Part 35 (1/2)
I do but mention these initial difficulties; I shall not dwell on them here. I speak to men who have determined, whether at the bidding of instinct or of reason, that it is well to be religious; well to approach in self-devoted reverence an infinite Power and Love. Our desire is simply to find the least unworthy way of thinking of matters which inevitably transcend and baffle our finite thought.
And here, for the broad purpose of our present survey, we may divide the best religious emotion of the world in triple fas.h.i.+on; tracing three main streams of thought,--streams which on the whole run parallel, and which all rise, as I believe, from some source in the reality of things.
First, then, I place that obscure consensus of independent thinkers in many ages and countries which, to avoid any disputable t.i.tle, I will here call simply the Religion of the Ancient Sage. Under that t.i.tle (though Lao Tz[)u] is hardly more than a name) it has been set forth to us in brief summary by the great sage and poet of our own time; and such words as Natural Religion, Pantheism, Platonism, Mysticism, do but express or intensify varying aspects of its main underlying conception.
That conception is the coexistence and interpenetration of a real or spiritual with this material or phenomenal world; a belief driven home to many minds by experiences both more weighty and more concordant than the percipients themselves have always known. More weighty, I say, for they have implied the veritable nascency and operation of a ”last and largest sense”; a faculty for apprehending, not G.o.d, indeed (for what finite faculty can apprehend the Infinite?), but at least some dim and scattered tokens and prefigurements of a true world of Life and Love.
More _concordant_ also; and this for a reason which till recently would have seemed a paradox. For the mutual corroboration of these signs and messages lies not only in their fundamental agreement up to a certain point, but in their inevitable divergence beyond it;--as they pa.s.s from things felt into things imagined; from actual experience into dogmatic creed.
The Religion of the Ancient Sage is of unknown antiquity. Of unknown antiquity also are various Oriental types of religion, culminating in historical times in the Religion of Buddha. For Buddhism all interpenetrating universes make the steps upon man's upward way; until deliverance from illusion leaves the spirit merged ineffably in the impersonal All. But the teaching of Buddha has lost touch with reality; it rests on no basis of observed or of reproducible fact.
On a basis of observed facts, on the other hand, Christianity, the youngest of the great types of religion, does a.s.suredly rest. a.s.suredly those facts, so far as tradition has made them known to us, do tend to prove the superhuman character of its Founder, and His triumph over death; and thus the existence and influence of a spiritual world, where men's true citizens.h.i.+p lies. These ideas, by common consent, lay at the origin of the Faith. Since those first days, however, Christianity has been elaborated into codes of ethic and ritual adapted to Western civilisation;--has gained (some think) as a rule of life what it has lost as a simplicity of spirit.
From the unfettered standpoint of the Ancient Sage the deep concordance of these and other schemes of religious thought may well outweigh their formal oppositions. And yet I repeat that it is not from any mere welding of these schemes together, nor from any choice of the best points in existing syntheses, that the new synthesis for which I hope must be born. It must be born from new-dawning knowledge; and in that new knowledge I believe that each great form of religious thought will find its indispensable--I may almost say its predicted--development. Our race from its very infancy has stumbled along a guarded way; and now the first lessons of its early childhood reveal the root in reality of much that it has instinctively believed.
What I think I know, therefore, I am bound to tell; I must give the religious upshot of observation and experiment in such brief announcement as an audience like this[212] has a right to hear, even before our discoveries can be laid in full before the courts of science for definite approval.
The _religious upshot_, I repeat:--for I cannot here reproduce the ma.s.s of evidence which has been published in full elsewhere. Its general character is by this time widely known. Observation, experiment, inference, have led many inquirers, of whom I am one, to a belief in direct or telepathic intercommunication, not only between the minds of men still on earth, but between minds or spirits still on earth and spirits departed. Such a _discovery_ opens the door also to _revelation_. By discovery and by revelation--by observation from without the veil, and by utterance from within--certain theses have been provisionally established with regard to such departed souls as we have been able to encounter. First and chiefly, I at least see ground to believe that their state is one of endless evolution in wisdom and in love. Their loves of earth persist; and most of all those highest loves which seek their outlet in adoration and wors.h.i.+p. We do not find, indeed, that support is given by souls in bliss to any special scheme of terrene theology. Thereon they know less than we mortal men have often fancied that we knew. Yet from their step of vantage-ground in the Universe, at least, they see that it is good. I do not mean that they know either of an end or of an explanation of evil. Yet evil to them seems less a terrible than a slavish thing. It is embodied in no mighty Potentate; rather it forms an isolating madness from which higher spirits strive to free the distorted soul. There needs no chastis.e.m.e.nt of fire; self-knowledge is man's punishment and his reward; self-knowledge, and the nearness or the aloofness of companion souls.
