Faith in a future life (foundations)

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Books by the Same Author Faith in a Future Life

Prefatory Note

On the Sunday evenings of the winter months in 1915, at the Meeting House of the Society for Ethical Culture of New York, I gave a series of eight lectures on Modern Occultism. The course included the following subjects : Modern Occultism and the Ethical Attitude Toward It, The Causes of Modern Occultism, Spiritualism and Its Cardinal Claim, Psychical Research and Its Results, Foundations for the Faith in a Future Life, Theosophy and Reincarnation, Christian Science in Its Relation to Jesus as Healer, A Candid Examination of Christian Science.

Only in its generic sense, as defined in the Century Dictionary, was the word "occultism" used. The aim of the course was expository, critical, constructive. It sought to sketch the origin and development of each of these modern movements, to set forth its distinctive characteristics, to indicate its contribution to religious thought, to show in what respects its main position seemed open to criticism.

This book is not a reproduction of those lectures. They were delivered without manuscript and the thought of extending my notes for publication was at no time entertained. But the receipt of several hundred signed applications for a book that should con-

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PREFATORY NOTE

tain at least a portion of the course, particularly what had been said on the subject of immortality and the various grounds on which thinkers have supported their faith in it, prompted the preparation of what is herein presented.

Be it understood, then, that the following chapters reproduce, not the original lectures but only the substance of certain parts of six in the series. It seemed necessary to say these preliminary words lest any of those who formed part of my friendly audience should expect to find here verbal reproduction of what they then heard.

Alfred W. Martin.

New York.

Contents

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Introduction ix

I. Three Minor Foundations 1

II

For the Christian millions faith in a future life is founded on the New Testament record of the most stupendous of all miracles. It is that the veritable body of Jesus rose from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and having thus risen appeared to disciples, talked with them, gave them directions and then ascended to heaven in the selfsame body he had worn throughout the thirty years of his earthly life.

It is this miracle and the inference of personal immortality which believing Christians draw from it that the Easter festival annually commemorates. The alleged physical resurrection of Jesus — this is the Christian foundation for the faith in a future life. But the difficulty here is that what Christians offer as proof of immortality is itself in need of being proved. Not only does the evidence fail to establish the occurrence of such a miracle but a physical resurrection from the grave is not at all what was believed and taught by Paul and the apostles.

Eecall with me briefly what the New Testament tells us on the subject.

Our earliest witness is the Apostle Paul. He expressly states that he never saw Jesus in the flesh (I Cor. 15:8). The one and only way in which Jesus was seen by him was in a "vision' ' on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus (Acts 9: 3-19 et passim). Moreover he confesses he was given to seeing visions, to having strange psychic experiences (II Cor. 12:1-4). From this we infer that the successive appearances of Jesus, related by the Apostle in his first letter to the Corinthians, were regarded by him as of the same vision type as his own on the journey to Damascus. In none of his letters does Paul testify to a resurrection of Jesus from the grave. What he does testify to is a resurrection from the dead — a distinction to which we shall shortly return. Paul, moreover, makes no mention of the reports of women at the tomb, nor of any appearances there or on the road to Emmaus, nor of Jesus, at a post-mortem appearance, eating fish in the company of disciples. Paul knew nothing of an empty tomb nor of visits that were made to it. Yet he was Peter's guest for a fortnight at Jerusalem (Gal.

1:18). How, then, could Peter have failed to make mention of these details if he knew them? Or how could Paul have failed to make use of them when confuting the skeptical Corinthians had he ever heard of these particulars? Nay more, any report of an empty tomb would have completely set at naught the argument adduced in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. Hence we are forced to the conclusion that all these details found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and written much later than Paul's letter, originated after the visit to Peter, who himself knew nothing of them.

Turning next to what is known as the ' i Triple Tradition, ' ' the story of Jesus ' life in which all three of the Synoptic Gospels agree, we observe that the narrative of a physical resurrection is no part of that source of information. True, the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke contain such a story, but it is missing in Mark's gospel. For the ending of that gospel as we have it in our New Testament is not the original ending. In the margin of the Revised Version we are expressly told that these concluding verses of the Gospel (9-20) "are omitted in the two oldest Greek Manuscripts"

and that ' 'other authorities have a different ending to the Gospel.' ' When inspecting the earliest extant New Testament manuscript in the imperial library at St. Petersburg, I was particularly impressed by the gap covering the space which the twelve verses of the present ending of the Gospel occupy and also by the abruptness of the ending of the Gospel, in the middle of a sentence and with the word " because." The probability is that the original ending of the gospel was unorthodox, recounting a "Docetic" or phantasmal appearance of Jesus after his death and for this reason was suppressed. Finding too in Matthew's story the phrase "but some doubted, " we infer that the reason for skepticism was the nature of the appearance. When we compare with one another the accounts of a physical resurrection as given in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we observe that they differ in eight particulars and all relating to what happened at the tomb.

