Part 6 (2/2)

Immortality.

First--The abolition of death.

Death is a black fact. It is the shadow the sun never penetrates, the robber who steals the treasure more precious than gold, the guest who never waits to be invited, the intruder who feels at home whether in palace or in cot, has no respect of persons, and lays his hand with equal familiarity on the king upon his throne, or the tramp by the wayside, saying ”come” to the sick, ”tarry not” to the well, is sure of the old, and revels like a reaper in the harvest of the young. It breaks the plans and disorganizes the relations of life; and then, like a coa.r.s.e comedian or a heartless satirist, compels those who survive to turn away from the memory of their dead, reorganize their lives and live on as though those who once lived with them and formed an intimate part of their daily experience had never existed.

Unless G.o.d himself shall intervene, death is the certain end of the longest life.

Side by side with the certainty of death are two things which give it emphasis: the brevity of life and its uncertainty.

How brief it is! what are sixty or seventy years as measured by hopes and fears, by splendor of genius, by forecasts that outreach the ages, by thoughts that climb and climb with ease to the infinite, by energy of mind, which, rising superior to the combined hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor, and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, ”What next?” Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten, the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and drinking which in spite of the glamor we throw about it is simply repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther); take out the time spent in sleep--in practical nonent.i.ty--and the remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them seems like a mathematical mockery, like numerical trifling.

And the uncertainty of life! What man is he who can a.s.sure himself of ten days? In that time he may die, be buried and be forgotten by the world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral bell, and had no time to stay and hear the falling of the grave clods upon the coffin lid.

This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has affected men more or less from the beginning. In the hour when Christianity was born it affected them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the vision of life, so tumultuous its incidents, so conscious were men of its uncertainty, that they played with it as gamblers throw dice. It became cheap, cheaper than the ground in which their bodies were so soon to be laid; and in derision of its cheapness they built great monuments to hold their scattered dust, monuments that should outlast by centuries their latest breath; with light laughter they rode past these chiselled tombs and scorned themselves as the builders of a longevity their own being could never know.

This fact of death is impressing men now.

In proportion as life increases in knowledge; in proportion as men become masters of nature's forces; in proportion as they measure the universe, make daily incursions therein, and bring back always some conquered thing, some new discovery as a tribute to the limitlessness of mind, in this proportion the unequal brevity and the disintegrating uncertainty of life, lead men to ask with more and more insistence, whether, after all, it is worth while. Is it worth while to carry burdens which force us to look down into the dust of the highway, and not up and out to the wider landscape? Is it worth while to put so much force of soul and spirit, brain and heart into things from which we may be summoned without a moment's notice? Is it worth while to live, and then go to pieces through the effort at living, live on day after day like a machine out of gear (held together oftentimes only by the surgeon's skill), then break down completely, give a final sigh and be hurried away to add a lot of useless fragments to the already acc.u.mulated sc.r.a.p heap of the still more useless graveyard?

Into this emphasis of brevity and uncertainty, there enters another element which increasingly raises the question--”Is it worth while?”

That added element is the silence of the grave.

The grave is terribly silent.

You can hear the gravel rattling out of the grave digger's shovel with a thud upon the coffin lid; or, you can hear the crunching, jarring sound as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and the snap of the bolt as the gate or door of the sepulchre is shut and locked.

You may stand above the simple mound of the churchyard, in front of some monumental shaft, or before the sculptured urn; it may be the dust of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar which is heaped within--the silence will be unbroken--except by the sound of your own voice as you ask:

”Where are they? What are they? ARE they?”

Although the sun may be s.h.i.+ning in full splendor over row after row of graves, no light will be there in which to read the answer to your questions.

Instead of light there will be thick darkness upon the graves, and gross darkness within.

Men peer into this darkness. There is no vision--no speech--and they ask: ”Is it worth while to toil, to labor, to acc.u.mulate, to make great advance in knowledge, to build higher every day the conning towers of science, and then leaving these high points of achievement, enter into that realm where no surveyor's chain has ever measured the extent, where no geographer has ever named a headland, and where the one supreme fact that meets us on the threshold is ignorance--a black, blinding, all-pervading ignorance as to the next moment after death; so that at the end of our reasoning, deduction and amplification, the one thing remaining to the scholar and the fool alike concerning death is a guess, a guess in which the wish of existence is father to the thought, but where the hope of to-morrow is, easily, the despair of to-day.”

With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in the starless night of silence, men in one form of utterance or another are, in substance, calling to each other and saying, ”Let us eat and drink-- for to-morrow we die.”

Thus the contemplation of death and its impartial and unprejudiced a.n.a.lysis leads to a belief in materialism and a greater or less surrender to mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they will go down; if they cannot live in the spirit, they will grovel in the flesh.

What then shall we say concerning this fact of death?

Shall we say it is a part of nature's economy--as legitimate as birth? Because we know nothing of any pre-existent state and are content to go forward in life, shall we now balk and hesitate to discharge our functions or meet our opportunities, because we have no evidence of an after existence?

Is death really natural?

Absolutely it is not!

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