2nd. The second line of thought leading us to belief in Immortality is,—that if there be no future life, there are millions of human beings whose existence has answered no purpose which we can rationally attribute to a wise and merciful God. He is a baffled God, if His creature be extinguished before reaching some end which He may possibly have designed.
3rd. The incompleteness of the noblest part of man offers so strange a contrast to the perfection of the other work of creation that we are drawn to conclude that the human soul is only a bud to blossom out into full flower hereafter. No man has ever in his life reached the plentitude of moral strength and beauty of which his nature gives promise. A garden wherein all the buds should perish before blooming, would be more hideous than a desert, and such a garden is God’s world if man dies for ever when we see him no more.
4th. Human love urges an appeal to Faith which has been to millions of hearts the most conclusive of all.
“To think of the one whose innermost self is to us the world’s chief treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to be, and become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love for ourselves forgotten for ever,—this is such agony, that having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the grave. Love would be the curse of mortality were it to bring always with it such unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge that every hour which knitted our heart more closely to our friend also brought us nearer to an eternal separation. Better never to have ascended to that high Vita Nuova where self-love is lost in another’s weal, better to have lived like the cattle which browse and sleep while they wait the butcher’s knife, than to endure such despair.
“But is there nothing in us which refuses to believe all this nightmare of the final sundering of loving hearts? Love itself seems to announce itself as an eternal thing. It has such an element of infinity in its tenderness, that it never fails to seek for itself an expression beyond the limits of time, and we talk, even when we know not what we mean of “undying affection,” “immortal love.” It is the only passion which in the nature of things we can carry with us into another world, and it is fit to be prolonged, intensified, glorified for ever. It is not so much a joy we may take with us, as the only joy which can make any world a heaven when the affections of earth shall be perfected in the supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which we share with God, and by which we live in Him and He in us. All its beautiful tenderness, its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure and ineffable delight, are the rays of God’s Sun of Love reflected in our souls.
“Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent dust decaying slowly in their coffins side by side in the vault? If so, let us have done with prating of any Faith in Heaven or Earth. We are mocked by a fiend.”—(Hopes, p. 52.)
5th. A remarkable argument is to be found in Prof. F. W. Newman’s Theism (p. 75). It insists on the fact that many men have certainly loved God and that God must love them in return (else Man were better than God); and we must reasonably infer that those whom God loves are deathless, else would the Divine Blessedness be imperfect, nay, “a yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow.”
6th. The extreme variability of the common human belief that the “soul of man never dies” makes it difficult to discern its proper evidential value, still it seems to have the Note of a genuine instinct. It begins early, though (probably) not at the earliest stage of human development. It attains its maximum among the highest races of mankind (the Vedic-Aryan, early Persian and Egyptian). It projects such varied and even contrasted ideals of the other life (e.g., Valhalla and Nirvana) that it cannot well have been borrowed by one race from another but must have sprung up in each indigenously. Finally the instinct begins to falter in ages of self-consciousness and criticism.
7th, lastly. The most perfect and direct faith in Immortality belongs to saintly souls who personally feel that they have entered into relations with the Divine Spirit which can never end. “Faith in God and in our eternal Union with Him,” said one such devout man to me, “are not two dogmas but one.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades. Thou wilt guide me by thy counsel and afterwards receive me to Glory.”
“Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the perfect evidence of things not seen. But can their full faith supply our lack? Can we see with their eyes and believe on their report? It is only possible in a very inferior measure. Yet if our own spiritual life have received even some faint gleams of the ‘light which never came from sun or star,’ then, once more, will our faith point the way to Immortality; for we shall know in what manner such truths come to the soul, and be able to trust that what is dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have journeyed nearer to the East than we; who have surmounted Duty more perfectly, or passed through rivers of affliction into which our feet have never dipped. God cannot have deluded them in their sacred hope of His eternal Love. If their experience be a dream all prayer and communion may be dreams likewise.”