CHAPTER XI.
HEAVEN.
"I am not getting on very well," he thought. "I have looked for three things, and two I am sure I have not found. I have found nowhere any explanation of the Universe, of the First Cause; I have found nowhere any true rule of life. Yet these are two of the three 'truths' that the faiths offer to me as inducements to believe. 'We will give you,' they say, 'a theory of this world and of its origin which is true, which will help you in this life because it will show you what you are and the world is, and whence you came. We will give you through this troublous life a guide that will never fail you, a staff that will never break. And finally, if you believe, you shall attain after death the happiness that is without end.'"
So they promise, and of their promises I have tried two. Have I found that they give what they declare? Is there anywhere any belief of the First Cause that is true, that is the whole truth? There is none. And is there any guide to life that can be followed in sincerity and truth? There is none. There remains only heaven. There remains only the bribe, the promise of happiness, if we will believe as they declare, if we will do as they say.
It may be that here is the secret, that I shall come now to the answer; it may be that this is the key to all. If there is in the heaven they promise us such a fulfilment of glory, such an appeal to our hearts that they cannot but answer, what matter the rest? Happiness is our end in life. For what do we strive all our days but for happiness, for truth, for joy, for the beauty of life? What matter that in the theory of the First Cause we can see no truth, that in the rule of life I can find only a contradiction of beauty, if in the end in heaven these are attained? The end, if the end be perfect, will reveal the truth and the beauty in the ways that are now hid. What is this heaven?
When we think of heaven, when with our eyes shut we try to recall all they have taught us of the Christian heaven, what are the images that come up? It seems as if we went back all those years to when we were little lads beside our mothers, and as the fire flickered across the unlit room, full of strange shadows, we said our childish prayers and leant our heads heavy with sleep upon her knee. It is our mothers that tell us of the heaven, whither they would that we should go, that urge us with imaginings of beauty to come to be "good." It is a childish heaven of which we learn, a heaven full of girl angels with white wings and floating dresses, of golden harps, of pearly gates, of everlasting song. There are, I think, no men there, only girls; no sheep, but fleecy lambs. It is a heaven that appeals only to them. And is it very different when we grow up? Indeed I think not. It is the same heaven always, the same conception full of childish things. Did you ever hear a sermon on the heaven, did you ever read a book, did you ever listen to a discourse that did not take you back again in memory to that far-off fire-lightened room of childhood? Surely there is nothing in all the world so babyish as the general idea of the Christian heaven. Can you imagine a man there, a man with great deep voice and passion-laden eyes, a man with the storms of life still beating on his soul amid these baby faces and white wings? "Ah," said the man, "they must make us into infants that we may enter their heaven. When I revolted against it as a boy as but a kindergarten, without even the distraction of being put in the corner, was I wrong?"
May be, for there are things beyond this. "In my Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you." "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive." "The peace of God which passeth all understanding." "Where God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." These are not childish things. Happiness that hath no sorrow, light that knows no shadow, glory that never ends.
I read a book long ago; I have forgotten the name of it, I have forgotten who wrote it, and I remember that at the time I did not understand it. The book was on the subject of perfect happiness, on heaven, which is postulated as the ideal peace. And what this book tried to show—what, indeed, it showed, I think—was that happiness if perfect was near akin to annihilation. The argument ran something like this. "You are happy in some particular employment, say in singing a hymn, in some particular attitude, let us say in kneeling. If your happiness in this act and attitude is perfect, they will endure for ever. You will pass eternity kneeling and singing the same hymn. For consider, Why do you ever change your acts, your attitudes? Because a particular act or a certain attitude has become wearisome. But if it be stated that your happiness is perfect you can never feel satiety, never feel any desire for change. The wish for change is born of the feeling of wearisomeness. You have had enough of one thing, you want another. But if you are perfectly happy this cannot be. Life would become a monotony, a satiety near akin to death. And if indeed peace be the highest happiness, then would this perfect peace be so near annihilation that the difference would only lie in that your consciousness of happiness still remained." Thus did this writer show that if the Christian heaven be as declared, perfect happiness, so it must be almost indistinguishable from death.
I do not think this writer had ever read of the Buddhist Nirvana, I do not remember that he ever even alluded to it. He was thinking of the Christian heaven and trying to make out what it was like, and that was what he found. He, taking the Christian ideal and working it to its inevitable conclusion, arrived at the same result as Buddhist teachers starting from such widely different premises have arrived at: the Christian heaven and the Buddhist peace are the same.
Readers of my former work, "The Soul of a People," will remember how the Buddhists arrive at Nirvana. It is the "Great Peace." Life is the enemy. Life is change, and change is misery. The ideal is to have done with life, to be steeped in the Great Peace. Thus do the purer ideas of the Christian heaven and the Buddhist heaven agree. It is the "Peace that passeth all understanding" for each.