‘I desire,’ he said, ‘that whatever merits I may have gained by good works may fall upon other people. May I be born again with them in the heaven of the blessed, be admitted to the family of Mi-le, and serve the Buddha of the future who is full of kindness and affection. When I descend again upon earth, to pass through other forms of existence, I desire at every new birth to fulfil my duties towards Buddha, and arrive at the last at the highest and most perfect intelligence.’
25. Having thus surveyed, however imperfectly, the belief regarding a future state held by the greater nations both of the East and West before the advent of Christianity, let us now make a few observations.
In the first place, there are manifestly two ways in which such a belief may be held. In one of these it becomes the natural result of an implicit faith in God and his goodness, which will not suffer him to disappoint the natural and innate longings of his intelligent creatures. And such a belief is most likely to arise amongst a nation which has already vividly realised the living presence and goodness of God. Now the ancient Jews were such a nation, and the belief that even death cannot break the fellowship of the believer with God comes out clearly enough in several of the Psalms. Moreover, the notion of some sort of future life lies clearly in what is said of Enoch. All this goes beyond the mere notion of Sheol, which is not thought of as a happy place. But in the time of the Maccabees this had grown into a definite belief in the resurrection, and without insisting on the truthfulness of the Second Book of Maccabees as an historical document, we may yet be sure that it embodies the feelings of the Jewish nation at the time when it was written. It is of little consequence whether a mother and seven brethren were actually put to death because they would not transgress what they believed to be the laws of God, or whether in dying they expressed their belief that they would be continued in a bodily existence by the Creator. For it is manifest from what we know of the Jews, that not merely one family but many would under similar circumstances have acted in the manner described by the historian, dying with the same fortitude and encouraged by the same hope. We have here a region in which there is no thought of the How—this troublesome question has not yet arisen, nor is it likely to arise. No doubt has yet been entertained regarding the power of God, nor would such a doubt be likely to receive much encouragement here.
26. But the human mind will not refrain from speculation, and this brings us to the second method in which a belief regarding a future state may be held. It may be held after a mode determined by speculations regarding the possible conditions of a future state. Such speculations may of course take every variety of form, but yet there are three well-defined classes into which they naturally group themselves:—
In the first place, we have the doctrine of an ethereal state, which may or may not be eternal;
Secondly, we have the doctrine of a bodily existence, which may or may not be eternal; and,
In the third place, we have the doctrine that a future state is inconceivable or impossible.
27. The first of these beliefs was probably held by a portion of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and by most of the Jews. It was likewise held by many amongst the eastern nations. It formed indeed one of the two ways of imagining a future state, but it was of a very vague and dreary nature; and from the passage of Homer already quoted ([Art. 14]), we realise the longing supposed to be felt by the inhabitants of such a place to escape into a more substantial region. Unquestionably it was not a place in which practical men like the Jews, for instance, would wish to dwell, and yet no doubt it had great attraction for minds of a visionary and ecstatic nature, who held matter to be the source of evil.
The return of the soul to its divine original, an Egyptian doctrine, the entrance into Nirvâna, proclaimed by Buddha, and the absorption into Buddha himself, proclaimed by some of his followers, are all proofs that a doctrine of this nature has peculiar fascinations for a dreamy order of minds. Nor must we analyse too rigidly the exact meaning and tendency of such doctrines, inasmuch as we cannot easily enter into the real feelings of those who propounded them, and who probably entertained conceptions which cannot adequately be expressed in words.
28. Coming now to the belief in a bodily future existence, it is remarkable that the doctrine of a transmigration of souls was extensively prevalent among all the nations we have named, if we except the Jews. It was believed in, as we have seen, by a large class of the Egyptians; it was introduced into Greece by Pythagoras and his followers; it is considered to have been from time immemorial a common property of the various religions of the extreme East; and it is recorded by Cæsar that the Druids believed in the same doctrine, although they confined the transmigration to human bodies.