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	EDITH
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This book-plate was desiened in 1909 by Edith BuUer Pool
(Class of 1896) for her library.
It seems appropriate
that it should be used to mark the books
purchased for the
Department of English Literature
through her memorial bequest

THE

HOPES OF THE HUMAN RACE,

HEEEAFTER AND HERE.

a

/'

THE

HOrES OF THE HUMAN RACE,

HEREAFTER AND HERE.

BY

FRANCES POWER COBBE.

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,

14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON; AND 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH,

1874.

(f-

244221

Sr fa/

LONDON :

PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SON,

178, STRAND.

CONTENTS.

PAaB

Preface (having special reference to Mr. Mill's Essay on Religion) . . . vii — Lxxv

The Life after Death. Part I : 1

Reprinted feom the Theological Review, Ootobee, 1872.

The Life after Death. Part II 62

Reprinted from the Theological Review, July, 1873.

Doomed to be Saved. An Address .... 121 The Evolution of the Social Sentiment . . 149

Reprinted from the Theological Review, January, 1874.

PKEFACE.

The principal essay in this book addresses itself to a small class of readers. For those who believe that a Life after Death has been guaranteed to mankind by a supernatural Eevelatiou, it is superfluous ; and for those who believe that the experiences of the bodily senses and the inductions thence derived mark the limits of human knowledge, it is useless. There yet remain some minds to whom I hope the specu- lations and observations which it contains may not be uninteresting or unserviceable ; who, having lost faith in the apocalyptic side of Christianity, find no basis therein for their immortal hopes, but who are yet able to trust the spiritual instincts of their own and other men's hearts, provided they can recognize the direction in which they harmoniously point. I in- dulge no dream of discovering new ground for faith in immortality, still less of proving that we are immor- tal by logical demonstration. But something will be

Vlll PREFACE.

gained if I succeed in warning off a few inquirers from false paths which lead only to disappointment, and point out to them, if not the true argument, yet the true method of argument, whereby such satisfaction as lies within our reach may be obtained. Perhaps I may have the greater advantage in speaking of the belief in a future life because for many years of my own earlier life, while slowly regaining faith in God after the collapse of supernaturalism, 1 failed to discover any sufficient reason for such trust, and in the desire to be loyal to truth deliberately thrust it away even under the pressure of a great sorrow. It is possible, therefore, that I may understand better than most believers in the doctrine why many honest, and not irreligious, minds are at this moment mourn- fully shutting out that gleam of a brighter world which should cheer and glorify the present ; and per- haps I may also have learned from experience how some of their difficulties may be met.

It is needless to discuss the importance of the belief of mankind in a Life beyond the grave. Whether, with a recent distinguished writer, we look on the threatened loss of it as the most perilous of our "Eocks Ahead," on which the whole order of society may make shipwreck, or whether (as I am more disposed to think) the danger lies in the gradual

PREFACE. IX

carnalization of our nature which would follow the extinction of those ennobling hopes which have lifted men above mere animalism and given to Duty and to Love an infinite extension, — in either case it is hard to speak too gravely of the imperilment of that which has been, since the beginning of history, per- haps the most precious of the mental heirlooms of our race. To conjure up a picture of the desolation which such a loss must bring to the hearts of the bereaved, and the dreary hopelessness of the dying and the aged, would be to give ourselves superfluous pain. Nor must it be forgotten that it does not ask a great deal, if not to kill such a faith (which is perhaps impossible), yet to maim and paralyze it, so that it shall become practically powerless to comfort or to elevate. The great majority of mankind rather catch belief and disbelief from those around them than ori- ginate them on their own account ; and the disbelief of even a few of their neighbours is often sufficient to take away all confidence in the affirmative verdict even of the wisest and best. Dr. Johnson said he was "injured by knowing there was one man who did not believe in Christianity ;" the knowledge was just so far a deduction from the universality of consent in which even that intellectual giant found repose. It would probably need only that five per cent, of the

PREFACE.

population should publish their conviction that there is no Future State, to make the greater part of the remainder so far lose reliance upon it, as to become quite insensible to its moral influences.

But while thoughtful persons are generally agreed on the great importance of the doctrine in question, it has perhaps scarcely been noticed how it is inevi- tably destined to form the turning-point of the future religious history^of our race. The dogma of a Future Life differs from other articles of faith notably in being indissoluble in the alembic of interpretation wherein so many of our more solid beliefs have of recent years been rarefied into thin air. " To be, or Not to be," is very literally the question of ques- tions, to which must needs be given a categorical response. Either we, ourselves, in innermost iden- tity, shall exist after the mortal hour, or we shall not so exist ; there is no third contingency. With respect to our faith in God, there are immeasurable shades between the definite and fervent conviction of the existence of a true Father in Heaven, and the admission that there lies behind Nature some " Un- known and Unknowable " Mind, Will, or, perchance, blind and unintelligent Force, which we choose to call by the same sacred name. Owing to the voluntary and involuntary obscurities of human language, and

PREFACE. XI

the dimness of hiimau thought, there will always exist a misty territory between the confines of Theism and Atheism ; and it may be only too easy to slip down imperceptibly, range after range, from one to the other, only discovering at last how far we have descended when the sunlight which shone on the mountain-tops has faded away utterly among the dark shadows of the abyss. But there is scarcely any such danger of thus playing fast and.lojoae with our beliefs as regards Immortality. It is true that among those alchemists of creeds of whom I have already spoken, many of whom can find the pure gold of moral truth in every base and heavy superstition, while others concoct an Elixir of Life out of the hellebore and the nightshade of denial and despair, there have not failed to be some who have taught that man, if mortal in the concrete, and doomed individually to perish in the dust, may yet call himself an Immortal Being; immortal, that is, in his abstract Humanity, in the Grand-etre of which he forms a part, and which wiU survive the falling off of such a mere fraction of it as himself; or (if this consolation be not amply sufficient) that he will yet live in his posterity, in his works of beneficence, in the books wherewith he may have instructed mankind. But even to very sanguine souls it must (I should sup-

Xll PREFACE.

pose) be nearly hopeless thus to attempt to give the change to our personal hopes and desires concerning a Life after Death, by reminding us of hopes for other people, which, far from being a novel equivalent for our own, have always hitherto been taken as con- current therewith and additional thereto ; and which actually bring with them, when the doctrine of in- dividual Immortality is denied, only the mournful question of how far it may remain an object of hope at all that a Eace should prolong its existence when every soul which composes it is destined to perish incomplete, unfinished, a failure like the ill-turned vase which the potter casts aside on the heap to be broken up as worthless. There can be truly, then, only the response of Aye or No to the question, " When a man dieth, shall he live again?" and on the decision whether most men say " Aye," or say " No," will de- pend, in yet undreamed-of measure, the moral con- dition of coming generations. '

In the following Essay I have stated to the best of my ability the grounds on which I think an affirma- tive answer to the great enigma may be given by all those who believe in a Righteous as well as an Intelli- gent Euler of the world. I have no desire to blink the fact that it is on the moral attributes of God that the whole question appears to me to hinge ; and that.

PREFACE. Xlll

without the help of Religion, (of a real religion, which takes for its corner-stone that God is good and just, not a philosophy which merely admits the hypothesis of an intelligent Force behind Nature,) the reasons for denial seem to me to preponderate altogether over those in favour of affirmation.

But here is the great, the tremendous difficulty. How is that belief in the Eighteousness and Benevo- lence of God to be established so as that we may build thereon securely our hopes of a Life to come ? Nay, how is it in these days of earthquake to be kept firm enough for the purpose — higher even than of affording us immortal hope — of giving us now a Father in Heaven to adore, and in allegiance to whose holy Will we may be content to live and die ? It is impossible to hide from ourselves that the obstacles in the way of a clear faith in the absolute Goodness of God have grievously multiplied upon us in our gene- ration. Perhaps genuine fidelity should call on us to rejoice that they have also at last found a most lucid and coherent expression in the mournful legacy left us by the great philosopher lately departed, wherein the yet formless questionings, the "ghastliest doubts" of thousands of souls have taken shape, and will stand revealed to themselves like the Afreet out of the smoke. Of this book I must speak presently. Let

c

XIV PREFACE.

it be remarked in passing that Mr. Mill has not un- naturally read all the religious history of mankind in the peculiar light of his own exceptional mental ex- perience, and has taken it for granted that men have in all ages constructed a God by the method of the inductive philosophy. I venture to think that an entirely opposite rationale of religious development is the true one, and that by recognizing it we may exactly perceive how it happens that we have arrived at our present pass.

Mankind, I believe, from the hour when Humanity arose out of its purely animal origin, has felt some vague stirrings of aspiration and awe — some infant- like liftings-up of the hands for help and pity to something greater, stronger, wiser than itself — some dim consciousness (enough at least to guide its funeral rites) that it is not all of a man which perishes in the grave. Long ages and millenniums doubtless passed away during which these vague sentiments fastened on some fetich, or on the orbs of heaven, at first without ascribing any definite individuality or personality to the object, and then again without attri- buting to it any moral character. In the " ages before morality" the gods were necessarily unmoral ; for man could no more invent morality to give his god, than he could invent for him a bodily sense which he did not

PREFACE. XV

himself possess. But with the dawnings of the ethical sentiment in man came simultaneously the conviction, — nay, rather, the consciousness, — that the Unseen Power was also Just (so far as the man yet appre- hended justice). Thenceforward the moral ideal of God continued to rise, century after century, in exact proportion to the moral development of mankind ; and the "Lord" was a pillar of cloud and fire, moving before the moving nations, guiding them towards the Holy Land. It mattered little that it was, for the masses, in the shape of the intuitions of dead prophets and apostles, which were called Divine inspirations (and loerc so in truth, albeit mixed with endless fables), that Jews and Zoroastrians, Christians and Moslems, accepted this inward idea of God, and only a few of the "strongest souls" received (as the old Chaldaean oracle has it) " light through themselves." Practically, mankind at large held, more or less imperfectly, the no- tion of Deity reflected from the highest consciousness yet developed at each stage ; and poor as it often was, it was the brightest which could filter throus-h the dim windows of their souls. The work of correcting this ideal by reference to the phenomena of nature, instead of being the normal process, hardly seems to have occurred to any one save Lucretius. When these phenomena were beneficent and beautiful, men

c2

XYl PREFACE.

sung psalms and proclaimed that the Heavens declared the glory of God, and the earth was full of His good- ness. When plague and earthquake, flood and famine, ravaged the world, they attributed the evil to the wrath of the higher Powers, brought down by the offences of mankind, of which there never was an in- sufficient store to serve for such explanation. It is even surprising in our day to note how very remote it was from the spirit of old philosophers or theolo- gians to put aside a priori doctrines about the gods, and learn from Nature herself concerning Nature's Authorship. Even down to the days of Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, it is clear that, when they applied to Nature at all, it was as a French judge sometimes interrogates a prisoner, to compel her to corroborate their foregone conclusions respecting a series of "Attributes" either apprehended by the reli- gious sentiment or logically deduced by the a priori arguments of the Schoolmen. There were doubtless abundant reasons for this state of things. The poets, the artists, the sages of old, cared comparatively little about Nature, and centred all their interest in man. As it has been wittily said, " Nature was only discovered in our generation." It followed obviously, then, that the theologians of former times should concern them- selves almost exclusively with the human aspects of

PREFACE. XVU

Eeligion and the notions of dead thinkers, and that only now and then some great teacher arose to rebuke the servile repetition of what was " said hy them of old time," and to point to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as evidence of the Father's love.

But our age witnesses a new tendency of thought altogether — the genuine application of the Inductive Philosophy to Theology. With the vast and sudden influx of knowledge concerning the outer world, has come a greatly enhanced sense of the importance of the inferences to be drawn therefrom regarding the character of its Author and the purpose of His work. Some of us are now at the stage of seeking in Nature the corroboration of our intuitive faith ; others, of painfully balancing the two revelations ; and others, yet again, have gone so far as to look exclusively to astronomy and geology and chemistry and physio- logy to afford them indications of who or what the Originator of the universe may be, and have come to regard with mistrust, as wholly unreliable bases of argument, those moral and religious phenomena of their own and other men's souls, which may, after all, they hold, be only the results of the "set of the brain " determined by the accidents of their ancestors' con- dition ; " psychical habits " conveyed by hereditary

XVlll PfiEFACE.

transmission, but having no validity whatever as indi- cators of any external reality.

Now, even in the first of these stages, where we only interrogate Nature to confirm the yet undimmed faith of our hearts, there comes undoubtedly to us a chill when she returns her stammering reply, instead of the loud and glad response which we had been taught by the shallow old Natural Theology to ex- pect with confidence. Instead of the " one chorus " which " all being " should, as we trusted, raise to the Maker of all, we hear an inarticulate mingling of psalms of joy with funeral dirges ; the morning song of the bird with the death-cry of the hunted brute ; the merry hum of the bee in the rose with the shrivelling of the moth in its " fruitless fire." Nature's incense rises one hour in balm and perfume to the skies, and the next steals along the ground, foul with the smell of blood and corruption.

We cannot shut out these things from our thought by any effort. We climb the mountains, where the "empty sky, the world of heather" seem all full of God, and we find beside the warbling brook a harm- less sheep dying in misery, and its little lamb plain- ing and starving beside it. We wander through the holy cloisters of the woods till we have forgotten the world's sin and toil, and the scattered feathers and

PREFACE. XIX

mangled breast of some sweet bird lie in our path, desecrating all the forest. We turn to the books which in former years used to expound to us the mar- vellous and beneficent mechanism of the Almighty Anatomist, and we grow sick as we read of the worse than devilish cruelties whereby Science has purchased her evermore unholy secrets. Further on, when we seek to reconcile the responses of the religious senti- ment with those of the Nature "red in tooth and claw," who shrieks against our creed that Love is " creation's final law," and treat them as two equally valid sources of knowledge, the riddle grows yet more terrible, till at last, when we discard the inward testi- mony to the Maker's character as unreliable, and look to the external world alone to tell us what He may be, we obtain the heart-chilling reply which Mr. Mill has left us as his last sad word : "A Mind whose power over the materials was not absolute, whose love for his creatures was not his sole actuating induce- ment, but who nevertheless desired their good."* "The scheme of Nature, regarded in its whole extent, can- not have had for its sole or even principal object the good of human or other sentient beings."f What is most disheartening is the reflection that to all appear- ance this contradiction (real or apparent) between the * Essays on Religion, p. 243. t Ibid. p. 65.

XX PREFACE.

inward voice of the soul and the voice of Nature must not only continue, but become continuall}^ more clearly pronounced. There seems no chance at all that we shall ever find a better solution of any one of the " riddles of the painful earth " than we possessed before Science set them in array ; and, on the other hand, there is every reason to believe that year by year, as the human conscience grows more enlight- ened, and sympathy with every form of suffering be- comes stronger and more universal, the pain conveyed to us by the sight of pain will become more acute, and our revolt at the seeming injustices of Providence consequently more agonizing.

In the second essay in this little book I have en- deavoured to shew that historically we may trace an enormous and hitherto little suspected development in the Social Sentiment of man, and that, to judge from irresistible analogy, every future generation will have a livelier sympathy with the joys and sorrows of all sentient beings, such as scarcely in their tenderest hours the most loving souls of former ages experi- enced. This is, I conceive, the great Hope for the future of humanity on earth, as the Immortal Life of Love is, I believe, that of each human soul after passing through the portals of the grave. But with this fresh growth of sympathy has already come upon us quite

PREFACE. XXI

a new sense of the vast extent and the terrible depth of the sufferings and wrongs existing around us ; and the easy complacency wherewith our fathers regarded many of them, and the thanksgivings they returned for being " given more " than others while conscious they did not deserve it, are well-nigh disgusting to us. Especially the sufferings of animals torture us, seen in the light of our new knowledge of their kin- dred sensibilities ; and we stand aghast before the long panorama of misery unrolled before us by the theory of the Struggle for Existence and the Survival of the Fittest at the expense of the unfit.

Much of the scepticism of the present day — so grave, so regretful, combined so often with the noblest philanthropy — is beyond a doubt the result of nothing- else than the rapid growth of tenderer sentiments of compassion for unmerited suffering, and livelier indig- nation at suspected injustice. And if this be so, future generations, as they become more just and more merciful, will also become more sceptical — nay, more Atheistic — unless some different method be found for treating the dread difficulty than any of those which have been tried and have broken down. Even for us now there is nothing more futile and disastrous than the attempt either to treat Doubt as " devil-born," instead of springing from that which is most divine

XXll PREFACE.

in us, or to silence it, like the Dog of Hell, with a few handfuls of dry dust of commonplace. The man to whom the fact of the evil of the world first comes home in the hour of trial, and to whom are presented as explanations the platitudes in ordinary use by divines, is like one of those hapless persons of whom we heard not long ago, who stood waiting at the upper window of a burning house for means of escape, and wdien the ladder was lifted, the brittle toy collapsed and shivered in fragments on the pavement, and with a never-to-be-forgotten cry of despair the victims fell back into the fiery gulf behind them, and were seen no more.

How, then, ought the dread mystery of the existence of Evil in creation to be treated ? Historically, since men were far enough advanced to find that it is a problem, and to feel the incongruity in the alternate beneficence and severity of the unseen Powers, which they had before contentedly supposed to be wayward and passionate as themselves, it has been explained in many different ways : — 1st, by the Judaic, Greek and Christian doctrine of a Fall, succeeding to a Golden or Saturnian Age of Innocence and Happiness ; 2nd, by the Zoroastrian, Egyptian and Manichsean hypotheses of an Ahriman or Typhon, Evil Principles the rival of Ormuzd and Osiris ; and the Hebrew doctrine of

PKEFACE. XXlll

a Satan subordinate to Jehovah, but permitted to work mischief in His creation ; 8rd, by the Gnostic hypothesis of the intractable properties of Hyle (Mat- ter), wherewith the Demiurge often contends ineffec- tually ; 4th, by the orthodox Catholic doctrine which, in addition to the Fall and Satan, refers Evil to the necessity for the presence of pain in a world intended to be one of trial ; 5th, by the doctrine of Leibnitz (and substantially also that of Archbishop King), that the world is as good as it was possible to make it, — every contingency other than those which it actually presents involving either greater evils or insuperable contradic- tions ; 6th, by the doctrine of Theodore Parker, which is simply the vehement affirmation on a 'priori grounds that, in the creation of a God all-good and omnipotent. Evil must be illusory, and a mere needful step to the highest good for every creature ; lastly, by the doc- trine, often timidly approached by previous thinkers, but for the first time, I believe, frankly stated by Mr. Mill, that supposing God to be, in any sense. Good, His character and dealings are explicable only on the hypothesis that He is possessed of very limited power and wisdom.

Such are the largest waves of human thought which for countless ages have dashed themselves against this cloud-capped rock. For us, in our day, few of them

XXIV PEEFACE.

bear mucli significance ; none can be said to be wholly satisfactory.

To explain natural evil and injustice by postu- lating the enormous injustice of punishing the whole human and animal creation for the sin of Adam, would be held absurd, even had not geology super- abundantly demonstrated the existence of the greatest natural evils before Man, or even before the order of Mammalia, came into being.

The hypothesis of a Great Bad God, whose opposi- tion mars perpetually the work of the Good Creator though even yet accepted by a few minds of high philosophic cast, seems to the majority of us only to darken the dark mystery. The God who could create a Satan would be himself a Satan ; and an uncreated Ahrimanes, issuing out of "Time without Bounds," would be in Morals what a Circular Triangle would be in Mathematics — a self-contradiction. When we have postulated eternal Existence, Wisdom and Power, we have ty our definition excluded Malevolence, Cruelty and Injustice.*

* " The notion of an absolutely Evil Principle is an express contradiction. For as the Princij)le resists the Good One, it also must be independent and infinite. But the notion of a Being infinitely evil, is of one infinitely imperfect ; its know- ledge and power therefore must be absolute ignorance and im- potence."— Law's Notes to King's Origin of Evil.

PREFACE. XXV

The "intractable properties of Matter" may pos- sibly indicate a class of causes which may stand for much in the solution of the riddle of Evil ; but till we have arrived at some conception of how the law of Evolution is worked by the Lawgiver, and find the equivalent in modern scientific terminology for the earlier " Creation" and the later " Contrivance," it is little better than cheating ourselves with words to speak of Matter as either " intractable" or otherwise in the hands of God. When all is said, we are not far, yet, beyond the philosophy which taught that

" All are but parts of one stupendous Whole, Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul ;"

and till we have learned something of the relation of our own bodies to our souls, of the "flesh" to the "spirit" against which it so often wars, it is hopeless to specu- late on that of the material universe to its directing Mind. Certainly there is nothing in the visible world corroborating the notion of yet incomplete conquests of the Demiurge over Matter. No discoverer has found an outlying tract of Chaos, any more than the " print of Satan's hoof in the Old Eed Sandstone," the marks of the handiwork of any second or opposing Intelligence. If Nature explains herself to us,

" 'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the garb thou seest Him by,"

XXVI PREFACE.

that " sjarb " we behold is neither unfinished in the minutest hem, nor yet torn or spotted anywhere as by an enemy's hand. The red threads which run through it are woven into its very texture ; nor is it possible to guess how some of them can ever be eliminated. Only the poet looks for the day when the "lion shall eat straw like the ox." The zoologist knows that by the law of his being the lion must prey on. the lamb, while the lamb and he inhabit together the earth. The " Holy Mountain," whereon they shall not " kill nor destroy," and where man and brute and bird and insect may live in peace and love, is, like Heaven itself, unmarked in the chart of any geographer.

Again, the orthodox Catholic doctrine — that Evil is necessary to afford scope for the moral freedom of man — is, I believe, valid as the explanation of a very large class of phenomena wherein Man is principally con- cerned ; but it is obvious that it leaves untouched the still harder problem of the misery of the brutes, since morals and geology have alike advanced too far to accept the theory which formerly supplemented it, that the "whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain " for Adam's offence.

Again, the doctrine of Leibnitz — that it is the best of all worlds which could have been created — though perhaps nearer the truth than any other, must

PEEFACE. XXVll

ratlier be deemed a statement of the problem than its solution, since he offers no suggestion as to the nature of that necessity for not making it hdtcr, which he is everywhere forced to assume as paramount to the Divine Benevolent Will.*

The unhesitating faith of Theodore Parker is one which few of us can regard without envy, and the mighty force of conviction with which he gave it utter- ance has served to warm and cheer a thousand hearts. God had revealed His absolute goodness in the very core of that large and loving heart, and in the blaze of that Divine light he ceased to discern the darkness around. The result is, that he has contributed more than perhaps any other man of our age to kindle amongst us a fervent and fearless love towards God, which may help us, as it helped him, to say, " though He slay me" — aye, and far worse, slay in my sight those

* Arclibisliop King, at the conchision of his celebrated Treatise — containing some vabiable observations and some singularly naif examples of the circular mode of argument — sums up his conclusions with mi;ch complacency thus : " The difficult question then, 'Whence came evil V is not unanswer- able. It arises from the very nature and constitution of created beings, and could not be avoided without a contradiction. Though we are not able to apply these principles to all cases, we are sure they may be so applied" (Treatise on the Origin of Evil, 4th edit. p. 145). I wish I could share the Archbishop's plenary satisfaction in the results of his labours.

XXVlll PREFACE.

who have never sinned as I have done — yet even so, " yet I will trust in Him." But he has only provoked from the scientific side a somewhat contemptuous re- jection of his dogmatic optimism, as making no real attempt to grapple with the difficulty of Evil, or recog- nize its extent*

Lastly, there remains the door of escape which Mr. Mill has set ajar — the hypothesis that God, though benevolent, may be weak and ignorant, unable to do better than He has done for His creatures, albeit that is bad enough.-j* This theory I must here dwell upon for a few moments, both because it will no doubt for some time to come hold considerable place in men's thoughts, and also because it very importantly touches the chief purport of this book — our hopes of the Life after Death. If God be really so feeble a Being as Mr. Mill suggests, if His contrivances be so " clumsy" (p. 30), and even His own immortality open to doubt

* It is evident fi-om his biographies that in his earlier years Theodore Parker was very deeply impressed hy the sufferings of animals, and much disturbed thereby. What was the key by which he escaped out of Doubting Castle I have never been able to ascertain.

t " And since the exertion of all his power to make it as little imperfect as possible, leaves it no better than it is, they cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human estimate, yet as in itself not merely finite, but extremely limited." Essays on Religion, p. 40.

PREFACE. XXIX

(p. 243), it is idle to argue any further concerning His goodness, for He may be sincerely desirous of giving to us eternal joy hereafter, and yet fail to do so as completely as He has failed to give us perfect happiness here. This world being the bungle it is reported to be, it is hopeless to count on what the sequel of it may prove.

If God's wisdom be really "limited/' and His con- trivances " clumsy," there is in nature a very singular anomaly, for it appears that He has made a being more clever than Himself, and able to point out where He has failed, if not exactly how to do better. The intelligence of man is the highest work of God with which we are acquainted (though nothing hinders us from supposing He may have made indefinitely nobler intelligent inhabitants of other worlds) ; but to sup- pose that this chef d'muvre of the human brain is en- dowed with such similar but superior powers to its Maker as to be qualified to criticise and discriminate the clever from the clumsy among them, would be astonishing indeed. I do not mean this remark in the sense of the "browbeating" of the human Intel- lect to which divines are so prone. There can be no audacity in exercising any faculties with which we are gifted. I only desire to observe that there is, on the face of the matter, something very like absurdity

d

XXX PREFACE.

in supposing that we, who, on the hypothesis, are, our- selves, God's handiwork, could find the end of His knowledge or wisdom. Practically, when we reflect on any one branch of the Divine Art, on the archi- tecture of the starry heavens, on the chemistry of the ever-shifting gases and fluids and solids in which creation every hour is born and dies, on the mechanism of the frame of an animalcule, or of our own bodies — say, of the Hand alone, as exemplified in Sir Charles Bell's splendid treatise — it seems indeed monstrous for us to open our lips regarding the "Wisdom of the Creator.

Where the limits of His Power may lie is another question, of which it seems impossible we should ever guess the answer. Undoubtedly Christian theologians have written much folly about " Omnipotence," having first invented a purely metaphysical term, and then argued back from it to facts, as if it were a specific datum within our measurement, like the horse-power of a steam-engine or an hydraulic-press. A more sober and reverent mode of regarding the stupendous Power above us, may, as I have long hoped and argued, become a " Note " of Theism ; and in the full admission that there must be some- limits even to supreme Might (limits existing in the very nature of things, which cannot at once be and not be,

PEEFACE. XXXI

or unite contradictory properties, such as those of a circle and a triangle), we may find some help in con- templating such evils as those which seem to follow inevitably on the grant of moral freedom to a finite being such as man.

But such limitations of the Divine Power as Mr. Mill seems to contemplate, would narrow it (if I understand him rightly) far beyond this mere nega- tion of contradictions ; and if we are to admit them into our philosophy, it ought surely to be on the ground that there are marks of such limits in nature ; places where the creative energy seems to have fallen short, or the obvious design has aborted. Now it is possible that some evils in nature — some forms of dis- ease, for example — may seem to possess this character ; but unquestionably the greater mass of evil bears no such marks. It is, as I have just said, woven into the very tissue of life on the planet, and seems just as much a part of the great plan as all the rest. All the terrible things in the world — the ruthless beak, the poisoned fang, the rending claw — are as much an integral part of the work as the downy breast of the bird or the milk of the mother-brute. Further, there is a very curious parallel, which I do not think has received sufficient attention, between the exceptional ugliness in a Beautiful world and the exceptional evil

^2

XXXU PREFACE.

in a Good oue, which apparently alike demand some other solution than that of a limitation of the Maker's Power. The Creator has covered the earth and filled the waters with beauty. Almost every animal and shell, every tree and flower and sea-weed, the moun- tains, the rivers, the oceans, every phase of day and night, summer and winter, — is essentially beautiful. Our sense of Beauty seems to be, not so much a bene- ficent adaptation to our dwelling-place (like our sense of taste for our food), but rather a filial sympathy with our Great Father's pleasure in His own lovely creation ; a pleasure which He must have enjoyed millions of years before our race existed, when all the exquisite forms of animal and vegetable life filled the ancient lands and seas of the earliest geologic epochs. Nothing but a preference for beauty, for grace of form and varied and harmonious colouring, inherent in the Author of the Cosmos, can explain how it comes to pass that Nature is on the whole so refulgent with loveliness. But even here there are exceptions. Put- ting aside all man's monstrosities (and the beings who could create the Black Country might be counted by a dweller in the planet Mars as the brood of Ahri- manes), there are in the animal and the vegetable kingdom objects which are, strictly speaking, as ugly as the vast majority are beautiful. The same principle

PREFACE. XXXlll

which authorizes us to pronounce an antelope or a Himalayan pheasant graceful and beautiful, requires us to admit that the form of a rhinoceros is clumsy and tlie colours of a macaw harsh and grating. If the song of the nightingale to its mate be musical, that of a peacock is frightful ; and if a firefly ranging among the roses of a southern night be a dream of beauty, a hairy and bloated tarantula spider hanging on the tree beside it causes us to shudder at its hideousness. Even amidst the flowers which seem like love-gifts from heaven to man, there are now and then to be found some evil-looking, crawling, blotched and sickly-smelling things, — not to speak of those cruel and gluttonous Dionsea, which, by the irony of fate, have been brought so specially to our notice at this moment, as if even in the study of the lilies of the field we could no more be sure of finding comfort and rest of heart. Now all these uglinesses in Nature are, I submit, real analogies to the sufferings of sentient creatures. They are few enough to be distinctly exceptional, but yet great and many enough, and bound up so completely in the chain of things, as to leave us no choice but to accept them as holding the same relation to the Author of Nature as all the rest. What view can we take, then, of this mystery of Ugliness, since it would seem that any hypothesis

XXXIV PREFACE.

which may account for it may very possibly fit that yet greater and more dreadful mystery of suffering? Putting it thus before us, it seems absurd to say that perhaps the Divine Power was not equal to the task of harmonizing the macaw's colour or the peacock's voice, or of reducing to proportion and grace the un- wieldy rhinoceros or the revolting spider. That His power should act freely in constructing the lion and the horse, the eagle and the ibis, the lark and the butterfly, and yet should be unaccountably thwarted and tram- melled when He made the animals so strangely con- trasted with them, is almost ridiculous to suppose. It seems, then, as impossible to frame an hypothesis which shall fit this aesthetic anomaly of nature, as one which shall meet the moral anomaly of Pain.

Thus, in short, it appears that every one of the theories on the origin of Evil which have been put forth from the days of the Pentateuch to the appearance of these Essays on Eeligion, are more or less unsatisfac- tory and incomplete ; and we may, with only too great probability, resign the hope that we shall ever hear of a better, or that any QEdipus will arise in the ages to come to resolve "the riddle of the painful earth," and relieve us from its direful pressure.

Two things only, I conceive, remain for us to do in the matter. The first is, to define somewhat more

PREFACE. XXXV

closely than, while oppressed by the declamations of pessimists, we are generally able to do, wliat it is in Nature which the human moral sense recognizes as Evil. Secondly, to convince ourselves what is the testimony to the goodness of the Creator to be set over against it, which may enable us — not by any means to honour Him on the balance, but — to give Him our heart-whole love and allegiance, and treat the mystery of Evil as we should treat the inexpli- cable conduct of a revered Father.

Of course no attempt to accomplish adequately either of these purposes can be made in these pages. I shall only shortly indicate the character of the con- clusions to which, in each case, I have myself arrived.

The first thing to be done, if we desire to define what we mean by Evil, is to determine what we are justified in expecting as Good, and then ask, what is there lacking of such Good in the universe as we actually behold it ? There is a principle which has been often laid down by sceptics as if it were a self-evident axiom, but which appears to me to be nothing short of a monstrous misstatement. They affirm that the existence of evil for an hour in the realm of a beneficent Deity is just as inexplicable as the final triumph of evil to all eter- nity ; and consequently that where we find so much evil as prevails on earth, it is wholly impossible to

XXXVl PREFACE.

say what extent and duration, even to infinity, may not be permitted to evil in other worlds present or future.

This argument, I contend, is wholly fallacious. It turns on two false assumptions — first, the perverse ascription to God of an omnipotence involving contra- dictions (e.g. that a creature could be made virtuous in a world devoid of trials) ; and secondly, the appli- cation of the limitations of time, proper to a weak and ignorant being such as man, to a Being who is in certain possession of the power to carry out His pur- poses whenever He sees fit. The justice and goodness of God must, indeed, be the same as the justice and goodness of man — such is the cardinal postulate of all sound theology. But it does not follow that because man is bound to do justice and mercy at once, when the opportunity is presented to him (since he never knows whether it may come again), that God is simi- larly morally bound to rectify immediately every wrong and relieve every pang. On the contrary, it seems clear that, to an eternal and all-foreseeing Being, this principle of human ethics has no application, and that He rightly says to man

" Tu n'as qu'un jour pour etre juste J'ai Teternite devant Moi."

Even human parents are authorized to inflict pain,

PREFACE. XXXVll

surgical or penal, which they reasonably believe to be calculated to benefit their children ; and it is obvious that the rights of the Divine Father, whose resources of compensation are infinite, must extend in this direction far beyond the bounds of the earthly horizon. All this line of argument, then, as against the Divine Justice, I consider to be wholly invalid. The point at which the human sense of justice as regards the relations of the Creator to the creature (a sense which I humbly believe God himself has planted in us and authorized us to exercise) actually pro- nounces itself, is far different. We feel that it would be unjust to create a being the sum of wJiose existence should he evil, who endured on the whole more misery than he enjoyed happiness. And this, I maintain, holds good even if the moral ill-deserts of that being should appear to merit overwhelming retributive punishment. The cruellest of all injustices would be to create a being, so constituted and placed in such conditions, as that it should in any umy come about that he should sink, not only into such misery, but such sin as should finally turn the scale and make his whole existence a curse. Evil cannot be fitly predicated of any amount of suffering within these bounds, as if it were incon- sistent with the Divine Justice ; and all that the Good- ness of God leads us to expect is, that no suffering,

XXXVlll PREFACE.

small or great, should ever be meaningless and un- necessary, but that it should either have been inevitable as the condition of larger good, and in the maintenance of that eternal order in whose fixed warp the woof of our freedom alone can play ; or else corrective and purgatorial, at once Just and in the highest sense Merciful.

