Chapter XXV: Part VIII: Eschatology, or the Doctrine of Final Things (1)

Neither the individual Christian character, nor the Christian church as a whole, attains its destined perfection in this life (Rom. 8:24). This perfection is reached in the world to come (1 Cor. 13:10). As preparing the way for the kingdom of God in its completeness, certain events are to take place, such as death, Christ’s second coming, the resurrection of the body, the general judgment. As stages in the future condition of men, there is to be an intermediate and an ultimate state, both for the righteous and for the wicked. We discuss these events and states in what appears from Scripture to be the order of their occurrence.

_Rom. 8:24_—“_in hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not
hope: for who hopeth for that which he seeth?_” _1 Cor.
13:10_—“_when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part
will be done away._” Original sin is not wholly eradicated from
the Christian, and the Holy Spirit is not yet sole ruler. So, too,
the church is still in a state of conflict, and victory is
hereafter. But as the Christian life attains its completeness only
in the future, so with the life of sin. Death begins here, but
culminates hereafter. _James 1:15_—“_the sin, when it is full
grown, bringeth forth death._” The wicked man here has only a
foretaste of “_the wrath to come_” (_Mat. 3:7_). We may “_lay up
... treasures in heaven_” (_Mat. 6:20_), but we may also
“_treasure up for ourselves wrath_” (_Rom. 2:5_), _i. e._, lay up
treasures in hell.

Dorner: “To the actuality of the consummation of the church
belongs a cessation of reproduction through which there is
constantly renewed a world which the church must subdue.... The
mutually external existence of spirit and nature must give way to
a perfect internal existence. Their externality to each other is
the ground of the mortality of the natural side, and of its being
a means of temptation to the spiritual side. For in this
externality the natural side has still too great independence and
exerts a determining power over the personality.... Art, the
beautiful, receives in the future state its special place; for it
is the way of art to delight in visible presentation, to achieve
the classical and perfect with unfettered play of its powers.
Every one morally perfect will thus wed the good to the beautiful.
In the rest, there will be no inactivity; and in the activity
also, no unrest.”

Schleiermacher: “Eschatology is essentially prophetic; and is
therefore vague and indefinite, like all unfulfilled prophecy.”
Schiller’s Thekla: “Every thought of beautiful, trustful seeming
Stands fulfilled in Heaven’s eternal day; Shrink not then from
erring and from dreaming,—Lofty sense lies oft in childish play.”
Frances Power Cobbe, Peak of Darien, 265—“Human nature is a ship
with the tide out; when the tide of eternity comes in, we shall
see the purpose of the ship.” Eschatology deals with the
precursors of Christ’s second coming, as well as with the second
coming itself. We are to labor for the coming of the kingdom of
God in society as well as in the individual and in the church, in
the present life as well as in the life to come.

Kidd, in his Principles of Western Civilization, says that
survives which helps the greatest number. But the greatest number
is always in the future. The theatre has become too wide for the
drama. Through the roof the eternal stars appear. The image of God
in man implies the equality of all men. Political equality implies
universal suffrage; economic equality implies universal profit.
Society has already transcended, first, city isolation, and
secondly, state isolation. The United States presents thus far the
largest free trade area in history. The next step is the unity of
the English speaking peoples. The days of separate nationalities
are numbered. _Laissez faire_ = surviving barbarism. There are
signs of larger ideas in art, ethics, literature, philosophy,
science, politics, economics, religion. Competition must be
moralized, and must take into account the future as well as the
present. See also Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the
Social Crisis.

George B. Stevens, in Am. Jour. Theology, Oct. 1902: 666‐684,
asks: “Is there a self‐constituted New Testament Eschatology?” He
answers, for substance, that only three things are sure: 1. The
certain triumph of the kingdom—this being the kernel of truth in
the doctrine of Christ’s second coming; 2. the victory of life
over death—the truth in the doctrine of the resurrection; 3. the
principle of judgment—the truth at the basis of the belief in
rewards and punishments in the world to come. This meagre and
abstract residuum argues denial both of the unity and the
sufficiency of Scripture. Our view of inspiration, while it does
not assure us of minute details, does notwithstanding give us a
broad general outline of the future consummation, and guarantees
its trustworthiness by the word of Christ and his apostles.

Faith in that consummation is the main incitement to poetic
utterance and to lofty achievement. Shairp, Province of Poetry,
28—“If poetry be not a river fed from the clear wells that spring
on the highest summits of humanity, but only a canal to drain off
stagnant ditches from the flats, it may be a very useful sanitary
contrivance, but has not, in Bacon’s words, any ’participation of
divineness.’” Shakespeare uses prose for ideas detached from
emotion, such as the merrymaking of clowns or the maundering of
fools. But lofty thought with him puts on poetry as its singing
robe. Savage, Life beyond Death, 1‐5—“When Henry D. Thoreau lay
dying at Concord, his friend Parker Pillsbury sat by his bedside.
He leaned over, took him by the hand, and said: ‘Henry, you are so
near to the border now, can you see anything on the other side?’
And Thoreau answered: ‘One world at a time, Parker!’ But I cannot
help asking about that other world, and if I belong to a future
world as well as to this, my life will be a very different one.”
Jesus knew our need of certain information about the future, and
therefore he said: “_In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it
were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place
for you_” (_John 14:2_).

