They who understand

Front matter

Class Book.

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GopightlJ?-

Contents

Chapteb Page

I The Gates of New Life .... 1

II The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 47

II

"And tears are never for those who die with their face to the duty done."

NEVER was there a time when the world so eagerly questioned about the nature of the next phase of life as now, when these untold thousands of our youth have suddenly been passing from the battlefield into the ethereal realm. The research into the superphysical has become an enormous quest. It is not irrational to believe that this is one of the results for which the War was here. For, that the most appalling conflict in all history came upon us by chance is not a tenable conclusion. Numerous are the reasons assigned, as formulated by statesmen and moralists.

One writer, in an able analysis of the political and economic causes for the most appalling tragedy that the world has ever known, sums up all these reasons in one, — " man's failure to live as God commands/ ' Nor can this be regarded as a mere phrase of rhetoric. "God's command" is a law as inescapable as is the law of gravitation. He who breaks it must suffer the penalty. We find the writer saying :

"... I have heard the statement that just previous to the War civilization was at its highest stage; mankind had evolved — developed, if you like — to a point never before attained ; education was more general than had been known ; even the spirit of charity was evident in all lands, among all races ; in fact, the world was going very well and the dawn of a better day was clearly visible. Therefore, such a climax of horror and suffering, such a tempest of the brutal instincts of primitive man, seems to be a negative answer to man's well-founded hope of a better and a brighter day. ... If a few years ago a prophet had declared what the world would see during 1914-1919, he would have been judged by the majority of mankind fit for the asylum."

The special command that man has broken is cited as the law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Justice and consideration are enjoined; but selfishness has largely ruled. Now if the teachings of Jesus regarding the conduct of human affairs are of any value they are practicable. If they are not practicable, they are of no value. The counsel to love one's neighbor as one's self is not that of a fanatic. It is the counsel of simple justice. Emerson notes that a time comes in a man's development when he is careful that his neighbor shall not cheat him. At a still higher degree of development he is careful that he shall not cheat his neighbor. The student of Emerson finds that he continually affirms the solidarity of society. "It is as great a loss to me that others should be low as that I should be low," we find him saying, "for I must have society." It is an entirely practicable ideal suggested in the counsel of Phillips Brooks : " Be such a man, live such a life, that if every man lived as you do, this earth would be heaven." All these ideals are intimations of a marvelous reality on whose threshold we stand.

It is nothing less than the threshold of an entirely new comprehension of the nature, the progress, the destiny of human life.

One signal factor in this new initiation has been the service of Frederic W. H. Myers, whose place in the world of letters as a scholar of the finest classical culture, a critical thinker, and a poet, was so widely recognized as to give due prestige to an incident in his life which has led to farreaching consequences.

It was on the evening of December 3, 1869, that Mr. Myers and Professor Sidgwick were out together for a starlit walk. Mr. Myers was a young man of twenty-six. Of this walk he afterward said to a friend, "I asked Sidgwick almost with trembling whether he thought that when tradition, intuition, metaphysics had failed to solve the riddle of the universe there was still a chance that from any observable phenomena — ■ ghosts, spirits, whatsoever there might be — some valid knowledge might be drawn as to a world unseen. Already, it seemed, he had thought it possible; . . . and from that night onward I resolved to pursue this quest." Thus was initiated, in that one moment, the signal purpose of his life. Mr. Myers held the conviction that if a spiritual world ever had been manifested to man it must be manifest in the present just the same. He more or less clearly perceived that the entire life, the energy, of every day depended upon some influence from the unseen. Was there in man "an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows, — an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation"? Could the spiritual man function separately from his physical body? Was the real personality capable of being liberated from its material organism? Was there truth to reward him who should diligently search in the mysterious realms of occult phenomena? Was the man, the spiritual man, in reality independent of his physical organism? Nothing less than this was the sublime quest on which Frederic Myers set out from that night. When (on January 17, 1901, in Rome) he passed into the unseen, did he find the answer to his life's questioning ? The little tablet placed to his memory in the English cemetery in the Eternal City, forever poetically consecrated by the ashes of Keats and Shelley, bears this fitting inscription: "He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him long life ever and forever."

