THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL. A CRITICAL HISTORYOF THEDOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE, BYWILLIAM 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, ANDDESTINY OF THE SOUL. THE TITLES CLASSIFIED AND ARRANGEDCHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH NOTES, AND INDEXES OF THE AUTHORS ANDSUBJECTS. BY EZRA ABBOT, PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION INTHE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY. BOSTON:ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1880 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, byWILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the UnitedStates 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 ofprint now for nearly a year. During the twenty years which haveelapsed since it was written, the question of immortality, thefaith and opinions of men and the drift of criticism and doubtconcerning it, have been a subject of dominant interest to me, andhave occupied a large space in my reading and reflection. Accordingly, now that my publisher, moved by the constant demandfor the volume, urges the preparation of a new edition introducingsuch additional materials as my continued researches have gatheredor 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 orconventicle, but in the spirit and interest of science andhumanity. Orthodoxy insists on doctrines whose irrationality intheir current forms is such that they can never be a basis for theunion of all men. Therefore, to discredit these, in preparationfor more reasonable and auspicious views, is a service to thewhole human race. This is my justification for the controversialquality which may frequently strike the reader. Looking back over his pages, after nearly a quarter of a centurymore of investigation and experience, the author is grateful thathe finds nothing to retract or expunge. He has but to add suchthoughts and illustrations as have occurred to him in the courseof his subsequent studies. He hopes that the supplementarychapters now published will be found more suggestive and maturethan the preceding ones, while the same in aim and tone. For hestill believes, as he did in his earlier time, that there is muchof error and superstition, bigotry and cruelty, to be purged outof the prevailing theological creed and sentiment of Christendom. And he still hopes, as he did then, to contribute something ofgood influence in this direction. The large circulation of thework, the many letters of thanks for it received by the authorfrom laymen and clergymen of different denominations, the numerousavowed and unavowed quotations from it in recent publications, all show that it has not been produced in vain, but has bornefruit in missionary service for reason, liberty, and charity. This ventilating and illumining function of fearless andreverential critical thought will need to be fulfilled much longerin many quarters. The doctrine of a future life has been made sofrightful by the preponderance in it of the elements of materialtorture and sectarian narrowness, that a natural revulsion ofgenerous sentiment joins with the impulse of materialistic scienceto produce a growing disbelief in any life at all beyond thegrave. Nothing else will do so much to renew and extend faith inGod and immortality as a noble and beautiful doctrine of God andimmortality, freed from disfiguring terror, selfishness, andfavoritism. The most popular preacher in England has recently asked hisfellow believers, "Can we go to our beds and sleep while China, India, Japan, and other nations are being damned?" The proprietorof a great foundry in Germany, while he talked one day with aworkman who was feeding a furnace, accidentally stepped back, andfell headlong into a vat of molten iron. The thought of whathappened then horrifies the imagination. Yet it was all over intwo or three seconds. Multiply the individual instance byunnumbered millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, andwe confront the orthodox idea of hell! Protesting human nature hurls off such a belief with indignantdisdain, except in those instances where the very form andvibration of its nervous pulp have been perverted by the hardeninganimus of a dogmatic drill transmitted through generations. Totrace the origin of such notions, expose their baselessness, obliterate their sway, and replace them with conceptions of a morerational and benignant order, is a task which still needs to bedone, and to be done in many forms, over and over, again andagain. Though each repetition tell but slightly, it tells. Every sound argument is instantly crowned with universal victoryin the sight of God, and therefore must at last be so in the sightof mankind. However slowly the logic of events limps after thelogic of thoughts, it always follows. Let the mind of one manperceive the true meaning of the doctrine of the generalresurrection and judgment and eternal life, as a natural evolutionof history from within, and it will spread to the minds of allmen; and the misinterpretation of that doctrine so long prevalent, as a preternatural irruption of power from without, will be setaside forever. For there is a providential plan of God, notinjected by arbitrary miracle, but inhering in the order of theworld, centred in the propulsive heart of humanity, which beatsthrob by throb along the web of events, removing obstacles andclearing the way for the revelation of the completed pattern. Whenit is done no trumpets may be blown, no rocks rent, no gravesopened. But all immortal spirits will be at their goals, and theuniverse will be full of music. NEW YORK, February 22, 1878. PREFACE. WHO follows truth carries his star in his brain. Even so bold athought is no inappropriate motto for an intellectual workman, ifhis heart be filled with loyalty to God, the Author of truth andthe Maker of stars. In this double spirit of independence andsubmission it has been my desire to perform the arduous task nowfinished and offered to the charitable judgment of the reader. Onemay be courageous to handle both the traditions and the noveltiesof men, and yet be modest before the solemn mysteries of fate andnature. He may place no veil before his eyes and no finger on hislips in presence of popular dogmas, and yet shrink from theconceit of esteeming his mind a mirror of the universe. Ideas, like coins, bear the stamp of the age and brain they were struckin. Many a phantom which ought to have vanished at the first cockcrowing of reason still holds its seat on the oppressed heart offaith before the terror stricken eyes of the multitude. Everythoughtful scholar who loves his fellow men must feel it anobligation to do what he can to remove painful superstitions, andto spread the peace of a cheerful faith and the wholesome light oftruth. The theories in theological systems being but philosophy, why should they not be freely subjected to philosophicalcriticism? I have endeavored, without virulence, arrogance, orirreverence towards any thing sacred, to investigate the variousdoctrines pertaining to the great subject treated in these pages. Many persons, of course, will find statements from which theydissent, sentiments disagreeable to them. But, where thought anddiscussion are so free and the press so accessible as with us, noone but a bigot will esteem this a ground of complaint. May allsuch passages be charitably perused, fairly weighed, and, ifunsound, honorably refuted! If the work be not animated with amean or false spirit, but be catholic and kindly, if it be notsuperficial and pretentious, but be marked by patience andthoroughness, is it too much to hope that no critic will assail itwith wholesale condemnation simply because in some parts of itthere are opinions which he dislikes? One dispassionate argumentis more valuable than a shower of missile names. The most vehementrevulsion from a doctrine is not inconsistent, in a Christianmind, with the sweetest kindness of feeling towards the personswho hold that doctrine. Earnest theological debate may be carriedon without the slightest touch of ungenerous personality. Who butmust feel the pathos and admire the charity of these eloquentwords of Henry Giles? "Every deep and reflective nature looking intently 'before andafter, ' looking above, around, beneath, and finding silence andmystery to all his questionings of the Infinite, cannot butconceive of existence as a boundless problem, perhaps aninevitable darkness between the limitations of man and theincomprehensibility of God. A nature that so reflects, thatcarries into this sublime and boundless obscurity 'the largediscourse of Reason, ' will not narrow its concern in the solutionof the problem to its own petty safety, but will brood over itwith an anxiety which throbs for the whole of humanity. Such anature must needs be serious; but never will it be arrogant: itwill regard all men with an embracing pity. Strange it should everbe otherwise in respect to inquiries which belong to infiniterelations, that mean enmities, bitter hatreds, should come intoplay in these fathomless searchings of the soul! Bring whatsolution we may to this problem of measureless alternatives, whether by Reason, Scripture, or the Church, faith will neverstand for fact, nor the firmest confidence for actualconsciousness. The man of great and thoughtful nature, therefore, who grapples in real earnest with this problem, however satisfiedhe may be with his own solution of it, however implicit may be histrust, however assured his convictions, will yet often bow downbefore the awful veil that shrouds the endless future, put hisfinger on his lips, and weep in silence. " The present work is in a sense, an epitome of the thought ofmankind on the destiny of man. I have striven to add value to itby comprehensiveness of plan, not confining myself, as most of mypredecessors have confined themselves, to one province or a fewnarrow provinces of the subject, but including the entire subjectin one volume; by carefulness of arrangement, not piling thematerial together or presenting it in a chaos of facts and dreams, but grouping it all in its proper relations; by clearness ofexplanation, not leaving the curious problems presented wholly inthe dark with a mere statement of them, but as far as possibletracing the phenomena to their origin and unveiling their purport;by poetic life of treatment, not handling the different topicsdryly and coldly, but infusing warmth and color into them; bycopiousness of information, not leaving the reader to hunt upevery thing for himself, but referring him to the best sources forthe facts, reasonings, and hints which he may wish; and bypersevering patience of toil, not hastily skimming here and thereand hurrying the task off, but searching and researching in everyavailable direction, examining and re examining each mooted point, by the devotion of twelve years of anxious labor. How far myefforts in these particulars have been successful is submitted tothe public. To avoid the appearance of pedantry in the multiplication of footnotes, I have inserted many authorities incidentally in the textitself, and have omitted all except such as I thought would bedesired by the reader. Every scholar knows how easy it is toincrease the number of references almost indefinitely, and alsohow deceptive such an ostensible evidence of wide reading may be. When the printing of this volume was nearly completed, and I hadin some instances made more references than may now seem needful, the thought occurred to me that a full list of the books publishedup to the present time on the subject of a future life, arrangedaccording to their definite topics and in chronological order, would greatly enrich the work and could not fail often to be ofvast service. Accordingly, upon solicitation, a valued friend Mr. Ezra Abbot, Jr. , a gentleman remarkable for his varied andaccurate scholarship undertook that laborious task for me; and hehas accomplished it in the most admirable manner. No reader, however learned, but may find much important information in thebibliographical appendix which I am thus enabled to add to thisvolume. Every student who henceforth wishes to investigate anybranch of the historical or philosophical doctrine of theimmortality of the soul, or of a future life in general, may thankMr. Abbot for an invaluable aid. As I now close this long labor and send forth the result, theoppressive sense of responsibility which fills me is relieved bythe consciousness that I have herein written nothing as a bigotedpartisan, nothing in a petty spirit of opinionativeness, but haveintended every thought for the furtherance of truth, the honor ofGod, the good of man. The majestic theme of our immortality allures yet baffles us. Nofleshly implement of logic or cunning tact of brain can reach tothe solution. That secret lies in a tissueless realm whereof nonerve can report beforehand. We must wait a little. Soon we shallgrope and guess no more, but grasp and know. Meanwhile, shall wenot be magnanimous to forgive and help, diligent to study andachieve, trustful and content to abide the invisible issue? Insome happier age, when the human race shall have forgotten, inphilanthropic ministries and spiritual worship, the bigotries anddissensions of sentiment and thought, they may recover, in itsall embracing unity, that garment of truth which God madeoriginally "seamless as the firmament, " now for so long a timetorn in shreds by hating schismatics. Oh, when shall we learn thata loving pity, a filial faith, a patient modesty, best become usand fit our state? The pedantic sciolist, prating of his clearexplanations of the mysteries of life, is as far from feeling thetruth of the case as an ape, seated on the starry summit of thedome of night, chattering with glee over the awful prospect ofinfinitude. What ordinary tongue shall dare to vociferateegotistic dogmatisms where an inspired apostle whispers, withreverential reserve, "We see through a glass darkly"? There arethree things, said an old monkish chronicler, which often make mesad. 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 hocnescio 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 andstrange portents borne far from an unknown somewhere, causing himto believe in another world. Comes not death as a means to bearhim thither? Accordingly as hope rests in heaven, fear shudders athell, or doubt faces the dark transition, the future life is asweet reliance, a terrible certainty, or a pathetic perhaps. Butliving in the present in the humble and loving discharge of itsduties, our souls harmonized with its conditions though aspiringbeyond them, why should we ever despair or be troubled overmuch?Have we not eternity in our thought, infinitude in our view, andGod 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 OFA 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 whencethe whole prospect of life is visible, what a solemn vision greetsus! We see the vast procession of existence flitting across thelandscape, from the shrouded ocean of birth, over the illuminatedcontinent of experience, to the shrouded ocean of death. Who canlinger there and listen, unmoved, to the sublime lament of thingsthat die? Although the great exhibition below endures, yet it ismade up of changes, and the spectators shift as often. Each rankof the host, as it advances from the mists of its commencingcareer, wears a smile caught from the morning light of hope, but, as it draws near to the fatal bourne, takes on a mournful castfrom the shadows of the unknown realm. The places we occupy werenot 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 breathRenew'd throughout the bounds of earth and ocean, The melancholy gates of deathRespond with sympathetic motion. " We appear, there is a short flutter of joys and pains, a brightglimmer of smiles and tears, and we are gone. But whence did wecome? And whither do we go? Can human thought divine the answer? It adds no little solemnity and pathos to these reflections toremember that every considerate person in the unnumberedsuccessions that have preceded us, has, in his turn, confrontedthe same facts, engaged in the same inquiry, and been swept fromhis attempts at a theoretic solution of the problem into the realsolution itself, while the constant refrain in the song ofexistence sounded behind him, "One generation passeth away, andanother generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. " Theevanescent 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'erman's mortality, " and viewed in a susceptible spirit, are, indeed, overwhelminglyimpressive. They invoke the intellect to its most piercingthoughts. 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 surgeOf time and tide rolls on, and bears afarOur bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the gravesOf 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 inthe whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What patheticsentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! Thesubject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussedby hundreds of philosophers, physicians, and poets, from Vyasa toDes Cartes, from Galen to Ennemoser, from Orpheus to Henry More, from Aristotle to Frohschammer. German literature during the lasthundred years has teemed with works treating of this question fromvarious points of view. The present chapter will present a sketchof these various speculations concerning the commencement andfortunes of man ere his appearance on the stage of this world. The first theory to account for the origin of souls is that ofemanation. This is the analogical theory, constructed from theresults of sensible observation. There is, it says, one infiniteBeing, and all finite spirits are portions of his substance, existing a while as separate individuals, and then reassimilatedinto the general soul. This form of faith, asserting the efflux ofall subordinate existence out of one Supreme Being, seemssometimes to rest on an intuitive idea. It is spontaneouslysuggested whenever man confronts the phenomena of creation withreflective observation, and ponders the eternal round of birth anddeath. Accordingly, we find traces of this belief all over theworld; from the ancient Hindu metaphysics whose fundamentalpostulate is that the necessary life of God is one constantprocess of radiation and resorption, "letting out and drawing in, "to that modern English poetry which apostrophizes the glad andwinsome child as "A silver streamBreaking with laughter from the lake DivineWhence all things flow. " The conception that souls are emanations from God is the mostobvious way of accounting for the prominent facts that salute ourinquiries. It plausibly answers some natural questions, and boldlyeludes others. For instance, to the early student demanding thecause of the mysterious distinctions between mind and body, itsays, the one belongs to the system of passive matter, the othercomes from the living Fashioner of the Universe. Again: thistheory relieves us from the burden that perplexes the finite mindwhen it seeks to understand how the course of nature, thesuccession of lives, can be absolutely eternal without involvingan alternating or circular movement. The doctrine of emanationhas, moreover, been supported by the supposed analytic similarityof the soul to God. Its freedom, consciousness, intelligence, love, correspond with what we regard as the attributes and essenceof Deity. The inference, however unsound, is immediate, that soulsare consubstantial with God, dissevered fragments of Him, sentinto bodies. But, in actual effect, the chief recommendation ofthis view has probably been the variety of analogies and imagesunder which it admits of presentation. The annual developments ofvegetable life from the bosom of the earth, drops taken from afountain and retaining its properties in their removal, theseparation of the air into distinct breaths, the soil intoindividual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying away inreverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light, the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, theevolution of numbers out of an original unity, these are among theillustrations by which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported thenotion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannotcome out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of ourrational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehensionheld in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolvingfrom another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely thesame with things beyond our comprehension, and that God is theaboriginal reservoir of being from which all the rills of finiteexistence are emitted. Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First, the analogies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit andthose of matter have two distinct sets of predicates andcategories. It is, for example, wholly illogical to argue thatbecause the circuit of the waters is from the sea, through theclouds, over the land, back to the sea again, therefore thederivation and course of souls from God, through life, back toGod, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with thesoul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which noknown facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, thescheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to theinfancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with somenecessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, andtherefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance isincompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely, immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of theillimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the emanationof souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a dreamingmind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and apparentcorrespondences. The second explanation of the origin of souls is that which saysthey come from a previous existence. This is the theory ofimagination, framed in the free and seductive realm of poeticthought. It is evident that this idea does not propose anysolution of the absolute origination of the soul, but only offersto account for its appearance on earth. The pre existence of soulshas been most widely affirmed. Nearly the whole world of Orientalthinkers have always taught it. Many of the Greek philosophersheld it. No small proportion of the early Church Fathers believedit. 1 And it is not without able advocates among the scholars andthinkers 1 Keil, Opuscula; Be Pre existentia Animarum. Beausobre, Hist. DuManicheisme, 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 belowthe rank of man, the other a descent of souls from a highersphere. Generation is the true Jacob's ladder, on which souls areever ascending or descending. The former statement is virtuallythat of the modern theory of development, which argues that thesouls known to us, obtaining their first organic being out of theground life of nature, have climbed up through a graduated seriesof births, from the merest elementary existence, to the plane ofhuman nature. A gifted author, Dr. Hedge, has said concerning preexistence in these two methods of conceiving it, writing in ahalf humorous, half serious, vein, "It is to be considered asexpressing rather an exceptional than a universal fact. If hereand there some pure liver, or noble doer, or prophet voice, suggests the idea of a revenant who, moved with pity for humankind, and charged with celestial ministries, has condescended to 'Soil his pure ambrosial weedsWith 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 suppositionof a visit from the Pit, the greater portion of mankind, wesubmit, are much too green for any plausible assumption of aforegone training in good or evil. This planet is not theirmissionary station, nor their Botany Bay, but their native soil. Or, if we suppose they pre existed at all, we must rather believethey pre existed as brutes, and have travelled into humanity bythe fish fowl quadruped road with a good deal of the habitudes anddust of that tramp still sticking to them. " The theory ofdevelopment, deriving human souls by an ascension from the lowerstages of rudimentary being, considered as a fanciful hypothesisor speculative toy, is interesting, and not destitute of plausibleaspects. But, when investigated as a severe thesis, it is founddevoid of proof. It is enough here to say that the mostauthoritative voices in science reject it, declaring that, thoughthere is a development of progress in the plan of nature, from themore general to the more specific, yet there is no advance fromone type or race to another, no hint that the same individual evercrosses the guarded boundaries of genus from one rank and kingdomto another. Whatever progress there may be in the upward processof natural creation or the stages of life, yet to suppose that thelife powers of insects and brutes survive the dissolution of theirbodies, and, in successive crossings of the death gulf, ascend tohumanity, is a bare assumption. It befits the delirious lips ofBeddoes, who says, "Had I been born a four legg'd child, methinks I might have foundthe steps from dog to man And crept into his nature. Are there notThose that fall down out of humanity Into the story where thefour legg'd dwell?" The doctrine that souls have descended from an anterior life onhigh may be exhibited in three forms, each animated by a differentmotive. The first is the view of some of the Manichean teachers, that spirits were embodied by a hostile violence and cunning, theforce and fraud of the apostatized Devil. Adam and Eve were angelssent to observe the doings of Lucifer, the rebel king of matter. He seized these heavenly spies and encased them in fleshlyprisons. And then, in order to preserve a permanent union of thesecelestial natures with matter, he contrived that their race shouldbe propagated by the sexes. Whenever by the procreative act thegerm body is prepared, a fiend hies from bale, or an angel stoopsfrom bliss, or a demon darts from his hovering in the air, toinhabit and rule his growing clay house for a term of earthlylife. The spasm of impregnation thrills in fatal summons to hellor heaven, and resistlessly drags a spirit into the appointedreceptacle. Shakspeare, whose genius seems to have touched everyshape of thought with adorning phrase, makes Juliet, distractedwith the momentary fancy that Romeo is a murderous villain, cry, "O Nature! what hadst thou to do in hellWhen thou didst bower the spirit of a fiendIn mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?" The second method of explaining the descent of souls into thislife is by the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrastedpeace and sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last weariesthe people of Paradise, until they seek relief in a fall. Theperfect sweetness of heaven cloys, the utter routine and safetytire, the salient spirits, till they long for the edge and hazardof earthly exposure, and wander down to dwell in fleshly bodiesand breast the tempest of sin, strife, and sorrow, so as to give afresh charm once more to the repose and exempted joys of thecelestial realm. In this way, by a series of recurring lives belowand above, novelty and change with larger experience and morevivid contentment are secured, the tedium and satiety of fixedhappiness and protection are modified by the relishing oppositionof varied trials of hardship and pain, the insufferable monotonyof immortality broken up and interpolated by epochs of surpriseand tingling dangers of probation. "Mortals, behold! the very angels quitTheir mansions unsusceptible of change, Amid your dangerous bowers to sitAnd through your sharp vicissitudes to range!" Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives anddeaths. Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we"straggle down to this terrene nativity:" When, amid the sourexposures and cruel storms of the world, we have renewed ourappetite for the divine ambrosia of peace and sweetness, weforsake the body and ascend to heaven; this constant recurrenceillustrating the great truths, that alternation is the law ofdestiny, and that variety is the spice of life. But the most common derivation of the present from a previous lifeis that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. Inthat earlier and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, andwere 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 toLemnos, but from heaven to earth; and here, ill at ease, andtroubled in this new and strange place, she hangs her head like adecaying plant. " Hundreds of passages to the same purport might easily be citedfrom as many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls fromtheir original estate was represented as a simultaneous event: apart of the heavenly army, under an apostate leader, havingrebelled, were defeated, and sentenced to a chained bodily life. Our whole race were transported at once from their native shoresin the sky to the convict land of this world. Sometimes thedescent was attributed to the fresh fault of each individual, andwas thought to be constantly happening. A soul tainted with impuredesire, drawn downwards by corrupt material gravitation, hoveringover the fumes of matter, inhaling the effluvia of vice, grewinfected with carnal longings and contagions, became fouled andclogged with gross vapors and steams, and finally fell into a bodyand pursued the life fitted to it below. A clear human child is ashining seraph from heaven sunk thus low. Men are degradedcherubim. "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 themystery one stage further back, and there leaves the problem ofour origin as hopelessly obscure as before. It is sufficientlyrefuted by the open fact that it is absolutely destitute ofscientific basis. The explanation of its wide prevalence as abelief is furnished by two considerations. First, there were oldauthoritative sages and poets who loved to speculate and dream, and who published their speculations and dreams to reign over thesubject fancies of credulous mankind. Secondly, the conception wasintrinsically harmonious, and bore a charm to fascinate theimagination and the heart. The fragmentary visions, brokensnatches, mystic strains, incongruous thoughts, fading gleams, with which imperfectrecollection comes laden from our childishyears and our nightly dreams, are referred by self pleasing fancyto some earlier and nobler existence. We solve the mysteries ofexperience by calling them the veiled vestiges of a bright lifedeparted, pathetic waifs drifted to these intellectual shores overthe surge of feeling from the wrecked orb of an anteriorexistence. It gratifies our pride to think the soul "a startravelled stranger, " a disguised prince, who has passinglyalighted on this globe in his eternal wanderings. The gorgeousglimpses of truth and beauty here vouchsafed to genius, thewondrous strains of feeling that haunt the soul in tender hours, are feeble reminiscences of the prerogatives we enjoyed in thoseeons when we trod the planets that sail around the upper world ofthe gods. That ennui or plaintive sadness which in all life's deepand lonesome hours seems native to our hearts, what is it but thenostalgia of the soul remembering and pining after its distanthome? Vague and forlorn airs come floating into our consciousness, as from an infinitely remote clime, freighted with a luxury ofdepressing melancholy. "Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use, Not daily labor's dull Lethean spring, Oblivion in lost angels can infuseOf the soil'd glory and the trailing wing. " How attractive all this must be to the thoughts of men, howfascinating to their retrospective and aspiring reveries, itshould be needless to repeat. How baseless it is as aphilosophical theory demanding sober belief, it should be equallysuperfluous to illustrate further. The third answer to the question concerning the origin of the soulis that it is directly created by the voluntary power of God. Thisis the theory of faith, instinctively shrinking from thedifficulty of the problem on its scientific ground, and evading itby a wholesale reference to Deity. Some writers have held that allsouls were created by the Divine fiat at the beginning of theworld, and laid up in a secret repository, whence they are drawnas occasion calls. The Talmudists say, "All souls were made duringthe six days of creation; and therefore generation is not bytraduction, but by infusion of a soul into body. " Others maintainthat this production of souls was not confined to any past period, but is continued still, a new soul being freshly created for everybirth. 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 tothe dogmatism of Tertullian on the one hand and to the doubts ofAugustine on the other. 2 It is called the theory of Insufflation, because it affirms that God immediately breathes a soul into eachnew being: even as in the case of Adam, of whom we read that "Godbreathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became aliving soul. " The doctrine drawn from this Mosaic text, that thesoul is a divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathedby Him into every creature at the commencement of its existence, often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history ofpsychological opinions. It corresponds with the beautiful Greekmyth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image fromthe dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, tohave animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, ismade of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that forms his soulis the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the realground and essence of this theory, only to its form andaccompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic; it conceives Godas working, after the manner of a man, intermittently, arbitrarily. It insulates the origination of souls from the fixedcourse of nature, severs it from all connection with that commonprocess of organic life which weaves its inscrutable web throughthe universe, that system of laws which expresses the unchangingwill of God, and which constitutes the order by whose solemn logicalone He acts. The objection to this view is, in a word, that itlimits the creative action of God to human souls. We suppose thatHe creates our bodies as well; that He is the immediate Author ofall life in the same sense in which He is the immediate Author ofour souls. The opponents of the creation theory, who strenuouslyfought it in the seventeenth century, were accustomed to urgeagainst 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 andare pleased to join in unlawful mixture, God is forced to stand aspectator of their vile impurities, stooping from his throne toattend their bestial practices, and raining down showers of soulsto animate the emissions of their concupiscence"3 A fourth reply to the inquiry before us is furnished inTertullian's famous doctrine of Traduction, the essential importof which is that all human souls have been transmitted, or broughtover, from the soul of Adam. This is the theological theory: forit arose from an exigency in the dogmatic system generally held bythe patristic Church. The universal depravity of human nature, theinherited corruption of the whole race, was a fundamental point ofbelief. But how reconcile this proposition with the conception, entertained by many, that each new born soul is a fresh creationfrom the "substance, " "spirit, " or "breath" of God? Augustinewrites to Jerome, asking him to solve this question. 4 Tertullian, whose fervid mind was thoroughly imbued with materialisticnotions, unhesitatingly cut this Gordian knot by asserting thatour first parent bore within him the undeveloped germ of allmankind, so that sinfulness and souls were propagated together. 5Thus the perplexing query, "how souls are held in the chain oforiginal sin, " was answered. As Neander says, illustratingTertullian's view, "The soul of the first man was the fountainhead of all human souls: all the varieties of individual humannature are but modifications of that one spiritual substance. " Inthe light of such a thought, we can see how Nature might, whensolitary Adam lived, fulfil Lear's wild conjuration, and "All the germens spillAt once that make ingrateful man. " In the seventh chapter of the Koran it is written, "The Lord drewforth their posterity from the loins of the sons of Adam. " Thecommentators say that God passed his hand down Adam's back, andextracted all the generations which should come into the worlduntil the resurrection. Assembled in the presence of the angels, and endued with understanding, they confessed their dependence onGod, and were then caused to return into the loins of their greatancestor. This is one of the most curious doctrines within thewhole range of philosophical history. It implies the strictcorporeality of the soul; and yet how infinitely fine must be itsattenuation when it has been diffused into countless thousands ofmillions! 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 offacts, a study of phenomena, or any fair process of reasoning, butwas arbitrarily created to rescue a dogma from otherwiseinevitable rejection. It was the desperate clutch of a headytheologian reeling in a vortex of hostile argument, and ready toseize 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 Woolnerpublished in London, in 1655, a book called "Extraction of Soul: asober 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 twoforms. First, it is declared that all souls are developed out ofthe one substance of Adam's soul; a view that logically implies anultimate attenuating diffusion, ridiculously absurd. Secondly, itis held that "the eating of the forbidden fruit corrupted all thevital fluids of Eve; and this corruption carried vicious andchaotic consequences into her ova, in which lay the souls of allher posterity, with infinitely little bodies, already existing. "6This form is as incredible as the other; for it equally implies alimitless distribution of souls from a limited deposit. As Whewellsays, "This successive inclusion of germs (EinschachtelungsTheorie) implies that each soul contains an infinite number ofgerms. "7 It necessarily excludes the formation of new spiritualsubstance: else original transmitted sin is excluded. The doctrinefinds no parallelism anywhere else in nature. Who, no matter howwedded 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 allserpents, eagles, and lions, were once compressed in the firstpatriarchal serpent, eagle, or lion? That the whole formative power of all the simultaneous members ofour race was concentrated in the first cell germ of our originalprogenitor, is a scientific impossibility and incredibleness. Thefatal sophistry in the traducian account of the transmission ofsouls may be illustrated in the following manner. The germs of allthe apple trees now in existence did not lie in the first appleseed. All the apple trees now existing were not derived by literaldevelopment out of the actual contents of the first apple seed. No: but the truth is this. There was a power in the first appleseed to secure certain conditions; that is, to organize a certainstatus in which the plastic vegetative life of nature would positnew and similar powers and materials. So not all souls were latentin Adam's, but only an organizing power to secure the conditionson which the Divine Will that first began, would, in accordancewith His creative plan, forever continue, His spirit creation. Thedistinction of this statement from that of traduction is thedifference between evolution from one original germ or stock andactual production of new beings. Its distinction from the thirdtheory the theory of immediate creation is the difference betweenan intermittent interposition of arbitrary acts and the continuousworking 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 calledthe speculative theory. Its statement is that the germs of soulswere created simultaneously with the formation of the materialuniverse, and were copiously sown abroad through all nature, waiting there to be successively taken up and furnished with theconditions of development. 8 These latent seeds of souls, swarmingin all places, are drawn in with the first breath or imbibed withthe 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 exPrincipiis Monadologicis stabilita. new born child into the already constructed body which before hasonly a vegetative life. The Germans call this representationpanspermismus, or the dissemination theory. Leibnitz, in hiscelebrated monadology, carries the same view a great deal further. He conceives the whole created universe, visible and invisible, toconsist of monads, which are not particles of matter, butmetaphysical points of power. These monads are all souls. They areproduced by what he calls fulgurations of God. The distinctionbetween fulguration and emanation is this: in the latter case theprocession is historically defined and complete; in the formercase it is momentaneous. The monads are radiated from the DivineWill, forth through the creation, by the constant flashes of Hisvolition. All nature is composed of them, and nothing isdepopulated and dead. Their naked being is force, and theirindestructible predicates are perception, desire, tendency todevelop. While they lie dormant, their potential capacities allinwrapped, they constitute what we entitle matter. When, by therising stir of their inherent longing, they leave their passivestate and reach a condition of obscure consciousness, they becomeanimals. Finally, they so far unwind their bonds and evolve theirfacultative potencies as to attain the rank of rational minds inthe grade of humanity. Generation is merely the method by whichthe aspiring monad lays the organic basis for the grouped buildingof its body. Man is a living union of monads, one regent monadpresiding over the whole organization. That king monad which hasattained to full apperception, the free exercise of perfectconsciousness, is the immortal human soul. 9 Any labored attemptto refute this ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrineitself is but the developed structure of a speculative conceptionwith no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis, spun out of the self fed bowels of a priori assumption andmetaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of theirform, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deep as before. It isa beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution andarchitecture of which well display the wonderful genius ofLeibnitz. It is a more subtle and powerful process of thought thanAristotle's Organon, a more pure and daring work of imaginationthan Milton's Paradise Lost. But it spurns the tests ofexperimental science, and is entitled to rank only among thesplendid curiosities of philosophy; a brilliant and plausibletheorem, not a sober and solid induction. One more method of treating the inquiry before us will completethe list. It is what we may properly call the scientific theory, though in truth it is hardly a theory at all, but rather a carefulstatement of the observed facts, and a modest confession ofinability to explain the cause of them. Those occupying thisposition, when asked what is the origin of souls, do not pretendto unveil the final secret, but simply say, everywhere in theworld of life, from bottom to top, there is an organic growth inaccordance with conditions. This is what is styled the theory ofepigenesis, and is adopted by the chief physiologists of thepresent day. Swammerdam, Malebranche, even Cuvier, had defendedthe doctrine of successive inclusion; but Wolf, Blumenbach, andVon Baer established in its place the doctrine of epigenesis. 10 9 Leibnitz, Monadologie. 10 Ennemoser, Historisch psychologische Untersuchungen tiber denUrsprung der menschlichen Seelen, zweite Auflage. Scrupulously confining themselves to the mass of collected factsand the course of scrutinized phenomena, they say there is anatural production of new living beings in conformity to certainlaws, and give an exposition of the fixed conditions and sequencesof this production. Here they humbly stop, acknowledging that thecausal root of power, which produces all these consequences, is aninexplicable mystery. Their attitude is well represented bySwedenborg when he says, in reference to this very subject, "Anyone may form guesses; but let no son of earth pretend to penetratethe mysteries of creation. " 11 Let us notice now the facts submitted to us. First, at the base ofthe various departments of nature, we see a mass of apparentlylifeless matter. Out of this crude substratum of the outward worldwe observe a vast variety of organized forms produced by avariously named but unknown Power. They spring in regular methods, in determinate shapes, exist on successive stages of rank, withmore or less striking demarcations of endowment, and finally fallback again, as to their physical constituents, into the inorganicstuff from which they grew. This mysterious organizing Power, pushing its animate and builded receptacles up to the level ofvegetation, 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 Powercreates the world of animals. And so, on the still higher level ofreason and its concomitants, it creates the world of men. In aword, the great general fact is that an unknown Power call it whatwe may, Nature, Vital Force, or God creates, on the various planesof its exercise, different families of organized beings. Secondly, a more special fact is, that when we have overleaped the mysteryof 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 theobserved phenomena an indefensible hypothesis that the error oftraduction is obtained. We observe that human beings are begottenby a deposit of germs through the generative process. To affirmthat these germs are transmitted down the generations from theoriginal progenitor of each race, in whom they all existed atfirst, is an unwarranted assertion and involves absurdities. It isrefuted both by Geoffrey St. Hilaire's famous experiments on eggs, and by the crossing of species. 12 In opposition to thistheological figment, observation and science require the beliefthat each being is endowed independently with a germ formingpower. Organic life requires three things: a fruitful germ; a quickeningimpulse; a nourishing medium. Science plainly shows us that thisprimal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of thecontents of a sperm cell with those of a germ cell; that thisdynamic start is imparted from the life force of the parents; andthat 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 theformative power of the new organism comes from, or at least iswholly conditioned by, the parent organism, should be believed, because it is the obvious conclusion, against which there isnothing to militate. That the soul of the child comes in some wayfrom the soul of the parent, or is stamped by it, is also impliedby the normal resemblance of children to parents, not more inbodily form than in spiritual idiosyncrasies. This fact alonefurnishes the proper qualification to the acute and significantlines of the Platonizing poet: "Wherefore who thinks from souls new souls to bring, The same let presse the sunne beames in his fistAnd squeeze out drops of light, or strongly wringThe rainbow till it die his hands, well prest. " "That which is born of the flesh is flesh: that which is born ofthe spirit is spirit. " As the body of the child is the derivativeof a germ elaborated in the body of the parent, so the soul of thechild is the derivative of a developing impulse of power impartedfrom the soul of the parent. And as the body is sustained byabsorbing nutrition from matter, so the soul is sustained byassimilating the spiritual substances of the invisible kingdom. The most ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consummateplant whose blossom is man's mind. This representation is notmaterialism; for spirit belongs to a different sphere and is thesubject of different predicates from matter, though equally undera constitution of laws. Nor does this view pretend to explain whatis inherently transcendent: it leaves the creation of the soulwithin as wide a depth and margin of mystery as ever. Neither isthis mode of exposing the problem atheistic. It refers the formsof life, all growths, all souls, to the indefinable Power thatworks everywhere, creates each thing, vivifies, governs, andcontains the universe. And, however that Power be named, is it notGod? And thus we still reverently hold that it is God's own hands"That reach through nature, moulding men. " The ancient heroes ofGreece and India were fond of tracing their genealogy up directlyto their deities, and were proud to deem that in guarding them thegods stooped to watch over a race of kings, a puissant andimmortal stock, "Whose glories stream'd from the same clond girt fountsWhence their own dawn'd upon the infant world. " After all the researches that have been made, we yet find thesecret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomlessmysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth tothe Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythicalepochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity ofskepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this moderntime, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder andsorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fearenough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit usrarely, in the illimitable visions that emancipate us often, inthe unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds, enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies ofa super earthly destiny whose splendors already break through theclouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains oftime in which our spirits here sit pavilioned. Augustine pointedly observes, "It is no evil that the origin ofthe soul remains obscure, if only its redemption be madecertain. "13 Non est periculum si origo animoe lateat, dumredemptio clareat. No matter how humanity originates, if itsobject be to produce fruit, and that fruit be immortal souls. Whenour organism has perfected its intended product, willingly will welet the decaying body return into the ground, if so be we areassured that the ripened spirit is borne into the heavenly garner. Let us, in close, reduce the problem of the soul's origin to itslast terms. The amount of force in the universe is uniform. 14Action and reaction being equal, no new creation of force ispossible: only its directions, deposits, and receptacles may bealtered. No combination of physical processes can produce apreviously non existent subject: it can only initiate themodification, development, assimilation, of realities already inbeing. Something cannot come out of nothing. The quickeningformation of a man, therefore, implies the existence, first, of amaterial germ, the basis of the body; secondly, of a power toimpart to that germ a dynamic impulse, in other words, to depositin it a spirit atom, or monad of life force. Now, the fresh bodyis originally a detached product of the parent body, as an appleis the detached product of a tree. So the fresh soul is atransmitted force imparted by the parent soul, either directlyfrom itself, or else conditioned by it and drawn from the groundlife of nature, the creative power of God. If filial soul bebegotten by procession and severance of conscious force fromparental soul, the spiritual resemblance of offspring andprogenitors is clearly explained. This phenomenon is also equallywell explained if the parent soul, so called, be a die strikingthe creative substance of the universe into individual form. Thelatter supposition seems, upon the whole, the more plausible andscientific. Generation is a reflex condition moving the life basisof the world to produce a soul, as a physical impression moves thesoul to produce a perception. 15 But, however deep the mystery of the soul's origin, whatever ourconclusion in regard to it, let us not forget that the inmostessence and verity of the soul is conscious power; and that allpower defies annihilation. It is an old declaration that whatbegins in time must end in time; and with the metaphysical shearsof that notion more than once the burning faith in eternal lifehas been snuffed out. Yet how obvious is its sophistry! A beingbeginning in time need not cease in time, if the Power whichoriginated it intends and provides for its perpetuity. And thatsuch is the Creative intention for man appears from the fact thatthe grand forms of belief in all ages issuing from his mentalorganization have borne the stamp of an expected immortality. Ourideas may disappear, but they are always recoverable. If the soulsof 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 phasesof nature as to lose hold on indestructible centres ofpersonality, should beware lest he lose the motive which propelsman to begin here, by virtue and culture, to climb that ladder oflife whose endless sides are affections, but whose discrete roundsare 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 nearlyevery literature death has been personified, while no kindredprosopopoeia of life is anywhere to be found. With the Greeks, Thanatos was a god; with the Romans, Mors was a goddess: but nostatue was ever moulded, no altar ever raised, to Zoe or Vita. Atfirst thought, we should anticipate the reverse of this; but, intruth, the fact is quite naturally as it is. Life is a continuousprocess; and any one who makes the effort will find how difficultit is to conceive of it as an individual being, with distinctiveattributes, functions, and will. It is an inward possession whichwe familiarly experience, and in the quiet routine of custom wefeel no shock of surprise at it, no impulse to give it imaginativeshape and ornament. On the contrary, death is an impendingoccurrence, something which we anticipate and shudder at, something advancing toward us in time to strike or seize us. Itsexternality to our living experience, its threatening approach, the mystery and alarm enwrapping it, are provocative conditionsfor fanciful treatment, making personifications inevitable. With the Old Aryan race of India, death is Yama, the soul of thefirst man, departed to be the king of the subterranean realm ofthe subsequent dead, and returning to call after him each of hisdescendants in turn. To the good he is mild and lovely, but to theimpious he is clad in terror and acts with severity. The purelyfanciful character of this thought is obvious; for, according toit, death was before death, since Yama himself died. Yama does notreally represent death, but its arbiter and messenger. He is theruler over the dead, who himself carries the summons to eachmortal to become his subject. In the Hebrew conception, death was a majestic angel, namedSammael, standing in the court of heaven, and flying thence overthe earth, armed with a sword, to obey the behests of God. TheTalmudists developed and dressed up the thought with many details, half sublime, half fantastic. He strides through the world at astep. From the soles of his feet to his shoulders he is full ofeyes. Every person in the moment of dying sees him; and at thesight the soul retreats, running through all the limbs, as ifasking permission to depart from them. From his naked sword fallthree drops: one pales the countenance, one destroys the vitality, one causes the body to decay. Some Rabbins say he bears a cup fromwhich the dying one drinks, or that he lets fall from the point ofhis sword a single acrid drop upon the sufferer's tongue: this iswhat is called "tasting the bitterness of death. " Here again, wesee, it is not strictly death that is personified. The embodimentis 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, butof God's decree coming to the fated individual who is to die. The Greeks sometimes depicted death and sleep as twin boys, oneblack, one white, borne slumbering in the arms of their mother, night. In this instance the phenomenon of dissolvingunconsciousness which falls on mortals, abstractly generalized inthe mind, is then concretely symbolized. It is a bold and happystroke of artistic genius; but it in no way expresses or suggeststhe scientific facts of actual death. There is also a classicrepresentation of death as a winged boy with a pensive brow andan inverted torch, a butterfly at his feet. This beautiful image, with its affecting accompaniments, conveys to the beholder notthe verity, nor an interpretation, of death, but the sentimentsof the survivors in view of their bereavement. The sad brow denotesthe grief of the mourner, the winged insect the disembodiedpsyche, the reversed torch the descent of the soul to the underworld; but the reality of death itself is nowhere hinted. The Romans give descriptions of death as a female figure in darkrobes, with black wings, with ravenous teeth, hovering everywhere, darting here and there, eager for prey. Such a view is apersonification of the mysteriousness, suddenness, inevitableness, and fearfulness, connected with the subject of death in men'sminds, rather than of death itself. These thoughts are groupedinto an imaginary being, whose sum of attributes are thenignorantly both associated with the idea of the unknown cause andconfounded 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 withthe accidents of the subject, the unexpectedness of the fatalblow, the treacherous springing of the trap, leaving the root ofthe matter untouched. The circumstances of the mortal hour areinfinitely varied, the heart of the experience is unchangeably thesame: there are a thousand modes of dying, but there is only onedeath. Ever so complete an exhibition of the occasions andaccompaniments of an event is no explanation of what the inmostreality of the event is. The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darklysweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrapped in itssable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination broodingnot so much on the distinct phenomena of an individual case as onthe melancholy mystery of the disappearance of men from thefamiliar places that knew them once but miss them now. In asomewhat kindred manner, the startling magnificence of the sketchin the Apocalypse, of death on the pale horse, is a product ofpure imagination meditating on the wholesale slaughter which wasto deluge the earth when God's avenging judgments fell upon theenemies of the Christians. But to consider this murderous warrioron his white charger as literally death, would be as erroneous asto imagine the bare armed executioner and the guillotine to bethemselves the death which they inflict. No more appalling pictureof death has been drawn than that by Milton, whose dire image hasthis stroke of truth in it, that its adumbrate formlessnesstypifies the disorganizing force which reduces all cunningly builtbodies of life to the elemental wastes of being. The incestuousand mistreated progeny of Sin is thus delineated: "The shape, If shape it might be call'd that shape had noneDistinguishable 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 headThe likeness of a kingly crown had on. " But the most common personification of death is as a skeletonbrandishing a dart; and then he is called the grisly king ofterrors; and people tremble at the thought of him, as children doat the name of a bugbear in the dark. What sophistry this is! Itis as if we should identify the trophy with the conqueror, thevestiges left in the track of a traveller with the travellerhimself. Death literally makes a skeleton of man; so manmetaphorically makes a skeleton of Death! All theserepresentations of death, however beautiful, or pathetic, orhorrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleadinganalogies, arbitrary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on afirm hold of realities, insight of truth, and philosophicalanalysis. They are all to be brushed aside as phantoms ofnightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostlyrested, hitherto, on no veritable foundation of science, but on avisionary 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 asa Hamadryad, the moving trunk and limbs her undulating form andbeckoning arms, the drooping boughs her hair, the rustling foliageher voice. A modern poet, endowed with the same strength ofsympathy, but acquainted with vegetable chemistry, might personifysap as a pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots andveins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descendingthrough the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So thepersonifications of death in literature, thus far, give us nopenetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acutedefinition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, oraccident, or emotion, associated with it. There are in popular usage various metaphors to express what ismeant by death. The principal ones are, extinction of the vitalspark, departing, expiring, cutting the thread of life, giving upthe ghost, falling asleep. These figurative modes of speech springfrom extremely imperfect correspondences. Indeed, the unlikenessesare more important and more numerous than the likenesses. They aresimply artifices to indicate what is so deeply obscure andintangible. They do not lay the secret bare, nor furnish us anyaid in reaching to the true essence of the question. Moreover, several of them, when sharply examined, involve a fatal error. Forexample, upon the admitted supposition that in every case of dyingthe soul departs from the body, still, this separation of the soulfrom the body is not what constitutes death. Death is the state ofthe body when the soul has left it. An act is distinct from itseffects. We must, therefore, turn from the literary inquiry to themetaphysical and scientific method, to gain any satisfactory ideaand 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 sounreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when heis. "1 This paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear issusceptible of quite lucid interpretation and defence. For deathis, 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 personifythe difference as death. Death, strictly analyzed, is only thisabstract conceit or metaphysical nonentity. Death, therefore, being but a conception in the mind of a living person, when thatperson dies death ceases to be at all. And thus the realization ofdeath is the death of death. He annihilates himself, dying withthe dart he drives. Having in this manner disposed of thepersonality or entity of death, it remains as an effect, an event, a state. Accordingly, the question next arises, What is death whenconsidered in this its true aspect? A positive must be understood before its related negative can beintelligible. Bichat defined life as the sum of functions by whichdeath is resisted. It is an identical proposition in verbaldisguise, with the fault that it makes negation affirmation, passiveness action. Death is not a dynamic agency warring againstlife, but simply an occurrence. Life is the operation of anorganizing force producing an organic form according to an idealtype, and persistently preserving that form amidst the incessantmolecular activity and change of its constituent substance. Thatoperation of the organic force which thus constitutes life is acontinuous process of waste, casting off the old exhausted matter, and of replacement by assimilation of new material. The close ofthis process of organific metamorphosis and desquamation is death, whose finality is utter decomposition, restoring all the bodilyelements to the original inorganic conditions from which they weretaken. The organic force with which life begins constrainschemical affinity to work in special modes for the formation ofspecial products: when it is spent or disappears, chemicalaffinity is at liberty to work in its general modes; and that isdeath. "Life is the co ordination of actions; the imperfection ofthe co ordination is disease, its arrest is death. " In otherwords, "life is the continuous adjustment of relations in anorganism with relations in its environment. " Disturb thatadjustment, and you have malady; destroy it, and you have death. Life is the performance of functions by an organism; death is theabandonment of an organism to the forces of the universe. Nofunction can be performed without a waste of the tissue throughwhich it is performed: that waste is repaired by the assimilationof fresh nutriment. In the balancing of these two actions lifeconsists. 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 andintegration 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 thebugbears named death are but poor phantoms of the frightened andchildish mind. Life consisting in the constant differentiation of the tissues bythe action of oxygen, and their integration from the blastemafurnished by the blood, why is not the harmony of these processespreserved forever? Why should the relation between the integrationand disintegration going on in the human organism ever fall out ofcorrespondence with the relation between the oxygen and foodsupplied from its environment? That is to say, whence originatedthe sentence of death upon man? Why do we not live immortally aswe are? The current reply is, we die because our first parentsinned. 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 mustconsider this theory a little. The narrative in Genesis, of the creation of man and of the eventsin the Garden of Eden, cannot be traced further back than to thetime of Solomon, three thousand years after the allegedoccurrences it describes. This portion of the book of Genesis, ashas long been shown, is a distinct document, marked by manypeculiarities, which was inserted in its present place by thecompiler of the elder Hebrew Scriptures somewhere between sevenand ten centuries before Christ. 3 Ewald has fully demonstratedthat the book of Genesis consists of many separate fragmentarydocuments of different ages, arranged together by a comparativelylate hand. Among the later of these pieces is the account of theprimeval pair in paradise. Grotefend argues, with much force andvariety of evidence, that this story was derived from a far moreancient legend book, only fragments of which remained when thefinal collection was made of this portion of the Old Testament. 4Many scholars have thought the account was not of Hebrew origin, but was borrowed from the literary traditions of some earlierOriental nation. Rosenmuller, Von Bohlen, and others, say it bearsunmistakable relationship to the Zendavesta which tells howAhriman, the old Serpent, beguiled the first pair into sin andmisery. These correspondences, and also that between the tree oflife and the Zoroastrian plant hom, which gives life and willproduce the resurrection, are certainly striking. Buttmann sees inGod's declaration to Adam, "Behold, I have given you for foodevery herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is fruit bearingseed, " traces of a prohibition of animal food. This was not thevestige of a Hebrew usage, but the vegetarian tradition of somesect eschewing meat, a tradition drawn from South Asia, whence thefathers of the Hebrew race came. 5 Gesenius says, "Many things inthis narrative were drawn from older Asiatic tradition. " 6 Knobelalso affirms that numerous matters in this relation were derivedfrom traditions of East Asian nations. 7 Still, it is not necessaryto suppose that the writer of the account in Genesis borrowed anything from abroad. The Hebrew may as well have originated suchideas as anybody else. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, theChaldeans, the Persians, the Etruscans, have kindred narrativesheld as most ancient and sacred. 8 The Chinese, the SandwichIslanders, the North American Indians, also have their legends ofthe origin and altered fortunes of the human race. Theresemblances between many of these stories are better accountedfor by the intrinsic similarities of the subject, of the mind, ofnature, and of mental action, than by the supposition ofderivation from one another. Regarding the Hebrew narrative as an indigenous growth, then, howshall we explain its origin, purport, and authority? Of course wecannot receive it as a miraculous revelation conveying infallibletruth. The Bible, it is now acknowledged, was not given in theprovidence 3 Tuch, Kommentar uber Genesis, s. Xcviii. 4 Zur altesten Sagenpoesie des Orients. Zeitschrift der deutschenMorgenlandischen 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 operationof organic forces, but to help educate men in morality and piety. It is a religious, not a scientific, work. Some unknown Hebrewpoet, in the early dawn of remembered time, knowing littlemetaphysics and less science, musing upon the fortunes of man, hiswickedness, sorrow, death, and impressed with an instinctiveconviction that things could not always have been so, castingabout for some solution of the dim, pathetic problem, at laststruck 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 ownhands God moulds from earth an image in his own likeness, breatheslife into it, and new made man moves, lord of the scene, and liftshis face, illuminated with soul, in submissive love to hisCreator. Endowed with free will, after a while he violated hisMaker's command: the divine displeasure was awakened, punishmentensued, and so rushed in the terrible host of ills under which wesuffer. The problem must early arise: the solution is, to acertain stage of thought, at once the most obvious and the mostsatisfactory conceivable. It is the truth. Only it is cast inimaginative, not scientific, form, arrayed in emblematic, notliteral, garb. The Greeks had a lofty poem by some early unknownauthor, setting forth how Prometheus formed man of clay andanimated him with fire from heaven, and how from Pandora's box thehorrid crew of human vexations were let into the world. The twonarratives, though most unequal in depth and dignity, belong inthe same literary and philosophical category. Neither was intendedas a plain record of veritable history, each word a naked fact, but as a symbol of its author's thoughts, each phrase themetaphorical dress of a speculative idea. Eichhorn maintains, with no slight plausibility, that the wholeaccount of the Garden of Eden was derived from a series ofallegorical pictures which the author had seen, and which hetranslated from the language of painting into the language ofwords. At all events, we must take the account as symbolic, asuccession of figurative expressions. Many of the best minds havealways so considered it, from Josephus to Origen, from Ambrose toKant. What, then, are the real thoughts which the author of thisHebrew poem on the primal condition of man meant to convey beneathhis legendary forms of imagery? These four are the essential ones. First, that God created man; secondly, that he created him in astate 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 hisblessed condition, beneath a load of retributive ills. Thecomposition shows the characteristics of a philosopheme or a myth, a scheme of conceptions deliberately wrought out to answer aninquiry, a story devised to account for an existing fact orcustom. The picture of God performing his creative work in sixdays and resting on the seventh, may have been drawn after theseptenary division of time and the religious separation of theSabbath, to explain and justify that observance. The creation ofEve out of the side of Adam was either meant by the author as anallegoric illustration that the love of husband and wife is themost powerful of social bonds, or as a pure myth seeking toexplain the incomparable cleaving together of husband and wife bythe entirely poetic supposition that the first woman was taken outof the first man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. All earlyliteratures teem with exemplifications of this process, aspontaneous secretion by the imagination to account for somepresented phenomenon. Or perhaps this part of the relation"and he called her woman [manness], because she was takenout of man" may be an instance of those etymological myths withwhich ancient literature abounds. Woman is named Isha because shewas taken out of man, whose name is Ish. The barbarous treatmentthe record under consideration has received, the utterbaselessness of it in the light of truth as foundation for literalbelief, find perhaps no fitter exposure than in the fact that formany centuries it was the prevalent faith of Christendom thatevery woman has one rib more than man, a permanent memorial of theDivine theft from his side. Unquestionably, there are many goodpersons now who, if Richard Owen should tell them that man has thesame number of ribs as woman, would think of the second chapter ofGenesis and doubt his word! There is no reason for supposing the serpent in this recital to beintended as a representative of Satan. The earliest trace of suchan interpretation is in the Wisdom of Solomon, an anonymous andapocryphal book composed probably a thousand years later. What issaid of the snake is the most plainly mythical of all theportions. What caused the snake to crawl on his belly in the dust, while other creatures walk on feet or fly with wings? Why, thesly, winding creature, more subtle, more detestable, than anybeast of the field, deceived the first woman; and this is hispunishment! Such was probably the mental process in the writer. Toseek a profound and true theological dogma in such a statement isas absurd as to seek it in the classic myth that the lapwing withhis sharp beak chases the swallow because he is the descendant ofthe enraged Tereus who pursued poor Progne with a drawn sword. Or, to cite a more apposite case, as well might we seek a reliablehistorical narrative in the following Greek myth. Zeus once gaveman a remedy against old age. He put it on the back of an ass andfollowed on foot. It being a hot day, the ass grew thirsty, andwould drink at a fount which a snake guarded. The cunning snakeknew what precious burden the ass bore, and would not, except atthe price of it, let him drink. He obtained the prize; but withit, as a punishment for his trick, he incessantly suffers theass's thirst. Thus the snake, casting his skin, annually renewshis youth, while man is borne down by old age. 9 In all these casesthe mental action is of the same kind in motive, method, andresult. The author of the poem contained in the third chapter of Genesisdoes not say that man was made immortal. The implication plainlyis that he was created mortal, taken from the dust and naturallyto return again to the dust. But by the power of God a tree wasprovided whose fruit would immortalize its partakers. The penaltyof Adam's sin was directly, not physical death, but being forcedin the sweat of his brow to wring his subsistence from the sterileground cursed for his sake; it was indirectly literal death, inthat 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. " Hewas therefore, according to the narrative, made originally subjectto death; but an immortalizing antidote was prepared for him, which he forfeited by his transgression. That the writer made useof the trees of life and knowledge as embellishing allegories ismost 9 Alian, no Nat. Animal. , lib. Vi. Cap. 51. probable. But, if not, he was not the only devout poet who, in theearly times, with sacred reverence believed the wonders theinspiring muse gave him as from God. It is not clear from theBiblical record that Adam was imagined the first man. On thecontrary, the statement that Cain was afraid that those who methim would kill him, also that he went to the land of Nod and tooka wife and builded a city, implies that there was another andolder race. Father Peyrere wrote a book, called "Praadamita, " morethan two hundred years ago, pointing out this fact and arguingthat there really were men before Adam. If science shouldthoroughly establish the truth of this view, religion need notsuffer; but the common theology, inextricably built upon andintertangled with the dogma of "original sin, " would be hopelesslyruined. But the leaders in the scientific world will not on thataccount shut their eyes nor refuse to reason. Christians shouldfollow 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 appearancein Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and punishmentof the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it issubsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time ofChrist. Had it been all along credited in its literal sense, as adivine revelation, could this be so? Philo Judaus gives it athoroughly figurative meaning. He says, "Adam was created mortalin body, immortal in mind. Paradise is the soul, piety the tree oflife, discriminative wisdom the tree of knowledge; the serpent ispleasure, the flaming sword turning every way is the sun revolvinground the world. "10 Jesus himself never once alludes to Adam or toany part of the story of Eden. In the whole New Testament thereare but two important references to the tradition, both of whichare by Paul. He says, in effect, "As through the sin of Adam allare condemned unto death, so by the righteousness of Christ allshall be justified unto life. " It is not a guarded doctrinalstatement, but an unstudied, rhetorical illustration of theaffiliation of the sinful and unhappy generations of the past withtheir offending progenitor, Adam, of the believing and blessedfamily of the chosen with their redeeming head, Christ. He doesnot use the word death in the Epistle to the Romans prevailinglyin the narrow sense of physical dissolution, but in a broad, spiritual sense, as appears, for example, in these instances: "Tobe carnally minded is death;" "The law of the spirit of life inChrist hath made me free from the law of sin and death. " For thespiritually minded were not exempt from bodily death. Paul himselfdied the bodily death. His idea of the relations of Adam andChrist to humanity is more clearly expressed in the other passagealready alluded to. It is in the Epistle to the Corinthians, andappears to be this. The first man, Adam, was of the earth, earthy, the head and representative of a corruptible race whose flesh andblood were never meant to inherit the kingdom of God. The secondman, Christ the Lord, soon to return from heaven, was a quickeningspirit, head and representative of a risen spiritual race for whomis prepared the eternal inheritance of the saints in light. As bythe first man came death, whose germ is transmitted with theflesh, so by the second man comes the resurrection of the dead, whose type is seen in his glorified ascension from Hades toheaven. "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 hasentailed, what otherwise would not have been known, moral deathand a disembodied descent to the under world. But the gospel ofChrist, and his resurrection as the first fruits of them thatslept, proclaim to all those that are his, at his speedy coming, akindred deliverance from the lower gloom, an investiture withspiritual bodies, and an admission into the kingdom of God. According to Paul, then, physical death is not the retributiveconsequence of Adam's sin, but is the will of the Creator in thelaw of nature, the sowing of terrestrial bodies for the gatheringof celestial bodies, the putting off of the image of the earthyfor the putting on of the image of the heavenly. The specialty ofthe marring and punitive interference of sin in the economy is, inaddition to the penalties in moral experience, the interpolation, between the fleshly "unclothing" and the spiritual "clothingupon, " of the long, disembodied, subterranean residence, from thedescent of Abel into its palpable solitude to the ascent of Christout of its multitudinous world. From Adam, in the flesh, humanitysinks into the grave realm; from Christ, in the spirit, it shallrise into heaven. Had man remained innocent, death, considered aschange of body and transition to heaven, would still have been hisportion; but all the suffering and evil now actually associatedwith death would not have been. Leaving the Scriptures, the first man appears in literature, inthe history of human thought on the beginning of our race, inthree forms. There is the Mythical Adam, the embodiment ofpoetical musings, fanciful conceits, and speculative dreams; thereis the Theological Adam, the central postulate of a group ofdogmas, the support of a fabric of controversial thought, the layfigure to fill out and wear the hypothetical dresses of adoctrinal system; and there is the Scientific Adam, the firstspecimen of the genus man, the supposititious personage who, asthe earliest product, on this grade, of the Creative organic forceor Divine energy, commenced the series of human generations. Thefirst is a hypostatized legend, the second a metaphysicalpersonification, the third a philosophical hypothesis. The firstis an attractive heap of imaginations, the next a dialectic massof dogmatisms, the last a modest set of theories. Philo says God made Adam not from any chance earth, but from acarefully selected portion of the finest and most sifted clay, andthat, as being directly created by God, he was superior to allothers generated by men, the generations of whom deteriorate ineach remove from him, as the attraction of a magnet weakens fromthe iron ring it touches along a chain of connected rings. TheRabbins say Adam was so large that when he lay down he reachedacross the earth, and when standing his head touched thefirmament: after his fall he waded through the ocean, Orion like. Even a French Academician, Nicolas Fleurion, held that Adam wasone hundred and twenty three feet and nine inches in height. Allcreatures except the angel Eblis, as the Koran teaches, madeobeisance to him. Eblis, full of envy and pride, refused, and wasthrust into hell by God, where he began to plot the ruin of thenew race. One effect of the forbidden fruit he ate was to causerotten teeth in his descendants. He remained in Paradise but oneday. After he had eaten from the prohibited tree, Eve gave of thefruit to the other creatures in Eden, and they all ate of it, andso became mortal, with the sole exception of the phoenix, whorefused to taste it, and consequently remained immortal. The Talmud teaches that Adam would never have died had he notsinned. The majority of the Christian fathers and doctors, fromTertullian and Augustine to Luther and Calvin, have maintained thesame opinion. It has been the orthodox that is, the prevailingdoctrine of the Church, affirmed by the Synod at Carthage in theyear four hundred and eighteen, and by the Council of Trent in theyear fifteen hundred and forty five. All the evils which afflictthe world, both moral and material, are direct results of Adam'ssin. He contained all the souls of men in himself; and they allsinned in him, their federal head and legal representative. Whenthe fatal fruit was plucked, "Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing throughall her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost. " Earthquakes, tempests, pestilences, poverty, war, the endlessbrood of distress, ensued. For then were "Turn'd askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and moreFrom the sun's axle, and with labor push'd Oblique the centricglobe. " Adam's transcendent faculties and gifts were darkened anddiminished in his depraved posterity, and all base propensitieslet loose to torment, confuse, and degrade them. We can scarcelyform a conception of the genius, the beauty, the blessedness, ofthe first man, say the theologians in chorus. 11 Augustinedeclares, "The most gifted of our time must be considered, whencompared with Adam in genius, as tortoises to birds in speed. "Adam, writes Dante, "was made from clay, accomplished with everygift that life can teem with. " Thomas Aquinas teaches that "he wasimmortal by grace though not by nature, had universal knowledge, fellowshipped with angels, and saw God. " South, in his famoussermon on "Man the Image of God, " after an elaborate panegyric ofthe wondrous majesty, wisdom, peacefulness, and bliss of manbefore the fall, exclaims, "Aristotle was but the rubbish of anAdam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise!" Jean Paul hasamusingly burlesqued these conceits. "Adam, in his state ofinnocence, possessed a knowledge of all the arts and sciences, universal and scholastic history, the several penal and othercodes of law, and all the old dead languages, as well as theliving. He was, as it were, a living Pegasus and Pindus, a movablelodge of sublime light, a royal literary society, a pocket seat ofthe Muses, and a short golden age of Louis the Fourteenth!" Adam has been called the Man without a Navel, because, not beingborn of woman, there could be no umbilical cord to cut. Thethought goes deep. In addition to the mythico theological picturesof the mechanical creation and superlative condition of the firstman, two forms of statement have been advanced by thoughtfulstudents of nature. One is the theory of chronological progressivedevelopment; the other is the theory of the 11 Strauss gives a multitude of apposite quotations in hisChristliche Glaubenslehre, band i. S. 691, sect. 51, ff. simultaneous creation of organic families of different species ortypical forms. The advocate of the former goes back along theinterminable vistas of geologic time, tracing his ancestral linethrough the sinking forms of animal life, until, with the aid of amicroscope, he sees a closed vesicle of structureless membrane;and this he recognises as the scientific Adam. This theory hasbeen brought into fresh discussion by Mr. Darwin in his rich andstriking work on the Origin of Species12 The other view contrastswidely with this, and is not essentially different from theaccount in Genesis. It shows God himself creating by regularmethods, in natural materials, not by a vicegerent law, not withthe anthropomorphitic hands of an external potter. Every organizedfabric, however complex, originates in a single physiologicalcell. Every individual organism from the simple plant known as redsnow to the oak, from the zoophyte to man is developed from such acell. This is unquestionable scientific knowledge. The phenomenalprocess of organic advancement is through growth of the cell byselective appropriation of material, self multiplication of thecell, chemical transformations of the pabulum of the cell, endowment of the muscular and nervous tissues produced by thosetransformations with vital and psychical properties. But the essence of the problem lies in the question, Why does oneof these simple cells become a cabbage, another a rat, another awhale, another a man? Within the limits of known observationduring historic time, every organism yields seed or bears progenyafter its own kind. Between all neighboring species there areimpassable, discrete chasms. The direct reason, therefore, why onecell stops in completion at any given vegetable stage, another ata certain animal stage, is that its producing parent was thatvegetable or that animal. Now, going back to the first individualof each kind, which had no determining parent like itself, thetheory of the gradually ameliorating development of one speciesout of the next below it is one mode of solving the problem. Another mode more satisfactory at least to theologians and theirallies is to conclude that God, the Divine Force, by whom the lifeof the universe is given, made the world after an ideal plan, including a systematic arrangement of all the possiblemodifications. This plan was in his thought, in the unity of allits parts, from the beginning; and the animate creation is theexecution of its diagrams in organic life. Instead of the linealextraction of the complicated scheme out of one cell, there hasbeen, from epoch to epoch, the simultaneous production of allincluded in one of its sections. The Creator, at his chosen times, calling into existence a multitude of cells, gave each one theamount and type of organic force which would carry it to thedestined grade and form. In this manner may have originated, atthe 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'dThe tawny lion, pawing to get freeHis 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 byHerbert Spencer. See, in his volume of Essays, No. 2 of theHaythorne Papers. Also see Oken, Entstehung des ersten Menechen, Isis, 1819, ss. 1117-1123. Each creature, therefore, would be distinct from others from thefirst. "Man, though rising from not man, came forth sharplydefined. " The races thus originated in their initiativerepresentatives by the creative power of God, thenceforth possessin themselves the power, each one, in the generative act, to putits typical dynamic stamp upon the primordial cells of itsimmediate descendants. Adam, then, was a wild man, cast infavoring conditions of climate, endowed with the same faculties asnow, only not in so high a degree. For, by his peculiar power offorming habits, accumulating experience, transmitting acquirementsand tendencies, he has slowly risen to his present state with allits 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 itmatters not at all whether there were only one Adam and Eve, orwhether each separate race had its own Adams and Eves, 13 notmerely a solitary pair, but simultaneous hundreds, man, physicallyconsidered, is indistinguishably included in the creative planunder the same laws and forces, and visibly subject to the samedestination, as the lower animals. He starts with a cell as theydo, grows to maturity by assimilative organization and endowingtransformation of foreign nutriment as they do, his life is acontinuous process of waste and repair of tissues as theirs is, and there is, from the scientific point of view, no conceivablereason why he should not be subject to physical death as they are. They have always been subject to death, which, therefore, is anaboriginal constituent of the Creative plan. It has beenestimated, upon data furnished by scientific observation, thatsince the appearance of organic life on earth, millions of yearsago, animals enough have died to cover all the lands of the globewith their bones to the height of three miles. Consequently, thehistoric commencement of death is not to be found in the sin ofman. We shall discover it as a necessity in the first organic cellthat was ever formed. The spherule of force which is the primitive basis of a cellspends itself in the discharge of its work. In other words, "theamount of vital action which can be performed by each living cellhas a definite limit. " When that limit is reached, the exhaustedcell is dead. To state the fact differently: no function can beperformed without "the disintegration of a certain amount oftissue, whose components are then removed as effete by theexcretory processes. " This final expenditure on the part of a cellof its modification of force is the act of molecular death, thegerminal essence of all decay. That this organic law should rulein every living structure is a necessity inherent in the actualconditions of the creation. And wherever we look in the realm ofphysical man, even "from the red outline of beginning Adam" to theamorphous adipocere of the last corpse when fate's black curtainfalls on our race, we shall discern death. For death is the otherside of life. Life and death are the two hands with which theorganic power works. The threescore simple elements known to chemists die, that is, surrender their peculiar powers and properties, and enter into newcombinations to produce and support higher forms of life. Otherwise these inorganic elemental wastes would be all that thematerial 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 itsdevelopment, give up their independent life for the productionof a more exalted vegetable form. The formation of a perfectlyorganized plant is made possible only through the continuous dyingand replacement of its cells. Similarly, in the development of ananimal, the constituent cells die for the good of the wholecreature; and the more perfect the animal the greater thesubordination of the parts. The cells of the human body areincessantly dying, being borne off and replaced. The epidermis orscarf skin is made of millions of insensible scales, consisting offormer cells which have died in order with their dead bodies tobuild this guardian wall around the tender inner parts. Thus, death, operating within the individual, seen in the light ofnatural science, is a necessity, is purely a form of selfsurrendering beneficence, is, indeed, but a hidden and indirectprocess and completion of life. 14 And is not the death of the total organism just as needful, justas benignant, as the death of the component atoms? Is it not thesame law, still expressing the same meaning? The chemicalelementswherein individuality is wanting, as Wagner says, die thatvegetable bodies may live. Individual vegetable bodies die thatnew individuals of the species may live, and that they may supplythe conditions for animals to live. The individual beast dies thatother individuals of his species may live, and also for the goodof man. The plant lives by the elements and by other plants: theanimal lives by the elements, by the plants, and by other animals:man lives and reigns by the service of the elements, of theplants, and of the animals. The individual man dies if we maytrust the law of analogy for the good of his species, and that hemay furnish the conditions for the development of a higher lifeelsewhere. 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, theycould never have any other life than the present. The foregoingconsiderations, fathomed and appreciated, transform theinstitution of death from caprice and punishment into necessityand benignity. In the timid sentimentalist's view, death ishorrible. Nature unrolls the chart of organic existence, aconvulsed and lurid list of murderers, from the spider in thewindow to the tiger in the jungle, from the shark at the bottom ofthe sea to the eagle against the floor of the sky. As the perfumedfop, in an interval of reflection, gazes at the spectacle throughhis dainty eyeglass, the prospect swims in blood and glares withthe ghastly phosphorus of corruption, and he shudders withsickness. In the philosophical naturalist's view, the dyingpanorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents morepain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life and death wear thesolemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all isbalanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safelysoar the dove and the rainbow; out of the charnel blooms the roseto which the nightingale sings love; nor is there poison whichhelps not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation withnutriment for greater good and joy. By painting such pictures as that of a woman with "Sin" written onher forehead in great glaring letters, giving to Death a globeentwined by a serpent, or that of Death as a 14 Hermann Wagner, Der Tod, beleuchtet vom Standpunkte derNaturwissenschaften. skeleton, waving a black banner over the world and soundingthrough a trumpet, "Woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth!" byinterpreting the great event as punishment instead of fulfilment, extermination instead of transition, men have elaborated, in thefaith of their imaginations, a melodramatic death which naturenever made. Truly, to the capable observer, death bears the doubleaspect of necessity and benignity: necessity, because it is anultimate fact, as the material world is made, that, since organicaction implies expenditure of force, the modicum of force given toany physical organization must finally be spent; benignity, because a bodily immortality on earth would both prevent all thehappiness of perpetually rising millions and be an unspeakablecurse upon its possessors. The benevolence of death appears from this fact, that itboundlessly multiplies the numbers who can enjoy the prerogativesof life. It calls up ever fresh generations, with wondering eyesand eager appetites, to the perennial banquet of existence. HadAdam not sinned and been expelled from Paradise, some of theChristian Fathers thought, the fixed number of saints foreseen byGod would have been reached and then no more would have beenborn. 15 Such would have been the necessity, there being no death. But, bythe removal of one company as they grow tired and sated, room ismade for a new company to approach and enjoy the ever renewingspectacle and feast of the world. Thus all the delightful boonslife has, instead of being cooped within a little stale circle, are ceaselessly diffused and increased. Vivacious claimantsadvance, see what is to be seen, partake of what is furnished, aresatisfied, and retire; and their places are immediately taken byhungry successors. Thus the torch of life is passed briskly, withpicturesque and stimulating effect, along the manifold race ofrunning ages, instead of smouldering stagnantly forever in themoveless grasp of one. The amount of enjoyment, the quantity ofconscious experience, gained from any given exhibition by amillion persons to each of whom it is successively shown for onehour, is, beyond all question, immensely greater and keener thanone person could have from it in a million hours. The generationsof men seem like fire flies glittering down the dark lane ofHistory; but each swarm had its happy turn, fulfilled its hour, and rightfully gave way to its followers. The disinterestedbeneficence of the Creator ordains that the same plants, insects, men, shall not unsurrenderingly monopolize and stop the bliss ofbreath. Death is the echo of the voice of love reverberated fromthe limit of life. The cumulative fund of human experience, the sensitive affiliatingline of history, like a cerebral cord of personal identitytraversing the centuries, renders a continual succession ofgenerations equivalent to the endless existence of one generation;but with this mighty difference, that it preserves all the edgeand spice of novelty. For consider what would be the result ifdeath were abolished and men endowed with an earthly immortality. At first they might rejoice, and think their last, dreadest enemydestroyed. But what a mistake! In the first place, since none areto 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 hangupon 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, andgushing joys and hopes associated with the rearing of children, gone! What a stupendous fragment is stricken from the fabric ofthose enriching satisfactions which give life its truest value andits purest charm! Ages roll on. They see the same everlastingfaces, confront the same returning phenomena, engage in the sameworn out exercises, or lounge idly in the unchangeable conditionswhich bear no stimulant which they have not exhausted. Thousandsof years pass. They have drunk every attainable spring ofknowledge dry. Not a prize stirs a pulse. All pleasures, permutated till ingenuity is baffled, disgust them. No terrorstartles them. No possible experiment remains untried; nor isthere any unsounded fortune left. No dim marvels and boundlesshopes beckon them with resistless lures into the future. They haveno future. One everlasting now is their all. At last the incessantrepetition of identical phenomena, the unmitigated sameness ofthings, the eternal monotony of affairs, become unutterablyburdensome and horrible. Full of loathing and immeasurablefatigue, a weariness like the weight of a universe oppresses them;and what would they not give for a change! any thing to break thenightmare spell of ennui, to fling off the dateless flesh, todie, to pass into some unguessed realm, to lie down and sleepforever: 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 fundamentalalterations of his constitution and relations that he would nolonger 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 tous; for it enables us to be men. Without it there would neither behusband and wife, nor parent and child, nor family hearth andaltar; nor, indeed, would hardly any thing be as it is now. Theexistent phenomena of nature and the soul would comprise all. Andwhen the jaded individual, having mastered and exhausted thisfinite sum, looked in vain for any thing new or further, the worldwould be a hateful dungeon to him, and life an awful doom; and howgladly he would give all that lies beneath the sun's golden roundand top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region andstate of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and liedown forever in the attractive slumber of the grave! Withoutdeath, mankind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, no future, andin the present the oppression of an intolerable task with anaching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of deathcreate the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human racean earthly immortality, and you exclude them from every thinggreater and diviner than the earth affords. Who could consent tothat? Take away death, and a brazen wall girds in our narrow life, against which, if we remained men, we should dash and chafe in theclimax of our miserable longing, as the caged lion or eagle beatsagainst his bars. The gift of an earthly immortality conferred on a single person aboon which thoughtless myriads would clasp with frantic triumphwould prove, perhaps, a still more fearful curse than ifdistributed over the whole species. Retaining his human affections, how excruciating and remedilesshis grief must be, to be so cut off from all equal community ofexperience and destiny with mankind, to see all whom he loves, generation after generation, fading away, leaving him alone, toform new ties again to be dissolved, to watch his beloved onesgrowing old and infirm, while he stands without a change! His lovewould be left, in agony of melancholy grandeur, "a solitary angelhovering over a universe of tombs" on the tremulous wings ofmemory and grief, those wings incapacitated, by his madly covetedprerogative of deathlessness, ever to move from above the sad rowsof funereal urns. Zanoni, in Bulwer's magnificent conception, saysto Viola, "The flower gives perfume to the rock on whose breast itgrows. A little while, and the flower is dead; but the rock stillendures, the snow at its breast, the sunshine on its summit. " Adeathless individual in a world of the dying, joined with them byever bereaved affections, would be the wretchedest creatureconceivable. As no man ever yet prayed for any thing he would prayto be released, to embrace dear objects in his arms and float awaywith them to heaven, or even to lie down with them in the kindembrace of mother earth. And if he had no affections, but lived astoic existence, exempt from every sympathy, in impassivesolitude, he could not be happy, he would not be man: he must bean intellectual marble of thought or a monumental mystery of woe. Death, therefore, is benignity. When men wish there were no suchappointed event, they are deceived, and know not what they wish. Literature furnishes a strange and profound, though whollyunintentional, confirmation of this view. Every form in whichliterary genius has set forth the conception of an earthlyimmortality represents it as an evil. This is true even down toSwift's painful account of the Struldbrugs in the island ofLaputa. The legend of the Wandering Jew, 16 one of the mostmarvellous products of the human mind in imaginative literature, is terrific with its blazoned revelation of the contents of anendless life on earth. This story has been embodied, with greatvariety of form and motive, in more than a hundred works. Everyone is, without the writer's intention, a disguised sermon ofgigantic force on the benignity of death. As in classic fable poorTithon became immortal in the dawning arms of Eos only to lead ashrivelled, joyless, repulsive existence; and the fair young witchof Cuma had ample cause to regret that ever Apollo granted herrequest for as many years as she held grains of dust in her hand;and as all tales of successful alchemists or Rosicrucians concurin depicting the result to be utter disappointment and revulsionfrom the accursed prize; we may take it as evidence of aspontaneous conviction in the depths of human nature a convictionsure to be brought out whenever the attempt is made to describe inlife an opposite thought that death is benign for man as he isconstituted and related on earth. The voice of human nature speakstruth through the lips of Cicero, saying, at the close of hisessay on Old Age, "Quodsi non sumus immortales futuri, tamenexstingui homini suo tempore optabile est. " In a conversation at the house of Sappho, a discussion once aroseupon the question whether death was a blessing or an evil. Somemaintained, the former alternative; but Sappho victoriously closedthe debate by saying, If it were a blessing to die, the immortalgods would experience it. The gods live forever: therefore, deathis an evil. 17 The reasoning was plausible and brilliant. Yet itssophistry is complete. To men, conditioned as they are in thisworld, 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, byPaul Lacroix; trans. Into English by G. W. Thornbury. Grasse, Derewige 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 frightfulcalamity, is no reason why a heavenly eternity in the spiritwould be other than a blissful inheritance. Thus the remonstrance which may be fallaciously based on some ofthe foregoing considerations namely, that they would equally makeit appear that the immortality of man in any condition would beundesirable is met. A conclusion drawn from the facts of thepresent scene of things, of course, will not apply to a sceneinconceivably different. Those whose only bodies are their mindsmay be fetterless, happy, leading a wondrous life, beyond ourdeepest dream and farthest fancy, and eternally free from troubleor satiety. Death is to us, while we live, what we think it to be. If weconfront it with analytic and defiant eye, it is that nothingwhich ever ceases in beginning to be. If, letting thesuperstitious senses tyrannize over us and cow our better part ofman, we crouch before the imagination of it, it assumes the shapeof the skeleton monarch who takes the world for his empire, theelectric fluid for his chariot, and time for his sceptre. In thecontemplation of death, hitherto, fancy inspired by fear has beenby far too much the prominent faculty and impulse. The literatureof the subject is usually ghastly, appalling, and absurd, withpoint of view varying from that of the credulous Hindu, personifying death as a monster with a million mouths devouringall creatures and licking them in his flaming lips as a firedevours the moths or as the sea swallows the torrents, 18 to thatof the atheistic German dreamer, who converts nature into animmeasurable corpse worked by galvanic forces, and that of thebold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led tothe theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, andconstellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a deadorrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So theextravagant author of Festus says, "God tore the glory from the sun's broad brow And flung theflaming scalp away. " The subject should be viewed by the unclouded intellect, guided byserene faith, in the light of scientific knowledge. Then death isrevealed, first, as an organic necessity in the primordial lifecell; secondly, as the cessation of a given form of life in itscompletion; thirdly, as a benignant law, an expression of theCreator's love; fourthly, as the inaugurating condition of anotherform of life. What we are to refer to sin is all the seeminglawlessness and untimeliness of death. Had not men sinned, allwould reach a good age and pass away without suffering. Death isbenignant necessity; the irregularity and pain associated with itare an inherited punishment. Finally, it is a condition ofimprovement in life. Death is the incessant touch with which theartist, 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'sSpiritual survival through that overshadowed crisis than there isfor the brute's. And on grounds of sentiment man ought not toshrink from sharing his open future with these mute comrades. DesCartes and Malebranche taught that animals are mere machines, without souls, worked by God's arbitrary power. Swedenborg heldthat "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 theimmortality of all creatures. Coleridge defended the same idea. Agassiz, with much power andbeauty, advocates the thought that animals as well as men have afuture life. 20 The old traditions affirm that at least fourbeasts have been translated to heaven; namely, the ass that spoketo Balaam, the white foal that Christ rode into Jerusalem, thesteed Borak that bore Mohammed on his famous night journey, andthe dog that wakened the Seven Sleepers. To recognise, as Goethedid, brothers in the green wood and in the teeming air, tosympathize with all lower forms of life, and hope for them an openrange of limitless possibilities in the hospitable home of God, issurely more becoming to a philosopher, a poet, or a Christian, than that careless scorn which commonly excludes them from regardand contemptuously leaves them to annihilation. This subject hasbeen genially treated by Richard Dean in his "Essay on the FutureLife of Brutes. " But on moral and psychological grounds the distinction is vastbetween the dying man and the dying brute. Bretschneider, in abeautiful sermon on this point, specifies four particulars. Manforesees and provides for his death: the brute does not. Man dieswith unrecompensed merit and guilt: the brute does not. Man dieswith faculties and powers fitted for a more perfect state ofexistence: the brute does not. Man dies with the expectation ofanother life: the brute does not. Three contrasts may be added tothese. First, man desires to die amidst his fellows: the brutecreeps away by himself, to die in solitude. Secondly, man intershis dead with burial rites, rears a memorial over them, cherishesrecollections of them which often change his subsequent character:but who ever heard of a deer watching over an expiring comrade, adeer funeral winding along the green glades of the forest? Thebarrows of Norway, the mounds of Yucatan, the mummy pits ofMemphis, the rural cemeteries of our own day, speak the humanthoughts of sympathetic reverence and posthumous survival, typicalof something superior to dust. Thirdly, man often makes death anactive instead of a passive experience, his will as it is hisfate, a victory instead of a defeat. 21 As Mirabeau sank towardshis end, he ordered them to pour perfumes and roses on him, and tobring music; and so, with the air of a haughty conqueror, amidstthe volcanic smoke and thunder of reeling France, his giant spiritwent forth. The patriot is proud to lay his body a sacrifice onthe altar of his country's weal. The philanthropist rejoices tospend himself without pay in a noble cause, to offer up his lifein the service of his fellow men. Thousands of generous studentshave given their lives to science and clasped death amidst theirtrophied achievements. Who can count the confessors who havethought it bliss and glory to be martyrs for truth and God?Creatures capable of such deeds must inherit eternity. Theirtranscendent souls step from their rejected mansions through theblue gateway of the air to the lucid palace of the stars. Anymeaner allotment would be discordant and unbecoming their rank. Contemplations like these exorcise the spectre host of the brainand quell the horrid brood of fear. The noble purpose of selfsacrifice enables us to smile upon the grave, "as some sweetclarion'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 menschlichpersonlicher 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 morningstar of hope, the Hesper of the sinking flesh, the Phosphor ofthe rising soul. Let the night come, then: it shall be welcome. And, as we gird our loins to enter the ancient mystery, we willexclaim, with vanishing voice, to those we leave behind, "Though I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but fora time I press God's lamp Close to my breast: its splendor, soonor 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 theoriginating supports of the common belief in a future life; not toprobe the depth and test the value of the various grounds out ofwhich the doctrine grows, but only to give a descriptive sketch ofwhat they are, and a view of the process of growth. The objectionsurged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the questionof immortality, not to an illustrative statement of the suggestinggrounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficientinvestigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almostuniversal expectation of another life springs, and by whatinfluences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer inless than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection. The doctrine of a future life for man has been created by thecombined force of instinctive desire, analogical observation, prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These arethe four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes;or the four glasses through which it looks to see its eternalheritage. First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once withforeknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is nota 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 soulin its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is aninseparable element of his very entity. Crowned with free will, walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individualfaculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy, he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into thegeneral abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeatedwith a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse ofdanger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardianinstinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroythe body, necessitates the conception of an escape into anotherstate of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedilyconstruct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire firstfathers thought, and then thought woos belief. Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond allthings, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment ofdestined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature, with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena furtherdeveloped, significant sequels in other creatures' fates, whoseevolution and fulfilment may haply throw light on his own. Witheager vision and heart prompted imagination he scrutinizeswhatever appears related to his object. Seeing the snake cast itsold slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death manbut sheds his fleshly exuvia, while the spirit emerges, regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchreand commence its summer work; and straightway he hangs a goldenscarsbaus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. Aftervegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring thatbrings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreamsof some far off spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frostsof man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sownthrough ages in the great earth tomb shall shoot up in celestialshapes. On the moaning sea shore, weeping some dear friend, heperceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he latelysaw 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 hisdrooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangledore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunklow, shall mount on high. " Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which, grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneouslyburning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for athousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for amiraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, fromthe ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it woveits cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, untilat length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, awinged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in anew sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in thefulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes ofthis world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail throughheavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on thetombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizingobservation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for anexistence beyond death. Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread andupheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul'ssurvival and transference to another world, where its experiencedepends on conditions observed or violated here, conditionssomewhat within the control of a select class of men here, such adoctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, avast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight ofpriesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of statessubsidized. In most cases of this kind the asserted doctrine isplaced on the basis of a divine revelation, and must be implicitlyreceived. 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 organizedpriesthood has flourished, from primeval pagan India to modernpapal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egyptand the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gauland the Druidic conclave in the oak groves of Mona; from thereeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the massesfor souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches ofChristendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which hasprevailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of itspromulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people inthe authoritative dicta of their religious teachers. In all the leading nations of the earth, the doctrine of a futurelife is a tradition handed down from immemorial antiquity, embalmed in sacred books which are regarded as infalliblerevelations from God. Of course the thoughtless never think ofquestioning it; the reverent piously embrace it; all are educatedto receive it. In addition to the proclamation of a future life bythe sacred books and by the priestly hierarchies, it has also beenaffirmed by countless individual saints, philosophers, andprophets. Most persons readily accept it on trust from them as ademonstrated theory or an inspired knowledge of theirs. It isnatural for modest unspeculative minds, busied with worldly cares, to say, These learned sages, these theosophic seers, so much moregifted, educated, and intimate with the divine counsels and planthan we are, with so much deeper experience and purer insight thanwe have, must know the truth: we cannot in any other way do so wellas to follow their guidance and confide in their assertions. Accordingly, multitudes receive the belief in a life to come onthe authority of the world's intellectual and religious leaders. Fourthly, the belief in a future life results from philosophicalmeditation, and is sustained by rational proofs. 1 For thecompletion of the present outline, it now remains to give a briefexposition of these arguments. For the sake of convenience andclearness, we must arrange these reasonings in five classes;namely, the physiological, the analogical, the psychological, thetheological, and the moral. There is a group of considerations drawn from the phenomena of ourbodily organization, life and death, which compose thephysiological argument for the separate existence of the soul. Inthe first place, it is contended that the human organization, sowondrously vitalized, developed, and ruled, could not have grownup out of mere matter, but implies a pre existent mental entity, aspiritual force or idea, which constituted the primeval impulse, grouped around itself the organic conditions of our existence, andconstrained the material elements to the subsequent processes andresults, according to a prearranged plan. 2 This dynamic agent, this ontological cause, may naturally survive when the fleshlyorganization which it has built around itself dissolves. Itsindependence before the body began involves its independence afterthe body is ended. Stahl has especially illustrated in physiologythis idea of an independent soul monad. Secondly, as some potential being must have preceded our birth, toassimilate and construct the physical system, so the greatphenomena attending our conscious life necessitate, both to ourinstinctive apprehension and in our philosophical conviction, thedistinctive division of man into body and soul, tabernacle andtenant. The illustrious Boerhaave wrote a valuable dissertation onthe distinction of the mind from the body, which is to be foundamong his works. Every man knows that he dwells in the flesh butis not flesh. He is a free, personal mind, occupying and using amaterial body, but not identified with it. Ideas and passions ofpurely immaterial origin pervade every nerve with terrificintensity, and shake his encasing corporeity like an earthquake. Athought, a sentiment, a fancy, may prostrate him as effectually asa blow on his brain from a hammer. He wills to move a palsiedlimb: the soul is unaffected by the paralysis, but the musclesrefuse to obey his volition: the distinction between the personwilling and the instrument to be wielded is unavoidable. Thirdly, the fact of death itself irresistibly suggests theduality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizingmind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of theundreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in itschemical embrace. A moment ago that hand was uplifted to claspyours, intelligent accents were vocal on those 1 Wohlfarth, Triumph des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit undWiedersehen uber jeden Zweifel. Oporinus, Historia CriticaDoctrina 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! Itis impossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible powerhas been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle hasproduced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable somethingwhich has gone still exist? Its vanishing from our sensiblecognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuineevidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of anycreature are destroyed. 3 In the absence of that proof, a multitudeof considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there isroom enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundlyobserves, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form oflife. " Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, notappearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposedto live hereafter in some other form. 4 A second series of observations and reflections, gathered frompartial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to makethe analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, inthe literature of many nations, a standard illustration of thethought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiturehas been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into thebutterfly. 5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body isbut a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience andstages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spiritemerges from its cast off cocoon and broken cell into the moreethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day. The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference isobvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowmentsand privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it isfrom the slow and loathsome worm on the leaf to the swift andglittering insect in the air. Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothingis ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing asannihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; butessences do not cease to be. Take a given quantity of any kind ofmatter; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, bymechanical violence, by chemical solvents. Still it exists, as thesame quantity of matter, with unchanged qualities as to itsessence, and will exist when Nature has manipulated it in all herlaboratories for a billion ages. Now, as a solitary exception tothis, are minds absolutely destroyed? are will, conscience, thought, and love annihilated? Personal intelligence, affection, identity, are inseparable components of the idea of a soul. Andwhat method is there of crushing or evaporating these out ofbeing? What force is there to compel them into nothing? Death isnot a substantive cause working effects. It is itself merely aneffect. It is simply a change in the mode of existence. That thischange puts an end to existence is an assertion against analogy, and wholly unsupported. Thirdly, following the analogy of science and the visible order ofbeing, we are led to the conception of an ascending series ofexistences rising in regular gradation from coarse to fine, frombrutal to mental, from earthly composite to simply spiritual, andthus pointing up the rounds of life's ladder, through all nature, to the angelic ranks of heaven. Then, feeling his kinship andcommon vocation with supernal beings, man is assured of a loftiercondition 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, vacantlyyawning chasms, as that would be, between our fleshly estate andthe Godhead. Nature takes no such enormous jumps. Her scalingadvance is by staid and normal steps. "There's lifeless matter. Add the power of shaping, And you've the crystal: add again the organsWherewith to subdue sustenance to the formAnd 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 manTo bring him higher?" Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into thefull range and masterdom of a spirit's powers! Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into thisworld and our departure out of it would make us believe that deathis but another and higher birth. 6 Any one acquainted with thestate of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its veryexistence, from its vascular connection with its mother couldhardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduceit to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that itwould perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it maybe in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as ourlatent or dimly groping senses were useless while we weredeveloping 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 mysteriousintimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere, "Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in thewomb. " The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme, "What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins ofdestiny. This world is the womb: the body, its envelopingmembrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs ofchildbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel ofeternity. " Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that thesoul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stageron this globe, having lived through many a previous existence, here or elsewhere. 7 They sustain this conclusion by variousconsiderations, either drawn from premises presupposing thenecessary 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 oftrepeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has beenby such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the 6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, undAnferstehung. 7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning thePre existence of Souls. connected analogies of the case carry us to the belief thatimmortality 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, andentertaining the supposition that there is no creating andoverruling God, but that all things have arisen by spontaneousdevelopment or by chance, still, we are not consistently obligedto expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoningfrom the analogy of the past, across the facts of the present, tothe impending contingencies of the future, we may say that thenext stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not thedestruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life, elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that ifmindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought ushere, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bearus there. Law or chance excluding God from the question may aseasily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by analogy, we mayaffirm that, as life has been given us, so it will be given usagain and forever. Seventhly, faith in immortality is fed by another analogy, notbased on reflection, but instinctively felt. Every change ofmaterial in our organism, every change of consciousness, is a kindof death. We partially die as often as we leave behind forgottenexperiences and lost states of being. We die successively toinfancy, childhood, youth, manhood. The past is the dead: but ourcourse is still on, forever on. Having survived so many deaths, weexpect to survive all others and to be ourselves eternally. There is a third cluster of reasonings, deduced from thedistinctive nature of spirit, constituting the psychologicalargument for the existence of the soul independent of the body. Inthe outset, obviously, if the soul be an immaterial entity, itsnatural immortality follows; because death and decay can only besupposed to take effect in dissoluble combinations. Severalingenious reasons have been advanced in proof of the soul'simmateriality, reasons cogent enough to have convinced a largeclass of philosophers. 8 It is sufficient here to notice thefollowing one. All motion implies a dynamic mover. Matter isdormant. Power is a reality entirely distinct from matter in itsnature. But man is essentially an active power, a free will. Consequently there is in him an immaterial principle, since allpower is immaterial. That principle is immortal, becausesubsisting in a sphere of being whose categories exclude thepossibility of dissolution. 9 Secondly, should we admit the human soul to be material, yet if itbe an ultimate monad, an indivisible atom of mind, it is immortalstill, defying all the forces of destruction. And that it actuallyis an uncompounded unit may be thus proved. Consciousness issimple, not collective. Hence the power of consciousness, thecentral soul, is an absolute integer. For a living perceptivewhole cannot be made of dead imperceptive parts. If the soul werecomposite, each component part would be an individual, adistinguishable consciousness. Such not being the fact, theconclusion results that the soul is one, a simple substance. 10 8 Astrue, Dissertation sur l'Immaterialite et l'Immortalite del'Ame. Broughton, Defence of the Doctrine of the Human Soul as anImmaterial and Naturally Immortal Principle. Marstaller, Von derUnsterblichkeit 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 inferencefrom its ontological characteristics. Reason, contemplating theelements of the soul, cannot but embrace the conviction of itsperpetuity and its essential independence of the fleshlyorganization. Our life in its innermost substantive essence isbest defined as a conscious force. Our present existence is theorganic correlation of that personal force with the physicalmaterials of the body, and with other forces. The cessation ofthat correlation at death by no means involves, so far as we cansee, the destruction or the disindividualization of the primalpersonal force. It is a fact of striking significance, oftennoticed by psychologists, that we are unable to conceive ourselvesas dead. The negation of itself is impossible to consciousness. The reason we have such a dread of death is that we conceiveourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering throughhorrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to materialgrowths 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 intoinanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate offorce? What material processes shall ever disintegrate thesimplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates thatrule there; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong toanother, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn thefretful sieges of decay. Fourthly, the surviving superiority of the soul, inferred from itscontrast of qualities to those of its earthy environment, isfurther shown by another fact, the mind's dream power, and theideal realm it freely soars or walks at large in when itpleases. 11 This view has often been enlarged upon, especially byBonnet and Sir Henry Wotton. The unhappy Achilles, exhausted withweeping for his friend, lay, heavily moaning, on the shore of thefar sounding sea, in a clear spot where the waves washed in uponthe beach, when sleep took possession of him. The ghost ofmiserable Patroclus calve to him and said, "Sleepest thou and artforgetful of me, O Achilles?" And the son of Peleus cried, "Comenearer: let us embrace each other, though but for a little while. "Then he stretched out his friendly hands, but caught him not; forthe 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 abodesa spirit and image, but there is no body in it. "12 The realm ofdreams is a world of mystic realities, intangible, yet existent, and all prophetic, through which the soul nightly floats while thegross body slumbers. It is everlasting, because there is nothingin it for corruption to take hold of. The appearances and soundsof that soft inner sphere, veiled so remote from sense, arereflections and echoes from the spirit world. Or are they a directvision and audience of it? The soul really is native resident in aworld of truth, goodness, and beauty, fellow citizen with divineideas and affections. Through the senses it has knowledge andcommunion with the hard outer world of matter. When the sensesfall away, it is left, imperishable denizen of its own appropriateworld 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, formthe theological argument for the future existence of man. 13Starting with the idea of a God of infinite perfections, theimmortality of his children is an immediate deduction from theeternity of his purposes. For whatever purpose God originally gaveman being, for the disinterested distribution of happiness, forthe increase of his own glory, or whatever else, will he not forthat same purpose continue him in being forever? In the absence ofany reason to the contrary, we must so conclude. In view of theunlimited perfections of God, the fact of conscious responsiblecreatures being created is sufficient warrant of their perpetuity. Otherwise God would be fickle. Or, as one has said, he would be amere drapery painter, nothing within the dress. Secondly, leaving out of sight this illustration of an eternalpurpose in eternal fulfilment, and confining our attention to theanalogy of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker, we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has God mouldedthe dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes andordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has hecreated, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalitiesreflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out inendless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sunshine of amomentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works invain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlastingnonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness isconcerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain, because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it hadnever been. God does nothing in sport or unmeaningly: least of allwould he create filial spirits, dignified with the solemnendowments of humanity, without a high and serious end. 14 To makemen, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, whollymortal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, werework far more unworthy of God than the task was to Michael Angeloset him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo theMagnificent in the dukedom of Florence, that he should scoop upthe snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statuefrom it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun. Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportionpowers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exactfitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath, then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowmentsand our opportunity; our attainments are most superfluouslysuperior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of six feetis to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whosetelescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity, systematized more worlds than there are grains of dust in thisglobe? the heart of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded tothe limits of sympathetic being? the soul of a Wycliffe, whoseundaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the firesof martyrdom and never blenched? the genius of a Shakspeare, whoseimagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vastincongruity 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 WesenGottes erwiesen. dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger andthirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortalworld. Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, Godwould have harmonized our powers with our lot. He would never haveset such magnificent conceptions over against such poorpossibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for sotrivial a prize of dust to dust. Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a futurelife is that yielded by the benevolence of God. Annihilation istotally irreconcilable with this. That He whose love for hiscreatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after theirlittle span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets ofexistence and begun to know the noble delights of spiritualprogress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessednessare beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe thatwhile his children turn to him with yearning faith and gratitude, with fervent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them intounmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happinesswhich he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase. Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the fieldof being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by thehoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It wereMoloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into deaththese multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dashinto silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of athousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody ofpraise and bliss. Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof, hard to be resisted, of a future state wherein there arecompensations for the unmerited ills, a complement for thefragmentary experiences, and rectification for the wrongs, of thepresent life. 15 God is just; but he works without impulse orcaprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires time to showtheir perfect results. Through the brief space of this existence, where the encountering of millions of free intelligences withinthe fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good andevil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villanyoften outreaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helplessinnocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury, drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some boldminions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves ofiron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems ofsociety, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous sufferundeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious. All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensatingtendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of themysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturatesthe 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 beopenly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul andNero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of deathinto precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if therebe 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 thelikelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may bestyled the moral argument in behalf of that belief. 17 Theseconsiderations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things, claims of parts beseeching completion, vaticinations ofexperience. They form a cumulative array of probabilities whoseguiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voicesswell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider theshrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If manbe not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of nonexistence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are coordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its ownfulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, stilllonging for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confidingin it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget menots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom? Secondly, an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from thepremature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in thehuman family. Nearly one half of our race perish before reachingthe age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilledthe total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, andnot the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary will appear fullcircle beyond the grave. The argument is hardly met by asserting that this untimelymortality is the punishment for non observance of law; for, denying any further life, would a scheme of existence have beenadmitted establishing so awful a proportion of violations andpenalties? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all shouldpass through the experience of a ripe and rounded life. But thereis the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant, sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are snatched into the invisiblestate. There is, as a noble thinker has said, an apparent "capricein the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hiddensequel. " Immortality unravels the otherwise inscrutable mystery. Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestationto the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of God in thebreast, arrayed in splendors and terrors, which shakes andillumines the whole circumference of our being with its thundersand lightnings, gives the good man, amidst oppressions and woes, aserene confidence in a future justifying reward, and transfixesthe bad man, through all his retinue of guards and panoplieddefences, with icy pangs of fear and with a horrid looking forjudgment to come. The sublime grandeur of moral freedom, theimperilling dignities of probation, the tremendousresponsibilities and hazards of man's felt power and position, areall inconsistent with the supposition that he is merely to crossthis petty stage of earth and then wholly expire. Such momentousendowments and exposures imply a corresponding arena and career. After the trial comes the sentence; and that would be as if apalace were built, a prince born, trained, crowned, solely that hemight occupy the throne five minutes! The consecrating, royalizingidea of duty cannot be less than the core of eternal life. Conscience is the sensitive corridor along which the mutualwhispers of a divine communion pass and repass. A moral law and afree will 17 Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV. : The Arguments forImmortality. Bretschneider, Die Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 20-21. are the root by which we grow out of God, and the stem by which weare grafted into him. Fourthly, all probable surmisings in favor of a future life, orany other moral doctrine, are based on that primal postulatewhich, by virtue of our rational and ethical constitution, we areauthorized and bound to accept as a commencing axiom, namely, thatthe 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 normalignant, a mistake nor a curse. Essentially and in the finality, every fundamental portion and element of it must be good andperfect. So far as science and philosophy have penetrated, theyconfirm by facts this a priori principle, telling us that there isno pure and uncompensated evil in the universe. Now, death is aregular ingredient in the mingled world, an ordered step in theplan of life. If death be absolute, is it not an evil? What canthe everlasting deprivation of all good be called but an immenseevil to its subject? Such a doom would be without possible solace, standing alone in steep contradiction to the whole parallel moraluniverse. Then might man utter the most moving and melancholyparadox 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 hostileagent, seems capable of endless progress without ever exhaustingeither its own capacity or the perfections of infinitude. 18 Thereare before it unlimited truth, beauty, power, nobleness, to becontemplated, 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 thefacts. True, the body decays, and all manifested energy fails; butthat is the fault of the mechanism, not of the spirit. Were we tolive many thousands of years, as Martineau suggests, no onesupposes new souls, but only new organizations, would be needed. And what period can we imagine to terminate the unimpeded spirit'sabilities to learn, to enjoy, to expand? Kant's famousdemonstration of man's eternal life on the grounds of practicalreason is similar. The related ideas of absolute virtue and amoral being necessarily imply the infinite progress of the lattertowards the former. That progress is impossible except oncondition of the continued existence of the same being. Thereforethe soul is immortal. 19 Sixthly, our whole life here is a steady series of growingpreparations for a continued and ascending life hereafter. All thespiritual powers we develop are so much athletic training, all theideal 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 succeedingexistence; and that foresight is given to prepare him. There arewondrous impulses in us, constitutional convictions prescient offuturity, like those prevising instincts in birds leading them totake preparatory flights before their actual migration. 18 Addison, Spectator, Nos. 3 and 210. 19 Jacob, Beweis fur die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus demBegriffe der Pflicht. Eternity is the stuff of which our love, flying forward, buildsits nest in the eaves of the universe. If we saw wings growingout upon a young creature, we should be forced to conclude thathe was intended some time to fly. It is so with man. By exploringthoughts, disciplinary sacrifices, supernal prayers, holy toilsof disinterestedness, he fledges his soul's pinions, lays uptreasures in heaven, and at last migrates to the attracting clime. "Here sits he, shaping wings to fly: His heart forebodes amystery; He names the name eternity. " Seventhly, in the degree these preparations are made in obedienceto obscure instincts and the developing laws of experience, theyare accompanied by significant premonitions, lucid signals of thefuture state looked to, assuring witnesses of its reality. Themore one lives for immortality, the more immortal things heassimilates into his spiritual substance, the more confirmingtokens of a deathless inheritance his faith finds. He becomesconscious of his own eternity. 20 When hallowed imagination weighsanchor and spreads sail to coast the dim shores of the otherworld, it hears cheerful voices of welcome from the headlands anddiscerns beacons burning in the port. When in earnest communionwith our inmost selves, solemn meditations of God, mysteriousinfluences shed from unseen spheres, fall on our souls, and many a"strange thought, transcending our wonted themes, into glorypeeps. " A vague, constraining sense of invisible beings, by whomwe are engirt, fills us. We blindly feel that our rank anddestination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, andthe occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudycrowds of angels. Thousand "hints chance dropped from nature'ssphere, " 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!" Notstrange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to thethrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score ofdestiny. When at night we gaze far out into immensity, along theshining vistas of God's abode, and are almost crushed by theoverwhelming prospects that sweep upon our vision, do not somepre monitions of our own unfathomed greatness also stir within us?Yes: "the sense of Existence, the ideas of Right and Duty, awfulintuitions of God and immortality, these, the grand facts andsubstance of the spirit, are independent and indestructible. Thebases of the Moral Law, they shall stand in every tittle, althoughthe stars should pass away. For their relations and root are inthat which upholds the stars, even with worlds unseen from thefinite, whose majestic and everlasting arrangements shall burstupon us as the heavens do through the night when the light of thisgarish life gives place to the solemn splendors of eternity. " Eighthly, the belief in a life beyond death has virtuallyprevailed everywhere and always. And the argument from universalconsent, as it is termed, has ever been esteemed one of theforemost testimonies, if not indeed the most convincing testimony, to the truth of the doctrine. Unless the belief can be shown to beartificial or sinful, it must seem conclusive. Its innocence isself evident, and its naturalness is evidenced by itsuniversality. 20 Theodore Parker, Sermon of Immortal Life. The rudest and the most polished, the simplest and the mostlearned, unite in the expectation, and cling to it throughevery thing. It is like the ruling presentiment implanted inthose insects that are to undergo metamorphosis. This believinginstinct, 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, today, in a future life, unquestionably, in a majority ofindividuals, rests directly on the basis of authority, trust in aforeign announcement. There are two forms of this authority. Theauthority of revelation is most prominent and extensive. God hasrevealed the truth from heaven. It has been exemplified by amiraculous resurrection. It is written in an infallible book, andsealed with authenticating credentials of super natural purport. It is therefore to be accepted with implicit trust. Secondly, withsome, the authority of great minds, renowned for scientificknowledge and speculative acumen, goes far. Thousands of such men, ranking among the highest names of history, have positivelyaffirmed the immortality of the soul as a reliable truth. Forinstance, Goethe says, on occasion of the death of Wieland, "Thedestruction of such high powers is something which can never, andunder no circumstances, even come into question. " Such a dogmaticexpression 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 confessedincompetence. 21 The argument is justly powerful when but humanlyconsidered, and when divinely derived, of course, it absolutelyforecloses all doubts. Tenthly, there is another life, because a belief in it isnecessary to order this world, necessary as a comfort and aninspiration to man now. A good old author writes, "the very nervesand sinews of religion is hope of immortality. " The convictionthat there is a retributive life hereafter is the moral cement ofthe social fabric. Take away this truth, and one great motive ofpatriots, martyrs, thinkers, saints, is gone. Take it away, and toall low minded men selfishness becomes the law, earthly enjoymentthe only good, suffering and death the only evil. Life then is tobe supremely coveted and never put in risk for any stake. Selfindulgence is to be secured at any hazard, little matter by whatmeans. Abandon all hope of a life to come, and "from that instantthere is nothing serious in mortality. " In order that the worldshould be governable, ethical, happy, virtuous, magnanimous, is itpossible that it should be necessary for the world to believe inan 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 thatgrand closing consideration which we may entitle the force ofcongruity, the convincing results of a confluence of harmoniousreasons. The hypothesis of immortality accords with the cardinalfacts of observation, meets all points of the case, andsatisfactorily answers every requirement. 21 Lewis, Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion. It is the solution of the problem, as the fact of Neptune explainedthe perturbations of the adjacent planets. Nothing ever gravitatestowards nothing; and it must be an unseen orb that so draws ouryearning souls. If it be not so, then what terrible contradictionsstagger us, and what a chilling doom awaits us! Oh, what mockingirony then runs through the loftiest promises and hopes of theworld! Just as the wise and good have learned to live, theydisappear amidst the unfeeling waves of oblivion, like snow flakesin the ocean. "The super earthly desires of man are then createdin him only, like swallowed diamonds, to cut slowly through hismaterial shell" and destroy him. The denial of a future life introduces discord, grief, and despairin every direction, and, by making each step of advanced culturethe ascent to a wider survey of tantalizing glory and experiencedsorrow, as well as the preparation for a greater fall and a sadderloss, turns faithful affection and heroic thought into "blindfuries slinging flame. " Unless immortality be true, man appears adark riddle, not made for that of which he is made capable anddesirous: every thing is begun, nothing ended; the facts of thepresent scene are unintelligible; the plainest analogies areviolated; the delicately rising scale of existence is broken offabrupt; our best reasonings concerning the character and designsof God, also concerning the implications of our own being andexperience, are futile; and the soul's proud faculties tellglorious lies as thick as stars. Such, at least, is the usual wayof thinking. However formidable a front may be presented by the spectral arrayof doubts and difficulties, seeming impediments to faith inimmortality, the faithful servant of God, equipped withphilosophical culture and a saintly life, will fearlessly advanceupon them, scatter them right and left, and win victorious accessto the prize. So the mariner sometimes, off Sicilian shores, seesa wondrous island ahead, apparently stopping his way with itscypress and cedar groves, glittering towers, vine wreathedbalconies, and marble stairs sloping to the water's edge. He sailsstraight forward, and, severing the pillared porticos and greengardens of Fata Morgana, glides far on over a glassy sea smilingin the undeceptive sun. CHAPTER IV. THEORIES OF THE SOUL'S DESTINATION. BEFORE examining, in their multifarious detail, the specialthoughts and fancies respecting a future life prevalent indifferent nations and times, it may be well to take a sort ofbird's eye view of those general theories of the destination ofthe soul under which all the individual varieties of opinion maybe classified. Vast and incongruous as is the heterogeneous massof notions brought forth by the history of this province of theworld's belief, the whole may be systematized, discriminated, andreduced to a few comprehensive heads. Such an architecturalgrouping or outlining of the chief schemes of thought on thissubject will yield several advantages. Showing how the different views arose from natural speculations onthe correlated phenomena of the outward world and facts of humanexperience, it affords an indispensable help towards aphilosophical analysis and explanation of the popular faith as tothe destiny of man after death, in all the immense diversity ofits contents. An orderly arrangement and exposition of thesecardinal theories also form an epitome holding a bewilderingmultitude of particulars in its lucid and separating grasp, changing the fruits of learned investigation from a cumbersomeburden on the memory to a small number of connected formularies inthe reason. These theories serve as a row of mirrors hung in aline of historic perspective, reflecting every relevant shape andhue of meditation and faith humanity has known, from the idealvisions of the Athenian sage to the instinctive superstitions ofthe Fejee savage. When we have adequately defined these theories, of which there are seven, traced their origin, comprehended theirsignificance and bearings, and dissected their supportingpretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in lightbefore us; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle, may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the lifebeyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall knowat once where to refer them and how to explain them. The preciseobject, therefore, of the present chapter is to set forth thecomprehensive theories devised to solve the problem, What becomesof man when he dies? But a little while man flourishes here in the bosom of visiblenature. Soon he disappears from our scrutiny, missed in all theplaces that knew him. Whither has he gone? What fate has befallenhim? It is an awful question. In comparison with its concentratedinterest, all other affairs are childish and momentary. Wheneverthat solemn question is asked, earth, time, and the heart, naturaltransformations, stars, fancy, and the brooding intellect, arefull of vague oracles. Let us see what intelligible answers can beconstructed from their responses. The first theory which we shall consider propounds itself in oneterrible word, annihilation. Logically this is the earliest, historically the latest, view. The healthy consciousness, theeager fancy, the controlling sentiment, the crude thought, all theuncurbed instinctive conclusions of primitive human nature, pointforcibly to a continued existence for the soul, in some way, whenthe body shall have perished. And so history shows us in all thesavage nations a vivid belief in a future life. But to thephilosophical observer, who has by dint of speculation freedhimself from the constraining tendencies of desire, faith, imagination, and authority, the thought that man totally ceaseswith the destruction of his visible organism must occur as thefirst and simplest settlement of the question. 1 The totality ofmanifested life has absolutely disappeared: why not conclude thatthe totality of real life has actually lost its existence and isno more? That is the natural inference, unless by some means thecontrary can be proved. Accordingly, among all civilized people, every age has had its skeptics, metaphysical disputants who havemournfully or scoffingly denied the separate survival of the soul. This is a necessity in the inevitable sequences of observation andtheory; because, when the skeptic, suppressing or escaping hisbiassed wishes, the trammels of traditional opinion, and thespontaneous convictions prophetic of his own uninterrupted being, first looks over the wide scene of human life and death, andreflectingly asks, What is the sequel of this strange, eventfulhistory? obviously the conclusion suggested by the immediatephenomena is that of entire dissolution and blank oblivion. Thisresult is avoided by calling in the aid of deeper philosophicalconsiderations and of inspiring moral truths. But some will notcall in that aid; and the whole superficial appearance of thecase regarding that alone, as they then will is fatal to ourimperial hopes. The primordial clay claims its own from thedisanimated frame; and the vanished life, like the flame of anoutburnt taper, has ceased to be. Men are like bubbles or foamflakes on the world's streaming surface: glittering in a momentaryray, they break and are gone, and only the dark flood remainsstill flowing forward. They are like tones of music, commencingand ending with the unpurposed breath that makes them. Nature is avast congeries of mechanical substances pervaded by mindlessforces of vitality. Consciousness is a production which resultsfrom the fermentation and elaboration of unconscious materials;and after a time it deceases, its conditions crumbling into theirinorganic grounds again. From the abyss of silence and dust intelligent creatures breakforth, shine, and sink back, like meteor flashes in a cloud. Thegenerations of sentient being, like the annual growths ofvegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring fromdead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapseinto dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, at once thewondrous womb and the magnificent mausoleum of man. Fate, like aniron skeleton seated at the summit of the world on a throne offresh growing grass and mouldering skulls, presides over all, andannihilation is the universal doom of individual life. Such is theatheistic naturalist's creed. However indefensible or shocking itis, it repeatedly appears in the annals of speculation; and anysynopsis of the possible conclusions in which the inquiry intoman's destiny may rest that should omit this, would be grosslyimperfect. This scheme of disbelief is met by insuperable objections. Itexcludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to awholly empirical view; and consequently the relentless solution itannounces applies only to a mutilated problem. To assert thecessation of the soul because its physical manifestations throughthe 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 evidencesof design seem to prove the existence of a God by whose will allthings are ordered according to a plan. Many powerful impressionsand arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teachthat in the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, fromthe closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomesirresistible when we see how reason and conscience, with delightedavidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightestfeatures and the darkest defects of the present life, whoseimperfect symmetries and segments are harmoniously filled out bythe adjusting complement of a future state. 2 The next representation of the fate of the soul disposes of it byre absorption into the essence from which it emanated. There is aneternal fountain of unmade life, from which all individual, transient lives flow, and into which they return. This conceptionarose in the outset from a superficial analogy which must haveobtruded itself upon primitive notice and speculation; for man isled to his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplationof outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individualforms perish, each sensible component relapses into its originalelement and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Ourexhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it:the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground andvegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, thesouls of men, when they disappear from us, are remerged in thenative spirit whence they came. The essential longing of everypart for union with its whole is revealed and vocal throughout allnature. Water is sullen in stillness, murmurs in motion, and neverceases its gloom or its complaining until it sleeps in the sea. Like spray on the rock, the stranding generations strike thesepulchre and are dissipated into universal vapor. As lightningsslink back into the charged bosom of the thunder cloud, as eagerwaves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away inthe great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, thestruggling masses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade anddissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all engulfing SOUL. This simplest, earliest philosophy of mankind has had mostextensive and permanent prevalence. 3 For immemorial centuries ithas possessed the mind of the countless millions of India. Baurthinks the Egyptian identification of each deceased person withOsiris and the burial of him under that name, were meant to denotethe reception of the individual human life into the universalnature life. The doctrine has been implicitly held whereverpantheism has found a votary, from Anaximander, to whom finitecreatures were "disintegrations or decompositions from theInfinite, " 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 andtinge to the thinking of after ages, were furthermore driven tothe supposition of a final absorption, from the 2 Drossbach, Die Harmonie der Ergebnisse der Naturforschung mitden Forderungen des Menschlichen Gemuthes. 3 Blount, Anima Mundi; or, The Opinions of the Ancients concerningMan's Soul after this Life. impossibility, in that initiatory stage of thought, of graspingany other theory which would apparently meet the case so well orbe more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at theidea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in theconstitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries onhis works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetitionor wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in neverceasingmotion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said, forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They didnot conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, makingimmortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it tothemselves as a circle, making an everlasting individualconsciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, an immenseround of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth andreturning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escapeso repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencingintegument of consciousness and empty all weary personalities intothe absolute abyss of being. Again: the extreme difficulty of apprehending the truth of aCreator literally infinite, and of a limitless creation, wouldlead to the same result in another way. Without doubt, it seemedto the naive thinkers of antiquity, that if hosts of new beingswere continually coming into life and increasing the number of theinhabitants of the future state, the fountain from which theyproceeded would some time be exhausted, or the universe growplethoric with population. There would be no more substance belowor no more room above. The easiest method of surmounting thisproblem would be by the hypothesis that all spirits come out of agreat World Spirit, and, having run their mortal careers, areabsorbed into it again. Many especially the deepest Orientaldreamers have also been brought to solace themselves with thisconclusion by a course of reasoning based on the exposures, andassumed inevitable sufferings, of all finite being. They arguethat every existence below the absolute God, because it is setaround with limitations, is necessarily obnoxious to all sorts ofmiseries. Its pleasures are only "honey drops scarce tasted in asea of gall. " This conviction, with its accompanying sentiment, runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heartof their theology, the dogma that makes the cruelest penancespleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentimentis not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the nightthought 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 thyblest embrace, Obtain her apotheosis in thee?" Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains toinvestigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from apremise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. Weemanate from the creative power of God, and are sustained by thein flowing presence of his life, but are not discerptions from hisown being, any more than beams of light are distinct substancesshot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn backand assimilated into the parent orb. We are destined to aharmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lostas insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of God's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be inGod as stars are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in asolvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments. In the first place, it is supported by the philosophicaldistinction between emanation and creation. The conception ofcreation gives us a personal God who wills to certain ends; thatof 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, finiteexistences flow from the Infinite as consequences from aprinciple, 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 logicalnecessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose anycircling return. Material things are thoughts which Godtransiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures arethoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality. The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which it isclothed. Secondly, the analogy which first leads to belief in absorption isfalsely 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 itsindividual existence. Distinct drops are not annihilated as totheir simple atoms of water, though sunk in the midst of the sea. The final particles or monads of air or granite are notdissolvingly blended into continuity of unindividualizedatmosphere or rock when united with their elemental masses, butare thrust unapproachably apart by molecular repulsion. Now, amind, being, as we conceive, no composite, but an ultimate unity, cannot be crushed or melted from its integral persistence ofpersonality. Though plunged into the centre of a surroundingwilderness or ocean of minds, it must still retain itself unlostin the multitude. Therefore, if we admit the existence of aninclusive mundane Soul, it by no means follows that lesser soulsreceived into it are deprived of their individuality. It is "onenot otherwise than as the sea is one, by a similarity andcontiguity of parts, being composed of an innumerable host ofdistinct spirits, as that is of aqueous particles; and as therivers continually discharge into the sea, so the vehicularpeople, upon the disruption of their vehicles, discharge andincorporate into that ocean of spirits making the mundane Soul. "4 Thirdly, every consideration furnished by the doctrine of finalcauses as applied to existing creatures makes us ask, What use isthere in calling forth souls merely that they may be taken backagain? To justify their creation, the fulfilment of some educativeaim, and then the lasting fruition of it, appear necessary. Whyelse should a soul be drawn from out the unformed vastness, andhave its being struck into bounds, and be forced to pass throughsuch appalling ordeals of good and evil, pleasure and agony? Anindividual of any kind is as important as its race; for itcontains in possibility all that its type does. And the purposesof things, so far as we can discern them, the nature of ourspiritual constitution, the meaning of our circumstances andprobation, the resulting tendencies of our experience, all seem toprophesy, not the destruction, but the perfection andperpetuation, of individual being. 4 Tucker, Light of Nature, Part II. Chap. Xxii. Fourthly, the same inference is yielded by applying a similarconsideration to the Creator. Allowing him consciousness andintentions, as we must, what object could he have either inexerting his creative power or in sending out portions of himselfin new individuals, save the production of so many immortalpersonalities of will, knowledge, and love, to advance towards theperfection of holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, filling hismansions with his children? By thus multiplying his own image headds to the number of happy creatures who are to be bound togetherin bands of glory, mutually receiving and returning his affection, and swells the tide of conscious bliss which fills and rollsforever through his eternal universe. Nor, finally, is it necessary to expect personal oblivion in Godin order to escape from evil and win exuberant happiness. Thoseends are as well secured by the fruition of God's love in us as bythe drowning of our consciousness in his plenitude of delight. Precisely herein consists the fundamental distinction of theChristian from the Brahmanic doctrine of human destiny. TheChristian hopes to dwell in blissful union with God's will, not tobe annihilatingly sunk in his essence. To borrow an illustrationfrom Scotus Erigena, 5 as the air when thoroughly illumined bysunshine still keeps its aerial nature and does not becomesunshine, or as iron all red in the flame still keeps its metallicsubstance and does not turn to fire itself, so a soul fullypossessed and moved by God does not in consequence lose its ownsentient and intelligent being. It is still a bounded entity, though recipient of boundless divinity. Thus evil ceases, eachpersonality is preserved and intensely glorified, and, at the sametime, 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, eachorganized, So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriadsof self conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fillsWith absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, thatyet seem Each to pursue its own self centring end. " A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by theconception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leavethe body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starlessgrave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things iscompleted, when the clock of time runs down and its lifelessweight falls in the socket, and "Death's empty helmet yawns grimlyover the funeral hatchment of the world, " the gates of this longbarred receptacle of the deceased will be struck open, and itspale prisoners, in accumulated hosts, issue forth, and enter onthe immortal inheritance reserved for them. In the sable land ofHades all departed generations are bivouacking in one vast army. On the resurrection morning, striking their shadowy tents, theywill scale the walls of the abyss, and, reinvested with theirbodies, either plant their banners on the summits of the earth inpermanent encampment, or storm the battlements of the sky andcolonize heaven with flesh and blood. 5 Philosophy and Doctrines of Erigena, Universalist QuarterlyReview, vol. Vii. P. 100. All advocates of the doctrine of psychopannychism, or the sleepof souls from death till the last day, in addition to the generalbody of orthodox Christians, have been supporters of thisconclusion. 6 Three explanations are possible of the origination of this belief. First, a man musing over the affecting panorama of the seasons asit rolls through the year, budding life alternating with deadlydesolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves, flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annualinterment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destinyof his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed, how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle andplanted in the tomb, might naturally especially if he had anything of the poet's associating and creative mind say to himself, Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higherfields, seed lying dormant now, but at last to sprout into swiftimmortality when God shall make a new sunshine and dewomnipotently penetrate the dry mould where we tarry? No matter howpartial the analogy, how forced the process, how false the result, such imagery would sooner or later occur; and, having occurred, itis no more strange that it should get literal acceptance than itis that many other popular figments should have secured the firmestablishment they have. Secondly, a mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole lovewas garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, hissoul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaceshimself with the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing whathe thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pass throughunconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculouspower of his grief wielded imagination the world is fluent, andfate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on whichcorruption now banquets, he sees again, animated, beaming, claspedin his arms. He cries, It cannot be that those holy days areforever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dreamin which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be thatsome time God will give me back again that beloved one! thesepulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored, and all be as it was before! The conception thus once born out ofthe delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnantimagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith. Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link ina chain of thought which, in the course of time and the range ofspeculation, the theorizing mind could not fail to forge. Theconcatenation of reflections is this. Death is the separation ofsoul and body. That separation is repulsive, an evil. Therefore itwas not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by afoe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally God will vanquishhis antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwartinginterferences with the primitive perfection of harmony andhappiness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to beseparated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulnessof time, when there shall be a universal resurrection andrestoration. So far as reason is competent to pronounce on thisview considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it isan arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science givesno hint of it. 6 Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschreibens Heyns vom Schlafeder abgeschiedenen Seelen. Chalmers. Astronomical Discourses, iv. It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated, based on analogies not parallel. So far as it assumes to reston revelation it will be examined in another place. Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as areply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma isnext encountered which we shall style that of a local andirrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to somefixed region, 7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarryunalterably. 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 orrewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by with few words, because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In thefirst place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn fromoccurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to thefortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. Thefigment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place orplanet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering andrepulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends thenoiseless continuity of God's self executing laws. It is a jarringmechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritualdestinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that theplanets are swung around the sun by material chains compares withthe law of gravitation. Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedomin separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by thefatal working of their interior forces of character, and theirrelations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonistkingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlastinghabitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, asdissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes, one after another, by progressive discovery, until now theintelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since weare not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul isto be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, andsince there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for thesupposition of such places and of the transferrence of thedeparted to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associatedbelief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is notthat different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to twoimmured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted andushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass intoone immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriateattractions, 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 thetheory of recurrence. 8 When man dies, his surviving spirit isimmediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned ina limited number to each world, continually return, each one stillforgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specificcreed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created atonce, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born overand over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of agun, 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 beenshot 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 youngmountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he wassnatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail ofconnecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule, in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of thosepasses which the conductors of railroad trains give theirpassengers, "good for this trip only. " The notion of an endlesssuccession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world, commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some mindsa fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pass ontheir ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment"to fresh fields and pastures new, " in unknown immensity, to arenewed excursion through landscapes already traversed andexperiences drained before. Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to hisidea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being, comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Theirconnection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousandyears. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higherplanet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander thatwill head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is toenjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leadinghim successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. Theinvisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on thisglobe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In theother life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the GreatSoul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnatedsouls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human soulstaken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, welose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in theGreat Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous livesboth in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternatingpassages between the two states will continue until the finalswooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search ofa better abode. 10 The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means ofmeeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tuckerin his "Light of Nature Pursued. " "The numbers of souls dailypouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require aproportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else thecountry might be overstocked. " The objection urged against such abelief from the fact that we do not remember having lived beforeis rebutted by the assertion that "Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, Theslipping through from state to state. " The theory associated with this Lethean draught is confirmed byits responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences, vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seemsas 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, onlyhalf baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges ofa foregone state; "And ever something is or seems That touches us with mysticgleams, 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, broughtto light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is toodestitute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained againstassault. 11 There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated, perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, bysuccessive deaths and births, traverses the universe, aneverlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worldsof space, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each. 12 Allreality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreatingGodhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these tomen. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligentspirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army offuture generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towardshis conscious estate, "the trees being imperfect men, that seem tobemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground, " so man himselfshall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star. The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whosedevelopment begins with those substances with the production ofwhich the life of an ordinary vegetable ends. 13 The fact, too, that embryonic man passes through ascending stagesundistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full ofmeaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the longhistory of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses oftime and distance intervene from the primary rock to the VictoriaRegia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterlessmind of a Schelling! But, snail pace by snail pace, thoseimmeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so everything that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reachthe transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theologicalprejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it isdegrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallento our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And inone respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than adegraded god; for in the former case the path is upwards, in thelatter 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 aone, which go upward and out of sight. " Such was plainly the trustof the author of the following exhortation: "Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnationof thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall bemore pure and high. " 11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz dermenechlichen Seele. 12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit derSeele. 13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. Ix. Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless seriesof those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of homeafter home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age afterage, the spirit that glorious nomad may shift its tent, fated notto rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with itevermore its twin elements, activity and desire. " But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, inthis prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pineand tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated withexperiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contentedfruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even sosublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, onthe road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bowertogether by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood, once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroringstream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow farbelow seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fellfrom above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one. Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepesthuman 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 greetIts 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 thetoo rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sobercredit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out inconsistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul hasrisen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of redearth 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 thesupposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humoroussatire of good old Henry More, "Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldycheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at lastshall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes Andview the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd:grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubtphilosophize!" The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts offancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the firstcritical probe. The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be setforth, may be designated by the word transition. 14 It affirms thatat death they pass from the separate material worlds, which aretheir initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, whichis everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible, each person in his turn consciously rising from this world'srudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwellinghere, 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 intoinnumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre ofan impassable solitude of space, " unless it be to train up in thevarious spheres separate households for final union as a singlediversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 Thesurmise 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'spowers. " The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, itsnatal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will, unobstructed, through every world and cerulean deep; andwheresoever it is, there, in proportion to its own capacity andfitness, is heaven and is God. 16 All those world spots so thicklyscattered through the Yggdrasill of universal space are but thebrief sheltering places where embryo intelligences clip theirshells, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline ofearthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into themighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternalemancipation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offeredyet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended byits harmony with our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wishto rest in it with humble trust. The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition intothe other world, must be either unending progress towards infiniteperfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and thenrevolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuingan infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flyinggoal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due seasontouch its bound and there be satisfied, "When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circularjoys 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 assertionof countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyondevery conceivable limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. Ifendless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the wholeuniverse would at last become a line! And though it is true thatthe idea of an ever novel chase attracts and refreshes theimagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels andwearies it, this is simply because we judge after our poor earthlyexperience and its flagging analogies. It will not be so if thatrevolution is the vivid realization of all our being'spossibilities. Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence, migration, transition, these seven answers to the question of ourfate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkablein words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no realeighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay. Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanationand impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return ofthe same persistent entities. Fourth, all matter may be sublimatedto spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless space. Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs bepopulated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlastinginhabitants, the present order continuing in each earth untilenough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physicallyrestored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, ifmatter be not transmutable to soul, when that peculiar realityfrom which souls are developed is exhausted, and the lastgeneration of incarnated beings have risen from the flesh, thematerial creation may, in addition to the inter stellar region, beeternally appropriated by the spirit races to their own free rangeand use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now; else itmay vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may beabsolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of God, andthe universe may be infinite: then the process may proceedforever. But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought theyhave learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not byargumentation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it. The moralist regards all creation as the work of a personal God, atheatre of moral ends, a just Providence watching over the parts, and the conscious immortality of the actors an inevitableaccompaniment. The physicist contemplates the universe asconstituted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist inperfect mobility through space, but are concreted in the molecularmasses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for thedistribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds offorce. This, in its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations andcombinations of the original atoms. Organic growth, life, is thefruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is therendering up of that force in its equivalents. Thus, the universeis a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ultimate unitieswhich are indestructible, though in constant circulation of newgroupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist, man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To thespeculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, tobe liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed insome organism. In both cases he is immortal: but in that, as afree citizen of the ideal world; in this, as a flying particle ofthe 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 inregard to a future life which have been prevalent, in differentages, in various nations of the earth, it will be best to begin bypresenting, in a rapid series, some sketches of the conceits ofthose uncivilized tribes who did not so far as our knowledgereaches possess a doctrine sufficiently distinctive and full, orimportant enough in its historical relations, to warrant adetailed treatment in separate chapters. We will glance first at the negroes. According to all accounts, while there are, among the numerous tribes, diversities anddegrees of superstition, there is yet, throughout the native paganpopulation of Africa, a marked general agreement of belief in thesurvival of the soul, in spectres, divination, and witchcraft; andthere is a general similarity of funeral usages. Early travellerstell us that the Bushmen conceived the soul to be immortal, and asimpalpable as a shadow, and that they were much afraid of thereturn of deceased spirits to haunt them. They were accustomed topray to their departed countrymen not to molest them, but to stayaway in quiet. They also employed exorcisers to lay these illomened ghosts. Meiners relates of some inhabitants of the Guineacoast that their fear of ghosts and their childish credulityreached such a pitch that they threw their dead into the ocean, inthe 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 enabledhim to furnish the most reliable information, says, in his recentwork, 1 "A native African would as soon doubt his present as hisfuture state of being. " Every dream, every stray suggestion of themind, is interpreted, with unquestioning credence, as a visit fromthe dead, a whisper from a departed soul. If a man wakes up withpains in his bones or muscles, it is because his spirit haswandered abroad in the night and been flogged by some otherspirit. On certain occasions the whole community start up atmidnight, with clubs, torches, and hideous yells, to drive theevil spirits out of the village. They seem to believe that thesouls of dead men take rank with good or bad spirits, as they havethemselves been good or bad in this life. They bury with thedeceased clothing, ornaments, utensils, 1 Western Africa, ch. Xii. and statedly convey food to the grave for the use of therevisiting spirit. With the body of king Weir of the Cavallatowns, who was buried in December of 1854, in presence of severalmissionaries, was interred a quantity of rice, palm oil, beef, andrum: it was supposed the ghost of the sable monarch would comeback and consume these articles. The African tribes, where theirnotions have not been modified by Christian or by Mohammedanteachings, appear to have no definite idea of a heaven or of ahell; but future reward or punishment is considered under thegeneral 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 aplace beneath the earth, called Reinga. The path to this region isa precipice close to the sea shore at the North Cape. It is saidthat the natives who live in the neighborhood can at night hearsounds caused by the passing of spirits thither through the air. After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long beforethe news can arrive by natural means. 2 It is a common superstitionwith 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 inthe sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the onlypart of them that is visible. It has been observed that themythological doctrine of the glittering host of heaven being anassemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a moreingenious version. 3 Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insularegotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor, having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyesup to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a celebrated NewZealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of agreat chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thusincreasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferredto the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that therewas a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, theleft ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of aspirit, taking flight for Reinga. The custom, common in Africa and in New Zealand, of slaying theslaves or the wives of an important person at his death andburying them with him, prevails also among the inhabitants of theFeejee Islands. A chief's wives are sometimes strangled on theseoccasions, sometimes buried alive. One cried to her brother, "Iwish to die, that I may accompany my husband to the land where hehas gone. Love me, and make haste to strangle me, that I mayovertake him. "4 Departing souls go to the tribunal of Ndengei, whoeither receives them into bliss, or sends them back, as ghosts, tohaunt the scenes of their former existence, or distributes them asfood to devils, or imprisons them for a period and then dooms themto annihilation. The Feejees are also very much afraid of Samiulo, ruler of a subterranean world, who sits at the brink of a hugefiery cavern, into which he hurls the souls he dislikes. In theroad to Ndengei stands an enormous giant, armed with an axe, whotries 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 monsterwas dodging the bullet. The people of the Sandwich Islands held a confused medley ofnotions as to another life. In different persons among them werefound, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blankindifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that thesouls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the"eyeball of the sun, " to a life in the heavens, while plebeiansouls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Somethought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others, that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; othersstill, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards andbutterflies. 5 What a piteous life they must have led here whoseimaginations could only soar to a future so unattractive as this! The Kamtschadales send all the dead alike to a subterraneanelysium, 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 huntingnor fishing is ever pursued in vain there. This lower paradise isbut a beautified Kamtschatka, freed from discommoding hardshipsand cleansed of tormenting Cossacks and Russians. They have nohell for the rectification of the present wrong relations ofvirtue and misery, vice and happiness. The only distinction theyappear to make is that all who in Kamtschatka are poor, and havefew small and weak dogs, shall there be rich and be furnished withstrong and fat dogs. The power of imagination is very remarkablein this raw people, bringing the future life so near, andawakening such an impatient longing for it and for their formercompanions that they often, the sooner to secure a habitationthere, anticipate the natural time of their death by suicide. 6 The Esquimaux betray the influence of their clime and habits, inthe formation of their ideas of the life to come, as plainly asthe Kamtschadales do. The employments and enjoyments of theirfuture state are rude and earthy. They say the soul descendsthrough successive places of habitation, the first of which isfull of pains and horrors. The good, that is, the courageous andskilful, those who have endured severe hardships and mastered manyseals, passing through this first residence, find that the othermansions regularly improve. They finally reach an abode of perfectsatisfaction, far beneath the storms of the sea, where the sun isnever obscured by night, and where reindeer wander in great drovesbeside waters that never congeal, and wherein the whale, thewalrus, and the best sea fowls always abound. 7 Hell is deep, butheaven 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 iceTheir creed has placed a lowlier paradise. " The Greenlanders, too, located their elysium beneath the abyssesof the ocean, where the good Spirit Torngarsuk held his reign in ahappy and eternal summer. The wizards, who pretended to visit thisregion at will, described the disembodied souls as pallid, and, ifone 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 theaurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So Coleridgepictures the Laplander "Marking the streamy banners of the North, And thinking he thosespirits soon should join Who there, in floating robes of rosylight, Dance sportively. " But others believed this state of restlessness in the clouds wasthe fate only of the worthless, who were there pinched with hungerand plied with torments. All agreed in looking for another stateof existence, where, under diverse circumstances, happiness andmisery should be awarded, in some degree at least, according todesert. 9 The Peruvians taught that the reprobate were sentenced to a hellsituated in the centre of the earth, where they must endurecenturies of toil and anguish. Their paradise was away in the bluedome of heaven. There the spirits of the worthy would lead a lifeof tranquil luxury. At the death of a Peruvian noble his wives andservants frequently were slain, to go with him and wait on him inthat happy region. 10 Many authors, including Prescott, yieldingtoo easy credence to the very questionable assertions of theSpanish chroniclers, have attributed to the Peruvians a belief inthe resurrection of the body. Various travellers and writers havealso predicated this belief of savage nations in Central Africa, of certain South Sea islanders, and of several native tribes inNorth America. In all these cases the supposition is probablyerroneous, as we think for the following reasons. In the firstplace, the idea of a resurrection of the body is either a lateconception of the associative imagination, or else a doctrineconnected with a speculative theory of recurring epochs in thedestiny of the world; and it is in both instances too subtle andelaborate for an uncultivated people. Secondly, in none of thecases referred to has any reliable evidence been given of theactual existence of the belief in question. It has merely beeninferred, by persons to whose minds the doctrine was previouslyfamiliar, from phenomena by no means necessarily implying it. Forexample, a recent author ascribes to the Feejees the belief thatthere will be a resurrection of the body just as it was at thetime of death. The only datum on which he founds this astoundingassertion is that they often seem to prefer to die in the fullvigor of manhood rather than in decrepit old age! 11 Thirdly, weknow that the observation and statements of the Spanish monks andhistorians, in regard to the religion of the pagans of SouthAmerica, were of the most imperfect and reckless character. Theyperpetrated gross frauds, such as planting in the face of highprecipices white stones in the shape of the cross, and thenpointing to them in proof of their assertion that, before theChristians came, the Devil had here parodied the rites anddoctrines of the gospel. 12 They said the Mexican goddess, wife ofthe 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 Suchaffirmers are to be cautiously followed. Finally, it is a quitesignificant fact that while some point to the pains which thePeruvians took in embalming their dead as a proof that they lookedfor a resurrection of the body, Acosta expressly says that theydid not believe in the resurrection, and that this unbelief wasthe cause of their embalming. 14 Garcilaso de la Vega, in his"Royal Commentaries of the Peruvian Incas, " says that when heasked some Peruvians why they took so great care to preserve inthe cemeteries of the dead the nails and hair which had been cutoff, they replied that in the day of resurrection the dead wouldcome forth with whatever of their bodies was left, and there wouldbe too great a press of business in that day for them to affordtime to go hunting round after their hair and nails. 15 The fancyof a Christian is too plain here. If the answer were really madeby the natives, they were playing a joke on their credulousquestioner, or seeking to please him with distorted echoes of hisown faith. The conceits as to a future life entertained by the Mexicansvaried considerably from those of their neighbors of Peru. Soulsneither good nor bad, or whose virtues and vices balanced eachother, were to enter a medium state of idleness and empty content. The wicked, or those dying in any of certain enumerated modes ofdeath, went to Mictlan, a dismal hell within the earth. The soulsof those struck by lightning, or drowned, or dying by any of agiven list of diseases, also the souls of children, weretransferred to a remote elysium, Tlalocan. There was a place inthe chief temple where, it was supposed, once a year the spiritsof all the children who had been sacrificed to Tlaloc invisiblycame and assisted in the ceremonies. The ultimate heaven wasreserved for warriors who bravely fell in battle, for women whodied in labor, for those offered up in the temples of the gods, and for a few others. These passed immediately to the house of thesun, 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 asbeautiful songsters among the flowers, now on earth, now inheaven, at their pleasure. 16 It was the Mexican custom to dressthe dead man in the garb appropriated to the guardian deity of hiscraft or condition in life. They gave him a jug of water. Theyplaced with him slips of paper to serve as passports throughguarded gates and perilous defiles in the other world. They made afire of his clothes and utensils, to warm the shivering soul whiletraversing a region of cold winds beyond the grave. 17 Thefollowing sentence occurs in a poem composed by one of the oldAztec monarchs: "Illustrious nobles, loyal subjects, let us aspireto that heaven where all is eternal and corruption cannot come. The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun, and theshadows 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 faithof the widely spread tribes of North America, we find a rulingagreement in the cardinal features of their thought concerning afuture state of existence. In common with nearly all barbarousnations, they felt great fear of apparitions. The Sioux were inthe habit of addressing the deceased at his burial, and imploringhim to stay in his own place and not come to distress them. Theirfuneral customs, too, from one extremity of the continent to theother, were very much alike. Those who have reported theiropinions to us, from the earliest Jesuit missionaries to thelatest investigators of their mental characteristics, concur inascribing to them a deep trust in a life to come, a cheerful viewof its conditions, and a remarkable freedom from the dread ofdying. Charlevoix says, "The best established opinion among thenatives is the immortality of the soul. " On the basis of anaccount written by William Penn, Pope composed the famous passagein his "Essay on Man:" Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mindSees God in clouds and hears him in the wind. His soul proud Science never taught to strayFar 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 surmisesas to its destiny, are implied in their funeral rites, which, asalready stated, were, with some exceptions, strikingly similareven in the remotest tribes. 19 In the bark coffin, with a dead Indian the Onondagas buried akettle of provisions, a pair of moccasins, a piece of deer skinand sinews of the deer to sew patches on the moccasins, which itwas supposed the deceased would wear out on his journey. They alsofurnished him with a bow and arrows, a tomahawk and knife, toprocure game with to live on while pursuing his way to the land ofspirits, the blissful regions of Ha wah ne u. 20 Several Indiannations, instead of burying the food, suspended it above thegrave, and renewed it from time to time. Some writers haveexplained this custom by the hypothesis of an Indian belief in twosouls, one of which departed to the realm of the dead, while theother tarried by the mound until the body was decayed, or until ithad itself found a chance to be born in a new body. 21 Thesupposition seems forced and extremely doubtful. The truthprobably lies in a simpler explanation, which will be offeredfurther 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 waythe "Road of the Dead. " 22 It was so white with the crowds ofjourneying ghosts! But almost all, like the Ojibways, imaginedtheir elysium to lie far in the West. The soul, freed from thebody, follows a wide beaten path westward, and enters a countryabounding with all that an Indian covets. On the borders of thisblessed land, in a long glade, he finds his relatives, for manygenerations back, gathered to welcome him. 23 The Chippewas, andseveral other important tribes, always kindled fires on the freshgraves of their dead, and kept them burning four successivenights, to light the wandering souls on their way. 24 An Indianmyth represents the ghosts coming back from Ponemah, the land ofthe Hereafter, and singing this song to the miraculous Hiawatha: "Do not lay such heavy burdensOn 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 journeyTo 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 journeyMay not grope about in darkness. " 25 The subject of a future state seems to have been by far the mostprominent one in the Indian imagination. They relate manytraditions of persons who have entered it, and returned, and givendescriptions of it. A young brave, having lost his betrothed, determined to follow her to the land of souls. Far South, beyondthe region of ice and snows, he came to a lodge standing beforethe entrance to wide blue plains. Leaving his body there, heembarked in a white stone canoe to cross a lake. He saw the soulsof wicked Indians sinking in the lake; but the good gained anelysian shore, where all was warmth, beauty, ease, and eternalyouth, and where the air was food. The Master of Breath sent himback, but promised that he might at death return and stay. 26 TheWyandots tell of a dwarf, Tcha ka bech, who climbed a tree whichgrew 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 returnedwith his sister and nephew, resting each night in one of thewigwams. 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 togo and examine his traps, he saw one all on fire, and, uponapproaching it, found that he had caught the sun! Where the Indian is found believing in a Devil and a hell, it isthe result of his intercourse with Europeans. These elements ofhorror were foreign to his original religion. 27 There are in somequarters faint traces of a single purgatorial or retributiveconception. It is a representation of paradise as an island, theordeal consisting in the passage of the dark river or lake whichsurrounds it. The worthy cross with entire facility, the unworthyonly after tedious struggles. Some say the latter are drowned;others, that they sink up to their chins in the water, where theypass eternity in vain desires to attain the alluring land on whichthey gaze. 28 Even this notion may be a modification consequentupon European influence. At all events, it is subordinate in forceand only occasional in occurrence. For the most part, in theIndian faith mercy swallows up the other attributes of the GreatSpirit. The Indian dies without fear, looking for no punishments, only for rewards. 29 He regards the Master of Breath not as a holyjudge, but as a kind father. He welcomes death as opening the doorto a sweet land. Ever charmingly on his closing eyes dawns theprospect of the aboriginal elysium, a gorgeous region of softshades, gliding streams, verdant groves waving in gentle airs, warbling birds, herds of stately deer and buffalo browsing onlevel plains. It is the earth in noiseless and solemnmetamorphosis. 30 We shall conclude this chapter by endeavoring to explain thepurport and origin of the principal ceremonies and notions whichhave now been set forth pertaining to the disembodied state. Thefirst source of these particulars is to be sought, not in anyclear mental perceptions, or conscious dogmatic belief, but in thenatural workings of affection, memory, and sentiment. Among almostevery people, from the Chinese to the Araucanians, from theEthiopians to the Dacotahs, rites of honor have been paid to thedead, various offerings have been placed at their graves. TheVedas enjoin the offering of a cake to the ghosts of ancestorsback 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" asAugustine and Tertullian call them from the heathen, andCelebrated them over the graves of their martyrs and of theirother deceased friends. Such customs as these among savages likethe Shillooks or the Choctaws are usually supposed to imply thebelief that the souls of the deceased remain about the places ofsepulture and physically partake of the nourishment thusfurnished. The interpretation is farther fetched than need be, andis unlikely; or, at all events, if it be true in some cases, it isnot the whole truth. In the first place, these people see that thefood and drink remain untouched, the weapons and utensils are leftunused in the grave. Secondly, there are often certain features inthe barbaric ritual obviously metaphorical, incapable of literalacceptance. For instance, the Winnebagoes light a small fire onthe grave of a deceased warrior to light him on his journey to theland 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. OfIndian 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 daysand nights and is wholly invisible. They light and tend thatwatch fire as a memorial of their departed companion and a rudeexpression of their own emotions; as an unconscious emblem oftheir own struggling faith, not as a beacon to the straying ghost. Again, the Indian mother, losing a nursing infant, spurts some ofher milk into the fire, that the little spirit may not want fornutriment on its solitary path. 31 Plato approvingly quotesHesiod's statement that the souls of noble men become guardiandemons coursing the air, messengers and agents of the gods in theworld. Therefore, he adds, "we should reverence their tombs andestablish solemn rites and offerings there;" though by his verystatement these places were not the dwellings or haunts of thefreely circuiting spirits. 32 Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctiveassociation, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the soulsof the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms. The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wanderingsouls within the enclosed graveyards. 33 These sepulchral folds arefull of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast drawspilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if notrestrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them tomake offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV. , the kings ofFrance lay in state and were served as in life for forty daysafter they died. 34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring anydoctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentimentwhich, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the ArruIslands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble anddestroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes thePapist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and torecite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, instill another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the prettyplaythings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, thissame sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelledthe Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter hisbrave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw tohang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. Whatshould we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence, when the present doctrines and customs of France and America areforgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners inPere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on thegraves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude thatit was believed the souls remained in the bodies in the tomb andenjoyed the perfume of the flowers? An American traveller, writingfrom Vienna on All Saints' Day, in 1855, describes the avenues ofthe great cemetery filled with people hanging festoons of flowerson the tombstones, and placing burning candles of wax on thegraves, and kneeling in devotion; it being their childish belief, he says, that their prayers on this day have efficacy to releasetheir deceased relatives from purgatory, and that the dim taperflickering on the sod lights the unbound soul to its heavenlyhome. Of course these rites are not literal expressions of literalbeliefs, 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 inadequateshadows of a theological doctrine, although, as is well known, there is, among the most ignorant persons, scarcely anydeliberately apprehended distinction between image and entity, material representation and spiritual verity. If a member of the Oneida tribe died when they were away fromhome, they buried him with great solemnity, setting a mark overthe grave; and whenever they passed that way afterwards theyvisited the spot, singing a mournful song and casting stones uponit, thus giving symbolic expression to their feelings. It would beabsurd to suppose this song an incantation to secure the repose ofthe buried brave, and the stones thrown to prevent his rising; yetit would not be more incredible or more remote from the facts thanmany a commonly current interpretation of barbarian usages. Anamusing instance of error well enforcing the need of extremecaution in drawing inferences is afforded by the example of thoseexplorers who, finding an extensive cemetery where the aborigineshad buried all their children apart from the adults, concludedthey had discovered the remains of an ancient race of pigmies! 35 The influence of unspeculative affection, memory, and sentimentgoes far towards accounting for the funeral ritual of thebarbarians. But it is not sufficient. We must call in further aid;and that aid we find in the arbitrary conceits, the poeticassociations, and the creative force of unregulated fancy andimagination. The poetic faculty which, supplied with materials byobservation and speculation, constructed the complex mythologiesof Egypt and Greece, and which, turning on its own resources, composed the Arabian tales of the genii and the modern literatureof pure fiction, is particularly active, fertile, and tyrannical, though in a less continuous and systematic form, in the barbarianmind. Acting by wild fits and starts, there is no end to theextravagant conjectures and visions it bodies forth. Destitute ofphilosophical definitions, totally unacquainted with criticaldistinctions or analytic reflection, absurd notions, soberconvictions, dim dreams, and sharp perceptions run confusedlytogether in the minds of savages. There is to them no clear andpermanent demarcation between rational thoughts and crazy fancies. Now, no phenomenon can strike more deeply or work more powerfullyin human nature, stirring up the exploring activities of intellectand imagination, than the event of death, with its bereavingstroke and prophetic appeal. Accordingly, we should expect to findamong uncultivated nations, as we actually do, a vast medley offragmentary thoughts and pictures plausible, strange, lovely, orterrible 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 experienceamidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes thesefigments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions, distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they weresuperstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assentof soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. Theselines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is toknow where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples willserve at once to illustrate the 35 Smithsonian Contributions, vol. Ii. Squier's AboriginalMonuments, appendix, pp. 127-131. operation of the principle now laid down, and to present stillfurther specimens of the barbarian notions of a future life. Some Indian tribes made offerings to the spirits of their departedheroes by casting the boughs of various trees around the ash, saying that the branches of this tree were eloquent with theghosts of their warrior sires, who came at evening in the chariotof cloud to fire the young to deeds of war. 36 There is an Indianlegend of a witch who wore a mantle composed of the scalps ofmurdered women. Taking this off, she shook it, and all the scalpsuttered shrieks of laughter. Another describes a magician scuddingacross a lake in a boat whose ribs were live rattlesnakes. 37 Anexercise of mind virtually identical with that which gave thesestrokes made the Philippine Islanders say that the souls of thosewho die struck by lightning go up the beams of the rainbow to ahappy place, and animated Ali to declare that the pious, on comingout of their sepulchres, shall find awaiting them white wingedcamels with saddles of gold. The Ajetas suspended the bow andarrows of a deceased Papuan above his grave, and conceived him asemerging from beneath every night to go a hunting. 38 The fishermanon the coast of Lapland was interred in a boat, and a flint andcombustibles were given him to light him along the dark cavernouspassage he was to traverse. The Dyaks of Borneo believe that everyone whose head they can get possession of here will in the futurestate be their servant: consequently, they make a business of"head hunting, " accumulating the ghastly visages of their victimsin their huts. 39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise forthe "brave and virtuous, " where, it is promised, they shall enjoythe sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; butthe "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternalbanishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked anddriven as slaves by their enemies. 40 The Hispaniolians locatetheir elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, deliciousfruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, where they expect tolive again with their departed ancestors and friends. 41 ThePatagonians say the stars are their translated countrymen, and themilky way is a field where the departed Patagonians huntostriches. Clouds are the feathers of the ostriches they kill. 42The 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 dogssurrounding a white bear, and on the belt of Orion as a company ofGreenlanders placed there because they could not find the way totheir own country. Black Bird, the redoubtable chief of the O MaHaws, when dying, said to his people, "Bury me on yonder loftybluff on the banks of the Missouri, where I can see the men andboats passing by on the river. " 43 Accordingly, as soon as heceased 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 heapedthe earth around him. This does not imply any believed doctrine, in our sense of the term, but is plainly a spontaneoustransference for the moment, by the poetic imagination, of thesentiments of the living man to the buried body. The unhappy Africans who were snatched from their homes, enslavedand cruelly tasked in the far West India islands, pined undertheir fate with deadly homesickness. The intense longing mouldedtheir plastic belief, just as the sensation from some hot bricksat the feet of a sleeping man shaped his dreams into a journey upthe side of Atna. They fancied that if they died they shouldimmediately live again in their fatherland. They committed suicidein great numbers. At last, when other means had failed to checkthis epidemic of self destruction, a cunning overseer brought themropes and every facility for hanging, and told them to hangthemselves as fast as they pleased, for their master had bought agreat plantation in Africa, and as soon as they got there theywould be set to work on it. Their helpless credulity took theimpression; and no more suicides occurred. 44 The mutual formative influences exerted upon a people's notionsconcerning the future state, by the imagination of their poets andthe peculiarities of their clime, are perhaps nowhere moreconspicuously exhibited than in the case of the Caledonians who atan early period dwelt in North Britain. They had picturesquetraditions locating the habitation of ghosts in the air abovetheir fog draped mountains. They promised rewards for nothing butvalor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; andeven of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an underworld. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, wherethey spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories ofthe 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 historicalrecords than they can claim when considered as fragments ofexquisite poetry. " "A dark red stream comes down from the hill. Crugal sat upon thebeam; he that lately fell by the hand of Swaran striving in thebattle 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 twodecaying flames; dark is the wound on his breast. The stars dimtwinkled through his form, and his voice was like the sound of adistant stream. Dim and in tears he stood, and stretched his palehand over the hero. Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like thegale of the reedy Lego. 'My ghost, O'Connal, is on my nativehills, but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt nevertalk with Crugal nor find his lone steps on the heath. I am lightas the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist. Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death. It hoversover the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Removefrom the field of ghosts. ' Like the darkened moon, he retired inthe midst of the whistling blast. " We recognise here several leading traits in all the earlyunspeculative faiths, the vapory form, the echoless motion, themarks 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 therhetorical imagery, the scenery, the location of the spirit worldin the lower clouds, are stamped by emphatic climaticpeculiarities, whose origination, easily traceable, throws lighton the growth of the whole mass of such notions everywhere. Two general sources have now been described of the barbarianconceptions in relation to a future state. First, the naturaloperation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy, regret, and reverence for them leading the thoughts and the heartto grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of theirfate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly, the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination when itis set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomenaassociated with death. But beyond these two comprehensivestatements there is, directly related to the matter, and worthy ofseparate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which hasbeen very extensively experienced and fertile of results. It is apeculiar example of the unconscious impartation of objectiveexistence to mental ideas. With the death of the body the man doesnot cease to live in the remembrance, imagination, and heart ofhis surviving friends. By an unphilosophical confusion, thisinternal image is credited as an external existence. The dead passfrom their customary haunts in our society to the imperishabledomain of ideas. This visionary world of memory and fantasy isprojected outward, located, furnished, and constitutes the futurestate apprehended by the barbarian mind. Feuerbach says in hissubtle and able Thoughts on Death and Immortality, "The Realm ofMemory is the Land of Souls. " Ossian, amid the midnight mountains, thinking of departed warriors and listening to the tempest, fillsthe 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 withthe feeling that every thing else has a ghost as well as man. TheGauls lent money in this world upon bills payable in the next. They threw letters upon the funeral pile to be read by the soul ofthe deceased. 45 As the ghost was thought to retain the scars ofinjuries inflicted upon the body, so, it appears, these letterswere thought, when destroyed, to leave impressions of what hadbeen written on them. The custom of burning or burying things withthe dead probably arose, in some cases at least, from thesupposition that every object has its mancs. The obolus forCharon, the cake of honey for Cerberus, the shadows of thesearticles would be borne and used by the shadow of the dead man. Leonidas saying, "Bury me on my shield: I will enter even Hades asa Lacedamonian, " 46 must either have used the word Hades bymetonymy for the grave, or have imagined that a shadowy fac simileof what was interred in the grave went into the grim kingdom ofPluto. It was a custom with some Indian tribes, on the new madegrave of a chief, to slay his chosen horse; and when he fell theysupposed "That then, upon the dead man's plain, The rider grasp'd his steedagain. " 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, inpresence of a missionary, took a weapon from the grave of a buriedcompanion, saying, "The ghost of the club has gone with him. " TheIroquois tell of a woman who was chased by a ghost. She heard hisfaint war whoop, his spectre voice, and only escaped with her lifebecause his war club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air. The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb. 47 Nothingseemed 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 haddeclared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the deadaccompanied them to his palace. 48 Before the Mohammedan era, onthe death of an Arab, the finest camel he had owned was tied to astake beside his grave, and left to expire of hunger over the bodyof his master, in order that, in the region into which death hadintroduced him, he should be supplied with his usual bearer. 49 TheChinese who surpass all other people in the offerings and worshippaid at the sepulchres of their ancestors make little paperhouses, fill them with images of furniture, utensils, domestics, and all the appurtenances of the family economy, and then burnthem, thus passing them into the invisible state for the use ofthe deceased whom they mourn and honor. 50 It is a touching thoughtwith the Greenlanders, when a child dies, to bury a dog with himas a guide to the land of souls; for, they say, the dog is able tofind his way anywhere. 51 The shadow of the faithful servant guidesthe shadow of the helpless child to heaven. In fancy, not withouta moved heart, one sees this spiritual Bernard dog bearing theghost child on his back, over the spectral Gothard of death, safeinto the sheltering hospice of the Greenland paradise. It is strange to notice the meeting of extremes in the rudeantithetical correspondence between Plato's doctrine of archetypalideas, the immaterial patterns of earthly things, and the beliefof savages in the ghosts of clubs, arrows, sandals, andprovisions. The disembodied soul of the philosopher, an eternalidea, turns from the empty illusions of matter to nourish itselfwith the substance of real truth. The spectre of the Mohawkdevours the spectre of the haunch of roast venison hung over hisgrave. 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 alsointo the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. BishopBerkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he toowas an idealist; for his ultimate ratios terms only appearing withthe 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 werebut the ghosts of departed quantities! It may be added here that, according to the teachings of physiological psychology, allmemories or recollected ideas are literally the ghosts of departedsensations. We have thus seen that the conjuring force of fear, with its dreadapparitions, the surmising, half articulate struggles ofaffection, the dreams of memory, the lights and groups of poetry, the crude germs of metaphysical speculation, the deposits of theinter action of human experience and phenomenal nature, now inisolated fragments, again, huddled indiscriminately togetherconspire 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, whoconstituted what may, with some correctness, be called the Celticpriesthood, were the recognised religious teachers throughoutGaul, Armorica, a small part of Germany on the southern border, all Great Britain, and some neighboring islands. The notions inregard to a future life put forth by them are stated only in avery imperfect manner by the Greek and Roman authors in whosesurviving works we find allusions to the Druids or accounts of theCelts. Several modern writers especially Borlase, in hisAntiquities of Cornwall1 have collected all these references fromDiodorus, Strabo, Procopius, Tacitus, Casar, Mela, ValeriusMaximus, and Marcellinus. It is therefore needless to cite thepassages here, the more so as, even with the aid of all theanalytic and constructive comments which can be fairly made uponthem, they afford us only a few general views, leaving all thedetails in profound obscurity. The substance of what we learn fromthese sources is this. First, that the Druids possessed a body ofscience and speculation comprising the doctrine of immortality, which they taught with clearness and authority. Secondly, thatthey inculcated the belief in a future life in inseparableconnection with the great dogma of metempsychosis. Thirdly, thatthe people held such cheerful and attractive views of the futurestate, and held them with such earnestness, that they wept aroundthe newborn infant and smiled around the corpse; that theyencountered death without fear or reluctance. This reversal ofnatural sentiments shows the tampering of a priesthood who hadmotives. A somewhat more minute conception of the Druidic view of thefuture life is furnished us by an old mythologic tale of Celticorigin. 2 Omitting the story, as irrelevant to our purpose, wederive from it the following ideas. The soul, on being divested ofits earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed ofthe souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads ofarmies, inspiring courage or striking terror. Not yet freed fromterrestrial affections, they mingle in the passions and affairs ofmen. Vainly they strive to soar above the atmosphere; animpassable wall of sapphire resists their wings. In the moon, millions of souls traverse tremendous plains of ice, losing allperception but that of simple existence, forgetting the adventuresthey have passed through and are about to recommence. Duringeclipses, on long tubes of darkness they return to the earth, and, revived by a beam of light from the all quickening sun, enternewly formed bodies, and begin again the career of life. The diskof the sun consists of an assemblage of pure souls swimming in anocean of bliss. Souls sullied with earthly impurities are to bepurged by repeated births and probations till the last stain isremoved, and they are all finally fitted to ascend to a successionof spheres still higher than the sun, whence they can never sinkagain to reside in the circle of the lower globes and grosseratmosphere. 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 thesoul's destinies has been presented to us through the translationof some of the preserved treasures of the old Bardic lore ofWales. The Welsh bards for hundreds of years were the solesurviving representatives of the Druids. Their poems numerousmanuscripts of which, with apparent authentication of theirgenuineness, have been published and explained contain quite fullaccounts of the tenets of Druidism, which was nowhere else sothoroughly systematized and established as in ancient Britain. 3The curious reader will find this whole subject copiously treated, and all the materials furnished, in the "Myvyrian Archaology ofWales, " a work in two huge volumes, published at London at thebeginning of the present century. After the introduction andtriumph of Christianity in Britain, for several centuries the twosystems 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 toDruidism. 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 ithaving been opened by Christ! Cautiously eliminating the Christianadmixtures, the following outline, which we epitomize from thepioneer5 of modern scholars to the Welsh Bardic literature, affords a pretty clear knowledge of that portion of the Druidictheology relating to the future life. There are, says one of the Bardic triads, three circles ofexistence. First, the Circle of Infinity, where of living or deadthere is nothing but God, and which none but God can traverse. Secondly, the Circle of Metempsychosis, where all things that liveare derived from death. This circle has been traversed by man. Thirdly, the Circle of Felicity, where all things spring fromlife. This circle man shall hereafter traverse. All animatedbeings originate in the lowest point of existence, and, by regulargradations through an ascending series of transmigrations, rise tothe highest state of perfection possible for finite creatures. Fate reigns in all the states below that of humanity, and they areall necessarily evil. In the states above humanity, on thecontrary, unmixed good so prevails that all are necessarily good. But in the middle state of humanity, good and evil are so balancedthat liberty results; and free will and consequent responsibilityare born. Beings who in their ascent have arrived at the state ofman, if, by purity, humility, love, and righteousness, they keepthe laws of the Creator, will, after death, rise into moreglorious spheres, and will continue to rise still higher, untilthey reach the final destination of complete and endlesshappiness. But if, while in the state of humanity, one pervertshis reason and will, and attaches himself to evil, he will, ondying, fall into such a state of animal existence as correspondswith the baseness of his soul. This baseness may be so great as toprecipitate him to the lowest point of being; but he shall climbthence through a series of births best fitted to free him from hisevil propensities. Restored to the probationary state, he may fallagain; but, though this should occur again and again 3 Sketch of British Bardism, prefixed to Owen's translation of theHeroic 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 preordainedfelicity, and fall nevermore. In the states superior to humanity, the soul recovers and retains the entire recollection of itsformer lives. We will quote a few illustrative triads. There are three necessarypurposes of metempsychosis: to collect the materials andproperties of every nature; to collect the knowledge of everything; 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. Threethings 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 soulis an inconceivably minute particle of the most refined matter, endowed with indestructible life, at the dissolution of one bodypassing, according to its merits, into a higher or lower stage ofexistence, where it expands itself into that form which itsacquired propensities necessarily give it, or into that animal inwhich such propensities naturally reside. The ultimate states ofhappiness are ceaselessly undergoing the most delightfulrenovations, without which, indeed, no finite being could endurethe tedium of eternity. These are not, like the death of the lowerstates, accompanied by a suspension of memory and of consciousidentity. All the innumerable modes of existence, after beingcleansed from every evil, will forever remain as beautifulvarieties in the creation, and will be equally esteemed, equallyhappy, equally fathered by the Creator. The successive occupationof these modes of existence by the celestial inhabitants of theCircle of Felicity will be one of the ways of varying what wouldotherwise be the intolerable monotony of eternity. The creation isyet in its infancy. The progressive operation of the providence ofGod will bring every being up from the great Deep to the point ofliberty, and will at last secure three things for them: namely, what is most beneficial, what is most desired, and what is mostbeautiful. There are three stabilities of existence: what cannotbe otherwise, what should not be otherwise, what cannot beimagined better; and in these all shall end, in the Circle ofFelicity. Such is a hasty synopsis of what here concerns us in the theologyof the Druids. In its ground germs it was, it seems to us, unquestionably imported into Celtic thought and Cymrian song fromthat prolific and immemorial Hindu mind which bore Brahmanism andBuddhism as its fruit. Its ethical tone, intellectual elevation, and glorious climax are not unworthy that free hierarchy ofminstrel priests whose teachings were proclaimed, as theirassemblies were held, "in the face of the sun and in the eye ofthe light, " and whose thrilling motto was, "THE TRUTH AGAINST THEWORLD. " 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 muchlight on many points of it. His ridicule of the arbitrary tenetsand absurdities which Davies, Pughe, and others have taught in allgood faith as Druidic lore and practice is richly deserved. But, despite the learning and acumen displayed in his able and valuablevolume, we must think Mr. Nash goes wholly against the record indenying the doctrine of metempsychosis to the Druidic system, andgoes clearly beyond the record in charging Edward Williams andothers with forgery and fraud in their representations of ancientBardic doctrines. 6 In support of such grave charges direct evidenceis needed; only suspicious circumstances are adduced. The nonexistence of public documents is perfectly reconcilable withthe existence of reliable oral accounts preserved by the initiatedfew, 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 anearly period a migration took place from Southern Asia to NorthernEurope, which constituted the commencement of what afterwards grewto be the great Gothic family. The correspondence of many of theleading doctrines and symbols of the Scandinavian mythology withwell known Persian and Buddhist notions notions of a purelyfanciful and arbitrary character is too peculiar, apparently, toadmit of any other explanation. 1 But the germs of thought andimagination transplanted thus from the warm and gorgeous climes ofthe East to the snowy mountains of Norway and the howling ridgesof Iceland, obtained a fresh development, with numerousmodifications and strange additions, from the new life, climate, scenery, and customs to which they were there exposed. Thetemptation to predatory habits and strife, the necessity for anintense though fitful activity arising from their geographicalsituation, the fierce spirit nourished in them by their actuallife, the tremendous phenomena of the Arctic world around them, all these influences break out to our view in the poetry, and arereflected 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 centralcaldron, Hvergelmir, dwells the gloomy dragon Nidhogg, rose floodsof 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, whosedwelling was Midgard; Jotuns, who occupied Utgard; and the Asir, whose home was Asgard. The Jotuns, or demons, seem to have beenoriginally personifications of darkness, cold, and storm, thedisturbing forces of nature, whatever is hostile to fruitful lifeand peace. They were frost giants ranged in the outer wastesaround the habitable fields of men. The Asir, or gods, on theother hand, appear to have been personifications of light, andlaw, and benignant power, the orderly energies of the universe. Between the Jotuns and the Asir there is an implacable contest. 2The rainbow, Bifrost, is a bridge leading from earth up to theskyey dwelling place of the Asir; and their sentinel, Heimdall, whose senses are so acute that he can hear the grass spring in themeadows and the wool grow on the backs of the sheep, keepsincessant watch upon it. Their chief deity, the father Zeus of theNorthern pantheon, was Odin, the god of war, who wakened thespirit of battle by flinging his spear over the heads of thepeople, its inaudible hiss from heaven being as the song of Atelet loose on earth. Next in rank was Thor, the personification ofthe exploding tempest. The crashing echoes of the thunder are hischariot wheels rattling through the cloudy halls of Thrudheim. Whenever the lightning strikes a cliff or an iceberg, then Thorhas 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, andall things loved him. After Christianity was established in theNorth, Jesus was called the White Christ, or the new Balder. Theappearance of Balder amidst the frenzied and bloody divinities ofthe Norse creed is beautiful as the dew cool moon hanging calmlyover the lurid storm of Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in theWreath of the Gods, " because with his fate that of all the restwas bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity, would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was theMomus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, thehalf amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, andevil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thoron his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his ownkith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth environing sea, or in livid Helheim deep beneath the domain of breathinghumanity. 3 With a Jotun woman, Angerbode, or Messenger of Evil, Loki begetsthree fell children. The first is Fenris, a savage wolf, so largethat 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 circlegirds the world. " The third is Hela, the grim goddess of death, whose ferociousaspect is half of a pale blue and half of a ghastly white, andwhose empire, stretching below the earth through Niflheim, is fullof freezing vapors and discomfortable sights. Her residence is thespacious under world; her court yard, faintness; her threshold, precipice; her door, abyss; her hall, pain; her table, hunger; herknife, 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 andloathsome. In Nastrond, or strand of corpses, stands a hall, theconception of which is prodigiously awful and enormouslydisgusting. It is plaited of serpents' backs, wattled togetherlike wicker work, whose heads turn inwards, vomiting poison. Inthe lake of venom thus deposited within these immense wrigglingwalls of snakes the worst of the damned wade and swim. High up in the sky is Odin's hall, the magnificent Valhalla, ortemple of the slain. The columns supporting its ceiling arespears. It is roofed with shields, and the ornaments on itsbenches are coats of mail. The Valkyrs are Odin's battle maids, choosers of heroes for his banquet rooms. With helmets on theirheads, in bloody harness, mounted on shadowy steeds, surrounded bymeteoric lightnings, and wielding flaming swords, they hover overthe conflict and point the way to Valhalla to the warriors whofall. The valiant souls thus received to Odin's presence arecalled Einheriar, or the elect. The Valkyrs, as white clad virginswith flowing ringlets, wait on them in the capacity of cupbearers. Each morning, at the crowing 3 Oehlenschlager, Gods of the North. This celebrated and brilliantpoem, with the copious notes in Frye's translation, affords theEnglish reader a full conception of the Norse pantheon and itssalient adventures. of a huge gold combed cock, the well armed Einheriar rush throughValhalla's five hundred and forty doors into a great court yard, and pass the day in merciless fighting. However pierced and hewnin pieces in these fearful encounters, at evening every wound ishealed, and they return into the hall whole, and are seated, according to their exploits, at a luxurious feast. Theperennial boar Sehrimnir, deliciously cooked by Andrimnir, thoughdevoured every night, is whole again every morning and ready to beserved anew. The two highest joys these terrible berserkers andvikings knew on earth composed their experience in heaven: namely, a battle by day and a feast by night. It is a vulgar error, longprevalent, that the Valhalla heroes drink out of the skulls oftheir enemies. This notion, though often refuted, still lingers inthe popular mind. It arose from the false translation of a phrasein the death song of Ragnar Lodbrok, the famous sea king, "Soonshall we drink from the curved trees of the head, " which, as afigure for the usual drinking horns, was erroneously rendered byOlaus Wormius, "Soon shall we drink from the hollow cups ofskulls. " It is not the heads of men, but the horns of beasts, fromwhich the Einheriar quaff Heidrun's mead. 4 No women being ever mentioned as gaining admission to Valhalla orjoining in the joys of the Einheriar, some writers have affirmedthat, according to the Scandinavian faith, women had no immortalsouls, or, at all events, were excluded from heaven. The charge isas baseless in this instance as when brought againstMohammedanism. Valhalla was the exclusive abode of the most daringchampions; but Valhalla was not the whole of heaven. Vingolf, theHall of Friends, stood beside the Hall of the Slain, and was theassembling place of the goddesses. 5 There, in the palace of Freya, the souls of noble women were received after death. The elder Eddasays that Thor guided Roska, a swift footed peasant girl who hadattended him as a servant on various excursions, to Freya's bower, where she was welcomed, and where she remained forever. The virgingoddess Gefjone, the Northern Diana, also had a residence inheaven, and all who died maidens repaired thither. 6 The presenceof virgin throngs with Gefjone, and the society of noble matronsin Vingolf, shed a tender gleam across the carnage and carousal ofValhalla. More is said of the latter the former is scarcelyvisible to us now because the only record we have of the Norsefaith is that contained in the fragmentary strains of ferociousSkalds, who sang chiefly to warriors, and the staple matter ofwhose songs was feats of martial prowess or entertainingmythological stories. Furthermore, there is above the heaven ofthe Asir a yet higher heaven, the abode of the far removed andinscrutable being, the rarely named Omnipotent One, the true AllFather, who is at last to come forth above the ruins of theuniverse to judge and sentence all creatures and to rebuild abetter world. In this highest region towers the imperishable goldroofed hall, Gimle, brighter than the sun. There is no hintanywhere in the Skaldic strains that good women are repulsed fromthis dwelling. According to the rude morality of the people and the time, thecontrasted conditions of admission to the upper paradise orcondemnation 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, orthe hated vices of feebleness, cowardice, deceit, humility. Thosewho have won fame by puissant feats and who die in battle aresnatched by the Valkyrs from the sod to Valhalla. To die in armsis to be chosen of Odin, "In whose hall of gold The steel clad ghosts their wonted orgieshold. Some taunting jest begets the war of words: In clamorousfray they grasp their gleamy swords, And, as upon the earth, withfierce delight By turns renew the banquet and the fight. " All, on the contrary, who, after lives of ignoble labor ordespicable ease, die of sickness, sink from their beds to thedismal house of Hela. In this gigantic vaulted cavern the airsmells like a newly stirred grave; damp fogs rise, hollow sighsare heard, the only light comes from funeral tapers held byskeletons; the hideous queen, whom Thor eulogizes as the Scourgerof Cowards, sits on a throne of skulls, and sways a sceptre, madeof a dead man's bone bleached in the moonlight, over a countlessmultitude of shivering ghosts. 7 But the Norse moralists plunge toa yet darker doom those guilty of perjury, murder, or adultery. InNastrond's grisly hail, which is shaped of serpents' spines, andthrough whose loop holes drops of poison drip, where no sunlightever reaches, they welter in a venom sea and are gnawed by thedragon Nidhogg. 8 In a word, what to the crude moral sense of themartial Goth seemed piety, virtue, led to heaven; what seemedblasphemy, baseness, led to hell. The long war between good and evil, light and darkness, order anddiscord, the Asir and the Jotuns, was at last to reach a fatalcrisis and end in one universal battle, called Ragnarokur, or the"Twilight of the Gods, " whose result would be the totaldestruction of the present creation. Portentous inklings of thisdread encounter were abroad among all beings. A shudderinganticipation of it sat in a lowering frown of shadow on the browsof the deities. In preparation for Ragnarokur, both partiesanxiously secured all the allies they could. Odin thereforejoyously welcomes every valiant warrior to Valhalla, as a recruitfor his hosts on that day when Fenris shall break loose. WhenHakon Jarl fell, the Valkyrs shouted, "Now does the force of thegods grow stronger when they have brought Hakon to their home. " ASkald makes Odin say, on the death of King Eirilc Blood Axe, as anexcuse for permitting such a hero to be slain, "Our lot isuncertain: the gray wolf gazes on the host of the gods;" that is, we shall need help at Ragnarokur. But as all the brave andmagnanimous champions received to Valhalla were enlisted on theside of the Asir, so all the miserable cowards, invalids, andwretches doomed to Hela's house would fight for the Jotuns. Fromday to day the opposed armies, above and below, increase innumbers. Some grow impatient, some tremble. When Balder dies, andthe ship Nagelfra is completed, the hour of infinite suspense willstrike. Nagelfra is a vessel for the conveyance of the hosts offrost 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 menand gods wish to have finished as late as possible. 9 At length Loki treacherously compasses the murder of Balder. Thefrightful foreboding which at once flies through all hearts findsvoice in the dark "Raven Song" of Odin. Having chanted thisobscure wail in heaven, he mounts his horse and rides down thebridge to Helheim. With resistless incantations he raises from thegrave, where she has been interred for ages, wrapt in snows, wetwith the rains and the dews, an aged vala or prophetess, andforces her to answer his questions. With appalling replies hereturns home, galloping up the sky. And now the crack of doom isat hand. Heimdall hurries up and down the bridge Bifrost, blowinghis horn till its rousing blasts echo through the universe. Thewolf Skoll, from whose pursuit the frightened sun has fled roundthe heavens since the first dawn, overtakes and devours his brightprey. Nagelfra, with the Jotun hosts on board, sails swiftly fromUtgard. Loki advances at the head of the troops of Hela. Fenrissnaps his chain and rushes forth with jaws so extended that theupper touches the firmament, while the under rests on the earth;and he would open them wider if there were room. Jormungandurwrithes his entire length around Midgard, and, lifting his head, blows venom over air and sea. Suddenly, in the south, heavencleaves asunder, and through the breach the sons of Muspel, theflame genii, ride out on horseback with Surtur at their head, hissword outflashing the sun. Now Odin leads forward the Asir and theEinheriar, and on the predestined plain of Vigrid the strifecommences. Heimdall and Loki mutually slay each other. Thor killsJormungandur; but as the monster expires he belches a flood ofvenom, under which the matchless thunder god staggers and fallsdead. Fenris swallows Odin, but is instantly rent in twain byVidar, the strong silent one, Odin's dumb son, who well avengeshis father on the wolf by splitting the jaws that devoured him. Then Surtur slings fire abroad, and the reek rises around allthings. Iggdrasill, the great Ash Tree of Existence, totters, butstands. All below perishes. Finally, the unnamable Mighty Oneappears, to judge the good and the bad. The former hie from fadingValhalla to eternal Gimle, where all joy is to be theirs forever;the latter are stormed down from Hela to Nastrond, there, "undercurdling mists, in a snaky marsh whose waves freeze black and thawin blood, to be scared forever, for punishment, with terrors evernew. " All strife vanishes in endless peace. By the power of AllFather, a new earth, green and fair, shoots up from the sea, to beinhabited by a new race of men free from sorrow. The foul, spotteddragon Nidhogg flies over the plains, bearing corpses and Deathitself away upon his wings, and sinks out of sight. 10 It has generally been asserted, in consonance with the foregoingview, that the Scandinavians believed that the good and the bad, respectively in Gimle and Nastrond, would experience everlastingrewards and punishments. But Blackwell, the recent editor ofPercy's translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities as publishedin Bohn's Antiquarian Library, argues with great force against thecorrectness 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 thespirit and large outlines of their faith have been reliably setforth. That faith, rising from the impetuous blood and rude mindof the martial race of the North, gathering wonderfulembellishments from the glowing imagination of the Skalds, reacting, doubly nourished the fierce valor and fervid fancy fromwhich it sprang. It drove the dragon prows of the Vikingsmarauding over the seas. It rolled the Goths' conquering squadronsacross the nations, from the shores of Finland and Skager Rack tothe foot of the Pyrenees and the gates of Rome. The very ferocitywith which it blazed consumed itself, and the conquest of theflickering faith by Christianity was easy. During the dominion ofthis religion, the earnest sincerity with which its disciplesreceived it appears alike from the fearful enterprises it promptedthem to, the iron hardihood and immeasurable contempt of death itinspired in them, and the superstitious observances which, withpains and expenses, they scrupulously kept. They buried, with thedead, gold, useful implements, ornaments, that they might descend, furnished and shining, to the halls of Hela. With a chieftain theyburied a pompous horse and splendid armor, that he might ride likea warrior into Valhalla. The true Scandinavian, by age or sicknessdeprived of dying in battle, ran himself through, or flung himselffrom a precipice, in this manner to make amends for not expiringin armed strife, if haply thus he might snatch a late seat amongthe Einheriar. With the same motive the dying sea king had himselflaid on his ship, alone, and launched away, with out stretchedsails, with a slow fire in the hold, which, when he was fairly outat sea, should flame up and, as Carlyle says, "worthily bury theold hero at once in the sky and in the ocean. " Surely then, ifever, "the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violenttook it by force. " CHAPTER IV. ETRUSCAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. ALTHOUGH the living form and written annals of Etruria perishedthousands of years ago, and although but slight references to heraffairs have come down to us in the documents of contemporarynations, yet, through a comparatively recent acquisition of facts, we have quite a distinct and satisfactory knowledge of hercondition and experience when her power was palmiest. We followthe ancient Etruscans from the cradle to the tomb, perceivingtheir various national costumes, peculiar physiognomies, names andrelationships, houses, furniture, ranks, avocations, games, dyingscenes, burial processions, and funeral festivals. And, furtherthan this, we follow their souls into the world to come, beholdthem in the hands of good or evil spirits, brought to judgment andthen awarded their deserts of bliss or woe. This knowledge hasbeen derived from their sepulchres, which still resist thecorroding hand of Time when nearly every thing else Etruscan hasmingled with the ground. 1 They hewed their tombs in the livingrock of cliffs and hills, or reared them of massive masonry. Theypainted 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 withpaintings and sculptures rich in information of their authors. From a study of these things, lately disinterred in immensequantities, has been constructed, for the most part, our presentacquaintance with this ancient people. Strange that, when thewhole scene of life has passed away, a sepulchral world shouldsurvive and open itself to reveal the past and instruct thefuture! We seem to see, rising from her tombs, and moving solemnlyamong the mounds where all she knew or cared for has for so manyages been inurned, the ghost of a mighty people. With dejected airshe leans on a ruined temple and muses; and her shadowy tears fallsilently over what was and is not. The Etruscans were accustomed to bury their deceased outside theirwalls; and sometimes the city of the living was thus surrounded bya far reaching city of the dead. At this day the decaying frontsof the houses of the departed, for miles upon miles along theroad, admonish the living traveller. These stone hewn sepulchrescrowd nearly every hill and glen. Whole acres of them are alsofound upon the plains, covered by several feet of earth, whereevery spring the plough passes over them, and every autumn theharvest waves; but the dust beneath reposes well, and knowsnothing of this. "Time buries graves. How strange! a buried grave! Death cannotfrom more death its own dead empire save. " The houses of the dead were built in imitation of the houses ofthe living, only on a smaller scale; and the interior arrangementswere so closely copied that it is said the resemblance held in allbut 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 thesepulchres were portraits of the deceased, accurate likenesses, varying with age, sex, features, and expression. These personalportraits were taken and laid up here, doubtless, to preservetheir remembrance when the original had crumbled to ashes. What atouching voice is this from antiquity, telling us that our poor, fond human nature was ever the same! The heart longed to be keptstill in remembrance when the mortal frame was gone. But how vainthe wish beyond the vanishing circle of hearts that returned itslove! For, as we wander through those sepulchres now, thousands offaces thus preserved look down upon us with a mute plea, whenevery vestige of their names and characters is forever lost, andtheir very dust scattered long ago. Along the sides of the burial chamber were ranged massive stoneshelves, or sometimes benches, or tables, upon which the dead werelaid in a reclining posture, to sleep their long sleep. It oftenhappens that on these rocky biers lie the helmet, breastplate, greaves, signet ring, and weapons, or, if it be a female, thenecklace, ear rings, bracelet, and other ornaments, each in itsrelative place, when the body they once encased or adorned has notleft a single fragment behind. An antiquary once, digging fordiscoveries, chanced to break through the ceiling of a tomb. Helooked in; and there, to quote his own words, "I beheld a warriorstretched on a couch of rock, and in a few minutes I saw himvanish under my eyes; for, as the air entered the cemetery, thearmor, thoroughly oxydized, crumbled away into most minuteparticles, and in a short time scarcely a trace of what I had seenwas left on the couch. It is impossible to express the effect thissight produced upon me. " An important element in the religion of Etruria was the doctrineof Genii, a system of household deities who watched over thefortunes of individuals and families, and who are continuallyshown on the engravings in the sepulchres as guiding, or activelyinterested in, all the incidents that happen to those under theircare. It was supposed that every person had two genii allotted tohim, one inciting him to good deeds, the other to bad, and bothaccompanying him after death to the judgment to give in theirtestimony and turn the scales of his fate. This belief, sincerelyheld, would obviously wield a powerful influence over theirfeelings in the conduct of life. The doctrine concerning the gods that prevailed in this ancientnation is learned partly from the classic authors, partly fromsepulchral monumental remains. It was somewhat allied to that ofEgypt, but much more to that of Rome, who indeed derived aconsiderable portion of her mythology from this source. As inother pagan countries, a multitude of deities were worshippedhere, each having his peculiar office, form of representation, andcycle of traditions. It would be useless to specify all. 2 Thegoddess of Fate was pictured with wings, showing her swiftness, and with a hammer and nail, to typify that her decrees wereunalterably fixed. The name of the supreme god was Tinia. He wasthe central power of the world of divinities, and was alwaysrepresented, like Jupiter Tonans, with a thunderbolt in his hand. There were twelve great "consenting gods, " composing the councilof Tinia, and called "The Senators of Heaven. " They were pitilessbeings, 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 theywere not deemed eternal, but were supposed to rise and falltogether. There was another class, called "The Shrouded Gods, "still more awful, potent, and mysterious, ruling all things, andmuch like the inscrutable Necessity that filled the darkbackground of the old Greek religion. Last, but most feared andmost prominent in the Etruscan mind, were the rulers of the lowerregions, Mantus and Mania, the king and queen of the under world. Mantus was figured as an old man, wearing a crown, with wings athis shoulders, and a torch reversed in his hand. Mania was afearful personage, frequently propitiated with human sacrifices. Macrobius says boys were offered up at her annual festival for along time, till the heads of onions and poppies were substituted. 