Chapter IX
MORALITY OF THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE. IN discussing the ethics of the doctrine of a future life a subject here amazingly neglected, there more amazingly maltreated, and nowhere, within our knowledge, truly analyzed and exhibited1 it is important that the theme be precisely defined and the debate kept strictly to the lines. Let it be distinctly understood, therefore, that the question to be handled is not, "Whether there ought to be a future life or not," nor, "Whether there is a future life or not." The question is, "What difference should it make to us whether we admit or deny the fact of a future life?" If we believe that we are to pass through death into an immortal existence, what inferences pertaining to the present are right, fully to be drawn from the supposition? If, on the other hand, we think there is nothing for us after the present, what are the logical consequences of that faith in regard to our aims and rules of conduct in this world?
Suppose a man who has always imagined that death is utter annihilation should in some way suddenly acquire knowledge that an endless existence immediately succeeds the termination of this: what would be the legitimate instructions of his new information? Before we can fairly answer this inquiry, we need to know what relations connect the two states of existence. A knowledge of the law and method and means of man's destiny is more important for his guidance than the mere ascertainment of its duration. With reference to the query before us, four hypotheses are conceivable. If, in the first place, there be no connection whatever except that of temporal sequence between the present life and the future, then, so far as duty is concerned, the expectation of a world to come yields not the slightest practical application for the experience that now is. It can only be a source of comfort or of terror; and that will be accordingly as it is conceived under the aspect of benignity or of vengeance. If, secondly, the character of the future life depend on conditions to be fulfilled here, but those conditions be not within our control, then, again, no inferences of immediate duty can be drawn from the apprehended hereafter. Being quasi actors in a scene prearranged and with a plot predetermined, we can no more be capable of any obligation or choice, in regard to the end, than puppets which some unseen Harlequin moves by the terrible wires of primitive decree or transmitted depravity towards the genial or the tragic crisis. If the soul's fate there is to be heaven or hell according to the part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise the future life is reduced, as far as it affects us here, to a mere source of complacency or of horror as it respectively touches the elect and the reprobate.
Thirdly, it may be conceived that the future life is a state of everlasting reward and punishment unchangeably decided by the way in which the probationary period allotted on
1 The only direct treatise on the subject known to us is Tilemann's Kritik der Unsterblichkeitslehre in Ansehung des Sittengesetzes, published in 1789. And this we have not seen.
earth is passed through. Here are men, for a brief time, free to act thus or otherwise. Do thus, and the endless bliss of heaven is won. Do otherwise, and the endless agony of hell is incurred. The plain rule of action yielded by this doctrine is, Sacrifice all other things to the one thing needful. The present life is in itself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustible eternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends on how you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing to do while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To waste a single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness of folly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and then to improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energy and every thought and every desire of every moment. This world is a bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is there leisure for sport and business, or room for science and literature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to get ourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, which will waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lake packed with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls the floating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, this should intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can be admitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not one flexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantine immortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makes eternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleeting probation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that it pronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. The only true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure the forensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointed means. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathless moment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea of blessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, such should be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety that there would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Every object should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, every sound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatory confession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single and preternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing could allow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting or blinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Such would be a logical application to life of the genuine morals of the doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to be rejected as false on many grounds. It is deduced from Scripture by a technical and unsound interpretation. It is unjust and cruel, irreconcilable with the righteousness or the goodness of God. It is unreasonable, opposed to the analogies of nature and to the experience of man. It is wholly impossible to carry it out consistently in the practice of life. If it were thoroughly credited and acted upon, all the business of the world would cease, and the human race would soon die out.
There remains one other view of the relationship of a future life with the present. And it seems to be the true view. The same Creator presiding, the same laws prevailing, over infinitude and eternity that now rule over time and earth, our immortality cannot reasonably be imagined either a moment of free action and an eternity of fixed consequences, or a series of separate fragments patched into a parti colored experience with blanks of death between the patterns of life. It must be conceived as one endless existence in linear connection of cause and effect developing in progressive phases under varying conditions of motive and scenery. With what we are at death we live on into the next life. In every epoch and world of our destiny our happiness depends on the possession of a harmoniously working soul harmoniously related with its environment. Each stage and state of our eternal existence has its peculiarities of duty and privilege. In this one our proper work is to improve the opportunities, discharge the tasks, enjoy the blessings, belonging here. We are to do the same in the next one when we arrive in that. All the wealth of wisdom, virtue, strength, and harmony we acquire in our present life is the vantage ground and capital wherewith we start in the succeeding life. Therefore the true preparation for the future is to fit ourselves to enter it under the most favorable auspices, by accumulating in our souls all the spiritual treasures afforded by the present. In other words, the truest aim we can set before ourselves during our existence on earth is to make it yield the greatest possible results of the noblest experience. The life hereafter is the elevated and complementary continuation of the life here; and certainly the directest way to ameliorate the continuation is to improve the commencement.
But, it may be said, according to this representation, the fact of a future life makes no difference in regard to our duty now; for if the grave swallows all, still, it is our duty and our interest to make the best and the most of our life in the world while it lasts. True; and really that very consideration is a strong proof of the correctness of the view in question. It corresponds with the other arrangements of God. He makes every thing its own end, complete in itself, at the same time that it subserves some further end and enters into some higher unity. He is no mere Teleologist, hobbling towards his conclusions on a pair of decayed logic crutches,2 but an infinite Artist, whose means and ends are consentaneous in the timeless and spaceless spontaneity and perfection of his play. If the tomb is our total goal, our genuine aim in this existence is to win during its course an experience the largest in quantity and the best in quality. On the other hand, if another life follows this, our wisdom is just the same; because that experience alone, with the favor of God, can constitute our fitness and stock to enter on the future. And yet between the two cases there is this immense difference, not indeed in duty, but in endowment, that in the latter instance we work out our allotted destiny here, in a broader illumination, with grander incentives, and with vaster consolations. A future life, then, really imposes no new duty upon the present, alters no fundamental ingredient in the present, takes away none of the charms and claims of the present, but merely sheds an additional radiance upon the shaded lights already shining here, infuses an additional motive into the stimulants already animating our purposes, distills an additional balm into the comforts which already assuage our sorrows amidst an evanescent scene. The belief that we are to live hereafter in a compensating world explains to us many a sad mystery, strengthens us for many an oppressive burden, consoles us in many a sharp grief. Else we should oftener go mad in the baffling whirl of problems, oftener obey the baser voice, oftener yield to despair. These three are the moral uses, in the present life, of the
2 "Seht, an der morschen Syllogismenkrucke Hinkt Gott in Seine Welt."Lenau's Satire auf einen Professor philosophia.
doctrine of a future life. Outside of these three considerations the doctrine has no ethical meaning for human observance here.
It will be seen, according to the foregoing representation, that the expectation of a future life, instead of being harmful to the interests and attractions of the present, simply casts a cheering and magnifying light upon them. It does not depreciate the realities or nullify the obligations now upon us, but emphasizes them, flinging their lights and shades forward through a mightier vista. Consequently there is no reason for assailing the idea of another life in behalf of the interests of this. Such an opposition between the two states is entirely sophistical, resulting from a profound misinterpretation of the truemoral relations connecting them.
The belief in immortality has been mistakenly attacked, not merely as hostile to our welfare on earth, but likewise as immoral in itself, springing from essential selfishness, and in turn nourishing selfishness and fatally tainting every thing with that central vice. To desire to live everlastingly as an identical individual, it has been said, is the ecstasy and culmination of avaricious conceitedness. Man, the vain egotist, dives out of sight in God to fish up the pearl of his darling self. He makes his poor individuality the measure of all things, his selfish desire the law of endless being. Such a rampant proclamation of self will and enthronement of pure egotism, flying in the face of the solemn and all submerging order of the universe, is the very essence and climax of immorality and irreligiousness. To this assault on the morality of the belief in a future life, whether made in the devout tones of magnanimous sincerity, as by the sublime Schleiermacher, or with the dishonest trickiness of a vulgar declaimer for the rehabilitation of the senses, as by some who might be named, several fair replies may be made. In the first place, the objection begs the question, by assuming that the doctrine is a falsehood, and that its disciples wilfully set up their private wishes against the public truth. Such tremendous postulates cannot be granted. It is seizing the victory before the battle, grasping the conclusion without establishing the premises. For, if there be a future life provided by the Creator, it cannot be sinful or selfish in us to trust in it, to accept it with humble gratitude, and to prepare our souls for it. That, instead of being rebellious arrogance or overweening selfishness, would simply be conforming our thoughts and plans, our desires and labors, to the Divine arrangements. That would be both morality and piety. When one clings by will to a doctrine known to be a falsehood, obstinately suppressing reason to affirm it as a truth, and, in obedience to his personal whims, trying to force all things into conformity with it, he does act as a selfish egotist in full violation of the moral law and the spirit of religion. But a future life we believe to be a fact; and therefore we are, in every respect, justified in gladly expecting it and consecratedly living with reference to it.
Furthermore, admitting it to be an open question, neither proved nor disproved, but poised in equal uncertainty, still, it is not immoral nor undevout deeply to desire and fondly to hope a personal immortality. "The aim of religion," it has been said, "is the annihilation of one's own individuality, the living in the All, the becoming one with the universe." But in such a definition altogether too much is assumed. The aim of religion is only the annihilation of the self will of the individual as opposed to the Will of the Whole, not the losing of one's self in the unconscious wastes of the universe, but the harmonizing of one's self with the Supreme Law of the universe.
An humble, loving, and joyous conformity to the truth constitutes morality and religion. This is not necessarily inconsistent with a personal immortality. Besides, the charge may be retorted. To be identified with the universe is a prouder thought than to be subordinated to it as an infinitesimal individual. It is a far haughtier conceit to fancy one's self an integral part of God's substance than to believe one's self a worshipping pensioner of God's will. The conception, too, is less native to the mind, has been more curiously sought out, and is incomparably more pampering to speculative luxury. If accusations of selfishness and wilfulness are to be hurled upon any modes of preferred faith as to our destiny, this self styled disinterested surrender of our personality to the pantheistic Soul is as obnoxious to them as the common belief.
If a desire for personal immortality be a normal experience in the development of our nature, it cannot be indictable as an offence, but must be recognised as an indication of God's design. Whether the desire is a cold and degraded piece of egotism deserving rebuke and contempt, or a lofty and sympathetic affection worthy of reverence and approval, depends on no intrinsic ingredient of the desire itself, but on the character in which it has its being. One person will be a heartless tyrant, another a loving saint, in his hope of a future life. Shall our love of the dead, our prayers to meet them again, our unfathomed yearnings to know that they still live and are happy, be stigmatized as mean and evil? Regard for others as much as for ourselves prompts the eternal sigh. Nor will Divinity ever condemn the feeling himself has awakened. It is said that Xerxes, gazing once upon his gorgeous army of a million men spread out below hire, sheathed in golden armor, white plumes nodding, purple standards waving, martial horns blowing, wept as he thought that in thirty years the entire host composing that magnificent spectacle would be dead. To have gazed thoughtfully upon such a sight with unmoved sensibilities would imply a much more selfish and hard hearted egotist. So when a lonely philanthropist from some meditative eminence looks down on the human race, if, as the contemplation of their pathetic fading and decay wounds his saddened heart, he heals and cheers it with the faith of a glorious immortality for them all, who shall call him selfish and sinful? To rest contented with the speedy night and the infinite oblivion, wiping off all the unsolved sums from the slate of existence with annihilation's remorseless sponge, that would be the selfishness and the cruelty.
When that sweet asp, death, fastens on our vein of earthly life, we all feel, like the dying queen of Egypt, that we have "immortal longings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinacious instinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rational to conclude that this is a pledge of her indestructible personality, God's impregnable defence reared around the citadel of her being, than to consider it the artificial rampart flung up by an insurgent egotism. In like manner, it is a misrepresentation of the facts to assert the culpable selfishness of the faith in a future life as a demanded reward for fidelity and merit here. No one demands immortality as pay for acquired desert. It is modestly looked for as a free boon from the God who freely gave the present and who has by a thousand symbolic prophecies promised it. Richter says, with great insight, "We desire immortality not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewarded than joy can: it is its own reward." Kant says, "Immortality has been left so uncertain in order that pure freedom of choice, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations." "But," Jean Paul keenly replies, "as we have now discovered this intention, its object is defeated. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so." The anticipation of heaven can hardly make man a selfish calculator of profit; because heaven is no reward for crafty reckoning, but the home of pure and holy souls. Virtue which resists temptation and perseveres in rectitude because it has a sharp eye to an ulterior result is not virtue. No credible doctrine of a future life offers a prize except to those who are just and devout and strenuous in sacred service from free loyalty to the right and the good, spontaneously obeying and loving the higher and better call because it divinely commands their obedience and love. The law of duty is the superior claim of truth and goodness. Virtue, yielding itself filially to this, finds in heaven not remuneration, but a sublimer theatre and an immortal career. Egotistic greed, all mere prudential considerations as determining conditions or forces in the award, are excluded as unclean and inadmissible by the very terms; and the doctrine stands justified on every ground as pure and wholesome before the holiest tribunal of ethics. Surely it is right that goodness should be blessed; but when it continues good only for the sake of being blessed it ceases to be goodness. It is not the belief in immortality, but only the belief in a corrupt doctrine of immortality which can poison the springs of disinterested virtue.
The morality of the doctrine of a future life having thus been defended from the attacks of those who have sought to destroy it in the fancied interests either of the enjoyments of the earth or of the purity of virtue and religion, it now remains to free it from the still more fatal supports which false or superficial religionists have sought to give it by wrenching out of it meanings it never held, by various perverse abuses of it, by monstrous exaggerations of its moral importance to the present. We have seen that the supposition of another life, correctly interpreted, lays no new duty upon man, takes away from him no old duty or privilege, but simply gives to the previously existing facts of the case the intensifying glory and strength of fresh light, motive, and consolation. But many public teachers, not content to treat the subject with this sobriety of reason, instead of presenting the careful conclusions of a conscientious analysis, have sought to strengthen their argument to the feelings by help of prodigious assumptions, assumptions hastily adopted, highly colored, and authoritatively urged. Upon the hypothesis that annihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely to take away from the present all the additional light, incentive, and comfort imparted by the faith in a future existence, but they arbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsically belonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues, and set it in a frame of midnight. Thus, instead of calmly seeking to elicit and recommend truth, they strive, by terrifying the fancy and shocking the prejudices, to make people accept their dogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejecting it. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which have been employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used for the same purpose.
Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton has said, "Without the belief in personal immortality there can be no religion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelings and the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a few years in this world?" 3 Such a statement from such a quarter is astonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person or incumbent upon him do not depend on the duration of his being, but on the character, endowments, and relations of his being. The hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy God, does not destroy man's dependence on God for all his privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness, does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility, while they last. The soul's gratitude, wonder, love, and worship are just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience on earth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and in conscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does not cause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may be doubted if heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerity in such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add to its qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of our capacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injurious error in saying, as he does, "If there be no future life, the moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor." 4 The creative Sovereign of fifty million firmaments of worlds "stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor" because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal! Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations and ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion is fitted for us on the former supposition, it is also on the latter. To any dependent intelligence blessed with our human susceptibilities, reverential love and submission are as obligatory, natural, and becoming on the brink of annihilation as on the verge of immortality.
Rebellious egotism makes all the difference. Truth is truth, whatever it be. Religion is the meek submission of self will to God's will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what the future reserves or excludes for us.