Hutton, Essays, 2:211—“Imagination may be powerful without being
fertile; it may summon up past scenes and live in them without
being able to create new ones. National unity and supernatural
guidance were beliefs which kept Hebrew poetry from being fertile
or original in its dealings with human story; for national pride
is conservative, not inventive, and believers in actual providence
do not care to live in a world of invention. The Jew saw in
history only the illustration of these two truths. He was never
thoroughly stirred by mere individual emotion. The modern poet is
a student of beauty; the O. T. poet a student of God. To the
latter all creation is a mere shadow; the essence of its beauty
and the sustaining power of its life are in the spiritual world.
Go beyond the spiritual nature of man, and the sympathy of the
Hebrew poet is dried up at once. His poetry was true and divine,
but at the expense of variousness of insight and breadth of
sympathy. It was heliocentric rather than geocentric. Only Job,
the latest, is a conscious effort of the imagination.” Apocalyptic
poetry for these reasons was most natural to the Hebrew mind.

Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 66—“Somewhere and for some Being,
there shines an unchanging splendor of beauty, of which in nature
and in art we see, each of us from his own standpoint, only
passing gleams and stray reflections, whose different aspects we
cannot now coördinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend,
but which at least is something other than the chance play of
subjective sensibility or the far‐off echo of ancestral lusts.”
Dewey, Psychology, 200—“All products of the creative imagination
are unconscious testimonials to the unity of spirit which binds
man to man, and man to nature, in one organic whole.” Tennyson,
Idylls of the King: “As from beyond the limit of the world, Like
the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city
were one voice Around a king returning from his wars.” See, on the
whole subject of Eschatology, Luthardt, Lehre von den letzten
Dingen, and Saving Truths of Christianity; Hodge, Systematic
Theology, 3:713‐880; Hovey, Biblical Eschatology; Heagle, That
Blessed Hope.

I. Physical Death.

Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. We distinguish it from spiritual death, or the separation of the soul from God; and from the second death, or the banishment from God and final misery of the reünited soul and body of the wicked.

Spiritual death: _Is. 59:2_—“_but your iniquities have separated
between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from
you, so that he will not hear_”; _Rom. 7:24_—“_Wretched man that I
am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?_” _Eph.
2:1_—“_dead through your trespasses and sins._” The second death:
_Rev. 2:11_—“_He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second
death_”; _20:14_—“_And death and Hades were cast into the lake of
fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire_”;
_21:8_—“_But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and
murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all
liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and
brimstone; which is the second death._”

Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:303—“Spiritual death, the inner
discord and enslavement of the soul, and the misery resulting
therefrom, to which belongs that other death, the second death, an
outward condition corresponding to that inner slavery.” Trench,
Epistles to the Seven Churches, 151—“This phrase [‘_second
death_’] is itself a solemn protest against the Sadduceeism and
Epicureanism which would make natural death the be‐all and the
end‐all of existence. As there is a life beyond the present life
for the faithful, so there is death beyond that which falls under
our eyes for the wicked.” E. G. Robinson: “The second death is the
continuance of spiritual death in another and timeless existence.”
Hudson, Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life, 222—“If a man
has a power that transcends the senses, it is at least presumptive
evidence that it does not perish when the senses are
extinguished.... The activity of the subjective mind is in inverse
proportion to that of the body, though the objective mind weakens
with the body and perishes with the brain.”

Prof. H. H. Bawden: “Consciousness is simply the growing of an
organism, while the organism is just that which grows.
Consciousness is a function, not a thing, not an order of
existence at all. It is the universe coming to a focus, flowering
so to speak in a finite centre. Society is an organism in the same
sense that the human being is an organism. The spatial separation
of the elements of the social organism is relatively no greater
than the separation of the unit factors of the body. As the
neurone cannot deny the consciousness which is the function of the
body, so the individual member of society has no reason for
denying the existence of a cosmic life of the organism which we
call society.”

Emma M. Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp.
Rev., Dec. 1893:878—“Man is nature risen into the consciousness of
its relationship to the divine. There is no receding from this
point. When ‘that which drew from out the boundless deep turns
again home,’ the persistence of each personal life is
necessitated. Human life, as it is, includes, though it transcends
the lower forms through which it has developed. Human life, as it
will be, must include though it may transcend its present
manifestation, _viz._, personality.” “Sometime, when all life’s
lessons have been learned, And suns and stars forevermore have
set, And things which our weak judgments here have spurned, The
things o’er which we grieved with lashes wet, Will flash before us
through our life’s dark night, As stars shine most in deepest
tints of blue: And we shall see how all God’s plans were right,
And most that seemed reproof was love most true: And if sometimes
commingled with life’s wine We find the wormwood and rebel and
shrink, Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine Pours out this
portion for our lips to drink. And if some friend we love is lying
low, Where human kisses cannot reach his face, O do not blame the
loving Father so, But wear your sorrow with obedient grace; And
you shall shortly know that lengthened breath Is not the sweetest
gift God sends his friend, And that sometimes the sable pall of
death Conceals the fairest boon his love can send. If we could
push ajar the gates of life, And stand within, and all God’s
working see, We could interpret all this doubt and strife, And for
each mystery find a key.”

