partitular been different in the structure of the
+eye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never have
+seen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole of
+creation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition may
+now be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements of
+immortality which in death's disenveloping hour are to burst into
+our vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut up
+now to one form of being and one method of experience, how can we
+expect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms and
+methods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it.
+But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustard
+seed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfold
+denser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance would bring no
+real argument against the survival of the soul. For in an
+omnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorance
+cannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping the
+flesh, we may soar into heaven
+
+"Upon ethereal wings, whose way
+Lies through an element so fraught
+With living Mind that, as they play,
+Their every movement is a thought."
+
+Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moral
+proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the
+stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain,
+could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and
+logic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, and
+no scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations and
+dreams. No metaphysical glass can detect, no prognosis foresee,
+the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: on
+empirical grounds, the assertion of it is therefore unwarranted.
+But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, no
+extent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is a
+legitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be no
+doubt, in multitudes of instances, the effectual cause of
+disbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividly
+conceiving its conditions and scenery; "for," as one of the
+subtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may go
+beyond experience, it
+
+16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after the
+Christian Life.
+
+
+must always be chained down by it at a distance." But if there are
+good grounds for anticipating another life, then man should
+confide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct its
+theatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one might
+have scouted the statement that the most fearful surgical
+operations would be performed without inflicting pain, because it
+was impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person had
+been informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America,
+should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, he
+might have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could not
+conceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we could
+reasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germs
+and mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to the
+fullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us,
+
+"Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not
+realized."
+
+The last weapon of disbelief in a future life is the Scientific
+Argument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing in
+the universe but bodies and the properties of bodies." This is a
+characteristic example of the method of the materialists: to
+assume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate,
+and that, too, in defiance of the intelligent instincts of
+consciousness which compel every unsophisticated person to
+acknowledge the simultaneous existence of mind and matter as two
+correlated yet distinct realities. The better statement would be,
+There is nothing in the universe but forces and the relations of
+forces. For, while we know ourselves in immediate self
+consciousness, as personal intelligences perceiving, willing, and
+acting, all we know of an outward world is the effects produced on
+us by its forces. Certainly the powers of the universe can never
+be lost from the universe. Therefore if our souls are, as
+consciousness declares, causes, and not mere phenomena, they are
+immortal. To ignore either factor in the problem of life, the
+material substratum or the dynamic agent, is mere narrowness and
+blindness.
+
+But the unbelieving naturalist argues that the total man is a
+product of organization, and therefore that with the dissolution
+of the living combination of organs all is over. Matter is the
+marriage bed and grave of soul. Priestley says, "The principle of
+thought no more belongs to substance distinct from body than the
+principle of sound belongs to substance distinct from bell." There
+is no relevancy in the comparison, because the things are wholly
+unlike. Thought is not, as Hartley's theory avowed it was, a
+vibration of a cerebral nerve, as sound is a vibration of a
+sonorous body; for how could these vibrations be accumulated in
+memory as our mental experiences are? When a material vibration
+ends, it has gone forever; but thoughts are stored up and
+preserved. A hypothetical simile, like that just cited from
+Priestley, is not a cogent argument. It is false science thus to
+limit the modes of being to what lies within our present empirical
+knowledge. Is it not pure presumptuousness to affirm that the
+creative power of Almighty God is shut up so that intelligent
+creatures can only exist in forms of flesh? When a recent
+materialist makes the assertion, "The thinking man is the sum of
+his senses," it is manifest that he goes beyond the data, assuming
+what should be proved, and confounding the instruments and
+material with the workman. It is as if one should say, "A working
+cotton manufactory is the sum of its machines," excluding the
+persons by whose guiding oversight all is done. Plainly, it may be
+granted that all which man knows is brought in through the door of
+the senses, without allowing the same of all that man is. We have
+no warrant for pronouncing the identical coextensiveness of what
+man learns to know and what he is created to be. The very
+proposition, man knows something, presupposes three things, a
+subject, an act, and an object. Whether the three exist and perish
+together or not is matter for discussion, and not fairly to be
+settled by forcibly lumping the heterogeneous three into
+homogeneous unity.
+
+In the present state of science it must be confessed that all
+kinds of physical force  whether mechanical, chemical, vital, or
+nervous are drawn more or less directly from the sun, the material
+reservoir of power for our solar system. This must be admitted,
+although some recent materialists have pushed the doctrine so far
+that they may be called the Parsees of the West. Whenever the
+proper conditions for an animate being are furnished, a force
+derived from the sun lifts matter from its stable equilibrium to
+the level of organic existence. In due season, from its wavering
+life struggle there, it decays back to the deep rest of insensate
+earth.17 This is a truth throughout the organic realm, from the
+bulb of a sea weed to the brain of a Casar. So much cannot be
+denied. Every organism constantly receives from the universe food
+and force, and as constantly restores in other forms the material
+and dynamical equivalents of what it receives, and finally itself
+goes to the sources whence it came. But the affirmation of this
+for all within the physical realm is not the admission of it for
+what subsists in an immeasurably higher rank and totally different
+realm. Entering the psychical sphere, where we deal with a new,
+distinct order of realities, not impenetrability, weight,
+extension, but thought, affection, will, why may not this province
+contain eternities, even though the other holds only mortalities?
+It is a question to be examined on its own grounds, not to be put
+aside with a foregone conclusion. In nature the cause endures
+under all evanescent changes, and survives all phenomenal
+beginnings and endings: so in spirit the causal personality, if
+there be one, may outlast all the shifting currents of the outward
+phenomena in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation of
+the mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longer
+remain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Is
+the mind an entity? or is it a collection of functions? If the
+soul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenal
+resultant, it ceases at death.
+
+A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychical
+totality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition,
+and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual entity in
+which they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physical
+totality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes of
+absorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which these
+processes are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without a
+subject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritual
+attributes involve a mind. And, if a mental entity be admitted,
+its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is not
+a fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence.
+
+The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, an
+idea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mind
+must be the common ground and element of all
+
+17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben.
+
+
+different states of consciousness. What is that common ground and
+element but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whether
+manifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal core
+of our mental being, integrating and holding in continuous
+identity all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It is
+clear that any other representation seems inconsistent with the
+most central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In illustration of
+this, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly,
+or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitary
+and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said
+that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes
+sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the
+rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own:
+the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed
+substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the
+comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground
+principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, conscious
+and continuous identity holding in each present moment all the
+changes of the past moments. If the rainbow were gifted with
+consciousness, it could not preserve its personal identity, but
+merely its phenomenal identity, for any two successive moments,
+since its whole being would consist of an untied succession of
+states.
+
+Traversing the body from its extreme tissues to the gray vesicular
+substance composing the spinal cord and covering the surface and
+convolutions of the brain, are two sets of white, fibrous nerves.
+One set, the afferents, bring in sensation, all kinds of tidings,
+from the out world of matter. The other set, the efferents, carry
+out volition, all kinds of decrees, from the in world of mind.
+Without an afferent nerve no influence of the world can reach the
+mind; and without an efferent nerve no conclusion of the mind can
+reach the world. As we are now constituted, this machinery is
+necessary for the intercommunication of the mind and the material
+universe. But if there be something in the case besides live
+machinery and crossing telegrams, if there be a monarch mind
+inaccessible to the vulgar crowd of things and only conversing
+with them through the internuncial nerves, that spirit entity may
+itself be capable of existing forever in an ideal universe and of
+communing there face to face with its own kingly lineage and
+brood. And we maintain that the account of the phenomena is
+grossly defective, and that the phenomena themselves are palpably
+inexplicable, except upon the supposition of such an entity, which
+uses the organism but is not the organism itself nor a function of
+it. "Ideas," one materialist teaches, "are transformed
+sensations." Yes; but that does not supersede a transforming mind.
+There must be a force to produce the transformations. "The
+phenomena of mind," says another, "consist in a succession of
+states of consciousness." Yes; but what is it that presides over,
+takes up, and preserves this succession? The phenomena of the mind
+are not the mind itself. "The actions of the mind are the
+functions of the cerebrum," adds a third. Yes; but the inquiry is,
+what is the mind itself? not, what are its acts? The admission of
+the gray nerve cells of the brain, as the material substratum
+through which sensations are received and volitions returned, does
+not exclude the necessity of a dynamical cause for the
+metamorphosing phenomenon. That cause must be free and
+intelligent, because the products of its action, as well as its
+accompanying consciousness, are marked by freedom and intelligence.
+For example, when a cylindrical and
+
+fibrous porter deposits his sensitive burden in the vesicular and
+cineritious substance, something examines it, tests its import,
+reflects on what shall be done, forms an intelligent resolution,
+and commands another porter to bear the dynamic load forth. The
+reflective and determining something that does this is the mind.
+Thus, by the fact of an indissoluble dynamic will, is the broad
+lineal experience of man grasped and kept from dissipating into
+crumbled psychical states, as when the dead kings of ancient India
+were burned their corpses were wrapped in asbestos shrouds to hold
+the ashes together.
+
+The flame of a burnt out candle twinkling in the socket is not
+numerically the same with that which appeared when it was first
+lighted; nor is a river at any two periods numerically the same.
+Different particles constantly feed an ever renewed flame or
+stream, just like the former but never the same. A totally new
+element appears when we contemplate mind. Here, although the whole
+molecular substance of the visible organism is in perpetual flux,
+the same conscious personality persists through all, growing ever
+richer in an accumulating possession of past experiences still
+held in living command. The Arethusa of identity threads the
+blending states of consciousness, and, passing the ocean bed of
+death, may emerge in some morning fount of immortality. A
+photographic image impressed on suitable paper and then
+obliterated is restored by exposure to the fumes of mercury. But
+if an indefinite number of impressions were superimposed on the
+same paper, could the fumes of mercury restore any one called for
+at random? Yet man's memory is a plate with a hundred millions of
+impressions all cleanly preserved, and he can at will select and
+evoke the one he wants. No conceivable relationship of
+materialistic forces can account for the facts of this miraculous
+daguerreotype plate of experience, and the power of the mind to
+call out into solitary conspicuousness a desired picture which has
+forty nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine
+hundred and ninety nine latent pictures lying above it, and fifty
+millions below it. It has been said that "the impressions on the
+brain, whether perceptions or intellections, are fixed and
+retained through the exactness of assimilation. As the mind took
+cognizance of the change made by the first impression of an object
+acting on the brain through the sense organs, so afterwards it
+recognises the likeness of that change in the parts inserted by
+the nutritive process.18 This passage implies that the mind is an
+agent, not a phenomenon; and it describes some of the machinery
+with which the mind works, not the essence of the mind itself. Its
+doctrine does not destroy nor explain the presiding and elective
+power which interprets these assimilated and preserved changes,
+choosing out such of them as it pleases, that unavoided and
+incomprehensible power, the hiding place of volition and eternity,
+whose startling call has often been known, in some dread crisis,
+to effect an instantaneous restoration of the entire bygone life,
+making all past events troop through the memory, a swiftly awful
+cavalcade marching along the fibrous pavement of the brain, while
+each terrified thought rushes to its ashy window to behold. We
+here leave the material realm behind and enter a spiritual
+province where other predicates and laws hold, and where,
+"delivered over to a night of pure light, in which no unpurged
+sight is sharp enough to penetrate the mysterious essence that
+sprouteth into different persons," we kneel in most pious awe, and
+cry, with Sir
+
+18 Paget. Surgical Pathology, Lecture II.
+
+
+Thomas Browne, "There is surely a piece of divinity in us,
+something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the
+sun!"
+
+The fatal and invariable mistake of materialism is that it
+confounds means and steps with causes, processes with sources,
+organs with ends, predicates with subject.19 Alexander Bain denies
+that there is any cerebral closet or receptacle of sensation and
+imagery where impressions are stored to be reproduced at pleasure.
+He says, the revival of a past impression, instead of being an
+evocation of it from an inner chamber, is a setting on anew of the
+current which originally produced it, now to produce it again.20
+But this theory does not alter the fact that all past impressions
+are remembered and can be revived at will by an internal
+efficiency. The miracle, and the necessity of an unchanging
+conscious entity to explain it, are implied just as they were on
+the old theory. "The organs of sense," Sir Isaac Newton writes,
+"are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things
+in its sensorium, but for conveying them there." 21 Now, as we
+cannot suppose that God has a brain or needs any material organs,
+but rather that all infinitude is his Sensorium, so spirits may
+perceive spiritual realities without any mediating organism. Our
+physical experience in the present is no limit to the spiritual
+possibilities of the future. The materialistic argument against
+immortality fails, because it excludes essential facts. As
+anterior to our experience in the present state there was a power
+to organize experiences and to become what we are, so none of the
+superficial reasonings of a mere earth science can show that there
+is not now a power to organize experiences in a future state and
+to become what our faith anticipates we shall be. And this
+suggests to speculative curiosity the query, Shall we commence our
+future life, a psychical cell, as we commenced our present life, a
+physical cell?
+
+It will be well, perhaps, to reply next to some of the aggressive
+sophistries of disbelief. The following lines by Dr. Beddoes are
+striking, but, considered as a symbol of life, seem almost
+wilfully defective:
+
+"The body is but an engine Which draws a mighty stream of
+spiritual power Out of the world's own soul, and makes it play A
+while in visible motion."
+
+Man is that miraculous engine which includes not only all the
+needful machinery, but also fuel, fire, steam, and speed, and
+then, in climacteric addition to these, an engineer! Does the
+engineer die when the fire goes out and the locomotive stops? When
+the engine madly plunges off the embankment or bridge of life,
+does the engineer perish in the ruin, or nimbly leap off and
+immortally escape? The theory of despair has no greater
+plausibility than that of faith.
+
+Feuerbach teaches that the memento mori of reason meets us
+everywhere in the spiritual God's acre of literature. A book is a
+grave, which buries not the dead remains, but the quick
+
+19 Frauenstadt, Per Materialismus, seine Wahrheit und sein
+Irrthum, s. 169.
+
+20 The Senses and the Intellect, p. 61.
+
+21 Brodie, Psychological Inquiries, p. 41, 3d edition.
+
+
+man, not his corpse, but his soul. And so we live on the psychical
+deposits of our ancestry. Our souls consist of that material which
+once constituted other souls, as our bodies consist of the
+material which once constituted other bodies. A thought, it is to
+be replied, is never excreted from the mind and left behind. Only
+its existence is indicated by symbols, while itself is added to
+the eternal stock of the deathless mind. A thought is a spiritual
+product in the mind from an affection of the cerebral substance. A
+sentence is a symbol of a thought adapted to create in the
+contemplator just such a cerebral affection as that from which it
+sprang, and to deposit in his mind just such a spiritual product
+as that which it now denotes. Thus are we stimulated and
+instructed by the transmitted symbols of our ancestors'
+experiences, but not literally nourished by assimilation of their
+very psychical substance, as this remorseless prophet of death's
+ghastly idealism would have us believe. Still, in whatever aspect
+we regard it, one cannot but shudder before that terrible
+cineritious substance whose dynamic inhabitants are generated in
+the meeting of matter's messages with mind's forces, and sent
+forth in emblems to shake the souls of millions, revolutionize
+empires, and refashion the world.
+
+Strauss employs an ingenious argument against the belief in a
+future life, an argument as harmless in reality as it is novel and
+formidable in appearance. "Whether the nerve spirit be considered
+as a dependent product, or as the producing principle of the
+organism, it ends at death: for, in the former case, it can no
+longer be produced when the organism perishes; in the latter case,
+that it ceases to sustain the organism is a proof that it has
+itself decayed."22 In this specious bit of special pleading,
+unwarranted postulates are assumed and much confusion of thought
+is displayed. It is covertly taken for granted that every thing
+seen in a given phenomenon is either product or producer; but
+something may be an accompanying part, involved in the conditions
+of the phenomenon, yet not in any way essentially dependent on it,
+and in fact surviving it. What does Strauss mean by "the nerve
+spirit"? Is there no mind behind it and above it, making use of it
+as a servant? Our present life is the result of an actual and
+regulated harmony of forces. Surely that harmony may end without
+implying the decay of any of its initial components, without
+implying the destruction of the central constituent of its
+intelligence. It is illegitimate logic, passing from pure
+ignorance to positive affirmation; a saltation of sophistry from a
+negative premise of blindness to all behind the organic life, to a
+dogmatic conclusion of denial that there is any thing behind the
+organic life.
+
+A subtle and vigorous disbeliever has said, "The belief in
+immortality is not a correct expression of human nature, but rests
+solely on a misunderstanding of it. The real opinion of human
+nature is expressed in the universal sorrow and wailing over
+death." It is obvious to answer that both these expressions are
+true utterances of human nature. It grieves over the sadness of
+parting, the appalling change and decay, the close locked mystery
+of the unseen state. It rejoices in the solace and cheer of a
+sublime hope springing out of the manifold powerful promises
+within and without. Instead of contemning the idea of a heavenly
+futurity as an idle dream image of human longing, it were both
+devouter and more reasonable, from
+
+22 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, s. 394.
+
+
+that very causal basis of it, to revere it and confide in it as
+divinely pledged. All the thwarted powers and preparations and
+affections, too grand, too fine, too sacred, to meet their fit
+fulfilment here, are a claim for some holier and vaster sphere, a
+prophecy of a more exalted and serene existence, elsewhere. The
+unsatisfied and longing soul has created the doctrine of a future
+life, has it? Very good. If the soul has builded a house in
+heaven, flown up and made a nest in the breezy boughs of
+immortality, that house must have tenants, that nest must be
+occupied. The divinely implanted instincts do not provide and
+build for naught.
+
+Certain considerations based on the resemblances of men and
+beasts, their asserted community of origin and fundamental unity
+of nature, have had great influence in leading to the denial of
+the immortality of the human soul. It is taken for granted that
+animals are totally mortal; and then, from the apparent
+correspondences of phenomena and fate between them and us, the
+inference is drawn that the cases are parallel throughout, and
+that our destiny, too, is annihilation. The course of thought on
+this subject has been extremely curious, illustrating, on the one
+hand, that "where our egotism begins, there the laws of logic
+break," and, on the other hand, that often when fancy gets scent
+of a theory the voice and lash of reason are futile to restrain it
+until the theory is run into the ground. Des Cartes, and after him
+Malebranche and a few other writers, gave no slight currency to
+the notion that brutes are mere machines, moved by prearranged
+influences and utterly destitute of intelligence, will, or
+consciousness. This scheme gave rise to many controversies, but
+has now passed into complete neglect.23 Of late years the tendency
+has been to assimilate instead of separating man and beast.
+Touching the outer sphere, we have Oken's homologies of the
+cranial vertebra. In regard to the inner sphere, we have a score
+of treatises, like Vogt's Pictures from Brute Life, affirming that
+there is no qualitative, but merely a quantitative, distinction
+between the human soul and the brute soul.24 Over this point the
+conflict is still thick and hot. But, however much of truth there
+may be in the doctrine of the ground identity of the soul of a man
+and the soul of a dog, the conclusion that man therefore perishes
+is a pure piece of sophistry. Such a monstrous assassination of
+the souls of the human race with the jaw bone of an ass may be
+legitimately avoided in either of two ways. It is as fair to argue
+the immortality of animals from their likeness to us, as our
+annihilation from our likeness to them. The psychological realm
+has been as much deepened in them by the researches of modern
+science as the physiological domain has been widened in us. As
+Agassiz says, we must not lose sight of the mental individuality
+of animals in an exclusive attention to the bodily side of their
+nature.25 A multitude of able thinkers have held the faith that
+animals have immaterial and deathless souls. Rightly considered,
+there is nothing in such a
+
+23 Darmanson, La bete transformee en machine. Ditton, Appendix to
+Discourse on Resurrection of Christ, showing that brutes are not
+mere machines, but have immortal souls. Orphal, Sind die Thiere
+blos sinnliche Geschopfe? Thomasius, De Anima Brutorum, quo
+asseritur, eam non esse Materialem, contra Cartesianam Opinionem.
+Winkler, Philosophische Untersuchungen von dem Seyn and Wesen der
+Seelen der Thiere, von einzelnen Liebhabern der Weltweisheit.
+
+24 Buchner, Kraft und Stoff, kap. 19: Die Thierseele.
+
+25 Essay on Classification, p. 64.
+
+
+doctrine which a keen reasoner may not credit and a person of the
+most refined feelings find pleasure in embracing. In their serene
+catholicity and divine sympathy, science and religion exclude
+pride and contempt.
+
+But admitting that there is no surviving psychical entity in the
+brute, that is in no way a clear postulate for proving that the
+same fact holds of man. The lower endowments and provinces of
+man's nature and experience may correspond ever so closely with
+the being and life of brutes whose existence absolutely ceases at
+death, and yet he may be immortal. The higher range of his
+spiritual faculties may elevate him into a realm of universal and
+eternal principles, extricating his soul from the meshes of decay.
+He may come into contact with a sphere of truths, grasp and rise
+into a region of realities, conferring the prerogative of
+deathlessness, not to be reached by natures gifted in a much lower
+degree, although of the same kind. Such a distinction is made
+between men themselves by Spinoza.26 His doctrine of immortality
+depicts the stupendous boon as contingent, to be acquired by
+observance of conditions. If the ideas of the soul represent
+perishable objects, it is itself mortal; if imperishable, it is
+immortal. Now, brutes, it is probable, never rise to the
+apprehension of pure and eternal truths; but men do. It was a mean
+prejudice, founded on selfish ignorance and pride, which first
+assumed the total destruction of brutes in death, and afterwards,
+by the grovelling range of considerations in which it fastened and
+the reaction it naturally provoked, involved man and all his
+imperial hopes in the same fate. A firm logical discrimination
+disentangles the human mind from this beastly snarl.27 The
+difference in data warrants a difference in result. The argument
+for the immortality of brutes and that for the immortality of men
+are, in some respects, parallel lines, but they are not
+coextensive. Beginning together, the latter far outreaches the
+former. Man, like the animals, eats, drinks, sleeps, builds;
+unlike them, he adorns an ideal world of the eternal future, lays
+up treasures in its heavenly kingdom, and waits to migrate into
+it.
+
+There are two distinct methods of escaping the fatal inference of
+disbelief usually drawn by materialists. First, by the denial of
+their philosophical postulates, by the predication of immaterial
+substance, affirming the soul to be a spaceless point, its life an
+indivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conception
+have been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a multitude of
+accomplished and vigorous thinkers.28 In Herbart's system the soul
+is an immaterial monad, or real, capable of the permanent
+formation of states in its interior. Its life consists of a
+quenchless series of self preservations. These reals, with their
+relations and aggregations, constitute at once the varying
+phenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. Mamertius
+Claudianus, a philosophical priest of Southern Gaul in the fifth
+century, wrote a treatise "On the Nature of the Soul." He says,
+"When the soul wills, it is all will; when it recollects or feels,
+it is all recollection or feeling. Now, will, recollection, and
+feeling, are not bodies. Therefore the soul is incorporeal." This
+makes the conscious man an
+
+26 Jouffroy, Introduction to Ethics: Channing's trans., vol. ii.
+pp. 189-191.
+
+27 Schaller, Leib und Seele, kap. 13: Der Psychische Unterschied
+des Menschen vom Thiere.
+
+28 Crombie, Natural Theology, vol. ii.: Essay on the Immortality
+of the Soul. Brougham, Discourse of Nat. Theol., sect. 5.
+
+
+imperishable substantial activity. An old English writer, with
+quaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atom
+and the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excesse
+vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth out
+of that orbe where they reside that scorn divisibility."
+
+From this brief statement of the position of the immaterialists,
+without arguing it, we pass to note, in the second place, that
+nearly all the postulates ordinarily claimed by the materialist
+may be granted without by any means proving the justice of their
+disbelief of a future life.29 Admit that there can be no sensation
+without a nerve, no thought without a brain, no phenomenal
+manifestation without an organ. Such an admission legitimates the
+conclusion, on empirical grounds, that our present mode of life
+must cease with the dissolution of our organism. It does not even
+empirically prove that we may not survive in some other mode of
+being, passing perhaps to an inconceivably higher stage and more
+blessed kind of life. After the entire disintegration of our
+material organs, we may, by some now unknown means, possess in a
+refined form the equivalents of what those organs gave us. There
+may be, interfused throughout the gross mortal body, an immortal
+body of exquisitely delicate structure invisibly extricating
+itself from the carious ruins at death. Plattner develops and
+defends this hypothesis with plausible skill and power.30 The
+Hindus conceived the soul to be concealed within several
+successive sheaths, the innermost of which accompanied it through
+all its transmigrations.31 "The subtile person extends to a small
+distance over the skull, like the flame of a lamp above its wick."
+32 The later Pythagoreans and Platonists seem to have believed
+that the same numerical ethereal body with which the soul was at
+first created adhered to it inseparably during all its descents
+into grosser bodies, a lucid and wingy vehicle, which, purged by
+diet and catharms, ascends again, bearing the soul to its native
+seat.33 The doctrine of Swedenborg asserts man to be interiorly an
+organized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacle
+of life from God. In his terminology, "constant influx of life"
+supersedes the popular idea of a self contained spiritual
+existence. But this influx is conditioned by its receiving organ,
+the undecaying inner body.34 However boldly it may be assailed and
+rejected as a baseless theory, no materialistic logic can disprove
+the existence of an ethereal form contained in, animating, and
+surviving, the visible organism. It is a possibility; although,
+even if it be a fact, science, by the very conditions of the case,
+can never unveil or demonstrate it.
+
+When subjected to a certain mode of thought developed recently by
+Faraday, Drossbach, and others, materialism itself brightens and
+dissolves into a species of idealism, the universe becomes a
+glittering congeries of indestructible points of power, and the
+immortality of the soul is established as a mathematical
+certainty.35 All bodies, all entities, are but forms of
+
+This has been ably shown by Spiers in his treatise, Ueber das
+korperliche Bedingtsein der Seelenthatigkeiten.
+
+30 Spes immortalitatis animorum per rationes physiologicas
+confirmata.
+
+31 Dabistan, vol. ii. p. 177.
+
+32 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 246.
+
+33 Cudworth, Int. Sys., vol. ii. pp. 218-230, Am. ed.
+
+34 On the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, sect. 9.
+
+35 Lott, Herbarti de animi immortalitate doctrina.
+
+
+force.36 Gravity, cohesion, bitterness, thought, love,
+recollection, are manifestations of force peculiarly conditioned.
+Our perceptions are a series of states of consciousness. An
+attribute or property of a thing is an exercise of force or mode
+of activity producing a certain state of consciousness in us. The
+sum of its attributes or properties constitutes the totality of
+the thing, and is not adventitiously laid upon the thing: you can
+separate the parts of a thing; but you cannot take away its forces
+from any part, because they are its essence. Matter is not a
+limitation or neutralization, but a state and expression, of
+force. Force itself is not multiplex, but one, all qualities and
+directions of it lying potentially in each entity, the kinds and
+amounts which shall be actually manifested depending in each case
+on the conditions environing it. All matter, all being, therefore,
+consists of ultimate atoms or monads, each one of which is an
+inseparable solidarity of activities. The universe is an eternal
+society of eternal force individuals, all of which are capable of
+constant changes in groupings, aggregations, developments,
+relations, but absolutely incapable of annihilation. Every atom
+possesses potential reason, and comes to self apprehension
+whenever the appropriate conditions meet. All differences
+originate from conditions and exist not in essentialities.
+
+According to this theory, the eternity of the soul is sure, but
+that eternity must be an endless series of mutual transitions
+between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death.37 Since
+all cannot be men at once, they must take their turns. Carus says,
+a soul enclosing in itself an independent consciousness is
+inconceivable. When the organism by which consciousness is
+conditioned and revealed is destroyed in death, consciousness
+disappears as certainly as the gleaming height of a dome falls in
+when its foundation is removed. And Drossbach adds, death is the
+shade side of life. Without shade, light would not be perceptible,
+nor life without death; for only contrast leads to knowledge. The
+consciousness of life is realized by interchange with the
+unconsciousness of death. Mortality is the inevitable attribute of
+a self conscious being. The immortality of such a being can be
+nothing else than an everlasting mortality. In this restless
+alternation between the opposite states of life and death, being
+holds continuous endurance, but consciousness is successively
+extinguished and revived, while memory is each time hopelessly
+lost. Widenmann holds that the periods of death are momentary, the
+soul being at once born again, retaining no vestiges of its
+past.38 Drossbach, on the contrary, believes that memory is an
+indefeasible quality of the soul atom, the reason why we do not
+remember previous lives being that the present is our first
+experiment. When all atoms destined to become men have once run
+the human career, the earliest ones will begin to reappear with
+full memory of their preceding course. It matters not how long it
+requires for one circuit of the whole series of souls; for the
+infinite future is before us, and, as we are unconscious in death,
+the lapse of ages is nothing. We lie down to sleep, and instantly
+rise up to a new life.
+
+36 Hickok, Rational Cosmology, ch. ii. sect. 1: Matter is force.
+
+37 Drossbach, Die personliche Unsterblichkeit als Folge der
+atomistischen Verfaasung der Natur, abschn. iv. kap. ii. sect. 5,
+6.
+
+38 Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des
+Erdenlebens.
+
+
+"Death gives to life all its relish, as hunger is the true sauce
+of food. Death first makes us precious and dear to ourselves.
+Since it lies in the nature of change that no condition is
+endless, but morning ever follows night, death cannot be endless.
+Be unconcerned; thy being shall as little be lost as the grain of
+dust at thy foot! Because in death thou dost not know that thou
+art, therefore fearest thou that thou shalt be no more? O
+pusillanimous! the great events of nature are too vast for thy
+weak heart. A whole eternity thou hast not been conscious that
+thou art, and yet thou hast become conscious of it. Every night
+thou losest thy consciousness, yet art thou conscious again, and
+shalt be. The loss of consciousness is not necessarily the loss of
+self. The knowledge of my being is not my being itself, but a
+peculiar force thereof, which, entering into reciprocal action
+with other forces, is subject to change. It is its essence to act,
+and thus to change, yet without surrendering its essence. Goethe's
+words may be applied to the soul: 'It is; therefore eternally it
+is.'
