The hopes of the human race, hereafter and here

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EDITH

BUTLER

VOOV

.

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

E

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

E 2

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 59

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

F

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,

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 67

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

68 THE LIFE AETEE DEATH.

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-

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 69

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-

70 THE LIFE AETER DEATH.

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.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 71

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.

72 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 73

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-

74 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 75

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

76 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 77

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

78 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 79

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-

80 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 81

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 -

G

82 THE LIFE AFTEE DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 83

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

g2

84 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 85

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.

86 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 87

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

88 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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-

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 89

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-

90 THE LIFE AFTEE DEATH.

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.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 91

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

92 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 93

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.

94 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 95

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.

96 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 97

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

98 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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,

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 99

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.

h2

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 101

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

102 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 103

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

104 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 105

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

106 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 107

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

108 THE LIPE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 109

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

110 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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 !

112 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH,

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 113

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

114 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

^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.

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 115

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-

i2

116 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 117

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

118 THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

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

THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. 119

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 127

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-

128 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 129

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

130 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 131

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

k2

132 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 133

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

134 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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-

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 135

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 137

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

138 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 139

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

140 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 141

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

142 DOOMED TO BE SAYED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 143

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

144 DOOMED TO BE SAYED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 145

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

146 DOOMED TO BE SAVED.

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

DOOMED TO BE SAVED. 147

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."

154 THE EVOLUTION OF

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,

158 THE EVOLTJTION OF

"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-

166 THE EVOLUTION OF

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.

N

178 THE EVOLUTION OF

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,

n2

180 THE EVOLUTION OF

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,

182 THE EVOLUTION OP

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

THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 183

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.

184 __„ THE EVOLUTION OF

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

210 THE EVOLUTION OF

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

212 THE EVOLUTION OF

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.

Date Due

W15'^

,*>?. - 3

195S

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<^Am^

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^fl663D0

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Library Bureau Cat, No. 1137

ftX^:§?i°''"^2'83

BT 901 . C65 1874

Cobbe, Frances Power, 1822-
1904.

The hopes of the human race