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Creatures capable of such deeds must inherit eternity. Their transcendent souls step from their rejected mansions through the blue gateway of the air to the lucid palace of the stars. Any meaner allotment would be discordant and unbecoming their rank.
Contemplations like these exorcise the spectre host of the brain and quell the horrid brood of fear. The n.o.ble purpose of self sacrifice enables us to smile upon the grave, ”as some sweet clarion's breath stirs the soldier's scorn of danger.”
20 Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, vol.
i. pp. 64-66. Umbreit, fiber das Sterben ais einen Akt menschlich personlicher Selbststandigkeit. Studien und Kritiken, 1837.
Death parts with its false frightfulness, puts on its true beauty, and becomes at once the evening star of memory and the morning star of hope, the Hesper of the sinking flesh, the Phosphor of the rising soul. Let the night come, then: it shall be welcome.
And, as we gird our loins to enter the ancient mystery, we will exclaim, with vanis.h.i.+ng voice, to those we leave behind,
”Though I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for a time I press G.o.d's lamp Close to my breast: its splendor, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge somewhere.”
CHAPTER III.
GROUNDS OF THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.
IT is the purpose of the following chapter to describe the originating supports of the common belief in a future life; not to probe the depth and test the value of the various grounds out of which the doctrine grows, but only to give a descriptive sketch of what they are, and a view of the process of growth. The objections urged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the question of immortality, not to an ill.u.s.trative statement of the suggesting grounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficient investigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almost universal expectation of another life springs, and by what influences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer in less than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection.
The doctrine of a future life for man has been created by the combined force of instinctive desire, a.n.a.logical observation, prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These are the four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes; or the four gla.s.ses through which it looks to see its eternal heritage.
First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once with foreknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is not a love of being here; for he often loathes the scene around him.
It is a love of self possessed existence; a love of his own soul in its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is an inseparable element of his very ent.i.ty. Crowned with free will, walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual faculties, served by va.s.sal nature with tributes of various joy, he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated with a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroy the body, necessitates the conception of an escape into another state of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedily construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire first fathers thought, and then thought woos belief.
Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond all things, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment of destined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature, with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena further developed, significant sequels in other creatures' fates, whose evolution and fulfilment may haply throw light on his own. With eager vision and heart prompted imagination he scrutinizes whatever appears related to his object. Seeing the snake cast its old slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death man but sheds his fleshly exuvia, while the spirit emerges, regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchre and commence its summer work; and straightway he hangs a golden scarsbaus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. After vegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring that brings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreams of some far off spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frosts of man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sown through ages in the great earth tomb shall shoot up in celestial shapes. On the moaning sea sh.o.r.e, weeping some dear friend, he perceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he lately saw declining in the dusk; and he is cheered by the thought that
”As sinks the day star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunk low, shall mount on high.”
Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which, grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove its coc.o.o.n and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a b.u.t.terfly on the tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an existence beyond death.
Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's survival and transference to another world, where its experience depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions somewhat within the control of a select cla.s.s of men here, such a doctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, a vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states subsidized. In most cases of this kind the a.s.serted doctrine is placed on the basis of a divine revelation, and must be implicitly received. G.o.d proclaims it through his anointed ministers: therefore, to doubt it or logically criticize it is a crime.
History bears witness to such a procedure wherever an organized priesthood has flourished, from primeval pagan India to modern papal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egypt and the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gaul and the Druidic conclave in the oak groves of Mona; from the reeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the ma.s.ses for souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches of Christendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which has prevailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of its promulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people in the authoritative dicta of their religious teachers.
In all the leading nations of the earth, the doctrine of a future life is a tradition handed down from immemorial antiquity, embalmed in sacred books which are regarded as infallible revelations from G.o.d. Of course the thoughtless never think of questioning it; the reverent piously embrace it; all are educated to receive it. In addition to the proclamation of a future life by the sacred books and by the priestly hierarchies, it has also been affirmed by countless individual saints, philosophers, and prophets. Most persons readily accept it on trust from them as a demonstrated theory or an inspired knowledge of theirs. It is natural for modest unspeculative minds, busied with worldly cares, to say, These learned sages, these theosophic seers, so much more gifted, educated, and intimate with the divine counsels and plan than we are, with so much deeper experience and purer insight than we have, must know the truth: we cannot in any other way do so well as to follow their guidance and confide in their a.s.sertions.
Accordingly, mult.i.tudes receive the belief in a life to come on the authority of the world's intellectual and religious leaders.
Fourthly, the belief in a future life results from philosophical meditation, and is sustained by rational proofs.1 For the completion of the present outline, it now remains to give a brief exposition of these arguments. For the sake of convenience and clearness, we must arrange these reasonings in five cla.s.ses; namely, the physiological, the a.n.a.logical, the psychological, the theological, and the moral.
There is a group of considerations drawn from the phenomena of our bodily organization, life and death, which compose the physiological argument for the separate existence of the soul. In the first place, it is contended that the human organization, so wondrously vitalized, developed, and ruled, could not have grown up out of mere matter, but implies a pre existent mental ent.i.ty, a spiritual force or idea, which const.i.tuted the primeval impulse, grouped around itself the organic conditions of our existence, and constrained the material elements to the subsequent processes and results, according to a prearranged plan.2 This dynamic agent, this ontological cause, may naturally survive when the fleshly organization which it has built around itself dissolves. Its independence before the body began involves its independence after the body is ended. Stahl has especially ill.u.s.trated in physiology this idea of an independent soul monad.
Secondly, as some potential being must have preceded our birth, to a.s.similate and construct the physical system, so the great phenomena attending our conscious life necessitate, both to our instinctive apprehension and in our philosophical conviction, the distinctive division of man into body and soul, tabernacle and tenant. The ill.u.s.trious Boerhaave wrote a valuable dissertation on the distinction of the mind from the body, which is to be found among his works. Every man knows that he dwells in the flesh but is not flesh. He is a free, personal mind, occupying and using a material body, but not identified with it. Ideas and pa.s.sions of purely immaterial origin pervade every nerve with terrific intensity, and shake his encasing corporeity like an earthquake. A thought, a sentiment, a fancy, may prostrate him as effectually as a blow on his brain from a hammer. He wills to move a palsied limb: the soul is unaffected by the paralysis, but the muscles refuse to obey his volition: the distinction between the person willing and the instrument to be wielded is unavoidable.
Thirdly, the fact of death itself irresistibly suggests the duality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizing mind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of the undreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in its chemical embrace. A moment ago that hand was uplifted to clasp yours, intelligent accents were vocal on those
1 Wohlfarth, Triumph des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit und Wiedersehen uber jeden Zweifel. Oporinus, Historia Critica Doctrina de Immortalitate Mortalium.
2 Muller, Elements of Physiology, book vi. sect. i. ch. 1.
lips, the light of love beamed in that eye. One shuddering sigh, and how cold, vacant, forceless, dead, lies the heap of clay! It is impossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible power has been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has produced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something which has gone still exist? Its vanis.h.i.+ng from our sensible cognizance is no proof of its peris.h.i.+ng. Not a shadow of genuine evidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of any creature are destroyed.3 In the absence of that proof, a mult.i.tude of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is room enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundly observes, ”life is not a form of body; but body is one form of life.” Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, not appearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposed to live hereafter in some other form.4
A second series of observations and reflections, gathered from partial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make the a.n.a.logical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in the literature of many nations, a standard ill.u.s.tration of the thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy invest.i.ture has been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the b.u.t.terfly.5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body is but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit emerges from its cast off coc.o.o.n and broken cell into the more ethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day.