Besides all these gates, and commanding them all, there is one everywhere accessible, and never shut on any soul which has the grace to try it the omnipresent gate of resignation. Remove the conditions of resistance, or friction, by a total surrender of self will and an absolute acceptance of the Divine Will, and, it matters not where you are, the essence of perdition is destroyed in your soul. The utter abandonment of pride, a pious submission to the laws of things, a glad and grateful acquiescence in whatever the Supreme Authority decrees this is the unrestricted way into heaven which waits before the steps of all who will only exhibit the requisite spirit, and enter. Yes, let any being but banish from himself every vestige of personal dictation before God and unexactingly identify his desires with universal good; and, even though he stand on the bottom of hell, heaven will be directly before him through the open gate of resignation. For the organic attitude of a pure and loving submission tunes the discordant creature to that eternal breath of God which blows everywhere through the universe of souls, sighing until they conspire with it to make the music of redemption.
CHAPTER V.
RESUME HOW THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY NOW STANDS.
IN THE leading nations of Christendom, the belief in the immortality of the soul has for some time past obviously been weakening. The number of those who assail the belief increases, and their utterances become more frank and dogmatic. A multitude of instances, clear to every careful observer, prove this. Especially at the present moment do examples of painful doubt, profound misgiving, bold and exultant denial, mocking flippancy and ridicule, abound on all sides, in private conversation, in public discussion, and in every form of literary activity. The hearty thoroughness and fervor with which the faith of the Church was once held have gone from whole classes. Subtle skepticism or blank negation is a common characteristic. Whether this tendency towards unbelief be sound or fallacious, temporary or permanent, it is at least actual. And it is important that we examine the causes of it, and test their logical validity while tracing their historic spread. Why, then, we ask, is the faith in a future life for man suffering such a marked decay in the present generation of Christendom?
In the first place, the faith pales and dwindles, from the general neglect of that strenuous and constant cultivation of it formerly secured by the stern doctrinal drill and by the rigid supervision of daily thought and habit in the interests of religion. Never before were men so absorbed as now in material toil and care during the serious portion of their existence; never before so beset as now during the leisure portion by innumerable forms of amusement and dissipation. The habit of lonely meditation and prayer grows rarer. The exactions of the struggle of ambition grow fiercer, the burdens of necessity press more heavily; the vices and temptations of society thicken: and they withdraw the attention of men from ideal and sacred aims. More and more men seem to live for labor and pleasure, for time and sense; less and less for truth and good, for God and eternity. Absorbed in the materialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolous diversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious age was maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilent an epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such a discount? But the things to which men really devote themselves dilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come to disbelieve that for which they take no thought and make no sacrifice or investment. The average men of our time, as well those of the educated classes as those of the laboring classes, do not live for immortality. Therefore their faith in it diminishes. Our fathers, to a degree not common now, walked in mental companionship with God, practiced solitary devotion, shaped their daily feelings and deeds with reference to the effect on their future life. Thus that hidden life became real to them. Now the interests and provocations of the present world, concentrated and intensified as never before the strife of aspirants, the giddy enterprises of speculation and commerce and engineering, the chaos of caucuses and newspapers and telegraphs monopolize our faculties and exhaust our energies, leaving us but faint inclination to attend to the solemn themes of the soul and the mystic lures of infinity. To those crazed with greed, battling with rivals or sunk in debauchery, God naturally becomes a verbal phantom and immortality a foolish dream. There is nothing in mechanism and mammon worship, nothing in selfish sloth and laughter, nothing in cruel oppression and drudgery, to inspire belief in the deathless spirituality of man. Among a people prevailingly given over to these earthlinesses, faith in the transcendent verities of religion perforce dies out. In the long run the supreme devotion of the soul irresistibly moulds its faith. Christendom does not live in conscious sacrifices and aspirations for God and eternal life, but it lives chiefly for selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer and more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in a future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this world, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existing here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue and blessedness now. When this shall have been done the tangential and fractional character of our experience will be so obvious, the inadequacy of the earthly state for the wants of our transcendent and prophetic faculties will be so urgent, and the supplementing adaptations of the entire unseen but clearly divined future to the craving parts in the present will be so manifest, that a complete revelation of immortality will break upon the prepared mind of the race. Then history will take a new departure in breathing communion with the whole creation.
But infidelity to duty and privilege does not destroy the truth of duty and privilege. It only blinds the faithless eyes so that they cannot see the truth. If the immortality of the soul be a truth, the materialistic absorption of our life would blind us to it and make us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide the future from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on the dark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlasting invitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness of our age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it does not logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test of the genuine evidence.