Although physical death falls upon the unbeliever as the original penalty of sin, to all who are united in Christ it loses its aspect of penalty, and becomes a means of discipline and of entrance into eternal life.

To the Christian, physical death is not a penalty: _see Ps.
116:15_—“_Precious in the sight of Jehovah Is the death of his
saints_”; _Rom. 8:10_—“_And if Christ is in you, the body is dead
because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness_”;
_14:8_—“_For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we
die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we
are the Lord’s_”; _1 Cor. 3:22_—“_whether Paul, or Apollos, or
Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or
things to come; all are yours_”; _15:55_—“_O death, where is thy
victory? O death, where is thy sting?_” _1 Pet. 4:6_—“_For unto
this end was the gospel preached even to the dead, that they might
be judged indeed according to men in the flesh, but live according
to God in the spirit_”; _cf._ _Rom. 1:18_—“_For the wrath of God
is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men, who hinder the truth in unrighteousness_”;
_8:1, 2_—“_There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are
in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus
made me free from the law of sin and of death_”; _Heb. 12:6_—“_For
whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth._”

Dr. Hovey says that “the present sufferings of believers are in
the nature of discipline, with an aspect of retribution; while the
present sufferings of unbelievers are retributive, with a glance
toward reformation.” We prefer to say that all penalty has been
borne by Christ, and that, for him who is justified in Christ,
suffering of whatever kind is of the nature of fatherly
chastening, never of judicial retribution; see our discussion of
the Penalty of Sin, pages 652‐660.

“We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly
damps; What are to us but sad funereal tapers May be Heaven’s
distant lamps. There is no death,—what seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian
Whose portal men call death.” “’Tis meet that we should pause
awhile, Ere we put off this mortal coil, And in the stillness of
old age, Muse on our earthly pilgrimage.” Shakespeare, Romeo and
Juliet, 4:5—“Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now
Heaven hath all, And all the better is it for the maid: Your part
in her you could not keep from death, But Heaven keeps his part in
eternal life. The most you sought was her promotion, For ’t was
your heaven she should be advanced; And weep ye now, seeing she is
advanced Above the clouds, as high as Heaven itself?” Phœbe Cary’s
Answered: “I thought to find some healing clime For her I loved;
she found that shore, That city whose inhabitants Are sick and
sorrowful no more. I asked for human love for her; The Loving knew
how best to still The infinite yearning of a heart Which but
infinity could fill. Such sweet communion had been ours, I prayed
that it might never end; My prayer is more than answered; now I
have an angel for my friend. I wished for perfect peace to soothe
The troubled anguish of her breast; And numbered with the loved
and called She entered on untroubled rest. Life was so fair a
thing to her, I wept and pleaded for its stay; My wish was granted
me, for lo! She hath eternal life to‐day!”

Victor Hugo: “The tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare.
It closes with the twilight, to open with the dawn.... I feel that
I have not said the thousandth part of what is in me.... The
thirst for infinity proves infinity.” Shakespeare: “Nothing is
here for tears; nothing to wail, Or knock the breast; no weakness,
no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair.” O. W.
Holmes: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift
seasons roll! Leave thy low‐vaulted past! Let each new temple,
nobler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by
life’s unresting sea!” J. G. Whittier: “So when Time’s veil shall
fall asunder, The soul may know No fearful change or sudden
wonder, Nor sink the weight of mystery under, But with the upward
rise, and with the vastness grow.”

To neither saint nor sinner is death a cessation of being. This we maintain, against the advocates of annihilation:

1. Upon rational grounds.

(_a_) The metaphysical argument.—The soul is simple, not compounded. Death, in matter, is the separation of parts. But in the soul there are no parts to be separated. The dissolution of the body, therefore, does not necessarily work a dissolution of the soul. But, since there is an immaterial principle in the brute, and this argument taken by itself might seem to prove the immortality of the animal creation equally with that of man, we pass to consider the next argument.

The Gnostics and the Manichæans held that beasts had knowledge and
might pray. The immateriality of the brute mind was probably the
consideration which led Leibnitz, Bishop Butler, Coleridge, John
Wesley, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Somerville, James Hogg, Toplady,
Lamartine, and Louis Agassiz to encourage the belief in animal
immortality. See Bp. Butler, Analogy, part i, chap. i (Bohn’s ed.,
81‐91); Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 99—“Most of the
arguments for the immortality of man apply equally to the
permanency of this principle in other living beings.” Elsewhere
Agassiz says of animals: “I cannot doubt of their immortality any
more than I doubt of my own.” Lord Shaftesbury in 1881 remarked:
“I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say
or conjecture how or where; but sure I am that the love, so
manifested by dogs especially, is an emanation from the divine
essence, and as such it can, or rather, it will, never be
extinguished.” St. Francis of Assisi preached to birds, and called
sun, moon, earth, fire, water, stones, flowers, crickets, and
death, his brothers and sisters. “He knew not if the brotherhood
His homily had understood; He only knew that to one ear The
meaning of his words was clear” (Longfellow, The Sermon of St.
Francis—to the birds). “If death dissipates the sagacity of the
elephant, why not that of his captor?” See Buckner, Immortality of
Animals; William Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 240.

