Man's tomorrow

II

Author of " Views on Vexed Questions," "Old Faiths and New Facts," etc.

BOSTON

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY

Copyright, 19 11 Sherman, French & Company

Preface

A decade and a half ago I published under another title the results of my research and reflection on this great question which has alike allured and eluded for almost a score of centuries, the most eager inquirers throughout the Christian world.

With increased leisure and facilities for investigation, I have secured so much important, attractive, and new material I have concluded to re-write my views and bring them down to date, for while life lasts this theme so far-reaching, and of such universal, personal interest cannot fail to arrest attention, and while scientists in recent times are so tireless and so successful in their search into the secrets of nature our conclusions should frequently pass in review and undergo careful revision in consonance with this continual inflooding of new light.

The fearless spirit of inquiry abroad to-day has unearthed a vast multitude of facts in every department, and also many interlacing systems of law. Thinkers in their attempted solution of this problem encounter novel and most formidable difficulties and also unexpected and valuable helps. The modes of solution that satisfied former centuries prove wholly inadequate to meet the demands of these modern times. There is not now that overmastering awe and reverence that once quite effectually barred out investigation. There is no

PREFACE

longer that childlike, unquestioning acceptance of the dictum of others, however learned or holy, or hedged about with ecclesiastical prestige and power. The Sacred Scriptures themselves have not escaped the searching criticisms that everywhere prevail, even in the schools of the prophets.

There are still, it is true, great numbers who are so intently busy with affairs, or so averse to, or untrained in consecutive thinking, or are so purblind through superstitions that are born of ignorance, that they feel no incitement to independent inquiries on this theme, resting content either with no opinion, or with simply an adopted one, accepting whatever conclusions they are told are Biblical or orthodox. This mass of minds, not yet having felt the stir of modern thought, or been disturbed by modern doubt, naturally feel little interest in the re-settlement of this question, although it is fraught with such momentous issues.

There is, however, a public, rapidly enlarging, made up of vigorous, progressive inquirers, eager after truth, and willing to follow it wherever it may lead, to which the old proofs appear wholly inadequate, and consequently the old beliefs to be shrouded in the gravest doubt. It is not enough for them to be shown merely what the Scriptures teach and the canons of the Church authoritatively affirm. They call for facts, facts incontrovertibly established with scientific accuracy, with cool judicial precision, in the various departments of physics and metaphysics, biology and psychology,

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history and biography, of the many different branches of modern research. They call for an orderly, logical grouping and interpretation of those facts and a clear demonstration of the underlying principles and laws that witness to the active presence of an organizing, over-ruling mind. It is to such inquirers that the following pages are addressed, and it is therefore from their standpoint that I am to carry on the present discussion.

In re-settling for my own personal needs this question, I have had to re-examine the lowest foundations of all theistic faith, to determine in my own mind whether there is an actual personality behind all phenomena from which they either directly or indirectly proceed, whether the universe evinces strict unity of design and witnesses to the thought-life of not only an ever-living but an ever-active Designer, or whether matter, having neither beginning nor end, does not really contain within itself "the promise and potency of all life." As I have attempted to settle this, the most fundamental of all beliefs, in my volume entitled "Views on Vexed Questions," in the divisions entitled "The Supernatural" and "Mental Life below the Human," I will in the present discussion assume as settled the truth of theism and will proceed on that basis.

If in my attempt to solve the present problem I have reached conclusions controverting those entertained by any of my readers, all I ask is that,

PREFACE

holding in abeyance preconceived opinions as I have endeavored to do in my own case, they inquire simply whether the facts cited have been satisfactorily established, and whether the conclusions based upon them have been logically reached. The present presentation of this theme has been prepared in the hope that some of the many disheartened ones in the great company of anxious and earnest inquirers may thereby escape shipwreck as they attempt, as I have done, to thread their way through the narrows and amid the hidden rocks of doubt and unbelief, and at last be enabled to sail out into the open sea of a reassured faith in an endless life prophesied and provided for by a distinctively personal, infinitely loving

W. W. K.

Washington, D. C.

No lips so mute as the lips of the dead. No curtain of so close a texture as that which hides from the life that now is the life which is to come. We sit by the deathbeds of our loved ones and think we catch glimpses of the spirit-world as their souls pass within the shadow. Sometimes when they seem sinking into the dreamless sleep there comes suddenly into their eyes a far-away look, a rapturous glow, and we listen with bated breath while they try to tell us of visions of marvelous splendor; but the light fades away and the voice is stilled forever, and as we brood in our desolation, we wonder whether, after all, the vision is not simply some bright figment of the fancy. We dare not, can not, rest our faith upon it. And so too, afterward, when, as often happens, a strangely peaceful, an almost youthful look comes back into the face of the dead, we try to persuade ourselves that here at last we surely see something more than a sunset's afterglow, that here are glintings of light from the other world shot through for an instant as the curtain is lifted to let the soul pass in; but sober second thought refuses even this consolation to abide with us longer than through the first lonely hours of our bereavement.