Taking our stand at this point, what is there that we must define as Evil in the world ? The outlook is threefold, and the answers correspondingly various. Has God been just and good to tcs ? Has He been so to other men ? Has He been so to the brutes ? Most frequently men confound all these questions ; and the answer which they find for the first determines that which they adopt for the second and the third ; and thus the optimism of the prosperous and the pessim- ism of the disappointed may be readih'' explained. But though the dealings of God with each of us as known to ourselves alone may, and indeed do, serve us as presumptive evidence of the character of His dealings with others, it is plain it can be only on condition that we read them in their true moral sig- nificance. Mr. Morley has expressed somewhere his unmitigated disgust at those who are ready to pro- claim that God is very good because their lot happens to be a fortunate one, regardless of the misery of their

PEEFACE. XXXIX

fellows. But it is surely no less disgusting to find others denounce Him as cruel and unjust because (albeit He has treated them with infinite forbearance) He has left them to suffer some of the consequences of their errors ; or because, in bestowing ninety-nine precious gifts, He has withheld the hundredth for which they crave? Here we come to one of many illustrations of the fact that the spiritual element in us alone enables us to judge truly of spiritual things. Spiritual men without exception testify that to their experience God has been tenfold better than their deserts — more kind, more long-suffering, more infi- nitely Father-like and merciful. Enduring every kind of loss, pain, or disappointment, their testimony is always the same ; and, however much their faith is tortured by the evils they witness around them, it has never so much as occurred to them to think that God might have been better to themselves personally than He has actually been. It is reserved for quite another order of minds to express indignation and a sense of injustice as regards their own destinies, and to argue that God has not (as Marcus Aurelius said) " done well for me and for the world ;" that He ought to have given them their heart's desire — health, wealth or success ; and that they have a right to complain of His dealings. What is the secret of this

xl PREFACE.

difference ? It is, very simply, that the spiritual man has learned somewhat of what God is, and, correspond- ingly, of what he is himself ; the One so good and holy, that the very thought of Injustice cannot be directed towards Him after the experience of His forgiving love ; the other so sinful, so vacillating, so ungrateful, that his never-ending wonder is how God continues to him the least of His mercies. Yery possibly among the chief of God's kindnesses he may reckon some acute suffering of body or mind which has driven him back from the ways of worldliness and sin, and restored him to his better self Thus, then, to the question, " Has God been good and just to us indi- vidually?" it will be found, I think, that different answers will generally be given by religious and irre- ligious men. The first never think themselves to have deserved so much good as they have received ; the second rarely think themselves to have deserved so much evil.

On first noticing this fact, the natural corollary seems to be that, in the life of every man, could we read it similarly from the inside, we should likewise trace the same contrast. But the rule cannot hold good as regards the tens of thousands who have never known anything deserving the name of a religion ; whose natures have been crushed, warped, stunted

PREFACE. xli

from childoood, or trampled down in manhood or womanhood into the mire of vice and shame, instead of being lifted into spirituality ; nor yet of the mil- lions of innocent children who have suffered and died in infancy. Some difference will appear in the incidence of the preponderance of evil in the moral or in the physical life, according as we regard Hap- piness as the end and aim of existence, or believe that end to consist in Virtue and eternal union with God. But in either case (as I have argued at length in the succeeding Essay) it is certain that the mass of mankind neither attain to such degree of Happi- ness nor of Virtue as that we can pronounce it to be positively " good," or to any which excludes very considerable evil.

Even here, however, regarding this great amount of evil in human life, we must guard ourselves against ex- aggeration, and especially against the fallacy of treating it as if it ever, or anywhere, outbalanced good. Where evil passions should actually preponderate over inno- cent or virtuous propensities, society must fall asunder, and human affairs come to a standstill. And where Want and Pain should prevail over satisfied appetite and ease, mortal life must terminate. In these days we need to be reminded again of the once familiar

xlii FREE ACE.

observation, that "it is a happy world after all ;" that all our senses normally convey pleasure, not pain ; and that the exercise of the faculties of heart and brain and limbs are all (under their proper conditions) delightful. We remark on a case of destitution, or on a friend's bodily suffering or bereavement ; but we could not find tongue to tell of all those around us who have sufficient food and clothing, who are free from pain, and who enjoy the sweet happiness of home affections. Many of us live for months and years without pain ; but few live a day without pleasure, if it be only the pleasure of food and sleep and of intercourse with their kind.

And, again, it ought to be borne in mind, as setting limits to our notions of Evil, that it has diminished in a perceptible degree in successive ages. Perhaps this lessening is not so great as we once fondly ima- gined, and that the progress of mankind is far from being achieved without drawbacks ; still it would appear there are decidedly more, and higher, pleasures now enjoyed, and fewer, and lesser, pains now suffered, by mankind, than in any preceding age of the world.

Here, then, rest our conclusions regarding Evil in human existence. It is vast, and much of it is wholly inexplicable by any of the hypotheses which have

PREFACE. xliii

passed current as its explanation. But, great as it is, the good in human hfe is greater still, and shews a constant tendency to gain ground upon it.

Regarding the suffering of animals, it seems that if our fathers treated it much too lightly in their sub- lime contempt for the brutes, we are not exempt from the danger of taking too dark a view of it. Mr. Mill says, for example,* that " if a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding bene- ficent adaptations in all nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided with scarcely an exception into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary to protect them- selves." I cannot but protest against words like these, as quite equally misleading with the easy-going opti- mism of Paley and his congeners. The lives of the lower animals, so far as we can understand their con- sciousness, are not, on the whole, a pain, but a pleasure. When undisturbed by human cruelty, they suffer but little or rarely till the closing scene ; and though that is, alas ! too often one of anguish, it scarcely occupies in any case a hundredth or a thousandth part of their

* Nature, p. 58.

Xliv PEEFACE.

existence. In the interval of days, months or years, between birth and death, they have evidently much ease and not a little delight. They enjoy the gambols of youth, undimmed by the pains of human education ; the passion of love, unchecked by shame or disappoint- ment ; the perpetually-recurring pleasures of food, rest and exercise ; and (in the case of the female birds and brutes) the exquisite enjoyments of their tender mo- therhood. The sum and substance of their lives under all normal conditions is surely beyond question happy, and the anxieties and cares which in their position would be ours, and which we are apt to lend them in imagination, are by them as totally unfelt as are our miserable vanities, our sorrowful memories, and our bitter remorse. The scene which the woods and pas- tures present to a thoughtful eye of a summer morning is not one to " blacken" the character of the Creator, but to lift up the soul in rapture, and prompt us to add a human voice of thanksgiving to the chirp of the happy birds, the bleating of the playful lambs, and the hum of the bees in the cowslips and the clover.

The law by which the death of one animal is need- ful to the life of another, is undoubtedly one whose working it is impossible for us to contemplate without pain. The process of killing and devouring, if on the

PREFACE. xlv

whole less productive of suffering than the slow death of age and want, is yet in millions of cases accom- panied by circumstances horrible to think of ; nor is it at all evident why natural death should not itself have been made painless, rather than that recourse should have been had to such an alternative. Ob- viously if creatures had not been made to devour one another, scarcely a hundredth part of those which now throng the earth and waters could have existed, and each individual may be said to hold his life on the tenure of relinquishing it when summoned for another's support* Still the Law is undoubtedly, to our sense, a harsh one ; and when we add to its action the suf- ferings of animals from disease, from noxious insects and parasites, from cold, from hunger, and, above all, from the cruelty of man, we have undoubtedly accumulated a mass of evil very awful to contemplate.*!' But it is wrong to exaggerate even here, or speak as if the lives of the brutes were on the whole a curse,

* ArchLisliop King says : " God could have created an ina- nimate machine which should have supplied animals with food. But a being that has life is preferable to one that has not. God therefore animated that machine which furnishes out provision for the more perfect animals." — Origin of Evil, c. iii. § 5.

t It is probable that every harmless little calf killed by the vile old process for producing white veal, suffers as much as a crucified man.

xlvi PREFACE.

and not a blessing. Even we who in our cruelty so often seek them only to hurt and destroy, yet see them — bird, beast and insect — ninety-nine times out of a hundred, happy and enjoying themselves, for once we notice them in any kind of pain. The same rule applies to our impressions as in the case of human suffering. We are so much more struck by the sight of pain than of ordinary pleasure and well-being, that we carry away a vivid impression of the former, and forget the latter.

Brought to its actual limits, then, I conceive the problem of Evil stands before us as a vast, but not an immense exception, in a rule of Good. A certain large share of it we can recognize as having great moral purposes fully justifying its existence, and even ele- vating it into the rank of beneficence ; such are the sufferings (of rational beings) which punish and re- press sin, and those through whose fires the noblest and the purest virtues have ever passed to perfection. That there is some wondrous power in Suffering thus to bring out of human souls qualities immeasurably nobler than are ever developed without its aid, is a fact equally plain to those who have watched the almost divine transformation it sometimes effects upon characters hitherto hard, selfish or commonplace ; and to those who have noted how thin-natured and

PREFACE. xlvii

unsympathetic, if not selfish, are at the best those men and women who have lived from youth to age in the unbroken sunshine of prosperity. Even among very ordinary characters, and where the lesson of suf- fering has not been deep, there are very few of us, I believe, who after the lapse cf a little while would wish that we could unlearn it, or return to be the slighter, feebler, shallower-hearted beings we were before it came. Eather do we recognize the truth of the poet's words :

" The energies too stern for mirth, The reach of thought, the strength of will, 'Mid cloud and tempest have their birth, Thi'ough blight and blast their course fulfil."

Another share of evil may be attributed to — though not altogether explained by — the beneficent purpose of securing preponderating physical advantage to the sufferer; as, for example, the pains which guard the integrity of the bodies of animals. But beyond all these, we are compelled mournfully to conclude that there exists, both in human life and in the life of the brutes, a large mass of evil, which can by no such hypotheses be accounted for consistently with the benevolence of the Creator ; and which utterly baffles now, and will probably for ever baffle, the ingenuity of mortal man so to explain.

e2

xlviii PREFACE.

What is it that shall help us to look this great re- siduum of inexplicable evil iu the face ? Where shall we find ground of faith whereon we may take our stand and confront it with unshaken hearts ?

Strange it is indeed to say, that I have hopes that the publication of the Essays on Nature, the Utility of Religion and Theism, which will give such bitter pain to all believing hearts, such double sadness to those who, like myself, regard their author with un- dying honour and gratitude, may even prove the turning-point of this controversy — may set us at last on the right track for the solution of the problem. For what have we in these powerful, limpidly clear, bravely outspoken words? We have, for the first time perhaps in human history, revealed sharply and dis- tinctly what that element in human nature must be which to the majority of mankind is the origin and organ of Eeligion, and which it is so transparently evident that Mr. Mill had not* Hitherto we have

* Let it be understood that, in speaking of the Religious Sentiment as deficient in Mr. Mill's nature, I use the term ex- pressly in the sense of that spiritual organ whereby man obtains direct perception of the Living God. In the broader meaning of the word, implying general reverence and tenderness towards all things noble and holy, — a sense of the mystery surrounding human life, and a fervent devotion to the ideal of Duty, — Mr, Mill was assuredly an eminently religious man. How it came

PKEFACE. xlix

seen it in its highest development in the saints, and had opportunity to learn what it positively is. But so natural does it seem to man, so much does it, in ordinary men and women, harmonize with and shade oft" into the moral, affectional and ratiocinative facul- ties, that it was easy to mistake their action for its own. Now it seems possible to learn more of it by the aid of the complete self-revelation of a very noble mind, wherein, owing to almost unique circumstances, the whole element has been eliminated ; and we are left to mark what are the tracts of human nature which it normally covers, and which are found to

to pass that sucli a soul could by any mortal hand be debarred from the happiness of direct recognition of God, is one of the riddles wherewith the spiritual as well as the physical world is full. As he himself says, "it is possible to starve an in- stiQct ;" and, as Mr. Upton has well explained in his profound paper on the "Experience Philosophy and Religious Belief," beside all other conditions on which spiritual knowledge is obtained, it is needful " that the understanding should be freed from all tyrannous misconceptions which preclude or distort the intellectual cognizance of spiritual truth." Nothing short of such a Divine hlotv as smote St. Paul would have been strong enough to overthrow the " tyrannous misconceptions" where- with Mr. Mill's education must have fenced his mind. I need scarcely add that, in my view, the absence of conscious recogni- tion of the relations between God and the soul is very far indeed from implying the non-existence of such relations, or the loss of some of the richest blessings which they bestow.

PREFACE.

lie bare like the sea-shore when that mighty tide has flowed away back to its bed. We behold one of the keenest intellects of this or any century, and, on the human side, one of the tenderest and most capacious of hearts — a man whose moral sense (what- ever were his theories of its nature) quivered with intensest life, and was true as needle to the pole of the loftiest justice to man, to woman and to brute, who yet, great philosopher as he was, when he comes to deal with a subject on which the rude tinker of Bedford has instructed the world, writes like a blind man discoursing of colours, or a deaf man criticising the contortions of a violinist wasted on the delusion of music. When he speaks of the Utility of Religion, he confounds, as if they were identical, those realms of human nature which public opinion or human autho- rity may sway ; and those which, in the solemn hours of visitation from the Divine Spirit, fall under the inner law of Conscience and of Love. And when he writes of the Consciousness of God, all he has to say of it, is to refer to the metaphysical subtleties of Cousin about the laws of perception, and to add con- temptuously :

" It would be a waste of time to examine any of these theories in detail. While each has its particular logical fallacies, they labour under the common infirmity that

PREFACE.

li

one man cannot, by proclaiming with ever so much confi- dence that he perceives an object, convince other people that they see it too. . . . When no claim is set up to any peculiar gift, but we are told that all of us are as capable as the prophet of seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels — nay, that we actually do so — and when the utmost effort of which we are capable fails to make us aware of what we are told we perceive, this supposed universality of intuition is but

* The dark lantern of the spirit Which none see by but those who bear it ;'

and the bearers may be asked to consider whether it is not more likely tliat they are mistaken as to the origin of au impression on their minds, than that others are ignorant of the very existence of an impression on theirs."*

The friends who can have told Mr. Mill that he saw, or was capable of seeing, religious truth as a Tauler or a Fenelon saw it, or of feeling on the sub- ject as even much less religious men are accustomed to feel, were bold indeed. It may have been a hard task to say that such was not the case. Nobody could have ventured upon it during his life or even after his death, had he not thrown down the chal- lenge, and elaborately explained to us the way in which his religious instincts were destroyed by his ruthless father. But now the matter stands plain ;

* P. 163.

lii PREFACE.

and I confess I look with some confidence to the results of the act of the elder Mill in extirpating the organ of religion from his child's heart, as serving to reveal to us the place it naturally takes among human faculties. Even at the cost of all the desolation the book will spread around, it is perhaps well that this dreadful experiment should once for all have been tried, and not in any "vile body" of fool or egotist, but in the person of one of the ablest, and, in all things beside, one of the very noblest of men.

That lesson, then, is this : that, as we did not first gain our knowledge of God from the external world, so we shall never obtain our truest and most reliable idea of Him from the inductions which Science may help us to draw from it. Spiritual things must be spiritually discerned, or we must be content never to discern them truly at all. In man's soul alone, so far as we may yet discover, is the moral nature of his Maker revealed, as the sun is mirrored in a mountain lake. While all the woods and moors and pastures are quivering in its heat, we only behold the great orb reflected in the breast of that deep, solitary pool. If (as we must needs hold for truth) there be a moral purpose running through all the physical crea- tion, its scope is too enormous, its intricacy too deep, the cycle of its revolution, like that of some great

PREFACE. liii

sidereal Period, too inimeuse for our brief and blind observation. It must be enough for us to learn what God bids us to be of just and merciful and loving, and then judge what must be His justice, His mercy and His love. That Being whom the sinful soul meets in the hour of its penitence — and the grateful heart in its plenitude of thanksgiving — and every man who really prays in the moments of supreme communion — that God is One concerning whom the very attempt to prove that He is infinitely good seems almost sacri- lege. It is as Goodness, as Holiness, Love and Pity ineffable, that He has revealed Himself Shall we treat all that we have so learned on our knees as idle self-delusions, and barricade with iron shutters the win- dows of the soul which look out heavenward, and this in the name of sense and reason ? Nay, but let us fling those windows wide open, and again and yet again seek to renew the celestial vision. These sacred faculties of our nature have a right to their exercise, as well as those which tell us of the properties of solids, fluids and gases, of light and electricity. Their reports may be false ? So may be everything we call knowledge, every report of the senses, every conclusion of the logical intellect. A persistent and widely recognized fact of human consciousness may be illusory ; but

liv PREFACE.

there is no better proof to be bad even of the existence of an external world*

The great root passion of normally constituted hu- manity, the craving to find some One to whom to

* An excellent illustration of tMs subject, expressing very closely my own view of it, is to he found in the following letter, published in the Spectator, Sept. 5, 1874 :

" Will you give me space for an illustration in support of that which, apart from revelation, is surely the best proof of all of the existence of God, — the existence, viz., of that religious instinct in man which, on Professor Tjmdall's and Mr. H. Spencer's own scientific principles, should be the subjective response to some objective reality, the adaptation of the crea- ture man to his ' environment.' The dog has a religion, and his deity is man. Previous to the introduction of man upon the scene, the dog must have been simply dog, minus this quasi-religious faculty. But man appears, and makes his appeal to the dog-nature ; in response, a capacity for human fellowship is developed in the dog, and is inherited, so that a craving for such fellowship becomes, thenceforth, part of his nature.

" Now if we imagine some being, some detached intelligence, with power to observe the dog in his development through the ages, but to whom the man, on his introduction, is invisible, what a strange problem would present itself for his solution ! Would not the higher development of the dog, as now observed by him, be analogous to the calling forth of the religious in- stinct in the creature man ? The observer would now see with wonder the frequent reference to a seemingly higher will, not always cheerfully yielded to. He would note the upward look, the overcoming of mere animal impulses, the occasional wiKul outbreak of the lower nature, bringing with it a sense of guilt, to be followed by shame, penitence and meek submission to chastisement ; strangest thing of all, he would see this chastise-

PEEFACE. Iv

look up with absolute moral reverence, a passion which even within the last few months the greatest thinkers on the agnostic side have one after another admitted to be a fundamental and ineradicable element in our nature, — that exalted aspiration can never find the smallest satisfaction in the notion of a Probable God, who is probably more Benevolent than other- wise. Mr. Mill arrives at the conclusion that such lights as we possess " afford no more than a prepon- derance of probability of the existence of a Creator ; of his benevolence a considerably less preponderance ;

ment seemingly accepted as a medium of reconcihation with some invisible being, whereby peace and contentment are re- stored to the canine mind.

" Which would be the soundest conclusion for such an ob- server as I have supposed to come to ? That these phenomena of dog-consciousness were self-evolved, mere subjective illu- sions ; or that, outside the range of his vision, there was some real object to call them forth I To the olwious criticism that, as a matter of fact, the dog does apprehend man, his deity, by his senses, while man does not thus a^iprehend God, the reply is that, though in many cases it may be latent, there is in man a higher sense whereby, and that with an intense reality, the invisible God has been and is apprehended by countless thou- sands.

" Supposing the evolution theory to be true, the question arises, when did man, the thinking animal, become man the religious being ? May not this example of a somewhat parallel phenomenon in a lower field supply an answer, viz. when his nature, however previously developed, was first consciously acted upon by a higher Nature ? — I am. Sir, &c.,

"Henry F. Bather."

Ivi PREFACE.

that there is some reason to think that he cares for the pleasure of his creatures, but by no means that this is his sole care, or that other purposes do not often take precedence of it."*

Further on, he grants that the " ideally perfect cha- racter may have a real existence in a Being to

whom we owe all such good as we enjoy."i- But such an hypothesis can only be admitted on condition of supposing that " his power over his materials was not absolute;" that "his love for his creatures was not his sole actuating inducement ;":|: and, finally, that even of his " continued existence " we have not a thoroughly satisfactory " guarantee."§ But as such a Being as this is no God at all to the needs either of the conscience or of the heart, we are conse- quently not surprised to find Mr. Mill setting Him aside in favour of that " standard of excellence," Jesus Christ. Here is another wonderful exemplification of the eminent presence of the Moral and the total ab- sence of the Spiritual element in this great thinker. He perfectly recognized the moral beauty of Christ's character as transcribed by history, but his inward eye was closed to that supreme Loveliness which is spiritually revealed to every soul which enters into communion with God ; and, which, shining full into

* P. 208. t P. 253. X P. 243. § P. 243.

PREFACE. Ivii

the heart of Christ, made him the mirror wherein humanity has ever since seen it reflected.

The fact that we want a Perfect God does not of course prove that any such Being exists, but it leaves such a Deity as ^Ir. ]\Iill has propounded for our quasi- belief altogether outside the re%ioz/.s question. If the Intellect or the Fancy may be contented with a Pro- bable God, provisionally accepted as Benevolent, it is certain that the Eeligious Sentiment can no more attach itself to such a Deity than a man can embrace a cloud. A balance of probabilities may properly determine our choice of an investment for a sum of money ; but when it comes to the gift of our heart's allegiance, we need a different kind of assurance. ISTo man can stand by patiently while arguments j^ro and con. are carefully weighed, and begin to love when the scale turns by a hair on the side of Benevolence, and drop on his knees in reverence as Justice begins to prepon- derate, and adore when the balance of Good appears finally by some degrees heavier than that of Evil. If this be so, then it follows that the Inductive Method is for ever inapplicable to the solution of the greater problems of theology, because under the most favour- able circumstances it can only give us a balance of more or less probability — a General, not an Universal proposition. We are compelled to seek in some other

Iviii PREFACE.

modes of thought an assurance of quite another kind.

I am far from conceding that no more decisive witness to the Divine Existence and Goodness than Mr, Mill has found in the external world is to be drawn therefrom, strictly by the Inductive Method. Respecting God's existence, it seems to me the sum- mary of arguments in Mr. Thornton's recent admirable treatise* leaves the scientific atheist a standing-room so infinitesimally small, that nothing short of one of those angels of whom the Eabbins taught that a legion may rest on the point of a needle could support himself thereon. And regarding the Divine Moral Character, I must protest against the unaccountable manner in which, when the Experience philosophy holds its court, the most important of the witnesses is rarely or ever put in the box. AVhy is it, I ask, that while every minute fact of organic and inorganic nature is freely cited as bearing testimony more or less important to the character of the Creator — why is the supreme fact — the existence of Man, of a being who loves and who prays, who has, deep set within him, the ideas of Justice and of Duty, a being capable of becoming a hero, a martyr, a saint, — why is this

* Old-FasHoned Ethics, &c. See the Chapter on " Recent Phases of Scientific Atheism."

PREFACE. lix

greatest of all the facts of Nature which our globe presents, passed over by the experimentalist with no notice at all so far as it bears on the Theistic argu- ment ? Let us waive for a moment all question of personal intuitive or spiritual knowledge. Let us suppose that we, individually, have no such transcen- dental moral or religious knowledge, and that we are regarding the human race altogether ab extra. Even so, such " facts of experience " as an Isaiah, a Christ, a Buddha, a Plato, a Marcus Aurelius, certainly claim attention as much as any of the facts from which the Creator's indifference to His creatures' welfare, or in- capacity to make them happy, has been inductively inferred. After all which has been said of recent years regarding the way in which our moral natures may be supposed to have been developed out of the instincts of the ape, there is nothing so wonderful in all the wide circuit of science as that it should happen that in a world teeming with injustice, and in which Nature's "recklessness" is her prevailing character- istic,* there should exist a being whose brain has acquired such a "set" of passionate love for justice as that for its sake he is often ready to sacrifice hap- piness and life.

And, again, I think even the Experience philosophy, * Essays on Religion, p. 28.

Ix PREFACE.

when its conclusions are reduced to logical coherency, points to the perfection of the moral attributes of the Supreme Being. Such a Being either has, or has not, a moral nature. If He have one, then He cannot he partially good or partially just — half God, half devil — with a fickle or a chequered character. So much as this is involved in the hypothesis of a Creator transcending all the wants, pains, weaknesses, igno- rances and passions of the creature. If any prepon- derance of evidence in Nature, then, appears to shew that God has moral purposes, and that those purposes are, in the majority of cases, benevolent, we are com- pelled, for mere coherency sake, to arrive per saltum at the conclusion that, if He be good so far. He must be good altogether. On these grounds, then, even such a small residuum of the sublime idea of God as is left us by the rigid application of the Experimental philosophy to theology, may be made to harmonize with and corroborate the faith derived from a higher source of knowledge, and the Atheistic and Kako- theistic creeds stand condemned even in the court of Nature.

But I repeat that such arguments have in my eyes but little worth save as intellectual satisfactions, and I would as lief, for my own part, forego all such conclu- sions of my understanding regarding the Great Power

• /.

PREFACE. Ixi

who dwells behind the veil of Nature, if I could not find in my heart the Lord of Life and Love, our all- holy, all-merciful Father and God.

A few words must be added, in conclusion, respecting Mr. Mill's remarks on the doctrine with which this little book is directly concerned — that of the Immor- tality of the Soul. After having described the reasons which he conceives have acted as powerful causes of the belief, not as rational grounds for it, and then stated the arguments deduced from the Goodness of God, he observes :

"These might be arguments in a world the constitution of which made it possible, without contradiction, to hold it for the work of a Being at once omnipotent and benevo- lent. But they are not arguments in a world like that in which we live With regard to the supposed improba- bility of his having given the wish without its gratification, the same answer may be made. The scheme which either limitation of power or conflict of purposes compelled him to adopt may have required that we should have the wish,

although it were not destined to be gratified There is,

therefore, no assurance whatever of a life after death on grounds of natural religion. But to any one who feels it conducive, either to his satisfaction or his usefulness, to hope for a future state as a possibdity, there is no hindrance to his indulging that hope. Appearances point to the ex- istence of a Being who has great power over us — all the

/

Ixii PEEFACE.

power implied in the creation of the Kosmos, or of its organized being, at least — and of whose goodness we have evidence, though not of its being his predominant attribute ; and as we do not know the limits of either his power or his goodness, there is room to hope that both, the one and the other may extend to granting us this gift, provided that it would be really beneficial to us."*

After having held before lis this even balance of probabilities that we shall, or shall not, live again after death, Mr. Mill further discusses how far the indul- gence of hope in a region of mere imagination ought to be encouraged, or discouraged as a " departure from the rational principle of regulating our feelings as well as opinions strictly by evidence," and gives his verdict in favour of " making the most of any even small probabilities on this subject which furnish ima- gination witli any footing to support itself upon."-|- This observation, again, is followed up by many perti- nent remarks on the benefits derivable from looking habitually to the brighter and nobler side of things ; and with regard to the prospect of immortality, he adds that the benefit of the doctrine " consists less in any specific hope than in the enlargement of the general scale of the feelings,"^ and that it is " legiti- mate and philosophically defensible while we recognize

* Essays on Eeligion, pp. 209, 210. t P. 245. X P. 250.

ruEFACE. Ixiii

as a clear truth that we have no ground for more than a hope."

Now to those amonGrst us who do not believe that great benefits are ever derived from crediting delusions, and who do not feel in themselves the inclination to cultivate and water a Hope which they know to be a flower stuck rootless by a child in the ground, this kind of exhortation is as strange as that which follows it on the " infinitely precious familiarity of the imagi- nation with the conception of a morally perfect Being;' the same idealization of our standard of excellence in a Person " being quite possible, even when that Person is conceived as merely imaginary."* Meditating upon imaginary gods, and cherishing hopes which are known to depend on an even balance of probabilities, seems to most of us very like the mournful preservation of a casket when the jewel is stolen, of a cage when the bird is flown ; for ever reminding us of an irreparable loss. Far better, to our apprehensions, would it be to gather courage from our despair, and face as best we may the facts (if facts they be) that we have either no Father above, or that He is weak and unwise, and that our hopes beyond the grave hang on a straw, than mock these solemn trusts of the human soul in God and Immortality by " making believe," like children,

* Essays on Religion, p. 250.

/2

Ixiv ' PREFACE.

that we possess them when they are ours no more. "Si Dieu n'existait pas il faudrait Tin venter," is an epigram which has now been paralleled : " If we are not immortal, we had better think ourselves so." Yet there seems some contradiction in Mr. Mill's view of the advantages of the Hope altogether. In the pre- ceding essay on the Utility of Eeligion, he makes very light of it. He says :

" When mankind cease to need a future life as a con- solation for the suflferings of the present, it will have lost its chief value to them for themselves. I am now speaking of the unselfish. Those who are so wrapped up in self that they are unable to identify their feelings with anything which will survive them, require the notion of another selfish life beyond the grave to keep up any interest in existence."*

Here, again, surely we meet the singular train of

misapprehensions which seem to crowd upon the

writer from his incapacity to understand the religious

sentiments of other men. It is precisely the selfish

man who has had a comfortable life here below, who

may inscribe on his tombstone that he

" From. Nature's temperate feast rose satisfied, Thanked Heaven tliat lie had Hved and that he died;"

and made no demand for further existence for himself or anybody else. But the unselfish man who has

* P. 119.

PREFACE. IXV

looked abroad with aching heart upon a sinful and suffering world, cannot thus be content to rise with a sanctimonious grace from the feast of life (so richly- spread for him), and to leave Lazarus starving at his doors. That his own life on earth should have been so happy, so replete with the joys of the senses, the intellect and the affections, — that he should have been kept from sinking into the slough of vice, and per- mitted to taste some of the unutterable joys of a loving and religious life, — all this makes it only the more inexplicable and the more agonizing to him to behold his brothers and sisters — no worse, he is well assured, and often far better, than himself — dragging out lives of misery and privation of all higher joy, and dying perhaps at last, so far as their own consciousness goes, in final alienation and revolt from God and goodness. It is for these that he demands another and a better life at the hands of the Divine Justice and Love ; and in as far as he loves both God and man, so far is he incapable of renouncing that demand, and resting satisfied because he has had a pleasant mortal existence, and because younger men will enjoy the like after him, and, when he is gone, help to " carry on the progressive movement of human affairs." The prayer of his soul, " Thy kingdom come," includes indefinitely more than this.

Ixvi PEEFACE.

Further, the writer's lack of the religious sense is once more revealed by the absence of any reference in the summary of the reasons why men hope for another life, of that which must always be to religious persons the supreme Hope of all. Mr. Mill expresses, in a few most touching words (what he, of all men, could not have failed to know), how the sceptic loses one most valuable consolation — " the hope of re- union with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him." "That loss," he adds, "is neither to be denied nor extenuated. In many cases it must be beyond tlie reach of comparison or estimate and will always suffice to keep alive in the more sen- sitive natures the imaginative hope of a futurity which, if there is nothing to prove, there is as little in our knowledge or experience to contradict." These words will find an echo in every heart. There is no " ex- tenuation" of the immeasurable loss of the hope of meeting once more with the beloved dead; and when M. Comte sets forth the satisfaction of being buried by their side — that we may perish instead of living tooether — it would seem as if he meant to mock at the anguish of mortal bereavement as some grim tyrant who has promised to release a captive, and ful- fils his word by giving back his corpse. But has Mr. Mill, who so deeply understands what the longing for

PllEFACE. Ixvii

the rc-uniou of human love may mean, never known the aspiration of every religious man for the com- munion of Divine Love in a world where we shall sin against it no more, and where it may be more perfectly unbroken than is possible while we stand behind the veil of the flesh ? This longing desire, which lies at the very core of every God-loving heart, is surely worth mention among the reasons for hoping for Im- mortality, even if it cannot be accepted, according to the principle of Experimental philosophy, as ground for the faith that every son of God who has felt it is, even in right thereof, immortal.

But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us of a man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career.

In conclusion, while commending to the reader's consideration what appears to me the true method of solving the problem of a Life after Death, I have but

Ixviii PREFACE.

to point out the fact that on the answer to that great question must hang the alternative, not only of the hope or despair of the human race, but of the glory or the failure of the whole Kosmos, so far as our uttermost vision can extend. Lions and eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their kind ; but if the summit aiid crown of the whole work, the being in vs^hose consciousness it is all mirrored, be worse than incomplete and imperfect, an undeveloped monster, an acorn mouldered in its shell, a bud blighted by the frost, then must the entire world be deemed a failure also. Now Man can only be reckoned on any ground as a provisionally successful work — successful, that is, provided we regard him as in transitu, on his way to another and far more perfect stage of development. We are content that the egg, the larva, the bud, the half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should only faintly indicate what will be the future bird and butterfly and flower and picture and temple. And thus to look on Man (as by some deep insight he has almost universally regarded himself) as a "sojourner upon earth," upon his way to " another country, even a heavenly," destined to complete his pilgrimage and make up for all his shortcomings elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to be even now a Divine work in its embryonic stage. But if we close

PREFACE. Ixix

out this view of the future, and assure ourselves that nothing more is ever to be expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last days of his mortal life ; if we are to believe we have seen the best development which his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing, feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing and being blessed, will ever obtain while the heavens endure, — then, indeed, is the conclusion inevitable and final. Man is a Failure, the consummate failure of creation. Everything else — star, ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast and insect — has a sort of complete- ness and perfection. It is fitting in its own place, and it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it is. " Every lion," as Parker has said, " is a type of all lionhood ; but there is no man who is a type of all manhood." Even the best and greatest of men have only been imperfect types of a single phase of man- hood— of the saint, the hero, the sage, the philanthro- pist, the poet, the friend, — never of the full-orbed man who should be all these together. If each perish at death, then, as the seeds of all these varied forms of good are in each, every one is cut off" prematurely, blighted, spoiled. Nor is this criterion of success or failure solely applicable to our small planet — a mere spark thrown off the wheel whereon a million suns are turned into space. It is easy to believe that

IXX PEEFACE.

mucli loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral powers than our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But Thought and Love are, after all, the grandest things which any world can shew, and if a whole race endowed with them proves such a failure as death-extino-uished mankind would un- doubtedly be, then there remains no reason why all the spheres of the universe should not be similar scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge blunder and mishap. In vain may the President of the British Congress of Science dazzle us with the splendid panorama of the material universe unrolling itself " from out of the primeval nebula's fiery cloud." Suns and planets swarming through the abysses of space are but whirling sepul- chres after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken from off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom they have been the palaces are all for ever lost. Spreading continents and flowing seas, soaring Alps and fertile plains, are worse than failures if we, even we, poor, feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures that we are, shall ever "vanish like the streak of morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past."