Another sophism almost universally accepted needs to be shown. Man, it is said, has no interest in a future life if not conscious in it of the past. If, on exchange of worlds, man loses his memory, he virtually ceases to exist, and might just as well be annihilated. A future life with perfect oblivion of the present is no life at all for us. Is not this style of thought the most provincial egotism, the utter absence of all generous thought and sympathy unselfishly grasping the absolute boons of being? It is a shallow error, too, even on the grounds of selfishness itself. In any point of view the difference is diametric and immense between a happy being in an eternal present, unconscious of the past, and no being at all. Suppose a man thirty years of age were offered his choice to die this moment, or to live fifty years longer of unalloyed success and happiness, only with a complete forgetfulness of all that has happened up to this moment. He would not hesitate to grasp the gift, however much he regretted the condition.
3 Tracts concerning Christianity, p. 307.
4 Bridgewater Treatise, part ii. ch. 10, sect. 15.
It has often been argued that with the denial of a retributive life beyond the grave all restraints are taken off from the passions, free course given to every impulse. Chateaubriand says, bluntly, "There can be no morality if there be no future state." 5 With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensible recklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to the essential nobleness of his loving, heroic nature, "If you believe in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do, then, as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery, rascality, robbery, and murder." What bible of Moloch had he been studying to form, for the time, so horrid a theory of the happiest life, and to put so degrading an estimate upon human nature? Is man's will a starved wolf only held back by the triple chain of fear of death, Satan, and hell, from tearing forth with ravenous bounds to flesh the fangs of his desires in bleeding virtue and innocence? Does the greatest satisfaction man is capable of here, the highest blessedness he can attain to, consist in drunkenness, gluttony, dishonesty, violence, and impiety? If he had the appetite of a tiger or a vulture, then, thus to wallow in the offal of vice, dive into the carrion of sensuality, abandon himself to revelling in carnivorous crime, might be his instinct and his happiness. But by virtue of his humanity man loves his fellows, enjoys the scenery of nature, takes delight in thought and art, dilates with grand presentiments of glory and eternity, mysteriously yearns after the hidden God. To a reasonable man and no other is to be reasoned with on matters of truth and interest the assumption of this brief season as all, will be a double motive not to hasten and embitter its brevity by folly, excess, and sin. If you are to be dead to morrow, for that very reason, in God's name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate death to day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a chasm of fire, but a high toned conscience of reason and honor, perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneously loathing them.
Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on passion within, but no moral law without; every man is free to do what he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, in his "Treatise on Man's Soule," that "to predicate mortality in the soule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, by removing the ground of all difference in those thinges which are to governe our actions." 6 This style of teaching is a very mischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in the woods of Brazil, and Schiller in the brilliant circles of Weimar, will at last meet the same fate in the dusty grasp of death; yet, while they live, one is an ape, the other is a man. And the differences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense. The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The words of an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than those of the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could be uttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamation on immortality, "If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty.
5 Genie du Christianisme, partie ii. livre vi. chap. 3.
6 Ch. ix. sect. 10.
If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention." 7 What debauched unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Its utter barelessness, as a single illustration may show, is obvious at a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, the relations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material world although they may be lost sight of when time and space are transcended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, the relations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifold grades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for human nature and experience in this life even if men perish in the grave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endure they are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strange slip of the mind, showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are the common prejudice and falsehood on this subject, even so bold and fresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his own philosophy by declaring, "If to morrow I perish utterly, then my fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread corn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations of mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will vanish." 8 Ah, man reveres his fathers and loves to act nobly, not because he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And, though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken from human life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish, as it is said the German crossbill pairs and broods in the dead of winter. The martyr's sacrifice and the voluptuary's indulgence are very different things to day, if they do both cease to morrow. No speed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon and Thersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice and fraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that they will interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutable morality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, and triangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties or compression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds of duty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil, magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery.
Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter the inherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. The most it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to give the great motor nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke of palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral law? Richter reasons as follows: "Suppose a statue besouled for two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob it of one day's life, would you be guilty of murder? One can injure only an immortal." 9 The sophistry appears when we rectify the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an immortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong and injury, for the time, to destroy one day's life of a man whose entire existence was confined to two days, than it would be to take away the same period from the bodily existence of one who immediately thereupon passes into a more exalted and eternal life. To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity, the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt act is the same. This general moral problem has been more accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as follows: "The creatures of a summer's day might be imagined, when
7 OEuvres Completes, tome xiii.: Immortalite de l'Ame.
8 Sermons of Theism, Sermon VII.
9 Werke, band xxxiii. s. 240.
they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of his government; for these are to be the law of their season of life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from the greater stake."
Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in human society cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedly weakened, its basis variously altered, but as a confessed sovereign principle it cannot be expelled. The denial of the freedom of the will theoretically explodes it; but social custom, law, and opinion will enforce it still. Make man a mere dissoluble mixture of carbon and magnetism, yet so long as he can distinguish right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and, unsophisticated by dialectics, can follow either of opposite courses of action, the moral law exists and exerts its sway.
It has been asked, "If the incendiary be, like the fire he kindles, a result of material combinations, shall he not be treated in the same way?" 10 We should reply thus: No matter what man springs from or consists of, if he has moral ideas, performs moral actions, and is susceptible of moral motives, then he is morally responsible: for all practical and disciplinary purposes he is wholly removed from the categories of physical science.
Another pernicious misrepresentation of the fair consequences of the denial of a life hereafter is shown in the frequent declaration that then there would be no motive to any thing good and great. The incentives which animate men to strenuous services, perilous virtues, disinterested enterprises, spiritual culture, would cease to operate. The essential life of all moral motives would be killed. This view is to be met by a broad and indignant denial based on an appeal to human consciousness and to the reason of the thing. Every man knows by experience that there are a multitude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with future reward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do good even with self sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman risks his life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, is the hope of heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offered bribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is the fear of hell all that animates him? A million such decisive specifications might be made. The renowned sentence of Cicero, "Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se pro patria offerret ad mortem," 11 is effective eloquence; but it is a baseless libel against humanity and the truth. In every moment of supreme nobleness and sacrifice personality vanishes. Thousands of patriots, philosophers, saints, have been glad to die for the freedom of native land, the cause of truth, the welfare of fellow men, without a taint of selfish reward touching their wills. Are there not souls "To whom dishonor's shadow is a substance More terrible than death here and hereafter"?
He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences of it eternally. Is there no motive for the
10 Some discussion of this general subject is to be found in Schaller, Leib nod Seele. kap. 5: Die Consequentzen des Materialismus. And in Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik.
11 Tuscul. Quast. lib. i. cap. 15.
preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever, shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating poisons?
If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot, the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike, who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like the fool and the felon? Shall heaven be held before man simply as a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving abyss. But some one may say, "If I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?" It advantageth you every thing until you are dead, although there be nothing afterwards. As long as you live, is it not glory and reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This is sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law. And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worth our affection, let great Shakspeare advance, with his matchless depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing, in tones of cordial solidity,
"This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long."
What though Decay's shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in the valleys of ignoble fear and selfishness, leaving all the clear road lines of moral truth and practical virtue and heroic consecration still high and bright on the table land of a worthy life; and every honorable soul, calmly confronting its fate, will cry, despite the worst, "The pathway of my duty lies in sunlight; And I would tread it with as firm a step, Though it should terminate in cold oblivion, As if Elysian pleasures at its Close Gleam'd palpable to sight as things of earth."
If a captain knew that his ship would never reach her port, would he therefore neglect his functions, be slovenly and careless, permit insubordination and drunkenness among the crew, let the broad pennon draggle in filthy rents, the cordage become tangled and stiff, the planks be covered with dirt, and the guns be grimed with rust? No: all generous hearts would condemn that. He would keep every inch of the deck scoured, every piece of metal polished like a mirror, the sails set full and clean, and, with shining muzzles out, ropes hauled taut in their blocks, and every man at his post, he would sweep towards the reef, and go down into the sea firing a farewell salute of honor to the sun, his flag flying above him as he sunk.
The dogmatic assertors of a future life, in a partisan spirit set upon making out the most impressive case in its behalf, have been guilty of painting frightful caricatures of the true nature and significance of the opposite conclusion. Instead of saying, "If such a thing be fated, why, then, it must be right, God's will be done," they frantically rebel against any such admission, and declare that it would make God a liar and a fiend, man a "magnetic mockery," and life a hellish taunt. This, however unconscious it may be to its authors, is blasphemous egotism. One of the tenderest, devoutest, richest, writers of the century has unflinchingly affirmed that if man who trusted that love was the final law of creation, although nature, her claws and teeth red with raven, shrieked against his creed be left to be blown about the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills,
"No more! a monster, then, a dream, A discord; dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match'd with Him!"
Epictetus says, "When death overtakes me, it is enough if I can stretch out my hands to God, and say, 'The opportunities which thou hast given me of comprehending and following thy government, I have not neglected. I thank thee that thou hast brought me into being. I am satisfied with the time I have enjoyed the things thou hast given me. Receive them again, and assign them to whatever place thou wilt.'" 12 Surely the pious heathen here speaks more worthily than the presumptuous Christian! How much fitter would it be, granting that death is the end all, to revise our interpretation, look at the subject from the stand point of universal order, not from this opinionative narrowness, and see if it be not susceptible of a benignant meaning, worthy of grateful acceptance by the humble mind of piety and the dispassionate spirit of science! Yea, let God and his providence stand justified, though man prove to have been egregiously mistaken.
"Though He smite me, yet will I praise Him; though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
To return into the state we were in before we were created is not to suffer any evil: it is to be absolutely free from all evil. It is but the more perfect playing of that part, of which every sound sleep is a rehearsal. The thought of it is mournful to the enjoying soul, but not terrific; and even the mournfulness ceases in the realization. He uttered a piece of cruel madness who said, "Hell is more bearable than nothingness." Is it worse to have nothing than it is to have infinite torture? Milton asks,
"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being?"
Every creature that exists, if full of pain, would snatch at the boon of ceasing to be. To be blessed is a good; to be wretched is an evil; not to be is neither a good nor an evil, but simply
12 Dissert., lib. iv. cap. x. sect. 2.
nothing. If such be our necessary fate, let us accept it with a harmonized mind, not entertaining fear nor yielding to sadness. Why should we shudder or grieve? Every time we slumber, we try on the dress which, when we die, we shall wear easily forever.
Not satisfied to let the result rest in this somewhat sad but peaceful aspect, it is quite customary to give it a turn and hue of ghastly horribleness, by casting over it the dyspeptic dreams, injecting it with the lurid lights and shades, of a morbid and wilful fancy. The most loathsome and inexcusable instance in point is the "Vision of Annihilation" depicted by the vermicular, infested imagination of the great Teutonic phantasist while yet writhing under the sanguinary fumes of some horrid attack of nightmare. Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad executioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by each unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as a corpse bleeds when its murderer approaches." Pah! Out upon this execrable retching of a nauseated fancy! What good is there in the baseless conceit and gratuitous disgust of saying, "The next world is in the grave, betwixt the teeth of the worm"? In the case supposed, the truth is merely that there is no next world anywhere; not that all the horrors of hell are scooped together into the grave, and there multiplied by others direr yet and unknown before. Man's blended duty and interest, in such a case, are to try to see the interior beauty and essential kindness of his fate, to adorn it and embrace it, fomenting his resignation with the sweet lotions of faith and peace, not exasperating his wounds with the angry pungents of suspicion, alarm, and complaint. At the worst, amidst all our personal disappointments, losses, and decay, "the view of the great universal whole of nature," as Humboldt says, "is reassuring and consolatory." If the boon of a future immortality be not ours, therefore to scorn the gift of the present life, is to act not like a wise man, who with grateful piety makes the best of what is given, but like a spoiled child, who, if he cannot have both his orange and his gingerbread, pettishly flings his gingerbread in the mud.
The future life, outside of the realm of faith, to an earnest and independent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question, lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, and there is room for doubt. The wavering evidences in some moods preponderate on that side, in other moods on this side. Meanwhile it is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do is to cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a noble character, lead a pure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and God, and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue with reverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms. Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert's dying flower, "Thanks to day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and earth and sky, for all the gifts from men and God which have made my little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thine azure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring tide, roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shall rise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I now fall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh." Surely the mournful nobility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much to the selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in the Middle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columns and doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by a hunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced in thousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, "I blessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of hell!"
Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is an achievement whose nobleness outweighs its sorrow, even if the gazer foresee his own destruction.
It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the unwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christian writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to do with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on the length, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Make the life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; make the life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has the psychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality may enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; it does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and contract those motives; it does not take them away.
Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not knowledge that the spirit is without terminus or rest. The faithful truth hunter, in dying, finds not a covert, but a better trail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged from prejudice and self will. With God we are not to prescribe conditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must die with the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious and dangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view is obviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophical thinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in the individual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole. This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God to a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law with disinterested conformity.
The influence of the doctrine of reward and punishment in a future state, as a working motive for the observance of the moral law, is enormously overestimated. The influence, as such a motive, of the public opinion of mankind, with the legal and social sanctions, is enormously underestimated. And the authority of a personal perception of right is also most unbecomingly depreciated. UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of God, not as arbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in a book, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works. The true basis of morality is universal order. The true end of morality is life, the sum of moral laws being identical with the sum of the conditions in accordance with which the fruition of the functions of life can be secured with nearest approach to perfectness, perpetuity, and universality. The true sanctions of morality are the manifold forms in which consciousness of life is heightened by harmony with universal order or lowered by discord with it. The true law of moral sacrifice or resistance to temptation is misrepresented by the common doctrine of heaven and hell, which makes it consist in the renunciation of a present good for the clutching of a future good, the voluntary suffering of a small present evil to avoid the involuntary suffering of an immense future evil. The true law of moral sacrifice is deeper, purer, more comprehensive, than that. It expresses our duty, in accordance with the requirements of universal order, to subordinate the gratification of any part of our being to that of the whole of our being, to forego the good of any portion of our life in deference to that of all our life, to renounce any happiness of the individual which conflicts with the welfare of the race, to hold the spiritual atom in absolute abeyance to the spiritual universe, to sink self in God. If a man believe in no future life, is he thereby absolved from the moral law? The kind and number of his duties remain as before: only the apparent grandeur of their scale and motives is diminished. The two halves of morality are the co ordination of separate interests in universal order, and the loyalty of the parts to the wholes. The desire to remove the obligations and sanctions of the moral law from their intrinsic supports, and posit them on the fictitious pedestals of a forensic heaven and hell, reveals incompetency of thought and vulgarity of sentiment in him who does it, and is a procedure not less perilous than unwarranted. If the creation be conceived as a machine, it is a machine self regulating in all its parts by the immanent presence of its Maker.
When we die, may the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter of Christ, be our confessor; the last inhaled breath our cup of absolution; the tears of some dear friend our extreme unction; no complaint for past trials, but a grateful acknowledgment for all blessings, our parting word. And then, resigning ourselves to the universal Father, assured that whatever ought to be, and is best to be, will be, either absolute oblivion shall be welcome, or we will go forward to new destinies, whether with preserved identity or with transformed consciousness and powers being indifferent to us, since the will of God is done. In the mean time, until that critical pass and all decisive hour, as Milnes says:
"We all must patient stand, Like statues on appointed pedestals: Yet we may choose since choice is given to shun Servile contentment or ignoble fear In the expression of our attitude; And with far straining eyes, and hands upcast, And feet half raised, declare our painful state, Yearning for wings to reach the fields of truth, Mourning for wisdom, panting to be free."
PART SIXTH SUPPLEMENTARY.
