Immortality a Nobler, Juster and Simpler Balancing of Life's Account-Book
If there be a want of opportunity in our present existence for a true balancing of the scales of justice, and if some future existence be needed to make things right, then the Christian doctrine of immortality has an immense advantage over the reincarnations of Theosophy. We have no right to underestimate the difficulties of a reasonable faith in immortality, but they are simplicity itself as compared with the difficulties of reincarnation, for reincarnation must answer every question which the possibility of immortality raises and answer even more difficult questions of its own. It is far simpler to believe that having survived the shock of death we go on with the same essential individuality we had before death, than to believe that having survived we are sent back again through the gates of birth and are really reincarnated in another individuality. More than that, the Christian belief in immortality is more ethical. The action and reaction of life have real meaning for me only as I know and remember. No theosophic evasion can take the force out of this.
If I consciously connect to-day's pain with yesterday's pain with the folly or fault of a previous existence of which I am really unconscious, the chain has been broken and no speculative question can supply the missing link. Very likely the accepted Christian doctrine of the finality of life after death has given Theosophy an opportunity in the West. Protestantism particularly has allowed absolutely no place after death for repentance, has offered no new chance to the adventuring soul; its Hell and its Heaven have been final states. Catholicism has eased the strain of this with purgatory, a belief wholly without Scriptural basis, but nevertheless evolved in answer to great necessities of life. We need neither purgatory nor reincarnation; we need only the recognition of what is so centrally a part of any conception of immortality as to make one wonder why we have so greatly missed it; the reasonable confidence, that is, that we really go on very much as we left off here.
If there be in a future existence—and there must be if there be a future existence—any room for repentance born of a clearer recognition of fault and new and holier purposes born of a clearer understanding of the true values of life, then we shall go on in a truly moral process of growth, availing ourselves always of the teachings of experience and working toward the true well-being of our souls, and if the mercy and justice of God be not the figment of our imagination those who have been hardly dealt with here will be given new opportunity, the deficient and the handicapped released from what weighed them down will find a new departure, and the justices of eternity complete what time began. All this will be accomplished not in a series of existences, separated one from the other by abysms of forgetfulness, but in a remembered continuity of life deepening through endless growth. If this be only faith and speculation it is at least a far more reasonable faith and speculation than the alternative which Theosophy offers. Theosophy is a side issue in the real solution of the problems of life.
Pantheism at Its Best—and Its Worst
Finally, though this is possibly unfair, Eastern Pantheism generally must be tested by its fruits. We ought not, if we are to deal justly with it, to ignore its better side. The East at its best has been strong in a type of life wanting in the West; the East has been rich in patience and gentleness and in consideration for every kind of life, even the ant in the dust or the beast in the jungle. The East at its best has weighed conduct in delicate balances and traced the play of cause and effect in character far, far beyond the West; it has been content with simple things and found its true wealth in the inner life. It has willingly, for the sake of truth and goodness, subjected itself to disciplines, some of which are admirable, others of which are loathsome. It has at its best ventured everything for the well-being of the soul, even when it has misconceived that well-being. It has had little of the hard driving quality of the West. Not a little of the teaching of Jesus fits in better with the temper and devotion of the Orient than the competitive materialism of the Occident. It is easily possible to pass not a little of the Gospels through the interpretation of Eastern mysticism and find therein arresting correspondences. For example, a little book called "At the Feet of the Master" by a young Indian student, has in it a wealth of insight and an understanding of the balanced conduct of life which is wanting in a good many of the Western interpretations of life, but none the less, things must be judged by their massed outcome and the massed outcome of Eastern Pantheism does not commend itself.
The larger part of the religious literature of the East is upon a distinctly lower level than those parts of it which are brought to us by its devotees, and when Pantheism—and the basis of all Eastern speculation is Pantheistic—comes down from its high places and begins practically to express itself in worship and the conduct of the crowd, then it is such as to give us pause. What Kipling calls "the sculptured horrors" of the carved fronts of the temples in Benares are no accident; they are simply the logical outcome of a faith which lifts the whole to the level of the divine and has nothing beyond to correct what is by what ought or ought not to be. Almost inevitably Pantheistic religions unduly exalt those powers which make for fertility of field and the increase of life. As they do this they have on their side the elemental forces in human nature. When we begin to make gods of what after all must be sternly subordinated to higher things, and the East has done this in spite of its mystics and its dreamers, then we are not only in danger of sculpturing symbolic horrors on the fronts of our temples but of setting up therein strange altars to strange gods who are best worshipped by strange rites. All this, inevitably enough, has given to Eastern worship a more than earthly character, and has invested with the sanction of religion forces which it must always be the business of religion to subordinate and control.
Along with all this has gone a grotesque mythology and an inconceivable multiplication of divinity. Since no one but an expert can hope to understand the complexities of a faith like this, the East has developed a priestly class which bears harder upon its devotees and at the same time more contemptuously separates itself from them than perhaps any priestly class in the world. If the East is to return upon the West in substituting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sterner forms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it is which, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altars amongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the West without recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself of Western science and informs itself with what Christianity has given to the West. If these were taken out of it it would be hopeless. Since, therefore, its speculations carry us beyond reason or science, since its solution of the problems of life is far too complex, since whatever is good in it may be found more richly and simply in what we already possess and since the practical outcome of it in the East itself is an arrested civilization which has many depths but few heights, one must inevitably conclude that Theosophy has no real meaning for those who possess already the knowledge which we have so laboriously gained and the faith and insight which Christianity has brought us.