“M. A. Schimmelpenninck is gone. She said just before her death, ‘Oh, I hear such beautiful voices, and the children’s are the loudest.’”
Can any old Italian picture of the ascending Madonna, with the cloud of cherub heads forming a glory of welcome around her as she enters the higher world, be more significant than this actual fact—so simply told—of a saintly woman in dying hearing “beautiful voices, and the children’s the loudest”? Of course, like all the rest, it may have been only a physiological phenomenon, a purely subjective impression; but it is at least remarkable that a second sense should thus be under the same glamour, and that again we have to confront, in the case of hearing as of sight, the anomaly of the (real or supposed) presence of the beautiful and the delightful, instead of the terrible and the frightful, while Nature is in the pangs of dissolution. Does the brain, then, unlike every known instrument, give forth its sweetest music as its chords are breaking?
Instances like those recorded in this paper might, I believe, be almost indefinitely multiplied, were attention directed to them, and the experience of survivors more generally communicated and recorded. Reviewing them, the question seems to press upon us, Why should we not thus catch a glimpse of the spiritual world through that half-open portal wherein our dying brother is passing? If the soul of man exist at all after the extinction of the life of the body, what is more probable than that it should begin at the very instant when the veil of the flesh is dropping off to exercise those spiritual powers of perception which we must suppose it to possess (else were its whole after-life a blank), and to become conscious of other things than those of which our dim senses can take cognizance? If it be not destined to an eternity of solitude (an absurd hypothesis), its future companions may well be recognized at once, even as it goes forth to meet them. It seems indeed almost a thing to be expected that some of them should be ready waiting to welcome it on the threshold. Is there not, then, a little margin for hope, if not for any confident belief, that our fondest anticipations will be verified; nay, that the actual experience of many has already verified them? May it not be that, when that hour comes for each of us which we have been wont to dread as one of parting and sorrow,—
“The last long farewell on the shore
Of this rude world,”
ere we “put off into the unknown dark”,—we may find that we only leave for a little time the friends of earth to go straight to the embrace of those who have long been waiting for us to make perfect for them the nobler life beyond the grave? May it not be that our very first dawning sense of that enfranchised existence will be the rapture of reunion with the beloved ones whom we have mourned as lost, but who have been standing near, waiting longingly for our recognition, as a mother may watch beside the bed of a fever-stricken child, till reason reillumines its eyes, and with outstretched arms it cries “Mother.”
There are doubtless some to whom it would be very dreadful to think of thus meeting on the threshold of eternity the wronged, the deceived, the forsaken. But for most of us, God be thanked, no dream of celestial glory has half the ecstasy of the thought that in dying we may meet—and meet at once, before we have had a moment to feel the awful loneliness of death—the parent, wife, husband, child, friend of our life, soul of our soul, whom we consigned long ago with breaking hearts to the grave. Their “beautiful” forms (as that dying lady beheld her brother and sister) entering our chamber, standing beside our bed of death, and come to rejoin us for ever,—what words can describe the happiness of such a vision? It may be awaiting us all. There is even, perhaps, a certain probability that it is actually the natural destiny of the human soul, and that the affections which alone of earthly things can survive dissolution will, like magnets, draw the beloved and loving spirits of the dead around the dying. I can see no reason why we should not indulge so ineffably blessed a hope. But, even if it be a dream, the faith remains, built on no such evanescent and shadowy foundation, that there is One Friend,—and He the best,—in whose arms we shall surely fall asleep, and to whose love we may trust for the reunion, sooner or later, of the severed links of sacred human affection.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] There is an argument which, I believe, now influences more or less consciously the minds of many intelligent persons against the belief in the immortal life. It amounts to this: Granted that there is a God, and that he is absolutely benevolently disposed toward mankind, it does not follow (as commonly assumed) that He will bestow immortality on man, because it is quite possible that there may be an inherent absurdity and contradiction in the idea of an immortal finite creature,—it may, in short, be no more within the scope of divine power to create an immortal man than to make a triangle with the properties of a circle. If we could be first assured that the thing were possible, then arguments derived from the justice and goodness of the Deity might be valuable, as affording us ground for believing that He will do that possible thing. But, while it remains an open question whether we are not talking actual nonsense when we speak of an ever-living created being, such reflections on the moral attributes of God are beside the mark. No justice or goodness can be involved in doing that which, in the nature of things, is impossible.
Now, of course, there is a little confusion here between a future life—a mere post-mortem addition of so many years or centuries to this mortal existence—and an immortal life, which, it is assumed, will continue either in a series of births and deaths or in one unbroken life forever and ever. In the former idea, no one can find any self-contradiction. It is only the latter notion of immortality, strictly so described, which is suspected of involving a contradiction. Practically, however, the two ideas must stand or fall together; for almost every argument for the survival of the soul after death bears with double force against its extinction at any subsequent epoch of its existence.
Taking then the future life of a man as, to all intents and purposes, the immortal life, we are bound to confront the difficulty,—“What right have we to assume that immortality and creaturehood are compatible the one with the other?”