—preached with such haunting eloquence by the Roman poet. The truth, as Dr. Illingworth has well expressed it, is that in practice "Pantheism is really indistinguishable from Materialism; it is merely Materialism grown sentimental, but no more tenable for its change of name." [10]
But, in the next place, in tentatively committing himself to the conclusion we are criticising, it seems to us that Sir Oliver Lodge loses sight of the very essence of his own contention: his conclusion, in effect, contradicts his premises. Syllogistically, and, of course, very bluntly stated, his argument might be summed up as follows: "What is of value is preserved; the soul is of value; therefore the soul is—dissolved." Let us put this a little more explicitly. That which has been gained in the course of evolution, so far as the human soul is concerned—that which makes it worthy to endure, viz., its character, conscience, idealism and so forth—belongs to the {238} soul precisely as an individual entity, and in no other way whatsoever; neither can it be effectively preserved save in the form of an individual entity. The soul, in other words, is not to be compared to a mere quantum of raw material, or to a cupful of water temporarily drawn from an infinite deep into which it may be poured back, and nothing lost: it is, on the contrary, a highly individualised product, so individual as to be unique, and in simply being merged in the totality of being all that is most valuable in it would be lost and wasted. We have no difficulty in believing that mere life—the potentiality, the material out of which higher things evolve—may go back into the all, to arise again in new manifestations and combinations; but it is otherwise with the highly complex resultant of the evolutionary process which we call personality, endowed as it is with self-consciousness, with the sense of right and wrong, the capacity for ideals, the faculty of self-giving, a god-like within answering to the God without. It is because these things—those which "avail for highest purposes"—make man personal and mark him off, broadly speaking, from the lower, sub-human life out of which he has emerged, that we believe in the permanence of human personality, of the spiritual element in man, in the survival of the soul as individual and personal, and not merely as "part of the eternal Being of God." A simple illustration will help us to enforce our {239} point of view. In the process of porcelain manufacture the half-finished ware is placed in "seggars" or coarse clay shells for protection in the glaze or enamel kiln. These temporary shells, having served their purpose, are broken up and ground down again into a shapeless mass under heavy revolving rollers; but no one would dream of treating the graceful vases and figures they enclosed for a time after the same fashion. The parallel is fairly obvious: the protecting clay envelope broken to pieces, merged and mingled with other clay, to be so used and broken a hundred times; the precious product carefully taken from its coarse shell and preserved. The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns unto God who gave it: returns, but not as it came forth from Him, but differentiated, individual, shaped and coloured; returns, not to be absorbed and lost in an "all-indissoluble All," but, as we hold, for still further processes of perfecting.
And if we are asked for the ground whence we derive the latter assurance, we answer, It is founded upon our belief, not in a "universal substance" or an "all-inclusive consciousness of being," but in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By no possibility can these two conceptions be made to harmonise or to pass into one another; on the former view, as we have seen, the significance of the individual soul is and must be nil—on the latter, the value of the soul is infinite, because it is {240} the object of the Divine Love, created by God "unto Himself," in order to experience and respond to His affection. On the former view, we are finite modes of infinite Being—on the latter, we are children of the Father.
It is because we have believed the love which God hath to us—the love made manifest supremely in Jesus Christ—that we echo so confidently the poet's "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust": the Christian doctrine of immortality flows quite naturally from the Christian doctrine of God. The argument is frankly ethical; it flows from the view of God's character which we have received through the revelation of that character in His Son. Without hurling any wild indictment at life, we dare to say that it requires to be supplemented by the life to come in order to fit in with the idea of a just and loving God, a faithful and merciful Creator. This span of days, this hand's-breadth of existence, is too palpably fragmentary. The sinner, the failure, all those who have here missed the way, ask another opportunity of the Divine mercy; the wronged, the sufferers from unmerited griefs, those whose lives passed in gloom and closed in tragedy, appeal for justice; the longing for reunion with loved ones whose going hence has left us permanently poorer, demands fulfilment; the goodness of the good and the sanctity of the saint plead for "the wages of going on." This ethical argument for personal {241} immortality—Browning's "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round"—will carry no weight with those who profess a "religion of the universe"; for the universe, viewed simply as the sum-total of phenomena, possesses, as we have so frequently pointed out, no sufficiently decided moral character to inspire us with confidence in its justice, or mercy, or pitifulness. On the other hand, the same argument will powerfully appeal to all who believe in the Divine Goodness, and especially to those who, looking unto Jesus, have in His face beheld the lineaments of the Father. If God be such as Jesus taught, then life everlasting may be a dim, intangible dream, but a dream that is destined to come true: we shall be satisfied when we awake.
Thus, at the close of this inquiry, we find ourselves left with two ultimate realities—two, not one; alike, not identical; related, and therefore distinct, for a relation can only subsist between one and another: the realities of God and the soul. Gott und die Seele, die Seele und ihr Gott—these two, eternally akin, yet in their kinship unconfounded, make up the theme and the content of religion; and any attempt to obliterate the distinction between them in some monistic formula, any tendency to surrender either the Divine or the human personality, any philosophy which seeks to merge man in God and God in the {242} universe, is fatal to religion itself. We have been told of late that "there is no Divine immanence which does not imply the allness of God"; we reply that there is no sane and sober theology which will not feel called upon to challenge this fundamental error. God, immanent in the universe as life and energy, is not the universe; man, the partaker of the Divine nature, indwelt by the Spirit of God, is other than God. These are commonplaces, truly; yet in the presence of more than one contemporary movement aiming to set these basal truths aside—truths whose acceptance or rejection involves far-reaching issues in faith and morals—there may be some excuse and even some necessity for reiterating them so persistently and at such length as has been done in these pages.
Man is inalienably akin to God—man is everlastingly other than God; upon this note we are content to close. In that fact we have, not only the ultimate explanation of the phenomenon of religion, the ultimate foundation of ethics, the ultimate ground of the felt need of salvation, but also the ultimate hope of immortality—that reasonable hope, expressed by the Hebrew seer for all time in words of sublime and intuitive insight: Art not THOU from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? WE SHALL NOT DIE.
[1] First and Last Things, pp. 80, 238.
[2] Ballard, Christian Essentials, pp. 10-12.
[3] The Riddle of the Universe, p. 72.
[4] Life Everlasting, p. 85. To the same effect is Huxley's statement declaring that while he would "neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man," immortality itself struck him "as not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter."