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ESCHATOLOGY, DOCTRINE OF FINAL THINGS.

Neither the individual Christian character, nor the Christian or the church as a whole, attains its destined perfection in this life ( Romans 8:24).

This perfection is reached in the world to come ( 1 Corinthians 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. Romans 8:24 — “in hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for who hopeth for that which he seeth?” 1 Corinthians 13:10 — “when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall 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” ( Matthew 3:7). We may “lay up...treasures in heaven” ( Matthew 6:20), but we may also “treasure up for ourselves wrath” ( Romans 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, isolation of the city, and secondly, isolation of the state. 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 and 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. This is the truth of the doctrine of the resurrection. 3. The principle of judgment. The truth is at the basis of the belief in rewards and punishments in the world to come. This meager and abstract residuum argues denial in both 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, such as the merrymaking of clowns or the maundering of fools, for ideas detached from emotion. 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 maybe 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 is 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 variety 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 coordinate, 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 reunited soul and body of the wicked.

Spiritual death: Isaiah 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”; Romans 7:24 — “Wretched man that I am!

Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Ephesians 2:1 — “deal through your trespasses and sins.” The second death: Revelation 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 Muller, 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 and not an order of existence at all. It is the universe coming to a focus, flowering so to speak, in a finite center. 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 neuron 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 whom 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 <19B615> Psalm 116:15 — “Precious in the sight of Jehovah is the death of his saints”; Romans 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 Corinthians 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?” 1Pet.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 . Romans 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’, Hebrews 12:6 — “for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”

Dr. Hovey says “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 penalties 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 ‘twas your heaven she should be advanced; And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced Above the clouds, as high as Heaven itself?” Phoebe 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 today!”

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 constitute the 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 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, Destiny of the Creature, 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, Introduction 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 fullness. 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 that 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, — “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 person forfeits his 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) A holy and benevolent God exists. (2) He has made man in his image. (3) 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” ( Matthew 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. It 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, A Place of Death in Evolution, 106). Nageli, 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 immorality 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 tomorrow.” 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 by 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 today 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 preexistence 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 indestructibly 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 and 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 wellbeing 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. (c) 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. Multitudes expect 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 arrowheads 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 somber 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 tomorrow we die” ( 1 Corinthians 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, efflorescence 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 has 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 heaven born 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 go 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 Khayy·m, Rub·iy·t, Stanzas 28-35 — “I came like Water, and like Wind I go...Up from Earth’s Center through the seventh gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a knot unraveled 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. 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 Traume 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 lather’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, 302-379 — “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. (2) That 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, Munsterberg, 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. Genesis 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 how good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: 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. Ecclesiastes 12:7 — “the dust returneth to the earth as it was and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Zechariah 12:1 — “Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.” Matthew 10:28 — “And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Acts 7:59 — “And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”: Corinthians 12:2 know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out or the body, I know not; God knoweth), such one caught up even to the third heaven”; 1 Corinthians 15:45-46 — “The first man became a living soul. The last Adam became a lifegiving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural then that which is spiritual” = the first Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal, a body of flesh and blood that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created immortal and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.

But it may be asked: Is not all this, In 1 Corinthians 15, spoken of the regenerate, those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated?

We answer, yes, but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul, for an regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added and no new principle of holiness is infused.

The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.

Savage, Life after Death,48,53 — “The word translated ‘soul’, In Gen. 2:7, is the same word, which, in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal. The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner platter, solid but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection. If a force, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”

Dr. H. Heath Bawden: “It is only the creature that is born that will die.

Monera and Amúbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a center or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member is, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the Great Spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.” (b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body. It does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul, which is the opposite of true life, viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness and of misery. Genesis 2:17 — “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”; cf. 3:8 — “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”; 16-19 — the curse of pain and toil: 22-24 — banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life. Matthew 8:22 — “Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”; 25:41, 46 — “Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire... These shall go away into eternal punishment.” Luke 15:32 — “this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is fond”; John 5:24 — “He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment but hath passed out of death into life”; 6:47, 53, 63 — “He that believeth hath eternal life...except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves...the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”: 8:51 — “If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.” Romans 5:21 — “that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”; 8:13 — “if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”; Ephesians 2:1 — “dead through your trespasses and sins”; 5:14 — “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead and Christ shall shine upon thee”; James 5:20 — “he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”; 1 John 3:14 — “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”; Revelations 3:1 — “I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”

We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to interpret our missionaries’ use of the Chinese words for “God”, “spirit”, “holiness” by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N.T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O.T. (c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning ( Esther 4:16) but in connections where they imply the opposite. Esther 4:16 — “if I perish, I perish”; Genesis 6:11 — “And the earth was corrupt before