Comparing the reports of all three Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) we note that the points of difference now increase from eight to twelve.

Add the account given in the Fourth Gospel to the resurrection narratives already exam-

THE CHEISTIAN FOUNDATION

ined, and we find the points of difference increase from twelve to twenty-one. 1

So far then as the testimony of the records is concerned — and remembering that we know not who wrote the Gospels — the evidence amounts only to this : somebody said that somebody saw Jesus, somewhere, somehow, after he had been entombed. In no irreverent or flippant spirit is the evidence thus summed up. It seems to express succinctly and with precision what the records compel us to conclude.

But what we have to note now is that not only do the records furnish no valid evidence for belief in a physical resurrection of Jesus, but also it is not what Paul and the apostles believed and taught. They believed and taught a resurrection from the dead, not a resurrection from the grave. Let me explain. In Old Testament times the Hebrews believed that at death all souls, good and bad alike, departed to Sheol, the underworld, that "land of thick darkness" as Job described it, "where the light is as darkness." There the dead passed their days in a gloomy, shadowy, ghostlike colorless existence. But during the interbiblical period,

1 For a detailed statement, see the Author's "Life of Jesus in the Light of the Higher Criticism," pp. 221 ft.

i. e., between the latest book of the Old Testament and the earliest of the New Testament, the belief gradually grew np in a division of Sheol into two sections, the one Gehenna, reserved for the wicked, and the other Paradise tenanted by the good; the two sections within visible and speaking distance of each other. This belief passed over into the New Testament and appears in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, recorded by Luke. Dives, agonizing in Gehenna, looks across the gulf separating it from Paradise and there sees poor Lazarus leaning on the bosom of Abraham. Dives calls to the patriarch bidding him ask Lazarus to dip his finger in water and bring relief to the burning tongue of Dives. Still another instance of the presence of this belief in the Gospels is furnished by the remark of Jesus to the penitent thief upon the cross: "This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise," meaning that portion of Sheol marked off for the repentent and the righteous; not the celestial Heaven, synonymous only at a later day with Paradise. In Jesus ' time it was believed that Heaven was the home of only God, the angels, Enoch and Elijah. All other beings that had died were thought of as in Sheol-Gehenna, or in Sheol-Paradise.

But even in this latter section, life was anything but desirable — joyless, actionless, purposeless, hopeless, cut off from all communion with God and all terrestrial relations and interests. Hence, there grew up the further belief that they who had been accounted worthy to occupy the Paradise portion of Sheol would somehow escape from this underworld and be resurrected from Sheol, when the great Messianic era would dawn. In the interbiblical book of "Enoch" we see this belief in an advanced stage of crystallization. And when we turn to the famous fifteenth chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians we see the belief in its fully developed form. Here the Apostle declares to the skeptical Corinthians that Jesus has already risen from the dead and is indeed "the first-fruits of them that slept" i. e., the first to have come up from Sheol (where life resembled a sleep rather than a waking state), "and has ascended into heaven whence he will shortly descend at the sound of the trump" and all the faithful in Sheol will ascend, wearing ' l celestial bodies," incorruptible, immortal. In the first letter to the Thessalonians still fuller details are given. There we read that when the risen Christ descends with a shout, at the sound of the trump, to establish the heavenly kingdom on earth they in Sheol, who believe he is the Messiah, will first be resurrected and then they who are still living and thus believe shall be "caught up in the clouds" together with them that had risen from Sheol, "to meet the Lord in the air" and all together be "ever with the Lord. " ' * Small wonder that the first Christians walked the streets of Jerusalem with their* faces turned upward, eager to catch the very first glimpse of the descending Christ (Acts 1:2). Thus the word "resurrection" as used by Paul and his fellow-converts signified only resurrection from the dead, from Sheol, never a physical resurrection from the grave. Jesus himself used the word with the selfsame signification current in the first century in Palestine. In his discussion with the Sadducees, recorded in the twelfth chapter of Mark, he uses the expression "when they shall rise from the dead."

In the light of this prevailing conception of the resurrection of the soul from Sheol as against the resurrection of the body from the grave, how unnatural and absurd it would have been for the disciples to go to the tomb to see if

1 1 Thess. 4.

