The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

3 Herod. i. 31; Cic. Tusc. Quast. i. 47.

4 Klencke, Das Buch vom Tode. Entwurf einer Lehre vom Sterben in der Natur und vom Tode des Mensehen insbesondere. Fur denkende Freunde der Wissenschaft.

Had there been no sin, men's lives would have glided on like the placid rivers that flow through the woodlands. They would have lived without strife or sorrow, grown old without sadness or satiety, and died without a pang or a sigh. But, alas! sin so abounds in the world that "there is not a just man that lives and sins not;" and it is a truth whose omnipresent jurisdiction can neither be avoided nor resisted that every kind of sin, every offence against Divine order, shall somewhere, at some time, be judged as it deserves. He who denies this only betrays the ignorance which conceals from him a pervading law of inevitable application, only reveals the degradation and insensibility which do not allow him to be conscious of his own experience. A harmonious, happy existence depends on the practice of pure morals and communion with the love of God. This great idea that the conscientious culture of the spiritual nature is the sole method of Divine life is equally a fundamental principle of the gospel and a conclusion of observation and reason: upon the devout observance of it hinge the possibilities of true blessedness. The pursuit of an opposite course necessitates the opposite experience, makes its votary a restless, wretched slave, wishing for freedom but unable to obtain it.

The thought just stated, we maintain, strikes the key note of the Christian Scriptures; and the voices of truth and nature accord with it. That Christianity declares sin to be the cause of spiritual death, in all the deep and wide meaning of the term, has been fully shown; that this is also a fact in the great order of things has been partially illustrated, but in justice to the subject should be urged, in a more precise and adequate form. In the first place, there is a positive punishment flowing evidently from sin, consisting both in outward inflictions of suffering and disgrace through human laws and social customs, and in the private endurance of bodily and mental pains and of strange misgivings that load the soul with fear and anguish. Subjection to the animal nature in the obedience of unrighteousness sensibly tends to bring upon its victim a woeful mass of positive ills, public and personal, to put him under the vile tyranny of devouring lusts, to induce deathlike enervation and disease in his whole being, to pervade his consciousness with the wretched gnawings of remorse and shame, and with the timorous, tormenting sense of guilt, discord, alienation, and condemnation.

In the second place, there is a negative punishment for impurity and wrong doing, less gross and visible than the former, but equally real and much more to be dreaded. Sin snatches from a man the prerogatives of eternal life, by brutalizing and deadening his nature, sinking the spirit with its delicate delights in the body and its coarse satisfactions, making him insensible to his highest good and glory, lowering him in the scale of being away from God, shutting the gates of heaven against him, and leaving him to wallow in the mire. The wages of sin is misery, and its gift is a degradation which prevents any elevation to true happiness. These positive and negative retributions, however delayed or disguised, will come where they are deserved, and will not fail. Do a wrong deed from a bad motive, and, though you fled on the pinions of the inconceivable lightning from one end of infinite space to the other, the fated penalty would chase you through eternity but that you should pay its debt; or, rather, the penalty is grappling with you from within on the instant, is a part of you.

Thirdly, if, by the searing of his conscience and absorption in the world, a sinner escapes for a season the penal consequences threatened in the law, and does not know how miserable he is, and thinks he is happy, yet let him remember that the remedial, restorative process through which he must pass, either in this life or in the next, involves a concentrated experience of expiatory pangs, as is shown both by the reason of the thing and by all relevant analogies. When the bad man awakes as some time or other he will awake to the infinite perfections and unalterable love of the Father whose holy commands he has trampled and whose kind invitations he has spurned, he will suffer agonies of remorseful sorrow but faintly shadowed in the bitterness of Peter's tears when his forgiving Master looked on him. Such is the common deadness of our consciences that the vices of our corrupt characters are far from appearing to us as the terrific things they really are. Angels, looking under the fleshly garment we wear, and seeing a falsehood or a sin assimilated as a portion of our being, turn away with such feeling as we should experience at beholding a leprous sore beneath the lifted ermine of a king. A well taught Christian will not fail to contemplate physical death as a stupendous, awakening crisis, one of whose chief effects will be the opening to personal consciousness, in the most vivid manner, of all the realities of character, with their relations towards things above and things below himself.

This thought leads us to a fourth and final consideration, more important than the previous. The tremendous fact that all the inwrought elements and workings of our being are self retributive, their own exceeding great and sufficient good or evil, independent of external circumstances and sequences, is rarely appreciated. Men overlook it in their superficial search after associations, accompaniments, and effects. When all tangible punishments and rewards are wanting, all outward penalties and prizes fail, if we go a little deeper into the mysterious facts of experience we shall find that still goodness is rewarded and evil is punished, because "the mind is its own place, and can itself," if virtuous, "make a heaven of hell, if wicked, "a hell of heaven." It is a truth, springing from the very nature of God and his irreversible relations towards his creatures, that his united justice and love shall follow both holiness and iniquity now and ever, pouring his beneficence upon them to be converted by them into their food and bliss or into their bane and misery. There is, then, no essential need of adventitious accompaniments or results to justify and pay the good, or to condemn and torture the bad, here or hereafter. To be wise, and pure, and strong, and noble, is glory and blessedness enough in itself. To be ignorant, and corrupt, and mean, and feeble, is degradation and horror enough in itself. The one abides in true life, the other in moral death; and that is sufficient. Even now, in this world, therefore, the swift and diversified retributions of men's characters and lives are in them and upon them, in various ways, and to a much greater extent than they are accustomed to think. History preaches this with all her revealing voices. Philosophy lays it bare, and points every finger at the flaming bond that binds innocence to peace, guilt to remorse. It is the substance of the gospel, emphatically pronounced. And the clear experience of every sensitive soul confirms its truth, echoing through the silent corridors of the conscience the declarations which fell in ancient Judea from the lips of Jesus and the pen of Paul: "The pure in heart shall see God;" "The wages of sin is death."

