George Eliot, walking with Frederic Myers in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity, Cambridge, “stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”But this idea of the infinite nature of Duty is the creation of Christianity—the last infinite would never have attained its present range and intensity, had it not been indissolubly connected with the other two (Forrest, Christ of History and Experience, 16).
This ethical argument has probably more power over the minds of men than any other. Men believe in Minos and Rhadamanthus, if not in the Elysian Fields. But even here it may be replied that the judgment which conscience threatens may be, not immortality, but extinction of being. We shall see, however, in our discussion of the endlessness of future punishment, that mere annihilation cannot satisfy the moral instinct which lies at the basis of this argument. That demands a punishment proportioned in each case to the guilt incurred by transgression. Extinction of being would be the same to all. As it would not admit of degrees, so it would not, in any case, sufficiently vindicate God's righteousness. F. W. Newman: “If man be not immortal, God is not just.”
But while this argument proves life and punishment for the wicked after death, it leaves us dependent on revelation for our knowledge how long that life and punishment will be. Kant's argument is that man strives equally for morality and for well-being; but morality often requires the sacrifice of well-being; hence there must be a future reconciliation of the two in the well-being or reward of virtue. To all of which it might be answered, first, that there is no virtue so perfect as to merit reward; and secondly, that virtue is its own reward, and so is well-being.
(d) The historical argument.—The popular belief of all nations and ages shows that the idea of immortality is natural to the human mind. It is not sufficient to say that this indicates only such desire for continued earthly existence as is necessary to self-preservation; for multitudes expect a life beyond death without desiring it, and multitudes desire a heavenly life without caring for the earthly. This testimony of man's nature to immortality may be regarded as the testimony of the God who made the nature.
Testimonies to this popular belief are given in Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, preface: The arrow-heads and earthen vessels laid by the side of the dead Indian; the silver obolus put in the mouth of the dead Greek to pay Charon's passage money; the furnishing of the Egyptian corpse with the Book of the Dead, the papyrus-roll containing the prayer he is to offer and the chart of his journey through the unseen world. The Gauls did not hesitate to lend money, on the sole condition that he to whom they lent it would return it to them in the other life,—so sure were they that they should get it again (Valerius Maximus, quoted in Boissier, La Religion Romaine, 1:264). The Laplanders bury flint and tinder with the dead, to furnish light for the dark journey. The Norsemen buried the horse and armor for the dead hero's triumphant ride. The Chinese scatter paper images of sedan porters over the grave, to help along in the sombre pilgrimage. The Greenlanders bury with the child a dog to guide him (George Dana Boardman, Sermon on Immortality).
Savage, Life after Death, 1-18—“Candles at the head of the casket are the modern representatives of the primitive man's fire which was to light the way of the soul on its dark journey.... Ulysses talks in the underworld with the shade of Hercules though the real Hercules, a demigod, had been transferred to Olympus, and was there living in companionship with the gods.... The Brahman desired to escape being reborn. Socrates: ‘To die and be released is better for me.’ Here I am walking on a plank. It reaches out into the fog, and I have got to keep walking. I can see only ten feet ahead of me. I know that pretty soon I must walk over the end of that plank,—I haven't the slightest idea into what, and I don't believe anybody else knows. And I don't like it.” Matthew Arnold: “Is there no other life? Pitch this one high.” But without positive revelation most men will say: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”(1 Cor. 15:32).
“By passionately loving life, we make Loved life unlovely, hugging her to death.”Theodore Parker: “The intuition of mortality is written in the heart of man by a Hand that writes no falsehoods.... There is evidence of a summer yet to be, in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter—efflorescences in human nature unaccountable if the end of man is in the grave.” But it may be replied that many universal popular impressions have proved false, such as belief in ghosts, and in the moving of the sun round the earth. While the mass of men have believed in immortality, some of the wisest have been doubters. Cyrus said: “I cannot imagine that the soul lives only while it remains in this mortal body.” But the dying words of Socrates were: “We part; I am going to die, and you to live; which of us goes the better way is known to God alone.” Cicero declared: “Upon this subject I entertain no more than conjectures;” and said that, when he was reading Plato's argument for immortality, he seemed to himself convinced, but when he laid down the book he found that all his doubts returned. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 134—“Though Cicero wrote his Tusculan Disputations to prove the doctrine of immortality, he spoke of that doctrine in his letters and speeches as a mere pleasing speculation, which might be discussed with interest, but which no one practically held.”
Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 3:9, calls death “the most to be feared of all things ... for it appears to be the end of everything; and for the deceased there appears to be no longer either any good or any evil.” Æschylus: “Of one once dead there is no resurrection.”Catullus: “When once our brief day has set, we must sleep one everlasting night.”Tacitus: “If there is a place for the spirits of the pious; if, as the wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies.” “In that if,” says Uhlhorn, “lies the whole torturing uncertainty of heathenism.” Seneca, Ep. liv.—“Mors est non esse”—“Death is not to be”; Troades, V, 393—“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil”—“There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.” Marcus Aurelius: “What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heavenborn things fly to their [pg 990]native seat.” The Emperor Hadrian to his soul: “Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.” Classic writers might have said of the soul at death: “We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relume.”
Chadwick, 184—“With the growth of all that is best in man of intelligence and affection, there goes the development of the hope of an immortal life. If the hope thus developed is not a valid one, then we have a radical contradiction in our moral nature. The survival of the fittest points in the same direction.” Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)—“At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast Eternity.” Goethe in his last days came to be a profound believer in immortality. “You ask me what are my grounds for this belief? The weightiest is this, that we cannot do without it.” Huxley wrote in a letter to Morley: “It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of time that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a great deal,—at any rate in one of the upper circles, where climate and the company are not too trying.”
The book of Job shows how impossible it is for man to work out the problem of personal immortality from the point of view of merely natural religion. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, represents Claudio as saying to his sister Isabella: “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod.” Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 2:739—“The other world is in all men the one enemy, in its aspect of a future world, however, the last enemy, which speculative criticism has to fight, and if possible to overcome.” Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, Stanzas 28-35—“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.... Up from Earth's Centre through the seventh gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a knot unravelled by the Road, But not the master-knot of human fate. There was the Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I might not see: Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was,—And then no more of Thee and Me. Earth could not answer, nor the Seas that mourn, In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn; Nor rolling Heaven, with all his signs revealed, And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn. Then of the Thee in Me, who works behind The veil, I lifted up my hands to find A Lamp, amid the darkness; and I heard As from without—‘The Me within Thee blind.’ Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn I leaned, the secret of my life to learn; And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—‘While you live, Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return!’ ” So “The Phantom Caravan has reached The Nothing it set out from.” It is a demonstration of the hopelessness and blindness and sensuality of man, when left without the revelation of God and of the life to come.