+
+Not in cold motionlessness consists eternal life, but in eternal
+movement, in eternal alteration, in incessant change. These are
+warranties that no state endures forever, not even the
+unconscious, death." 39
+
+In this unfolding of the theory there are many arbitrary and
+fanciful conceptions which may easily be dispensed with. The
+interspersion of the bright life of the human monads with blank
+epochs of oblivious darkness, and the confinement of their destiny
+to an endless repetition of their life course on this globe, are
+not necessary. In the will of God the free range of the boundless
+universe may lie open to them and an incessant career in forever
+novel circumstances await them. It is also conceivable that human
+souls, leading still recurrent lives on earth with total
+forgetfulness, may at last acquire sufficient power, in some happy
+concurrence or sublime exigency, to summon back and retain all
+their foregone states. But, leaving aside all such incidental
+speculations, the chief interest of the dynamic atomistic or monad
+theory, as affording a solid basis for immortality, is in relation
+to the arrogance of a shallow and conceited materialism. Says the
+materialist, "Show me a spirit, and I will believe in your
+heaven." Replies the idealist, "Show me your matter, however small
+a piece, and I will yield to your argument." Spirit is no
+phenomenon to be shown, and matter is an inference from thought:
+thus the counter statements of physical science and ideal
+philosophy fairly offset each other, and throw their respective
+advocates back upon the natural ground of unsophisticated faith
+and observation. Standing there unperverted, man has an invincible
+reliance on the veracity of his faculties and the normal reports
+of nature. Through immediate apprehension of his own conscious
+will and the posited experience of his senses, he has knowledge
+both of causal forms of being, or free productive force, and of
+resultant processes and phenomena. And surely sound logic teaches
+that the latter may alter or disappear without implying the
+annihilation of the former. If all material substance, so called,
+were destroyed, not only would space remain as an infinite
+indivisible unity, but the equivalents
+
+39 Drossbach, Die individuelle Unsterblichkeit vom monadistisch
+metaphysischen Standpunkte betrachtet.
+
+
+of what had been destroyed must remain in some form or other. Who
+shall say that these equivalents would not be intelligent points
+of power, capable of organizing aggregate bodies and of
+reconstituting the universe in the will of God, or of forming from
+period to period, in endless succession, new kinds of universes,
+each abounding in hitherto unimagined modes of life and degrees of
+bliss? To our present faculties, with only our present
+opportunities and data, the final problem of being is insoluble.
+We resolve the properties of matter into methods of activity,
+manifestations of force. But there, covered with alluring awe, a
+wall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thus
+far, and no farther, shall thine explicating gaze read the secrets
+of destiny." We cannot tell what force is. We can conceive neither
+its genesis nor its extinction. Over that obscure environment,
+into the immense empire of possibilities, we must bravely fling
+the treasures of our love and the colors of our hope, and with a
+divine impulse in the moment of death leap after, trusting not to
+sink as nothing into the abyss of nowhere, but, landing safe in
+some elysium better than we know, to find ourselves still in God.
+
+In dealing with moral problems in the realm of the higher reason,
+intuitions, mysterious hints, prophetic feelings, instinctive
+apprehensions of fitness and harmony, may be of more convincing
+validity than all the formal arguments logic can build.40
+"Sentiment," Ancillon says, as quoted by Lewes, "goes further than
+knowledge: beyond demonstrative proofs there is natural evidence;
+beyond analysis, inspiration; beyond words, ideas; beyond ideas,
+emotions; and the sense of the infinite is a primitive fact of the
+soul." In transcendental mathematics, problems otherwise
+unapproachable are solved by operating with emblems of the
+relations of purely imaginary quantities to the facts of the
+problems. The process is sound and the result valid, notwithstanding
+the hypothetical and imaginary character of the aids in reaching it.
+
+When for mastering the dim momentous problems of our destiny
+the given quantities and relations of science are inadequate,
+the helpful supposititious conditions furnished by faith may
+equally lead over their airy ways to conclusions of eternal truth.
+
+The disbelievers of a future life have in their investigations
+applied methods not justly applicable to the subject, and
+demanded a species of proof impossible for the subject to yield:
+as if one should use his ear to listen to the symmetries of beauty,
+and his eye to gaze upon the undulations of music.
+
+It is therefore that the terribly logical onslaughts of
+Feuerbach are harmless upon most persons. The glittering scimetar
+of this Saracenic metaphysician flashes swift and sharp, but he
+fights the air with weapons of air. No blood flows from the
+severed emptiness of space; no clash of the blows is heard any
+more than bell strokes would be heard in an exhausted receiver.
+One may justifiably accept propositions which strict science
+cannot establish and believe in the existence of a thing which
+science cannot reveal, as Jacobi has abundantly shown41 and as
+Wagner has with less ability tried to illustrate.42 The utmost
+possible achievement of a negative criticism is to show the
+invalidity of the physiological,
+
+40 Abel, Disquisitio omnium tam pro immortalitate quam pro
+mortalitate argumentandi generum.
+
+41 Von den goutlichen Dingen and ibrer Offenbarung. Wissen und
+Glauben mit besonderer Beziehung zur Zukunft der Seelen:
+Fortsetzung der Betrachtungen uber Menschenschopfung und
+Seelensubstanz.
+
+
+analogical, and metaphysical arguments to furnish positive proof
+of a future life for us. But this negation fully admitted is no
+evidence of our total mortality. Science is impotent to give any
+proof reaching to such a conclusion. However badly the archery of
+the sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddled
+the outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain the
+garrison. Scientific criticism therefore leaves us at this point:
+there may be an immortal soul in us. Then the question whether
+there actually is an immortal soul in us, rests entirely on moral
+facts and considerations. Allowing their native force to these
+moral facts and considerations, the healthy ethical thinker,
+recognising in himself an innermost self conscious ego which knows
+itself persistent and identical amidst the multiplex vicissitude
+of transient conditions, lies down to die expecting immediately to
+continue his being's journey elsewhere, in some other guise.
+Leaving out of view these moral facts and considerations, the
+materialistic naturalist thinker, recognising his consciousness as
+only a phantom procession of states across the cerebral stage hung
+in ashy livery and afloat on blood, lies down to expire expecting
+immediately to be turned into nobody forever. Misinterpreting and
+undervaluing these moral facts and considerations, the anchorless
+speculative thinker, recognising his organism as an eye through
+which the World Spirit beholds itself, or a momentary pulse in
+which the All feels itself, his consciousness as a part of the
+infinite Thought, lies down on his death couch expecting
+immediately to be turned into everybody, eternity, instead of
+greeting him with an individual kiss, wrapping him in a monistic
+embrace. The broad drift of human conviction leads to the first
+conclusion, a persistent personality. The greatest philosophers,
+from Plato to Pascal, deny the second view, a blotting extinction
+of the soul, declaring it false in science and incredible in
+presentation. The third theory a pantheistic absorption  the
+irresistible common sense of mankind repudiates as a morbid dream.
+Man naturally believes himself immortal but not infinite. Monism
+is a doctrine utterly foreign to undiseased thinking. Although it
+be a Fichte, a Schelling, or a Hegel, who says that the soul is a
+circumscribed yet omnipotent ego, which first radiates the
+universe, and afterwards beholds it in the mirror of itself, and
+at length breaks into dead universality, the conception is, to the
+average apprehension of humanity, as overweening a piece of wild
+fancy as ever rose in a madman's reveries.43
+
+The ordinary contemplator of the phenomena of the world and the
+sequel of human life from the materialistic point of view feels
+disgust and terror at the prospect. The scene seems to him
+degrading and the fate fearful. The loathing and dismay vulgarly
+experienced thus, it is true, arise from an exaggerated
+misapprehension of the basis and meaning of the facts: rightly
+appreciated, all is rulingly alive, aspirant, beautiful, and
+benignant. The ceaseless transformations filling the heights and
+depths of the creation are pervaded with joy and
+
+42 A full discussion of the pantheistic doctrine of immortality
+will be found in the following works. Richmann, Gemsinfassl.
+Darstellung und Wurdigung aller gehaltreichen Beweisarten fur Gott
+und fur Unsterblichkeit der Seele. Unius, Unsterblichkeit.
+Blanche, Philosophische Unsterblichkeitlehre.
+
+43 Weisse, Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeit
+des menschlichen Individuums. Goschel, Von den Beweisen fur die
+Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der speculativen
+Philosophie. Morell, Historical and Critical View of the
+Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the 19th Century, part ii. ch.
+v. sect. 2: The German School of the 19th Century. Buchanan,
+Modern Atheism.
+
+
+clothed with a noble poetry. There is no real death: what seems so
+is but a "return or falling home of the fundamental phenomenon to
+the phenomenal foundation, a dissolution through which nature
+seeks her ground and strives to renew herself in her principles."
+Still, in spite of this more profound and genial interpretation of
+the shifting metamorphoses of nature, the fear of there being no
+conscious future life for man produces, when first entertained, a
+horrid constriction around the heart, felt like the ice cold coils
+of a serpent. The thought of tumbling hopelessly into "The blind
+cave of eternal night" naturally oppresses the heart of man with
+sadness and with alarm. To escape the unhappiness thus inflicted,
+recourse has been had to expedients. Four artificial substitutes
+for immortality have been devised. Fondly fixing attention upon
+these, men have tried to find comfort and to absorb their thoughts
+from the dreaded spectre and the long oblivion. The first is the
+sentimental phantasm of posthumous fame. The Latin bard, ancient
+Ennius, sings,
+
+"Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu Faxit. Cur? volito
+vivu' per ora virum." 44
+
+Shakspeare likewise often expresses the same thought:
+
+"When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shall
+live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even in
+the mouths of men."
+
+And again in similar strain:
+
+"My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of
+him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and
+speechless tribes."
+
+Napoleon is reported to have said, "My soul will pass into history
+and the deathless memories of mankind; and thus in glory shall I
+be immortal." This characteristically French notion forms the
+essence of Comte's "positivist" doctrine of a future life. Those
+deemed worthy after their death to be incorporated, by vote of the
+people, in the Supreme Being, the Grand Etre, a fictitious product
+of a poetic personification, through the perpetual fame and
+influence thus secured have an immortal life in the thoughts and
+feelings of a grateful posterity. Comte says, "Positivism greatly
+improves immortality and places it on a firmer foundation, by
+changing it from objective to subjective." Great and eternal
+Humanity is God. The dead who are meritorious are alone
+remembered, and, thus incorporated into the Divinity, they have a
+"subjective immortality in the brains of the living." 45 It is a
+poor shadow of the sublime truth which the soul craves. Leopardi,
+in his Bruto Minore, expresses this "poor hope of being in the
+future's breath:"
+
+44 Cicero, Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xv.
+
+45 Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversation III.
+
+
+"dell' atra morte ultima raggio Conscia future eta." That proud
+and gifted natures should have seriously stooped to such a toy, to
+solace themselves with it, is a fact strange and pathetic. With
+reverential tenderness of sympathy must we yearn towards those
+whose loving natures, baffled of any solid resource, turn
+appealingly, ere they fade away, to clasp this substanceless image
+of an image.
+
+Another scheme is what may be called the "lampada tradunt" 46
+theory of a future life. Generations succeed each other, and the
+course is always full. Eternal life takes up new subjects as fast
+as its exhausted receptacles perish. Men are the mortal cells of
+immortal humanity. The individual must comfort himself with the
+sympathetic reflection that his extinction destroys nothing, since
+all the elements of his being will be manipulated into the forms
+of his successors.
+
+Life is a constant renovation, and its sum is forever full and
+equal on the globe. The only genuine resurrection unto eternal
+life is an unending re creation of organisms from the same
+materials to repeat the same physiological and psychological
+processes.47 There is a gleam of cheer and of nobleness in this
+representation; but, upon the whole, it is perhaps as ineffectual
+as the former. It is a vapid consolation, in view of our own
+annihilation, to think that others will then live and also be
+annihilated in their turn. It is pleasant to believe that the
+earth will forever be peopled with throngs of men; but though such
+a belief might help to reconcile us to our fate, it could not
+alter the intrinsic sadness of that fate.
+
+A third substitute for the common view of immortality is a
+scientific perception of the fact that the peculiar force which
+each man is, the sum of his character and life, is a cause
+indestructibly mixed with the course of subsequent history, an
+objective personal immortality, though not a conscious one. What
+he was, remains and acts forever in the world.
+
+The fourth substitute is an identification of self with the
+integral scheme of things. I am an inseparable portion of the
+totality of being, to move eternally in its eternal motion.
+
+"If death seem hanging o'er thy separate soul, Discern thyself a
+part of life's great whole."
+
+Lose the thought of thy particular evanescence in the thought of
+the universal permanence. The inverted torch denotes death to a
+mere inhabitant of the earth: to a citizen of the universe,
+downward and upward are the same. Perhaps one who rejects the
+ordinary doctrine of a future life can be solaced and edified by
+these substitutes in proportion to his fineness, greatness, and
+nobleness. But to most persons no substitute can atone for the
+withdrawn truth of immortality itself.
+
+In regard to the eternal preservation of personal consciousness,
+it were bigoted blindness to deny that there is room for doubts
+and fears. While the monad soul so to call it lies here beneath
+the weak glimmer of suns so far off that they are forceless to
+develop it to a
+
+46 Lucretius, De Nat. Rerum, lib. ii. 1. 78.
+
+47 Schultz Schultzenstein, Die Bildung des menschlichen Geistes
+durch Kultur der Verjungung seines Lebens, ss. 834-847: Die
+Unsterblichkeitsbegriffe.
+
+
+victorious assurance, we cannot but sometimes feel misgivings and
+be depressed by skeptical surmises. Accordingly, while belief has
+generally prevailed, disbelief has in every age had its
+representatives. The ancients had their Dicaarchus, Protagoras,
+Panatius, Lucan, Epicurus, Casar, Horace, and a long list besides.
+The moderns have had their Gassendi, Diderot, Condillac, Hobbes,
+Hume, Paine, Leopardi, Shelley, and now have their Feuerbach,
+Vogt, Moleschott, and scores of others needless to be named. And
+although in any argument from authority the company of the great
+believers would incomparably outshine and a thousand times
+outweigh the array of deniers, this does not alter the obvious
+fact that there are certain phenomena which are natural
+provocatives of doubt and whose troubling influence scarcely any
+one can always escape. Homer, in giving expression to Hector's
+confidence of victory over the Greeks, makes him wish that he were
+but as sure of entering the state of the immortal gods.48 When
+some one asked Dr. Johnson, "Have we not proof enough of the
+immortality of the soul?" he replied, "I want more." Davenant of
+whom Southey says, "I know no other author who has so often
+expressed his doubts respecting a future state and how burdensome
+he felt them" writes,  "But ask not bodies doom'd to die,
+To what abode they go: Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy,
+It is not safe to know."
+
+Charles Lamb writes, "If men would honestly confess their
+misgivings, (which few men will,) there are times when the
+strongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of such
+staggering obscurity." Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil of
+shifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations,
+voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictory
+queries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, before
+the darkness of unknown futurity might piteously exclaim, without
+deserving blame,
+
+"I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which down
+hurls me to the ground."
+
+Who that has reached maturity of reflection cannot appreciate and
+sympathize somewhat with these lines of Byron, when he stands
+before a lifeless form of humanity?
+
+"I gazed, as oft I have gazed the same, To try if I could wrench
+aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make, a
+faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: but
+where? Five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far!
+And is this blood, then, form'd but to be shed? Can every element
+our elements mar? Can air, earth, water, fire, live and we dead?
+We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more."
+
+48 Iliad, lib, viii. Il. 538-540.
+
+
+Doubt is not sin, but rather a misfortune; for it is to adopt a
+suggestion from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thought
+steals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence of
+doubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are two
+attitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions and
+evidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints of
+the nails and lay my finger in the marks of the wounds." The other
+is, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." In abstract logic
+or rigid science the former may be appropriate and right. The
+latter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. If
+a man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, he
+shall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts,
+complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaron
+with his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist of
+disbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of what
+he is most assured,  His glassy essence," his conduct is offensive
+to every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation of
+God. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager to destroy
+those lofty thoughts which so much help to make us men, is a
+shocking spectacle. Yet a few such there are, who seem delighted
+as by their dismal theory they bury mankind in an iron tomb of
+materialism and inscribe on the irrevocable door the solitary
+words, Fate and Silence.
+
+The more attentively one dwells on the perishable physical side of
+life, the more prone he will be to believe in an absolute death;
+the more prevailingly he ponders the incorruptible psychical side,
+the more prepared he will be to credit immortality. The chemist
+who confines his studies exclusively within his own province, when
+he reflects on the probable sequence of life, will speculatively
+see himself vanish in his blowpipes and retorts. Whoso devotedly
+dabbles in organisms, nerves, and bloods may easily become
+skeptical of spirit; for it everywhere balks his analysis and
+eludes his search. The objects he deals with are things. They
+belong to change and dissolution. Mind and its proper home belong
+to a different category of being. Because no heaven appears at the
+end of the telescope, and no soul is seen on the edge of the
+dissecting knife, and no mind is found at the bottom of the
+crucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, nor
+soul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be to
+infer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilled
+in any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes into
+the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of
+immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it,
+is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under
+Rome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thus
+lost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault of
+heaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine and
+sentient joy!
+
+When we contemplate men in a mass, like a swarm of bees or a hive
+of ants, we find ourselves doubting their immortality. They melt
+away, in swiftly confused heaps and generations, into the bosom of
+nature. On the other hand, when we think of individuals, an almost
+unavoidable thought of personal identity makes us spontaneously
+conclude them immortal. It rather requires the effort then to
+think them otherwise. But obviously the real problem is never of
+the multitudinous throng, but always of the solitary person. In
+reference
+
+to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinese
+city as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable human
+inhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin. Fairness requires
+that our imaginations and reasonings upon the subject fasten upon
+an individual, set apart and uplifted, like a king, in the
+incommunicable distinctness and grandeur of selfhood and
+responsibility.
+
+From looking about this grave paved star, from painful and
+degrading contemplations of dead bodies, "the snuff and loathed
+part of nature which burns itself out," let a man turn away, and
+send his interior kingly glance aloft into ideal realms, let him
+summon up the glorious sentiments of freedom, duty, admiration,
+the noble experiences of self sacrifice, love, and joy, and his
+soul will extricate itself from the filthy net of material decay,
+and feel the divine exemption of its own clean prerogatives,
+dazzling types of eternity, and fragments of blessedness that
+"Promise, on our Maker's truth, Long morrow to this mortal youth."
+Martyrdom is demonstration of immortality; for self preservation
+is the innermost, indestructible instinct of every conscious
+being. When the soul, in a sacred cause, enthusiastically rushes
+upon death, or in calm composure awaits death, it is irresistibly
+convinced that it cannot be hurt, but will be blessed, by the
+crisis. It knows that in an inexpressibly profound sense whosoever
+would ignobly save his life loses it, but whosoever would nobly
+lose his life saves it. Martyrdom demonstrates immortality.
+
+"Life embark'd out at sea, 'mid the wave tumbling roar, The poor
+ship of my body went down to the floor; But I broke, at the bottom
+of death, through a door, And, from sinking, began forever to
+soar."
+
+The most lamentable and pertinacious doubts of immortality
+sometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness,
+sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, as
+these undeniably are palpable violations of the creative
+intention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness the
+argument demands that we select the noblest, healthiest specimens
+of completed humanity to reason from. Should we not take a case in
+which God's will is so far plainly fulfilled, in order to trace
+that will farther and even to its finality? And regarding on his
+death bed a Newton, a Fenelon, a Washington, is it difficult to
+conceive him surviving the climax and catastrophe of his somatic
+cell basis and soaring to a more august range of existence?
+Remembering that such as these have lived and died, ay, and even
+the godlike Nazarene, can we believe that man is merely a white
+interrogation point lifted on the black margin of matter to ask
+the answerless secret of the universe and be erased?
+
+Such a conclusion charges God with the transcendent crime of
+infanticide perpetrated in the most deliberate manner and on the
+most gigantic scale. Who can bear, by thus quenching the hope of
+another life, to add death to death, and overcast, to every
+thoughtful eye, the whole sunny field of life with the melancholy
+shadow of a bier? There is a noble strength and confidence,
+cheering to the reader, in these words of one of the wisest and
+boldest of thinkers: "I should be the very last man to be willing
+to dispense with the faith in a future life: nay, I would say,
+with Lorenzo de'Medici, that all those are dead, even for the
+present life, who do not hope for another. I have the firm
+conviction that our soul is an existence of indestructible nature,
+whose working is from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun,
+that seems indeed to set, but really never sets, shining on in
+unchangeable splendor." 49 Such a view of our destiny incomparably
+inspires and ennobles us. Man, discovering under all the poor,
+wretched accidents of earth and sense and hard fortune the
+immortality of his soul, feels as that king's son who, lost in
+infancy, and growing up under the care of a forest hind, supposed
+himself to belong to the rude class among whom he lived; but one
+day, learning his true parentage, he knew beneath his mean
+disguise that he was a prince, and immediately claimed his
+kingdom. These facts of experience show clearly how much it
+behooves us to cultivate by every honest method this cardinal
+tenet of religion, how much wiser faith is in listening to the
+lucid echoes of the sky than despair in listening to the muffled
+reverberations of the grave. All noble and sweet beliefs grow with
+the growing nobleness and tenderness of characters sensitive to
+those fine revealings which pachydermatous souls can never know.
+In the upper hall of reason, before the high shrine of faith, burn
+the base doubts begotten in the cellars of sense; and they may
+serve as tapers to light your tentative way to conviction. If the
+floating al Sirat between physiology and psychology, earth and
+heaven, is too slippery and perilous for your footing, where heavy
+limbed science cannot tread, nerve the wings of faith for a free
+flight. Or, if every effort to fasten a definite theory on some
+solid support on the other side of the gulf fails, venture forth
+on the naked line of limitless desire, as the spider escapes from
+an unwelcome position by flinging out an exceedingly long and fine
+thread and going forth upon it sustained by the air.50 Whoever
+preserves the full intensity of the affections is little likely to
+lose his trust in God and a future life, even when exposed to
+lowering and chilling influences from material science and
+speculative philosophy: the glowing of the heart, as Jean Paul
+says, relights the extinguished torch in the night of the
+intellect, as a beast stunned by an electric shock in the head is
+restored by an electric shock in the breast. Daniel Webster says,
+in an expression of his faith in Christianity written shortly
+before his death, "Philosophical argument, especially that drawn
+from the vastness of the universe in comparison with the apparent
+insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for
+the faith which is in me; but my heart has always assured and
+reassured me."51 Contemplating the stable permanence of nature as
+it swallows our fleet generations, we may feel that we vanish like
+sparks in the night; but when we think of the persistent identity
+of the soul, and of its immeasurable superiority to the brute mass
+of matter, the aspect of the case changes and the moral inference
+is reversed. Does not the simple truth of love conquer and trample
+the world's aggregated lie? The man who, with assiduous toil and
+earnest faith, develops his forces, and disciplines his faculties,
+and cherishes his aspirations, and accumulates virtue and wisdom,
+is thus preparing the auspicious stores and conditions of another
+existence. As he slowly journeys over the mountains of life, aware
+that there can be
+
+49 Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.
+
+50 Greenough, An Artist's Creed.
+
+51 Memorial of Daniel Webster from the City of Boston, p. 16.
+
+
+no returning, he gathers and carries with him materials to build a
+ship when he reaches the strand of death. Upon the mist veiled
+ocean launching then, he will sail where? Whither God orders. Must
+not that be to the right port?
+
+We remember an old Brahmanic poem brought from the East by Ruckert
+and sweetly resung in the speech of the West full of encouragement
+to those who shall die.52 A man wrapped in slumber calmly reclines
+on the deck of a ship stranded and parting in the breakers. The
+plank on which he sleeps is borne by a huge wave upon a bank of
+roses, and he awakes amidst a jubilee of music and a chorus of
+friendly voices bidding him welcome. So, perhaps, when the body is
+shattered on the death ledge, the soul will be tossed into the
+fragrant lap of eternal life on the self identified and dynamic
+plank of personality.
+
+52 Brahmanische Erzahlungen, s. 5.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. IN discussing the
+ethics of the doctrine of a future life a subject here amazingly
+neglected, there more amazingly maltreated, and nowhere, within
+our knowledge, truly analyzed and exhibited1 it is important that
+the theme be precisely defined and the debate kept strictly to the
+lines. Let it be distinctly understood, therefore, that the
+question to be handled is not, "Whether there ought to be a future
+life or not," nor, "Whether there is a future life or not." The
+question is, "What difference should it make to us whether we
+admit or deny the fact of a future life?" If we believe that we
+are to pass through death into an immortal existence, what
+inferences pertaining to the present are right, fully to be drawn
+from the supposition? If, on the other hand, we think there is
+nothing for us after the present, what are the logical
+consequences of that faith in regard to our aims and rules of
+conduct in this world?
+
+Suppose a man who has always imagined that death is utter
+annihilation should in some way suddenly acquire knowledge that an
+endless existence immediately succeeds the termination of this:
+what would be the legitimate instructions of his new information?
+Before we can fairly answer this inquiry, we need to know what
+relations connect the two states of existence. A knowledge of the
+law and method and means of man's destiny is more important for
+his guidance than the mere ascertainment of its duration. With
+reference to the query before us, four hypotheses are conceivable.
+If, in the first place, there be no connection whatever except
+that of temporal sequence between the present life and the future,
+then, so far as duty is concerned, the expectation of a world to
+come yields not the slightest practical application for the
+experience that now is. It can only be a source of comfort or of
+terror; and that will be accordingly as it is conceived under the
+aspect of benignity or of vengeance. If, secondly, the character
+of the future life depend on conditions to be fulfilled here, but
+those conditions be not within our control, then, again, no
+inferences of immediate duty can be drawn from the apprehended
+hereafter. Being quasi actors in a scene prearranged and with a
+plot predetermined, we can no more be capable of any obligation or
+choice, in regard to the end, than puppets which some unseen
+Harlequin moves by the terrible wires of primitive decree or
+transmitted depravity towards the genial or the tragic crisis. If
+the soul's fate there is to be heaven or hell according to the
+part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity
+to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future life
+is reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source of
+complacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect and
+the reprobate.
+
+Thirdly, it may be conceived that the future life is a state of
+everlasting reward and punishment unchangeably decided by the way
+in which the probationary period allotted on
+
+1 The only direct treatise on the subject known to us is
+Tilemann's Kritik der Unsterblichkeitslehre in Ansehung des
+Sittengesetzes, published in 1789. And this we have not seen.
+
+
+earth is passed through. Here are men, for a brief time, free to
+act thus or otherwise. Do thus, and the endless bliss of heaven is
+won. Do otherwise, and the endless agony of hell is incurred. The
+plain rule of action yielded by this doctrine is, Sacrifice all
+other things to the one thing needful. The present life is in
+itself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustible
+eternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends on
+how you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing to
+do while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To waste
+a single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness of
+folly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and then
+to improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energy
+and every thought and every desire of every moment. This world is
+a bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is there
+leisure for sport and business, or room for science and
+literature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to get
+ourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, which
+will waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lake
+packed with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls the
+floating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, this
+should intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can be
+admitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not one
+flexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantine
+immortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makes
+eternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleeting
+probation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that it
+pronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. The
+only true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure the
+forensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointed
+means. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathless
+moment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea of
+blessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, such
+should be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety that
+there would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Every
+object should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, every
+sound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatory
+confession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single and
+preternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing could
+allow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting or
+blinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Such
+would be a logical application to life of the genuine morals of
+the doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to be
+rejected as false on many grounds. It is deduced from Scripture by
+a technical and unsound interpretation. It is unjust and cruel,
+irreconcilable with the righteousness or the goodness of God. It
+is unreasonable, opposed to the analogies of nature and to the
+experience of man. It is wholly impossible to carry it out
+consistently in the practice of life. If it were thoroughly
+credited and acted upon, all the business of the world would
+cease, and the human race would soon die out.
+
+There remains one other view of the relationship of a future life
+with the present. And it seems to be the true view. The same
+Creator presiding, the same laws prevailing, over infinitude and
+eternity that now rule over time and earth, our immortality cannot
+reasonably be imagined either a moment of free action and an
+eternity of fixed consequences, or a series of separate fragments
+patched into a parti colored experience with blanks of death
+between the patterns of life. It must be conceived as one endless
+existence in linear connection of cause and effect developing in
+progressive phases under varying conditions of motive and scenery.
+With what we are at death we live on into the next life. In every
+epoch and world of our destiny our happiness depends on the
+possession of a harmoniously working soul harmoniously related
+with its environment. Each stage and state of our eternal
+existence has its peculiarities of duty and privilege. In this one
+our proper work is to improve the opportunities, discharge the
+tasks, enjoy the blessings, belonging here. We are to do the same
+in the next one when we arrive in that. All the wealth of wisdom,
+virtue, strength, and harmony we acquire in our present life is
+the vantage ground and capital wherewith we start in the
+succeeding life. Therefore the true preparation for the future is
+to fit ourselves to enter it under the most favorable auspices, by
+accumulating in our souls all the spiritual treasures afforded by
+the present. In other words, the truest aim we can set before
+ourselves during our existence on earth is to make it yield the
+greatest possible results of the noblest experience. The life
+hereafter is the elevated and complementary continuation of the
+life here; and certainly the directest way to ameliorate the
+continuation is to improve the commencement.
+
+But, it may be said, according to this representation, the fact of
+a future life makes no difference in regard to our duty now; for
+if the grave swallows all, still, it is our duty and our interest
+to make the best and the most of our life in the world while it
+lasts. True; and really that very consideration is a strong proof
+of the correctness of the view in question. It corresponds with
+the other arrangements of God. He makes every thing its own end,
+complete in itself, at the same time that it subserves some
+further end and enters into some higher unity. He is no mere
+Teleologist, hobbling towards his conclusions on a pair of decayed
+logic crutches,2 but an infinite Artist, whose means and ends are
+consentaneous in the timeless and spaceless spontaneity and
+perfection of his play. If the tomb is our total goal, our genuine
+aim in this existence is to win during its course an experience
+the largest in quantity and the best in quality. On the other
+hand, if another life follows this, our wisdom is just the same;
+because that experience alone, with the favor of God, can
+constitute our fitness and stock to enter on the future. And yet
+between the two cases there is this immense difference,  not
+indeed in duty, but in endowment, that in the latter instance we
+work out our allotted destiny here, in a broader illumination,
+with grander incentives, and with vaster consolations. A future
+life, then, really imposes no new duty upon the present, alters no
+fundamental ingredient in the present, takes away none of the
+charms and claims of the present, but merely sheds an additional
+radiance upon the shaded lights already shining here, infuses an
+additional motive into the stimulants already animating our
+purposes, distills an additional balm into the comforts which
+already assuage our sorrows amidst an evanescent scene. The belief
+that we are to live hereafter in a compensating world explains to
+us many a sad mystery, strengthens us for many an oppressive
+burden, consoles us in many a sharp grief. Else we should oftener
+go mad in the baffling whirl of problems, oftener obey the baser
+voice, oftener yield to despair. These three are the moral uses,
+in the present life, of the
+
+2 "Seht, an der morschen Syllogismenkrucke Hinkt Gott in Seine
+Welt."Lenau's Satire auf einen Professor philosophia.
+
+
+doctrine of a future life. Outside of these three considerations
+the doctrine has no ethical meaning for human observance here.
+
+It will be seen, according to the foregoing representation, that
+the expectation of a future life, instead of being harmful to the
+interests and attractions of the present, simply casts a cheering
+and magnifying light upon them. It does not depreciate the
+realities or nullify the obligations now upon us, but emphasizes
+them, flinging their lights and shades forward through a mightier
+vista. Consequently there is no reason for assailing the idea of
+another life in behalf of the interests of this. Such an
+opposition between the two states is entirely sophistical,
+resulting from a profound misinterpretation of the truemoral
+relations connecting them.