For in that world love is actually self-preservation; the Communion of Saints not only adorns but const.i.tutes the Life Everlasting. Nay, from the law of telepathy it follows that that communion is valid for us here and now. Even now the love of souls departed makes answer to our invocations. Even now our loving memory--love is itself a prayer--supports and strengthens those delivered spirits upon their upward way. No wonder; since we are to them but as fellow-travellers shrouded in a mist; ”neither death, nor life, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,” can bar us from the hearth-fire of the universe, or hide for more than a moment the inconceivable oneness of souls.
And is not this a fresh instalment, or a precursory adumbration, of that Truth into which the Paraclete should lead? Has any world-scheme yet been suggested so profoundly corroborative of the very core of the Christian revelation? Jesus Christ ”brought life and immortality to light.” By His appearance after bodily death He proved the deathlessness of the spirit. By His character and His teaching He testified to the Fatherhood of G.o.d. So far, then, as His unique message admitted of evidential support, it is here supported. So far as He promised things unprovable, that promise is here renewed.
I venture now on a bold saying; for I predict that, in consequence of the new evidence, all reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the Resurrection of Christ, whereas, in default of the new evidence, no reasonable men, a century hence, would have believed it. The ground of this forecast is plain enough. Our ever-growing recognition of the continuity, the uniformity of cosmic law has gradually made of the alleged _uniqueness_ of any incident its almost inevitable refutation.
Ever more clearly must our age of science realise that any relation between a material and a spiritual world cannot be an ethical or emotional relation alone; that it must needs be a great structural fact of the Universe, involving laws at least as persistent, as identical from age to age, as our known laws of Energy or of Motion. And especially as to that central claim, of the soul's life manifested after the body's death, it is plain that this can less and less be supported by remote tradition alone; that it must more and more be tested by modern experience and inquiry. Suppose, for instance, that we collect many such histories, recorded on first-hand evidence in our critical age; and suppose that all these narratives break down on a.n.a.lysis; that they can all be traced to hallucination, misdescription, and other persistent sources of error;--can we then expect reasonable men to believe that this marvellous phenomenon, always vanis.h.i.+ng into nothingness when closely scrutinised in a modern English scene, must yet compel adoring credence when alleged to have occurred in an Oriental country, and in a remote and superst.i.tious age? Had the results (in short) of ”psychical research” been purely negative, would not Christian evidence--I do not say Christian _emotion_, but Christian _evidence_--have received an overwhelming blow?
As a matter of fact,--or, if you prefer the phrase, in my own personal opinion,--our research has led us to results of a quite different type.
They have not been negative only, but largely positive. We have shown that amid much deception and self-deception, fraud and illusion, veritable manifestations do reach us from beyond the grave. The central claim of Christianity is thus confirmed, as never before. If our own friends, men like ourselves, can sometimes return to tell us of love and hope, a mightier Spirit may well have used the eternal laws with a more commanding power. There is nothing to hinder the reverent faith that, though we be all ”the Children of the Most Highest,” He came nearer than we, by some s.p.a.ce by us immeasurable, to That which is infinitely far.
There is nothing to hinder the devout conviction that He of His own act ”took upon Him the form of a servant,” and was made flesh for our salvation, foreseeing the earthly travail and the eternal crown. ”Surely before this descent into generation,” says Plotinus,[213] ”we existed in the intelligible world; being other men than now we are, and some of us G.o.ds; clear souls, and minds unmixed with all existence; parts of the Intelligible, nor severed thence; nor are we severed even now.”
It is not thus to less of reverence that man is summoned, but to more.
