When that sweet asp, death, fastens on our vein of earthly life, we all feel, like the dying queen of Egypt, that we have "immortal longings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinacious instinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rational to conclude that this is a pledge of her indestructible personality, God's impregnable defence reared around the citadel of her being, than to consider it the artificial rampart flung up by an insurgent egotism. In like manner, it is a misrepresentation of the facts to assert the culpable selfishness of the faith in a future life as a demanded reward for fidelity and merit here. No one demands immortality as pay for acquired desert. It is modestly looked for as a free boon from the God who freely gave the present and who has by a thousand symbolic prophecies promised it. Richter says, with great insight, "We desire immortality not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewarded than joy can: it is its own reward." Kant says, "Immortality has been left so uncertain in order that pure freedom of choice, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations." "But," Jean Paul keenly replies, "as we have now discovered this intention, its object is defeated. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so." The anticipation of heaven can hardly make man a selfish calculator of profit; because heaven is no reward for crafty reckoning, but the home of pure and holy souls. Virtue which resists temptation and perseveres in rectitude because it has a sharp eye to an ulterior result is not virtue. No credible doctrine of a future life offers a prize except to those who are just and devout and strenuous in sacred service from free loyalty to the right and the good, spontaneously obeying and loving the higher and better call because it divinely commands their obedience and love. The law of duty is the superior claim of truth and goodness. Virtue, yielding itself filially to this, finds in heaven not remuneration, but a sublimer theatre and an immortal career. Egotistic greed, all mere prudential considerations as determining conditions or forces in the award, are excluded as unclean and inadmissible by the very terms; and the doctrine stands justified on every ground as pure and wholesome before the holiest tribunal of ethics. Surely it is right that goodness should be blessed; but when it continues good only for the sake of being blessed it ceases to be goodness. It is not the belief in immortality, but only the belief in a corrupt doctrine of immortality which can poison the springs of disinterested virtue.
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?" 3 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." 4 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.
3 Tracts concerning Christianity, p. 307.
4 Bridgewater Treatise, part ii. ch. 10, sect. 15.
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." 5 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 revelling in 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 embitter 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.
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." 6 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.
5 Genie du Christianisme, partie ii. livre vi. chap. 3.