+
+The belief in immortality has been mistakenly attacked, not merely
+as hostile to our welfare on earth, but likewise as immoral in
+itself, springing from essential selfishness, and in turn
+nourishing selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with that
+central vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identical
+individual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination of
+avaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out of
+sight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makes
+his poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfish
+desire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation of
+self will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face of
+the solemn and all submerging order of the universe, is the very
+essence and climax of immorality and irreligiousness. To this
+assault on the morality of the belief in a future life, whether
+made in the devout tones of magnanimous sincerity, as by the
+sublime Schleiermacher, or with the dishonest trickiness of a
+vulgar declaimer for the rehabilitation of the senses, as by some
+who might be named, several fair replies may be made. In the first
+place, the objection begs the question, by assuming that the
+doctrine is a falsehood, and that its disciples wilfully set up
+their private wishes against the public truth. Such tremendous
+postulates cannot be granted. It is seizing the victory before the
+battle, grasping the conclusion without establishing the premises.
+For, if there be a future life provided by the Creator, it cannot
+be sinful or selfish in us to trust in it, to accept it with
+humble gratitude, and to prepare our souls for it. That, instead
+of being rebellious arrogance or overweening selfishness, would
+simply be conforming our thoughts and plans, our desires and
+labors, to the Divine arrangements. That would be both morality
+and piety. When one clings by will to a doctrine known to be a
+falsehood, obstinately suppressing reason to affirm it as a truth,
+and, in obedience to his personal whims, trying to force all
+things into conformity with it, he does act as a selfish egotist
+in full violation of the moral law and the spirit of religion. But
+a future life we believe to be a fact; and therefore we are, in
+every respect, justified in gladly expecting it and consecratedly
+living with reference to it.
+
+Furthermore, admitting it to be an open question, neither proved
+nor disproved, but poised in equal uncertainty, still, it is not
+immoral nor undevout deeply to desire and fondly to hope a
+personal immortality. "The aim of religion," it has been said, "is
+the annihilation of one's own individuality, the living in the
+All, the becoming one with the universe." But in such a definition
+altogether too much is assumed. The aim of religion is only the
+annihilation of the self will of the individual as opposed to the
+Will of the Whole, not the losing of one's self in the unconscious
+wastes of the universe, but the harmonizing of one's self with the
+Supreme Law of the universe.
+
+An humble, loving, and joyous conformity to the truth constitutes
+morality and religion. This is not necessarily inconsistent with a
+personal immortality. Besides, the charge may be retorted. To be
+identified with the universe is a prouder thought than to be
+subordinated to it as an infinitesimal individual. It is a far
+haughtier conceit to fancy one's self an integral part of God's
+substance than to believe one's self a worshipping pensioner of
+God's will. The conception, too, is less native to the mind, has
+been more curiously sought out, and is incomparably more pampering
+to speculative luxury. If accusations of selfishness and
+wilfulness are to be hurled upon any modes of preferred faith as
+to our destiny, this self styled disinterested surrender of our
+personality to the pantheistic Soul is as obnoxious to them as the
+common belief.
+
+If a desire for personal immortality be a normal experience in the
+development of our nature, it cannot be indictable as an offence,
+but must be recognised as an indication of God's design. Whether
+the desire is a cold and degraded piece of egotism deserving
+rebuke and contempt, or a lofty and sympathetic affection worthy
+of reverence and approval, depends on no intrinsic ingredient of
+the desire itself, but on the character in which it has its being.
+One person will be a heartless tyrant, another a loving saint, in
+his hope of a future life. Shall our love of the dead, our prayers
+to meet them again, our unfathomed yearnings to know that they
+still live and are happy, be stigmatized as mean and evil? Regard
+for others as much as for ourselves prompts the eternal sigh. Nor
+will Divinity ever condemn the feeling himself has awakened. It is
+said that Xerxes, gazing once upon his gorgeous army of a million
+men spread out below hire, sheathed in golden armor, white plumes
+nodding, purple standards waving, martial horns blowing, wept as
+he thought that in thirty years the entire host composing that
+magnificent spectacle would be dead. To have gazed thoughtfully
+upon such a sight with unmoved sensibilities would imply a much
+more selfish and hard hearted egotist. So when a lonely
+philanthropist from some meditative eminence looks down on the
+human race, if, as the contemplation of their pathetic fading and
+decay wounds his saddened heart, he heals and cheers it with the
+faith of a glorious immortality for them all, who shall call him
+selfish and sinful? To rest contented with the speedy night and
+the infinite oblivion, wiping off all the unsolved sums from the
+slate of existence with annihilation's remorseless sponge, that
+would be the selfishness and the cruelty.
+
+When that sweet asp, death, fastens on our vein of earthly life,
+we all feel, like the dying queen of Egypt, that we have "immortal
+longings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinacious
+instinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rational
+to conclude that this is a pledge of her indestructible
+personality, God's impregnable defence reared around the citadel
+of her being, than to consider it the artificial rampart flung up
+by an insurgent egotism. In like manner, it is a misrepresentation
+of the facts to assert the culpable selfishness of the faith in a
+future life as a demanded reward for fidelity and merit here. No
+one demands immortality as pay for acquired desert. It is modestly
+looked for as a free boon from the God who freely gave the present
+and who has by a thousand symbolic prophecies promised it. Richter
+says, with great insight, "We desire immortality not as the reward
+of virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewarded
+than joy can: it is its own reward." Kant says, "Immortality has
+been left so uncertain in order that pure freedom of choice, and
+no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations." "But," Jean Paul
+keenly replies, "as we have now discovered this intention, its
+object is defeated. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes
+virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make
+it more so." The anticipation of heaven can hardly make man a
+selfish calculator of profit; because heaven is no reward for
+crafty reckoning, but the home of pure and holy souls. Virtue
+which resists temptation and perseveres in rectitude because it
+has a sharp eye to an ulterior result is not virtue. No credible
+doctrine of a future life offers a prize except to those who are
+just and devout and strenuous in sacred service from free loyalty
+to the right and the good, spontaneously obeying and loving the
+higher and better call because it divinely commands their
+obedience and love. The law of duty is the superior claim of truth
+and goodness. Virtue, yielding itself filially to this, finds in
+heaven not remuneration, but a sublimer theatre and an immortal
+career. Egotistic greed, all mere prudential considerations as
+determining conditions or forces in the award, are excluded as
+unclean and inadmissible by the very terms; and the doctrine
+stands justified on every ground as pure and wholesome before the
+holiest tribunal of ethics. Surely it is right that goodness
+should be blessed; but when it continues good only for the sake of
+being blessed it ceases to be goodness. It is not the belief in
+immortality, but only the belief in a corrupt doctrine of
+immortality which can poison the springs of disinterested virtue.
+
+The morality of the doctrine of a future life having thus been
+defended from the attacks of those who have sought to destroy it
+in the fancied interests either of the enjoyments of the earth or
+of the purity of virtue and religion, it now remains to free it
+from the still more fatal supports which false or superficial
+religionists have sought to give it by wrenching out of it
+meanings it never held, by various perverse abuses of it, by
+monstrous exaggerations of its moral importance to the present. We
+have seen that the supposition of another life, correctly
+interpreted, lays no new duty upon man, takes away from him no old
+duty or privilege, but simply gives to the previously existing
+facts of the case the intensifying glory and strength of fresh
+light, motive, and consolation. But many public teachers, not
+content to treat the subject with this sobriety of reason, instead
+of presenting the careful conclusions of a conscientious analysis,
+have sought to strengthen their argument to the feelings by help
+of prodigious assumptions, assumptions hastily adopted, highly
+colored, and authoritatively urged. Upon the hypothesis that
+annihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely to
+take away from the present all the additional light, incentive,
+and comfort imparted by the faith in a future existence, but they
+arbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsically
+belonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues,
+and set it in a frame of midnight. Thus, instead of calmly seeking
+to elicit and recommend truth, they strive, by terrifying the
+fancy and shocking the prejudices, to make people accept their
+dogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejecting
+it. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which have
+been employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used for
+the same purpose.
+
+Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton has
+said, "Without the belief in personal immortality there can be no
+religion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelings
+and the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a few
+years in this world?" 3 Such a statement from such a quarter is
+astonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person or
+incumbent upon him do not depend on the duration of his being, but
+on the character, endowments, and relations of his being. The
+hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy
+God, does not destroy man's dependence on God for all his
+privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of
+the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness,
+does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility,
+while they last. The soul's gratitude, wonder, love, and worship
+are just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience on
+earth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and in
+conscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does not
+cause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may be
+doubted if heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerity
+in such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add to
+its qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of our
+capacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injurious
+error in saying, as he does, "If there be no future life, the
+moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the
+Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom and
+authority and honor." 4 The creative Sovereign of fifty million
+firmaments of worlds "stripped of his wisdom and authority and
+honor" because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal!
+Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of
+immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations
+and ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion is
+fitted for us on the former supposition, it is also on the latter.
+To any dependent intelligence blessed with our human susceptibilities,
+reverential love and submission are as obligatory, natural, and
+becoming on the brink of annihilation as on the verge of immortality.
+
+Rebellious egotism makes all the difference. Truth is truth,
+whatever it be. Religion is the meek submission of self will to
+God's will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what the
+future reserves or excludes for us.
+
+Another sophism almost universally accepted needs to be shown.
+Man, it is said, has no interest in a future life if not conscious
+in it of the past. If, on exchange of worlds, man loses his
+memory, he virtually ceases to exist, and might just as well be
+annihilated. A future life with perfect oblivion of the present is
+no life at all for us. Is not this style of thought the most
+provincial egotism, the utter absence of all generous thought and
+sympathy unselfishly grasping the absolute boons of being? It is a
+shallow error, too, even on the grounds of selfishness itself. In
+any point of view the difference is diametric and immense between
+a happy being in an eternal present, unconscious of the past, and
+no being at all. Suppose a man thirty years of age were offered
+his choice to die this moment, or to live fifty years longer of
+unalloyed success and happiness, only with a complete
+forgetfulness of all that has happened up to this moment. He would
+not hesitate to grasp the gift, however much he regretted the
+condition.
+
+3 Tracts concerning Christianity, p. 307.
+
+4 Bridgewater Treatise, part ii. ch. 10, sect. 15.
+
+
+It has often been argued that with the denial of a retributive
+life beyond the grave all restraints are taken off from the
+passions, free course given to every impulse. Chateaubriand says,
+bluntly, "There can be no morality if there be no future state." 5
+With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensible
+recklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to the
+essential nobleness of his loving, heroic nature, "If you believe
+in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do,
+then, as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a
+fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery,
+rascality, robbery, and murder." What bible of Moloch had he been
+studying to form, for the time, so horrid a theory of the happiest
+life, and to put so degrading an estimate upon human nature? Is
+man's will a starved wolf only held back by the triple chain of
+fear of death, Satan, and hell, from tearing forth with ravenous
+bounds to flesh the fangs of his desires in bleeding virtue and
+innocence? Does the greatest satisfaction man is capable of here,
+the highest blessedness he can attain to, consist in drunkenness,
+gluttony, dishonesty, violence, and impiety? If he had the
+appetite of a tiger or a vulture, then, thus to wallow in the
+offal of vice, dive into the carrion of sensuality, abandon
+himself to revelling in carnivorous crime, might be his instinct
+and his happiness. But by virtue of his humanity man loves his
+fellows, enjoys the scenery of nature, takes delight in thought
+and art, dilates with grand presentiments of glory and eternity,
+mysteriously yearns after the hidden God. To a reasonable man and
+no other is to be reasoned with on matters of truth and interest
+the assumption of this brief season as all, will be a double
+motive not to hasten and embitter its brevity by folly, excess,
+and sin. If you are to be dead to morrow, for that very reason, in
+God's name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate death
+to day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a
+crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a
+chasm of fire, but a high toned conscience of reason and honor,
+perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneously
+loathing them.
+
+Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert
+that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on
+passion within, but no moral law without; every man is free to do
+what he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, in
+his "Treatise on Man's Soule," that "to predicate mortality in the
+soule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, by
+removing the ground of all difference in those thinges which are
+to governe our actions." 6 This style of teaching is a very
+mischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in the
+woods of Brazil, and Schiller in the brilliant circles of Weimar,
+will at last meet the same fate in the dusty grasp of death; yet,
+while they live, one is an ape, the other is a man. And the
+differences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense.
+The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The words
+of an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than those
+of the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could be
+uttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamation
+on immortality, "If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of
+charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are
+but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty.
+
+5 Genie du Christianisme, partie ii. livre vi. chap. 3.
+
+6 Ch. ix. sect. 10.
+
+
+If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere
+chimera, a bugbear of human invention." 7 What debauched
+unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Its
+utter barelessness, as a single illustration may show, is obvious
+at a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, the
+relations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material world
+although they may be lost sight of when time and space are
+transcended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, the
+relations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifold
+grades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for human
+nature and experience in this life even if men perish in the
+grave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endure
+they are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strange
+slip of the mind, showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are the
+common prejudice and falsehood on this subject,  even so bold and
+fresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his own
+philosophy by declaring, "If to morrow I perish utterly, then my
+fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread
+corn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations of
+mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will
+vanish." 8 Ah, man reveres his fathers and loves to act nobly, not
+because he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And,
+though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken from
+human life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish,
+as it is said the German crossbill pairs and broods in the dead of
+winter. The martyr's sacrifice and the voluptuary's indulgence are
+very different things to day, if they do both cease to morrow. No
+speed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon and
+Thersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice and
+fraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that they
+will interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutable
+morality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, and
+triangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties or
+compression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds of
+duty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil,
+magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery.
+
+Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter the
+inherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. The
+most it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to give
+the great motor nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke of
+palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral
+law? Richter reasons as follows: "Suppose a statue besouled for
+two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob
+it of one day's life, would you be guilty of murder? One can
+injure only an immortal." 9 The sophistry appears when we rectify
+the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an
+immortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong and
+injury, for the time, to destroy one day's life of a man whose
+entire existence was confined to two days, than it would be to
+take away the same period from the bodily existence of one who
+immediately thereupon passes into a more exalted and eternal life.
+To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity,
+the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt
+act is the same. This general moral problem has been more
+accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as
+follows: "The creatures of a summer's day might be imagined, when
+
+7 OEuvres Completes, tome xiii.: Immortalite de l'Ame.
+
+8 Sermons of Theism, Sermon VII.
+
+9 Werke, band xxxiii. s. 240.
+
+
+they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make
+inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of
+his government; for these are to be the law of their season of
+life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality
+would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from
+the greater stake."
+
+Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in human
+society cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedly
+weakened, its basis variously altered, but as a confessed
+sovereign principle it cannot be expelled. The denial of the
+freedom of the will theoretically explodes it; but social custom,
+law, and opinion will enforce it still. Make man a mere dissoluble
+mixture of carbon and magnetism, yet so long as he can distinguish
+right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and, unsophisticated
+by dialectics, can follow either of opposite courses of action,
+the moral law exists and exerts its sway.
+
+It has been asked, "If the incendiary be, like the fire he kindles,
+a result of material combinations, shall he not be treated in the
+same way?" 10 We should reply thus: No matter what man springs
+from or consists of, if he has moral ideas, performs moral
+actions, and is susceptible of moral motives, then he is morally
+responsible: for all practical and disciplinary purposes he is
+wholly removed from the categories of physical science.
+
+Another pernicious misrepresentation of the fair consequences of
+the denial of a life hereafter is shown in the frequent
+declaration that then there would be no motive to any thing good
+and great. The incentives which animate men to strenuous services,
+perilous virtues, disinterested enterprises, spiritual culture,
+would cease to operate. The essential life of all moral motives
+would be killed. This view is to be met by a broad and indignant
+denial based on an appeal to human consciousness and to the reason
+of the thing. Every man knows by experience that there are a
+multitude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with future
+reward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do good
+even with self sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman risks
+his life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, is
+the hope of heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offered
+bribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is the
+fear of hell all that animates him? A million such decisive
+specifications might be made. The renowned sentence of Cicero,
+"Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerret
+ad mortem," 11 is effective eloquence; but it is a baseless libel
+against humanity and the truth. In every moment of supreme
+nobleness and sacrifice personality vanishes. Thousands of
+patriots, philosophers, saints, have been glad to die for the
+freedom of native land, the cause of truth, the welfare of fellow
+men, without a taint of selfish reward touching their wills. Are
+there not souls "To whom dishonor's shadow is a substance More
+terrible than death here and hereafter"?
+
+He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime
+act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences
+of it eternally. Is there no motive for the
+
+10 Some discussion of this general subject is to be found in
+Schaller, Leib nod Seele. kap. 5: Die Consequentzen des
+Materialismus. And in Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme der
+Ethik.
+
+11 Tuscul. Quast. lib. i. cap. 15.
+
+
+preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting
+possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever,
+shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating
+poisons?
+
+If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we
+die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of
+immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than
+sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity
+better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally
+preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot,
+the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike,
+who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like
+the fool and the felon? Shall heaven be held before man simply as
+a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a
+shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the
+theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our
+perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our
+sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly
+to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving
+abyss. But some one may say, "If I have fought with beasts at
+Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?" It
+advantageth you every thing until you are dead, although there be
+nothing afterwards. As long as you live, is it not glory and
+reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This is
+sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law.
+And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of
+sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worth
+our affection, let great Shakspeare advance, with his matchless
+depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing,
+in tones of cordial solidity,
+
+"This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To love
+that well which thou must leave ere long."
+
+What though Decay's shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung
+and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor
+degrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in the
+valleys of ignoble fear and selfishness, leaving all the clear
+road lines of moral truth and practical virtue and heroic
+consecration still high and bright on the table land of a worthy
+life; and every honorable soul, calmly confronting its fate, will
+cry, despite the worst, "The pathway of my duty lies in sunlight;
+And I would tread it with as firm a step, Though it should
+terminate in cold oblivion, As if Elysian pleasures at its
+Close Gleam'd palpable to sight as things of earth."
+
+If a captain knew that his ship would never reach her port, would
+he therefore neglect his functions, be slovenly and careless,
+permit insubordination and drunkenness among the crew, let the
+broad pennon draggle in filthy rents, the cordage become tangled
+and stiff, the planks be covered with dirt, and the guns be grimed
+with rust? No: all generous hearts would condemn that. He would
+keep every inch of the deck scoured, every piece of metal polished
+like a mirror, the sails set full and clean, and, with shining
+muzzles out, ropes hauled taut in their blocks, and every man at
+his post, he would sweep towards the reef, and go down into the
+sea firing a farewell salute of honor to the sun, his flag flying
+above him as he sunk.
+
+The dogmatic assertors of a future life, in a partisan spirit set
+upon making out the most impressive case in its behalf, have been
+guilty of painting frightful caricatures of the true nature and
+significance of the opposite conclusion. Instead of saying, "If
+such a thing be fated, why, then, it must be right, God's will be
+done," they frantically rebel against any such admission, and
+declare that it would make God a liar and a fiend, man a "magnetic
+mockery," and life a hellish taunt. This, however unconscious it
+may be to its authors, is blasphemous egotism. One of the
+tenderest, devoutest, richest, writers of the century has
+unflinchingly affirmed that if man who trusted that love was the
+final law of creation, although nature, her claws and teeth red
+with raven, shrieked against his creed be left to be blown about
+the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills,
+
+"No more! a monster, then, a dream,
+A discord; dragons of the prime,
+That tare each other in their slime,
+Were mellow music match'd with Him!"
+
+Epictetus says, "When death overtakes me, it is enough if I can
+stretch out my hands to God, and say, 'The opportunities which
+thou hast given me of comprehending and following thy government,
+I have not neglected. I thank thee that thou hast brought me into
+being. I am satisfied with the time I have enjoyed the things thou
+hast given me. Receive them again, and assign them to whatever
+place thou wilt.'" 12 Surely the pious heathen here speaks more
+worthily than the presumptuous Christian! How much fitter would it
+be, granting that death is the end all, to revise our interpretation,
+look at the subject from the stand point of universal order,
+not from this opinionative narrowness, and see if it be not
+susceptible of a benignant meaning, worthy of grateful acceptance
+by the humble mind of piety and the dispassionate spirit of science!
+Yea, let God and his providence stand justified, though man prove
+to have been egregiously mistaken.
+
+"Though He smite me, yet will I praise Him; though He slay me, yet
+will I trust in Him."
+
+To return into the state we were in before we were created is not
+to suffer any evil: it is to be absolutely free from all evil. It
+is but the more perfect playing of that part, of which every sound
+sleep is a rehearsal. The thought of it is mournful to the
+enjoying soul, but not terrific; and even the mournfulness ceases
+in the realization. He uttered a piece of cruel madness who said,
+"Hell is more bearable than nothingness." Is it worse to have
+nothing than it is to have infinite torture? Milton asks,
+
+"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual
+being?"
+
+Every creature that exists, if full of pain, would snatch at the
+boon of ceasing to be. To be blessed is a good; to be wretched is
+an evil; not to be is neither a good nor an evil, but simply
+
+12 Dissert., lib. iv. cap. x. sect. 2.
+
+
+nothing. If such be our necessary fate, let us accept it with a
+harmonized mind, not entertaining fear nor yielding to sadness.
+Why should we shudder or grieve? Every time we slumber, we try on
+the dress which, when we die, we shall wear easily forever.
+
+Not satisfied to let the result rest in this somewhat sad but
+peaceful aspect, it is quite customary to give it a turn and hue
+of ghastly horribleness, by casting over it the dyspeptic dreams,
+injecting it with the lurid lights and shades, of a morbid and
+wilful fancy. The most loathsome and inexcusable instance in point
+is the "Vision of Annihilation" depicted by the vermicular,
+infested imagination of the great Teutonic phantasist while yet
+writhing under the sanguinary fumes of some horrid attack of
+nightmare. Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad
+executioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the
+larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches
+down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are
+pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation,
+the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by each
+unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as a
+corpse bleeds when its murderer approaches." Pah! Out upon this
+execrable retching of a nauseated fancy! What good is there in the
+baseless conceit and gratuitous disgust of saying, "The next world
+is in the grave, betwixt the teeth of the worm"? In the case
+supposed, the truth is merely that there is no next world
+anywhere; not that all the horrors of hell are scooped together
+into the grave, and there multiplied by others direr yet and
+unknown before. Man's blended duty and interest, in such a case,
+are to try to see the interior beauty and essential kindness of
+his fate, to adorn it and embrace it, fomenting his resignation
+with the sweet lotions of faith and peace, not exasperating his
+wounds with the angry pungents of suspicion, alarm, and complaint.
+At the worst, amidst all our personal disappointments, losses, and
+decay, "the view of the great universal whole of nature," as
+Humboldt says, "is reassuring and consolatory." If the boon of a
+future immortality be not ours, therefore to scorn the gift of the
+present life, is to act not like a wise man, who with grateful
+piety makes the best of what is given, but like a spoiled child,
+who, if he cannot have both his orange and his gingerbread,
+pettishly flings his gingerbread in the mud.
+
+The future life, outside of the realm of faith, to an earnest and
+independent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question,
+lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, and
+there is room for doubt. The wavering evidences in some moods
+preponderate on that side, in other moods on this side. Meanwhile
+it is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do is
+to cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a noble character, lead a
+pure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and God,
+and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue with
+reverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms.
+Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert's dying flower, "Thanks to
+day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and
+earth and sky, for all the gifts from men and God which have made
+my little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thine
+azure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring tide,
+roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shall
+rise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I now
+fall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh." Surely the mournful
+nobility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much to
+the selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in the
+Middle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columns
+and doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by a
+hunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced in
+thousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, "I
+blessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soul
+to perish under the everlasting weight of hell!"
+
+Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is an
+achievement whose nobleness outweighs its sorrow, even if the
+gazer foresee his own destruction.
+
+It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the
+immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in
+it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the
+unwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christian
+writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such
+a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to
+do with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on the
+length, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Make
+the life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; make
+the life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has the
+psychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality may
+enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; it
+does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and
+contract those motives; it does not take them away.
+
+Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude
+over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a
+word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who
+weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not
+knowledge that the spirit is without terminus or rest. The
+faithful truth hunter, in dying, finds not a covert, but a better
+trail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged from
+prejudice and self will. With God we are not to prescribe
+conditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must die
+with the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious and
+dangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view is
+obviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophical
+thinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in the
+individual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole.
+This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably
+increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to
+shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God to
+a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole
+safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law with
+disinterested conformity.
+
+The influence of the doctrine of reward and punishment in a future
+state, as a working motive for the observance of the moral law, is
+enormously overestimated. The influence, as such a motive, of the
+public opinion of mankind, with the legal and social sanctions, is
+enormously underestimated. And the authority of a personal
+perception of right is also most unbecomingly depreciated.
+UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of God, not as
+arbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in a
+book, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works.
+The true basis of morality is universal order. The true end of
+morality is life, the sum of moral laws being identical with the
+sum of the conditions in accordance with which the fruition of the
+functions of life can be secured with nearest approach to
+perfectness, perpetuity, and universality. The true sanctions of
+morality are the manifold forms in which consciousness of life is
+heightened by harmony with universal order or lowered by discord
+with it. The true law of moral sacrifice or resistance to
+temptation is misrepresented by the common doctrine of heaven and
+hell, which makes it consist in the renunciation of a present good
+for the clutching of a future good, the voluntary suffering of a
+small present evil to avoid the involuntary suffering of an
+immense future evil. The true law of moral sacrifice is deeper,
+purer, more comprehensive, than that. It expresses our duty, in
+accordance with the requirements of universal order, to
+subordinate the gratification of any part of our being to that of
+the whole of our being, to forego the good of any portion of our
+life in deference to that of all our life, to renounce any
+happiness of the individual which conflicts with the welfare of
+the race, to hold the spiritual atom in absolute abeyance to the
+spiritual universe, to sink self in God. If a man believe in no
+future life, is he thereby absolved from the moral law? The kind
+and number of his duties remain as before: only the apparent
+grandeur of their scale and motives is diminished. The two halves
+of morality are the co ordination of separate interests in
+universal order, and the loyalty of the parts to the wholes. The
+desire to remove the obligations and sanctions of the moral law
+from their intrinsic supports, and posit them on the fictitious
+pedestals of a forensic heaven and hell, reveals incompetency of
+thought and vulgarity of sentiment in him who does it, and is a
+procedure not less perilous than unwarranted. If the creation be
+conceived as a machine, it is a machine self regulating in all its
+parts by the immanent presence of its Maker.
+
+When we die, may the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter of Christ, be
+our confessor; the last inhaled breath our cup of absolution; the
+tears of some dear friend our extreme unction; no complaint for
+past trials, but a grateful acknowledgment for all blessings, our
+parting word. And then, resigning ourselves to the universal
+Father, assured that whatever ought to be, and is best to be, will
+be, either absolute oblivion shall be welcome, or we will go
+forward to new destinies, whether with preserved identity or with
+transformed consciousness and powers being indifferent to us,
+since the will of God is done. In the mean time, until that
+critical pass and all decisive hour, as Milnes says:
+
+"We all must patient stand, Like statues on appointed pedestals:
+Yet we may choose since choice is given to shun Servile
+contentment or ignoble fear In the expression of our attitude; And
+with far straining eyes, and hands upcast, And feet half raised,
+declare our painful state, Yearning for wings to reach the fields
+of truth, Mourning for wisdom, panting to be free."
+
+PART SIXTH SUPPLEMENTARY.
+
+[FIFTEEN YEARS LATER]
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE END OF THE WORLD.
+
+WE read in the New Testament that the heavens and the earth are
+reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, when they shall be
+burned up, and all be made new. It is said that the elements shall
+melt with ferment heat, the stars fall, and the sky pass away like
+a scroll that is rolled together. On these and similar passages is
+based the belief of Christendom in the destined destruction of the
+world by fire and in the scenic judgment of the dead and the
+living gathered before the visible tribunal of Christ. This belief
+was once general and intense. It is still common, though more
+vague and feeble than formerly. In whatever degree it is held, it
+is a doctrine of terror. We hope by tracing its origin, and
+showing how mistaken it is, to help dispel its sway, free men from
+the further oppression of its fearfulness, and put in its place
+the just and wholesome authority of the truth. The true doctrine
+of the divine government of the world, the correct explanation of
+the course and sequel of history, must be more honorable to God,
+more useful to men, of better working and omen in the life of
+society, than any error can be. Let us then, as far as we are
+able, displace by the truth the errors prevalent around us in
+regard to the end of the world and the day of judgment.
+
+It will help us in our proposed investigation, if we first notice
+that the ecclesiastical doctrine as to an impending destruction of
+the world is not solitary, but has prototypes and parallels in the
+faiths of other nations and ages. Almost every people, every
+tribe, has its cosmogony or theory of the creation, in which there
+are accounts, more or less rude or refined, general or minute, of
+the supposed beginning and of the imagined end of nature. All
+early literatures from the philosophic treatises of the Hindus to
+the oral traditions of the Polynesians are found to contain either
+sublime dreams or obscure prophecies or awful pictures of the
+final doom and destruction of earth and man. The Hebrew symbols
+and the Christian beliefs in relation to this subject therefore
+stand not alone, but in connection with a multitude of others,
+each one plainly reflecting the degree of knowledge and stage of
+development attained by the minds which originated it. Before
+proceeding to examine the familiar doctrine so enveloped in our
+prejudices, a brief examination of some kindred doctrines, less
+familiar to us and quite detached from our prejudices, will be of
+service.
+
+The sacred books of the Hindus describe certain enormous periods
+of time in which the universe successively begins and ends,
+springs into being and sinks into nothing. These periods are
+called kalpas, and each one covers a duration of thousands of
+millions of years. Each kalpa of creation is called a day of
+Brahma; each kalpa of destruction, a night of Brahma. The belief
+is that Brahma, waking from the slumber of his self absorbed
+solitude, feels his loneliness, and his thoughts and emotions go
+forth in creative forms, composing the immense scheme of worlds
+and creatures. These play their parts, and run their courses,
+until the vast day of Brahma is completed; when he closes his
+eyes, and falls to rest, while the whole system of finite things
+returns to the silence and darkness of its aboriginal unity, and
+remains there in invisible annihilation through the stupendous
+night that precedes the reawaking of the slumbering Godhead and
+the appearance of the creation once more.
+
+A little reflection makes the origin of this imagery and belief
+clear. Each night, as the darkness comes down, and the outer world
+disappears, man falls asleep, and, so far as he is consciously
+concerned, every thing is destroyed. In his unconsciousness,
+everything ceases to be. The light dawns again, he awakes, and his
+reopened senses create anew the busy frame and phenomena of
+nature. Transfer this experience from man to God; consider it not
+as abstract and apparent, but as concrete and real, and you have
+the Hindu doctrine of the kalpa. When we sleep, to us all things
+are destroyed; and when we awake, to us they reappear. When God
+sleeps, all things in themselves really end; and when he wakes,
+they begin anew to be. The visible and experimental phenomena of
+day and night, sleeping and waking, are universalized, and
+attributed to God, It is a poetic process of thought, natural
+enough to a rich minded, simple people, but wholly illegitimate as
+a logical ground of belief, But being stated in books supposed to
+be infallibly inspired, and in the absence of critical tests for
+the discrimination of sound from unsound thought, it was
+implicitly accepted by multitudes.