3Intimately connected with these divinities was Charun, their chiefminister, the conductor of souls into the realm of the future, whose dread image, hideous as the imagination could conceive, isconstantly introduced in the sepulchral pictures, and who with hisattendant demons well illustrates the terrible character of thesuperstition which first created, then deified, and then trembledbefore him. Who can become acquainted with such horrors as thesewithout drawing a freer breath, and feeling a deeper gratitude toGod, as he remembers how, for many centuries now, the religion oflove has been redeeming man from subterranean darkness, hatred, and fright, to the happiness and peace of good will and trust inthe sweet, sunlit air of day! That a belief in a future existence formed a prominent andcontrolling feature in the creed of the Etruscans4 is abundantlyshown by the contents of their tombs. They would never haveproduced and preserved paintings, tracings, types, of such acharacter and in such quantities, had not the doctrines theyshadow forth possessed a ruling hold upon their hopes and fears. The symbolic representations connected with this subject may bearranged in several classes. First, there is an innumerablevariety of death bed scenes, many of them of the most touching andpathetic character, such as witnesses say can scarcely be lookedupon without tears, others of the most appalling nature, showingperfect abandonment to fright, screams, sobbing, and despair. Thelast hour is described under all circumstances, coming to allsorts of persons, prince, priest, peasant, man, mother, and child. Patriarchs are dying surrounded by groups in every posture ofgrief; friends are waving a mournful farewell to their weepinglovers; wives are torn from the embrace of their husbands; someseem resigned and willingly going, others reluctant and driven interror. The next series of engravings contain descriptions and emblems ofthe departure of the soul from this world, and of its passage intothe next. There are various symbols of this mysterious transition:one is a snake with a boy riding upon its back, its amphibiousnature plainly typifying the twofold existence allotted to man. The soul is also often shown muffled in a veil and travellinggarb, seated upon a horse, and followed by a slave carrying alarge sack of provisions, an emblem of the long and dreary journeyabout to be taken. Horses are depicted harnessed to cars in whichdisembodied 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, bythe squalid and savage Charun, the horrible death king, or one ofhis ministers; sometimes a good and an evil spirit are seencontending for the soul; sometimes the soul is seen, on its knees, beseeching the aid of its good genius and grasping at hisdeparting wing, as, with averted face, he is retiring; andsometimes the good and the evil spirits are leading it awaytogether, to abide the sentence of the tribunal of Mantus. Wholecompanies of souls are also set forth marching in procession, under the guidance of a winged genius, to their subterraneanabode. Finally, there is a class of representations depicting theultimate fate of souls after judgment has been passed. Some areshown seated at banquet, in full enjoyment, according to theirideas of bliss. Some are shown undergoing punishment, beaten withhammers, stabbed and torn by black demons. There are no proofsthat the Etruscans believed in the translation of any soul to theabode of the gods above the sky, no signs of any path rising tothe supernal heaven; but they clearly expected just discriminationsto be made in the under world. Into that realm many gates are shownleading, some of them peaceful, inviting, surrounded by apparentemblems of deliverance, rest, and blessedness; others yawning, terrific, engirt by the heads of gnashing beasts and furiesthreatening their victim. "Shown is the progress of the guilty soulFrom earth's worn threshold to the throne of doom;Here the black genius to the dismal goalDrags the wan spectre from the unsheltering tomb, While from the side it never more may warnThe better angel, sorrowing, flees forlorn. There (closed the eighth) seven yawning gates revealThe 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 KingArthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a futurelife is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts ofit, 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 ancientinhabitants of Egypt on the subject of a future life, we are firstmet by the inquiry why they took such great pains to preserve thebodies of their dead. It has been supposed that no common motivecould have animated them to such lavish expenditure of money, time, and labor as the process of embalming required. It has beentaken for granted that only some recondite theologicalconsideration could explain this phenomenon. Accordingly, it isnow the popular belief that the Egyptians were so scrupulous inembalming their dead and storing them in repositories of eternalstone, because they believed that the departed souls would at somefuture time come back and revivify their former bodies, if thesewere kept from decay. This hypothesis seems to us as false as itis gratuitous. In the first place, there is no evidence of itwhatever, neither written testimony nor circumstantial hint. Herodotus tells us, "The Egyptians say the soul, on thedissolution of the body, always enters into some other animal thenborn, and, having passed in rotation through the variousterrestrial, aquatic, and arial beings, again enters the body of aman then born. "1 There is no assertion that, at the end of thethree thousand years occupied by this circuit, the soul will reenter its former body. The plain inference, on the contrary, isthat it will be born in a new body, as at each preceding step inthe series of its transmigrations. Secondly, the mutilation of thebody in embalming forbids the belief in its restoration to life. The brain was extracted, and the skull stuffed with cotton. Theentrails were taken out, and sometimes, according to Porphyry2 andPlutarch, 3 thrown into the Nile; sometimes, as modern examinationshave revealed, bound up in four packages and either replaced inthe cavity of the stomach or laid in four vases beside the mummy. It is absurd to attribute, without clear cause, to an enlightenedpeople the belief that these stacks of brainless, evisceratedmummies, dried and shrunken in ovens, coated with pitch, bound upin a hundredfold bandages, would ever revive, and, inhabited bythe same souls that fled them thirty centuries before, again walkthe streets of Thebes! Besides, a third consideration demandsnotice. By the theory of metempsychosis universally acknowledgedto have been held by the Egyptians it is taught that souls atdeath, either immediately, or after a temporary sojourn in hell orheaven has struck the balance of their merits, are born in freshbodies; never that they return into their old ones. But the pointis set beyond controversy by the discovery of inscriptions, accompanying pictures of scenes illustrating the felicity ofblessed souls in heaven, to this effect: "Their bodies shallrepose in their tombs forever; they live in the celestial regionseternally, enjoying the presence of the Supreme God. " 4 A writeron 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'sTrans. Of Greppo's Essay, p. 262. of souls would naturally take extraordinary pains to preserve thebody from putrefaction, in the hope of the soul again joining thebody it had quitted. " The remark is intrinsically untrue, becausethe doctrine of transmigration coexists in reconciled belief withthe observed law of birth, infancy, and growth, not with themiracle of transition into reviving corpses. The notion islikewise historically refuted by the fact that the believers ofthat doctrine in the thronged East have never preserved the body, but at once buried or burned it. The whole Egyptian theology ismuch more closely allied to the Hindu, which excluded, than to thePersian, which emphasized, the resurrection of the body. Another theory which has been devised to explain the purpose ofEgyptian embalming, is that "it was to unite the soul permanentlyto its body, and keep the vital principle from perishing ortransmigrating; the body and soul ran together through the journeyof the dead and its dread ordeal. " 5 This arbitrary guess isincredible. The preservation of the body does not appear in anyway not even to the rawest fancy to detain or unite the soul withit; for the thought is unavoidable that it is precisely theabsence of the soul which constitutes death. Again: such anexplanation of the motive for embalming cannot be correct, becausein the hieroglyphic representations of the passage to the judgmentthe separate soul is often depicted as hovering over the body, 6or as kneeling before the judges, or as pursuing its adventuresthrough the various realms of the creation. "When the body isrepresented, " Champollion says, "it is as an aid to the spectator, and not as teaching a bodily resurrection. Sharpe's opinion thatthe picture of a bird poised over the mouth of a mummy, with theemblems of breath and life in its claws, implies the doctrine of ageneral physical resurrection, is an inferential leap of the moststartling character. What proof is there that the symbol denotesthis? Hundreds of paintings in the tombs show souls undergoingtheir respective allotments in the other world while their bodilymummies are quiet in the sepulchres of the present. In histreatise on "Isis and Osiris, " Plutarch writes, "The Egyptiansbelieve that while the bodies of eminent men are buried in theearth their souls are stars shining in heaven. " It is equallynonsensical in itself and unwarranted by evidence to imagine that, in the Egyptian faith, embalming either retained the soul in thebody or preserved the body for a future return of the soul. Whocan believe that it was for either of those purposes that theyembalmed the multitudes of animals whose mummies the explorer isstill turning up? They preserved cats, hawks, bugs, crocodiles, monkeys, bulls, with as great pains as they did men. 7 When theCanary Islands were first visited, it was found that theirinhabitants had a custom of carefully embalming the dead. The samewas the case among the Peruvians, whose vast cemeteries remain tothis day crowded with mummies. But the expectation of a return ofthe souls into these preserved bodies is not to be ascribed tothose peoples. Herodotus informs us that "the Ethiopians, havingdried the bodies of their dead, coat them with white plaster, which they paint with colors to the likeness of the deceased andencase in a transparent substance. The dead, thus kept from beingoffensive, 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. Afterwardsthey are carried out and placed upright in the tombs around thecity. " 8 It has been argued, because the Egyptians expended somuch in preparing lasting tombs and in adorning their walls withvaried embellishments, that they must have thought the soulremained in the body, a conscious occupant of the dwelling placeprovided for it. 9 As well might it be argued that, because theancient savage tribes on the coast of South America, who obtainedtheir support by fishing, buried fish hooks and bait with theirdead, they supposed the dead bodies occupied themselves in theirgraves by fishing! The adornment of the tomb, so lavish and variedwith the Egyptians, was a gratification of the spontaneousworkings of fancy and affection, and needs no far fetchedexplanation. Every nation has its funeral customs and its rites ofsepulture, many of which would be as difficult of explanation asthose of Egypt. The Scandinavian sea king was sometimes buried, inhis ship, in a grave dug on some headland overlooking the ocean. The Scythians buried their dead in rolls of gold, sometimesweighing forty or fifty solid pounds. Diodorus the Sicilian says, "The Egyptians, laying the embalmed bodies of their ancestors innoble monuments, see the true visages and expressions of those whodied ages before them. So they take almost as great pleasure inviewing their bodily proportions and the lineaments of their facesas if they were still living among them. " 10 That instinct whichleads us to obtain portraits of those we love, and makes usunwilling to part even with their lifeless bodies, was the causeof embalming. The bodies thus prepared, we know from the testimonyof ancient authors, were kept in the houses of their children orkindred, until a new generation, "who knew not Joseph, " removedthem. Then nothing could be more natural than that the priesthoodshould take advantage of the custom, so associated with sacredsentiments, and throw theological sanctions over it, shroud it inmystery, and secure a monopoly of the power and profit arisingfrom it. It is not improbable, too, as has been suggested, thathygienic considerations, expressing themselves in political lawsand priestly precepts, may at first have had an influence inestablishing the habit of embalming, to prevent the pestilencesapt to arise in such a climate from the decay of animalsubstances. There is great diversity of opinion among Egyptologists on thispoint. One thinks that embalming was supposed to keep the soul inthe body until after the funeral judgment and interment, but that, when the corpse was laid in its final receptacle, the soulproceeded to accompany the sun in its daily and nocturnal circuit, or to transmigrate through various animals and deities. Anotherimagines that the process of embalming was believed to secure therepose of the soul in the other world, exempt fromtransmigrations, so long as the body was kept from decay. 11Perhaps the different notions on this subject attributed by modernauthors to the Egyptians may all have prevailed among them atdifferent times or among distinct sects. But it seems most likely, as we have said, that embalming first arose from physical andsentimental considerations naturally operating, rather than fromany 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 thepriesthood appropriated the business, it is altogether probablethat they interwove it with an artificial and elaborate system ofsacerdotal dogmas, in which was the hiding of the national power. The second question that arises is, What was the significance ofthe funeral ceremonies celebrated by the Egyptians over theirdead? When the body had been embalmed, it was presented before atribunal of forty two judges sitting in state on the easternborders of the lake Acherusia. They made strict inquiry into theconduct and character of the deceased. Any one might makecomplaint against him, or testify in his behalf. If it was foundthat he had been wicked, had died in debt, or was otherwiseunworthy, he was deprived of honorable burial and ignominiouslythrown into a ditch. This was called Tartar, from the wailings thesentence produced among his relatives. But if he was found to haveled an upright life, and to have been a good man, the honors of aregular interment were decreed him. The cemetery a large plainenvironed with trees and lined with canals lay on the western sideof the lake, and was named Elisout, or rest. It was reached by aboat, the funeral barge, in which no one could cross without anorder from the judges and the payment of a small fee. In these andother particulars some of the scenes supposed to be awaiting thesoul in the other world were dramatically shadowed forth. Eachrite was a symbol of a reality existing, in solemn correspondence, in the invisible state. What the priests did over the body onearth the judicial deities did over the soul in Amenthe. It seemsplain that the Greeks derived many of their notions concerning thefate and state of the dead from Egypt. Hades corresponds withAmenthe; Pluto, with the subterranean Osiris; Mercurypsychopompos, with Anubis, "the usher of souls;" Aacus, Minos, andRhadamanthos, with the three assistant gods who help in weighingthe soul and present the result to Osiris; Tartarus, to the ditchTartar; Charon's ghost boat over the Styx, to the barge conveyingthe mummy to the tomb; Cerberus, to Oms; Acheron, to Acherusia;the Elysian Fields, to Elisout. 12 Kenrick thinks the Greeks mayhave developed these views for themselves, without indebtedness toEgypt. But the notions were in existence among the Egyptians atleast twelve hundred years before they can be traced among theGreeks. 13 And they are too arbitrary and systematic to have beenindependently constructed by two nations. Besides, Herodotuspositively affirms that they were derived from Egypt. Severalother ancient authors also state this; and nearly every modernwriter on the subject agrees in it. The triumphs of modern investigation into the antiquities ofEgypt, unlocking the hieroglyphics and lifting the curtain fromthe secrets of ages, have unveiled to us a far more full andsatisfactory view of the Egyptian doctrine of the future life thancan be constructed from the narrow glimpses afforded by theaccounts of the old Greek authorities. Three sources of knowledgehave been laid open to us. First, the papyrus rolls, one of whichwas placed in the bosom of every mummy. This roll, covered withhieroglyphics, is called the funeral ritual, or book of the dead. It served as a passport through the burial rites. It contained thenames of the deceased and his parents, a series of prayers he wasto recite 12 Spineto on Egyptian Antiq, Lectures IV. , V. 13 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 2dSeries, vol. I. Ch. 12. before the various divinities he would meet on his journey, andrepresentations of some of the adventures awaiting him in theunseen state. 14 Secondly, the ornamental cases in which themummies are enclosed are painted all over with scenes settingforth the realities and events to which the soul of the deadoccupant has passed in the other life. 15 Thirdly, the variousfates of souls are sculptured and painted on the walls in thetombs, in characters which have been deciphered during the presentcentury:16 "Those mystic, stony volumes on the walls long writ, Whose senseis late reveal'd to searching modern wit. " Combining the information thus obtained, we learn that, accordingto the Egyptian representation, the soul is led by the god Thothinto Amenthe, the infernal world, the entrance to which lies inthe extreme west, on the farther side of the sea, where the sungoes down under the earth. It was in accordance with thissupposition that Herod caused to be engraved, on a magnificentmonument erected to his deceased wife, the line, "Zeus, thisblooming woman sent beyond the ocean. " 17 At the entrance sits awide throated monster, over whose head is the inscription, "Thisis the devourer of many who go into Amenthe, the lacerator of theheart of him who comes with sins to the house of justice. " Thesoul next kneels before the forty two assessors of Osiris, withdeprecating asseverations and intercessions. It then comes to thefinal trial in the terrible Hall of the two Truths, the approvingand the condemning; or, as it is differently named, the Hall ofthe double Justice, the rewarding and the punishing. Here thethree divinities Horns, Anubis, and Thoth proceed to weigh thesoul in the balance. In one scale an image of Thmei, the goddessof Truth, is placed; in the other, a heart shaped vase, symbolizing the heart of the deceased with all the actions ofhis 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 withit to the foot of the throne on which sits Osiris, lord of thedead, king of Amenthe. He pronounces the decisive sentence, andhis assistants see that it is at once executed. The condemned soulis either scourged back to the earth straightway, to live again inthe form of a vile animal, as some of the emblems appear todenote; or plunged into the tortures of a horrid hell of fire anddevils below, as numerous engravings set forth; or driven into theatmosphere, to be vexed and tossed by tempests, violently whirledin blasts and clouds, till its sins are expiated, and anotherprobation 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 toconsist of three grand departments. First came the earth, or zoneof trial, where men live on probation. Next was the atmosphere, orzone 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 abstractof this letter may be found in Stuart's trans. Of Greppo's Essayon 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 ofthis 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 drewit from the priestly science of Egypt. Every one will recollecthow Paul speaks of "the prince of the power off the air. " AndShakspeare makes the timid Claudio shrink from the verge of deathwith horror, lest his soul should, through ages, "Be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restlessviolence round about The pendent world. " After their purgation in this region, all the souls live again onearth by transmigration. 18 The third realm was in the serene bluesky among the stars, the zone of blessedness, where the accepteddwell in immortal peace and joy. Eusebius says, "The Egyptiansrepresented the universe by two circles, one within the other, anda 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 whichpictures the creation simply as having the earth in the centre, and the sun with his attendants as circulating around it in thebrightness 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 theearth, or confined in the nether space for punishment. Ifjustified, they join the blissful company of the Sun God, and risewith 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 ofeach of these golden segments a sentinel god is stationed, to whomthe newly arriving soul must give its credentials to secure apassage. In like manner, the lower hemisphere is cut into the samenumber of gloomy sections, corresponding with the twelve hours ofthe night. Daily the chief divinity, in robes of light, traversesthe beaming zones of the blessed, where they hunt and fish, orplough and sow, reap and gather, in the Fields of the Sun on thebanks of the heavenly Nile. Nightly, arrayed in deep black fromhead to foot, he traverses the dismal zones of the damned, wherethey undergo appropriate retributions. Thus the future destiny ofman was sublimely associated with the march of the sun through theupper and lower hemispheres. 19 Astronomy was a part of theEgyptian's theology. He regarded the stars not figuratively, butliterally, as spirits and pure genii; the great planets asdeities. 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 doctrinesand symbols. The necessity of virtue, the dread ordeals of thegrave, the certainty of retribution, the mystic circuits oftransmigration, a glorious immortality, the paths of planets andgods and souls through creation, all were impressively enounced, dramatically shown. 18 Liber Metempsychosis Veterum Agyptiorum, edited and translatedinto Latin from the funeral papyri by H. Brugsch. 19 L'Univers, Egypte Ancienne, par Champollion Figeac, pp. 123145. 20 Agyptische Glaubenslehre von Dr. Ed. Roth, ss. 171, 174. "The Egyptain soul sail'd o'er the skyey seaIn 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 voidAnd 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 astronomicuniverse, this grand blending of the deepest of moral doctrineswith the most august of physical sciences, plainly betrays thebrain and hand of that hereditary hierarchy whose wisdom was thewonder of the ancient world. Osburn thinks the localization ofAmenthe in the west may have arisen in the following way. Somesuperstitious Egyptians, travelling westwards, at twilight, on thegreat marshes haunted by the strange gray white ibis, saw troopsof these silent, solemn, ghostlike birds, motionless or slowstalking, and conceived them to be souls waiting for the funeralrites to be paid, that they might sink with the setting sun totheir destined abode. 21 That such a system of belief was too complex and elaborate to havebeen a popular development is evident. But that it was really heldby the people there is no room to doubt. Parts of it were publiclyenacted on festival days by multitudes numbering more than ahundred thousand. Parts of it were dimly shadowed out in thesecret recesses of temples, surrounded by the most astonishingaccompaniments that unrivalled learning, skill, wealth, and powercould contrive. Its authority commanded the allegiance, its charmfascinated the imagination, of the people. Its force built thepyramids, and enshrined whole generations of Egypt's embalmedpopulation in richly adorned sepulchres of everlasting rock. Itssubstance of esoteric knowledge and faith, in its form of exotericimposture and exhibition, gave it vitality and endurance long. Inthe vortex of change and decay it sank at last. And now it is onlyafter its secrets have been buried for thirty centuries that theexploring genius of modern times has brought its hiddenhieroglyphics to light, and taught us what were the doctrinesoriginally contained in the altar lore of those priestly schoolswhich once dotted the plains of the Delta and studded the banks ofeldest Nile, where now, disfigured and gigantic, the solemn "Old Syhinxes lift their countenances bland Athwart the river seaand 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, metaphysicalsubtlety and imaginative vastness, intellect and fancy, slavishtradition and audacious speculation, besotted ritualism andheaven storming spirituality, are mingled together on a scale ofgrandeur and intensity wholly without a parallel elsewhere in theliterature or faith of the world. Brahmanism, with its hundredmillion adherents holding sway over India, and Buddhism, withits four hundred million disciples scattered over a dozennations, from Java to Japan, and from the Ceylonese to theSamoyedes, practically considered, in reference to their actuallyreceived dogmas and aims pertaining to a future life, agreesufficiently to warrant us in giving them a general examinationtogether. The chief difference between them will be explained inthe sequel. The most ancient Hindu doctrine of the future fate of man, asgiven in the Vedas, was simple, rude, and very unlike the forms inwhich it has since prevailed. Professor Wilson says, in theintroduction to his translation of the Rig Veda, that thereferences to this subject in the primeval Sanscrit scriptures aresparse and incomplete. But no one has so thoroughly elucidatedthis obscure question as Roth of Tubingen, in his masterly paperon the Morality of the Vedas, of which there is a translation, byProfessor Whitney, in the Journal of the American OrientalSociety. 1 The results of his researches may be stated in fewwords. When a man dies, the earth is invoked to wrap his body up, as amother wraps her child in her garment, and to lie lightly on him. He himself is addressed thus: "Go forth, go forth on the ancientpaths which our fathers in old times have trodden: the two rulersin bliss, Yama and Varuna, shalt thou behold. " Varuna judges all. He thrusts the wicked down into darkness; and not a hint or clewfurther of their doom is furnished. They were supposed either tobe annihilated, as Professor Roth thinks the Vedas imply, or elseto live as demons, in sin, blackness, and woe. The good go up toheaven and are glorified with a shining spiritual body like thatof the gods. Yama, the first man, originator of the human race onearth, is the beginner and head of renewed humanity in anotherworld, and is termed the Assembler of Men. It is a poetic andgrand conception that the first one who died, leading the way, should be the patriarch and monarch of all who follow. The oldVedic hymns imply that the departed good are in a state of exaltedfelicity, but scarcely picture forth any particulars. Thefollowing 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 heavenbright. Where those abounding waters flow, oh, make me but immortal there!Where there is freedom unrestrain'd, where the triple vault ofheaven's in sight, Where worlds of brightest glory are, oh, make me but immortalthere!Where pleasures and enjoyments are, where bliss and raptures ne'ertake 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 Hinduremembrance, lost in the multiplying developments andspecifications of a mystical philosophy, and a teemingsuperstition nourished by an unbounded imagination. Both Brahmans and Buddhists conceive of the creation on the mostenormous scale. Mount Meru rises from the centre of the earth tothe height of about two millions of miles. On its summit is thecity of Brahma, covering a space of fourteen thousand leagues, andsurrounded by the stately cities of the regents of the spheres. Between Meru and the wall of stone forming the extremecircumference of the earth are seven concentric circles of rocks. Between these rocky bracelets are continents and seas. In some ofthe seas wallow single fishes thousands of miles in everydimension. The celestial spaces are occupied by a large number ofheavens, called "dewa lokas, " increasing in the glory and bliss oftheir prerogatives. The worlds below the earth are hells, called"naraka. " The description of twenty eight of these, given in theVishnu Purana, 2 makes the reader "sup full of horrors. " TheBuddhist "Books of Ceylon" 3 tell of twenty six heavens placed inregular order above one another in the sky, crowded with allimaginable delights. They also depict, in the abyss underneath theearth, 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, eachpartially enclosing and overlapping that next beneath; and thesufferings inflicted on their unfortunate occupants are of themost terrific character. But these poor hints at the localapparatus of reward and punishment afford no conception whateverof the extent of their mythological scheme of the universe. They call each complete solar system a sakwala, and say that, if awall were erected around the space occupied by a million millionsof sakwalas, reaching to the highest heaven, and the entire spacewere filled with mustard seeds, a god might take these seeds, and, looking towards any one of the cardinal points, throw a singleseed towards each sakwala until all the seeds were gone, and stillthere would be more sakwalas, in the same direction, to which noseed had been thrown, without considering those in the other threequarters of the heavens. In comparison with this Eastern vision ofthe infinitude of worlds, the wildest Western dreamer over thevistas opened by the telescope may hide his diminished head! Theirother conceptions are of the same crushing magnitude, Thus, whenthe demons, on a certain occasion, assailed the gods, Siva usingthe Himalaya range for his bow, Vasuke for the string, Vishnu forhis arrow, the earth for his chariot with the sun and moon for itswheels and the Vedas for its horses, the starry canopy for hisbanner with the tree of Paradise for its staff, Brahma for hischarioteer, and the mysterious monosyllable Om for his whipreduced them all to ashes. 4 The five hundred million Brahmanic and Buddhist believers holdthat all the gods, men, demons, and various grades of animal lifeoccupying this immeasurable array of worlds compose one cosmicfamily. 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 thelaw of retribution constantly interchanging their residences in asuccession of rising and sinking existences, ranging through allthe earths, heavens, and hells of the universe, bound by theterrible links of merit and demerit in the phantasmagoric dungeonof births and deaths. The Vishnu Purana declares, "The universe, this whole egg of Brahma, is everywhere swarming with livingcreatures, all of whom are captives in the chains of acts. " 5 The one prime postulate of these Oriental faiths the groundprinciple, never to be questioned any more than the central andstationary position of the earth in the Ptolemaic system is thatall beings below the Infinite One are confined in the circle ofexistence, the whirl of births and deaths, by the consequences oftheir virtues and vices. When a man dies, if he has an excess ofgood desert, he is born, as a superior being, in one of theheavens. According to the nature and degree of his merit, hisheavenly existence is prolonged, or perhaps repeated many times insuccession; or, if his next birth occurs on earth, it is underhappy 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 repeatedlives run the circuit of the hells; or, if he at once returns tothe earth, it is as a beggar, a leprous outcast, a wretchedcripple, or in the guise of a rat, a snake, or a louse. "The illustrious souls of great and virtuous menIn godlike beings shall revive again;But base and vicious spirits wind their wayIn 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 findA proper dwelling for his wandering mind. " A specific evil is never cancelled by being counterbalanced by agreater good. The fruit of that evil must be experienced, and alsoof that greater good, by appropriate births in the hells andheavens, or in the higher and lower grades of earthly existence. The two courses of action must be run through independently. Thisis what is meant by the phrases, so often met with in Orientalworks, "eating the fruits of former acts, " "bound in the chains ofdeeds. " Merit or demerit can be balanced or neutralized only bythe full fruition of its own natural and necessary consequences. 6The law of merit and of demerit is fate. It works irresistibly, through all changes and recurrences, from the beginning to theend. The cessation of virtue or of vice does not put an end to itseffects until its full force is exhausted; as an arrow continuesin flight until all its imparted power is spent. A man faultlesslyand scrupulously good through his present life may be guilty ofsome foul crime committed a hundred lives before and not yetexpiated. Accordingly, he may now suffer for it, or his next birthmay take place in a hell. On the contrary, he may be credited withsome 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 bringhim good fortune in spite of present sins, or on the rolling andmany colored wheel of metempsychosis may secure for him next acelestial birthplace. In short periods, it will be seen, there ismoral confusion, but, in the long run, exact compensation. The exuberant prodigiousness of the Hindu imagination isstrikingly manifest in its descriptions of the rewards of virtuein the heavens and of the punishments of sin in the hells. Visionspass 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 thelotus blooms, palaces of gems, crowds of friends and lovers, endless revelations of truth, boundless graspings of power, allthat can stir and enchant intellect, will, fancy, and heart. Insome of the heavens the residents have no bodily form, but enjoypurely spiritual pleasures. In others they are self resplendent, and traverse the ether. They are many miles in height, one beingdescribed whose crown was four miles high and who wore on hisperson sixty wagon loads of jewels. The ordinary lifetime of theinhabitants of the dewa loka named Wasawartti equals nine billionstwo hundred and sixteen millions of our years. They breathe onlyonce in sixteen hours. The reverse of this picture is still more vigorously drawn, highlycolored, and diversified in contents. The walls of the Hindu hellare over a hundred miles thick; and so dazzling is theirbrightness that it bursts the eyes which look at them anywherewithin a distance of four hundred leagues. 7 The poor creatureshere, wrapped in shrouds of fire, writhe and yell in frenzy ofpain. The very revelry and ecstasy of terror and anguish fill thewhole region. The skins of some wretches are taken off from headto foot, and then scalding vinegar is poured over them. A gluttonis punished thus: experiencing an insatiable hunger in a body aslarge as three mountains, he is tantalized with a mouth no largerthan the eye of a needle. 8 The infernal tormentors, throwing theirvictims down, take a flexible flame in each hand, and with theselash them alternately right and left. One demon, Rahu, is seventysix thousand eight hundred miles tall: the palm of his handmeasures fifty thousand acres; and when he is enraged he rushes upthe sky and swallows the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse!In the Asiatic Journal for 1840 is an article on "The ChineseJudges of the Dead, " which describes a series of twenty fourpaintings of hell found in a Buddhist temple. Devils in humanshapes are depicted pulling out the tongues of slanderers withredhot wires, pouring molten lead down the throats of liars, withburning prongs tossing souls upon mountains planted with hooks ofiron reeking with the blood of those who have gone before, screwing the damned between planks, pounding them in huskingmortars, grinding them in rice mills, while other fiends, in theshape of dogs, lap up their oozing gore. But the hardestsensibility 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 Hinduscontrast 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 ofreposing power and quietistic contemplation. In consequence oftheir endlessly varied, constantly recurring, intensely earnestspeculations and musings over this contrast of finite restlessnessand pain with infinite peace and blessedness, a contrast whichconstitutes the preaching of their priests, saturates their sacredbooks, fills their thoughts, and broods over all their life, theOrientals are pervaded with a profound horror of individualexistence, and with a profound desire for absorption into theInfinite Being. A few quotations from their own authors willillustrate this: "A sentient being in the repetition of birth and death is like aworm in the midst of a nest of ants, like a lizard in the hollowof a bamboo that is burning at both ends. "9 "Emancipation from allexistence is the fulness of felicity. "10 "The being who is stillsubject to birth may now sport in the beautiful gardens of heaven, now be cut to pieces in hell; now be Maha Brahma, now a degradedoutcast; now sip nectar, now drink blood; now repose on a couchwith gods, now be dragged through a thicket of thorns; now residein a mansion of gold, now be exposed on a mountain of lava; nowsit on the throne of the gods, now be impaled amidst hungry dogs;now be a king glittering with countless gems, now a mendicanttaking a skull from door to door to beg alms; now eat ambrosia asthe monarch of a dewa loka, now writhe and die as a bat in theshrivelling flame. "11 "The Supreme Soul and the human soul do notdiffer, and pleasure or pain ascribable to the latter arises fromits imprisonment in the body. The water of the Ganges is the samewhether it run in the river's bed or be shut up in a decanter; buta drop of wine added to the water in the decanter imparts itsflavor to the whole, whereas it would be lost in the river. TheSupreme Soul, therefore, is beyond accident; but the human soul isafflicted by sense and passion. Happiness is only obtained inreunion with the Supreme Soul, when the dispersed individualitiescombine again with it, as the drops of water with the parentstream. Hence the slave should remember that he is separated fromGod by the body alone, and exclaim, perpetually, 'Blessed be themoment when I shall lift the veil from off that face! the veil ofthe face of my Beloved is the dust of my body. '"12 "A pious manwas once born on earth, who, in his various transmigrations, hadmet eight hundred and twenty five thousand Buddhas. He rememberedhis former states, but could not enumerate how many times he hadbeen a king, a beggar, a beast, an occupant of hell. He utteredthese words: 'A hundred thousand years of the highest happiness onearth are not equal to the happiness of one day in the dewa lokas;and a hundred thousand years of the deepest misery on earth arenot equal to the misery of one day in hell; but the misery of hellis reckoned by millions of centuries. Oh, how shall I escape, andobtain 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 withpainful descriptions of the compromises, uncleannesses, andafflictions inseparably connected with existence. Volumes would berequired to furnish an adequate representation of the vivid andinexhaustible amplification with which they set forth the direfuldisgusts and loathsome terrors associated with the series of ideasexpressed by the words conception, birth, life, death, hell, andregeneration. The fifth chapter in the sixth book of the VishnuPurana affords a good specimen of these details; but, toappreciate them fully, one must peruse dispersed passages in ahundred miscellaneous works: "As long as man lives, he is immersed in afflictions, like theseed 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 smotheredby the dust of imagination. When that dust is washed away by thebland water of real knowledge, then the weariness is removed. Thenthe internal man is at peace, and obtains supreme felicity. "14 The result of these views is the awakening of an unquenchabledesire to "break from the fetters of existence, " to be "deliveredfrom the whirlpool of transmigration. " Both Brahmanism andBuddhism are in essence nothing else than methods of securingrelease from the chain of incarnated lives, and attaining toidentification with the Infinite. There is a text in theApocalypse which may be strikingly applied to this exemption fromfurther metempsychosis: "Him that overcometh I will make a pillarin the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out forever. " Thetestimony of all who have investigated the subject agrees with thefollowing assertion by Professor Wilson: "The common end of everysystem studied by the Hindus is the ascertainment of the means bywhich perpetual exemption from the necessity of repeated birthsmay be won. "15 In comparison with this aim, every thing else isutterly insignificant. Prahlada, on being offered by Vishnu anyboon he might ask, exclaimed, "Wealth, virtue, love, are asnothing; for even liberation is in his reach whose faith is firmin thee. " And Vishnu replied, "Thou shalt, therefore, obtainfreedom from existence. "16 All true Orientals, however favored orpersecuted by earthly fortune, still cry night and day upwardsinto 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 regularlycalled into being and again destroyed at the beginning and end ofcertain stupendous epochs called kalpas. Four thousand threehundred and twenty million years make a day of Brahma. At the endof this day the lower worlds are consumed by fire; and Brahmasleeps 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 lokahave survived the dissolution of the lower portions of theuniverse, contemplate the slumbering deity until he wakes andrestores the mutilated creation. Three hundred and sixty of thesedays and nights compose a year of Brahma; a hundred such yearsmeasure his whole life. Then a complete destruction of all thingstakes place, every thing merging into the Absolute One, until heshall rouse himself renewedly to manifest his energies. 17 Althoughcreated beings who have not obtained emancipation are destroyed intheir 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 Brahmacreates the world anew they are the progeny of his will, in thefourfold condition of gods, men, animals, and inanimate things. 18And Buddhism embodies virtually the same doctrine, declaring "thewhole universe of sakwalas to be subject alternately todestruction and renovation, in a series of revolutions to whichneither beginning nor end can be discovered. " What is the Brahmanic method of salvation, or secret ofemancipation? Rightly apprehended in the depth and purity of thereal doctrine, it is this. There is in reality but ONE SOUL: everything else is error, illusion, misery. Whoever acquires theknowledge of this truth by personal perception is therebyliberated. He has won the absolute perfection of the unlimitedGodhead, and shall never be born again. "Whosoever views theSupreme Soul as manifold, dies death after death. " God isformless, but seems to assume form; as moonlight, impinging uponvarious objects, appears crooked or straight. 19 Bharata says tothe king of Sauriva, "The great end of all is not union of selfwith the Supreme Soul, because one substance cannot becomeanother. The true wisdom, the genuine aim of all, is to know thatSoul is one, uniform, perfect, exempt from birth, omnipresent, undecaying, made of true knowledge, dissociated withunrealities. "20 "It is ignorance alone which enables Maya toimpress the mind with a sense of individuality; for as soon asthat is dispelled it is known that severalty exists not, and thatthere is nothing but one undivided Whole. " 21 The Brahmanicscriptures say, "The Eternal Deity consists of true knowledge. ""Brahma that is Supreme is produced of reflection. "22 The logicruns thus. There is only One Soul, the absolute God. All beside isempty deception. That One Soul consists of true knowledge. Whoeverattains to true knowledge, therefore, is absolute God, foreverfreed from the sphere of semblances. The foregoing exposition is philosophical and scripturalBrahmanism. But there are numerous schismatic sects which holdopinions diverging from it in regard to the nature and destiny ofthe human soul. They may be considered in two classes. First, there are some who defend the idea of the personal immortality ofthe soul. The Siva Gnana Potham "establishes the doctrine of thesoul's eternal existence as an individual being. " 23 The Saivaschool 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 otherdeveloped existences are rendered back to their primordial state, souls are excepted. These, once developed and delivered from thethraldom of their merit and demerit, will ever remain intimatelyunited with Deity and clothed in the resplendent wisdom. 24Secondly, there are others and probably at the present time theyinclude a large majority of the Brahmans who believe in the realbeing both of the Supreme Soul and of separate finite souls, conceiving the latter to be individualized parts of the former andtheir true destiny to consist in securing absorption into it. Therelation of the soul to God, they maintain, is not that of ruledand ruler, but that of part and whole. "As gold is one substancestill, however diversified as bracelets, tiaras, ear rings, orother things, so Vishnu is one and the same, although modified inthe forms of gods, animals, and men. As the drops of water raisedfrom the earth by the wind sink into the earth again when the windsubsides, so the variety of gods, men, and animals, which havebeen detached by the agitation of the qualities, are reunited, when the disturbance ceases, with the Eternal. " 25 "The wholeobtains its destruction in God, like bubbles in water. " TheMadhava sect believe that there is a personal All Soul distinctfrom the human soul. Their proofs are detailed in one of the MahaUpanishads. 26 These two groups of sects, however, agree perfectlywith the ancient orthodox Brahmans in accepting the fundamentaldogma of a judicial metempsychosis, wherein each one is fastenedby his acts and compelled to experience the uttermost consequencesof his merit or demerit. They all coincide in one commonaspiration as regards the highest end, namely, emancipation fromthe necessity of repeated births. The difference between the threeis, that the one class of dissenters expect the fruition of thatdeliverance to be a finite personal immortality in heaven; theother interpret it as an unwalled absorption in the Over Soul, like a breath in the air; while the more orthodox believers regardit as the entire identity of the soul with the Infinite One. Against the opinion that there is only one Soul for all bodies, asone string supports all the gems of a necklace, some Hinduphilosophers argue that the plurality of souls is proved by theconsideration that, if there were but one soul, then when any onewas born, or died, or was lame, or deaf, or occupied, or idle, allwould at once be born, die, be lame, deaf, occupied, or idle. ButProfessor Wilson says, "This doctrine of the multitudinousexistence or individual incorporation of Soul clearly contradictsthe Vedas. They affirm one only existent soul to be distributed inall beings. It is beheld collectively or dispersedly, like thereflection of the moon in still or troubled water. Soul, eternal, omnipresent, undisturbed, pure, one, is multiplied by the power ofdelusion, not of its own nature. "27 All the Brahmanic sects unite in thinking that liberation from thenet of births is to be obtained and the goal of their wishes to bereached by one means only; and that is knowledge, real wisdom, anadequate sight of the truth. Without this knowledge there is nopossible emancipation; but there are three ways of seeking theneeded knowledge. 24 Ibid. Vol. Iv. P. 15. 25 Vishnu Purana, p. 287. 26 Weber, Akademische Vorlesungen uber IndischeLiteraturgeschichte, s. 160. 27 Sankbya Karika, p. 70. Some strive, by direct intellectual abstraction and effort, bymetaphysical speculation, to grasp the true principles of being. Others try, by voluntary penance, self abnegation, and pain, toaccumulate such a degree of merit, or to bring the soul into sucha state of preparedness, as will compel the truth to revealitself. And still others devote themselves to the worship of somechosen deity, by ritual acts and fervid contemplation, to obtainby his favor the needed wisdom. A few quotations may serve toillustrate the Brahmanic attempts at winning this one thingneedful, the knowledge which yields exemption from all incarnatelives. The Sankhya philosophy is a regular system of metaphysics, to bestudied as one would study algebra. It presents to its disciplesan exhaustive statement of the forms of being in twenty fivecategories, and declares, "He who knows the twenty fiveprinciples, whatever order of life he may have entered, andwhether he wear braided hair, a top knot only, or be shaven, he isliberated. " "This discriminative wisdom releases forever fromworldly bondage. "28 "The virtuous is born again in heaven, thewicked is born again in hell; the fool wanders in error, the wiseman is set free. " "By ignorance is bondage, by knowledge isdeliverance. " "When Nature finds that soul has discovered that itis to her the distress of migration is owing, she is put to shameby 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 aknowledge of the Soul is gifted with it, the Soul rendering itselfconspicuous to him. " "Man, having known that Nature which iswithout a beginning or an end, is delivered from the grasp ofdeath. " "Souls are absorbed in the Supreme Soul as the reflectionof the sun in water returns to him on the removal of the water. "32 The thought underlying the last statement is that there is onlyone Soul, every individual consciousness being but an illusorysemblance, and that the knowledge of this fact constitutes theall coveted emancipation. As one diffusive breath passing throughthe perforations of a flute is distinguished as the several notesof the scale, so the Supreme Spirit is single, though, inconsequence of acts, it seems manifold. As every placid lakeletholds an unreal image of the one real moon sailing above, so eachhuman soul is but a deceptive reflection of the one veritableSoul, or God. It may be worth while to observe that Plotinus, asis well known, taught the doctrine of the absolute identity ofeach soul with the entire and indistinguishable entity of God: "Though God extends beyond creation's rim, Yet every being holdsthe whole of him. " It belongs to an unextended substance, an immateriality, to beeverywhere by totality, not by portions. If God be omnipresent, hecannot 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 ofmatter, in every point of space, in all infinitude. The Brahmanic religion is a philosophy; and it keeps anincomparably strong hold on the minds of its devotees. Its mostvital and comprehensive principle is expressed in the followingsentence: "The soul itself is not susceptible of pain, or decay, or death; the site of these things is nature; but nature isunconscious; the consciousness that pain exists is restricted tothe soul, although the soul is not the actual seat of pain. " Thisis the reason why every Hindu yearns so deeply to be freed fromthe meshes of nature, why he so anxiously follows the light offaith and penance, or the clew of speculation, through all mazesof mystery. It is that he may at last gaze on the central TRUTH, and through that sight seize the fruition of the supreme andeternal good of man in the unity of his selfhood with theInfinite, and so be born no more and experience no more trouble. It is very striking to contrast with this profound and gorgeousdream of the East, whatever form it assumes, the more practicaland definite thought of the West, as expressed in these lines ofTennyson's "In Memoriam:" "That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and, fusing allThe skirts of self again, should fallRemerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet:Eternal form shall still divideThe 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 lineswhich immediately succeed, the love inspired and deep musinggenius of the English thinker can find ultimate repose only byrecurring 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 moodOf Love on earth! He seeks at leastUpon 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 asdistinguished from the Brahmanic. The "Four Sublime Truths" ofBuddhism, as they are called, are these: first, that there issorrow; secondly, that every living person necessarily feels it;thirdly, that it is desirable to be freed from it; fourthly, thatthe only deliverance from it is by that pure knowledge whichdestroys all cleaving to existence. A Buddha is a being who, inconsequence of having reached the Buddhaship, which implies thepossession of infinite goodness, infinite power, and infinitewisdom, is able to teach men that true knowledge which securesemancipation. The Buddhaship that is, the possession of Supreme Godhead is opento every one, though few ever acquire it. Most wonderful andtremendous is the process of its attainment. Upon a time, somebeing, perhaps then incarnate as a mosquito alighting on a muddyleaf in some swamp, pauses for a while to muse. Looking up throughinfinite stellar systems, with hungry love and boundless ambition, to the throne and sceptre of absolute immensity, he vows withinhimself, "I will become a Buddha. " The total influences of hispast, the forces of destiny, conspiring with his purpose, omnipotence is in that resolution. Nothing shall ever turn himaside from it. He might soon acquire for himself deliverance fromthe dreadful vortex of births; but, determined to achieve thepower of delivering others from their miseries as sentient beings, he voluntarily throws himself into the stream of successiveexistences, and with divine patience and fortitude undergoes everything. From that moment, no matter in what form he is successively born, whether as a disgusting bug, a white elephant, a monarch, or agod, he is a Bodhisat, that is, a candidate pressing towards theBuddhaship. He at once begins practising the ten primary virtues, called paramitas, necessary for the securing of his aim. Theperiod required for the full exercise of one of these virtues is abhumi. Its duration is thus illustrated. Were a Bodhisat once in athousand births to shed a single drop of blood, he would in thespace of a bhumi shed more blood than there is water in a thousandoceans. On account of his merit he might always be born amidst thepleasures of the heavens; but since he could there make noprogress towards his goal, he prefers being born in the world ofmen. During his gradual advance, there is no good he does notperform, no hardship he does not undertake, no evil he does notwillingly suffer; and all for the benefit of others, to obtain themeans of emancipating those whom he sees fastened by ignorance inthe afflictive circle of acts. Wherever born, acting, orsuffering, his eye is still turned towards that EMPTY THRONE, atthe apex of the universe, from which the last Buddha has vaultedinto Nirwana. The Buddhists have many scriptures, especially one, called the "Book of the Five Hundred and Fifty Births, " detailingthe marvellous adventures of the Bodhisat during his numeroustransmigrations, wherein he exhibits for each species of being towhich he belongs a model character and life. At length the momentous day dawns when the unweariable Bodhisatenters on his well earned Buddhaship. From that time, during therest of his life, he goes about preaching discourses, teachingevery prepared creature he meets the method of securing eternaldeliverance. Leaving behind in these discourses a body of wisdomsufficient to guide to salvation all who will give attentive earand heart, the Buddha then his sublime work of disinterested lovebeing completed receives the fruition of his toil, the superessential prize of the universe, the Infinite Good. In a word, hedies, and enters Nirwana. There is no more evil of any sort forhim at all forever. The final fading echo of sorrow has ceased inthe silence of perfect blessedness; the last undulation of thewave of change has rolled upon the shore of immutability. The only historic Buddha is Sakya Muni, or Gotama, who was born atKapila about six centuries before Christ. His teachings containmany principles in common with those of the Brahmans. But herevolted against their insufferable conceit and cruelty. Heprotested against their claim that no one could obtainemancipation until after being born as a Brahman and passingthrough the various rites and degrees of their order. In theface of the most powerful and arrogant priesthood in the world, he preached the perfect equality of all mankind, and the consequentabolition of castes. Whoever acquires a total detachment ofaffection from all existence is thereby released from birth andmisery; and the means of acquiring that detachment are freelyoffered to all in his doctrine. Thus did Gotama preach. He took the monopoly of religion out of thehands of a caste, and proclaimed emancipation to every creaturethat breathes. He established his system in the valley of theGanges near the middle of the sixth century before Christ. It soonoverran the whole country, and held sway until about eight hundredyears after Christ, when an awful persecution and slaughter on thepart of the uprising Brahmans drove it out of the land with swordand fire. "The colossal figure which for fourteen centuries hadbestridden the Indian continent vanished suddenly, like a rainbowat sunset. "33 Gotama's philosophy, in its ontological profundity, is of asubtlety and vastness that would rack the brain of a Fichte or aSchelling; but, popularly stated, so far as our present purposedemands, it is this. Existence is the one all inclusive evil;cessation of existence, or Nirwana, is the infinite good. Thecause of existence is ignorance, which leads one to cleave toexisting objects; and this cleaving leads to reproduction. If onewould escape from the chain of existence, he must destroy thecause of his confinement in it, that is, evil desire, or thecleaving to existing objects. The method of salvation in Gotama'ssystem is to vanquish and annihilate all desire for existingthings. How is this to be done? By acquiring an intense perceptionof the miseries of existence, on the one hand, and an intenseperception, on the other hand, of the contrasted desirableness ofthe state of emancipation, or Nirwana. Accordingly, the discoursesof Gotama, and the sacred books of the Buddhists, are filled withvivid accounts of every thing disgusting and horrible connectedwith existence, and with vivid descriptions, consciously falteringwith inadequacy, of every thing supremely fascinating inconnection with Nirwana. "The three reflections on the impermanency, suffering, and unreality of the body are three gates leading tothe city of Nirwana. " The constant claim is, that whosoever byadequate moral discipline and philosophical contemplation attainsto a certain degree of wisdom, a certain degree of intellectualinsight, instead of any longer cleaving to existence, will shudderat the thought of it, and, instead of shrinking from death, willbe 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 awretchedly decrepit old man, a loathsomely diseased man, and adecomposing dead man, then the three worlds of passion, matter, and spirit seemed to him like a house on fire, and he longed to beextricated from the dizzy whirl of existence, and to reach thestill haven of Nirwana. Finding ere long that he had now, as thereward of his incalculable endurances through untold aons past, become Buddha, he said to himself, "You have borne the misery ofthe whole round of transmigrations, and have arrived at infinitewisdom, which is the highway to Nirwana, the 33 Major Cunningham, Bbilsa Topes, or Buddhist Monuments ofCentral India, p. 168. city of peace. On that road you are the guide of all beings. Beginyour work and pursue it with fidelity. " From that time until theday of his death he preached "the three laws of mortality, misery, and mutability. " Every morning he looked through the world to seewho should be caught that day in the net of truth, and took hismeasures accordingly to preach in the hearing of men the truths bywhich alone they could climb into Nirwana. When he was expiring, invisible gods, with huge and splendid bodies, came and stood, asthick as they could be packed, for a hundred and twenty milesaround the banyan tree under which he awaited Nirwana, to gaze onhim who had broken the circle of transmigration. 34 The system of Gotama distinguishes seven grades of being: sixsubject to repeated death and birth; one the condition of therahats and the Buddhaship exempt therefrom. "Who wins this hasreached the shore of the stormy ocean of vicissitudes, and is insafety forever. " Baur says, "The aim of Buddhism is that all mayobtain unity with the original empty Space, so as to unpeople theworlds. "35 This end it seeks by purification from all modes ofcleaving 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 tobe the only ford to Nirwana. Others also make the samerepresentation: "For all that live and breathe have once been men, And insuccession 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 someof the heavens, likewise of their entering the final fruitionthrough a decease in a dewa loka. Still, it is the common viewthat emancipation from all existence can be secured only by ahuman being on earth. The last birth must be in that form. Theemblem of Buddha, engraved on most of his monuments, is a wheel, denoting that he has finished and escaped from the circle ofexistences. Henceforth he is named Tathagata, he who has gone. Let us notice a little more minutely what the Buddhists say ofNirwana; for herein to them hides all the power of theirphilosophy and lies the absorbing charm of their religion. "The state that is peaceful, free from body, from passion, andfrom fear, where birth or death is not, that is Nirwana. " "Nirwanaputs an end to coming and going, and there is no other happiness. ""It is a calm wherein no wind blows. " "There is no difference inNirwana. " "It is the annihilation of all the principles ofexistence. " "Nirwana is the completion and opposite shore ofexistence, free from decay, tranquil, knowing no restraint, and ofgreat blessedness. " "Nirwana is unmixed satisfaction, entirelyfree from sorrow. " "The wind cannot be squeezed in the hand, norcan its color be told. Yet the wind is. Even so Nirwana is, butits properties cannot be told. " "Nirwana, like space, iscauseless, does not live nor die, and has no locality. It is theabode of those liberated from existence. " "Nirwana is not, exceptto 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 valuablework, "Eastern Monachism, " chap. Xxii. , on "Nirwana, its Paths andFruition. " Some scholars maintain that the Buddhist Nirwana is nothing butthe atheistic Annihilation. The subject is confessedly a mostdifficult one. But it seems to us that the opinion just stated isthe very antithesis of the true interpretation of Nirwana. In thefirst place, it should be remembered that there are various sectsof Buddhists. Now, the word Nirwana may be used in differentsenses by different schools. 37 A few persons a small party, represented perhaps by able writers may believe in annihilation inour sense of the term, just as has happened in Christendom, whilethe common doctrine of the people is the opposite of that. In thesecond place, with the Oriental horror of individuated existence, and a highly poetical style of writing, nothing could be morenatural, in depicting their ideas of the most desirable state ofbeing, than that they should carry their metaphors expressive ofrepose, freedom from action and emotion, to a pitch conveying toour cold and literal thought the conceptions of blankunconsciousness and absolute nothingness. Colebrooke says, "Nirwana is not annihilation, but unceasingapathy. The notion of it as a happy state seems derived from theexperience of ecstasies; or else the pleasant, refreshed feelingwith which one wakes from profound repose is referred to theperiod of actual sleep. "38 A Buddhist author speculates thus:"That the soul feels not during profound trance, is not for wantof sensibility, but for want of sensible objects. " Wilson, Hodgson, and Vans Kennedy three able thinkers, as well asscholars, in this field agree that Nirwana is not annihilation aswe understand that word. Mr. Hodgson believes that the Buddhistsexpect 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 theBuddhist doctrine of futurity, and says he is compelled toconclude that Nirwana denotes imperishable being in a blissfulquietude. 39 Many additional authorities in favor of this viewmight be adduced, enough to balance, at least, the names on theother 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 ofAnnihilation. " But he forgets that the motto on the title page ofhis volume is the following sentence quoted from Sakya Munihimself: "To those who know the concatenation of causes andeffects, there is neither being nor nothing. " To them Nirwana is. Considering it, then, as an open question, unsettled by anyauthoritative assertion, we will weigh the probabilities of thecase. No definition of Nirwana is more frequent than the one given bythe Kalpa Sutra, 40 namely, "cessation from action and freedom fromdesire. " But this, like many of the other representations, such, for instance, as the exclusion of succession, very plainly is nota denial of all being, but only of our present modes ofexperience. The dying Gotama is said to have "passed through theseveral states, one after another, until he arrived at the statewhere there is no pain. He then continued to enter the otherhigher states, and from the highest entered Nirwana. " Can literalannihilation, 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 Nothingon the positive side as identical with All, make annihilatingdeprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation asaffirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see theabysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The idealzero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, butan indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, atranslucency, 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 usto believe that Nirwana is utter nothingness, others apparentlyimply the opposite. "The discourses of Buddha are a charm to curethe poison of evil desire; a succession of fruit bearing treesplaced here and there to enable the traveller to cross the desertof existence; a power by which every sorrow may be appeased; adoor of entrance to the eternal city of Nirwana. " "The mind of therahat" (one who has obtained assurance of emancipation and is onlywaiting for it to arrive) "knows no disturbance, because it isfilled with the pleasure of Nirwana. " "The sight of Nirwanabestows perfect happiness. " "The rahat is emancipated fromexistence in Nirwana, as the lotus is separated from the mud outof which it springs. " "Fire may be produced by rubbing togethertwo sticks, though previously it had no locality: it is the samewith Nirawna. " "Nirwana is free from danger, peaceful, refreshing, happy. When a man who has been broiled before a huge fire isreleased, and goes quickly into some open space, he feels the mostagreeable sensation. All the evils of existence are that fire, andNirwana is that open space. " These passages indicate the cessationin Nirwana of all sufferings, perhaps of all present modes ofexistence, but not the total end of being. It may be said thatthese are but figurative expressions. The reply is, so are thecontrasted statements metaphors, and it is probable that theexpressions which denote the survival of pure being in Nirwana arecloser approximations to the intent of their authors than thosewhich hint at an unconscious vacancy. If Nirwana in its originalmeaning was an utter and infinite blank, then, "out of that veryNothing, " as Max Muller says, "human nature made a new paradise. " There is a scheme of doctrine held by some Buddhist philosopherswhich may be thus stated. There are five constituent elements ofsentient existence. They are called khandas, and are as follows:the organized body, sensation, perception, discrimination, andconsciousness. Death is the dissolution and entire destruction ofthese khandas, and apart from them there is no synthetical unit, soul, or personality. Yet in a certain sense death is not theabsolute annihilation of a human existence, because it leaves apotentiality inherent in that existence. There is no identical egoto survive and be born again; but karma that is, the sum of aman's action, his entire merit and demerit produces at his death anew being, and so on in continued series until Nirwana isattained. Thus the succession of being is kept up with transmittedresponsibility, as a flame is transferred from one wick toanother. It is evident enough, as is justly claimed by Hardy andothers, 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 forthose now living an absurdity. But we are convinced that this viewis the speculative peculiarity of a sect, and by no means thecommon belief of the Buddhist populace or the teaching of Gotamahimself. This appears at the outset from the fact that Gotama isrepresented as having lived through millions of existences, indifferent states and worlds, with preserved identity and memory. The history of his concatenated advance towards the Buddhaship isthe supporting basis and the saturating spirit of documentaryBuddhism. And the same idea pervades the whole range of narrativesrelating to the repeated births and deaths of the innumerableBuddhist 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 oftheir experience stretching through many lives. Again: the arguments cited from Buddha seem aimed to prove, notthat there is absolutely no self in man, but that the five khandasare not the self, that the real self is something distinct fromall that is exposed to misery and change, something deep, wondrous, divine, infinite. For instance, the report of a debateon this subject between Buddha and Sachaka closes with thesewords: "Thus was Sachaka forced to confess that the five khandasare impermanent, connected with sorrow, unreal, not the self. 42These terms appear to imply the reality of a self, only that it isnot to be confounded with the apprehensible elements of existence. Besides, the attainment of Nirwana is held up as a prize to belaboriously sought by personal effort. To secure it is a positivetriumph quite distinct from the fated dissolution of the khandasin death. Now, if there be in man no personal entity, what is itthat with so much joy attains Nirwana? The genuine Buddhistnotion, as seems most probable, is that the conscious essence ofthe rahat, when the exterior elements of existence fall fromaround him, passes by a transcendent climax and discrete leapbeyond the outermost limits of appreciable being, and becomes thatINFINITE which knows no changes and is susceptible of nodefinitions. In the Ka gyur collection of Tibetan sacred books, comprising a hundred volumes, and now belonging to the Cabinet ofManuscripts in the Royal Library of Paris, there are two volumesexclusively occupied by a treatise on Nirwana. It is a significantfact that the title of these volumes is "Nirwana, or Deliverancefrom Pain. " If Nirwana be simply annihilation, why is it not sostated? Why should recourse be had to a phrase partiallydescriptive of one feature, instead of comprehensively announcingor implying the whole case? Still further: it deserves notice that, according to the unanimousaffirmation of Buddhist authors, if any Buddhist were offered thealternative of an existence as king of a dewa loka, keeping hispersonality for a hundred million years in the uninterruptedenjoyment of perfect happiness, or of translation into Nirwana, hewould spurn the former as defilement, and would with unutterableavidity choose the latter. We must therefore suppose that byNirwana he understands, not naked destruction, but some mysteriousgood, too vast for logical comprehension, too obscure toOccidental thought to find expression in Occidental language. 42 Hardy, Manual, p. 427. At the moment when Gotama entered upon the Buddhaship, likea vessel overflowing with honey, his mind overflowed with thenectar of oral instruction, and he uttered these stanzas: "Through many different births I have run, vainly seeking Thearchitect of the desire resembling house. Painful are repeatedbirths. O house builder! I have seen thee. Again a house thoucanst not build for me. I have broken thy rafters and ridge pole;I have arrived at the extinction of evil desire; My mind is goneto Nirwana. " Hardy, who stoutly maintains that the genuine doctrine of Buddha'sphilosophy is that there is no transmigrating individuality inman, but that the karma creates a new person on the dissolution ofthe former one, confesses the difficulties of this dogma to be sogreat that "it is almost universally repudiated. " M. Obrypublished at Paris, in 1856, a small volume entirely devoted tothis subject, under the title of "The Indian Nirwana, or theEnfranchisement of the Soul after Death. " His conclusion, after acareful and candid discussion, is, that Nirwana had differentmeanings to the minds of the ancient Aryan priests, the orthodoxBrahmans, the Sankhya Brahmans, and the Buddhists, but had not toany of them, excepting possibly a few atheists, the sense ofstrict annihilation. He thinks that Burnouf and Barthelemy SaintHilaire themselves would have accepted this view if they had paidparticular attention to the definite inquiry, instead of merelytouching upon it in the course of their more comprehensivestudies. 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 andthe contrasted vicissitudes of existence, and may perhaps throwlight on their meaning. The supposition of immaterial, unlimited, absolutely unalterable being the scholastic ens sine qualitateanswers to the descriptions of it much more satisfactorily thanthe idea of unqualified nothingness does. "Nirwana is real; allelse is phenomenal. " The Sankhyas, who do not hold to thenonentity nor to the annihilation of the soul, but to its eternalidentification with the Infinite One, use nevertheless nearly thesame 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 mundaneegg, containing the whole creation, was surrounded by sevenenvelops, water, air, fire, ether, egotism, intelligence, andfinally the indiscrete principle"44 Is not this IndiscretePrinciple of the Brahmans the same as the Nirwana of theBuddhists? The latter explicitly claim that "man is capable ofenlarging 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 existpreviously to its reception, nor is that which was not, broughtinto existence: still, to the being who attains it, there isNirwana. " According to this statement, taken in connection withthe hundreds similar to it, Nirwana seems to be a simple mentalperception, most difficult of acquirement, and, when acquired, assimilating the whole conscious being perfectly to itself. TheAsangkrata Sutra, as translated by Mr. Hardy, says, "From thejoyful exclamations of those who have seen Nirwana, its charactermay be known by those who have not made the same attainment. " Thesuperficial thinker, carelessly scanning the recorded sayings ofGotama and his expositors in relation to Nirwana, is aware only ofa confused mass of metaphysical hieroglyphs and poeticalmetaphors; but the Buddhist sages avow that whoso, by concentratedstudy and training of his faculties, pursues the inquiry withadequate perseverance, will at last elicit and behold the realmeaning of Nirwana, the achieved insight and revelation formingthe widest horizon of rapturous truth ever contemplated by thehuman mind. The memorable remark of Sir William Hamilton, that"capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure ofexistence, " should show the error of those who so unjustifiablyaffirm that, since Nirwana is said to be neither corporeal norincorporeal, nor at all describable, it is therefore absolutelynothing. A like remark is also to be addressed to those who drawthe same unwarrantable conclusion of the nothingness of Nirwanafrom the fact that it has no locality, or from the fact that it issometimes said to exclude consciousness. Plato, in the Timaus, stigmatizes as a vulgar error the notion that what is not in anyplace is a nonentity. Many a weighty philosopher has followed himin this opinion. The denial of place is by no means necessarilythe denial of being. So, too, with consciousness. It isconceivable that there is a being superior to all the modes ofconsciousness now known to us. We are, indeed, unable to definethis, yet it may be. The profoundest analysis shows thatconsciousness consists of co ordinated changes. 45 "Consciousnessis a succession of changes combined and arranged in special ways. "Now, in contrast to the Occidental thinker, who covets alternationbecause in his cold climate action is the means of enjoyment, theHindu, in the languid East, where repose is the condition ofenjoyment, conceives the highest blessedness to consist inexemption from every disturbance, in an unruffled unity excludingall changes. Therefore, while in some of its forms his dream ofNirwana admits not consciousness, still, it is not inconsistentwith a homogeneous state of being, which he, in his metaphysicaland theosophie soarings, apprehends as the grandest and mostecstatic of all. The etymological force of the word Nirwana is extinction, as whenthe sun has set, a fire has burned out, or a lamp is extinguished. The fair laws of interpretation do not compel us, in cases likethis, to receive the severest literal significance of a word asconveying the meaning which a popular doctrine holds in the mindsof its believers. There is almost always looseness, vagueness, metaphor, accommodation. But take the term before us in itsstrictest sense, and mark the result. When a fire is extinguished, it is obvious that, while the flame has disappeared, the substanceof 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 certainvisible form in which it existed before; but it still survivesunder altered conditions. Now, to compare the putting out of alamp to the death of a man, extinction is not actual destruction, but a transition of the flame into another state of being. Thatother state, in the case of the soul, is Nirwana. There is a final consideration, possibly of some worth in dealingwith this obscure theme. We will approach it through a preliminaryquery and quotation. That nothing can extend beyond its limits isan identical proposition. How vast, then, must be the soul of manin form or in power! "If souls be substances corporeal, Be they as big just as the bodyis? Or shoot they out to the height ethereal? Doth it not seem theimpression of a seal Can be no larger than the wax? The soul withthat vast latitude must move Which measures the objects that itdoth descry. So must it be upstretch'd unto the sky And rubagainst the stars. " Cousin asserts that man is conscious of infinity, that "theunconditional, the absolute, the infinite, is immediately known inconsciousness by difference, plurality, and relation. " Now, doesnot the consciousness of infinity imply the infinity ofconsciousness? If not, we are compelled into the contradictionthat a certain entity or force reaches outside of its outermostboundary. The Buddhist ideal is not self annihilation, but selfuniversalization. It is not the absorption of a drop into the sea, but the dilatation of a drop to the sea. Each drop swells to thewhole ocean, each soul becomes the Boundless One, each rahat isidentified with the total Nirwana. The rivers of emancipated menneither disembogue into the ocean of spirit nor evaporate into theabyss of nonentity, but are blended with infinitude as anontological integer. Nirwana is unexposed and illimitable space. Buddhism is perfect disinterestedness, absolute self surrender. Itis the gospel of everlasting emancipation for all. It cannot bethat a deliberate suicide of soul is the ideal holding the deepestdesire of four hundred millions of people. Nirwana is notnegation, but a pure positive without alternation or foil. Some light may be thrown on the subject by contemplating thesuccessive states through which the dying Gotama passed. MaxMuller describes them, after the Buddhist documents, thus: "Heenters into the first stage of meditation when he feels freedomfrom sin, acquires a knowledge of the nature of all things, andhas no desire except that of Nirvana. But he still feels pleasure;he even uses his reasoning and discriminating powers. The use ofthese powers ceases in the second stage of meditation, whennothing remains but a desire after Nirvana, and a general feelingof satisfaction arising from his intellectual perfection. Thatsatisfaction, also, is extinguished in the third stage. Indifference succeeds; yet there is still self consciousness, anda certain amount of physical pleasure. In the fourth stage theselast remnants are destroyed; memory fades away, all pleasure andpain are gone, and the doors of Nirvana now open before him. Wemust soar still higher, and, though we may feel giddy and disgusted, 46 we must sit out the tragedy till the curtainfalls. After the four stages of meditation are passed, the Buddha(and every being is to become a Buddha) enters first into theinfinity of space, then into the infinity of intelligence, andthence he passes into the third region, the realm of nothing. Buteven here there is no rest. There is still something left, theidea of the nothing in which he rejoices. That also must bedestroyed; and it is destroyed in the fourth and last region, where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and wherethere is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is notnothing. "47 Analyze away all particulars until you reach anuncolored boundlessness of pure immateriality, free from everypredicament; and that is Nirwana. This is one possible way ofconceiving the fate of the soul; and the speculative mind mustconceive it in every possible way. However closely the resultresembles the vulgar notion of annihilation, the difference inmethod of approach and the difference to the contemplator'sfeeling are immense. The Buddhist apprehends Nirwana as infinitudein absolute and eternal equilibrium: the atheist finds Nirwana ina coffin. That is thought of with rapture, this, with horror. It should be noticed, before we close this chapter, that some ofthe Hindus give a spiritual interpretation to all the grossphysical details of their so highly colored and extravagantmythology. One of their sacred books says, "Pleasure and pain arestates of the mind. Heaven is that which delights the mind, hellis that which gives it pain. Hence vice is called hell, and virtueis called heaven. " Another author says, "The fire of the angrymind produces the fire of hell, and consumes its possessor. Awicked person causes his evil deeds to impinge upon himself, andthat is hell. " The various sects of mystics, allied in faith andfeeling to the Sufis, which are quite numerous in the East, agreein a deep metaphorical explanation of the vulgar notionspertaining to Deity, judgment, heaven, and hell. In conclusion, the most remarkable fact in this whole field ofinquiry is the contrast of the Eastern horror of individuality andlonging for absorption with the Western clinging to personalityand abhorrence of dissolution. 48 The true Orientalist, whetherBrahman, Buddhist, or Sufi, is in love with death. Through thisgate 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 shallcease with deliverance from the spectral semblances of this falselife. All pure contemplation, perfect repose, unsullied andunrippled joy shall begin with entrance upon the true life beyond. Thus thinking, he feels that death is the avenue to infiniteexpansion, freedom, peace, bliss; and he longs for it with anintensity not dreamed of by more frigid natures. He often compareshimself, in this world aspiring towards another, to an enamoredmoth drawn towards the fire, and he exclaims, with a sigh and athrill, 46 Not disgust, but wonder and awe, fathomless intellectualemotion, at so unparalleled a phenomenon of our miraculous humannature. 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 rapturefalls the moth, and bravely dies. Think not what thou art, Believer; think but what thou mayst become For the World is thydeceiver, 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. Negativeacts, denying function, are antipathetic, and lower the sense oflife; positive acts, affirming function, are sympathetic, andraise the sense of life. Therefore the end to which those look, annihilation, is dreaded; that to which these look, Nirwana, isdesired. 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 asreviser, with that remarkable system of rites and doctrines whichconstituted the religion of the ancient Iranians, and which yetfinds adherents in the Ghebers of Persia and the Parsees of India. Pliny, following the affirmation of Aristotle, asserts that heflourished 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 thebeginning of the seventh century before Christ. Hyde, Prideaux, DuPerron, Kleuker, Herder, Klaproth, and others, bring him down toabout a hundred and fifty years later. Meanwhile, several weightynames press the scale in favor of the hypothesis of two or threeZoroasters, living at separate epochs. So the learned men differ, and the genuine date in question cannot, at present at least, bedecided. It is comparatively certain that, if he was the author ofthe work attributed to him, he must have flourished as early asthe sixth century before Christ. The probabilities seem, upon thewhole, that he lived four or five centuries earlier than that, even, "in the pre historic time, " as Spiegel says. However, thesettlement of the era of Zoroaster is not a necessary condition ofdiscovering the era when the religion commonly traced to him wasin full prevalence as the established faith of the Persian empire. The latter may be conclusively fixed without clearing up theformer. And it is known, without disputation, that that religionwhether it was primarily Persian, Median, Assyrian, or Chaldeanwas flourishing at Babylon in the maturity of its power in thetime of the Hebrew prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, twenty five hundred years ago. The celebrated work on the religion of the ancient Medes andPersians by Dr. Hyde, published in 1700, must be followed withmuch caution and be taken with many qualifications. The author wasbiassed by unsound theories of the relation of the Hebrew theologyto the Persian, and was, of course, ignorant of the mostauthoritative ancient documents afterwards brought to light. Hiswork, therefore, though learned and valuable, considering the timewhen it was written, is vitiated by numerous mistakes and defects. In 1762, Anquetil du Perron, returning to France from protractedjourneying and abode in the East, brought home, among the fruitsof his researches, manuscripts purporting to be parts of the oldPersian Bible composed or collected by Zoroaster. It was writtenin a language hitherto unknown to European scholars, one of theprimitive dialects of Persia. This work, of which he soonpublished a French version at Paris was entitled by him the "ZendAvesta. " It confirmed all that was previously known of theZoroastrian religion, and, by its allusions, statements, andimplications, threw great additional light upon the subject. A furious controversy, stimulated by personal rivalries andnational jealousy, immediately arose. Du Perron was denounced asan impostor or an ignoramus, and his publication stigmatized as awretched forgery of his own, or a gross imposition palmed upon himby some lying pundit. Sir William Jones and John Richardson, bothdistinguished English Orientalists, and Meiners in Germany, werethe chief impugners of the document in hand. Richardsonobstinately went beyond his data, and did not live long enough toretract; but Sir William, upon an increase of information, changedhis views, and regretted his first inconsiderate zeal and somewhatmistaken championship. The ablest defender of Du Perron wasKleuker, who translated the whole work from French into German, adding many corrections, new arguments, and researches of greatability. His work was printed at Riga, in seven quarto volumes, from 1777 to 1783. The progress and results of the wholediscussion are well enough indicated in the various papers whichthe 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 leastground for doubt that his asserted discovery was in everyessential what it claimed to be. It is a sort of litany; acollection of prayers and of sacred dialogues held between Ormuzdand Zoroaster, from which the Persian system of theology may beinferred and constructed with some approach to completeness. The assailants of the genuineness of the "Zend Avesta" wereeffectually silenced when, some thirty years later, ProfessorRask, a well known Danish linguist, during his inquiries in theEast, found other copies of it, and gave to the world suchinformation and proofs as could not be suspected. He, discoveringthe close affinities of the Zend with Sanscrit, led the way to themost brilliant triumph yet achieved by comparative philology. Portions of the work in the original character were published in1829, under the supervision of Burnouf at Paris and of Olshausenat Hamburg. The question of the genuineness of the dialectexhibited in these specimens, once so freely mooted, has beendiscussed, and definitively settled in the affirmative, by severaleminent scholars, among whom may be mentioned Bopp, whose"Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, and German Languages" is anastonishing monument of erudition and toil. It is the convictionof Major Rawlinson that the Zoroastrian books of the Parsees wereimported to Bombay from Persia in their present state in theseventh century of our era, but that they were written at leasttwelve centuries earlier. 1 But the two scholars whose opinions upon any subject within thisdepartment of learning are now the most authoritative areProfessor Spiegel of Erlangen, and Professor Westergaard ofCopenhagen. Their investigations, still in progress, made with allthe aids furnished by their predecessors, and also with theadvantage of newly discovered materials and processes, are ofcourse to be relied on in preference to the earlier, and in somerespects necessarily cruder, researches. It appears that theproper Zoroastrian Scriptures namely, the Yasna, the Vispered, theVendidad, the Yashts, the Nyaish, the Afrigans, the Gahs, theSirozah, and a few other fragments were composed in an ancientIranian 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 becalled the Avestan dialect. (No other book in this dialect, webelieve, is known to be in existence now. ) It is difficult to saywhen these 1 Wilson, Parsi Religion Unfolded, p. 405. documents were written; but in view of all the relevantinformation now possessed, including that drawn from thedeciphered cuneiform inscriptions, the most probable date is abouta thousand years before Christ. Professor R. Roth of Tubingenwhose authority herein as an original investigator is perhapshardly second to any other man's says the books of the Zoroastrianfaith were written a considerable time before the rise of theAchamenian dynasty. He is convinced that the whole substantialcontents of the Zend Avesta are many centuries older than theChristian era. 2 Professor Muller of Oxford also holds the sameopinion. 3 And even those who set the date of the literary record afew centuries later, as Spiegel does, freely admit the greatantiquity of the doctrines and usages then first committed tomanuscript. In the fourth century before Christ, Alexander ofMacedon overran the Persian empire. With the new rule newinfluences prevailed, and the old national faith and ritual fellinto decay and neglect. Early in the third century of theChristian era, Ardeshir overthrew the Parthian dominion in Persiaand established the Sassanian dynasty. One of his first acts was, stimulated doubtless by the surviving Magi and the old piety ofthe people, to reinaugurate the ancient religion. A fresh zeal ofloyalty broke out, and all the prestige and vigor of the longsuppressed worship were restored. The Zoroastrian Scriptures werenow sought for, whether in manuscript or in the memories of thepriests. It would seem that only remnants were found. Thecollection, such as it was, was in the Avestan dialect, which hadgrown partially obsolete and unintelligible. The authoritiesaccordingly had a translation of it made in the speech of thetime, Pehlevi. This translation most of which has reached uswritten in with the original, sentence after sentence forms thereal Zend language, often confounded by the literary public withAvestan. The translation of the Avestan books, probably made underthese circumstances as early as A. D. 350, is called theHuzvaresch. In regard to some of these particulars there arequestions still under investigation, but upon which it is notworth our while to pause here. For example, Spiegel thinks theZend identical with the Pehlevi of the fourth century; Westergaardbelieves it entirely distinct from Pehlevi, and in truth only adisguised mode of writing Parsee, the oldest form of the modernPersian language. The source from which the fullest and clearest knowledge of theZoroastrian faith, as it is now held by the Parsees, is drawn, isthe Desatir and the Bundehesh. The former work is the uniquevestige of an extinct dialect called the Mahabadian, accompaniedby a Persian translation and commentary. It is impossible toascertain the century when the Mahabadian text was written; butthe translation into Persian was, most probably, made in theseventh century of the Christian era. 4 Spiegel, in 1847, saysthere can be no doubt of the spuriousness of the Desatir; but hegives no reasons for the statement, and we do not know that it isbased on any other arguments than those which, advanced by DeSacy, were refuted by Von Hammer. The Bundehesh is in the Pehlevior Zend language, and was written, it is 2 Ueber die Heiligen Schriften der Arier. Jahrbucher fur DeutscheTheologie, 1857, band ii. Ss. 146, 147. 3 Essay on the Veda and the Zend Avesta, p. 24. See also Bunsen'sChristianity 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 isclaimed, from a more ancient work. 5 The book entitled "Revelationsof Ardai Viraf" exists in Pehlevi probably of the fourth century, according to Troyer, 6 and is believed to have been originallywritten 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 soulleaving his body for that length of time paid to those regions. Many later and enlarged versions of this have appeared. One ofthem, dating from the sixteenth century, was translated intoEnglish by T. A. Pope and published in 1816. Sanscrit translationsof several of the before named writings are also in existence. Andseveral other comparatively recent works, scarcely needing mentionhere, although considered as somewhat authoritative by the modernfollowers of Zoroaster, are to be found in Guzeratee, the presentdialect of the Indian Parsees. A full exposition of theZoroastrian religion, with satisfactory proofs of its antiquityand documentary genuineness, is presented in the PreliminaryDiscourse and Notes to the Dabistan. This curious and entertainingwork, a fund of strange and valuable lore, is an historicocritical view of the principal religions of the world, especiallyof the Oriental sects, schools, and manners. It was composed inPersian, apparently by Mohsan Fani, about the year 1645. AnEnglish translation, with elaborate explanatory matter, by DavidShea and Anthony Troyer, was published at London and at Paris in1843. 7 In these records there are obscurities, incongruities, and chasms, as might naturally be anticipated, admitting them to be strictlywhat they would pass for. These faults may be accounted for inseveral ways. First, in a rude stage of philosophical culture, incompleteness of theory, inconsistent conceptions in differentparts 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 totheir various views in literary productions of the same date andpossessing a balanced authority. Or, thirdly, the heterogeneousconceptions in some particulars met with in these scriptures maybe a result of the fact that the collection contains writings ofdistinct ages, when the same problems had been differentlyapproached and had given birth to opposing or divergentspeculations. The later works of course cannot have the authorityof the earlier in deciding questions of ancient belief: they areto be taken rather as commentaries, interpreting and carrying outin detail many points that lie only in obscure hints and allusionsin the primary documents. But it is a significant fact that, inthe generic germs of doctrine and custom, in the essentialoutlines of substance, in rhetorical imagery, in practical morals, the statements of all these books are alike: they only vary insubordinate matters and in degrees of fulness. The charge has repeatedly been urged that the materials of themore recent of the Parsee Scriptures the Desatir and theBundehesh were drawn from Christian and Mohammedan sources. Noevidence of value for sustaining such assertions has been adduced. Under the circumstances, scarcely any motive for such animposition 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 firstplace, we have ample evidence for the existence of the generalZoroastrian system long anterior to the rise of Christianity. Thetestimony of the classic authors to say nothing of the knownantiquity of the language in which the system is preserved isdemonstrative on this point. Secondly, the striking agreement inregard to fundamental doctrines, pervading spirit, and ritualforms between the accounts in the classics and those in theAvestan books, and of both these with the later writings andtraditional practice of the Parsees, furnishes powerfulpresumption that the religion was a connected development, possessing the same essential features from the time of itsnational establishment. Thirdly, we have unquestionable proofsthat, during the period from the Babylonish captivity to theadvent of Christ, the Jews borrowed and adapted a great deal fromthe Persian theology, but no proof that the Persians took anything from the Jewish theology. This is abundantly confessed bysuch scholars as Gesenius, Rosenmuller, Stuart, Lucke, De Wette, Neander; and it will hardly be challenged by any one who hasinvestigated the subject. But the Jewish theology being thusimpregnated with germs from the Persian faith, and being in asense the historic mother of Christian theology, it is far morereasonable, in seeking the origin of dogmas common to Parsees andChristians, to trace them through the Pharisees to Zoroaster, thanto imagine them suddenly foisted upon the former by forgery on thepart of the latter at a late period. Fourthly, it is notoriousthat Mohammed, in forming his religion, made wholesale draughtsupon previously existing faiths, that their adherents might morereadily accept his teachings, finding them largely in unison withtheir own. It is altogether more likely, aside from historicevidence which we possess, that he drew from the tenets andimagery of the Ghebers, than that they, when subdued by his armiesand persecuted by his rule from their native land, introduced newdoctrines from the Koran into the ancestral creed which they sorevered that neither exile nor death could make them abjure it. For, driven by those fierce proselytes, the victorious Arabs, tothe mountains of Kirman and to the Indian coast, they clung withunconquerable tenacity to their religion, still scrupulouslypractising its rites, proudly mindful of the time when everyvillage, from the shore of the Caspian Sea to the outlet of thePersian Gulf, had its splendid fire temple, "And Iran like a sunflower turn'd Where'er the eye of Mithraburn'd. " We therefore see no reason for believing that important Christianor Mohammedan ideas have been interpolated into the oldZoroastrian religion. The influence has been in the otherdirection. Relying then, though with caution, on what Dr. EdwardRoth says, that "the certainty of our possessing a correctknowledge of the leading ancient doctrines of the Persians is nowbeyond all question, " we will try to exhibit so much of the systemas is necessary for appreciating its doctrine of a future life. In the deep background of the Magian theology looms, in mysteriousobscurity, the belief in an infinite First Principle, ZeruanaAkerana. According to most of the scholars who have investigatedit, the meaning of this term is "Time without Bounds, " or absoluteduration. But Bohlen says it signifies the "Untreated Whole;" andSchlegel thinksit denotes the "Indivisible One. " The conceptionseems to have been to the people mostly an unapplied abstraction, too vast and remote to become prominent in their speculation orinfluential in their faith. Spiegel, indeed, thinks the conceptionwas derived from Babylon, and added to the system at a laterperiod than the other doctrines. The beginning of vital theology, the source of actual ethics to the Zoroastrians, was in the ideaof the two antagonist powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman, the firstemanations of Zeruana, who divide between them in unresting strifethe empire of the universe. The former is the Principle of Good, the perfection of intelligence, beneficence, and light, the sourceof all reflected excellence. The latter is the Principle of Evil, the contriver of misery and death, the king of darkness, theinstigator of all wrong. With sublime beauty the ancient Persiansaid, "Light is the body of Ormuzd; Darkness is the body ofAhriman. " There has been much dispute whether the Persian theologygrew out of the idea of an essential and eternal dualism, or wasbased on the conception of a partial and temporary battle; inother words, whether Ahriman was originally and necessarily evil, or fell from a divine estate. In the fragmentary documents which have reached us, the wholesubject lies in confusion. It is scarcely possible to unravel thetangled mesh. Sometimes it seems to be taught that Ahriman was atfirst good, an angel of light who, through envy of his greatcompeer, sank from his primal purity, darkened into hatred, andbecame the rancorous enemy of truth and love. At other times heappears to be considered as the pure primordial essence of evil. The various views may have prevailed in different ages or indifferent schools. Upon the whole, however, we hold the opinionthat the real Zoroastrian idea of Ahriman was moral and free, notphysical and fatal. The whole basis of the universe was good; evilwas an after perversion, a foreign interpolation, a battlingmixture. First, the perfect Zeruana was once all in all: Ahriman, as well as Ormuzd, proceeded from him; and the inference that hewas 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 perhapsthe earliest appearance of the Persian notion in Jewishliterature warrants any inference or supposition at all, it wouldlead to the image of one who was originally a prince in heaven, and who must have fallen thence to become the builder andpotentate of hell. Thirdly, that matter is not an essential coreof evil, the utter antagonist of spirit, and that Ahriman is notevil by an intrinsic necessity, will appear from the twoconceptions lying at the base and crown of the Persian system:that the creation, as it first came from the hands of Ormuzd, wasperfectly good; and that finally the purified material world shallexist again unstained by a breath of evil, Ahriman himselfbecoming like Ormuzd. He is not, then, aboriginal andindestructible evil in substance. The conflict between Ormuzd andhim is the temporary ethical struggle of light and darkness, notthe internecine ontological war of spirit and matter. Roth says, "Ahriman was originally good: his fall was a determination of hiswill, not an inherent necessity of his nature. " 8 Whatever otherconceptions may be found, whatever inconsistencies orcontradictions to this may appear, still, we believe the genuineZoroastrian view was such as we have now stated. The oppositedoctrine arose from the more abstruse lucubrations of a moremodern time, and is Manichaan, not Zoroastrian. 8 Zoroastrische Glaubenslehre, ss. 397, 398. Ormuzd created a resplendent and happy world. Ahriman instantlymade deformity, impurity, and gloom, in opposition to it. Allbeauty, virtue, harmony, truth, blessedness, were the work of theformer. All ugliness, vice, discord, falsehood, wretchedness, belonged to the latter. They grappled and mixed in a millionhostile shapes. This universal battle is the ground of ethics, theclarion call to marshal out the hostile hosts of good and ill; andall other war is but a result and a symbol of it. The strife thusindicated between a Deity and a Devil, both subordinate to theunmoved 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 theworks of nature and in the soul of man. In the long struggle thatensued, Ormuzd created multitudes of co operant angels to assailhis foe, stocking the clean empire of Light with celestial alliesof his holy banner, who hang from heaven in great numbers, readyat the prayer of the righteous man to hie to his aid and work hima thousandfold good. Ahriman, likewise, created an equal number ofassistant demons, peopling the filthy domain of Darkness withcounterbalancing swarms of infernal followers of his pirate flag, who lurk at the summit of hell, watching to snatch everyopportunity to ply their vocation of sin and ruin. There are suchhosts of these invisible antagonists sown abroad, and incessantlyactive, 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 areendeavoring in every manner to acquire control over his conductand possession of his soul. The Persians curiously personified the source of organic life inthe world under the emblem of a primeval bull. In this symbolicbeast were packed the seeds and germs of all the creaturesafterwards to people the earth. Ahriman, to ruin the creation ofwhich this animal was the life medium, sought to kill him. He setupon him two of his devs, who are called "adepts of death. " Theystung him in the breast, and plagued him until he died of rage. But, as he was dying, from his right shoulder sprang theandrogynal Kaiomorts, who was the stock root of humanity. His bodywas made from fire, air, water, and earth, to which Ormuzd addedan immortal soul, and bathed him with an elixir which rendered himfair and glittering as a youth of fifteen, and would havepreserved him so perennially had it not been for the assaults ofthe Evil One. 9 Ahriman, the enemy of all life, determined to slayhim, and at last accomplished his object; but, as Kaiomorts fell, from his seed, through the power of Ormuzd, originated Meschia andMeschiane, male and female, the first human pair, from whom allour race have descended. They would never have died, 10 butAhriman, in the guise of a serpent, seduced them, and they sinnedand fell. This account is partly drawn from that later treatise, the Bundehesh, whose mythological cosmogony reminds us of theScandinavian Ymer. But we conceive it to be strictly reliable as arepresentation of the Zoroastrian faith in its essentialdoctrines; for the earlier documents, the Yasna, the Yeshts, andthe Vendidad, contain the same things in obscure and undevelopedexpressions. They, too, make repeated mention of the mysteriousbull, and of Kaiomorts. 11 They invariably represent death asresulting 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 theearthly condition of men describes them as living in a gardenwhich Yima or Jemschid had enclosed at the command of Ormuzd. 12During the golden age of his reign they were free from heat andcold, sickness and death. "In the garden which Yima made they leda most beautiful life, and they bore none of the marks whichAhriman has since made upon men. " But Ahriman's envy and hatredknew no rest until he and his devs had, by their wiles, brokeninto this paradise, betrayed Yima and his people into falsehood, and so, by introducing corruption into their hearts, put an end totheir glorious earthly immortality. This view is set forth in theopening fargards of the Vendidad; and it has been clearlyillustrated in an elaborate contribution upon the "Old IranianMythology" by Professor Westergaard. 13 Death, like all otherevils, was an after effect, thrust into the purely good creationof Ormuzd by the cunning malice of Ahriman. The Vendidad, at itscommencement, recounts the various products of Ormuzd's beneficentpower, and adds, after each particular, "Thereupon Ahriman, who isfull of death, made an opposition to the same. " According to the Zoroastrian modes of thought, what would havebeen 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 fromhate, sickness, pain, and every other ill; and, when the earth wasfull of them, Ormuzd would have taken his sinless subjects to hisown realm of light on high. But when they forsook the true serviceof Ormuzd, falling into deceit and defilement, they becamesubjects of Ahriman; and he would inflict on them, as thecreatures of his hated rival, all the calamities in his power, dissolve the masterly workmanship of their bodies in death, andthen take their souls as prisoners into his own dark abode. "HadMeschia continued to bring meet praises, it would have happenedthat when the time of man, created pure, had come, his soul, created pure and immortal, would immediately have gone to the seatof bliss. "14 "Heaven was destined for man upon condition that hewas humble of heart, obedient to the law, and pure in thought, word, and deed. " But "by believing the lies of Ahriman they becamesinners, and their souls must remain in his nether kingdom untilthe resurrection of their bodies. "15 Ahriman's triumph thusculminates in the death of man and that banishment of thedisembodied soul into hell which takes the place of itsoriginally intended reception into heaven. The law of Ormuzd, revealed through Zoroaster, furnishes to allwho faithfully observe it in purity of thought, speech, andaction, "when body and soul have separated, attainment of paradisein the next world, "16 while the neglecters of it "will pass intothe dwelling of the devs, "17 "after death will have no part inparadise, but will occupy the place of darkness 12 Die Sage von Dschemschid. Von Professor R. Roth. In Zeitschriftder 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 souladvances upon "the way created by Ormuzd for good and bad, " to beexamined as to its conduct. The pure soul passes up from thisevanescent world, over the bridge Chinevad, to the world ofOrmuzd, and joins the angels. The sinful soul is bound and ledover the way made for the godless, and finds its place at thebottom of gloomy hell. 19 An Avestan fragment 20 and the VirafNameh give the same account, only with more picturesque fulness. On the soaring bridge the soul meets Rashne rast, the angel ofjustice, who tries those that present themselves before him. Ifthe merits prevail, a figure of dazzling substance, radiatingglory and fragrance, advances and accosts the justified soul, saying, "I am thy good angel: I was pure at the first, but thygood deeds have made me purer;" and the happy one is straightwayled to Paradise. But when the vices outweigh the virtues, a darkand frightful image, featured with ugliness and exhaling a noisomesmell, meets the condemned soul, and cries, "I am thy evil spirit:bad myself, thy crimes have made me worse. " Then the culpritstaggers on his uncertain foothold, is hurled from the dizzycauseway, and precipitated into the gulf which yawns horriblybelow. A sufficient reason for believing these last details nolate and foreign interpolation, is that the Vendidad itselfcontains all that is essential in them, Garotman, the heaven ofOrmuzd, open to the pure, Dutsakh, the abode of devs, ready forthe wicked, Chinevad, the bridge of ordeal, upon which all mustenter. 21 Some authors have claimed that the ancient disciples of Zoroasterbelieved in a purifying, intermediate state for the dead. Passagesstating such a doctrine are found in the Yeshts, Sades, and inlater Parsee works. But whether the translations we now possess ofthese passages are accurate, and whether the passages themselvesare authoritative to establish the ancient prevalence of such abelief, we have not yet the means for deciding. There was a yearlysolemnity, called the "Festival for the Dead, " still observed bythe Parsees, held at the season when it was thought that thatportion of the sinful departed who had ended their penance wereraised from Dutsakh to earth, from earth to Garotman. Du Perronsays that this took place only during the last five days of theyear, when the souls of all the deceased sinners who wereundergoing punishment had permission to leave their confinementand visit their relatives; after which, those not yet purifiedwere to return, but those for whom a sufficient atonement had beenmade were to proceed to Paradise. For proof that this doctrine washeld, reference is made to the following passage, with others:"During these five days Ormuzd empties hell. The imprisoned soulsshall be freed from Ahriman's plagues when they pay penance andare ashamed of their sins; and they shall receive a heavenlynature; the meritorious deeds of themselves and of their familiescause this liberation: all the rest must return to Dutsakh. "22Rhode thinks this was a part of the old Persian faith, and thesource 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 ornot, it is certain that the Zoroastrians regarded the wholeresidence of the departed souls in hell as temporary. The duration of the present order of the world was fixed at twelvethousand years, divided into four equal epochs. In the first threethousand years, Ormuzd creates and reigns triumphantly over hisempire. Through the next cycle, Ahriman is constructing andcarrying on his hostile works. The third epoch is occupied with adrawn battle between the upper and lower kings and theiradherents. During the fourth period, Ahriman is to be victorious, and a state of things inconceivably dreadful is to prevail. Thebrightness of all clear things will be shrouded, the happiness ofall joyful creatures be destroyed, innocence disappear, religionbe scoffed from the world, and crime, horror, and war be rampant. Famine will spread, pests and plagues stalk over the earth, andshowers of black rain fall. But at last Ormuzd will rise in hismight and put an end to these awful scenes. He will send on eartha savior. Sosiosch, to deliver mankind, to wind up the finalperiod of time, and to bring the arch enemy to judgment. At thesound 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 thefirstling. Next, Meschia and Meschiane, the primal parent pair, will appear. And then the whole multitudinous family of mankindwill throng up. The genii of the elements will render up thesacred materials intrusted to them, and rebuild the decomposedbodies. Each soul will recognise, and hasten to reoccupy, its oldtenement of flesh, now renewed, improved, immortalized. Formeracquaintances will then know each other. "Behold, my father! mymother! 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 thisfield attributed the doctrine of a general and bodily resurrectionof the dead to the ancient Zoroastrians. The subsequent researchesof Burnouf, Roth, and others, have shown that several, at least, of the passages which Anquetil supposed to teach such a doctrinewere erroneously translated by him, and do not really contain it. And recently the ground has been often assumed that the doctrineof the resurrection does not belong to the Avesta, but is a moremodern dogma, derived by the Parsees from the Jews or theChristians, and only forced upon the old text by misinterpretationthrough the Pehlevi version and the Parsee commentary. A questionof so grave importance demands careful examination. In the absenceof that reliable translation of the entire original documents, andthat thorough elaboration of all the extant materials, which weare awaiting from the hands of Professor Spiegel, whose secondvolume has long been due, and Professor Westergaard, whose secondand third volumes are eagerly looked for, we must make the bestuse of the resources actually available, and then leave the pointin such plausible light as existing testimony and fair reasoningcan 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 whenthe 23 Rhode, Heilige Sage des Zendvolks, s. 410. 24 Bundehesh, ch. Xxxi. Avesta was written. We know that the Christians of the first twocenturies believed a great many things of which there is nostatement in the New Testament. Spiegel holds that the doctrine indebate is not in the Avesta, the text of which in its present formhe thinks was written after the time of Alexander. 25 But heconfesses that the resurrection theory was in existence longbefore that time. 26 Now, if the Avesta, committed to writing threehundred years before Christ, at a time when the doctrine of theresurrection is known to have been believed, contains no referenceto it, the same relation of facts may just as well have existed ifwe date the record seven centuries earlier. We possess only asmall and broken portion of the original Zoroastrian Scriptures;as Roth says, "songs, invocations, prayers, snatches oftraditions, parts of a code, the shattered fragments of a oncestately building. " If we could recover the complete documents intheir earliest condition, it might appear that the now lost partscontained the doctrine of the general resurrection fully formed. We have many explicit references to many ancient Zoroastrian booksno longer in existence. For example, the Parsees have a very earlyaccount that the Avesta at first consisted of twenty one Nosks. Ofthese but one has been preserved complete, and small parts ofthree or four others. The rest are utterly wanting. The fifthNosk, whereof not any portion remains to us, was called the Do azah Hamast. It contained thirty two chapters, treating, among otherthings, "of the upper and nether world, of the resurrection, ofthe bridge Chinevad, and of the fate after death. " 27 If thisevidence be true, and we know of no reason for not crediting it, it is perfectly decisive. But, at all events, the absence from theextant parts of the Zend Avesta of the doctrine under examinationwould be no proof that that doctrine was not received when thosedocuments were penned. Secondly, we have the unequivocal assertion of Theopompus, in thefourth century before Christ, that the Magi taught the doctrine ofa general resurrection. 28 "At the appointed epoch Ahriman shall besubdued, " and "men shall live again and shall be immortal. " AndDiogenes adds, "Eudemus of Rhodes affirms the same things. "Aristotle calls Ormuzd Zeus, and Ahriman Haides, the Greek namesrespectively of the lord of the starry Olympians above, and themonarch of the Stygian ghosts beneath. Another form also in whichthe early Greek authors betray their acquaintance with the Persianconception of a conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman is in theidea expressed by Xenophon in his Cyropadia, in the dialoguebetween Araspes and Cyrus of two souls in man, one a brilliantefflux of good, the other a dusky emanation of evil, each bearingthe likeness of its parent. 29 Since we know from Theopompus thatcertain conceptions, illustrated in the Bundehesh and notcontained in the fragmentary Avestan books which have reached us, were actually received Zoroastrian 25 Studien uber das Zend Avesta, in Zeitschrift der DeutschenMorgenlandischen 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 ingiving credence to the doctrinal statements of that book asaffording, in spite of its lateness, a correct epitome of the oldPersian theology. Thirdly, we are still further warranted in admitting the antiquityof the Zoroastrian system as including the resurrection theory, when we consider the internal harmony and organic connection ofparts in it; how the doctrines all fit together, and imply eachother, and could scarcely have existed apart. Men were thecreatures of Ormuzd. They should have lived immortally under hisfavor and in his realm. But Ahriman, by treachery, obtainedpossession of a large portion of them. Now, when, at the end ofthe fourth period into which the world course was divided by theMagian theory, as Theopompus testifies, Ormuzd overcomes thisarch adversary, will he not rescue his own unfortunate creaturesfrom the realm of darkness in which they have been imprisoned?When a king storms an enemy's castle, he delivers from thedungeons his own soldiers who were taken captives in a formerdefeat. The expectation of a great prophet, Sosiosch, to come andvanquish Ahriman and his swarms, unquestionably appears in theAvesta itself. 30 With this notion, in inseparable union, theParsee tradition, running continuously back, as is claimed, to avery remote time, joins the doctrine of a general resurrection; adoctrine literally stated in the Vendidad, 31 and in many otherplaces in the Avesta, 32 where it has not yet been shown to be aninterpolation, but only supposed so by very questionableconstructive inferences. The consent of intrinsic adjustment andof historic evidence would, therefore, lead to the conclusion thatthis was an old Zoroastrian dogma. In disproof of this conclusionwe believe there is no direct positive evidence whatever, and noinferential argument cogent enough to produce conviction. There are sufficient reasons for the belief that the doctrine of aresurrection was quite early adopted from the Persians by theJews, not borrowed at a much later time from the Jews by theParsees. The conception of Ahriman, the evil serpent, bearingdeath, (die Schlange Angramainyus der voll Tod ist, ) isinterwrought from the first throughout the Zoroastrian scheme. Inthe Hebrew records, on the contrary, such an idea appears butincidentally, briefly, rarely, and only in the later books. Theaccount of the introduction of sin and death by the serpent in thegarden of Eden dates from a time subsequent to the commencement ofthe Captivity. Von Bohlen, in his Introduction to the Book ofGenesis, says the narrative was drawn from the Zend Avesta. Rosenmuller, in his commentary on the passage, says the narratorhad in view the Zoroastrian notions of the serpent Ahriman and hisdeeds. Dr. Martin Haug an acute and learned writer, whose opinionis entitled to great weight, as he is the freshest scholaracquainted with this whole field in the light of all that othershave done thinks it certain that Zoroaster lived in a remoteantiquity, from fifteen hundred to two thousand years beforeChrist. He says that Judaism after the exile and, through Judaism, Christianity afterwards received an important influence fromZoroastrianism, 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 Hebrewtheology had no demonology, no Satan, until after the residence atBabylon. This is admitted. Well, is not the resurrection a pendantto the doctrine of Satan? Without the idea of a Satan there wouldbe no idea of a retributive banishment of souls into hell, and ofcourse no occasion for a vindicating restoration of them thence totheir former or a superior state. On this point the theory of Rawlinson is very important. Heargues, with various proofs, that the Dualistic doctrine was aheresy which broke out very early among the primitive Aryans, whothen were the single ancestry of the subsequent Iranians andIndians. This heresy was forcibly suppressed. Its adherents, driven out of India, went to Persia, and, after severe conflictsand final admixture with the Magians, there established theirfaith. 34 The sole passage in the Old Testament teaching theresurrection is in the so called Book of Daniel, a book full ofChaldean and Persian allusions, written less than two centuriesbefore Christ, long after we know it was a received Zoroastriantenet, and long after the Hebrews had been exposed to the wholetide and atmosphere of the triumphant Persian power. Theunchangeable tenacity of the Medes and Persians is a proverb. Howoften the Hebrew people lapsed into idolatry, accepting Pagangods, doctrines, and ritual, is notorious. And, in particular, howcompletely subject they were to Persian influence appears clearlyin large parts of the Biblical history, especially in the Books ofEsther and Ezekiel. The origin of the term Beelzebub, too, in theNew Testament, is plain. To say that the Persians derived thedoctrine of the resurrection from the Jews seems to us asarbitrary as it would be to affirm that they also borrowed fromthem the custom, mentioned by Ezekiel, of weeping for Tammuz inthe gates of the temple. In view of the whole case as it stands, until further researcheseither strengthen it or put a different aspect upon it, we feelforced to think that the doctrine of a general resurrection was acomponent element in the ancient Avestan religion. A furtherquestion of considerable interest arises as to the nature of thisresurrection, whether it was conceived as physical or asspiritual. We have no data to furnish a determinate answer. Plutarch quotes from Theopompus the opinion of the Magi, thatwhen, at the subdual of Ahriman, men are restored to life, "theywill 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, sothat no food will be necessary to supply the wasting processeswhich no longer exist; and that the entire creation will be sofull of light that a shadow will be impossible. It might bethought that the familiar Persian conception of angels, both goodand evil, fervers and devs, and the reception of departed soulsinto their company, with Ormuzd in Garotman, or with Ahriman inDutsakh, would exclude the belief in a future bodily resurrection. But Christians and Mohammedans at this day believe in immaterialangels and devils, and in the immediate entrance of disembodiedsouls 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 finalreturn to the earth, and in a restoration to them of their formertabernacles of flesh. Discordant, incoherent, as the two beliefsmay be, if their coexistence is a fact with cultivated andreasonable people now, much more was it possible with anundisciplined and credulous populace three thousand years in thepast. Again, it has been argued that the indignity with which theancient Persians treated the dead body, refusing to bury it or toburn it, lest the earth or the fire should be polluted, isincompatible with the supposition that they expected aresurrection of the flesh. In the first place, it is difficult toreason safely to any dogmatic conclusions from the funeral customsof a people. These usages are so much a matter of capriciouspriestly ritual, ancestral tradition, unreasoning instinct, blindor morbid superstition, that any consistent doctrinal constructionis not fairly to be put upon them. Secondly, the Zoroastrians didnot express scorn or loathing for the corpse by their manner ofdisposing of it. The greatest pains were taken to keep it fromdisgusting decay, by placing it in "the driest, purest, openestplace, " upon a summit where fresh winds blew, and where certainbeasts and birds, accounted most sacred, might eat the corruptibleportion: then the clean bones were carefully buried. The dead bodyhad yielded to the hostile working of Ahriman, and become hispossession. The priests bore it out on a bed or a carpet, andexposed it to the light of the sun. The demon was thus exorcised;and the body became further purified in being eaten by the sacredanimals, and no putrescence was left to contaminate earth, water, or fire. 35 Furthermore, it is to be noticed that the modernParsees dispose of their dead in exactly the same manner depictedin the earliest accounts; yet they zealously hold to a literalresurrection of the body. If the giving of the flesh to the dogand the vulture in their case exists with this belief, it may havedone so with their ancestors before Nebuchadnezzar swept the Jewsto Babylon. Finally, it is quite reasonable to conclude that theold Persian doctrine of a resurrection did include the physicalbody, when we recollect that in the Zoroastrian scheme of thoughtthere is no hostility to matter or to earthly life, but all isregarded as pure and good except so far as the serpent Ahriman hasintroduced evil. The expulsion of this evil with his ultimateoverthrow, the restoration of all as it was at first, in purity, gladness, and eternal life, would be the obvious and consistentcarrying out of the system. Hatred of earthly life, contempt forthe flesh, the notion of an essential and irreconcilable warfareof soul against body, are Brahmanic and Manichaan, notZoroastrian. Still, the ground plan and style of thought may nothave been consistently adhered to. The expectation that the verysame body would be restored was known to the Jews a century or twobefore Christ. One of the martyrs whose history is told in theSecond Book of Maccabees, in the agonies of death plucked out hisown bowels, and called on the Lord to restore them to him again atthe resurrection. Considering the notion of a resurrection of thebody as a sensuous burden on the idea of a resurrection of thesoul, it may have been a later development originating with theJews. But it seems to us decidedly more probable that the Magiheld it as a part of their creed before they came in contact withthe children of Israel. Such an opinion may be modestly held untilfurther 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 thegood from the bad. "Father shall be divided from child, sisterfrom brother, friend from friend. The innocent one shall weep overthe guilty one, the guilty one shall weep for himself. Of twosisters one shall be pure, one corrupt: they shall be treatedaccording to their deeds. " 37 Those who have not, in theintermediate state, fully expiated their sins, will, in sight ofthe whole creation, be remanded to the pit of punishment. But theauthor of evil shall not exult over them forever. Their prisonhouse will soon be thrown open. The pangs of three terrible daysand nights, equal to the agonies of nine thousand years, willpurify all, even the worst of the demons. The anguished cry of thedamned, as they writhe in the lurid caldron of torture, rising toheaven, will find pity in the soul of Ormuzd, and he will releasethem from their sufferings. A blazing star, the comet Gurtzscher, will fall upon the earth. In the heat of its conflagration, greatand small mountains will melt and flow together as liquid metal. Through this glowing flood all human kind must pass. To therighteous it will prove as a pleasant bath, of the temperature ofmilk; but on the wicked the flame will inflict terrific pain. Ahriman will run up and down Chinevad in the perplexities ofanguish and despair. The earth wide stream of fire, flowing on, will cleanse every spot and every thing. Even the loathsome realmof darkness and torment shall be burnished and made a part of theall inclusive Paradise. Ahriman himself, reclaimed to virtue, replenished with primal light, abjuring the memories of hisenvious ways, and furling thenceforth the sable standard of hisrebellion, shall become a ministering spirit of the Most High, and, together with Ormuzd, chant the praises of Time withoutBounds. All darkness, falsehood, suffering, shall flee utterlyaway, and the whole universe be filled by the illumination of goodspirits blessed with fruitions of eternal delight. In regard tothe fate of man, Such are the parables Zartushi address'd To Iran's faith, in theancient Zend Avest. 36 Windischmann has now (1863) fully proved this, in hisZoroastrische Studien. Spiegel frankly avows it: Avesta, bandiii. , 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 haveasserted that the doctrine of a retributive immortality is clearlytaught throughout the Old Testament. Able writers, like BishopWarburton, have maintained, on the other extreme, that it saysnothing whatever about a future life, but rather implies the totaland eternal end of men in death. But the most judicious, trustworthy critics hold an intermediate position, and affirm thatthe Hebrew Scriptures show a general belief in the separateexistence of the spirit, not indeed as experiencing rewards andpunishments, but as surviving in the common silence and gloom ofthe under world, a desolate empire of darkness yawning beneath allgraves and peopled with dream like ghosts. 1 A number of important passages have been cited from differentparts of the Old Testament by the advocates of the view firstmentioned above. It will be well for us to notice these and theirmisuse before proceeding farther. The translation of Enoch has been regarded as a revelation of theimmortality of man. It is singular that Dr. Priestley shouldsuggest, as the probable fact, so sheer and baseless a hypothesisas he does in his notes upon the Book of Genesis. He says, "Enochwas probably a prophet authorized to announce the reality ofanother life after this; and he might be removed into it withoutdying, as an evidence of the truth of his doctrine. " The grossmaterialism of this supposition, and the failure of God's designwhich it implies, are a sufficient refutation of it. And, besidesthe utter unlikelihood of the thought, it is entirely destitute ofsupport in the premises. One of the most curious of the manystrange things to be found in Warburton's argument for the DivineLegation of Moses an argument marked, as is well known, byprofound erudition, and, in many respects, by consummate abilityis the use he makes of this account to prove that Moses believedthe doctrine of immortality, but purposely obscured the fact fromwhich it might be drawn by the people, in order that it might notinterfere with his doctrine of the temporal special providence ofJehovah over the Jewish nation. Such a course is inconsistent withsound morality, much more with the character of an inspiredprophet of God. The only history we have of Enoch is in the fifth chapter of theBook of Genesis. The substance of it is as follows: "And Enochwalked 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 centuriesbefore his time, began to give mystical interpretations of theScriptures, infers from this statement that Enoch was borne intoheaven without tasting death. But it is not certainly known whothe 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 Hebraorumet Gracoram Opinionibus. this. Replying to the supposititious argument furnished by thispassage, we say, Take the account as it reads, and it neitherasserts nor implies the idea commonly held concerning it. It saysnothing about translation or immortality; nor can any thing of thekind be legitimately deduced from it. Its plain meaning is no morenor less than this: Enoch lived three hundred and sixty fiveyears, fearing God and keeping his commandments, and then he died. Many of the Rabbins, fond as they are of finding in the Pentateuchthe doctrine of future blessedness for the good, interpret thisnarrative as only signifying an immature death; for Enoch, it willbe recollected, reached but about half the average age of theothers whose names are mentioned in the chapter. Had thisoccurrence been intended as the revelation of a truth, it wouldhave been fully and clearly stated; otherwise it could not answerany purpose. As Le Clerc observes, "If the writer believed soimportant a fact as that Enoch was immortal, it is wonderful thathe relates it as secretly and obscurely as if he wished to hideit. " But, finally, even admitting that the account is to beregarded as teaching literally that God took Enoch, it by no meansproves a revelation of the doctrine of general immortality. Itdoes not show that anybody else would ever be translated or wouldin any way enter upon a future state of existence. It is not putforth as a revelation; it says nothing whatever concerning arevelation. It seems to mean either that Enoch suddenly died, orthat he disappeared, nobody knew whither. But, if it really meansthat God took him into heaven, it is more natural to think thatthat was done as a special favor than as a sign of what awaitedothers. No general cause is stated, no consequence deduced, noprinciple laid down, no reflection added. How, then, can it besaid that the doctrine of a future life for man is revealed by itor implicated in it? The removal of Elijah in a chariot of fire, of which we read inthe second chapter of the Second Book of Kings, is usuallysupposed to have served as a miraculous proof of the fact that thefaithful servants of Jehovah were to be rewarded with a life inthe heavens. The author of this book is not known, and can hardlybe guessed at with any degree of plausibility. It wasunquestionably written, or rather compiled, a long time probablyseveral hundred years after the prophets whose wonderfuladventures it recounts had passed away. The internal evidence issufficient, both in quality and quantity, to demonstrate that thebook is for the most part a collection of traditions. Thischaracteristic applies with particular force to the ascension ofElijah. But grant the literal truth of the account: it will notprove the point in support of which it is advanced, because itdoes not purport to have been done as a revelation of the doctrinein question, nor did it in any way answer the purpose of such arevelation. So far from this, in fact, it does not seem even tohave suggested the bare idea of another state of existence in asingle instance. For when Elisha returned without Elijah, and toldthe sons of the prophets at Jericho that his master had gone up ina chariot of fire, which event they knew beforehand was going tohappen, they, instead of asking the particulars or exulting overthe revelation of a life in heaven, calmly said to him, "Behold, there be with thy servants fifty sons of strength: let them go, wepray thee, and seek for Elijah, lest peradventure a whirlwind, theblast of the Lord, hath caught him up and cast him upon one of themountains or into one of the valleys. And he said, Ye shall notsend. 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, itwould not so easily have passed from notice, but mightyinferences, never to be forgotten, would have been drawn from itat once. The story as it stands reminds one of the closing scenein the career of Romulus, speaking of whom the historians say, "Inthe thirty seventh year of his reign, while he was reviewing anarmy, a tempest arose, in the midst of which he was suddenlysnatched from the eyes of men. Hence some thought he was killed bythe senators, others, that he was borne aloft to the gods. "2 Ifthe ascension of Elijah to heaven in a chariot of fire did reallytake place, and if the books held by the Jews as inspired andsacred contained a history of it at the time of our Savior, it iscertainly singular that neither he nor any of the apostles alludeto it in connection with the subject of a future life. The miracles performed by Elijah and by Elisha in restoring thedead children to life related in the seventeenth chapter of theFirst Book of Kings and in the fourth chapter of the Second Bookare often cited in proof of the position that the doctrine ofimmortality is revealed in the Old Testament. The narration ofthese events is found in a record of unknown authorship. The modein which the miracles were effected, if they were miracles, theprophet measuring himself upon the child, his eyes upon his eyes, his mouth upon his mouth, his hands upon his hands, and in onecase the child sneezing seven times, looks dubious. The twoaccounts so closely resemble each other as to cast still greatersuspicion upon both. In addition to these considerations, and evenfully granting the reality of the miracles, they do not touch thereal controversy, namely, whether the Hebrew Scriptures containthe revealed doctrine of a conscious immortality or of a futureretribution. The prophet said, "O Lord my God, let this child'ssoul, I pray thee, come into his inward parts again. " "And theLord heard the voice of Elijah, and the soul of the child cameinto him again, and he revived. " Now, the most this can show isthat the child's soul was then existing in a separate state. Itdoes not prove that the soul was immortal, nor that it wasexperiencing retribution, nor even that it was conscious. And wedo not deny that the ancient Jews believed that the spirits of thedead retained a nerveless, shadowy being in the solemn vaults ofthe under world. The Hebrew word rendered soul in the text issusceptible of three meanings: first, the shade, which, upon thedissolution of the body, is gathered to its fathers in the greatsubterranean congregation; second, the breath of a person, used assynonymous with his life; third, a part of the vital breath ofGod, which the Hebrews regarded as the source of the life of allcreatures, and the withdrawing of which they supposed was thecause of death. It is clear that neither of these meanings canprove 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 propositionwhich we are combating at least, so considered by nearly all theRabbins, and by not a few modern critics is the account of thevivification of the dead recorded in the thirty seventh chapter ofthe Book of Ezekiel. The prophet "was carried in the spirit ofJehovah" that is, mentally, in a prophetic ecstasy into a valleyfull 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 stoodon their feet, an exceeding great army. " It should first beobserved that this account is not given as an actual occurrence, but, after the manner of Ezekiel, as a prophetic vision meant tosymbolize something. Now, of what was it intended as the symbol? adoctrine, or a coming event? a general truth to enlighten andguide uncertain men, or an approaching deliverance to console andencourage the desponding Jews? It is fair to let the prophet behis own interpreter, without aid from the glosses of prejudicedtheorizers. It must be borne in mind that at this time the prophetand his countrymen were bearing the grievous burden of bondage ina foreign nation. "And Jehovah said to me, Son of man, these bonesdenote the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, Our bones aredried, and our hope is lost, and we are cut off. " This plainlydenotes their present suffering in the Babylonish captivity, andtheir despair of being delivered from it. "Therefore prophesy, andsay to them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I will open yourgraves 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 youfrom your slavery and restore you to freedom in your own land. Thedry bones and their subsequent vivification, therefore, clearlysymbolize the misery of the Israelites and their speedyrestoration to happiness. Death is frequently used in a figurativesense to denote misery, and life to signify happiness. But thosewho maintain that the doctrine of the resurrection is taught as arevealed truth in the Hebrew Scriptures are not willing to letthis passage pass so easily. Mr. Barnes says, "The illustrationproves that the doctrine was one with which the people werefamiliar. " Jerome states the argument more fully, thus: "Asimilitude drawn from the resurrection, to foreshadow therestoration of the people of Israel, would never have beenemployed unless the resurrection itself were believed to be a factof future occurrence; for no one thinks of confirming what isuncertain by what has no existence. " It is not difficult to reply to these objections with convincingforce. First, the vision was not used as proof or confirmation, but as symbol and prophecy. Secondly, the use of any thing as anillustration does by no means imply that it is commonly believedas a fact. For instance, we are told in the ninth chapter of theBook of Judges that Jotham related an allegory to the people as anillustration of their conduct in choosing a king, saying, "Thetrees once on a time went forth to anoint a king over them; andthey said to the olive tree, Come thou and reign over us;" and soon. Does it follow that at that time it was a common belief thatthe trees actually went forth occasionally to choose them a king?Thirdly, if a given thing is generally believed as a fact, aperson who uses it expressly as a symbol, of course does notthereby give his sanction to it as a fact. And if a belief in theresurrection of the dead was generally entertained at the time ofthe prophet, its origin is not implied, and it does not followthat it was a doctrine of revelation, or even a true doctrine. Finally, there is one consideration which shows conclusively thatthis vision was never intended to typify the resurrection; namely, that it has nothing corresponding to the most essential part ofthat doctrine. When the bones have come together and are coveredwith flesh, God does not call up the departed spirits of thesebodies from Sheol, does not bring back the vanished lives toanimate their former tabernacles, now miraculously renewed. No: hebut breathes on them with his vivifying breath, and straightwaythey live and move. This is not a resurrection, but a newcreation. The common idea of a bodily restoration implies and, that any just retribution be compatible with it, it necessarilyimplies the vivification of the dead frame, not by theintroduction of new life, but by the reinstalment of the very samelife or spirit, the identical consciousness that before animatedit. Such is not represented as being the case in Ezekiel's visionof the valley of dry bones. That vision had no reference to thefuture state. In this connection, the revelation made by the angel in hisprophecy, 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 manyof the sleepers of the dust of the ground shall awake, those tolife everlasting, and these to shame, to contempt everlasting. Andthey that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for everand ever. " No one can deny that a judgment, in which reward andpunishment shall be distributed according to merit, is hereclearly foretold. The meaning of the text, taken with theconnection, is, that when the Messiah appears and establishes hiskingdom the righteous shall enjoy a bodily resurrection upon theearth to honor and happiness, but the wicked shall be left belowin darkness and death. 3 This seems to imply, fairly enough, thatuntil the advent of the Messiah none of the dead existedconsciously in a state of retribution. The doctrine of thepassage, as is well known, was held by some of the Jews at thebeginning of the Christian era, and, less distinctly, for abouttwo centuries previous. Before that time no traces of it can befound in their history. Now, had a doctrine of such intenseinterest and of such vast importance as this been a matter ofrevelation, it seems hardly possible that it should have beenconfined to one brief and solitary text, that it should haveflashed up for a single moment so brilliantly, and then vanishedfor three or four centuries in utter darkness. Furthermore, nearlyone half of the Book of Daniel is written in the Chaldee tongue, and the other half in the Hebrew, indicating that it had twoauthors, who wrote their respective portions at different periods. Its critical and minute details of events are history rather thanprophecy. The greater part of the book was undoubtedly written aslate as about a hundred and sixty years before Christ, long afterthe awful simplicity and solitude of the original Hebrew theologyhad been marred and corrupted by an intermixture of the doctrinesof those heathen nations with whom the Jews had been often broughtin contact. Such being the facts in the case, the text isevidently without force to prove a divine revelation of thedoctrine it teaches. In the twenty second chapter of the Gospel by Matthew, Jesus saysto the Sadducees, "But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, Iam 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 towhich reference is made is written in the third chapter of theBook of Exodus. In order to ascertain the force of the Savior'sargument, the extent of meaning it had in his mind, and the amountof knowledge attributed by it to Moses, it will be necessary todetermine 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 toaccomplish it. We shall find that the use he made of the text doesnot imply that Moses had the slightest idea of any sort of futurelife for man, much less of an immortal life of blessedness for thegood and of suffering for the bad. We should suppose, beforehand, that such would be the case, since upon examining the declarationcited, with its context, we find it to be simply a statement madeby Jehovah explaining who he was, that he was the ancient nationalguardian of the Jews, the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This does not seem to contain the most distant allusion to theimmortality of man, or to have suggested any such thought to themind of Moses. It should be distinctly understood from the outsetthat Jesus did not quote this passage from the Pentateuch asproving any thing of itself, or as enabling him to prove any thingby it directly, but as being of acknowledged authority to theSadducees themselves, to form the basis of a process of reasoning. The purpose he had in view, plainly, was to convince the Sadduceeseither of the possibility or of the actuality of the resurrectionof the dead: its possibility, if we assume that by resurrection hemeant the Jewish doctrine of a material restoration, the reunionof soul and body; its actuality, if we suppose he meant theconscious immortality of the soul separate from the body. If theresurrection was physical, Christ demonstrates to the Sadduceesits possibility, by refuting the false notion upon which theybased their denial of it. They said, The resurrection of the bodyis 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 fromthe body, and, consequently, may be reunited to it. You admit thatJehovah 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 thedead, for all live unto him. You must confess this. The soul, then, survives the body, and a resurrection is possible. It willbe seen that this implies nothing concerning the nature orduration of the separate existence, but merely the fact of it. But, if Christ meant by the resurrection of the dead as we thinkhe did the introduction of the disembodied and conscious soul intoa state of eternal blessedness, the Sadducees denied its realityby maintaining that no such thing as a soul existed after bodilydissolution. He then proved to them its reality in the followingmanner. You believe for Moses, to whose authority you implicitlybow, relates it that God said, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, " and this, long after they died. But evidently hecannot be said to be the God of that which does not exist:therefore their souls must have been still alive. And if Jehovahwas emphatically their God, their friend, of course he will showthem his loving kindness. They are, then, in a conscious state ofblessedness. The Savior does not imply that God said so much insubstance, nor that Moses intended to teach, or even knew, anything like it, but that, by adding to the passage cited a premiseof his own, which his hearers granted to be true, he could deduceso much from it by a train of new and unanswerable reasoning. Hisopponents 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 humanimmortality, namely, that God's love for man is a pledge andwarrant of his eternal blessedness a proof whose originality andsignificance set it far beyond all parallel is due to the dimgropings of no Hebrew prophet, but to the inspired insight of thegreat Founder of Christianity. The various passages yet unnoticed which purport to have beenuttered by Jehovah or at his command, and which are urged to showthat the reality of a retributive life after death is a revealeddoctrine of the Old Testament, will be found, upon criticalexamination, either to owe their entire relevant force tomistranslation, or to be fairly refuted by the reasonings alreadyadvanced. Professor Stuart admits that he finds only oneconsideration to show that Moses had any idea of a futureretribution; and that is, that the Egyptians expressly believedit; and he is not able to comprehend how Moses, who dwelt so longamong them, should be ignorant of it. 4 The reasoning is obviouslyinconsequential. It is not certain that the Egyptians held thisdoctrine in the time of Moses: it may have prevailed among thembefore or after, and not during, that period. If they believed itat that time, it may have been an esoteric doctrine, with which hedid not become acquainted. If they believed it, and he knew it, hemight have classed it with other heathen doctrines, and supposedit false. And, even if he himself believed it, he might possiblynot 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 bearingupon the point in hand, because they were acquired at a laterperiod than that of the writing of the records we are nowconsidering. They were formed, and gradually grew in consistencyand favor, either by the natural progress of thought among theJews themselves, or, more probably, by a blending of theintimations of the Hebrew Scriptures with Gentile speculations, the doctrines of the Egyptians, Hindus, and Persians. We leavethis portion of the subject, then, with the following proposition. In the canonic books of the Old Dispensation there is not a singlegenuine text, claiming to come from God, which teaches explicitlyany doctrine whatever of a life beyond the grave. That doctrine asit existed among the Jews was no part of their pure religion, butwas a part of their philosophy. It did not, as they held it, implyany thing like our present idea of the immortality of the soulreaping in the spiritual world what it has sowed in the physical. It simply declared the existence of human ghosts amidst unbrokengloom and stillness in the cavernous depths of the earth, withoutreward, without punishment, without employment, scarcelywith consciousness, as will immediately appear. We proceed to the second general division of the subject. Whatdoes the Old Testament, apart from the revelation claimed to becontained in it, and regarding only those portions of it which areconfessedly a collection of the poetry, history, and philosophy ofthe Hebrews, intimate concerning a future state of existence?Examining these writings with an unbiased mind, we discover thatin different portions of them there are large variations andopposition of opinion. In some books we trace an undoubting beliefin certain rude notions of the future condition of souls; in otherbooks we encounter unqualified denials of every such thought. "Manlieth down and riseth not, " sighs the despairing Job. "The deadcannot praise God, neither any that go down into darkness, " wailsthe repining Psalmist. "All go to one place, " 4 Exegetical Essays, (Andover, 1830, ) p. 108. and "the dead know not any thing, " asserts the disbelievingPreacher. These inconsistencies we shall not stop to point out andcomment upon. They are immaterial to our present purpose, which isto bring together, in their general agreement, the sum andsubstance of the Hebrew ideas on this subject. The separate existence of the soul is necessarily implied by thedistinction the Hebrews made between the grave, or sepulchre, andthe under world, or abode of shades. The Hebrew words bor andkeber mean simply the narrow place in which the dead body isburied; while Sheol represents an immense cavern in the interiorof the earth where the ghosts of the deceased are assembled. Whenthe patriarch was told that his son Joseph was slain by wildbeasts, he cried aloud, in bitter sorrow, "I will go down to Sheolunto my son, mourning. " He did not expect to meet Joseph in the grave; for he supposed hisbody torn in pieces and scattered in the wilderness, not laid inthe family tomb. The dead are said to be "gathered to theirpeople, " or to "sleep with their fathers, " and this whether theyare interred in the same place or in a remote region. It iswritten, "Abraham gave up the ghost, and was gathered unto hispeople, " notwithstanding his body was laid in a cave in the fieldof Machpelah, close by Hebron, while his people were buried inChaldea and Mesopotamia. "Isaac gave up the ghost and died, andwas gathered unto his people;" and then we read, as if it weredone afterwards, "His sons, Jacob and Esau, buried him. " Theseinstances might be multiplied. They prove that "to be gatheredunto one's fathers" means to descend into Sheol and join there thehosts of the departed. A belief in the separate existence of thesoul is also involved in the belief in necromancy, or divination, the prevalence of which is shown by the stern laws against thosewho engaged in its unhallowed rites, and by the history of thewitch of Endor. She, it is said, by magical spells evoked theshade of old Samuel from below. It must have been the spirit ofthe prophet that was supposed to rise; for his body was buried atRamah, more than sixty miles from Endor. The faith of the Hebrewsin the separate existence of the soul is shown, furthermore, bythe fact that the language they employed expresses, in everyinstance, the distinction of body and spirit. They had particularwords appropriated to each. "As thy soul liveth, " is a Hebrewoath. "With my spirit within me will I seek thee early. " "I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body:" thefigure here represents the soul in the body as a sword in asheath. "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. "Thyvoice shall be as that of a spirit out of the ground:" the word"Lhere used signifies the shade evoked by a necromancer from theregion of death, which was imagined to speak in a feeble whisper. The term rephaim is used to denote the manes of the departed. Theetymology 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 underworld; I am as a man that hath no strength. " This faint, powerlesscondition accords with the idea that they were destitute of flesh, blood, and animal life, mere umbroe. These ghosts are described asbeing nearly as destitute of sensation as they are of strength. They are called "the inhabitants of the land of stillness. " Theyexist in an inactive, partially torpid state, with a dreamyconsciousness of past and present, neither suffering nor enjoying, and seldom moving. Herder says of the Hebrews, "The sad andmournful images of their ghostly realm disturbed them, and weretoo much for their self possession. " Respecting these images, headds, "Their voluntary force and energy were destroyed. They werefeeble as a shade, without distinction of members, as a nervelessbreath. They wandered and flitted in the dark nether world. " This"wandering and flitting, " however, is rather the spirit ofHerder's poetry than of that of the Hebrews; for the whole tenorand drift of the representations in the Old Testament show thatthe state of disembodied souls is deep quietude. Freed frombondage, pain, toil, and care, they repose in silence. The ghostsummoned from beneath by the witch of Endor said, "Why hast thoudisquieted me to bring me up?" It was, indeed, in a dismal abodethat they took their long quiet; but then it was in a place "wherethe wicked ceased from troubling and the weary were at rest. " Those passages which attribute active employments to the dwellersin the under world are specimens of poetic license, as the contextalways shows. When Job says, "Before Jehovah the shades beneathtremble, " he likewise declares, "The pillars of heaven tremble andare confounded at his rebuke. " When Isaiah breaks forth in thatstirring lyric to the King of Babylon, "The under world is in commotion on account of thee, To meet theeat thy coming; It stirreth up before thee the shades, all themighty of the earth; It arouseth from their thrones all the kingsof the nations; They all accost thee, and say, Art thou too becomeweak as we?" he also exclaims, in the same connection, "Even the cypress trees exult over thee, And the cedars ofLebanon, saying, Since thou art fallen, No man cometh up to cut usdown. " The activity thus vividly described is evidently a mere figure ofspeech: so is it in the other instances which picture the rephaimas employed and in motion. "Why, " complainingly sighed theafflicted patriarch, "why died I not at my birth? For now should Ilie down and be quiet; I should slumber; I should then be atrest. " And the wise man says, in his preaching, "There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol. " What has alreadybeen said is sufficient to establish the fact that the Hebrews hadan idea that the souls of men left their bodies at death andexisted as dim shadows, in a state of undisturbed repose, in thebowels of the earth. Sheol is directly derived from a Hebrew word, signifying, first, to dig or excavate. It means, therefore, a cavity, or emptysubterranean 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 rapaciousOrcus lays claim unsparingly to all; or, as others have fancifullyconstrued it, the object of universal inquiry, the unknown mansionconcerning which all are anxiously inquisitive. The place isconceived on an immense scale, shrouded in accompaniments ofgloomy grandeur and peculiar awe: an enormous cavern in the earth, filled with night; a stupendous hollow kingdom, to which arepoetically attributed valleys and gates, and in which arecongregated the slumberous and shadowy hosts of the rephaim, neverable to go out of it again forever. Its awful stillness isunbroken by noise. Its thick darkness is uncheered by light. Itstretches far down under the ground. It is wonderfully deep. Inlanguage that reminds one of Milton's description of hell, wherewas "No light, but rather darkness visible, " Job describes it as "the land of darkness, like the blackness ofdeath shade, where is no order, and where the light is asdarkness. " The following passages, selected almost at random, willshow the ideas entertained of the place, and confirm andillustrate the foregoing statements. "But he considers not that inthe valleys of Sheol are her guests. " "Now shall I go down intothe gates of Sheol. " "The ground slave asunder, and the earthopened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and alltheir men, and all their goods: they and all that appertained tothem went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed upon them. "Its depth is contrasted with the height of the sky. "Though theydig into Sheol, thence shall mine hand take them; though theyclimb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down. " It is thedestination of all; for, though the Hebrews believed in a world ofglory above the solid ceiling of the dome of day, where Jehovahand the angels dwelt, there was no promise, hope, or hint that anyman could ever go there. The dirge like burden of their poetry wasliterally these words: "What man is he that liveth and shall notsee death? Shall he deliver his spirit from the hand of Sheol?"The old Hebrew graves were crypts, wide, deep holes, like thehabitations of the troglodytes. In these subterranean caves theylaid the dead down; and so the Grave became the mother of Sheol, arendezvous of the fathers, a realm of the dead, full of eternalghost life. This under world is dreary and altogether undesirable, save as anescape from extreme anguish. But it is not a place of retribution. Jahn says, "That, in the belief of the ancient Hebrews, there weredifferent situations in Sheol for the good and the bad, cannot beproved. "5 The sudden termination of the present life is thejudgment the Old Testament threatens upon sinners; its happyprolongation is the reward it promises to the righteous. Textsthat prove this might be quoted in numbers from almost every page. "The wicked shall be turned into Sheol, and all the nations thatforget God, " not to be punished there, but as a punishment. It istrue, the good and the bad alike pass into that gloomy land; butthe 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 thelatter are suddenly hurried there by an untimely and miserablefate. The man that loves the Lord shall have length of days; theunjust, 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 theideas the Hebrews had of the soul and of its fate, by marking thedifferent 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 inwhich the word occurs will set this in a full light. "The Lord Godformed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into hisnostrils the spirit of existence, and man became a consciousbeing. " "It is the divine spirit of man, even the inspiration ofthe Almighty, that giveth him understanding. " "The Spirit of Godmade me, and his breath gave me life. " Ruah signifies, originally, a breathing or blowing. Two othermeanings are directly connected with this. First, the vitalspirit, the principle of life as manifested in the breath of themouth and nostrils. "And they went in unto Noah into the ark, twoand two of all flesh in whose nostrils was the breath of life. "Second, the wind, the motions of the air, which the Hebrewssupposed caused by the breath of God. "By the blast of thine angerthe waters were gathered on an heap. " "The channels of waters wereseen, and the foundations of the world were discovered, O Lord, atthe blast of the breath of thy nostrils. " So they regarded thethunder as his voice. "The voice of Jehovah cutteth out the fierylightnings, " and "shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh. " This word isalso frequently placed for the rational spirit of man, the seat ofintellect and feeling. It is likewise sometimes representative ofthe character and disposition of men, whether good or bad. Hoseaspeaks of "a spirit of vile lust. " In the Second Book ofChronicles we read, "There came out a spirit, and stood beforeJehovah, and said, I will entice King Ahab to his destruction. Iwill go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all hisprophets. " Belshazzar says to Daniel, "I know that the spirit ofthe holy gods is in thee. " Finally, it is applied to Jehovah, signifying the divine spirit, or power, by which all animatecreatures live, the universe is filled with motion, allextraordinary gifts of skill, genius, strength, or virtue arebestowed, and men incited to forsake evil and walk in the paths oftruth and piety. "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created, and thou renewest the face of the earth; thou takest away theirbreath, they die and return to their dust. " "Jehovah will be aspirit of justice in them that sit to administer judgment. " Itseems to be implied that the life of man, having emanated from thespirit, is to be again absorbed in it, when it is said, "Thenshall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shallreturn unto God who gave it. " Nephesh is but partially a synonym for the word whosesignifications we have just considered. The different senses itbears are strangely interchanged and confounded in King James'sversion. Its first meaning is breath, the breathing of a livingbeing. Next it means the vital spirit, the indwelling life of thebody. "If any mischief follow, thou shalt take life for life. " Themost adequate rendering of it would be, in a great majority ofinstances, by the term life. "In jeopardy of his life [not soul]hath Adonijah spoken this. " It sometimes represents theintelligent soul or mind, the subject of knowledge and desire. "Mysoul knoweth right well. ". Also the heart, is often used morefrequently perhaps than any other term as meaning the vitalprinciple, and the seat of consciousness, intellect, will, andaffection. Jehovah said to Solomon, in answer to his prayer, "Lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart. " The laterJews speculated much, with many cabalistic refinements, on thesedifferent words. They said many persons were supplied with aNephesh without a Ruah, much more without a Neshamah. Theydeclared that the Nephesh (Psyche) was the soul of the body, theRuah (Pneuma) the soul of the Nephesh, and the Neshamah (Nous) thesoul of the Ruah. Some of the Rabbins assert that the destinationof the Nephesh, when the body dies, is Sheol; of the Ruah, theair; and of the Neshamah, heaven. 6 The Hebrews used all those words in speaking of brutes, to denotetheir sensitive existence, that they did in reference to men. Theyheld that life was in every instance an emission, or breath, fromthe Spirit of God. But they do not intimate of brutes, as they doof men, that they have surviving shades. The author of the Book ofEcclesiastes, however, bluntly declares that "all have one breath, and all go to one place, so that a man hath no pre eminence abovea beast. " As far as the words used to express existence, soul, ormind, legitimate any inference, it would seem to be, either thatthe essential life is poured out at death as so much air, or elsethat it is received again by God, in both cases implyingnaturally, though not of philosophic necessity, the close ofconscious, individual existence. But the examination we have madeof their real opinions shows that, however obviously thisconclusion might flow from their pneumatology, it was not theexpectation they cherished. They believed there was a dismalempire 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 landItself is but a shadow, and the raceThat 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, knewnothing of a blessed immortality, is shown by two conclusivearguments, in addition to the positive demonstration afforded bythe views which, as we have seen, they did actually hold in regardto the future lot of man. First, they were puzzled, they weretroubled and distressed, by the moral phenomena of the presentlife, the misfortunes of the righteous, the prosperity of thewicked. Read the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job, some ofthe Psalms. Had they been acquainted with future reward andpunishment, they could easily have solved these problems to theirsatisfaction. Secondly, they regarded life as the one blessing, death as the one evil. Something of sadness, we may suppose, wasin the wise man's tones when he said, "A living dog is better thana dead lion. " Obey Jehovah's laws, that thy days may be long inthe land he giveth thee; the wicked shall not live out half hisdays: such is the burden of the Old Testament. It was reserved fora later age to see life and immortality brought to light, and forthe disciples of a clearer faith to feel that death is gain. There are many passages in the Hebrew Scriptures generallysupposed and really appearing, upon a slight examination, notafterwards to teach doctrines different from those here stated. Wewill 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 forevermore. " This text, properly translated and explained, means, Thou wilt not leave me to misfortune and untimely death: . . . Inthy royal favor is prosperity and length of days. "I know that myRedeemer liveth:. . . In my flesh I shall see God. " The genuinemeaning of this triumphant exclamation of faith is, I know thatGod is the Vindicator of the upright, and that he will yet justifyme before I die. A particular examination of the remainingpassages of this character with which erroneous conceptions aregenerally connected would show, first, that in nearly every casethese passages are not accurately translated; secondly, that theymay be satisfactorily interpreted as referring merely to thislife, and cannot by a sound exegesis be explained otherwise;thirdly, that the meaning usually ascribed to them is inconsistentwith the whole general tenor, and with numberless positive andexplicit statements, of the books in which they are found;fourthly, that if there are, as there dubiously seem to be in someof the Psalms, texts implying the ascent of souls after death to aheavenly life, for example, "Thou shalt guide me with thycountenance, and afterward receive me to glory, " they were theproduct of a late period, and reflect a faith not native to theHebrews, but first known to them after their intercourse with thePersians. Christians reject the allegorizing of the Jews, and yettraditionally accept, on their authority, doctrines which can bededuced from their Scriptures in no other way than by the absurdhypothesis of a double or mystic sense. For example, scores ofChristian authors have taught the dogma of a general resurrectionof the dead, deducing it from such passages as God's sentence uponAdam: "From the dust wast thou taken, and unto the dust shalt thoureturn;" as Joel's patriotic picture of the Jews victorious inbattle, and of the vanquished heathen gathered in the valley ofJehoshaphat to witness their installation as rulers of the earth;and as the declaration of the God of battles: "I am he that killsand that makes alive, that wounds and that heals. " And theymaintain that the doctrine of immortality is inculcated in suchtexts as these: when Moses asks to see God, and the reply is, "Noman can see me and live;" when Bathsheba bows and says, "Let mylord King David live forever;" and when the sacred poet praisesGod, saying, "Thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyesfrom tears, and my feet from falling. " Such interpretations ofScripture are lamentable in the extreme; their context shows themto be absurd. The meaning is forced into the words, not derivedfrom them. Such as we have now seen were the ancient Hebrew ideas of thefuture state. To those who received them the life to come wascheerless, offering no attraction save that of peace to the wearysufferer. On the other hand, it had no terror save the naturalrevulsion of the human heart from everlasting darkness, silence, and dreams. In view of deliverance from so dreary a fate, bytranslation through Jesus Christ to the splendors of the worldabove the firmament, there are many exultations in the Epistles ofPaul, and in other portions of the New Testament. The Hebrew views of the soul and its destiny, as discerned throughthe intimations of their Scriptures are very nearly what, from afair consideration of the case, we should suppose they would be, agreeing in the main with the natural speculations of other earlynations upon the same subject. These opinions underwent but littlealteration until a century or a century and a half before the dawnof the Christian era. This is shown by the phraseology of the Septuagint version ofthe Pentateuch, and by the allusions in the so calledApocryphal books. In these, so far as there are any relevantstatements or implications, they are of the same character asthose which we have explained from the more ancient writings. Thisis true, with the notable exceptions of the Wisdom of Solomon andthe Second Maccabees, neither of which documents can be datedearlier than a hundred and twenty years before Christ. The formercontains the doctrine of transmigration. The author says, "Beingwise, I came into a body undefiled. "7 But, with the exception ofthis and one other passage, there is little or nothing in the bookwhich is definite on the subject of a future life. It is difficultto tell what the author's real faith was: his words seem ratherrhetorical than dogmatic. He says, "To be allied unto wisdom isimmortality;" but other expressions would appear to show that byimmortality he means merely a deathless posthumous fame, "leavingan eternal memorial of himself to all who shall come after him. "Again he declares, "The spirit when it is gone forth returnethnot; neither the soul received up cometh again. " And here we find, too, the famous text, "God created man to be immortal, and madehim to be an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless, through envyof the devil came death into the world, and they that hold of hisside do find it. "8 Upon the whole, it is pretty clear that thewriter believed in a future life; but the details are toopartially 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 itsevident 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 andwoe, because it is contrasted with the plainly literal phrases, "created to be immortal, " "an image of God's eternity. " It cannotsignify simply physical dissolution, because this is found as wellby God's servants as by the devil's. Its genuine meaning is, mostprobably, a descent into the black kingdom of sadness and silenceunder the earth, while the souls of the good were "received up. " The Second Book of Maccabees with emphasis repeatedly assertsfuture retribution and a bodily resurrection. In the seventhchapter a full account is given of seven brothers and their motherwho suffered martyrdom, firmly sustained by faith in a gloriousreward for their heroic fidelity, to be reaped at theresurrection. One of them says to the tyrant by whose order he wastortured, "As for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life. "Nicanor, bleeding from many horrible wounds, "plucked out hisbowels and cast them upon the throng, and, calling upon the Lordof life and spirit to restore him those again, [at the day ofresurrection, ] he thus died. "9 Other passages in this book to thesame effect it is needless to quote. The details lying latent inthose we have quoted will soon be illuminated and filled out whenwe 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 ideasconcerning immortality, resurrection, judgment, and retribution, contained in the Old Testament Apocrypha, and those in the NewTestament, by Frisch, inserted in Eichhorn's Allgemeine Bibliothekder Biblischen Literatur, band iv. Stuck iv. There lived in Alexandria a very learned Jew named Philo, theauthor of voluminous writings, a zealous Israelite, but deeplyimbued both with the doctrines and the spirit of Plato. He wasborn about twenty years before Christ, and survived him aboutthirty years. The weight of his character, the force of histalents, the fascinating adaptation of his peculiar philosophicalspeculations and of his bold and subtle allegorical expositions ofScripture to the mind of his age and of the succeeding centuries, together with the eminent literary position and renown earlysecured for him by a concurrence of causes, have combined to makehim exert according to the expressed convictions of the bestjudges, such as Lucke and Norton a greater influence on thehistory of Christian opinions than any single man, with theexception of the Apostle Paul, since the days of Christ. It isimportant, and will be interesting, to see some explanation of hisviews on the subject of a future life. A synopsis of them mustsuffice. Philo was a Platonic Alexandrian Jew, not a ZoroastrianPalestinian Pharisee. It was a current saying among the ChristianFathers, "Vel Plato Philonizat, vel Philo Platonizat. " He haslittle to say of the Messiah, nothing to say of the Messianiceschatology. We speak of him in this connection because he was aJew, flourishing at the commencement of the Christian epoch, andcontributing much, by his cabalistic interpretations, to leadChristians to imagine that the Old Testament contained thedoctrine of a spiritual immortality connected with a system ofrewards and punishments. Three principal points include the substance of Philo's faith onthe subject in hand. He rejected the notion of a resurrection ofthe body and held to the natural immortality of the soul. Heentertained the most profound and spiritual conceptions of theintrinsically deadly nature and wretched fruits of all sin, and ofthe self contained welfare and self rewarding results of everyelement of virtue, in themselves, independent of time and placeand regardless of external bestowments of woe or joy. He alsobelieved at the same time in contrasted localities above andbelow, appointed as the residences of the disembodied souls ofgood and of wicked men. We will quote miscellaneously variouspassages from him in proof and illustration of these statements: "Man's bodily form is made from the ground, the soul from nocreated thing, but from the Father of all; so that, although manwas mortal as to his body, he was immortal as to his mind. "11"Complete virtue is the tree of immortal life. "12 "Vices andcrimes, rushing in through the gate of sensual pleasure, changed ahappy and immortal life for a wretched and mortal one. "13Referring to the allegory of the garden of Eden, he says, "Thedeath threatened for eating the fruit was not natural, theseparation of soul and body, but penal, the sinking of the soul inthe body. "14 "Death is twofold, one of man, one of the soul. Thedeath of man is the separation of the soul from the body; thedeath 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 ispreferable to life with the impious. For those so dying, deathlesslife delivers; but those so living, eternal death seizes. "16 Hewrites of three kinds of life, "one of which neither ascends norcares to ascend, groping in the secret recesses of Hades andrejoicing in the most lifeless life. "17 Commenting on the promiseof the Lord to Abram, that he should be buried in a good old age, Philo observes that "A polished, purified soul does not die, butemigrates: it is of an inextinguishable and deathless race, andgoes to heaven, escaping the dissolution and corruption whichdeath 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 forthe good, the confines of the earth for the bad. "20 He thinks theladder 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 lightwings seeking the lofty ether, pass eternity in sublimecontemplations. "21 "The wise inherit the Olympic and heavenlyregion to dwell in, always studying to go above; the bad, theinnermost parts of Hades, always laboring to die. "22 He literallyaccredits the account, in the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, of theswallowing of Korah and his company, saying, "The earth opened andtook them alive into Hades. "23 "Ignorant men regard death as theend of punishments, whereas in the Divine judgment it is scarcelythe beginning of them. "24 He describes the meritorious man as"fleeing to God and receiving the most intimate honor of a firmplace in heaven; but the reprobate man is dragged below, down tothe very lowest place, to Tartarus itself and profounddarkness. "25 "He who is not firmly held by evil may by repentancereturn to virtue, as to the native land from which he haswandered. But he who suffers from incurable vice must endure itsdire penalties, banished into the place of the impious until thewhole of eternity. "26 Such, then, was the substance of Philo's opinions on the themebefore us, as indeed many more passages, which we have omitted assuperfluous, might be cited from him to show. Man was madeoriginally a mortal body and an immortal soul. He should have beenhappy and pure while in the body, and on leaving it have soared upto 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 theangels are the army of God, bodiless and happy souls. "27 But, through the power of evil, all who yield to sin and vice lose thatestate of bright and blessed immortality, and become discordant, wretched, despicable, and, after the dissolution of the body, arethrust down to gloom and manifold just retribution in Hades. Hebelieved in the pre existence, and in a limited transmigration, ofsouls. Here he leaves the subject, saying nothing of aresurrection or final restoration, and not speculating as to anyother 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 intheir theories of the future fate of man. First, there were theskeptical, materialistic Sadducees, wealthy, proud, few. Theyopenly denied the existence of any disembodied souls, avowing thatmen utterly perished in the grave. "The cloud faileth and passethaway: so he that goeth down to the grave doth not return. "29 Weread in the Acts of the Apostles, "The Sadducees say there is noresurrection, neither angel nor spirit. " At the same time theyaccepted the Pentateuch, only rejecting or explaining away thoseportions of it which relate to the separate existence of souls andto their subterranean abode. They strove to confound theiropponents, the advocates of a future life, by such perplexingquestions as the one they addressed to Jesus, asking, in the caseof a woman who had had seven successive husbands, which one ofthem should be her husband in the resurrection. All that we cangather concerning the Sadducees from the New Testament is amplyconfirmed by Josephus, who explicitly declares, "Their doctrine isthat souls die with the bodies. " The second sect was the ascetical and philosophical Essenes, ofwhom the various information given by Philo in his celebratedpaper on the Therapeuta agrees with the account in Josephus andwith the scattered gleams in other sources. The doctrine of theEssenes on the subject of our present inquiry was much like thatof Philo himself; and in some particulars it remarkably resemblesthat of many Christians. They rejected the notion of theresurrection of the body, and maintained the inherent immortalityof the soul. They said that "the souls of men, coming out of themost subtle and pure air, are bound up in their bodies as in somany prisons; but, being freed at death, they do rejoice, and areborne aloft where a state of happy life forever is decreed for thevirtuous; but the vicious are assigned to eternal punishment in adark, cold place. " 30 Such sentiments appear to have inspired theheroic Eleazar, whose speech to his followers is reported byJosephus, when they were besieged at Masada, urging them to rushon 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 stuckii. , an article by Dr. Schreiter, entitled Philo's Ideen uberUnsterblichkeit, 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 atthat time, and ever since, were the eclectic, traditional, formalist Pharisees: eclectic, inasmuch as their faith was formedby a partial combination of various systems; traditional, sincethey allowed a more imperative sway to the authority of theFathers, and to oral legends and precepts, than to the plainletter of Scripture; formalist, for they neglected the weightierspiritual matters of the law in a scrupulous tithing of mint, cumin, and anise seed, a pretentious wearing of broadphylacteries, an uttering of long prayers in the streets, and thevarious other hypocritical priestly paraphernalia of a severemechanical ritual. From Josephus we learn that the Pharisees believed that the soulsof the faithful that is, of all who punctiliously observed the lawof Moses and the traditions of the elders would live again bytransmigration into new bodies; but that the souls of all others, on leaving their bodies, were doomed to a place of confinementbeneath, where they must abide forever. These are his words: "ThePharisees believe that souls have an immortal strength in them, and that in the under world they will experience rewards orpunishments according as they have lived well or ill in this life. The righteous shall have power to live again, but sinners shall bedetained in an everlasting prison. "32 Again, he writes, "ThePharisees say that all souls are incorruptible, but that only thesouls of good men are removed into other bodies. "33 The fragmententitled "Concerning Hades, " formerly attributed to Josephus, isnow acknowledged on all sides to be a gross forgery. The Greekculture and philosophical tincture with which he was imbued ledhim to reject the doctrine of a bodily resurrection; and this isprobably the reason why he makes no allusion to that doctrine inhis account of the Pharisees. That such a doctrine was held amongthem is plain from passages in the New Testament, passages whichalso 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 privilegeor penalty of transmigration, and of the resurrection, to therighteous. They once asked Jesus, "Who did sin, this man or hisparents, that he was born blind?" Plainly, he could not have beenborn blind for his own sins unless he had known a previous life. Paul, too, says of them, in his speech at Casarea, "Theythemselves also allow that there shall be a resurrection of thedead, both of the just and of the unjust. " This, however, is veryprobably an exception to their prevailing belief. Their religiousintolerance, theocratic pride, hereditary national vanity, andsectarian formalism, often led them to despise and overlook theGentile world, haughtily restricting the boon of a renewed life tothe legal children of Abraham. But the grand source now open to us of knowledge concerning theprevailing opinions of the Jews on our present subject at andsubsequent to the time of Christ is the Talmud. This is acollection of the traditions of the oral law, (Mischna, ) with thecopious precepts and comments (Gemara) of the most learned andauthoritative Rabbins. It is a wonderful monument of myths andfancies, 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 thenational peculiarities. The Jews reverence it extravagantly, saying, "The Bible is salt, the Mischna pepper, the Gemara balmyspice. " 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 havejoined with various other causes to withhold from it far too muchof the attention of Christian critics. Saving by old Lightfoot andPocock, scarcely a contribution has ever been offered us inEnglish from this important field. The Germans have done farbetter; and numerous huge volumes, the costly fruits of theirtoils, are standing on neglected shelves. The eschatological viewsderived from this source are authentically Jewish, however closelythey may resemble some portion of the popular Christianconceptions upon the same subject. The correspondences betweensome Jewish and some Christian theological dogmas betoken theinflux of an adulterated Judaism into a nascent Christianity, notthe reflex of a pure Christianity upon a receptive Judaism. It isimportant to show this; and it appears from severalconsiderations. In the first place, it is demonstrable, it isunquestioned, that at least the germs and outlines of the dogmasreferred to were in actual existence among the Pharisees beforethe conflict between Christianity and Judaism arose. Secondly, inthe Rabbinical writings these dogmas are most fundamental, vital, and pervading, in relation to the whole system; but in theChristian they seem subordinate and incidental, have everyappearance of being ingrafts, not outgrowths. Thirdly, in theapostolic age Judaism was a consolidated, petrified system, defended from outward influence on all sides by an invulnerablebigotry, a haughty exclusiveness; while Christianity was in ayoung 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 permitthem to adopt peculiarities of belief from the latter; but theChristians were undeniably Jews in almost every thing except inasserting the Messiahship of Jesus: they claimed to be the genuineJews, children of the law and realizers of the promise. The Jewishdogmas, therefore, descended to them as a natural linealinheritance. Finally, in the Acts of the Apostles, the letters ofPaul, and the progress of the Ebionites, (which sect includednearly all the Christians of the first century, ) we can trace stepby step the actual workings, in reliable history, of the processthat we affirm, namely, the assimilation of Jewish elements intothe popular Christianity. CHAPTER IX. RABBINICAL DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. THE starting point in the Talmud on this subject is with theeffects 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 representationthat misery and death were an after doom brought into the world bysin, the Rabbinical authorities strikingly agree. The testimony isirresistible. We need not quote confirmations of this statement, as every scholar in this department will accept it at once. But asto what is meant precisely by the term "death, " as used in such aconnection, there is no little obscurity and diversity of opinion. In all probability, some of the Pharisaical fathers perhaps themajority of them conceived that, if Adam had not sinned, he andhis posterity would have been physically immortal, and wouldeither have lived forever on the earth, or have been successivelytransferred to the home of Jehovah over the firmament. They callthe devil, who is the chief accuser in the heavenly court ofjustice, the angel of death, by the name of "Sammael. " RabbiReuben says, "When Sammael saw Adam sin, he immediately sought toslay him, and went to the heavenly council and clamored forjustice against him, pleading thus: 'God made this decree, "In theday thou eatest of the tree thou shalt surely die. " Therefore givehim to me, for he is mine, and I will kill him; to this end was Icreated; and give me power over all his descendants. ' When thecelestial Sanhedrim perceived that his petition was just, theydecreed that it should be granted. "1 A great many expressions ofkindred tenor might easily be adduced, leaving it hardly possibleto doubt as indeed we are not aware that any one does doubt thatmany of the Jews literally held that sin was the sole cause ofbodily dissolution. But, on the other hand, there were ascertainly others who did not entertain that idea, but understoodand explained the terms in which it was sometimes conveyed in adifferent, a partially figurative, sense. Rabbi Samuel ben Davidwrites, "Although the first Adam had not sinned, yet death wouldhave been; for death was created on the first day. " The referencehere is, as Rabbi Berechias explains, to the account in Genesiswhere we read that "darkness was upon the face of the deep, " "bywhich is to be understood the angel of death, who has darkened theface of man. "2 The Talmudists generally believed also in the preexistence of souls in heaven, and in a spiritual body investingand fitting the soul for heaven, as the present carnal bodyinvests and fits it for the earth. Schoettgen has collectednumerous illustrations in point, of which the following may serveas specimens. 3 "When the first Adam had not sinned, he was everyway an angel of the Lord, perfect and spotless, and it was decreedthat he should live forever like one of the celestial ministers. ""The soul cannot ascend into Paradise except it be first investedwith a 1 Schoettgen, Dissertatio de Hierosolyma Coelesti, cap. Iii. Sect. 9. 2 Schoettgen, Hora Biblica et Talmudica, in Rom. V. 12, et inJohan. 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 wasoriginally destined for a physical eternity on this globe. Allthis difficulty disappears, we think, and the true metaphoricalforce often intended in the word "death" comes to view, throughthe following conception, occupying the minds of a portion of theJewish Rabbins, as we are led to believe by the clews furnished inthe close connection between the Pharisaic and the Zoroastrianeschatology, by similar hints in various parts of the NewTestament, and by some quite explicit declarations in the Talmuditself, which we shall soon cite in a different connection. God atfirst intended that man should live for a time in pure blessednesson the earth, and then without pain should undergo a gloriouschange making him a perfect peer of the angels, and be translatedto their lofty abode in his own presence; but, when he sinned, Godgave him over to manifold suffering, and on the destruction of hisbody adjudged his naked soul to descend to a doleful imprisonmentbelow the grave. The immortality meant for man was a timely ascentto heaven in a paradisal clothing, without dying. The doom broughton him by sin was the alteration of that desirable change ofbodies and ascension to the supernal splendors, for a permanentdisembodiment and a dreaded descent to the subterranean glooms. Itis a Talmudical as much as it is a Pauline idea, that thetriumphant power of the Messiah would restore what the unfortunatefall 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 thelater Jews expected the Messianic resurrection to be the preludeto an ascent into heaven, and not the beginning of a gross earthlyimmortality, it will powerfully confirm the theory which we havejust indicated. "When, " says one of the old Rabbins, "the dead inIsraelitish earth are restored alive, " their bodies will be "asthe body of the first Adam before he sinned, and they shall allfly into the air like birds. "4 At all events, whether the general Rabbinical belief was in theprimitive destination of man to a heavenly or to an earthlyimmortality, whether the "death" decreed upon him in consequenceof sin was the dissolution of the body or the wretchedness of thesoul, they all agree that the banishment of souls into the realmof 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 ofthem maintained, as we think, that, had there been no sin, theywould have lived eternally upon earth in their present bodies; butall of them agreed, it is undisputed, that in consequence of sinsouls were condemned to the under world. No man would have seenthe dismal realm of the sepulchre had there not been sin. Theearliest Hebrew conception was that all souls went down to acommon abode, to spend eternity in dark slumber or nervelessgroping. This view was first modified soon after the Persiancaptivity, by the expectation that there would be discriminationat the resurrection which the Jews had learned to look for, whenthe just should rise but the wicked should be left. The next alteration of their notions on this subject was thesubdivision of the underworld into Paradise and Gehenna, aconception known among them probably as early as a century beforeChrist, and very prominent with them in the apostolic age. "WhenRabbi 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 mydoom. '"5 "Paradise is separated from hell by a distance no greaterthan the width of a thread. "6 So, in Christ's parable of Dives andLazarus, Abraham's bosom and hell are two divisions. "There arethree doors into Gehenna: one in the wilderness, where Korah andhis company were swallowed; one in the sea, where Jonah descendedwhen he 'cried out of the belly of hell;' one in Jerusalem, forthe Lord says, 'My furnace is in Jerusalem. '"7 "The under world isdivided into palaces, each of which is so large that it would takea man three hundred years to roam over it. There are distinctapartments where the hell punishments are inflicted. One place isso dark that its name is 'Night of Horrors. "8 "In Paradise thereare certain mansions for the pious from the Gentile peoples, andfor those mundane kings who have done kindness to theIsraelites. "9 "The fire of Gehenna was kindled on the evening ofthe first Sabbath, and shall never be extinguished. "10 TheEgyptians, Persians, Hindus, and Greeks, with all of whom the Jewsheld relations of intercourse, had, in their popularrepresentations of the under world of the dead, regions of peaceand honor for the good, and regions of fire for the bad. The ideamay have been adopted from them by the Jews, or it may have beenat last developed among themselves, first by the imaginativepoetical, afterwards by the literally believing, transferencebelow of historical and local imagery and associations, such asthose connected with the ingulfing of Sodom and Gomorrah in fireand sulphur, and with the loathed fires in the valley of Hinnom. Many of the Rabbins believed in the transmigration or revolutionof souls, an immemorial doctrine of the Fast, and developed itinto the most ludicrous and marvellous details. 11 But, with theexception of those who adopted this Indian doctrine, the Rabbinssupposed all departed souls to be in the under world, some in thedivision of Paradise, others in that of hell. Here they fanciedthese souls to be longingly awaiting the advent of the Messiah. "Messiah and the patriarchs weep together in Paradise over thedelay of the time of the kingdom. "12 In this quotation the Messiahis represented as being in the under world, for the Jews expectedthat he would be a man, very likely some one who had alreadylived. For a delegation was once sent to ask Jesus, "Art thouElias? art thou the Messiah? art thou that prophet?" Light is thusthrown upon the Rabbinical saying that "it was doubted whether theMessiah would come from the living, or the dead. "13 Borrowing somePersian modes of thinking, and adding them to their own inordinatenational 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 RabbinischenJudenthums, 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 ofthe 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 Pharisaicritual, and kindred particulars, must exert a great effect indetermining the destination of souls and their condition in theunder world. Observe the following quotations from the Talmud. "Abraham sits at the gate of hell to see that no Israeliteenters. " "Circumcision is so agreeable to God, that he swore toAbraham that no one who was circumcised should descend intohell. "14 "What does Abraham to those circumcised who have sinnedtoo much? He takes the foreskins from Gentile boys who diedwithout circumcision, and places them on those Jews who werecircumcised but have become godless, and then kicks them intohell. "15 Hell here denotes that division in the under world wherethe condemned are punished. The younger Buxtorf, in a preface tohis father's "Synagoga Judaica, " gives numerous specimens ofJewish representations of "the efficacy of circumcision being sogreat that no one who has undergone it shall go down into hell. "Children can help their deceased parents out of hell by their gooddeeds, prayers, and offerings. 16 "Beyond all doubt, " says Gfrorer, "the ancient Jewish synagogue inculcated the doctrine ofsupererogatory good works, the merit of which went to benefit thedeparted souls. "17 Here all souls were, in the under world, eitherin 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 inexpectation of the advent of the Messiah. How deeply rooted, how eagerly cherished, the Jewish belief in theapproaching appearance of the Messiah was, and what a splendidgroup of ideas and imaginations they clustered around his reign, are well known facts. He was to be a descendant of royal David, aninspired prophet, priest, and king, was to subdue the whole earthbeneath his Jewish sceptre and establish from Jerusalem atheocratic empire of unexampled glory, holiness, and delight. Inso much the consent was general and earnest; though in regard tomany further details there would seem to have been an incongruousdiversity of opinions. They supposed the coming of the Messiahwould be preceded by ten frightful woes, 18 also by the appearanceof the prophet Elias as a forerunner. 19 There are a few passagesin the Rabbinical writings which, unless they were forged andinterpolated by Christians at a late period, show that there werein the Jewish mind anticipations of the personal descent of theMessiah into the under world. 20 "After this the Messiah, the sonof David, came to the gates of the underworld. But when the bound, who are in Gehenna, saw the light of the Messiah, they beganrejoicing to receive him, saying, 'He shall lead us up from thisdarkness. '" "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. Maimonidesalso asserts the doctrine of supererogatory works: see p. 237 ofH. 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, EntdecktesJudenthum, th. Ii. Kap. Xv. Xvii. ascend from the under world, Schechinah at their head. "21 Gfrorerderives the origin of the doctrine that Christ rescued souls outof the under world, from a Jewish notion, preserved in theTalmud, 22 that the just patriarchs sometimes did it. 23 Bertholdtadduces 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 thisstatement from the Sohar: "Messia shall die, and shall remain inthe state of death a time, and shall rise. "25 The so called FourthBook 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 fromthe account in John xii. 34, that there was a prevalentexpectation among the Jews that "the Messiah would abide forever, "it also seems quite certain that there were at the same time atleast obscure presentiments, based on prophecies and traditions, that he must die, that an important part of his mission wasconnected with his death. This appears from such passages as wehave cited above, found in early Rabbinical writers, who wouldcertainly be very unlikely to borrow and adapt a new idea of sucha character from the Christians; and from the manner in whichJesus assumes his death to be a part of the Messianic fate andinterprets the Scriptures as necessarily pointing to that effect. He charges his disciples with being "fools and blind" in not sounderstanding the doctrine; thus seeming to imply that it wasplainly known to some. But this question the origin of the idea ofa suffering, atoning, dying Messiah is confessedly a very nice andobscure one. The evidence, the silence, the inferences, thepresumptions and doubts on the subject are such, that some of themost thorough and impartial students say they are unable to decideeither way. However the foregoing question be decided, it is admitted by allthat the Jews earnestly looked for a resurrection of the dead asan accompaniment of the Messiah's coming. Whether Christ was to godown into the under world, or to sit enthroned on Mount Zion, ineither case the dead should come up and live again on earth at theblast of his summoning trumpet. Rabbi Jeremiah commanded, "Whenyou 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 beready. "26 Most of the Rabbins made this resurrection partial. "Whoever denies the resurrection of the dead shall have no part init, for the very reason that he denies it. "27 "Rabbi Abbu says, "Aday of rain is greater than the resurrection of the dead; becausethe rain is for all, while the resurrection is only for thejust. "28 "Sodom and Gomorrah shall not rise in the resurrection ofthe dead. "29 Rabbi Chebbo says, "The patriarchs so vehementlydesired 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, (DeDescensu 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 shallbe the first to revive and shall devour his years, [the years ofthe Messiah. ] But for those just who are interred beyond the holyland, it is to be understood that God will make a passage in theearth, through which they will be rolled until they reach the landof Israel. "30 Rabbi Jochanan says, "Moses died out of the holyland, in order to show that in the same way that God will raise upMoses, so he will raise all those who observe his law. " Thenational bigotry of the Jews reaches a pitch of extravagance insome of their views that is amusing. For instance, they declarethat "one Israelitish soul is dearer and more important to Godthan all the souls of a whole nation of the Gentiles!" Again, theysay, "When God judges the Israelites, he will stand, and make thejudgment brief and mild; when he judges the Gentiles, he will sit, and make it long and severe!" They affirm that the resurrectionwill be effected by means of a dew; and they quote to that effectthis verse from Canticles: "I sleep, but my heart waketh; my headis filled with dew, and my locks with drops of the night. " Someassert that "the resurrection will be immediately caused by God, who never gives to any one the three keys of birth, rain, and theresurrection of the dead. " Others say that the power to raise andjudge the dead will be delegated to the Messiah, and even go sofar as to assert that the trumpet whose formidable blasts willthen shake the universe is to be one of the horns of that ramwhich Abraham offered up instead of his son Isaac! Some confinethe resurrection to faithful Jews, some extend it to the wholeJewish nation, some think all the righteous of the earth will havepart in it, and some stretch its pale around all mankind alike. 31They seem to agree that the reprobate would either be left in thewretched regions of Sheol when the just arose, or else be thrustback after the judgment, to remain there forever. It was believedthat the righteous after their resurrection would never die again, but ascend to heaven. The Jews after a time, when the increase ofgeographical knowledge had annihilated from the earth their oldEden whence the sinful Adam was expelled, changed its locationinto the sky. Thither, as the later fables ran, Elijah was bornein his chariot of fire by the horses thereof. Rabbi Pinchas says, "Carefulness leads us to innocence, innocence to purity, purity tosanctity, sanctity to humility, humility to fear of sins, fear ofsins to piety, piety to the holy spirit, the holy spirit to theresurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the dead to theprophet Elias. "32 The writings of the early Christian Fatherscontain many allusions to this blessed habitation of saints abovethe clouds. It is illustrated in the following quaint Rabbinicalnarrative. Rabbi Jehosha ben Levi once besought the angel of deathto take him up, ere he died, to catch a glimpse of Paradise. Standing on the wall, he suddenly snatched the angel's sword andsprang over, swearing by Almighty God that he would not come out. Death was not allowed to enter Paradise, and the son of Levi didnot restore his sword until he had promised to be more gentletowards the dying. 33 The righteous were never to return to thedust, but "at the end 30 Schoettgen, De Messia, lib. Vi. Cap. Vi. Sect. 27. 31 See an able dissertation on Jewish Notions of the Resurrectionof the Dead, prefixed to Humphrey's Translation of Athenagoras onthe Resurrection. 32 Surenhusius, Mischna, pars tertia, p. 309. 33 Schroder, s. 419. of the thousand years, " the duration of the Messiah's earthlyreign, "when the Lord is lifted up, God shall fit wings to thejust, like the wings of eagles. "34 In a word, the Messiah and hisredeemed 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 inthe clouds to be forever with the Lord. " We forbear to notice a thousand curious details of speculation andfancy in which individual Rabbins indulged; for instance, theircommon notion concerning the bone luz, the single bone which, withstanding dissolution, shall form the nucleus of theresurrection body. It was a prevalent belief with them that theresurrection would take place in the valley of Jehoshaphat, inproof of which they quote this text from Joel: "Let the heathen bewakened and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will Isit to judge the nations around. " To this day, wherever scatteredabroad, faithful Jews cling to the expectation of the Messiah'scoming, and associate with his day the resurrection of the dead. 35The statement in the Song of Solomon, "The king is held in thegalleries, " means, says a Rabbinical book, "that the Messiah isdetained in Paradise, fettered by a woman's hair!" Every day, throughout the world, every consistent Israelite repeats the wordsof Moses Maimonides, the peerless Rabbi, of whom it is a proverbthat "from Moses to Moses there arose not a Moses:" "I believewith a perfect faith that the Messiah will come, and though hedelays, nevertheless, I will always expect him till he come. " Thenshall glory cover the living, and the risen, children of Israel, and confusion fall on their Gentile foes. In almost every inch ofthe beautiful valley of Jehoshaphat a Jew has been buried. Allover the slopes of the hill sides around lie the thick clusteringsepulchral slabs, showing how eagerly the chosen people seek tosleep in the very spot where the first rising of the dead shallbe. Entranced and mute, "In old Jehoshaphat's valley, theyOf Israel think the assembled worldWill 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 astriking resemblance between many of its dogmas and those, first, of Pharisaism, secondly, of the popular Christianity. Someexamination of this subject properly belongs here. There is, then, as is well known, a circle or group of ideas, particularlypertaining to eschatology, which appear in the later Jewishwritings, and remarkably correspond to those held by the Parsees, the followers of Zoroaster. The same notions also reappear in theearly Christianity as popularly understood. We will specify someof these correspondences. The doctrine of angels, received by theJews, their names, offices, rank, and destiny, was borrowed andformed 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, vonAbbe Foucher, in Kleuker's Zend Avesta, band i. Zweit anhang, ss. 328-342. by them during and just after the Babylonish captivity, and ismuch like that which they found among their enslavers. 37 Theguardian angels appointed over nations, spoken of by Daniel, arePersian. The angels called in the Apocalypse "the seven spirits ofGod sent forth into all the earth, " in Zechariah "the seven eyesof God which run to and fro through all the earth, " are theAmschaspands of the Persian faith. The wars of the angels aredescribed as minutely by the old Persians as by Milton. The ZendAvesta pictures Ahriman pregnant with Death, (die altehollenschlange, todschwangere Ahriman, ) as Milton describes thewomb of Sin bearing that fatal monster. The Gahs, or second orderof angels, the Persians supposed, 38 were employed in preparingclothing and laying it up in heaven to clothe the righteous afterthe resurrection, a fancy frequent among the Rabbins andrepeatedly alluded to in the New Testament. With both the Persiansand the Jews, all our race both sexes sprang from one originalman. With both, the first pair were seduced and ruined by means offruit which the devil gave to them. With both, there was a beliefin demoniacal possessions, devils or bad spirits entering humanbodies. With both, there was the expectation of a greatDeliverer, the Persian Sosiosch, the Jewish Messiah, whose comingwould be preceded by fearful woes, who would triumph over allevil, raise the dead, judge the world, separate the righteous andthe wicked, purge the earth with fire, and install a reign ofglorious blessedness. 39 "The conception of an under world, " saysDr. Roth, "was known centuries before Zoroaster; but probably hewas the first to add to the old belief the idea that the underworld was a place of purification, wherein souls were purged fromall traces of sin. "40 Of this belief in a subterranean purgatorythere are numerous unmistakable evidences and examples in theRabbinical writings. 41 These notions and others the Pharisees early adopted, and wroughtinto the texture of what they called the "Oral Law, " that body ofverbally transmitted legends, precepts, and dogmas, afterwardswritten out and collected in the Mischna, to which Christrepeatedly alluded with such severity, saying, "Ye by yourtraditions make the commandments of God of none effect. " To somedoctrines of kindred character and origin with these Paul referswhen he warns his readers against "the worshipping of angels, ""endless genealogies, " "philosophy falsely so called, " and variousbesetting heresies of the time. But others were so woven andassimilated into the substance of the popular Judaism of the age, as inculcated by the Rabbins, that Paul himself held them, thelingering vestiges of his earnest Pharisaic education andorganized experience. They naturally found their way into theApostolic Church, principally composed of Ebionites, Christianswho had been Jews; and from it they were never separated, but havecome 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 vonder Anferstehung des Leibes nicht ein alt Persische Lehre?" F. Nork, Mythen der Alten Perser als Quellen ChristlicherGlaubenslehren und Ritualien. 40 Die Zoroastrischen Glaubenslehre, von Dr. Eduard Roth. S. 450. 41 See, In tom. I. Kabbala Denudata, Synopsis Dogmatum Libri Soharpp. 108, 109, 113. retained now. Still, they were errors. They are incredible to thethinking minds of to day. It is best to get rid of them by thetruth, that they are pagan growths introduced into Christianity, but to be discriminated from it. By removing these antiquated andincredible excrescences from the real religion of Christ, we shallsave the essential faith from the suspicion which theirassociation with it, their fancied identity with it, invites andprovokes. The correspondences between the Persian and the Pharisaic faith, in regard to doctrines, are of too arbitrary and peculiar acharacter to allow us for a moment to suppose them to have been anindependent product spontaneously developed in the two nations;though even in that case the doctrines in question have nosanction of authority, not being Mosaic nor Prophetic, but onlyRabbinical. One must have received from the other. Which was thebestower and which the recipient is quite plain. 42 There is not awhit of evidence to show, but, on the contrary, ample presumptionto disprove, that a certain cycle of notions were known among theJews previous to a period of most intimate and constantintercourse between them and the Persians. But before that periodthose notions were an integral part of the Persian theology. EvenPrideaux admits that the first Zoroaster lived and Magianismflourished at least a thousand years before Christ. And the dogmaswe refer to are fundamental features of the religion. These dogmasof the Persians, not derived from the Old Testament nor knownamong the Jews before the captivity, soon after that time began toshow themselves in their literature, and before the opening of theNew Testament were prominent elements of the Pharisaic belief. Theinference is unavoidable that the confluence of Persian thoughtand feeling with Hebrew thought and feeling, joined with thematerials and flowing in the channels of the subsequent experienceof the Jews, formed a mingled deposit about the age of Christ, which deposit was Pharisaism. Again: the doctrines common toZoroastrianism and Pharisaism in the former seem to be primesources, in the latter to be late products. In the former, theycompose an organic, complete, inseparable system; in the latter, they are disconnected, mixed piecemeal, and, to a considerableextent, historically traceable to an origin beyond the native, national mind. It is a significant fact that the abnormal symbolicbeasts described by several of the Jewish prophets, and in theApocalypse, were borrowed from Persian art. Sculpturesrepresenting these have been brought to light by the recentresearches at Persepolis. Finally, all early ecclesiasticalhistory incontestably shows that Persian dogmas exerted on theChristianity of the first centuries an enormous influence, apervasive and perverting power unspent yet, and which it is one ofthe highest tasks of honest and laborious Christian students inthe present day to explain, define, and separate. What was thatManichaanism 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 GnosticChristians 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 imaginativelyregard that sacred scene as an emblematical figure of the fardifferent 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, theunfortunate contributions that permeated and corrupted so much ofthe form in which it thenceforth appeared and spread. In the puregospel's pristine day, ere it had hardened into theological dogmasor become encumbered with speculations and comments, from the lipsof God's Anointed Son repeatedly fell the earnest warning, "Bewareof the leaven of the Pharisees. " There is far more need to havethis warning intelligently heeded now, coming with redoubledemphasis from the Master's own mouth, "Beware of the leaven of thePharisees. " For, as the gospel is now generally set forth andreceived, 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 themby the Romans, is material, but of so thin a contexture that itcannot be felt with the hands. It is exhaled with the dyingbreath, or issues through a warrior's wounds. The sword passesthrough its uninjured form as through the air. It is to the bodywhat a dream is to waking action. Retaining the shape, lineaments, and motion the man had in life, it is immediately recognised uponappearing. It quits the body with much reluctance, leaving thatwarm and vigorous investiture for a chill and forceless existence. It glides along without noise and very swiftly, like a shadow. Itis unable to enter the lower kingdom and be at peace until itsdeserted body has been buried with sacred rites: meanwhile, nakedand sad, it flits restlessly about the gates, uttering dolefulmoans. The early Greek authors describe the creation as a stupendoushollow globe cut in the centre by the plane of the earth. Theupper hemisphere is lighted by beneficent luminaries; the lowerhemisphere is filled with unvarying blackness. The top of thehigher 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 ofthe dead; its bottom is Tartarus, the prison of the Titans, rebellious giants vanquished by Zeus. Earth lies half way from thecope of Heaven to the floor of Tartarus. This distance is so greatthat, according to Hesiod, it would take an anvil nine days tofall from the centre to the nadir. Some of the ancients seem tohave surmised the sphericity of the earth, and to have thoughtthat Hades was simply its dark side, the dead being our antipodes. In the Odyssey, Ulysses reaches Hades by sailing across the oceanstream and passing the eternal night land of the Cimmerians, whereupon he comes to the edge of Acheron, the moat of Pluto'ssombre house. Virgil also says, "One pole of the earth to usalways points aloft; but the other is seen by black Styx and theinfernal ghosts, where either dead night forever reigns or elseAurora returns thither from us and brings them back the day. "1 Butthe prevalent notion evidently was that Hades was an immensehollow region not far under the surface of the ground, and that itwas to be reached by descent through some cavern, like that atAvernus. This subterranean place is the destination of all alike, rapaciousOrcus sparing no one, good or bad. It is wrapped in obscurity, asthe etymology of its name implies, a place where one cannot see. "No sun e'er gilds the gloomy horrors there; No cheerful galesrefresh the stagnant air. " The dead are disconsolate in this dismal realm, and the livingshrink from entering it, except as a refuge from intolerableafflictions. 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, toserve for hire another man of poor estate, rather than rule overall the dead. " Souls carry there their physical peculiarities, thefresh and ghastly likenesses of the wounds which have despatchedthem thither, so that they are known at sight. Companies offellow countrymen, knots of friends, are together there, preserving their remembrance ofearthly fortunes and belovedrelatives left behind, and eagerly questioning each newly arrivingsoul for tidings from above. When the soul of Achilles is told ofthe glorious deeds of Neoptolemus, "he goes away taking mightysteps through the meadow of asphodel in joyfulness, because he hadheard that his son was very illustrious. "2 Sophocles makes thedying Antigone say, "Departing, I strongly cherish the hope that Ishall be fondly welcomed by my father, and by my mother, and by mybrother. "3 It is important to notice that, according to the earlyand popular view, this Hades, the "dark dwelling of the joylessimages of deceased mortals, " is the destination of universalhumanity. In opposition to its dolorous gloom and repulsiveinanity are vividly pictured the glad light of day, the glory andhappiness of life. "Not worth so much to me as my life, " says theincomparable son of Peleus, "are all the treasures which populousTroy possessed, nor all which the stony threshold of PhoebusApollo contains in rocky Pytho. Oxen, and fat sheep, and trophies, and horses with golden manes, may be acquired by effort; but thebreath of man to return again is not to be obtained by plunder norby purchase, when once it has passed the barrier of his teeth. " It is not probable that all the ornamental details associated bythe poets with the fate and state of the dead as they are setforth, for instance, by Virgil in the sixth book of the Aneid wereever credited as literal truth. But there is no reason to doubtthat the essential features of this mythological scenery wereaccepted in the vulgar belief. For instance, that the popular mindhonestly held that, in some vague sense or other, the ghost, onleaving the body, flitted down to the dull banks of Acheron andoffered a shadowy obolus to Charon, the slovenly old ferryman, fora passage in his boat, seems attested not only by a thousandaverments to that effect in the current literature of the time, but also by the invariable custom of placing an obolus in the deadman's mouth for that purpose when he was buried. The Greeks did not view the banishment of souls in Hades as apunishment for sin, or the result of any broken law in the plan ofthings. It was to them merely the fulfilment of the inevitablefate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, likesuccessive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble torank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease fromhis substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunlessHades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, aghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, orbusying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits, was melancholy enough; but it was his natural destiny, and not anavenging judgment. But that powerful instinct in man which desires to see villanypunished and goodness rewarded could not fail, among so cultivateda people as the Greeks, to develop a doctrine of futurecompensation for the contrasted deserts of souls. The earliesttrace 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 worldis the punishment of the Titans, those monsters who tried bypiling up mountains to storm the heavenly abodes, and to wrest theThunderer's bolts from his hand. This germ is slowly expanded; andnext we read of a few specified criminals, who had beenexcessively impious, personally offending Zeus, condemned by hisdirect indignation to a severe expiation in Tartarus. The insulteddeity wreaks his vengeance on the tired Sisyphus, the mockedTantalus, the gnawed Tityus, and others. Afterwards we meet thestatement that condign retribution is always inflicted for the twoflagrant sins of perjury and blasphemy. Finally, we discern ageneral prevalence of the belief that punishment is decreed, notby 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, accordingto their merits, with impartial accuracy. The distribution ofpoetic justice in Hades at last became, in many authors, somelodramatic as to furnish a fair subject for burlesque. Someludicrous examples of this may be seen in Lucian's Dialogues ofthe Dead. A fine instance of it is also furnished in the EmperorJulian's Symposium. The gods prepare for the Roman emperors abanquet, in the air, below the moon. The good emperors areadmitted to the table with honors; but the bad ones are hurledheadlong down into Tartarus, amidst the derisive shouts of thespectators. As the notion that the wrath of the gods would pursue theirenemies in the future state gave rise to a belief in thepunishments of Tartarus, so the notion that the distinguishingkindness of the gods would follow their favorites gave rise to themyth of Elysium. The Elysian Fields were earliest portrayed lyingon the western margin of the earth, stretching from the verge ofOceanus, where the sun set at eve. They were fringed withperpetual green, perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, andeternally fanned by refreshing breezes. They were representedmerely as the select abode of a small number of living men, whowere either the mortal relatives or the special favorites of thegods, and who were transported thither without tasting death, there to pass an immortality which was described, with greatinconsistency, sometimes as purely happy, sometimes as joyless andwearisome. To all except a few chosen ones this region was utterlyinaccessible. Homer says, "But for you, O Menelaus, it is notdecreed by the gods to die; but the immortals will send you to theElysian plain, because you are the son in law of Zeus. "4 Had theinheritance of this clime been proclaimed as the reward of heroicmerit, had it been really believed attainable by virtue, it wouldhave been held up as a prize to be striven for. The whole account, as it was at first, bears the impress of imaginative fiction aslegibly upon its front as the story of the dragon watched gardenof Hesperus's daughters, whose trees bore golden apples, or thestory of the enchanted isle in the Arabian tales. The early location of Elysium, and the conditions of admission toit, were gradually changed; and at length it reappeared, in theunder world, as the abode of the just. On one side of theprimitive Hades Tartarus had now been drawn up to admit thecondemned into its penal tortures, and on the other side Elysiumwas lowered down to reward the justified by receiving them intoits 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 forunsentenced shades. The highly colored descriptions of thissubterranean heaven, frequently found thenceforth, it is to besupposed were rarely accepted as solid verities. They werescarcely ever used, to our knowledge, as motives in life, incitement in difficulties, consolation in sorrow. They weremostly set forth in poems, works even professedly fictitious. Theywere often denied and ridiculed in speeches and writings receivedwith public applause. Still, they unquestionably exerted someinfluence on the common modes of thought and feeling, had ashadowy seat in the popular imagination and heart, helped men toconceive of a blessed life hereafter and to long for it, and tookaway something of the artificial horror with which, under thepower of rooted superstition, their departing ghosts hailed thedusky limits of futurity: "Umbra Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi Pallida regnapetunt. " First, then, from a study of the Greek mythology we find all thedead a dull populace of ghosts fluttering through the neutralmelancholy of Hades without discrimination. And finally we discernin the world of the dead a sad middle region, with a Paradise onthe right and a Hell on the left, the whole presided over by threeincorruptible judges, who appoint the new corners their places inaccordance with their deserts. The question now arises, What did the Greeks think in relation tothe ascent of human souls into heaven among the gods? Did theyexcept none from the remediless doom of Hades? Was there no pathfor the wisest and best souls to climb starry Olympus? To disposeof this inquiry fairly, four distinct considerations must beexamined. First, Ulysses sees in the infernal regions the image ofHerakles shooting the shadows of the Stymphalian birds, while hissoul is said to be rejoicing with fair legged Hebe at the banquetsof the immortal gods in the skies. To explain this, we mustremember that Herakles was the son of Alcmene, a mortal woman, andof Zeus, the king of the gods. Accordingly, in the flames on MountOeta, the surviving ghost which he derived from his motherdescends to Hades, but the purified soul inherited from his fatherhas the proper nature and rank of a deity, and is received intothe Olympian synod. 5 Of course no blessed life in heaven for thegenerality of men is here implied. Herakles, being a son andfavorite of Zeus, has a corresponding destiny exceptional fromthat of other men. Secondly, another double representation, somewhat similar, buthaving an entirely different interpretation, occurs in the case ofOrion, the handsome Hyrian hunter whom Artemis loved. At one timehe is described, like the spectre of the North American Indian, chasing over the Stygian plain the disembodied animals he had inhis lifetime killed on the mountains: "Swift through the gloom a giant hunter flies: A ponderous brazenmace, 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, phantomforms, shoot o'er the lawn of hell. " In the common belief this, without doubt, was received as actualfact. But at another time Orion is deified and shown as one of thegrandest constellations of the sky, "A belted giant, who, with arm uplift, Threatening the throne ofZeus, forever stands, Sublimely impious. " This, obviously, is merely a poetic symbol, a beautiful artificeemployed by the poets to perpetuate a legend by associating itwith the imperishable hieroglyphs of the galaxy. It is notcredible that men imagined that group of stars only outlined insuch shape by the help of arbitrary fancy to be literally thetranslated hunter himself. The meaning simply was that he wasimmortalized through the eternal linking of his name and form witha stellar cluster which would always shine upon men. "Thereverence and gratitude of a weak world for the heroes andbenefactors they could not comprehend, named them divinities, whomthey did star together to an idolatrous immortality whichnationalized the heavens" with the shining shapes of the great andbrave. These types of poetry, symbols lent to infant science, werenever meant to indicate a literal translation and metamorphosis ofhuman souls, but were honors paid to the memories of illustriousmen, emblems and pledged securities of their unfading fame. Withwhat glorious characters, with what forms of deathless beauty, defiant of decay, the sky was written over! Go out this eveningbeneath the old rolling dome, when the starry scroll is outspread, and you may still read the reveries of the marvelling minds of theantique world, as fresh in their magic loveliness as when thebards and seers of Olympus and the Agean first stamped them inheaven. There "the great snake binds in his bright coil half themighty host. " There is Arion with his harp and the charmeddolphin. The fair Andromeda, still chained to her eternal rock, looks mournfully towards the delivering hero whose conquering handbears aloft the petrific visage of Medusa. Far off in the norththe gigantic Bootes is seen driving towards the Centaur and theScorpion. And yonder, smiling benignantly upon the crews of many ahome bound ship, are revealed the twin brothers, joined in theembrace of an undying friendship. Thirdly, it is asserted by several Latin authors, in generalterms, that the ghost goes to Hades but the soul ascends toheaven; and it has been inferred most erroneously that thisstatement contains the doctrine of an abode for men after death onhigh 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; theunder world receives the image; the spirit seeks the stars. " Thoseconversant with the opinions then prevalent will scarcely doubtthat these words were meant to express the return of the compositeman to the primordial elements of which he was made. Theparticulars of the dissolving individual are absorbed in thegeneral elements of the universe. Earth goes back to earth, ghostto the realm of ghosts, breath to the air, fiery essence of soulto the lofty ether in whose pure radiance the stars burn. Euripides expressly says that when man dies each part goes whenceit came, "the body to the ground, the spirit to the ether. "6Therefore the often misunderstood phrase of the Roman writers, "the soul seeks the stars, " merely denotes the impersonal minglingafter death of the divine portion of man's being with the parentDivinity, who was supposed indeed to pervade all things, but moreespecially to reside beyond the empyrean. Fourthly: what shall be said of the apotheosis of their celebratedheroes and emperors by the Greeks and Romans, whereby these wereelevated to the dignity of deities, and seats were assigned themin heaven? What was the meaning of this ceremony? It does notsignify that a celestial immortality awaits all good men; becauseit appears as a thing attainable by very few, is only allotted byvote of the Senate. Neither was it supposed actually to confer onits recipients equality of attributes with the great gods, makingthem peers of Zeus and Apollo. The homage received as gods byAlexander and others during their lives, the deification of JuliusCasar during the most learned and skeptical age of Rome, withother obvious considerations, render such a suppositioninadmissible. In view of all the direct evidence and collateralprobabilities, we conclude that the genuine import of an ancientapotheosis was this: that the soul of the deceased person sohonored was admitted, in deference to his transcendent merits, oras a special favor on the part of the gods, into heaven, into thedivine society. He was really a human soul still, but was called agod because, instead of descending, like the multitude of humansouls, to Hades, he was taken into the abode and company of thegods above the sky. This interpretation derives support from theremarkable declaration of Aristotle, that "of two friends one mustbe unwilling that the other should attain apotheosis, because insuch case they must be forever separated. "7 One would be inOlympus, the other in Hades. The belief that any, even a favoredfew, could ever obtain this blessing, was of quite limiteddevelopment, and probably sprang from the esoteric recesses of theMysteries. To call a human soul a god is not so bold a speech asit may seem. Plotinus says. "Whoever has wisdom and true virtue insoul itself differs but little from superior beings, in this alonebeing inferior to them, that he is in body. Such an one, dying, may therefore properly say, with Empedocles, 'Farewell! a godimmortal now am I. '" The expiring Vespasian exclaimed, "I shall soon be a god. "8 Muresays that the doctrine of apotheosis belonged to the GracoPelasgic race through all their history. 9 Seneca severelysatirizes the ceremony, and the popular belief which upheld it, inan elaborate lampoon called Apocolocyntosis, or the reception ofClaudius 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 thedistance from the honest credulity of one class and period to thekeen infidelity of another. One of the most important passages in Greek literature, inwhatever aspect viewed, is composed of the writings of the greatTheban lyrist. Let us see what representation is there made of thefate of man in the unseen world. The ethical perception, profoundfeeling, and searching mind of Pindar could not allow him toremain satisfied with the undiscriminating views of the futurestate prevalent in his time. Upon such a man the problem of deathmust weigh as a conscious burden, and his reflections wouldnaturally lead him to improved conclusions. Accordingly, we findhim representing the Blessed Isles not as the haven of a fewfavorites of the gods, but as the reward of virtue; and thepunishments of the wicked, too, are not dependent on fickleinclinations, but are decreed by immutable right. He does notdescribe the common multitude of the dead, leading a dark sadexistence, like phantoms in a dream: his references to death andHades seem cheerful in comparison with those of many other ancientGreek authors. Dionysius the Rhetorician, speaking of hisThrenes, dirges sung at funerals, says, "Simonides lamented thedead pathetically, Pindar magnificently. " His conceptions of the life to come were inseparably connectedwith certain definite locations. He believed Hades to be thedestination of all our mortal race, but conceived it subdividedinto a Tartarus for the impious and an Elysium for the righteous. He thought that the starry firmament was the solid floor of aworld of splendor, bliss, and immortality, inhabited by the gods, but fatally inaccessible to man. When he thinks of this place, itis with a sigh, a sigh that man's aspirations towards it are vainand his attempts to reach it irreverent. This latter thought heenforces by an earnest allusion to the myth of Bellerophon, who, daring to soar to the cerulean seat of the gods on the wingedsteed Pegasus, was punished for his arrogance by being hurled downheadlong. These assertions are to be sustained by citations of hisown words. The references made are to Donaldson's edition. In the second Pythian Ode10 Pindar repeats, and would appear toendorse, the old monitory legend of Ixion, who for his outrageouscrimes was bound to an ever revolving wheel in Hades and made toutter warnings against such offences as his own. In the firstPythian we read, "Hundred headed Typhon, enemy of the gods, liesin dreadful Tartarus. "11 Among the preserved fragments of Pindarthe one numbered two hundred and twenty three reads thus: "Thebottom of Tartarus shall press thee down with solid necessities. "The following is from the first Isthmian Ode: "He who, laying upprivate wealth, laughs at the poor, does not consider that heshall close up his life for Hades without honor. "12 The latterpart of the tenth Nemean Ode recounts, with every appearance ofdevout belief, the history of Castor and Pollux, the god begottentwins, who, reversing conditions with each other on successivedays and nights, spent their interchangeable immortality eachalternately in heaven and in Hades. The astronomicalinterpretation of this account may be correct; but itsapplicability to the wondering faith of the earlier poets isextremely doubtful. 10 L. 39. 11 LI. 15, 16. 12 L. 68. The seventh Isthmian contains this remarkable sentence: "Unequalis the fate of man: he can think of great things, but is tooephemeral a creature to reach the brazen floored seat of thegods. "13 A similar sentiment is expressed in the sixth Nemean:"Men are a mere nothing; while to the gods the brazen heavenremains a firm abode forever. "14 The one hundred and secondfragment is supposed to be a part of the dirge composed by Pindaron the death of the grandfather of Pericles. It runs in this way:"Whoso by good fortune has seen the things in the hollow under theearth knows indeed the end of life: he also knows the beginningvouchsafed by Zeus. " It refers to initiation in the EleusinianMysteries, and means that the initiate understands the life whichfollows death. It is well known that a clear doctrine of futureretribution was inculcated in the Mysteries long before it foundgeneral publication. The ninety fifth fragment is all that remainsto us of a dirge which appears, from the allusion in the firstline, to have been sung at a funeral service performed atmidnight, or at least after sunset. "While it is night here withus, to those below shines the might of the sun; and the red rosiedmeadows of their suburbs are filled with the frankincense tree, and with golden fruits. Some delight themselves there with steedsand exercises, others with games, others with lyres; and amongthem all fair blossoming fortune blooms, and a fragrance isdistilled through the lovely region, and they constantly mingleall kinds of offerings with the far shining fire on the altars ofthe gods. " This evidently is a picture of the happy scenes in thefields that stretch around the City of the Blessed in the underworld, and is introduced as a comfort to the mourners over thedead body. The ensuing passage the most important one on our subject is fromthe second Olympic Ode. 15 "An honorable, virtuous man may restassured as to his future fate. The souls of the lawless, departingfrom 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 bythe gods for having always delighted in virtue: the others endurea life too dreadful to look upon. Whoever has had resolutionthrice in both worlds to stand firm, and to keep his soul purefrom evil, has found the path of Zeus to the tower of Kronos, where the airs of the ocean breathe around the Isle of theBlessed, and where some from resplendent trees, others from thewater glitter golden flowers, with garlandsofwhich they wreathetheir wrists and brows in the righteous assemblies ofRhadamanthus, whom father Kronos has as his willing assistant. "The "path of Zeus, " in the above quotation, means the path whichZeus takes when he goes to visit his father Kronos, whom heoriginally dethroned and banished, but with whom he is nowreconciled, and who has become the ruler of the departed spiritsof the just, in a peaceful and joyous region. The following passage constitutes the ninety eighth fragment. "Tothose who descend from a fruitless and ill starred life Persephone[the Queen of the Dead] will grant a compensation for their formermisfortune, after eight years [the judicial period of atonementand 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; andafterwards they shall be invoked by men as sacred heroes. " In thispiece, as in the preceding one where reference is made to thethrice living man, is contained the doctrine, early brought fromthe East, that souls may repeatedly return from the dead and innew bodies lead new lives. One other fragment, the ninety sixth, added to the foregoing, will make up all the important genuinepassages in Pindar relating to the future life. "By a beneficentallotment, all travel to an end freeing from toil. The body indeedis subject to the power of death; but the eternal image is leftalive, and this alone is allied to the gods. When we are asleep, it shows in many dreams the approaching judgment concerninghappiness and misery. " When our physical limbs are stretched ininsensible repose, the inward spirit, rallying its sleepless andprophetic powers, foretells the balancing awards of another world. We must not wholly confound with the mythological schemes of thevulgar creed the belief of the nobler philosophers, many of whom, as is well known, cherished an exalted faith in the survival ofthe conscious soul and in a just retribution. "Strike!" one ofthem said, with the dauntless courage of an immortal, to a tyrantwho had threatened to have him brayed in a mortar: "strike! youmay crush the shell of Anaxarchus: you cannot touch his life. "Than all the maze of fabulous fancies and physical rites in whichthe dreams of the poets and the guesses of the people wereentangled, how much more "Just was the prescience of the eternal goalThat gleamed, 'midCyprian shades, on Zeno's soul, Or shone to Plato in the lonelycave, God in all space, and life in every grave!" An account of the Greek views on the subject of a future lifewhich should omit the doctrine of Plato would be defective indeed. The influence of this sublime autocrat in the realms of intellecthas transcended calculation. However coldly his thoughts may havebeen regarded by his contemporary countrymen, they soon obtainedcosmopolitan audience, and surviving the ravages of time andignorance, overleaping the bars of rival schools and sects, appreciated and diffused by the loftiest spirits of succeedingages, closely blended with their own speculations by manyChristian theologians have held an almost unparalleled dominionover the minds of millions of men for more than fifty generations. In the various dialogues of Plato, written at different periods ofhis life, there are numerous variations and inconsistencies ofdoctrine. There are also many mythical passages obviously intendedas symbolic statements, poetic drapery, by no means to be handledor looked at as the severe outlines of dialectic truth. Furthermore, in these works there are a vast number of opinionsand expressions introduced by the interlocutors, who often belongto antagonistic schools of philosophy, and for which, of course, Plato is not to be held responsible. Making allowance for thesefacts, and resolutely grappling with the many other difficultiesof the task, we shall now attempt to exhibit what we consider werethe real teachings of Plato in relation to the fate of the soul. This exposition, sketchy as it is, and open to question as it maybe in some particulars, is the carefully weighed result ofearnest, patient, and repeated study of all the relevant passages. In the first place, it is plain that Plato had a firm religiousand philosophical faith in the immortality of the soul, which wascontinually attracting his thoughts, making it a favorite themewith him and exerting no faint influence on his life. This faithrested both on ancient traditions, to which he frequently referswith invariable reverence, and on metaphysical reasonings, whichhe over and over presents in forms of conscientious elaboration. There are two tests of his sincerity of faith: first, that healways 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 thoughhe were a comic poet, would say that I am talking idly. "16 Again, referring to Homer's description of the judgments in Hades, hesays, "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in themost healthy condition. "17 "To a base man no man nor god is afriend on earth while living, nor under it when dead, " say thesouls of their ancestors to the living; "but live honorably, andwhen your destined fate brings you below you shall come to us asfriends to friends. "18 "We are plants, not of earth, but ofheaven. "19 We start, then, with the affirmation that Platohonestly and cordially believed in a future life. Secondly, his ethical and spiritual beliefs, like those of nearlyall the ancients, were closely interwoven with physical theoriesand local relations. The world to him consisted of two parts, thecelestial region of ideas, and the mundane region of materialphenomena, corresponding pretty well, as Lewes suggests, to ourmodern conception of heaven and earth. Near the close of thePhado, Socrates says that the earth is not of the kind andmagnitude 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 onedwelling in the bottom of the sea should think that he dwelt onthe sea, and, beholding the sun through the water, should imaginethat the sea was the heavens. So, if we could fly up to the summitof the air as fishes emerging from the sea to behold what is onthe earth here and emerge hence, we should know that the trueearth is there. The people there dwell with the gods, and seethings as they really are; and what the sea is to us the air is tothem, and what the air is to us the ether is to them. " Again, inthe tenth book of the Republic, eleventh chapter, the soul ismetaphorically said in the sea of this corporeal life to getstones and shell fish attached to it, and, fed on earth, to berendered to a great extent earthy, stony, and savage, like themarine Glaucus, some parts of whose body were broken off andothers worn away by the waves, while such quantities of shells, sea weed, and stones had grown to him that he more resembled abeast than a man. In keeping with the whole tenor of the Platonicteaching, this is a fine illustration of the fallen state of manin his vile environment of flesh here below. The soul, in itsearthly sojourn, embodied here, is as much mutilated and degradedfrom its equipped and pure condition in its lofty natal home, thearchetypal world of Truth above the base Babel of materialexistence, 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 encrustedshape and blind prowling in the monstrous deep. At another time Plato contrasts the situation of the soul on earthwith its situation in heaven by the famous comparison of the darkcave. He supposes men, unable to look upwards, dwelling in acavern which has an opening towards the light extending lengthwisethrough the top of the cavern. A great many images, carryingvarious objects and talking aloud, pass and repass along the edgeof the opening. Their shadows fall on the side of the cave below, in front of the dwellers there; also the echoes of their talksound back from the wall. Now, the men, never having been orlooked out of the cave, would suppose these shadows to be the realbeings, these echoes the real voices. As respects this figure, says Plato, we must compare ourselves with such persons. Thevisible region around us is the cave, the sun is the light, andthe soul's ascent into the region of mind is the ascent out of thecave and the contemplation of things above. 20 Still again, Plato describes the ethereal paths and motions of thegods, who, in their chariots, which are the planets and stars, ride through the universe, accompanied by all pure souls, "thefamily of true science, contemplating things as they really are. ""Reaching the summit, they proceed outside, and, standing on theback of heaven, its revolution carries them round, and they beholdthat supercelestial region which no poet here can ever sing of asit deserves. " In this archetypal world all souls of men havedwelt, though "few have memory enough left, " "after their fallhither, " "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 wasthen splendid to look on when we, in company with the gods, beheldthat blissful spectacle, and were initiated into that most blessedof all mysteries, which we celebrated when we were unaffected bythe evils that awaited us in time to come, and when we beheld, inthe pure light, perfect and calm visions, being ourselves pure andas yet unmasked with this shell of a body to which we are nowfettered. "21 To suppose all this employed by Plato as mere fancy and metaphoris to commit an egregious error. In studying an ancient author, wemust forsake the modern stand point of analysis, and envelopourselves in the ancient atmosphere of thought, where poetry andscience were as indistinguishably blended in the personal beliefsas oxygen and nitrogen are in the common air. We have not a doubtthat Plato means to teach, literally, that the soul was alwaysimmortal, and that in its anterior states of existence, in therealm of ideas on high, it was in the midst of those essentialrealities whose shifting shadows alone it can behold in its lapsedcondition and bodily imprisonment here. That he closelyintertwisted ethical with physical theories, spiritual destinieswith insphering localities, the fortunes of men with therevolutions of the earth and stars, is a fact which one can hardlyread the Timaus and fail to see; a fact which continuallyreappears. It is strikingly shown in his idea of the consummationof all things at regular epochs determined by the recurrence of agrand 20 Republic, lib. Vii. Cap. 1 4. 21 Phadrus, 56-58, 63, 64. revolution of the universe, a period vulgarly known under the nameof the "Platonic Year. "22 The second point, therefore, in thepresent explanation of Plato's doctrine of another life, is theconception that there is in the empyrean a glorious world ofincorruptible truth, beauty, and goodness, the place of the gods, the native haunt of souls; and that human souls, having yielded tobase attractions and sunk into bodies, are but banished sojournersin this phenomenal world of evanescent shadows and illusions, where they are "stung with resistless longings for the skies, andonly solaced by the vague and broken reminiscences of their formerstate. " Thirdly, Plato taught that after death an unerring judgment andcompensation await all souls. Every soul bears in itself the plainevidence of its quality and deeds, its vices and virtues; and inthe unseen state it will meet inevitable awards on its merits. "Togo to Hades with a soul full of crimes is the worst of allevils. "23 "When a man dies, he possesses in the other world adestiny suited to the life which he has led in this. "24 In thesecond book of the Republic he says, "We shall in Hades suffer thepunishment of our misdeeds here;" and he argues at much length theabsolute impossibility of in any way escaping this. The fact of afull reward for all wisdom and justice, a full retribution for allfolly and vice, is asserted unequivocally in scores of passages, most of them expressly connecting the former with the notion of anascent to the bright region of truth and intellect, the latterwith a descent to the black penal realm of Hades. Let the citationof a single further example suffice. "Some souls, being sentenced, go to places of punishment beneath the earth; others are borneupward to some region in heaven. "25 He proves the genuineness ofhis faith in this doctrine by continually urging it, in the mostearnest, unaffected manner, as an animating motive in theformation of character and the conduct of life, saying, "He whoneglects his soul will pass lamely through existence, and againpass into Hades, aimless and unserviceable. "26 The fourth and last step in this exposition is to show theparticular form in which Plato held his doctrine of futureretribution, the way in which he supposed the consequences ofpresent good and evil would appear hereafter. He received theOriental theory of transmigration. Souls are born over and over. The banishment of the wicked to Tartarus is provisional, apreparation for their return to incarnate life. The residence ofthe good in heaven is contingent, and will be lost the moment theyyield to carelessness or material solicitations. The circumstancesunder which they are reborn, the happiness or misery of theirrenewed existence, depend on their character and conduct in theirprevious career; and thus a poetic justice is secured. At theclose of the Timaus, Plato describes the whole animal kingdom asconsisting of degraded human souls, from "the tribe of birds, which were light minded souls, to the tribe of oysters, which havereceived the most remote habitations as a punishment of theirextreme 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 theloss or acquisition of intellect and folly. " The general doctrineof metempsychosis is stated and implied very frequently in many ofthe Platonic dialogues. Some recent writers have tried to explainthese representations as figures of speech, not intended toportray the literal facts, but merely to hint their moralequivalents. Such persons seem to us to hold Plato's pages in thefull glare of the nineteenth century and read them in thephilosophic spirit of Bacon and Comte, instead of holding them inthe old shades of the Academy and pondering them in the marvellingspirit of Pythagoras and Empedocles. We are led by the following considerations to think that Platoreally 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 hesets forth, without any such qualification or guard, with so muchearnestness and frequency, as a promise and a warning, that we areforced, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, tosuppose that he meant the statements as sober fact and not asmythical drapery. As with a parable, of course we need notinterpret all the ornamental details literally; but we must acceptthe central idea. And in the present case the fundamental thoughtis that of repeated births of the soul, each birth trailingretributive effects from the foregone. For example, the last fourchapters of the tenth book of the Republic contain the account ofErus, a Pamphylian, who, after lying dead on the battle field tendays, revived, and told what he had seen in the other state. Platoin the outset explicitly names this recital an "apologue. " Itrecounts a multitude of moral and physical particulars. Thesedetails may fairly enough be considered in some degreeas mythicaldrapery, or as the usual traditional painting; but the essentialconception running through the account, for the sake of which itis told, we are not at liberty to explain away as empty metaphor. Now, that essential conception is precisely this: that souls afterdeath are adjudged to Hades or to heaven as a recompense for theirsin or virtue, and that, after an appropriate sojourn in thoseplaces, they are born again, the former ascending, squalid andscarred, from beneath the earth, the latter descending, pure, fromthe sky. In perfect consonance with this conclusion is the moraldrawn by Plato from the whole narrative. He simply says, "If thecompany will be persuaded by me, considering the soul to beimmortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall alwayspersevere in the road which leads upwards. " Secondly, the conception of the metempsychosis is thoroughlycoherent with Plato's whole philosophy. If he was in earnest aboutany doctrine, it was the doctrine that all knowledge isreminiscence. The following declarations are his. "Soul is olderthan body. " "Souls are continually born over again from Hades intothis life. " "To search and learn is simply to revive the images ofwhat the soul saw in its pre existent state of being in the worldof realities. "27 Why should we hesitate to attribute a sincerebelief in the metempsychosis to the acknowledged author of thedoctrine that the soul lived in another world before appearinghere, and that its knowledge is but reminiscence? If born from theother world 27 Menexenus, 15. once, we may be many times; and then all that is wanted tocomplete the dogma of transmigration is the idea of a presidingjustice. Had not Plato that idea? Thirdly, the doctrine of a judicial metempsychosis was mostprofoundly rooted in the popular faith, as a strict verity, throughout the great East, ages before the time of Plato, and wasfamiliarly known throughout Greece in his time. It had beenimported thither by Musaus and Orpheus at an early period, wasafterwards widely recommended and established by the Pythagoreans, and was unquestionably held by many of Plato's contemporaries. Herefers once to those "who strongly believe that murderers who havegone to Hades will be obliged to come back and end their nextlives by suffering the same fate which they had before inflictedon others. "28 It is also a remarkable fact that he states theconditions of transmigration, and the means of securing exemptionfrom it, in the same way that the Hindus have from immemorialtime: "The soul which has beheld the essence of truth remains freefrom harm until the next revolution; and if it can preserve thevision of the truth it shall always remain free from harm, " thatis, be exempt from birth; but "when it fails to behold the fieldof truth it falls to the earth and is implanted in a body. "29 Thisstatement and several others in the context corresponds preciselywith Hindu theology, which proclaims that the soul, upon attainingreal wisdom, that is, upon penetrating beneath illusions andgazing on reality, is freed from the painful necessity of repeatedbirths. Now, since the Hindus and the Pythagoreans held thedoctrine as a severe truth, and Plato states it in the identicalforms which they employed, and never implies that he is merelypoetizing, we naturally conclude that he, too, veritablyinculcates it as fact. Finally, we are the more confirmed in this supposition when wefind that his lineal disciples and most competent expounders, suchas Proclus, and nearly all his later commentators, such as Ritter, have so understood him. The great chorus of his interpreters, fromPlotinus to Leroux, with scarcely a dissentient voice, approve theopinion pronounced by the learned German historian of philosophy, that "the conception of the metempsychosis is so closelyinterwoven both with his physical system and with his ethical asto justify the conviction that Plato looked upon it as legitimateand valid, and not as a merely figurative exposition of the soul'slife after death. " To sum up the whole in one sentence: Platotaught with grave earnestness the immortality of the soul, subjectto a discriminating retribution, which opened for its temporaryresidences three local regions, heaven, earth, and Hades, andwhich 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 wickedsouls; 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 hasbeen the subject of innumerable debates from his own time untilnow. It is certainly a most ominous fact that his great name hasbeen cited as authority for rejecting the doctrine of a futurelife 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 weightyrepresentatives of every generation of his disciples. Antagonisticadvocates have collected from his works a large number of varyingstatements, endeavoring to distinguish between the literal and thefigurative, the esoteric and the popular. It is not worth ourwhile here, either for their intrinsic interest or for theirhistoric importance, to quote the passages and examine thearguments. All that is required for our purpose may be expressedin the language of Ritter, who has carefully investigated thewhole subject: "No passage in his extant works is decisive; but, from the general context of his doctrine, it is clear that he hadno conception of the immortality of any individual rationalentity. "31 It would take a whole volume instead of a chapter to set forth themultifarious contrasting tenets of individual Greek philosophers, from the age of Pherecydes to that of Iamblichus, in relation to afuture life. Not a few held, with Empedocles, that human life is apenal state, the doom of such immortal souls as for guilt havebeen disgraced and expelled from heaven. "Man is a fallen godcondemned to wander on the earth, sky aspiring but sense clouded. "Purged by a sufficient penance, he returns to his former godlikeexistence. "When, leaving this body, thou comest to the freeether, thou shalt be no longer a mortal, but an undying god. "Notions of this sort fairly represent no small proportion of thespeculations upon the fate of the soul which often reappearthroughout the course of Greek literature. Another class ofphilosophers 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 ofgods: 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? Howhas the earth found room for all the bodies buried in it? Thesolution of the latter problem will solve the former. The corpseturns to dust and makes space for another: so the spirit, letloose into the air, after a while dissolves, and is either renewedinto another soul or absorbed into the universe. Thus room is madefor succession. "33 These passages, it will be observed, leave thesurvival of the soul at all entirely hypothetical, and, evensupposing it to survive, allow it but a temporary duration. Suchwas the common view of the great sect of the Stoics. They allagreed that there was no real immortality for the soul; but theydiffered greatly as to the time of its dissolution. In the wordsof Cicero, "Diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant:" they saysouls endure for a long time, but not forever. Cleanthes taughtthat the intensity of existence after death would depend on thestrength or weakness of the particular soul. Chrysippus held thatonly the souls of the wise and good would survive at all. 34Panatius said the soul always died with the body, because it wasborn with it, which he proved by the resemblances of children'ssouls to those of their parents. 35 Seneca has a great manycontradictory 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, isthat 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, soought we to consider our present life as a preparation for thelife 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 stricteternity of the soul, and the Stoics, like Poseidonius, whobelieved 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 ofbelievers in a future life, namely, the ignorant body of thepeople, who credited, more or less fully, the common fablesconcerning Hades; and an educated body of select minds, who, whilecasting off the popular superstitions, yet clung tenaciously tothe great fact of immortality in some form or other, withoutattempting 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 offirm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme andparticulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. Athousand current allusions and statements in the generalliterature of those times prove the actual existence of a commonand literal belief in Hades with all its accompaniments. This wasfar from being, in the average apprehension, a mere myth. Platosays, "Many, of their own accord, have wished to descend intoHades, induced by the hope of there seeing and being with thosethey have loved. "39 He also says, "When a man is about to die, thestories of future punishment which he had formerly ridiculedtrouble him with fears of their truth. "40 And that frightfulaccounts of hell really swayed and terrified the people, even solate as the time of the Roman republic, appears from the earnestand elaborate arguments employed by various writers to refutethem. The same thing is shown by the religious ritual enacted atfunerals and festivals, the forms of public and private worshipobserved till after the conversion of Constantine. The cake ofrice and honey borne in the dead hand for Cerberus, the periodicalofferings to the ghosts of the departed, as at the festivalscalled Feralia and Parentalia, 41 the pictures of the scenery ofthe under world, hung in the temples, of which there was a famousone by Polygnotus, 42 all imply a literal crediting of the vulgardoctrine. Altars were set up on the spots where Tiberius and CaiusGracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honorof their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived inthe second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium astone covered pit which was supposed to be the 36 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften. Commentarius quo Stoicorum Sententia; de Animorum post mortemStatu 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 torise out into the upper world. 43 Apuleius describes, in histreatise on "the god of Socrates, " the Roman conceptions of thedeparted 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 wasa lar or a larva, it was named "manes. " The lares were mildhousehold gods to their posterity. The larva were wandering, frightful shapes, harmless to the pious, but destructive to thereprobate. 44 The belief in necromancy is well known to have prevailedextensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes representsthe coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "seehis own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man withbreath alone. "45 In Latin literature no popular terror is morefrequently alluded to or exemplified than the dread of seeingghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom thatappeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. Itpervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote thefollowing 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 beingcaused by a synod of ghosts assembled under ground! It is one ofthe best of the numerous jokes attributed to the great Samian; agood nut for the spirit rappers to crack. There is an epigram byDiogenes Laertius, on one Lycon, who died of the gout: "He who before could not so much as walk alone, The whole longroad to Hades travell'd in one night!" Philostratus declares that the shade of Apollonius appeared to askeptical disciple of his and said, "The soul is immortal. "47 Itis unquestionable that the superstitious fables about the underworld and ghosts had a powerful hold, for a very long period, uponthe Greek and Roman imagination, and were widely accepted asfacts. At the same time, there were many persons of more advanced cultureto whom such coarse and fanciful representations had becomeincredible, but who still held loyally to the simple idea of thesurvival of the soul. They cherished a strong expectation ofanother life, although they rejected the revolting form anddrapery in which the doctrine was usually set forth. Xenophon putsthe following speech into the mouth of the expiring Cyrus: "I wasnever able, my children, to persuade myself that the soul, as longas it was in a mortal body, lived, but when it was removed fromthis, that it died; neither could I believe that the soul ceasedto think when separated from the unthinking and senseless body;but it seemed to me most probable that when pure and free from anyunion 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 andcuriosity were so excited by Plato's writings that he committedsuicide to test the fact of futurity. Callimachus tells the storyneatly: "Cleombrotus, the Ambracian, having said, 'Farewell, O sun!'leap'd from a lofty wall into the world Of ghosts. No deadly illhad chanced to him at all; But he had read in Plato's book uponthe soul. " 49 The falling of Cato on his sword at Utica, after carefullyperusing the Phado, is equally familiar. In the case of Cicero, too, notwithstanding his fluctuations offeeling and the obvious contradictions of sentiment in some of hisletters and his more deliberate essays, it is, upon the whole, plain enough that, while he always regarded the vulgar notions aspuerile falsehoods, the hope of a glorious life to come waspowerful in him. This may be stated as the result of a patientinvestigation and balancing of all that he says on the subject, and of the circumstances under which he says it. To cite andcriticize the passages here would occupy too much space to toolittle profit. At the siege of Jerusalem, Titus made a speech to his soldiers, inthe course of it saying to them, "Those souls which are severedfrom their fleshly bodies by the sword in battle, are received bythe pure ether and joined to that company which are placed amongthe stars. "50 The beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche, thatloveliest of all the myths concerning the immortality of the soul, was a creation by no means foreign to the prevalent ideas andfeelings of the time when it was written. The "Dissertations" ofMaximus Tyrius abound with sentences like the following. "Thisvery thing which the multitude call death is the birth of a newlife, and the beginning of immortality. "51 "When Pherecydes laysick, conscious of spiritual energy, he cared not for bodilydisease, his soul standing erect and looking for release from itscumbersome vestment. So a man in chains, seeing the walls of hisprison crumbling, waits for deliverance, that from the darkness inwhich he has been buried he may soar to the ethereal regions andbe filled with glorious light. "52 The conception of man as a member of the cosmic family of gods andgenii was known to all the classic philosophers, and was cherishedby the larger portion of them. Pindar affirms one origin for godsand men. Plato makes wise souls accompany the gods in theirexcursions about the sky. Cicero argues that heaven, and notHades, is the destination of the soul at death, because the soul, being lighter than the earthly elements surrounding it here, wouldrise aloft through the natural force of gravitation. 53 Plutarchsays, "Demons are the spies and scouts of the gods, wandering andcircuiting 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 theseproduced in the Greek and Roman imagination a profound sense ofinvisible beings, a sense which was further intensified by thepopular personifications of all natural forces, as in fountainsand trees, full of lapsing naiads and rustling dryads. Anillustrative fact is furnished by an effect of the tradition thatThetis, snatching the body of Achilles from the funeral pile, conveyed him to Leuke, an island in the Black Sea. The marinerssailing by often fancied they saw his mighty shade flitting alongthe shore in the dusk of evening. 54 But a passage in Hesiod yieldsa more adequate illustration: "When the mortal remains of thosewho flourished during the golden age were hidden beneath theearth, their souls became beneficent demons, still hovering overthe world they once inhabited, and still watching, clothed in thinair and gliding rapidly through every region of the earth, asguardians over the affairs of men. "55 But there were always some who denied the common doctrine of afuture life and scoffed at its physical features. Through theabsurd extravagances of poets and augurs, and through the growthof critical thought, this unbelief went on increasing from thedays of Anaxagoras, when it was death to call the sun a ball offire, to the days of Catiline, when Julius Casar could be chosenPontifex Maximus, almost before the Senate had ceased toreverberate his voice openly asserting that death was the utterend of man. Plutarch dilates upon the wide skepticism of theGreeks as to the infernal world, at the close of his essay on themaxim, "Live concealed. " The portentous growth of irreverentunbelief, the immense change of feeling from awe to ribaldry, ismade 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 fromthe banks of the Styx, swimming after Charon's boat, climbing intoit upon the shoulders of the tyrant Megapenthes and tormenting himthe whole way. Pliny, in his Natural History, affirms that deathis an everlasting sleep. 56 The whole great sect of the Epicureansunited in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridiculeand argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended bythe consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature ofThings. " Horace, 57 Juvenal, 58 Persius, 59 concur in scouting at thetales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vastaudiences perceptibly tremble. 