THE FUTURE LIFE.
ixREMARK contained in the interesting letter written _ by the author of "Natural Religion," and communi- cated to these columns by his permission, to the effect that we ought to believe in the future life, but to think of it as little as possible, must have roused much speculation in many minds as to the widely differing mental atti- tude possible towards a matter of absolutely common interest. If the future life concerns one of us, it concerns all; one person cannot be more or less interested than another in what, if it have any meaning, is simply the larger part of the existence of every one. And yet a thinker who has much in- fluence on his generation, in speaking of -it as something that we are tempted to think of too much, reverses the ordinary view not only of those who believe in it (as we understand him to do), but even of those who are not inclined tovrards any spiritual belief. At least, the letter recalled to the mind of one of its readers a remark of Hume's on the strangeness of the fact that, believ- ing in a future life, men think of it so little. It is not, he says, that men take no interest in what is to happen after their own death; the arrangements which are only then to come into effect occupy much of their attention. What is strange is that that part of the future which concerns themselves is the part which fails to engage their thoughts. The passage does not strike us as a mere sarcastic way of saying that the belief in a future life is unreal Eighteenth-century unbelief was a very different thing from that of our own day (we speak of English thought), as eighteenth-century belief was also. There was a great deal more violent language used against unbelievers than there is now, but there was not the same profound cleft between the two parties. It is difficult to realise the great difference that there is in the very same statement, according as it has a different background. "Christianity is a mere superstition," meant to the men of that day,—Christianity is an invention of priests, a fruit of the cun- ningly-devised alliance between the Church and the Throne, one of a set of beliefs (in the memorable language of Gibbon) "to the multitude equally true, to the philosopher equally false, to the legislator equally useful." In our own day, the same words mean simply that Christianity is a belief opposed to the conclu- sions arrived at by the student of the material universe. It is as an opponent, not of democratic sentiment, but of the system of reasoned belief concerning all that we can see, and hear, and touch, that Christianity is attacked by its present enemies. We are, of course, not conceding that Christianity is an opponent of either of these things, but merely observing on the contrasted aspects it has taken in the past, and does take in the present, towards those who regard it as false, especially with regard to its doctrine of immortality. The disbelief that takes its rise in any theories whatever concerning the human world is not necessarily opposed to the belief in a spiritual world, as is the disbelief that arises from speculations into the world of things. It is not any difficulty in the evidences for the resurrection of Christ, it is the effort needed for believing that what we love survives, when what we have embraced is hidden away beneath the turf, that makes it hard, in our time, to believe in a Future Life.
And then, too, there is another aspect of the same change which is worth remembering, and which must have been recalled to every reader by the letter which forms our text. The writer
spoke, with a frankness which we greatly admire, of the fashion- able opinion of the day, meaning opinion hostile to Christianity.
It would not have been natural to speak thus of any form of unbelief before our own time, in our own country. The change is more important than it seems with regard to the nature of unbelief. In the eighteenth century orthodoxy was a characteristic of certain views about the spiritual universe, and now it is the characteristic of certain views about
the material universe. "Right opinion," the opinion, that is, of people who have the ear of the public, is to be sought for among men of science, not among divines. Health has taken the place of "salvation ;" the doctor has supplanted the priest. Of course this is another way of saying that the future life has ceased to be an object of general contemplation. Any reference to it now has a distinctly religious character, whereas, in former days, it used to be a part of the ordi- nary dialect of secular mankind about accepted fact, and to find its place in conventional statements which merely under- took to echo the assumptions of ordinary people. Hence has arisen a different feeling about immortality, in those who do not deny it. Whatever makes most people think the future life a delusion will make some people, not agreeing with them, still consider it an undesirable subject of contemplation. The mere desire to be in sympathy with the general current of cultivated feeling settles to some extent even what people will believe, and what they will think about is settled by it, of course, to a much greater extent. We are not inquiring whether it is right or wrong that this should be so; the fact, at least, is unquestionable.
But there must surely be more than this to say for a precept that is given us by such a thinker as the writer of the letter which has occasioned these remarks. In a certain sense, we might even extend the scope of his advice. To occupy the mind with what is future, in the sense that it is not yet present with us in any form—for a schoolboy, for instance, to think what he will say when he gets into Parliament, or for a school-girl to mix anticipations of her future household with her study of the French verbs—is nothing but a waste of time. Children hire playing at being grown up, and as long as it is only play, there is no harm in it; but a wise parent would discourage any form of such play that seemed transforming itself into a series of dreams, bringing in impatience of the restrictions of the nursery and the schoolroom ; it is, in fact, only a play for children, and ceases to be healthful when it becomes a dream for youth. And if anything like this be a temptation with regard to the childhood of our race, we should fully agree that here, too, the mistake would be equally great. But is it? Does any one occupy himself or herself with thoughts of some experience that is to begin when this school. time of our life is left behind? We have never met with such a man or woman. Unquestionably there are many to whom the question,—Is this life the school-time of our race? is the most interesting question in the world. But it is wrong to call this a speculation concerning a future life: It is an inquiry con- cerning the nature of this life that now is. The difference be- tween those who believe in immortality and those who deny it is not a difference as to something that is to begin by-and-by, and leave the present common ground. It is a question of the same kind as that between two people who should assert, the one that a statue was made of snow, and the other that it was made of marble. Something that happens by-and-by will decide which of the two is right, but their difference concerns that which exists at the moment.
But we may say, in a more special sense than this, that the question Of Immortality concerns not the future, but the pre- sent. It is only by a great concession to the egotism of human nature that the life of the immensely larger number of men and women that have ever lived is spoken of as the future life, just because it is. not the life of those who speak and hear. In the deepest sense, it is not a future life to any one. But in no sense is it a future life to most people. The greater number of men and women know by experience what that life is which lies beyond what we call death. A small minority—and a continually decreasing minority—of the great names that stir the world's sympathies, point out those who are still visible among men. The voice of fame is mainly concerned with those who inhabit the invisible world, which, though we call it future, has its long past, just as the present has. And as we advance in life, the voice of affection is so likewise. The structure of human rela- tion which we are building up with every hour of life's best activities here belongs, as life draws near its evening, more and more to the unseen world. One whole domain of affection has no longer any exercise. The sheltering love which greeted us on our arrival here has long since taken flight, and the part of our nature which found its exercise in response has none now withi,n the limits of what is visible and audible. But, indeed,when we come into sight of our goal, this may be said of a large part of the whole exercise of the affections, nay, of feelings wider than what we commonly understand by the affections. Every variety of feeling that can bind one human being to another finds its object in that hidden world. There is the companionship that has attracted us like warmth or light; there, too, that which we should have avoided, but for some.feeling of gratitude or duty, the love which was all enjoyment revives as the eye turns back- ward ; and so does the love that was chiefly pain. There are beings whom we have wronged, and whose forgiveness we long to implore; there, too, are those who have wronged us, and whose memory still brings with it the sense of injury, however dimmed and softened. There is the pleasant comrade of an idle hour, moving in us a sense of unnaturalness in thinking of intercourse with him apart from the incidents of social intercourse on earth; and there is the companion of our most earnest aspirations, with whom intercourse was too precious to be Teuton anything but the deepest and most permanent of our desires and our speculations. There some worthy bore, whose image seems to bring back a half-humorous blending of affection and tedium, keeps company with the most intolerant of his antagonists; the images of those to whom we could give nothing better than mild endurance blend with others which make us speculate on the one-sidedness of attraction from its negative pole. There is no feeling that does not revive as we remember the dead, except those frivolous im- pulses of distaste or attraction which the mere lapse of time would have rendered it equally impossible to revive, or almost remember, and which are more rapidly, but not more certainly, extinguished by death. Perhaps we hide from ourselves this immense variety of feeling by a certain conventional dialect about those who are gone.
"Why do we never name them, or but in voices low,
As if some shame were on them, or superhuman woe ?" asks a writer whose verse expresses the various shades of social relation with peculiar happiness ; and whatever the cause of this conventional silence, its result is obvious. The monotony of dialect conceals from us the variety of feeling. We are sup- posed, for instance, to feel only self-reproach when we remember a quarrel with a person who is dead, though every one who is honest with himself knows that it may be just as difficult to forgive the dead as the living ; and that even when we are con- scious of wrong towards those who are gone, we are conscious, too, of all that made the right course difficult, and, as it seemed at times, almost impossible. We are not urging that this retic- ence is a bad thing; we are merely pointing out that the habit of speaking in one tone of the dead, and in many of the living, tends to conceal from us that the world of human relation is just as large, whether its hemisphere is dipped in day or night.
Now, what we mean, when we ask if there is a Future Life— or at least a part of what we mean—is the question whether this whole world of human relation, and by far the most dis- tinct phase of human relation, is or is not a reality. As an old man turns backward to some loved playmate, snatched away in infancy, whose very existence is unknown now to any one living but himself, does he turn towards some real inhabitant of the world of human affection, or to a mere image, void of all reality except that which he bestows upon it in the act of recollection ? As some widow turns for awhile from the society of her children that she may revive the fading image of one towards whom her heart still goes out with a sense of unchang- ing need, is she turning from actual claimants on her affection to a mere phantom ? It is unreasonable that such a question should be thought merely speculative. It is impractical, if all that we do is done by our hands. But to assert this is to decide the question. If the unseen world be real, we are never more active than when we turn in thought to the mingled memory and anticipation that centres in some tomb that hides all that is earthly of the one we loved best. If, indeed, nothing exists but what we can see, or touch, or hear, then nothing is done but what can be represented to the eye or ear, or weighed in the balance. But why deny the first belief, and accept the second? Why break up a consistent scheme of negation into halves, according as it deals with the intellect or the will, and make room for the influence of a denial which you have rejected ? The compromise leaves the mind in a condition of unstable equilibrium ; every touch of suggestion must cause one who is trying to retain it to believe less, or feel more.
