The Hearts of Men Part 16

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE AFTER DEATH.

It is two years and a half ago now that I pa.s.sed through Westminster Hall, one of a great mult.i.tude. They went in double file, thickly packed between barriers of rails on either side the hall, and between where everyone looked there lay--what? A plain oak coffin on a table.

Within this coffin there lay the body of Mr. Gladstone, he who in his day had filled the public eye in England more than any other man. His body lay there in state, and the people came to see.

Emerging into the street beyond and seeing the ceaseless stream of people that flowed past, I wondered to myself. These people are Christians. If you ask them where Mr. Gladstone is now, they will, if they reply hurriedly, answer, "He is dead and in there"; but if they pause to reflect they will say, "He is in heaven. His soul is with G.o.d."

If, then, his soul, if _he_ be with G.o.d, what are you come to see?

Shortly there will be a funeral, and what will it be called? The funeral of Mr. Gladstone. But Mr. Gladstone is in heaven, not here. Surely this is strange.

"If there is anything I can do for you be sure you tell me, for your husband was my great friend." So wrote the man. And to him came her reply: "Sometimes when you are near go and see his grave where he sleeps in that far land, and put a flower upon it for your remembrance and for mine."

But if he, too, be in heaven and not there at all? If it be, as the Burmans say, but the empty sh.e.l.l that lies there? Why should we visit graves if the soul be indeed separate from the body? If he be far away in happiness, why go to his grave? To remember but the corruption that lies beneath?

Men use words and phrases remembering what they ought to believe. For very few are sincere and know what really they do believe. You cannot tell from their professions, only from their unconscious words and their acts.

What do these unconscious words, these acts, tell us of the belief about the soul and body? That they are separable and separate? No, but that they are inseparable. No one in the West, I am sure--no one anywhere, I think--has ever been able to conceive of the soul as apart from the body. We cannot do so. Try, try honestly, and remember your dead friends. What is it you recall and long for and miss so bitterly?

It was his voice that awoke echoes in you, it was the clasp of his hand in yours, it was his eyes looking back to you the love you felt for him.

It was his footfall on the stair, his laugh, the knowledge of his presence. And are not these all of the body?

Men talk glibly of the soul as apart from the body. What do they mean?

Nothing but words, for the soul without a body is an incomprehensible thing, certainly to us.

And it is always the same body, not another. It is the old hand, the face, that we want. Not the soul, if it could be possible, looking at us out of other eyes. No; we want him we lost, and not another. It is the cry of our hearts.

And therefore, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." Have you wondered how that came into the creed? It came into religion as came all that we believe in, never out of theory but out of instinct.

What is your feeling towards the dead? Is it envy that they have reached everlasting happiness? Is it gladness to reflect that they are no longer with us? Do we think of them as superior to us? Alas, no. The great and overpowering sentiment we have for them is pity. The tears come to our eyes for them, because they are dead. They have left behind them light and life and gone into the everlasting forgetfulness. "The night hath come when no man can work." That is our real instinct towards the dead.

"Poor fellow." And you will hear people say, with tardy remembrance of their creeds, "But for his sake we ought to rejoice, because he is at peace."

We ought? But _do_ we? Surely we never do. We are sorry for the dead.

All the compa.s.sion that is in us goes out to them, because they are dead.

The Catholic Church has prayers for the dead. There was never a Church yet that knew the hearts of men as that Church of Rome. Prayers for the dead. Ma.s.ses for the dead.

Our Protestant theories forbid such. But tell me, is there a woman who has lost those she loves to whom such prayers would not come home? How narrow sometimes are the Reformed Creeds in their refusal to help the sorrow of their people.

"In the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection." What is to arise? The disembodied soul? But you say it is already with G.o.d. What is to arise? It is the body. It is more. It is he who is dead--who sleeps; he whom we have buried there. Whatever our creeds may say, we do not, we cannot ever understand the soul without the body. Not _a_ body, but _the_ body. We believe not in the life of a soul previous to the body.

They are born together, and they die together. If they live hereafter it must be together. For they are one.

Never be deceived by theories or professions. No one in the West has ever understood the soul without the body, no one can do so. The conception is wanting. We play with the theory in words as we do with the fourth dimension. But who ever realised either?

But with the Oriental it is different. He believes in the migration of souls. They pa.s.s from body to body. He can realise this--somehow, I know not--but he can. Those who have read my "Soul of a People" will remember that they not only believe it but _know_ it. They are sure of it because it has happened to each one, and he can remember his former lives. This comes not from Buddhism, because Buddhist theory denies the existence of soul at all, nor from Brahminism. It is the Oriental's instinct. He does not, I think, ever realise a soul apart from any body, but he can and does realise a soul exhibited first in one body then in another, as a lamp s.h.i.+ning through different globes.

Therefore, when a Christian tells him of the resurrection of the body he cannot understand. "Which body," he asks, "for I have had so many?"

Neither can he understand a Christian heaven of bodies risen from the earth. His heaven is immaterial. It is the Great Peace, where life has pa.s.sed away. That he can understand. For neither can he conceive a life of the soul without some body. When perfection is reached and the last weary body done with, then life, too, is gone--life and all pa.s.sion, all love, all happiness, all fear, all the emotions that are life. They are gone, and there is left only the Great Peace.

Our heaven grows out of our instincts as his does out of his instincts.

Our dead without their bodies would not be those we love, and hence our heaven, where we shall recognise each other and love them as we did. I did not understand heaven when I read books, but out of men have I learned what I wished to know. Reason alone can tell you nothing, but sympathy will tell you all things.