PREFACE. Ixxi

For the concluding Essay in tins book, wherein I have endeavoured to explain what I deem to be the best Hope of the Human Eace here on earth, I have to crave the readers' forgiveness for two defects of which I am thoroughly sensible. One is that I have at- tempted to compress the statement of a large and somewhat revolutionary theory of human development into a compass far too small to do justice to whatever claims it may have upon acceptance. Should the psychological fact, which I imagine myself to have for the first time brought to notice, provoke any discussion, I could readily double again and again the illustrations of it given in these brief pages ; and even since they were written I may boast that they have received singular confirmation (so far as the story of the Aryan race is concerned) in the profound work of the Eev. George Cox.* It would, however, no doubt require a somewhat voluminous treatise dedicated to the purpose to establish thoroughly the principle for which I contend.

Secondly, I must ask (albeit I scarcely expect to receive) condonation for the presumption of offering a new word (JSeteropathy) to define the hitherto un- noticed sentiment to which I wish to direct attention. Between the inevitable result of causing every critic * History of Greece, Vol. I. ch. ii.

Ixxii PREFACE.

to make merry with the word instead of seriously discussing the thing it signifies, and the opposite danger of leaving my argument logically floundering among terms none of which express accurately what I mean, I have chosen the former alternative, and must of course suffer the consequences, against which, however, I now put forth this plea in mitigation. Persons who feel any genuine interest in a somewhat curious, if not really a novel or valuable, psychological inquiry, may perhaps, if they should come to the con- clusion that they have gained a new idea, be willing to accept along with it a compendious term, having a score of analogies in the language, to afford it definite expression.

Finally, if the sketch I have attempted to draw of the Evolution of the Social Sentiment appear to possess historical truth, it remains only to remark — that the long progress upward of mankind which I have traced from the primeval reign of violence and antagonism to that of sympathy and mutual help, has not sup- plied us with the slightest clue to the mystery of how, at each successive stage and as the higher sentiment dawns, there is a corresponding overruling inward command to follow the higher and disregard the lower impulse. Nothing in the progress of the emotion ex- plains either the existence or progress of the moral

PREFACE. Ixxiii

sense of obligation ; any more than the anatomy of a horse explains how he is found with bit and bridle. Other things grow, nay, everything in our nature grows, as M'ell as these emotions ; every taste alters, every sentiment develops. But nothing within us corresponding to the Moral Sense develops simul- taneously along side of them, setting the seal of approval on the tastes and feelings of adult life, and of disapprobation on those of childhood. If, then, this Eegulative Principle or Intuition of a Duty to follow the higher Emotion and renounce the lower stand out no less inexplicable when we have traced the long history of one of the chief emotions to he regulated, we have surely obtained at least a negative reply to the desolating doctrine recently introduced, that the Moral Sense in man is only the social instinct of the brute modified under the conditions of human existence? These cultivated instincts, rising into humane emotions, are not the Moral sense itself, but only that which the Moral Sense tvorks upo7i, — not that which, in any way, explains the ethical choice of good and rejection of evil, but merely the good and evil things refrarding; which the choice is exercised. Wlience we derive the solemn sense of Duty to give place to the higher emotion rather than to the lower (a sense which undoubtedly grows simultaneously

Ixxiv PREFACE.

with the growth of the emotions which it controls), is another problem whose solution cannot here be at- tempted. One remark only need be made to forestall a commonplace of the new phase of Utilitarianism. We are told that our personal Intuitions of Duty are the inherited prejudices of our ancestors in favour of the kind of actions which have proved on experience to be most conducive to the general welfare of the community, or, as Mr. Martineau well calls them, "the capitalized experiences of utility and social coercion ; the record of ancestral fears and satisfactions stored in the brain and re-appearing with divine pretensions only because their animal origin is forgotten." If this be the case,howdoes it happen that we have all acquired in these days a very clear Intuition that it is our duty to preserve the lives of the aged, of sufferers by disease, and of deformed children ? The howl of indignation which followed the publication of a humanely-intended scheme of Euthanasia for shortening tlie existence of such persons for their oion benefit, may afford us a measure of what the feelings of modern Christendom would be were some new Lycurgus to propose to extinguish them for the good of the commonwealth. Yet what, in truth, is this ever-growing sense of the infinite sacredness of human life but a sentiment tending directly to counteract the interest of the com-

PREFACE. IXXV

munity at large? Mr. Greg has clearly expounded that our compassion for the feeble and the sickly defeats, as regards the human race, the beneficent natural law of the "Survival of the Fittest;"* and Mr. Galton considers it to involve nothing short of a menace to the civilization whence it has sprung. Nature kills off such superfluous lives among the brutes ; and savages and Chinese follow Nature, to their great advantage and convenience. Yet even the Chinese do not profess to have any sense of moral obligation to drown their superfluous babies ; and we, who ruthlessly entail on our nation all the evils resulting from allowing diseased and deformed people to live and multiply, have actually a "set of the brain " in favour of our own practice, and decidedly against that of the natives of the Flowery Land ! Till this enigma be satisfactorily explained, I think we are justified in assuming that, whencesoever the awful and Divine idea of Moral Duty may have descended to us, it has, at all events, not been derived from the inherited prejudices of our ancestors in favour of the kind of actions which are " most conducive to the general welfare of the community ;" and have even been recognized so to be for thousands of years.

* See the whole remarkable chapter, Enigmas, iii.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

Theological Eeview, October, 1872, and July, 1873.

B

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

I.

Earthly minds, no less than heavenly bodies, seem constrained to pursue their walk by a compromise between opposing forces. Our orbits lie half-way between the tracks which we should follow did we obey exclusively cen- tripetal Selfishness or centrifugal Love, the gravitation of the senses or the upward attrac- tions of the soul. Especially is this compromise observable in the case of our anticipation of prolonged existence after death. !N'ot one man in a thousand lives either as if he relied on these hopes, or renounced them ; as if he ex- pected immortality, or resigned himself to anni- hilation. The average human being never gives entii-e loose to his passions on the principle, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ;"

b2

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

but he constantly attaches to the transient con- cerns of earth an importance which, if death be a prelude to a nobler existence, is not merely disproportionate, but absurd. The sentiments he entertains towards God are not such as might befit an insect towards him who is prej)aring to crush it ; but neither are they those of a son to a Father, into whose home on high he is assured ere long of a welcome. He mourns his departed friends not altogether with despair, but with very little of the confident "hope of a joyful resurrection" which his clergyman offi- cially expresses while he commits their bodies to the ground. He awaits his own demise with regret or resignation nearly always measured by his happiness or misery in the world he quits, rather than by his expectations of one or the other in that which he is about to enter ; but he rarely contemplates the possibility of final loss of consciousness, or fails to project himself eagerly into interests with which, in such contingency, he can have no concern what- ever. In a word, he lives and dies so as to secui'e for himself pretty nearly the maximum of care and sorrow, and the minimum of peace and hope.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

It is in a certain degree inevitable that some such indecision should pertain to our feelings regarding the Life after Death. Our belief that such a life awaits us is derived (as I hope presently to shew), not from any definite de- monstration such as is furnished to us by the logical understanding, but from the testimony of our moral and spiritual faculties, which varies in force with the more or less perfect working condition of those faculties at all times. Yet there can be few thoughtful men or women amongst us who do not desire some more equa- ble tenure of the priceless "Hope full of Im- mortality." If, during the years of multifold youthful enthusiasms or of world -engrossed middle age, the threat of death seemed dream- like— so full was our life ! — and the further Hope beyond, a dream within a dream too faint and filmy for thought to seize upon it, such capacity for indiff'erence inevitably passes away with the shock of a bereavement, an illness, or the symptoms of failing strength, and we marvel how it has been possible for us to forget that interests so near and so stupendous yet hang for us all undetermined in the balance. Or if in the vivid ecstasy of early religion it happened

6 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

to US to think that the joy of once beholding the face of God was enough, and that we were content to die for ever the next honr, even this experience after a time makes annihilation seem doubly impossible, and prompts the question, which has but one answer, —

" Can a finite thing, created in the hounds of time and

space, Can it live, and grow, and love Thee, catch the glory of

Thy face, Fade and die, be gone for ever, know no being, have no

place?"*

And as the wrong and injustice of the world by degrees force themselves on our awakening consciousness, we learn to appeal with confi- dence to God, if not on our own behalf, yet for all the miserable and the vice-abandoned, that He should open to them the door of a happier and holier world than they have known below. And for mankind at large, the solution of the problem of Immortality which will be generally received in the future reconstruction of opinion must prove of incalculable importance. Should the belief in a life after death still remain an

* Verses, by E. B. Henry King and Co., London.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

article of popular faith after the fall of super- naturalism, then (freed, as it must be, of its dead- weight of the dread of Hell) the religion of succeeding generations will possess more than all the influence of the creeds of old, for it will meet human nature on all its noblest sides at once, and insult it on none. On the other hand, if the present well-nigh exclusive devotion to physico-scientific thought end in thi'owing the spmtual faculties of our nature so far into disuse and discredit as to leave the faith in Immortality permanently under a cloud,* then it is inevitable that religion will lose half the power it has wielded over human hearts. The God with whom our relations are so insig- nificant that He has condemned them to termi- nate at the end of a few short years, — the God whose world contains so many cruel wrongs destined to remain unrectified for ever, — the God who cares so little for man's devotion that He will "suffer his Holy One to see corruption," — that God may receive our distant homage as the Arbiter of the universe, but it is quite im- possible that He should obtain our love. IsTor

* See the remarks on this subject in " Christ in Modern Life," by the Eev. Stopford Brooke, p. 194.

8 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

will the results of the general retention, or loss, of the faith in a future life on the Morals of mankind, be less significant than those affect- ing their Eeligion. They will not, I believe, be of the kind vulgarly apprehended. The fear of Hell has been vastly over-estimated as an engine of police ; for the natures which .are capable of receiving a practical check to strong passion from anticipations only to be realized in a distant world, are (by the hypothesis) constituted with singularly blended elements of imagination and prudence, the furthest pos- sible from the criminal temperament. And the hope of Heaven has been probably even less valuable as a moral agent, having spoiled the pure disinterestedness of virtue for thousands by degrading Duty into that " Other-worldli- ness" which is only harder and more selfish than worldliness pui^e and simple. But though the loss of the bribes and threats of the life to come would tend little to lower the standard of human virtue, it would be quite otherwise as regards the final closing of all out-look beyond this world, and the shutting up of morality within the narrow sphere of mortal life. We need an infinite horizon to enable us to form

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 9

any concoptiou of tlic graudcur and sanctity of moral distinctions ; nor is it possible we should continue to attach to Yirtue and Yice the same profound significance, could we believe their scope to reach no further than our brief span. Theoretically, Eight and Wrong would come to be regarded as of comparatively small im- portance. Practically, the virtue which must shortly come to an end for ever would seem to the tempted soul scarcely deserving of effort ; and the vice which must lie down harmless in the sinner's grave, too mere a trifle to waste on it remorse or indignation. Life, in short, after we had passed its meridian, would become in our eyes more and more like an autumn garden, wherein it would be vain to plant seeds of good which could never bloom before the frosts of death ; and useless to eradicate weeds which must needs be killed ere long without our labour. Needless to say that of that dismal spot it might surely soon be said,

*' Between tlie time of the wind and the snow All loathsome tilings began to grow 3"

and that when winter came at last, none would regret the white shroud it threw over corrup- tion and decay.

10 THE LIFE AETER DEATH.

Nor ought we to hide from ourselves that, under such loss of hope in Immortality, the highest forms of human heroism must needs disappear and cease to glorify the world. The old martyrs of the stake and the rack, and modern martyrs of many a wreck and battle- field and hospital, have not braved torture and death for the sake of the rewards of Paradise, but they have at least believed that their supreme act of virtue and piety did not involve the renunciation on their part of all fiu^ther moral progress and of all communion with God throughout eternity. It is not easy to see how any virtue is to help a man to renounce virtue, nor even how the love of God is to make him ready to renounce the joy of His love for ever. Deprived, then, of its boundless scope, human morality must necessarily be dwarfed more and more in each successive generation, till in com- parison of the mere animal life (which would inevitably come to the front) the nobler part in us would dwindle to a vanishing point, and the man return to the ape.

What are the probabilities that the faith in Immortality may escape the wreck of the super- natui-al creeds, and what are the spars and rafts.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 11

if any such there be, to which individually we may most safely cling ? To answer these ques- tions it is necessary to cast a glance around us on the present attitude of thinking men on the matter. A few books and articles — among which I would specially direct the reader's attention to four of Mr. Stopford Brooke's admirable Discourses — give some hint of the currents of thought now passing over us ; but there is little doubt that before long a much larger share of attention will be given to the subject, and that it will form in truth the battle- ground for one of the most decisive struggles in the history of the mental progress of our race.* Our standpoint at this moment is some- what peculiar. We are losing the old ground, and have not yet found footing on the new.

The delusion which has prevailed so long in England, that we acquire such truths as the existence of God and our own immortality by means of logical demonstration, appears to be

* A miserable pseudo-scientific treatise, Le LencUmain

de la Mart, by Louis Figuier, has already run through four

or five editions in as many months. Simple readers ask

for bread, and the Frenchman drops into their mouths a

, bonbon.

12 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

slowly passing away. We hardly imagine now, as English divines from Paley to Whately habi- tually took for granted, that if we convince (or "vanquish") a man in argument concerning them, his next step must infallibly be to embrace them heartily, as the Arabs did Islam, at the point of the sword. Especially we begin to perceive that we have been on a wrong track in dealing with the belief in a Future Life; nay, that we have been twice misled in the matter. The old popular creed having pre- sented the doctrine to us as a matter of histori- cal revelation, we were first trained to think of it as a fact guaranteed by a Book, and, accord- ingly, of course to be ascertained by the criti- cism of that Book. Our eternal life was secure if we could demonstrate the authenticity and canonicity of certain Greek manuscripts ; but, were the Bible to prove untrustworthy, our only valid ground of hope would be lost, and the Immortality (which, in the face of Egypt and India, we were complacently assured had been only "brought to light through the gos- ]3el") would be re-consigned to the blackness of darkness. From this primary mistake those who think fi-eely in our day are pretty nearly

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 13

emancipated. The "apocalyptic side of Chris- tianity" has ceased to satisfy even those reli- gious liberals who still take its moral and spiri- tual part as absolutely divine ; and the halting logic which argued from the supposed corporeal resurrection of the Second Person of the Trinity to the spiritual survival of the mass of mankind, has been so often exposed, that it can scarcely again be produced in serious controversy.*

* That the Death of Christ — not his supposed Eesiarrec- tion — furnishes a strong argument in favour of Immortality, will be shewn by and by. Is it not probable that the great myth of his bodily revival owes its origin simply to the overwhelming impression which the scene of the Pas- sion must have made on the disciples, transforming their hitherto passive Pharisaic or Essene beHef in a future life, into the vivid personal faith that such a soul could not have become extinct ? In a lesser way the grave of a beloved friend has been to many a man the birthplace of his faith, and it is obvious that in the case of Christ every condition was fulfilled which would raise such sudden conviction to the height of passionate fervour. The first words of the disciples to one another on that Easter morn may well have been : " He is not dead. His spirit is this day in Paradise among the sons of God." It was the sunplest consequence of their veneration for him that they should feel such assurance and give it utterance with pro- phetic fire. In that age of belief in miracles, this new-born faith in the immortality of a righteous soul was inevitably

14 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

"While we have escaped, however, from the error of supernaturalism, a second and no less fatal mistake has risen in our way. The pre- valent passion of the age for physical science has brought the relation of Physiology to the problem of a Future Life altogether into the foreground of our attention, as if it formed the only important consideration ; and of course on this side there was never any hope of a success- ful solution. Apologists of vivisectors made it indeed their excuse that those modern Sworn Tormentors were " seeking the Eeligion of the

cloth.ed almost immediately in materialistic shape, and by the time the Gospels were written it had become stereo- typed in traditions which we can class only as Jewish ghost-stories.

If this conjecture be admitted, we are absolved equally from the acceptance as historical of the monster-miracle of the New Testament, and from the insufferable alternative of recourse to some hypothesis of fraud, collusion or mis- take. It cannot have been on any such base or haphazard incident that the reliance of Christendom has rested for eighteen centuries. Even Avith its blended note of human error, it is after aU the reverberation of that earthquake which rent the hearts of those who watched on Calvary and tore the veil of mortality from their eyes, which has ever since echoed down the ages and still sounds in our ears.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 15

Future" in the brains of tortured dogs ; but no one, I presume, ever seriously expected any other result than that which we behold. 'No ossiculum luz^ no "infrangible bone" such as the Eabbins averred was the germ of the resur- rection-body, no "indestructible monad" such as Leibnitz dreamed, has come to light; and no "grey matter," or " hijDpocampus," or mul- tiplied convolutions of the human brain, are found to aiford the faintest suggestion of a life beyond mortality. The only verdict which can be wrung from Science is, that the cessation of all conscious being at death is "]N"ot proven." She recognizes a mysterious somewhat termed " Life," whose nature she has yet failed to ascertain, and concerning whose possible changes she is therefore silent. And further, having proved that no force is ever destroyed, she admits that it is open to conjecture that the force of the human Will may have its " con- servation" in some mode whereby conscious agency may indefinitely be prolonged. But beyond this point. Science refuses to say one word to encourage the hope of Immortality. She remains neutral even when she forbears to utter oracles of despair, l^ay, rather is she no

16 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

prophetess at all, but may better be likened to some gaunt sign-post beside the highway of life, pointing with one wooden arm to the deso- late waste, and with the other to fair fields and fresh pastures, but giving no response to our cry of anguish, Whither have our beloved ones gone?

l*^or will the analogies of JS'ature help us better than the physiological analysis of our own frames. The "fifty" — nay, rather the five thousand — seeds, of which " she scarcely brings but one to bear," and the wrecks of the myriad forms of animal life which lie embedded in the rocks under our feet, reveal the lavish- ness of her waste. All the sweet old similes in which our forefathers found comfort — ^the reviving grain '' sown in corruption and raised in power" — the crawling larva endued with wings as Psyche's butterfly — fail, when seri- ously criticised, to afford any parallel with the hoped-for resurrection of the human soul. IN^ay, Nature seems constantly to mock us by reviving in preference her humblest products, and bring- ing up year after year to the sunshine of sj)ring the clover and the crocus and the daisy, while manly strength and womanly beauty lie perish-

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 17

ing beneath tlic flowers; hid for ever in the hopeless ruin of the grave.

And, lastly, there are certain arguments which may be classed as Metaphysical, which were once generally relied on as aflbrding de- monstration of a future life. The value of these arguments, from Plato's downwards, — that the idea of a dead soul is absurd; that the soul being "simple" and "one" cannot be "dis- solved;" that being "immaterial" it cannot die, &c., — is extremely difficult to estimate. It is possible they may point to great truths ; but it is manifest that they all hinge on certain assumptions concerning the nature of the soul and the supposed antithesis between mind and matter, which we are learning each day to regard with more distrust ; in fact, to treat as insoluble problems. In this direction also, then, it is not too much to conclude, we can- not hope to find a satisfactory answer to our inquiry.

When we have dismissed the expectation of obtaining the desired solution either from a supernatural revelation or from physics or me- taphysics, where do we stand ? We are left to face, on one hand, a number of very heavy

c

18 THE LIFE AETEE DEATH.

presumptions against the survival of conscious- ness after death; and, on the other hand, the sole class of considerations which remain to be opposed to them.

The presumptions against survival are so plain and numerous, that none of us can fail to be impressed with their force. There is, first, the obvious fact that everything we have seen of a man perishes, to our certain knowledge, in his grave, and passes into other organic and inorganic forms. The assumption is physio- logically baseless that something — and that something his conscious self — Kves elsewhere. And starting from this baseless assumption, we find no foothold for even a conjecture of how he is transferred to his new abode, tvhere in the astronomical universe that abode can be, and what can be the conditions of existence and consciousness without a brain or a single one of our organs of the senses. The fact that injuries to the brain in this life are capable of clouding a man's mind and distorting his will in frenzy or idiotcy, presses severely against the assumption that the entire dissolution of that brain will leave intellect and volition per- fect and free. Nor do even these enormous

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 19

difficulties exhaust the obstacles in the way. If man be immortal, he must have become an immortal being at some point in his develop- ment after the first beginning of physical life. But to name even a plausible date for so stupendous a change in his destiny is utterly imjDOSsible ; and the new theory of Evolution saddles us yet with another analogous difficulty, namely, to designate the links in the chain of generations between the Ascidian and the Sage, when the mortal creature gave birth to an heir of immortality. It is almost impossible to over- state the weight of these and other presump- tions of a similar kind against the belief in a Life after Death. Let it be granted that they are as heavy as they could be without absolutely disproving the point in question and making the belief logically absurd. They render at all events the fact of immortality so improbable, that to restore the balance and make it pro- bable an immense equiponderant consideration becomes indispensable.

Where is that counterweight to be found? What can we cast into the scale which shall outweigh these presumptions? Certainly no- thing in the way of direct answers to them,

c 2

20 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

nor of plausible hypotheses to explain how the conditions of future being may possibly be carried on. Confronted by the challenge to produce such hypotheses, we can but say, with one of the greatest men of science of the -age, that "the further we advance in the path of science, the more the infinite possibilities of Nature are revealed to us;" and among those possibilities there must needs be the possibility of another life for man. Beyond this, we can- not proffer a word ; and it must be some con- sideration altogether of another character which can afford anything like a positive reason for believing in immortality in opposition to the terrible array of presumptions on the other side. That consideration, so sorely needed, is, I be- lieve, to be found — nay, is found already by the great mass of mankind — in Faith, — faith in its true sense of Trust in Goodness and Jus- tice and Fidelity and Love, and in all these things impersonated in the Lord of Life and Death. Not the Supernatural argument, nor yet the Physical, nor the Metaphysical, but the Moral^ is the real counterpoise to all the diffi- culties in the way of belief in a life beyond the grave.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 21

That this is the true ground of whatever confidence we can rationally entertain on the subject, is, I think, clear on very short reflec- tion. It has been but partially recognized, indeed, that such is the case ; and the teachers who have undertaken to demonstrate immor- tality on natiu-al grounds, have very commonly presented their moral arguments as if they were purely inductive, and belonged to the same class of logical proofs as we have sought for in vain in physics and metaphysics. But their syllogisms, when carefully examined, will in- variably be found to involve a major term which is not a fact of knowledge, but only a dogma of faith. They conduct us half-way across the gulf by means of stepping-stones of facts and inductions, and then invite us to complete our transit by swimming. They open our cause in the court of the Intellect, and then move it for decision to the equity-chamber of the Heart. A few pages hence I shall hope to give this assertion full illustration. For the present it will be sufficient to remind the reader that the arguments usually drawn from the general con- sciousness of mankind, from the many injustices of the world, from the incompleteness of moral

22 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

progress in this life, &c. &c., all involve, at the crucial point, the assumption that we possess some guarantee that mankind will not be de- ceived, that justice will triumph eventually, and that human progress is the concern of a Power whose purposes cannot fail. "Were the faith which supplies such warrants to prove irrespon- sive to the call, the whole elaborate argument which preceded the appeal would be seen at once to fall to the ground. If, then, the strength of a chain must be measui-ed by that of its most fragile link, it is clear that the value in sum- total of all such arguments, however multiplied or ingeniously stated, is neither more nor less than that which we may be disposed to assign to simple Faith. It is a value precisely tanta- mount to that of our moral and religious intui- tions— to the value (as I hope presently to shew) of all such intuitions culminating in one point together. But beyond this, it is nothing. This conclusion, however distasteful it may be to us, is one which eminently harmonizes with all we can learn respecting the method of the Divine tuition of souls. There is one kind of knowledge which the Creator has appointed shall be acquired by the busy Intellect, and

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 23

wliich, wlicn so acquired, is held in inalienable possession. There is another kind of know- ledge which He gives to faithful and obedient hearts, and which even the truest of them hold on the precarious tenure of sustained faith and unrelaxing obedience. The future world as- suredly belongs to this latter class of know- ledge. It is, as one of the greatest of living teachers has said, " a part of our religion, not a branch of our geography." "Why it is so, and why our passionate longings for more sense- satisfying information cannot be indulged, we can even partially see ; for we may perceive that it would instantaneously destroy the per- spective of this life, and nullify the whole present system of moral tuition by earthly joys and chastisements. The mental chaos into which those persons obviously fall who in our day imagine that they have obtained tangible, audible and visible proofs of another life, sup- plies evidence of the ruinous results which would follow were any such corporeal access to the other world actually opened to mankind.

Let us then courageously face the conclusion which we seem to have reached. The key

24 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

which must open the door of Hope beyond the grave will never be found by fumbling among the heterogeneous stores of the logical under- standing. Like the one with which the Pilgrim unlocked the dungeon of Giant Despair's Castle, it is hidden in our own breasts — given to us long ago by the Lord of the "Way.

This essay is not the place, even were I pos- sessed of the needful ability, to determine the true "Grammar of Assent" as regards such Faith as is now in question. I must limit myself to addressing those readers who are pre- pared to concede that spiritual things are " spi- ritually discerned," and moral things morally ; and that the human moral sense and religious sentiment are something more than untrust- worthy delusions. To those who doubt all this, who believe in food and houses and rail- ways and stocks and gravitation and electricity, but not in self-sacrificing Love or Justice or God, I can say nothing. The argument has been shewn to have no standpoint on any grounds they will admit. That they should disbelieve in immortality, is the perfectly logi- cal outcome of their other disbeliefs. It would

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 25

be entirely inconsequent and irrational for them to believe in it.

Assuming, then, that I address men and women who believe in God and Justice and Love, I proceed to endeavour to shew how — even should they stand appalled by the diffi- culties of belief in Immortality — they may yet oppose to those difficulties moral arguments so numerous and irrefragable, that the scale may well turn on the side of belief. I hope to shew that, by many different but converging lines, Faith uniformly points to a Life after Death, and that if we follow her guidance in any one direction implicitly, we are invariably led to the same conclusion. Nay, more : I think it may be demonstrated that we cannot stop short of this culmination and afterwards retain intact our faith in anything beyond matters of sense and experience. Every idea we can form of Justice, Love, Duty, is truncated and imperfect if we deny them the extension of eternity ; and as for our conception of God, I see not how any one who has realized the '' riddle of the painful earth," can thenceforth call Him " good," unless he believe that the solution is yet to be given to that dark problem hereafter.

26 THE LIFE APTER DEATH.

The following are some of tlie channels in which Faith flows towards Immortality.

I. There is one unendurable thought. It is, that Justice may fail to be done in time or in eternity. This thought makes the human soul writhe like a trampled worm. Other ideas are sad, even agonizing, but this one cannot be borne. No courage, no virtue, no unselfishness, will help us to bear it. The better we are, the more insufferable it is. To receive it into the soul is madness. On the other hand, every threat besides, however sorrowful or terrible, if it be but overshadowed by the sense, " It will be just," becomes endurable — nay, is followed by a sort of awful calm. Could we even feel certain that our guilt merited eternal perdition, then the doom of Hell would bring to us only dumb despan\ Something greater than our- selves within us would say to- the wailings of our self-pity, ''Peace! be stiU." But let us only doubt that there is any Justice here or hereafter, let us think that "Wrong and Tyranny may be finally triumphant, and Groodness and Heroism ultimately defeated, punished and de- rided, and lo I there surges up fi'om the very depths of our souls a high and stern Eemon-

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 27

strance, an appeal which should make the hol- low heavens resound with our indignation and our rebellion.

The religions of the world, well nigh in the proportion in which they deserve to be called religions and not mere dreams of awe and wonder, are the expressions of the universal human aspiration after Justice. Even the Budd- hist creed (whose acceptance by the myriads of Eastern Asia for two millenniums gives the lie to so many of our theories, and seems to shew human nature different under another sky) — even this abnormal creed insists that Eighteous- ness rules everywhere and for ever ; even when it teaches there is no righteous Euler on high, or ''peradventure he sleepeth" in the eternal slumber of l^irvana. The doctrine of " Karma," — that every good and every evil action in- exorably brings forth fruit of reward or fruit of punishment in this life or some other life to come, — is the confession of three hundred mil- lion souls that, if they can endure to live with- out God, they yet cannot live without Justice. !N'ay, it is more. It is evidence that human Eeason can accept such a blank absurdity as the idea that the unintelligent elements may

28 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

bring about moral order, sooner than the human Spirit can rest satisfied that such moral order is nowhere to be found. Gravitation and elec- tricity may weigh self-sacrifice and purity in their balances, and the winds and waves may measure out the punishment of cruelty and falsehood ; but Virtue cannot be without reward, nor can the crimes which human tribunals fail to reach, escape retribution for ever.

The shapes which this desire of Justice as- sumes in the earlier stages of human thought are, of course, rude and materialistic in the extreme. Men cannot expect from Nemesis, or Karma, or Jehovah, higher justice than they have begun to apprehend as the law of their own dealings. But everywhere throughout mythology, history and poetry, we may trace the parallel lines of the moral growth of each nation, and the corresponding development of its belief that over and above human justice there is a Justice-working Power, personal or impersonal, controlling all events, and making war and plague and famine, the earthquake and the storm, the punishments of crime ; and health and victory, length of days, abundant wealth and numerous progeny, the rewards of vii'tue.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 29

The obvious failure of the exhibition of any such overruling Justice in multitudes of in- stances, has commonly driven the bewildered observers to devise explanations more or less ingenious of each particular case, but rarely, if ever, to the much more logical course of aban- doning the expectation of such Justice. Half the myths of the elder nations are nothing more than hypotheses invented to justify Pro- vidence and explain consistently with equity some striking inequality in the distribution of prosperity and adversity. As I^egroes and Canaanites underwent more cruel oppressions than other races, their supposed progenitor Ham must have incurred some special curse. As women endure peculiar sufferings, and are, in early times, altogether enslaved by men, so Eve must have merited the punishment of bringing forth children in sorrow, and being " ruled over" by her husband. As the cities of the Plain were overwhelmed by a terrific convul- sion, so it was certain Sodom and Gomorrah were more wicked than Memphis or Thebes. In Grecian fable, the calamities which befel the house of (Edipus presupposed

" The ill-advised transgression of old Laius ;"

30 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

and even such trivial matters as the blackness of the crow and the chatter of the magpie might be traced to the punishment of a human offender transformed into the bird whose whole race thenceforward, like that of Adam, was destined to bear the penalty of " original sin." Nor do the monuments of the graver thoughts of mankind bear less emphatic testimony than mythology to the universal desire to " see Jus- tice done." Beginning with the Yedas and Genesis, Homer and Herodotus, we may trace the straining effort of every writer to " point a moral" of reward and punishment, even when the facts to be dealt with lent but faint colour to the lesson that perfidious chiefs will always be defeated, and good kings crowned with vic- tory and prosperity. The story of ruined cities is always told in the same spirit :

" They rose while all the depths of guilt their vaiii creators sounded ; They fell because on fraud and force their corner-stones were founded."

In every age and nation, epics, dramas and popular legends, wherever they may be found, either directly aim to represent what we have significantly learned to name '' Poetic Justice,"

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 31

or pay the idea still deeper homage by founding the tragedy of the piece on the failure of Justice. Never is the notion absent, either from the ethical poets, such as the author of "Job," Euripides, Dante or Milton, or from those who have followed the principle of Art for Art's sake — ^schylus, Shakespeare and Goethe. Each of us in the course of life exemplifies the cycle of human thought in the matter. In child- hood we read History with impatient longing for the triumph of patriots and heroes and the overthrow of their oppressors, and we prefer ancient history to modern because it seems to offer a clearer field for the vindication of ethical ideas. In youth we find delight in the romances which exhibit Virtue as crowned with success and wickedness defeated ; and it is invariably with a mingled sense of surprise and indigna- tion that we fiing down the first tale which leaves us at its conclusion with our legitimate anticipations of such a denouement unsatisfied. To this hour the play-going public, which re- presents the youthful- mindedness of the com- munity, refuses to sanction any picture of life wherein, ere the curtain falls, the hero is not vindicated from all aspersion and the villain

32 THE LIFE AETEE DEATH.

punished and exposed. Only far on in life and in literary culture do we begin, with many misgivings, mournfully to recognize the supe- rior verisimilitude of tales which depict Virtue as receiving no reward, and Guilt no punish- ment, in this world.

The question, "How mankind has come to possess this confidence in I^emesis?" will of course be answered differently according to our various theories of the origin of all moral sen- timents. Dr. Johnson ascribes our passion for justice to the simple source of Fear lest we should personally suffer from injustice, — an hypothesis which would be highly satisfactory, provided, in the first place, we were all so good that we had everything to hope and nothing to dread from justice ; and, secondly, provided our interest in justice never extended backward in time and far off into distance, immeasurably beyond the circle of events in which we can ever have personal concern. The theory which would accord with the general neo-utihtarian doctrine now in fashion would be a little more philosophic than this. Our modern teachers would probably tell us that our expectation of justice is the result of the "set" of the human

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 33

brain, fixed by experience throngh countless generations. As our sense of Duty is, on their showing, derived from the repeated observation of the utility of virtuous actions, so, on the same principle, our expectation of Justice must come from numberless observations of instances wherein justice has been illustriously mani- fested. It is, indeed, easier to see how the constant association of the ideas of guilt and punishment, virtue and reward, formed by such observations, should produce the expectation to see one always follow the other, than it is to understand how the observation of the Uti- lity of Virtue should impress upon us the solemn categoric imperative, "Be virtuous." The expectation of Justice might be merely an intellectual presumption of the same character as our anticipation of the recurrence of day and night, or any other phenomena associated in unbroken sequence. The sense of Duty is a practical spur to action, whose relation to its supposed origin of long-observed utility remains, when all is said, a ''mystic extension" of that prosaic idea altogether unaccountable.

But there is imfortunately a difficulty in the way of availing ourselves of this easy solution

D

34 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

of the origin of the universal expectation of Justice. It is hard to see how the " set of our brains" towards such expectation could have been formed by experience, considering that no generation seems to have been favoured by any such experience at all. To produce such a " set," it would (by the hypothesis) be neces- sary that the instances wherein Justice was plainly exhibited should be so common as to constitute the rule, and those wherein it failed exceptions too rare to hinder the solid mass of conviction from settling in the given direction. Like a sand-bar formed by the action of the tides and currents, our '' set of brain" can only come from uniform impressions, and were the angle of pressure to shift continually, it is clear it could take no permanent shaj)e whatever. Now, does any one imagine that such uniform and perspicuous vindication of Justice in the course of events, has been witnessed by mankind' at any age of the world's history ? Is there any- thing like it impressed upon our own minds as we read day after day of public affairs, or reflect on the occurrences of private life? Are we accustomed to see well-meant actions always followed by reward, and evil ones infallibly

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 35

productive of failure or disgrace ? Even at the present stage of moral advance in public opinion and in righteous legislation, can we flatter ourselves that things are so arranged as to secure the unvarying triumph of probity, veracity, modesty, and all the other virtues, and the exemplary overthrow of fraud, impu- dence and selfishness? Suppose a cynic to hold the opposite thesis, and maintain that we are continually punished for our generosity and simplicity, and rewarded for cunning and hypo- crisy. Should we be able to overwhelm him with a mass of instances to the contrary, ready at a moment's notice in our memory ? Can we imagine (as a single illustration of the subject) that the thousands of adulterating tradesmen and fraudulent merchants in England at this moment would pursue their evil courses so consistently, did daily experience really warn those sagacious persons that "Honesty is the best policy" ? Of course, as we recede towards times when laws were far less just than they are now, and oppression and violence were far more common, the scene becomes darker and less hopeful. Looking back through the vista of the historic and pre-historic ages, the proba-

d2

36 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

bility of finding a reign of Astreea when Eight always triumplied over Might, becomes neces- sarily "fine by degrees and beautifully less," till we are driven to the conclusion, that, if yf^e owe the set of our brains towards Justice to the experience of our ancestors, that "set" must have been given when Justice was rarely mani- fest at all, "and the earth was full of violence and cruel habitations." The share which the purely physical laws have had in punishing moral ofiences has doubtless been always what it is now, and that share, to all our knowledge, is extremely obscure. If health and longevity are the frequent accompaniment of one class of virtues, disease and death are equally often incurred by another ; nor is there any sort of token that abundant harvests or blighted fields, prosperous voyages or tempest-driven wrecks, have any relation to the moral character of the mariner or the agriculturist ; or that from the observation of such events for sixty centuries, a theory of morals could possibly have been evolved. Practically, it is obvious that men do not see wickedness and infer punishment, but rather when they see punishment they infer wickedness. A thousand tyrants had been more

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 37

cruel than Herod, and yet had never been " smitten by God" with the portentous disease of which the Idumsean died. A hundred in- vaders before Xerxes had trampled on the necks of conquered nations, but no I^emesis had de- served a temple for rebuking their pride ; no Hellespontine waves had risen in tempest to destroy their fleets.

It is not Experience, then, it never could be experience gained in such a world as ours, which has impressed on the brain of man its "set" towards the expectation of Justice, or inspired its string of accordant aphorisms, that " the wicked will come to a fearful end," that "murder will out," that "honesty is the best policy," and that " the righteous" man is never forsaken, nor his seed destined to "beg their bread." From some other source remote from experience we must have derived an impression which we persistently maintain, and endeavour to verify in defiance of ever-recurring failure and disappointment. What that source may be, it does not vitally concern the present argu- ment to determine. Probably the expectation may most safely be treated as the imperfect intellectual expression of a great moral intui-

38 THE LIFS AFTER DEATH.

tion, forming an ultimate fact of our moral constitution. All such deep but dim intuitions, wlien rendered into definite ideas, are necessa- rily imperfect and liable to error. "We err both as to the time and the form in which they are to be fulfilled. We feel that Justice ought to be supreme ; but when we translate that senti- ment into an idea, we fondly picture the great scheme of the universe developed within the sphere of our vision. Like children possessed of a magnet, we imagine the pole to which it points may be found in the neighbouring field. Our magnet is true enough ; but

" the far-off Divine Event

Towards wliicli the whole creation moves,"

is beyond our horizon. And, similarly, we give to our spiritual intuitions materialistic forms which are far from rendering them voraciously. The concrete, the visible, the tangible, are in- evitably the earliest expressions even of our highest sentiments. We feel the Majesty of God, and picture Him seated on a throne. We feel His Justice, and the myth of a Day of Judgment rises before us. In like manner, our intuitive expectation that virtue will be re- warded, clothes itself in all manner of carnal

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 39

shapes of crowns and riches ; and our expecta- tion that vice will be punished, in similar shapes of pain and infamy. At a further stage of human thought, when the anticipation of phy- sical reward and punishment in this life has been of necessity postponed to, or supplemented by, those of another world, we substitute the almost equally materialistic rewards of Elysium and Paradise, or penalties of Jehanum and Hell. It needs a long course of progress to get beyond such ideas, and learn to render spiritual senti- ments spiritually, and moral ones morally only. It militates nothing against the veracity of the origmal profound intuition of Justice, that hitherto men have thus mistranslated it into the promise of a speedy settlement of the Great Account in the gross earthly coin of physical good or evil, here or hereafter. That intuition will doubtless be far more perfectly fulfilled in the grander scope of eternity, and by means of the transcendent joys and sorrows of the spiritual life. When we have advanced far enough to feel that all other good and evil are as nothing in comparison of these, it will be easy to see how the Supreme Justice may use those tremendous instruments in its ultimate

40 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

dealings with merit and. demerit; and reward Yirtiie — not with the dross of earthly health or wealth, or of celestial crowns and harps — but with the only boon the true saint desires, even the sense of union with God ; and punish Yice — not with disease and disgrace, nor with the fire and worms of hell — but with the most awful of all penalties, the severance of the soul from Divine light and love. 'No one who has obtained even a glimmering of the meaning of these spiritual realities can hesitate to confess that his soul's most passionate craving after Justice may be superabundantly fulfilled in such ways ; even in worlds not necessarily divided into distinct realms of reward and pun- ishment, but where, as in another school and higher stage of being, our spiritual part shall have freer scope and leave the carnal in the shade.

We now proceed to the next step of the argu- ment, which, as yet, makes no appeal beyond experience. "We assume that mankind at large anticipates and desires that Justice may be done. Is it done in this world? We have seen that it is not outwardly or perspicuously vindicated, — is there, nevertheless, room left

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 41

to suppose that it possibly may have been ful- filled in ways hidden from us, such as the satisfaction of a mens eonseia rectij or the misery of secret remorse ?

The answer to this question has been com- monly evaded, or the question itself blinked, under what I conceive to be a most mistaken sense of reverence to God. Sometimes we are told it is not for us to say what is Justice ; and sometimes we are reminded how little we can guess the hidden joys and pangs of our fellow- creatures, and how easily these may counter- balance all external conditions. I do not think the case is so obscure as is alleged, and I am quite sure that reverence for God never requires us to close our eyes to facts. What is in ques- tion is not any abstract or occulta Justitia^ but precisely our idea of Justice — that expectation which, by some means or other, has been raised in the hearts of men from the beginning of history till now. Is that fulfilled, or room left for its fulfilment, in this world? I do not hesitate to affirm that it is not fulfilled — and that in thousands of cases there is no room left wherein it can possibly be fulfilled up to the hour of death. No retribution which could

42 THE LIFE AFTEK DEATH.

satisfy it has had space to be exhibited. The tyrant with his last breath has crowned the pyramid of his crimes and died with the smile of gratified cruelty on his lips. The martyr has expired in tortures of body and of mind. Nothing that can be imagined to have been experienced of remorse in the one soul, or of joy in the other, would rectify the balance.

Two classes of readers will demur to what I have to say on this topic. One will take the injustice of the world to be so notorious a fact as to need no elaborate proof, and will resent as superfluous any attempt to establish it. The other will be shocked by the naked statement, and may even contradict it with impatience. Let us clear up our position a little. What a well- developed sense of Justice requires for its satisfaction is, that no one being shall suff'er more than he has deserved, or undergo the penalty of another's guilt. It is nothing to the satisfaction of such Justice that nine hun- dred and ninety-nine persons are treated with exactest equity, if the humblest and meanest bears sufferings disproportioned to his deserts ; nor if the punishment which A has merited falls upon B, and the reward of the virtue of

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 43

C be enjoyed by D. A single instance of posi- tive injustice done to a single individual would siiffice to decide the point. Justice is not ful- filled on earth if there has been one such case since creation.

I^ow will any one dispute that such cases have occiuTcd, not singly, but by hundreds and thousands? Of course there are innumerable instances, seemingly of crying injustice, in which, could we see behind the scenes and know all the bearings of the matter, we should find no injustice at all. But there are also other instances in which, rationally speaking, it is certain there was injustice, and no further knowledge conceivable could alter our judg- ment. With all reverence I will endeavour to state one such case, about which there can be little obscurity.

Jesus Chi'ist was assuredly one of the holiest of men. He died in undeserved tortui-es, and at the supreme hour of his agony he cried out in despair, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Instead of flooding his departing soul with the raptui'ous vision which might have neutralized all the horrors of the cross, it pleased the Father, whom he loved as no man

44 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

had loved Him before, to withdraw all con- sciousness of His presence, and to leave him. to expire in darkness and doubt. That ancient story, stripped of all its misleading supernatu- ralism, seems to me the sufficient evidence that God reserves His justice for eternity.

It is not only the crimes and merits of the death-hour to which Justice fails to mete due measure upon earth. ISTothing is more obvious than that men are continually doomed to suffer for the evil-doing of others, and that the good which one has sown another reaps. Health and disease, honour and ignominy, wealth and poverty, everything we can name in the way of external good and evil, come to us more often by the virtue and vice of our parents and neighboui's than by any merit or demerit of our own.

Again, the enormous inequality in the dis- tribution of penalties for similar offences, leaves a huge mass of injustice which it is impossible to suppose is often providentially rectified in this life. For myself, I do not hesitate to say that the intolerable cruelty with which sins of unchastity in women are visited all over the world, in comparison of the immunity from dis-

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 45

grace enjoyed by profligate men, decides for me the question. Could we realize the reflec- tions of many a poor wretch banished from her home for her first transgression, and driven on helplessly, scoui'ged by hunger and infamy, deeper and deeper into ruin, till she lies wrecked in body and soul, — could we understand her feelings as she compares her lot with that of the man who first tempted her to sin, and whose fault has never stood in the way of his prosperity or reputation, — we should then learn somewhat of how the supposed Justice of the world appears from another side from that on which the haj)py behold it.

In a world where such things happen every day, is it possible to maintain that Providence trims the balance of Justice on this side the grave, or that the inner life's history, if revealed to us, would rectify any apparent outward in- equality? The horror of such cases lies pre- cisely in this : that the hideously excessive punishment of the one sinner consists in the fact that she is forced helj)lessly into the deepest moral pollution ; while the light penalty of the other leaves him life-long space for restoration to self-respect and virtue.

46 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

When we go back from our own age of com- parative equity to darker times, or pass to the contemjDlation of the wrongs suffered in semi- harbarous countries, the impressions of injustice multij)ly and deepen. We think of the hundred thousand helpless creatures burnt to death for the impossible crime of witchcraft ; the victims of bigotry or statecraft who have languished out their lives in the dungeons of the Inqui- sition, of the Bastille, of every castle which frowned over the plains of mediaeval Europe; of the myriads who suffered by that huge "mockery of justice, the question by torture ; of the untold miseries of the slaves and serfs of classic and modern times; and, finally, of the crowning mystery of all, the woful sufferings of innocent little babes and harmless brutes ; — and as these things pass before us, instead of doubting whether Justice sometimes fails, we begin to doubt whether all history be not the record of its failure, and, like Shelley, we are ready to talk of " this ivrong world."

What does Faith say now ? Surely she stakes her whole authority on the assertion that there is another life where such failures of justice will be rectified? The moral argument for

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 47

Immortality drawn from the consideration of its necessity to give ethical completion to the order of Pjovidence, is quite irrefragable. Either moral arguments have no practical validity, or in this case, at all events, we may rely upon the conclusion to which they point. Man's noblest and most disinterested passion — a pas- sion which may well be deemed the supreme manifestation of the Divine element in his nature — will, if death be the end of existence, have proved a miserable delusion; while God Himself will prove to have created us, children of the dust, to love and hope for Justice ; but Himself to disregard Justice on the scale of a disappointed world.

I have devoted so large a space to this parti- cular line of considerations in favour of a Life after Death, because I conceive that it has hardly received all the attention it deserves, or been generally stated as broadly as is requisite to exhibit its enormous force. We are not un- frequently reminded that our personal sense of Justice is unsatisfied in this world ; but it is rarely set forth that it is the sacred thirst of the whole human race for Justice which is de- frauded if there be no world beyond. We are

48 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

often exhorted to hope that the Lord of Con- science will not prove Himself less just towards ns than He requires us mortals to he to one another. But we are not bidden resolutely and with filial confidence to say — the more boldly so much the more reverently — Either Man is Immortal or Grod is not Just.

II. Another line of thought leading to the same conclusion lies parallel with the above, but can here be only briefly indicated. Creation, as we behold it, presents a scene in which not only Justice fails to be completed, but no single purpose, such as we can attribute for a moment to a good and wise Creator, is thoroughly worked out or fulfilled. If we take the lowest hypo- thesis, and say He meant us merely to be happy — to have just such a preponderance of pleasure over pain as should make existence on the whole a boon and not a curse — then it is clear that there are multitudes with regard to whom His purpose fails; as, for example, the poor babes who come into the world diseased, and who die after weeks or months of pain, without enjoyment of any kind. And if we take a more worthy view of the purpose of creation, and suppose that God has made us and placed us in

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 49

this world of trial to attain the highest end of finite beings, namely, virtue and union with His own Divine spirit, then still more obviously, for thousands of men and women, this blessed purjiose is abortive ; for their mortal life has ended in sin and utter alienation from God and goodness. If God be wise. He cannot have made His creatures for ends He knew they would never reach ; nor if He be good, can He have made them only for suffering, or only for sin. There is no escape from the conclusion to which Faith points unhesitatingly, namely, to a world wherein the beneficent designs of God will finally be carried out.

As the preceding argument appealed to the Justice of God, so this one hinges on His Goodness and His Wisdom. It is essentially a Theistic argument, as distinguished from the Pantheistic glorification of intellectual great- ness. The Pantheist says that a philosopher ought to be immortal, for he is the crown of things. The Theist says that a tortured slave, a degraded woman, must be immortal, for God's creature could not have been made for torture and pollution. To minds which have been wont to ponder on the theme of the meaning

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50 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

and purpose of creation, this ground of faith in Immortality is perhaps the most broadly satis- factory of any. Having once learned to think of God as the Almighty Guide who is leading every soul He has made to the joy of eternal union with Himself, it becomes simply impos- sible to lower that conception, and think of Him as content to " let him that is ujijust be unjust still," and permit His rebellious child to perish for ever with a blasphemy on his lips.

III. Again, the incompleteness and imper- fection of the noblest ])avt of man, compared to the finished work which creation elsewhere presents, affords ground for the presumption that that noblest j)art has not yet reached the development it is intended to attain. The green leaf gives no promise of becoming anything but a leaf, and in due time it withers and drops to the ground without exciting in the beholder any sense of disappointment. But the flower- bud holds out a different prospect. If the canker-worm devour it ere it bloom into a rose, we are sensible of grievous failure; and a garden in which all the buds should so perish would be more hideous than any desert. The body of a man grows to its full stature and

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 51

complete development; but no man lias ever yet reached his loftiest mental stature, or the plenitude of moral strength and beauty of which he is capable. If the simile be just which compares the physical nature to a scaffolding, and the spiritual to the temple built up within it, then we behold the strange anomaly of a mere framework made so perfect that it could gain nothing were it preserved to the fabulous age of the patriarchs, while the temple within is never finished, and is often an unsightly heap. The "City of God" cannot be built of piles never to be completed, nor His Garden of Souls filled with flowers destined all to canker ere they bloom.

IV. Human love also urges on us an appeal to Faith which has probably been to millions of hearts the most conclusive of all. We are fond of quoting the assertion, that

" 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."

But its truth may very much be questioned, unless we can trust that the "many waters" of the Dark Eiver " cannot quench love," and that we shall surely rejoice still in that light

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52 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

of life upon the further shore. Intense love becomes torture if we believe it to be a transient joy, the '' meteor gleam of a starless night," and fear that it must soon go out in unfathom- able gloom. To think of the one whose inner- most self is to us the world's chief treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to le, and become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love for ourselves for- gotten for ever, — this is such agony, that having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the grave. Love would be the curse of mortality were it to bring always with it such unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge that every hour which knitted our heart more closely to our friend also brought us nearer to an eternal separation. Better never to have ascended to that high Vita Nuova where self-love is lost in another's weal, better to have lived like the cattle which browse and sleep while they wait the butcher's knife, than to endure such despair. But is there nothing in us which refuses to

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 63

believe all this nightmare of the final sundering of loving hearts ? Love itself seems to announce itself as an eternal thing. It has such an ele- ment of infinity in its tenderness, that it never fails to seek for itself an expression beyond the limits of time, and we talk, even when we know not what we mean, of "undying aff'ection," " immortal love." It is the only passion which in the nature of things we can carry with us into another world, and it is fit to be prolonged, intensified, glorified for ever. It is not so much a joy we may take with us, as the only joy which can make any world a heaven when the affections of earth shall be perfected in the supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which we share with God, and by which we live in Him and He in us. All its beautiful tender- ness, its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure and ineffable delight, are the rays of God's Sun of Love reflected in our souls.

Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent dust decaying slowly in their coffins side by side in the vault ? If so, let us have done with prating of any Faith in heaven or earth. We are mocked by a fiend. Mephistopheles is on the throne of the universe.

64 THE LIFE AETER DEATH.

Y. Another and very remarkable moral argu- ment for Immortality was put forth, some years ago by Prof. Newman, and has never (to my knowledge) attracted the attention it deserves. It cannot be stated more succinctly than in his own volume of "Theism" (p. 75). After de- scribing our pain at the loss of a friend, he continues :

" But if Virtue grieve thus for lost virtue justly, How then must God, the Fountain of Virtue, feel 1 If our highest feelings, and the feelings of all the holy, Guide rightly to the Divine heart, then it would grieve

likewise. And grieve eternally, if Goodness perish eternally. 'Naj, and as a man who should live ten thousand years, Sustained miraculously amid perishing generations. Would sorrow perpetually in the perpetual loss of friends, Even so, some might judge the Divine heart likewise Would stint its affections towards the creatures of a

day

Would it not be a yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow Losing every loved one, just when virtue was ripening. And foreseeing perpetual loss, friend after friend, for

ever, So that all training perishes and has to be begun anew, Winning new souls to virtue, to be lost as soon as won 1 If then we must not doubt that the Highest has deep

love for the holy. Such love as man has for man in pure and sacred friend- ship,

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 65

We seem justly to infer that those whom God loves are

deathless ; Else would the Divine blessedness be imperfect and

impaired. N'or avails it to reply by resting on God's infinitude, Which easily supports sorrows which would weigh us

do^vn ; For if to promote Virtue be the highest end with the

Creator, Then to lose His own work, not casually and by exception, But necessarily and always, agrees not with his Infinitude More than with his Wisdom, nor more than with his

Blessedness. In short, close friendship between the Eternal and the

Perishing Appears unseemly to the nature of the Eternal, Whom it befits to keep his beloved, or not to love at all. But to say God loveth no man, is to make religion vain ; Hence it is judged that ' whatsoever God loveth, liveth

with God.'"

lu the five ways now specified, the moral arguments drawn from the phenomena of human life and sentiment, and from all that we may conjecture of the Divine purposes, lead up in- directly to the conclusion that there must be another act of the drama after that on which the curtain falls at death.

There remain some other lines of thought converging towards the same end which cannot

56 THE LIFE AETER DEATH.

now be followed out ; as, for example, the en- nobling influence of the belief in Immortality ; which Faith refuses to trace to a delusion. Space only can be reserved to touch briefly on the two forms in which mankind possesses something like a direct consciousness of a Life after Death, and in which Faith therefore speaks immediately and without any preliminary argu- ment. These two forms are : 1st, the general dim consciousness of the mass of mankind that the soul of a man never dies ; 2nd, the specific vivid consciousness of devout men that their spiritual union with God is eternal.

YI. The first of these forms of direct faith is too familiar a topic to need much elucidation. The extreme variability of its manifestations in nations and individuals makes it difficult to estimate its just value, and to decide whether we have a right to treat it as a mere tradition, or as the quasi-umvQv^^i testimony of the soul to its own natural superiority to death. It may be remarked, however, that the belief, when examined carefully (e. g. as in Alger's admira- ble History of the Doctrine of a Future Life), bears very much the characteristics we should attribute to a real and spontaneous instinct, and

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 57

not to any common tradition, — such as that of a Deluge, — disseminated by the various branches of the human family in their migra- tions. 1st. The belief begins early, though probably not in the very earliest stage of human development. 2nd. It attains its maxi- mum among the highest races of mankind in the great primary forms of civilization (e. g. the Egyptian, Yedic-Aryan and Persian). 3rd. It projects such various, and even contrasted ideals of the future world (e. g. Yalhalla and ISTirvana), that it must be supposed to have sprung up indigenously in each race, and by no means to have been borrowed by one from the other. 4th. Finally, the instinct begins to falter at a later stage of civilization, when self-conscious- ness is more developed, and the practice of arguing about our beliefs takes the place of more simple habits of mind, — a stage which we may perhaps exactly mark in Eoman history when, as Cicero tells us, "there were some in his day who had begun to doubt of Immortal- ity." All these characters would certainly form "notes" of an original instinct in the human soul testifying to its own undyingness, and are not easily accounted for on any other hypothesis.

58 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

It will be observed that this Consciousness of Immortality, and the Expectation of Justice, spoken of above, are entirely distinct things. Though confluent at last, they have remote sources. It is at a comparatively late stage of history that the Expectation of Justice projects itself beyond the horizon of this world, and at an equally late one when the Consciousness of Immortality crystallizes into a definite idea of a state of Eewards and Punishments!

Direct reliance on this Consciousness of Im- mortality, when it happens to be strongly deve- loped in the individual, is probably the origin of that robust faith which we still find, not rarely, among persons of warm and simple natures. Those amongst us who lack such vivid instinct may yet obtain, indirectly, a ground of confidence from the observation of its almost universal prevalence, implying its Divine origin and consequent veracity. That the Creator of the human race should have so formed our mental constitution as that such a belief should have sprung up and prevailed over the whole globe, and yet that it should be from first to last a mistake, is an hypothesis which Faith cannot endure. The God of Truth will have

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deceived the human race if the soul of a man dies with his body.

VII. Lastly : the most perfect and direct faith in Immortality is assuredly that which is vouchsafed to the haj)py souls who personally feel that they have entered into a relation with God which can never end. It is hard to speak on this sacred theme without appearing to some irreverent, to others fanatical. I can but say that there are men and women who have given their testimony in this matter whom I think we do well to trust, even as prophets who have stood on Pisgah. " Faith in God and in our eternal union with Him," said one of them, "are not two dogmas of our creed, but one." That inner experience which is the living know- ledge of the one truth, brings home also the other. At a certain stage of religious progress, we cannot doubt that the man learns by direct perception that God loves him, and that "he is in God and God in him," in a sense which conveys the warrant of eternal life. As hum- bler souls find their last word of faith to be that of Marcus Aurelius, " Thou wilt do well for me and for the world," — such a man has the loftier right to say with assurance : " Thou

60 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

wilt guide me by Thy counsel and afterwards receive me to glory. Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer Thine holy one to see corruption."

Perhaps the knowledge of his immortality has come to the saint in some supreme hour of adoring happiness. Perhaps it has come when the clouds of death seemed to close round him, and, instead of darkness, lo ! there was a great light, and a sense of Life flowing fresh and strong against the ebbing tide of mortality ; a life which is the same as love, the same as infinite joy and trust. It matters not whence or how it came. Thenceforth there is for him no more doubt. The next world is as sure as the present, and Grod is shining over all.

Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the perfect '' evidence of things not seen." But can their full faith supply our lack ? Can we see with their eyes and believe on their report ? It is only possible in a very inferior measure. Yet if our own spiritual life have received even some faint gleams of the "light which never came from sun or star," then, once more, will our faith point the way to Immortality ; for we shall know in what manner such truths come

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 61

to the soul, and be able to trust that what is dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have journeyed nearer to the East than we; who have surmounted Duty more perfectly, or passed through rivers of affliction into which our feet have never dipped. God cannot have deluded them in their sacred hope of His eternal love. If their experience be a dream, all prayer and all communion may likewise be dreams. In so far as we have faith in such prayer and commu- nion, we can believe in the high experience of the saints ; and so in the immortal life to which it witnesses.

62 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

II.

The immense growth which, has taken place in the moral consciousness of mankind within historical times may be estimated by a simple observation. The Future Life, which was once altogether uncoloured by moral hues, has for ages been painted as if it were a Moral Life only ; all its happiness Eeward, and all its suffering either Eetribution or Purification. In the preceding paper, it was remarked in passing that the consciousness of Immortality and the expectation of Justice are totally dis- tinct things, and, though confluent at last, arise in remote sources. It is at a compara- tively late historical era that the expectation of Justice projects itself beyond the horizon of this world; and equally late when the consciousness of Immortality takes shape as an ideal state of rewards and punishments beyond the grave. But having once passed into this phase, it is astonishing how rapidly

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 63

the Moral aspect of the future world begins to occupy the minds of men, almost to the exclu- sion of every other. The analogies of our pre- sent existence (if they might be accounted in any measure as guides) would lead us to infer that hereafter, as here, the moral life will be only one of the elements of existence; and though the most important of all (and therefore more discernible at a higher elevation), yet never absolutely bare and alone, but rather, like the granite foundations of the eternal hills, clothed with forests of usefulness and flowery meads of beauty and affection. Instead of this, the popular idea for millenniums has been, that the moment a man dies, he goes, not into a higher School with its lessons and its play (often the most instructive of lessons), but into a Divine Police-court, where the presiding Magistrate, — Minos or Osiris, or He who frowns behind the altar of the Sistine, — is always sitting in readiness to send him to the dread prison on one hand, or to dole him out the arrears of pay for his faith and virtues on the other. When that sentence has been passed, all that follows throughout eternity is (accord- ing to the same conception) merely a sequel

64 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

thereof — either punishment or reward under diiFerent forms of suffering or enjoyment.

Of course among persons accustomed to think freely for themselves, such views as these carry no authority; but it would be well if, before tui'ning our attention to a study of the pro- blems connected with the possible conditions of a future life, we could shake ourselves alto- gether free of them and start afresh. That which the past has really bequeathed to us is an immense consensus of the human race in favour of the two opinions, " that the Soul of a man never dies," and that " Justice will be done hereafter, if not here." The value of this almost universal testimony is (as I have endeavoured to shew in the preceding part of this essay) very great indeed. But beyond these two great general affirmations, the voice of the ages can say nothing to us of the smallest weight con- cerning either the details of the life to come, or of the special form in which justice is to be fulfilled. The soul may have consciousness of its own immortality, and the moral sense may point to the final triumph of justice as the needle points to the magnetic pole. But the details of how, when and where, the

THE LIFE AFTEK DEATH. 65

future life is to be spent, or how justice is to be fulfilled, are matters regarding whicli it is inii^ossible that we can have any conscious- ness ; and such ideas as we inherit concerning them must needs have come to us tlurough the exercise of the mytho^^oeic faculty of men of old, elevated as time went on to the rank of Divine revelations. And it is to be remarked that as these ideas (e.g. that of a New Jeru- salem) were evolved in accordance with the psychology, politics, aesthetics, and all other conditions of the community which gave them birth, so they inevitably bear the stamp of their age, and we entangle ourselves in endless ana- chronisms by retaining them now, even with widest latitude of Swedenborgian tyjDe-making. Few readers of Gibbon will forget the scorn wherewith that

" Lord of irony, the master-spell Which stung his foes to hate which grew from fear,"

describes the origin of the Apocalyptic vision. In the state of society in the Eoman empire in the first and second centuries, a town was the centre of all delights, and the country was con- sidered a place of banishment. "A City," he

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66 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

says, ''was accordingly constrnctecl in the skies of gold and jewels." l^ow, in England, on the contrary, in the nineteenth century, nothing can be further from our notions of peace and repose than a walled town, even if provided with gates of the singularly incongruous mate- rial of pearls. Eather, when Martin some years ago desired to paint the "Plains of Heaven," he innocently sketched a handsome English pleasure-ground, with a distant view — let us say of the "Weald of Kent, or of the Shropshire woodlands with the Welsh niountains in the horizon. Had he attempted to depict the Blessed walking up and down on the trottoirs of a gold-paved street, his critics would have treated him as a caricaturist of the legend of Whit- tington, rather than as an illustrator of the Vision of the Seer of Patmos. And yet it may be questioned whether, in the minds of thou- sands amongst us, orthodox and heterodox, some dim idea of the Apocalyptic City does not even yet arise whenever we think of another life ; an idea perhaps more directly derived in our case from Bunyan than from St. John. It would be superfluous to remark further, how the doctrine of the Eesurrection of the Body,

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which accommodated itself to the pneumatology of the Egyptians and Jewish Pharisees, still colours the notions of persons who have (so far as they are conscious) entirely renounced any such belief, and who are quite aware of the insolubility of the problems concerning Spirit and Matter, of which the ancients cut the knot with so much decision. If we would avoid following in the wake of perfectly unseaworthy speculations, we must needs let all these notions di'ift away from us at once and for ever.

Another order of errors from which it is also very desirable we should clear our minds are those which arise from the old view of the Creator as a Dens ex Macliina^ always ready miraculously to interfere with the order of things, and bring His moral will suddenly to bear upon, and snap the chain of physical events. If the soul does, as we believe, survive the dissolution of the body, then that survival is assuredly a natural event, prepared for even from the first beginnings of our physical exist- ence, and taking place normally as the new- born child enters the world. The child comes into the light out of darkness, and we seem to pass into darkness out of light, but the one

f2

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transition must be as natural as the other. It is among the "infinite possibilities of l^ature" ■ — IN'ature, whose Laws are the changeless Habits of God — that the Immortality of the human soul must be henceforth anticipated ; not among the beneficent freaks of an erratic OmnijDotence. Excluding these ancient misleadings, and endeavouring to stand face to face with the bare fact that the Self of man must be disem- bodied if it survive death, what are the con- ditions of existence conceivable under such severance ? It is a truism all too familiar, that an unborn babe might projDhesy of the flowers and stars which are shortly to meet its eyes, as well as a living man tell of the things which lie beyond the tomb. But I apprehend that the utter, unilluminable darkness which conceals the whole outer environment of the future life (a darkness which no apocalypse could lighten), does not close quite so imj)enetrably as has been generally supposed over the conditions of the inner world which we must needs carry with us. Our position is in a measure like that of a blind man who should be told that on a certain day he should both receive his sight and suffer amputation of his arms. What re-

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ceiving his sight may be, he cannot in the remotest degree guess or understand, but he may form some, not wholly false, conception of what it will be to lose his limbs. At death, a portcullis falls on the senses, the appetites are cut off at their roots, and the affections are sub- jected to a strain of changed conditions hitherto untried. Perhaps still more intimate changes may be involved, and with the loss of its brain- tablet, Memory may alter its character. In any case, our whole past world is gone, whatever new one may, either immediately or at a remoter future, take its place and supply us with fresh sensations and ideas. Like creatures which have hitherto inhabited the waters, we quit the element in which we have lived and moved and had our being; and whatever we have henceforth to experience must come from ano- ther. Yet we carry ouf^selves into the new ele- ment,— selves which must be affected most importantly by the transition, but which can- not, in the nature of things, lose their indivi- duality, or change instantaneously their ethical status. In the following pages regard will be paid exclusively to those problems which arise on contemplating the simple fact of disembodi-

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ment and its consequences; and no attempt whatever will be made to construct any theory of the ouUuard conditions of the surviving Self or its possible environment. Further, it must be understood that it is rather with the hope of stating such problems with some fresh clear- ness, and leaving the reader to choose between the dilemmas which arise, than with the bolder ambition of offering a solution of them, that I have engaged in this task. Only in a few cases has it seemed to me that there are indications sufficiently obvious to enable us to decide with some degree of confidence regarding the true answers to the eager questions of our hearts. To avoid perpetual circumlocutions, I shall speak generally of the disembodied Self as the " Soul," without thereby intending to commit myself to any particular theory associated with the word, either as distinguished from Matter or (according to the ancient pneumatology) from that much-misleading term, "Spirit."*

* It may perhaps aid a little to bring reader and writer to mutual comprehension in these obscure researches, if I say that such idea as I have been able to form of the rationale of Immortality is, that Life, vegetative, animated, conscious and self-conscious, forms a series of evolutions.

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I. With regard to the Intellectual part of us which may survive dissolution, the difficulties seem even more abstruse and insoluble than those which concern the Love which may be renewed, or the Justice which may be fulfilled hereafter. Is Knowledge, such as we gain on earth, an everlasting treasure ? Can we lose it, any more than we can lose the food which we have swallowed, and which has gone to make

not merely in the sense of a higher and more elaborate organization, but of a subtler essence, — a series of sheaths out of which finer and finer shoots grow successively, till at last comes the Flower of full Consciousness, into whose heart the Divine Sun pours His beams directly, and wherein is formed a Seed which does not perish when the petals fall in the dust. The stage of being at which something, self-conscious or otherwise, survives the dissolution of the body may be — nay (in my humble oj)inion), is almost cer- tainly— a lower one than we have been accustomed to consider. A few only out of the grounds of faith in human immortality apply to the immortality of the higher brutes ; but human immortality being assumed as a given fact, and a future life for man being predicated as normal, the phy- siological laws (whatever they may be) under which such survival takes place in our case, are almost sm'e to apply to creatures many of whom possess intelligence and senti- ment far surpassing those of human infants. The great argument of Justice of course applies to ill-used and inno- cent beasts with even greater force than to similarly ill-used but more or less guilty men.

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up the tissue of our frames ? Or, on the other hand, can we keep it, and carry it with us, entering the higher state, one of us as a philo- sopher, and the other as a boor ? If this last hypothesis be the nearest to the truth, then we ask. Whether all kinds of knowledge, or only the knowledge which deals with l^ature or eternal things, have value in the other world ? Thus we find ourselves conducted to the prac- tical query, Whether the education of earth ought not to be carried on with reference to the probable value of mental acquirements be- yond the sjDhere of human concerns? The common and orthodox notion of Immortality seems to be, that the silliest or most ignorant person admitted into heaven instantly becomes wiser than Plato, and far better acquainted with science than Humboldt. But even new organs, new capacities, new revelations, can scarcely convey such knowledge and wisdom instantaneously. The philosopher who has eagerly sought some hidden truth, may find the light immediately break on his soul; the man of science who has thoroughly understood and ardently endeavoured to untie the knots of creation's mysteries, may be enabled to loosen

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them by the help of fresh faculties and wider vision. But it seems well-nigh nonsense to talk of a clown who has no notion that there are hidden truths or mysteries waiting explana- tion, to receive the whole flood of quasi-omni- science into the narrow mill-dam of his soul. "To him that hath shall be given." For him that hath not, some rudiments and dawning rays of knowledge seem all that he is cajDable of receiving. The Hottentot who died in his kraal an hour before Sir John Herschel, did he learn in that hour more about the laws and motions of the heavenly bodies than Herschel knew ? Or were Herschel' s illumined eyes able to take in at a glance what the Hottentot will take years to learn, when, as the old Greek epitaph on Thales has it, "he was removed on high because his eyes, dimmed by age, could no longer from afar behold the stars" ?

The difficulty of conceiving how any mental act is hereafter to be performed tvithout a brain which hitherto has been performed — if not " ^^," yet invariably " wiW^ and " through'''' the brain — has been undoubtedly immeasurably height- ened by recent physiological discoveries which have tended more and more at each step to con-

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nect both. Thought and Memory with changes in cerebral matter. Dr. Carpenter's very re- markable paper in the Contemporary Eeview for May, 1873, "On the Hereditary Transmis- sion of acquired Psychical Habits," goes very far indeed towards identifying alike the con- sciousness of present sensorial impressions and the memory of past ones, with physical changes in the brain ; and, however willing we may be to retain the notion that there is a Soul in all cases (except perhaps those of unconscious or involuntary cerebration), present and active, using the brain as its instrument, and no more identifiable therewith than the organist with his organ, we still find ourselves face to face with an appalling problem when we try to ima- gine any way in which a Brainless Soul can Think or Eemember. The two hypotheses open to us in the matter are, to suppose either, first, that the thing which we speak of as the Soul has many powers undisclosed now, while it is wrapped in the sheath of the body — ^powers to Perceive (as magnetized persons have been sup- posed to do) without use of eyes or ears, and corresponding powers to Eemember without a Note-book Brain ; or, second, that (as Leibnitz

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insisted with regard to every finite intelligence) the Soul is necessarily always clothed with a material body more or less rarefied, and that it finds in its future "spiritual body" of the old Pauline type, fresh organs of consciousness. Of these abysses of speculation the present writer has no intention to do more than skirt the edge, merely refusing to cover them up, as is too often done, with cut -and -dried phrases, like traps awaiting us in the hours of doubt and darkness. The strain on moral and religious Faith caused by the difficulties attendant on every theory of a Life after Death is simply enor- mous ; and the more plainly we recognize that it is so, the safer we are. He is a foolish en- gineer who refuses to test — lest it should break down under the strain — the strength of the bridge over which ere long everything dear to him must pass. One point, however, regarding these solemn problems may, I think, here be justly noted, having in effect come out into much clearer light than heretofore in consequence of the physiological discoveries above mentioned. The hypothesis of a re-clothing of the disem- bodied Soul with a new body is now the less tenable of the two, unless we are prepared to

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anticipate an obliteration of Memory. It will not suffice to believe that fresb senses may be developed in a future frame. Such senses might properly reveal to us our future surroundings, as our present ones reveal those which are now present. But it is not conceivable that they should reveal the Past; and if the memorial tablet of the brain be lost, it would appear that we must needs find our new organ of thought a tabula rasa. Thus we are shut up in the dilemma that either the Soul carries its own Memory with it (in which case it would seem as if it may as naturally retain all other facul- ties, and so need no fresh body) ; or that it does not carry its Memory, and so, when re-embodied, lives beyond Lethe, utterly unaware of what has passed in this state of existence. I am not disj)Osed to insist that there could be absolutely no fulfilment of Justice, no satis- faction of the unquenched thirst of Love, in a world between which and our own had fallen a veil of Oblivion. The consequences of our acts (as I shall by-and-by attempt to shew) may bring about sure retribution by working themselves into the very tissue of our souls; and Love may draw once more together and

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perfect the friendsliip of spirits whose affinity first proclaimed itself here below. But, un- doubtedly, so far as we can yet grasp such thoughts, the retention or restoration of Memory is almost, if not absolutely, a sine qua non among the conditions of such a Life after Death as shall altogether fulfil those aspirations which (God-given as we believe them to be) are our chief pledge that such a Life awaits us.

11. Yery interesting, though less important, are the speculations regarding another world which refer to that side of our intellectual nature which we call the Esthetic. How will the beauty of our new habitations touch us ? Or will it be the yet unexplored loveliness of our own planet which we shall behold at last, and no longer with care-worn hearts or tear-dimmed eyes ? To how many of the sick and sufi'ering, the narrow-fortuned, the toil-enslaved, have the scenes of Alps and Andes, Grecian isles and Yosemite valleys, been dreams of longing never appeased ere death closed their unsatisfied eyes ? What bliss might be given to many of the purest of souls, who have passed whole years imprisoned in sordid streets, or amid all the

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Ugliness of a sick chamber, by merely permit- ting them ''to see those things which we see," of woods and hills and waters, the sumise and the moon walking in glory amid the clouds? We dare not say it is a debt owing to such souls that they should one day behold God's beautiful world ; but assuredly it would be no improbable display of His love to shew it to them.

All these questions, however, and all which concern the mental faculties in another life, are (as I said a few pages back) even more rebuff- ing to our poor thoughts and speculations than those which concern the future of the Affections and the Conscience ; and to these I hasten, as also infinitely the most interesting.

III. If there be a Life after Death, it can scarcely be but that Love will assume therein a much higher place than it holds here. What gifts of tongues and proj)hecy may cease, what wit and learning and science may "vanish away," we cannot define. But that Love "never faileth" is no less sure than that we ourselves shall continue to be. God cannot — it is reverence itself that makes us say it — God

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cannot have made our human hearts as if ex- pressly to contain and feed that light of a world else so dark, and yet permit the gleam to be extinguished like the toy-lamps launched on the Ganges, leaving them to go down the stream of eternity in the blackness of night. If He can and does so ordain it, He is not the God who has given us the law of justice and fidelity, nor the adored, all-merciful One whom we have found in life's supremest hours in the Holy of Holies of Prayer. He is not our God ; and even if He (or It?) be a " Stream of Tendency," an " TJniversum," or the " Deity of the Eeligion of Inhumanity," which our various new teachers would have us recognize, Eeligion is evermore closed to us, for we cannot love Him, and the hope of Immortality vanishes as a dream. As Florence ^Nightingale recently wrote, " Our ground for believing in a future life is simply Because God isy His character is the pledge of our Immortality, and it is quite as much the pledge that the Love which is the most godlike thing in us shall be immortal too. Our di\dnes are so jealous of what they have deemed to be God's "glory" as the Judge of all the earth, that they have supposed Judging to be altoge-

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ther His chief concern, and that He calls us from the grave expressly to punish us or to reward. But beside these royal functions of Deity (if we may so express it), there must remain the cares of the tender Father, the divine Friend ; and it would be strange indeed if these should not be vindicated by that Good One quite as surely and perfectly as the others.

One of the many questions which crowd on us when we attempt to construct any theory of what the future of the Affections may be, has doubtless made the hearts of the bereaved ache whenever it has occurred to them. What war- rant have we that, dying long years after our lost ones, perchance in wholly different spiritual and moral conditions, we shall ever meet or overtake them, and not rather remain " ever- more a life behind," "through all the secular to be" ? Even granting that they live and we live, who has told us that our paths, which haj^pened to approach, like those of a comet and a planet, for the mere moment of earthly existence, will ever touch again throughout the cycles of eternity ? In view of these agonizing questions, we can scarcely wonder at those who have killed themselves with their beloved ones.

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rather than allow them to go out alone into the darkness, striving thus to secure a natural prox- imity, even while they madly placed the moral distance of a great crime between them. The supreme kindness of Providence would seem to be shewn when it suffers two loving spirits to pass linked in inseparable embrace through the awful portals of the unknown world. Could we anticipate such a lot with certainty, Death would lose half its terrors and all its sadness.

And again, another painful doubt is. How shall we recognize our friends in a disembodied or re-embodied state? Suppose that we both live again and meet again, how shall we be sure that, in some strange glorified form which passes us by all unwittingly and luu-ecognized, we shall not miss the being whom we would traverse half eternity to find ? These are the anxious, but after all somewhat childish, ques- tions which the restlessness of severed affection naturally suggests. But in truth we are quite as sure of re-union with our beloved ones, and of mutual recognition, as of the immortal life itself. As we have just observed, the ground of our belief in that Life is the same which guarantees the restoration of Love, and there -

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fore, implicitly, some sure method of re-union. How it is to be brought about is the concern of Him who will lead us into that unseen Land partly for that very purpose. Perhaps we may most readily conceive of it by supposing (what is for all other reasons most probable) that in another life we shall be indefinitely more free than we are now, more able to move and to communicate through space, and, having per- haps no physical wants, being at length disen- thralled from the endless Liliputian cords which bind us here and often keep apart the tenderest friends. And again, as to the mutual recogni- tion of departed spirits, the question really is not. How should we know — but, How should we not know — the one who has been soul of our soul, in any form, or in formless spiritual exist- ence ? Even through the thick veil of the flesh we are always dimly conscious of the presence of Love. One sympathizing heart amid a crowd of enemies makes itself felt and gives strength unspeakable. To suppose that we could ever at any time be brought into contact with the spiiit which has been nearest to our own, and not recognize it under any disguise, is wholly gratuitously to doubt our instincts. But why

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should wc even postulate that a disguise of any- kind is to be anticipated ? If the spirit wear any frame, however ethereal, it must bear some resemblance to the first, since both were the fitting shell of the same soul. Such a portrait as Titian made of a man may well stand for ever at once for the glorified image of what he was on earth, and the faint and imperfect adum- bration of what he is in heaven. Our pitiful grief for

" — the garments by tlie soul laid by,"

which we have placed folded upon the narrow shelves of the tomb, the agony with which we have thought of the grave-damp marring what was so beautiful and so dear, will be soothed perchance at last when we behold the yet love- lier raiment of the same beloved soul, alike in all that we loved so fondly, unlike inasmuch as every token of weakness and pain and age and care will for ever have disappeared.

Again, there are problems of another kind which sometimes cloud the hopes of renewed affection in another world. How, for example, are we to reconcile the conflicting claims of relatives and friends whom we have loved, each

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supremely in his turn, but who now await us together in the " land of the leal" ? Supposing there has been no failure of fidelity, but only that, as the years flowed on, the love of the parent, over whose grave the grass has many times sprung and withered, has been replaced (so far as one affection ever replaces another, which is but little) by the love of a child; and as friends have drifted away, new attachments have caught the tendrils of our hearts ; and when the wife or husband of youth has long left the earth, we have formed new ties no less sacred and near ? It is a part of the beneficent order of things that such transitions should take place ; and looking back over life, it is impossible, without ruthless violence to oui'selves, to give the pre- ference to one over the other, or to be willing to renounce one for the other. If the love of youth were more vehement, that of middle life is more strong ; sweet as were the affections of early years, still more tender and grave and noble are the friendships of age. But how is it possible for us to renew simultaneously these relations, which followed each other succes- sively? This is the old Sadducean question under a more refined form, and the answer.

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that ''in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage," is as little satisfactory a solution to us as it can have been to the disci- ples of Antigonus. The later doubt as well as the earlier seems to have sprung out of the same inveterate propensity for transferring the limitations and negations as well as the affirma- tions of this life to a higher sphere. Why is it we cannot love now many friends with equal intensity ? It is only because we are so limited, our time and thoughts are so bounded, and (what is far worse) our hearts are so cold and narrow, that even when we recognize that A, B and C, are all deserving of our uttermost love, we must needs make one supreme, and give the others only the residue of our ten- derness and remembrance. This is the true rationale of the limits of love on earth; and those who treat them as if they were in them- selves good and desii-able things, and who would prefer to give or receive only a narrow and exclusive affection, have hardly yet learned the real sense of unselfish attachment.

" That love for one, from which, there doth not spring True love for aU, is but a worthless thing."*

* Mrs. Browning's Sonnets.

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But in a state of existence in whicli we should be altogether nobler, larger, wider- hearted, and pressed on no longer by the end- less claims which break up our present time into fragments, could we not also love more than we do now? Eelieved from fears of wretched jealousies, with the cycles of immor- tality before us, and with the whole scope of our natures widened, what should hinder but that we should be able in the same happy hearts to hold at once the love of all whom we have ever loved truly on earth — aye, and of new friends found in heaven ? Even conjugal love, fitting and inevitable as it is that there should be exclusiveness in it now, niay be as tender hereafter, though no longer passionate, when the wife meets again the husband whom in dying she prayed should find another to love him as well. She will not be less generous there than here ; nor will the bitter thought that affection given to another is robbed from ourselves, prevail more in such connections hereafter than it does now in happy households where the children love the parents the more because they love each and all, and where the

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father's and mother's hearts have widened with every child born to their arms.

Yet no one can seriously believe on reflec- tion (what many assume without it) that the next life will be occupied by a continual return upon the present. It cannot be that all our earthly friendships and acquaintances will be renewed, or that every one with whom we have had a few moments' intercourse in the course of our threescore years and ten will certainly meet us again hereafter. Such re-unions would be in thousands of cases wholly purposeless, and only the old narrow Heaven could be ima- gined to secure such an end. Where will the line be drawn if we are sure to meet some and by no means sure to meet others ? The answer is hard to find ; yet I think two obvious prin- ciples must prevail. One is, the liberty, of which we have spoken, the freedom of the dis- embodied soul to seek out its own affinities in the spiritual world ; and the other is, the moral necessity which will be laid on us to redeem the unatoned offences and shortcomings of earth towards those from whom we have parted in anything short of right relations. It could be no realm of peace to many of us if we could

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not at last say those words, "Forgive me," which have been on our lips ever since the hour when we learned that the doors of the grave had closed between us and one whom we had wronged, misconstrued, failed to love as he deserved.

" The riglit ear which, is filled with dust Hears little of the true or just."

But if we could not hope to speak hereafter, ''spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost," and let the dead know all our repentance. Immortality would cease to represent the completion of the web of existence. Some of the thi-eads which we most desire to take up would remain for ever ravelled. And we, too, for our share, must receive the atonements of love and regret for the pangs which unkindness, mistrust, mo- roseness, and perchance cruelty, have given us, from the unjust severity and repression which crushed the joy of childhood, to the last neglect of tedious age. 'Not necessarily or even pro- bably need there be any revision of special acts, only (what we need so sorely) the admission that the wrongs done to us are felt to have been wrongs indeed, and the establishment evermore of truer and more just relations. These reflec-

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tions belong more properly to the succeeding portion of this paper, wherein the moral state of departed souls will be considered ; but I cannot but add one word here of the over- whelming impressiveness of the view opened to us through such a conception of Justice as this. Not by the arbitrary sentence of an Omnipotent Judge, dismissing the persecutor to the dungeons of hell and seating the martyr on the thrones of Paradise, would our highest thought be fulfilled, while the Damned one should for ever curse and hate, and the Glorified know that he had an enemy even in the nether- most vaults of death. Only by the subduing of the heart of the wrong-doer, the vanquishing not of him, but of his hate, and the me-lting of his spirit in remorse and penitence at the feet of his victim, can we conceive of the fitting close of the awful drama. The penitence of an enemy which shall be his salvation as well as his atonement to us, that we may accept with solemn joy even when risen a hundred-fold nearer to God than we are now. But his phy- sical torture, " where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched," that we could not endure even were we to remain poor and im-

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perfect human creatures still. All the glory of the skies would be blackened by the smoke of the Pit, and through the anthems of the arch- angels our ears would catch the discord of the wail of the lost.

In brief, then, the persons with whom we may confidently expect to have relationships in the world to come are —

1. Those whom we have loved.

2. Those whom we have hated.

3. Those who have hated us.

I leave the reader to draw the very obvious conclusions regarding the influence which such expectations ought to have upon our present feelings. To look on those whom we love as ours for ever — ours in a purer sphere than this — is to ennoble and sanctify our love. To look on those whom we hate, or on those who hate us, as beings with whom some day or other we must be reconciled, is to deprive hatred of its sting, and almost to transform it into love.

But, admitting that our hearts in another life may be wide enough to gather into them every affection of the past at once, it would still seem hard to guess how the natural ties of our human nature will bind us hereafter.

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There are friendships which seem obviously made for an eternal world, which have had their roots in religious sympathies or the inter- change of moral help, and which would scarcely need any modification to be transferred to the spiritual realms. They have been a part of our heaven, always. But, on the other hand, there are affections, if not more tender, yet more human than these, which when they are severed by death seem almost irreparably snapped asun- der. We and the departed may meet again as Spiiits in a world of spirits, but never more (so our hearts moan in their despair) — ^never more as mother and child, son and father, husband and wife. All the infinite sweetness of those purely human ties seems as if it must exhale and be lost when the last act of mortal compa- nionship has been accomplished, and the kindred dust has been laid side by side. And yet need we be so sure it is so ? Are not our thoughts of these temples of flesh wherein God has caused us to dwell, far too little reverent, and too much tinged even yet with the old Gnostic notions of the impurity of matter, the unholiness of I^a- ture, which have pervaded all post -Pauline Christianity ? I cannot but think that it is in

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a true direction modern sentiment is growing, while it tends continually to dignify and hallow the body, and to find infinite beauty and sacred- ness in the relations which spring out of its mysterious laws. So long as men and women deemed themselves holier as celibates than as husbands and wives, and that the laws of nature were supposed to have been set aside to give Christ an immaculate Mother (as if natural Motherhood were not the divinest thing God has made), — so long as this was the case it was inevitable that the bonds of consanguinity should be supposed to be finally unloosed by death. But with other thoughts of our sacred human rights, of all the depth of meaning which lies (rarely half-fathomed here) in the names of Father and Mother, Brother and Sister, Hus- band and Wife, Son and Daughter, shall we have no hope that when our spirits meet again, it will be in such sort as that the old beloved ties shall never be forgotten, but rather that what fell short in our comprehension and enjoy- ment of them will yet be made up ? It seems to me almost to follow from the very statement of the problem that it must be so.

But Sin? What can we hope or think of

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future re-union when heinous guilt has been incurred on one side or the other ? How are relations and friends, once dear to each other, to meet after the revelation of this gulf between their feet ?

I confess that it has been with great surprise that I have read the eloquent words on this subject of a distinguished living writer, with whose scheme of theology in general I have almost entire sympathy, and for whose manly honesty and powerful grasp of thought I enter- tain sincere admiration. In speculating on the awful probabilities of "Elsewhere," Mr. Greg lays it down, as if it were an obvious truth, that love must retreat from the discovery of the sinfulness of the person hitherto beloved, and that both saint and sinner will accept as inevi- table an eternal separation.* Further, Mr. Greg thinks it possible that at the highest summit of finite existence, the souls which have ascended together through all the shining ranks for half an eternity of angelic friendship, will part com- pany at last ; Thought for ever superseding Love. " Farewell, we lose ourselves in light." It would, perhaps, be wrong to say that the * Enigmas, 1st edition, p. 263.

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two views hang logically together, and that the mind which (with all its capacity to understand and express the tenderest feelings) yet holds that there may even possibly be something more divine than Love, may well also imagine that Love cannot conquer Sin. But is it not only by a strange transposition in the true table of precedence of human faculties that either doc- trine can be accepted? Let us suppose two persons loving each other genuinely and ten- derly in this life (so much is granted in the hypothesis). The very power of the worse to love the better truly and unselfishly, is ipso facto evidence of his being love-worthy, of his having in him, in the depth of his nature, the kernel of all goodness, the seed out of which all moral beauty springs, and which whosoever sees and recognizes in his brother's soul cannot choose but love. '' Spirit," says the Bhagvat Ghita in one of its deepest utterances, — '' Spirit is always lovely." There is something at the very root of our being which, when revealed to any other spirit, calls forth spontaneously sym- pathy and affection. It is because we do not commonly see this innermost core of our fellow- men, because it is hidden under a mass of

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fleshly lusts and worldly ambitions, or because they cover it up carefully in a thousand folds of artificial and secondhand sentiments, that they are so little interesting to us. But let chance blow aside the mantle for an instant, let us see a human heart in the moment of its supreme joy or agony, remorse or victory, and, hard as the nether mill-stone as our own hearts may be, they will vibrate like the Lia-Fail when the true king stood on it to be crowned. "When we conceive of a holy God loving such creatures as ourselves, it is only by the help of the faith that His eye can see this "lovely spiiit" beneath all its coverings and conceal- ments. Whether there exists, or has ever ex- isted, a rational creature of God in whom there was no such germ of goodness and innermost core of loveliness, it is impossible to say. Hide- ous tales there are of men, with the hearts of tigers and the brains of murderers, who have passed through childhood and youth without once displaying a trait of infant tenderness or boyish affection, and who seem utterly incapa- ble of understanding what self-sacrificing love may mean. The dog which dies to save his master is a million-fold more human than they.

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What may he the key to the horrible mystery of such lives of moral idiotcy, whether, indeed, they ever really exist in all the deformity which has been painted, and if so, whether fearful physiological malformations of brain and the negation of every good influence in childhood are not to be held accountable for the monsters' growth, I cannot now argue. But one thing is certain from the very statement of the case : a man who has ever once truly loved anyhody is no such creature. The poor self - condemned soul whom Mr. Greg images as turning away in an agony of shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance, — such a soul is not outside the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he not, even assuming his guilt to be black as night, only in a similar relation to the purest of created souls, which that purest soul holds to the All-holy One above ? If God can love us^ is it not the acme of moral presumption to think of a human soul being too pure to love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection? The whole problem is unreal and impossible. In the first place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls

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capable of equal love, and the one can never reach a height whence it may justly despise the other. And in the second place, the higher the virtuous soul may have risen in the spiri- tual world, the more it must have acquired the godlike Insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the godlike Love which embraces the repentant Prodigal.*

* It is vnth. sincere pleasure that I add, on the re-pub- lication of this paper, the following generoiis admission and candid revision of his judgment which Mr. Greg has ap- pended to the last (7th) edition of his Enigmas of Life. After quoting some observations of the Eev. J. Hamilton Thom and the above, he says :

" The force of these objections to my delineation cannot be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No doubt, a soul that can so love and so feel its separation from the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qua- lities to win and to merit ansAvering affection. The loving- ness of a nature — its capacity for strong and deep attach- ment— must constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out of which to elicit and foster all other good. ITo doubt, again, if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness. If so, it is natural, and indeed inevitable, to infer that a chief portion of their occupation in the spiritual world will consist in comforting the misery, and assisting in the restoration of the lost whom they have loved. We shall pursue this work with aU the

H

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But if such a dream of future separation for loving souls be wholly baseless, what can we

aid wliicli oux augmeBted powers on the one side, and tlieir purged perceptions on tlie otlier, will combiae to gather round the task, — and in the success and completion of that task, and in that alone, must lie the consummation of the bliss of Heaven.

" But this is not the only, nor perhaps the most irresis- tible inference forced upon us by the above considerations. If so vast an ingredient in the misery of the condemned consist in the severance from those they love, this same severance must form a terrible drawback from the felicity of the redeemed. How, indeed, can they enjoy anything to be called happiness hereafter, if the bad — their bad, not strangers, but their dearest intimates, those who have shared their inmost confidences, and made up the intensest inte- rests of their eartlily life — are groaning and writhing in hopeless anguish close at hand? (for everything will be close to us in that scene where darkness and distance are no more). Obviously only in one way, — by ceasing to love : that is, by renouncing, or losing, or crushing the best and purest part of their nature, by abjuring the most specific teaching of Christ, by turning away from the worship and imitation of that God who is Love. Or, to put it in still terser and bolder language, How, given a Hell of torment and despair for millions of our friends and fellow-men, can the good enjoy Heaven except by becoming bad? without becoming transformed, miraculously changed, and changed deplorably for the worse ? without, in a word, putting on, along with the white garments of the Eedeemed, a coldness and hardness of heart, a stony, supercilious egotism, which on earth would have justly forfeited all claim to regard,

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imagine of the real relation which may subsist hereafter between souls attached in faithful friendship, but of which one is of far higher moral standing than the other ? It is a very- hard thing to conceive how the guilt of a beloved soul would look from the regions of

endurance, or esteem ? Our affections are probably the best things about us — the attributes through which we most approach and resemble the Divine nature ; yet, assuming the Hell of Theologians, those affections must be foregone or trampled do^vn in Heaven, or else Heaven will itself become a Hell. As a condition, or a consequence, of being admitted to the presence of God, we should have to for- swear the little that is Godlike in our composition. Do not these simple reflections suffice to disperse into thin air the current notions of a world of everlasting pain ?

" One further corollary may be briefly indicated. Hell, if there be such a place or state, though a scene of merited and awfid. suffering, must be full of the mighty mitigations which Hope always brings, and can scarcely be devoid of an element of sweetness which might almost seem like joy, if the consciousness be permitted and ever present to its denizens, that ' elsewhere ' Guardian Angels — parents who have 'entered into glory,' wives who cluster round the Throne, sisters and friends who have * emerged from the ruins of the tomb, and the deeper ruins of the Fall' — are for ever at work, with untiring faithfulness and the sure instincts of a perfected intelligence, for the purification of the stained, the strengthening of the weak, the softening of the fierce and hard, and the final rescue of them all." Postscriptuin, p. 311.

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100 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

celestial purity; but I think something may be done to help ourselves if we endeavour to fix our attention steadily on what would probably hold an analogous position in our eyes, namely, the sins of our own long past years. Passing over the mere faults of childhood, many of us can unhappily remember committing very serious errors at a period of youth when we had attained to full responsibility. Looking back to one of these sins, say after twenty or forty years, how does it strike us? We do not, I apprehend, feel much of the indignation against ourselves which in a certain measure warps our judgment of offences still recent, the disgust of sloughs into which even now we do not feel safe but that our foot again may slip. "We can think of the old faults, long lived over or conquered, calmly as of the faults of another person. But it is of another whose inmost mind and all whose antecedents are intimately known to us. Yery commonly we feel that we deserved the heaviest punishment for our misdeeds, that what did befal us of evil was perfectly merited, and that much heavier chas- tisement would not have exceeded our deserts. Yet we never feel that we were deserving of

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reprobation^ of being finally abandoned by God or man. "We say to ourselves, " I was odious at that age. How heartless, self-engrossed, false, sensual, ungenerous I was ! Truly there was hardly a spark of good in me, and I wonder my friends bore me any afiection." But even while we thus condemn ourselves, there is a latent comprehension of how it all came about ; how we had slipped into this fault, or been led into that one ; found ourselves entangled by a preceding act and driven into the third; and how, all through, there was, at bottom, the pos- sibility of becoming better, the seed of some- what which God's kind Hand has since planted in a happier soil. Probably few of us turn ffom such memories save with the thanksgiving of the Psalmist to Him who has taken our feet out of the net, out of the mire and clay, and set them on a rock and ordered our goings. But while we bless God for His mercy to our sinfulness, that mercy only seems to us the natural act of a Divine Creator who penetrates all the depths of His creature's soul, and, with a compassion all-forgiving because all-knowing, pities and helps oiu- helplessness. The creeds which have taught men that God first gives

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over His children to a reprobate mind and then consigns them to a world of reprobation, find nothing to countenance them in the experience of the heart. They teach, strictly speaking, an unnatural God. The natural Father-God is a very different Person. Now, in a certain faint and far-off way, we can imagine (not presump- tuously, I think) the sympathy of God for the struggling soul to be like that which we should feel for a beloved child whose faults we under- stood better than any earthly parent, and even better than we understand the faults of our own youth. There is no abatement needful of the fall measure of condemnation for the sin. There is only the reservation (never forgotten in our own case) that the sinner was something else besides a sinner, that there were outlying tracts of his nature over which the blight never wholly prevailed ; — that he was, after all, worth saving. And like this sympathy of God for us in our worst and darkest hours, must surely be the sympathy of a glorified soul for its sinful bro- ther. Like Him, he must hate the sin which stands revealed in the blaze of heaven in blacker hues than moral realities ever wear in the dim twilight of earth. But, like Him, he must feel

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ineffable tenderness and pity for the spirit wear- ing that foul stain, and a godlike will to help him to perfect purification. It would not be too much, indeed, to imagine the very converse of the eternal parting of " Elsewhere," even the self-losing of the purer soul in its infinite long- ing for the pardon of the sinful one, and its flight through all the worlds of space, locked in an embrace, not, — like Paolo and Francesca's, — of a common guilt, but of a common prayer.

And, again, at the summit of existence, far up above the clouds and storms of sin and peni- tence, in the high realm of everlasting Peace, will Love have no more place? Then the greatness of man must consist in somewhat else than the greatness of God ! God has not been content to "lose Himself in light," and live alone in His ineffable radiance throughout eternity. He has filled the universe with life and love, and His own awful joy, so far as we may catch the glitter of its sheen, must consist in Love — in loving those whom He blesses, and blessing those whom He loves. Whatever other mysteries of joy are hidden in Him, what delight He may take in the beauty of His glorious works or the rhythmic dance of the

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clusters of suns, or yet in sources of happiness utterly inconceivable and unknown to us, there must remain eyen for Him one joy greater than these, the joy of infinite love and eternal bene- diction. As we climb up, age after age, the steps of the interminable ascent, nearer and more like to Him,

" Aloft, aloft, from terrace to broad terrace evermore,"

we must share that joy ; and if we could '' lose ourselves" at all, it would rather be in the ocean of Love than in the unbreathable ether of a purely intellectual existence. Christ must have become more godlike, and therefore more loving, during the millenniums since he trod the Yia Dolorosa. Assuredly he has not attained a stage whereunto Goethe might fitly have pre- ceded him.

There is, however, no greater mistake, I imagine, than the fandamental one of supposing that any "self-losing," "absorption," or merg- ing of personality of one kind or another, can possibly form a step oi progress hereafter. The advance through inorganic, vegetative, ani- mated, conscious and self-conscious existence, and again from the lowest savage to the loftiest

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philosopher or heroic martyr, is all in the direc- tion of a more and more perfect, complete and definite personality. The severance of the Ego from the Non-ego may indeed be held in one sense to be the supreme result of all the ma- chinery of the physical life; and the whole history of Thought tends to shew that a better recognition of the distinction has been at the root of the superiority of the Western over the Eastern and classic nations. Morality, of course, is grounded in it; and the ages before Per- sonality was clearly self-conscious, were neces- sarily, like the years of infancy, ages before Morality. To suppose that there is a height in the range of Being, whereto having attained, this supreme, slowly-evolved Personality sud- denly collapses like a volcanic island, and sub- sides into the ocean of impersonal being, in which "He" becomes "It," is to suppose that the whole scheme of things is self-stultifying — a great " much ado about nothing" — the build- ing up of a tower which should reach to heaven, but which is in truth only a child's house of cards, to be swept flat as soon as the coping is laid on it.