60 And Cicero asks, "What old womanis so insane as to fear these things?"61 There were two classes of persons who sought differently to freemankind from the terrors which had invested the whole prospect ofdeath and another world. The first were the materialists, whoendeavored to prove that death was to man the absolute end ofevery thing. Secondly, there were the later Platonists, whomaintained that this world is the only Hades, that heaven is ourhome, that all death is ascent to better life. "To remain on highwith the gods is life; to descend into this world is death, adescent into Orcus, " they said. The following couplet, of anunknown date, is translated from the Greek Anthology: "Diogenes, whose tub stood by the road, Now, being dead, has thestars 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. Theriver of oblivion is the wandering of the mind forgetting themajesty of its former life and thinking a residence in the bodythe only life. Phlegethon is the fires of wrath and desire. Acheron is retributive sadness. Cocytus is wailing tears. Styx isthe whirlpool of hatreds. The vulture eternally tearing the liveris the torment of an evil conscience. "62 To the ancient Greek in general, death was a sad doom. When helost a friend, he sighed a melancholy farewell after him to thefaded shore of ghosts. Summoned himself, he departed with alingering look at the sun, and a tearful adieu to the bright dayand the green earth. To the Roman, death was a grim reality. Tomeet it himself he girded up his loins with artificial firmness. But at its ravages among his friends he wailed in anguishedabandonment. To his dying vision there was indeed a future; butshapes of distrust and shadow stood upon its disconsolate borders;and, when the prospect had no horror, he still shrank from itspoppied 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 theseventh century. A more energetic and trenchant faith than it wasfor eight hundred years has not appeared among men. Finallyexpelled from its startling encampments in Spain and theArchipelago, it still rules with tenacious hold over Turkey, apart of Tartary, Palestine, Persia, Arabia, and large portions ofAfrica. At this moment, as to adherence and influence, it issubordinate only to the two foremost religious systems in theworld, Buddhism and Christianity. The dogmatic structure of Islamas a theology and its practical power as an experimental religionoffer a problem of the gravest interest. But we must hasten on togive an exposition of merely those elements in it which areconnected with its doctrine of a future life. It is a matter of entire notoriety that there is but the leastamount of originality in the tenets of the Mohammedan faith. Theblending together of those tenets was distinctive, the unifyingsoul breathed into them was a new creation, and the great aim towhich the whole was subordinated was peculiar; but the componentdoctrines themselves, with slight exception, existed before asavowed principles in the various systems of belief and practicethat prevailed around. Mohammed adopted many of the notions andcustoms of the pagan Arabs, the central dogma of the Jews as tothe unity of God, most of the traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures, innumerable fanciful conceits of the Rabbins, 1 whole doctrines ofthe Magians with their details, some views of the Gnostics, andextensive portions of a corrupted Christianity, grouping themtogether with many modifications of his own, and such additions ashis genius afforded and his exigencies required. The motleystrangely results in a compact and systematic working faith. The Islamites are divided into two great sects, the Sunnees andthe Sheeahs. The Arabs, Tartars, and Turks are Sunnees, aredominant in numbers and authority, are strict literalists, and arecommonly considered the orthodox believers. The Persians areSheeahs, are inferior in point of numbers, are somewhat freer incertain interpretations, placing a mass of tradition, like theJewish Mischna, on a level with the Koran, 2 and are usuallyregarded as heretical. To apply our own ecclesiastical phraseologyto them, the latter are the Moslem Protestants, the former theMoslem Catholics. Yet in relation to almost every thing whichshould seem at all fundamental or vital they agree in theirteachings. Their differences in general are upon trivial opinions, or especially upon ritual particulars. For instance, the Sheeahssend all the Sunnees to hell because in their ablutions they washfrom the elbow to the finger tips; the Sunnees return thecompliment to their rival sectarists because they wash from thefinger tips to the elbow. Within these two grand denominations ofSheeah and 1 Rabbi Abraham Geiger, Prize Essay upon the question, proposed bythe University of Bonn, "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthumaufgenommen?" 2 Merrick, Translation of the Sheeah Traditions of Mohammed in theHyat ul Kuloob, note x. Sunnee are found a multitude of petty sects, separated from eachother on various questions of speculative faith and ceremonialpractice. Some take the Koran alone, and that in its plain literalsense, as their authority. Others read the Koran in theexplanatory light of a vast collection of parables, proverbs, legends, purporting to be from Mohammed. There is no less than ascore of mystic allegorizing sects3 who reduce almost every thingin the Koran to symbol, or spiritual signification, and some ofwhom as the Sufis are the most rapt and imaginative of all theenthusiastic devotees in the world. A cardinal point in the Mohammedan faith is the asserted existenceof angels, celestial and infernal. Eblis is Satan. He was an angelof lofty rank; but when God created Adam and bade all the angelsworship him, Eblis refused, saying, "I was created of fire, he ofclay: I am more excellent and will not bow to him. "4 Upon this Godcondemned Eblis and expelled him from Paradise. He then became theunappeasable foe and seducing destroyer of men. He is the fatherof those swarms of jins, or evil spirits, who crowd all hearts andspace with temptations and pave the ten thousand paths to hellwith lures for men. The next consideration preliminary to a clear exhibition of ourspecial subject, is the doctrine of predestination, theunflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. Thebreath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and itsvery name of Islam means "Submission. " In heaven the prophet saw aprodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table, " on which werewritten the decrees of all events between the morning of creationand the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preachingwas the proclamation of the one true God whose volition bears theirresistible destiny of the universe; and inseparably associatedwith this was an intense hatred of idolatry, fanned by the wingsof God's wrath and producing a fanatic sense of a divinecommission to avenge him on his insulters and vindicate for himhis rightful worship from every nation. There is an apparentconflict between the Mohammedan representations of God's absolutepredestination of all things, and the abundant exhortations to allmen to accept the true faith and bring forth good works, and thusmake sure of an acceptable account in the day of judgment. Theformer make God's irreversible will all in all. The latter seem toplace alternative conditions before men, and to imply in them apower of choice. But this is a contradiction inseparable from thediscussion of God's infinite sovereignty and man's individualfreedom. The inconsistency is as gross in Augustine and Calvinismas it is in the Arabian lawgiver and the creed of the Sunnees. TheKoran, instead of solving the difficulty, boldly cuts it, and doesthat in exactly the same way as the thorough Calvinist. God hasrespectively elected and reprobated all the destined inhabitantsof heaven and hell, unalterably, independently of their choice oraction. At the same time, reception of the true faith, and a lifeconformed to it, are virtually necessary for salvation, because itis decreed that all the elect shall profess and obey the truefaith. Their obedient reception of it proves them to be elected. On the other hand, it is foreordained that none of the reprobateshall become disciples and followers of the Prophet. Theirrejection 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 originalreprobation. As the Koran itself expresses it, salvation is for"all who are willing to be warned; but they shall not be warnedunless 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 orspurned in the eager affray of affairs and the imminent straits ofthe soul. While in dogma and theory the profession of an orthodoxbelief, together with scrupulous prayer, fasting, alms, and thepilgrimage to Mecca, or the absence of these things, simplydenotes the foregone determinations of God in regard to the givenindividuals, in practice and feeling the contrasted beliefs andcourses of conduct are held to obtain heaven and hell. And wefind, accordingly, that Mohammed spoke as if God's primevalordination had fixed all things forever, whenever he wished toawaken in his followers reckless valor and implicit submission. "Whole armies cannot slay him who is fated to die in his bed. " Onthe contrary, when he sought to win converts, to move his hearersby threatenings and persuasions, he spoke as if every thingpertaining to human weal and woe, present and future, rested onconditions 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 ofthe infernal fire. " Practically speaking, the essence ofpropagandist Islam was a sentiment like this. All men who do notfollow Mohammed are accursed misbelievers. We are God's chosenavengers, the commissioned instruments for reducing his foes tosubmission. Engaged in that work, the hilts of all our scimitarsare in his hand. He snatches his servant martyr from the battlefield to heaven. Thus the weapons of the unbelievers send theirslain to paradise, while the weapons of the believers send theirslain to hell. Up, then, with the crescent banner, and, drippingwith idolatrous gore, let it gleam over mountain and plain tillour sickles have reaped the earth! "The sword is the key of heavenand the key of hell. A drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, anight spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fastingand prayer. Whoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven. In theday of judgment his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion andodoriferous as musk. "7 An infuriated zeal against idolaters andunbelievers inflamed the Moslem heart, a fierce martial enthusiasmfilled the Moslem soul, and tangible visions of paradise and hellfloated, illuminate, throughtheMoslem imagination. And so from thePersian Gulf to the Caucasus, from Sierra Leone to the Pyrenees, the polity of Mohammed overran the nations, with the Koran in itsleft hand, the exterminating blade in its right, one thunder shoutstill breaking from its awful lips: "Profess Islam, and live, withthe clear prospect of eternal bliss beyond life; reject it, anddie, with the full certainty of eternal anguish beyond death. "When the crusading Christians and the Saracenic hosts met inbattle, the conflict was the very frenzy of fanaticism. "There thequestion of salvation or damnation lay on the ground between themarshalled armies, to be fought for and carried by the stronger. "Christ and Allah encountered, and the endless fate of theiropposed 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 theappalling ideas of the invisible world so much and so distinctlymingled with the fury of mortal strife as in this instance. To theeyes of Turk and Arab the smoke of the infernal pit appeared tobreak up from the ground in the rear of the infidel lines. As thesquadrons of the faithful moved on to the charge, that pit yawnedto receive the miscreant host; and in chasing the foe theprophet's champions believed they were driving their antagonistsdown the very slopes of perdition. When at length steel clashedupon steel and the yell of death shook the air, the strife was notso much between arm and arm as between spirit and spirit, and eachdeadly thrust was felt to pierce the life at once of the body andof the soul. "8 That terrible superstition prevails almost universally among theMussulmans, designated the "Beating in the Sepulchre, " or theexamination and torture of the body in the grave. As soon as acorpse is interred, two black and livid angels, called theExaminers, whose names are Munkeer and Nakeer, appear, and orderthe dead person to sit up and answer certain questions as to hisfaith. If he give satisfactory replies, they suffer him to rest inpeace, refreshed by airs from paradise; but if he prove to havebeen an unbeliever or heretic, they beat him on the temples withiron maces till he roars aloud with pain and terror. They thenpress the earth on the body, which remains gnawed and stung bydragons and scorpions until the last day. Some sects give afigurative explanation of these circumstances. The utter denial ofthe whole representation is a schismatic peculiarity of the sectof Motozallites. But all true believers, both Sunnee and Sheeah, devoutly accept it literally. The commentators declare that it isimplied in the following verse of the Koran itself: "How, therefore, will it be with them when they die and the angels shallstrike their faces and their backs?" 9 The intermediate state of souls from the time of death until theresurrection has been the subject of extensive speculation andargument with the Islamites. The souls of the prophets, it isthought, are admitted directly to heaven. The souls of martyrs, according to a tradition received from Mohammed, rest in heaven inthe crops of green birds who eat of the fruits and drink of therivers there. As to the location of the souls of the common crowdof the faithful, the conclusions are various. Some maintain thatthey and the souls of the impious alike sleep in the dust untilthe end, when Israfil's blasts will stir them into life to bejudged. But the general and orthodox impression is that they tarryin one of the heavens, enjoying a preparatory blessedness. Thesouls of the wicked, it is commonly held, after being refused aplace in the tomb and also being repulsed from heaven, are carrieddown to the lower abyss, and thrown into a dungeon under a greenrock, or into the jaw of Eblis, there to be treated withforetastes of their final doom until summoned to the judgment. 10 A very prominent doctrine in the Moslem creed is that of theresurrection of the body. This is a central feature in theorthodox faith. It is expounded in all the emphatic details of itsgross literality by their authoritative doctors, and is dwelt uponwith unwearied reiteration by the Koran. True, some minorheretical 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 physicalshape. The intrinsic unnaturalness and improbability of the dogmawere evidently felt by Mohammed and his expositors; and all themore they strove to bolster it up and enforce its reception byvehement affirmations and elaborate illustrations. In the secondchapter of the Koran it is related that, in order to remove theskepticism of Abraham as to the resurrection, God wrought themiracle of restoring four birds which had been cut in pieces andscattered. In chapter seventh, God says, "We bring rain upon awithered country and cause the fruits to spring forth. Thus willwe bring the dead from their graves. " The prophet frequentlyrebukes those who reject this belief. "What aileth them, that theybelieve not the resurrection?"11 "Is not He who created man ableto quicken the dead?"12 "The scoffers say, 'Shall we be raised tolife, and our forefathers too, after we have become dust andbones? This is nothing but sorcery. '"13 First, Israfil will blowthe blast of consternation. After an interval, he will blow theblast of examination, at which all creatures will die and thematerial universe will melt in horror. Thirdly, he will blow theblast of resurrection. Upon that instant, the assembled souls ofmankind will issue from his trumpet, like a swarm of bees, andfill the atmosphere, seeking to be reunited to their formerbodies, which will then be restored, even to their very hairs. The day of judgment immediately follows. This is the dreadful dayfor which all other days were made; and it will come withblackness and consternation to unbelievers and evil doers, butwith peace and delight to the faithful. The total race of man willbe gathered in one place. Mohammed will first advance in front, tothe right hand, as intercessor for the professors of Islam. Thepreceding prophets will appear with their followers. Gabriel willhold suspended a balance so stupendous that one scale will coverparadise, the other hell. "Hath the news of the overwhelming dayof judgment reached thee?"14 "Whoever hath wrought either good orevil of the weight of an ant shall in that day behold the same. "15An infallible scrutiny shall search and weigh every man's deeds, and exact justice shall be done, and no foreign help can avail anyone. "One soul shall not be able to obtain any thing in behalf ofanother soul. "16 "Every man of them on that day shall havebusiness enough of his own to employ his thoughts. "17 In all theMohammedan representations of this great trial and of theprinciples which determine its decisions, no reference is made tothe doctrine of predestination, but all turns on strict equity. Reckoning a reception or rejection of the true faith as a crowningmerit or demerit, the only question is, Do his good worksoutweigh, by so much as a hair, his evil works? If so, he goes tothe right; if not, he must take the left. The solitary trace offatalism or rather favoritism is this: that no idolater, once inhell, can ever possibly be released, while no Islamite, howeverwicked, can be damned eternally. The punishment of unbelievers iseverlasting, that of believers limited. The opposite of thisopinion is a great heresy with the generality of the Moslems. Somesay the judgment will require but the twinkling of an eye; othersthat it will occupy fifty thousand years, during which time thesun will be drawn from its sheath and burn insufferably, and thewicked 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 trythe passage of al Sirat, a bridge thinner than a hair, sharperthan a razor, and hotter than flame, spanning in one frail archthe immeasurable distance, directly over hell, from earth toparadise. Some affect a metaphorical solution of this air severingcauseway, and take it merely as a symbol of the true Sirat, orbridge of this world, namely, the true faith and obedience; butevery orthodox Mussulman firmly holds it as a physical fact to besurmounted in the last day. 18 Mohammed leading the way, thefaithful and righteous will traverse it with ease and as quicklyas a flash of lightning. The thin edge broadens beneath theirsteps, the surrounding support of convoying angels' wings hidesthe fire lake below from their sight, and they are swiftlyenveloped in paradise. But as the infidel with his evil deedsessays to cross, thorns entangle his steps, the lurid glarebeneath blinds him, and he soon topples over and whirls into theblazing abyss. In Dr. Frothingham's fine translation fromRuckert, "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 ofall his sin, rushing on his sight. But when forward steps thejust, he is safe e'en here: Round him gathers holy trust, anddrives back his fear. Each good deed's a mist, that wide, goldenborders gets; And for him the bridge, each side, shines withparapets. " Between hell and paradise is an impassable wall, al Araf, separating the tormented from the happy, and covered with thosesouls whose good works exactly counterpoise their evil works, andwho are, consequently, fitted for neither place. The prophet andhis expounders have much to say of this narrow intermediateabode. 19 Its lukewarm denizens are contemptuously spoken of. It issaid that Araf seems hell to the blessed but paradise to thedamned; for does not every thing depend on the point of view? The Mohammedan descriptions of the doom of the wicked, thetorments of hell, are constantly repeated and are copious andvivid. Reference to chapter and verse would be superfluous, sincealmost every page of the Koran abounds in such tints and tones asthe following. "The unbelievers shall be companions of hell fireforever. " "Those who disbelieve we will surely cast to be broiledin hell fire: so often as their skins shall be well burned we willgive them other skins in exchange, that they may taste the sharpertorment. " "I will fill hell entirely full of genii and men. " "Theyshall be dragged on their faces into hell, and it shall be saidunto them, 'Taste ye that torment of hell fire which ye rejectedas a falsehood. '" "The unbelievers shall be driven into hell bytroops. " "They shall be taken by the forelocks and the feet andflung into hell, where they shall drink scalding water. " "Theironly entertainment shall be boiling water, and they shall be fuelfor hell. " "The smoke of hell shall cast forth sparks as big astowers, resembling yellow camels in color. " "They who believe notshall 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 beatenwith maces of red hot iron. " "The true believers, lying oncouches, shall look down upon the infidels in hell and laugh themto scorn. " There is a tradition that a door shall be shown the damned openinginto paradise, but when they approach it, it shall be suddenlyshut, and the believers within will laugh. Pitiless and horribleas these expressions from the Koran are, they are mercifulcompared with the pictures in the later traditions, of womensuspended by their hair, their brains boiling, suspended by theirtongues, molten copper poured down their throats, bound hands andfeet and devoured piecemeal by scorpions, hung up by their heelsin flaming furnaces and their flesh cut off on all sides withscissors of fire. 20 Their popular teachings divide hell intoseven stories, sunk one under another. The first and mildest isfor the wicked among the true believers. The second is assigned tothe 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 thedeepest and worst belongs to the hypocrites of all religions. Thefirst hell shall finally be emptied and destroyed, on the releaseof the wretched believers there; but all the other hells willretain their victims eternally. If the visions of hell which filled the fancies of the faithfulwere material and glowing, equally so were their conceptions ofparadise. On this world of the blessed were lavished all thecharms so fascinating to the Oriental luxuriousness of sensuallanguor, and which the poetic Oriental imagination knew so wellhow to depict. As soon as the righteous have passed Sirat, theyobtain the first taste of their approaching felicity by arefreshing draught from "Mohammed's Pond. " This is a square lake, a month's journey in circuit, its water whiter than milk or silverand more fragrant than to be comparable to any thing known bymortals. As many cups are set around it as there are stars in thefirmament; and whoever drinks from it will never thirst more. Thencomes paradise, an ecstatic dream of pleasure, filled withsparkling streams, honeyed fountains, shady groves, preciousstones, all flowers and fruits, blooming youths, circulatinggoblets, black eyed houris, incense, brilliant birds, delightsomemusic, unbroken peace. 21 A Sheeah tradition makes the prophetpromise to Ali twelve palaces in paradise, built of gold andsilver bricks laid in a cement of musk and amber. The pebblesaround them are diamonds and rubies, the earth saffron, itshillocks camphor. Rivers of honey, wine, milk, and water flowthrough the court of each palace, their banks adorned with variousresplendent trees, interspersed with bowers consisting each of onehollow transparent pearl. In each of these bowers is an emeraldthrone, with a houri upon it arrayed in seventy green robes andseventy yellow robes of so fine a texture, and she herself sotransparent, that the marrow of her ankle, notwithstanding robes, flesh, and bone, is as distinctly visible as a flame in a glassvessel. Each houri has seventy locks of hair, every one under thecare of a maid, who perfumes it with a censer which God has madeto smoke with incense without the presence of fire; and no mortalhas 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 isplain, was strikingly adapted to win and work fervidly on theminds of the imaginative, voluptuous, indolent, passionate racesof the Orient. It possesses a nucleus of just and natural moralconviction and sentiment, around which is grouped a composite of ascore of superstitions afloat before the rise of Islam, set offwith the arbitrary drapery of a poetic fancy, colored by thepeculiar idiosyncrasies of Mohammed, emphasized to suit hisspecial ends, and all inflamed with a vindictive and propagandistanimus. Any word further in explanation of the origin, or inrefutation of the soundness, of this system of belief once soimminently aggressive and still so widely established would seemto be superfluous. CHAPTER XII. EXPLANATORY SURVEY OF THE FIELD AND ITS MYTHS. SURVEYING the thought of mankind upon the subject of a futurelife, as thus far examined, one can hardly fail to be struck bythe 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 thedevelopment of his experience. But the forms and accompaniments ofthe doctrine, the immense diversity of dress and colors it appearsin, are subject to all the laws and accidents that mould andclothe the products within any other department of thought andliterature. We must refer the ethnic conceptions of a future stateto the same sources to which other portions of poetry andphilosophy 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 ofauthoritative poets, priests, and philosophers on one side, and ofthe feeling, faith, and thought of credulous multitudes and docilepupils on the other. In the light of these great centres ofintellectual activity, parents of intellectual products, there isnothing pertaining to the subject before us, however curious, which may not be intelligibly explained, seen naturally to springout of certain conditions of man's mind and experience as relatedwith the life of society and the phenomena of the world. So far as the views of the future life set forth in the religionsof the ancient nations constitute systematically developed andarranged schemes of doctrine and symbol, the origin of themtherefore needs no further explanation than is furnished by acontemplation of the regulated exercise of the speculative andimaginative faculties. But so far as those representations containunique, grotesque, isolated particulars, their production isaccounted for by this general law: In the early stages of humanculture, when the natural sensibilities are intensely preponderantin power, and the critical judgment is in abeyance, whateverstrongly moves the soul causes a poetical secretion on the part ofthe imagination. 1 Thus the rainbow is personified; a waterfall issupposed to be haunted by spiritual beings; a volcano with fierycrater is seen as a Cyclops with one flaming eye in the centre ofhis forehead. This law holds not only in relation to impressiveobjects or appearances in nature, but also in relation tooccurrences, traditions, usages. In this way innumerable mythsarise, explanatory or amplifying thoughts secreted by thestimulated imagination and then narrated as events. Sometimesthese tales are given and received in good faith for truth, asGrote abundantly proves in his volume on Legendary Greece;sometimes they are clearly the gleeful play of the fancy, as whenit is said that the hated infant Herakles having been put toHera's breast as she lay asleep in heaven, she, upon waking, thrust him away, and the lacteal fluid, streaming athwart thefirmament, originated the Milky Way! To apply this law to ourspecial 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 acrude, sensitive people, in an early stage of the world, with noelaborate discipline of religious thought, than the facts andphenomena of death? Plainly, around this centre there must bedeposited a vast quantity of ideas and fantasies. The task is todiscriminate them, trace their individual origin, and classifythem. One of the most interesting and difficult questions connected withthe subject before us is this: What, in any given time and place, were the limits of the popular belief? How much of the currentrepresentations in relation to another life were held as strictverity? What portions were regarded as fable or symbolism? It isobvious enough that among the civilized nations of antiquity thedistinctions of literal statement, allegory, historic report, embellished legend, satire, poetic creation, philosophicalhypothesis, religious myth, were more or less generally known. Forexample, when Aschylus makes one of his characters say, "Yondercomes a herald: so Dust, Clay's thirsty sister, tells me, " thepersonification, unquestionably, was as purposed and conscious asit is when a poet in the nineteenth century says, "Thirst divedfrom the brazen glare of the sky and clutched me by the throat. "So, too, when Homer describes the bag of Aolus, the winds, inpossession of the sailors on board Ulysses' ship, the halfhumorous allegory cannot be mistaken for religious faith. It isequally obvious that these distinctions were not always carefullyobserved, but were often confounded. Therefore, in respect to thefaith of primitive times, it is impossible to draw any broad, fixed lines and say conclusively that all on this side wasconsciously considered as fanciful play or emblem, all on thatside as earnest fact. Each particular in each case must beexamined by itself and be decided on its own merits by the lightand weight of the moral probabilities. For example, if there wasany historic basis for the myth of Herakles dragging Cerberus outof Hades, it was that this hero forcibly entered the Mysteries anddragged out to light the enactor of the part of the three headeddog. The aged North man, committing martial suicide rather thandie in his peaceful bed, undoubtedly accepted the ensanguinedpicture of Valhalla as a truth. Virgil, dismissing Aneas from theTartarean realm through "the ivory gate by which false dreams andfictitious visions are wont to issue, " plainly wrought as a poeton imaginative materials. It should be recollected that most of the early peoples had norigid formularies of faith like the Christian creeds. The writingspreserved to us are often rather fragments of individualspeculations and hopes than rehearsals of public dogmas. Plato isfar from revealing the contemporaneous belief of Greece in thesense in which Thomas Aquinas reveals the contemporaneous beliefof Christendom. In Egypt, Persia, Rome, among every culturedpeople, there were different classes of minds, the philosophers, the priests, the poets, the warriors, the common multitude, whosemodes of thinking were in contrast, whose methods of interpretingtheir ancestral traditions and the phenomena of human destiny werewidely apart, whose respective beliefs had far differentboundaries. The openly skeptical Euripides and Lucian are to beborne in mind as well as the apparently credulous Hesiod andHomer. Of course the Fables of Asop were not literally credited. Neither, as a general thing, were the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Withthe ancients, while there was a general national cast of faith, there were likewise varieties of individual and sectarian beliefand unbelief, skepticism and credulity, solemn reason andrecreative fancy. The people of Lystra, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, actually thought Barnabas and Paul were Zeus and Hermes, andbrought oxen and garlands to offer them the sacrifices appropriateto those deities. Peisistratus obtained rule over Athens bydressing a stately woman, by the name of Phye, as Athene, andpassing off her commands as those of the tutelary goddess. Herodotus ridicules the people for unsuspiciously accepting her. 2The incredibleness of a doctrine is no obstacle to a popularbelief in it. Whosoever thinks of the earnest reception of thedogma of transubstantiation the conversion of a wheaten wafer intothe infinite God by nearly three quarters of Christendom at thismoment, must permit the paradox to pass unchallenged. Doubtlessthe closing eye of many an expiring Greek reflected the pitilessold oarsman plying his frost cold boat across the Stygian ferry, and his failing ear caught the rush of the Phlegethonian surge. Itis equally certain that, at the same time, many another laughed atthese things as childish fictions, fitted only to scare "the babyof a girl. " Stricken memory, yearning emotion, kindled fancy, a sensitive andtimorous observation of natural phenomena, rustling leaves, wavering shadows, apparent effects of unknown causes, each is asuperstitious mother of beliefs. The Sonora Indians say thatdeparted souls dwell among the caves and rocks of the cliffs, andthat the echoes often heard there are their voices. Ruskinsuggests that the cause of the Greeks surrounding the lower worldresidence of Persephone with poplar groves was that "thefrailness, fragility, and inconstancy of the leafage of thepoplar tree resembled the fancied ghost people. " We can veryeasily imagine how, in the breeze at the entrance to somesubterranean descent, "A ghostly rank Of poplars, like a halted train of shades, Trembled. " The operations of fierce passions, hate, fright, and rage, in abrain boiling with blood and fire, make pictures which the savageafterwards holds in remembrance as facts. He does not byreflection consciously distinguish the internal acts and sights ofthe mind from objective verities. Barbarians as travellers andpsychologists have repeatedly observed usually pay great attentionto the vagaries of madmen, the doings and utterances of theinsane. These persons are regarded as possessed by higher beings. Their words are oracles: the horrible shapes, the grotesquescenes, which their disordered and inflamed faculties conjure up, are eagerly caught at, and such accounts of them as they are ableto make out are treasured up as revelations. This fact is of noslight importance as an element in the hinting basis of thebeliefs of uncultivated tribes. Many a vision of delirium, many araving medley of insanity, has been accepted as truth. 3 Anotherphenomenon, closely allied to the former, has wrought in a similarmanner and still more widely. It has been a common superstitionwith barbarous nations in every part of the world, from Timbuctooto 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 thebody lies, a dormant shell, wrapped in slumber. The power of thisinfluence in nourishing a copious credulity may easily beimagined. The origin of many notions touching a future state, found inliterature, is to be traced to those rambling thoughts and poeticreveries with which even the most philosophical minds, in certainmoods, indulge themselves. For example, Sir Isaac Newton "doubtswhether there be not superior intelligencies who, subject to theSupreme, oversee and control the revolutions of the heavenlybodies. " And Goethe, filled with sorrow by the death of Wieland, musing on the fate of his departed friend, solemnly surmised thathe had become the soul of a world in some far realm of space. Thesame mental exercises which supply the barbarian superstitionsreappear in disciplined minds, on a higher plane and in morerefined forms. Culture and science do not deliver us from allillusion and secure us sober views conformed to fact. Still, whatwe think amid the solid realities of waking life, fancy in hersleep disjointedly reverberates from hollow fields of dream. Themetaphysician or theologian, instead of resting contented withmere snatches and glimpses, sets himself deliberately to reasonout a complete theory. In these elaborate efforts many an opinionand metaphor, plausible or absurd, sweet or direful, is born andtakes its place. There is in the human mind a natural passion forcongruity and completeness, a passion extremely fertile incomplementary products. For example, the early Jewish notion ofliterally sitting down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the resurrection, was gradually developed by accretion ofassisting particulars into all the details of a consummatebanquet, at which Leviathan was to be the fish, Behemoth theroast, and so on. 4 In the construction of doctrines or ofdiscourses, one thought suggests, one premise or conclusionnecessitates, another. This genetic application is sometimesplainly to be seen even in parts of incoherent schemes. Forinstance, the conception that man has returned into this life fromanterior experiences of it is met by the opposing fact that hedoes not remember any preceding career. The explanatory idea is atonce hit upon of a fountain of oblivion a river Lethe from whichthe disembodied soul drinks ere it reappears. Once establish inthe popular imagination the conception of the Olympian synod ofgods, and a thousand dramatic tales of action and adventure, appropriate to the characters of the divine personages, willinevitably follow. The interest, cunning, and authority of priesthoods are anothersource of prevailing opinions concerning a life to come. Manynations, early and late, have been quite under the spiritualdirection of priests, and have believed almost every thing theysaid. Numerous motives conspire to make the priest concoctfictions and exert his power to gain credence for them. He musthave an alluringly colored elysium to reward his obedientdisciples. When his teachings are rejected and his authoritymocked, his class isolation and incensed pride find a naturalsatisfaction in threatening the reprobate aliens that a rain offire will one day wash them down the smoking gulfs of sulphur. TheMaronites, a sect of Catholic Christians in Syria, purchase oftheir priests a few yards of land in heaven, to secure a residencethere when 4 Corrodi, Gesch. Des Chiliasmns, th. I. Abschn. 15: Gastmahl desLeviathan. they die. 5 The Siamese Buddhists accumulate silver and bury it insecret, to supply the needs of the soul during its wandering inthe separate state. "This foolish opinion robs the state ofimmense sums. The lords and rich men erect pyramids over thesetreasures, and for their greater security place them in charge ofthe talapoins!"6 When, for some reason or other, either as amatter of neatness and convenience, or as a preventive of mutualclawing, or for some to us unimaginable end, the authoritativeSkald wished to induce the Northmen to keep their nails close cut, he devised the awful myth of the ship Nagelfra, and made his rawminded people swallow it as truth. The same process was followedunquestionably in a thousand other cases, in different particularsof thought and aim, in different parts of the world. In a bird's eye survey of the broad field we have traversed, onecannot help noticing the marked influence of the present sceneryand habits, history and associations, of a people in deciding thecharacter of their anticipations of the future. The Esquimauxparadise is surrounded by great pots full of boiled walrus meat. The Turk's heaven is a gorgeously idealized pleasure garden orcelestial harem. As the apparition of a man wanders into the nextstate, a shadow of his present state floats over into the futurewith him. The Hereafter is the image flung by the Now. Heaven andhell are the upward and downward echoes of the earth. Like thespectre of the Brocken on the Hartz Mountains, our ideas ofanother life are a reflection of our present experience thrown incolossal on the cloud curtains of futurity. Charles Lamb, pushingthis elucidating observation much further, says, "The shapings ofour heavens are the modifications of our constitutions. " A tribeof savages has been described who hoped to go after death to theirforefathers in an under ground elysium whose glory consisted ineternal drunkenness, that being their highest conception of blissand glory. What can be more piteous than the contemplation ofthose barbarians whose existence here is so wretched that eventheir imagination and faith have lost all rebound, and whoconceive of the land of souls only as poorer and harder than this, expecting to be tasked and beaten there by stronger spirits, andto have nothing to eat? The relation of master and servant, thetyranny of class, is reflected over into the other life in thosearistocratic notions which break out frequently in the history ofour subject. The Pharisees some of them, at least excluded therabble from the resurrection. The Peruvians confined their heavento 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 ofPeter the Great, believed that only the Czar and the boyars couldreach heaven. It was almost a universal custom among savagenations when a chieftain died to slay his wives and servants, thattheir ghosts might accompany his to paradise, to wait on him thereas here. Even among the Greeks, as Bulwer has well remarked, "theHades of the ancients was not for the many; and the dwellers ofElysium are chiefly confined to the oligarchy of earth. " The coarse and selfish assumption on the part of man ofsuperiority over woman, based on his brawniness and tyranny, hassometimes 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 highestheaven possible for man. The former statement has been vulgarlyattributed to the Moslem creed, but with utter falsity. A piousand aged female disciple once asked Mohammed concerning her futurecondition in heaven. The prophet replied, "There will not be anyold women in heaven. " She wept and bewailed her fate, but wascomforted upon the gracious assurance from the prophet's lips, "They will all be young again when there. " The Buddhists relatethat Gotama once directed queen Prajapati, his foster mother, toprove by a miracle the error of those who supposed it impossiblefor a woman to attain Nirwana. She immediately made as manyrepetitions of her own form as filled the skies of all thesakwalas, and, after performing various wonders, died and roseinto Nirwana, leading after her five hundred virtuous princesses. 7 How spontaneously the idiosyncrasies of men in the present areflung across the abysm into the future state is exhibitedamusingly, and with a rough pathos, in an old tradition of adialogue between Saint Patrick and Ossian. The bard contrasts theapostle's pitiful psalms with his own magnificent songs, and saysthat the virtuous Fingal is enjoying the rewards of his valor inthe aerial existence. The saint rejoins, No matter for Fingal'sworth; being a pagan, assuredly he roasts in hell. In hot wraththe honest Caledonian poet cries, "If the children of Morni andthe tribes of the clan Ovi were alive, we would force brave Fingalout of hell, or the same habitation should be our own. "8 Many of the most affecting facts and problems in human experienceand destiny have found expression, hypothetic solution, instriking myths preserved in the popular traditions of nations. Themutual resemblances in these legends in some cases, though amongfar separated peoples, are very significant and impressive. Theydenote that, moved by similar motives and exercised on the samesoliciting themes, human desire and thought naturally find vent insimilar theories, stories, and emblems. The imagination of man, asGfrorer says, runs in ruts which not itself but nature has beaten. The instinctive shrinking from death felt by man would, sooner orlater, quite naturally suggest the idea that death was not anoriginal feature in the divine plan of the world, but aretributive additional discord. Benignant nature meant herchildren should live on in happy contentment here forever; but sinand Satan came in, and death was the vengeance that followed theirdoings. The Persians fully developed this speculation. The Hebrewseither also originated it, or borrowed it from the Persians; andafterwards the Christians adopted it. Traces of the sameconception appear among the remotest and rudest nations. TheCaribbeans have a myth to the effect that the whole race of menwere doomed to be mortal because Carus, the first man, offendedthe great god Tiri. The Cherokees ascribe to the Great Spirit theintention of making men immortal on earth; but, they say, the sunwhen he passed over told them there was not room enough, and thatpeople had better die! They also say that the Creator attempted tomake the first man and woman out of two stones, but failed, andafterwards fashioned them of clay; and therefore it is that theyare 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 awhile, at first, among men. As he was leaving them, he turnedaround in his canoe and said, "Ye shall never die, but shall shedyour skins. " An old woman would not believe what he said; hetherefore recalled his promise and vowed that they should die. The thought of more than one death that the composite man issimplified by a series of separating deaths has repeatedly foundplace. The New Testament speaks of "the second death;" but that isa metaphorical phrase, descriptive, as there employed, ofcondemnation and suffering. It is a thought of Plato that theDeity put intellect in soul, and soul in a material envelope. Following this hint, Plutarch says, in his essay on the Face inthe Moon, that the earth furnishes the body, the moon the soul, the sun the mind. The first death we die, he continues, makes ustwo from three; the second makes us one from two. The Feejees tellhow one of their warriors, seeing the spectre of a recentlydeceased enemy of his, threw his war club at it and killed it. They believed the spirit itself was thus destroyed. There issomething pathetic in this accumulation of dissolution upondissolution, this pursuit of death after death. We seem to hear, in this thin succession of the ghosts of ghosts, the faintergrowing echoes of the body fade away. Many narratives reveal the fond hovering of the human mind overthe problem of avoiding death altogether. The Hebrew Scriptureshave made us familiar with the translation of Enoch and theascension of Elijah without tasting death. The Hindus tell ofDivadassa, who, as a reward for his exceeding virtue and piety, was permitted to ascend to heaven alive. 10 They also say that thegood Trisanku, having pleased a god, was elevated in his livingbody to heaven. 11 The Buddhists of Ceylon preserve a legend of theelevation of one of the royal descendants of Maha Sammata to thesuperior heavens without undergoing death. 12 There are Buddhisttraditions, furthermore, of four other persons who were taken upto Indra's heaven in their bodies without tasting death, namely, the musician Gattila, and the kings Sadhina, Nirni, andMandhatu. 13 A beautiful myth of the translation of Cyrus is foundin Firdousi's Shah Nameh: "Ky Khosru bow'd himself before his God: In the bright water hewash'd his head and his limbs; And he spake to himself the ZendAvesta's prayers; And he turn'd to the friends of his life andexclaim'd, 'Fare ye well, fare ye well for evermore! When tomorrow's sun lifts its blazing banner, And the sea is gold, andthe land is purple, This world and I shall be parted forever. Yewill never see me again, save in Memory's dreams. 'When the sunuplifted his head from the mountain, The king had vanish'd fromthe eyes of his nobles. They roam'd around in vain attempts tofind 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 farewellto the king of the world. Never hath any one seen such a marvelNo, though he live long in the world That a man should go aliveinto 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. "14Philostratus relates a tradition of the Cretans, affirming that, Apollonius having entered a temple to worship, a sound was heardas of a chorus of virgins singing, "Come from the earth; come intoheaven; come. " And he was taken up, never having been seenafterwards. Here may be cited also the exquisite fable ofEndymion. Zeus promised to grant what he should request. He beggedfor immortality, eternal sleep, and never fading youth. Accordingly, in all his surpassing beauty he slumbers on thesummit of Latmus, where every night the enamored moon stoops tokiss his spotless forehead. One of the most remarkable fragmentsin the traditions of the American aborigines is that concerningthe final departure of Tarenyawagon, a mythic chief ofsupernatural knowledge and power, who instructed and united theIroquois. He sprang across vast chasms between the cliffs, andshot over the lakes with incredible speed, in a spotless whitecanoe. At last the Master of Breath summoned him. Suddenly the skywas 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 vanishedbeyond the summer clouds, and all was still. 15 Another mythological method of avoidingdeath is by bathing in someimmortal fountain. The Greeks tell of Glaucus, who by chancediscovered and plunged in a spring of this charmed virtue, but wasso chagrined at being unable to point it out to others that heflung himself into the ocean. He could not die, and so became amarine deity, and was annually seen off the headlands sportingwith whales. The search for the "Fountain of Youth" by theSpaniards who landed in Florida is well known. How with a vaineagerness did Ponce de Leon, the battered old warrior, seek afterthe magic wave beneath which he should sink to emerge free fromscars and stains, as fresh and fair as when first he donned theknightly harness! Khizer, the Wandering Jew of the East, accompanied Iskander Zulkarnain (the Oriental name for Alexanderthe Great) in his celebrated expedition to find the fountain oflife. 16 Zulkarnain, coming to a place where there were threehundred and sixty fountains, despatched three hundred and sixtymen, ordering each man to select one of the fountains in which towash a dry salted fish wherewith he was furnished. The instantKhizer's fish touched the water of the fountain which he hadchosen, it sprang away, alive. Khizer leaped in after it anddrank. Therefore he cannot die till the last trump sounds. Meanwhile, clad in a green garb, he roams through the world, apersonified spring of the year. 14 Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, vol. I. P. 135, (1stEng. 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 apunitive after piece in the creation, and which have inventedcases wherein it was set aside, have also fabricated tales ofreturns from its shrouded realm. The Thracian lover's harp, "drawing iron tears down Pluto's cheek, " won his mistress half wayto the upper light, and would have wholly redeemed her had he notin impatience looked back. The grim king of Hades, yielding topassionate entreaties, relented so far as to let the haplessProtesilaus return to his mourning Laodameia for three hours. Atthe swift end of this poor period he died again; and this time shedied with him. Erus, who was killed in battle, and Timarchus, whose soul was rapt from him in the cave of Trophonius, bothreturned, as we read in Plato and Plutarch, to relate withcircumstantial detail what they saw in the other world. Alcestis, who so nobly died to save her husband's life, was brought backfrom the region of the dead, by the interposition of Herakles, tospend happy years with her grateful Admetus. The cunning Sisyphus, who was so notorious for his treachery, by a shrewd plot obtainedleave, after his death, to visit the earth again. Safely up in thelight, he vowed he would stay; but old Hermes psychopompusforcibly dragged him down. When Columbus landed at San Salvador, the natives thought he haddescended from the sun, and by signs inquired if he had not. TheHawaiians took Captain Cook for the god Lono, who was once theirking but was afterwards deified, and who had prophesied, as he wasdying, that he should in after times return. Te Wharewara, a NewZealand youth, relates a long account of the return of his auntfrom the other world, with a minute description of her adventuresand observations there. 17 Schoolcraft gives a picturesquenarrative of a journey made by a Wyandot brave to and from theland of souls. 18 There is a group of strangely pleasing myths, closely allied tothe two preceding classes, showing how the popular heart andimagination glorify their heroes, and, fondly believing them toogodlike to die, fancy them only removed to some secret place, where they still live, and whence in the time of need they willcome again to rescue or to bless their people. Greece dreamed thather swift footed Achilles was yet alive in the White Island. Denmark long saw king Holger lingering on the old warrior cairnsof his country. Portugal trusted that her beauteous princeSebastian had escaped from the fatal field to the East, and wouldone day return to claim his usurped realm. 19 So, too, of Roderickthe Goth, who fell in disastrous battle with the Arabs, theVisiogothic traditions and faith of the people long insisted thathe would reappear. The Swiss herdsmen believe the founders oftheir confederacy still sleep in a cavern on the shores ofLucerne. When Switzerland is in peril, the Three Tells, slumberingthere in their antique garb, will wake to save her. Sweetly andoften, the ancient British lays allude to the puissant Arthurborne away to the mystic vales of Avalon, and yet to be hailed inhis native kingdom, Excalibur once more gleaming in his hand. Thestrains of the Troubadours swell and ring as they tell ofCharlemagne 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 hisunrivalled sceptre, and glorify the Frank race. And what grand andweird ballads picture great Barbarossa seated in the vaults ofKyffhauser, his beard grown through the stone table in front ofhim, tarrying till he may come forth, with his minstrels andknights around him, in the crisis hour of Germany's fortunes! TheIndians of Pecos, in New Mexico, still anxiously expect the returnof Montezuma; while in San Domingo, on the Rio Grande, a sentinelevery morning ascends to the top of the highest house, at sunrise, and looks out eastward for the coming of the great chief. 20 Thepeasants of Brittany maintain as a recent traveller testifies thatNapoleon is still alive in concealment somewhere, and will one daybe heard of or seen in pomp and victory. One other dead man therehas been who was expected to return. The hated Nero, the popularhorror of whom shows itself in the shuddering belief expressed inthe Apocalypse and in the Sibylline Oracles that he was stillalive and would reappear. 21 Alian, in his Various History, recounts the following singularcircumstances concerning the Meropes who inhabited the valley ofAnostan. 22 It would seem to prove that no possible conceit ofspeculation pertaining to our subject has been unthought of. Ariver of grief and a river of pleasure, he says, lapsed throughthe valley, their banks covered with trees. If one ate of thefruit growing on the trees beside the former stream, he burst intoa flood of tears and wept till he died. But if he partook of thathanging on the shore of the latter, his bliss was so great that heforgot all desires; and, strangest of all, he returned over thetrack of life to youth and infancy, and then gently expired. Heturned "Into his yesterdays, and wander'd back To distant childhood, andwent 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 hisposterity who were destined for paradise on one side, and all whowere destined for hell on the other. When he looked on the righthe smiled and rejoiced, but as often as he looked on the left hemourned and wept. How finely this reveals the stupendous pathosthere is in the theological conception of a Federal Head ofhumanity! The idea of a great terminal crisis is met with so often inreviewing the history of human efforts to grasp and solve theproblem of the world's destiny, that we must consider it a normalconcomitant of such theorizings. The mind reels and loses itselfin trying to conceive of the everlasting continuance of thepresent order, or of any one fixed course of things, but findsrelief in the notion of a revolution, an end, and a fresh start. The Mexican Cataclysm or universal crash, the close of the HinduCalpa, the Persian Resurrection, the Stoic Conflagration, theScandinavian Ragnarokur, the Christian Day of Judgment, all embodythis one thought. The Drama of Humanity is played out, the curtainfalls, and when it rises again 20 Abbe Domenech's Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts ofNorth 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 hasto be wound up anew. The Brahmans are now expecting the tenthavatar of Vishnu. The Parsees look for Sosiosch to come, toconsummate the triumph of good, and to raise the dead upon arenewed earth. The Buddhists await the birth of Maitri Buddha, whois tarrying in the dewa loka Tusita until the time of his adventupon earth. The Jews are praying for the appearance of theMessiah. And many Christians affirm that the second advent ofJesus draws nigh. One more fact, even in a hasty survey of some of the most peculiaropinions current in bygone times as to a future life, can scarcelyfail to attract notice. It is the so constant linking of thesoul's fate with the skyey spaces and the stars, in fondexplorings and astrologic dreams. Nowhere are the kingly greatnessand the immortal aspiring of man more finely shown. The loadstoneof his destiny and the prophetic gravitation of his thoughts areupward, 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 fateOf men and empires, 'tis to be forgiven, That, in our aspirations to be great, Our destinies o'erleap their mortal stateAnd claim a kindred with you; for ye areA beauty and a mystery, and createIn us such love and reverence from afarThat fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star. " What an immeasurable contrast between the dying Cherokee, whowould leap into heaven with a war whoop on his tongue and a stringof scalps in his hand, and the dying Christian, who sublimelymurmurs, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!" What a sweepof thought, from the poor woman whose pious notion of heaven wasthat it was a place where she could sit all day in a clean whiteapron and sing psalms, to the far seeing and sympathetic naturalphilosopher whose loving faith embraces all ranks of creatures andwho conceives of paradise as a spiritual concert of the combinedworlds with all their inhabitants in presence of their Creator!Yet from the explanatory considerations which have been set forthwe can understand the derivation of the multifarious swarm ofnotions afloat in the world, as the fifteen hundred varieties ofapple now known have all been derived from the solitary whitecrab. Differences of fancy and opinion among men are as natural asfancies and opinions are. The mind of a people grows from theearth of its deposited history, but breathes in the air of itsliving literature. 23 By his philosophic learning and poeticsympathy the cosmopolitan scholar wins the last victory of mindover matter, frees himself from local conditions and temporaltinges, and, under the light of universal truth, traces, throughthe causal influences of soil and clime and history, and thecolored threads of great individualities, the formation ofpeculiar national creeds. Through sense the barbarian mind feedson the raw pabulum furnished by the immediate phenomena of theworld and of its own life. Through culture the civilized mindfeeds 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 directlyfrom nature; the educated man lives also on sensations obtainedfrom the symbols of other people's sensations. The illiteratesavage hunts for his mental living in the wild forest ofconsciousness; the erudite philosopher lives also on the psychicalstores of foregone men. NOTE. To the ten instances, stated on pages 210, 211, ofremarkable men who after their death were popularly imagined to bestill alive, and destined to appear again, an eleventh may beadded. The Indians of Pecos, in New Mexico, anxiously expect thereturn of Montezuma. In San Domingo, on the Rio Grande, a sentinelevery morning ascends to the roof of the highest house at sunriseand looks out eastward for the coming of the great chief. See theAbbe Domenech's "Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts ofNorth 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 NewTestament writers concerning the fate of man after his bodilydissolution, we may commence by glancing at the various allusionscontained in the record to opinions on this subject prevalent atthe time of the Savior or immediately afterwards, but which formedno part of his religion, or were mixed with mistakes. There are several incidents recorded in the Gospels which showthat a belief in the transmigration of the soul was received amongthe Jews. As Jesus was passing near Siloam with his disciples, hesaw a man who had been blind from his birth; and the disciplessaid to him, "Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, thathe was born blind?" The drift of this question is, Did the parentsof this man commit some great crime, for which they were punishedby having their child born blind, or did he come into the worldunder this calamity in expiation of the iniquities of a previouslife? Jesus denies the doctrine involved in this interrogation, atleast, as far as his reply touches it at all; for he rarely entersinto any discussion or refutation of incidental errors. He says, Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents as the cause of hisblindness; but the regular workings of the laws of God are mademanifest in him: moreover, it is a providential occasion offeredme that I should show the divinity of my mission by giving himsight. 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 thedead; and therefore mighty works are wrought by him. This briefstatement plainly shows that the belief in the reappearance of adeparted spirit, in bodily form, to run another career, was extantin Judea at that period. The Evangelists relate anothercircumstance to the same effect. Jesus asked his disciples who thepeople thought he was. And they replied, Some think that thou artJohn the Baptist, some Elias, and some Jeremiah or some other ofthe old prophets, a forerunner of the Messiah. Then Jesus asked, But who think ye that I am? And Simon Peter said, Thou art thepromised Messiah himself. There was a prophetic tradition amongthe Jews, drawn from the words of Malachi, that before the Messiahwas revealed Elias would appear and proclaim his coming. Therefore, when the disciples of Christ recognised him as thegreat Anointed, they were troubled about this prophecy, and saidto their Master, Why do the Scribes say that Elias must firstcome? He replies to them, in substance, It is even so: theprophet's words shall not fail: they are already fulfilled. Butyou must interpret the prophecy aright. It does not mean that theancient prophet himself, in physical form, shall come upon earth, but that one with his office, in his spirit and power, shall gobefore me. If ye are able to understand the true import of thepromise, it has been realized. John the Baptist is the Elias whichwas to come. The New Testament, therefore, has allusions to thedoctrine of transmigration, but gives it no warrant. The Jewish expectations in regard to the Messiah, the nature ofhis kingdom, and the events which they supposed would attend hiscoming or transpire during his reign, were the source andfoundation of the phraseology of a great many passages in theChristian Scriptures and of the sense of not a few. The nationalideas and hopes of the Jews at that time were singularly intenseand extensive. Their influence over the immediate disciples ofJesus and the authors of the New Testament is often very evidentin the interpretations they put upon his teachings, and in theirown words. Still, their intellectual and spiritual obtuseness tothe true drift of their Master's thoughts was not so great, theirmistakes are neither so numerous nor so gross, as it is frequentlysupposed they were. This is proved by the fact that when they usethe language of the Messianic expectations of the Jews in theirwritings they often do it, not in the material, but in a spiritualsense. When they first came under the instruction of Jesus, theywere fully imbued with the common notions of their nation and age. By his influence their ideas were slowly and with great difficultyspiritualized and made to approach his own in some degree. But itis unquestionably true that they never not even after his deatharrived at a clear appreciation of the full sublimity, the purespirituality, the ultimate significance, of his mission and hiswords. Still, they did cast off and rise above the grossly carnalexpectations of their countrymen. Partially instructed in thespiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, and partially biassed bytheir Jewish prepossessions, they interpreted a part of hislanguage figuratively, according to his real meaning, and a partof it literally, according to their own notions. The result ofthis was several doctrines neither taught by Christ nor held bythe Jews, but formed by conjoining and elaborating a portion ofthe conceptions of both. These doctrines are to be found in theNew Testament; but it should be distinctly understood that thereligion of Christ is not responsible for them, is to be separatedfrom them. The fundamental and pervading aim of that epistle of Peter thegenuineness of which is unquestioned and the same is true in agreat degree of his speeches recorded in the Acts of the Apostlesis to exhort the Christians to whom it is written to purifythemselves by faith, love, and good works; to stand firmly amidstall their tribulations, supported by the expectations and preparedto meet the conditions of a glorious life in heaven at the closeof this life. Eschatology, the doctrine of the Last Things, withits practical inferences, all inseparably interwoven with themission of Christ, forms the basis and scope of the wholedocument. 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 wiltnot leave my soul in the under world, " he says it was a prophecyconcerning Christ, which was fulfilled in his resurrection. "Thesoul of this Jesus was not left in the under world, but God hathraised him up, whereof we all are witnesses. " When it is writtenthat his soul was not left in the subterranean abode ofdisembodied spirits, of course the inference cannot be avoidedthat it was supposed to have been there for a time. In the next place, we are warranted by several considerations inasserting that Peter believed that down there, in the gloomy realmof shades, were gathered and detained the souls of all the deadgenerations. We attribute this view to Peter from the combinedforce of the following reasons: because such was, notoriously, thebelief of his ancestral and contemporary countrymen; because hespeaks of the resurrection of Jesus as if it were a wonderfulprophecy or unparalleled miracle, a signal and most significantexception to the universal law; because he says expressly of Davidthat "he is not yet ascended into the heavens, " and if David wasstill retained below, undoubtedly all were; because the samedoctrine is plainly inculcated by other of the New Testamentwriters; and, finally, because Peter himself, in another part ofthis epistle, declares, in unequivocal terms, that the soul ofChrist went and preached to the souls confined in the underworld, for such is the perspicuous meaning of the famous text, "being put to death in the body, but kept alive in the soul, inwhich also he went and preached [went as a herald] to the spiritsin prison. " The meaning we have attributed to this celebratedpassage is the simple and consistent explanation of the words andthe context, and is what must have been conveyed to those familiarwith the received opinions of that time. Accordingly, we findthat, with the exception of Augustine, it was so understood andinterpreted by the whole body of the Fathers. 1 It is likewise soheld now by an immense majority of the most authoritative moderncommentators. Rosenmuller says, in his commentary on this text, "That by the spirits in prison is meant souls of men separatedfrom their bodies and detained as in custody in the under world, which the Greeks call Hades, the Hebrews Sheol, can hardly bedoubted, " (vix dubitari posse videtur. ) Such has ever been andstill is the common conclusion of nearly all the best criticaltheologians, as volumes of citations might easily be made to show. The reasons which led Augustine to give a different exposition ofthe text before us are such as should make, in this case, even hisgreat name have little or no weight. He firmly held, as revealedand unquestionable truth, 2 the whole doctrine which we maintain isimplied in the present passage; but he was so perplexed by certaindifficult 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 exegesisis not only arbitrary and opposed to the catholic doctrine of theChurch; 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 ofmen confined in their bodies here in this life, to preach to whomChrist came from heaven. But the careful reader will observe thatPeter speaks as if the spirits were collected and kept in onecommon custody, refers to the spirits of a generation long agodeparted to the dead, and represents the preaching as taking placein the interval between Christ's death and his resurrection. Aglance from the eighteenth to the twenty second verse inclusiveshows indisputably that the order of events narrated by theapostle is this: First, Christ was put to death in the flesh, suffering for sins, the just for the unjust; secondly, he wasquickened in the spirit; thirdly, he went and preached to thespirits in prison; fourthly, he rose from the dead; fifthly, heascended into heaven. How is it possible for any one to doubt thatthe text under consideration teaches his subterranean missionduring the period of his bodily burial? In the exposition of the Apostles' Creed put forth by the Churchof England under Edward VI. , this text in Peter was referred to asan authoritative proof of the article on Christ's descent into theunder world; and when, some years later, thatreference wasstricken out, notoriously it was not because the Episcopal rulerswere convinced of a mistake, but because they had become afraid ofthe associated Romish doctrine of purgatory. If Peter believed as he undoubtedly did that Christ after hiscrucifixion descended to the place of departed spirits, what didhe suppose was the object of that descent? Calvin's theory wasthat he went into hell in order that he might there suffervicariously the accumulated agonies due to the LOST, thusplacating the just wrath of the Father and purchasing the releaseof the elect. A sufficient refutation of that dogma, as to itsphilosophical basis, is found in its immorality, its forensictechnicality. As a mode of explaining the Scriptures, it isrefuted by the fact that it is nowhere plainly stated in the NewTestament, but is arbitrarily constructed by forced and indirectinferences from various obscure texts, which texts can beperfectly explained without involving it at all. For what purpose, then, was it thought that Jesus went to the imprisoned souls ofthe under world? The most natural supposition the conception mostin harmony with the character and details of the rest of thescheme and with the prevailing thought of the time would be thathe went there to rescue the captives from their sepulchralbondage, to conquer death and the devil in their own domain, openthe doors, break the chains, proclaim good tidings of comingredemption to the spirits in prison, and, rising thence, to ascendto heaven, preparing the way for them to follow with him at hisexpected return. This, indeed, is the doctrine of the Judaizingapostles, the unbroken catholic doctrine of the Church. Paulwrites to the Colossians, and to the Ephesians, that, when Christ"had spoiled the principalities and powers" of the world of thedead, "he ascended up on high, leading a multitude of captives. "Peter himself declares, a little farther on in his epistle, "thatthe glad tidings were preached to the dead, that, though they hadbeen persecuted and condemned in the flesh by the will of men, they might be blessed in the spirit by the will of God. "4 Christfulfilled the law of 4 See Rosenmuller's explanation in hoc loco. death, 5 descending to the place of separate spirits, that he mightdeclare deliverance to the quick and the dead by comingtriumphantly back and going into heaven, an evident token of theremoval of the penalty of sin which hitherto had fatally doomedall men to the under world. 6 Let us see if this will not enable us to explain Peter's languagesatisfactorily. Death, with the lower residence succeeding it, letit be remembered, was, according to the Jewish and apostolicbelief, the fruit of sin, the judgment pronounced on sin. ButChrist, Peter says, was sinless. "He was a lamb without blemishand without spot. " "He did no sin, neither was guile found in hismouth. " Therefore he was not exposed to death and the under worldon his own account. Consequently, when it is written that "he boreour 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 ofa vicarious sacrifice offered to quench the anger of God or tofurnish 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 forour sakes that which was to others the penalty of their sin. Theobject of his dying was not to conciliate the alienated Father orto adjust the unbalanced law: it was to descend into the realm ofthe dead, heralding God's pardon to the captives, and to returnand rise into heaven, opening and showing to his disciples the waythither. For, owing to his moral sinlessness, or to his delegatedomnipotence, if he were once in the abode of the dead, he mustreturn: nothing could keep him there. Epiphanius describes thedevil complaining, after Christ had burst through his nets anddungeons, "Miserable me! what shall I do? I did not know God wasconcealed in that body. The son of Mary has deceived me. Iimagined he was a mere man. "7 In an apocryphal writing of veryearly 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 thecaptives, is represented upbraiding Satan in these terms: "Oprince of all evil, author of death, why didst thou crucify andbring down to our regions a person righteous and sinless? Therebythou hast lost all the sinners of the world. "8 Again, in anancient treatise on the Apostles' Creed, we read as follows: "Inthe bait of Christ's flesh was secretly inserted the hook of hisdivinity. This the devil knew not, but, supposing he must staywhen 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, breakthe fetters of the captives, and fix a time for theirresurrection. " To the same effect, old Hilary, Bishop ofPoictiers, in his commentary on Psalm cxxxviii. , says, "It is alaw of human necessity that, the body being buried, the soulshould descend ad interos. " 6 Ambrose, De Fide, etc. , lib. Iv. Cap. 1, declares that "no oneascended to heaven until Christ, by the pledge of hisresurrection, solved the chains of the under world and translatedthe souls of the pious. " Also Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, in hisfourth catechetical lecture, sect. 11, affirms "that Christdescended into the under world to deliver those who, from Adamdownwards, had been imprisoned there. " 7 In Assumptionem Christi. 8 Evan. Nicodemi, cap. Xviii. devoured, greedily swallowed the corpse, and the bolts of thenether world were wrenched asunder, and the ensnared dragonhimself dragged from the abyss. "9 Peter himself explicitlydeclares, "It was not possible that he should be held by death. "Theodoret says, "Whoever denies the resurrection of Christ rejectshis death. "10 If he died, he must needs rise again. And hisresurrection would demonstrate the forgiveness of sins, theopening of heaven to men, showing that the bond which had bound indespair the captives in the regions of death for so many voicelessages was at last broken. Accordingly, "God, having loosed thechains of the under world, raised him up and set him at his ownright hand. "11 And now the question, narrowed down to the smallest compass, isthis: What is the precise, real signification of the sacrificialand other connected terms employed by Peter, those phrases whichnow, by the intense associations of a long time, convey so stronga Calvinistic sense to most readers? Peter says, "Ye know that yewere redeemed with the precious blood of Christ. " If there werenot so much indeterminateness of thought, so much unthinkingreception 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, ofcourse, could have no virtue, no moral efficacy, of any sort. Whenthe infuriated Jews cried, "His blood be on us, and on ourchildren!" they meant, Let the responsibility of his death rest onus. When the English historian says, "Sidney gave his blood forthe cause of civil liberty, " the meaning is, he died for it. So, no one will deny, whenever the New Testament speaks in any way ofredemption by the blood of the crucified Son of Man, theunquestionable meaning is, redemption by his death. What, then, does the phrase "redemption by the death of Christ" mean? Let itbe noted here let it be particularly noticed that the NewTestament nowhere in explicit terms explains the meaning of thisand the kindred phrases: it simply uses the phrases withoutinterpreting them. They are rhetorical figures of speech, necessarily, upon whatever theological system we regard them. Nosinner is literally washed from his transgressions and guilt inthe blood of the slaughtered Lamb. These expressions, then, arepoetic images, meant to convey a truth in the language ofassociation and feeling, the traditionary language of imagination. The determination of their precise significance is wholly a matterof fallible human construction and inference, and not a matter ofinspired statement or divine revelation. This is so, beyond aquestion, because, we repeat, they are figures of speech, havingno direct explanation in the records where they occur. TheCalvinistic view of the atonement was a theory devised to explainthis scriptural language. It was devised without sufficientconsideration of the peculiar notions and spirit, the peculiargrade 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 "thepains of death, " instead of "the chains of the under world. " Thesense requires the latter. Besides, numerous manuscripts read[non ASCII characters]. See, furthermore, Rosenmuller's thoroughcriticism in loc. Likewise see Robinson's New Testament GreekLexicon, in [NAC]. doctrine of the atonement to explain the figures of speech inwhich the apostles declare their doctrine. But, since theCalvinistic scheme was devised by human thought to explain the NewTestament language, any scheme which explains that language aswell has equal Scripture claims to credence; any which betterexplains 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 meaningoriginally associated with, and meant to be conveyed by, thephrases equivalent to "redemption by the death of Christ. " Inconsequence of sin, the souls of all mankind, after leaving thebody, were shut up in the oblivious gloom of the under world. Christ alone, by virtue of his perfect holiness, was not subjectto any part of this fate. But, in fulfilment of the Father'sgracious designs, he willingly submitted, upon leaving the body, to go among the dead, that he might declare the good tidings tothem, and burst the bars of darkness, and return to life, and riseinto heaven as a pledge of the future translation of the faithfulto that celestial world, instead of their banishment into thedismal bondage below, as hitherto. The death of Christ, then, wasthe 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 hadforgiven men their sins and would receive their souls to his ownabode on high. Three very strong confirmations of the correctness of thisinterpretation are afforded in the declarations of Peter. First, he never even hints, in the faintest manner, that the death ofChrist was to have any effect on God, any power to change hisfeeling or his government. It was not to make a purchasingexpiation for sins and thus to reconcile God to us; but it was, bya revelation of the Father's freely pardoning love, to give uspenitence, purification, confidence, and a regenerating piety, andso to reconcile us to God. He says in one place, in emphaticwords, that the express purpose of Christ's death was simply "thathe might lead us to God. " In the same strain, in another place, hedefines the object of Christ's death to be "that we, beingdelivered from sins, should live unto righteousness. " It is plainthat in literal reality he refers our marvellous salvation to thevoluntary goodness of God, and not to any vicarious ransom paid inthe sacrifice of Christ, when he says, "The God of all grace hathcalled us unto his eternal glory by Jesus Christ. " The death ofChrist was not, then, to appease the fierce justice of God byrectifying the claims of his inexorable law, but it was to callout and establish in men all moral virtues by the power of faithin the sure gift of eternal life sealed to them through theascension of the Savior. For, secondly, the practical inferences drawn by Peter from thedeath of Christ, and the exhortations founded upon it, areinconsistent with the prevailing theory of the atonement. Uponthat view the apostle would have said, "Christ has paid the debtand secured a seat in heaven for you, elected ones: thereforebelieve in the sufficiency of his offerings, and exult. " But notso. He calls on us in this wise: "Forasmuch as Christ hathsuffered for us, arm yourselves with the same mind. " "Christsuffered for you, leaving an example that ye should follow hissteps. " The whole burden of his practical argument based on themission of Christ is, the obligation of a religious spirit and ofpure morals. He does not speak, as many modern sectarists havespoken, of the "filthy rags of righteousness;" but he says, "Liveno longer in sins, " "have a meek and quiet spirit, which is inthe sight of God of great price, " "be ye holy in all manner ofconversation, " "purify your souls by obedience to the truth, ""be ye a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, " "havea good conscience, " "avoid evil and do good, " "above all, havefervent love, for love will cover a multitude of sins. " No candidperson can peruse the epistle and not see that the great moraldeduced in it from the mission of Christ is this: Since heavenis offered you, strive by personal virtue to be prepared for itat the judgment which shall soon come. The disciple is not toldto trust in the merits of Jesus; but he is urged to "abstainfrom 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 thefollowing fact. According to our view, the death of Christ isemphasized, not on account of any importance in itself, but as thenecessary condition preliminary to his resurrection, thehumiliating prelude to his glorious ascent into heaven. The reallyessential, significant thing is not his suffering, vicariousdeath, but his triumphing, typical ascension. Now, the plain, repeated statements of Peter strikingly coincide with thisrepresentation. He says, "God raised Christ up from the dead, andgave him glory, [that is, received him into heaven, ] that yourfaith and hope might be in God. " Again he writes, "Blessed be God, who according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto alively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead untoan incorruptible inheritance in heaven. " Still again, he declaresthat "the figure of baptism, signifying thereby the answer of agood conscience toward God, saves us by the resurrection of JesusChrist, who is gone into heaven. " According to the commonlyreceived doctrine, instead of these last words the apostle oughtto have said, "saves us by the death of him who suffered inexpiation of our sins. " He does not say so. Finally, in theintrepid speech that Peter made before the Jewish council, referring to their wicked crucifixion of Jesus, he says, "Him hathGod raised up to his own right hand, to be a Leader and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. " How plainlyremission of sins is here predicated, not through Christ'signominious suffering, but through his heavenly exaltation! Thatexaltation showed in dramatic proof that by God's grace thedominion of the lower world was about to be broken and an accessto the celestial world to be vouchsafed. If Christ bought off our merited punishment and earned ouracceptance, then salvation can no more be "reckoned of grace, butof debt. " But the whole New Testament doctrine is, "that sinnersare justified freely through the redemption that is in ChristJesus. " "The redemption that is in Christ"! Take these wordsliterally, and they yield no intelligible meaning. The senseintended to be conveyed or suggested by them depends oninterpretation; and here disagreement arises. The Calvinist saysthey mean the redemption undertaken, achieved, by Christ. We saythey 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. Weought therefore to adopt the one which is at once most rationaland plausible in itself, and most in harmony with the peculiaropinions 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 theologicalbelief of modern Protestant Christendom, a belief which is thegradual product of a few great, mistaken teachers like Augustineand Calvin. We do not find the slightest difficulty in explaining sharply andbroadly, with all its niceties of phraseology, each one of thetexts urged in behalf of the prevalent doctrine of the atonement, without involving the essential features of that doctrine. Threedemonstrable assertions of fact afford us all the requisitematerials. First, it was a prevalent belief with the Jews, that, since death was the penalty of sin, the suffering of death was initself expiatory of the sins of the dying man. 12 Lightfoot says, "It is a common and most known doctrine of the Talmudists, thatrepentance and ritual sacrifice expiate some sins, death the rest. Death wipes off all unexpiated sins. "13 Tholuck says, "It was aJewish opinion that the death of the just atoned for thepeople. "14 He quotes from the Talmud an explicit assertion to thateffect, and refers to several learned authorities for furthercitations and confirmations. Secondly, the apostles conceived Christ to be sinless, andconsequently not on his own account exposed to death and subjectto Hades. If, then, death was an atonement for sins, and he wassinless, his voluntary death was expiatory for the sins of theworld; not in an arbitrary and unheard of way, according to theCalvinistic scheme, but in the common way, according to aPharisaic notion. And thirdly, it was partly a Jewish expectationconcerning the Messiah that he would, 15 and partly an apostolicconviction concerning Christ that he did, break the bolts of theold Hadean prison and open the way for human ascent to heaven. AsJerome says, "Before Christ Abraham was in hell, after Christ thecrucified thief was in paradise;"16 for "until the advent ofChrist all alike went down into the under world, heaven being shutuntil Christ threw aside the flaming sword that turned everyway. "17 These three thoughts that death is the expiatory penalty of sin, that Christ was himself sinless, that he died as God's envoy torelease the prisoners of gloom and be their pioneer to bliss leavenothing to be desired in explaining the sacrificial terms andkindred phrases employed by the apostles in reference to hismission. Without question, Peter, like his companions, looked for thespeedy return of Christ from heaven to judge all, and to save theworthy. Indications of this belief are numerously afforded in hiswords. "The end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore soberand watch unto prayer. " "You shall give account to him that isready to judge the quick and the dead. " Here the common idea ofthat 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 descensuMessia ad Inferos, ) note 2. "The captives shall ascend from theunder 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 undoubtedlyimplied. "Salvation is now ready to be revealed in the last time. ""That your faith may be found unto praise and honor and glory atthe appearing of Jesus Christ. " "Be sober, and hope to the end forthe grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation ofJesus Christ. " "Be ye examples to the flock, and when the chiefShepherd shall appear ye shall receive an unfading crown ofglory. " "God shall send Jesus Christ, . . . Whom the heavens mustreceive until the times of the restitution of all things. " It isevident that the author of these passages expected the secondcoming of the Lord Jesus to consummate the affairs of his kingdom. If the apostle had formed definite conclusions as to the finalfate of unbelieving, wicked, reprobate men, he has not statedthem. He undeniably implies certain general facts upon thesubject, but leaves all the details in obscurity. He adjures hisreaders with exceeding earnestness he over and over again adjuresthem to forsake every manner of sinful life, to strive for everykind of righteous conversation, that by faith and goodness theymay receive the salvation of their souls. He must have supposed anopposite 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 thewicked prominent, and presents the idea that Christ shall come tojudge them both, and shall reward the former with gladness, crowns, and glory; while it is just as clearly implied as if hehad said it that the latter shall be condemned and punished. Whena judge sits in trial on the good and the bad, and accepts those, plainly the inference is that he rejects these, unless thecontrary be stated. What their doom is in its nature, what in itsduration, is neither declared, nor inferrible from what isdeclared. All that the writer says on this point is substantiallyrepeated or contained in the fourth chapter of his epistle, fromverses 12 to 19. A slight explanatory paraphrase of it will makethe position clear so far as it can be made clear. "Christianbelievers, in the fiery trials which are to try you, stand firm, even rejoicing that you are fellow sufferers with Christ, a pledgethat 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 whichyou ought to suffer; then, if persecuted and slain for yourChristian profession and virtues, falter not. The terrible timepreceding the second advent of your Master is at hand. Thesufferings of that time will begin with the Christian household;but how much more dreadful will be the sufferings of the close ofthat time among the disobedient that spurn the gospel of God! Ifthe righteous shall with great difficulty be snatched from theperils and woes encompassing that time, surely it will happen verymuch worse with ungodly sinners. Therefore let all who suffer inobedience to God commit the keeping of their souls to him in welldoing. " The souls of men were confined in the under world for sin. Christcame to turn men from sin and despair to holiness and areconciling faith in God. He went to the dead to declare to themthe good tidings of pardon and approaching deliverance through thefree grace of God. He rose into heaven to demonstrate and visiblyexhibit the redemption of men from the under world doom ofsinners. He was soon to return to the earth to complete theunfinished work of his commissioned kingdom. His accepted onesshould then be taken to glory and reward. The rejected onesshould 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 wasoriginally a Jew, afterwards a zealous Christian. He wasunquestionably a man of remarkable talent and eloquence and oflofty religious views and feelings. He lived in the time of theimmediate followers of Jesus, and apparently was acquainted withthem. The individual authorship it is now impossible to determinewith certainty. Many of the most learned, unprejudiced, and ablecritics have ascribed it to Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, a compeerof Paul and a fellow citizen of Philo. This opinion is moreprobable than any other. Indeed, so numerous are the resemblancesof thoughts and words in the writings of Philo to those in thisepistle, that even the wild conjecture has been hazarded thatPhilo himself at last became a Christian and wrote to his Hebrewcountrymen the essay which has since commonly passed for Paul's. No one can examine the hundreds of illustrations of the epistlegathered from Philo by Carpzov, in his learned but ill reasonedwork, without being greatly impressed. The supposition which hasrepeatedly been accepted and urged, that this composition wasfirst written in Hebrew, and afterwards translated into Greek byanother person, is absurd, in view of the masterly skill andeloquence, critical niceties, and felicities in the use oflanguage, displayed in it. We could easily fill a paragraph withthe names of those eminent in the Church such as Tertullian, Hippolytus, Erasmus, Luther, Le Clerc, and Neander who haveconcluded that, whoever the author of the Epistle to the Hebrewswas, he was not Paul. The list of those names would reach from theEgyptian Origen, whose candor and erudition were without parallelin his age, to the German Bleek, whose masterly and exhaustivework is a monument of united talent and toil, leaving little to bedesired. It is not within our present aim to argue this point: wewill therefore simply refer the reader to the thorough andunanswerable discussion and settlement of it by Norton. 1 The general object of the composition is, by showing thesuperiority of the Christian system to the Hebrew, to arm theconverts from Judaism to whom it is addressed against thetemptations to desert the fulfilling faith of Christ and to returnto the emblematic faith of their fathers. This aim gives apervading cast and color to the entire treatment to the reasoningand especially to the chosen imagery of the epistle. Omitting, forthe most part, whatever is not essentially interwoven with thesubject of death, the resurrection, and future existence, and withthe mission of Christ in relation to those subjects, we advance tothe consideration of the views which the epistle presents orimplies concerning those points. It is to be premised that we areforced to construct from fragments and hints the theologicalfabric that stood in the mind of the writer. The suggestion alsois quite obvious that, since the letter is addressed solely to theHebrews and describes Christianity as the completion of 1 Christian Examiner, vols. For 1827 29. Judaism, an acquaintance with the characteristic Hebrew opinionsand hopes at that time may be indispensable for a fullcomprehension of its contents. The view of the intrinsic nature and rank of Christ on which theepistle rests seems very plainly to be that great Logos doctrinewhich floated in the philosophy of the apostolic age and is sofully developed in the Gospel of John: "The Logos of God, alive, energetic, irresistibly piercing, to whose eyes all things arebare and open;" "first begotten of God;" "faithful to Him thatmade him;" inferior to God, superior to all beside; "by whom Godmade the worlds;" whose seat is at the right hand of God, theangels looking up to him, and "the world to come put in subjectionto him. " The author, thus assuming the immensely super human rankand the pre existence of Christ, teaches that, by the good will ofGod, he descended to the world in the form of a man, to save themthat were without faith and in fear, them that were lost throughsin. God "bringeth in the first begotten into the world. " "When hecometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thouwouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared for me. " "Jesus wasmade a little while inferior to the angels. " "Forasmuch, then, asthe children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himselflikewise partook of the same;" that is, in order to pass throughan experience like that of those whom he wished to deliver, heassumed their nature. "He taketh not hold of angels, but he takethhold of the seed of Abraham:" in other words, he aimed not toassist angels, but men. These passages, taken in connection withthe 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 donot see how it is possible for any person to read the epistlethrough intelligently, in the light of an adequate knowledge ofcontemporary Hebrew opinions, and not perceive that the author'sanswer to that inquiry is, that Christ assumed the guise and fateof humanity in order to die; and died in order to rise from thedead; and rose from the dead in order to ascend to heaven; andascended to heaven in order to reveal the grace of God opening theway for the celestial exaltation and blessedness of the souls offaithful men. We will commence the proof and illustration of thesestatements by bringing together some of the principal passages inthe epistle which involve the objects of the mission of Christ, and then stating the thought that chiefly underlies and explainsthem. "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 forevery man through the suffering of death crowned with glory andhonor. " With the best critics, we have altered the arrangement ofthe clauses in the foregoing verse, to make the sense clearer. Theexact meaning is, that the exaltation of Christ to heaven afterhis death authenticated his mission, showed that his death had adivine meaning for men; that is, showed that they also should riseto heaven. "When he had by himself made a purification of oursins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. " "Forthis cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant, that, his deathhaving occurred, (for the redemption of the transgressions underthe first covenant, ) they which are called might enter uponpossession of the promised eternal inheritance. " The force of thislast passage, with its context, turns on the double sense of theGreek word for covenant, which likewise means a will. Severalstatements in the epistle show the author's belief that thesubjects of the old dispensation had the promise of immortal lifein heaven, but had never realized the thing itself. 2 Now, hemaintains the purpose of the new dispensation to be the actualrevelation and bestowment of the reality which anciently was onlypromised and typically foreshadowed; and in the passage before ushe figures Christ the author of the Christian covenant as themaker of a will by which believers are appointed heirs of aheavenly immortality. He then following the analogy oftestamentary legacies and legatees describes those heirs as"entering on possession of that eternal inheritance" "by the deathof the Testator. " He was led to employ precisely this language bytwo obvious reasons: first, for the sake of that paronomasia ofwhich he was evidently fond; secondly, by the fact that it reallywas the death of Christ, with the succeeding resurrection andascension, which demonstrated both the reality of the thingpromised in the will and the authority of the Testator to bestowit. All the expressions thus far cited, and kindred ones scatteredthrough the work, convey a clear and consistent meaning, withsharp outlines and coherent details, if we suppose their authorentertained the following general theory; and otherwise theycannot be satisfactorily explained. A dreadful fear of death, introduced by sin, was tyrannizing over men. In consequence ofconscious alienation from God through transgressions, theyshuddered at death. The writer does not say what there was indeath that made it so feared; but we know that the prevailingHebrew conception was, that death led the naked soul into thesilent, dark, and dreary region of the under world, a dolefulfate, from which they shrank with sadness at the best, guiltconverting that natural melancholy into dread foreboding. In theabsence of any evidence or presumption whatever to the contrary, we are authorized, nay, rather forced, to conclude that such aconception is implied in the passages we are considering. Now, themission of Jesus was to deliver men from that fear and bondage, byassuring them that God would forgive sin and annul itsconsequence. Instead of banishing their disembodied spirits intothe sepulchral Sheol, he would take them to himself into the gloryabove the firmament. This aim Christ accomplished by literallyexemplifying the truths it implies; that is, by personallyassuming the lot of man, dying, rising from among the spirits ofthe dead, and ascending beyond the veil into heaven. By his deathand victorious ascent "he purged our sins, " "redeemedtransgressions, " "overthrew him that has the power of death, " inthe sense that he thereby, as the writer thought, swept away thesupposed train of evils caused by sin, namely, all theconcomitants of a banishment after death into the cheerlesssubterranean 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, "intothe 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 thingpromised, 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 whichwas made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto ustheir children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again" that bythis ascent he for the first time opened the way for others toascend to him where he is, avoiding the doom of Hades. "We have a great High Priest, who has passed through theheavens, Jesus, the Son of God. " "Christ is not entered into themost holy place, made with hands, the figure of the true, but intoheaven 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 allits face. It is much more necessary for us to show that the authorbelieved that the men who had previously died had not risenthither, but that it was the Savior's mission to open the way fortheir ascension. It is extremely significant, in the outset, that Jesus is called"the first leader and the bringer to the end of our faith;" forthe words in this clause which the common version renders "author"and "finisher"3 mean, from their literal force and the latentfigure they contain, "a guide who runs through the course to thegoal so as to win and receive the prize, bringing us after him tothe same consummation. " Still more striking is the passage weshall next adduce. Having enumerated a long list of the choicestworthies of the Old Testament, the writer adds, "These all, havingobtained testimony through faith, did not realize the promise, 4God having provided a better thing for us, that they without usshould not be perfected, " should not be brought to the end, theend of human destiny, that is, exaltation to heaven. Undoubtedlythe author here means to say that the faithful servants of Godunder the Mosaic dispensation were reserved in the under worlduntil the ascension of the Messiah. Augustine so explains the textin hand, declaring that Christ was the first that ever rose fromthe under world. 5 The same exposition is given by Origen, 6 andindeed by nearly every one of the Fathers who has undertaken togive a critical interpretation of the passage. This doctrineitself was held by Catholic Christendom for a thousand years; isnow held by the Roman, Greek, and English Churches; but is, forthe most part, rejected or forgotten by the dissenting sects, fromtwo causes. It has so generally sunk out of sight among us, first, from ignorance, ignorance of the ancient learning and opinions onwhich it rested and of which it was the necessary completion;secondly, from rationalistic speculations, which, leading men todiscredit the truth of the doctrine, led them arbitrarily to denyits existence in the Scripture, making them perversely force thetexts that state it and wilfully blink the texts that hint it. Whether this be a proper and sound method of proceeding incritical investigations any one may judge. To us it seems equallyunmanly and immoral. We know of but one justifiable course, andthat is, with patience, with earnestness, and with all possibleaids, to labor to discern the real and full meaning of the wordsaccording to the understanding and intention of the author. We doso elsewhere, regardless of consequences. No other method, in thecase of the Scriptures, is exempt from guilt. The meaning (namely, to bring to the end) which we have aboveattributed to the word [NAC](translated in the common version tomake 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 itover nicely in the present instance, the following examples fromvarious parts of the epistle unimpeachably witness. "For it wasproper that God, in bringing many sons unto glory, should make himwho was the first leader of their salvation perfect [reach theend] through sufferings;" that is, should raise him to heavenafter he had passed through death, that he, having himself arrivedat the glorious heavenly goal of human destiny, might bring othersto it. "Christ, being made perfect, " (brought through all theintermediate steps to the end, ) "became the cause of eternalsalvation to all them that obey him; called of God an highpriest. " The context, and the after assertion of the writer thatthe priesthood of Jesus is exercised in heaven, show that the word"perfected, " as employed here, signifies exalted to the right handof God. "Perfection" (bringing unto the end) "was not by theLevitical priesthood. " "The law perfected nothing, but it was theadditional introduction of a better hope by which we draw nearunto God. " "The law maketh men high priests which have infirmity, which are not suffered to continue, by reason of death; but theword of the oath after the law maketh the Son perfect forevermore, " bringeth him to the end, namely, an everlastingpriesthood in the heavens. That Christian believers are not underthe first covenant, whereby, through sin, men commencing with theblood of Abel, the first death were doomed to the lower world, butare under the second covenant, whereby, through the graciouspurpose of God, taking effect in the blood of Christ, the firstresurrection, they are already by faith, in imagination, translated to heaven, this is plainly what the author teaches inthe following words: "Ye are not come to the palpable mount thatburneth with fire, and to blackness and tempest, where so terriblewas the sight that Moses exceedingly trembled, but ye are come toMount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerablecompany of angels, and to God, and to the spirits of the perfectedjust, and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, and to thelustral blood which speaks better things than that of Abel. " Theconnection here demonstrates that the souls of the righteous arecalled "perfected, " as having arrived at the goal of their destinyin heaven. Again, the author, when speaking of the sure andsteadfast 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 Jewscalled the outward or lowermost heaven the veil. 7 But the mostconclusive consideration upon the opinion we are arguing for andit must be entirely convincing is to be drawn from the first halfof the ninth chapter. To appreciate it, it is requisite toremember that the Rabbins with whose notions our author wasfamiliar and some of which he adopts in his reasoning wereaccustomed to compare the Jewish temple and city with the templeand city of Jehovah above the sky, considering the former asminiature types of the latter. This mode of thought was originallylearned by philosophical Rabbins from the Platonic doctrine ofideas, without doubt, and was entertained figuratively, spiritually; but in the unreflecting, popular mind the Hebraicviews to which it gave rise were soon grossly materialized andlocated. They also derived the same conception from God's commandto 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 theein the mount. " They refined upon these words with many conceits. They compared the three divisions of the temple to the threeheavens: the outer Court of the Gentiles corresponded with thefirst heaven, the Court of the Israelites with the second heaven, and the Holy of Holies represented the third heaven or the veryabode of God. Josephus writes, "The temple has three compartments:the first two for men, the third for God, because heaven isinaccessible to men. "8 Now, our author says, referring to thistriple symbolic arrangement of the temple, "The priests wentalways into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service, butinto the second went the high priest alone, once every year, notwithout blood; this, which was a figure for the time then present, signifying that the way into the holiest of all9 was not yet laidopen; but Christ being come, an high priest of the future goodthings, by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal deliverance. " The points of the comparisonhere instituted are these: On the great annual day of atonement, after the death of the victim, the Hebrew high priest went intothe adytum of the earthly temple, but none could follow; Jesus, the Christian high priest, went after his own death into theadytum of the heavenly temple, and enabled the faithful to enterthere after him. Imagery like the fore going, which implies aSanctum Sanctorum above, the glorious prototype of that below, isfrequent in the Talmud. 10 To remove all uncertainty from theexposition thus presented, if any doubt linger, it is onlynecessary to cite one more passage from the epistle. "We have, therefore, brethren, by the blood of Jesus, leading into theholiest, a free road, a new and blessed road, which he hathinaugurated for us through the veil, that is to say, through hisflesh. " As there was no entrance for the priest into the holiestof the temple save by the removal of the veil, so Christ could notenter heaven except by the removal of his body. The blood of Jesushere, as in most cases in the New Testament, means the death ofJesus, involving his ascension. Chrysostom, commenting on theseverses, 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 underworld; the other is of life, " leading to heaven. The interpretation we have given of these passages reconcilesand blends that part of the known contemporary opinions whichapplies to them, and explains and justifies the natural forceof the imagery and words employed. Its accuracy seems to us unquestionable by any candid person who iscompetently acquainted with the subject. The substance of it is, that Jesus came from God to the earth as a man, laid down his lifethat he might rise from the dead into heaven again, into the realSanctum Sanctorum of the universe, thereby proving that faithfulbelievers also shall rise thither, being thus delivered, after thepattern of his evident deliverance, from the imprisonment of therealm of death below. We now proceed to quote and unfold five distinct passages, not yetbrought forward, from the epistle, each of which proves that weare 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, inwhich 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 weshall adduce it is certain that the word "death" includes theentrance of the soul into the subterranean kingdom of ghosts. Itis written of Christ that, "in the days of his flesh, when he hadearnestly prayed to Him that was able to do it, to save him fromdeath, he was heard, " and was advanced to be a high priest in theheavens, "was made higher than the heavens. " Now, obviously, Goddid not rescue Christ from dying, but he raised him, [non-ASCIIcharacters], from the world of the dead. So Chrysostom declares, referring to this very text, "Not to beretained 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 usedto denote the safe restoration of a warrior from an incursion intoan 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, " Philosays, "inherit the Olympic and heavenly region to dwell in, alwaysstudying to go above; the bad inherit the innermost parts of theunder world, always laboring to die. "12 The antithesis betweengoing above and dying, and the mention of the under world inconnection with the latter, prove that to die here means, or atleast includes, going below after death. The Septuagint version of the Old Testament twice translates Sheolby the word "death. "13 The Hebrew word for death, maveth, isrepeatedly used for the abode of the dead. 14 And the nail of theinterpretation we are urging is clenched by this sentence fromOrigen: "The under world, in which souls are detained by death, is called death. "15 Bretschneider cites nearly a dozen passagesfrom the New Testament where, in his judgment, death is used todenote Hades. Again: we read that Christ took human nature upon him "in orderthat by means of [his own] death he might render him that has thepower of death that is, the devil idle, and deliver those whothrough fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. "It is apparent at once that the mere death of Christ, so far fromending the sway of Death, would be giving the grim monster a newvictory, incomparably the most important he had ever achieved. Therefore, the only way to make adequate sense of the passage isto join with the Savior's death what followed it, namely, hisresurrection and ascension. It was the Hebrew belief that sin, introduced by the fraud of the devil, was the cause of death, andthe doomer of the disembodied spirits of men to the lower cavernsof darkness and rest. They personified Death as king, tyrannizingover mankind; and, unless in severe affliction, they dreaded thehour when they must lie down under his sceptre and sink into hisvoiceless kingdom of shadows. Christ broke the power of Satan, closed his busy reign, rescued the captive souls, and relieved thetimorous 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. : "Infernilocus in quo anima detinebantur a morte mors appellatur. " the long bound dominion of the grave, and ascending in a new pathof light, pioneering the saints to immortal glory. In another part of the epistle, the writer, having previouslyexplained that as the high priest after the death of the expiatorygoat entered the typical holy place in the temple, so Christ afterhis own death entered the true holy place in the heavens, goes onto guard against the analogy being forced any further to deny thenecessity of Christ's service being repeated, as the priest's wasannually repeated, saying, "For then he must have died many timessince the foundation of the world; but, on the contrary, [itsuffices that] once, at the close of the ages, through thesacrifice of himself he hath appeared [in heaven] for theabrogation of sin. "16 The rendering and explanation we give ofthis language are those adopted by the most distinguishedcommentators, and must be justified by any one who examines theproper punctuation of the clauses and studies the context. Thesimple idea is, that, by the sacrifice of his body through death, Christ rose and showed himself in the presence of God. The authoradds that this was done "unto the annulling of sin. " It is withreference to these last words principally that we have cited thepassage. What do they mean? In what sense can the passing ofChrist's soul into heaven after death be said to have done awaywith sin? In the first place, the open manifestation of Christ'sdisenthralled and risen soul in the supernal presence of God didnot in any sense abrogate sin itself, literally considered, because all kinds of sin that ever were upon the earth among menbefore have been ever since, and are now. In the second place, that miraculous event did not annul and remove human guilt, theconsciousness of sin and responsibility for it, because, in fact, men feel the sting and load of guilt now as badly as ever; and thevery epistle before us, as well as the whole New Testament, addresses Christians as being exposed to constant and varieddanger of incurring guilt and woe. But, in the third place, theascension of Jesus did show very plainly to the apostles and firstChristians that what they supposed to be the great outward penaltyof sin was annulled; that it was no longer a necessity for thespirit to descend to the lower world after death; that fatal doom, entailed on the generations of humanity by sin, was now abrogatedfor all who were worthy. Such, we have not a doubt, is the truemeaning of the declaration under review. This exposition is powerfully confirmed by the two succeedingverses, which we will next pass to examine. "As it is appointedfor men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, shall appear asecond time, without sin, for salvation unto those expecting him. "Man dies once, and then passes into that state of separateexistence in the under world which is the legal judgment for sin. Christ, taking upon himself, with the nature of man, the burden ofman's lot and doom, died once, and then rose from the dead by thegracious power of the Father, bearing away the outward penalty ofsin. He will come again into the world, uninvolved, the next time, with any of the accompaniments or consequences of sin, to savethem that look for him, and victoriously lead them into heavenwith him. In this instance, as all through the writings of theapostles, 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 bemade of the contrasted terms righteousness, grace, immortal lifeabove the sky; 17 the former being traced from the sinful andfallen Adam, the latter from the righteous and risen Christ. The author says, "If the blood of bulls and goats sanctifies untothe purification of the flesh, how much more shall the blood ofChrist, who having18 an eternal spirit offered himself faultlessto God, cleanse your consciousness!" The argument, fullyexpressed, is, if the blood of perishable brutes cleanses thebody, the blood of the immortal Christ cleanses the soul. Theimplied inference is, that as the former fitted the outward manfor the ritual privileges of the temple, so the latter fitted theinward man for the spiritual privileges of heaven. This appearsclearly from what follows in the next chapter, where the writersays, in effect, that "it is not possible for the blood of bullsand of goats to take away sins, however often it is offered, butthat Christ, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins, foreversat down at the right hand of God. " The reason given for theefficacy of Christ's offering is that he sat down at the righthand of God. When the chosen animals were sacrificed for sins, they utterly perished, and there was an end. But when Christ wasoffered, his soul survived and rose into heaven, an evident signthat the penalty of sin, whereby men were doomed to the underworld after death, was abolished. This perfectly explains thelanguage; and nothing else, it seems to us, can perfectly explainit. That Christ would speedily reappear from heaven in triumph, tojudge his foes and save his disciples, was a fundamental articlein the primitive Church scheme of the last things. There areunmistakable evidences of such a belief in our author. "For yet alittle while, and the coming one will come, and will not delay. ""Provoke one another unto love and good works, . . . So much themore as ye see the day drawing near. " There is another referenceto this approaching advent, which, though obscure, affordsimportant testimony. Jesus, when he had ascended, "sat down at theright hand of God, henceforward waiting till his enemies be madehis footstool. " That is to say, he is tarrying in heaven for theappointed time to arrive when he shall come into the world againto consummate the full and final purposes of his mission. We mayleave this division of the subject established beyond allquestion, by citing a text which explicitly states the idea in somany words: "Unto them that look for him he shall appear thesecond time. " That expectation of the speedy second coming of theMessiah which haunted the early Christians, therefore, unquestionably occupied the mind of the composer of the Epistle tothe Hebrews. If the writer of this epistolary essay had a firm and detailedopinion as to the exact fate to be allotted to wicked andpersistent unbelievers, his allusions to that opinion are too fewand vague for us to determine precisely what it was. We willbriefly quote the substance of what he says upon the subject, andadd a word in regard to the inferences it does, or it does not, warrant. "If under the Mosaic dispensation every transgressionreceived a just recompense, how shall we escape if we neglect sogreat 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, onaccount of their unbelief and provocations, were not permitted toenter the promised land, but perished in the wilderness, so let usfear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, anyof you should seem to come short of it. " Christ "became the causeof eternal salvation to all them that obey him. " "He hath broughtunto the end forever them that are sanctified. " It will beobserved that these last specifications are partial, and thatnothing is said of the fate of those not included under them. "Itis impossible for those who were once enlightened, . . . If theyshall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance. . . . But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, even things thataccompany salvation. " "We are not of them who draw back unto thedestruction, but of them who believe unto the preservation, of thesoul. " "If we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge ofthe truth, there is no longer left a sacrifice for sins, but acertain fearful looking for of judgment, and of fiery indignationto devour the adversaries. " "It is a fearful thing to fall intothe hands of the living God. " "If they escaped not who refused himthat spoke on earth, [Moses, ] much more we shall not escape if weturn away from him that speaks from heaven, " (Christ. ) In view ofthe foregoing passages, which represent the entire teaching of theepistle in relation to the ultimate destination of sinners, wemust assert as follows. First, the author gives no hint of thedoctrine of literal torments in a local hell. Secondly, he isstill further from favoring nay, he unequivocally denies thedoctrine of unconditional, universal salvation. Thirdly, he eitherexpected that the reprobate would be absolutely destroyed at thesecond coming of Christ, which does not seem to be declared; orthat they would be exiled forever from the kingdom of glory intothe 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 originalelect, which is not written in the record; or, lastly, that theywould be disposed of in some way unknown to him, which he does notavow. He makes no allusion to such a terrific conception as isexpressed by our modern use of the word hell: he emphaticallypredicates conditionality of salvation, he threatens sinners ingeneral terms with severe judgment. Further than this he hasneglected to state his faith. If it reached any further, he haspreferred to leave the statement of it in vague and impressivegloom. 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 inthe guise of humanity to undergo its whole experience and to beits redeemer. He died, passed through the vanquished kingdom ofthe grave, and rose into heaven again, to exemplify to men thatthrough the grace of God a way was opened to escape the underworld, the great external penalty of sin, and reach a bettercountry, even a heavenly. From his seat at God's right hand, heshould ere long descend to complete God's designs in his mission, judge his enemies and lead his accepted followers to heaven. Theall important thought running through the length and breadth ofthe treatise is the ascension of Christ from the midst of the dead[non-ASCII characters]into the celestial presence, as the pledge ofour ascent. "Among the things of which we are speaking, this is thecapital consideration, [non-ASCII characters] the most essentialpoint, "that we have such a high priest, who hath sat down at theright hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens. " Neandersays, though apparently without perceiving the extent of itsulterior significance, "The conception of the resurrection inrelation to the whole Christian system lies at the basis of thisepistle. " A brief sketch and exposition of the scope of the epistle ingeneral will cast light and confirmation upon the interpretationwe have given of its doctrine of a future life in particular. Theone comprehensive design of the writer, it is perfectly clear, isto prove to the Christian converts from the Hebrews thesuperiority of Christianity to Judaism, and thus to arm themagainst apostasy from the new covenant to the ancient one. Hebegins by showing that Christ, the bringer of the gospel, isgreater than the angels, by whom the law was given, 19 andconsequently that his word is to be reverenced still more thantheirs. 20 Next he argues that Jesus, the Christian Mediator, asthe Son of God, is crowned with more authority and is worthy ofmore glory than Moses, the Jewish mediator, as the servant of God;and that as Moses led his people towards the rest of Canaan, soChrist leads his people towards the far better rest of heaven. Hethen advances to demonstrate the superiority of Christ to theLevitical priesthood. This he establishes by pointing out thefacts that the Levitical priest had a transient honor, being afterthe law of a carnal commandment, his offerings referring to theflesh, while Christ has an unchangeable priesthood, being afterthe power of an endless life, his offering referring to the soul;that the Levitical priest once a year went into the symbolic holyplace in the temple, unable to admit others, but Jesus rose intothe real holy place itself above, opening a way for all faithfuldisciples to follow; and that the Hebrew temple and ceremonieswere but the small type and shadow of the grand archetypal templein heaven, where Christ is the immortal High Priest, fulfilling inthe presence of God the completed reality of what Judaism merelyminiatured, an emblematic pattern that could make nothing perfect. "By him therefore let us continually offer to God the sacrifice ofpraise. " The author intersperses, and closes with, exhortations tosteadfast faith, pure morals, and fervent piety. There is one point in this epistle which deserves, in itsessential connection with the doctrine of the future life, aseparate treatment. It is the subject of the Atonement. Thecorrespondence between the sacrifices in the Hebrew ritual and thesufferings and death of Christ would, from the nature of the case, irresistibly suggest the sacrificial terms and metaphors which ourauthor uses in a large part of his argument. Moreover, his preciseaim in writing compelled him to make these resemblances asprominent, as significant, and as effective as possible. Griesbachsays well, in his learned and able essay, "When it was impossiblefor the Jews, lately brought to the Christian faith, to tear awaythe attractive associations of their ancestral religion, whichwere twined among the very roots of their minds, and they wereconsequently in danger of falling away from Christ, the mostingenious author of this epistle met the case by a masterlyexpedient. He instituted a careful comparison, showing thesuperiority of Christianity to Judaism even in regard to the verypoint where the latter seemed so much more glorious, namely, inpriesthoods, 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 thesecomparisons are sometimes used by the writer analogically, figuratively, imaginatively, for the sake of practicalillustration and impression, not literally as logical expressionsand proofs of a dogmatic theory of atonement, is made sufficientlyplain by the following quotations. "The bodies of those beastswhose blood is brought into the holy place by the high priest forsin are burned without the camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that hemight sanctify the people through his own blood, suffered withoutthe gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. " Every one will at once perceive that thesesentences are not critical statements of theological truths, butare imaginative expressions of practical lessons, spiritualexhortations. Again, we read, "It was necessary that the patternsof the heavenly things should be purified with sacrificed animals, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices thanthese. " Certainly it is only by an exercise of the imagination, for spiritual impression, not for philosophical argument, thatheaven can be said to be defiled by the sins of men on earth so asto need cleansing by the lustral blood of Christ. The writer alsoappeals to his readers in these terms: "To do good and tocommunicate forget not; for with such sacrifices God is wellpleased. " The purely practical aim and rhetorical method withwhich the sacrificial language is employed here are evidentenough. We believe it is used in the same way wherever it occursin the epistle. The considerations which have convinced us, and which we thinkought to convince every unprejudiced mind, that the Calvinisticscheme of a substitutional expiation for sin, a placation ofDivine wrath by the offering of Divine blood, was not in the mindof the author, and does not inform his expressions when they arerightly understood, may be briefly presented. First, the notionthat the suffering of Christ in itself ransomed lost souls, boughtthe withheld grace and pardon of God for us, is confessedlyforeign and repulsive to the instinctive moral sense and tonatural reason, but is supposed to rest on the authority ofrevelation. Secondly, that doctrine is nowhere specifically statedin the epistle, but is assumed, or inferred, to explain languagewhich to a superficial look seems to imply it, perhaps even seemsto be inexplicable without it;22 but in reality such a view isinconsistent with that language when it is accurately studied. Forexample, notice the following passage: "When Christ cometh intothe world, " he is represented as saying, "I come to do thy will, OGod. " "By the which will, " the writer continues, "we aresanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus. " That is, the death of Christ, involving his resurrection and ascension intoheaven, fulfils and exemplifies the gracious purpose of God, notpurchases for us an otherwise impossible benignity. The abovecited explicit declaration is irreconcilable 21 Opuscula: De Imaginibus Judaicis in Epist. Ad Hebraos. 22 That these texts were not originally understood as implying anyvicarious efficacy in Christ's painful death, but as attributing atypical power to his triumphant resurrection, his glorious returnfrom the world of the dead into heaven, appears very plainly inthe following instance, Theodoret, one of the earliest explanatorywriters on the New Testament, says, while expressly speaking ofChrist's death, the sufferings through which he was perfected, "His resurrection certified a resurrection for us all. " Comm. InEpist. Ad Heb. Cap. 2, v. 10. with the thought that Christ came into the world to die that hemight appease the flaming justice and anger of God, and byvicarious agony buy the remission of human sins: it conveys theidea, on the contrary, that God sent Christ to prove andillustrate to men the free fulness of his forgiving love. Thirdly, the idea, which we think was the idea of the author of the Epistleto the Hebrews, that Christ, by his death, resurrection, andascent, demonstrated to the faith of men God's merciful removal ofthe supposed outward penalty of sin, namely, the banishment ofsouls after death to the under world, and led the way, as theirforerunner, into heaven, this idea, which is not shocking to themoral sense nor plainly absurd to the moral reason, as theAugustinian dogma is, not only yields a more sharply defined, consistent, and satisfactory explanation of all the relatedlanguage of the epistle, but is also which cannot be said of theother doctrine in harmony with the contemporary opinions of theHebrews, and would be the natural and almost inevitabledevelopment from them and complement of them in the mind of aPharisee, who, convinced of the death and ascension of the sinlessJesus, the appointed Messiah, had become a Christian. In support of the last assertion, which is the only one that needsfurther proof, we submit the following considerations. In thefirst place, every one familiar with the eschatology of theHebrews knows that at the time of Christ the belief prevailed thatthe sin of Adam was the cause of death among men. In the secondplace, it is equally well known that they believed the destinationof souls upon leaving the body to be the under world. Thereforedoes it not follow by all the necessities of logic? they believedthat sin was the cause of the descent of disembodied spirits tothe dreary lower realm. In the third place, it is notorious andundoubted that the Jews of that age expected that, when theMessiah should appear, the dead of their nation, or at least aportion of them, would be raised from the under world and bereclothed with bodies, and would reign with him for a period onearth and then ascend to heaven. Now, what could be more naturalthan that a person holding this creed, who should be brought tobelieve that Jesus was the true Messiah and after his death hadrisen from among the dead into heaven, should immediately concludethat this was a pledge or illustration of the abrogation of thegloomy penalty of sin, the deliverance of souls from thesubterranean prison, and their admission to the presence of Godbeyond the sky? We deem this an impregnable position. Everyrelevant text that we consider in its light additionally fortifiesit by the striking manner in which such a conception fits, fills, and explains the words. To justify these interpretations, and tosustain particular features of the doctrine which they express, almost any amount of evidence may be summoned from the writingsboth of the most authoritative and of the simplest Fathers of theChurch, beginning with Justin Martyr, 23 philosopher of Neapolis, at the close of the apostolic age, and ending with John Hobart, 24Bishop 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 futurechapters. 23 Dial. Cum Tryph. Cap. V. Et cap. Lxxx. 24 State of the Departed. The intelligent reader will observe that the essential point ofdifference distinguishing our exposition of the fundamentaldoctrine of the composition in review, on the one hand, from theCalvinistic interpretation of it, and, on the other hand, from theUnitarian 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 ofsouls from an agonizing and endless hell. Unitarianism says thatChrist, by his teachings, spirit, life, and miracles, revealed thecharacter of the Father, set an example for man, gave certainty togreat truths, and exerted moral influences to regenerate men, redeem them from sin, and fit them for the blessed kingdom ofimmortality. We understand the writer of the Epistle to theHebrews really to say in subtraction from what the Calvinist, inaddition to what the Unitarian, says that Christ, by hisresurrection from the tyrannous realm of death, and ascent intothe unbarred heaven, demonstrated the fact that God, in hissovereign grace, in his free and wondrous love, would forgivemankind their sins, remove the ancient penalty of transgression, no more dooming their disembodied spirits to the noiseless andeverlasting gloom of the under world, but admitting them to hisown presence, above the firmamental floor, where the beams of hischambers are laid, and where he reigneth forever, covered withlight as with a garment. CHAPTER III. DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE APOCALYPSE. BEFORE attempting to exhibit the doctrine of a future lifecontained in the Apocalypse, we propose to give a brief account ofwhat is contained, relating to this subject, in the Epistle ofJames, the Epistle of Jude, and the (so called) Second Epistle ofPeter. The references made by James to the group of points included underthe general theme of the Future Life are so few and indirect, orvague, that it is impossible to construct any thing like acomplete doctrine from them, save by somewhat arbitrary anduncertain suppositions. His purpose in writing, evidently, waspractical exhortation, not dogmatic instruction. His epistlecontains no expository outline of a system; but it has allusionsand hints which plainly imply some partial views belonging to asystem, 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 moralmetaphor to convey a spiritual meaning, or as a literal statementof a physical fact, or as a comprehensive enunciation includingboth these ideas, there is nothing in the context positively todetermine. He offers not the faintest clew to his conception ofthe purpose of the death and resurrection of Christ. He uses theword for the Jewish hell but once, and then, undeniably, in afigurative sense, saying that a "curbless and defiling tongue isset on fire of Gehenna. " He appears to adopt the common notion ofhis contemporary countrymen in regard to demoniacal existences, when he declares that "the devils believe there is one God, andtremble, " and when he exclaims, "Resist the devil, and he willflee from you. " He insists on the necessity of a faith thatevinces itself in good works and in all the virtues, as the meansof acceptance with God. He compares life to a vanishing vapor, denounces terribly the wicked and dissolute rich men who wanton incrimes and oppress the poor. Then he calls on the sufferingbrethren to be patient under their afflictions "until the comingof the Lord;" to abstain from oaths, be fervent in prayer, andestablish 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 ofChrist, to finish his work, sit in judgment, accept some, andreject others, is clearly implied. And if James held this elementof the general scheme of eschatology held by the other apostles asshown in their epistles, it is altogether probable that he alsoembraced the rest of that scheme. There are no means of definitelyascertaining whether he did or did not; though, according to avery learned and acute theologian, another fundamental part ofthat general system of doctrine is to be found in the last verseof the epistle, where James says that "he who converts a sinnerfrom the error of his ways shall save a soul from death and hide amultitude of sins. " Bretschneider thinks that saving a soul fromdeath here means rescuing it from a descent into the under world, the word death being often used in the New Testament as by theRabbins to denote the subterranean abode of the dead. 1 This 1 Bretschneider, Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 59. interpretation may seem forced to an unlearned reader, whoexamines the text for personal profit, but will not seem at allimprobable to one who, to learn its historic meaning, reads thetext in the lighted foreground of a mind over whose backgroundlies a fitly arranged knowledge of all the materials requisite foran adequate criticism. For such a man was Bretschneider himself. The eschatological implications and references in the Epistle ofJude are of pretty much the same character and extent as thosewhich we have just considered. A thorough study and analysis ofthis brief document will show that it may be fairly divided intothree heads and be regarded as having three objects. First, thewriter exhorts his readers "to contend earnestly for the faithonce delivered to the saints, " "to remember the words of Christ'sapostles, " "to keep themselves in the love of God, looking foreternal life. " He desires to stir them up to diligence in effortsto 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 examplesof the terrible judgments of God on the rebellious and wicked inother times. Among these instances is the case of the Cities ofthe Plain, eternally destroyed by a storm of fire for theiruncleanness; also the example of the fallen angels, "who kept nottheir first estate, but left their proper habitation, and arereserved in everlasting chains and darkness unto the judgment ofthe great day. " The writer here adopts the doctrine of fallenangels, and the connected views, as then commonly received amongthe Jews. This doctrine is not of Christian origin, but was drawnfrom Persian and other Oriental sources, as is abundantly shown, with details, in almost every history of Jewish opinions, inalmost every Biblical commentary. 2 In this connection Jude cites alegend from an apocryphal book, called the "Ascension of Moses, "of which Origen gives an account. 3 The substance of the traditionis, that, at the decease of Moses, Michael and Satan contendedwhether the body should be given over to death or be taken up toheaven. The appositeness of this allusion is, that, while in thisstrife the archangel dared not rail against Satan, yet the wickedmen whom Jude is denouncing do not hesitate to blaspheme theangels and to speak evil of the things which they know not. "Woeunto such ungodly men: gluttonous spots, dewless clouds, fruitlesstrees plucked up and twice dead, they are ordained tocondemnation. " Thirdly, the epistle announces the second coming ofChrist, in the last time, to establish his tribunal. The Prophecyof Enoch an apocryphal book, recovered during the present centuryis quoted as saying, "Behold, the Lord cometh, with ten thousandof his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict theungodly of their ungodly deeds. "4 Jude, then, anticipated thereturn of the Lord, at "the judgment of the great day, " to judgethe world; considered the under world, or abode of the dead, notas a region of fire, but a place of imprisoning gloom, wherein "todefiled and blaspheming dreamers is reserved the blackness ofdarkness 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'sIntroduction 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 strivingto secure their salvation, because "all sensual mockers, nothaving the spirit, but walking after their own ungodly lusts, "would be lost. He probably expected that, when all freecontingencies were past and Christ had pronounced sentence, thecondemned would be doomed eternally into the black abyss, and theaccepted would rise into the immortal glory of heaven. He closeshis letter with these significant words, which plainly imply muchof what we have just been setting forth: "Everlasting honor andpower, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be unto God, who is able tokeep you from falling and to present you faultless before the faceof his glory with exceeding joy. "5 The first chapter of the so called Second Epistle of Peter is notoccupied with theological propositions, but with historical, ethical, and practical statements and exhortations. These are, indeed, of such a character, and so expressed, that they clearlypresuppose certain opinions in the mind of the writer. First, heevidently believed that a merciful and holy message had been sentfrom God to men by Jesus Christ, whereby are given unto usexceeding great and precious promises. " The substance of thesepromises was "a call to escape the corruption of the world, andenter into glory and be partakers of the Divine nature. " Bypartaking of the Divine nature, we understand the writer to meanentering the Divine abode and condition, ascending into the safeand eternal joy of the celestial prerogatives. That the authorhere denotes heaven by the term glory, as the other New Testamentwriters frequently do, appears distinctly from the seventeenth andeighteenth verses of the chapter, where, referring to the incidentat the baptism of Jesus, he declares, "There came a voice from theexcellent glory, saying, 'This is my beloved Son;' and this voice, which came from heaven, we heard. " Secondly, our author regardedthis glorious promise as contingent on the fulfilment of certainconditions. 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 entranceshall be ministered unto him abundantly into the everlastingkingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. " The writerfurnishes us no clew to his idea of the particular part performedby Christ in our salvation. He says not a word concerning thesufferings or death of the Savior; and the extremely scanty andindefinite allusions made to the relation in which Christ wassupposed to stand between God and men, and the redemption andreconciliation of men with God, do not enable us to draw anydogmatic conclusions. He speaks of "false teachers, who shallbring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that boughtthem. " But whether by this last phrase he means to imply a ransomof imprisoned souls from the under world by Christ's descentthither and victory over its powers, or a purchased exemption ofsinners from their merited doom by the vicarious sufferings ofChrist's death, or a practical regenerative redemption ofdisciples from their sins by the moral influences of his mission, his teachings, example, and character, there is nothing in theepistle clearly to decide; though, forming our judgment by the aidof other sources of information, we should conclude in favor ofthe first of these three conceptions as most probably expressingthe writer's thought. 5 Griesbuch's reading of the 25th verse of Jude. The second chapter of the epistle is almost an exact parallel withthe 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 bepunished. " It warns such persons by citing the example of therebellious "angels, who were thrust down into Tartarus, andfastened in chains of darkness until the judgment. " It speaks of"cursed children, to whom is reserved the mist of darknessforever. " Herein, plainly enough, is betrayed the common notion ofthe Jews of that time, the conception of a dismal under world, containing the evil angels of the Persian theology, and where thewicked were to be remanded after judgment and eternallyimprisoned. The third and last chapter is taken up with the doctrine of thesecond coming of Christ. "Be mindful of the words of the prophetsand apostles, knowing this first, that in the last days thereshall be scoffers, who will say, 'Where is the promise of hiscoming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue asfrom the beginning. '" The writer meets this skeptical assertionwith denial, and points to the Deluge, "whereby the world thatthen was, being overflowed with water, perished. " His argument is, the world was thus destroyed once, therefore it may be destroyedagain. He then goes on to assert positively relying for authorityon old traditions and current dogmas that "the heavens and theearth which are now are kept by the word of God in store to bedestroyed by fire in the day of judgment, when the perdition ofungodly men shall be sealed. " "The delay of the Lord to fulfil hispromise is not from procrastination, but from his long sufferingwho is not willing that any should perish. " He waits "that all maycome to repentance. " But his patience will end, and "the day ofGod come as a thief in the night, when the heavens, being on fire, shall pass away with a crash, and the elements melt with ferventheat. " There are two ways in which these declarations may beexplained, though in either case the events they refer to are tooccur in connection with the physical reappearance of Christ. First, they may be taken in a highly figurative sense, as meaningthe moral overthrow of evil and the establishment of righteousnessin the world. Similar expressions were often used thus by theancient Hebrew prophets, who describe the triumphs of Israel andthe 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 afire, like waters poured over a precipice. " "The heavens shall berolled up like a scroll, all their hosts shall melt away and falldown; for Jehovah holdeth a great slaughter in the land of Edom:her streams shall be turned into pitch, and her dust intobrimstone, and her whole land shall become burning pitch. " Thesuppression of Satan's power and the setting up of the Messiah'skingdom might, according to the prophetic idiom, be expressed inawful images of fire and woe, the destruction of the old, and thecreation of a new, heaven and earth. But, secondly, thisphraseology, as used by the writer of the epistle before us, mayhave a literal significance, may have been intended to predictstrictly that the world shall be burned and purged by fire at thesecond coming of the Lord. That such a catastrophe would takeplace in the last day, or occurred periodically, was notoriouslythe doctrine of the Persians and of the Stoics. 6 For our own part, we are convinced that the latter is the real meaning of thewriter. This seems to be shown alike by the connection of hisargument, by the prosaic literality of detail with which hespeaks, and by the earnest exhortations he immediately bases onthe declaration he has made. He reasons that, since the world wasdestroyed once by water, it may be again by fire. The deluge hecertainly 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, whatmanner of persons ought ye to be in all holiness, looking for anew heaven and a new earth, and striving that ye may be found byhim in peace, without spot, and blameless!" We do not suppose thiswriter expected the annihilation of the physical creation, butonly that the fire would destroy all unransomed creatures from itssurface, and thoroughly purify its frame, and make it clean andfit 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 courseNot 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 NewTestament, that book which, in the words of Lucke, "lies like aSphinx at the lofty outgate of the Bible. " There are three modesof interpreting the Apocalypse, each of which has had numerous anddistinguished advocates. First, it may be regarded as a congeriesof inspired prophecies, a scenic unfolding, with infallibleforesight, of the chief events of Christian history from the firstcentury till now, and onwards. This view the combined effect ofthe facts in the case and of all the just considerationsappropriate to the subject compels us to reject. There is noevidence to support it; the application of it is crowded withegregious follies and absurdities. We thus simply state the resultof our best investigation and judgment, for there is no space hereto discuss it in detail. Secondly, the book may be taken as asymbolic exhibition of the transitional crises, exposures, struggles, and triumphs of the individual soul, a description ofpersonal experience, a picture of the inner life of the Christianin a hostile world. The contents of it can be made to answer tosuch a characterization only by the determined exercise of anunrestrained fancy, or by the theory of a double sense, as theSwedenborgians expound it. This method of interpreting theRevelation is adopted, not by scholarly thinkers, who, by thelight of learning and common sense, seek to discern what thewriter meant to express, but by those persons who go to theobscure document, with traditional superstition and lawlessimaginations, to see what lessons they can find there for theirexperimental guidance and edification. We suppose that everyintelligent and informed student who has 6 Cicero de Nat. Deorum, lib. Ii. Cap. 46. Also Ovid, MinuciusFelix, Seneca, and other authorities, as quoted by Rosenmuller on2 Peter iii. 7. examined the subject with candid independence holds it as anexegetical axiom that the Apocalypse is neither a pure prophecy, blazing full illumination from Patmos along the track of thecoming centuries, nor an exhaustive vision of the experience ofthe faithful Christian disciple. We are thus brought to the thirdand, as we think, the correct mode of considering this remarkablework. It is an outburst from the commingled and seething mass ofopinions, persecutions, hopes, general experience, and expectationof the time when it was written. This is the view which wouldnaturally arise in the mind of an impartial student from thenature of the case, and from contemplating the fervid faith, suffering, lowering elements, and thick coming events of theapostolic age. It also strikingly corresponds with numerousexpress statements and with the whole obvious spirit and plan ofthe work; for its descriptions and appeals have the vivid colors, the thrilling tones, the significantly detailed allusions toexperiences and opinions and anticipations notoriously existing atthe time, which belong to present or immediately impending scenes. This way of considering the Apocalypse likewise enables one who isacquainted with the early Jewish Christian doctrines, legends, andhopes, to explain clearly a large number of passages in it whoseobscurity has puzzled many a commentator. We should be glad togive various illustrations of this, if our limits did not confineus strictly to the one class of texts belonging to the doctrine ofa future life. Furthermore, nearly all the most gifted critics, such as Ewald, Bleek, Lucke, De Wette, those whose words on suchmatters as these are weightiest, now agree in concluding that theRevelation of John was a product springing out of the intenseJewish Christian belief and experience of the age, and referring, in its dramatic scenery and predictions, to occurrences supposedto be then transpiring or very close at hand. Finally, this viewin regard to the Apocalypse is strongly confirmed by a comparisonof that production with the several other works similar to it incharacter and nearly contemporaneous in origin. These apocryphalproductions were written or compiled according to the prettygeneral agreement of the great scholars who have criticized themsomewhere between the beginning of the first century before, andthe middle of the second century after, Christ. We merely proposehere, in the briefest manner, to indicate the doctrine of a futurelife contained in them, as an introduction to an exposition ofthat contained in the New Testament Apocalypse. In the TESTAMENT OF THE TWELVE PATRIARCHS it is written that "theunder world shall be spoiled through the death of the MostExalted. "7 Again, we read, "The Lord shall make battle against thedevil, and conquer him, and rescue from him the captive souls ofthe righteous. The just shall rejoice in Jerusalem, where the Lordshall reign himself, and every one that believes in him shallreign in truth in the heavens. "8 Farther on the writer says of theLord, after giving an account of his crucifixion, "He shall riseup from the under world and ascend into heaven. "9 These extractsseem to imply the common doctrine of that time, that Christdescended into the under world, freed the captive saints, and roseinto heaven, and would soon return to establish his throne inJerusalem, to reign there for a time with his accepted followers. 7 See this book in Fabricii Codex Pseudepigraphus VeterisTestamenti, 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 hintsof the same nature. 10 It describes a vision of the Messiah, onMount Zion, distributing crowns to those confessors of his namewho had died in their fidelity. 11 The world is said to be full ofsorrows and oppressions; and as the souls of the just ask when theharvest shall come, 12 for the good to be rewarded and the wickedto be punished, they are told that the day of liberation is notfar distant, though terrible trials and scourges must yet precedeit. "My Son Jesus shall be revealed. " "My Son the Christ shalldie; and then a new age shall come, the earth shall give up thedead, sinners shall be plunged into the bottomless abyss, andParadise shall appear in all its glory. "13 The "Son of God willcome and consume his enemies with fire; but the elect will beprotected and made happy. "14 The ASCENSION OF ISAIAH is principally occupied with an account ofthe rapture of the soul of that prophet through the seven heavens, and of what he there saw and learned. It describes the descent ofChrist, the beloved Son of God, through all the heavens, to theearth; his death; his resurrection after three days; his victoryover Satan and his angels, who dwell in the welkin or higherregion of the air; and his return to the right hand of God. 15 Itpredicts great apostasy and sin among the disciples of theapostles, and much dissension respecting the nearness of thesecond advent of Christ. 16 It emphatically declares that "Christshall come with his angels, and shall drag Satan and his powersinto Gehenna. Then all the saints shall descend from heaven intheir heavenly clothing, and dwell in this world; while the saintswho had not died shall be similarly clothed, and after a timeleave their bodies here, that they may assume their station inheaven. The general resurrection and judgment will follow, whenthe ungodly will be devoured by fire. "17 The author as Gesenius, with almost all the rest of the critics, says was unquestionably aJewish Christian, and his principal design was to set forth thespeedy second coming of Christ, and the glorious triumph of thesaints that would follow with the condign punishment of thewicked. The first book of the SIBYLLINE ORACLES contains a statement thatin the golden age the souls of all men passed peacefully into theunder world, to tarry there until the judgment; a prediction of afuture Messiah; and an account of his death, resurrection, andascension. The second book begins with a description of thehorrors that will precede the last time, threats against thepersecuting tyrants, and promises to the faithful, especially tothe 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 handChrist will sit, the bodies of the dead be raised, the righteousbe purified, and the wicked be plunged into final ruin. The fundamental thought and aim of the apocryphal BOOK OF ENOCHare the second coming of Christ to judge the world, theencouragement of the Christians, and the warning 10 See the abstract of it given in section vi. Of Stuart'sCommentary 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 tothose and vengeance to these. This is transparent at frequentintervals through the whole book. 18 "Ye righteous, wait withpatient hope: your cries have cried for judgment, and it shallcome, and the gates of heaven shall be opened to you. " "Woe toyou, powerful oppressors, false witnesses! for you shall suddenlyperish. " "The voices of slain saints accusing their murderers, theoppressors of their brethren, reach to heaven with intercedingcries for swift justice. "19 When that justice comes, "the horseshall wade up to his breast, and the chariot shall sink to itsaxle, in the blood of sinners. "20 The author teaches that thesouls of men at death go into the under world, "a place deep anddark, where all souls shall be collected;" "where they shallremain in darkness till the day of judgment, " the spirits of therighteous being in peace and joy, separated from the tormentedspirits of the wicked, who have spurned the Messiah and persecutedhis disciples. 21 A day of judgment is at hand. "Behold, he cometh, with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment. " Then therighteous shall rise from the under world, be approved, become asangels, and ascend to heaven. But the wicked shall not rise: theyremain imprisoned below forever. 22 The angels descend to earth todwell with men, and the saints ascend to heaven to dwell withangels. 23 "From beginning to end, like the Apocalypse, the book isfilled, " says Professor Stuart, (and the most careless reader mustremark it, ) "with threats for the wicked persecutors andconsolations for the suffering pious. " A great number ofremarkable correspondences between passages in this book andpassages in the Apocalypse solicit a notice which our presentsingle object will not allow us to give them here. An under worlddivided into two parts, a happy for the good, a wretched for thebad; temporary woes prevailing on the earth; the speedy advent ofChrist for a vindication of his power and his servants; theresurrection of the dead; the final translation of the acceptedinto heaven, and the hopeless dooming of the rejected into theabyss, these are the features in the book before us which we arenow to remember. There is one other extant apocryphal book whose contents arestrictly appropriate to the subject we have in hand, namely, theAPOCALYPSE OF JOHN. 24 It claims to be the work of the Apostle Johnhimself. It represents John as going to Mount Tabor after theascension of Christ, and there praying that it may be revealed tohim when the second coming of Christ will occur, and what will bethe consequences of it. In answer to his request, a long andminute disclosure is made. The substance of it is, that, afterfamines 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, thedead will rise, Christ 18 Book of Enoch, translated into English by Dr. R. Laurence. Seeparticularly 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 dieOffenbar. Joh. , cap. 2, sect. 17. will descend in pomp, with myriads of angels, and the judgmentwill follow. The spirits of Antichrist will be hurled into a gulfof outer darkness, so deep that a heavy stone would not plunge tothe bottom in three years. Unbelievers, sinners, hypocrites, willbe cast into the under world; while true Christians are placed atthe right hand of Christ, all radiant with glory. The good andaccepted will then dwell in an earthly paradise, with angels, andbe free from all evils. In addition to these still extant Apocalypses, we have referencesin the works of the Fathers to a great many others long sinceperished; especially the Apocalypses of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hystaspes, Paul, Peter, Thomas, Cerinthus, and Stephen. Sofar as we have any clew, by preserved quotations or otherwise, tothe contents of these lost productions, they seem to have beenmuch occupied with the topics of the avenging and redeeming adventof the Messiah, the final judgment of mankind, the supernal andsubterranean localities, the resurrection of the dead, theinauguration of an earthly paradise, the condemnation of thereprobate to the abyss beneath, the translation of the elect tothe Angelic realm on high. These works, all taken together, wereplainly the offspring of the mingled mass of glowing faiths, sufferings, fears, and hopes, of the age they belonged to. Anacquaintance with them will help us to appreciate and explain manythings in our somewhat kindred New Testament Apocalypse, byplacing us partially in the circumstances and mental attitude ofthe writer and of those for whom it was written. The Persian Jewish and Jewish Christian notions andcharacteristics of the Book of Revelation are marked andprevailing, as every prepared reader must perceive. The threefolddivision of the universe into the upper world of the angels, themiddle world of men, and the under world of the dead; the keys ofthe bottomless pit; the abode of Satan, the accuser, in heaven;his revolt; the war in the sky between his seduced host and theangelic army under Michael, and the thrusting down of the former;the banquet of birds on the flesh of kings, mighty men, andhorses; the battle of Gog and Magog; the tarrying of souls underthe altar of God; the temple in heaven containing the ark of thecovenant, and the scene of a various ritual service; the twelvegates of the celestial city bearing the names of the twelve tribesof the children of Israel, and the twelve foundations of the wallshaving the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb; the bodilyresurrection and general judgment, and the details of its sequel, all these doctrines and specimens of imagery, with a hundredothers, carry us at once into the Zend Avesta, the Talmud, and theEbionitish documents of the earliest Christians, who mixed theirinterpretations of the mission and teaching of Christ with thepoetic visions of Zoroaster and the cabalistic dogmatics of thePharisees. 25 It is astonishing that any intelligent person can peruse theApocalypse and still suppose that it is occupied with propheciesof remote events, events to transpire successively in distant agesand 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 itsbreath in view of the universal crash that was coming withelectric velocity. 25 See, e. G. , Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus, bandii. 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 persecutedand slain by the tyrannical rulers of the earth. Let them be ofgood cheer: they shall speedily be delivered. Their tyrants shallbe trampled down in "blood flowing up to the horse bridles, " andthey shall reign in glory. "Here is the faith and the patience ofthe saints, " trusting that, if "true unto death, they shall have acrown of life, " and "shall not be hurt of the second death, " butshall soon rejoice over the triumphant establishment of theMessiah's kingdom and the condign punishment of his enemies whoare now "making themselves drunk with the blood of the martyrs ofJesus. " The Beast, described in the thirteenth chapter, isunquestionably Nero; and this fact shows the expectedimmediateness of the events pictured in connection with the riseand destruction of that monstrous despot. 26 The truth of thisrepresentation is sealed by the very first verses of the book, indicating the nature of its contents and the period to which theyrefer: "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 keepthem; for the time is at hand. " This rescue and reward of the faithful, this overthrow andpunishment of the wicked, were to be effected by the agency of aunique and sublime personage, who was expected very soon toappear, with an army of angels from heaven, for this purpose. Theconception of the nature, rank, and offices of Jesus Christ whichexisted in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse is in somerespects but obscurely hinted in the words he employs; yet therelationship of those words to other and fuller sources ofinformation in the contemporaneous notions of his countrymen issuch as to give us great help in arriving at his ideas. Herepresents Christ as distinct from and subordinate to God. Hemakes Christ say, "To him that overcometh I will give power overthe nations, even as I received of my Father. " He characterizeshim as "the beginning of the creation of God, " and describes himas "mounted on a white horse, leading the heavenly armies to war, and his name is called the Logos of God. " These terms evidentlycorrespond to the phrases in the introduction to the Gospel ofJohn, and in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, where are unfoldedsome portions of that great doctrine, so prevalent among the earlyFathers, which was borrowed and adapted by them from the PersianHonover, the Hebrew Wisdom, and the Platonic Logos. 27 "In thebeginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and allthings were made by him;. . . And the Logos was made flesh and dweltamong us. "28 "God of our fathers, and Lord of mercy, who hast madeall things by thy Logos. "29 "Thine almighty Logos leaped down fromheaven from his royal throne, a fierce warrior, into the midst ofa land of destruction. "30 "Plainly enough, the Apocalyptic view ofChrist 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 thanNero. 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 distinctlyendorsed in numerous passages of the New Testament. First, thereis the absolute God. Next, there is the Logos, the first begottenSon and representative image of God, the instrumental cause of thecreation, the head of all created beings. This Logos, born intoour world as a man, is Christ. Around him are clustered all thefeatures and actions that compose the doctrine of the last things. The vast work of redemption and judgment laid upon him has in partbeen already executed, and in part remains yet to be done. We are first to inquire, then, into the significance of what thewriter of the Apocalypse supposes has already been effected byChrist in his official relations between God and men, so far asregards the general subject of a life beyond the grave. A fewbrief and vague but comprehensive expressions include all that hehas written which furnishes us a guide to his thoughts on thisparticular. He describes Jesus, when advanced to his nativesupereminent dignity in heaven, as the "Logos, clothed in avesture dipped in blood, " and also as "the Lamb that was slain, "to whom the celestial throng sing a new song, saying, "Thou hastredeemed us unto God by thy blood. " Christ, he says, "loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood. " He represents therisen Savior as declaring, "I am he that liveth, and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of theunder world and of death. " "Jesus Christ, " again he writes, "isthe faithful witness, the first begotten from the dead. " What, now, is the real meaning of these pregnant phrases? What is thecomplete 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, thesubterranean empire of shadows. Christ, leaving his exalted statein heaven, was born into the world as a messenger, or "faithfulwitness, " of surprising grace to them from God, and died that hemight fulfil his mission as the agent of their redemption, bydescending into the great prison realm of the dead, and, exertinghis irresistible power, return thence to light and life, andascend into heaven as the forerunner and pledge of the deliveranceand ascension of others. Moses Stuart, commenting on the clause"first begotten from the dead, " says, "Christ was in fact thefirst who enjoyed the privilege of a resurrection to eternal gloryand he was constituted the leader of all who should afterwards bethus raised from the dead. "31 All who had died, with the soleexception of Christ, were yet in the under world. He, since histriumphant subdual of its power and return to heaven, possessedauthority over it, and would ere long summon its hosts toresurrection, as he declares: "I was dead, and, behold, I am alivefor ever more, and have the keys of the under world. " The figureis that of a conqueror, who, returning from a captured and subduedcity, bears the key of it with him, a trophy of his triumph and apledge of its submission. The text "Thou hast redeemed us unto Godby thy blood" is not received in an absolutely literal sense byany theological sect whatever. The severest Calvinist does notsuppose that the physical blood shed on the cross is meant; but heexplains it as denoting the atoning efficacy of the vicarioussufferings of Christ. But this interpretation is as forced andconstructive 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, whichdo, on the contrary, support and necessitate the other. The directstatement is, that men were redeemed unto God by the blood ofChrist. All agree that in the word "blood" is wrapped up afigurative meaning. The Calvinistic dogma makes it denote thesatisfaction of the law of retributive justice by a substitutionalanguish. We maintain that a true historical exegesis, with farless violence to the use of language, and consistently with knowncontemporaneous ideas, makes it denote the death of Christ, andthe 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 exiledin Hades, but should dwell with God. Out of an abundance ofillustrative authorities we will cite a few. Augustine describes "the ancient saints" as being "in the underworld, in places most remote from the tortures of the impious, waiting for Christ's blood and descent to deliver them. "32Epiphanius says, "Christ was the first that rose from the underworld to heaven from the time of the creation. "33 Lactantiusaffirms, "Christ's descent into the under world and ascent intoheaven were necessary to give man the hope of a heavenlyimmortality. "34 Hilary of Poictiers says, "Christ went down intoHades for two reasons: first, to fulfil the law imposed on mankindthat every soul on leaving the body shall descend into the underworld, and, secondly, to preach the Christian religion to thedead. "35 Chrysostom writes, "When the Son of God cometh, the earthshall burst open, and all the men that ever were born, from Adam'sbirth up to that day, shall rise up out of the earth. "36 Irenaustestifies, "I have heard from a certain presbyter, who heard itfrom those who had seen the apostles and received theirinstructions, that Christ descended into the under world, andpreached the gospel and his own advent to the souls there, andremitted the sins of those who believed on him. "37 Eusebiusrecords that, "after the ascension of Jesus, Thomas sent Thaddeus, one of the Seventy, to Abgarus, King of Edessa. This disciple toldthe king how that Jesus, having been crucified, descended into theunder world, and burst the bars which had never before beenbroken, and rose again, and also raised with himself the dead thathad slept for ages; and how he descended alone, but ascended witha great multitude to his Father; and how he was about to comeagain to judge the living and the dead. "38 Finally, we cite thefollowing undeniable statement from Daille's famous work on the"Right Use of the Fathers:" "That heaven shall not be opened tillthe second coming of Christ and the day of judgment, that duringthis time the souls of all men, with a few exceptions, are shut upin 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 isliterally held by the whole Greek Church at the present day. Nordid any of the Latins expressly deny any part of it until theCouncil of Florence, in the year of our Lord 1439. "39 In view of these quotations, and of volumes of similar ones whichmight be adduced, we submit to the candid reader that the meaningmost probably in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse when hewrote the words "redemption by the Blood of Christ" was this, therescue certified to men by the commissioned power and devotedself sacrifice of Christ in dying, going down to the mightycongregation of the dead, proclaiming good tidings, breaking thehopeless bondage of death and Hades, and ascending as the pioneerof a new way to God. If before his death all men were supposed togo down to helpless confinement in the under world on account ofsin, but after his resurrection the promise of an ascension toheaven was made to them through his gospel and exemplification, then well might the grateful believers, fixing their hearts on hiswilling martyrdom in their behalf, exclaim, "He loved us, andwashed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kingsand priests unto God. " It is certainly far more natural, far morereasonable, to suppose that the scriptural phrase "the blood ofChrist" means "the death of Christ, " with its historicalconsequences, than to imagine that it signifies a complicated andmysterious scheme of sacerdotal or ethical expiation, especiallywhen that scheme is unrelated to contemporaneous opinion, irreconcilable withmorality, and confessedly nowhere plainly statedin Scripture, but a matter of late and laborious construction andinference. We have not spoken of the strictly moral and subjectivemission and work of Christ, as conceived by the author of theApocalypse, 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 isplain and unquestioned. But he also believed in somethingadditional to this, an objective function: and what that was wethink is correctly explained above. We are next to inquire more immediately into the closing parts ofthe doctrine of the last things. Christ has appeared, declared thetidings of grace, died, visited the dead, risen victoriously, andgone back to heaven, where he now tarries. But there remain manythings for him, as the eschatological King, yet to do. What arethey? and what details are connected with them? First of all, heis soon to return from heaven, visiting the earth a second time. The first chapter of the book begins by declaring that it is "arevelation of things which must shortly come to pass, " and"blessed is he that readeth; for the time is at hand. " The lastchapter is full of such repetitions as these: "things which mustshortly 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 theApocalypse, "There is but one voice in it, through all itsepistles, seals, trumpets, signs, and plagues, namely, THE LORD ISCOMING!" The souls of the martyrs, impatiently waiting, under thealtar, the completion of the great drama, cry, "How long, O Lord, dost thou delay to avenge our blood?" and they are told that "theyshall 39 Lib. Ii. Cap. 4, pp. 272, 273 of the English translation. rest only for a little season. " Tertullian writes, without a traceof doubt, "Is not Christ quickly to come from heaven with aquaking of the whole universe, with a shuddering of the world, amidst the wailings of all men save the Christians?" TheApocalyptic seer makes Christ say, "Behold, I come as a thief inthe night: blessed is he that watcheth. " Accordingly, "a sentinelgazed wherever a Christian prayed, and, though all the watchmendied without the sight, " the expectation lingered for centuries. The Christians of the New Testament time to borrow the words ofone of the most competent of living scholars "carried forward tothe account of Christ in years to come the visions which his stay, as they supposed, was too short to realize, and assigned to him aquick return to finish what was yet unfulfilled. The suffering, the scorn, the rejection of men, the crown of thorns, were overand gone; the diadem, the clarion, the flash of glory, the troopof angels, were ready to burst upon the world, and might be lookedfor at midnight or at noon. "40 Secondly, when Christ returned, he was to avenge the sufferingsand reward the fidelity of his followers, tread the heathentyrants in the wine press of his wrath, and crown the persecutedsaints with a participation in his glory. When "the time of hiswrath is come, he shall give reward to the prophets, and to thesaints, and to them that fear his name, and shall destroy themthat destroy the earth. " "The kings, captains, mighty men, richmen, bondmen, and freemen, shall cry to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the wrath of the Lamb. " "To him thatovercometh, and doeth my works, I will give power over theGentiles;" "I will give him the morning star;" "I will grant himto sit with me on my throne. " Independently, moreover, of thesedistinct texts, the whole book is pervaded with the thought that, at the speedy second advent of the Messiah, all his enemies shallbe fearfully punished, his servants eminently compensated andglorified. 41 Thirdly, the writer of the Apocalypse expected in accordance withthat Jewish anticipation of an earthly Messianic kingdom which wasadopted with some modifications by the earliest Christians thatJesus, on his return, having subdued his foes, would reign for aseason, in great glory, on the earth, surrounded by the saints. "Adoor was opened in heaven, " and the seer looked in, and saw avision of the redeemed around the throne, and heard them "singinga new song unto the Lamb that was slain, " in the course of which, particularizing the favors obtained for them by him, they say, "Weshall reign upon the earth. " Again, the writer says that "theworshippers of the beast and of his image shall be tormented withfire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in thepresence of the Lamb. " Now, the lake of sulphurous fire into whichthe reprobate were to be thrust was located, not in the sky, butunder the surface of the earth. The foregoing statement, therefore, implies that Christ and his angels would be tarrying onthe earth when the final woe of the condemned was inflicted. Butwe need not rely on indirect arguments. The writer explicitlydeclares 40 Martineau, Sermon, "The God of Revelation his own Interpreter. " 41 It seems to have been a Jewish expectation that when theMessiah should appear he would thrust his enemies into Hades. In apassage of the Talmud Satan is represented as seeing the Messiahunder the Throne of Glory: he falls on his face at the sight, exclaiming, "This is the Messiah, who will precipitate me and allthe Gentiles into the under world. " Bertholdt, Christologia, sect. 36. that, in his vision of what was to take place, the Christianmartyrs, "those who were slain for the witness of Jesus, lived andreigned with Christ a thousand years, while the rest of the deadlived not again until the thousand years were finished. This isthe first resurrection. Then Satan was loosed out of his prison, and gathered the hosts of Gog and Magog to battle, and went up onthe breadth of the earth and compassed the camp of the saintsabout, and fire came down out of heaven and devoured them. " Itseems impossible to avoid seeing in this passage a plain statementof the millennial reign of Christ on the earth with his risenmartyrs. Fourthly, at the termination of the period just referred to, theauthor of the Apocalypse thought all the dead would be raised andthe tribunal of the general judgment held. As Lactantius says, "All souls are detained in custody in the under world until thelast day; then the just shall rise and reign; afterwards therewill be another resurrection of the wicked. "42 "The time of thedead is come, that they should be judged. " "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, andthe dead were judged out of those things which were written in thebooks, according to their works. And the sea gave up the deadwhich were in it, and death and the under world delivered up thedead which were in them, and they were judged, every man accordingto his works. " "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the firstresurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but theyshall be priests of God and of Christ, and reign with him athousand years. " This text, with its dark and tacit reference bycontrast 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 theclose of the thousand years, the sentence of a hopeless doom tohell is to be executed on the condemned. "Whosoever was not foundwritten in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. " "Thefearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, andwhoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shallhave their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone;which is the second death. " The "second death" is a term used byOnkelos in his Targum, 43 and sometimes in the Talmud, and by theRabbins generally. It denotes, as employed by them, the return ofthe wicked into hell after their summons thence for judgment. 44 Inthe Apocalypse, its relative meaning is this. The martyrs, whowere slain for their allegiance to the gospel, died once, anddescended into the under world, the common realm of death. At thecoming of Christ they were to rise and join him, and to die nomore. This was the first resurrection. At the close of themillennium, all the rest of the dead were to rise and be judged, and the rejected portion of them were to be thrust back againbelow. This was a second death for them, a fate from which therighteous were exempt. There was a difference, greatly for theworse in the latter, between their condition in the two deaths. Inthe former they descended to the dark under world, the silent andtemporary abode of the universal dead; but in the latter they wentdown "into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the devil and thebeast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day andnight 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 deadwhich were in them, were cast into the lake of fire. This is thesecond death. " It is plain that here the common locality ofdeparted souls is personified as two demons, Death and Hades, andthe real thought meant to be conveyed is, that this region is tobe sunk beneath a "Tartarean drench, " which shall henceforth rollin burning billows over its victims there, "the smoke of theirtorment ascending up for ever and ever. " This awful imagery of alake of flaming sulphur, in which the damned were plunged, was ofcomparatively late origin or adoption among the Jews, from whomthe Christians received it. The native Hebrew conception of thestate of the dead was that of the voiceless gloom and dismalslumber of Sheol, whither all alike went. The notion of fierytortures inflicted there on the wicked was either conceived by thePharisees from the loathed horrors of the filth fire kept in thevale of Hinnom, outside of Jerusalem, (which is the opinion ofmost commentators, ) or was imagined from the sea of burningbrimstone that showered from heaven and submerged Sodom andGomorrah in a vast fire pool, (which is maintained byBretschneider and others, ) or was derived from the Egyptians, orthe Persians, or the Hindus, or the Greeks, all of whom had lakesand rivers of fire in their theological hells, long before historyreveals the existence of such a belief among the Jews, (which isthe conclusion of many learned authors and critics. ) We have now reached the last feature in the scheme of eschatologyshadowed forth in the Apocalypse, the most obscure and difficultpoint of all, namely, the locality and the principal elements ofthe final felicity of the saved. The difficulty of clearlysettling this question is twofold, arising, first, from the swiftand partial glimpses which are all that the writer yields us onthe subject, and, secondly, from the impossibility of decidingwith precision how much of his language is to be regarded asfigurative and how much as literal, where the poetic presentationof symbol ends and where the direct statement of fact begins. Alarge part of the book is certainly written in prophetic figuresand images, spiritual visions, never meant to be accepted in aprosaic sense with severe detail. And yet, at the same time, allthese imaginative emblems were, unquestionably, intended toforeshadow, in various kinds and degrees, doctrinal conceptions, hopes, fears, threats, promises, historical realities, past, present, or future. But to separate sharply the dress and thesubstance, the superimposed symbols and the underlying realities, is always an arduous, often an impossible, achievement. The writerof the Apocalypse plainly believed that the souls of all, exceptthe martyrs, at death descended to the under world, and wouldremain there till after the second coming of Christ. But whetherhe thought that the martyrs were excepted, and would at deathimmediately rise into heaven and there await the fulfilment oftime, is a disputed point. For our own part, we think it extremelydoubtful, and should rather decide in the negative. In the firstplace, his expressions on this subject seem essentiallyfigurative. He describes the prayers of the saints as being pouredout from golden vials and burned as incense on a golden altar inheaven before the throne of God. "Under that altar, " he says, "Isaw the souls of them that were slain for the word of God. " If thesouls of the martyrs, in his belief, were really admitted intoheaven, would he have conceived of them as huddled under the altarand not walking at liberty? Does not the whole idea appear ratherlike 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 adogmatic, but as a poetical and prophetic, representation. Andin regard to the seer's vision of the innumerable company of theredeemed in heaven, surrounding the throne and celebrating thepraises of God and the Lamb, surely it is obvious enough thatthis, like the other affiliated visions, is a vision, byinspired insight, in the present tense, of what is yet tooccur in the successive unfolding of the rapid scenes in thegreat drama of Christ's redemptive work, a prophetic vision ofthe future, not of what already is. We know that in Tertullian'stime the idea was entertained by some that Christian martyrs, asa special allotment, should pass at once from their sufferings toheaven, without going, as all others must, into the under world;but the evidence preponderates with us, upon the whole, that nosuch doctrine is really implied in the Apocalypse. In thefourteenth chapter, the author describes the hundred and fortyfour thousand who were redeemed from among men, as standing withthe Lamb on Mount Zion and hearing a voice from heaven singing anew song, which no man, save the hundred and forty four thousand, could learn. The probabilities are certainly strongest that thisgreat company of the selected "first fruits unto God and theLamb, " now standing on the earth, had not yet been in heaven; forthey only learn the heavenly song which is sung before the throneby hearing it chanted down from heaven in a voice likemultitudinous thunders. Finally, the most convincing proof that the writer did not supposethat the martyrs entered heaven before the second advent ofChrist a proof which, taken by itself, would seem to leave nodoubt on the subject is this. In the famous scene detailed in thetwentieth chapter usually called by commentators the martyr sceneit is said that "the souls of them that were beheaded for the wordof God, and which had not worshipped the beast, lived and reignedwith Christ a thousand years. This is the first resurrection. "Now, is it not certain that if the writer supposed these souls hadnever been in the under world, but in heaven, he could not havedesignated their preliminary descent from above as "the firstresurrection, " the first rising up? That phrase implies, we think, that all the dead were below: the faithful and chosen ones were torise first to reign a while with Jesus, and after that the restshould rise to be judged. After that judgment, which was expectedto be on earth in presence of the descended Lamb and his angels, the lost were to be plunged, as we have already seen, into thesubterranean pit of torture, the unquenchable lake of fire. Butwhat was to become of the righteous and redeemed? Whether, by theApocalyptic representation, they were to remain forever on earth, or to ascend into heaven, is a question which has been zealouslydebated for over sixteen hundred years, and in some theologicalcircles is still warmly discussed. Were the angels who came downto the earth with Christ to the judgment never to return to theirnative seats? Were they permanently to transfer their deathlesscitizenship from the sky to Judea? Were the constitution of humannature and the essence of human society to be abrogated, and themembers of the human family to cease enlarging, lest they shouldoverflow the borders of the world? Was God himself literally todesert his ancient abode, and, with the celestial city and all itsangelic hierarchy, float from the desolated firmament to MountZion, there to set up the central eternity of his throne. Wecannot believe that such is the meaning, which the seer of theApocalypse wished to convey by his symbolic visions and pictures, any more than we can believe that he means literally to say thathe saw "a woman in heaven clothed with the sun, and the moon underher feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars, " or thatthere were actually "armies in heaven, seated on white horsesand clothed in fine linen, white and clean, which is therighteousness of saints. " Our conviction is that he expectedthe Savior would ascend with his angels and the redeemedinto heaven, the glorious habitation of God above the sky. Hespeaks in one place of the "temple of God in heaven, into which noman could enter until the seven plagues were fulfilled, " and inanother place says that the "great multitude of the redeemed arebefore the throne of God in heaven, and serve him day and night inhis temple;" and in still another place he describes two prophets, messengers of God, who had been slain, as coming to life, "andhearing a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come uphither;' and they ascended up to heaven in a cloud, and theirenemies beheld them. " De Wette writes, "It is certain that anabstract conception of heavenly blessedness with God duskilyhovers over the New Testament eschatology. " We think this is trueof 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 partof the mission of Christ to restore that lost privilege. We thinkthe writer of the Apocalypse shared in that belief. His allusionsto a new heaven and a new earth, and to the descent of a NewJerusalem from heaven, and other related particulars, are symbolsneither novel nor violent to Jewish minds, but both familiar andexpressive, to denote a purifying glorification of the world, theinstallation of a divine kingdom, and the brilliant reign ofuniversal righteousness and happiness among men, as if under thevery eyes of the Messiah and the very sceptre of God. TheChristians shall reign in Jerusalem, which shall be adorned withindescribable splendors and shall be the centre of a world widedominion, the saved nations of the earth surrounding it and"walking in the light of it, their kings bringing their glory andhonor into it. " "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death. " That is, upon the whole, as weunderstand the scattered hints relevant to the subject to imply, when Christ returns to the Father with his chosen, he will leave aregenerated earth, with Jerusalem for its golden and peerlesscapital, peopled, and to be peopled, with rejoicing and immortalmen, who will keep the commandments, be exempt from ancient evils, hold intimate communion with God and the Lamb, and, fromgeneration to generation, pass up to heaven through that swift andpainless change, alluded to by Paul, whereby it was intended atthe first that sinless man, his corruptible and mortal putting onincorruption and immortality, should be fitted for thecompanionship of angels in the pure radiance of the celestialworld, and should be translated thither without tasting thebitterness of death, which was supposed to be the subterraneanbanishment of the disembodied ghost. CHAPTER IV. PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. THE principal difficulty in arriving at the system of thought andfaith in the mind of Paul arises from the fragmentary character ofhis extant writings. They are not complete treatises drawn out inindependent statements, butspecial letters full of latentimplications. They were written to meet particular emergencies, togive advice, to convey or ask information and sympathy, to argueor decide concerning various matters to a considerable extent of apersonal or local and temporal nature. Obviously their authornever suspected they would be the permanent and immenselyinfluential documents they have since become. They were notcomposed as orderly developments or full presentations of a creed, but rather as supplements to more adequate oral instructionpreviously 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 alsoperhaps many have been lost. He exhorts the Colossians to "readlikewise the epistle from Laodicea. " In his present First Epistleto the Corinthians he intimates that he had previouslycorresponded with them, in the words, "I wrote to you in aletter. " There are good reasons, too, for supposing that hetransmitted other epistles of which we have now no account. Owing, therefore, to the facts that his principal instructions were givenby word of mouth, and that his surviving writings set forth nosystematic array of doctrines, we have no choice left, if wedesire to know what his opinions concerning the future life were, when deduced and arranged, but to exercise our learning and ourfaculties upon the imperfect discussions and the significant hintsand clews in his extant epistles. Bringing these together, in thelight of contemporary Pharisaic and Christian conceptions andopinions, we may construct a system from them which will representhis theory; somewhat as the naturalist from a few fragmentarybones describes the entire skeleton to which they belonged. As weproceed to follow this process, we must particularly remember theleading notions in the doctrinal belief of the Jews at thatperiod, and the fact that Paul himself was "brought up at the feetof Gamaliel, " "after the most straitest order of the sect, aPharisee. " When on trial at Jerusalem, he cried, "Men andbrethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope ofthe resurrection of the dead I am called in question. " We canhardly suppose that he would entirely throw off the influence andform of the Pharisaic dogmas and grasp Christianity in its purespirituality. It is most reasonable to expect what we shall findactually the fact that he would mix the doctrinal and emotionalresults of his Pharisaic training with the teachings of Christ, thus forming a composite system considerably modified from anythen existing. Indeed, a great many obscure texts in Paul may bemade perspicuous by citations from the old Talmudists. Consideringthe value and the importance of this means of illustrating the NewTestament, it is neglected by modern commentators in a veryremarkable manner. In common with his countrymen and the Gentiles, Paul undoubtedlybelieved in a world of light and bliss situated over the sky, where the Deity, surrounded by his angels, reigns in immortalsplendor. 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, " "thehabitation of eternity, " "the world of holy angels. " The OldTestament contains many sublime allusions to this place. Jacob inhis dream saw a ladder set up that reached unto heaven, and theangels were ascending and descending upon it. Fixing his eyes uponthe summit, the patriarch exclaimed, not referring, as is commonlysupposed, to the ground on which he lay, but to the opening in thesky through which the angels were passing and repassing, "Surelythis is the house of God and this the gate of heaven. " Jehovah isdescribed as "riding over the heaven of heavens;" as "treadingupon the arch of the sky. " The firmament is spoken of as the solidfloor of his abode, where "he layeth the beams of his chambers inthe waters, " the "waters above, " which the Book of Genesis sayswere "divided from the waters beneath. " Though this divine worldon high was in the early ages almost universally regarded as alocal reality, it was not conceived by Jews or Gentiles to be thedestined abode of human souls. It was thought to be exclusivelyoccupied by Jehovah and his angels, or by the gods and theirmessengers. Only here and there were scattered a few dimtraditions, or poetic myths, of a prophet, a hero, a god descendedman, who, as a special favor, had been taken up to the supernalmansions. The common destination of the disembodied spirits of menwas the dark, stupendous realms of the under world. As Augustineobserves, "Christ died after many; he rose before any: by dying hesuffered what many had suffered before; by rising he did what noone had ever done before. "1 These ideas of the celestial and theinfernal localities and of the fate of man were of courseentertained by Paul when he became a Christian. A few texts by wayof evidence of this fact will here suffice. "That at the name ofJesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and those onearth, and those under the earth. " "He that descended first intothe lower parts of the earth is the same also that ascended up farabove all heavens. " The untenableness of that explanation whichmakes the descent into the lower parts of the earth refer toChrist's descent to earth from his pre existent state in heavenmust be evident, as it seems to us, to every mind. Irenaus, discussing this very text from Ephesians, exposes the absurdityand stigmatizes the heresy of those who say that the infernalworld is this earth, ("qui dicunt inferos quidem esse huncmundum. ")2 "I knew a man caught up to the third heaven, . . . Caught up into paradise. " The threefold heaven of the Jews, herealluded to, was, first, the region of the air, supposed to beinhabited by evil spirits. Paul repeatedly expresses this idea, aswhen he speaks of "the prince of the power of the air, the spiritthat worketh in the children of disobedience, " and when he says, "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but againstprincipalities, against powers, against the rulers of thedarkness, against wicked spirits in heavenly places. " The secondheaven comprised the region of the planetary bodies. The third laybeyond the firmament, and was the actual residence of God and theangelic hosts. These quotations, sustained as they are by thewell known previous opinions of the Jews, as well as by numerousunequivocal texts in the writings of the other apostles and bymany 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 receivedheaven above the blue ether and stellar dome, and in the receivedHadean abyss beneath the earth. In the absence of all evidence tothe contrary, every presumption justifies the supposition that healso believed as we know all his orthodox contemporaries did thatthat under world was the abode of all men after death, and thatthat over world was solely the dwelling place of God and theangels. Nay, we are not left to conjecture; for he expresslydeclares of God that he "dwelleth in the light which no man canapproach unto. " This conclusion will be abundantly established inthe course of the following exposition. With these preliminaries, we are prepared to see what was Paul'sdoctrine of death and of salvation. There are two prevalenttheories on this subject, both of which we deem partly scriptural, neither of them wholly so. On the one extreme, the consistentdisciple of Augustine the historic Calvinist attributes to theapostle the belief that the sin of Adam was the sole cause ofliteral death, that but for Adam's fall men would have lived onthe earth forever or else have been translated bodily to heavenwithout any previous process of death. That such really was notthe view held by Paul we are convinced. Indeed, there is oneprominent feature in his faith which by itself proves that thedisengagement of the soul from the material frame did not seem tohim an abnormal event caused by the contingency of sin. We referto his doctrine of two bodies, the "outward man" and the "inwardman, " the "earthly house" and the "heavenly house, " the "naturalbody" and the "spiritual body. " Neander says this is "an expressassertion" of Paul's belief that man was not literally made mortalby sin, but was naturally destined to emerge from the flesh into ahigher form of life. 3 Paul thought that, in the original plan ofGod, man was intended to drop his gross, corruptible body and puton an incorruptible one, like the "glorious body" of the risenChrist. He distinctly declares, "Flesh and blood cannot inheritthe kingdom of God. " Therefore, we cannot interpret the word"death" to mean merely the separation of the soul from its presenttabernacle, when he says, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men. " On the otherextreme, the fully developed Pelagian the common Unitarian holdsthat the word "death" is always used in the arguments of Paul in aspiritual or figurative sense, merely meaning moral alienationfrom God in guilt, misery, and despair. Undoubtedly it is usedthus in many instances, as when it is written, "I was alivewithout the law once; but, when the commandment came, sin rose tolife, and I died. " But in still more numerous cases it meanssomething more than the consciousness of sin and the resultingwretchedness in the breast, and implies something external, mechanical, visible, as it were. For example, "Since by man camedeath, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. " Any one whoreads the context of this sentence may see that the terms "death"and "resurrection" antithetically balance each other, and refernot to an inward experience, but to an outward event, not to amoral change, but to the physical descent and resurrection. It iscertain that here the words are not employed in a moral sense. Thephraseology Paul uses in stating the connection of the sin of Adamwith death, the connection of the resurrection of Christ withimmortal life, is too peculiar, emphatic, and extensive not to beloaded with 3 Planting and Training, Ryland's trans. P. 240. a more general and vivid significance than the simple unhappinessof a sense of guilt, the simple peace and joy of a reconciledconscience. The advocates, then, of both theories the Calvinistasserting that Paul supposed sin to be the only reason why we donot live eternally in the world with our present organization, andthe Rationalist asserting that the apostle never employs the word"death" except with a purely interior signification are alikebeset by insuperable difficulties, perplexed by passages whichdefy their fair analysis and force them either to use a violentinterpretation or to confess their ignorance. We must therefore seek out some third view, which, rejecting theerrors, shall combine the truths and supply the defects of the twoformer. We have now to present such a view, a theory of thePauline doctrine of the last things which obviously explains andfills out all the related language of the epistles. We suppose heunfolded it fully in his preaching, while in his supplementary andpersonal letters he only alludes to such disconnected parts of itas then rose upon his thoughts. A systematic development of it asa whole, with copious allusions and labored defences, was notneeded then, as it might seem to us to have been. For thefundamental notions on which it rested were the common belief ofthe nation and age. Geology and astronomy had not disturbed thecredit of a definitely located Hades and heaven, nor had freemetaphysics sharpened the common mind to skeptical queries. Theview 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 itwith an ethereal vehicle, and immediately translating it toheaven. 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 slumberousgloom of the under world. Thus death was changed from a pleasantorganic fulfilment and deliverance, spiritual investiture andheavenly ascent, to a painful punishment condemning the nakedghost to a residence below the grave. As Ewald says, throughAdam's sin "death acquired its significance as pain andpunishment. "4 Herein is the explanation of the word "death" asused by Paul in reference to the consequence of Adam's offence. Christ came to reveal the free grace and gift of God in redeemingus from our doom and restoring our heavenly destiny. This heexemplified, in accordance with the Father's will, by dying, descending into the dreary world of the dead, vanquishing theforces there, rising thence, and ascending to the right hand ofthe throne of heaven as our forerunner. On the very verge of thetheory just stated as Paul's, Neander hovers in his exposition ofthe apostle's views, but fails to grasp its theological scope andconsequences. Krabbe declares that "death did not arise from thenative perishableness of the body, but from sin. "5 This statementNeander controverts, maintaining that "sin introduced no essentialchange in the physical organization of man, but merely in themanner in which his earthly existence terminates. Had it not beenfor sin, death would have been only the form of a higherdevelopment of life. "6 Exactly so. With innocence, the soul atdeath 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 sincompelled it to descend painfully, without any body, to Hades. Wewill cite a few of the principal texts from which this generaloutline has been inferred and constructed. The substance of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romansmay be thus stated. As by the offence of one, sin entered into theworld, and the judgment of the law came upon all men in a sentenceof condemnation unto death, so by the righteousness of one, thefree gift of God came upon all men in a sentence of justificationunto life; that as sin, by Adam's offence, hath reigned untodeath, so grace, by Christ's righteousness, might reign untoeternal life. Now, we maintain that the words "death" and "life"cannot in the present instance be entirely explained, in aspiritual sense, as signifying disturbance and woe in the breast, or peace and bliss there, because the whole connected discourse isnot upon the internal contingent experience of individuals, butupon the common necessity of the race, an objective sentencepassed upon humanity, followed by a public gift of reversal andannulment. So, too, we deny that the words can be justly taken, intheir strictly literal sense, as meaning cessation or continuanceof physical existence on the earth, because, in the first place, that would be inconsistent with the doctrine of a spiritual bodywithin the fleshly one and of a glorious inheritance reserved inheaven, a doctrine by which Paul plainly shows that he recogniseda natural organic provision, irrespective of sin, for a change inthe form and locality of human existence. Secondly, we submit thatdeath and life here cannot mean departure from the body orcontinuance in it, because that is a matter with which Christ'smission did in no way interfere, but left exactly as it wasbefore; whereas, in the thing really meant by Paul, Christ isrepresented as standing, at least partially, in the same relationbetween life and men that Adam stands in between death and men. The reply to the question, What is that relation? will at oncedefine the genuine signification of the terms "death" and "life"in the instance under review. And thus it is to be answered. Thedeath brought on mankind by Adam was not only internalwretchedness, but also the condemnation of the disembodied soul tothe under world; the life they were assured of by Christ was notonly internal blessedness, but also the deliverance of the soulfrom its subterranean prison and its reception into heaven in a"body celestial, " according to its original destiny had sin notbefallen. This interpretation is explicitly put forth by Theodoretin his comments on this same passage, (Rom. V. 15-18. ) He says, "There must be a correspondence between the disease and theremedy. Adam's sin subjected him to the power of death and thetyranny of the devil. In the same manner that Adam was compelledto descend into the under world, we all are associates in hisfate. Thus, when Christ rose, the whole humankind partook in hisvivification. "7 Origen also and who, after the apostlesthemselves, knew their thoughts and their use of language betterthan he? emphatically declares in exposition of the expression ofPaul, "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 ofphysical death came on all, so in Christ that necessity shall beremoved, " because Christ's mission did not touch physical death, which was still reigning as ever, before Paul's eyes. Neither canthe passage signify, "As through Adam wretchedness is the portionof every heart of man, so through Christ blessedness shall begiven to every heart, " because, while the language itself does nothint that thought, the context demonstrates that the realreference is not to an inward experience, but to an outwardevent, not to the personal regeneration of the soul, but to ageneral resurrection of the dead. The time referred to is thesecond coming of Christ; and the force of the text must be this:As by our bodily likeness to the first man and genetic connectionwith him through sin we all die like him, that is, leave the bodyand go into the under world, and remain there, so by our spirituallikeness to the second man and redeeming connection with himthrough 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 linealdescent from him; Christ is the head of a pardoned race, destinedfor heaven in consonance with the plain token of his resurrectionand ascension. Again, the apostle writes, "In the twinkling of aneye, at the last trump, the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we (who are then living) shall be changed; for thiscorruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality. Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, 'Deathis swallowed up in victory?" O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?'" The writer evidently exults in the thoughtthat, at the second coming of Christ, death shall lose itsretributive character and the under world be baffled of itsexpected prisoners, because the living shall instantly experiencethe change of bodies fitting them to ascend to heaven with thereturning and triumphant Lord. Paul also announces that "JesusChrist hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortalityto light. " The word "death" here cannot mean physical dissolution, because Christ did not abolish that. It cannot denote personal sinand unhappiness, because that would not correspond with andsustain the obvious meaning of the contrasted member of thesentence. Its adequate and consistent sense is this. God intendedthat man should pass from a preliminary existence on earth to aneternal life in heaven; but sin thwarted this glorious design andaltered our fate to a banishment into the cheerless under world. But now, by the teachings and resurrection of Christ, we areassured that God of his infinite goodness has determined freely toforgive us and restore our original destination. Our descent andabode below are abolished and our heavenly immortality made clear. "We earnestly desire to be clothed upon with our house which isfrom heaven, if so be that, being clothed, we shall not be foundnaked. Not that we desire to be unclothed, but clothed upon, thatmortality may be swallowed up of life. " 8 Comm. In Epist. Ad Rom. Lib. Vi. Cap. 6, sect. 6. Also seeJerome, Comm. In Ecc. Iii. 21. Professor Mau, in his able treatise"Von dem Tode dem Solde der Sunden, and der Aufhebung desselbendurch die Auferstehung Christi, " cogently argues, against Krabbe, that death as the punishment of sin is not bodily dissolution, butwretchedness and condemnation to the under world, (amandatioOrcum. ) In Pelt's Theologische Mitarbeiten, 1838, heft ii. Ss. 107-108. In these remarkable words the apostle expresses several particularsof what we have already presented as his general doctrine. Hestates his conviction that, when his "earthly house of thistabernacle" dissolves, there is a "divinely constructed, heavenly, and eternal house" prepared for him. He expresses his desire atthe coming of the Lord not to be dead, but still living, and thento be divested of his earthly body and invested with the heavenlybody, that thus, being fitted for translation to the incorruptiblekingdom of God, he might not be found a naked shadow or ghost inthe under world. Ruckert says, in his commentary, and the bestcritics agree with him, "Paul herein desires to become immortalwithout passing the gates of death. " Language similar to theforegoing in its peculiar phrases is found in the Jewish Cabbala. The Zohar describes the ascent of the soul to heaven clothed withsplendor, and afterwards illustrates its meaning in these terms:"As there is given to the soul a garment with which she is clothedin order to establish her in this world, so there is given her agarment of heavenly splendor in order to establish her in thatworld. "9 So in the "Ascension of Isaiah the Prophet" an apocryphalbook written by some Jewish Christian as early, without doubt, asthe 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 ofthe flesh: I viewed them in their heavenly clothing like theangels who stood there in great splendor. " Again he says, "All thesaints from heaven in their heavenly clothing shall descend withthe Lord and dwell in this world, while the saints who have notdied shall be clothed like those who come from heaven. Then thegeneral resurrection will take place and they will ascend togetherto heaven. "10 Schoettgen, commenting on this text, (2 Cor. V. 2, )likewise quotes a large number of examples of like phraseologyfrom Rabbinical writers. The statements thus far made and proofsoffered will be amply illustrated and confirmed as we go on toconsider the chief component parts of the Pauline scheme of thelast things. For, having presented the general outline, it will beuseful, in treating so complex and difficult a theme, to analyzeit by details. We are met upon the threshold of our inquiry by the essentialquestion, What, according to Paul, was the mission of Christ? Whatdid he accomplish? A clear reply to this question comprises threedistinct propositions. First, the apostle plainly represents theresurrection, and not the crucifixion, as the efficacious featurein Christ's work of redemption. When we recollect the almostuniversal prevalence of the opposite notion among existing sects, it is astonishing how clear it is that Paul generally dwells uponthe dying of Christ solely as the necessary preliminary to hisrising. "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, andyour faith also is vain: ye are yet in your sins. " These words areirreconcilable with that doctrine which connects our"justification" with the atoning death, and not with the typicalresurrection, of Christ. "That Christ died for our sins, and thathe was buried, and that he rose again the third day. " To place avicarious stress upon the first clause of this text is asarbitrary as it would be to place it upon the second; butnaturally 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 themission of Christ are not usually connected in any essentialmanner with his painful death, but directly with his gloriousresurrection out from among the dead unto the heavenlyblessedness. "If we have been planted together in the likeness ofhis death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. "Sinking into the water, when "buried by baptism into the death ofChrist, " was, to those initiated into the Christian religion, asymbol of the descent of Christ among the dead; rising out of thewater was a symbol of the ascent of Christ into heaven. "If yethen 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 thevictory over the sting of death and the strength of sin, " Jeromesays, "We cannot and dare not interpret this victory otherwisethan by the resurrection of the Lord. "11 Commenting on the text"To this end Christ both died and lived again, that he might reignboth over the dead and the living, " Theodoret says that Christ, going through all these events, "promised a resurrection to usall. " Paul makes no appeal to us to believe in the death ofChrist, to believe in the atoning sacrifice of Christ, but heunequivocally affirms, "If thou shalt believe in thine heart thatGod hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. " Paulconceived that Christ died in order to rise again and convince menthat the Father would freely deliver them from the bondage ofdeath in the under world. All this took place on account of sin, was only made requisite by sin, one of whose consequences was thesubterranean confinement of the soul, which otherwise, upondeserting its clayey tent, would immediately have been clothedwith a spiritual body and have ascended to heaven. That is to say, Christ "was delivered because of our offences and was raised againbecause of our justification. " In Romans viii. 10 the prepositionoccurs twice in exactly the same construction as in the textjust quoted. In the latter case the authors of the common versionhave rendered it "because of. " They should have done so in theother instance, in accordance with the natural force andestablished usage of the word in this connection. The meaning is, Our offences had been committed, therefore Christ was deliveredinto Hades; our pardon had been decreed, therefore Christ wasraised into heaven. Such as we have now stated is the realmaterial which has been distorted and exaggerated into theprevalent doctrine of the vicarious atonement, with all its dreadconcomitants. 12 The believers of that doctrine suppose themselvesobliged to accept it by the language of the epistles. But the viewabove maintained as that of Paul solves every difficulty and givesan intelligent and consistent meaning to all the phrases usuallythought to legitimate the Calvinistic scheme of redemption. Whilewe deny the correctness of the Calvinistic interpretation of thosepassages in which occur such expressions as "Christ gave himselffor 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, deraltesten Kirche, den Christlichen Symbolen, und nach ihrerunendlichen Wichtigkeit und vielumfassenden Bedeutung dargestellt, von Joh. Ludwig Konig. The author presents in this work anirresistible array of citations and authorities. In an appendix hegives a list of a hundred authors on the theme of Christ's descentinto hell. of the explanations of them proposed by Unitarians, and assertthat their genuine force is this. Christ died and rose that wemight be freed through faith from the great entailed consequenceof sin, the bondage of the under world; beholding, through hisascension, our heavenly destination restored. "God made him, whoknew no sin, to be sin on our account, that we might become therighteousness of God in him, " might through faith in him beassured of salvation. In other words, Christ, who was not exposedto the evils brought on men by sin, did not think his divineestate a thing eagerly to be retained, but descended to the estateof man, underwent the penalties of sin as if he were himself asinner, and then rose to the right hand of God, by this token toassure men of God's gracious determination to forgive them andreinstate them in their forfeited primal privileges. "If we bereconciled by his death, much more shall we be saved by his life. "That is, if Christ's coming from heaven as an ambassador from Godto die convinces us of God's pardoning good will towards us, muchmore does his rising again into heaven, where he now lives, deliver us from the fear of the under world condemnation andassure us of the heavenly salvation. Except in the light and withthe aid of the theory we have been urging, a large number of textslike the foregoing cannot, as we think, be interpreted withoutconstructive violence, and even with that violence cannot conveytheir full point and power. Secondly, in Paul's doctrine of the redeeming work of Christ werecognise something distinct from any subjective effect inanimating and purifying the hearts and lives of men. "Christ hathredeemed us from the curse of the law. " "In Christ we haveredemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins. "Nothing but the most desperate exegesis can make these and manysimilar texts signify simply the purging of individual breastsfrom their offences and guilt. Seeking the genuine meaning ofPaul, we are forced to agree with the overwhelming majority of thecritics and believers of all Christendom, from the very times ofthe apostles till now, and declare that these passages refer to anoutward deliverance of men by Christ, the removal by him of acommon doom resting on the race in consequence of sin. What Paulsupposed that doom was, and how he thought it was removed, let ustry to see. It is necessary to premise that in Paul's writings thephrase "the righteousness of God" is often used by metonymy tomean God's mode of accounting sinners righteous, and is equivalentto "the Christian method of salvation. " "By the deeds of the lawno flesh shall be justified; but the righteousness of God withoutthe law is manifested, freely justifying them through theredemption that is in Christ. " How evidently in this verse "therighteousness of God" denotes God's method of justifying theguilty by a free pardon proclaimed through Christ! The apostleemploys the word "faith" in a kindred technical manner, sometimesmeaning by it "promise, " sometimes the whole evangelic apparatusused to establish faith or prove the realization of the promise. "What if some did not believe? Shall their unbelief make the faithof 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 thefaith which should afterwards be revealed. " Here "faith" plainlymeans the object of faith, the manifested fulfilment of thepromises: it means the gospel. Again, "Whereof he hath offeredfaith to all, in that he hath raised him from the dead. " "Hathoffered faith" here signifies, unquestionably, as the commonversion well expresses it, "hath given assurance, " or hathexemplified the proof. "Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster tobring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Butafter that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. "In this instance "faith" certainly means Christianity, incontradistinction to Judaism, and "justification by faith" isequivalent to "salvation by the grace of God, shown through themission of Christ. " It is not so much internal and individual inits reference as it is public and general. We believe that no man, sacredly resolved to admit the truth, can study with a purposedreference to this point all the passages in Paul's epistles wherethe word "faith" occurs, without being convinced that for the mostpart it is used in an objective sense, in contradistinction to thelaw, as synonymous with the gospel, the new dispensation of grace. Therefore "justification by faith" does not usually mean salvationthrough personal belief, either in the merits of the Redeemer orin any thing else, but it means salvation by the plan revealed inthe gospel, the free remission of sins by the forbearance of God. In those instances where "faith" is used in a subjective sense forpersonal belief, it is never described as the effectual cause ofsalvation, but as the condition of personal assurance ofsalvation. Grace has outwardly come to all; but only the believersinwardly know it. This Pauline use of terms in technical senseslies broadly on the face of the Epistles to the Romans and theGalatians. New Testament lexicons and commentaries, by the bestscholars of every denomination, acknowledge it and illustrate it. Mark now these texts. "And by him all that believe are justifiedfrom all things from which ye could not be justified by the law ofMoses. " "To declare his righteousness, that he might be just andthe justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. " "What things weregain to me [under Judaism] I counted loss in comparison withChrist, that I may be found in him, not having mine ownrighteousness, which is of the law, but the righteousness which isof God through faith in Christ. " "By the deeds of the law no mancan be justified, " "but ye are saved through faith. " We submitthat these passages, and many others in the epistles, find aperfect explanation in the following outline of faith, commencedin the mind of Paul while he was a Pharisee, completed when he wasa Christian. The righteousness of the law, the method of salvationby keeping the law, is impossible. The sin of the first man brokethat whole plan and doomed all souls helplessly to the underworld. If a man now should keep every tittle of the law withoutreservation, it would not release him from the bondage below andsecure for him an ascent to heaven. But what the law could not dois done for us in Christ. Sin having destroyed the righteousnessof the law, that is, the fatal penalty of Hades having renderedsalvation by the law impossible, the righteousness of God, thatis, a new method of salvation, has been brought to light. God hassent his Son to die, descend into the under world, rise again, andreturn to heaven, to proclaim to men the glorious tidings ofjustification by faith, that is, a dispensation of grace freelyannulling the great consequence of sin and inviting them to heavenin the Redeemer's footsteps. Paul unequivocally declares thatChrist broke up the bondage of the under world by his irresistibleentrance and exit, in the following text: "When he had descendedfirst 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 passagewhich was the source of those tremendous pictures so frequent inthe cathedrals of the Middle Age, Christus spoliat Infernum: "Godhath forgiven you all trespasses, blotting out the handwriting ofordinances that was against us, and took it away, nailing it toChrist's cross; and, having spoiled principalities and powers, hemade a show of them, openly triumphing over them in Christ. " Theentire theory which underlies the exposition we have just setforth is stated in so many words in the passage we next cite. Forthe word "righteousness" in order to make the meaning moreperspicuous we simply substitute "method of salvation, " which isunquestionably its signification here. "They [the Jews] beingignorant of God's method of salvation, and going about toestablish their own method, have not submitted themselves untoGod's. For Christ is the end of the law for a way of salvation toevery one that believeth. For Moses describeth the method ofsalvation which is of the law, that the man who doeth these thingsshall be blessed in them. But the method of salvation which is offaith ["faith" here means the gospel, Christianity] speaketh onthis wise: Say not in thy heart, 'Who shall ascend into heaven?'that is, to bring Christ down; or, 'Who shall descend into theunder world?' that is, to bring up Christ again from among thedead. " This has been done already, once for all. "And if thoushalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from thedead, thou shalt be saved. " The apostle avows that his "heart'sdesire and his prayer unto God for Israel is, that they may besaved;" and he asserts that they cannot be saved by the law ofMoses, but only by the gospel of Christ; that is, "faith;" thatis, "the dispensation of grace. " Paul's conception of the foremost feature in Christ's mission isprecisely this. He came to deliver men from the stern law ofJudaism, which could not wipe away their transgressions nor savethem from Hades, and to establish them in the free grace ofChristianity, which justifies them from all past sin and sealsthem for heaven. What could be a more explicit declaration of thisthan the following? "When the fulness of the time was come, Godsent forth his Son to redeem them that were under the law. " Hereinis the explanation of that perilous combat which Paul waged somany years, and in which he proved victorious, the great battlebetween the Gentile Christians and the Judaizing Christians; asubject of altogether singular importance, without a minuteacquaintance with which a large part of the New Testament cannotbe understood. "Christ gave himself for our sins, that he mightdeliver us from this present evil world, according to the will ofGod. " Now, the Hebrew terms corresponding with the English terms"present world" and "future world" were used by the Jews to denotethe Mosaic and the Messianic dispensations. We believe withSchoettgen and other good authorities that such is the sense ofthe phrase "present world" in the instance before us. Not only isthat interpretation sustained by the usus loquendi, it is also theonly defensible meaning; for the effect of the establishment ofthe gospel was not to deliver men from the present world, thoughit did deliver them from the hopeless bondage of Judaism, whereinsalvation was by Christians considered impossible. And that isprecisely the argument of the Epistle to the Galatians, in whichthe text occurs. In a succeeding chapter, while speaking expresslyof the external forms of the Jewish law, Paul says, "By the crossof Christ the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world;"and he instantly adds, by way of explanation, "for in Christ Jesusneither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision. "Undeniably, "world" here means "Judaism;" as Rosenmuller phrasesit, Judaica vanitas. In another epistle, while expostulating withhis readers on the folly of subjecting themselves to observances"in meat and drink, and new moons and sabbaths, " after "thehandwriting of ordinances that was against them had been blottedout, taken away, nailed to the cross, " Paul remonstrates with themin these words: "Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ from therudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are yesubject to ordinances?" We should suppose that no intelligentperson could question that this means, "Now that by the gospel ofChrist ye are emancipated from the technical requisitions ofJudaism, why are ye subject to its ordinances, as if ye were stillliving under its rule?" as many of the best commentators agree insaying, "tanquam viventes adhuc in Judaismo. " From thesecollective passages, and from others like them, we draw theconclusion, in Paul's own words, that, "When we were children, wewere in bondage under the rudiments of the world, " "the weak andbeggarly elements" of Judaism; but, now that "the fulness of thetime has come, and God has sent forth his Son to redeem us, " weare called "to receive the adoption of sons" and "become heirs ofGod, " inheritors of a heavenly destiny. We think that the intelligent and candid reader, who is familiarwith Paul's epistles, will recognise the following features in hisbelief and teaching. First, all mankind alike were under sin andcondemnation. "Jews and Gentiles all are under sin. " "All theworld is subject to the sentence of God. " And we maintain thatthat condemning sentence consisted, partly at least, in thebanishment of their disembodied souls to Hades. Secondly, "apromise was given to Abraham, " before the introduction of theMosaic dispensation, "that in his seed [that is, in Christ] allthe nations of the earth should be blessed. " When Paul speaks, ashe does in numerous instances, of "the hope of eternal life whichGod, who cannot lie, promised before the world began, " "thepromise given before the foundation of the world, " "the promisemade of God unto the fathers, that God would raise the dead, " thedate referred to is not when the decree was formed in the eternalcounsels of God, previous to the origin of the earth, but when thecovenant was made with Abraham, before the establishment of theJewish dispensation. The thing promised plainly was, according toPaul's idea, a redemption from Hades and an ascension to heaven;for this is fully implied in his "expectation of the resurrectionof the dead" from the intermediate state, and their being "clothedin celestial bodies. " This promise made unto Abraham by God, to befulfilled by Christ, "the law, which was four hundred and thirtyyears afterwards, could not disannul. " That is, as any one may seeby the context, the law could not secure the inheritance of thething promised, but was only a temporary arrangement on account oftransgressions, "until the seed should come to whom the promisewas made. " In other words, there was "no mode of salvation by thelaw;" "the law could not give life;" for if it could it would have"superseded the promise, " made it without effect, whereas theinviolable promise of God was, that in the one seed of Abrahamthat is, in Christ alone should salvation be preached to all thatbelieved. "For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith ismade useless, and the promise is made useless. " In the mean time, until Christ be come, all are shut up under sin. Thirdly, thespecial "advantage of the Jews was, that unto them this promise ofGod 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 yetto be brought. While the Jews indulged in glowing and exclusiveexpectations of the Messiah who was gloriously to redeem them, theGentiles were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangersfrom the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God inthe world. " Fourthly, in the fulness of time long after "theScripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen, hadpreached the gospel beforehand unto Abraham, saying, In thy seedshall all nations be blessed" "Christ redeemed us from the curseof the law, being made a curse for us, that the blessing promisedto Abraham might come upon the Gentiles. " It was the precisemission of Christ to realize and exemplify and publish to thewhole world the fulfilment of that promise. The promise itselfwas, that men should be released from the under world through theimputation of righteousness by grace that is, through freeforgiveness and rise to heaven as accredited sons and heirs ofGod. This aim and purpose of Christ's coming were effected in hisresurrection. But how did the Gentiles enter into belief andparticipation of the glad tidings? Thus, according to Paul: Thedeath, descent, resurrection, and ascent of Jesus, and hisresidence in heaven in a spiritual form, divested him of hisnationality. 13 He was "then to be known no more after the flesh. "He was no longer an earthly Jew, addressing Jews, but a heavenlyspirit and son of God, a glorified likeness of the spirits of allwho were adopted as sons of God, appealing to them all as jointheirs with himself of heaven. He has risen into universality, andis accessible to the soul of every one that believeth. "In himthere is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. " The experience resulting in aheart raised into fellowship with him in heaven is the inward sealassuring us that our faith is not vain. "Ye Gentiles, who formerlywere afar off, are now made nigh by the blood of Christ; for hehath broken down the middle wall of partition between Jews andGentiles, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, namely, thelaw of commandments in ordinances, in order to make in himself oftwain one new man. For through him we both have access by onespirit unto the Father. Now, therefore, ye are no more strangersand foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of thehousehold of God. " Circumcision was of the flesh; and the vainhope of salvation by it was confined to the Jews. Grace was of thespirit; and the revealed assurance of salvation by it was given tothe Gentiles too, when Christ died to the nationalizing flesh, rose in the universalizing spirit, and from heaven impartiallyexhibited himself, through the preaching of the gospel, to theappropriating faith of all. The foregoing positions might be further substantiated by applyingthe general theory they contain to the explication of scores ofindividual texts which it fits and unfolds, and which, we think, cannot upon any other view be interpreted without forcedconstructions unwarranted by a thorough acquaintance with the mindof Paul and with the mind of his age. But we must be content withone or two such applications as specimens. The word "mystery"often occurs in the letters of Paul. Its current meaning in histime was "something concealed, " something into which one must beinitiated in order to understand it. 13 Martineau, Liverpool Controversy: Inconsistency of the Schemeof Vicarious Redemption. The Eleusinian Mysteries, for instance, were not necessarily any thingintrinsically dark and hard to be comprehended, but things hiddenfrom public gaze and only to be known by initiation into them. Paul uses the term in a similar way to denote the peculiar schemeof grace, which "had been kept secret from the beginning of theworld, " "hidden from ages and generations, but now made manifest. "No one denies that Paul means by "this mystery" the very heart andessence of the gospel, precisely that which distinguishes it fromthe law and makes it a universal method of salvation, a wondroussystem of grace. So much is irresistibly evident from the way andthe connection in which he uses the term. He writes thus inexplanation of the great mystery as it was dramatically revealedthrough Christ: "Who was manifested in the flesh, [i. E. Seen inthe body during his life on earth, ] justified in the spirit, [i. E. Freed after death from the necessity of imprisonment inHades, ] seen of angels, [i. E. In their fellowship after hisresurrection, ] preached unto the Gentiles, [i. E. After the giftof tongues on Pentecost day, ] believed on in the world, [i. E. Hisgospel widely accepted through the labors of his disciples, ]received up into glory, [i. E. Taken into heaven to the presenceof God. ]" "The revelation of the mystery" means, then, the visibleenactment and exhibition, through the resurrection of Christ, ofGod's free forgiveness of men, redeeming them from the Hadeangloom to the heavenly glory. The word "glory" in the New Testamentconfessedly often signifies the illumination of heaven, thedefined abode of God and his angels. Robinson collects, in hisLexicon, numerous examples wherein he says it means "that statewhich is the portion of those who dwell with God in heaven. " Now, Paul repeatedly speaks of the calling of believers to glory as oneof the chief blessings and new prerogatives of the gospel. "Beingjustified by faith, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. " "Walkworthy of God, who hath called you unto his glory. " "We speakwisdom to the initiates, the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery, which before the world [the Jewish dispensation] God ordained forour 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 theColossians, Paul speaks of "the hope which is laid up for you inheaven, whereof ye have heard in the gospel;" also of "theinheritance of the saints in light:" then he says, "God would nowmake known among the Gentiles the mystery, which is, Christ amongyou, the hope of glory. " In the light of what has gone before, howsignificant and how clear is this declaration! "All have sinned, and failed to attain unto the glory of God; but now, through thefaith of Jesus Christ, [through the dispensation brought to lightby Christ, ] the righteousness of God [God's method of salvation]is unto all that believe. " That is, by the law all were shut up inHades, but by grace they are now ransomed and to be received toheaven. The same thought or scheme is contained in that remarkablepassage in the Epistle to the Galatians where Paul says the freeIsaac and the bond woman Hagar were an allegory, teaching thatthere were two covenants, one by Abraham, the other by Moses. TheMosaic covenant of the law "answers to the Jerusalem which is onearth, and is in bondage with her children, " and belongs only tothe Jews. The Abrahamic covenant of promise answers to "theJerusalem which is above, and is free, and is the mother of usall. " In the former, we were "begotten unto bondage. " In thelatter, "Christ hath made us free. " We will notice but one more text in passing: it is, of all theproof texts of the doctrine of a substitutional expiation, the onewhich has ever been regarded as the very Achilles. And yet it canbe made to support that doctrine only by the aid of arbitraryassumptions and mistranslations, while by its very terms itperfectly coincides with nay, expressly declares the theory whichwe have been advocating as the genuine interpretation of Paul. Theusual commentators, in their treatment of this passage, haveexhibited a long continued series of perversions and sophisms, affording a strong example of unconscious prejudice. The correctGreek reading of the text is justly rendered thus: "Whom God setforth, a mercy seat through the faith in his blood, to exhibit hisrighteousness through the remission of former sins by theforbearance of God. " For rendering [non-ASCII characters]"mercy seat, " the usus loquendi and the internal harmony of meaningare 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 therendering of it by "sin offering. " That makes no importantdifference in the result. Christ was a sin offering, in theconception of Paul, in this sense: that when he was not himselfsubject to death, which was the penalty of sin, he yet died inorder to show God's purpose of removing that penalty of sinthrough his resurrection. For rendering [non-ASCII characters]"through, " no defence is needed: the only wonder is, how it evercould have been here translated "for. " Now, let two or three factsbe noticed. First, the New Testament phrase "the faith of Christ, " "the faith ofJesus, " is very unfairly and unwarrantably made to mean aninternal affection towards Christ, a belief of men in him. Itsgenuine meaning is the same as "the gospel of Christ, " or thereligion of Christ, the system of grace which he brought. 14 Whocan doubt that such is the meaning of the word in these instances?"Contend for the faith once delivered to the saints;" "Greet themthat love us in the faith;" "Have not the faith of our Lord JesusChrist with respect of persons. " So, in the text now under ournotice, "the faith which is in his blood" means the dispensationof pardon and justification, the system of faith, which wasconfirmed 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 ProfessorStuart's words, "God's pardoning mercy, " or "acquittal, " or"gratuitous justification, " "in which sense, " he says truly, "itis almost always used in Paul's epistles. "15 It signifies neithermore nor less than God's method of salvation by freely forgivingsins and treating the sinner as if he were righteous, the methodof salvation now carried into effect and revealed in the gospelbrought by Christ, and dramatically enacted in his passion andascension. Furthermore, we ask attention to the fact that theordinary interpreter, hard pressed by his unscriptural creed, interpolates a disjunctive conjunction in the opposing teeth ofPaul's plain statement. Paul says, as the common version has it, God is "just, and [i. E. Even] the justifier. " The creed boundcommentators read it, 14 Robinson has gathered a great number of instances in hisLexicon, under the word "Faith, " wherein it can only mean, as hesays, "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 meaningof the whole passage, in our view of it, according to Paul's ownuse of language. To establish a conviction of the correctness ofthe exposition, we only ask the ingenuous reader carefully tostudy the clauses of the Greek text and recollect the foregoingdata. "God has set Christ forth, to be to us a sure sign that wehave been forgiven and redeemed through the faith that was provedby his triumphant return from death, the dispensation of graceinaugurated by him. Herein God has exhibited his method of savingsinners, which is by the free remission of their sins through hiskindness. Thus God is proved to be disposed to save, and to besaving, by the system of grace shown through Jesus, him thatbelieveth. " In consequence of sin, men were under sentence ofcondemnation to the under world. In the fulness of time Godfulfilled his ancient promise to Abraham. He freely justifiedmen, that is, forgave them, redeemed them from their doom, andwould soon open the sky for their abode with him. This scheme ofredemption was carried out by Christ. That is to say, Godproclaimed it to men, and asked their belief in it, by "settingforth Christ" to die, descend among the dead, rise thence, andascend into heaven, as an exemplifying certification of the truthof the glad tidings. Thirdly, Paul teaches that one aim of Christ's mission was topurify, animate, and exalt the moral characters of men, andrectify their conduct, to produce a subjective sanctification inthem, and so prepare them for judgment and fit them for heaven. The establishment of this proposition will conclude the presentpart of our subject. He writes, "Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, gavehimself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity andpurify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works. " "Letevery one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity. " Invarious ways he often represents the fact that believers have beensaved by grace through Christ as the very reason, the intensifiedmotive, why they should scrupulously keep every tittle of themoral law and abstain even from the appearance of evil, walkingworthy of their high vocation. "The grace of God that bringethsalvation to all men hath appeared, teaching us that, denying allungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. " Bad men, "that obeynot the gospel of Christ, " such characters as "thieves, extortioners, drunkards, adulterers, shall not inherit the kingdomof God. " He proclaims, in unmistakable terms, "God will render toevery man according to his deeds, wrath and tribulation to theevil doer, honor and peace to the well doer, whether Jew orGentile. " The conclusion to be drawn from these and other likedeclarations is unavoidable. It is that "every one, Jew andGentile, shall stand before the judgment seat of Christ andreceive according to the deeds done in the body; for there is norespect of persons. " And one part of Christ's mission was to exerta hallowing moral influence on men, to make them righteous, thatthey might pass the bar with acquittal. But the reader whorecollects the class of texts adduced a little while since willremember that an opposite conclusion was as unequivocally drawnfrom them. Then Paul said, "By faith ye are justified, without thedeeds of the law. " Now he says, "For not the hearers of the laware just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justifiedin the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by JesusChrist. " Is there a contradiction, then, in Paul? Only inappearance. Let us distinguish and explain. In the two quotationsabove, the apostle is referring to two different things. First, he would say, By the faith of Christ, the free grace of Goddeclared in the gospel of Christ, ye are justified, gratuitouslydelivered from that necessity of imprisonment in Hades which isthe penalty of sin doomed upon the whole race from Adam, and fromwhich no amount of personal virtue could avail to save men. Secondly, when he exclaims, "Know ye not that the unrighteousshall not inherit the kingdom of God?" his thought is of aspiritual qualification of character, indispensable for positiveadmission among the blest in heaven. That is to say, the impartialpenalty of primeval sin consigned all men to Hades. They could notby their own efforts escape thence and win heaven. That fatedinability God has removed, and through Christ revealed itsremoval; but, that one should actually obtain the offered andpossible prize of heaven, personal purity, faith, obedience, holiness, are necessary. In Paul's conception of the scheme ofChristian salvation, then, there were two distinct parts: one, what God had done for all; the other, what each man was to do forhimself. And the two great classes of seemingly hostile textsfilling his epistles, which have puzzled so many readers, becomeclear and harmonious when we perceive and remember that by"righteousness" and its kindred terms he sometimes means theexternal and fulfilled method of redeeming men from thetransmitted necessity of bondage in the under world, and sometimesmeans the internal and contingent qualifications for actuallyrealizing that redemption. In the former instance he refers to theobjective mode of salvation and the revelation of it in Christ. Inthe latter, he refers to the subjective fitness for that salvationand the certitude of it in the believer. So, too, the words"death" and "life, " in Paul's writings, are generally charged, bya 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 underworld. Life, in its full Pauline force, includes inward rectitude, peace, and joy, and outward ascent into the upper world. Holinessis necessary, "for without it no one can see the Lord;" yet byitself it can secure only inward life: it is ineffectual to winheaven. Grace by itself merely exempts from the fatality of thecondemnation to Hades: it offers eternal life in heaven only uponcondition of "patient continuance in well doing" by "faith, obedience to the truth, and sanctification of the spirit. " ButGod's free grace and man's diligent fidelity, combined, give thefull fruition of blessedness in the heart and of glory andimmortality in the sky. Such, as we have set forth in the foregoing three divisions, wasPaul's view of the mission of Christ and of the method ofsalvation. It has been for centuries perverted and mutilated. Thetoil now is by unprejudiced inspection to bring it forward in itsgenuine completeness, as it stood in Paul's own mind and in theminds of his contemporaries. The essential view, epitomized in asingle sentence, is this. The independent grace of God hasinterfered, first, to save man from Hades, and secondly, to enablehim, by the co operation of his own virtue, to get to heaven. Hereare two separate means conjoined to effect the end, salvation. Now, compare, in the light of this statement, the three greattheological theories of Christendom. The UNITARIAN, overlookingthe objective justification, or offered redemption from the deathrealm to the sky home, which whether it be a truth or an error issurely in the epistles, makes the subjective sanctification all inall. The CALVINIST, in his theory, comparatively scorns thesubjective sanctification, which Paul insists on as a necessityfor entering the kingdom of God, and, having perverted theobjective justification from its real historic meaning, exaggerates it into the all in all. The ROMAN CATHOLIC holds thatChrist simply removed the load of original sin and its entaileddoom, and left each person to stand or fall by his own merits, inthe helping communion of the Church. He also maintains that a partof Christ's office was to exert an influence for the moralimprovement and consecration of human character. His error, as aninterpreter of Paul's thought, is, that he, like the Calvinist, attributes to Christ's death a vicarious efficacy by suffering thepangs of mankind's guilt to buy their ransom from the inexorablejustice of God; whereas the apostle really represents Christ'sredeeming mission as consisting simply in a dramaticexemplification of the Father's spontaneous love and purpose topardon past offences, unbolt the gates of Hades, and receive theworthy to heaven. Moreover, while Paul describes the heavenlysalvation as an undeserved gift from the grace of God, theCatholic often seems to make it a prize to be earned, under theChristian dispensation, by good works which may fairly challengethat reward. However, we have little doubt that this apparentopposition is rather in the practical mode of exhortation than inany interior difference of dogma; for Paul himself makes personalsalvation hinge on personal conditions, the province of gracebeing seen in the new extension to man of the opportunity andinvitation to secure his own acceptance. And so the Roman Catholicexposition of Paul's doctrine is much more nearly correct than anyother interpretation now prevalent. We should expect, a priori, that it would be, since that Church, containing two thirds ofChristendom, 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 deservingdistinct notice as necessarily involving a considerable part ofthe theory which we have attributed to him, is the suppositionthat Christ was the first person, clothed with humanity andexperiencing death, admitted into heaven. Of all the hosts who hadlived and died, every soul had gone down into the dusky underworld. There they all were held in durance, waiting for the GreatDeliverer. In the splendors of the realm over the sky, God and hisangels dwelt alone. That we do not err in ascribing this belief toPaul we might summon the whole body of the Fathers to testify inalmost unbroken phalanx, from Polycarp to St. Bernard. The Roman, Greek, and English Churches still maintain the same dogma. But theapostle's own plain words will be sufficient for our purpose. "That Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first thatshould rise from among the dead. " "Now is Christ risen from amongthe dead and become the first fruits of them that slept. " "He isthe beginning, the first born from among the dead, that among allhe might have the pre eminence. " "God raised Christ from among thedead, 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 thispassage cannot bear a moral interpretation, but necessarily has aphysical 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 uptogether with Christ and made us sit in heavenly places with him. "These testimonies are enough to show that Paul believed Jesus tohave been raised up to the abode of God, the first man everexalted thither, and that this was done as a pledge andillustration of the same exaltation awaiting those who believe. "If we be dead with Christ, we believe we shall also live withhim. " And the apostle teaches that we are not only connected withChrist's resurrection by the outward order and sequence of events, but also by an inward gift of the spirit. He says that to everyobedient believer is given an experimental "knowledge of the powerof the resurrection of Christ, " which is the seal of God withinhim, the pledge of his own celestial destination. "After that yebelieved, ye were sealed with that holy spirit of promise which isthe earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of thepurchased possession. " The office of this gift of the spirit is toawaken in the believing Christian a vivid realization of thethings in store for him, and a perfect conviction that he shallyet possess them in the unclouded presence of God, beyond thecanopy of azure and the stars. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, the things which God hath preparedfor them that love him. But he hath revealed them unto us; for wehave received his spirit, that we might know them. " "The spiritbeareth witness with our spirit that we are children and heirs ofGod, 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 celebratedpassage in the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. "Notonly do the generality of mankind groan in pain in this decayingstate, under the bondage of perishable elements, travailing foremancipation from the flesh into the liberty of the heavenly gloryappointed for the sons and heirs of God, but even we, who have thefirst fruits of the spirit, [i. E. The assurance springing fromthe resurrection of Christ, ] we too wait, painfully longing forthe adoption, that is, our redemption from the body. " By longingfor the adoption, or filiation, is meant impatient desire to bereceived into heaven as children to the enjoyment of theprivileges of their Father's house. "God predetermined that thosecalled should be conformed to the image of his Son, [i. E. Shouldpass through the same course with Christ and reach the heavenlygoal, ] that he might be the first born among many brethren. " Tothe securing of this end, "whom he called, them he also justified, [i. E. Ransomed from Hades;17] and whom he justified, them he alsoglorified, " (i. E. Advanced to the glory of heaven. ) It is evidentthat Paul looked for the speedy second coming of the Lord in theclouds of heaven, with angels and power and glory. He expectedthat at that time all enemies would be overthrown and punished, the dead would be raised, the living would be changed, and allthat were Christ's would be translated to heaven. 18 "The LordJesus shall be revealed from 17 That "justify" often means, in Paul's usage, to absolve fromHades, we have concluded from a direct study of his doctrines andlanguage. We find that Bretschneider gives it the same definitionin his Lexicon of the New Testament. See [non ASCII characters] 18 "Every one shall rise in his own division" of the great army ofthe dead, "Christ, the first fruits; afterwards, they that areChrist's, at his coming. " heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeanceon them that know not God and obey not the gospel of Christ. " "Weshall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, atthe last trump. " "We who are alive and remain until the coming ofthe Lord shall not anticipate those that are asleep. For the Lordhimself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice ofthe archangel, and with the trump of God;19 and the dead in Christshall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caughtup with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so weshall always be with the Lord. Brethren, you need not that Ishould specify the time to you; for yourselves are perfectly awarethat the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. " "Thetime is short. " "I pray God your whole spirit, soul, and body bepreserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. " "Athis appearing he shall judge the living and the dead. " "The Lordis at hand. " The author of these sentences undeniably looked forthe great advent soon. Than Paul, indeed, no one more earnestlybelieved (or did more to strengthen in others that belief) in thatspeedy return of Christ, the anticipation of which thrilled allearly Christendom with hope and dread, and kept the disciples dayand night on the stretch and start of expectation to hear theawful blast of the judgment trump and to see the glorious visionof the Son of God descending amidst a convoy of angels. Whatsublime emotions must have rushed through the apostle's soul whenhe thought that he, as a survivor of death's reign on earth, mightbehold the resurrection without himself entering the grave! Upon atime when he should be perchance at home, or at Damascus, or, itmight be, at Jerusalem, the sun would become as blood, the moon assackcloth of hair, the last trump would swell the sky, and, "Lo! the nations of the dead, Which do outnumber all earth'sraces, rise, And high in sumless myriads overhead Sweep past himin a cloud, as 'twere the skirts Of the Eternal passing by. " The resurrection which Paul thought would attend the second comingof Christ was the rising of the summoned spirits of the deceasedfrom their rest in the under world. Most certainly it was not therestoration of their decomposed bodies from their graves, althoughthat incredible surmise has been generally entertained. He says, while answering the question, How are the dead raised up, and withwhat body do they come? "That which thou sowest, thou sowest notthat body which shall be, but naked grain: God giveth it a body asit hath pleased him. " The comparison is, that so the naked soul issown in the under world, and God, when he raiseth it, giveth it afitting body. He does not hesitate to call the man "a fool" whoexpects the restoration of the same body that was buried. Hiswhole argument is explicitly against that idea. "There are bodiescelestial, as well as bodies terrestrial: the first man was 19 Rabbi Akiba says, in the Talmud, "God shall take and blow atrumpet a thousand godlike yards in length, whose echo shall soundfrom end to end of the world. At the first blast the earth shalltremble. At the second, the dust shall part. At the third, thebones shall come together. At the fourth, the members shall growwarm. At the fifth, they shall be crowned with the head. At thesixth, the soul shall re enter the body. And at the seventh, theyshall stand erect. " Corrodi, Geschichte des Chiliasmus, band i. S. 355. of the earth, earthy; the second man was the Lord from heaven; andas we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear theimage of the heavenly; for flesh and blood cannot inherit thekingdom of God. " In view of these declarations, it is astonishingthat any one can suppose that Paul believed in the resurrection ofthese present bodies and in their transference into heaven. "Inthis tabernacle we groan, being burdened, " and, "Who shall deliverme from this body of death?" he cries. If ever there was a manwhose goading experience, keen intellectual energies, and moralsensibilities, made him weary of this slow, gross body, andpassionately to long for a more corresponding, swift, and pureinvestiture, it was Paul. And in his theory of "the glorious bodyof Christ, according to which our vile body shall be changed, " herelieved his impatience and fed his desire. What his conception ofthat body was, definitely, we cannot tell; but doubtless it wasthe idea of a vehicle adapted to his mounting and ardent soul, andin many particulars very unlike this present groaning load ofclay. The epistles of Paul contain no clear implication of thenotion of a millennium, a thousand years' reign of Christ with hissaints on the earth after his second advent. On the contrary, inmany places, particularly in the fourth chapter of the FirstEpistle to the Thessalonians, (supposing that letter to be his, )he says that the Lord and they that are his will directly passinto heaven after the consummation of his descent from heaven andtheir resurrection from the dead. But the declaration "He mustreign till he hath put all enemies under his feet, " taken with itscontext, is thought, by Bertholdt, Billroth, De Wette, and others, to imply that Christ would establish a millennial kingdom onearth, and reign in it engaged in vanquishing all hostile forces. Against this exegesis we have to say, first, that, so far as thatgoes, the vast preponderance of critical authorities is opposed toit. Secondly, if this conquest were to be secured on earth, thereis nothing to show that it need occupy much time: one hour mightanswer for it as well as a thousand years. There is nothing hereto 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 mustreign, it does not follow that he believed that reign would be onearth: it might be in heaven. The "enemies" referred to are, inpart at least, the wicked spirits occupying the regions of theupper air; for he specifies these "principalities, authorities, and powers. "20 And the author of the Epistle to the Hebrewsrepresents God as saying to Jesus, "Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. " Fourthly, it seemscertain that, if in the apostle's thought a thousand years wereinterpolated between Christ's second coming and the delivering ofhis mediatorial sceptre to God, he would have said so, at leastsomewhere in his writings. He would naturally have dwelt upon it alittle, as the Chiliasts did so much. Instead of that, herepeatedly contradicts it. Upon the whole, then, with Ruckert, wecannot 20 The apocryphal "Ascension of Isaiah, " already spoken of, givesa detailed description of the upper air as occupied by Satan andhis angels, among whom fighting and evil deeds rage; but Christ inhis ascent conquers and spoils them all, and shows himself avictor ever brightening as he rises successively through the wholeseven heavens to the feet of God. Ascensio Vatis Isaia, cap. Vi x. see any reason for not supposing that, according to Paul, "theend" was immediately to succeed "the coming, " as [non-ASCIIcharacters] would properly indicate. The doctrine of a long earthly reign of Christ is not deducedfrom this passage, by candid interpretation, because it must bethere, but foisted into it, by Rabbinical information, becauseit may be there. Paul distinctly teaches that the believers who died before thesecond coming of the Savior would remain in the under world untilthat event, when they and the transformed living should ascend"together with the Lord. " All the relevant expressions in hisepistles, save two, are obviously in harmony with this conceptionof a temporary subterranean sojourn, waiting for the appearance ofJesus from heaven to usher in the resurrection. But in the fifthchapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians he writes, "Abiding in the body we are absent from the Lord. " It is usuallyinferred, from these words and those which follow them, that theapostle expected whenever he died to be instantly with Christ. Certainly they do mean pretty nearly that; but they mean it inconnection with the second advent and the accompanyingcircumstances and events; for Paul believed that many of thedisciples possibly himself would live until Christ's coming. Allthrough these two chapters (the fourth and fifth) it is obvious, from the marked use of the terms "we" and "you, " and from otherconsiderations, that "we" here refers solely to the writer, theindividual Paul. It is the plural of accommodation used by commoncustom and consent. In the form of a slight paraphrase we mayunfold the genuine meaning of the passage in hand. "In this body Iam afflicted: not that I would merely be released from it, forthen I should be a naked spirit. But I earnestly desire, unclothing myself of this earthly body, at the same time to clothemyself with my heavenly body, that I may lose all my mortal partand its woes in the full experience of heaven's eternal life. Godhas determined that this result shall come to me sooner or later, and has given me a pledge of it in the witnessing spirit. But itcannot happen so long as I tarry in the flesh, the Lord delayinghis appearance. Having the infallible earnest of the spirit, I donot dread the change, but desire to hasten it. Confident ofacceptance in that day at the judgment seat of Christ, beforewhich we must all then stand, I long for the crisis when, divestedof this body and invested with the immortal form wrought for me byGod, I shall be with the Lord. Still, knowing the terror whichshall environ the Lord at his coming to judgment, I plead with mento be prepared. " Whoever carefully examines the whole connectedpassage, from iv. 6 to v. 16, will see, we think, that the aboveparaphrase truly exposes its meaning. The other text alluded to as an apparent exception to the doctrineof a residence in the lower land of ghosts intervening betweendeath and the ascension, occurs in the Epistle to thePhilippians: "I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire todepart and to be with Christ, which is far better; but that Ishould abide in the flesh is more needful for you. " There arethree possible ways of regarding this passage. First, we maysuppose that Paul, seeing the advent of the Lord postponed longerand longer, changed his idea of the intermediate state of deceasedChristians, and thought they would spend that period of waiting inheaven, not in Hades. Neander advocates this view. But there islittle to sustain it, and it is loaded with fatal difficulties. Achange of faith so important and so bright in its view as thismust have seemed under the circumstances would have been clearlyand fully stated. Attention would have been earnestly invited toso great a favor and comfort; exultation and gratitude would havebeen expressed over so unheard of a boon. Moreover, what hadoccurred to effect the alleged new belief? The unexpected delay ofChrist's coming might make the apostle wish that his departedfriends were tarrying above the sky instead of beneath thesepulchre; but it could furnish no ground to warrant a suddenfaith in that wish as a fulfilled fact. Besides, the truth is thatPaul never ceased, even to the last, to expect the speedy arrivalof the Lord and to regard the interval as a comparative trifle. Inthis very epistle he says, "The Lord is at hand: be careful fornothing. " Secondly, we may imagine that he expected himself, as adivinely chosen and specially favored servant, to go to Christ inheaven as soon as he died, if that should happen before the Lord'sappearance, while the great multitude of believers would abide inthe under world until the general resurrection. The death he wasin peril of and is referring to was that of martyrdom for thegospel at the hands of Nero. And many of the Fathers maintainedthat in the case of every worthy Christian martyr there was anexception to the general doom, and that he was permitted to enterheaven at once. Still, to argue such a thought in the text beforeus requires an hypothesis far fetched and unsupported by a singleclear declaration of the apostle himself. Thirdly, we may assumeand it seems to us by far the least encumbered and the mostplausible theory that attempts to meet the case that Paul believedthere would be vouchsafed to the faithful Christian during histransient abode in the under world a more intimate and blessedspiritual fellowship with his Master than he could experiencewhile in the flesh. "For I am persuaded that neither death[separation from the body] nor depth [the under world] shall beable to separate us from God's love, which he has manifestedthrough Christ. " He may refer, therefore, by his hopes of beingstraightway with Christ on leaving the body, to a spiritualcommunion with him in the disembodied state below, and not to hisphysical presence in the supernal realm, the latter not beingattainable previous to the resurrection. Indeed, a little fartheron in this same epistle, he plainly shows that he did notanticipate being received to heaven until after the second comingof Christ. He says, "We look for the Savior from heaven, who shallchange our vile body and fashion it like unto his own gloriousbody. " This change is the preliminary preparation to ascent toheaven, which change he repeatedly represents as indispensable. What Paul believed would be the course and fate of things on earthafter the final consummation of Christ's mission is a matter ofinference from his brief and partial hints. The most probable andconsistent view which can be constructed from those hints is this. He thought all mankind would become reconciled and obedient toGod, and that death, losing its punitive character, would becomewhat it was originally intended to be, the mere change of theearthly for a heavenly body preparatory to a direct ascension. "Then shall the Son himself be subject unto Him that put allthings under him, that God may be all in all. " Then placid virtuesand innocent joys should fill the world, and human life be what itwas in Eden ere guilt forbade angelic visitants and converse withheaven. 