Mansel, Metaphysics, 371, maintains that all this argument proves
is that the objector cannot show the soul to be compound, and so
cannot show that it is destructible. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy,
259—“The facts which point toward the termination of our present
state of existence are connected with our physical nature, not
with our mental.” John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 110—“With
his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist
transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet
who sings of the New Jerusalem, with its river of life and its
streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle
of evidence for either view.” John Fiske, Life Everlasting,
80‐85—“How could immortal man have been produced through heredity
from an ephemeral brute? We do not know. Nature’s habit is to make
prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises
the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour,
until at length it overflows, and straightway vast systems of
machinery are awakened into rumbling life. Slowly the ellipse
becomes eccentric, until suddenly the finite ellipse becomes an
infinite paraboloid.”

Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206—“The ideas of dividing up or
splitting off are not applicable to mind. The argument for the
indestructibility of mind as growing out of its indiscerptibility,
and the argument by which Kant confuted it, are alike absurd
within the realm of mental phenomena.” Adeney, Christianity and
Evolution, 127—“Nature, this argument shows, has nothing to say
against the immortality of that which is above the range of
physical structure.” Lotze: “Everything which has once originated
will endure forever so soon as it possesses an unalterable value
for the coherent system of the world; but it will, as a matter of
course, in turn cease to be, if this is not the case.” Bowne, Int.
to Psych. Theory, 315‐318—“Of what use would brutes be hereafter?
We may reply: Of what use are they here?... Those things which
have perennial significance for the universe will abide.” Bixby,
Crisis in Morals, 203—“In living beings there is always a pressure
toward larger and higher existence.... The plant must grow, must
bloom, must sow its seeds, or it withers away.... The aim is to
bring forth consciousness, and in greatest fulness.... Beasts of
prey and other enemies to the ascending path of life are to be
swept out of the way.”

But is not the brute a part of that Nature which has been
subjected to vanity, which groans and travails in pain, and which
waits to be redeemed? The answer seems to be that the brute is a
mere appendage to man, has no independent value in the creation,
is incapable of ethical life or of communion with God the source
of life, and so has no guarantee of continuance. Man on the other
hand is of independent value. But this is to anticipate the
argument which follows. It is sufficient here to point out that
there is no proof that consciousness is dependent upon the soul’s
connection with a physical organism. McLane, Evolution in
Religion, 261—“As the body may preserve its form and be to a
degree made to act after the psychic element is lost by removal of
the brain, so this psychic element may exist, and act according to
its nature after the physical element ceases to exist.” Hovey,
Bib. Eschatology, 19—“If I am in a house, I can look upon
surrounding objects only through its windows; but open the door
and let me go out of the house, and the windows are no longer of
any use to me.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 295—“To
perpetuate mind after death is less surprising than to perpetuate
or transmit mind here by inheritance.” See also Martineau, Study,
2:332‐337, 363‐365.

William James, in his Essay on Human Immortality, argues that
thought is not necessarily a _productive_ function of the brain;
it may rather be a permissive or _transmissive_ function. Thought
is not _made_ in the brain, so that when the brain perishes the
soul dies. The brain is only the organ for the _transmission_ of
thought, just as the lens transmits the light which it does not
produce. There is a spiritual world behind and above the material
world. Our brains are thin and half transparent places in the
veil, through which knowledge comes in. Savage, Life after Death,
289—“You may attach a dynamo for a time to some particular
machine. When you have removed the machine, you have not destroyed
the dynamo. You may attach it to some other machine and find that
you have the old time power. So the soul may not be confined to
one body.” These analogies seem to us to come short of proving
personal immortality. They belong to “psychology without a soul,”
and while they illustrate the persistence of some sort of life,
they do not render more probable the continuance of my individual
consciousness beyond the bounds of death. They are entirely
consistent with the pantheistic theory of a remerging of the
personal existence in the great whole of which it forms a part.
Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds and, fusing all The skirts of self again,
should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as
all unsweet.” See Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 12;
Howison, Limits of Evolution, 279‐312.

Seth, Hegelianism: “For Hegel, immortality is only the permanence
of the Absolute, the abstract process. This is no more consoling
than the continued existence of the chemical elements of our
bodies in new transformations. Human self‐consciousness is a spark
struck in the dark, to die away on the darkness whence it has
arisen.” This is the only immortality of which George Eliot
conceived in her poem, The Immortal Choir: “O may I join the choir
invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made
better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In
deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in
self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And
with their mild persistence urge man’s search To vaster issues.”
Those who hold to this unconscious immortality concede that death
is not a separation of parts, but rather a cessation of
consciousness; and that therefore, while the substance of human
nature may endure, mankind may ever develop into new forms,
without individual immortality. To this we reply, that man’s self‐
consciousness and self‐determination are different in kind from
the consciousness and determination of the brute. As man can
direct his self‐consciousness and self‐determination to immortal
ends, we have the right to believe this self‐consciousness and
self‐determination to be immortal. This leads us to the next
argument.