The meeting of two souls here or hereafter

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in perfect affection is not, as our inadequate and misleading metaphors often seem to imply, a blending in which personality is lost, but rather the act wherein personality comes out into most definite form. As in strong moral effort or vivid religious consciousness, so in the not less sacred outburst of pure human love, the intensity with which we admire, revere, sym- pathize with, embrace soul to soul, the soul of a friend, is like the heat which brings out all the hidden scriptures on our hearts. We are never so truly ourselves as when we go out of ourselves. And as Emerson says that "the first requisite for friendship is to be able to do without friendshi})," so it is those natures which are most self- sustained, and possess the most vigorous and defined personality, with smallest of blurred and slovenly margins, which are most capable of vivid and stringent friendship. And, on the other hand, there are people who may rather be said to slop over into each other, — to invade each other's personality and lose their own, — than to be united, as true friends ought to be, like the Ehone and the Arve, absolutely clear and distinct, even when running side by side in the same channel.

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IV. The Moral Condition of the Dead is (as I have remarked) the one point concerning them on which the thought of Christendom has persistently fostened. Yet it has fixed on a view of that moral state which originated in a comparatively dark and rude age of ethical feeling, and must necessarily have given place long ago to higher conceptions, were it not for the stereotyping process by which the Cyclo- paedia of Eeligious Knowledge supposed to be contained in the two Testaments has been closed against either correction or amendment for eighteen centuries. While our clergy say as little as they can help about the eternity of torment, we are all aware that any serious attempt to remove the doctrine from the Church formularies, or even to place the dogmas of the Eesurrection of the Body, and the physical penalties with which it is threatened, in the category of open questions, would be met by invincible opposition. We have conquered from the adherents of the Book of Genesis the million ages of past geologic time ; but the million millions of ages of future torment in the Lake of Fii'e we have by no means won from the disciples of the Book of the

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Apocalypse. They will give up almost any doctrine sooner tlian this. As Theodore Parker said, they cry out in dismay when such a thing is named — "What! give up Hell? our own eternal Hell? IN'ever, I^ever, I^ever!"

We shall accomplish very little, however, towards the removal of this dreadful cloud from the souls of men, by merely pointing out how gloomy it is, or even by proving how it darkens the face of the Sun of Eighteousness. Con- sciously or unconsciously, it is felt by the ortho- dox to be a necessary part of their whole scheme of theology ; and the Atonement, which is their Eainbow of Hope, would fade and disappear were that black cloud to pass away from behind it. Our only course is to do justice to the pro- found sentiment of the infinite solemnity of moral realities, the "exceeding sinfulness of sin," out of which sprung such ideas; and then, if possible, shew how the same sentiment, guided by the calmer reflection and more re- fined ethical judgment of a later age, may pro- ject other ideas of the future world, vindicating the Divine Justice and Love, no longer as in the awful diptych of an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, but in one harmonious pictui-e of

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a world of souls all ascending by various paths, thorny or flower-strewn, towards the Father's Throne. It cannot be doubted, I apprehend, that it was the intense sense of the horror and ill-desert of sin which impressed itself on the minds of the first teachers of Christianity as the correlative of their new-born sense of the love of God, which drove them to make the future world of retribution darker, more hope- less, and embracing a larger class of souls, than any other prophets ever painted it. Christianity is nearly the only religion in the world which teaches that there is such a thing as eternal torture, and that it awaits ordinary sinners. The paradox that this should be the lesson of the creed which also teaches more clearly than any other that " God is Love," is explicable only on the hypothesis, that with the fresh con- viction of God's goodness came likewise to the early Christians a fresh conviction of the hei- nousness of human guilt. They could actually see no light through it at all. Christ himself never said a word implying that Dives would ever taste one cooling drop; that the ''worm" would ever die, or the fire of hell ever be quenched. But, then, there is no token in the

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JN'ew Testament that he or any of his apostles dreamed of composing a Scheme of Theology such as Calvin and Jonathan Edwards delighted to construct, each doctrine dovetailing neatly into the next, till the whole terrible "Puzzle" is square and complete. Had they done so, it could hardly have been but that most merciful heart which uttered such tender words of peace and pardon to Magdalen, and the adulteress, and the crucified thief, — or even his who wrote the Epistles to Timothy and to Philemon, — would have thrilled with horror at the thought that they were practically bequeathing to Christen- dom for eighteen centuries the idea of a God whose cruelty should exceed that of all the tyrants of Persia or of Rome, and towards whom men should lift their tear-worn eyes, divided ever between natural fihal trust and the abject terror of slaves awaiting their doom. Yiewed from the side of man, and man's guilt, they could threaten limitless punishment of sin. Had they looked at it from the side of God, and thought what the character of the Creator involved and guaranteed, it would have been, I venture to affirm, impossible for Christ or his followers to have left this hideous dogma of a

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. Ill

world of perdition, unrelieved by the assui-ance that even into the lowest pit of sin and suffering the Father's Love should penetrate and the Father's Arm lift up the fallen.*

But if, on the one hand, human guilt must remain for us, as for the greatest souls of the past, an abyss of darkness we cannot fathom ; and, on the other hand, the goodness of God stands out rounded into such an orb that we know evermore that "in Him is no darkness at all," nor in His universe any final evil, — how are the two truths to be reconciled ? How are we to avoid subtracting somewhat from our sense of the ill-desert of Sin, while affirming with fearless confidence that it is finite and evanescent ? I believe this is a problem having

* A MS. sermon by an old divine, Arclabisliop Cobbe, affirms tliat tlie Greek words in St. Matthew signifying " Tbon fool," were probably translated from tbe Aramaic original, and might be rendered more accurately, " Thon reprobate." I know not on what authority the Archbishop made tliis statement, but if verifiable it would mark a very curious anomaly in. the teaching of Cluist. He condemned it as a mortal sin, deserving of hell-fire, for a man to treat his brother as hreclaimable and morally worthless. Yet he taught that the Father would actually consign that brother, as such, to eternal perdition !

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a very practical bearing on the religious life of the time, and I doubt very much whether the common substitute for the doctrine of the eter- nity of future physical pain — namely, a definite period of such pain after death — will at all meet the requirements of the case. Whatever be the relations of Pain and Sin (and I am far from denying that they exist), they are not of a kind which wholly satisfy the mind. They seem to offer a form of Eetribution and a method of Eestoration, but not necessarily to constitute one or the other. Something different from mere suffering is needful to complete an " atone- ment" (or renewal of union) between the sinful soul and the Divine Holiness. Not every ' ' fire ' ' would be a "Purgatory." In fact, among the mysterious uses of Pain it is hardly possible to reckon it as a simple counterpoise thrown into the scale against guilt, and of itself adjust- ing the balance of Justice. Those who hold that there is no such thing as Punishment in the Divine order, and those who hold that a certain definite modicum of pain apportioned to each sin fulfils that order, seem to me equally to err.

Surely the clue to the truth must lie in some

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other direction ? Our bodies, witli their plea- sures and pains, are so much a part of ourselves now, that our moral lessons must necessarily come to us joartly through them. Yery natu- rally, that intimate union and its consequences was transferred in the imagination of the men of old to another world, and the doctrine of the Eesurrection of the Flesh (which happened to descend to us with more valuable heirlooms in one line of our mental pedigree) has served to give some sort of coloiu' to our persistence in their ideas. But looking at the matter from the standpoint of modern psychology, it is hard to see what we can have to do beyond the grave with physical pains of any kind. Of course it is possible to imagine that the new bodies with which we may (or may not) be clothed should from the first be inlets of suffering. But as they can hardly be supposed to receive the taint of the diseases of the poor sin-stained frames left in the grave, whatever pains they may endure must be conceived of as purely arbitrary, and of a kind bearing no analogy to any order of the Divine government with which we are acquainted.

But though it is most difficult to conceive of

I

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^physical suffering under the conditions of a new life (unless as the reflex of more sensitive frames with the sufferings of the soul), it is, on the contrary, almost saliently obvious that the dis- embodied soul must immediately pass into a state wherein mental pain proportioned to its moral guilt will be unavoidable. We have no need to imagine a burning vault. Pit of Devils, or any other machinery of the Divine Inquisi- tion. The mere fact of disembodiment, it would seem, must adequately account for all that is needed to work out the ends of justice.*

In those rare hours when the claims of the body are for a time partially suspended, — when we are neither hungry nor thirsty, nor somno- lent nor restless, — when no objects distract our

* "Wlaen tlie portals of this world have been past, wlien time and sense have been left behind, and this ' body of death' has dropped away from the liberated soul, every- thing which clouded the perception, which duEed the vision, which drugged the conscience while on earth, will be cleared off like the morning mist. We slicdl see tilings as they really are, ourselves and our sins among the number. ISTo other punishment, Avhether retributive or purgatorial, is needed. leaked truth, unfilmed eyes, will do all that the most righteous vengeance could desire." — Enigmas, p. 260. The following two pages of this essay are among the most beautiful and striking in the range of literature.

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eyes and no sounds play upon the ear, — when we feel, in a word, neither Pain, nor Want, nor Pleasure, from our corporeal frames, we obtain in a few moments more self-insight than in weeks and months of ordinary life. A prolon- gation of such a condition under disease, wherein (in some rare cases) the body's wants are reduced to a minimum without such positive pain as to occupy the mind, — in interminable sleepless nights, and days when in solitude and silence the hours go by almost uninterrupted by those changes of sensation produced in healthy life by food, ablutions and exercise, — then, it would seem (from the testimony of those who have passed through such experience), the soul be- comes self-conscious to a degree quite inconceiv- able under ordinary conditions. The physical life falls comparatively into the background, the spiritual and moral life come forward ; and the facts of our relations towards God, our sense of past transgressions, and our hopes of existence beyond the nearly-opened grave, become real- ities quite as sensibly felt as those of our bodily surroundings. We have but to imagine one degree more of such separation from physical interruptions and sensations, and conceive our-

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selves as actually severed from the body, and it becomes clear that we should instantly, and from that circumstance alone, pass into a Pur- gatory. Even if we should retain no recollection of the special sins of earth, their consequences^ sensible at last in our degraded natures, our mean and malignant sentiments, our withered hearts, would be the heaviest curse. Every- thing we have ever done of evil has undoubtedly left its stain on us in ways like these, even should the actual recollection of it be effaced with the brain-record of Memory. We — our very selves, whatever in us can possibly survive the dissolution of the body — must carry with us — nay, rather in us, these dreadful results. As Theodore Parker says quaintly, '^The sad- dler does not remember every stitch he took when a 'prentice, but every stitch served to make him a saddler." So every act we have done of good or evil, every sentiment we have indulged of loving or hateful, has gone to make us saints or sinners. "We may repent the past, abhor it, renounce it, with the whole force of God -supported will. But, as even Aristotle knew, "of this even God is deprived, to make the Past not to have been." The sins have been

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committed, and the trail of them over our souls must remain, even if we forget them one by one.

But if (as seems infinitely more consonant with the Divine order) we pass through no river of oblivion on leaving the world, but, on the contrary, find all the Past unrolling itself in one long unbroken panorama from the hour of Death backward to the first hours of childish consciousness, — then will our Purgatory be complete indeed ! Then, as we look, unhurried, dispassioned, at one hour of mortal life after another, remembering all we felt and did in it, all the weaknesses and mixed motives which spoiled our purest moments, all the selfishness, the bitterness, the ingratitude, perchance the sensual vice or cruel vindictiveness which black- ened the worst — ^then in very truth shall we learn at last — what it has been idly di-eamed that only Hell could teach — "the exceeding Sinfulness of Sin." The thought is almost too tremendous to dwell upon, yet it is but the simplest consequence from the laws of Mind, as we know them. There is no need for the Almighty to bare His arm and hurl us into the Lake of Fire. He has only to leave us alone

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with our sins ; to draw the curtain between us and the world ; and our punishment must come with unerring certainty.

This is the awful Purgatory which I believe awaits us all. Is there nothing but terror in it for the sinner and sadness for the saint ? I^ay, but is there not also somewhat of deep and stern satisfaction? At the best moments of life, have we not longed for such an insight into our own dark souls, such a sense of the guilt which we dimly knew existed, but under which our hardened consciences remained numb"? Will it not be something gained when the scales which ever cover our eyes when we strive to look inward shall fall from them at last? "We shall then know, and be sure we know truly, what is the whole evil of our hearts, the sinfulness of our acts. There will be no more uncertainty and fear of self-delusion, of walking in a vain shadow of self-acquittal, or, it may be, of ill-allotted self-condemnation. We shall know our true place in the moral world, our true relation to the all-holy God. And we shall not only know what is true, but suffer what is just. We shall endure all the agony, and also learn the infinite relief, of a

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repentance at last adequate and proportioned to our sinfulness. The pain will fall, where it ought to fall, upon oui' hearts themselves ; and, as Cranmer held his '' guilty hand" to the fire, so perchance shall we, instead of striving to escape, even desire to hold them to their tor- ture. That entire, absolute, perfect Eepentance will be the great and true Expiation ; and when it has been accomplished, the blessed Justice of God will be vindicated, and all will be well.

Is there an outlook beyond this Purgatory, wherein Time can have no meaning ? Assuredly there must be. There yet must remain for the souls which God has made and purified both work to do for Him and joy in Him and in one another. There must be the service of His creatures ; the learning of His truth ; the recon- ciliation with every foe; the re-union of im- mortal affection ; and the everlasting approach, nearer and nearer through the infinite ages, to perfect goodness and to Him who is supremely good. But these things lie afar off, where eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, the things which God hath prepared for those who love Him — aye, and for those, also, who now love Him not.

/

DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

An Address read at Clerkenwell Unitarian Church, October 5, 1873.

DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

— f-

In old times, two or three centuries ago, men believed that they could sell their souls to the Devil. N'o one seems to think such a bargain possible now, though the belief in the existence of the strange Incarnate Evil, the Great Bad God, with whom it was supposed to be trans- acted, still forms part of the accepted creed of Christendom. I am not concerned now to dis- cuss the absurdity" and blasphemy involved in this doctrine of a cruel and relentless Wolf left freely by the Shepherd of Souls to prowl for ever through His hapless fold. But I shall ask of you to dwell in imagination for a few mo- ments on the state of one of the hundreds of men and women who formerly believed, with unhesitating credulity, that they had bartered their existence to the Fiend, and were hence-

124 DOOMED TO BE SAYED.

forth for evermore, and without hope of escape, the sworn servants of Satan.

Probably such imaginary transactions gene- rally happened somewhat in this way. A man was violently goaded by vindictiveness to desire the ruin of an enemy, or by want or avarice to long for gold, or by passionate love to covet the possession of the person he loved. At the same time he entertained, undoubtingly, the dangerous belief that there was a Power always at hand ready to gratify his desires at the price of a penalty to be paid only in the distant future. If we attempt to realize the terrible ever-present temptation which such a belief would offer, I think it will apj)ear only too natural that in some moment when his longings were most vehement, the tempted wretch should say, "/ will be revenged" — or "J ivill be rich" — or " / will gain the woman I love — even if I lose my soul ! I will give myself to the Devil for ever, if he will do for me what I want !" Sup- posing after this, by some perfectly natural chance, the man did obtain his end, his enemy fell sick or died, a little money unexpectedly came in his way, or the woman he loved returned his passion, from that moment he would inevi-

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 125

tably conclude Satan had accepted the bargain, and fulfilled his part of the contract. There was no more retrocession possible. He was no more free to draw back and give up his coveted gains. Hell had hold of him by a bond which could never be broken. He was the servant of Sin, outlawed from God and Heaven and the society of the good and innocent, and destined, without hope of pardon or reprieve, to pass, whenever his new Master chose to call him, to the realms of everlasting torture and despair. What, I ask, would be the result on a man's character of finding himself so doomed? I think that after the first flush of gratified pas- sion had subsided, the poor deluded wretch must always have felt creeping over him a horror such as no experience of our lives can render altogether comprehensible. Even the fact of his success (being at the same time the pledge that the barter was actually made) must have brought with it a thrill of unspeakable awe. Then as time went on, and the gratified desire sank down among his passions, while natural affections and harmless interests re- sumed their ordinary sway, there would begin a period of unmitigated agony. No innocent

126 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

pursuit could be followed, no pure affection cherished, no kindly action performed, for the man would know that he would be an object of loathing and horror to the nearest and dearest did they understand his real condition, and that none would take a gift from his hand. Every allusion made by those aroimd him to religion, the memory of his own innocent childhood, the spectacle of death and interment, would each be like a fresh lash of despair. By degrees, I believe, even a very bad and irreligious man, finding thus every avenue to good closed to him, would begin to envy every beggar by the wayside, every dying sufferer in the hospital, nay, every criminal going to the gallows, who was not like himself utterly and eternally shut out from God and goodness. Of course the belief in the futility and hopelessness of any repentance on his part, the idea that the Fiend would laugh were he to attempt to pray, would finally drive him into absolute recklessness and hardness of heart. He would say, "Evil, be thou my good," and give himself up to such gross pleasures, such malignity, cruelty, per- fidy and blasphemy, as his miserable heart might choose in its despair. Looking back after the

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lapse of ages to the historical proofs that our fellow -men have actually gone through this hideous torture, we feel now as if the nightmare must have been more than the brain of man could bear, and that the ha^ang caused such direful woe must be added to the long list of terrors, persecutions and asceticisms, which go farther, perhaps, than Christians commonly ima- gine, to counterbalance the benefits which hu- manity has received from their creed. If the faith which had its origin in the pure spirit of Christ, but which so soon became corrupted, has indeed bound up many a broken heart, it has also assuredly broken many ; in monasteries and nunneries, in the dungeons of the Inquisi- tion— aye, and in Protestant homes, whence guiltless and believing souls have been driven into mad-houses under the terrors of the Unpar- donable Sin.

But for us, who neither believe it possible to sell our souls at all, nor in a Devil to whom we might sell them, is there any lesson in this sad old story ? I think there must be one, for we hQliOiYQ exactly the reverse of that hideous doctrine which drove these poor wretches to destruction. Our faith teaches us that our only Lord is Good-

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ness itself impersonated ; and that we are not " sold" to Him by any act of our own, not even '' reconciled " to Him by any Atonement or Mediator, but are His by birthright and by nature. His as the child belongs to its parent, His as a man's thought is his own. We are each of us Thoughts of God. We owe our being to having heen in that Infinite Mind ; and, as the author of the Book of Wisdom says, ^'I^ever wouldst Thou have made anything hadst Thou not loved it." The Creator cannot be disgusted with His creature's infirmities, or wearied of his weakness, or ready to abandon him because of his sin, for He has understood it all from the first, and in His book were all our transgressions written when as yet there were none of them, and we hung as innocent babes upon our mothers' breasts.

I know that this faith is held by us in the very teeth of scores of passages in the Bible, and of the denunciation of ten thousand ortho- dox divines. Nay, there are some even among those who have left orthodoxy far behind, who yet hold that it is both a false and especially a dangerous creed to teach men that God loves them always, and that they are certain to be

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saved (to use the much misapplied old phrase) at last. Let us inquire more carefully how this may be, seeing that, in a great measure, the practical side of our religion depends on our sense of the matter.

I think it will be found that Sin looks very differently in proportion as we regard it from its own level, or from a little higher up, or from a region still farther above it. The man who is quite on a level with the sin, who is himself cruel, unchaste, deceitful, dishonest, drunken, hears always of another falling into his sin with a certain evil pleasure. As we say, it "keeps him in countenance," and prevents him feeling shame. He finds no jests so diverting as those which tell of cheats and drunken brawls, adul- teries and filth. A large mass of literature, from the old story of Gil Bias and Fielding's novels down to the latest French romances, prove how wide-spread is this taste for tales of vice, this propensity to "rejoice in iniquity."

But when a man has begun in earnest to try and amend his own life, and has learned to hate his own sins, he ceases to find anything amusing or ridiculous in the sins of others. His feeling about them becomes one of righ-

K

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teous anger, if the offence involve cruelty or perfidy ; of disgust and loathing, if it be one of sensual vice. He wishes heartily that justice may be done on the offender, and beyond this he has no feeling towards him but contempt and abhorrence. Fortunately the majority of people in every civilized community have at- tained at least so far as this point ; and it is, so far as it goes, a very sound standing-ground, and one infinitely superior either to the pleasure of the grossly wicked, or to the sentimental softness and laxity about crime, which is one of the evil fashions of our day. I confess, when I hear of a mob being with difficulty prevented from tearing to pieces some monster who has committed an act of dastardly cruelty, I cannot altogether regret the exhibition of righteous popular indignation ; and on the other hand, I know few worse symptoms of national moral health than a great crowd cheering and doing honour to a villain.

But does no man, I would ask, get beyond the stage of mere anger at crime? I think even very poor aspirants after goodness do so, especially if they are parents. Suppose a man or a woman to have striven for years to bring

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Tip a young lad in honesty and religion; to have watched his boyish faults and repentances, his efforts to do well, and his sorrow and shame when he failed. At the end of all, the elder friend hears perhaps that the youth has com- mitted a forgery, or seduced an innocent girl, or has sunk into habits of perpetual drunken- ness. What are the feelings with which he receives the sad tidings ? Surely they are very different from mere anger and indignation, and a fierce desire to punish the offender ? He will indeed feel (inasmuch as he is human) a horrible shock of surprise and disappointment, and also perhaps some personal resentment that all his good counsels have been thrown away. But beyond all this, and far more deeply, he will grieve that such wickedness should be done, and done by the man he knows so well, whose soul has so often lain bare to him, who was capable of so much better things. He will understand how certain faults in his nature, certain temptations in his lot, have led him on, step by step, till he has been entangled in sin and has fallen so miserably. And then his heart will go out in pity and compassion unutterable towards the unhappy one. He will know that

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his condition is infinitely deplorable; that if he repent and feel his guilt he must endure agonies of remorse, and that if he be callous and feel it not, it is so much the worse. He will estimate the man's misfortunes as ten thou- sand times heavier than if he had lost his health or wealth, or become blind or maimed. And if he be the father or master of the offender, and obliged in some way to visit his transgres- sion with punishment, he will earnestly strive that even in punishing him he may do him good and bring him to a better mind, so as to lead to his restoration to peace and virtue, and entire reconciliation with himself.

Now I challenge those who forbid us to believe in the infinite mercy of God to say which of these thi-ee ways of viewing Sin is most Godlike — most probably nearest to the way in which God must view it. Will He feel pleasure in it ? Assuredly not ! Will He feel mere anger and wrathful indignation ? I think it was very natural that the old Hebrews, who had just reached that stage themselves, should suppose He did so. But I also think that it is monstrous, for a race who have for two thou- sand years taken Christ's blessed parable of the

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Prodigal Son as the very Word of God, to do anything of the kind. I think if we were not caught in the meshes of that wretched Angus- tinian scheme of theology which makes the Atonement necessary to appease God's wrath, and postulates eternal Hell to compel us to accept it, — I think, I say, if it were not for this theology, all Christendom must have long ago come to see that, at the very least, God feels towards a sinner as a Father or a Saint would do, and not as a man less good or wise or mer- ciful,— the great Policeman of the Universe ! And remember, when we are presuming to speak of the awful character of God, it is not our business to inquire what it is just possible He may be or do without injustice or cruelty ; but what is the very highest, the noblest, the kindest, the most royal and fatherlike thing we can possibly lift our minds to conceive. When we have found that, we may be assured it is the nearest we can yet apj)roach to the truth. By-and-by, when we are loftier, nobler, and kinder too, we shall get nearer to it still. Of all impossible things, the most impossible must surely be that a Man should dream some- thing of the Good and the Noble, and that it

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sKould prove at last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had dreamed. We Theists then, I conceive, are justified (even in this dim world of imperfect and uncertain vision) in holding clearly and boldly, as the very core of our faith, that God loves eternally and unalterably every creature He has made ; and that our Sin, while it draws a thick veil over our eyes, and makes it impossible to give us the joy of communion with Him, yet never changes Him ; never blackens that Sun of Love in the heavens.

Nor is it only by argument and analogy that we come to this conclusion. The Lord of Con- science who bids tis forgive till seventy times seven ; the Lord of Life, the Father of Spirits, who reveals Himself to us in the supreme hour of heartfelt prayer ; that God whose voice has so often called us back from our wanderings and put it into our hearts to pray, and then has blessed and restored us again and yet again — ^that God we know is never to be alienated. He is our Guide for ever and ever; Friend, Master, Father, Lord ! As physically we live and move and have our being in Him, so morally we live in His bosom, and are sur-

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rounded by His love and pity. Poor, froward, rebellious babes, struggling now with the pains of mortality, and now stretching out vain hands of longing to seize forbidden joys — with all our wrestlings and struggles we never fall out of His Arms. They close round us even at our worst. The Calvinists hold, as one of their " Five Points," the '' Final Perseverance of the Saints." We Theists believe in that "Per- severance" too, and are persuaded that no human heart which has once known the un- utterable bliss of loving God can ever forget it, or cease to yearn to return from every wander- ing to His feet. But we also believe in the Final Salvation of those who are not Saints, but Sinners, — nay, of the very worst and most hardened of mankind. As one of the wisest men I ever knew (the late Matthew Davenport Hill) once said to me, " I believe in the aggres- sive power of love and kindness, and in the comparative weakness of every obstacle of evil or stubbornness which can be opposed thereto." "We do not think man's evil can, in the long run of the infinite ages, outspeed finally God's ever-piu'suing mercy. He must overtake us sooner or later. True, it may be late — very

136 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

late, before He does so. IS'ot necessarily in this world ; not perchance in the next world to come. We may doom ourselves to groan be- neath the burden of sin, and writhe beneath the scourge of just and most merciful Eetribu- tion — again and yet again — no one knows how long. We may choose evil rather than good, and vileness instead of nobleness, and be un- grateful and sinful almost as He is long-suffer- ing and infinitely holy. But it is almost, not quite ! God will get the better of us at last.

Is this indeed a "dangerous creed"? "Will men be the worse and harder and more daringly wicked for holding it ? My friends, we are all, I fear, very unworthy types of what Theists should be. l^ay, I have never yet seen man or woman, not that hero-soul Theodore Parker — not that true saint of God, Keshub Chunder Sen — who altogether and j)erfectly attained those Alpine heights to which Theism should lift us. But yet even at our weakest, we know that we are not the worse for believing in the infinite goodness of God. Was any one ever the worse for having an earthly father who would grieve, or a mother who would weep and pray for him in his sin, rather than curse

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liiiii aud cast him off? Human nature is bad enough, — I am not disposed to underrate its vices and meanness. But with all my soul I rejDudiate and reject the blasphemy that it can grow worse for having a better knowledge of God.

The results of a settled faith that we are in- evitably destined to become good and blessed, ought obviously to be as nearly as possible the precise converse of the results of the belief of the poor wretch who imagined he had sold him- self to the Power of Evil. Just as he must have looked round and envied the meanest or most suffering of mankind, so we must look upon the happiest or most fortunate who hold darker creeds as far less blessed than ourselves. To them, half the horizon is covered by a great lurid cloud, out of which come the thunders and the bolts of doom, and which may at any moment blot out the sun for ever from their sight, even as they believe that to tens of thou- sands of the dead He is hid for evermore. For uSj that shi'oud of blackness has rolled utterly away, and the Glory of God shines wide as earth and heaven, showering blessings on the head of every creatiu'e He has made. It is

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only our own dim eyes, blinded by the mists of sin and selfishness, wMch sometimes fail to see Him.

And again — just as the fiend-bought man dreamed it was of no use for him to try to return to virtue, or to yield to the softening of his heart when the sweet dews of penitence fell on him, as they fall sometimes on us all, — so we, on the contrary, must needs know that it is no use for us to persist in rebellion and harden ourselves against the thought of God's love. We are doomed (0 blessed doom !) to be con- quered at last, and brought in remorse and shame, and yet with the infinite peace of resto- ration, to our Father's arms. We are destined to be noble, not base ; pure, not unholy ; loving, not selfish or malicious. Sooner or later through- out the cycles of our immortality, all the vile sensuality, the yet more hideous hate and malice which we sometimes hug now to our hearts, must fall off us like loathsome, outworn rags, and be trampled under our feet with disgust and shame. We never sink our souls in gross and unholy pleasures now, but we are befouling them with mire which hereafter we shall wash away with rivers of tears. We never utter a

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cruel or slanderous word, or hurt a child or a brute, but we are making a wound in our hearts which will smart long, long, after oui* victim has forgotten its pain. Nay, we never miss an opportunity of giving innocent pleasure, or of helping another soul on the path to God, but we are taking away from ourselves for ever what might have been a happy memory, and leaving in its place a remorse. A French cynic (who could not have known what friendship meant) advises us to ''live with our friends as if they might one day become our enemies." A good Englishman reversed the maxim, and bade us " live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends." My fellow- Theists, it is not for us a matter of chance that our enemies may one day become our friends, but of firm faith that they will one day do so ; that, as Mahomet said, " the blessed shall sit beside one another, and all grudges shall be taken away out of their hearts." Why, even the approach of holy Death heals our mise- rable quarrels now, and softens our bitterest animosity ! When we have crossed the Dark Eiver and climbed but a little way towards the City of God beyond, everything resembling

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hatred and jealousy and malice and spite will have died out of our souls. Only where their baleful fires have burned, there must long re- main a black spot charred and blistering.

And as to God ; when we come a little more to know Him, a little to understand what love He bears us, how He fulfils all our dreams of what the highest, the most loveable and ador- able can be, that which our own hearts from their depths spontaneously love and adore, — when, I say, we come to know somewhat more of all this, how shall we look back on our hard- ness and our ingratitude? The tears of an unworthy son upon a mother's grave must be less bitter than ours. God will forgive us, but when shall we be able to forgive ourselves ?

These are, in our faith, the certainties of the future. We are sure that we must repent every sin, and rise out of every weakness, till we become at last meet to be called the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty. Assuredly the conviction that such things are in store should not leave us passive now, any more than it could be indifferent to the man who had sold himself to the Fiend that he was irrevocably destined to perdition. At the bottom of our

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hearts, I think, there is even at our worst and ■weakest a wish to be good, a dumb longing to be brave, upright, truthful, sober, deserving of our own esteem. Perhaps our ideal is not very high; we do not hunger and thirst after any very exalted and self-denying righteousness; but at least we wish we were better than we are. The German poet Schiller says, that no man ever loves Evil for Evil's sake, as he may love Good for Goodness' sake. He only chooses evil because, contingently, it includes what is agreeable or saves what is disagreeable. This is the lowest platform on which I believe we ever stand permanently, though now and then some of us may be able to understand all too well what the wretch did whom we have been considering, who gave himself up to the powers of darkness, or as St. Paul says, determined to ''work all iniquity with greediness." There are some of us who can look back to such black eclipses of all the better life in us, when deli- berately and with our eyes open we resolved to do some wicked thing, even though we saw beyond it a long vista of other sins and deceits, and practically in doing it threw our whole future into the balance of evil. Looking back

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to such days (if any such there be in our me- mory), we tremble as in remembering how once perchance we hung helpless over a terrific pre- cipice, till some strong hand lifted us up; or how we were sinking in the waters of a fathom- less sea, when some plank was thrown to us to which we clung and were saved. Again, there are some of us who have risen a little above either of these states, who have long turned their backs on the dreadful temptations of a life of resolute sin and self-indulgence, and who do a little more than vaguely wish to be better, or pray (as St. Augustine says he did in his youth), '' Make me holy, hut not yet.'''' They desire to be holy noio and at once. They have learned to hate and loathe their remaining faults, "the sin which doth so easily beset them," and to wish, beyond all earthly wishes, for strength

" To feel, to think, to do, Only the holy Eight, To yield no step in the awful race, JSTo blow in the fearful fight ;"

to be " perfect even as their Father which is in Heaven is perfect."

But whether our desire to be good and noble be only a feeble and faint aspiration, dimly felt

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amid the tumult of life's toil and passion, or the supreme and conscious longing of our souls, — in either case, I think the faith that we are made for such goodness is calculated (if we could but realize it aright) to carry with it an immea- sui-able power to strengthen us, to fan our little spark of holy ambition into a flame which might burn on God's own altar. The Parsees, the disciples of Zoroaster, have among their prayers in the Zend-Avesta the direction that every believer should say every morning as he fastens his girdle, '' Douzakh (Hell) will be destroyed at the resurrection, and Ormusd (the Lord of Good) shall reign over all for ever." Not amiss, I think, was theii* ritual devised to make the first thought of each opening day one of moral encouragement, and of hope assured in the final victory of Light over Darkness, Virtue over Vice, and Joy over Sorrow and Pain. I do not say that good men have not been ready to lead a forlorn hope, and fight the good fight even in a world they believed doomed to perdition, with the terror before their eyes that even they them- selves might become, as St. Paul said of himself, perhaps "a castaway." But beyond all doubt it is a very different thing to wage that awful

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and relentless war with inward and outward evil, if we can but see, like Constantine's Con- quering Legion, far away in the heavens the signals of victory. To look round on our fellow- men, the worst and weakest, — or, what is far harder to understand, the basest^ — and believe with firm assurance that they are one day to be worthy of all the love and honour we can give them, — this is to enable us to love and labour for them now, and to have patience, as God has patience, with the weight of clay which overlays so heavily their little seed of good. And still more, to look into our own souls, and trust that one day we shall be pure, one day all the vile- ness there shall be burnt out, one day we shall live in that upper air of noble feelings and high thoughts into which now and then we have just risen in some hour of prayer, to sink again in shameful failure to the dust, — to trust that all this is in store for us, is to lift us up out of the slough of our despond and renew our strength like the eagle's. I suppose there are not many of us who have advanced many steps along that brief way which leads from the cradle to the grave without having sad reason to feel weary and disgusted with themselves and their futile

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efforts to amend. As tjie old hymn of Charles "Wesley says, they have cried a hundred times, " This only once forgive," and then they have sinned again, till at last the power of feeling anything like acute repentance has passed away, and they have ceased to hope very much that they will ever grow better in this world. There is nothing in all life so sad as this November of the soul; — the scorching suns of summer passion, the April showers of youthful remorse, would be infinitely better than this colourless, dim moral life, so chill, so unhopeful ! But even for this, the faith in the Eternal Love of God is the retui*n of spring. Brothers and sisters, if you have felt this deadness fall on you, remember that it has no place, no reason in our creed. We may be cold and dull and unrepenting. "We may know even the horrible experience that we have greatly failed, greatly sinned, and yet have no tear of anguish, no heart -felt throb of remorse to give to our shameful past. Yet this is all our misery and deadness of heart, — not God'^s withdrawal. We cannot help ourselves. But our Father in Heaven, He who desires our righteousness more than we ever desire it, whose "Will is

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our salvation," — He can help us, He will help us. We have learned our own weakness. Now is the time to learn His Almighty strength. It is not for us to despair of growing, not merely pure but good, not merely good but holy. God has made us for that very thing, and what God intends, that assuredly will, at last, be done. He is not wearied of us ; it is we who are weary of our vain and vacillating selves. I cannot use the accustomed phrase, that "He will forgive us if we pray." He is always for- giving. He stands by every hour watching all our poor struggles, with pity and love ineffable; longing — ^yes ! — I believe we may dare to say it — longing for our return, that He may bless us once more with the consciousness of His love ; the sense of re-rmion with His holiness ; the infinite, immeasurable, awful joy of giving ourselves to be His in soul and body on earth, His to do His holy Will in worlds beyond the grave for ever and for ever.

