IL—THE AFFIRMATIVE SIDE.
THE weak spot in this argument appears to me to lie here,— that it treats the future life too much from the side of the hypothetical purpose which God has had, or may have had, in creating us, and too little from the side of the actual humanity with which we have to deal, and the indications He has so given us. In such a paper as this, it would be idle to attempt a disquisition on the reasons for anticipating a future life, but I must say this,—that there seem to me even stronger reasons for treating men as in this respect all of one type, than for the faith in immortality itself,— which, however, I firmly hold. This at least is certain ;—for whatever destiny man is made, it has been prepared for him through long ages of prehistoric, and not only prehistoric, but prehuman existence. The nature thus slowly moulded and forged in the great laboratory of the past, necessarily traces back its lineage to a common ancestry of infinitely longer duration and one infinitely more important in its bearing on the nature we now have, than any ancestry which any single race, or tribe, or family, least of all any individual, can point to as exclu- sively its own. The differences between individual and individual, between family and family, between race and race, seam to us so great only because we discriminate the differences at once, but see likeness without discerning it. It is the vast extent of the com- munity of nature uniting us, which makes us think so much of the differences of type, and which makes us exaggerate their relative amount and significance. But when we come to think what im- mortality means, we feel at once that whatever may be or may not be involved in it, it is at least a characteristic so intrinsically great and momentous, that a nature carefully prepared for it, must have a great many characteristics which a nature not prepared for it and not intended for it, could hardly share. To suppose that the same tree would hear two completely distinct kinds of fruit, so distinct that the one should go on ripening for endless ages, while the other should ripen and rot in a few score of years, is to sup- pose something for which the analogy of nature gives us no kind of warrant. Of course, what I am saying only goes so far as this,— that the nature so carefully evolved by the cosmic agencies of millions of years, and disciplined in a long common ancestry of prehistoric and historic conditions, must be, to start with, made of much the same stuff in one man as in another ; and that, great as the difference due to Use or abuse may be, it is not credible that there is any intrinsic difference be- tween different human beings in their initial capacity for im- mortal life. Of course, this is not saying that God could not suddenly destroy, if He so pleased, what is intrinsically capable of an immortal destiny ; nor that it is abstractedly inconceivable that this awful decree might really go forth, as the penalty of mis- used powers. But it is something—indeed a vast step—to realise that if He does decree this, it is as it were putting a violent end to the preparations of immeasurable ages ;—that such a result is a great moral catastrophe, not the natural close of a career. The moral fact which Bowe so ineradicable belief in a future life in self- conscious men—the recognition of personal identity, the be- wildering consciousness of the "I," beneath all the marvellous changes of body and mind which time brings to us all between in- fancy and age—is the same in us all. Sir James Stephen, certainly no mere dreamer, still less a facile believer in the transcendental assumptions of theology, in commenting on a passage of Mr. John Stuart Mill's, has put this very powerfully :—" All human language, all human observation implies that the mind, the I, is a thing in itself, a fixed point in the midst of a world of change, of which world of change its own organs form a part. It is the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. It was what it is when its organs were of a different shape and consisted of different matter from their present shape and matter. It will be what it is when they have gone through other changes. I do not say that this proves, but surely it suggests, it renders probable, the belief that this ultimate fact, this starting- point of all knowledge, thought, feeling, and language, this
final inexplicability (an emphatic though a clumsy phrase), is independent of its organs ; that it may have existed before they were collected out of the elements, and may continue to exist after they are dissolved into the elements." And a little further on, he adds what, coming from such a writer as Sir James Stephen, is far more impressive than if it mine from one of less negative creed :—" It seems to me that we are spirits in prison, able only to make signals to each other, but with a world of things to think and to say which our signals cannot describe at all." Now, if this belief in an imprisoned I,' which does not change, while its prison-house grows up, or falls to ruin about it, has anything really to do with the deeply-rooted faith in a future life, it touches a point on which all men,—from the congenital idiot to the highest amongst us,—have the same experience. The ablest man might fall into idiocy, or the merest idiot suddenly grow into intelligence, by a change in the structure of his brain, and yet either the one or the other would apply the same word 'I' to both the opposite states through which he had passed. Indeed, as far as science has traced back the history of man into the past, we might fairly say that evolution means the story of the long preparation, first, for the introduction into the world of a being with a sense of personal identity, who can distinguish himself from the uni- Irene around him,—and next of the taming and subduing and disciplining and purifying, of the immense capacity for anarchy and selfishness which the attainment of this marvellous end Involves. But if this be so, then at least it seems clear that the selection of some such egos to destroy,—even though not purely arbitrary,—while others of them are reserved for what may be called their natural career, would involve a great catas- trophe, a signal intervention of the Creator to change the course for which apparently He had been creating man.
