The Destiny of the Soul Part 5

8 Astrue, Dissertation sur l'Immaterialite et l'Immortalite de l'Ame. Broughton, Defence of the Doctrine of the Human Soul as an Immaterial and Naturally Immortal Principle. Marstaller, Von der Unsterblichkeit der Menschlichen Seele.

9 Andrew Baxter, Inquiry into the Nature of the Soul.

10 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, sect. 150.

Of course it is not liable to death, but is naturally eternal.

Thirdly, the indestructibleness of the soul is a direct inference from its ontological characteristics. Reason, contemplating the elements of the soul, cannot but embrace the conviction of its perpetuity and its essential independence of the fleshly organization. Our life in its innermost substantive essence is best defined as a conscious force. Our present existence is the organic correlation of that personal force with the physical materials of the body, and with other forces. The cessation of that correlation at death by no means involves, so far as we can see, the destruction or the disindividualization of the primal personal force. It is a fact of striking significance, often noticed by psychologists, that we are unable to conceive ourselves as dead. The negation of itself is impossible to consciousness.

The reason we have such a dread of death is that we conceive ourselves as still alive, only in the grave, or wandering through horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation, reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away?

Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates that rule there; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong to another, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn the fretful sieges of decay.

Fourthly, the surviving superiority of the soul, inferred from its contrast of qualities to those of its earthy environment, is further shown by another fact, the mind's dream power, and the ideal realm it freely soars or walks at large in when it pleases.11 This view has often been enlarged upon, especially by Bonnet and Sir Henry Wotton. The unhappy Achilles, exhausted with weeping for his friend, lay, heavily moaning, on the sh.o.r.e of the far sounding sea, in a clear spot where the waves washed in upon the beach, when sleep took possession of him. The ghost of miserable Patroclus calve to him and said, "Sleepest thou and art forgetful of me, O Achilles?" And the son of Peleus cried, "Come nearer: let us embrace each other, though but for a little while."

Then he stretched out his friendly hands, but caught him not; for the spirit, shrieking, vanished beneath the earth like smoke.

Astounded, Achilles started up, clasped his hands, and said, dolefully, "Alas! there is then indeed in the subterranean abodes a spirit and image, but there is no body in it."12 The realm of dreams is a world of mystic realities, intangible, yet existent, and all prophetic, through which the soul nightly floats while the gross body slumbers. It is everlasting, because there is nothing in it for corruption to take hold of. The appearances and sounds of that soft inner sphere, veiled so remote from sense, are reflections and echoes from the spirit world. Or are they a direct vision and audience of it? The soul really is native resident in a world of truth, goodness, and beauty, fellow citizen with divine ideas and affections. Through the senses it has knowledge and communion with the hard outer world of matter. When the senses fall away, it is left, imperishable denizen of its own appropriate world of idealities.

11 Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes.

12 Iliad, lib. xxiii. ll. 60 106.

Another a.s.semblage of views, based on the character of G.o.d, form the theological argument for the future existence of man.13 Starting with the idea of a G.o.d of infinite perfections, the immortality of his children is an immediate deduction from the eternity of his purposes. For whatever purpose G.o.d originally gave man being, for the disinterested distribution of happiness, for the increase of his own glory, or whatever else, will he not for that same purpose continue him in being forever? In the absence of any reason to the contrary, we must so conclude. In view of the unlimited perfections of G.o.d, the fact of conscious responsible creatures being created is sufficient warrant of their perpetuity.

Otherwise G.o.d would be fickle. Or, as one has said, he would be a mere drapery painter, nothing within the dress.

Secondly, leaving out of sight this ill.u.s.tration of an eternal purpose in eternal fulfilment, and confining our attention to the a.n.a.logy of the divine works and the dignity of the divine Worker, we shall be freshly led to the same conclusion. Has G.o.d moulded the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and ordered them to fly through the halls of s.p.a.ce forever, and has he created, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalities reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the suns.h.i.+ne of a momentary life? It is not to be imagined that G.o.d ever works in vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting nonent.i.ty, so far as the production of that consciousness is concerned he has wrought for nothing. His action was in vain, because all is now, to that being, exactly the same as if it had never been. G.o.d does nothing in sport or unmeaningly: least of all would he create filial spirits, dignified with the solemn endowments of humanity, without a high and serious end.14 To make men, gifted with such a transcendent largess of powers, wholly mortal, to rot forever in the grave after life's swift day, were work far more unworthy of G.o.d than the task was to Michael Angelo set him in mockery by Pietro, the tyrant who succeeded Lorenzo the Magnificent in the dukedom of Florence, that he should scoop up the snow in the Via Larga, and with his highest art mould a statue from it, to dissolve ere night in the glow of the Italian sun.

