We have in our last letters got upon those subjects which, upon principle and by choice, I avoid,—bottomless speculations, wherein the mind, attempting to gaze, falls from the very brink and is drowned, as it were, at the very surface of them.
Your theory of partial immortality is abhorrent to me—I can use no other term. Pray conceive me rightly—'tis an abhorrence of the opinion, which does not include you for holding it; for though my whole being, moral and mental, revolts from certain notions, this is a mere necessity of my nature, as to contemplate such issues is the necessity of certain others, differently organized from mine.
I would rather disbelieve in the immortality of my own soul than suppose the boon given to me was withheld from any of my fellow-creatures. Besides, I did not, in the position I placed before you, suggest the efficacy of any special kind of idea of God, as connecting the holder of it with Him.
For aught I can tell, the noble conception of the Divinity, formed out of the extension of the noble qualities of his own soul by the noblest man, may be further from any adequate idea of God than the gross notion of a log-worshipper is from the spiritual conception of the most spiritually minded man (only remember I don't believe this). But, inasmuch as it is something out of himself, beyond himself, to which the religious element of his nature aspires—that highest element in the human creature, since it combines the sense of reverence and the sense of duty, no matter how distorted or misapplied—it is an idea of a God, it is a manifestation of the germ of those capacities which, enlightened and cultivated, have made (be it with due respect spoken) the God of Fénelon and of Channing. I do not believe that any human creature, called by God into this life, is without some notion of a Divinity, no matter how mean, how unworthy, how seldom thought of, how habitually forgotten.
CONCEPTIONS OF GOD'S DEALINGS WITH US. Superstition, terror, hope, misery, joy—every one of these sentiments brings paroxysms in every man's life when some idea of God is seized upon, no matter of what value, no matter how soon relinquished, how evanescent. Eternity is long enough for the progress of those that we see lowest in our moral scale. You know I believe in the progress of the human race, as I do in its immortality; and the barbarous conception of the Divinity of the least advanced of that race confirms me in this faith as much as the purest Christianity of its foremost nations and individuals. Revelation, you say, alone gives any image of God to you; but which Revelation? When did God begin, or when has He ceased, to reveal Himself to man? And is it in the Christian Revelation that you find your doctrine of partial immortality and partial annihilation? I believe I told you once of my having read in America a pamphlet suggesting that sin eventually put out, destroyed, annihilated, and did away with, those souls of which it took possession; this is something like your present position, and I do not know when I received so painful an impression as from reading that pamphlet, or a profound distress that lasted so long, from a mere abstract proposition addressed to my imagination.
I believe all God's creatures have known Him, in such proportion as He and they have chosen; i.e., to none hath He left Himself utterly without witness; to some that witness has been the perfect life and doctrine of Jesus Christ, the most complete revelation of God that the world has known.
All have known Him, by His great grace, in some mode and measure; and therefore I believe all are immortal: none have known Him as He is, and but few in any age of the world have known Him as they might; and an eternity of progress holds forth, to my mind, the only hope large enough to compensate for the difference of advantages here, and to atone for the inadequate use of those advantages.
Dearest Harriet, I hate not to make an effort to answer you, and you like, above all things, this species of questioning, speculating, and discussing. But there is something to me almost irreverent in thus catching up these everlasting themes, as it were, in the breathing-time between my theatrical rehearsals and performances. You will not mistake me. I know that the soul may be about its work (does not George Herbert say
"Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine"?)
even at such times, but a deep and difficult mental process should not be snapped at thus.