At all events Myers dedicated his life, his genius, to this inquiry. Flournoy well says of the spiritistic doctrine of Myers, "If future discoveries confirm his thesis of the intervention of the discarnate in the web and woof of our mental and physical worlds, then will his name be inscribed in the golden book of the initiated, and, joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, he will complete the triad of geniuses who have the most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought, in the order, Cosmological, Biological, Psychological."

That epoch-making book, "Human Personality ", which Mr. Myers left as his imperishable legacy to mankind, and which was not published until after its author had passed from the realm of questioning to the realm of replies, is an encyclopaedia of the most profound and scientific investigation of phenomena. It is scientific, it is philosophic, it is religious. Its depth and sincerity of religious tone impart to its scientific and philosophical scope an irresistible claim to value. The author studies the problem of telepathy as to whether this is the law of the direct intercommunion of the spiritual man; whether it is a supreme truth, reuniting all beings, — those in the physical realm, those who have withdrawn from that realm, — whether it is the law that unites them all "in a splendid universe of moral and spiritual life"? The problem of the subliminal consciousness; the problems of duty, prayer, life eternal, and all their relations to the life that now is, as well as to that which is to come ; the mystery of genius; these, and other vital questions are marvelously discussed in these two large volumes of "Human Personality.''

Now life may be defined as the adventure of the spirit into temporary conditions which are ever increasing in significance and enlarging in their horizons; or which decrease in significance and power of satisfaction, and whose horizons narrow instead of enlarge, according to the personal power that is brought to bear upon them. This power is increased or decreased in its nature by the degree of the goodness and intelligence, or of the evil and the ignorance of the man himself. For all objective conditions are fluctuating and are relative to the degree of individual control. There are certain laws of nature which are fixed, as the law of gravitation, for instance. In relation to these, man must control his own attitude. He cannot defy the law without suffering the penalty, but it is in his power to control his own attitude in relation to the law. The fluctuating conditions of health, or illness; of some reasonable degree of success and prosperity, or failure and privation; the achievement of increasing stores of knowledge, or the remaining in ignorance, — all these and others which need not be cited are a part of " the flowing conditions of life" over which the individual may also exercise an increasing control. Even the momentous question of immortality (in its differentiation from merely continued existence) is subject to the power of the individual. For immortality is not merely being alive after the change of death ; it is the condition of being alive now! It is a matter of spiritual vitality.

To be just, considerate, sympathetic; to hold service as one of the priceless privileges; to be generous rather than selfish ; responsive rather than indifferent ; truthful and noble in every respect, to be active in all that makes for the usefulness and happiness of the largest possible number, to keep one's spirit in sensitive response to the guidance of the Divine Spirit — this is to be immortal in the present. Immortality is not a condition, not a locality. The question is not so much, Shall we be immortal? as it is, Are we immortal at this moment? Immortality is something to be achieved and increased by living in the sympathies and the activities that create immortality. In so much greater measure, then, as one has developed these qualities of the spirit before death, is he the more fitted to enter on this next higher plane of life. "Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus " — that mind that is love, joy, peace, righteousness. To "bear much fruit" in that the Father may be glorified is to live in the widest relations with one's fellow beings ; to render the service needed at the moment, not counting the cost; to give the gift that is helpful, though it leave one's own hands empty. For spiritual treasure is infinite, and to him who lives in the spirit the supply is sure. Human life is potentially divine life. Religion, in its highest possibilities, is a life and not a litany, although the litany gives its strength and support and direction to life.

It could not be assumed that the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, some years after the resolution of Frederic Myers to devote his life to the quest outlined above, was in itself the initiation of a new and higher spirituality of life ; but that it has been a contributing cause no one can deny. The last quarter of the nineteenth century revealed many phases of new ethical movements. The reconcilement of science and religion began ; they were seen to be not mutually antagonistic, but complementary and mutually supporting. Theosophy arose, offering a great explanation of the phenomena of the universe; of the problem of the origin, progress, and destiny of the soul. Spiritualistic phenomena had opened the way for more from the mid-century years. Accepted, or denied, it challenged attention. It became a factor in religious life. All these movements, and the increasing enlightenment of humanity, created a moral preparation for a more highly developed order of human life.

Now here we see the contrast of two great opposing forces advancing towards the future : Germany, with her imperialistic and military ideals teaching the doctrine that Might, not Right, is the arbiter of national destinies; England, France, America, Italy, and other nations imbued with a purer ethical purpose. How could the advance of two such utterly opposite movements, — the one for physical domination, the other for moral and spiritual domination, — result in anything else than a terrible conflict ?