Thirdly, it is an attribute of Infinite Wisdom to proportion powers to results, to adapt instruments to ends with exact fitness. But if we are utterly to die with the ceasing breath, then there is an amazing want of symmetry between our endowments and our opportunity; our attainments are most superfluously superior to our destiny. Can it be that an earth house of six feet is to imprison forever the intellect of a La Place, whose telescopic eye, piercing the unfenced fields of immensity, systematized more worlds than there are grains of dust in this globe? the heart of a Borromeo, whose seraphic love expanded to the limits of sympathetic being? the soul of a Wycliffe, whose undaunted will, in faithful consecration to duty, faced the fires of martyrdom and never blenched? the genius of a Shakspeare, whose imagination exhausted worlds and then invented new? There is vast incongruity between our faculties and the scope given them here.

On all it sees below the soul reads "Inadequate," and rises

13 Aebli, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, sechster Brief.

14 Ulrici, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele aus dem Wesen Gottes erwiesen.

dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger and thirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortal world. Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, G.o.d would have harmonized our powers with our lot. He would never have set such magnificent conceptions over against such poor possibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for so trivial a prize of dust to dust.

Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a future life is that yielded by the benevolence of G.o.d. Annihilation is totally irreconcilable with this. That He whose love for his creatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after their little span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets of existence and begun to know the n.o.ble delights of spiritual progress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessedness are beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe that while his children turn to him with yearning faith and grat.i.tude, with fervent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them into unmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happiness which he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase.

Will the affectionate G.o.d permit humanity, ensconced in the field of being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by the hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death these mult.i.tudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody of praise and bliss.

Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof, hard to be resisted, of a future state wherein there are compensations for the unmerited ills, a complement for the fragmentary experiences, and rectification for the wrongs, of the present life.15 G.o.d is just; but he works without impulse or caprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires time to show their perfect results. Through the brief s.p.a.ce of this existence, where the encountering of millions of free intelligences within the fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good and evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany often outreaches and tramples ingenuous n.o.bility and helpless innocence. Some saintly spirits, victims of disease and penury, drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of society, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous suffer undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious.

All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensating tendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of the mysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturates the moral atmosphere with influence, the world is full of wrongs, sufferings, and unfinished justice.16 There must be another world, where the remunerating processes interiorly begun here shall be openly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul and Nero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of death into precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if there be a G.o.d!

15 M. Jules Simon, La Religion Naturelle, liv. iii.: l'Immortalite.

16 Dr. Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, chap. 10.

There is a final a.s.semblage of thoughts pertaining to the likelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may be styled the moral argument in behalf of that belief.17 These considerations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things, claims of parts beseeching completion, vaticinations of experience. They form a c.u.mulative array of probabilities whose guiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voices swell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider the shrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If man be not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of non existence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are co ordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its own fulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, still longing for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confiding in it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget me nots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom? Secondly, an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from the premature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in the human family. Nearly one half of our race perish before reaching the age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilled the total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, and not the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary will appear full circle beyond the grave.

The argument is hardly met by a.s.serting that this untimely mortality is the punishment for non observance of law; for, denying any further life, would a scheme of existence have been admitted establis.h.i.+ng so awful a proportion of violations and penalties? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all should pa.s.s through the experience of a ripe and rounded life. But there is the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant, sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are s.n.a.t.c.hed into the invisible state. There is, as a n.o.ble thinker has said, an apparent "caprice in the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hidden sequel." Immortality unravels the otherwise inscrutable mystery.

Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestation to the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of G.o.d in the breast, arrayed in splendors and terrors, which shakes and illumines the whole circ.u.mference of our being with its thunders and lightnings, gives the good man, amidst oppressions and woes, a serene confidence in a future justifying reward, and transfixes the bad man, through all his retinue of guards and panoplied defences, with icy pangs of fear and with a horrid looking for judgment to come. The sublime grandeur of moral freedom, the imperilling dignities of probation, the tremendous responsibilities and hazards of man's felt power and position, are all inconsistent with the supposition that he is merely to cross this petty stage of earth and then wholly expire. Such momentous endowments and exposures imply a corresponding arena and career.

After the trial comes the sentence; and that would be as if a palace were built, a prince born, trained, crowned, solely that he might occupy the throne five minutes! The consecrating, royalizing idea of duty cannot be less than the core of eternal life.

Conscience is the sensitive corridor along which the mutual whispers of a divine communion pa.s.s and repa.s.s. A moral law and a free will

17 Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV.: The Arguments for Immortality. Bretschneider, Die Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect.

20-21.

are the root by which we grow out of G.o.d, and the stem by which we are grafted into him.

Fourthly, all probable surmisings in favor of a future life, or any other moral doctrine, are based on that primal postulate which, by virtue of our rational and ethical const.i.tution, we are authorized and bound to accept as a commencing axiom, namely, that the scheme of creation is as a whole the best possible one, impelled and controlled by wisdom and benignity. Whatever, then, is an inherent part of the plan of nature cannot be erroneous nor malignant, a mistake nor a curse. Essentially and in the finality, every fundamental portion and element of it must be good and perfect. So far as science and philosophy have penetrated, they confirm by facts this a priori principle, telling us that there is no pure and uncompensated evil in the universe. Now, death is a regular ingredient in the mingled world, an ordered step in the plan of life. If death be absolute, is it not an evil? What can the everlasting deprivation of all good be called but an immense evil to its subject? Such a doom would be without possible solace, standing alone in steep contradiction to the whole parallel moral universe. Then might man utter the most moving and melancholy paradox ever expressed in human speech:

"What good came to my mind I did deplore, Because it perish must, and not live evermore."

Fifthly, the soul, if not outwardly arrested by some hostile agent, seems capable of endless progress without ever exhausting either its own capacity or the perfections of infinitude.18 There are before it unlimited truth, beauty, power, n.o.bleness, to be contemplated, mastered, acquired. With indefatigable alacrity, insatiable faculty and desire, it responds to the infinite call.

The obvious inference is that its destiny is unending advancement.

Annihilation would be a sequel absurdly incongruous with the facts. True, the body decays, and all manifested energy fails; but that is the fault of the mechanism, not of the spirit. Were we to live many thousands of years, as Martineau suggests, no one supposes new souls, but only new organizations, would be needed.

And what period can we imagine to terminate the unimpeded spirit's abilities to learn, to enjoy, to expand? Kant's famous demonstration of man's eternal life on the grounds of practical reason is similar. The related ideas of absolute virtue and a moral being necessarily imply the infinite progress of the latter towards the former. That progress is impossible except on condition of the continued existence of the same being. Therefore the soul is immortal.19

Sixthly, our whole life here is a steady series of growing preparations for a continued and ascending life hereafter. All the spiritual powers we develop are so much athletic training, all the ideal treasures we acc.u.mulate are so many preliminary attainments, for a future life. They have this appearance and superscription.

Man alone foreknows his own death and expects a succeeding existence; and that foresight is given to prepare him. There are wondrous impulses in us, const.i.tutional convictions prescient of futurity, like those prevising instincts in birds leading them to take preparatory flights before their actual migration.

18 Addison, Spectator, Nos. 3 and 210.

19 Jacob, Beweis fur die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus dem Begriffe der Pflicht.

Eternity is the stuff of which our love, flying forward, builds its nest in the eaves of the universe. If we saw wings growing out upon a young creature, we should be forced to conclude that he was intended some time to fly. It is so with man. By exploring thoughts, disciplinary sacrifices, supernal prayers, holy toils of disinterestedness, he fledges his soul's pinions, lays up treasures in heaven, and at last migrates to the attracting clime.

"Here sits he, shaping wings to fly: His heart forebodes a mystery; He names the name eternity."

