A CELESTIAL PILGRIM.
THE doctrine of previous existence has never appealed to the Western mind. It offers an easy explanation of almost all the problems of life. Yet most of ns instinctively set it aside. For the purposes of literature Mr. A. C. Benson has feigned to accept it. The theory of the transmigration of souls underlies his last book (" The Child of the Dawn," Smith, Elder and Co., 7s. 6d.) and is used to great effect. The story begins with the death of the hero, who once released from the body finds himself at home in the world of spirits; a sense of permanence and security possesses his soul. His lives on earth have been but as terms at school; from heaven he came, and thither he must return. The same sensation has taken hold of him at moments of great happiness while he lived in the world, and he now perceives that happiness to be of the nature of a recollection.
Many of the experiences of this present world pointed, he tells himself, to the reality of previous existence, but till now he bad never put them together. Sympathy is remem- brance in the eyes of this new exponent of an old theory. Some men and women are able to sympathize, he reflects, with an immense range of feeling, with emotions which during a single life they could hardly have passed through, and of which no theory but that of previous existence explains their understanding. It follows that while young spirits who have seen little arc hard and narrow•bearted, old spirits are full of kindness and indulgence—men of the world in the best sense. This explanation of sympathy makes one think. There have been great men of letters who have known the hearts of kings, who never saw a king—and who have revealed the souls of women as no woman has revealed them. Again, our hero points out how many friendships appear, so to speak, to begin in the middle—to be something not created, but continued. He remembers a wayward and, to other people, unattractive boy to whom his heart went out in sympathy and affection, and knows that this was his son in a pre- vious existence. The tie of parent and child is, he reflects, unbreakable. He sees himself in the past as a poor woman toiling for her children, and far, far longer ago as a savage—a savage who kisses his son before, "strangely attired for war," he goes out to fight, his heart full of " hurtful, cruel, and rapacious thought." The recol- lection shocks him. " You were very young, then," says his guide, who appears to him in the form of a graceful young man sent to bear him company in the spirit world wherein, despite the sense of home and familiarity, the exigencies of the story require him to find much which is new.
It is extraordinary how well this theory—which, on the other hand, no sane Western person seems able to helieve- fits the facts. To begin very low down, it accounts for the instincts of many animals. Why do birds know how to build a nest; what path to follow towards a warmer climate, &c. P It may be because the lower one goes in the scale of sentient beings the more clear is the recollec- tion of past incarnations. Among the human race certain gifted children learn so fast as to suggest recollection, and it is very difficult to account for the similarity of folk-lore stories which do not appear by any means always to prove that two races have been one in the past. It is certain that fear often foreshadows with complete accuracy sensations of which the person who is afraid has no previous knowledge, not even such as may be gained by observation. Ambition in many men is like a regretful hunger for a past eminence, and the power of certain men and women to accommodate themselves to new surroundings is inexplicable except upon the theory of previous experience. Every one who knows anything of the dark races knows that a few white men understand them at once and the majority of white men never understand them at all. The remembrance of another life would account even for this fact also. Do we, one wonders, connect imagination and memory sufficiently P The East says not; but then the East seeks to explain good and evil fortune on the theory of merit—a theory contrary to the religion which has conquered the West.
Rank in the world of spirits depends, Mr. Benson tells us (the word " rank " is not used), upon the degree of cultivation to which the imagination has attained, the test being sym- pathy. Intellect in the ordinary sense of the word, sheer force or brilliance of mind, counts for nothing at all; a man's power to put himself in some one else's place is what counts for merit, and the more lives he has led and better use he has made of his time during each, the greater he becomes—the nearer he approaches to what, for want of a better word, is hero called " the knowledge of the truth," for in heaven the worship of God and the service of man are in- divisible, and all the higher forms of love and of charity are religion, which, by the by, has no forms in heaven. Like the writer of the Revelation Mr. Benson finds no Temple in his ideal city. Oddly enough, however, though there is no temple there is a college—a college wherein, for the further cultivation of the sympathetic imagination, students study psychology. Mr. Benson does not intend that the description of the lectures which take place in the great Heavenly Hall should cause the reader to smile. We think, however, that few people will read of thern without laughing.