(_b_) The teleological argument.—Man, as an intellectual, moral, and religious being, does not attain the end of his existence on earth. His development is imperfect here. Divine wisdom will not leave its work incomplete. There must be a hereafter for the full growth of man’s powers, and for the satisfaction of his aspirations. Created, unlike the brute, with infinite capacities for moral progress, there must be an immortal existence in which those capacities shall be brought into exercise. Though the wicked forfeit all claim to this future, we have here an argument from God’s love and wisdom to the immortality of the righteous.

In reply to this argument, it has been said that many right wishes
are vain. Mill, Essays on Religion, 294—“Desire for food implies
enough to eat, now and forever? hence an eternal supply of
cabbage?” But our argument proceeds upon three presuppositions:
(1) that a holy and benevolent God exists; (2) that he has made
man in his image; (3) that man’s true end is holiness and likeness
to God. Therefore, what will answer the true end of man will be
furnished; but that is not cabbage—it is holiness and love, _i.
e._, God himself. See Martineau, Study, 2:370‐381.

The argument, however, is valuable only in its application to the
righteous. God will not treat the righteous as the tyrant of
Florence treated Michael Angelo, when he bade him carve out of ice
a statue, which would melt under the first rays of the sun. In the
case of the wicked, the other law of retribution comes in—the
taking away of “_even that which he hath_” (_Mat. 25:29_). Since
we are all wicked, the argument is not satisfactory, unless we
take into account the further facts of atonement and
justification—facts of which we learn from revelation alone.

But while, taken by itself, this rational argument might be called
defective, and could never prove that man may not attain his end
in the continued existence of the race, rather than in that of the
individual, the argument appears more valuable as a rational
supplement to the facts already mentioned, and seems to render
certain at least the immortality of those upon whom God has set
his love, and in whom he has wrought the beginnings of
righteousness.

Lord Erskine: “Inferior animals have no instincts or faculties
which are not subservient to the ends and purposes of their being.
Man’s reason, and faculties endowed with power to reach the most
distant worlds, would be useless if his existence were to
terminate in the grave.” There would be wastefulness in the
extinction of great minds; see Jackson, James Martineau, 439. As
water is implied by the organization of the fish, and air by that
of the bird, so “the existence of spiritual power within us is
likewise presumption that some fitting environment awaits the
spirit when it shall be set free and perfected, and sex and death
can be dispensed with” (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution,
106). Nägeli, the German botanist, says that Nature tends to
perfection. Yet the mind hardly begins to awake, ere the bodily
powers decline (George, Progress and Poverty, 505). “Character
grows firmer and solider as the body ages and grows weaker. Can
character be vitally implicated in the act of physical
dissolution?” (Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 353). If a rational and
moral Deity has caused the gradual evolution in humanity of the
ideas of right and wrong, and has added to it the faculty of
creating ethical ideals, must he not have provided some
satisfaction for the ethical needs which this development has thus
called into existence? (Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 351).

Royce, Conception of God, 50, quotes Le Conte as follows: “Nature
is the womb _in_ which, and evolution the process _by_ which, are
generated sons of God. Without immortality this whole process is
balked—the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God
be so long and at so great pains to achieve a _spirit_, capable of
communing with himself, and then allow it to lapse again into
nothingness?” John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 116, accepts the
immortality of the soul by “a supreme act of faith in the
reasonableness of God’s work.” If man is the end of the creative
process and the object of God’s care, then the soul’s career
cannot be completed with its present life upon the earth (Newman
Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 92, 93). Bowne, Philosophy of
Theism, 254—“Neither God nor the future life is needed to pay us
for present virtue, but rather as the condition without which our
nature falls into irreconcilable discord with itself, and passes
on to pessimism and despair. High and continual effort is
impossible without correspondingly high and abiding hopes.... It
is no more selfish to desire to live hereafter than it is to
desire to live to‐morrow.” Dr. M. B. Anderson used to say that
there must be a heaven for canal horses, washerwomen, and college
presidents, because they do not get their deserts in this life.

Life is a series of commencements rather than of accomplished
ends. Longfellow, on Charles Sumner: “Death takes us by surprise,
And stays our hurrying feet; The great design unfinished lies, Our
lives are incomplete. But in the dark unknown Perfect their
circles seem, Even as a bridge’s arch of stone Is rounded in the
stream.” Robert Browning, Abt Vogler: “There never shall be one
lost good”; Prospice: “No work begun shall ever pause for death”;
“Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to
pain; And this first life claims a second, else I count its good
no gain”; Old Pictures in Florence: “We are faulty—why not? We
have time in store”; Grammarian’s Funeral: “What’s time? Leave Now
for dogs and apes,—Man has Forever.” Robert Browning wrote in his
wife’s Testament the following testimony of Dante: “Thus I
believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this
life I shall pass to another better, there where that lady lives,
of whom my soul was enamored.” And Browning says in a letter: “It
is a great thing—the greatest—that a human being should have
passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a
witness to the power and love of God.... I see even more reason to
hold by the same hope.”

(_c_) The ethical argument.—Man is not, in this world, adequately punished for his evil deeds. Our sense of justice leads us to believe that God’s moral administration will be vindicated in a life to come. Mere extinction of being would not be a sufficient penalty, nor would it permit degrees of punishment corresponding to degrees of guilt. This is therefore an argument from God’s justice to the immortality of the wicked. The guilty conscience demands a state after death for punishment.

This is an argument from God’s justice to the immortality of the
wicked, as the preceding was an argument from God’s love to the
immortality of the righteous. “History defies our moral sense by
giving a peaceful end to Sulla.” Louis XV and Madame Pompadour
died in their beds, after a life of extreme luxury. Louis XVI and
his queen, though far more just and pure, perished by an appalling
tragedy. The fates of these four cannot be explained by the
wickedness of the latter pair and the virtue of the former.
Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the popes, was apparently
prosperous and happy in his iniquities. Though guilty of the most
shameful crimes, he was serenely impenitent, and to the last of
his days he defied both God and man. Since there is not an
execution of justice here, we feel that there must be a “_judgment
to come_,” such as that which terrified Felix (_Acts 24:25_).
Martineau, Study, 2:383‐388. Stopford A. Brooke, Justice: “Three
men went out one summer night, No care had they or aim, And dined
and drank. ‘Ere we go home We’ll have,’ they said, ‘a game.’ Three
girls began that summer night A life of endless shame, And went
through drink, disease, and death As swift as racing flame.
Lawless and homeless, foul, they died; Rich, loved and praised,
the men: But when they all shall meet with God, And Justice
speaks,—what then?” See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
2:255‐297. G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution: “Belief in
immortality is a practical necessity of evolution. If the
decisions of to‐day are to determine our eternal destiny, then it
is vastly more important to choose and act aright, than it is to
preserve our earthly life. The martyrs were right. Conscience is
vindicated. We can live for the ideal of manhood. Immortality is a
powerful reformatory instrument.” Martineau, Study of Religion,
2:388—“If Death gives a final discharge to the sinner and the
saint alike, Conscience has told us more lies than it has ever
called to their account.” Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:2—“If
[transgressors] have defeated the law and outrun native
punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to
fly from God”; Henry VI, 2d part, 5:2—“Can we outrun the heavens?”
Addison, Cato: “It must be so,—Plato, thou reasonest well.—Else
whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after
immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of
falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself and
startles at destruction? ’Tis the divinity that stirs within us,
’Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter, And intimates
eternity to man.”

Gildersleeve, in The Independent, March 30, 1899—“Plato in the
Phædo argues for immortality from the alternation of opposites:
life must follow death as death follows life. But alternation of
opposites is not generation of opposites. He argues from
reminiscence. But this involves pre‐existence and a cycle of
incarnations, not the immortality which we crave. The soul abides,
as the idea abides, but there is no guarantee that it abides
forever. He argues from the uncompounded nature of the soul. But
we do not know the soul’s nature, and at most this is an analogy:
as soul is like God, invisible, it must like God abide. But this
is analogy, and nothing more.” William James, Will to Believe,
87—“That our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
atmosphere, a dimension of being which we at present have no organ
for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the
life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are _in_ our
human life, but are not of it. They bite, but do not know what it
means; they submit to vivisection, and do not know the meaning of
that.”

George Eliot, walking with Frederic Myers in the Fellows’ Garden
at Trinity, Cambridge, “stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and
taking as her text the three words which have been used so often
as the inspiring trumpet‐calls of men—the words God, Immortality,
Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was
the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and
absolute the third.” But this idea of the infinite nature of Duty
is the creation of Christianity—the last infinite would never have
attained its present range and intensity, had it not been
indissolubly connected with the other two (Forrest, Christ of
History and Experience, 16).

This ethical argument has probably more power over the minds of
men than any other. Men believe in Minos and Rhadamanthus, if not
in the Elysian Fields. But even here it may be replied that the
judgment which conscience threatens may be, not immortality, but
extinction of being. We shall see, however, in our discussion of
the endlessness of future punishment, that mere annihilation
cannot satisfy the moral instinct which lies at the basis of this
argument. That demands a punishment proportioned in each case to
the guilt incurred by transgression. Extinction of being would be
the same to all. As it would not admit of degrees, so it would
not, in any case, sufficiently vindicate God’s righteousness. F.
W. Newman: “If man be not immortal, God is not just.”

But while this argument proves life and punishment for the wicked
after death, it leaves us dependent on revelation for our
knowledge how long that life and punishment will be. Kant’s
argument is that man strives equally for morality and for well‐
being; but morality often requires the sacrifice of well‐being;
hence there must be a future reconciliation of the two in the
well‐being or reward of virtue. To all of which it might be
answered, first, that there is no virtue so perfect as to merit
reward; and secondly, that virtue is its _own_ reward, and so _is_
well‐being.

(_d_) The historical argument.—The popular belief of all nations and ages shows that the idea of immortality is natural to the human mind. It is not sufficient to say that this indicates only such desire for continued earthly existence as is necessary to self‐preservation; for multitudes expect a life beyond death without desiring it, and multitudes desire a heavenly life without caring for the earthly. This testimony of man’s nature to immortality may be regarded as the testimony of the God who made the nature.