We will briefly sum up the principal positions of the ground we have now traversed. To be enslaved by the senses in the violation of the Divine laws, neglecting the mind and abusing the members, is to be dead to the goodness of God, the joys of virtue, and the hopes of heaven, and alive to guilt, anguish, and despair. To obey the will of God in love, keeping the body under, and cherishing a pure soul, is to be dead to the evil of the world, the goading of passions, and the fears of punishment, and alive to innocence, happiness, and faith. According to the natural plan of things from the dawn of creation, the flesh was intended to fall into the ground, but the spirit to rise into heaven. Suffering is the retributive result and accumulated merit of iniquity; while enjoyment is the gift of God and the fruit of conformity to his law. To receive the instructions of Christ and obey them with the whole heart, walking after his example, is to be quickened from that deadly misery into this living blessedness. The inner life of truth and goodness thus revealed and proposed to men, its personal experience being once obtained, is an immortal possession, a conscious fount springing up unto eternity through the beneficent decree of the Father, to play forever in the light of his smile and the shadow of his arm. Such are the great component elements of the Christian doctrine of life and death, both present and eternal.

The purely interior character of the genuine teachings of Christianity on this subject is strikingly evident in the foregoing epitome. The essential thing is simply that the hate life of error and sin is inherent alienation from God, in slavery, wretchedness, death; while the love life of truth and virtue is inherent communion with God, in conscious freedom and blessedness. Here pure Christianity leaves the subject, declaring this with authority, but not pretending to clear up the mysteries or set forth the details of the subject. Whatever in the New Testament goes beyond this and meddles with minute external circumstances we regard as a corrupt addition or mixture drawn from various Gentile and Pharisaic sources and erroneously joined with the authentic words of Christ. What we maintain in regard to the apostles and the early Christians in general is not so much that they failed to grasp the deep spiritual principles of the Master's teaching, not that they were essentially in error, but that, while they held the substance of the Savior's true thoughts, they also held additional notions which were errors retained from their Pharisaic education and only partially modified by their succeeding Christian culture, a set of traditional and mechanical conceptions. These errors, we repeat, concern not the heart and essence of ideas, but their form and clothing. For instance, Christ teaches that there is a heaven for the faithful; the apostles suppose that it is a located region over the firmament. The dying Stephen said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." Again: Christ teaches that there is a banishment for the wicked; the apostles suppose that it is into a located region under the earth. In accordance with the theological dogmas of their time and countrymen, with such modification as the peculiar character, teachings, and life of Jesus enforced, they believed that sin sent through the black gates of Sheol those who would otherwise have gone through the glorious doors of heaven; that Christ would return from heaven soon, raise the dead from the under world, judge them, rebanish the reprobate, establish his perfect kingdom on earth, and reascend to heaven with his elect. That these distinctive notions came into the New Testament through the mistakes and imperfect knowledge of the apostles, how can any candid and competent scholar doubt?5 In the first place, the process whereby these conceptions were transmitted and assimilated from Zoroastrian Persia to Pharisaic Judea is historically traceable. Secondly, the brevity and vagueness of the apostolic references to eschatology, and their perfect harmony with known Pharisaic beliefs, prove their mutual consonance and the derivation of the later from the earlier. If the supposed Christian views had been unheard of before, their promulgators would have taken pains to define them carefully and give detailed expositions of them. Thirdly, it was natural almost inevitable that the apostles would retain at least some of their original peculiarities of belief, and mix them with their new ideas, unless they were prevented by an infallible inspiration. Of the presence of any such infallibility there is not a shadow of evidence; but, on the contrary, there is a demonstration of its absence. For they differed among themselves, carried on violent controversies on important points. Paul says of Peter, "I withstood him to the face." The Gentile and Judaic dissensions shook the very foundations of the Apostolic Church. Paul and Barnabas "had a sharp controversy, insomuch that they parted asunder." Almost every commentator and scholar worthy of notice has been compelled to admit the error of the apostles in expecting the visible return of Christ in their own day. And, if they erred in that, they might in other matters. The progress of positive science and the improvement of philosophical thought have rendered the mechanical dogmas popularly associated with Christianity incredible to enlightened minds. For this reason, as for many others, it is the duty of the Christian teacher to show that those dogmas are not an integral part of the gospel, but only an adventitious element imported into it from an earlier and unauthoritative system. Take away these incongruous and outgrown errors, and the pure religion of Christ will be seen, and will be seen to be the everlasting truth of God.

In attempting to estimate the actual influence of Christianity, wherever it has spread, in establishing among men a faith in immortality, we must specify six separate considerations. First, the immediate reception of the resurrection and ascension of Christ as a miraculous and typical fact, putting an infallible seal on his teachings, and demonstrating, even to the senses of men, the reality of a heavenly life, was an extremely potent influence in giving form and vigor to faith, more potent for ages than every thing else combined. The image of the victorious Christ taken up to heaven and glorified there forever, this image, pictured in every believer's mind, stimulated the imagination and kept an ideal vision of heaven in constant remembrance as an apprehended reality. "There is Jesus," they said, pointing up to heaven; "and there one day we shall be with him."