[FIFTEEN YEARS LATER]
I. THE END OF THE WORLD
WE read in the New Testament that the heavens and the earth are reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, when they shall be burned up, and all be made new. It is said that the elements shall melt with ferment heat, the stars fall, and the sky pass away like a scroll that is rolled together. On these and similar passages is based the belief of Christendom in the destined destruction of the world by fire and in the scenic judgment of the dead and the living gathered before the visible tribunal of Christ. This belief was once general and intense. It is still common, though more vague and feeble than formerly. In whatever degree it is held, it is a doctrine of terror. We hope by tracing its origin, and showing how mistaken it is, to help dispel its sway, free men from the further oppression of its fearfulness, and put in its place the just and wholesome authority of the truth. The true doctrine of the divine government of the world, the correct explanation of the course and sequel of history, must be more honorable to God, more useful to men, of better working and omen in the life of society, than any error can be. Let us then, as far as we are able, displace by the truth the errors prevalent around us in regard to the end of the world and the day of judgment.
It will help us in our proposed investigation, if we first notice that the ecclesiastical doctrine as to an impending destruction of the world is not solitary, but has prototypes and parallels in the faiths of other nations and ages. Almost every people, every tribe, has its cosmogony or theory of the creation, in which there are accounts, more or less rude or refined, general or minute, of the supposed beginning and of the imagined end of nature. All early literatures from the philosophic treatises of the Hindus to the oral traditions of the Polynesians are found to contain either sublime dreams or obscure prophecies or awful pictures of the final doom and destruction of earth and man. The Hebrew symbols and the Christian beliefs in relation to this subject therefore stand not alone, but in connection with a multitude of others, each one plainly reflecting the degree of knowledge and stage of development attained by the minds which originated it. Before proceeding to examine the familiar doctrine so enveloped in our prejudices, a brief examination of some kindred doctrines, less familiar to us and quite detached from our prejudices, will be of service.
The sacred books of the Hindus describe certain enormous periods of time in which the universe successively begins and ends, springs into being and sinks into nothing. These periods are called kalpas, and each one covers a duration of thousands of millions of years. Each kalpa of creation is called a day of Brahma; each kalpa of destruction, a night of Brahma. The belief is that Brahma, waking from the slumber of his self absorbed solitude, feels his loneliness, and his thoughts and emotions go forth in creative forms, composing the immense scheme of worlds and creatures. These play their parts, and run their courses, until the vast day of Brahma is completed; when he closes his eyes, and falls to rest, while the whole system of finite things returns to the silence and darkness of its aboriginal unity, and remains there in invisible annihilation through the stupendous night that precedes the reawaking of the slumbering Godhead and the appearance of the creation once more.
A little reflection makes the origin of this imagery and belief clear. Each night, as the darkness comes down, and the outer world disappears, man falls asleep, and, so far as he is consciously concerned, every thing is destroyed. In his unconsciousness, everything ceases to be. The light dawns again, he awakes, and his reopened senses create anew the busy frame and phenomena of nature. Transfer this experience from man to God; consider it not as abstract and apparent, but as concrete and real, and you have the Hindu doctrine of the kalpa. When we sleep, to us all things are destroyed; and when we awake, to us they reappear. When God sleeps, all things in themselves really end; and when he wakes, they begin anew to be. The visible and experimental phenomena of day and night, sleeping and waking, are universalized, and attributed to God, It is a poetic process of thought, natural enough to a rich minded, simple people, but wholly illegitimate as a logical ground of belief, But being stated in books supposed to be infallibly inspired, and in the absence of critical tests for the discrimination of sound from unsound thought, it was implicitly accepted by multitudes.
Closely allied to the foregoing doctrine, yet in several particulars strikingly different from it, and evidently quite independent in its origin, was the Great Year of the Stoics, or the alternative blotting out and restoration of all things. This school of philosophers conceived of God as a pure artistic force or seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in the evolution of the kosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms into fire, and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagration destroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible God alone in his pure essence again. The artistic germ or seed force then begins, under its laws of intrinsic necessity, to go once more through the same process to the same end.
The rise of this imagery and belief is not so obvious as in the last instance, but it is equally discoverable and intelligible. Every animal, every flower, every plant, begins from its proper specific germ or force, goes through a fixed series of growths and changes, and relapses into its prime elements, and another and another follow after it in the same order. The seasons come and go, and come again and go again, Every planet repeats its revolutions over and over. Wherever we look, this repetition of identical processes greets our vision. Now, by imaginative association universalize this repetition of the course of phenomena as seen in the parts, and take it up and apply it to the whole creation, and you have the doctrine in hand.
It is a poetic process of thought not scientific or philosophic, and without claim to belief; yet, in the absence of scientific data and standards, it might easily win acceptance on authority.
The Scandinavians, also, have transmitted to us, in their sacred books, descriptions of their belief in the approaching end of the world, descriptions rude, wild, terrible, not without elements of appalling grandeur. They foretell a day called Ragnarok, or the Twilight of the gods, when all the powers of good and evil shall join in battle, and the whole present system of things perish in a scene of unutterable strife and dismay. The Eddas were composed in an ignorant but deeply poetic and fertile age, when all the mythological elements of mind were in full action. Their authors looking within, on their own passions, and without, on the natural scenery around them, conscious of order and disorder, love and hate, virtue and crime, beholding phenomena of beauty and horror, sun and stars, night and tempest, winter and summer, icebergs and volcanoes, placid moonlight and blinding mist, assisting friends and battling foes, personified everything as a demon or a divinity. Asgard, above the blue firmament, was the bright home of the gods, the Asir. Helheim, beneath the rocky earth and the frozen ocean, was the dark and foul abode of the bad spirits, the Jotuns. Everywhere in nature, fog and fire, fertility and barrenness, were in conflict; everywhere in society, law and crime were contending. In the moon followed by a drifting cloud, they saw a goddess chased by a wolf. The strife goes on waxing, and must sooner or later reach a climax. Each side enlists its allies, until all are ranged in opposition, from Jormungandur, the serpent of the deep, to Heindall, the warder of the rainbow, gods and brave men there, demons, traitors, and cowards here. Then sounds the horn of battle, and the last day dawns in fire and splendor from the sky, in fog and venom from the abyss. Flame devours the earth. For the most part, the combatants mutually slay each other. Only Gimli, the high, safe heaven of All Father, remains as a refuge for the survivors and the beginning of a new and fairer world.
The natural history of this mythological mess is clear enough. It arises from the poetic embodiment and personification of phenomena, the grouping together of all evil and of all good, then imaginatively universalizing the conflict, and carrying it out in idea to its inevitable ultimatum. The process of thought was obviously natural in its ground, but fictitious in its result. Yet in a period when no sharp distinction was drawn between fancy and fact, song and science, but an indiscriminate faith was often yielded to both, even such a picturesque medley as this might be held as religious truth.
The Zarathustrian or Persian scheme of a general judgment of men and of the world in some respects resembles the systems already set forth, in other respects more closely approaches that Christian doctrine partially borrowed from it, and which is hereafter to be noticed. Ahura Mazda, the God of light and truth, creates the world full of all sorts of blessings. His adversary, Angra Mainyus, the author of darkness and falsehood, seeks to counteract and destroy the works of Ahura Mazda by means of all sorts of correspondent evils and woes. When Ahura Mazda creates the race of men happy and immortal, Angra Mainyus, the old serpent, full of corruption and destruction, steals in, seduces them from their allegiance, and brings misery and death on them, and then leads their souls to his dark abode. The whole creation is supposed to be crowded with good spirits, the angels of Ahura Mazda,
seeking to carry out his beneficent designs; and also with evil spirits, the ministers of Angra Mainyus, plotting to make men wicked, and to pervert and poison every blessing with an answering curse. Light is the symbol of God, darkness the symbol of his Antagonist. Under these hostile banners are ranged all living creatures, all created objects. For long periods this dreadful contention rages, involving everything below in its fluctuations. But at last Ahura Mazda subdues Angra Mainyus, overturns all the mischief he has done, by means of a great deliverer whom he has sent among men to instruct and redeem them raises the dead, purifies the world with fire, and, after properly punishing the guilty, restores all nature to its original paradisal condition, free from pain and death.
In the primitive state of mankind, when the germs of this religion were conceived, when men dwelt in ignorance, exposure, and fear, they naturally shuddered at darkness as a supernatural enemy, and worshipped light as a supernatural friend. That became the emblem or personification of the Devil, this the emblem or personification of God. They grouped all evils with that, all goods with this.
Imaginatively associating all light and darkness, all blessing and bale, respectively with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyus, they universalized the fragmentary embodiments and oppositions of these into one great battle; and under the impulse of worshipping faith and hope, carried it to its crisis in the final victory of the good. Plainly, it is mere poetry injected a little with a later speculative element, and dealing in mythological fashion chiefly with the phenomena of nature as related to the experience of man. No one now can accept it literally.
This survey of the various heathen myths of the end of the world has prepared us, in some degree, to consider the corresponding view held by the Jews, and more completely developed by the Christian successors to the Jewish heritage of thought and feeling.
The Hebrews believed themselves to be exclusively the chosen people of God, who directly ruled over them himself by a theocratic government represented in their patriarchs, law givers, prophets, and kings. Jehovah was the only true God; they were his only pure and accepted worshippers, sharply distinguished from the whole idolatrous world. The heathen nations, uncircumcised adorers of vain idols or of demons, were by consequence enemies both of the true God and of his servants. This contrast and hostility they even carried over into the unseen world, and imagined that each nation had its own guardian angel in the Court of Jehovah in heaven, who contended there for its interests; their own national guardian, the angel Michael, being more powerful and nearer to the throne than any other one. In the calamities that fell on them, they recognized the vengeance of Jehovah for the violation of his commands. In their victories, their deliverances, their great blessings, especially in their rescue from Egypt, and in the many miracles which they believed to have accompanied that great passage, they saw the signal superiority of their God over every other god, and the proofs of his particular providence over them in distinct preference to all other peoples. He had, as they piously believed, made a special covenant with Abraham, and set apart his posterity as a sacred family, exclusively intrusted with the divine law, and commissioned to subdue and govern all the other families of the earth. When this proud and intensely cherished faith was baffled of fulfillment, they never dreamed of abandoning it.
They only supposed its triumphant execution postponed, as a penalty for their sins, and looked forward with redoubled ardor to a better time when their hopes should break into fruition, their exile be ended, their captivity appear as a dream, Jerusalem be the central gem of the world, and the anointed ruler wield his sceptre over all mankind.
But misfortunes and woes were heaped on them. Their city was sacked, their temple desecrated, their people dragged into foreign slavery, forbidden to celebrate the rites of their religion, slaughtered by wholesale. Many times, during the two centuries before and the first century after Christ, did they suffer these terrible sorrows. Their hatred and scorn of their heathen persecutors; their faith in their own incomparable destiny; their expectation of the speedy appearance of an anointed deliverer, raised up by Jehovah to avenge them and vindicate their trust, all became the more fervent and profound the longer the delay. Under these circumstances grew up the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah, as it is seen in that Apocalyptic literature represented by the Book of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, the Book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Fourth Book of Esdras, and similar documents.
The Jews were remarkably free from that habit of mind which led almost all the other nations to personify the most startling phenomena of nature as living beings, which created fetiches of stocks and stones and animals; saw a god in every wind, season, star, and cloud. The Semitic mind and literature were more sober, rational, and monotheistic. The place occupied in the thoughts of other peoples by the phenomena of nature was held in the thoughts of the Jews by political phenomena, by ritual, legal, and military relations. And the poetic action of fancy, the mythological creativeness and superstitious feeling which other people exercised on the objects and changes of nature, the Jews exercised on the phenomena of their own national history. The burning central point of their polity and belief and imagination was the conviction of their own national consecration as the exclusive people of God, meant to conquer, teach, and rule all the infidel nations; that Jehovah was literally their invisible King, represented in their chief ruler; that every great triumph or disaster was a signal Day of the Lord, a special Coming of Jehovah to reward or punish his people. During their repeated bondages under the Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, their feeling of the antagonism between themselves and the other people increased. From the time of the Babylonish captivity the Persian doctrine of good and evil spirits had infiltrated into their belief; and they adopted the notion of Angra Mainyus, and developed it (with certain modifications) into their conception of Satan. Then, in their faith, the war of Jews and Gentiles spread into the invisible world, and took up on its opposite sides the good and the fallen angels. And, finally, the idea of their Messiah became the centre of a battle and a judgment in which all the generations of the dead as well as of the living were to have a part; and which should culminate in the overthrow of evil, the subjection of the heathen, the assignment of the righteous to a paradisal reign, and of the wicked to a doom typified by the submersion of Sodom and Gomorrah in fiery brimstone.
How plainly this doctrine was the result of the same poetic process of thought with the other schemes already depicted! Only they were developed on the basis of natural phenomena; this, on the basis of political phenomena. It is simply the imaginative universalization of the struggle between Jew and Gentile, and the carrying of it to its crisis and sequel. And when inexplicable delays and the accumulation of obstacles made the realization of the expected result amidst the conditions of the present world seem ever more and more hopeless, the growing and assimilative action of faith and fancy expanded the scene, and transferred it to a transmundane state, involving the destruction of the heavens and earth and their replacement with a new creation.
Is there any more real reason for believing this doctrine than there is for believing the other kindred schemes? Not a whit. It is a mistake of the same poetic nature, and resting on the same grounds with them. Two thousand years have passed, and it has not been fulfilled; and there is ever less and less sign of its fulfillment. It never will be fulfilled, except in a spiritual sense. The Jews will finally lose their pride of race and covenant, abandon their special Messianic creed, and blend themselves and their opinions in the mass of redeemed and progressive humanity, and no more dream of a physical resurrection of the dead amidst the dissolving elements of nature.
And now we must notice that besides all these poetic pictures of the end of the world, there are prophecies of a similar result which wear an apparently scientific garb. Many men of science firmly believe that our world is destined to be destroyed, that a close for the earthly fortunes of mankind can be plainly foreseen. No little alarm was felt a century or more ago, when it was discovered that there was a progressive diminution going on in the orbit of the moon, which must cause it at length to impinge upon the earth. But La Grange exhibited the fallaciousness of the prophecy, by showing that the decrease was periodical and succeeded by a corresponding increase. Intense and widely spread terror has repeatedly been felt less a comet should come within our planetary orbit, and shatter or melt our globe by its contact. But the discovery of the nebulous nature of comets, of their great numbers and regular movements, has quite dissipated that fear from the popular mind in our day.
There are, however, other forms of scientific speculation which put the prophesied destruction of the world on a more plausible and formidable basis. It is supposed by many scientists that all force is derived from the consumption of heat; and that the fuel must at last be used up, and therefore no life or energy be left for sustaining the present system of the creation. This theory is met by the counter statement that the heat of the sun and other similar centres may possibly not depend on any material consumption; or, if it does, there may be a self replenishing supply, loss and repair forming an endless circle.
It is foretold by some chemists, that the progressive interior cooling and contraction of our orb will cause ever greater interstices or vacant spaces among the solid substances below the outer crust; and that into these pores, first all liquids, then all gases and the whole atmosphere, will be absorbed: so that the world will be left desolate, utterly uninhabitable by life.
Again: it is said that all force or energy tends at every transformation to pass (at least partially) into heat; and therefore that, finally, all force will be frittered down into the one form of heat, all matter vanishing from its separate shapes into the state of a homogeneous, nebulous fire. The portentous sight, repeatedly descried by astronomers, of a nameless world, away in remotest space, which has suddenly kindled, blazed, smouldered, darkened, and vanished forever from its place, is perhaps a solemn symbol of the fate of our own planet; hinting at a time when the earth, too, shall make itself a funeral pyre,
And, awed in distant orbs, some race unknown Shall miss one star whose smile had lit their own.
This same final crisis is also prophesied on the basis of a slight retardation to which the planets are subjected in their passage through the ethereal medium. No matter how slight the resistance thus interposed, its consequence, it is thought, must accumulate and ultimately compel all material bodies to approach each other; and, as their successive collisions convert them into heat and vapor, nothing will be left at last but one uniform nebula. The process of evolution will then begin anew, and so the stupendous history of the universe repeat itself eternally.
This is the sublimest of all the generalizations of science. It may be true, and it may not be true. At any rate, it differs immensely in the moral impression it makes from that made by the current theological doctrine of the same catastrophe. We can contemplate the scientific prophecy of the end of the world with a peace of mind which the traditional prophecy does not permit.
In the first place, the ecclesiastical doctrine makes the destruction of the world a result of wrath and vengeance. The angry God looms above us with flaming features and avenging weapons to tread down his enemies. We shrink in fright from the wrath and power of the personal Judge, the inexorable Foe of the wicked. But the scientific doctrine makes the end a result of passionless laws, a steady evolution of effects from causes, wholly free from everything vindictive.
Secondly. The ecclesiastical doctrine makes the dreadful conclusion a sudden event, an inconceivable shock of horror, falling in an instant, overwhelming all its victims with the swiftness of lightning in the unutterable agony of their ruin. But the scientific doctrine makes the climax a matter of slow and gradual approach. Whether the worlds are to be frozen up by increasing cold, or to evaporate in culminating heat, or to be converted into gas as they meet in their career, the changes of the chemical conditions will be so steady and moderate beforehand as to cause all living creatures to have diminished in numbers by insensible degrees, and to have utterly ceased long before the final shock arrives.
Thirdly. The ecclesiastical doctrine makes the sequel imminent, near, ready to fall at a moment's warning. At any hour the signal may strike. Thus it is to the earnest believer a constant, urgent alarm, close at hand. But the scientific doctrine depicts the close as almost unimaginably remote. All the data in the hands of our scientists lead their calculations as to the nearest probable end to land them in an epoch so far off as to be stated only in thousands of millions of years. Thus the picture is so distant as to be virtually enfeebled into nothing. We cannot, even by the most vivid imagination, bring it home closely enough to make it real and effective on our plans.
And, finally, the theological dogma of the destruction of the world professes to be an infallible certainty. The believer holds that he absolutely knows it by a revelation of supernatural authority. But with the scientist such a belief is held as merely a probability. A billion of centuries hence the world may perhaps come to an end; and, on the other hand, the phenomena which lead to such a belief may yet be explained as implying no such result. And these two issues, so far as our social or ideal experience is concerned, are virtually the same.
A brilliant French writer has suggested that even if the natural course of evolution does of itself necessitate the final destruction of the world, yet our race, judging from the magnificent achievements of science and art already reached, may, within ten thousand centuries, which will be long before the foreseen end approaches, obtain such a knowledge and control of the forces of nature as to make collective humanity master of this planet, able to shape and guide its destinies, ward off every fatal crisis, and perfect and immortalize the system as now sustained. It is an audacious fancy. But like many other incredible conceptions which have forerun their own still more incredible fulfillment, the very thought electrifies us with hope and courage.
And thus the conclusion in which we rest at the close of our investigation is the belief that the world is to last, and our race to flourish on it virtually forever. This conclusion is equally a relief from the frightful burdens of superstition, and a consolation for our own personal evanescence. The stable harmony of natural beauty and beneficence, amidst which we individually play our brief part and vanish, shall stand fast, blooming with fresh growths, and shining with fadeless light, and the successive generations of our dear fellow men shall grow ever wiser and happier, beyond the reach of our farthest vision into the future. And if we recognize in the great catastrophic myths and previsions of the poets and scientists the fundamental truth that the things which are seen are temporal, while the things alone which are unseen are eternal, the end being a regular and remote sequel in the creative plan of God, free from anger, retributive disappointment, or cruelty will not alarm us. For if souls are substantial entities, and not mere phenomenal processes, they will survive the universal crisis, and either at the lucid goals of their perfected destiny rejoice forever in a reflected individual fruition of the attributes of God, or else start refreshed on a new career with that redistribution of the cosmic matter and motion which in its gigantic and eternal rhythm of development and dissolution the ancient Hindu mind figured as the respiration of Brahm and which ambitious science now generalizes as the law of evolution.
II. THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
JUDAISM so largely supplied the circumstantial and doctrinal germs out of which dogmatic Christianity grew, that we cannot thoroughly understand the Christian belief in a final day of judgment, unless we first notice the historic and literary derivation of that belief from Judaism, and then trace its development in the new conditions through which it passed. The personal character, teachings, life, and death of Jesus Christ, together with his subsequent resurrection and career in the consciousness of ecclesiastical Christendom, constituted the crystalizing centre which, dipped in the inherited solution of ideal and social materials furnished by the Church, has gathered around it the accretion of faith and dogma composing the theoretic Christianity of the present day. To follow this process with reference to the particular tenet before us, analyze it, discriminate the appropriate in it from the inappropriate, the true from the false, maybe difficult; but it is necessary for a satisfactory conclusion. To this task let us therefore now address ourselves, putting away all bias and prejudice, invoking in equal degree candor, fearlessness and charity.
The Jews believed themselves to be a people chosen out of all the world as the exclusive favorites of God. By the covenant of Abraham, and the code of Moses, Jehovah had entered, as they thought, into a special contract with them to be their peculiar God, Guardian, and Ruler. In contrast with the depraved habits and idolatrous rites of the heathen nations, the Israelites were strictly to keep the moral law, and, at the same time, to pay a pure worship to Jehovah through the scrupulous observance of their ceremonial law. The bond of race and family descent from Abraham, the practice of circumcision, and the ceremonies of the Mosaic ritual, sealed them as accepted members of this divine covenant. So long as they were true to the duties involved in this relation, Jehovah would watch over them, defend them from their enemies, set them proudly above the alien Gentiles, and crown them with every spiritual and temporal blessing. The noblest representatives of the people believed this with unparalleled thoroughness and intensity. They looked down on the uncircumcised nations as wicked idolaters, destined to be their servants until they should be adopted into the same covenant by becoming proselytes to their faith. Jehovah was literally their direct, though invisible, King, Law giver, and Judge, palpably rewarding their fidelity by overt temporal blessings, punishing their dereliction by awful temporal calamities and sufferings.
Every signal instance of his providential intervention in their affairs they called a Day of the Lord, a Coming of Jehovah, a Judgment from heaven. Thus the prophet Joel foretells the vengeance which God would take on Tyre and Sidon and Philistia, because they had assailed and scattered his people. "Behold the day of Jehovah cometh, the great and terrible day. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood. Then whosoever calleth on the name of Jehovah shall be delivered: for upon Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance. I will contend with the Gentiles for my people, and will bring back the captives.
The multitudes, the multitudes in the valley of judgment: for the day of Jehovah is near in the valley of judgment." In a similar strain Isaiah prophesies against Edom: "Draw near, O ye nations, and hear! For the wrath of Jehovah is kindled against the nations, and he hath given up their armies to slaughter. The stench of their carcasses shall ascend, and the mountains shall melt with their blood. And all the hosts of heaven shall melt away; and all their host shall fall down, as the blighted fruit from the fig tree. For my sword shall rush drunk from heaven: behold, upon Edom shall it descend. For it is a day of vengeance from Jehovah. Her streams shall be turned into pitch, and her dust into brimstone, and her whole land shall become burning pitch. It shall lie waste forever, and none shall pass through it. The pelican and the hedgehog shall possess it; the heron and the raven shall dwell in it."
Tremendous and appalling as this imagery is, it is obvious that the whole meaning of it is earthly and temporal, a local judgment of Jehovah in vindication of his people against the heathen. And kindred judgments are threatened against his own people when they lapse into wickedness and idolatry. "Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down." "Jehovah appeareth as a hostile witness, the Lord from his holy place. Behold, Jehovah cometh forth from his dwelling place, and advanceth on the high places of the earth. The mountains melt under him, and the valleys cleave asunder like wax before the fire. For the sin of the house of Israel is all this."
Thus the earliest meaning of the phrase, Day of the Lord, or Day of Judgment, according to Biblical usage, was the occurrence of any severe calamity, either to the Jews, as a punishment for their apostasy; or to the Gentiles, as a punishment for their wickedness, or for their violent encroachment on the rights of the chosen people. These visitations of military disaster or political subjection, though purely local and temporal, are depicted in the most terrific images, such as flaming brimstone, falling stars, heaven and earth dissolving in darkness, blood, and fire. Ezekiel, alluding to the barbarous invasion headed by Prince Gog, represents Jehovah as declaring, "I will contend against him, and will rain fire and brimstone upon him and his hosts. Thus will I show myself in my greatness and glory before the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am Jehovah." The highly figurative character of this imagery must be apparent to every candid critic.
For example, in the following passage from Zechariah, no one will suppose for a moment that it is meant that Jehovah will appear visibly in person and reign in Jerusalem, but only that his promise shall be fulfilled, and his law shall prevail there in the triumphant establishment of his chosen people: "Behold the day of Jehovah cometh, when I will gather all nations to battle against Jerusalem; and the city shall be taken. Then shall Jehovah go forth, and fight against those nations. And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives. And Jehovah shall be king over all the earth. And it shall be that whoso of all the families of the earth will not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, Jehovah of hosts, upon them shall be no rain."
When the prophets burst out in the lyric metaphors, "Jehovah will roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem;" "Egypt shall be a waste and Edom a wilderness for their violence to the sons of Judah; but Jerusalem shall be inhabited forever, and Jehovah shall dwell upon Zion," the meaning is simply that "Jehovah will be a refuge to his people, a stronghold to the sons of Israel, and all people shall know that Jehovah is God." It would imply the grossest ignorance in any critic if he imagined that the Jews ever believed that Jehovah was visibly to come down and reign over them in person. They did however, believe that an awful token or the presence of Jehovah dwelt in the holy of holies of their temple. They also believed that every anointed ruler who governed them in justice and piety represented the authority of Jehovah. And as, in the long times of their natural captivity and oppression, their hopes sought refuge from the depressing present in bright visions of a glorious future, when some inspired deliverer should justify their faith by carrying the national power and happiness to the highest pitch, they naturally believed that the spirit and signet of the Lord would, in a special manner, rest on that Messianic hero.
By the assimilative action of faith and imagination, this idea of a divinely accredited Messiah developed, and grew ever richer and more complete. It began simply with the expectation of a holy leader and ruler who should subdue the heathen and establish the favored people of Jehovah in peerless purity, power, and happiness in the land of Judea. Little by little the rewards of the righteous and the punishments of the wicked were extended beyond those living on the earth, and took in the dead. The prophet Ezekiel depicted the promised restoration of the Jews from their captivity at Babylon to Jerusalem under the poetic image of a revivification of a heap of dead bones. This metaphor slowly assumed the form of a literal dogma, which grew from its beginning as an exceptional belief in the resurrection of a chosen few, stated in the book of Daniel and the second book of Maccabees, to the belief in the universal resurrection of the dead, avowed by Paul as the common Pharisaic belief. The belief, too, in regard to the scene of the Messianic triumph, the penalties to be inflicted on the enemies of Jehovah, and the kind and number of those enemies, underwent the same process of development and growth. The world was conceived as a sort of three story house connected with passage ways; heaven above the firmament, the earth between, and a penal region below. The imagery of fire and brimstone associated in the Hebrew mind with Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fearful imagery of idolatory, filth, and flames in the detested valley of Hinnom where the refuse of Jerusalem was carried to be burned, had been transferred by the popular imagination to the subterranean place of departed souls. The story in the book of Genesis about the sons of God forming an alliance with the daughters of men, and begetting a wicked brood of giants, had been wrought into the belief in a race of fallen angels, foes of God and men, whose dwelling place was the upper air. Above these wicked spirits in high places, but below the heaven of Jehovah, was the paradise whither Enoch and Elijah were supposed to have been translated, and whence they would come again in the last days. The Jewish apocryphal book of Enoch which was written probably about a century and a half before the birth of Christ, and is explicitly quoted in the Epistle of Jude contains a minute account of the final judgment, including in its scope this whole scenery and all these agents, and closely anticipating both the doctrinal and verbal details of the same subject as recorded in the New Testament itself. There is not, with one exception, a single essential feature of the now current Christian belief, in regard to the day of judgment at the end of the world, which is not distinctly brought out in the same form in the book of Enoch, written certainly more than a hundred years before a line of the Gospels was composed. The exception referred to relates to the person of the Messiah. In the book of Enoch he is indeed called the Son of man, but is wrapt in mysterious obscurity, undefined and unnamed: in the Christian documents and faith he is, of course, identified with Jesus of Nazareth, and, at a later period, identified also with God.
The growth of the Messianic personality in distinctness, prominence, importance, and completeness of associated grouping, is not only historically traceable, but was also perfectly natural. At first the prophecy of the triumphant re establishment of the Jews was conceived as the result of the favoring power of Jehovah, not in a personal manifestation, but providentially displayed. Thus Joel represents Jehovah as saying, in his promise to vindicate Jerusalem, "Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about." It cannot be denied that this was purely metaphorical. But in all imagery of a kingdom, of war, of judgment, the idea of the king, the leader, the judge, would naturally be the strongest point of imaginative action, the center of crystalizing association around which congruous particulars would be drawn until the picture was complete. So it actually happened. Perhaps the most striking example of this is seen in the growth of the notion of the great Adversary who precedes and fights against the Messiah. The book of Daniel, written just after Antiochus Epiphanes had oppressed the Jews with such frightful cruelties and profaned their temple with such abominable desecrations, impersonated in him the whole head and front of the impious hostility which the promised deliverer would have to subdue in vindicating the rights and hopes of the chosen people. "The figure of Antiochus Epiphanes," Martineau has happily said, "placed in immediate antecedence and antithesis to that of the Messiah, as the predicted crisis moved forward, was carried with it, and spread its portentous shadow over the expected close." The writer of the book of Daniel looked for the immediate arising of some inspired hero and servant of Jehovah to overthrow this wicked despot, this persecuting monster, and avenge the oppressed Jews on their Gentile tyrants. When subsequent events postponed this expected sequel, the opposed parties in it, the Antichrist and the Christ, were thrown forward together in ever dilating proportions of gloom and brightness: the fierce countenanced king in Daniel becomes the Man of Sin in Paul and the Beast drunk with the blood of saints in the Apocalypse. And in the Rabbinical books of the Jews the belief in Antichrist, under the name of Armillus, is developed into a mass of mythological details, afterwards adopted quite in the gross by the Mohammedans. Terrible signs will precede the appearance of the Messiah, such as a dew of blood, the darkening of the sun, the destruction of the holy city, with the slaughter and dispersion of the Israelites, and the suffering of awful woes. The Messiah shall gather his people and rebuild and occupy Jerusalem. Armillus shall collect an army and besiege that city. But God shall say to Messiah, "Sit thou on my right hand," and to the Israelites, "Stand still, and see what God will work for you to day." Then God will pour down sulphur and fire from heaven, and consume Armillus and his hosts. Then the trumpet will sound, the tombs be opened, the ten tribes be led to Paradise to celebrate the marriage supper of the Messiah, the aliens be consigned to Gehenna, and the earth be renovated.