+
+Closely allied to the foregoing doctrine, yet in several
+particulars strikingly different from it, and evidently quite
+independent in its origin, was the Great Year of the Stoics, or
+the alternative blotting out and restoration of all things. This
+school of philosophers conceived of God as a pure artistic force
+or seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in the
+evolution of the kosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms into
+fire, and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagration
+destroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible God alone in his
+pure essence again. The artistic germ or seed force then begins,
+under its laws of intrinsic necessity, to go once more through the
+same process to the same end.
+
+The rise of this imagery and belief is not so obvious as in the
+last instance, but it is equally discoverable and intelligible.
+Every animal, every flower, every plant, begins from its proper
+specific germ or force, goes through a fixed series of growths and
+changes, and relapses into its prime elements, and another and
+another follow after it in the same order. The seasons come and
+go, and come again and go again, Every planet repeats its
+revolutions over and over. Wherever we look, this repetition of
+identical processes greets our vision. Now, by imaginative
+association universalize this repetition of the course of
+phenomena as seen in the parts, and take it up and apply it to the
+whole creation, and you have the doctrine in hand.
+
+It is a poetic process of thought not scientific or philosophic,
+and without claim to belief; yet, in the absence of scientific
+data and standards, it might easily win acceptance on authority.
+
+The Scandinavians, also, have transmitted to us, in their sacred
+books, descriptions of their belief in the approaching end of the
+world, descriptions rude, wild, terrible, not without elements of
+appalling grandeur. They foretell a day called Ragnarok, or the
+Twilight of the gods, when all the powers of good and evil shall
+join in battle, and the whole present system of things perish in a
+scene of unutterable strife and dismay. The Eddas were composed in
+an ignorant but deeply poetic and fertile age, when all the
+mythological elements of mind were in full action. Their authors
+looking within, on their own passions, and without, on the natural
+scenery around them, conscious of order and disorder, love and
+hate, virtue and crime, beholding phenomena of beauty and horror,
+sun and stars, night and tempest, winter and summer, icebergs and
+volcanoes, placid moonlight and blinding mist, assisting friends
+and battling foes, personified everything as a demon or a
+divinity. Asgard, above the blue firmament, was the bright home of
+the gods, the Asir. Helheim, beneath the rocky earth and the
+frozen ocean, was the dark and foul abode of the bad spirits, the
+Jotuns. Everywhere in nature, fog and fire, fertility and
+barrenness, were in conflict; everywhere in society, law and crime
+were contending. In the moon followed by a drifting cloud, they
+saw a goddess chased by a wolf. The strife goes on waxing, and
+must sooner or later reach a climax. Each side enlists its allies,
+until all are ranged in opposition, from Jormungandur, the serpent
+of the deep, to Heindall, the warder of the rainbow, gods and
+brave men there, demons, traitors, and cowards here. Then sounds
+the horn of battle, and the last day dawns in fire and splendor
+from the sky, in fog and venom from the abyss. Flame devours the
+earth. For the most part, the combatants mutually slay each other.
+Only Gimli, the high, safe heaven of All Father, remains as a
+refuge for the survivors and the beginning of a new and fairer
+world.
+
+The natural history of this mythological mess is clear enough. It
+arises from the poetic embodiment and personification of
+phenomena, the grouping together of all evil and of all good, then
+imaginatively universalizing the conflict, and carrying it out in
+idea to its inevitable ultimatum. The process of thought was
+obviously natural in its ground, but fictitious in its result. Yet
+in a period when no sharp distinction was drawn between fancy and
+fact, song and science, but an indiscriminate faith was often
+yielded to both, even such a picturesque medley as this might be
+held as religious truth.
+
+The Zarathustrian or Persian scheme of a general judgment of men
+and of the world in some respects resembles the systems already
+set forth, in other respects more closely approaches that
+Christian doctrine partially borrowed from it, and which is
+hereafter to be noticed. Ahura Mazda, the God of light and truth,
+creates the world full of all sorts of blessings. His adversary,
+Angra Mainyus, the author of darkness and falsehood, seeks to
+counteract and destroy the works of Ahura Mazda by means of all
+sorts of correspondent evils and woes. When Ahura Mazda creates
+the race of men happy and immortal, Angra Mainyus, the old serpent,
+full of corruption and destruction, steals in, seduces them from
+their allegiance, and brings misery and death on them, and then
+leads their souls to his dark abode. The whole creation is
+supposed to be crowded with good spirits, the angels of Ahura
+Mazda,
+
+seeking to carry out his beneficent designs; and also with evil
+spirits, the ministers of Angra Mainyus, plotting to make men
+wicked, and to pervert and poison every blessing with an answering
+curse. Light is the symbol of God, darkness the symbol of his
+Antagonist. Under these hostile banners are ranged all living
+creatures, all created objects. For long periods this dreadful
+contention rages, involving everything below in its fluctuations.
+But at last Ahura Mazda subdues Angra Mainyus, overturns all the
+mischief he has done, by means of a great deliverer whom he has
+sent among men to instruct and redeem them raises the dead,
+purifies the world with fire, and, after properly punishing the
+guilty, restores all nature to its original paradisal condition,
+free from pain and death.
+
+In the primitive state of mankind, when the germs of this religion
+were conceived, when men dwelt in ignorance, exposure, and fear,
+they naturally shuddered at darkness as a supernatural enemy, and
+worshipped light as a supernatural friend. That became the emblem
+or personification of the Devil, this the emblem or personification
+of God. They grouped all evils with that, all goods with this.
+
+Imaginatively associating all light and darkness, all blessing
+and bale, respectively with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyus,
+they universalized the fragmentary embodiments and oppositions
+of these into one great battle; and under the impulse of
+worshipping faith and hope, carried it to its crisis in the
+final victory of the good. Plainly, it is mere poetry injected a
+little with a later speculative element, and dealing in
+mythological fashion chiefly with the phenomena of nature as
+related to the experience of man. No one now can accept it
+literally.
+
+This survey of the various heathen myths of the end of the world
+has prepared us, in some degree, to consider the corresponding
+view held by the Jews, and more completely developed by the
+Christian successors to the Jewish heritage of thought and
+feeling.
+
+The Hebrews believed themselves to be exclusively the chosen
+people of God, who directly ruled over them himself by a
+theocratic government represented in their patriarchs, law givers,
+prophets, and kings. Jehovah was the only true God; they were his
+only pure and accepted worshippers, sharply distinguished from the
+whole idolatrous world. The heathen nations, uncircumcised
+adorers of vain idols or of demons, were by consequence enemies
+both of the true God and of his servants. This contrast and
+hostility they even carried over into the unseen world, and
+imagined that each nation had its own guardian angel in the Court
+of Jehovah in heaven, who contended there for its interests; their
+own national guardian, the angel Michael, being more powerful and
+nearer to the throne than any other one. In the calamities that
+fell on them, they recognized the vengeance of Jehovah for the
+violation of his commands. In their victories, their deliverances,
+their great blessings, especially in their rescue from Egypt, and
+in the many miracles which they believed to have accompanied that
+great passage, they saw the signal superiority of their God over
+every other god, and the proofs of his particular providence over
+them in distinct preference to all other peoples. He had, as they
+piously believed, made a special covenant with Abraham, and set
+apart his posterity as a sacred family, exclusively intrusted with
+the divine law, and commissioned to subdue and govern all the
+other families of the earth. When this proud and intensely
+cherished faith was baffled of fulfillment, they never dreamed of
+abandoning it.
+
+They only supposed its triumphant execution postponed, as a
+penalty for their sins, and looked forward with redoubled ardor to
+a better time when their hopes should break into fruition, their
+exile be ended, their captivity appear as a dream, Jerusalem be
+the central gem of the world, and the anointed ruler wield his
+sceptre over all mankind.
+
+But misfortunes and woes were heaped on them. Their city was
+sacked, their temple desecrated, their people dragged into foreign
+slavery, forbidden to celebrate the rites of their religion,
+slaughtered by wholesale. Many times, during the two centuries
+before and the first century after Christ, did they suffer these
+terrible sorrows. Their hatred and scorn of their heathen
+persecutors; their faith in their own incomparable destiny; their
+expectation of the speedy appearance of an anointed deliverer,
+raised up by Jehovah to avenge them and vindicate their trust, all
+became the more fervent and profound the longer the delay. Under
+these circumstances grew up the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, as
+it is seen in that Apocalyptic literature represented by the Book
+of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, the Book of Enoch, the
+Assumption of Moses, the Fourth Book of Esdras, and similar
+documents.
+
+The Jews were remarkably free from that habit of mind which led
+almost all the other nations to personify the most startling
+phenomena of nature as living beings, which created fetiches of
+stocks and stones and animals; saw a god in every wind, season,
+star, and cloud. The Semitic mind and literature were more sober,
+rational, and monotheistic. The place occupied in the thoughts of
+other peoples by the phenomena of nature was held in the thoughts
+of the Jews by political phenomena, by ritual, legal, and military
+relations. And the poetic action of fancy, the mythological
+creativeness and superstitious feeling which other people
+exercised on the objects and changes of nature, the Jews exercised
+on the phenomena of their own national history. The burning
+central point of their polity and belief and imagination was the
+conviction of their own national consecration as the exclusive
+people of God, meant to conquer, teach, and rule all the infidel
+nations; that Jehovah was literally their invisible King,
+represented in their chief ruler; that every great triumph or
+disaster was a signal Day of the Lord, a special Coming of Jehovah
+to reward or punish his people. During their repeated bondages
+under the Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, their
+feeling of the antagonism between themselves and the other people
+increased. From the time of the Babylonish captivity the Persian
+doctrine of good and evil spirits had infiltrated into their
+belief; and they adopted the notion of Angra Mainyus, and
+developed it (with certain modifications) into their conception of
+Satan. Then, in their faith, the war of Jews and Gentiles spread
+into the invisible world, and took up on its opposite sides the
+good and the fallen angels. And, finally, the idea of their
+Messiah became the centre of a battle and a judgment in which all
+the generations of the dead as well as of the living were to have
+a part; and which should culminate in the overthrow of evil, the
+subjection of the heathen, the assignment of the righteous to a
+paradisal reign, and of the wicked to a doom typified by the
+submersion of Sodom and Gomorrah in fiery brimstone.
+
+How plainly this doctrine was the result of the same poetic
+process of thought with the other schemes already depicted! Only
+they were developed on the basis of natural phenomena; this, on
+the basis of political phenomena. It is simply the imaginative
+universalization of the struggle between Jew and Gentile, and the
+carrying of it to its crisis and sequel. And when inexplicable
+delays and the accumulation of obstacles made the realization of
+the expected result amidst the conditions of the present world
+seem ever more and more hopeless, the growing and assimilative
+action of faith and fancy expanded the scene, and transferred it
+to a transmundane state, involving the destruction of the heavens
+and earth and their replacement with a new creation.
+
+Is there any more real reason for believing this doctrine than
+there is for believing the other kindred schemes? Not a whit. It
+is a mistake of the same poetic nature, and resting on the same
+grounds with them. Two thousand years have passed, and it has not
+been fulfilled; and there is ever less and less sign of its
+fulfillment. It never will be fulfilled, except in a spiritual
+sense. The Jews will finally lose their pride of race and
+covenant, abandon their special Messianic creed, and blend
+themselves and their opinions in the mass of redeemed and
+progressive humanity, and no more dream of a physical resurrection
+of the dead amidst the dissolving elements of nature.
+
+And now we must notice that besides all these poetic pictures of
+the end of the world, there are prophecies of a similar result
+which wear an apparently scientific garb. Many men of science
+firmly believe that our world is destined to be destroyed, that a
+close for the earthly fortunes of mankind can be plainly foreseen.
+No little alarm was felt a century or more ago, when it was
+discovered that there was a progressive diminution going on in the
+orbit of the moon, which must cause it at length to impinge upon
+the earth. But La Grange exhibited the fallaciousness of the
+prophecy, by showing that the decrease was periodical and
+succeeded by a corresponding increase. Intense and widely spread
+terror has repeatedly been felt less a comet should come within
+our planetary orbit, and shatter or melt our globe by its contact.
+But the discovery of the nebulous nature of comets, of their great
+numbers and regular movements, has quite dissipated that fear from
+the popular mind in our day.
+
+There are, however, other forms of scientific speculation which
+put the prophesied destruction of the world on a more plausible
+and formidable basis. It is supposed by many scientists that all
+force is derived from the consumption of heat; and that the fuel
+must at last be used up, and therefore no life or energy be left
+for sustaining the present system of the creation. This theory is
+met by the counter statement that the heat of the sun and other
+similar centres may possibly not depend on any material
+consumption; or, if it does, there may be a self replenishing
+supply, loss and repair forming an endless circle.
+
+It is foretold by some chemists, that the progressive interior
+cooling and contraction of our orb will cause ever greater
+interstices or vacant spaces among the solid substances below the
+outer crust; and that into these pores, first all liquids, then
+all gases and the whole atmosphere, will be absorbed: so that the
+world will be left desolate, utterly uninhabitable by life.
+
+Again: it is said that all force or energy tends at every
+transformation to pass (at least partially) into heat; and
+therefore that, finally, all force will be frittered down into the
+one form of heat, all matter vanishing from its separate shapes
+into the state of a homogeneous, nebulous fire. The portentous
+sight, repeatedly descried by astronomers, of a nameless world,
+away in remotest space, which has suddenly kindled, blazed,
+smouldered, darkened, and vanished forever from its place, is
+perhaps a solemn symbol of the fate of our own planet; hinting at
+a time when the earth, too, shall make itself a funeral pyre,
+
+And, awed in distant orbs, some race unknown Shall miss one star
+whose smile had lit their own.
+
+This same final crisis is also prophesied on the basis of a slight
+retardation to which the planets are subjected in their passage
+through the ethereal medium. No matter how slight the resistance
+thus interposed, its consequence, it is thought, must accumulate
+and ultimately compel all material bodies to approach each other;
+and, as their successive collisions convert them into heat and
+vapor, nothing will be left at last but one uniform nebula. The
+process of evolution will then begin anew, and so the stupendous
+history of the universe repeat itself eternally.
+
+This is the sublimest of all the generalizations of science. It
+may be true, and it may not be true. At any rate, it differs
+immensely in the moral impression it makes from that made by the
+current theological doctrine of the same catastrophe. We can
+contemplate the scientific prophecy of the end of the world with a
+peace of mind which the traditional prophecy does not permit.
+
+In the first place, the ecclesiastical doctrine makes the
+destruction of the world a result of wrath and vengeance. The
+angry God looms above us with flaming features and avenging
+weapons to tread down his enemies. We shrink in fright from the
+wrath and power of the personal Judge, the inexorable Foe of the
+wicked. But the scientific doctrine makes the end a result of
+passionless laws, a steady evolution of effects from causes,
+wholly free from everything vindictive.
+
+Secondly. The ecclesiastical doctrine makes the dreadful
+conclusion a sudden event, an inconceivable shock of horror,
+falling in an instant, overwhelming all its victims with the
+swiftness of lightning in the unutterable agony of their ruin. But
+the scientific doctrine makes the climax a matter of slow and
+gradual approach. Whether the worlds are to be frozen up by
+increasing cold, or to evaporate in culminating heat, or to be
+converted into gas as they meet in their career, the changes of
+the chemical conditions will be so steady and moderate beforehand
+as to cause all living creatures to have diminished in numbers by
+insensible degrees, and to have utterly ceased long before the
+final shock arrives.
+
+Thirdly. The ecclesiastical doctrine makes the sequel imminent,
+near, ready to fall at a moment's warning. At any hour the signal
+may strike. Thus it is to the earnest believer a constant, urgent
+alarm, close at hand. But the scientific doctrine depicts the
+close as almost unimaginably remote. All the data in the hands of
+our scientists lead their calculations as to the nearest probable
+end to land them in an epoch so far off as to be stated only in
+thousands of millions of years. Thus the picture is so distant as
+to be virtually enfeebled into nothing. We cannot, even by the
+most vivid imagination, bring it home closely enough to make it
+real and effective on our plans.
+
+And, finally, the theological dogma of the destruction of the
+world professes to be an infallible certainty. The believer holds
+that he absolutely knows it by a revelation of supernatural
+authority. But with the scientist such a belief is held as merely
+a probability. A billion of centuries hence the world may perhaps
+come to an end; and, on the other hand, the phenomena which lead
+to such a belief may yet be explained as implying no such result.
+And these two issues, so far as our social or ideal experience is
+concerned, are virtually the same.
+
+A brilliant French writer has suggested that even if the natural
+course of evolution does of itself necessitate the final
+destruction of the world, yet our race, judging from the
+magnificent achievements of science and art already reached, may,
+within ten thousand centuries, which will be long before the
+foreseen end approaches, obtain such a knowledge and control of
+the forces of nature as to make collective humanity master of this
+planet, able to shape and guide its destinies, ward off every
+fatal crisis, and perfect and immortalize the system as now
+sustained. It is an audacious fancy. But like many other
+incredible conceptions which have forerun their own still more
+incredible fulfillment, the very thought electrifies us with hope
+and courage.
+
+And thus the conclusion in which we rest at the close of our
+investigation is the belief that the world is to last, and our
+race to flourish on it virtually forever. This conclusion is
+equally a relief from the frightful burdens of superstition, and a
+consolation for our own personal evanescence. The stable harmony
+of natural beauty and beneficence, amidst which we individually
+play our brief part and vanish, shall stand fast, blooming with
+fresh growths, and shining with fadeless light, and the successive
+generations of our dear fellow men shall grow ever wiser and
+happier, beyond the reach of our farthest vision into the future.
+And if we recognize in the great catastrophic myths and previsions
+of the poets and scientists the fundamental truth that the things
+which are seen are temporal, while the things alone which are
+unseen are eternal, the end being a regular and remote sequel in
+the creative plan of God, free from anger, retributive
+disappointment, or cruelty will not alarm us. For if souls are
+substantial entities, and not mere phenomenal processes, they will
+survive the universal crisis, and either at the lucid goals of
+their perfected destiny rejoice forever in a reflected individual
+fruition of the attributes of God, or else start refreshed on a
+new career with that redistribution of the cosmic matter and
+motion which in its gigantic and eternal rhythm of development and
+dissolution the ancient Hindu mind figured as the respiration of
+Brahm and which ambitious science now generalizes as the law of
+evolution.
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.
+
+JUDAISM so largely supplied the circumstantial and doctrinal germs
+out of which dogmatic Christianity grew, that we cannot thoroughly
+understand the Christian belief in a final day of judgment, unless
+we first notice the historic and literary derivation of that
+belief from Judaism, and then trace its development in the new
+conditions through which it passed. The personal character,
+teachings, life, and death of Jesus Christ, together with his
+subsequent resurrection and career in the consciousness of
+ecclesiastical Christendom, constituted the crystalizing centre
+which, dipped in the inherited solution of ideal and social
+materials furnished by the Church, has gathered around it the
+accretion of faith and dogma composing the theoretic Christianity
+of the present day. To follow this process with reference to the
+particular tenet before us, analyze it, discriminate the
+appropriate in it from the inappropriate, the true from the false,
+maybe difficult; but it is necessary for a satisfactory
+conclusion. To this task let us therefore now address ourselves,
+putting away all bias and prejudice, invoking in equal degree
+candor, fearlessness and charity.
+
+The Jews believed themselves to be a people chosen out of all the
+world as the exclusive favorites of God. By the covenant of
+Abraham, and the code of Moses, Jehovah had entered, as they
+thought, into a special contract with them to be their peculiar
+God, Guardian, and Ruler. In contrast with the depraved habits and
+idolatrous rites of the heathen nations, the Israelites were
+strictly to keep the moral law, and, at the same time, to pay a
+pure worship to Jehovah through the scrupulous observance of their
+ceremonial law. The bond of race and family descent from Abraham,
+the practice of circumcision, and the ceremonies of the Mosaic
+ritual, sealed them as accepted members of this divine covenant.
+So long as they were true to the duties involved in this relation,
+Jehovah would watch over them, defend them from their enemies, set
+them proudly above the alien Gentiles, and crown them with every
+spiritual and temporal blessing. The noblest representatives of
+the people believed this with unparalleled thoroughness and
+intensity. They looked down on the uncircumcised nations as wicked
+idolaters, destined to be their servants until they should be
+adopted into the same covenant by becoming proselytes to their
+faith. Jehovah was literally their direct, though invisible, King,
+Law giver, and Judge, palpably rewarding their fidelity by overt
+temporal blessings, punishing their dereliction by awful temporal
+calamities and sufferings.
+
+Every signal instance of his providential intervention in their
+affairs they called a Day of the Lord, a Coming of Jehovah, a
+Judgment from heaven. Thus the prophet Joel foretells the
+vengeance which God would take on Tyre and Sidon and Philistia,
+because they had assailed and scattered his people. "Behold the
+day of Jehovah cometh, the great and terrible day. And I will show
+wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire and
+pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the
+moon into blood. Then whosoever calleth on the name of Jehovah
+shall be delivered: for upon Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be
+deliverance. I will contend with the Gentiles for my people, and
+will bring back the captives.
+
+The multitudes, the multitudes in the valley of judgment: for the
+day of Jehovah is near in the valley of judgment." In a similar
+strain Isaiah prophesies against Edom: "Draw near, O ye nations,
+and hear! For the wrath of Jehovah is kindled against the nations,
+and he hath given up their armies to slaughter. The stench of
+their carcasses shall ascend, and the mountains shall melt with
+their blood. And all the hosts of heaven shall melt away; and all
+their host shall fall down, as the blighted fruit from the fig
+tree. For my sword shall rush drunk from heaven: behold, upon Edom
+shall it descend. For it is a day of vengeance from Jehovah. Her
+streams shall be turned into pitch, and her dust into brimstone,
+and her whole land shall become burning pitch. It shall lie waste
+forever, and none shall pass through it. The pelican and the
+hedgehog shall possess it; the heron and the raven shall dwell in
+it."
+
+Tremendous and appalling as this imagery is, it is obvious that
+the whole meaning of it is earthly and temporal, a local judgment
+of Jehovah in vindication of his people against the heathen. And
+kindred judgments are threatened against his own people when they
+lapse into wickedness and idolatry. "Thus saith the Lord, Behold,
+I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and
+turning it upside down." "Jehovah appeareth as a hostile witness,
+the Lord from his holy place. Behold, Jehovah cometh forth from
+his dwelling place, and advanceth on the high places of the earth.
+The mountains melt under him, and the valleys cleave asunder like
+wax before the fire. For the sin of the house of Israel is all
+this."
+
+Thus the earliest meaning of the phrase, Day of the Lord, or Day
+of Judgment, according to Biblical usage, was the occurrence of
+any severe calamity, either to the Jews, as a punishment for their
+apostasy; or to the Gentiles, as a punishment for their
+wickedness, or for their violent encroachment on the rights of the
+chosen people. These visitations of military disaster or political
+subjection, though purely local and temporal, are depicted in the
+most terrific images, such as flaming brimstone, falling stars,
+heaven and earth dissolving in darkness, blood, and fire. Ezekiel,
+alluding to the barbarous invasion headed by Prince Gog,
+represents Jehovah as declaring, "I will contend against him, and
+will rain fire and brimstone upon him and his hosts. Thus will I
+show myself in my greatness and glory before the eyes of many
+nations, and they shall know that I am Jehovah." The highly
+figurative character of this imagery must be apparent to every
+candid critic.
+
+For example, in the following passage from Zechariah, no one will
+suppose for a moment that it is meant that Jehovah will appear
+visibly in person and reign in Jerusalem, but only that his
+promise shall be fulfilled, and his law shall prevail there in the
+triumphant establishment of his chosen people: "Behold the day of
+Jehovah cometh, when I will gather all nations to battle against
+Jerusalem; and the city shall be taken. Then shall Jehovah go
+forth, and fight against those nations. And his feet shall stand
+in that day upon the Mount of Olives. And Jehovah shall be king
+over all the earth. And it shall be that whoso of all the families
+of the earth will not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King,
+Jehovah of hosts, upon them shall be no rain."
+
+When the prophets burst out in the lyric metaphors, "Jehovah will
+roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem;" "Egypt shall
+be a waste and Edom a wilderness for their violence to the sons of
+Judah; but Jerusalem shall be inhabited forever, and Jehovah shall
+dwell upon Zion," the meaning is simply that "Jehovah will be a
+refuge to his people, a stronghold to the sons of Israel, and all
+people shall know that Jehovah is God." It would imply the
+grossest ignorance in any critic if he imagined that the Jews ever
+believed that Jehovah was visibly to come down and reign over them
+in person. They did however, believe that an awful token or the
+presence of Jehovah dwelt in the holy of holies of their temple.
+They also believed that every anointed ruler who governed them in
+justice and piety represented the authority of Jehovah. And as, in
+the long times of their natural captivity and oppression, their
+hopes sought refuge from the depressing present in bright visions
+of a glorious future, when some inspired deliverer should justify
+their faith by carrying the national power and happiness to the
+highest pitch, they naturally believed that the spirit and signet
+of the Lord would, in a special manner, rest on that Messianic
+hero.
+
+By the assimilative action of faith and imagination, this idea of
+a divinely accredited Messiah developed, and grew ever richer and
+more complete. It began simply with the expectation of a holy
+leader and ruler who should subdue the heathen and establish the
+favored people of Jehovah in peerless purity, power, and happiness
+in the land of Judea. Little by little the rewards of the
+righteous and the punishments of the wicked were extended beyond
+those living on the earth, and took in the dead. The prophet
+Ezekiel depicted the promised restoration of the Jews from their
+captivity at Babylon to Jerusalem under the poetic image of a
+revivification of a heap of dead bones. This metaphor slowly
+assumed the form of a literal dogma, which grew from its beginning
+as an exceptional belief in the resurrection of a chosen few,
+stated in the book of Daniel and the second book of Maccabees, to
+the belief in the universal resurrection of the dead, avowed by
+Paul as the common Pharisaic belief. The belief, too, in regard to
+the scene of the Messianic triumph, the penalties to be inflicted
+on the enemies of Jehovah, and the kind and number of those
+enemies, underwent the same process of development and growth. The
+world was conceived as a sort of three story house connected with
+passage ways; heaven above the firmament, the earth between, and a
+penal region below. The imagery of fire and brimstone associated
+in the Hebrew mind with Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fearful
+imagery of idolatory, filth, and flames in the detested valley of
+Hinnom where the refuse of Jerusalem was carried to be burned, had
+been transferred by the popular imagination to the subterranean
+place of departed souls. The story in the book of Genesis about
+the sons of God forming an alliance with the daughters of men, and
+begetting a wicked brood of giants, had been wrought into the
+belief in a race of fallen angels, foes of God and men, whose
+dwelling place was the upper air. Above these wicked spirits in
+high places, but below the heaven of Jehovah, was the paradise
+whither Enoch and Elijah were supposed to have been translated,
+and whence they would come again in the last days. The Jewish
+apocryphal book of Enoch which was written probably about a
+century and a half before the birth of Christ, and is explicitly
+quoted in the Epistle of Jude contains a minute account of the
+final judgment, including in its scope this whole scenery and all
+these agents, and closely anticipating both the doctrinal and
+verbal details of the same subject as recorded in the New
+Testament itself. There is not, with one exception, a single
+essential feature of the now current Christian belief, in regard
+to the day of judgment at the end of the world, which is not
+distinctly brought out in the same form in the book of Enoch,
+written certainly more than a hundred years before a line of the
+Gospels was composed. The exception referred to relates to the
+person of the Messiah. In the book of Enoch he is indeed called
+the Son of man, but is wrapt in mysterious obscurity, undefined
+and unnamed: in the Christian documents and faith he is, of
+course, identified with Jesus of Nazareth, and, at a later period,
+identified also with God.
+
+The growth of the Messianic personality in distinctness,
+prominence, importance, and completeness of associated grouping,
+is not only historically traceable, but was also perfectly
+natural. At first the prophecy of the triumphant re establishment
+of the Jews was conceived as the result of the favoring power of
+Jehovah, not in a personal manifestation, but providentially
+displayed. Thus Joel represents Jehovah as saying, in his promise
+to vindicate Jerusalem, "Let the heathen be wakened, and come up
+to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all
+the heathen round about." It cannot be denied that this was purely
+metaphorical. But in all imagery of a kingdom, of war, of
+judgment, the idea of the king, the leader, the judge, would
+naturally be the strongest point of imaginative action, the center
+of crystalizing association around which congruous particulars
+would be drawn until the picture was complete. So it actually
+happened. Perhaps the most striking example of this is seen in the
+growth of the notion of the great Adversary who precedes and
+fights against the Messiah. The book of Daniel, written just after
+Antiochus Epiphanes had oppressed the Jews with such frightful
+cruelties and profaned their temple with such abominable
+desecrations, impersonated in him the whole head and front of the
+impious hostility which the promised deliverer would have to
+subdue in vindicating the rights and hopes of the chosen people.
+"The figure of Antiochus Epiphanes," Martineau has happily said,
+"placed in immediate antecedence and antithesis to that of the
+Messiah, as the predicted crisis moved forward, was carried with
+it, and spread its portentous shadow over the expected close." The
+writer of the book of Daniel looked for the immediate arising of
+some inspired hero and servant of Jehovah to overthrow this wicked
+despot, this persecuting monster, and avenge the oppressed Jews on
+their Gentile tyrants. When subsequent events postponed this
+expected sequel, the opposed parties in it, the Antichrist and the
+Christ, were thrown forward together in ever dilating proportions
+of gloom and brightness: the fierce countenanced king in Daniel
+becomes the Man of Sin in Paul and the Beast drunk with the blood
+of saints in the Apocalypse. And in the Rabbinical books of the
+Jews the belief in Antichrist, under the name of Armillus, is
+developed into a mass of mythological details, afterwards adopted
+quite in the gross by the Mohammedans. Terrible signs will precede
+the appearance of the Messiah, such as a dew of blood, the
+darkening of the sun, the destruction of the holy city, with the
+slaughter and dispersion of the Israelites, and the suffering of
+awful woes. The Messiah shall gather his people and rebuild and
+occupy Jerusalem. Armillus shall collect an army and besiege that
+city. But God shall say to Messiah, "Sit thou on my right hand,"
+and to the Israelites, "Stand still, and see what God will work
+for you to day." Then God will pour down sulphur and fire from
+heaven, and consume Armillus and his hosts. Then the trumpet will
+sound, the tombs be opened, the ten tribes be led to Paradise to
+celebrate the marriage supper of the Messiah, the aliens be
+consigned to Gehenna, and the earth be renovated.