Testimonies to this popular belief are given in Bartlett, Life and
Death Eternal, preface: The arrow‐heads and earthen vessels laid
by the side of the dead Indian; the silver obolus put in the mouth
of the dead Greek to pay Charon’s passage money; the furnishing of
the Egyptian corpse with the Book of the Dead, the papyrus‐roll
containing the prayer he is to offer and the chart of his journey
through the unseen world. The Gauls did not hesitate to lend
money, on the sole condition that he to whom they lent it would
return it to them in the other life,—so sure were they that they
should get it again (Valerius Maximus, quoted in Boissier, La
Religion Romaine, 1:264). The Laplanders bury flint and tinder
with the dead, to furnish light for the dark journey. The Norsemen
buried the horse and armor for the dead hero’s triumphant ride.
The Chinese scatter paper images of sedan porters over the grave,
to help along in the sombre pilgrimage. The Greenlanders bury with
the child a dog to guide him (George Dana Boardman, Sermon on
Immortality).

Savage, Life after Death, 1‐18—“Candles at the head of the casket
are the modern representatives of the primitive man’s fire which
was to light the way of the soul on its dark journey.... Ulysses
talks in the underworld with the shade of Hercules though the real
Hercules, a demigod, had been transferred to Olympus, and was
there living in companionship with the gods.... The Brahman
desired to escape being reborn. Socrates: ‘To die and be released
is better for me.’ Here I am walking on a plank. It reaches out
into the fog, and I have got to keep walking. I can see only ten
feet ahead of me. I know that pretty soon I must walk over the end
of that plank,—I haven’t the slightest idea into what, and I don’t
believe anybody else knows. And I don’t like it.” Matthew Arnold:
“Is there no other life? Pitch this one high.” But without
positive revelation most men will say: “_Let us eat and drink, for
to‐morrow we die_” (_1 Cor. 15:32_).

“By passionately loving life, we make Loved life unlovely, hugging
her to death.” Theodore Parker: “The intuition of mortality is
written in the heart of man by a Hand that writes no
falsehoods.... There is evidence of a summer yet to be, in the
buds which lie folded through our northern winter—efflorescences
in human nature unaccountable if the end of man is in the grave.”
But it may be replied that many universal popular impressions have
proved false, such as belief in ghosts, and in the moving of the
sun round the earth. While the mass of men have believed in
immortality, some of the wisest have been doubters. Cyrus said: “I
cannot imagine that the soul lives only while it remains in this
mortal body.” But the dying words of Socrates were: “We part; I am
going to die, and you to live; which of us goes the better way is
known to God alone.” Cicero declared: “Upon this subject I
entertain no more than conjectures;” and said that, when he was
reading Plato’s argument for immortality, he seemed to himself
convinced, but when he laid down the book he found that all his
doubts returned. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 134—“Though Cicero
wrote his Tusculan Disputations to prove the doctrine of
immortality, he spoke of that doctrine in his letters and speeches
as a mere pleasing speculation, which might be discussed with
interest, but which no one practically held.”

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 3:9, calls death “the most to be feared of
all things ... for it appears to be the end of everything; and for
the deceased there appears to be no longer either any good or any
evil.” Æschylus: “Of one once dead there is no resurrection.”
Catullus: “When once our brief day has set, we must sleep one
everlasting night.” Tacitus: “If there is a place for the spirits
of the pious; if, as the wise suppose, great souls do not become
extinct with their bodies.” “In that _if_,” says Uhlhorn, “lies
the whole torturing uncertainty of heathenism.” Seneca, Ep.
liv.—“Mors est non esse”—“Death is not to be”; Troades, V,
393—“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil”—“There is nothing
after death, and death itself is nothing.” Marcus Aurelius: “What
springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heavenborn things
fly to their native seat.” The Emperor Hadrian to his soul:
“Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc
abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.” Classic writers might
have said of the soul at death: “We know not where is that
Promethean torch That can its light relume.”

Chadwick, 184—“With the growth of all that is best in man of
intelligence and affection, there goes the development of the hope
of an immortal life. If the hope thus developed is not a valid
one, then we have a radical contradiction in our moral nature. The
survival of the fittest points in the same direction.” Andrew
Marvell (1621‐1678)—“At my back I always hear Time’s winged
chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of
vast Eternity.” Goethe in his last days came to be a profound
believer in immortality. “You ask me what are my grounds for this
belief? The weightiest is this, that we cannot do without it.”
Huxley wrote in a letter to Morley: “It is a curious thing that I
find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get
older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of
time that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going
on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a great deal,—at
any rate in one of the upper circles, where climate and the
company are not too trying.”