Nor can I at all accept as justly applicable to this subject the argument from analogy suggested in the preceding paper, derived from the apparent predominance of waste,—the weeding out of what is unfitted to survive,—in the world as we see it. "Entire species of living creatures have died out unknown. Whole races of men,—,some of them of high mental qualities,—have passed to the abyss." Well, the difference between a species dying out "unknown," and dying out when it is a little known, or even very well known, by men, is not a difference of kind. That iehthyosauri preceded man and were not at all known by him in their life-time, comes to very little more than that a vast number of infinitesimally small creatures, and a few tape-fish of gigantic size, appear still to live in the depths of the ocean far away from human sight, and only now and then to give a hint to some keen- eyed observer of their existence. There is no difference in kind between dying out in one series of centuries and dying out in another. As far as their bodily forms are concerned, all races of beings apparently die out, some sooner, some later, while all will expire when the resources of the planet are exhausted. But surely the were evanescence of a temporal life, whether that of a type or an individual, fitted Only for a short existence, suggests no reason for supposing that a type expressly made and fitted for endless existence,— which is what I am assuming, and what I think I must assume for all, if I may assume it for any,—could without a cata- strophe,—a natural shook that would violate all analogies,— split off into two parts, one disappearing for ever and the other pursuing its progress for ever. You cannot apply analogies drawn from the shortness of a career which at longest would but be a few years or centuries longer, to make out that there is nothing surprising in a sudden branching-off of the same stock into mortals on the one band, and immortals on the other. Nor do 1 see that any of the criteria suggested could well con- stitute the ground of discrimination. "Why shouldlhe congenital idiot continue ? " Why, because, if I have argued soundly at all, he has that sense of personality which constitutes the essential characteristic of immortal life ; while the idiocy, as a matter of organisation, may well drop off with given organic changes, as it often comes on with given organic changes. Why should the bad roan continue, "if he be bad, not as the world reckons badness, but as the Author of life reckons it?" Why, only because, as far as Milt4 ° w and understand God's laws, there is no sign in them that badness in this sense leads to the extinction of a personality any more than
that God goodness itself. I am not arguing, of course,
may not, if he pleases, destroy the evil soul, but the whole question is whether there be any sort of reason, natural, analogioal, or revealed, for thinking that He does so please. The evil personality, so long as it re- mains evil, is rather emphasized than extinguished. It is never merged in others. It goes on to even greater and greater degrees of self-assertion. It lives in the attitude of protest, defiance, and rebellion,—that is, in a state of more highly exaggerated and marked personality than the personality of any one who lives for Others, or for God. There is a passage in Dr. Newman's 4 Callista," —the marvellous tale he wrote concerning a martyr of the third Century,—'w0h always struck me as abounding in truth and opower, though certainly not as being in any sense a vindication f the eternal duration of punishment, for which apparently it was meant :—
" The•
priest began again ;_l Perhaps you have been growing in unhappiness for years,—Is it so ? You assent ; you have a heavy burden at your heart, you don't well know what. And the chance is that you will grow in unhappiness for the next ton years to come. You will be more and more unhappy the longer you live. Did you live till you wore an old woman, you would not know how to bear your existence.' Callista cried out as if in bodily pain. 'It is true, Sir, whoever told you. But how can you have the heart to say it, to insult and mock me ?'—' God forbid!' exclaimed Creoilius. But lot me go on. Listen, my child. Be brave, and dare to look at things as they are. Every day adds to your burden. This is the law of your present being, somewhat more cer- tain than that which just now you so confidently assorted, the impos- sibility of your believing in that law. You cannot refuse to accept what is not an opinion, but a fact. I say this burden which I speak of is not simply a dogma of our creed, it is an undeniable fact of nature. You cannot change it by wishing ; if you wore to live on earth two hundred years, it would not be reversed, it would be more and more true. At the ond of two hundred years, you would be too miserable oven for your