Father ! Blessed Father ! Take us thus back ! From all our wanderings, our coldness, our miserable guilt and rebellion, our baseness and our sin, redeem us, 0 God ! Father, we

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love Thee, — only a little now. But we shall love Thee hereafter, wholly and perfectly. Take our hearts and mould them, to Thyself. "We give them to Thee. That which Thou desirest for us, even the same do we desire. Fulfil Thy blessed purposes in us. As Thou hast made us to be pure and good, so burn Thou out of our souls all our sinfulness. As Thou hast made us to be strong and holy, so do Thou strengthen us with might by Thy Spirit in the inner man. Shew us all the depth of the evil, the sensuality, the bitterness of heart, the coldness towards Thee in which we have lived, and the glory and beauty and blessing of the life of love to Thee and to our fellows, which it is in our power yet to live. Lift us out of the pit, out of the mire and clay, and set our feet upon a rock, and order all our goings. "We are Thine, 0 Father and Mother of the world ! we are Thine — save us ! We know that Thou wilt save !

l2

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT ;

OB,

HETEEOPATHY, AVEKSION AND SYMPATHY.

-I-

Theological Keview, Januaey, 1874.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT.

There is perhaps no human emotion which may not be described as infectious or epidemic, quite as justly as idiopathic or endemic. We "catch" cheerfulness or depression, courage or terror, love or hatred, cruelty or pity, from a gay or a mournful, a brave or a cowardly, an affectionate or malicious, a brutal or tender- hearted associate, fully as often as such feelings are generated in our own souls by the incidents of our personal experience. In the case of individuals of cold and weak temperaments, it may even be doubted whether they would ever hate, were not the poisoned shafts of an enemy's looks to convey the venom to their veins ; nor love, did not the kiss of a lover kindle the unlighted fuel in their hearts. The sight of heroic daring stirs the blood of the poltroon to

152 THE EVOLTJTION OP

bravery, and the sound of a single scream of alarm conveys to whole armies the contagion of panic fear. Among the horrors of sieges and revolutions, the worst atrocities are usually committed by men and women hitherto harm- less, who suddenly exhibit the tiger passions of assassins and petroleuses ; maddened with the infection of cruelty and slaughter. Sympathy, then, is not, properly speaking, one kind of Emotion, but a spring in human nature whence every Emotion may in turn be drawn, like the manifold liquids from a conjm'or's bottle. In the following pages I shall, however, endeavour to trace its development only in the limited sense of that Emotion to which we commonly give the name of Sympathy par excellence; namely, the sentiment of Pain which we expe- rience on witnessing the Pain of another person, and of Pleasure in his Pleasure, irrespective of any anticipated results, present or future, touching our personal interests. It has been hitherto assumed universally (so far as I am aware) that this precise emotion of Sympathetic Pain and Pleasure has been felt in all ages by mankind; and that, allowance being made for warmer and colder temperaments, and for the

THE SOCIAL SElS'TIMEIfT. 153

intervention of stronger or weaker moral rein- forcements, we might take it for granted that every man, woman and child, savage and civil- ized, has always felt, and will always feel, reflected pain in pain and pleasure in pleasure.* It is the aim of the present paper to urge certain reasons for reconsidering this popular opinion, and for treating the Emotion of Sym- pathy as a sentiment having a Natural History and being normally progressive through various and very diverse phases ; differing in all men, not solely according to their temperaments or moral self-control, but, still more emphatically, according to the stage of genuine civilization which they may have attained. It is super- fluous to remark that this inquiry is an impor-

* Mr. Bain says (The Emotions and the WUl, p. 113) that Compassion has been manifested ia every age of the world, and that "never has the destitute been utterly forsaken." Also (p. 210) that "the foundations of Sym- pathy and Imitation are the same ;" and that though " the power of interpreting emotional expression is acquired," some of the manifestations of feeling do instinctively excite the same kind of emotion in others, the principal instances occurring under the tender emotion. The moistened eye, and the sob, wall or whiae of grief, by a pre-established connection or coincidence, are at once signs and exciting causes of the same feeling."

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tant one, and must, if successfully conducted, serve to throw no small light on the whole subject of the Social Affections. Here, in the electric commotion caused by the actual spec- tacle of vivid pain or pleasure, we must needs find the best marked among all the multifarious psychological phenomena which result from the collision of human souls. All our Benevo- lence is, in truth, only the extension of such instant and vehement sympathy with actually- witnessed pain or pleasure, into the remoter and less ascertained conditions of our fellow- creatures' sufferings and enjoyments ; all our Cruelty is only the perpetuation and exacerba- tion of the converse sentiment. As a flash of lightning is to latent electricity, such is the rapid and vivid Emotion struck out in us by the sight of another's agony or ecstasy, com- pared with our calm, habitual social sentiments. Hitherto little attention has been paid to such Emotions, because (as above remarked) it has been assumed that they exhibit uniform phe- nomena ; and that if a man be so far elevated above a senseless clod as to feel anything at the sight of another's Pain, that which he feels is always sympathetic Pain ; and if he feel any-

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 155

thing at sight of Pleasure, it is Pleasure. So deeply, indeed, is this delusion rooted in our minds, that it is almost impossible at the first effort to dissever the idea of such sympathy from our conception of human nature in its rudest stage ; much more to divide it from the sentiment of Love, or avoid confounding the lack of it with personal Hatred. With those whom we love (it is taken for granted) we must sympathize intensely ; and with the rest of mankind in lesser measure, unless some special bar of antipathy intervene. But a little reflection will shew that this is far from holding good as universally true. There is such a thing as Love which is wholly a Love of Complacency without admixture of Benevolence ; which seeks its own gratification, and is perfectly callous to the pains and joys of its object. And there is often absolute absence of sympathy between man and man, when no personal hatred exists to interfere with its expansion. The explana- tion of the facts must be found, if at all, by disentangling the roots of Egotism and Altruism (now so closely interwoven, but in their origin so far apart) at the very nexus of immediate Sympathy, where one human heart reflects

\

156 THE EVOLUTION OF

back in vivid Emotion the Emotion of ano- ther.

The first question which concerns us is : Does the description of Sympathy, as above given, as the common sentiment of men and women at our stage of civilization, apply properly to the spontaneous sentiments of children and savages ? Does their Emotion at the sight of Pain or Pleasure take the same form as ours, and does it prompt them to similar actions? There are grounds, I believe, for denying that it does anything of the kind, and for surmising that the Emotion felt at such stages at the sight of Pain is more nearly allied to Anger and Irritation than to Tenderness and Pity; and the Emotion felt at the sight of Pleasure, more akin to Displeasure than to reflected Enjoyment.

Before endeavouring to interpret the senti- ments of savages in these matters, we shall do well to cast a preliminary glance at the behaviour of the lower animals, concerning which we know somewhat more, and are less liable to be misled. Without assuming that the feelings of brutes supply, in a general way, any direct evidence regarding those of even the

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 157

most degraded tribes of men, they may justly be held to afford useful indication of them in the case of those actions wherein brute and savage obviously coincide, while the sentiments of civilized humanity fail to supply any expla- nation.

Of all the facts of natural history, none is better ascertained than the painful one, that almost all kinds of animals have a propensity to destroy their sick and aged or wounded companions. The hound which has fallen off his bench, the wolf caught in a trap, the super- annuated rook or robin — in truth, nearly all known creatures, wild or domesticated, undergo involuntary "Euthanasia" from the teeth, bills or claws of their hitherto friendly associates. It may be said to be the law of creation that such destruction of the sick and aged should take place; a law whose general beneficence, as curtailing the slow torments of hunger and decay, has properly been adduced by natural theologians to console us for its seeming repul- siveness and severity. The sight of another animal of its kind in agony appears to act on the brute as an incentive to destructive rage. He is vehemently excited, rushes at the sufferer,

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"bellowing, barking or screecMng wildly, and commonly gores, bites or pecks it till it dies. The decay of its aged companion, tbougb it affects the animal less violently than its agony, stirs somehow the same instinct, which is the precise converse of helpful pity ; and, if the species be gregarious, a whole flock or herd will often join to extinguish the last spark of expiring life in one of their own band. There are of course exceptions to this rule, especially among domesticated animals, which sometimes acquire gentler habits, and at one stage of advance merely forsake their sick companions, and at another actually help and befriend them. The broad fact, however, on which I desire to insist at this moment is, that at the sight of Pain animals generally feel an impulse to Destroy rather than to Help; a passion more nearly resembling Anger than Tenderness. This emotion (to avoid continual circumlocution) will be indicated in the following pages by the term which seems most nearly to describe its chief characteristic, namely, Heteropathy. It is the converse of "Sympathy," as we under- stand that feeling; and it differs from "Anti- pathy" as Anger differs from Hatred; Hetero-

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 159

pathy being the sudden and (possibly) transient emotion, and Antipathy implying permanent dislike, with a certain combination of disgust.

The sight of the Pleasure of another animal does not seem generally to convey more Plea- sure to the brute than the sight of another's Pain inspires it with Pity. As a rule, the beast displays under such circumstances emo- tions ludicrously resembling the exhibitions of human envy, jealousy and dudgeon. Only will the friendly dog testify delight at his comrade's release from his chain; or the generous horse display satisfaction when his yoke -mate is turned out in the same field with him to graze.

Keeping these facts of animal life in view, we are surely justified in interpreting the murderous practices in vogue to the present day among many savage tribes (and formerly common all over the world) as monumental institutions, preserving still the evidence of the early sway of the same passion of Heteropathy in the human race in its lowest stage of deve- lopment. The half-brutal Fuegian, who kills and eats his infirm old grandfather, difi'ers in no perceptible way, as regards his action, from the young robin which cruelly pecks to death

160 THE EVOLUTION OP

the robin two generations older than himself. An equally wide-spread and similar impulse may fairly be assumed to account for actions so nearly identical in barbarian and in bird. The only appreciable difference is, that, as regards the savage, it would seem that Custom (which must have originally sprung out of an instinct, or at least have been in harmony with it) has so long been stereotyped, that the act of human parricide is generally performed with unruffled calmness of demeanour, and even with some display of tenderness towards the father or mother, who is buried alive in Polynesia as kindly as he, or she, would have been put to bed by an affectionate son or daughter in England.*

The same dispassionateness in the perform-

* Sir J. LublDOck (Origin of Civilization, p. 248) quotes from " Fiji and tlie Fijians" an instance in whicli Mr. Hunt was invited by a young man to attend his mother's funeral. Mr. Hunt joined the procession and was surprised to see no corpse, when the young man pointed out his mother, who was wallcing along with them as gay and lively and apparently as much pleased as anybody present. To Mr. Hunt's remonstrance, the yoimg man only replied, that " she was theu' mother, and her sons ought to put her to death, now she had lived long enough." Eventually the old woman was ceremoniously strangled.

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 161

ance of the cbeadful act seems indeed to have prevailed so far back as historical records extend, and we cannot (as it were) actually catch the brutal IIeteroj)athy in the fact of murder. Herodotus says the Masagetse used in his time to kill, boil and eat their super- annuated relations, holding such to be the happiest kind of death.* ^lian describes the Sardinians as killing their fathers with clubs as an honourable release from the distresses of age. The Wends, even after the introduction of Christianity, are accused of cannibal practices of the like kind; and (Mr. Tylor adds) there still existed in Sweden in many churches, so late as 1600, certain ancient clubs "known as atta-Jclubhor, or family-clubs, wherewith in old days the aged and hopelessly sick were solemnly killed by their kinsfolk."

* See an article on Primitive Society, by E. Tylor : Contemp. Eeview, April, 1873. Mr. Tylor traces the custom to the necessities of wandering tribes, and says that after there is no longer the excuse of necessity, the practice may still go on, partly from the humane intent of putting an end to lingering misery, but perhaps more through the survival of a custom inherited from harder and ruder times. Necessity may explain desertion, but surely hardly murder and cannibalism ?

M

162 THE EVOLUTION OF

Nevertheless, taking into consideration the law pervading the brute creation, and (as we shall presently see) the yet perceptible destruc- tive impulse in the children of civilized regions, there seems to be ground for attributing the remote origin of all such practices, however tenderly performed within historic times, to the fierce instinct of the earliest savage, whom the sight of pain and helplessness excited just as it excites the bird or beast. In the wild animal, it still acts simply and unimpaired. In the man, even in his lowest present con- dition, it has been stereotyped into a custom.

Nor is it by any means only in the case of aged parents that the Heteropathy of the savage betrays itself. 'No similar custom of deliberate murder of the infirm has had room to grow up in the case of wives, who are of course usually younger than their husbands ; and we do not therefore hear of a regular system of strangling them when permanently diseased or incapaci- tated. They are only starved, beaten and over- taxed with toil, till they exj^ire in the way unhappily not unfamiliarly known to English coroners' juries as " Death from natural causes, accelerated by want of food and harsh treat-

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 1G3

ment." But if Heteropathy acts only indirectly on sickly wives, it exhibits itself in full force on puling and superfluous infants. Custom, among numberless savages, and even among nations so far advanced in civilization as the ancient Greeks and modern Chinese, has regu- larly established child-murder precisely in those cases in zvJiich the helplessness threatens to prove permanent^ and which, consequently, leave the destructive sentiment full play, though they would call forth the most passionate instincts of pity and protection among ourselves. A puny and deformed boy is, in the ruder state of society, an unendurable object to his parents, who, without troubling themselves about Spar- tan principles concerning the general interests of the community, silence his pitiful baby- wails at once and for ever. Needless to add, no mercy can be expected for a daughter born where women are (to use Mr. Greg's phrase) " redundant." She is exposed or drowned with less pity than a humane Englishman feels for a fly in his milk-jug.*

* See the Marquis de BeauToir's hideous account of an evening walk outside the walls of Canton, with scores of dead and dying iafants lying beside the path. A recent

m2

1G4 THE EVOLUTIOX OF

Of the feelings of savages towards their sick and wounded companions, we rarely hear any

official Cliuiese Ukase on the subject of infanticide, trans- lated in the correspondence of the Times, sufficiently corro- borates these statements, and shews also, happily, some desire on the part of the Government to put a stop to the practice. It is issued by the provincial Treasurer of Hupei, who begins by quoting stock examples from Chinese history of the piety of daughters, and proceeds to ask how it comes to pass, since in the present day girls are doubtless equally devoted, that "the female infant is looked upon as an enemy from the moment of its birth, and no sooner enters the world than it is consigned to the nearest pool of water % Certainly, there are parents who entertain an affection for their female infants and rear them up, but such number scarcely 20 or 30 per cent. The reasons are either (1) that the child is thrown away in disgust because the parents have too many children abeady ; or (2) that it is drowned from sheer chagrin at having begotten none but females ; or, lastly, in the fear that the poverty of the family will make it difficult to devote the milk to her own child, when the mother might otherwise hire herself out as a wet- nurse. iN'ow all these are the most stupid of reasons. All that those have to do who are unable through poverty to feed their children is to send them to the Foundling Hos- pital, where they will be reared up until they become women and wives, and where they will always be sure of enjoying a natural lifetime. "With regard to the question of means or no means of bringing up a family, why the bare necessaries of life for such children do not cost much. There are cases enough of poor lads not being able to find a wife all their lives long, but the Treasurer has yet to hear of a poor girl Avho cannot find a husband, so that

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 165

anecdotes.* I have failed to meet one illustra- tive of Pity or Tenderness. Their Emotions

there is even less cause for anxiety on that score. But there is another way of looking at it. Heaven's retribu- tion is sure, and cases are common where repeated female bu'ths have followed those when the infants have been drowned ; that is, man loves to slay what Heaven loves to beget, and those perish who set themselves against Heaven, as those die who take human life. Also they are haunted by the wraiths of the murdered children, and thus not only fad to hasten the birth of a male child, but run a risk of making victims of themselves by their behaviour. The late Governor, hearing that this wicked custom was rife in Hupei, set forth the law some time ago in severe prohi- bitory proclamations ; notwithstanding this, many poor districts and out-of-the-way places will not allow them- selves to see what is right, but obstinately cling to their old delusion. Hia Cliien-yin, a graduate from Kianghia, and others have lately petitioned that a proclamation be issued once more prohibiting this practice in strong terms. Wherefore you are now required and requested to acquaint yourselves all, that male and female infants being of your own flesh and blood, you may be visited by some monstrous calamity if you rear only the male and drown the female children. If these exhortations are looked upon any more as mere formal words, and if any people with conscious wickedness neglect to turn over a new leaf, they will be punished.

" Beware and obey ! Beware !"

* Dr. Johnson loq. : " Pity is not natural to man. Chil- dren are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in dis-

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on witnessing the pleasures, feastings and mar- riages of others, seem nsually to partake of the character of restless and envious disquietude, visible in dogs when their companions are petted or possessed of a supernumerary bone.

Passing now from the Brute and the Savage, we must inquire whether any faint trace of Heteropathy yet lingers amongst ourselves. Let us take a young child, the offspring of a cultivated English gentleman and tender- hearted English lady, and observe what are the emotions it exhibits when it sees its baby- brother receive an injury and cry aloud in pain. That child's sentiments are, we cannot doubt, considerably modified from those of its barbarian ancestors,

"When wild in woods the noble savage ran ;"

just as the instincts of the kitten of a domestic cat or puppy of a lap-dog differ from those of

tress, without pity ; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it late, have bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist. No, Sir, I wish him to drive on." Main's Boswell, p. 120.

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 167

the cub of a cat-o'-mountain or the whelp of a wolf. Even yet, however, an impartial study may leave us room to hesitate before we '' count the grey barbarian" so very far ''lower than the Christian child," as that no signs of savage impulse shall now and then betray the old lea- ven in the curled darling of the British nursery. If narrowly watched, at least one child out of two or three will be seen to be very abnormally excited by the sight of his brother's Pain. He will appear much as if subjected to an elec- tric shock, and his behavioui' will be found to partake in an unaccountable way of all the characteristics of Anger and Annoyance against the sufferer. There is no softness or tenderness in the looks which he casts at his companion, nor will he usually sjpontaneously make the slightest effort to help or comfort him by the caresses which he is wont to lavish on him to excess at other moments. On the contrary, a disposition will generally be manifested to add by a good hard blow or sharp vicious scratch to the woe of his unfortunate friend. There may be — indeed, there will usually occur — a burst of tears like a thunder shower, but the character of this weeping fit is that of an explo-

168 THE EVOLUTION OP

sion of irritation and disgust, rather than of pity or fellow-feeling. A gentle and affec- tionate little girl of three years old has been seen by the writer to exhibit these emotions of Heteropathy as distinctly as any angry bull or cannibal savage. The child's baby-sister of two years old fell off the lofty bed on which both were amicably playing, and of course set up a wail of fright and pain on the floor. Instantly the elder child let herself slip down on the opposite side, ran round the bed, and pounced on the poor little one on the floor, whom she proceeded incontinently to belabour violently with both hands before rescue could arrive. Of course eventually both parties joined in a roar ; but the baby's was a wail of pain and terror, the elder child's a tempest of indignation. Mothers and nurses, on being strictly interrogated, will generally confess to having witnessed similar unmistakable symp- toms of Heteropathy still lurking in the sweet- est-tempered children. The sight of the pain- distorted features of their friends or the moans of an invalid often call forth very ugly emo- tions ; and though many tender-natured babies shew trouble at the tears of their elders, even

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 169

they are generally more excited tlian depressed when they chance to witness any solemn scene or demonstrative grief. Fond mothers natui-ally explain- all such disagreeable exhibitions as resulting from the inability of innocent little children to understand pain and sorrow. But the fact is, that they do, to a certain extent, imderstand what they see, but the exalted emotion of reflected Sympathy is yet lacking, and in place of it there are traces of the merely animal and savage instinct. Of course the infantine displays of anger and irritation are instantly checked in civilized homes, and the imitative faculty is enlisted, during its earliest and most vigorous period, on the side of Com- passion, which is often enough foolishly mis- applied and exaggerated, till by the time the little girl is four or five years old she is so far trained as to endure paroxysms of woe for the misadventures of her doll, deprived of an eye, or exposed to the martyrdom of St. Lawrence before the nursery fire. The '' Hereditary transmission of Psychical Habits" has also obviously in many cases resulted in the inhe- ritance of genuine Sympathy even from the

170 THE EVOLUTION OF

cradle. The old Heteropathy has been, strictly speaking, "bred out."

In a similar, though less marked manner, the sight of another person's Pleasure produces in the childish and yet uncultured mind some- thing much more like Displeasure than reflex happiness. Apart from the sense of injustice in the distribution of toys, food or caresses (of course a fertile source of infantile jealousy), there is an actual irritation at the spectacle of another's enjoyment, and a disposition to detract from it, — ^to destroy the toy, or spoil the food, or disturb the caresses — forming the most perfect antithesis to the reflected delight in, and desire to enhance another's pleasure which constitute the Sympathy of adult life. Of course here also Education generally steps in to check the display, if not to eradicate the sentiment, of Envy, which, as La Eoche- foucauld says, is the only one of all human passions in which no one takes pride, and which therefore its most abject victims soon learn carefully to cloak. But enough of it is betrayed in every school-room and play-ground to corroborate the assertion that our earliest

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 171

emotion is not Pleasure in another's Pleasure, any more than Pain in another's Pain.

May we stop here? Does true Sympathy invariably fill the breasts of all grown-up men and women in a civilized land so as to leave no room for Heteropathy, either in its form of irritation at Pain or disgust at Pleasure ? Alas ! it is to be feared that a stern self-scrutiny would permit few of us to boast that there are no im- pulses resembling these left in our nature to testify to their ancient sway. There are not many men whom the tears of a woman or the wail of an infant do not irritate, and who have no need of self-control to avoid giving expression to anger at such sights or sounds. To many more, and even to some women, the spectacle of dis- ease and feebleness is naturally so repugnant, that the effort to render help must always be stimulated by some potent affection, interest or sense of duty, — a fact, we may parenthetically observe, which merits the serious attention of that " l*^oodledom" which Sydney Smith says is "never tired of repeating that the proper sphere of woman is the sickroom," and assumes that every human female is a heaven-made nurse.

172 THE EVOLUTION OF

Among the lower classes of society, tlie Emotion of Heteropathy unmistakably often finds its terrible vent in the violence of hus- bands to wiveSj and of parents, step-parents and schoolmasters, to children. Carefully scan- ning the police reports, it will be seen that the rage of the criminal (usually half- drunk and guided by instinct alone) is excited by the pre- cise objects which would wring his heart with pity had he attained the stage of genuine Sym- pathy. The group of shivering and starving children and weeping wife is the sad sight which, greeting the eyes of the husband and father reeling home from the gin-shop, some- how kindles fury in his breast. If the baby cry in its cradle, he stamps on it ; if his wife wring her hands in despair and implore him to give her bread for their children, he fells her with his fist, or perhaps (as in a recent notorious case) holds her on the fire till she is burned past recovery. Again, as regards the no less hor- rible crime of cruelty practised by both men and women (especially as step-parents) upon children, it may be always observed that from, the moment in which an unfortunate little creature has fallen behind its brothers and

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 173

sisters in physical or mental strength, or re- ceived an nnjustly severe punishment, from thenceforth its weakness and sobs, its crouching and timid demeanour, and at last its attenuated frame and joyless young face (the very sights "which almost break a compassionate heart to behold), prove only provocations to its natural guardians to fresh outrage and chastisement. The feebler and more miserable the child grows, the more malignant is the Heteropathy of its persecutors, till the neighbours (often so crimi- nally inert!) wonder "■ what has come to them'^ to behave so barbarously. The truth is that here, in the yet lingering shades of the old savage passion, we find the explanation of a familiar but most hideous mystery in our nature, the fact that Cruelty grows by what it feeds on ; that the more a tyrant causes his victim to suffer, the more he hates him, and revels in the sight of his anguish. Beside the deep- seated sting of self-reproach, which has been generally supposed to goad the cruel man to hate those whom he has injured (just as self- complacency makes the philanthropist love the object of his beneficence), the cruel person is always lashed by his own Heteropathy to hate

174 THE EVOLUTION OE

his victim exactly in proportion to Ms sufferings. The boor who has, perhaps almost uncon- sciously, struck some wretched woman who bears his burdens, grows savage if he see her bleed or faint, and repeats the blow with re- doubled violence, till the moment comes in which he suddenly recognizes that the object of his rage can suffer no more, when his passion instantly collapses and he seems to waken out of a dream. Just in a parallel way in the higher walks of life, moral cruelty develops itself in proportion as the victim betrays the anguish caused by cutting words and unkind acts ; and receives its check only when a real or feigned indifference shields the suffering heart from further wounds.

If we go yet a step further, and note the emotions raised in the breast of men of the ruder sort at the sight of the pain and death of animals, there can be little doubt that the existence of thoroughly savage Heteropathy may often be traced among the cruelties of slaughter-houses, whale and seal fisheries, bull- fights and dog-fights, and even among many field sports of a better kind.

The rudimentary form of reflex emotion where

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 175

it concerns Pleasure is somewhat more difficult to trace than where it meets with Pain. The Envy* candidly exhibited by children, animals and savages, as before remarked, is carefully veiled in civilized and adult life ; but un- doubtedly it prevails everywhere to an extent sadly inimical to the existence of genuine re- flected Pleasure. For reasons to be hereafter stated, however, it would appear that the de- velopment of true Sympathy with Pleasure

* The Cliinese, to justify the sentiment, have framed the ingenious theory that there exists only a fixed quantity of happiness for mankind to partake, and that conse- quently when A is happy, B is authorized to consider him- self defrauded. The late amiable and gifted statesman, Cavaliere Massimo d'Azeglio, who had singularly favour- able opportunities for comparing English and Italian public life, remarked to the writer, that " Invidia" unhappily per- vaded Italian politics to a degree almost inconceivable to an Englishman. Even a success, he said, such as a battle gained or a powerful speech made in the Chamber, was a source of danger to a Minister, owing to the enmity it excited even among his own partizans. In France, the immense success of the insurance offices is attributed to the value of their plaques, placed prominently on a house, as a protection against malicious arson ; and in ]S"ormandy, of very recent years, the inhabitants of several districts have adopted the use of tiles, instead of thatch, avowedly to save themselves from the dangers arising from the envy of neighbours and relatives.

176 THE EVOLUTION OF

precedes chronologically that of similar Syra- pathy with Pain.

Starting now from the position, which I hope may haye been sufficiently established, that the earliest reflected emotion is not sympa- thetic Pain with Pain, nor yet Pleasure with Pleasure, but heteropathic Eesentment towards Pain, and Displeasure towards Pleasure, — our next task is to attempt to define the stages by which these crude and cruel emotions pass into the tender and beneficent sentiment. That this transition is not only exceedingly slow, but also' altogether irregular, is obvious at first sight. There are two things to be accomplished simultaneously — the sentiment itself must alter its character from cruel to kind ; and secondly, having become kind, it must extend its influ- ence, according to Pope's beautiful simile, in ever- widening circles,

" As a small pebble stirs some peaceful lake."

Practically, we find that the sentiment is al- ways unequally developed in character, and also extended in an erratic and unaccountable manner, not at all in symmetric circles, but in irregular polygons with which no geometry of

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 177

the affections can deal. Nay, there would appear to be almost insuperable difficulties in the "way of a simultaneous development in warmth, and in expanse, of sympathy. He ■who feels passionately for his friends, rarely embraces the wider range of social and na- tional interests ; and he who extends his phi- lanthropy to whole classes and continents, too often proves incapable of that strong individual love of which the poet could boast,

" Which, like an indivisible glory, lay On both our souls, and dwelt in us As we did dwell in it •"

the most beautiful sentiment in human nature, and the most blessed joy — next to the joy of Divine love — in human life.*

How the destructive and cruel instincts began of old to modify themselves, is naturally a very obscure problem, on which even Mr. Bagehot's ingenious and valuable speculations regarding the early crystallization of society can throw

* That it is not impossible, though singularly rare, for a man to unite the character of an ardent philanthropist with that of a most affectionate husband, father and friend, will be readily conceded by the many who mourn the recent death of Matthew Davenport Hill.

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little light. The process of amelioration must have advanced considerably even before a Polity, in any sense, can have existed. From the first, the human mother, like the mother- bird and brute, no doubt felt "compassion for the son of her womb," even though her pity lamentably failed to prevent her concurrence in infanticide in the cases most calling for that compassion. From the tenderness of mothers must have radiated, as from a focus, the pro- tective instincts in each family; the father sharing them in a secondary degree. In the earliest savage state, except for such parental love, those affections defined by the Schoolmen as the Complacent, as distinguished from the Benevolent, must have had it all their own way. The man loved the persons who minis- tered to his pleasure, not those who called on him for self-sacrifice. Still, even through such wholly selfish love, we must suppose him to have begun to realize in his dim imagination the pain he witnessed in a beloved person, and, having once figured it as his own, to have regarded the sufierer with softened feelings. Possibly in some cases this newly-born emo- tion may at once have taken the shape of help-

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 179

ful Sympathy. The "brave" who saw his companion wounded may have carried him off the fiekl, plucked out the spear-head from his side, or quenched his burning thirst with water. More often, and as a general rule, however, it may be suspected that a long interval has taken place after the destructive instinct is checked before the protective one arises ; and in this interval the emotion exhibited is that which I shall class as the second in the development of the feelings — namely. Aversion.

Pursuing our method of seeking illustrations from the animal world, we find that several of the gentler brutes, and such as have seemed to receive some influence from the companionship of civilised man, very often display this Aver- sion to theii' sick and suffering companions. They forsake and shun them, instead of goring or tearing them to pieces. Among such species, the diseased creature itself is so well aware of the instincts of its kind, that without waiting to be " sent to Coventry," it shrinks into some out-of-the-way corner to hide its misery from their unfeeling eyes, though in the very same distress it will seek out a human friend and dehberately call his attention to its sad state,

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obviously with full confidence that he will gladly afford relief.

Just in the same way young children very often testify Aversion to grown people of mournful aspect, or who bear the traces of suffering on their features. As a general rule, they shrink from the sight of pain, and run from it to hide their faces in their mothers' lap. A little girl brought to visit a lady whom she had been accustomed to see strong and active, but who had become a cripple, burst into a passion of tears at the sight of her crutches, and could not be persuaded to ap- proach or look at her again. Perhaps few of us even in after life could boast that we have wholly outgrown this phase of feeling, and that we invariably experience the impulse of the Samaritan, and not that of the Levite or the Priest, when any specially deplorable spec- tacle lies by the side of our way. Certainly the pleasure-loving nations of the South of Europe have by no means arrived at such a stage of progress, but habitually abandon even the house wherein father or mother, wife, brother or child, is lying in life's last piteous struggle, aided only by the muttered prayers

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 181

of the priest at the bed-foot, and without a loving hand to wipe the death-sweat from the brow, or a human breast on which to rest the fainting head. That the childish fears of Italians concerning infection from such dis- eases as consumption has something to do with this shameful cowardice (prevalent under all circumstances and in every . class, from the highest to the lowest, thi'oughout the Peninsula) may be probable. And that the monopoly of religious consolation by the Eomish priesthood, and their jealousy of all lay interference with the position into which they thrust themselves between each soul and its Maker, has encou- raged and sanctioned it till it has become an indisputable custom, there can be little doubt. Nevertheless, we have assuredly here, among one of the most gifted and warm-hearted of nations, an illustration on the largest scale of the fact I am endeavouring to bring forward, namely, that Aversion to the suffering and dying is an Emotion having a place in. the historical development of human feeling, no less marked than the Heteropathy which pre- ceded it.

If my theory of development be correct,

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this sentiment of Aversion must at a certain stage of progress have been the prevailing one, and perhaps I shall do no injustice to Mr. Gladstone's dearly-loved Homeric Greeks if I surmise that they had approximately reached that era, and stood, in the matter of sentiment, about half-way between the pre-historic savage and the English gentleman. Among the former, Philoctetes would have been speared or stoned to death. Had he lived in our time and served on those same shores in British ranks, he would have been tenderly conveyed to a hospital, and a band of high-born ladies from his native land would have traversed the seas to nui'se him. The actual comrades of Philoctetes took, or (what comes to the same thing) are represented by their poets as taking, neither one course nor the other. They felt Aversion to their mise- rable companion in his horrible suffering, and accordingly banished him to Lemnos, where even Sophocles is content to represent him howling over his anguish and desertion as quite in the natural order of things.

