Dawn on these regions peopled with the dead.
Our hearts leap forward to begin the song
Of a glad universe whence sin has fled.
APPENDIX.
MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
The following is from “The Doctrine of a Future Life,” by W. R. Alger. He here discusses the “morality of the doctrine of a future life” on the strong hypothesis that there is to be no existence hereafter, and utterly disproves the conclusions which some would make the inevitable consequence of such a doctrine. The same objections are urged against the view we entertain that after the Judgment the sinner is to endure a punishment which reaches its climax in the loss of existence. With a hundred-fold more force the reasoning of Mr. Alger lies against these objections when urged in opposition to our view. We have in this life the great incentive to goodness and virtue, that is involved in the hope of immortality, seconded by the wonderful intervention of Christ in our behalf, which is calculated to arouse all the nobler sentiments of our being. If this will not win men from sin to a holy life, they would not be driven to it by threats of eternal torture. Mr. Alger says:--
“The morality of the doctrine of a future life having thus been defended from the attacks of those who have sought to destroy it in the fancied interests either of the enjoyments of the earth, or of the purity of virtue and religion, it now remains to free it from the still more fatal supports which false or superficial religionists have sought to give it by wrenching out of it meanings it never held, by various perverse abuses of it, by monstrous exaggerations of its moral importance to the present. We have seen that the supposition of another life, correctly interpreted, lays no new duty upon man, takes away from him no old duty or privilege, but simply gives to the previously-existing facts of the case the intensifying glory and strength of fresh light, motive, and consolation. But many public teachers, not content to treat the subject with this sobriety of reason, instead of presenting the careful conclusions of a conscientious analysis, have sought to strengthen their argument to the feelings by help of prodigious assumptions, assumptions hastily adopted, highly colored, and authoritatively urged. Upon the hypothesis that annihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely to take away from the present all the additional light, incentive, and comfort, imparted by the faith in a future existence, but they arbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsically belonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues, and set it in a frame of midnight. Thus, instead of calmly seeking to elicit and recommend truth, they strive, by terrifying the fancy and shocking the prejudices, to make people accept their dogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejecting it. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which have been employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used for the same purpose.
“Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton has said: ‘Without the belief in personal immortality there can be no religion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelings and the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a few years in this world?’ Such a statement from such a quarter is astonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person or incumbent upon him do not depend on the duration of his being, but on the character, endowments, and relations of his being. The hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy God, does not destroy man’s dependence on God for all his privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness, does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility, while they last. The soul’s gratitude, wonder, love, and worship, are just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience on earth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and in conscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does not cause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may be doubted if Heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerity in such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add to its qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of our capacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injurious error in saying as he does, ‘If there be no future life, the moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom, and authority and honor.’ The creative Sovereign of fifty million firmaments of worlds, ‘stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor,’ because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal! Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations and ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion is fitted for us on the former supposition, it is also on the latter. To any dependent intelligence blessed with our human susceptibilities, reverential love and submission are as obligatory, natural and becoming on the brink of annihilation as on the verge of immortality. Rebellious egotism makes all the difference. Truth is truth, whatever it be. Religion is the meek submission of self-will to God’s will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what the future reserves or excludes for us.
“Another sophism almost universally accepted needs to be shown. Man, it is said, has no interest in a future life if not conscious in it of the past. If, on exchange of worlds, man loses his memory, he virtually ceases to exist, and might just as well be annihilated. A future life with perfect oblivion of the present is no life at all for us. Is not this style of thought the most provincial egotism, the utter absence of all generous thought and sympathy unselfishly grasping the absolute boons of being? It is a shallow error, too, even on the grounds of selfishness itself. In any point of view the difference is diametric and immense between a happy being in an eternal present, unconscious of the past, and no being at all. Suppose a man thirty years of age were offered his choice to die this moment, or to live fifty years longer of unalloyed success and happiness, only with a complete forgetfulness of all that has happened up to this moment. He would not hesitate to grasp the gift, however much he regretted the condition.
“It has often been argued that with the denial of a retributive life beyond the grave all restraints are taken off from the passions, free course given to every impulse. Chateaubriand says bluntly, ‘There can be no morality if there be no future state.’ With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensible recklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to the essential nobleness of his loving, heroic nature, ‘If you believe in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do, then, as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery, rascality, robbery, and murder.’ What bible of Moloch had he been studying to form, for the time, so horrid a theory of the happiest life, and to put so degrading an estimate upon human nature? Is man’s will a starved wolf, only held back by the triple chain of fear of death, Satan, and hell, from tearing forth with ravenous bounds to flesh the fangs of his desires in bleeding virtue and innocence? Does the greatest satisfaction man is capable of here, the highest blessedness he can attain to, consist in drunkenness, gluttony, dishonesty, violence, and impiety? If he had the appetite of a tiger or a vulture,--then, thus to wallow in the offal of vice, dive into the carrion of sensuality, abandon himself to reveling in carnivorous[carnivorous] crime, might be his instinct and his happiness. But by virtue of his humanity man loves his fellows, enjoys the scenery of nature, takes delight in thought and art, dilates with grand presentiments of glory and eternity, mysteriously yearns after the hidden God. To a reasonable man--and no other is to be reasoned with on matters of truth and interest--the assumption of this brief season as all, will be a double motive not to hasten and imbitter its brevity by folly, excess, and sin. If you are to be dead to-morrow, for that very reason, in God’s name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate death to-day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a chasm of fire, but a high-toned conscience of reason and honor, perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneously loathing them.