21 "So when" without a 21 Neander thinks Paul's idea was that "the perfected kingdom ofGod would then blend itself harmoniously throughout his unboundeddominions. " We believe his apprehension is correct. This globewould become a part of the general paradise, an ante room or a lower story to the Temple of the Universe. previous descent into Hades, as the context proves "this mortalshall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass thesaying which is written, 'Death shall be swallowed up in victory. O Death, thou last enemy, where is thy sting? O Hades, thou gloomyprison, where is thy victory?'" The exposition just offered isconfirmed by its striking adaptedness to the whole Pauline scheme. It is also the interpretation given by the earliest Fathers, andby the Church in general until now. This idea of men being changedand rising into heaven without at all entering the disembodiedstate below was evidently in the mind of Milton when he wrote thefollowing lines: "And from these corporeal nutriments, perhaps. Your bodies may atlast turn all to spirit, And, wing'd, ascend ethereal, may, atchoice, Here, or in heavenly paradise, dwell. " It now remains to see what Paul thought was to be the finalportion of the hardened and persevering sinner. One class ofpassages in his writings, if taken by themselves, would lead us tobelieve that on that point he had no fixed convictions in regardto particulars, but, thinking these beyond the present reach ofreason, contented himself with the general assurance that all suchpersons would meet their just deserts, and there left the subjectin obscurity. "God will render to every man to the Jew first, andalso to the Greek according to his deeds. " "Whatsoever a mansoweth, that shall he also reap. " "So then every one of us shallgive an account of himself to God. " "At the judgment seat ofChrist every one shall receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or whether itbe bad. " From these and a few kindred texts we might infer thatthe author, aware that he "knew but in part, " simply held thebelief without attempting to pry into special methods, details, and results that at the time of the judgment all should have exactjustice. He may, however, have unfolded in his preaching minutiaof faith not explained in his letters. A second class of passages in the epistles of Paul would naturallycause the common reader to conclude that he imagined that theunregenerate those unfit for the presence of God were to beannihilated when Christ, after his second coming, should return toheaven with his saints. "Those who know not God and obey not thegospel of Christ shall be punished with everlasting destructionfrom the presence and glory of the Lord when he shall come. " "Theend of the enemies of the cross of Christ is destruction. " "Thevessels of wrath fitted for destruction. " "As many as have sinnedwithout law shall perish without law. " But it is to be observedthat the word here rendered "destruction" need not signifyannihilation. It often, even in Paul's epistles, plainly meanssevere punishment, dreadful misery, moral ruin, and retribution. For example, "foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men indestruction and perdition, " "piercing them through with manysorrows. " It may or may not have that sense in the instances abovecited. Their meaning is intrinsically uncertain: we must bringother passages and distinct considerations to aid ourinterpretation. From a third selection of texts in Paul's epistles it is notstrange that some persons have deduced the doctrine ofunconditional, universal salvation. "As in Adam all die, even soin Christ shall all be made alive. " But the genuine explanation ofthis 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 thejudgment, after which event some may be taken to heaven, othersbanished again into Hades. "We trust in the living God, who is theSavior of all men, especially of them that believe. " This meansthat all men have been saved now from the unconditional sentenceto Hades brought on them by the first sin, but not all know theglad tidings: those who receive them into believing hearts arealready exulting over their deliverance and their hopes of heaven. All are objectively saved from the unavoidable and universalnecessity of Hadean imprisonment; the obedient believers are alsosubjectively saved from the contingent and personal risk ofincurring that doom. "God hath shut them all up together inunbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. " "All" here meansboth Jews and Gentiles; and the reference is to the universalannulment of the universal fatality, and the impartial offer ofheaven to every one who sanctifies the truth in his heart. In somecases the word "all" is used with rhetorical looseness, not withlogical rigidness, and denotes merely all Christians. Ruckertshows this well in his commentary on the fifteenth chapter ofFirst Corinthians. In other instances the universality, which isindeed plainly there, applies to the removal from the race of theinherited doom; while a conditionality is unquestionably impliedas to the actual salvation of each person. We say Paul doesconstantly represent personal salvation as depending onconditions, as beset by perils and to be earnestly striven for. "Lest that by any means I myself should be a castaway. " "Deliversuch an one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that thespirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. " "Wherefore welabor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of thelord. " "To them that are saved we are a savor of life unto life;to them that perish, a savor of death unto death. " "Charge themthat are rich that they be humble and do good, laying up in storea good foundation, that they may lay hold on eternal life. " It isclear, from these and many similar passages of Paul, that he didnot believe in the unconditional salvation, the positivemechanical salvation, of all individuals, but held personalsalvation to be a contingent problem, to be worked out, throughthe permitting grace of God, by Christian faith, works, andcharacter. How plainly this is contained, too, in his doctrine of"a resurrection of the just and the unjust, " and of a day ofjudgment, from whose august tribunal Christ is to pronouncesentence according to each man's deeds! At the same time, theundeniable fact deserves particular remembrance that he says, andapparently knows, nothing whatever of a hell, in the presentacceptation of that term, a prison house of fiery tortures. Heassigns the realm of Satan and the evil spirits to the air, thevexed region between earth and heaven, according to the demonologyof his age and country. 22 Finally, there is a fourth class of passages, from which we mightinfer that the apostle's faith merely excluded the reprobate fromparticipating in the ascent with Christ, just as some of thePharisees excluded the Gentiles from their resurrection, and thereleft the subject in darkness. 22 A detailed and most curious account of this region, which hecalls 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 inheritancein the kingdom of Christ and of God. " "There is laid up a crown ofrighteousness, which the Lord shall give in that day to all themthat love his appearing. " In all these, and in many other cases, there is a marked omission of any reference to the ultimatepositive disposal of the wicked. Still, against the supposition ofhis holding the doctrine that all except good Christians would beleft below eternally, we have his repeated explicit avowals. "Ihave hope towards God that there shall be a resurrection both ofthe just and the unjust. " "We must all appear before the judgmentseat of Christ. " These last statements, however, prove only thatPaul thought the bad as well as the good would be raised up andjudged: they are not inconsistent with the belief that thecondemned would afterwards either be annihilated, or remandedeverlastingly to the under world. This very belief, we think, iscontained in that remarkable passage where Paul writes to thePhilippians that he strives "if by any means he may attain untothe resurrection. " Now, the common resurrection of the dead forjudgment needed not to be striven for: it would occur to allunconditionally. But there is another resurrection, or anotherpart remaining to complete the resurrection, namely, after thejudgment, a rising of the accepted to heaven. All shall rise fromHades upon the earth to judgment. This Paul calls simply theresurrection, [Non ASCII Characters] After the judgment, theaccepted shall rise to heaven. This Paul calls, with distinctiveemphasis, [Non ASCII Characters] the pre eminent or completeresurrection, the prefix being used as an intensive. This is whatthe apostle considers uncertain and labors to secure, "stretchingforward and pressing towards the goal for the prize of that callupwards, " [Non ASCII Characters] (that invitation to heaven, )"which God has extended through Christ. " Those who are condemnedat the judgment can have no part in this completion of theresurrection, cannot enter the heavenly kingdom, but must be"punished with everlasting destruction from the presence and gloryof the Lord, " that is, as we suppose is signified, be thrust intothe under world for evermore. As unessential to our object, wehave omitted an exposition of the Pauline doctrine of the naturalrank and proper or delegated offices of Christ in the universe;also an examination of the validity of the doubts and argumentsbrought against the genuineness of the lesser epistles ascribed toPaul. In close, we will sum up in brief array the leadingconceptions in his view of the last things. First, there is aworld of immortal light and bliss over the sky, the exclusiveabode of God and the angels from of old; and there is a drearyworld of darkness and repose under the earth, the abode of alldeparted human spirits. Secondly, death was originally meant tolead souls into heaven, clothed in new and divine bodies, immediately on the fall of the present tabernacle; but sin brokethat plan and doomed souls to pass disembodied into Hades. Thirdly, the Mosaic dispensation of law could not deliver men fromthat sentence; but God had promised Abraham that through one ofhis posterity they should be delivered. To fulfil that promiseChrist came. He illustrated God's unpurchased love and forgivenessand determination to restore the original plan, as if men hadnever sinned. Christ effected this aim, in conjunction with histeachings, by dying, descending into Hades, as if the doom of asinful man were upon him also, subduing the powers of that prisonhouse, rising again, and ascending into heaven, the first one everadmitted there from among the dead, thus exemplifying thefulfilled "expectation of the creature that was groaning andtravailing in pain" to be born into the freedom of the heavenlyglory of the sons of God. Fourthly, "justification by faith, "therefore, means the redemption from Hades by acceptance of thedispensation of free grace which is proclaimed in the gospel. Fifthly, every sanctified believer receives a pledge or earnest ofthe spirit sealing him as God's and assuring him of acceptancewith Christ and of advance to heaven. Sixthly, Christ is speedilyto come a second time, come in glory and power irresistible, toconsummate his mission, raise the dead, judge the world, establisha new order of things, and return into heaven with his chosenones. Seventhly, the stubbornly wicked portion of mankind will bereturned eternally into the under world. Eighthly, after thejudgment the subterranean realm of death will be shut up, no moresouls going into it, but all men at their dissolution beinginstantly invested with spiritual bodies and ascending to theglories of the Lord. Finally, Jesus having put down all enemiesand restored the primeval paradise will yield up his mediatorialthrone, and God the Father be all in all. The preparatory rudiments of this system of the last thingsexisted in the belief of the age, and it was itself composed bythe union of a theoretic interpretation of the life of Christ andof the connected phenomena succeeding his death, with the elementsof Pharasaic Judaism, all mingled in the crucible of the soul ofPaul and fused by the fires of his experience. It illustrates agreat number of puzzling passages in the New Testament, withoutthe necessity of recourse to the unnatural, incredible, unwarranted dogmas associated with them by the unique, isolatedpeculiarities of Calvinism. The interpretation given above, moreover, has this strong confirmation of its accuracy, namely, that it isarrived at from the stand point of the thought and life of theApostle Paul in the first century, not from the stand point of thetheology and experience of the educated Christian of thenineteenth century. CHAPTER V. JOHN'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. WE are now to see if we can determine and explain what were theviews of the Apostle John upon the subject of death and life, condemnation and salvation, the resurrection and immortality. Tounderstand his opinions on these points, it is obviously necessaryto examine his general system of theological thought. John isregarded as the writer of the proem to the fourth Gospel, also ofthree brief epistles. There are such widely spread doubts of hisbeing the author of the Apocalypse that it has seemed better toexamine that production separately, leaving each one free toattribute its doctrine of the last things to whatever person knownor unknown he believes wrote the book. It is true that theauthorship of the fourth Gospel itself is powerfully disputed; butan investigation of that question would lead us too far and detainus too long from our real aim, which is not to discuss thegenuineness or the authority of the New Testament documents, butto show their meaning in what they actually contain and implyconcerning a future life. It is necessary to premise that we thinkit certain that John wrote with some reference to the sproutingphilosophy of his time, the Platonic and Oriental speculations soearly engrafted upon the stock of Christian doctrine. For thepeculiar theories which were matured and systematized in thesecond and third centuries by the Gnostic sects were floatingabout, in crude and fragmentary forms, at the close of the firstcentury, when the apostle wrote. They immediately awakeneddissension and alarm, cries of heresy and orthodoxy, in theChurch. Some modern writers deny the presence in the New Testamentof any allusion to such views; but the weight of evidence on theother side internal, from similarity of phrase, and external, fromthe testimony of early Fathers is, when accumulated andappreciated, overwhelming. Among these Gnostic notions the mostdistinctive and prominent was the belief that the world wascreated and the Jewish dispensation given, not by the true andinfinite God, but by a subordinate and imperfect deity, theabsolute God remaining separate from all created things, unknownand 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 efficiencyconstructed, illuminated, and carried on the various provinces ofcreation and races of existence. Many other opinions, fanciful, absurd, or recondite, which they held, it is not necessary here tostate. The evangelist, without alluding perhaps to any particularteachers or systems of these doctrines, but only to their generalscope, traverses by his declarations partially the same ground ofthought which they cover, stating dogmatically the positive factsas he apprehended them. He agrees with some of the Gnosticdoctrines and differs from others, not setting himself to followor to oppose them indiscriminately, but to do either as the truthseemed to him to require. There are two methods of seeking the meaning of the introductionto the fourth Gospel where the Johannean doctrine of the Logos iscondensed. We may study it grammatically, or historically;morally, or metaphysically; from the point of view of experimentalreligious faith, or from that of contemporary speculativephilosophy. He who omits either of these ways of regarding thesubject must arrive at an interpretation essentially defective. Both modes of investigation are indispensable for acquiring a fullcomprehension of the expressions employed and the thoughtsintended. But to be fitted to understand the theme in itshistorical aspect which, in this case, for purposes of criticism, is by far the more important one must be intelligently acquaintedwith the Hebrew personification of the Wisdom, also of the Word, of God; with the Platonic conception of archetypal ideas; with theAlexandrian Jewish doctrine of the Divine Logos; and with therelevant Gnostic and Christian speculation and phraseology of thefirst two centuries. Especially must the student be familiar withPhilo, who was an eminent Platonic Jewish philosopher and acelebrated writer, flourishing previous to the composition of thefourth Gospel, in which, indeed, there is scarcely a singlesuperhuman predicate of Christ which may not be paralleled withstriking closeness from his extant works. In all these fields arefound, in imperfect proportions and fragments, the materials whichare developed in John's belief of the Logos become flesh. Topresent all these materials here would be somewhat out of placeand would require too much room. We shall, therefore, simplystate, as briefly and clearly as possible, the final conclusionsto which a thorough study has led us, drawing such illustrationsas we do advance almost entirely from Philo. 1 1 The reader who wishes to see in smallest compass and most lucidorder the facts requisite for the formation of a judgment isreferred to Lucke's "Dissertation on the Logos, " to Norton's"Statement of Reasons, " and to Neander's exposition of theJohannean theology in his "Planting and Training of the Church. "Nearly every thing important, both external and internal, iscollected in these three sources taken together, and set forthwith great candor, power, and skill. Differing in their conclusions, they supply pretty adequate means for the independent student toconclude for himself. In the first place, what view of the Father himself, the absoluteDeity, do these writings present? John conceives of God no one canwell collate the relevant texts in his works without perceivingthis as the one perfect and eternal Spirit, in himself invisibleto mortal eyes, the Personal Love, Life, Truth, Light, "in whom isno darkness at all. " This corresponds entirely with the purest andhighest idea the human mind can form of the one untreated infiniteGod. The apostle, then, going back to the period anterior to thematerial creation, and soaring to the contemplation of the soleGod, does not conceive of him as being utterly alone, but ashaving a Son with him, an "only begotten Son, " a beloved companion"before the foundation of the world. " "In the beginning was theLogos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He wasin the beginning with God. All things were made through him, andwithout him was nothing made that was made. " The true explanationof these words, according to their undeniable historical and theirunforced grammatical. There is an English translation of it, byProfessor G. R. Noyes, in the numbers of the Christian Examinerfor March and May, 1849, meaning, is as follows. Before thematerial creation, when God was yet the sole being, his firstproduction, the Logos, was a Son, at once the image of himself andthe 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, werebrought, from their being in a state of conception in the mind ofGod, into actual existence in space and time. Thus Philo says, "God is the most generic; second is the Logos of God. "2 "The Logosis the first begotten Son. "3 "The Logos of God is above the wholeworld, and is the most ancient and generic of all that had abeginning. "4 "Nothing intervenes between the Logos and God on whomhe rests. "5 "This sensible world is the junior son of God; theSenior is the Idea, "6 or Logos. "The shadow and seeming portraitof God is his Logos, by which, as by an assumed instrument, hemade the world. As God is the original of the image here calledshadow, so this image becomes the original of other things. "7 "Theintelligible world, or world of archetypal ideas, is the Logos ofthe world creating God; as an intelligible or ideal city is thethought of the architect reflecting to build a sensible city. "8"Of the world, God is the cause by which, the four elements thematerial from which, the Logos the instrument through which, thegoodness of the Creator the end for which, it was made. "9 Thesecitations from Philo clearly show, in various stages ofdevelopment, that doctrine of the Logos which began first arguingto the Divine Being from human analogies with separating theconception of a plan in the mind of God from its execution infact; proceeded with personifying that plan, or sum of ideas, as amediating agent between motive and action, between impulse andfulfilment; and ended with hypostatizing the arranging power ofthe Divine thought as a separate being, his intellectual image orSon, his first and perfect production. They unequivocally expressthese thoughts: that God is the only being who was from eternity;that the Logos was the first begotten, antemundane being, that hewas the likeness, image, immediate manifestation, of the Father;that he was the medium of creation, the instrumental means in theoutward formation of the world. History shows us this doctrineunfolded by minute steps, which it would be tedious to follow, from the Book of Proverbs to Philo Judaus and John, from Plato toJustin Martyr and Athanasius. But the rapid sketch just presentedmay be sufficient now. When it is written, "and the Logos was God, " the meaning is notstrictly literal. To guard against its being so considered, theauthor tautologically repeats what he had said immediately before, "the same was in the beginning with God. " Upon the suppositionthat the Logos is strictly identical with God, the verses makeutter nonsense. "In the beginning was God, and God was with God, and God was God. God was in the beginning with God. " But supposethe Logos to mean an ante mundane but subordinate being, who was aperfect image or likeness of God, and the sense is both clear andsatisfactory, and no violence is done either to historical data orto grammatical demands. "And the Logos was God, " that is, was themirror or facsimile of God. So, employing the same idiom, we areaccustomed 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 manhimself! Or, without the use of this idiom, we may explain theexpression "the Logos was God" thus: He stands in the place of Godto 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 isGod. "10 The inward significance of the Logos doctrine, in all its degreesand phases, circumstantially and essentially, from first to last, is the revelation of God. God himself, in himself, is conceived asabsolutely withdrawn beyond the apprehension of men, in boundlessimmensity and inaccessible secrecy. His own nature is hidden, as athought is hidden in the mind; but he has the power of revealingit, as a thought is revealed by speaking it in a word. Thatuttered word is the Logos, and is afterwards conceived as aperson, and as creative, then as building and glorifying theworld. All of God that is sent forth from passive concealment intoactive manifestation is the Logos. "The term Logos comprehends, "Norton says, "all the attributes of God manifested in the creationand government of the universe. " The Logos is the hypostasis of"the unfolded portion, " "the revealing power, " "the self showingfaculty, " "the manifesting action, " of God. The essential idea, then, concerning the Logos is that he is the means through whichthe hidden God comes to the cognizance of his creatures. Inharmony with this prevailing philosophy one who believed the Logosto have been incarnated in Christ would suppose the purpose of hisincarnation to be the fuller revelation of God to men. AndMartineau says, "The view of revelation which is implicated in thefolds of the Logos doctrine that everywhere pervades the fourthGospel, is that it is the appearance to beings who have somethingof a divine spirit within them, of a yet diviner without them, leading them to the divinest of all, who embraces them both. " Thisis a fine statement of the practical religious aspect of John'sconception 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 exactimage of him in manifestation, it follows that John regardedChrist, next in rank below God, as personal love, life, truth, andlight; and the belief that he was the necessary medium ofcommunicating these Divine blessings to men would naturallyresult. Accordingly, we find that John repeats, as falling fromthe lips of Christ, all the declarations required by andsupporting such an hypothesis. "I am the way, the truth, and thelife. " "No man cometh unto the Father but by me. " But Philo, too, had written before in precisely the same strain. Witness thecorrespondences between the following quotations respectively fromJohn and Philo. "I am the bread which came down from heaven togive life to the world. "11 Whoso eateth my body and drinketh myblood hath eternal life. "12 "Behold, I rain bread upon you fromheaven: the heavenly food of the soul is the word of God, and theDivine Logos, from whom all eternal instructions and wisdomsflow. "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 UsuPhilonis in Interpretatione Novi Testamenti, " p. 82. 14 lbid. P. 81. in you. "15 "He alone can become the heir of incorporeal and divinethings whose whole soul is filled with the salubrious Word. "16"Every one that seeth the Son and believeth on him shall haveeverlasting life. "17 "He strains every nerve towards the highestDivine Logos, who is the fountain of wisdom, in order that, drawing from that spring, he may escape death and win everlastinglife. "18 "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: ifany man eat of this bread he shall live forever. "19 "Lifting uphis 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 themost ancient Logos. "21 "As the living Father hath sent me, and Ilive by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live byme. "22 Does it not seem perfectly plain that John's doctrine ofthe Christ is at bottom identical with Philo's doctrine of theLogos? The difference of development in the two doctrines, so faras there is a difference, is that the latter view isphilosophical, abstract; the former, practical, historical. Philodescribes 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. Thesame dignity, the same offices, are predicated of him by both. John declares, "In him [the Divine Logos] was life, and the lifewas the light of men. "23 Philo asserts, "Nothing is more luminousand irradiating than the Divine Logos, by the participation ofwhom other things expel darkness and gloom, earnestly desiring topartake of living light. "24 John speaks of Christ as "the onlybegotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father. "25 Philo says, "The Logos is the first begotten Son of God, " "between whom andGod nothing intervenes. "26 John writes, "The Son of man will giveyou the food of everlasting life; for him hath God the Fathersealed. "27 Philo writes, "The stamp of the seal of God is theimmortal Logos. "28 We have this from John: "He was manifested totake away our sins; and in him is no sin. "29 And this from Philo:"The Divine Logos is free from all sins, voluntary andinvoluntary. "30 The Johannean Christ is the Philonean Logos born into the world asa man. "And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full ofgrace and truth. " The substance of what has thus far beenestablished 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 andtruth, life and light. The Logos is his first born Son, his exactimage, the reproduction of his being, the next lower personalityof love and truth, life and light, the instrument for creating andruling the world, the revelation of God, the medium ofcommunication between God and his works. Christ is that Logos comeupon the earth as a man to save the perishing, proving his preexistence and superhuman nature by his miraculous knowledge andworks. That the belief expressed in the last sentence is correctlyattributed 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: inregard to the statements in the preceding sentences no furtherproof is thought necessary. With the aid of a little repetition, we will now attempt to make astep of progress. The tokens of energy, order, splendor, beneficence, in the universe, are not, according to John, as wehave seen, the effects of angelic personages, emanating gods, Gnostic aons, but are the workings of the self revealing power ofthe one true and eternal God, this power being conceived by John, according to the philosophy of his age, as a proper person, God'sinstrument 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, butare the very working of the Logos, consubstantial manifestationsof God's nature and attributes. But mankind, fallen into folly andvice, perversity and sin, lying in darkness, were ignorant thatthese Divine qualities were in reality mediate exhibitions of God, immediate exhibitions of the Logos. "The light was shining indarkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. " Then, to revealto men the truth, to regenerate them and conjoin them throughhimself with the Father in the experience of eternal life, thehypostatized Logos left his transcendent glory in heaven and cameinto the world in the person of Jesus. "No man hath seen God atany 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 ofHim that sent me. " This will is that all who see and believe onthe Son shall have everlasting life. "God so loved the world thathe gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in himshould not perish, but have everlasting life. " "The bread of Godis He who cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world. "The doctrine of the pre existence of souls, and of their beingborn into the world in the flesh, was rife in Judea when thisGospel was written, and is repeatedly alluded to in it. 31 ThatJohn applies this doctrine to Christ in the following and in otherinstances is obvious. "Before Abraham was, I am. " "I came forthfrom the Father and am come into the world. " "Father, glorify thoume 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 wasbefore?" As for ourselves, we do not see how it is possible forany unprejudiced person, after studying the fourth Gospelfaithfully with the requisite helps, to doubt that the writer ofit believed that Jesus pre existed as the Divine Logos, and thathe became incarnate to reveal the Father and to bring men into theexperience of true eternal life. John declares this, in his firstepistle, in so many words, saying, "The living Logos, the eternallife which was with the Father from the beginning, was manifestedunto us;" and, "God sent his only begotten Son into the world thatwe might live through him. " Whether the doctrine thus set forthwas really entertained and taught by Jesus himself, or whether itis the interpretation put on his language by one whose mind wasfull of the notions of the age, are distinct questions. With thesettlement of these questions we are not now concerned: such adiscussion would be more appropriate when examining the genuinemeaning of the words of Christ. All that is necessary here is thesuggestion that when we show the theological system of John itdoes not necessarily follow that that is the true 31 John i. 21; ix. 2. teaching of Christ. Having adopted the Logos doctrine, it mighttinge and turn his thoughts and words when reporting from memory, after the lapse of many years, the discourses of his Master. Hemight unconsciously, under such an influence, represent literallywhat was figuratively intended, and reflect from his own mindlights and shades, associations and meanings, over all or much ofwhat he wrote. There are philosophical and literary peculiaritieswhich have forced many of the best critics to make thisdistinction between the intended meaning of Christ's declarationsas he uttered them, and their received meaning as this evangelistreported them. Norton says, "Whether St. John did or did not adoptthe Platonic conception of the Logos is a question not importantto be settled in order to determine our own judgment concerningits truth. "32 Lucke has written to the same effect, but morefully: "We are allowed to distinguish the sense in which Johnunderstood the words of Christ, from the original sense in whichChrist 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 notionof the Trinity. The idea put forth by John is not at all alliedwith the idea that the infinite God himself assumed a human shapeto walk the earth and undergo mortal sufferings. It is simply saidthat that manifested and revealing portion of the Divineattributes which constituted the hypostatized Logos was incarnatedand displayed in a perfect, sinless sample of man, thus exhibitingto the world a finite image of God. We will illustrate thisdoctrine with reference to the inferences to be drawn from it inregard to human nature. John repeatedly says, in effect, "God istruth, " "God is light, " "God is love, " "God is life. " He likewisesays of the Savior, "In him was life, and the life was the lightof men, " and reports him as saying of himself, "I am the truth, ""I am the life, " "I am the light of the world. " The fundamentalmeaning of these declarations so numerous, striking, and varied inthe writings of John is, that all those qualities which theconsciousness of humanity has recognised as Divine areconsubstantial with the being of God; that all the reflections ofthem in nature and man belong to the Logos, the eldest Son, thefirst production, of God; and that in Jesus their personality, thevery Logos himself, was consciously embodied, to be brought nearerto men, to be exemplified and recommended to them. Reason, power, truth, light, love, blessedness, are not individual aons, membersof a hierarchy of deities, but are the revealing elements of theone true God. The personality of the abstract and absolute fulnessof all these substantial qualities is God. The personality of thediscerpted portion of them shown in the universe is the Logos. Now, that latter personality Christ was. Consequently, while hewas a man, he was not merely a man, but was also a supernaturalmessenger from heaven, sent into the world to impersonate theimage of God under the condition of humanity, free from everysinful defect and spot. Thus, being the manifesting representativeof the Father, he could say, "He that hath seen me hath[virtually] seen the Father. " Not that they were identical inperson, but that they were similar in nature and character, spiritand design: both were eternal holiness, love, truth, and life. "Iand 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 theFather that the Father sent him, that he could do nothing withoutthe Father, that his Father was greater than he, that histestimony was confirmed by the Father's in a hundred places byJohn, both as author writing his own words and as interpreterreporting Christ's. There is not a text in the record that impliesChrist'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, andexhibits the elements of the Divine life, the characteristics ofGod, is in that degree a son of God, Christ being pre eminentlythe Son on account of his pre eminent likeness, his supernaturaldivinity, as the incarnate Logos. That the apostle held and taught this conclusion appears, first, from the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that he records the samesublime statements concerning all good Christians, with no otherqualification than that of degree, that he does concerning Christhimself. Was Jesus the Son of God? "To as many as received him hegave power to become the sons of God. " There is in Philo a passagecorresponding remarkably with this one from John: "Those who haveknowledge of the truth are properly called sons of God: he who isstill unfit to be named a son of God should endeavor to fashionhimself 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 aspecial commission? "As thou hast sent me into the world, even sohave I also sent them into the world. " Was Jesus the subject of apeculiar glory, bestowed upon him by the Father? "The glory whichthou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, even as weare one. " Had Jesus an inspiration and a knowledge not vouchsafedto the princes of this world? "Ye have an unction from the HolyOne, 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 theactual fulness of truth and love and light and blessedness; thatChrist, the Logos, is the manifested impersonation of them; andthat all men who receive him partake of their Divine substance andenjoy their prerogative, the texts just cited, and numerous othersimilar ones, are transparent. It is difficult to see how on anyother hypothesis they can be made to express an intelligible andconsistent meaning. Secondly, we are brought to the same conclusion by the synonymoususe and frequent interchange of different terms in the Johanneanwritings. Not only it is said, "Whoever is born of God cannotsin, " but it is also written, "Every one that doeth righteousnessis born of God;" and again, "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is theChrist is born of God. " In other words, having a good characterand leading a just life, heartily receiving and obeying therevelation made by Christ, are identical phrases. "He that haththe Son hath life. " "Whosoever transgresseth and abideth not inthe doctrine of Christ hath not God. " "This is the victory thatovercometh the world, even our faith" in the doctrine of Christ. "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him. " "Hethat keepeth the commandments dwelleth in God and God in him. " "Hethat 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 thatwe may know the true God and eternal life. " From these citations, and from other passages which will readily occur, we gather thefollowing pregnant results. To "do the truth, " "walk in thetruth, " "walk in the light, " "keep the commandments, " "dorighteousness, " "abide in the doctrine of Christ, " "do the will ofGod, " "do good, " "dwell in love, " "abide in Christ, " "abide inGod, " "abide in life, " all are expressions meaning precisely thesame thing. They all signify essentially the conscious possessionof goodness; in other words, the practical adoption of the lifeand teachings of Jesus; or, in still other terms, the personalassimilation of the spiritual realities of the Logos, which arelove, life, truth, light. Jesus having been sent into the world toexemplify the characteristics and claims of the Father, and toregenerate men from unbelief and sin to faith and righteousness, those who were walking in darkness, believers of lies and doers ofunrighteousness, those who were abiding in alienation and death, might by receiving and following him be restored to the favor ofGod and pass from darkness and death into life and light. "This iseternal life, that they should know thee, the only true God, andJesus Christ whom thou hast sent. " The next chief point in the doctrine of John is his belief in anevil being, the personality of wickedness, and the relationbetween him and bad men. There have been, from the earlycenturies, keen disputes on the question whether this apostle usesthe terms devil and evil one with literal belief or withfigurative accommodation. We have not a doubt that the former isthe true view. The popular denial of the existence of evilspirits, with an arch demon over them, is the birth of aphilosophy much later than the apostolic age. The use of the term"devil" merely as the poetic or ethical personification of theseductive influences of the world is the fruit of theologicalspeculation neither originated nor adopted by the Jewish prophetsor by the Christian apostles. Whoso will remember the prevailingfaith of the Jews at that time, and the general state ofspeculative opinion, and will recollect the education of John, andnotice the particular manner in which he alludes to the subjectthroughout his epistles and in his reports of the discourses ofJesus, we think will be convinced that the Johannean systemincludes a belief in the actual existence of Satan according tothe current Pharisaic dogma of that age. It is not to bedisguised, either, that the investigations of the ablest criticshave led an overwhelming majority of them to this interpretation. "I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the evilone. " "He that is begotten of God guardeth himself, and the evilone toucheth him not. " "He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning. " "Whosoever is born ofGod cannot sin. In this the children of God are manifest, and thechildren of the devil. " "Ye are of your father the devil, and hislusts ye will do. " There can be no doubt that these, and otherpassages of a kindred and complementary nature, yield thefollowing view. Good men are allied to God, because theircharacteristics are the same as his, truth, light, love, life, righteousness. "As he is, so are we in this world. " Bad men areallied to the devil, because their characteristics are the same ashis, falsehood, darkness, hatred, death, sin. "Cain, who slew hisbrother, was of the evil one. " The facts, then, of the great moralproblem of the world, according to John, were these. God is theinfinite Father, whose nature and attributes comprehend all holy, beautiful, desirable realities, and who would draw mankind to hisblessed embrace forever. The goodness, illumination, and joy ofholy souls reflect his holiness and display his reign. The devilis the great spirit of wickedness, whose attributes comprehend allevil, dark, fearful realities, and who entices mankind to sin. Thewickedness, gloom, and misery of corrupt souls reveal his likenessand his kingdom. The former manifests himself in the glories of the world and inthe divine qualities of the soul. The latter manifests himself inthe whole history of temptation and sin and in the vicioustendencies of the heart. Good men, those possessing pre eminentlythe moral qualities of God, are his children, are born of him, that is, are inspired and led by him. Bad men, those possessing ina ruling degree the qualities of the devil, are his children, areborn of him, that is, are animated and governed by his spirit. Whether the evangelist gave to his own mind any philosophicalaccount of the origin and destiny of the devil or not is aquestion concerning which his writings are not explicit enough forus to determine. In the beginning he represents God as making, bymeans of the Logos, all things that were made, and his light asshining in darkness that comprehended it not. Now, he may haveconceived of matter as uncreated, eternally existing in formlessnight, the ground of the devil's being, and may have limited thework of creation to breaking up the sightless chaos, defining itinto orderly shapes, filling it with light and motion, andpeopling it with children of heaven. Such was the Persian faith, familiar at that time to the Jews. Neander, with others, objectsto this view that it would destroy John's monotheism and make hima dualist, a believer in two self existents, aboriginal andeverlasting antagonists. It only needs to be observed, in reply, that John was not a philosopher of such thorough dialectictraining as to render it impossible for inconsistencies to coexistin his thoughts. In fact, any one who will examine the beliefs ofeven such men as Origen and Augustine will perceive that such anobjection is not valid. Some writers of ability and eminence havetried to maintain that the Johannean conception of Satan was ofsome exalted archangel who apostatized from the law of God andfell from heaven into the abyss of night, sin, and woe. They couldhave been led to such an hypothesis only by preconceived notionsand prejudices, because there is not in John's writings even theobscurest intimation of such a doctrine. On the contrary, it iswritten that the devil is a liar and the father of lies from thebeginning, the same phrase used to denote the primitivecompanionship of God and his Logos anterior to the creation. Thedevil is spoken of by John, with prominent consistency, as bearingthe same relation to darkness, falsehood, sin, and death that Godbears to light, truth, righteousness, and life, that is, as beingtheir original personality and source. Whether the belief itselfbe true or not, be reconcilable with pure Christianity or not, inour opinion John undoubtedly held the belief of the personality ofthe source of wickedness, and supposed that the great body ofmankind 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 thatdisinterested interference of God through his revelation in Christwhich aimed to break the reigning power of sin and redeem lostmen from the tyranny of Satan. "For this purpose the Son of Godwas manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. " That is to say, the revelation of the nature and will of God inthe works of the creation and in the human soul was not enough, even when aided by the law of Moses, to preserve men in thetruth and the life. They had been seduced by the evil one intosin, alienated from the Divine favor, and plunged in darknessand death. A fuller, more powerful manifestation of thecharacter, claims, attractions of the Father was necessary torecall the benighted wanderers from their lost state and restorethem to those right relations and to that conscious communion withGod in which alone true life consists. Then, and for that purpose, Jesus Christ was commissioned to appear, a pre existent being ofmost exalted rank, migrating from the super stellar sphere intothis world, to embody and mirror forth through the flesh thosecharacteristics which are the natural attributes of God the Fatherand the essential conditions of heaven the home. In him theglorious features of the Divinity were miniatured on a finitescale and perfectly exhibited, "thus revealing, " (as Neander says, in his exposition of John's doctrine, ) "for the first time, in acomprehensible manner, what a being that God is whose holypersonality man was created to represent. " So Philo says, "TheLogos is the image of God, and man is the image of the Logos. "35Therefore, according to this view, man is the image of the imageof God. The dimmed, imperfect reflection of the Father, originallyshining in nature and the soul, would enable all who had notsuppressed it and lost the knowledge of it, to recognise at onceand adore the illuminated image of Him manifested and movingbefore them in the person of the Son; the faint gleams of Divinequalities yet left within their souls would spontaneously blendwith the full splendors irradiating the form of the inspired andimmaculate Christ. Thus they would enter into a new andintensified communion with God, and experience an unparalleleddepth of peace and joy, an inspired assurance of eternal life. Butthose who, by worldliness and wickedness, had obscured anddestroyed all their natural knowledge of God and their affinitiesto him, being without the inward preparation and susceptibilityfor the Divine which the Savior embodied and manifested, would notbe able to receive it, and thus would pass an infallible sentenceupon themselves. "When the Comforter is come, he will convict theworld of sin, because they believe not on me. " "He that believethon the Son hath eternal life; but he that believeth not iscondemned already, in that he loveth darkness rather than light. ""Hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error: hethat knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth notus. " "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?"The idea is, that such a denial must be caused by inwarddepravity, could only spring from an evil character. In the ground thought just presented we may find the explanationof the seemingly obscure and confused use of terms in thefollowing instances, and learn to understand more fully John'sidea of the effect of spiritual contact with Christ. "He thatdoeth righteousness is born of God. " "He that believeth Jesus tobe the Christ is born of God. " "He that denieth the Son, the samehath not the Father. " "He that hath the Son hath life. " Thesepassages all become perspicuous and concordant in view of John'sconception of the inward unity of 35 Philo, vol. I. P. 106. truth, or the universal oneness of the Divine life, in God, inChrist, in all souls that partake of it. A character in harmonywith the character of God will, by virtue of its inherent lightand affinity, recognise the kindred attributes or characteristicsof God, wherever manifested. He who perceives and embraces theDivinity in the character of Christ proves thereby that he wasprepared to receive it by kindred qualities residing in himself, proves that he was distinctively of God. He who fails to perceivethe peculiar glory of Christ proves thereby that he was alienatedand blinded by sin and darkness, distinctively of the evil one. Varying the expression to illustrate the thought, if the light andwarmth of a living love of God were in a soul, it wouldnecessarily, when brought into contact with the concentratedradiance of Divinity incarnated and beaming in Christ, effect amore fervent, conscious, and abiding union with the Father thancould be known before he was thus revealed. But if iniquities, sinful lusts, possessing the soul, had made it hard and cold, eventhe blaze of spotless virtues and miraculous endowments in themanifesting Messiah would be the radiation of light upon darknessinsensible to it. Therefore, the presentation of the Divinecontents of the soul or character of Jesus to different personswas an unerring test of their previous moral state: the good wouldapprehend him with a thrill of unison, the bad would not. To havethe Son, to have the Father, to have the truth, to have eternallife, all are the same thing: hence, where one is predicated ordenied all are predicated or denied. Continuing our investigation, we shall find the distinction drawnof a sensual or perishing life and a spiritual or eternal life. The term world (kosmos) is used by John apparently in twodifferent senses. First, it seems to signify all mankind, dividedsometimes into the unbelievers and the Christians. "Christ is thepropitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for thesins of the whole world. " "God sent not his Son to condemn theworld, but that the world through him might be saved. " It isundeniable that "world" here means not the earth, but the men onthe earth. Secondly, "world" in the dialect of John means all theevil, all the vitiating power, of the material creation. "Nowshall the Prince of this world be cast out. " It is not meant thatthis is the devil's world, because John declares in the beginningthat God made it; but he means that all diabolic influence comesfrom the darkness of matter fighting against the light ofDivinity, and by a figure he says "world, " meaning the evils inthe world, meaning all the follies, vanities, sins, seductiveinfluences, of the dark and earthy, the temporal and sensual. Inthis case the love of the world means almost precisely what isexpressed by the modern word worldliness. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love theworld, the love of the Father is not in him. " In a vein strikingly similar, Philo writes, "It is impossible forthe love of the world and the love of God to coexist, as it isimpossible for light and darkness to coexist. "36 "For all that isin the world, " says John, "the lust of the flesh, and the greed ofthe eyes, and the pomp of living, is not of the Father, but is ofthe world. And the world passes away, with the lust thereof: buthe that does the will of God abides forever. " He who is taken upand absorbed in the gauds and pleasures of time and sense has nodeep spring of religious experience: 36 Philo, vol. Ii. P. 649. his enjoyments are of the decaying body; his heart and his thoughtsare set on things which soon fly away. But the earnest believer inGod pierces through all these superficial and transitory objectsand pursuits, and fastens his affections to imperishable verities:he feels, far down in his soul, the living well of faith andfruition, the cool fresh fountain of spiritual hope and joy, whosestream of life flows unto eternity. The vain sensualist and hollowworldling has no true life in him: his love reaches not beyond thegrave. The loyal servant of duty and devout worshipper of God hasa spirit of conscious superiority to death and oblivion: thoughthe sky fall, and the mountains melt, and the seas fade, he knowshe shall survive, because immaterial truth and love are deathless. The whole thought contained in the texts we are considering isembodied with singular force and beauty in the following passagefrom one of the sacred books of the Hindus: "Who would haveimmortal life must beware of outward things, and seek inwardtruth, purity, and faith; for the treacherous and evanescent worldflies from its votaries, like the mirage, or devil car, whichmoves so swiftly that one cannot ascend it. " The mere negation ofreal life or blessedness is predicated of the careless worldling;positive death or miserable condemned unrest is predicated of thebad hearted sinner. Both these classes of men, upon acceptingChrist, that is, upon owning the Divine characteristics incarnatein him, enter upon a purified, exalted, and new experience. "Hethat hates his brother is a murderer and abides in death. " "Weknow that we have passed from death unto life, because we love thebrethren. " This new experience is distinctively, emphatically, life; it is spiritual peace, joy, trust, communion with God, andtherefore immortal. It brings with it its own sufficient evidence, leaving its possessor free from misgiving doubts, conscious of hiseternity. "He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness inhimself. " "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 yehave eternal life. " The objects of Christ's mission, so far as they refer to thetwofold purpose of revealing the Father by an impersonation of hisimage, and giving new moral life to men by awakening within them aconscious fellowship with Divine truth and goodness, have alreadybeen unfolded. But this does not include the whole: all this mighthave been accomplished by his appearance, authoritative teachings, miracles, and return to heaven, without dying. Why, then, did hedie? What was the meaning or aim of his death and resurrection?The apostle conceives that he came not only to reveal God and toregenerate men, but also to be a "propitiation" for men's sins, toredeem them from the penalty of their sins; and it was for thisend that he must suffer the doom of physical death. "Ye know thathe was manifested to take away our sins. " It is the more difficultto tell exactly what thoughts this language was intended by Johnto convey, because his writings are so brief and miscellaneous, sounsystematic and incomplete. He does not explain his own terms, but writes as if addressing those who had previously received suchoral instruction as would make the obscurities clear, the hintscomplete, and the fragments whole. We will first quote from Johnall the important texts bearing on the point before us, and thenendeavor to discern and explain their sense. "If we walk in thelight 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 andvague as they are, comprise every thing directly said by John uponthe atonement and redemption: other relevant passages merelyrepeat the same substance. Certainly these statements do not ofthemselves teach any thing like the Augustinian doctrine ofexpiatory sufferings to placate the Father's indignation at sinand sinners, or to remove, by paying the awful debt of justice, the insuperable bars to forgiveness. Nothing of that sort isanywhere intimated in the Johannean documents, even in thefaintest manner. So far from saying that there was unwillingnessor inability in the Father to take the initiative for our ransomand pardon, he expressly avows, "Herein is love, not that we lovedGod, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiationfor our sins. " Instead of exclaiming, with the majority of moderntheologians, "Believe in the atoning death, the substitutionalsufferings, of Christ, and your sins shall then all be washedaway, and you shall be saved, " he explicitly says, "If we confessour sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. " Andagain: "Whosoever believeth in him" not in his death, but in him"shall have eternal life. " The allusions in John to the doctrineof redemption and reconciliation do not mean, it is plain enough, the buying off of the victims of eternal condemnation by thevicarious pains of Jesus. What, then, do they mean? They are toofew, short, and obscure for us to decide this questionconclusively by their own light alone. We must get assistance fromabroad. The reader will remember that it was the Jewish belief, and theretained belief of the converts to Christianity, at that time, that men's souls, in consequence of sin, were doomed upon leavingthe body to descend into the under world. This was the objectivepenalty of sin, inherited from Adam. Now, Christ in hissuperangelic state in heaven was not involved in sin or in itsdoom of death and subterranean banishment. Yet at the will of theFather he became a man, went through our earthly experiences, diedlike a sinner, and after death descended into the prison ofdisembodied souls below, then rose again and ascended into heavento the Father, to show men that their sins were forgiven, thepenalty taken away, and the path opened for them too to rise toeternal life in the celestial mansions with Christ "and be withhim where he is. " Christ's death, then, cleanses men from sin, heis a propitiation for their sins, in two ways. First, by hisresurrection from the power of death and his ascent to heaven heshowed men that God had removed the great penalty of sin: by hisdeath and ascension he was the medium of giving them thisknowledge. Secondly, the joy, gratitude, love to God, awakened inthem by such glorious tidings, would purify their natures, exalttheir souls into spiritual freedom and virtue, into a blessed andDivine life. According to this view, Christ was a vicarioussacrifice, not in the sense that he suffered instead of theguilty, to purchase their redemption from the iron justice of God, but in the sense that, when he was personally free from any needto suffer, he died for the sake of others, to reveal to them themighty boon of God's free grace, assuring them of the wondrousgift of a heavenly immortality. This representation perfectlyfills and explains the language, without violence or arbitrarysuppositions, does it in harmony with all the exegeticalconsiderations, historical and grammatical; which no other viewthat we know of can do. There are several independent facts which lend strong confirmationto the correctness of the exposition now given. We know that wehave not directly proved the justice of that exposition, onlyconstructively, inferentially, established it; not shown it to betrue, only made it appear plausible. But that plausibility becomesan extreme probability nay, shall we not say certainty? when weweigh the following testimonies for it. First, this precisedoctrine is unquestionably contained in other parts of the NewTestament. We have in preceding chapters demonstrated itsexistence in Paul's epistles, in Peter's, in the Epistle to theHebrews, and in the Apocalypse. Therefore, since John'sphraseology is better explained by it than by any otherhypothesis, it is altogether likely that his real meaning was thesame. Secondly, the terms "light" and "darkness, " so frequent in thisevangelist, were not originated by him, but adopted. They wereregarded by the Persian theology, by Plato, by Philo, by theGnostics, as having a physical basis as well as a spiritualsignificance. In their conceptions, physical light, as well asspiritual holiness, was an efflux or manifestation from thesupernal God; physical darkness, as well as spiritual depravity, was an emanation or effect from the infernal Satan, or principleof evil. Is it not so in the usage of John? He uses the terms, itis true, prevailingly in a moral sense: still, there is much inhis statements that looks as if he supposed they had a physicalground. If so, then how natural is this connection of thought! Allgood comes from the dazzling world of God beyond the sky; all evilcomes from the nether world of his adversary, the prince ofdarkness. That John believed in a local heaven on high, theresidence of God, is made certain by scores of texts too plain tobe evaded. Would he not, then, in all probability, believe in alocal hell? Believing, as he certainly did, in a devil, the authorand lord of darkness, falsehood, and death, would he not conceivea kingdom for him? In the development of ideas reached at thattime, it is evident that the conception of God implied an upperworld, his resplendent abode, and that the conception of Satanequally implied an under world, his gloomy realm. To the latterhuman souls were doomed by sin. From the former Christ came, andreturned to it again, to show that the Father would forgive oursins and take us there. Thirdly, John expected that Christ, after death, would return tothe Father in heaven. This appears from clear and reiteratedstatements in his reports of the Savior's words. But after theresurrection he tells us that Jesus had not yet ascended to theFather, but was just on the point of going. "Touch me not, for Iam not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren, and sayunto them, I ascend unto my Father. " Where, then, did he supposethe soul of his crucified Master had been during the intervalbetween his death and his resurrection? Dormant in the body, deadwith the body, laid in the tomb? That is opposed to the doctrineof uninterrupted life which pervades his writings. Besides, such abelief was held only by the Sadducees, whom the New Testamentstigmatizes. To assume that such was John's conception of the factis an arbitrary supposition, without the least warrant from anysource whatever. If he imagined the soul of Jesus during that timeto have been neither in heaven nor in the sepulchre, is it notpretty sure that he supposed it was in the under world, the commonreceptacle 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 generalinterpretation, that the doctrine it unfolds is in harmony withthe contemporary opinions, a natural development from them, adevelopment which would be forced upon the mind of a JewishChristian accepting the resurrection of Christ as a fact. It wasthe Jewish opinion that God dwelt with his holy angels in a worldof everlasting light above the firmament. It was the Jewishopinion that the departed souls of men, on account of sin, wereconfined beneath the earth in Satan's and death's dark andslumberous cavern of shadows. It was the Jewish opinion that theMessiah would raise the righteous dead and reign with them onearth. Now, the first Christians clung to the Jewish creed andexpectations, with such modifications merely as the variation ofthe actual Jesus and his deeds from the theoretical Messiah andhis anticipated achievements compelled. Then, when Christ havingbeen 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, mustthey not have regarded it all as a dramatic exemplification of thefact that the region of death was no longer a hopeless dungeon, since one mighty enough to solve its chains and burst its gateshad returned from it? must they not have considered him as apledge that their sins were forgiven, their doom reversed, andheaven attainable? John, in common with all the first Christians, evidently expectedthat the second advent of the Lord would soon take place, toconsummate the objects he had left unfinished, to raise the deadand judge them, justifying the worthy and condemning the unworthy. There was a well known Jewish tradition that the appearance ofAntichrist would immediately precede the triumphant coming of theMessiah. John says, "Even now are there many Antichrists: therebywe know that it is the last hour. "37 "Abide in him, that, when heshall appear, we may not be ashamed before him at his coming. ""That we may have boldness in the day of judgment. " Theevangelist's outlook for the return of the Savior is also shown atthe end of his Gospel. "Jesus said not unto him, 'He shall notdie;' but, 'If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that tothee?'" That the doctrine of a universal resurrection which theJews probably derived, through their communication with thePersians, from the Zoroastrian system, and, with variousmodifications, adopted is embodied in the following passage, whocan doubt? "The hour is coming when all that are in the gravesshall hear the voice of the Son of Man and shall come forth. " Thata general resurrection would literally occur under the auspices ofJesus was surely the meaning of the writer of those words. Whetherthat thought was intended to be conveyed by Christ in the exactterms he really used or not is a separate question, with which weare not now concerned, our object being simply to set forth John'sviews. Some commentators, seizing the letter and neglecting thespirit, have inferred from various texts that John expected thatthe resurrection would be limited to faithful Christians, just asthe 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, yehave no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my bloodhath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. " 37 See the able and impartial discussion of John's belief on thissubject contained in Lucke's Commentary on the First Epistle ofJohn, i. 18-28. To force this figure into a literal meaning is a mistake; for inthe preceding chapter it is expressly said that "They that havedone good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; theythat have done evil unto the resurrection of condemnation. " Bothshall rise to be judged; but as we conceive the most probablesense of the phrases the good shall be received to heaven, the badshall be remanded to the under world. "Has no life in him" ofcourse cannot mean is absolutely dead, annihilated, but means hasnot faith and virtue, the elements of blessedness, thequalifications for heaven. The particular figurative use of wordsin these texts may be illustrated by parallel idioms from Philo, who says, "Of the living some are dead; on the contrary, the deadlive. For those lost from the life of virtue are dead, though theyreach the extreme of old age; while the good, though they aredisjoined from the body, live immortally. "38 Again he writes, "Deathless life delivers the dying pious; but the dying impiouseverlasting death seizes. "39 And a great many passages plainlyshow that one element of Philo's meaning, in such phrases asthese, is, that he believed that, upon their leaving the body, thesouls of the good would ascend to heaven, while the souls of thebad would descend to Hades. These discriminated events he supposedwould follow death at once. His thorough Platonism had weaned himfrom the Persian Pharisaic doctrine of a common intermediate statedetaining the dead below until the triumphant advent of a Redeemershould 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, ifwe walk in the light as he is in the light;" not otherwise. "Hethat believeth not the Son shall not see eternal life, but thewrath of God abideth on him. " "If any man see his brother commit asin which is not unto death, he shall pray, and shall receive lifefor them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I donot say that he shall pray for it. " "Beloved, now are we the sonsof God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we knowthat when he [Christ] shall appear we shall be like him, for weshall see him as he is. Every man that hath this hope in himpurifieth himself, even as he is pure. " The heads of the doctrinewhich seems to underlie these statements are as follow. Christshall come again. All the dead shall rise for judicial ordeal. Those counted worthy shall be accepted, be transfigured into theresemblance of the glorious Redeemer and enter into eternalblessedness in heaven. The rest shall be doomed to the darkkingdom of death in the under world, to remain there for aughtthat is hinted to the contrary forever. From these premises twopractical inferences are drawn in exhortations. First, we shouldearnestly strive to fit ourselves for acceptance by moral purity, brotherly love, and pious faith. Secondly, we should seek pardonfor our sins by confession and prayer, and take heed lest byaggravated sin we deprave our souls beyond recovery. There arethose 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 irrevocablyswallow them. And now we may sum up in a few words the essential results of thiswhole inquiry into the principles of John's theology, especiallyas 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 theirincomprehensible absoluteness, are the elements of his infinitebeing. Secondly, these spiritual substances, as diffused throughthe worlds of the universe and experienced in the souls of moralcreatures, are the medium of God's revelation of himself, thedirect presence and working of his Logos. Thirdly, the persons whoprevailingly partake of these qualities are God's loyal subjectsand approved children, in peaceful communion with the Father, through the Son, possessing eternal life. Fourthly, Satan ispersonal hatred, falsehood, darkness, sin, misery. Theserealities, in their abstract nature and source, are his being; intheir special manifestations they are his efflux and power. Fifthly, the persons who partake rulingly of these qualities arethe devil's enslaved subjects and lineal children: in sinfulbondage to him, in depraved communion with him, they dwell in astate of hostile banishment and unhappiness, which is moral death. Sixthly, Christ was the Logos who, descending from his anteriorglory in heaven, and appearing in mortal flesh, embodied all theDivine qualities in an unflawed model of humanity, gathered up andexhibited all the spiritual characteristics of the Father in astainless and perfect soul supernaturally filled and illumined, thus to bear into the world a more intelligible and effectiverevelation of God the Father than nature or common humanityyielded, to shine with regenerating radiance upon the deadlydarkness of those who were groping in lying sins, "that they mighthave 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 lifein vain and transitory things, gives place in the soul of aChristian to a profoundly earnest, unchanging experience of truthand love, a steady and everlasting life in Divine and everlastingthings. Eighthly, the experimental reception of the revealed graceand verity by faith and discipleship in Jesus is accompanied byinternal convincing proofs and seals of their genuineness, validity, and immortality. They awaken a new consciousness, a newlife, inherently Divine and self warranting. Ninthly, Christ, byhis incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension, was apropitiation for our sins, a mercy seat pledging forgiveness; thatis, he was the medium of showing us that mercy of God whichannulled the penalty of sin, the descent of souls to the gloomyunder world, and opened the celestial domains for the ransomedchildren of earth to join the sinless angels of heaven. Tenthly, Christ was speedily to make a second advent. In that last day thedead should come forth for judgment, the good be exalted tounfading glory with the Father and the Son, and the bad be left inthe lower region of noiseless shadows and dreams. These ten pointsof view, we believe, command all the principal features of thetheological landscape which occupied the mental vision of thewriter 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 thefuture fate of man, we should throw off the weight of creeds andprejudices, and, by the aid of all the appliances in our power, endeavor to reach beneath the imagery and unessential particularsof his instructions to learn their bare significance in truth. This is made difficult by the singular perversions his religionhas undergone; by the loss of a complete knowledge of thepeculiarities of the Messianic age in the lapse of the ages since;by the almost universal change in our associations, modes offeeling and thought, and styles of speech; and by the gradualaccretion and hardening of false doctrines and sectarian biasesand wilfulness. As we examine the words of Christ to find theirreal meaning, there are four prominent considerations to beespecially weighed and borne in mind. First, we must not forget the poetic Eastern style common to theJewish prophets; their symbolic enunciations in bold figures ofspeech: "I am the door;" "I am the bread of life;" "I am thevine;" "My sheep hear my voice;" "If these should hold theirpeace, the stones would immediately cry out. " This daringemblematic language was natural to the Oriental nations; and theBible is full of it. Is the overthrow of a country foretold? It isnot said, "Babylon shall be destroyed, " but "The sun shall bedarkened at his going forth, the moon shall be as blood, the starsshall fall from heaven, and the earth shall stagger to and fro asa drunken man. " If we would truly understand Christ'sdeclarations, we must not overlook the characteristics offigurative language. For "he spake to the multitude in parables, and without a parable spake he not unto them;" and a parable, ofcourse, is not to be taken literally, but holds a latent sense andpurpose which are to be sought out. The greatest injustice is doneto the teachings of Christ when his words are studied as those ofa dry scholastic, a metaphysical moralist, not as those of aprofound poet, a master in the spiritual realm. Secondly, we must remember that we have but fragmentary reports ofa small part of the teachings of Christ. He was engaged in theactive prosecution of his mission probably about three years, atthe shortest over one year; while all the different words of hisrecorded in the New Testament would not occupy more than fivehours. Only a little fraction of what he said has been transmittedto us; and though this part may contain the essence of the whole, yet it must naturally in some instances be obscure and difficultof apprehension. We must therefore compare different passages witheach other, carefully probe them all, and explain, so far aspossible, those whose meaning is recondite by those whose meaningis obvious. Some persons may be surprised to think that we havebut a small portion of the sayings of Jesus. The fact, however, isunquestionable. And perhaps there is no more reason that we shouldhave a full report of his words than there is that we should havea complete account of his doings; and the evangelist declares, "There are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, ifthey should every one be written, I suppose that even the worlditself could not contain the books. " Thirdly, when examining the instructions of Jesus, we shouldrecollect that he adopted, and applied to himself and to hiskingdom, the common Jewish phraseology concerning the Messiah andthe events that were expected to attend his advent and reign. Buthe did not take up these phrases in the perverted sense held inthe corrupt opinions and earthly hopes of the Jews: he used themspiritually, in the sense which accorded with the true Messianicdispensation as it was arranged in the forecasting providence ofGod. No investigation of the New Testament should be unaccompaniedby 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 thoroughlyas he can with the knowledge and spirit of the opinions, events, influences, circumstances, of the time when the document waswritten, and of the persons who wrote it. The inquirer must beequipped for his task by a mastery of the Rabbinism of Gamaliel, at whose feet Paul was brought up; for the Jewish mind of that agewas filled, and its religious language directed, by thisRabbinism. Guided by this principle, furnished with the necessaryinformation, in the helpful light of the best results of moderncritical scholarship, we shall be able to explain many dark texts, and to satisfy ourselves, at least in a degree, as to the genuinesubstance of Christ's declarations touching the future destiniesof men. Finally, he who studies the New Testament with patientthoroughness and with honest sharpness will arrive at adistinction most important to be made and to be kept in view, namely, a distinction between the real meaning of Christ's wordsin his own mind and the actual meaning understood in them by hisauditors and reporters. 1 Here we approach a most delicate andvital point, hitherto too little noticed, but destined yet tobecome prominent and fruitful. A large number of religious phraseswere in common use among the Jews at the time of Jesus. He adoptedthem, but infused into them a deeper, a correct meaning, asCopernicus did into the old astronomic formulas. But thebystanders who listened to his discourses, hearing the familiarterms, seized the familiar meaning, and erroneously attributed itto him. It is certain that the Savior was often misunderstood andoften not understood at all. When he declared himself the Messiah, the people would have made him a king by force! Even the apostlesfrequently grossly failed to appreciate his spirit and aims, wrenched unwarrantable inferences from his words, and quarrelledfor the precedency in his coming kingdom and for seats at hisright hand. In numerous cases it is glaringly plain that his ideaswere far from their conceptions of them. We have no doubt the samewas true in many other instances where it is not so clear. Herepeatedly reproves them for folly and slowness because they didnot perceive the sense of his instructions. Perhaps there was aslight impatience in his tones when he said, "How is it that ye donot understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, thatye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of theSadducees?" Jesus uttered in established phrases new andprofoundly spiritual thoughts. The apostles educated in, and fullof, as they evidently were, the dogmas, prejudices, and 1 See this distinction affirmed by De Wette, in the preface to hisCommentatio de Morte Jesus Christi Expiatoria. See also Thurn, Jesus und seine Apostel in Widerspruch in Ansehung der Lehre vonder 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 naturalthat their own convictions and sentiments would have a powerfulinfluence in modifying and shaping the animus and the verbalexpressions in their reports! Under the circumstances, that weshould now possess the very equivalents of his words with strictliteralness, and conveying his very intentions perfectlytranslated from the Aramaan into the Greek tongue, would imply themost sustained and amazing of all miracles. There is nothingwhatever that indicates any such miraculous intervention. There isnothing to discredit the fair presumption that the writers wereleft to their own abilities, under the inspiration of an earnestconsecrating love and truthfulness. And we must, with duelimitations, distinguish between the original words and consciousmeaning of the sublime Master, illustrated by the emphasis anddiscrimination of his looks, tones, and gestures, and theapprehended meaning recorded long afterwards, shaped and coloredby passing through the minds and pens of the sometimes dissentientand always imperfect disciples. He once declared to them, "I havemany things to say unto you, but ye are not able to bear them. "Admitting his infallibility, as we may, yet asserting theirfallibility, as we must, and accompanied, too, as his words noware by many very obscuring circumstances, it is extremelydifficult to lay the hand on discriminated texts and say, "[non ASCII characters]" The Messianic doctrine prevalent among the Jews in the time ofJesus appears to have been built up little by little, by religiousfaith, national pride, and priestly desire, out of literalinterpretations of figurative prophecy, and Cabalisticinterpretations of plain language, and Rabbinical traditions andspeculations, additionally corrupted in some particulars byintercourse with the Persians. Under all this was a centralspiritual germ of a Divine promise and plan. A Messiah was reallyto come. It was in answering the questions, what kind of a king hewas to be, and over what sort of a kingdom he was to reign, thatthe errors crept in. The Messianic conceptions which have comedown to us through the Prophets, the Targums, incidental allusionsin the New Testament, the Talmud, and the few other traditions andrecords yet in existence, are very diverse and sometimescontradictory. They agreed in ardently looking for an earthlysovereign in the Messiah, one who would rise up in the line ofDavid and by the power of Jehovah deliver his people, punish theirenemies, subdue the world to his sceptre, and reign with Divineauspices of beneficence and splendor. They also expected that thena portion of the dead would rise from the under world and assumetheir bodies again, to participate in the triumphs and blessingsof his earthly kingdom. His personal reign in Judea was what theyusually meant by the phrases "the kingdom of heaven, " "the kingdomof God. " The apostles cherished these ideas, and expressed them inthe terms common to their countrymen. But we cannot doubt thatJesus employed this and kindred language in a purer and deepersense, which we must take pains to distinguish from the early andlingering errors associated with it. Upon the threshold of our subject we meet with predictions of asecond coming of Christ from heaven, with power and glory, to siton his throne and judge the world. The portentous imagery in whichthese prophecies are clothed is taken from the old prophets; andto them we must turn to learn its usage and force. The Hebrews called anysignal manifestation of power especially any dreadful calamity acoming of the Lord. It was a coming of Jehovah when his vengeancestrewed the ground with the corpses of Sennacherib's host; whenits storm swept Jerusalem as with fire, and bore Israel intobondage; when its sword came down upon Idumea and was bathed inblood upon Edom. "The day of the Lord" is another term ofprecisely similar import. It occurs in the Old Testament aboutfifteen times. In every instance it means some mightymanifestation of God's power in calamity. These occasions arepictured forth with the most astounding figures of speech. Isaiahdescribes the approaching destruction of Babylon in these terms:"The stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall give nolight; the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not shine, theheavens shall shake, and the earth shall remove out of her placeand be as a frightened sheep that no man taketh up. " The Jewsexpected that the coming of the Messiah would be preceded by manyfearful woes, in the midst of which he would appear with peerlesspomp and might. The day of his coming they named emphatically theday of the Lord. Jesus actually appeared, not, as they expected, awarrior travelling in the greatness of his strength, with dyedgarments from Bozrah, staining his raiment with blood as hetrampled in the wine vat of vengeance, but the true Messiah, God'sforeordained and anointed Son, despised and rejected of men, bringing good tidings, publishing peace. It must have beenimpossible for the Jews to receive such a Messiah withoutexplanations. Those few who became converts apprehended hisMessianic language, at least to some extent, in the sense whichpreviously occupied their minds. He knew that often he was notunderstood; and he frequently said to his followers, "Who hathears to hear, let him hear. " His disciples once asked him, "Whatshall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" Hereplied, substantially, "There shall be wars, famines, andunheard of trials; and immediately after the sun shall bedarkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fallfrom heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Thenshall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven withgreat power. And he shall sit upon the throne of his glory, andall nations shall be gathered before him, and he shall separatethem one from another. " That this language was understood by theevangelists and the early Christians, in accordance with theirPharisaic notions, as teaching literally a physical reappearanceof Christ on the earth, a resurrection, and a general judgment, wefully believe. Those ideas were prevalent at the time, areexpressed in scores of places in the New Testament, and are thedirect strong assertion of the words themselves. But that such wasthe meaning of Christ himself we much more than doubt. In the first place, in his own language in regard to his secondcoming 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 asthose used by the Jewish prophets to denote great and signalevents on the earth, and may be so taken here without violence tothe idiom. Thirdly, he expressly fixed the date of the events hereferred to within that generation; and if, therefore, he spokeliterally, he was grossly in error, and his prophecies failed offulfilment, a conclusion which we cannot adopt. To suppose that hepartook in the false, mechanical dogmas of the carnal Jews wouldbe equally irreconcilable with the common idea of his Divineinspiration, and with the profound penetration and spiritualityof his own mind. He certainly used much of the phraseology of his contemporarycountrymen, metaphorically, to convey his own purer thoughts. Wehave no doubt he did so in regard to the descriptions of hissecond coming. Let us state in a form of paraphrase what his realinstructions on this point seem to us to have been: "You cannotbelieve that I am the Messiah, because I do not deliver you fromyour oppressors and trample on the Gentiles. Your minds areclouded with errors. The Father hath sent me to found the kingdomof peace and righteousness, and hath given me all power to rewardand punish. By my word shall the nations of the earth be honoredand blessed, or be overwhelmed with fire; and every man must standbefore my judgment seat. The end of the world is at the doors. TheMosaic dispensation is about to be closed in the fearfultribulations of the day of the Lord, and my dispensation to be setup. When you see Jerusalem encompassed with armies, know that theday is at hand, and flee to the mountains; for not one stone shallbe left upon another. Then the power of God will be shown on mybehalf, and the sign of the Son of Man be seen in heaven. Mytruths shall prevail, and shall be owned as the criteria of Divinejudgment. According to them, all the righteous shall bedistinguished as my subjects, and all the iniquitous shall beseparated from my kingdom. Some of those standing here shall nottaste death till all these things be fulfilled. Then it will beseen that I am the Messiah, and that through the eternalprinciples of truth which I have proclaimed I shall sit upon athrone of glory, not literally, in person, as you thought, blessing the Jews and cursing the Gentiles, but spiritually, inthe truth, dispensing joy to good men and woe to bad men, according to their deserts. " Such we believe to be the meaning ofChrist's own predictions of his second coming. He figurativelyidentifies himself with his religion according to that idiom bywhich it is written, "Moses hath in every city them that read him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day. " His figure ofhimself as the universal judge is a bold personification; for heelsewhere says, "He that believeth in me believeth not in me, butin Him that sent me. " And again, "He that rejecteth me, I judgehim not: the word that I have spoken, that shall judge him. " Hiscoming in the clouds of heaven with great power and glory waswhen, at the destruction of Jerusalem, the old age closed and thenew began, the obstacles to his religion were removed and histhrone established on the earth. 2 The apostles undoubtedlyunderstood the doctrine differently; but that such was his ownthought we conclude, because he did sometimes undeniably usefigurative language in that way, and because the other meaning isan error, not in harmony either with his character, his mind, orhis mission. This interpretation is so important that it may need to beillustrated and confirmed by further instances: "When the Son ofMan sits on the throne of his glory, and all nations are gatheredbefore him, his angels shall sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be weepingand gnashing of teeth. " A few such picturesque phrases have led tothe 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 intothe tortures of an unquenchable world of flame. How arbitrary andviolent a conclusion this is, how unwarranted and gross aperversion of the language of Christ it is, we may easily see. Thefact that the old prophets often described fearful misfortunes andwoes in images of clouds and flame and falling stars, and otherportentous symbols, and that this style was therefore familiar tothe Jews, would make it very natural for Jesus, in foretellingsuch an event as the coming destruction of Jerusalem, inconflagration and massacre, with the irretrievable subversion ofthe old dispensation, to picture it forth in a similar way. Firewas to the Jews a common emblem of calamity and devastation; andjudgments incomparably less momentous than those gathered aboutthe fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the self boastedfavorites of Jehovah were often described by the prophets inappalling images of darkened planets, shaking heavens, clouds, fire, and blackness. Joel, speaking of a "day of the Lord, " whenthere should be famine and drought, and a horrid army ofdestroying insects, "before whom a fire devoureth, and behind thema flame burneth, " draws the scene in these terrific colors: "Theearth shall quake before them; the sun and moon shall be dark, andthe stars shall withdraw their shining; and the Lord shall utterhis voice before his terrible army of locusts, caterpillars, anddestroying worms:" Ezekiel represents God as saying, "The house ofIsrael is to me become dross: therefore I will gather you into themidst of Jerusalem: as they gather silver, brass, iron, tin, andlead into the midst of the furnace to blow the fire upon it, sowill I gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, andye shall be melted in the midst thereof. " We read in Isaiah, "TheAssyrian shall flee, and his princes shall be afraid, saith theLord, whose fire is in Zion and his furnace in Jerusalem. " Malachialso says, "The day cometh that shall burn as a furnace, and allthat do wickedly shall be stubble, and shall be burned up root andbranch. They shall be trodden as ashes beneath the feet of therighteous. " The meaning of these passages, and of many othersimilar ones, is, in every instance, some severe temporalcalamity, some dire example of Jehovah's retributions among thenations of the earth. Their authors never dreamed of teaching thatthere is a place of fire beyond the grave in which the wicked deadshall be tormented, or that the natural creation is finally to bedevoured by flame. It is perfectly certain that not a single textin the Old Testament was meant to teach any such doctrine as that. The judgments shadowed forth in kindred metaphors by Christ are tobe understood in the light of this fact. Their meaning is, thatall unjust, cruel, false, impure men shall endure severepunishments. This general thought is fearfully distinct; but everything beyond all details are left in utter obscurity. In the august scene of the King in judgment, when the sentence hasbeen pronounced on those at the left hand, "Depart from me, yecursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and hisangels, " it is written, "and they shall go away into everlastingpunishment. " It is obvious to remark that the imagery of a fieryprison built for Satan and the fallen angels, and into which thebad shall be finally doomed, is poetical language, or language ofaccommodation to the current notions of the time. These startlingOriental figures are used to wrap and convey the assertion thatthe wicked shall be severely punished according to their deserts. No literal reference seems to be made either to the particulartime, to the special place, or to the distinctive character, of the punishment;but the mere fact is stated in a manner to fill the consciencewith awe and to stamp the practical lesson vividly on the memory. But admitting the clauses apparently descriptive of the nature ofthis retribution to be metaphorical, yet what shall we think ofits duration? Is it absolutely unending? There is nothing in therecord to enable a candid inquirer to answer that questiondecisively. So far as the letter of Scripture is concerned, thereare no data to give an indubitable solution to the problem. It istrue the word "everlasting" is repeated; but, when impartiallyweighed, it seems a sudden rhetorical expression, of indefiniteforce, used to heighten the impressiveness of a sublime dramaticrepresentation, rather than a cautious philosophical term employedto convey an abstract conception. There is no reason whatever forsupposing that Christ's mind was particularly directed to themetaphysical idea of endlessness, or to the much more metaphysicalidea of timelessness. The presumptive evidence is that he spokepopularly. Had he been charged to reveal a doctrine so tremendous, so awful, so unutterably momentous in its practical relations, asthat of the endless close of all probation at death, is itconceivable that he would merely have couched it in a fewfigurative expressions and left it as a matter of obscureinference and uncertainty? No: in that case, he would haveiterated and reiterated it, defined, guarded, illustrated it, andhave left no possibility of honest mistake or doubt of it. The Greek word [non-ASCII characters], and the same is true of thecorresponding Hebrew word, translated "everlasting" in the EnglishBible, has not in its popular usage the rigid force of eternalduration, but varies, is now applied to objects as evanescent asman's earthly life, now to objects as lasting as eternity. 3Its power in any given case is to be sought from the context andthe reason of the thing. Isaiah, having threatened the unrighteous nations that they"should conceive chaff and bring forth stubble, that their ownbreath should be fire to devour them, and that they should beburnt like lime, like thorns cut up in the fire, " makes theterror smitten sinners and hypocrites cry, "Who among us can dwellin devouring fire? Who among us can dwell in everlastingburnings?" Yet his reference is solely to an outward, temporaljudgment in this world. The Greek adjective rendered "everlasting"is etymologically, and by universal usage, a term of duration, butindefinite, its extent of meaning depending on the subjects ofwhich it is predicated. Therefore, when Christ connects this wordwith the punishment of the wicked, it is impossible to say withany certainty, judging from the language itself, whether heimplies that those who die in their sins are hopelessly lost, perfectly irredeemable forever, or not, though the probabilitiesare very strongly in the latter direction. "Everlastingpunishment" may mean, in philosophical strictness, a punishmentabsolutely eternal, or may be a popular expression denoting, withgeneral indefiniteness, a very long duration. Since in all Greekliterature, sacred and profane, [non-ASCII characters] is appliedto things that end, ten times as often as it is to things immortal, no fair critic can assert positively that when it is connectedwith future punishment it has the stringent meaning ofmetaphysical endlessness. On the other hand, no one has anycritical 3 See Christian Examiner for March, 1854, pp. 280-297. right to say positively that in such cases it has not thatmeaning. The Master has not explained his words on this point, buthas left them veiled. We can settle the question itself concerningthe limitedness or the unlimitedness of future punishment only onother grounds than those of textual criticism, even on grounds ofenlightened reason postulating the cardinal principles ofChristianity and of ethics. Will not the unimpeded Spirit ofChrist 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 utmostimportance to understand is the sense in which he used the Jewishphrases "Resurrection of the Dead" and "Resurrection at the LastDay. " The Pharisees looked for a restoration of the righteous fromtheir graves to a bodily life. This event they supposed would takeplace at the appearance of the Messiah; and the time of his comingthey called "the last day. " So the Apostle John says, "Already arethere 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 andmoral, not an outward and physical, force. "This is the will ofHim that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son and believethon him should have everlasting life; and I will raise him up atthe last day. " Again, when Martha told Jesus that "she knew herbrother Lazarus would rise again in the resurrection at the lastday, " he replied, "I am the resurrection and the life: he thatbelieveth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; andwhosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. " Thisutterance is surely metaphorical; for belief in Jesus does notprevent physical dissolution. The thoughts contained in thevarious passages belonging to this subject, when drawn out, compared, and stated in general terms, seem to us to be asfollows: "You suppose that in the last day your Messiah willrestore the dead to live again upon the earth. I am the Messiah, and the last days have therefore arrived. I am commissioned by theFather to bestow eternal life upon all who believe on me; but notin the manner you have anticipated. The true resurrection is notcalling the body from the tomb, but opening the fountains ofeternal life in the soul. I am come to open the spiritual world toyour faith. He that believeth in me and keepeth my commandmentshas passed from death unto life, become conscious that thoughseemingly he passes into the grave, yet really he shall live withGod forever. The true resurrection is, to come into the experienceof the truth that 'God is not the God of the dead, but of theliving; for all live unto him. ' Over the soul that is filled withsuch an experience, death has no power. Verily, I say unto, you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead, the ignorant andguilty, buried in trespasses and sins, shall hear these truthsdeclared, and they that believe shall lay hold of the life thusoffered and be blessed. The Father hath given me authority toexecute judgment, that is, to lay down the principles by which menshall be judged according to their deserts. All mankind shall bejudged in the spiritual state by the spirit and precepts of myreligion as veritably as if in their graves the generations of thedead heard my voice and came forth, the good to blessedness, theevil to misery. The judgment which is, as it were, committed untome, is not really committed unto me, but unto the truth which Ideclare; for of mine own self I can do nothing. " We believe thisparaphrase expresses the essential meaning of Christ's owndeclarations concerning a resurrection and an associated judgment. Coming to bring from the Father authenticated tidings ofimmortality, and to reveal the laws of the Divine judgment, he declared that those who believed and kept his words weredelivered from the terror of death, and, knowing that an endlesslife of blessedness was awaiting them, immediately entered uponits experience. He did not teach the doctrine of a bodilyrestoration, but said, "In the resurrection, " that is, in thespiritual state succeeding death, "they neither marry nor aregiven 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 thoube with me in Paradise:" instantly upon leaving the body theirsouls would be together in the state of the blessed. It is often said that the words of Jesus in relation to the deadhearing his voice and coming forth must be taken literally; forthe metaphor is of too extreme violence. But it is in keeping withhis usage. He says, "Let the dead bury their dead. " It is far lessbold than "This is my body; this is my blood. " It is not nearly sostrong as Paul's adjuration, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and risefrom the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. " It is not moredaringly imaginative than the assertion that "the heroes sleepingin Marathon's gory bed stirred in their graves when Leonidasfought at Thermopyla; or than Christ's own words, "If thou hadstfaith like a grain of mustard seed, thou couldst say to thismountain, 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 tombsAnd gives the blind their sight. " And in the latter days, when it has done its work, and theglorious measure of human redemption is full, liberty, intelligence, and love shall stand hand in hand on the mountainsummits and raise up the long generations of the dead to beholdthe completed fruits of their toils. In this figurative moralsense Jesus probably spoke when he said, "Thou shalt berecompensed at the resurrection of the just. " He referred simplyto the rewards of the virtuous in the state beyond the grave. Thephraseology in which he clothed the thought he accommodatinglyadopted from the current speech of the Pharisees. Theyunquestionably meant by it the group of notions contained in theirdogma of the destined physical restoration of the dead from theirsepulchres at the advent of the Messiah. And it seems perfectlyplain to us, on an impartial study of the record, that theevangelist, in reporting his words, took the Pharisaic dogma, andnot merely the Christian truth, with them. But that Jesus himselfmodified and spiritualized the meaning of the phrase when heemployed it, even as he did the other contemporaneous languagedescriptive of the Messianic offices and times, we conclude fortwo reasons. First, he certainly did often use language in thatspiritual way, dressing in bold metaphors moral thoughts ofinspired insight and truth. Secondly, the moral doctrine is theonly one that is true, or that is in keeping with his penetrativethought. The notion of a physical resurrection is an errorborrowed most likely from the Persians by the Pharisees, and notbelonging to the essential elements of Christianity. The notionbeing prevalent at the time in Judea, and being usually expressedin certain appropriated phrases, when Christ used those phrases ina true spiritual sense the apostles would naturally apprehend fromthem the carnal meaning which already filled their minds in commonwith the minds of their countrymen. The word Hades, translated in the English New Testament by theword "hell, " a word of nearly the same etymological force, but nowconveying a quite different meaning, occurs in the discourses ofJesus only three several times. The other instances of its use arerepetitions or parallels. First, "And thou, Capernaum, which artexalted to heaven, shalt be brought down to the under world;" thatis, the great and proud city shall become powerless, a heap ofruins. Second, "Upon this rock I will found my Church, and thegates of the under world shall not prevail against it;" that is, the powers of darkness, the opposition of the wicked, the strengthof evil, shall not destroy my religion; in spite of them it shallassert its organization and overcome all obstacles. The remaining example of the Savior's use of this word is in theparable of Dives and Lazarus. The rich man is described, afterdeath, as suffering in the under world. Seeing the beggar afar offin Abraham's bosom, he cries, "Father Abraham, pity me, and sendLazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and coolmy tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. " Well known fanciesand opinions are here wrought up in scenic form to convey certainmoral impressions. It will be noticed that the implied division ofthe under world into two parts, with a gulf between them, corresponds to the common Gentile notion of an Elysian region ofdelightful meadows for the good and a Tartarean region ofblackness and fire for the bad, both included in one subterraneankingdom, but divided by an interval. 4 The dramatic details of the account Lazarus being borne into blissby angels, Dives asking to have a messenger sent from bale to warnhis surviving brothers rest on opinions afloat among the Jews ofthat age, derived from the Persian theology. Zoroaster prays, "When I shall die, let Aban and Bahman carry me to the bosom ofjoy. "5 And it was a common belief among the Persians that soulswere at seasons permitted to leave purgatory and visit theirrelatives on earth. 6 It is evident that the narrative before us isnot a history to be literally construed, but a parable to becarefully analyzed. The imagery and the particulars are to be laidaside, and the central thoughts to be drawn forth. Take the wordsliterally, that the rich man's immaterial soul, writhing inflames, wished the tip of a finger dipped in water to cool histongue, and they are ridiculous. Take them figuratively, as a typeof unknown spiritual anguish, and they are awful. Besides, hadChrist intended to teach the doctrine of a local burning hell, hesurely would have enunciated it in plain words, with solemniteration and explanatory amplifications, instead of merelyinsinuating 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 malorumExercet 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, thatthe formal distinctions of this world will have no influence inthe allotments of the future state, but will often be reversedthere; 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 towarn them, but should heed the instructions they already have, andso live in the life that now is, as to avoid a miserablecondemnation, and secure a blessed acceptance, in the life that isto come. By inculcating these truths in a striking manner, throughthe aid of a parable based on the familiar poetical conceptions ofthe future world and its scenery, Christ no more endorses thoseconceptions than by using the Messianic phrases of the Jews heapproves the false carnal views which they joined with thatlanguage. To interpret the parable literally, then, and suppose itmeant to teach the actual existence of a located hell of fire forsinners 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 tobe found in the teachings of Christ in only five independentinstances, each of which, after tracing the original Jewish usageof the term, we will briefly examine. Gehenna, or the Vale ofHinnom, is derived from two Hebrew words, the first meaning avale, the second being the name of its owner. The place thuscalled was the eastern part of the beautiful valley that forms thesouthern boundary of Jerusalem. Here Moloch, the horrid idol godworshipped by the Ammonites, and by the Israelites during theiridolatrous lapses, was set up. This monstrous idol had the head ofan ox and the body of a man. It was hollow; and, being filled withfire, children were laid in its arms and devoured alive by theheat. This explains the terrific denunciations uttered by theprophets against those who made their children pass through thefire to Moloch. The spot was sometimes entitled Tophet, a place ofabhorrence; its name being derived, as some think, from a wordmeaning to vomit with loathing, or, as others suppose, from a wordsignifying drum, because drums were beaten to drown the shrieks ofthe burning children. After these horrible rites were abolished byJosiah, the place became an utter abomination. All filth, theoffal of the city, the carcasses of beasts, the bodies of executedcriminals, were cast indiscriminately into Gehenna. Fires werekept constantly burning to prevent the infection of the atmospherefrom the putrifying mass. Worms were to be seen preying on therelics. The primary meaning, then, of Gehenna, is a valley outsideof Jerusalem, a place of corruption and fire, only to be thoughtof with execration and shuddering. Now, it was not only in keeping with Oriental rhetoric, but alsonatural in itself, that figures of speech should be taken fromthese obvious and dreadful facts to symbolize any dire evil. Forexample, how naturally might a Jew, speaking of some foul wretch, and standing, perhaps, within sight of the place, exclaim, "Hedeserves to be hurled into the fires of Gehenna!" So the termwould gradually become an accepted emblem of abominablepunishment. Such was the fact; and this gives a perspicuousmeaning to the word without supposing it to imply a fiery prisonhouse of anguish in the future world. Isaiah threatens the King ofAssyria with ruin in these terms: "Tophet is ordained of old, andprepared for the king: it is made deep and large; the pile thereofis fire and much wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream ofbrimstone, doth kindle it. " The prophet thus portrays, with thedread imagery of Gehenna, approaching disaster and overthrow. Athorough study of the Old Testament shows that the Jews, duringthe period which it covers, did not believe in future rewards andpunishments, but expected that all souls without discriminationwould pass their shadowy dream lives in the silence of Sheol. Between the termination of the Old Testament history and thecommencement of the New, various forms of the doctrine of futureretribution had been introduced or developed among the Jews. Butduring this period few, if any, decisive instances can be found inwhich the image of penal fire is connected with the future state. On the contrary, "darkness, " "gloom, " "blackness, " "profound andperpetual night, " are the terms employed to characterize the abodeand fate of the wicked. Josephus says that, in the faith of the Pharisees, "the worstcriminals were banished to the darkest part of the under world. "Philo represents the depraved and condemned as "groping in thelowest and darkest part of the creation. The word Gehenna israrely found in the literature of this time, and when it is itcommonly seems to be used either simply to denote the detestableVale of Hinnom, or else plainly as a general symbol of calamityand horror, as in the elder prophets. But in some of the Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases of the HebrewScriptures, especially in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, wemeet repeated applications of the word Gehenna to signify apunishment by fire in the future state. 7 This is a fact aboutwhich there can be no question. And to the documents showing sucha usage of the word, the best scholars are pretty well agreed inassigning a date as early as the days of Christ. The evidenceafforded by these Targums, together with the marked application ofthe term by Jesus himself, and the similar general use of itimmediately after both by Christians and Jews, render it notimprobable that Gehenna was known to the contemporaries of theSavior as the metaphorical name of hell, a region of fire, in theunder world, where the reprobate were supposed to be punishedafter death. But admitting that, before Christ began to teach, theJews had modified their early conception of the under world as thesilent and sombre abode of all the dead in common, and had dividedit into two parts, one where the wicked suffer, called Gehenna, one where the righteous rest, called Paradise, still, thatmodification having been borrowed, as is historically evident, from the Gentiles, or, if developed among themselves, at allevents unconnected with revelation, of course Christianity is notinvolved with the truth or falsity of it, is not responsible forit. It does not necessarily follow that Jesus gave precisely thesame meaning to the word Gehenna that his contemporaries orsuccessors did. He may have used it in a modified emblematicsense, as he did many other current terms. In studying hislanguage, we should especially free our minds both from thetyranny of pre Christian notions and dogmas and from theassociations and influences of modern creeds, and seek tointerpret it in the light of his own instructions and in thespirit of his own mind. We will now examine the cases in which Christ uses the termGehenna, and ask what it means. First: "Whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou vile wretch!shall be in danger of the fiery Gehenna. " Interpret thisliterally, 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 filthyflames in the Vale of Hinnom. But no one supposes that such wasits meaning. Jesus would say, as we understand him, "I am not cometo destroy, but to fulfil, the law; to show how at the culminationof the old dispensation a higher and stricter one opens. I sayunto you, that, unless your righteousness exceeds that of thePharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The conditionsof acceptance under the new order are far more profound anddifficult than under the old. That said, Whosoever commits murdershall be exposed to legal punishment from the public tribunal. This says, An invisible inward punishment, as much to be dreadedas the judgments of the Sanhedrim, shall be inflicted upon thosewho harbor the secret passions that lead to crime; whosoever, outof an angry heart, insults his brother, shall be exposed tospiritual retributions typified by the horrors of yon flamingvalley. They of old time took cognizance of outward crimes byoutward penalties. I take cognizance of inward sins by inwardreturns more sure and more fearful. " Second: "If thy right eye be a source of temptation to thee, pluckit out and fling it away; for it is better for thee that one ofthy members perish than that thy whole body should be cast intoGehenna. " Give these words a literal interpretation, and theymean, "If your eyes or your hands are the occasions of crime, ifthey tempt you to commit offences which will expose you to publicexecution, to the ignominy and torture heaped upon felons put to ashameful death and then flung among the burning filth of Gehenna, pluck them out, cut them off betimes, and save yourself from sucha 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 cansuppose that Jesus meant to convey such an idea as that when heuttered these words. We must, then, attribute a deeper, anexclusively moral, significance to the passage. It means, "If youhave some bosom sin, to deny and root out which is like tearingout an eye or cutting off a hand, pause not, but overcome anddestroy it immediately, at whatever cost of effort and suffering;for it is better to endure the pain of fighting and smothering abad passion than to submit to it and allow it to rule until itacquires complete control over you, pervades your whole naturewith its miserable unrest, and brings you at last into a state ofwoe of which Gehenna and its dreadful associations are a fitemblem. " A verse spoken, according to Mark, in immediateconnection with the present passage, confirms the figurative sensewe have attributed to it: "Whosoever shall cause one of theselittle ones that believe in me to fall, it were better for himthat a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were plungedinto the midst of the sea;" that is, in literal terms, a man hadbetter meet a great calamity, even the loss of life, than commit afoul crime and thus bring the woe of guilt upon his soul. The phrase, "their worm dieth not, and their fire is notquenched, " is a part of the imagery naturally suggested by thescene in the Valley of Hinnom, and was used to give greatervividness and force to the moral impression of the discourse. Byan interpretation resulting either from prejudice or ignorance, itis generally held to teach the doctrine of literal fire tormentsenduring forever. It is a direct quotation from a passage inIsaiah which signifies that, in a glorious age to come, Jehovahwill cause his worshippers to go forth from new moon to new moonand look upon the carcasses of the wicked, and see them devouredby fire which shall not be quenched and gnawed by worms whichshall not die, until the last relics of them are destroyed. Third: "Fear not them that kill the body but are not able to killthe soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul andbody in Gehenna. " A similar use of figurative language, in a stillbolder manner, is found in Isaiah. Intending to say nothing morethan that Assyria should be overthrown and crushed, the prophetbursts out, "Under the glory of the King of Assyria Jehovah shallkindle a burning like the burning of a fire; and it shall burn anddevour his thorns and his briers in one day, and shall consume theglory of his forest and of his fruitful field, both soul andbody. " Reading the whole passage in Matthew with a single eye, itsmeaning will be apparent. We may paraphrase it thus. Jesus says tohis disciples, "You are now going forth to preach the gospel. Myreligion and its destinies are intrusted to your hands. As you gofrom place to place, be on your guard; for they will persecuteyou, and scourge you, and deliver you up to death. But fear themnot. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master; andif 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 bodiesand are not able in any wise to injure your souls, shrink fromdanger and prove recreant to the momentous duties imposed uponyou; but be inspired to proclaim the principles of the heavenlykingdom with earnestness and courage, in the face of all perils, by fearing God, him who is able to plunge both your souls and yourbodies in abomination and agony, him who, if you prove unfaithfuland become slothful servants or wicked traitors, will leave yourbodies to a violent death and after that your souls to bittershame and anguish. Fear not the temporal, physical power of yourenemies, to be turned from your work by it; but rather fear theeternal, spiritual power of your God, to be made faithful by it. " Fourth: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for yecompass sea and land to make one proselyte; and, when he is made, ye make him twofold more a child of Gehenna than yourselves. " Thatis, "Ye make him twice as bad as yourselves in hypocrisy, bigotry, extortion, impurity, and malice, a subject of double guilt and ofdouble retribution. " Finally, Jesus exclaims to the children of those who killed theprophets, "Serpents, brood of vipers! how can ye escape thecondemnation of Gehenna?" That is to say, "Venomous creatures, badmen! you deserve the fate of the worst criminals; you are worthyof the polluted fires of Gehenna; your vices will surely befollowed by condign punishment: how can such depravity escape theseverest retributions?" These five are all the distinct instances in which Jesus uses theword Gehenna. It is plain that he always uses the wordmetaphorically. We therefore conclude that Christianity, correctlyunderstood, never implies that eternal fire awaits sinners in thefuture world, but that moral retributions, according to theirdeeds, are the portion of all men here and hereafter. There is nomore reason to suppose that essential Christianity contains thedoctrine of a fiery infernal world than there is to suppose thatit really means to declare that God is a glowing mass of flame, when it says, "Our God is a consuming fire. " We must remember themetaphorical character of much scriptural language. Wickedness isa fire, in that it preys upon men and draws down the displeasureof the Almighty, and consumes them. As Isaiah writes, "Wickedness burneth as the fire, the anger ofJehovah darkens the land, and the people shall be the food of thefire. " And James declares to proud extortioners, "The rust of yourcankered gold and silver shall eat your flesh as it were fire. " When Jesus says, "It shall be more tolerable for Sodom andGomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city" which will notlisten to the preaching of my kingdom, but drives my disciplesaway, he uses a familiar figure to signify that Sodom and Gomorrahwould at such a call have repented in sackcloth and ashes. Theguilt of Chorazin and Bethsaida was, therefore, more hardened thantheirs, and should receive a severer punishment; or, makingallowance for the natural exaggeration of this kind of language, he means, That city whose iniquities and scornful unbelief lead itto reject my kingdom when it is proffered shall be brought tojudgment and be overwhelmed with avenging calamities. Two parallelillustrations of this image are given us by the old prophets. Isaiah says, "Babylon shall be as when God overthrew Sodom andGomorrah. " And Jeremiah complains, "The punishment of Jerusalem isgreater than the punishment of Sodom. " It is certainly remarkablethat such passages should ever have been thought to teach thedoctrine of a final, universal judgment day breaking on the worldin fire. The subject of our Lord's teachings in regard to the punishment ofthe wicked is included in two classes of texts, and may be summedup in a few words. One class of texts relate to the visibleestablishment of Christianity as the true religion, the Divinelaw, at the destruction of the Jewish power, and to the frightfulwoes which should then fall upon the murderers of Christ, thebitter enemies of his cause. All these things were to come uponthat generation, were to happen before some of them then standingthere tasted death. The other class of texts and they are by farthe more numerous signify that the kingdom of Truth is nowrevealed and set up; that all men are bound to accept and obey itwith reverence and love, and thus become its blessed subjects, thehappy and immortal children of God; that those who spurn itsoffers, break its laws, and violate its pure spirit shall bepunished, inevitably and fearfully, by moral retributionsproportioned to the degrees of their guilt. Christ does not teachthat the good are immortal and that the bad shall be annihilated, but that all alike, both the just and the unjust, enter thespiritual world. He does not teach that the bad shall be eternallymiserable, cut off from all possibility of amendment, but simplythat they shall be justly judged. He makes no definitive referenceto duration, but leaves us at liberty, peering into the gloom asbest we can, to suppose, if we think it most reasonable, that theconditions of our spiritual nature are the same in the future asnow, and therefore that the wicked may go on in evil hereafter, or, if they will, all turn to righteousness, and the universefinally become as one sea of holiness and as one flood of praise. Another portion of Christ's doctrine of the future life hinges onthe phrase "the kingdom of heaven. " Much is implied in this termand its accompaniments, and may be drawn out by answering thequestions, What is heaven? Who are citizens of, and who are aliensfrom, the kingdom of God? Let us first examine the subordinatemeanings and shades of meaning with which the Savior sometimesuses these phrases. "Ye shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending anddescending upon the Son of Man. " No confirmation of the literalsense of this that is afforded by any incident found in theGospels. There is every reason for supposing that he meant by it, "There shall be open manifestations of supernatural power andfavor bestowed upon me by God, evident signs of directcommunications between us. " His Divine works and instructionsjustified the statement. The word "heaven" as here used, then, does not mean any particular place, but means the approvingpresence of God. The instincts and natural language of man promptus to consider objects of reverence as above us. We kneel belowthem. The splendor, mystery, infinity, of the starry regions helpon the delusion. But surely no one possessing clear spiritualperceptions will think the literal facts in the case mustcorrespond to this, that God must dwell in a place overhead calledheaven. He is an Omnipresence. "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you for mysake: rejoice, for great is your reward in heaven. " This passageprobably means, "In the midst of tribulation be exceeding glad;because you shall be abundantly rewarded in a future state for allyour present sufferings in my cause. " In that case, heavensignifies the spiritual world, and does not involve reference toany precisely located spot. Or it may mean, "Be not disheartenedby insults and persecutions met in the cause of God; for you shallbe greatly blessed in your inward life: the approval ofconscience, the immortal love and pity of God, shall be yours: themore you are hated and abused by men unjustly, the closer andsweeter shall be your communion with God. " In that case, heavensignifies fellowship with the Father, and is independent of anyparticular time or place. "Our Father, who art in heaven. " Jesus was not the author of thissentence. It was a part of the Rabbinical synagogue service, andwas based upon the Hebrew conception of God as having his abode inan especial sense over the firmament. The Savior uses it as thelanguage of accommodation, as is evident from his conversationwith the woman of Samaria; for he told her that no exclusive spotwas an acceptable place of worship, since "God is a Spirit; andthey that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. " Noone who comprehends the meaning of the words can suppose that theInfinite Spirit occupies a confined local habitation, and that menmust literally journey there to be with him after death. Whereverthey may be now, they are away from him or with him, according totheir characters. After death they are more banished from him ormore immediately with him, instantly, wherever they are, accordingto the spirit they are of. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, but in heaven. " Inother words, Be not absorbed in efforts to accumulate hoards ofgold and silver, and to get houses and lands, which will soon passaway; but rather labor to acquire heavenly treasures, wisdom, love, purity, and faith, which will never pass from yourpossession nor cease from your enjoyment. "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a placefor you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that whereI am there ye may be also. " To understand this text, we mustcarefully study the whole four chapters of the connection in whichit stands. They abound in bold symbols. An instance of this isseen 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 ofthe passage before us may be illustrated by a short paraphrase ofit with the context: "Let not your hearts be troubled by thethought that I must die and be removed from you; for there areother states of being besides this earthly life. When they crucifyme, as I have said to you before, I shall not perish, but shallpass into a higher state of existence with my Father. Whither I goye know, and the way ye know: my Father is the end, and the truthsthat I have declared point out the way. If ye loved me, ye wouldrejoice 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 ofblessedness and glory (as I prophesy unto you that I shall, ) Iwill reveal myself unto you again, and tell you. I go before youas a pioneer, and will surely come back and confirm, withirresistible evidence, the reality of what I have already toldyou. Therefore, trouble not your hearts, but be of good cheer. " "There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinnerthat repenteth. " The sentiment of this Divine declaration simplyimplies that all good beings sympathize with every triumph ofgoodness; that the living chain of mutual interest runs throughthe spiritual universe, making one family of those on earth andthose in the invisible state. "Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father. " "Cling notto 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 Imust seek my disciples, to convince them of my resurrection and togive them my parting commission and blessing. " He used the commonlanguage, for it was the only language which she whom he addressedwould understand; and although, literally interpreted, it conveyedthe idea of a local heaven on high, yet at the same time itconveyed, and in the only way intelligible to her, all the truththat was important, namely, that when he disappeared he wouldstill be living, and be, furthermore, with God. When Christ finally went from his disciples, he seemed to them torise and vanish towards the clouds. This would confirm theirprevious material conceptions, and the old forms of speech wouldbe handed down, strengthened by these phenomena, misunderstood inthemselves and exaggerated in their importance. We generally speaknow of God's "throne, " of "heaven, " as situated far away in theblue ether; we point upward to the world of bliss, and say, Therethe celestial hosannas roll; there the happy ones, the unforgottenones of our love, wait to welcome us. These forms of speech areentirely natural; they are harmless; they aid in givingdefiniteness to our thoughts and feelings, and it is well tocontinue their use; it would be difficult to express our thoughtswithout them. However, we must understand that they are notstrictly and exclusively true. God is everywhere; and wherever heis 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 synonymouswith the Divine will, the spiritual principles or laws which hewas inspired to proclaim. Many of his parables were spoken toillustrate the diffusive power and the incomparable value of thetruth he taught, as when he said, "The kingdom of heaven is like agrain of mustard seed, which becomes a great tree;" it is "likeunto leaven, which a woman put in two measures of meal until thewhole was leavened;" it is "like a treasure hid in a field, " or"like a goodly pearl of great price, which, a man finding, he goesand sells all that he has and buys it. " In these examples "thekingdom of heaven" is plainly a personification of the revealedwill of God, the true law of salvation and eternal life. In answerto the question why he spoke so many things to the people inparables, Jesus said to his disciples, "Because it is given untoyou to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto themit is not given;" that is, You are prepared to understand thehitherto concealed truths of God's government, if set forthplainly; but they are not prepared. Here as also in the parables of the vineyard let out tohusbandmen, and of the man who sowed good seed in his field, andin a few other cases "the kingdom of heaven" means God'sgovernment, his mode of dealing with men, his method ofestablishing his truths in the hearts of men. "The kingdom ofheaven" sometimes signifies personal purity and peace, freedomfrom sensual solicitations. "There be eunuchs which have madethemselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that isable to receive it, let him receive it. " Christ frequently uses the term "kingdom of heaven" in a somewhatrestricted, traditional sense, based in form but not in spiritupon the Jewish expectations of the Messiah's kingdom. "Be ye sureof this, that the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you;" "I mustpreach the kingdom of God to other cities also;" "Repent, for thekingdom of heaven is at hand. " Christ was charged to bear to men anew revelation from God of his government and laws, that he mightreign over them as a monarch over conscious and loyal subjects. "Many shall come from the East and the West, and shall sit downwith Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but thechildren of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness. "The sense of these texts is as follows. "God is now offering untoyou, through me, a spiritual dispensation, a new kingdom; but, unless you faithfully heed it and fulfil its conditions, you shallbe rejected from it and lose the Divine favor. Although, by yourposition as the chosen people, and in the line of revelation, youare its natural heirs, yet, unless you rule your spirits and livesby its commands, you shall see the despised Gentiles enjoying allthe privileges your faith allows to the revered patriarchs of yournation, while yourselves are shut out from them and overwhelmedwith shame and anguish. Your pride of descent, haughtiness ofspirit, and reliance upon dead rites unfit you for the truekingdom of God, the inward reign of humility and righteousness;and the very publicans and harlots, repenting and humblingthemselves, shall go into it before you. " To be welcomed under this Messianic dispensation, to become acitizen of this spiritual kingdom of God, the Savior declares thatthere are certain indispensable conditions. A man must repent andforsake his sins. This was the burden of John's preaching, thatthe candidate for the kingdom of heaven must first be baptizedwith water unto repentance, as a sign that he abjures and iscleansed from all his old errors and iniquities. Then he must bebaptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire, that is, must learnthe positive principles of the coming kingdom, and apply them tohis own character, to purge away every corrupt thing. He must beborn again, born of water and of the Spirit: in other words, hemust be brought out from his impurity and wickedness into a newand Divine life of holiness, awakened to a conscious experience ofpurity, truth, and love, the great prime elements in the reign ofGod. He must be guileless and lowly. "Whosoever will not receivethe kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise entertherein. " The kingdom of heaven, the better dispensation which Christ cameto establish, is the humility of contrite hearts, the innocence oflittle children, the purity of undefiled consciences, the fruit ofgood works, the truth of universal laws, the love of God, and theconscious experience of an indestructible, blessed being. Thosewho enter into these qualities in faith, in feeling, and in actionare full citizens of that eternal kingdom; all others are aliensfrom it. Heaven, then, according to Christ's use of the word, is notdistinctively a world situated somewhere in immensity, but apurely spiritual experience, having nothing to do with any specialtime 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 thislife or in a future. He said to the young ruler who had walkedfaithfully in the law, and whose good traits drew forth his love, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. " It is evident thatthis does not mean a bounded place of abode, but a true state ofcharacter, a virtuous mode of life "My kingdom is not of thisworld. " "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. " Thatis, "My kingdom is the realm of truth, the dominion of God's will, and all true men are my subjects. " Evidently this is not amaterial but a moral reign and therefore unlimited by seasons orplaces. Wherever purity, truth, love, obedience, prevail, there isGod, and that is heaven. It is not necessary to depart into somedistant 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 oursouls and breath of our lives, if we are only in a state that isfitted to recognise and enjoy him. "He that hath sent me is withme: the Father hath not left me alone, for I always do thosethings which please him. " It is a fair inference from suchstatements as this that to do with conscious adoration and lovethose things that please God is to be with him, without regard totime or place; and that is heaven. "I speak that which I have seenwith my Father, " God, "and ye do that which ye have seen with yourfather, the devil. " No one will suppose that Jesus meant to tellthe wicked men whom he was addressing that they committed theiriniquities in consequence of lessons learned in a previous stateof existence with an arch fiend, the parent of all evil. Hismeaning, then, was, I bring forth in words and deeds the thingswhich I have learned in my secret soul from inspired communionwith infinite goodness and perfection; you bring forth the thingswhich you have learned from communion with the source of sin andwoe, that is, foul propensities, cruel passions, and evilthoughts. "I come forth from the Father and am come into the world; again Ileave the world and go unto the Father. " "I go unto Him that sentme. " Since it is declared that God is an Omnipresent Spirit, andthat those who obey and love him see him and are with himeverywhere, these striking words must bear one of the twofollowing interpretations. First, they may imply in general thatman is created and sent into this state of being by the Father, and that after the termination of the present life the soul isadmitted to a closer union with the Parent Spirit. This gives anatural meaning to the language which represents dying as going tothe Father. Not that it is necessary to travel to reach God, butthat the spiritual verity is most adequately expressed under sucha metaphor. But, secondly, and more probably, the phraseologyunder consideration may be meant as an assertion of the Divineorigin and authority of the special mission of Christ. "Neithercame I of myself, but He sent me;" "The words that I speak untoyou I speak not of myself;" "As the Father hath taught me, I speakthese things. " These passages do not necessarily teach the preexistence of Christ and his descent from heaven in the flesh. Thatis a carnal interpretation which does great violence to thegenuine nature of the claims put forth by our Savior. They maymerely declare the supernatural commission of the Son of God, hisdirect inspiration and authority. He did not voluntarily assumehis great work, but was Divinely ordered on that service. Comparethe following text: "The baptism of John, whence was it, fromHeaven, or of men?" That is to say, was it of human or of Divineorigin and authority? So when it is said that the Son of Mandescended from heaven, or was sent by the Father, the meaning inChrist'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 followingcitation from the Savior's own words, when he is speaking in hisprayer at the last supper of sending his disciples out to preachthe gospel: "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have Ialso sent them into the world. " The reference, evidently, is to aDivine choice and sealing, not to a descent upon the earth fromanother sphere. That the author of the Fourth Gospel believed that Christdescended from heaven literally we have not the shadow of a doubt. He repeatedly speaks of him as the great super angelic Logos, thefirst born Son and perfect image of God, the instrumental cause ofthe creation. His mind was filled with the same views, the samelofty Logos theory that is so abundantly set forth in the writingsof Philo Judaus. He reports and describes the Savior in conformitywith such a theological postulate. Possessed with the foregoneconclusion that Jesus was the Divine Logos, descended from thecelestial abode, and born into the world as a man, in endeavoringto write out from memory, years after they were uttered, theSavior's words, it is probable that he unconsciouslymisapprehended and tinged them according to his theory. TheDelphic apothegm, "Know thyself, " was said to have descended fromheaven: "E coelo descendit [non ASCII characters]. " By a familiar Jewish idiom, "to ascend into heaven" meant to learnthe will of God. 8 And whatever bore the direct sancion of God wassaid to descend from heaven. When in these figurative terms Jesusasserted his Divine commission, it seems that some understood himliterally, and concluded perhaps in consequence of his miracles, joined with their own speculations that he was the Logosincarnated. That such a conclusion was an unwarranted inferencefrom metaphorical language and from a foregone pagan dogma appearsfrom his own explanatory and justifying words spoken to the Jews. For when they accused him of making himself God, he replies, "Ifin your law they are called gods to whom the word of God came, charge ye him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into theworld 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 existenceor superhuman nature. But it does not seem to us that John'spossibly can be. His miracles, according to the common idea ofthem, did not prove him to be the coequal fac simile, but merelyproved 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 oflight and glory located by the Hebrews, and by some other nations, just above the visible firmament. His meaning, when he spoke ofthe kingdom of God or heaven, was always, in some form, either thereign of justice, purity, and love, or the invisible world ofspirits. If that world, heaven, be in fact, and were in hisconception, a sphere located in space, he never alluded to itsposition, but left it perfectly in the dark, keeping hisinstructions scrupulously free from any such commitment. He said, "I go to Him that sent me;" "I will come again and receive youunto myself, that where I am there ye may be also. " The referencesto locality are vague and mysterious. The nature of his words, andtheir scantiness, are as if he had said, We shall live hereafter;we shall be with the Father; we shall be together. All the rest ismystery, even to me: it is not important to be known, and theFather hath concealed it. Such, almost, are his very words. "Alittle while, and ye shall not see me; again, a little while, andye shall see me, because I go to the Father. " "Father, I will thatthey also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am. " Whetherheaven be technically a material abode or a spiritual state it isof little importance to us to know; and the teachings of Jesusseem to have nothing to do with it. The important things for us toknow are that there is a heaven, and how we may prepare for it;and on these points the revelation is explicit. To suppose theSavior ignorant of some things is not inconsistent with hisendowments; for he himself avowed his ignorance, saying, "Of thatday 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 theworld, to conceive him hovering on the verge of the same mysterywhich has enveloped every passing mortal, hovering there withchastened wonder and curiosity, inspired with an absolute trustthat in that fathomless obscurity the Father would be with him, and would unveil new realms of life, and would enable him to comeback and assure his disciples. He certainly did not reveal thedetails of the future state: whether he was acquainted with themhimself or not we cannot tell. We next advance to the most important portion of the words ofChrist regarding the life and destiny of the soul, those parts ofhis doctrine which are most of a personal, experimental character, sounding the fountains of consciousness, piercing to the dividingasunder of our being. It is often said that Jesus everywhere takesfor granted the fact of immortality, that it underlies andpermeates all he does and says. We should know at once that such abeing must be immortal; such a life could never be lived by anephemeral creature; of all possible proofs of immortality he ishimself the sublimest. This is true, but not the whole truth. Theresistless assurance, the Divine inspiration, the sublime repose, with which he enunciates the various thoughts connected with thetheme of endless existence, are indeed marvellous. But he not onlyauthoritatively assumes the truth of a future life: he speaksdirectly of it in many ways, often returns to it, continuallyhovers about it, reasons for it, exhorts upon it, makes most ofhis instructions hinge upon it, shows that it is a favoritesubject of his communion. We may put the justice of thesestatements in a clear light by bringing together and explainingsome of his scattered utterances. His express language teaches that man in this world is a twofoldbeing, leading a twofold life, physical and spiritual, the onetemporal, the other eternal, the one apt unduly to absorb hisaffections, the other really deserving his profoundest care. Thisseparation of the body and the soul, and survival of the latter, is brought to light in various striking forms and with variouspiercing applications. In view of the dangers that beset hisdisciples on their mission, he exhorted and warned them thus:"Fear not them which have power to kill the body and afterwardshave no more that they can do; but rather fear Him who can killboth soul and body;" "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it;and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it;" thatis, whosoever, for the sake of saving the life of his body, shrinks from the duties of this dangerous time, shall lose thehighest welfare of the soul; but whosoever loveth his lower lifein the body less than he loves the virtues of a consecrated spiritshall win the true blessedness of his soul. Both of these passagesshow that the soul has a life and interest separate from thematerial tabernacle. With what pathos and convincing power was thesame 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, couldonly have been prompted by that inspiration of God which he alwaysclaimed to have. Christ once reasoned with the Sadducees "as touching the dead, that they rise;" in other words, that the souls of men upon thedecease of the body pass into another and an unending state ofexistence: "Neither can they die any more; for they are equal withthe angels, and are children of God, being children of theresurrection. " His argument was, that "God is the God of theliving, not of the dead;" that is, the spiritual nature of maninvolves such a relationship with God as pledges his attributes toits perpetuity. The thought which supports this reasoningpenetrates far into the soul and grasps the moral relationsbetween man and God. It is most interesting viewed as theunqualified affirmation by Jesus of the doctrine of a future lifewhich shall be deathless. But the Savior usually stood in a more imposing attitude and spokein a more commanding tone than are indicated in the foregoingsentences. The prevailing stand point from which he spoke was thatof an oracle giving responses from the inner shrine of theDivinity. The words and sentiments he uttered were not his, butthe Father's; and he uttered them in the clear tones of knowledgeand authority, not in the whispering accents of speculation orsurmise. 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 hecould no more question or resist than he could deny his ownexistence. He was set apart as a messenger to men. The tide ofinspiration welled up till it filled every nerve and crevice ofhis being with conscious life and with an overmasteringrecognition of its living relations with the Omnipresent andEverlasting Life. Straightway he knew that the Father was inhim and he in the Father, and that he was commissioned toreveal 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, spiritualvitality the thought of death fled away, the thought ofannihilation could not come. So far removed was his soul from theperception of interior sleep and decay, so broad and powerful washis consciousness of indestructible life, that he saw quitethrough the crumbling husks of time and sense to the crystal seaof spirit and thought. So absorbing was his sense of eternal lifein himself that he even constructed an argument from his personalfeeling to prove the immortality of others, saying to hisdisciples, "Because I live, ye shall live also;" "Ye believe inGod, believe also in me. " Ye believe what God declares, for hecannot be mistaken; believe what I declare for his inspirationmakes me infallible when I say there are many spheres of life forus when this is ended. It was from the fulness of this experience that Jesus addressedhis hearers. He spoke not so much as one who had faith thatimmortal life would hereafter be revealed and certified, butrather as one already in the insight and possession of it, as onewhose foot already trod the eternal floor and whose vision piercedthe immense horizon. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he thatheareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me hath everlastinglife, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed fromdeath unto life. " Being himself brought to this immovableassurance of immortal life by the special inspiration of God, itwas his aim to bring others to the same blessed knowledge. Hisefforts to effect this form a most constant feature in histeachings. His own definition of his mission was, "I am come thatthey might have life, and that they might have it moreabundantly. " We see by the persistent drift of his words that hestrove to lead others to the same spiritual point he stood at, that they might see the same prospect he saw, feel the samecertitude he felt, enjoy the same communion with God and sense ofimmortality he enjoyed. "As the Father raiseth up the dead andquickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will;" "For asthe Father hath life in himself, so hath he given the Son to havelife in himself;" "Father, glorify thy Son, that thy Son also mayglorify thee; as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that hemight give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him: andthis is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only trueGod, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. " In other words, themission of Christ was to awaken in men the experience of immortallife; and that would be produced by imparting to them reproducingin them the experience of his own soul. Let us notice what stepshe took to secure this end. He begins by demanding the unreserved credence of men to what hesays, claiming to say it with express authority from God, andgiving miraculous credentials. "Whatsoever I speak, therefore, asthe Father said to me, so I speak. " This claim to inspiredknowledge he advances so emphatically that it cannot beoverlooked. He then announces, as an unquestionable truth, thesupreme claim of man's spiritual interests upon his attention andlabor, alike from their inherent superiority and their enduringsubsistence. "For what shall it profit a man if he gain the wholeworld and lose his own soul?" "Thou fool, this night thy soulshall be required of thee: then whose shall be those things thouhast gathered?" "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but forthat meat which endureth unto everlasting life. " The inspiration which dictated these instructions evidentlybased them upon the profoundest spiritual philosophy, upon thetruth that man lives at once in a sphere of material objects whichis comparatively unimportant because he will soon leave it, and ina sphere of moral realities which is all important because he willlive in it forever. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but byevery word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. " The body, existing in the sphere of material relations, is supported bymaterial bread; but the soul, existing in the sphere of spiritualrelations, is supported by truth, the nourishing breath of God'slove. We are in the eternal world, then, at present. Its laws andinfluences penetrate and rule us; its ethereal tides lave and bearus on; our experience and destiny in it are decided every momentby our characters. If we are pure in heart, have vital faith andforce, we shall see God and have new revelations made to us. Suchare among the fundamental principles of Christianity. There is another class of texts, based upon a highly figurativestyle of speech, striking Oriental idioms, the explanation ofwhich will cast further light upon the branch of the subjectimmediately before us. "As the living Father hath sent me, and Ilive by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live byme;" that is, As the blessed Father hath inspired me with theknowledge of him, and I am blessed with the consciousness of hisimmortal love, so he that believes and assimilates these truths asI proclaim them, he shall experience the same blessedness throughmy instruction. The words. "I am the bread of life" are explainedby the words "I am the truth. " The declaration "Whoso eateth myflesh hath eternal life" is illustrated by the declaration"Whosoever heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me hatheverlasting life. " There is no difficulty in understanding whatJesus meant when he said, "I have meat to eat ye know not of: mymeat is to do the will of Him that sent me. " Why should we notwith the same ease, upon the same principles, interpret hiskindred expression, "This is the bread which cometh down fromheaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die"? The idea to beconveyed by all this phraseology is, that whosoever understands, accepts, assimilates, and brings out in earnest experience, thetruths Christ taught, would realize the life of Christ, feel thesame assurance of Divine favor and eternal blessedness. "He thateateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I inhim;" that is, we have the same character, are fed by the samenutriment, rest in the same experience. Fortunately, we are notleft to guess at the accuracy of this exegesis: it is demonstratedfrom the lips of the Master himself. When he knew that thedisciples murmured at what he had said about eating his flesh, andcalled it a hard saying, he said to them, "It is the spirit thatquickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speakunto you, they are spirit and they are life. But there are some ofyou that believe not. " Any man who heartily believed what Christsaid that he was Divinely authorized to declare, and did declare, the pervading goodness of the Father and the immortal blessednessof the souls of his children, by the very terms was delivered fromthe bondage of fear and commenced the consciousness of eternallife. Of course, we are not to suppose that faith in Christobtains immortality itself for the believer: it only rectifies andlights up the conditions of it, and awakens the consciousness ofit. "I am the resurrection and the life: whosoever liveth andbelieveth in me shall never die. " We suppose this means, he shallknow that he is never to perish: it cannot refer to physicaldissolution, for the believer dies equally with the unbeliever; itcannot refer to immortal existence in itself, for the unbelieveris as immortal as the believer: it must refer to the blessednature of that immortality and to the personal assurance of it, because these Christ does impart to the disciple, while theunregenerate unbeliever in his doctrine, of course, has them not. Coming from God to reveal his infinite love, exemplifying theDivine elements of an immortal nature in his whole career, comingback from the grave to show its sceptre broken and to point theway to heaven, well may Christ proclaim, "Whosoever believes inme" knows he "shall never perish. " Among the Savior's parables is an impressive one, which we cannothelp thinking perhaps fancifully was intended to illustrate thedealings of Providence in ordering the earthly destiny ofhumanity. "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seedinto the ground and the seed should grow up; but when the fruit isripe he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come. " Menare seed sown in this world to ripen and be harvested in another. The figure, taken on the scale of the human race and the wholeearth, is sublime. Whether such an image were originally suggestedby the parable or not, the conception is consistent with Christiandoctrine. 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 beautifulmeaning by the mistaken belief that we sleep in our graves until adistant resurrection day is often applied to burial grounds. Letits appropriate significance be restored. Life is the field, deaththe reaper, another sphere of being the immediate garner. Anenlightened Christian, instead of entitling a graveyard the gardenof the dead, and looking for its long buried forms to spring fromits cold embrace, will hear the angel saying again, "They are nothere: they are risen. " The line which written on Klopstock's tombis a melancholy error, engraved on his cradle would have been aninspiring truth: "Seed sown by God to ripen for the harvest. " Several fragmentary speeches, which we have not yet noticed, ofthe most tremendous and even exhaustive import, are reported ashaving fallen from the lips of Christ at different times. Thesesentences, rapid and incomplete as they are in the form in whichthey have reached us, do yet give us glimpses of the mostmomentous character into the profoundest thoughts of his mind. They are sufficient to enable us to generalize their fundamentalprinciples, and construct the outlines, if we may so speak, of histheology, his inspired conception of God, the universe, and man, and the resulting duties and destiny of man. We will briefly bringtogether and interpret these passages, and deduce the system whichthey seem to presuppose and rest upon. Jesus told the woman of Samaria that God was to be worshippedacceptably neither in that mountain nor at Jerusalem exclusively, but anywhere, if it were worthily done. "God is a Spirit; and theythat worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. " Thispassage, with others, teaches the spirituality and omnipresence ofGod. Christ conceived of God as an infinite Spirit. Again, comforting his friends in view of his approaching departure, hesaid, "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so Iwould have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. " Here heplainly figures the universe as a house containing manyapartments, all pervaded and ruled by the Father's presence. Hewas about taking leave of this earth to proceed to another part ofthe creation, and he promised to come back to his followers andassure them there was another abode prepared for them. Christconceived of the universe, with its innumerable divisions, as thehouse of God. Furthermore, he regarded truth or the essential lawsand 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 senthim; that is, as he at another time expressed it, he came into theworld to bear witness unto the truth. Thus he prayed, "Father, sanctify them through the truth: thy word is truth. " Christconceived of pure truth as the will of God. Finally, he taughtthat all who obey the truth, or do the will of God, therebyconstitute one family of brethren, one family of the acceptedchildren of God, in all worlds forever. "He that doeth the truthcometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that theyare wrought in God;" "Whosoever shall do the will of God, the sameis my brother, and my sister, and mother;" "Ye shall know thetruth, and the truth shall make you free. Whosoever committeth sinis the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the houseforever; but the son abideth forever. If the Son, therefore, makeyou free, ye shall be free indeed. " That is to say, truth gives agood man the freedom of the universe, makes him know himself anheir, immortally and everywhere at home; sin gives the wicked manover to bondage, makes him feel afraid of being an outcast, loadshim with hardships as a servant. Whoever will believe therevelations of Christ, and assimilate his experience, shall losethe wretched burdens of unbelief and fear and be no longer aservant, but be made free indeed, being adopted as a son. The whole conception, then, is this: The universe is one vasthouse, comprising many subordinate mansions. All the moral beingsthat dwell in it compose one immortal family. God is the universalFather. His will the truth is the law of the household. Whoeverobeys it is a worthy son and has the Father's approbation; whoeverdisobeys it is alienated and degraded into the condition of aservant. We may roam from room to room, but can never get lostoutside the walls beyond the reach of the Paternal arms. Death isvariety of scenery and progress of life: "We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straightAnother golden chamber of the King's, Larger than this we leave, and lovelier. " Who can comprehend the idea, in its overwhelming magnificence andin its touching beauty, its sweeping amplitude embracing allmysteries, its delicate fitness meeting all wants, without beingimpressed and stirred by it, even to the regeneration of his soul?If there is any thing calculated to make man feel and live like achild of God, it would surely seem to be this conception. Itsunrivalled simplicity and verisimilitude compel the assent of themind to its reality. It is the most adequate and sublime view ofthings that ever entered the reason of man. It is worthy theinspiration of God, worthy the preaching of the Son of God. Allthe artificial and arbitrary schemes of fanciful theologians areas ridiculous and impertinent before it as the offensive flaringof torches in the face of one who sees the steady and solemnsplendors of the sun. To live in the harmony of the truth ofthings, in the conscious love of God and enjoyment of immortality, blessed children, everywhere at home in the hospitable mansions ofthe everlasting Father, this is the experience to which Christcalls his followers; and any eschatology inconsistent with such aconception is not his. There are two general methods of interpretation respectivelyapplied to the words of Christ, the literal, or mechanical, andthe spiritual, or vital. The former leads to a belief in hissecond visible advent with an army of angels from heaven, a bodilyresurrection of the dead, a universal judgment, the burning up ofthe world, eternal tortures of the wicked in an abyss of infernalfire, a heaven located on the arch of the Hebrew firmament. Thelatter gives us a group of the profoundest moral truths clusteredabout the illuminating and emphasizing mission of Christ, sealedwith Divine sanctions, truths of universal obligation and of allredeeming power. The former method is still adopted by the greatbody of Christendom, who are landed by it in a system of doctrineswell nigh identical with those of the Pharisees, against whichChrist so emphatically warned his followers, a system oftraditional dogmas not having the slightest support in philosophy, nor the least contact with the realities of experience, nor thefaintest color of inherent or historical probability. In this agethey are absolutely incredible to unhampered and studious minds. On the other hand, the latter method is pursued by the growingbody of rational Christians, and it guides them to a consistentarray of indestructible moral truths, simple, fundamental, andexhaustive, an array of spiritual principles commanding universaland implicit homage, robed in their own brightness, accredited bytheir own fitness, armed with the loveliness and terror of theirown rewarding and avenging divinity, flashing in mutual lights andsounding in consonant echoes alike from the law of nature and fromthe soul of man, as the Son of God, with miraculous voice, speaksbetween. CHAPTER VII. RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. OF all the single events that ever were supposed to have occurredin the world, perhaps the most august in its moral associationsand the most stupendous in its lineal effects, both on the outwardfortunes and on the inward experience of mankind, is theresurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If, therefore, thereis one theme in all the range of thought worthy of candidconsideration, it is this. There are two ways of examining it. Wemay, as unquestioning Christians, inquire how the New Testamentwriters represent it, what premises they assume, what statementsthey make, and what inferences they draw. Thus, withoutperversion, without mixture of our own notions, we shouldconstruct the Scripture doctrine of the resurrection of theSavior. Again as critical scholars and philosophical thinkers, wemay study that doctrine in all its parts, scrutinize it in all itsbearings, trace, as far as possible, the steps and processes ofits formation, discriminate as well as we can, by all fair tests, whether it be entirely correct, or wholly erroneous, or partlytrue and partly false. Both of these methods of investigation arenecessary to a full understanding of the subject. Both areobligatory upon the earnest inquirer. Whoso would bravely face hisbeliefs and intelligently comprehend them, with their grounds andtheir issues, with a devout desire for the pure truth, whatsoeverit may be, putting his trust in the God who made him, will nevershrink from either of these courses of examination. Whoso doesshrink from these inquiries is either a moral coward, afraid ofthe results of an honest search after that truth of things whichexpresses the will of the Creator, or a spiritual sluggard, frightened by a call to mental effort and torpidly clinging toease of mind. And whoso, accepting the personal challenge ofcriticism, carries on the investigation with prejudice andpassion, holding errors because he thinks them safe and useful, and rejecting realities because he fancies them dangerous andevil, is an intellectual traitor, disloyal to the sacred laws bywhich God hedges the holy fields and rules the responsiblesubjects of the realm of truth. We shall combine the two modes ofinquiry, first singly asking what the Scriptures declare, thencritically seeking what the facts will warrant, it beingunimportant to us whether these lines exactly coincide or divergesomewhat, the truth itself being all. We now pass to anexamination of Christ's resurrection from five points of view:first, as a fact; second, as a fulfilment of prophecy; third, as apledge; fourth, as a symbol; and fifth, as a theory. The writers of the New Testament speak of the resurrection ofChrist, in the first place, as a fact. "Jesus whom ye slew andhanged on a tree, him hath God raised up. " It could not have beenviewed by them in the light of a theory or a legend, nor, indeed, as any thing else than a marvellous but literal fact. This appearsfrom their minute accounts of the scenes at the sepulchre and ofthe disappearance of his body. Their declarations of this are mostunequivocal, emphatic, iterated, "The Lord is risen indeed. " Allthat was most important in their faith they based upon it, allthat was most precious to them in this life they staked upon it. "Else why stand we in jeopardy every hour?" They held it beforetheir inner vision as a guiding star through the night of theirsufferings and dangers, and freely poured out their blood upon thecruel shrines of martyrdom in testimony that it was a fact. That they believed he literally rose from the grave in visibleform also appears, and still more forcibly, from their descriptionsof his frequent manifestations to them. These show that in theirfaith he assumed at his resurrection the same body in which he hadlived before, which was crucified and buried. All attempts, whetherby Swedenborgians or others, to explain this Scripture language assignifying that he rose in an immaterial body, are futile. 1 Heappeared to their senses and was recognised by his identicalbodily form. He partook of physical food with them. "They gave hima piece of broiled fish and of an honey comb; and he ate beforethem. " The marks in his hands and side were felt by theincredulous Thomas, and convinced him. He said to them, "Handleme, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see mehave. " To a candid mind there can hardly be a question that thegospel records describe the resurrection of Christ as a literalfact, that his soul reanimated the deceased body, and that in ithe showed himself to his disciples. Yet that there are a few textsimplying the immateriality of his resurrection body that there aretwo accounts of it in the gospels we cannot deny. We advance to see what is the historical evidence for the fact ofthe resurrection of Christ. This argument, of course, turnschiefly on one point, namely, the competency of the witnesses, andthe validity of their testimony. 2 We will present the usuallyexhibited scheme of proof as strongly as we can. 3 In the firstplace, those who testified to the resurrection were numerousenough, so far as mere numbers go, to establish the fact beyondquestion. Paul declares there were above five hundred who fromtheir 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 thecandidates for Judas Iscariot's apostleship were selected, consisting probably of most of the seventy. If the evidence of anynumber of men ought to convince us of the alleged event, then, under the existing circumstances, that of twelve ought. Importantmatters of history are often unhesitatingly received on theauthority of a single historian. If the occurrences at the timewere sufficient to demonstrate to a reasonable mind the reality ofthe resurrection, then the unanimous testimony of twelve men tothose occurrences should convince us. The oaths of a thousandwould be no stronger. These men possessed sufficient abilities to be trusted, goodpowers of judgment, and varied experience. The selection of themby Him who "knew what was in man, " the boldness and efficiency oftheir lives, the fruits of their labors everywhere, amply provetheir 1 The opposite view is ably argued by Bush in his valuabletreatise on the Resurrection. 2 Sherlock, Trial of the Witnesses. 3 Ditton, Demonstration of the Resurrection of Christ. For asternly faithful estimate of the cogency of this argument, it mustbe remembered that all the data, every fact and postulate in eachstep of the reasoning, rest on the historical authority of thefour Gospels, documents whose authorship and date are lost inobscurity. Even of "orthodox" theologians few, with any claims toscholarship, now hold that these Gospels, as they stand, werewritten by the persons whose names they bear. They wander andwaver 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 mostabundant opportunities of knowledge in regard to the facts towhich they bore witness. They were present in the places, at thetimes, when and where the events occurred. Every motive wouldconspire to make them scrutinize the subject and the attendantcircumstances. And it seems they did examine; for at first somedoubted, but afterwards believed. They had been close companionsof Jesus for more than a year at the least. They had studied hisevery feature, look, gesture. They must have been able torecognise him, or to detect an impostor, if the absurd idea of anattempted imposition can be entertained. They saw him many times, near at hand, in the broad light. Not only did they see him, butthey handled his wounded limbs and listened to his wondrous voice. If these means of knowing the truth were not enough to make theirevidence valid, then no opportunities could be sufficient. Whoso allows its full force to the argument thus far will admitthat the testimony of the witnesses to the resurrection isconclusive, unless he suspects that by some cause they were eitherincapacitated to weigh evidence fairly, or were led wilfully tostifle the truth and publish a falsehood. Very few persons haveever been inclined to make this charge, that the apostles wereeither wild enthusiasts of fancy, or crafty calculators of fraud;and no one has ever been able to support the position even withmoderate plausibility. Granting, in the first place, hypothetically, that the disciples were ever so great enthusiastsin their general character and conduct, still, they could not havebeen at all so in relation to the resurrection, because, before itoccurred, they had no belief, expectations, nor thoughts about it. By their own frank confessions, they did not understand Christ'spredictions, nor the ancient supposed prophecies of that event. And without a strong faith, a burning hopeful desire, or somethingof the kind, for it to spring from, and rest on, and be nourishedby, evidently no enthusiasm could exist. Accordingly, we find thatprevious to the third day after Christ's death they said nothing, thought nothing, about a resurrection; but from that time, as byan inspiration from heaven, they were roused to both words anddeeds. The sudden astonishing change here alluded to is to beaccounted for only by supposing that in the mean time they hadbeen brought to a belief that the resurrection had occurred. But, secondly, it is to be noticed that these witnesses were notenthusiasts on other subjects. No one could be the subject of suchan overweening enthusiasm as the hypothesis supposes, withoutbetraying it in his conduct, without being overmastered and led byit as an insane man is by his mania. The very opposite of all thiswas actually the case with the apostles. The Gospels areunpretending, dispassionate narratives, without rhapsody, adulation, or vanity. Their whole conduct disproves the charge offanaticism. Their appeals were addressed more to reason than tofeeling; their deeds were more courageous than rash. They avoidedtumult, insult, and danger whenever they could honorably do so;but, when duty called, their noble intrepidity shrank not. Theywere firm as the trunks of oaks to meet the agony and horror of aviolent death when it came; yet they rather shunned than sought towear the glorious crown from beneath whose crimson circlet dropsof bloody sweat must drip from a martyr's brows. The number of thewitnesses for the resurrection, the abilities they possessed, their opportunities for knowing the facts, prove the impossibilityof their being duped, unless we suppose them to have been blindfanatics. 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 thehistoric resurrection of Christ. He may say, "I confess thewitnesses were capable of knowing, and undoubtedly did know, thetruth; but, for some reason, they suppressed it, and proclaimed adeception. " As to this charge, we not only deny the actuality, buteven the possibility, of its truth. The narratives of theevangelists contain the strongest evidences of their honesty. Themany little unaccountable circumstances they recount, which are somany difficulties in the way of critical belief, the real and theapparent inconsistencies, none of these would have been permittedby fraudulent authors. They are the most natural things in theworld, supposing their writers unsuspiciously honest. They alsofrankly confess their own and each others' errors, ignorance, prejudices, and faults. Would they have done this save fromsimple hearted truthfulness? Would a designing knave voluntarilyreveal to a suspicious scrutiny actions and traits naturallysubversive of confidence in him? The conduct of the disciplesunder the circumstances, through all the scenes of their afterlives, proves their undivided and earnest honesty. The cause theyhad espoused was, if we deny its truth, to the last degreerepulsive in itself and in its concomitants, and they weresurrounded with allurements to desert it. Yet how unyielding, wonderful, was their disinterested devotedness to it, withoutexception! 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 devouredalive by wild beasts, when they were manacled fast amidst theflames till their souls rode forth into heaven in chariots offire, amidst all this, not one of them ever acknowledged fraud orrenounced his belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Were they nothonest? Others have died in support of theories and opinions withwhich their convictions and passions had become interwoven: theydied rather than deny facts which were within the cognizance oftheir senses. Could any man, however firm and dauntless, under thecircumstances, go through the trials they bore, without a feelingof truth and of God to support him? These remarks are particularly forcible in connection with thecareer of Paul. Endowed with brilliant talents, learned, living atthe time and place, he must have been able to form a reliableopinion. And yet, while all the motives that commonly actuate menloudmouthed consistency, fame, wealth, pride, pleasure, the rootedforce of inveterate prejudices all were beckoning to him from thetemples and palaces of the Pharisaic establishment, he spurned theglowing visions of his ambition and dashed to earth the brightdreams of his youth. He ranged himself among the Christians, thefeeble, despised, persecuted Christians; and, after having sufferedevery thing humanity could bear, having preached the resurrectioneverywhere with unflinching power, he was at last crucified, orbeheaded, by Nero; and there, expiring among the seven hills ofRome, he gave the resistless testimony of his death to theresurrection of Jesus, gasping, as it were, with his last breath, "It is true. " Granting the honesty of these men, we could not haveany greater proof of it than we have now. But dishonesty in this matter was not merely untrue; it was alsoimpossible. If fraud is admitted, a conspiracy must have beenformed among the witnesses. But that a conspiracy of such acharacter should have been entered into by such men is in itselfincredible, in the outset. And then, if it had been entered into, it must infallibly have broken through, been found out, or beenbetrayed, in the course of the disasters, perils, terrible trials, to which it and its fabricators were afterwards exposed. Provethat a body of from twelve to five hundred men could form a planto palm off a gross falsehood upon the world, and could thenadhere to it unfalteringly through the severest disappointments, dangers, sufferings, differences of opinion, dissension of feelingand action, without retiring from the undertaking, letting out thesecret, or betraying each other in a single instance in the courseof years, prove this, and you prove that men may do and dare, denyand suffer, not only without motives, but in direct opposition totheir duty, interest, desire, prejudice, and passion. Thedisciples could not have pretended the resurrection fromsensitiveness to the probable charge that they had been miserablydeceived; for they did not understand their Master to predict anysuch event, nor had they the slightest expectation of it. Theycould not have pretended it for the sake of establishing andgiving authority to the good precepts and doctrines Jesus taught;because such a course would have been in the plainest antagonismto all those principles themselves, and because, too, they musthave known both the utter wickedness and the desperate hazards andforlornness of such an attempt to give a fictitious sanction tomoral truths. In such an enterprise there was before them not thefaintest probability of even the slightest success. Every selfishmotive would tend to deter them; for poverty, hatred, disgrace, stripes, imprisonment, contempt, and death stared in their facesfrom the first step that way. Dishonesty, deliberate fraud, then, in this matter, was not merely untrue, but was impossible. Theconclusion from the whole view is, therefore, the conviction thatthe evidence of the witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus isworthy of credence. There are three considerations, further, worthy of notice inestimating the strength of the historic argument for theresurrection. First, the conduct of the Savior himself in relationto the subject. The charge of unbalanced enthusiasm isinconsistent with the whole character and life of Jesus; butsuppose on this point he was an enthusiast, and really believedthat three days after his death he would rise again. In that case, would not his mind have dwelt upon the wonderful anticipatedphenomenon? Would not his whole soul have been wrapped up in it, and his speech have been almost incessantly about it? Yet he spokeof it only three or four times, and then with obscurity. Again:suppose he was an impostor. An impostor would hardly have riskedhis reputation voluntarily on what he knew could never take place. Had he done so, his only reliance must have been upon thecredulous enthusiasm of his followers. He would then have made itthe chief topic, would have striven strenuously to make it aliving and intense hope, an immovable, all controlling faith, concentrating on it their desires and expectations, heart andsoul. But he really did not do this at all. He did not even makethem understand what his vaticinations of the resurrection meant. And when they saw his untenanted body hanging on the cross, theyslunk away in confusion and despair. Admit, again, that Christ wasenthusiast, or impostor, or both: these qualities exist not in thegrave. Here was their end. They could neither raise him from thedead nor move him from the tomb. No considerations in any wayconnected with Christ himself, therefore, can account for theoccurrences that succeeded his death. Secondly, if the resurrection did not take place, what became ofthe Savior's body? We have already given reasons why the disciplescould not have falsely pretended the resurrection. It is alsoimpossible that they obtained, or surreptitiously disposed of, thedead and interred body; because it was in a tomb of rock securelysealed against them, and watched by a guard which they couldneither bribe nor overpower; because they were too muchdisheartened and alarmed to try to get it; because they could notpossibly want it, since they expected a temporal Messiah, and hadno hope of a resurrection like that which they soon beganproclaiming to the world. And as for the story told by the watch, or rather by the chief priests and Pharisees, it has notconsistency enough to hold together. Its foolish unlikelihood hasalways been transparent. It is unreasonable to suppose that freshguards would slumber at a post where the penalty of slumbering wasdeath. And, if one or two did sleep, it is absurd to think allwould do so. Besides, if they slept, how knew they what transpiredin the mean time? Could they have dreamed it? Dreams are not takenin legal depositions; and, furthermore, it would be an astounding, gratuitous miracle if they all dreamed the same thing at the sametime. Finally, a powerful collateral argument in proof of theresurrection of Christ is furnished by the conduct of the Jews. Itmight seem that if the guards told the chief priests, scribes, andPharisees, of the miracles which occurred at the sepulchre, theymust immediately have believed and proclaimed their belief in theMessiahship and resurrection of the crucified Savior. But they hadpreviously remained invulnerable to as cogent proof as this wouldafford. They had acknowledged the miracles wrought by him when hewas alive, but attributed them even his works of beneficence todemoniacal power. They said, "He casteth out devils by the powerof Beelzebub, the prince of devils. " So they acted in the presentcase, and, notwithstanding the peerless miracle related by thesentinels, still persisted in their alienation from the Christianfaith. Their intensely cherished preconceptions respecting theMessiah, their persecution and crucifixion of Jesus, the glaringinconsistency of his teachings and experience with most that theyexpected, these things compelled their incredulity to every proofof the Messiahship of the contemned and murdered Nazarene. For, ifthey admitted the facts on which such proof was based, they wouldmisinterpret them and deny the inferences justly drawn from them. This was plainly the case. It may be affirmed that the Jewsbelieved the resurrection, because they took no fair measures todisprove it, but threatened those who declared it. Since they hadevery inducement to demonstrate its falsity, and might, it seems, have done so had it been false, and yet never made the feeblesteffort to unmask the alleged fraud, we must suspect that they werethemselves secretly convinced of its truth, but dared not let itbe known, for fear it would prevail, become mighty in the earth, and push them from their seats. In the rage and blindness of theirprejudices, they cried, "His blood be on us and on our children!"And from that generation to our own, their history has afforded aliving proof of the historic truth of the gospel, and of thestability of its chief corner stone, the resurrection of Christ. The triumphal progress of Christianity from conquering toconquering, together with the baffled plans and completesubjection of the Jews, show that their providential preparatorymission has been fulfilled. If God is in history, guiding themoral drift of human affairs, then the dazzling success of theproclamation of the risen Redeemer is the Divine seal upon thetruth of his mission and the reality of his apotheosis. Plantinghimself on this ground, surrounding himself with these evidences, the reverential Christian will at least for a long time to comecling firmly to the accepted fact of the resurrection of Christ, regardless of whatever misgivings and perplexities may trouble themind of the iconoclastic and critical truth seeker. The Christian Scriptures, assuming the resurrection of Christ as afact, describe it as a fulfilment of prophecy. Luke reports fromthe risen Savior the words, "O fools, and slow of heart to believeall that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to havesuffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" "Thus it iswritten, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise fromthe dead the third day. " Peter declares that the patriarch Davidbefore "spake of the resurrection of Christ. " And Paul alsoaffirms, "That the promise which was made unto the fathers, Godhath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hathraised up Jesus again. " One can scarcely hesitate in deciding themeaning of these words as they were used by the apostles. Theunanimous opinion and interpretation of the Christians of thefirst centuries, and of all the Church Fathers, leave no shadow ofa doubt that it was believed that the resurrection of Jesus wasrepeatedly foretold in the Old Testament, expected by theprophets, and fulfilled in the event as a seal of the inspiredprophecy. Furthermore, Jesus himself repeatedly prophesied his ownresurrection from the dead, though his disciples did notunderstand his meaning until the event put a clear comment on thewords. He charged those who saw his transfiguration on the mount, "Tell it to no man until the Son of Man be risen again from thedead. " The chief priests told Pilate that they remembered thatJesus said, while he was yet alive, "After three days I will riseagain. " 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 disciplesremembered that he had said this unto them;" and then theyunderstood that "he had spoken of the temple of his body. " It isperfectly plain that the New Testament represents the resurrectionof Christ as the fulfilment of prophecies, those prophecies havingbeen so expounded by him. There are few problems presented to the candid Christian scholarof to day more perplexing than the one involved in the subject ofthese prophecies. Paul declares to King Agrippa, "I say none otherthings than those which the prophets and Moses did say shouldcome: that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the firstthat should rise from the dead and should show light unto theGentiles. " It is vain to attempt to disguise the fact that theingenuous student cannot find these prophecies in the OldTestament as we now have it. He will search it through in vain, unless his eyes create what they see. Let any man endeavor todiscover a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures which, taken with itscontext, can fairly bear such a sense. There is not a shadow ofvalid evidence of any kind to support the merely traditionalnotions on this subject. The only way of discerning predictions ofa death, descent, and ascent, of the Messiah, in the law and theprophets, is by the application of Cabalistic methods ofinterpretation, theories of occult types, double senses, methodswhich now are not tolerable to intelligent men. That Rabbinicalinterpretation which made the story of Ishmael and Isaac, the twochildren borne to Abraham by Hagar and Sarah, an allegoryreferring to the two covenants of Judaism and Christianity, couldeasily extract any desired meaning from any given text. Bearing inmind the prevalence of this kind of exegesis among the Jews, andremembering also that they possessed in the times of Jesus a vastbody of oral law, to which they attributed as great authority asto the written, there are two possible ways of honestly meetingthe difficulty before us. First: in God's counsels it was determined that a Messiah shouldafterwards arise among the Jews. The revealed hope of this stirredthe prophets and the popular heart. It became variously andvaguely hinted in their writings, still more variously andcopiously unfolded in their traditions. The conception of himgradually took form; and they began to look for a warrior prophet, a national deliverer, a theocratic king. Jesus, being the trueMessiah, though a very different personage from the one meant bythe writers and understood by the people, yet being the Messiahforeordained by God, applied these Messianic passages to himself, and explained them according to his experience and fate. This willsatisfactorily clear up the application of some texts. And othersmay be truly explained as poetical illustrations, rhetoricalaccommodations, as when he applies to Judas, at the Last Supper, the words of the Psalm, "He that eateth with me lifteth up hisheel against me;" and when he refers to Jonah's tarry in thewhale's belly as a symbol of his own destined stay beneath thegrave for a similar length of time. Or, secondly, we may concludethat the prophecies under consideration, referred to in the NewTestament, were not derived from any sacred documents now in ourpossession, but either from perished writings, or from oralsources, which we know were abundant then. Justin Martyr saysthere was formerly a passage in Jeremiah to this effect: "The Lordremembered the dead who were sleeping in the earth, and went downto them to preach salvation to them. " 4 There were floating in theJewish mind, at the time of Christ, at least some fragmentarytraditions, vague expectations, that the Messiah was to die, descend to Sheol, rescue some of the captives, and triumphantlyascend. It is true, this statement is denied by some; but theweight of critical authorities seems to us to preponderate in itsfavor, and the intrinsic historical probabilities leave hardly adoubt of it in our own minds. 5 Now, three alternatives are offeredus. Either Jesus interpreted Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, on the Rabbinical ground of a double sense, with mysticapplications; or he accepted the prophecies referred to, from oraltraditions held by his countrymen; or the apostles misunderstood, and in consequence partially misreported, him. All we canpositively say is that these precise predictions are plainly notin the Jewish Scriptures, undoubtedly were in the oral law, andwere certainly received by the apostles as authoritative. Continuing our inquiry into the apostolic view of the resurrectionof Christ, we shall perceive that it is most prominently set forthas the certificate of our redemption from the 4 Dial. Cum Tryph. Sect. Lxxii. 5 Discussed, with full list of references, in Strauss's Life ofJesus, part iii. Cap. I. Sect. 112. kingdom of death to the same glorious destiny which awaited himupon his ascension into heaven. The apostles regarded hisresurrection as a supernatural seal set on his mission, warrantinghis claims as an inspired deliverer and teacher. Thereby, theythought, 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 anacceptance to a heavenly immortality as he had ascended to it. Theresurrection of Christ, then, and not his death, was to them thepoint of vital interest, the hinge on which all hung. Does not therecord plainly show this to an impartial reader? Wherever theapostles preach, whenever they write, they appeal not to the deathof a veiled Deity, but to the resurrection of an appointedmessenger; not to a vicarious atonement or purchase effected bythe mortal sufferings of Jesus, but to the confirmation of thegood tidings he brought, afforded by the Father's raising him fromthe dead. "Whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that hehath raised him from the dead, " Paul proclaimed on Mars Hill. Inthe discourses of the apostles recorded in the Book of Acts, wefind that, when they preached the new religion to new audiences, the great doctrine in all cases set forth as fundamental andabsorbing is the resurrection; not an atoning death, but ajustifying resurrection. "He died for our sins, and rose for ourjustification. " Some of the Athenians thought Paul "a setter forthof two strange gods, Jesus and Resurrection. " And when they desireto characterize Christ, the distinguishing culminating phrasewhich they invariably select shows on what their minds rested asof chief import: they describe him as the one "whom God hathraised from the dead. " "If we believe that Jesus died and roseagain, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring withhim. " "That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of God'spower toward us who believe, according to the working of hismighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him fromthe dead and set him at his own right hand in heaven. " It is plainhere that the dying of Christ is regarded merely as preliminary tohis rising, and that his resurrection and entrance into heaven arereceived as an assurance that faithful disciples, too, shallobtain admission into the heavenly kingdom. The Calvinistic doctrine is that the unutterable vicarious agoniesof the death of Christ placated the wrath of God, satisfied hisjustice, and ransomed the souls of the elect from the tortures ofhell, and that his resurrection was simply his victorious returnfrom a penal conflict with the powers of Satan. The Unitariandoctrine is that the violent death of Christ was an expression ofself sacrificing love, to exert a moral power on the hearts ofmen, and that his resurrection was a miraculous proof of theauthority and truth of his teachings, a demonstration of humanimmortality. We maintain that neither of these views fullycontains the true representation of the New Testament. Theartificial horrors of the former cannot be forced into nor wrungout of the written words; while the natural simplicity andmeagerness of the latter cannot be made to fill up the writtenwords with adequate significance. There is a medium doctrine, based on the conceptions prevalent at the time the Christiansystem was constructed and written; a doctrine which equallyavoids the credulous excess of the Calvinistic interpretation andthe skeptical poverty of the Unitarian; a doctrine which fullyexplains all the relevant language of the New Testament withoutviolence; a doctrine which, for our own part, we feel sureaccurately represents the ideas meant to be conveyed by theScripture authors. We will state it, and then quote, for itsillustration and for their own explanation, the principal textsrelating to the resurrection of Jesus. On account of sin, which had alienated man from God and unfittedhim for heaven, he was condemned after death to descend as adisembodied soul into the dark kingdom of the grave, the underworld. In that cheerless realm of helpless shades and stillnessall departed human spirits were prisoners, and must be, until theadvent of the Messiah, when they, or a part of them, should rise. This was the Jewish belief. Now, the apostles were Jews, who hadthe ideas of their countrymen, to which, upon becoming Christians, they added the new conceptions formed in their minds by theteachings, character, deeds, death, resurrection, of Christ, mixedwith their own meditations and experience. Accepting, with theseprevious notions, the resurrection of Christ as a fact and afulfilment of prophecy, they immediately supposed that histriumphant exit from the prison of the dead and return to heavenwere the prefiguration of the similar deliverance of others andtheir entrance into heaven. They considered him as "the first bornfrom the dead, " "the first fruits of the dead. " They emphaticallycharacterize his return to life as a "resurrection out from amongthe dead, " "[non-ASCII characters], plainly implying that the restof the dead still remained below. 6 They received his experience inthis respect as the revealing type of that which was awaiting hisfollowers. So far as relates to the separate existence of thesoul, the restoration of the widow's son by Elijah, or theresurrection of Lazarus, logically implies all that is implied inthe mere resurrection of Christ. But certain notions oflocalities, of a redemptive ascent, and an opening of heaven forthe redeemed spirits of men to ascend thither, were associatedexclusively with the last. When, through the will of God, Christrose, "then first humanity triumphant passed the crystal ports oflight, and seized eternal youth!" Their view was not that Christeffected all this by means of his own; but that the free grace ofGod decreed it, and that Christ came to carry the plan intoexecution. "God, for his great love to us, even when we were deadin sins, has quickened us together with Christ. " This was effectedas in dramatic show: Christ died, which was suffering the fate ofa sinner; he went in spirit to the subterranean abode of spirits, which was bearing the penalty of sin; he rose again, which wasshowing the penalty of sin removed by Divine forgiveness; heascended into heaven, which was revealing the way for our ascentthrown open. Such is the general scope of thought in close andvital connection with which the doctrine of the resurrection ofChrist stands. We shall spare enlarging on those parts of it whichhave been sufficiently proved and illustrated in precedingchapters, and confine our attention as much as may be to thoseportions which have direct relations with the resurrection ofChrist. It is our object, then, to show what we think will plainlyappear in the light of the above general statement that, to theNew Testament writers, the resurrection, and not the death, ofChrist is the fact of central moment, is the assuring seal of ourforgiveness, reconciliation, and heavenly adoption. 6 Wood, The Last Things, pp. 31-44. They saw two antithetical starting points in the history ofmankind: a career of ruin, beginning with condemned Adam in thegarden of Eden at the foot of the forbidden tree, dragging afleshly race down into Sheol; a career of remedy, beginning withvictorious Christ in the garden of Joseph at the mouth of the rentsepulchre, guiding a spiritual race up into heaven. The Savior himself is reported as saying, "I lay down my life thatI may take it again:" the dying was not for the sake ofsubstitutional suffering, but for the sake of a resurrection. "Except a corn of wheat die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, itbringeth forth much fruit. " "A woman when she is in travail hathsorrow; but as soon as she is delivered of the child sheremembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born intothe world. " The context here shows the Savior's meaning to be thatthe woe of his death would soon be lost in the weal of hisresurrection. The death was merely the necessary antecedent to thesignificant resurrection. "Blessed be the God and Father of ourLord Jesus Christ, who, according to his abundant mercy, hathbegotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of JesusChrist from the dead unto an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for youwho are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvationready to be revealed. " "Him hath God raised on high by his righthand, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. " Howclear it is here that not the vicarious death of Christ buys offsinners, but his resurrection shows sins to be freely forgiven, the penalty remitted! "Remember that Jesus Christ was raised fromthe dead, according to my gospel: therefore I endure all thingsfor the elect's sake, that they may obtain the salvation which isin Christ Jesus with eternal glory. " "Be it known unto you, therefore, men, brethren, that through Him whom God raised againis preached unto you the forgiveness of sins. " The passage in theEpistle to the Hebrews, ninth chapter, from the twenty third verseto the twenty seventh, most emphatically connects the annulling ofsin through the sacrifice of Christ with his ascended appearancein heaven. "Jesus who was delivered for our offences and wasraised again for our justification:" that is, Jesus died becausehe had entered the condition of sinful humanity, the penalty ofwhich was death; he was raised to show that God had forgiven usour sins and would receive us to heaven instead of banishing us tothe under world. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the LordJesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised himfrom the dead, thou shalt be saved. " Belief in the resurrection ofChrist is here undeniably made the great condition of salvation. No text can be found in which belief in the death, or blood, oratoning merits, of Christ is made that condition. And yet ninetenths of Christendom by their creeds are to day proclaiming, "Believe in the vicarious sufferings of Christ, and thou shalt besaved; believe not in them, and thou shalt be damned!" "God hathboth raised up the Lord and will also raise up us. " "If Christ benot raised, your faith is vain: ye are yet in your sins. " Thistext cannot be explained upon the common Calvinistic or Unitariantheories. Whether Christ was risen or not made no difference intheir 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 supposingthat heaven had been opened for them: they were yet held in thenecessity of descending to the under world, the penalty of theirsins. The careful reader will observe that, in many places in theScriptures where a burden and stress of importance seem laid uponthe death of Christ, there immediately follows a reference to hisresurrection, showing that the dying is only referred to as thepreparatory step to the rising, the resurrection being theessential thing. "The Apostle Paul scarcely speaks of the death ofthe Savior except in connection with his resurrection, " Bleeksays, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. "It isChrist that died, yea, rather, that is risen again and is now atthe right hand of God. " "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again. " "To this endChrist both died, and rose and lived again. " "He died for them androse again. " We confidently avow, therefore, that the ChristianScriptures concentrate the most essential significance and valueof the mission of Jesus in his resurrection, describing it as theDivine seal of his claims, the visible proof and pledge of ourredemption, by God's freely forgiving grace, from the fatalbondage of death's sepulchral domain to the blessed splendors ofheaven's immortal life. There remain a class of passages to be particularly noticed, inwhich an extraordinary emphasis seems to be laid on Christ'ssufferings, Christ's blood, Christ's death, three phrases thatmean virtually the same thing and are used interchangeably. Thepeculiar prominence given to the idea of the sacrifice of Christin the instances now referred to is such as might lead one tosuppose that some mysterious efficacy was meant to be attributedto it. But we think an accurate examination of the subject willshow that these texts are really in full harmony with the view wehave been maintaining. Admitting that the resurrection of Christwas the sole circumstance of ultimate meaning and importance, still, his violent and painful death would naturally be spoken ofas often and strongly as it is, for two reasons. First, the chiefground of wonder and claim for gratitude to him was that he shouldhave left his pre existent state of undisturbed bliss and glory, and submitted to such humiliation and anguish for others, forsinners. Secondly, it was the prerequisite to his resurrection, the same, in effect, with it, since the former must lead to thelatter; for, as the foremost apostle said, "It was not possiblethat he should be holden in death. " The apostolical writers do not speak of salvation by the blood ofChrist any more plainly than they do of salvation by the name ofChrist, salvation by grace, and salvation by faith. If at one timethey identify him with the sacrificial "lamb, " at another timethey as distinctively identify him with the "high priest offeringhimself, " and again with "the great Shepherd of the sheep, " andagain with "the mediator of the new covenant, " and again with "thesecond Adam. " These are all figures of speech, and, takensuperficially, they determine nothing as to doctrine. Thepropriety and the genuine character and force of the metaphor arein each case to be carefully sought with the lights of learningand under the guidance of a docile candor. The thoughts that, inconsequence of transmitted sin, all departed souls of men wereconfined in the under world that Christ, to carry out andrevealingly exemplify the free grace of the Father, came into theworld, died a cruel death, descended to the prison world of thedead, declared there the glad tidings, rose thence and ascendedinto heaven, the forerunner of the ransomed hosts to follow, thesethoughts enable us to explain, in a natural, forcible, andsatisfactory manner, the peculiar phraseology of the New Testamentin regard to the death of Christ, without having recourse to thearbitrary conceptions and mystical horror usually associated withit now. For instance, consider the passage in the second chapter of theEpistle to the Ephesians, from the eleventh verse to thenineteenth. The writer here says that "the Gentiles, who formerlywere far off, strangers from the covenants of promise, are nowmade nigh by the blood of Christ. " This language he clearlyexplains as meaning that through the death and resurrection ofChrist "the middle wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles wasbroken down" and a universal religion inaugurated, free from allinvidious distinctions and carnal ordinances. In his bodily deathand spiritual ascension the Jewish ritual law was abolished andthe world wide moral law alone installed. From his spirit, risinginto heaven, all national peculiarities fell away, and through himJews and Gentiles both had access, by communion with his ascendedand cosmopolitan soul, unto the Father. A careful study of all thepassages in the New Testament which speak of Christ as deliveringmen from the wrath of God will lead, it seems to us, almost everyunprejudiced person to agree with one of the ablest Germancritics, who says that "the technical phrase 'wrath of God' heremeans, historically, banishment of souls into the under world, andthat the fact of Christ's triumph and ascent was a precious pledgeshowing to the Christians that they too should ascend to eternallife in heaven. "7 The doctrine of the descent of Christ among thedead and of his redemptive mission there has of late wellnighfaded from notice; but if any one wishes to see the evidence ofits universal reception and unparalleled importance in theChristian Church for fifteen hundred years, presented inoverwhelming quantity and irresistible array, let him read thelearned work devoted to this subject recently published inGermany. 8 He can hardly peruse this work and follow up itsreferences without seeing that, almost without an exception, fromthe days of Peter and Paul to those of Martin Luther, it has beenheld that "the death and resurrection of Christ are the two polesbetween which, " as Guder says, "his descent into the under worldlies. " The phrase "blood of Christ" is often used in Scripture ina pregnant sense, including the force of meaning that would beexpressed by his death, descent, resurrection, and ascension, withall their concomitants. As a specimen of innumerable passages oflike import which might be cited, we will quote a singleexpression from Epiphanius, showing that the orthodox teachers inthe fourth century attributed redeeming efficacy to Christ'sresurrection rather than to his death. " As the pelican restoresits dead offspring by dropping its own blood upon their wounds, soour Lord Jesus Christ dropped his blood upon Adam, Eve, and allthe dead, and gave them life by his burial and resurrection. " 9 It was a part of the Mosaic ritual, laid down in the sixteenthchapter of Leviticus, that on the great annual day of expiationthere should be two goats chosen by lot, one for the Lord and onefor Azazel. The former the high priest was to slay, and with hisblood sprinkle 7 Bretschneider, Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect. 59: Christus derErloser vom Tode. 8 Guder, Die Lehre von der Erscheinung Jesu Christi unter denTodten: In ihrem Zusammenhange mit der Lehre von den LetztenDingen. 9 Physiol. , cap. 8: De Pelecano. the mercy seat. The latter, when the high priest's hands had beenlaid on his head and all the iniquities of the children of Israelconfessed over him, was to be sent into the wilderness and loosed. The former goat is called "a sin offering for the people. " Thelatter is called "a scape goat to make an atonement with theLord. " The blood of the sin offering could not have been supposedto be a substitute purchasing the pardon of men's offences, because there is no hint of any such idea in the record, andbecause it was offered to reconcile "houses, " "tabernacles, ""altars, " as well as to reconcile men. It had simply a ceremonialsignificance. Such rites were common in many of the earlyreligions. They were not the efficient cause of pardon, but werethe formal condition of reconciliation. And then, in regard to thescapegoat, it was not sacrificed as an expiation for sinners; itmerely symbolically carried off the sins already freely forgiven. All these forms and phrases were inwrought with the whole nationallife and religious language of the Jews. Now, when Jesus appeared, a messenger from God, to redeem men from their sins and to promisethem pardon and heaven, and when he died a martyr's death in thefulfilment of his mission, how perfectly natural that thissacrificial imagery these figures of blood, propitiation, sprinkling the mercy seat should be applied to him, and to hiswork and fate! The burden of sins forgiven by God's grace in theold covenant the scape goat emblematically bore away, and thepeople went free. So if the words must be supposed to have anobjective 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 thatis, the Hadean doom which God's free grace had annulled and openheaven to the ranks of reconciled souls. There is not the leastshadow of proof that the sacrifices in the Mosaic ritual wereDivinely ordained as types pre figuring the great sacrifice ofChrist. There is no such pretence in the record, no such traditionamong the people, not the slightest foundation whatever of anysort to warrant that arbitrary presumption. All such applicationsof them are rhetorical; and their historical force and moralmeaning are clearly explicable on the views which we havepresented in the foregoing pages, but are most violently strainedand twisted by the Calvinistic theory to meet the severeexigencies of a theoretical dogma. If any one, granting that the central efficacy of the mission ofChrist, dogmatically and objectively considered, lay in hisdescent into Hades and in his resurrection, maintains that stillcertain passages in the New Testament do ascribe an expiatoryeffect directly to his death as such, we reply that thisinterpretation is quite likely to be correct. And we can easilytrace the conception to its origin beyond the pale of revelation. It was an idea prevalent among the Jews in the time of theapostles, and before, that death was an atonement for all sins, and that the death of the righteous atoned for the sins ofothers. 10 Now, the apostles might adopt this view and apply itpre eminently to the case of Christ. This is the very explanationgiven by Origen. 11 De Wette quotes the following sentence, andmany others of the same purport, 10 Gfrorer, Gesehichte des Urchristenthums, abth. Ii. Pp. 187190. 11 Mosheim, Commentaries on Christianity in the First ThreeCenturies, Eng. Trans. , vol. Ii. Pp. 162-163. from the Talmud: "The death of the just is the redemption ofsinners. "12 The blood of any righteous man was a little atonement;that of Christ was a vast one. The former all Protestants call aheathen error. So they should the latter, because it sprung fromthe same source and is the same in principle. If, then, there areany scriptural texts which imply that the mere death of Christ hada vicarious, expiatory efficacy, they are, so far forth, thereflection of heathen and Jewish errors yet lingering in the mindsof the writers, and not the inspired revelation of an isolated, arbitrary after expedient contrived in the secret counsels of Godand wonderfully interpolated into the providential history of theworld. But, if there are any such passages, they are few andunimportant. The great mass of the scriptural language on thissubject is fairly and fully explained by the historical theorywhose outlines we have sketched. The root of the matter is theresurrection of Christ out from among the dead and his ascent intoheaven. It has not been our purpose in this chapter, or in the precedingchapters, to present the history of the Christian doctrine of theatonement, either in its intrinsic significance or in itsrelations to subjective religious experience. We have only soughtto explain it, according to the original understanding of it, inits objective relations to the fate of men in the future life. Theimportance of the subject, its difficulty, and the profoundprejudices connected with it, are so great as not only to excuse, but even to require, much explanatory repetition to make the truthclear and to recommend it, in many lights, with various methods, and by accumulated authorities. Those who wish to see the wholesubject of the atonement treated with consummate fulness andability, leaving nothing to be desired from the historical pointof view, have only to read the masterly work of Baur. 13 In leaving this part of our subject here, we would submit thefollowing considerations to the candid judgment of the reader. Admitting the truth of the common doctrine of the atonement, whydid Christ die? It does not appear how there could be anyparticular efficacy in mere death. The expiation of sin which hehad undertaken required only a certain amount of suffering. It didnot as far as we can see on the theory of satisfaction by anequivalent substituted suffering require death. It seems as iflocal and physical ideas must have been associated with thethought of his death. And we find the author of the Epistle to theHebrews thus replying to the question, Why did Christ die? "Thatthrough death he might destroy him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of deathwere all their lifetime subject to bondage. " Now, plainly, thisend was accomplished by his resurrection bursting asunder thebonds of Hades and showing that it was no longer the hopelessprison of the dead. The justice of this explanation appears fromthe logical necessity of the series of ideas, the internalcoherence and harmony of thought. It has been ably shown thatsubstantially this view is the accurate interpretation of the NewTestament doctrine by 12 Comm. De Morte Christi Expiatoria, cap. Iii. : Qua JudaorumRecentiorum Christologia de Passione ac Morte Messia docet. 13 Die Christliche Lehre von der Versohnung in ihrerGeschichtlichen Entwicklung von der Alteaten Zeit bis auf dieNeueste. Steinbart, 14 Schott, 15 Bretschneider, 16 Klaiber, 17 and others. Thegradual deviations from this early view can be historicallytraced, step by step, through the refining speculations oftheologians. First, in ecclesiastical history, after the NewTestament times, it is thought the devil has a right over allsouls in consequence of sin. Christ is a ransom offered to thedevil to offset his claim. Sometimes this is represented as a fairbargain, sometimes as a deception practised on the devil, sometimes as a battle waged with him. Next, it is conceived thatthe devil has no right over human souls, that it is God who hasdoomed them to the infernal prison and holds them there for theirsin. Accordingly, the sacrifice of Christ for their ransom isoffered not to the tyrannical devil but to the offended God. Finally, in the progress of culture, the satisfaction theoryappears; and now the suffering of Christ is neither to buy soulsfrom the devil nor to appease God and soften his anger intoforgiveness; but it is to meet the inexorable exigencies of theabstract law of infinite justice and deliver sinners by bearingfor them the penalty of sin. The whole course of thought, oncecommenced, is natural, inevitable; but the starting point is froman error, and the pausing places are at false goals. The view which we have asserted to be the scriptural viewprevailed as the orthodox doctrine of the Church throughout thefirst three centuries, as Bahr has proved in his valuable treatiseon the subject. 18 He shows that during that period Christ's deathwas regarded as a revelation of God's love, a victory over thedevil, (through his resurrection, ) a means of obtaining salvationfor men, but not as a punitive sacrifice, not as a vindication ofGod's justice, not as a vicarious satisfaction of the law. 19 Ifthe leading theologians of Christendom, such as Anselm, Calvin, and Grotius, have so thoroughly repudiated the original Christianand patristic doctrine of the atonement, and built anotherdoctrine upon their own uninspired speculations, why should ourmodern sects defer so slavishly to them, and, instead of freelyinvestigating the subject for themselves from the first sources ofScripture and spiritual philosophy, timidly cling to the resultsreached by these biassed, morbid, and over sharp thinkers? Inproportion as scholarly, unfettered minds engage in such acriticism, we believe the exposition given in the foregoing pageswill be recognised as scriptural. Without involving this wholetheory, how can any one explain the unquestionable fact thatduring the first four centuries the entire orthodox Churchbelieved that Christ at his resurrection from the under worlddelivered Adam from his imprisonment there?20 All acknowledge thatthe phrase "redemption by the blood of Christ" is a metaphor. Theonly question is, what meaning was it intended to convey? Wemaintain its meaning to be that 14 System der Reinen Philosophie, oder Gluckseligkeitslehre desChristenthums, u. S. F. 15 Epitome Theologia Christiana Dogmatica. 16 Die Lehren von Adam's Fall, der Erbsunde, und dem OpferChristi. 17 Studien der Evang. Geietlichkeit Wurtemburgs, viii. 1, 2. Doederlein, Morus, Knapp, Schwarze, and Reinhard affirm that thedeath of Christ was not the price of our pardon, but theconfirming declaration of free pardon from God. Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 297, note 5. 18 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten DreiJahrhunderteu. 19 Die Lehre der Kirche vom Tode Jesu in den Ersten DreiJahrhunderten, 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 whenChrist, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi. through all the events and forces associated with the death ofChrist, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, menare delivered from the doom of the under world. The commontheology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatoryefficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system knownas Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a savingspiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretationcharges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of thelove of God freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. Thesecond seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeancelegally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appetite. Thethird fills it with a regenerative moral influence to bedistributed upon the characters of believers. The two former alsoinclude 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 themission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which theylived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples ofJesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortalitybrought to light by Christianity. 21 The second is the form offalse theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruelresults of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third isthe dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truthin the case. There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holdsup the resurrection of Christ. It is regarded as a summons to amoral and spiritual resurrection within the breast of thebeliever. As the great Forerunner had ascended to a spiritual andimmortal life in the heavens, so his followers should be inspiredwith such a realizing sense of heavenly things, with such Divinefaith and fellowship, as would lift them above the world, with allits evanescent cares, and fix their hearts with God. This highcommunion with Christ, and intense assurance of a destined speedyinheritance with him, should render the disciple insensible to theclamorous distractions of earth, invulnerable to the open andsecret assaults of sin, as if in the body he were already dead, and only alive in the spirit to the obligations of holiness, theattractions of piety, and the promises of heaven. "When we weredead in trespasses and sins, God loved us, and hath quickened ustogether with Christ, and hath raised us up together and made ussit together in heavenly places. " "If ye, then, be risen withChrist, set your affection on things above, not on earthly things;for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. " Thismoral symbolic application of the resurrection is most beautifuland effective. Christ has risen, immaculate and immortal, into thepure and holy heaven: then live virtuously and piously, that youmay be found worthy to be received unto him. "He that hath thishope purifieth himself, even as He is pure. " Paul enforces thisthought through the striking figure that, since "we are freed fromthe law through the death of Christ, we should be married to hisrisen spirit and bring forth fruit unto God. " And again, when hespeaks in these words, "Christ in you the hope of glory, " wesuppose he refers to the spiritual image of the risen Redeemerformed in the disciples' imagination and heart, the prefiguringand witnessing pledge of their ascension also to heaven. The samepractical use is made of the doctrine through the rite and sign ofbaptism. "Ye are buried with Christ in 21 Bretschneider forcibly illustrates this in his Handbuch derDogmatik der Evang. Luther. Kirche, sects. 156-158, band ii. baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through faith in theworking of God, who hath raised him from the dead. " "Wherefore, ifye 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 wastypically dead and buried, as Jesus was in the tomb; when he rosefrom the waters into the air again, he figuratively representedChrist rising from the dead into heaven. Henceforth, therefore, hewas to consider himself as dead to all worldly sins and lusts, alive to all heavenly virtues and aspirations. "Therefore, " theapostle says, "we are buried with Christ by baptism unto death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we shouldwalk in newness of life. " "In that Christ died, he died unto sinonce; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckonye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive untoGod. " "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. Whenhe died, their hearts died within them; they shrank away inhopeless confusion and gloom. When he returned to life andascended 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, Outof their darkness and despair, Triumphant over fears and foes, Thesouls of his disciples rose. " An unheard of assurance of the Father's love and of their eternalinheritance flooded their being with its regenerating, upliftingpower. To their absorbing anticipations the mighty consummation ofall was at hand. In reflective imagination it was already past, and they, dead to the world, only lived to God. The material worldand the lust thereof had sunk beneath them and vanished. They weremoving in the universe of imperishable realities unseen by thefleshly eye. To their faith already was unrolled over them thatnew firmament in whose spanless welkin no cloudy tempests evergather and break, and the serene lights never fade nor go down. This experience of a spiritual exaltation above the sins anddegrading turmoils of passion, above the perishing baubles of theearth, into the religious principles which are independent andassured, peace, and bliss, and eternity, is attainable by all whowith the earnestness of their souls assimilate the moral truths ofChristianity, pressing in pious trust after the steps of the risenMaster. And this, after all, is the vital essence of the doctrineof the resurrection as it makes practical appeal to us. This willstand, though gnawing time and hostile criticism should assail andshake all the rest. It is something not to be mechanically wroughtupon us from without, but to be done within by our own voluntaryeffort and prayer, by God's help. To rise from sloth, unbelief, sin, from moral death, to earnestness, faith, beneficence, toeternal life in the breast, is a real and most sublimeresurrection, the indispensable preparation for that other andfinal one which shall raise us from the sepulchre to the sky. When, on Easter morning, Christian disciples throughout the worldhear the joyous cry, "Christ is risen, " and their ownhearts instinctively respond, with an unquenchable persuasion thathe is now alive somewhere in the heights of the universe, "Christis risen indeed, " they should endeavor in spirit to rise too, risefrom the deadly bondage and corruption of vice and indifference. While the earth remains, and men survive, and the evils whichalienate them from God and his blessedness retain any sway overthem, so oft as that hallowed day comes round, this is thekindling message of Divine authority ever fresh, and oftranscendent import never old, that it bears through all theborders of Christendom to every responsible soul: "Awake from yoursleep, arise from your death, lift up your eyes to heaven, and therisen Redeemer will give you the light of immortal life!" Havethis awakening and deathless experience in the soul, and you willbe troubled by no doubts about an everlasting life succeeding theclose of the world. But so long as this spiritual resurrection inthe breast is unknown, you can have no knowledge of eternal life, no experimental faith in a future entrance from the grave intoheaven, no, not though millions of resurrections had crowded theinterstellar space with ascending shapes. Rise, then, from yourmoral graves, and already, by faith and imagination, sit inheavenly places with Christ Jesus. Before leaving this subject, it belongs to us to look at it as atheory; that is, to consider with critical scrutiny theconclusions which are supposed to flow from its central fact. Wemust regard it from three distinct points of view, seeking itsmeaning in sound logic, its force in past history, its value inpresent experience. First, then, we are to inquire what really isthe logical significance of the resurrection of Christ. Thelooseness and confusion of thought prevailing in relation to thispoint are amazing. It seems as if mankind were contented withinvestigations careless, reasonings incoherent, and inferencesarbitrary, in proportion to the momentousness of the matter inhand. In regard to little details of sensible fact and dailybusiness their observation is sharp, their analysis careful, theirreflection patient; but when they approach the great problems ofmorality, God, immortality, they shrink from commensurate effortsto master those mighty questions with stern honesty, and remainsatisfied with fanciful methods and vague results. Theresurrection of Christ is generally regarded as a directdemonstration of the immortality of man, an argument ofirrefragable validity. But this is an astonishing mistake. Theargument was not so constructed by Paul. He did not seek directlyto prove the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of thedead. He took for granted the Pharisaic doctrine that all souls onleaving their bodies descended to Sheol, where they darklysurvived, waiting to be summoned forth at the arrival of theMessianic epoch. Assuming the further premise that Christ afterdeath went down among these imprisoned souls, and then rose thenceagain, Paul infers, by a logical process strictly valid andirresistible to one holding those premises, that the generaldoctrine of a resurrection from the dead is true, and that by thisvisible pledge we may expect it soon, since the Messiah, who is tousher in its execution, has already come and finished thepreliminary stages of his work. The apostle's own words plainlyshow this to be his meaning. "If there be no resurrection of thedead, then is Christ not risen. But now is Christ risen from thedead, become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by mancame death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Everyman 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 notionsof 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 traditionaldogma, ridiculed by many, cared for at all by few, realizinglyheld by almost none, Paul's argument has been perverted andmisinterpreted, until it is now commonly supposed to mean this:Christ has risen from the dead: therefore the soul of man isimmortal. Whereas the argument really existed in his mind in thereverse form, thus: The souls of men are immortal and arehereafter to be raised up: therefore Christ has risen as anexample and illustration thereof. It is singular to notice that hehas himself clearly stated the argument in this form three timeswithin the space of four consecutive verses, as follows: "If therebe no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:" "Godraised Christ not up, if so be that the dead rise not. " "For ifthe dead rise not, then is Christ not raised. " The fact of theresurrection of Christ, taken in connection with the relatednotions previously held in the mind of Paul, formed the complementof an irresistible argument to prove the impending resurrection ofthe dead, But if it be now perceived that those other notions werePharisaic errors, the argument, as he employed it, falls to theground. Taken by itself and analyzed by a severe logic, the resurrectionof Christ proves nothing conclusively in regard to ourimmortality. If it did of itself prove any thing, the directlogical inference from it would be that henceforth all men, threedays after death, would rise bodily from the dead, appear for aseason on earth as before, and then ascend visibly into the sky. If at the present time a man who had been put to death andentombed three days should openly come forth alive, considered asan isolated fact, what would it prove? It would merely prove thata wonderful event had occurred. It would show that either by somemysterious means he had escaped death, or else that by someapparently preternatural agency he had been restored to life fromthe dead. Taken by itself, it could not prove whether theoccurrence was caused by a demoniacal or by a Divine power, or bysome occult force of nature developed by a peculiar combination ofconditions. The strange event would stand clear to our senses; butall beyond that would be but an hypothesis of our own, and liableto mistake. Consequently, we say, the resurrection, taken byitself, proves no doctrine. But we may so suppose the case thatsuch an event would, from its relation to something else, acquirelogical meaning. For instance, if Christ had taught that he hadsupernatural knowledge of truth, a Divine commission to reveal afuture life, and said that, after he should have been dead andburied three days, God would restore him to life to authenticatehis words, and if, then, so stupendous a miracle occurred inaccordance with his prediction, it would prove that his claims anddoctrine were true, because God is no accomplice in deception. Such was the case with Jesus as narrated; and thus hisresurrection appears, not as having doctrinal significance anddemonstrative validity in itself, but as a miraculousauthentication of his mission. That is to say, the Christian'sfaith in immortality rests not directly on the resurrection ofChrist, but on his teachings, which were confirmed and sealed byhis resurrection. It is true that, even in this modified form, some persons of dialectical minds will deny all validity to theargument. What necessary connection is there, they will ask, between the exhibition of mechanico chemical wonders, physicalfeats, however abnormal and inexplicable, and the possession ofinfallibility of intellectual insight and moral utterance? If aman should say, God is falsehood and hatred, and in evidence ofhis declaration should make a whole cemetery disembogue its deadalive, or cause the sun suddenly to sink from its station at noonand return again, would his wonderful performance prove hishorrible doctrine? Why, or how, then, would a similar feat provethe opposite doctrine? Plainly, there is not, on rigid logicalprinciples, any connecting tie or evidencing coherence between aphysical miracle and a moral doctrine. 22 We admit the correctnessof this, on philosophical grounds. But the validity of a miracleas proof of a doctrine rests on the spontaneous assumption that noman can work a miracle unless God specially delegate him thepower: thereby God becomes the voucher of his envoy. And when aperson claiming to be a messenger from God appears, saying, "TheFather hath commanded me to declare that in the many mansions ofhis house there is a blessed life for men after the close of thislife, " and when he promises that, in confirmation of his claim, God will restore him to life after he shall have been three daysdead, and when he returns accordingly triumphant from thesepulchre, the argument will be unquestioningly received as validby the instinctive common sense of all who are convinced of thefacts. We next pass from the meaning of the resurrection in logic to itsforce and working in history. When Jesus hung on the cross, andthe scornful shouts of the multitude murmured in his ears, thedisciples had fled away, disappointed, terror stricken, despairing. His star seemed set in a hopeless night of shame anddefeat. The new religion appeared a failure. But in three daysaffairs 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 anorganic centre of thought and belief, as a fervid and enduringincitement to action, in the apostolic times and all through theearly centuries, the received fact of the resurrection of Christwielded an incomparable influence and produced incalculableresults. Christianity indeed rose upon it, and, to a great extent, flourished through it. The principal effect which the gospel hashad in bringing life and immortality to light throughout a largepart of the world is to be referred to the proclaimed resurrectionof Christ. For without the latter the former would not have been. Its historical value has therefore been immense. More than ninetenths of the dormant common faith of Christendom in a future lifenow outwardly reposes on it from tradition and custom. The greatmajority of Christians grow up, by education and habit, withoutany sharp conscientious investigation of their own, to anundisturbed belief in immortality, a belief passively resting onthe demonstration of the doctrine supposed to have been furnishedby the resurrection of Christ in Judea two thousand years ago. Thehistorical power of that fact has therefore been inexpressiblyimportant; and its vast and happy consequences as food and basisof faith still remain. But this historic force is no longer whatit once was as a living and present cause. It now operates mostlythrough traditional reception as an established doctrine to betaken 22 J. Blanco White, Letter on Miracles, in appendix to Martineau'sRationale of Religious Inquiry. for granted, without fresh individual inquiry. Education andcustom use it as an unexamined but trusted foundation to build onby common assumptions. And so the historic impetus is not yetspent. But it certainly has diminished; and it will diminish more. When faced with dauntless eyes and approached by skepticalmethods, it of course cannot have the silencing, all sufficientauthority, now that it is buried in the dim remoteness of nineteencenturies and surrounded by obscuring accompaniments, that it hadwhen its light blazed close at hand. The historical force of thealleged resurrection of Christ must evidently, other things beingequal, lessen to an unprejudiced inquirer in some proportion tothe lengthening distance of the event from him in time, and thegrowing difficulties of ignorance, perplexity, doubt, manifolduncertainty, deficiency, infidel suggestions, and naturalisticpossibilities, intervening between it and him. The shock of faithgiven by the miracle is dissipated in coming through such an abyssof time. The farther off and the longer ago it was, the morechances for error and the more circumstances of obscurity thereare, and so much the worth and force of the historical belief init will naturally become fainter, till they will finally fadeaway. An honest student may bow humbly before the august front ofChristian history and join with the millions around inacknowledging the fact of the resurrection of Christ. But wemaintain that the essential fact in this historic act is not thevisible resuscitation of the dead body, but the celestialreception of the deathless spirit. So Paul evidently thought; forhe had never seen Christ in the flesh, yet he places himself, as awitness to the resurrection of Christ, in the same rank with thosewho had seen him on his reappearance in the body: "Last of all hewas seen of me also. " Paul had only seen him in vision as aglorified spirit of heaven. We know that our belief in the fleshly resurrection of Jesus restson education and habit, on cherished associations of reverence andattachment, rather than on sifted testimony and convincing proof. It is plain, too, that if a person takes the attitude, not ofpiety and receptive trust, but of skeptical antagonism, it isimpossible, as the facts within our reach are to day, to convincehim of the asserted reality in question. An unprejudiced mindcompetently taught and trained for the inquiry, but whose attitudetowards the declared fact is that of distrust, a mind which willadmit nothing but what is conclusively proved, cannot be drivenfrom its position by all the extant material of evidence. Education, associations, hopes, affections, leaning that way, hemay be convinced; but leaning the other way, or poised inindifference on a severe logical ground, he will honestly remainin his unbelief despite of all the arguments that can bepresented. In the first place, he will say, "The only history wehave of the resurrection is in the New Testament; and thetestimony of witnesses in their own cause is always suspicious;and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote thosedocuments, or precisely when and how they originated: besidesthat, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterlyuncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation whichsatisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in anysevere court of reason. " And in reply, although we may claim thatthere is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble Christian, previously inclined to such a faith, that the New Testamentdocuments were written by the persons whose names they bear, andthat their accounts are true, yet we cannot pretend that there issufficient evidence effectually to convince a critical inquirerthat there is no possibility of ungenuineness and unauthenticity. In the second place, such a person will say, "Many fabulousmiracles have been eagerly credited by contemporaries of theirprofessed authors, and handed down to the credulity of aftertimes; many actual events, honestly, interpreted as miracles, without fraud in any party concerned, have been so accepted andtestified to. Roman Catholic Christendom claims to this day the performance ofmiracles within the Church; while all Protestant Christendomscouts them as ridiculous tales: and this may be one of them. Howcan we demonstrate that it does not fall within the same class onthe laws of evidence?" And although our own moral beliefs andsympathies may force upon us the most profound conviction to thecontrary, it is plainly out of our power to disprove thepossibility of this hypothesis being true. In the third place, hewill say, "Of all who testify to the resurrection, there isnothing in the record admitting its entire reliableness as aningenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors toshow that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, orthat any one of them made any real search into that point. He mayhave revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in hisgrave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at lasthave died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he wasused to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, withperfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion ordeceit anywhere, may have put a miraculous interpretation upon itall, such additional particulars as his visible ascension into thesky being a later mythical accretion. " This view may well seemoffensive, even shocking, to the pious believer; but it is plainlypossible. It is intrinsically more easily conceivable than theaccredited miracle. It is impossible positively to refute it: theavailable data do not exist. Upon the whole, then, we concludethat the time is coming when the basis of faith in immortality, inorder to stand the tests of independent scrutiny, must behistorically as well as logically shifted from a blind dependenceon the miraculous resurrection of Christ to a wise reliance oninsight into the supernatural capacity and destiny of man, on thedeductions of moral reason and the prophecies of religious trust. Finally, we pause a moment, in closing this discussion, to weighthe practical value of the resurrection of Christ as acknowledgedin the experience of the present time. How does that event, admitted as a fact, rest in the average personal experience ofChristians now? We shall provoke no intelligent contradiction whenwe say that it certainly does not often rest on laborious researchand rigorous testing of evidence. We surely risk nothing in sayingthat with the multitude of believers it rests on a docilereception of tradition, an unquestioning conformity to theestablished doctrine. And that reception and conformity in thepresent instance depend, we shall find by going a step furtherback, upon a deep a priori faith in God and immortality. When Paulreasons that, if the dead are not to rise, Christ is not risen, but that the dead are to rise, and therefore Christ is risen, hisargument reposes on a spontaneous practical method of moralassumption, not on a judicial process of logical proof. So is itwith Christians now. The intense moral conviction that God isgood, and that there is another life, and that it would besupremely worthy of God to send a messenger to teach that doctrineand to rise from the dead in proof of it, it is this earnestprevious faith that gives plausibility, vitality, and power to thepreserved tradition of the actual event. If we trace the case hometo the last resort, as it really lies in the experience developedin us by Christianity, we shall find that a deep faith in God isthe basis of our belief, first in general immortality, andsecondly in the special resurrection of Christ as related thereto. But, by a confusion, or a want, of thought, the former ismistakenly supposed to rest directly and solely on the latter. Thedoctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection of Christfall within the province of faith, resting on moral grounds, notwithin that of knowledge, resting on logical grounds. For example:what direct proof is there that Christ, when he vanished from thedisciples, went to the presence of God in heaven, to die no more?It was only seen that he disappeared: all beyond that except as itrests on belief in the previous words of Christ himself is aninference of faith, a faith kindled in the soul by God and notcreated by the miracle of the resurrection. That imagination, tradition, feeling, and faith, have much more todo with the inferences commonly drawn from the resurrection ofChrist than any strict investigation of its logical contents has, appears clearly enough from the universal neglect to draw anyinferences from, or to attribute any didactic importance to, theother resurrections recorded in the New Testament. We referespecially to the resurrection narrated in the twenty seventhchapter of Matthew, "the most stupendous miracle ever wrought uponearth, " it has been termed; and yet hardly any one ever deigns tonotice it. Thus the evangelist writes: "And the graves wereopened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and cameout of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holycity, and appeared unto many. " Nothing is inferred from thisalleged event but the power of God. Yet logically what separatesit from the resurrection of Christ? In Greece there was theaccredited account of the resurrection of Er, in Persia that ofViraf, in Judea that of Lazarus, in other nations those of otherpersons. None of these ever produced great results. Yet theresurrection of one individual from the dead logically containsall that that of any other individual can. Why, then, has that ofChrist alone made such a change in the faith of the world?Because, through a combination of causes, it has appealed to theimagination and heart of the world and stirred their believingactivity, because the thought was here connected with a person, ahistory, a moral force, and a providential interposition, fit forthe grandest deductions and equal to the mightiest effects. It isnot accurate philosophical criticism that has done this, buthumble love and faith. In the experience of earnest Christians, a personal belief in theresurrection of Christ, vividly conceived in the imagination andtaken home to the heart, is chiefly effective in its spiritual, not in its argumentative, results. It stirs up the powers andawakens the yearnings of the soul, opens heaven to the gaze, locates there, as it were visibly, a glorious ideal, and thushelps one to enter upon an inward realization of the immortalworld. The one essential thing is not that Jesus appeared alive inthe flesh after his physical death, the revealer of superhumanpower and possessor of infallibility, but that he divinely livesnow, 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 Christand the apostolic writers usually put into the words "death, ""life, " and other kindred terms. These words are scarcely everused in their merely literal sense, but are charged with a vividfulness of significance not to be fathomed without especialattention. "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. "Obviously this means more than simple life; because those whoneglect 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 inhim, but abideth in death;" that is to say, a soul rankling withbad passions is "in the gall of bitterness and the bond ofiniquity, " but, when converted from hatred to love, it passes fromwretchedness to blessedness. "Let the dead bury their dead. " Noone reading this passage with its context can fail to perceivethat it means, substantially, "Let those who are absorbed in theaffairs of this world, and indifferent to the revelation I havebrought from heaven, attend to the interment of the dead; butdelay not thou, who art kindled with a lively interest in thetruth, to proclaim the kingdom of God. " When the returningprodigal had been joyfully received, the father said, in reply tothe murmurs of the elder son, "Thy brother was dead and is aliveagain;" he was lost in sin and misery, he is found in penitenceand happiness. Paul writes to the Romans, "Without the law sin wasdead, and I was alive; but when the law was made known, sin cameto life, and I died. " In other words, when a man is ignorant ofthe moral law, immoral conduct does not prevent him from feelinginnocent and being at peace; but when a knowledge of the law showsthe wickedness of that conduct, he becomes conscious of guilt, andis unhappy. For instance, to state the thought a littledifferently, to a child knowing nothing of the law, the law, orits purposed violation, sin, does not exist, is dead: he thereforeenjoys peace of conscience; but when he becomes aware of the lawand its authority, if he then break it, sin is generated andimmediately stings, and spiritual happiness dies. These passages are sufficient to show that Christianity uses thewords "death" and "life" in a spiritual sense, penetrating to thehidden realities of the soul. To speak thus of the guilty, unbelieving man as dead, and only of the virtuous, believing manas truly alive, may seem at first a startling use of figurativelanguage. It will not appear so when we notice its appropriatenessto the case, or remember the imaginative nature of Oriental speechand recollect how often we employ the same terms in the same wayat the present time. We will give a few examples of a similar useof language outside of the Scriptures. That which threatens orproduces death is sometimes, by a figure, identified with death. Orpheus, in the Argonautika, speaks of "a terrible serpent whoseyawning jaw is full of death. " So Paul says he was "in deathsoft. " Ovid says, "The priests poured out a dog's hot life on thealtar of Hecate at the crossing of two roads. " The Pythagoreans, when one of their number became impious and abandoned, wereaccustomed to consider him dead, and to erect a tomb to him, onwhich his name and his age at the time of his moral decease wereengraved. The Roman law regarded an excommunicated citizen ascivilis mortuus, legally dead. Fenelon writes, "God has kindled aflame at the bottom of every heart, which should always burn as alamp for him who hath lighted it; and all other life is as death. "Chaucer says, in one of his Canterbury Tales, referring to a manenslaved by dissolute habits, "But certes, he that haunteth swiche delices Is ded while that heliveth in tho' vices. " And in a recent poem the following lines occur: "From his great eyes The light has fled: When faith departs, whenhonor dies, The man is dead. " To be subjected to the lower impulses of our nature by degradedhabits of vice and criminality is wretchedness and death. The truelife of man consists, the Great Teacher declared, "not in theabundance of the things which he possesseth, but rather in hisbeing rich toward God, " in conscious purity of heart, energy offaith, and union with the Holy Spirit. "He that lives in sensualpleasure is dead while he lives, " Paul asserts; but he that livesin spiritual righteousness has already risen from the dead. To sumup the whole in a single sentence, the service and the fruits ofsin form an experience which Christianity calls death, because itis a state of insensibility to the elements and results of truelife, in the adequate sense of that term, meaning the sereneactivity and religious joy of the soul. The second particular in the essential doctrine of Christianityconcerning the states of human experience which it entitles deathand life is their inherent, enduring nature, their independence onthe objects and changes of this world. The gospel teaches that theelements of our being and experience are transferred from the lifethat now is into the life that is to come, or, rather, that weexist continuously forever, uninterrupted by the event of physicaldissolution. "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall givehim, " Jesus declares, "shall never thirst; but the water that Ishall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up intoeverlasting life. " John affirms, "The world passeth away, and thelust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever. "Paul writes to the Christians at Rome, "In that Christ died, hedied unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, butalive unto God. " Numerous additional texts of kindred import mightbe cited. They announce the immortality of man, the unendingcontinuance of the Christian consciousness, unless forfeited byvoluntary defection. They show that sin and woe are notarbitrarily bounded by the limits of time and sense in the grave, and that nothing can ever exhaust or destroy the satisfaction oftrue life, faith in the love of God: it abides, blessed andeternal, in the uninterrupted blessedness and eternity of itsObject. The revelation and offer of all this to the acceptance ofmen, its conditions, claims, and alternative sanctions, were firstdivinely made known and planted in the heart of the world, as theScriptures assert, by Jesus Christ, who promulgated them by hispreaching, illustrated them by his example, proved them by hisworks, attested them by his blood, and crowned them by hisresurrection. And now there is opened for all of us, through him, that is tosay, through belief and obedience of what he taught andexemplified, an access unto the Father, an assurance of hisforgiveness of us and of our reconciliation with him. We thusenter upon the experience of that true life which is "joy andpeace in believing, " and which remains indestructible through allthe vanishing vagrancy of sin, misery, and the world. "This iseternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, andJesus Christ whom thou hast sent:" that is, imperishable life isto be obtained by union with God in faith and love, through ahearty 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 therighteous, happy believer in the gospel has the experience ofgenuine life; and, secondly, that these essential elements ofhuman character and experience survive all events of time andplace in everlasting continuance. The next consideration prominent in the Christian doctrine ofdeath and life is the distinction continually made between thebody and the soul. Man is regarded under a twofold aspect, asflesh and spirit, the one a temporal accompaniment and dependentmedium, the other an immortal being in itself. The distinction isa fundamental one, and runs through nearly all philosophy andreligion in their reference to man. In the Christian Scriptures itis not sharply drawn, with logical precision, nor alwaysaccurately maintained, but is loosely defined, with wavingoutlines, is often employed carelessly, and sometimes, if strictlytaken, inconsistently. Let us first note a few examples of thedistinction itself in the instructions of the Savior and of thedifferent New Testament writers. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is bornof the spirit is spirit. " "Fear not them which kill the body butare not able to kill the soul. " "Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed. " "He that soweth to his flesh shallreap corruption; he that soweth to the spirit shall reap lifeeverlasting. " "Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened inthe spirit. " "Knowing that I must shortly put off thistabernacle. " "The body without the spirit is dead. " It would beuseless to accumulate examples. It is plain that these authorsdistinguish the body and the soul as two things conjoined for aseason, the latter of which will continue to live when the otherhas mixed with the dust. The facts and phenomena of our being fromwhich this distinction springs are so numerous and so influential, so profound and so obvious, that it is impossible they shouldescape the knowledge of any thinking person. Indeed, thedistinction has found a recognition everywhere among men, from theignorant savage, whose instincts and imagination shadow forth adim world in which the impalpable images of the departed dwell, tothe philosopher of piercing intellect and universal culture, "Whose lore detects beneath our crumbling clay A soul, exiled, andjourneying back to day. " "Labor not for the meat which perisheth, " Jesus exhorts hisfollowers, "but labor for the meat which endureth unto everlastinglife. " The body and the luxury that pampers it shall perish, butthe spirit and the love that feeds it shall abide forever. We now pass to examine some metaphorical terms often erroneouslyinterpreted as conveying merely their literal force. Every onefamiliar with the language of the New Testament must remember howrepeatedly the body and the soul, or the flesh and the spirit, areset in direct opposition to each other, sin being referred to theformer, righteousness to the latter. "I know that in my fleshthere is no good thing; but with my mind I delight in the law ofGod. " "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spiritlusteth against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to theother. " All this language and it is extensively used in theepistles 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 helpperceiving. We will state the real substance of Christian teachingand phraseology on this point in two general formulas, and thenproceed to illustrate them. First, both the body and the soul maybe corrupt, lawless, empty of Divine belief, full of restlessnessand 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 inany way to the former result to make man guilty, feeble, andwretched, to deaden his spiritual sensibilities, to keep him fromunion with God and from immortal reliances is variouslypersonified as "the Flesh, " "Sin, " "Death, " "Mammon, " "the World, ""the Law of the Members, " "the Law of Sin and Death;" whatever, onthe contrary, tends in any way to the latter result to purify man, to intensify his moral powers, to exalt and quicken hisconsciousness in the assurance of the favor of God and of eternalbeing is personified as "the Spirit, " "Life, " "Righteousness, ""the Law of God, " "the Law of the Inward Man, " "Christ, " "the Lawof the Spirit of Life in Christ. " Under the first class of termsare included all the temptations and agencies by which man is ledto sin, and the results of misery they effect; under the secondclass are included all the aspirations and influences by which heis 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, andsuch like. " Certainly some of these evils are more closelyconnected with the mind than with the body. The term "flesh" isobviously used in a sense coextensive with the tendencies andmeans by which we are exposed to guilt and degradation. Thesepersonifications, it will therefore be seen, are employed withgeneral rhetorical looseness, not with definite logical exactness. It is self evident that the mind is the actual agent and author ofall sins and virtues, and that the body in itself is unconscious, irresponsible, incapable of guilt. "Every sin that man doeth iswithout the body. " In illustration of this point Chrysostom says, "If a tyrant or robber were to seize some royal mansion, it wouldnot be the fault of the house. " And how greatly they err who thinkthat any of the New Testament writers mean to represent the fleshas necessarily sinful and the spirit as always pure, the followingcases to the contrary from Paul, whose speech seems most to leanthat way, will abundantly show. "Glorify God in your body and inyour spirit, which are his. " "Know ye not that your body is thetemple of the Holy Ghost?" "Yield not your members as instrumentsof unrighteousness unto sin, but as instruments of righteousnessunto God. " "That the life of Jesus might be made manifest in ourmortal flesh. " "Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God. " It is clear that the author of thesesentences did not regard the body, or literal flesh, asnecessarily unholy, but as capable of being used by the manhimself in fulfilling the will of God. Texts that appear tocontradict this must be held as figures, or as impassionedrhetorical exclamations. We also read of "the lusts of the mind, "the "fleshly mind, " "filthiness of the spirit, " "seducingspirits, " "corrupt minds, " "mind and conscience defiled, ""reprobate mind, " showing plainly that the spirit was sometimesregarded as guilty and morally dead. The apostle writes, "I praythat your whole spirit and soul and body may be preservedblameless. " The scriptural declarations now cited teach explicitlythat both the body and the soul may be subjected to the perfectlaw of God, or that both may abide in rebellion and wickedness, the latter state being called, metaphorically, "walking after theflesh, " the former "walking after the spirit, " that being sin anddeath, this being righteousness and life. An explanation of the origin of these metaphors will cast furtherlight upon the subject. The use of a portion of them arose fromthe fact that many of the most easily besetting and perniciousvices, conditions and allurements of sin, defilements and clogs ofthe spirit, come through the body, which, while it is itselfevidently fated to perish, does by its earthly solicitationsentice, contaminate, and debase the soul that by itself is invitedto better things and seems destined to immortality. Not that theseevils originate in the body, of course, all the doings of a manspring from the spirit of man which is in him, but that the bodyis the occasion and the aggravating medium of their manifestation. This thought is not contradicted, it is only omitted, in the wordsof Peter: "I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims, abstain fromfleshly lusts, which war against the soul. " For such languagewould be spontaneously suggested by the fact that to be in bondageto the baser nature is hostile alike to spiritual dignity andpeace, and to physical health and strength. The principles of themoral nature are at war with the passions of the animal nature;the goading vices of the mind are at war with the organicharmonies of the body; and on the issues of these conflicts hangall the interests of life and death, in every sense the words canbe made to bear. Another reason for the use of these figures of speech, undoubtedly, was the philosophy of the ineradicable hostility ofmatter and spirit, the doctrine, so prevalent in the East from theearliest times, that matter is wholly corrupt and evil, theessential root and source of all vileness. An old, unknown Greekpoet embodies the very soul of this faith in a few verses which wefind in the Anthology. Literally rendered, they run thus: "The body is the torment, hell, fate, load, tyrant, Dreadful pest, and punishing trial, of the soulWhich, when it quits the body, flies, as from the bondsOf death, to immortal God. " It was this idea that produced the wild asceticism prevalent inthe Christian Church during the Middle Age and previously, thefearful macerations, scourgings, crucifixions of the flesh. Itshould be understood that, though some of the phraseology of theScriptures is tinged by the influence of this doctrine, thedoctrine itself is foreign to Christianity. Christ came eating anddrinking, not abjuring nature, but adopting its teachings, viewingit as a Divine work through which the providence of God isdisplayed and his glory gleams. He was no more of a Pharisee thannature is. As corn grows on the Sabbath, so it may be plucked andeaten on the Sabbath. The apostles never recommend self inflictedtorments. The ascetic expressions found in their letters grewdirectly out of the perils besetting them and their expectation ofthe speedy end of the world. Christianity, rightly understood, renders even the body of a good man sacred and precious, throughthe indwelling of the Infinite. "We have this treasure in earthenvessels, " and the poor, dying tenement of flesh is hallowed as"A vase of earth, a trembling clod, Constrain'd to hold the breathof God. " The chief secret, however, of the origin of the peculiar phrasesunder consideration consisted in their striking fitness to thenature and facts of the case, their adaptedness to express thesefacts in a bold and vivid manner. The revelation of thetranscendent claims of holiness, of the pardoning love of God, ofthe splendid boon of immortality, made by Christ and enforced bythe miraculous sanctions and the kindling motives presented in hisexample, thrilled the souls of the first converts, shamed them oftheir degrading sins, opened before their imaginations a visionthat paled the glories of the world, and regenerated them, stirring up the depths of their religious sensibilities, andflooding their whole being with a warmth, an energy, aspirituality, that made their previous experience seem a grosscarnal slumber, a virtual death. "And you hath he quickened, whowere dead in trespasses and sins. " They were animated and raisedto a new, pure, glad life, through the feeling of the hopes andthe practice of the virtues of the gospel of Christ. Unto thosewho "were formerly in the flesh, the servants of sin, bringingforth fruit unto death, " but now obeying the new form of doctrinedelivered unto them, with renewed hearts and changed conduct, itis written, "If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin;but the spirit is life because of righteousness;" that is, IfChristian truth reign in you, the body may still be tormented, orpowerless, owing to your previous bad habits; but the soul will beredeemed from its abandonment to error and vice, and be assured ofpardon and immortal life by the witnessing spirit of God. The apostle likewise says unto them, "If the Spirit of God dwellin you, it shall also quicken your mortal bodies. " This remarkableexpression was meant to convey a thought which the observation ofcommon facts approves and explains. If the love of the pureprinciples 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 agreat extent reflects the permanent mind and life of a man. It isan aphorism of Solomon that "a sound heart is the life of theflesh. " And Plotinus declares, "Temperance and justice are thesaviors of the body so far as they are received by it. " Deficiencyof thought and knowledge, laziness of spirit, animality of habits, betray themselves plainly enough in the state and expression ofthe physical frame: they render it coarse, dim, and insensible;the person verges towards the condition of a clod; spiritualthings are clouded, the beacon fire of his destiny wanes, thepossibilities of Christian faith lessen, "the external and theinsensate creep in on his organized clay, " he feels the chain ofthe brute earth more and more, and finally gives himself up toutter death. On the other hand, the assimilation of Divine truthand goodness by a man, the cherishing love of all high duties andaspirations, exert a purifying, energizing power both on the fleshand the mind, animate and strengthen them, like a heavenly flameburn away the defiling entanglements and spiritual fogs that filland hang around the wicked and sensual, increasingly pervade hisconsciousness with an inspired force and freedom, illuminate hisface, touch the magnetic springs of health and healthful sympathy, make him completely alive, and bring him into living connectionwith the Omnipresent Life, so that he perceives the full testimonythat he shall never die. For, when brought into such a state bythe experience of live spirits in live frames, "We feel throughall this fleshly dresse Bright shootes of everlastingnesse. " Spiritual sloth and sensual indulgence stupefy, blunt, and confusetogether in lifeless meshes, the vital tenant and the mortaltenement; 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, profoundlove, and the earnest pursuit, in the daily duties of life, of"Those lofty musings which within us sow The seeds of higher kindand brighter being. " Cleanse, vivify, and distinguish the body andthe soul, so that, when this tabernacle of clay crumbles fromaround it, the unimprisoned spirit soars into the universe atonce, and, looking back upon the shadowy king bearing his paleprey 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 theopposite corresponding class of facts, and considered in theirmutual spiritual and physical relations and results, originallysuggested, and now interpret and justify, that peculiarphraseology of the New Testament which we have been investigating. It has no recondite meaning drawn from arbitrary dogmas, but aplain meaning drawn from natural truths. It remains next to see what is the Christian doctrine concerningliteral, physical death, concerning the actual origin andsignificance of that solemn event. This point must be treated themore at length on account of the erroneous notions prevailing uponthe subject. For that man's first disobedience was the procuringcause of organic, as well as of moral, death, is a doctrine quitegenerally believed. It is a fundamental article in the creeds ofall the principal denominations of Christendom, and istraditionally held, from the neglect of investigation, by nearlyall Christians. By this theory the words of James who writes, "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death" are interpretedwith strict literalness. It is conceived that, had not evilentered the first man's heart and caused him to fall from hisnative innocence, he would have roamed among the flowers of Edento this day. But he violated the commandment of his Maker, andsentence of death was passed upon him and his posterity. We arenow to prove that this imaginative theory is far from the truth. 1. The language in which the original account of Adam's sin andits punishment is stated shows conclusively that the penalty oftransgression was not literal death, but spiritual, that is, degradation, suffering. God's warning in relation to the forbiddentree was, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surelydie. " Of course, Jehovah's solemn declaration was fulfilled as hehad said. But in the day that man partook of the prohibited fruithe did not die a physical death. He lived, driven from thedelights of Paradise, (according to the account, ) upwards of eighthundred years, earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. Consequently, the death with which he had been threatened musthave been a moral death, loss of innocence and joy, experience ofguilt and woe. 2. The common usage of the words connected with this subject inthe New Testament still more clearly substantiates the view heretaken of it. There is a class of words, linked together bysimilarity of meaning and closeness of mutual relation, often usedby the Christian writers loosely, figuratively, and sometimesinterchangeably, as has been shown already in another connection. We mean the words "sin, " "flesh, " "misery, " "death. " The sameremark may be made of another class of words of precisely oppositesignification, "righteousness, " "faith, " "life, " "blessedness, ""eternal life. " These different words frequently stand torepresent the same idea. "As the law hath reigned through sin untodeath, so shall grace reign through righteousness unto life. " Inother terms, as the recognition of the retributive law of Godthrough rebellion and guilt filled the consciences of men withwretchedness, so the acceptance of the pardoning love of Godthrough faith and conformity will fill them with blessedness. Sinincludes conscious distrust, disobedience, and alienation;righteousness includes conscious faith, obedience, andreconciliation. Sin and death, it will be seen, are related justas righteousness and life are. The fact that they are sometimesrepresented in the relation of identity "the minding of the fleshis death, but the minding of the spirit is life" and sometimes inthe relation of cause and effect "the fruit of sin is death, thefruit of righteousness is life" proves that the words are usedmetaphorically, and really mean conscious guilt and misery, conscious virtue and blessedness. No other view is consistent. Weare urged to be "dead unto sin, but alive unto God;" that is, tobe in a state of moral perfection which turns a deaf andinvincible front to all the influences of evil, but is open andjoyfully sensitive to every thing good and holy. Paul also wrote, in his letter to the Philippians, that he had "not yet attainedunto the resurrection, " but was striving to attain unto it; thatis, he had not yet reached, but was striving to reach, that loftystate of holiness and peace invulnerable to sin, which no changecan injure, with which the event of bodily dissolution cannotinterfere, because its elements faith, truth, justice, and loveare the immutable principles of everlasting life. 3. In confirmation of this conclusion, an argument amounting tocertainty is afforded by the way in which the disobedience of Adamand its consequences, and the obedience of Christ and itsconsequences, are spoken of together; by the way in which a sortof antithetical parallel is drawn between the result of Adam'sfall and the result of Christ's mission. "As by one man sinentered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed uponall men, so much more shall all receive the gift of God by oneman, Jesus Christ, and reign unto eternal life. " This means, asthe writer himself afterwards explains, that "as by one man'sdisobedience many were made sinners" and suffered the consequencesof sin, figuratively expressed by the word "death, " "so by theobedience of one shall many be made righteous" and enjoy theconsequences of righteousness, figuratively expressed by the word"life. " Give the principal terms in this passage their literalforce, and no meaning which is not absolutely incompatible withthe plainest truths can be drawn from it. Surely literal death hadcome equally and fully upon all men everywhere; literal life coulddo no more. But render the idea in this way, the blessednessoffered to men in the revelation of grace made by Jesus outweighsthe wretchedness brought upon them through the sin introduced byAdam, and the sense is satisfactory. That which Adam isrepresented as having lost, that, the apostle affirms, Christrestored; that which Adam is said to have incurred, that Christ issaid to have removed. But Christ did not restore to man a physicalimmortality on the earth: therefore that is not what Adamforfeited; but he lost peace of conscience and trust in the Divinefavor. Furthermore, Christ did not free his followers from naturaldecay and death: therefore that is not what Adam's transgressionbrought upon his children; but it entailed upon them proclivitiesto evil, spiritual unrest, and woe. The basis of the comparison isevidently this: Adam's fall showed that the consequences of sin, through the stern operation of the law, were strife, despair, andmisery, all of which is implied in the New Testament usage of theword "death;" Christ's mission showed that the consequences ofrighteousness, through the free grace of God, were faith, peace, and indestructible happiness, all of which is implied in the NewTestament usage of the word "life. " In the mind of Paul there wasundoubtedly an additional thought, connecting the descent of thesoul to the under world with the death of the sinful Adam, and itsascent to heaven with the resurrection of the immaculate Christ;but this does not touch the argument just advanced, because itdoes not refer to the cause of physical dissolution, but to whatfollowed that event. 4. It will not be out of place here to demonstrate that sinactually was not the origin of natural decay, by the revelationsof science, which prove that death was a monarch on the earth forages before moral transgression was known. As the geologistwanders, and studies the records of nature, where earthquake, deluge, and volcano have exposed the structure of the globe andits organic remains in strata piled on strata, upon these, as uponso many pages of the earth's autobiography, he reads the historyof a hundred races of animals which lived and died, leaving theirbones layer above layer, in regular succession, centuries beforethe existence of man. It is evident, then, that, independent ofhuman guilt, and from the very first, chemical laws were in force, and death was a part of God's plan in the material creation. Asthe previous animals perished without sin, so without sin theanimal part of man too would have died. It was made perishablefrom the outset. The important point just here in the theology ofPaul was, as previously implied, that death was intended to leadthe soul directly to heaven in a new "spiritual body" or "heavenlyhouse;" but sin marred the plan, and doomed the soul to go intothe under world, a naked manes, when "unclothed" of "the naturalbody" or "earthly house. " The mission of Christ was to restore theoriginal plan; and it would be consummated at his second coming. 5. There is a gross absurdity involved in the supposition that anearthly immortality was the intended destiny of man. Thatsupposition necessarily implies that the whole groundwork of God'sfirst design was a failure, that his great purpose was thwartedand changed into one wholly different. And it is absurd to thinksuch a result possible in the providence of the Almighty. Besides, had there been no sin, could not man have been drowned if he fellinto the water without knowing how to swim? If a building tumbledupon him, would he not have been crushed? Nor is this theory freefrom another still more palpable absurdity; for, had there been nointerference of death to remove one generation and make room foranother, the world could not support the multitudes with which itwould now swarm. Moreover, the time would arrive when the earthcould not only not afford sustenance to its so numerousinhabitants, but could not even contain them. So that if this werethe original arrangement, unless certain other parts which wereindisputable portions of it were cancelled, the surplus myriadswould have to be removed to some other world. That is just whatdeath accomplishes. Consequently, death was a part of God's primalplan, and not a contingence accidentally caused by sin. 6. If death be the result of sin, then, of course, it is apunishment inflicted upon man for his wickedness. In fact, this isan identical proposition. But death cannot be intended as apunishment, because, viewed in that light, it is unjust. It comesequally upon old and young, good and bad, joyous and wretched. Itdoes not permit the best man to live longest; it does not comewith the greatest terror and agony to the most guilty. All thesethings depend on a thousand contingencies strung upon an iron law, which inheres to the physical world of necessity, and has not itsbasis and action in the spiritual sphere of freedom, character, and experience. The innocent babe and the hardened criminal arestruck at the same instant and die the same death. Solomon knewthis when he said, "As dieth the fool, so the wise man dieth. "Death regarded as a retribution for sin is unjust, because it isdestitute of moral discrimination. It therefore is not aconsequence of transgression, but an era, incident, and step inhuman existence, an established part of the visible order ofthings from the beginning. When the New Testament speaks of deathas a punishment, it always uses the word in a symbolic sense, meaning spiritual deadness and misery, which is a perfectretribution, because it discriminates with unerring exactness. This has been conclusively proved by Klaiber, 1 who shows that thepeculiar language of Paul in regard to the trichotomist divisionof man into spirit, soul, and body necessarily involves theperception of physical death as a natural fact. 7. Finally, natural death cannot be the penalty ofunrighteousness, because it is not a curse and a woe, but ablessing and a privilege. Epictetus wrote, "It would be a curseupon ears of corn not to be reaped; and we ought to know that itwould be a curse upon man not to die. " 2 It cannot be the effectof man's sin, because it is the improvement of man's condition. Who can believe it would be better for man to remain on earthforever, under any 1 Die Neutestamentliche Lehre von der Sunde and Erlosung, ss. 2245. 2 Dissert. Ii. 6, 2. circumstances, than it is for him to go to heaven to such anexperience as the faithful follower of Christ supposes is thereawaiting him? It is not to be thought by us that death is afrowning enemy thrusting us into the gloom of eternal night orinto the flaming waves of irremediable torment, but rather asmiling friend ushering us into the endless life of the spiritualworld and into the unveiled presence of God. According to thearrangement and desire of God, for us to die is gain: everypersonal exception to this if there be any exception is causedthrough the marring interference of personal wickedness with theCreator's intention and with natural order. Who has not sometimesfelt the bondage of the body and the trials of earth, and peeredwith awful thrills of curiosity into the mysteries of the unseenworld, until he has longed for the hour of the soul's liberation, that it might plume itself for an immortal flight? Who has notexperienced moments of serene faith, in which he could hardly helpexclaiming, "I would not live alway; I ask not to stay: Oh, whowould live alway away from his God?" A favorite of Apollo prayed for the best gift Heaven could bestowupon man. The god said, "At the end of seven days it shall begranted: in the mean time, live happy. " At the appointed hour hefell into a sweet slumber, from which he never awoke. 3 He whoregards death as upon the whole an evil does not take theChristian's view of it, not even the enlightened pagan's view, butthe frightened sensualist's view, the superstitious atheist'sview. And if death be upon the whole normally a blessing, thenassuredly it cannot be a punishment brought upon man by sin. Thecommon hypothesis of our mortality namely, that sin, hereditarilylodged in the centre of man's life, spreads its dynamic virusthence until it appears as death in the periphery, expending itsfinal energy within the material sphere in the dissolution of thephysical frame is totally opposed to the spirit of philosophy andto the most lucid results of science. Science announces deathuniversally as the initial point of new life. 4 The New Testament does not teach that natural death, organicseparation, is the fruit of sin, that, if man had not sinned, hewould have lived forever on the earth. But it teaches that moraldeath, misery, is the consequence of sin. The pains andafflictions which sometimes come upon the good without fault oftheirs do yet spring from human faults somewhere, with thoseexceptions alone that result from the necessary contingencies offinite creatures, exposures outside the sphere of humanaccountability. With this qualification, it would be easy to showin detail that the sufferings of the private individual and ofmankind at large are, directly or indirectly, the products ofguilt, violated law. All the woes, for instance, of poverty arethe results of selfishness, pride, ignorance, and vice. And it isthe same with every other class of miseries. "The world in Titanic immortality Writhes beneath the burningmountain of its sins. " 3 Herod. I. 31; Cic. Tusc. Quast. I. 47. 4 Klencke, Das Buch vom Tode. Entwurf einer Lehre vom Sterben inder Natur und vom Tode des Mensehen insbesondere. Fur denkendeFreunde der Wissenschaft. Had there been no sin, men's lives would have glided on like theplacid rivers that flow through the woodlands. They would havelived without strife or sorrow, grown old without sadness orsatiety, and died without a pang or a sigh. But, alas! sin soabounds in the world that "there is not a just man that lives andsins not;" and it is a truth whose omnipresent jurisdiction canneither be avoided nor resisted that every kind of sin, everyoffence against Divine order, shall somewhere, at some time, bejudged as it deserves. He who denies this only betrays theignorance which conceals from him a pervading law of inevitableapplication, only reveals the degradation and insensibility whichdo not allow him to be conscious of his own experience. Aharmonious, happy existence depends on the practice of pure moralsand communion with the love of God. This great idea that theconscientious culture of the spiritual nature is the sole methodof Divine life is equally a fundamental principle of the gospeland a conclusion of observation and reason: upon the devoutobservance of it hinge the possibilities of true blessedness. Thepursuit of an opposite course necessitates the oppositeexperience, makes its votary a restless, wretched slave, wishingfor freedom but unable to obtain it. The thought just stated, we maintain, strikes the key note of theChristian Scriptures; and the voices of truth and nature accordwith it. That Christianity declares sin to be the cause ofspiritual death, in all the deep and wide meaning of the term, hasbeen fully shown; that this is also a fact in the great order ofthings has been partially illustrated, but in justice to thesubject should be urged, in a more precise and adequate form. Inthe first place, there is a positive punishment flowing evidentlyfrom sin, consisting both in outward inflictions of suffering anddisgrace through human laws and social customs, and in the privateendurance of bodily and mental pains and of strange misgivingsthat load the soul with fear and anguish. Subjection to the animalnature in the obedience of unrighteousness sensibly tends to bringupon its victim a woeful mass of positive ills, public andpersonal, to put him under the vile tyranny of devouring lusts, toinduce deathlike enervation and disease in his whole being, topervade his consciousness with the wretched gnawings of remorseand shame, and with the timorous, tormenting sense of guilt, discord, alienation, and condemnation. In the second place, there is a negative punishment for impurityand wrong doing, less gross and visible than the former, butequally real and much more to be dreaded. Sin snatches from a manthe prerogatives of eternal life, by brutalizing and deadening hisnature, sinking the spirit with its delicate delights in the bodyand its coarse satisfactions, making him insensible to his highestgood and glory, lowering him in the scale of being away from God, shutting the gates of heaven against him, and leaving him towallow in the mire. The wages of sin is misery, and its gift is adegradation which prevents any elevation to true happiness. Thesepositive and negative retributions, however delayed or disguised, will come where they are deserved, and will not fail. Do a wrongdeed from a bad motive, and, though you fled on the pinions of theinconceivable lightning from one end of infinite space to theother, the fated penalty would chase you through eternity but thatyou should pay its debt; or, rather, the penalty is grappling withyou from within on the instant, is a part of you. Thirdly, if, by the searing of his conscience and absorption inthe world, a sinner escapes for a season the penal consequencesthreatened in the law, and does not know how miserable he is, andthinks he is happy, yet let him remember that the remedial, restorative process through which he must pass, either in thislife or in the next, involves a concentrated experience ofexpiatory pangs, as is shown both by the reason of the thing andby all relevant analogies. When the bad man awakes as some time orother he will awake to the infinite perfections and unalterablelove of the Father whose holy commands he has trampled and whosekind invitations he has spurned, he will suffer agonies ofremorseful sorrow but faintly shadowed in the bitterness ofPeter's tears when his forgiving Master looked on him. Such is thecommon deadness of our consciences that the vices of our corruptcharacters are far from appearing to us as the terrific thingsthey really are. Angels, looking under the fleshly garment wewear, and seeing a falsehood or a sin assimilated as a portion ofour being, turn away with such feeling as we should experience atbeholding a leprous sore beneath the lifted ermine of a king. Awell taught Christian will not fail to contemplate physical deathas a stupendous, awakening crisis, one of whose chief effects willbe the opening to personal consciousness, in the most vividmanner, of all the realities of character, with their relationstowards things above and things below himself. This thought leads us to a fourth and final consideration, moreimportant than the previous. The tremendous fact that all theinwrought elements and workings of our being are self retributive, their own exceeding great and sufficient good or evil, independentof external circumstances and sequences, is rarely appreciated. Men overlook it in their superficial search after associations, accompaniments, and effects. When all tangible punishments andrewards are wanting, all outward penalties and prizes fail, if wego a little deeper into the mysterious facts of experience weshall 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 atruth, springing from the very nature of God and his irreversiblerelations towards his creatures, that his united justice and loveshall follow both holiness and iniquity now and ever, pouring hisbeneficence upon them to be converted by them into their food andbliss or into their bane and misery. There is, then, no essentialneed of adventitious accompaniments or results to justify and paythe good, or to condemn and torture the bad, here or hereafter. Tobe wise, and pure, and strong, and noble, is glory and blessednessenough in itself. To be ignorant, and corrupt, and mean, andfeeble, is degradation and horror enough in itself. The one abidesin true life, the other in moral death; and that is sufficient. Even now, in this world, therefore, the swift and diversifiedretributions of men's characters and lives are in them and uponthem, in various ways, and to a much greater extent than they areaccustomed to think. History preaches this with all her revealingvoices. Philosophy lays it bare, and points every finger at theflaming bond that binds innocence to peace, guilt to remorse. Itis the substance of the gospel, emphatically pronounced. And theclear experience of every sensitive soul confirms its truth, echoing through the silent corridors of the conscience thedeclarations which fell in ancient Judea from the lips of Jesusand the pen of Paul: "The pure in heart shall see God;" "The wagesof sin is death. " We will briefly sum up the principal positions of the ground wehave now traversed. To be enslaved by the senses in the violationof the Divine laws, neglecting the mind and abusing the members, is to be dead to the goodness of God, the joys of virtue, and thehopes of heaven, and alive to guilt, anguish, and despair. To obeythe will of God in love, keeping the body under, and cherishing apure soul, is to be dead to the evil of the world, the goading ofpassions, and the fears of punishment, and alive to innocence, happiness, and faith. According to the natural plan of things fromthe dawn of creation, the flesh was intended to fall into theground, but the spirit to rise into heaven. Suffering is theretributive result and accumulated merit of iniquity; whileenjoyment is the gift of God and the fruit of conformity to hislaw. To receive the instructions of Christ and obey them with thewhole heart, walking after his example, is to be quickened fromthat deadly misery into this living blessedness. The inner life oftruth and goodness thus revealed and proposed to men, its personalexperience being once obtained, is an immortal possession, aconscious fount springing up unto eternity through the beneficentdecree of the Father, to play forever in the light of his smileand the shadow of his arm. Such are the great component elementsof the Christian doctrine of life and death, both present andeternal. The purely interior character of the genuine teachings ofChristianity on this subject is strikingly evident in theforegoing epitome. The essential thing is simply that the hatelife of error and sin is inherent alienation from God, in slavery, wretchedness, death; while the love life of truth and virtue isinherent communion with God, in conscious freedom and blessedness. Here pure Christianity leaves the subject, declaring this withauthority, but not pretending to clear up the mysteries or setforth the details of the subject. Whatever in the New Testamentgoes beyond this and meddles with minute external circumstances weregard as a corrupt addition or mixture drawn from various Gentileand Pharisaic sources and erroneously joined with the authenticwords of Christ. What we maintain in regard to the apostles andthe early Christians in general is not so much that they failed tograsp the deep spiritual principles of the Master's teaching, notthat they were essentially in error, but that, while they held thesubstance of the Savior's true thoughts, they also held additionalnotions which were errors retained from their Pharisaic educationand only partially modified by their succeeding Christian culture, a set of traditional and mechanical conceptions. These errors, werepeat, concern not the heart and essence of ideas, but their formand clothing. For instance, Christ teaches that there is a heavenfor the faithful; the apostles suppose that it is a located regionover the firmament. The dying Stephen said, "Behold, I see theheavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand ofGod. " Again: Christ teaches that there is a banishment for thewicked; the apostles suppose that it is into a located regionunder the earth. In accordance with the theological dogmas oftheir time and countrymen, with such modification as the peculiarcharacter, teachings, and life of Jesus enforced, they believedthat sin sent through the black gates of Sheol those who wouldotherwise have gone through the glorious doors of heaven; thatChrist would return from heaven soon, raise the dead from theunder world, judge them, rebanish the reprobate, establish hisperfect kingdom on earth, and reascend to heaven with his elect. That these distinctive notions came into the New Testamentthrough the mistakes and imperfect knowledge of the apostles, how can any candid and competent scholar doubt?5 In thefirst place, the process whereby these conceptions weretransmitted and assimilated from Zoroastrian Persia to PharisaicJudea is historically traceable. Secondly, the brevity andvagueness of the apostolic references to eschatology, and theirperfect harmony with known Pharisaic beliefs, prove their mutualconsonance and the derivation of the later from the earlier. Ifthe supposed Christian views had been unheard of before, theirpromulgators would have taken pains to define them carefully andgive detailed expositions of them. Thirdly, it was natural almostinevitable that the apostles would retain at least some of theiroriginal peculiarities of belief, and mix them with their newideas, unless they were prevented by an infallible inspiration. Ofthe presence of any such infallibility there is not a shadow ofevidence; but, on the contrary, there is a demonstration of itsabsence. For they differed among themselves, carried on violentcontroversies on important points. Paul says of Peter, "Iwithstood him to the face. " The Gentile and Judaic dissensionsshook the very foundations of the Apostolic Church. Paul andBarnabas "had a sharp controversy, insomuch that they partedasunder. " Almost every commentator and scholar worthy of noticehas been compelled to admit the error of the apostles in expectingthe visible return of Christ in their own day. And, if they erredin that, they might in other matters. The progress of positivescience and the improvement of philosophical thought have renderedthe mechanical dogmas popularly associated with Christianityincredible to enlightened minds. For this reason, as for manyothers, it is the duty of the Christian teacher to show that thosedogmas are not an integral part of the gospel, but only anadventitious element imported into it from an earlier andunauthoritative system. Take away these incongruous and outgrownerrors, and the pure religion of Christ will be seen, and will beseen 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 inimmortality, we must specify six separate considerations. First, the immediate reception of the resurrection and ascension ofChrist as a miraculous and typical fact, putting an infallibleseal on his teachings, and demonstrating, even to the senses ofmen, the reality of a heavenly life, was an extremely potentinfluence in giving form and vigor to faith, more potent for agesthan every thing else combined. The image of the victorious Christtaken up to heaven and glorified there forever, this image, pictured in every believer's mind, stimulated the imagination andkept an ideal vision of heaven in constant remembrance as anapprehended reality. "There is Jesus, " they said, pointing up toheaven; "and there one day we shall be with him. " Secondly, the obloquy and desertion experienced by the earlyChristians threw them back upon a double strength of spiritualfaith, and opened to them an intensified communion with God. Asworldly goods and pleasures were sacrificed, the more powerfulbecame their 5 Eschatologie, oder die Lebre von den Letzten Dingen. Mitbesonderer Rucksicht anf die gangbare Irriehre vom Hades. Basel, 1840. De Wette interprets the doctrine of Christ's descent intoHades as a myth derived from the idea that he was the Savior notonly 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 causefor which they suffered, and the more profoundly the moral springsof faith were stirred in their souls. The natural revulsion oftheir souls was from destitution, contempt, peril, and pain onearth to a more vivid and magnified trust in a great reward laidup for them in heaven. Thirdly, the unflinching zeal kindled in the early confessors ofChristianity, the sublime heroism shown by them amidst the awfultortures inflicted on them by the persecuting Jews and Romans, reacted on their brethren to give profounder firmness and newintensity to their faith in a glorious life beyond the grave. TheChristians thrown into the amphitheatre to the lions calmlykneeled in prayer, and to the superstitious bystanders a brightnimbus seemed to play around their brows and heaven to be openedabove. As they perished at the stake, amidst brutal jeers andshrivelling flames, serenely maintaining their profession, andcalling on Christ, over the lurid vista of smoke and fire broke ontheir rapt vision the blessed splendors of Paradise; and their joyseemed, to the enthusiastic believers around, no less than aDivine inspiration, confirming their faith, and preaching, throughthe unquestionable truthfulness of martyrdom, the certainty ofimmortal life. The survivors celebrated the anniversaries of themartyrs' deaths as their birthdays into the endless life. Fourthly, another means by which Christianity operated to deepenand spread a belief in the future life was, indirectly, throughits influence in calling out and cultivating the affections of theheart. The essence of the gospel in theory, as taught by all itsteachers, in fact, as incarnated by Christ, and in practice, asworking in history is love. From the first it condemned and tendedto destroy all the coldness and hatred of human hearts; and itstrove to elicit and foster every kindly sentiment and generousimpulse, to draw its disciples together by those yearning ties ofsympathy and devotion which instinctively demand and divinelyprophesy an eternal union in a better world. The more mightily twohuman hearts love each other, the stronger will be theirspontaneous longing for immortality. The unrivalled revelation ofthe disinterested love of God made by Christianity, and its effectin refining and increasing the love of men, have contributed in amost important degree to sanction and diffuse the faith in ablessed life reserved for men hereafter. One remarkablespecification may be noticed. The only pagan description ofchildren in the future life is that given by some of the classicpoets, who picture the infant shades lingering in groups aroundthe dismal gates of the under world, weeping and wailing becausethey could never find admittance. "Continuo audita voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumqueanimaflentes in limine primo. " Go the long round of the pagan heavens, you will find no trace ofa child. Children were withered blossoms blown to oblivion. Thesoft breezes that fanned the Blessed Isles and played through theperennial summer of Elysium blew upon no infant brows. The graveheld all the children very fast. By the memorable words, "Of suchis the kingdom of heaven, " Christ unbarred the portals of thefuture world and revealed therein hosts of angelic children. Eversince then children have been seen in heaven. The poet has sungthat the angel child is first on the wing to welcome the parenthome. Painters have shown us, in their visions of the blessedrealms, 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 worldhas thrown the prestige of public opinion, the imposing authorityof general affirmation and acceptance, around its componentdoctrines chief among which is the doctrine of immortality andsecured in their behalf the resistless influences of currentcustom and education. From the time the gospel was acknowledged bya nation as the true religion, each generation grew up by habitualtutelage to an implicit belief in the future life. It became adogma not to be questioned. And the reception of it was made morereasonable and easy by the great superiority of its moral featuresover those of the relative superstitions embodied in the ethnicreligions which Christianity displaced. Finally, Christianity has exerted no small influence both inexpressing and imparting faith in immortality by means of the artto which it has given birth. The Christian ritual and symbolism, which culminated in the Middle Age, from the very first had theirvitality and significance in the truth of another life. Everyphase and article of them implied, and with mute or vocalarticulation proclaimed, the superiority and survival of mind andheart, the truth of the gospel history, the reality of the openedheaven. Who, in the excited atmosphere, amidst the dangers, livingtraditions, and dramatic enactments of that time, could behold thesacraments of the Church, listen to a mighty chant, kneel beside aholy tomb, or gaze on a painting of a gospel scene, withoutfeeling that the story of Christ's ascent to God was true, beingassured that elsewhere than on earth there was a life for thebeliever, and in rapt imagination seeing visions of thesupernatural kingdom unveiled? The inmost thought or sentiment of mediaval art to adapt aremarkable passage from Heine6 was the depression of the body andthe elevation of the soul. Statues of martyrs, pictures ofcrucifixions, 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 fleshdegraded. The inside of the dome is itself a hollow cross, and wewalk there within the very witness work of martyrdom. The gorgeouswindows fling their red and green lights upon us like drops ofblood and decay. Funereal music wails and fades away along the dimarches. Under our feet are gravestones and corruption. With thecolossal columns the soul climbs aloft, loosing itself from thebody, which sinks to the floor as a weary weed. And when we lookon one of these vast Gothic structures from without, so airy, graceful, tender, transparent, it seems cut out of one piece, ormay 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 whichcould so subdue even stone that it shines spectrally possessed, and make the most insensate of materials voice forth the grandteaching of Christianity, the triumph of the spirit over theflesh. In these six ways, therefore, by placing a tangible image of it inthe imagination through the resurrection of Christ, by thepowerful stirring of the springs of moral faith through thepersecutions that attended its confession, by the apparentinspiration of the martyrs who died in its strength, by callingout the latent force of the heart's affections that crave it, bythe moulding power of establishment, custom, and education, by thespiritualizing, vision conjuring effect of its worship and art, has Christianity done a work of incalculable extent instrengthening the world's belief in a life to come. 7 A remarkable evidence of the impression Christianity carriedbefore it is furnished by an incident in the history of themissionary Paulinus. He had preached before Edwin, King ofNorthumbria. An old earl stood up and said, "The life of manseems, when compared with what is hidden, like the sparrow, who, as you sit in your hall, with your thanes and attendants, warmedby the blazing fire, flies through. As he flies through from doorto door, he enjoys a brief escape from the chilling storms of rainand snow without. Again he goes forth into the winter andvanishes. So seems the short life of man. If this new doctrinebrings us something more certain, in my mind it is worthy ofadoption. "8 The most glorious triumph of Christianity in regard to thedoctrine of a future life was in imparting a character ofimpartialness and universality to the proud, oligarchic faithwhich had previously excluded from it the great multitude of men. The lofty conceptions of the fate of the soul cherished by theillustrious philosophers of Greece and Rome were not shared by thecommonalty until the gospel its right hand touching the throne ofGod, its left clasping humanity announced in one breath theresurrection of Jesus and the brotherhood of man. "Their highest lore was for the few conceived, By schoolsdiscuss'd, but not by crowds believed. The angel ladder clomb theheavenly steep, But at its foot the priesthoods lay, asleep. Theydid not preach to nations, 'Lo, your God!' No thousands follow'dwhere their footsteps trod: Not to the fishermen they said, 'Arise!' Not to the lowly offer'd they the skies. Wisdom wastheirs: alas! what men most need Is no sect's wisdom, but thepeople's creed. Then, not for schools, but for the human kind, Theuncultured reason, the unletter'd mind, The poor, the oppress'd, the laborer, and the slave, God said, 'Be light!' and light was onthe grave! No more alone to sage and hero given, For all wide opedthe impartial gates of heaven. " 9 7 Compare Bengal's essay, Quid Doctrina de Animarum ImmortalitateReligioni 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 theperiod of the Church Fathers as including the nine centuriessucceeding the close of the apostolic age. It extends fromClement, Barnabas, and Hermas to OEcumenius and Gerbert. The principal components of the doctrine of the future life heldduring 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 havebeen generally recognised by the Church as orthodox. For reasons previously given, we believe that Jesus himself taughta purely moral doctrine concerning the future life, a doctrinefree from arbitrary, mechanical, or sacerdotal peculiarities. Withexperimental knowledge, with inspired insight, with fullestauthority, he set forth conclusions agreeing with the wisestphilosophy and confirmatory of our noblest hopes, namely, that aconscious immortality awaits the soul in the many mansions of theFather's house, which it enters on leaving the body, and where itsexperience will depend upon ethical and spiritual conditions. Tothis simple and sublime doctrine announced by Jesus, so rationaland satisfactory, we believe for reasons already explained thatthe apostles joined various additional and modifying notions, Judaic and Gentile, such as the local descent of Christ into theprison world of the dead, his mission there, his visible secondcoming, a bodily resurrection, a universal scenic judgment, andother kindred views. The sum of results thus reached the Fathersdeveloped in greater detail, distinguishing and emphasizing them, and also still further corrupting them with some additionalconceptions and fancies, Greek and Oriental, speculative andimaginative. The peculiar theological work of the apostles inregard to this subject was the organizing of the Persian Jewishdoctrine of the Pharisees, with a Christian complement andmodifications, around the person of Christ, and fixing so near inthe immediate future the period when it was to be consummated thatit might be looked for at any time. The peculiar theological workof the Fathers in regard to the doctrine thus formed by theapostles was twofold. First, being disappointed of the expectedspeedy second coming of Christ, they developed the intermediatestate of the dead more fully, and made it more prominent. Secondly, in the course of the long and vehement controversieswhich sprang up, they were led to complete and systematize theirtheology, to define their terms, to explain and defend theirdoctrines, comparing them together and attempting to harmonizethem with history, reason, and ethics, as well as with Scriptureand tradition. In this way the patristic mind became familiar withmany processes of thought, with many special details, and withsome general principles, quite foreign to the apostolic mind. Meanwhile, defining and systematizing went on, loose notionshardened into rigid dogmas, free thought was hampered byauthority, the scheme generally received assumed the title oforthodox, anathematizing all who dared to dissent, and thefundamental outlines of the patristic eschatology were firmlyestablished. 1 In seeking to understand and to give an exposition of this schemeof faith, we have, besides various collateral aids, three chiefguidances. First, we possess the symbols or confessions of faithput forth by several of the leading theologians of those times, orby general councils, and openly adopted as authority in many ofthe churches, the creed falsely called the Apostles', extant asearly as the close of the third century, the creed of Arius, thatof Cyril, the Nicene creed, the creed falsely named theAthanasian, and others. Secondly, we have the valuable assistanceafforded by the treatises of Irenaus, Tertullian, Epiphanius, Augustine, and others still later, on the heresies that had arisenin the Church, treatises which make it easy to infer, by contrastand construction, what was considered orthodox from the statementof what was acknowledged heretical. And, thirdly, abundantresources are afforded us in the extant theological dissertations, and historical documents of the principal ecclesiastical authorsof the time in review, a cycle of well known names, sweeping fromTheophilus of Antioch to Photius of Byzantium, from Cyprian ofCarthage to Maurus of Mentz. We think that any candid person, mastering these sources of information in the illustrating anddiscriminating light of a sufficient knowledge of the previous andthe succeeding related opinions, will recognise in the followingabstract a fair representation of the doctrine of a future life asit was held by the orthodox Fathers of the Christian Church in theperiod extending from the first to the tenth century. Before proceeding to set forth the common patristic scheme, a fewpreliminary remarks are necessary in relation to some of thepeculiar, prominent features of Origen's theology, and in relationto the rival systems of Augustine and Pelagius. Origen was a manof vast learning, passionately fond of philosophy; and hemodifyingly mingled a great many Oriental and Platonic notionswith his theology. He imagined that innumerable worlds like thishad existed and perished before it, and that innumerable otherswill do so after it in endless succession. 2 He held that all soulswhether devils, men, angels, or of whatever rank were of the samenature; that all who exist in material bodies are imprisoned inthem as a punishment for sins committed in a previous state; thefig leaves in which Adam and Eve were dressed after their sin werethe fleshly bodies they were compelled to assume on being expelledfrom the Paradise of their previous existence; that in proportionto their sins they are confined in subtile or gross bodies ofadjusted grades until by penance and wisdom they slowly win their 1 Bretschneider, Was lehren die altesten Kirchenvater uber dieEntstehung der Sude und des Todes, Adam's Vergehen und dieVersohnung 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 beingfiguratively represented by Jacob's ladder; that all punishmentsand rewards are exactly fitted to the degree of sin or merit, without possibility of failure; that all suffering even that inthe lowest hell is benevolent and remedial, so that even the worstspirits, including Satan himself, shall after a time be restoredto heaven; that this alternation of fall and restoration shall becontinued so often as the cloy and satiety of heavenly bliss, orthe preponderant power of temptation, pervert free will into sin. 3He declared that it was impossible to explain the phenomena andexperience of human life, or to justify the ways of God, except byadmitting that souls sinned in a pre existent state. He wasignorant of the modern doctrine of vicarious atonement, consideredas placation or satisfaction, and regarded Christ's suffering notas a substitute for ours, but as having merely the same efficacyin kind as the death of any innocent person, only more eminent indegree. He represents the mission of Christ to be to show men thatGod can forgive and recall them from sin, banishment, and hell, and to furnish them, in various ways, helps and incitements to winsalvation. The foregoing assertions, and other kindred points, arewell established by Mosheim, in his exposition of the characteristicviews of Origen. 4 The famous controversy between Augustine and Pelagius shookChristendom for a century and a half, and has rolled its echoingresults even to the theological shores of to day. Augustine wasmore Calvinistic in his doctrines than the Fathers before him, andeven than most of those after him. In a few particulars perhaps amajority of the Fathers really agreed more nearly with Pelagiusthan with him. But his system prevailed, and was publicly adoptedfor all Christendom by the third general council at Ephesus in theyear 431. Yet some of its principles, in their full force, wereactually not accepted. For instance, his dogma of unconditionalelection that some were absolutely predestinated to eternalsalvation, others to eternal damnation has never been taught bythe Roman Catholic Church. When Gottschalk urged it in the ninthcentury, it was condemned as a heresy;5 and among the Protestantsin the sixteenth century Calvin was obliged to fight for itagainst odds. Augustine's belief must therefore be taken as arepresentation of the general patristic belief only with cautionand with qualifications. The distinctive views of Augustine ascontrasted with those of Pelagius were as follow. 6 Augustine heldthat, by Adam's fault, a burden of sin was entailed on all souls, dooming them, without exception, to an eternal banishment in theinfernal 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 subjectfrom the power which the devil had over the soul on account oforiginal sin, and that all would infallibly be doomed to hell whowere not baptized, except, first, the ancient saints, who foreknewthe evangelic doctrines and believed, and, secondly, the martyrs, whose blood was their baptism. Pelagius claimed that Christianbaptism was only necessary to secure an 3 Ibid. Lib. Ii. Cap. 9, 10. 4 Commentaries on the Affairs of the Christians in the First ThreeCenturies: Third Century sects. 27-29. 5 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 183. 6 Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, trans. From the German byR. Emerson, ch. Xix. ; also pp. 62, 68, 75, 79. entrance into heaven: infants and good men, if unbaptized; wouldenjoy a happy immortality in Paradise, but they never could enterthe kingdom of heaven. Augustine affirmed that Adam's sindestroyed the freedom of the will in the whole human race. Pelagius asserted the freedom of the individual will. Augustinedeclared that a few were arbitrarily elected to salvation frometernity, and that Christ died only for them. Pelagius taught thatsalvation or reprobation depended on personal deserts, and thatthe 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 orresisted by conformity to certain conditions in each person'spower. Augustine believed that bodily death was inflicted as apunishment for sin;7 Pelagius, that it was the result of a naturallaw. The extensive, various learning, massive, penetrating mind, and remorseless logical consistency, of Augustine, enabled him togather up the loose, floating theological elements and notions ofthe time, and generalize them into a complete system, in strikingharmony, indeed, with the general character and drift of patristicthought, but carried out more fully in its details and appliedmore unflinchingly in its principles than had been done before, and therefore in some of its dogmas outstripping the currentconvictions of his contemporaries. His dogma of election was toorevolting and immoral ever to win universal assent; and few couldhave the heart to unite with him in stigmatizing the whole humanrace in their natural state as "one damned batch and mass ofperdition!" (conspersio damnata, massa perditionis. ) With thesehints, we are ready to advance to the general patristic scheme ofeschatology. The exceptional variations and heresies will bereferred to afterwards. First, in regard to the natural state of men under the law, fromthe time of Adam's sin to the time of Christ's suffering, theirmoral condition and destination, no one can deny that the Fatherscommonly supposed that the dissolution of the body and the descentof the soul to the under world were a penalty brought on all menthrough the sin of the first man. Wherever the lengthening line ofhuman generations wandered, the trail of the serpent, stamp ofdepravity, was on them, sealing them as Death's and marking themfor the Hadean prison. This was the indiscriminate and theinevitable doom. There is no need of citing proofs of thisstatement, as it is well known that the writings of the Fathersare thronged both with indirect implications and with explicitavowals of it. Secondly, they thought that Christ came from heaven to redeem menfrom their lost state and subterranean bondage and to guide themto heaven. Augustine, and perhaps some others, maintained that hecame merely to effectuate the salvation of a foreordained few; butundoubtedly the common belief was that he came to redeem all whowould conform to certain conditions which he proposed and madefeasible. The important question here is, What did the Fatherssuppose the essence of Christ's redemptive work to be? and how, intheir estimation, did he achieve that work? Was it the renewal andsanctification of human character by the melting power of aproclamation of mercy and love from God, by the regeneratinginfluences and motives of the truths and appeals spoken by hislips, illustrated 7 In Gen. Lib. Ix. Cap. 10, 11: "Parents would have yielded tochildren not by death, but by translation, and would have becomeas the angels. " in his life, and brought to a focus in his martyr death? Certainlythis was too plainly and prominently a part of the mission ofChrist ever to be wholly overlooked. And yet one acquainted withthe writings of the Fathers can hardly mistake so widely as tothink that they esteemed this the principal element in Christ'sredemptive work. Was the essence of that work, then, the making ofa vicarious atonement, according to the Calvinistic interpretationof that phrase, the offering of a substitutional anguishsufficient to satisfy the claims of inexorable justice, so thatthe guilty might be pardoned? No. The modern doctrine of theatonement the satisfaction theory, as it is called was unknown tothe Fathers. It was developed, step by step, after manycenturies. 8 It did not receive its acknowledged form until it camefrom the mind of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, aslate as the twelfth century. No scholar will question thisconfessed fact. What, then, were the essence and method ofChrist'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, andcredentials transcending those delegated to any other being belowGod himself. He became flesh, to seek and to save the lost. Thissaving work was done not by his mortal sufferings alone, but bythe totality of labors extending through the whole period of hisincarnation. The subjective or moral part of his redemptivemission was to regenerate the characters of men and fit them forheaven by his teachings and example; the objective or physicalpart was to deliver their souls from the fatal confinement of theunder world and secure for them the gracious freedom of the sky, by descending himself as the suppressing conqueror of death andthen ascending as the beckoning pioneer of his followers. TheFathers did not select the one point or act of Christ's death asthe pivot of human redemption; but they regarded that redemptionas wrought out by the whole of his humiliation, instruction, example, suffering, and triumph, as the resultant of all thecombined acts of his incarnate drama. Run over the relevantwritings of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, Cyril, Ambrose, Augustine himself, Jerome, Chrysostom, and therest of the prominent authors of the first ten centuries, and youcannot fail to be struck with the fact that they invariably speakof redemption, not in connection with Christ's death alone, butemphatically in connection with the group of ideas, hisincarnation, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension! For themost part, they received it by tradition as a fact, without muchphilosophizing, that, in consequence of the sin of Adam, all menwere doomed to die, that is, to leave their bodies and descendinto 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 Christthe original boon forfeited by Adam was to be restored, and thatmen, instead of undergoing death and banishment to Hades, shouldbe translated to heaven. So far as they had a theory about thecause, it turned on two simple points: first, the free grace andlove 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 havebeen devised in a hundred different forms, from that of Aquinas tothat of Calvin; from that of Anselm to that of Grotius; from thatof Socinus to that of Bushnell. Tertullian describes the profoundabyss beneath the grave, in the bowels of the earth, where, hesays, all the dead are detained unto the day of judgment, andwhere Christ in his descent made the patriarchs and prophets hiscompanions. 9 Augustine says that nearly the whole Church agreed inbelieving that Christ delivered Adam from the under world when herose thence himself. 10 One must be very ignorant on the subject todoubt that the Fathers attributed unrivalled importance to theliteral descent of Christ into the abode of the departed. 11 Thirdly, after the advent of Christ, what were the conditionsproposed for the actual attainment of personal salvation? It wasthe orthodox belief that Christ led up into Paradise with him theancient saints who were awaiting his appearance in the underworld:12 but with this exception it was not supposed that he savedany outright: he only put it in their power to save themselves, removing the previously insuperable obstacles. In the faith ofthose who accepted the dogma of predestination, of course, thepresupposed condition of actual personal salvation was that thegiven individual should become one of the elect number. But itseems to have been usually believed that baptism was indispensableto give final efficacy to the decree of election in eachindividual case. 13 Augustine says, "All are born under the powerof the devil, held in chains by him as a jailer: baptism alone, through the force of Christ's redemptive work, breaks these chainsand secures heaven. " In regard to this necessity of baptismPelagius agreed with his great adversary, saving an unessentialmodification, as we have seen before. The same may be said ofCyprian, Tertullian, and many other leading Fathers. Again, the socalled Athanasian Creed, which shows the prevalent opinion of theChurch in the fifth and sixth centuries, asserts that whosobelieves not in the Trinity and kindred dogmas as therein laiddown "without doubt shall perish everlastingly. " In other words, assent of mind to the established creed of the Church is a vitalcondition of salvation. Finally, in the writings of nearly all ofthe Fathers we find frequent declarations of the necessity ofmoral virtue, righteous conduct, and piety, as a condition ofadmission into the kingdom of heaven. For example, Augustine says, "Such as have been baptized, partaken of the sacraments, andremained always in the catholic faith, but have led wicked lives, can have no hope of escaping eternal damnation. " 14 These pointswere not sharply defined, authoritatively established, andconsistently adhered to; and yet there was a pretty generalagreement among the body of the Fathers that for actual salvationthere were three practical necessary conditions, baptism, a soundfaith, a good life. 9 De Anima, sects. 7 et 55. 10 Epist. CLXIV. 11 Huidekoper, Belief of the First Three Centuries concerningChrist's Mission to the Under World. 12 Augustine, De Civ. Del. Lib. Xx. Cap. Xv. Wiedenfeld, DeExorcismi Origine, Mutatione, deque hujus Actus peragendi RationeNeander, 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 deadcould be admitted into heaven itself, the abode of God and hisangels, until after the second coming of Christ and the holding ofthe general judgment; neither were any of the reprobate dead, according to their view, to be thrust into hell itself until afterthose events; but meanwhile all were detained in an intermediatestate, the justified in a peaceful region of the under worldenjoying some foretaste of their future blessedness, the condemnedin a dismal region of the same under world suffering someforetaste of their future torment. 15 After the numerous evidencesgiven in previous chapters of the prevalence of this view amongthe Fathers, it would be superfluous to cite further authoritieshere. We will only reply to an objection which may be urged. Itmay be said, the Fathers believed that Enoch and Elijah weretranslated to heaven, also that the patriarchs, whom Christrescued on his descent to Hades, were admitted thither, and, furthermore, that the martyrs by special privilege were grantedentrance there. The point is an important one. The reply turns onthe broad distinction made by the Fathers between heaven andParadise. Some of the Fathers regarded Paradise as one division ofthe under world; some located it in a remote and blessed region ofthe earth; others thought it was high in the air, but below thedwelling place of God. 16 Now, it was to "Paradise, " not to heaven, that the dying thief, penitent on the cross, was promisedadmission. It was of "Paradise, " not of heaven, that Tertulliansaid "the blood of the martyrs is the perfect key. " So, too, whenJerome, Chrysostom, and others speak of a few favored onesdelivered from the common fate before the day of judgment, it is"Paradise, " and not heaven, that is represented as being thrownopen to them. Irenaus says, "Those who were translated weretranslated to the Paradise whence disobedient Adam was driven intothe world. "17 A notable attempt has been repeatedly made for example, by thefamous Dr. Coward, by Dodwell, and by some other more obscurewriters to prove that the Fathers of the Greek Church, inopposition to the Latin Fathers, denied the consciousness of thesoul during the interval from death to the resurrection, andmaintained that the soul died with the body and would be restoredwith it at the last day. But this is an error arising from themisinterpretation of the figurative terms in which the GreekFathers express themselves. Tatian, Justin, Theophilus, andIrenaus do not differ from the others in reality, but only inwords. The opinion that the soul is literally mortal iserroneously attributed to those Greek Fathers, who in truth nomore held it than Tertullian did. "The death" they mean is, toborrow their own language, "deprived of the rays of Divine light, to bear a deathly immortality, " (in immortalitate mortemtolerantes, ) an eternal existence in the ghostly under world. 18The con 15 They feel, as Novatian says, (De Trinitate, 1, ) a prajudiciumfuturi judicii. See also Ernesti, Excurs. De Veter. PatrumOpinione de Statu Medio Animor. A Corpore sejunctorum. In hisLect. 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 dissertationpublished at Konigsberg, 1827, bearing the title "AntiquissimorumEcclesia Grsecte Patrum de Immortalitate Anima SententiaRecensentur. " They held that the inner man was originally a spirit [non-ASCIIcharacters 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 themission of Christ, man is elevated again to conscious communion withGod, and the spirit is restored to the soul. "Si restituitur, manet[non-ASCII characters omitted] fit autem [non-ASCII charactersomitted]; 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 thedead was that, with the exception of a few admitted to Paradise, they were in the under world waiting the fulness of time, when theworld should be judged and their final destination be assigned to them. As Tertullian says, "constituimus omnem animam apud inferosseguestrari in diem Domini. " Finally, the Fathers expected that Christ would return fromheaven, hold a general day of judgment, and consummate all things. The earliest disciples seem to have looked anxiously, almost fromhour to hour, for that awful crisis. But, as years rolled on andthe last apostle died, and it came not, the date was fixed moreremotely; and, as other years passed away, and still no clearsigns of its arrival appeared, the date grew more and moreindefinite. Some still looked for the solemn dawn speedily tobreak; others assigned it to the year 1000; others left the timeutterly vague; but none gave up the doctrine. All agreed thatsooner 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 hisblast so clear and brave, And quicken the charnel birth At theroots of the grave, Till the dead all stand erect. " Augustine, representing the catholic faith, says, "The coming ofElias, the conversion of the Jews, Antichrist's persecution, thesetting up of Christ's tribunal, the raising of the dead, thesevering of the good and the bad, the burning of the world, andits renovation, this is the destined order of events. "19 The savedwere to be transported bodily to the eternal bliss of heaven; thedamned, in like manner, were to be banished forever to a fieryhell in the centre of the earth, there to endure uncomprehendedagonies, both physical and spiritual, without any respite, withoutany end. There were important, and for a considerable period quiteextensive, exceptions, to the belief in this last dogma:nevertheless, such was undeniably the prevailing view, theorthodox doctrine, of the patristic Church. The strict literalitywith which these doctrines were held is strikingly shown inJerome's artless question: "If the dead be not raised with fleshand bones, how can the damned, after the judgment, gnash theirteeth in hell?" During the period now under consideration there were greatfluctuations, growths, changes, of opinion on three subjects inregard to which the public creeds did not prevent all freedom ofthought by laying down definite propositions. We refer to baptism, the millennium, and purgatory. Christian baptism was first simplya rite of initiation into the Christian religion. Then it becamemore distinctly a symbol of faith in Christ and in his gospel, andan emblem of a new birth. Next it was imagined to be literallyefficacious to 19 De Civ. Del, lib. Xx. Cap. 30, sect. 5. personal salvation, solving the chains of the devil, washing offoriginal sin, and opening the door of heaven. 20 To trace thedoctrine through its historical variations and its logicalwindings would require a large volume, and is not requisite forour 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 withgreat diversities of conception as to the form and features of thedoctrine. 21 It was a Jewish notion which crept among theChristians of the first century and has been transmitted even tothe present day. Some supposed the millennium would precede thedestruction of the world, others that it would follow thatterrible event, after a general renovation. None but the faithfulwould have part in it; and at its close they would pass up toheaven. Irenaus quotes a tradition, delivered by Papias, that "inthe millennium each vine will bear ten thousand branches, eachbranch ten thousand twigs, each twig ten thousand clusters, eachcluster ten thousand grapes, each grape yielding a hogshead ofwine; and if any one plucks a grape its neighbors will cry, Takeme: I am better!" This, of course, was a metaphor to show what theplenty and the joy of those times would be. According to theheretics Cerinthus and Marcion, the millennium was to consist inan abundance of all sorts of sensual riches and delights. Many ofthe orthodox Fathers held the same view, but less grossly; whileothers made its splendors and its pleasures mental and moral. 22Origen attacked the whole doctrine with vehemence and cogency. Hisadmirers continued the warfare after him, and the belief in thiscelestial Cocaigne suffered much damage and sank into comparativeneglect. The subject rose into importance again at the approachingclose of the first chiliad of Christianity, but soon died away asthe excitement of that ominous epoch passed with equaldisappointment to the hopes and the fears of the believers. Agalvanized controversy has been carried on about it again in thepresent century, chiefly excited by the modern sect of SecondAdventists. Large volumes have recently appeared, principallyaiming to decide whether the millennium is to precede or to followthe second coming of Christ! 23 The doctrine itself is a JewishChristian figment supported only by a shadowy basis of fancy. Thetruth contained in it, though mutilated and disguised, is thatwhen the religion of Christ is truly enthroned over the earth, when his real teachings and life are followed, the kingdom of Godwill indeed cover the world, and not for a thousand years only, but unimaginable glory and happiness shall fill the dwellings ofthe successive generations of men forever. 24 The doctrine of a purgatory a place intermediate between Paradiseand hell, where souls not too sinful were temporarily punished, and where their condition and stay were in the power of the Churchon 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 inden Drei Ersten Jahrhunderten. In Henke's Magaz. B. Vi. Ss. 233254. 23 See e. G. The End, by Dr. Cumming. The Second Advent, by D. Brown. 24 Bush, On the Millennium. Bishop Russell, Discourses on theMillennium. Carroll, Geschichte des Chiliasmus. the foremost instrument of ecclesiastical influence and income wasthrough the age of the Fathers gradually assuming shape andfirmness. It seems to have been first openly avowed as a Churchdogma and effectively organized as a working power by Pope Gregorythe Great, in the latter part of the sixth century. 25 No moreneeds to be said here, as the subject more properly belongs to thenext chapter. It but remains in close to notice those opinions relating to thefuture life which were generally condemned as heresies by theFathers. One of the earliest of these was the destruction of theintermediate state and the denial of the general judgment by theassertion, which Paul charges so early as in his day upon Hymeneusand Philetus, "that the resurrection has passed already;" that is, that the soul, when it leaves the body, passes immediately to itsfinal destination. This opinion reappeared faintly at intervals, but obtained very little prevalence in the early ages of theChurch. Hierax, an author who lived at Leontopolis in Egypt earlyin the fourth century, denied the resurrection of the body, andexcluded from the kingdom of heaven all who were married and allwho died before becoming moral agents. Another heretical notion which attracted some attention was theopposite extreme from the foregoing, namely, that the soul totallydies with the body, and will be restored to life with it in thegeneral resurrection at the end of the world; an opinion held byan Arabian sect of Christians, who were vanquished in debate uponit by Origen, and renounced it. 26 Still another doctrine known among the Fathers was the belief thatChrist, when he descended into the under world, saved and led awayin triumph all who were there, Jews, pagans, good, bad, all, indiscriminately. This is number seventy nine in Augustine's listof the heresies. And there is now extant among the writings ofPope Boniface VI, of the ninth century, a letter furiouslyassailing a man who had recently maintained this "damnabledoctrine. " The numerous Gnostic sects represented by Valentinus, Cerinthus, Marcion, Basilides, and other less prominent names, held a systemof speculation copious, complex, and of intensely Orientalcharacter. That portion of it directly connected with our subjectmay be stated in few words. They taught that all souls pre existedin a world of pure light, but, sinning through the instigation andcraft of demons, they fell, were mixed with darkness and matter, and bound in bodies. Through sensual lusts and ignorance, theywere doomed to suffer after death in hell for various periods, andthen to be born again. Jehovah was the enemy of the true God, andwas the builder of this world and of hell, wherein he contrives tokeep his victims imprisoned by deceiving them to worship him andto live in errors and indulgences. Christ came, they said, toreveal the true God, unmask the infernal character and wiles ofJehovah, rescue those whom he had cruelly shut up in hell, andteach men the real way of salvation. Accordingly, Marcion declaredthat when Christ descended into the under world he released andtook into his own kingdom Cain, and the Sodomites, and all the 25 Flugge, Geschichte der Lehre vom Zustande des Menschen nach demTode 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 otherpatriarchs, together with all the prophets. 27 The Gnostics agreedin attributing evil to matter, and made the means of redemption toconsist in fastings and scourgings of the flesh, with denial ofall its cravings, and in lofty spiritual contemplations. Ofcourse, with one accord they vehemently assailed the dogma of theresurrection of the flesh. Their views, too, were inconsistentwith the strict eternity of future hell punishments. Thefundamental basis of their system was the same as that of nearlyall the Oriental philosophies and religions, requiring an asceticwar 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 theGnostics carried it, and indignantly rejected all the strangeimaginations which those heretics had devised to explain thesubject of evil in a systematic manner. 28 Augustine said, "If wesay all sin comes from the flesh, we make the fleshless devilsinless!" Hermogenes, some of whose views at least were tingedwith Gnosticism, believed the abyss of hell was formed by theconfluence of matter, and that the devil and all his demons wouldat last be utterly resolved into matter. 29 The theological system of the Manichaan sect was in some of itscardinal principles almost identical with those of the Gnostics, but it was still more imaginative and elaborate. 30 It started withthe Persian doctrine of two antagonist deities, one dwelling withgood spirits in a world of light and love, the other with demonsin a realm of darkness and horror. Upon a time the latter, sallying forth, discovered, far away in the vastness of space, theworld of light. They immediately assailed it. They were conqueredafter a terrible struggle and driven back; but they bore with themcaptive a multitude of the celestial souls, whom they instantlymixed with darkness and gross matter. The good God built thisworld of mingled light and darkness to afford these imprisonedsouls an opportunity to purge themselves and be restored to him. In arranging the material substances to form the earth, a mass ofevil fire, with no particle of good in it, was found. It had beenleft in their flight by the vanquished princes of darkness. Thiswas cast out of the world and shut up somewhere in the dark air, and is the Manichaan hell, presided over by the king of thedemons. If a soul, while in the body, mortify the flesh, observe asevere ascetic moral discipline, fix its thoughts, affections, andprayers on God and its native home, it will on leaving the bodyreturn to the celestial light. But if it neglect these duties andbecome more deeply entangled in the toils of depraved matter, itis cast into the awful fire of hell, where the cleansing flames oftorture partially purify it; and then it is born again and put ona new trial. If after ten successive births twice in each of fivedifferent forms the soul be still unreclaimed, then it ispermanently remanded to the furnace of hell. At last, when all thecelestial souls seized by the princes of darkness have returned toGod, save those just mentioned, this world will be burned. Thenthe 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 intheir native land of light; the prince of evil, with his fiends, will exist wretchedly in their original realm of darkness. Thenall those souls whose salvation is hopeless shall be drawn out ofhell and be placed as a cordon of watchmen and a phalanx ofsoldiers entirely around the world of darkness, to guard itsfrontiers forever and to see that its miserable inhabitants neveragain come forth to invade the kingdom of light. 31 The Christian after Christ's own pattern, trusting that when thesoul left the body it would find a home in some other realm ofGod's universe where its experience would be according to itsdeserts, capacity, and fittedness, sought to do the Father's willin the present, and for the future committed himself in faith andlove to the Father's disposal. The apostolic Christian, conceivingthat Christ would soon return to raise the dead and reward hisown, eagerly looked for the arrival of that day, and strove thathe might be among the saints who, delivered or exempt from theHadean imprisonment, should reign with the triumphant Messiah onearth and accompany him back to heaven. The patristic Christian, looking forward to the divided under world where all the dead mustspend the interval from their decease to the general resurrection, shuddered at the thought of Gehenna, and wrestled and prayed thathis tarrying might be in Paradise until Christ should summon hischosen ones, justified from the great tribunal, to the Father'spresence. The Manichaan Christian, believing the soul to beimprisoned in matter by demons who fought against God in aprevious life, struggled, by fasting, thought, prayer, andpenance, to rescue the spirit from its fleshly entanglements, fromall worldly snares and illusions, that it might be freed from thenecessity of any further abode in a material body, and, on thedissolution of its present tabernacle, might soar to its nativelight 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 theclose of the tenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, fromthe first full establishment of the Roman Catholic theology andthe last general expectation of the immediate end of the world tothe commencing decline of mediaval faith and the successfulinauguration of the Protestant Reformation. The principal mentalcharacteristic of that age, especially in regard to the subject ofthe future life, was fear. "Never, " says Michelet, "can we know inwhat terrors the Middle Age lived. " There was all abroad a livingfear of men, fear of the State, fear of the Church, fear of God, fear of the devil, fear of hell, fear of death. Preachingconsisted very much in the invitation, "Submit to the guidance ofthe Church while you live, " enforced by the threat, "or you shallgo to hell when you die. " Christianity was practically reduced tosome cruel metaphysical dogmas, a mechanical device for rescuingthe devil's captives from him, and a system of ritual magic in thehands of a priesthood who wielded an authority of supernaturalterrors over a credulous and shuddering laity. It is true that thegenuine spirit and contents of Christianity were never whollysuppressed. The love of God, the blessed mediation of thebenignant Jesus, the lowly delights of the Beatitudes, theredeeming assurance of pardon, the consoling, triumphantexpectation of heaven, were never utterly banished even from thebelievers of the Dark Age. Undoubtedly many a guilty but repentantsoul found forgiveness and rest, many a meek and spotless breastwas filled with pious rapture, many a dying disciple was comfortedand inspired, by the good tidings proclaimed from priestly lipseven then. No doubt the sacred awe and guarded peace surroundingtheir precincts, the divine lessons inculcated within their walls, the pathetic prayers breathed before their altars, the traditionsof saintly men and women who had drawn angelic visitants down totheir cells and had risen long ago to be angels themselves, thestrains of unearthly melody bearing the hearts of the kneelingcrowd into eternity, no doubt these often made cathedral andconvent seem "islands of sanctity amidst the wild, roaring, godless sea of the world. " Still, the chief general feeling of thetime in relation to the future life was unquestionably fearspringing from belief, the wedlock of superstitious faith andhorror. During the six centuries now under review the Roman CatholicChurch and theology were the only Christianity publiclyrecognised. The heretics were few and powerless, and the papalsystem had full sway. Since the early part of the periodspecified, the working theology of the Roman Church has undergonebut few, and, as pertaining to our subject, unimportant, changesor developments. Previous to that time her doctrinal scheme wasinchoate, gradually assimilating foreign elements and developingitself step by step. The principal changes now concerning us tonotice in the passage from patristic eschatology as deducible, forinstance, 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 definitelyarranged in greater subdivision; heaven has been opened for theregular admission of certain souls; the loose notions aboutpurgatory have been completed and consolidated; and the wholecombined scheme has been organized as a working instrument ofecclesiastical power and profit. These changes seem to have been wrought out, first, bycontinual assimilations of Christianity to paganism, 1 both indoctrine and ceremony, to win over the heathen; and, secondly, bymodifications and growths to meet the exigencies of doctrinalconsistency and practical efficiency, exigencies repeatedlyarising from philosophical discussion and political opposition. The degree in which papal Christianity was conformed to theprejudices and customs of the heathen believers, whose allegiancewas sought, is astonishing. It extended to hundreds ofparticulars, from the most fundamental principles of theologicalspeculation to the most trivial details of ritual service. Weshall mention only a few instances of this kind immediatelybelonging to the subject we are treating. In the first place, thehierophant in the pagan Mysteries, and the initiatory rites, werethe prototypes of the Roman Catholic bishop and the ceremoniesunder his direction. 2 Christian baptism was made to be the same asthe pagan initiation: both were supposed to cleanse from sin andto secure for their subject a better fate in the future life: theywere both, therefore, sometimes delayed until just before death. 3The custom of initiating children into the Mysteries was alsocommon, as infant baptism became. 4 When the public treasury waslow, the magistrates sometimes raised a fund by recourse to theinitiating fees of the Mysteries, as the Christian popesafterwards collected money from the sale of pardons. In the second place, the Roman Catholic canonization was the sameas the pagan apotheosis. Among the Gentiles, the mass of mankindwere supposed to descend to Hades at death; but a few favored oneswere raised to the sky, deified, and a sort of worship paid tothem. So the Roman Church taught that nearly all souls passed tothe subterranean abodes, but that martyrs and saints were admittedto heaven and might lawfully be prayed to. 5 Thirdly, the heathen under world was subdivided into severalregions, wherein different persons were disposed according totheir deserts. The worst criminals were in the everlasting penalfire of Tartarus; the best heroes and sages were in the calmmeadows of Elysium; the hapless children were detained in thedusky borders outside the grim realm of torture; and there was apurgatorial place where those not too guilty were cleansed fromtheir stains. In like manner, the Romanist theologians divided theunder world into four parts: hell for the final abode of thestubbornly wicked; one limbo for the painless, contented tarryingof the good patriarchs who died before the advent of Christ hadmade salvation possible, and another limbo for the sad and pallidresting place of those children who died unbaptized; purgatory, inwhich expiation is offered in agony for sins committed on earthand unatoned for. 6 1 Middleton, Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity betweenPopery 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 onInvocation of Saints. 6 See Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, book xiv. Ch. Ii. Before proceeding further, we must trace the prevalence andprogress of the doctrine of purgatory a little as it was knownbefore its embodiment in mediaval mythology, and then as it wasembodied there. The fundamental doctrine of the Hindu hell wasthat a certain amount of suffering undergone there would expiate acertain amount of guilt incurred here. When the disembodied soulhad endured a sufficient quantity of retributive and purifyingpain, it was loosed, and sent on earth in a new body. It waslikewise a Hindu belief that the souls of deceased parents mightbe assisted out of this purgatorial woe by the prayers andofferings of their surviving children. 7 The same doctrine was heldby the Persians. They believed souls could be released frompurgatory by the prayers, sacrifices, and good deeds of righteoussurviving descendants and friends. "Zoroaster said he could, byprayer, send any one he chose to heaven or to hell. " 8 Suchrepresentations are found obscurely in the Vendidad and more fullyin the Bundehesh. The Persian doctrine that the living had powerto affect the condition of the dead is further indicated in thefact that, from a belief that married persons were peculiarlyhappy in the future state, they often hired persons to be espousedto such of their relatives as had died in celibacy. 9 The doctrineof purgatory was known and accepted among the Jews too. In theSecond Book of Maccabees we read the following account: "Judassent two thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to defray theexpense of a sin offering to be offered for the sins of those whowere slain, doing therein very well and honestly, in that he wasmindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they whowere slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain topray for the dead. Whereupon he made an atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin. "10 The Rabbins taught thatchildren by sin offerings could help their parents out of theirmisery in the infernal world. 11 They taught, furthermore, that allsouls except holy ones, like those of Rabbi Akiba and hisdisciples, must lave themselves in the fire river of Gehenna; thattherein they shall be like salamanders; that the just shall soonbe cleansed in the fire river, but the wicked shall be lastinglyburned. 12 Again, we find this doctrine prevailing among theRomans. In the great Forum was a stone called "Lapis Manalis, "described by Festus, which was supposed to cover the entrance tohell. This was solemnly lifted three times a year, in order to letthose souls flow up whose sins had been purged away by theirtortures or had been remitted in consideration of the offeringsand services paid for them by the living. Virgil describes howsouls are purified by the action of wind, water, and fire. 13 Thefeast day of purgatory observed by papal Rome corresponds to theLemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinalbasis. In the Catholic countries of Europe at the present time, onAll Saints' Day, festoons of sweet smelling flowers are hung onthe tomb stones, and the people kneeling there repeat the prayerprescribed for releasing the souls of their relatives and friendsfrom the plagues of purgatory. There is a notable coincidencebetween 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, andManners 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 theseventh moon of every year, prayers are offered up accompanied byilluminations and other rites for the release of souls inpurgatory. At these times the Buddhist priests hang up largepictures, showing forth the frightful scenes in the other world, to induce the people to pay them money for prayers in behalf oftheir 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 naturallyconceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, thatafter death some souls will be punished for their sins until theyare cleansed, and then will be released from pain. The Manichaansimagined that all souls, before returning to their native heaven, must be borne first to the moon, where with good waters they wouldbe washed pure from outward filth, and then to the sun, where theywould be purged by good fires from every inward stain. 15 Afterthese lunar and solar lustrations, they were fit for the eternalworld of light. But the conception of purgatory as it was held bythe early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects, was merely the just and necessary result of applying to thesubject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishmentshould partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that itshould be restorative. Jeremy Taylor conclusively argues that theprayers for the dead used by the early Christians do not imply anybelief in the Papal purgatory. 16 The severity and duration of thesufferings of the dead were not supposed to be in the power of theliving, either their relatives or the clergy, but to depend on themoral and physical facts of the case according to justice andnecessity, qualified only by the mercy of God. Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, either borrowingsome of the more objectionable features of the purgatory doctrinepreviously held by the heathen, or else devising the same thingshimself from a perception of the striking adaptedness of suchnotions to secure an enviable power to the Church, constructed, established, and gave working efficiency to the dogmatic scheme ofpurgatory ever since firmly defended by the papal adherents as anintegral part of the Roman Catholic system. 17 The doctrine asmatured and promulgated by Gregory, giving to the representativesof the Church an almost unlimited power over purgatory, rapidlygrew into favor with the clergy and sank with general convictioninto the hopes and fears of the laity. Venerable Bede, in theeighth century, gives a long account of the fully developeddoctrine concerning purgatory, hell, paradise, and heaven. It isnarrated in the form of a vision seen by Drithelm, who, in atrance, visits the regions which, on his return, he describes. Thewhole thing is gross, literal, horrible, closely resemblingseveral well known descriptions given under similar circumstancesand preserved in ancient heathen writers. 18 The Church, seeing howadmirably this instrument was calculated to promote her interestand deepen her power, left hardly any means untried to enlarge itssweep and intensify its operation. Accordingly, from the ninth tothe sixteenth century, no doctrine was so central, prominent, andeffective 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 vividlyfelt in the bosom of Christendom, as the doctrine and the fear ofpurgatory. 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 andall his posterity, and the devil acquired a right to shut up theirdisembodied souls in the under world. In consequence of the"original sin" transmitted from Adam, every human being, besidessuffering the other woes flowing from sin, was helplessly doomedto the under world after death. In addition to this penalty, eachone 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 "descendedinto the under world, " "subdued the devil, " "despoiled thedepths, " "rescued the Fathers and just souls, " and "openedheaven. "19 "Until he rose, heaven was shut against every child ofAdam, as it still is to those who die indebted. " "The price paidby the Son of God far exceeded our debts. " The surplus balance ofmerits, together with the merits accruing from the supererogatorygood works of the saints and from the Divine sacrifice continuallyoffered anew by the sacrament of the mass, constituted a reservedtreasure upon which the Church was authorized to draw in behalf ofany one she chose to favor. The localities of the future life werethese:20 Limbus Patrum, or Abraham's Bosom, a place of peace andwaiting, where the good went who died before Christ; LimbusInfantum, a mild, palliated hell, where the children go who, sinceChrist, have died unbaptized; Purgatory, where all sinners sufferuntil they are purified, or are redeemed by the Church, or untilthe last day; Hell, or Gehenna, whither the hopelessly wicked havealways been condemned; and Heaven, whither the spotlessly goodhave been admitted since the ascension of Jesus. At the day ofjudgment the few human souls who have reached Paradise, togetherwith the multitudes that crowd the regions of Gehenna, Purgatory, and Limbo, will reassume their bodies: the intermediate stateswill then be destroyed, and when their final sentence ispronounced all will depart forever, the acquitted into heaven, the condemned into hell. In the mean time, the poor victims ofpurgatory, by the prayers of the living for them, by the transferof good works to their account, above all, by the celebration ofmasses in their behalf, may be relieved, rescued, translated toparadise. The words breathed by the spirit of the murdered King ofDenmark in the ears of the horror stricken Hamlet paint thepopular belief of that age in regard to the grisly realm whereguilty souls were plied with horrors whereof, but that they wereforbidden: "To tell the secrets of their prison house, They could a taleunfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thyyoung blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from theirspheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And eachparticular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretfulporcupine. " 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 andsuperstitions current in the Middle Age may better illustrate thecharacteristic belief of the time than much abstract description. An unquestioning faith in the personality, visibility, andextensive 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. Themediaval conception of the devil was sometimes comical, sometimesawful. Grimm says, "He was Jewish, heathenish, Christian, idolatrous, elfish, titanic, spectral, all at once. " He was "asoul snatching wolf, " a "hell hound, " a "whirlwind hammer;" now aninfernal "parody of God" with "a mother who mimics the VirginMary, " and now the "impersonated soul of evil. "21 The well knownstory of Faust and the Devil, which in so many forms spreadthrough Christendom, is so deeply significant of the faith andlife of the age in which it arose that a volume would be requiredto unfold all its import. There was an old tradition that thestudents of necromancy or the black art, on reaching a certainpitch of proficiency, were obliged to run through a subterraneanhall, where the devil literally caught the hindmost unless he spedso swiftly that the arch enemy could only seize his shadow, and inthat case, a veritable Peter Schlemihl, he never cast a shadowafterwards! A man stood by his furnace one day casting eyes forbuttons. The devil came up and asked what he was doing. "Castingeyes, " replied the man. "Can you cast a pair for me?" quoth thedevil. "That I can, " says the man: "will you have them large orsmall?" "Oh, very large, " answered the devil. He then ties thefiend on a bench and pours the molten lead into his eyes. Up jumpsthe devil, with the bench on his back, flees howling, and hasnever been seen since! There was also in wide circulation a wildlegend to the effect that a man made a compact with the devil onthe condition that he should secure a new victim for hell once ina century. As long as he did this he should enjoy life, riches, power, and a limited ubiquity; but failing a fresh victim at theend of each hundred years his own soul should be the forfeit. Helived four or five centuries, and then, in spite of his mostdesperate efforts, was disappointed of his expected victim on thelast night of the century; and when the clock struck twelve thedevil burst into his castle on a black steed and bore him off in astorm of lightning amidst the crash of thunders and the shrieks offiends. St. Britius once during mass saw the devil in churchtaking account of the sins the congregation were committing. Hecovered the parchment all over, and, afraid of forgetting some ofthe offences, seized the scroll in his teeth and claws to stretchit out. It snapped, and his head was smartly bumped against thewall. St. Britius laughed aloud. The officiating priest rebukedhim, but, on being told what had happened, improved the accidentfor the edification of his hearers. 22 On the bursting of a certainglacier on the Alps, it is said the devil was seen swimming downthe Rhone, a drawn sword in one hand, a golden ball in the other:opposite the town of Martigny, he cried, "Rise, " and instantly theobedient river swelled above its banks and destroyed the town. Ignes fatui, hovering about marshes and misty places, were thoughtto be the spirits of unbaptized children endeavoring to guidetravellers 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, " afterwardscorrupted to "hell hounds, " composed of the souls of unbaptizedchildren, which could not rest, but roamed and howled through thewoods all night. 23 A touching popular myth said, the robin'sbreast is so red because it flies into hell with drops of water inits bill to relieve the children there, and gets scorched. In 1171, Silo, a philosopher, implored a dying pupil of his tocome back and reveal his state in the other world. A few daysafter his death the scholar appeared in a cowl of flames coveredwith logical propositions. He told Silo that he was frompurgatory, that the cowl weighed on him worse than a tower, andsaid 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, "Ileave croaking to frogs, cawing to crows, and vain things to thevain, and hie me to the logic which fears not death. " "Linquo coax ranis, cras corvis, vanaque vanis, Ad logicen pergoqua mortis non timet ergo. " 24 In the long, quaint poem, "Vision of William concerning PiersPloughman, " written probably by Robert Langland about the year1362, there are many things illustrative of our subject. "I, Trojanus, a true knight, after death was condemned to hell fordying unbaptized. But, on account of my mercy and truth inadministering the laws, the pope wished me to be saved; and Godmercifully heard him and saved me without the help of masses. "25"Ever since the fall of Adam, Age has shaken the Tree of HumanLife, and the devil has gathered the fruit into hell. "26 Theauthor gives a most spirited account of Christ's descent into theunder world after his death, his battle with the devils there, histriumph over them, his rescue of Adam, and other particulars. 27 Inthis poem, as in nearly all the extant productions of that period, there are copious evidences of the extent and power of the popularfaith in the devil and in purgatory, and in their close connectionwith the present life, a faith nourishingly embodied in thousandsof singular tales. Thomas Wright has collected many of these inhis antiquarian works. He relates an amusing incident that oncebefell a minstrel who had been borne into hell by a devil. Thedevils went forth in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Luciferleft the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, ifhe let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monkroasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiendswere away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel toplay at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture underhis care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils, coming back and finding the fires all out and hell empty, kickedthe hapless minstrel out, and Lucifer swore a big oath that nominstrel 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 lastjudgment, 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, "Theinmost distinction of mediaval experience was an awful sense ofanother life and an invisible world. " A most piteous illustrationof the conjoined faith and fear of that age is furnished by an olddialogue between the "Soul and the Body" recently edited byHalliwell, an expression of humble trust and crouching horrorirresistibly pathetic in its simplicity. 28 A flood of revealinglight is given as to the energy with which the doctrine ofpurgatory impressed itself on the popular mind, by the two facts, first, that the Council of Auxerre, in 1578, prohibited theadministration of the eucharist to the dead; and, secondly, thatin the eleventh and twelfth centuries "crosses of absolution" thatis, crosses cut out of sheet lead, with the formula of absolutionengraved on them were quite commonly buried with the dead. 29 Theeager sincerity of the mediaval belief in another life isattested, too, by the correspondence of the representations of thedead in their legends to the appearance, disposition, and pursuitsthey 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 buriedtreasure allowed them no rest till they had led some one to raiseit. An unfinished task, an uncancelled obligation, forced themagain 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 spectrerobber fell on the benighted traveller. 30 It is hard for us now toreproduce, even in imagination, the fervid and frightfulearnestness of the popular faith of the Middle Age in theramifying agency of the devil and in the horrors of purgatory. Wewill try to do it, in some degree, by a series of illustrationsaiming 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 authorityin spiritual concerns bore almost unquestioned sway over the mindsof more than eighteen generations. By the logical subtleties ofher scholastic theologians, by the persuasive eloquence of herpopular preachers, by the frantic ravings of her fanatic devotees, by the parading proclamation of her innumerable pretendedmiracles, by the imposing ceremonies of her dramatic ritual, almost visibly opening heaven and hell to the over awedcongregation, by her wonder working use of the relics of martyrsand saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal thesick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to behostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinalsystem into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people, and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wandconvulsed the world. In a pastoral letter addressed to theCarlovingian prince Louis, the grandson of Charlemagne, a letterprobably composed by the famous Hincmar, bearing date 858, andsigned by the Bishops of Rheims and Rouen, a Gallic synodauthoritatively declared that Charles Martel was damned; "that onthe opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smellof fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon, and that a saint of thetimes was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body ofthis 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 eschatologicalnotions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease whenit died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation ofthe impending end of the world which wellnigh universallyprevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the chartersgiven at that time commence with the words, "As the world is nowdrawing to a close. " 31 This expectation drew additional strengthfrom the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence, war, superstition then weighing on the people. "The idea of theend 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 atthose antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute, meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with alook of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. Seehow they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreadedmoment when the resurrection shall redeem them from theirunspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existenceand from the grave to God. " Furthermore, this superstitious character of the mediaval beliefin the future life acquired breadth and intensity from theprofound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of thatwhole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, romances, fears, when every landscape of life "wore a strange hue, as ifseen through the sombre medium of a stained casement. " Whilecongregations knelt in awe beneath the lifted Host, and the imageof the dying Savior stretched on the rood glimmered through cloudsof incense, perhaps an army of Flagellants would march by thecathedral, shouting, "The end of the world is at hand!" fillingthe streets with the echoes of their torture as they lashed theirnaked backs with knotted cords wet with blood; and no soul butmust shudder with the infection of horror as the dreadful notes ofthe "Dies Iioe" went sounding through the air. The narratives ofthe desert Fathers, the miracles wrought in convent cells, thevisions of pillar saints, the thrilling accompaniments of theCrusades, and other kindred influences, made the world a perpetualmirage. The belching of a volcano was the vomit of uneasy hell. The devil stood before every tempted man, Ghosts walked in everynightly dell. Ghastly armies were seen contending where the auroraborealis hung out its bloody banners. The Huns under Attila, ravaging Southern Europe, were thought to be literal demons whohad made an irruption from the pit. The metaphysician was in perilof the stake as a heretic, the natural philosopher as a magician. A belief in witchcraft and a trust in ordeals were universal, evenfrom Pope Eugenius, who introduced the trial by cold water, andKing James, who wrote volumes on magic, to the humblest monk whoshuddered when passing the church crypt, and the simplest peasantwho quaked in his homeward path at seeing a will o' the wisp. "Denounced by the preacher and consigned to the flames by thejudge, the wizard received secret service money from the Cabinetto induce him to destroy the hostile armament as it sailed beforethe wind. " As a vivid writer has well said, "A gloomy mist ofcredulity enwrapped the cathedral and the hall of justice, thecottage and the throne. In the dank shadows of the universalignorance 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 asort of epidemic character, diffusing and working like acontagion. 32 There were numberless throngs of pilgrims to famousshrines, immense crowds about the localities of popular legends, relics, or special grace. In the magnetic sphere of such a fervidand credulous multitude, filled with the kindling interaction ofenthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables wouldflourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. Incommemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St. Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church atAssisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of Augusteach year that being the anniversary of the saint's achievement afree pardon for all the sins committed by them since theirbaptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flockedthither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in thesuffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly twothousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of yearsthe pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to thetemple of Juggernaut. 33 Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see iteverywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it. Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Itsapplications and results were constantly and universally thrustinto notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching ofexcommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagnecomplained that the bishops and abbots forced property fromfoolish people by promises and threats: "Suadendo de coelestisregni beatitudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni. "34 Therival 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 theirorders 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 ofDominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised. " The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monksthat their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thenceto heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order. The Carmelites also asserted that the Virgin Mary appeared toSimon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemnpromise that the souls of such as left the world with theCarmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infalliblypreserved from eternal damnation. Mosheim says that Pope BenedictXIV. Was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction. 35 If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine of thefuture life, whether with respect to the hair drawn scholasticmetaphysics by which it was defended, or with respect to theconcrete forms in which the popular apprehension held it, let himread the Divina Commedia of Dante; for it is all there. Whoso withadequate 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 ashe walked the streets, and said, "There goes the man who has beenin hell" will not fail to perceive with what a profound sinceritythe popular breast shuddered responsive to ecclesiastical threatsand purgatorial woes. The tremendous moral power of this solitary work lies in the factthat it is a series of terrific and fascinating tableaux, embodying the idea of inflexible poetic justice impartiallyadministered upon king and varlet, pope and beggar, oppressor andvictim, projected amidst the unalterable necessities of eternity, and moving athwart the lurid abyss and the azure cope with anintense distinctness that sears the gazer's eyeballs. The DivinaCommedia, with a wonderful truth, also reflects the feeling of theage when it was written in this respect, that there is a grapplingforce of attraction, a compelling realism, about its "Purgatory"and "Hell" which are to be sought in vain in the delineations ofits "Paradise. " The mediaval belief in a future life had for itscentral thought the day of judgment, for its foremost emotionterror. 36 The roots of this faith were unquestionably fertilized, and thedevelopment of this fear quickened, to a very great extent, bydeliberate and systematic delusions. One of the most celebrated ofthese organized frauds was the gigantic one perpetrated under theauspices of the Dominican monks at Berne in 1509, the chief actorsin which were unmasked and executed. Bishop Burnet has given anextremely interesting account of this affair in his volume oftravels. Suffice it to say, the monks appeared at midnight in thecells of various persons, now impersonating devils, in horridattire, breathing flames and brimstone, now claiming to be thesouls of certain sufferers escaped from purgatory, and againpretending to be celebrated saints, with the Virgin Mary at theirhead. By the aid of mechanical and chemical arrangements, theywrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of thespectators in a frightful manner. 37 There is every reason tosuppose that such deceptions miracles in which secret speakingtubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were mostfrequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors wereunscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one ofthe foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Agein the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and sointense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarmingspirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So theDanish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says toHamlet, "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk thenight, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foulcrimes 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 inthe 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, thesepoor 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 ofghostly and demoniac revelry on the earth. As the hour fell withbrazen clang from the tower, the belated traveller, afraid of therustle of his own dress, the echo of his own footfall, thewavering of his own shadow, afraid of his own thoughts, wouldbreathe the suppressed invocation, "Angels and ministers of gracedefend us!" as the idea crept curdling over his brain and throughhis veins, "It is the very witching time of night, Whenchurchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to thisworld. " Working in alliance with the foregoing forces of superstition wasthe powerful influence of the various forms of insanity whichremarkably abounded in the Middle Age. The insane person, it wasbelieved, was possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives, were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernalvisions, diabolical interviews, encounters with apparitions, andevery thing that would naturally arise in a deranged andpreternaturally sensitive mind from the chief conceptions thencurrent concerning the invisible world. 39 The principal works of art exposed to the people were such asserved to impress upon their imaginations the Church doctrine ofthe future life in all its fearfulness, with its vigorous dramaticpoints. In the cathedral at Antwerp there is a representation ofhell carved in wood, whose marvellous elaborateness astonishes, and whose painful expressiveness oppresses, every beholder. Withwhat excruciating emotions the pious crowds must have contemplatedthe harrowingly vivid paintings of the Inferno, by Orcagna, stillto be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa! In the cathedral atCanterbury there was a window on which was painted a detailedpicture of Christ vanquishing the devils in their own domain; butwe believe it has been removed. However, the visitor still sees onthe fine east window of York Cathedral the final doom of thewicked, hell being painted as an enormous mouth; also in the westfront of Lincoln Cathedral an ancient bas relief representing hellas a monstrous mouth vomiting flame and serpents, with two humanbeings walking into it. The minster at Freyburg has a grotesquebas 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, anda couple of malicious imps try to make the human scale kick thebeam. Underneath, St. Peter is ushering the good into Paradise. Onthe right is shown a devil, with a pig's head, dragging after hima throng of the wicked. He also has a basket on his back filledwith figures whom he is in the act of flinging into a reekingcaldron stirred by several imps. Hell is typified, on one side, bythe jaws of a monster crammed to the teeth with reprobates, andSatan is seen sitting on his throne above them. A recent travellerwrites from 39 De Boismont, Rational Hist. Of Hallucivatious, ch. Xiv. Naples, "The favorite device on the church walls here is avermilion picture of a male and a female soul, respectively up tothe waist [the waist of a soul!] in fire, with an angel over eachwatering them from a water pot. This is meant to get money fromthe compassionate to pay for the saying of masses in behalf ofsouls in purgatory. " Ruskin has described some of the churchpaintings of the Last Judgment by the old masters as possessing apower even now sufficient to stir every sensibility to its depths. Such works, gazed on day after day, while multitudes were kneelingbeneath in the shadowy aisles, and clouds of incense were floatingabove, and the organ was pealing and the choir chanting in fullaccord, must produce lasting effects on the imagination, and thuscontribute in return to the faith and fear which inspired them. Villani as also Sismondi gives a description of a horriblerepresentation of hell shown at Florence in 1304 by theinhabitants of San Priano, on the river Arno. The glare of flames, the shrieks of men disguised as devils, scenes of infernaltorture, filled the night. Unfortunately, the scaffolding brokebeneath the crowd, and many spectators were burned or drowned, andthat which began as an entertaining spectacle ended as a direfulreality. The whole affair is a forcible illustration of theliterality with which the popular mind and faith apprehended thenotion of the infernal world. Another means by which the views we have been considering wereboth expressed and recommended to the senses and belief of thepeople was those miracle plays that formed one of the mostpeculiar features of the Middle Age. These plays, founded on, andmeant to illustrate, Scripture narratives and theologicaldoctrines, were at first enacted by the priests in the churches, afterwards by the various trading companies or guilds ofmechanics. In 1210, Pope Gregory "forbade the clergy to take anypart in the plays in churches or in the mummings at festivals. " Asimilar prohibition was published by the Council of Treves, in1227. The Bishop of Worms, in 1316, issued a proclamation againstthe abuses which had crept into the festivities of Easter, andgives a long and curious description of them. 40 There were twopopular festivals, of which Michelet gives a full and amusingdescription, one called the "Fete of the Tipsy Priests, " when theyelected a Bishop of Unreason, offered him incense of burnedleather, sang obscene songs in the choir, and turned the altarinto a dice table; the other called the "Fete of the Cuckolds, "when the laymen crowned each other with leaves, the priests woretheir surplices wrong side out and threw bran in each others'eyes, and the bell ringers pelted each other with biscuits. Thereis a religious play by Calderon, entitled "The Divine Orpheus, " inwhich the entire Church scheme of man's fall the devil's empire, Christ's descent there, and the victorious sequel is embodied in amost effective manner. In the priestly theology and in the popularheart of those times there was no other single particular onetenth part so prominent and vivid as that of Christ's entranceafter his death into hell to rescue the old saints and break downSatan's power. 41 40 Early Mysteries and Latin Poems of the XII. And XIII. Centuries, edited by Thomas Wright. See the eloquent sermon onthis 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 whohad us in his bonds? He offered him the cross as a mouse trap, andput his blood on it as bait. " 42 About that scene there was anincomparable fascination for every believer. Christ laid aside hisGodhead 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'nerloose, the jailer bounde!" 43 A large proportion of the miracle plays, or Mysteries, turned onthis event. In the "Mystery of the Resurrection of Christ" occursthe 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 Mysteriesis "Extractio Animarum ab Inferno. " It describes Christ descendingto the gates of hell to claim his own. Adam sees afar the gleam ofhis coming, and with his companions begins to sing for joy. Theinfernal porter shouts to the other demons, in alarm, "Since firstthat hell was made and I was put therein, Such sorrow never ere Ihad, nor heard I such a din. My heart begins to start; my wit itwaxes thin; I am afraid we can't rejoice, these souls must fromus go. Ho, Beelzebub! bind these boys: such noise was never heardin hell. " Satan vows he will dash Beelzebub's brains out for frightening himso. Meanwhile, Christ draws near, and says, "Lift up your gates, ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and theKing of glory shall come in. " The portals fly asunder. Satanshouts up to his friends, "Dyng the dastard down;" but Beelzebubreplies, "That is easily said. " Jesus and the devil soon meet, face to face. A long colloquy ensues, in the course of which thelatter tells the former that he knew his Father well by sight! Atlast Jesus frees Adam, Eve, the prophets, and others, and ascends, leaving the devil in the lowest pit, resolving that hell shallsoon be fuller than before; for he will walk east and he will walkwest, and he will seduce thousands from their allegiance. Anotherplay, similar to the foregoing, but much more extensively knownand acted, was called the "Harrowing of Hell. " Christ and Satanappear on the stage and argue in the most approved scholasticstyle for the right of possession in the human race. Satan says, "Whoever purchases any thing, It belongs to him and to hischildren. Adam, hungry, came to me; 42 Sententia, lib. Iii. Distinctio 19. 43 Hone, Ancient Mysteries. 44 "Resurrexit hodie Rex angelorum Ducitur de tenebris turbapiorum. " I made him do me homage: For an apple, which I gave him, He andall his race belong to me. " But Christ instantly puts a differentaspect on the argument, by replying, "Satan! it was mine, Theapple thou gavest him. The apple and the apple tree Both were madeby me. As he was purchased with my goods, With reason will I havehim. " 45 In a religious Mystery exhibited at Lisbon as late as the close ofthe eighteenth century, the following scene occurs. Cain kicks hisbrother Abel badly and kills him. A figure like a Chinesemandarin, seated in a chair, condemns Cain and is drawn up intothe clouds. The mouth of hell then appears, like the jaws of agreat 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 acup of brimstone coffee, and another asking him to make up a partyat whist. Cain snarls, and they tumble him and themselves headlonginto the squib vomiting mouth. Various books of accounts kept by the trading companies whocelebrated these Mysteries of the expenses incurred have beenpublished, and are exceedingly amusing. "Item: payd for kepyng offyer at hellmothe, four pence. " "For a new hoke to hang Judas, sixpence. " "Item: payd for mendyng and payntyng hellmouthe, twopence. " "Girdle for God, nine pence. " "Axe for Pilatte's son, oneshilling. " "A staff for the demon, one penny. " "God's coat ofwhite leather, three shillings. " The stage usually consisted ofthree platforms. On the highest sat God, surrounded by his angels. On the next were the saints in Paradise, the intermediate state ofthe good after death. On the third were mere men yet living in theworld. On one side of the lowest stage, in the rear, was a fearfulcave or yawning mouth filled with smoke and flames, and denotinghell. From this ever and anon would issue the howls and shrieks ofthe damned. Amidst hideous yellings, devils would rush forth andcaper about and snatch hapless souls into this pit to theirdoom. 46 The actors, in their mock rage, sometimes leaped from thepageant into the midst of the laughing, screaming, tremblingcrowd. The dramatis personoe included many queer characters, suchas a "Worm of Conscience, " "Deadman, " (representing a souldelivered from hell at the descent of Christ, ) numerous "DamnedSouls, " dressed in flame colored garments, "Theft, " "Lying, ""Gluttony. " But the devil himself was the favorite character; andoften, when his personified vices jumped on him and pinched andcudgelled him till he roared, the mirth of the honest audienceknew no bounds. For there were in the Middle Age two sides to thepopular idea of the devil and of all appertaining to him. He was asoul harrowing bugbear or a rib shaking jest according to the hourand 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 irresistibleburlesques of the doctrine of purgatory. The ludicrous side ofthis subject may be seen by reading Tarlton's "Jests" and his"Newes out of Purgatorie. " 47 Glimpses of it are also to be caughtthrough many of the humorous passages in Shakspeare. Dromio saysof an excessively fat and greasy kitchen wench, "If she lives tilldoomsday she'll burn a week longer than the whole world!" AndFalstaff, cracking a kindred joke on Bardolph's carbuncled nose, avows his opinion that it will serve as a flaming beacon to lightlost souls the way to purgatory! Again, seeing a flea on the sameflaming proboscis, the doughty knight affirmed it was "a blacksoul burning in hell fire. " In this element of mediaval life, thisfeature of mediaval literature, a terrible belief lay under thegay raillery. Here is betrayed, on a wide scale, that naturalreaction of the faculties from excessive oppression to sportivewit, from deep repugnance to superficial jesting, which has oftenbeen pointed out by philosophical observers as a striking fact inthe psychological history of man. One more active and mighty cause of the dreadful faith and fearwith which the Middle Age contemplated the future life was theinnumerable and frightful woes, crimes, tyrannies, instruments oftorture, engines of persecution, insane superstitions, which thenexisted, making its actual life a hell. The wretchedness andcruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightfulbeliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earthwas full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse withthem. The Inquisition sat shrouded and enthroned in supernaturalobscurity of cunning and awfulness of power, and thrust itsinvisible daggers everywhere. The facts men knew here around themgave credibility to the imagery in which the hereafter wasdepicted. The flaming stakes of an Auto da Fe around which thevictims of ecclesiastical hatred writhed were but faint emblems ofwhat awaited their souls in the realm of demons whereto the tendermercies of the Church consigned them. Indeed, the fate of myriadsof heretics and traitors could not fail to project the luridvision of hell with all its paraphernalia into the imaginations ofthe people of the Dark Age. The glowing lava of purgatory heatedthe soil they trod, and a smell of its sulphur surcharged the air. A stupendous revelation of terror, bearing whole volumes ofdireful meaning, is given in the single fact that it was a commonbelief of that period that the holy Inquisitors would sit withChrist in the judgment at the last day. 48 If king or noble tookoffence at some uneasy retainer or bold serf, he ordered him to besecretly buried in the cell of some secluded fortress, and he wasnever heard of more. So, if pope or priest hated or feared somestubborn thinker, he straightway, "Would banish him to wear aburning chain In the great dungeons of the unforgiven, Beneaththe space deep castle walls of heaven. " It was an age of cruelty, never to be restored, when the world wasboiling in tempest and men rode on the crests of fear. 47 Recently edited by Halliwell and published by the ShakspeareSociety. 48 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 205. Researches made within the last century among the remains offamous mediaval edifices, both ecclesiastic and state, havebrought to light the dismal records of forgotten horrors. In manya royal palace, priestly building, and baronial castle, there weresecret chambers full of infernal machinery contrived forinflicting tortures, and under them concealed trap doors openinginto rayless dungeons with no outlet and whose floors were coveredwith the mouldering bones of unfortunate wretches who hadmysteriously disappeared long ago and tracelessly perished there. Sometimes these trap doors were directly above profound pits ofwater, in which the victim would drown as he dropped from themangling hooks, racks, and pincers of the torture chamber. Therewere horrible rumors current in the Middle Age of a machine calledthe "Virgin, " used for putting men to death; but little was knownabout it, and it was generally supposed to be a fable, until, someyears ago one of the identical machines was discovered in an oldAustrian castle. It was a tall wooden woman, with a painted face, which the victim was ordered to kiss. As he approached to offerthe salute, he trod on a spring, causing the machine to fly open, stretch out a pair of iron arms, and draw him to its breastcovered with a hundred sharp spikes, which pierced him to death. 49 Ignorance and alarm, in a suffering and benighted age, surroundedby sounds of superstition and sights of cruelty, must needs breedand foster a horrid faith in regard to the invisible world. Accordingly, the common doctrine of the future life prevailing inChristendom from the ninth century till the sixteenth was as wehave portrayed it. Of course there are exceptions to be admittedand qualifications to be made; but, upon the whole, the picture isfaithful. Fortunately, intellect and soul could not slumberforever, nor the mediaval nightmares always keep their torturingseat on the bosom of humanity. Noble men arose to vindicate therights of reason and the divinity of conscience. The world wascircumnavigated, and its revolution around the sun wasdemonstrated. A thousand truths were discovered, a thousandinventions introduced. Papacy tottered, its prestige waned, itsinfallibility sunk. The light of knowledge shone, the simplicityof nature was seen, and the benignity of God was surmised. Thought, throwing off many restrictions and accumulating muchmaterial, 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 enwreathedthe mind of the time with its pendent and breathing horrors, gradually broke up and dissolved, "Like a great superstitioussnake, uncurled From the pale temples of the awakening world. " 49 The Kiss of the Virgin, in the Archaologia published by theAntiquaries of London, vol. Xxviii. CHAPTER III. MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. THE folly and paganism of some of the Church dogmas, the rapacioushaughtiness of its spirit, the tyranny of its rule, and theimmoral character of many of its practices, had often awakened theindignant protests and the determined opposition of men ofenlightened minds, vigorous consciences, and generous hearts, bothin its bosom and out of it. Many such men, vainly struggling topurify the Church from its iniquitous errors or to relieve mankindfrom its outrageous burdens, had been silenced and crushed by itsrelentless might. Arnold, Wickliffe, Wessel, Savonarola, and ahost of others, are to be gratefully remembered forever as theheroic though unsuccessful forerunners of the mighty monk ofWittenberg. 1 The corruption of the mediaval Church grew worse, andbecame so great as to stir a very extensive disgust and revulsion. Wholesale pardons for all their sins were granted indiscriminatelyto those who accepted the terms of the papal officials; whileevery independent thinker, however evangelical his faith andexemplary his character, was hopelessly doomed to hell. Especiallywere these pardons given to pilgrims and to the Crusaders. Bernardof Clairvaux, exhorting the people to undertake a new Crusade, tells them that "God condescends to invite into his servicemurderers, robbers, adulterers, perjurers, and those sunk in othercrimes; and whosoever falls in this cause shall secure pardon forthe sins which he has never confessed with contrite heart. "2 Atthe opening of "Piers the Ploughman's Crede" a person isintroduced saying, "I saw a company of pilgrims on their way toRome, who came home with leave to lie all the rest of theirlives!" Nash, in his "Lenten Stuff, " speaks of a proclamationwhich caused "three hundred thousand people to roam to Rome forpurgatorie pills. " Ecclesiasticism devoured ethics. Allegiance tomorality was lowered into devotion to a ritual. The sale ofindulgences at length became too impudent and blasphemous to beany longer endured, when John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, travelledover Europe, and, setting up his auction block in the churches, offered for sale those famous indulgences of Leo X. Whichpromised, 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 boastedthat "he had saved more souls from hell by the sale of indulgencesthan St. Peter had converted to Christianity by his preaching. " Healso said that "even if any one had ravished the Mother of God hecould sell him a pardon for it!" The soul of Martin Luther tookfire. The consequence to which a hundred combining causescontributed was the Protestant Reformation. This great movementproduced, in relation to our subject, three important results. Itnoticeably modified the practice and the popular preaching of theRoman 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 papalfunctionaries. Morality was made more prominent, and mereritualism less obtrusive. Comparatively speaking, an emphasis wastaken from ecclesiastic confession and indulgence, and laid uponethical obedience and piety. The Council of Trent, held at thistime, says, in its decree concerning indulgences, "In grantingindulgences, the Church desires that moderation be observed, lest, by excessive facility, ecclesiastical discipline be enervated. "Imposture became more cautious, threats less frequent and lessterrible; the teeth of persecution were somewhat blunted; miraclesgrew rarer; the insufferable glare of purgatory and hell faded, and the open traffic in forgiveness of sins, or the compoundingfor deficiencies, diminished. But among the more ignorant papalmultitudes the mediaval superstition holds its place still in allits virulence and grossness. "Heaven and hell are as much a partof the Italian's geography as the Adriatic and the Apennines; theQueen of Heaven looks on the streets as clear as the morning star;and the souls in purgatory are more readily present to conceptionthan the political prisoners immured in the dungeons of Venice. " A second consequence of the Reformation is seen in the numerousdissenting sects to which its issues gave rise. The chiefpeculiarities of the Protestant doctrines of the future life areembodied in the four leading denominations commonly known asLutheran, Calvinistic, Unitarian, and Universalist. Each of theseincludes a number of subordinate parties bearing distinctivenames, (such as Arminian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Restorationist, and many others;) but these minor differences aretoo trivial to deserve distinctive characterization here. TheLutheran 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 willnot, and so will be lost forever. Luther's views were not firmlydefined and consistent throughout his career; they were oftenobscure, and they fluctuated much. It is true he always insistedthat there was no salvation without faith, and that all who hadfaith should be saved. But, while he generally seems to believe inthe current doctrine of eternal damnation, he sometimes appears toencourage the hope that all will finally be saved. In a remarkableletter to Hansen von Rechenberg, dated 1522, he says, in effect, "Whoso hath faith in Christ shall be saved. God forbid that Ishould limit the time for acquiring this faith to the presentlife! In the depths of the Divine mercy, there may be opportunityto win it in the future state. " The Calvinistic formula is that heaven is attainable only forthose whom the arbitrary predestination of God has elected; allothers are irretrievably damned. Calvin was the first Christiantheologian who succeeded in giving the fearful doctrine ofunconditional election and reprobation a lodgment in the popularbreast. The Roman Catholic Church had earnestly repudiated it. Gotteschalk was condemned and died in prison for advocating it, inthe ninth century. But Calvin's character enabled him to believeit, and his talents and position gave great weight to his advocacyof it, and it has since been widely received. Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, all agreed in the general proposition thatby sin physical death came into the world, heaven was shut againstman, and all men utterly lost. They differed only in someunessential details concerning the condition of that lost state. They also agreed in the general proposition that Christ came, byhis incarnation, death, descent to hell, resurrection, andascension, to redeem men from their lost state. They only differedin regard to the precise grounds and extent of that redemption. The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score oforiginal sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelityand the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonementmade all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all mayhave faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would falland incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatchedas brands from the burning, while the mass should be left toeternal torture; and Christ's atonement purchased the predestinedsalvation of the chosen few. Furthermore, Lutherans andCalvinists, in all their varieties, agree with the Romanist inasserting that Christ shall come again, the dead be raised bodily, a universal judgment be held, and that then the condemned shallsink into the everlasting fire of hell, and the accepted rise intothe endless bliss of heaven. The Socinian doctrine relative to the future fate of man differedfrom the foregoing in the following particulars. First, it limitedthe redeeming mission of Christ to the enlightening influences ofthe truths which he proclaimed with Divine authority, the moralpower of his perfect example, and the touching motives exhibitedin his death. Secondly, it asserted a natural ability in every manto live a life conformed to right reason and sound morality, andpromised heaven to all who did this in obedience to theinstructions and after the pattern of Christ. Thirdly, it declaredthat the wicked, after suffering excruciating agonies, would beannihilated. Respecting the second coming of Christ, a physicalresurrection of the dead, and a day of judgment, the Sociniansbelieved with the other sects. 4 Their doctrine scarcelycorresponds with that of the present Unitarians in any thing. Thedissent of the Unitarian from the popular theology is much morefundamental, detailed, and consistent than that of the Socinianwas, and approaches much closer to the Rationalism of the presentday. The Universalist formula every soul created by God shall sooner orlater be saved from sin and woe and inherit everlasting happinesshas been publicly defended in every age of the Christian Church. 5It was first publicly condemned as a heresy at the very close ofthe fourth century. It ranks among its defenders the names ofClement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory ofNyssa, and several other prominent Fathers. Universalism has beenheld in four forms, on four grounds. First, it has been supposedthat Christ died for all, and that, by the infinite efficacy ofhis redeeming merits, all sins shall be cancelled and every soulbe saved. This was the scheme of those early UniversalistChristians whom Epiphanius condemns as heretics; also of a few inmore modern times. Secondly, it has been thought that each personwould be punished in the future state according to the deeds donein the body, each sin be expiated by a proportionate amount ofsuffering, 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 referencesto 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 thenotion of Origen, the basis of the doctrine of purgatory, and theview of most of the Restorationists. Thirdly, it has been imaginedthat, by the good pleasure and fixed laws of God, all men aredestined to an impartial, absolute, and instant salvation beyondthe grave: all sins are justly punished, all moral distinctionsequitably compensated, in this life; in the future an equal gloryawaits all men, by the gracious and eternal election of God, asrevealed to us in the benignant mission of Christ. This is thepeculiar conception distinguishing some members of thedenomination now known as Universalists. Finally, it has beenbelieved that the freedom and probation granted here extend intothe life to come; that the aim of all future punishment will beremedial, beneficent, not revengeful; that stronger motives willbe applied for producing repentance, and grander attractions toholiness be felt; and that thus, at some time or other, even themost sunken and hardened souls will be regenerated and raised upto heaven in the image of God. Almost all Universalists, mostUnitarians, and large number of individual Christians outwardlyaffiliated with other denominations, now accept and cherish thistheory. One important variation from the doctrine of the dominant sects, in connection with the present subject, is worthy of specialnotice. We refer to the celebrated controversy waged in England, in the first part of the eighteenth century, in regard to theintermediate state of the dead. The famous Dr. Coward and a fewsupporters labored, with much zeal, skill, and show of learning, to prove the natural mortality of the soul. They asserted this tobe both a philosophical truth proved by scientific facts and aChristian doctrine declared in Scripture and taught by theFathers. They argued that the soul is not an independent entity, but is merely the life of the body. Proceeding thus far on theprinciples of a materialistic science, they professed to completetheir theory from Scripture, without doing violence to anydoctrine of the acknowledged religion. 6 The finished scheme wasthis. Man was naturally mortal; but, by the pleasure and will ofGod, he would have been immortally preserved alive had he notsinned. Death is the consequence of sin, and man utterly perishesin the grave. But God will restore the dead, through Christ, atthe day of the general resurrection which he has foretold in thegospel. 7 Some of the writers in this copious controversymaintained that previous to the advent of Christ death was eternalannihilation to all except a few who enjoyed an inspiredanticipatory faith in him, but that all who died after his comingwould be restored in the resurrection, the faithful to be advancedto heaven, the wicked to be the victims of unending torture. 8Clarke and Baxter both wrote with extreme ability in support ofthe natural immortality and separate existence of the soul. On theother hand, the learned Henry Dodwell cited, from the lore ofthree thousand years, a plausible body of authorities to show thatthe soul is in itself but a mortal breath. He also contended, by asingular perversion of figurative phrases from the New Testamentand 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, EpistolaryDiscourse. Peckard, Observations. Fleming, Survey of the Searchafter Souls. Law, State of Separate Spirits. Layton, Treatise ofDeparted Souls. in counteraction of man's natural mortality, all who undergobaptism at the hands of the ordained ministers of the Church ofEngland the only true priesthood in apostolic succession therebyreceive an immortalizing spirit brought into the world by Christand committed to his successors. This immortalizing spiritconveyed by baptism would secure their resurrection at the lastday. Those destitute of this spirit would never awake from theoblivious sleep of death, unless as he maintained will actually bethe case with a large part of the dead they are arbitrarilyimmortalized by the pleasure of God, in order to suffer eternalmisery in hell! Absurd and shocking as this fancy was, it obtainedquite a number of converts, and made no slight impression at thetime. One of the writers in this controversy asserted that Lutherhimself had been a believer in the death or sleep of the souluntil the day of judgment. 9 Certain it is that such a belief hadat one period a considerable prevalence. Its advocates were calledPsychopannychians. Calvin wrote a vehement assault on them. Theopinion has sunk into general disrepute and neglect, and it wouldbe hard to find many avowed disciples of it. The nearly universalsentiment of Christendom would now exclaim, in the quaint words ofHenry More, "What! has old Adam snorted all this time Under some senselesseclod, with sleep ydead?" 10 John Asgill printed, in the year 1700, a tract called "An argumentto prove that by the new covenant man may be translated intoeternal life without tasting death. " He argues that the law ofdeath was a consequence of Adam's sin and was annulled by Christ'ssacrifice. Since that time men have died only because of anobstinate habit of dying formed for many generations. For hispart, he has the independence and resolution to withstand theuniversal pusillanimity and to refuse to die. He has discovered"an engine in Divinity to convey man from earth to heaven. " Hewill "play a trump on death and show himself a match for thedevil!" While treating of the various Protestant views of the future life, it would be a glaring defect to overlook the remarkable doctrineon that subject published by Emanuel Swedenborg and now held bythe intelligent, growing body of believers called after his name. It would be impossible to exhibit this system adequately in itsscientific bases and its complicated details without occupyingmore space than can be afforded here. Nor is this necessary, nowthat his own works have been translated and are easily accessibleeverywhere. His "Heaven and Hell, " "Heavenly Arcana, " "Doctrine ofInflux, " and "True Christian 9 Blackburne, View of the Controversy Concerning an IntermediateState: appendix. It is probable that the great Reformer's opinionon this point was not always the same. For he says, distinctly, "The first man who died, when he awakes at the last day, willthink he has been asleep but an hour" Beste, Dr. M. Luther'sGlaubenslehre, cap. Iv. : Die Lehre von den Letzen Dingen. Yet. J. S. Muller seems conclusively to prove the truth of the propositionwhich forms the title of his book, "Dass Luther die Lehre vomSeelenschlafe nie geglaubt habe. " 10 The controversy concerning the natural immortality of the soulhas within a few years raged afresh. The principal combatants wereDobney, Storrs, White, Morris, and Hinton. See Athanasia, by J. H. Hinton, London, 1849. Religion, " contain manifold statements and abundant illustrationsof every thing important bearing on his views of the theme beforeus. We shall merely attempt to present a brief synopsis of theessential principles, accompanied by two or three suggestions ofcriticism. Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truthand love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed fora season of probation in a perishable material body. Every momentreceiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returningit through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in consciousobedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal, and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power ofman's life, and the understanding is its form. When the will isdisinterested love and the understanding is celestial truth, thenman fulfils the end of his being, and his home is heaven; he is aspirit frame into which the goodness of God perpetually flows, ishumbly acknowledged, gratefully enjoyed, and piously returned. Butwhen his will is hatred or selfishness and his understanding isfalsehood or evil, then his powers are abused, his destinyinverted, and his fate hell. While in the body in this world he isplaced 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. Inthe intermediate or spiritual world are the earths inhabited bymen, and surrounded by the transition state through which souls, escaping from their bodies, after a while soar to heaven or sinkto hell, according to their fitness and attraction. In this lifeman is free, because he is an energy in equilibrium between theinfluences of heaven and hell. The middle state surrounding man isfull of spirits, some good and some bad. Every man is accompaniedby swarms of both sorts of spirits, striving to make him likethemselves. Now, there are two kinds of influx into man. Mediateinflux is when the spirits in the middle state flow into man'sthoughts and affections. The good spirits are in communicationwith heaven, and they carry what is good and true; the evilspirits are in communication with hell, and they carry what isevil and false. Between these opposed and reacting agencies man isin an equilibrium whose essence is freedom. Deciding for himself, if he turns with embracing welcome to the good spirits, he isthereby placed and lives in conjunction with heaven; but if heturns, 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 elementsof saving goodness flow sweetly down and are appropriated by thefreedom of the good man; while from hell, through the bad spirits, all the elements of damning evil flow foully up and areappropriated by the freedom of the bad man. The other kind of influx is called immediate. This is when theLord himself, the pure substance of truth and good, flows intoevery organ and faculty of man. This influx is perpetual, but isreceived as truth and good only by the true and good. It isrejected, suffocated, or perverted by those who are in love withfalsities and evils. So the light of the sun produces colorsvarying with the substances it falls on, and water takes formscorresponding to the vessels it is poured into. The whole invisible world heaven, hell, and the middle state ispeopled solely from the different families of the human raceoccupying the numerous material globes of the universe. The good, on leaving the fleshly body, are angels, the bad, demons. There isno angel nor demon who was created such at first. Satan is not apersonality, but is a figurative term standing for the wholecomplex of hell. In the invisible world, time and space in onesense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. Theyvirtually cease because all our present measures of them areannihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondencesto them are left. To spirits, time is no longer measured by therevolution of planets, but by the succession of inward states;space is measured not by way marks and the traversing ofdistances, but by inward similitudes and dissimilitudes. Those whoare unlike are sundered by gulfs of difference. Those who arealike are together in their interiors. Thought and love, forgetfulness and hate, are not hampered by temporal and spatialboundaries. Spiritual forces and beings spurn materialimpediments, and are united or separate, reciprocally visible orinvisible, mutually conscious or unconscious, according to theirown laws of kindred or alien adaptedness. The soul the true man is its own organized and deathless body, andwhen it leaves its earthly house of flesh it knows the onlyresurrection, and the cast off frame returns to the dust forever. Swedenborg repeatedly affirms with emphasis that no one is bornfor hell, but that all are born for heaven, and that when any onecomes into hell it is from his own free fault. He asserts thatevery infant, wheresoever born, whether within the Church or outof it, whether of pious parents or of impious, when he dies isreceived by the Lord, and educated in heaven, and becomes anangel. A central principle of which he never loses sight is that"a life of charity, which consists in acting sincerely and justlyin every function, in every engagement, and in every work, from aheavenly motive, according to the Divine laws, is possible toevery one, and infallibly leads to heaven. " It does not matterwhether the person leading such a life be a Christian or aGentile. The only essential is that his ruling motive be divineand his life be in truth and good. The Swedenborgian doctrine concerning Christ and his mission isthat he was the infinite God incarnate, not incarnate for thepurpose of expiating human sin and purchasing a ransom for thelost by vicarious sufferings, but for the sake of suppressing therampant power of the hells, weakening the influx of the infernalspirits, setting an example to men, and revealing many importanttruths. The advantage of the Christian over the pagan is that theformer is enlightened by the celestial knowledge contained in theBible, and animated by the affecting motives presented in thedrama of the Divine incarnation. There is no probation after thislife. Just as one is on leaving the earth he goes into thespiritual world. There his 11 Philo the Jew says, (vol. I. P. 277, ed. Mangey, ) "God is theFather of the world: the world is the father of time, begetting itby its own motion: time, therefore, holds the place of grandchildto God. " But the world is only one measure of time; another, and amore important one, is the inward succession of the spirit'sstates of consciousness. Between Philo and Swedenborg, it may beremarked here, there are many remarkable correspondences both ofthought 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 cannever be extirpated or changed to all eternity. After death, evillife cannot in any manner or degree be altered to good life, norinfernal love be transmuted to angelic love, inasmuch as everyspirit from head to foot is in quality such as his love is, andthence such as his life is, so that to transmute this life intothe opposite is altogether to destroy the spirit. It were easier, says Swedenborg, to change a night bird into a dove, an owl into abird of paradise, than to change a subject of hell into a subjectof heaven after the line of death has been crossed. But why thecrossing of that line should make such an infinite difference hedoes not explain; nor does he prove it as a fact. The moral reason and charitable heart of Swedenborg vehementlyrevolted from the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination andvicarious atonement, and the group of thoughts that cluster aroundthem. He always protests against these dogmas, refutes them withvaried power and consistency; and the leading principles of hisown system are creditable to human nature, and attribute nounworthiness to the character of God. A debt of eternal gratitudeis due to Swedenborg that his influence, certainly destined to bepowerful and lasting, is so clearly calculated to advance theinterests at once of philosophic intelligence, social affection, and true piety. The superiorities of his view of the future lifeover 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 orcasting the faintest shadow on his benevolence, it gives us themost appalling realization of the horribleness of sin and of itsconsequences. God is commonly represented in effect, at least asflaming with anger against sinners, and forcibly flinging theminto the unappeasable fury of Tophet, where his infinite vengeancemay forever satiate itself on them. But, Swedenborg says, God isincapable of hatred or wrath: he casts no one into hell; but thewicked go where they belong by their own election, from theinherent fitness and preference of their ruling love. The evil mandesires to be in hell because there he finds his food, employment, and home; in heaven he would suffer unutterable agonies from everycircumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary andbenignant love of God, not by his indignation; and theirretributions are in their own characters, not in their prisonhouse. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shockthe heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to preferwallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to thevery evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst ofall the impressions of sin, and beneath the lowest deep of thepopular hell opens to our shuddering conceptions a deep ofloathsomeness immeasurably lower still. Secondly, the Swedenborgian doctrine of the conditions ofsalvation 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 oftruth and good from the Lord and convert it to its blessed andsaving uses, piety towards God, good will towards the neighbor, and all kinds of right works. Who does this, no matter in whatland or age he lives, becomes an heir of heaven. Who pervertsthose Divine gifts to selfishness and unrighteous deeds becomes asubject of hell. No mere opinion, no mere profession, no mereritual services, no mere external obedience, not all these thingstogether, can save a man, nor their absence condemn him; but thecontrolling motive of his life, the central and ruling love whichconstitutes the substance of his being, this decides every man'sdoom. The view is simple, reasonable, just, necessary. And so isthe doctrine of degrees accompanying it; namely, that there are inheaven different grades and qualities of exaltation and delight, and in hell of degradation and woe, for different men according totheir capacities and deserts. A profoundly ethical characterpervades the scheme, and the great stamp of law is over it all. Thirdly, a manifest advantage of Swedenborg's doctrine over thepopular doctrine is the intimate connection it establishes betweenthe present and the future, the visible and the invisible, God andman. Heaven and hell are not distant localities, entrance intowhich is to be won or avoided by moral artifices or sacramentalsubterfuges, but they are states of being depending on personalgoodness or evil. God is not throned at the heart or on the apexof the universe, where at some remote epoch we hope to go and seehim, 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 dawningon the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentaryassimilation of a celestial or an infernal love leading to statesand acts, rewards and retributions, corresponding. Before thisview the dead universe becomes a live transparency overwrittenwith the will, tremulous with the breath, and irradiate with theillumination of God. We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the futurelife should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error ofthe dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of allthe subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness, denying that they can ever make the slightest amelioratingprogress. We have never been able to see force enough in any ofthe arguments or assertions advanced in support of this tremendoushorror to warrant the least hesitation in rejecting it. Forourselves, we must regard it as incredible, and think that Godcannot permit it. Instruction, reformation, progress, are thefinal aims of punishment. Aspiration is the concomitant ofconsciousness, and the authentic voice of God. Surely, sooner orlater, in the boonful eternities of being, every creature capableof intelligence, allied to the moral law, drawing life from theInfinite, must begin to travel the ascending path of virtue andblessedness, and never retrograde again. Neither can we admit in general the claim made by Swedenborg andby his disciples that the way in which he arrived at his system oftheology elevates it to the rank of a Divine revelation. It isasserted that God opened his interior vision, so that he saw whathad hitherto been concealed from the eyes of men in the flesh, namely, the inhabitants, laws, contents, and experiences of thespiritual world, and thus that his statements are not speculationsor arguments, but records of unerring knowledge, his descriptionsnot fanciful pictures of the imagination, but literal transcriptsof the truth he saw. This, in view of the great range of knownexperience, is not intrinsically probable, and we have seen noproof of it. Judging from what we know of psychological andreligious history, it is far more likely that a man shouldconfound his intangible reveries with solid fact than that heshould 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 ofSwedenborg's exposition of the future life, we cannot but shrinkfrom many of the details and forms in which he carries them out. Notwithstanding the earnest avowals of able disciples of hisschool that all his details are strictly necessitated by hispremises, and that all his premises are laws of truth, we arecompelled to regard a great many of his assertions as purelyarbitrary and a great many of his descriptions as purely fanciful. But, denying that his scheme of eschatology is a scientificrepresentation of the reality, and looking at it as a poeticstructure reared by co working knowledge and imagination on theground 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 oneof the most wonderful examples of creative power extant in theliterature of the world. No one who has mastered it withappreciative mind will question this. There are, expressed andlatent, in the totality of Swedenborg's accounts of hell andheaven, more variety of imagery, power of moral truth and appeal, exhibition of dramatic justice, transcendent delights of holinessand love, curdling terrors of evil and woe, strength ofphilosophical grasp, and sublimity of emblematic conception, thanare to be found in Dante's earth renowned poem. We say this of thesubstance of his ideas, not of the shape and clothing in whichthey are represented. Swedenborg was no poet in language and form, only in conception. Take this picture. In the topmost height of the celestial worldthe Lord appears as a sun, and all the infinite multitudes ofangels, swarming up through the innumerable heavens, wherever theyare, continually turn their faces towards him in love and joy. Butat the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness, towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through thesuccessive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God. Orconsider this. Every thing consists of a great number of perfectleasts like itself: every heart is an aggregation of littlehearts, every lung an aggregation of little lungs, every eye anaggregation of little eyes. Following out the principle, everysociety in the spiritual world is a group of spirits arranged inthe form of a man, every heaven is a gigantic man composed of animmense number of individuals, and all the heavens togetherconstitute one Grand Man, a countless number of the mostintelligent angels forming the head, a stupendous organization ofthe most affectionate making the heart, the most humble going tothe feet, the most useful attracted to the hands, and so onthrough every part. With exceptions, then, we regard Swedenborg's doctrine of thefuture life as a free poetic presentment, not as a severescientific statement, of views true in moral principle, not offacts real in literal detail. His imagination and sentiment aremathematical and ethical instead of asthetic and passionate. Milkseems to run in his veins instead of blood, but he is oftruthfulness and charity all compact. We think it most probablethat the secret of his supposed inspiration was the abnormalfrequent or chronic turning of his mind into what is called theecstatic or clairvoyant state. This condition being spontaneouslyinduced, while he yet, in some unexplained manner, retainedconscious possession and control of his usual faculties, hetreated his subjective conceptions as objective realities, believed his interior contemplations were accurate visions offacts, and took the strange procession of systematic reveriesthrough his teeming brain for a scenic revelation of theexhaustive mysteries of heaven and hell. "Each wondrous guessbeheld the truth it sought, And inspiration flash'd from what wasthought. " This hypothesis, taken in conjunction with the comprehensivenessof his mind, the vastness of his learning, the integralcorrectness of his conscience, and his disciplined habits ofthought, will go far towards explaining the unparalleledphenomenon of his theological works; and, though it leaves manythings unaccounted for, it seems to us more credible than anyother which has yet been suggested. The last of the three prominent phenomena which as before saidfollowed the Protestant Reformation was rationalism, an attempt totry all religious questions at the tribunal of reason and by thetests of conscience. The great movement led by Luther was but oneelement in a numerous train of influences and events all yieldingtheir different contributions to that resolute rationalistictendency which afterwards broke out so powerfully in England, France, and Germany, and, spreading thence into every country inChristendom, has been, in secret and in public, with slow, suresteps, irresistibly advancing ever since. In the history ofscholasticism there were three distinct epochs. The first periodwas characterized by the servile submission and conformity ofphilosophy to the theology dictated by the Church. The secondperiod was marked by the formal alliance and attemptedreconciliation of philosophy and theology. The third period saw anever increasing jealousy and separation between the philosophersand the theologians. 12 Many an adventurous thinker pushed hisspeculations beyond the limits of the established theology, anddeliberately dissented from the orthodox standards in hisconclusions. Perhaps Abelard, who openly strove to put all theChurch dogmas in forms acceptable to philosophy, and who did nothesitate to reject in many instances what seemed to himunreasonable, deserves to be called the father of rationalism. Theworks of Des Cartes, Leibnitz, Wolf, Kant's "Religion within theBounds of Pure Reason, " together with the influence and thewritings of many other eminent philosophers, gradually gavemomentum to the impulse and popularity to the habits of freethought and criticism even in the realm of theology. The dogmaticscheme of the dominant Church was firmly seized, many errorsshaken out to the light and exposed, and many long receivedopinions questioned and flung into doubt. 13 The authenticity ofmany of the popular doctrines regarding the future life could notfail to be denied as soon as it was attempted as was extensivelydone about the middle of the eighteenth century to demonstratethem by mathematical methods, with all the array of axioms, theorems, lemmas, doubts, and solutions. Flugge has historicallyillustrated the employment of this method at considerablelength. 14 12 Cousin, Hist. Mod. Phil. , lect. Ix. 13 Staudlin, Geschichte des Rationalismus. Saintes, HistoireCritique 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 theFathers, nor the Church, nor the Scriptures, nor all of themtogether, can rightfully establish any proposition opposed to thelogic of sound philosophy, the principles of reason, and theevident truth of nature. Around this thesis the battle has beenfought and the victory won; and it will stand with spreading favoras long as there are unenslaved and cultivated minds in the world. This position is, in logical necessity, and as a general thing infact, that of the large though loosely cohering body of believersknown as "Liberal Christians;" and it is tacitly held by stilllarger and ever growing numbers nominally connected with sectsthat officially eschew it with horror. The result of the studiesand discussions associated with this principle, so far as itrelates to the subject before us, has been the rejection of thefollowing popular doctrines: the plenary inspiration of theScriptures as an ultimate authority in matters of belief;unconditional predestination; the satisfaction theory of thevicarious atonement; the visible second coming of Christ, inperson, to burn up the world and to hold a general judgment; theintermediate state of souls; the resurrection of the body; a localhell of material fire in the bowels of the earth; the eternaldamnation of the wicked. These old dogmas, 15 scarcely changed, still remain in the stereotyped creeds of all the prominentdenominations; but they slumber there to an astonishing extentunrealized, unnoticed, unthought of, by the great multitude ofcommon believers, while every consciously rational investigatorvehemently repudiates them. To every candid mind that has reallystudied their nature and proofs their absurdity is now transparenton all the grounds alike of history, metaphysics, morals, andscience. The changes of the popular Christian belief in regard to threesalient points have been especially striking. First, respectingthe immediate fate of the dead, an intermediate state. Thepredominant Jewish doctrine was that all souls went indiscriminatelyinto a sombre under world, where they awaited a resurrection. The earliest Christian view prevalent was the same, with theexception that it divided that place of departed spiritsinto two parts, a painful for the bad, a pleasant for the good. The next opinion that prevailed the Roman Catholic was the same asthe foregoing, with two exceptions: it established a purgatory inaddition to the previous paradise and hell, and it opened heavenitself for the immediate entrance of a few spotless souls. PopeJohn XXII. , as Gieseler shows, was accused of heresy by thetheological doctors of Paris because he declared that no soulcould enter heaven and enjoy the beatific vision until after theresurrection. Pope Benedict XII. Drew up a list of one hundred andseventeen heretical opinions held by the Armenian Christians. Oneof these notions was that the souls of all deceased adults wanderin the air until the Day of Judgment, neither hell, paradise, norheaven being open to them until after that day. Thomas Aquinassays, "Each soul at death immediately flies to its appointedplace, whether in hell or in heaven, being without the body untilthe resurrection, with it afterwards. "16 Then came the 15 They are defended in all their literal grossness in the twofollowing works, both recent publications. The World to Come; bythe Rev. James Cochrane. Der Tod, das Todtenreich, und der Zustandder abgeschiedenen Seelen; von P. A. Maywahlen. 16 Summa iii. In Suppl. 69. 2. dogma of the orthodox Protestants, slightly varying in thedifferent sects, but generally agreeing that at death all redeemedsouls pass instantly to heaven and all unredeemed souls to hell. 17The principal variation from this among believers within theProtestant fellowship has been the notion that the souls of allmen die or sleep with the body until the Day of Judgment, a notionwhich peeps out here and there in superstitious spots along thepages of ecclesiastical history, and which has found now and thenan advocate during the last century and a half. The Council ofElvin, in Spain, forbade the lighting of tapers in churchyards, lest it should disturb the souls of the deceased buried there. Atthis day, in prayers and addresses at funerals, no phrases aremore common than those alluding to death as a sleep, and implyingthat the departed one is to slumber peacefully in his grave untilthe resurrection. And yet, at the same time, by the same personscontrary ideas are frequently expressed. The truth is, thesubject, owing to the contradictions between their creed and theirreason, is left by most persons in hopeless confusion anduncertainty. They have no determinately reconciled and consciousviews of their own. Rationalism sweeps away all the foregoingincongruous medley at once, denying that we know any thing aboutthe precise localities of heaven and hell, or the destined orderof events in the hidden future of separate souls; affirming thatall we should dare to say is simply that the souls whether of goodor of bad men, on leaving the body, go at once into a spiritualstate of being, where they will live immortally, as God decrees, never returning to be reinvested with the vanished charnel housesof clay they once inhabited. Secondly, the thought that Christ after his death descended intothe under world to ransom mankind, or a part of mankind, from thedoom there, is in the foundation of the apostolic theology. It wasa central element in the belief of the Fathers, and of the Churchfor fourteen hundred years. None of the prominent Protestantreformers thought of denying it. Calvin lays great stress on it. 18Apinus and others, at Hamburg, maintained that Christ's descentwas a part of his humiliation, and that in it he sufferedunutterable pains for us. On the other hand, Melancthon and theWittenbergers held that the descent was a part of Christ'striumph, since by it he won a glorious victory over the powers ofhell. 19 But gradually the importance and the redeeming effectsattached to Christ's descent into hell were transferred to hisdeath on the cross. Slowly the primitive dogma dwindled away, andfinally sunk out of sight, through an ever encroaching disbeliefin the physical conditions on which it rested and in the pictorialenvironments by which it was recommended. And now it is scarcelyever heard of, save when brought out from old scholastic tomes bysome theological delver. Baumgarten Crusius has learnedlyillustrated the important place long held by this notion, and wellshown 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 theWestminster Divines, art. Xxxii. , says, "Souls neither die norsleep, 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 undergoneremarkable change is in regard to the number of the saved. Ablessed improvement has come over the popular Christian feelingand teaching in respect to this momentous subject. The Jewsexcluded from salvation all but their own strict ritualists. Theapostles, it is true, excluded none but the stubbornly wicked. Butthe majority of the Fathers virtually allowed the possibility ofsalvation to few indeed. Chrysostom doubted if out of the hundredthousand souls constituting the Christian population of Antioch inhis day one hundred would be saved! 21 And when we read, withshuddering soul, the calculations of Cornelius a Lapide, or thecelebrated sermon of Massillon on the "Small Number of the Saved, "we are compelled to confess that they fairly represent the almostuniversal sentiment and conviction of Christendom for more thanseventeen hundred years. A quarto volume published in London in1680, by Du Moulin, called "Moral Reflections upon the Number ofthe Elect, " affirmed that not one in a million, from Adam down toour times, shall be saved. A flaming execration blasted the wholeheathen world, 22 and a metaphysical quibble doomed ninety nine ofevery hundred in Christian lands. Collect the whole relevanttheological literature of the Christian ages, from the birth ofTertullian to the death of Jonathan Edwards, strike the averagepitch of its doctrinal temper, and you will get this result: thatin the field of human souls Satan is the harvester, God thegleaner; hell receives the whole vintage in its wine press ofdamnation, heaven obtains only a few straggling clusters pluckedfor salvation. The crowded wains roll staggering into the irondoorways of Satan's fire and brimstone barns; the redeemedvestiges of the world crop of men are easily borne to heaven inthe arms of a few weeping angels. How different is the prevailingtone of preaching and belief now! What a cheerful ascent of viewsfrom the mournful passage of the dead over the river of oblivionfancied by the Greeks, or the excruciating passage of the river offire painted by the Catholics, to the happy passage of the riverof balm, healing every weary bruise and sorrow, promised by theUniversalists! It is true, the old harsh exclusiveness is stillorganically imbedded in the established creeds, all of which denythe possibility of salvation beyond the little circle who vitallyappropriate the vicarious atonement of Christ; but then this is, for the most part, a dead letter in the creeds. In the hearts andin the candid confessions of all but one in a thousand it isdiscredited and sincerely repelled as an abomination to humannature, a reflection against God, an outrage upon the substance ofethics. Remorseless bigots may gloat and exult over the thoughtthat those who reject their dogmas shall be thrust into theroaring fire gorges of hell; but a better spirit is the spirit ofthe age we live in; and, doubtless, a vast majority of the men wedaily meet really believe that all who try to the best of theirability, according to their light and circumstances, to do what isright, in the love of God and man, shall be saved. In that movingscene of the great dramatist where the burial of the innocent andhapless Ophelia is represented, and Lacrtes vainly seeks to winfrom the Church official 21 In Acta Apostolorum, homil. Xxiv. 22 Gotze, Ueber die Neue Meinung von der Seligkeit der angeblichguten und redlichen Seelen unter Juden, Heiden, und Turken durchChristum, ohne dass sie an ihn glauben. the full funeral rites of religion over her grave, the priest maystand for the false and cruel ritual spirit, the brother for thejust and native sentiment of the human heart. Says the priest, "We should profane the service of the dead To sing a requiem andsuch rest to her As to peace parted souls. " And Laertes replies, "Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted fleshShall violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest, A ministeringangel shall my sister be When thou liest howling. " Indeed, who that has a heart in his bosom would not be ashamed notto sympathize with the gentle hearted Burns when he expresses evento the devil himself the quaint and kindly wish, "Oh wad ye tak' athought and mend!" The creeds and the priests, in congenial alliance with many evilthings, may strive to counteract this progressive selfemancipation from cruel falsehoods and superstitions, but in vain. The terms of salvation are seen lying in the righteous will of agracious God, not in the heartless caprice of a priesthood nor inthe iron gripe of a set of dogmas. The old priestly monopoly overthe way to heaven has been taken off in the knowledge of theenlightened present, and, for all who have unfettered feet to walkwith, the passage to God is now across a free bridge. The ancientexactors may still sit in their toll house creeds and confessionals;but their authority is gone, and the virtuous traveller, steppingfrom 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 andstrongest tendencies of the people, are against them today, and will be more against them in every coming day. Everysuccessive explosion of the Second Adventist fanaticism will leaveless of that element behind. Its rage in America, under theauspices of Miller, in the nineteenth century, was tame and feeblewhen compared with the terror awakened in Europe in the fifteenthcentury by Stofler's prediction of an approaching comet. 23 Everynew discovery of the harmonies of science, and of the perfectionsof nature, and of the developments of the linear logic of Godconsistently unfolding in implicated sequences of peaceful orderunperturbed by shocks of failure and epochs of remedy, willincrease and popularize an intelligent faith in the originalordination and the intended permanence of the present constitutionof things. Finally men will cease to be looking up to see the bluedome cleave open for the descent of angelic squadrons headed bythe majestic Son of God, the angry breath of his mouth consumingthe world, cease to 23 Bayle, Historical Dictionary, art. Stofler, note B. expect salvation by any other method than that of earnest anddevout truthfulness, love, good works, and pious submissiveness toGod, cease to fancy that their souls, after waiting through thelong sleep or separation of death, will return and take on theirold bodies again. Recognizing the Divine plan for training soulsin this lower and transient state for a higher and immortal state, they will endeavor, in natural piety and mutual love, while theylive, to exhaust the genuine uses of the world that now is, andthus prepare themselves to enter with happiest auspices, when theydie, the world prepared for them beyond these mortal shores. These cheerful prophecies must be verified in the natural courseof things. The rapid spread of the doctrine of a future lifetaught by the "Spirit rappers" is a remarkable revelation of thegreat extent to which the minds of the common people have at lastbecome free from the long domination of the ecclesiastical dogmason that subject. The leading representatives of the "Spiritualists"affirm, with much unanimity, the most comforting conclusionsas to the condition of the departed. They exclude all wrathand favoritism from the disposition of the Deity. They havelittle in fact, they often have nothing whatever to say of hell. They emphatically repudiate the ordinarily taught terms ofsalvation, and deny the doctrine of hopeless reprobation. Alldeath is beautiful and progressive. "Every form and thing isconstantly growing lovelier and every sphere purer. " The abode ofeach soul in the future state is determined, not by decrees ordogmas or forms of any kind, but by qualities of character, degrees of love, purity, and wisdom. There are seven ascendingspheres, each more abounding than the one below it in beauties, glories, and happiness. "The first sphere is the natural; thesecond, the spiritual; the third, the celestial; the fourth, thesupernatural; the fifth, the superspiritual; the sixth, thesupercelestial; the seventh, the Infinite Vortex of Love andWisdom. "24 Whatever be thought of the pretensions of this doctrineto be a Divine revelation, whatever be thought of its variouspsychological, cosmological, and theological characteristics, itsethics are those of natural reason. It is wholly irreconcilablewith the popular ecclesiastical system of doctrines. Its epidemicdiffusion until now burdened as it is with such nauseatingaccompaniments of crudity and absurdity, it reckons its adherentsby millions is a tremendous evidence of the looseness with whichthe old, cruel dogmas sit on the minds of the masses of thepeople, and of their eager readiness to welcome more humane views. In science the erroneous doctrines of the Middle Age are nowgenerally discarded. The mention of them but provokes a smile orawakens surprise. Yet, as compared with the historic annals of ourrace, it is but recently that the true order of the solar systemhas been unveiled, the weight of the air discovered, thecirculation of the blood made known, the phenomena of insanityintelligently studied, the results of physiological chemistrybrought to light, the symmetric domain and sway of calculable lawpushed far out in every direction of nature and experience. Itused to be supposed that digestion was effected by means of amechanical power equal to many tons. Borelli asserted that themuscular force of the heart was one hundred and eighty thousandpounds. These absurd estimates only disappeared when the 24 Andrew Jackson Davis, Nature's Divine Revelations, sects. 192203. properties of the gastric juice were discerned. The method inwhich we distinguish the forms and distances of objects was notunderstood until Berkeley published his "New Theory of Vision. "Few persons are aware of the opposition of bigotry, stolidity, andauthority against which the brilliant advances of scientificdiscovery and mechanical invention and social improvement havebeen forced to contend, and in despite of which they have slowlywon their way. Excommunications, dungeons, fires, sneers, politepersecution, bitter neglect, tell the story, from the time theAthenians banned Anaxagoras for calling the sun a mass of fire, tothe day an English mob burned the warehouses of Arkwright becausehe had invented the spinning jenny. But, despite all the hostileenergies of establishment, prejudice, and scorn, the earnestvotaries of philosophical truth have studied and toiled with everaccumulating victories, until now a hundred sciences are ripe withemancipating fruits and perfect freedom to be taught. Railroadsgird the lands with ribs of trade, telegraphs thread the airs withelectric tidings of events, and steamships crease the seas withchannels of foam and fire. There is no longer danger of any onebeing put to death, or even being excluded from the "bestsociety, " for saying that the earth moves. An eclipse cannot beregarded as the frown of God when it is regularly foretold withcertainty. The measurement of the atmosphere exterminated thewiseacre proverb, "Nature abhors a vacuum, " by the burlesqueaddition, "but only for the first thirty two feet. " The madmancannot be looked on as divinely inspired, his words to be caughtas oracles, or as possessed by a devil, to be chained andscourged, since Pinel's great work has brought insanity within therange of organic disease. When Franklin's kite drew electricityfrom the cloud to his knuckle, the superstitious theory of thunderdied a natural death. The vast progress effected in all departments of physical scienceduring the last four centuries has not been made in any kindreddegree in the prevailing theology. Most of the harsh, unreasonabletenets of the elaborately morbid and distorted mediavaltheologyare still retained in the creeds of the great majority ofChristendom. The causes of this difference are plain. Theestablishment of newly discovered truths in material science beingless intimately connected with the prerogatives of the rulingclasses, less clearly hostile to the permanence of their power, they have not offered so pertinacious an opposition to progress inthis province: they have yielded a much larger freedom tophysicists than to moralists, to discoverers of mathematical, chemical, and mechanical law than to reformers of political andreligious thought. Livy tells us that, in the five hundred andseventy third year of Rome, some concealed books of Numa werefound, which, on examination by the priests, being thoughtinjurious to the established religion, were ordered to beburned. 25 The charge was not that they were ungenuine, nor thattheir contents were false; but they were dangerous. In the secondcentury, an imperial decree forbade the reading of the SibyllineOracles, because they contained prophecies of Christ and doctrinesof Christianity. By an act of the English Parliament, in themiddle of the seventeenth century, every copy of the RacovianCatechism (an exposition of the Socinian doctrine) that could beobtained was burned in the streets. 25 Lib. Xl. Cap. Xxix. The Index Expurgatorius for Catholic countries is still freshlyfilled every year. And in Protestant countries a more subtle and amore effectual influence prevents, on the part of the majority, the candid perusal of all theological discussions which are notpitched in the orthodox key. Certain dogmas are the absorbedthought of the sects which defend them: no fresh and independentthinking is to be expected on those subjects, no matter how purelyfictitious these secretions of the brain of the denomination or ofsome ancient leader may be, no matter how glaringly out of keepingwith the intelligence and liberty which reign in other realms offaith and feeling. There is nowhere else in the world a tyranny sopervasive and despotic as that which rules in the department oftheological opinion. The prevalent slothful and slavish surrenderof 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 ofentrenched tradition, priestly directors, a bigoted, overawing, and persecuting sectarianism, is nowhere else a hundredth part sopowerful or so extensive. In addition to the bitter determination by interested persons tosuppress reforming investigations of the doctrines which holdtheir private prejudices in supremacy, and to the tremendoussocial prestige of old establishment, another cause has beenactive to keep theology stationary while science has been makingsuch rapid conquests. Science deals with tangible quantities, theology with abstract qualities. The cultivation of the formeryields visible practical results of material comfort; thecultivation of the latter yields only inward spiritual results ofmental welfare. Accordingly, science has a thousand resolutevotaries where theology has one unshackled disciple. At thismoment, a countless multitude, furnished with complex apparatus, are ransacking every nook of nature, and plucking trophies, andthe world with honoring attention reads their reports. But how fewwith competent preparation and equipment, with fearlessconsecration to truth, unhampered, with fresh free vigor, arescrutinizing the problems of theology, enthusiastically bent uponrefuting errors and proving verities! And what reception do theconclusions of those few meet at the hands of the public? Surelynot prompt recognition, frank criticism, and grateful acknowledgmentor courteous refutation. No; but studied exclusion from notice, or sophistical evasions and insulting vituperation. What a striking and painful contrast is afforded by the generousencouragement given to the students of science by the annualbestowment of rewards by the scientific societies such as theCuvier Prize, the Royal Medal, the Rumford Medal and the jealouscontempt and assaults visited by the sectarian authorities uponthose earnest students of theology who venture to propose anyinnovating improvement! Suppose there were annually awarded anAquinas Prize, a Fenelon Medal, a Calvin Medal, a Luther Medal, aChanning Medal, not to the one who should present the mostingenious defence of any peculiar tenet of one of those masters, but to him who should offer the most valuable fresh contributionto theological truth! What should we think if the French Instituteoffered a gold medal every year to the astronomer who presentedthe ablest essay in support of the Ptolemaic system, or if theRoyal Society voted a diploma for the best method of castingnativities? Such is the course pursued in regard to dogmatictheology. The consequence has been that while elsewhere theultimate standard by which to try a doctrine is, What do themost 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 theold traditions? We read in the Hak ul Yakeen that the envoy of Herk, Emperor ofRum, once said to the prophet, "You summon people to a Paradisewhose extent includes heaven and earth: where, then, is hell?"Mohammed replied, "When day comes, where is night?" That is tosay, according to the traditionary glosses, as day and night areopposite, so Paradise is at the zenith and hell at the nadir. Yes;but if Paradise be above the heavens, and hell below the seventhearth, then how can Sirat be extended over hell for people to passto Paradise? "We reply, " say the authors of the Hak ul Yakeen, "that speculation on this subject is not necessary, nor to beregarded. Implicit faith in what the prophets have revealed mustbe had; and explanatory surmises, which are the occasion ofSatanic doubts, must not be indulged. "26 Certainly this exclusionof reason cannot always be suffered. It is fast giving wayalready. And it is inevitable that, when reason secures its rightand bears its rightful fruits in moral subjects as it now does inphysical subjects, the mediaval theology must be rejected asmediaval science has been. It is the common doctrine of the Churchthat 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 attributedubiquity to the body in which they reside, thus asserting theomnipresence of a material human body, a bulk of a hundred andfifty pounds' weight more or less. He furiously assailed Zwingle'sobjection to this monstrous nonsense, as "a devil's mask andgrandchild of that old witch, mistress Reason. " 27 The RomanChurch teaches, and her adherents devoutly believe, that the houseof the Virgin Mary was conveyed on the wings of angels fromNazareth to the eastern slope of the Apennines above the AdriaticGulf. 28 The English Church, consistently interpreted, teaches thatthere is no salvation without baptism by priests in the line ofapostolic succession. These are but ordinary specimens ofteachings still humbly received by the mass of Christians. Thecommon distrust with which the natural operations of reason areregarded in the Church, the extreme reluctance to accept theconclusions of mere reason, seem to us discreditable to thetheological leaders who represent the current creeds of theapproved sects. Many an influential theologian could learninvaluable lessons from the great guides in the realm of science. The folly which acute learned wise men will be guilty of themoment they turn to theological subjects, where they do not allowreason to act, is both ludicrous and melancholy. The victim oflycanthropy used to be burned alive; he is now placed under thecareful treatment of skilful and humane physicians. But theheretic or infidel is still thought to be inspired by the devil, afit subject for discipline here and hell hereafter. The light shedabroad by the rising spirit of rational investigation mustgradually dispel the delusions which lurk in the vales oftheology, as it already has dispelled those that formerly hauntedthe hills of science. The spectres which have so long terrified achildish 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 ofthe "Holy House of Loretto. " from the path of man as advancing reason, in the name of the Godof truth, utters its imperial "Avaunt!" Henry More wrote a book on the "Immortality of the Soul, " printedin London in 1659, just two hundred years ago. It is full ofbeauty, acumen, and power. He was one of the first men of thetime. Yet he seriously elaborates an argument like this: "The scumand spots that lie on the sun are as great an Argument that thereis no Divinity in him as the dung of Owls and Sparrows that isfound on the faces and shoulders of Idols in Temples are clearevidences that they are no true Deities. "29 He also in good faithtells a story like this: "That a Woman with child, seeing aButcher divide a Swine's head with a Cleaver, brought forth herChild with its face cloven in the upper jaw, the palate, and upperlip to the very nose. "30 The progress marked by the contrast ofthe scientific spirit of the present time with the ravenouscredulity of even two centuries back must continue and spread intoevery province. Some may vilify it; but in vain. Some maysophisticate against it; but in vain. Some may invoke authorityand social persecution to stop it; but in vain. Some may appeal tothe prejudices and fears of the timid; but in vain. Some may closetheir own eyes, and hold their hands before their neighbors' eyes, and attempt to shut out the light; but in vain. It will go on. Itis the interest of the world that it should go on. It is the manlyand the religious course to help this progress with prudence andreverence. Truth is the will of God, the way he has made things tobe and to act, the way he wishes free beings to exist and to act. He has ordained the gradual discovery of truth. And despite thestruggles of selfish tyranny, and the complacence of luxuriousease, and the terror of ignorant cowardice, truth will be more andmore brought to universal acceptance. Some men have fancied theirbodies composed of butter or of glass; but when compelled to moveout into the sunlight or the crowd they did not melt nor break. 31Esquirol had a patient who did not dare to bend her thumb, lestthe world should come to an end. When forced to bend it, she wassurprised that the crack of doom did not follow. The mechanico theatrical character of the popular theology isenough to reveal its origin and its fundamental falsity. Thedifference between its lurid and phantasmal details and the calmeternal verities in the divinely constituted order of nature is asgreat as the difference between those stars which one sees inconsequence of a blow on the forehead and those he sees by turninghis gaze to the nightly sky. To every competent thinker, the bareappreciation of such a passage as that which closesChateaubriand's chapter on the Last Judgment, with the huge bathosof its incongruous mixture of sublime and absurd, is itssufficient refutation: "The globe trembles on its axis; the moonis covered with a bloody veil; the threatening stars hang halfdetached from the vault of heaven, and the agony of the worldcommences. Now resounds the trump of the angel. The sepulchresburst: the human race issues all at once, and fills the Valley ofJehoshaphat! The Son of Man appears in the clouds; the powers ofhell ascend from the infernal depths; the goats are separated fromthe sheep; the wicked are plunged into the gulf; the just ascendto 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 wholescheme of doctrine from instant rejection except neglect ofthought, or incompetence of thought, on the part of those whocontemplate it. The peculiar dogmas of the exclusive sects are theproducts of mental and social disease, psychological growths inpathological moulds. The naked shapes of beautiful women floatingaround St. Anthony in full display of their maddening charms areinterpreted by the Romanist Church as a visible work of the devil. An intelligent physician accounts for them by the laws ofphysiology, the morbid action of morbid nerves. There is no doubtwhatever as to which of these explanations is correct. Theabsolute prevalence of that explanation is merely a question oftime. Meanwhile, it is the part of every wise and devout man, without bigotry, without hatred for any, with strict fidelity tohis own convictions, with entire tolerance and kindness for allwho differ from him, sacredly to seek after verity himself andearnestly to endeavor to impart it to others. To such men forms ofopinion, instead of being prisons, fetters, and barriers, will bebut as tents of a night while they march through life, the burningand cloudy column of inquiry their guide, the eternal temple oftruth their goal. The actual relation, the becoming attitude, the appropriatefeeling, of man towards the future state, the concealed segment ofhis destiny, are impressively shown in the dying scene of one ofthe wisest and most gifted of men, one of the fittest representativesof the modern mind. In a good old age, on a pleasant spring day, with a vast expanse of experience behind him, with an immensity ofhope before him, he lay calmly expiring. "More light!" he cried, with departing breath; and Death, solemnwarder of eternity, led him, blinded, before the immemorial veilof awe and secrets. It uprolled as the flesh bandage fell from hisspirit, and he walked at large, triumphant or appalled, amidst theunimagined revelations of God. And now, recalling the varied studies we have passed through, andseeking for the conclusion or root of the matter, what shall wesay? This much we will say. First, the fearless Christian, fullyacquainted with the results of a criticism unsparing as therequisitions of truth and candor, can scarcely, with intelligenthonesty, do more than place his hand on the beating of his heart, and fix his eye on the riven tomb of Jesus, and exclaim, "Feelinghere the inspired promise of immortality, and seeing there thesign of God's authentic seal, I gratefully believe that Christ hasrisen, and that my soul is deathless!" Secondly, the trustingphilosopher, fairly weighing the history of the world's belief ina 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 thisshell, the soul may survive, and I confidently hope to liveforever. " Meanwhile, the believer and the speculator, combining toform a Christian philosophy wherein doubt and faith, thought andfreedom, reason and sentiment, nature and revelation, all embrace, even as the truth of things and the experience of life demand, mayboth adopt for their own the expression wrought for himself by apure 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, Faintgleams and broken, like the light Of meteors in a Northern night, Betraying to the darkling earth The unseen sun which gave thembirth; I listen to the sibyl's chant, The voice of priest andhierophant; I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, And what of lifeand what of death The demon taught to Socrates, And what, beneathhis garden trees Slow pacing, with a dream like tread, The solemnthoughted Plato said; Nor Lack I tokens, great or small, Of God'sclear light in each and all, While holding with more dear regardThan scroll of heathen seer and bard The starry pages, promiselit, With Christ's evangel overwrit, Thy miracle of life anddeath, 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 inthe Mysteries. These were recondite institutions, sometimeswielded by the state, sometimes by a priesthood, sometimes by aramifying private society. None could be admitted into them savewith the permission of the hierarchs, by rites of initiation, andunder solemn seals of secrecy. These mysterious institutions, charged with strange attractions, shrouded in awful wonder, werenumerous, and, agreeing in some of their fundamental features, were spread nearly all over the world. The writings of theancients abound with references to them, mostly eulogistic. Themighty part played by these veiled bodies in the life of theperiods when they flourished, the pregnant hints and alluringobscurities amid which they stand in relation to the learning ofmodern times, have repeatedly obtained wide attention, elicitedopposite opinions, provoked fierce debates, and led differentinquirers to various conclusions as to their true origin, character, scope, meaning, and results. One of the principal points in discussion by scholars concerningthe Mysteries has been whether they inculcated an esotericdoctrine of philosophy, opposed to the popular religion. Somewriters have maintained that in their symbols and rites wascontained a pure system of monotheistic ethics and religion. Ourown opinion is that in some of these institutions, at one period, higher theological views and scientific speculations wereunfolded, but in others never. Still, it is extremely difficult toprove any thing on this part of the general subject: there is muchthat is plausible to be said on both sides of the question. Another query to be noticed in passing is in regard to the degreeof exclusiveness and concealment really attached to the form ofinitiation. Lobeck, in his celebrated work, "Aglaophamus, " borneaway by a theory, assumes the extravagant position that theEleusinian Mysteries were almost freely open to all. 1 His errorseems to lie in not distinguishing sufficiently between the Lesserand the Greater Mysteries, and in not separating the noisy showsof the public festal days from the initiatory and explanatoryrites 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 fitnessof the applicant before his admission, and that many were openlyrejected, that instant death was inflicted on all who intrudedunprepared within the sacred circuits, and that death was thepenalty of divulging what happened during the celebrations, allare inconsistent with the notion of Lobeck, and prove that theMysteries were hedged about with dread. Aschylus narrowly escapedbeing torn in pieces upon the stage by the people on suspicionthat in his play he had given a hint of something in theMysteries. He delivered himself by appealing to the Areopagus, andproving that he had never been initiated. Andocides also, a Greekorator who lived about four hundred years before Christ, wassomewhat similarly accused, and only escaped by a strenuousdefence of himself in an oration, still extant, entitled"Concerning the Mysteries. " A third preliminary matter is as to the moral character of theservices performed by these companies. Some held that theircharacteristics were divinely pure, intellectual, exalting; othersthat 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, againstevery 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 toexcept or qualify, or to be thoroughly informed and just, theyincluded the ancient stern generations and their own degradedcontemporaries, the vile rites of the Corinthian Aphrodite and thesolemn service of Demeter, the furious revels of the Bacchanaliansand the harmonious mental worship of Apollo, all in oneindiscriminate charge of insane beastliness and idolatry. Theirview of the Mysteries has been most circulated among the modernsby Leland's learned but bigoted work on the "Use and Necessity ofa Divine Revelation. " He would have us regard each one as a vortexof atheistic sensuality and crime. There should be discrimination. The facts are undoubtedly these, as we might abundantlydemonstrate were it in the province of the present essay. Theoriginal Mysteries, the authoritative institutions co ordinatedwith the state or administered by the poets and philosophers, werepure: their purpose was to purify the lives and characters oftheir disciples. Their means were a complicated apparatus ofsensible and symbolic revelations and instructions admirablycalculated to impress the most salutary moral and religiouslessons. In the first place, is it credible that the state wouldfling its auspices over societies whose function was to organizelawlessness and debauchery, to make a business of vice and filth?Among the laws of Solon is a regulation decreeing that the Senateshall convene in the Eleusinian temple, the day after thefestival, to inquire whether every thing had been done withreverence and propriety. Secondly, if such was the character ofthese secrets, why was inquisition always made into the moralhabits of the candidate, that he might be refused admittance ifthey were bad? This inquiry was severe, and the decisionunrelenting. Alcibiades was rejected, as we learn from Plutarch'slife of him, on account of his dissoluteness and insubordinationin the city. Nero dared not attend the Eleusinian Mysteries, "because to the murder of his mother he had joined the slaughterof his paternal aunt. "2 All accepted candidates were scrupulouslypurified in thought and body, and clad in white robes, for ninedays previous to their reception. Thirdly, it is intrinsicallyabsurd to suppose that an institution of gross immorality andcruelty could have flourished in the most polite and refined Greeknation, as the Eleusinian Mysteries did for over eighteen hundredyears, ranking among its members a vast majority of both sexes, ofall classes, of all ages, and constantly celebrating its ritesbefore immense audiences of them all. Finally, a host of men likePlato, Sophocles, Cimon, Lycurgus, Cicero, were members of thesebodies, partook in their transactions, and have left on recordeulogies of them and of their influence. The concurrent testimonyof antiquity is that in the Great Mysteries the desires werechastened, the heart purified, the mind calmed, the soul inspired, all the virtues of morality and hopes of religion taught andenforced with sublime solemnities. There is no just ground forsuspecting this to be false. But there remains something more and different to be said also. While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, theredid afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, andpretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under thecontrol of the most unprincipled persons, and in whichunquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, andprostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreigngrafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuousclimes of the remote East. They established themselves late inGreece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities ascompelled the Senate to suppress them. Livy gives a detailed andvivid account of the whole affair in his history. 3 But thegladiators, scoundrels, rakes, bawds, who swarmed in these stewsof rotting Rome, are hardly to be confounded with the noble menand matrons of the earlier time who openly joined in the pureMysteries with the approving example of the holiest bards, thegravest statesmen, and the profoundest sages, men like Pindar, Pericles, and Pythagoras. Ample facilities are afforded in thenumerous works to which we shall refer for unmasking the differentorganizations that travelled over the earth in the guise of theMysteries, and of seeing what deceptive arts were practised insome, what superhuman terrors paraded in others, what horriblecruelties perpetrated in others, what leading objects sought ineach. The Mysteries have many bearings on several distinct subjects; butin those aspects we have not space here to examine them. Wepurpose to consider them solely in their relation to the doctrineof a future life. We are convinced that the very heart of theirsecret, the essence of their meaning in their origin and theirend, was no other than the doctrine of an immortality succeeding adeath. Gessner published a book at Gottingen, so long ago as theyear 1755, maintaining this very assertion. His work, which isquite scarce now, bears the title "Dogma de perenni AnimoruinNatura per Sacra pracipue Eleusinia Propagata. " The consentingtestimony of more than forty of the most authoritative ancientwriters comes down to us in their surviving works to the effectthat those who were admitted into the Mysteries were therebypurified, 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 thefuture state. Two or three specimens from these witnesses willsuffice. Aristophanes, in the second act of the Frogs, describesan elysium of the initiates after death, where he says they bound"in sportive dances on rose enamelled meadows; for the light ischeerful only to those who have been initiated. "4 Pausaniasdescribes the uninitiated as being compelled in Hades to carrywater in buckets bored full of holes. 5 Isocrates says, in hisPanegyric, "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 oldOrphic verses cited by Thomas Taylor in his Treatise on theMysteries run thus: "The soul that uninitiated dies Plunged in theblackest mire in Hades lies. " 6 The same statement is likewise found in Plato, who, in anotherplace, also explicitly declares that a doctrine of futureretribution was taught in the Mysteries and believed by theserious. 7 Cicero says, "Initiation makes us both live morehonorably and die with better hopes. " 8 In seasons of imminentdanger as in a shipwreck it was customary for a man to ask hiscompanion, Hast thou been initiated? The implication is thatinitiation removed fear of death by promising a happy life tofollow. 9 A fragment preserved from a very ancient author is plainon this subject. "The soul is affected in death just as it is inthe initiation into the great Mysteries: thing answers to thing. At first it passes through darkness, horrors, and toils. Then aredisclosed a wondrous light, pure places, flowery meads, repletewith mystic sounds, dances, and sacred doctrines, and holyvisions. Then, perfectly enlightened, they are free: crowned, theywalk about worshipping the gods and conversing with good men. "10The principal part of the hymn to Ceres, attributed to Homer, isoccupied with a narrative of her labors to endow the youngDemophoon, mortal child of Metaneira, with immortality. Now, Cereswas the goddess of the Mysteries; and the last part of this veryhymn recounts how Persephone was snatched from the light of lifeinto Hades and restored again. Thus we see that the implicationsof the indirect evidence, the leanings and guidings of all theincidental clews now left us to the real aim and purport of theMysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was adoctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards andpunishments. All this we shall more fully establish, both bydirect proofs and by collateral supports. It is a well known fact, intimately connected with the differentreligions of Greece and Asia Minor, that during the time ofharvest in the autumn, and again at the season of sowing in thespring, the shepherds, the vintagers, and the people in general, were accustomed to observe certain sacred festivals, the autumnalsad, the vernal joyous. These undoubtedly grew out of the deepsympathy between man and nature over the decay and disappearance, the revival and return, of vegetation. When the hot season hadwithered 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 andsnatches borne abroad by the breeze and their echoes dying at lastin the distance. In every instance, these mournful strains werethe annual lamentation of the people over the death of somemythical boy of extraordinary beauty and promise, who, in theflower of youth, was suddenly drowned, or torn in pieces by wildbeasts, "Some Hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and Aprilbloom. " Among the Argives it was Linus. With the Arcadians it wasScephrus. In Phrygia it was Lityerses. On the shore of the BlackSea it was Bormus. In the country of the Bithynians it was Hylas. At Pelusium it was Maneros. And in Syria it was Adonis. Theuntimely death of these beautiful boys, carried off in theirmorning of life, was yearly bewailed, their names re echoing overthe plains, the fountains, and among the hills. It is obvious thatthese cannot have been real persons whose death excited a sympathyso general, so recurrent. "The real object of lamentation, " saysMuller, "was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the ragingheat, and other similar phenomena, which the imagination of thoseearly times invested with a personal form. "11 All this was woveninto the Mysteries, whose great legend and drama were that everyautumn Persephone was carried down to the dark realm of the Kingof Shadows, but that she was to return each spring to her mother'sarms. Thus were described the withdrawal and reappearance ofvegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. But thesechanges of nature typified the changes in the human lot; elsePersephone would have been merely a symbol of the buried grain andwould not have become the Queen of the Dead. 12 Her return to theworld of light, by natural analogy, denoted a new birth to men. Accordingly, "all the testimony of antiquity concurs in sayingthat these Mysteries inspired the most animating hopes with regardto the condition of the soul after death. "13 That the fate of manshould by imagination and sentiment have been so connected withthe phenomena of nature in myths and symbols embodied in patheticreligious ceremonies was a spontaneous product. For how "Her freshbenignant look Nature changes at that lorn season when, Withtresses drooping o'er her sable stole, She yearly mourns themortal doom of man, Her noblest work! So Israel's virgins erstWith annual moan upon the mountains wept Their fairest gone!" And soon again the birds begin to warble, the leaves and blossomsput forth, and all is new life once more. In every age the gentleheart and meditative mind have been impressed by the mournfulcorrespondence and the animating prophecy. 11 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. Iii. Sects. 23. 12 For the connection of the Eleusinian goddesses withagriculture, 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 andgladsome summer joined by affecting analogies with the human doomof death and hope of another life. The phenomena of the skies, theimpressive succession of day and night, also were early seizedupon and made to blend their shadows and lights, by means ofimaginative suggestions, into an image of the decease andresurrection of man. Among the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, socalled, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage isidentified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus andsoaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak ofthe setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension inthe horizon being its return to life. 14 The black abysm under theearth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above theearth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun risesroyally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth andsplendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of hisambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves inmourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffledin his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial. How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolicallyinterwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joyand activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness andsad repose of midnight and of death. The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poorNature loves to weep. " Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, doesmother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, intype of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buriedseed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day burstingfruit. These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together withexplanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by thepeculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among theearliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth asliteral history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth oncehistorically exemplified by some traditional personage. It wasdramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiationinto the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatricalrepresentation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years, of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, hisflight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king ofthe dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ranalong the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of thegod in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurelfrom the sacred valley. 15 The doctrine of a future life connectedwith the legend of some hero who had died, descended into theunder world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramaticallyrepresented in the personal experience of the initiate, was theheart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity. "Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death boltedMysteries. " 14 Leitch's Eng. Trans. Of K. O. Muller's Introduction to aScientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342. 15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also hisDorian, lib. Ii. Cap. Vii. Sect. 8. Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grewup naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed atonce, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology, by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral andreligious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps itwas gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives. Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliantprimeval revelation. This question of the origination, the firstcauses and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopelessobscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thingwe know, namely, that at an early age these societies formedorganizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitallyconnected with the prevailing religions of the principal nationsof the earth. In Egypt the legend of initiation was this. 16 Typhon, a wicked, destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against hisbrother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest, inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose bodywould fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhoninstantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into theriver. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and wasannually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But thewinds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, theinconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband'sremains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. Thispart of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection ofOsiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestationof excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in thefinding him again, " Augustine writes, "first their lamentation, then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yetthe fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weepand rejoice truly. "17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration, and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religiousfestivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration ofTyphon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, thesubsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of thedelicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, theencroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, thedisappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness ofwinter. 18 But the real interest and power of the whole subjectprobably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena, traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a futurelife for man. In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, anddoctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They arecredulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself, who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, wherethousands thronged to be initiated by him. 19 This Mithraic cavewas an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with theconstellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black andfiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blueand starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangersand instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathingcelestial music. In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, indramatic 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 theMithraic Mysteries to the teaching of Satan. afterwards rose unto a new life, all of which was a type of thenatural fate of man. 20 The descent of the soul from heaven and itsreturn thither were denoted by a torch borne alternately reversedand upright, and by the descriptions of the passage of spirits, inthe round of the metempsychosis, through the planetary gates ofthe zodiac. The sun and moon and the morning and evening star weredepicted in brilliant gold or blackly muffled, according to theirjourneying in the upper or in the lower hemisphere. 21 The hero of the Syrian Mysteries was Adonis or Thammuz, thebeautiful favorite of Aphrodite, untimely slain by a wild boar. His death was sadly, his resurrection joyously, celebrated everyyear at Byblus with great pomp and universal interest. Thefestival lasted two days. On the first, all things were clad inmourning, sorrow was depicted in every face, and wails and weepingresounded. Coffins were exposed at every door and borne innumerous processions. Frail stalks of young corn and flowers werethrown into the river to perish, as types of the premature deathof blooming Adonis, cut off like a plant in the bud of his age. 22The second day the whole aspect of things was changed, and thegreatest exultation prevailed, because it was said Adonis hadreturned from the dead. 23 Venus, having found him dead, depositedhis body on a bed of lettuce and mourned bitterly over him. Fromhis blood sprang the adonium, from her tears the anemone. 24 TheJews were captivated by the religious rites connected with thistouching myth, and even enacted them in the gates of their holytemple. Ezekiel says, "Behold, at the gate of the Lord's housewhich was towards the north [the direction of night and winter]there sat women weeping for Tammuz. " It was said that Aphroditeprevailed on Persephone to let Adonis dwell one half the year withher on earth, and only the rest among the shades, a plainreference to vegetable life in summer and winter. 25 Lucian, in hislittle treatise on the Syrian Goddess, says that "the riverAdonis, rising out of Mount Libanus, at certain seasons flows redin its channel: some say it is miraculously stained by the bloodof the fresh wounded youth; others say that the spring rains, washing in a red ore from the soil of the country, discolor thestream. " Dupuis remarks that this redness was probably an artificeof the priests. 26 Milton's beautiful allusion to this fable isfamiliar to most persons. Next came he "Whose annual wound inLebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorousditties all a summer's day, While smooth Adonis from his nativerock 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 purportof this fascinating story. But, after all is said, it seems to usthat there are in it essentially two significations, one relatingto the phenomena of the sun and the earth, the other to the mutualchanges of nature and the fate of humanity. Aphrodite bewailingAdonis is surviving Nature mourning for departed Man. In India the story was told of Mahadeva searching for his lostconsort Sita, and, after discovering her lifeless form, bearing itaround the world with dismal lamentations. Sometimes it was thedeath of Camadeva, the Hindu Cupid, that was mourned with solemndirges. 27 He, like Osiris, was slain, enclosed in a chest, andcommitted to the waves. He was afterwards recovered andresuscitated. Each initiate passed through the emblematicceremonies corresponding to the points of this pretended history. The Phrygians associated the same great doctrine with the personsof Atys and Cybele. Atys was a lovely shepherd youth passionatelyloved by the mother of the gods. 28 He suddenly died; and she, infrantic grief, wandered over the earth in search of him, teachingthe people where she went the arts of agriculture. He was atlength restored to her. Annually the whole drama was performed bythe assembled nation with sobs of woe succeeded by ecstasies ofjoy. 29 Similar to this, in the essential features, was theEleusinian myth. Aidoneus snatched the maiden Kore down to hisgloomy empire. Her mother, Demeter, set off in search of her, scattering the blessings of agriculture, and finally discoveredher, and obtained the promise of her society for half of everyyear. These adventures were dramatized and explained in themysteries which she, according to tradition, instituted atEleusis. The form of the legend was somewhat differently incorporated withthe Bacchic Mysteries. It was elaborately wrought up by the Orphicpoets. The distinctive name they gave to Bacchus or Dionysus wasZagreus. He was the son of Zeus, and was chosen by him to sit onthe throne of heaven. Zeus gave him Apollo and the Curetes asguards; but the brutal Titans, instigated by jealous Hera, disguised themselves and fell on the unfortunate youth while hisattention was fixed on a splendid mirror, and, after a fearfulconflict, 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 thegolden age. His devotees looked to him for the liberation of theirsouls through the purifying rites of his Mysteries. The initiationshadowed out an esoteric doctrine of death and a future life, inthe mock murder and new birth of the aspirant, who impersonatedZagreus. 31 The Northmen constructed the same drama of death around the youngBalder, their god of gentleness and beauty. This legend, as Dr. Oliver has shown, constituted the secret of the GothicMysteries. 32 Obscure and dread prophecies having crept among thegods that the death of the beloved Balder was at hand, portendinguniversal ruin, a consultation was held to devise means foraverting the calamity. At the suggestion of Balder's mother, Freya, the Scandinavian Venus, an oath that they would not beinstrumental 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, onaccount of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfullyneglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, takingadvantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe, and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicingin fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed exemptionfrom wounds, persuaded him to be the mark for the weapons of thegods. But, alas! when Hodur tilted at him, the devoted victim wastranspierced and fell lifeless to the ground. Darkness settledover the world, and bitter was the grief of men and gods over theinnocent and lovely Balder. A deputation imploring his release wassent to the queen of the dead. Hela so far relented as to promisehis liberation to the upper world on condition that every thing onearth wept for him. Straightway there was a universal mourning. Men, beasts, trees, metals, stones, wept. But an old witheredgiantess Asa Loke in disguise shed no tears; and so Hela kept herbeauteous and lamented prey. But he is to rise again to eternallife and joy when the twilight of the gods has passed. 33 Thisentire fable has been explained by the commentators, in all itsdetails, as a poetic embodiment of the natural phenomena of theseasons. But it is not improbable that, in addition, it bore aprofound doctrinal reference to the fate of man which wasinterpreted to the initiates. A great deal has been written concerning the ceremonies andmeaning of the celebrated Celtic Mysteries established so long atSamothrace, and under the administration of the Druids throughoutancient Gaul and Britain. The aspirant was led through a series ofscenic representations, "without the aid of words, " mysticallyshadowing forth in symbolic forms the doctrine of the transmigrationof 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 rangeof metamorphoses enacted by the aid of secret dramatic machinery. He died, was buried, was born anew, rising from his dark confinementto life again. The hierophant enclosed him in a little boat andset him adrift, pointing him to a distant rock, which he calls"the harbor of life. " Across the black and stormy waters he strivesto gain the beaconing refuge. In these scenes and rites a recondite doctrine of the physicaland moral relations and destiny of man was shrouded, to be unveiledby degrees to their docile disciples by the Druidic mystagogues. 34 It may appear strange that there should be in connection with somany of the old religions of the earth these arcana only to beapproached by secret initiation at the hands of hierophants. Butit will seem natural when we remember that those religions were inthe exclusive keeping of priesthoods, which, organized withwondrous cunning and perpetuated through ages, absorbed thescience, art, and philosophy of the world, and, concealing theirwisdom in the mystic signs of an esoteric language, wielded themighty enginery of superstition over the people at will. Thescenes and instructions through which the priests led theunenlightened candidate were the hiding of their power. Thus, wherever was a priesthood we should expect to find mysteries andinitiations. 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'stranslations has been called in question. His statements, even onthe matters affirmed above, must be received with some reservationof faith. supposition; learning unveils the obscure places of antiquity, andshows us the templed or cavernous rites of the religious world, from Hindostan to Gaul, from Egypt to Norway, from Athens toMexico. And this brings us to the Mysteries of Vitzliputzli, established in South America. Dr. Oliver, in the twelfth lectureof his History of Initiation, gathering his materials from varioussources, gives a terrific account of the dramatic ritual hereemployed. The walls, floor, images, were smeared and caked withhuman blood. Fresh slaughters of victims were perpetrated atfrequent intervals. The candidate descended to the grim cavernsexcavated under the foundations of the temple. This course wasdenominated "the path of the dead. " Phantoms flitted before him, shrieks appalled him, pitfalls and sacrificial knives threatenedhim. At last, after many frightful adventures, the aspirantarrived at a narrow stone fissure terminating the range ofcaverns, through which he was thrust, and was received in the openair, as a person born again, and welcomed with frantic shouts bythe multitudes who had been waiting for him without during theprocess of his initiation. Even among the savage tribes of North America striking traces havebeen found of an initiation into a secret society by a mysticdeath and resurrection. Captain Jonathan Carver, who spent thewinter of 1776 with the Naudowessie Indians, was an eye witness ofthe admission of a young brave into a body which they entitledWakou Kitchewah, or Friendly Society of the Spirit. "This singularinitiation, " he says, "took place within a railed enclosure in thecentre of the camp at the time of the new moon. " First came thechiefs, clad in trailing furs. Then came the members of thesociety, dressed and painted in the gayest manner. When all wereseated, one of the principal chiefs arose, and, leading the youngman forward, informed the meeting of his desire to be admittedinto their circle. No objection being offered, the variouspreliminary arrangements were made; after which the director beganto speak to the kneeling candidate, telling him that he was aboutto receive a communication of the spirit. This spirit wouldinstantly strike him dead; but he was told not to be terrified, because he should immediately be restored to life again, and thisexperience was a necessary introduction to the advantages of thecommunity he was on the point of entering. Then violent agitationdistorted the face and convulsed the frame of the old chief. Hethrew something looking like a small bean at the young man. Itentered his mouth, and he fell lifeless as suddenly as if he hadbeen shot. Several assistants received him, rubbed his limbs, beathis back, stripped him of his garments and put a new dress on him, and finally presented him to the society in full consciousness asa member. 36 All the Mysteries were funereal. This is the most striking singlephenomenon connected with them. They invariably began in darknesswith groans and tears, but as invariably ended in festive triumphwith shouts and smiles. In them all were a symbolic death, amournful entombment, and a glad resurrection. We know this fromthe abundant direct testimony of unimpeachable ancient writers, and also from their indirect descriptions of the ceremonies andallusions to them. For example, Apuleius says, "The delivery ofthe Mysteries is celebrated as a thing resembling a voluntarydeath: 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 thecourse of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant wasburied for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin orgrave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins ofthe chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. Theseabound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curiousrecesses; and in connection with them is always found someexcavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollowbeds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to beseen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as innearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration ofthe Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt. 37 It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols andrites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadowforth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well knownmythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity, to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of theDeluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death, burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are arepresentation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, hisdark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out ofit. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariablybegan, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over theirconfinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphantrejoicings with which the initiations always ended, referred tothe glad exit of the patriarchal family from their floating prisoninto the blooming world. The advocates of this theory havelaboriously collected all the materials that favor it, andskilfully striven by their means to elucidate the whole subject ofancient paganism, especially of the Mysteries. But, after readingall that they have written, and considering it in the light ofimpartial researches, one is constrained to say that they have byno means made out their case. It is somewhat doubtful if there beany ground whatever for believing that traditions concerningNoah's deluge and the ark, and his doings in connection with them, in any way entered into the public doctrines and forms, or intothe secret initiations, of the heathen religions. At all events, there can be no doubt that the Arkite theorists have exaggeratedthe importance and extent of these views beyond all tolerablebounds, and even to absurdity. But our business with them now isonly so far as they relate to the Mysteries. Our own conviction isthat the real meaning of the rites in the Mysteries was based uponthe affecting phenomena of human life and death and the hope ofanother life. We hold the Arkite theory to be arbitrary ingeneral, unsupported by proofs, and inconsistent in detail, unableto meet the points presented. In the first place, a fundamental part of the ancient belief wasthat below the surface of the earth was a vast, sombre underworld, the destination of the ghosts of men, the Greek Hades, theRoman Orcus, the Gothic Hell. A part of the service of initiationwas a symbolic descent into this realm. Apuleius, describing hisinitiation, 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 IndianAntiquities. of death and trod on the threshold of Proserpine. " 38 Orpheus, towhom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the Eastwas ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent intoHades. " Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus, Rhampsinitus, and many others. 39 It is painted in detail by Homerin the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much moreminutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with greatlearning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, withirresistible cogency, to show that these descents are no more norless than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted inthe esoteric recesses of the Mysteries. 40 Any person must beinvincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant acapacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryantand his disciples do, 41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah'sark, " or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as acoffin bearing the relics of dead Nature, " is a purely arbitrarystep taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means theunder 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 centralabyss of the earth. " But such was not the location of Noah'svessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above thetops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonablesupposition in itself, and the one best supported by historicfacts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in aship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic ritesdrawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressivephenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and someother early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the skyas ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself wassometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was thesepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over theAcherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in whichCharon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surelythere was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likelythat what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into theArkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematicshowing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death andfuture fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, withstriking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life, as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a goldencup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also representthe cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing himfearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcomingsociety of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over thetempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to thesheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state andlot, with their mysteries, perils, threats, and promises, could beeither more natural or more impressive than that of a vessellaunched on the deep. The dying Socrates said "that he shouldtrust his soul on the hope of a future life as upon a raft, andlaunch away into the unknown. " Thus the imagination broods overand explores the shows and secrets, presageful warnings andalluring 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 ofthe Fabulous Hades with the Mysteries. invitations, storms and calms, island homes and unknown havens, ofthe dim seas of nature and of man, of time and of eternity. 42 Thirdly, the defenders of the Arkite theory are driven into grossinconsistencies with themselves by the falsity of their views. Thedilaceration of Zagreus into fragments, the mangling of Osiris andscattering of his limbs abroad, they say, refer to the throwingopen of the ark and the going forth of the inmates to populate theearth. They usually make Osiris, Zagreus, Adonis, and the otherheroes of the legends enacted in the Mysteries, representatives ofthe diluvian patriarch himself; but here, with no reason whateversave the exigencies of their theory, they make these mythicpersonages representatives of the ark, a view which is utterlyunfounded and glaringly wanting in analogy. When Zagreus is tornin pieces, his heart is preserved alive by Zeus and born againinto the world within a human form. After the body of Osiris hadbeen strewn piecemeal, the fragments were fondly gathered by Isis, and he was restored to life. There is no plausible correspondencebetween these cases and the sending out from the ark of thepatriarchal family to repeople the world. Their real purpose wouldseem plainly to be to symbolize the thought that, however the bodyof man crumbles in pieces, there is life for him still, he doesnot hopelessly die. They likewise say that the egg which wasconsecrated in the Mysteries, at the beginning of the rites, wasintended as an emblem of the ark resting on the abyss of waters, and that its latent hatching was meant to suggest the opening ofthe ark to let the imprisoned patriarch forth. This hypothesis hasno proof, and is needless. It is much more plausible to supposethat the egg was meant as a symbol of a new life about to burstupon the candidate, a symbol of his resurrection from the mystictomb wherein he was buried during one stage of initiation; for weknow that the initiation was often regarded as the commencement ofa fresh life, as a new birth. Apuleius says, "I celebrated themost joyful day of my initiation as my natal day. " Faber argues, from the very close similarity of all thedifferently named Mysteries, that they were all Arkite, allderived from one mass of traditions reaching from Noah andembodying his history. 43 The asserted fact of general resemblanceamong the instituted Mysteries is unquestionable; but theinference above drawn from it is unwarrantable, even if no betterexplanation could be offered. But there is another explanationready, more natural in conception, more consistent in detail, andbetter sustained by evidence. The various Mysteries celebrated inthe ancient nations were so much alike not because they were allfounded on one world wide tradition about the Noachian deluge, butbecause they all grew out of the great common facts of humandestiny in connection with natural phenomena. The Mysteries werefunereal and festive, began in sorrow and ended in joy, notbecause they represented first Noah's sad entrance into the arkand then his glad exit from it, but because they began withshowing the initiate that he must die, and ended with showing himthat he should live again in a happier state. Even the mostprejudiced advocates of the Arkite theory 42 Procopius, in his History of the Gothic War, mentions a curiouspopular British superstition concerning the ferriage of souls amongthe neighboring islands at midnight. See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, kap. Xxvi. Zweite ausgabe. 43 Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10: Comparison of the VariousMysteries. are forced to admit, on the explicit testimony of the ancients, that the initiates passed from the darkness and horrors ofTartarus to the bliss and splendors of Elysium by a dramaticresurrection from burial in the black caverns of probation toadmission within the illuminated hall or dome of perfection. 44That the idea of death and of another life runs through all theMysteries as their cardinal tenet is well shown in connection withthe rites of the celebrated Cave of Trophonius at Lebadea inBoeotia. Whoso sought this oracle must descend head foremost overan inclined plane, bearing a honey cake in his hand. Aristophanesspeaks of this descent with a shudder of fear. 45 The adventurerwas suddenly bereft of his senses, and after a while returned tothe upper air. What he could then remember composed the Divinerevelation which had been communicated to him in his unnaturalstate below. Plutarch has given a full account of this experiencefrom one Timarchus, who had himself passed through it. 46 Thesubstance of it is this. When Timarchus reached the bottom of thecave, his soul passed from his body, visited the under world ofthe departed, saw the sphere of generation where souls were reborninto the upper world, received some explanation of all thesethings: then, returning into the body, he was taken up out of thecave. Here is no allusion to any traditions of the Deluge or theark; but the great purpose is evidently a doctrine of the destinyof man after death. Before the eyes and upon the heart of all mankind in every age haspassed in common vision the revolution of the seasons, with itsbeautiful and sombre changes, phenomena having a power ofsuggestion irresistible to stir some of the most profoundsentiments of the human breast. The day rolls overhead full oflight and life and activity; then the night settles upon the scenewith silent gloom and repose. So man runs his busy round of toiland pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, followingthe sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallidpopulations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer issucceeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams ofenterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks inmaturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozenin the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds theleafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks of the funerealblast. The flush of childish gayety, the bloom of youthfulpromise, when a new comer is growing up sporting about the hearthof home, are like the approach of the maiden and starry Spring, "Who comes sublime, as when, from Pluto free, Came, through theflash of Zeus, Persephone. " And then draw hastily on the long, lamenting autumnal days, when "Above man's grave the sad windswail and rain drops fall, And Nature sheds her leaves in yearlyfuneral. " 44 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10, pp. 331-356. DionChrysostom 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 aregone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people ofdreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soarsinto new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens onthe heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surelyreturns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten therenewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping overthe beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus, is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annualwintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless lossof man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies andsuggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart, enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized bypoets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestlysocieties and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and animposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the centralmeaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noahand his ark. The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold;and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The firstobject was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence ofa doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearfullooking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerableproportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be tracedto the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations andterrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the goodand obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and gloriousrewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near theclose of his letter of consolation to her, ) "Some say the soulwill be entirely insensible after death; but you are too wellacquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries ofBacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such anerror. " The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, thesecret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions, thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish itsdoctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus toincrease the power of the priesthood and the state. To compassthese ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vaguesuperstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resourcesavailable by the ancient world, were marshalled and brought tobear in the Mysteries. By chemical and mechanical secrets then intheir exclusive possession, the mystagogues worked miracles beforethe astonished novices. 47 They had the powers of electricity, gunpowder, hydrostatic pressure, at their command. 48 Their riteswere carried out on the most magnificent scale. The temple atEleusis could hold thirty thousand persons. Imagine what effectmight be produced, under such imposing and prepared circumstances, on an ignorant multitude, by a set of men holding all thescientific secrets and mechanical inventions till then discovered, illumination flashing after darkness successively before theirsmitten eyes, the floors seeming to heave and the walls to crack, thunders bellowing through the mighty dome; now yawning revealedbeneath them the ghostly chimera of Tartarus, with all theshrieking and horrid scenery gathered there; now 47 Anthon's Class. Dict. , art. "Elicius. " 48 Salverte, Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie. Seealso editor's introduction to Thomson's Eng. Trans. Of Salverte'swork. 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 ofAlexandria tells us that one feature of the initiation was adisplay of the grisly secrets of Hades. 49 Apuleius, in his accountof his own initiation, says, "At midnight I saw the sun shiningwith a resplendent light; and I manifestly drew near to the lowerand to the upper gods and adored them in immediate presence. " 50Lobeck says that, on the lifting of the veil exposing the adytumto the gaze of the initiates, apparitions of the gods appeared tothem. 51 Christie, in his little work on the Greek Mysteries, saysthat the doctrines of the Eleusinian shows were explained by meansof transparent scenes, many of which were faithfully copied uponthe painted Greek vases; and these vase accordingly, weredeposited in tombs to evidence the faith of the deceased in afuture life. The foregoing conceptions may be illustrated by thedramatic representations, scenic shadows behind transparentcurtains, in Java, alluded to by Sir Stamford Raffles. 52 It is remarkable how far the Mysteries spread over the earth, andwhat popularity they attained. They penetrated into almost everynation under the sun. They admitted, in some degree, nearly thewhole people. Herodotus informs us that there were collected inEgypt, 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 welcomedwithin the mystic pale. "Men, " says Cicero, "came from the mostdistant shores to be initiated at Eleusis. " Sophocles declares, asquoted by Warburton, "True life is to be found only among theinitiates: all other places are full of evil. " At the rise of theChristian religion, all the life and power left in the nationalreligion of Greece and Rome were in the Mysteries. Accordingly, here was the most formidable foe of the new faith. Standing in itsold entrenchments, with all its popular prestige around it, itfought with desperate determination for every inch it wassuccessively forced to yield. The brilliant effort of Julian toroll back the tide of Christianity and restore the pagan religionto more than its pristine splendor an effort beneath which thescales of the world's fortunes poised, tremulous, for a while waschiefly an endeavor to revive and enlarge the Mysteries. Such wasthe attachment of the people to these old rites even in the middleof the fourth century of the Christian era, that a murderous riotbroke out at Alexandria, in which Bishop George and others wereslain, on occasion of the profanation by Christians of a secretadytum in which the Mysteries of Mithra were celebrated. 54 Andwhen, a little later, the Emperor Valentinian had determined tosuppress all nocturnal rites, he was induced to withdraw hisresolution by Pretextatus, proconsul in Greece, "a man endowedwith every virtue, who represented to him that the 49 Stromata, lib. Iii. , cited by a writer on the Mysteries inBlackwood, Feb. 1853, pp. 201-203. 50 Taylor's trans. Of Golden Ass, p. 283. In a note to p. 275 ofthis work, the translator describes (with a citation of hisauthorities) "the breathing resemblances of the gods used in theMysteries, statues fabricated by the telesta, so as to beilluminated and to appear animated. " 51 Aglaophamus, lib. I. Sect. 7. 52 Discourse to the Lit. And Sci. Soc. Of Java, 1815, pub. InValpy'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 tocelebrate those most sacred Mysteries which bind together thehuman race. "55 Upon the whole, we cannot fail to see that theMysteries must have exerted a most extensive and profoundinfluence alike in fostering the good hopes of human naturetouching a life to come, and in giving credit and diffusion to thepopular fables of the poets concerning the details of the futurestate. Much of that belief which seems to us so absurd we caneasily suppose they sincerely embraced, when we recollect whatthey thought they had seen under supernatural auspices in theirinitiations. In the Greek and Roman faith there was gradually developed inconnection chiefly with the Mysteries, as we believe anaristocratic doctrine which allotted to a select class of souls anabode in the sky as their distinguished destination after death, while the common multitude were still sentenced to the shadowregion below the grave. As Virgil writes, "The descent to Avernusis easy. The gate of dark Dis is open day and night. But to riseinto the upper world is most arduous. Only the few heroes whomfavoring Jove loves or shining virtue exalts thither can effectit. " 56 Numerous scattered, significant traces of a belief in thischange of the destination of some souls from the pit of Hades tothe hall of heaven are to be found in the classic authors. Virgil, celebrating the death of some person under the fictitious name ofDaphnis, exclaims, "Robed in white, he admires the strange courtof heaven, and sees the clouds and the stars beneath his feet. Heis a god now. " 57 Porphyry ascribes to Pythagoras the declarationthat the souls of departed men are gathered in the zodiac. 58 Platoearnestly describes a region of brightness and unfading realitiesabove this lower world, among the stars, where the gods live, andwhither, he says, the virtuous and wise may ascend, while thecorrupt and ignorant must sink into the Tartarean realm. 59 Asimilar conception of the attainableness of heaven seems to besuggested in the old popular myths, first, of Hercules coming backin triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, risingto the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place amongthem; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuinghis 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 ofjustice and piety is the path to heaven, where patriots, exemplarysouls, released from their bodies, enjoy endless happiness amidstthe brilliant orbs of the galaxy. " 60 The same author also speaksof certain philosophers who flourished before his time, "whoseopinions encouraged the belief that souls departing from bodieswould arrive at heaven as their proper dwelling place. " 61 Heafterwards stigmatizes the notion that the life succeeding deathis subterranean as an error, 62 and in his own name addresses hisauditor thus: "I see you gazing upward and wishing to migrate intoheaven. " 63 It was the common belief of the Romans for ages thatRomulus was taken up into heaven, where he would remain forever, claiming Divine honors. 64 The Emperor Julian says, in his Letteron 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 thesouls of all of us who worship him sincerely: to the pious, instead of Tartarus he promises Olympus. " "It is lawful, " writesPlato, "only for the true lover of wisdom to pass into the rank ofgods. " 65 The privilege here confined to philosophers we believewas promised to the initiates in the Mysteries, as the specialprerogative secured to them by their initiation. "To pass into therank of the gods" is a phrase which, as here employed, means toascend into heaven and have a seat with the immortals, instead ofbeing banished, with the souls of common mortals, to the underworld. In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed tothat set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth, and who were called the chthonian gods. 66 The hope of immortalityfirst sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship. But in the progress of time and culture the supernal circle ofdivinities who kept state on bright Olympus acquired a greatershare of attention, and at last received a degree of worship farsurpassing that paid to their swarthy compeers below. Theadoration of these bright beings, with a growing trust in theirbenignity, the fables of the poets telling how they had sometimeselevated human favorites to their presence, for instance, receiving a Ganymede to the joys of their sublime society, theencouraging thoughts of the more religious and cheerful of thephilosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking fromthe dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and anative longing for admission to the serene pleasures of theunfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction, perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of theold faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, untilthe hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithfulsoul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor ofthe celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of hisseventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him inthis strain: "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that ifyou follow us you will be a god and with us will behold ourFather. " Several learned writers have strenuously labored to provethat the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealedin them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the establishedtheology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods weremerely deified men. We believe the real significance of thevarious collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which thesewriters have been brought to such a conclusion is this; thegenuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the godswere once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teachthat Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to trembleat the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete, whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterlyabsurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligentimage of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to liveeternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have beena brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and theheart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citationfrom Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send thebodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuoussouls, 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 ofthe passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascendfrom genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the justand established order of nature. " 67 The reference in the last clause is to the decrees of the Senatewhereby apotheosis was conferred on various persons, placing themamong the gods. This ceremony has often been made to appearunnecessarily ridiculous, through a perversion of its actualmeaning. When the ancients applied the term "god" to a human souldeparted from the body, it was not used as the modernsprevailingly employ that word. It expressed a great deal less withthem than with us. It merely meant to affirm similarity ofessence, qualities, and residence, but by no means equal dignityand power of attributes between the one and the others. It meantthat the soul had gone to the heavenly habitation of the gods andwas thenceforth a participant in the heavenly life. 68 Heraclituswas accustomed to say, "Men are mortal gods; gods are immortalmen. " Macrobius says, "The soul is not only immortal, but a god. "69 And Cicero declares, "The soul of man is a Divine thing, asEuripides dares to say, a god. " 70 Milton uses language preciselyparallel, speaking of those who are "unmindful of the crown trueVirtue gives her servants, after their mortal change, among theenthroned gods on sainted seats. " Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch inthe second century, says that "to become a god means to ascendinto heaven. " 71 The Roman Catholic ceremony of beatification andcanonization of saints, offering them incense and prayersthereafter, means exactly what was meant by the ancientapotheosis, namely, that while the multitudes of the dead abidebelow, in the intermediate state, these favored souls have beenadvanced 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 theMysteries came. It is well known that the Brahmans and Buddhistsbelieved, centuries before the Christian era, in the contrastedfate of good men after death to enjoy the successive heavens abovethe clouds, and of bad men to suffer the successive hells beneaththe earth. A knowledge of this attractive Oriental doctrine mayhave united with the advance of their own speculations to win thepartial acceptance obtained among the Greeks and Romans for thefaith which broke the universal doom to Hades and opened heaven totheir hopeful aspirations. In a tragedy of Euripides the followingpassage occurs, addressed to the bereaved Admetus: "Let not thetomb of thy wife be looked on as the mound of the ordinary dead. Some wayfarer, as he treads the sloping road, shall say, 'Thiswoman once died for her husband; but now she is a saint inheaven. '" 72 When the meaning of the cheerful promises given to the initiatesof a more favored fate in the future life than awaited othersnamely, as we think, that their spirits on leaving the body shouldscale Olympus instead of plunging to Tartarus had been concealedwithin the 67 Lives, Romulus, sect. Xxviii. 68 See a valuable discussion of the ancient use of the terms theosand deus in note D vol. Iii. Of Norton's Genuineness of theGospels. 69 Somn. Scip. , lib. Ii. Cap. 12. 70 Tusc. Quest. , lib. I. Cap. 26. 71 We omit several other authorities, as the reader would probablydeem any further evidence superfluous. 72 Alcestis, ll. 1015-1025, ed. Glasg. Mysteries for a long time, it at length broke into public view inthe national apotheosis of ancient heroes, kings, and renownedworthies, the instances of which became so numerous that Cicerocries, "Is not nearly all heaven peopled with the human race?" 73Over the heads of the devout heathen, as they gazed up through theclear night air, twinkled the beams of innumerable stars, eachchosen to designate the cerulean seat where some soul wasrejoicing with the gods in heaven over the glorious issue of thetoils and sufferings in which he once painfully trod this earthlyscene. Herodian, a Greek historian of some of the Roman emperors, hasleft a detailed account of the rite of apotheosis. 74 An image ofthe person to be deified was made in wax, looking all sick andpale, laid in state on a lofty bed of ivory covered with cloth ofgold, surrounded on one side by choirs of noble lords, on theother side by their ladies stripped of their jewels and clad inmourning, visited often for several days by a physician, who stillreports his patient worse, and finally announces his decease. Thenthe Senators and haughtiest patricians bear the couch through thevia sacra to the Forum. Bands of noble boys and of proud womenranged opposite each other chant hymns and lauds over the dead insolemn melody. The bier is next borne to the Campus Martius, whereit is placed upon a high wooden altar, a large, thin structurewith a tower like a lighthouse. Heaps of fragrant gums, herbs, fruits, and spices are poured out and piled upon it. Then theRoman knights, mounted on horseback, prance before it in beautifulbravery, wheeling to and fro in the dizzy measures of the Pyrrhicdance. Also, in a stately manner, purple clothed charioteers, wearing masks which picture forth the features of the most famousworthies of other days to the reverential recognition of thesilent 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 theshouts of her people. Thus into the residence of the gods "Sicitur ad astra" was borne the divinely favored mortal; "And thus wesee how man's prophetic creeds Made gods of men when godlike weretheir deeds. " For it was only in times of degradation and by a violentperversion that the honor was allowed to the unworthy; and even insuch cases it was usually nullified as soon as the peoplerecovered their senses and their freedom. There is extant amongthe works of Seneca a little treatise called Apocolocuntosis, thatis, pumpkinification, or the metamorphosis into a gourd, a sharpsatire levelled against the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius. The deification of mortals among the ancients has long beenlaughed at. When the great Macedonian monarch applied for a decreefor his apotheosis while he was yet alive, the LacedemonianSenate, with bitter sarcasm, voted, "If Alexander desires to be agod, let him be a god. " The doctrine is often referred to among usin terms of mockery. But this is principally because it is notunderstood. It simply signifies the ascent of the soul after deathinto the Olympian halls instead of descending into the Acheroniangulfs. And whether we 73 Tusc. Quast. , lib. I. Cap. 12. 74 Lib. Iv. consider the symbolic justice and beauty of the conception as apoetic image applied to the deathless heroes of humanity enspheredabove us forever in historic fame and natural worship, or regardits comparative probability as the literal location of theresidence of departed spirits, it must recommend itself to us as adecided improvement on the ideas previously prevalent, and as asort of anticipation, in part, of that bright faith in a heavenlyhome for faithfuls souls, afterwards established in the world byHim of whom it was written, "No man hath ascended up to heaven buthe that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, who is now inheaven. " Indeed, so forcible and close is the correspondencebetween the course of the aspirant in his initiation dramaticallydying, descending into Hades, rising again to life, and ascendinginto heaven with the apostolic presentation of the redemptivecareer of Christ, our great Forerunner, that some writers Nork, for instance have suggested that the latter was but the exotericpublication to all the world of what in the former wasesoterically taught to the initiates alone. There was a striking naturalness, a profound propriety, in theobscurities of secrecy and awe with which the ancient Mysteriesshrouded from a rash curiosity their instructions concerning thefuture life and only unfolded them by careful degrees to theprepared candidate. It is so with the reality itself in the natureof things. It is the great mystery of mysteries, darkly hinted intypes, 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 verybeginning of his race on earth has been thickly encompassed bymysteries, hung around by the muffling curtains of ignorance andsuperstition. Through one after another of these he has forced hisway and gazed on their successive secrets laid bare. Once theOcean was an alluring and terrible mystery, weltering before himwith its endless wash of waves, into which the weary sun, in thewest, plunged at evening, and out of which, in the east, itbounded refreshed in the morning. But the daring prows of hisships, guided by pioneering thought and skill, passed its islandsand touched its ultimate shores. Once the Polar Circle was afrightful and frozen mystery, enthroned on mountains of eternalice and wearing upon its snowy brow the flaming crown of theaurora borealis. But his hardy navigators, inspired by enterpriseand philanthropy, armed with science, and supplied by art, havedriven the awful phantom back, league by league, until but a smallexpanse of its wonders remains untracked by his steps. Once thecrowded Sky was a boundless mystery, a maze of motions, a fieldwhere ghastly comets played their antics and shook down terrors onthe nations. But the theories of his reason, based on the giganticgrasp of his calculus and aided by the instruments of hisinvention, have solved perplexity after perplexity, blendeddiscords into harmony, and shown to his delighted vision the calmperfection of the stellar system. So, too, in the moral world hehas lifted the shrouds from many a dark problem, and extended theempire of light and love far out over the ancient realm ofdarkness and terror. But the secret of Death, the mystery of theFuture, remains yet, as of old, unfathomed and inscrutable to hisinquiries. Still, as of old, he kneels before that unlifted veiland beseeches the oracles for a response to faith. The ancient Mysteries in their principal ceremony but copied theordination and followed the overawing spirit of Nature herself. The religious reserve and awe about the entrance into the adytumof their traditions were like those about the entrance into theinvisible scenes beyond the veils of time and mortality. Theirinitiation was but a miniature symbol of the great initiationthrough which, and that upon impartial terms, every mortal, fromKing Solomon to the idiot pauper, must sooner or later pass toimmortality. When a fit applicant, after the preliminaryprobation, kneels with fainting sense and pallid brow before theveil of the unutterable Unknown, and the last pulsations of hisheart tap at the door of eternity, and he reverentially asksadmission 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. Hecomes, pushes the curtain aside, leads the awe struck initiate in, takes the blinding bandage of the body from his soul; andstraightway the trembling neophyte receives light in the midst ofthat innumerable Fraternity of Immortals over whom the SupremeAuthor of the Universe presides. CHAPTER II. METEMPSYCHOSIS; OR, TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS. NO other doctrine has exerted so extensive, controlling, andpermanent an influence upon mankind as that of the metempsychosis, the notion that when the soul leaves the body it is born anew inanother body, its rank, character, circumstances, and experiencein each successive existence depending on its qualities, deeds, and attainments in its preceding lives. Such a theory, wellmatured, bore unresisted sway through the great Eastern world, long before Moses slept in his little ark of bulrushes on theshore of the Egyptian river; Alexander the Great gazed withamazement on the self immolation by fire to which it inspired theGymnosophists; Casar found its tenets propagated among the Gaulsbeyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as thelearned 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 leastsix hundred and fifty millions of mankind. "1 There is abundantevidence to prove that this scheme of thought prevailed at a veryearly period among the Egyptians, all classes and sects of theHindus, the Persian disciples of the Magi, and the Druids, and, ina later age, among the Greeks and Romans as represented by Musaus, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Macrobius, Ovid, and many others. Itwas generally adopted by the Jews from the time of the Babyloniancaptivity. Traces of it have been discovered among the ancientScythians, the African tribes, some of the Pacific Islanders, andvarious aboriginal nations both of North and of South America. Charlevoix says some tribes of Canadian Indians believed in atransmigration of souls; but, with a curious mixture of fancy andreflection, they limited it to the souls of little children, who, being balked of this life in its beginning, they thought would tryit again. Their bodies, accordingly, were buried at the sides ofroads, that their spirits might pass into pregnant womentravelling by. A belief in the metempsychosis limited in the sameway to the souls of children also prevailed among the Mexicans. 2The Maricopas, by the Gila, believe when they die they shalltransmigrate into birds, beasts, and reptiles, and shall return tothe banks of the Colorado, whence they were driven by the Yumas. They will live there in caves and woods, as wolves, rats, andsnakes; so will their enemies the Yumas; and they will fighttogether. 3 On the western border of the United States, only threeor four years ago, two Indians having been sentenced to be hungfor murder, the chiefs of their tribe came in and begged that theymight be shot or burned instead, as they looked upon hanging withthe utmost horror, believing that the spirit of a person who isthus strangled to death goes into the next world in a foul manner, and that it assumes a beastly form. The Sandwich Islanderssometimes 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, NewMexico, &c. , ch. Xxx. to spare the living whom accident should throw within theirreach. 4 Similar superstitions, but more elaborately developed, arerife among many tribes of African negroes. 5 It was inculcated inthe early Christian centuries by the Gnostics and the Manichaans;also by Origen and several other influential Fathers. In theMiddle Ages the sect of the Cathari, the Bogomiles, the famousscholastics Scotus Erigena and Bonaventura, as well as numerousless distinguished authors, advocated it. And in modern times ithas been earnestly received by Lessing and Fourier, and is notwithout its open defenders to day, as we can attest from our ownknowledge, even in the prosaic and enlightened circles of Europeanand American society. There have been two methods of explaining the origin of the dogmaof 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 overTo the Master TimeTo work out their ransomFor the ancient crime. " With the ancient Egyptians the doctrine was developed inconnection with the conception of a revolt and battle among thegods in some dim and disastrous epoch of the past eternity, whenthe defeated deities were thrust out of heaven and shut up infleshly prison bodies. So man is a fallen spirit, heaven hisfatherland, this life a penance, sometimes necessarily repeated inorder to be effectual. 6 The pre existence of the soul, whethertaught by Pythagoras, sung by Empedocles, dreamed by Fludd, orcontended for by Beecher, is the principal foundation of thebelief in the metempsychosis. But, secondly, the transmigration ofsouls has been considered as the means of their progressiveascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of thescale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth, climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endlessaspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent arethought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, mansoaring to God; but by sin the natural order and working of meansare inverted, and the series of births lead downward, untilexpiation and merit restore the primal adjustment and direction. The idea of a metempsychosis, or soul wandering, as the Germanscall it, has been broached in various forms widely differing inthe extent of their application. Among the Jews the writings ofPhilo, the Talmud, and other documents, are full of it. They seem, for the most part, to have confined the mortal residence of soulsto human bodies. They say that God created all souls on the firstday, the only day in which he made aught out of nothing; and theyimply, in their doctrine of the revolution of souls, that theseare born over and over, and will continue wandering thus until theMessiah 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 tilldeath; and "Ibbur, " which is where one soul occupies severalbodies, changing its residence at pleasure, or where several soulsoccupy one body. 7 The latter kind is illustrated by examples ofdemoniacal possession in the New Testament. The demons weresupposed to be the souls of deceased wicked men. Sometimes theyare represented as solitary and flitting from one victim toanother; sometimes they swarm together in the same person, asseven were at once cast out of Mary Magdalene. More frequently, however, the range of the soul's travels in itsrepeated births has been so extended as to include all animalbodies, beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects. In this extentthe doctrine was held by the Pythagoreans and Platonists, and infact by a majority of its believers. Shakspeare's wit is notwithout historical warrant when he makes the clown say toMalvolio, "Thou shalt fear to kill a woodcock, lest thoudispossess the soul of thy grandam. " Many the Manichaans, forinstance taught that human souls transmigrated not only throughthe lowest animal bodies but even through all forms of vegetablelife. Souls inhabit ears of corn, figs, shrubs. "Whoso plucks thefruit or the leaves from trees, or pulls up plants or herbs, isguilty of homicide, " say they; "for in each case he expels a soulfrom its body. " 8 And some have even gone so far as to believethat the soul, by a course of ignorance, cruelty, and uncleannesspursued through many lives, will at length arrive at an inanimatebody, and be doomed to exist for unutterable ages as a stone or asa particle of dust. The adherents of this hypothesis regard thewhole world as a deposition of materialized souls. At every stepthey tread on hosts of degraded souls, destined yet, though now bysin sunk thus low, to find their way back as redeemed and blessedspirits to the bosom of the Godhead. Upon the whole, the metempsychosis may be understood, as to itsinmost meaning and its final issue, to be either a Development, aRevolution, or a Retribution, a Divine system of developmenteternally leading creatures in a graduated ascension from the basetowards the apex of the creation, a perpetual cycle in the orderof nature fixedly recurring by the necessities of a physical fateunalterable, unavoidable, eternal, a scheme of punishment andreward exactly fitted to the exigencies of every case, presidedover by a moral Nemesis, and issuing at last in the emancipationof every purified soul into infinite bliss, when, by the upwardgravitation of spirit, they shall all have been strained throughthe successively finer growing filters of the worlds, from thecoarse grained foundation of matter to the lower shore of theDivine essence. In seeking to account for the extent and the tenacious grasp ofthis antique and stupendous belief, in looking about for thevarious suggestions or confirmations of such a dogma, we wouldcall attention to several considerations, each claiming somedegree of importance. First, among the earliest notions of areflecting man is that of the separate existence of the soul afterthe 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 changesand decays everywhere visible around him, he naturally imaginesthat "As billows on the undulating main, That swelling fall andfalling swell again, So on the tide of time inconstant roll Thedying body and the deathless soul. " To one thus meditating, and desiring, as he surely would, toperceive or devise some explanation of the soul's posthumousfortunes, the idea could hardly fail to occur that the destiny ofthe soul might be to undergo a renewed birth, or a series ofbirths in new bodies. Such a conception, appearing in a rude stateof culture, before the lines between science, religion, and poetryhad been sharply drawn, recommending itself alike by itssimplicity and by its adaptedness to gratify curiosity andspeculation in the formation of a thousand quaint and engaginghypotheses, would seem plausible, would be highly attractive, would very easily secure acceptance as a true doctrine. Secondly, the strange resemblances and sympathies between men andanimals would often powerfully suggest to a contemplative observerthe doctrine of the transmigration of souls. 9 Looking over thosevolumes of singular caricatures wherein certain artists have madeall the most distinctive physiognomies of men and beasts mutuallyto approximate and mingle, one cannot avoid the fancy that thebodies of brutes are the masks of degraded men. Notice an oxreclining in the shade of a tree, patiently ruminating as if sadlyconscious of many things and helplessly bound in some obscurepenance, a mute world of dreamy experiences, a sombre mystery: howeasy to imagine him an enchanted and transformed man! See howcertain animals are allied in their prominent traits to humanity, the stricken deer, weeping big, piteous tears, the fawningaffection and noble fidelity of the dog, the architectural skillof the beaver, the wise aspect of the owl, the sweet plaint of thenightingale, the shrieks of some fierce beasts, and the howls ofothers startlingly like the cries of children and the moans ofpain, the sparkling orbs and tortuous stealthiness of the snake;and the hints at metempsychosis are obvious. Standing face to facewith a tiger, an anaconda, a wild cat, a monkey, a gazelle, aparrot, a dove, we alternately shudder with horror and yearn withsympathy, now expecting to see the latent devils throw off theirdisguise and start forth in their own demoniac figures, nowwaiting for the metamorphosing charm to be reversed, and for theenchanted children of humanity to stand erect, restored to theirformer shapes. Pervading all the grades and forms of distinctanimal life there seems to be a rudimentary unity. The fundamentalelements and primordial germs of consciousness, intellect, will, passion, appear the same, and the different classes of being seemcapable of passing into one another by improvement or deterioration. Spontaneously, then, might a primitive observer, unhampered byprejudices, think that the soul of man on leaving its present bodywould find or construct another according to its chief intrinsicqualities and 9 Scholz, Beweis, dass es eine Seelenwanderung bei den Thierengiebt. forces, whether those were a leonine magnanimity of courage, avulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. Thespirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energyanother form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims asan 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 thehuman attributes of some brutes and the brutal attributes of somemen. Thus Gratiano, enraged at the obstinate malignity of Shylock, cries to the hyena hearted Jew, "Thou almost mak'st me waver in myfaith, To hold opinion, with Pythagoras, That souls of animalsinfuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spiritGovern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter, Even from thegallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thineunhallow'd dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Arewolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous. " Thirdly, there is a figurative metempsychosis, which may sometimesthe history of mythology abounds in examples of the same sort ofthing have been turned from an abstract metaphor into a concretebelief, or from a fanciful supposition have hardened into areceived fact. There is a poetic animation of objects whereby theimaginative person puts himself into other persons, into trees, clouds, whirlwinds, or what not, and works them for the time inideal realization. The same result is put in speech sometimes ashumorous play: for example, a celebrated English author says, "Nature meant me for a salamander, and that is the reason I havealways been discontented as a man: I shall be a salamander in thenext world!" Such imagery stated to a mind of a literal ordersolidifies into a meaning of prosaic fact. It is a common mode ofspeech to say of an enthusiastic disciple that the spirit of hismaster possesses him. A receptive student enters into the soul ofPlato, or is full of Goethe. We say that Apelles lived again inTitian. Augustine reappeared in Calvin, and Pelagius in Arminius, to fight over the old battle of election and freedom. Luther rosein Ronge. Take these figures literally, construct what they implyinto a dogma, and the product is the transmigration of souls. Theresult thus arrived at finds effective support in the strikingphysical resemblance, spiritual likeness, and similarity ofmission frequently seen between persons in one age and those in aformer age. Columbus was the modern Jason sailing after the GoldenFleece of a New World. Glancing along the portrait gallery of someancient family, one is sometimes startled to observe a face, extinct for several generations, suddenly confronting him againwith all its features in some distant descendant. A peculiarity ofconformation, a remarkable trait of character, suppressed for acentury, all at once starts into vivid prominence in a remotebranch of the lineage, and men say, pointing back to the ancestor, "He has revived once more. " Seeing Elisha do the same things thathis departed master had done before him, the people exclaimed, "The spirit of Elijah is upon him. " Beholding in John the Baptistone going before him in the spirit of that expected prophet, Jesussaid, "If ye are able to receive it, this is he. " Some of thelater Rabbins assert many entertaining things concerning therepeated births of the most distinguished personages in theirnational history. Abel was born again in Seth; Cain, in thatEgyptian whom Moses slew; Abiram, in Ahithophel; and Adam, havingalready reappeared once in David, will live again in the Messiah. The performance by an eminent man of some great labor which hadbeen done in an earlier age in like manner by a kindred spiritevokes in the imagination an apparition of the return of the deadto repeat his old work. Fourthly, there are certain familiar psychological experienceswhich 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 impressionarises in the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot helpfeeling, that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflectionsbefore. Learning a fact, meeting a face, for the first time, weare puzzled with an obscure assurance that it is not the firsttime. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted bya sense of familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude thatsurely we have more than once trodden those fields and gazed onthose scenes; and from hoary mountain, trickling rill, and vesperbell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial music seem tosigh, in remembered accents, through the soul's plaintive echoinghalls, "'Twas auld lang syne, my dear, 'Twas auld lang syne. " Plato's doctrine of reminiscence here finds its basis. We havelived before, perchance many times, and through the clouds ofsense and imagination now and then float the veiled visions ofthings that were. Efforts of thought reveal the half effacedinscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches ofdialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of oldfriendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deedsperformed long ago pass in weird procession before the mind's halfopened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachableveracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firmbeliever in his own existence on the earth previously to hispresent life. He testifies that on innumerable occasions he hasexperienced remembrances of events and recognitions of places, accompanied by a flash of irresistible conviction that he hadknown them in a former state. Nearly every one has felt instancesof this, more or less numerous and vivid. The doctrine at whichsuch things hint that "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not inutter nakedness, " but trailing vague traces and enigmas from abygone history, "do we come" yields the secret of many a mood anddream, the spell of inexplicable hours, the key and clew tobaffling labyrinths of mystery. The belief in the doctrine of themetempsychosis, among a fanciful people and in an unscientificage, need be no wonder to any cultivated man acquainted with themarvels 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 heartHad heard their shadowy step before. " Fifthly, the theory of the transmigration of souls is marvellouslyadapted 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 theheterogeneousness of our present existence, refutes the charge ofa groundless favoritism urged against Providence, and completelyjustifies the ways of God to man. The loss of remembrance betweenthe states is no valid objection to the theory; because such aloss is the necessary condition of a fresh and fair probation. Besides, there is a parallel fact of deep significance in ourunquestionable experience; "For is not our first year forgot? Thehaunts of memory echo not. " Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regardto 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 hisprivileges and heaped on his soul a load of guilt which he is nowexpiating. If a sudden calamity overwhelm a good man withunmerited ruin and anguish, it is the penalty of some crimecommitted in a state of responsible being beyond the confines ofhis present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrueto any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerlessfriendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlierlife. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled, awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every mandeformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hardconditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favoredand perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregoneexistence. When the Hindu looks on a man beautiful, learned, noble, fortunate, and happy, he exclaims, "How wise and good mustthis man have been in his former lives!" In his philosophy, orreligion, the proof of the necessary consequences of virtue andvice is deduced from the metempsychosis, every particular of theoutward man being a result of some corresponding quality of hissoul, and every event of his experience depending as effect on hisprevious merit as cause. 10 Thus the principal physical and moralphenomena of life are strikingly explained; and, as we gaze aroundthe world, its material conditions and spiritual elements combinein one vast scheme of unrivalled order, and the total experienceof humanity forms a magnificent picture of perfect poetic justice. We may easily account for the rise and spread of a theory whosesole difficulty is a lack of positive proof, but whoseapplications are so consistent and fascinating alike toimagination and to conscience. Hierocles said, and distinguishedphilosophers both before and since have said, "Without thedoctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the waysof Providence. " 10 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. I. P. 286. Finally, this doctrine, having been suggested by the variousforegoing considerations, and having been developed into apractical system of conceptions and motives by certain leadingthinkers, was adopted by the principal philosophers andpriesthoods of antiquity, and taught to the common people withauthority. The popular beliefs of four thousand years ago dependedfor their prevalence, not so much on cogent arguments or intrinsicprobability, as upon the sanctions thrown around them by renownedteachers, priests, and mystagogues. Now, the doctrine of thetransmigration of souls was inculcated by the ancient teachers, not as a mere hypothesis resting on loose surmises, but as anunquestionable fact supported by the experimental knowledge ofmany individuals and by infallible revelation from God. The sacredbooks 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 ofthe retention of memory through several successive lives. 11Pythagoras pretended to recollect his adventures in previous lives;and on one occasion, as we read in Ovid, going into the temple ofJuno, he recognised the shield he had worn as Euphorbus at thesiege of Troy. Diogenes Laertius also relates of him, that one day meeting a manwho was cruelly beating a dog, the Samian sage instantly detectedin the piteous howls of the poor beast the cries of a dear friendof his long since deceased, and earnestly and successfullyinterceded for his rescue. In the life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, numerousextraordinary instances are told of his recognitions ofpersons he had known in preceding lives. Such examples as theseexactly met the weakest point in the metempsychosis theory, andmust have had vast influence in fostering the common faith. Plotinus said, "Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plungedin it forget all. " Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defenderof the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objectiondrawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appealrather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves thedoubts unsolved. 12 His supposition is that in each spirit life weremember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but ineach earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here, every night we lose in sleep all memory of the past, but recoverit each day again as we awake. Throughout the East this generaldoctrine is no mere superstition of the masses of ignorant people:it is the main principle of all Hindu metaphysics, the foundationof all their philosophy, and inwrought with the intellectualtexture of their inspired books. It is upheld by the venerableauthority of ages, by an intense general conviction of it, and bymultitudes of subtle conceits and apparent arguments. It was alsoimpressed upon the initiates in the old Mysteries, by being theredramatically shadowed forth through masks, and quaint symbolicceremonies enacted at the time of initiation. 13 This, then, is what we must say of the ancient and widely spreaddoctrine of transmigration. As a suggestion or theory naturallyarising from empirical observation and confirmed by a variety ofphenomena, 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 ofthe Druids. knowledge, not only easy to be believed, but hard to be resisted. As an ethical scheme clearing up on principles of poetic justicethe most perplexed and awful problems in the world, it throwsstreams of light through the abysses of evil, gives dramaticsolution to many a puzzle, and, abstractly considered, charms theunderstanding and the conscience. As a philosophical dogmaanswering to some strange, vague passages in human nature andexperience, it echoes with dreamy sweetness through the deepmystic chambers of our being. As the undisputed creed which hasinspired and spell bound hundreds of millions of our race forperhaps over a hundred and fifty generations, it commandsdeference and deserves study. But, viewing it as a thesis in thelight of to day, challenging intelligent scrutiny and soberbelief, we scarcely need to say that, based on shadows and onarbitrary interpretations of superficial appearances, built ofreveries and occult experiences, fortified by unreliableinferences, destitute of any substantial evidence, it is unable toface the severity of science. A real investigation of its validity by the modern methodsdissipates it as the sun scatters fog. First, the mutualcorrespondences between men and animals are explained by the factthat they are all living beings are the products of the same Godand the same nature, and built according to one plan. They thuspartake, in different degrees and on different planes, of many ofthe same elements and characteristics. Lucretius, with his usualmixture of acuteness and sophistry, objects to the doctrine that, if it were true, when the soul of a lion passed into the body of astag, or the soul of a man into the body of a horse, we should seea stag with the courage of a lion, a horse with the intelligenceof a man. But of course the manifestations of soul depend on theorgans of manifestation. Secondly, the singular psychologicalexperiences referred to are explicable so far as we can expectwith our present limited data and powers to solve the densemysteries of the soul by various considerations not involving thedoctrine in question. Herder has shown this with no little acumenin three "Dialogues on the Metempsychosis, " beautifully translatedby the Rev. Dr. Hedge in his "Prose Writers of Germany. " The senseof pre existence the confused idea that these occurrences havethus happened to us before which is so often and strongly felt, isexplicable partly by the supposition of some sudden and obscuremixture of associations, some discordant stroke on the keys ofrecollection, jumbling together echoes of bygone scenes, snatchesof unremembered dreams, and other hints and colors in a weird anduncommanded manner. The phenomenon is accounted for still moredecisively by Dr. Wigand's theory of the "Duality of the Mind. "The mental organs are double, one on each side of the brain. Theyusually act with perfect simultaneity. When one gets a slightstart of the other, as the thought reaches the slow side abewildered sense of a previous apprehension of it arises in thesoul. And then, the fact that the supposition of a great system ofadjusting transmigrations justifies the ways of Providence is noproof that the supposition is a true one. The difficulty is, thatthere is no evidence of the objective truth of the assumption, however well the theory applies; and the justice and goodness ofGod may as well be defended on the ground of a single life hereand a discriminating retribution hereafter, as on the ground of anunlimited series of earthly births. The doctrine evidently possesses two points of moral truth andpower, and, if not tenable as strict science, is yet instructiveas symbolic poetry. First, it embodies, in concrete shapes themost vivid and unmistakable, the fact that beastly and demoniacqualities of character lead men down towards the brutes andfiends. Rage makes man a tiger; low cunning, a fox; coarseness andferocity, a bear; selfish envy and malice, a devil. On thecontrary, the attainment of better degrees of intellectual andethical qualities elevates man towards the angelic and the Divine. There are three kinds of lives, corresponding to the three kindsof metempsychosis, ascending, circular, descending: the aspiringlife of progress in wisdom and goodness; the monotonous life ofroutine in mechanical habits and indifference; the deterioratinglife of abandonment in ignorance and vice. Timaus the Locrian, andsome other ancient Pythagoreans, gave the whole doctrine a purelysymbolic meaning. Secondly, the theory of transmigrating soulstypifies the truth that, however it may fare with persons now, however ill their fortunes may seem to accord with their desertshere, justice reigns irresistibly in the universe, and sooner orlater every soul shall be strictly compensated for every tittle ofits merits in good or evil. There is no escaping the chain of actsand consequences. This entire scheme of thought has always allured the Mystics toadopt it. In every age, from Indian Vyasa to Teutonic Boehme, wefind them contending for it. Boehme held that all materialexistence was composed by King Satan out of the physical substanceof his fallen followers. The conception of the metempsychosis is strikingly fitted for thepurposes of humor, satire, and ethical hortation; and literatureabounds with such applications of it. In Plutarch's account ofwhat Thespesius saw when his soul was ravished away into hell fora time, we are told that he saw the soul of Nero dreadfullytortured, transfixed with iron nails. The workmen forged it intothe form of a viper; when a voice was heard out of an exceedinglight ordering it to be transfigured into a milder being; and theymade it one of those creatures that sing and croak in the sides ofponds and marshes. 14 When Rosalind finds the verses with which herenamored Orlando had hung the trees, she exclaimed, "I was neverso berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, whichI can hardly remember. " One of the earliest popular introductionsof this Oriental figment to the English public was by Addison, whose Will Honeycomb tells an amusing story of his friend, JackFreelove, how that, finding his mistress's pet monkey alone oneday, he wrote an autobiography of his monkeyship's surprisingadventures in the course of his many transmigrations. Leaving thisprecious document in the monkey's hands, his mistress found it onher return, and was vastly bewildered by its pathetic andlaughable contents. 15 The fifth number of the "Adventurer" gives avery entertaining account of the "Transmigrations of a Flea. "There is also a poem on this subject by Dr. Donne, full ofstrength and wit. It traces a soul through ten or twelve births, giving the salient points of its history in each. First, the soulanimates the apple our hapless mother Eve ate, bringing "deathinto 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 spoutedrivers up as if he meant o join our seas with seas abovethe firmament. " Next, as a mouse, it crept up an elephant's sinewyproboscis to the soul's bedchamber, the brain, and, gnawing thelife cords there, died, crushed in the ruins of the giganticbeast. Afterwards it became a wolf, a dog, an ape, and finally awoman, where the quaint tale closes. Fielding is the author of aracy literary performance called "A Journey from this World to theNext. " The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysiumthe adventures he had passed through, living successively in thecharacter of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, abeau, a monk, a fiddler, a wise man, a king, a fool, a beggar, aprince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, aknight, a dancing master, and a bishop. Whoever would see howvividly, with what an honest and vigorous verisimilitude, thedoctrine can be embodied, should read "The Modern Pythagorean, " byDr. Macnish. But perhaps the most humorous passage of this sort isthe following description from a remarkable writer of the presentday: "In the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, 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 festaltables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor. The mostaldermanic, with his chin upon a heart leaf, which serves for anapkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs adeep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cupwith the ejaculation tr r r oonk, tr r r oonk! and straightwaycomes over the water from some distant cove the same passwordrepeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down tohis mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of theshores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, withsatisfaction, tr r r conk! and each in his turn, down to theflabbiest paunched, repeats the same, that there be no mistake;and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sundisperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not underthe pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, andpausing for a reply. " 16 The doctrine of the metempsychosis, which was the priest's threatagainst sin, was the poet's interpretation of life. The formergave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latterimparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to thecontemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullestdevelopment, the mountains piled towering to the sky and theplains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dustof souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight, was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated formthat caught his attention might be the dwelling of some ancestor, or of some once cherished companion of his own. Hence the Hindu'sso sensitive kindness towards animals: 16 Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, p. 137. "Crush not the feeble, inoffensive worm: Thy sister's spirit wearsthat humble form. Why should thy cruel arrow smite yon bird? Inhim thy brother's plaintive song is beard. Let not thine anger onthy dog descend: That faithful animal was once thy friend. " There is a strange grandeur, an affecting mystery, in the view ofthe creation from the stand point of the metempsychosis. It is anawful dream palace all aswarm with falling and climbing creaturesclothed in ever shifting disguises. The races and changes of beingconstitute a boundless masquerade of souls, whose bodies arevizards and whose fortunes poetic retribution. The motivefurnished by the doctrine to self denial and toil has a peerlesssublimity. In our Western world, the hope of acquiring largepossessions, or of attaining an exalted office, often stimulatesmen to heroic efforts of labor and endurance. What, then, shouldwe not expect from the application to the imaginative minds of theEastern world of a motive which, transcending all set limits, offers unheard of prizes, to be plucked in life after life, and atthe end unveils, for the occupancy of the patient aspirant, theThrone of Immensity? No wonder that, under the propulsion of amotive so exhaustless, a motive not remote nor abstract, butconcrete, and organized in indissoluble connection with thevisible chain of eternal causes and effects, no wonder we see suchtremendous exhibitions of superstition, voluntary sufferings, superhuman deeds. Here is the secret fountain of that irresistibleforce which enables the devotee to measure journeys of a thousandmiles by prostrations of his body, to hold up his arm until itwithers and remains immovably erect as a stick, or to swinghimself by red hot hooks through his flesh. The poorest wretch ofa soul that has wandered down to the lowest grade of animateexistence can turn his resolute and longing gaze up theresplendent ranks of being, and, conscious of the god head's germwithin, feel that, though now unspeakably sunken, he shall one dayspurn every vile integument and vault into seats of heavenlydominion. Crawling as an almost invisible bug in a heap ofcarrion, he can still think within himself, holding fast to thelaw of righteousness and love, "This is the infinite ladder ofredemption, over whose rounds of purity, penance, charity, andcontemplation I may ascend, through births innumerable, till Ireach a height of wisdom, power, and bliss that will cast intoutter contempt the combined glory of countless millions of worlds, ay, till I sit enthroned above the topmost summit of the universeas omnipotent Buddha. " 17 17 Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find thefollowing references useful: Hardy, "Manual of Buddhism, " ch. V. Upham, "History of Buddhism, " ch. Iii. Beausobre, "Histoire duManicheisme, " livre vi. Ch. Iv. Helmont, "De Revolution Animarum. "Richter, "Das Christenthum und die Kitesten Religionen desOrients, " sects. 54-65. Sinner, "Essai sur les Dogmes de laMetempsychose et du Purgatoire. " Conz, "Schicksale derSeelenwanderungshypothese unter verschiedenen Volkern und inverschiedenen 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 ofthis probationary epoch, Christ will appear with an army of angelsin the clouds of heaven, descend, and set up his tribunal on theearth. The light of his advancing countenance will be the longwaited Aurora of the Grave. All the souls of men will be summonedfrom their tarrying places, whether in heaven, or hell, orpurgatory, or the sepulchre; the fleshly tabernacles they formerlyinhabited will be re created, a strong necromancy making the rootyand grave floored earth give up its dust of ruined humanity, andmoulding it to the identical shapes it formerly composed; eachsoul will enter its familiar old house in company with which itssins were once committed; the books will be opened and judgmentwill be passed; then the accepted will be removed to heaven, andthe rejected to hell, both to remain clothed with those samematerial bodies forever, the former in celestial bliss, the latterin infernal torture. In the present dissertation we propose to exhibit the sources, trace the developments, explain the variations, and discuss themerits, of this doctrine. The first appearance of this notion of a bodily restoration whichoccurs in the history of opinions is among the ancient Hindus. With them it appears as a part of a vast conception, embracing thewhole universe in an endless series of total growths, decays, andexact restorations. In the beginning the Supreme Being is one andalone. He thinks to himself, "I will become many. " Straightway themultiform creation germinates forth, and all beings live. Then foran inconceivable period a length of time commensurate with theexistence of Brahma, the Demiurgus the successive generationsflourish and sink. At the end of this period all forms of matter, all creatures, sages, and gods, fall back into the UniversalSource whence they arose. Again the Supreme Being is one andalone. 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 whichdisappear'd, Remains stored up in the storehouse of fate: When thesystem of the heavens returns to its former order, God, the AllJust, will bring them forth from the veil of mystery. " 2 The same general conception, in a modified form, was held by theStoics of later Greece, who doubtless borrowed it from the East, and who carried it out in greater detail. "God is an artisticfire, out of which the cosmopoeia issues. " This fire proceeds in acertain fixed course, in obedience to a fixed law, passing throughcertain intermediate gradations and established periods, until itultimately returns into itself and closes with a universalconflagration. It is to this catastrophe that reference is made inthe following passage of Epictetus: "Some say that when Zeus isleft alone at the time of the conflagration, he is solitary, andbewails 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 succeedingformation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particularthat happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before, and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connectedwith astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creatingof the world coincide with the same position of the stars as thatat which it previously occurred. 4 This they called the restorationof all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identicalepochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Platois a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of thepast, by reproducing it over and over forever. Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "Insubmitting, " he says, "physical phenomena and historical events tothe exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to theircauses by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by thatancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and thoseregulating the moral world, exert their action under the presenceof a primordial necessity and according to movements periodicallyrenewed. " The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, itis that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shallbe done, and there is no new thing under the sun. " The conceptionof the destinies of the universe as a circle returning foreverinto itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind earlyseizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeblepowers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but theinfinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformationsever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend andmaster 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 likedestruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and stillThe mighty measure never, never full?" And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinitythreatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in theview of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end fromtime to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for ussimply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception towhich 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 whollydifferent ground, again emerges upon our attention in theZoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to bepure and happy and to pass to a heavenly immortality. The evilAhriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primaldestiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their materialframes to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to apainful abode in hell. Meanwhile, the war between the Light Godand the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good Oneshall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evildeeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed atfirst be restored. Then all 3 Epictetus, lib. Iii. Cap. 13. Sonntag, De PalingenesiaStoicorum. 4 Ritter's Hist. Of An. Phil. , lib. Xi. Cap. 4. souls shall be redeemed from hell and their bodies be rebuilt fromtheir scattered atoms and clothed upon them again. 5 Thisresurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, noris it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzdof the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred anddefeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is stillunderstood and looked for by the Parsees. The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with whichit is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitousassumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. Thehypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battlebetween two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neitherthe scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic ofreason; and it has long since been driven from the arena ofearnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violentcurse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform andspoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now, as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, apunishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system. " It isunreasonable to suppose that the Infinite God would deliberatelylay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. Andit is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or anafter result foisted into the system of the world. Death that is, a succession of generations is surely an essential part of thevery constitution of nature, plainly stamped on all those "medalsof the creation" which bear the features of their respective agesand which are laid up in the archives of geological epochs. Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's originalplan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and thewhole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermoreactually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence ofman, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. Andso the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as therestoration of God's broken plan to its completeness falls to theground. The Jews, in the course of their frequent and long continuedintercourse with the Persians, did not fail to be much impressedwith the vivid melodramatic outlines of the Zoroastrian doctrineof the resurrection. They finally adopted it themselves, andjoined it, with such modifications as it naturally underwent fromthe union, with the great dogmas of their own faith. A few faintreferences to it are found in the Old Testament. Some explicitdeclarations and boasts of it are in the Apocrypha. In theTargums, the Talmud, and the associated sources, abundantstatements of it in copious forms are preserved. The Jews restedtheir doctrine of the resurrection on the same general ground asthe Persians did, from whom they borrowed it. Man was meant to beimmortal, either on earth or in heaven; but Satan seduced him tosin, and thus wrested from him his privilege of immortality, madehim die and descend into a dark nether realm which was to befilled with the disembodied souls of his descendants. Theresurrection was to annul all this and restore men to theiroriginal footing. We need not labor any disproof of the truth or authority of thisdoctrine as the Pharisees held it, because, admitting that theyhad the record of a revelation from God, this doctrine was not apart of it. It is only to be found in their canonic scriptures byway of vague and hasty allusion, and is historically traceable toits derivation from the pagan oracles of Persia. 5 Frazer, History of Persia, chap. Iv. Baur, Symbolik undMythologice thl. Ii. Absch. Ii. Cap. Ss. 394-404. Of course it is possible that the doctrine of the resurrection, asthe Hebrews held it, was developed by themselves, from imaginativecontemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectresseen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in theunder world; ideas of God as the deliverer of living men from theopen gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapesfrom destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Beforeadvancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that someof the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising fromthe under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized, incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identicalbodies they formerly wore would be literally restored. Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose andspread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect. Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years wereChristian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolicage virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it, then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salientdogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality andbigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission ofChristianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retainedby early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In theNew Testament itself there are seeming references to thisdoctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrectionof the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it foundin any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourthcentury. 6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrinewas not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The factis, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of thedescent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called inquestion at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up onthe symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. Assoon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and allbut unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in everycreed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has beendenied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy andschism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, whoconcerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was pastalready. " The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Churchhas always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodiesformerly inhabited by men shall be raised from the earth, sea, andair, and given to them again to be everlastingly assumed. Thescattered exceptions to the believers in this doctrine have beenfew, and have ever been styled heretics by their contemporaries. Any one who will glance over the writings of the Fathers withreference to this subject will find the foregoing statements amplyconfirmed. 7 Justin Martyr wrote a treatise on the resurrection, afragment of which is still extant. Athenagoras has left us anextremely elaborate and able discussion of the whole doctrine, ina separate work. Tertullian is author of a famous book on thesubject, entitled "Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh, " inwhich he says, "The teeth are providentially made eternal to serveas the seeds of the 6 Dr. Sykes, Inquiry when the Article of the Resurrection of theBody or Flesh was first introduced into the Public Creeds. 7 Mosheim, De Resurrectione Mortuorum. resurrection. " Chrysostom has written fully upon it in two of hiseloquent homilies. All these, in company indeed with the commonbody of their contemporaries, unequivocally teach a carnalresurrection with the grossest details. Augustine says, "Everyman's body, howsoever dispersed here, shall be restored perfect inthe resurrection. Every body shall be complete in quantity andquality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut, shall not return in such enormous quantities to deform theiroriginal places; but neither shall they perish: they shall returninto the body into that substance from which they grew. " 8 As ifthat would not cause any deformity! 9 Some of the later Origenistsheld 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 dogmaof a general bodily resurrection already prevailing among theParsees, the Jews, and the Christians, and perceiving, too, howwell adapted for purposes of vivid representation and practicaleffect it was, or perhaps believing it himself, the Arabianprophet ingrafted this article into the creed of his followers. Ithas ever been with them, and is still, a foremost and controllingarticle of faith, an article for the most part held in its literalsense, although there is a powerful sect which spiritualizes thewhole conception, turning all its details into allegories andimages. But this view is not the original nor the orthodox view. The subject of the resurrection was a prominent theme in thetheology of the Middle Age. Only here and there a dissenting voicewas raised against the doctrine in its strict physical form. Thegreat body of the Scholastics stood stanchly by it. In defence andsupport of the Church thesis they brought all the quirks andquiddities of their subtle dialectics. As we take down theirponderous tomes from their neglected shelves, and turn over thedusty, faded old leaves, we find chapter after chapter in many aformidable folio occupied with grave discussions, carried on inacute logical terminology, of questions like these: "Will theresurrection be natural or miraculous?" "Will each one's hairs andnails all be restored to him in the resurrection?" "When bodiesare raised, will each soul spontaneously know its own and enterit? or will the power of God distribute them as they belong?""Will the deformities and scars of our present bodies be retainedin the resurrection?" "Will all rise of the same age?" "Will allhave one size and one sex?" 11 And so on with hundreds of kindredquestions. For instance, Thomas Aquinas contended "that no othersubstance would rise from the grave except that which belonged tothe individual in the moment of death. "12 What dire prospects thisproposition must conjure up before many minds! If one chance togrow prodigiously obese before death, he must lug that enormouscorporeity wearily about forever; but if he happen to die whenwasted, 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 etAtate 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 armsmust appear on the resurrection stage without those veryconvenient appendages. There will still be need of hospitals forthe battered veterans of Chelsea and Greenwich, mutilated heroes, pensioned relics of deck and field. Then in the resurrection therenowned "Mynheer von Clam, Richest merchant in Rotterdam, "will again have occasion for the services of the "patent cork legmanufacturer, " though it is hardly to be presumed he will acceptanother unrestrainable one like that which led him so fearful arace through the poet's verses. The Manichaans denied a bodily resurrection. In this all the sectstheologically allied to them, who have appeared in ecclesiasticalhistory, for instance, the Cathari, have agreed. There have alsobeen a few individual Christian teachers in every century who haveassailed the doctrine. But, as already declared, it has uniformlybeen the firm doctrine of the Church and of all who acknowledgedher authority. The old dogma still remains in the creeds of therecognised Churches, Papal, Greek, and Protestant. It has beenterribly shattered by the attacks of reason and of progressivescience. It lingers in the minds of most people only as a deadletter. But all the earnest conservative theologians yet cling toit in its unmitigated grossness, with unrelaxing severity. We hearit in practical discourses from the pulpit, and read it indoctrinal treatises, as offensively proclaimed now as ever. Indeed, it is an essential part of the compact system of theruling theology, and cannot be taken out without loosening thewhole dogmatic fabric into fragments. Thus writes to day adistinguished American divine, Dr. Spring: "Whether buried in theearth, or floating in the sea, or consumed by the flames, orenriching the battle field, or evaporate in the atmosphere, all, from Adam to the latest born, shall wend their way to the greatarena of the judgment. Every perished bone and every secretparticle of dust shall obey the summons and come forth. If onecould then look upon the earth, he would see it as one mightyexcavated globe, and wonder how such countless generations couldhave found a dwelling beneath its surface. " 13 This is the way therecognised authorities in theology still talk. To venture anyother opinion is a heresy all over Christendom at this hour. We will next bring forward and criticize the arguments for andagainst the doctrine before us. It is contended that the doctrineis demonstrated in the example of Christ's own resurrection. "Theresurrection of the flesh was formerly regarded as incredible, "says Augustine; "but now we see the whole world believing thatChrist's earthly body was borne into heaven. " 14 It is the faithof the Church that "Christ rose into heaven with his body of fleshand blood, and wears it there now, and will forever. " "Had he beenthere in body before, it would have been no such wonder that heshould have returned with it; but that the flesh of our flesh andbone of our bone should be seated at the right hand of God isworthy of the greatest admiration. " 15 That is to say, Christ wasfrom 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 returningto 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 violentlyabused the significance of Christ's ascension. The drama of hisresurrection, with all its connected parts, was not meantthroughout as a strict representation of our destiny. It was aseal upon his commission and teachings, not an exemplification ofwhat should happen to others. It was outwardly a miracle, not atype, an exceptional instance of super natural power, not asignificant exhibition of the regular course of things. The samelogic which says, "Christ rose and ascended with his fleshly body:therefore we shall, " must also say, "Christ rose visibly on thethird day: therefore we shall. " Christ's resurrection was amiracle; and therefore we cannot reason from it to ourselves. Thecommon conception of a miracle is that it is the suspension, notthe manifestation, of ordinary laws. We have just as much logicalright to say that the physical appearance in Christ's resurrectionwas merely an accommodation to the senses of the witnesses, andthat on his ascension the body was annihilated, and only his soulentered heaven, as we have to surmise that the theory embodied inthe common belief is true. The record is according to meresensible appearances. The reality is beyond our knowledge. Therecord gives no explanation. It is wiser in this dilemma to followthe light of reason than to follow the blind spirit of tradition. The point in our reasoning is this. If Christ, on rising from theworld of the dead, assumed again his former body, he assumed it bya miracle, and for some special purpose of revealing himself tohis disciples and of finishing his earthly work; and it does notfollow either that he bore that body into heaven, or that anyothers will ever, even temporarily, reassume their cast off forms. The Christian Scriptures do not in a single passage teach thepopular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text inthe New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanationwithout implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it isundeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul doesnot perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, fromnumerous explicit passages, that the New Testament authors, incommon with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departedto be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls theintermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterraneanrealm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiahto release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of thedoctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the NewTestament is fully met by the simple ascension of thiscongregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of theupper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up toheaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefullyobserved, there is not one text in the New Testament, as beforestated, 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 hiscontroversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, verypointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of thewords "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shallcome forth. " Nothing can come out of the grave except what is init. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separatestate. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they longago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulationsof the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto theresurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the underworld, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events, nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is amatter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to havematerial bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection yeshall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as theangels of heaven. " It seems clear to us that the author of theEpistle to the Hebrews also looked for no restoration of thefleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintestallusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spiritsof just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with aninnumerable company of angels, and with the general assembly andchurch of the first born. " The Jews and early Christians whobelieved in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departedcould enter heaven until after that great consummation. The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach theresurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave isfurnished by the celebrated passage in Paul's Epistle to theCorinthians. The apostle's premises, reasoning, and conclusion areas follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the firstfruits of them that slept. " That is to say, all who have died, except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of soulsunder the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so thesolitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the generalresurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the deadraised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle'sreply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can considerhim as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that waslaid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that whichthou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but nakedgrain, and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him. " "Thereare celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a naturalbody, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of theearth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh andblood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" "we shall all bechanged, " and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have bornethe image of the earthy. " The analogy which has been so strangelyperverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germwhich was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, wasnot any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was thesoul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from itshull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christshall 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 principleof life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up and puts onits body fashioned appropriately for it. So, according to Paul'sconception, when a man is buried, the material corpse is not theresurrection body that shall be; but the living soul whichoccupied it is the germ that shall put on a new body ofimmortality when the spring tide of Christ's coming draws theburied treasures of Hades up to the light of heaven. A species of proof which has been much used by the advocates ofthe dogma of a bodily resurrection is the argument from analogy. The intimate connection of human feeling and fancy with thechanging phenomena of Nature's seasons would naturally suggest toa pensive mind the idea, Why, since she has her annualresurrection, may not humanity some time have one? And what firstarose as a poetic conceit or stray thought, and was expressed inglowing metaphors, might by an easy process pass abroad and hardeninto a prosaic proposition or dogmatic formula. "O soul of the spring time, now let us behold The stone from themouth of the sepulchre roll'd, And Nature rise up from her death'sdamp mould; Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness haslain, Revive with the warmth and the brightness again, And inblooming of flower and budding of tree The symbols and types ofour destiny see. " Standing by the graves of our loved and lost ones, our inmostsouls yearn over the very dust in which their hallowed formsrepose. We feel that they must come back, we must be restored toeach other as we were before. Listening to the returned birdswhose warble fills the woods once more, gazing around on theverdant and flowery forms of renewed life that clothe thelandscape over again, we eagerly snatch at every apparent emblemor prophetic analogy that answers to our fond imagination anddesiring dream. Sentiment and fancy, especially when stimulated bylove and grief, and roving in the realms of reverie, free from thecold guidance and sharp check of literal fact and severe logic, are poor analysts, and then we easily confuse things distinct andwander to conclusions philosophy will not warrant. Before buildinga dogmatic doctrine on analogies, we must study those analogieswith careful discrimination, must see what they really are, and towhat they really lead. There is often an immense differencebetween the first appearance to a hasty observer and the finalreality to a profound student. Let us, then, scrutinize a littlemore closely those seeming analogies which, to borrow a happyexpression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sisterof Immortality. " Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in anew shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof ofany doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, whatwould the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, thathumanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her livinghandiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature doesnot reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perishedthe previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not aresurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The passage ofthe worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbolof a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emancipation, notresuming a deserted dead body, but assuming a new live one. Doesthe butterfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that haveperished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, notreturn, ascent through future developments, not descent throughthe stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of aseed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seedof? Of a soul. " Sir Thomas Browne, after others, argues for the restoration ofman's body from the grave, from the fancied analogy of thepalingenesis or resurrection of vegetables which the magicians ofthe antique East and the mystic chemists of the Middle Age boastedof 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 sohigh and noble a piece of chemistry, the reindividuality of anincinerated plant. " We are not informed that Sir Thomas evergranted him the sight. Of this beautiful error, this exquisitesuperstition, which undoubtedly arose from the crystallizations ofcertain salts in arborescent forms which suddenly surprised theearly alchemists in some of their experiments, we have thefollowing account in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature:" "Thesemina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in theblood of man. The ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been plantedunsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew onrose trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment. This magical phoenix lies thusconcealed in its cold ashes till the presence of a certainchemical heat produces its resurrection. " Any refutation of thisnow would be considered childish. Upon the whole, then, whilerecurrent spring, bringing in the great Easter of the year, typifies to us indeed abundantly the development of new life, thegrowth of new bodies out of the old and decayed, but nowhere hintsat the gathering up and wearing again of the dusty sloughs androtted foliage of the past, let men cease to talk of there beingany natural analogies to the ecclesiastical dogma of theresurrection of the flesh. The teaching of nature finds a truerutterance in the words of Aschylus: "There is no resurrection forhim who is once dead. " 16 The next argument is that based on considerations of reason and ofethics. The supporters of the doctrine of the resurrection of thebody have often disingenuously evaded the burden of proof thrownupon 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 againstit, every absurdity shown to be involved in it, has been met andconfidently rebutted with declarations of God's abundant power toeffect a physical resurrection, or to do any thing else hepleases, however impossible it may appear to us. Now, it is truethe power of God is competent to innumerable things utterly beyondour skill, knowledge, or conception. Nevertheless, there is aprovince within which our reason can judge of probabilities, andcan, if not absolutely grasp infallible truth, at least reachsatisfactory convictions. God is able to restore the vast coaldeposits 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 willdo it. The truth or falsity of the popular theory of theresurrection is not a question of God's power; it is simply aquestion of God's will. A Jewish Rabbin relates the followingconversation, as exultingly as if the quibbling evasion on whichit turns positively settled the question itself, which in fact itdoes not approach. A Sadducee says, "The resurrection of the deadis a fable: the dry, scattered dust cannot live again. " A bystanding Pharisee makes this reply: "There were in a city twoartists: one made vases of water, the other made them of clay:which was the more wondrous artist?" The Sadducee answered, "Theformer. " The Pharisee rejoins, "Cannot God, then, who formed manof water, (gutta seminis humida, ) much more re form him of clay?"Such a method of reasoning is an irrelevant impertinence. God cancall Nebuchadnezzar from his long rest, and seat him on his oldthrone again to morrow. What an absurdity to infer that thereforehe will do it! God can give us wings upon our bodies, and enableus 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 raiseour dead bodies, but whether he has the will. To that questionsince, as we have already seen, he has sent us no miraculousrevelation replying to it we can only find an answer by tracingthe indications of his intentions contained in reason, morals, andnature. One of the foremost arguments urged by the Fathers for theresurrection was its supposed necessity for a just and completejudgment. The body was involved and instrumental in all the sinsof the man: it must therefore bear part in his punishment. TheRabbins tell this allegory: "In the day of judgment the body willsay, The soul alone is to blame: since it left me, I have lainlike a stone in the grave. The soul will retort, The body alone issinful: since released from it, I fly through the air like a bird. The Judge will interpose with this myth: A king once had abeautiful garden full of early fruits. A lame man and a blind manwere in it. Said the lame man to the blind man, Let me mount uponyour shoulders and pluck the fruit, and we will divide it. Theking accused them of theft; but they severally replied, the lameman, How could I reach it? the blind man, How could I see it? Theking ordered the lame man to be placed upon the back of the blindman, and in this position had them both scourged. So God in theday of judgment will replace the soul in the body, and hurl themboth into hell together. " There is a queer tradition among theMohammedans implying, singularly enough, the same general thought. The Prophet's uncle, Hamzah, having been slain by Hind, daughterof Atabah, the cursed woman cut out his liver and gnawed it withfiendish joy; but, lest any of it should become incorporated withher system and go to hell, the Most High made it as hard as astone; and when she threw it on the ground, an angel restored itto its original nature and place in the body of the martyred hero, that lion of God. The Roman Catholic Church endorses the representation that thebody must be raised to be punished. In the Catechism of theCouncil of Trent, which is an authoritative exposition of Romanisttheology, we read that the "identical body" shall be restored, though "without deformities or superfluities;" restored that "asit was a partner in the man's deeds, so it may be a partner in hispunishments. " The same Catechism also gives in this connection thereason why a general judgment is necessary after each individualhas been judged at his death, namely, this: that they may bepunished for the evil which has resulted in the world since theydied from the evil they did in the world while they lived! Is itnot astonishing how these theologians find out so much? A livingPresbyterian divine of note says, "The bodies of the damned in theresurrection shall be fit dwellings for their vile minds. With allthose fearful and horrid expressions which every base andmalignant passion wakes up in the human countenance stamped uponit for eternity and burned in by the flaming fury of their ownterrific wickedness, they will be condemned to look upon their owndeformity and to feel their fitting doom. " It is therefore urgedthat the body must be raised to suffer the just penalty of thesins man committed while occupying it. Is it not an absurdity toaffirm that nerves and blood, flesh and bones, are responsible, guilty, must be punished? Tucker, in his "Light of NaturePursued, " says, "The vulgar notion of a resurrection in the sameform and substance we carry about at present, because the bodybeing partaker in the deed ought to share in the reward, as wellrequires a resurrection of the sword a man murders with, or thebank note he gives to charitable uses. " We suppose an intelligentpersonality, a free will, indispensable to responsibleness andalone amenable to retributions. Besides, if the body must beraised to undergo chastisement for the offences done in it and bymeans of it, this insurmountable difficulty by the same logicconfronts 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 certaincrime, he must be in the very body he occupied when that crime wasperpetrated. Since he was a sinner all his days, his resurrectionbody must comprise all the matter that ever formed a part of hiscorporeity, and each sinner may hereafter be as huge as thewrithing Titan, Tityus, whose body, it was fabled, covered nineacres. God is able to preserve the integral soul in being, and topunish it according to justice, without clothing it in flesh. Thisfact by itself utterly vacates and makes gratuitous the hypothesisof a physical resurrection from punitive considerations, anhypothesis which is also refuted by the truth contained in Locke'sremark to Stillingfleet, "that the soul hath no greater congruitywith the particles of matter which were once united to it, but areso no longer, than it hath with any other particles of matter. "When the soul leaves the body, it would seem to have done withthat stage of its existence, and to enter upon another and higherone, leaving the dust to mix with dust forever. The body wants notthe soul again; for it is a senseless clod and wants nothing. Thesoul wants not its old body again: it prefers to have the freedomof the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in thetwelfth century, a book called "Dioptra, " presenting thecontroversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and atlength. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a"Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present andFuture State. " William Crashaw, an old English poet, translatedfrom the Latin a poem entitled "The Complaint: a Dialogue betweenthe Body and the Soul of a Damned Man. "17 But any one who willperuse with intelligent heed the works that have been written onthis whole subject must be amazed to see how exclusively thedoctrine which we are opposing has rested on pure grounds oftradition and fancy, alike destitute of authority and reason. Someauthors have indeed attempted to support the doctrine witharguments: for 17 Also see Dialogue inter Corpus et Animam, p. 95 of Latin Poemsattributed to Walter Mapes. instance, there are two German works, one by Bertram, one byPflug, entitled "The Resurrection of the Dead on Grounds ofReason, " in which recourse is had to every possible expedient tomake out a case, not even neglecting the factitious assistance ofLeibnitz's scheme of "Pre established Harmony. " But it may bedeliberately affirmed that not one of their arguments is worthy ofrespect. Apparently, they do not seek to reach truth, but tobolster up a foregone conclusion held merely from motives oftradition. The Jews had a favorite tradition, developed by their Rabbins inmany passages, that there was one small, almond shaped bone, (supposed now to have been the bone called by anatomists the oscoccygis, ) which was indestructible, and would form the nucleusaround which the rest of the body would gather at the time of theresurrection. This bone, named Luz, was miraculously preservedfrom demolition or decay. Pound it furiously on anvils with heavyhammers of steel, burn it for ages in the fiercest furnaces, soakit for centuries in the strongest solvents, all in vain: its magicstructure still remained. So the Talmud tells. "Even as there is around dry grain In a plant's skeleton, which, being buried, Canraise the herb's green body up again; So is there such in man, aseed 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 thisbone was a germ which after long burial would fructify by anatural process and bear a perfect body: they regarded it only asa nucleus around which the Messiah would by a miracle compel thedecomposed flesh to return as in its pristine life. All that theJews say of Luz the Mohammedans repeat of the bone Al Ajib. This conceit of superstition has been developed by a Christianauthor of considerable reputation into a theory of a naturalresurrection. The work of Mr. Samuel Drew on the "Identity andGeneral Resurrection of the Human Body" has been quite a standardwork on the subject of which it treats. Mr. Drew believes there isa germ in the body which slowly ripens and prepares theresurrection body in the grave. As a seed must be buried for aseason in order to spring up in perfect life, so must the humanbody be buried till the day of judgment. During this period it isnot idle, but is busily getting ready for its consummation. Hesays, "There are four distinct stages through which those partsconstituting the identity of the body must necessarily pass inorder 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 ofits union with an immaterial spirit, and with the fluctuatingportions of flesh and blood in our present state; and the fourthstage is that of its residence in the grave. All these stages areundoubtedly necessary to the full perfection of the body: they arealembics through which its parts must necessarily move to attainthat vigor which shall continue forever. "18 To state this figmentis enough. It would be folly to attempt any refutation of a fancyso obviously a pure contrivance to fortify a preconceived opinion, a fancy, too, so preposterous, so utterly without countenance, either from experience, observation, science, reason, orScripture. The egg of man's divinity is not laid in the nest ofthe grave. Another motive for believing the resurrection of the body has beencreated by the exigencies of a materialistic philosophy. There wasin the early Church an Arabian sect of heretics who were reclaimedfrom their errors by the powerful reasonings and eloquence ofOrigen. 19 Their heresy consisted in maintaining that the soul dieswith the body being indeed only its vital breath and will berestored with it at the last day. In the course of the Christiancenturies there have arisen occasionally a few defenders of thisopinion. Priestley, as is well known, was an earnest supporter ofit. Let us scan the ground on which he held this belief. In thefirst place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal lifeto come had been supernaturally revealed to men by God throughChrist. 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 physicalorganism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to himwas the total destruction of man for the time. There was thereforeplainly no alternative for him but either to abandon one of hisfundamental convictions as a Christian and a philosopher, or elseto accept the doctrine of a future resurrection of the body intoan immortal life. He chose the latter, and zealously taught alwaysthat death is an annihilation lasting till the day of judgment, when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this wholecourse of thought there are several replies to be made. In thefirst place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism isfalse: standing in the province of science and reason, it may beaffirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on thebody, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, butmerely state it. Secondly, it is certain that the doctrine whichmakes soul perish with body finds no countenance in the NewTestament. It is inconsistent with the belief in angelic spirits, in demoniac possessions, in Christ's descent as a spirit to preachto the spirits of departed men imprisoned in the under world, andwith other conceptions underlying the Gospels and the Epistles. But, thirdly, admitting it to be true, then, we affirm, thelegitimate deduction from all the arrayed facts of science and allthe presumptive evidence of appearances is not that a futureresurrection will restore the dead man to life, but that all isover with him, he has hopelessly perished forever. When the breathceases, if nothing survives, if the total man is blotted out, thenwe challenge the production of a shadow of proof that he will everlive again. The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fatemay make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a futurearbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificialexpedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that thebody is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are goneforever. One intuition of the spirit, seizing the conscioussupports of eternal ideas, casts contempt on "The doubtfulprospects 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. Betweennonentity 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 ownincorruptible frame, mocking at death, a celestial house, whosemaker and builder is God. Finally, there remain to be weighed the bearings of the argumentfrom chemical and physiological science on the resurrection. Hereis the chief stumbling block in the way of the popular doctrine. The scientific absurdities connected with that doctrine have beenmarshalled against it by Celsus, the Platonist philosopher, byAvicenna, the Arabian physician, and by hundreds more, and havenever been answered, and cannot be answered. As long as man lives, his bodily substance is incessantly changing; the processes ofsecretion and absorption are rapidly going forward. Every fewyears he is, as to material, a totally new man. Dying at the ageof seventy, he has had at least ten different bodies. He is oneidentical soul, but has lived in ten separate houses. With whichshall he be raised? with the first? or the fifth? or the last? orwith all? But, further, the body after death decays, enters intocombination with water, air, earth, gas, vegetables, animals, other human bodies. In this way the same matter comes to havebelonged to a thousand persons. In the resurrection, whose shallit be? We reply, nearly in the language of Christ to theSadducees, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the will ofGod: 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 oflate derived a greatly increased force from the brilliantdiscoveries in chemistry. It is now found that only a small numberof substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies. 20The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenizedsubstances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the formeralone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are fewin number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life dependson a relatively small quantity of matter. Over and over again, asthe modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out ofthe same material. " The particles that composed Adam's frame maybefore the end of the world have run the circuit of ten thousandbodies of his descendants: "'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has beenslave to thousands. " To proclaim the resurrection of the flesh asis usually done, seems a flat contradiction of clear knowledge. 21A late writer on this subject, Dr. Hitchcock, evades theinsuperable difficulty by saying, "It is not necessary that theresurrection body should contain a single particle of the bodylaid in the grave, if it only contain particles of the same kind, united in the same proportion, and the compound be made to assumethe same form and structure as the natural body. " 22 Then two menwho look exactly alike may in the resurrection exchange bodieswithout any harm! Here the theory of punishment clashes. Does notthe esteemed author see that this would not be a resurrection ofthe 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 orthodoxdoctrine of the Church? If he varies so far from the establishedformularies out of a regard for philosophy, he may as well beconsistent and give up the physical doctrine wholly, because itrests solely on the tradition which he leaves and is every whitirreconcilable with philosophy. This device is as wilful anattempt to escape the scientific difficulty as that employed byCandlish to avoid the scriptural difficulty put in the way of thedoctrine by the apostolic words "Flesh and blood cannot inheritthe kingdom of God. " The eminent Scottish divine affirms that"flesh and bones" that is, these present bodies madeincorruptible can inherit the kingdom of God; although "flesh andblood" that is, these present bodies subject to decay cannot. 23 Itis surely hard to believe that the New Testament writers had sucha distinction in their minds. It is but a forlorn resourceconjured 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 deadlybreath into the firmament, " as it is supposed, the great earthcemetery will burst open and its innumerable millions swarm forthbefore him. Unto the tremendous act of habeas corpus, thenproclaimed, every grave will yield its prisoner. Ever since theascension of Jesus his mistaken followers have been anxiouslyexpecting that awful advent of his person and his power in theclouds; but in vain. "All things remain as they were: where is thepromise of his appearing?" As the lookers out hitherto have beendisappointed, so they ever will be. Say not, Lo here! or, Lothere! for, behold, he is within you. The reason why this carnalerror, Jewish conceit, retains a hold, is that men accept itwithout any honest scrutiny of its foundations or any earnestthought of their own about it. They passively receive thetradition. They do not realize the immensity of the thing, nor theludicrousness of its details. To their imaginations the awfulblast 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 forthe Curriculum Vita! President Hitchcock tells us that, "when thelast trumpet sounds, the whole surface of the earth will becomeinstinct with life, from the charnels of battle fields alone morethan a thousand millions of human beings starting forth andcrowding upwards to the judgment seat. " On the resurrectionmorning, at the first tip of light over acres of opening monumentand heaving turf, "Each member jogs the other, And whispers, Liveyou, brother?" And how will it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammothof men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then beagain joined by the living ligament of their congenital band?Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in whichthey died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work ofGod"? 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 Thevarious bones, obsequious to the call, Self moved, advance; theneck perhaps to meet The distant head; the distant head the feet. Dreadful to view! see, through the dusky sky Fragments of bodiesin confusion fly, To distant regions journeying, there to claimDeserted members and complete the frame. " The glaring melodramatic character, the startling mechanicotheatrical effects, of this whole doctrine, are in perfect keepingwith the raw imagination of the childhood of the human mind, butin profound opposition to the working philosophy of nature and thesublime simplicity of God. Many persons have never distinctly defined their views upon thesubject before us. In the minds even of many preachers andwriters, several different and irreconcilable theories would seemto exist together in confused mixture. Now they speak as if thesoul were sleeping with the body in the grave; again they appearto imply that it is detained in an intermediate state; and amoment afterwards they say it has already entered upon its finalreward or doom. Jocelyn relates, in his Life of St. Patrick, that"as the saint one day was passing the graves of two men recentlyburied, observing that one of the graves had a cross over it, hestopped his chariot and asked the dead man below of what religionhe had been. The reply was, 'A pagan. ' 'Then why was this crossput over you?' inquired St. Patrick. The dead man answered, 'Hewho is buried near me is a Christian; and one of your faith, coming hither, placed the cross at my head. ' The saint stepped outof his chariot, rectified the mistake, and went his way. " Calvin, in the famous treatise designated "Psychopannychia, " which helevelled against those who taught the sleep of souls until the dayof judgment, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediatelyto heaven, the souls of the reprobate to hell. Here they tarry inbliss 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 theirflesh, why need they ever resume it? The cumbrous machinery of thescheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still furtherspecimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific andunphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thoughtby most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to BishopBurnet's work "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium, " which teachesthat at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be thesame as the present, but at the second resurrection, after themillennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritualbody will be developed. The true idea of man's future destiny appears to be that noresurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man neverdies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonableways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaveshis present frame. It may be that within his material system lurksan exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it andconstituting its vital power. This ethereal structure isdisengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soarsto the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an "innerbody" is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet's"Palingenesie Philosophique. " Or it may be that there is in eachone a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organicidentity of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant, unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spiritgerm, born into the present life, assimilates and holds thepresent body around it, out of the materials of this world; borninto the future life, it will assimilate and hold around it adifferent body, out of the materials of the future world. 25 Thusthere are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory ofthe terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the gloryof the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of thingshereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the materialfurnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall webear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible mass, heir to a thousand ills. Our body shall rather be such "Iflightning were the gross corporeal frame Of some angelic essence, whose bright thoughts As far surpass'd in keen rapidity Thelagging action of his limbs as doth Man's mind his clay; with likeexcess of speed To animated thought of lightning flies That spiritbody o'er life's deeps divine, Far past the golden isles ofmemory. " What man knows constitutes his present world. All beyond thatconstitutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which hisdesire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into theUnknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the lattersupposition the restoration of the flesh is involved. Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan ofthe world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, butthat the essence of his life should escape from the flesh anddepart to some other sphere of being, there either to fashionitself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold thecommon doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out withphilosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves toall existing planetary races as well as to their own, should theycause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine togo on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the finalconsummation the sundered earths approach each other, andfirmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred inone orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of beingwould be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar systemmaking a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities constitutingone 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 OFA HELL. A HELL of fire and brimstone has been, perhaps still is, the mostterrible of the superstitions of the world. We propose to give ahistoric sketch of the popular representations on this subject, trace them to their origin, and discuss the merits of the questionitself. 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, allthat is necessary to a fair understanding of the subject, orreally interesting, may be presented within the compass of anessay. Any one who should read the literature of this subjectwould be astonished at the almost universal prevalence of thedoctrine and at the immense diversity of appalling descriptions ofit, and would ask, Whence arises all this? How have these horrorsobtained such a seated hold in the world? In the first place, it is to be replied, as soon as reason is infair possession of the idea of a continued individual existencebeyond the grave, the moral sense, discriminating the deeds, tempers, and characters of men, would teach that there must bedifferent allotments and experiences for them after death. It isnot right, say reason and conscience, for the coward, the idler, fool, knave, sot, murderer, to enter into the same realm and havethe same bliss with heroes, sages, and saints; neither are theyable to do it. The spontaneous thought and sentiment of humanitywould declare, if the soul survives the body, passing into theinvisible world, its fortunes there must depend somewhat upon itsfitness and deserts, its contained treasures and acquired habits. Reason, judging the facts of observation according to theprinciples of ethics and the working of experienced spirituallaws, at once decides that there is a difference hereafter betweenthe fate of the good heart and the bad one, the great soul and themean one: in a word, there is, in some sense or other, a heavenand a hell. Again: the same belief would be necessitated by the conception, sodeeply entertained by the primitive people of the earth, ofoverruling and inspecting gods. They supposed these gods to be ina great degree like themselves, partial, fickle, jealous, revengeful. Such beings, of course, would caress their favoritesand torture their offenders. The calamities and blessings of thislife were regarded as tokens, revengeful or loving, of the rulingdeities, now pleased, now enraged. And when their votaries orvictims had passed into the eternal state, how natural to supposethem still favored or cursed by the passionate wills of theseirresponsible gods! Plainly enough, they who believe in gods thatlaunch thunderbolts and upheave the sea in their rage and takevengeance for an insult by sending forth a pestilence, must alsobelieve in a hell where Ixion may be affixed to the wheel andTantalus be tortured with maddening mockeries. These twoconceptions of discriminating justice and of vengeful gods bothlead to the theoretic construction of a hell, and to the growth ofdoctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, theformer illustrating a pervasive law which distributes menaccording to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings withhuman passions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties accordingto their pleasure. Thirdly, when the general idea of a hell has once obtainedlodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented, carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popularteachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative viewsand pictures act and react both upon the sources and the productsof faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblemsaddressing the imagination, after a while are received in aliteral sense, become physically located and clothed with thepower of horror. A Hindu poet says, "The ungrateful shall remainin hell as long as the sun hangs in heaven. " An old Jewish Rabbisays that after the general judgment "God shall lead all theblessed through hell and all the damned through paradise, and showto each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, sothat they shall not be able to say, 'We are not to be blamed orpraised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand. ' Suchutterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic assertions;and yet in a rude age they very easily pass into the popular mindas declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writersays, "There are in hell seven abodes, in each abode seventhousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in eachcleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, andon each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also inhell seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touchesit he bursts. " Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minutedescriptions of hell and its agonies, descriptions which haveunquestionably had a tremendous influence in cherishing andfashioning the world's faith in that awful empire. The poems ofDante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrificpictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and thepopular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far moreclosely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations ofthe New Testament. The English poet's "Paradise Lost" hasundoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparablewith that of the Genevan theologian's "Institutes of the ChristianReligion. " There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by theJewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiendscalled the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, makehim sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul, and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy ironmaces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purelyarbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitnessor probability; but they are received because unthinking ignoranceand hungry superstition will greedily believe any thing they hear. Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forththe scene of damnation: "Doom'd to live death and never to expire, In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The damn'd shallgroan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, inhurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, Aflaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid firemakes seas, the solid, shores; Arch'd o'er with flames, the horridconcave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, Andsulphurous 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, andlick 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 vapidand pale before the preternatural frightfulness of those given atunmerciful length and in sickening specialty in some of the Hinduand Persian sacred books. 1 Here worlds of nauseating disgusts, ofloathsome agonies, of intolerable terrors, pass before us. Someare hung up by their tongues, or by their eyes, and slowlydevoured by fiery vermin; some scourged with whips of serpentswhose poisonous fangs lacerate their flesh at every blow; someforced to swallow bowls of gore, hair, and corruption, freshlyfilled as fast as drained; some packed immovably in red hot ironchests and laid in raging furnaces for unutterable millions ofages. One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist hellswill think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor andJonathan Edwards, were dipped in water. There is just as muchground for believing the accounts of the former to be true asthere is for crediting those of the latter: the two arefundamentally the same, and the pagan had earlier possession ofthe field. Furthermore, in the early ages, and among people where castes wereprominent, when the learning, culture, and power were confined toone class at the expense of others, it is unquestionable thatcopious and fearful descriptions of the future state were spreadabroad by those who were interested in establishing such a dogma. The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, theexclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancientpriesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing thepeople, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought todevise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentratepower in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly, in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the luridand dusky image of hell, gathering around it all that was mostabominated and awful. Then they set up certain fancifulconditions, without the strict observance of which no one couldavoid damnation. The animus of a priesthood in the structure ofthis doctrine is shown by the glaring fact that in the oldreligions the woes of hell were denounced not so much upon bad menwho committed crimes out of a wicked heart, as upon careless menwho neglected priestly guidance and violated the ritual. Theomission of a prayer or an ablution, the neglect of baptism orconfession, a slight thrown upon a priest, a mental conceptiondiffering from the decree of the "Church, " would condemn a man farmore surely and deeply into the Egyptian, Hindu, Persian, Pharisaic, Papal, or Calvinistic hell than any amount of moralculpability 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; andColeman'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 aroundwith arbitrary and traditional rituals. Through the breaches madein these rituals by neglect, souls have been plunged in. TheParsee priest describes a woman in hell "beaten with stone clubsby two demons twelve miles in size, and compelled to continueeating a basin of putridity, because once some of her hair, as shecombed it, fell into the sacred fire. " The Brahmanic priest tellsof a man who, for "neglecting to meditate on the mysticmonosyllable Om before praying, was thrown down in hell on an ironfloor and cleaved with an axe, then stirred in a caldron of moltenlead till covered all over with the sweated foam of torture like agrain of rice in an oven, and then fastened, with head downwardsand feet upwards, to a chariot of fire and urged onwards with ared hot goad. " The Papal priest declares that the schismatic, though the kindest and justest man, at death drops hopelessly intohell, while the devotee, though scandalously corrupt in heart andlife, who confesses and receives extreme unction, treads theprimrose path to paradise. The Episcopalian priest dooms thedissenter to everlasting woe in spite of every virtue, because hehas not known sacramental baptism in the apostolic line. TheArminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires ofeternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation ofthe Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been thepriestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that hasdeepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportionedthe victims, of hell. The perversions and excesses of the doctrinehave grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and beenreceived by docile ignorance and superstition on the other, andbeen mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessivevanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude allthe Gentiles, whom they stigmatized as "uncircumcised dogs, " fromthe Jewish salvation. The same spirit, aggravated if possible, passed lineally into Christendom, causing the Orthodox Church toexclude all the heathen, all heretics, and the unbaptized, fromthe Christian salvation. A fifth explanation of the wholesale severity and multiplieddetails of horror, which came to be incorporated with the doctrineof hell, is to be found in the gloomy theories of certainphilosophers whose relentless speculations were tinged and mouldedby their own recluse misanthropy and the prevailing superstitionsof their time. Out of the old asceticism of the East the falsespiritualism which regarded matter as the source of evil and thislife as a penance arose the dogma of metempsychosis. Theconsequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created adescending congeries of hells, reaching from centre to nadir, incorrespondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching fromcentre to zenith. Out of the myth of the Fall sprang the dogma oftotal depravity, dooming our whole race to hell forever, exceptthose saved by the subsequent artifice of the atonement. Theoriesconjured 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, mighteasily legitimate and establish any conclusions, howeverunreasonable and monstrous. The history of philosophy isthe broad demonstration of this. The Church philosophers, (withexceptions, of course, ) receiving the traditions of the commonfaith, partaking in the superstitions of their age, banished fromthe bosoms of men by their monastic position, and inflamed withhierarchic pride, with but a faint connection or intercoursebetween conscience and intellect or between heart and fancy, strove to spin out theories which would explain and justify theorthodox dogmas. Working with metaphysical tools of abstract reason, not with thepractical faculties of life, dealing with the fanciful materialsof priestly tradition, not with the solid facts of ethicalobservation, they would naturally be troubled with but few qualmsand make but few reservations, however overwhelming the results ofhorror at which they might arrive. Habituated for years to hairdrawn analyses and superstitious broodings upon the subject, overshadowed by the supernatural hierarchy in which they lived, surrounded by a thick night of ignorance, persecution, andslaughter, it was no wonder they could believe the system theypreached, although in reality it was only a traditionalabstraction metaphysically wrought up and vivified by themselves. Being thus wrought out and animated by them, who were the soledepositaries of learning and the undisputed lords of thought, themass of the people, lying abjectly in the fetters of authority, could not help accepting it. Ample illustrations of theseassertions will occur to all who are familiar with the theologicalschemes and the dialectic subtleties of the early Church Fathersand of the later Church Scholastics. Finally, by the combined power, first, of natural conscienceaffirming 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 awfulimaginative pictures of future woe; fourthly, of the cruel spiritand the ambitious plans of selfish priesthoods; and fifthly, ofthe harsh and relentless theories of conforming metaphysicians, the doctrine of hell, as a located place of manifold terrificphysical tortures drawing in vast majorities of the human race, became established in the ruling creeds and enthroned as anorthodox dogma. In some heathen nations the descriptions of thepoets, in others the accounts of the priestly books, were held tobe inspired revelations. To call them in question was blasphemous. In Christendom the scriptural representations of the subject, which were general moral adaptations, incidentally made, ofrepresentations already existing, obtained a literal interpretation, had the stamp of infallibility put on them and immense pervertedadditions joined to them. Thus everywhere the dogma becameassociated 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 excruciatingtortures. From that moment the doctrine was taken out ofthe province of natural reason, out of the realm of ethicaltruth. The absurdities, wrongs, and barbarities deducible from itwere a part and parcel of it, and not to be considered as anyobjection to it. No free thought and honest criticism wereallowed. Because taught by authority, it must be submissivelytaken for granted. Henceforth we are not to wonder at therevolting inhumanity of spirit and horribleness of gloating hatredshown in connection with the doctrine; for it was not theindependent thought and proper moral spirit of individuals, butthe petrified dogma and irresponsible corporate spirit of thattowering hierarchy, the Church. The Church set forth certain conditional offers of salvation. Whenthose offers were spurned or neglected, the Church felt personallyinsulted and aggrieved. Her servants hurled on the hated hereticsand heathen the denunciations of bigotry and the threats of rage. Rugged old Tertullian, in whose torrid veins the fire of hisAfrican deserts seems infused, revels with infernal glee over thecontemplation of the sure damnation of the heathen. "At thatgreatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment, " hesays, "how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, whenI behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss ofdarkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames thanthey ever kindled against the Christians; so many sagephilosophers blushing in red hot fires with their deluded pupils;so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their ownsufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish thanever before from applause. "2 Hundreds of the most accreditedChristian writers have shown the same fiendish spirit. Drexel theJesuit, preaching of Dives, exclaims, "Instead of a lofty bed ofdown on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying inthe flames; his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are takenfrom him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his foodbut smoke and sulphur. " Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse onthe "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of hismatchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imaginationin multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture withinfinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferableabominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, whoroasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of thatfire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consumingthem;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see theirchildren, tormented before their eyes;" "the bodies of the damnedshall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press, which press one another till they burst;" "every distinct senseand organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and mostexquisite sufferings. " Christopher Love belying his name says ofthe damned, "Their cursings are their hymns, howlings their tunes, and blasphemies their ditties. " Calvin writes, "Forever harassedwith a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunderby an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight ofhis hand, so that to sink into any gulfs would be more tolerablethan to stand for a moment in these terrors. " A living divine, Dr. Gardiner Spring, declares, "When the omnipotent and angry God, whohas access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frameand all the inlets to agony in the intellectual constitution, undertakes to punish, he will convince the universe that he doesnot gird himself for the work of retribution in vain;" "it will bea glorious deed when He who hung on Calvary shall cast those whohave 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 becollected from Christian authors, dating their utterance from thedays of St. Irenaus, Bishop of Lyons, who flamed against theheretics, to the days of Nehemiah Adams, Congregational preacherof Boston, who says, "It is to be feared the forty two childrenthat mocked Elisha are now in hell. " 4 There is an unmercifulanimus 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 ofheaven, " and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from thetenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. " There are somesectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, andrigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardenedconscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, andartificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verilybelieve, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human racewere placed in their hands, they would with scarcely a twinge ofpain perhaps some of them even with a horrid satisfaction andtriumph doom all except their own dogmatic coterie to hell. Theyare bound to do so. They profess to know infallibly that God willdo so: if, therefore, the case being in their arbitration, theywould decide differently, they thereby impeach the action of God, confess his decrees irreconcilable with reason and justice, andset up their own goodness as superior to his. Burnet has preservedthe plea of Bloody Mary, which was in these words: "As the soulsof heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in hell, therecan be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divinevengeance by burning them on earth. " Thanks be to the infiniteFather that our fate is in his hands, and not in the hands of menwho 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'dThe 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 berepudiated. But by no means is it so in the recognised formulariesof the established Churches and in the teachings of the popularclergy. All through the Gentile world, wherever there is aprevailing religion, the threats and horrors of a fearful doctrineof hell are still brandished over the trembling or carelessmultitudes. In Christendom, the authoritative announcement of theRoman and Greek Churches, and the public creeds confessed by everycommunicant of all the denominations, save two or three which arecomparatively insignificant in numbers, show that the doctrine isyet held without mitigation. The Bishop of Toronto, only a year ortwo ago, published the authoritative declaration that "every childof humanity, except the Virgin Mary, is from the first moment ofconception a child of wrath, hated by the blessed Trinity, belonging to Satan, and doomed to hell!" Indeed, the doctrine, inits whole naked and frightful extent, is necessarily, in strictlogic, an integral part of the great system of the popularChristianity, that is, Christianity as falsely interpreted, paganized, and scholasticized. For if by the sin of Adam theentire race were totally depraved and condemned to a hopelesshell, and only those can be saved who personally appropriate by arealizing faith the benefits of the subsequent artifice carriedout in the atoning blood of the incarnate God, certainly theextremist advocate of the doctrine concerning hell has notexceeded the truth, and cannot exceed it. All the necessities oflogic rebuke the tame hearted theologians, and great Augustine's, great Calvin's, ghost walks unapproached among them, crying outthat they are slow and inefficient in describing the enormoussweep of the inherited penalty! Many persons who have not takenpains to examine the subject suppose that the horrifyingdescriptions given by Christian authors of the state andsufferings of the lost were not intended to be literally received, but were meant as figures of speech, highly wrought metaphorscalculated to alarm and impress with physical emblems correspondingonly to moral and spiritual realities. The progress ofthought and refinement has made it natural that recourse shouldoften be had to such an explanation; but unquestionably it is amistake. The annals of theology, both dogmatic and homiletic, fromthe time of the earliest Fathers till now, abound in detailedaccounts of the future punishment of the wicked, whereof thecontext, the train of thought, and all the intrinsic characteristicsof style and coherence, do not leave a shadow of doubt that theywere written as faithful, though inadequate, accounts of facts. The Church, the immense bulk of Christendom, has in theory alwaysregarded hell and its dire concomitants as material facts, and not as merely spiritual experiences. Tertullian says, "The damned burn eternally without consuming, asthe volcanoes, which are vents from the stored subterranean fireof hell, burn forever without wasting. " 5 Cyprian declares that"the wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze inthose living fires. " Augustine argues at great length and withingenious varieties of reasoning to show how the material bodiesof the damned may withstand annihilation in everlasting fire. 6Similar assertions, which cannot be figuratively explained, aremade 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, wasseverely condemned for saying that the fire of hell was inward andof the conscience, rather than outward and of the body. For thestrict materiality of the fire of hell we might adduce volumes ofauthorities from nearly every province of the Church. Dr. Barrowasserts that "our bodies will be afflicted continually by asulphurous flame, piercing the inmost sinews. " John Whitakerthinks "the bodies of the damned will be all salted with fire, sotempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely and yet neverconsume. " Jeremy Taylor teaches that "this temporal fire is but apainted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire inhell. " Jonathan Edwards soberly and believingly writes thus: "Theworld will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globeof fire, a vast ocean of fire, in which the wicked shall beoverwhelmed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shallbe tost to and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves orbillows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of whichthey 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 livelysense 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 forone age, nor for two ages, nor for a hundred ages, nor for tenthousands of millions of ages one after another, but for ever andever, without any end at all, and never, never be delivered. " 7Calvin says, "Iterum quaro, unde factum est, ut tot gentes una cumliberis eorum infantibus aterna morti involveret lapsus Ada absqueremedio, nisi quia Deo ita visum est? Decretum horribile fateor. "8 Outraged humanity before the contemplation cries, "O God, horrorhath overwhelmed me, for thou art represented as an omnipotentFiend. " It is not the Father of Christ, but his Antagonist, whoseface glares down over such a scene as that! The above diabolicalpassage at the recital of which from the pulpit, Edwards'sbiographers tell us, "whole congregations shuddered andsimultaneously rose to their feet, smiting their breasts, weepingand groaning" is not the arbitrary exaggeration of an individual, but a fair representation of the actual tenets and vividly heldfaith of the Puritans. It is also, in all its uncompromisingliterality, a direct and inevitable part of the system of doctrinewhich, with insignificant exceptions, professedly prevailsthroughout Christendom at this hour. We know most persons willhesitate at this statement; but let them look at the logic of thecase in the light of its history, and they must admit thecorrectness of the assertion. Weigh the following propositions, the accuracy of which no one, we suppose, will question, and itwill appear at once that there is no possibility of avoiding theconclusion. First, it is the established doctrine of Christendom that no onecan be saved without a supernatural regeneration, or sincere faithin the vicarious atonement, or valid reception of sacramentalgrace at the hands of a priest, conditions which it is notpossible that one in a hundred thousand of the whole human racehas fulfilled. Secondly, it is the established doctrine ofChristendom that there will be a general day of judgment, when allmen will be raised in the same bodies which they originallyoccupied on earth, when Christ and his angels will visibly descendfrom heaven, separate the elect from the reprobate, summon thesheep to the blissful pastures on the right hand, but "ProclaimThe flocks of goats to folds of flame. " The world is to be burnt up, and the damned, restored to theirbodies, are to be driven into the everlasting fire prepared forthem. 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 ofhell. That eminent living divine, Dr. Gardiner Spring, says, "Thesouls of all who have died in their sins are in hell; and theretheir bodies too will be after the resurrection. " 9 Mr. Spurgeonalso, in his graphic and fearful sermon on the "Resurrection ofthe Dead, " uses the following language: "When thou diest, thy soulwill be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it: but at theday of judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilthave twin hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy bodysuffused with agony. In fire exactly like that which we have onearth 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 thefeet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devilshall forever play his diabolical tune of Hell's UnutterableLament!" And, if this doctrine be true, no ingenuity, howeverfertile in expedients and however fiendish in cruelty, canpossibly devise emblems and paint pictures half terrific enough topresent in imagination and equal in moral impression what thereality will be to the sufferers. It is easy to speak or hear theword "hell;" but to analyze its significance and realize it in asensitive fancy is difficult; and whenever it is done the fruit ismadness, as the bedlams of the world are shrieking in testimony atthis instant. The Revivalist preachers, so far from exaggeratingthe frightful contents latent in the prevalent dogma concerninghell, have never been able and no man is able to do any thing likejustice to its legitimate deductions. Edwards is right indeclaring, "After we have said our utmost and thought our utmost, all that we have said and thought is but a faint shadow of thereality. " Think of yourselves, seized, just as you are now, andflung into the roaring, glowing furnace of eternity; think of suchtorture for an instant, multiply it by infinity, and then say ifany words can convey the proper force of impression. It is truethese intolerable details are merely latent and unappreciated bythe multitude of believers; and when one, roused to fanaticism byearnest contemplation of his creed, dares to proclaim its logicalconsequences and to exhort men accordingly, they shrink, andcharge him with excess. But they should beware ere they repudiatethe literal horrors of the historic orthodox doctrine for anyfigurative and moral views accommodated to the advanced reason andrefinement of the times, beware how such an abandonment of a partof 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 comingof Christ to a general judgment. Abandon the general judgment, andthe climacteric completion of the Church scheme of redemption iswanting. Mar the wholeness of the redemption plan, and farewell tothe incarnation and vicarious atonement. Neglect the vicariousatonement, and down crumbles the hollow and broken shell of thepopular theology helplessly into its grave. The old literaldoctrine of a material hell, however awful its idea, as it hasbeen set forth in flaming views and threats by all the accreditedrepresentatives 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 understandthis perfectly well, and for the most part they act accordingly. We have now under our hand numerous extracts, from writingspublished within the last five years by highly influentialdignitaries in the different denominations, which for frightfulnessof outline and coloring, and for unshrinking assertions ofliterality, will compare with those already quoted. Especially read the following description of this kind from JohnHenry Newman: "Oh, terrible moment for the soul, when it suddenlyfinds itself at the judgment seat of Christ, when the Judge speaksand consigns it to the jailers till it shall pay the endless debtwhich lies against it! 'Impossible! I a lost soul? I separatedfrom hope and from peace forever? It is not I of whom the Judge sospake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Savior, hold thyhand: 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 thepoor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demonwhich has hold of it, and whose every touch is torment. 'Oh, atrocious!' it shrieks, in agony, and in anger too, as if thevery 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 forthee, or sport for thee! I have been taught religion; I have hada conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in scienceand 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 thesacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I diedin communion with the Church: nothing, nothing which I have everbeen, which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, andto 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 destinywhich it has brought upon itself and those companions whom it haschosen, the man's name perhaps is solemnly chanted forth, and hismemory decently cherished, among his friends on earth. Men talk ofhim from time to time; they appeal to his authority; they quotehis words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, orwrite his history. 'So comprehensive a mind! such a power ofthrowing light on a perplexed subject and bringing conflictingideas or facts into harmony!' 'Such a speech it was that he madeon such and such an occasion: I happened to be present, and nevershall forget it;' or, 'A great personage, whom some of us knew;'or, 'It was a rule with a very worthy and excellent friend ofmine, now no more;' or, 'Never was his equal in society, so justin his remarks, so lively, so versatile, so unobtrusive;' or, 'Sogreat a benefactor to his country and to his kind;' or, 'Hisphilosophy so profound. ' 'Oh, vanity! vanity of vanities! all isvanity! What profiteth it? What profiteth it? His soul is in hell, O ye children of men! While thus ye speak, his soul is in thebeginning 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 hellthe bodies of the damned shall be nealed, as we speak of glass, soas to endure the fire without being annihilated thereby. " "Made ofthe nature of salamanders, " they shall be "immortal kept to feelimmortal fire. " Well may we take up the words of the Psalmist andcry out of the bottomless depths of disgust and anguish, "I amoverwhelmed with horror!" Holding this abhorrent mass of representations, so grossly carnaland fearful, up in the free light of to day, it cannot stand thetest of honest and resolute inquiry. It exists only by timid, unthinking sufferance. It is kept alive, among the superstitiousvestiges of the outworn and out grown past, only by the power oftradition, authority, and custom. In refutation of it we shall notpresent here a prolonged detail of learned researches and logicalprocesses; for that would be useless to those who are enslaved tothe foregone conclusions of a creed and possessed by invulnerableprejudices, 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 fewclear and brief propositions, the results in which we suppose allfree and enlightened minds who have adequately studied the subjectnow agree, leaving the reader to weigh these propositions forhimself, with such further examination as inclination andopportunity may cause him to bestow upon the matter. We reject the common belief of Christians in a hell which is alocal prison of fire where the wicked are to be tortured bymaterial instruments, on the following grounds, appealing to Godfor the reverential sincerity of our convictions, and appealing toreason for their truth. First, the supposition that hell is anenormous region in the hollow of the earth is a remnant of ancientignorance, a fancy of poets who magnified the grave into Hades, athought of geographers who supposed the earth to be flat andsurrounded 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 theinstruments of science. Therefore, in the nature of things, itcannot be chained in a dungeon, nor be cognizant of suffering frommaterial fire or other physical infliction, but its woes must bemoral and inward; and the figment that its former fleshly body isto be restored to it is utterly incredible, being an absurdity inscience, and not affirmed, as we believe, in Scripture. Thirdly, the imagery of a subterranean hell of fire, brimstone, and undyingworms, as used in the Scriptures of the New Testament, is the sameas that drawn from heathen sources with modifications and employedby the Pharisees before the time of Christ and his disciples; andwe must therefore, since neither Persians nor Pharisees wereinspired, either suppose that this imagery was adopted by theapostles figuratively to convey moral truths, or else that theywere left, in common with their countrymen, at least partiallyunder the dominion of the errors of their time. Thus in everyalternative we deny that the interior of the earth is, or everwill be, an abode of souls, full of fire, a hell in which thedamned are to be confined and physically tormented. The elements of the popular doctrine of future punishment which wethus reject are the falsities contributed by superstition and thepriestly spirit. The truths remaining in the doctrine, furnishedby conscience, reason, and Scripture, we will next exhibit, inorder not to dismiss this head, on the nature of futurepunishment, with negations. What is the real character of theretributions in the future state? We do not think they arenecessarily connected with any peculiar locality or essentiallydependent on any external circumstances. As Milton says, whenspeaking of the best theologians, "To banish forever into a localhell, whether in the air, or in the centre, or in that uttermostand bottomless gulf of chaos deeper from holy bliss than theworld's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishment soproper and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin withsin. " God does not arbitrarily stretch forth his arm, like an enragedand vindictive man, and take direct vengeance on offenders; but byhis immutable laws, permeating all beings and governing allworlds, evil is, and brings, its own punishment. The intrinsicsubstances and forces of character and their organizedcorrelations with the realities of eternity, the rulingprinciples, habits, and love of the soul, as they stand affectedtowards the world to which they go, these are the conditions onwhich experience depends, herein is the hiding of retribution. "Each one, " as Origen says, "kindles the flame of his ownappropriate fire. " Superior spirits must look on a corrupted humansoul with a sorrow similar, though infinitely profounder, to thatwith which the lapidary contemplates a splendid pearl with a darkflaw in its centre. The Koran says, "Men sleep while they live, and when they die they wake. " The sudden infliction of pain in thefuture state comes from the sudden unveiling of secrets, quickening of the moral consciousness, and exposure of the nakedsoul's fitnesses to the spiritual correspondences of its deserts. It is said, "Death does Away disguise: souls see each otherclear, At one glance, as two drops of rain in air Might look intoeach other had they life. " The quality of the soul's character decides the elements of thesoul's life; and, as this becomes known on crossing the deathdrawn line of futurity, conscious retribution then arises in theguilty. This is a retribution which is reasonable, moral, unavoidable, before which we may well pause and tremble. The greatmoral of it is that we should not so much dread being thrust intoan eternal hell as we should fear carrying a hell with us when wego into eternity. It is not so bad to be in hell as to be forcedtruly to say, "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell. " If these general ideas are correct, it follows even as all commonsense and reflection affirm that every real preparation for deathand for what is to succeed must be an ingrained characteristic, and cannot consist in a mere opinion, mood, or act. Here we strikeat one of the shallowest errors, one of the most extensive androoted superstitions, of the world. Throughout the immensekingdoms of the East, where the Brahmanic and Buddhist religionshold sway over six hundred millions of men, the notion ofyadasanna that is, the merit instantaneously obtained when at thepoint 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 statesof thought and feeling, and meditating on certain objects orrepeating certain sacred words, they can suddenly obtain exemptionfrom punishment in their next life. 11 The notion likewise obtainsalmost 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 proclaimedand acted on: that is the meaning of the sacrament of extremeunction, whereby, on submission to the Church and confession to apriest, the venal sins of the dying man are forgiven, purgatoryavoided or lessened, and heaven made sure. The ghost of the Kingof Denmark complains most of the unwarned suddenness of hismurder, not of the murder itself, but of its suddenness, whichleft him no opportunity to save his soul: "Sleeping, was I by abrother'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 tomy account With all my imperfections on my head. " Hamlet, urged by supernatural solicitings to vengeance, finds hismurderous uncle on his knees at prayer. Stealing behind him withdrawn sword, he is about to strike the fatal blow, when thethought occurs to him that the guilty man, if killed when at hisdevotions, would surely go to heaven; and so he refrains until adifferent opportunity. For to send to heaven the villain who hadslain his father, "That would be hire and salary, not revenge. He took my fathergrossly full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flushas May; And how his audit stands who knows save Heaven? But, inour circumstance and course of thought, 'Tie heavy with him. Andam I then revenged To take him in the purging of his soul, When heis fit and season'd for his passage? No; but when he is drunk, asleep, enraged, Or in the incestuous pleasures of his bed, Atgaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish ofsalvation 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 itgoes. " This, though poetry, is a fair representation of the mediavalfaith held by all Christendom in sober prose. The same train ofthought latently underlies the feelings of most Protestants too, though it is true any one would now shrink from expressing it withsuch frankness and horrible gusto. But what else means the minutemorbid anatomy of death beds, the prurient curiosity to know howthe dying one bore himself in the solemn passage? How commonly, ifone dies without physical anguish, and with the artificialexultations of a fanatic, rejoiceful auguries are drawn! if hedies in physical suffering, and with apparent regret, a gloomyverdict is rendered! It is superstition, absurdity, and injustice, all. Not the accidental physical conditions, not the transientemotions, with which one passes from the earth, can decide hisfate, but the real good or evil of his soul, the genuine fitnessor unfitness of his soul, his soul's inherent merits of bliss orbale. There is no time nor power in the instant of death, by anymagical legerdemain, to turn away the impending retributions ofwickedness and guilt. What is right, within the conditions ofInfinite wisdom and goodness, will be done in spite of alltraditional juggles and spasmodic spiritual attitudinizations. What can it avail that a most vile and hardened wretch, whendying, 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 ofbelief towards a certain ancient and abstract dogma? "Yet I've seen men who meant not ill, Compelling doctrine out ofdeath, With hell and heaven acutely poised Upon the turning of abreath. " Cruelly racking the soul with useless probes of theologicalquestions and statements, they stand by the dying to catch thewords of his last breath, and, in perfect consistence with theirfaith, they pronounce sentence accordingly. If, as the pallid lipsfaintly close, they hear the magic words, "I put my trust in theatoning blood of Christ, " up goes the soul to heaven. If they hearthe less stereotyped words, "I have tried to do as well as Icould: I hope God will be merciful towards me and receive me, "down goes the soul to hell. Strange and cruel superstition, thatimagines God to act towards men only according to the evanescenttemper and technical phrase with which they leave the world! Themost popular English preacher of the present day, the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, after referring to the fable that those before whomPerseus held the head of Medusa were turned into stone in the veryact and posture of the moment when they saw it, says, "Death issuch a power. What I am when death is held before me, that I mustbe forever. When my spirit goes, if God finds me hymning hispraise, I shall hymn it in heaven: doth he find me breathing outoaths, I shall follow up those oaths in hell. As I die, so shall Ilive eternally!" 12 No: the true preparation for death and the invisible realm ofsouls is not the eager adoption of an opinion, the hurriedassumption of a mood, or the frightened performance of an outwardact: it is the patient culture of the mind with truth, the piouspurification of the heart with disinterested love, the consecratedtraining of the life in holiness, the growth of the soul in habitsof righteousness, faith, and charity, the organization of divineprinciples into character. Every real preparation of the soul fordeath must be a characteristic rightly related to the immortalrealities to which death is the introduction of the soul. An evilsoul is not thrust into a physical and fiery hell, fenced in androofed over from the universal common; but it is revealed toitself, and consciously enters on retributive relations. In thespiritual world, whither all go at death, we suppose that likeperceives like, and thus are they saved or damned, having, by thenatural attraction and elective seeing of their virtues or vices, the beatific vision of God, or the horrid vision of iniquity andterror. It cannot be supposed that God is a bounded shape so vast as tofill the entire circuits of the creation. Spirit transcends thecategories of body, and it is absurd to apply the language offinite things to the illimitable One, except symbolically. When wedie, we do not sink or soar to the realm of spirits, but are init, at once, everywhere; and the resulting experience will dependon the prevailing elements of our moral being. If we are bad, ourbadness is our banishment from God; if we are good, our goodnessis our union with God. In every world the true nature and law ofretribution lie in the recoil of conduct on character, and theassimilated results ensuing. Take a soul that is saturated withthe rottenness of depravity into the core of heaven, and it is inthe 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 isreaction, experience is the resultant. Death but unveils thefacts. Pass that great crisis, in the passage becoming consciousof universal realities and of individual relations to them, andthe Father will say to the discordant soul, "Alienated one, incapable of my embrace, change and come to me;" to the harmonioussoul, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. " Having thus considered the question as to the nature of futurepunishments, it now remains to discuss the question concerningtheir duration. The fact of a just and varied punishment for soulswe firmly believe in. The particulars of it in the future, or thedegrees of its continuance, we think, are concealed from thepresent knowledge of man. These details we do not profess to beable to settle much about. We have but three general convictionson the subject. First, that these punishments will be experiencedin accordance with those righteous and inmost laws whichindestructibly express the mind of God and rule the universe, andwill not be vindictively inflicted through arbitrary externalpenalties. Secondly, that they will be accurately tempered to thejust deserts and qualifications of the individual sufferers. Andthirdly, that they will be alleviated, remedial, and limited, notunmitigated, hopeless, and endless. Upon the first of these thoughts perhaps enough has already beensaid, and the second and third may be discussed together. Ourbusiness, therefore, in the remainder of this dissertation, is todisprove, if truth in the hands of reason and conscience willenable us to disprove, the popular dogma which asserts that thestate of the condemned departed is a state of complete damnationabsolutely eternal. Against that form of representing futurepunishment which makes it unlimited by conceiving the destiny ofthe soul to be an eternal progress, in which their initiativesteps of good or evil in this life place different souls underadvantages or disadvantages never relatively to be lost, we havenothing to object. It is reasonable, in unison with natural law, and not frightful. 13 But we are to deal, if we fairly can, arefutation against the doctrine of an intense endless misery forthe wicked, as that doctrine is prevailingly taught and received. The advocates of eternal damnation primarily plant themselves uponthe Christian Scriptures, and say that there the voice of aninfallible inspiration from heaven asserts it. First of all, letus examine this ground, and see if they do not stand there onlyupon erroneous premises sustained by prejudices. In the beginning, then, we submit to candid minds that, if the literal eternity offuture torment be proclaimed in the New Testament, it is not apart of the revelation contained in that volume; it is not a truthrevealed by inspiration; and that we maintain for this reason. Thesame representations of the everlasting duration of futurepunishment in hell, the same expressions for an unlimitedduration, which occur in the New Testament, were previouslyemployed by the Hindus, Greeks, and Pharisees, who were notinspired, but must have drawn the doctrine from fallible sources. Now, to say the least, it is as reasonable to suppose that theseexpressions, 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 theprevailing thought and customary phraseology of their time, as toconclude that they were derived from an unerring inspiration. Theformer is a natural and reasonable inference; the latter is agratuitous hypothesis for which we have never heard of anyevidence. If its advocates will honestly attempt really to proveit, we are convinced they will be forced to renounce it. The onlyway they continue to hold it is by taking it for granted. If, therefore, the strict eternity of future woe be declared in theNew Testament, we regard it not as a part of the inspiredutterance of Jesus, but as an error which crept in among othersfrom the surrounding notions of a benighted pagan age. But, in the next place, we do not admit by any means that theliteral 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 NewTestament was written. The Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, often makemost emphatic use of phrases declaring the eternal sufferings ofthe wicked in hell; but they must have meant by "eternal" only avery long time, because a fundamental portion of the great systemof thought on which their religions rested was the idea ofrecurring epochs, sundered by immense periods statedly arriving, when all things were restored, the hells and heavens vanishedaway, and God was all in all. If the representations of theeternal punishment of the wicked, made before the New Testamentwas written, were not significant, with metaphysical severity, ofan eternity of duration, but only, with popular looseness, of anextremely long period, the same may be true of the similarexpressions found in that record. Secondly, we argue from the usage of language in and after the NewTestament age. The critics have collected, as any one desirous mayeasily find, and as every theological scholar well knows, scoresof instances from the writings of authors contemporary with Christand his apostles, and succeeding them, where the Greek word for"eternal" is used popularly, not strictly, in a rhetorical, not ina philosophical, sense, not denoting a duration literally endless, but one very prolonged. In all Greek literature the word isundoubtedly used in a careless and qualified sense at least ahundred times where it is used once with its close etymologicalforce. And the same is true of the corresponding Hebrew term. Thewriter of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, " at the closeof every chapter, describing the respective patriarch's death, says, "he slept the eternal sleep, " though by "eternal" he canonly mean a duration reaching to the time of the resurrection, asplainly appears from the context. Iamblichus speaks of "an eternaleternity of eternities. "14 Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, andothers, the fact of whose belief in final universal salvation noone pretends to deny, do not hesitate with earnestness andfrequency to affirm the "eternal" punishment of the wicked inhell. Now, if the contemporaries of the evangelists, and theirsuccessors, often used the word "eternal" popularly, in afigurative, limited sense, then it may be so employed when itoccurs in the New Testament in connection with the future pains ofthe bad. Thirdly, we argue from the phraseology and other peculiarities ofthe representation of the future woe of the condemned, given inthe New Testament itself, that its authors 14 De Mysteriis Egyptiorum, cap. Viii. Sect. 10. did not consciously intend to proclaim the rigid endlessness ofthat woe. 15 "These shall go away into everlasting punishment. "Since the word "everlasting" was often used simply to denote along period, what right has any one to declare that here it mustmean an absolutely unending duration? How does any one know thatthe mind of Jesus dialectically grasped the metaphysical notion ofeternity and deliberately intended to express it? Certainly theintrinsic probabilities are all the other way. Such a conclusionis hardly compatible with the highly tropical style of speechemployed throughout the discourse. Besides, had he wished toconvey the overwhelming idea that the doom of the guilty would bestrictly irremediable, their anguish literally infinite, would henot have taken pains to say so in definite, guarded, explained, unmistakable terms? He might easily, by a precise prosaicutterance, by explanatory circumlocutions, have placed thatthought beyond possibility of mistake. Fourthly, we have an intense conviction not only that the leavingof such a doctrine by the Savior in impenetrable obscurity anduncertainty is irreconcilable with the supposition of hisdeliberately holding it in his belief, but also that a belief inthe doctrine itself is utterly irreconcilable with the veryessentials of his teachings and spirit, his inmost convictions andlife. He taught the infinite and unchangeable goodness of God:confront the doctrine of endless misery with the parable of theprodigal son. He taught the doctrine of unconquerable forgiveness, without apparent qualification: bring together the doctrine ofnever relenting punishment and his petition on the cross, "Father, forgive them. " He taught that at the great judgment heaven or hellwould be allotted to men according to their lives; and the notionof endless torment does not rest on the demerit of sinful deeds, which is the standard of judgment that he holds up, but onconceptions concerning a totally depraved nature, a God inflamedwith wrath, a vicarious atonement rejected, or some other ethnictradition or ritual consideration equally foreign to his mind andhostile to his heart. Fifthly, if we reason on the popular belief that the letter ofScripture teaches only unerring truth, we have the strongestargument of all against the eternal hopelessness of futurepunishment. The doctrine of Christ's descent to hell underlies theNew Testament. We are told that after his death "he went andpreached to the spirits in prison. " And again we read that "thegospel was preached also to them that are dead. " This NewTestament idea was unquestionably a vital and important feature inthe apostolic and in the early Christian belief. It necessarilyimplies that there is probation, and that there may be salvation, after death. It is fatal to the horrid dogma which commands allwho enter hell to abandon every gleam of hope, utterly andforever. The symbolic force of the doctrine of Christ's descentand preaching in hell is this, as Guder says in his "Appearance ofChrist among the Dead, " that the deepest and most horrible depthof damnation is not too deep and horrible for the pitying lovewhich wishes to save the lost: even into the veriest depth of hellreaches down the love of God, and his beatific call sounds to themost distant distances. There is no outermost darkness to whichhis heavenly and all conquering light cannot shine. The book whichteaches that Christ went even into hell itself, to seek and tosave that which was lost, 15 Corrodi, Ueber die Ewigkeit der Hollenetrafen. In den Beitragenzur Beforderung des Vernunft. Denk. N. S. W. Heft vii. Ss. 41-72. does not teach that from the instant of death the fate of thewicked is irredeemably fixed. Upon the whole, then, we reach the clear conclusion that theChristian Scriptures do not really declare the hopeless eternityof future punishment. 16 They speak popularly, not scientifically, speak in metaphors which cannot be analyzed and reduced tometaphysical precision. The subject is left with fearful warningsin an impressive obscurity. There we must either leave it, in aweand faith, undecided; or, if not content to do that, we mustexamine and decide it on other grounds than those of traditionalauthority, and with other instruments than those of textualinterpretation. Let us next sift and weigh the arguments from reason by which thedogma of the eternity of future misery is respectively defendedand assailed. The advocates of it have sought to support it byfour positions, which are such entire assumptions that only a wordwill be requisite to expose each of them to logical rejection. First, it is said that sin is infinite and deserves an infinitepenalty because it is an outrage against an infinite being. 17 Amore absurd perversion of logic than this, a more glaringviolation of common sense, was never perpetrated. It directlyreverses the facts and subverts the legitimate inference. Is thesin measured by the dignity of the lawgiver, or by theresponsibility of the law breaker? Does justice heed the wrath ofthe offended, or the guilt of the offender? As well say that theeye of man is infinite because it looks out into infinite space, as affirm that his sin is infinite because committed against aninfinite God. That man is finite, and all his acts finite, andconsequently not in justice to be punished infinitely, is a plainstatement of fact which compels assent. All else is emptyquibbling, scholastic jugglery. The ridiculousness of the argumentis amusingly apparent as presented thus in an old Miracle Play, wherein Justice is made to tell Mercy "That man, havinge offendedGod who is endlesse, His endlesse punchement therefore may nevyrseese. " The second device brought forward to sustain the doctrine inquestion is more ingenious, but equally arbitrary. It is based onthe foreknowledge of God. He foresaw that the wicked, if allowedto live on earth immortally in freedom, would go on forever in acourse of constant sin. They were therefore constructively guiltyof all the sin which they would have committed; but he saved theworld the ravages of their actual crimes by hurling them into hellbeneath the endless penalty of their latent infinite guilt. Inreply to those who argue thus, it is obvious to ask, whence didthey learn all this? There is no such scheme drawn up or hinted inScripture; and surely it is not within the possible discoveries ofreason. 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 fromother considerations. It is an imaginative hypothesis withoutconfirmation. 16 Bretschneider, in his Systematische Entwickelung aller in derDogmatik vorkommenden Begriffe, gives the literature of thissubject in a list of thirty six distinct works. Sect. 139, Ewigkeit der Hollenstrafen. 17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars iii. Suppl. Qu. 99, art. 1. Thirdly, it has been said that future punishment will be endlessbecause sin will be so. The evil soul, growing ever more evil, getting its habits of vice and passions of iniquity more deeplyinfixed, and surrounded in the infernal realm with all theincentives to wickedness, will become confirmed in depravitybeyond all power of cure, and, sinning forever, be necessarilydamned and tortured forever. The same objection holds to thisargument as to the former. Its premises are daring assumptionsbeyond 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 besin; and those who retain moral freedom may reform, cease to doevil and learn to do good. There are invitations and opportunitiesto change from evil to good here: why not hereafter? The will isfree now: what shall suddenly paralyze or annihilate that freedomwhen the soul leaves the body? Why may not such amazingrevelations be made, such regenerating motives be brought to bear, in the spiritual world, as will soften the hardest, convince thestubbornest, and, sooner or later, transform and redeem the worst?It is true the law of sinful habit is dark and fearful; but it isfrequently neutralized. The argument as the support of a positivedogma is void because itself only hypothetical. Some have tried to prove eternal condemnation by an assumednecessity of moral gravitation. There is a great deal of loose andhasty talk afloat about the law of affinities distributing soulshereafter in fitted companies. Similar characters willspontaneously come together. The same qualities and grades ofsympathy will coalesce, the unlike will fly apart. And so allfuture existence will be arranged in circles of dead equality onstagnant levels of everlasting hopelessness of change. The law ofspiritual attraction is no such force as that, produces no suchresults. It is broken up by contrasts, changes, multiplicity ofother interacting forces. We are not only drawn by affinity tothose like ourselves, but often still more powerfully, withrebuking and redeeming effect, to those above us that we maybecome like them, to those beneath us that we may pity and helpthem. The law of affinity is not in moral beings a simple forcenecessitating an endless uniformity of state, but a complex offorces, sometimes mingling the unlike by stimulants of weddedsimilarity and contrast to bless and advance all, now punishing, now rewarding, but ever finally intended to redeem. Reasoning bysound analogy, the heavens and hells of the future state are notmonotonous circles each filled with mutually reflectingpersonalities, but one fenceless spiritual world of distinctive, ever varying degrees, sympathetic and contrasted life, circulatingfreshness, variety of attractions and repulsions, divineadvancement. Finally, it is maintained by many that endless misery is the fateof the reprobate because such is the sovereign pleasure of God. This is no argument, but a desperate assertion. It virtuallyconfesses that the doctrine cannot be defended by reason, but isto be thrown into the province of wilful faith. A host of gloomytheologians have taken this ground as the forlorn hope of theirbelief. The damned are eternally lost because that is thearbitrary decree of God. Those who thus abandon reason fordogmatic authority and trample on logic with mere reiteratedassertion can only be met with the flat denial, such is not thearbitrary pleasure of God. Then, as far as argument is concerned, the controversy ends where it began. These four hypotheses include all the attempted justifications ofthe doctrine of eternal misery that we have ever seen offered fromthe stand point of independent thought. We submit that, consideredas proofs, they are utterly sophistical. There are three great arguments in refutation of the endlessnessof future punishment, as that doctrine is commonly held. The firstargument is ethical, drawn from the laws of right; the second istheological, drawn from the attributes of God; the third isexperimental, drawn from the principles of human nature. We shallsubdivide these and consider them successively. In the first place, we maintain that the popular doctrine ofeternal punishment is unjust, because it overlooks the differencesin the sins of men, launching on all whom it embraces one infinitepenalty of undiscriminating damnation. The consistent advocates ofthe doctrine, the boldest creeds, unflinchingly avow this, anddefend it by the plea that every sin, however trivial, is equallyan offence against the law of the infinite God with the mostterrible 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 alevel with the pirate guilty of robbery and murder through coldblooded avarice and hate. In a hell where all are plunged inphysical fire for eternity there are no degrees of retribution, though the degrees of evil and demerit are as numerous and variousas the individuals. The Scriptures say, "Every man shall receiveaccording to the deeds done in the body:" some "shall be beatenwith many stripes, " others "with few stripes. " The first principle of justice exact discrimination of judgmentaccording to deeds and character is monstrously violated and alldifferences blotted out by the common dogma of hell. A betterthought is shown in the old Persian legend which tells that Godonce permitted Zoroaster to accompany him on a visit to hell. Theprophet saw many in grievous torments. Among the rest, he saw onewho was deprived of his right foot. Asking the meaning of this, God replied, "Yonder sufferer was a king who in his whole life didbut one kind action. Passing once near a dromedary which, tied upin a state of starvation, was vainly striving to reach someprovender placed just beyond its utmost effort, the king with hisright foot compassionately kicked the fodder within the poorbeast's reach. That foot I placed in heaven: the rest of him ishere. " 18 Again: there is the grossest injustice in the first assumption orfundamental ground on which the theory we are opposing rests. Thattheory does not teach that men are actually damned eternally onaccount of their own personal sins, but on account of originalsin: the eternal tortures of hell are the transmitted penaltyhurled on all the descendants of Adam, save those who in some wayavoid it, in consequence of his primal transgression. Languagecannot characterize with too much severity, as it seems to us, theinjustice, the immorality, involved in this scheme. The belief ina sin, called "original, " entailed by one act of one person upon awhole immortal race of countless millions, dooming vast majoritiesof them helplessly to a hopeless torture prison, can rest only ona 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 penaltyinflicted on it would not be the necessary severity of a holy God, but a species of gratuitous vengeance. For sin, by the veryessence of ethics, is the free, intelligent, wilful violation of alaw known to be right; and every punishment, in order to be just, must be the suffering deserved by the intentional fault, thepersonal evil, of the culprit himself. The doctrine before usreverses all this, and sends untold myriads to hell forever for noother sin than that of simply having been born children ofhumanity. Born totally depraved, hateful to God, helpless throughan irresistible proclivity to sin and an ineradicable aversion toevangelical truth, and asked to save themselves, asked by amockery like that of fettering men hand and foot, clothing them inleaden straitjackets, and then flinging them overboard, tellingthem not to drown! What justice, what justice, is here in this? Thirdly, the profound injustice of this doctrine is seen in itsmaking the alternative of so unutterably awful a doom hinge uponsuch trivial particulars and upon merely fortuitous circumstances. One is born of pious, orthodox parents, another of heretics orinfidels: with no difference of merit due to them, one goes toheaven, the other goes to hell. One happens to form a friendshipwith an evangelical believer, another is influenced by arationalist 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 bedwould have been made in hell, heaven closed against him forever. One says, "I believe in the Trinity of God, in the Deity ofChrist;" and, dying, he goes to heaven. Another says, "I believein the Unity of God and in the humanity of Christ:" he, dying, goes to hell. Of two children snatched away by disease when twentyfour hours old, one has been baptized, the other not: the angelsof heaven welcome that, the demons of hell clutch this. Thedoctrine of infant damnation, intolerably painful as it is, hasbeen proclaimed thousands of times by authoritative teachers andby large parties in the Church, and is a logical sequence from thepopular theology. It is not a great many years since people heard, it is said, the celebrated statement that "hell is paved with theskulls of infants not a span long!" Think of the everlasting blissor misery of a helpless infant depending on the petty accident ofwhether it was baptized or not! There are hypothetical cases likethe following: If one man had died a year earlier, when he was asaint, he would not have fallen from grace, and renounced hisfaith, and rolled in crimes, and sunk to hell. If another hadlived 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 aneternity of woe hung fatally poised on the time appointed for himto die. Oh how the bigoted pride, the exclusive dogmatism of selfstyled saints, self flatterers equally satisfied of their ownelection and of the rejection of almost everybody else, ought tosink and fade when they reflect on the slight chances, merechances of time and place, by which the infinite contingency hasbeen, or is to be, decided! They should heed the impregnable goodsense and logic conveyed in the humane hearted poet's satiricalhumor 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 birthThey might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo. " It is evidently but the rankest mockery of justice to suspend aninfinite woe upon an accident out of the power of the partyconcerned. Still further: there is a tremendous injustice even in that formof the doctrine of endless punishment, the most favorable of all, which says that no one is absolutely foreordained to hell, butthat all are free, and that life is a fixed season of probationwherein the means of salvation are offered to all, and if theyneglect or spurn them the fault is their own, and eternal paintheir merited portion. The perfectly apparent inconsistency ofthis theory with known facts is fatal to it, since out of everygeneration there are millions on millions of infants, idiots, maniacs, heathen, within whose hearing or power the means ofsalvation by a personal appropriation of the atoning merit ofChrist's blood were never brought; so that life to them is noscene of Christian probation. But, waiving that, the probation isnot a fair one to anybody. If the indescribable horror of aneternal damnation be the consequence that follows a certain coursewhile we are on trial in this life, then a knowledge of that factin all its bearings ought to be given us, clear, explicit, beyondany possibility of mistake or doubt. Otherwise the probation isnot fair. To place men in the world, as millions are constantlyplaced, beset by allurements of every sort within and without, ledastray 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 ofit only in terms that seem absurd in themselves and unaccompaniedby sufficient, if by any, proof, and then, if under these fearfulhazards they waver from strict purity of heart, rectitude ofconduct, or orthodoxy of belief, to condemn them to a world ofeverlasting agony, would be the very climax of cruelty, with notouch of mercy or color of right. Beneath such a rule the universe should be shrouded in theblackness of despair, and God be thought of with a convulsiveshudder. Such a "probation" would be only like that on which theInquisitors put their victims who were studiously kept ignorant intheir dungeons, waiting for the rack and the flame to be madeready. Few persons will deny that, as the facts now are, a good, intelligent, candid man may doubt the reality of an endlesspunishment awaiting men in hell. But if the doctrine be true, andhe is on probation under it, is it fair that he should be lefthonestly in ignorance or doubt about it? No: if it be true, itought to be burned into his brain and crushed into his soul withsuch terrific vividness and abiding constancy of impression aswould deter him ever from the wrong path, keep him in the right. Adistinguished writer has represented a condemned delinquent, suffering on, and still interminably on, in hell, thus complainingof the unfairness of his probation: "Oh, had it been possible forme to conceive even the most diminutive part of the weight andhorror of this doom, I should have shrunk from every temptation tosin, 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 tohave an infallible certainty of it, with all possible helps andincentives to avoid it. Such is not the case; and therefore, sinceGod is just and generous, the doctrine is not true. Finally, the injustice of the dogma of everlasting punishment ismost emphatically shown by the fact that there is no sort ofcorrespondence or possible proportion between the offence and thepenalty, between the moment of sinning life and the eternity ofsuffering death. If a child were told to hold its breath thirtyseconds, and, failing to do it, should be confined in a darksolitary dungeon for seventy years amidst loathsome horrors andspeechless afflictions, and be frightfully scourged six times aday for that entire period, there would be just proportion nay, aninexpressibly merciful proportion between the offence and thepunishment, in comparison with that which, being an absolutelyinfinite disproportion, does not really admit of any comparison, the sentence to an eternal abode in hell as a penalty for theworst kind and the greatest amount of crime a man could possiblycrowd into a life of a thousand years. Think, then, of passingsuch a sentence on one who has struggled hard against temptation, and yielded but rarely, and suffered much, and striven to do aswell as he could, and borne up courageously, with generousresolves and affections, and died commending his soul to God inhope. "Fearfully fleet is this life, " says one, "and yet in it eternallife is lost or won: profoundly wretched is this life, yet in iteternal bliss is lost or won. " Weigh the words adequately, and sayhow improbable is the thought, and how terribly unjust. Perhapsthere have already lived upon this earth, and died, and passedinto the invisible world, two hundred thousand millions of men, the everlasting doom of every one of whom, it is imagined, wasfixed unalterably during the momentary period of his mortaltransit from cradle to grave. In respect of eternity, six thousandyears and this duration must be reduced to threescore years andten, since that is all that each generation enjoyed is the same asone hour. Suppose, now, that all these two hundred thousandmillions of men were called into being at once; that they wereplaced on probation for one hour; that the result of their choiceand action in that hour was to decide their irrevocable fate, actually forever, to ecstatic bliss or to ecstatic woe; thatduring that hour they were left, as far as clear and stableconviction goes, in utter ignorance and uncertainty as to thegreat realities of their condition, courted by opposing theoriesand modes of action; and that, when the clock of time knelled theclose of that awful, that most evanescent hour, the roaring gulfof torture yawned, and its jaws of flame and blackness closed overninety nine hundredths of them for eternity! That is a fairpicture of the popular doctrine of temporal probation and eternalpunishment, when examined in the light of the facts of human life. Of course, no man at this day, who is in his senses and thinkshonestly upon the subject, can credit such a doctrine, unlessindeed he believes that a lawless fiend sits on the throne of theuniverse and guides the helm of destiny. And lives there a man ofunperverted soul who would not decidedly prefer to have no Godrather than to have such a one? Ay, "Rather than so, come FATEinto the list And champion us to the utterance. " Let us be atheists, and bow to mortal Chance, believe there is nopilot at all at the rudder of Creation's vessel, no channel beforethe 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 eternaldamnation that it is incompatible with any worthy idea of thecharacter of God. God is love; and love cannot consent to theuseless torture of millions of helpless souls for eternity. Thegross contradiction of the common doctrine of hell to the spiritof love is so obvious that its advocates, unable to deny orconceal it, have often positively proclaimed it, avowing that, inrespect to the wicked, God is changed into a consuming fire fullof hatred and vengeance. But that is unmitigated blasphemy. God isunchangeable, his very nature being disinterested, immutablegoodness. The sufferings of the wicked are of their ownpreparation. If a pestilential exhalation is drawn from somedecaying substance, it is not the fault of any alteration in thesunlight. But a Christian writer assures us that when "the damnedare packed like brick in a kiln, so bound that they cannot move alimb nor even an eyelid, God shall blow the fires of hell throughthem for ever and ever. " And another writer says, "All in God is turned into fury: in hellhe draws out into the field all his forces, all his attributes, whereof wrath is the leader and general. "20 Such representationsmay be left without a comment. Every enlightened mind willinstantly reject with horror the doctrine which necessitates aconception of God like that here pictured forth. God is a being ofinfinite forgiveness and magnanimity. To the wandering sinner, even while a great way off, his arms are open, and his invitingvoice, penetrating the farthest abysses, says, "Return. " His sunshines and his rain falls on the fields of the unjust andunthankful. What is it, the instant mortals pass the line ofdeath, that shall transform this Divinity of yearning pity andbeneficence into a devil of relentless hate and cruelty? It cannotbe. We shall find him dealing towards us in eternity as he doeshere. An eminent theologian says, "If mortal men kill the bodytemporally in their anger, it is like the immortal God to damn thesoul eternally in his. " "God holds sinners in his hands over themouth of hell as so many spiders; and he is dreadfully provoked, and he not only hates them, but holds them in utmost contempt, andhe will trample them beneath his feet with inexpressiblefierceness, he will crush their blood out, and will make it fly sothat it will sprinkle his garments and stain all his raiment. "21Oh, ravings and blasphemies of theological bigotry, blinded withold creeds, inflamed with sectarian hate, soaked in the gall ofbitterness, encompassed by absurd delusions, you know not what yousay! A daring writer of modern times observes that God can never sayfrom the last tribunal, in any other than a limited andmetaphorical sense, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlastingfire, " because that would not be doing as he would be done by. Saving the appearance of irreverence, we maintain his assertion tobe just, based on impregnable morality. A recent religious poetdescribes Jesus, on descending into hell after his crucifixion, 20 For these and several other quotations we are indebted to theRev. T. J. Sawyer's work, entitled "Endless Punishment: its Originand Grounds Examined. " 21 Edwards's works, vol. Vii. P. 499. meeting Judas, and when he saw his pangs and heard his stifledsobs, "Pitying, Messiah gazed, and had forgiven, But Justice hereternal bar opposed. " 22 The instinctive sentiment is worthy of Jesus, but the deliberatethought is worthy of Calvin. Why is it so calmly assumed that Godcannot pardon, and that therefore sinners must be given over toendless pains? By what proofs is so tremendous a conclusionsupported? Is it not a gratuitous fiction of theologians? Theexemplification of God's character and conduct given in thespirit, teachings, and deeds of Christ is full of a free mercy, aneager charity that rushes forward to forgive and embrace thesinful and wretched wanderers. He is a very different being whomthe evangelist represents saying of Jesus, "This is my belovedSon, in whom I am well pleased, " from Him whom Professor Parkdescribes "drawing his sword on Calvary and smiting down his Son!" Why may not pardon from unpurchased grace be vouchsafed as wellafter death as before? What moral conditions alter the case then?Ah! it is only the metaphysical theories of the theologians thathave altered the case in their fancies and made it necessary forthem to limit probation. The attributes of God are laws, his modesof action are the essentialities of his being, the same in all theworlds of boundless extension and all the ages of endlessduration. How far some of the theologians have perverted thesimplicity of the gospel, or rather how utterly they have strayedfrom it, may be seen when we remember that Christ said concerninglittle children, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven, " and thencompare with this declaration such a statement as this: "Reprobateinfants are vipers of vengeance which Jehovah will hold over hellin the tongs of his wrath, till they writhe up and cast theirvenom in his face. " We deliberately assert that no depraved, insane, pagan imagination ever conceived of a fiend malignant andhorrible enough to be worthily compared with this Christianconception of God. Edwards repeatedly says, in his two sermons onthe "Punishment of the Wicked" and "Sinners in the Hands of anAngry God, " "You cannot stand an instant before an infuriatedtiger even: what, then, will you do when God rushes against you inall his wrath?" Is this Christ's Father? The God we worship is "the Father of lights, with whom there isneither variableness nor shadow of turning, from whom cometh downevery good and every perfect gift. " It is the Being referred to bythe Savior when he said, in exultant trust and love, "I am notalone; for the Father is with me. " It is the infinite One to whomthe Psalmist says, "Though I make my bed in hell, behold, thou artthere. " If God is in hell, there must be mercy and hope there, some gleams of alleviation and promise there, surely; even as theLutheran creed says that "early on Easter morning, before hisresurrection, Christ showed himself to the damned in hell. " If Godis in hell, certainly it must be to soothe, to save. "Oh, no, "says the popular theologian. Let us quote his words. "Why is Godhere? To keep the tortures of the damned freshly plied, and to seethat 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 andChrist 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 thepresence of the Lord: One arm humility takes hold upon His dearHumanity; the other love Clasps his Divinity: so, where I go Hegoes; and better fire wall'd Hell with him Than golden gatedParadise without. " The irreconcilableness of the common doctrine of endless miserywith any worthy idea of God is made clear by a process ofreasoning whose premises are as undeniable as its logic isirrefragable and its conclusion consolatory. God is infinitejustice and goodness. His purpose in the creation, therefore, mustbe the diffusion and triumph of holiness and blessedness. God isinfinite wisdom and power. His design, therefore, must befulfilled. Nothing can avail to thwart the ultimate realization ofall his intentions. The rule of his omnipotent love pervadesinfinitude and eternity as a shining leash of law whereby he holdsevery child of his creation in ultimate connection with histhrone, and will sooner or later bring even the worst soul to areturning curve from the career of its wildest orbit. In the realmand under the reign of a paternal and omnipotent God every beingmust be salvable. Remorse itself is a recoil which may fling thepenitent into the lap of forgiving love. Any different thoughtappears narrow, cruel, heathen. The blackest fiend that glooms themidnight air of hell, bleached through the merciful purgation ofsorrow and loyalty, may become a white angel and be drawn intoheaven. Lavater writes of himself, and the same is true of many a goodman, "I embraced in my heart all that is called man, past, present, and future times and nations, the dead, the damned, evenSatan. I presented them all to God with the warmest wishes that hewould 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 Orientalapologue. God once sat on his inconceivable throne, and far around him, rankafter rank, angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim, restingon their silver wings and lifting their dazzling brows, rose andswelled, with the splendors of an illimitable sea of immortalbeings, gleaming and fluctuating to the remotest borders of theuniverse. The anthem of their praise shook the pillars of thecreation, and filled the vault of heaven with a pulsing flood ofharmony. When, as they closed their hymn, stole up, faint heard, as from some most distant region of all space, in dim accentshumbly rising, a responsive "Amen. " God asked Gabriel, "Whencecomes that Amen?" The hierarchic peer replied, "It rises from thedamned in hell. " God took, from where it hung above his seat, thekey that unlocks the forty thousand doors of hell, and, giving itto Gabriel, bade him go release them. On wings of light sped theenraptured messenger, rescued the millions of the lost, and, justas 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, andplaced next to the throne; and henceforth, for evermore, thedearest strain to God's ear, of all the celestial music, was thatborne by the choir his grace had ransomed from hell. And, becausethere is no envy or other selfishness in heaven, this promotionsent but new thrills of delight and gratitude through the heightsand depths of angelic life. We come now to the last class of reasons for disbelieving thedogma of eternal damnation, namely, those furnished by theprinciples of human nature and the truths of human experience. Thedoctrine, as we think can be clearly shown, is literallyincredible to the human mind and literally intolerable to thehuman heart. In the first place, it is, viewed in the abstract, absolutely incredible because it is inconceivable: no man canpossibly grasp and appreciate the idea. The nearest approximationto it ever made perhaps is in De Quincey's gorgeous elaboration ofthe famous Hindu myth of an enormous rock finally worn away by thebrushing of a gauze veil; and that is really no approximation atall, since an incommensurable chasm always separates the finiteand the infinite. John Foster says, "It is infinitely beyond thehighest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of thehorror of the doom to eternal damnation. " The Buddhists, whobelieve that the severest sentence passed on the worst sinner willbe brought to an end and his redemption be attained, use thefollowing illustration of the staggering periods that will firstelapse. A small yoke is thrown into the ocean and borne about inevery direction by the various winds. Once in a hundred thousandyears a blind tortoise rises to the surface of the water. Will thetime ever come when that tortoise shall so rise up that its neckshall enter the hole of the yoke? It may, but the time requiredcannot 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 theidea of endless misery, by Suso, a mystic preacher who flourishedseveral 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 nomore to love you; we must be separated forever! O separation, everlasting separation, how painful art thou! Oh, the wringing ofhands! Oh, sighing, weeping, and sobbing, unceasing howling andlamenting, and yet never to be pardoned! Give us a millstone, saysthe damned, as large as the whole earth, and so wide incircumference as to touch the sky all around, and let a littlebird come in a hundred thousand years, and pick off a smallparticle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grainof millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him comeagain, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off asmuch as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desirenothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus ourpains also; yet even that cannot be. "23 But, after all thestruggles of reason and all the illustrations of laboringimagination, the meaning of the phrase "eternal suffering in hell"remains remote, dim, unrealized, an abstraction in words. If wecould adequately apprehend it, if its full significance shouldburst 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, anannihilating shudder would seize and destroy the soul. We say, therefore, that the doctrine of the eternity of futurepunishment 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 itis actually held by hardly any one as a practical vivid beliefeven within the limits wherein, as an intellectual conception, itis possible. When intellect and imagination do not fail, heart andconscience do, with sickened faintness and convulsive protest. Inhis direful poem on the Last Day, Young makes one of the condemnedvainly beg of God to grant "This one, this slender, almost no, request: When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment isgrown weary of its prey, When I have raved of anguish'd years infire Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire. " Such a thought, when confronted with any generous holy sentimentor with any worthy conception of the Divine character, ispractically incredible. The men all around us in whose Churchcreed such a doctrine is written down do not truly believe it. "They delude themselves, " as Martineau well says, "with the merefancy and image of a belief. The death of a friend who departsfrom life in heresy affects them in the same way as the loss ofanother whose creed was unimpeachable: while the theoreticdifference is infinite, the practical is virtually nothing. " Whothat had a child, parent, wife, brother, or other precious friend, condemned to be roasted to death by a slow fire, would not befrantic with agony? But there are in the world literally millionson millions, some of whose nearest and dearest ones have diedunder circumstances which, by their professed creeds, can leave nodoubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguishunutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about assmilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame, in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerlyand as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth ofthis exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma towhose technical terms they formally subscribe. A small proportion of its professors do undeniably believe thedoctrine so far as it can be sanely believed; and accordingly theworld is to them robed in a sable shroud, and life is an awfulmockery, under a flashing surface of sports concealing abottomless pit of horror. Every observing person has probablyknown some few in his life who, in a degree, really believed thecommon notions concerning hell, and out of whom, consequently, allgeniality, all bounding impulses, all magnanimous generosities, were crushed, and their countenances wore the perpetual livery ofmourning, despair, and misanthropy. We will quote the confessionsof two persons who may stand as representatives of the class ofsincere believers in the doctrine. The first is a celebratedFrench preacher of a century and a half ago, the other a veryeminent American divine of the present day. Saurin says, in hisgreat sermon on Hell, "I sink under the weight of this subject, and I find in the thought a mortal poison which diffuseth itselfinto every period of my life, rendering society tiresome, nourishment insipid, pleasure disgustful, and life itself a cruelbitter. " Albert Barnes writes, "In the distress and anguish of myown spirit, I confess I see not one ray to disclose to me thereason why man should suffer to all eternity. I have never seen aparticle of light thrown on these subjects that has given amoment's ease to my tortured mind. It is all dark dark dark to mysoul; and I cannot disguise it. " Such a state of mind is the legitimate result of an endeavorsincerely to grasp and hold the popularly professed belief. Sooften as that endeavor reaches a certain degree of success, andthe idea of an eternal hell is reduced from its vagueness to anembraced conception, the over fraught heart gives way, the brain, stretched on too high a tension, reels, madness sets in, and onemore case is added to that list of maniacs from religious causeswhich, according to the yearly reports of insane asylums, forms solarge a class. Imagine what a vast and sudden change would comeover the spirit and conduct of society if nineteen twentieths ofChristendom believed that at the end of a week a horrible influxof demons, from some insurgent region, would rush into our worldand put a great majority of our race to death in excruciatingtortures! But the doctrine of future punishment professed bynineteen twentieths of Christendom is, if true, an evilincomparably worse than that, though every element of itsdreadfulness were multiplied by millions beyond the power ofnumeration; and yet all goes on as quietly, the most of thesefancied believers live as chirpingly, as if heaven were sure foreverybody! Of course in their hearts they do not believe theterrific formula which drops so glibly from their tongues. Again: it is a fatal objection to the doctrine in question that ifit be true it must destroy the happiness of the saved and fill allheaven with sympathetic woe. Jesus teaches that "there is joy inheaven over every sinner that repenteth. " By a moral necessity, then, there is sorrow in heaven over the wretched, lost soul. Thatsorrow, indeed, may be alleviated, if not wholly quenched, by theknowledge that every retributive pang is remedial, and that God'sglorious design will one day be fully crowned in the redemption ofthe last prodigal. But what shall solace or end it if they knowthat hell's borders are to be enlarged and to rage with avengingmisery forever? The good cannot be happy in heaven if they are tosee the ascending smoke and hear the resounding shrieks of a hellfull of their brethren, the children of a common humanity, amongwhom are many of their own nearest relatives and dearest friends. True, a long list of Christian writers may be cited as maintainingthat this is to be a principal element in the felicity of theredeemed, gloating over the tortures of the damned, singing thesong of praise with redoubled emphasis as they see their parents, their children, their former bosom companions, writhing andhowling in the fell extremities of torture. Thomas Aquinas says, "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of Godmore richly, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned isgranted to them. "24 Especially did the Puritans seem to revel inthis idea, that "the joys of the blessed were to be deepened andsharpened by constant contrast with the sufferings of the damned. "One of them thus expresses the delectable thought: "The sight ofhell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever, as asense of the opposite misery always increases the relish of anypleasure. " 24 Summa, pars iii. , Suppl. Qu. 93, art. I. But perhaps Hopkins caps the climax of the diabolical pyramid ofthese representations, saying of the wicked, "The smoke of theirtorment shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed for ever andever, and serve, as a most clear glass always before their eyes, to give them a bright and most affecting view. This display of theDivine character will be most entertaining to all who love God, will give them the highest and most ineffable pleasure. Should thefire of this eternal punishment cease, it would in a great measureobscure the light of heaven and put an end to a great part of thehappiness and glory of the blessed. "25 That is to say, in plainterms, the saints, on entering their final state of bliss inheaven, are converted into a set of unmitigated fiends, outsataning Satan, finding their chief delight in forever comparingtheir own enjoyments with the pangs of the damned, extractingmorsels of surpassing relish from every convulsion or shriek ofanguish they see or hear. It is all an exquisite piece ofgratuitous horror arbitrarily devised to meet a logical exigencyof the theory its contrivers held. When charged that the knowledgeof the infinite woe of their friends in hell must greatly affectthe saints, the stern old theologians, unwilling to recede an inchfrom their dogmas, had the amazing hardihood to declare that, sofar from it, on the contrary their wills would so blend with God'sthat the contemplation of this suffering would be a source ofecstasy to them. It is doubly a blank assumption of the mostdaring 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 natureand 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 adevil. On entering heaven, what magic shall work such a demoniacalchange in him? There is not a word, direct or indirect, in theScriptures to warrant the dreadful notion; nor is there anyreasonable explanation or moral justification of it given by anyof its advocates, or indeed conceivable. The monstrous hypothesiscannot be true. Under the omnipotent, benignant government of apaternal God, each change of character in his chosen children, asthey advance, must be for the better, not for the worse. We once heard a father say, running his fingers the while amongthe golden curls of his child's hair, "If I were in heaven, andsaw my little daughter in hell, should not I be rushing down thereafter her?" There spoke the voice of human nature; and that lovecannot be turned to hatred in heaven, but must grow purer andintenser there. The doctrine which makes the saints pleased withcontemplating the woes of the damned, and even draw much of theirhappiness from the contrast, is the deification of the absoluteselfishness of a demon. Human nature, even when left to itsuncultured 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 intothe water, he asked the priest if he should meet his forefathersin heaven. Learning that they, being unbaptized pagans, werevictims of endless misery, he drew his foot back, and refused therite, choosing to be with his brave ancestors in hell rather thanto be in heaven with the Christian priests. And, speaking from thestand point of the highest refinement of feeling and virtue, whothat 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 tolook down on the quenchless agonies of all I have loved here!" Isit not strictly true that the thought that even one should haveendless woe "Would cast a shadow on the throne of God And darkenheaven"? If a monarch, possessing unlimited power over all the earth, hadcondemned one man to be stretched on a rack and be freshly pliedwith incessant tortures for a period of fifty years, and ifeverybody on earth could hear his terrible shrieks by day andnight, 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 abody and go to implore the king's clemency for the solitaryvictim? So, if hell had but one tenant doomed to eternal anguish, a petition reaching from Sirius to Alcyone, signed by the universeof moral beings, borne by a convoy of angels representing everystar in space, would be laid and unrolled at the foot of God'sthrone, and He would read thereon this prayer: "FORGIVE HIM, ANDRELEASE HIM, WE BESEECH THEE, O GOD. " And can it be that everysoul in the universe is better than the Maker and Father of theuniverse? The popular doctrine of eternal torment threatening nearly all ourrace is refuted likewise by the impossibility of any generalobservance of the obligations morally and logically consequentfrom it. In the first place, as the world is constituted, and aslife goes on, the great majority of men are upon the whole happy, evidently were meant to be happy. But every believer of thedoctrine in debate is bound to be unutterably wretched. If he hasany gleam of generous sentiment or touch of philanthropy in hisbosom, if he is not a frozen petrifaction of selfishness or anincarnate devil, how can he look on his family, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow beings, in the light of hisfaith seeing them quivering over the dizzy verge of a blindprobation and momentarily dropping into the lake of fire andbrimstone that burns forever, how can he do this without beingceaselessly stung with wretchedness and crushed with horror by theperception? For a man who appreciatingly believes that hell isdirectly under our meadows, streets, and homes, and that ninetenths of the dead are in it, and that nine tenths of the livingsoon will be, for such a man to be happy and jocose is as horribleas it would be for a man, occupying the second story of a house, to light it up brilliantly with gas, and make merry with hisfriends, eating tidbits, sipping wine, and tripping it on thelight fantastic toe to the strains of gay music, while, immediately under him, men, women, and children, including his ownparents and his own children, were stretched on racks, torn withpincers, lacerated with surgical instruments, cauterized, lashedwith whips of fire, their half suppressed shrieks and groansaudibly rising through the floor! Secondly, if the doctrine be true, then all unnecessary worldlyenterprises, labors, and studies should at once cease. One momenton earth, and then, accordingly as we spend that moment, aneternity in heaven or in hell: in heaven, if we succeed inplacating God by a sound belief and ritual proprieties; in hell, if we are led astray by philosophy, nature, and the attractions oflife! On these suppositions, what time have we for any thing butreciting our creed, meditating on the atonement, and seeking tosecure an interest for ourselves with God by flouting at ourcarnal reason, praying in church, and groaning, "Lord, Lord, havemercy on us miserable sinners"? What folly, what mockery, to besearching into the motions of the stars, and the occult forces ofmatter, and the other beautiful mysteries of science! There willbe no astronomy in hell, save vain speculations as to the distancebetween the nadir of the damned and the zenith of the saved; nochemistry in hell, save the experiments of infinite wrath indistilling new torture poisons in the alembics of memory anddepositing fresh despair sediments in the crucibles of hope. IfCalvin'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 oftheology;" no business be pursued, save "the business ofsalvation. " What have men who are in imminent peril, who are intruth almost infallibly sure, of being eternally damned the nextinstant, what have they to do with science, literature, art, social ambition, or commerce? Away with them all! Lures of thedevil to snare souls are they! The world reflecting from everycorner the lurid glare of hell, who can do any thing else butshudder and pray? "Who could spare any attention for thevicissitudes of cotton and the price of shares, for the merits ofthe last opera and the bets upon the next election, if the actorsin these things were really swinging in his eye over such a vergeas he affects to see?" Thirdly, those who believe the popular theory on this subject arebound to live in cheap huts, on bread and water, that they maydevote to the sending of missionaries among the heathen every centof money they can get beyond that required for the barenecessities of life. If our neighbor were perishing of hunger atour door, it would be our duty to share with him even to the lastcrust we had. How much more, then, seeing millions of our poorhelpless brethren sinking ignorantly into the eternal fires ofhell, are we bound to spare no possible effort until theconditions of salvation are brought within the reach of every one!An American missionary to China said, in a public address afterhis return, "Fifty thousand a day go down to the fire that is notquenched. Six hundred millions more are going the same road. Should you not think at least once a day of the fifty thousand whothat day sink to the doom of the lost?" The American Board ofCommissioners of Foreign Missions say, "To send the gospel to theheathen is a work of great exigency. Within the last thirty yearsa whole generation of five hundred millions have gone down toeternal death. " Again: the same Board say, in their tract entitled"The Grand Motive to Missionary Effort, " "The heathen are involvedin the ruins of the apostasy, and are expressly doomed toperdition. Six hundred millions of deathless souls on the brink ofhell! What a spectacle!" How a man who thinks the heathen are thussinking to hell by wholesale through ignorance of the gospel canlive in a costly house, crowded with luxuries and splendors, spending every week more money on his miserable body than he givesin his whole life to save the priceless souls for which he saysChrist died, is a problem admitting but two solutions. Either hisprofessed faith is an unreality to him, or else he is as selfishas a demon and as hard hearted as the nether millstone. If hereally believed the doctrine, and had a human heart, he must feelit to be his duty to deny himself every indulgence and give hiswhole fortune and earnings to the missionary fund. And when he hadgiven all else, he ought to give himself, and go to pagan lands, proclaiming the means of grace until his last breath. If he doesnot that, he is inexcusable. Should he attempt to clear himself of this obligation by adoptingthe theory of predestination, which asserts that all men wereunconditionally elected from eternity, some to heaven, others tohell, so that no effort can change their fate, logical consistencyreduces him to an alternative more intolerable in the eyes ofconscience and common sense than the other was. For by this theorythe gates of freedom and duty are hoisted, and the dark flood ofantinomian consequences rushes in. All things are fated. Let menyield to every impulse and wish. The result is fixed. We havenothing 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: itis a duty to let the race die out and cease. He who begets achild, forcing him to run the fearful risk of human existence, with every probability of being doomed to hell at the close ofearth, commits a crime before whose endless consequences of horrorthe guilt of fifty thousand deliberate murders would be asnothing. For, be it remembered, an eternity in hell is an infiniteevil; and therefore the crime of thrusting such a fate on a singlechild, with the unasked gift of being, is a crime admitting of nojust comparison. Rather than populate an everlasting hell withhuman vipers and worms, a hell whose fires, alive and wrigglingwith ghastly shapes of iniquity and anguish, shall swell with avast accession of fresh recruits from every generation, ratherthan this, let the sacred lights on the marriage altar go out, nomore bounding forms of childhood be seen in cottage or hall, therace grow old, thin out, and utterly perish, all happy villages beovergrown, all regal cities crumble down, and this world rollamong the silent stars henceforth a globe of blasted deserts andrank wildernesses, resonant only with the shrieks of the wind, theyells of wild beasts, and the thunder's crash. Fifthly, there is one more conclusion of moral duty deducible fromthe prevalent theory of infinite torment. It is this. God oughtnot to have permitted Adam to have any children. Let us not seempresumptuous and irreverent in speaking thus. We are merelyreasoning on the popular theory of the theologians, not on anysupposition of our own or on any truth; and by showing theabsurdity and blasphemy of the moral consequences and dutiesflowing from that theory, the absurdity, blasphemy, andincredibility of the theory itself appear. We are not responsiblefor the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who chargeGod with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin ofAdam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty ofsuffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocentbecause not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause therace to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woethat would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line ofgenerations? Or, to go still further back, why did he not, foreseeing Adam's fall, refrain from creating even him? There wasno necessity laid on God of creating Adam. No positive evil wouldhave been done by omitting to create him. An infinite evil, multiplied by the total number of the lost, was done by creatinghim. Why, then, was he not left in peaceful nonentity? On theAugustinian theory we see no way of escaping this awful dilemma. Who can answer the question which rises to heaven from the abyssof the damned? "Father of mercies, why from silent earth Didstthou awake and curse me into birth, Push into being a reverse ofthee, And animate a clod with misery?" Satan is a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernalcellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot bywhich he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the worldparliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Willthe King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to carryout his design? The doctrine of eternal damnation, as it has prevailed in theChristian 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 itsrepresentations and sought to escape its conclusions. Many of itsstrongest advocates in every age have avowed it to be a fearfulmystery, resting on the inscrutable sovereignty of God, and beyondthe power of man's faculties to explain and justify. The dogma hasbeen eluded in two ways. Some have believed in the annihilation ofthe wicked after they should have undergone just punishmentproportioned to their sins. This supposition has had aconsiderable number of advocates. It was maintained, among others, by Arnobius, at the close of the third century, by the Socini, byDr. Hammond, and by some of the New England divines. 26 All thatneed be said in opposition to it is that it is an arbitrary deviceto avoid the intolerable horror of the doctrine of endless misery, unsupported by proof, extremely unsatisfactory in many of itsbearings, and really not needed to achieve the consummationdesired. Others have more wisely maintained that all will finally be saved:however severely and long they may justly suffer, they will atlast all be mercifully redeemed by God and admitted to the commonheaven. Defenders of the doctrine of ultimate universal salvationhave appeared from the beginning of Christian history. 27 Duringthe last century and a half their numbers have rapidlyincreased. 28 A dignified and influential class of theologians, represented by such names as Tillotson. Bahrdt, and Less, say thatthe threats of eternal punishment, in the Scriptures, areexaggerations to deter men from sin, and that God will not reallyexecute them, but will mercifully abate and limit them. 29 Anotherclass of theologians, much more free, consistent, and numerous, base their reception of the doctrine of final restoration onfigurative explanations of the scriptural language seeminglyopposed to it, and on arguments drawn from the character of God, from reason, and from morals. This view of the subject isspreading fast. All independent, genial, and cultivated thoughtnaturally leads to it. The central principles of the gospelnecessitate it. The spirit of the age cries for it. Before it theold antagonistic dogma must fall and perish from respect. Dr. Spring says, in reference to the hopeless condemnation of thewicked to hell, "It puts in requisition all our confidence 26 This theory bas been resuscitated and advocated within a fewyears by quite a number of writers, among whom may be specifiedthe 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 grosshorrors and unreasonableness of the usual view of this subject, bychanging the mechanical and arithmetical values of the terms forspiritual and religious values. They give the word "eternity" aqualitative instead of a quantitative meaning. The everlasting woeof the damned consists not in mechanical inflictions of tortureand numerical increments of duration, but in spiritual discord, alienation from God, a wretched state of being, with which timesand 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 awfulperplexities and misgivings as to the justice and goodness of Godnecessarily raised in them whenever they really face the darkproblems of their system of faith, 32 resolutely to ask whetherthere are any such problems in the actual government of God, oranywhere else, except in their own "Bodies of Divinity"! It is anextremely unfortunate and discreditable evasion of responsibilitywhen any man, especially when a teacher, takes for granted thereceived formularies handed down to him, and, instead of honestlyanalyzing their genuine significance and probing their foundationsto see if they be good and true, spends his genius in contrivingexcuses and supports for them. It is the very worst policy at this day to strive to fasten thedogma of eternal misery to the New Testament. If both must betaken or rejected together, an alternative which we emphaticallydeny, what sincere and earnest thinker now, whose will isunterrifiedly consecrated to truth, can be expected to hesitatelong? The doctrine is sustained in repute at present principallyfor two reasons. First, because it has been transmitted to us fromthe Church of the past as the established and authoritativedoctrine. It is yet technically current and popular because it hasbeen so: that is, it retains its place simply by right ofpossession. The question ought to be sincerely and universallyraised whether it is true or false. Then it will swiftly lose itsprestige and disappear. Secondly, it is upheld and patronized bymany as a useful instrument for frightening the people and throughtheir fears deterring them from sin. We have ourselves heardclergymen of high reputation say that it would never do to admit, before the people, that there is any chance whatever of penitenceand salvation beyond the grave, because they would be sure toabuse the hope as a sort of permission to indulge and continue insin. Thus to ignore the only solemn and worthy standard of judgingan abstract doctrine, namely, Is it a truth or a falsehood? andput it solely on grounds of working expediency, is disgraceful, contemptible, criminal. Watts exposes with well merited rebuke agross instance of pious frail in Burnet, who advised preachers toteach the eternity of future punishment whether they believed itor not. 33 It is by such a course that error and superstitionreign, that truckling conformity, intellectual disloyalty, moralindifference, vice, and infidelity, abound. It is practicalatheism, 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 asinexpedient in practice as it is wrong in theory. Experience andobservation show it to be as pernicious in its result as it isimmoral in its origin. Is a threat efficacious over men inproportion to its intrinsic terror, or in proportion as it ispersonally felt and feared by them? Do the menacing penalties of asin deter a man from it in proportion to their awfulness, or inproportion to his belief in their reality and unavoidableness?Eternal misery would be a threat of infinite frightfulness, if itwere realized and believed. But it is incredible. Some reject itwith indignation and an impetuous recoil that sends them much toofar towards antinomianism. Others let it float in the spectralbackground of imagination, the faint reflection of a disagreeableand fading dream. To all it is an unreality. An earnest belief ina sure retribution exactly limited to desert must be far moreeffective. If an individual had a profound conviction that forevery sin he committed he must suffer a million centuries ofinexpressible anguish, realizing that thought, would he commit asin? If he cannot appreciate that enormous penalty, much less can hethe infinite one, which is far more likely to shade off and blurout into a vague and remote nothing. Truth is an expression ofGod's will, which we are bound exclusively to accept and employregardless of consequences. When we do that, God, the author oftruth, is himself solely responsible for the consequences. Butwhen, thinking we can devise something that will work better, weuse some theory of our own, we are responsible for theconsequences. Let every one beware how he ventures to assume thatdread responsibility. It is surely folly as well as sin. Fornothing can work so well as truth, the simple, calm, living truth, which is a chime in the infinite harmony of morals and things. Itis only the morbid melodramatic tastes and incompetencies of anunfinished culture that make men think otherwise. The magnificentpoetry of the day of judgment an audience of five hundred thousandmillions gathered in one throng as the Judge rises to pronouncethe last oration over a dissolving universe takes possession ofthe fancy, and people conceive it so vividly, and are so moved byit, that they think they see it to be true. Grant for a moment the truth of the conception of hell as aphysical world of fiery torture full of the damned. Suppose thescene of probation over, hell filled with its prisoners shut up, banished and buried in the blackest deeps of space. Can it be leftthere forever? Can it be that the roar of its furnace shall rageon, and the wail of the execrable anguish ascend, eternally?Endeavor to realize in some faint degree what these questionsmean, and then answer. If anybody can find it in his heart or inhis head to say yes, and can gloat over the idea, and wish to haveit continually brandished in terrorem over the heads of thepeople, one feels impelled to declare that he of all men the mostneeds to be converted to the Christian spirit. An unmitigated hellof depravity, pain, and horror, would be Satan's victory and God'sdefeat; for the very wish of a Satanic being must be for theeverlasting prevalence of sin and wretchedness. As above theweltering hosts of the lost, each dreadful second, the iron clockof hell ticked the thunder word "eternity, " how would the devil onhis sulphurous dais shout in triumph! But if such a world of fire, crowded with the writhing damned, ever existed at all, could itexist forever? Could the saved be happy and passive in heaven when the muffledshrieks of their brethren, faint from the distance, fell on theirears? In tones of love and pity that would melt the verymountains, they would plead with God to pardon and free the lost. Many a mourning lover would realize the fable of the Thracian poetwho wandered into Hades searching for his Eurydice; many a heroicson would emulate the legend of the Grecian god who burst throughthe iron walls of Tartarus and rescued his mother, the unfortunateSemele, and led her in triumph up to heaven. Could the angels be contented when they contemplated the far offlurid 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 sympathetictears and to cool its burning brows with the fanning of their wings. Could Christ be satisfied? he who once was rich but for our sakesbecame poor? he whose loving soul breathed itself forth in thetender words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavyladen, and I will give you rest"? he who poured his blood onJudea's awful summit, be satisfied? Not until he had tried theefficacy of ten thousand fresh crucifixions, on as many newCalvaries, would he rest. Could God suffer it? God! with the full rivers of superfluousbliss rolling around thy throne, couldst thou look down and hearthy creatures calling thee Father, and see them plunging in a seaof fire eternally eternally eternally and never speak thepardoning word? It would not be like thee, it would be like thineadversary to do that. Not so wouldst thou do. But if Satan hadmillions of prodigals, snatched from the fold of thy family, shutup and tortured in hell, paternal yearnings after them would fillthy heart. Love's smiles would light the dread abyss where theygroan. Pity's tears would fall over it, shattered by the radianceinto rainbows. And through that illumination THOU wouldst descend, marching beneath the arch of its triumphal glories to the rescueof thy children! Therefore we rest in hope, knowing that "Thouwilt not leave our souls in hell. " CHAPTER V. THE FIVE THEORETIC MODES OF SALVATION. THE conceptions and fore feelings of immortality which men haveentertained have generally been accompanied by a sense ofuncertainty in regard to the nature of that inheritance, by aperception of contingent conditions, yielding a twofold fate ofbliss and woe, poised on the perilous hinge of circumstance orfreedom. Almost as often and profoundly, indeed, as man hasthought that he should live hereafter, that idea has been followedby the belief that if, on the one hand, salvation gleamed for himin the possible sky, on the other hand perdition yawned for him inthe probable abyss. Heaven and Hell are the light side and shadeside of the doctrine of a future life. Few questions are moreinteresting, as none can be more important, than that inquirywhich is about the salvation of the soul. The inherent reach ofthis inquiry, and the extent of its philosophical and literaryhistory, are great. But, by arranging under certain heads thevarious principal schemes of salvation which Christian teachershave from time to time presented for popular acceptance, andpassing them before the mind in order and in mutual lights, we canvery 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 theremoval of the soul's doom to misery beyond the grave, and thesecuring of its future blessedness. Heaven and hell are termsemployed with wide latitude and fluctuating boundaries of literaland figurative meaning; but their essential force is simply afuture life of wretchedness, a future life of joy; and salvation, in its prevailing theological sense, is the avoidance of that andthe gaining of this. We shall not attempt to present the differenttheories 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 perspicuousexhibition of their logical contents and practical bearings. The first scheme of Christian salvation to be noticed is the oneby which it is represented that the interference and suffering ofChrist, in itself, unconditionally saved all souls and emptiedhell forever. This theory arose in the minds of those who receivedit as the natural and consistent completion of the view they heldconcerning the nature and consequences of the fall of Adam, thecause and extent of the lost state of man. Adam, as the federalhead of humanity, represented and acted for his whole race: theresponsibility of his decision rested, the consequences of hisconduct would legitimately descend, it was thought, upon allmankind. If he had kept himself obedient through that easy yettremendous probation in Eden, he and all his children would havelived on earth eternally in perfect bliss. But, violating thecommandment of God, the burden of sin, with its terrible penalty, fell on him and his posterity. Every human being was henceforth tobe alien from the love of goodness and from the favor of God, hopelessly condemned to death and the pains of hell. The sin ofAdam, it was believed, thoroughly corrupted the nature of man, andincapacitated him from all successful efforts to save his soulfrom its awful doom. The infinite majesty of God's will, the lawof the universe, had been insulted by disobedience. The only justretribution was the suffering of an endless death. The adamantinesanctities of God's government made forgiveness impossible. Thusall men were lost, to be the prey of blackness, and fire, and theundying worm, through the remediless ages of eternity. Just thenGod had pity on the souls he had made, and himself came to therescue. 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, byhis death on the cross expiated all offences, satisfied the claimsof offended justice, vindicated the inexpressible sacredness ofthe law, and, at the same time, opened a way by which a full andfree reconciliation was extended to all. When the blood of Jesusflowed over the cross, it purchased the ransom of every sinner. AsJerome says, "it quenched the flaming sword at the entrance ofParadise. " The weary multitude of captives rose from their bed, shook off the fetters and stains of the pit, and made the cope ofheaven snowy with their white winged ascent. The prison house ofthe devil and his angels should be used no more to confine theguilty souls of men. 1 Their guilt was all washed away in the bloodof the Lamb. Their spirits, without exception, should follow tothe right hand of the Father, in the way marked out by theascending Redeemer. This is the first form of Universalism, theform in which it was held by several of the Fathers in the earlierages of the Church, and by the pioneers of that doctrine in moderntimes. Cyril of Jerusalem says, "Christ went into the under worldalone, but came out with many. " 2 Cyril of Alexandria says thatwhen Christ ascended from the under world he "emptied it, and leftthe devil there utterly alone. " 3 The opinion that the wholepopulation of Hades was released, is found in the lists of ancientheresies. 4 It was advanced by Clement, an Irish priest, antagonistof Boniface the famous Archbishop of Mentz, in the middle of theeighth century. He was deposed by the Council of Soissons, andafterwards anathematized by Pope Zachary. Gregory the Great alsorefers in one of his letters with extreme severity to twoecclesiastics, contemporaries of his own, who held the samebelief. Indeed, this conclusion is a necessary result of aconsistent development of the creed of the Orthodox Church, socalled. By the sin of one, even Adam, through the working ofabsolute justice, hell became the portion of all, irrespective ofany fault or virtue of theirs; so, by the voluntary sacrifice, theinfinite atonement, of one, even Christ, through the unspeakablemercy of God, salvation was effected for all, irrespective of anyvirtue or fault of theirs. One member of the scheme is the exactcounterpoise of the other; one doctrine cries out for andnecessitates the other. Those who accept the commonly receiveddogmas of original sin, total depravity, and universalcondemnation entailed upon all men in lineal descent from Adam, and the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the VicariousAtonement, are bound, by all the constructions of logic, to acceptthe scheme of salvation just set forth, namely, that the death ofChrist secured the deliverance of all unconditionally. We do notbelieve that doctrine, only because we do not believe the otherassociated doctrines out of which it springs and of whose systemit 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 helplessdepravity and ruin in the sin of the first man are, in essence, briefly these: First, we have never been able to perceive anyproof whatever of the truth of that dogma; and certainly the onusprobandi rests on the side of such an assumption. It arosepartially from a misinterpretation of the language of the Bible;and so far as it has a basis in Scripture, we are compelled byforce of evidence to regard it as a Jewish adoption of a paganerror without authority. Secondly, this doctrinal system seems tous equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seemsto trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, andspurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blackenand load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitoushorror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilfulbarbarity. How can men be guilty of a sin committed thousands ofyears before they were born, and deserve to be sent to hopelesshell for it? What justice is there in putting on one sinless headthe demerits of a world of reprobates, and then letting thecriminal go free because the innocent has suffered? A thirdobjection 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 BiblicalAdam is not at all a historical personage, but only a significantfigment of poetry. The common belief of the most authoritative menof science, that the human race has existed on this earth for avastly longer period than the Hebrew statement affirms, may yet becompletely established. It may also yet be acknowledged that eachdistinct race of men had its own Adam. 5 Then the dogmatictheology, based on the fall of our entire race into perdition inits primary representative, will, of course, crumble. The second doctrine of Christian salvation is a modification andlimitation of the previous one. This theory, like the former, presupposes that a burden of original sin and natural depravitytransmitted from the first man had doomed, and, unless preventedin some supernatural manner, would forever press, all souls downto the realms of ruin and woe; also that an infinite graciousnessin the bosom of the Godhead led Christ to offer himself as anexpiation for the sins, an atoning substitute for the condemnation, of men. But, according to the present view, this interferenceof Christ did not by itself save the lost: it only removedthe otherwise insuperable bar to forgiveness, and presentedto a chosen portion of mankind the means of experiencinga condition upon the realization of which, in each individualcase, the certainty of salvation depends. That condition is amysterious conversion, stirring the depths of the soul through aninspired faith in personal election by the unchanging decree ofGod. The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods ofsalvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume thatmankind are doomed to death and hell in consequence of the sin ofAdam, the one asserts that the interference of Christ of itselfsaved all souls, the other asserts that that interference cannotsave any soul except those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure, had from eternity arbitrarily elected. 6 This scheme grew directlyout of the dogma of fatalism, which sinks human freedom in Divinepredestination. God having solely of his 5 Burdach, Carus, Oken, Bayrhoffer, Agassiz. See Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vol. Iv. P. 28; Mott and Gliddon, Typesof Mankind, p. 338. 6 Confession of Faith of Westminster Divines, ch. Iii. Sect. 3. own will foreordained that a certain number of mankind should besaved, Christ died in order to pay the penalty of their sins andrender it possible for them to be forgiven and taken into heavenwithout violating the awful bond of justice. The benefits of theatonement, therefore, are limited to the elect. Nor is this to beregarded as an act of severity; on the contrary, it is an act ofunspeakable benevolence. For by the sin of Adam the whole race ofmen, without exception, were hateful to God, and justly sentencedto eternal damnation. When, consequently, he devised a plan ofredemption by which he could himself bear the guilt, and sufferthe agony, and pay the debt of a few, and thus ransom them fromtheir doom, the reprobates who were left had no right to complain, but the chosen were a monument of disinterested love, because allalike deserved the endless tortures of hell. According to thisconception, all men being by their ancestral act and inheritednature irretrievably lost, God's arbitrary pleasure was the cause, Christ's voluntary death was the means, by which a certain numberwere to be saved. What individuals should compose this portion ofthe race, was determined from eternity beyond all contingencies. The effect of faith and conversion, and of the new birth, is notto save the soul, but simply to convince the soul that it issaved. That is to say, a regenerating belief and love is not theefficient cause, it is merely the revealed assurance, ofsalvation, proving to the soul that feels it, by the testimony ofthe Holy Spirit, that it is of the chosen number. The preaching ofthe gospel is to be extended everywhere, not for the purpose ofsaving those who would otherwise be lost, but because itspresentation will awaken in the elect, and in them alone, thatresponsive experience which will reveal their election to them, and make them sure of it, already foretasting it; though it isthought that no one can be saved who is ignorant of the gospel: itis mysteriously ordered that the terms of the covenant shall bepreached 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, thewrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from theBible, 7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are itssufficient refutation and condemnation. If the death of Christ hassuch wondrous saving efficacy, and nothing else has, what keepshim from dying again to convince the unbelieving and to save thelost? What man is there who, if he knew that, after thirty yearsof suffering terminated by a fearful death, he should rise againinto boundless bliss and glory while rapt infinitude rung with thepaans of an applauding universe, and that by means of hishumiliation he could redeem countless millions from eternaltorture, would not with a joyous spring undertake the task? And isa common man better than Christ? The third general plan of Christian salvation which we are toconsider differs from the foregoing one in several essentialparticulars. It affirms the free will of man in opposition to afatal predestination. It declares that the atonement is sufficientto redeem not only a portion of our race, but all who will putthemselves in right spiritual relations with it. In a word, whileit admits that some will actually be lost forever, it asserts thatno one is doomed 7 Schweizer, Die Lehre des Apostels Paulus vom erlosenden TodeChristi. 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 sacrificeof the incarnate Deity vindicated the majesty of the law, appeasedthe 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 themselvesbefore the throne of mercy clothed in the righteousness andsprinkled with the blood of Christ. Here the appropriation of themerits of Christ, through an orthodox and vivifying faith, is thereal cause as well as the experimental assurance of salvation. This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in thewilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look onit 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 theirsouls to be saved. The vital condition of salvation is anappropriating faith in the vicarious atonement. Without this noone can be saved. Thus with one word and a single breath wholenations and races are whiffed into hell. All that the good heartedLuther could venture to say of Cicero, whom he deeply admired andloved, was the kind ejaculation, "I hope God will be merciful tohim!" To those who appreciate it with hostility, and look on allthings in its light, the thought that there can be no salvationexcept by belief in the expiatory death of Christ, hopelesslydooming all the heathen, 8 and all infant children, unless baptizedin a proxy faith, 9 builds an altar of blood among the stars andmakes the universe reek with horror. Other crimes, though stainedthrough with midnight dyes and heaped up to the brim of outrageousguilt, may be freely forgiven to him who comes heartily to creditthe vicarious death of the Savior; but he who does not trust inthat, though virtuous as man can be, must depart into theunappeasable fires. "Why this unintelligible crime of not seeingthe atonement happens to be the only sin for which there is noatonement, it is impossible to say. " Though this view of themethod, extent, and conditions of redemption is less revolting andincredible than the other, still, it does not seem to us that anyperson whose mental and moral nature is unprejudiced, healthy, andenlightened, and who will patiently study the subject, canpossibly accept either of them. The leading assumed doctrinescommon to them, out of which they severally spring, and on whichthey both rest, are not only unsupported by adequate proofs, butreally have no evidence at all, and are absurd in themselves, confounding the broadest distinctions in morals, and subvertingthe best established principles of natural religion. 10 The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicatesthe power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. Thisis the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state ofnature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all menare alienated from God, and by the universal original sinuniversally exposed to damnation, indeed, the helpless victims ofeternal misery. In the fulness of time, Christ appeared, andoffered himself to suffer in their stead to secure theirdeliverance. 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 powerfullyexposed in Bushnell's Discourse on the Atonement: God in Christ, pp. 193-202. original sin, and only that, thus taking away the absoluteimpossibility of salvation, and leaving every man in the worldfree to stand or fall, incur hell or win heaven, by his personalmerits. From that time any person who lived a perfectly holy lifewhich no man could find practically possible thereby securedeternal 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 oforiginal sin from all mankind, but made no provision for theirpersonal sins, so that practically, all men being voluntary aswell 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 bythe celebration of the mass to re enact, as often as it pleased, the tragedy of the crucifixion. In this service Christ is supposedliterally to be put to death afresh, and the merit of hissubstitutional sufferings is supposed to be placed to the accountof the Church. 11 As Sir Henry Wotton says, "One rosy drop fromJesus' heart Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire. " In one of the Decretals of Clement VI. , called "Extravagants, " itis asserted that "one drop of Christ's blood [una guttulasanguinis] being sufficient to redeem the whole human race, theremaining quantity which was shed in the garden and on the crosswas left as a legacy to the Church, to be a treasure whenceindulgences were to be drawn and administered by the Romanpontiffs. " Furthermore, saints and martyrs, by their constant selfdenial, voluntary sufferings, penances, and prayers, like Christ, do more good works than are necessary for their own salvation; andthe balance of merit the works of supererogation is likewiseaccredited to the Church. In this way a great reserved fund ofmerits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasurethey can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it inplace of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolvethem and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dreadmachinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale, heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. Butwhoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receivethe sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey thepriests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that thosewho neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost, by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, therebytypifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection andascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject asalike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd toconscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in historythrough the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy ofan interested body. There is not one text in the Bible whichaffords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughtypretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have theexclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It isincredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fatesforever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mereaccident of time 11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. Pars iii. Qu. 25, art. 1. and place, or at best on the moral contingence of theiracknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannicalhierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent oftheir lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. Oneis here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Manought to hear Poems. " The lines in Sophocles which declare thatthe initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life, but that all others shall be wretched, having been read toDiogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion, the notorious robber, be better after death than that ofEpaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" Itis also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all properappreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the grossmechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between thebad and the good, as if moral qualities were not personal, butmight be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as theaccounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoreticfalsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as itspractical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculousthis ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as statedby Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, haveentered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have, and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stakethe argument on one question. If there be no salvation save bybelieving and accepting the sacraments with the authority of theRomanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in ahundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved. Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelmingproportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonizeddrops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires ofdamnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that hebelieves? We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkablefor its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as thosewe have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, andseverity. The theory referred to promises the natural andinevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on twopositions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially andtemporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfectwisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of thisdoctrine point first to observation and experience, and declarethat no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable;those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, andhardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that maybe made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of thewhole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of theSpirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations. True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed bythe caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost tospiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religiousbelief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. Butthis, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it canendure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessednesscome with the morning dawn of a better world. Exact retributionsare awarded to all iniquity here; so 12 Julian, lib. Vi. Ix. that at the termination of the present state there is nothing toprevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. Thesubstantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good andright: only their action is perverted to evil. 13 This perversionwill cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus deathis the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions for hiscreatures, again they argue, must be purely gracious and blessed;for Nature, the Bible, and the Soul blend their ultimate teachingsin one affirmation that he is Love. Being omnipotent and ofperfect wisdom, nothing can withstand his decrees or thwart hisplans. His purpose, of course, must be fulfilled. There is everything to prove, and nothing, rightly understood, to disprove, thatthat purpose is the eternal blessedness of all his intelligentoffspring after death. Therefore, they think they are justified inconcluding, the laws of nature, God's regular habits and course ofgovernment, the normal arrangement and process of things, will ofthemselves work out the inevitable salvation of all mankind. Afterthe uproar and darkness, the peril and fear, of a tempestuousnight, the all embracing smile of daylight gradually spreads overthe world, and the turmoil silently subsides, and the scenesleeps. So after the sins and miseries, the condemnation and hell, of this state of existence, shall succeed the redemption, theholiness and happy peace, of heaven, into which all pass by theorder of nature, the original and undisturbed arrangement of thecreative Father. This view is advanced by some on grounds both ofrevelation and reason. It is the doctrine of those Beghards whotaught that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; that no one isdamned, neither Jew nor Saracen, because on the death of the bodythe soul returns to God. "14 But the proper doctrine of theUniversalist denomination is founded directly on Scripture, andseems now to be simply the absolute certainty of final salvationfor all. Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will ofGod, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner, by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwiseendless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossilnow. 15 It will be noticed that by this view salvation is an unlimitednecessity, not a contingency, a boon thrown to all, and which noone 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 treadWith all their banners furl'd. " This theory contains elements, it seems to us, both of truth andfalsehood. It casts off gross mistakes, announces some fundamentalrealities, overlooks, perverts, exaggerates, some essential factsin the case. There is so much in it that is grateful and beautifulthat we cannot wonder at its reception where the tender instinctsof the heart are stronger than the stern decisions of theconscience, where the kindly sentiments usurp the province of thecritical reason and sit in judgment upon evidence for theconstruction of a dogmatic creed. We 13 Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. X. Art. Xvi. : Character andits 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 unqualifiedconclusion, not only because there is no direct evidence for it, but because there are many potent presumptions against it. It isnot built upon the facts of our consciousness and presentexperience, but is resolutely constructed in defiance of them byan arbitrary process of assumption and inference; for since God'sperfections are as absolute now as they ever can be, and he nowpermits sin and misery, there is no impossibility that they willbe permitted for a season hereafter. If they are necessary now, they may be necessary hereafter. An experience of salvation byall, regardless of what they do or what they leave undone, wouldalso defeat what we have always considered the chief final causeof man, namely, the self determined resistance of Evil and choiceof Good, the free formation of virtuous character. The plan of anecessary and indiscriminate redemption likewise breaks theevident continuity of life, ignores the lineal causative power ofexperience, whereby each moment partially produces and moulds thenext, destroys the probationary nature of our lot, and palsies thestrength of moral motive. It is furthermore the height ofinjustice, awarding to all men the same condition, remorselesslyswallowing up their infinite differences, making sin and virtue, sloth and toil, exactly alike in the end. Whose earnestly embracesthe theory, and meditates much upon it, and reasons closely, willbe likely to become an Antinomian. It overlooks the loud, omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state isincomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visiblesegment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisibleworld to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses willsatisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. We rejectthis scheme, as to its distinctive feature, for all those reasonswhich 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 conditionsof salvation or of reprobation. Swedenborg, who teaches that manin the future state is the son of his own deeds in the presentstate, says he once saw Melancthon in hell, writing, "Faith alonesaves, " the words fading out as fast as written, becauseexpressive of a falsehood! It is not belief, but love, thatdominates 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 relationswith truth, beauty, goodness, or in vitiated relations with them, so, and to that extent, is the soul saved or lost. This is not amatter of arbitrary determination on one hand; and of helplesssubmission on the other: it is a matter of Divine permission onone hand, and of free, though sometimes unintelligent andmistaken, choice on the other. The only perdition is to be out oftune 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 normalefficiency of the faculties, the restoration of their harmony withthe moral law, the recommencement of their action in unison withthe will of God. When a soul, through its exposure and freedom, becomes and experiences what God did not intend and is not pleasedwith, what his creative and executive arrangements are notpurposely 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 aspirationfill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in itsexperience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims ofits existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmoniousfruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, allthings work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beamsof the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnationand misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever andwherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations withthe universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienatedmournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces ofthings, produces unrest and suffering with the same naturalnecessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances depositspoison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation andwretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice, impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of theseevils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holyand sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven isnot, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawingfires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as itis to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseasedcondition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness andretribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day torturesa sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, itsindwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it mayreside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision withdelight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmoniousblessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powersand relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of somephysical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain sideto a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just asbadly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, whereverhe may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so tospeak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions ofsalvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle, but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of theuniverse. "Every devil, " Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough oftorture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumferenceto afflict him. " If there are, as there may be, two entirelyseparate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclosehell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into theother, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perditionor of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but thecharacteristic condition of the soul, which produces itsexperience and decides its destination, that is the essentialthing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening isintolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but mostwelcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects, operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostileand retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify thesoul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing istransfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven. We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles ofthis theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience towhich souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on themby an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by freeagency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritualworld. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particularlocalities into which spirits are thrust, nor states ofconsciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character. Thirdly, condemnation, or justification, is not absolute andcomplete, equalizing all on each side of a given line, but is athing of degrees, not exactly the same in any two individuals, or in the same person at all times. Fourthly, we have no reasonto suppose that probation closes with the closing of thepresent life; but every relevant consideration leads us toconclude that the same great constitution of laws pervades allworlds and reigns throughout eternity, so that the fate of soulsis not unchangeably fixed at death. No analogy indicates thatafter death all will be thoroughly different from what it isbefore death. Rather do all analogies argue that the hell andheaven of the future will be the aggravation, or mitigation, orcontinuation, of the perdition and salvation of the present. It isaltogether a sentence of exact right according to character, amatter of personal achievement depending upon freedom, anexperience of inward elements and states, a thing of degrees, anda subject of continued probation. The condition of the heathen nations in reference to salvation issatisfactory only in the light of the foregoing theory. If aperson is what God wishes, as shown by his revealed will in themodel of Christ, pure, loving, devout, wise, and earnest, he issaved, whether he ever heard of Christ or not. Are Plato andAristides, Cato and Antoninus, to be damned, while Pope AlexanderVI. And King Philip II are saved, because those gloriouscharacters merely lived at the then height of attainableexcellence, but these fanatic scoundrels made a technicalprofession of Christianity? The "Athanasian" creed asserts thatwhoever doth not fully believe its dogmas "shall without doubtperish everlastingly. " And the eighteenth article in the creed ofthe Church of England declares "them accursed who presume to saythat any man can be saved by diligently framing his life accordingto the law or sect which he professeth, and the light ofnature. "16 Another particular in which the present view of salvation issatisfactory, in opposition to the other theories, is in leavingthe personal nature of sin clear, the realm of personalresponsibility unconfused. Why should a system of thought be setup and adhered to in religion that would be instantly anduniversally scouted at if applied to any other subject? 17 "No onedreams that the sin of an unexercised intellect, of grossignorance, can be pardoned only through faith in the sacrifice ofsome incarnation of the Perfect Reason. No one expects to be toldthat the violation of the bodily laws can be forgiven by theInfinite Creator only on the ground that some perfect physicianhonors them by obedience and death. It is by opening the mind toGod's published truth, and by conformity to the discoveredphilosophical 16 Arnauld, Emes, Goeze, and others, have written volumes to provethe indiscriminate damnation of the heathen. On the contrary, Muller, in his "Diss. De Paganorum poet Mortem Conditione, " andMarmontel, in his "Belisaire, " take a more favorable view of thefate of the ethnic world. The best work on the subject a work ofgreat geniality and ability is Eberhard's "Neue Apologie desSocrates. " Also see Knapp's Christian Theology, sect. Lxxxviii. 17 Martineau, Studies of Christianity, pp. 153-176: MediatorialReligion. Ibid. Pp. 468-477: Sin What it is, What it is not. order, or the reception of the adopted remedy, that the mind andthe frame experience new life. And our souls are redeemed, not byany expiation on account of which penalties are lifted, but byreception of spiritual truth and consecration of will, which pushaway penalties by wholesome life. " 18 The awful inviolability of justice is shown by the eternal courseof God's laws bringing the exactly deserved penalty upon everysoul that sinneth. Whoever breaks a Divine decree puts all sacredthings in antagonism to him, and the precise punishment of hisoffences not the worth of worlds nor the blood of angels canavert. The boundless mercy of God, his atoning love, is shown bythe absence of all vindictiveness from his judgments, theirrestorative aim and tendency. Whenever the sinner repents, reforms, puts himself in a right attitude, God is waiting topardon and bless him, the sun shines and the happy heart is gladas at first, the cloudy screen of sin and fear and retributivealienation being removed. This view, when appreciated, affords asimpressive a sanction to law, and as affecting an exhibition oflove, as are theoretically ascribed to the doctrine of vicariousexpiation. The infinite sanctity of justice and the fathomlesslove of God are certainly much more plainly and satisfactorilyshown by the righteous nature and beneficent operation of the law, than by its terrible severity and arbitrary subversion. Accordingto the present view, the relation of Christ to human redemption isas simple and rational as it is divinely appointed and perfectlyfulfilled. Accredited with miraculous seals, presenting the mostpathetic and inspiring motives, he reveals the truths andexemplifies the virtues which, when adopted, regenerate thesprings of faith and character, rectify the lines of conduct, andchange men from sinful and wretched to saintly and blessed. Hestirs the stagnant soul, that man may replunge into his nativeself, and rise redeemed. For the more distinct comprehension and remembrance of the schemesof Christian salvation we have been considering, it may be well torecapitulate them. The first theory is this: When, by the fall of Adam, all men wereutterly lost and doomed to hell forever, the vicarious sufferingsof Christ cancelled sin, and unconditionally purchased and savedall. This was the original development of Universalism. It sprangconsistently from Augustinian grounds. It was taught by a party inthe Church of the first centuries, was afterwards repeatedlycondemned as a heresy by popes and by councils, and was revived byKelly, Murray, and others. We are not aware that it now has anyavowed disciples. The second conception is, in substance, that God, foreseeing frometernity the fall of Adam and the consequent damnation of hisposterity, arbitrarily elected a portion of them to salvation, leaving the rest to their fate; and the vicarious sufferings ofChrist were the only possible means of carrying that decree intoeffect. This is the Augustinian and Calvinistic theology, and hashad a very extensive prevalence among Christians. Many churchcreeds still embody the doctrine; but in its original, uncompromising form it is rapidly fading from belief. Even now fewpersons 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 reston them attributes to the vicarious sufferings of Christ aconditional efficacy, depending upon personal faith. Every one whowill heartily believe in the substitutional death of Christ, andtrust in his atoning merits, shall thereby be saved. This was thesystem of Pelagius, Arminius, Luther. It prevails now in the socalled Evangelical Churches more generally than any other system. The fourth received method of salvation, assuming the samepremises which the three foregoing schemes assume, namely, thatthrough the fall all men are eternally sentenced to hell, declaresthat, by Christ's vicarious sufferings, power is given to theChurch, a priestly hierarchy, to save such as confess herauthority and observe her rites. All others must continue lost. 19This theory early began to be constructed and broached by theFathers. It is held by the Roman Catholic Church, and by all theconsistent portion of the Episcopalian. A part of the Baptistdenomination also through their popular preachers, if not in theirrecognised symbols assert the indispensableness of ritual baptismto salvation. The fifth view of the problem is that no soul is lost or doomedexcept so far as it is personally, voluntarily depraved andsinful. And even to that extent, and in that sense, it can becalled lost only in the present life. After death every soul isfreed from evil, and ushered at once into heaven. This is thedistinctive doctrine of the ultra Universalists. It isdisappearing from among its recent advocates. As a body they havealready 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, bythe immutable laws which the Creator has established in and overhis works and creatures, a free soul may choose good or evil, truth or falsehood, love or hate, beneficence or iniquity. Just sofar and just so long as it partakes of the former it is saved; asit partakes of the latter it is lost, that is, alienates the favorof God, forfeits so much of the benefits of creation and of theblessings of being. The conditions and means of repentance, reformation, regeneration, are always within its power, the futurestate being but the unencumbered, more favorable experience of thespiritual elements of the present, under the same Divineconstitution and laws. This is the common belief of Unitarians andUniversalists, the latter alone teaching it as a sure doctrine ofRevelation. Salvation by purchase, by the redeeming blood of Christ; salvationby election, by the independent decree of God, sealed by the bloodof Christ; salvation by faith, by an appropriating faith in theblood of Christ; salvation by the Church, by the sacraments madeefficacious to that end by the blood of Christ; salvation bynature, by the irresistible working of the natural order ofthings, declared by the teachings of Christ; salvation by aresurrection from the dead, miraculously effected by the delegatedpower of Christ; salvation by character, by conformity ofcharacter to the spiritual laws of the universe, to the nature andwill of God, revealed, urged, exemplified, by the whole mission ofChrist; these are the different theories 19 Adams, Mercy to Babes. (A plea for the baptism of infants, thatthey 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 invarious forms, all the theoretic modes of salvation acknowledgedwithin it, and some others in addition. The creed and practice ofthe Mohammedans afford a more unflinching embodiment of theconception of salvation by election than is furnished anywhereelse. Islam denotes Fate. All is predestinated and follows on ininevitable sequence. No modifying influence is possible. Can abreath move Mount Kaf? The chosen of Allah shall believe; therejected of Allah shall deny. Every believer's bower is bloomingfor him in Paradise; every unbeliever's bed is burning for him inhell. And nothing whatever can avail to change the persons or thetotal 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 theBuddhist thinker relies on obtaining salvation by knowledge. Lifein 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 pietycan ever release him. Knowledge alone can do it: an unsulliedintellectual vision and a free intellectual grasp of truth andlove alone can rescue him from the turbid sea of forms andstruggles. "As a lump of salt is of uniform taste within andwithout, so the soul is nothing but intelligence. "21 If the soulbe an entire mass of intelligence, a current of ideas, its realsalvation depends on its becoming pure and eternal truth withoutmixture of falsehood or of emotional disturbance. He "must freehimself from virtues as well as from sins; for the confinement offetters is the same whether the chain be of gold or of iron. "22Accordingly, the Hindu, to secure emancipation, planes down themountainous thoughts and passions of his soul to a desert level ofindifferent insight. And when, in direct personal knowledge, freefrom joy and sorrow, free from good and ill, he gazes into thelimitless abyss of Divine truth, then he is sure of the bosom ofBrahm, the door of Nirwana. Then the wheel of the Brahmanic Ixionceases revolving, and the Buddhist Ahasuerus flings away hisstaff; for salvation is attained. The conception of salvation by ritual works based on faith eitherfaith in Deity or in some redemptive agency is exhibited all overthe world. Hani, a Hindu devotee, dwelt in a thicket, and repeatedthe name of Krishna a hundred thousand times each day, 23 and thussaved his soul. The saintly Muni Shukadev said, as is written inthe most popular religious authority of India, "Who evenignorantly sing the praises of Krishna undoubtedly obtain finalbeatitude; just as, if one ignorant of the properties of nectarshould drink it, he would still become immortal. Whoever worshipsHari, 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 himwho approaches it unwillingly. "25 Nothing is more common in thesacred writings of the Hindus than the promise that "whoever readsor hears this narrative with a devout mind shall receive finalbeatitude. " Millions on millions of these docile and abjectdevotees 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, asif it were an omnipotent amulet. Another meditates on some mystictheme, as if musing were a resistless spell of silent exorcism andinvocation. Another pierces himself with red hot irons, as ifvoluntary pain endured now could accumulate merit for him and buyoff future inflictions. It is surprising to what an extent men's efforts for salvationseem underlaid by conceptions of propitiation, the placation of ahatred, 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 hideousidol of his choice. The fakir, swung upon sharp hooks, revolvesslowly round a fire. The monk wears a hair shirt, and flagellateshimself until blood trickles across the floor of his cell. ThePortuguese sailor in a storm takes a leaden saint from his bosomand kneels before it for safety. The offending Bushman crawls inthe dust and shudders as he seeks to avert the fury of the fetichwhich he has carved and set in a tree. The wounded brigand in theApennines, with unnumbered robberies and murders on his soul, finds perfect ease to his conscience as his glazing eye falls on acarefully treasured picture of the Virgin, and he expires in atriumph of faith, saying, "Sweet Mother of God, intercede for me. "The Calvinistic convert, about to be executed for his fearfulcrimes, kneels at the foot of the gallows, and exclaims, as in arecent well known instance, "I hold the blood of Christ between mysoul and the flaming face of God, and die happy, assured that I amgoing to heaven. " It is all a terrible delusion, arising from perverted sentimentand degraded thought. Of the five theoretical modes of salvationtaught in the world, Election, Faith, Works, Knowledge, Harmony, one alone is real and divine, although it contains principlestaken from all the rest and blended with its own. There is nosalvation by foregone election; for that would dethrone the morallaws and deify caprice. There is no salvation by dogmatic faith;because faith is not a matter of will, but of evidence, not withinman's own power, and a thousand varieties of faith arenecessitated among men. There is no salvation by determinateworks; for works are measurable quantities, whose rewards andpunishments are meted and finally spent, but salvation isqualitative and infinite. There is no salvation by intellectualknowledge; for knowledge is sight, not being, an accident, not anessence, an attribute of one faculty, not a right state and rulingforce in all. The true salvation is by harmony; for harmony of allthe forces of the soul with themselves and with all related forcesbeyond, harmony of the individual will with the Divine will, harmony of personal action with the universal activity, what othernegation of perdition is possible? what other definition andaffirmation of salvation conceivable? By the Creator's fiat, manis first elected to be. By the guiding stimulus of faith, he isnext animated to spiritual exertion. By the performance of goodworks, he then brings his moral nature into beautiful form andattitude. By knowledge of truth, he furthermore sees how todirect, govern, and attune himself. And finally, by theaccomplishment of all this in the organized harmony of a wise andholy soul, there results that state of being whose passiveconditions constitute salvation, and whose active experience iseternal life. CHAPTER VI. RECOGNITION OF FRIENDS IN A FUTURE LIFE. OF all the sorrows incident to human life, none is so penetratingto gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets, and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearesttreasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of allthe questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for asolution, beseeching the oracles of the universe for a response, none can have a more intense interest than gathers about theirrepressible inquiry, "Shall we ever meet again, and know, thefriends we have lost? somewhere in the ample creation and in theboundless ages, join, with the old familiar love, our long parted, fondly cherished, never forgotten dead?" The grief of bereavementand the desire of reunion are experienced in an endless diversityof degrees by different persons, according as they are careless, hard, and sense bound, or thoughtful, sympathizing, andimaginative; undisciplined by the mysteries and afflictions of ourmortal destiny, or profoundly tried by the disappointments andprophecies of time and fate; and as they are shadowed by the gloomof despair, or cheered by the radiance of belief. But to all whofeel, even the least, the uncertain but deep monitions of thesilent pall, the sad procession, and the burial mound, theimpressive problem must occur, with frequency and power, Does thegrave 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 pantheisticabsorption, it is supposable that, surviving the blow of death, our spirits may return to God and run their endless course indivine 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 aspiretogether along the interminable gradations of the world to come. If the former supposition be true, and the farewell of the dyingis the announcement of an irrevocable separation, then the tearswe shed over the shrouded clay, once so prized, should bedistillations from Lethe's flood, to make us forget all. But ifthe latter be true, then our deadly seeming losses are as thepartings of travellers at night to meet in the morning; and, asfriend after friend retires, we should sigh to each departingspirit a kind adieu till we meet again, and let pleasing memoriesof them linger to mingle in the sacred day dreams of remaininglife. Evidently it is of much importance to a man which of these viewshe shall take; for each exerts a distinctive influence in regardto his peace of mind, his moral strength, and his religiouscharacter. On one who believes that hereafter, beyond all thepartings in this land of tombs, he shall never meet the dearcompanions 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 aglory nothing can ever replace, and leaving in his heart awretched void nothing can ever fill. Henceforth he will bedeprived mostly for all felt connection between them is hopelesslysundered of the good influences they exerted on him when present:he must try, by all expedients, to forget them; think no more oftheir virtues, their welcome voices and kindly deeds; wipe fromthe tablets of his soul all fond records of their united happydays; look not to the future, let the past be as though it hadnever been, and absorb his thoughts and feelings in the turmoil ofthe present. This is his only course; and even then, if true tothe holiest instincts of his soul, he will find the fatalseparation 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 worldresigning. " But to him who earnestly expects soon to be restored under fairerauspices and in a deathless world to those from whom he parted ashe laid their crumbling bodies in the earth, the death of friendswill come as a message from the Great Father, a message solemn yetkind, laden indeed with natural sadness yet brightened by surepromise and followed by heavenly compensations. If his tears flow, they flow not in scalding bitterness from the Marah fountain ofdespair, but in chastened joy from the smitten rock of faith. Sofar from endeavoring to forget the departed, he will cling totheir memories with redoubled tenderness, as a sacred trust and aredeeming power. They will be more precious to him than ever, stronger to purify and animate. Their saintly examples willattract him as never before, and their celestial voices plead fromon high to win him to virtue and to heaven. The constant thoughtof seeing them once more, and wafting in their arms through theenchanted spaces of Paradise, will wield a sanctifying force overhis spirit. They will make the invisible sphere a peopled realityto him, and draw him to God by the diffused bonds of a spiritualacquaintance and an eternal love. Since the result in which a man rests on this subject, believingor disbelieving that he shall recognise his beloved ones the otherside of the grave, exerts a deep influence on him, in one casedisheartening, in the other uplifting, it is incumbent on us toinvestigate the subject, try to get at the truth, clear it up, andappreciate it as well as we can. It is a theme to interest us all. Who has not endeared relatives, choice friends, freshly or longago removed from this earth into the unknown clime? In a littlewhile, as the ravaging reaper sweeps on his way, who will not havestill more there, or be there himself? Whether old acquaintanceshall be all forgot or be well remembered there, is an inquirywhich must profoundly interest all who have hearts to love theircompanions, and minds to perceive the creeping shadows of mysterydrawing over us as we approach the sure destiny of age and the dimconfines of the world. It is a theme, far removed from noisystrifes and vain shows, penetrating that mysterious essence ofaffection and thought which we are. The thing of first importanceis not the conclusion we reach, but the spirit in which we seekand hold it. The Christian says to his friend, "Our souls will beunited in yonder heaven. " Danton, with a horrible travesty, saidto his comrades on the scaffold, "Our heads will meet in thatsack. " Before engaging directly in the discussion, it will be interestingto notice, for an instant, the verdict which history, in thespontaneous suppositions and rude speculations of ancient peoples, pronounces on this subject. 1 Among their various opinions aboutthe state after death, it is a prominent circumstance that theygenerally agree in conceiving it as a social state in whichpersonal likenesses and memories are retained, fellow countrymenare grouped together, and friends united. This is minutely true ofthose nations with the details of whose faith we are acquainted, and is implied in the general belief of all others, except thosewho expected the individual spirit to be absorbed in the soul ofthe universe. Homer shows Ulysses and Virgil in like manner showsAneas upon his entrance into the other world mutually recognisinghis old comrades and recognised by them. The two heroes whoseinseparable friendship on earth was proverbial are still togetherin Elysium: "Then, side by side, along the dreary coast Advanced Achilles' andPatroclus' ghost, A friendly pair. " In this representation that there was a full recognition ofacquaintances, all the accounts of the other world given in Greekand Roman literature harmonize. The same is true of the accountscontained in the literature of the ancient Hebrews. In the Book ofGenesis, when Jacob hears of the death of his favorite child, heexclaims, "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. Themonarch shades in the under world are pictured by Isaiah asrecognising the shade of the king of Babylon and rising from theirsombre thrones to greet him with mockery. Ezekiel shows us eachpeople of the heathen nations in the under world in a company bythemselves. When David's child died, the king sorrowfullyexclaimed, "He will not return to me; but I shall go to him. " Allthese passages are based on the conception of a gloomysubterranean abode where the ghosts of the dead are reunited aftertheir separation at death on earth. An old commentator on theKoran says a Mohammedan priest was once asked how the blessed inparadise could be happy when missing some near relative or dearfriend whom they were thus forced to suppose in hell. He replied, God will either cause believers to forget such persons or else torest in expectation of their coming. The anecdote showsaffectingly that the same yearning heart and curiosity arepossessed by Moslem and Christian. A still more impressive case inpoint is furnished by a picture in a Buddhist temple in China. Thepainting represents the story of the priest Lo Puh, who, onpassing 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, andintercessions, rescued her. The picture vividly portraying thewhole story may be seen and studied at the present time byChristian missionaries who enter that temple of the benevolentBuddha. 2 From the faith of many other nations illustrations mightbe brought of the same fact, that the great common instinct whichhas led men to believe in a future life has at the same timecaused them to believe that in that life there would be a unionand recognition of friends. Let this far reaching historical factbe taken at its just value, 1 Alexius, Tod and Wiedersehen. Eine Gedankenfolge der bestenSchriftsteller aller Zeiten und Volker. 2 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 211. while we proceed to the labor in hand. The fact referred to is ofsome value, because, being an expression of the heart of man asGod 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 presentrelated facts of the case; argue from what they now know; test thequestion by induction and inference. Let us see to what resultsthey will thus be led. In the first place, we learn uponreflection that we now distinguish each other by the outward form, physical proportion, and combination of looks, tones of voice, andother the like particulars. Every one has his individuality inthese respects, by which he is separable from others. It may behastily inferred, then, that if we are to know our friendshereafter it will be through the retention or the recovery oftheir sensible peculiarities. Accordingly, many believe the soulto be a perfect reflection or immaterial fac simile of the body, the exact correspondence in shadowy outline of its grosstabernacle, and consequently at once recognizable in thedisembodied state. The literature of Christendom we may almost sayof the world teems with exemplifications of this idea. Others, arguing from the same acknowledged premises, conclude that futurerecognition will be secured by the resurrection of the materialbody as it was in all its perfection, in renovated and unfadingprime. But, leaving out of view the inherent absurdity of thedoctrine of a physical resurrection, there is a fatal difficultyin the way of both these supposititious modes of mutual knowledgein another world. It is this. The outward form, features, andexpression sometimes alter so thoroughly that it is impossible forus to recognise our once most intimate companions. Cases are notrare of this kind. Let one pass in absence from childhood tomaturity, and who that had not seen him in the mean time couldtell that it was he? The trouble arising thence is finelyillustrated by Shakspeare in the motherly solicitude of Constance, who, on learning that her young son has been imprisoned by hisuncle, King John, and will probably be kept until he pines todeath, cries in anguish to her confessor, "Father cardinal, I have heard you sayThat 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 budAnd 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 heavenI shall not know him: therefore never, neverMust 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 anyresemblance of the spirit to it. Besides, not the faintest proofcan be adduced of any such perceptible correspondence subsistingbetween them. Turning again to the facts of experience, we find that it is notalone, nor indeed chiefly, by their visible forms and featuresthat we know our chosen ones. We also, and far more truly, knowthem by the traits of their characters, the elements of theirlives, the effluence of their spirits, the magic atmosphere whichsurrounds them, the electric thrill and communication which vivifyand conjoin our souls. And even in the exterior, that which mostreveals and distinguishes each is not the shape, but theexpression, the lights and shades, reflected out from the immortalspirit shrined within. We know each other really by the mysteriousmotions of our souls. And all these things endure and actuninterrupted though the fleshly frame alter a thousand times ordissolve in its native dust. The knowledge of a friend, then, being independent of the body, spirits may be recognised in thefuture state by the associations mutually surrounding them, thefeelings connecting them. Amidst all the innumerable throngingmultitudes, through all the immeasurable intervening heights anddepths, of the immaterial world, remembered and desired companionsmay be selected and united by inward laws that act with the easeand precision of chemical affinities. We may therefore recogniseeach other by the feelings which now connect us, and which shallspontaneously kindle and interchange when we meet in heaven, asthe signs of our former communion. It needs but little thought to perceive that by this view futurerecognition is conditional, being made to depend on the permanenceof our sympathies: there must be the same mutual relations, affinities, fitness to awaken the same emotions upon approachingeach other's sphere, or we shall neither know nor be known. But infact our sympathies and aversions change as much as our outwardappearance does. The vices and virtues, loves and hatreds, of ourhearts alter, the peculiar characteristics of our souls undergo asgreat a transformation, sometimes, as thorough a revolution, asthe body does in the interval between childhood and manhood. Thesechanges going on in our associates frequently change our feelingstowards them, heightening or diminishing our affection, creating anew interest, destroying an old one, now making enemies lovers, and now thoroughly alienating very friends. Such fundamentalalterations of character may occur in us, or in our friend, beforewe meet in the unseen state, that we shall no more recognise eachother's spirits than we should know each other on earth after aseparation in which our bodily appearances and voices had beenentirely changed. These considerations would induce us to thinkthat recognition hereafter is not sure, but turns on the conditionthat we preserve a remembrance, desire, and adaptedness for oneanother. If now the critical inquirer shall say there is no evidence, andit 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 maybe identified, furthermore, if he shall maintain that the doctrineof the revelation and recognition of the souls of friends inanother life by an instinctive feeling, a mysterious attractionand response, is fanciful, an overdrawn conclusion of theimagination, not warranted by a stern induction of the averagerealities of the subject, and if he shall then ask, how are we todistinguish our former acquaintances among the hosts of heaven?there is one more fact of experience which meets the case andanswers his demand. When long absence and great exposures havewiped off all the marks by which old companions knew each other, it has frequently happened that they have met and conversed withindifference, each being ignorant of whom the other was; and so ithas continued until, by some indirect means, some accidentalallusion, or the agency of a third person, they have been suddenlyrevealed. Then, with throbbing hearts, in tears and rapture, theyhave rushed into each other's arms, with an instantaneousrecurrence of their early friendship in all its original warmth, fulness, and flooding associations. Many such instances arerelated in books of romance with strict truth to the actualoccurrences of life. Several instances of it are authenticated inthe early history of America, when children, torn from their homesby the Indians, were recovered by their parents after twenty orthirty years had elapsed and they were identified by circumstantialevidence. 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 anddevotion as though there were no outward change and they hadknown one another at sight. So, in the life beyond thegrave, if we are not able to recognise our earthly companionsdirectly, either by spiritual sight or by intuitive feeling, wemay obtain knowledge of each other indirectly by comparison ofcommon recollections, or by the mediation of angels, or by someother Divine arrangement especially prepared for that purpose. Andtherefore, whether in heaven we look or feel as we do here or not, whether there be any provision in our present constitution forfuture recognition or not, is of no consequence. In a thousandways the defect can be remedied, if such be the will of God. Andthat such is his will every relevant fact and consideration wouldseem to prove. It is a consistent and seemingly requisitecontinuation and completion of that great scheme of which thislife is a part. It is an apparently essential element andfulfilment of the wonderful apparatus of retribution, reward, anddiscipline, intended to educate us as members of God's eternalfamily. Because from the little which we now understand we cannotinfer with plainness and certainty the precise means and method bywhich we can discriminate our friends in heaven need be noobstacle to believing the fact itself; for there are millions ofundoubted truths whose conditions and ways of operation we cannowise fathom. Upon the whole, then, we conclude that we cannot byour mere understandings decide with certainty the questionconcerning future recognition; but we are justified in trusting tothe accuracy of that doctrine, since it rests safely with the freepleasure of God, who is both infinitely able and disposed to dowhat is best, and we cannot help believing that it is best for usto be with and love hereafter those whom we are with and lovehere. 3 There is a way of dealing with the general subject before uswholly different from the course thus far pursued. Ceasing to actthe philosopher, laying aside all arguments and theories, all dryspeculations, we may come as simple believers to the ChristianScriptures and investigate their teachings to accept whatever theypronounce as the word of God's truth. Let us see to what resultswe shall thus be led. Searching the New Testament to learn itsdoctrine 3 Munch, Werden wir uns wiedersehen nach dem Tode. This work, based on the Kantian philosophy, denies future recognition. Thereis an able reply to it by Vogel, Ueber die Hoffnung desWiedersehens. in regard to reunion in a future state, we are very soon struckwith surprise at the mysterious reserve, so characteristic of itspages, on this entire theme. Instead of a full and minuterevelation blazing along the track of the gospel pens, a fewfragmentary intimations, incidental hints, scattered here andthere, are the substance of all that it expressly says. But thoughlittle is directly declared, yet much is plainly implied:especially the one great inference with which we are now concernedmay be unequivocally and repeatedly drawn. In the parable of theRich Man and the Beggar the Savior pictures forth the recognitionof their souls in the disembodied state. Dives also is describedas recollecting with intense interest, with the most anxioussympathy, his endangered brethren on earth. Although this occursin a parable, yet it is likely that so prominent and vital afeature of it would be moulded, as to its essential significance, in accordance with what the author intended should be received astruth. Jesus also speaks of many who should come from the east andthe west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in thekingdom of heaven; from which it would appear that the patriarchsare together in fellowship and that the righteous of after timeswere to be received with them in mutual acquaintance. On the Mountof Transfiguration the witnessing disciples saw Moses and Eliastogether with Jesus, and recognised them, probably from theirresemblance to traditional descriptions of them. Jesus alwaysrepresented the future state as a society. He said to hisfollowers, "I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am thereye may be also;" and he prayed to his Father that his disciplesmight be with him where he was going. At another time he declaredof little children, "Their angels always behold the face of myFather in heaven:" he also taught that "there is joy in heavenover every sinner that repenteth;" passages that presuppose such acommunity of faculties, sympathies, in heaven and earth, in angelsand men, as certainly implies the doctrine of continued knowledgeand fellowship. When heaven was opened before the dying Stephen, he saw and instantly knew his Divine Master, the Lord Jesus, andcalled to him to welcome his ascending spirit. Paul writes to theThessalonians that he would not have them sorrow concerning thedead as those who have no hope, assuring them that when Christreappears they shall all be united again. In the Apocalypse, Johnsaw, in a vision, the souls of the martyrs, who had died for thefaith of the gospel, together, under the altar. From community ofsuffering and a common abode together in heaven we may safelyinfer their recognition of each other. The Gospels declare thatChrist after his death remembered his disciples and came back tothem to assure them that they should rejoin him on high; and theapostles assert that we are to be with Christ and to be like himin the future state. It follows from the admission of thesedeclarations that we shall remember our friends and be united withthem in conscious knowledge. Few, and brief, and vague as theutterances of the Scriptures are in relation to this theme, theynecessarily involve all the results of an avowed doctrine. Theyundeniably involve the supposition that in the other life we shallbe conscious personalities as here, retaining our memories andconstituting a society. From these implications the fact of thefuture recognition of friends irresistibly results, unless therebe some special interference to prevent it; and such aninterposition there is no hint of and can be no reason forfearing. Such is really all that we can learn from the Scriptures on thesubject of our inquiry. 4 Its indirectness and brevity wouldconvince us that God did not intend to betray to us in clear lightthe secrets of the shrouded future, that for some reason it isbest that his teaching should be so reserved, and leave us to thehaunting wonder, the anxious surmise, the appalling mystery, thealluring possibilities, that now meet our gaze on the unmovingveil of death. God intends we shall trust in him withoutknowledge, and by faith, not by sight, pursue his guidance intothe silent and unknown land. Therefore, after analyzing the relevant facts of presentexperience and inferring what we can from them, and after studyingthe Scriptures and finding what they say, there is yet anothermethod of considering the problem of recognition in the futurestate. That is without caring for critical discussion, withoutdeferring to extraneous authority, we may follow the gravitatingforce of instinct, imagination, and moral reason. We are made tolove and depend on each other. The longer, the more profoundly, weknow and admire the good, the more our being becomes intertwinedwith theirs, so much the more intensely we desire to be with themalways, and so much the more awful is the agony of separation. This, what is it but great Nature's testimony, God's silentavowal, that we are to meet in eternity? Can the fearful anguishof bereavement be gratuitous? can the yearning prophecies of thesmitten heart be all false? Belief in reunion hereafter isspontaneously adopted by humanity. We therefore esteem it divinelyordered or true. Without that soothing and sustaining trust, theunrelieved, intolerable wretchedness in many cases would burstthrough the fortress of the mind, hurl reason from its throne, andtear the royal affections and their attendants in the trampleddust of madness. Many a rarely gifted soul, unknown in hisnameless privacy of life, has been so conjoined with a worthypeer, through precious bonds of unutterable sympathy, that, ratherthan be left behind, "the divided half of such a friendship as hadmastered time, " he has prayed that they, dying at once, might, involved together, hover across the dolorous strait to the othershore, and "Arrive at last the blessed goalWhere He that died in Holy LandMight reach them out the shining handAnd take them as a single soul. " Denied that inmost wish, the rest of his widowed life below hasbeen one melancholy strain of "In Memoriam. " Many a faithful andnoble mourner, whose garnered love and hope have been blighted forthis world, would tell you that, without meeting his lost onesthere, heaven itself would be no heaven to him. In such a state ofsoul we must expect to know again in an unfading clime thecherished dead. That belief is of Divine inspiration, anarrangement to heal the deadly wounds of sorrow. It is madness notto think it a verity. Who believes, as he shall float through theambrosial airs of heaven, he could touch, in passing, the radiantrobes of his chosen friends without a thrill of recognition, theprelude to a blissful and immortal communion? Is there not truthin the poet's picture of the meeting of child and parent in heaven? 4 Harbaugh, The Heavenly Recognition. Gisborne, Recollections ofFriends in the World to Come. Muston, Perpetuation of ChristianFriendship. "It was not, mother, that I knew thy face: The luminous eclipsethat is on it now, Though it was fair on earth, would have made itstrange Even to one who knew as well as he loved thee; But myheart cried out in me, Mother!" Think of the unfathomable yearnings, the infinite ecstasies ofdesire and faith from age to age swelling in the very heart of theworld, all set on the one hope of future union, and who then canbelieve that God will coldly blast them all? They are innocent, they are holy, they are meritorious, they are unspeakably dear. Wewould 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, stronglyresembling himself, and to whom he was most tenderly attached. Shedies young. He frequents fountains to gaze upon his own imagereflected in the waters, it seeming to him the likeness of her hehas lost. He is in pity transformed into a flower on the border ofa stream, where, bending on his fragile stem, he seeks his imagein the waters murmuring by, until he fades and dies. Has not God, the all loving Author who composed the sweet poem of Man andNature, written at the close a reconciling Elysium wherein thesepure lovers, the fond Narcissus and his echo mate, shall wander inperennial bliss, their embracing forms mirrored in unruffledfountains? Looking now for the conclusion of the whole matter, we find thatit lies in three different aspects, both of inquiring thought andof practical morality, according to the lights and modes in whichthree different classes of minds approach it. To the consistentmetaphysician, reasoning rigidly on grounds of science andphilosophy, every thing pertaining to the methods and circumstancesof the future life is an affair of entire uncertainty and hypothesis. 