Throughout the whole millennium before the bii'th of Christ, we may dimly discern among the nations of East and West the struggle

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which was going forward. If Aversion were probably the predominant sentiment towards distress, Sympathy was beginning to work freely, and Heteropathy still remained as a stupendous power. The most ancient litera- ture— the Eig-Yeda, the Zend-Avesta and the Hebrew Scriptures — reaches back to no period before Sympathy was in full exercise, and had received the solemn sanction of religion. Among the Hebrews (or perhaps, in the special case, we must say the Chaldseans), the sense of Sympathy with pain and misfortune reigned at all events as early as the days of Job, whose friends, unlike those of Philoctetes, flocked ostensibly to mourn with him, albeit their sympathy was injudiciously expressed, and bears some tokens of that disposition to add moral to physical suffering which is a refined form of Heteropathy. It took several centuries more before Euripides, the most sentimental of the Greeks, could go so far as to say,

" 'Tis unlDecoming not to shed a tear Over the wretchecl. He too is devoid Of virtue Tvho ahounds iu wealth, yet scruples Through sordid Avarice to relieve his wants."*

* Antiope.

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And, on the other hand, Hebrews and Heathens alike believed that the opposite sentiment of Heteropathy towards the sufferings of enemies was divinely sanctioned, and that, in a word, the principle to be acted upon was, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy." Few modern readers can have failed to remark the extraordinary share which those " enemies," against whom it was lawful to pray, seem to take in the concerns of the Psalmists; and perhaps to have wondered whether the thoughts of any men of similar piety and exalted feeling in these days are ever occupied in the like way.

Among the Gentile nations no subjects of art seem to have pleased the Assyrians and Egyp- tians better than the impalings and flayings of captives, — cruelties which, had they been com- mitted by a modern army, would certainly not have been reproduced in painting or sculpture. A great revolution in feeling must have occur- red between the ages when Sennacherib and Eameses desired to be immortalized in con- nection with such atrocities, and that when Marcus Aurelius chose that his magnificent equestrian statue on the Capitoline Hill should

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 185

represent him in the act of protecting his cap- tives from the violence of his Legions.

JN^ot only Art, but the very Language of the ancient world, preserves the traces of the cruel Heteropathy of old, as the rocks the fossil teeth of the Saurians,

** Which tare each other in their slime."

It shocks us to imagine the discij)le of Socrates, '' whose benevolence," as Xenophon wonder- ingly remarks, "even extended to all mankind," wandering amid the groves of the Academy dis- cussing all the loftiest themes of human thought, and at the same time talking incidentally of iTTLxaipeKaKia as of au cvcry-day and familiar passion. Yet this was the case even in " sacred Athens," where

" near the fane Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood,"

an altar which Demonax said would need to be overthrown were the cruel Eoman Games to be introduced into the city. Between "rejoicing in the misfortunes of others" and enjoying a gladiatorial show, there was not much to choose in the way of sympathetic emotion.

Passing from Greece to Eome, we find the

186 THE EVOLUTION OF

•whole population, at the close of the Eepublic and the era of the Csesars, mad with enthusiasm for the exhibitions, held in every town in the empire, of men killing one another by scores or thrown to be devoured by beasts. Mar- vellous is the story that the very same populace which clamoured for these "circenses" as for bread, filled the theatre with shouts of ap- plause when Terence first gave expression to that sense of the claims of all human beings to Sympathy which has since played so large a part in the history of oui- race :

" Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

Something within those stony Eoman breasts echoed, like Memnon's statue, to the kindling rays of the rising sun. But we should deceive ourselves widely if we imagined that anything resembling our sense of the claims of human brotherhood was then, or for ages afterwards, commonly understood. The precept of Sextius the Pythagorean (preserved by Stobseus) — "Count yourself the care-taker of all men under God" — is almost an anachronism still, if we place the author in the Augustan age, and critically incredible at the earlier date when it

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 187

was formerly supposed to have been written. The current feeling of the contemporaries of Cato and Cicero, Tacitus and Pliny, received no shock from the most hideous cruelties, hourly practised on slaves and captives of war; nor did there then exist in Europe a single hospital for the sick, or asylum for the destitute, the blind, or the insane ; the first institution of the kind known in history being a hospital, built in the fifth century in Jerusalem, for monks driven mad by asceticism, and one of the next earliest, a Foundling hospital opened in Milan in 789. Organized Cruelty was in full force, but organized Charity was yet unknown ; and the wealthy Herodes Atticus, the proto-philan- thropist, found no better way to display his beneficence than by building the splendid theatre whose ruins still crumble in the shadow of the Athenian Acropolis.

And here we fall on the natural explanation of a fact mentioned a few pages ago. The Emotion of Pleasure in another's Pleasure, though usually fainter than the parallel sym- pathy with Pain, seems to have been histo- rically the soonest developed, — at all events, among the sunny-spirited nations of the South

188 THE EVOLUTION OF

with •whom classic history is concerned. The Greeks andEomans "rejoiced with those who did rejoice," much sooner and more readily than they " wept with those who wept." " Ysd victis!" the vulture - shriek of Heteropathy, echoes through the night of time across the arenas where slaughtered gladiators, and Chris- tians mangled by the lions, made the "glory of a Eoman holiday." But even that hideous triumph may be interpreted as in some sort the expression of Sympathy felt for the suc- cessful swordsman or for the ravenous wild beast. The pain (if any could be said to exist) of beholding so pitiful a sight as that which the statue of the Dying Gladiator recalls, or the still worse horror of watching a tiger's car- nival, was lost to the fierce Eoman heart in the joy of triumph with the victor. Is all this utterly inconceivable to us? The bull-fights of Spain exhibit to the present day precisely analogous phenomena ! The spectacle of a miserable horse gored to death and dragged along, leaving his entrails strewed across the arena, has been witnessed scores of times with supreme indifierence by men and women, noble and imperial, engrossed by sympathetic delight

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 189

in the skill of the Toreador, or even in the courage of the poor maddened bull, whose dying agony afforded the next instant's pleasure.

Even in our own field-sports, whence cruelty has been eliminated to the uttermost, the most tender-hearted of fox-hunters and fowlers tell us that they sympathize so much with the hounds that they have no time to feel for the fox ; and share so keenly the pleasure of their pointers in a day on the moors that the brief death-pangs of the grouse are unnoticed. In the earlier ages, it would seem as if Pleasure in the Pleasure of others, particularly in the Pleasure of Victory, always outran Pain in the Pain of the vanquished. It asked the deeper sentiment of the " dark and true and tender !N'orth," the tenderness breathed all through Christianity from the spirit of its Founder, perchance even the accumulated ex]3erience of suffering ploughing deep through generations into the race, as a single experience ploughs up and makes soft the individual heart, — it needed all these to enable men to feel other men's Pain as their own.

Be it also borne in mind, that Sympathy with Pleasure usually demanding of us far less sacri-

190 THE EVOLUTION OE

fice than Sympathy with Pain (indeed gene- rally demanding no sacrifice at all), obtains its way, necessarily, sooner than the sentiment which must rise high enough to compel self- sacrifice before it becomes manifest. The pro- verbial readiness of Englishmen to espouse the weaker cause, implies more stringent as well as nobler emotion than the spaniel-like readi- ness of slavish races to attack the beaten and side with the strong. Of course such heroism, like every other good deed, brings its reward in a fresh sense of sympathy towards those who have been protected. The roots of the tree of human love are nourished by the fallen leaves of kind actions which sprung from its heart, and have long dropped and been for- gotten.

While the slow progress above described was going on, a singular limitation may be observed among those to whom Sympathy was extended. Among the indubitable results of recent ethno- logical research, is the discovery that in early times, and to this day among savages, such affectionate sentiments and notions of moral obligation as are yet developed are entirely confined to the tribe. Beyond the tribe, robbery,

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 191

plunder, rape and assassination, are never un- derstood to be offences, and are frequently con- sidered as meritorious ; much as tiger-shooting is deemed laudable and public-spirited among ourselves. There is a line of circumvalla- tion outside of which kindly feeling does not extend, and the moral obligations which concern such feelings are consequently not imagined to apply. Within the line there is brotherhood, and certain recognized rules of action, rising by degrees from the mere prohi- bition of perfidy, murder and adultery, to the inculcation of truth and helpfulness, extending to the very borders of communism. Outside the line all the while, the '' Gentile," the "Barbarian," the man of alien blood, is not merely less considered (as is the case between ourselves and foreigners), but has actually no status at all, either as regards feeling or duty. The step over this barrier of race, when it begins to be taken, is an enormous stride ; and we may see how it was felt as such even by the writers of the New Testament. This sub- ject, however, is far too large to be here treated otherwise than by briefest indication, l^o doubt the union of the known world in one empire in

192 THE EVOLUTION OF

the Augustan age helped to give birth to the great idea of a common Humanity, with uni- versal claims to Sympathy, which, as I have remarked, at that time first arose. The simile of the Body and its members occurred alike to St. Paul and to Cicero* to express the mutual suffering of men in the woes of their kind ; and from thenceforth the Enthusiasm of Humanity may be said to have been kindled, though as yet but a spark.

But from the hour that the idea of a common Humanity with universal claims dawned on the minds of men, the question, "Who is Human?" appears to have arisen; just as the Pharisee, when commanded to "love his neighbour," asked, " Who is my neighbour ?" From that distant date, till the day, not yet a decade ago, when the Supreme Court of the United States decreed that " a IN'egro was not a Man under the terms of the Constitution," there has been a ceaseless effort to shut out inferior and inimi- cal races from the title which was felt to carry with it the claims of brotherhood. In the pre- historic and earliest historic times, the basis

* De Off. iii. 5.

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 193

was laid for a great many of the prejudices which survive even yet. "When the tall fair races invaded Europe and drove the short and dark-haired ones into remote mountains and caves, then began the legends of the Giants and the Dwarfs, each regarding the other as non-human, and fit objects of hatred and all manner of perfidy and injury. To the tall race, their predecessors were Pigmies and Gnomes, engaged in mysterious arts of metal- lurgy in the bowels of the hills. To the short race, their lusty conquerors were Monsters, Cyclopes, Giants, ever ready to slay them with clubs, and perchance devour them limb by limb. "Wonderful is it to reflect that the stories em- bodying these primeval passions of fear and hatred have actually borne down to us in their course, through the traditions of thousands of years, so much of their original sentiment, that every child amongst us to this hour entertains the belief that it is quite right and proper to play perfidious tricks on a Dwarf; and that the sanguinary achievements of Jack the Giant- killer, Jack of the Bean-stalk and Tom Thumb, against the most unoffending Giants, were alto- gether laudable and glorious I Which of our

0

194 THE EVOLUTION OF

readers (we beg to ask the question with due seriousness) can even in adult years lay his hand on his heart and say he should feel any moral or sentimental objection to murdering a ''Giant" in cold blood, or running a red-hot stake into his solitary eye ? As to Ogres, the case is worse. If those archseologists be right who say that the word is the same as Hogres, Hongres, Hungarians, Huns, we have here, in the full daylight of History, a peculiarly noble European race actually transformed by the imagination of their neighbours into such preternaturally horrible monsters, that even our uncharitable feelings towards Giants fade into mildness beside our animosity towards an Ogre !

As our own ancestors felt towards the earlier races of Europe, as the old Yedic Aryans felt to the Dasyus (their dark-skinned enemies), as the Mazdiesnans of Zoroaster felt to the Touranians, so, it would seem, existing savage tribes still feel to races far apart from their own in blood, but having neighbouring habitations. Among numerous anecdotes illustrative of such senti- ments, none are more horrible than those which tell of the hatred of the Eed Men for the Esqui-

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 195

maux. A case is recorded where a tribe of the former travelled two or three hundred miles over the snow for the sole purpose of destroying a village of the inoffensive Esquimaux, with whom they had no quarrel, and who possessed no property worth their robbery. As a dog kills a rat, so do such races destroy each other under an impulse of pure hatred, which per- haps had its origin in the Heteropathy of con- quering generations ages before. Probably in its earlier stages every nation now existing has thus had its detested " Canaanite" dwelling on the borders of the land, and credited with every inhuman vice and crime.*

Parallel and nearly contemporaneously with the idea of a common Humanity, arose the idea of a common Christianity, forming the bond of still more sacred mutual Sympathy. It would be to re-write the history of the last eighteen centui'ies to record how this new impulse has drawn together the hearts of men in twofold

* " The almost physical loathing which a primitive com- munity feels for men of widely different manners from its own, usually expresses itself by describing them as mon- sters, such as giants, or even (as is almost always the case in Oriental mythology) as demons. The Cyclops is Homer's type of an alien." — Maine's Ancient Law, p. 125.

o2

196 THE EYOLTJTIOlSr OE

fashion. Inwardly, tlie deeper spiritual life whicli then was awakened, and with it the peculiarly softening influence of penitence, must have effected much ; while the apotheosis of Suffering in the ever-recurrent emblem of the Cross cannot have failed (as Mr. Lecky eloquently describes it) to have trained to sentiments of compassion the rough races who substituted it for the images of Thor and "Woden, or of Mars and Zeus. Outwardly, a welding no less obvious has been effected by the organization of a "Christendom" begun among all the tender associations of the little band in the "upper chamber," and continued through ages "when the disciples had all things in common," and in those wherein they endured together the Ten Persecutions; and finally completed in the era when antagonism with Islam united all the Christian nations in the Crusades. A similar, though perhaps less forcible, influence of the outward kind was meanwhile effected outside the Christian camp, among the nations which accepted the creed of Mahomet, whose levelling tendency (like that of Buddhism) has probably scarcely less aided the growth of mutual sympathies among its

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 197

disciples, than the presentation of a common Object of worship and the direct inculcation of mercy and beneficence. As the present con- dition of India unhappily exemplifies, Caste is of all barriers the most insurmountable to the sympathies of mankind. All the great reli- gions of the East, however, and pre-eminently Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, have contri- buted importantly to the nourishment of the sympathetic affections, by stamping them with approval and condemning any manifestation of the opposite sentiments. When men in each nation have risen so high as to recognize the Benevolence of God, they have always em- bodied that truth in creeds, wherein God is represented as commanding men to be benevo- lent ; and these crystallized creeds have acted with compact and persistent force on the future development of the benevolent affections. In each case, we must needs account in the first place, outside of conscious or recognized reli- gious influences, and in the region of the secret Divine education of the race, for the develop- ment of those social sentiments which, as all ethnology proves, are not in the earliest stage

198 THE EVOLUTION OF

understood to have any connection with the worship of the unseen Powers.

Eeturning to the history of such feelings in Christendom, we find that, just as the title of *' Human" was refused to inimical races as soon as a common Humanity was understood to convey the right to sympathy, so the claim of Christian Brotherhood was still more jealously refused to all outside the pale of the Catholic Church. Pity for Jews, Turks, Infidels or Heretics, there was little or none during all the ages wherein that great Church maintained its unity unbroken. To torture the Jew, to slay the Saracen, and to burn the Heretic, were actions not only laudable (as the primitive savage thought it laudable to slay the enemies of his tribe), but religiously obligatory. The Church had taken the place of the Tribe, and the feelings it inspired and sanctioned were even more vivid, alike for good and for evil.

At last the Eeformation came, and with it fresh questionings as to whom the fold of Chris- tian Brotherhood should include. The Pro- testants— themselves outside the pale of Eoman fraternity — found Quakers, Socinians and Ana-

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 199

baptists, to exclude from their own ; and still further off, a hundred thousand hapless witches and wizards to thrust beyond the limits even of Humanity. At last the fires of Hate and Fear died down, and for a century and a half true Sympathy has been permitted to grow up amongst us comparatively unchecked. The result is, that the sense of Christian Brotherhood has perhaps more force amongst us than ever before, while the Enthusiasm of Humanity (ex- tending far and experienced intensely, alto- gether beyond the bounds of the Churches) has risen to the height when a passion becomes self- conscious, and receives baptism, evermore to take its place among the recognized sentiments of our race. If a barrier to perfect sympathy among men be now anywhere left standing, we acknowledge unanimously that it is a blot on our civilization, and, so far from being in accord- ance with our religion, is in defiance thereof.

From destructive Heteropathy to negative Aversion, and thence to positive and helpful Sympathy, such has been the progress in the character of the Emotion I have now endea- voured to trace from the dawn of history till the present time. From the Tribe to the I^ation,

200 THE EVOLUTION OF

to the Human Eace, to the whole sentient Cre- ation— such has been the progress in extension of that Sympathy as it gradually developed itself. Neither line of progress is yet nearly completed. Much Heteropathy still lingers amongst us. Aversion to the suffering and miserable is even yet a common sentiment; and our Sympathy, such as it is, might be far warmer and better sustained. E^or is the lateral expansion of our fellow-feeling any way uniform or co-extensive with our know- ledge. There must of course, from the limi- tations of our natures, be always a more vivid emotion raised by a neighbouring than by a remote catastrophe. None but He who is alike near to all can sympathize with all alike. But, making every allowance for the inevitable par- tialities of nationality and neighbourhood, and the comparatively easy comprehension of the joys and sorrows of persons of our own age, race and class, it would seem that there is yet great room for further and more equable deve- lopment. Along every plane on which our feelings run, they as yet come short. In the first place, even as regards local and national extension, the just proportion between the near

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 201

and the remote, the concerns of our countrymen and those of others, is very far from being represented by the various degrees of interest manifested by the British public when it reads of the burning of a warehouse in London, or the conflagration of a city in America; of a boat upset on the Isis, or of the suflbcation of the whole crew of a Chinese junk ; of a breeze off the Goodwins, or of a hurricane in Bengal ; of a scarcity of water in a Kentish village, or of the depoj)ulation of whole provinces by famine in Persia.

Secondly, it is not only geographically and laterally that our sympathies fail in extension, but also, and much more emphatically, perpen- dicularly (if we may so express it), through the various strata of society. Our class-sym- pathies (especially at both ends of the scale) are as strong as our national sympathies, and, more than they, need to be widened. The high-born Englishman feels more akin to the German, Italian or Eussian noble than to the small tradesman or peasant of his own country ; and the rise of the perilous International affords singular proof how far the working classes are beginning to feel their cosmopolitan class-sym-

202 THE EVOLUTION OF

patMes over-ride their patriotism. A great deal, however, has been done during this cen- tury, on the other hand, towards the break- ing down of the barriers which limited the more tender emotions to different ranks. Free and cordial association is far more common everywhere, and the failure to sympathize out- side of a man's own class is now (as it ought to be) more often noticeable among the uneducated or half-educated than the cultured.

The literature of two generations past recalls the yet recent period when anything like " sen- timent" was supposed to be the exclusive attri- bute of well-born and well-mannered people, and when no novelist would have dreamed of asking for sympathy in the woes of any " com- mon person." There were gentlemen, indeed, of whom Tremaine was the archetype, and ladies, who lived on air and ^olian harps, and there were also beggars and shepherdesses; but of the intermediate classes of cotton -spinners, clerks, bakers, ironmongers, bricklayers, needle- women and housemaids, it had never entered into anybody's head in the pre-Dickens age that anything affecting could be written. Even Shakespeare himself had looked, like a born

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 203

aristocrat, not unkindly but somewhat jestingly, at such subjects ; and though we cannot doubt that in real life there must have been far more of mutual sympathy than books betray, it is tolerably certain there was infinitely less readi- ness to feel for vulgar sorrows and rejoice in homely joys than, thank God ! is now to be found amongst us. The writers who have helped us to this tenderer feeling for human nature under its less refined forms, — writers such as Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell and Mrs. Stowe, — deserve even more honour than those who, like Miss Bremer and d'Azeglio and George Sand and Eichter, have aided us to sympathize with the inner life of other nations. There yet remain to be noticed other direc- tions in which our sympathies extend them- selves very irregularly. As a general rule, the tenderest of all feelings are those between persons of opposite sexes, and the differences which exist, so far from diminishing sympathy, probably often enhance it. Nevertheless, the position of women in the East, and even in Europe, ofi'ers irrefragable evidence that, with all their Lwish affection, men have not, on the whole, been able to sympathize with women as

204 THE EVOLUTION OF

with one another. They have been ready enough to indulge their pleasure-loving pro- pensities, their vanity and their indolence ; but those nobler aspirations after instruction and usefulness which many of them must always have shewn (aspirations which men remark with the most ardent and helpful sympathy when displayed by boys) have rarely touched them in women. 'No man will give his son a stone when he asks for bread ; but thousands of men have given their daughters diamonds when they prayed for books, and coiled the serpents of dissipation and vanity round their necks when they needed the wholesome food of beneficent employment.

On the other hand, though women cannot be accused of any general want of sympathy with men, yet they too bestow it often in a weak and unworthy manner, rejoicing in their lower pleasui'es and suffering with their lower pains, but having little fellow-feeling with their loftier aims, or regrets for their sadder failures. ''Eosamond Yincy" would have doubtless shed abundant tears over Lydgate's misfortune had he broken his arm. She had not a sigh to give to his shattered aspirations.

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 205

And yet, again, beside the imperfect sym- pathy of men and women for each other, there is very commonly failure in the sympathy of both for children. With all the fondness of parents and relatives, numberless poor little creatures pass through the spring-time of life exposed to very nipping winds, so far as their feelings are concerned, though perhaps all the time mentally and physically precociously forced in a hot-bed of high culture. Because their pains are mere childish pains, we find it hard to pity them ; and their little pleasures, because they are so simple, seem only to deserve from us a patronizing smile, or the warning "not to be foolish and excited," which often quenches the joyous little spirit most effectually. But, as St. Augustine truly says, the boy's sufferings while they last are quite as real as those of the man ; indeed, few of us have troubles much worse even now, than punishment and heavy tasks. And as to the pleasures of those young years when all earth seemed Paradise, and every sense was an inlet of fresh delight, — may we not vainly look round for cause for equal sym- pathy in the happiness of an adult companion such as we may find in that of the child playing

206 THE EVOLUTION OP

in the meadow with its cowslip ball, or shout- ing with ecstacy as its kite soars into the blue summer heaven ? Hateful is it to reflect that to many a world-worn heart amongst us the spectacle of such pure joy, instead of awakening that sense of " Pleasure inPleasm-e" which we flatter ourselves is our habitual sentiment, not seldom calls up, on the contrary, an ugly emo- tion much more partaking of the character of Heteropathy, and provoking us to check the exuberance of the child's delight by some harsh word or peremptory prohibition.

One more observation, and this part of my subject may close. Not only do our sympathies require to be more equally extended as regards nations, classes, sexes and ages, but there is sore need that they should spread outside the human race among the tribes of sentient crea- tures who lie beneath us and at our mercy. The great ideas of a common Humanity and a common Christianity, which were at first such noble extensions of family and national sympa- thies, have long acted as limitations thereof. To this hour, in all Eomish countries, the sneer, "You talk as if the brute were a Christian," or the simple statement^ " Non e Cristiano^'' is

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 207

understood to dispose finally of a remonstrance against overloading a horse, skinning a goat alive, or plucking the quills of a living fowl. The present benevolent Pope answered, a few years ago, the request to found a Society for Prevention of Cruelty in Eome, by the formal response (officially delivered through Lord Odo Eussell), "that such an Association could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being founded on a Theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any duties to Animals." Similarly, the limitation of sympathy to Humanity caused English moralists of the last century to argue deliberately, that the evil of cruelty to the lower creatures lay solely in the fact that it injured the finer feelings — the humanity — of the men who were guilty of it. Even to this hour it is not rare to hear in cultivated society the fiendish practice of vivisection condemned or excused by reference solely to the hardening of the sentiments of young surgeons, or the benefits which may remotely accrue to some hypothe- tical human sufferer, the cause of whose disease may, just possibly, be elucidated thereby.*

* " The horrors of vivisection, often so wantonly and so needlessly practised" (the anatomia vivorum which the

208 THE EVOLUTIOlSr 0"P

Surveying the position in wliicli we now stand, after reviewing the long progress of the ages, there is much at which to rejoice for the present, much more to , hope for the future. The human heart seems more tender than it has been heretofore ; and if so, the gain is one to which all the triumphs of science and art are small in comparison. Our sympathies are yet very imperfect and very unequally distri- buted. To one of us, Physical Pain appeals most forcibly; to another, Want; to another. Ignorance. Some of us feel for the sorrows of the aged, some for the helplessness of infancy.

heathen Celsus reproved as too inhuman to he perpetrated) — -" the prolonged and atrocious tortures sometimes inflicted in order to procure some gastronomic delicacy, are so far removed from the public gaze that they exercise little in- fluence on the characters of men. Yet no humane man can reflect on them without a shudder. To bring these things within the range of ethics, to create the notion of duties towards the animal world, has been, so far as Chris- tian countries are concerned, one of the peculiar merits of the last century, and for the most part of Protestant nations. Mahometans and Brahmins have in this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians, and Spain and Italy, in which Catholicism has most deeply planted its roots, are even now probably beyond all other countries those in which inhumanity to animals is most wanton and most unrebuked." — European Morals, Vol. II. p. 187.

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 209

One can weep with the mourner, another can joy with the happy. Mental doubts and anguish touch minds which have known their agony, and the aspirations after Knowledge and Beauty those which have felt their noble thirst. Some of us feel intensely for human troubles, and others again are full of compassion for the harmless brutes, and feel keenly the

" Sorrow for tlie horse o'erdriven, And love in which the dog has part."

But all these various hues of the same gentle sentiment have their natural explanation in the experience or the idiosyncrasy of those who display them ; and if they act only as special stimulants to activity, and not as limitations of it, they are innocent and even beneficial. Such as they are, also, these inequalities in the dis- tribution of our sympathies tend constantly to reduce themselves to a minimum, seeing that, in every direction, one tender emotion leads im- perceptibly to another. We cannot help the child without helping the parent, nor educate the mind without feeding the body, nor in any way cultivate the habit of noting and relieving the wants of others without causing the full tide

p

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of OUT outflowing charity to rise beyond any bounds which we may at first have assigned to it. In point of strength, we cannot doubt that in our time, in spite of the supposed materialism and selfishness of the age,* Sympathy has ac- quired in thousands of generous hearts a very high development indeed. It affords the main- spring of life to a whole army of philanthropists, statesmen, clergymen, sisters of charity, and many more of whom the world never hears. Did the laws of nature permit one person to take the physical pains of another, there would be a constant struggle as to which should bear each wound, each deformity, and each disease. Especially among women, in whom this spirit of loving self-sacrifice is commonly predominant, there would be found at an hour's call a hun- dred Arrias to tell every shrinking Peetus that "death did not pain;" a thousand Alcestes to descend to the grave in the stead of every selfish Admetus. Nay, it may be doubted whether

* Mr. Bain " approaches the consideration" of that " large region of human feeling," the " Tender Emotion," by remarking, " This is pre-eminently a Glandular Emo- tion. In it, the muscular diffusion is secondary," &c. &c. The Emotions, &c., p. 94.

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 211

after a while the hospitals of the land would contain a single inmate (save perchance a few forsaken old women) of those originally sent there as patients; but every man would go forth, lailed out, willingly and joyfully, by mother, sister, wife or child, remaining to suffer in his stead. Of course there are special obsta- cles as well as special aids under the new forms of modern life to the growth and diffusion of sympathy. If literature and steam locomotion, and cheap and rapid postage, and telegraphy, assist immensely to diffuse and to sustain the sympatliies of mankind, on the other hand the vehement struggles for existence and for wealth, and the haste and bustle of our lives, tend almost equally to check and blunt them. If we only compare the amount of feeling which any one of us readily gives to the illness, ruin or death of a neighbour in the country, and that which we find time to spare to the same misfortunes of another, equally well known and liked, in London, we shall obtain some measure of the influence of the increased rapidity of social circulation on the affections. More diffi- cult is it to estimate the cruel results of the competition for professional advancement and

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for "quick returns and large profits," out of •which come such offences as the adulterations of food and medicine, the unnatural and por- tentous extension of the liquor-traffic, and the frightful recklessness of life displayed in the employment of unseaworthy ships. These things are more shocking to the moral sense than the savage atrocities of half-barbarous times, being done at the instigation of meaner passions by men far more accountable for their actions. But though Mr. Euskin and Mr. Carlyle treat them as the genuine " Signs of the Times," I am inclined to believe that a better test of our state may be found in the wide-spread horror and disgust which they have created, and the preponderance, far beyond that of any former age, of public deeds springing unmis- takably from the purest Enthusiasm of Hu- manity. There are few, I think, who on calm reflection will hesitate to admit that there exist less of the anti-social passions and more of the humane and benevolent ones now in the world •than at any known period of past history.

Beyond all that we have yet attained, we may dimly discern the progress yet to be, and

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 213

welcome for happier generations the time when a divine and universal Sympathy will do its perfect work. Even now there are few of us but must have felt how variable are our powers to feel with others ; how for long periods our hearts seem shut up in our own interests and pains ; and how again they seem to open, we know not why, to a sense of the suffering of a friend, a child, a bird or brute, so keen that it seems a revelation, and every other sorrow and pain we know of acquires new meaning in our eyes, and pierces us as a thorn in our own breasts. There are hours wherein we sponta- neously long to do anything or suffer anything which should mitigate the woes we have sud- denly learned to perceive. And again there are times when the happiness of others is simi- larly near and dear to us, and we feel capable of sacrificing all our own joys to secure for them felicity here and beatitude hereafter. These oscillations of our emotions must surely point to a time in the future growth of humanity wherein that which is now rare shall be fre- quent, and that which is only occasional shall be habitual. As the whole history of the past shews the gradual dropping away of the crude

214 THE EVOLUTION OF

and cruel emotions of Heteropathy and Aver- sion, and the development of Sympathy from its first small seed in the family till it has become the great Tree of Life which we behold, sOj without indulging in Utopian dreams of human perfection, we may reasonably antici- pate that the long progress will not stop at that precise step where we find it, but extend yet further indefinitely. As the men of old felt in rare hours of tenderness amid their cease- less struggles, when '' the earth was full of vio- lence and cruel habitations," so the cultured amongst us feel habitually now. And as we feel in our best and tenderest moments, so men in ages to come will likewise feel habitually.

Such gradual rising of the temperature of human Sympathy, when it shall take place, will necessarily call into existence a whole new flora of kindly deeds and customs to cover the ground of life. Economists are for ever looking to im- proved external organizations to better the con- ditions of all classes, and these have doubtless their significance and use. But what would be the introduction of the wisest, justest, most perfect political and social organizations which could be planned, compared to the elevation, even

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 215

by a single degree, of the sense of universal Bro- therhood and of the kindly sympathies of man with man? Already we begin to feel that acts of beneficence are scarcely lawful save when they come as from brother to brother, from the heart of the giver to the hand of the receiver. In the time to come, it is not too much to hope that there will be far less than now of such ungenerous generosity as finds vent in such phrases as, "I have done my duty by him, and now I wash my hands of him ;" " I have done my part, and if he rot I care not." Less need even may there be for the deep-sighted Buddhist precept, " If a man can- not feel in charity with another, let him resolve on doing him a kindness, and then he will feel kindly."

And, finally, there seems faintly revealed, above the mists wherein we dwell, the lofty summits of an emotion transcending all that our race yet has experienced, — a Sympathy which shall shine on the joys and melt with the sorrows, not only of the Lovely, but of the Unlovely, and thus make man at last "perfect as his Father in Heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth

216 THE EVOLUTION OF

rain on the just and on the unjust." For eighteen centuries those words have rung in the ears of men ; but who can boast he has fathomed their meaning, or conceived any plan of life which could give them practical realization? To do this thoroughly, to feel such genuine sympathy for the stupid, the mean-minded, the vicious, as to enable us to make for them the same sacrifices we should readily make for a beloved friend, this is to reach that zenith of goodness which the world has idealized in Christ, but towards which scarcely an approxi- mation has been practically made, even by the best of Christians.

What will mortal life be when men come to feel thus ? It will be already the fulfilment of the best promise of heaven, for ''he that liveth in love, liveth in God, and God in him." Mankind will then be joined as in one great Insurance against Want and Woe, and no mis- fortune will be unbearable to one, because it will be shared by all. So many hearts will rejoice with every innocent joy, that men will live as in a room brightened all round with mirrors reflecting every light. So many hands will stretch forth to alleviate every pain, and

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 217

remove every burden, and supply every want, that in the sweet sense of that kindly human love even the heaviest sorrow will melt away like snow in the sunshine of spring.

Even our poor sympathies, such as they are now, are the source of all our purest joys. Pain and Pleasure alike undergo a Eosicrucian trans- formation from lead to gold when they pass through the alembic of another's soul; and, while the dreariest hell would be entire self- enwrapment, so the sweetest heaven would be to feel as God feels for every creature He has made. When we have advanced a little nearer to such Divine Sympathy, then it is obvious, also, that we shall be more capable of the su- preme joy of Divine Love, and no longer iind the harmony of communion for ever broken by the discords of earth. He who will teach us how truly to love the unlovely, will lead us into the land where our Sun shall no more go down.

Such is, I believe, the great Hope of the human race. It does not lie in the "Progress of the Intellect," or in the conquest of fresh powers over the realms of nature ; not in the

218 THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT.

improvement of laws, or the more harmonious adjustment of the relations of classes and states ; not in the glories of Art, or the triumphs of Science. All these things may, and doubtless will, adorn the better and happier ages of the future. But that which will truly constitute the blessedness of man will be the gradual dying out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and his selfishness, and the growth within him of the godlike faculty of love and self-sacrifice; the development of that holiest Sympathy wherein all souls shall blend at last, like the tints of the rainbow which the Seer beheld around the Great "White Throne on high.

Printed by C. Green <fe Son, 178, Strand.

WORKS BY THE AUTHOR.

Essay on Intuitive Morals. (Out of print.)

Religious Duty. 2nd Edit. 5s.

Broken Lights. 2nd Edit. 5s.

Dawning Lights. 5s.

Thanksgiving (a Chapter of Religious Duty). Is.

Pursuits of Women. (Out of print.)

Studies of Ethical and Social Subjects. 5s.

Cities of the Past. (Out of print.)

Italics. 5s.

Hours of Work and Play. 5s.

Darwinism in Morals, &c. 5s.

Alone to the Alone. 2nd Edit. 5s.

Williams and Norgate.

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Cobbe, Frances Power, 1822- 1904.

The hopes of the human race