THE CHEISTIAN FOUNDATION

Jesus' body were still there or not! They had no interest in his body; what concerned them was his soul and its residence in Sheol. Surely one as spiritually great as he must have escaped from Paradise, ascended to Heaven and will soon return to earth to establish the Kingdom of which he preached. Had not Enoch and Elijah been translated to Heaven? How much more worthy he who transcended the patriarch and the prophet ! How could so exalted and exalting a personality be permitted to remain in Sheol ! He must have risen. No other alternative is any longer to be entertained. In some such wise the disciples reflected — as we are led to infer from the New Testament record. How natural and inevitable such reflection must have been! On that fateful Thursday evening they had been terrorstricken by the arrest of their master. In terror they fled from Gethsemane and found their way back to Galilee (Acts 1:2; compare Mk. 14:5). Here they took breath and came to themselves. For here they had walked and talked with Jesus, day after day, for a year or more. Here every footpath, valley, lakeshore, hilltop was sanctified by the memory of his presence and his preaching. Here, then, the conviction came to the disciples that he whom they had thus known and loved and revered could not remain in Sheol but must have risen, ascended to Heaven, soon to fulfill the heavenly Father's commission and usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. But for the rise of this conviction in the minds and hearts of the disciples they would never have rallied at Jerusalem as we read they did. But for that mighty belief of theirs the birth of Christianity would have been indefinitely postponed. Given this intense conviction and it needed only a hint, a rumor that someone had seen Jesus, to start the legend of a physical resurrection. And, once started, it would quickly and spontaneously take on increasing marvelous detail — as in the retelling of many other incidents which the Gospels record x — especially in that age when the masses were on tiptoe of excitement in anticipation of the speedy advent of the Messiah. Hence the story of a physical resurrection from the grave followed upon the conviction of the disciples that their Master could not remain in Sheol but had experienced a resurrection from the dead. They had been dull of understanding

2 For illustration, see the Author's "Life of Jesus," pp. 85, 212.

but now that this conviction had come upon them they comprehended their mission to mankind. They had slept in Gethsemane, now they were awake to the pressing need of the hour. They had fled from their Master's cross, now they were ready to take up their own cross. They had been sheep, timidly following the shepherd, now they were themselves shepherds, eager to give their life for the sheep. Thus, for the belief in a physical resurrection of Jesus, we substitute the belief that his body perished, returned to dust, mingled with the streams, nourished the grasses and the flowers, while what he stood for rose again through the resurrection of faith, courage, loyalty, consecration, in the hearts of his despondent and despairing disciples. Christianity, therefore, arose not in a fiction, nor in a delusion, much less in an imposture. It arose, not from a material fact, but from a great spiritual fact which promptly brought other spiritual facts in its train. First, there was the thought of the personality and influence of Jesus as recalled by the disciples when they were once more in Galilee. That thought gave rise to the conviction that their master could not be in Paradise-Sheol with all the rest of the noble dead, but that he, above all others, must have escaped and ascended to heaven soon to return to earth and reign over the Messianic Kingdom. That conviction transformed the disciples from despairing cowards into apostolic heroes, heralding their conviction that Jesus was now in heaven and would soon come back to earth. From the heralding of that belief sprang the rumor that Jesus had been seen, and from the rumor were eventually evolved the familiar stories of a physical resurrection. These, I incline to believe, were the five successive steps in the process that led to the belief in a physical resurrection of Jesus.

"We are thus brought back to my initial remark that what is offered as proof of immortality is itself in need of being proved. The evidence simply does not support the belief in a physical resurrection of Jesus and what is more this does not represent the conception entertained by Paul and the Apostles who gave the word "resurrection" only the same connotation that Jesus applied to it, viz., the soul's rising from Sheol, tersely expressed in the phrase "resurrection from the dead. ' '

But now, even were it granted that Jesus did rise physically from the grave, it would not follow that all believing Christians are immortal. For, according to their view, it was the "Son of God" that thus rose and we are not warranted in inferring the immortality of ordinary beings from the experience of one who was supernatural. Jesus, in the estimation of all Christians, differed from all other persons in kind as well as in degree. It would therefore be illogical to infer from the resurrection of so unique a personality the immortality of lesser souls albeit they believe in his uniqueness.

Nay more, not even were Jesus a man, differing from all other souls only in degree, a view that has the support of the Synoptic Gospels, would his resurrection prove the immortality of his followers. All that could be logically, consistently inferred therefrom would be that not all men are eternally subject to death; i. e., what occurred in the case of one man might possibly occur in the case of others. Consequently whether we take the orthodox or the heterodox view of Jesus r personality, the alleged miracle of his resurrection furnishes no adequate foundation for the faith in a future life. Certain, at any rate, it is, that future generations will not attach the evidential value to the New Testament story that has been accorded it in the past. Equally certain it would seem that apart from some sort of evidential support for the belief in immortality it is not likely to take on any new or greater degree of importance for the people of coming centuries.

Ill

Before entering upon discussion of the foundations for faith in a future life which modern occultism presents, it may be well if at this point we pause to consider a negative aspect of our subject, one which has been given forceful expression by a class of scientific thinkers commonly known as materialists. Their contention is that the faith in a future life must be discredited because there are "established conclusions of science" with which that faith fails to harmonize. Very widely does this opinion prevail, extending far beyond the circle of avowed materialists. Science, it is said, has pushed her investigations so far that the last vestige of a reasonable basis for the doctrine of personal immortality has disappeared.

It behooves us therefore, as free truth-seekers, to examine the thesis of materialism and determine whether its claim can be substantiated or whether, perchance, its destructive shaft, like the boomerang, has recoiled upon the projector, and with fatal effect.

In the estimation of materialists all phenomena whatsoever, be they in outward nature, or in human consciousness, are explicable by the ultimate properties of matter. It is maintained, moreover, that these properties are eternal and underived; existing, therefore, as ultimate facts which explain everything while remaining themselves unexplained. According to this view not only is consciousness the product of a peculiar organization of matter but it cannot survive the disorganization of the material body with which it is associated. In other words, every living person is an organized whole and consciousness is something which pertains to this organized whole, as music belongs to the harp that is entire; but when the harp is broken it is silent; so when the organized whole of personality falls to pieces consciousness ceases forever. Tyndall, in his famous Belfast address, described matter as ' l that mysterious thing by which all phenomena have been accomplished from the evaporation of a drop of water to the conscious life of man, ' ' a statement of which it has been truly said, "it is not a definition but an oracle. ' ' To say that the force inherent in matter is matter, is to reason in a circle rather than toward a goal. Professor Hering, of Vienna, included memory among the inherent properties of matter and referred to it as "the reproduction of parental forms, " a position which clearly "begs the question" because memory is a purely intellectual function and, as such, cannot be classed among physical properties at all.

Martineau in his memorable address on "Substitutes for Grod" makes short work of the unwarranted liberties that materialists have taken in their effort to explain consciousness in terms of matter. The materialist asks for as many kinds of atoms as there are chemical elements, seventy-two in all. But how, even with these, can consciousness be educed? How can the concurrence of any number of any kind of atoms ever explain consciousness? And when the materialist replies by positing "polarity and gravitation" among the eternal properties of matter and "organic and inorganic molecules" as constituting "the one and only substance," it becomes clear that each new emergency is provided for by a new ascription to matter of some quality or property not in requisition before. Matter "began as a beggar and lo, it turns up as a prince,' ' loaded with more and more properties to meet the ever heavier tax that is put upon it. Like a bank account, the original deposit of matter is repeatedly drawn on to meet each new demand and every claim seems to have been honorably met, whereas the account was overdrawn at the start when, in order to explain consciousness, more was required than was originally deposited; thus forcing the insolvent theory into the hands of a receiver.

Clifford's "mind-stuff," HaeckePs atoms with " mind-sides," Leibnitz' "ideated monads," what are these but ascriptions to matter of foreign elements in order to make it explain the phenomena of consciousness. As the miner "salts" his claim with gold dust to enhance its value for the unsuspecting purchaser, so the materialist ' i salts ' ' matter with mental or spiritual qualities, not one of which can be taken out except as it was first put in. Not inaptly did Francis E. Abbot compare the thesis of materialism, that matter is the only substance and that all natural forces are but the qualities or properties of matter, to the polytheism of the ancient Greeks and to the former's decided disadvantage. For him materialism was "a degeneration of mythological religion,' ' a neo-poly theism in which the Hellenic deities have become metaphysical entities or abstractions — the properties of matter being independent, unintelligent powers whose blind, haphazard conjunctions or collisions have resulted in the world of Nature and of Man.

"When Tyndall made his famous declarations that "the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable " ; that "while a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other"; that "the chasm between these physical processes and the facts of consciousness remains intellectually impassable,' ' the great physicist disqualified materialism to sit as a juror in the case of conscious survival of death. Were brain and thought related to each other as cause and effect, materialism would hold the field and its claim to have disposed of immortality would be substantiated.