5If in the future state the soul retains its individuality as anidentical force, form, life, and memory, and if associates in thepresent state are brought together, it is probable that old friendswill recognise each other. But if they are oblivious of the past, if they are incommunicably separated in space or state, if oneprogresses so much farther that the other can never overtake him, if the personal soul blends its individual consciousness with theunitary consciousness of the Over Soul, if it commences a new careerfrom a fresh psychical germ, then, by the terms, there will be nomutual recognition. In that case his comfort and his duty are toknow that the anguish and longing he now feels will cease then; totrust in the benignity of the Infinite Wisdom, who knows best whatto appoint for his creatures; and to submit with harmonizingresignation to the unalterable decree, offering his private wish avoluntary sacrifice on the altar of natural piety. That he shallknow his friends hereafter is not impossible, not improbable;neither is it certain. He may desire it, expect it, but not withspeculative pride dogmatically affirm it, nor with insistingegotism presumptuously demand it. 5 Gravell, Das Wiedersehen nach dem Tode. Wie es nur sein konne. To the uncritical Christian the recognising reunion of friends inheaven is an unshaken assurance. 6 There is nothing to disturb hisimplicit reception of the plain teaching of Scripture. Thelegitimate exhortations of his faith are these. Mourn not toobitterly nor too long over your absent dead; for you shall meetthem in an immortal clime. As the last hour comes for your dearestones or for yourself, be of good cheer; for an imperishable joy isyours. You: "Cannot lose the hope that many a yearHath shone on a gleaming way, When the walls of life are closing roundAnd the sky grows sombre gray. " Put not away the intruding thoughts of the departed, but let themoften recur. The dead are constant. You know not how much they maythink of you, how near they may be to you. Will you pass to meetthem not having thought of them for years, having perhapsforgotten them? Let your mind have its nightly firmament ofreligious communion, beneath which white and sable memories shallwalk, and the sphered spirits of your risen friends, like stars, shed down their holy rays to soothe your feverish cares and hushevery murmuring doubt to rest. From the dumb heavings of yourloving and trustful heart, sometimes exclaim, Parents who nurturedand watched over me with unwearied affection, I would remember youoft, and love you well, and so live that one day I may meet you atthe right hand of God. Early friends, so close and dear once, whoin the light of young romance trod with me life's morning hills, neither your familiar faces nor your sweet communion are forgottenby me: I fondly think of you, and aspire towards you, and pray fora 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 thyFather's throne, or pacest along the crystal coast as a leader, chief among ten thousand, whose condescending brow the bloodythorns no longer press, but the dazzling crown of thy Divinityencircles, oh, remember us, poor erring pilgrims after thineearthly steps; pity us, help us, and after death bring us to thyhome. To the sympathetic poet, the man of sentiment and meditation, whoviews the question from the position of the heart, in the gloryand vistas of the imagination, but with all the known facts andrelations of the subject lying bare under his sight, the unitingrestoration, in another sphere, of earth's broken ties and partedfriends, is an unappeasable craving of the soul, in harmony withthe moral law, powerfully prophesied to his experience from allquarters, and seemingly confirmed to his hopes by every promise ofGod and nature. 7 6 Grafe, Biblische Beitrage zu der Frage, Werden wir unswiedersehen nach dem Tode. 7 Engel, Wir werden uns wiedersehen. Halst, Beleuchtung derHauptgrunde fur den Glauben an Erinnerung und Wiedersehen nach demTode. Streicher, Neue Beitrage zur Kritik des Glaubens anRuckerinnerung nach dem Tode. Received as a truth, it is a well of inexhaustible comfort, makingexperience a green oasis where it overflows. The denial of it as aproven falsehood is a withering blast of dust blowing on thefriendly caravan of sojourners in the desert of life. If existenceis the enjoyment of a largess of social love, and death is to havea solitary hand snatch it all away forever, how dismal is theprospect to the poor heart that loves and clings, loses anddespairs, and can only falter hopelessly on! It cannot be so. Loveis the true prophet. Heaven will restore the treasures earth haslost. The mourner by the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel!Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn ofWashington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It isthe most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth thepelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breastin agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wingsabove them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they werebrought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in historyto brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears ofher grief and faith into the future to restore her deceasedchildren to life and draw them together within her embrace. Andthat sublime Rachel will not easily be comforted except when herthoughts, migrating whither her offspring have gone, seem to findthem happy in some happy heaven. The poet, lover of his race, who cannot trust his happierinstinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line ofmortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helpsto a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of twopossible contemplations. 8 He may sadly lay upon his heart thestifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness, but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstoneof my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowdthe capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, In theunchangeable fulness of an infinite bliss, all specialties will bemerged and forgotten, and I shall be one of those to whom "thewearisome disease" of remembered sorrow and anticipated joy "is analien thing. " 8 Wieland's Euthanasia expresses disbelief in the preservation ofpersonality and consciousness after death. The same ground hadbeen taken in the work published anonymously at Halle in 1775, Plato and Leibnitz jenseits des Styx. See, on the other side ofthe question, Wohlfahrt, Tempel der Unsterblichkeit, oder neueAnthologie der wichtigsten Ausspruche, besonders neuerer Weisenuber Wiedersehen u. S. W. CHAPTER VII. LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE. ACCORDING to the imagining of some speculative geologists, perhapsthis earth first floated in the abyss as a volume of vapor, wreathing its enormous folds of mist in fantastic shapes as it wasborne along on the idle breath of law. Ages swept by, until thisstupendous fog ball was condensed into an ocean of fire, whosebillows heaved their lurid bosoms and reared their ashy crestswithout a check, while their burning spray illuminated its trackaround the sable vault. During periods which stagger computation, this molten world was gradually cooled down; constant rivers wrungfrom the densely swathing vapor poured over the heated mass and atlast submerged its crust in an immense sea. Then, for unknowncenturies, fire, water, and wind waged a Titanic war, thatimagination 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 caldronand the atmosphere saturated with steam, again explosions hurlingmountains far into space and tearing the earth open in ghastlyrents to its very heart. At length the fire was partially subdued, the peaceful deep glassed the sky in its bosom or rippled to thewhispers of the breeze, and from amidst the fertile slime andmould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces oforganic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation. Thousands of years rolled on. The world ocean subsided, the peaksof mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged, and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, agigantic 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 carpetof living verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetationwere successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the darklayers of inexhaustible coal beds, the world, one wavingwilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless andsilent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all itsmagnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavilysurcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerableages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching itslimit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, theearliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugsof the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during whichanimal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, byplesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feetin length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flightloaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea, the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, thenightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, whenmillions of aons had worn away, the creative process culminated inHumanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let usmake man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with uprightform, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on thesummit of the world and gave names to all the races of creaturesbeneath. 1 At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whetherman is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan forthis world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to besuperseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, andattributes transcending our conceptions, even as our owntranscended the ideas of the previous orders of existence. Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep andmaking it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures ofthe antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast, crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheepfor his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would havereplied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world. What animal can there be superior to me? beyond a question, myrace shall possess the earth forever!" The mastodon could not knowany uses of nature except those he was fitted to experience, norimagine a being with the form and prerogatives of man. Thereforehe would not believe that the mastodon race would ever bedisplaced by the human. We labor under the same disqualificationfor judgment. There may be in the system of nature around usadaptations, gifts, glories, as much higher than any we enjoy asour noblest powers and privileges are in advance of those of thetiger or the lark. It is a remarkable fact that the mature states of the antediluvianraces correspond with the foetal states of the present races, andthat the foetal states of embryonic man are counterparts of themature states of the lower races now contemporaneous with him. This great discovery of modern science, though perhaps destituteof logical value, suggests to the imagination the thought that manmay be but the foetal state of a higher being, a regenttemporarily presiding here until the birth and inauguration of thetrue king of the world, and destined himself to be born from thewomb of this world into the free light and air of the spiritkingdom! The resources of God are inexhaustible; and in the evolution ofhis prearranged ages it may be that there will arise upon theearth a race of beings of unforetold majesty, who shall disinterthe remnant bones and ponder the wrecked monuments of forgottenman as we do those of the disgusting reptiles of the Saurianepoch. But this is a mere conceit of possibility; and, so far asthe data for forming an opinion are in our hands, it is altogetherincredible. So far as appears, the adaptation between man and theearth is exhaustive. He is able to subdue all her forces, reignover all her provinces, enjoy all her delights, and gather intohis consciousness all her prophecies. And our practical convictionis absolute that the race of men is the climax of being destinedfor this earth, and that they will occupy its hospitable bosomforever with their toils and their homes, their sports and theirgraves. 2 The other question is this: Was the subjection of the human raceto physical death a part of the Creator's original plan, or theretributive result of a subsequent dislocation of that plan bysin? a part of the great harmony of nature, or a discord marringthe happy destiny 1 Harris, The Pre Adamite Earth. 2 Agassiz says no higher creature than man is to be expected onearth, because the capacities of the earthly plan of organiccreation are completed and exhausted with him. Introduction toStudy of Natural History, p. 57. of man? Approaching this problem on grounds of science and reasonalone, there can be no hesitation as to the reply. There are buttwo considerations really bearing upon the point and throwinglight upon it; and they both force us to the same conclusion. First, it is a fact admitting no denial that death was thepredetermined natural fate of the successive generations of theraces that preceded man. Now, what conceivable reason is there forsupposing that man, constructed from the same elements, livingunder the same organic laws, was exempt from the same doom? Thereis not in the whole realm of science a single hint to that effect. Secondly, the reproductive element an essential feature in thehuman constitution, leading our kind to multiply and replenish theearth is a demonstration that the office of death entered intoGod's original plan of the world. For otherwise the earth at thismoment could not hold a tithe of the inhabitants that would bedemanding room. When God had permitted this world to roll in spacefor awful ages, a lifeless globe of gas, fire, water, earth, andthen let it be occupied for incommensurable epochs more by snails, vermin, and iguanodons, would he wind up the whole scene anddestroy it when the race of man, crowning glory of all, had onlyflourished for a petty two thousand years? It is not credible. Andyet it must have been so unless it was decreed that the successivegenerations should pass away and thus leave space for, the newcomers. We conclude, then, that it is the will of God and was inthe beginning that the human race shall possess the earth throughall the unknown periods of the future, the parents continuallypassing off the stage in death as the children rise upon it tomaturity. We cannot discern any authority in those old traditionswhich foretell the impending destruction of the world. On whatgrounds are we to believe them? The great system of things is astable harmony. There is no wear or tear in the perfect machineryof the creation, rolling noiseless in its blue bearings of ether. It seems, comparatively speaking, to have just begun. Itsoscillations are self adjusted, and science prophesies forhumanity an illimitable career on this earthly theatre. The swiftmelting of the elements and restoration of chaos is a mere heathenwhim 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 thestars, Which stand as thick as glittering dewdrops on The fieldsof heaven, shall pass in blazing mist. " Such pictures are delusion winning the imagination, not truthcommanding the reason. In spite of all the Cassandra screams ofthe priesthood, vaticinating universal ruin, the young old earth, fresh every spring, shall remain under God's preservingprovidence, and humanity's inexhaustible generations renewedlyreign over its kingdoms, forever. Plotinus said, "If God repentshaving made the world, why does he defer its destruction? If hedoes 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 onefuneral pyre. " Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astraMisturus. But to receive such a good piece of poetry as veritable previsionis surely a puerile error which a mature mind in the nineteenthcentury should be ashamed to commit. The most recently broached theory of the end of the world is thatdeveloped from some remarkable speculations as to the compositionand distribution of force. The view is briefly this. All force isderived from heat. All heat is derived from the sun. 4 Themechanical value of a cubic mile of sunlight at the surface of theearth is one horse power for a third of a minute; at the sun it isfifteen thousand horse power for a minute. Now, it is calculatedthat enough heat is radiated from the sun to require for itsproduction the annual consumption of the whole surface of the sunto the depth of from ten to twenty miles. Of course, ultimatelythe fuel will be all expended; then the forces of the system willexpire, and the creation will die. 5 This brilliant and sublimetheorem assumes, first, that the heat of the sun arises fromconsumption of matter, which may not be true; secondly, that it isnot a self replenishing process, as it certainly may be. Some haveeven surmised that the zodiacal light is an illuminated tornado ofstones showering into the sun to feed its tremendousconflagration. The whole scheme is a fine toy, but a very faintterror. Even if it be true, then we are to perish at last fromlack of fire, and not, as commonly feared, from its abundance! The belief of mankind that a soul or ghost survives the body hasbeen so nearly universal as to appear like the spontaneous resultof an instinct. We propose to trace the history of opinionsconcerning the physical destination of this disembodied spirit, its connection with localities, to give the historical topographyof the future life. The earliest conception of the abode of the dead was probably thatof the Hebrew Sheol or the Greek Hades, namely, the idea born fromthe silence, depth, and gloom of the grave of a stupendoussubterranean cavern full of the drowsy race of shades, theindiscriminate habitation of all who leave the land of the living. Gradually the thought arose and won acceptance that the favoritesof Deity, peerless heroes and sages, might be exempt from thisdismal fate, and migrate at death to some delightful clime beyondsome far shore, there, amidst unalloyed pleasures, to spendimmortal days. This region was naturally located on the surface ofthe earth, where the cheerful sun could shine and the freshbreezes blow, yet in some untrodden distance, where the gauntletof fact had not smitten the sceptre of fable. The paltry portionof this earth familiar to the ancients was surrounded by anunexplored region, which their fancy, stimulated by the legends ofthe poets, peopled with mythological kingdoms, the rainbow bowersand cloudy synods of Olympus, from whose glittering peak theThunderer 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 SolarSystem. Hesperides, whose dragons lay on guard in the remote west; thedivine cities of Meru, whose encircling towers pierced the easternsky; the Banquet Halls of Ethiopia, gleaming through the fierydesert; the fragrant Islands of Immortality, musical and luring inthe central ocean; the happy land of the Hyperboreans, beyond thesnowy 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 toomuch: scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves: Our onlypoint of ignorance Is centred in ourselves. " There was a belief among the Persians that Kaf, a mountain twothousand miles high, formed a rim to the flat world and preventedtravellers from ever falling off. 6 The fact that the earth is aglobe inhabited on all sides is a comparatively recent piece ofknowledge. So late as in the eighth century Pope Zachary accusedVirgilius, an Irish mathematician and monk, of heresy forbelieving in the existence of antipodes. 7 St. Boniface wrote tothe Pope against Virgilius; and Zachary ordered a council to beheld to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against Godand his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine. " To theancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknownland, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement. Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hinduplaced the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalizedmen. 8 Under the attraction of a mystic curiosity, well might theold, wearied Ulysses say, "Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Pushoff, and, sitting well in order, smite The sounding furrows; formy purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of allthe western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will washus down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see thegreat Achilles, whom we knew. " Decius Brutus and his army, as Florus relates, reaching the coastof Portugal, where, for the first time, they saw the sun settingin the blood tinged ocean, turned back their standards with horroras they beheld "the huge corpse of ruddy gold let down into thedeep. " The Phoenician traders brought intelligence to Greece of apeople, the Cimmerians, who dwelt on the borders of Hades in theumbered realms of perpetual night. To the dying Roman, on thefarthest verge of the known horizon hovered a vision of ElysianFields. 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 happierHunting Grounds, whose woods trooped with game, and where thearrows of the braves never missed, and there was no winter. Therewas a pretty myth received among some of the ancient Britons, locating their paradise in a spot surrounded by tempests, far inthe Western Ocean, and named Flath Innis, or Noble Island. 9 Thefollowing legend is illustrative. An old man sat thoughtful on arock beside the sea. A cloud, under whose squally skirts thewaters foamed, rushed down; and from its dark womb issued a boat, with white sails bent to the wind, and hung round with movingoars. Destitute of mariners, itself seemed to live and move. Avoice said, "Arise, behold the boat of heroes: embark, and see theGreen Isle of those who have passed away!" Seven days and sevennights he voyaged, when a thousand tongues called out, "The Isle!the Isle!" The black billows opened before him, and the calm landof the departed rushed in light on his eyes. We are reminded bythis of what Procopius says concerning the conveyal of the soul ofthe barbarian to his paradise. At midnight there is a knocking atthe door, and indistinct voices call him to come. Mysteriouslyimpelled, he goes to the sea coast, and there finds a frail, emptywherry awaiting him. He embarks, and a spirit crew row him to hisdestination. 10 "He finds with ghosts His boat deep freighted, sinking to the edgeOf the dark flood, and voices hears, yet sees No substance; but, arrived where once again His skiff floats free, hears friends tofriends 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 earthremained to a great extent concealed from knowledge, wherever theHebrew Scriptures were known went the cherished traditions of theGarden of Eden from which our first parents were driven for theirsin. Speculation naturally strove to settle the locality of thislost paradise. Sometimes it was situated in the mysterious bosomof India; sometimes in the flowery vales of Georgia, where rosesand spices perfumed the gales; sometimes in the guarded recessesof Mesopotamia. Now it was the Grand Oasis in the Arabian desert, flashing on the wilted pilgrim, over the blasted and blazingwastes, with the verdure of palms, the play of waters, the smelland flavor of perennial fruits. Again it was at the equator, wherethe torrid zone stretched around it as a fiery sword waving everyway so that no mortal could enter. In the "Imago Mundi, " a Latintreatise on cosmography written early in the twelfth century, weread, "Paradise is the extreme eastern part of Asia, and is madeinaccessible by a wall of fire surrounding it and rising untoheaven. " At a later time the Canaries were thought to be theancient Elysium, and were accordingly named the Fortunate Isles. Indeed, among the motives that animated 9 Macpherson, Introduction to the History of Great Britain andIreland, pp. 180-186. 10 Procopius, Gothica, lib. Iv. Columbus on his adventurous voyage no inferior place must beassigned to the hope of finding the primeval seat of Paradise. 11The curious traveller, exploring these visionary spots one by one, found them lying in the light of common day no nearer heaven thanhis own natal home; and at last all faith in them died out whenthe whole surface of the globe had been surveyed, no nook leftwherein romance and superstition might any longer play at hide andseek. Continuing our search after the local abode of the departed, wenow leave the surface of the earth and descend beneath it. Thefirst haunted region we reach is the realm of the Fairies, which, as every one acquainted with the magic lore of old Germany orEngland knows, was situated just under the external ground, andwas clothed with every charm poets could imagine or the heartdream. There was supposed to be an entrance to this enchanteddomain at the Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, and at several otherplaces. Sir Walter Scott has collected some of the best legendsillustrative of this belief in his "History of Demonology. " SirGawaine, a famous knight of the Round Table, was once admitted todine, above ground, in the edge of the forest, with the King ofthe Fairies: "The banquet o'er, the royal Fay, intentTo 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 wallsAnd phosphor lights of myriad hues redouble. There, in the blissful subterranean halls, When morning wakes the world of human troubleGlide 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 jewelledbanks, lapsing streams, and enchanting visions, it was thought afew favored mortals might now and then find their way. But thiswas never an earnest general faith. It was a poetic superstitionthat hovered over fanciful brains, a legendary dream that pleasedcredulous 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 worldof the dead deep beneath the earth, subdivided into severalsubordinate regions. The Greenlanders believed in a separatedheaven and hell, both located far below the Polar Ocean. Accordingto the old classic descriptions of the under world, what a sceneof colossal gloom it is! Its atmosphere murmurs with a breath ofplaintive sighs. Its population, impalpable ghosts timidlyflitting at every motion, 11 Irving, Life of Columbus: Appendix on the Situation of theTerrestrial Paradise. By far the most valuable book ever publishedon this subject is that of Schulthess, Das Paradies, das irdischeund uberirdische historische, mythische und mystische, nebst einerkritischen Revision der allgemelnen biblischen Geographie. crowd the sombre landscapes in numbers surpassing imagination. There Cocytus creeps to the seat of doom, his waves emittingdoleful wails. Styx, nine times enfolding the whole abode, dragshis black and sluggish length around. Charon, the slovenly oldferryman, plies his noiseless boat to and fro laden with shadowypassengers. Far away in the centre grim Pluto sits on his ebonythrone and surveys the sad subjects of his dreadful domain. By hisside sits his stolen and shrinking bride, Proserpine, herglimmering brows encircled with a wreath of poppies. Above thesubterranean monarch's head a sable rainbow spans the infernalfirmament; and when, with lifted hand, he announces his decrees, the applause given by the twilight populace of Hades is a rustleof sighs, a vapor of tears, and a shudder of submission. The belief in this dolorous kingdom was early modified by thereception of two other adjacent realms, one of reward, one oftorture; even as Goethe says, in allusion to the current Christiandoctrine, "Hell was originally but one apartment: limbo andpurgatory were afterwards added as wings. " Passing through Hades, and turning in one direction, the spirit traveller would arrive atElysium or Abraham's bosom: "To paradise the gloomy passage winds Through regions drear anddismal, and through pain, Emerging soon in beatific blaze Oflight. " There the blessed ones found respite and peaceful joys in floweryfields, pure breezes, social fellowship, and the similitudes oftheir earthly pursuits. In this placid clime, lighted by its ownconstellations, favored souls roamed or reposed in a sort ofineffectual happiness. According to the pagans, here were suchheroes as Achilles, such sages as Socrates, to remain forever, oruntil the end of the world. And here, according to the Christians, the departed patriarchs and saints were tarrying expectant ofChrist's arrival to ransom them. Dante thus describes that greatevent: "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 herWhom 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 openingthat led down into Tartarus, "a place made underneath all things, so low and horrible that hell is its heaven. " Here the old earthgiants, the looming Titans, lay, bound, transfixed withthunderbolts, their 12 Parsons's trans. Dell' Inferno, canto iv. Ii. 55-63. mountainous shapes half buried in rocks, encrusting lava, andashes. Rivers of fire seam the darkness, whose borders are braidedwith sentinel furies. On every hand the worst criminals, perjurers, blasphemers, ingrates, groan beneath the pitilesspunishments inflicted on them without escape. Any realization ofthe terrific scenery of this whole realm would curdle the blood. 13There were fabled entrances to the dread under world at Acherusia, in Bithynia, at Avernus, in Campania, where Ulysses evoked thedead and traversed the grisly abodes, through the Sibyl's cave atCuma, at Hermione, in Argolis, where the people thought thepassage below so near and easy that they neglected to give thedying an obolus to pay ferriage to Charon, at Tanarus, thesouthern most point of Peloponnesus, where Herakles went down anddragged the three headed dog up into day, at the cave ofTrophonius, in Lebadea, and at several other places. Similar conceptions have been embodied in the ecclesiasticaldoctrine which has generally prevailed in Christendom. Locatingthe scene in the hollow of the earth, thus has it been describedby Milton, "A dungeon horrible on all sides round As one great furnaceflamed; yet from those flames No light, but rather darknessvisible, Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions ofanguish, doleful shades, where peace Nor hope can come, buttorture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge fed With everburning sulphur unconsumed;" wherein, confined by adamantinewalls, the fallen angels and all the damned welter overwhelmedwith floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire. Shapes oncecelestially fair and proud, but now scarred from battle anddarkened by sin into faded forms of haggard splendor, supporttheir uneasy steps over the burning marl. Everywhere shrieks andmoans resound, and the dusky vault of pandemonium is lighted by ablue glare cast pale and dreadful from the tossings of the flaminglake. This was hell, where the wicked must shrink and howlforever. Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli, Hecla, were believed to bevent holes from this bottomless and living pit of fire. The famoustraveller, Sir John Maundeville, asserted that he found a descentinto hell "in a perilous vale" in the dominions of Prester John. Many a cavern in England still bears the name of "Hell hole. " In adialogue between a clerk and a master, preserved in an old Saxoncatechism, the following question and reply occur: "Why is the sunso 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 detailedtopographical account of the interior of the earth, hell, purgatory, and limbo. 14 There is a lake in the south of Ireland inwhich is an island containing a cavern said to open down intohell. This cave 13 Descriptions of the sufferings of hell, according to thepopular notions at different periods, are given in the workpublished at Weimar in 1817, Das Rad der ewigen Hollenqual. In denCuriositaten der physisch literarisch artistisch historischen Vorund Mitwelt, band vi. St. 2. 14 De Inferno et Statn Damonum ante Mundi Exitium. is called St. Patrick's Purgatory, and the pretence obtained quitegeneral credit for upwards of five centuries. Crowds of pilgrimsvisited the place. Some who had the hardihood to venture in wereseverely pinched, beaten, and burned, by the priests within, disguised as devils, and were almost frightened out of their witsby the diabolical scenes they saw where "Forth from the depths of flame that singed the gloom Despairingwails and piercing shrieks were heard. " Several popes openly preached in behalf of this gross imposition;and the Church virtually authorized it by receiving the largerevenues accruing from it, until at last outraged common sensedemanded its repudiation and suppression. 15 Few persons now, as they walk the streets and fields, are muchdisturbed by the thought that, not far below, the vivid lake offire and brimstone, greedily roaring for new food, heaves itstortured surges convulsed and featured with souls. Few persons nowshudder at a volcanic eruption as a premonishing message freshlybelched from hell. 16 In fact, the old belief in a local physicalhell within the earth has almost gone from the public mind of today. It arose from pagan myths and figures of speech based onignorant observation and arbitrary fancy, and with the growth ofscience and the enlightenment of reason it has very extensivelyfallen and faded away. No honest and intelligent inquirer into thematter can find the slightest valid support for such a notion. Itis now a mere tradition, upheld by groundless authority. And yetthe dim shadow of that great idea of a subterranean hell whichonce burned so fierce and lurid in the brain of Christendom stillvaguely haunts the modern world. The dogma still lies in theprevalent creeds, and is occasionally dragged out and brandishedby fanatic preachers. The transmitted literature and influences ofthe past are so full of it that it cannot immediately cease. Accordingly, while the common understanding no longer grasps it asa definite verity, it lingers in the popular fancy as a halfcredible image. The painful attempts made now and then by someantiquated or fanatical clergyman to compel attention to it andbelief in it as a tangible fact of science, as well as anunquestionable revelation of Scripture, scarcely win a passingnotice, but provoke a significant smile. Father Passaglia, aneminent Jesuit theologian, in 1856 published in Italy a work onthe Literality of Hell Fire and the Eternity of the Punishments ofthe Damned. He says, "In this world fire burns by chemicaloperations; but in hell it burns by the breath of the Lord!" Thelearned and venerable Faber, a voluminous author and distinguishedEnglish divine, published in the year 1851 a large octavo entitled"The Many Mansions in the House of the Father, " discussing withelaborate detail the question as to the locality of the scenesawaiting souls after death. His grand conclusion the unreasonablenessof which will be apparent without comment is as follows:"The saints having first risen with Christ into the highestregions of the air, out of reach of the dreadful heat, thetremendous flood of fire hitherto detained inside the earth willbe let loose, and an awful conflagration rage till the wholematerial globe is dissipated into sublimated particles. Then theworld will be formed anew, in three parts. First, there will be 15 Wright, St. Patrick's Purgatory: an Essay on the Legends ofParadise, 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 twothousand miles in diameter. Secondly, there shall roll around thiscentral ball on all sides an ignited ocean of liquid fire twothousand miles in depth, the peculiar residence of the wicked, thesulphurous lake spoken of in the Apocalypse. Thirdly, around thisinfernal sea a vast spherical arch will hang, a thousand milesthick, a massive and unbroken shell, through which there are nospiracles, and whose external surface, beautiful beyondconception, becomes the heaven of the redeemed, where Christhimself, perfect man as well as perfect God, fixes his residenceand establishes the local sovereignty of the Universal Archangel. "17 A comfortable thought it must be for the saints, as they roamthe flowery fields, basking in immortal bliss, to remember thatunder the crust they tread, a soundless sea of fire is foreverplunging on its circular course, all its crimson waves packed withthe agonized faces of the damned as thick as drops! The wholescheme is without real foundation. Science laughs at such atheory. Its scriptural supports are either ethnic figments orrhetorical tropes. Reason, recollecting the immateriality of thesoul, dissipates the ghastly dream beyond the possibility ofrestoration to belief. Following the historic locations of the abode of departed souls, we next ascend from the interior of the earth, and above thesurface of the earth, into the air and the lofty realms of ether. The ancient Caledonians fixed the site of their spirit world inthe clouds. Their bards have presented this conception in manifoldforms and with the most picturesque details. In tempests theghosts of their famous warriors ride on the thunderbolts, lookingon the earth with eyes of fire, and hurling lances of lightning. They float over the summits of the hills or along the valleys inwreaths of mist, on vapory steeds, waving their shadowy arms inthe moonlight, the stars dimly glimmering through their visionaryshapes. The Laplanders also placed their heaven in the upper air, where the Northern Lights play. They regarded the auroralstreamers as the sport of departed spirits in the happy region towhich they had risen. Such ideas, clad in the familiar imageryfurnished by their own climes, would naturally be suggested to theignorant fancy, and easily commended to the credulous thoughts, ofthe Celts and Finns. Explanation and refutation are alikeunnecessary. Plutarch describes a theory held by some of the ancients locatinghell in the air, elysium in the moon. 18 After death all souls arecompelled to spend a period in the region between the earth andthe moon, the wicked in severe tortures and for a longer time, thegood in a mild discipline soon purging away all their stains andfitting them for the lunar paradise. After tarrying a seasonthere, they were either born again upon the earth, or transportedto the divine realm of the sun. Macrobius, too, says, "ThePlatonists 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, andthe subsequent residence of the redeemed on this globe as theireternal heaven under the immediate rule of Christ. Quite a fulldetail of the historic and present belief in this scheme may befound in the recent work of its earnest advocate, D. T. Taylor, The Voice of the Church on the Coming of the Redeemer, or aHistory 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 alsoadds, "The tropical signs Cancer and Capricorn are called thegates of the sun, because there he meets the solstice and can gono farther. Cancer is the gate of men, because by it is thedescent to the lower regions; Capricorn is the gate of gods, because by it is a return for souls to the rank of gods in theseat of their proper immortality. " 20 The Manicheans taught thatsouls were borne to the moon on leaving their bodies, and therewashed from their sins in water, then taken to the sun and furthercleansed in fire. They described the moon and sun as two splendidships prepared for transferring souls to their native country, theworld of perfect light in the heights of the creation. 21 The ancient Hebrews thought the sky a solid firmament overarchingthe earth, and supporting a sea of inexhaustible waters, beyondwhich God and his angels dwelt in monopolized splendor. Eliphazthe Temanite says, "Is not God in the height of heaven? And beholdthe stars, how high they are; but he walketh upon the arch ofheaven!" And Job says, "He covereth the face of his throne, andspreadeth his clouds under it. He hath drawn a circular bound uponthe waters to the confines of light and darkness. " From thedazzling realm above this supernal ocean all men were supposed, until after the resurrection of Christ, to be excluded. But fromthat time the belief gradually spread in Christendom that a waywas open for faithful souls to ascend thither. Ephraim theSyrian, 22 and Ambrose, located paradise in the outermost East onthe highest summit of the earth, stretching into the sereneheights of the sky. The ancients often conceived the universe toform one solid whole, whose different provinces were accessiblefrom each other to gods and angels by means of bridges and goldenstaircases. Hence the innumerable paradisal legends associatedwith 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 ofthis belief in a sea over the sky: "One Sunday the people of anEnglish village were coming out of church, a dark, gloomy day, when they saw the anchor of a ship hooked to one of thetombstones, the cable, tightly stretched, hanging down the air. Presently they saw a sailor sliding down the rope to unfix theanchor. When he had just loosened it the villagers seized hold ofhim; and, while in their hands, he quickly died, as though he hadbeen drowned!" There is also a famous legend called "St. Brandon'sVoyage. " The worthy saint set sail from the coast of Ireland, andheld on his way till he arrived at the moon, which he found to bethe location of hell. Here he saw Judas Iscariot in execrabletortures, regularly respited, however, every week from Saturdayeve till Sunday eve! The thought so entirely in accordance with the first impressionmade by the phenomenon of the night sky on the ignorant senses andimagination that the stars are set in a firm revolving dome, haswidely prevailed; and the thought that heaven lies beyond thatsolid arch, in the unknown space is a popular notion lingeringstill. The scriptural image declaring that the convulsions of thelast 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 sheis shaken of a mighty wind, " although so obviously a figure ofspeech, has been very generally credited as the description of aliteral fact yet to occur. And how many thousands of piousChristians have felt, with the sainted Doddridge, "Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my Divine abode, Thepavement of those heavenly courts Where I shall see my God!" The universal diffusion in civilized nations of the knowledge thatthe visible sky is no substantial expanse, but only an illimitablevoid of space hung with successive worlds, has by no meansbanished the belief, originally based on the opposite error, in aphysical heaven definitely located far overhead, the destinationof all ransomed souls. This is undoubtedly the most common idea atthe 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 aregatherings of damned souls. 23 Isaac Taylor, on the contrary, contends with no little force and ingenuity that the sun may bethe heaven of our planetary system, a globe of immortalblessedness and glory. 24 The celebrated Dr. Whiston was convincedthat the great comet which appeared in his day was hell. Heimagined 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 thestigma of being the infernal prison house on the moon, in thisstyle: "I know thee well, O Moon, thou cavern'd realm, Sad satellite, thou giant ash of death, Blot on God's firmament, pale home ofcrime, Scarr'd prison house of sin, where damned souls Feed uponpunishment: Oh, thought sublime, That amid night's black deeds, when evil prowls Through the broad world, thou, watching sinnerswell, 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 theextremest edge of light, Where all things are disaster and decay:That black and outcast orb is Satan's home That dusky world man'sscience counteth not Upon the brightest sky. He never knows Hownear it comes to him; but, swathed in clouds, As though in plumedand palled state, it steals, Hearse like and thief like, round theuniverse, 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 hiddenin its breast, which burns With all concentrate and superfluentwoe. " In the average faith of individuals to day, heaven and hell existas separate places located somewhere in the universe; but thenotions as to the precise regions in which they lie are most vagueand ineffectual when compared with what they formerly were. The Scandinavian kosmos contained nine worlds, arranged in thefollowing order: Gimle, a golden region at the top of theuniverse, 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 homeof the air spirits; Manheim, the earth, or middle realm;Jotunheim, the world of the giants, outside the sea surroundingthe earth; Elfheim, the world of the black demons and dwarfs, justunder the earth's surface; Helheim, the domain of the goddess ofdeath, deep within the earth's bosom; and finally, Niflheim, thelowest kingdom of horror and pain, at the very bottom of thecreation. The Buddhist kosmos, in the simplest form, as some ofthem conceived it, was composed of a series of concentric sphereseach separated from the next by a space, and successivelyoverarching and under arching each other with circular layers ofbrightness above and blackness beneath; each starry hollowoverhead being a heaven inhabited by gods and blessed souls, eachlurid hollow underfoot being a hell filled with demons and wickedsouls in penance. The Arabian kosmos, beginning with the earth, ascended to a world of water above the firmament, next to a worldof air, then to a world of fire, followed in rising order by anemerald heaven with angels in the form of birds, a heaven ofprecious stones with angels as eagles, a hyacinth heaven withangels as vultures, a silver heaven with angels as horses, agolden and a pearl heaven each peopled with angel girls, a crystalheaven with angel men, then two heavens full of angels, andfinally a great sea without bound, each sphere being presided overby a chief ruler, the names of all of whom were familiar to thelearned Arabs. The Syrian kosmos corresponded closely to theforegoing. It soared up the mounting steps of earth, water, air, fire, and innumerable choruses successively of Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubimand Seraphim, unto the Expanse whence Lucifer fell; afterwards toa boundless Ocean; and lastly to a magnificent Crown of Lightfilling the uppermost space of all. 25 It is hard for us to imagine the aspects of the universe to theancients and the impressions it produced in them, all seemed sodifferent then, in the dimness of crude observation, from thepresent appearance in the light of astronomic science. Anaximanderheld that the earth was of cylindrical form, suspended in themiddle of the universe and surrounded by envelopes of water, air, and fire, as by the coats of an onion, but that the exteriorstratum was broken up and collected into masses, and thusoriginated the sun, moon, and stars, which are carried around bythe three spheres in which they are fixed. 26 Many of the Orientalnations believed the planets to be animated beings, consciousdivinities, freely marching around their high realms, keepingwatch and ward over the creation, smiling their favorites on tohappy 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. " Thisbelief was cherished among the later Greek philosophers and Romanpriests, and was vividly held by such men as Philo, Origen, andeven Kepler. It is here that we are to look for the birth ofastrology, that solemn lore, linking the petty fates of men withthe starry conjunctions, which once sank so deeply into the mindof 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, Andall your heavenly houses and effects, Shall meet no more devoutexpounders here. The joy of Jupiter, The exaltation of the Dragon's head, The sun'striplicity and glorious Day house on high, the moon's dimdetriment, And all the starry inclusions of all signs, Shall rise, and rule, and pass, and no one know That there are spirit rulersof all worlds, Which fraternize with earth, and, though unknown, Hold in the shining voices of the stars Communion on high andeverywhere. " The belief that the stars were living beings, combining with thefancy of an unscientific time, gave rise to the stellar apotheosisof heroes and legendary names, and was the source of thosenumerous asterisms, out lined groups of stars, which still bedeckthe skies and form the landmarks of celestial topography. It wasthese 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'spetrific Head, the Bear's frightful form, Berenice's streamingHair, the curdling length of Ophiuchus, and the Hydra's horridshape. The poetic eye of old religion saw gods in the planetswalking their serene blue paths, "Osiris, Bel, Odin, Mithras, Brahm, Zeus, Who gave their names tostars which still roam round The skies all worshipless, even fromclimes Where their own altars once topp'd every hill. " By selected constellations the choicest legends of the antiqueworld are preserved in silent enactment. On the heavenly sea theArgonautss keep nightly sail towards the Golden Fleece. ThereHerakles gripes the hydra's heads and sways his irresistible club;Arion with his harp rides the docile Dolphin; the Centaur's righthand clutches the Wolf; the Hare flees from the raging eye andinaudible bark of the Dog; and space crawls with the horrors ofthe Scorpion. In consequence of the earth's revolution in its orbit, the sunappears at different seasons to rise in connection with differentgroups of stars. It seems as if the sun made an annual journeyaround the ecliptic. This circuit was divided into twelve partscorresponding to the months, and each marked by a distinctconstellation. There was a singular agreement in regard to thesesolar 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 Amongthe 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 frommonth to month were named thus: at the time of the overflow of theNile, the stars of inundation, (Aquarius;) at the time ofploughing, stars of the ox, (Taurus;) when lions, driven forth bythirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile, stars of the lion, (Leo;) at the time of reaping, stars of the sheaf, (Virgo;) starsof 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 thesun reached the highest point in his yearly track; stars of thebalance, (Libra, ) when days and nights were in equilibrium; starsof the scorpion, (Scorpio, ) when periodical simooms burned likethe venom of a scorpion; and so on of the rest. 28 The progress of astronomical science from the wild time when menthought the stars were mere spangles stuck in a solid expanse notfar off, to the vigorous age when Ptolemy's mathematics spannedthe scope of the sky; from the first reverent observations of theChaldean shepherds watching the constellations as gods, to themagnificent reasonings of Copernicus dashing down the innumerablecrystalline spheres, "cycle on epicycle, orb on orb, " with whichcrude theorizers had crowded the stellar spaces; from the uncurbedpoetry of Hyginus writing the floor of heaven over with romanticmyths in planetary words, to the more wondrous truth of Le Verriermeasuring the steps from nimble Mercury flitting moth like in thebeard of the sun to dull Neptune sagging in his cold course twentysix hundred million miles away; from the half inch orb ofHipparchus's naked eye, to the six feet speculum of Rosse's awfultube; from the primeval belief in one world studded around withskyey torch lights, to the modern conviction of octillions ofinhabited worlds all governed by one law constitutes the mostastonishing chapter in the history of the human mind. Every stepof this incredible progress has had its effect in modifying theconceptions of man's position and importance in nature and of theconnection of his future fate with localities. Of old, the entirecreation was thought to lie pretty much within the comprehensionof man's unaided senses, and man himself was supposed to be thechief if not the sole object of Divine providence. The deitiesoften came down in incarnations and mingled with their favoritesand rescued the earth from evils. Every thing was anthropomorphized. Man's relative magnitude and power were believed to be suchthat he fancied during an eclipse that, by screams, the crashingof 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 throughthe evening air the Arabs believed were fallen angels trying toget back into heaven but hurled from the crystal battlements bythe 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 outweighing millions of our earth. Then they read their nativities inthe planets and felt how great must be the state overwatched bysuch resplendent servitors. Now "They seek communion with the starsthat 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 wasthat an iron mass would require nine days and nights to plungefrom its Olympian height to its Tartarean depth. Now we are toldby the masters of science that there are stars so distant that itwould take their light, travelling at a rate of nearly twelvemillion miles a minute, thirty million years to reach us. Thetelescope has multiplied the size of the creation by hundreds ofmillions, and the grandest conception of the stellar universepossible to the most capacious human mind probably bears no largerproportion to the fact than an orrery does to the solar system. Our earth is a hundred million miles from the sun, whose diameteris so monstrous that a hundred such orbs strung in a straight linewould occupy the whole distance. The sun, with all his attendantplanets and moons, is sweeping around his own centre supposed bysome to be Alcyone at the rate of four hundred thousand miles aday; and it will take him eighteen million years to complete onerevolution. Our firmamental cluster contains, it has beencalculated, in round numbers about twenty million stars. There aremany thousands of such nebula visible, some of them capable ofpacking away in their awful bosoms hundreds of thousands of ourgalaxies. Measure off the abysmal space into seven hundredthousand stages each a hundred million miles wide, and you reachthe nearest fixed stars, for instance, the constellation of theLyre. Multiply that inconceivable distance by hundreds ofthousands, and still you will discern enormous sand banks of starsobscurely 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 wholeuniverse may be as one plain, the distance between planet andplanet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spacesbetween system and system no greater than the intervals betweenone grain and the grain adjacent. " One of the vastest thoughts yetconceived by any mortal mind is that of turning the universe froma mechanical to a chemical problem, as illustrated by Prof. Lovering. 29 Assuming the acknowledged truths in physics, that theultimate particles of matter never actually touch each other, andthat water in evaporating expands into eighteen hundred times itsprevious volume, he demonstrates that the porosity of our solarsystem is no greater than that of steam. "The porosity of graniteor gold may be equal to that of steam, 29 Cambridge Miscellany, 1842. the greater density being a stronger energy in the centralforces. " And the conclusion is scientifically reached that "thevast interval between the sun and Herschel is an enormous pore, while the invisible distance that separates the most closelynestled atoms is a planetary space, a stupendous gulf whencompared with the little spheres between which it flows. " Thus wemay think of the entire universe as a living organism, like aripening orange, its component atoms worlds, the siderealmovements its vital circulation. Surely, when a man looks up from his familiar fields and householdroof to such incommensurable objects as scientific imaginationreveals in the sparkling sword handle of Perseus and the hazygirdle of Andromeda, overpowering humility will fill his breast, an unutterable solemnity will "fall on him as from the verypresence chamber of the Highest. " And will he not, when hecontemplates the dust like shoals of stars, the shining films offirmaments, that retreat and hover through all the boundlessheights, the Nubecula nebula, looking like a bunch of ribbonsdisposed in a true love's knot, that most awful nebula whirledinto the shape and bearing the name of the Dumb Bell, the Crabnebula, hanging over the infinitely remote space, a sprawlingterror, every point holding millions of worlds, thinking of theseall transcendent wonders, and then remembering his owninexpressible littleness, how that the visible existence of hiswhole race does not occupy a single tick of the great SiderealClock, will he not sink under helpless misgivings, will he notutterly despair of immortal notice and support from the King ofall this? In a word, how does the solemn greatness of man, thesupposed eternal destiny of man, stand affected by the modernknowledge of the vastness of creation? Regarding the immensitiesreceding over him in unfathomable abysses bursting with dust heapsof suns, must not man be dwarfed into unmitigated contempt, hislife and character rendered absolutely insignificant, the utmostspan of his fortunes seeming but as the hum and glitter of anephemeron in a moment's sunshine? Doubtless many a one has attimes felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying himwith a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him infatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the augustdome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes upand sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth abovehim in the order and silence of their primeval pomp. Peacefullyand forever they shine there. In nebula separated from nebula bytrillions of leagues, plane beyond plane, they stretch and glitterto the feet of God. Falling on his knees, he clasps his hands inspeechless adoration, but feels, with an intolerable ache of theheart, that in this infinitude such an one as he can be of noconsequence whatever. He waits passively for the resistless roundof fate to bear him away, ah, whither? "Conscious that he dwellsbut as an atom of dust on the outskirts of a galaxy ofinconceivable glory" moving through eternity in the arms of law, he becomes, in his own estimation, an insensible dot lost in theuncontainable wilderness of firmamental systems. But thisconclusion of despair is a mistake as sophistical as it isinjurious, as baseless in reality as it is natural in seeming. Itsantidote and corrective are found in a more penetrative thoughtand juster understanding of the subject, which will preserve thegreatness and the immortal destiny of man unharmed despite thefrowning vastitudes of creation. This will appear from fairlyweighing the following considerations. In the first place, the immensity of the material universe is anelement entirely foreign to the problem of human fate. Whenseeking to solve the question of human destiny, we are to studythe facts and prophecies of human nature, and to concludeaccordingly. It is a perversion of reason to bring from far aninduction of nebular magnitudes to crush with their brute weightthe plain indications of the spirit of humanity. What though thenumber of telescopic worlds were raised to the ten thousandthpower, and each orb were as large as all of them combined wouldnow be? what difference would that make in the facts of humannature and destiny? It is from the experience going on in man'sbreast, and not from the firmaments rolling above his head, thathis importance and his final cause are to be inferred. The humanmind, heart, and conscience, thought, love, faith, and piety, remain the same in their intrinsic rank and capacities whether theuniverse be as small as it appeared to the eyes of Abraham or aslarge as it seems in the cosmical theory of Humboldt. Thus thespiritual position of man really remains precisely what it wasbefore the telescope smote the veils of distance and bared theouter courts of being. Secondly, if we do bring in the irrelevant realms of science tothe examination of our princely pretensions, it is but fair tolook in both directions. And then what we lose above we gainbelow. The revelations of the microscope balance those of thetelescope. The animalcula magnify man as much as the nebulsabelittle him. We cannot help believing that He who frames andprovides for those infinitesimal animals quadrillions of whommight inhabit a drop of water or a leaf and have ample room andverge enough, and whose vital and muscular organization is ascomplicated and perfect as that of an elephant, will much moretake care of man, no matter how numerous the constellations are. Let us see how far scientific vision can look beneath ourselves asthe question is answered by a few well known facts. In each dropof human blood there are three million vitalized corpusculardisks. Considering all the drops made up in this way, man is akosmos, his veins galaxies through whose circuits these redclustering planets perform their revolutions. How small theexhaling atoms of a grain of musk must be, since it will perfumeevery breath of air blowing through a hall for a quarter of acentury, and then not be perceptibly diminished. An ounce of goldmay be reduced into four hundred and thirty two billion parts, each microscopically visible. 30 There is a deposit of slate inBohemia covering forty square miles to the depth of eight feet, each cubic inch of which Ehrenberg found by microscopicmeasurement to contain forty one thousand million infusorialanimals. Sir David Brewster says, "A cubic inch of the Bilinpolieschiefer slate contains above one billion seven hundred andfifty thousand millions of distinct individuals of Galionellaferruginea. "31 It is a fact that the size of one of these insectsas compared with the bulk of a man is virtually as small as thatof a man compared with the whole scheme of modern astronomy. Thus, if the problem of our immortal consequence is prejudiciallyvitiated by contemplating the immense extremity of vision, it isrectified by gazing on the opposite extremity. If man justlyscrutinized, without comparisons, is fitted for and worthy ofeternity, 30 Lardner, Hand Book of Natural Philosophy, book i. Chap. V. 31More Worlds than One, ch. Viii. Note 3. no foreign facts, however magnificent or minute, should alter ourjudgment from the premises. Thirdly, is it not evident that man's greatness keeps even pacealong the scale of magnitude with the widening creation, since itis his mind that sees and comprehends how wondrous the dimensionsof the universe are? The number of stars and the limits of spaceare not more astounding than it is that he should be capable ofknowing such things, enumerating and staking them off. When manhas measured the distance and weighed the bulk of Sirius, it ismore appropriate to kneel in amazement before the inscrutablemystery of his genius, the irrepressible soaring of his soul, thanto sink in despair under the swinging of those lumps of dirt intheir unapproachable spheres because they are so gigantic! Theappearance of the creation to man is not vaster than hisperception of it. They are exactly correlated by the very terms ofthe statement. As the astronomic world expands, the astronomer'smind dilates and must be as large as it in order to contain it inthought. What we lose in relative importance from the enlargementof the boundaries of the universe we gain from the new revelationof our capacities that is made through these transcendentachievements of our science. That we are favorites of the Creatorand destined for immortal glories is therefore logically andmorally just as credible after looking through Herschel's fortyfeet reflector and reading La Place's Mecanique Celeste as itwould be were this planet, suspended in a hollow dome, theentirety of material being. Furthermore, we can reason only from the data we have; and, doingthat, we should conclude, from the intrinsic and incomparablesuperiority of spirit to matter, that man and his kindredscattered in families over all the orbs of space were the especialobjects of the infinite Author's care. They are fitted by theirfilial attributes to commune with Him in praise and love. Theyknow the prodigious and marvellous works of mechanical nature;mechanical nature knows nothing. Man can return his Maker'sblessing in voluntary obedience and thanks; matter is inanimateclay for the Potter's moulding. Turning from the gleamingwildernesses of star land to the intellect and heart, appreciatingthe 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 ofheavens is but a veil. Not chaos, darkest pit of Erebus, Nor aughtof blinder vacancy, scoop'd out By help of dreams, can breed suchfear 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, onedivine impulse of devotion, better than a whole planet of mud, awhole solar system of gas and dust? Who would not rather be thesoul that gauges the deeps, groups the laws, foretells themovements, of the universe, writing down in a brief mathematicalformula a complete horoscope of the heavens as they will appear onany given night thousands of years hence, than to be all thatarray of swooping systems? To think the world is to be superior tothe world. That which appreciates is akin to that which makes; andso we are the Creator's children, and these crowding nebula, packed with orbs as thick as the ocean beach with sands, are themany mansions of the House fitted up for His abode and ours. Anonly prince would be of more consideration than a palace, althoughits foundation pressed the shoulders of Serpentarius, its turrettouched the brow of Orion, and its wings reached from the GreatBear to the Phoenix. So a mind is of more importance than thematerial creation, and the moral condition of a man is of greatermoment than the aspect of stellar firmaments. Another illustration of the truth we are considering is to bedrawn from the idealist theory, to which so many of the ablestthinkers of the world have given their devoted adhesion, thatmatter is merely phenomenal, no substantial entity, but atransient show preserved in appearance for some ulterior cause, and finally, at the withdrawal or suspension of God's volition, toreturn into annihilating invisibility as swiftly as a flash oflightning. The solid seeming firmaments are but an exertion ofDivine force projected into vision to serve for a season as atheatre for the training of spirits. When that process iscomplete, in the twinkling of an eye the phantasmal exhibition ofmatter will disappear, leaving only the ideal realm ofindestructible things, souls with their inward treasures remainingin 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 oftranscendental metaphysics. For Newton has given in his Principiaa geometrical demonstration of the infinite compressibility ofmatter. All the worlds, therefore, that cluster in yon swellingvault can be condensed into a single globe of the size of awalnut; and then, on that petty lump of apparent substance, theenfranchised soul might trample in an exultation of magnanimousscorn upon the whole universe of earths, and soar through its ownunlimited dominion, Monarch of Immortality, the snatched glory ofshrunken firmaments flashing from its deathless wings. Finally, a proper comprehension of the idea of God will neutralizethe skepticism and despondency sometimes stealthily nourished orcrushingly impressed by contemplations of the immensity of nature. If one, from regarding the cold and relentless mechanism of thesurrounding system, tremble for fear of there being no kindOverruler, let him gaze on the warm beauty that flushes thecountenance of day, the mystic meditativeness that hangs on thepensive and starry brow of night, let him follow the commandinginstincts of his own heart, and he will find himself clinging inirresistible faith and filial love to the thought of an infiniteFather. If still the atheistic sentiment obtrudes upon him andoppresses him, let him observe how every spot of immensity whereonthe eye of science has fallen is crowded with unnumbered amazingexamples of design, love, beneficence, and he will perceive thatthe irrefragable lines of argument drawn through the boundlessspaces of creation light up the stupendous contour of God and showthe expression of his features to be love. It seems as though anyman acquainted with the truths and magnitudes of astronomy, who, after seeing the star strewn abysses, would look in his mirror andask if the image reflected there is that of the greatest being inthe universe, would need nothing further to convince him that aGod, the Creator, Preserver, Sovereign, lives. And then, if, mistakenly judging from his own limitations, he thinks that theparticular care of all the accumulated galaxies of worlds, everyworld perhaps teeming with countless millions of consciouscreatures, would transcend the possibilities even of God, amoment's reflection will dissolve that sophistry in the truth thatGod is infinite, and that to his infinite attributes globule andglobe are alike, the oversight of the whole and of each part amatter of instantaneous and equal ease. Still further: if thisabstract 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 theorbs of the remotest firmament, are now taken care of by DivineProvidence? God now keeps them all in being and order, unconfusedby their multiplicity, unoppressed by their magnitude, and not foran instant forgetting or neglecting either the mightiest or theleast. Morbidly suspicious, perversely incredulous, must be themind that denies, since it is so now in this state, that it may beso as well in the other state and forever! Grasping the conceptionof one God, who creates, rules, and loves all, man mayunpresumptuously feel himself to be a child of the Infinite and asafe heir of immortality. Looking within and without, and soaringin fancy amidst the blue and starry altitudes interspersed withblazing suns and nebulous oceans, he may cry, from a soberestimate of all the experimental and phenomenal facts within hisreach, "Even here I feel, Among these mighty things, that as I amI am akin to God; that I am partOf the use universal, and can graspSome portion of that reason in the whichThe whole is ruled and founded; that I haveA 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 andexpressed by help of an individual illustration. While the pen isforming these words, the announcement of the death of Dr. Kanesaddens the world. Alas that the gallant heart no longer beats, the story of whose noble generosity and indomitable prowess hasjust thrilled the dull nations of men of meaner mould! Who eventhough standing before a telescope under the full architecture ofthe heavens can believe that that maiden soul of heroism anddevotion is now but an extinguished spark, that the love, honor, intelligence, self sacrificing consecration which enswathed him aswith a saintly halo have all gone out? Turning from that paleform, stretched on the couch of death in fatal Cuba, through thereceding gulfs of space where incomputable systems of worlds arewheeling on their eternal courses, and then looking back againfrom the noiseless glitter and awful bulk of the creation, do youdespair of the immortal consequence of the poor sufferer whosefleshly moorings to existence are successively loosening at everygasp? Ah, remember that Matter and the Soul are not alone! Farabove that clay bound, struggling soul, and far above thosemeasureless, firmamental masses, is God, the Maker of them both, and the Lover of his child. Glancing in His omniscience down uponthat human death couch, around which affectionate prayers arefloating from every part of the earth, and from whose pallidoccupant confiding sighs are rising to His ear, He sees theunutterable mysteries of yearning thought, emotion, and power, which are the hidden being of man, and which so ally the filialspirit to the parent Divinity. As beneath His gaze the faithfulsoul of Elisha Kane slowly extricating itself from its overwroughttabernacle, and also extricating itself from the holy network ofheart strings which sixty millions of men speaking one speech haveflung around him, if haply so they might retain him to earth totake their love and waiting honors rises into the invisible, seeking to return, bearing its virgin purity with it, to the bosomof God, will He overlook it, or carelessly spurn it into night, because the banks of stars are piled up so thick and high thatthey absorb His regards? My soul, come not thou into the counselsof them that think so! It should not be believed though astronomywere a thousand times astronomy. But it shall rather be thoughtthat, ere now, the brave American has discovered the Mariner whomhe sought, though sailing on far other seas, where there is nodestroying winter and no need of rescue. In association with the measureless spaces and countless worldsbrought to light by astronomic science naturally arises thequestion whether the other worlds are, like our earth, peopledwith responsible intelligences. In ancient times the stars werenot generally thought to be worlds, but to be persons, genii orgods. At the dawn of creation "the morning stars sang together;"that is, "the sons of God shouted for joy. " The stars were theliving army of "Jehovah of hosts. " At the time when thetheological dogmas now prevalent were first conceived, thegreatness and glory of the universe were supposed to centre onthis globe. The fortunes of man wellnigh absorbed, it wasimagined, the interest of angels and of God. The whole creationwas esteemed a temporary theatre for the enactment of the sublimedrama of the fall and redemption of man. The entire heavens withall their host were thought to revolve in satellite dependencearound this stationary and regal planet. For God to hold long, anxious, repeated councils to devise means to save us, was notdeemed out of keeping with the relative dignity of the earth andthe human race. But at length the progress of discovery put adifferent aspect on the physical conditions of the problem. Thephilosopher began to survey man's habitation and history, and toestimate man's comparative rank and destiny, not from the standpoint of a solitary planet dating back only a few thousand years, but in the light of millions of centuries of duration and from aposition among millions of crowded firmaments whence our sunappears as a dim and motionless star. This new vision of sciencerequired a new construction of theology. The petty and monstrousnotions of the ignorant superstition of the early age neededrectification. In the minds of the wise and devout few this waseffected; but with the great majority the two sets of ideasexisted 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 today and night, and various other laws and changes, like our ownabode, it was natural to infer that these innumerable worlds werealso inhabited by rational creatures akin to ourselves and capableof worshipping God. Numerous considerations, possessing more orless 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 SingleIntellectual Realm. " It became the popular faith, and isundoubtedly more so now than ever before. Towards the end of theseventeenth century a work was published in explicit support ofthis faith by Fontenelle. It was entitled "Conversations on thePlurality of Worlds, " and had marked success, running through manyeditions. A few years later, Huygens wrote a book, called"Cosmotheoros, " in maintenance of the same thesis. The more thisdoctrine obtained root and life in the convictions of men, themore strongly its irreconcilableness with the ordinary theologymust have made itself felt by fearless and competent thinkers. Could a quadrillion firmaments loaded with stars, each inhabitedby its own race of free intelligences, all be burned up anddestroyed in the Day of Judgment provoked on this petty grain ofdust by the sin of Adam? 32 Were the stars mere sparks andspangles stuck in heaven for us to see by, it would be no shock toour reason to suppose that they might be extinguished with ourextinction; but, grasping the truths of astronomy as they now liein the brain of a master in science, we can no longer think of Godexpelling our race from the joys of being and then quenching thesplendors of his hall "as an innkeeper blows out the lights whenthe dance is at an end. " God rules and over rules all, andserenely works out his irresistible ends, incapable of wrath ordefeat. Would it be more incongruous for Him to be angry with anant hill and come down to trample it, than to be so with the earthand 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 ofstellar worlds stocked with intellectual families. 33 Hegel, eitherimbued with that Gnostic contempt and hatred for matter whichdescribed the earth as "a dirt ball for the extrication of lightspirits, " or from an obscure impulse of pantheistic thought, sullies the stars with every demeaning phrase, even stigmatizingthem as "pimples of light. " Michelet, a disciple of Hegel, followed his example, and, in a work published in 1840, strovevigorously to aggrandize the earth and man at the expense of theaccepted teachings of astronomy. 34 With argument and ridicule, witand reason, he endeavored to make it out that the stars are nobetter than gleaming patches of vapor. We are the exclusiveautocrats of all immensity. Whewell has followed up this speciesof thought with quite remarkable adroitness, force, andbrilliance. 35 Whether his motive in this undertaking is purelyscientific and artistic, or whether he is impelled by a fanciedreligious animus, having been bitten by some theological fearwhich has given him the astrophobia, does not clearly appear. 32 As specimens of the large number of treatises which have beenpublished asserting the destruction of the whole creation in theDay of Judgment, the following may be consulted. Osiander, DeConsummatione Saculi Dissertationum Pentus. Lund, De ExcidioUniversi Totali et Substantiali. Frisch, Die Welt im Feuer, oderdas wahre Vergehen und Ende der Welt durch den letzen Sundenbrand. For a century past the opinion has been gaining favor that thegreat catastrophe will be confined to our earth, and that eventhis is not to be annihilated, but to be transformed, purged, andbeautified by the crisis. See, e. G. , Brumhey, Ueber die endlicheUmwandlung 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 aPlurality of Worlds: An Essay. Brewster has replied to Whewell's disturbing essay in a volumewhich more commands our sympathies and carries our reason, but is less sustained in force and less close in logic. 36 Powellhas still more recently published a very valuable treatise on thesubject;37 and with this work the discussion rests thus far, leaving, as we believe, the popular faith in an astronomicuniverse of inhabited worlds unshaken, however fatal thelegitimate implications of that faith may be to other doctrinessimultaneously held. 38 It is curious to observe the shiftingpositions taken up by skepticism in science, now, with powerfulrecoil from the narrow bigotries of theology, eagerly embracingthe sublimest dreams of astronomic speculation, and now incliningto the faith that the remoter stars are but brilliant globulestrickling from the poles of some terrible battery in the godlessheights of space. But if there be any thing sure in science atall, it is that the material creation is inconceivably vast, including innumerable systems, and all governed by invariablelaws. But let us return from this episode. The foregoing sixfold argument, preserving us from the remorselessgrasp of annihilation, leaves to us unchanged the problem of therelations which shall be sustained by the disembodied soul to timeand space, the question as to the locality of the spirit world, the scene of our future life. Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, Valhallawith its mead brimmed horns, Blessed Isles, Elysium, supernalOlympus, firmamental Heaven, paradisal Eden, definite sites ofcelestial Worlds for departed souls, the Chaldee's golden orbs, the Sanscrit Meru, the Indian Hunting Ground, the Moslem's lovebowers, and wine rivers, and gem palaces thronged with dark eyedhouris, these notions, and all similar ones, of materialresidences for spirits, located and bounded, we must dismiss asdreams and cheats of the childish world's unripe fancy. There isno evidence for any thing of that coarse, crude sort. Thefictitious theological Heaven is a deposit of imagination on theazure ground of infinity, like a bird's nest on Himalaya. What, then, shall we say? Why, in the first place, that, while there arereasons enough and room enough for an undisheartened faith in thegrand fact of human immortality, it is beyond our present powersto establish any detailed conclusions in regard to its locality orits 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 riseto a more ideal and sublime view than any of those tangiblefigments which were the products of untrained sensual imaginationand gross materialistic theory. When the fleshly prison walls ofthe mind fall, its first inheritance is a stupendous freedom. Thenarrow limits that caged it here are gone, and it lives in anethereal sphere with no impeding bounds. Leaving its natalthreshold of earth and the lazar house of time, its home isimmensity, 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 Hopeof the Christian. 37 Essay on the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. See, furthermore, inWestminster Review, July, 1858, Recent Astronomy and the NebularHypothesis. 38 Volger, Erde and Ewigkeit. (Natural History of the Earth as aPeriodical Process of Development in Opposition to the UnnaturalGeology of Revolutions and Catastrophes. ) Treise, Dag Endlose dergrossen und der kleinen materiellen Welt. thinker there is no ascent or descent or terminating wall inspace, but equal motion illimitably in all directions; and noabsolute standard of duration, only a relative and variable onefrom the insect of an hour, to man, to an archangel, to thatincomprehensible Being whose shortest moments are too vast to benoted by the awful nebula of the Hour Glass, although its rushingsands are systems of worlds. The soul emerges from earthly bondageemancipated into eternity, while "The ages sweep around him withtheir wings, Like anger'd eagles cheated of their prey. " We have now sufficient premonitions and examples of this wondrousenlargement to base a rational belief on. What hems us in when wethink, feel, and imagine? And what is the heaven that shall dawnfor us beyond the veil of death's domain but the realm of Thought, the sphere of the spirit's unhampered powers? There are oftenvouchsafed to us here hours of outsoaring emotion and conceptionwhich make the enclosures in which the astronomer loiters seemnarrow. "His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirstytraveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mindimpatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, likecobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to wheredistance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary. " There are moods of spiritual expansion andinfinite longing that illustrate the train of thought so wellexpressed in the following lines: "Even as the dupe in tales ArabianDipp'd but his brow beneath the beaker's brim, And in that instant all the life of manFrom youth to age roll'd its slow years on him, And, while the foot stood motionless, the soulSwept 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 eyesThe undefined Immeasurable lies. " 39 Then we realize that the spiritual world does not form some nowunseen and distant region of the visible creation, but that theastronomic universe is a speck lying in the invisible bosom of thespiritual world. "Space is an attribute of God in which all matteris laid, and other attributes he may have which are the home ofmind and soul. " We suppose the difference between the presentembodied and the future disembodied state to be so vast that theconditions of the latter cannot be intelligibly illustrated by theanalogies of the former. It is not to be expected that the humansoul will ever be absolutely independent of time and space, literally transcending them, but only relatively so as comparedwith its earthly predicament. 39 Bulwer, King Arthur, book xi. For, as an able thinker and writer a philosopher of theSwedenborgian school, too has said, "The conception of a mindabsolutely sundered from all connection with space is a merepretence which words necessarily repudiate. " The soul on the hypothesis that there is a soul is now in thebody. Evidently, on leaving the body, it must either be nowhere, and that is annihilation, which the vehement totality of ourthought denies; or everywhere, and that implies infinity, the lossof finite being in boundless Deity, a conclusion which we know ofnothing to warrant; or somewhere, and that predicates a survivingindividuality related to surrounding externals, which is theprophesied and satisfactory result in which we rest in faith, humbly confessing our ignorance as to all the minutia. It does notnecessarily follow from this view, however, that the soul islimited to a fixed region in space. It may have the freedom of theuniverse. More wonders, and sublimer than mortal fancies have eversuspected, are waiting to be revealed when we die: "For this life is but being's first faint ray, And heaven onheaven make up God's dazzling day. " We are here living unconsciously engirt by another universe thanthe senses can apprehend, thinly veiled, but real, and waiting forus with hospitable invitation. "What are those dream like andinscrutable thoughts which start up in moments of stillness, apparently as from the deeps, like the movement of the leavesduring a silent night, in prognostic of the breeze that has yetscarce come, if not the rustlings of schemes and orders ofexistence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the abodeand destiny of the soul after death is all immensity. Theinterstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are barren desertswhere nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdomcolonized by the spirits who since the beginning of the creationhave sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be thecrowded aisles of the universal temple trod by bright throngs ofworshipping angels. The soul's home, the heaven of God, may besuffused throughout the material universe, ignoring the existenceof physical globes and galaxies. So light and electricity pervadesome solid bodies, as if for them there were no solidity. So, doubtless, there are millions of realities around us utterlyeluding our finest senses. "A fact, " Emerson says, "is the lastissue of spirit, " and not its entire extent. "The visible creationis the terminus of the invisible world, " and not the totality ofthe universe. There are gradations of matter and being, from therock to the flower, from the vegetable to man. Is it most probablethat the scale breaks abruptly there, or that other ranks ofspiritual existence successively rise peopling the seeming abyssesunto 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 reignClasp 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, toloose our hold from the various supposed localities of the soul'sdestination, which have pleased the fancies and won the assent ofmankind in earlier times. But it cannot touch the simple andcardinal fact of an immortal life for man. It merely forces us toacknowledge that while the fact stands clear and authoritative toinstinct, reason, and faith, yet the how, and the where, and allsuch problems, are wrapped in unfathomable mystery. We are to obeyand hope, not dissect and dogmatize. However the fantastic dreamsof the imagination and the subtle speculations of the intellectmay shift from time to time, and be routed and vanish, the deepyearning of the heart remains the same, the divine polarity of thereason changes not, and men will never cease fondly to believethat although they cannot tell where heaven is, yet surely thereis a heaven reserved for them somewhere within the shelteringembrace of God's infinite providence. We may not say of thatkingdom, Lo, here! or Lo, there! but it is wherever God'sapproving presence extends: and is that not wherever the pure inheart are found? 40 Let every elysian clime the breezes blow over, every magic islethe waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy hasdevised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet thathangs afar on the neck of night, be disenchanted of theirimaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, withinthe relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze offleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MINDwould not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still theunquenchable instincts of the HEART would retain, uninjured, thegreat expectation of ANOTHER WORLD, although no traveller returnsfrom its voiceless bourne to tell in what local direction it lies, no voyager comes back from its mystic port to describe itslatitude and longitude on the chartless infinite of space. Turn we now from the lateral distribution of notions as to afuture life, to their lineal development. We have seen that thedevelopment of belief as to the locality of our future destinationhas been a chase of places, over the earth, under the earth, through the sky, as fast as the unknown was brought within theknown, until it has stopped at the verge of the unknowable. Therewe stand, confessing our inability to fix the scene. The doctrineof the conditions and contents of the future life has followed thesame course as that of its locality. In the first stage of belief the future life consists of the grossconditions and materials of the known present reflected, under theimpulse of the senses, into the unknown future. This style offaith prevailed for a vast period, and is not yet obsolete. Whenthe King of Dahomey has done a great feat, he kills a man to carrythe tidings to the ghost of his royal father. When he dieshimself, a host are killed, that he may enter Deadland with abecoming cortege. His wives also are slain, or commit suicide, that they may rejoin him. The second stage of belief is reached when, under the ethicalimpulse, only certain refined elements of the present, discriminated portions of the products of reason, imagination andsentiment, are reflected into the future, and accepted as thefacts of the life there. Critical processes, applied to thoughtand faith, cause the rejection of much that was received. Thatalone which answers to our wants, and has coherence, continues tobe held 40 Chalmers, Sermon, Heaven a Character and not a Locality. as truth. An example is afforded by Augustine in his essay, DeLibero Arbitrio. He argues that the wicked are kept in being onthe out skirts of the material universe; partly wretched, partlyhappy; too bad for heaven, too good for annihilation; incapable ofattaining the summit of their beatified destiny. Not the crudereflection of the present state, but a criticized and purgedportion of the results of speculation on it, is thrown forward, and composes the doctrine of the future life. This is thecondition of faith in which civilized mankind, for the most part, now are. The third stage of development is that wherein the thinkerperceives that it is illegitimate to reflect into the future anyof the realities or relations of the present, and then to regardthem as the truths of the experience which awaits him after death. His experience here is the resultant of his faculties as relatedto the universe. Destroy his organization, and what follows? Onewill say, "Nonentity. " Another, more wise and modest, will say, "Something necessarily unknown as yet. " We have no better right toproject into the ideal space of futurity the ingredients of ourthoughts than we have to project there the objects of our senses. Bunsen, whose thought and scholarship included pretty much all theknowledge of mankind, represents this stage of faith. He stands onthe religious side of the movement of Science, believing inimmortality without defining it. Comte stands on the positivistside, blankly denying all objective immortality. These tworepresent 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; withBunsen, Christian faith pointing the child to an eternal home inthe Father. For all but fetichistic minds the only choice liesbetween these two. The organic evolution of the doctrine of a life to come is, therefore, a process of faith beginning with the crudetransference of the elements of the present into the future, continuing with refined modifications of that transference, endingwith an entire cessation of it as inapplicable and incompetent. Having examined all the historic, experimental, and scientificdata within our reach, we pause on the edge of the PART which weknow, and wait, with serene trust, though with bowed head andsilent 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 ofGod, dropped from the skies into organic forms of matter, or whowere created here on an exalted plane of insight and communion farabove any thing now experienced by us, then the destination of manto a life after death may originally have been a fact of directknowledge, universally seen and grasped without any obscuringperadventure. From that state it gradually declined into dubiousdimness as successive generations grew sinful, sensual, hardened, immersed and bound in affairs of passion and earth. It becameremoter, assumed a questionable aspect, gave rise to discussionsand doubts, and here and there to positive disbelief and opendenial. Thus, beginning as a clear reality within the vision ofall, it sank into a matter of uncertain debate among individuals. But if the first men were called up into being from the earth, bythe creative energy of God, as the distinct climax of the otherspecies, then the early generations of our race, during the longages of their wild and slowly ameliorating state, were totallyignorant of any conscious sequel to the fate seemingly closed indeath. They were too animal and rude yet to conceive a spiritualexistence outside of the flesh and the earth. Among theaccumulating trophies of their progressive intellectual conquestshung up by mankind in the historic hall of experience, thismarvellous achievement is one of the sublimest. What a day wasthat for all humanity forever after, when for the first time, onsome climbing brain, dawned from the great Sun of the spirit worldthe idea of a personal immortality! It was announced. It dawnedseparately wherever there were prepared persons. It spread fromsoul to soul, and became the common faith of the world. Still, among every people there were pertinacious individuals, who sworenot by the judge and went not with the multitude, persons of lesscredulous hearts and more skeptical faculties, who demurred at thegreat doctrine, challenged it in many particulars, gainsaid it onvarious grounds, disbelieved it from different motives, and foughtit with numerous weapons. Whichever of the foregoing suppositions be adopted, that thedoctrine of a future life subsided from universal acceptance intoparty contention, or that it arose at length from personalperception and authority into common credit, the fact remainsequally prominent and interesting that throughout the traceablehistory of human opinion there is a line of dissenters who havethought death the finality of man, and the next world an illusion. The history of this special department of thought opens a wide andfertile subject. To gain a comprehensive survey of its boundariesand a compact epitome of its contents, it will be well to considerit 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 impulsescould move persons to undertake, as many constantly haveundertaken, a crusade against a faith so dear to man, so ennoblingto his nature. Peruse the pages of philosophical history withcareful reflection, and the mystery is scattered, and variousgroups of disbelievers stand revealed, with earnest voices andgestures assailing the doctrine of a future life. 1 One company, having their representatives in every age, reject itas a protest in behalf of the right of private judgment againstthe tyranny of authority. The doctrine has been inculcated bypriesthoods, embodied in sacred books, and wrought into theorganic social life of states; and acceptance of it has beencommanded as a duty, and expected as a decent and respectablething. To deny it has required courage, implied independentopinions, and conferred singularity. To cast off the yoke oftradition, undermine the basis of power supporting a gallingreligious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in ageneration of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely failto exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of thepresent time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kingsand the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living coreof the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God andfuturity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign overthem and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretendedinterests of a future life. 2 The true way to secure the realdesideratum corruptly indicated in this movement is not by denyingthe reality of a future life, but by removing the adjustment ofits conditions and the administration of its rewards and penaltiesout of the hands of every clique of priests and rulers. Arighteously and benignly ordered immortality, based in truth andadjudicated by the sole sovereignty of God, is no engine ofoppression, though a doctrine of heaven and hell irresponsiblymanaged by an Orphic association, the guardians of a Delphictripod, the owners of a secret confessional, or the interpretersof an exclusive creed, may be. In a matter of such graveimportance, that searching and decisive discrimination, so rarewhen the passions get enlisted, is especially needed. Because adoctrine is abused by selfish tyrants is no reason for supposingthe doctrine itself either false or injurious. No little injury has been done to the common faith in a futurelife, great disbelief has been provoked unwittingly, by writerswho have sought to magnify the importance of revealed religion atthe expense of natural religion. Many such persons have labored toshow that all the scientific, philosophical, and moral argumentsfor immortality are worthless, the teachings and resurrection ofChrist, the revealed word of God, alone possessing any validity toestablish that great truth. An accomplished author says, in arecent work, "The immortality of the soul cannot be proved withoutthe aid of revelation. " 3 Bishop Courtenay published, a few yearssince, a most deliberate and unrelenting attack upon the argumentsfor the deathlessness of the soul, seeking with perseveringremorselessness to demolish every one of them, and to prove thatman totally perishes, but will be restored to life at the secondcoming of Christ. 4 There can scarcely be a question that suchstatements usually awaken and confirm a deep skepticism as to afuture life, instead of enhancing a grateful estimate of thegospel. 1 J. A. Luther, Recensetur numerus eorum, qui immortalitateminficiati sunt. 2 Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im neunzehntenJahrhundert, band iii. Kap. Iv. : Der philosophische Radicalismus. 3 Bowen, Metaphysical and Ethical Science, part ii. Ch. Ix. TheFuture States: Their Evidences and Nature considered on PrinciplesPhysical, Moral, and Scriptural, with the Design of Showing theValue of the Gospel Revelation. If man is once annihilated, it is hardly credible that he will beidentically restored. Such a stupendous and arbitrary miracleclashes with the continuity of the universe, and staggers ratherthan steadies faith. We should beg such volunteers however sincereand good their intentions to withhold the impoverishing gift oftheir service. And when kindred reasonings are advanced by suchmen as the unbelieving Hume, we feel tempted to say, in thelanguage of a distinguished divine speaking on this very point, "Ah, gentlemen, we understand you: you belong to the sappers andminers in the army of the aliens!" Another party of disbelievers have repudiated the whole conceptionof a future state as a protest against the nonsense and crueltyassociated with it in the prevailing superstitions and dogmatismsof their time. From the beginning of history in most nations, thedetails of another existence and its conditions have beenfurnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawlessfancies of poets, the fine spinning brains of metaphysicians, andthe cold blooded calculations or hot headed zeal of sectarianleaders. Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around thecentral germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While thecommon throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculousand revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt, satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. So wefind it was in Greece. The fables about the under world theferriage over the Styx, poor Tantalus so torturingly mocked, thedaughters of Danaus drawing water in sieves all were accredited bythe general crowd on one extreme. 5 On the other extreme the wholescheme, root and branch, was flung away with scorn. The followingepitaph on an unbeliever is attributed to Callimachus. "OCharidas, what are the things below? Vast darkness. And what thereturns to earth? A falsehood. And Pluto? A fable. We haveperished: this is my true speech to you; but, if you want theflattering style, the Pellaan's great ox is in the shades. "6Meanwhile, a few judicious mediators, neither swallowing the wholegross draught at a gulp, nor throwing the whole away with utterdisgust, drank through the strainer of a discriminativeinterpretation. Because caprice, hatred, and favoritism areembalmed in some perverse doctrine of future punishment is nodefensible reason for denying a righteous retribution. Becauseheaven has been located on a hill top, and its sublime denizensmade 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 arbitrarilyconnected with principles claiming to be eternal truths should becarefully separated, and not the whole be despised and trodden ontogether. From lack of this analysis and discrimination, in thepresence of abnormal excrescences and offensive secretions dislikeand disbelief have often flourished where, if judicial thought andconscience had cut off the imposed deformities 5 Plutarch, De Superstition. The reality of the popular credulityand terror in later Rome clearly appears from the fact that MarcusAurelius had a law passed condemning to banishment "those who doany thing through which men's excitable minds are alarmed by asuperstitious fear of the Deity. " Nero, after murdering hismother, haunted by her ghost and tortured by the Furies, attemptedby magical rites to bring up her shade from below, and soften hervindictive wrath Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. Xxxiv. 6 Epigram. XIV. and dispelled the discoloring vengeance, faith and love would havebeen confirmed in contemplating the pure and harmonious form ofdoctrine left exposed in the beauty of benignant truth. The aimostensibly proposed by Lucretius, in his elaborate and masterlyexposition of the Epicurean philosophy, is to free men from theirabsurd belief in childish legends and their painful fears of deathand hell. As far as merely this purpose is concerned, he mighthave accomplished it as effectually, perhaps, and more directly, by exposing the adventitious errors without assailing the greatdoctrine around which they had been gathered. Bion theBorysthenite is reported by Diogenes Laertius to have said, with asharp humor, that the souls below would be more punished bycarrying water in whole buckets than in such as had been bored! Asoul may pass into the unseen state though there be no Plutonianwherry, suffer woe though there be no river Pyriphlegethon, enjoybliss though there be no cup of nectar borne by Hebe. But to flyto rash extremes and build positive conclusions on mere ignorancehas always been natural to man, not only as a believer, but alsoas an iconoclastic denier. A third set of disbelievers in a future life consists of those whoadvocate the "emancipation of the flesh" and assert thesufficiency of this life when fully enjoyed. They attack the dogmaof immortality as the essential germ of asceticism, and abjure itas a protest against that superstitious distrust and gloom whichput a ban on the pleasures of the world. These are the earthlingswho would fain displace the stern law of self denial with thebland permission of self indulgence, rehabilitate the senses, feedevery appetite full, and, when satiated of the banquet ofexistence, fall asleep under the table of the earth. Thecountenance of Duty, severe daughter of God, looks commands uponthem to turn from dallying ease and luxury, to sacrifice themeaner inclinations, to gird themselves for an arduous racethrough difficulties, to labor and aspire evermore towards thehighest and the best. They prefer to install in her steadAphrodite crowned with Paphian roses, her eyes aglow with thelight of misleading stars, her charms bewitching them with fatalenchantments and melting them in softest joys. The pale face ofDeath, with mournful eyes, lurks at the bottom of every winecupand looks out from behind every garland; therefore brim the purplebeaker higher and hide the unwelcome intruder under more flowers. We are a cunning mixture of sense and dust, and life is a fair butswift opportunity. Make haste to get the utmost pleasure out of itere it has gone, scorning every pretended bond by which sourascetics would restrain you and turn your days into penitentialscourges. This gospel of the senses had a swarm of apostles in thelast century in France, when the chief gates of the cemetery inParis bore the inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep. " It hashad more in Germany in this century; and voices of enervatingmusic are not wanting in our own literature to swell its sirenchorus. 7 Perhaps the greatest prophet it has had was Heine, whosepages reek with a fragrance of pleasure through which sighs, likea fading wail from the solitary string of a deserted harp struckby 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 imneuntzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii: kap. I. : Das jungeDeutschland. enjoy what there is; for I must die. Oh, the gusty relish of life!Oh, the speechless mystery, the infinite reality, of death!" Hesays himself, comparing the degradation of his later experiencewith the soaring enthusiasm of his youth, "It is as if a star hadfallen from heaven upon a hillock of muck, and swine were gnawingat it!" These men think that the doctrine of a future life, like a greatmagnet, has drawn the needle of human activity out of its truedirection; that the dominant tendency of the present age is, andof right ought to be, towards the attainment of material wellbeing, in a total forgetfulness to lay up treasures in heaven. Theend is enjoyment; the obstacle, asceticism; the means to securethe end, the destruction of faith in immortality, so that man, having nothing left but this world, will set himself to improveand enjoy it. The monkish severity of a morbid and erroneoustheology, darkening the present and prescribing pain in it tobrighten the future and increase its pleasures, legitimates anearnest reaction. But that reaction should be wise, measured bytruth. It should rectify, not demolish, the prevailing faith. Forthe desired end is most likely to be reached by perceiving, notthat all terminates in the grave, but that the greatest enjoymentflows from a self controlling devotedness to noble ends, that theclaims of another life are in perfect unison with the interests ofthis life, that the lawful fruition of every function of humannature, each lower faculty being subordinated to each higher one, and the highest always reigning, at once yields the most immediatepleasure and makes the completest preparation for the hereafter. In the absence of the all irradiating sun of immortality, thesedisbelievers, exulting over the pale taper of sensual pleasure, remind us of a parcel of apes gathered around a cold glow worm andrejoicing that they have found a fire in the damp, chilly night. Besides the freethinkers, who will not yield to authority, butinsist upon standing apart from the crowd, and the satirists, wholevel their shafts undiscriminatingly against what they perceiveassociated with absurdity, and the worldlings, who prefer thepleasures of time to the imaginarily contrasted goods of eternity, there is a fourth class of men who oppose the doctrine of apersonal immortality as a protest against the burdensome miseriesof individuality. The Gipseys exclaimed to Borrow, "What! is itnot enough to have borne the wretchedness of this life, that wemust also endure another?" 8 A feeling of the necessarylimitations and suffering exposures of a finite form of being hasfor untold ages harassed the great nations of the East withpainful unrest and wondrous longing. Pantheistic absorption tolose all imprisoning bounds, and blend in that ecstatic flood ofDeity which, forever full, never ebbs on any coast has beenequally the metaphysical speculation, the imaginative dream, andthe passionate desire, of the Hindu mind. It is the basis andmotive of the most extensive disbelief of individual immortalitythe world has known. "The violence of fruition in these foulpuddles of flesh and blood presently glutteth with satiety, " andthe mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs andpangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead. Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is thatgrovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfishinstincts, crawling on brutish grounds, 8 The Zincali, part ii. Ch. I. cannot awaken the creative force of spiritual wants slumberingwithin, nor lift its head high enough out of the dust to see thestars of a deathless destiny; and a fifth group of disbelieversdeny immortality because their degraded experience does notprophesy it. Many a man might say, with Autolycus, "For the lifeto 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 ofincorporeal shapes of angels, and aware of their immaterialdisentanglement and eternity. A brain surcharged with fires ofhatred, drowsed with filthy drugs, and drenched with drunkenness, will teem, on the contrary, with vermin writhing in the meshes ofdecaying matter. Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that theyare passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictionsrooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abidein serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from everyobscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenlyvision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials andtoils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divinetreasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and atthe same time consciousness will crave and faith behold anillimitable destiny. Experiences worthy of being eternal generatefaith in their own eternity. But the ignorant and selfishsensualist, whose total experience is of the earth earthy, who hasno realization of pure truth, goodness, beauty, is incapable ofsincere faith in immortal life. The dormancy of his higher powersexcludes the necessary conditions of such a faith. His ignoblebodily life does not furnish the conscious basis and prophecy of aglorious spiritual life, but shudderingly proclaims the cessationof all his experience with the destruction of his senses. Thetermination of all the functions he knows, what else can it be buthis virtual annihilation? When to the privative degradations of anuncultivated and earthy experience, naturally accompanied by apassive unbelief in immortality, are added the positive coarsenessand guilt of a thick insensibility and a wicked life, aggressivedisbelief is quite likely to arise, the essay of an uneasyconscience to slay what it feels would be a foe, and strangle theworm that never dies. The denial springing from such sources isrefuted when it is explained. Its motive should never by any manbe yielded to, much less be willingly nourished. It should beresisted by a devout culture courting the smiles of God, by risinginto the loftier airs of meditation and duty, by imaginativesentiment and practical philanthropy, until the eternal instinct, long smothered under sluggish loads of sense and sin, reached by asoliciting warmth from heaven, stirs with demonstrating vitality. The last and largest assemblage of dissenters from the prevailingopinion on this subject comprises those who utter their disbeliefin a future existence out of simple loyalty to seeming truth, as aprotest against what they think a false doctrine, and against thesophistical and defective arguments by which it has been propped. It may be granted that the five previously named classes areequally sincere in their convictions, honest assailants of errorand adherents of truth; but they are actuated by animating motivesof a various moral character. In the present case, the rulingmotive is purely a determination, as Buchner says, to stand by thefacts and to establish the correct doctrine. The directest andclearest way of giving a descriptive account of the activephilosophical history of this class of disbelievers will be tofollow on the lines of their tracks with statements and criticismsof their procedures. 9 Disbelief in the doctrine of a future lifefor man has planted itself upon bold affirmation, and fortifieditself with arguments which may most conveniently be consideredunder five distinct heads. First is the sensational Argument from Appearance. In death thevisible functions cease, the organism dissolves, the minddisappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of theindividual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought ofannihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact isabsurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the veryproblem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive thevisible material disintegration? Among the unsound andsuperstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future life is thatfounded on narratives of ghosts, appearances and visions of thedead. Dr. Tafel published at Tubingen in 1853 a volume aiming todemonstrate the immortality and personal identity of the soul bycitation of ninety cases of supernatural appearances, extendingfrom the history of the ghost whose address to Curtius Rufus isrecorded by Tacitus, to the wonderful story told by RenatusLuderitz in 1837. Such efforts are worse than vain. Their data areso explicable in many cases, and so inconclusive in all, that theyquite naturally provoke deeper disbelief and produce tellingretorts. While here and there a credulous person is convinced of afuture life by the asserted appearance of a spirit, the wellinformed psychologist refers the argument to the laws of insanityand illusions, and the skeptic adds as a finality his belief thatthere is no future life, because no ghost has ever come back toreveal and certify it. The argument on both sides is equallyfutile, and removed from the true requisitions of the problem. To the philosophical thinker a mere appearance is scarcely apresumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it. Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullityor the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around theearth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances andthe forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we seenothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based onacquired experience. The first darkness would seem to thetrembling contemplator absolutely to blot out the universe; but intruth it only prevented him from seeing it. The first thoroughunconscious sleep would seem to be the hopeless destruction of thesoul 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 tomistakes and falsehoods. They are always superficial, furnishingno reliable evidence of the reality. "Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'dWithin 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 dieEinfachheit 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 thatthe mind has therefore ceased to be at all, is a mere supposition. It may still live and act, independently of the body. An outsidephenomenon can prove nothing here. We must by some psychologicalprobe pierce to the core of the being and discern, as thereconcealed, the central interpretation of truth, or else, in wantof this, turn from these surface shadows and seek the solution insome other province. Millions of appearances being opposed to thetruth or inadequate to hint it, we must never implicitly trusttheir suggestions. What microscope can reveal the organic life ina kernel of corn, and show that through the decay of that kernel astalk will spring up and bear a thousand kernels more? But if anew mental life emerges from the dying form of man, it lies in aspiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Everyexistent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only finalweapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goesinto nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; intoinfinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie indiscerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universeis the body of our body. " The boundary of our life is boundlesslife. Schlegel has somewhere asked the question, "Is life in us, or are we in life?" Because man appears to be wholly extinguishedin death, we have no right whatever in reason to conclude that hereally is so. The star which seemed to set in the western grave ofaged and benighted time, we, soon coming round east to the truespirit sky, may discern bright in the morning forehead ofeternity. There can be no safe reasoning from the outmost husk andphenomenon of a thing to its inmost essence and result. And, inspite of any possible amount of appearance, man himself may passdistinct and whole into another sphere of being when his fleshfalls to dust. That science should search in vain with her finestglasses to discern a royal occupant reigning in the purplechambered palace of the heart, or to trace any such mysterioustenant departing in sudden horror from the crushed and bleedinghouse of life, belongs to the necessary conditions of the subject;for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. As well might youseek to smell a color, or taste a sound, tie a knot of water, orbraid a cord of wind. Next comes the abstract Argument from Speculative Philosophy. Under this head are to be included all those theories which denythe soul to be a spiritual entity, but reduce it to an atomicarrangement, or a dependent attribute, or a process of action. Heracleitus held that the soul was fire: of course, when the fuelwas exhausted the fire would go out. Thales taught that it waswater: this might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that itwas air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction andcondensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanentpersonal identity. Critias said it was blood: this mightdegenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground. Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: asthese came together, so they might fly apart and there be an endof what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that itwas a fifth unknown substance, with properties of its own, unlikethose of fire, air, water, and earth. This might be mortal orimmortal: there was nothing decisive in the conception or thedefining terms to prove which it was. Accordingly, the Peripateticschool has always been divided on the question of the immortalityof the soul, from the time of its founder's immediate disciples tothis day. It cannot be clearly shown what the mighty Stagyrite'sown opinion really was. Speculative conceptions as to the nature of the soul like theforegoing, when advanced as arguments to establish its propermortality, are destitute of force, because they are gratuitousassumptions. They are not generalizations based on carefulinduction of facts; they are only arbitrary hypotheses. Furthermore, they are inconsistent both with the facts andphenomena of experience. Mind cannot fairly be brought into thecategory of the material elements; for it has properties andperforms functions emphatically distinguishing it from every thingelse, placing it in a rank by itself, with exclusive predicates ofits own. Can fire think? Can water will? Can air feel? Can bloodsee? Can a mathematical number tell the difference between goodand evil? Can earth be jealous of a rival and loyal to a duty? Cana ganglion solve a problem in Euclid or understand the Theodiceeof Leibnitz? It is absurd to confound things so distinct. Mind ismind, and matter is matter; and though we are now consciouslyacquainted with them only in their correlation, yet there is asmuch reason for supposing that the former survives the close ofthat correlation as for supposing that the latter does. True, weperceive the material remaining and do not perceive the spirit. Yes; but the differentiation of the two is exactly this, that oneis appreciable by the senses, while the other transcends andbaffles them. It is absolutely inconceivable in imagination, wholly incredible to reason, intrinsically nonsensical every way, that a shifting concourse of atoms, a plastic arrangement ofparticles, a regular succession of galvanic shocks, a continuousseries of nervous currents, or any thing of the sort, shouldconstitute the reality of a human soul, the process of a humanlife, the accumulated treasures of a human experience, allpreserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personalidentity. The things lie in different spheres and are full ofincommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimatelycorrelated the physical and psychical constituents of man are, yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeplyopposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwiseconsciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recentable author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union formsthe brain and whose action constitutes the mind. " 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose andresolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not anagent necessary for an action? All such speculative conceptions asto the nature of soul as make it purely phenomenal are to beoffset, if they can be, by the view which exhibits the personalego or conscious selfhood of the soul, not as an empty spot inwhich a swarm of relations centre as their goal point, but as anindestructible monad, the innermost and substantial essence andcause of the organization, the self apprehending and unchangeableaxis of all thinking and acting. Some of the most free, acute, learned, wise, and powerful thinkers of the world have beenchampions of this doctrine; especially among the moderns may benamed Leibnitz, Herbart, Goethe, and Hartenstein. Jacobi mostearnestly maintained it both against Mendelssohn and againstFichte. 10 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 371. That the mind is a substantial entity, and therefore may beconceived as immortal, that it is not a mere functional operationaccompanying the organic life, a phantom procession of consciousstates filing off on the stage of the cerebrum "in a dead march ofmere effects, " that it is not, as old Aristoxenus dreamed, merelya harmony resulting from the form and nature of the body in thesame way that a tune springs from the consenting motions of amusical instrument, seems to be shown by facts of which we havedirect knowledge in consciousness. We think that the mind is anindependent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighingopposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting sometendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding uponits own course of action and carrying out its chosen designsaccordingly. If the soul were a mere process, it could not pausein mid career, select from the mass of possible considerationsthose adapted to suppress a base passion or to kindle a generoussentiment, deliberately balance rival solicitations, and, whenfully satisfied, proceed. Yet all this it is constantly doing. So, if the soul were but a harmony, it would give no sounds contraryto the affections of the lyre it comes from. But actually itresists the parts of the instrument from which they say itsubsists, exercising dominion over them, punishing some, persuading others, and ruling the desires, angers, and fears, asif itself of a different nature. 11 Until an organ is seen to blowits own bellows, mend its shattered keys, move its pedals, andplay, with no foreign aid, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, " or aviolin tunes up its discordant strings and wields its bow in aspontaneous performance of the Carnival, showing us every Cremonaas its own Paganini, we may, despite the conceits of speculativedisbelief, hold that the mind is a dynamic personal entity. Thatthought is the very "latch string of a new world's wicket. " Thirdly, we have the fanciful Argument from Analogy. The keenchampions of disbelief, with their athletic agility of dialectics, have made terrible havoc among the troops of poetic arguments fromresemblance, drawn up to sustain the doctrine of immortality. Theyhave exposed the feebleness of the argument for our immortalityfrom the wonderful workmanship and costliness of human nature, onthe ground that what requires the most pains and displays the mostskill and genius in its production is the most lovingly preserved. For God organizes the mind of a man just as easily as heconstructs the geometry of a diamond. His omnipotent attributesare no more enlisted in the creation of the intelligence of anelephant or the gratitude of a soul than they are in thefabrication 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 thebutterfly and psyche. The butterfly, lying in the caterpillarneatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comesforth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a commondemonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spiritfrom a fleshly encasement, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesiswholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel inthe cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato'sfamous analogical argument that by a general law of nature allthings are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies intothe 11 Plato, Phado, 98. life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is bornfrom the death of day, and day is born from the death of night;and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life fromdeath. 12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of humanimmortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. Whenone hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it isnight there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again. To this state of facts this revolving succession there isobviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases ofman, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then theother seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor, 13after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus, argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for theimmortality of the soul from the analogy of lamps burning in tombsfor centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite andvalid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable. An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independentspiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from theflesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, werecollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author. 14 Hereasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels thelost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpableproof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Ofcourse, the simple physiological explanation is that the mindinstinctively refers the sensations brought in by the severednerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has hithertolearned to trace their origination. The report being the same, itis naturally attributed to the same source. But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallaciousarguments from analogy have themselves reasoned in the same way asfallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves thephysical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters thecorpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so whenpersonal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universalspirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet, a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortexof force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy, and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a waterspout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, mangoes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from abroken harp string. All these analogies are vitiated by radicalunlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they areperfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in thecases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vitalpoint. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentarygyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by asun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using adependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his owndestiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring thematerials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision ofeternity. A flower may just as well perish as live, a musicalsound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they knownot the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpassa 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 whomadly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith andmoment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horrorbefore, having first "Put out the light, he then puts outTHE LIGHT!" There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the rangeof physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairlypredicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a selfcontained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhapstranscendent of space and time, how burlesque is the terror of theancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, onleaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm, would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has ahearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it. 15 Theanswer to the skeptical reasoning from analogy is double. First, the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate withinour tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination ofother lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritualregion. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatallylimited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But nosuch limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, asfar as there is genuine analogy, its implications are muchstronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whoseessence 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 thenegative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall liveagain; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain thedetails of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it issaid, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. Theproposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it reallyamounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in thesky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor waterin stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and theblood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question. Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of theconditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yetexperienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millionsof facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It isnot in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions ofexperiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powersmay hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved. Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of theuniverse? In the present, experience must be confined within itsown boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo wereendowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could notconstruct any intelligible theory of the world and life into whichit was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logicto infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materialswithin its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, andthe what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other lifereserved for it. An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould, if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know anydefinite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upperlight and air, with cattle in its shade and 15 Lib. Iii. Ll. 503-508. singing birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground ofargument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what weknow. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with whichscience abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, meltand remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Anyquantity of facts have been scientifically established as realwhich are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to beliefthan the assertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is nomore mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in itshaving been kept out of life through a past eternity. Theauthentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been madefrom the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that, from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, weshall continue to be. " 16 The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and opento imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that wecannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state. Had one little partitular been different in the structure of theeye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never haveseen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole ofcreation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition maynow be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements ofimmortality which in death's disenveloping hour are to burst intoour vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut upnow to one form of being and one method of experience, how can weexpect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms andmethods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it. But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustardseed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfolddenser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance would bring noreal argument against the survival of the soul. For in anomnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorancecannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping theflesh, we may soar into heaven "Upon ethereal wings, whose wayLies through an element so fraughtWith living Mind that, as they play, Their every movement is a thought. " Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moralproofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of thestomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain, could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, andlogic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, andno scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations anddreams. No metaphysical glass can detect, no prognosis foresee, the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: onempirical grounds, the assertion of it is therefore unwarranted. But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, noextent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is alegitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be nodoubt, in multitudes of instances, the effectual cause ofdisbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividlyconceiving its conditions and scenery; "for, " as one of thesubtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may gobeyond experience, it 16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after theChristian Life. must always be chained down by it at a distance. " But if there aregood grounds for anticipating another life, then man shouldconfide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct itstheatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one mighthave scouted the statement that the most fearful surgicaloperations would be performed without inflicting pain, because itwas impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person hadbeen informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America, should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, hemight have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could notconceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we couldreasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germsand mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to thefullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us, "Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds notrealized. " The last weapon of disbelief in a future life is the ScientificArgument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing inthe universe but bodies and the properties of bodies. " This is acharacteristic example of the method of the materialists: toassume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate, and that, too, in defiance of the intelligent instincts ofconsciousness which compel every unsophisticated person toacknowledge the simultaneous existence of mind and matter as twocorrelated yet distinct realities. The better statement would be, There is nothing in the universe but forces and the relations offorces. For, while we know ourselves in immediate selfconsciousness, as personal intelligences perceiving, willing, andacting, all we know of an outward world is the effects produced onus by its forces. Certainly the powers of the universe can neverbe lost from the universe. Therefore if our souls are, asconsciousness declares, causes, and not mere phenomena, they areimmortal. To ignore either factor in the problem of life, thematerial substratum or the dynamic agent, is mere narrowness andblindness. But the unbelieving naturalist argues that the total man is aproduct of organization, and therefore that with the dissolutionof the living combination of organs all is over. Matter is themarriage bed and grave of soul. Priestley says, "The principle ofthought no more belongs to substance distinct from body than theprinciple of sound belongs to substance distinct from bell. " Thereis no relevancy in the comparison, because the things are whollyunlike. Thought is not, as Hartley's theory avowed it was, avibration of a cerebral nerve, as sound is a vibration of asonorous body; for how could these vibrations be accumulated inmemory as our mental experiences are? When a material vibrationends, it has gone forever; but thoughts are stored up andpreserved. A hypothetical simile, like that just cited fromPriestley, is not a cogent argument. It is false science thus tolimit the modes of being to what lies within our present empiricalknowledge. Is it not pure presumptuousness to affirm that thecreative power of Almighty God is shut up so that intelligentcreatures can only exist in forms of flesh? When a recentmaterialist makes the assertion, "The thinking man is the sum ofhis senses, " it is manifest that he goes beyond the data, assumingwhat should be proved, and confounding the instruments andmaterial with the workman. It is as if one should say, "A workingcotton manufactory is the sum of its machines, " excluding thepersons by whose guiding oversight all is done. Plainly, it may begranted that all which man knows is brought in through the door ofthe senses, without allowing the same of all that man is. We haveno warrant for pronouncing the identical coextensiveness of whatman learns to know and what he is created to be. The veryproposition, man knows something, presupposes three things, asubject, an act, and an object. Whether the three exist and perishtogether or not is matter for discussion, and not fairly to besettled by forcibly lumping the heterogeneous three intohomogeneous unity. In the present state of science it must be confessed that allkinds of physical force whether mechanical, chemical, vital, ornervous are drawn more or less directly from the sun, the materialreservoir of power for our solar system. This must be admitted, although some recent materialists have pushed the doctrine so farthat they may be called the Parsees of the West. Whenever theproper conditions for an animate being are furnished, a forcederived from the sun lifts matter from its stable equilibrium tothe level of organic existence. In due season, from its waveringlife struggle there, it decays back to the deep rest of insensateearth. 17 This is a truth throughout the organic realm, from thebulb of a sea weed to the brain of a Casar. So much cannot bedenied. Every organism constantly receives from the universe foodand force, and as constantly restores in other forms the materialand dynamical equivalents of what it receives, and finally itselfgoes to the sources whence it came. But the affirmation of thisfor all within the physical realm is not the admission of it forwhat subsists in an immeasurably higher rank and totally differentrealm. 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 provincecontain eternities, even though the other holds only mortalities?It is a question to be examined on its own grounds, not to be putaside with a foregone conclusion. In nature the cause enduresunder all evanescent changes, and survives all phenomenalbeginnings and endings: so in spirit the causal personality, ifthere be one, may outlast all the shifting currents of the outwardphenomena in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation ofthe mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longerremain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Isthe mind an entity? or is it a collection of functions? If thesoul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenalresultant, it ceases at death. A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychicaltotality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition, and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual entity inwhich they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physicaltotality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes ofabsorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which theseprocesses are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without asubject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritualattributes involve a mind. And, if a mental entity be admitted, its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is nota fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence. The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, anidea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mindmust be the common ground and element of all 17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben. different states of consciousness. What is that common ground andelement but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whethermanifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal coreof our mental being, integrating and holding in continuousidentity all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It isclear that any other representation seems inconsistent with themost central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In illustration ofthis, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly, or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitaryand crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is saidthat thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changessustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as therainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own:the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewedsubstratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But thecomparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest groundprinciple of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, consciousand continuous identity holding in each present moment all thechanges of the past moments. If the rainbow were gifted withconsciousness, it could not preserve its personal identity, butmerely its phenomenal identity, for any two successive moments, since its whole being would consist of an untied succession ofstates. Traversing the body from its extreme tissues to the gray vesicularsubstance composing the spinal cord and covering the surface andconvolutions 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, carryout volition, all kinds of decrees, from the in world of mind. Without an afferent nerve no influence of the world can reach themind; and without an efferent nerve no conclusion of the mind canreach the world. As we are now constituted, this machinery isnecessary for the intercommunication of the mind and the materialuniverse. But if there be something in the case besides livemachinery and crossing telegrams, if there be a monarch mindinaccessible to the vulgar crowd of things and only conversingwith them through the internuncial nerves, that spirit entity mayitself be capable of existing forever in an ideal universe and ofcommuning there face to face with its own kingly lineage andbrood. And we maintain that the account of the phenomena isgrossly defective, and that the phenomena themselves are palpablyinexplicable, except upon the supposition of such an entity, whichuses the organism but is not the organism itself nor a function ofit. "Ideas, " one materialist teaches, "are transformedsensations. " Yes; but that does not supersede a transforming mind. There must be a force to produce the transformations. "Thephenomena of mind, " says another, "consist in a succession ofstates of consciousness. " Yes; but what is it that presides over, takes up, and preserves this succession? The phenomena of the mindare not the mind itself. "The actions of the mind are thefunctions of the cerebrum, " adds a third. Yes; but the inquiry is, what is the mind itself? not, what are its acts? The admission ofthe gray nerve cells of the brain, as the material substratumthrough which sensations are received and volitions returned, doesnot exclude the necessity of a dynamical cause for themetamorphosing phenomenon. That cause must be free andintelligent, because the products of its action, as well as itsaccompanying consciousness, are marked by freedom and intelligence. For example, when a cylindrical and fibrous porter deposits his sensitive burden in the vesicular andcineritious 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. Thereflective and determining something that does this is the mind. Thus, by the fact of an indissoluble dynamic will, is the broadlineal experience of man grasped and kept from dissipating intocrumbled psychical states, as when the dead kings of ancient Indiawere burned their corpses were wrapped in asbestos shrouds to holdthe ashes together. The flame of a burnt out candle twinkling in the socket is notnumerically the same with that which appeared when it was firstlighted; nor is a river at any two periods numerically the same. Different particles constantly feed an ever renewed flame orstream, just like the former but never the same. A totally newelement appears when we contemplate mind. Here, although the wholemolecular substance of the visible organism is in perpetual flux, the same conscious personality persists through all, growing everricher in an accumulating possession of past experiences stillheld in living command. The Arethusa of identity threads theblending states of consciousness, and, passing the ocean bed ofdeath, may emerge in some morning fount of immortality. Aphotographic image impressed on suitable paper and thenobliterated is restored by exposure to the fumes of mercury. Butif an indefinite number of impressions were superimposed on thesame paper, could the fumes of mercury restore any one called forat random? Yet man's memory is a plate with a hundred millions ofimpressions all cleanly preserved, and he can at will select andevoke the one he wants. No conceivable relationship ofmaterialistic forces can account for the facts of this miraculousdaguerreotype plate of experience, and the power of the mind tocall out into solitary conspicuousness a desired picture which hasforty nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand ninehundred and ninety nine latent pictures lying above it, and fiftymillions below it. It has been said that "the impressions on thebrain, whether perceptions or intellections, are fixed andretained through the exactness of assimilation. As the mind tookcognizance of the change made by the first impression of an objectacting on the brain through the sense organs, so afterwards itrecognises the likeness of that change in the parts inserted bythe nutritive process. 18 This passage implies that the mind is anagent, not a phenomenon; and it describes some of the machinerywith which the mind works, not the essence of the mind itself. Itsdoctrine does not destroy nor explain the presiding and electivepower which interprets these assimilated and preserved changes, choosing out such of them as it pleases, that unavoided andincomprehensible 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 awfulcavalcade marching along the fibrous pavement of the brain, whileeach terrified thought rushes to its ashy window to behold. Wehere leave the material realm behind and enter a spiritualprovince where other predicates and laws hold, and where, "delivered over to a night of pure light, in which no unpurgedsight is sharp enough to penetrate the mysterious essence thatsprouteth into different persons, " we kneel in most pious awe, andcry, 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 thesun!" The fatal and invariable mistake of materialism is that itconfounds means and steps with causes, processes with sources, organs with ends, predicates with subject. 19 Alexander Bain deniesthat there is any cerebral closet or receptacle of sensation andimagery where impressions are stored to be reproduced at pleasure. He says, the revival of a past impression, instead of being anevocation of it from an inner chamber, is a setting on anew of thecurrent which originally produced it, now to produce it again. 20But this theory does not alter the fact that all past impressionsare remembered and can be revived at will by an internalefficiency. The miracle, and the necessity of an unchangingconscious entity to explain it, are implied just as they were onthe old theory. "The organs of sense, " Sir Isaac Newton writes, "are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of thingsin its sensorium, but for conveying them there. " 21 Now, as wecannot suppose that God has a brain or needs any material organs, but rather that all infinitude is his Sensorium, so spirits mayperceive spiritual realities without any mediating organism. Ourphysical experience in the present is no limit to the spiritualpossibilities of the future. The materialistic argument againstimmortality fails, because it excludes essential facts. Asanterior to our experience in the present state there was a powerto organize experiences and to become what we are, so none of thesuperficial reasonings of a mere earth science can show that thereis not now a power to organize experiences in a future state andto become what our faith anticipates we shall be. And thissuggests to speculative curiosity the query, Shall we commence ourfuture life, a psychical cell, as we commenced our present life, aphysical cell? It will be well, perhaps, to reply next to some of the aggressivesophistries of disbelief. The following lines by Dr. Beddoes arestriking, but, considered as a symbol of life, seem almostwilfully defective: "The body is but an engine Which draws a mighty stream ofspiritual power Out of the world's own soul, and makes it play Awhile in visible motion. " Man is that miraculous engine which includes not only all theneedful machinery, but also fuel, fire, steam, and speed, andthen, in climacteric addition to these, an engineer! Does theengineer die when the fire goes out and the locomotive stops? Whenthe engine madly plunges off the embankment or bridge of life, does the engineer perish in the ruin, or nimbly leap off andimmortally escape? The theory of despair has no greaterplausibility than that of faith. Feuerbach teaches that the memento mori of reason meets useverywhere in the spiritual God's acre of literature. A book is agrave, which buries not the dead remains, but the quick 19 Frauenstadt, Per Materialismus, seine Wahrheit und seinIrrthum, 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 psychicaldeposits of our ancestry. Our souls consist of that material whichonce constituted other souls, as our bodies consist of thematerial which once constituted other bodies. A thought, it is tobe replied, is never excreted from the mind and left behind. Onlyits existence is indicated by symbols, while itself is added tothe eternal stock of the deathless mind. A thought is a spiritualproduct in the mind from an affection of the cerebral substance. Asentence is a symbol of a thought adapted to create in thecontemplator just such a cerebral affection as that from which itsprang, and to deposit in his mind just such a spiritual productas that which it now denotes. Thus are we stimulated andinstructed by the transmitted symbols of our ancestors'experiences, but not literally nourished by assimilation of theirvery psychical substance, as this remorseless prophet of death'sghastly idealism would have us believe. Still, in whatever aspectwe regard it, one cannot but shudder before that terriblecineritious substance whose dynamic inhabitants are generated inthe meeting of matter's messages with mind's forces, and sentforth in emblems to shake the souls of millions, revolutionizeempires, and refashion the world. Strauss employs an ingenious argument against the belief in afuture life, an argument as harmless in reality as it is novel andformidable in appearance. "Whether the nerve spirit be consideredas a dependent product, or as the producing principle of theorganism, it ends at death: for, in the former case, it can nolonger be produced when the organism perishes; in the latter case, that it ceases to sustain the organism is a proof that it hasitself decayed. "22 In this specious bit of special pleading, unwarranted postulates are assumed and much confusion of thoughtis displayed. It is covertly taken for granted that every thingseen in a given phenomenon is either product or producer; butsomething may be an accompanying part, involved in the conditionsof the phenomenon, yet not in any way essentially dependent on it, and in fact surviving it. What does Strauss mean by "the nervespirit"? Is there no mind behind it and above it, making use of itas a servant? Our present life is the result of an actual andregulated harmony of forces. Surely that harmony may end withoutimplying the decay of any of its initial components, withoutimplying the destruction of the central constituent of itsintelligence. It is illegitimate logic, passing from pureignorance to positive affirmation; a saltation of sophistry from anegative premise of blindness to all behind the organic life, to adogmatic conclusion of denial that there is any thing behind theorganic life. A subtle and vigorous disbeliever has said, "The belief inimmortality is not a correct expression of human nature, but restssolely on a misunderstanding of it. The real opinion of humannature is expressed in the universal sorrow and wailing overdeath. " It is obvious to answer that both these expressions aretrue utterances of human nature. It grieves over the sadness ofparting, the appalling change and decay, the close locked mysteryof the unseen state. It rejoices in the solace and cheer of asublime hope springing out of the manifold powerful promiseswithin and without. Instead of contemning the idea of a heavenlyfuturity as an idle dream image of human longing, it were bothdevouter and more reasonable, from 22 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, s. 394. that very causal basis of it, to revere it and confide in it asdivinely pledged. All the thwarted powers and preparations andaffections, too grand, too fine, too sacred, to meet their fitfulfilment here, are a claim for some holier and vaster sphere, aprophecy of a more exalted and serene existence, elsewhere. Theunsatisfied and longing soul has created the doctrine of a futurelife, has it? Very good. If the soul has builded a house inheaven, flown up and made a nest in the breezy boughs ofimmortality, that house must have tenants, that nest must beoccupied. The divinely implanted instincts do not provide andbuild for naught. Certain considerations based on the resemblances of men andbeasts, their asserted community of origin and fundamental unityof nature, have had great influence in leading to the denial ofthe immortality of the human soul. It is taken for granted thatanimals are totally mortal; and then, from the apparentcorrespondences of phenomena and fate between them and us, theinference is drawn that the cases are parallel throughout, andthat our destiny, too, is annihilation. The course of thought onthis subject has been extremely curious, illustrating, on the onehand, that "where our egotism begins, there the laws of logicbreak, " and, on the other hand, that often when fancy gets scentof a theory the voice and lash of reason are futile to restrain ituntil the theory is run into the ground. Des Cartes, and after himMalebranche and a few other writers, gave no slight currency tothe notion that brutes are mere machines, moved by prearrangedinfluences and utterly destitute of intelligence, will, orconsciousness. This scheme gave rise to many controversies, buthas now passed into complete neglect. 23 Of late years the tendencyhas been to assimilate instead of separating man and beast. Touching the outer sphere, we have Oken's homologies of thecranial vertebra. In regard to the inner sphere, we have a scoreof treatises, like Vogt's Pictures from Brute Life, affirming thatthere is no qualitative, but merely a quantitative, distinctionbetween the human soul and the brute soul. 24 Over this point theconflict is still thick and hot. But, however much of truth theremay be in the doctrine of the ground identity of the soul of a manand the soul of a dog, the conclusion that man therefore perishesis a pure piece of sophistry. Such a monstrous assassination ofthe souls of the human race with the jaw bone of an ass may belegitimately avoided in either of two ways. It is as fair to arguethe immortality of animals from their likeness to us, as ourannihilation from our likeness to them. The psychological realmhas been as much deepened in them by the researches of modernscience as the physiological domain has been widened in us. AsAgassiz says, we must not lose sight of the mental individualityof animals in an exclusive attention to the bodily side of theirnature. 25 A multitude of able thinkers have held the faith thatanimals have immaterial and deathless souls. Rightly considered, there is nothing in such a 23 Darmanson, La bete transformee en machine. Ditton, Appendix toDiscourse on Resurrection of Christ, showing that brutes are notmere machines, but have immortal souls. Orphal, Sind die Thiereblos sinnliche Geschopfe? Thomasius, De Anima Brutorum, quoasseritur, eam non esse Materialem, contra Cartesianam Opinionem. Winkler, Philosophische Untersuchungen von dem Seyn and Wesen derSeelen 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 themost refined feelings find pleasure in embracing. In their serenecatholicity and divine sympathy, science and religion excludepride and contempt. But admitting that there is no surviving psychical entity in thebrute, that is in no way a clear postulate for proving that thesame fact holds of man. The lower endowments and provinces ofman's nature and experience may correspond ever so closely withthe being and life of brutes whose existence absolutely ceases atdeath, and yet he may be immortal. The higher range of hisspiritual faculties may elevate him into a realm of universal andeternal principles, extricating his soul from the meshes of decay. He may come into contact with a sphere of truths, grasp and riseinto a region of realities, conferring the prerogative ofdeathlessness, not to be reached by natures gifted in a much lowerdegree, although of the same kind. Such a distinction is madebetween men themselves by Spinoza. 26 His doctrine of immortalitydepicts the stupendous boon as contingent, to be acquired byobservance of conditions. If the ideas of the soul representperishable objects, it is itself mortal; if imperishable, it isimmortal. Now, brutes, it is probable, never rise to theapprehension of pure and eternal truths; but men do. It was a meanprejudice, founded on selfish ignorance and pride, which firstassumed the total destruction of brutes in death, and afterwards, by the grovelling range of considerations in which it fastened andthe reaction it naturally provoked, involved man and all hisimperial hopes in the same fate. A firm logical discriminationdisentangles the human mind from this beastly snarl. 27 Thedifference in data warrants a difference in result. The argumentfor the immortality of brutes and that for the immortality of menare, in some respects, parallel lines, but they are notcoextensive. Beginning together, the latter far outreaches theformer. Man, like the animals, eats, drinks, sleeps, builds;unlike them, he adorns an ideal world of the eternal future, laysup treasures in its heavenly kingdom, and waits to migrate intoit. There are two distinct methods of escaping the fatal inference ofdisbelief usually drawn by materialists. First, by the denial oftheir philosophical postulates, by the predication of immaterialsubstance, affirming the soul to be a spaceless point, its life anindivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conceptionhave been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a multitude ofaccomplished and vigorous thinkers. 28 In Herbart's system the soulis an immaterial monad, or real, capable of the permanentformation of states in its interior. Its life consists of aquenchless series of self preservations. These reals, with theirrelations and aggregations, constitute at once the varyingphenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. MamertiusClaudianus, a philosophical priest of Southern Gaul in the fifthcentury, 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, andfeeling, are not bodies. Therefore the soul is incorporeal. " Thismakes 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 Unterschieddes Menschen vom Thiere. 28 Crombie, Natural Theology, vol. Ii. : Essay on the Immortalityof the Soul. Brougham, Discourse of Nat. Theol. , sect. 5. imperishable substantial activity. An old English writer, withquaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atomand the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excessevanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth outof 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, thatnearly all the postulates ordinarily claimed by the materialistmay be granted without by any means proving the justice of theirdisbelief of a future life. 29 Admit that there can be no sensationwithout a nerve, no thought without a brain, no phenomenalmanifestation without an organ. Such an admission legitimates theconclusion, on empirical grounds, that our present mode of lifemust cease with the dissolution of our organism. It does not evenempirically prove that we may not survive in some other mode ofbeing, passing perhaps to an inconceivably higher stage and moreblessed kind of life. After the entire disintegration of ourmaterial organs, we may, by some now unknown means, possess in arefined form the equivalents of what those organs gave us. Theremay be, interfused throughout the gross mortal body, an immortalbody of exquisitely delicate structure invisibly extricatingitself from the carious ruins at death. Plattner develops anddefends this hypothesis with plausible skill and power. 30 TheHindus conceived the soul to be concealed within severalsuccessive sheaths, the innermost of which accompanied it throughall its transmigrations. 31 "The subtile person extends to a smalldistance over the skull, like the flame of a lamp above its wick. "32 The later Pythagoreans and Platonists seem to have believedthat the same numerical ethereal body with which the soul was atfirst created adhered to it inseparably during all its descentsinto grosser bodies, a lucid and wingy vehicle, which, purged bydiet and catharms, ascends again, bearing the soul to its nativeseat. 33 The doctrine of Swedenborg asserts man to be interiorly anorganized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacleof life from God. In his terminology, "constant influx of life"supersedes the popular idea of a self contained spiritualexistence. But this influx is conditioned by its receiving organ, the undecaying inner body. 34 However boldly it may be assailed andrejected as a baseless theory, no materialistic logic can disprovethe existence of an ethereal form contained in, animating, andsurviving, 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 byFaraday, Drossbach, and others, materialism itself brightens anddissolves into a species of idealism, the universe becomes aglittering congeries of indestructible points of power, and theimmortality of the soul is established as a mathematicalcertainty. 35 All bodies, all entities, are but forms of This has been ably shown by Spiers in his treatise, Ueber daskorperliche Bedingtsein der Seelenthatigkeiten. 30 Spes immortalitatis animorum per rationes physiologicasconfirmata. 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. Anattribute or property of a thing is an exercise of force or modeof activity producing a certain state of consciousness in us. Thesum of its attributes or properties constitutes the totality ofthe thing, and is not adventitiously laid upon the thing: you canseparate the parts of a thing; but you cannot take away its forcesfrom any part, because they are its essence. Matter is not alimitation or neutralization, but a state and expression, offorce. Force itself is not multiplex, but one, all qualities anddirections of it lying potentially in each entity, the kinds andamounts which shall be actually manifested depending in each caseon the conditions environing it. All matter, all being, therefore, consists of ultimate atoms or monads, each one of which is aninseparable solidarity of activities. The universe is an eternalsociety of eternal force individuals, all of which are capable ofconstant changes in groupings, aggregations, developments, relations, but absolutely incapable of annihilation. Every atompossesses potential reason, and comes to self apprehensionwhenever the appropriate conditions meet. All differencesoriginate from conditions and exist not in essentialities. According to this theory, the eternity of the soul is sure, butthat eternity must be an endless series of mutual transitionsbetween consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death. 37 Sinceall cannot be men at once, they must take their turns. Carus says, a soul enclosing in itself an independent consciousness isinconceivable. When the organism by which consciousness isconditioned and revealed is destroyed in death, consciousnessdisappears as certainly as the gleaming height of a dome falls inwhen its foundation is removed. And Drossbach adds, death is theshade side of life. Without shade, light would not be perceptible, nor life without death; for only contrast leads to knowledge. Theconsciousness of life is realized by interchange with theunconsciousness of death. Mortality is the inevitable attribute ofa self conscious being. The immortality of such a being can benothing else than an everlasting mortality. In this restlessalternation between the opposite states of life and death, beingholds continuous endurance, but consciousness is successivelyextinguished and revived, while memory is each time hopelesslylost. Widenmann holds that the periods of death are momentary, thesoul being at once born again, retaining no vestiges of itspast. 38 Drossbach, on the contrary, believes that memory is anindefeasible quality of the soul atom, the reason why we do notremember previous lives being that the present is our firstexperiment. When all atoms destined to become men have once runthe human career, the earliest ones will begin to reappear withfull memory of their preceding course. It matters not how long itrequires for one circuit of the whole series of souls; for theinfinite future is before us, and, as we are unconscious in death, the lapse of ages is nothing. We lie down to sleep, and instantlyrise up to a new life. 36 Hickok, Rational Cosmology, ch. Ii. Sect. 1: Matter is force. 37 Drossbach, Die personliche Unsterblichkeit als Folge deratomistischen Verfaasung der Natur, abschn. Iv. Kap. Ii. Sect. 5, 6. 38 Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung desErdenlebens. "Death gives to life all its relish, as hunger is the true sauceof food. Death first makes us precious and dear to ourselves. Since it lies in the nature of change that no condition isendless, but morning ever follows night, death cannot be endless. Be unconcerned; thy being shall as little be lost as the grain ofdust at thy foot! Because in death thou dost not know that thouart, therefore fearest thou that thou shalt be no more? Opusillanimous! the great events of nature are too vast for thyweak heart. A whole eternity thou hast not been conscious thatthou art, and yet thou hast become conscious of it. Every nightthou losest thy consciousness, yet art thou conscious again, andshalt be. The loss of consciousness is not necessarily the loss ofself. The knowledge of my being is not my being itself, but apeculiar force thereof, which, entering into reciprocal actionwith other forces, is subject to change. It is its essence to act, and thus to change, yet without surrendering its essence. Goethe'swords may be applied to the soul: 'It is; therefore eternally itis. ' Not in cold motionlessness consists eternal life, but in eternalmovement, in eternal alteration, in incessant change. These arewarranties that no state endures forever, not even theunconscious, death. " 39 In this unfolding of the theory there are many arbitrary andfanciful conceptions which may easily be dispensed with. Theinterspersion of the bright life of the human monads with blankepochs of oblivious darkness, and the confinement of their destinyto an endless repetition of their life course on this globe, arenot necessary. In the will of God the free range of the boundlessuniverse may lie open to them and an incessant career in forevernovel circumstances await them. It is also conceivable that humansouls, leading still recurrent lives on earth with totalforgetfulness, may at last acquire sufficient power, in some happyconcurrence or sublime exigency, to summon back and retain alltheir foregone states. But, leaving aside all such incidentalspeculations, the chief interest of the dynamic atomistic or monadtheory, as affording a solid basis for immortality, is in relationto the arrogance of a shallow and conceited materialism. Says thematerialist, "Show me a spirit, and I will believe in yourheaven. " Replies the idealist, "Show me your matter, however smalla piece, and I will yield to your argument. " Spirit is nophenomenon to be shown, and matter is an inference from thought:thus the counter statements of physical science and idealphilosophy fairly offset each other, and throw their respectiveadvocates back upon the natural ground of unsophisticated faithand observation. Standing there unperverted, man has an invinciblereliance on the veracity of his faculties and the normal reportsof nature. Through immediate apprehension of his own consciouswill and the posited experience of his senses, he has knowledgeboth of causal forms of being, or free productive force, and ofresultant processes and phenomena. And surely sound logic teachesthat the latter may alter or disappear without implying theannihilation of the former. If all material substance, so called, were destroyed, not only would space remain as an infiniteindivisible unity, but the equivalents 39 Drossbach, Die individuelle Unsterblichkeit vom monadistischmetaphysischen Standpunkte betrachtet. of what had been destroyed must remain in some form or other. Whoshall say that these equivalents would not be intelligent pointsof power, capable of organizing aggregate bodies and ofreconstituting the universe in the will of God, or of forming fromperiod to period, in endless succession, new kinds of universes, each abounding in hitherto unimagined modes of life and degrees ofbliss? To our present faculties, with only our presentopportunities 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, awall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thusfar, and no farther, shall thine explicating gaze read the secretsof destiny. " We cannot tell what force is. We can conceive neitherits genesis nor its extinction. Over that obscure environment, into the immense empire of possibilities, we must bravely flingthe treasures of our love and the colors of our hope, and with adivine impulse in the moment of death leap after, trusting not tosink as nothing into the abyss of nowhere, but, landing safe insome 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, instinctiveapprehensions of fitness and harmony, may be of more convincingvalidity than all the formal arguments logic can build. 40"Sentiment, " Ancillon says, as quoted by Lewes, "goes further thanknowledge: 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 thesoul. " In transcendental mathematics, problems otherwiseunapproachable are solved by operating with emblems of therelations of purely imaginary quantities to the facts of theproblems. The process is sound and the result valid, notwithstandingthe hypothetical and imaginary character of the aids in reaching it. When for mastering the dim momentous problems of our destinythe given quantities and relations of science are inadequate, the helpful supposititious conditions furnished by faith mayequally lead over their airy ways to conclusions of eternal truth. The disbelievers of a future life have in their investigationsapplied methods not justly applicable to the subject, anddemanded 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 ofFeuerbach are harmless upon most persons. The glittering scimetarof this Saracenic metaphysician flashes swift and sharp, but hefights the air with weapons of air. No blood flows from thesevered emptiness of space; no clash of the blows is heard anymore than bell strokes would be heard in an exhausted receiver. One may justifiably accept propositions which strict sciencecannot establish and believe in the existence of a thing whichscience cannot reveal, as Jacobi has abundantly shown41 and asWagner has with less ability tried to illustrate. 42 The utmostpossible achievement of a negative criticism is to show theinvalidity of the physiological, 40 Abel, Disquisitio omnium tam pro immortalitate quam promortalitate argumentandi generum. 41 Von den goutlichen Dingen and ibrer Offenbarung. Wissen undGlauben mit besonderer Beziehung zur Zukunft der Seelen:Fortsetzung der Betrachtungen uber Menschenschopfung undSeelensubstanz. analogical, and metaphysical arguments to furnish positive proofof a future life for us. But this negation fully admitted is noevidence of our total mortality. Science is impotent to give anyproof reaching to such a conclusion. However badly the archery ofthe sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddledthe outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain thegarrison. Scientific criticism therefore leaves us at this point:there may be an immortal soul in us. Then the question whetherthere actually is an immortal soul in us, rests entirely on moralfacts and considerations. Allowing their native force to thesemoral facts and considerations, the healthy ethical thinker, recognising in himself an innermost self conscious ego which knowsitself persistent and identical amidst the multiplex vicissitudeof transient conditions, lies down to die expecting immediately tocontinue his being's journey elsewhere, in some other guise. Leaving out of view these moral facts and considerations, thematerialistic naturalist thinker, recognising his consciousness asonly a phantom procession of states across the cerebral stage hungin ashy livery and afloat on blood, lies down to expire expectingimmediately to be turned into nobody forever. Misinterpreting andundervaluing these moral facts and considerations, the anchorlessspeculative thinker, recognising his organism as an eye throughwhich the World Spirit beholds itself, or a momentary pulse inwhich the All feels itself, his consciousness as a part of theinfinite Thought, lies down on his death couch expectingimmediately to be turned into everybody, eternity, instead ofgreeting him with an individual kiss, wrapping him in a monisticembrace. The broad drift of human conviction leads to the firstconclusion, a persistent personality. The greatest philosophers, from Plato to Pascal, deny the second view, a blotting extinctionof the soul, declaring it false in science and incredible inpresentation. The third theory a pantheistic absorption theirresistible common sense of mankind repudiates as a morbid dream. Man naturally believes himself immortal but not infinite. Monismis a doctrine utterly foreign to undiseased thinking. Although itbe a Fichte, a Schelling, or a Hegel, who says that the soul is acircumscribed yet omnipotent ego, which first radiates theuniverse, and afterwards beholds it in the mirror of itself, andat length breaks into dead universality, the conception is, to theaverage apprehension of humanity, as overweening a piece of wildfancy as ever rose in a madman's reveries. 43 The ordinary contemplator of the phenomena of the world and thesequel of human life from the materialistic point of view feelsdisgust and terror at the prospect. The scene seems to himdegrading and the fate fearful. The loathing and dismay vulgarlyexperienced thus, it is true, arise from an exaggeratedmisapprehension of the basis and meaning of the facts: rightlyappreciated, all is rulingly alive, aspirant, beautiful, andbenignant. The ceaseless transformations filling the heights anddepths of the creation are pervaded with joy and 42 A full discussion of the pantheistic doctrine of immortalitywill be found in the following works. Richmann, Gemsinfassl. Darstellung und Wurdigung aller gehaltreichen Beweisarten fur Gottund fur Unsterblichkeit der Seele. Unius, Unsterblichkeit. Blanche, Philosophische Unsterblichkeitlehre. 43 Weisse, Die philosophische Geheimlehre von der Unsterblichkeitdes menschlichen Individuums. Goschel, Von den Beweisen fur dieUnsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der speculativenPhilosophie. Morell, Historical and Critical View of theSpeculative 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 sois but a "return or falling home of the fundamental phenomenon tothe phenomenal foundation, a dissolution through which natureseeks her ground and strives to renew herself in her principles. "Still, in spite of this more profound and genial interpretation ofthe shifting metamorphoses of nature, the fear of there being noconscious future life for man produces, when first entertained, ahorrid constriction around the heart, felt like the ice cold coilsof a serpent. The thought of tumbling hopelessly into "The blindcave of eternal night" naturally oppresses the heart of man withsadness and with alarm. To escape the unhappiness thus inflicted, recourse has been had to expedients. Four artificial substitutesfor immortality have been devised. Fondly fixing attention uponthese, men have tried to find comfort and to absorb their thoughtsfrom the dreaded spectre and the long oblivion. The first is thesentimental phantasm of posthumous fame. The Latin bard, ancientEnnius, sings, "Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu Faxit. Cur? volitovivu' per ora virum. " 44 Shakspeare likewise often expresses the same thought: "When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shalllive (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, even inthe mouths of men. " And again in similar strain: "My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite ofhim, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull andspeechless tribes. " Napoleon is reported to have said, "My soul will pass into historyand the deathless memories of mankind; and thus in glory shall Ibe immortal. " This characteristically French notion forms theessence of Comte's "positivist" doctrine of a future life. Thosedeemed worthy after their death to be incorporated, by vote of thepeople, in the Supreme Being, the Grand Etre, a fictitious productof a poetic personification, through the perpetual fame andinfluence thus secured have an immortal life in the thoughts andfeelings of a grateful posterity. Comte says, "Positivism greatlyimproves immortality and places it on a firmer foundation, bychanging it from objective to subjective. " Great and eternalHumanity is God. The dead who are meritorious are aloneremembered, and, thus incorporated into the Divinity, they have a"subjective immortality in the brains of the living. " 45 It is apoor shadow of the sublime truth which the soul craves. Leopardi, in his Bruto Minore, expresses this "poor hope of being in thefuture'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 proudand gifted natures should have seriously stooped to such a toy, tosolace themselves with it, is a fact strange and pathetic. Withreverential tenderness of sympathy must we yearn towards thosewhose loving natures, baffled of any solid resource, turnappealingly, ere they fade away, to clasp this substanceless imageof an image. Another scheme is what may be called the "lampada tradunt" 46theory of a future life. Generations succeed each other, and thecourse is always full. Eternal life takes up new subjects as fastas its exhausted receptacles perish. Men are the mortal cells ofimmortal humanity. The individual must comfort himself with thesympathetic reflection that his extinction destroys nothing, sinceall the elements of his being will be manipulated into the formsof his successors. Life is a constant renovation, and its sum is forever full andequal on the globe. The only genuine resurrection unto eternallife is an unending re creation of organisms from the samematerials to repeat the same physiological and psychologicalprocesses. 47 There is a gleam of cheer and of nobleness in thisrepresentation; but, upon the whole, it is perhaps as ineffectualas the former. It is a vapid consolation, in view of our ownannihilation, to think that others will then live and also beannihilated in their turn. It is pleasant to believe that theearth will forever be peopled with throngs of men; but though sucha belief might help to reconcile us to our fate, it could notalter the intrinsic sadness of that fate. A third substitute for the common view of immortality is ascientific perception of the fact that the peculiar force whicheach man is, the sum of his character and life, is a causeindestructibly mixed with the course of subsequent history, anobjective personal immortality, though not a conscious one. Whathe was, remains and acts forever in the world. The fourth substitute is an identification of self with theintegral scheme of things. I am an inseparable portion of thetotality of being, to move eternally in its eternal motion. "If death seem hanging o'er thy separate soul, Discern thyself apart of life's great whole. " Lose the thought of thy particular evanescence in the thought ofthe universal permanence. The inverted torch denotes death to amere inhabitant of the earth: to a citizen of the universe, downward and upward are the same. Perhaps one who rejects theordinary doctrine of a future life can be solaced and edified bythese substitutes in proportion to his fineness, greatness, andnobleness. But to most persons no substitute can atone for thewithdrawn truth of immortality itself. In regard to the eternal preservation of personal consciousness, it were bigoted blindness to deny that there is room for doubtsand fears. While the monad soul so to call it lies here beneaththe weak glimmer of suns so far off that they are forceless todevelop it to a 46 Lucretius, De Nat. Rerum, lib. Ii. 1. 78. 47 Schultz Schultzenstein, Die Bildung des menschlichen Geistesdurch Kultur der Verjungung seines Lebens, ss. 834-847: DieUnsterblichkeitsbegriffe. victorious assurance, we cannot but sometimes feel misgivings andbe depressed by skeptical surmises. Accordingly, while belief hasgenerally prevailed, disbelief has in every age had itsrepresentatives. 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. Andalthough in any argument from authority the company of the greatbelievers would incomparably outshine and a thousand timesoutweigh the array of deniers, this does not alter the obviousfact that there are certain phenomena which are naturalprovocatives of doubt and whose troubling influence scarcely anyone can always escape. Homer, in giving expression to Hector'sconfidence of victory over the Greeks, makes him wish that he werebut as sure of entering the state of the immortal gods. 48 Whensome one asked Dr. Johnson, "Have we not proof enough of theimmortality of the soul?" he replied, "I want more. " Davenant ofwhom Southey says, "I know no other author who has so oftenexpressed his doubts respecting a future state and how burdensomehe 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 theirmisgivings, (which few men will, ) there are times when thestrongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of suchstaggering obscurity. " Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil ofshifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations, voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictoryqueries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, beforethe darkness of unknown futurity might piteously exclaim, withoutdeserving blame, "I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which downhurls me to the ground. " Who that has reached maturity of reflection cannot appreciate andsympathize somewhat with these lines of Byron, when he standsbefore a lifeless form of humanity? "I gazed, as oft I have gazed the same, To try if I could wrenchaught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make, afaith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: butwhere? 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 elementour 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 asuggestion from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thoughtsteals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence ofdoubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are twoattitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions andevidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints ofthe nails and lay my finger in the marks of the wounds. " The otheris, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief. " In abstract logicor rigid science the former may be appropriate and right. Thelatter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. Ifa man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, heshall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts, complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaronwith his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist ofdisbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of whathe is most assured, His glassy essence, " his conduct is offensiveto every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation ofGod. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager to destroythose lofty thoughts which so much help to make us men, is ashocking spectacle. Yet a few such there are, who seem delightedas by their dismal theory they bury mankind in an iron tomb ofmaterialism and inscribe on the irrevocable door the solitarywords, Fate and Silence. The more attentively one dwells on the perishable physical side oflife, 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 chemistwho confines his studies exclusively within his own province, whenhe reflects on the probable sequence of life, will speculativelysee himself vanish in his blowpipes and retorts. Whoso devotedlydabbles in organisms, nerves, and bloods may easily becomeskeptical of spirit; for it everywhere balks his analysis andeludes his search. The objects he deals with are things. Theybelong to change and dissolution. Mind and its proper home belongto a different category of being. Because no heaven appears at theend of the telescope, and no soul is seen on the edge of thedissecting knife, and no mind is found at the bottom of thecrucible, to infer that therefore there is neither heaven, norsoul, nor mind, is as monstrous a non sequitur as it would be toinfer the non existence of gravity because it cannot be distilledin any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes intothe dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs ofimmortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it, is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs underRome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thuslost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault ofheaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine andsentient joy! When we contemplate men in a mass, like a swarm of bees or a hiveof ants, we find ourselves doubting their immortality. They meltaway, in swiftly confused heaps and generations, into the bosom ofnature. On the other hand, when we think of individuals, an almostunavoidable thought of personal identity makes us spontaneouslyconclude them immortal. It rather requires the effort then tothink them otherwise. But obviously the real problem is never ofthe multitudinous throng, but always of the solitary person. Inreference to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinesecity as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable humaninhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin. Fairness requiresthat our imaginations and reasonings upon the subject fasten uponan individual, set apart and uplifted, like a king, in theincommunicable distinctness and grandeur of selfhood andresponsibility. From looking about this grave paved star, from painful anddegrading contemplations of dead bodies, "the snuff and loathedpart of nature which burns itself out, " let a man turn away, andsend his interior kingly glance aloft into ideal realms, let himsummon up the glorious sentiments of freedom, duty, admiration, the noble experiences of self sacrifice, love, and joy, and hissoul 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 preservationis the innermost, indestructible instinct of every consciousbeing. When the soul, in a sacred cause, enthusiastically rushesupon death, or in calm composure awaits death, it is irresistiblyconvinced that it cannot be hurt, but will be blessed, by thecrisis. It knows that in an inexpressibly profound sense whosoeverwould ignobly save his life loses it, but whosoever would noblylose his life saves it. Martyrdom demonstrates immortality. "Life embark'd out at sea, 'mid the wave tumbling roar, The poorship of my body went down to the floor; But I broke, at the bottomof death, through a door, And, from sinking, began forever tosoar. " The most lamentable and pertinacious doubts of immortalitysometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness, sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, asthese undeniably are palpable violations of the creativeintention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness theargument demands that we select the noblest, healthiest specimensof completed humanity to reason from. Should we not take a case inwhich God's will is so far plainly fulfilled, in order to tracethat will farther and even to its finality? And regarding on hisdeath bed a Newton, a Fenelon, a Washington, is it difficult toconceive him surviving the climax and catastrophe of his somaticcell basis and soaring to a more august range of existence?Remembering that such as these have lived and died, ay, and eventhe godlike Nazarene, can we believe that man is merely a whiteinterrogation point lifted on the black margin of matter to askthe answerless secret of the universe and be erased? Such a conclusion charges God with the transcendent crime ofinfanticide perpetrated in the most deliberate manner and on themost gigantic scale. Who can bear, by thus quenching the hope ofanother life, to add death to death, and overcast, to everythoughtful eye, the whole sunny field of life with the melancholyshadow of a bier? There is a noble strength and confidence, cheering to the reader, in these words of one of the wisest andboldest of thinkers: "I should be the very last man to be willingto dispense with the faith in a future life: nay, I would say, with Lorenzo de'Medici, that all those are dead, even for thepresent life, who do not hope for another. I have the firmconviction 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 inunchangeable splendor. " 49 Such a view of our destiny incomparablyinspires and ennobles us. Man, discovering under all the poor, wretched accidents of earth and sense and hard fortune theimmortality of his soul, feels as that king's son who, lost ininfancy, and growing up under the care of a forest hind, supposedhimself to belong to the rude class among whom he lived; but oneday, learning his true parentage, he knew beneath his meandisguise that he was a prince, and immediately claimed hiskingdom. These facts of experience show clearly how much itbehooves us to cultivate by every honest method this cardinaltenet of religion, how much wiser faith is in listening to thelucid echoes of the sky than despair in listening to the muffledreverberations of the grave. All noble and sweet beliefs grow withthe growing nobleness and tenderness of characters sensitive tothose fine revealings which pachydermatous souls can never know. In the upper hall of reason, before the high shrine of faith, burnthe base doubts begotten in the cellars of sense; and they mayserve as tapers to light your tentative way to conviction. If thefloating al Sirat between physiology and psychology, earth andheaven, is too slippery and perilous for your footing, where heavylimbed science cannot tread, nerve the wings of faith for a freeflight. Or, if every effort to fasten a definite theory on somesolid support on the other side of the gulf fails, venture forthon the naked line of limitless desire, as the spider escapes froman unwelcome position by flinging out an exceedingly long and finethread and going forth upon it sustained by the air. 50 Whoeverpreserves the full intensity of the affections is little likely tolose his trust in God and a future life, even when exposed tolowering and chilling influences from material science andspeculative philosophy: the glowing of the heart, as Jean Paulsays, relights the extinguished torch in the night of theintellect, as a beast stunned by an electric shock in the head isrestored by an electric shock in the breast. Daniel Webster says, in an expression of his faith in Christianity written shortlybefore his death, "Philosophical argument, especially that drawnfrom the vastness of the universe in comparison with the apparentinsignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason forthe faith which is in me; but my heart has always assured andreassured me. "51 Contemplating the stable permanence of nature asit swallows our fleet generations, we may feel that we vanish likesparks in the night; but when we think of the persistent identityof the soul, and of its immeasurable superiority to the brute massof matter, the aspect of the case changes and the moral inferenceis reversed. Does not the simple truth of love conquer and tramplethe world's aggregated lie? The man who, with assiduous toil andearnest 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 anotherexistence. As he slowly journeys over the mountains of life, awarethat 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 aship when he reaches the strand of death. Upon the mist veiledocean launching then, he will sail where? Whither God orders. Mustnot that be to the right port? We remember an old Brahmanic poem brought from the East by Ruckertand sweetly resung in the speech of the West full of encouragementto those who shall die. 52 A man wrapped in slumber calmly reclineson the deck of a ship stranded and parting in the breakers. Theplank on which he sleeps is borne by a huge wave upon a bank ofroses, and he awakes amidst a jubilee of music and a chorus offriendly voices bidding him welcome. So, perhaps, when the body isshattered on the death ledge, the soul will be tossed into thefragrant lap of eternal life on the self identified and dynamicplank of personality. 52 Brahmanische Erzahlungen, s. 5. CHAPTER IX. MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. IN discussing theethics of the doctrine of a future life a subject here amazinglyneglected, there more amazingly maltreated, and nowhere, withinour knowledge, truly analyzed and exhibited1 it is important thatthe theme be precisely defined and the debate kept strictly to thelines. Let it be distinctly understood, therefore, that thequestion to be handled is not, "Whether there ought to be a futurelife or not, " nor, "Whether there is a future life or not. " Thequestion is, "What difference should it make to us whether weadmit or deny the fact of a future life?" If we believe that weare to pass through death into an immortal existence, whatinferences pertaining to the present are right, fully to be drawnfrom the supposition? If, on the other hand, we think there isnothing for us after the present, what are the logicalconsequences of that faith in regard to our aims and rules ofconduct in this world? Suppose a man who has always imagined that death is utterannihilation should in some way suddenly acquire knowledge that anendless 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 whatrelations connect the two states of existence. A knowledge of thelaw and method and means of man's destiny is more important forhis guidance than the mere ascertainment of its duration. Withreference to the query before us, four hypotheses are conceivable. If, in the first place, there be no connection whatever exceptthat of temporal sequence between the present life and the future, then, so far as duty is concerned, the expectation of a world tocome yields not the slightest practical application for theexperience that now is. It can only be a source of comfort or ofterror; and that will be accordingly as it is conceived under theaspect of benignity or of vengeance. If, secondly, the characterof the future life depend on conditions to be fulfilled here, butthose conditions be not within our control, then, again, noinferences of immediate duty can be drawn from the apprehendedhereafter. Being quasi actors in a scene prearranged and with aplot predetermined, we can no more be capable of any obligation orchoice, in regard to the end, than puppets which some unseenHarlequin moves by the terrible wires of primitive decree ortransmitted depravity towards the genial or the tragic crisis. Ifthe soul's fate there is to be heaven or hell according to thepart enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunityto work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future lifeis reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source ofcomplacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect andthe reprobate. Thirdly, it may be conceived that the future life is a state ofeverlasting reward and punishment unchangeably decided by the wayin which the probationary period allotted on 1 The only direct treatise on the subject known to us isTilemann's Kritik der Unsterblichkeitslehre in Ansehung desSittengesetzes, published in 1789. And this we have not seen. earth is passed through. Here are men, for a brief time, free toact thus or otherwise. Do thus, and the endless bliss of heaven iswon. Do otherwise, and the endless agony of hell is incurred. Theplain rule of action yielded by this doctrine is, Sacrifice allother things to the one thing needful. The present life is initself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustibleeternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends onhow you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing todo while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To wastea single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness offolly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and thento improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energyand every thought and every desire of every moment. This world isa bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is thereleisure for sport and business, or room for science andliterature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to getourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, whichwill waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lakepacked with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls thefloating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, thisshould intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can beadmitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not oneflexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantineimmortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makeseternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleetingprobation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that itpronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. Theonly true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure theforensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointedmeans. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathlessmoment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea ofblessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, suchshould be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety thatthere would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Everyobject should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, everysound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatoryconfession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single andpreternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing couldallow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting orblinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Suchwould be a logical application to life of the genuine morals ofthe doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to berejected as false on many grounds. It is deduced from Scripture bya technical and unsound interpretation. It is unjust and cruel, irreconcilable with the righteousness or the goodness of God. Itis unreasonable, opposed to the analogies of nature and to theexperience of man. It is wholly impossible to carry it outconsistently in the practice of life. If it were thoroughlycredited and acted upon, all the business of the world wouldcease, and the human race would soon die out. There remains one other view of the relationship of a future lifewith the present. And it seems to be the true view. The sameCreator presiding, the same laws prevailing, over infinitude andeternity that now rule over time and earth, our immortality cannotreasonably be imagined either a moment of free action and aneternity of fixed consequences, or a series of separate fragmentspatched into a parti colored experience with blanks of deathbetween the patterns of life. It must be conceived as one endlessexistence in linear connection of cause and effect developing inprogressive phases under varying conditions of motive and scenery. With what we are at death we live on into the next life. In everyepoch and world of our destiny our happiness depends on thepossession of a harmoniously working soul harmoniously relatedwith its environment. Each stage and state of our eternalexistence has its peculiarities of duty and privilege. In this oneour proper work is to improve the opportunities, discharge thetasks, enjoy the blessings, belonging here. We are to do the samein the next one when we arrive in that. All the wealth of wisdom, virtue, strength, and harmony we acquire in our present life isthe vantage ground and capital wherewith we start in thesucceeding life. Therefore the true preparation for the future isto fit ourselves to enter it under the most favorable auspices, byaccumulating in our souls all the spiritual treasures afforded bythe present. In other words, the truest aim we can set beforeourselves during our existence on earth is to make it yield thegreatest possible results of the noblest experience. The lifehereafter is the elevated and complementary continuation of thelife here; and certainly the directest way to ameliorate thecontinuation is to improve the commencement. But, it may be said, according to this representation, the fact ofa future life makes no difference in regard to our duty now; forif the grave swallows all, still, it is our duty and our interestto make the best and the most of our life in the world while itlasts. True; and really that very consideration is a strong proofof the correctness of the view in question. It corresponds withthe other arrangements of God. He makes every thing its own end, complete in itself, at the same time that it subserves somefurther end and enters into some higher unity. He is no mereTeleologist, hobbling towards his conclusions on a pair of decayedlogic crutches, 2 but an infinite Artist, whose means and ends areconsentaneous in the timeless and spaceless spontaneity andperfection of his play. If the tomb is our total goal, our genuineaim in this existence is to win during its course an experiencethe largest in quantity and the best in quality. On the otherhand, if another life follows this, our wisdom is just the same;because that experience alone, with the favor of God, canconstitute our fitness and stock to enter on the future. And yetbetween the two cases there is this immense difference, notindeed in duty, but in endowment, that in the latter instance wework out our allotted destiny here, in a broader illumination, with grander incentives, and with vaster consolations. A futurelife, then, really imposes no new duty upon the present, alters nofundamental ingredient in the present, takes away none of thecharms and claims of the present, but merely sheds an additionalradiance upon the shaded lights already shining here, infuses anadditional motive into the stimulants already animating ourpurposes, distills an additional balm into the comforts whichalready assuage our sorrows amidst an evanescent scene. The beliefthat we are to live hereafter in a compensating world explains tous many a sad mystery, strengthens us for many an oppressiveburden, consoles us in many a sharp grief. Else we should oftenergo mad in the baffling whirl of problems, oftener obey the baservoice, 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 SeineWelt. "Lenau's Satire auf einen Professor philosophia. doctrine of a future life. Outside of these three considerationsthe doctrine has no ethical meaning for human observance here. It will be seen, according to the foregoing representation, thatthe expectation of a future life, instead of being harmful to theinterests and attractions of the present, simply casts a cheeringand magnifying light upon them. It does not depreciate therealities or nullify the obligations now upon us, but emphasizesthem, flinging their lights and shades forward through a mightiervista. Consequently there is no reason for assailing the idea ofanother life in behalf of the interests of this. Such anopposition between the two states is entirely sophistical, resulting from a profound misinterpretation of the truemoralrelations connecting them. The belief in immortality has been mistakenly attacked, not merelyas hostile to our welfare on earth, but likewise as immoral initself, springing from essential selfishness, and in turnnourishing selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with thatcentral vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identicalindividual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination ofavaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out ofsight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makeshis poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfishdesire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation ofself will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face ofthe solemn and all submerging order of the universe, is the veryessence and climax of immorality and irreligiousness. To thisassault on the morality of the belief in a future life, whethermade in the devout tones of magnanimous sincerity, as by thesublime Schleiermacher, or with the dishonest trickiness of avulgar declaimer for the rehabilitation of the senses, as by somewho might be named, several fair replies may be made. In the firstplace, the objection begs the question, by assuming that thedoctrine is a falsehood, and that its disciples wilfully set uptheir private wishes against the public truth. Such tremendouspostulates cannot be granted. It is seizing the victory before thebattle, grasping the conclusion without establishing the premises. For, if there be a future life provided by the Creator, it cannotbe sinful or selfish in us to trust in it, to accept it withhumble gratitude, and to prepare our souls for it. That, insteadof being rebellious arrogance or overweening selfishness, wouldsimply be conforming our thoughts and plans, our desires andlabors, to the Divine arrangements. That would be both moralityand piety. When one clings by will to a doctrine known to be afalsehood, obstinately suppressing reason to affirm it as a truth, and, in obedience to his personal whims, trying to force allthings into conformity with it, he does act as a selfish egotistin full violation of the moral law and the spirit of religion. Buta future life we believe to be a fact; and therefore we are, inevery respect, justified in gladly expecting it and consecratedlyliving with reference to it. Furthermore, admitting it to be an open question, neither provednor disproved, but poised in equal uncertainty, still, it is notimmoral nor undevout deeply to desire and fondly to hope apersonal immortality. "The aim of religion, " it has been said, "isthe annihilation of one's own individuality, the living in theAll, the becoming one with the universe. " But in such a definitionaltogether too much is assumed. The aim of religion is only theannihilation of the self will of the individual as opposed to theWill of the Whole, not the losing of one's self in the unconsciouswastes of the universe, but the harmonizing of one's self with theSupreme Law of the universe. An humble, loving, and joyous conformity to the truth constitutesmorality and religion. This is not necessarily inconsistent with apersonal immortality. Besides, the charge may be retorted. To beidentified with the universe is a prouder thought than to besubordinated to it as an infinitesimal individual. It is a farhaughtier conceit to fancy one's self an integral part of God'ssubstance than to believe one's self a worshipping pensioner ofGod's will. The conception, too, is less native to the mind, hasbeen more curiously sought out, and is incomparably more pamperingto speculative luxury. If accusations of selfishness andwilfulness are to be hurled upon any modes of preferred faith asto our destiny, this self styled disinterested surrender of ourpersonality to the pantheistic Soul is as obnoxious to them as thecommon belief. If a desire for personal immortality be a normal experience in thedevelopment of our nature, it cannot be indictable as an offence, but must be recognised as an indication of God's design. Whetherthe desire is a cold and degraded piece of egotism deservingrebuke and contempt, or a lofty and sympathetic affection worthyof reverence and approval, depends on no intrinsic ingredient ofthe desire itself, but on the character in which it has its being. One person will be a heartless tyrant, another a loving saint, inhis hope of a future life. Shall our love of the dead, our prayersto meet them again, our unfathomed yearnings to know that theystill live and are happy, be stigmatized as mean and evil? Regardfor others as much as for ourselves prompts the eternal sigh. Norwill Divinity ever condemn the feeling himself has awakened. It issaid that Xerxes, gazing once upon his gorgeous army of a millionmen spread out below hire, sheathed in golden armor, white plumesnodding, purple standards waving, martial horns blowing, wept ashe thought that in thirty years the entire host composing thatmagnificent spectacle would be dead. To have gazed thoughtfullyupon such a sight with unmoved sensibilities would imply a muchmore selfish and hard hearted egotist. So when a lonelyphilanthropist from some meditative eminence looks down on thehuman race, if, as the contemplation of their pathetic fading anddecay wounds his saddened heart, he heals and cheers it with thefaith of a glorious immortality for them all, who shall call himselfish and sinful? To rest contented with the speedy night andthe infinite oblivion, wiping off all the unsolved sums from theslate of existence with annihilation's remorseless sponge, thatwould 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 "immortallongings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinaciousinstinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rationalto conclude that this is a pledge of her indestructiblepersonality, God's impregnable defence reared around the citadelof her being, than to consider it the artificial rampart flung upby an insurgent egotism. In like manner, it is a misrepresentationof the facts to assert the culpable selfishness of the faith in afuture life as a demanded reward for fidelity and merit here. Noone demands immortality as pay for acquired desert. It is modestlylooked for as a free boon from the God who freely gave the presentand who has by a thousand symbolic prophecies promised it. Richtersays, with great insight, "We desire immortality not as the rewardof virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewardedthan joy can: it is its own reward. " Kant says, "Immortality hasbeen left so uncertain in order that pure freedom of choice, andno selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations. " "But, " Jean Paulkeenly replies, "as we have now discovered this intention, itsobject is defeated. Besides, if the belief in immortality makesvirtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would makeit more so. " The anticipation of heaven can hardly make man aselfish calculator of profit; because heaven is no reward forcrafty reckoning, but the home of pure and holy souls. Virtuewhich resists temptation and perseveres in rectitude because ithas a sharp eye to an ulterior result is not virtue. No credibledoctrine of a future life offers a prize except to those who arejust and devout and strenuous in sacred service from free loyaltyto the right and the good, spontaneously obeying and loving thehigher and better call because it divinely commands theirobedience and love. The law of duty is the superior claim of truthand goodness. Virtue, yielding itself filially to this, finds inheaven not remuneration, but a sublimer theatre and an immortalcareer. Egotistic greed, all mere prudential considerations asdetermining conditions or forces in the award, are excluded asunclean and inadmissible by the very terms; and the doctrinestands justified on every ground as pure and wholesome before theholiest tribunal of ethics. Surely it is right that goodnessshould be blessed; but when it continues good only for the sake ofbeing blessed it ceases to be goodness. It is not the belief inimmortality, but only the belief in a corrupt doctrine ofimmortality which can poison the springs of disinterested virtue. The morality of the doctrine of a future life having thus beendefended from the attacks of those who have sought to destroy itin the fancied interests either of the enjoyments of the earth orof the purity of virtue and religion, it now remains to free itfrom the still more fatal supports which false or superficialreligionists have sought to give it by wrenching out of itmeanings it never held, by various perverse abuses of it, bymonstrous exaggerations of its moral importance to the present. Wehave seen that the supposition of another life, correctlyinterpreted, lays no new duty upon man, takes away from him no oldduty or privilege, but simply gives to the previously existingfacts of the case the intensifying glory and strength of freshlight, motive, and consolation. But many public teachers, notcontent to treat the subject with this sobriety of reason, insteadof presenting the careful conclusions of a conscientious analysis, have sought to strengthen their argument to the feelings by helpof prodigious assumptions, assumptions hastily adopted, highlycolored, and authoritatively urged. Upon the hypothesis thatannihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely totake away from the present all the additional light, incentive, and comfort imparted by the faith in a future existence, but theyarbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsicallybelonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues, and set it in a frame of midnight. Thus, instead of calmly seekingto elicit and recommend truth, they strive, by terrifying thefancy and shocking the prejudices, to make people accept theirdogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejectingit. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which havebeen employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used forthe same purpose. Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton hassaid, "Without the belief in personal immortality there can be noreligion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelingsand the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a fewyears in this world?" 3 Such a statement from such a quarter isastonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person orincumbent upon him do not depend on the duration of his being, buton the character, endowments, and relations of his being. Thehypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroyGod, does not destroy man's dependence on God for all hisprivileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence ofthe 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 worshipare just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience onearth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and inconscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does notcause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may bedoubted if heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerityin such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add toits qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of ourcapacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injuriouserror in saying, as he does, "If there be no future life, themoral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and theAuthor of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom andauthority and honor. " 4 The creative Sovereign of fifty millionfirmaments of worlds "stripped of his wisdom and authority andhonor" because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal!Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial ofimmortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relationsand ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion isfitted 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, andbecoming 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 toGod's will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what thefuture 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 consciousin it of the past. If, on exchange of worlds, man loses hismemory, he virtually ceases to exist, and might just as well beannihilated. A future life with perfect oblivion of the present isno life at all for us. Is not this style of thought the mostprovincial egotism, the utter absence of all generous thought andsympathy unselfishly grasping the absolute boons of being? It is ashallow error, too, even on the grounds of selfishness itself. Inany point of view the difference is diametric and immense betweena happy being in an eternal present, unconscious of the past, andno being at all. Suppose a man thirty years of age were offeredhis choice to die this moment, or to live fifty years longer ofunalloyed success and happiness, only with a completeforgetfulness of all that has happened up to this moment. He wouldnot hesitate to grasp the gift, however much he regretted thecondition. 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 retributivelife beyond the grave all restraints are taken off from thepassions, free course given to every impulse. Chateaubriand says, bluntly, "There can be no morality if there be no future state. " 5With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensiblerecklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to theessential nobleness of his loving, heroic nature, "If you believein 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 afallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery, rascality, robbery, and murder. " What bible of Moloch had he beenstudying to form, for the time, so horrid a theory of the happiestlife, and to put so degrading an estimate upon human nature? Isman's will a starved wolf only held back by the triple chain offear of death, Satan, and hell, from tearing forth with ravenousbounds to flesh the fangs of his desires in bleeding virtue andinnocence? 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 theappetite of a tiger or a vulture, then, thus to wallow in theoffal of vice, dive into the carrion of sensuality, abandonhimself to revelling in carnivorous crime, might be his instinctand his happiness. But by virtue of his humanity man loves hisfellows, enjoys the scenery of nature, takes delight in thoughtand art, dilates with grand presentiments of glory and eternity, mysteriously yearns after the hidden God. To a reasonable man andno other is to be reasoned with on matters of truth and interestthe assumption of this brief season as all, will be a doublemotive not to hasten and embitter its brevity by folly, excess, and sin. If you are to be dead to morrow, for that very reason, inGod's name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate deathto day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not acrouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying achasm of fire, but a high toned conscience of reason and honor, perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneouslyloathing them. Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assertthat unless there be a future life there is not only no check onpassion within, but no moral law without; every man is free to dowhat he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, inhis "Treatise on Man's Soule, " that "to predicate mortality in thesoule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, byremoving the ground of all difference in those thinges which areto governe our actions. " 6 This style of teaching is a verymischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in thewoods 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 thedifferences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense. The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The wordsof an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than thoseof the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could beuttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamationon immortality, "If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims ofcharity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, arebut 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 merechimera, a bugbear of human invention. " 7 What debauchedunbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Itsutter barelessness, as a single illustration may show, is obviousat a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, therelations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material worldalthough they may be lost sight of when time and space aretranscended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, therelations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifoldgrades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for humannature and experience in this life even if men perish in thegrave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endurethey are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strangeslip of the mind, showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are thecommon prejudice and falsehood on this subject, even so bold andfresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his ownphilosophy by declaring, "If to morrow I perish utterly, then myfathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my breadcorn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations ofmankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality willvanish. " 8 Ah, man reveres his fathers and loves to act nobly, notbecause he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And, though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken fromhuman life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish, as it is said the German crossbill pairs and broods in the dead ofwinter. The martyr's sacrifice and the voluptuary's indulgence arevery different things to day, if they do both cease to morrow. Nospeed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon andThersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice andfraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that theywill interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutablemorality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, andtriangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties orcompression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds ofduty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil, magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery. Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter theinherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. Themost it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to givethe great motor nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke ofpalsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a morallaw? Richter reasons as follows: "Suppose a statue besouled fortwo days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus robit of one day's life, would you be guilty of murder? One caninjure only an immortal. " 9 The sophistry appears when we rectifythe conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on animmortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong andinjury, for the time, to destroy one day's life of a man whoseentire existence was confined to two days, than it would be totake away the same period from the bodily existence of one whoimmediately 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 overtact is the same. This general moral problem has been moreaccurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is asfollows: "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 makeinquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules ofhis government; for these are to be the law of their season oflife and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortalitywould put the same questions with an intensity the greater fromthe greater stake. " Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in humansociety cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedlyweakened, its basis variously altered, but as a confessedsovereign principle it cannot be expelled. The denial of thefreedom of the will theoretically explodes it; but social custom, law, and opinion will enforce it still. Make man a mere dissolublemixture of carbon and magnetism, yet so long as he can distinguishright and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and, unsophisticatedby 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 thesame way?" 10 We should reply thus: No matter what man springsfrom or consists of, if he has moral ideas, performs moralactions, and is susceptible of moral motives, then he is morallyresponsible: for all practical and disciplinary purposes he iswholly removed from the categories of physical science. Another pernicious misrepresentation of the fair consequences ofthe denial of a life hereafter is shown in the frequentdeclaration that then there would be no motive to any thing goodand 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 motiveswould be killed. This view is to be met by a broad and indignantdenial based on an appeal to human consciousness and to the reasonof the thing. Every man knows by experience that there are amultitude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with futurereward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do goodeven with self sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman riskshis life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, isthe hope of heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offeredbribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is thefear of hell all that animates him? A million such decisivespecifications might be made. The renowned sentence of Cicero, "Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerretad mortem, " 11 is effective eloquence; but it is a baseless libelagainst humanity and the truth. In every moment of supremenobleness and sacrifice personality vanishes. Thousands ofpatriots, philosophers, saints, have been glad to die for thefreedom of native land, the cause of truth, the welfare of fellowmen, without a taint of selfish reward touching their wills. Arethere not souls "To whom dishonor's shadow is a substance Moreterrible than death here and hereafter"? He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublimeact of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequencesof it eternally. Is there no motive for the 10 Some discussion of this general subject is to be found inSchaller, Leib nod Seele. Kap. 5: Die Consequentzen desMaterialismus. And in Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme derEthik. 11 Tuscul. Quast. Lib. I. Cap. 15. preservation of health because it cannot be an everlastingpossession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever, shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseatingpoisons? If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when wedie, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition ofimmortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better thansloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and puritybetter than hatred and corruption, also makes them equallypreferable 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 likethe fool and the felon? Shall heaven be held before man simply asa piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is ashocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let thetheory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, ourperception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, oursense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmlyto every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolvingabyss. But some one may say, "If I have fought with beasts atEphesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?" Itadvantageth you every thing until you are dead, although there benothing afterwards. As long as you live, is it not glory andreward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This issufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law. And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine ofsentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worthour affection, let great Shakspeare advance, with his matchlessdepth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing, in tones of cordial solidity, "This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To lovethat well which thou must leave ere long. " What though Decay's shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflungand enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nordegrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in thevalleys of ignoble fear and selfishness, leaving all the clearroad lines of moral truth and practical virtue and heroicconsecration still high and bright on the table land of a worthylife; and every honorable soul, calmly confronting its fate, willcry, despite the worst, "The pathway of my duty lies in sunlight;And I would tread it with as firm a step, Though it shouldterminate in cold oblivion, As if Elysian pleasures at itsClose Gleam'd palpable to sight as things of earth. " If a captain knew that his ship would never reach her port, wouldhe therefore neglect his functions, be slovenly and careless, permit insubordination and drunkenness among the crew, let thebroad pennon draggle in filthy rents, the cordage become tangledand stiff, the planks be covered with dirt, and the guns be grimedwith rust? No: all generous hearts would condemn that. He wouldkeep every inch of the deck scoured, every piece of metal polishedlike a mirror, the sails set full and clean, and, with shiningmuzzles out, ropes hauled taut in their blocks, and every man athis post, he would sweep towards the reef, and go down into thesea firing a farewell salute of honor to the sun, his flag flyingabove him as he sunk. The dogmatic assertors of a future life, in a partisan spirit setupon making out the most impressive case in its behalf, have beenguilty of painting frightful caricatures of the true nature andsignificance of the opposite conclusion. Instead of saying, "Ifsuch a thing be fated, why, then, it must be right, God's will bedone, " they frantically rebel against any such admission, anddeclare that it would make God a liar and a fiend, man a "magneticmockery, " and life a hellish taunt. This, however unconscious itmay be to its authors, is blasphemous egotism. One of thetenderest, devoutest, richest, writers of the century hasunflinchingly affirmed that if man who trusted that love was thefinal law of creation, although nature, her claws and teeth redwith raven, shrieked against his creed be left to be blown aboutthe 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 canstretch out my hands to God, and say, 'The opportunities whichthou hast given me of comprehending and following thy government, I have not neglected. I thank thee that thou hast brought me intobeing. I am satisfied with the time I have enjoyed the things thouhast given me. Receive them again, and assign them to whateverplace thou wilt. '" 12 Surely the pious heathen here speaks moreworthily than the presumptuous Christian! How much fitter would itbe, 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 notsusceptible of a benignant meaning, worthy of grateful acceptanceby the humble mind of piety and the dispassionate spirit of science!Yea, let God and his providence stand justified, though man proveto have been egregiously mistaken. "Though He smite me, yet will I praise Him; though He slay me, yetwill I trust in Him. " To return into the state we were in before we were created is notto suffer any evil: it is to be absolutely free from all evil. Itis but the more perfect playing of that part, of which every soundsleep is a rehearsal. The thought of it is mournful to theenjoying soul, but not terrific; and even the mournfulness ceasesin the realization. He uttered a piece of cruel madness who said, "Hell is more bearable than nothingness. " Is it worse to havenothing than it is to have infinite torture? Milton asks, "For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectualbeing?" Every creature that exists, if full of pain, would snatch at theboon of ceasing to be. To be blessed is a good; to be wretched isan 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 aharmonized mind, not entertaining fear nor yielding to sadness. Why should we shudder or grieve? Every time we slumber, we try onthe dress which, when we die, we shall wear easily forever. Not satisfied to let the result rest in this somewhat sad butpeaceful aspect, it is quite customary to give it a turn and hueof ghastly horribleness, by casting over it the dyspeptic dreams, injecting it with the lurid lights and shades, of a morbid andwilful fancy. The most loathsome and inexcusable instance in pointis the "Vision of Annihilation" depicted by the vermicular, infested imagination of the great Teutonic phantasist while yetwrithing under the sanguinary fumes of some horrid attack ofnightmare. Stepping across the earth, which is but a broadexecutioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters thelarva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reachesdown into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead arepictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by eachunsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as acorpse bleeds when its murderer approaches. " Pah! Out upon thisexecrable retching of a nauseated fancy! What good is there in thebaseless conceit and gratuitous disgust of saying, "The next worldis in the grave, betwixt the teeth of the worm"? In the casesupposed, the truth is merely that there is no next worldanywhere; not that all the horrors of hell are scooped togetherinto the grave, and there multiplied by others direr yet andunknown before. Man's blended duty and interest, in such a case, are to try to see the interior beauty and essential kindness ofhis fate, to adorn it and embrace it, fomenting his resignationwith the sweet lotions of faith and peace, not exasperating hiswounds with the angry pungents of suspicion, alarm, and complaint. At the worst, amidst all our personal disappointments, losses, anddecay, "the view of the great universal whole of nature, " asHumboldt says, "is reassuring and consolatory. " If the boon of afuture immortality be not ours, therefore to scorn the gift of thepresent life, is to act not like a wise man, who with gratefulpiety 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 andindependent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question, lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, andthere is room for doubt. The wavering evidences in some moodspreponderate on that side, in other moods on this side. Meanwhileit is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do isto cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a noble character, lead apure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and God, and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue withreverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms. Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert's dying flower, "Thanks today for all the favors I have received from sun and stream andearth and sky, for all the gifts from men and God which have mademy little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thineazure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring tide, roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shallrise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I nowfall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh. " Surely the mournfulnobility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much tothe selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in theMiddle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columnsand doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by ahunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced inthousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, "Iblessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soulto perish under the everlasting weight of hell!" Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is anachievement whose nobleness outweighs its sorrow, even if thegazer foresee his own destruction. It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on theimmortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief init. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from theunwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christianwriters in their exaggeration of the practical importance of sucha faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing todo with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on thelength, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Makethe life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; makethe life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has thepsychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality mayenlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; itdoes not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale andcontract those motives; it does not take them away. Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitudeover the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter aword calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, whoweeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith notknowledge that the spirit is without terminus or rest. Thefaithful truth hunter, in dying, finds not a covert, but a bettertrail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged fromprejudice and self will. With God we are not to prescribeconditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must diewith the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious anddangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view isobviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophicalthinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in theindividual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole. This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionablyincrease. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture toshift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God toa precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The solesafety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law withdisinterested conformity. The influence of the doctrine of reward and punishment in a futurestate, as a working motive for the observance of the moral law, isenormously overestimated. The influence, as such a motive, of thepublic opinion of mankind, with the legal and social sanctions, isenormously underestimated. And the authority of a personalperception of right is also most unbecomingly depreciated. UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of God, not asarbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in abook, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works. The true basis of morality is universal order. The true end ofmorality is life, the sum of moral laws being identical with thesum of the conditions in accordance with which the fruition of thefunctions of life can be secured with nearest approach toperfectness, perpetuity, and universality. The true sanctions ofmorality are the manifold forms in which consciousness of life isheightened by harmony with universal order or lowered by discordwith it. The true law of moral sacrifice or resistance totemptation is misrepresented by the common doctrine of heaven andhell, which makes it consist in the renunciation of a present goodfor the clutching of a future good, the voluntary suffering of asmall present evil to avoid the involuntary suffering of animmense future evil. The true law of moral sacrifice is deeper, purer, more comprehensive, than that. It expresses our duty, inaccordance with the requirements of universal order, tosubordinate the gratification of any part of our being to that ofthe whole of our being, to forego the good of any portion of ourlife in deference to that of all our life, to renounce anyhappiness of the individual which conflicts with the welfare ofthe race, to hold the spiritual atom in absolute abeyance to thespiritual universe, to sink self in God. If a man believe in nofuture life, is he thereby absolved from the moral law? The kindand number of his duties remain as before: only the apparentgrandeur of their scale and motives is diminished. The two halvesof morality are the co ordination of separate interests inuniversal order, and the loyalty of the parts to the wholes. Thedesire to remove the obligations and sanctions of the moral lawfrom their intrinsic supports, and posit them on the fictitiouspedestals of a forensic heaven and hell, reveals incompetency ofthought and vulgarity of sentiment in him who does it, and is aprocedure not less perilous than unwarranted. If the creation beconceived as a machine, it is a machine self regulating in all itsparts by the immanent presence of its Maker. When we die, may the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter of Christ, beour confessor; the last inhaled breath our cup of absolution; thetears of some dear friend our extreme unction; no complaint forpast trials, but a grateful acknowledgment for all blessings, ourparting word. And then, resigning ourselves to the universalFather, assured that whatever ought to be, and is best to be, willbe, either absolute oblivion shall be welcome, or we will goforward to new destinies, whether with preserved identity or withtransformed consciousness and powers being indifferent to us, since the will of God is done. In the mean time, until thatcritical 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 Servilecontentment or ignoble fear In the expression of our attitude; Andwith far straining eyes, and hands upcast, And feet half raised, declare our painful state, Yearning for wings to reach the fieldsof 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 arereserved unto fire against the day of judgment, when they shall beburned up, and all be made new. It is said that the elements shallmelt with ferment heat, the stars fall, and the sky pass away likea scroll that is rolled together. On these and similar passages isbased the belief of Christendom in the destined destruction of theworld by fire and in the scenic judgment of the dead and theliving gathered before the visible tribunal of Christ. This beliefwas once general and intense. It is still common, though morevague and feeble than formerly. In whatever degree it is held, itis a doctrine of terror. We hope by tracing its origin, andshowing how mistaken it is, to help dispel its sway, free men fromthe further oppression of its fearfulness, and put in its placethe just and wholesome authority of the truth. The true doctrineof the divine government of the world, the correct explanation ofthe course and sequel of history, must be more honorable to God, more useful to men, of better working and omen in the life ofsociety, than any error can be. Let us then, as far as we areable, displace by the truth the errors prevalent around us inregard to the end of the world and the day of judgment. It will help us in our proposed investigation, if we first noticethat the ecclesiastical doctrine as to an impending destruction ofthe world is not solitary, but has prototypes and parallels in thefaiths of other nations and ages. Almost every people, everytribe, has its cosmogony or theory of the creation, in which thereare accounts, more or less rude or refined, general or minute, ofthe supposed beginning and of the imagined end of nature. Allearly literatures from the philosophic treatises of the Hindus tothe oral traditions of the Polynesians are found to contain eithersublime dreams or obscure prophecies or awful pictures of thefinal doom and destruction of earth and man. The Hebrew symbolsand the Christian beliefs in relation to this subject thereforestand not alone, but in connection with a multitude of others, each one plainly reflecting the degree of knowledge and stage ofdevelopment attained by the minds which originated it. Beforeproceeding to examine the familiar doctrine so enveloped in ourprejudices, a brief examination of some kindred doctrines, lessfamiliar to us and quite detached from our prejudices, will be ofservice. The sacred books of the Hindus describe certain enormous periodsof time in which the universe successively begins and ends, springs into being and sinks into nothing. These periods arecalled kalpas, and each one covers a duration of thousands ofmillions of years. Each kalpa of creation is called a day ofBrahma; each kalpa of destruction, a night of Brahma. The beliefis that Brahma, waking from the slumber of his self absorbedsolitude, feels his loneliness, and his thoughts and emotions goforth in creative forms, composing the immense scheme of worldsand creatures. These play their parts, and run their courses, until the vast day of Brahma is completed; when he closes hiseyes, and falls to rest, while the whole system of finite thingsreturns to the silence and darkness of its aboriginal unity, andremains there in invisible annihilation through the stupendousnight that precedes the reawaking of the slumbering Godhead andthe appearance of the creation once more. A little reflection makes the origin of this imagery and beliefclear. Each night, as the darkness comes down, and the outer worlddisappears, man falls asleep, and, so far as he is consciouslyconcerned, every thing is destroyed. In his unconsciousness, everything ceases to be. The light dawns again, he awakes, and hisreopened senses create anew the busy frame and phenomena ofnature. Transfer this experience from man to God; consider it notas abstract and apparent, but as concrete and real, and you havethe Hindu doctrine of the kalpa. When we sleep, to us all thingsare destroyed; and when we awake, to us they reappear. When Godsleeps, all things in themselves really end; and when he wakes, they begin anew to be. The visible and experimental phenomena ofday and night, sleeping and waking, are universalized, andattributed to God, It is a poetic process of thought, naturalenough to a rich minded, simple people, but wholly illegitimate asa logical ground of belief, But being stated in books supposed tobe infallibly inspired, and in the absence of critical tests forthe discrimination of sound from unsound thought, it wasimplicitly accepted by multitudes. Closely allied to the foregoing doctrine, yet in severalparticulars strikingly different from it, and evidently quiteindependent in its origin, was the Great Year of the Stoics, orthe alternative blotting out and restoration of all things. Thisschool of philosophers conceived of God as a pure artistic forceor seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in theevolution of the kosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms intofire, and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagrationdestroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible God alone in hispure essence again. The artistic germ or seed force then begins, under its laws of intrinsic necessity, to go once more through thesame process to the same end. The rise of this imagery and belief is not so obvious as in thelast instance, but it is equally discoverable and intelligible. Every animal, every flower, every plant, begins from its properspecific germ or force, goes through a fixed series of growths andchanges, and relapses into its prime elements, and another andanother follow after it in the same order. The seasons come andgo, and come again and go again, Every planet repeats itsrevolutions over and over. Wherever we look, this repetition ofidentical processes greets our vision. Now, by imaginativeassociation universalize this repetition of the course ofphenomena as seen in the parts, and take it up and apply it to thewhole 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 scientificdata and standards, it might easily win acceptance on authority. The Scandinavians, also, have transmitted to us, in their sacredbooks, descriptions of their belief in the approaching end of theworld, descriptions rude, wild, terrible, not without elements ofappalling grandeur. They foretell a day called Ragnarok, or theTwilight of the gods, when all the powers of good and evil shalljoin in battle, and the whole present system of things perish in ascene of unutterable strife and dismay. The Eddas were composed inan ignorant but deeply poetic and fertile age, when all themythological elements of mind were in full action. Their authorslooking within, on their own passions, and without, on the naturalscenery around them, conscious of order and disorder, love andhate, virtue and crime, beholding phenomena of beauty and horror, sun and stars, night and tempest, winter and summer, icebergs andvolcanoes, placid moonlight and blinding mist, assisting friendsand battling foes, personified everything as a demon or adivinity. Asgard, above the blue firmament, was the bright home ofthe gods, the Asir. Helheim, beneath the rocky earth and thefrozen ocean, was the dark and foul abode of the bad spirits, theJotuns. Everywhere in nature, fog and fire, fertility andbarrenness, were in conflict; everywhere in society, law and crimewere contending. In the moon followed by a drifting cloud, theysaw a goddess chased by a wolf. The strife goes on waxing, andmust sooner or later reach a climax. Each side enlists its allies, until all are ranged in opposition, from Jormungandur, the serpentof the deep, to Heindall, the warder of the rainbow, gods andbrave men there, demons, traitors, and cowards here. Then soundsthe horn of battle, and the last day dawns in fire and splendorfrom the sky, in fog and venom from the abyss. Flame devours theearth. For the most part, the combatants mutually slay each other. Only Gimli, the high, safe heaven of All Father, remains as arefuge for the survivors and the beginning of a new and fairerworld. The natural history of this mythological mess is clear enough. Itarises from the poetic embodiment and personification ofphenomena, the grouping together of all evil and of all good, thenimaginatively universalizing the conflict, and carrying it out inidea to its inevitable ultimatum. The process of thought wasobviously natural in its ground, but fictitious in its result. Yetin a period when no sharp distinction was drawn between fancy andfact, song and science, but an indiscriminate faith was oftenyielded to both, even such a picturesque medley as this might beheld as religious truth. The Zarathustrian or Persian scheme of a general judgment of menand of the world in some respects resembles the systems alreadyset forth, in other respects more closely approaches thatChristian doctrine partially borrowed from it, and which ishereafter 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 tocounteract and destroy the works of Ahura Mazda by means of allsorts of correspondent evils and woes. When Ahura Mazda createsthe race of men happy and immortal, Angra Mainyus, the old serpent, full of corruption and destruction, steals in, seduces them fromtheir allegiance, and brings misery and death on them, and thenleads their souls to his dark abode. The whole creation issupposed to be crowded with good spirits, the angels of AhuraMazda, seeking to carry out his beneficent designs; and also with evilspirits, the ministers of Angra Mainyus, plotting to make menwicked, and to pervert and poison every blessing with an answeringcurse. Light is the symbol of God, darkness the symbol of hisAntagonist. Under these hostile banners are ranged all livingcreatures, all created objects. For long periods this dreadfulcontention rages, involving everything below in its fluctuations. But at last Ahura Mazda subdues Angra Mainyus, overturns all themischief he has done, by means of a great deliverer whom he hassent among men to instruct and redeem them raises the dead, purifies the world with fire, and, after properly punishing theguilty, restores all nature to its original paradisal condition, free from pain and death. In the primitive state of mankind, when the germs of this religionwere conceived, when men dwelt in ignorance, exposure, and fear, they naturally shuddered at darkness as a supernatural enemy, andworshipped light as a supernatural friend. That became the emblemor personification of the Devil, this the emblem or personificationof God. They grouped all evils with that, all goods with this. Imaginatively associating all light and darkness, all blessingand bale, respectively with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyus, they universalized the fragmentary embodiments and oppositionsof these into one great battle; and under the impulse ofworshipping faith and hope, carried it to its crisis in thefinal victory of the good. Plainly, it is mere poetry injected alittle with a later speculative element, and dealing inmythological fashion chiefly with the phenomena of nature asrelated to the experience of man. No one now can accept itliterally. This survey of the various heathen myths of the end of the worldhas prepared us, in some degree, to consider the correspondingview held by the Jews, and more completely developed by theChristian successors to the Jewish heritage of thought andfeeling. The Hebrews believed themselves to be exclusively the chosenpeople of God, who directly ruled over them himself by atheocratic government represented in their patriarchs, law givers, prophets, and kings. Jehovah was the only true God; they were hisonly pure and accepted worshippers, sharply distinguished from thewhole idolatrous world. The heathen nations, uncircumcisedadorers of vain idols or of demons, were by consequence enemiesboth of the true God and of his servants. This contrast andhostility they even carried over into the unseen world, andimagined that each nation had its own guardian angel in the Courtof Jehovah in heaven, who contended there for its interests; theirown national guardian, the angel Michael, being more powerful andnearer to the throne than any other one. In the calamities thatfell on them, they recognized the vengeance of Jehovah for theviolation of his commands. In their victories, their deliverances, their great blessings, especially in their rescue from Egypt, andin the many miracles which they believed to have accompanied thatgreat passage, they saw the signal superiority of their God overevery other god, and the proofs of his particular providence overthem in distinct preference to all other peoples. He had, as theypiously believed, made a special covenant with Abraham, and setapart his posterity as a sacred family, exclusively intrusted withthe divine law, and commissioned to subdue and govern all theother families of the earth. When this proud and intenselycherished faith was baffled of fulfillment, they never dreamed ofabandoning it. They only supposed its triumphant execution postponed, as apenalty for their sins, and looked forward with redoubled ardor toa better time when their hopes should break into fruition, theirexile be ended, their captivity appear as a dream, Jerusalem bethe central gem of the world, and the anointed ruler wield hissceptre over all mankind. But misfortunes and woes were heaped on them. Their city wassacked, their temple desecrated, their people dragged into foreignslavery, forbidden to celebrate the rites of their religion, slaughtered by wholesale. Many times, during the two centuriesbefore and the first century after Christ, did they suffer theseterrible sorrows. Their hatred and scorn of their heathenpersecutors; their faith in their own incomparable destiny; theirexpectation of the speedy appearance of an anointed deliverer, raised up by Jehovah to avenge them and vindicate their trust, allbecame the more fervent and profound the longer the delay. Underthese circumstances grew up the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, asit is seen in that Apocalyptic literature represented by the Bookof Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, the Book of Enoch, theAssumption of Moses, the Fourth Book of Esdras, and similardocuments. The Jews were remarkably free from that habit of mind which ledalmost all the other nations to personify the most startlingphenomena of nature as living beings, which created fetiches ofstocks 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 ofother peoples by the phenomena of nature was held in the thoughtsof the Jews by political phenomena, by ritual, legal, and militaryrelations. And the poetic action of fancy, the mythologicalcreativeness and superstitious feeling which other peopleexercised on the objects and changes of nature, the Jews exercisedon the phenomena of their own national history. The burningcentral point of their polity and belief and imagination was theconviction of their own national consecration as the exclusivepeople of God, meant to conquer, teach, and rule all the infidelnations; that Jehovah was literally their invisible King, represented in their chief ruler; that every great triumph ordisaster was a signal Day of the Lord, a special Coming of Jehovahto reward or punish his people. During their repeated bondagesunder the Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, theirfeeling of the antagonism between themselves and the other peopleincreased. From the time of the Babylonish captivity the Persiandoctrine of good and evil spirits had infiltrated into theirbelief; and they adopted the notion of Angra Mainyus, anddeveloped it (with certain modifications) into their conception ofSatan. Then, in their faith, the war of Jews and Gentiles spreadinto the invisible world, and took up on its opposite sides thegood and the fallen angels. And, finally, the idea of theirMessiah became the centre of a battle and a judgment in which allthe generations of the dead as well as of the living were to havea part; and which should culminate in the overthrow of evil, thesubjection of the heathen, the assignment of the righteous to aparadisal reign, and of the wicked to a doom typified by thesubmersion of Sodom and Gomorrah in fiery brimstone. How plainly this doctrine was the result of the same poeticprocess of thought with the other schemes already depicted! Onlythey were developed on the basis of natural phenomena; this, onthe basis of political phenomena. It is simply the imaginativeuniversalization of the struggle between Jew and Gentile, and thecarrying of it to its crisis and sequel. And when inexplicabledelays and the accumulation of obstacles made the realization ofthe expected result amidst the conditions of the present worldseem ever more and more hopeless, the growing and assimilativeaction of faith and fancy expanded the scene, and transferred itto a transmundane state, involving the destruction of the heavensand earth and their replacement with a new creation. Is there any more real reason for believing this doctrine thanthere is for believing the other kindred schemes? Not a whit. Itis a mistake of the same poetic nature, and resting on the samegrounds with them. Two thousand years have passed, and it has notbeen fulfilled; and there is ever less and less sign of itsfulfillment. It never will be fulfilled, except in a spiritualsense. The Jews will finally lose their pride of race andcovenant, abandon their special Messianic creed, and blendthemselves and their opinions in the mass of redeemed andprogressive humanity, and no more dream of a physical resurrectionof the dead amidst the dissolving elements of nature. And now we must notice that besides all these poetic pictures ofthe end of the world, there are prophecies of a similar resultwhich wear an apparently scientific garb. Many men of sciencefirmly believe that our world is destined to be destroyed, that aclose for the earthly fortunes of mankind can be plainly foreseen. No little alarm was felt a century or more ago, when it wasdiscovered that there was a progressive diminution going on in theorbit of the moon, which must cause it at length to impinge uponthe earth. But La Grange exhibited the fallaciousness of theprophecy, by showing that the decrease was periodical andsucceeded by a corresponding increase. Intense and widely spreadterror has repeatedly been felt less a comet should come withinour planetary orbit, and shatter or melt our globe by its contact. But the discovery of the nebulous nature of comets, of their greatnumbers and regular movements, has quite dissipated that fear fromthe popular mind in our day. There are, however, other forms of scientific speculation whichput the prophesied destruction of the world on a more plausibleand formidable basis. It is supposed by many scientists that allforce is derived from the consumption of heat; and that the fuelmust at last be used up, and therefore no life or energy be leftfor sustaining the present system of the creation. This theory ismet by the counter statement that the heat of the sun and othersimilar centres may possibly not depend on any materialconsumption; or, if it does, there may be a self replenishingsupply, loss and repair forming an endless circle. It is foretold by some chemists, that the progressive interiorcooling and contraction of our orb will cause ever greaterinterstices or vacant spaces among the solid substances below theouter crust; and that into these pores, first all liquids, thenall gases and the whole atmosphere, will be absorbed: so that theworld will be left desolate, utterly uninhabitable by life. Again: it is said that all force or energy tends at everytransformation to pass (at least partially) into heat; andtherefore that, finally, all force will be frittered down into theone form of heat, all matter vanishing from its separate shapesinto the state of a homogeneous, nebulous fire. The portentoussight, 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, isperhaps a solemn symbol of the fate of our own planet; hinting ata time when the earth, too, shall make itself a funeral pyre, And, awed in distant orbs, some race unknown Shall miss one starwhose smile had lit their own. This same final crisis is also prophesied on the basis of a slightretardation to which the planets are subjected in their passagethrough the ethereal medium. No matter how slight the resistancethus interposed, its consequence, it is thought, must accumulateand ultimately compel all material bodies to approach each other;and, as their successive collisions convert them into heat andvapor, nothing will be left at last but one uniform nebula. Theprocess of evolution will then begin anew, and so the stupendoushistory of the universe repeat itself eternally. This is the sublimest of all the generalizations of science. Itmay be true, and it may not be true. At any rate, it differsimmensely in the moral impression it makes from that made by thecurrent theological doctrine of the same catastrophe. We cancontemplate the scientific prophecy of the end of the world with apeace of mind which the traditional prophecy does not permit. In the first place, the ecclesiastical doctrine makes thedestruction of the world a result of wrath and vengeance. Theangry God looms above us with flaming features and avengingweapons to tread down his enemies. We shrink in fright from thewrath and power of the personal Judge, the inexorable Foe of thewicked. But the scientific doctrine makes the end a result ofpassionless laws, a steady evolution of effects from causes, wholly free from everything vindictive. Secondly. The ecclesiastical doctrine makes the dreadfulconclusion a sudden event, an inconceivable shock of horror, falling in an instant, overwhelming all its victims with theswiftness of lightning in the unutterable agony of their ruin. Butthe scientific doctrine makes the climax a matter of slow andgradual approach. Whether the worlds are to be frozen up byincreasing cold, or to evaporate in culminating heat, or to beconverted into gas as they meet in their career, the changes ofthe chemical conditions will be so steady and moderate beforehandas to cause all living creatures to have diminished in numbers byinsensible degrees, and to have utterly ceased long before thefinal shock arrives. Thirdly. The ecclesiastical doctrine makes the sequel imminent, near, ready to fall at a moment's warning. At any hour the signalmay strike. Thus it is to the earnest believer a constant, urgentalarm, close at hand. But the scientific doctrine depicts theclose as almost unimaginably remote. All the data in the hands ofour scientists lead their calculations as to the nearest probableend to land them in an epoch so far off as to be stated only inthousands of millions of years. Thus the picture is so distant asto be virtually enfeebled into nothing. We cannot, even by themost vivid imagination, bring it home closely enough to make itreal and effective on our plans. And, finally, the theological dogma of the destruction of theworld professes to be an infallible certainty. The believer holdsthat he absolutely knows it by a revelation of supernaturalauthority. But with the scientist such a belief is held as merelya probability. A billion of centuries hence the world may perhapscome to an end; and, on the other hand, the phenomena which leadto such a belief may yet be explained as implying no such result. And these two issues, so far as our social or ideal experience isconcerned, are virtually the same. A brilliant French writer has suggested that even if the naturalcourse of evolution does of itself necessitate the finaldestruction of the world, yet our race, judging from themagnificent achievements of science and art already reached, may, within ten thousand centuries, which will be long before theforeseen end approaches, obtain such a knowledge and control ofthe forces of nature as to make collective humanity master of thisplanet, able to shape and guide its destinies, ward off everyfatal crisis, and perfect and immortalize the system as nowsustained. It is an audacious fancy. But like many otherincredible conceptions which have forerun their own still moreincredible fulfillment, the very thought electrifies us with hopeand courage. And thus the conclusion in which we rest at the close of ourinvestigation is the belief that the world is to last, and ourrace to flourish on it virtually forever. This conclusion isequally a relief from the frightful burdens of superstition, and aconsolation for our own personal evanescence. The stable harmonyof natural beauty and beneficence, amidst which we individuallyplay our brief part and vanish, shall stand fast, blooming withfresh growths, and shining with fadeless light, and the successivegenerations of our dear fellow men shall grow ever wiser andhappier, beyond the reach of our farthest vision into the future. And if we recognize in the great catastrophic myths and previsionsof the poets and scientists the fundamental truth that the thingswhich are seen are temporal, while the things alone which areunseen are eternal, the end being a regular and remote sequel inthe creative plan of God, free from anger, retributivedisappointment, or cruelty will not alarm us. For if souls aresubstantial entities, and not mere phenomenal processes, they willsurvive the universal crisis, and either at the lucid goals oftheir perfected destiny rejoice forever in a reflected individualfruition of the attributes of God, or else start refreshed on anew career with that redistribution of the cosmic matter andmotion which in its gigantic and eternal rhythm of development anddissolution the ancient Hindu mind figured as the respiration ofBrahm and which ambitious science now generalizes as the law ofevolution. CHAPTER II. THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. JUDAISM so largely supplied the circumstantial and doctrinal germsout of which dogmatic Christianity grew, that we cannot thoroughlyunderstand the Christian belief in a final day of judgment, unlesswe first notice the historic and literary derivation of thatbelief from Judaism, and then trace its development in the newconditions through which it passed. The personal character, teachings, life, and death of Jesus Christ, together with hissubsequent resurrection and career in the consciousness ofecclesiastical Christendom, constituted the crystalizing centrewhich, dipped in the inherited solution of ideal and socialmaterials furnished by the Church, has gathered around it theaccretion of faith and dogma composing the theoretic Christianityof the present day. To follow this process with reference to theparticular tenet before us, analyze it, discriminate theappropriate in it from the inappropriate, the true from the false, maybe difficult; but it is necessary for a satisfactoryconclusion. To this task let us therefore now address ourselves, putting away all bias and prejudice, invoking in equal degreecandor, fearlessness and charity. The Jews believed themselves to be a people chosen out of all theworld as the exclusive favorites of God. By the covenant ofAbraham, and the code of Moses, Jehovah had entered, as theythought, into a special contract with them to be their peculiarGod, Guardian, and Ruler. In contrast with the depraved habits andidolatrous rites of the heathen nations, the Israelites werestrictly to keep the moral law, and, at the same time, to pay apure worship to Jehovah through the scrupulous observance of theirceremonial law. The bond of race and family descent from Abraham, the practice of circumcision, and the ceremonies of the Mosaicritual, 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, setthem proudly above the alien Gentiles, and crown them with everyspiritual and temporal blessing. The noblest representatives ofthe people believed this with unparalleled thoroughness andintensity. They looked down on the uncircumcised nations as wickedidolaters, destined to be their servants until they should beadopted into the same covenant by becoming proselytes to theirfaith. Jehovah was literally their direct, though invisible, King, Law giver, and Judge, palpably rewarding their fidelity by overttemporal blessings, punishing their dereliction by awful temporalcalamities and sufferings. Every signal instance of his providential intervention in theiraffairs they called a Day of the Lord, a Coming of Jehovah, aJudgment from heaven. Thus the prophet Joel foretells thevengeance which God would take on Tyre and Sidon and Philistia, because they had assailed and scattered his people. "Behold theday of Jehovah cometh, the great and terrible day. And I will showwonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire andpillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and themoon into blood. Then whosoever calleth on the name of Jehovahshall be delivered: for upon Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall bedeliverance. I will contend with the Gentiles for my people, andwill bring back the captives. The multitudes, the multitudes in the valley of judgment: for theday of Jehovah is near in the valley of judgment. " In a similarstrain 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 oftheir carcasses shall ascend, and the mountains shall melt withtheir blood. And all the hosts of heaven shall melt away; and alltheir host shall fall down, as the blighted fruit from the figtree. For my sword shall rush drunk from heaven: behold, upon Edomshall it descend. For it is a day of vengeance from Jehovah. Herstreams shall be turned into pitch, and her dust into brimstone, and her whole land shall become burning pitch. It shall lie wasteforever, and none shall pass through it. The pelican and thehedgehog shall possess it; the heron and the raven shall dwell init. " Tremendous and appalling as this imagery is, it is obvious thatthe whole meaning of it is earthly and temporal, a local judgmentof Jehovah in vindication of his people against the heathen. Andkindred judgments are threatened against his own people when theylapse into wickedness and idolatry. "Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it andturning it upside down. " "Jehovah appeareth as a hostile witness, the Lord from his holy place. Behold, Jehovah cometh forth fromhis dwelling place, and advanceth on the high places of the earth. The mountains melt under him, and the valleys cleave asunder likewax before the fire. For the sin of the house of Israel is allthis. " Thus the earliest meaning of the phrase, Day of the Lord, or Dayof Judgment, according to Biblical usage, was the occurrence ofany severe calamity, either to the Jews, as a punishment for theirapostasy; or to the Gentiles, as a punishment for theirwickedness, or for their violent encroachment on the rights of thechosen people. These visitations of military disaster or politicalsubjection, though purely local and temporal, are depicted in themost 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, andwill rain fire and brimstone upon him and his hosts. Thus will Ishow myself in my greatness and glory before the eyes of manynations, and they shall know that I am Jehovah. " The highlyfigurative character of this imagery must be apparent to everycandid critic. For example, in the following passage from Zechariah, no one willsuppose for a moment that it is meant that Jehovah will appearvisibly in person and reign in Jerusalem, but only that hispromise shall be fulfilled, and his law shall prevail there in thetriumphant establishment of his chosen people: "Behold the day ofJehovah cometh, when I will gather all nations to battle againstJerusalem; and the city shall be taken. Then shall Jehovah goforth, and fight against those nations. And his feet shall standin that day upon the Mount of Olives. And Jehovah shall be kingover all the earth. And it shall be that whoso of all the familiesof 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 willroar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem;" "Egypt shallbe a waste and Edom a wilderness for their violence to the sons ofJudah; but Jerusalem shall be inhabited forever, and Jehovah shalldwell upon Zion, " the meaning is simply that "Jehovah will be arefuge to his people, a stronghold to the sons of Israel, and allpeople shall know that Jehovah is God. " It would imply thegrossest ignorance in any critic if he imagined that the Jews everbelieved that Jehovah was visibly to come down and reign over themin person. They did however, believe that an awful token or thepresence of Jehovah dwelt in the holy of holies of their temple. They also believed that every anointed ruler who governed them injustice and piety represented the authority of Jehovah. And as, inthe long times of their natural captivity and oppression, theirhopes sought refuge from the depressing present in bright visionsof a glorious future, when some inspired deliverer should justifytheir faith by carrying the national power and happiness to thehighest pitch, they naturally believed that the spirit and signetof the Lord would, in a special manner, rest on that Messianichero. By the assimilative action of faith and imagination, this idea ofa divinely accredited Messiah developed, and grew ever richer andmore complete. It began simply with the expectation of a holyleader and ruler who should subdue the heathen and establish thefavored people of Jehovah in peerless purity, power, and happinessin the land of Judea. Little by little the rewards of therighteous and the punishments of the wicked were extended beyondthose living on the earth, and took in the dead. The prophetEzekiel depicted the promised restoration of the Jews from theircaptivity at Babylon to Jerusalem under the poetic image of arevivification of a heap of dead bones. This metaphor slowlyassumed the form of a literal dogma, which grew from its beginningas an exceptional belief in the resurrection of a chosen few, stated in the book of Daniel and the second book of Maccabees, tothe belief in the universal resurrection of the dead, avowed byPaul as the common Pharisaic belief. The belief, too, in regard tothe scene of the Messianic triumph, the penalties to be inflictedon the enemies of Jehovah, and the kind and number of thoseenemies, underwent the same process of development and growth. Theworld was conceived as a sort of three story house connected withpassage ways; heaven above the firmament, the earth between, and apenal region below. The imagery of fire and brimstone associatedin the Hebrew mind with Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fearfulimagery of idolatory, filth, and flames in the detested valley ofHinnom where the refuse of Jerusalem was carried to be burned, hadbeen transferred by the popular imagination to the subterraneanplace of departed souls. The story in the book of Genesis aboutthe sons of God forming an alliance with the daughters of men, andbegetting a wicked brood of giants, had been wrought into thebelief in a race of fallen angels, foes of God and men, whosedwelling place was the upper air. Above these wicked spirits inhigh places, but below the heaven of Jehovah, was the paradisewhither Enoch and Elijah were supposed to have been translated, and whence they would come again in the last days. The Jewishapocryphal book of Enoch which was written probably about acentury and a half before the birth of Christ, and is explicitlyquoted in the Epistle of Jude contains a minute account of thefinal judgment, including in its scope this whole scenery and allthese agents, and closely anticipating both the doctrinal andverbal details of the same subject as recorded in the NewTestament itself. There is not, with one exception, a singleessential feature of the now current Christian belief, in regardto the day of judgment at the end of the world, which is notdistinctly brought out in the same form in the book of Enoch, written certainly more than a hundred years before a line of theGospels was composed. The exception referred to relates to theperson of the Messiah. In the book of Enoch he is indeed calledthe Son of man, but is wrapt in mysterious obscurity, undefinedand unnamed: in the Christian documents and faith he is, ofcourse, 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 perfectlynatural. At first the prophecy of the triumphant re establishmentof the Jews was conceived as the result of the favoring power ofJehovah, not in a personal manifestation, but providentiallydisplayed. Thus Joel represents Jehovah as saying, in his promiseto vindicate Jerusalem, "Let the heathen be wakened, and come upto the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge allthe heathen round about. " It cannot be denied that this was purelymetaphorical. But in all imagery of a kingdom, of war, ofjudgment, the idea of the king, the leader, the judge, wouldnaturally be the strongest point of imaginative action, the centerof crystalizing association around which congruous particularswould be drawn until the picture was complete. So it actuallyhappened. Perhaps the most striking example of this is seen in thegrowth of the notion of the great Adversary who precedes andfights against the Messiah. The book of Daniel, written just afterAntiochus Epiphanes had oppressed the Jews with such frightfulcruelties and profaned their temple with such abominabledesecrations, impersonated in him the whole head and front of theimpious hostility which the promised deliverer would have tosubdue 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 theMessiah, as the predicted crisis moved forward, was carried withit, and spread its portentous shadow over the expected close. " Thewriter of the book of Daniel looked for the immediate arising ofsome inspired hero and servant of Jehovah to overthrow this wickeddespot, this persecuting monster, and avenge the oppressed Jews ontheir Gentile tyrants. When subsequent events postponed thisexpected sequel, the opposed parties in it, the Antichrist and theChrist, were thrown forward together in ever dilating proportionsof gloom and brightness: the fierce countenanced king in Danielbecomes the Man of Sin in Paul and the Beast drunk with the bloodof saints in the Apocalypse. And in the Rabbinical books of theJews the belief in Antichrist, under the name of Armillus, isdeveloped into a mass of mythological details, afterwards adoptedquite in the gross by the Mohammedans. Terrible signs will precedethe appearance of the Messiah, such as a dew of blood, thedarkening of the sun, the destruction of the holy city, with theslaughter and dispersion of the Israelites, and the suffering ofawful woes. The Messiah shall gather his people and rebuild andoccupy Jerusalem. Armillus shall collect an army and besiege thatcity. But God shall say to Messiah, "Sit thou on my right hand, "and to the Israelites, "Stand still, and see what God will workfor you to day. " Then God will pour down sulphur and fire fromheaven, and consume Armillus and his hosts. Then the trumpet willsound, the tombs be opened, the ten tribes be led to Paradise tocelebrate the marriage supper of the Messiah, the aliens beconsigned to Gehenna, and the earth be renovated. As the doctrine of the functions of the Messiah, in this finishedform, is not stated in the Old Testament, but was familiar in theChristian Church, it is commonly supposed to be exclusively alater Christian development from the Jewish germ. It did, however, exist in the Jewish mind, before the birth of Christ, in themature form already set forth. It is found clearly laid down anddrawn out in Jewish apocryphal books dated earlier than theChristian era. It is likewise explicitly and minutely detailed inthe Talmud, where its subsequent adoption from the Christians musthave been impossible to the bigoted scorn and hate of the Jews forthe Christians; while the historic affiliation of Christianity onJudaism made the Christians avowedly adopt all the vital doctrinesof the older creed. The gradual growth of the Christian doctrineof the connection of the Messiah with the final judgment, out ofthe previous Jewish and Rabbinical notions, by the hardening ofmetaphors into dogmas and the universalizing of local peculiarities, is confessedly an obscure process, in many of its particularsextremely difficult to trace. But that it did thus grow up, no impartial scholar, who has mastered what is now knownon the subject, can doubt. A world of new knowledge and light hasbeen thrown on this whole field during the last thirty five yearsby Gfrorer, Baur, Ewald, Hoffmann, Hilgenfeld, Dilmann, Ceriani, Volkmar, and other students of kindred power and spirit. Researches and discussions in this department are still pushedwith the greatest zeal; and it is confidently believed that in afew years the views adopted in the present writing will beestablished beyond all cavil from any fair minded critic. Then allthe steps will have been clearly defined in the development ofthat doctrine of the great Day of the Lord, which, beginning witha poetic picture of a Jewish overthrow of the Gentiles, throughthe inspiring power of Jehovah, before the walls of Jerusalem, ended with a literal belief in the setting up, by the Messiah, ofa tribunal in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the assemblage there ofall the living and the dead for judgment, the installation of theimmortalized righteous in Paradise, and the submerging of thewicked under the Vale of Hinnom in a rainstorm of blazingbrimstone. And now what must we think in regard to the truth or falsehood ofthe outward, forensic, military, and ritual part of the doctrineof historic and literary development we have imperfectly followed. Is it not perfectly clear, that the growth of the doctrine inquestion has been but a natural action of the imagination on thematerials furnished it; adding congruous particulars, one afteranother, until the view was complete, and therefore could extendno further? And is it not equally obvious, that it can lay no sortof claim to logical validity? The superstitious and arbitrarycharacter of its intrinsic constituents, its irreconcilablenesswith science and philosophy, disprove, to all who dare honestlyface the facts, every plea set up for it as an inspired revelationof truth. It is a mixture of poetry and speculation, credibleenough in an early and uncritical age, but a hopeless stumblingblock to the educated reason of the present day. Every one whobrings a free intelligence to the subject will find it impossiblenot to recognize the same fanciful process of thought, the samepoetic ingredients, here as in the schemes of those heathenreligions 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, tobring them to judgment, destroy their homes and cities, and laywaste their lands with fire and sword, therefore God, the supremeKing, will do so by the whole world, is not to reason logically, but to poetize creatively. There can be no warrant fortransferring the political and military relations between men andearthly sovereigns to the moral and spiritual relations betweenthe human race and God, since the two sets of relations are whollydifferent. The relation of Creator and creature is immenselyhigher and wider than that of king and subject. He whose laws areeverywhere incessantly self executing needs not to select andgroup and reserve his friends or foes for any climatericcatastrophe. The common notion of a final judgment day thefanciful association of all the good together, on one side, to besaved; of all the bad together, on the other side, to be damned, applies to the divine government an imperfection belonging only tohuman governments. Surely every one must see, the moment thethought is stated, that this imaginative universalizing of theindignation of God, and carrying it to a climax, in thedestruction of the world, is a mythological procedure utterlyinapplicable to a Being who can know no anger, no caprice, nochange, a Being whose will is universal truth, whose throne isimmensity, whose robe is omnipresence. Original Christianity, internally regarded in its divine truth, was the pure moral law exemplified in the personal traits of JesusChrist, and universalized by his ascent out of the flesh into thatkingdom of heaven which knows not nationalities or ceremonies. Butoriginal Christianity, externally and historically regarded, inthe belief of its first disciples, was simply Judaism, with theaddition of the faith that the Messiah had actually come in theperson of Jesus Christ. The first disciples vividly cherished theprevalent Pharisaic doctrine that the Messiah would glorify hispeople, vanquish the heathen, raise and judge the dead, change theface of the earth, and inaugurate a holy reign of Israel in joyand splendor. This the Messiah was to do. But they believed Jesusto be the Messiah. Yet, before doing these things, he had been putto death. Therefore, they argued, he must come again, to finishhis uncompleted mission. Such was the derivation of the apostolicand ecclesiastical doctrine of the speedy second advent of Christto judge the dead and the living, and to wind up the presentscheme of things. The belief was inevitable under the circumstances. To have believed otherwise, they must have reconstructed the currentidea of the Messiah, and have seen in him no political monarchwith an outward realm, but purely a king of truth. For this they were not ready; though it seems as if, afterthe experience of eighteen hundred years, we ought by thistime to be prepared to see that such was really the intention ofProvidence. It is a question of primary interest, whether Jesus himself, inassuming the Messiahship, regarded it personally as an exclusivelyspiritual office, or as a literally including these royal andjudicial functions in a visible form. Jesus foretold, in the same imaginary used by the previousprophets, and familiar to the minds of his contemporaries, thespeedy approach of frightful calamities, wars, rumor of wars, famine and slaughter, Jerusalem compassed with armies anddestroyed. Then, he adds, the Son of man shall come in the cloudsof heaven, with all his holy angels, and take possession of thescene, apportioning the destinies of the righteous and the wicked. The question is, whether this pictured reappearance, in suchtranscendent pomp and power, was meant by him as a literalprophecy, to be physically fulfilled in his own person; or as amoral horoscope of the destined fortunes of his religion, afigurative representation of the establishment and reign of hisspiritual truth. The latter view seems to us to be the correct one. In the first place, this is what has actually taken place. In thegrowing recognition of his spirit and power, in the spread of histeachings and name, in the revolutionizing advancement of hiskingdom among men, Jesus has come again and again. Jerusalem wasdestroyed by the Romans, as he foretold, amidst unspeakabletribulations, and the disciples of the new faith installed indomination over the world. He said the time was then at hand, evenat the doors, that some of those standing by should not tastedeath until all these things came to pass. If his prophecy bore amoral sense, the sequel justified it; if it bore a physical sense, the sequel refuted and falsified it. For that generation passedaway, fifty generations since have passed away, and yet there hasbeen no literal second advent of Jesus in person to judge the deadand the living, and to destroy the world. The event proves that wemust either give the words of Jesus a metaphorical interpretationor hold that he was in error. But, secondly, such an error would be incompatible with soundnessof mind. For any man, even for him called by an apostle "the manChrist Jesus, " to believe that after his death he should reappear, swooping down from heaven, convoyed by squadrons of angels, tocollect all men from their graves, and replace the old creationwith a new one, would imply a profound disturbance of reason, amonomaniacal fanaticism if not an actual insanity. It is such apure piece of theatrics that no one deeply in unison with thatspirit of truth which expresses the mind of God through the orderof nature and providence could possibly believe it. Such a naturewas preeminently that of Jesus. All his most characteristicutterances, such as: "blessed are the pure in heart, for theyshall see God;" "who loves much shall be forgiven much;" revealunsurpassed saneness and truth of perception. It is by much themost probable supposition, that Jesus employed in the deepest andpurest moral sense alone those Messianic images and catastrophicprophecies 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, inhis own physical reappearance and reign, is not only incompatiblewith his supreme soundness of mind, it is also irreconcilable withhis other explicit teachings. "My kingdom is not of this world. ""Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. " He warns hisdisciples against the many false Christs who will appear, and saysthat "the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation. " "Saynot, lo here! or lo there! for the kingdom of heaven is withinyou. " "I am the truth, the way, and the life. " "He that rejectethme, I judge him not; the word that I have spoken, that shall judgehim. " "Whoever doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same ismy brother. " In view of these and kindred utterances of theprofoundest insight, irreconcilable with any gross mythologicalbeliefs, we must hold to the purely spiritual character of thedoctrine of Jesus concerning his personal offices, and think thatall the speeches, if any such there be, which cannot be fairlyexplained in accordance with this view, have been refracted intheir transmission through incompetent reporters, or even perhapsfictitiously ascribed to him from the faith of a later age. Thereis a grateful satisfaction in thus discharging, as we feel we arefairly entitled to do, from the authority of Jesus a burden toogreat even for his peerless name any longer to support. For, saywhat its advocates may, this gigantic melo drama of the secondadvent, this world wide mixture and display of martial andforensic elements before an audience of all mankind and amidst aconvulsed and closing universe, is inherently incredible by anymind not grossly ignorant and undisciplined or drilled to the mostslavish servility of traditional thought. Every one reallyeducated in science and philosophy, and familiar with thephysiological conditions and literary history of mythology in theother nations of the world, will plainly perceive the intrinsicfancifulness and falsity of the belief, at the same time that heeasily accounts for its rise and prevalence. The same picture of the siege of Jerusalem by a league ofidolatrous armies, and of the mighty coming of the Messiah, foundin the New Testament, is drawn in the third book of the SibyllineOracles, which was composed by a Jew two hundred years before oneword of Matthew or Luke was written. Jesus took up this currentand fitting imagery wherein to express the conflict of hisreligion with the world, and to predict its ultimate triumph. Heidentifies himself with the truths he has brought, with theregenerating energies he has inaugurated to combat and overcomethe wickedness and despotism of the nations of men. Every adventof his universal principles to a wider conflict or a higher seatof authority, is a true coming of the Son of Man. The vices andcrimes of men, the selfishness and tyranny of governments, accumulate impediments in the way of the free working of the willof God in human society. Therefore from period to periodconvulsive crises occur, shocks of progressive truth and libertyagainst the obstacles gathered in their way. Thus, not only thedestruction of Jerusalem, but the destruction of Rome, the FrenchRevolution, and all the terrible social crises in the advancingaffairs of the world, write on the earth and the sky, in hugecharacters of blood, smoke and fire, the true meaning of therepeated coming of Christ. This is the only kind of judicialsecond advent he will ever make, and this will occur over and overin calamitous but helpful revolutions, until all removable evilsare done away, all the laws of men made just and all the hearts ofmen pure. Then the spirit once manifested by Jesus in his lonelymission will be a universal presence on earth, and the genuinemillennium prevail without end. It is necessary now, as preliminary to a clear exposition of thetrue Christian doctrine of judgment, to explain the cause andprocess of the dark perversion which the teachings of Christhimself have so unfortunately undergone in the Church. For thispurpose we must again, for a moment, refer to the originalconnection of Christianity with Judaism. Judaism was composed of two parts: one an accidental form; theother, essential truth. The first was the ceremonial peculiaritiesof the Jewish race and history; the second was the absolute andeternal principles of morality and religion. These two parts theritual law and moral law were closely joined in all the bestrepresentatives of the nation at all the best periods of itshistory. Yet there was a constant tendency to separate these. Oneparty exalted the ritual element, another party the spiritualelement; 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 personaland national righteousness, purity, and devotion, as the oneessential thing. But the natural tendency of the common multitude, and of every professional class, to an external routine ofmechanised forms, manifested itself more and more in a party whichmade an overt covenant and ritualistic conformity the allimportant thing. This party reached its head in the sect of thePharisees, who, at the time of Jesus, possessed the offices, andrepresented the dominant spirit and authority of the Jewishnation. The character of this sect of bigoted formalists, asindignantly described and denounced by Jesus, is too well known toneed illustration. They subordinated and trivialized the weightiermatters of justice, mercy, humility, and peace, but enthroned andglorified the regime of mint, anise, and cummin. What was the Jewish idea of salvation, or citizenship in thekingdom of God? What was the condition of acceptance in thePharisaic church? It was heirship in the Jewish race, either bydescent or adoption, with ceremonial blamelessness in belief andact. Do you belong to the chosen family of Abraham, and are youundefiled in relation to all the requirements of our code? Thenyou are one of the elect. Are you a Gentile, an idolatrous memberof the uncircumcision, or a scorner of the Levitic and Rabbinicalcustoms? Then you are unfit to enter beyond the outer precincts ofthe 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 unprecedentedsensibility to divine truth in its utmost purity and freedom, expanded beyond all these shallow material accidents andbonds; and he propounded a perfectly moral and spiritual test ofacceptance before God; namely, the possession of an intrinsicallygood character. He made nothing of the distinction between Jew andGentile, declaring, "My father is able of these stones to raise upchildren unto Abraham. " He affirmed the condition of admittanceinto 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, hisheart yearned towards him in benediction. And, finally, in hissublime picture of the last judgment, he, in the most explicit andunmistakable manner, makes the one essential condition ofrejection to be inhumanity of life, cruel selfishness ofcharacter; the one essential condition of acceptance, the spiritof love, the practical doing of good. He utters not a solitarysyllable about immaculateness of ceremonial propriety or soundnessof dogmatic belief. He only says, Inasmuch as ye have or have notvisited the sick and the imprisoned, fed the hungry, and clothedthe naked, ye shall be justified or condemned at the divinetribunal. This test of personal goodness or wickedness, benevolentor malignant conduct, proclaimed by Jesus, is the true standard, free from everything local and temporary, fitted for applicationto all nations and all ages. But no sooner had Christianity obtained a foothold on earth, multiplied its converts, and gained some outward sway, than itsJudaizing disciples and promulgators, fastening on that which waseasiest to comprehend and practise, that which was most impressiveto the imagination, that which seemed most sharply to distinguishthem from the unbelieving and unconforming world around, thrustfar into the background this universal and eternal test ofjudgment set up by Jesus himself, and in place of it installed anexclusive test fashioned after a more developed and aggravatedpattern of the very narrowest and worst elements in thePhariasaism which he expressly came to supersede. The Pharisaiccondition of salvation was inheritance, by blood or adoption, inthe Jewish race and Abrahamic covenant, together with exactitudeof ceremonial observance. Everybody else was an unclean alien, anuncircumcised dog, an uncovenanted leper. In place of this test, the orthodox ecclesiastical party made their test dogmatic beliefin the supernatural Messiahship of Jesus Christ, formal professionof allegiance to the official person of Jesus Christ. It is summedup in the formula, "Whoso believeth that Jesus is the Christ, isof 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 morefully developed in its historic sequence, but substantially inperfect unison with the free teachings and spirit of Jesushimself. With Paul the test of Christian salvation was thepossession of the mind of Christ. "If any man have not the spiritof Christ, he is none of his;" "but as many as are led by thespirit of God are sons of God. " "Neither circumcision availethanything, nor uncircumcision; but a new creature, " begotten in theimage of Christ, availeth everything before God. "God rewardethevery man, the Jew and the Gentile, according to his works. " WithPaul, descent from Abraham was nothing, observance of the legalcode was nothing: a just and pure character, full of selfsacrificing love, evoked by faith in Christ, was the all in all. Jesus Christ was the head of a new race, the second Adam; and alldisciples, who, through moral faith in him, were regenerated intohis likeness and unto newness of living, were thereby adopted assons of God and joint heirs with him. The Pauline formula ofsalvation, freely open to all the world, was, spiritualassimilation and reproduction of Christ in the disciple. But the Judaizing party bore a heavy preponderance in the earlyChurch, and has succeeded unto this day in imposing onecclesiastical Christendom its own test: namely, a sound dogmatic, belief in the supreme personal rank and office of Christ, as theonly means of admission to the kingdom of heaven. The onepeculiarity which most sharply and broadly contrasted the earlyChristians with the rest of the world was unquestionably theirbelief in the miraculous mission of Jesus, a belief growingdeeper, higher, intenser, until it actually identified him withthe omnipotent God. There was an inevitable tendency, it was aperfectly natural and necessary process, for them to make thispoint of contrast the central condition on which depended thepossession of all the special privileges supposed to be promisedto its disciples by the new religion. The result is well expressedby Polycarp in these words: "Whosoever confesses not that Christis come in the flesh, is an Antichrist; and whosoever acknowledgesnot the martyrdom of the cross, is of the Devil; and whosoeversays that there is no resurrection nor judgment, is the first bornof Satan. " This extract strikes the key note of the OrthodoxChurch all through Christendom from the second century to thepresent hour. In place of the true condition of salvationannounced by Jesus, personal and practical goodness, itinaugurates the false ecclesiastic standard, soundness of dogmaticbelief in relation to Jesus himself! Those who hold this are theelect, and shall stand in heaven with white robes and palms and anew song, while all the rest of the world apostate and detestedenemies of God and his saints shall be trampled down in mercilessslaughter, and flung into the pit whence the smoking signal oftheir torment shall ascend for ever and ever. It is a transformationof the bigoted scorn and hate of the covenanted Jew for hisGentile foes into the intensified horror of the Orthodoxbeliever for the reprobate infidel. And it finally culminated inthe following frightful picture which still lowers and blazes inthe imagination of ecclesiastical Christendom as a veritablerevelation of what is to take place at the end of the world: While the stars are falling, the firmament dissolving, the deadswarming from their graves, and the nations assembling, Christwill come in the clouds of heaven with a host of angels and sit injudgment on collected mankind. All who submissively believed inhis 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 theunbeliever: his unbelief dooms him. No matter for the naturaldepravity and iniquity of the believer: his faith in the atoningsacrifice saves him. The Judge will say to the orthodox, on hisright, "You may have been impure and cruel, lied, cheated, hatedyour neighbor, rolled in vice and crime, but you have believed inme, in my divinity: therefore, come, ye blessed, inherit mykingdom. " To the heretical, on his left, he will say, "You mayhave been pure and kind, sought the truth, self sacrificinglyserved 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 afit verdict to be pronounced by the avenging Warrior depicted inthe Apocalypse, from whose mouth issues a two edged sword, to cuthis enemies asunder; who sits on a white charger, in a vesturedipped in blood, with a bow and a crown, and goes forth conqueringand to conquer; whose eyes are flames of fire; who treads hisrejecters in the wine press of his wrath until their blood reachesto the horse bridles. It was the natural reflection of an agefilled with the most murderous hatreds and persecutions, based onpolitical and dogmatic distinctions. But how contradictory it isto the teachings of Jesus himself! How utterly irreconcilable itis with the image and spirit of that meek and lowly Son of Man whosaid that he "came not to destroy men's lives but to save them;"who declared, "of mine own self I can do nothing;" who modestlydeprecated all personal homage, asking, "Why callest thou megood?" who sat with the publican, and forgave the harlot, anddenounced bigotry in many an immortal breathing of charity; andwho, even in his final agony, pardoned and prayed for hismurderers! What reason is there for supposing that he who was soinfinitely gentle, unselfish, forgiving, when on earth, willundergo such a fiendish metamorphosis in his exaltation andreturn? It is the most monstrous, the most atrocious travesty ofthe truth that ever was perpetrated by the superstitious ignoranceand audacity of the human mind. It is a direct transference intothe Godhead of the most egotistical and hateful feelings of a badman. No good man who had been ever so grossly misconceived, vilified, and wronged, if he saw his enemies prostrate insubmissive terror at his feet, perfectly powerless before hisauthority, could bear to trample on them and wreak vengeance onthem. He would say, "Unhappy ones, fear not; you have misunderstoodme; I will not injure you; if there be any favor which I canbestow on you, freely take it. " And is it not an incredibleblasphemy to deny to the deified Christ a magnanimity equal tothat which any good man would exhibit? It is with pain and regret that the writer has penned theforegoing sentences, which, he supposes, some persons will readwith the feeling that they are inexcusable misrepresentations, others, with a shocked and resentful horror, relieving itself inthe cry, Infidelity! Blasphemy! The reply of the writer is simplythat, while reluctant to wound the sensibility of any, he feelsbound in conscience to make this exposition, because he believesit to be a true statement; and loyalty to truth is the first dutyof every man. Truth is the will of God, obedience to which aloneis 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 everylineament of it is logically implied in the formula. "There is nosalvation for the man who unbelievingly rejects, no damnation forthe man who believingly accepts, the official Christ and hisblood. " And what teacher will have the presumption to deny thatjust this has been, and still is, the central dogma in the faithof ecclesiastical Christendom? The legitimate result of this view, unflinchingly carried out, and applied to the precise point we nowhave in hand, is seen in that horrible portrayal of the LastJudgment wherewith Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling of theSistine Chapel, in Rome. The great anatomical artist consistentlydepicts Christ as an almighty athlete, towering with vindictivewrath, flinging thunderbolts on the writhing and helplesswilderness of his victims. The popular conception of Christ in thejudgment has been borrowed from the type of a king, who, hurlingoff the incognito in which he has been outraged, breaks out in hisproper insignia, to sentence and trample his scorners. The trueconception is to be fashioned after the type given in his ownexample during his life. So far as Christ is the representative ofGod, there must be no vanity or egotism in him. Every such qualityascribed to the Godhead is anthropomorphizing sophistry. Howevermuch more God may be, he is the General Mind of the Universe. Heincludes, while he transcends, all other beings. Now, the GeneralMind must represent the interests of all, the disinterested goodof the whole, and not any particular and selfish exactions, orresentful caprices, fashioned on the pattern shown among humanegotists by a kingly despot. The Church, in developing Christianity out of Judaism through theperson and life of Jesus, has given prominence and emphasis to thewrong elements, seeking to universalize and perpetuate, in atransformed guise, the local spirit and historic errors of thatPharisaic sect against which he had himself launched all hisinvective. That temper of bigotry and ceremonial technicalitywhich hates all outside of its own pale as reprobate, and whichultimated itself in the virtual Pharisaic formula, "Keep the handsand platter washed, and it is no matter how full of uncleannessyou are within, " at a later period embodied itself through theleaders of ecclesiastical Orthodoxy in the central dogma, "Nothingbut faith in Christ can avail man anything before God. " Instead ofthis the true doctrine is, Nothing but obedience, surrender, andtrust, personal penitence and aspiration, can avail man anythingbefore God. The Christians, as the Jews did before them, have made a wrongselection of the doctrine to be, on the one hand, particularizedand left behind; on the other hand, carried forward anduniversalized. This immense error demands correction. Let usnotice a few specimens in exemplication of it. Jehovah is not theonly true God in distinction from odious idols; but Brahma, AhuraMazda, Osiris, Zeus, Jupiter, and the rest, are names given bydifferent nations to the Infinite Spirit whom each nation worshipsaccording to its own light. The Jews and the Christians are notthe only chosen people of God; but all nations are his people, chosen in the degree of their harmony with his will. Theprovidence of God is not an exceptional interference from without, exclusively for the Jews and Christians; but it is for all, asteady order of laws within, as much to be seen in the shining ofthe sun, or the regular harvest, as in any shocks of politicalcalamity and glory. Not the Messiah alone reveals God; but, in hisdegree, every ruler, prophet, priest, every man who stands forwisdom, justice, purity, and devotion, represents him. It is notdoctrinal belief in the Messiah, but vital adoption of his spiritand character, of the principles of real goodness, thatconstitutes the salvation of the disciple. We are to look not forthe resurrection of the flesh from the grave, but for theresurrection of the soul from all forms of sin, ignorance, andmisery. It is the universal prevalence of truth and virtue, knowledge, love, and peace, in the hearts of men, not the physicalreign of the returning Messiah, which will make a millennium onearth. The kingdom of God which Judaism localized exclusively inPalestine, and the early church exclusively in heaven or on themillennial earth, should be recognized in every place, whetherabove the sky or on the globe, where duty is done, and pureaffection, trust, and joy experienced; for God is not excludedfrom all other spaces by any enthronization in one. We ought notto cling, as to permanent fixtures of revealed truth, to the rigidoutlines of that scheme of faith which was struck out when thethree story house of the Hebrew cosmogony showed the limits ofwhat men knew, before exact science was born, or criticismconceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia andthe Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculativetheological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstructand read just them, from time to time, in accordance with thedemands of the growing body of human knowledge. Reflecting, in the light of these general ideas of truth, on thewhole subject of the current doctrine of the end of the world andthe day of judgment, we shall see that that doctrine presents novalid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out ofthe historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianityarose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by theunconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figurescame, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginativecollection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literaltruths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historicaland critical information for entering into the book from the pointof view occupied by its author, it is just as evident that itsimagery was meant to describe the immediate conflict of HebrewChristianity with pagan Rome, and not the literal blotting out ofthe universe, as it is unquestionable that the book of Danieldepicts, not the impending destruction of the world, but therelations of the chosen nation with the hostile empires ofPersia, Media, Babylon, and Macedonia, from which they hadsuffered so much, and which they then hoped speedily to putbeneath their feet. The slain Lamb, standing amidst the throne ofGod, with seven eyes and seven horns; Death, on a pale horse, withHell following him; the woman, clothed with the sun, and the moonunder her feet; the great red dragon, whose tail casts to theearth 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 ofthe earth into bitterness; the seven thunders, seven seals, sevenvials, seven spirits before the throne, seven candlesticks, sevenangels, 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 anutterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why, then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the mostviolent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements offact? If the rest is symbolism, so are the pictures of theavenging armies of angels, the reeking gulf of sulphur, and thegolden streets of the city. The entire scheme of thought, as it still stands in the mind ofthe Orthodox believer, is to be rejected as spurious, because itrests on a process of imaginative accumulation and transferencewhich is absolutely illegitimate; namely, the association anduniversalizing of political and military images, which are thenhardened from emblems into facts, and cast over upon the mutualrelations of God and mankind. We ought to break open themetaphors, extract their significance, and throw the shells aside. But ignorant bibliolatary and ecclesiasticism insist onworshipping the shells, with no insight of their contents. There is one all important fact which should convince of theirerror those who hold the current view of a general judgment at theend of the world as having been revealed from God through Christ. We refer to the fact that the system of ideas in which a finalresurrection and judgment of the dead are logical parts, existedin the Zoroastrian theology five or six centuries before the birthof Christ. It was adopted thence by the Jews, and afterwardsadopted from the Jews by the Christians. If, therefore, thisdoctrine be a revelation from God, it was revealed by him to thePersians in a dark and credulous antiquity. In that case it isZoroaster and not Christ to whom we are indebted for the centraldogmas of our religion! No, these things are imagery, not essence, the human element of imaginative error with which the divineelement of truth has been overlaid, and from whose darkening andcorrupt company this is to be extricated. There are, in the New Testament, in addition to the relevantmetaphors which we have already examined, several others of greatimpressiveness and importance. We must now explain these, separatethe truths and errors popularly associated with them, and leavethe subject with an exposition of the real method of the divinegovernment and the true idea of the day of judgment, in contrastwith the prevalent ecclesiastical perversions of them. The part played in theological speculation and popular religiousbelief by imagery borrowed from the scenery and methods ofjudicial tribunals, the procedures and enforcement of penal law, has not been less prominent and profound than the influenceexerted by natural, political, and military metaphors. The power, the pomp, the elaborate spectacle, the mysterious formalities, thefrightful penalties, the intense personal hopes and fears, associated with the trial of culprits in courts or before the headof a nation, must always have sunk so deeply into the minds of menas to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typicalstamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and thefuture world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctlyshown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before thesarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake tobe deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of thedeparted, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, togetherwith forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of aparticular sin, assembled on the shore and sat in judgment. Thedeceased was put on his trial before them: and, if justified, awarded an honorable burial; if condemned, disgraced by thewithholding of the funeral rites. Now the papyrus rolls found withthe mummies give a description of the judgment of the dead, apicture 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 asymbol of truth in one scale, the symbol of a human heart in theother. The accuser is heard, and the deceased defends himselfbefore forty two divine judges who preside over the forty two sinsfrom which he must be cleared. The gods Horus and Anubis attend tothe 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 changesand additions, from the connected scenery and experience known onthe earth. Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scenein human society so impressive as the periodical sitting injudgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of thosehalf deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, theEmperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in thegate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversibleadministration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing inpurple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest tohis person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next inorder; his body guards and various classes of servants, indistinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast massesof troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must havecomposed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared theaccusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captivestaken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who hadcomplaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. Themonarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executionerscarried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, somesent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When thetribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended, there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darknessthere, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place. Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in somedegree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary inhuman governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, thejudge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of thesocial order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties, wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminalsgathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, maygo on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up ofarrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural itwould be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, andvividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relationbetween mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of theCreator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a finalday to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery, summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate theirdoom according to his sovereign pleasure? The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifthchapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture ofan Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come inhis glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he situpon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered allnations: and he shall separate them one from another, as ashepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set thesheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. " If Jesushimself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively toindicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling andjudging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles ofmorality, the true universal principles of religion, which he hadtaught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved sooverpoweringly 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 ofthe human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthlyking, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacityof popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal andundivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, theapostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day inthe which he would judge the world in righteousness by that manwhom he hath ordained. " Is not this notion of the judgment beingdelegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of adeputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he isgenerally represented there by an inferior officer. But thisarrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicatehis prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. Theessential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be nosubstitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, normultiplied. 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, whojudged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectorsfor the souls from America and Australia, because those divisionsof the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixtureof knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a placewhere they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and finda summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals andwalruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold;the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and everyman unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correctthe tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future informs and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiarexperiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding tothe literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as inanother? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom, of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and ahuge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters ofheaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth, while the Judge and his officers take their places in theUniversal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology, should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinksinto gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture ofthe Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely, the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentaryjudicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over uponour relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one, because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternaltruths are wholly different from their relations with each otherin the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formalor forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of aleague or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fitsand starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays toconvulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity. God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewardsand punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual, results of the regular action of the laws of our being as relatedto all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from thosejudicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken andhitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable, the circumstances are so completely different. The trueillustration of the divine government must be adopted fromphysiology and psychology, where the perfect working of theCreator is exemplified, not from the forum and the court, wherethe imperfect artifices of men are exhibited. God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions oftheir own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kickof the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. Thethief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, thephilosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just andintrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in thefitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discordswith the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus isthe daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded withthrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream ofdevouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed ofuncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions ofuniversal good; the vices represent private opposition to thoseconditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting andcooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonisticand repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfectretribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel itsworking, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of thesecrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his ownexperience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far fromrefuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truthof that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, theyhave their reward. " Those who consider themselves saints indulgein an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinnershave their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next. "The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical withthe first law of motion in the material sphere; action andreaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law beinginstantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be nooccasion 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 tohis creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies allfinite receptacles in accordance with their special forms oforganization and character, and who causes exact retributions ofgood and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes ofthought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices, fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic viewworthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. Theincomparably inferior view the external, intermittent, constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on thetraditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance, originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as atruth. For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to bedrawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered, not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and thetransmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of theapproaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terriblecalamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate andrebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewisharmies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destinedevolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in thefuture. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact, and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on theimage of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the incomeof his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringerof fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes andstores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares, because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can beriches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives onrevenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, theproperty of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of thebad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging tothemselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, inthe moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily cropsof experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at theright hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into aflaming furnace. Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as thevehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctoryminds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. Heis represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "Whenthe Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shallsit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. "Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moralmeaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializingdegradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appearsclearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wifeof Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his righthand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said, "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptismthat I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on myleft, is not mine to give. " The imagery meant that the missionaryassistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth andlove he came to establish, would be represented in common withhimself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world. When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, asindicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and thathis favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, andglory, he solemnly repudiated it. There is yet another and a wholly different style of imageryemployed by Jesus to convey his instructions as to the judgmentwhich is to separate the justified from the condemned. Theconsideration of this species of imagery would afford anindependent proof, of a cogent character, that they strangelymisapprehend the mind of Jesus who interpret the moral meaning ofhis parable in an outward and dramatic sense. The metaphors towhich we now refer are of a domestic and convivial nature, basedon some of the most impressive social customs of the Orientalnations. It was the habit of kings, governors, and other rich andpowerful men, to give, on certain occasions, great banquets, towhich the guests were invited by special favor. These feasts werecelebrated with the utmost pomp and splendor, by night, inbrilliantly illuminated apartments. The contrast of the blazinglights, the richly costumed guests, the music and talk, the honorand luxury within, set against the darkness, the silence, theenvious poverty and misery without, must have deeply struck allwho saw it, and would naturally secure rhetorical reflections inspeech and literature. The Jews illustrated their idea of theKingdom of God by the symbol of a table at which Abraham and Isaacand Jacob were banqueting, and would be joined by all theirfaithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing howa king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast andsent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagerystill more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Isit not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended itas an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he firstannounced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, havingrejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to theGentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joyand honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused toaccept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias thatthe parable has been perverted into a description of the LastJudgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to orexclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter ofpersonal experience in the heart of the disciple and in thesociety of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, withoutwhich no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, andloving 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 rightthere, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, hisinability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom, constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind ofJesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually inthe present, and not something to be shown collectively andmaterially at the end of the world, appears from the great numberof different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had hemeant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the lastday, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had adistinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one andthe same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach thatall who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct toassimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby mademembers of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsicunfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that hisfertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey thisone truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in whichthe images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agreemust be the essential thought. Now the parables differ in theforms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms aremetaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fateto the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is thevital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist inanything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere issomething moral. The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief thatwe are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truthreflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, andelusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and ofsome persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind ofman is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of theCreator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympatheticconnection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing theverdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need toproject the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of atrial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into anoverwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt, was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully forgood in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be asmuch better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real andmore pervasive. Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power ofjustice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, thegenuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career ofthat being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment;because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the endat which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If wecould survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view, and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedlywe should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of eachephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of itssun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as thefinal day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then thesum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from allfurther alteration by him, passing into history as a collectivecause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls inspace, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal willtell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will nottremble at the thought of a judgment so unavoidable and sotremendous as this! The votaries of superstition are mistaken insupposing that the removal of their false beliefs will destroy orweaken the sanctions of duty among men. The removal of imaginarysanctions will but cause the true ones to appear more clearly andto work more effectively. The judgment of God then, we conclude, is no vengeful wreaking ofarbitrary royal volitions; but it is the return of the laws ofbeing on all deeds, actual or ideal. This is, in itself, perpetualand infallible: but it sometimes forces itself on our recognitionin sudden shocks or crises caused by the gathering obstacles andopposition made to it by our ignorance, vice, and crime. Everyother doctrine of the Divine judgment is either an error or afigurative statement of this one. In the latter case, the physicalcover should be dissolved and thrown away, the moral nucleus laidbare and appropriated. But the popular mind of Christendom hasunfortunately pursued the contrary course, first exaggerating andconsolidating the metaphors, then putting their forms literally inthe place of their meaning. The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in theApocalypse, the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon asblood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the greatwhite throne, from before the face of whose occupant thefrightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of thedead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and thejudging of the dead out of the things written therein, this scenicarray has, by its terrible vividness and power of fancifulplausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken sucha tenacious hold on the feelings of the Christian world, securedfor itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself withsuch a mass of associations, that it has actually come to beregarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act assuch. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think onthe subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books areprovided in heaven with the names of men in them and recordingangels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by singleentry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white daisraised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. Onwhat principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayalrendered as emblem, the rest accepted as absolute verity? If theblood red warrior on his white horse followed by the shiningcavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimericalangels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror struckfugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incrediblewalls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yieldingtwelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burningsulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of thedead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The readersmiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in Leavenamidst boiling pots of walrus meat, while in hell the fish linesof the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed byfalling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give forthe reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his presentexperience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process ofthought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally creditthe following verses: "There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and ingreat books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down Thegood ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God. The other keeps his dreadful day book open Till sunset, that wemay repent, which doing, The record of the action fades away, Andleaves a line of white across the page. " No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in theNew Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in histreasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled init. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents? When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament werewritten, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment wasalmost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. Atany instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, thetroops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, andthe sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left. Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict inthe flame of the west, " the believers felt that the supreme Diesiroe was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation aftergeneration died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approachseemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its earlyprominence into the background. But as it retreated, and becamemore obscure and vague in its date and other details, it grew evermore sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certaintyand preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nighits close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "thedragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, afterbeing bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years, " should"be loosed a little season, " filled Christendom with the mostintense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and historyof that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of thegeneral expectation of the impending judgment and destruction ofthe world have rolled down to the present time. The portentousseason passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immenseincubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Ourexpectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and stillcontinued to expect him. The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was broodedover, the more awful the suppositious picture became. TheMohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts:the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglectthe babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; theblast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything butheaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast ofresurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels, in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space ofthousands of years. But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed ashape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation, when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, withAntichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of theavenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted oneach other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated thefears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day. Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable ormore dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain andPortugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of hereticscondemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling ofbells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carryingtheir horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross;the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and therepulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders whohad escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in blackcoffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and, finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. Theprocession tediously winds to the great square in front of thecathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix withextinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his courtand the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by theirpresence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish inlong drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a morevivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than thefact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of anAuto da Fe magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth, Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiarsstanding by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil hisbidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, thecrucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe;the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helplessbefore him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at theinexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutlythank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it iscruel? Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, themillennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if theliterature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books, sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pileas big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about aquarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the timefor the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic inthe United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germanyhave also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebratedLondon preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End, " and"The Great Tribulation, " have been circulated in tens of thousandsof copies, is now the most prominent representative of thiscatastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculousby his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has becomemore an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematicalcalculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalypticpoetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerablesect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the mostilliterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to thefanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead aneleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiouslywait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake, pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoricshower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startlesthem as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some ofthem are said to keep their white robes in their closets all readyfor ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such alurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hopethat its end is at hand, "Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathwayfor the coming Judge!" But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception. In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those whostill cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment hasbeen put forward as far as the day of creation has been putbackward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before thetheatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; moreand more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic jurisdictionin the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. Thetime is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit ofnational separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred, whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, allothers with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies, " will give wayto that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which seesbrethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equalsalvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the selfrighteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and sorelentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over theidea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chiefcaptains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, sayingto the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from theface of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of theLamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall beable to stand?" then the temper of this faith will be seen to beas wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as aremnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the wholemind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the discipleswished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents, rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, "Yeknow not what spirit ye are of. " Many a bigoted and complacentdogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to day, fails to read hisown heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishlyfancying himself better and safer, on account of his blindconservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance ofscience. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses ofthe mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The wholeecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No suchgigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza, will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, asfreshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his willthrough his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness andjustice; 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 thebreast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it istime ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstitionon 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 benignantmysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward toour fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend youraid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benignbattle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, everyfree mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer. Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into thelight. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinionswhere all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itselfshall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made tooutgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning thesun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night beforehim. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now wefling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope toescape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under theinspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees inthe very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressiveunfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrectionand assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorancefrom all souls brought into full community, and the illuminationbefore their opened faculties of the whole contents of history. For we believe that all history is by its own enactmentindestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that everyconsciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfectjustification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of theuniverse is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetualsession, 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 tobe the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on thelanguage of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of thechurch, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failingfaith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one triesto show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prisonhouse of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors ofphysical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that Godhimself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are boundto accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For thereasons which we will immediately proceed to give, thisrepresentation must be rejected as a mistake. The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is amythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque andfrightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separatedfrom them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, thesubstance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomlesspit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God willconfine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after theirbodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality andreligion, something belonging to the two departments ofdescriptive geography and police history. The existence ornonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for thewicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. Inearlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerouscaves, lakes, volcanos, as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus, Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere were believed to be literallyentrances to hell. So famous and eminent a man as Saint Gregorythe Great, when the great Sicilian volcano was seen to beincreasingly agitated, taught that it was owing to the press oflost souls, rendering it necessary to enlarge the approach totheir prison. With the increase of knowledge, the localization ofhell was subsequently by many authors, made a part of cosmography, and shifted about among the comets, the moon and the sun, althoughmost people still think that it is the interior of the earth. But, the best theologians of all denominations, the most authoritativethinkers of all schools, now hold that the supernaturalrevelations of God are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and donot include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry andmathematics. God is not a local king, ruling his subjects by means of politicalmachinery and external interferences; he is the omnipresentCreator, spiritually sustaining and governing his creatures fromwithin by means of the laws which determine their experience, theaction and reaction between their faculties and their surroundingconditions. Accordingly, the sphere of direct revelations from thespirit of God to the spirit of man is limited to the implicationsin the divine logic of the soul and its life, that is, to moraland religious truths. The facts of history and cosmology are leftfor the processes of natural discovery. Whether there be or be nota localized hell of material tortures lies not within the domainof revelation, but is a problem of physical science. And sciencedemonstrates, from the weight of the globe, that it is solid; andnot, according to the current belief, a hollow shell containing asea of flame packed with the floating hosts of the lost. Furthermore, the only mode in which the truth of such a doctrinecould be made known is wholly aside from the method ofsupernatural revelation. God does not utter his thoughts to hischosen 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 naturalmistake of a crude age to suppose that God does the same, breathing verbal formularies into the of minds of his selectedservants. But this is not the case. Revelation is not to receivean announcement; it is to perceive a truth. Since God is infinite, we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finerand fuller harmony with the works and laws of God, thus fulfillingthe human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divineconditions, 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 therevelation to them. For this new enlightenment, sanctification, orrise of life, is what alone constitutes a true revelation. Now ifthere be a local and physical hell, it is not a moral truth whichthe inspired soul can see, but a scientific fact which can beperceived only by the senses or deduced by the logical intellect. If a man could travel to every nook of the creation he mightdiscover whether there were such a hell or not. But you cannotdiscover a spiritual truth by any amount of outward travel. When asoul is so delivered from egotism, or the jar of self will againstuniversal law, and brought into such high harmony with the spiritof the whole, as to perceive this divine law of life, "He whodwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him, " then he isinspired to see a religious truth. He has obtained a divinerevelation. But we cannot conceive of any degree of exaltationinto unison with God which would enable a man to see the fact thatthe centre of the earth or the surface of the sun or any otherspot, is a place of fire set apart as the penal abode of thedamned, and that it is crowded with burning sulphur andunimaginable forms of wickedness and agony. Such a doctrine is outof the province, and its conveyance irreconcilable with the methodof revelation, which consists not in an exterior communication ofscientific facts to messengers selected to receive them, but in aninterior unveiling of religious truths to souls prepared to seethem. In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell, a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to beregarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because itis plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of themythology of the world, a natural product of the poeticimagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages andlands men have recognized the difference between the good and thebad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtuerepresented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that guiltand vice represented the insurrection of private or lower andtransient 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 nationssociety has teemed with devices for the distribution of thesereturns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict. There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable inart which has not been used as a means for the punishment ofcriminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions ofdespots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned beforejudicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to everyspecies of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment, fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen, burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wildbeasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while hebanquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants andfavorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered indungeons, 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 populardoctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravatethe known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflictedon criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive andpitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as arepresentation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes. Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes andacts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished thetypes of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of thehereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurlsthose he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into theflame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, animaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offendhim. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned andtormented forever. This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is, is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of allmythological construction in contrast both with inspiredperception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truthin consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the actionof our faculties in correspondence with some relation in thereality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this, employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our presentexperience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultantfancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge. This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine ofan eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural andpunitive horrors of the present state have been collected, intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world ofunmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of thevengeance of God on his insurgent subjects. Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason canrest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: thatwhat is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions;that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoreticapproaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedlyrecognized as such. This regulative principle of thought isgrossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in amaterial hell. Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell amongdifferent peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we seethem reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world theleading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic, judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of thefrigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of thetorrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process andits sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is avast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whoseheads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lakeof venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers andmurderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, oris it mythology? The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to haveimplicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hellsawaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulouslyobserved the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the passwords and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion ofthe post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of theterrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid inthe extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort ofpenalty and pang known in Egypt. The same thing may be affirmedwith quadruple emphasis of the Hindu doctrine of futurepunishment. In the Hindu hells, truly, the possibilities of horrorare exhausted. To enumerate their sufferings in anything liketheir own detail would require a large volume. The Vishnu Parananames twenty eight distinct hells, assigning each one to aparticular class of sinners; and it adds that there are hundredsof others, in which the various classes of offenders undergo thepenalties of their misdeeds. There are separate hells for thieves, for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, forthose who insult a priest, and so on. Some of the victims arechained to posts of red hot steel and lashed with flexible flames:others are forced to devour the most horrible filth. Some aremangled and eaten by ravenous birds, others are squeezed intochests of fire and locked up for millions of years. These examplesmay serve as a small specimen of the infernal ingenuity displayedin the descriptions of the Hindu hells, which are all of onesubstantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery. The Parsees hold that when a bad man dies his soul remains by thebody three days and nights, seeing all the sins it has evercommitted, and anxiously crying, "Whither shall I go? Who willsave me?" On the fourth day devils come and thrust the bad soulinto fetters and lead it to the bridge that reaches from earth toheaven. The warder of the bridge weighs the deeds of the wickedsoul in his balance, and condemns it. The devils then fling thesoul 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. Itdemands, "Who art thou, O, maiden, uglier and more detestable thanI ever saw in the world?" She replies, "I am no maiden; I am thineown wicked deeds, O, thou hateful unbeliever furnished with badthoughts and words. " After further disagreeable adventures, thesoul is plunged into the abode of the devil, where the darknessand foul odor are so thick that they can be grasped. Fed withhorrid viands, such as snakes, scorpions, poison, there the wickedsoul must remain until the day of resurrection. Now, no enlightened Christian scholar or thinker will hesitatewith one stroke to brush away all the details of these pagandescriptions of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leavingnothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution forthe guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in theecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we seethe full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitionsincorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hellsof the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither isthat of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, allillustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association ofthings known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Nota single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his localhell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or thePersian, would not urge in behalf of his. We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodoxbelief in a material hell from its simple beginning to itssubsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol orunderworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the OldTestament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm, gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. Thedead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of thesurvivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there. The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presenceexisting and moving wherever their conscious thought located him. The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into anotheradjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous spacethus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in theburial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in therecollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was animaginative dilatation of the grave. But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest andpeace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, andkindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say ingeneral that these ideas were joined with the supposed world ofthe dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar resulthas been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is, by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrorsexperienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in thisworld is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men, in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in thenext world by one who has at his command all possible modes ofpain, 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 thelegend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol, Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority ofMoses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumedtwo 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 ofthe wicked. But another narrative has been of far greater importance in thisdirection, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. TheCities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted andvolcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandonedto vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When aterrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with alltheir people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminousflame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in aftertime should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone fromheaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take formin their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doomof the wicked. So it did. At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valleyof Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendencyand completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested valethe worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting childrenalive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fiercefire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten andhymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all therefuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in aconflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst anuncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was castover into the future state as a representation of the fateawaiting the wicked. Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to havecriminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects oftheir own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, andthere burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example ofthis given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had thefurnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and orderedShadrach, Meshach and Abednego cast into it, furnished both theJews and the Christians with another type of the punishment ofhell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, andto be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament. The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to bechained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of theChurch 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 ofburning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full offiends and shrieking souls. Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devilin the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hotchains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands heseizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, andwith his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat. Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by theirtongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldronsof fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten onan anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strainedthrough a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hellwill admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but theywill say it is the product of a benighted age, and long sinceoutgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations inthe Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudesof the believing. And what shall be said of the following extractfrom a little book called "The Sight of Hell, " recently publishedwith high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among thechildren of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J. Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passagewhich we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series oftracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having alarge sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeonthere is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Twolong flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazingfire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettleboiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow isboiling 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 twistsitself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof ofthe oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. Very likely Godsaw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent, and thus would have to be punished much more in hell. So God inhis mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood. " Ofthese diabolical horrors, drawn out through hundreds of pages, theorthodox Protestant may say, "Oh, this is only a piece of Popishsuperstition. We all repudiate it as a most repulsive and absurdfancy. " Well, what then will he say if representations, though perhaps notquite so grossly graphic in circumstance, yet absolutely identicalin principle, are set before him from the fresh utterances ofhundreds of the most distinguished Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian preachers and theologians? It would beeasy to present whole volumes of apposite citations. But two orthree will be enough. John Henry Newman in that one of hisparochial sermons, entitled, "On the Individuality of the Soul, "gives us accounts of hell which for unshrinking detail ofmateriality will compare with the most frightful passages ofOriental mythology. George Bull, Lord Bishop of Saint Davids, inhis volume of sermons declares that all who die with any sinunrepented of, "are immediately consigned to a place and state ofirreversible misery a place of horrid darkness where there shinesnot the least glimmering of light or comfort. " Mr. Spurgeonasserts, "There is a real fire in hell a fire exactly like thatwhich we have on earth, except that it will torture withoutconsuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone inhell: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, andthen thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, eachbrimfull of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops ofblood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; notonly conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy headtormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from theirsockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented withhorrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulserattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in thefire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet undestroyed. Ah! fine lady, who takest care of thygoodly fashioned face, that fair face shall be scarred with theclaws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodlyapparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It illbecomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you areonly feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, andthe Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you willfind it one day to be so. " Is not this paragraph a disgustingcombination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept asideand forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash, loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with whichChristendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceivedand surfeited. Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell allthe incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the puretruth remains that God will forever see that justice is done, virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In whatway is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell. For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a naturalproduct of the mythological action of the human mind in itsdevelopment through the circumstances of history, but whenregarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It isa figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retainsby force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority. In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a facsimile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable ofbecoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of utteringfaint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food andpleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible ofmaterial imprisonment and material torments. Such was the commonbelief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. Thedoctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription andunthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested hasbeen dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know thatthe soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend oncertain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identicalwith them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, theseare spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut upin a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with awhip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You maycrush or blast the visible organism in connection with which thesoul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch asentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists, what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It isidle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know. Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement andpenalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prisonhouse of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority ofmankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before thetruth of the absolute spirituality of mind. In those early times, when military, political, judicial andconvivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructivephenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had givenus their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidablethat men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs, each having his own empire and striving to secure his ownsubjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes tobe thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thoughtevil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbalphantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out andblent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards noneas enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures, everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but toharmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better outof good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that Godis the pervading Creator who governs all from within by thecontinuous action and reaction between every life and itsenvironing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this theincompetent conception of God as a political king, governing byexternal edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. Thisdeludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, whichhas no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the openturnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The greatking's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universeis the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of thisbroad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, emptyinto hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedialreturn of resisted law on a being out of tune with some justcondition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty andtyranny of the mythological hell, supported by the constantdrilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vestedinterests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have heldthe human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. Ina Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersedin the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth, boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once insixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top. As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, andsink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their lifeon earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and thePriesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrineresting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power andsensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When atlast in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away whata long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw! If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which isa bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space, it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment somemore just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played sucha tremendous part in the religious history of the world must bebased on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth maybe. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot bewithout some important reality within. In distinction, then, fromthe monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truthcarried in the awful word, hell? Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in timeand space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever thespiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are notto 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. Beinga personal experience and not a material place, many are in it nowand here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we toexclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, asthose do who say that all the hell there is terminates with theemergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sinsdiscords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physicalone. 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 evildeeds. It is a state within rather than a place without. The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to thewill of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universalorder or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as thevulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying samenessinto which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is athing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with theindividual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in thewill, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vainaspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in theimagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hellof remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays. There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on themelancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentlessnevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncraticas his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evilexperience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be onemonotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering withthe different elements and degrees afforded, and softening orending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements anddegrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty, faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell beingthe consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonisticto some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, inevery instance, must be measured by the variations of thisantagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are theresults or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount ofreflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of allthe mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannottell 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 inthe history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concernsus. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly intothe nature of hell. The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any specialplace or time, is respectively the experience of good, and theexperience of evil. But what are good and evil? Good is theconscious realization of universal order, the absolute fruition ofbeing, the fulfillment of individual function, in accordance withthe conditions for the most perfect and prolonged fulfillment ofthe universal totality of functions. Supposing that there wereonly one instance and form of conscious life, with no possibilityof conflicting claims within or without, then good would be tothat life simply the fulfillment of the functions of its nature. But the moment a being is set in relation with other beings likeitself, and also made aware of various gradations of importanceamong its own interior faculties, then the definition of good isno longer the simple fulfillment of function, or the meregratification of desire; but it becomes the fulfillment offunction in such a manner as to secure the greatest total qualityand quantity of fulfilled function. Now evil is the opposite ornegation of this. It is whatever lessens the fruition of life, prevents the fulfillment of function, contracts or mars therealization of universal order in the consciousness of a livingbeing. Thus evil is not merely the keeping of an individual desirefrom its own proper good. But every gratification of desire whichinvolves the winning of a less important good at the expense of amore important one is evil; or, on the other hand, the evil ofsacrificing or denying a gratification in itself legitimate, becomes good when it is the means for securing a more authoritativegratification. Let us try to make these abstract statementsintelligible by illustration. The appropriation of nutriment is a good, the indispensable methodfor sustaining life. It is right that we should eat and drink; andthe pleasure which accompanies the proper performance of thefunction is the reflex approval of the Creator. The refusal fitlyto take and relish our food brings debility, disease, pain, andpremature death. Whether this refusal results from absorption inother employment or from some superstitious belief, it is aviolation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent sufferingand dissolution are the retributive hell or reflex signals, painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if thepleasure of gratifying appetite becomes a motive for its own sakeand leads to excessive indulgence, the superior good of permanenthealth and vigor is sacrificed to the far inferior transient goodof a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomachis 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 malicein this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distortedarrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in everyrespect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently anduniversally, will secure the greatest amount and the best qualityof life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interfereswith this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moralfaculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for thesake of some passing gratification in the present. God commandsman to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; toexercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winningof a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do thismeasures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity ofmen. The failure to do this is the condition on which everyinfernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A manmay feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royalpowers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness setin, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. Howmuch better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut offthis single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast intohell. Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged orderexperienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of facultyand motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who giveshimself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, isthereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consumingpassion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoardingand gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. Histime and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into anobscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges ofthe 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 squalidchamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is aconglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear ofrobbery, 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 competenthell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is theelevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. Hisunclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns thespectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open hissoul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank andbears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay andruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is thathe makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount overthe broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty goodof his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented bythat respect for the right of property which is a conditionessential to the life of the community. The principle on which heacts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. Theevil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, isincomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means forthe death of society. The resulting sense of hostility betweenhimself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and fromGod, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience, and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt inproportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritualdisturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence toreadjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to thehigher interest of the general public, and remove the threatenedruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it hasdisbalanced and broken. These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of thetrue idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God isexpressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks whichindicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and theaccordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit ofthem. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance andauthority, every level of function beneath kept subservient toevery one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaventhrough the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God, the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of publicmotives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher andgreater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell throughthe universe. The lowest function of man is a simple momentary gratification ofsense, as, for example, an act of nutrition. The highest functionof which his nature is capable is the surrender of himself to theuniversal order, the sympathetic identification of himself withthe eternal law and weal of the whole. Between those vast extremesthere are hundreds of intermediate functions, rising in worth andauthority from the direct gratifications of appetite to the idealappropriations of transcendental good, from the titillation givenby a pinch of snuff to the thrill imparted by an imaginativecontemplation of the redeemed state of humanity a million yearsahead. But, throughout the entire range, all the sin and guiltfrom which hell is produced consist in obeying a lower motive inpreference to a higher one, making some narrow or selfish goodparamount over a wider or disinterested one. A man, educated as aphysician, practiced his profession on scientific principles, andnearly starved on an income of seven hundred dollars a year. Hethen set up as a quack, compounded a worthless nostrum, and, bydint of impudence, advertising, and other charlatanry, madeeighteen thousand dollars a year, and justified his conduct on theground of his success. By falsehood and cheating he preyed on thecredulity of the public. If all men were like him, society couldnot exist. The meanness of his soul, shutting him out from themost exquisite and exalted prerogatives of human nature, is therevenge which the universe takes on such a man the hell in whichGod envelops him. A manufacturer turns out certain products bymeans of a chemical process which adds seven per cent. To hisprofit, but shortens the average life of his workmen five years. All mankind would indignantly denounce him with an instinctiverecognition of his wickedness in thus erecting the profanestandard of pecuniary gain above the sacredness of the lives ofhis brothers. But when of two men in deadly peril from anapproaching explosion only one can escape, and the stronger, instead of monopolizing the chance, as he might, stands back andlays down his life in saving the weaker, it is a deed of heroicvirtue, applauded by all men, supported by the whole moralcreation which derives new beauty and sweetness from it. Itradiates a peaceful bliss of self approval through the breastbefore it is mangled and cold, and fills the soul with a serenejoy as it flies to God. The essential merit of such an action isthe subjection of that selfishness which is the principle of allsin, and whose recoil is the spring trap of hell, to thatdisinterestedness which is the germ of redemption and the perfumeof heaven. It is not an unfrequent occurrence for a mixture of heaven andhell to be experienced. Here is an able and upright merchant whois about to fail, in consequence of disasters which he couldneither foresee nor prevent, and for which he is in no senseresponsible. He shrinks from bankruptcy with inexpressible shameand distress. He is mortified, cut to the quick, robbed of sleep, can hardly look his creditors in the face. Now, he reflects, "Thisis not my fault. I have been honest, prudent, economical, unwearied in effort, I have done my duty to the best of myability. God approves me, and all good men would if they knew theexact facts. " If that assurance does not shed an element of heaveninto his hell, spread a soothing veil of light and oil over hisstormy trouble, then it is because his pride is greater than hisself respect, his vanity more keen than his conscience is strong, his regard for appearances more influential than his knowledge ofthe truth. And in that case the misery he suffers is the penaltyof 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, anddespair. He who seeks good only in the just order of itssuccessive standards, gratifying no lower function, except insubservience to the higher ones, escapes these experiences, feelsthat he fulfills his destiny, and is an approved freeman of God. The service of truth and good alone makes free; all service ofevil is slavery and wretchedness. For freedom is spontaneousobedience to that which has a right to command. The thirsty manwho quaffs a glass of cold water does an act of liberty; but hewho constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid anddespotic 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 preyon the interests of the community, writhe under the rebuke of thehigher laws they break in enthroning their selfish propensitiesabove the cardinal standards of the public good; and in the stalemonotony of their indulgences, they know nothing of the gloriouszest shed by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of thevirtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced ontheir way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows theforge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with allgood not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generoussympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good itcontemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an enviousman in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to theexperience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, andhate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys whichsinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and thento lock the bolts behind. A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, fromthe central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest andouter most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law ofsalvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending andexpanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truthand life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are thereverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the lawof perdition, which guides the soul in a descending andcontracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and vilerattractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve thesuperior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests andinvitations above. When the members of a family erect theirseparate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniouslyblending around a common authority of truth and love, when theylive in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, apoisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, afiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domesticatmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is aconcentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentionsand encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishingalternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to bedeprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of ourbeing, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closerdefinition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoidedor neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviouslythe inevitable result and penalty of sin. The great mistake in the popular view or mythological doctrine ofhell has arisen from conceiving of God under the image of apolitical ruler, acting from without, by wilful methods, andinflicting arbitrary judgments on his rebellious subjects. Heshould be conceived as the dynamic Creator, acting from within, through the intrinsic order and laws of things, for theinstruction and guidance of his creatures. His condemnation is theinevitable culmination of a discordant state of being, rather thanthe verdict of a vindictive judge or the sentence of a forensicmonarch. Every retribution is an impinge of the creature in thecreation, and, so far from expressing destructive wrath, is an actof the self rectifying mechanism of the universe to readjust thepart with the whole. With what pernicious folly, what cruelsuperstition, men have attributed their own miserable passions totheir imperturbable Maker, breaking his infinite perfection intoall sorts of frightful shapes, as seen through the blur andeffervescence of their own imperfections! So the sun seems to godown with his garments rolled in blood, and to set angrily in astormy ocean of fire: but really the great lamp of the universeshines serenely from the unalterable fixture of his central seat, and all this spectral tempest of blaze and glare is but arefraction of his beams through our vexed atmosphere. God being infinitely perfect, does not change his dispositions andmodes of action like a fickle man. His intentions and deeds arethe same here and everywhere, now and always. If we wish to learnin what manner God will prepare a hell and punish the impenitentwicked after death, we must not, as men did in the barbaric andmythological ages, make an induction from the treatment ofcriminals by capricious and revengeful rulers in this world; wemust see how God himself now treats his disobedient children fortheir demerits here, assured that his eternal temper and methodare identical with his temporal temper and method. Well, then, how does God treat offenders now? Incapable of angeror caprice, he retains his own steady procedures and absoluteserenity unaltered, but leaves the culprits to endure the effectsof their perverted bearing towards him and towards the order hehas established. If a man lies or defiles himself, or blasphemes, or murders, Goddoes 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 theoffender to the reactions of his own acts, the discordant vilenessof his own degradation, the devouring return of his own passions, to punish him for his sin, and to purge him of his wrong. The trueretribution of every wicked deed is contained in the recalcitrationof its own motive. What fitter penalty can the soul suffer thanthat 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 beencommonly supposed, express the indignation and revengefulness ofGod. No, at their very darkest, they must suggest the shadow ofhis aggrieved will, not the lurid frown of his rage. A part of thediscord which sin is and introduces, they denote the remedialstruggles of nature and grace to restore the perverted being toits normal condition. If you put your finger in the fire theburning pain is the reaction of your act, and that pain is notvengeance, but preservative education. When some frightful diseaseseizes on a man, the inflammation and convulsions which succeedare the violent spring of the constitution on the enemy, itsdesperate attempt to shake off the fell grasp, and bring theorganism to health and peace again. These efforts either succeed, or in the exhausting shocks the body is destroyed. It is the samewith the soul. Sin is the displacement of the hierarchy ofauthorities in the soul, the misbalancing of its energies, thedisturbance of its health and peace. And all the varieties ofretribution are the recoil of the injured faculties, the strugglesof the insulted authorities, to vindicate and reestablishthemselves. Now, these efforts, if the soul is indestructible, must always, at last, be successful. Health in the body is theharmonious adjustment of its energies with its conditions; and asufficient modicum must be obtained or death ensues. Virtue in thesoul is the harmony of its powers with the laws of God; themeasure of this is the measure of spiritual life; and granting thesoul to be immortal, the tendency towards a complete measure ofvirtue must ultimately become irresistible, and every hell at lastterminate in paradise. The persistent forces or laws of the divineenvironment steadily tend to draw the unstable forces or passionsof all creatures into harmony with them, and that harmony isredemption. Perdition is consequently never, as the ecclesiasticaldoctrine makes it always, a state of fixed hopelessness. Though wemake our bed in the nethermost hell, God is there. And whereverGod is, penitence and grace, reformation and pardon, have a rightof 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 oneopen course to damnation for all except the few elected to besaved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts thelineage of Adam as a dark river of perdition, choked with thesouls of the damned, steadily pouring into hell ever since ourhuman generations began. But in addition to the refutation of thisterrible belief by its monstrous moral iniquity, science is nowdoubly refuting it by the proof of the existence of the human raceon the earth for unnumbered centuries before the Biblical date ofAdam. So this fictitious gate of a fictitious hell is shut andabolished. With it vanishes the horrible picture of this world asfloored with omnipresent trap doors to the bottomless pit, andclosed fatally around by a dead wall of doom, through which, byone bloody orifice alone, the believers in the vicarious atonementcould crawl up into heaven. In place of this, we see the wholeuniverse as one open House of God, traversed in all directions bythe free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love. And so of the remaining theoretic gates of hell, unbelief, ritualneglect, and the other technicalities on which priests and deludedzealots have always hinged the perdition of such as heed not theirauthority; none of them shall much longer prevail. With the wipingout of the mythological hell all these fanciful entrances to itlikewise disappear. But instead of these visionary ones we shouldpoint out and warn men from the substantial gates of the truehell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruitionin 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, badexample, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all theinfluences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, andharmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in. In holding back those who are approaching these fatal gates, intrying to contract them, to shut them up here is a vital work tobe done, infinitely more promising than the brandishing of theterrors of that material hell in which sensible men can no longerbelieve. For the only true hell is the remedial vibration of truthin an uncoordinated soul, even when not remedial for theindividual still remedial for the race. It is not our outward abode, but our inmost spirit, that makes ourexperience infernal or heavenly: for, in the last result, it isthe occupying spirit that moulds the environment, not thehabitation that determines the tenant. This is the substance ofthe whole matter. An accomplished chemist, who was a good man intruth, but a heretic by the standard of orthodoxy, died. Being anunbeliever, of course, he went to hell. Seeing a group of childrenin torment there, he pitied them very deeply, and straightwaybegan to devise measures, by means of his skill in chemicalscience, to shield them from the flame. Instantly the whole scenechanged. The beauty of heaven lay around him, and all itsblandness breathed through him. Forgetting his own sufferings insympathy for those of others, he had obeyed the law of virtue, subjecting a selfish desire to a disinterested one; and theomnipotent God enveloped him with the heaven of his own spirit. Another man, who was hard and cruel in character, but perfectlysound in the orthodox faith and observances, died. It is true hewas an avaricious and hard saint, but then he believed in theatoning blood; and so, of course, he went to heaven. No sooner didhe find himself safely seated in bliss than he tried to peep overthe golden wall into the pit of perdition, in order to heightenthe relish of his favored lot by the contrast of the agonies ofthe lost. Instantly the celestial scenery about him was changedinto infernal, and, by the radiation and return of his own badspirit, he found himself plunged into hell and writhing under itsretributive experience. His character exemplified the law ofperdition, enthroning selfishness over disinterestedness, subverting the order of virtue; and the insulted will of God madehis imagined heaven a real hell. Hell is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishingquantity through the successive periods since war, cannibalism andslavery were universal. Will not the progressive process terminatein the utter extinction of it, paradise everywhere steadilyencroaching on purgatory until at last the whole universe of matterand spirit composes an unbroken heaven? According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was oncea measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions, making a universal hell of matter. But the discords andperturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order moreand more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled intheir gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weavingthroughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. Theevolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and ismore complex than the material, each mind being as complicated asthe whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be ascomplete 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 nothingunredeemed. CHAPTER IV. THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS. HEAVEN, in the crude fancy of mankind, has generally beenconceived as a definite, exclusive, material abode; either someelysian clime on the surface of the earth; or some happy islebeyond the setting sun; or this whole globe, renovated by fire andpeopled with a risen and ransomed race; or else some halcyon spotin the sky, curtained with inaccessible splendor and crowded witheternal blessings. It was natural that men should think thus ofheaven as a place whence all the evils which they knew wereexcluded and where all the goods which they knew were carried tothe highest pitch, God himself visibly enthroned there inentrancing glory amidst throngs of worshippers. This was unavoidable, because, in an early age, before knowledgeand reflection had trained men to the critical examination andcorrection of their instinctive conclusions, all the data whichthey possessed would naturally lead them to imagine the unknownGod in the glorified form and circumstances of the most enviablebeing their experience had yet revealed to them; and to paint theunknown future state of perfected souls under the purest aspectsof the most desirable boons they had known in the present state. It being a necessity of their uncritical minds to personify God bya definite picture of imagination, and to portray heaven tothemselves as an external place, they could not do otherwise thanwork out the results by means of the most intense experiences andthe most impressive imagery familiar to them. The highest ideathey had of man, purified and expanded to the utmost, would betheir idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions ofexistence within their observation, enhanced by the removal ofevery limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both wouldbe outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royalcourts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, withtheir exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, theirprocessions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailingcasts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion. For what were the most vivid of all the experiences men had amongtheir fellows on earth? Why, the exhibitions of the sultan withhis gorgeous ceremonial state, and of the high priest with thedread sacrifice and homage he paid amidst clouds of incense androlling waves of song; the admission of the favored, in glitteringrobes, to share the privileges; the exclusion of the profane andvulgar in squalid misery and outer darkness. Consequently, exceptby a miracle, these sights could not fail largely to constitutethe scenic elements for the popular belief concerning God andheaven. What should men reflect over into the unknown to portraytheir ideals there, if not the most coveted ingredients and themost impressive forms of the known? The great thing, then, inevitably, would be supposed to be to gain the personal favor ofthe supreme Sovereign by some artifice, some flattery, somefortunate compliance with his arbitrary caprice, and to get intothe charmed enclosure of his abode by some special grace someauthoritative passport or magic art. But as soon as science and philosophy, and a spiritual experiencerectifying its own errors by reflective criticism, have created amore competent theology it discredits all these raw schemes. Itteaches that God, being the eternal omnipresent power and mysterywhich foreran, underlies, pervades and includes all things, cannotjustly be figured as a man, locally here or there, and notelsewhere. He can be justly thought of only as the almightyCreator of the universe, intelligible in the order of his worksand ways, but inscrutable in his essence, absent nowhere, presenteverywhere in general, and specially revealed anywhere whenever afit experience in the soul awakens a special consciousness of him. This conception of God the only one any longer defensible as theInfinite Spirit, incapable, except in his various incarnations, ofparticular local enthronement and uncovering to the outward gazeof worshippers, necessitates a correspondent alteration in thevulgar idea of heaven as an exclusive spot in space. In every form of being, in any portion of the universe, thecentral idea of a state of salvation, is the fulfillment of thewill of the Creator in the faculties of the creature, the fruitionof the ends of the whole in the consciousness of the part, thecongruity of the forces of the soul with the requirements of itssituation. If this definition be accepted, it is clear that nomere place of residence, however excellent, can be heaven. That isbut one factor of heaven, and worthless without a correspondingfactor of a spiritual kind. Essentially, heaven is a divineexperience, not a divine location; yet constructively it is bothof these. Ever so serene and pure a space, perfectly free fromevery perturbation of ill, and surrounded with all the outerprovisions of power and order, would be no heaven, until aprepared soul entered it, furnishing the spiritual conditions forthe forces to run into fruition, for the melody of blissful beingto play. The material elements of the universe, so far as we know, are unconscious dynamics. However perfectly marshalled, they canby themselves compose no heaven. So the conscious soul, as far aswe know, is incapable of an independent and unrelated existence initself. All its experience, when ultimately analyzed, is theresultant of the mutual relations between its own energies andcapacities and the forms and forces of things outside of itself. When there is a right arrangement of right realities in theresidence, and a right development of faculties and affectionswithin the resident, and such an adjustment of the spiritualstates with the surrounding conditions, that, as these act andreact upon each other, the laws of the universe break intoconscious harmony, or the will of God is realized in a life ofblessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean byheaven; and the conditions of its realization constitute the lawof salvation. Such being the true idea of heaven, obviously, it cannot belimited 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 andoutward circumstances so adjusted as to produce an experiencewhich fulfills the will of God and realizes the end of thecreation. Hereafter this may be, as we know it now on earth, aspiritual fruition in material conditions, or it may be somethingaltered in accordance with the varying exigences of worlds whosedetails are as yet inconceivable by us, altogether hidden behindthe veil of futurity and our ignorance. But its one fundamentalcondition, its eternal essence under all circumstances which canpossibly happen, must always be the same. Whatever changes awaitthe soul, embodied in a new form in the state after death, orremaining in pure disembodiment; whatever be the relation of theimmaterial entity of mind to the circumference and contents of itsnew home, it can be in paradise, it can command peace and bliss, or any equivalent of these terms, only by the fulfillment of thewill of God in its being. Heaven is, therefore, the reconciliationand unison of the soul with its divinely appointed lot, theidentification of the ideal and the real. The will of God is expressed in the soul in the submissiveservices and virtues of a pure and pious character it is expressedin the outward creation by the unbreakable persistency of his lawsthrough all the aberrations and discords of accompaning evil orlimitation. Nowhere can it ever be an impossibility to conjointhese and thus to make a heaven. The one thing which everywhere isvariable and evanescent, is evil, or the imperfect adjustment ofthe creature with the works and designs of the Creator. The onething which forever stays, and steadily invites the intelligentsoul to its embrace, is good, that is, the opportunity to realizethe divinely intended correspondence of the relations in the partwith the relations in the whole, a serene movement of life throughthe unison of the soul with its true fate. Now, the one predicatewhich is essential in all things, without whose presence nothingcan be, is the will of God. Even could that will be violated orwithstood, still it would be there, upholding, forgiving, wooingSalvation, or a life of conscious harmony, is capable ofrealization, of course, wherever the means are offered for theperformance and enjoyment of the will of God; and the infinity ofhis attributes necessarily makes that condition an omnipresentpossibility in the realm of free spirits. Therefore, heaven is notoutwardly limited to one place, or to one period, but may beachieved at any time, and anywhere. This throws light on thefallacy of the current, narrow doctrine of a limited probation. The oriental belief that the action of the present is the fate ofthe future unquestionably covers a profound truth. Yet, if thereis always a future there must likewise always be a present, andthe right action in this may forever redeem that. Probation islimited by no decree, only by the duration of free being. Although the essential element in the idea of heaven is foreverthe same, it may be regarded in three different aspects, or onthree different scales as an individual experience, as a socialstate, as a far off universal event. Heaven, as a privateexperience, is the harmonized intercourse of the soul with thedivineness in its surrounding conditions. Heaven, as a publicsociety, is the blessed communion of blessed souls, a completeadjustment of the lives of kindred natures. Heaven, as a finalconsummation, is the publication of the vindicated will of God inthe total harmony of the universe, all individual wills so manyseparate notes blent in the collective consonance of the whole. But, for all practical purposes, we may overlook this tripledistinction and think of heaven simply as the correspondence ofthe life of the soul with those outward conditions which representthe will of God. And towards this conclusion everything, in itsprofoundest and most persistent tendency, is bearing. In spite ofinterruptions and seeming exceptions, it is towards this that theentire confluence of forces and beings gravitates and slowlyadvances. The universal law of evolution, in which a scientificphilosophy has generalized its most comprehensive induction, isbut a history and prophecy of the progress towards a movingequilibrium of the totality of worlds and intelligences, which caneventuate only in a universal heaven, or unimpeded completion ofthe creative design. Do we not see all creatures tending towards the perfection oftheir respective types, every improvement selectively taken up andcarried on, every deteriorating deviation eliminated, all errorsand failures doomed to perish or change into new conditions formore hopeful attempts? This confirms the faith first based on thedeeper argument. For, since the will of God is the one persistentreality, the one all evolving and all inclusive power of whichevil is only the distorted and shadowy negation, that oppositionto the will of God which constitutes sin and misery, that discordwith him which generates hell, must prove an ever smalleraccompaniment of his plan, a transitory phenomenon ceasing in evendegree with the spreading conquests of his almighty purpose, asrace on race of creatures, and system on system of worlds, sweepinto the victorious harmony, until the boundless realm of beingshall be boundless heaven. Heaven, then, in essence, is not merely a favored locality, notmerely a resigned soul, but the result of a combination of thesein a just relation. It is not a playing power in the materialenvironment nor an inherent attribute of the spiritual instrument;but it is the music which flows from the instrument when it isattuned 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 rightlyordered conditions in the realm and rightly directed energies inthe inhabitant. Heaven, then, in the best and briefest definitionwe can give, is the will of God in fulfillment, or the law of thewhole 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 incapableof violation; as every seeming resistance to gravitation is infact a deeper obedience to gravitation, then we may say, in moreaccurate phrase, hell is the collision and friction of thelimitations of different laws. It is the discord of the part withthe whole. It is the antagonism of the soul with God. But theperpetual preservation of a perfectly balanced antagonism with Godis inconceivable. It must vary, totter, grow either worse orbetter. If it grows worse, it will finally destroy itself, theaberrant individuality or malign insurgence vanishing in thetotality of force, as the filth of our sewers vanishes purely inthe purity of the ocean. If it grows better, its improvement willfinally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evildisappearing in good. Therefore, every being must at length besaved from misery, if not by redemptive atonement then byabsolvent annihilation, and one absolute heaven finally absorb thedwindling hells. The question of chief importance to us in relation to heaven is, How can we gain admission into it. The limitations of languagenecessitate the use of imagery for the expression of religiousideas: and there is no objection to it if it be recognized asimagery, and be interpreted accordingly. Considering, then, thatbeatific experience of which heaven consists, under the metaphorof a city, what are its ways of entrance? How can we pass to itscitizenship? The obstacles to our entrance exist not in the city itself. Itsgates are never closed. The supreme conditions of redemption arespiritual, and not local or material. If there be withinno fatal impediments to the free course of the will of God, allouter obstacles easily give way and cease. If we are ever to knowheaven, it is within ourselves that we must find it out. Whateverabolishes that internal rebellion of the soul which makes itsexperience a purgatory, whatever replaces this confusion with anaccord of the faculties, is a road to heaven. Whatever removesvices and inserts virtues in their stead, attuning us to theeternal laws of things, leads us through some gate into paradise. And nothing else can no ceremonial artifice, no externaltransference, no sacramental exorcism, no priestly dodge. The same mistake generally committed in regard to the nature ofheaven, making it a mere local residence, has been as generallycommitted in regard to the conditions of admission. They have beenmade arbitrary, whereas they are intrinsic. They are inwroughtwith the substantial laws of being. The idea of God being firstfashioned after the image of a sultan throned in his palace amidsthis courtiers, ruling an empire by his whims, it was but naturalthat heaven, and the terms of entrance there, should be in asimilar manner conceived under the forms of court ceremonial withits capricious favoritisms. Thus it has been supposed that by theatoning sacrifice of an incarnate person of the Godheadsatisfaction has been made for the sins of the world, which washopelessly ruined by its original federal representative, and thatthus a pardon was offered to those alone who mentally accept theformula of the correspondent belief. According to this view, the only open gateway of heaven is faithin the vicarious atonement, a baptismal passage through the bloodof Christ. Science explodes this narrow and repulsive doctrine bydemonstrating its irreconcilableness alike with physical fact andwith moral law, first tracing the affiliated lines of our raceback to many separate Adams in the shadows of an indeterminableantiquity, and then showing that the divine method of salvation isthrough substantial rejection of evil and appropriation of good inpersonal character, and not through royal proclamation andforensic conformity. The plan of God for the salvation of men, as its culmination isseen in Christ, is the exhibition of the true type of being, thetrue style of motive and action, for their assimilation andreproduction: but Calvinism, when fundamentally analyzed, reducesit to a monarchical manifesto and spectacular drama working itseffects through verbal terms, acts of mental assent and gesticulardeeds. Every sound teaching of philosophy refutes this exclusiveand arbitrary creed. In fact, its fictitious and mythologicalnature is obvious the moment we see that the will of God isrepresented in those laws of nature which are the directarticulations and embodiments of his eternal mind, and not inthose political regulations or priestly and judicial formalitieswhich express the perverted desires and artificial devices of men. The wearing of a certain dress, the bending of the knee, themuttering of a phrase, may flatter an earthly sovereign and gain aseat at his banquets. But it is childish folly to fancy any suchthing of God. It is absurd to suppose that he has two schemes ofgovernment, one for the present state, another for the future; onefor the elect, another for the reprobate; one for those who gazeon the spectacle of the crucifixion and make a certain sign, another for those who do not. His laws, identified with theunchangeable nature and course of the creation, sweep in oneunbroken order throughout immensity and eternity, awarding perfectjustice, and perfect mercy to all alike, making the experience ofall souls a hell or a heaven to them accordingly as they striveagainst or harmonize with the divine system of existence inwhich they have their being. The mere acceptance of a technicaldogma, the mere performance of a ritual action, cannot adjusta discordant character with the conditions of blessedness soas to reinstate an exile of heaven. To imagine that God will, in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven aman whose character fits him for hell, or, in default of thatconventionality, place in hell a man whose character fits himfor heaven, is to represent him as acting on an eccentric whim. And surely every one who has a worthy idea of God must findit much easier to believe that men have mixed mythologicaldreams with their religion, than to believe that the infiniteGod is capable of despotic freaks or melo dramatic caprices. The poor, odious figment that baptism with the blood of Christis the sole entrance to heaven, is rebuked by the sweet and awfulimperturbableness with which the laws of being act, distributingthe ingredients of hell or heaven to every one accordingly as hisvices disobey or his virtues obey the will of God. In a universe of law where God with all his attributes isomnipresent no trick can ever be the pathway into paradise. Thetrue method of salvation is by the production of a good characterthrough divine grace and the discipline of life. Thus, the reallaw of salvation through Christ consists not in the technicalbelief that he shed his blood for our redemption, but in thepersonal derival from him of that spirit which will make uswilling to shed our own blood for the good of others. There was, not long ago, called to her eternal home, a youngwoman, who, by the sweet gentleness, the heroic generosity and theunspotted fidelity of her whole life, deserves an exalted place onthe roll of feminine chivalry and saintliness. Not a brightername, or one associated with a more fearless and accomplishedspirit, is recorded on the list of those Christian women whovolunteered to serve as nurses in the great American war ofnationality. No soldier was braver, few were more under fire, thanshe; still plying her holy work with unfaltering love andfortitude, both in the horrid miasma of camps and before thecharge of cavalry and the blaze of cannon. Many a time, thelivelong night, under the solemn stars, equipped with assuagingstores, she threaded her way alone through the debris of carnage, seeking out the wounded among the dead, lifting her voice in songas a signal for any lingering survivor who might be near. Many atime she broke on the vision of mutilated and dying men, with thelight of love in her eyes, a hymn of cheer on her lips, andunwearied ministrations in her hands, transfigured with courageand devotion, gleaming on their sight through the sulphurous flameof battle or the darkening mists of disease like an angel fromheaven. Receiving the seeds of fatal illness from her exposures, she returned home to delight with her noble qualities all who knewher, to make a husband happy, and then to die a contented martyr. Meekly folding her hands, and saying: "Thanks, Father, for whatthou hast enabled me to do, and still more for the new home towhich thou art calling me now" she was gone. The cruel creed ofsuperstition says: "Since she was a Universalist, having no part, by faith, in the mystic sacrifice of Christ, she is doomed tohell. " But every attribute of God, every promise written by hisown finger in the sacred instincts of our nature, as well as thecardinal teachings of the New Testament, assure us that as thevictorious purity and devotedness of her soul bore her away fromthe tabernacle of flesh, the welcoming Savior said: "Come, thoublessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared from thefoundation of the world. " And heaven swung wide its gate for her;and excited fancy conceives that, as she passed in, there was agratulatory flutter of wings and waving of palms through theangelic ranks. In distinction from that hypothetical gate of blood, set up by acrude theology in one narrow place alone, what, then, are the realgates of heaven, which stand open throughout the realms ofresponsible being? All the causes which bring the will of man intoconsent with the will of God. Truth is the harmony of mind withthe divine order; beauty, the harmony of taste with the divinesymmetries; good, the harmony of volition with the divine ends. Everything that secures these for us is an avenue into thepeaceful city of bliss. To be in heaven is to be a transparentmedium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections ofphenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessedfreedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysteriousattraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. To be therein a superlative degree is to have a mind which is aninfinitesimal mirror of the All, and a heart responsive to thatmind, every perception of truth in the realm of the intellectgenerating a correspondent emotion of good in the realm ofaffection. Not any forensic act of faith in atoning blood, butingrained piety a modest renunciation before the reality of thingsis the grand gateway of souls to the blessedness and repose ofGod. Anselm, the great sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, said: "Iwould rather be in hell without a fault than in heaven with one. "Can any defective technicality damn such a man? No; such a spiritcarries and radiates heaven is itself heaven. That spirit is Godhimself in his creature, and can no more be imprisoned in hellthan God can be. On the other hand, any professing Orthodoxistwho, according to a horrible doctrine of the Calvinists in formerdays, should hope in heaven to obtain a sharper relish for his ownjoy by looking down on the tortures of the damned, and contrastinghis 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 thepublic disinterestedness belonging to the divine will, must invertevery proper experience of heaven. Could any conventionalarrangement, or accident of locality, save such a man, while hischaracter remained unchanged? No; such a spirit carries andradiates hell, is itself hell. A Mohammedan author says of the seventy three sects into which hiscoreligionists are divided, that seventy two are wrong ways, terminating in eternal damnation; the remaining one alone, inwhich are the party of salvation, leads through the true faithinto the City of Allah. The same unwise bigotry, the sameunripeness of judgment, has been generally shown by Christians. Itis time they were ashamed of it, and allowed their souls to matureand expand into a more liberal creed in fuller keeping with thehospitable amplitude of the righteousness and goodness of God. Everything that tends to bring the will of man into lovingsubmission to the infinite Father, to mould the structure ofcharacter into correspondence with those established conditions ofrightful being represented by the moral and religiousvirtues, is an open highway of salvation. And all the greatcardinal ordinations of life do legitimately tend to this result. Therefore all these are gates of heaven. Some pass in through oneof them, others through another; and by means of them all, it isdecreed 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 youthsand maidens who have known no malice or guile, the saintly fewamong mature men and women who by the untempted elevation andserenity of their temper have kept their integrity unmarred andtheir robes unsullied, enter by this nearest and easiest gate. Borne aloft by their own native gravitation, we see the whiteprocession of the innocent ones winding far up the cerulean heightand defiling in long melodious line into heaven. The second gate is prosperity. Through this enter those to whomgood fortune has served as the guiding smile of God, not pamperingthem with arrogance, nor hardening them with careless egotism, butshaping them to thankful meekness and generosity. Exempt fromlacerating trials, every want benignly supplied, girt withfriends, they have grown up in goodness and gratitude, obeying thewill of God by the natural discharge of their duties, diffusingbenedictions 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 crystalstream of joy percolating throughout the soul cleanses it moreperfectly than any flames of pain can. And so the virtuouschildren of a favored fortune, who have improved their privilegeswith 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, buttriumphant. These are they who have endured hardship withuncomplaining fortitude and fought their way through all enemies, seductions and tribulations. These are they who, armed with thenative sacrament of righteousness, inspired with a loyal love, would never stoop their crests to wrong nor make a league withiniquity the conquering champions who tread down every viletemptation, ever hearing their Leader say, "In the world ye shallhave trouble and sorrow; but be of good cheer, I have overcome theworld. " Penitence is another gate of heaven. By the instructions ofProvidence, by the natural progress of experience, the evolutionof wisdom, a sinner may become aware of the ingratitude of hisdisobedience, ashamed of the odiousness of his guilt; be smittenwith a regenerating love of truth, beauty, goodness, God; and, without waiting for the lash of an external judgment to drive himthe way he should go, by voluntary preference may grieve over hisfolly and sin, and turn to his duty and his Savior. Then theblessed gate of a spontaneous repentance stands open before him;and through this hospitable entrance multitudes find admission tothe divine home. Death often gives an otherwise unattainable deliverance, and soyields the poor victim of unhappy outer conditions a passage toheaven. It is a thought no less false than it is frightful, whichrepresents death as the vindictive turnkey of the creation, atwhose approach probation ends, and the shuddering convict isthrust into hell, the hopeless bolt dropping into its ward behindhim. It is rather the divine messenger of deliverance for thosewho are borne down here under a fate too hard for them. Oh, whatmyriads of afflicted ones orphan children crushed by brutaltreatment; poor seamstresses starving in garrets; men and womenground and grimed almost out of the semblance of humanity, in thedrudgery and darkness of coal mines; hapless suicides, who haverashly fled from this step dame world, and whose alabaster forms, purpled with bruises, are laid on the dismal beds of brass in themorgue, where a ghastly light strains through the grates, and thecrowd of gazers sweeps endlessly on; unsuccessful men of genius, unappreciated, neglected, cruelly wronged, their extremesensitiveness making their lives a long martyrdom to these what ablessed angel is death, freeing them, setting them in a new state, starting them on a fresh career, amidst fairer circumstances, infront of better opportunities! To be saved, and in paradise, whatis it but to be a pure instrument to echo the music of divinethings? When the corruptible parts of the instrument arehopelessly discordant, or the circumstances of its place here arejangled with evils which it cannot overcome, then thedisentanglement of the spiritual harp, and the translation of itto some finer sphere; where its free chords may ring their propermusic clearly out, are a blessed redemption, making death itself atriumphant gate of heaven. Retribution is the remotest and most difficult of all the heavenlygates; and yet it is one, and one that is indispensable for many aneglectful, halting, and obstinate child of man. It is an extremeerror to think punishment a gate of hell. It is rather a result ofbeing already inside, and it legitimately serves as an outletthence. Whatever may be the case with imperfect human rulers, inthe government of God no punishment is ever inflicted for the sakeof vengeance, a gratuitous evil. It is blasphemy to deem Godvindictive. He always punishes for the sake of good, to awakenattention, produce insight and sorrow, and cause a reattunement ofcharacter and conduct with the laws of right, seen at last to besupremely authoritative and benignant, indissolubly bound up withthe truest good of each and with the sole good of all. On everygate of hell may be written. Wherever retribution is actual, salvation is possible, equivalent to the great maxim ofjurisprudence: Ubi jus ibi remedium! So, even the dark door ofretribution, when men will advance by no other way, leads them tothoughtfulness, regret, and a redemptive readjustment of theirpassions and acts. Thus it becomes the ultimate gate of heaven. And, alas! what a dismal crowd of sufferers, refusing all shorterand happier ways, wait to be drawn through this torturing passageof remedial mercy! May the number entering by the other gates everincrease, and those entering this dwindle! And yet, may it foreverstand open for the unhappy culprits who must be lost unless savedhere! Besides all these gates, and commanding them all, there is oneeverywhere accessible, and never shut on any soul which has thegrace to try it the omnipresent gate of resignation. Remove theconditions of resistance, or friction, by a total surrender ofself will and an absolute acceptance of the Divine Will, and, itmatters not where you are, the essence of perdition is destroyedin your soul. The utter abandonment of pride, a pious submissionto the laws of things, a glad and grateful acquiescence inwhatever the Supreme Authority decrees this is the unrestrictedway into heaven which waits before the steps of all who will onlyexhibit the requisite spirit, and enter. Yes, let any being butbanish from himself every vestige of personal dictation before Godand unexactingly identify his desires with universal good; and, even though he stand on the bottom of hell, heaven will be directlybefore him through the open gate of resignation. For the organicattitude of a pure and loving submission tunes the discordantcreature to that eternal breath of God which blows everywherethrough the universe of souls, sighing until they conspire withit 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 theimmortality of the soul has for some time past obviously beenweakening. The number of those who assail the belief increases, and their utterances become more frank and dogmatic. A multitudeof 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 flippancyand ridicule, abound on all sides, in private conversation, inpublic discussion, and in every form of literary activity. Thehearty thoroughness and fervor with which the faith of the Churchwas once held have gone from whole classes. Subtle skepticism orblank negation is a common characteristic. Whether this tendencytowards unbelief be sound or fallacious, temporary or permanent, it is at least actual. And it is important that we examine thecauses of it, and test their logical validity while tracing theirhistoric spread. Why, then, we ask, is the faith in a future lifefor man suffering such a marked decay in the present generation ofChristendom? In the first place, the faith pales and dwindles, from the generalneglect of that strenuous and constant cultivation of it formerlysecured by the stern doctrinal drill and by the rigid supervisionof daily thought and habit in the interests of religion. Neverbefore were men so absorbed as now in material toil and careduring the serious portion of their existence; never before sobeset as now during the leisure portion by innumerable forms ofamusement and dissipation. The habit of lonely meditation andprayer grows rarer. The exactions of the struggle of ambition growfiercer, the burdens of necessity press more heavily; the vicesand temptations of society thicken: and they withdraw theattention of men from ideal and sacred aims. More and more menseem to live for labor and pleasure, for time and sense; less andless for truth and good, for God and eternity. Absorbed in thematerialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolousdiversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious agewas maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilentan epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such adiscount? But the things to which men really devote themselvesdilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come todisbelieve that for which they take no thought and make nosacrifice or investment. The average men of our time, as wellthose of the educated classes as those of the laboring classes, donot live for immortality. Therefore their faith in it diminishes. Our fathers, to a degree not common now, walked in mentalcompanionship with God, practiced solitary devotion, shaped theirdaily feelings and deeds with reference to the effect on theirfuture life. Thus that hidden life became real to them. Now theinterests and provocations of the present world, concentrated andintensified as never before the strife of aspirants, the giddyenterprises of speculation and commerce and engineering, the chaosof caucuses and newspapers and telegraphs monopolize ourfaculties and exhaust our energies, leaving us but faintinclination to attend to the solemn themes of the soul and themystic lures of infinity. To those crazed with greed, battlingwith rivals or sunk in debauchery, God naturally becomes a verbalphantom and immortality a foolish dream. There is nothing inmechanism and mammon worship, nothing in selfish sloth andlaughter, nothing in cruel oppression and drudgery, to inspirebelief in the deathless spirituality of man. Among a peopleprevailingly given over to these earthlinesses, faith in thetranscendent verities of religion perforce dies out. In the longrun the supreme devotion of the soul irresistibly moulds itsfaith. Christendom does not live in conscious sacrifices andaspirations for God and eternal life, but it lives chiefly forselfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Thereforein Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believethis decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richerand more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in afuture life is destined by concentrating attention on the presentto develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of thisworld, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existinghere, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue andblessedness now. When this shall have been done the tangential andfractional character of our experience will be so obvious, theinadequacy of the earthly state for the wants of our transcendentand prophetic faculties will be so urgent, and the supplementingadaptations of the entire unseen but clearly divined future to thecraving parts in the present will be so manifest, that a completerevelation of immortality will break upon the prepared mind of therace. Then history will take a new departure in breathingcommunion with the whole creation. But infidelity to duty and privilege does not destroy the truth ofduty and privilege. It only blinds the faithless eyes so that theycannot see the truth. If the immortality of the soul be a truth, the materialistic absorption of our life would blind us to it andmake us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide thefuture from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on thedark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlastinginvitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness ofour age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it doesnot logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test ofthe genuine evidence. The second reason for the apparent rapid crumbling away of thebelief in immortality in Christendom is the recent wide diffusionof a critical knowledge of the comparative history of the opinionsof all nations on the subject of a future life, revealing themythological character common to them, and tracking them back totheir origin in primitive superstitions no longer is their literalpurport credible to any educated intelligence. In many works bytheological writers, and by scientific writers, of free habits ofthought, like Strauss and Spencer, collections have been made ofthe fancies and theories of mankind respecting the survival of thespirit and the conditions of its experience after the death of thebody. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the mostenlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with thecrudest 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, andthe life to come in heaven or hell, back to the rude conceptionsof the naked savages who fashioned their idea of the ghost fromthe shadow or the reflection of the man, which was a picture orrepresentative of him, yet without matter, and from the phenomenaof dreams, in which they supposed the spirit of the man left himand went through the adventures of the dream and returned ere heawoke it has been asserted that every form of later faith, howeverrefined and improved in details, yet really resting on suchpuerile fancies, such incompetent and absurd beginnings, isthereby 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 incongruousmedley of physical imagery and gross imaginative pictures, conceptions of just the same character as the grotesque dreamingsof the earliest savages and the elaborate mythology of subsequentpriesthoods, we are required to treat the whole suppositious massas mere poetry or superstition, and to dismiss it from our faith. But we are by no means justified in doing so with the essentialfact itself of a future life. The essential fact, the assertion ofimmortality, may be true, even if the mythological dress be allfictitious. It does not follow that man has no surviving soulbecause the local heaven or hell, described by savage or priest asits residence, is unreal. It surely is no correct inference thatthe soul perishes with the body, because the barbarian mindgeneralized its idea of the soul from the phenomena of shadows, reflections, echoes and dreams. The critical scholar, who judgesthe case fairly, will correct the fallacies of the confusedreasoning instinct, and relegate the mythology to its properprovince, but reserve his judgment on the question itself ofspiritual survival to be settled on the only appropriate evidence. Although the habit thus formed by the critical scholar, and bythose who follow his authority, of sweeping away as whollyuntenable so many varieties of speculation, and so many groups ofimages connected with the belief in a future life, hasunquestionably contributed powerfully to foster complete disbeliefin the doctrine itself, yet it is equally unquestionable that thisprocess of negation is illogical. Many a true doctrine has beencradled in superstitions and absurdities. A faith supported bymany classes of independent arguments is not overthrown by thedisproof of one of those classes. It is as wrongful a procedure todeny the immortality of the soul because barbaric instinctgrounded it on erroneous notions and enveloped it with falsehoods, as it would be to reject the established laws of gravitation andlight and sound, for the reason that the various provisionaltheories, preceding the correct ones, were ridiculous mistakes. The problem to be solved is, Does the man who is now a soul in abody remain a soul when the body dissolves? The inadequacy orfolly of a hundred provisional answers does not affect the finalanswer. Instead of denying immortality because the childish mindof the early world feigned impossible things about it, we shouldchange the question by appeal to a more competent court, andinquire what Pythagoras, Augustine, Dante, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, Swedenborg, Goethe, thought about it. It is a questionfor the consensus of the most gifted and impartial minds, the veryAreopagus of Humanity, to decide. Furthermore, on a deeperinquiry, it seems clear that the real belief in immortality didnot originate from the contemplation of the phenomena of dreamsand shadows and echoes, but arose rather from the inexpugnableself assertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself nonexistent. This persistency of consciousness, following it in allits imaginative flights of thought beyond the death of the body, was the cause of the mythological creativeness of the barbaricmind. And thus the elaboration of the imagery of ghosts and aghostly realm was not the precursor, but the result of a belief inanother life. The belief sprang directly out of the feeling of acontinuous being unconquerably connected with human selfconsciousness, and is independent of the imagery in which it hasbeen clothed, may clothe itself in endless forms of imagery, andsurvive their removal on the discovery of their incompetence. Besides, the savage himself was, after all, not so far out of theway. His mythology was not a mere fiction concreted into fact bysuperstition. He was on that track of analogy which, when cleared, will be, perhaps, the luminous highway to universal truth. Thesavage was obscurely conscious that the objects which appearedaround him as solid material realities had their immaterialcorrespondences within his spirit. The tree, the stone, theflower, the star, the beast, the man, had within him correspondentmental images or ideas just as real as they, but without sensiblequalities, and incapable of hurt. With creative wonder herecognized a symbol or analogy of this inner world in the shadowand the reflection. The shadow or the reflection is a representationof its original, but without material substance. See, it lies there, wavering, on the rock, or in the water. Noarrow can pierce it, no club bruise it, no pestle pulverize it, nochemistry disintegrate it. It is an emblem of the immaterial andindestructible spirit, revealed in the outer world of matter, where everything changes and passes away except the noumena underthe phenomena. No wonder it stirred the brooding fancy of theignorant, but prophetic primitive man, and made it teem with poesyand personification. Freely, then, let us brush aside the mythological extravagance andirrational errors in the entire cosmopolitan doctrine of a futurelife, but beware of rejecting the fact itself of immortality untilwe have better grounds than have yet been afforded by theaccumulating insight of literary history. As the world moves on, and the human mind develops with it, the crude must give way tothe mature, and the false be replaced, not with vacancy, but withthe true. The problem of the nature and destiny of the soul willnot be solved by tearing away the fictitious drapery thrown aroundit, but by piercing to the roots of the reality within thedrapery. And now we come to the third reason for the increasing doubt anddecreasing faith in regard to a future life: that reason is thatthe form of the belief in it prevalent in Christendom has becomeincredible, and the rejection of the form has loosened the hold onthe substance. The philosophic mind, which has attained to theidea of the infinite God, without body, or parts, or passions, omnipresent in his total perfection, can reason to the belief in akindred immortality for its own finite being. But since ourexperience is here limited to the life now known, we are utterlywithout data or ability to image forth such a conception ofimmortality in any form of picture or mental scenery. There seemto be only three ways in which we can give imaginativerepresentation of a future life. The first is the method of theuniversal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as ashadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, anunsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm ofghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their formeradventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy whichis the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the restas fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those whoare unwilling to leave their thoughts of the future life in emptyrational abstraction, portray it in vivid concrete. This they doby means of the doctrine of a general bodily resurrection of thedead. It is a striking fact that four of the great historic and literaryreligions have taught the doctrine of immortality under the formof a physical resurrection, namely: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. It has been attributed, also, tothe ancient religion of Egypt, but erroneously. Its belief thereis a mere inference from facts which do not really imply it. TheEgyptians plainly believed in a series of individual reincarnations, not in any general resurrection. But it is a sufficientlyinteresting and impressive fact that over one third of the humanrace have embodied their expectation of a future eternal lifein this concrete and astonishing form. It has not rested on a basisof reason, but on one of asserted revelation and authority. Itoriginated in the fact that the only life of which we now haveany experience is a life in the body, and, therefore, this is thelife which we instinctively love and prefer; also in the factthat this is the only mode of life which we are able torepresent to ourselves in any satisfactory, apprehensible image. It then bolstered itself up by arbitrary theological theorizings, and proclaimed itself with sanctions of a pretended supernaturalauthority. Slowly the minds of its disciples were drilled to afamiliarity with it, and to a habit of implicitly believing it, which grew strong enough to make them hold to it in spite of itsdifficulty as a sheer and violent miracle having no connectionwhatever with the natural order of things. Authority and passivehabit long maintained the belief in unbroken sway. They still sosupport it in the Mohammedan world, where there is almost noscience, but little skeptical thought, and a common uniformity ofabject submission to the word of the Koran. But in Christendom itfares differently. Here, the knowledge of modern science andhabits of free inquiry are almost universally diffused. Theconsequence is, since the chief Christian belief in immortalityhas been identified with the notion of a general physicalresurrection of the dead at the last day, and since allphilosophical and scientific thinking refutes that notion bysetting its arbitrariness and monstrous abnormality in high andsteep relief against the consensus of demonstrated knowledge andmoral probability, that the popular belief of Christendom inimmortality itself is depolarized and swiftly dropping into decaywith a large class of persons. But this spread of doubt anddenial, while a natural process, is yet an illogical andunnecessary one. The competent thinker will extricate the questionof the immortality of the soul from its accidental entanglementwith the doctrine of the resurrection, and, rejecting the latteras incredible, still affirm the former on its own independentgrounds. To prove and illustrate these statements we must heregive a little additional study, fresh and independent study, tothe subject. The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is bound up with thewhole fabric of the Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic theology ofChristendom, and cannot be removed without logically shaking thatsystem of belief into pieces. And yet the doctrine, as has beenshown in a previous chapter, is unscriptural and of a purely paganorigin, the New Testament foretelling a resurrection of spiritsfrom the underworld, not of bodies from the grave. It has no realanalogies in the world, but is a figment of fancy, unsupported byreason on any authentic physical or moral grounds. It is, furthermore, a doctrine whose realization is impossible, becauseit is a self destroying absurdity. All that we need for demonstrating its absolute incredibility, issimply to ultimate its implications, carry it out in thought tothe necessary results which its ignorant originators neverforesaw. The doctrine of a physical resurrection presupposes thatour race was originally intended to be immortal on earth, and thatdeath was a penalty for sin. Fill out the theory. Adam and Eve, made male and female, were commanded to multiply and replenish theearth. Their descendants, doubling every twenty five years, would, after sixty or seventy generations had accumulated, have coveredthe whole earth so thickly that they would be packed in oneimmovable mass, the whole planet carpeted with their forms andpaved with their upturned faces. Not an inch of room on the globefor any harvest to grow or any creature to move; the world, crowded and imbedded at every point with one continuous multitudeof immortal human beings, would have then rolled around thezodiac, presenting this chronic and motionless picture, to alleternity! If it be maintained that had it not been for sin and its penalty, the successive generations would neither have died nor haveremained forever on the earth, but would have been translatedbodily to some other world, the absurdity just exposed is escapedonly to introduce another one equally glaring. For in time, theentire solid contents of the globe would thus be removed, and thedisappearance of our planet unhinge the solar system and produce ageneral cataclysm. The solid contents of the earth have beenestimated at about thirty nine trillions of cubic feet. Seventyfive doublings of the primal pair would reach to over seventytrillions of human beings, each containing more than a solid cubicfoot. It is perfectly clear, therefore, in any view, that the only wayin which the human race, with their reproductive constitution, could permanently inhabit the world is by the present system ofsuccessive births and deaths; a system, furthermore, which scienceshows to have been in working existence among the preceding racesof creatures for innumerable ages before the mythical sin of Adamand Eve, with its mythical consequences. The fabulous scheme of an intended bodily immortality on the earthis a discordant and disagreeable one in every respect, asthetic, rational, and moral. It jars incongruously with the great order ofnature and providence, which everywhere interpolates a nightbetween two days, a sleep between two wakings, to keep the edge ofconsciousness fresh and the possibilities of pleasure alive. Imprisoned in this carcass of flesh with its ignoble necessitiesfor endless ages, the contemplation of the fearful burden ofmonotony would be insufferable to any one who had thought the caseout in all its details with vivid realization. And yet, sounthinking are most persons in regard to the conventional beliefsprevalent in society, Parsees, Jews, Christians and Mohammedans, professedly base their entire faith in immortality on this dogmawith the resurrection involved in it. When carried out in its particulars by the imagination, thedoctrine is self evidently untenable, contradictory to theessential facts of human nature under the given conditions of thematerial creation. It had its theologic birth in the speculationsof the dualistic religion of Persia, whence it was first borrowedby the Jews, then secondarily adopted into Christianity, andthence finally impacted into the mongrel creed of Mohammed and hisfollowers. It is philosophically irreconcilable with a puremonotheism; for, if God be infinite, no enemy could subvert hisoriginal scheme and force Him to an arbitrary miracle to restoreit. It is a creaking and dissonant artifice, every way repugnantto all whose reason and sentiment have learned to love the smoothand continuous evolution of the order of the cosmos and theconnected destinies of conscious beings. It is absolutely refutedby the double reductio ad absurdum shown above to be contained init. Yet, while the grounds on which the common belief in a destinedgeneral resurrection of the dead rests have really lost theirvalidity to the mind of the nineteenth century, the millions ofIslam and Christendom retain the article unchanged in theircreeds, and to question it is a heresy. No wonder skepticismflourishes and genuine faith decays. This clinging to an outgrownscheme is not only from the strong drift of a passive mentalconformity, as the train of cars keeps on for some time after thedynamic locomotive has been taken off. Another reason is that thetenet is so centrally imbedded in the dogmatic ecclesiasticismthat it cannot be extricated without involving all the associateddogmas. Therefore, one portion of this knowing generation repeatthe formula and blink the difficulties, while another portion goover to open disbelief of any future life. The doctrine of theliteral resurrection of the body from the grave is incredible tothe educated and free intelligence of the age. In continuing toaffirm it ecclesiastical Christendom brands itself with frivolity, not earnest enough to carry its thought in loyalty to truth as faras possible, or with hypocrisy, consciously dishonest to itsdoubts. It is a precious boon to be rid of such an unnatural and ominousbelief as that in the final disemboguing of the dead by sea andland, the tumbling of the rocks, the falling of the stars, and theeverlasting torture of the condemned in a prison of fire. Farbetter than any such doctrine is a calm confronting of the mysteryof the future in its confessed secrecy as it is, and a peacefulresignation to the will of God in conscious ignorance and trust. And yet the believer in this scheme of colossal and ghastlynecromancy, when confronted with the unanswerable argumentsagainst it, is sometimes found clinging to it with willfultenacity, and bitterly complaining of those who refute it, thatthey would rob him of his faith and give him nothing in exchange. Suppose a man to believe that in the year nineteen hundred theearth will be exploded, and that all men, except himself and thelittle clique of his friends, will be strung for eternity on a redhot iron wire in empty space. Suppose that this horrid notion isclearly proved to him to be an error. Then, because he is nottaught exactly what will happen in the year nineteen hundred, he, the unhappy man, assails his enlightener for having robbed him ofhis faith and given him nothing in exchange! Is not the truth ofignorance better than the falsity of superstition? Modest faith infront of the shrouded unknown can well stand comparison with thearrogant and incompetent exultation of fanaticism. In regard tothat belated relic of the belief in magic, the doctrine of theliteral resurrection of the dead in their fleshy bodies, let usgratefully wipe it all out and draw a long breath of relief. Letus rejoice to know that the will of God will be done in thefulfilling order of the universe, although we may now be ignorantof precisely what that will is. Believing the will of God to begood, whether revealed or concealed, we can afford to wait inpeace, trying in the meantime to carry our individual characterand our social state and experience here steadily towardperfection. Surely, that is the best way to prepare ourselves forwhatever lies beyond. And yet we are not wholly shut up to mere blind faith. There isalways some ground of moral truth in every widely extendeddogmatic belief. In casting off the dogma we should carefullyextract its moral purport and try to give it a more authenticsetting. It will not be hard to do this with reference to thedoctrine now under consideration. Obscure and complicated and baffling as the problem of our futuredestiny is, we can already trace many a line of light, many aprophetic signal and hint suggestive of what is ordained to happento the individual and the race. Unquestionably, the genuine moral reason why the belief in thefleshly resurrection has been so general and tenacious is the twofold consideration: first; that we desire our future life to be anincarnate life because our experience makes that form of beingrealizable and precious to our imagination, while a disembodiedghostliness is, perforce, repulsively vacant and abstract; and, secondly because our affection and our imagination and ourconscience profoundly crave the complete fulfillment of the schemeof the historic career of collective humanity in this world insome such manner, that here, on this dear old earth, theexperience of our whole race may be brought to a clear epicalunity, and may close with an illuminating justification ofprovidence in the sight of all men, who shall then read theinterpretation of their entire past, and see together eye to eye. Now we believe that the essence of this natural desire and thissublime hope is a divine prophecy which shall be fulfilled. Webelieve that in the very falsity of the doctrine of a carnalresurrection and judgment there lurks a truth yet to break out inoverwhelming refulgence and perfectly satisfy every soul of man. But it will be brought about by the gradual culmination of themeans and processes which God is now visibly carrying forward, andnot by any sudden convulsion of miracle. The faculties of human consciousness in the individual and therace are in process of development. Also the transmissible sum ofknowledge, on which those faculties employ themselves, is inprocess of rapid increase. The faculties of knowledge possessed byan accomplished master of literature and science now, contrastedwith those of a cannibal savage of the pre glacial epoch, revealan advance which hardly needs to be repeated in order to give us acomprehension of the whole experience of our kind on earth, quiteample to explain the facts of the case and solve the problem ofour destiny. The grasp of our intelligence and the richness of oursensibility increase along the ages. The generalizations of ourphilosophy grow wider, the gropings of our sympathetic faithbecome vaster, the retrospection and the prevision of our sciencekeener and longer and more inclusive, every generation. It is verysignificant that the further away we get from the prehistorictimes the more we learn about them. Archaology is one of thelatest and most swiftly enlarging branches of knowledge. Let theprocesses thus indicated go on, as they have gone on and are withaccelerated pace going on, and the date is not beyond prophecywhen all earthly and human secrets will be solved, and theirmysteries be revealed, and the autobiographic book and volume ofthe world be opened, and the universal tribunal be set in thelight of every life, and the irreversible judgment be declared, bythe simple revelation of the truth of history in the web of itsrelations. For as every atom of matter is conjoined by all thelaws of nature with all other atoms of matter, and the history ofall their adventures is registered by their own indestructiblevibrations in the elemental spaces of the universe where they runtheir career, so every identity of spirit is conjoined by all thelaws of spirit with all other spirits, and all their deeds andsufferings are ineffaceably self registered in their reactionsupon the authors, in the pictures they shed upon space, and theinfluences they set rolling through the eternity of successivesouls and lives. All, then, that is needed for a perfectlyvindicating judgment is the awakening of consciousness to the fullview of the facts. And the tendencies are powerfully moving inthat direction. What was the illumination of Swedenborg but thetaking possession by his consciousness of the unconscious lowernervous system, with all its impacted ancestral experiences andwondrous relations with the visible and invisible worlds? And thismay be repeated, by and by, and be perfected, and become common. What may result is as yet almost inconceivable. Let us trace alittle, in this regard, the connections of the individual and theface, and follow out some of their implications. Suppose that in turn every child born begets or bears twochildren. Then in the thirtieth generation the transmittedqualities of spirit, nerve and blood, of the single original pairof parents will be represented in upwards of one thousand millionsof descendants. It is clear from this law, allowing for alldeviations from its numerical progression on account of intermarriages and of failures of offspring, how powerfully and swiftlythe ever multiplying streams of consanguinity are spreading inevery direction, affiliating and fraternizing the whole human raceliterally into one family, the innumerable rills of separatedescent intermingling as they flow on, and finally diffusing overthe earth in that oceanic unity of humanity, which, when full, will beat with the tidal pulse of a single sympathy. It isbelieved by many that no experience of any living creature is everlost, but is by its own spontaneous and exact reflex vibrationseither registered in the conscious memory or deposited in theunconscious 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 hisprogeny the possibility of reviving into consciousness, when theproper conditions shall be furnished, the accumulated sum of allthat has happened throughout the entire line of his ancestry. Andagain, imagine that all the souls composing the human race each ofwhich is a substantial and indestructible entity, livingincarnated over and over, and not a mere phenomenal process thatvanishes into nothing with the dissolution of the body are solimited in number that they may be embodied on the earth in onegeneration, whose members shall be so conjoined in knowledge andfellowship that the life of the whole is concentrated in everyone, 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 adevelopment which enables them to grasp in distinct consciousnessthe collective sum of the organic heritage of the race, each onereading with perfect clearness in every particular the completehistory of humanity from the beginning to the end, understandingall its causes, courses and consequences, and beholding withunspeakable delight the justification of the ways of God, thewhole universe opening into free intercommunication, as if timeand space were either no more or else their measures were ofboundless subjective elasticity, every creature found in peace andrapture at the goal of his destiny. That, indeed, would be arealization of the day of judgment and the resurrection of thedead, but without a shock or a jar in the course of things whichscience reveals. The process of development now going on, ifcarried far enough, will naturally result in this or in somethingequivalent to it; while the notion of the vomiting forth of theaccumulated dead from land and sea, at the blast of a trumpet, isa wild piece of imagery, borrowed from startling politicalphenomena, and applied with absurd incongruity to the chronicprovidence of God. The former view contains all the moralsignificance of the latter, but without its violation ofprobability. Nor is it all necessary that the climax shall bebrought about of a simultaneous universal judgment, or of theappearance of our whole race on the earth at one time. The givingof the vision to souls subjectively, one after another, in theorder of their attainment of the conditions, would meet everyrequirement of the case. To each one in turn, wherever he was, asthe result broke on him in the ecstatic glory of all it means, theessence of the so long cherished faith of Christendom would bejustified, and the providential theater and scenery of humanexperience would appear under its illumination as a dazzlingvision of poetic justice perfect at every point. Marvelous and almost incredible as this scheme of thought mayseem, it is not more mysterious in itself, or more staggering inits demand on our faith, than many things successively were whichare now established beyond a doubt such as the telegraphicconversation of men through the ocean and around the globe; theseven hundred and thirty three thousand millions of etherealvibrations in a second, which cause the report of the violet rayin consciousness; the transcendent disclosures of the spectrumanalysis; the conception of gravitation as a force which holds allmatter in unbroken union, and acts throughout the stellar universewith timeless simultaneity. It is in entire keeping witheverything else in the workings of God, as demonstrated byscience, on every hand, both in nature and history. The atomictheory and the nebular hypothesis, the chemical crucible and themathematical calculus, the microscope and the telescope discoverto our senses and our reason, wherever we look, facts asmysterious to the understanding, and as baffling to theimagination as any of the foregoing implications; showing us, inevery department of nature and experience, the bewilderingmiracles of the infinitely little and the infinitely great exactlybalanced and perpetually passing into one another. There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of theprimitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of theChristian and Parsee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which theimagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, hasconcreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine oftransmigration. A striking feature and no slight recommendation ofthe foregoing view of the true meaning of the dogma of theresurrection is that it reconciles these two chief forms of thebelief in immortal life. For resurrection and transmigration agreein the central point of a restoration of the disembodied soul to anew bodily existence, only the former represents this as a singlecollective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of God at theclose of the earthly drama, the latter depicts it as constantlytaking place in the regular fulfillment of the divine plan in thecreation. This difference is certainly, to a scientific andphilosophical thinker, who reasons on the data of nature andexperience and not on the dicta of theologians, strongly in favorof the Oriental theory. We have no experience whatever of anygeneral resurrection, but all experience is full of the constantappearances of souls in freshly created bodies throughout thescale of sentient being. If our final future life is to be abodily 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 reasonfor the resurrection holds with at least equal force fortransmigration. The argument from analogy is especially strong. Itis natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnatedlife that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety ofsouls finding in the variety of worlds an everlasting series ofadventures, 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 ofrecollection of past lives is no disproof of their actuality. Every night we lose all knowledge of the past, but every day wereawaken to a memory of the whole series of days and nights. So inone life we may forget or dream, and in another recover the wholethread of experience from the beginning. In every event, it must be confessed that of all the thoughtfuland refined forms of the belief in a future life none has had soextensive and prolonged a prevalence as this. It has the vote ofthe majority, having for ages on ages been held by half of thehuman race with an intensity of conviction almost without aparallel. Indeed the most striking fact, at first sight, about thedoctrine of the repeated existences of the soul incarnated indifferent organisms, its form and experience in each successiveembodiment being determined by its merits and demerits in thepreceding ones, is the constant reappearance of the faith in it inall parts of the world, and its permanent hold on certain greatnations. The ancient civilization of Egypt, whose contrastedsplendors and horrors awaken astonishment more and more with eachstep in the progressive decipherment of its mysterious record, seems largely to have grown out of this faith. The swarmingmillions of India also, through the chief periods of theirhistory, have lain under its spell, suffered their lives, wroughttheir great works of government, architecture, philosophy, andpoetry, and in its belief meditated, aspired, and exhaled theirsouls. Ruder forms of it are reported among innumerable barbarictribes. It played an important part in the speculations of theearly Fathers of the Christian Church, and has often cropped outin the works of later theologians. Men of the profoundestmetaphysical genius, like Scotus Erigena and Leibnitz, haveaffirmed it, and sought to give it a logical or scientific basis. And even amidst the predominance of skeptical and materialisticinfluences in Europe and America, at the present time, weconstantly meet individuals with independent minds who earnestlybelieve the alluring dogma. For, to a large and varied class ofminds, the doctrine holds a transcendent attraction as well as amanifold plausibility. Another striking fact connected with this doctrine is that itseems to be a native and ineradicable growth of the Orientalworld; but appears in the Western world only in scatteredinstances, and rather as an exotic form of thought. In the growingfreedom and liberality of thought, which no less than its doubtand denial, now characterize Christendom, it seems as if the fulltime had come for a greater mental and asthetic hospitality on thepart of Christians towards Hindus. The advocates of theresurrection should not confine their attention to the repellentor the ludicrous aspects of metempsychosis, but do justice to itsclaim and its charm. The Pantheistic tendency which possessed andoverwhelmed the Brahminic mind, shaping and tinging its viewsopened the whole range of sentient existences to an indiscriminatesympathy, and made the idea of transmigration natural, and morepleasing than repugnant. Furthermore, the Brahminic thinkers andsages were a distinct class of men whose whole lives were absorbedin introspective reveries and metaphysical broodings calculated tostimulate the imagination and arouse to the keenest consciousnessall the latent marvels and possibilities of human experience, thusfurnishing the most favorable conditions for exactly such a beliefas that of transmigration, an endless series of ever varyingadventures for the imperishable soul. And the vast swarms of thecommon people in the East are the passive followers of this highcaste of thinkers, abjectly accepting what they teach. Accordingly, the mysterious doctrine of the metempsychosis hasheld the entire mind, sentiment and civilization of the East, through every period of its history, as with an irreversiblespell. The persistent practice of various modes of profound andrhythmical breathing by which the Brahmins perfect theirrespiration, and the keen and sustained concentration of theirattention on their inner states, tend at the same time to heightenthe richness and intensity of the cerebral nerves, to unify theconnections of the lower nerve centres with them, and to fuse theunconscious physiological processes with the consciouspsychological processes. Then the persevering disuse andsuppression of the action of their outer senses cause the objectsof the material world around them to seem more vague and dreamythan the impressions of the ideal world within. And so the earthwith all its affairs seems an illusion, while their own unsoughttrains of thought, feeling and imagery the rich mental panorama ofpictures and events, are taken for a series of substantialrevelations of the universe of being. An irresistible belief inpreexistence, immortality and transmigration, results. On the contrary, in the Western world, the characteristictendencies are all different. Pantheistic theories are rarelyheld, and the dreams and emotions which those theories are fittedto feed are foreign and repulsive. An impassible barrier isimagined separating humanity from every other form of being. Speculative reason, imagination and affection, are chieflyemployed in scientific studies and social pursuits, or personalschemes, external rather than internal. This absorption inmaterial things and evanescent affairs engenders in the spirit anarid atmosphere of doubt and denial, in which no efflorescence ofpoetic and mystic faiths can flourish. Thus, while the outwardutilities abound, hard negations spread abroad; and living, personal apprehension of God, of an all pervasive Providence, andof the immortality of the soul in any form, dies out either inopen infidelity or in a mere verbal acceptance of the establishedcreed of society. Consequently, to the average mind of the modernWestern world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a merefancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strangepoetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical andreligious quality. The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strongresemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beingswith the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the sensesin common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence andwill. They all seem created after one plan, as if their varietieswere the gradulations of a single original type. We recognizekindred forms of experience and modes of expression in ourselvesand 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 ofhis eyes, it is not difficult to fancy him some ancient Brahmintransmigrated to this, and patiently awaiting his release. Nor isit incongruous with our reason or moral feeling to suppose thatthe cruel monsters of humanity may in a succeeding birth find thefit penalty for their degradation and crime, in the horrid life ofa crocodile or a boa constrictor. The conception of a series of connected lives also furnishes aplausible explanation for many mysteries in our presentexperience. Reference is made to all that class of phenomenacovered by the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. Faces previouslyunseen, and localities unvisited, awaken in us a vivid feeling ofa long familiarity with them. Thoughts and emotions, not hithertoentertained, come to us as if we had welcomed and dismissed them athousand times in periods long gone by. Many an experience, apparently novel and untried, makes us start as at the shadowyreminder of something often known before. The supposition offorgotten lives preceding the present, portions of whoseconsciousness reverberate and gleam through the veils of thoughtand sense, seems to throw satisfactory light on this strangedepartment of experience. Much more weighty and penetrative, however, than the foregoingconsiderations is the philosophical argument in behalf oftransmigration, drawn from the nature of the soul. Consciousnessbeing in its very essence the feeling of itself, the conscioussoul can never feel itself annihilated, even in thought it onlyloses the knowledge of its being when it lapses into unconsciousness, as in sleep or trance. The soul may indeed think of its ownannihilation but cannot realize the thought in feeling, since the fainter emotional reflex upon the idea of itsdestruction is instantly contradicted and over borne by the moremassive and vivid sense of its persistent being in immediateconsciousness. This incessant self assertion of consciousness atonce suggests the idea of its being independent of the changingand vanishing body in which it is temporarily shrined. Then theconception naturally follows that the soul, as it has onceappeared in human form, so it may reappear indefinitely in any ofthe higher or lower forms of being which compose the hierarchy ofthe universe. The eternity of the soul, past and future, onceaccepted by the mind, leads directly to the construction of thewhole scheme of metempsychosis an everlasting succession of birthsand deaths, disembodiments and reembodiments, with their laws ofpersonality and fortunes of time and space weaving the boundlessweb of destiny and playing the endless drama of providence. But the strongest support of the theory of transmigration is thehappy moral solution it seems to give to the problem of the darkand distressing inequality and injustice which otherwise appear sopredominant in the experience of the world. To the superficialobserver of human life the whole scene of struggle, sin andsorrow, nobleness and joy, triumph and defeat, is a tangled mazeof inconsistencies, a painful combination of violent discords. Butif we believe that every soul, from that of the lowest insect tothat of the greatest archangel, forms an affiliated member of theinfinite family of God, and is eternal in its conscious essence, perishable only as to its evanescent disguises of unconsciousincarnation; that every act of every creature is followed by itslegitimate reactions; that these actions and reactions constitutea law of retribution absolutely perfect; that these souls, withall their doings and sufferings are interconnected with oneanother, and with the whole, all whose relationships copenetrateand cooperate with mutual influences whose reports are infallibleand with lines of sequence that never break, then the bewilderingmaze becomes a vindicated plan, the horrible discord a divineharmony. What an explication it gives of those mysteries of evil, pain, sorrow and retribution, which often wrap the innocent andthe wicked in one sad fate, if we but see that no individualstands alone, but trails along with him the unfinished sequels ofall ancestral experience, and, furthermore, is so bound up withhis simultaneous race that each is responsible for all and all foreach, and that no one can be wholly saved or safe until all areredeemed and perfected! Then every suffering we endure for faultsnot our own, the consequence of the deeds of others, assumes aholy light and a sublime dignity, associating us with that greatsacrament of atoning pain whereof the crucified Christ is not theexclusive instance but the representative head. The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of theresurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciledwith the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some avery fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it isso. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It isadvanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true, as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of historyand the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are sowonderful, the method of it is so rational, the region ofcontemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, theprospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, thatthe study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublimescope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindicationof providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of thelittleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes iteasier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have everknown. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destinyto seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty ofthe powers of the mind which can conceive such things. Aftertraversing the grounds here set forth we feel that if the viewbased on them be not the truth, it must be because God has inreserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner than ourbrightest dream hitherto. The worthiest theory of the fate of manwhich the spirit of man can construct must either be a revelatorydivination of the truth, or an inadequate attempt to grasp thedesign of the Creator in its true glory. It is impious and absurdto hold that man can think out a scheme superior to the one Godhas decreed. And it seems equally unreasonable to suppose that thescheme of God for the future stages of our career is one which hasno hints in our present experience. Certainly it appears morelikely that the sequel will be discovered by the logicalcompletion of the inwrought order which has been slowly unfoldingfrom the first. And what do history and prophecy show more plainlythan the tendency to a convergence of all humanity in every man?Spreading consanguinity in descent and growth of sympatheticknowledge both point to this. Perfect this in each man, andilluminate his whole organism and its relations with adequateintelligence, and we have a true resurrection, not indeed ofdecayed bodies from the grave, but of historic states ofconsciousness 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 etherealmedium into perceptions of light, heat, sound, and so interprettheir contents and extract their tidings. It is not impossiblethat in a coming stage of development we may obtain additionalsenses; our spirits may command the means of translating intocorrespondent states of consciousness all the other modes ofvibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimitedknowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The wholeuniverse may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of alldeeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power torecover and read its own. As each generation is the inheritor of the preceding ones, all ofwhich from the first prolong their existence into the last inunbroken continuity of historic conduct and responsibility, justice may at the ripened period be naturally summed up withoutany miracle. We all are projections of our ancestors. Theyproperly in us suffer and enjoy in accordance with what has flowedfrom their lives. The whole of this, lighted up with consciousnessat last, may be the real meaning of the burden of the spirit givento the apostle Paul, but misinterpreted by him into the mechanicoscenic scheme of the Judaized Christian Church. For when themighty influx struck the brain of the persecuting zealot, revolutionizing his life, it came into connection with all theinflamed theories and convictions so deeply drilled therein by hisPharisaic education. These convictions, partly of a mere local andtransient character, associated with legends of Adam and Abrahamand the under world and Christ and the sky, mixed with the trueand universal import of the higher inspiration now given him, caused his misconstrual of its message, and stamped the purelyhuman and providential meaning of the doctrine of the resurrectionwith the rabbinical die of a politico mythological dogma. If thiswere so, it is not the only instance in which the preexistentdiscolorations in the mind of an inspired prophet have refractedthe truth of his burden into distorted error and bequeathed thetask of a future rectification when more light shall have come. In the next place, we come to the fourth reason for the growingdoubts and disbelief of our day in immortality. It is theremarkable diffusion of the habits of thought engendered by thestudy of materialistic science. The authority of physical sciencehas been rapidly encroaching on and displacing the authority ofthe church theology and sectarian creeds. Belief in invariablelaws has undermined belief in miracle and supernatural revelation. Those who had been taught that the resurrection of Christ was theonly adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, learning todeny the former, have naturally proceeded to question the latter. For in such matters the real implications of logic are littlenoticed. The religious skepticism nourished by physical science isin all respects really as irrational and baseless as it is actual. For example, the resurrection of Christ, admitting it to be afact, did not create the immortality it was considered toillustrate. If he rose, it was because men are immortal, and menare not immortal because he rose. If he did not rise, men areimmortal all the same, provided human immortality be a truth; ifit be not a truth, the resurrection of Christ would be an isolatedabnormal event without any logical validity on the question. Thetruth or falsity of human immortality, therefore, is a question ofthe creative plan of God and the essential nature of man, to bedecided on the intrinsic evidences, and cannot logically beaffected one way or the other by any individual historicoccurrence limited to a certain time and place. Yet it is apractical necessity that any great popular faith, if it rests onauthority, will be shocked and weakened by everything which shocksand weakens that authority, no matter how adventitious it is. Ifone cannot believe in the preternatural resurrection of Christ, that surely is no valid reason for denying the natural immortalityof the soul, but only a good reason for seeking to learn if therebe not adequate grounds for this faith quite independent ofscripture text and priestly assertion. Precisely the same reasoning holds in relation to the doubts aboutspiritual realities bred in the minds of those whose studies areconversant exclusively with material realities. The professors ofphysical science, thoroughly familiarized with things whichcombine and dissolve, often come to fancy that everything isphenomenal and evanescent, that there is no immaterial substance, that spirit is not entity but process, that thought and feelingand will are mere transient functions of transient matter. Thusall faith in the individuality of mind is pulverized at thefountain head. There can be no question but that such is thecommon influence of a constant contemplation of the physicalaspects alone of physical things. Mentality, consciousness, isregarded as the prismatic bow in the cloud, a spectral show thatappears and vanishes, with no permanent substance. At the presenttime, in Christendom, the one conquering power in literature, theone fascinating absorption of thought in society, is thatconnected with the cultivation of physical science. Its prestigeis overwhelming. Its prevalent methods and results give amaterialistic turn of interpretation to the popular mind upon allsubjects. The direct consequence, among that class of minds whoput physical science above theology, is the spreading disavowal ofall belief in the immortality of the soul. The fallacy is obvious, and the remedy is simple, if there be at hand but enough of modestcandor and patience fairly to weigh the facts of the case in thescales of a sound logic. In the first place, by the very structure of our being, by thevery necessity of our experience, the universe is divided into twoirreconcilable classes of realities, namely, spiritual subjectsand material objects. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, volitions, all qualities of mind, all states of consciousness, areabsolutely immaterial. They are more real to us, that is to say, they more inexpugnably assert and maintain themselves, thanmaterial things do: and it is only hopeless vulgarity andincompetence of thinking which can ever confuse or merge them withmaterial things. Matter is that which proves itself to spirit bythe effects it produces on spirit. Spirit is that which is its ownevidence. The center of consciousness in us is its own proof ofits own being, and all that occurs within it is its own proof, andis unsusceptible of any other or foreign demonstration. Hope, fear, love, imagination, reason, are absolutely unthinkable asforms of material substance, however exquisitely refined andexalted. There is no conceivable community of being between asentiment and an atom, a gas and an aspiration, an idea of truthin the soul and any mass of matter in space. Each of these facts, conscious thought and material extension, has its own incommunicableand incomparable sphere of being and laws of action, which can beconfused only by ignorance and sophistry. So clear has this become to all profound reflection, that the ablestsupporters of the theory of evolution, with all their preponderantbias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words ofHerbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking ofspirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the termsof spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give anidealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialisticinterpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despitethe fallacious influences of habit to the contrary, that noprogress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount ofinduction and generalization as to the composition or decompositionof material bodies, can throw any new light or darkness on thenature and destiny of the immaterial soul. The incessant flux of phenomena constructing and destroying apparentthings, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing butmirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence ofspiritual identity. To force it to discredit our claim to a divinedescent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. Thequestion must be snatched back from the assumption of the retortand crucible, the observational and numerical methods of thephysical realm, and relegated to the legitimate tests of the moraland metaphysical realm. Again, there is furnished in the results of the study of physicalscience itself, as pursued by its most gifted masters, a gloriousoverthrow and neutralization of the moral and religious doubtscalled out in its shallower votaries by their absorption in itsmore superficial phases. The scientific men of the most profoundintellectual power and the most brilliant original genius, thesupreme heads of chemistry, dynamics and mathematics, have appliedto the phenomena of the material creation modes of observation andinstruments of reasoning before whose compelling efficacy thewhole frowning vastitude of the outer universe melts into idealpoints of force and forms of law. Everything in time and space isreduced to molecular vibrations, regulated by the mentalconceptions of number, weight and measure. The reasonings of suchmen as Oersted and Faraday on electricity and magnetism; of SirWilliam Thomson and Clerk Maxwell on thermodynamics; the theoriesof the greatest mathematicians, grasping all things in heaven andearth with their irresistible calculus, literally using infinitesas toys, creating imaginary quantities, and, going through certainoperations with them, actually discovering new truths in the soliddomain of reality yield conceptions of order, beauty andsublimity, and emotions of wonder, awe and delight, nowhere elsesurpassed. They exalt the spectacle of nature into a vision ofpoetic intelligence, and show the theorizing mind of man to beakin to the creating mind of God. Thus, if skepticism as to thedeathless royalty of soul is bred in the physicist who constantlystoops with the scalpel and the microscope, it is offset in himwho, with as steady a judgment, soars to the contemplation of theethereal medium with its lines of force traversing immensity andvibrating timelessly along their whole length, loaded, for thosewho can interpret them, with tidings of all that happens. Insteadof spirit being materialized, matter is spiritualized and naturetransfigured into the ideal home of ideal entities. Dumas, yearsago, asserted that hydrogen gas is but an etherealized metal. Justnow, it is said, Pictet has succeeded, under a pressure of sixhundred and fifty atmospheres, in actually crystallizing oxygenand hydrogen. One has only to read such papers as those of Stalloon the fundamental concepts of science to learn that if matter ormind is ever to be lost, it will not be mind. But there remains a more direct and more important way ofcorrecting the dismal or defiant doubts of immortality caused bythe inferior phases of materialistic study; and that is, bybringing up to a correspondent fullness and intensity the counteractivity of the ideal powers. Let justice be done to the subjectas well as to the object. Over against the watching of clouds andwaves, the sorting of herbs, the weighing of metals, the measuringof quantities, bring up the exercise of the mind on the treasuresof qualitative substance in its own proper sphere of reason andlove and faith. Admire the beautiful, love the good, obey thetrue, worship the right, aspire to the highest, subordinate orsacrifice everything base or wrong in a generous service of duty, and thus nourish a consciousness of those ontological relations bywhich the soul is rooted in the Godhead, and stimulate thatintuitive efflorescence of faith which grows out of progressivefulfillment and which prophecies perpetuity of fulfillment. To saythe least, the subject is as real as the object, the contemplatingfaculty as valid as the phenomenon it confronts. The teachings ofthe soul rightly construed are as authentic as the teachings ofnature. And, some day in the future, a complete system of truthdeveloped from the central principle of the one by the subjectivemethod will be found to correspond perfectly with the completesystem of truth developed by the objective method from the centralprinciple of the other. As the objective scientific principle isthe persistence of force, the subjective scientific principle isthe potential infinity of individual spirit, each one theequivalent of the all. What else than this can be the ultimatemeaning of the primal, universal, indestructible antithesis ordual classification of being, the ego and the non ego, self andnot self, the former including each individual in his ownapprehension, the latter including all besides? There is a philosophical authority which, for those incompetent tojudge for themselves, should properly take the place vacated bythe ecclesiastical authority, which, in our day, is plainly on thewane. Multitudes no longer believe in the immortality of theirsouls on the ground of the resurrection of Christ, or theassertion of Scripture or creed. Shall they, then, deny italtogether because the materialistic band clamor that it is adelusion, and they themselves see no sufficient evidence for it?There is a more appropriate alternative. Many theories in naturalphilosophy have been exploded by the proof of their absurdity, andthe correct explanations are accepted on trust by the multitudesincompetent to master their logical and mathematical grounds. Veryfew understand the proofs of the chief laws of nature, but thevast majority of men implicitly trust the assertions of those whodo know them. In like manner there is a legitimate sphere forauthority in moral and religious beliefs; only it should be theauthority of the competent and disinterested. Now, it is a factthat the very greatest philosophers who have ever lived, thepreeminently imperial thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Anselm, Hegel, and the resplendent group of their peers, haveasserted as a necessary principle the real being and eternalsubstantiality of the soul. Besides all the combinations of matterthat dissolve, all the phenomena that pass, they affirm theexistence of enduring entities, individual spirits, thinkersconscious of their thoughts. In central calm, far within thestruggle and vex of the rolling elements, throned in its ownserene realm of law, lives the free, conscious soul, and will liveeternally, actualizing its potentialities. Nothing candisintegrate it, because it is not an aggregate but a unity, not aquantitative mass of matter, but a spaceless monad of power. It isa closed circuit of thinking activity, impenetrable to everythingelse. Spirits are the only solids, matter being endlesslypenetrable and transmutable. We are all obliged to think of ourselves as entities, and not asmere phenomenal series of states. There must be a substratum forthe affections of consciousness. All changes are changes ofsomething. It is true there is a mystery involved here which nowords can make clear; yet the more deeply one thinks and feels themore intense will be his assurance that there is something in himwhich thinks and feels, or rather that he himself is a somethingwhich thinks and feels. The best conception we can get of the soulis that it is a subject which is its own object and a mirror forthe inner reflection of all other objects. God is not an object, because He is the actualized infinite Subject. His thoughts areconcrete creations, the objective realities of the universephenomenal and substantial. We are actually finite subjects, butwith a potential infinity, patterned in free correspondence withHim. Our thoughts are subjective reflections of His, modified bythe contents of our facultative constitution and the peculiaritiesof our historic experience. What constitutes my soul is thepotentiality of all states of consciousness, actual and latent, past, present and future. It reveals itself to me, so to speak, inmy actual thoughts and feelings. So far as these are true andgood, they correspond with and represent the will of God, and mustshare the fortunes of the Divine Reality with which they areimplicitly joined. Then my soul cannot be annihilated unless thewill of God is so far annihilated. But God is infinite being, andthere is nothing outside of or counter to infinite being todestroy it. All evil is but defect or negation. I am only in sofar as I am positive reality. Nothing of me, therefore, can everperish, except my imperfections; and the thought of the perishingof imperfections is a thought of joy. Welcome, then, be theapproach of death which shall cleanse and dislimit me intounimprisonable divineness of being, the crystalline sphere of pureintelligence and immortality! The only real proof of immortality in the sight of the intellect, is the perception of the necessity of self determining entities asthe causes and grounds of the facts of experience. A series ofstates implies something of which they are states. There seems tobe no possible explanation or understanding of the phenomena whichconfront our experience without the conception of ultimateindividualities, indestructible subject objects, centers ofspiritual activity, monistic selfhoods, conscious egos, each ofwhich distinguishes itself from every other, and contrasts itselfwith the All. Now it is claimed that every thinker who reaches thematurest stage of thought attains to this insight. It is theimperial mark of a certain stage of knowledge. Here the supremethinkers, sceptered with final perception of the truth of theirown eternity, sit at ease, enthroned in the serene and lucid realmof law, beyond the reach of the dark tempest of cavils and doubts. And there is a larger company who on easier terms have attainedthe same result. For, without this wearisome metaphysical hewingof conclusions from the quarries of ontology, the good and pure, who, in their loving obedience and aspiration, keep the harmonicquickness and innocence of their intuitions uninjured, also havean unshaken assurance that they live in God and shall share hislife forevermore. The mystics of every period seem in feeling tohave an immediate grasp of all that the greatest philosophers havepainfully conquered by speculation. These two classes may claim topossess direct certitude of eternal life. All others must eitherattain to the stage of development and mount of vision of these, or receive the faith on their authority, or else be subject todoubt and unbelief. To accept the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on theauthority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints, is alegitimate procedure perfectly in keeping with what the human racedoes in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable ofproving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easilyappreciate and make practical application of the truths they haveaffirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains arescientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules areimplicitly followed by the common multitude. One form orreceptacle of authority after another may be superseded; butauthority itself always remains. And the true course for those topursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, orchurch creed, or the resurrection of Christ, as a proof of thefuture life of man, is not at once to abandon all belief in afuture state, but to accept the guidance of the most competentindependent thinkers in place of that of the most arbitrarydogmatists. For unto all who do not arrogate to themselves atranscendent competency to judge, the general consensus of thethought and feeling of the world, clarified and interpreted by thefittest few, will always be a grateful ground of reliance andtrust. And the verdict thus revealed is unequivocally in favor ofthe doctrine of immortality. There can be no changes independently of something which ischanged. Amidst all the changeable in us which passes and isforgotten, there is something which stays and is inexpugnable. Itis our identity. That which appears in consciousness first, whichrecurs oftenest, and which persists longest, is the most validobject of belief. And what is that but the very consciousness, orthe subject as its own object? Surely, the one invariableaccompaniment of all the shifting states of consciousness is thebare essential consciousness itself: this is, so to speak, theunitary vessel containing all their varieties. This unquestionablyexists now. The burden of proof, then, as Bishop Butler long agoshowed, is on those who affirm its destruction in the article ofdeath. Consciousness is purely immaterial, as every one who haspassed beyond the most ignorant and childish stages of thoughtmust see. Merely because it is, in our present experience, associated in time and space with a material organism, thereforeto declare that it is a dependent production of matter, or atransient concomitant of the transient body, is a gratuitousassertion with not one scintilla of evidence. Even, for the moment, admitting it to be true that no argument ofirresistible cogency has yet been advanced to prove theimmortality of the soul, it is certain that no proof has everbeen given of its mortality. The very utmost that can be claimedby any skeptic who fairly understands the whole case, is that thedifferent arguments, for and against, offset one another, andleave the question in a neutral balance of suspense, just where itwas before the debate began. Many persons hold that the counterreasonings do thus balance and annul one another. For them theproblem remains to be decided on other grounds than those of thelogical disputation which has proved inadequate to its settlement. These other grounds are considerations of congruity, probability, the prophetic preparations and demands of present experience. Whatsort of a figure would the segments which we now see, compose, ifthey were completed? What in the hidden future portions of ourdestiny would be harmonic and complementary as related with theparts here experienced? When the other modes of inquiry areabandoned this mode remains. Its teachings are rich and impressivein proportion to the greatness of the faculties and the wealth ofknowledge and love brought to its consideration. And thus we comeface to face with the fifth and last cause of the failing faith inimmortality confessed to characterize the present day. That cause is the common inability to realize in the thoughts ofthe mind, and to hold in the faith of the feelings, a conceptionso vast, so mysterious, so remote from the usual routine of theselfish trifles and petty notions which monopolize the powers andfritter down the faculties of the average people of the nineteenthcentury. The battle of sensualism, the scramble over materialinterests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescentstruggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to theever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizingdiscussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatalto that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of passion, thatserene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, thatdocile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fitcontemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that ofimmortality. The grade of thought and scale of emotion ordinarilycharacteristic of ordinary men are utterly out of keeping with theinexpressible grandeur of themes like that of the divine kinshipand eternity of the soul. The reason and fancy, before they can becompetent to appreciate such truths, must be trained in the studyand worshipful meditation of subjects of commensurate mystery andsublimity. It is no wonder that when minds and hearts familiaronly with houses and clothes and food, the trivial gossip andvanity of the hour, are summoned to grasp the idea of spiritualsurvival and an everlasting destiny of conscious adventures, theyare overwhelmed and helplessly fail to represent to themselves thepossibility of any such truth. This cause of doubt is veryprevalent and effective; for ever more and more in our ageconscious attention is turned away from states within and fixedupon things without. The natural consequence is that the objectiveworld is arrogating the first place in consciousness, and thesubjective world is sinking into the secondary rank. Whateverexalts the object at the expense of the subject tends tomaterialism, unbelief in the separate being of the spirit. On theother hand whatever gives the panoramic passage of subjectivestates in the soul greater apparent vividness and tenacity thanbelong to outer phenomena, tends to produce faith in theindependence and immortality of the spirit. Hence it is quite tobe expected that until our modern concentration on objective toiland study and amusement reaches its destined climax and begins thereturn career to subjective reason and feeling, the skepticism ofthe age will increase. Meanwhile the remedy for the evil is, first, to perceive it, andthen, to cultivate the kinds of experience calculated toneutralize it. For the logical invalidity and fallaciousness ofthe doubts concerning immortality, arising from the immensedisparity of such a belief with the mental habits of ignorantearthlings and social parasites, appear from the fact that thereare others with whose experience and thought the doctrine has nosuch disparity, but for whose spiritual range and haunt it is asnatural to believe it as to breathe. And, in explaining thedestiny of man, it is legitimate to take the most finished andfurnished specimens, not the abortive ones. There are grounds ofknowledge, domains of imagination, heights of nobility, familiarto the most exalted characters, perfectly cognate and harmoniouswith the conception of eternal life, and making the faith in itfully as credible as the transcendent truths of science andphilosophy which have been actually demonstrated. Those who arefamiliar only with the little affairs of sense, in narrow boundsof time and space, may well gasp in despair and denial when thebewildering contents of the doctrine of immortality are heldbefore them; but for all who have mastered what science reveals ofthe objective world of nature, and what literature records of thesubjective world of soul, both these spheres furnish ampleillustrative examples and data to make the faith in every waycongruous with what else they know, and as easy as it is pleasingto receive. Assuredly the belief resulting in this latter classfrom their positive perception and correspondent desire andpersuasion, are, on every ground of reason or moral fitness, morethan a counterbalance for the unbelief resulting in the formerclass from their negative experience and incompetency. If wesought to estimate the possibility and destined fulfillment ofhuman nature when all its conditions shall have been perfected, should we choose for the basis of our judgment the incapacity ofthe lower specimens of man? or the capacity of the higher? Afterconsidering the chief achievements of human genius, the mysteriouspowers of the human soul now, the doctrine of immortality does notseem too great and wonderful for belief; but, on the contrary, itappears the coherent complement of the facts of the present. Nothing can be more marvelous or imply greater glory for thedestiny of the individual being than the fact that eachconsciousness is to itself the antithetical equivalent or balanceof the totality of being beside; since the whole universe, allother beings, God himself, are known to the individualconsciousness only as revealed in itself through its personalfaculties. The slightest change in the subject is reported by acorrespondent change in objects. Heighten the internal activitiesof the soul to a certain pitch, and the convictions they engenderwill be so intense, and the experience so absorbing, asirresistibly to sweep away all opposing doubts and fill everycraving with the triumphant flood of life. What overwhelmingrevelations of the providence of God and eternal life, crowdingthe cosmos at every point with the workings of poetic justice, maythus be made to prepared spirits, only those who receive themknow. Paul said he was caught up into the third heaven and heardunspeakable words. It is to be believed that such visions, whileoften illusory, are sometimes genuine. A test to discriminate thespurious and the authentic will one day be secured. Meanwhile itis either a faithless faintheartedness or a vulgar arrogance toomit from the data of our expected fate those thoughts, which, though beyond the reaches of our souls, nevertheless irresistiblyallure our attention and enchain our affection; ideas belonging toour nature, though transcending our experience, and, whilesurpassing our faculties, still attracting us to our destiny. Whatare presentiments but divine wings of the spirit fluttering towardour unseen goal? Again, the great metaphysicians, who have elaborated theidealistic philosophy in so many forms, exhibit the mind of man tous as superior to the cosmic spectacle it contemplates projectedin immensity. They portray the material creation as a phantasmalshow of mind, a phenomenal process and aspect of spirit, indissoluble centers of consciousness alone having solid verityand stay, while matter and force and times and places whirl andpass, combine and dissolve. Likewise the mathematicians, with their mighty calculus, translateall quantities and qualities, all objects and operations, intonumerical symbols, and with these intellectual toys play the samemiraculous tricks that the Creator himself plays with theoriginals. They symbolize purely imaginary quantities, bring theminto relations and pass them through certain operations, andthereby discover truths which are found to have permanentobjective validity. It demonstrates, as said before, that thefilial mind which thus wanders in thought through the house of theFather, and, everywhere making itself familiarly at home, disportsamong His treasures, is of the same type with the parental Mind. And now, still farther, that the cultivators of physical scienceare pushing their discoveries and their theories to ultimates, webegin to see the adamantine structure of material nature meltinginto a system of ideal equivalents, vaporizing into an undulatoryether, vanishing before our microscopes in immaterial bases ofthought, reason, law and will. The gases have just been firstliquified and then actually solidified, confirming the speculativeannouncement long before made that oxygen and hydrogen are metalsvolatilized. Many valuable and strange discoveries have beenreached in physical science by following prophetic declarationsmade a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs ofintellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order ofatomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops andsnowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals andflowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a treeand of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artisticworks of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in theproduction of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poemAnd 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 ofideal powers, a divine gallery of ideal pictures, a divine theaterfor the eternal adventures of conscious spirits. In mental conception man deals with mathematical infinites aseasily as with the pettiest objects, dilates a point to theuniverse and shrinks the universe to a point, condenses eternityinto a moment or stretches a moment to eternity. It has been shownthat if correspondent diminution or enlargement in the facultiesof sense and intelligence and in all the forces concerned weremade, the whole stellar system and its contents might be dwarfedinto the bulk of a grain of sand, or so magnified that each grainwould fill the space now occupied by the whole, and no one wouldperceive any change whatever in the scale. In reply to thestatement that nothing can act where it is not, it has been provedthat every atom is virtually omnipresent. It takes the entireuniverse to constitute an atom, since the forces centered in eachatom are connected with the whole by the insunderable continuityof all the laws of being. The science of molecular physics asexpounded by its latest masters is not less astounding than thewildest soarings of transcendental metaphysics. For instance, itis proved that if there be ultimate atoms their size must be sosmall that it would require at least five hundred millions of themto an inch in length. In a cubic inch of hydrogen gas, then, forexample, there are 125, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 one hundredand twenty five septillions of atoms, moving with the inconceivablevelocity that is implied by their making thousands of millionsof changes of direction every second. The view of the dynamic structure of the universe opened in this direction is asappalling as that unveiled in the opposite direction by thelargest extension of the nebular hypothesis. He who can gaze herewith steady reason need not be staggered by the sublimest doctrineof religion. Amazed at the spectacle of creative power and wisdom, equally amazed at the discovering faculty of man, we feel it to beincredible that he should have been made capable of such thoughtsonly to be annihilated after a brief tantalization. Confrontingthe immeasurable wilderness of divine glory, strewn all throughwith prizes before which his soul burns with the unconsumable fireof a god like ambition, man lifts his eye to worship and reachesout his hand to receive. Is he merely taunted with the starry sky, and mocked with an infinite illusion of progress, suddenly barredwith endless night and oblivion? Behold him emerging out ofnothingness, mastering his self conscious identity, climbing overthe rounds of symbolic experience and language through the heightsof knowledge and love. Strange, helpless, sublime prince of theuniverse, beggar of God, when he has attained the summit ofillimitable perception, holding immortal joys in full prospect, shall he be dashed back into nonentity? Is it not fitter that hebe welcomed by triumphant initiation into the family of thedeathless Father? Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was acannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, andcontending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till nowthat he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions ofHamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers, holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements composeit, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass ofincandescent hydrogen. From such a background of accomplished facthe seems really to have a right to peer forth into the unboundedfuture and promise himself an unbounded destiny. The repetition ofsuch a progress, nay much less, it may not unreasonably beimagined would raise the curtains from unsuspected secrets, bringthe family of intelligences scattered over all worlds intoconscious communication, and accomplish the deliverance of thewhole creation travailing and groaning together unto this day forthe redemption of the creature. What a splendid, almost incredibletask man has already achieved in disentangling the apparentastronomic motions and converting them into the real ones. Howimmensely sublimer and more complex is the position of man on thisplanet than it seemed to the primitive savage, who knew only whathis crude senses taught him, although, all the while, the moon wascircling about him twenty five hundred miles an hour, and he waswhirling with the revolving earth a thousand miles an hour, andspinning around the sun over thirty thousand miles an hour, andswooping with the whole solar system through the blue void with astill swifter gyre in a yet vaster cycle! This is demonstratedphysical fact. Its harmonic correlate in the spiritual spherewould be nothing less than a lease of eternal existence for thesoul which sees endless invitations ahead, and exults at theprospect of an eternal pursuit of them, its reason and affectionaffiliated with those of the whole divine household of immortals. Two or three generations ago it would have been more inconceivablethat men a hundred miles apart could audibly converse together, asthey now do by means of the telephone, than it is at this day tobelieve that communication may at some future time be openedbetween the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of Siriusthrough the vibrations of the ethereal medium. Futhermore, the idea of the infinite God, in possession of whichman finds himself, is a warrant for his immortality. There cannotbe more in an effect than was in its cause, though there may beless. We perceive intelligence, orderly purpose, as well as power, in nature. We find in ourselves all the explicit attributes andtreasures of consciousness. Reasoning back by indubitable steps wecome to an uncaused, unlimited, infinite Being, the underived andeternal source of all that is. This idea in our minds of a Beingof absolute perfection, whose boundless consciousness as beingnecessarily indivisible must be totally present at every point ofinfinitude, is the charter of our own divine nature and heirship. For we can become, even here, friends and companions of thisomnipresent One, of whose essence and attributes everything belowis but a defective transcript or dimmed revelation. This idea ofHimself is the gift of God to us. To suppose that we are capableof originating it implies a greater miracle than the one it seeksto account for, and really puts ourselves in the place of God. Canwe imagine that we are the creators of God? If the absolutenoumenal Power beyond all phenomena be unknowable, it cannotcontain less, but must contain more than all the attributes of thematerial and spiritual creation which has proceeded thence. Thenoblest and best spirits of all lands and ages have walked in fullfellowship with this Being, seeking supremely to serve and loveHim in the subjection of self will and in the doing of good. Manya nameless saint, in a pure consecration, has heroically thoughtand suffered and aspired, worn out life in slow toils or offeredit up in sharp sacrifice, for the good of fellow creatures, as atribute to God, and exhaled the last breath in a prayer of loveand trust. Such faithful servants and comrades must be dear to theInfinite Spirit, and it is natural to believe that He will keepthem with him forever. When Christ, in self sacrificing love, submitted to death on the cross, saying, "Father, into Thy hands Icommit my spirit, " he who can believe that the magnanimoussufferer was disappointed, blotted out and extinguished, thusreveals the grade of his own insight, but does not refute thegreater hope of nobler seers. It seems as if the idea of God, withloving faith and obedience to its requirements, planted in a soulwhich had not inherited immortality would straightway begin todevelop it there. The atmosphere of eternity alone befits a naturewhich feels itself living in the companionship of God. Everythingsubject to decay cowers into oblivion from before the idea of thataugust, incorruptible presence. The fear of death is but therecoil of the immortal from mortality. When man voluntarily facesdeath without fear, even courting martyrdom with a radiant joy, itis because there is in him, deeper than consciousness, a mysticknowledge that he is essentially eternal and cannot perish. He whofreely sacrifices anything thereby proves himself superior to thatwhich he sacrifices. Man freely sacrifices his life. Therefore heis immortal. The ancient Semitic philosopher and poet who wrote the book ofJob, brooding on the strange problem of life and death, murmured, "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" With each successivegeneration, for many ages, countless millions have dissolved andvanished 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 silencestill maintained as of old. And, in a moment more, he who breathedthe wondering inquiry is himself gone. Whither? Into the vacantdark of nothingness? Into the transparent sphere of perfectintelligence? The sublimity of the demand seems to ally the finitequestioner with the infinite Creator; and, with a presentiment ofmarvelous joy, we look beyond the ignorant veil at the close ofearth, and hold that eternity itself will not exhaust thepossibilities of the soul, whose career shall be kept fromstagnation by constant interspersals of death and birth, refreshing disembodiments from worn out forms and reincarnationsin new. If this life on the earth, where man feels himself a stranger, behis all, how superfluously he is equipped with foresights andlongings that outrun every conceivable limit! Why is he giftedwith powers of reason and demands of love so far beyond hisconditions? If there be no future for him, why is he tortured withthe inspiring idea of the eternal pursuit of the still flying goalof perfection? Is it possible that the hero and the martyr and thesaint, whose experience is laden with painful sacrifices forhumanity, are mistaken? and that the slattern and the voluptuaryand the sluggard, whose course is one of base self indulgence, arecorrect? Is it credible that, with no justifying explanationhereafter, it should be ordained that the more gifted anddisinterested a man is the more he shall uselessly suffer, fromhis sympathetic carriage of the greater share in the sin andsorrow of all his race? No, far back in the past there has beensome dark mystery which yet flings its dense shadows over ourhistory here; and in the obscurity we cannot read its solution. But there is a solution. And when in some blessed age to comemankind shall outgrow their discords and be reconciled, so thattheir divinest living member can become the focalizing center oftheir collective inspiration, through him the truth will berevealed. The most inspired individual can only in a degreeanticipate his age. At a certain distance he is tethered by hisconnections with the race. They must be near the goal before hecan deliver the final message. Inspiration and revelation are asreal as the sensuous method of outer knowledge. Spirit orconsciousness, as that which is its own evidence, has a more thanmathematic validity. When men purely love one another, and, withsupreme loyalty, seek truth, ignorance and delusion will melt awaybefore the encroaching illumination from God, and the dominion ofdeath will be abolished. That the human mind shall be the victim of death is incongruouswith its rank. The atheistic scientist who imagines that theenergy of the stellar creation is gradually dissipating, so thatthe whole scheme must at last perish; and who sees the soul, then, like a belated butterfly, fall frozen on the boundary of a deaduniverse, refutes his own dismal creed by the grandeur of thepower shown in thinking it. The might of love, the faculty ofthought, the instinct of curiosity, are insatiable; and that whichremains wooing them to grasp it, is infinite. And, after all issaid, it seems certain that we are either discerpted emanationsand avatars of God suffering transient incarnations for a purpose, and then to be resumed, immortal in his immortality; or else weare separate and inherent entities, immortal in ourselves. Theformer faith ought to satisfy the proudest ambition. The latterfaith yields every motive for contentment and aspiring obedience. Man, forever feeding on the unknown, is the mysterious guest ofGod in the universe. We cannot believe that, the hospitality ofthe infinite Housekeeper becoming exhausted, He will ever blow outthe 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 ofwisdom, a maxim equally applicable on all occasions, that I mayfortify myself with it against the caprices of fortune. " Solomonreflected a moment, then gave him, in these words, the maxim hesought: "This, too, shall pass away. " The courtier at first feltdisappointed, but, meditating awhile, perceived the pertinent andprofound meaning hidden in the transparent simplicity of thewords. Are you afflicted? Be not despondent or rash, This, too, shall pass away. Are you blessed? Be not elated or careless, Thistoo 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 everydiversity of situation in which man can be placed. Whateverrestraint, whatever encouragement, whatever consolation he needs, it is all contained in the profound thought, This too shall passaway. This maxim for all times needs to be supplemented by acorresponding maxim for all persons. There is a truth constantlysuited for the variety of immortal souls, as the foregoing one isfor the variety of temporal changes. Let us see what that truth isand set it in a fitting aphorism. The desires of the human soul are boundless. Nothing can satisfyits wishes by fulfilling them and circumscribing there a fixedlimit. It would devour the whole creation, and hungrily cry formore. Whatever extension of power or fruition it can conceive, itwants for its own, and frets if deprived of it. Now, if the spiritof the Creator is in the creature, this illimitable passion ofacquisition cannot be a mere mockery. It must be a hint of thewill of God and of the destiny of his child in whom He hasimplanted it. It is prophetic of something awaiting fulfillment. But what is the prophecy, and how is it to be fulfilled? Theanswer to this question will give us that maxim of eternalhumanity which accords with the maxim of transient fortune. Andthus it reads: Over all the things for which men struggle witheach other, there is one thing, out of the sphere of struggle, which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that one thing is thewhole universe! Be not baffled by the appearance of transcendentalmysticism in this maxim, as the ancient inquirer was by theappearance of commonplace in his, but seek its significance. A son is an heir of his father. All men are sons of God, thoughonly a few, and that in varying degree, are distinctly consciousas yet of their sonship. But, despite their ignorance, all aretending, more or less swiftly, toward the goal of their nature andinheritance. There are exclusive prizes which men can monopolize: and theyfight with one another for these, because the more some have theless others can obtain. There are also inclusive prizes, or modesof holding and enjoying property which do not interfere withuniversal participation, with universal, undivided ownership. Inthese no one need have any the less because every one has all. This is the region of reason, imagination, affection, the empireof the soul. The more one knows of mathematical truth, poeticbeauty or moral good, the easier it is, not the harder, for othersto know and enjoy as much or more. In this divine domain nomonopoly or conflict is possible, because the outward moving fenceof each consciousness, retreating and vanishing before itsconquests of experience, is a vacuum with respect to that of everyother. They overlap and penetrate one another as if they weremutually nonexistent. For example, the pleasure any one takes in apicture, or in a play, does not lessen the pleasure which remainsfor the other spectators; but, on the contrary, adds to it if theyhave sympathy. Now, the all inclusive prize of desire, the very secret of theGodhead namely, the power of taking a full pure joy in every formof being, in every substance and phenomenon of the creation isforever wooing every soul; and every soul, in proportion to itsadvancement, is forever embracing it just as freely as if no othersoul existed, yet has the zest of its enjoyments endlessly variedand heightened by mutual contemplations and reflections of thoseof all the rest. Such is the superiority of the disinterestedspirit over the selfish flesh, of the inner world over the outerworld, of good over evil. Mental ownership is sympathetic and universal, physicalappropriation antagonistic and individual. We hate and oppose ourfellows that with hand and foot we may monopolize some wretchedgrains of good, while God is inviting every one of us with ourmind and heart to accept as fast as we can his whole undividedinfinitude of good. The universe is the house of the Father; thetrue spirit of the family is disinterested, and consequently everychild is heir of the whole even as the apostle Paul said, jointheir with Christ. Register, then, deeply in memory, side by sidewith the historic maxim for all times, This too shall pass away!the religious maxim for all souls. Over those things for which menstruggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere ofstruggle, which belongs indivisibly to every man, and that onething is the whole universe! Then, should you ever feel vexed ordisheartened by the irritations and failures you meet in yourjourney through the evanescent masquerade of this world, pause andsay to yourself, Is it worthy of me, while the entire realm ofexistence asks me to appropriate it in ever expansive possession, to be angry or sad because some infinitesimal speck of it does notgrant me as much of itself as I crave? The more things we love the richer we are. The fewer things wecare for the freer we are. O blessed wealth and wretched freedom, how shall we perfect and reconcile them? This is the secret: If welove the divine and eternal in everything, and care not for thelimiting and perishable evil connected with it, then we shall atonce be both rich and free. The former practice educates ourpowers; the latter emancipates them. The true use of renunciationis as a means for larger fulfillment. Detach from lower and lesserobjects in order to attach to higher and greater ones. Be alwaysready to renounce the meaner at the invitation of the nobler. Thesoul, like a grand frigate, may be loosely tied by a thousandseparate strings, but should be held firm by one cable. Ourrelations to fellow creatures are those threads; our supremerelation to God, that cable. Those are the gossamer of time; thisthe 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 wereomnipresent, and therefore had no need to move! The end of onewish is but the beginning of another; and the craving of everyhuman soul, let loose in sincere expression, is absolutelyillimitable. It always comes, in the last analysis, to this; everyone really longs to be God. Therefore, unless the rationalcreation is mendacious, to be deified, is, in some mystical buttrue sense, the final destiny of all souls. Every one, in itsconsciousness fully developed and harmonized, shall become a focusof universal being, a finite reflex of God, the infinite Godhimself remaining eternally the same unescapable and incomprehensiblemystery as ever. There are, therefore, two supreme maxims for souls conditioned intime and space but destined for eternity and infinity a maxim ofcomfort for those who suffer, and a maxim of impulse for those whoaspire. The one, to be used in view of every fear, every evil orlimit. This, too, shall pass away! The other, to be used in viewof every insatiable desire, Over all those things for which menstruggle with each other, there is one thing, out of the sphere ofstruggle, which indivisibly belongs to every man, and that onething is the whole universe! Nothing but the Absolute Good is everlasting: and that must belongto 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 asdivinely live forevermore. They shall cease to say any more ofanything, This, too, shall pass away! because the infinite Godshall have said to each of them, Son, thou art ever with me, andall that I have is thine! If the view above marked out, a view in many respects so sublimeand satisfactory, a view which goes so far to explain themysteries, reconcile the contradictions, and transfigure the evilsof our transient life and lot below be not true, it must either bebecause some other higher and better view is the truth in whichcase we certainly ought to be contented or else the creative andprovidential plan of God is inferior to the thought of one of hiscreatures. It is not possible for me to suppose that a speculativetheory of my brain can transcend in harmony and beneficence thedesign of the infinite God. Could it do so, then, in reality, Ishould be a higher being than He. I should veritably havedethroned Him and vaulted into his place. Is not that a pitch ofimpiety and absurdity too great even for the pride of man, insurgent atom of criticising assumption, set, baffled at everypoint, amidst the awful immensity of existence? Here, then, isrest. Either our highest view is the truth, or the truth is higherand better than that. For to think that his thought is superior tothe purpose of God, thus making himself the real God, is too muchfor the extremist human egotist within the limits of sanity. Therefore, until a better theory is propounded, we hold that thedestiny of the soul is to become, through the progressiveactualization of its potential consciousness, a free thinkingcenter of the universe, an infinitesimal mirror of God. Theadventures of the different souls, full of inexhaustible curiosityand relish in the mutually revealing contacts of their degrees ofdevelopment and originalities of personal character and treasure, constitute the endless drama of spiritual existence within thephenomenal theater of the material creation. And still theinfinite One serenely smiles on the troubled play of the eternalMany; because the psychological kaleidoscope of their experienceis a continuous improvisation of justice, weaving the fate of Eachwith the fates of All, and transfusing the monotonous unity of theSame with the zestful variety of the Other.