As the doctrine of the functions of the Messiah, in this finished form, is not stated in the Old Testament, but was familiar in the Christian Church, it is commonly supposed to be exclusively a later Christian development from the Jewish germ. It did, however, exist in the Jewish mind, before the birth of Christ, in the mature form already set forth. It is found clearly laid down and drawn out in Jewish apocryphal books dated earlier than the Christian era. It is likewise explicitly and minutely detailed in the Talmud, where its subsequent adoption from the Christians must have been impossible to the bigoted scorn and hate of the Jews for the Christians; while the historic affiliation of Christianity on Judaism made the Christians avowedly adopt all the vital doctrines of the older creed. The gradual growth of the Christian doctrine of the connection of the Messiah with the final judgment, out of the previous Jewish and Rabbinical notions, by the hardening of metaphors into dogmas and the universalizing of local peculiarities, is confessedly an obscure process, in many of its particulars extremely difficult to trace. But that it did thus grow up, no impartial scholar, who has mastered what is now known on the subject, can doubt. A world of new knowledge and light has been thrown on this whole field during the last thirty five years by Gfrorer, Baur, Ewald, Hoffmann, Hilgenfeld, Dilmann, Ceriani, Volkmar, and other students of kindred power and spirit. Researches and discussions in this department are still pushed with the greatest zeal; and it is confidently believed that in a few years the views adopted in the present writing will be established beyond all cavil from any fair minded critic. Then all the steps will have been clearly defined in the development of that doctrine of the great Day of the Lord, which, beginning with a poetic picture of a Jewish overthrow of the Gentiles, through the inspiring power of Jehovah, before the walls of Jerusalem, ended with a literal belief in the setting up, by the Messiah, of a tribunal in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the assemblage there of all the living and the dead for judgment, the installation of the immortalized righteous in Paradise, and the submerging of the wicked under the Vale of Hinnom in a rainstorm of blazing brimstone.
And now what must we think in regard to the truth or falsehood of the outward, forensic, military, and ritual part of the doctrine of historic and literary development we have imperfectly followed. Is it not perfectly clear, that the growth of the doctrine in question has been but a natural action of the imagination on the materials furnished it; adding congruous particulars, one after another, until the view was complete, and therefore could extend no further? And is it not equally obvious, that it can lay no sort of claim to logical validity? The superstitious and arbitrary character of its intrinsic constituents, its irreconcilableness with science and philosophy, disprove, to all who dare honestly face the facts, every plea set up for it as an inspired revelation of truth. It is a mixture of poetry and speculation, credible enough in an early and uncritical age, but a hopeless stumbling block to the educated reason of the present day. Every one who brings a free intelligence to the subject will find it impossible not to recognize the same fanciful process of thought, the same poetic ingredients, here as in the schemes of those heathen religions whose principal portrayals we all regard as mythology. To argue that because earthly rulers, in their anger and power, send retributive armies against their rebellious subjects, to bring them to judgment, destroy their homes and cities, and lay waste their lands with fire and sword, therefore God, the supreme King, will do so by the whole world, is not to reason logically, but to poetize creatively. There can be no warrant for transferring the political and military relations between men and earthly sovereigns to the moral and spiritual relations between the human race and God, since the two sets of relations are wholly different. The relation of Creator and creature is immensely higher and wider than that of king and subject. He whose laws are everywhere incessantly self executing needs not to select and group and reserve his friends or foes for any climateric catastrophe. The common notion of a final judgment day the fanciful association of all the good together, on one side, to be saved; of all the bad together, on the other side, to be damned, applies to the divine government an imperfection belonging only to human governments. Surely every one must see, the moment the thought is stated, that this imaginative universalizing of the indignation of God, and carrying it to a climax, in the destruction of the world, is a mythological procedure utterly inapplicable to a Being who can know no anger, no caprice, no change, a Being whose will is universal truth, whose throne is immensity, whose robe is omnipresence.
Original Christianity, internally regarded in its divine truth, was the pure moral law exemplified in the personal traits of Jesus Christ, and universalized by his ascent out of the flesh into that kingdom of heaven which knows not nationalities or ceremonies. But original Christianity, externally and historically regarded, in the belief of its first disciples, was simply Judaism, with the addition of the faith that the Messiah had actually come in the person of Jesus Christ. The first disciples vividly cherished the prevalent Pharisaic doctrine that the Messiah would glorify his people, vanquish the heathen, raise and judge the dead, change the face of the earth, and inaugurate a holy reign of Israel in joy and splendor. This the Messiah was to do. But they believed Jesus to be the Messiah. Yet, before doing these things, he had been put to death. Therefore, they argued, he must come again, to finish his uncompleted mission. Such was the derivation of the apostolic and ecclesiastical doctrine of the speedy second advent of Christ to judge the dead and the living, and to wind up the present scheme of things. The belief was inevitable under the circumstances. To have believed otherwise, they must have reconstructed the current idea of the Messiah, and have seen in him no political monarch with an outward realm, but purely a king of truth.
For this they were not ready; though it seems as if, after the experience of eighteen hundred years, we ought by this time to be prepared to see that such was really the intention of Providence.
It is a question of primary interest, whether Jesus himself, in assuming the Messiahship, regarded it personally as an exclusively spiritual office, or as a literally including these royal and judicial functions in a visible form.
Jesus foretold, in the same imaginary used by the previous prophets, and familiar to the minds of his contemporaries, the speedy approach of frightful calamities, wars, rumor of wars, famine and slaughter, Jerusalem compassed with armies and destroyed. Then, he adds, the Son of man shall come in the clouds of heaven, with all his holy angels, and take possession of the scene, apportioning the destinies of the righteous and the wicked. The question is, whether this pictured reappearance, in such transcendent pomp and power, was meant by him as a literal prophecy, to be physically fulfilled in his own person; or as a moral horoscope of the destined fortunes of his religion, a figurative representation of the establishment and reign of his spiritual truth. The latter view seems to us to be the correct one.
In the first place, this is what has actually taken place. In the growing recognition of his spirit and power, in the spread of his teachings and name, in the revolutionizing advancement of his kingdom among men, Jesus has come again and again. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, as he foretold, amidst unspeakable tribulations, and the disciples of the new faith installed in domination over the world. He said the time was then at hand, even at the doors, that some of those standing by should not taste death until all these things came to pass. If his prophecy bore a moral sense, the sequel justified it; if it bore a physical sense, the sequel refuted and falsified it. For that generation passed away, fifty generations since have passed away, and yet there has been no literal second advent of Jesus in person to judge the dead and the living, and to destroy the world. The event proves that we must either give the words of Jesus a metaphorical interpretation or hold that he was in error.
But, secondly, such an error would be incompatible with soundness of mind. For any man, even for him called by an apostle "the man Christ Jesus," to believe that after his death he should reappear, swooping down from heaven, convoyed by squadrons of angels, to collect all men from their graves, and replace the old creation with a new one, would imply a profound disturbance of reason, a monomaniacal fanaticism if not an actual insanity. It is such a pure piece of theatrics that no one deeply in unison with that spirit of truth which expresses the mind of God through the order of nature and providence could possibly believe it. Such a nature was preeminently that of Jesus. All his most characteristic utterances, such as: "blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God;" "who loves much shall be forgiven much;" reveal unsurpassed saneness and truth of perception. It is by much the most probable supposition, that Jesus employed in the deepest and purest moral sense alone those Messianic images and catastrophic prophecies which were indeed originally used as moral metaphors, but had been afterwards degraded into material dogmas.
Still further, the literal belief commonly attributed to Jesus, in his own physical reappearance and reign, is not only incompatible with his supreme soundness of mind, it is also irreconcilable with his other explicit teachings. "My kingdom is not of this world." "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." He warns his disciples against the many false Christs who will appear, and says that "the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation." "Say not, lo here! or lo there! for the kingdom of heaven is within you." "I am the truth, the way, and the life." "He that rejecteth me, I judge him not; the word that I have spoken, that shall judge him." "Whoever doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother." In view of these and kindred utterances of the profoundest insight, irreconcilable with any gross mythological beliefs, we must hold to the purely spiritual character of the doctrine of Jesus concerning his personal offices, and think that all the speeches, if any such there be, which cannot be fairly explained in accordance with this view, have been refracted in their transmission through incompetent reporters, or even perhaps fictitiously ascribed to him from the faith of a later age. There is a grateful satisfaction in thus discharging, as we feel we are fairly entitled to do, from the authority of Jesus a burden too great even for his peerless name any longer to support. For, say what its advocates may, this gigantic melo drama of the second advent, this world wide mixture and display of martial and forensic elements before an audience of all mankind and amidst a convulsed and closing universe, is inherently incredible by any mind not grossly ignorant and undisciplined or drilled to the most slavish servility of traditional thought. Every one really educated in science and philosophy, and familiar with the physiological conditions and literary history of mythology in the other nations of the world, will plainly perceive the intrinsic fancifulness and falsity of the belief, at the same time that he easily accounts for its rise and prevalence.
The same picture of the siege of Jerusalem by a league of idolatrous armies, and of the mighty coming of the Messiah, found in the New Testament, is drawn in the third book of the Sibylline Oracles, which was composed by a Jew two hundred years before one word of Matthew or Luke was written. Jesus took up this current and fitting imagery wherein to express the conflict of his religion with the world, and to predict its ultimate triumph. He identifies himself with the truths he has brought, with the regenerating energies he has inaugurated to combat and overcome the wickedness and despotism of the nations of men. Every advent of his universal principles to a wider conflict or a higher seat of authority, is a true coming of the Son of Man. The vices and crimes of men, the selfishness and tyranny of governments, accumulate impediments in the way of the free working of the will of God in human society. Therefore from period to period convulsive crises occur, shocks of progressive truth and liberty against the obstacles gathered in their way. Thus, not only the destruction of Jerusalem, but the destruction of Rome, the French Revolution, and all the terrible social crises in the advancing affairs of the world, write on the earth and the sky, in huge characters of blood, smoke and fire, the true meaning of the repeated coming of Christ. This is the only kind of judicial second advent he will ever make, and this will occur over and over in calamitous but helpful revolutions, until all removable evils are done away, all the laws of men made just and all the hearts of men pure. Then the spirit once manifested by Jesus in his lonely mission will be a universal presence on earth, and the genuine millennium prevail without end.
It is necessary now, as preliminary to a clear exposition of the true Christian doctrine of judgment, to explain the cause and process of the dark perversion which the teachings of Christ himself have so unfortunately undergone in the Church. For this purpose we must again, for a moment, refer to the original connection of Christianity with Judaism.
Judaism was composed of two parts: one an accidental form; the other, essential truth. The first was the ceremonial peculiarities of the Jewish race and history; the second was the absolute and eternal principles of morality and religion. These two parts the ritual law and moral law were closely joined in all the best representatives of the nation at all the best periods of its history. Yet there was a constant tendency to separate these. One party exalted the ritual element, another party the spiritual element; the priestly class and the vulgar populace the former; the prophets the men of poetic, fiery heart and genius the latter.
Such men as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, always insisted on personal and national righteousness, purity, and devotion, as the one essential thing. But the natural tendency of the common multitude, and of every professional class, to an external routine of mechanised forms, manifested itself more and more in a party which made an overt covenant and ritualistic conformity the all important thing. This party reached its head in the sect of the Pharisees, who, at the time of Jesus, possessed the offices, and represented the dominant spirit and authority of the Jewish nation. The character of this sect of bigoted formalists, as indignantly described and denounced by Jesus, is too well known to need illustration. They subordinated and trivialized the weightier matters of justice, mercy, humility, and peace, but enthroned and glorified the regime of mint, anise, and cummin.
What was the Jewish idea of salvation, or citizenship in the kingdom of God? What was the condition of acceptance in the Pharisaic church? It was heirship in the Jewish race, either by descent or adoption, with ceremonial blamelessness in belief and act. Do you belong to the chosen family of Abraham, and are you undefiled in relation to all the requirements of our code? Then you are one of the elect. Are you a Gentile, an idolatrous member of the uncircumcision, or a scorner of the Levitic and Rabbinical customs? Then you are unfit to enter beyond the outer precincts of the Temple; you are a hopeless alien from the kingdom of heaven. Thus the Jewish test of acceptance with God was national, external, formal, a local and temporal peculiarity.
When Jesus arose and began to teach, his transcendent genius, working under the unparalleled inspiration of God, an unprecedented sensibility to divine truth in its utmost purity and freedom, expanded beyond all these shallow material accidents and bonds; and he propounded a perfectly moral and spiritual test of acceptance before God; namely, the possession of an intrinsically good character. He made nothing of the distinction between Jew and Gentile, declaring, "My father is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." He affirmed the condition of admittance into the kingdom of God to be simply the doing of the will of God. When he saw the young lawyer who had kept the two commandments, loving God with all his soul, and his neighbor as himself, his heart yearned towards him in benediction. And, finally, in his sublime picture of the last judgment, he, in the most explicit and unmistakable manner, makes the one essential condition of rejection to be inhumanity of life, cruel selfishness of character; the one essential condition of acceptance, the spirit of love, the practical doing of good. He utters not a solitary syllable about immaculateness of ceremonial propriety or soundness of dogmatic belief. He only says, Inasmuch as ye have or have not visited the sick and the imprisoned, fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, ye shall be justified or condemned at the divine tribunal. This test of personal goodness or wickedness, benevolent or malignant conduct, proclaimed by Jesus, is the true standard, free from everything local and temporary, fitted for application to all nations and all ages.
But no sooner had Christianity obtained a foothold on earth, multiplied its converts, and gained some outward sway, than its Judaizing disciples and promulgators, fastening on that which was easiest to comprehend and practise, that which was most impressive to the imagination, that which seemed most sharply to distinguish them from the unbelieving and unconforming world around, thrust far into the background this universal and eternal test of judgment set up by Jesus himself, and in place of it installed an exclusive test fashioned after a more developed and aggravated pattern of the very narrowest and worst elements in the Phariasaism which he expressly came to supersede. The Pharisaic condition of salvation was inheritance, by blood or adoption, in the Jewish race and Abrahamic covenant, together with exactitude of ceremonial observance. Everybody else was an unclean alien, an uncircumcised dog, an uncovenanted leper. In place of this test, the orthodox ecclesiastical party made their test dogmatic belief in the supernatural Messiahship of Jesus Christ, formal profession of allegiance to the official person of Jesus Christ. It is summed up in the formula, "Whoso believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is of God; whoso denieth this, is of the Devil."
Exactly here is where Paul, the noble apostle to the Gentiles, broke with the Judaizing apostles, and taught a doctrine more fully developed in its historic sequence, but substantially in perfect unison with the free teachings and spirit of Jesus himself. With Paul the test of Christian salvation was the possession of the mind of Christ. "If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his;" "but as many as are led by the spirit of God are sons of God." "Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but a new creature," begotten in the image of Christ, availeth everything before God. "God rewardeth every man, the Jew and the Gentile, according to his works." With Paul, descent from Abraham was nothing, observance of the legal code was nothing: a just and pure character, full of self sacrificing love, evoked by faith in Christ, was the all in all. Jesus Christ was the head of a new race, the second Adam; and all disciples, who, through moral faith in him, were regenerated into his likeness and unto newness of living, were thereby adopted as sons of God and joint heirs with him. The Pauline formula of salvation, freely open to all the world, was, spiritual assimilation and reproduction of Christ in the disciple.