worst enemy to rejoice in it But you will not live, you will die. Perhaps you will toll me that you will then cease to be. I don't believe you think so. I may take for granted that you think, with me and with tho multitude of men, that you will still live, that you will still be you. You will still be the same being, but deprived of those outward stays, and• reliefs, and solaces which, such as they are, you now enjoy. You will be yourself shut up in yourself. I have heard that people go mad at length when placed in solitary confinement. If then, in passing hence, you are cut off from what you had been, and have only the company of yourself, I think your burden will be so far greater, not lose than it is now. Suppose, for instance, you had still your love of conversing, and could not converse ; your love of the poets of your race, and no means of recalling them ; your love of music, and no instrument to play upon ; your love of knowledge, and nothing to learn ; your love of sympathy, and no one to love,—would not that be still greater misery ? Let me proceed a step further,—suppose you were among those you
actually did not love; supposing you did not like them nor their occu- pations, and could not understand their aims ; suppose there to be, as
Christiana say, an Almighty God, and you did not like Him, and had no taste for thinking of Him and no interest in what He was and what He did ; and supposing you found that there was nothing else anywhere but He, whom you did not love and whom you wished away,—would you not be still more wretched ?'"
That does not seem to me at all to grapple with the teaching that by God's decree eternal punishment is reserved, without even the opening for change or penitence, for all who do not happen to die truly penitent for their sins,—but nothing can illus- trate better the tendency of evil, true evil, that is,—not what the world calls evil,—to emphasise the separateness of the human personality, instead of tending to extinguish it. If, then, the bad are to die eternally, it must be due to an act, so to say, of divine violence, not to the operation of any law we can discern,— assuming, as I do assume, that like the rest of us, their nature is moulded and prepared for immortality. In other words, if this be the end of the bad, and the bad only, it will be due to some sudden arrest of the development of spiritual beings, not to any principle now visibly at work.
And further, it seems to me that the difference between human beings after their short time of trial on earth, grave as it is, is, relatively to the long antecedents of their life, too minute by far to become the foundation of so enormous and unalterable a dis- tinction as this. Talk of the idiot ; why, a fever reduces a man to temporary idiocy, and old age very frequently reduces him to idiocy which ends only with life. Or take even the.greater distinc- tion of moral qualities. Why the sudden growth of a belated human affection, or the swift impression made by one of Christ's sentences, will not unfrequently become a turning-point, and that, too, towards the very end of a human career, which leads to a new kind of life. For beings who have been preparing for millions of years, it is, to my mind, barely possible, that the incidents,—how- ever distinctly voluntary,—of a score or two of years, can ever be the ground of the tremendous discrimination between eternal life and extinction. And certainly in Revelation there does not seem to me to be the least trace of sanction for any view of this kind. There man is always treated as a specific type, not as a species comprehending a number of immortale living side by side with ephemerals, who are their brothers and sisters if we look only at their origin, but who are to part from them so widely in destiny that they might have been creatures of ,a different universe.
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