For what was this War? Had it not aspects unknown to the historic past, and that brand it as a new order of human tragedy? "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Then what remains ? What can we do ?

In this War we encountered not men ; we encountered fiends from Hades. The editor of a leading American journal thus characterizes the Prussian policy :

" ' The enemy must be thoroughly engaged at once.' Nothing could better illustrate the nauseating hypocrisy, the bloodless formalism unconvincingly covering a bloodthirsty savagery which so constantly characterizes the Prussian beast. Who are 'the enemy ' that are to be 'thoroughly engaged'? Are they fighting men who can fight back? Not a bit of it. They are unarmed, non-combatant messengers of mercy — ambulance men risking their lives in the always perilous No Man's Land that they may perhaps ease the pain or save the life of some tortured and helpless human being ripped open by shrapnel or left with a bullet-shattered limb, suffering through terrible hours the torments of the damned ! These heroes of pity, standing right up in the daylight, human targets that cannot be missed, men who have not fired and will not fire a shot in this war, are to be mercilessly mowed down by machine guns. . . .

"So this official order to leave the dead uncoffined and the wounded uncared for comes as no surprise. It is the proper fruit of the upas tree. It is akin to the deliberate and officially ordered bombing of hospitals. It is typical of Prussian militarism. It is precisely the sort of thing that our young men have sailed away across the Atlantic to uproot and finally destroy.

"The German army! What is it in reality? A collection of cowards who shoot down Red Cross men, ruffians who rob and 'beat up' helpless civilians, beasts who mutilate children, criminals who poison wells and even give deadly sweets to babies, torturers who crucify prisoners and abuse wounded enemies.

"Leave the dead unburied! Abandon the wounded to writhe in agony under the burning midsummer sun, without water, without succor, without pity ! Shoot down the Red Cross stretcher-parties ! These are official German orders. This is the sort of enemy our boys fought in France."

In this startling presentation of the powers of darkness which our young men nobly sprang to overcome is revealed the conditions they met. Then what follows ?

"Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all, to stand." For this world is being prepared for the diviner life to come in. The ethical forces had long been gathering new strength and manifesting themselves in new forms of activity ; the materialistic and inhuman forces of Prussian militarism had also long been gathering new strength and manifesting themselves in increasing activities. The conflict was inevitable. The Powers of Evil closed in a deadly grapple with the Powers of Good. The Powers of Darkness and the Powers of Light were in their conflict.

It was to this awful combat that the Flower of American youth went forth. The hour is consecrated with their holy knighthood.

"And tears are never for those who die with their face to the duty done ! "

The material, the spiritual, were arrayed against each other. It was such a conflict as no age of the world ever witnessed before. For evil forces and righteous forces cannot dwell together. And the reason th^y cannot longer dwell together in any semblance of peace lies deeper still. It is that humanity itself has now advanced to that degree of spiritual development that requires for its existence and nurture a purer environment. No nation is wholly righteous, or without grave sins against the ideal state. Humanity has developed to that higher degree when it can no longer condone its own sins, whatever they may be. Temperance, economic and social justice, must now come. It is the law and the prophets. History reveals that at intervals of about two thousand years there appears some order of a restatement of spiritual truth; a new manifestation; a new call to "Turn to the Lord and live." For in God alone is life.

"For Evil, in its nature, is decay,

And any hour may blot it all away."

May it not be true that now, at the approach of two thousand years from the appearance of Jesus, the Christ, a new wave of spirituality sweeps over the land? But does so divine a thing as spirituality of life manifest itself in aspects too appalling for reference ? The tragedy of Belgium ;

of the Lusitania, of countless atrocities, are these the pledge and prophecy of a new wave of spirituality ? The association of the two is unthinkable and incredible. So we might rationally say. There is a mystery still deeper than this. May we try to penetrate it, in however feeble a measure ? It is an established truth that God works through orderly laws. Evolution, not revolution, rules the kingdom of nature. If we sow wheat we do not reap a harvest of tares. Cause and effect go hand in hand in orderly sequence. But the very advent of a higher wave of spirituality forces a deadly conflict with the evil that is in the world, both individually and nationally. If a man to-day rise to a new height of spiritual power, what is the first effect ? It is to exterminate the sin that he had yesterday. If he were unjust yesterday he must free himself from injustice to-day. Now the very degree of moral development that humanity has achieved will no longer tolerate the sins that civilization, up to this time, has tolerated. The very good focuses the evil. The conflict was inevitable. The causes had existed in the immaterial world. They were recognized by the spiritual consciousness of mankind. They encountered the invisible challenge of this higher moral consciousness, and they crystallized and formulated themselves for the awful conflict.

On the higher plane the War was a spiritual drama. We have talked of Armageddon; we saw it before us. The Forces of Good, the Forces of Evil, met in their grapple. Now, in relation to the youth who have leaped forward into this conflict ; whose noble purpose, whose high enthusiasm, whose devotion to lofty ideals have led them on, — what is revealed to us when they sacrifice their physical life in this tragic struggle ?

This is revealed : that these gallant young spirits have forever allied themselves with all that makes for righteousness ; that their devotion to true ideals has consecrated itself by seal and sign eternal !

They have died that the noblest ideals of humanity shall live ! What ineffable blessedness is theirs ! What ineffable blessedness is ours by all that sharing of their nobleness through undying love !

Humanity has now achieved that degree of spiritual development which requires a finer and purer environment. That is what this War, effacing and exterminating old conditions and creating new ones, is to give us. A world remade beckons us on in a not remote future. It will not be a sudden transformation. We shall not close our eyes in sleep on the world as it is and awaken in the morning to find it transformed to paradise. But that we are at that standpoint, even now, when all conditions for life are contemplated from a loftier range of vision and estimated by purer ideals, could hardly be denied. The larger recognition of the spiritual forces of life in the scale of the practicable and the applicable is, in itself, a signal advance of the race. It is not the lack of sound judgment, but the test and the sign of the sound and wise judgment to recognize unseen forces as those whose influences are the determining and the permanent. The hardships of the physical life increase; physical resources constantly become more difficult to compass. What then? Are we to learn that beyond the physical, — in the superphysical realm, — exists an infinite supply on which, hitherto, man has drawn to only a very slight extent? Are we to recognize that when Emerson said, in reply to an assertion that the world was coming to an end, that he "could get along without it ", the remark is not mere wit and persiflage, but states an wholly practicable truth? We relinquish the physical resources of life to an increasing extent. They grow more difficult, more impossible for us to compass. The high and ever higher prices of food, clothing, shelter, — the three primary necessities of life, — suggest to one the wonder as to how he is to continue on this planet at all! Travel becomes so expensive that he vaguely contemplates his restriction to such portion of the earth's surface as he may be able to traverse on his two feet. What is to be the end? Are we to be crowded off the earth altogether ?

This brings us to the verge of the recognition of the true nature of our life.

Man is a spiritual being and an inhabitant of the spiritual universe. It is only in the most temporary and fragmentary sense that he is a physical being and an inhabitant of the physical universe. His nature is so largely adjusted to respond to higher realms that the fact of being, as it were, compelled to transfer much of his life, here and now, to those higher realms, cannot be a misfortune. It is as if he were inhabiting only the lower floor of his dwelling, while above were successive floors far more delightful. But he remains on the accustomed level and will not be persuaded to mount higher. Suddenly floods come ; or fire invades his familiar interior, and to escape destruction he must ascend to the next story of his house. Once bestowing himself there he finds it far more desirable ; but he would never have made this change had he not been forced into it. Is it not possible that this analogy explains the present condition of humanity? Are we not being forced to a higher level of life ? Our real world is that among the unseen potencies and under superphysical conditions.

In the middle of the nineteenth century people were crossing the continent to the Pacific coast in conveyances drawn by horses. A quarter of a century later they were crossing it in railway trains. The steam engine had taken its own place. Morse invented the telegraph which carried messages with a rapidity undreamed of before. Marconi perfected the system of sending messages through the ether. We have learned to navigate the air and to sail under the surface of the water. The horse is superseded by the motor car. Entering into the use of the more subtle mechanical forces, man will also develop and use the more spiritual forces in application to his personal life. Immortality is more in increasing degrees of consciousness than it is the question of duration. He who lives in a more abounding spiritual consciousness, now and here, is thereby more immortal. For in consciousness is the true life.