It would be interesting, it is very interesting, to look back into our past histories and see these instincts grow and wane, to mark how they have influenced not only our religious theories, but our lives; to trace in other people like or opposed instincts. The Mahommedans refuse amputation because they will not appear maimed in the next world. For they, too, cannot distinguish soul from one body. The Jews had no idea of soul at all as existing after death, whether with or without a body.

"As a man dies so will he be, all through the ages of eternity." They learned the idea of immortality from Egypt, but it never took root because they had no instinctive feeling of soul. Their witches were foreigners. "You shall not suffer a witch to live." The incantation of ghosts was utterly forbidden by them as a foreign wickedness. It has so been forbidden by _all_ religions. Yet there are people who think religions arise from ideas of ghosts.

The African negroes have no idea of life after death, as witness the story of Dr. Livingstone and the negro king about the seed. It is a very curious history this of the longing for immortality, the belief in a life beyond the grave.

But I am not now concerned with the past only with the present. The history of instincts is never the explanation of them. If we could unravel clearly all the history of the instincts of all peoples as regards the after death, we should be no nearer an explanation of why the instinct exists at all, why it grows or decays, why it takes one form or another. But we might, as so many do, blind ourselves to the fact that instincts exist now quite apart from reason, either now or previously. No reasoning can explain the absolute clinging of the European peoples to the resurrection of the body. No reasoning can possibly explain the Burman's remembrance of previous lives. Reasoning would deny both. Observation and sympathy know that both exist.

And which is true? No one can tell.

"Not one returns to tell us of the Road Which to discover we must travel too."

For some years now there has been a movement in England to introduce cremation as a method of disposing of the dead. There can be no doubt of its sanitary superiority to burial; there can be no doubt that, as far as reason and argument go, cremation should be preferred to the grave.

There seems to be absolutely no good reason to bring forward in favour of the latter. And yet cremation makes no way. Men die and they are buried, and if over their tombs we do not now write "Hic jacet," but "In memory of," our ideas have suffered no change.

We cannot bear to burn the bodies of the dead because we cannot disa.s.sociate the body from the soul. The body is to rise, and if we burn it, what then? What will there be to rise? Man has but one body and one soul dwelling therein, and if you destroy the body the soul is dead too.

Only people who believe in the transmigration of souls burn their dead--the Hindus and, in Burma, the monks of Buddha. They see no objection to the destruction of the body because the soul is migratory, and has pa.s.sed into another. What is left after death is but the "empty sh.e.l.l."

Therefore do Hindus and Buddhists cremate, whereas Christians and Mahommedans bury. Nor does rejection of creed alter this instinct.

Intellectual France boasts of its freedom from religion. But _is_ it free? Has it outgrown the instincts that are the root of religion? One certainly it has not yet done, for secularists are buried just as believers are, usually with the same rites. And even if the funeral be secular, the body is buried, not burnt. Why do they shrink from cremation if reason is to be the only guide? The creed is outworn but the roots of faith are never dead.

CHAPTER XXIX.

OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM.

Thus are the heavens of all religions explanations to materialise, as it were, the vague instincts of men's hearts. The Mahommedan's absolutely material garden of the houris, the Christian semi-material heaven, the Buddhist absolutely immaterial Nirvana, are all outcomes of the people's capability of separating soul from body. These heavens are just as the dogmas of G.o.dhead, or Law, or Atonement, but the theory to explain the fact, which is in this case the desire for immortality. And in exactly the same way as the theories of other matters are unsatisfying, so are these theories of heaven. The desire for immortality is there, one of the strongest of all the emotions; but the ideal which the theologian offers to the believer to fulfil his desire has no attraction. The more it is defined the less anyone wants it. Heaven we would all go to, but not _that_ heaven. The instinct is true, but the theory which would materialise the aim of that desire is false. No heaven that has been pictured to any believer is desirable.

It is strange to see in this but another instance of the invincible pessimism of the human reason. No matter to what it turns itself it is always the same.

I have read all the Utopias, from Plato's New Republic to Bellamy's, from the Anarchist's Paradise to that of the Socialists, and I confess that I have always risen from them with one strong emotion. And that was, the relief and delight that never in my time--never, I am sure, in any time--can any one of them be realised. This world as it exists, as it has existed, may have its drawbacks. There is crime, and misfortune, and unhappiness, more than need be. There are tears far more than enough. But there is suns.h.i.+ne too; and if there be hate there is love, if there is sorrow there is joy. Here there is life. But in these drab Utopias of the reason, what is there? That which is the worst of all to bear--monotony tending towards death.

No one, I think, can study philosophy, that grey web of the reason, without being oppressed by its utter pessimism. No matter what the philosophy be, whether it be professedly a pessimism as Schopenhauer's or not, there is no difference. It is all dull, weary barrenness, with none of the light of hope there. Hope and beauty and happiness are strangers to that twilight country. They could not live there. Like all that is beautiful and worth having, they require light and shadow, suns.h.i.+ne and the dark.

And the lives of philosophers, what do they gain from the reason alone?

Is there anyone who, after reading the life of any philosopher, would not say, "G.o.d help me from such." What did his unaided reason give him?

Pessimism, and pessimism, and again pessimism. No matter who your philosopher is--Horace or Omar Khayyam, or Carlyle or Nietsche:--where is the difference? See how Huxley even could not stifle his desire for immortality that no reason could justify. What has reason to offer me?

Only this, resignation to the worst in the world, and of it knows nothing.

To which it would be replied: