Immortality : an essay in discovery, co-ordinating scientific, psychical, and Biblical research

Introduction

I. PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PRE-

JUDGMENTS

PAGE

By A. GLUTTON-BROCK, Author of 'Thoughts on the War,9 'The Ultimate Belief,' 'William Morris: his Work and Influence' (Home University Library) I

(A DISCUSSION OF IMMORTALITY FROM THE STANDPOINT

OF SCIENCE) By J. A. HADFIELD, M.A., M.B., Surgeon, Royal Navy 17

III. THE RESURRECTION OF THE

DEAD

By the REV. B. H. STREETER, M.A., Canon Residentiary of Hereford, Fellow and Lecturer of Queen s College, Oxford. Editor of 'Foundations9 and 'Concerning Prayer, 'Author of 'Restatement and Reunion9 75

IV. THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO

COME

By B. H. STREETER 131 vi IMMORTALITY

By the REV. C. W. EMMET, B.D., Vicar of West Hendred, Berks, Author of 'The Eschatological Question in the Gospels,' 'The Epistle to the Galatians' (Readers' Commentary), 'The Third Book of Maccabees' (Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. by Charles), 'The Fourth Book of Maccabees' (S.P.C.K. translations of early documents), etc 167

By A. CLUTTON-BROCK 219

VII. THE GOOD AND EVIL IN SPIRITUALISM

By the AUTHOR OF TRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA* (LiLY DOUGALL), Author of 'Christus Futurus,' 'Absente Reo,' (Voluntas Dei,' 'The Practice of Christianity,' (The Christian Doctrine of Health'; also of 'Beggars All,' 'The Zeitgeist,' 'The Mormon Prophet,' 'Paths of the Righteous, 'etc 241

VIII. REINCARNATION, KARMA AND

THEOSOPHY

By the AUTHOR OF TRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA* . . 293

By the AUTHOR OF TRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA* . . 343

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 375

INDEX OF NAMES 379

INTRODUCTION

Man's life is like a Sparrow, mighty King! That — while at banquet with your chiefs you sit Housed near a blazing fire — is seen to flit Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering, Here did it enter; there, on hasty wing, Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold; But whence it came we know not, nor behold Whither it goes. Even such, that Transient Thing The Human Soul. . . .

This mystery if the Stranger can reveal, His be a welcome cordially bestowed!

BECAUSE they believed the Roman Stranger could reveal the mystery of the After-life our Saxon fathers accepted Christianity. May we believe that any teacher, Christian or other, can reveal that mystery to us to-day? . . . That is a question which tens of thousands are asking now.

That there is a life beyond the grave, many, perhaps the majority, still believe; but it is a belief resting mainly upon instinct or upon a tradition the trustworthiness of which they are increasingly aware is being questioned from many sides.

The growth alike of knowledge and of moral insight has gradually made more and more untenable the conventional pictures of Heaven and Hell which seem to have satisfied, or at least to have been accepted by,

vii viii IMMORTALITY

most men well on into the nineteenth century. Popular confidence in the authority of Scripture has been sapped by scientific discovery and vague rumours of the Higher Criticism. Above all, by demonstrating how intimate is the union of the mindewith a brain which is obviously perishable, Science seems to not a few to have given the final coup de grace to any belief in personal Immortality at all.

To such a situation different individuals react in different ways. To the ignoble is open the simple course, "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." The nobler sort are moved in divers ways. Some by an act of will turn their backs upon the whole of the achievement of the human intellect and cling, with the desperation of drowning men, to an infallible Bible or an infallible Church. Others seek new light in Spiritualistic seance or in Theosophical revelation. The majority, thinking like the old Rabbi that "God hath given man the present, the future He has kept in His own hand," give themselves over to the task of living cleanly and doing good work in this world, deliberately refusing to let their thoughts dwell over much on a possible Beyond.

Of these last perhaps the greater number still "faintly trust the larger hope"; others with a Stoic renunciation reject it as an out-worn superstition and an enervating dream ; others again have lost all interest in any life beyond the present — and are content. But such contentment, whether the disciplined contentment of the Stoic or the easy acquiescence of the indifferent, has a way of breaking down,

INTRODUCTION ix

And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,

And while the purple joy is pass'd about, Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit

Or homeless night without;

And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see New prospects, or fall sheer — a blinded thing!

Thereiis, O grave, thy hourly victory, And there, O death, thy sting.

And, to-day, most of those who care little on their own account are thinking of brave men about whose present case they would fain know more — if only they believed that possible.

