"In the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection." What is to arise? The disembodied soul? But you say it is already with God. What is to arise? It is the body. It is more. It is he who is dead—who sleeps; he whom we have buried there. Whatever our creeds may say, we do not, we cannot ever understand the soul without the body. Not a body, but the body. We believe not in the life of a soul previous to the body. They are born together, and they die together. If they live hereafter it must be together. For they are one.
Never be deceived by theories or professions. No one in the West has ever understood the soul without the body, no one can do so. The conception is wanting. We play with the theory in words as we do with the fourth dimension. But who ever realised either?
But with the Oriental it is different. He believes in the migration of souls. They pass from body to body. He can realise this—somehow, I know not—but he can. Those who have read my "Soul of a People" will remember that they not only believe it but know it. They are sure of it because it has happened to each one, and he can remember his former lives. This comes not from Buddhism, because Buddhist theory denies the existence of soul at all, nor from Brahminism. It is the Oriental's instinct. He does not, I think, ever realise a soul apart from any body, but he can and does realise a soul exhibited first in one body then in another, as a lamp shining through different globes.
Therefore, when a Christian tells him of the resurrection of the body he cannot understand. "Which body," he asks, "for I have had so many?" Neither can he understand a Christian heaven of bodies risen from the earth. His heaven is immaterial. It is the Great Peace, where life has passed away. That he can understand. For neither can he conceive a life of the soul without some body. When perfection is reached and the last weary body done with, then life, too, is gone—life and all passion, all love, all happiness, all fear, all the emotions that are life. They are gone, and there is left only the Great Peace.
Our heaven grows out of our instincts as his does out of his instincts. Our dead without their bodies would not be those we love, and hence our heaven, where we shall recognise each other and love them as we did. I did not understand heaven when I read books, but out of men have I learned what I wished to know. Reason alone can tell you nothing, but sympathy will tell you all things.
It would be interesting, it is very interesting, to look back into our past histories and see these instincts grow and wane, to mark how they have influenced not only our religious theories, but our lives; to trace in other people like or opposed instincts. The Mahommedans refuse amputation because they will not appear maimed in the next world. For they, too, cannot distinguish soul from one body. The Jews had no idea of soul at all as existing after death, whether with or without a body. "As a man dies so will he be, all through the ages of eternity." They learned the idea of immortality from Egypt, but it never took root because they had no instinctive feeling of soul. Their witches were foreigners. "You shall not suffer a witch to live." The incantation of ghosts was utterly forbidden by them as a foreign wickedness. It has so been forbidden by all religions. Yet there are people who think religions arise from ideas of ghosts.
The African negroes have no idea of life after death, as witness the story of Dr. Livingstone and the negro king about the seed. It is a very curious history this of the longing for immortality, the belief in a life beyond the grave.
But I am not now concerned with the past only with the present. The history of instincts is never the explanation of them. If we could unravel clearly all the history of the instincts of all peoples as regards the after death, we should be no nearer an explanation of why the instinct exists at all, why it grows or decays, why it takes one form or another. But we might, as so many do, blind ourselves to the fact that instincts exist now quite apart from reason, either now or previously. No reasoning can explain the absolute clinging of the European peoples to the resurrection of the body. No reasoning can possibly explain the Burman's remembrance of previous lives. Reasoning would deny both. Observation and sympathy know that both exist.
And which is true? No one can tell.
"Not one returns to tell us of the Road
Which to discover we must travel too."