And then? Then it is for us, for those in the seen and in the unseen, to unite in building a new world. If the War leaves us no better than it found us, all its appalling tragedy and suffering and its incalculable loss will have been in vain. Are we to take up life again on no higher round ? Not so. The evolution of a nobler civilization is working itself out on lines of harmony with the eternal purpose. All the ease and pleasure and joyfulness of life that seemed so innocent and so full of enjoyment was yet deteriorating if it tended to retard this nobler progress into the new civilization ; if we rested content in it, knowing how imperfect was its structure ; knowing that it harbored economic injustice, selfishness, self-indulgence; that it tolerated sins of omission and commission. Yet it was a pleasant, easy-going life, with an abundance of charity, even if not over-abundant in justice ; not without its nobler aims, even with rather prevailing ideals of having a good time. For the most part all fairly well-todo people had a very good time, indeed. In the old, easy-going sense of those days, no one has a good time now. Those good times were not, in themselves, evil, but if they were retarding the more noble organization of society, then they should give way to these more difficult conditions which are yet doing the nobler work in forcing a more just and a finer adjustment of national life. Not unfrequently is destruction the initial step toward regeneration.

Two forces are now in mortal combat ; one is evolving the divine harmony ; one is opposing and retarding that evolution. What service is being rendered by this retarding agency? It is within the personal choice of each man to identify himself with that which is advancing all that is noblest in life, or with that force which is opposing it.

"See, I have set before thee this day life and good and death and evil ; . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing ; therefore choose life. . . . That thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him; for he is thy life, and the length of thy days; . . ."

And again :

" Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them : for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee ; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee."

To identify one's self with the forces of higher progress which are those of the life and good, as against those which are for death and evil is to go on in an unbroken continuity of experience, whether in the body or out of the body. The spiritual man has thus identified himself with that which is permanent and immortal.

" . . . What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent."

For it is that which is —

"Built of tears and sacred flames, And virtue reaching to its aims ; Built of furtherance and pursuing ; Not of spent deeds, but of doing."

To the soul that has chosen life and good, that has identified itself with the highest, the chrism of the divinest joy is given. It has been finely said of our soldiers that they died that the nation might live. But beyond this is an even greater truth, — they died that they themselves might live! That they thus attained to a life so far more abundant than that which they have laid down that their joy is full.

"Never were there so many knights, or so noble," we find Doctor Stires again saying; "but all grateful for the honor of serving, and all ready to conquer death with a shout or a smile, and gladly to cross the frontier for the higher service. It is light, light, everywhere light, and no darkness at all."

These who make the Adventure Beautiful have thereby so made themselves a component part of the nobler order of life that in this brief time they have thus compassed the spiritual development ordinarily only achieved through a long period of discipline. We can only hold fast to our invincible faith in God. The "dreams of the joy of dear ones in the Life eternal", as so tenderly phrased in some preceding citation from Doctor Stires, are, in reality, spiritual insights and spiritual visions. They are glimpses into the divine realities which God permits us to enjoy for our sustaining and our courage to still press on. Nor are these visions in a merely symbolic sense. Actual knowledge of those in the unseen is wholly possible. Actual communion with them, spirit to spirit, may be enjoyed. Love is the supreme and irresistible potency, and where love unites, all the powers of earth and air are powerless to divide those who are thus united.

The release of the spiritual man from his physical body is not to uncomprehended conditions. Science gives us definite knowledge of the ethereal environment. Consciousness is not a function of the physical brain, but a function that manifests itself by means of the physical brain, although it is as independent of this instrument and as much greater than can be thus manifested, as the musician is independent of his piano or violin ; or as his resources of music to manifest are as far greater than any instrument can afford him adequate scope for producing. The question of the order of life immediately succeeding the life on earth is a much larger one than that involving the fact of communication alone. It demands a more adequate comprehension of the very nature of life itself. Sir Oliver Lodge says of death that it is "an important and momentous event, truly, even as birth is ; a waking up to new conditions, like a more thorough emigration than can be taken on a planet ; but no destruction, no lessening of power. Rather an enhancement of existence, an awakening from this earthly dream, a casting off of the trammels of the flesh, the realization of a body more adapted to the needs of an emancipated spirit, the entering on a wider field of service, the uniting with the many who have gone on before."