+
+As the doctrine of the functions of the Messiah, in this finished
+form, is not stated in the Old Testament, but was familiar in the
+Christian Church, it is commonly supposed to be exclusively a
+later Christian development from the Jewish germ. It did, however,
+exist in the Jewish mind, before the birth of Christ, in the
+mature form already set forth. It is found clearly laid down and
+drawn out in Jewish apocryphal books dated earlier than the
+Christian era. It is likewise explicitly and minutely detailed in
+the Talmud, where its subsequent adoption from the Christians must
+have been impossible to the bigoted scorn and hate of the Jews for
+the Christians; while the historic affiliation of Christianity on
+Judaism made the Christians avowedly adopt all the vital doctrines
+of the older creed. The gradual growth of the Christian doctrine
+of the connection of the Messiah with the final judgment, out of
+the previous Jewish and Rabbinical notions, by the hardening of
+metaphors into dogmas and the universalizing of local peculiarities,
+is confessedly an obscure process, in many of its particulars
+extremely difficult to trace. But that it did thus grow up,
+no impartial scholar, who has mastered what is now known
+on the subject, can doubt. A world of new knowledge and light has
+been thrown on this whole field during the last thirty five years
+by Gfrorer, Baur, Ewald, Hoffmann, Hilgenfeld, Dilmann, Ceriani,
+Volkmar, and other students of kindred power and spirit.
+Researches and discussions in this department are still pushed
+with the greatest zeal; and it is confidently believed that in a
+few years the views adopted in the present writing will be
+established beyond all cavil from any fair minded critic. Then all
+the steps will have been clearly defined in the development of
+that doctrine of the great Day of the Lord, which, beginning with
+a poetic picture of a Jewish overthrow of the Gentiles, through
+the inspiring power of Jehovah, before the walls of Jerusalem,
+ended with a literal belief in the setting up, by the Messiah, of
+a tribunal in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the assemblage there of
+all the living and the dead for judgment, the installation of the
+immortalized righteous in Paradise, and the submerging of the
+wicked under the Vale of Hinnom in a rainstorm of blazing
+brimstone.
+
+And now what must we think in regard to the truth or falsehood of
+the outward, forensic, military, and ritual part of the doctrine
+of historic and literary development we have imperfectly followed.
+Is it not perfectly clear, that the growth of the doctrine in
+question has been but a natural action of the imagination on the
+materials furnished it; adding congruous particulars, one after
+another, until the view was complete, and therefore could extend
+no further? And is it not equally obvious, that it can lay no sort
+of claim to logical validity? The superstitious and arbitrary
+character of its intrinsic constituents, its irreconcilableness
+with science and philosophy, disprove, to all who dare honestly
+face the facts, every plea set up for it as an inspired revelation
+of truth. It is a mixture of poetry and speculation, credible
+enough in an early and uncritical age, but a hopeless stumbling
+block to the educated reason of the present day. Every one who
+brings a free intelligence to the subject will find it impossible
+not to recognize the same fanciful process of thought, the same
+poetic ingredients, here as in the schemes of those heathen
+religions whose principal portrayals we all regard as mythology.
+To argue that because earthly rulers, in their anger and power,
+send retributive armies against their rebellious subjects, to
+bring them to judgment, destroy their homes and cities, and lay
+waste their lands with fire and sword, therefore God, the supreme
+King, will do so by the whole world, is not to reason logically,
+but to poetize creatively. There can be no warrant for
+transferring the political and military relations between men and
+earthly sovereigns to the moral and spiritual relations between
+the human race and God, since the two sets of relations are wholly
+different. The relation of Creator and creature is immensely
+higher and wider than that of king and subject. He whose laws are
+everywhere incessantly self executing needs not to select and
+group and reserve his friends or foes for any climateric
+catastrophe. The common notion of a final judgment day the
+fanciful association of all the good together, on one side, to be
+saved; of all the bad together, on the other side, to be damned,
+applies to the divine government an imperfection belonging only to
+human governments. Surely every one must see, the moment the
+thought is stated, that this imaginative universalizing of the
+indignation of God, and carrying it to a climax, in the
+destruction of the world, is a mythological procedure utterly
+inapplicable to a Being who can know no anger, no caprice, no
+change, a Being whose will is universal truth, whose throne is
+immensity, whose robe is omnipresence.
+
+Original Christianity, internally regarded in its divine truth,
+was the pure moral law exemplified in the personal traits of Jesus
+Christ, and universalized by his ascent out of the flesh into that
+kingdom of heaven which knows not nationalities or ceremonies. But
+original Christianity, externally and historically regarded, in
+the belief of its first disciples, was simply Judaism, with the
+addition of the faith that the Messiah had actually come in the
+person of Jesus Christ. The first disciples vividly cherished the
+prevalent Pharisaic doctrine that the Messiah would glorify his
+people, vanquish the heathen, raise and judge the dead, change the
+face of the earth, and inaugurate a holy reign of Israel in joy
+and splendor. This the Messiah was to do. But they believed Jesus
+to be the Messiah. Yet, before doing these things, he had been put
+to death. Therefore, they argued, he must come again, to finish
+his uncompleted mission. Such was the derivation of the apostolic
+and ecclesiastical doctrine of the speedy second advent of Christ
+to judge the dead and the living, and to wind up the present
+scheme of things. The belief was inevitable under the circumstances.
+To have believed otherwise, they must have reconstructed the current
+idea of the Messiah, and have seen in him no political monarch
+with an outward realm, but purely a king of truth.
+
+For this they were not ready; though it seems as if, after
+the experience of eighteen hundred years, we ought by this
+time to be prepared to see that such was really the intention of
+Providence.
+
+It is a question of primary interest, whether Jesus himself, in
+assuming the Messiahship, regarded it personally as an exclusively
+spiritual office, or as a literally including these royal and
+judicial functions in a visible form.
+
+Jesus foretold, in the same imaginary used by the previous
+prophets, and familiar to the minds of his contemporaries, the
+speedy approach of frightful calamities, wars, rumor of wars,
+famine and slaughter, Jerusalem compassed with armies and
+destroyed. Then, he adds, the Son of man shall come in the clouds
+of heaven, with all his holy angels, and take possession of the
+scene, apportioning the destinies of the righteous and the wicked.
+The question is, whether this pictured reappearance, in such
+transcendent pomp and power, was meant by him as a literal
+prophecy, to be physically fulfilled in his own person; or as a
+moral horoscope of the destined fortunes of his religion, a
+figurative representation of the establishment and reign of his
+spiritual truth. The latter view seems to us to be the correct one.
+
+In the first place, this is what has actually taken place. In the
+growing recognition of his spirit and power, in the spread of his
+teachings and name, in the revolutionizing advancement of his
+kingdom among men, Jesus has come again and again. Jerusalem was
+destroyed by the Romans, as he foretold, amidst unspeakable
+tribulations, and the disciples of the new faith installed in
+domination over the world. He said the time was then at hand, even
+at the doors, that some of those standing by should not taste
+death until all these things came to pass. If his prophecy bore a
+moral sense, the sequel justified it; if it bore a physical sense,
+the sequel refuted and falsified it. For that generation passed
+away, fifty generations since have passed away, and yet there has
+been no literal second advent of Jesus in person to judge the dead
+and the living, and to destroy the world. The event proves that we
+must either give the words of Jesus a metaphorical interpretation
+or hold that he was in error.
+
+But, secondly, such an error would be incompatible with soundness
+of mind. For any man, even for him called by an apostle "the man
+Christ Jesus," to believe that after his death he should reappear,
+swooping down from heaven, convoyed by squadrons of angels, to
+collect all men from their graves, and replace the old creation
+with a new one, would imply a profound disturbance of reason, a
+monomaniacal fanaticism if not an actual insanity. It is such a
+pure piece of theatrics that no one deeply in unison with that
+spirit of truth which expresses the mind of God through the order
+of nature and providence could possibly believe it. Such a nature
+was preeminently that of Jesus. All his most characteristic
+utterances, such as: "blessed are the pure in heart, for they
+shall see God;" "who loves much shall be forgiven much;" reveal
+unsurpassed saneness and truth of perception. It is by much the
+most probable supposition, that Jesus employed in the deepest and
+purest moral sense alone those Messianic images and catastrophic
+prophecies which were indeed originally used as moral metaphors,
+but had been afterwards degraded into material dogmas.
+
+Still further, the literal belief commonly attributed to Jesus, in
+his own physical reappearance and reign, is not only incompatible
+with his supreme soundness of mind, it is also irreconcilable with
+his other explicit teachings. "My kingdom is not of this world."
+"Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." He warns his
+disciples against the many false Christs who will appear, and says
+that "the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation." "Say
+not, lo here! or lo there! for the kingdom of heaven is within
+you." "I am the truth, the way, and the life." "He that rejecteth
+me, I judge him not; the word that I have spoken, that shall judge
+him." "Whoever doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is
+my brother." In view of these and kindred utterances of the
+profoundest insight, irreconcilable with any gross mythological
+beliefs, we must hold to the purely spiritual character of the
+doctrine of Jesus concerning his personal offices, and think that
+all the speeches, if any such there be, which cannot be fairly
+explained in accordance with this view, have been refracted in
+their transmission through incompetent reporters, or even perhaps
+fictitiously ascribed to him from the faith of a later age. There
+is a grateful satisfaction in thus discharging, as we feel we are
+fairly entitled to do, from the authority of Jesus a burden too
+great even for his peerless name any longer to support. For, say
+what its advocates may, this gigantic melo drama of the second
+advent, this world wide mixture and display of martial and
+forensic elements before an audience of all mankind and amidst a
+convulsed and closing universe, is inherently incredible by any
+mind not grossly ignorant and undisciplined or drilled to the most
+slavish servility of traditional thought. Every one really
+educated in science and philosophy, and familiar with the
+physiological conditions and literary history of mythology in the
+other nations of the world, will plainly perceive the intrinsic
+fancifulness and falsity of the belief, at the same time that he
+easily accounts for its rise and prevalence.
+
+The same picture of the siege of Jerusalem by a league of
+idolatrous armies, and of the mighty coming of the Messiah, found
+in the New Testament, is drawn in the third book of the Sibylline
+Oracles, which was composed by a Jew two hundred years before one
+word of Matthew or Luke was written. Jesus took up this current
+and fitting imagery wherein to express the conflict of his
+religion with the world, and to predict its ultimate triumph. He
+identifies himself with the truths he has brought, with the
+regenerating energies he has inaugurated to combat and overcome
+the wickedness and despotism of the nations of men. Every advent
+of his universal principles to a wider conflict or a higher seat
+of authority, is a true coming of the Son of Man. The vices and
+crimes of men, the selfishness and tyranny of governments,
+accumulate impediments in the way of the free working of the will
+of God in human society. Therefore from period to period
+convulsive crises occur, shocks of progressive truth and liberty
+against the obstacles gathered in their way. Thus, not only the
+destruction of Jerusalem, but the destruction of Rome, the French
+Revolution, and all the terrible social crises in the advancing
+affairs of the world, write on the earth and the sky, in huge
+characters of blood, smoke and fire, the true meaning of the
+repeated coming of Christ. This is the only kind of judicial
+second advent he will ever make, and this will occur over and over
+in calamitous but helpful revolutions, until all removable evils
+are done away, all the laws of men made just and all the hearts of
+men pure. Then the spirit once manifested by Jesus in his lonely
+mission will be a universal presence on earth, and the genuine
+millennium prevail without end.
+
+It is necessary now, as preliminary to a clear exposition of the
+true Christian doctrine of judgment, to explain the cause and
+process of the dark perversion which the teachings of Christ
+himself have so unfortunately undergone in the Church. For this
+purpose we must again, for a moment, refer to the original
+connection of Christianity with Judaism.
+
+Judaism was composed of two parts: one an accidental form; the
+other, essential truth. The first was the ceremonial peculiarities
+of the Jewish race and history; the second was the absolute and
+eternal principles of morality and religion. These two parts the
+ritual law and moral law were closely joined in all the best
+representatives of the nation at all the best periods of its
+history. Yet there was a constant tendency to separate these. One
+party exalted the ritual element, another party the spiritual
+element; the priestly class and the vulgar populace the former;
+the prophets the men of poetic, fiery heart and genius the latter.
+
+Such men as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, always insisted on personal
+and national righteousness, purity, and devotion, as the one
+essential thing. But the natural tendency of the common multitude,
+and of every professional class, to an external routine of
+mechanised forms, manifested itself more and more in a party which
+made an overt covenant and ritualistic conformity the all
+important thing. This party reached its head in the sect of the
+Pharisees, who, at the time of Jesus, possessed the offices, and
+represented the dominant spirit and authority of the Jewish
+nation. The character of this sect of bigoted formalists, as
+indignantly described and denounced by Jesus, is too well known to
+need illustration. They subordinated and trivialized the weightier
+matters of justice, mercy, humility, and peace, but enthroned and
+glorified the regime of mint, anise, and cummin.
+
+What was the Jewish idea of salvation, or citizenship in the
+kingdom of God? What was the condition of acceptance in the
+Pharisaic church? It was heirship in the Jewish race, either by
+descent or adoption, with ceremonial blamelessness in belief and
+act. Do you belong to the chosen family of Abraham, and are you
+undefiled in relation to all the requirements of our code? Then
+you are one of the elect. Are you a Gentile, an idolatrous member
+of the uncircumcision, or a scorner of the Levitic and Rabbinical
+customs? Then you are unfit to enter beyond the outer precincts of
+the Temple; you are a hopeless alien from the kingdom of heaven.
+Thus the Jewish test of acceptance with God was national,
+external, formal, a local and temporal peculiarity.
+
+When Jesus arose and began to teach, his transcendent genius,
+working under the unparalleled inspiration of God, an unprecedented
+sensibility to divine truth in its utmost purity and freedom,
+expanded beyond all these shallow material accidents and
+bonds; and he propounded a perfectly moral and spiritual test of
+acceptance before God; namely, the possession of an intrinsically
+good character. He made nothing of the distinction between Jew and
+Gentile, declaring, "My father is able of these stones to raise up
+children unto Abraham." He affirmed the condition of admittance
+into the kingdom of God to be simply the doing of the will of God.
+When he saw the young lawyer who had kept the two commandments,
+loving God with all his soul, and his neighbor as himself, his
+heart yearned towards him in benediction. And, finally, in his
+sublime picture of the last judgment, he, in the most explicit and
+unmistakable manner, makes the one essential condition of
+rejection to be inhumanity of life, cruel selfishness of
+character; the one essential condition of acceptance, the spirit
+of love, the practical doing of good. He utters not a solitary
+syllable about immaculateness of ceremonial propriety or soundness
+of dogmatic belief. He only says, Inasmuch as ye have or have not
+visited the sick and the imprisoned, fed the hungry, and clothed
+the naked, ye shall be justified or condemned at the divine
+tribunal. This test of personal goodness or wickedness, benevolent
+or malignant conduct, proclaimed by Jesus, is the true standard,
+free from everything local and temporary, fitted for application
+to all nations and all ages.
+
+But no sooner had Christianity obtained a foothold on earth,
+multiplied its converts, and gained some outward sway, than its
+Judaizing disciples and promulgators, fastening on that which was
+easiest to comprehend and practise, that which was most impressive
+to the imagination, that which seemed most sharply to distinguish
+them from the unbelieving and unconforming world around, thrust
+far into the background this universal and eternal test of
+judgment set up by Jesus himself, and in place of it installed an
+exclusive test fashioned after a more developed and aggravated
+pattern of the very narrowest and worst elements in the
+Phariasaism which he expressly came to supersede. The Pharisaic
+condition of salvation was inheritance, by blood or adoption, in
+the Jewish race and Abrahamic covenant, together with exactitude
+of ceremonial observance. Everybody else was an unclean alien, an
+uncircumcised dog, an uncovenanted leper. In place of this test,
+the orthodox ecclesiastical party made their test dogmatic belief
+in the supernatural Messiahship of Jesus Christ, formal profession
+of allegiance to the official person of Jesus Christ. It is summed
+up in the formula, "Whoso believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is
+of God; whoso denieth this, is of the Devil."
+
+Exactly here is where Paul, the noble apostle to the Gentiles,
+broke with the Judaizing apostles, and taught a doctrine more
+fully developed in its historic sequence, but substantially in
+perfect unison with the free teachings and spirit of Jesus
+himself. With Paul the test of Christian salvation was the
+possession of the mind of Christ. "If any man have not the spirit
+of Christ, he is none of his;" "but as many as are led by the
+spirit of God are sons of God." "Neither circumcision availeth
+anything, nor uncircumcision; but a new creature," begotten in the
+image of Christ, availeth everything before God. "God rewardeth
+every man, the Jew and the Gentile, according to his works." With
+Paul, descent from Abraham was nothing, observance of the legal
+code was nothing: a just and pure character, full of self
+sacrificing love, evoked by faith in Christ, was the all in all.
+Jesus Christ was the head of a new race, the second Adam; and all
+disciples, who, through moral faith in him, were regenerated into
+his likeness and unto newness of living, were thereby adopted as
+sons of God and joint heirs with him. The Pauline formula of
+salvation, freely open to all the world, was, spiritual
+assimilation and reproduction of Christ in the disciple.
+
+But the Judaizing party bore a heavy preponderance in the early
+Church, and has succeeded unto this day in imposing on
+ecclesiastical Christendom its own test: namely, a sound dogmatic,
+belief in the supreme personal rank and office of Christ, as the
+only means of admission to the kingdom of heaven. The one
+peculiarity which most sharply and broadly contrasted the early
+Christians with the rest of the world was unquestionably their
+belief in the miraculous mission of Jesus, a belief growing
+deeper, higher, intenser, until it actually identified him with
+the omnipotent God. There was an inevitable tendency, it was a
+perfectly natural and necessary process, for them to make this
+point of contrast the central condition on which depended the
+possession of all the special privileges supposed to be promised
+to its disciples by the new religion. The result is well expressed
+by Polycarp in these words: "Whosoever confesses not that Christ
+is come in the flesh, is an Antichrist; and whosoever acknowledges
+not the martyrdom of the cross, is of the Devil; and whosoever
+says that there is no resurrection nor judgment, is the first born
+of Satan." This extract strikes the key note of the Orthodox
+Church all through Christendom from the second century to the
+present hour. In place of the true condition of salvation
+announced by Jesus, personal and practical goodness, it
+inaugurates the false ecclesiastic standard, soundness of dogmatic
+belief in relation to Jesus himself! Those who hold this are the
+elect, and shall stand in heaven with white robes and palms and a
+new song, while all the rest of the world apostate and detested
+enemies of God and his saints shall be trampled down in merciless
+slaughter, and flung into the pit whence the smoking signal of
+their torment shall ascend for ever and ever. It is a transformation
+of the bigoted scorn and hate of the covenanted Jew for his
+Gentile foes into the intensified horror of the Orthodox
+believer for the reprobate infidel. And it finally culminated in
+the following frightful picture which still lowers and blazes in
+the imagination of ecclesiastical Christendom as a veritable
+revelation of what is to take place at the end of the world:
+
+While the stars are falling, the firmament dissolving, the dead
+swarming from their graves, and the nations assembling, Christ
+will come in the clouds of heaven with a host of angels and sit in
+judgment on collected mankind. All who submissively believed in
+his Divinity, and have the seal of his blood on their foreheads,
+he will approve and accept; all others he will condemn and reject.
+No matter for the natural goodness and integrity of the
+unbeliever: his unbelief dooms him. No matter for the natural
+depravity and iniquity of the believer: his faith in the atoning
+sacrifice saves him. The Judge will say to the orthodox, on his
+right, "You may have been impure and cruel, lied, cheated, hated
+your neighbor, rolled in vice and crime, but you have believed in
+me, in my divinity: therefore, come, ye blessed, inherit my
+kingdom." To the heretical, on his left, he will say, "You may
+have been pure and kind, sought the truth, self sacrificingly
+served your fellow men, fulfilled every moral duty in your power,
+but you have not believed in me, in my deity, and my blood:
+therefore, depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." Such is a
+fit verdict to be pronounced by the avenging Warrior depicted in
+the Apocalypse, from whose mouth issues a two edged sword, to cut
+his enemies asunder; who sits on a white charger, in a vesture
+dipped in blood, with a bow and a crown, and goes forth conquering
+and to conquer; whose eyes are flames of fire; who treads his
+rejecters in the wine press of his wrath until their blood reaches
+to the horse bridles. It was the natural reflection of an age
+filled with the most murderous hatreds and persecutions, based on
+political and dogmatic distinctions. But how contradictory it is
+to the teachings of Jesus himself! How utterly irreconcilable it
+is with the image and spirit of that meek and lowly Son of Man who
+said that he "came not to destroy men's lives but to save them;"
+who declared, "of mine own self I can do nothing;" who modestly
+deprecated all personal homage, asking, "Why callest thou me
+good?" who sat with the publican, and forgave the harlot, and
+denounced bigotry in many an immortal breathing of charity; and
+who, even in his final agony, pardoned and prayed for his
+murderers! What reason is there for supposing that he who was so
+infinitely gentle, unselfish, forgiving, when on earth, will
+undergo such a fiendish metamorphosis in his exaltation and
+return? It is the most monstrous, the most atrocious travesty of
+the truth that ever was perpetrated by the superstitious ignorance
+and audacity of the human mind. It is a direct transference into
+the Godhead of the most egotistical and hateful feelings of a bad
+man. No good man who had been ever so grossly misconceived,
+vilified, and wronged, if he saw his enemies prostrate in
+submissive terror at his feet, perfectly powerless before his
+authority, could bear to trample on them and wreak vengeance on
+them. He would say, "Unhappy ones, fear not; you have misunderstood
+me; I will not injure you; if there be any favor which I can
+bestow on you, freely take it." And is it not an incredible
+blasphemy to deny to the deified Christ a magnanimity equal to
+that which any good man would exhibit?
+
+It is with pain and regret that the writer has penned the
+foregoing sentences, which, he supposes, some persons will read
+with the feeling that they are inexcusable misrepresentations,
+others, with a shocked and resentful horror, relieving itself in
+the cry, Infidelity! Blasphemy! The reply of the writer is simply
+that, while reluctant to wound the sensibility of any, he feels
+bound in conscience to make this exposition, because he believes
+it to be a true statement; and loyalty to truth is the first duty
+of every man. Truth is the will of God, obedience to which alone
+is sound morality, reverential love of which alone is pure piety.
+Frightful as is the picture drawn above of Christ in the judgment,
+it is impossible to deny, without utter stultification, that every
+lineament of it is logically implied in the formula. "There is no
+salvation for the man who unbelievingly rejects, no damnation for
+the man who believingly accepts, the official Christ and his
+blood." And what teacher will have the presumption to deny that
+just this has been, and still is, the central dogma in the faith
+of ecclesiastical Christendom? The legitimate result of this view,
+unflinchingly carried out, and applied to the precise point we now
+have in hand, is seen in that horrible portrayal of the Last
+Judgment wherewith Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling of the
+Sistine Chapel, in Rome. The great anatomical artist consistently
+depicts Christ as an almighty athlete, towering with vindictive
+wrath, flinging thunderbolts on the writhing and helpless
+wilderness of his victims. The popular conception of Christ in the
+judgment has been borrowed from the type of a king, who, hurling
+off the incognito in which he has been outraged, breaks out in his
+proper insignia, to sentence and trample his scorners. The true
+conception is to be fashioned after the type given in his own
+example during his life. So far as Christ is the representative of
+God, there must be no vanity or egotism in him. Every such quality
+ascribed to the Godhead is anthropomorphizing sophistry. However
+much more God may be, he is the General Mind of the Universe. He
+includes, while he transcends, all other beings. Now, the General
+Mind must represent the interests of all, the disinterested good
+of the whole, and not any particular and selfish exactions, or
+resentful caprices, fashioned on the pattern shown among human
+egotists by a kingly despot.
+
+The Church, in developing Christianity out of Judaism through the
+person and life of Jesus, has given prominence and emphasis to the
+wrong elements, seeking to universalize and perpetuate, in a
+transformed guise, the local spirit and historic errors of that
+Pharisaic sect against which he had himself launched all his
+invective. That temper of bigotry and ceremonial technicality
+which hates all outside of its own pale as reprobate, and which
+ultimated itself in the virtual Pharisaic formula, "Keep the hands
+and platter washed, and it is no matter how full of uncleanness
+you are within," at a later period embodied itself through the
+leaders of ecclesiastical Orthodoxy in the central dogma, "Nothing
+but faith in Christ can avail man anything before God." Instead of
+this the true doctrine is, Nothing but obedience, surrender, and
+trust, personal penitence and aspiration, can avail man anything
+before God.
+
+The Christians, as the Jews did before them, have made a wrong
+selection of the doctrine to be, on the one hand, particularized
+and left behind; on the other hand, carried forward and
+universalized. This immense error demands correction. Let us
+notice a few specimens in exemplication of it. Jehovah is not the
+only true God in distinction from odious idols; but Brahma, Ahura
+Mazda, Osiris, Zeus, Jupiter, and the rest, are names given by
+different nations to the Infinite Spirit whom each nation worships
+according to its own light. The Jews and the Christians are not
+the only chosen people of God; but all nations are his people,
+chosen in the degree of their harmony with his will. The
+providence of God is not an exceptional interference from without,
+exclusively for the Jews and Christians; but it is for all, a
+steady order of laws within, as much to be seen in the shining of
+the sun, or the regular harvest, as in any shocks of political
+calamity and glory. Not the Messiah alone reveals God; but, in his
+degree, every ruler, prophet, priest, every man who stands for
+wisdom, justice, purity, and devotion, represents him. It is not
+doctrinal belief in the Messiah, but vital adoption of his spirit
+and character, of the principles of real goodness, that
+constitutes the salvation of the disciple. We are to look not for
+the resurrection of the flesh from the grave, but for the
+resurrection of the soul from all forms of sin, ignorance, and
+misery. It is the universal prevalence of truth and virtue,
+knowledge, love, and peace, in the hearts of men, not the physical
+reign of the returning Messiah, which will make a millennium on
+earth. The kingdom of God which Judaism localized exclusively in
+Palestine, and the early church exclusively in heaven or on the
+millennial earth, should be recognized in every place, whether
+above the sky or on the globe, where duty is done, and pure
+affection, trust, and joy experienced; for God is not excluded
+from all other spaces by any enthronization in one. We ought not
+to cling, as to permanent fixtures of revealed truth, to the rigid
+outlines of that scheme of faith which was struck out when the
+three story house of the Hebrew cosmogony showed the limits of
+what men knew, before exact science was born, or criticism
+conceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia and
+the Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculative
+theological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstruct
+and read just them, from time to time, in accordance with the
+demands of the growing body of human knowledge.
+
+Reflecting, in the light of these general ideas of truth, on the
+whole subject of the current doctrine of the end of the world and
+the day of judgment, we shall see that that doctrine presents no
+valid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out of
+the historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianity
+arose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by the
+unconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figures
+came, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginative
+collection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literal
+truths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historical
+and critical information for entering into the book from the point
+of view occupied by its author, it is just as evident that its
+imagery was meant to describe the immediate conflict of Hebrew
+Christianity with pagan Rome, and not the literal blotting out of
+the universe, as it is unquestionable that the book of Daniel
+depicts, not the impending destruction of the world, but the
+relations of the chosen nation with the hostile empires of
+Persia, Media, Babylon, and Macedonia, from which they had
+suffered so much, and which they then hoped speedily to put
+beneath their feet. The slain Lamb, standing amidst the throne of
+God, with seven eyes and seven horns; Death, on a pale horse, with
+Hell following him; the woman, clothed with the sun, and the moon
+under her feet; the great red dragon, whose tail casts to the
+earth the third part of the stars of heaven; the worm wood star,
+that falls as a blazing lamp, and turns a third of the waters of
+the earth into bitterness; the seven thunders, seven seals, seven
+vials, seven spirits before the throne, seven candlesticks, seven
+angels, seven trumpets, seven epistles to the seven churches,
+seven horns, seven headed beast, all these things must, perforce,
+be taken as free poetic imagery; it would require a lunatic or an
+utterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why,
+then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the most
+violent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements of
+fact? If the rest is symbolism, so are the pictures of the
+avenging armies of angels, the reeking gulf of sulphur, and the
+golden streets of the city.
+
+The entire scheme of thought, as it still stands in the mind of
+the Orthodox believer, is to be rejected as spurious, because it
+rests on a process of imaginative accumulation and transference
+which is absolutely illegitimate; namely, the association and
+universalizing of political and military images, which are then
+hardened from emblems into facts, and cast over upon the mutual
+relations of God and mankind. We ought to break open the
+metaphors, extract their significance, and throw the shells aside.
+But ignorant bibliolatary and ecclesiasticism insist on
+worshipping the shells, with no insight of their contents.
+
+There is one all important fact which should convince of their
+error those who hold the current view of a general judgment at the
+end of the world as having been revealed from God through Christ.
+We refer to the fact that the system of ideas in which a final
+resurrection and judgment of the dead are logical parts, existed
+in the Zoroastrian theology five or six centuries before the birth
+of Christ. It was adopted thence by the Jews, and afterwards
+adopted from the Jews by the Christians. If, therefore, this
+doctrine be a revelation from God, it was revealed by him to the
+Persians in a dark and credulous antiquity. In that case it is
+Zoroaster and not Christ to whom we are indebted for the central
+dogmas of our religion! No, these things are imagery, not essence,
+the human element of imaginative error with which the divine
+element of truth has been overlaid, and from whose darkening and
+corrupt company this is to be extricated.
+
+There are, in the New Testament, in addition to the relevant
+metaphors which we have already examined, several others of great
+impressiveness and importance. We must now explain these, separate
+the truths and errors popularly associated with them, and leave
+the subject with an exposition of the real method of the divine
+government and the true idea of the day of judgment, in contrast
+with the prevalent ecclesiastical perversions of them.
+
+The part played in theological speculation and popular religious
+belief by imagery borrowed from the scenery and methods of
+judicial tribunals, the procedures and enforcement of penal law,
+has not been less prominent and profound than the influence
+exerted by natural, political, and military metaphors. The power,
+the pomp, the elaborate spectacle, the mysterious formalities, the
+frightful penalties, the intense personal hopes and fears,
+associated with the trial of culprits in courts or before the head
+of a nation, must always have sunk so deeply into the minds of men
+as to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typical
+stamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and the
+future world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctly
+shown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before the
+sarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake to
+be deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of the
+departed, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, together
+with forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of a
+particular sin, assembled on the shore and sat in judgment. The
+deceased was put on his trial before them: and, if justified,
+awarded an honorable burial; if condemned, disgraced by the
+withholding of the funeral rites. Now the papyrus rolls found with
+the mummies give a description of the judgment of the dead, a
+picture of the fate of the disembodied soul in the Egyptian Hades,
+minutely agreeing in many particulars with the foregoing ceremony.
+Ma, the Goddess of Justice, leads the soul into the judgment hall,
+before the throne of Osiris, where stands a great balance with a
+symbol of truth in one scale, the symbol of a human heart in the
+other. The accuser is heard, and the deceased defends himself
+before forty two divine judges who preside over the forty two sins
+from which he must be cleared. The gods Horus and Anubis attend to
+the balance, and Thoth writes down the verdict and the sentence.
+The soul then passes on through adventures of penance or bliss,
+the details of which are obviously copied, with fanciful changes
+and additions, from the connected scenery and experience known on
+the earth.
+
+Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scene
+in human society so impressive as the periodical sitting in
+judgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of those
+half deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, the
+Emperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in the
+gate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversible
+administration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing in
+purple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest to
+his person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next in
+order; his body guards and various classes of servants, in
+distinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast masses
+of troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must have
+composed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared the
+accusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captives
+taken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who had
+complaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. The
+monarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executioners
+carried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, some
+sent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When the
+tribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended,
+there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darkness
+there, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place.
+
+Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in some
+degree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary in
+human governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, the
+judge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of the
+social order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties,
+wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminals
+gathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, may
+go on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up of
+arrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural it
+would be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and
+vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation
+between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the
+Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final
+day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery,
+summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their
+doom according to his sovereign pleasure?
+
+The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth
+chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of
+an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in
+his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit
+upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all
+nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a
+shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the
+sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus
+himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to
+indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and
+judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of
+morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had
+taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so
+overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times,
+that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.
+
+This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of
+the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly
+king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity
+of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and
+undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the
+apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in
+the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man
+whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being
+delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a
+deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is
+generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this
+arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate
+his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The
+essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no
+substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor
+multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.
+
+The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead,
+Minos, who presided at the trial of souls arriving from Europe;
+Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who
+judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors
+for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions
+of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture
+of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place
+where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find
+a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and
+walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold;
+the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every
+man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct
+the tendency  conceive their destiny in the unknown future in
+forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar
+experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to
+the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in
+another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom,
+of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a
+huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of
+heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth,
+while the Judge and his officers take their places in the
+Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology,
+should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks
+into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of
+the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely,
+the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary
+judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon
+our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one,
+because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal
+truths are wholly different from their relations with each other
+in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal
+or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a
+league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits
+and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to
+convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity.
+God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards
+and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual,
+results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related
+to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those
+judicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken and
+hitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable,
+the circumstances are so completely different. The true
+illustration of the divine government must be adopted from
+physiology and psychology, where the perfect working of the
+Creator is exemplified,  not from the forum and the court, where
+the imperfect artifices of men are exhibited.
+
+God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions of
+their own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kick
+of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. The
+thief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, the
+philosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just and
+intrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in the
+fitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discords
+with the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus is
+the daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded with
+thrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream of
+devouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed of
+uncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions of
+universal good; the vices represent private opposition to those
+conditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting and
+cooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonistic
+and repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfect
+retribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel its
+working, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of the
+secrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his own
+experience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far from
+refuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truth
+of that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, they
+have their reward." Those who consider themselves saints indulge
+in an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinners
+have their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next."
+The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical with
+the first law of motion in the material sphere; action and
+reaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law being
+instantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be no
+occasion for a final epoch to redress its accumulated disbalancements.
+It has no disbalancements, save in our erroneous or defective vision.
+
+The true conception of the relation of the all judging Creator to
+his creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies all
+finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of
+organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of
+good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of
+thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices,
+fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view
+worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The
+incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent,
+constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the
+traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance,
+originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a
+truth.
+
+For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be
+drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered,
+not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the
+transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the
+approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible
+calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and
+rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish
+armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined
+evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the
+future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact,
+and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the
+image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income
+of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer
+of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and
+stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares,
+because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be
+riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on
+revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the
+property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the
+bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to
+themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in
+the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops
+of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the
+right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a
+flaming furnace.
+
+Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the
+vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory
+minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He
+is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "When
+the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall
+sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."
+Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moral
+meaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializing
+degradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appears
+clearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wife
+of Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his right
+hand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said,
+"Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism
+that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my
+left, is not mine to give." The imagery meant that the missionary
+assistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth and
+love he came to establish, would be represented in common with
+himself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world.
+When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, as
+indicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and that
+his favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, and
+glory, he solemnly repudiated it.
+
+There is yet another and a wholly different style of imagery
+employed by Jesus to convey his instructions as to the judgment
+which is to separate the justified from the condemned. The
+consideration of this species of imagery would afford an
+independent proof, of a cogent character, that they strangely
+misapprehend the mind of Jesus who interpret the moral meaning of
+his parable in an outward and dramatic sense. The metaphors to
+which we now refer are of a domestic and convivial nature, based
+on some of the most impressive social customs of the Oriental
+nations. It was the habit of kings, governors, and other rich and
+powerful men, to give, on certain occasions, great banquets, to
+which the guests were invited by special favor. These feasts were
+celebrated with the utmost pomp and splendor, by night, in
+brilliantly illuminated apartments. The contrast of the blazing
+lights, the richly costumed guests, the music and talk, the honor
+and luxury within, set against the darkness, the silence, the
+envious poverty and misery without, must have deeply struck all
+who saw it, and would naturally secure rhetorical reflections in
+speech and literature. The Jews illustrated their idea of the
+Kingdom of God by the symbol of a table at which Abraham and Isaac
+and Jacob were banqueting, and would be joined by all their
+faithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing how
+a king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast and
+sent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagery
+still more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Is
+it not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended it
+as an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he first
+announced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, having
+rejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to the
+Gentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joy
+and honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused to
+accept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias that
+the parable has been perverted into a description of the Last
+Judgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to or
+exclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter of
+personal experience in the heart of the disciple and in the
+society of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, without
+which no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, and
+loving character. In consequence of his destitution of this,
+Judas, although seated at the table, with the most honored guests,
+in the very presence of his Lord, was proved to have no right
+there, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, his
+inability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom,
+constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind of
+Jesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually in
+the present, and not something to be shown collectively and
+materially at the end of the world, appears from the great number
+of different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had he
+meant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the last
+day, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had a
+distinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one and
+the same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach that
+all who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct to
+assimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby made
+members of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsic
+unfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that his
+fertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey this
+one truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in which
+the images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agree
+must be the essential thought. Now the parables differ in the
+forms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms are
+metaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fate
+to the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is the
+vital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist in
+anything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere is
+something moral.
+
+The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that
+we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth
+reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and
+elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of
+some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of
+man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the
+Creator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympathetic
+connection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing the
+verdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need to
+project the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of a
+trial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into an
+overwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt,
+was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully for
+good in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be as
+much better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real and
+more pervasive.
+
+Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power of
+justice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, the
+genuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career of
+that being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment;
+because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the end
+at which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If we
+could survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view,
+and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedly
+we should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of each
+ephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of its
+sun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as the
+final day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then the
+sum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from all
+further alteration by him, passing into history as a collective
+cause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls in
+space, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal will
+tell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will not
+tremble at the thought of a judgment so unavoidable and so
+tremendous as this! The votaries of superstition are mistaken in
+supposing that the removal of their false beliefs will destroy or
+weaken the sanctions of duty among men. The removal of imaginary
+sanctions will but cause the true ones to appear more clearly and
+to work more effectively.
+
+The judgment of God then, we conclude, is no vengeful wreaking of
+arbitrary royal volitions; but it is the return of the laws of
+being on all deeds, actual or ideal. This is, in itself, perpetual
+and infallible: but it sometimes forces itself on our recognition
+in sudden shocks or crises caused by the gathering obstacles and
+opposition made to it by our ignorance, vice, and crime. Every
+other doctrine of the Divine judgment is either an error or a
+figurative statement of this one. In the latter case, the physical
+cover should be dissolved and thrown away, the moral nucleus laid
+bare and appropriated. But the popular mind of Christendom has
+unfortunately pursued the contrary course, first exaggerating and
+consolidating the metaphors, then putting their forms literally in
+the place of their meaning.
+
+The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in the
+Apocalypse, the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as
+blood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the great
+white throne, from before the face of whose occupant the
+frightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of the
+dead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and the
+judging of the dead out of the things written therein, this scenic
+array has, by its terrible vividness and power of fanciful
+plausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken such
+a tenacious hold on the feelings of the Christian world, secured
+for itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself with
+such a mass of associations, that it has actually come to be
+regarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act as
+such. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think on
+the subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books are
+provided in heaven with the names of men in them and recording
+angels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by single
+entry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white dais
+raised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. On
+what principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayal
+rendered as emblem, the rest accepted as absolute verity? If the
+blood red warrior on his white horse followed by the shining
+cavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimerical
+angels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror struck
+fugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incredible
+walls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yielding
+twelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burning
+sulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of the
+dead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The reader
+smiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in Leaven
+amidst boiling pots of walrus meat, while in hell the fish lines
+of the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed by
+falling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give for
+the reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his present
+experience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process of
+thought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally credit
+the following verses:
+
+"There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and in
+great books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down The
+good ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God.
+The other keeps his dreadful day book open Till sunset, that we
+may repent, which doing, The record of the action fades away, And
+leaves a line of white across the page."
+
+No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in the
+New Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in his
+treasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled in
+it. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents?
+
+When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament were
+written, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment was
+almost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. At
+any instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, the
+troops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, and
+the sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left.
+Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict in
+the flame of the west," the believers felt that the supreme Dies
+iroe was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation after
+generation died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approach
+seemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its early
+prominence into the background. But as it retreated, and became
+more obscure and vague in its date and other details, it grew ever
+more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty
+and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh
+its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the
+dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after
+being bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years," should
+"be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most
+intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history
+of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the
+general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of
+the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous
+season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense
+incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church,
+like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our
+expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion,
+fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still
+continued to expect him.
+
+The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded
+over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The
+Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts:
+the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect
+the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the
+blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but
+heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of
+resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels,
+in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of
+thousands of years.
+
+But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a
+shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation,
+when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with
+Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the
+avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on
+each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the
+fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day.
+Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or
+more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and
+Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics
+condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of
+bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying
+their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross;
+the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and the
+repulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders who
+had escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in black
+coffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and,
+finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. The
+procession tediously winds to the great square in front of the
+cathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix with
+extinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his court
+and the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by their
+presence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish in
+long drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a more
+vivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than the
+fact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of an
+Auto da Fe magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth,
+Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiars
+standing by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil his
+bidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, the
+crucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe;
+the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helpless
+before him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at the
+inexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutly
+thank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it is
+cruel?
+
+Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, the
+millennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if the
+literature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books,
+sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pile
+as big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about a
+quarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the time
+for the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic in
+the United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germany
+have also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebrated
+London preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End," and
+"The Great Tribulation," have been circulated in tens of thousands
+of copies, is now the most prominent representative of this
+catastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculous
+by his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has become
+more an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematical
+calculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalyptic
+poetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerable
+sect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the most
+illiterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to the
+fanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead an
+eleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiously
+wait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake,
+pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoric
+shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles
+them as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some of
+them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready
+for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a
+lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope
+that its end is at hand,
+
+"Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathway
+for the coming Judge!"
+
+But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception.
+In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those who
+still cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment has
+been put forward as far as the day of creation has been put
+backward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before the
+theatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; more
+and more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic jurisdiction
+in the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. The
+time is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit of
+national separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred,
+whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, all
+others with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord,
+dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies," will give way
+to that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which sees
+brethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equal
+salvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the self
+righteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and so
+relentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over the
+idea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chief
+captains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman,
+and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, saying
+to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the
+face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the
+Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be
+able to stand?"  then the temper of this faith will be seen to be
+as wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as a
+remnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the whole
+mind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the disciples
+wished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents,
+rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, "Ye
+know not what spirit ye are of." Many a bigoted and complacent
+dogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to day, fails to read his
+own heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishly
+fancying himself better and safer, on account of his blind
+conservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance of
+science. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses of
+the mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The whole
+ecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No such
+gigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza,
+will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, as
+freshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his will
+through his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness and
+justice; and forever may all his creatures come to him unimpeded,
+and trust in him without limit.
+
+Away, then, monstrous horrors, bred in the night of the past!
+Dreadful incubi! too cruelly and too long ye have sat on the
+breast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it is
+time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition
+on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels,
+fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims!
+Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant
+mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to
+our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your
+aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign
+battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every
+free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer.
+Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into the
+light. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinions
+where all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itself
+shall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made to
+outgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning the
+sun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night before
+him. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now we
+fling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope to
+escape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the
+inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in
+the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive
+unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection
+and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance
+from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination
+before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history.
+For we believe that all history is by its own enactment
+indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every
+consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect
+justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the
+universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual
+session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION.
+
+
+THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to
+be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the
+language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the
+church, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failing
+faith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one tries
+to show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prison
+house of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of
+physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that God
+himself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are bound
+to accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For the
+reasons which we will immediately proceed to give, this
+representation must be rejected as a mistake.
+
+The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is a
+mythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque and
+frightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separated
+from them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, the
+substance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomless
+pit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God will
+confine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after their
+bodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality and
+religion, something belonging to the two departments of
+descriptive geography and police history. The existence or
+nonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for the
+wicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. In
+earlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerous
+caves, lakes, volcanos, as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus,
+Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere were believed to be literally
+entrances to hell. So famous and eminent a man as Saint Gregory
+the Great, when the great Sicilian volcano was seen to be
+increasingly agitated, taught that it was owing to the press of
+lost souls, rendering it necessary to enlarge the approach to
+their prison. With the increase of knowledge, the localization of
+hell was subsequently by many authors, made a part of cosmography,
+and shifted about among the comets, the moon and the sun, although
+most people still think that it is the interior of the earth. But,
+the best theologians of all denominations, the most authoritative
+thinkers of all schools, now hold that the supernatural
+revelations of God are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and do
+not include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry and
+mathematics.
+
+God is not a local king, ruling his subjects by means of political
+machinery and external interferences; he is the omnipresent
+Creator, spiritually sustaining and governing his creatures from
+within by means of the laws which determine their experience, the
+action and reaction between their faculties and their surrounding
+conditions. Accordingly, the sphere of direct revelations from the
+spirit of God to the spirit of man is limited to the implications
+in the divine logic of the soul and its life, that is, to moral
+and religious truths. The facts of history and cosmology are left
+for the processes of natural discovery. Whether there be or be not
+a localized hell of material tortures lies not within the domain
+of revelation, but is a problem of physical science. And science
+demonstrates, from the weight of the globe, that it is solid; and
+not, according to the current belief, a hollow shell containing a
+sea of flame packed with the floating hosts of the lost.
+
+Furthermore, the only mode in which the truth of such a doctrine
+could be made known is wholly aside from the method of
+supernatural revelation. God does not utter his thoughts to his
+chosen messengers in words or other outward signs as a man does.
+Men communicate information to one another by voice, gesture,
+drawing, writing or other mechanical devices. It is the natural
+mistake of a crude age to suppose that God does the same,
+breathing verbal formularies into the of minds of his selected
+servants. But this is not the case. Revelation is not to receive
+an announcement; it is to perceive a truth. Since God is infinite,
+we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finer
+and fuller harmony with the works and laws of God, thus fulfilling
+the human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divine
+conditions, and obtain new insight of the ways and designs of God.
+They experience purer and richer ideas and emotions than others,
+and may afterwards impart them to others, thus transmitting the
+revelation to them. For this new enlightenment, sanctification, or
+rise of life, is what alone constitutes a true revelation. Now if
+there be a local and physical hell, it is not a moral truth which
+the inspired soul can see, but a scientific fact which can be
+perceived only by the senses or deduced by the logical intellect.
+If a man could travel to every nook of the creation he might
+discover whether there were such a hell or not. But you cannot
+discover a spiritual truth by any amount of outward travel. When a
+soul is so delivered from egotism, or the jar of self will against
+universal law, and brought into such high harmony with the spirit
+of the whole, as to perceive this divine law of life, "He who
+dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him," then he is
+inspired to see a religious truth. He has obtained a divine
+revelation. But we cannot conceive of any degree of exaltation
+into unison with God which would enable a man to see the fact that
+the centre of the earth or the surface of the sun or any other
+spot, is a place of fire set apart as the penal abode of the
+damned, and that it is crowded with burning sulphur and
+unimaginable forms of wickedness and agony. Such a doctrine is out
+of the province, and its conveyance irreconcilable with the method
+of revelation, which consists not in an exterior communication of
+scientific facts to messengers selected to receive them, but in an
+interior unveiling of religious truths to souls prepared to see
+them.
+
+In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell,
+a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be
+regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because it
+is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the
+mythology of the world, a natural product of the poetic
+imagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages and
+lands men have recognized the difference between the good and the
+bad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtue
+represented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that guilt
+and vice represented the insurrection of private or lower and
+transient desire against public or higher and more lasting good;
+and have felt that the former deserved to be praised and rewarded,
+the latter to be blamed and punished. In all ages and all nations
+society has teemed with devices for the distribution of these
+returns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict.
+There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable in
+art which has not been used as a means for the punishment of
+criminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions of
+despots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned before
+judicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to every
+species of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment,
+fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen,
+burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wild
+beasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while he
+banquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants and
+favorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered in
+dungeons, plied with every conceivable indignity and misery,
+bastinadoed, bowstrung, or torn in pieces with lingering torture.
+Here we have the germ of hell. To get the fully developed popular
+doctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravate
+the known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflicted
+on criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive and
+pitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as a
+representation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes.
+Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and
+acts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished the
+types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the
+hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged,
+put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls
+those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the
+flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an
+imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend
+him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned and
+tormented forever.
+
+This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is,
+is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all
+mythological construction in contrast both with inspired
+perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truth
+in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action
+of our faculties in correspondence with some relation in the
+reality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this,
+employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present
+experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant
+fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge.
+This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine of
+an eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural and
+punitive horrors of the present state have been collected,
+intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world of
+unmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of the
+vengeance of God on his insurgent subjects.
+
+Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason can
+rest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: that
+what is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions;
+that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoretic
+approaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedly
+recognized as such. This regulative principle of thought is
+grossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in a
+material hell.
+
+Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell among
+different peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we see
+them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the
+leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic,
+judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the
+frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the
+torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and
+its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a
+vast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whose
+heads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lake
+of venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers and
+murderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, or
+is it mythology?
+
+The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have
+implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells
+awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously
+observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass
+words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of
+the post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of the
+terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in
+the extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort of
+penalty and pang known in Egypt. The same thing may be affirmed
+with quadruple emphasis of the Hindu doctrine of future
+punishment. In the Hindu hells, truly, the possibilities of horror
+are exhausted. To enumerate their sufferings in anything like
+their own detail would require a large volume. The Vishnu Parana
+names twenty eight distinct hells, assigning each one to a
+particular class of sinners; and it adds that there are hundreds
+of others, in which the various classes of offenders undergo the
+penalties of their misdeeds. There are separate hells for thieves,
+for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, for
+those who insult a priest, and so on. Some of the victims are
+chained to posts of red hot steel and lashed with flexible flames:
+others are forced to devour the most horrible filth. Some are
+mangled and eaten by ravenous birds, others are squeezed into
+chests of fire and locked up for millions of years. These examples
+may serve as a small specimen of the infernal ingenuity displayed
+in the descriptions of the Hindu hells, which are all of one
+substantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery.
+
+The Parsees hold that when a bad man dies his soul remains by the
+body three days and nights, seeing all the sins it has ever
+committed, and anxiously crying, "Whither shall I go? Who will
+save me?" On the fourth day devils come and thrust the bad soul
+into fetters and lead it to the bridge that reaches from earth to
+heaven. The warder of the bridge weighs the deeds of the wicked
+soul in his balance, and condemns it. The devils then fling the
+soul down and beat it cruelly. It shrieks and groans, struggles,
+and calls for help; but all in vain. It is forced on toward hell,
+when it is suddenly met by a hideous and hateful maiden. It
+demands, "Who art thou, O, maiden, uglier and more detestable than
+I ever saw in the world?" She replies, "I am no maiden; I am thine
+own wicked deeds, O, thou hateful unbeliever furnished with bad
+thoughts and words." After further disagreeable adventures, the
+soul is plunged into the abode of the devil, where the darkness
+and foul odor are so thick that they can be grasped. Fed with
+horrid viands, such as snakes, scorpions, poison, there the wicked
+soul must remain until the day of resurrection.
+
+Now, no enlightened Christian scholar or thinker will hesitate
+with one stroke to brush away all the details of these pagan
+descriptions of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leaving
+nothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution for
+the guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in the
+ecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we see
+the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitions
+incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hells
+of the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither is
+that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all
+illustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association of
+things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not
+a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local
+hell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or the
+Persian, would not urge in behalf of his.
+
+We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodox
+belief in a material hell from its simple beginning to its
+subsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol or
+underworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the Old
+Testament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm,
+gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. The
+dead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of the
+survivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there.
+The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presence
+existing and moving wherever their conscious thought located him.
+The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into another
+adjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous space
+thus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in the
+burial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in the
+recollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was an
+imaginative dilatation of the grave.
+
+But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest and
+peace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, and
+kindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say in
+general that these ideas were joined with the supposed world of
+the dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar result
+has been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is,
+by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrors
+experienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in this
+world is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men,
+in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in the
+next world by one who has at his command all possible modes of
+pain, should think of the application of fire there. But happily,
+we are not left to this possible conjecture.
+
+Few influences sank more deeply into the Hebrew mind then the
+legend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol,
+Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority of
+Moses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumed
+two hundred and fifty of their confederates. In this story,
+rebellion against a prophet of God, fire and submersion in Sheol,
+are fused into one thought as a type of the future punishment of
+the wicked.
+
+But another narrative has been of far greater importance in this
+direction, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The
+Cities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted and
+volcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandoned
+to vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When a
+terrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with all
+their people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminous
+flame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in after
+time should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone from
+heaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take form
+in their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doom
+of the wicked. So it did.
+
+At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valley
+of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendency
+and completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested vale
+the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children
+alive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fierce
+fire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten and
+hymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all the
+refuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in a
+conflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst an
+uncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was cast
+over into the future state as a representation of the fate
+awaiting the wicked.
+
+Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to have
+criminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects of
+their own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, and
+there burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example of
+this given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had the
+furnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and ordered
+Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cast into it, furnished both the
+Jews and the Christians with another type of the punishment of
+hell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, and
+to be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament.
+The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to be
+chained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of the
+Church fathers, and in the visions of the monks of the Middle Age,
+this image constantly occupies a conspicuous place. And thus,
+finally, the common notion of hell became an underground world of
+burning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full of
+fiends and shrieking souls.
+
+Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devil
+in the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hot
+chains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands he
+seizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, and
+with his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat.
+Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by their
+tongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldrons
+of fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten on
+an anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strained
+through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hell
+will admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but they
+will say it is the product of a benighted age, and long since
+outgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations in
+the Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudes
+of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract
+from a little book called "The Sight of Hell," recently published
+with high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among the
+children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J.
+Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passage
+which we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series of
+tracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having a
+large sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeon
+there is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two
+long flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazing
+fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle
+boiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy.
+The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is
+boiling in his bones. There is a little child in a red hot oven.
+Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists
+itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of
+the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. Very likely God
+saw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent,
+and thus would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in
+his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood." Of
+these diabolical horrors, drawn out through hundreds of pages, the
+orthodox Protestant may say, "Oh, this is only a piece of Popish
+superstition. We all repudiate it as a most repulsive and absurd
+fancy."
+
+Well, what then will he say if representations, though perhaps not
+quite so grossly graphic in circumstance, yet absolutely identical
+in principle, are set before him from the fresh utterances of
+hundreds of the most distinguished Baptist, Methodist,
+Presbyterian, Episcopalian preachers and theologians? It would be
+easy to present whole volumes of apposite citations. But two or
+three will be enough. John Henry Newman in that one of his
+parochial sermons, entitled, "On the Individuality of the Soul,"
+gives us accounts of hell which for unshrinking detail of
+materiality will compare with the most frightful passages of
+Oriental mythology. George Bull, Lord Bishop of Saint Davids, in
+his volume of sermons declares that all who die with any sin
+unrepented of, "are immediately consigned to a place and state of
+irreversible misery a place of horrid darkness where there shines
+not the least glimmering of light or comfort." Mr. Spurgeon
+asserts, "There is a real fire in hell a fire exactly like that
+which we have on earth, except that it will torture without
+consuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone in
+hell: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and
+then thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, each
+brimfull of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops of
+blood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; not
+only conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy head
+tormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from their
+sockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented with
+horrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulse
+rattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in the
+fire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil,
+pained, yet undestroyed. Ah! fine lady, who takest care of thy
+goodly fashioned face, that fair face shall be scarred with the
+claws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodly
+apparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It ill
+becomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you are
+only feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, and
+the Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you will
+find it one day to be so." Is not this paragraph a disgusting
+combination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept aside
+and forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash,
+loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with which
+Christendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceived
+and surfeited.
+
+Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell all
+the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure
+truth remains that God will forever see that justice is done,
+virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In what
+way is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell.
+For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a natural
+product of the mythological action of the human mind in its
+development through the circumstances of history, but when
+regarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It is
+a figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free
+
+mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retains
+by force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority.
+In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a fac
+simile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable of
+becoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of uttering
+faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and
+pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of
+material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common
+belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The
+doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and
+unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has
+been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that
+the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on
+certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identical
+with them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, these
+are spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut up
+in a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with a
+whip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You may
+crush or blast the visible organism in connection with which the
+soul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch a
+sentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists,
+what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It is
+idle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know.
+Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement and
+penalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prison
+house of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority of
+mankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before the
+truth of the absolute spirituality of mind.
+
+In those early times, when military, political, judicial and
+convivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructive
+phenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had given
+us their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidable
+that men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs,
+each having his own empire and striving to secure his own
+subjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes to
+be thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thought
+evil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbal
+phantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out and
+blent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards none
+as enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures,
+everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but to
+harmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better out
+of good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that God
+is the pervading Creator who governs all from within by the
+continuous action and reaction between every life and its
+environing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this the
+incompetent conception of God as a political king, governing by
+external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This
+deludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, which
+has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open
+turnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The great
+king's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universe
+is the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of this
+broad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, empty
+into hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedial
+return of resisted law on a being out of tune with some just
+condition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty and
+tyranny of the mythological hell, supported by the constant
+drilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vested
+interests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have held
+the human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. In
+a Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersed
+in the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth,
+boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once in
+sixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top.
+As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, and
+sink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their life
+on earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and the
+Priesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrine
+resting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power and
+sensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When at
+last in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away what
+a long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw!
+
+If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which is
+a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space,
+it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment some
+more just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played such
+a tremendous part in the religious history of the world must be
+based on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth may
+be. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot be
+without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from
+the monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth
+carried in the awful word, hell?
+
+Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in time
+and space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever the
+spiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are not
+to exclude it from the present state and confine it to the future,
+as those seem to do who say that men go to hell after death. Being
+a personal experience and not a material place, many are in it now
+and here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we to
+exclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, as
+those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the
+emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins
+discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not.
+A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical
+one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time,
+accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions.
+We are not to say of the sinner that he goes to hell when he dies,
+but that hell comes to him when he feels the returns of his evil
+deeds. It is a state within rather than a place without.
+
+The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to the
+will of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universal
+order or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as the
+vulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying sameness
+into which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is a
+thing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with the
+individual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the
+will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain
+aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the
+imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell
+of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays.
+There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the
+melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless
+nevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncratic
+as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil
+experience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be one
+monotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering with
+the different elements and degrees afforded, and softening or
+ending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements and
+degrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty,
+faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell being
+the consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonistic
+to some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, in
+every instance, must be measured by the variations of this
+antagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are the
+results or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount of
+reflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of all
+the mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannot
+tell why the principles of our destiny should be as we find them,
+we can see what the facts of the case actually are as revealed in
+the history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concerns
+us. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly into
+the nature of hell.
+
+The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any special
+place or time, is respectively the experience of good, and the
+experience of evil. But what are good and evil? Good is the
+conscious realization of universal order, the absolute fruition of
+being, the fulfillment of individual function, in accordance with
+the conditions for the most perfect and prolonged fulfillment of
+the universal totality of functions. Supposing that there were
+only one instance and form of conscious life, with no possibility
+of conflicting claims within or without, then good would be to
+that life simply the fulfillment of the functions of its nature.
+But the moment a being is set in relation with other beings like
+itself, and also made aware of various gradations of importance
+among its own interior faculties, then the definition of good is
+no longer the simple fulfillment of function, or the mere
+gratification of desire; but it becomes the fulfillment of
+function in such a manner as to secure the greatest total quality
+and quantity of fulfilled function. Now evil is the opposite or
+negation of this. It is whatever lessens the fruition of life,
+prevents the fulfillment of function, contracts or mars the
+realization of universal order in the consciousness of a living
+being. Thus evil is not merely the keeping of an individual desire
+from its own proper good. But every gratification of desire which
+involves the winning of a less important good at the expense of a
+more important one is evil; or, on the other hand, the evil of
+sacrificing or denying a gratification in itself legitimate,
+becomes good when it is the means for securing a more authoritative
+gratification. Let us try to make these abstract statements
+intelligible by illustration.
+
+The appropriation of nutriment is a good, the indispensable method
+for sustaining life. It is right that we should eat and drink; and
+the pleasure which accompanies the proper performance of the
+function is the reflex approval of the Creator. The refusal fitly
+to take and relish our food brings debility, disease, pain, and
+premature death. Whether this refusal results from absorption in
+other employment or from some superstitious belief, it is a
+violation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent suffering
+and dissolution are the retributive hell or reflex signals,
+painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if the
+pleasure of gratifying appetite becomes a motive for its own sake
+and leads to excessive indulgence, the superior good of permanent
+health and vigor is sacrificed to the far inferior transient good
+of a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomach
+is plunged into the horrid hell of nightmare: the gourmand,
+pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy,
+shrieks from the twinging hell of gout. There is no divine malice
+in this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distorted
+arrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in every
+respect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently and
+universally, will secure the greatest amount and the best quality
+of life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interferes
+with this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moral
+faculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for the
+sake of some passing gratification in the present. God commands
+man to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to
+exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning
+of a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do this
+measures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity of
+men. The failure to do this is the condition on which every
+infernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A man
+may feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royal
+powers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness set
+in, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. How
+much better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut off
+this single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast into
+hell.
+
+Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged order
+experienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of faculty
+and motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who gives
+himself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, is
+thereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consuming
+passion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoarding
+and gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. His
+time and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into an
+obscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges of
+the universe, nothing of the sweetest delights of humanity.