The book of Job shows how impossible it is for man to work out the
problem of personal immortality from the point of view of merely
natural religion. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, represents
Claudio as saying to his sister Isabella: “Aye, but to die, and go
we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This
sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod.” Strauss,
Glaubenslehre, 2:739—“The other world is in all men the one enemy,
in its aspect of a future world, however, the last enemy, which
speculative criticism has to fight, and if possible to overcome.”
Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, Stanzas 28‐35—“I came like Water, and like
Wind I go.... Up from Earth’s Centre through the seventh gate I
rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a knot unravelled
by the Road, But not the master‐knot of human fate. There was the
Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I
might not see: Some little talk awhile of _Me_ and _Thee_ There
was,—And then no more of _Thee_ and _Me_. Earth could not answer,
nor the Seas that mourn, In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his signs revealed, And hidden by the
sleeve of Night and Morn. Then of the _Thee in Me_, who works
behind The veil, I lifted up my hands to find A Lamp, amid the
darkness; and I heard As from without—‘The Me within Thee blind.’
Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn I leaned, the secret of
my life to learn; And Lip to Lip it murmur’d—‘While you live,
Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return!’ ” So “The Phantom
Caravan has reached The Nothing it set out from.” It is a
demonstration of the hopelessness and blindness and sensuality of
man, when left without the revelation of God and of the life to
come.

The most that can be claimed for this fourth argument from popular
belief is that it indicates a general appentency for continued
existence after death, and that the idea is congruous with our
nature. W. E. Forster said to Harriet Martineau that he would
rather be damned than annihilated; see F. P. Cobbe, Peak of
Darien, 44. But it may be replied that there is reason enough for
this desire for life in the fact that it ensures the earthly
existence of the race, which might commit universal suicide
without it. There is reason enough in the present life for its
existence, and we are not necessitated to infer a future life
therefrom. This objection cannot be fully answered from reason
alone. But if we take our argument in connection with the
Scriptural revelation concerning God’s making of man in his image,
we may regard the testimony of man’s nature as the testimony of
the God who made it.

We conclude our statement of these rational proofs with the acknowledgment that they rest upon the presupposition that there exists a God of truth, wisdom, justice, and love, who has made man in his image, and who desires to commune with his creatures. We acknowledge, moreover, that these proofs give us, not an absolute demonstration, but only a balance of probability, in favor of man’s immortality. We turn therefore to Scripture for the clear revelation of a fact of which reason furnishes us little more than a presumption.

Everett, Essays, 76, 77—“In his Träume eines Geistersehers, Kant
foreshadows the Method of his Kritik. He gives us a scheme of
disembodied spirits, and calls it a bit of mystic (_geheimen_)
philosophy; then the opposite view, which he calls a bit of vulgar
(_gemeimen_) philosophy. Then he says the scales of the
understanding are not quite impartial, and the one that has the
inscription ‘Hope for the future’ has a mechanical advantage. He
says he cannot rid himself of this unfairness. He suffers feeling
to determine the result. This is intellectual agnosticism
supplemented by religious faith.” The following lines have been
engraved upon the tomb of Professor Huxley: “And if there be no
meeting past the grave, If all is darkness, silence, yet ’tis
rest. Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, For God still
giveth his beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep he wills, so
best.” Contrast this consolation with: “_Let not your heart be
troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s
house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that
where I am, there ye may be also_” (_John 14:1‐3_).

Dorner: “There is no rational evidence which compels belief in
immortality. Immortality has its pledge in God’s making man in his
image, and in God’s will of love for communion with men.”
Luthardt, Compendium, 289—“The truth in these proofs from reason
is the idea of human personality and its relation to God. Belief
in God is the universal presupposition and foundation of the
universal belief in immortality.” When Strauss declared that this
belief in immortality is the last enemy which is to be destroyed,
he forgot that belief in God is more ineradicable still. Frances
Power Cobbe, Life, 92—“The doctrine of immortality is to me the
indispensable corollary of that of the goodness of God.”

Hadley, Essays, Philological and Critical, 392‐397—“The claim of
immortality may be based on one or the other of two assumptions:
(1) The same organism will be reproduced hereafter, and the same
functions, or part of them, again manifested in connection with
it, and accompanied with consciousness of continued identity; or,
(2) The same functions may be exercised and accompanied with
consciousness of identity, though not connected with the same
organism as before; may in fact go on without interruption,
without being even suspended by death, though no longer manifested
to us.” The conclusion is: “The light of nature, when all directed
to this question, does furnish a presumption in favor of
immortality, but not so strong a presumption as to exclude great
and reasonable doubts upon the subject.”

For an excellent synopsis of arguments and objections, see Hase,
Hutterus Redivivus, 276. See also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics,
417‐441; A. M. Fairbairn, on Idea of Immortality, in Studies in
Philos. of Religion and of History; Wordsworth, Intimations of
Immortality; Tennyson, Two Voices; Alger, Critical History of
Doctrine of Future Life, with Appendix by Ezra Abbott, containing
a Catalogue of Works relating to the Nature, Origin, and Destiny
of the Soul; Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality, by George A.
Gordon, Josiah Royce, William James, Dr. Osler, John Fiske, B. I.
Wheeler, Hyslop, Münsterberg, Crothars.

2. Upon scriptural grounds.

(_a_) The account of man’s creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.

_Gen. 1:26, 27_—“_Let us make man in our image_”; _2:7_—“_And
Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul_”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man’s Original
State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is
formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the
divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating
soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body. _Gen.
3:22, 23_—“_Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good
and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of
the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah
God sent him forth from the garden of Eden_”—man had immortality
of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is
expelled from the tree of life. _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the dust returneth
to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave
it_”; _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens,
and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of
man within him._”