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

by William Rounseville Alger

In the primitive state of mankind, when the germs of this religion were conceived, when men dwelt in ignorance, exposure, and fear, they naturally shuddered at darkness as a supernatural enemy, and worshipped light as a supernatural friend. That became the emblem or personification of the Devil, this the emblem or personification of God. They grouped all evils with that, all goods with this.

Imaginatively associating all light and darkness, all blessing and bale, respectively with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyus, they universalized the fragmentary embodiments and oppositions of these into one great battle; and under the impulse of worshipping faith and hope, carried it to its crisis in the final victory of the good. Plainly, it is mere poetry injected a little with a later speculative element, and dealing in mythological fashion chiefly with the phenomena of nature as related to the experience of man. No one now can accept it literally.

This survey of the various heathen myths of the end of the world has prepared us, in some degree, to consider the corresponding view held by the Jews, and more completely developed by the Christian successors to the Jewish heritage of thought and feeling.

The Hebrews believed themselves to be exclusively the chosen people of God, who directly ruled over them himself by a theocratic government represented in their patriarchs, law givers, prophets, and kings. Jehovah was the only true God; they were his only pure and accepted worshippers, sharply distinguished from the whole idolatrous world. The heathen nations, uncircumcised adorers of vain idols or of demons, were by consequence enemies both of the true God and of his servants. This contrast and hostility they even carried over into the unseen world, and imagined that each nation had its own guardian angel in the Court of Jehovah in heaven, who contended there for its interests; their own national guardian, the angel Michael, being more powerful and nearer to the throne than any other one. In the calamities that fell on them, they recognized the vengeance of Jehovah for the violation of his commands. In their victories, their deliverances, their great blessings, especially in their rescue from Egypt, and in the many miracles which they believed to have accompanied that great passage, they saw the signal superiority of their God over every other god, and the proofs of his particular providence over them in distinct preference to all other peoples. He had, as they piously believed, made a special covenant with Abraham, and set apart his posterity as a sacred family, exclusively intrusted with the divine law, and commissioned to subdue and govern all the other families of the earth. When this proud and intensely cherished faith was baffled of fulfillment, they never dreamed of abandoning it.

They only supposed its triumphant execution postponed, as a penalty for their sins, and looked forward with redoubled ardor to a better time when their hopes should break into fruition, their exile be ended, their captivity appear as a dream, Jerusalem be the central gem of the world, and the anointed ruler wield his sceptre over all mankind.

But misfortunes and woes were heaped on them. Their city was sacked, their temple desecrated, their people dragged into foreign slavery, forbidden to celebrate the rites of their religion, slaughtered by wholesale. Many times, during the two centuries before and the first century after Christ, did they suffer these terrible sorrows. Their hatred and scorn of their heathen persecutors; their faith in their own incomparable destiny; their expectation of the speedy appearance of an anointed deliverer, raised up by Jehovah to avenge them and vindicate their trust, all became the more fervent and profound the longer the delay. Under these circumstances grew up the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, as it is seen in that Apocalyptic literature represented by the Book of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, the Book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Fourth Book of Esdras, and similar documents.

The Jews were remarkably free from that habit of mind which led almost all the other nations to personify the most startling phenomena of nature as living beings, which created fetiches of stocks and stones and animals; saw a god in every wind, season, star, and cloud. The Semitic mind and literature were more sober, rational, and monotheistic. The place occupied in the thoughts of other peoples by the phenomena of nature was held in the thoughts of the Jews by political phenomena, by ritual, legal, and military relations. And the poetic action of fancy, the mythological creativeness and superstitious feeling which other people exercised on the objects and changes of nature, the Jews exercised on the phenomena of their own national history. The burning central point of their polity and belief and imagination was the conviction of their own national consecration as the exclusive people of God, meant to conquer, teach, and rule all the infidel nations; that Jehovah was literally their invisible King, represented in their chief ruler; that every great triumph or disaster was a signal Day of the Lord, a special Coming of Jehovah to reward or punish his people. During their repeated bondages under the Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, their feeling of the antagonism between themselves and the other people increased. From the time of the Babylonish captivity the Persian doctrine of good and evil spirits had infiltrated into their belief; and they adopted the notion of Angra Mainyus, and developed it (with certain modifications) into their conception of Satan. Then, in their faith, the war of Jews and Gentiles spread into the invisible world, and took up on its opposite sides the good and the fallen angels. And, finally, the idea of their Messiah became the centre of a battle and a judgment in which all the generations of the dead as well as of the living were to have a part; and which should culminate in the overthrow of evil, the subjection of the heathen, the assignment of the righteous to a paradisal reign, and of the wicked to a doom typified by the submersion of Sodom and Gomorrah in fiery brimstone.

How plainly this doctrine was the result of the same poetic process of thought with the other schemes already depicted! Only they were developed on the basis of natural phenomena; this, on the basis of political phenomena. It is simply the imaginative universalization of the struggle between Jew and Gentile, and the carrying of it to its crisis and sequel. And when inexplicable delays and the accumulation of obstacles made the realization of the expected result amidst the conditions of the present world seem ever more and more hopeless, the growing and assimilative action of faith and fancy expanded the scene, and transferred it to a transmundane state, involving the destruction of the heavens and earth and their replacement with a new creation.

Is there any more real reason for believing this doctrine than there is for believing the other kindred schemes? Not a whit. It is a mistake of the same poetic nature, and resting on the same grounds with them. Two thousand years have passed, and it has not been fulfilled; and there is ever less and less sign of its fulfillment. It never will be fulfilled, except in a spiritual sense. The Jews will finally lose their pride of race and covenant, abandon their special Messianic creed, and blend themselves and their opinions in the mass of redeemed and progressive humanity, and no more dream of a physical resurrection of the dead amidst the dissolving elements of nature.

And now we must notice that besides all these poetic pictures of the end of the world, there are prophecies of a similar result which wear an apparently scientific garb. Many men of science firmly believe that our world is destined to be destroyed, that a close for the earthly fortunes of mankind can be plainly foreseen. No little alarm was felt a century or more ago, when it was discovered that there was a progressive diminution going on in the orbit of the moon, which must cause it at length to impinge upon the earth. But La Grange exhibited the fallaciousness of the prophecy, by showing that the decrease was periodical and succeeded by a corresponding increase. Intense and widely spread terror has repeatedly been felt less a comet should come within our planetary orbit, and shatter or melt our globe by its contact. But the discovery of the nebulous nature of comets, of their great numbers and regular movements, has quite dissipated that fear from the popular mind in our day.