It may sound strange to call this compromise an influence of the new orthodoxy, but we believe it to be true. When ortho- doxy was spiritual, the terror of an endless Hell was sometimes brought forward as a reason for acting as if one believed in it, whether one did or not. Supposing we are mistaken in our belief, it was argued on the part of the orthodox, how shall we be the worse in the future ? Supposing you are mistaken in your unbelief, how terribly you will be the worse ! Had you
not better live as if our opipion were true ? As this argument was summed up in the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine,— "With all your deep learning, pray who is most wise,
We who follow Christ's doctrine, or you who despise ?
Since this, Sir, as fact, is allowed by your crew, We are safe, though it's false ; you are damned, if it's true !"
Unbelievers were urged to act and speak with Christians, if they could not believe with them, and no doubt they very often did so, as far as the writer of this scrap of doggrel was a specimen of Christianity. Now, the argument. is precisely reversed. This world, it is urged, may be all ; you cannot be sure that your faith is not a delusion. Which is the wiser, in any case, he who spends his energies on the world we are sure of, or he who occu- pies himself with what may never come, and what, if it does come, you now fully admit will be best met by those who have made the best of its preliminary ? Why give any thought to what is, after all, as things are now, a mere opinion ? Such an argument has, it cannot be denied, a great power. It had great power in the past, when the terror of an endless Hell, if it could never have been with the majority of human beings anything but an uneasy doubt, fortified, however, by a good deal that went on under their own eyes, still remained an as- sumption practically accepted, not only by the religious world (indeed, it was only in the religions world here and there that a doubt was whispered), but also by the whole secular dialect of reference and suggestion,— an assumption bearing down all pro- test with the weight of a general consent to take it for granted which it required enormous courage and strength to deny. And now all this weight of assumption—a far mightier agent for pro- ducing belief than any amount of argument—is gone over to a view which, though we speak of it as the opposite, has many of the same results. On both views this world remains our only chance throughout eternity, on both views it might be urged with equal plausibleness that it is best to act on the hypothesis in which error would practically be most disastrous. And though we, who believe in immortality, consider that those will do the best for this life who treat it as part of something larger than itself, who are encouraged in all failure by the thought of an infinite future in which no effort is wasted, and. can set to work for their kind at any hour in their day with the sense of beginning some- thing that death will not interrupt, still, we must remember that practically it is almost the same thing to believe this life to be part of a larger whole, and to think that we shall do its special work best on that hypothesis. An opposite belief, we see, leads people to find a "moral tonic" in a dogma which would seem more productive of the indolence of despair. And just as in former days there was a temptation to speak and even to feel with the majority, apart from all real conviction, so there is now. There may be a future in which the whole of our being shall find its scope ; but suppose there is none, we shall have wasted our time in thinking of it, and in the meantime we had better live as if this life, of which we are certain, were the only life. To reason thus is natural, from many points of view most reason- able, certainly very easy, under the circumstances of the day. But it is natural only because we are all tempted to doubt what others disbelieve, and it is a mistake to regard this argu- ment as anything but an expression of that doubt. Belief is the mental act by which we determine to deal with certain objects of thought as realities, and to live as if life on this earth were the whole of life is simply to begin to believe that it is the whole. Those who differ in this belief gain nothing by a common consent that to make the best of this life is the best preparation for whatever is to follow it, for they mean different things by the same words. They will no more agree upon what the best of life is than they will on its duration ; their view of its highest aim will vary with their belief as to its permanence. Doubtless, they will have most aims in common—all human beings have that—but the key-note of character is given by the aim that is preferred, and a wide common ground will disappear, if the dominant aim be different on the two sides. And this will in many cases be not only different, but contrary. Those dim stirrings of a larger life that are music to one who finds in them a promise, disturb him who feels them illusory as mere jarring vibration ; the desire of the one must always be to approach their source,—of the other, to recede from it. A sense of participation in things Eternal will always be a dividing, where it is not a uniting influence; and. its influence pervades the whole of our being, appearing to those who reject it as that want of symmetry necessarily characteristic of a fragment that is judged as a whole, and causing those who accept it to recoil, in many unexpected directions, from that narrowness which all must find in a supposed whole which they regard as a fragment. For that "correlation of growth" so mysteriously discernible in the visible world is but a faint shadow of the law by which our whole spiritual being is moulded in harmony with our convictions. Our spirit is more a unity than even our bodily organism, and that which affects its deepest part, affects the whole.
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