Saving souls, not the life here, but that which is to come, has been the blight and curse of mankind. The doctrine of “one world at a time,” and the present supreme, is a reaction against this essentially vicious dogma. Neither extreme may be true; for the truth is the “golden mean,” which makes the future life a continuity of this, carrying forward all its ideals to full realization, and making the spiritual realm held in abeyance to as fixed and unchangeable laws as the material world.
By knowledge, man has been led out of the fogs to the highlands of free thought, and aroused from the nightmare of theology, which for ages held him in thraldom. Those were the ages when God and Christ were inwrought into the Constitution of the State, and the Holy Bible was the foundation of the law. Those were the ages of St. Bartholomew massacres, of autos-da-fé, of the rack and the fagot. Those were the ages when the day was darkened by the smoke of burning cities, and the fair fields gleamed white with the bones of the slain. Those were the ages when the whole Christian world engaged itself in saving souls!
A Jesus may suffer on the cross; not only one, but ten thousand may die, admirable in self-sacrifice and examples of firm adhesion to their sense of duty; but, for saving souls, their sacrifice is lost; for they suffer for a misconception of the plan of the world. Man has never been lost, and can not be lost, and hence can not be saved by the blood of one or ten thousand sacrifices.
If the future life is a continuity of this, then the perfection of religion is the making of this life perfect. Not by crucifixion of the body, not by suffering or disappointment, but by complete and harmonious culture, can this be accomplished.
The New Method.—To solve the problem of immortality by the methods of Science, to bring it up from the marshlands of conjecture to the region of absolute knowledge, belongs to the present age and generation. It is a task they can and must accomplish. It has for so many ages been the fertile field of superstition, that it seems impossible to disentangle it from its unsatisfactory wrappings. The investigation must commence with the physical man as the basis of the spiritual, as through and by means of the body he is related to the physical world. He is the superlative being; the last, greatest and yet incomplete effort of creative energy. All departments of science gather around him as a center, and to have perfect knowledge of him is to comprehend the universe.
In the earliest ages; in the very childhood of the race, the momentous question was asked: What am I? The solution was felt to be fraught with momentous consequences not only in this life but the interminable future which was vaguely shadowed in the mind of savage man. The answers given became the foundations of the great religious systems of the world. The conjecture of untutored minds was received as the true system of causation, and growing hoary with age arrogated to itself infallible authority, and required implicit faith, and the exercise of reason, only, in making palatable the requirements of that faith. Conceived in an age when nature was an unknown realm, when science opened her mysteries to the understanding, and one by one, dogmas claiming infallibility were shown to be false, there of necessity was antagonism and conflict. I do not propose to enlarge on the theological aspect of this subject more than incidentally. That treatment has grown “stale, flat and unprofitable,” for every drop of vital juice it contained has been extracted long ago. The interminable sects, wrangling over the dogmatic solution of this vital question of man’s origin and destiny, arriving at nothing determinate, wrangling with each other and themselves, are not incentives to beguile the earnest truth-seeker to follow their paths. If metaphysical theology contained the germ of a truthful solution, satisfaction would have resulted ages ago, and the mind, reposing contented with the answer, would have employed its energies in other directions. Instead, there is restlessness, turmoil, conflict and indecision, and never has been an answer so broad and deep in Catholicity of truth as to meet the demand. If science fails also, it can not retrieve its failure by assumed infallibility. Its teachings are ever tentative and prophecies of final triumph, as the grandest study of mankind is man, the crowning work of science is the solution of this vexed question.
Physical Man.—First, as most tangible and obvious in this investigation, is the physical man, the body, the temple of the psyche. The student, even when imbued with the doctrine of materialism, arises from the study of the physical machine with wonder and surprise akin to awe, declaring man to be fearfully and wonderfully made.
It is not surprising that we die, but that we live. The rupture of a nerve fiber, the obstruction of a valve, the momentary cessation of breath, the introduction of a mote at some vital point, brings this most complex structure to eternal rest. By what constant oversight, by what persistency of reparation is it preserved from ruin!
This physical man is an animal, amenable to the laws of animal growth. His body is the type of which theirs are imperfect copies. From two or three mineral substances his bones are crystalized, and articulated as the bones of all vertebrate animals, and over them the muscles are extended. From the amphioxus, too low in the scale of being to be called a fish; a being without organs, without a brain; little more than an elongated sack of gelatinous substance, through which a white line marks the position of the spinal cord and the future spinal axis; there is a slow and steady evolution to the perfected skeleton of man. His osseous structure is the type of all. The fin of the fish, the huge paddle of the whale, the cruel paw of the tiger, the hoof of the horse, the wing of the bird, and the wonderfully flexible hand of man, so exquisite in adaptations to be taken as an unqualified evidence of design, are all fashioned out of the same elementary bones, after one model. The change of form to meet the wants of their possessors, results from the relative enlargement or atrophy of one or more of these elements. When the fleshy envelope is stripped away, it is astonishing how alike these apparently divergent forms really are. In the whale the flesh unites the huge bones of the fingers and produces a broad, oar-like fin; in the tiger the nails become retractile talons; in the bird some of the fingers are atrophied, while others are elongated to support the feathers which are to offer resistance to the air in flight; in the horse the bones of the fingers are consolidated, and the united nails appear in the hoof.
If there exists such perfect similarity in the bony structure of man to the animal world, the muscular system for which it furnishes support offers the same likeness. Trace any muscle in the human body from its origin to its termination, mark the points where it seizes the bones, the function it performs, and then dissect the most obscure or disreputable member of the vertebrate kingdom, and you will find the same muscle performing the same function. The talons of the tiger are extended and flexed by muscles, similar to those which give flexibility to the human hand, and the same elements are traceable in the ponderous paddle of the whale.