"One of the moat striking parts of these discourses was the fact that they were accompanied by illustrations. I will describe the first of these which I saw. The lecturer stopped for an instant and held up his hand. In the middle of one of the side-walls of the room was a great shallow arched recess. In this recess thera
suddenly appeared a scene, not as though it were east by a lantern on the wall, but as if the wall were broken down, and showed a room beyond."
Sometimes the scenes were "vulgar and debasing," sometimes heroic beyond words. The cinematograph is indeed outshone by this new realistic process. Pedantic as the scholastic heaven may sound, our author never goes back from his notion that mere knowledge—information—is contemptible, at any rate in the world. of spirits. The reader follows Mr. Benson's hero into the paradise of the intellectual, where the " meagre, spurious philosophers and all who have submerged life in intellect have their reward." It is indeed a fearsome place where nothing goes on but logical debate, and where the hero finds himself being " slowly stifled with interesting information."
The best and most effective paragraphs in the whole book describe a sort of heavenly lunatic asylum where all those narrow-minded persons who thought they could explain the ways of God to men upon the lines of a cut-and-dried creed go when they die. There, in the care of ideally clever and kind doctors and in the enjoyment of every form of comfort, they reside until they are cured. The cure is very painful, towards its consummation, as it takes the form of anxious longing to rejoin some person whom they loved upon earth, but whose views were not perfectly correct, and for whose sake they are willing to abandon what they imagine to be heaven. The vast majority who are still far from a cure amuse themselves by gazing into cupboards in which they imagine that they see the misfortunes which overtake the theologically mistaken. They nearly all have a look of "amused dignity," which Mr. Benson assures us is very typical of these deluded persons. A few very bad cases show lees dignity, but may be distinguished by a sort of " flighty cheerfulness." It is interesting to see how the aggressively assured in the field of theology impress the son of an archbishop, who must have seen a good many of them. Only those suffer who are soon to be released. One man is in mental agony so great that our hero begs to stay with him to assuage his pain. This, however, is not allowed. The sufferer, the doctor assures him, is just upon a cure and is to be reunited to the heretic woman, without whom heaven has become hell, in a few hours. Hell in Mr. Benson's eyes is a place of pleasures—pleasures which slowly sicken till the pleasure- seelcer would rather risk pain than continue in them. Then, and then only, is be allowed to climb the steep ascent to heaven.
The sad idea which haunts the reader from beginning to end of Mr. Benson's book is that suffering is reserved for the good. It is the seal of merit: the very mark of spiritual aristocracy which the great spirits bear gladly in order that they may excel. All those forms of talent which dull the suffering of their possessors he despises. Artists in whatever domain get short shrift from Mr. Benson. " They have lost," he says, " their capacity for pain " by regarding all things from a " spectacular point of view."
That pain is educational is, of course, an idea as old as the hills, but Mr. Benson uses it in a somewhat new way. His expression of the old idea of transmigration has also a warns tinge of originality. To the present writer it seems that if we accept the theory that the cultivation of sym- pathy or of love in St. Paul's sense of the word is the great object of life, then its logical conclusion, when the wheel has come full circle, would be the merging of the individuality in the source of life. But Mr. Benson be- lieves personality to be indestructible, though to our minds transmigration destroys it. How could the same man be successively a savage, a modern working woman, and an English gentleman of the period P At home, in heaven, he is always the same, he will perhaps say; but human recollections of that state, if they indeed exist at all, are so faint that the answer is meaningless. "Yet Mr. Benson does suggest in a very striking manner that temperament never changes. The scenery of heaven reminds his hero of the parts of England which remain most old-world and picturesque. On the other band it reminds his guide—a more advanced spirit than himself—of Tooting, because in that unlovely suburb he spent his happiest earthly hours. To have lived almost everywhere and then—to prefer Tooting! This is a real touch of nature, an evidence of the power of sympathy. It suggests that Mr. Benson himself is no "green band at life," whether the present world is his first experience of living or not.
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