+Contracted, stooping, poorly clad, ill fed, self neglected,
+despised by everybody, dwelling alone in a bleak and squalid
+chamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is a
+conglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear of
+robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of God, fear of death,
+all fused together by a lust for money. Is he not in a competent
+hell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the
+elevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. His
+unclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns the
+spectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open his
+soul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank and
+bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and
+ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that
+he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over
+the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good
+of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by
+that respect for the right of property which is a condition
+essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he
+acts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. The
+evil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, is
+incomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means for
+the death of society. The resulting sense of hostility between
+himself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and from
+God, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience,
+and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt in
+proportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritual
+disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to
+readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the
+higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened
+ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has
+disbalanced and broken.
+
+These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of the
+true idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God is
+expressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks which
+indicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and the
+accordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit of
+them. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance and
+authority, every level of function beneath kept subservient to
+every one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaven
+through the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God,
+the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of public
+motives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher and
+greater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell through
+the universe.
+
+The lowest function of man is a simple momentary gratification of
+sense, as, for example, an act of nutrition. The highest function
+of which his nature is capable is the surrender of himself to the
+universal order, the sympathetic identification of himself with
+the eternal law and weal of the whole. Between those vast extremes
+there are hundreds of intermediate functions, rising in worth and
+authority from the direct gratifications of appetite to the ideal
+appropriations of transcendental good, from the titillation given
+by a pinch of snuff to the thrill imparted by an imaginative
+contemplation of the redeemed state of humanity a million years
+ahead. But, throughout the entire range, all the sin and guilt
+from which hell is produced consist in obeying a lower motive in
+preference to a higher one, making some narrow or selfish good
+paramount over a wider or disinterested one. A man, educated as a
+physician, practiced his profession on scientific principles, and
+nearly starved on an income of seven hundred dollars a year. He
+then set up as a quack, compounded a worthless nostrum, and, by
+dint of impudence, advertising, and other charlatanry, made
+eighteen thousand dollars a year, and justified his conduct on the
+ground of his success. By falsehood and cheating he preyed on the
+credulity of the public. If all men were like him, society could
+not exist. The meanness of his soul, shutting him out from the
+most exquisite and exalted prerogatives of human nature, is the
+revenge which the universe takes on such a man the hell in which
+God envelops him. A manufacturer turns out certain products by
+means of a chemical process which adds seven per cent. to his
+profit, but shortens the average life of his workmen five years.
+All mankind would indignantly denounce him with an instinctive
+recognition of his wickedness in thus erecting the profane
+standard of pecuniary gain above the sacredness of the lives of
+his brothers. But when of two men in deadly peril from an
+approaching explosion only one can escape, and the stronger,
+instead of monopolizing the chance, as he might, stands back and
+lays down his life in saving the weaker, it is a deed of heroic
+virtue, applauded by all men, supported by the whole moral
+creation which derives new beauty and sweetness from it. It
+radiates a peaceful bliss of self approval through the breast
+before it is mangled and cold, and fills the soul with a serene
+joy as it flies to God. The essential merit of such an action is
+the subjection of that selfishness which is the principle of all
+sin, and whose recoil is the spring trap of hell, to that
+disinterestedness which is the germ of redemption and the perfume
+of heaven.
+
+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.
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS.
+
+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.
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+RESUME HOW THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY NOW STANDS.
+
+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.
+
+Suppose that in turn every child born begets or bears two
+children. Then in the thirtieth generation the transmitted
+qualities of spirit, nerve and blood, of the single original pair
+of parents will be represented in upwards of one thousand millions
+of descendants. It is clear from this law, allowing for all
+deviations from its numerical progression on account of inter
+marriages and of failures of offspring, how powerfully and swiftly
+the ever multiplying streams of consanguinity are spreading in
+every direction, affiliating and fraternizing the whole human race
+literally into one family, the innumerable rills of separate
+descent intermingling as they flow on, and finally diffusing over
+the earth in that oceanic unity of humanity, which, when full,
+will beat with the tidal pulse of a single sympathy. It is
+believed by many that no experience of any living creature is ever
+lost, but is by its own spontaneous and exact reflex vibrations
+either registered in the conscious memory or deposited in the
+unconscious organism in latent perfection of vestige and tendency.
+Memory is a faithful treasurer of all the stores of events.
+Suppose now that each parent bequeaths in the dynamic germ of his
+progeny the possibility of reviving into consciousness, when the
+proper conditions shall be furnished, the accumulated sum of all
+that has happened throughout the entire line of his ancestry. And
+again, imagine that all the souls composing the human race each of
+which is a substantial and indestructible entity, living
+incarnated over and over, and not a mere phenomenal process that
+vanishes into nothing with the dissolution of the body are so
+limited in number that they may be embodied on the earth in one
+generation, whose members shall be so conjoined in knowledge and
+fellowship that the life of the whole is concentrated in every
+one, and the life of every one mirrored in the whole. Now,
+finally, let it be conceived that this latest generation,
+including all who have ever inhabited the world, at last attain a
+development which enables them to grasp in distinct consciousness
+the collective sum of the organic heritage of the race, each one
+reading with perfect clearness in every particular the complete
+history of humanity from the beginning to the end, understanding
+all its causes, courses and consequences, and beholding with
+unspeakable delight the justification of the ways of God, the
+whole universe opening into free intercommunication, as if time
+and space were either no more or else their measures were of
+boundless subjective elasticity, every creature found in peace and
+rapture at the goal of his destiny. That, indeed, would be a
+realization of the day of judgment and the resurrection of the
+dead, but without a shock or a jar in the course of things which
+science reveals. The process of development now going on, if
+carried far enough, will naturally result in this or in something
+equivalent to it; while the notion of the vomiting forth of the
+accumulated dead from land and sea, at the blast of a trumpet, is
+a wild piece of imagery, borrowed from startling political
+phenomena, and applied with absurd incongruity to the chronic
+providence of God. The former view contains all the moral
+significance of the latter, but without its violation of
+probability. Nor is it all necessary that the climax shall be
+brought about of a simultaneous universal judgment, or of the
+appearance of our whole race on the earth at one time. The giving
+of the vision to souls subjectively, one after another, in the
+order of their attainment of the conditions, would meet every
+requirement of the case. To each one in turn, wherever he was, as
+the result broke on him in the ecstatic glory of all it means, the
+essence of the so long cherished faith of Christendom would be
+justified, and the providential theater and scenery of human
+experience would appear under its illumination as a dazzling
+vision of poetic justice perfect at every point.
+
+Marvelous and almost incredible as this scheme of thought may
+seem, it is not more mysterious in itself, or more staggering in
+its demand on our faith, than many things successively were which
+are now established beyond a doubt such as the telegraphic
+conversation of men through the ocean and around the globe; the
+seven hundred and thirty three thousand millions of ethereal
+vibrations in a second, which cause the report of the violet ray
+in consciousness; the transcendent disclosures of the spectrum
+analysis; the conception of gravitation as a force which holds all
+matter in unbroken union, and acts throughout the stellar universe
+with timeless simultaneity. It is in entire keeping with
+everything else in the workings of God, as demonstrated by
+science, on every hand, both in nature and history. The atomic
+theory and the nebular hypothesis, the chemical crucible and the
+mathematical calculus, the microscope and the telescope discover
+to our senses and our reason, wherever we look, facts as
+mysterious to the understanding, and as baffling to the
+imagination as any of the foregoing implications; showing us, in
+every department of nature and experience, the bewildering
+miracles of the infinitely little and the infinitely great exactly
+balanced and perpetually passing into one another.
+
+There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of the
+primitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of the
+Christian and Parsee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which the
+imagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, has
+concreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine of
+transmigration. A striking feature and no slight recommendation of
+the foregoing view of the true meaning of the dogma of the
+resurrection is that it reconciles these two chief forms of the
+belief in immortal life. For resurrection and transmigration agree
+in the central point of a restoration of the disembodied soul to a
+new bodily existence, only the former represents this as a single
+collective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of God at the
+close of the earthly drama, the latter depicts it as constantly
+taking place in the regular fulfillment of the divine plan in the
+creation. This difference is certainly, to a scientific and
+philosophical thinker, who reasons on the data of nature and
+experience and not on the dicta of theologians, strongly in favor
+of the Oriental theory. We have no experience whatever of any
+general resurrection, but all experience is full of the constant
+appearances of souls in freshly created bodies throughout the
+scale of sentient being. If our final future life is to be a
+bodily one there surely is a world of presumptive evidence,
+therefore, in behalf of transmigration as opposed to resurrection.
+Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason
+for the resurrection holds with at least equal force for
+transmigration. The argument from analogy is especially strong. It
+is natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated
+life that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety of
+souls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting series of
+adventures, in appropriate organisms; there being, as Paul said,
+one kind of flesh of birds, another kind of flesh of beasts,
+another of men, another of angels, and so on. Our present lack of
+recollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality.
+Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day we
+reawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So in
+one life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the whole
+thread of experience from the beginning.
+
+In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtful
+and refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had so
+extensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote of
+the majority, having for ages on ages been held by half of the
+human race with an intensity of conviction almost without a
+parallel. Indeed the most striking fact, at first sight, about the
+doctrine of the repeated existences of the soul incarnated in
+different organisms, its form and experience in each successive
+embodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in the
+preceding ones, is the constant reappearance of the faith in it in
+all parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain great
+nations. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose contrasted
+splendors and horrors awaken astonishment more and more with each
+step in the progressive decipherment of its mysterious record,
+seems largely to have grown out of this faith. The swarming
+millions of India also, through the chief periods of their
+history, have lain under its spell, suffered their lives, wrought
+their great works of government, architecture, philosophy, and
+poetry, and in its belief meditated, aspired, and exhaled their
+souls. Ruder forms of it are reported among innumerable barbaric
+tribes. It played an important part in the speculations of the
+early Fathers of the Christian Church, and has often cropped out
+in the works of later theologians. Men of the profoundest
+metaphysical genius, like Scotus Erigena and Leibnitz, have
+affirmed it, and sought to give it a logical or scientific basis.
+And even amidst the predominance of skeptical and materialistic
+influences in Europe and America, at the present time, we
+constantly meet individuals with independent minds who earnestly
+believe the alluring dogma. For, to a large and varied class of
+minds, the doctrine holds a transcendent attraction as well as a
+manifold plausibility.
+
+Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that it
+seems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the Oriental
+world; but appears in the Western world only in scattered
+instances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growing
+freedom and liberality of thought, which no less than its doubt
+and denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the full
+time had come for a greater mental and asthetic hospitality on the
+part of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of the
+resurrection should not confine their attention to the repellent
+or the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to its
+claim and its charm. The Pantheistic tendency which possessed and
+overwhelmed the Brahminic mind, shaping and tinging its views
+opened the whole range of sentient existences to an indiscriminate
+sympathy, and made the idea of transmigration natural, and more
+pleasing than repugnant. Furthermore, the Brahminic thinkers and
+sages were a distinct class of men whose whole lives were absorbed
+in introspective reveries and metaphysical broodings calculated to
+stimulate the imagination and arouse to the keenest consciousness
+all the latent marvels and possibilities of human experience, thus
+furnishing the most favorable conditions for exactly such a belief
+as that of transmigration, an endless series of ever varying
+adventures for the imperishable soul. And the vast swarms of the
+common people in the East are the passive followers of this high
+caste of thinkers, abjectly accepting what they teach.
+Accordingly, the mysterious doctrine of the metempsychosis has
+held the entire mind, sentiment and civilization of the East,
+through every period of its history, as with an irreversible
+spell.
+
+The persistent practice of various modes of profound and
+rhythmical breathing by which the Brahmins perfect their
+respiration, and the keen and sustained concentration of their
+attention on their inner states, tend at the same time to heighten
+the richness and intensity of the cerebral nerves, to unify the
+connections of the lower nerve centres with them, and to fuse the
+unconscious physiological processes with the conscious
+psychological processes. Then the persevering disuse and
+suppression of the action of their outer senses cause the objects
+of the material world around them to seem more vague and dreamy
+than the impressions of the ideal world within. And so the earth
+with all its affairs seems an illusion, while their own unsought
+trains of thought, feeling and imagery the rich mental panorama of
+pictures and events, are taken for a series of substantial
+revelations of the universe of being. An irresistible belief in
+preexistence, immortality and transmigration, results.
+
+On the contrary, in the Western world, the characteristic
+tendencies are all different. Pantheistic theories are rarely
+held, and the dreams and emotions which those theories are fitted
+to feed are foreign and repulsive. An impassible barrier is
+imagined separating humanity from every other form of being.
+Speculative reason, imagination and affection, are chiefly
+employed in scientific studies and social pursuits, or personal
+schemes, external rather than internal. This absorption in
+material things and evanescent affairs engenders in the spirit an
+arid atmosphere of doubt and denial, in which no efflorescence of
+poetic and mystic faiths can flourish. Thus, while the outward
+utilities abound, hard negations spread abroad; and living,
+personal apprehension of God, of an all pervasive Providence, and
+of the immortality of the soul in any form, dies out either in
+open infidelity or in a mere verbal acceptance of the established
+creed of society. Consequently, to the average mind of the modern
+Western world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a mere
+fancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strange
+poetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical and
+religious quality.
+
+The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strong
+resemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beings
+with the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the senses
+in common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence and
+will. They all seem created after one plan, as if their varieties
+were the gradulations of a single original type. We recognize
+kindred forms of experience and modes of expression in ourselves
+and in them. Now the man seems a travesty of the hog, the parrot,
+the ape, the hawk, or the shark; now they seem travesties of him.
+As we gaze at the ruminating ox, couched on the summer grass,
+notice the slow rhythm of his jaw, and the wondering dreaminess of
+his eyes, it is not difficult to fancy him some ancient Brahmin
+transmigrated to this, and patiently awaiting his release. Nor is
+it incongruous with our reason or moral feeling to suppose that
+the cruel monsters of humanity may in a succeeding birth find the
+fit penalty for their degradation and crime, in the horrid life of
+a crocodile or a boa constrictor.
+
+The conception of a series of connected lives also furnishes a
+plausible explanation for many mysteries in our present
+experience. Reference is made to all that class of phenomena
+covered by the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. Faces previously
+unseen, and localities unvisited, awaken in us a vivid feeling of
+a long familiarity with them. Thoughts and emotions, not hitherto
+entertained, come to us as if we had welcomed and dismissed them a
+thousand times in periods long gone by. Many an experience,
+apparently novel and untried, makes us start as at the shadowy
+reminder of something often known before. The supposition of
+forgotten lives preceding the present, portions of whose
+consciousness reverberate and gleam through the veils of thought
+and sense, seems to throw satisfactory light on this strange
+department of experience.
+
+Much more weighty and penetrative, however, than the foregoing
+considerations is the philosophical argument in behalf of
+transmigration, drawn from the nature of the soul. Consciousness
+being in its very essence the feeling of itself, the conscious
+soul can never feel itself annihilated, even in thought it only
+loses the knowledge of its being when it lapses into unconsciousness,
+as in sleep or trance. The soul may indeed think of its own
+annihilation but cannot realize the thought in feeling,
+since the fainter emotional reflex upon the idea of its
+destruction is instantly contradicted and over borne by the more
+massive and vivid sense of its persistent being in immediate
+consciousness. This incessant self assertion of consciousness at
+once suggests the idea of its being independent of the changing
+and vanishing body in which it is temporarily shrined. Then the
+conception naturally follows that the soul, as it has once
+appeared in human form, so it may reappear indefinitely in any of
+the higher or lower forms of being which compose the hierarchy of
+the universe. The eternity of the soul, past and future, once
+accepted by the mind, leads directly to the construction of the
+whole scheme of metempsychosis an everlasting succession of births
+and deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments, with their laws of
+personality and fortunes of time and space weaving the boundless
+web of destiny and playing the endless drama of providence.
+
+But the strongest support of the theory of transmigration is the
+happy moral solution it seems to give to the problem of the dark
+and distressing inequality and injustice which otherwise appear so
+predominant in the experience of the world. To the superficial
+observer of human life the whole scene of struggle, sin and
+sorrow, nobleness and joy, triumph and defeat, is a tangled maze
+of inconsistencies, a painful combination of violent discords. But
+if we believe that every soul, from that of the lowest insect to
+that of the greatest archangel, forms an affiliated member of the
+infinite family of God, and is eternal in its conscious essence,
+perishable only as to its evanescent disguises of unconscious
+incarnation; that every act of every creature is followed by its
+legitimate reactions; that these actions and reactions constitute
+a law of retribution absolutely perfect; that these souls, with
+all their doings and sufferings are interconnected with one
+another, and with the whole, all whose relationships copenetrate
+and cooperate with mutual influences whose reports are infallible
+and with lines of sequence that never break, then the bewildering
+maze becomes a vindicated plan, the horrible discord a divine
+harmony. What an explication it gives of those mysteries of evil,
+pain, sorrow and retribution, which often wrap the innocent and
+the wicked in one sad fate, if we but see that no individual
+stands alone, but trails along with him the unfinished sequels of
+all ancestral experience, and, furthermore, is so bound up with
+his simultaneous race that each is responsible for all and all for
+each, and that no one can be wholly saved or safe until all are
+redeemed and perfected! Then every suffering we endure for faults
+not our own, the consequence of the deeds of others, assumes a
+holy light and a sublime dignity, associating us with that great
+sacrament of atoning pain whereof the crucified Christ is not the
+exclusive instance but the representative head.
+
+The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the
+resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciled
+with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some a
+very fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it is
+so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is
+advanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true,
+as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history
+and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so
+wonderful, the method of it is so rational, the region of
+contemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the
+prospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, that
+the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime
+scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication
+of providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the
+littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it
+easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever
+known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny
+to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of
+the powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After
+traversing the grounds here set forth we feel that if the view
+based on them be not the truth, it must be because God has in
+reserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner than our
+brightest dream hitherto. The worthiest theory of the fate of man
+which the spirit of man can construct must either be a revelatory
+divination of the truth, or an inadequate attempt to grasp the
+design of the Creator in its true glory. It is impious and absurd
+to hold that man can think out a scheme superior to the one God
+has decreed. And it seems equally unreasonable to suppose that the
+scheme of God for the future stages of our career is one which has
+no hints in our present experience. Certainly it appears more
+likely that the sequel will be discovered by the logical
+completion of the inwrought order which has been slowly unfolding
+from the first. And what do history and prophecy show more plainly
+than the tendency to a convergence of all humanity in every man?
+Spreading consanguinity in descent and growth of sympathetic
+knowledge both point to this. Perfect this in each man, and
+illuminate his whole organism and its relations with adequate
+intelligence, and we have a true resurrection, not indeed of
+decayed bodies from the grave, but of historic states of
+consciousness from their latent embedment in the nervous system,
+and their undulatory record in the dynamic medium of the creation.
+Our senses now convert certain sets of undulations of the ethereal
+medium into perceptions of light, heat, sound, and so interpret
+their contents and extract their tidings. It is not impossible
+that in a coming stage of development we may obtain additional
+senses; our spirits may command the means of translating into
+correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of
+vibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited
+knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole
+universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all
+deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to
+recover and read its own.
+
+As each generation is the inheritor of the preceding ones, all of
+which from the first prolong their existence into the last in
+unbroken continuity of historic conduct and responsibility,
+justice may at the ripened period be naturally summed up without
+any miracle. We all are projections of our ancestors. They
+properly in us suffer and enjoy in accordance with what has flowed
+from their lives. The whole of this, lighted up with consciousness
+at last, may be the real meaning of the burden of the spirit given
+to the apostle Paul, but misinterpreted by him into the mechanico
+scenic scheme of the Judaized Christian Church. For when the
+mighty influx struck the brain of the persecuting zealot,
+revolutionizing his life, it came into connection with all the
+inflamed theories and convictions so deeply drilled therein by his
+Pharisaic education. These convictions, partly of a mere local and
+transient character, associated with legends of Adam and Abraham
+and the under world and Christ and the sky, mixed with the true
+and universal import of the higher inspiration now given him,
+caused his misconstrual of its message, and stamped the purely
+human and providential meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection
+with the rabbinical die of a politico mythological dogma. If this
+were so, it is not the only instance in which the preexistent
+discolorations in the mind of an inspired prophet have refracted
+the truth of his burden into distorted error and bequeathed the
+task of a future rectification when more light shall have come.
+
+In the next place, we come to the fourth reason for the growing
+doubts and disbelief of our day in immortality. It is the
+remarkable diffusion of the habits of thought engendered by the
+study of materialistic science. The authority of physical science
+has been rapidly encroaching on and displacing the authority of
+the church theology and sectarian creeds. Belief in invariable
+laws has undermined belief in miracle and supernatural revelation.
+Those who had been taught that the resurrection of Christ was the
+only adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, learning to
+deny the former, have naturally proceeded to question the latter.
+For in such matters the real implications of logic are little
+noticed. The religious skepticism nourished by physical science is
+in all respects really as irrational and baseless as it is actual.
+For example, the resurrection of Christ, admitting it to be a
+fact, did not create the immortality it was considered to
+illustrate. If he rose, it was because men are immortal, and men
+are not immortal because he rose. If he did not rise, men are
+immortal all the same, provided human immortality be a truth; if
+it be not a truth, the resurrection of Christ would be an isolated
+abnormal event without any logical validity on the question. The
+truth or falsity of human immortality, therefore, is a question of
+the creative plan of God and the essential nature of man, to be
+decided on the intrinsic evidences, and cannot logically be
+affected one way or the other by any individual historic
+occurrence limited to a certain time and place. Yet it is a
+practical necessity that any great popular faith, if it rests on
+authority, will be shocked and weakened by everything which shocks
+and weakens that authority, no matter how adventitious it is. If
+one cannot believe in the preternatural resurrection of Christ,
+that surely is no valid reason for denying the natural immortality
+of the soul, but only a good reason for seeking to learn if there
+be not adequate grounds for this faith quite independent of
+scripture text and priestly assertion.
+
+Precisely the same reasoning holds in relation to the doubts about
+spiritual realities bred in the minds of those whose studies are
+conversant exclusively with material realities. The professors of
+physical science, thoroughly familiarized with things which
+combine and dissolve, often come to fancy that everything is
+phenomenal and evanescent, that there is no immaterial substance,
+that spirit is not entity but process, that thought and feeling
+and will are mere transient functions of transient matter. Thus
+all faith in the individuality of mind is pulverized at the
+fountain head. There can be no question but that such is the
+common influence of a constant contemplation of the physical
+aspects alone of physical things. Mentality, consciousness, is
+regarded as the prismatic bow in the cloud, a spectral show that
+appears and vanishes, with no permanent substance. At the present
+time, in Christendom, the one conquering power in literature, the
+one fascinating absorption of thought in society, is that
+connected with the cultivation of physical science. Its prestige
+is overwhelming. Its prevalent methods and results give a
+materialistic turn of interpretation to the popular mind upon all
+subjects. The direct consequence, among that class of minds who
+put physical science above theology, is the spreading disavowal of
+all belief in the immortality of the soul. The fallacy is obvious,
+and the remedy is simple, if there be at hand but enough of modest
+candor and patience fairly to weigh the facts of the case in the
+scales of a sound logic.
+
+In the first place, by the very structure of our being, by the
+very necessity of our experience, the universe is divided into two
+irreconcilable classes of realities, namely, spiritual subjects
+and material objects. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts,
+volitions, all qualities of mind, all states of consciousness, are
+absolutely immaterial. They are more real to us, that is to say,
+they more inexpugnably assert and maintain themselves, than
+material things do: and it is only hopeless vulgarity and
+incompetence of thinking which can ever confuse or merge them with
+material things. Matter is that which proves itself to spirit by
+the effects it produces on spirit. Spirit is that which is its own
+evidence. The center of consciousness in us is its own proof of
+its own being, and all that occurs within it is its own proof, and
+is unsusceptible of any other or foreign demonstration. Hope,
+fear, love, imagination, reason, are absolutely unthinkable as
+forms of material substance, however exquisitely refined and
+exalted. There is no conceivable community of being between a
+sentiment and an atom, a gas and an aspiration, an idea of truth
+in the soul and any mass of matter in space. Each of these facts,
+conscious thought and material extension, has its own incommunicable
+and incomparable sphere of being and laws of action, which can be
+confused only by ignorance and sophistry.
+
+So clear has this become to all profound reflection, that the ablest
+supporters of the theory of evolution, with all their preponderant
+bias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words of
+Herbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking of
+spirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the terms
+of spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give an
+idealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialistic
+interpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despite
+the fallacious influences of habit to the contrary, that no
+progress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount of
+induction and generalization as to the composition or decomposition
+of material bodies, can throw any new light or darkness on the
+nature and destiny of the immaterial soul.
+
+The incessant flux of phenomena constructing and destroying apparent
+things, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing but
+mirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence of
+spiritual identity. To force it to discredit our claim to a divine
+descent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. The
+question must be snatched back from the assumption of the retort
+and crucible, the observational and numerical methods of the
+physical realm, and relegated to the legitimate tests of the moral
+and metaphysical realm.
+
+Again, there is furnished in the results of the study of physical
+science itself, as pursued by its most gifted masters, a glorious
+overthrow and neutralization of the moral and religious doubts
+called out in its shallower votaries by their absorption in its
+more superficial phases. The scientific men of the most profound
+intellectual power and the most brilliant original genius, the
+supreme heads of chemistry, dynamics and mathematics, have applied
+to the phenomena of the material creation modes of observation and
+instruments of reasoning before whose compelling efficacy the
+whole frowning vastitude of the outer universe melts into ideal
+points of force and forms of law. Everything in time and space is
+reduced to molecular vibrations, regulated by the mental
+conceptions of number, weight and measure. The reasonings of such
+men as Oersted and Faraday on electricity and magnetism; of Sir
+William Thomson and Clerk Maxwell on thermodynamics; the theories
+of the greatest mathematicians, grasping all things in heaven and
+earth with their irresistible calculus, literally using infinites
+as toys, creating imaginary quantities, and, going through certain
+operations with them, actually discovering new truths in the solid
+domain of reality yield conceptions of order, beauty and
+sublimity, and emotions of wonder, awe and delight, nowhere else
+surpassed. They exalt the spectacle of nature into a vision of
+poetic intelligence, and show the theorizing mind of man to be
+akin to the creating mind of God. Thus, if skepticism as to the
+deathless royalty of soul is bred in the physicist who constantly
+stoops with the scalpel and the microscope, it is offset in him
+who, with as steady a judgment, soars to the contemplation of the
+ethereal medium with its lines of force traversing immensity and
+vibrating timelessly along their whole length, loaded, for those
+who can interpret them, with tidings of all that happens. Instead
+of spirit being materialized, matter is spiritualized and nature
+transfigured into the ideal home of ideal entities. Dumas, years
+ago, asserted that hydrogen gas is but an etherealized metal. Just
+now, it is said, Pictet has succeeded, under a pressure of six
+hundred and fifty atmospheres, in actually crystallizing oxygen
+and hydrogen. One has only to read such papers as those of Stallo
+on the fundamental concepts of science to learn that if matter or
+mind is ever to be lost, it will not be mind.
+
+But there remains a more direct and more important way of
+correcting the dismal or defiant doubts of immortality caused by
+the inferior phases of materialistic study; and that is, by
+bringing up to a correspondent fullness and intensity the counter
+activity of the ideal powers. Let justice be done to the subject
+as well as to the object. Over against the watching of clouds and
+waves, the sorting of herbs, the weighing of metals, the measuring
+of quantities, bring up the exercise of the mind on the treasures
+of qualitative substance in its own proper sphere of reason and
+love and faith. Admire the beautiful, love the good, obey the
+true, worship the right, aspire to the highest, subordinate or
+sacrifice everything base or wrong in a generous service of duty,
+and thus nourish a consciousness of those ontological relations by
+which the soul is rooted in the Godhead, and stimulate that
+intuitive efflorescence of faith which grows out of progressive
+fulfillment and which prophecies perpetuity of fulfillment. To say
+the least, the subject is as real as the object, the contemplating
+faculty as valid as the phenomenon it confronts. The teachings of
+the soul rightly construed are as authentic as the teachings of
+nature. And, some day in the future, a complete system of truth
+developed from the central principle of the one by the subjective
+method will be found to correspond perfectly with the complete
+system of truth developed by the objective method from the central
+principle of the other. As the objective scientific principle is
+the persistence of force, the subjective scientific principle is
+the potential infinity of individual spirit, each one the
+equivalent of the all. What else than this can be the ultimate
+meaning of the primal, universal, indestructible antithesis or
+dual classification of being, the ego and the non ego, self and
+not self, the former including each individual in his own
+apprehension, the latter including all besides?
+
+There is a philosophical authority which, for those incompetent to
+judge for themselves, should properly take the place vacated by
+the ecclesiastical authority, which, in our day, is plainly on the
+wane. Multitudes no longer believe in the immortality of their
+souls on the ground of the resurrection of Christ, or the
+assertion of Scripture or creed. Shall they, then, deny it
+altogether because the materialistic band clamor that it is a
+delusion, and they themselves see no sufficient evidence for it?
+There is a more appropriate alternative. Many theories in natural
+philosophy have been exploded by the proof of their absurdity, and
+the correct explanations are accepted on trust by the multitudes
+incompetent to master their logical and mathematical grounds. Very
+few understand the proofs of the chief laws of nature, but the
+vast majority of men implicitly trust the assertions of those who
+do know them. In like manner there is a legitimate sphere for
+authority in moral and religious beliefs; only it should be the
+authority of the competent and disinterested. Now, it is a fact
+that the very greatest philosophers who have ever lived, the
+preeminently imperial thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
+Anselm, Hegel, and the resplendent group of their peers, have
+asserted as a necessary principle the real being and eternal
+substantiality of the soul. Besides all the combinations of matter
+that dissolve, all the phenomena that pass, they affirm the
+existence of enduring entities, individual spirits, thinkers
+conscious of their thoughts. In central calm, far within the
+struggle and vex of the rolling elements, throned in its own
+serene realm of law, lives the free, conscious soul, and will live
+eternally, actualizing its potentialities. Nothing can
+disintegrate it, because it is not an aggregate but a unity, not a
+quantitative mass of matter, but a spaceless monad of power. It is
+a closed circuit of thinking activity, impenetrable to everything
+else. Spirits are the only solids, matter being endlessly
+penetrable and transmutable.
