T| Lotze and those who side with him, though they are Monists inasmuch as they believe that there is only one substance in the Universe, viz., Spiritual Life and Energy, yet at the same time believe that the Eternal God, who by the partial differentiation of His own essential being calls into existence the world of nature and humanity, has also, while remaining immanent in all His creatures, given to these finite and dependent existences in pro- gressive degrees a real selfhood; which selfhood culminates in that self-consciousness and moral freedom in man which enables him both to know and even to resist God. According to this view, God is immanent and active both in the inorganic and in the organic world ; and in the latter He, without the animal's consciousness of the purpose, controls and directs its instinctive life. And when, as Prof. John Fiske has so well explained, physical evolution reaches its acme and the all-important and un- ending process of psychical evolution takes its place, then for the first time the Creator begins to take the creature into His intimate
324 A MEETING WITH GOD
confidence ; and in man's rational, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual nature makes an immediate but progressive revelation of His own presence and His own character.1
I.
1. There is a voice within every one of us, if we will but let it speak, which says solemnly, sternly, " Prepare to meet thy God." If we hear not this voice now, we shall hear it hereafter ; if not in the day of rude health, yet, unless the moral nerve has been cauterized, when we are sick or dying. Every man who believes that God exists, and that he himself has a soul which does not perish with the body, knows that a time must come when this meeting with God will be inevitable. At the hour of death, whether in mercy or in displeasure, God looks in the face of man, His creature, as never before. The veils of sense, which long have hidden His countenance, are then stripped away, and as spirit meets with spirit, without the interposition of any fibres of matter so does man in death meet with God. It is this that makes death so exceedingly solemn. Ere yet the last breath has fairly passed from the body, or the failing eyes have closed, the soul has partly entered upon a world altogether new, magnificent, awful. It has seen beings, shapes, modes of existence, never imagined before. But it has done more ; it has met its God, as a disembodied spirit can meet Him. Surely, " Prepare — prepare for death ! " is the voice of prudence. The one certain thing about life is that we must leave it. The one certain thing about death is that we must die. What will happen first, we know not. How much time will pass before our hour comes, we know not. What will be the manner of our death, violence or disease, an accident, or what we call natural causes, we know not. Where we shall die, at home or on a visit, in our beds or in the street, or in a railway train, or in a sinking steamboat, — this, too, we know not. Under what circumstances we shall die, in solitude or among friends, with the consolations of religion or without them, in spasms of agony or softly, as if we were going to sleep, we know not. The time, the place, the manner, the circum- stances of death, are hidden from every one of us ; but that which 1 The Life and Letters of James Martineau, ii. 411.
AMOS iv. 12 325
stands out from all this ignorance, in absolute, unassailable tragic certainty, is the fact itself that we must die, all and each of us. Scripture says, and experience echoes, " It is appointed."
T[ There is a light-hearted way of discounting death, and mocking the fear of it, which passes for courage, and is really mere slightness of intellect and poverty of conscience and imagination. The awf ulness of death remains, felt by ineradicable instinct, and it was meant to remain. The subject may be called crude, harsh, morbid, if you like ; but the winding-sheet, the coffin, and the six feet of earth are facts that wait for us. We may change the colour of its livery, but the fact we cannot change. It has been supposed to be a religious thing to meditate on death, and forecast its circumstances, and in this way religion has grown morbid. A well-known passage in Mr. Hardy's Tess of the oV Urbervilles illustrates the morbidness without the religion. Thinking of her birthdays, " she suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of more importance to her than those ; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared ; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she actually passed over it ; but not the less surely there. When was it ? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation ? " The only use of such speculations is to force death back into the region of actual realities that we may reckon with it, and pass on to the true business of life. Lost in the mists of the future, the event of death seems uncertain and life eternal. Did we know the hour, life, foreshortened by the exact sight of the end, would shrink to a very small appearance though the limit were at five- score years.1