Part 56 (1/2)
The argument against the common theory of a material resurrection, on account of numerous claimants for the same substance, has of late derived a greatly increased force from the brilliant discoveries in chemistry. It is now found that only a small number of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20 The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few in number and comparatively limited in extent. ”All life depends on a relatively small quant.i.ty of matter. Over and over again, as the modeller fas.h.i.+ons his clay, are plant and animal formed out of the same material.” The particles that composed Adam's frame may before the end of the world have run the circuit of ten thousand bodies of his descendants: ”'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” To proclaim the resurrection of the flesh as is usually done, seems a flat contradiction of clear knowledge.21 A late writer on this subject, Dr. Hitchc.o.c.k, evades the insuperable difficulty by saying, ”It is not necessary that the resurrection body should contain a single particle of the body laid in the grave, if it only contain particles of the same kind, united in the same proportion, and the compound be made to a.s.sume the same form and structure as the natural body.” 22 Then two men who look exactly alike may in the resurrection exchange bodies without any harm! Here the theory of punishment clashes. Does not the esteemed author see that this would not be a resurrection of the old bodies, but a creation of new ones
20 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, sect. xix.
21 The Circulation of Matter, Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1853.
22 The Resurrection of Spring, p. 26.
just like them? And is not this a desertion of the orthodox doctrine of the Church? If he varies so far from the established formularies out of a regard for philosophy, he may as well be consistent and give up the physical doctrine wholly, because it rests solely on the tradition which he leaves and is every whit irreconcilable with philosophy. This device is as wilful an attempt to escape the scientific difficulty as that employed by Candlish to avoid the scriptural difficulty put in the way of the doctrine by the apostolic words ”Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of G.o.d.” The eminent Scottish divine affirms that ”flesh and bones” that is, these present bodies made incorruptible can inherit the kingdom of G.o.d; although ”flesh and blood” that is, these present bodies subject to decay cannot.23 It is surely hard to believe that the New Testament writers had such a distinction in their minds. It is but a forlorn resource conjured up to meet a desperate exigency.
At the appearing of Christ in glory,
”When the Day of Fire shall have dawn'd, and sent Its deadly breath into the firmament,” as it is supposed, the great earth cemetery will burst open and its innumerable millions swarm forth before him. Unto the tremendous act of habeas corpus, then proclaimed, every grave will yield its prisoner. Ever since the ascension of Jesus his mistaken followers have been anxiously expecting that awful advent of his person and his power in the clouds; but in vain. ”All things remain as they were: where is the promise of his appearing?” As the lookers out hitherto have been disappointed, so they ever will be. Say not, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold, he is within you. The reason why this carnal error, Jewish conceit, retains a hold, is that men accept it without any honest scrutiny of its foundations or any earnest thought of their own about it. They pa.s.sively receive the tradition. They do not realize the immensity of the thing, nor the ludicrousness of its details. To their imaginations the awful blast of the trumpet calling the world to judgment, seems no more, as Feuerbach says, than a tone from the tin horn of a postillion, who, at the post station of the Future, orders fresh horses for the Curriculum Vita! President Hitchc.o.c.k tells us that, ”when the last trumpet sounds, the whole surface of the earth will become instinct with life, from the charnels of battle fields alone more than a thousand millions of human beings starting forth and crowding upwards to the judgment seat.” On the resurrection morning, at the first tip of light over acres of opening monument and heaving turf, ”Each member jogs the other, And whispers, Live you, brother?”
And how will it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band?
Shall ”infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work of G.o.d”? 24
23 Candlish, Life in a Risen Savior: Discourse XV.
24 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. xiv.
Young sings, ”Now charnels rattle; scatter'd limbs, and all The various bones, obsequious to the call, Self moved, advance; the neck perhaps to meet The distant head; the distant head the feet.
Dreadful to view! see, through the dusky sky Fragments of bodies in confusion fly, To distant regions journeying, there to claim Deserted members and complete the frame.”
The glaring melodramatic character, the startling mechanico theatrical effects, of this whole doctrine, are in perfect keeping with the raw imagination of the childhood of the human mind, but in profound opposition to the working philosophy of nature and the sublime simplicity of G.o.d.
Many persons have never distinctly defined their views upon the subject before us. In the minds even of many preachers and writers, several different and irreconcilable theories would seem to exist together in confused mixture. Now they speak as if the soul were sleeping with the body in the grave; again they appear to imply that it is detained in an intermediate state; and a moment afterwards they say it has already entered upon its final reward or doom. Jocelyn relates, in his Life of St. Patrick, that ”as the saint one day was pa.s.sing the graves of two men recently buried, observing that one of the graves had a cross over it, he stopped his chariot and asked the dead man below of what religion he had been. The reply was, 'A pagan.' 'Then why was this cross put over you?' inquired St. Patrick. The dead man answered, 'He who is buried near me is a Christian; and one of your faith, coming hither, placed the cross at my head.' The saint stepped out of his chariot, rectified the mistake, and went his way.” Calvin, in the famous treatise designated ”Psychopannychia,” which he levelled against those who taught the sleep of souls until the day of judgment, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediately to heaven, the souls of the reprobate to h.e.l.l. Here they tarry in bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth, they a.s.sume their bodies and return to their respective places.
But if the souls live so long in heaven and h.e.l.l without their flesh, why need they ever resume it? The c.u.mbrous machinery of the scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop Burnet's work ”De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium,” which teaches that at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be the same as the present, but at the second resurrection, after the millennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritual body will be developed.