+
+We are all obliged to think of ourselves as entities, and not as
+mere phenomenal series of states. There must be a substratum for
+the affections of consciousness. All changes are changes of
+something. It is true there is a mystery involved here which no
+words can make clear; yet the more deeply one thinks and feels the
+more intense will be his assurance that there is something in him
+which thinks and feels, or rather that he himself is a something
+which thinks and feels. The best conception we can get of the soul
+is that it is a subject which is its own object and a mirror for
+the inner reflection of all other objects. God is not an object,
+because He is the actualized infinite Subject. His thoughts are
+concrete creations, the objective realities of the universe
+phenomenal and substantial. We are actually finite subjects, but
+with a potential infinity, patterned in free correspondence with
+Him. Our thoughts are subjective reflections of His, modified by
+the contents of our facultative constitution and the peculiarities
+of our historic experience. What constitutes my soul is the
+potentiality of all states of consciousness, actual and latent,
+past, present and future. It reveals itself to me, so to speak, in
+my actual thoughts and feelings. So far as these are true and
+good, they correspond with and represent the will of God, and must
+share the fortunes of the Divine Reality with which they are
+implicitly joined. Then my soul cannot be annihilated unless the
+will of God is so far annihilated. But God is infinite being, and
+there is nothing outside of or counter to infinite being to
+destroy it. All evil is but defect or negation. I am only in so
+far as I am positive reality. Nothing of me, therefore, can ever
+perish, except my imperfections; and the thought of the perishing
+of imperfections is a thought of joy. Welcome, then, be the
+approach of death which shall cleanse and dislimit me into
+unimprisonable divineness of being, the crystalline sphere of pure
+intelligence and immortality!
+
+The only real proof of immortality in the sight of the intellect,
+is the perception of the necessity of self determining entities as
+the causes and grounds of the facts of experience. A series of
+states implies something of which they are states. There seems to
+be no possible explanation or understanding of the phenomena which
+confront our experience without the conception of ultimate
+individualities, indestructible subject objects, centers of
+spiritual activity, monistic selfhoods, conscious egos, each of
+which distinguishes itself from every other, and contrasts itself
+with the All. Now it is claimed that every thinker who reaches the
+maturest stage of thought attains to this insight. It is the
+imperial mark of a certain stage of knowledge. Here the supreme
+thinkers, sceptered with final perception of the truth of their
+own eternity, sit at ease, enthroned in the serene and lucid realm
+of law, beyond the reach of the dark tempest of cavils and doubts.
+And there is a larger company who on easier terms have attained
+the same result. For, without this wearisome metaphysical hewing
+of conclusions from the quarries of ontology, the good and pure,
+who, in their loving obedience and aspiration, keep the harmonic
+quickness and innocence of their intuitions uninjured, also have
+an unshaken assurance that they live in God and shall share his
+life forevermore. The mystics of every period seem in feeling to
+have an immediate grasp of all that the greatest philosophers have
+painfully conquered by speculation. These two classes may claim to
+possess direct certitude of eternal life. All others must either
+attain to the stage of development and mount of vision of these,
+or receive the faith on their authority, or else be subject to
+doubt and unbelief.
+
+To accept the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on the
+authority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints, is a
+legitimate procedure perfectly in keeping with what the human race
+does in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable of
+proving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easily
+appreciate and make practical application of the truths they have
+affirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains are
+scientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules are
+implicitly followed by the common multitude. One form or
+receptacle of authority after another may be superseded; but
+authority itself always remains. And the true course for those to
+pursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, or
+church creed, or the resurrection of Christ, as a proof of the
+future life of man, is not at once to abandon all belief in a
+future state, but to accept the guidance of the most competent
+independent thinkers in place of that of the most arbitrary
+dogmatists. For unto all who do not arrogate to themselves a
+transcendent competency to judge, the general consensus of the
+thought and feeling of the world, clarified and interpreted by the
+fittest few, will always be a grateful ground of reliance and
+trust. And the verdict thus revealed is unequivocally in favor of
+the doctrine of immortality.
+
+There can be no changes independently of something which is
+changed. Amidst all the changeable in us which passes and is
+forgotten, there is something which stays and is inexpugnable. It
+is our identity. That which appears in consciousness first, which
+recurs oftenest, and which persists longest, is the most valid
+object of belief. And what is that but the very consciousness, or
+the subject as its own object? Surely, the one invariable
+accompaniment of all the shifting states of consciousness is the
+bare essential consciousness itself: this is, so to speak, the
+unitary vessel containing all their varieties. This unquestionably
+exists now. The burden of proof, then, as Bishop Butler long ago
+showed, is on those who affirm its destruction in the article of
+death. Consciousness is purely immaterial, as every one who has
+passed beyond the most ignorant and childish stages of thought
+must see. Merely because it is, in our present experience,
+associated in time and space with a material organism, therefore
+to declare that it is a dependent production of matter, or a
+transient concomitant of the transient body, is a gratuitous
+assertion with not one scintilla of evidence.
+
+Even, for the moment, admitting it to be true that no argument of
+irresistible cogency has yet been advanced to prove the
+immortality of the soul, it is certain that no proof has ever
+been given of its mortality. The very utmost that can be claimed
+by any skeptic who fairly understands the whole case, is that the
+different arguments, for and against, offset one another, and
+leave the question in a neutral balance of suspense, just where it
+was before the debate began. Many persons hold that the counter
+reasonings do thus balance and annul one another. For them the
+problem remains to be decided on other grounds than those of the
+logical disputation which has proved inadequate to its settlement.
+These other grounds are considerations of congruity, probability,
+the prophetic preparations and demands of present experience. What
+sort of a figure would the segments which we now see, compose, if
+they were completed? What in the hidden future portions of our
+destiny would be harmonic and complementary as related with the
+parts here experienced? When the other modes of inquiry are
+abandoned this mode remains. Its teachings are rich and impressive
+in proportion to the greatness of the faculties and the wealth of
+knowledge and love brought to its consideration. And thus we come
+face to face with the fifth and last cause of the failing faith in
+immortality confessed to characterize the present day.
+
+That cause is the common inability to realize in the thoughts of
+the mind, and to hold in the faith of the feelings, a conception
+so vast, so mysterious, so remote from the usual routine of the
+selfish trifles and petty notions which monopolize the powers and
+fritter down the faculties of the average people of the nineteenth
+century. The battle of sensualism, the scramble over material
+interests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescent
+struggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to the
+ever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizing
+discussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatal
+to that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of passion, that
+serene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, that
+docile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fit
+contemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that of
+immortality. The grade of thought and scale of emotion ordinarily
+characteristic of ordinary men are utterly out of keeping with the
+inexpressible grandeur of themes like that of the divine kinship
+and eternity of the soul. The reason and fancy, before they can be
+competent to appreciate such truths, must be trained in the study
+and worshipful meditation of subjects of commensurate mystery and
+sublimity. It is no wonder that when minds and hearts familiar
+only with houses and clothes and food, the trivial gossip and
+vanity of the hour, are summoned to grasp the idea of spiritual
+survival and an everlasting destiny of conscious adventures, they
+are overwhelmed and helplessly fail to represent to themselves the
+possibility of any such truth. This cause of doubt is very
+prevalent and effective; for ever more and more in our age
+conscious attention is turned away from states within and fixed
+upon things without. The natural consequence is that the objective
+world is arrogating the first place in consciousness, and the
+subjective world is sinking into the secondary rank. Whatever
+exalts the object at the expense of the subject tends to
+materialism, unbelief in the separate being of the spirit. On the
+other hand whatever gives the panoramic passage of subjective
+states in the soul greater apparent vividness and tenacity than
+belong to outer phenomena, tends to produce faith in the
+independence and immortality of the spirit. Hence it is quite to
+be expected that until our modern concentration on objective toil
+and study and amusement reaches its destined climax and begins the
+return career to subjective reason and feeling, the skepticism of
+the age will increase.
+
+Meanwhile the remedy for the evil is, first, to perceive it, and
+then, to cultivate the kinds of experience calculated to
+neutralize it. For the logical invalidity and fallaciousness of
+the doubts concerning immortality, arising from the immense
+disparity of such a belief with the mental habits of ignorant
+earthlings and social parasites, appear from the fact that there
+are others with whose experience and thought the doctrine has no
+such disparity, but for whose spiritual range and haunt it is as
+natural to believe it as to breathe. And, in explaining the
+destiny of man, it is legitimate to take the most finished and
+furnished specimens, not the abortive ones. There are grounds of
+knowledge, domains of imagination, heights of nobility, familiar
+to the most exalted characters, perfectly cognate and harmonious
+with the conception of eternal life, and making the faith in it
+fully as credible as the transcendent truths of science and
+philosophy which have been actually demonstrated. Those who are
+familiar only with the little affairs of sense, in narrow bounds
+of time and space, may well gasp in despair and denial when the
+bewildering contents of the doctrine of immortality are held
+before them; but for all who have mastered what science reveals of
+the objective world of nature, and what literature records of the
+subjective world of soul, both these spheres furnish ample
+illustrative examples and data to make the faith in every way
+congruous with what else they know, and as easy as it is pleasing
+to receive. Assuredly the belief resulting in this latter class
+from their positive perception and correspondent desire and
+persuasion, are, on every ground of reason or moral fitness, more
+than a counterbalance for the unbelief resulting in the former
+class from their negative experience and incompetency. If we
+sought to estimate the possibility and destined fulfillment of
+human nature when all its conditions shall have been perfected,
+should we choose for the basis of our judgment the incapacity of
+the lower specimens of man? or the capacity of the higher? After
+considering the chief achievements of human genius, the mysterious
+powers of the human soul now, the doctrine of immortality does not
+seem too great and wonderful for belief; but, on the contrary, it
+appears the coherent complement of the facts of the present.
+
+Nothing can be more marvelous or imply greater glory for the
+destiny of the individual being than the fact that each
+consciousness is to itself the antithetical equivalent or balance
+of the totality of being beside; since the whole universe, all
+other beings, God himself, are known to the individual
+consciousness only as revealed in itself through its personal
+faculties. The slightest change in the subject is reported by a
+correspondent change in objects. Heighten the internal activities
+of the soul to a certain pitch, and the convictions they engender
+will be so intense, and the experience so absorbing, as
+irresistibly to sweep away all opposing doubts and fill every
+craving with the triumphant flood of life. What overwhelming
+revelations of the providence of God and eternal life, crowding
+the cosmos at every point with the workings of poetic justice, may
+thus be made to prepared spirits, only those who receive them
+know. Paul said he was caught up into the third heaven and heard
+unspeakable words. It is to be believed that such visions, while
+often illusory, are sometimes genuine. A test to discriminate the
+spurious and the authentic will one day be secured. Meanwhile it
+is either a faithless faintheartedness or a vulgar arrogance to
+omit from the data of our expected fate those thoughts, which,
+though beyond the reaches of our souls, nevertheless irresistibly
+allure our attention and enchain our affection; ideas belonging to
+our nature, though transcending our experience, and, while
+surpassing our faculties, still attracting us to our destiny. What
+are presentiments but divine wings of the spirit fluttering toward
+our unseen goal?
+
+Again, the great metaphysicians, who have elaborated the
+idealistic philosophy in so many forms, exhibit the mind of man to
+us as superior to the cosmic spectacle it contemplates projected
+in immensity. They portray the material creation as a phantasmal
+show of mind, a phenomenal process and aspect of spirit,
+indissoluble centers of consciousness alone having solid verity
+and stay, while matter and force and times and places whirl and
+pass, combine and dissolve.
+
+Likewise the mathematicians, with their mighty calculus, translate
+all quantities and qualities, all objects and operations, into
+numerical symbols, and with these intellectual toys play the same
+miraculous tricks that the Creator himself plays with the
+originals. They symbolize purely imaginary quantities, bring them
+into relations and pass them through certain operations, and
+thereby discover truths which are found to have permanent
+objective validity. It demonstrates, as said before, that the
+filial mind which thus wanders in thought through the house of the
+Father, and, everywhere making itself familiarly at home, disports
+among His treasures, is of the same type with the parental Mind.
+
+And now, still farther, that the cultivators of physical science
+are pushing their discoveries and their theories to ultimates, we
+begin to see the adamantine structure of material nature melting
+into a system of ideal equivalents, vaporizing into an undulatory
+ether, vanishing before our microscopes in immaterial bases of
+thought, reason, law and will. The gases have just been first
+liquified and then actually solidified, confirming the speculative
+announcement long before made that oxygen and hydrogen are metals
+volatilized. Many valuable and strange discoveries have been
+reached in physical science by following prophetic declarations
+made a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs of
+intellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order of
+atomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops and
+snowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals and
+flowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a tree
+and of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artistic
+works of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in the
+production of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poem
+And so, before the gaze of the accomplished and devout scientist,
+matter is translated into terms of mind, rather than the reverse,
+and the whole cosmos is transmuted into a divine laboratory of
+ideal powers, a divine gallery of ideal pictures, a divine theater
+for the eternal adventures of conscious spirits.
+
+In mental conception man deals with mathematical infinites as
+easily as with the pettiest objects, dilates a point to the
+universe and shrinks the universe to a point, condenses eternity
+into a moment or stretches a moment to eternity. It has been shown
+that if correspondent diminution or enlargement in the faculties
+of sense and intelligence and in all the forces concerned were
+made, the whole stellar system and its contents might be dwarfed
+into the bulk of a grain of sand, or so magnified that each grain
+would fill the space now occupied by the whole, and no one would
+perceive any change whatever in the scale. In reply to the
+statement that nothing can act where it is not, it has been proved
+that every atom is virtually omnipresent. It takes the entire
+universe to constitute an atom, since the forces centered in each
+atom are connected with the whole by the insunderable continuity
+of all the laws of being. The science of molecular physics as
+expounded by its latest masters is not less astounding than the
+wildest soarings of transcendental metaphysics. For instance, it
+is proved that if there be ultimate atoms their size must be so
+small that it would require at least five hundred millions of them
+to an inch in length. In a cubic inch of hydrogen gas, then, for
+example, there are 125,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 one hundred
+and twenty five septillions of atoms, moving with the inconceivable
+velocity that is implied by their making thousands of millions
+of changes of direction every second. The view of the dynamic s
+tructure of the universe opened in this direction is as
+appalling as that unveiled in the opposite direction by the
+largest extension of the nebular hypothesis. He who can gaze here
+with steady reason need not be staggered by the sublimest doctrine
+of religion. Amazed at the spectacle of creative power and wisdom,
+equally amazed at the discovering faculty of man, we feel it to be
+incredible that he should have been made capable of such thoughts
+only to be annihilated after a brief tantalization. Confronting
+the immeasurable wilderness of divine glory, strewn all through
+with prizes before which his soul burns with the unconsumable fire
+of a god like ambition, man lifts his eye to worship and reaches
+out his hand to receive. Is he merely taunted with the starry sky,
+and mocked with an infinite illusion of progress, suddenly barred
+with endless night and oblivion? Behold him emerging out of
+nothingness, mastering his self conscious identity, climbing over
+the rounds of symbolic experience and language through the heights
+of knowledge and love. Strange, helpless, sublime prince of the
+universe, beggar of God, when he has attained the summit of
+illimitable perception, holding immortal joys in full prospect,
+shall he be dashed back into nonentity? Is it not fitter that he
+be welcomed by triumphant initiation into the family of the
+deathless Father?
+
+Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was a
+cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and
+contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now
+that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of
+Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers,
+holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose
+it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass of
+incandescent hydrogen. From such a background of accomplished fact
+he seems really to have a right to peer forth into the unbounded
+future and promise himself an unbounded destiny. The repetition of
+such a progress, nay much less, it may not unreasonably be
+imagined would raise the curtains from unsuspected secrets, bring
+the family of intelligences scattered over all worlds into
+conscious communication, and accomplish the deliverance of the
+whole creation travailing and groaning together unto this day for
+the redemption of the creature. What a splendid, almost incredible
+task man has already achieved in disentangling the apparent
+astronomic motions and converting them into the real ones. How
+immensely sublimer and more complex is the position of man on this
+planet than it seemed to the primitive savage, who knew only what
+his crude senses taught him, although, all the while, the moon was
+circling about him twenty five hundred miles an hour, and he was
+whirling with the revolving earth a thousand miles an hour, and
+spinning around the sun over thirty thousand miles an hour, and
+swooping with the whole solar system through the blue void with a
+still swifter gyre in a yet vaster cycle! This is demonstrated
+physical fact. Its harmonic correlate in the spiritual sphere
+would be nothing less than a lease of eternal existence for the
+soul which sees endless invitations ahead, and exults at the
+prospect of an eternal pursuit of them, its reason and affection
+affiliated with those of the whole divine household of immortals.
+Two or three generations ago it would have been more inconceivable
+that men a hundred miles apart could audibly converse together, as
+they now do by means of the telephone, than it is at this day to
+believe that communication may at some future time be opened
+between the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of Sirius
+through the vibrations of the ethereal medium.
+
+Futhermore, the idea of the infinite God, in possession of which
+man finds himself, is a warrant for his immortality. There cannot
+be more in an effect than was in its cause, though there may be
+less. We perceive intelligence, orderly purpose, as well as power,
+in nature. We find in ourselves all the explicit attributes and
+treasures of consciousness. Reasoning back by indubitable steps we
+come to an uncaused, unlimited, infinite Being, the underived and
+eternal source of all that is. This idea in our minds of a Being
+of absolute perfection, whose boundless consciousness as being
+necessarily indivisible must be totally present at every point of
+infinitude, is the charter of our own divine nature and heirship.
+For we can become, even here, friends and companions of this
+omnipresent One, of whose essence and attributes everything below
+is but a defective transcript or dimmed revelation. This idea of
+Himself is the gift of God to us. To suppose that we are capable
+of originating it implies a greater miracle than the one it seeks
+to account for, and really puts ourselves in the place of God. Can
+we imagine that we are the creators of God? If the absolute
+noumenal Power beyond all phenomena be unknowable, it cannot
+contain less, but must contain more than all the attributes of the
+material and spiritual creation which has proceeded thence. The
+noblest and best spirits of all lands and ages have walked in full
+fellowship with this Being, seeking supremely to serve and love
+Him in the subjection of self will and in the doing of good. Many
+a nameless saint, in a pure consecration, has heroically thought
+and suffered and aspired, worn out life in slow toils or offered
+it up in sharp sacrifice, for the good of fellow creatures, as a
+tribute to God, and exhaled the last breath in a prayer of love
+and trust. Such faithful servants and comrades must be dear to the
+Infinite Spirit, and it is natural to believe that He will keep
+them with him forever. When Christ, in self sacrificing love,
+submitted to death on the cross, saying, "Father, into Thy hands I
+commit my spirit," he who can believe that the magnanimous
+sufferer was disappointed, blotted out and extinguished, thus
+reveals the grade of his own insight, but does not refute the
+greater hope of nobler seers. It seems as if the idea of God, with
+loving faith and obedience to its requirements, planted in a soul
+which had not inherited immortality would straightway begin to
+develop it there. The atmosphere of eternity alone befits a nature
+which feels itself living in the companionship of God. Everything
+subject to decay cowers into oblivion from before the idea of that
+august, incorruptible presence. The fear of death is but the
+recoil of the immortal from mortality. When man voluntarily faces
+death without fear, even courting martyrdom with a radiant joy, it
+is because there is in him, deeper than consciousness, a mystic
+knowledge that he is essentially eternal and cannot perish. He who
+freely sacrifices anything thereby proves himself superior to that
+which he sacrifices. Man freely sacrifices his life. Therefore he
+is immortal.
+
+The ancient Semitic philosopher and poet who wrote the book of
+Job, brooding on the strange problem of life and death, murmured,
+"Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" With each successive
+generation, for many ages, countless millions have dissolved and
+vanished into the vast, dumb mystery. Now, the spectator,
+remembering all this, stands beneath the dome of midnight,
+imploringly breathes the mystic sigh, "Man giveth up the ghost,
+and where is he?" The only responses is the same dread silence
+still maintained as of old. And, in a moment more, he who breathed
+the wondering inquiry is himself gone. Whither? Into the vacant
+dark of nothingness? Into the transparent sphere of perfect
+intelligence? The sublimity of the demand seems to ally the finite
+questioner with the infinite Creator; and, with a presentiment of
+marvelous joy, we look beyond the ignorant veil at the close of
+earth, and hold that eternity itself will not exhaust the
+possibilities of the soul, whose career shall be kept from
+stagnation by constant interspersals of death and birth,
+refreshing disembodiments from worn out forms and reincarnations
+in new.
+
+If this life on the earth, where man feels himself a stranger, be
+his all, how superfluously he is equipped with foresights and
+longings that outrun every conceivable limit! Why is he gifted
+with powers of reason and demands of love so far beyond his
+conditions? If there be no future for him, why is he tortured with
+the inspiring idea of the eternal pursuit of the still flying goal
+of perfection? Is it possible that the hero and the martyr and the
+saint, whose experience is laden with painful sacrifices for
+humanity, are mistaken? and that the slattern and the voluptuary
+and the sluggard, whose course is one of base self indulgence, are
+correct? Is it credible that, with no justifying explanation
+hereafter, it should be ordained that the more gifted and
+disinterested a man is the more he shall uselessly suffer, from
+his sympathetic carriage of the greater share in the sin and
+sorrow of all his race? No, far back in the past there has been
+some dark mystery which yet flings its dense shadows over our
+history here; and in the obscurity we cannot read its solution.
+But there is a solution. And when in some blessed age to come
+mankind shall outgrow their discords and be reconciled, so that
+their divinest living member can become the focalizing center of
+their collective inspiration, through him the truth will be
+revealed. The most inspired individual can only in a degree
+anticipate his age. At a certain distance he is tethered by his
+connections with the race. They must be near the goal before he
+can deliver the final message. Inspiration and revelation are as
+real as the sensuous method of outer knowledge. Spirit or
+consciousness, as that which is its own evidence, has a more than
+mathematic validity. When men purely love one another, and, with
+supreme loyalty, seek truth, ignorance and delusion will melt away
+before the encroaching illumination from God, and the dominion of
+death will be abolished.
+
+That the human mind shall be the victim of death is incongruous
+with its rank. The atheistic scientist who imagines that the
+energy of the stellar creation is gradually dissipating, so that
+the whole scheme must at last perish; and who sees the soul, then,
+like a belated butterfly, fall frozen on the boundary of a dead
+universe, refutes his own dismal creed by the grandeur of the
+power shown in thinking it. The might of love, the faculty of
+thought, the instinct of curiosity, are insatiable; and that which
+remains wooing them to grasp it, is infinite. And, after all is
+said, it seems certain that we are either discerpted emanations
+and avatars of God suffering transient incarnations for a purpose,
+and then to be resumed, immortal in his immortality; or else we
+are separate and inherent entities, immortal in ourselves. The
+former faith ought to satisfy the proudest ambition. The latter
+faith yields every motive for contentment and aspiring obedience.
+Man, forever feeding on the unknown, is the mysterious guest of
+God in the universe. We cannot believe that, the hospitality of
+the infinite Housekeeper becoming exhausted, He will ever blow out
+the lights and quench the guests.
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT IN THE DESTINY OF MAN.
+
+A COMPANION of Solomon once said to him, "Give me, O king of
+wisdom, a maxim equally applicable on all occasions, that I may
+fortify myself with it against the caprices of fortune." Solomon
+reflected a moment, then gave him, in these words, the maxim he
+sought: "This, too, shall pass away." The courtier at first felt
+disappointed, but, meditating awhile, perceived the pertinent and
+profound meaning hidden in the transparent simplicity of the
+words. Are you afflicted? Be not despondent or rash, This, too,
+shall pass away. Are you blessed? Be not elated or careless, This
+too shall pass away. Are you in danger? in temptation? in glory?
+Still, for your proper guidance, in relation to each one,
+remember; This too shall pass away. And so on, under every
+diversity of situation in which man can be placed. Whatever
+restraint, whatever encouragement, whatever consolation he needs,
+it is all contained in the profound thought, This too shall pass
+away.
+
+This maxim for all times needs to be supplemented by a
+corresponding maxim for all persons. There is a truth constantly
+suited for the variety of immortal souls, as the foregoing one is
+for the variety of temporal changes. Let us see what that truth is
+and set it in a fitting aphorism.
+
+The desires of the human soul are boundless. Nothing can satisfy
+its wishes by fulfilling them and circumscribing there a fixed
+limit. It would devour the whole creation, and hungrily cry for
+more. Whatever extension of power or fruition it can conceive, it
+wants for its own, and frets if deprived of it. Now, if the spirit
+of the Creator is in the creature, this illimitable passion of
+acquisition cannot be a mere mockery. It must be a hint of the
+will of God and of the destiny of his child in whom He has
+implanted it. It is prophetic of something awaiting fulfillment.
+But what is the prophecy, and how is it to be fulfilled? The
+answer to this question will give us that maxim of eternal
+humanity which accords with the maxim of transient fortune. And
+thus it reads: Over all the things for which men struggle with
+each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of struggle,
+which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one thing is the
+whole universe! Be not baffled by the appearance of transcendental
+mysticism in this maxim, as the ancient inquirer was by the
+appearance of commonplace in his, but seek its significance.
+
+A son is an heir of his father. All men are sons of God, though
+only a few, and that in varying degree, are distinctly conscious
+as yet of their sonship. But, despite their ignorance, all are
+tending, more or less swiftly, toward the goal of their nature and
+inheritance.
+
+There are exclusive prizes which men can monopolize: and they
+fight with one another for these, because the more some have the
+less others can obtain. There are also inclusive prizes, or modes
+of holding and enjoying property which do not interfere with
+universal participation, with universal, undivided ownership. In
+these no one need have any the less because every one has all.
+This is the region of reason, imagination, affection, the empire
+of the soul. The more one knows of mathematical truth, poetic
+beauty or moral good, the easier it is, not the harder, for others
+to know and enjoy as much or more. In this divine domain no
+monopoly or conflict is possible, because the outward moving fence
+of each consciousness, retreating and vanishing before its
+conquests of experience, is a vacuum with respect to that of every
+other. They overlap and penetrate one another as if they were
+mutually nonexistent. For example, the pleasure any one takes in a
+picture, or in a play, does not lessen the pleasure which remains
+for the other spectators; but, on the contrary, adds to it if they
+have sympathy.
+
+Now, the all inclusive prize of desire, the very secret of the
+Godhead namely, the power of taking a full pure joy in every form
+of being, in every substance and phenomenon of the creation is
+forever wooing every soul; and every soul, in proportion to its
+advancement, is forever embracing it just as freely as if no other
+soul existed, yet has the zest of its enjoyments endlessly varied
+and heightened by mutual contemplations and reflections of those
+of all the rest. Such is the superiority of the disinterested
+spirit over the selfish flesh, of the inner world over the outer
+world, of good over evil.
+
+Mental ownership is sympathetic and universal, physical
+appropriation antagonistic and individual. We hate and oppose our
+fellows that with hand and foot we may monopolize some wretched
+grains of good, while God is inviting every one of us with our
+mind and heart to accept as fast as we can his whole undivided
+infinitude of good. The universe is the house of the Father; the
+true spirit of the family is disinterested, and consequently every
+child is heir of the whole even as the apostle Paul said, joint
+heir with Christ. Register, then, deeply in memory, side by side
+with the historic maxim for all times, This too shall pass away!
+the religious maxim for all souls. Over those things for which men
+struggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of
+struggle, which belongs indivisibly to every man, and that one
+thing is the whole universe! Then, should you ever feel vexed or
+disheartened by the irritations and failures you meet in your
+journey through the evanescent masquerade of this world, pause and
+say to yourself, Is it worthy of me, while the entire realm of
+existence asks me to appropriate it in ever expansive possession,
+to be angry or sad because some infinitesimal speck of it does not
+grant me as much of itself as I crave?
+
+The more things we love the richer we are. The fewer things we
+care for the freer we are. O blessed wealth and wretched freedom,
+how shall we perfect and reconcile them? This is the secret: If we
+love the divine and eternal in everything, and care not for the
+limiting and perishable evil connected with it, then we shall at
+once be both rich and free. The former practice educates our
+powers; the latter emancipates them. The true use of renunciation
+is as a means for larger fulfillment. Detach from lower and lesser
+objects in order to attach to higher and greater ones. Be always
+ready to renounce the meaner at the invitation of the nobler. The
+soul, like a grand frigate, may be loosely tied by a thousand
+separate strings, but should be held firm by one cable. Our
+relations to fellow creatures are those threads; our supreme
+relation to God, that cable. Those are the gossamer of time; this
+the adamant of eternity.
+
+The lame man cries, O, that I could walk! He who can walk says, O,
+that I could fly! If he could soar, he would sigh, O, that I were
+omnipresent, and therefore had no need to move! The end of one
+wish is but the beginning of another; and the craving of every
+human soul, let loose in sincere expression, is absolutely
+illimitable. It always comes, in the last analysis, to this; every
+one really longs to be God. Therefore, unless the rational
+creation is mendacious, to be deified, is, in some mystical but
+true sense, the final destiny of all souls. Every one, in its
+consciousness fully developed and harmonized, shall become a focus
+of universal being, a finite reflex of God, the infinite God
+himself remaining eternally the same unescapable and incomprehensible
+mystery as ever.
+
+There are, therefore, two supreme maxims for souls conditioned in
+time and space but destined for eternity and infinity a maxim of
+comfort for those who suffer, and a maxim of impulse for those who
+aspire. The one, to be used in view of every fear, every evil or
+limit. This, too, shall pass away! The other, to be used in view
+of every insatiable desire, Over all those things for which men
+struggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of
+struggle, which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one
+thing is the whole universe!
+
+Nothing but the Absolute Good is everlasting: and that must belong
+to all who, being essential personalities, are superior to death.
+Blessed, blessed, then, are they who hunger and thirst after God;
+for, by a real transubstantiation assimilating Him, they shall as
+divinely live forevermore. They shall cease to say any more of
+anything, This, too, shall pass away! because the infinite God
+shall have said to each of them, Son, thou art ever with me, and
+all that I have is thine!
+
+If the view above marked out, a view in many respects so sublime
+and satisfactory, a view which goes so far to explain the
+mysteries, reconcile the contradictions, and transfigure the evils
+of our transient life and lot below be not true, it must either be
+because some other higher and better view is the truth in which
+case we certainly ought to be contented or else the creative and
+providential plan of God is inferior to the thought of one of his
+creatures. It is not possible for me to suppose that a speculative
+theory of my brain can transcend in harmony and beneficence the
+design of the infinite God. Could it do so, then, in reality, I
+should be a higher being than He. I should veritably have
+dethroned Him and vaulted into his place. Is not that a pitch of
+impiety and absurdity too great even for the pride of man,
+insurgent atom of criticising assumption, set, baffled at every
+point, amidst the awful immensity of existence? Here, then, is
+rest. Either our highest view is the truth, or the truth is higher
+and better than that. For to think that his thought is superior to
+the purpose of God, thus making himself the real God, is too much
+for the extremist human egotist within the limits of sanity.
+
+Therefore, until a better theory is propounded, we hold that the
+destiny of the soul is to become, through the progressive
+actualization of its potential consciousness, a free thinking
+center of the universe, an infinitesimal mirror of God. The
+adventures of the different souls, full of inexhaustible curiosity
+and relish in the mutually revealing contacts of their degrees of
+development and originalities of personal character and treasure,
+constitute the endless drama of spiritual existence within the
+phenomenal theater of the material creation. And still the
+infinite One serenely smiles on the troubled play of the eternal
+Many; because the psychological kaleidoscope of their experience
+is a continuous improvisation of justice, weaving the fate of Each
+with the fates of All, and transfusing the monotonous unity of the
+Same with the zestful variety of the Other.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Destiny of the Soul, by 
+William Rounseville Alger
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