In conclusion, while commending to the reader’s consideration what appears to me the true method of solving the problem of a Life after Death, I point to the fact that on the answer to that question must hang the alternative, not only of the hope or despair of the Human Race, but of the glory or the failure of the whole Kosmos, so far as our uttermost vision can extend.
“Lions and eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their kind; but if the summit and crown of the whole work, the being in whose consciousness it is all mirrored, be worse than incomplete and imperfect, an undeveloped embryo, an acorn mouldered in its shell, a bud blighted by the frost, then must the entire world he deemed a failure also. Now, Man can only be reckoned on any ground as a provisionally successful work; successful, that is, provided we regard him as in transitu, on his way to another and far more perfect stage of development. We are content that the egg, the larva, the bud, the half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should only faintly indicate what will be the future bird and butterfly and flower and picture and temple. And thus to look on man (as by some deep insight he has almost universally regarded himself) as a ‘sojourner upon earth,’ upon his way to ‘another country, even a heavenly,’ destined to complete his pilgrimage and make up for all his shortcomings elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to be even now a Divine work in its embryonic stage. But if we close out this view of the future, and assure ourselves that nothing more is ever to be expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last days of his mortal life; if we are to believe we have seen the best development which his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing, feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing and being blessed, will ever obtain while the heavens endure,—then, indeed, is the conclusion inevitable and final. Man is a Failure, the consummate failure of creation. Everything else,—star, ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast and insect—has a sort of completeness and perfection. It is fitting in its own place, and it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it is. ‘Every Lion,’ as Parker has said, ‘is a type of all lionhood; but there is no Man who is a type of all Manhood.’ Even the best and greatest of men have only been imperfect types of a single phase of manhood—of the saint, the hero, the sage, the philanthropist, the poet, the friend,—never of the full-orbed man who should be all these together. If each perish at death, then,—as the seeds of all these varied forms of good are in each,—every one is cut off prematurely, blighted, spoiled. Nor is this criterion of success or failure solely applicable to our small planet; a mere spark thrown off the wheel whereon a million suns are turned into space. It is easy to believe that much loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral powers than our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But Thought and Love are, after all, the grandest things which any world can show; and if a whole race endowed with them should prove such a failure as death-extinguished Mankind would undoubtedly be, there remains no reason why all the spheres of the universe should not be similar scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge blunder and mishap. In vain may the President of the British Congress of Science dazzle us with the splendid panorama of the material universe unrolling itself ‘from out of the primal nebula’s fiery cloud.’ Suns and planets swarming through the abysses of space are but whirling sepulchres after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken from off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom they have been the palaces are all for ever lost. Spreading continents and flowing seas, soaring Alps and fertile plains are worse than failures, if we, even we, poor feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures that we are, shall ever ‘vanish like the streak of morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past.’”
The second part of this essay discusses the possible conditions of the Life after Death. I cannot summarize it here.
The rest of the volume consists of a sermon which I read at Clerkenwell Unitarian Chapel, in 1873, entitled “Doomed to be Saved.” I describe the disastrous moral consequences to a man in old times who believed himself to have sold his soul to the Evil One, and to have cast himself off from God’s Goodness for ever; and I contrast this with what we ought to feel when we recognize that we are Doomed to be Saved—destined irretrievably to be brought back, in this life or in far future lives, from all our wanderings in remorse and penitence to the feet of God.
The book concludes with an Essay on the Evolution of the Social Sentiment, in which I maintain that the primary human feeling in the savage which still lingers in the Aryan child, is not Sympathy with suffering, but quite an opposite, angry and even cruel sentiment, which I have named Heteropathy; which inspires brutes and birds to kill their wounded or diseased companions. Half-way after this, comes Aversion; and last of all, Sympathy,—slowly extending from the mother’s “pity for the son of her womb,” to the Family, the Tribe, the Nation, and the Human Race; and, at last to the Brutes. I conclude thus:
“Such is, I believe, the great Hope of the human race. It does not lie in the progress of the intellect, or in the conquest of fresh powers over the realms of nature; not in the improvement of laws, or the more harmonious adjustment of the relations of classes and states; not in the glories of Art, or the triumphs of Science. All these things may, and doubtless will, adorn the better and happier ages of the future. But that which will truly constitute the blessedness of Man will be the gradual dying out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and his selfishness, and the growth within him of the god-like faculty of love and self-sacrifice; the development of that holiest Sympathy wherein all souls shall blend at last, like the tints of the rainbow which the Seer beheld around the great White Throne on high.”
Beside these theological works I published more recently two slight volumes on cognate subjects: A Faithless World, and Health and Holiness. I wrote “A Faithless World” (first published in the Contemporary Review) in reply to Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s remark in the Nineteenth Century, No. 88, that “We get on very well without religion” ... “Love, Friendship, Ambition, Science, literature, art, politics, commerce, and a thousand other matters will go equally well as far as I can see, whether there is or is not a God and a future state.” I examine this view in detail and conclude that instead of life remaining (in the event of the fall of religion) to most people much what it is at present, there would, on the contrary, be actually nothing which would be left unchanged by such a catastrophe.
I sent a copy of this article when first published, (as I was bound in courtesy to do), to Sir James, whom I had often met, and whose brother and sister were my kind friends. He replied in such a manly and generous spirit that I am tempted to give his letter.
“December 2nd,
“32, De Vere Gardens, W.