We go to the Sacred Records of our religion and in answer to our longing there comes the voice, "Beloved, it does not yet appear what we shall be." We are assured, however, that the life beyond is made up of two widely contrasted spiritual states, but these are so poetically pictured, the descriptions are so ablaze with the richest profusion of Oriental imagery, that we are often left quite free to follow our own imaginings. As a consequence of the granting of such wide latitude of belief we, in our eager search for the secret hidden away so deeply in the eternal silence, have been widely misled, as is evidenced by the differences in the interpretations we have given to the vague and meager revelations of the Record, our judgments being warped by our individual temperaments, our early training, our tastes and aptitudes, our hopes and fears.

Heaven, as generally conceived by the Christian world, is some resplendent city in a golden by and by, lying just over the border line of death, an Elysium into which the ransomed soul is instantly ushered the moment it makes its exit from this perishing and pain-racked body of clay. It is the supposed embodiment, the perfect fruition of all that aching, hungering human hearts have here most sorely missed and intensely longed for. To the footsore and care-burdened it is fondly looked forward to as an unbroken, joyous rest, a sweet Beulah Land; to the starving, shivering poor, as an ever-blooming and ever-fruiting Paradise of Delights ; to the disabled, the sick, and the ill-shaped, to the bereaved, the neglected, and the lonely, as the place where all ills are ended, where long-lost loved ones meet again in never-ending union, where there is generous appreciation and blessed companionship and love without alloy.

At the magic touch of death, in the twinkling of an eye, the most marvelous change is supposed to be wrought, the soul stepping at once from a life measured by a span and marked by swift vicissitude, by broken hopes and painful partings, by desperate battlings and tumultuous storms of passion, into one of eternal duration, of unbroken calm, and of fixed fate.

Hell looms up as a place of blackest shadow, where lost souls wander ceaselessly, abandoned of hope and of love, driven hither and thither by wild gusts of passion and gnawed by sharp pangs of remorse as they revolve over and over again in their awful nightmare of wretched, rayless thought the misspent privileges of an irrevocable past.

Many, however, refusing to accept this creed of the masses, have formulated others more in consonance, as they think, with reason and the Revealed Word, while many others still, becoming bewildered in their search, have either lapsed into agnosticism or settled down into indifference or blank materialistic unbelief.

The scientific researches and discoveries of today, while they have in their first influences tended to unsettle the old faiths and to lead multitudes of earnest seekers to seriously question whether this life does not really end all, are beginning to give promising token of clarifying and settling opinions as to whether there is a life beyond and what that life will be; and while inducing scholars to search for new meanings in the dim foreshadowings of Scripture, are bringing to light a wondrous and hitherto unthought-of harmony between the intimations of science and the partial disclosures of that Holy Writ on whose divine inspiration reverent millions still cofidently and lovingly rest their faith.

This is no idle and fruitless speculation, for our present life is essentially colored and shaped by our conceptions of that which is to come.

If science can be shown to be, as far as it goes, corroborative of Scripture and to throw strong side-lights upon its pages, and if more just views can be made to prevail as to what the Bible actually teaches, thousands will be rescued from a most alarming paralysis of doubt and disbelief.

In the present discussion I desire to include under the appellation of science not only what are generally designated the exact sciences, but also the science of history, of metaphysics, of biology, and of psychology.

In the first place, what aids have investigations of science furnished for determining whether there is any life beyond? We may concede that it has thus far obtained no positive knowledge on this point, for it has kept itself busy discovering, classifying, and interpreting the phenomena of the life that now is. It is true it has quite recently entered upon a serious and systematic study of apparitions. In 1882 a Society for Psychical Research was founded in England with an important branch in our own country. Prof. Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge University, England, was at its head. His successors have been scientists of international fame. Among its vicepresidents have been the Right Hon. Arthur J. Balfour, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Bishop of Ripon, Prof. James, of Harvard University, Prof. Langley, of the Smithsonian Institution, and Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S. On its roll of members are the names of Gladstone, Ruskin, Lord Tennyson, Frederick W. H. Myers, Prof. J. C. Adams, F.R. S., Alfred Russel Wallace. Twenty-one or more volumes of reports have already been issued by it. In one of them it deliberately makes the announcement that "the society has at last succeeded in establishing beyond all gainsaying, first, the fact of apparitions, and secondly, that they are as often those of persons living at a distance from the place where they are observed as of those who have died." But this, instead of finally disposing of the old query, starts new ones. What are those apparitions? Are they real entities?