The second reason for the apparent rapid crumbling away of the belief in immortality in Christendom is the recent wide diffusion of a critical knowledge of the comparative history of the opinions of all nations on the subject of a future life, revealing the mythological character common to them, and tracking them back to their origin in primitive superstitions no longer is their literal purport credible to any educated intelligence. In many works by theological writers, and by scientific writers, of free habits of thought, like Strauss and Spencer, collections have been made of the fancies and theories of mankind respecting the survival of the spirit and the conditions of its experience after the death of the body. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the most enlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with the crudest notions of the barbarians of the prehistoric period, namely, the spontaneous workings of raw instinct and imagination. Tracing the views of Christians as to the nature of the soul, and the life to come in heaven or hell, back to the rude conceptions of the naked savages who fashioned their idea of the ghost from the shadow or the reflection of the man, which was a picture or representative of him, yet without matter, and from the phenomena of dreams, in which they supposed the spirit of the man left him and went through the adventures of the dream and returned ere he awoke it has been asserted that every form of later faith, however refined and improved in details, yet really resting on such puerile fancies, such incompetent and absurd beginnings, is thereby discredited and must be rejected.
Now, it is true that when we find among Christian believers, connected with the doctrine of a future life, an incongruous medley of physical imagery and gross imaginative pictures, conceptions of just the same character as the grotesque dreamings of the earliest savages and the elaborate mythology of subsequent priesthoods, we are required to treat the whole suppositious mass as mere poetry or superstition, and to dismiss it from our faith. But we are by no means justified in doing so with the essential fact itself of a future life. The essential fact, the assertion of immortality, may be true, even if the mythological dress be all fictitious. It does not follow that man has no surviving soul because the local heaven or hell, described by savage or priest as its residence, is unreal. It surely is no correct inference that the soul perishes with the body, because the barbarian mind generalized its idea of the soul from the phenomena of shadows, reflections, echoes and dreams. The critical scholar, who judges the case fairly, will correct the fallacies of the confused reasoning instinct, and relegate the mythology to its proper province, but reserve his judgment on the question itself of spiritual survival to be settled on the only appropriate evidence. Although the habit thus formed by the critical scholar, and by those who follow his authority, of sweeping away as wholly untenable so many varieties of speculation, and so many groups of images connected with the belief in a future life, has unquestionably contributed powerfully to foster complete disbelief in the doctrine itself, yet it is equally unquestionable that this process of negation is illogical. Many a true doctrine has been cradled in superstitions and absurdities. A faith supported by many classes of independent arguments is not overthrown by the disproof of one of those classes. It is as wrongful a procedure to deny the immortality of the soul because barbaric instinct grounded it on erroneous notions and enveloped it with falsehoods, as it would be to reject the established laws of gravitation and light and sound, for the reason that the various provisional theories, preceding the correct ones, were ridiculous mistakes. The problem to be solved is, Does the man who is now a soul in a body remain a soul when the body dissolves? The inadequacy or folly of a hundred provisional answers does not affect the final answer. Instead of denying immortality because the childish mind of the early world feigned impossible things about it, we should change the question by appeal to a more competent court, and inquire what Pythagoras, Augustine, Dante, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, Swedenborg, Goethe, thought about it. It is a question for the consensus of the most gifted and impartial minds, the very Areopagus of Humanity, to decide. Furthermore, on a deeper inquiry, it seems clear that the real belief in immortality did not originate from the contemplation of the phenomena of dreams and shadows and echoes, but arose rather from the inexpugnable self assertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself non existent. This persistency of consciousness, following it in all its imaginative flights of thought beyond the death of the body, was the cause of the mythological creativeness of the barbaric mind. And thus the elaboration of the imagery of ghosts and a ghostly realm was not the precursor, but the result of a belief in another life. The belief sprang directly out of the feeling of a continuous being unconquerably connected with human self consciousness, and is independent of the imagery in which it has been clothed, may clothe itself in endless forms of imagery, and survive their removal on the discovery of their incompetence.
Besides, the savage himself was, after all, not so far out of the way. His mythology was not a mere fiction concreted into fact by superstition. He was on that track of analogy which, when cleared, will be, perhaps, the luminous highway to universal truth. The savage was obscurely conscious that the objects which appeared around him as solid material realities had their immaterial correspondences within his spirit. The tree, the stone, the flower, the star, the beast, the man, had within him correspondent mental images or ideas just as real as they, but without sensible qualities, and incapable of hurt. With creative wonder he recognized a symbol or analogy of this inner world in the shadow and the reflection. The shadow or the reflection is a representation of its original, but without material substance.
See, it lies there, wavering, on the rock, or in the water. No arrow can pierce it, no club bruise it, no pestle pulverize it, no chemistry disintegrate it. It is an emblem of the immaterial and indestructible spirit, revealed in the outer world of matter, where everything changes and passes away except the noumena under the phenomena. No wonder it stirred the brooding fancy of the ignorant, but prophetic primitive man, and made it teem with poesy and personification.