“Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on passion within, but no moral law without: every man is free to do what he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, in his ‘Treatise on Man’s Soule,’ that ‘to predicate mortality in the soule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, by removing the ground of all difference in those thinges which are to governe our actions.’ This style of teaching is a very mischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in the woods of Brazil, and Schiller in the brilliant circles of Weimar, will at last meet the same fate in the dusty grasp of death; yet, while they live, one is an ape, the other is a man. And the differences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense. The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The words of an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than those of the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could be uttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamation on immortality, ‘If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty. If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention.’ What debauched unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Its utter baselessness, as a single illustration may show, is obvious at a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, the relations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material world although they may be lost sight of when time and space are transcended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, the relations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifold grades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for human nature and experience in this life even if men perish in the grave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endure they are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strange slip of the mind,--showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are the common prejudice and falsehood on this subject,--even so bold and fresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his own philosophy by declaring, ‘If to-morrow I perish utterly, then my fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread-corn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations of mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will vanish.’ Ah, man reveres his fathers, and loves to act nobly, not because he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And, though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken from human life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish, as it is said the German cross-bill pairs and broods in the dead of winter. The martyr’s sacrifice and the voluptuary’s indulgence are very different things to-day, if they do both cease to-morrow. No speed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon and Thersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice and fraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that they will interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutable morality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, and triangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties or compression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds of duty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil, magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery.
“Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter the inherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. The most it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to give the great motor-nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke of palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral law? Richter reasons as follows: ‘Suppose a statue besouled for two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob it of one day’s life, would you be guilty of murder? One can injure only an immortal.’ The sophistry appears when we rectify the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an immortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong and injury, for the time, to destroy one day’s life of a man whose entire existence was confined to two days, than it would be to take away the same period from the bodily existence of one who immediately thereupon passes into a more exalted and eternal life. To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity, the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt act is the same. This general moral problem has been more accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as follows: ‘The creatures of a summer’s day might be imagined, when they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of his government; for these are to be the law of their season of life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from the greater stake.’
“Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in human society cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedly weakened, its basis variously altered, but as a confessed sovereign principle it cannot be expelled. The denial of the freedom of the will theoretically explodes it; but social custom, law, and opinion will enforce it still. Make man a mere dissoluble mixture of carbon and magnetism, yet so long as he can distinguish right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and, unsophisticated by dialectics, can follow either of opposite courses of action, the moral law exists and exerts its sway. It has been asked, ‘If the incendiary be, like the fire he kindles, a result of material combinations, shall he not be treated in the same way?’ We should reply thus: No matter what man springs from or consists of, if he has moral ideas, performs moral actions, and is susceptible of moral motives, then he is morally responsible; for all practical and disciplinary purposes he is wholly removed from the categories of physical science.
“Another pernicious misrepresentation of the fair consequences of the denial of a life hereafter is shown in the frequent declaration that then there would be no motive to any thing good and great. The incentives which animate men to strenuous services, perilous virtues, disinterested enterprises, spiritual culture, would cease to operate. The essential life of all moral motives would be killed. This view is to be met by a broad and indignant denial based on an appeal to human consciousness and to the reason of the thing. Every man knows by experience that there are a multitude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with future reward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do good even with self-sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman risks his life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, is the hope of Heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offered bribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is the fear of hell all that animates him? A million such decisive specifications might be made. The renowned sentence of Cicero, “Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerret ad mortem,” is effective eloquence; but it is a baseless libel against humanity and the truth. In every moment of supreme nobleness and sacrifice, personality vanishes. Thousands of patriots, philosophers, saints, have been glad to die for the freedom of native land, the cause of truth, the welfare of fellow-men, without a taint of selfish reward touching their wills. Are there not souls
‘To whom dishonor’s shadow is a substance
More terrible than death here and hereafter.’
He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences of it eternally. Is there no motive for the preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever, shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating poisons?
“If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot, the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike, who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like the fool and the felon? Shall Heaven be held before man simply as a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving abyss. But some one may say, ‘If I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?’ It advantageth you everything until you are dead, although there be nothing afterwards. As long as you live is it not glory and reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This is sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law. And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worthy our affection, let great Shakespeare advance, with his matchless depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing, in tones of cordial solidity,--
‘This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’