Have the souls of the living been able in some mysterious way to leave their bodies for a time, cross continents and seas with the swiftness of light, take on and lay off at will new bodies, featured and contoured like the old ones, and startle their friends as they thrust themselves into their presence in open, wakeful vision? Or have they become possessed with some strange power of placing themselves in close mental union with those to whom they seem to appear, and thus momentarily so to monopolize their imagination that their very forms seem to stand revealed like living personages, their eyes to glisten, their cheeks to flush, their lips to move, and even their voices to utter familiar thoughts in the same old familiar tones? Have the souls of the dead re-clothed themselves and entered once more the haunts of the living? Or are these apparitions some spiritual mirage, some seeming materialization of the concepts of unconscious cerebration? That the creations of the fancy have been apparently projected into space and assumed the form of actual, living personages is shown by the well-known experiences of William Blake, that mystic poet, engraver, and painter, born in London in the middle of the eighteenth century. He was haunted with visions all his life. It is said of him that, when only a boy, sauntering along one day he saw a tree filled with angels, bright wings bespangling every bough like stars. He told of it when he reached home, and his father threatened to thrash him for lying, but his more gentle mother, prompted by her sympathy, saved him through her intercessions. Multitudes of his pictures were careful copies of the faces and forms that he said he saw all about him. He would draw with the utmost alacrity and composure, looking up from time to time as though he had a real sitter before him. Sometimes he would have to wait for the vision, then again it would promptly answer to his call. At others, in the midst of his sketching, he would suddenly leave off and remark, "I can not go on, it is gone, the, mouth has moved," or, "He frowns, he is displeased with my picture." The devil himself would politely sit in a chair to this strange man and then vanish instantly and without warning. When his work was criticised he would calmly reply, "It must be right, I saw it so," and this without any appearance of conceit on his part. These visionary heads were called by Varley, a warm personal friend and admirer, "Blake's specters." They had the characteristics of literal portraitures of what Blake saw.

Emanuel Swedenborg is another case in point, being a man of like constitutional temperament and gifts ; and similar experiences are also related of that most ethereally gifted Shelley, whose imagination Peter Bayne, the Scotch critic, has pronounced "the princeliest that ever sublimed enthusiasm or personated thought." Martin Luther, history tells us, once hurled his inkstand at the Imp of Darkness because, as he thought, he had too persistently intruded upon the privacy of his study chamber.

The recorded evidences of the various apparitions of Christ after his crucifixion are well worthy of the dispassionate study of scientists, and as eminent investigators have at last thought it worth their while to enter methodically upon the examination of this whole group of psychic phenomena, embracing wakeful vision, mesmeric trance, and mental telegraphy, too largely abandoned to superstitious fear and reverent religious faith, and as this society to which I have referred has already announced as established beyond gainsay that apparitions of both the living and the dead have actually taken place, I have no doubt that Christ's recorded appearances will receive careful and candid attention. It is confidently claimed, and certainly with fair show of reason, that no accredited fact of history has been more strongly fortified by testimony and circumstantial evidence. The science of historical research ought most thoroughly to test the sufficiency of the proofs and authoritatively announce whether it has discovered any fatal flaw. The candor of the witnesses it would seem must stand unimpeached. These reappearances were wholly unanticipated by Christ's disciples. Overcome by their fears, they had abandoned him in his last extremity. After he was taken down from the cross they had no question but that he was dead. All hope was lost. The devout women who went first to his tomb carried spices to embalm his corpse. The prepossession, the "fixed idea" necessary to hallucination, is noticeably absent in the case of all these witnesses.

