‘Rabbi Jacob said, “This world is as it were the anteroom of the world to come. Prepare thyself in the anteroom so that thou mayest be fit to enter the banquet-room.”’—Mishna, Pirke Aboth, chap. iv. par. 16.
‘Eternal process moving on
From state to state the spirit walks,
And these are but the shatter’d stalks,
Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.’—Tennyson.
192. In the preceding chapters we have examined by the light of our present knowledge the possibilities contained in the visible universe. What is it good for in the way of possible immortality? is the question we have tried to answer. It will have been seen that the reply is eminently unfavourable. If we take the individual man to begin with, we find that he lives his short tale of years, and that then the visible machinery which connects him with the past, as well as that which enables him to act in the present, falls into ruin and is brought to an end. If any germ or potentiality remains, it is certainly not connected with the visible order of things.
If we next consider the human race we find that the state of advancement to which they have attained is in many respects greatly due to their physical surroundings. Coal and iron have been as instrumental in promoting knowledge as Galileo and Newton, but our whole stock of these materials will come to an end. By economy it may be possible to lengthen out the period during which they can be supplied, but is it not manifest that we are year by year exhausting them as sources of available energy?
Are we not inevitably led to conclude that our present state cannot last even for a lengthened period, but will be brought to an end long before the inevitable dissipation of energy shall have rendered our earth unfit for habitation?
193. But even supposing that man, in some form, is permitted to remain on the earth for a long series of years, we merely lengthen out the period, but we cannot escape the final catastrophe. The earth will gradually lose its energy of rotation, as well as that of revolution round the sun. The sun himself will wax dim and become useless as a source of energy, until at last the favourable conditions of the present solar system will have quite disappeared.
But what happens to our system will happen likewise to the whole visible universe ([Art. 116]), which will, if finite, become in time a lifeless mass, if indeed it be not doomed to utter dissolution. In fine, it will become old and effete, no less truly than the individual—it is a glorious garment this visible universe, but not an immortal one—we must look elsewhere if we are to be clothed with immortality as with a garment.