2. The instinct of immortality is reinforced by man's innate sense of justice. He feels that something is needed to complete this life elsewhere. Immortality has been named "the great prophecy of reason " — a phrase which is in itself an argument. We cannot look into ourselves without finding it. The belief is a part of the contents of human nature : take it away, and its most unifying bond is broken ; it has no longer an order or a relation ; the higher faculties are without function : eyes, but nothing to see ; hands, but nothing to lay hold of ; feet, but no path to tread ; wings, but no air to uphold them, and no heaven to fly into.
^ I do not know that there is anything in nature (unless indeed it be the reputed blotting out of suns in the stellar
^ C. C. Albertson, Death and Afterwards, 41.
^ S. Parkes Cadman, Charles Darwin and other English Thinkers, 76.
JOB XIV. 14 61
heavens) which can be compared in wastefulness with the extinction of great minds : their gathered resources, their matured skill, their luminous insight, their unfailing tact, are not like instincts that can be handed down ; they are absolutely personal and inalienable, grand conditions of future power unavailable for the race, and perfect for an ulterior growth of the individual. If that growth is not to be, the most brilliant genius bursts and vanishes as a firework in the night. A mind of balanced and finished faculties is a production at once of infinite delicacy and of most enduring constitution ; lodged in a fast-perishing organism, it is like a perfect set of astronomical instruments, misplaced in an observatory shaken by earthquakes or caving in with decay. The lenses are true, the mirrors without a speck, the movements smooth, the micrometers exact : what shall the Master do but save the precious system, refined with so much care, and build for it a new house that shall be founded on a " rock " ? ^
^ Kant, the great moralist, based his demonstration of the doctrine of immortality on the demands of the conscience. Conscience bids us aim at perfection. But perfection is not reached upon the earth. If the earth be all, if death ends every- thing, then we are overweighted in our moral nature. Conscience needs an enduring arena for its operation. Conscience demands immortality.
The facts of life confirm the hope That in a world of larger scope — What here is faithfully begun Will be completed, not undone.^
^ If no atom of matter is ever lost, no unit of force ever wasted — if nothing is destroyed, although all is changed — will the Father fail to preserve the gift of immortality in His children ? Every true gift of God preaches this sublime truth. We have felt sometimes, when we have listened to beautiful music, that it must be an echo from those " choirs invisible " of which our great composers have often dreamed. And as of music, so of poetry ; for the real poet is by nature a seer and a prophet, and his noblest lines are full of the consciousness of the Eternal. He takes his illumination from —
The light that never was on sea or land.
Whichever way we look, into whatever realm of life we enter, the immortal truth is seen shining more and more brightly unto ^ James Martineau. ^ T. E. Ruth.
62 LIFE BEYOND DEATH
the perfect day. Life, not death — restoration, not ruin — growth, not decay, — these are our rich inheritance and possession.^
For love, and beauty, and delight. There is no death, nor change; their might Exceeds our organs', which endure No light, being themselves obscure.^
3. There is in every soul a crystal skylight opening out toward the upper realms ; but if we do not keep it clean the vision of those realms will grow dim until it is obscured from us altogether. Sincerely and practically to believe that we are immortal, we must more or less feel ourselves immortal ; but this feeling of immor- tality will seldom visit the bosom of the man who does not honestly try to live on earth the life of heaven. Emerson has truly said that from a low type of moral life a slaughter-house style of thinking invariably results — a style of thinking, that is, which butchers men's fairest ideals and noblest hopes, because it cannot realize how fair and noble they are. Spiritual things are not likely to be discerned by the animal man.
^ It is the hardest thing in the world for a child to believe that the dead are no more. Wordsworth has shown us this with beautiful simplicity, in his poem of the little cottage-girl, to whom the sister and the brother lying in the churchyard were as really alive and pleased with the songs she sang to them, as were the two who dwelt at Conway and the two who had gone to sea.
Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh, life, not death, for which we pant, More life, and fuller, that I want.^
II.
The Answek of the Old Testament.