Identity
Enough, some faithful souls may say, upon which to rest the hope of the preservation of human identity. Alas! I must confess with a sigh, it is not enough for me. I see the mass of His teaching directed to life, and the issues of the moment; I seem to see Him turn His back again and again on the future, and wave His followers away. Is it conceivable that if He could have said, in words unmistakable and precise, “You have before you, when the weary body closes its eyes on the world, an existence in which perception is as strong or stronger, identity as clearly defined, memory as real, though as swift as when you lived—and this too unaccompanied by any of the languors or failures or traitorous inheritance of the poor corporal frame,”—is it conceivable, I say, that if He could have said this, He would have held His peace, and spoken only through dark hints, dim allegories, shadowy imaginings. Could a message of peace more strong, more vital, more tremendous have been given to the world? To have satisfied the riddles of the sages, the dream of philosophers, the hopes of the ardent—to have allayed the fears of the timid the heaviness of the despairing; to have dried the mourner’s tears—all in a moment. And He did not!
What then can we believe? I can answer but for myself.
I believe with my whole heart and soul in the indestructibility of life and spirit. Even matter to my mind seems indestructible—and matter is, I hold, less real than the motions and activities of the spirit.
It has sometimes seemed to me that matter may afford us the missing analogy: when the body dies, it sinks softly and resistlessly into the earth, and is carried on the wings of the wind, in the silent speeding fountains, to rise again in ceaseless interchange of form.
Individuality
Could it be so with life and spirit? As the fountain casts the jet high into the air over the glimmering basin, and the drops separate themselves for a prismatic instant—when their separate identity seems unquestioned—and then rejoin the parent wave, could not life and spirit slip back as it were into some vast reservoir of life, perhaps to linger there awhile, to lose by peaceful self-surrender, happy intermingling, by cool and tranquil fusion the dust, the stain, the ghastly taint of suffering and sin? I know not, but I think it may be so.
But if I could affirm the other—that the spirit passes onwards through realms undreamed of, in gentle unstained communion, not only with those whom one has loved, but with all whom one ever would have loved, lost in sweet wonder at the infinite tenderness and graciousness of God—would it not in one single instant give me the peace I cannot find, and make life into a radiant antechamber leading to a vision of rapturous delight?