From physics we learn that heat, light and electricity are interconvertible because all are modes of motion. Motion is their common factor. But between moving particles of gray matter in the brain and thought there is no such relation ; on the contrary, there is a chasm that has never yet been bridged. If thought is to be assigned a cause it must be of the same kind as the effect, and no such adequate cause has been discerned. How physical brainprocesses are connected with the facts of consciousness still remains a mystery. Browning, in "Abt Vogler," furnishes a suggestive parallel here. Could we explain how, from the physical musical notes, psychical emotional states are awakened, we would have solved the riddle of the universe. Hence his injunction to the reader reverently to bow before this mystery of music, as inexplicable indeed as the whence of thought, associated with physical processes in the brain.

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is

naught ; It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is

said: Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my

thought : And, there ! Ye have heard and seen : Consider and

bow the head !

No, science has not disproved immortality and till it does no one need apologize for retaining his faith. All that science has proved is that material processes accompany mental states, not that the latter are caused by the former. Science has proved that the molecular motion of the gray matter in the brain is concomitant with thought, not that it is the cause of thought. Science has demonstrated that the eye is the organ of sight, but not the seer; the ear the organ of hearing but not the hearer; the brain the organ of thought but not the thinker. In the movements, groupings, electrical discharges of brain molecules we have the function of the brain, i. e., the actions it is fitted to perform, just as the chemical resolution of food is the function of the stomach ; or the conducting of stimulus, the function of the nerves. And since the brain finds its function in a class of actions separated by an "intellectually impassable chasm' ' from consciousness and will, how can we rationally or consistently attribute these also to the brain as part of its function? The most we can legitimately say of consciousness and will is that they coexist with their physical concomitants while incapable of being brought into intelligible relation with them. Consequently we are wholly without warrant for affirming, as the materialists do, that disconnection of brain and thought is impossible. By as much as the union of physical and psychical states is a mystery, so their separation can scarcely be considered as beyond the pale of possibility. In other words, in the physics of the brain there is nothing that forecloses the question of a future life. In his widely read Harvard lecture on "Immortality" Professor William James declared the materialist's objection to belief in immortality as shallow and worthless. It does not follow that the "I" which now uses the brain as its organ of thought will cease to exist when that instrument returns to dust. "Thought is not a function of the brain as steam is of the tea-kettle, but only as the color-fan of the spectrum is of the refracting prism." Our brains are the prisms, as it were, through which thought is transmitted. In other words, according to Professor James, the brain has a " transrnissive" as against a "productive" function.

The brain then is only a machine for making our thoughts and emotions apparent to others. At death the machine breaks, but for all that science knows, the operator may still possess what he had to communicate. The materialist asks, what reason is there to expect that after the dissolution of brain matter, consciousness will remain, any more than that the wetness of water will remain after it has been resolved into hydrogen and oxygen? Assuredly, so far as the limits of our experience and knowledge are concerned, we have no warrant at all for such an expectation. But what does this argument amount to so far as disproving immortality goes? Absolutely nothing. What right have we to assume that because we know thought only in association with brain, there can be no thought without brain? To say that because the universe has no brain of which we know anything, therefore there is no thought in the universe, would be obviously absurd. On a par with this falsely reasoned dependence of thought upon brain stands the celebrated materialistic epigram of Buchner: "The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile" — a wholly undemonstrated proposition and based on the fallacious identifying of two distinct and unbridged sets of phenomena. As Clifford so forcefully expressed it, ' l the literal existence of thought in the brain is destitute of all experimental support." No one can see a thought, a sensation. Eefine and attenuate the atoms of gray matter in the brain as much as you please, your thought still remains utterly unlike the whitest, thinnest cerebral tissue. The most delicate fibers of gray matter woven in the loom of science or of the imagination cannot be spun into an emotion. You can resolve a tear into oxygen, hydrogen, chlorin and sodium, but the mystery of grief remains as unexplained as ever. The difference between the tone of the marriage bell which begins happiness and that of the funeral toll which ends it cannot be stated in terms of "heat-waves" or the "concurrence of brain-atoms. ' '

Twenty-five years ago Haeckel broached what to many seemed the final scientific objection to belief in personal survival of death. His points were briefly these : All phenomena of the mind are inseparable from and products of physiological conditions. If, therefore, the cerebral centers of the brain are removed by surgery, or ruined by disease, all the corresponding mental activities will cease. When, at death, the cells which are the seat of thought and feeling cease their physiological activities, then the atoms of the brain separate and drop down into the lower unconscious states and all mental life terminates. The self is only a collective name for the aggregation of thought-producing atoms with mind-sides which therefore have no more reality or permanence than the spectrum colors of the summer rainbow.