But is it really necessary to rest content in such a state of doubt and darkness? Has Science really proved that Mind is only a pale reflection of material changes in the Brain? A few years ago it did indeed look as if at no distant date such a conclusion might be reached. It is otherwise to-day.

Again, must the Christian outlook on the Future Life be for ever confined within what we now know to be pre-Christian forms of thought which were already, when St. Paul wrote, obsolescent? Must a grown man always lisp in baby speech? Is Theology the one department of human enterprise in which there can never be advance? And, while the range of human knowledge is expanding yearly on every side, is the destiny of man the one and only subject on which we can never hope to learn something new?

Macaulay, in a well-known passage, contrasts the gigantic strides of human science in every other direction with the absolute stagnation in our knowledge of x IMMORTALITY

all that lies behind the world of sight and touch. "There are branches of knowledge with respect to which the law of the human mind is progress. . . . But with theology the case is very different. ... A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth with a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being, of course, supposed equal."

But things have changed since Macaulay wrote. Science is every day making new discoveries which bear on the relation of the body and the soul. Psychical Research, if it has added little to our knowledge of another life, has at least thrown startling light on the nature of that mind whose survival is in question; and Philosophy has not been idle. The application to Theology of the doctrine of Evolution and of the results of Psychology and of the Science of Comparative Religions has given a new meaning to the word Revelation; while, in the light-of lately discovered documents and new methods of study, the New Testament speaks with another voice. It is not the lack of new knowledge but the difficulty of co-ordinating it which holds us back; for no one person can have really first-hand knowledge of all the various departments of thought concerned.

Discovery comes whenever trains of thought or pieces of information originally separate are seen to illuminate and explain each other. But, when the things requiring to be brought together exist in different minds, this fusion is made harder or easier in exact proportion to the degree of sympathy and the range of contact between those minds. Hence, though much

INTRODUCTION xi

may be accomplished by the reading of books or articles by workers in different departments, conditions become more favourable if this can be supplemented by the living contact of mind with mind. The maximum possibilities of such fusion of different strains is reached where there is personal as well as intellectual understanding, and where there is an overmastering passion for Truth which makes each willing to put all he has into the common stock, to hold back no half-formed thought as foolish or immature, to secrete no bright idea as private property, and to defend no position once taken up merely from respect to interest or conservatism or from personal amour propre. Intellectual co-operation only achieves its greatest possibilities where its basis is enthusiasm for a common cause and personal friendship; and experience shows that the intellectual activity and receptivity of each is raised to the highest pitch when that fellowship is not in work alone and in discussion, but in jest and prayer as well — for humour and common devotion, when both are quite spontaneous, are, though in very different ways, the greatest solvents of egotism and a well-spring of fellowship and mutual understanding. Such fellowship and co-operation in not always an easy thing to compass, but when it exists persons of quite modest gifts and moderate experience can do, relatively to their capacity, great things.

The last ten years have seen a widespread recognition of the value of this group method of attacking current problems, practical as well as intellectual. The volumes Foundations and Concerning Prayer were an xii IMMORTALITY

attempt to apply it to some urgent questions of Religion; and, whatever may.be thought of these works, such merits as they have are mainly due to this method of approach. The experience gained in the preparation of these books, particularly the latter, suggested the hope that, by the application of the same method, light might be gained on the burning question of the Future Life.

Several whose names do not appear on the title-page of this book took part in one or more of the preliminary conferences held at Cumnor, and contributed memoranda on special points. And though none of them are in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in any of the Essays, the authors feel bound to acknowledge the value of their participation in the conferences by the mention of their names: Dr. E. W. Barnes, Master of the Temple; the Rev. W. S. Bradley, Tutor of Mansfield College; the Rev. C. H. S. Matthews, Vicar of St. Peter's, Thanet; Captain W. H. Moberly, D.S.O., Fellow of Lincoln College; and lastly, Miss M. S. Earp, who, besides being present at all the conferences, has given invaluable help in connection with the MSS. and proofs. An acknowledgment is also due to Miss M. E. Campbell for the compilation of the Index.

In addition to the discussions, both in this larger group and among themselves, individual contributors have had the advantage of being able to consult other friends who had special knowledge on particular points. By this method it has been possible to focus upon the subjects treated a range of thought, experience, and expert knowledge which no one person could have com-

INTRODUCTION xiii

manded alone. As a result of thorough discussion a degree of unity and unanimity has been arrived at which, in view of the very various tastes, training, and experience of the authors, is remarkable, and which encourages them to believe that the conclusions reached are really sound. Sometimes, of course, an Essay treats of subjects of which its author has himself made a special study, but about which some or all of the other contributors feel that they are not competent to speak with authority; and things are sometimes said by one writer which would have been put with a different kind of emphasis by another. Subject, however, to these reservations, the book is put forward on the corporate responsibility of all the contributors; it presents a connected train of thought and a definite and coherent point of view, and, though each Essay is complete in itself, it will gain by being read in the order and context in which it stands.

In the first two Essays and the first section of the third the attempt is made to set out in a logical sequence the main arguments for the belief in personal Immortality. The rest of Essay III. and Essays IV. to VI. deal with the nature of the after-life, and discuss the meaning and value for modern thought of conceptions like Resurrection, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Essays VII. and VIII. endeavour to estimate judicially the elements of truth and error in Spiritualism and in the doctrine of Reincarnation, more especially in relation to the claims made on its behalf by modern Theosophy. Essay IX forms, as it were, an Epilogue to the whole collection.

xiv IMMORTALITY

The effect of the very considerable amount of thought and labour given to the preparation of this book on the minds of its authors has been to convince them of three things :

First, they have come to see that the belief in personal Immortality rests on a wider and surer basis in reason than they had originally supposed.

Secondly, they feel that though a veil must always hang between this world and the next, it is not entirely impenetrable. If he will only seek it in the right way some real and definite knowledge of the life Beyond can be attained by man.

Thirdly, if they believe, as they do, that they have something of value to contribute, it is not from any conceit of their own ability, but because of the method they have used. This has been, in effect, an endeavour to get right away from the old bickerings between Science and Religion, Reason and Revelation; and to bring together the ascertained results of different branches of Scientific, Philosophical, Critical, and Historical study in such a way as to interpenetrate and illuminate one another in the light of the values derivable from Religion, Ethics, and Art. But what they have done is only to make a beginning, and they are confident that others, improving on their method and commanding wider and deeper ranges of knowledge and experience, will be able to go further forward, and that such light as men can now see is only the twilight

which precedes the dawn.

B. H. S.

CUTTS END, CUM NOR, October i, 1917.

PRESUPPOSITIONS & PREJUDGMENTS

BY

ARTHUR CLUTTON-BROCK

AUTHOR OF "THOUGHTS ON THE WAR," "THE ULTIMATE BELIEF," "WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE" (HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY)

PAGE

Agnosticism, i. e. complete suspense of judgment about a future

life is really impossible ..... 3

One main cause of disbelief in it is the passion for disinterestedness. In this case the disbelief is not so complete as it supposes. It is moral rather than intellectual . . 3

Another cause is the reaction against current presentations of the belief. If our beliefs fail to express our values, we reject them. Our effort is to conceive reality in terms of our values. The conflict between beliefs and values is most acute in the matter of a future life ... 5

There is a disinterested desire to believe in a future life in so far as we wish to prove the justice of the universe. But the consequent effort to attain certainty leads us into an unjust conception. So we lose certainty ... 6

The belief in Hell and its revenge on those who hold it. The natural reaction and the despair of all belief. The suspicion of any belief in a future life as tainted with egotism. So agnosticism seems safer and more moral ... 9

But there is always a counter-reaction. The revolt against mechanical conceptions of life inevitable. The belief in a future life not obsolete but always growing. Only the expression of it becomes obsolete. Men believe more and more in a future state. But they have to earn their belief, and it is always being destroyed by unearned certainties. It can be earned only by the practice of the principles of Christianity ....... 10

I

PRESUPPOSITIONS AND PREJUDGMENTS

IN this paper I propose to discuss, not the reasons men give for their belief or disbelief in a future life, but deeper, unconscious causes, which are peculiarly powerful in this case because there is so little to argue about. The unseen world, if there is one, is unseen; and we know no facts about it as we know facts about this world. Therefore there are many who say they are agnostics about it; but it is impossible to be really an agnostic about the question of a future life. If this life is a preparation for another, it cannot be the same for us as if it ended with death; hence we cannot escape from a working hypothesis that it does or does not end with death, which must, one would suppose, affect our conduct. It may be, of course, that all our working hypotheses, all our thoughts, are merely part of a mechanism and have nothing to do with our conduct, which is another part of the mechanism of life. But we must and do always dismiss that possibility when we think; for it makes all thinking and all theories futile, including itself.

It is, however, a strange fact that unbelievers in a future life do not greatly differ in conduct or in values from believers. They do not say, "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die." They believe just as firmly in absolute values, in truth, in righteousness, and in beauty, as the man who could draw you a map of heaven; indeed they often seem to believe more firmly in them, for it is possible to believe in a future life and to have no absolute values at all, to see every good action merely as an investment. But the man who refuses to believe in a future life, if he acts rightly, must do so for the sake of doing so; righteousness must have an absolute value for him indeed. And here, perhaps, we may find the cause of much avowed disbelief. It is really faith, a faith in absolute values which refuses the support and comfort of any dogma. It maintains that man has his values and that it is his duty to obey them without hope of reward, without even seeking for a proof that they belong to the order of the universe, that they are shared by anything except man; that man must be good without postulating a God to approve of his goodness, or a universe in which that goodness has any significance or lasting effect. This refusal to believe in a future life is the supreme example of man's passion for disinterestedness. It is the most resolute and defiant of all possible answers to the question — Doth Job fear God for nought? The answer is — Yes, even though there be no God, and though he who fears is but a quintessence of dust, for a moment become conscious of itself. That is the last asceticism of which man in his passion for absolute values is capable. He proclaims them in the face of a universe which he asserts to be utterly indifferent to them.

But this asceticism is never, I think, the complete disbelief it supposes itself to be. Rather it is a kind of self-denial, a discipline which the mind imposes on itself so that it may be sure that its values are absolute. All the beliefs of man have been tainted with his egotism; they have supplied him with reasons for righteousness other than the right reasons, and have therefore perverted his very conception of righteousness. Tantum religio potuit, suadere malorum; and we are better without it in the form of dogma, for we cannot trust ourselves not to frame dogmas that will pervert our absolute values. As Nietzsche said, there is the will to power in all religion; and it continually deceives us by pretending to express our absolute values, while it really expresses our desire for rewards for ourselves and punishments for others.

All this is not consciously stated; but it is deep in the minds of many upright men and produces in them a habit of defiant incredulity, which is not so much rational as moral.

But there is also another, narrower reason why many excellent men deny a future life. What they really deny is not a future life generally, but the particular kind of future life which they have been taught to believe in, or the particular arguments advanced for it. It is a natural infirmity of the human mind thus to deny the general in the particular. There are, for instance, many people who suppose that the whole question of a future life is bound up with the notion that Heaven is a place above the sky and with the dogma of the physical Resurrection of Christ. It has never occurred to them to consider the two questions separately. Because they do not believe in a local Heaven, or in the physical Resurrection, they assume that they cannot believe in a future life. But it is possible not to be a Christian at all, to believe that Christ never existed, or never to have heard of the name Heaven, and yet to believe in a future life with Plato. Yet another irrelevant cause of disbelief in a future life is the strange assertion, commonly associated with the Christian faith, that animals have no souls. This did not matter so long as men saw no likeness between themselves and animals; but, now that a thousand discovered facts prove the likeness, the contention is obvious that, since animals have no souls, men can have none either, and must die like

/ dogs. But how if dogs die like men? How if animals are like men rather than men like animals? Perhaps the last piece of Christian humility we have to learn, with St. Francis, is that the black beetle is our brother. Perhaps it is the generic snobbery of man, more than anything else, that has deprived him of his highest hopes, just as all our snobberies deprive us of hope by emptying life of absolute values for us. I cannot believe in any real and universal fellowship unless I am ready to strip myself of all status; I cannot believe in a real future life so long as I think of it as a privilege of my own species. In the long run exclusiveness always shuts out those who exclude; for there is a terrible unconscious sincerity in the human mind by which all lies told for comfort or pride revenge themselves on the liar.

If in our beliefs we express our own sense of status, our own hatred, or our own selfish desires, those beliefs gradually empty the universe of values, and so become intolerable to us. Then, whatever truth there may be in them, is also rejected; hence much of our modern defiant refusal to believe in a future state, in a God, in a universe, which can be valued, is the result of a reaction from beliefs in a future state, a God, a universe, which men find that they cannot value. In his beliefs about these things man is always trying to express his absolute values; but his beliefs are incessantly tainted with his egotism and so mis-express his values. The values are permanent; they are the most certain and unchanging fact in the mind of man; they are always seeking expression and always failing of it because they arc so deep and unconscious. There is in man always

, a desire to love something for its own sake, and not as it helps him to live, either in this life or in another. That passion, that appetite of the soul, persists always through all his changing bodily appetites, and because of it he can never be content with the pleasure he gets from them. It is the most permanent fact of his mind, and to him the most permanent fact of the universe. Therefore he makes an incessant effort to conceive of the universe in terms of it. Since he has this incessant desire to love something for its own sake and values such a love, whether he attains to it or no, above all other experiences of his mind or body, he has also an unceasing desire to find in the very nature of the universe that which is worthy of his love. This desire, because of its very nature, cannot be satisfied by any merely comforting belief. It is indeed the reason why men are suspicious of all comforting beliefs; for, if I love God, or any one or anything, so that I may be comforted by my love, my love itself is spurious. I might as well try to fall in love with a woman because she is rich. But what man desires above all things is a love which is not spurious; and yet, because he desires that love so much, his egotism is always tempting him into spurious loves, into spurious certainties. And for a time perhaps he is certain, convinced by miracles or documentary proofs that he has found the true God whom he can love, the creator and ruler of a righteous universe. But gradually, through that terrible unconscious sincerity of his, the very proofs which have given him certainty cause him discomfort. He finds that the God who has been revealed to him so precisely does not satisfy his own values. Will he then give up the God or the values? The conflict between the God and the values rages through all religious history; for man clings tenaciously to both and is torn by the logic which would force him to reject the one or the other.

But nowhere is this conflict fiercer than in the matter of beliefs about a future life. For man has a disinterested desire to believe in a future life. It is not merely that the individual man wishes to survive, that his egotism cannot endure the thought of a universe in which he himself will not be; it f is that he wishes to find justice, not merely in the mind of man, but also in the order of the universe, and that, without a future life, there seems to him to be no justice, no significance in pain and grief. There are of course those who tell us that our pain and grief will profit posterity. That is not certain; and, even if it were, there would be no justice in it; for it is not justice that one man should profit by another's misfortunes; justice is a matter of the treatment of individuals, not of the race. There it is like love. If I do not love individuals, if I am not just to them, I do not love, I am not just, at all. So, if I believe in the love and the justice of God at all, I believe in His love and justice to individuals. What we really value is persons, not processes; and we cannot value a mere process of salvation for some abstraction called the race, if persons are utterly sacrificed to it. We cannot value a universe in which this sacrifice occurs, whatever brave efforts we may make to do so.

Since, then, there is in man this quite disinterested desire to believe in a future life, since it is an essential part of his desire to believe in a universe which he can value, man is continually tempted to find sure proofs that there is a future life. He is "hot for certainties"; and these very certainties, when he has attained to them, cause him discomfort. For, since they are spurious certainties, they are always tainted with his own egotism; and there is some lack of the very justice he desires in the future state of which he is certain. This lack of justice, though it may at first seem to work in his own favour, will afterwards take a terrible revenge upon him ; for it is the injustice of an omnipotent God, in whose hands he is helpless. There is, for instance, the taint of egotism in all our traditional beliefs about rewards and punishments in a future state ; men have always used those beliefs to discourage certain kinds of conduct and to encourage others. Churches in particular have used them to suit their own purposes. They conceive of a God who gives to their enemies the kind of future life that they deserve. But if this God of ours is capable of punishing our enemies as we wish, He is capable also of punishing us as He wishes. If He will take vengeance for us He may take vengeance on us. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; and vengeance is a terrible weapon in the hands of an omnipotent being into whose nature you have read your own vindictiveness. Hence the belief in Hell, a Hell in which our enemies will suffer; but we do not know that we ourselves shall not meet them there.

Men have been utterly certain about this Hell, and they have not been able to escape from the logic of their own certainty. It is a danger to them as well as to their enemies; if they use it as a terror to others they cannot escape from the terror of it themselves. They can escape only by denying it altogether; and this denial comes to them at last, when they see that they cannot value the God whom they have made the instrument of their own vengeance. Hence the fierce reactions against our egotistical conceptions of a future life, of God, of the universe, reactions of man's values against his spurious certainties. In them man tries to destroy all that he has achieved; he despairs of belief altogether and finds his safety only in denial.

In this mood he is peculiarly suspicious of all beliefs in a future state ; for they, more than all other beliefs, have been tainted with egotism and discredited by the frightful revenge they have taken upon it. Certainly belief in a future state has been the cause of more fantastic misery than any other kind of belief, the cause of more fantastic cruelty inflicted by man on man. The struggle for life is a human and kindly thing compared with the struggle for salvation. Egotism in time can be reasoned with and limited; but egotism projected io IMMORTALITY I