The true idea of man's future destiny appears to be that no resurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man never dies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonable ways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaves his present frame. It may be that within his material system lurks an exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it and const.i.tuting its vital power. This ethereal structure is disengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soars to the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an ”inner body” is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet's ”Palingenesie Philosophique.” Or it may be that there is in each one a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organic ident.i.ty of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant, unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spirit germ, born into the present life, a.s.similates and holds the present body around it, out of the materials of this world; born into the future life, it will a.s.similate and hold around it a different body, out of the materials of the future world.25 Thus there are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory of the terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the glory of the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of things hereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the material furnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall we bear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible ma.s.s, heir to a thousand ills. Our body shall rather be such ”If lightning were the gross corporeal frame Of some angelic essence, whose bright thoughts As far surpa.s.s'd in keen rapidity The lagging action of his limbs as doth Man's mind his clay; with like excess of speed To animated thought of lightning flies That spirit body o'er life's deeps divine, Far past the golden isles of memory.”
What man knows const.i.tutes his present world. All beyond that const.i.tutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which his desire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into the Unknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the latter supposition the restoration of the flesh is involved.
Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan of the world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, but that the essence of his life should escape from the flesh and depart to some other sphere of being, there either to fas.h.i.+on itself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold the common doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out with philosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves to all existing planetary races as well as to their own, should they cause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine to go on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the final consummation the sundered earths approach each other, and firmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred in one orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of being would be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar system making a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities const.i.tuting one prodigious, death exempted empire, its solitary sovereign G.o.d.
But this is pure poetry, and not science nor philosophy.
25 Lange on the Resurrection of the Body, Studien und Kritiken, 1836.
CHAPTER IV.
DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF A h.e.l.l.
A h.e.l.l of fire and brimstone has been, perhaps still is, the most terrible of the superst.i.tions of the world. We propose to give a historic sketch of the popular representations on this subject, trace them to their origin, and discuss the merits of the question itself. To follow the doctrine through all its variations, ill.u.s.trating the practical and controversial writings upon it, would require a large volume; but, by a judicious arrangement, all that is necessary to a fair understanding of the subject, or really interesting, may be presented within the compa.s.s of an essay. Any one who should read the literature of this subject would be astonished at the almost universal prevalence of the doctrine and at the immense diversity of appalling descriptions of it, and would ask, Whence arises all this? How have these horrors obtained such a seated hold in the world?
In the first place, it is to be replied, as soon as reason is in fair possession of the idea of a continued individual existence beyond the grave, the moral sense, discriminating the deeds, tempers, and characters of men, would teach that there must be different allotments and experiences for them after death. It is not right, say reason and conscience, for the coward, the idler, fool, knave, sot, murderer, to enter into the same realm and have the same bliss with heroes, sages, and saints; neither are they able to do it. The spontaneous thought and sentiment of humanity would declare, if the soul survives the body, pa.s.sing into the invisible world, its fortunes there must depend somewhat upon its fitness and deserts, its contained treasures and acquired habits.
Reason, judging the facts of observation according to the principles of ethics and the working of experienced spiritual laws, at once decides that there is a difference hereafter between the fate of the good heart and the bad one, the great soul and the mean one: in a word, there is, in some sense or other, a heaven and a h.e.l.l.
Again: the same belief would be necessitated by the conception, so deeply entertained by the primitive people of the earth, of overruling and inspecting G.o.ds. They supposed these G.o.ds to be in a great degree like themselves, partial, fickle, jealous, revengeful. Such beings, of course, would caress their favorites and torture their offenders. The calamities and blessings of this life were regarded as tokens, revengeful or loving, of the ruling deities, now pleased, now enraged. And when their votaries or victims had pa.s.sed into the eternal state, how natural to suppose them still favored or cursed by the pa.s.sionate wills of these irresponsible G.o.ds! Plainly enough, they who believe in G.o.ds that launch thunderbolts and upheave the sea in their rage and take vengeance for an insult by sending forth a pestilence, must also believe in a h.e.l.l where Ixion may be affixed to the wheel and Tantalus be tortured with maddening mockeries. These two conceptions of discriminating justice and of vengeful G.o.ds both lead to the theoretic construction of a h.e.l.l, and to the growth of doctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, the former ill.u.s.trating a pervasive law which distributes men according to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings with human pa.s.sions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties according to their pleasure.
Thirdly, when the general idea of a h.e.l.l has once obtained lodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented, carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popular teachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative views and pictures act and react both upon the sources and the products of faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblems addressing the imagination, after a while are received in a literal sense, become physically located and clothed with the power of horror. A Hindu poet says, ”The ungrateful shall remain in h.e.l.l as long as the sun hangs in heaven.” An old Jewish Rabbi says that after the general judgment ”G.o.d shall lead all the blessed through h.e.l.l and all the d.a.m.ned through paradise, and show to each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, so that they shall not be able to say, 'We are not to be blamed or praised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand.' Such utterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic a.s.sertions; and yet in a rude age they very easily pa.s.s into the popular mind as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer says, ”There are in h.e.l.l seven abodes, in each abode seven thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in h.e.l.l seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches it he bursts.” Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minute descriptions of h.e.l.l and its agonies, descriptions which have unquestionably had a tremendous influence in cheris.h.i.+ng and fas.h.i.+oning the world's faith in that awful empire. The poems of Dante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrific pictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and the popular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far more closely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations of the New Testament. The English poet's ”Paradise Lost” has undoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparable with that of the Genevan theologian's ”Inst.i.tutes of the Christian Religion.” There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by the Jewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiends called the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, make him sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul, and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy iron maces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purely arbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitness or probability; but they are received because unthinking ignorance and hungry superst.i.tion will greedily believe any thing they hear.
Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forth the scene of d.a.m.nation: ”Doom'd to live death and never to expire, In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The d.a.m.n'd shall groan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, in hurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, A flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid fire makes seas, the solid, sh.o.r.es; Arch'd o'er with flames, the horrid concave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, And sulphurous surges on each other ride. The hollow winding vaults, and dens, and caves, Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves.