earth is passed through. Here are men, for a brief time, free to act thus or otherwise. Do thus, and the endless bliss of heaven is won. Do otherwise, and the endless agony of hell is incurred. The plain rule of action yielded by this doctrine is, Sacrifice all other things to the one thing needful. The present life is in itself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustible eternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends on how you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing to do while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To waste a single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness of folly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and then to improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energy and every thought and every desire of every moment. This world is a bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is there leisure for sport and business, or room for science and literature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to get ourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, which will waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lake packed with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls the floating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, this should intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can be admitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not one flexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantine immortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makes eternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleeting probation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that it pronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. The only true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure the forensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointed means. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathless moment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea of blessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, such should be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety that there would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Every object should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, every sound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatory confession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single and preternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing could allow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting or blinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Such would be a logical application to life of the genuine morals of the doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to be rejected as false on many grounds. It is deduced from Scripture by a technical and unsound interpretation. It is unjust and cruel, irreconcilable with the righteousness or the goodness of God. It is unreasonable, opposed to the analogies of nature and to the experience of man. It is wholly impossible to carry it out consistently in the practice of life. If it were thoroughly credited and acted upon, all the business of the world would cease, and the human race would soon die out.
There remains one other view of the relationship of a future life with the present. And it seems to be the true view. The same Creator presiding, the same laws prevailing, over infinitude and eternity that now rule over time and earth, our immortality cannot reasonably be imagined either a moment of free action and an eternity of fixed consequences, or a series of separate fragments patched into a parti colored experience with blanks of death between the patterns of life. It must be conceived as one endless existence in linear connection of cause and effect developing in progressive phases under varying conditions of motive and scenery. With what we are at death we live on into the next life. In every epoch and world of our destiny our happiness depends on the possession of a harmoniously working soul harmoniously related with its environment. Each stage and state of our eternal existence has its peculiarities of duty and privilege. In this one our proper work is to improve the opportunities, discharge the tasks, enjoy the blessings, belonging here. We are to do the same in the next one when we arrive in that. All the wealth of wisdom, virtue, strength, and harmony we acquire in our present life is the vantage ground and capital wherewith we start in the succeeding life. Therefore the true preparation for the future is to fit ourselves to enter it under the most favorable auspices, by accumulating in our souls all the spiritual treasures afforded by the present. In other words, the truest aim we can set before ourselves during our existence on earth is to make it yield the greatest possible results of the noblest experience. The life hereafter is the elevated and complementary continuation of the life here; and certainly the directest way to ameliorate the continuation is to improve the commencement.
But, it may be said, according to this representation, the fact of a future life makes no difference in regard to our duty now; for if the grave swallows all, still, it is our duty and our interest to make the best and the most of our life in the world while it lasts. True; and really that very consideration is a strong proof of the correctness of the view in question. It corresponds with the other arrangements of God. He makes every thing its own end, complete in itself, at the same time that it subserves some further end and enters into some higher unity. He is no mere Teleologist, hobbling towards his conclusions on a pair of decayed logic crutches,2 but an infinite Artist, whose means and ends are consentaneous in the timeless and spaceless spontaneity and perfection of his play. If the tomb is our total goal, our genuine aim in this existence is to win during its course an experience the largest in quantity and the best in quality. On the other hand, if another life follows this, our wisdom is just the same; because that experience alone, with the favor of God, can constitute our fitness and stock to enter on the future. And yet between the two cases there is this immense difference, not indeed in duty, but in endowment, that in the latter instance we work out our allotted destiny here, in a broader illumination, with grander incentives, and with vaster consolations. A future life, then, really imposes no new duty upon the present, alters no fundamental ingredient in the present, takes away none of the charms and claims of the present, but merely sheds an additional radiance upon the shaded lights already shining here, infuses an additional motive into the stimulants already animating our purposes, distills an additional balm into the comforts which already assuage our sorrows amidst an evanescent scene. The belief that we are to live hereafter in a compensating world explains to us many a sad mystery, strengthens us for many an oppressive burden, consoles us in many a sharp grief. Else we should oftener go mad in the baffling whirl of problems, oftener obey the baser voice, oftener yield to despair. These three are the moral uses, in the present life, of the
2 "Seht, an der morschen Syllogismenkrucke Hinkt Gott in Seine Welt."Lenau's Satire auf einen Professor philosophia.
doctrine of a future life. Outside of these three considerations the doctrine has no ethical meaning for human observance here.
It will be seen, according to the foregoing representation, that the expectation of a future life, instead of being harmful to the interests and attractions of the present, simply casts a cheering and magnifying light upon them. It does not depreciate the realities or nullify the obligations now upon us, but emphasizes them, flinging their lights and shades forward through a mightier vista. Consequently there is no reason for assailing the idea of another life in behalf of the interests of this. Such an opposition between the two states is entirely sophistical, resulting from a profound misinterpretation of the truemoral relations connecting them.
The belief in immortality has been mistakenly attacked, not merely as hostile to our welfare on earth, but likewise as immoral in itself, springing from essential selfishness, and in turn nourishing selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with that central vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identical individual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination of avaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out of sight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makes his poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfish desire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation of self will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face of the solemn and all submerging order of the universe, is the very essence and climax of immorality and irreligiousness. To this assault on the morality of the belief in a future life, whether made in the devout tones of magnanimous sincerity, as by the sublime Schleiermacher, or with the dishonest trickiness of a vulgar declaimer for the rehabilitation of the senses, as by some who might be named, several fair replies may be made. In the first place, the objection begs the question, by assuming that the doctrine is a falsehood, and that its disciples wilfully set up their private wishes against the public truth. Such tremendous postulates cannot be granted. It is seizing the victory before the battle, grasping the conclusion without establishing the premises. For, if there be a future life provided by the Creator, it cannot be sinful or selfish in us to trust in it, to accept it with humble gratitude, and to prepare our souls for it. That, instead of being rebellious arrogance or overweening selfishness, would simply be conforming our thoughts and plans, our desires and labors, to the Divine arrangements. That would be both morality and piety. When one clings by will to a doctrine known to be a falsehood, obstinately suppressing reason to affirm it as a truth, and, in obedience to his personal whims, trying to force all things into conformity with it, he does act as a selfish egotist in full violation of the moral law and the spirit of religion. But a future life we believe to be a fact; and therefore we are, in every respect, justified in gladly expecting it and consecratedly living with reference to it.
Furthermore, admitting it to be an open question, neither proved nor disproved, but poised in equal uncertainty, still, it is not immoral nor undevout deeply to desire and fondly to hope a personal immortality. "The aim of religion," it has been said, "is the annihilation of one's own individuality, the living in the All, the becoming one with the universe." But in such a definition altogether too much is assumed. The aim of religion is only the annihilation of the self will of the individual as opposed to the Will of the Whole, not the losing of one's self in the unconscious wastes of the universe, but the harmonizing of one's self with the Supreme Law of the universe.
An humble, loving, and joyous conformity to the truth constitutes morality and religion. This is not necessarily inconsistent with a personal immortality. Besides, the charge may be retorted. To be identified with the universe is a prouder thought than to be subordinated to it as an infinitesimal individual. It is a far haughtier conceit to fancy one's self an integral part of God's substance than to believe one's self a worshipping pensioner of God's will. The conception, too, is less native to the mind, has been more curiously sought out, and is incomparably more pampering to speculative luxury. If accusations of selfishness and wilfulness are to be hurled upon any modes of preferred faith as to our destiny, this self styled disinterested surrender of our personality to the pantheistic Soul is as obnoxious to them as the common belief.
If a desire for personal immortality be a normal experience in the development of our nature, it cannot be indictable as an offence, but must be recognised as an indication of God's design. Whether the desire is a cold and degraded piece of egotism deserving rebuke and contempt, or a lofty and sympathetic affection worthy of reverence and approval, depends on no intrinsic ingredient of the desire itself, but on the character in which it has its being. One person will be a heartless tyrant, another a loving saint, in his hope of a future life. Shall our love of the dead, our prayers to meet them again, our unfathomed yearnings to know that they still live and are happy, be stigmatized as mean and evil? Regard for others as much as for ourselves prompts the eternal sigh. Nor will Divinity ever condemn the feeling himself has awakened. It is said that Xerxes, gazing once upon his gorgeous army of a million men spread out below hire, sheathed in golden armor, white plumes nodding, purple standards waving, martial horns blowing, wept as he thought that in thirty years the entire host composing that magnificent spectacle would be dead. To have gazed thoughtfully upon such a sight with unmoved sensibilities would imply a much more selfish and hard hearted egotist. So when a lonely philanthropist from some meditative eminence looks down on the human race, if, as the contemplation of their pathetic fading and decay wounds his saddened heart, he heals and cheers it with the faith of a glorious immortality for them all, who shall call him selfish and sinful? To rest contented with the speedy night and the infinite oblivion, wiping off all the unsolved sums from the slate of existence with annihilation's remorseless sponge, that would be the selfishness and the cruelty.