What worldly incentive could his friends have had to fraudulently proclaim him risen? The Roman soldiers took special pains to make sure that he was dead, and the results of the spear-thrust so thoroughly convinced them of it that they concluded not to break his legs. The Roman Government with extraordinary precaution sealed his tomb and set a watch. How account for the fact that his disciples, every one of them without an exception, after they had disgraced themselves by cowardly flight, reappeared, boldly and stoutly contending that Christ had risen, and persisting in this open proclamation notwithstanding such public avowal jeopardized their every worldly prospect and endangered their lives? Why did they make this the central thought in all their public discourses, and endure contumely, poverty, stripes, and imprisonment for this their professed belief, and persist in their intrepid advocacy until, with but a single exception, they met with a violent death? The apparitions, it is asserted, were many, were made under widely different circumstances, and in some instances before a large concourse of witnesses in broad daylight. On one occasion Christ is said to have actually eaten fish and honey with some of his disciples, and to have told them to handle him so as to be thoroughly satisfied that he was not a wraith. Even doubting Thomas became convinced after he had been permitted to thrust his fingers into the print of the nails. How account for the substitution of the Christian Sunday for the Jewish Sabbath except on the ground of a prevalent belief in the verity of Christ's resurrection, which if true must take rank as preeminently the most significant fact in all the past? De Wette, a leading German rationalist, who with Vater did more than any other, so Strauss himself acknowledges, to establish the mythical explanation of the Bible narrative, freely confessed that the historical evidence of Christ's resurrection was absolutely incontrovertible, although the manner of it was still a mystery. This testimony is entitled to great weight, and may well set scientists thinking, for it was given after long and painstaking research begun with the confident expectation of finding the account fallacious, and in the face of the skepticism he had himself helped to create.

No candid mind can question for an instant that Saul of Tarsus firmly believed that he saw Christ while on the road to Damascus. He apparently had no self-interest to conserve by affirming the apparition, but every self-interest to sacrifice. He was at the time a young man of bright parts and brilliant prospects, a favorite pupil of Gamaliel, a most enthusiastic and bigoted leader among the persecutors of the Christians — one whose ambition knew no bounds, whose heart knew no fear, whose brain knew no fatigue. This vision was not the vivid imagining of one tortured by an upbraiding conscience, for, as he afterwards expressed it, he verily thought he was doing God's service. There is therefore, as far as we can see, no assignable cause for his insistence that he saw Christ, except the fact itself of such a vision. This belief he steadfastly maintained, though it subjected him to lifelong persecution and privation, exposed him to imminent perils, cost him his liberty, and at last his life. The narrator naively adds that the rest of the company heard a voice, but saw no man. While this moderation of statement wins our faith in the truth of the tale, it naturally raises the query whether there appeared and spoke the veritable Christ, or whether the excitable and highly imaginative Saul unwittingly misinterpreted the effects on himself of some electrical discharge from the clouds. But, on second thought, we see how extremely improbable it is that he should have remained thus deluded through those three succeeding years of retirement and quiet thought and the long after-life of severe trial. Besides, the theory that it was a delusion fails to explain Paul's vision two or three days after of one named Ananias coming to restore his sight, the specific direction by Christ's apparition to this same Ananias to visit Saul in a certain place, and the correctness of the information it then conveyed. The corresponding events which immediately followed and the fact that similar visions were claimed by many with whom Saul daily conversed and in whom he afterward learned implicitly to confide, confirmed him in his belief. If Christ had power to open Saul's eyes he certainly had equal power to shut the eyes of those who journeyed with him. During his forty days* tarrying after his crucifixion it is affirmed that Christ became visible and invisible at will. These strange occurrences are well worth the careful consideration of scientists. Few facts have been more thoroughly authenticated. Few have more convincing force or are fraught with more momentous issues.

While it is the province of the science of history to sift the evidence upon which belief in these apparitions of Christ is based, it is that of psychology to account for their origin, explain their nature, and assign them their true place among the accredited phenomena of this mystery-shrouded something which we call life.

As this most inviting field of inquiry is now being examined more systematically than ever before by scientific explorers of world-wide repute, we may confidently look for some authoritative statement on the subject at no very distant day, and it may be that science will finally establish as a demonstrated fact that there is a life beyond and that Christ's resurrection with its blessed promise and prophecy must be classed among the accredited facts of history.

There are certain phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance and clairaudience, hypnotic trance, and telepathy which science has accepted as established facts, but of which it has not as yet been able to make any satisfactory explanation, resting content, with here and there a notable exception, to pronounce them results of abnormal nervous conditions.