Seventhly, in the degree these preparations are made in obedience to obscure instincts and the developing laws of experience, they are accompanied by significant premonitions, lucid signals of the future state looked to, a.s.suring witnesses of its reality. The more one lives for immortality, the more immortal things he a.s.similates into his spiritual substance, the more confirming tokens of a deathless inheritance his faith finds. He becomes conscious of his own eternity.20 When hallowed imagination weighs anchor and spreads sail to coast the dim sh.o.r.es of the other world, it hears cheerful voices of welcome from the headlands and discerns beacons burning in the port. When in earnest communion with our inmost selves, solemn meditations of G.o.d, mysterious influences shed from unseen spheres, fall on our souls, and many a "strange thought, transcending our wonted themes, into glory peeps." A vague, constraining sense of invisible beings, by whom we are engirt, fills us. We blindly feel that our rank and destination are with them. Lift but one thin veil, we think, and the occult Universe of Spirit would break to vision with cloudy crowds of angels. Thousand "hints chance dropped from nature's sphere," pregnant with friendly tidings, rea.s.sure us. "Strange,"

said a gifted metaphysician once, "that the barrel organ, man, should terminate every tune with the strain of immortality!" Not strange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to the thrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score of destiny. When at night we gaze far out into immensity, along the s.h.i.+ning vistas of G.o.d's abode, and are almost crushed by the overwhelming prospects that sweep upon our vision, do not some pre monitions of our own unfathomed greatness also stir within us?

Yes: "the sense of Existence, the ideas of Right and Duty, awful intuitions of G.o.d and immortality, these, the grand facts and substance of the spirit, are independent and indestructible. The bases of the Moral Law, they shall stand in every t.i.ttle, although the stars should pa.s.s away. For their relations and root are in that which upholds the stars, even with worlds unseen from the finite, whose majestic and everlasting arrangements shall burst upon us as the heavens do through the night when the light of this garish life gives place to the solemn splendors of eternity."

Eighthly, the belief in a life beyond death has virtually prevailed everywhere and always. And the argument from universal consent, as it is termed, has ever been esteemed one of the foremost testimonies, if not indeed the most convincing testimony, to the truth of the doctrine. Unless the belief can be shown to be artificial or sinful, it must seem conclusive. Its innocence is self evident, and its naturalness is evidenced by its universality.

20 Theodore Parker, Sermon of Immortal Life.

The rudest and the most polished, the simplest and the most learned, unite in the expectation, and cling to it through every thing. It is like the ruling presentiment implanted in those insects that are to undergo metamorphosis. This believing instinct, so deeply seated in our consciousness, natural, innocent, universal, whence came it, and why was it given?

There is but one fair answer. G.o.d and nature deceive not.

Ninthly, the conscious, practical faith of civilized nations, to day, in a future life, unquestionably, in a majority of individuals, rests directly on the basis of authority, trust in a foreign announcement. There are two forms of this authority. The authority of revelation is most prominent and extensive. G.o.d has revealed the truth from heaven. It has been exemplified by a miraculous resurrection. It is written in an infallible book, and sealed with authenticating credentials of super natural purport.

It is therefore to be accepted with implicit trust. Secondly, with some, the authority of great minds, renowned for scientific knowledge and speculative ac.u.men, goes far. Thousands of such men, ranking among the highest names of history, have positively affirmed the immortality of the soul as a reliable truth. For instance, Goethe says, on occasion of the death of Wieland, "The destruction of such high powers is something which can never, and under no circ.u.mstances, even come into question." Such a dogmatic expression of conviction resting on bare philosophical grounds, from a mind so equipped, so acute, and so free, has great weight, and must influence a modest student who hesitates in confessed incompetence.21 The argument is justly powerful when but humanly considered, and when divinely derived, of course, it absolutely forecloses all doubts.

Tenthly, there is another life, because a belief in it is necessary to order this world, necessary as a comfort and an inspiration to man now. A good old author writes, "the very nerves and sinews of religion is hope of immortality." The conviction that there is a retributive life hereafter is the moral cement of the social fabric. Take away this truth, and one great motive of patriots, martyrs, thinkers, saints, is gone. Take it away, and to all low minded men selfishness becomes the law, earthly enjoyment the only good, suffering and death the only evil. Life then is to be supremely coveted and never put in risk for any stake. Self indulgence is to be secured at any hazard, little matter by what means. Abandon all hope of a life to come, and "from that instant there is nothing serious in mortality." In order that the world should be governable, ethical, happy, virtuous, magnanimous, is it possible that it should be necessary for the world to believe in an untruth?