Let him keep hold of early sanct.i.ties; but let him remember also that once again ”a great sheet has been let down out of heaven”; and lo!
neither Buddha nor Plato is found common or unclean.
Nay, as to our own soul's future, when that first shock of death is past, it is in Buddhism that we find the more inspiring, the truer view.
That Western conception of an instant and unchangeable bliss or woe--a bliss or woe determined largely by a man's beliefs, in this earthly ignorance, on matters which ”the angels desire to look into”--is the bequest of a pre-Copernican era of speculative thought. In its Mahomedan travesty, we see the same scheme with outlines coa.r.s.ened into grotesqueness;--we see it degrade the cosmic march and profluence into a manner of children's play.
Meantime the immemorial musings of unnumbered men have dreamt of a consummation so far removed that he who gazed has scarcely known whether it were Nothingness or Deity. With profoundest fantasy, the East has pondered on the vastness of the world that now is, of the worlds that are to be. What rest or pasture for the mind in the seven days of Creation, the four rivers of Paradise, the stars ”made also”? The farther East has reached blindly forth towards astronomical epochs, sidereal s.p.a.ces, galactic congregations of inconceivable Being. Pressed by the inc.u.mbency of ancestral G.o.ds (as the Chinese legend tells us), it has ”created by one sweep of the imagination a thousand Universes, to be the Buddha's realm.”
The sacred tale of Buddha, developed from its earlier simplicity by the shaping stress of many generations, opens to us the whole range and majesty of human fate. ”The destined Buddha has desired to be a Buddha through an almost unimaginable series of worlds.” No soul need ever be without that hope. ”The spirit-worlds are even now announcing the advent of future Buddhas, in epochs too remote for the computation of men.” No obstacles without us can arrest our way. ”The rocks that were thrown at Buddha were changed into flowers.” Not our own worst misdoings need beget despair. ”Buddha, too, had often been to h.e.l.l for his sins.” The vast complexity of the Sum of Things need not appal us. ”Beneath the bottomless whirlpool of existences, behind the illusion of Form and Name,” we, too, like Buddha, may discover and reveal ”the perfection of the Eternal Law.” Us, too, like Buddha, the cosmic welcome may await; as when ”Earth itself and the laws of all worlds” trembled with joy ”as Buddha attained the Supreme Intelligence, and entered into the Endless Calm.”
I believe that some of those who once were near to us are already mounting swiftly upon this heavenly way. And when from that cloud encompa.s.sing of unforgetful souls some voice is heard,--as long ago,--there needs no heroism, no sanct.i.ty, to inspire the apostle's ?p????a e?? t? ??a???a?, the desire to lift our anchor, and to sail out beyond the bar. What fitter summons for man than the wish to live in the memory of the highest soul that he has known, now risen higher;--to lift into an immortal security the yearning pa.s.sion of his love? ”As the soul hasteneth,” says Plotinus,[214] ”to the things that are above, she will ever forget the more; unless all her life on earth leave a memory of things done well. For even here may man do well, if he stand clear of the cares of earth. And he must stand clear of their memories too; so that one may rightly speak of a n.o.ble soul as forgetting those things that are behind. And the shade of Herakles, indeed, may talk of his own valour to the shades, but the true Herakles in the true world will deem all that of little worth; being transported into a more sacred place, and strenuously engaging, even above his strength, in those battles in which the wise engage.” Can we men now on earth claim more of sustainment than lies in the incipient communion with those enfranchised souls? What day of hope, of exaltation, has dawned like this, since the message of Pentecost?
Yet a durable religious synthesis should do more than satisfy man's immediate aspiration. It should be in itself progressive and evolutionary; it should bear a promise of ever deeper holiness, to answer to the long ages of heightening wisdom during which our race may be destined to inhabit the earth. This condition has never yet been met.
No scheme, indeed, could meet it which was not based upon recurrent and developing facts. To such facts we now appeal. We look, not backward to fading tradition, but onward to dawning experience. We hope that the intercourse, now at last consciously begun--although as through the mouth of babes and sucklings, and in confused and stammering speech--between discarnate and incarnate souls, may through long effort clarify into a director communion, so that they shall teach us all they will.