Somnambulists have been known, while wrapped in profound sleep, with eyes shut or insensible, to walk with firm, quick tread and with marvelous precision along the edge of precipices, to climb the rough, rocky sides of cliffs and take eaglets from their nests, to cross narrow bridges and the steep roofs of houses, to make long and dangerous journeys afoot and on horseback and return to their couches again, utterly unconscious at daybreak that they had ever left them. How is it they thread their way with such certainty among the thousand pitfalls that beset them everywhere? There is no appearance of blind groping. They act as if they saw clearly and quickly and had their wits about them. How do they see? How tread so safely, keep their poise, avoid obstructions? How adapt themselves to ever-changing circumstances? Artisans have been known while in this state to be as expert and exact in their difficult work as when awake and with eyes wide open. Sermons, musical compositions, and poems have thus for the first time been written out and carefully corrected, and long and intricate problems in higher mathematics solved and transferred to paper, involving many a tedious process. Some affirm that Coleridge attributed his "Christabel," whose exquisite music so charmed Scott and Byron, to a vision. It has, as you remember, a very abrupt closing. He was never able to extend and complete it as begun, as it seemed above, or at least foreign to, his ordinary conceptual and rythmical power.

It may have been the product of simply a preternatural awakening of Coleridge's intellectual powers, or, possibly, the unconscious output of what T. J. Hudson, in a work entitled "The Law of Psychic Phenomena," denominates the subjective self. I have failed to find in Coleridge's published works any mention of this alleged vision-origin, but as to that far-famed fragment, Kubla Khan, written about the same time, we know that it sprang into life and actually assumed its present literary form while this exceptionally gifted seer lay in the arms of that enchantress, opium, under whose fatal spell he finally fell. In a preface to this poem it is said that "in consequence of a slight indisposition an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which Coleridge fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading from Purchas' Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereunto, and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid consciousness that he composed not less than from two to three hundred lines, if that can indeed be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of effort. On awaking, he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business and detained an hour, and on his return found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the vision, the lines and images had passed away forever. He frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him — but the tomorrow never came.

Raphael painted visions which he thought were presented to him by the spirit of his mother. The poem, "A Rose Leaf," by the late Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson, was, as she related to a friend, composed in her sleep, she awaking with the words on her lips. She immediately wrote out the verses and handed them to her physician, saying: "Can you tell me what this means? I am sure I don't know." This occurred but a few weeks before her death.

We have been wont to pronounce all these to be but specimens of dream-literature and art, not of converse with the dead, yet, granting this, is there is not a mystery about them still, as well as about the unwonted powers of sense displayed in sleep to which I have referred? Do they not furnish strong presumptive evidence that there are moods of the soul in which the resources of this tangible body of ours are not called into service, when the ordinary organs of sense are not needed for sense-perception, when thought processes are carried on without the use of the convoluted gray matter of the brain, when this cumbersome clay organism, failing to satisfy our needs, is temporarily laid aside and a second, subtler servant does the bidding of the master?

There are seemingly wakeful moods that are wrapped in as profound a mystery. Lady Henry Somerset, when at the opening of her great career of reformer and philanthropist, became greatly depressed with doubt, questioning even the being of a God. But as she sat alone one summer afternoon in her garden at the foot of an elm, deeply absorbed in thought, she heard a voice saying to her with startling distinctness, "Act as if I were and thou shalt know I am." From that moment her painful questionings ceased, the restful calm of a childlike faith pervaded and transformed her whole after-life, and she became a consecrated leader of reform, worthily taking up the work which the great Lord Shaftesbury had laid down. Luther, while at Rome, heard a voice as he was climbing painfully on his knees up the steps of the so-called Judgment Seat of Pilate, and its influence never left him. It changed all the course of his after-life. It became one of the great determining forces that shook all Europe to its center in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Jeanne D'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, that simple, uneducated, inexperienced peasant girl of eighteen years of age, who at the opening of the fifteenth century led the forces of France to frequent victory over the disciplined veterans of England, proving herself more than a match for the trained strategists of the most warlike nation then on the globe — this maid insisted upon it that she was acting under the express direction of invisible guides, that she heard distinct voices time and again that told her how to dispose of her forces, manoeuvre her artillery, and make and manage her onsets. She also claimed to have visions and to be prompted to prophecy, and her foretellings, improbable as many of them seemed when she uttered them, came true with rarely an exception. How will we explain her unerring insight into the deep problems that arise in the conduct of a great campaign, in the frequent and fearful emergencies of a raging battle? Would the pronouncing her a great military genius solve the mystery of her career? Whence that profound knowledge of the arts of war? The age was indeed superstitious, and religious fears and fervors were rife, but will these account for her victories? However great the enthusiasm with which she, mounted on her charger and waving aloft her white standard, led her hosts against the enemy, it offers no adequate explanation of the results. For almost five hundred years her career has filled the world with wonder. Was she one of those Heaven-sent and Heaven-taught leaders and rescuers that have now and then flashed out on the centuries of human history? Was she in touch with wiser intelligence than her own? Or was she privileged to call into activity some latent energies of the soul?