Transition
Longfellow's line, "There is no death; what seems so is transition," at once suggests itself. Read literally the first half of this sentence is obviously untrue, but in the sense intended, and as a whole, the statement is true enough. There is no extinction, and the change called death is the entrance to a new condition of existence—what may be called a new life.
Yet life itself is continuous, and the conditions of the whole of existence remain precisely as before. Circumstances have changed for the individual, but only in the sense that he is now aware of a different group of facts. The change of surroundings is a subjective one. The facts were of course there, all the time, as the stars are there in the daytime; but they were out of our ken. Now these come into our ken, and others fade into memory.
The Universe is one, not two. Literally there is no 'other' world—except in the limited and partial sense of other planets—the Universe is one. We exist in it continuously all the time; sometimes conscious in one way, sometimes conscious in another; sometimes aware of a group of facts on one side of a partition, sometimes aware of another group, on the other side. But the partition is a subjective one; we are all one family all the time, so long as the link of affection is not broken. And for those who believe in prayer at all to cease from praying for the welfare of their friends because they are materially inaccessible—though perhaps spiritually more accessible than before—is to succumb unduly to the residual evil of past ecclesiastical abuses, and to lose an opportunity of happy service.
Footnotes
[35] It is rash to condemn a human custom which has prevailed for centuries or millenniums, and it is wrong to treat it de haut en bas. I would not be understood as doing so, in this brief and inadequate reference to the contents of Egyptian tombs. Their fuller interpretation awaits the labour of students now working at them.
In the same spirit I wish to leave open the question of what possible rational interpretation may be given to the mediæval phrase "Resurrection of the body"; a subject on which much has been written. What I am contending against is not the scholarly but the popular interpretation. For further remarks on this subject see Chapter VII below.