But as the two moments of religious thought which I have now discussed have both reached their culmination in a substantial repudiation of religion, that which stimulates the religious sentiment to-day must be something different from either. This I take to be the idea of personal survival after physical death, or, as it is generally called, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
This is the main dogma in the leading religions of the world to-day. “A God,” remarks Sir William Hamilton, speaking for the enlightened Christians of his generation, “is to us of practical interest, only inasmuch as he is the condition of our immortality.”[256-1] In his attractive work, La Vie Eternelle, whose large popularity shows it to express the prevailing views of modern Protestant thought, Ernest Naville takes pains to distinguish that Christianity is not a means of living a holy life so much as one of gaining a blessed hereafter. The promises of a life after death are numerous and distinct in the New Testament. Most of the recommendations of action and suffering in this world are based on the doctrine of compensation in the world to come.
Mohammed taught the same tenet with equal or even greater emphasis. In one sura he says: “To whatever is evil may they be likened who believe not in a future life;” and elsewhere: “As for the blessed ones—their place is Paradise. There shall they dwell so long as the heavens and the earth endure, enjoying the imperishable bounties of God. But as for those who shall be consigned to misery, their place is the Fire. There shall they abide so long as the heavens and the earth shall last, unless God wills it otherwise.”[256-2]
In Buddhism, as generally understood, the doctrine of a future life is just as clear. Not only does the soul wander from one to another animal body, but when it has completed its peregrinations and reaches its final abode, it revels in all sorts of bliss. For the condition of Nirvana, understood by philosophical Buddhists as that of the extinction of desires even to the desire of life, and of the complete enlightenment of the mind even to the recognition that existence itself is an illusion, has no such meaning to the millions who profess themselves the followers of the sage of Kapilavastu. They take it to be a material Paradise with pleasures as real as those painted by Mohammed, wherein they will dwell beyond all time, a reward for their devotions and faith in this life.
These three religions embrace three-fourths of the human race and all its civilized nations, with trifling exceptions. They displaced and extinguished the older creeds and in a few centuries controlled the earth; but as against each other their strife has been of little avail. The reason is, they share the same momentum of religious thought, differing in its interpretation not more among themselves than do orthodox members of either faith in their own fold. Many enlightened Muslims and Christians, for example, consider the descriptions of Paradise given in the Koran and the Apocalypse to convey wholly spiritual meanings.
There has been so much to surprise in the rapid extension of these faiths that the votaries of each claim manifest miraculous interposition. The religious idea of an after life is a sufficient moment to account for the phenomenon. I say the religious idea, for, with one or two exceptions, however distinct had been the belief in a hereafter, that belief had not a religious coloring until they gave it such. This distinction is an important one.
Students of religions have hitherto attributed too much weight to the primitive notion of an existence after death. It is common enough, but it rarely has anything at all to do with the simpler manifestations of the religious sentiment. These are directed to the immediate desires of the individual or the community, and do not look beyond the present life. The doctrine of compensation hereafter is foreign to them. I have shown this at length so far as the religions of America were concerned. “Neither the delights of a heaven on the one hand, nor the terrors of a hell on the other were ever held out by priests or sages as an incentive to well doing, or a warning to the evil disposed.”[258-1] The same is true of the classical religions of Greece and Rome, of Carthage and Assyria. Even in Egypt the manner of death and the rites of interment had much more to do with the fate of the soul, than had its thoughts and deeds in the flesh. The opinions of Socrates and Plato on the soul as something which always existed and whose after life is affected by its experiences here, struck the Athenians as novel and innovating.
On the other hand, the ancient Germans had a most lively faith in the life hereafter. Money was loaned in this world to be repaid in the next. But with them also, as with the Aztecs, the future was dependent on the character or mode of death rather than the conduct of life. He who died the “straw-death” on the couch of sickness looked for little joy in the hereafter; but he who met the “spear-death” on the field of battle went at once to Odin, to the hall of Valhalla, where the heroes of all time assembled to fight, eat boar’s fat and drink beer. Even this rude belief gave them such an ascendancy over the materialistic Romans, that these distinctly felt that in the long run they must succumb to a bravery which rested on such a mighty moment as this.[259-1]
The Israelites do not seem to have entertained any general opinion on an existence after death. No promise in the Old Testament refers to a future life. The religion there taught nowhere looks beyond the grave. It is materialistic to the fullest extent. Hence, a large body of orthodox Jewish philosophers, the Sadducees, denied the existence of the soul apart from the body.
The central doctrine of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the leading impulse which he gave to the religious thought of his age, was that the thinking part of man survives his physical death, and that its condition does not depend on the rites of interment, as other religions then taught,[260-1] but on the character of its thoughts during life here. Filled with this new and sublime idea, he developed it in its numerous applications, and drew from it those startling inferences, which, to this day, stagger his followers, and have been in turn, the terror and derision of his foes. This he saw, that against a mind inwardly penetrated with the full conviction of a life hereafter, obtainable under known conditions, the powers of this world are utterly futile, and its pleasures hollow phantoms.