According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was once a measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions, making a universal hell of matter. But the discords and perturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order more and more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled in their gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weaving throughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. The evolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and is more complex than the material, each mind being as complicated as the whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be as complete as the evolution of the astronomic motions already is, and a divine empire of holy and happy men be the goal of history? This hope carries the cross through hell, and leaves nothing unredeemed.
CHAPTER IV.
THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS.
HEAVEN, in the crude fancy of mankind, has generally been conceived as a definite, exclusive, material abode; either some elysian clime on the surface of the earth; or some happy isle beyond the setting sun; or this whole globe, renovated by fire and peopled with a risen and ransomed race; or else some halcyon spot in the sky, curtained with inaccessible splendor and crowded with eternal blessings. It was natural that men should think thus of heaven as a place whence all the evils which they knew were excluded and where all the goods which they knew were carried to the highest pitch, God himself visibly enthroned there in entrancing glory amidst throngs of worshippers.
This was unavoidable, because, in an early age, before knowledge and reflection had trained men to the critical examination and correction of their instinctive conclusions, all the data which they possessed would naturally lead them to imagine the unknown God in the glorified form and circumstances of the most enviable being their experience had yet revealed to them; and to paint the unknown future state of perfected souls under the purest aspects of the most desirable boons they had known in the present state. It being a necessity of their uncritical minds to personify God by a definite picture of imagination, and to portray heaven to themselves as an external place, they could not do otherwise than work out the results by means of the most intense experiences and the most impressive imagery familiar to them. The highest idea they had of man, purified and expanded to the utmost, would be their idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions of existence within their observation, enhanced by the removal of every limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both would be outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royal courts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, with their exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, their processions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailing casts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion. For what were the most vivid of all the experiences men had among their fellows on earth? Why, the exhibitions of the sultan with his gorgeous ceremonial state, and of the high priest with the dread sacrifice and homage he paid amidst clouds of incense and rolling waves of song; the admission of the favored, in glittering robes, to share the privileges; the exclusion of the profane and vulgar in squalid misery and outer darkness. Consequently, except by a miracle, these sights could not fail largely to constitute the scenic elements for the popular belief concerning God and heaven. What should men reflect over into the unknown to portray their ideals there, if not the most coveted ingredients and the most impressive forms of the known? The great thing, then, inevitably, would be supposed to be to gain the personal favor of the supreme Sovereign by some artifice, some flattery, some fortunate compliance with his arbitrary caprice, and to get into the charmed enclosure of his abode by some special grace some authoritative passport or magic art.
But as soon as science and philosophy, and a spiritual experience rectifying its own errors by reflective criticism, have created a more competent theology it discredits all these raw schemes. It teaches that God, being the eternal omnipresent power and mystery which foreran, underlies, pervades and includes all things, cannot justly be figured as a man, locally here or there, and not elsewhere. He can be justly thought of only as the almighty Creator of the universe, intelligible in the order of his works and ways, but inscrutable in his essence, absent nowhere, present everywhere in general, and specially revealed anywhere whenever a fit experience in the soul awakens a special consciousness of him. This conception of God the only one any longer defensible as the Infinite Spirit, incapable, except in his various incarnations, of particular local enthronement and uncovering to the outward gaze of worshippers, necessitates a correspondent alteration in the vulgar idea of heaven as an exclusive spot in space.
In every form of being, in any portion of the universe, the central idea of a state of salvation, is the fulfillment of the will of the Creator in the faculties of the creature, the fruition of the ends of the whole in the consciousness of the part, the congruity of the forces of the soul with the requirements of its situation. If this definition be accepted, it is clear that no mere place of residence, however excellent, can be heaven. That is but one factor of heaven, and worthless without a corresponding factor of a spiritual kind. Essentially, heaven is a divine experience, not a divine location; yet constructively it is both of these. Ever so serene and pure a space, perfectly free from every perturbation of ill, and surrounded with all the outer provisions of power and order, would be no heaven, until a prepared soul entered it, furnishing the spiritual conditions for the forces to run into fruition, for the melody of blissful being to play. The material elements of the universe, so far as we know, are unconscious dynamics. However perfectly marshalled, they can by themselves compose no heaven. So the conscious soul, as far as we know, is incapable of an independent and unrelated existence in itself. All its experience, when ultimately analyzed, is the resultant of the mutual relations between its own energies and capacities and the forms and forces of things outside of itself. When there is a right arrangement of right realities in the residence, and a right development of faculties and affections within the resident, and such an adjustment of the spiritual states with the surrounding conditions, that, as these act and react upon each other, the laws of the universe break into conscious harmony, or the will of God is realized in a life of blessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean by heaven; and the conditions of its realization constitute the law of salvation.
Such being the true idea of heaven, obviously, it cannot be limited to any particular locality. It may be here, elsewhere, anywhere, everywhere, before death, in death, after death; whenever and wherever the proper conditions meet inward state and outward circumstances so adjusted as to produce an experience which fulfills the will of God and realizes the end of the creation. Hereafter this may be, as we know it now on earth, a spiritual fruition in material conditions, or it may be something altered in accordance with the varying exigences of worlds whose details are as yet inconceivable by us, altogether hidden behind the veil of futurity and our ignorance. But its one fundamental condition, its eternal essence under all circumstances which can possibly happen, must always be the same. Whatever changes await the soul, embodied in a new form in the state after death, or remaining in pure disembodiment; whatever be the relation of the immaterial entity of mind to the circumference and contents of its new home, it can be in paradise, it can command peace and bliss, or any equivalent of these terms, only by the fulfillment of the will of God in its being. Heaven is, therefore, the reconciliation and unison of the soul with its divinely appointed lot, the identification of the ideal and the real.
The will of God is expressed in the soul in the submissive services and virtues of a pure and pious character it is expressed in the outward creation by the unbreakable persistency of his laws through all the aberrations and discords of accompaning evil or limitation. Nowhere can it ever be an impossibility to conjoin these and thus to make a heaven. The one thing which everywhere is variable and evanescent, is evil, or the imperfect adjustment of the creature with the works and designs of the Creator. The one thing which forever stays, and steadily invites the intelligent soul to its embrace, is good, that is, the opportunity to realize the divinely intended correspondence of the relations in the part with the relations in the whole, a serene movement of life through the unison of the soul with its true fate. Now, the one predicate which is essential in all things, without whose presence nothing can be, is the will of God. Even could that will be violated or withstood, still it would be there, upholding, forgiving, wooing Salvation, or a life of conscious harmony, is capable of realization, of course, wherever the means are offered for the performance and enjoyment of the will of God; and the infinity of his attributes necessarily makes that condition an omnipresent possibility in the realm of free spirits. Therefore, heaven is not outwardly limited to one place, or to one period, but may be achieved at any time, and anywhere. This throws light on the fallacy of the current, narrow doctrine of a limited probation. The oriental belief that the action of the present is the fate of the future unquestionably covers a profound truth. Yet, if there is always a future there must likewise always be a present, and the right action in this may forever redeem that. Probation is limited by no decree, only by the duration of free being.
Although the essential element in the idea of heaven is forever the same, it may be regarded in three different aspects, or on three different scales as an individual experience, as a social state, as a far off universal event. Heaven, as a private experience, is the harmonized intercourse of the soul with the divineness in its surrounding conditions. Heaven, as a public society, is the blessed communion of blessed souls, a complete adjustment of the lives of kindred natures. Heaven, as a final consummation, is the publication of the vindicated will of God in the total harmony of the universe, all individual wills so many separate notes blent in the collective consonance of the whole.