Foregleams and Foreshadows of Immortality

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Part I. The Immortal Life

L Natusaxism 17

n. Non-Beuef 22

IIL The Theory of Metaphysics. 26

IV. The Theoby op Natttbalesm 34

V. Foreshadows 42

VL FORESPUSKDORS 50

VTL The Bible Pneumatology 63

VIIL Death, as God ordained it. ..; 70

IX Death, AS Man makes it 75

X The Resurrection 81

XL Organic Connection op the Present and the

Future Life 89

Xn. The Judgment-Day ; 101

XnL Christ as the Judge 108

XIV. Everlasting Youth 117

XV. Eternal Lipe 122

XVI. Home 125

XVn. The Heavenly Peace 133

XVn£ Agreements and Differences. 141

12 CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGl

XIX Agbeements 154

XX. Summary 160

XXI. Conclusion 165

PAKT II.

THE EXCAENATION OF THE SON OF MAN.

I. Intboductory 169

n. The Great Morning 170

in. The First Meeting » 178

IV. The Second Meeting 182

V. The Meeting in Galilee 184

VI. The Last Meeting, and the Ascension 189

VII. Theories 192

VIIL Theories 199

IX. The Glorified Saviour 202

X. The Post-Eesurrection Body 210

XL The Grand Apostolic Doctrine 214

XII. Conclusions 223

PAKT III.

THE PNEUMATOLOGY OF ST. PAUL.

I. Introductory 229

n. The Doctrine op the Primitive Church 232

III. The Hebrew Doctrine op Hades 242

IV. The Scripture Doctrine 247

CONTENTS. 13

CBAP. PAOl

V. St. PATjii ON THE Besubbbction 259

VI. Jewish Ideas compabed with Ghbistian 268

VIL The AiiLeoed Natubausm op St. Paul 274

Vin. The Hades op Chbistianity 283

IX. SUMMABY 287

PAKT IV.

THE SYMPHONY OF RELIGIONS.

I. Intboductoby 303

n. The Abyan People 305

m. The Eeligious Consciousness op the Hindus... 311

V. The Hellenic Eemgious Consciousness 341

VII. SUMMABY AND CONCLUSION 373 r

i

PART I

THE IMMORTAL LIFE.

** If a man has a statue decayed by rust and age, and mutilated in many of its parts, he breaks it up and casts it into a furnace, and after the melting he receives it again in more beautiful form. As thus the dissolving in the furnace was not a destruction, but a renewing of the statue, so the death of our bodies is not a destruction, but a renovation. When, therefore, you see as in a furnace our flesh flowing away to corruption, dwell not on that sight, but wait for the recasting. And advance in your thoughts to a still higher point, for the statuary casting into the furnace a brazen image but makes a brazen one again. God does not thus; but casting in a mortal body formed of clay, he returns yon an immortal statue of gold." — Chbtsostom. 16

FOREGLEAMS AND FORESHADOWS

OP

IMMORTALITY.

CHAPTEK I

NATURALISM.

The tendencies of the present age set strongly and decisively toward what some would call by way of distinction the practical. That which is apprehensible by the senses, and can be handled, weighed, and measured, is sure to become sufficiently valued, while that which transcends the senses hardly obtains an attentive hearing from the working world. In the long run, however, the highest truths are always the most useful, and produce the most wide and thorough changes in human affairs. Material interests are always promoted by spiritual, and neither can be undervalued without detriment to the other. It is not, therefore, a love of what is really practical which works any ill to religion : it always saves religion from running into fanaticism and superstition. It is not a proper value of material things, it is an intense and confirmed naturalism placing itself in opposition

I to the supreme good, which works all the mischief to religion of which the preachers complain.

The preachers, however, do not always recognize the fact, that there are two species of naturalism, one lacking the religious element, the other including it, and that the latter is a cropping out from the former, and borrows from it its whole style of conception and reasoning. In describing these two kinds, and showing how one runs into the other and shapes religious ideas, we shall indicate, we think, a radical vice in our theologizings, and disclose one of the deepest wants of the present hour.

By the word "Naturalism" we describe a belief in nature alone. It is a new name for the old infidelity. It indicates the creed of one who has a lively faith in the objects of sense, but in nothing beyond. What he can hear, see, handle, taste and smell, he affirms to be veritable existences, and he affirms no more. This material scene, therefore, spread out under the sun and the stars, limits his hopes and expectations, and the highest aims of his being do not reach any farther. He does not of necessity deny that there are other modes and realms of existence. He simply does not affirm. If you aver anything beyond the limits of time, so far positive as to be thought worthy to sway us and shape our ends, he reminds you that you have no proof of it, and that you have passed over into the region of speculations and shadows.

Though religious ideas be excluded from this creed, and cultus, it does not follow of necessity that religious names and rites must be — such names as God,

KA:rnBALisM. 19

the Soul, Immortality, and Eternal Life. But they are used invariably to describe things and processes on the hither side of spiritual existence. God is the unconscious energy immanent in matter, circulating through all nature, and showing ever a new phasis in the trees and the grass, and man and woman. He is not a Being out of nature and above it, but a force subject to it and locked in with its conditions. In the ever-living and glowing Cosmos we behold the beauteous face of the Supreme. The human soul is its life circulating in man, instead of the cedar, the mjrrtle and the violet. The soul is immortal, not individually and consciously, but only in the sense that, when a man dies, the life that was in him is drawn back into the general vortex, to reappear by and by and blossom anew in flowers and animals and little children, and so man is sure of eternal life.

But when it attempts to transcend the sphere of visible nature with its growths and decays, it finds itself in a vast inane or a hopeless and boundless night. Death is not a transition to another existence on the thither side of nature, but a change of form within it. The region beyond lies on the imagination without form or voice or motion. Such is naturalism without religious ideas, sometimes with the pale adornment of religious phraseologies from which religious ideas have been expunged.

Religious naturalism diflers from this mainly in the fact that it extends the domain of nature farther outward into space and time. It never transcends nature, or if it does it finds itself in darkness or in spectral light and comes back straightway to material ism for a place to stand upon. As it cannot rise out of the natural degree of life, and shake off the clogs of sense, its only resource is to drag along its cumbrous material, and wield it in spiritual things as best it may. It cannot rise to the conception of a purely spiritual world, but it can push forward the dominion of the natural world so as to include the dread hereafter. It cannot rise above the level of time, but it can extend its view longitudinally and get some glimpse of the adjacent plains.

Hence its view of death and of what lies beyond it. Its immortality is only the natural life prolonged. The external body wastes and dies and mingles with the dust again. To the natural senses and conceptions the man exists no more. But naturalized faith preserves the scattered dust to be combined anew, and so its hopes are treasured up in charnel-houses. Christ is to have a new incarnation on the earth, which is to be burned over and fiirnished for the risen saints ; and here under the reign of natural law is to be the kingdom of Christ, amid the gorgeous flora of a sensuous paradise. Heaven and hell are not modes and realms of being above the natural degree of life, and freed of its conditions, but localities somewhere among the planetary and stellar spaces, whose precise position eludes for the present our poor optics and clumsy telescopes. Though the pains of hell are not physical altogether, yet the sufferings of the body, and its unpropitious and dismal surroundings, are the chief things that strike the imagination with dread. The Divine Being himself is naturalized and brought down to the plane of these conceptions. He is the

NATURALISM. 21

suj^reme natural man. The creation and government of the world are a mere stupendous mechanism, and Its final destruction will be a mere tremendous exercise of natural strength on the crashing or crackling timbers of the universe. And so on. There is not a subject in the whole range of religious thought which has not been, so to say, completely carnalized by this mode of conceiving and representing spiritual things. The real future, the eternity toward which we travel and which is soon to fold us in, lies as completely void and formless to religious naturalism as to nonreligious, and not an echo comes back to either as it sends its shout into the abyss. For them there is no hereafter which is above the plane of natural things. It is very true that theologizers of the school we describe complain loud enough of naturalistic tendencies leading to doubts of immortality ; but they themselves go down and swamp in naturalism, the moment they attempt to spread their sails on that mystic and solemn sea.

Chapter II. Non-beleep

It is generally a waste of effort to reason against hard and stubborn Denial^ and fortunately that is not the state of mind we usually meet with when we discourse of a life to come. There is, however, a widespread conviction, that this is a subject that lies beyond the reach of human ken. It is well to admit that we are to live again. Probably we shall. But when we ask how, when, and where, we trend upon forbidden topics, which will yield us nothing but vain conjecture. No one has come back from the land of mystery ; the language of revelation itself is indeterminate and variously understood. Let us confine ourselves to what we know, and do the work of this world instead of speculating about another. Such is the attitude of a mind by which this class of subjects is very commonly ignored. Probably a distaste for them has been increased by the fact that the sects have disputed about them and agreed in nothing, and so thousands outside of the sects attend only to their present business and "jump the life to come.^^

We would conciliate this class of minds if possible, and gain from them an attentive hearing. There are two suggestions, we think, which will not fail to get an audience with them at last. The first is, that, if

NON-BELIEF. 23

there be a future life, it has probably some very important comiection with the present. It is not likely — no candid mind will so affirm — that the after-scene, cou[ld we discern it, has nothing to do in shaping the end for which we live now ; that two realms of being lie closely proximate, and men pass daily from one to the other, and yet have no inter-connection which it becomes us to know. Men do not reason thus respect/- ing other periods of their existence. They do not think it of no consequence that childhood should have some preconceptions of the period of youth, and indicate what its studies are to be ; that youth shall have some forecast of its manhood, and be educated for its work ; that manhood shall comprehend in its view the period of age, and prepare to go down the stream sheltered from the storms. But what if childhood and youth, manhood and age, are only successive waves in the river of years, that rolls onward its mighty waters till they stir the vast ocean-wavas whose throbs beat on for ever, though they never touch the shore ? Is it likely that any period of an endless life is to begin de novo, — that any one of its ever-moving billows is independent of the rest, and not rather the resultant of all the antecedent forces ? Does not everjrthing about us and within us indicate that this life is preliminary and preparatory, — ^a segment, and not a circle ; and do not all its consenting voices make up one grand prophecy of something to be hereafter ? Can it fell, then, to occur, at least to him who admits the possibility of a future life, that what it is, and how, and where, are questions of momentous bearing on what the present life ought to be.

and that hence the most insignificant occurrence may be fitted into a vast and endless economy ? If we are preparing for something, shall we not ask what ? If we are afloat, and the shores move from us, and farewells are wafted from the banks, shall we not ask whither ? Does not even the material universe indicate very distinctly an end beyond itself? Was it prepared with so much splendid garniture only for beings who perish and return to the earth to be " rolled round with its stones and trees '^ ? Was all this lavishment of the Divine wisdom designed only to educate man for that, or is it not rather for a worthier and more lasting result that the worlds with rhythmic step travel the celestial highways and pour together their unending song? And if the light of the aft«r-scene were turned full upon the fore-scene, should we not know better what to do and how to do it? and would not the fore-scene be elevated into new importance and grandeur, its smallest things be rescued from meanness and insignificance, and should we not feel as never before the dignity and beauty of our daily life ?

If all this be so, can a second suggestion fail to occur to the non-believer — that some means are probably at hand of gaining a knowledge sufficiently clear and distinct of what the after-scene is ? Since it is probable that such knowledge will have a bearing on all our doings now, is it likely that the knowledge is withheld ? If some have missed of it, is it not probably their fault, and not that of the great Revealer ? and may not the sects have lost it through their own janglings, and because they would not be

NON-BELIEF. 25

hushed before the Eternal Reason ? And if we rise out of the sphere of their noises and stand and listen^ shall we not be in a position to hear with sufi&cient clearness, not what the synods, but what the Spirit saith unto the churches? Yea, among all the churches, do not thirsting and honest minds obtain, under various forms of statement, so much of the substance of truth as serves to illumine their steps, and is not the agreement more perfect than you suppose among all those who have been separated from the disputings, and caught inward toward the eternal melodies?

These considerations, we think, ought to gain for our theme a candid hearing, even from those who have excluded all such topics from their daily thought. They ought to convince the practical man that it may be the most practical subject that can possibly engage him, even as the calculations and formulas of Bowditch in his study were of more practical importance than the figures of any merchant's ledger to the sailor tossing at his helm upon the seas.

i

CHAPTER III*

THE THEORY OF METAPHYSICS.

If we rise out of non-belief to positive affirmation, our thoughts must take one of three forms of conception. There are only three possible theories to be applied to the future life. If we think about it at all, we shall adopt one of them either consciously or unconsciously, for none other has ever been conceived of by the mind or expressed in language. It is an important point gained, when modes of belief can be so distinctly classified that we can see clearly the range within which our choice must lie.

The first is the faintest possible departure from non-belief. It asserts that the state after death is one of mind without body, or, in other words, of " disembodied spirits ;" and its mode of induction is to abstract all the qualities of body, and take what is left as our knowledge of the life hereafter. You must first go through the process of subtraction, and then look after your remainder ; and by this careful ciphering you have all that you may affirm of immortality. Thus: Body has form, color, extension, and divisibility into parts. Take these away, and you have left pure spirit, without form, without color, without extension, and without parts. Body is conditioned in space. Take away this condition, and

THE THEOBT OF METAPHYSICS. 27

you have mind or spirit out of space. Very well. Having denuded us to this extent, please tell us what there is left of us. We get for an answer, " the thinking principle," ^* pure essence," " a metaphysical entity," ^'a substance uncompounded and without parts," ''pure simplicity," '^a substance so simple that nothing can be simpler, and which may be likened to a point which is of no dimension," ^'a substance which has no parts and no extension, and is circumscribed by no place," '^a monad, indivisible fuid unextended, and therefore immaterial." "*" It most be a ^^ substance," for what is not a substance is nothing. But the suhstance must not have any form, for that would look so much like a body that metaphysical hairnsplittang could hardly show the difierence. The substance must not be extended, for extension requires space to be extended in, and you are now supposed to be out of space ; and it must be extended, if at all, eith^ up and down, laterally or lengthwise, and then you would expand into dimensions, and that would be body again ; and you are supposed to have left your body behind you. So, having lost your body, rememb^ jthat you have become pure simplicity, or a mathematical point, from whidi you must neither be extended nor expanded a hair's breadth ; for then you would expand into a heresy which so great a metaphysician as Lord Hon-

* Sacfa definitions of disembodied spirit are made by Lord Monboddo, autbor of " Ancient Metapbysics," by Arcbbisbop Seeker, by Lord Brougbam (see Discourse of Natural Tbeology), by Bisbep Newton, by Dean Sberlock, by Dr. Good, author of the Book of Nature, and by many othecs.

boddo has pronounced "as absurd and impious as can well be imagined," and which Dr. Mosheim thinks endangers a very important doctrine of the Christian Church, namely, the resurrection of the material body.

The remainder, therefore, after our subtraction, is uncompounded substance compressed to a mathematical point and without parts. If the reader should be diksposed to ask. If there are no parts, how can there be any whole ? let him remember that, in metaphysics, not only the whole is not always made up of parts, but that two and two do not by any means make four. And if he should be disposed to burnish his faculties in order to get at the profound meaning of these philosophers, we beg that he will spare himself that trouble ; for we assure him, on their own averments, that they do not mean anything at all. Some of them are candid enough to tell us that they do not attach any ideas to their own language except negative ones, and that, when they affirm anything of the state beyond death, they use phrases very much as an algebraist uses the terms of an unknown quantity. There is this difference, however. The algebraist has sure data by which to determine the value of the unknown term. The metaphysician has not ; and we are left in woeful doubt of how much value it stands for, or whether indeed it stands for any. " In the Scripture," says Edward Irving, as quoted by Clissold,* "the state of the soul, where it is set forth, is set forth to be a state of imperfection, as it needs must be without the body " ; and again, " the actings and suffer-

* New Church Essajs, p. i6.

THE THEORY OP METAPHYSICS. 29

ings, the blessedness and misery, of a disembodied soul are what no man can conceive of, let him imagine and let him fancy till the day of doom." Lord Monboddo says, " No one can have a clear conception of a substance existing without parts"; and Sherlock acknowledges that it "sounds very much like nothing," and is what we can " form no positive idea of." Dr. Mosheim thinks we ought to be modest in our ignorance, and let the question alone. He is very sure that, when we step out of this world, we shall be without bodies ; but he thinks we ought to shut our eyes, and bravely make the plunge, trusting in the power of Grod that we shall not go out in total darkness.

Our case, then, under metaphysical regimen, seems disastrous enough. They give us husks, which we eagerly strip away ; but we find not a kernel of grain, or even a cob for the grain to grow on. Our existence tapers down to a point, and there they leave us. On the negative side, they are confident enough. On the affirmative side, they have nothing but words. We shall be without space and without body, but it does not yet appear what we shall be. Or rather it does appear; for Dr. Good says, ominously, "The mind, or thinking principle, can have no place of existence : it can exist no- where ; for where, or place, is an idea that cannot be separated from the idea of extension, and hence the metaphysical materialists of modern times freely admit that the mind has no place of existence, that it exists nowhere." * Or, in the language of a clear and forcible writer, who has run

* Book of Nature, vol. iii., p. 7. 8»

r

30 THE DCHOBTAL LIFE.

this theory down into its last dismal absnrdity, aa soon as a man dies^ " he goes nowhere and becomes nobody J^ If this is not a direct plunge into annihilation, we should think it was grazing as close as possible upon its borders.

Having left your body in the grave, therefore, you are supposed to be in limbo, reduced to a mathematical point. You must not expand, for then you will become body again ; and that will render nugatory the doctrine of a future resurrection from the graves, and so be a dangerous heresy. You are not to make any motion, for motion implies space to move in, — ^requires a here and a there, and you must by no means project into space again. These philosophers, however, give you the assurance, that, when reduced to this " pure simplicity," you shall be in no danger of annihilation. You are not any further divisible. You are reduced to your lowest terms. You are " without parts," and therefore cannot be divided again, and hence have become indestructible. We think they are right here, for the destruction of nothing is not a conceivable catastrophe.

it is perfectly clear that these writers not only express nothing, but conceive of nothing, whenever they think in strict accordance with their own theory. No man ever conceived of spirit without form, or of anything without form, for the simple reason that no one has the power of suspending the laws of thought. Any mind may try the experiment to its ample satisfaction. Try to send your thought beyond death, and represent to it the region of ^* disembodied spirits " that exist " out of space." You may try, with Irving,

THE THEORY OF METAPHYSICS. 31

till the day of doom, and still the vast future lies before you as a total blank. The moment you evoke anything out of the boundless inane, it shall rise on your thought as form and body, and put to rout the theories of the metaphysicians. This hypothesis, therefore, in everything except the substitution of verbiage for ideas, resolves itself back into the notion of the non-believer, who does not allow that the after-scene should be made an object of thought at all. The metaphysicians tell us, after they have done, that we must not be curious and speculate upon these things. But why did they not say so at the beginning, and take their place with the non-believer, instead of pretending they were giving us wisdom, when they were only playing at shuttle-cocks with words?

Form and substance are co-essentials of each other. As they cannot be separated in the nature of things, so it is not in the power of any one to separate them in his idea. As soon as you deny form to substance, you deny its existence.* You remove it from the

* Cuf'worth, in the fifth chapter of his " Intellectual System," reasons finely on the subject of spiritual and angelic bodies, and introduces an array of authorities, both from the Christian Fathers and the ancient philosophers, some of whose arguments it would be difficult to evade. Dr. Mosheim, however, the scholiast of Cudworth, undertakes to refute them. He holds fully to the doctrine, that not only spirits, but angels also, are without bodies, and all his reasoning starts with the assumption that God is without body. If God can exist and act without body, why not angels and spirits ? Such is his argument ab ignorantia.

The writer is a Trinitarian. It would be a luxury, if the topic were not foreign to our subject, to take up his logic and run It out. It would be pertinent to ask: Do you believe an article of your categoiy of actual things. In vain you take refuge in abstractions and verbiage. In vain you instance the qualities of virtue, goodness, affection, intellect, and so forth : they must attach themselves primarily to living beings, else they fade off into airy nothings, not without a name it may be, yet without habitation. Qualities must attach to things and attributes to persons, or else be numbered among the quiddities of the Schoolmen.

The theory of the future life under examination is not only powerless over human conduct, since it utterly fails to make the motives of a spiritual world touch visibly on the affairs of this, but it fiiils as a motive power in calling a living literature into existence. All the great productions of genius have been evolved and nurtured under a very different regimen. No Iliad, that brings down the living divinities, and makes them mingle in human affairs, — no Divina Comoedia, nor Jerusalem Recovered, nor Paradise Lost, — ^not even those creations which the Drama calls forth under her potent witchery to unveil human nature to itself,— could ever have had existence

own creed, — the essential Divinity of Christ? And has Christ any body? Deny the first, and the road is wide open toward " Socinianisni," if you are not already there. Deny the second, and the way looks pretty clear and direct toward the most spectral kind of Gnosticism. Deny both, and the slide into Pantheism is remarkably easy. Deny that God exists, and is manifest in some form which is above natare, and yoa will end by seeing him sunk in nature. Hence the great doctrine of a Mediatoi which the New Testament makes fundamental. Pope says : —

" There, dim in clonds, the poring scholiaxts mark ; WiH who like owla Me only in the dark.**

THE THEORY OP METAPHYSICS. 33

under the iDspiration of such a supernal world. As soon as the imagination crosses over the frontier, its wings drop frozen, and it falls into the limbo and dies. What is imagination, or what is fiiith, where all imagery is prohibited, and What image can start out of the vast abyss, where there is no form nor body in which it may appear? Body is denied to substance, and then substance straightway dwindles' to a " point " and disappears, and we are in an unfathomable death-realm, where black night takes the color from things,* and not even a poet can find a myth for his machinery. Not an angel must show his face, or rustle with his wing, for these attach to bodies ; and our philosophers will have it — and must, if consistent — that angels are without bodies too, they also being " pure simplicities." All those great works of the human intellect which have been utterances out of the heart of humanity, and gone to its heart again, are so many protests against these notions of the supernatural, — notions that do not even allow a spectre to come up, for not a spectre can rise and gibber unless you allow him to be bodied forth. And as for those hopes and comforts which are the Christian's solace at the final hour, these metaphysicians have the privilege, when their game at words is over, of lying down to the great agony and being turned into nobody. All the consolations of their system go with them ! But has the Gospel which brought life and immortality to light become reduced at last to this shrunken and shriveled scroll ?