But the Judaizing party bore a heavy preponderance in the early Church, and has succeeded unto this day in imposing on ecclesiastical Christendom its own test: namely, a sound dogmatic, belief in the supreme personal rank and office of Christ, as the only means of admission to the kingdom of heaven. The one peculiarity which most sharply and broadly contrasted the early Christians with the rest of the world was unquestionably their belief in the miraculous mission of Jesus, a belief growing deeper, higher, intenser, until it actually identified him with the omnipotent God. There was an inevitable tendency, it was a perfectly natural and necessary process, for them to make this point of contrast the central condition on which depended the possession of all the special privileges supposed to be promised to its disciples by the new religion. The result is well expressed by Polycarp in these words: "Whosoever confesses not that Christ is come in the flesh, is an Antichrist; and whosoever acknowledges not the martyrdom of the cross, is of the Devil; and whosoever says that there is no resurrection nor judgment, is the first born of Satan." This extract strikes the key note of the Orthodox Church all through Christendom from the second century to the present hour. In place of the true condition of salvation announced by Jesus, personal and practical goodness, it inaugurates the false ecclesiastic standard, soundness of dogmatic belief in relation to Jesus himself! Those who hold this are the elect, and shall stand in heaven with white robes and palms and a new song, while all the rest of the world apostate and detested enemies of God and his saints shall be trampled down in merciless slaughter, and flung into the pit whence the smoking signal of their torment shall ascend for ever and ever. It is a transformation of the bigoted scorn and hate of the covenanted Jew for his Gentile foes into the intensified horror of the Orthodox believer for the reprobate infidel. And it finally culminated in the following frightful picture which still lowers and blazes in the imagination of ecclesiastical Christendom as a veritable revelation of what is to take place at the end of the world:
While the stars are falling, the firmament dissolving, the dead swarming from their graves, and the nations assembling, Christ will come in the clouds of heaven with a host of angels and sit in judgment on collected mankind. All who submissively believed in his Divinity, and have the seal of his blood on their foreheads, he will approve and accept; all others he will condemn and reject. No matter for the natural goodness and integrity of the unbeliever: his unbelief dooms him. No matter for the natural depravity and iniquity of the believer: his faith in the atoning sacrifice saves him. The Judge will say to the orthodox, on his right, "You may have been impure and cruel, lied, cheated, hated your neighbor, rolled in vice and crime, but you have believed in me, in my divinity: therefore, come, ye blessed, inherit my kingdom." To the heretical, on his left, he will say, "You may have been pure and kind, sought the truth, self sacrificingly served your fellow men, fulfilled every moral duty in your power, but you have not believed in me, in my deity, and my blood: therefore, depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." Such is a fit verdict to be pronounced by the avenging Warrior depicted in the Apocalypse, from whose mouth issues a two edged sword, to cut his enemies asunder; who sits on a white charger, in a vesture dipped in blood, with a bow and a crown, and goes forth conquering and to conquer; whose eyes are flames of fire; who treads his rejecters in the wine press of his wrath until their blood reaches to the horse bridles. It was the natural reflection of an age filled with the most murderous hatreds and persecutions, based on political and dogmatic distinctions. But how contradictory it is to the teachings of Jesus himself! How utterly irreconcilable it is with the image and spirit of that meek and lowly Son of Man who said that he "came not to destroy men's lives but to save them;" who declared, "of mine own self I can do nothing;" who modestly deprecated all personal homage, asking, "Why callest thou me good?" who sat with the publican, and forgave the harlot, and denounced bigotry in many an immortal breathing of charity; and who, even in his final agony, pardoned and prayed for his murderers! What reason is there for supposing that he who was so infinitely gentle, unselfish, forgiving, when on earth, will undergo such a fiendish metamorphosis in his exaltation and return? It is the most monstrous, the most atrocious travesty of the truth that ever was perpetrated by the superstitious ignorance and audacity of the human mind. It is a direct transference into the Godhead of the most egotistical and hateful feelings of a bad man. No good man who had been ever so grossly misconceived, vilified, and wronged, if he saw his enemies prostrate in submissive terror at his feet, perfectly powerless before his authority, could bear to trample on them and wreak vengeance on them. He would say, "Unhappy ones, fear not; you have misunderstood me; I will not injure you; if there be any favor which I can bestow on you, freely take it." And is it not an incredible blasphemy to deny to the deified Christ a magnanimity equal to that which any good man would exhibit?
It is with pain and regret that the writer has penned the foregoing sentences, which, he supposes, some persons will read with the feeling that they are inexcusable misrepresentations, others, with a shocked and resentful horror, relieving itself in the cry, Infidelity! Blasphemy! The reply of the writer is simply that, while reluctant to wound the sensibility of any, he feels bound in conscience to make this exposition, because he believes it to be a true statement; and loyalty to truth is the first duty of every man. Truth is the will of God, obedience to which alone is sound morality, reverential love of which alone is pure piety. Frightful as is the picture drawn above of Christ in the judgment, it is impossible to deny, without utter stultification, that every lineament of it is logically implied in the formula. "There is no salvation for the man who unbelievingly rejects, no damnation for the man who believingly accepts, the official Christ and his blood." And what teacher will have the presumption to deny that just this has been, and still is, the central dogma in the faith of ecclesiastical Christendom? The legitimate result of this view, unflinchingly carried out, and applied to the precise point we now have in hand, is seen in that horrible portrayal of the Last Judgment wherewith Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Rome. The great anatomical artist consistently depicts Christ as an almighty athlete, towering with vindictive wrath, flinging thunderbolts on the writhing and helpless wilderness of his victims. The popular conception of Christ in the judgment has been borrowed from the type of a king, who, hurling off the incognito in which he has been outraged, breaks out in his proper insignia, to sentence and trample his scorners. The true conception is to be fashioned after the type given in his own example during his life. So far as Christ is the representative of God, there must be no vanity or egotism in him. Every such quality ascribed to the Godhead is anthropomorphizing sophistry. However much more God may be, he is the General Mind of the Universe. He includes, while he transcends, all other beings. Now, the General Mind must represent the interests of all, the disinterested good of the whole, and not any particular and selfish exactions, or resentful caprices, fashioned on the pattern shown among human egotists by a kingly despot.
The Church, in developing Christianity out of Judaism through the person and life of Jesus, has given prominence and emphasis to the wrong elements, seeking to universalize and perpetuate, in a transformed guise, the local spirit and historic errors of that Pharisaic sect against which he had himself launched all his invective. That temper of bigotry and ceremonial technicality which hates all outside of its own pale as reprobate, and which ultimated itself in the virtual Pharisaic formula, "Keep the hands and platter washed, and it is no matter how full of uncleanness you are within," at a later period embodied itself through the leaders of ecclesiastical Orthodoxy in the central dogma, "Nothing but faith in Christ can avail man anything before God." Instead of this the true doctrine is, Nothing but obedience, surrender, and trust, personal penitence and aspiration, can avail man anything before God.
The Christians, as the Jews did before them, have made a wrong selection of the doctrine to be, on the one hand, particularized and left behind; on the other hand, carried forward and universalized. This immense error demands correction. Let us notice a few specimens in exemplication of it. Jehovah is not the only true God in distinction from odious idols; but Brahma, Ahura Mazda, Osiris, Zeus, Jupiter, and the rest, are names given by different nations to the Infinite Spirit whom each nation worships according to its own light. The Jews and the Christians are not the only chosen people of God; but all nations are his people, chosen in the degree of their harmony with his will. The providence of God is not an exceptional interference from without, exclusively for the Jews and Christians; but it is for all, a steady order of laws within, as much to be seen in the shining of the sun, or the regular harvest, as in any shocks of political calamity and glory. Not the Messiah alone reveals God; but, in his degree, every ruler, prophet, priest, every man who stands for wisdom, justice, purity, and devotion, represents him. It is not doctrinal belief in the Messiah, but vital adoption of his spirit and character, of the principles of real goodness, that constitutes the salvation of the disciple. We are to look not for the resurrection of the flesh from the grave, but for the resurrection of the soul from all forms of sin, ignorance, and misery. It is the universal prevalence of truth and virtue, knowledge, love, and peace, in the hearts of men, not the physical reign of the returning Messiah, which will make a millennium on earth. The kingdom of God which Judaism localized exclusively in Palestine, and the early church exclusively in heaven or on the millennial earth, should be recognized in every place, whether above the sky or on the globe, where duty is done, and pure affection, trust, and joy experienced; for God is not excluded from all other spaces by any enthronization in one. We ought not to cling, as to permanent fixtures of revealed truth, to the rigid outlines of that scheme of faith which was struck out when the three story house of the Hebrew cosmogony showed the limits of what men knew, before exact science was born, or criticism conceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia and the Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculative theological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstruct and read just them, from time to time, in accordance with the demands of the growing body of human knowledge.
Reflecting, in the light of these general ideas of truth, on the whole subject of the current doctrine of the end of the world and the day of judgment, we shall see that that doctrine presents no valid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out of the historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianity arose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by the unconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figures came, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginative collection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literal truths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historical and critical information for entering into the book from the point of view occupied by its author, it is just as evident that its imagery was meant to describe the immediate conflict of Hebrew Christianity with pagan Rome, and not the literal blotting out of the universe, as it is unquestionable that the book of Daniel depicts, not the impending destruction of the world, but the relations of the chosen nation with the hostile empires of Persia, Media, Babylon, and Macedonia, from which they had suffered so much, and which they then hoped speedily to put beneath their feet. The slain Lamb, standing amidst the throne of God, with seven eyes and seven horns; Death, on a pale horse, with Hell following him; the woman, clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet; the great red dragon, whose tail casts to the earth the third part of the stars of heaven; the worm wood star, that falls as a blazing lamp, and turns a third of the waters of the earth into bitterness; the seven thunders, seven seals, seven vials, seven spirits before the throne, seven candlesticks, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven epistles to the seven churches, seven horns, seven headed beast, all these things must, perforce, be taken as free poetic imagery; it would require a lunatic or an utterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why, then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the most violent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements of fact? If the rest is symbolism, so are the pictures of the avenging armies of angels, the reeking gulf of sulphur, and the golden streets of the city.
The entire scheme of thought, as it still stands in the mind of the Orthodox believer, is to be rejected as spurious, because it rests on a process of imaginative accumulation and transference which is absolutely illegitimate; namely, the association and universalizing of political and military images, which are then hardened from emblems into facts, and cast over upon the mutual relations of God and mankind. We ought to break open the metaphors, extract their significance, and throw the shells aside. But ignorant bibliolatary and ecclesiasticism insist on worshipping the shells, with no insight of their contents.
There is one all important fact which should convince of their error those who hold the current view of a general judgment at the end of the world as having been revealed from God through Christ. We refer to the fact that the system of ideas in which a final resurrection and judgment of the dead are logical parts, existed in the Zoroastrian theology five or six centuries before the birth of Christ. It was adopted thence by the Jews, and afterwards adopted from the Jews by the Christians. If, therefore, this doctrine be a revelation from God, it was revealed by him to the Persians in a dark and credulous antiquity. In that case it is Zoroaster and not Christ to whom we are indebted for the central dogmas of our religion! No, these things are imagery, not essence, the human element of imaginative error with which the divine element of truth has been overlaid, and from whose darkening and corrupt company this is to be extricated.
There are, in the New Testament, in addition to the relevant metaphors which we have already examined, several others of great impressiveness and importance. We must now explain these, separate the truths and errors popularly associated with them, and leave the subject with an exposition of the real method of the divine government and the true idea of the day of judgment, in contrast with the prevalent ecclesiastical perversions of them.
The part played in theological speculation and popular religious belief by imagery borrowed from the scenery and methods of judicial tribunals, the procedures and enforcement of penal law, has not been less prominent and profound than the influence exerted by natural, political, and military metaphors. The power, the pomp, the elaborate spectacle, the mysterious formalities, the frightful penalties, the intense personal hopes and fears, associated with the trial of culprits in courts or before the head of a nation, must always have sunk so deeply into the minds of men as to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typical stamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and the future world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctly shown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before the sarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake to be deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of the departed, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, together with forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of a particular sin, assembled on the shore and sat in judgment. The deceased was put on his trial before them: and, if justified, awarded an honorable burial; if condemned, disgraced by the withholding of the funeral rites. Now the papyrus rolls found with the mummies give a description of the judgment of the dead, a picture of the fate of the disembodied soul in the Egyptian Hades, minutely agreeing in many particulars with the foregoing ceremony. Ma, the Goddess of Justice, leads the soul into the judgment hall, before the throne of Osiris, where stands a great balance with a symbol of truth in one scale, the symbol of a human heart in the other. The accuser is heard, and the deceased defends himself before forty two divine judges who preside over the forty two sins from which he must be cleared. The gods Horus and Anubis attend to the balance, and Thoth writes down the verdict and the sentence. The soul then passes on through adventures of penance or bliss, the details of which are obviously copied, with fanciful changes and additions, from the connected scenery and experience known on the earth.
Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scene in human society so impressive as the periodical sitting in judgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of those half deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, the Emperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in the gate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversible administration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing in purple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest to his person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next in order; his body guards and various classes of servants, in distinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast masses of troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must have composed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared the accusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captives taken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who had complaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. The monarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executioners carried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, some sent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When the tribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended, there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darkness there, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place.
Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in some degree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary in human governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, the judge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of the social order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties, wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminals gathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, may go on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up of arrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural it would be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery, summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their doom according to his sovereign pleasure?
The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times, that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.
This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.
The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead, Minos, who presided at the trial of souls arriving from Europe; Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold; the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct the tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future in forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom, of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth, while the Judge and his officers take their places in the Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology, should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely, the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one, because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal truths are wholly different from their relations with each other in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity. God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual, results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those judicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken and hitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable, the circumstances are so completely different. The true illustration of the divine government must be adopted from physiology and psychology, where the perfect working of the Creator is exemplified, not from the forum and the court, where the imperfect artifices of men are exhibited.
God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions of their own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kick of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. The thief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, the philosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just and intrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in the fitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discords with the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus is the daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded with thrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream of devouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed of uncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions of universal good; the vices represent private opposition to those conditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting and cooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonistic and repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfect retribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel its working, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of the secrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his own experience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far from refuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truth of that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward." Those who consider themselves saints indulge in an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinners have their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next." The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical with the first law of motion in the material sphere; action and reaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law being instantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be no occasion for a final epoch to redress its accumulated disbalancements. It has no disbalancements, save in our erroneous or defective vision.
The true conception of the relation of the all judging Creator to his creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies all finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices, fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent, constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance, originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a truth.
For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered, not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact, and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares, because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a flaming furnace.
Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "When the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moral meaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializing degradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appears clearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wife of Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his right hand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said, "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give." The imagery meant that the missionary assistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth and love he came to establish, would be represented in common with himself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world. When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, as indicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and that his favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, and glory, he solemnly repudiated it.
There is yet another and a wholly different style of imagery employed by Jesus to convey his instructions as to the judgment which is to separate the justified from the condemned. The consideration of this species of imagery would afford an independent proof, of a cogent character, that they strangely misapprehend the mind of Jesus who interpret the moral meaning of his parable in an outward and dramatic sense. The metaphors to which we now refer are of a domestic and convivial nature, based on some of the most impressive social customs of the Oriental nations. It was the habit of kings, governors, and other rich and powerful men, to give, on certain occasions, great banquets, to which the guests were invited by special favor. These feasts were celebrated with the utmost pomp and splendor, by night, in brilliantly illuminated apartments. The contrast of the blazing lights, the richly costumed guests, the music and talk, the honor and luxury within, set against the darkness, the silence, the envious poverty and misery without, must have deeply struck all who saw it, and would naturally secure rhetorical reflections in speech and literature. The Jews illustrated their idea of the Kingdom of God by the symbol of a table at which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were banqueting, and would be joined by all their faithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing how a king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast and sent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagery still more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Is it not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended it as an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he first announced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, having rejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to the Gentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joy and honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused to accept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias that the parable has been perverted into a description of the Last Judgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to or exclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter of personal experience in the heart of the disciple and in the society of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, without which no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, and loving character. In consequence of his destitution of this, Judas, although seated at the table, with the most honored guests, in the very presence of his Lord, was proved to have no right there, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, his inability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom, constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind of Jesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually in the present, and not something to be shown collectively and materially at the end of the world, appears from the great number of different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had he meant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the last day, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had a distinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one and the same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach that all who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct to assimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby made members of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsic unfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that his fertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey this one truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in which the images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agree must be the essential thought. Now the parables differ in the forms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms are metaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fate to the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is the vital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist in anything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere is something moral.
The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the Creator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympathetic connection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing the verdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need to project the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of a trial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into an overwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt, was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully for good in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be as much better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real and more pervasive.
Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power of justice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, the genuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career of that being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment; because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the end at which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If we could survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view, and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedly we should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of each ephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of its sun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as the final day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then the sum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from all further alteration by him, passing into history as a collective cause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls in space, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal will tell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will not tremble at the thought of a judgment so unavoidable and so tremendous as this! The votaries of superstition are mistaken in supposing that the removal of their false beliefs will destroy or weaken the sanctions of duty among men. The removal of imaginary sanctions will but cause the true ones to appear more clearly and to work more effectively.
The judgment of God then, we conclude, is no vengeful wreaking of arbitrary royal volitions; but it is the return of the laws of being on all deeds, actual or ideal. This is, in itself, perpetual and infallible: but it sometimes forces itself on our recognition in sudden shocks or crises caused by the gathering obstacles and opposition made to it by our ignorance, vice, and crime. Every other doctrine of the Divine judgment is either an error or a figurative statement of this one. In the latter case, the physical cover should be dissolved and thrown away, the moral nucleus laid bare and appropriated. But the popular mind of Christendom has unfortunately pursued the contrary course, first exaggerating and consolidating the metaphors, then putting their forms literally in the place of their meaning.
The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in the Apocalypse, the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as blood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the great white throne, from before the face of whose occupant the frightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of the dead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and the judging of the dead out of the things written therein, this scenic array has, by its terrible vividness and power of fanciful plausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken such a tenacious hold on the feelings of the Christian world, secured for itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself with such a mass of associations, that it has actually come to be regarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act as such. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think on the subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books are provided in heaven with the names of men in them and recording angels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by single entry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white dais raised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. On what principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayal rendered as emblem, the rest accepted as absolute verity? If the blood red warrior on his white horse followed by the shining cavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimerical angels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror struck fugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incredible walls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yielding twelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burning sulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of the dead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The reader smiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in Leaven amidst boiling pots of walrus meat, while in hell the fish lines of the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed by falling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give for the reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his present experience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process of thought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally credit the following verses:
"There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and in great books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down The good ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God. The other keeps his dreadful day book open Till sunset, that we may repent, which doing, The record of the action fades away, And leaves a line of white across the page."
No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in the New Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in his treasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled in it. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents?
When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament were written, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment was almost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. At any instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, the troops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, and the sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left. Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict in the flame of the west," the believers felt that the supreme Dies iroe was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation after generation died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approach seemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its early prominence into the background. But as it retreated, and became more obscure and vague in its date and other details, it grew ever more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after being bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years," should "be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still continued to expect him.
The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts: the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels, in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of thousands of years.
But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation, when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day. Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross; the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and the repulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders who had escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in black coffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and, finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. The procession tediously winds to the great square in front of the cathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix with extinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his court and the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by their presence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish in long drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a more vivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than the fact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of an Auto da Fe magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth, Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiars standing by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil his bidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, the crucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe; the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helpless before him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at the inexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutly thank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it is cruel?
Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, the millennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if the literature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books, sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pile as big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about a quarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the time for the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic in the United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germany have also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebrated London preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End," and "The Great Tribulation," have been circulated in tens of thousands of copies, is now the most prominent representative of this catastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculous by his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has become more an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematical calculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalyptic poetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerable sect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the most illiterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to the fanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead an eleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiously wait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake, pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoric shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles them as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some of them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope that its end is at hand,
"Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathway for the coming Judge!"
But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception. In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those who still cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment has been put forward as far as the day of creation has been put backward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before the theatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; more and more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic jurisdiction in the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. The time is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit of national separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred, whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, all others with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies," will give way to that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which sees brethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equal salvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the self righteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and so relentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over the idea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chief captains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, saying to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?" then the temper of this faith will be seen to be as wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as a remnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the whole mind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the disciples wished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents, rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." Many a bigoted and complacent dogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to day, fails to read his own heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishly fancying himself better and safer, on account of his blind conservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance of science. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses of the mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The whole ecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No such gigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza, will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, as freshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his will through his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness and justice; and forever may all his creatures come to him unimpeded, and trust in him without limit.
Away, then, monstrous horrors, bred in the night of the past! Dreadful incubi! too cruelly and too long ye have sat on the breast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it is time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels, fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims! Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer. Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into the light. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinions where all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itself shall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made to outgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning the sun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night before him. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now we fling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope to escape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history. For we believe that all history is by its own enactment indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.
Chapter III
THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION.
THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the church, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failing faith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one tries to show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prison house of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that God himself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are bound to accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For the reasons which we will immediately proceed to give, this representation must be rejected as a mistake.
The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is a mythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque and frightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separated from them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, the substance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomless pit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God will confine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after their bodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality and religion, something belonging to the two departments of descriptive geography and police history. The existence or nonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for the wicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. In earlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerous caves, lakes, volcanos, as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus, Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere were believed to be literally entrances to hell. So famous and eminent a man as Saint Gregory the Great, when the great Sicilian volcano was seen to be increasingly agitated, taught that it was owing to the press of lost souls, rendering it necessary to enlarge the approach to their prison. With the increase of knowledge, the localization of hell was subsequently by many authors, made a part of cosmography, and shifted about among the comets, the moon and the sun, although most people still think that it is the interior of the earth. But, the best theologians of all denominations, the most authoritative thinkers of all schools, now hold that the supernatural revelations of God are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and do not include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry and mathematics.
God is not a local king, ruling his subjects by means of political machinery and external interferences; he is the omnipresent Creator, spiritually sustaining and governing his creatures from within by means of the laws which determine their experience, the action and reaction between their faculties and their surrounding conditions. Accordingly, the sphere of direct revelations from the spirit of God to the spirit of man is limited to the implications in the divine logic of the soul and its life, that is, to moral and religious truths. The facts of history and cosmology are left for the processes of natural discovery. Whether there be or be not a localized hell of material tortures lies not within the domain of revelation, but is a problem of physical science. And science demonstrates, from the weight of the globe, that it is solid; and not, according to the current belief, a hollow shell containing a sea of flame packed with the floating hosts of the lost.
Furthermore, the only mode in which the truth of such a doctrine could be made known is wholly aside from the method of supernatural revelation. God does not utter his thoughts to his chosen messengers in words or other outward signs as a man does. Men communicate information to one another by voice, gesture, drawing, writing or other mechanical devices. It is the natural mistake of a crude age to suppose that God does the same, breathing verbal formularies into the of minds of his selected servants. But this is not the case. Revelation is not to receive an announcement; it is to perceive a truth. Since God is infinite, we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finer and fuller harmony with the works and laws of God, thus fulfilling the human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divine conditions, and obtain new insight of the ways and designs of God. They experience purer and richer ideas and emotions than others, and may afterwards impart them to others, thus transmitting the revelation to them. For this new enlightenment, sanctification, or rise of life, is what alone constitutes a true revelation. Now if there be a local and physical hell, it is not a moral truth which the inspired soul can see, but a scientific fact which can be perceived only by the senses or deduced by the logical intellect. If a man could travel to every nook of the creation he might discover whether there were such a hell or not. But you cannot discover a spiritual truth by any amount of outward travel. When a soul is so delivered from egotism, or the jar of self will against universal law, and brought into such high harmony with the spirit of the whole, as to perceive this divine law of life, "He who dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him," then he is inspired to see a religious truth. He has obtained a divine revelation. But we cannot conceive of any degree of exaltation into unison with God which would enable a man to see the fact that the centre of the earth or the surface of the sun or any other spot, is a place of fire set apart as the penal abode of the damned, and that it is crowded with burning sulphur and unimaginable forms of wickedness and agony. Such a doctrine is out of the province, and its conveyance irreconcilable with the method of revelation, which consists not in an exterior communication of scientific facts to messengers selected to receive them, but in an interior unveiling of religious truths to souls prepared to see them.
In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell, a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because it is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the mythology of the world, a natural product of the poetic imagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages and lands men have recognized the difference between the good and the bad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtue represented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that guilt and vice represented the insurrection of private or lower and transient desire against public or higher and more lasting good; and have felt that the former deserved to be praised and rewarded, the latter to be blamed and punished. In all ages and all nations society has teemed with devices for the distribution of these returns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict. There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable in art which has not been used as a means for the punishment of criminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions of despots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned before judicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to every species of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment, fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen, burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wild beasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while he banquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants and favorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered in dungeons, plied with every conceivable indignity and misery, bastinadoed, bowstrung, or torn in pieces with lingering torture. Here we have the germ of hell. To get the fully developed popular doctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravate the known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflicted on criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive and pitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as a representation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes. Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and acts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished the types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned and tormented forever.
This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is, is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all mythological construction in contrast both with inspired perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truth in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action of our faculties in correspondence with some relation in the reality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this, employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge. This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine of an eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural and punitive horrors of the present state have been collected, intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world of unmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of the vengeance of God on his insurgent subjects.
Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason can rest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: that what is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions; that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoretic approaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedly recognized as such. This regulative principle of thought is grossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in a material hell.
Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell among different peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we see them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic, judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a vast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whose heads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lake of venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers and murderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, or is it mythology?
The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of the post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of the terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in the extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort of penalty and pang known in Egypt. The same thing may be affirmed with quadruple emphasis of the Hindu doctrine of future punishment. In the Hindu hells, truly, the possibilities of horror are exhausted. To enumerate their sufferings in anything like their own detail would require a large volume. The Vishnu Parana names twenty eight distinct hells, assigning each one to a particular class of sinners; and it adds that there are hundreds of others, in which the various classes of offenders undergo the penalties of their misdeeds. There are separate hells for thieves, for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, for those who insult a priest, and so on. Some of the victims are chained to posts of red hot steel and lashed with flexible flames: others are forced to devour the most horrible filth. Some are mangled and eaten by ravenous birds, others are squeezed into chests of fire and locked up for millions of years. These examples may serve as a small specimen of the infernal ingenuity displayed in the descriptions of the Hindu hells, which are all of one substantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery.
The Parsees hold that when a bad man dies his soul remains by the body three days and nights, seeing all the sins it has ever committed, and anxiously crying, "Whither shall I go? Who will save me?" On the fourth day devils come and thrust the bad soul into fetters and lead it to the bridge that reaches from earth to heaven. The warder of the bridge weighs the deeds of the wicked soul in his balance, and condemns it. The devils then fling the soul down and beat it cruelly. It shrieks and groans, struggles, and calls for help; but all in vain. It is forced on toward hell, when it is suddenly met by a hideous and hateful maiden. It demands, "Who art thou, O, maiden, uglier and more detestable than I ever saw in the world?" She replies, "I am no maiden; I am thine own wicked deeds, O, thou hateful unbeliever furnished with bad thoughts and words." After further disagreeable adventures, the soul is plunged into the abode of the devil, where the darkness and foul odor are so thick that they can be grasped. Fed with horrid viands, such as snakes, scorpions, poison, there the wicked soul must remain until the day of resurrection.
Now, no enlightened Christian scholar or thinker will hesitate with one stroke to brush away all the details of these pagan descriptions of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leaving nothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution for the guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in the ecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we see the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitions incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hells of the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither is that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all illustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association of things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local hell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or the Persian, would not urge in behalf of his.
We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodox belief in a material hell from its simple beginning to its subsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol or underworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the Old Testament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm, gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. The dead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of the survivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there. The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presence existing and moving wherever their conscious thought located him. The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into another adjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous space thus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in the burial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in the recollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was an imaginative dilatation of the grave.
But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest and peace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, and kindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say in general that these ideas were joined with the supposed world of the dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar result has been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is, by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrors experienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in this world is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men, in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in the next world by one who has at his command all possible modes of pain, should think of the application of fire there. But happily, we are not left to this possible conjecture.
Few influences sank more deeply into the Hebrew mind then the legend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol, Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority of Moses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumed two hundred and fifty of their confederates. In this story, rebellion against a prophet of God, fire and submersion in Sheol, are fused into one thought as a type of the future punishment of the wicked.
But another narrative has been of far greater importance in this direction, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Cities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted and volcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandoned to vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When a terrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with all their people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminous flame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in after time should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone from heaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take form in their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doom of the wicked. So it did.
At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendency and completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested vale the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children alive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fierce fire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten and hymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all the refuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in a conflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst an uncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was cast over into the future state as a representation of the fate awaiting the wicked.
Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to have criminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects of their own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, and there burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example of this given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had the furnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and ordered Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cast into it, furnished both the Jews and the Christians with another type of the punishment of hell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, and to be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament. The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to be chained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of the Church fathers, and in the visions of the monks of the Middle Age, this image constantly occupies a conspicuous place. And thus, finally, the common notion of hell became an underground world of burning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full of fiends and shrieking souls.
Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devil in the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hot chains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands he seizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, and with his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat. Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by their tongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldrons of fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten on an anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strained through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hell will admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but they will say it is the product of a benighted age, and long since outgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations in the Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudes of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract from a little book called "The Sight of Hell," recently published with high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among the children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J. Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passage which we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series of tracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having a large sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeon there is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazing fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle boiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. There is a little child in a red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent, and thus would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood." Of these diabolical horrors, drawn out through hundreds of pages, the orthodox Protestant may say, "Oh, this is only a piece of Popish superstition. We all repudiate it as a most repulsive and absurd fancy."
Well, what then will he say if representations, though perhaps not quite so grossly graphic in circumstance, yet absolutely identical in principle, are set before him from the fresh utterances of hundreds of the most distinguished Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian preachers and theologians? It would be easy to present whole volumes of apposite citations. But two or three will be enough. John Henry Newman in that one of his parochial sermons, entitled, "On the Individuality of the Soul," gives us accounts of hell which for unshrinking detail of materiality will compare with the most frightful passages of Oriental mythology. George Bull, Lord Bishop of Saint Davids, in his volume of sermons declares that all who die with any sin unrepented of, "are immediately consigned to a place and state of irreversible misery a place of horrid darkness where there shines not the least glimmering of light or comfort." Mr. Spurgeon asserts, "There is a real fire in hell a fire exactly like that which we have on earth, except that it will torture without consuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone in hell: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, each brimfull of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops of blood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; not only conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy head tormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from their sockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented with horrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in the fire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet undestroyed. Ah! fine lady, who takest care of thy goodly fashioned face, that fair face shall be scarred with the claws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodly apparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It ill becomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you are only feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, and the Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you will find it one day to be so." Is not this paragraph a disgusting combination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept aside and forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash, loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with which Christendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceived and surfeited.
Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell all the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure truth remains that God will forever see that justice is done, virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In what way is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell. For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a natural product of the mythological action of the human mind in its development through the circumstances of history, but when regarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It is a figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free
mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retains by force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority. In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a fac simile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable of becoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of uttering faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identical with them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, these are spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut up in a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with a whip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You may crush or blast the visible organism in connection with which the soul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch a sentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists, what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It is idle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know. Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement and penalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prison house of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority of mankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before the truth of the absolute spirituality of mind.
In those early times, when military, political, judicial and convivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructive phenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had given us their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidable that men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs, each having his own empire and striving to secure his own subjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes to be thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thought evil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbal phantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out and blent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards none as enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures, everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but to harmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better out of good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that God is the pervading Creator who governs all from within by the continuous action and reaction between every life and its environing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this the incompetent conception of God as a political king, governing by external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This deludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, which has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open turnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The great king's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universe is the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of this broad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, empty into hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedial return of resisted law on a being out of tune with some just condition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty and tyranny of the mythological hell, supported by the constant drilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vested interests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have held the human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. In a Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersed in the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth, boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once in sixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top. As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, and sink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their life on earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and the Priesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrine resting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power and sensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When at last in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away what a long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw!
If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which is a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space, it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment some more just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played such a tremendous part in the religious history of the world must be based on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth may be. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot be without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from the monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth carried in the awful word, hell?
Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in time and space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever the spiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are not to exclude it from the present state and confine it to the future, as those seem to do who say that men go to hell after death. Being a personal experience and not a material place, many are in it now and here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we to exclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, as those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time, accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions. We are not to say of the sinner that he goes to hell when he dies, but that hell comes to him when he feels the returns of his evil deeds. It is a state within rather than a place without.
The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to the will of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universal order or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as the vulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying sameness into which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is a thing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with the individual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays. There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless nevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncratic as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil experience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be one monotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering with the different elements and degrees afforded, and softening or ending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements and degrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty, faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell being the consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonistic to some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, in every instance, must be measured by the variations of this antagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are the results or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount of reflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of all the mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannot tell why the principles of our destiny should be as we find them, we can see what the facts of the case actually are as revealed in the history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concerns us. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly into the nature of hell.
The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any special place or time, is respectively the experience of good, and the experience of evil. But what are good and evil? Good is the conscious realization of universal order, the absolute fruition of being, the fulfillment of individual function, in accordance with the conditions for the most perfect and prolonged fulfillment of the universal totality of functions. Supposing that there were only one instance and form of conscious life, with no possibility of conflicting claims within or without, then good would be to that life simply the fulfillment of the functions of its nature. But the moment a being is set in relation with other beings like itself, and also made aware of various gradations of importance among its own interior faculties, then the definition of good is no longer the simple fulfillment of function, or the mere gratification of desire; but it becomes the fulfillment of function in such a manner as to secure the greatest total quality and quantity of fulfilled function. Now evil is the opposite or negation of this. It is whatever lessens the fruition of life, prevents the fulfillment of function, contracts or mars the realization of universal order in the consciousness of a living being. Thus evil is not merely the keeping of an individual desire from its own proper good. But every gratification of desire which involves the winning of a less important good at the expense of a more important one is evil; or, on the other hand, the evil of sacrificing or denying a gratification in itself legitimate, becomes good when it is the means for securing a more authoritative gratification. Let us try to make these abstract statements intelligible by illustration.
The appropriation of nutriment is a good, the indispensable method for sustaining life. It is right that we should eat and drink; and the pleasure which accompanies the proper performance of the function is the reflex approval of the Creator. The refusal fitly to take and relish our food brings debility, disease, pain, and premature death. Whether this refusal results from absorption in other employment or from some superstitious belief, it is a violation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent suffering and dissolution are the retributive hell or reflex signals, painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if the pleasure of gratifying appetite becomes a motive for its own sake and leads to excessive indulgence, the superior good of permanent health and vigor is sacrificed to the far inferior transient good of a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomach is plunged into the horrid hell of nightmare: the gourmand, pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy, shrieks from the twinging hell of gout. There is no divine malice in this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distorted arrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in every respect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently and universally, will secure the greatest amount and the best quality of life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interferes with this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moral faculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for the sake of some passing gratification in the present. God commands man to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning of a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do this measures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity of men. The failure to do this is the condition on which every infernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A man may feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royal powers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness set in, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. How much better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut off this single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast into hell.
Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged order experienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of faculty and motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who gives himself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, is thereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consuming passion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoarding and gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. His time and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into an obscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges of the universe, nothing of the sweetest delights of humanity. Contracted, stooping, poorly clad, ill fed, self neglected, despised by everybody, dwelling alone in a bleak and squalid chamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is a conglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear of robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of God, fear of death, all fused together by a lust for money. Is he not in a competent hell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the elevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. His unclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns the spectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open his soul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank and bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by that respect for the right of property which is a condition essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he acts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. The evil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, is incomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means for the death of society. The resulting sense of hostility between himself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and from God, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience, and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt in proportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritual disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has disbalanced and broken.
These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of the true idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God is expressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks which indicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and the accordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit of them. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance and authority, every level of function beneath kept subservient to every one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaven through the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God, the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of public motives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher and greater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell through the universe.
The lowest function of man is a simple momentary gratification of sense, as, for example, an act of nutrition. The highest function of which his nature is capable is the surrender of himself to the universal order, the sympathetic identification of himself with the eternal law and weal of the whole. Between those vast extremes there are hundreds of intermediate functions, rising in worth and authority from the direct gratifications of appetite to the ideal appropriations of transcendental good, from the titillation given by a pinch of snuff to the thrill imparted by an imaginative contemplation of the redeemed state of humanity a million years ahead. But, throughout the entire range, all the sin and guilt from which hell is produced consist in obeying a lower motive in preference to a higher one, making some narrow or selfish good paramount over a wider or disinterested one. A man, educated as a physician, practiced his profession on scientific principles, and nearly starved on an income of seven hundred dollars a year. He then set up as a quack, compounded a worthless nostrum, and, by dint of impudence, advertising, and other charlatanry, made eighteen thousand dollars a year, and justified his conduct on the ground of his success. By falsehood and cheating he preyed on the credulity of the public. If all men were like him, society could not exist. The meanness of his soul, shutting him out from the most exquisite and exalted prerogatives of human nature, is the revenge which the universe takes on such a man the hell in which God envelops him. A manufacturer turns out certain products by means of a chemical process which adds seven per cent. to his profit, but shortens the average life of his workmen five years. All mankind would indignantly denounce him with an instinctive recognition of his wickedness in thus erecting the profane standard of pecuniary gain above the sacredness of the lives of his brothers. But when of two men in deadly peril from an approaching explosion only one can escape, and the stronger, instead of monopolizing the chance, as he might, stands back and lays down his life in saving the weaker, it is a deed of heroic virtue, applauded by all men, supported by the whole moral creation which derives new beauty and sweetness from it. It radiates a peaceful bliss of self approval through the breast before it is mangled and cold, and fills the soul with a serene joy as it flies to God. The essential merit of such an action is the subjection of that selfishness which is the principle of all sin, and whose recoil is the spring trap of hell, to that disinterestedness which is the germ of redemption and the perfume of heaven.
It is not an unfrequent occurrence for a mixture of heaven and hell to be experienced. Here is an able and upright merchant who is about to fail, in consequence of disasters which he could neither foresee nor prevent, and for which he is in no sense responsible. He shrinks from bankruptcy with inexpressible shame and distress. He is mortified, cut to the quick, robbed of sleep, can hardly look his creditors in the face. Now, he reflects, "This is not my fault. I have been honest, prudent, economical, unwearied in effort, I have done my duty to the best of my ability. God approves me, and all good men would if they knew the exact facts." If that assurance does not shed an element of heaven into his hell, spread a soothing veil of light and oil over his stormy trouble, then it is because his pride is greater than his self respect, his vanity more keen than his conscience is strong, his regard for appearances more influential than his knowledge of the truth. And in that case the misery he suffers is the penalty of his excessive self sensitiveness.
The elements of hell are pain, slavery, imprisonment, rebellion, forced exertion, forced inaction, shame, fear, self condemnation, social condemnation, universal condemnation, aimlessness, and despair. He who seeks good only in the just order of its successive standards, gratifying no lower function, except in subservience to the higher ones, escapes these experiences, feels that he fulfills his destiny, and is an approved freeman of God. The service of truth and good alone makes free; all service of evil is slavery and wretchedness. For freedom is spontaneous obedience to that which has a right to command. The thirsty man who quaffs a glass of cold water does an act of liberty; but he who constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid and despotic appetite, knows that he is a slave, and feels condemned, and chafes in the hell of his bondage.
The dissipated sluggards and thieves who feed the vices and prey on the interests of the community, writhe under the rebuke of the higher laws they break in enthroning their selfish propensities above the cardinal standards of the public good; and in the stale monotony of their indulgences, they know nothing of the glorious zest shed by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of the virtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced on their way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows the forge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with all good not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generous sympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good it contemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an envious man in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to the experience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, and hate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys which sinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and then to lock the bolts behind.
A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, from the central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest and outer most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law of salvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending and expanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truth and life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are the reverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the law of perdition, which guides the soul in a descending and contracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and viler attractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve the superior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests and invitations above. When the members of a family erect their separate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniously blending around a common authority of truth and love, when they live in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, a poisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, a fiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domestic atmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is a concentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentions and encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishing alternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to be deprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of our being, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closer definition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoided or neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviously the inevitable result and penalty of sin.
The great mistake in the popular view or mythological doctrine of hell has arisen from conceiving of God under the image of a political ruler, acting from without, by wilful methods, and inflicting arbitrary judgments on his rebellious subjects. He should be conceived as the dynamic Creator, acting from within, through the intrinsic order and laws of things, for the instruction and guidance of his creatures. His condemnation is the inevitable culmination of a discordant state of being, rather than the verdict of a vindictive judge or the sentence of a forensic monarch. Every retribution is an impinge of the creature in the creation, and, so far from expressing destructive wrath, is an act of the self rectifying mechanism of the universe to readjust the part with the whole. With what pernicious folly, what cruel superstition, men have attributed their own miserable passions to their imperturbable Maker, breaking his infinite perfection into all sorts of frightful shapes, as seen through the blur and effervescence of their own imperfections! So the sun seems to go down with his garments rolled in blood, and to set angrily in a stormy ocean of fire: but really the great lamp of the universe shines serenely from the unalterable fixture of his central seat, and all this spectral tempest of blaze and glare is but a refraction of his beams through our vexed atmosphere.
God being infinitely perfect, does not change his dispositions and modes of action like a fickle man. His intentions and deeds are the same here and everywhere, now and always. If we wish to learn in what manner God will prepare a hell and punish the impenitent wicked after death, we must not, as men did in the barbaric and mythological ages, make an induction from the treatment of criminals by capricious and revengeful rulers in this world; we must see how God himself now treats his disobedient children for their demerits here, assured that his eternal temper and method are identical with his temporal temper and method.
Well, then, how does God treat offenders now? Incapable of anger or caprice, he retains his own steady procedures and absolute serenity unaltered, but leaves the culprits to endure the effects of their perverted bearing towards him and towards the order he has established.
If a man lies or defiles himself, or blasphemes, or murders, God does not dash him from a cliff or cast him into a furnace of fire. There would be no connection of cause and effect in
that; and to suppose it, is a gross superstition. He leaves the offender to the reactions of his own acts, the discordant vileness of his own degradation, the devouring return of his own passions, to punish him for his sin, and to purge him of his wrong. The true retribution of every wicked deed is contained in the recalcitration of its own motive. What fitter penalty can the soul suffer than that of being embraced in the hellish atmosphere of its own bad spirit, to teach it to reform itself and cultivate a better spirit?
What, then, is the meaning of the fear, suffering and horror, which so often accompany or follow sin? They do not, as has been commonly supposed, express the indignation and revengefulness of God. No, at their very darkest, they must suggest the shadow of his aggrieved will, not the lurid frown of his rage. A part of the discord which sin is and introduces, they denote the remedial struggles of nature and grace to restore the perverted being to its normal condition. If you put your finger in the fire the burning pain is the reaction of your act, and that pain is not vengeance, but preservative education. When some frightful disease seizes on a man, the inflammation and convulsions which succeed are the violent spring of the constitution on the enemy, its desperate attempt to shake off the fell grasp, and bring the organism to health and peace again. These efforts either succeed, or in the exhausting shocks the body is destroyed. It is the same with the soul. Sin is the displacement of the hierarchy of authorities in the soul, the misbalancing of its energies, the disturbance of its health and peace. And all the varieties of retribution are the recoil of the injured faculties, the struggles of the insulted authorities, to vindicate and reestablish themselves. Now, these efforts, if the soul is indestructible, must always, at last, be successful. Health in the body is the harmonious adjustment of its energies with its conditions; and a sufficient modicum must be obtained or death ensues. Virtue in the soul is the harmony of its powers with the laws of God; the measure of this is the measure of spiritual life; and granting the soul to be immortal, the tendency towards a complete measure of virtue must ultimately become irresistible, and every hell at last terminate in paradise. The persistent forces or laws of the divine environment steadily tend to draw the unstable forces or passions of all creatures into harmony with them, and that harmony is redemption. Perdition is consequently never, as the ecclesiastical doctrine makes it always, a state of fixed hopelessness. Though we make our bed in the nethermost hell, God is there. And wherever God is, penitence and grace, reformation and pardon, have a right of eminent domain between him and the souls of his children.
According to the common doctrine of hell as a physical locality, and the predestination of all men to it through the sin of Adam, birth is a universal gateway of perdition, the whole world one open course to damnation for all except the few elected to be saved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts the lineage of Adam as a dark river of perdition, choked with the souls of the damned, steadily pouring into hell ever since our human generations began. But in addition to the refutation of this terrible belief by its monstrous moral iniquity, science is now doubly refuting it by the proof of the existence of the human race on the earth for unnumbered centuries before the Biblical date of Adam. So this fictitious gate of a fictitious hell is shut and abolished. With it vanishes the horrible picture of this world as floored with omnipresent trap doors to the bottomless pit, and closed fatally around by a dead wall of doom, through which, by one bloody orifice alone, the believers in the vicarious atonement could crawl up into heaven. In place of this, we see the whole universe as one open House of God, traversed in all directions by the free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love.
And so of the remaining theoretic gates of hell, unbelief, ritual neglect, and the other technicalities on which priests and deluded zealots have always hinged the perdition of such as heed not their authority; none of them shall much longer prevail. With the wiping out of the mythological hell all these fanciful entrances to it likewise disappear. But instead of these visionary ones we should point out and warn men from the substantial gates of the true hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell. All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition, avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in. In holding back those who are approaching these fatal gates, in trying to contract them, to shut them up here is a vital work to be done, infinitely more promising than the brandishing of the terrors of that material hell in which sensible men can no longer believe. For the only true hell is the remedial vibration of truth in an uncoordinated soul, even when not remedial for the individual still remedial for the race.
It is not our outward abode, but our inmost spirit, that makes our experience infernal or heavenly: for, in the last result, it is the occupying spirit that moulds the environment, not the habitation that determines the tenant. This is the substance of the whole matter. An accomplished chemist, who was a good man in truth, but a heretic by the standard of orthodoxy, died. Being an unbeliever, of course, he went to hell. Seeing a group of children in torment there, he pitied them very deeply, and straightway began to devise measures, by means of his skill in chemical science, to shield them from the flame. Instantly the whole scene changed. The beauty of heaven lay around him, and all its blandness breathed through him. Forgetting his own sufferings in sympathy for those of others, he had obeyed the law of virtue, subjecting a selfish desire to a disinterested one; and the omnipotent God enveloped him with the heaven of his own spirit. Another man, who was hard and cruel in character, but perfectly sound in the orthodox faith and observances, died. It is true he was an avaricious and hard saint, but then he believed in the atoning blood; and so, of course, he went to heaven. No sooner did he find himself safely seated in bliss than he tried to peep over the golden wall into the pit of perdition, in order to heighten the relish of his favored lot by the contrast of the agonies of the lost. Instantly the celestial scenery about him was changed into infernal, and, by the radiation and return of his own bad spirit, he found himself plunged into hell and writhing under its retributive experience. His character exemplified the law of perdition, enthroning selfishness over disinterestedness, subverting the order of virtue; and the insulted will of God made his imagined heaven a real hell.
Hell is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishing quantity through the successive periods since war, cannibalism and slavery were universal. Will not the progressive process terminate in the utter extinction of it, paradise everywhere steadily encroaching on purgatory until at last the whole universe of matter and spirit composes an unbroken heaven?
According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was once a measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions, making a universal hell of matter. But the discords and perturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order more and more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled in their gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weaving throughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. The evolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and is more complex than the material, each mind being as complicated as the whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be as complete as the evolution of the astronomic motions already is, and a divine empire of holy and happy men be the goal of history? This hope carries the cross through hell, and leaves nothing unredeemed.